Justice David Eady said that Google is not a publisher because searches are carried out entirely by computers and the search engine does not choose the terms itself.

The case was closely watched because the United Kingdom is perceived as having particularly stringent libel laws.

The ruling came in a suit by Metropolitan International Schools Limited, a British company which offers distance learning courses and trades under the brands of SkillsTrain or Train2Game, and previously as Scheidegger MIS.

MIS sued both Google UK Ltd. and the parent company, Google Inc., and Designtechnica Corp., incorporated in Oregon. The company's Web site hosts bulletin boards and forums that have carried allegedly defamatory complaints about Metropolitan International Schools.

Google cannot be "regarded as a publisher" for what its searches discover on the Web, the judge said in his ruling handed down Thursday, noting that Google had prevailed against similar suits in the Netherlands two years ago, and this year in cases in Spain and France.

Aiden Quinn was arraigned Monday in Suffolk Superior Court on charges of gross negligence by a person in control of a train. He was released on personal recognizance after entering his plea.

Quinn did not speak to reporters after his appearance, but defense attorney James Sultan described Quinn as "very afraid" of the situation he's in.

Prosecutors said in court that Quinn made a cell phone call and admitted typing a text message to his girlfriend in the moments before his Green Line trolley crashed into the rear of another trolley beneath Government Center on May 8.

In a verbal statement, Ajmal Kasab described his group's journey from Karachi, Pakistan on a boat, their subsequent landing in Mumbai on Nov. 26, and his assault on a railway station and a hospital with a comrade he identified as Abu Ismail.

The other gunmen, also armed with automatic rifles and grenades, attacked a Jewish center and two five-star hotels, including the Taj Mahal. The rampage ended at the historic hotel days later after commandos killed the attackers holed up there.

"I was firing and Abu was hurling hand grenades (at the railway station)," Kasab told the court. "We both fired, me and Abu Ismail. We fired on the public."

Earlier Kasab, 21, stood up before the special court hearing his case just as a prosecution witness was to take the stand and addressed the judge. "Sir, I plead guilty to my crime," he said, triggering a collective gasp in the courtroom.

Tariq Ramadan, a professor sympathetic to Palestinian resistance to Israel, had his U.S. visa revoked in 2004 as he was about to take a tenured teaching job at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

His subsequent applications for a new visa were denied on the grounds that he had donated $1,336 to a charity that gave money to Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that it was legal for the government to bar Ramadan from the country, but said it had an obligation to inform him of the concerns about his donations and give him a chance to prove he didn't know his money would go to Hamas.

The three-judge panel said it was possible that a consular official had, in fact, given him that opportunity, but there was no record of it before the court.

The case will now return to a lower court and the government will be given a chance to figure out more about the exact details of the conversations between Ramadan and the consular staff in Bern, Switzerland that handled his visa application.

Ramadan could also reapply for the visa, the court said.

Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued Ramadan's case before the appeals court, said he was hopeful the Obama administration would allow the professor to enter the U.S. without further litigation.

"Over the next few weeks, we'll be encouraging the administration to take a new look not only at Ramadan's case but at the cases of other foreign scholars and writers who were excluded by the Bush administration on ideological grounds," he said.

In the ruling filed Tuesday, the court said any right O'Keeffe had to most of the 101 works of art ended with her death.

The financially struggling university had asked a lower court for permission to sell two of the works — O'Keeffe's 1927 oil painting "Radiator Building — Night, New York," and Marsden Hartley's "Painting No. 3."

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum objected to the plan, arguing that Fisk was violating the terms of the bequest, which required the works be displayed together, and asking for the artwork to be turned over to the estate.

The Davidson County Chancery Court blocked the sale as well as a proposed $30 million arrangement to share the collection with the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark. Nashville Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle ordered last year that the university had to take the collection out of storage and put it back on display or forfeit it to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

But the state appeals court overturned that decision, ruling the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum has no right to the work and no standing in court.

Representatives of the museum could not immediately be reached for comment. They will have 60 days to appeal the decision.

Ninety-seven of the works were part of a collection that belonged to O'Keeffe's late husband, the photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. O'Keeffe donated those works to the university in 1949 while executing Stieglitz's will.

The high court's unanimous decision reversed lower court rulings that sided with the city of Woodinville's refusal to consider the Northshore United Church of Christ's land-use permit application for Tent City 4 in a largely residential area in 2006.

Woodinville officials violated a constitutional provision that guarantees "absolute freedom of conscience in all matters of religious sentiment, belief and worship," Justice James M. Johnson wrote.

Six other justices signed Johnson's ruling, which reversed findings by King County Superior Court Judge Charles W. Mertel and a state Court of Appeals panel. The majority faulted the church on some procedural grounds but nonetheless found the city mainly in the wrong.

The other two justices would have gone farther. Justice Richard B. Sanders wrote, and Justice Tom Chambers agreed, that the majority held an "errant and dangerous assumption that the government may constitutionally be in the business of prior licensing or permitting religious exercise any more than it can license journalists."

Neither group of justices ruled on whether federal religious freedoms were violated in the case, which was closely watched by civil rights advocates and churches.