Elizabeth Taylor painting lawsuit dismissed 

A California judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the actress Elizabeth Taylor, by a German family claiming  ownership of a painting by Vincent van Gogh. The lawsuit, by the descendants of a Holocaust escapee Margarete Mauthner, claimed that the painting has been seized by the Nazis after she fled to South Africa from Germany in 1939 and that "Ms Taylor was negligent and careless when she bought the painting and should have known the painting had been confiscated from a victim of Nazi persecution." Ms. Taylor bought the painting, 'View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy', for $257,600 at Sotheby's in London in 1963. The District Court Judge said that California state law only allows individuals to sue for up to three years after their property is taken.