A French appeals court on Thursday upheld the Church of Scientology's 2009 fraud conviction on charges it pressured members into paying large sums for questionable remedies.

The case began with a legal complaint by a young woman who said she took out loans and spent the equivalent of euro21,000 ($28,000) on books, courses and "purification packages" after being recruited in 1998. When she sought reimbursement and to leave the group, its leadership refused to allow either. She was among three eventual plaintiffs.

"It's a severe defeat for the Church of Scientology, which is hit at the very heart of its organization in France," Olivier Morice, a lawyer for the National Union of Associations Defending Family and Individual Victims of Sects, told reporters after the decision.

Karin Pouw, a spokeswoman for the church in Los Angeles, denounced Thursday's decision, calling it a "miscarriage of justice."

She said the group would appeal the decision to the Court of Cassation and plans to bring a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights. Another complaint is pending with a U.N. special rapporteur.

Investigative documents in the WikiLeaks probe spilled out into the public domain Saturday for the first time, pointing to the Obama administration's determination to assemble a criminal case no matter how long it takes and how far afield authorities have to go.

Backed by a magistrate judge's court order from Dec. 14, the newly disclosed documents sent to Twitter Inc. by the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, Va., demand details about the accounts of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who's in custody and suspected of supplying WikiLeaks with classified information.

The others whose Twitter accounts are targeted in the prosecutors' demand are Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator; Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp; and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum. Gonggrijp and Appelbaum have worked with WikiLeaks in the past.

Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller declined comment on the disclosure in the case, which intensified following WikiLeaks' latest round of revelations with the posting of classified State Department diplomatic cables. The next day, Nov. 29, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed that anyone found to have violated U.S. law in the leaks would be prosecuted.

A juvenile court on Monday refused to grant bail to an American teenager charged with murder after his mother was found dead at a resort in western India, a prosecutor said.

The court sided with police who argued 16-year-old Joncarlo Patton should not be set free given the seriousness of the alleged offense, said prosecutor N.K. Sankhala.

Patton was arrested at an airport on Aug. 13, a day after his mother, Cindy Iannarelli from Cecil, Pennsylvania, was found with her throat slit at a resort in the town of Osian in Rajasthan state.

Police have formally charged the teenager with murder and destruction of evidence. Patton denies the charges.

Patton's father, University of Pittsburgh business associate professor G. Richard Patton, who arrived in India over the weekend, attended Monday's court proceedings in Jodhpur, a tourist hub in Rajasthan. The judge granted Patton's request to meet his son in the juvenile home.

A Japanese court sentenced a former senior defense official to 2 1/2 years in prison Wednesday for accepting bribes in exchange for his recommendation in government arms contracts, a court official said.

Former Vice-Defense Minister Takemasa Moriya was also ordered to pay 12.5 million yen ($125,400) in penalties — the value of the gifts and entertainment he pocketed, the Tokyo District Court official said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.

In his ruling, Judge Minoru Uemura said Moriya received golf trips, cash and other gifts when he was vice-defense minister 2003-2007, knowing that favorable treatment in contracts was expected in return.

According to a summary of the ruling published in Japanese newspapers, Moriya took golf trips worth about 8.86 million yen ($88,900) on 120 occasions from two defense trading companies led by Motonobu Miyazaki, a former executive of Yamada Yoko Corp. Moriya also accepted 3.64 million yen ($36,500) in cash gifts from Miyazaki and his two aides, paid into the bank accounts of his wife and his daughter.

Moriya, in return, recommended Miyazaki's companies in ministry procurement deals, including the 2004-2005 purchase of General Electric Co. C-X engines for next generation Japanese cargo aircraft.

A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana ruled Friday that the US Army will be able to complete its shipment of chemical waste from a location in western Indiana to Port Arthur, Texas, where the material will be incinerated. The Sierra Club and other citizen groups had filed the lawsuit in an attempt to block the Army from hauling the neutralized remains of the Cold-War era chemical weapon called VX. The groups had argued that the Army characterized the material, also called hydrolysate, as having less of an amount of VX and other toxic byproducts than it actually did. Chief Judge Larry McKinney held that the waste being shipped was not a munition or chemical agent, and rejected the argument that the Army had not fully considered the risk of shipping the material across the country. Most of the 1,513,994 gallons of the waste had already been shipped and the last portion had left the Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana on September 4. A spokesman for the Chemical Weapons Working Group said the groups would not appeal the ruling since the shipment was essentially complete.

The destruction of the VX nerve agent began in May 2005, in accordance with the requirements of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Over 180 nations have signed on to the Convention since it entered into force in 1997. Under the Convention, banned weapons, including nerve and mustard gases, had to be destroyed by June 2007, though countries could apply for a five-year extension.