In a ruling published Friday, the Federal Criminal Tribunal rejected an appeal by the Duvalier family, which wants to reclaim the money. It can now appeal the case to Switzerland's highest court.

The government says the Duvalier family has failed to prove that the money stashed in Swiss accounts is of legitimate origin.

Many in Haiti consider that money stolen from public funds before Duvalier was ousted in 1986. Duvalier, who is believed to be living in exile in France, has always denied that.

The court said the Duvalier family had diverted public funds into Swiss accounts through a Liechtenstein foundation that amounted to a "criminal organization."

The accounts in Switzerland have been blocked since 2002.

Switzerland has traditionally been a favorite location for dictators' money because of its banking secrecy rules. But reforms over the past two decades have made it harder to hide money in Switzerland and the country has returned hundreds of millions of francs (dollars) to countries in Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere.

Three men are being retried for allegedly playing minor roles in Politkovskaya's 2006 slaying after the Supreme Court overturned their acquittal in June.

Politkovskaya's family had hoped the retrial, which started Wednesday, would spur a new inquiry to discover the masterminds of the killing. Prosecutors had backed the family's request for a new investigation.

But Friday's ruling dashed those hopes, and underpinned suspicion of official obstruction in the high-profile case.

Politkovskaya's daughter, Vera, said Friday's decision lessened the family's faith in the fairness of the proceedings.

Prosecutors said California State University, Chico student Kelsey Michael Mudd was more than three times over the legal alcohol limit on the day of the June 27 accident. They have yet to spell out their case in court, but the murder charge suggests they believe Mudd caused the accident.

The South China Morning Post newspaper reported earlier that Mudd was arguing with his driver before the crash.

Mudd's lawyer, Ian Polson, argued in court that the crash "always was and is a traffic accident," arguing there was no evidence that Mudd, 22, was behind the wheel during the accident that killed the driver.

"It's been blown all out of proportion," Polson told Acting Principal Magistrate Bina Chainrai.

Polson told reporters after Monday's brief hearing that the alcohol test results are irrelevant because there is no evidence that Mudd was driving.

Mudd, who has not entered a plea, appeared in court with his hair shortly cropped and wearing a dark blue suit jacket over a checkered dress shirt and khaki pants. He did not show any emotion, but briefly glanced to the back of the courtroom, where his parents and friends were seated.

He was remanded into custody after Chainrai adjourned his case to Aug. 28 to allow more time for prosecutors to investigate. Polson said he plans to file a bail application in the coming weeks.

Two taxis carrying explosives blew up within minutes of each other Aug. 25, 2003, at the Gateway of India, a popular tourist attraction on the waterfront, and at a busy shopping complex.

The bombings were one of the worst attacks in Mumbai's history. No one else has been charged.

Ashrat Shafiq Mohammed Ansari, Syed Mohammed Haneef Abdul Rahim and his wife Fahmeeda Syed Mohammed Haneef were arrested under India's tough anti-terrorism law shortly after the attacks.

The charges against the three included murder, conspiracy to kill and damaging public property. They had pleaded not guilty.

Judge M.R. Puranic said all three were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned, Pakistan-based militant group formed in the 1980s — with the alleged blessing of Pakistani intelligence — to sow trouble in the disputed Kashmir region. The three denied involvement with the group.

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.

The National Court said investigative magistrate Santiago Pedraz had produced no new evidence to indicate that the soldiers had acted incorrectly, given that they were in a war situation.

The soldiers, members of a tank crew, said they were responding to hostile fire when they shot at a Baghdad hotel housing Western journalists during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Spanish cameraman Jose Couso was one of two journalists killed in the shooting. The other was Reuters cameraman Taras Portsyk.

Pedraz first charged the soldiers in 2007. The National Court threw out that indictment this year, saying the evidence was insufficient and concluded the Couso's death was an accident of war.

But Pedraz reinstated it in May citing new evidence from three Spanish journalists who were at the hotel at the time of the shelling and looking out of a hotel window along with Couso.

These reporters testified that the tank had not come under fire before shooting at the Palestine Hotel.

But in the latest ruling, the National Court said their testimonies provided no new evidence which could lead the court to question the soldiers' claims that they believed, rightly or wrongly, they had come under fire, possibly from a sniper.

The Democrats picked the bouffant-haired Hatoyama to replace his scandal-hit predecessor in a May leadership race, seeing him as best able to hold the sometimes fractious party together.

He was not, however, the most popular candidate with the public, who saw him as being under the shadow of previous party leader Ichiro Ozawa.

Hatoyama attracts more support than Prime Minister Taro Aso in opinion polls, but many voters say they see neither as suitable to be premier.

"His best quality is that he's not Aso," said Jeff Kingston, professor of Asian studies at Temple University's Tokyo campus. "He's a bit of a cipher. He's prominent, but he doesn't leave a strong impression."

Aso, the grandson of a former prime minister, has been criticized as out of touch with ordinary Japanese because of his wealthy background.

But Hatoyama, a Stanford University PhD once nicknamed "the alien" for his prominent eyes, hails from an even wealthier family of industrialists and politicians. His mother's father founded Bridgestone Corp, one of the world's largest tire makers.