The Church of Scientology and six of its French leaders went on trial on Monday on charges of organised fraud that could lead to an outright ban on the organisation in France.

The Church of Scientology has been accused of manipulating followers into handing over their savings, in a trial that could see the church banned from France. The church's main centre in France, the ASES-Celebrity Centre, its bookshop and six of its leaders were charged on Monday with organised fraud and illegally prescribing drugs. One former church member claimed she had been psychologically pressured into paying thousands of pounds for lessons, books, drugs and a device called an "electrometre", which the church ...

Are the secrets of Scientology about to be exposed in a French court? More4 News goes to Paris to find out. It sounds like a science, but calls itself a church, while opponents have other names for it. Despite celebrity followers such as John Travolta, the Church of Scientology is viewed with suspicion in some countries. Now the organisation faces a legal battle in France, with a trial starting next week threatening its operations there.

Tom and Katie Cruise’s doll-like daughter Suri is to be trained in Scientology after her third birthday this week. The Cruises are sending their daughter five days a week to the Church of Scientology’s £6,000-a-year New Village Academy in Los Angeles, launched last year by Tom’s friend, fellow actor Will Smith. It is staffed by trained Scientologists and lists ‘study technology’ as a key curricular focus. ‘The children have a lot of responsibilities from a very young age,’ says a source. ...

Intense scrutiny has focused on John Travolta's family after the death of the actor's chronically ill 16-year-old son Jett, who died at the family's vacation home at a Grand Bahama resort on Friday. Yesterday, an undertaker said the death certificate concluded that the cause of death was a seizure, and that the teen's body showed no sign of head trauma despite earlier police reports that he hit his head on a bathtub. Mr. Travolta, 54, and wife Kelly Preston, 46, were ...

THERE are some of us who fear that if all the toxins were removed from our body, there'd be very little body left. And before anyone starts with accusations of exaggeration, they should take a look at recent images of Katie Holmes, allegedly toxin-free but not looking good on it. The actress's painfully gaunt and unhealthy appearance, as she reputedly approaches the end of a punishing detox regime, would be enough to make anyone reach for a large Irish coffee to ...

Copyright © 2009 Albuquerque Journal Journal Staff Writer The Second Chance drug rehab program was pitched to lawmakers and the judiciary as the missing link in a broken system that recycled non-violent drug offenders between jails, prisons and the streets. The past year, it has struggled through money problems and accusations that it is housing ineligible inmates. On Saturday, faced with a city-delivered Jan. 31 deadline to vacate, Second Chance officials moved the last of its inmates out. But throughout the ...

Bahamas Using 2 Experts for Travolta Son Autopsy Bahamas' health minister requests 2 pathologists to oversee autopsy on John Travolta's son By CHRIS GILLETTE Associated Press Writer FREEPORT, Bahamas January 3, 2009 (AP) The Bahamas will use two pathologists to ensure a careful autopsy on John Travolta's son, who died at the actor's vacation home in Grand Bahama, the territory's health minister said Saturday. Dr. Hubert Minnis told The Associated Press that he decided to use a second specialist to guarantee ...

SANTA FE (KRQE) — A report presented to a legislative committee Monday suggests an Albuquerque drug-treatment program seeking more state money may not be as good as it claimed. Dr. Paul Guerin, who has been studying the program based on the teachings of the founder of Scientology, reported it does not have the success rate it has pointed to in the past. He delivered the results of his study in testimony to the Legislatures Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee meeting in ...

PARIS (Reuters) - A French judge has ordered two branches of the Church of Scientology and seven of its leaders to stand trial for fraud, a judicial source said on Monday. The case is the latest in a series of legal battles that have pitted the French judicial system against the Scientologists, who are viewed by the authorities as a sect. The latest suit centers on a complaint made in 1998 by a woman who said she was enrolled into the ...

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - An Albuquerque rehabilitation program doesn't have nearly as good a success rate as organizers claim, a News 13 investigation finds. The Second Chance program, developed by the founder of Scientology, uses saunas to sweat out toxins and other techniques to try to get people off drugs and alcohol. Judges have sent more than 90 convicts to the facility near the Double Eagle II airport on Albuquerque's West Mesa since it opened in September 2006. The federal government and ...

Scientology’s International Base is located on the sloping foothills at the north end of California’s San Jacinto Valley, about ninety miles east of Los Angeles. When I first moved there in 1989, the valley was still mostly a rural farming community – sheep still grazed on fields near the Base. But the area was being rapidly taken over by LA’s "Inland Empire" suburbs, spreading out east from Riverside like a virus. Nearby Moreno Valley had already achieved the dubious status of ...

It was well after midnight and the Tampa airport terminal was almost empty. Just a few late-night travelers sitting on the benches, reading, trying to sleep or, like me, watching the movie on the screen hanging above the waiting area. They were showing Pancho Villa, the 1972 Eugenio Martin film with Telly Savalas as Villa. I was identifying with Villa – his betrayal and imprisonment, his escape, his revolt against his enemy, Huerta. I could feel Villa’s hot outrage. ''¡Viva la ...

Scientology expert and outspoken critic Dave Touretzky will be joining Glosslip to discuss his knowledge of LRH's controversial "Study Tech" and the drug addiction program Narconon. The second hour we'll be talking to best-selling author and Scientology critic Mark Ebner of the popular website Hollywood Interrupted. Ebner has written countless articles on the CoS and has been victimized by the CoS.

OREM, UTAH - Officer Terry Sparks says he feels like he was beaten with a sledgehammer. The pounding headache was bad enough, but the surging nausea made it almost unbearable. He gathered his energy and once again entered the nondescript clinic in this rural community south of Salt Lake City. The side effects of his treatment there are a price he is willing to pay to purge his body of toxins he believes have built up in his system after years ...

Apparently all of Katie Holmes' recent naughty behavior has prompted loving husband Tom Cruise to reprimand her with a punishment that's slightly more severe than asking her to not only wash the dishes but dry them, too. After eating too little with bad influence Victoria Beckham and daring to consider a promising role on Broadway later this year, Cruise decided to step up her Scientology training with a fun-filled three-day vacation to Gold Base. And Canyon Ranch it is not. Gold ...

La scientologie est une entreprise ultramoderne qui a aussi des activités séculières. Par exemple, en 1966, Ron Hubbard fondait avec un collègue Narconon une cure de désintoxication qui compte aujourd'hui plus d'une centaine de centres dans le monde, dont un à Trois-Rivières. En plus d'être une cure de désintoxication, Narconon s'est donné pour mission d'instruire les jeunes sur les méfaits de la drogue en donnant des conférences dans de nombreuses écoles de la province. L'atelier offert dans les écoles, appelé La ...

In this article, we argue that Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, likely presented a personality disorder known as malignant narcissism, and then we establish that this disorder probably contributed to his creation of organizational policies against perceived enemies that reflected his narcissistic rage. We illustrate our argument by discussing Hubbard’s creation of an internal Scientology organization called the Guardian’s Office, which carried out a sustained and covert attack against a Scientology critic, Paulette Cooper. This attack, and the Scientology policies that ...

[Picture / Caption: Nov. 7: Ailing meth cops sweat it out at an Orem, Utah, clinic.] A controversial Church of Scientology treatment used on World Trade Center emergency responders is being used in Utah to "detoxify" cops who raided methamphetamine labs in the 1980s and 1990s. The Utah Meth Cops Project is treating around a dozen former and current police officers at taxpayers' expense, using a regime devised by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard at a Bio-Cleansing Centers of America facility ...