Coast Guard officials in New Orleans say a petty officer has been convicted and sentenced on charges involving sexual assault and possession of child pornography.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Christopher C. Bush's court martial was held in Norfolk, Va.

A Coast Guard news release said the 28-year-old Bush was convicted Friday on four violations of a Uniform Code of Military Justice article dealing with rape and sexual assault and one involving child pornography.

The crimes involved a junior Coast Guard woman and a civilian woman. They happened between January 2010 and May 2013 while Bush was stationed at a unit in New Orleans. The Coast Guard said it was not releasing the name of the unit to protect the privacy of the victims.

Three Northern California men are each facing up to ten years in prison after pleading guilty to charges that they damaged federal conservation land while allegedly growing marijuana.

Prosecutors say Chou Vang, Vang Pao Yang and Pao Vang, all of Eureka, each entered their pleas in federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday to one count of willful injury to federal property.

The men were accused of clearing away trees and vegetation, using fertilizers, and failing to properly dispose of trash while growing pot in the summer of 2012 in the King Range National Conservation Area along California's Lost Coast. The area provides habitat for four federally-listed threatened species, including Chinook and Coho salmon.

As part of a plea deal, prosecutors say they dropped marijuana cultivation charges. The men are scheduled to be sentenced in July.

A federal jury found two men guilty Wednesday of economic espionage involving the theft and sale of a U.S. company’s technology to a competitor controlled by the Chinese government.

The jury returned the verdicts against Robert Maegerle and Walter Liew.

They were accused of stealing Delaware-based DuPont Co.’s method for making titanium oxide, a chemical that fetches $17 billion a year in sales worldwide and is used to whiten everything from cars to the middle of Oreo cookies.

A federal jury found two men guilty Wednesday of economic espionage involving the theft and sale of a U.S. company’s technology to a competitor controlled by the Chinese government.

Prosecutors said DuPont was unwilling to sell its method to China, so it was stolen and sent to a company called Pangang Group Co. Ltd., according to testimony during the diplomatically dicey proceedings. The jury heard six weeks of testimony.

Prosecutors alleged that Pangang’s factory is the only facility inside China known to be producing titanium oxide the DuPont way, which uses chlorination.

The Supreme Court has upheld a British natural gas company's multimillion dollar award against the government of Argentina.

BG Group won $185 million through arbitration of a dispute with Argentina over investment in natural gas development. An arbitration tribunal said the company did not have to first submit the dispute to Argentine courts before arbitration could begin.

Argentina asked a U.S. court to throw out the award. The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., sided with Argentina because it found that judges, not arbitrators, should decide where attempts to resolve the dispute should begin.

But the Supreme Court said Wednesday the arbitrators get to make that call and that they were correct to rule in favor of BG Group in this case.

The Supreme Court says whistleblower protections in a federal law passed in response to the Enron financial scandal apply broadly to employees of publicly traded companies and contractors hired by the companies.

The justices ruled 6-3 Tuesday in favor of two former employees of companies that administer the Fidelity family of mutual funds. The workers claimed they faced retaliation after they reported allegations of fraud affecting Fidelity funds.

The case involved the reach of a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, that protects whistleblower activity. The measure was intended to protect people who expose the kind of corporate misdeeds that arose at Enron.

The Supreme Court is considering whether to abandon a quarter-century of precedent and make it tougher for investors to band together to sue corporations for securities fraud.

The justices hear arguments Wednesday in an appeal by Halliburton Co. that seeks to block a class-action lawsuit claiming the energy services company inflated its stock price.

A group of investors says it lost money when Halliburton's stock price dropped after revelations the company misrepresented revenues, understated its liability in asbestos litigation and overstated the benefits of a merger.

Justices threw out the company's first attempt to block the lawsuit in 2011. But Halliburton is now urging the court to overturn a 25-year-old decision that sparked a tidal wave of securities-related, class-action lawsuits against publicly traded companies and has led to billions in settlements.

The court's 1988 decision in Basic v. Levinson says shareholders who claim they were defrauded by false statements in securities filings don't have to prove they actually relied on the statements. Rather, the court reasoned that any misrepresentation would be reflected in the current stock price. Even if investors are not aware of the misstatements, they are presumed to be aware of them because they affect the stock price.

This presumption, known as the "fraud-on-the-market theory," has become the driving force for modern class-action securities cases. But some economists have questioned whether this theory makes sense anymore, saying it doesn't account for the sometimes random and arbitrary nature of stock trading.