From The Associate Press:

A British judge sent Julian Assange to jail on Tuesday, denying bail to the WikiLeaks founder who vowed to fight efforts to extradite him to Sweden in a sex-crimes investigation.

A WikiLeaks spokesman said the flow of secret U.S. diplomatic cables would not be affected by Assange’s legal troubles, nor by the group’s increasingly rocky finances as both Visa and MasterCard cut off key funding methods.

“This will not change our operation,” Kristinn Hrafnsson told The Associated Press. As if to underline the point, WikiLeaks released a dozen new diplomatic cables, its first publication in more than 24 hours, including the details of a NATO defense plan for Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that prompted an indignant response from the Russian envoy to the alliance.

Assange turned himself in to Scotland Yard on Tuesday morning, and was sent to the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court in the early afternoon. He showed no reaction as Judge Howard Riddle denied him bail and sent him to jail until his next extradition hearing on Dec. 14.

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, came under increasing financial pressure Tuesday as it became increasingly difficult to collect the individual donations that fund most of the operations of the loosely knit group of activists. Visa Inc. said it would “suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks’ website pending further investigation into the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules.” MasterCard said it would suspend payments “until the situation is resolved.” PayPal Inc., a popular online payment service, has already cut its links to the website, while Swiss authorities closed Assange’s new Swiss bank account on Monday, freezing tens of thousands of euros, according to his lawyers.

WikiLeaks is still soliciting donations through bank transfers to affiliates in Iceland and Germany, as well as by mail to an address at University of Melbourne in Australia.