Too Legit To Quit

'Brazilian Fritzl' held daughter prisoner for 12 years and had SEVEN children with her

2010-06-10T02:17:00.001-07:00

A man in a remote Brazilian fishing village is said to have kept his daughter imprisoned for 12 years, raped her repeatedly and had seven children with her, in a case resembling that of Josef Fritzl.
Jose Agostinho Pereira is also accused of abusing a young girl he had with his daughter.
Police allege the 54-year-old kept his daughter, now 28, under virtual house arrest in a two-room, thatched-roof hut near a tiny fishing village in northeastern Brazil.
An officer who aided in the arrest said the home was located in such a remote, jungle area that the only way to reach it was by using canoes.

Accused: Jose Agostinho Pereira, 54, is seen at a police station in Maranhao state, Brazil yesterday

Authorities said the children appeared to suffer from malnutrition and could barely communicate with others. Most were unclothed.
The alleged abuse began when Pereira's wife left him in 1998, said police inspector Jair Lima de Paiva.
Pereira has been in jail since Tuesday in the city of Pinheiro in Maranhao state, about 1,400 miles north of Rio de Janeiro.
Charges have not been filed against him. Under Brazilian law, prosecutors only file charges after police have ended their investigation.
It was not immediately known if Pereira had a lawyer.
Paiva said Pereira kept his daughter and the children in nearly complete isolation in the countryside near the village of Experimento, about 50 miles outside of Pinheiro.
While the exact ages of the children - four girls and three boys - were not known as none of their births were registered, police believe they range in age from two-months-old to 12.

Jose Agostinho Pereira's home in Maranhao state. According to police, Pereira kept his daughter imprisoned for 12 years near a remote fishing village, raped her repeatedly and had seven children with her

'None of them were allowed to leave the house. None can read, they can barely communicate with other people,' said Paiva.
'They were all threatened with their lives if they tried to escape or tell anyone about the situation.'
Paiva said police were tipped off about Pereira's alleged crimes by an anonymous phone call.
Officers from Pinheiro were sent to the remote area about ten days ago, where they located Pereira's house, kept it under observation for a few days and then arrested him.
'He confessed to everything,' said a police officer who helped arrest Pereira.
Pereira's daughter and the seven children are now under the care of the government's protective services.
It was last year in Austria that Josef Fritzl was found guilty of locking his daughter in a dungeon for 24 years and fathering seven children with her.

Sex offender 101

2010-05-28T22:37:00.001-07:00

Indian Anti-narcotics officer on payroll of Israeli drug dealers

2010-05-26T02:01:00.001-07:00

Goa, May 26 : A former chief of the Goa Police's anti-narcotics cell was on the pay-roll of two leading Israeli drug dealers, officials said Wednesday.

While opposing the bail application of senior police inspector Ashish Shirodkar, who was arrested for his links to Israeli drug dealer Yaniv Benaim alias Atala, the crime branch has said that Shirodkar was also on the pay-roll of another Israeli drug dealer David Driham alias Dudu.

'It has also come on records that the arrested David Driham alias Dudu had disclosed during his interrogation the name of the petitioner/accused that he was on his pay-roll in order to encourage his drug activities and also as protection money,' Deputy Superintendent of Police Chandrakant Salgaonkar said in his statement to the court, while opposing the bail application.

Both Dudu and Atala have been arrested and are in judicial lock-up.

The officer also said that the police department had already started preparing a list of movable and immovable assets of the police inspector and was in the process of accounting for the salary and other remuneration received by the petitioner from the time he joined the department.

'A letter has been sent to the state registrar, Panaji, village panchayat to inform (about) the properties registered in the name of the petitioner and the information in respect of the same is awaited,' the written statement says.

'The process of getting information on close relatives of the petitioner with respect to moveable and immovable assets is in progress,' Salgaonkar said.

Seven policemen, including two senior police officers, were arrested for their links to the drugs mafia in Goa in the past two months, with reports suggesting that a senior cabinet minister's son was linked to the powerful drug mafia.

Student Sues School for Damages in Sexting Case

2010-05-26T00:26:00.001-07:00

A former Pennsylvania high school student has sued school and county officials for damages in a controversial sexting case.
The student alleges a violation of her constitutional rights, in a civil suit filed last week that could serve as a cautionary tale to other officials considering punishing students over risque self-portraits.
In the complaint filed in a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania, the former student — identified only as “N.N.” — accuses former District Attorney George P. Skumanick, Jr., principal Gregory Ellsworth, the Tunkhannock School District and Wyoming County of violating her constitutional rights (.pdf). The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
The complaint alleges that officials had no probable cause to seize and search her phone, and violated her privacy and her right to free expression by punishing her for storing nude and semi-nude photos of herself on her phone.
The plaintiff, now 19 years old, was a student at Tunkhannock Area High School in January 2009 when school officials, who discovered that male students had been trading photos of female students showing them in various states of undress, confiscated and searched the phones of her and several other students. Officials then turned the phones over to the district attorney’s office, which began a criminal investigation.
Then-District Attorney Skumanick, who lost his bid for a sixth term last year, threatened about 16 students — three boys and 13 girls — who either appeared in the images or were found in possession of them with child porn charges unless they agreed to six months of probation, submitted to drug testing and attended a five-week, 10-hour education program to discuss why what they did was wrong. He gave the parents of the students 48 hours to agree to the terms. The plaintiff is now suing the school and county for illegal search and for forcing her to take the educational program.
In a separate but related case, the American Civil Liberties Union sued last year on behalf of three other Tunkhannock students who appeared in risque photos but refused to participate in the forced education program. The ACLU sought to bar prosecutors from charging the teens with a crime and won a permanent injunction last month.

According to N.N.’s civil complaint, a teacher seized the phone after the plaintiff received a call during class. The school’s rules require student cellphones to be turned off and stored in lockers during school hours. Students who violate the rules risk detention and having their phone temporarily confiscated.
A while after the plaintiff’s phone was seized, she was summoned to see the principal, Gregory Ellsworth, who told her that he had gone through her phone and found explicit images stored in the memory. He told her that he had given the phone to law enforcement officials, and then suspended the plaintiff for three days.
In several of the photos, the plaintiff’s breasts are exposed, and one photo shows her pubic area, according to the court document.
The plaintiff says that except for one image, she took all of the photos herself and never shared the images with any other students. They were meant to be viewed only by her and her long-term boyfriend.
Even though no charges were brought against her, the images are still part of the government record, and the plaintiff is seeking to have them destroyed. She’s also seeking to be reimbursed for the $100 cost of the educational course and for about $71 in lost wages.

Joslyn James Talks '11th Hole' Tiger Woods-Themed Porn Film

2010-05-24T23:31:00.001-07:00

Joslyn James, one of two adult actresses who allegedly carried on an affair with Tiger Woods, is set to star in an upcoming porn film based on her time with the superstar golfer.
In a radio interview last week with Atlanta's 680 the Fan, James elaborated on the movie and and talked about her past. SportsRadioInterviews.com prepared the latest transcript.
James confirmed that the movie is based on the graphic and dirty text messages that Woods allegedly sent her, and in a bizarre twist, she told WCNN that "we have got a couple of different gentlemen playing Tiger."
The adult actress is barely a week removed from clashing with another alleged Tiger Woods mistress, VIP hostess Rachel Uchitel (PHOTOS). James slammed Uchitel's "bed hopping talents" and lashed out at comments Uchitel made in an interview days earlier.

Women linked to Tiger Woods

Raychel Coudriet, the daughter of Woods' neighbor, met the golfer when she was just 14.
Devon James is a "porn queen" whose alleged escort listing contained plenty of naked pictures.

Emma Rotherham allegedly had early-morning sex on Woods' office couch. Tiger reportedly loved to see her in black stockings and suspenders.
Jaimee Grubbs (PHOTOS) saved a voicemail from her lover, as well as steamy text messages. Jaimee stripped down for two magazines (sexy PHOTOS).
Jamie Jungers (PHOTOS) says she and Tiger had "wild" and "crazy" sex against a wall. She also claims to have slept with Woods the night his father died. Jungers, who allegedly once worked as a stripper, parlayed her newfound fame into jobs pitching vodka and an auction web site. She also appeared on the Today show and Dateline.
Julie Postle (PHOTOS) allegedly met Woods when she worked as a cocktail waitress in Orlando. Tiger was reportedly "obsessed" with Postle and "really hunted" her. She was also photographed in a bikini.
Susie Ogren says she took ecstasy with Tiger and he hoped "to get me into bed."
Rachel Uchitel (PHOTOS) was the first of Tiger's alleged mistresses. Woods reportedly emailed her once to say that "I finally found someone I connect with." In another alleged email, Woods shared a steamy fantasy of Uchitel simultaneously having sex with Derek Jeter and Bones star David Boreanaz. A National Enquirer source called Uchitel a "celebrity whore."
Loredana Jolie, a Playboy model, was allegedly "one of [Tiger's] favorites." She is planning a book that will spill the beans on Woods' alleged sexual encounters with men.
Theresa Rogers has been described as a "cougar" who allegedly boasted that she taught Tiger "everything he needed to know to be a great lover." She reportedly conceived a baby while she was seeing Woods, but an article suggests she believes the father is a Serbian basketball player she was also seeing at the time. According to another article, Woods told Rogers that he only married Elin Nordegren to boost his image. The 40-something Rogers may have negotiated a payoff in exchange for her silence.
Joslyn James is a porn star (PHOTOS, VIDEO) who has starred in films such as Porn Star Brides and MIA - Milfs In Action. She is also wanted in Washington state.
Holly Sampson is a porn star (NSFW pictures, video) whose films include Descent Into Bondage and Diary of a Horny Housewife. She may have worked as an escort (NSFW) and appeared in a video in which she describes her "amazing" sex with Tiger Woods. In another article, she spoke about the "sensual, beautiful experience."

Priest Accused Of Abusing Boy, Turning Home Into 'Erotic Dungeon' Surrenders To Police

2010-05-24T23:21:00.001-07:00

SAO PAULO - A Polish priest accused of sexually abusing a former altar boy in Rio de Janeiro and turning his parish home into an "erotic dungeon" has surrendered and is now in police custody, a public safety official said Saturday.

State prosecutors have accused Marcin Michael Strachanowski of handcuffing the 16-year-old former altar boy to a bed three years ago in the parish house where the priest lived and threatening to kill the youth if he spoke of the abuse.

Strachanowski arrived at a police station Friday night, said a spokesman for Rio's state public security department. He spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with departmental policy. Images published in Brazilian newspapers showed Strachanowski being driven away in a police car.

The 44-year-old priest was suspended from duties after the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro learned that a judge had issued an order Thursday for his arrest.

The archdiocese issued a statement Friday announcing the suspension and expressing regret over the alleged abuse.

Judge Alexandre Abrahao Dias said that investigators found "erotic material sent to the victim via Internet to seduce him" and that the priest also took other youths to the parish house, "which he converted into a kind of erotic dungeon where he submitted them, often with the use of handcuffs, to orgies."

Lawyers representing the priest did not immediately return a telephone message left Friday afternoon seeking comment. The phone number for the lawyers went unanswered on Saturday. The judge said that he was ordering the priest detained in part because he feared Strachanowski might try to flee from Brazil.

Church officials said that Strachanowski also faces a canonical legal process by an ecclesiastical tribunal, but they declined to provide additional information about the priest, such as how long he has been in Brazil or his work history with the Church.

The security department spokesman said the priest submitted a document in Polish as evidence that he is a college graduate, which could allow him to be kept in a lockup with better conditions than most Brazilian jails, which are severely overcrowded and dangerous because they are ruled by hardened gang members. The determination will be made by Brazilian education officials in conjunction with authorities.

Strachanowski's lawyers also have the option of trying to seek his release through the courts next week, the spokesman said.

Sex-abuse scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church have mushroomed around the world recently, and some of the accused priests have surfaced in Brazil, home to more Catholics than any other nation.

Late last month, prosecutors charged the Rev. Jose Afonso with abusing altar boys ranging in age from 12 to 16. Prosecutors said the alleged abuses took place in the city of Franca, in southeastern Sao Paulo state.

Also last month, 83-year-old Monsignor Luiz Marques Barbosa was detained in northeastern Brazil for alleged abuse of at least three boys after being caught on videotape having sex with a former altar boy who was an adult when the video was filmed. Barbosa is under house arrest while authorities investigate. Two other priests in the same archdiocese are also accused of abuses.

The National Conference of Brazilian Bishops announced this month that it plans to craft a manual with guidelines to help bishops prevent child-abuse cases.

Sexual Assault On Plane: Ramesh Advani Arrested For Sexually Abusing Passenger On Continental Flight

2010-05-24T23:20:00.001-07:00

NEWARK, NJ (Associated Press) - Federal prosecutors say a New Jersey man sexually assaulted a sleeping female passenger on flight from Hong Kong to Newark.
Ramesh Advani is charged with abusive sexual contact.
Prosecutors say the 63-year-old Berkley Heights resident was seated next to the woman on the Continental Airlines flight.

Authorities say Advani reached under her blanket and sexually abused her.

Authorities say two passengers seated behind the pair observed what was happening and kicked the woman's seat to wake her. The woman awoke and alerted the flight crew.

Advani was detained when the plane landed in Newark on Friday.

An initial court appearance is scheduled for Monday afternoon.

It is not known whether Advani has retained a lawyer.

Attack Dogs Kill 3-Year-Old Girl, Injure Her Great-Grandmother

2010-05-23T05:19:00.001-07:00

BERLIN — Four attack dogs killed a 3-year-old toddler in eastern Germany and badly injured the girl's great-grandmother, who had tried to rescue the girl, police said on Saturday.
Prosecutors opened an investigation for negligent homicide against the dogs' owner, the girl's aunt, police spokeswoman Jeanette Schwahn-Witzenhausen said.
The girl and her 70-year-old great-grandmother had been visiting the girl's aunt Friday evening in Oldisleben-Sachsenburg in Thuringia state when the Staffordshire bull terriers attacked the girl while she was in the house, police said.
The great-grandmother tried to stop the dogs, each weighing between 65 and 90 pounds (30 to 40 kilograms), but only the aunt rushing in from the garden was able to pull them away, police said.
The girl died on the scene, about a week before her fourth birthday. She lived in the same village and had visited her aunt previously, prosecutor Sandra Bock said, adding that authorities had yet to question the 44-year-old woman.
Veterinarian Gunter Wolf said the dogs had bitten the girl's head "very aggressively" until moments before her death, German news agency DAPD reported from nearby Nordhausen. Wolf said that while the animals' behavior was abnormal, but they did not have rabies.
The dogs were killed by authorities with the aunt's consent, police said.
They were not registered with authorities, as is required in Germany for dogs deemed potentially dangerous, DAPD quoted police officer Michael Becker as saying.
In a similar tragedy less than a month ago in Germany, a Husky killed an 8-week-old baby in Cottbus, in the eastern state of Brandenburg.

Ex-Miss Russia Charged With Possession, Forgery

2010-05-20T07:55:00.001-07:00

NEW YORK — A former Miss Russia was charged Wednesday with forging a prescription for painkillers on a pad stolen from her psychiatrist's office.
Anna Malova was arrested Tuesday afternoon by the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement at a Manhattan pharmacy after she filled a prescription for 85 pills of the painkiller Vicodin, prosecutors said. A pharmacist there said she had come in with a similar prescription on April 10 and bought painkillers.
Authorities were notified by Malova's doctor, who reported the prescription pad stolen from her office shortly after Malova left there Feb. 24. They told pharmacies in the area to be on the lookout.
Malova was wearing a black, fur-lined jacket and jeans and carried a Burberry plaid umbrella when she was arrested.
"I don't know what happened," she told a reporter for the Fox 5 News television show, which had been tipped off to the arrest and was waiting for her when she left the pharmacy.
Malova, 38, was charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, forgery and criminal possession of stolen property. She didn't enter a plea.
A lawyer who has represented Malova in the past declined to comment Wednesday. Malova was being held pending bail and is due back in court Monday.
Malova has pleaded not guilty in a similar case in which she was accused of stealing a prescription pad from another doctor – a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction – and using it to fill a prescription for 90 Vicodin pills. Prosecutors said she was caught on surveillance cameras at the pharmacy. She's due back in court on that case July 13.
Malova, a tall blonde with a wide smile, was Miss Russia in 1998 and once finished in the Top 10 in the Miss Universe pageant. She had been living in New York and was a physician in her native county though not licensed to practice medicine in the U.S., according to her statements at the 1998 pageant.

Bestiality Tourist Stephen Clarke Charged With Lying On Visa After Sex With Dogs

2010-05-16T00:07:00.001-07:00

SEATTLE (AP)-- There's no federal law against having sex with dogs, but there is one against lying on government documents.
Prosecutors say a zoophilic British tourist broke that law when he wrote on a visa waiver application that he had never been convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude and wasn't entering the U.S. to engage in criminal or immoral activities.
Stephen Clarke was arrested last month in Washington state at what investigators say was a farm where visitors could have sex with animals.
Investigators found videos of Clarke having sex with dogs, and he pleaded guilty to animal abuse in state court Tuesday. He was charged Friday in U.S. District Court with lying on his application for a visa waiver that allowed him to stay in the country for 90 days.
WATCH: Seattle TV station's report on farm Clarke visited

Tripura police arrest Maharashtra youth with gold

2010-05-11T09:05:00.001-07:00

Agartala, May 11 (IANS) Tripura Police have busted an international gold smuggling racket with the arrest of a Maharashtra youth and recovered four gold bars worth Rs.1.2 million, an official said Tuesday.

“Acting on a tip-off, we arrested Anand Tulsi Roy Thurat, 32, from a hotel in Agartala Monday night. The youth purchased the gold bars weighing 700 gram from Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka and entered India Monday,” Deputy Superintendent of Police (Central) Harimohan Das told reporters.

He said that after preliminary interrogation, police handed over Anand, a resident of Sangli district of Maharashtra, to the customs to unearth the racket behind the illegal gold trade.

Ganja seized in Cachar

2010-05-06T01:48:00.001-07:00

Silchar, May 6 : Cachar police seized 42 quintals of ganja, valued at Rs 1 crore, from two Bihar-bound trucks on National Highway 53 this morning.

Cachar superintendent of police Prashanta Bhuyan said acting on a tip-off, his men seized the trucks, with number plates registered in Manipur and Assam, and found the contraband hidden in the driver’s cabin.

The official said this was by far the largest ganja haul in Cachar.

Five persons, all Manipuris and truck opera- tors, were arrested for questioning.

Cachar is emerging as a favourite route for ganja smugglers who collect the contraband from neighbouring Manipur and transport it to Bihar.

The Silchar-Haflong highway and National Highway 44 which runs through this district to enter Meghalaya and Assam, North Bengal and then Bihar, are the most commonly used routes.

In 2009 alone, 12 quintals of ganja were seized in Cachar during raids by the police and excise staff.

The Chinese laboratories where scientists are already at work on the new 'meow meow'

2010-04-25T03:18:00.001-07:00

By MIKE POWER in LONDON and SIMON PARRY in CHINA

Last updated at 10:00 PM on 24th April 2010

In a filthy Shanghai laboratory, chemists make batches of mephedrone - and a new incarnation of the 'plant food' linked to the deaths of British teenagers. Never heard of the drugs Eric-1 and Eric-2? That's the point. By Mike Power in London and Simon Parry in China

In a filthy Shanghai laboratory, chemists make batches of mephedrone - and a new incarnation of the 'plant food' linked to the deaths of British teenagers

Young, rich and brimming with energy, Eric embodies the entrepreneurial spirit of modern China. He sits at his desk beneath a cabinet of spirits and cigars that he dispenses liberally to his overseas clients while secretaries totter in and out carrying samples and price lists.
Eric, 35, wears designer clothes, drives a Buick SUV and works such long hours his wife moans that he treats the luxury villa where they live like a hotel. But for all his infectious charm as he chats and jokes at his offi ce in an up-market Shanghai apartment block, there is a sinister side to the business that has made this chemistry graduate conspicuously wealthy.
The booming and rapidly expanding company he heads produces designer drugs that supply tens of thousands of British youngsters with a legal - and potentially lethal - high. These new drugs could take over as a legal replacement for mephedrone, the amphetamine-like drug some users have called 'meow meow', which was banned by the Government ten days ago after legislation was rushed through. This followed media reports that cited its use by some users before their deaths. One of those was Lois Waters, 24, of North Yorkshire who died last month having taken mephedrone several days before.
With a laboratory near the city's international airport (whose neighbours include offices of Glaxo Smith Kline, Novartis and Astra Zeneca) and a factory with 65 workers three hours from Shanghai, Eric claims his company manufactures and ships hundreds of kilograms of drugs to Britain every week.
Despite the ban on mephedrone and other related-compounds, Eric and many other Chinese businessmen like him are ahead of the game. They beat customs controls using know-how and corruption and are creating and preparing new drugs that will deliberately dodge our classifications and continue to offer profitable, legal kicks in the UK.

Drug boss Eric, right, inspects the latest batch of a new drug yet to be named at his company in Shanghai, China

Posing as customers, we were shown around his laboratory and witnessed a sophisticated and ruthless export industry that is indifferent to the harm and addiction its products cause. It is driven instead by modern China's guiding light: money.
Eric makes it clear that he views the death of Lois Waters and two British youngsters who had allegedly taken mephedrone as being a business inconvenience rather than a moral dilemma.
'They died in the UK,' he tells us in a rare display of earnestness. 'As a result UK customs have recently been very strict and lots of packages from China and India are stopped and seized. It is in the media and on the TV and a lot of our customers are worried. But we assure them there is no risk for them.'
He then reveals how his company has already been avoiding customs checks in the UK by sending packages into Britain via 'soft' third countries in the EU.
'We have agents in Europe so we can send to Ireland, Austria, Spain and Italy. Then the package will be re-sent to the UK from those countries. If the package comes from outside Europe there might be trouble. Within Europe, the UK customs normally will not check.'
Even if the packages were stopped, he promises us, the orders would be honoured.

'I can't think of any way we can get ahead of the game, there are just too many chemical possibilities. There's always going to be something we haven't thought of and legislated for'

'If it is stopped we always refund or reship. That is why we have so many customers in the UK. There is no risk for them.'
Eric's company sends its drugs to Britain by express courier. At the entrance to his office, barrels of MDPV - a potent and addictive stimulant that was banned along with mephedrone on April 16 - are piled up alongside dozens of one-kilo packages sitting ready to be taken to the airport.
Posing as large, London-based wholesalers of legal highs, we had insisted on a visit to the lab before making our order - for 10kg of MDPV every month for a year. Eric says our order is almost laughably small: 'It amounts to 120kg a year. I have that much in my office now. Every month we produce two tons.'
However, our order still amounts to 200,000 doses monthly, and 2.4 million doses annually.
Even with shipment via a European country, packages are delivered in three to four days from the time payment hits his account, he says, adding with a knowing grin: 'Some packages we send directly to the UK. We have our own methods.'

Lois Waters, 24, of North Yorkshire, who had taken mephedrone before she died last month

The boom in demand for legal highs in the UK has generated a huge new revenue stream for Eric's company.
'It has all happened in the past two years and the demand from the UK and other countries just keeps increasing,' he says.
Set up seven years ago, his lab was already doing brisk international business turning out five or six new generic drugs a year for worldwide sales. These ranged from anti-retroviral drugs for HIV sufferers and heart-disease drugs to fake Viagra.
Eric said there was no problem in continuing to send the drug to the UK, promising to fulfil our 12-month order. What's more, Eric told us that he is developing a new drug to ship to the UK after this month's ban.
At his company's laboratory, the size of a small flat, a team of young scientists in white coats and face masks work on new formulas. Dipping his nose into a sample bag of white powder, Eric says: 'I can't tell you the name of this. It is going to be very popular and your buyers will be very interested in this.'
Scooping out a pinch between his fingers he says: 'We've been working on this for some time. It is almost perfect and ready to ship. The purity is 99.9 per cent. If you look at it, you can see it is snow white. That shows how pure it is.'
Inside the laboratory, with huge bell jars at one end, a small team of scientists appear to be working on a dozen different chemical processes at once. When we point out the extraordinary variety of colours in one of the bell jars and compare it to an oil painting, Eric laughs.
'You must be artists,' he says. 'When you look at that jar, you see colours. When I look at it, I see only orders and money.'
Driving us from his laboratory back to his downtown office in the hope of sealing another overseas order, Eric was in a hurry to move on to the next deal.
'I have no time for holidays. I am working all the time,' he says.
Eric, though, like all the most successful drug dealers, chooses not to get high on his own supply. His only vice is cans of Red Bull.
'I have a lot of business on my hands. I need all the energy I can get,' he says.
For the past year, the drug market in the UK has been teetering on the edge of complete anarchy. Drug laws look impotent in the face of the ingenuity and resourcefulness of dealers, users and chemists. We have ended up in a situation where anyone of any age can buy limitless amounts of powerful drugs on the high street or on the internet, and - feasibly - consume it in front of a police officer with little chance of prosecution.
Chinese scientists such as Eric are identifying illegal compounds that have a psychoactive effect and modifying them slightly on a molecular level so they still get users high - but are legal. Over the course of our investigation, Eric has offered dozens more chemicals, a garbled narcotic alphabet soup of untried and untested drugs, whose chemical structures, experts tell us, makes them likely to be addictive and harmful.

'Now people have discovered mephedrone, they'll look for others. It will be interesting to see if the new control kills the market or if goes underground. That's the dilemma for legislators: is controlling it the best way?'

The recent ban on mephedrone followed a wave of public outrage after reports claiming that 25 young people had died after using it. Coroners' reports have shown that most of these users had more than one drug in their bloodstream - in the case of Louis Wainwright, 18, and his friend Nicholas Smith, 19, who died in Scunthorpe in March, both men were taken the drug with heroin substitute methadone and alcohol, a fatal mix experienced methadone users avoid.
It is undeniable, though, that mephedrone is addictive, dangerous, and the market around it is far from benign. Politicians and scientists have distinctly opposed views about what is to be done. Professor David Nutt was sacked as chairman of the independent Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in October for his views in favour of a more relaxed legal stance to reflect what he claims are over-stated dangers. Other members with similar views have also resigned. Nutt recently caused more controversy saying it would be better to sell controlled doses of mephedrone at nightclubs and give safety guidance than ban it.
While the Government and their advisers have been at loggerheads and seem unable to come up with a clear policy, Chinese labs have filled the policy vacuum.
It seems as if the legal drugs scene burst out of nowhere, but experts have been expecting it for years. Dr John Ramsey, a toxicologist at St George's Medical School, University of London, says most of the new legal highs he sees are made in China.
'It's not difficult to look at the pharmaceutical literature, find things that are controlled, then devise a minor chemical modification to bring them outside control,' he says. 'Then you can contact a Chinese laboratory and they'll happily custom-synthesise it for you.'
Ramsey believes that current models of control are inadequate and out of date: 'All we're doing is propelling people through a series of new chemicals, none of which have been toxicity tested.'
The Labour MP for Bolton South East, Brian Iddon, who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for many years, agrees.
'There's an unlimited supply of synthetic drugs,' he says. 'As a chemist I know that I can move one functional group around a molecule and produce an analogue that will have a similar physiological effect. The trouble is, by banning new drugs, there's this procession of new ones that people will turn to.'
Ramsey says the chemical landscape has changed irrevocably in the last few years.
'I can't think of any way we can get ahead of the game, there are just too many chemical possibilities. There's always going to be something we haven't thought of and legislated for.'
Shadow Minister for Crime Reduction James Brokenshire disagrees, and says the Government needs a more integrated approach.
'When new psychoactive drugs emerge onto the market - which we should monitor via an early-warning system - we need to be able to put them into a temporary classification, during which time there would be restrictions on import and sale,' he says.
'This would allow the ACMD to do its work so we can come up with a longer-term classification. But in that initial period, you'd actually be dealing with the harms they pose.'
Brokenshire believes we may soon need more broad, catch-all legislation as they have in the U.S. and Australia. 'We need to look at ways in which analogues can be captured so that if there is an existing illegal drug and someone merely creates an analogue of it, there should be a way of legislating against it.'

A laboratory assistant by a machine containing the new substance - possibly soon to be exported to online buyers in the UK

Keith Vaz, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee that monitors domestic policy, says the answer is even simpler: do away with complex and lengthy scientific consultation, and change the law fast.
'As the Home Secretary has said on a number of occasions, the ACMD are the experts but politicians have to make the decisions. We need to say to the ACMD, "You have 28 days to ban this." It's not rocket science. We also need to gather drugs intelligence in the same way we gather anti-terrorism information.'
MP Brian Iddon, meanwhile, argues a more radical position, one few politicians are keen to hear, much less advocate.
'Since the war on drugs started, usage has escalated,' he says. 'Legal enforcements do not work. Supply-side control does not work. We have to reduce or minimise demand. You'll never stop it. We have to get the health risks of drugs across to young people early in secondary schools.'
The last time new drugs sparked such a fevered response was in the late Eighties, when ecstasy exploded onto the British music scene. However, TV and press coverage of outdoor raves unintentionally brought the new drug into the orbit, if not the pockets, of millions of young British people throughout the following decades. A similar scenario has now played out with mephedrone and other legal highs.
To understand the chaos we are in today in the UK, you need to trace the decades-old links between an octogenarian chemist in California, makeshift essential oil distilleries in the Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia, laboratories such as Eric's in Shanghai, nightclubs in the UK and hippy shops in towns like Scunthorpe.
What ties them all together is the internet.
Alexander Shulgin, now aged 84, has been called the godfather of ecstasy - a title he, as a scientist, hates. In the late Fifties, in common with other intellectuals, Shulgin had tried mescaline - a natural and at that time legal hallucinogen produced by cacti. He was so profoundly affected by the experience that he gave over the rest of his life to radical psychedelic research. He considered, correctly, that if he tinkered with the molecules of the drug (which belongs to a chemical class known as phenethylamines), the new compounds would have novel and interesting effects. He was right, and he produced hundreds of new drugs.

Newspaper reports on the inability of teachers to confiscate legal highs

On September 12, 1976, Shulgin synthesised MDMA, the principal component of ecstasy. He introduced it to his friends, many of whom worked in psychotherapy. They found the drug's dismantling of social barriers and personal inhibitions useful in their work.
Shulgin was working with a U.S. government-approved licence, which saw him producing samples of outlawed drugs to help the Drug Enforcement Agency; police needed verified samples of drugs against which to compare their seizures.
His production techniques used easy-to-acquire chemicals. For ecstasy, this involved safrole, an essential oil produced by distilling the root bark of certain trees. He published his work in a book PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, which was bought by hundreds of underground chemists. Illegal production got underway. In 1994, the DEA raided Shulgin's laboratory - allegedly finding problems with his record keeping - but by then his research was already in the public domain.

The resignation of members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs members

The rapid commercial growth of the internet in the mid-Nineties saw the growth of communities of self-styled 'psychonauts' - drug-users who hunted online for firms selling legal drugs. Hundreds of powerful drugs were available until 2004, when a U.S.-UK anti-drugs operation, Operation Ismene, clamped down on their sale. Police raided firms in the U.S. and homes in Britain and arrested 22 people for buying a Shulgin-designed hallucinogen, 2CI (illegal in the UK).
Over the past few years, scientists in China have been doing much the same thing as Shulgin - altering the molecules of one drug to produce another with similar properties. Nothing, not even legal barriers, can stop their innovation now a market has developed.
The reason is profit. The locus of the legal drug market has shifted to China, where production is cheap. Now Beijing has part-liberalised its economy, it is trading more freely with the West. However, it lacks the infrastructure to deal with corrupt customs offi cials and local government. A flood of new or seldom-seen drugs is appearing with greater frequency than ever before. Mephedrone has been joined by buphedrone, flephedrone, ethylone and butylone. And those are just the ones scientists have identified.
There's a reason these drugs took over from ecstasy. In July 2008, in Pursat, 170km west of Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, UN anti-drug o fficers destroyed 30 tons of safrole-rich oil, which was to be used by clandestine chemists in Holland to make ecstasy, using Shulgin's recipe.
The oil, confiscated over the preceding weeks and months, had been distilled from the roots of the mreah prew phnom tree in jungle labs that produced an average of 60 litres a day. If it had got to Holland, it could have been synthesised into 245 million doses of ecstasy. Instead, it was burnt. The impact was profound and lasting and inadvertently caused the mephedrone phenomenon.
Throughout 2007 and 2008, health and drug professionals reported the clubbing scene had been taken over by a new class of drugs, piperazines. These are used in the production of a number of medicines, as worming treatment for animals, or compounds designed to induce migraines in medical research. Their eff ects are powerful, but often unpleasant. They are legal, cheap and made an ideal replacement for ecstasy dealers following the Cambodian clampdown.
About then, at the start of 2007, the internet was a-buzz over the release of two new legal products: Neo Doves and Sub Coca. Normally, legal highs were a ripo , a hotch-potch of herbs, piperazines and ca ffeine. But these new products, sold by a firm in Israel named BioRepublik, were diff erent, and the firm refused to reveal what was in them. Sold in capsules, users were unanimous that they worked, and said they felt like a cross between ecstasy and cocaine.
Their contents may have been a mystery - but it was a mystery worth solving. They were selling in their hundreds of thousands. It was no surprise they were selling so well - they were addictive, and scarily so; users reported going on crazed binges for days. Soon, information emerged online that BioRepublik's products contained a new drug - the most popular of which was 4-methylmethcathinone, or mephedrone, a previously unseen chemical on the global drug market.
There was serious money to be made and a huge human experiment was under way, with young drug users all over the world turning themselves into lab rats. Almost immediately, unscrupulous entrepreneurs were Googling for chemistry labs in China and getting them to synthesise the drug.
'The designers of mephedrone stumbled across something with the pharmacology somewhere between cocaine and ecstasy that was cheap, legal and freely available,' says Dr Ramsey. 'And this coincided with a drop in the quality and availability of other drugs.'
In a matter of weeks it had descended into a mad free-for-all, a chemical gold-rush with dozens of new players popping up daily. The new drugs could be bought for around £1,000 to £2,500 per kilo and sold for £10,000 - legally. Internet forums dedicated to selling and discussing mephedrone and other new legal highs came online. Websites with garish branding skirted British trade, food and medicine laws by selling the new drugs as 'plant food' with rave-style graphics and absurd instructions: 'Water your plants no more than once a week. Will make your garden bloom!'
Then things got even more bizarre, thanks again to the internet. The Google Adsense programme, which automatically generates advertisements from keywords paid for by businesses, started adding links to online mephedrone shops at the end of online newspaper articles calling for it to be banned. Mephedrone and other legal highs received a vast, free boost with adverts paid for by the very organisations that wanted to ban them. Google was not checking what its advertisers sold before they ran the ads, and newspapers had no control of the ads that Google was generating on its web pages. The search giant took down dozens of legal high ads the day I alerted them to their presence.
Facebook groups and blogs dedicated to the drug sprang up, and pubs and clubs all over Britain began to reek of mephedrone, which often has a fishy, synthetic smell, and which is sweated out as users dance and rant emptily.
At the height of the madness came the first reports of a death. Gabrielle Price, a 14-year-old girl from Hastings, died in November 2009 after a night when she had taken the drug. The newspapers reported the tragedy but, again, the automatically generated Google ads beneath the reports showed people exactly where they could buy this new, legal drug. It had gone viral.
In March, the ACMD told the Home Secretary in its recommendations on banning mephedrone that Google's 'insights for search' tool, which analyses user searches, demonstrates how every death attributed to the drug in newspaper reports coincided with a massive spike in searches for the term 'buy mephedrone online'.
By the time the cause of Gabrielle's death was known - she died of pulmonary problems and a bronchial infection both unrelated to the mephedrone, ketamine and alcohol she'd taken - the adverts for online drug shops had vanished.
And the story doesn't end here. Ramsey says the designer-drug genie may be out of the bottle.
'Now people have discovered mephedrone, they'll look for others. It will be interesting to see if the new control kills the market or if goes underground. That's the dilemma for legislators: is controlling it the best way?'
We call Eric to cancel our order, telling him as honest businessmen, we only want to sell legal drugs, and hoping he can reveal what was in the new compound he showed us in the lab. He mails back, swatting away such trivial concerns as British drug law. He sends a link to the UK Government's Office of Public Sector Information, which details how the Misuse of Drugs Act is to be amended to reflect the ban on mephedrone.
No worries, though. He tells us he's ready to do business.
'We can supply new legal stuff for the UK. It falls outside all laws currently regarding research chemicals. This is a snow-white powder. The purity is above 99.8 per cent. Sorry, we cannot disclose the ingredient now. This is our technical know-how. If others know it, they will copy our products, and this product will be ruined very quickly like mephedrone. So we should keep secrecy at this moment. It can't possibly be banned yet because it was only invented a few months ago.'
Already reports have surfaced online about horrific overdoses on these new drugs, with people in their twenties being hospitalised with heart trouble and panic attacks. And the name of the new highs?
Eric says we can call them whatever we like. Some vendors are calling it Energy-1, others NRG-1. None of them know what it is - and Eric tells us he has lied to some vendors to spread confusion, saying the new drug is naphyrone. Without expensive testing, we can't know for sure what they are. Their real name is his secret.
Modestly, he's called them Eric-1 and Eric-2.

via dailymail

Convicted killer gets his dying wish... execution by FIRING SQUAD after U.S. judge gives green light

2010-04-25T03:15:00.001-07:00

A convicted killer will be executed by firing squad i n the U.S. state of Utah after a judge last night agreed to the inmate's request.
Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, was given the choice of being killed by lethal injection or shot by a five-man team of executioners firing from a set of matched rifles - a rarely used method of execution that harkens back to to the Wild West.
'I would like the firing squad, please,' Gardner told state court Judge Robin Reese after hearing his avenues for appeal appear to be exhausted.
Gardner was sentenced to death for killing a lawyer 25 years ago during a failed escape attempt and shootout.

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Ronnie Lee Gardner sits with his lawyer Andrew Parnes in court at the Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah, yesterday

Defence attorney Andrew Parnes said he plans to seek a stay of execution and appeal Reese's ruling to the Utah Supreme Court.
It's unclear if a stay would be granted, but an appeal would be promptly reviewed because of the nature of the case, Utah State Courts spokeswoman Nancy Volmer said.
Gardner also has seven days to ask Utah's Board of Pardons and Parole to commute his sentence to life without the possibility of parole.
This is the fourth time a judge has signed a warrant for Gardner's execution. Parnes said it seems his client's death may be 'closer than ever before.'
'I don't think it was a shock or a surprise, and he's coming to grips with that,' Parnes said without explaining Gardner's choice of firing squad.

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Gardner is restrained on the lawn at the Metropolitan Hall of Justice, in Salt Lake City after the courthouse shooting death of attorney Michael Burdell during Gardner's failed escape attempt in April 1985

'It's his personal choice,' he said. 'He did that in 1985 and he's done it again.'
Gardner would be Utah's first execution since 1999 and the third man to be killed by a firing squad in the state since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976: Gary Gilmore on January 17, 1977 - after famously uttering the last words, 'Let's do it,' and John Albert Taylor on January 26, 1996.
Of the 35 states with the death penalty on the books, Utah is the only one to still use the firing squad as a method of execution.
Oklahoma is the only other state that considers a firing squad an acceptable option, but by law would only use it if lethal injection was deemed unconstitutional. The state has never used the method.
In an appeal, Parnes would likely reiterate arguments made to Reese that Gardner had been denied state funds to pay for experts and investigators who could have provided mitigating evidence during the penalty phase of his case.

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Reinard Knutsen, right, of the American Civil Liberties Union hands out anti-death penalty sign's before a news conference held by 'Utahans for the Alternative to the Death Penalty' at the Matheson Courthouse

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Ruby Price holds a anti death penalty sign and waits for a news conference to start held by 'Utahans for the Alternative to the Death Penalty'

'We believe that there is a reasonable probability that had the evidence been presented at a sentencing phase in front of a jury of eight or 12 people that at least one of those jurors would have returned a verdict of life,' he said after the hearing.
'If there is not unanimity, then it is an automatic life sentence under the laws of Utah.'
Assistant Utah Attorney General Tom Brunker said he doesn't think Gardner is entitled to an appeal, but that he may be able to seek an expedited review of his case by the state's highest court.
'We will vigorously oppose any further stays of execution,' Brunker said.
Friday's hearing was conducted amid heavy security with several officers standing guard around the shackled Gardner, who wore an orange jumpsuit and white shoes.
He traded pleasantries with Brunker and Utah's Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who asked Gardner how he was doing.
'Good, considering the circumstances,' Gardner replied.
Utah's death row inmates were for decades allowed to choose how they wanted to die.
State lawmakers removed that choice in 2004 and made lethal injection the default method, though inmates sentenced before then still have a choice.
The repeal of the firing squad wasn't tied to any discomfort with the method itself. Rather, state lawmakers disliked the heaps of negative media attention that firing squads focused on the state, said U.S. Representative Sheryl Allen, who twice carried legislation to change the law.

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Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, right, and lead attorney for the Utah Attorney General office Thomas Brunker, look over the warrant of execution signed for Ronnie Lee Gardner

The view through a rifle slot for the execution of Gary Gilmore at the Utah State Prison. Gilmore was strapped to a chair, with a wall of sandbags placed behind him to absorb the bullets

In 1996, more than 150 media outlets descended on Utah to cover Taylor's execution, painting the firing squad as an Old West-style of justice that allows killers to go out in a blaze of glory that embarrasses the state.
Lawmakers did not retroactively ban the firing squad out of fear that it would give condemned inmates a new avenue of appeal, Allen said.

Spree killer Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in January 1979

Gardner is one of at least four of 10 men on Utah's death row who have said they want to die by firing squad.
About 20 anti-death penalty protesters demonstrated in the courthouse rotunda before the hearing.
'The firing squad is archaic, it's violent, and it simply expands on the violence that we already experience from guns as a society,' said Bishop John C. Wester, of Utah's Catholic Diocese.
Gardner was convicted of the fatal shooting death of Utah attorney Michael J. Burdell during an escape attempt and shootout at the old Metropolitan Hall of Justice in downtown Salt Lake City on April 2, 1985.
Although he was handcuffed and surrounded by prison guards, a female acquaintance slipped Gardner a loaded, long-barreled .22-caliber handgun in the basement of the building just before the shooting.
He shot Burdell in the head and wounded the court bailiff before being captured on the courthouse lawn.
On Friday, both Burdell's girlfriend from 1985 and his father, Joseph Burdell Jr., testified that Burdell would not want Gardner to die in his name.
A pacifist who was drafted into the U.S. Army, Burdell served in Vietnam but refused to carry a gun, Donna Nu said.
'He would have not wanted Ronnie Lee's execution. He didn't believe in that,' a tearful Nu said. 'If Ronnie would have just wounded him and Michael would have lived, he would have defended him.'

Minor sold as ‘slave wife’ rescued in India

2010-04-25T01:13:00.000-07:00

The Hindu Memi Khatoon adressing a press conference in Jaipur on Sturday. Photo: Rohit Paras Jain

A 16-year-old Muslim girl from West Bengal, who was allegedly sold to live as a “slave wife” with a Dalit man, has been rescued from Ponchhada village in Karauli district of Rajasthan. Women’s groups here say the girl was a victim of a big trafficking network in eastern part of the State where there is a high gender imbalance.

Memi Khatoon, belonging to Nijgaon village in Malda district of West Bengal, was brought to Ponchhada from Delhi about a year ago after allegedly being purchased for Rs.26,000. She was forced to live as a wife with 40-year-old Paramsukh Lal Bairwa and was tortured and confined to his house for doing household chores.

Women’s groups produced the visibly upset and malnourished girl at a press conference here on Saturday, claiming that she escaped while being taken for medical treatment to another village and was rescued by some Muslim families whom she approached. She will be lodged for the time being at the short-stay home, Shakti Stambh, run by the Rajasthan University Women’s Association.

Memi said she had left her village with some of her relatives to visit Delhi, where she met a woman who gave her biscuits laced with a tranquillising drug. She fell unconscious and later found herself at a house in Ponchhada village. When she tried to escape, the family members said they had “purchased” her and forced her to live with Paramsukh.

The Dalit family allegedly forced her to speak to her mother on telephone and tell her that she had married a Muslim boy on her own and was living happily with him. She was not allowed to venture out of home and was compelled to have sexual relations with the 40-year-old man.

Memi also said she knew of four to five girls living in similar circumstances in the village. “I noticed that the woman I had met in Delhi was in regular touch with the family which purchased me. She seemed to be running a racket for supplying young girls to the region,” she said.

Activists belonging to the National Federation of Indian Women and National Muslim Women’s Welfare Society demanded stringent punishment to those who had purchased the girl and identification of people involved in the girl trafficking racket. They have lodged a complaint at the women’s police station in Gandhi Nagar here.

Kavita Srivastava of People’s Union for Civil Liberties said the girl trafficking route in eastern Rajasthan had revived during the last couple of years following the decline in the sex ratio due to which the men were not able to find girls for marriage. As many as four such cases had been detected during the last two months in the region, she added.

Association for Protection of Civil Rights convenor Paikar Farooque said the case of Memi Khatoon clearly depicted the increasing crimes against women in the State. Women activists Nisha Siddhu and Nishat Hussain demanded immediate reconstitution of the State Women’s Commission, lying defunct for over a year, for dealing with such cases.

Activists also expressed concern over the Dalit families in Hindon tehsil, where Ponchhada is situated, reportedly threatening the local Muslims for having extended support to Memi. A caste panchayat of Bairwa community is reportedly being convened shortly in the village to discuss the matter.

Cops: Detroit Strip Club, All Star, Employed 14-Year-Old Girl

2010-04-24T02:09:00.000-07:00

DETROIT — The manager of a Detroit strip club was charged after authorities learned a 14-year-old girl was employed as a topless dancer, making several hundred dollars a night, authorities said Friday.
The 31-year-old manager of the All Star topless bar was arraigned Friday on a charge of child sexually abusive activity.
Andrew Hutson was arrested Wednesday night at the club on Eight Mile Road. The girl, whose name was not released because of her age, is believed to have danced at the club several nights each week, making about $350 per night, Police Chief Warren Evans said at a news conference across the street from the establishment.
"It is clear that she danced there for a significant amount of time. It's clear, at least to us, that the club knew or should have known that she shouldn't be there," Evans said.
The girl's mother pulled her daughter from the club one night last week after learning she was working there. Employees of the club brought the girl out to a lobby area near the door, said her mother, whose name was withheld to protect her daughter's identity.
"Our youth are not some cheap commodity, to be used and cast aside," Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a release. "We are sending a clear message that if you hire underage women you will face criminal charges."
An elaborate sign on an outside wall of the club bills it as "The 'ALL STARS' of GENTLEMEN CLUBS." But Evans described it as a constant thorn in the sides of police.
Over the past six years, there have been 11 nonfatal shootings and three fatal shootings "related to this club," Evans said. Violations also have been found in each of the last 15 Vice Squad inspections.
The Associated Press left a message Friday seeking comment from the club's owner. Hutson was released on a personal bond Friday. The AP could not determine if he has an attorney.

SEC Porn Probe: Staffers Watched Porn As Economy Crashed

2010-04-23T05:39:00.001-07:00

WASHINGTON — Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.
The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.
The staffers' behavior violated government-wide ethics rules, it says.
It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
_ A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
_ An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
_ Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.

_ The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."
He said in a statement that SEC officials "were preoccupied with other distractions" when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.
An SEC spokesman declined to comment Thursday night.
About 16 percent of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey by Websense Inc.
Former SEC spokesman Michael Robinson said he shares the public's outrage about SEC staffers who enjoyed porn on the taxpayer dime when they were supposed to be keeping the markets safe.
"That kind of behavior is just intolerable and atrocious," said Robinson, now with Levick Strategic Communications. He said he expects SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro and her team are "very focused on" the issue.
Schapiro has had other worries in recent days. She has been parrying Republican attacks after announcing civil fraud charges Friday against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Agency officials had hoped the charges would mark a new era of tougher oversight of Wall Street. They followed high-profile embarrassments including the failure to catch Ponzi kings Bernard Madoff and R. Allen Stanford.
But soon after Goldman charges were filed, Republicans began questioning the timing of the announcement. The news came as the Senate prepared to take up a sweeping overhaul of the rules governing banks and other financial companies.
Republican lawmakers also accused the SEC of being influenced by politics. The SEC's commissioners approved the Goldman charges on a rare 3-2 vote. The two who objected were Republicans.
Schapiro is a registered independent who has been appointed by presidents of both parties.
___
Associated Press writer Christine Simmons contributed to this report.

Mephedrone: Chemistry lessons

2010-04-22T03:46:00.000-07:00

It may be the end of the line for legal mephedrone, after a brief and controversial high, but that doesn’t mean the party’s over, as Ed Cumming discovers.

By Ed Cumming

Mephedrone also known as 4-MMC Photo: Rex Features

On a Thursday evening in early March a group of Oxford students are preparing for a night out. Though exams are looming, lectures are about to take a break for a few weeks, so it’s a perfect opportunity to kick back. In a couple of years’ time they will be bankers, lawyers, doctors, government aides, and they study hard the whole year round. They play hard, too, but they don’t take drugs. At least not what most people think of as drugs – cocaine or MDMA (Ecstasy), for years Britain’s party drugs of choice. Sitting around a comfortable flat in the suburbs, they are eating pizza, chatting and taking 'drone’. Lots of it. Conversation is fluid and fast: they flit from politics to art and back to whimsy, refilling each others’ glasses with rum and ginger ale as they go.
Eventually, Laura, an elegant grey-eyed classicist in her second year, stands up. 'We’re just going to pick up again,’ she says, as her boyfriend puts on his jacket. Nobody bats an eyelid. Half an hour later she returns, blustering. 'It’s absolutely ridiculous,’ she says. 'Five minutes to pick up, 25 minutes to get a cab.’ Four grams of mephedrone, more than enough for all of them, has cost £50 – the same price as a single gram of cocaine. She neatly racks six lines of white powder; 10 minutes later they have all sent it up their noses and are sitting back, more animated than ever and ready to go out.

'I’d never really take anything else, but this is so easy,’ Robbie, a medical student, says, as we walk towards a club off George Street. 'It stings your nose a bit, but then it’s a nice rush, and it’s so reliable. It works the same every time. You can rely on its effects.’ The club is full of others just like them. Bright, good-looking young people: dancing, drinking, smoking Camel Lights on the kerb outside and talking rapidly. Many have taken mephedrone. 'Drone is so normal now,’ Laura says. 'People are taking it all the time. In some ways it makes me miss the days I used to take MDMA, though at least you don’t get a big comedown with drone.’
Over the past few months the drug has become so prevalent that it’s almost commonplace. One physics undergraduate I speak to, James, complains that 'everyone is on it’. Standing outside the club, he points down the road towards a group of giggling girls. 'They’re definitely on it for a start.’ James is starting to find drone too 'gritty’, too 'up and down’. 'You keep wanting more,’ he says. 'It makes you long for proper drugs.’ Evidently mephedrone, the 'legal high’, does not count as 'proper’.
Not for much longer, it seems. Last month Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, announced that following a series of high-profile deaths connected with mephedrone use, he was rushing through a ban on the drug that would come into effect within weeks, classifying it as a class-B substance (the same as cannabis). Supporting the decision, Les Iversen, the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), the public body that recommends classification of new or existing drugs to the government, said, 'It is being taken by young people who have never taken drugs before… because they think it is legal and it is safe. It isn’t.’
Mephedrone, or di-methylmethcathinone, is a cathinone – one of the family of drugs derived from the khat shrub, chewed widely in Africa to produce a stimulant effect. Dr Paul Dargan, a consultant toxicologist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in west London, and an active member of the British Pharmacological Society, has seen mephedrone rise from being unknown to an increasingly frequent cause of poisoning in his patients. 'It’s a phenomenon of 2009 and 2010 which we weren’t seeing prior to 15 months ago,’ he says. 'The pattern of toxicity is very similar to other stimulant drugs such as Ecstasy or cocaine. Patients are presenting with significant agitation – they often have a fast heart rate, high blood pressure and chest pains. There’s a small but significant minority that have convulsions or seizures.’ He says that the problem is growing. 'We saw 30-40 patients who had taken mephedrone up to January 2010. But the figure for the first quarter this year is higher than the final quarter of last year.’
Though the drug’s precise human effect remains unstudied, doctors seem in agreement that the effects of the cathinone family are similar to those of amphetamines, which work by increasing the uptake of stimulant chemicals such as dopamine and noradrenaline. Dr John Thompson, a clinical toxicologist from the University of Cardiff, says, 'What’s happened with amphetamines is that people have taken the basic structure and modified it, and by modifying the molecule they’ve affected how the drugs work. The evidence at the moment is that cathinones are very similar. The differences depend on how each drug affects the neurotransmitters – there’s a suggestion that these cathinones last longer than amphetamines. Whether that’s because there’s something inherent to the drug or if they haven’t worked out how much to take, I don’t know.’
Though mephedrone has only recently hit Britain, its earliest recorded widespread production was by an Israeli company called Neorganics, which sold it as Neodoves until January 2008, when the Israeli government banned it. Since then it has been available from limited websites, most of them originating in China and south-east Asia. Though it is advertised as plant fertiliser, or 'plant food’, it was always designed to be a human stimulant. But it didn’t take off in Britain until the early summer of last year, when it became popular at music festivals after the supply of MDMA suddenly and acutely dried up across Europe.
'It was just like that,’ Sophie, a final-year student at Cambridge, says, snapping her fingers. 'One week mandy [MDMA], next week none. Then a few of the more hardcore takers started arriving with this new stuff, mephedrone, which was legal and which had a kind of halfway effect between coke and mandy. Then it got really big at Oxford at the start of Michaelmas [the term beginning in October]. It’s got bigger since then – I reckon on some big nights maybe a quarter of students have been on it.’
The MDMA shortage was caused by successes in the war against drugs. In June 2008 Cambodian authorities working with Australian agents burnt 1,278 barrels of sassafras oil, hidden up and down the Cardamom Mountains. Extracted from the roots of the sassafras tree, this slick light-brown oil is the diesel fuel of the euphoria industry. This is thanks to safrole, a chemical found naturally in the oil which is one of the foundation blocks of amphetamine production.
Although there are lots of sources of safrole – the United States and South America are both producers of the oil – the MDMA industry depends mainly on its supply from less regulated shores, such as Cambodia. Authorities claimed that their actions destroyed a potential £2 billion worth of MDMA. Six months later, this was followed by a secondary clampdown, in which forces destroyed factories in the forest. This paroxysm of success at stopping the drug at source had a knock-on effect down the production line. It was felt in Britain a few months later, and the supply first weakened and then almost vanished.
As ever, freed from the effects of marketing and legislation, the drugs industry provides a very clear demonstration of the workings of the free market. As the quality of MDMA fell, mephedrone – less strong but far more abundant – stepped up to take its place. It was quickly clear that something different was happening. Its legality meant that it was both readily available and also stripped of the taboo surrounding other narcotics. Those who didn’t want to run the gauntlet of being busted for cocaine or Ecstasy could take mephedrone without fear of punishment. Those frightened by the idea that illegal drugs must be dangerous felt that a legal stimulant must be largely harmless, and were inclined to give it a try.
A broad demographic began using it, found it a positive experience, and told their friends, who did the same thing. Use accelerated to the level of widespread and casual consumption. The tabloids would later call it an epidemic.
It’s not only the people who take mephedrone who do not fit the stereotype; neither do the dealers. Until now, there has been none of the griminess surrounding mephedrone’s distribution that is associated with banned drugs. Its legality has meant that the dealer is simply a middle-man, like a car salesman. One I spoke to, a polite Old Etonian entrepreneur, Harry, put it like this: 'Me and some mates heard about it last summer, and then saw that you could buy a kilo for £3,000. We bought it and then sold it on for £5-10 a gram.’
Drugs such as cocaine and MDMA are often 'cut’ (mixed) with other substances (talcum powder, painkillers, laxatives) to produce a larger quantity, but Harry has always kept his supply pure. 'There’s no point in cutting it,’ he says. 'It’s so cheap anyway, and everyone else is selling the pure stuff so people would notice pretty fast.’ This purity, along with the accessibility, has been a core part of the drug’s appeal. The students I met said they could call any number of companies and dealers and have mephedrone delivered within the hour. Harry beams at the inventiveness of some his rivals: 'There’s one company that brings it over in a pizza box, and another that offers to help you start your own franchise.’
Such was the demand, that Harry’s mephedrone business quickly expanded. 'Eventually it didn’t make sense getting on my bike to go across town to make a fiver, so we started selling it in 20g bags for a bit more. We got a few more kilos after that.’ He reckons he made a 'few grand’ from the enterprise, but wouldn’t dream of selling anything else. 'It’s not worth the risk. It was just about cash – when it becomes illegal I’ll stop. I don’t think the price will go up that much if the law changes – people will just stop buying it. Why? Because it’s not that great. And people who use it become really annoying.’
It’s mid-March and Lucy, a final-year history student at Cambridge, is telling me about the scene at the end of last term: 'It was carnage. Groups of people were staying awake for four nights in a row, taking about five grams each. They just stayed up and partied.’ She divides users into two categories: regular users, who 'take it once in a while to boost themselves a bit for a big night, when they want a halfway experience between booze and proper drugs’; and 'livers’, who use mephedrone habitually. 'Because the effect is quite mild you can use it as a pick-me-up. You can have a little line in the morning, like a coffee, and it doesn’t make you weird. You can write essays on it, you can go to supervisions [the private tutorials that are the bread and butter of Oxbridge academic life] on it – you can just use it to keep you going during the day.
'I think drone suits Oxbridge really well. Cambridge doesn’t have that much of a partying culture. People have to work hard – they want to be able to have a good time without a two-day comedown. And they don’t want to get into trouble. At Leeds or wherever I think they’re more into mixing drugs and taking stronger stuff.’
She can’t really see a downside to taking mephedrone, until her friend Tom points out an obvious flaw. 'It smells terrible,’ he says. 'I mean, really bad – and it hangs around.’ Lucy, Tom and a couple of friends then take out their wallets and purses, sniffing everything to provide a suitable sample. 'Ugh – yup, that’s it,’ Lucy says. 'Horrible, see?’
Like Lucy, most users are flippant about the dangers, despite the toxicology of the drug being completely unknown. 'Enough people have taken it and been fine,’ Robbie the medical student says. 'Your body tells you when things are going wrong.’
But not everyone who has taken mephedrone has been fine. A fortnight after my trip to Cambridge, mephedrone became the tabloids’ favourite story. Two young men, Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19, were found dead at their homes in the Scunthorpe area after taking it on a night out. Over the following weeks there were reports of at least 20 more young people who died having taken mephedrone. Newspaper headlines proclaimed mephedrone to be 'the new killer drug’, and the horror stories came thick and fast ('Man blasts himself in face with shotgun after mephedrone party’, 'Boy rips off own scrotum after taking mephedrone’). Editorials demanded that it be banned before it claimed any more lives.
Some of the users I spoke to felt that the press reaction was over-the-top and inaccurate. 'For a start, nobody’s ever called it “meow-meow”,’ Laura says. 'Maybe one person once called it that and told a newspaper. At Secret Garden Party [a boutique music festival in Suffolk] two years ago, some people were taking something called “meow-meow”, but that was a mixture of ketamine and MDMA, not mephedrone. You knew when people were on that, trust me.’
Some of the doctors I spoke to don’t entirely support the media view either. 'It’s not clear at the moment whether many of the [recent] deaths were directly related to mephedrone,’ Dr Dargan says. 'Many of the early cases attributed to mephedrone turned out not to be.’
But the mood was changing quickly, and some of those who had previously been happy to speak openly about mephedrone for this article become suddenly apprehensive, and asked for their identities to be obscured. 'I know it’s still legal,’ one said, a few days before the Home Secretary announced the ban, 'but you know that people will look at you and be judgmental.’
Following Johnson’s announcement, which included an immediate ban on importing mephedrone from overseas, a student at Bristol told me, 'The story’s over. Mephedrone was just a substitute for real drugs. People took it because it was cheap and because the MDMA was crap. Nobody will take it if it’s illegal. It wasn’t that good.’
By coincidence, the crackdown on mephedrone seems to have come at the same time as reports of a recent surge in the quality and quantity of MDMA in Britain. The timing, perhaps, gives credence to the notion that mephedrone’s rise was triggered by the one-off event in Cambodia.
A simple case of supply and demand. Rumours ripple quickly through the drug-taking community: 'Some guy in Amsterdam has been sitting on all the MDMA for a year,’ one user tells me, conspiratorially. Another says it was part of a big plan by China, where almost all mephedrone is manufactured.
As the ban comes into force, it’s possible to assume that mephedrone was a blip – a brief chapter in the long history of recreational drug use. But will those people for whom mephedrone offered the first taste of a chemical high move on to other, more dangerous drugs? Will some continue to use mephedrone, buying it in impure form from less scrupulous dealers? Is it possible that the decision to ban it was a little hasty?
Eric Carlin, who has spent a distinguished career working with young people and drugs, resigned his seat on the ACMD in disgust at the ban last month. In a letter to Alan Johnson, he explained that he was 'not prepared to continue to be part of a body which, as its main activity, works to facilitate the potential criminalisation of increasing numbers of young people’. He felt that the public health issues related to mephedrone had been completely overlooked.
'It was made quite clear to us that the chairman [of the ACMD] had to present a recommendation to the Home Secretary that afternoon,’ he says. 'He’d left for the meeting before we’d even discussed the public health issue; we just talked about the chemical structure of the drug. With Ecstasy and cannabis we made a proper, reasoned recommendation. We need to do that with mephedrone – but without pressure from the Government or the media.’
Carlin is pessimistic about what comes next. 'The chemists will just come up with another drug,’ he says, 'and the media will come up with another scare story. I’m not arguing mephedrone is safe, we just need a proper review. There were a couple of policemen on the committee who raised the issue of criminalising young people; they were ignored. We need to look at the whole of UK drugs policy. Making things illegal just doesn’t work.’
A week after the ban was announced, I speak to Laura again. 'I never thought of bulk buying before,’ she says. 'But I’m considering getting a kilo now. I’m sure the price will soon rocket, but more than that, if it’s illegal I just wouldn’t trust it any more. I like knowing that what I’m taking is pure. I’ll probably buy some and then just keep it for myself and my friends.’ And if she doesn’t?
'I might go back to coke and MDMA – when they work they’re both better. It’s just that you never know what you’re getting.’

Names have been changed

via telegraph.co.uk

ATM ‘withdrawal' shocks cardholder

2010-04-22T00:32:00.000-07:00

VISAKHAPATNAM: An ATM cardholder was cheated of Rs.15,000 through a fraudulent transaction.
Venkata Babji, a resident of Maharanipeta, got a message on his mobile on Sunday morning that Rs.15,000 was withdrawn from his bank account. He was shocked to see in the message ‘withdrawal from ATM at Ramnagar' as his ATM card was with him.
On Monday morning, he went to the bank branch and enquired with the officials concerned regarding the fraudulent transaction. They failed to give a satisfactory reply. He lodged a complaint with the Two Town Police on Wednesday.
CI S.S.V. Prasada Rao is investigating the case.
Man drugged, robbed
A passenger travelling by the Dibrugarh – Chennai Express was reportedly drugged and his bag and certificates were stolen by some unidentified miscreants.
L. Dayanand Singh of Manipur was going to Chennai when two unidentified miscreants drugged him before the train reached Visakhapatnam on Wednesday morning. The victim got down at Visakhapatnam and lodged a complaint with the Government Railway Police.
The victim, who was in a dazed condition, was shifted to the King George Hospital for treatment.
SI Venugopal is investigating the case under the supervision of CI Srinivasa Rao.
Dies in hospital
A man died after accidentally coming in contact with a live wire. G. Adinarayana, 46, an employee of a bank, was living at Salipeta. On Tuesday night, he went out of his house to attend a nature's call. He came in contact with a live wire that was hanging from a pole and suffered a shock.
He was shifted to a hospital, where he died later. Two Town Police are investigating the case.

Drug consignment caught on border

2010-04-21T23:37:00.001-07:00

A haul of Phensedyl in Silchar

Silchar, April 22 : Bottles of Phensedyl hidden under onion sacks were being smuggled across the border to Bangladesh through Cachar district when the entire consignment was caught after a dramatic police chase.

The office of the director-general of police got a tip-off about a large consignment of the drug making its way to Tripura through Cachar to be finally offloaded in Tripura.

An intelligence team, led by Azizul Haque Mazumdar, a staff officer in the DIG’s office, flagged the truck down in Cachar’s Kalain township, on the Meghalaya-Assam border.

The truck had managed to evade checkgates at Srirampur, Jorabat, Umkiang and Digarkhal after it began its journey from Siliguri in West Bengal.

The truck was being ecorted by six persons in two cars.

The police found 150 cartons of Phensedyl, each carton containing 150 bottles of various sizes. The market value of the consignment is estimated at Rs1 crore — the biggest recovery in the Barak valley.

The driver and an agent were picked up.

The police, however, declined to name the kingpin of the racket.

The recovery once again revealed how Cachar was used as a convenient route for cross-border smuggling.

Danger is their middle name (no, seriously)

2010-03-31T11:35:00.001-07:00

Amy and Glenn Lampard wanted to give their four-day-old twins a “novelty” middle name that would also offer them a little street cred on the playground. Providing their kids the perfect pick-up line for years to come, the parents went with Billie Danger and Ridley Danger. Yeah, because that joke will never get old.
Full story at News.au.

'House of horrors' suspect due in court

2010-03-24T06:13:00.000-07:00

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Anthony Sowell is suspected in the killings of 11 women in Cleveland, Ohio
Sowell faces 85 charges, including murder, rape and kidnapping
Sowell served 15 years in prison for a 1989 attempted rape and was released in 2005

A man suspected in the killings of 11 women, whose remains were found in his Ohio home, is due in court Wednesday morning.
Human remains were discovered at the Cleveland home of Anthony Sowell in October and November. Sowell, 50, pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in December. He could face the death penalty if convicted.
A pre-trial hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. in Cuyahoga County, according to court documents.
Sowell faces 85 charges, including murder, rape and kidnapping.
At least one victim was strangled by hand, and most of the others by ligature, authorities said. The remains of seven still had ligatures -- string, cord or wire -- wrapped around their necks. The skull of one woman was wrapped in a paper bag and stuffed into a bucket in the home's basement.
The grisly discoveries in Sowell's home have led to the case being called a "house of horrors."

Sowell served 15 years in prison for a 1989 attempted rape and was released in 2005. He was required to register as a sex offender.

TN among top fake currency hubs

2010-03-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI: Fake currency smugglers have now spread their wings. Intelligence agencies have nabbed a large number of couriers with fake Indian currency notes (FICN) and drug parcels in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu than the traditionally preferred J&K and Rajasthan corridor.

States like Maharashtra, UP, Assam and Chhattisgarh are also not lagging behind in the number of arrests.Seizures are generally considered a very small fraction of the actual smuggling, accounting for less than 10%. According to figures compiled by the government, West Bengal couriers were caught with over Rs 60 lakh, the highest FICN seizure among all states between July and December 2009.

Andhra Pradesh stood second with seizure of Rs 50 lakh. The other substantial FICN seizure was made in Punjab (Rs 49 lakh), Maharashtra (Rs 33 lakh), UP (Rs 32 lakh), TN (Rs 25 lakh), Assam (Rs 20 lakh), Gujarat (Rs 12 lakh) and Chhattisgarh (Rs 9 lakh).

Intelligence agencies have often found these couriers carrying arms and explosives such as high-grade RDX along with FICN consignments at the behest of terror masterminds in Pakistan. The couriers also act as feeder to various terror sleeper cells in the country as revealed during investigations in many of these cases.

A high-level committee headed by the home secretary and comprising officials of central agencies and police officials constantly monitor these issues and draw strategies to counter the rising menace. Similar monitoring bodies have also been set up in states comprising of police and intelligence officials.

Most Popular Internet Scam In 2009: Impersonating The FBI

2010-03-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON — The cost of Internet fraud doubled in 2009 to about $560 million, the FBI said Friday. The most common type of frauds reported were scams from people falsely claiming to be from the FBI.

Individual complaints of Internet scams grew more than 20 percent last year, according to a report issued by the FBI in partnership with a private fraud-fighting group, the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

The amounts taken by individual frauds ranged from less than $30 to more than $100,000, officials said.

The most frequently reported scams were those that falsely used the FBI's name, accounting for 16 percent of the more than 300,000 complaints received last year. Some of those frauds have even featured e-mails purporting to be from FBI Director Robert Mueller, though the e-mail addresses of the senders often betray the con, authorities said.

Peter Trahon, head of the FBI's cyber division, said people should evaluate the e-mail pitches they receive "with a healthy skepticism – if something seems to good to be true, it likely is."

For example, one popular scam last year involved a phone pitch made by someone who sounded a lot like President Barack Obama.

The recorded message told people to visit a Web site to get government stimulus money. When victims who visited the site entered personal information and paid $28 in fees, they were promised a big stimulus check, but got nothing.

Filthy lucre: Drugs gang so rich it left £225,000 to rot in damp safe

2010-03-08T03:13:00.001-08:00

A drugs gang became so rich importing cannabis that it left £225,000 to rot in a damp safe.
The smugglers, who brought the 'skunk' into Britain hidden in boxes of flowers from Holland, are believed to have made an estimated £62million.
At one point, the gang was shipping in consignments worth up to £750,000 a week and would use an East London bureau de change to clean up its 'dirty' profits.
Terrence Bowler will be sentenced, along with 11 others, at Southwark Crown Court in London for his leading role in what is believed to be Britain's most prolific skunk cannabis-smuggling rings.

Neatly stacked wads of cash illustrate the scale of the cannabis ring's wealth

Bags of skunk weighting more than 220 kilogrammes were found within the shipment at Harwich belonging to members of the gang believed to be Britain's most prolific importers of skunk cannabis

The rotting money was found in an underground safe at a lock-up in Kingston, Surrey. Of the £225,000, £60,000 was so damaged it was given to the Bank of England to be destroyed.
Details of the case can be reported for the first time today for legal reasons.
A 14-month undercover investigation found that the drugs were imported into the UK through Harwich ferry port in Essex and taken to a warehouse in Chatham, Kent.
But officers at the port intercepted a shipment of 224kg, worth more than £750,000, on July 16, 2008, prompting a major change in tactics.
From September 2008, the drugs were shipped to Hull and taken to a warehouse in Leeds, West Yorkshire, before being transported to one of a number of lock-up garages in Kingston, Worcester Park, Epsom and Ashtead, where the skunk cannabis would be unpacked and stored.

Along with Bowler, who led the gang's so-called board of directors, 11 others now face jail in connection with the network.

More than £60,000 that was found within the safe at Deer Park Close that had gone mouldy

Drugs were even hidden inside deliveries of fresh flowers

Bowler, 40, from Kingston, Surrey, Peter Moran, 37, from Fulham, west London; and Mark Kinnimont, 40, from Surbiton, Surrey, made up the board of directors and all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import controlled drugs and conspiracy to launder the proceeds of crime.
Liam Salter, David Couchman and Timothy Sullivan represented the next level of authority.

Salter, 39, from Tadworth, Surrey, Couchman, 38, from Southwark, south London, and Sullivan, 38, from Epsom, Surrey, all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply controlled drugs and conspiracy to launder the proceeds of crime.
Asim Bashir, 35, from Ilford, Essex, made sure that the drug money was included with legitimate cash and laundered through the financial system.
He was convicted of laundering the proceeds of crime.

Gang member Peter Brown is seen unloading drugs at a lock up in Marlborough Gardens belonging to the gang

Roger Alexander, 44, from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, sold much of the imported product, earning £150 to £175 per kilo, and admitted conspiracy to supply controlled goods and conspiracy to launder the proceeds of crime.

Peter Brown, 37, from Kingston, was a late entrant into the operation, only joining in September 2008, but was key once the drugs started being imported to Leeds via Hull.
He was witnessed meeting dealer Barrie Burn, 59, from Bristol, and both men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply controlled drugs.
Andrew West, 36, from Tadworth, was a driver for the gang and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder the proceeds of crime.

Driver James Hay, who helped to transport drugs and money, was found guilty today by a jury at Southwark Crown Court of possession with intent to supply controlled drugs.
Hay, 31, from Ashtead, was remanded in custody by Judge Gregory Stone QC and told he must expect a custodial sentence.
Mandy Cripps, 34, from High Wycombe, Richard Seville, 42, from Islington, north London, Peter Gilmour, 36, from High Wycombe, and Lindsay Graham, 42, from Sutton, Surrey, were cleared of any involvement in the gang earlier this week.
All the convicted defendants will be sentenced 'within two or three weeks', the judge said.

The gang: Terrence Bowler, Peter Moran, Mark Kinnimont and Liam Salter, with (from left bottom row) David Couchman, Timothy Sullivan, Asim Bashir and Roger Alexander, members of a ang believed to be Britain's most prolific importers of skunk cannabis who were facing jail today

Child Porn Charge for MySpace Revenge Pics

2010-03-07T09:35:00.001-08:00

Boy, 17, Posted Nude Photos of 16-Year-Old Girlfriend After She Dumped Him

By SUSAN DONALDSON JAMES
May 23, 2008

51 comments

Alex Phillips, a "wise guy" who wanted to get revenge on his 16-year-old girlfriend by posting photos of her most private parts on MySpace, now faces felony child pornography charges in Wisconsin.

Alex Phillips, 17, of La Crosse County, Wis., could face up to 12 years in prison for posting photos of his 16-year-old girlfriend on MySpace when the couple broke up.

Phillips is 17 and considered an adult under the law, and his former girlfriend is a minor. He told La Crosse County Sheriff's Department he was just "venting" after she jilted him last week.
The girlfriend had taken the naked photos of herself in her home, then sent them to Phillips on her cell phone, according to Sgt. Mark Yehle. One was "front body nudity" and a second was her "vaginal and anal area," he said.
"I can only surmise she thought that would impress him somehow," said Yehle. "She's not an innocent victim. Kids don't realize that once a photo is in a digital format and you send it to someone, you better trust that person."
When the girl discovered the photos had been posted on the Internet with explicit captions, she contacted police, who asked Phillips to take them down or face jail time. Police said the boy refused, saying, "F*** that, I am keeping them up."

Phillips eventually told police he would take down the photos, but they were still there the next day, according to Yehle, so they contacted MySpace, which immediately had them removed.
Yehle said Phillips has been living with his grandparents, who are his guardians, and not attending school. He also had been previously charged with drug violations.

Sentence Could Be 12 Years

Phillips, who is one year older than his ex-girlfriend, has been charged with possession of child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child by a person under 18 and defamation. The exploitation charges alone carry a 12-year sentence, according to circuit court papers.
The charges may seem harsh for two teens so close in age, but one Internet safety expert said they are a stern warning. Phillips turns 18 in June, and could have been charged under federal law with even tougher penalties.
Attempts by ABC News to reach Phillips for comment were unsuccessful.
"Generally, law enforcement doesn't want to do it unless it's trafficking," said Parry Aftab, an Internet privacy and security lawyer and volunteer for WiredSafety. "The problem was he was a wise guy."

Why Shady Deeds Are More Likely to Happen in the Dark

2010-03-07T09:33:00.001-08:00

Human beings can be a devious lot. At some point, even the most moral of us have skulked or sneaked or filched something we weren't supposed to — even if it were just a cookie from the kitchen. Of all the things that get our sneakiness juices going, there is nothing like a little darkness.
There has always been a correlation between how ethically we behave and how brightly our surroundings are lit — most evil deeds are done under cover of darkness, and the rarest and most brazen crimes are those committed in broad daylight — not least because we're less likely to be caught in the act after nightfall. But in a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Vanessa Bohns of the University of Toronto and Francesca Gino of the University of North Carolina suggest that it's not only about the threat of discovery. There are other reasons darkness gives us a waiver to misbehave.

The investigators already knew that throughout our lives, we have a sometimes distorted sense of the ability of darkness to conceal. Toddlers cover their eyes when they're playing hide and seek in the belief that if they can't see you, you can't see them. In his famed 1969 experiments on human moral behavior, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo found that if subjects were wearing dark hoods and baggy clothes, they were more inclined to administer electric shocks to other volunteers than they otherwise would be.
In the new study, Zhong and his colleagues took a subtler approach, but one that's likely to have more real-world implications. In the first part of their three-part experiment, they recruited 84 students and divided them between a brightly lit room with 10 fluorescent bulbs burning and a dimmer room with only four bulbs. The subjects were each given a brown envelope with $10 in singles and coins as well as an empty white envelope. They were all then told they had five minutes to complete a simple mathematical task, looking for pairs of numbers that added up to 10 in a grid of three-digit numbers. They could keep 50 cents for every pair they found and were to put the leftover money in the brown envelope.

When the researchers collected the envelopes and reviewed the results at the end of the five-minute period, what they found was striking. Consistently, the people in the dimmer room reported finding more matches — an average of 11.47 — than those in the bright room, who averaged just 7.78. When their work was checked, it turned out that cheating was rife in the dim room, with the participants there claiming an average of 4.21 more correct answers than they actually got, compared with 0.83 for the other room. Even though none of the subjects put their name on their paper and all were thus anonymous, the darkness still seemed to confer what the researchers called a "false sense of concealment," and that in turn created an additional "licensing effect."
In the second experiment, 50 students were similarly divided into two groups, this time in equally bright rooms, but one group was given sunglasses to wear and the other glasses with clear lenses. Each volunteer was then placed before a computer and told to interact — via chat only — with a partner in another room, who was actually one of the researchers. The volunteers were given $6 to divide any way they wanted between themselves and their partner. There was no question of honesty on the line — keeping the entire $6 and giving the partner nothing was a permissible choice — but there were questions of generosity and fairness, and once again, darkness made a difference. Participants who wore sunglasses gave an average of $1.81, compared with $2.71 for the other group.
"[The] participants did not expect to see or talk to the recipient of their offer before or after the experiment," the researchers wrote. "Nevertheless, darkness increased self-interested behavior."
In the final part of the experiment, Zhong and his colleagues re-ran the sunglasses test, but also asked the participants to complete a questionnaire in which they agreed or disagreed on a 1-to-7 scale with statements like "I was anonymous during the study," "I was watched during the study" and "Others were paying attention to my behavior during the study." Again, the people wearing sunglasses scored significantly higher on the perception of anonymity study, even though they all rationally knew the glasses made no difference.

There are a number of evolutionary explanations for the participants' behavior — and a number of practical implications. We evolved in a world with a day-night cycle and as a practical matter, darkness does conceal behavior, so it's no surprise that that protected feeling lingers in the unconscious whenever the lights go down. What's more, humans are notoriously egocentric, and we have a hard time remembering that the rest of the world doesn't always perceive things the way we do. That's the reason that in psychological tests, children in the 4-to-7 age group mistakenly believe that a doll seated facing them would see the room the same way they do, instead of from the opposite perspective. It's also the reason that in adulthood, we tend to overestimate the ability of others to notice when we're nervous or distracted, simply because we feel that way. Says Zhong: "We believe this behavior is learned through our early experiences with darkness and also our egocentric biases."
Zhong and his colleagues do not recommend flooding trading floors or K Street lobbyists' offices with light in order to enforce ethical behavior — at least not yet. But they do speculate that even when we communicate via e-mail, we may be more inclined to lie or distort if the lights are low than if the room were filled with sunshine. Perhaps the next time you — or your kids — sit down at the computer to chat or text, it's best to raise the blinds and insist that the person on the other end do so too.

Police: Dodge parents trade sex with 14-year-old daughter for car payments

2010-03-07T09:32:00.001-08:00

A Dodge County mother and father have been accused of trading sex with their 14-year-old daughter in exchange for monthly payments on their minivan.
Dodge sheriff’s investigators say the girl’s parents made her do “sexual favors” for the manager of Shorty’s Used Cars in Eastman so they wouldn’t have to make the $281 payment on the 1998 Dodge Caravan they bought two years ago.

The allegations surfaced after a months-long investigation into the girl’s welfare that began last summer.
“It makes me personally sick to my stomach,” Dodge sheriff’s Capt. Tony Winborn said Tuesday. “The only thing I can tell you is there were drugs involved in this family and it was some very sick, perverted stuff going on amongst the entire family. ... Rhyme or reason, I couldn’t tell you.”
The teenager’s parents, James Clarence Davis and Sandra Davis, both 36 and Eastman residents, were jailed Friday on child molestation charges. James Davis also has been charged with aggravated child molestation.
The manager of the car lot, 66-year-old Wayne Bearden of Eastman, was, among other charges, locked up on charges of alleged aggravated child molestation and one count of child molestation.
Bearden, who made an unsuccessful run for state senate in the 1970s, has a criminal past that includes three stints in state prison and a 19-month stretch in federal prison, records show.
In 1978, he was sentenced to two years for voluntary manslaughter in the handgun-shooting death of a friend and political ally during a fight. Bearden served less-than-one-year prison terms in the early 1990s on marijuana related charges.
In 1997, he was sent to federal prison for his role in a vote buying conspiracy in Dodge County in what was the largest election fraud prosecution in U.S. history.
Wendell Bearden, 63, who once owned 20 Shorty’s Quick Stop convenience stores between Valdosta and Macon, said he was trying to help his older brother by giving him a job managing the Fifth Avenue car lot he owns.
“He had had a turbulent life up until 2000 and he was — he is — a recovering alcoholic,” Wendell Bearden said. “He came here and was sober for seven years, fell off the wagon, I fired him and he was straight for a while, came back and I put him back to work. I thought everything was fine, goes to church. I’ve never been so surprised of anything in my life. It was a total shocker to me. I mean, and these are allegations at this point. ... It’s almost too much for me to believe.”
The 14-year-old victim is living in foster care in another county, the sheriff’s department’s Winborn said.
“I don’t know how it transpired up to the point that they were exchanging (sex) for the car payment,” Winborn said.
Other suspects, “multiple players,” are expected to surface in the coming days, the sheriff’s captain said.
“(Wayne) Bearden wasn’t the only person that this couple gave this child to,” Winborn said. “It’s very horrific. It was for drugs and for money from other folks.”

Melinda Dennehy's Naked Pictures Popular with High School Students, Not With Police

2010-03-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

LONDONDERRY, N.H. (CBS/WBZ) Perhaps New Hampshire high school teacher Melinda Dennehy missed the orientation session when they explained that sending your naked photos to a student is sort of a bad idea.

Police say the 41-year-old English teacher sent four sexy shots of herself to a 15-year-old male student at Londonderry High School. The student, it seems, thought that was pretty nifty. Police say he forwarded the images to his friends.

According to police documents, the pictures were sent two months ago. Investigators say they obtained a copy of one of the photos and co-workers identified Dennehy.

The teen told police that Dennehy had "continuously sent him text messages," some of which were sexually explicit. He also claimed that she "kissed him twice on two separate occasions" in a classroom at school.

Dennehy, of Hampstead, turned herself in to Londonderry police Friday. She is charged with one felony count of indecent exposure. Hampstead is 30 miles northwest from Concord.

The mother of two has since been freed on bail, but was ordered to stay away from anyone under 16. Police do not know of any other victims.

Dennehy will be arraigned in Derry District Court April 30.

Man tries to sell off sister for Rs20,000 in UP; 5 arrested

2010-02-26T07:54:00.001-08:00

Ghaziabad (UP): Police have rescued a 17-year-old girl from the clutches of touts, who had struck a deal with her brother to sell her off to two persons for Rs20,000 at Jarcha village in Gautam Budh Nagar area in Ghaziabad.

The teenager, hailing from Guwahati in Assam, was bought here by her brother Raju Thakur on the pretext of arranging her marriage, SSP Raghubir Lal said today.

Thakur living at Shyam Park in Loni, was in dire need of money and brought his sister for her marriage and decided to
sell her off, the officer said.

With the help of two touts, he struck a deal last night with two persons, who had come to his house to buy the girl for Rs20,000. The payment was to be made today.

On a tip-off, police raided the house and arrested Rajpal and Dharam Pal of Gautam Budh Nagar, two touts Babu Khan and Alam Ali of Loni and Thakur.

They were produced before a court, which sent them in police custody.

Wipro hit by $4-mn fraud

2010-02-17T01:21:00.000-08:00

MUMBAI/BANGALORE: A Wipro employee embezzled crores of rupees over the past three years, sending India’s third-largest software exporter scrambling to tighten internal controls in the finance division where the fraud took place.

The employee had been working with the company for the past three years in the ‘controllership’ division within the finance department. This cell is responsible for keeping the company’s financial books and also has powers to authorise payments whenever needed. The employee is believed to have embezzled about $4 million by stealing a password and transferring money from Wipro’s account at a bank.

Suresh C Senapaty, Wipro’s CFO, confirmed the incident. “This has been a case of embezzlement, which we discovered in December, and it’s very unfortunate that this person succumbed to this,” Senapaty said. “The company has carried out an investigation and is undertaking actions with respect to stricter adherence to processes.”

Wipro has since disbanded the controllership unit. The fraud is believed to have cost the company about $4 million. Wipro officials have succeeded in recovering about half the money, but will still face a loss of about $2 million.

Senapaty said the incident did not involve more than one Wipro staffer. “Our investigations have revealed that only this employee was involved, and nobody else in the team had any clue,” Senapaty said.

Apart from setting up an internal investigation team, Wipro has also taken help from external auditors and investigation experts who will vet its processes and certify the soundness of its controls. The company is already engaged with an external agency for conducting assessment of the existing audit and other processes in order to verify any potential loopholes.

The amount involved is not large, but the incident has upset people at the helm of India’s the IT major. Wipro has always taken pride in the sound work ethics of its employees and in the strictness of its controls. “We have to be more alert in monitoring, and we need to tighten the processes for ensuring an early warning system and make it tougher,” Senapaty said.

Among other measures being considered by Wipro, employees working in sensitive functions within the finance department may be rotated more frequently. Currently, employees in such functions spend around three years before a transfer. Going forward, Wipro also plans to make it mandatory for employees working in the finance division and elsewhere, to sign an undertaking about sharing of passwords and any unauthorised transactions.

Wipro officials discovered the fraud after receiving an alert about ‘overdraft’ transaction, even when the company’s accounts had sufficient balance according to the official records. The employee, whose name cannot be made public, siphoned off the company’s money to his personal savings accounts in multiple transactions worth anywhere between Rs 1 lakh to Rs 1.2 crore, and used the money to acquire jewellery, apart from making other investments, including buying land.

“The employee stole password from a colleague and used it to transfer money to his and his family members’ personal accounts,” an official told on condition of anonymity. While the company continues to believe that it was a fraudulent act committed by the employee, the issue raises questions about information security policies.

An interim report on the incident was presented to the management, board members and other authorities concerned, including disclosure and audit committees. “We have recovered more than half of the amount, and it’s not substantial enough. However, we have kept all the stakeholders posted in an interim report submitted recently,” Senapaty added.

Senapaty, according to several people who spoke on condition of anonymity, had to face some tough questions from the management, and he had to act swiftly in terms of restructuring the entire division.

Police bust fake document racket

2010-02-12T01:58:00.000-08:00

One arrested on charges of forgery

A STAFF REPORTER

Balaram Sharma in police custody in Guwahati on Thursday. Picture by Eastern Projections

Guwahati, Feb. 12 : Police today busted a racket allegedly supplying fake documents, including registration certificates of vehicles, to car thieves.

A large number of fake documents and stamps of the transport departments of Assam, Nagaland and Meghalaya were seized and one person was arrested.

The police said the accused, Balram Sharma, 30, of Silchar was arrested from his rented house in the Six Mile area and hundreds of fake documents, including registration certificates, no-objection certificates, driving licences and stamps were confiscated from the house.

The owner of the house is the inspector-general of Sashastra Seema Bal, D.R. Doley Burman.

A team of Bharalumukh police raided the house and arrested Sharma on the basis of confessions made by a car thief, Bidul Das, who was arrested recently.

“He ran a parallel district transport office where he forged documents which were used by car thieves to sell the stolen vehicles to customers at different places in the country, mostly in the northeastern states including Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya,” a police source said.

“The accused also used to make fake no-objection certificates that are used for re-registration of vehicles,” he said.

The police seized hundreds of fake blank driving licences of Nagaland, registration certificates of Meghalaya and stamps of the regional transport officer of Mokukchung in Nagaland, the secretary of the regional transport authority in Nagaland and the district transport officer (registration and licensing) of Kamrup district, among others.

“During interrogation, the accused admitted to have sold these forged documents for an amount ranging from Rs 300 to Rs 3,000,” a source said.

The police said more arrests were likely to be made.

“Some employees of the transport department may also be involved in this racket. The matter is under investigation,” the source said.

According to the source, the vehicle-lifters have a strong network in the Northeast. They made new registration books and numberplates before stealing vehicles and changed the original ones on the way.

He said most of the stolen cars were taken to Nagaland that has a ready market for such vehicles.

Leif Garrett HEROIN ARREST: Booked With Drug In His Shoe

2010-02-04T08:23:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES — Former 1970s teen idol Leif Garrett has been released from jail on a charge he carried heroin into a Los Angeles subway station.

Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore says the actor and singer was arrested late Monday for heroin possession and released on bond Wednesday.

Whitmore says the 48-year-old was shaking and sweating.

Whitmore says Garrett denied having drugs at first and allowed them to search him, then acknowledged that he had black tar heroin in his shoe.

Garrett has a history of drug use, including a 2006 arrest at another Los Angeles subway stop for having heroin.

He is due back in court Feb. 24.

It was not immediately clear if Garrett had an attorney.

Abducted again, girl found dead in AP

2010-02-02T03:21:00.001-08:00

Vaishnavi

Hyderabad, Feb. 1: Kidnapped 11-year-old schoolgirl Naga Vaishnavi was found dead this evening, two days after she was taken captive for the second time in her short life.

Vaishnavi’s mutilated body was found near Guntur, about 310km southeast of Hyderabad, after a 48-hour search by the police failed to trace the young girl and her captors.

The Class IV student was the daughter of P. Prabhakar, a liquor merchant from Vijayawada. Vaishnavi had been kidnapped once five years ago, but was released after her parents paid a ransom.

On Saturday, Vaishnavi was abducted on her way to school along with her brother Sai Tejesh in their family car.

The kidnappers, who had come riding a motorcycle, took away Vaishnavi after killing driver Lakshman Rao (28). The criminals drove away with the girl in the same car.

The distraught parents said they had not received any ransom demand, and declared through television channels that they were ready to pay any amount.

The police had raided the home of Prabhakar’s first wife, who is locked in a property dispute with the family. Vaishnavi was the daughter of Prabhakar and his second wife.

Three arrested for robbery by police

2010-01-26T00:20:00.001-08:00

The three accused who were arrested today by the police for robbery.

Dimapur, January 25 : Bindi Singh from Tinsukia lodging in MP road was robbed by three miscreants on January 24 at around 8:00 pm who came to the hotel and entered his room. They then proceeded to steal his belongings - bag, blanket (2 nos), 10 pairs of long pant, 10 pairs of shirts, cash amounting to 3000 rupees and his personal mobile handset, which was forcibly taken from his possession. The victim was also assaulted badly leading to grievous injuries.

On January 25, 9:30 am he identified the three miscreants near the railway station area who were wearing the same clothes that they had stolen from him and quickly informed the police. The three accused are in police custody - Ram Dadi (27), Akai Kuki (26) and Hukheto Sumi (27). A case has been booked against the three.

Former boyfriend used Craigslist to arrange woman's rape, police say

2010-01-18T05:21:00.000-08:00

A Wyoming man is accused of posing online as his former girlfriend and soliciting someone to act out a violent sexual fantasy.

Police say Ty Oliver McDowell raped a woman after responding to an ad seeking an “aggressive man.” They believe the woman's ex-boyfriend placed the ad in her name. (Dan Cepeda / Casper

By DeeDee Correll

Reporting from Denver - The advertisement appeared on Craigslist in early December.

"Need a real aggressive man with no concern for women," read the posting on the Internet classified advertising forum. Its purported author was a Casper, Wyo., woman, whose photo also was posted.

One week later, a man accepted the offer, forcing his way into the woman's home, tying her up and raping her at knifepoint.

"I'll show you aggressive," he allegedly said, according to court testimony.

In fact, authorities say, the woman had nothing to do with the ad. Instead, they say, a former boyfriend had posted it, soliciting her assault.

Such an incident would have been impossible -- or at least much less likely -- 20 years ago, Natrona County Dist. Atty. Mike Blonigen said. "It's probably only possible in our modern age," he said.

For Craigslist, the San Francisco-based website used by millions to sell and barter goods and services, the incident comes after a year punctuated by legal battles over its adult advertisements, as well as the highly publicized Boston slaying of a woman who advertised erotic services on the site.

Last year, Thomas Dart, the sheriff in Cook County, Ill., filed a federal lawsuit accusing the site of facilitating prostitution and urging the court to view it as a public nuisance. State attorneys general also pressured the company to eliminate what they called a "blatant Internet brothel."

Though Craigslist prevailed in the Illinois lawsuit, the website eliminated its erotic services section, replacing it with "adult services" and pledging to review every ad posted there to prevent flagrant prostitution and pornography.

Craigslist also has made headlines for cases of impersonation, including one last year in which a Long Island, N.Y., mother allegedly posted an ad seeking sex and directing men to the mother of her 9-year-old daughter's rival.

The Wyoming case began to unfold Dec. 5. Jebidiah James Stipe, 27, a Carbon, Wyo., native and Marine stationed at Twentynine Palms, Calif., allegedly posed as his ex-girlfriend and placed the ad seeking an aggressive man.

Two days later, she spotted it and contacted the Natrona County Sheriff's Office, as well as Craigslist, which took down the ad.

But Ty Oliver McDowell, 26, from Bar Nunn, Wyo., had allegedly already seen it.

McDowell, an employee of the Wyoming Medical Center's radiology department, e-mailed the address listed in the ad, according to an affidavit in the case.

McDowell later told authorities that he and the woman exchanged instant messages, and she described what she wanted -- "humiliation, physical abuse, sexual abuse," according to investigators -- and gave him her home address.

In fact, authorities say, McDowell was communicating with Stipe.

On Dec. 11, McDowell allegedly went to the woman's home and forced his way inside. He bound, blindfolded and gagged the 25-year-old woman, then raped her as he pressed a knife to her throat, the affidavit said.

Detectives said he told them he thought he was fulfilling her rape fantasy.

McDowell was arrested and charged with first-degree sexual assault, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated burglary. Stipe was also arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree sexual assault.

A maintenance mechanic who enlisted in the Marines in 2001, Stipe was in the process of being ejected for an undisclosed pattern of misconduct at the time of his arrest, a Marine Corps spokeswoman said.

Documents related to Stipe's arrest have been sealed. But as for the alleged rapist, Blonigen said his state of mind would be central to the case. Though jurors must weigh what McDowell believed to be true, they also must consider how a reasonable, objective person would view the situation, he said.

Blonigen said that although Craigslist officials had cooperated with the investigation, the fact that they published sexually suggestive ads also facilitated the crime.

"If I were king, I'd like to see them not run these personal ads," he said. "This is a debate we've had for a long time: . . . Do we censor the Internet?"

Craigslist did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal law protects Internet sites from liability for their users' actions, said M. Ryan Calo, residential fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

"The idea was that these website platforms were truly communities assembled of random users, with no editorial control over what users were doing. Craigslist is like a hotel with millions of rooms, but it doesn't have the ability to figure out what's happening in those rooms," Calo said.

A crime committed through a social networking site is no different than one perpetrated through a newspaper's printed classifieds, he said. Yet Internet-based crimes do make it easier for police to track down suspects because they leave a cyber-trail, Calo said.

But Steve Patterson, a spokesman for the Cook County sheriff who sued Craigslist, said the website wasn't blameless. By hosting an adult services forum, "they create this specific place for criminal activity to take place," he said.

As a "good corporate citizen," Craigslist should not involve itself in such business, he said.

Authorities have not said which section of the website published the posting, but Patterson noted that Craigslist had pledged to monitor adult ads.

He said it was unclear whether or how thoroughly it was doing so, and added that the Wyoming incident suggested a lack of monitoring.

"If a woman is putting an ad online saying she'd like to be raped, I'd hope it would be stopped," he said.

Twitter hoax spreads rumors of airlines' free flights to Haiti

2010-01-17T05:57:00.001-08:00

American Airlines flew supplies to Haiti on Wednesday but did not offer free flights to medical personnel, it says.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Rumors spread on Twitter on Thursday about airlines flying doctors to Haiti free of charge
American Airlines spokesman calls the rumors a hoax
Rumors also spread that JetBlue is offering free flights and UPS is shipping packages for free
Both airlines say they are working with relief agencies to fly in supplies and personnel

(CNN) -- Twitter was buzzing Thursday morning with news that several airlines are flying doctors and nurses to Haiti free of charge to help with relief efforts there in the wake of Tuesday's devastating earthquake.
The only problem: The rumors are false, an American Airlines spokesman says.
"Last night's hoax on Twitter about American and JetBlue flying doctors and nurses to Haiti for free was just that -- a hoax. We don't know who is responsible, but it's a very low thing to do," airline spokesman Tim Smith said in e-mails sent Thursday.
Twitter users also circulated a rumor that UPS would ship for free any package under 50 lbs. to Haiti. In a blog post Wednesday on UPS's Web site, a spokeswoman debunked the rumor and said that destruction of Haiti's roads and communications networks "means our own shipping services to Haiti are on hold."
UPS is donating $1 million to help the people of Haiti through relief agencies, she said.
On Wednesday, American and American Eagle sent three planes to Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, carrying 30,000 pounds of water, food and other nonperishable goods for its more than 100 employees who work at the airport there and for assistance at Port-au-Prince hospitals, the airline said in a news release.
Three more relief flights are planned from Puerto Rico to Haiti on Thursday, and an additional three for Friday, the airline said.
"We've incentivized our 62 million AAdvantage members to give cash to Red Cross and receive bonus miles from us," Smith added. "We cannot fly any passengers to Haiti at this time and our efforts on the humanitarian front are as described above."
A spokeswoman for JetBlue said the airline is flying relief workers from agencies such as the American Red Cross free of charge to Santo Domingo in the neighboring Dominican Republic, but only after they have been vetted by the Haitian Consulate. The consulate then arranges transportation for passengers from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince, she said.
"There have been a lot of people mobilizing on Twitter asking for our support. And I think that's where these rumors are coming from," JetBlue spokeswoman Alison Croyle said.
"We're not offering free transportation for just any doctors who walk up and want to fly there."
The American Airlines and JetBlue rumors erupted quickly on Twitter and other social networks, with people retweeting the Haitian Consulate's New York City phone number, which medical professionals could supposedly call for free flights.
Calls overwhelmed the consulate, resulting in repeated busy signals for callers.
But by late Thursday morning, word appeared to be spreading that the rumors were not true.

Posted one user on Twitter about 10:30 a.m. ET: "American Airline and Jet Blue Are NOT Flying doctors and nurses into Haiti for free. Do NOT call them."

Bruce Lavallee-Davidson On Trial For Fatal Russian Roulette Game In Maine Sex Dungeon

2010-01-14T01:21:00.000-08:00

PORTLAND, Maine — A gun collector who introduced several weapons into sexual play with two other men contended the weapons were intended to fulfill a sexual fantasy. Instead, a lethal combination of drugs, extreme sex and Russian roulette put him on trial for manslaughter.

Both the defense and prosecutors said there was no intention to kill. But prosecutors said defendant Bruce Lavallee-Davidson, a farmer from Skowhegan, was responsible for ensuring his gun wasn't loaded when it was being handled. He was convicted Wednesday and faces at least four years in prison.

The trial shed light on a dungeon in the victim's South Portland home that was filled with sex toys that three men used as a drug-fueled escape from reality.

Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese said the focus should be on the handling of the gun – not the sexual acts that were going on in the victim's basement. The victim, Fred Wilson, 50, of South Portland, died of a single gunshot wound to the head on April 18, 2009.

"You just don't hold a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger without making sure it's not loaded. And at the moment he pulled the trigger, he didn't know," she said.

Defense lawyer Tom Hallett told jurors the men had been using guns as part of their sexual play and that the victim was a thrill seeker who may have slipped a bullet into the .44-caliber Rossi revolver unbeknownst to Lavallee-Davidson, who'd previously checked to make sure the gun was unloaded.

Jurors deliberated less than an hour before returning their guilty verdict in Cumberland County Superior Court. Manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in state prison in Maine. Because a gun was involved, the minimum sentence is four years, Marchese said.

The bespectacled Lavallee-Davidson, with short gray hair and a goatee and dressed in a sport coat, gave the appearance of a college professor in the courtroom. He showed no visible reaction to the verdict, and left without speaking to reporters. Hallett said the outcome was "devastating" for him.

The Dartmouth College graduate was in a committed relationship when he testified in favor of keeping Maine's now-overturned gay marriage law at a public hearing, four days after the discovery of Wilson's body and several weeks before he was indicted by a grand jury in Cumberland County.

The fatal shooting happened after Wilson, Lavallee-Davidson and a third man had been smoking pot, consuming the party drug GBL, huffing aerosol inhalants and having sex over a 12-hour period in the basement of Wilson's Colonial home in a middle-class neighborhood two blocks from the ocean.

The third participant, James Pombriant, 65, of Auburn, testified he first thought the others were playing a sick joke on him when he saw the flash of a handgun after hours of partying.

Pombriant, who was engaged in a sex act with the victim when the shot rang out, says there was a moment of silence before Lavallee-Davidson said, "I think I killed him."

Lavallee-Davidson, 50, contended the killing was a tragic accident.

His lawyers said their client checked not just once – but three times – over the course of the night to make sure the revolver wasn't loaded. They contend the victim loaded a bullet into the revolver's chamber while Lavallee-Davidson slipped out of the room to use the bathroom.

When Lavallee-Davidson returned, Wilson asked him to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger to intensify his pleasure, the defense contended. On the first try, there was a click when Lavallee-Davidson pulled the trigger. Wilson asked him to do it again, and there was a flash, the defense said.

After the shooting, Pombriant and Lavallee-Davidson left Wilson's body behind for hours before Pombriant called police. Police recovered the handgun used in the killing and a .12-gauge Mossberg shotgun that Lavallee-Davidson had taken to Wilson's home for the sex games.

Hallett said he was disappointed by the jury's fast verdict. "It was a close call. It was a tough case, and minds can disagree," he said.

2010 preview: Tooth-mounted hearing aid for the masses

2009-12-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

Beethoven is said to have overcome his deafness by attaching a rod to his piano and clenching it between his teeth, enabling the musical vibrations to travel through his jawbone to his inner ear. Next year, a similar but less unwieldy approach might restore hearing to people with a common form of deafness.

Single-sided deafness (SSD) affects around 9 million people in the US, and makes it difficult for them to pinpoint the exact source of sounds. This can make crossing roads extremely hazardous, and also makes it hard to hear conversations in noisy rooms.

Sonitus Medical of San Mateo in California has created a small device that wraps around the teeth. It picks up the sounds detected from a tiny microphone in the deaf ear and transforms them into vibrations. These then travel through the teeth and down the jawbone to the cochlea in the working ear, where they are transmitted to the brain providing stereo sound. The same process of "bone conduction" explains how we hear our own voices, and why they sound different when they are recorded and played back to us.

Some existing hearing aids also use bone conduction to transmit sounds to the cochlea, but these either require a titanium post to be drilled into the skull, or rely on cumbersome headsets. It also differs from conventional hearing aids, which employ air conduction to simply turn up the volume of sound travelling into the ear. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio voted Sonitus's device its top medical innovation for 2010.

Sonitus is testing the device in people with SSD. One study suggests the device is comfortable and doesn't damage the teeth, and that it improved speech intelligibility in noisy surroundings (Otology and Neurotology, DOI: 10.1097/mao.0b013e3181be6741). The firm may start testing the device in people with other forms of deafness and at least one functioning cochlea.

The company plans to submit its results to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval in early 2010, and if all goes to plan, the device should become available later in the year. It will lend an ear to millions.

Assam rapist given death

2009-12-22T00:16:00.001-08:00

Sentence to be executed after HC seal

A STAFF REPORTER

Guwahati, Dec. 21: The Kamrup district and sessions court today awarded death penalty to the rapist and murderer of a three-year-old.

The accused, Sujit Biswas, now 23, had forced himself on the child, Seema Khatun, after luring her away from her elder sister Sultana, 9. The duo had gone pandal-hopping during Durga Puja in Paltan Bazar here on October 18, 2007.

The child was found lying in a drain inside a gunny bag near Nepali Mandir but died at the Guwahati Medical College and Hospital soon after.

Apart from telltale signs of rape, there were injury marks on the child’s head and face. The accused had clubbed her to death in the most merciless manner in a bid to cover up his crime.

The death order was passed by additional district and sessions judge Mazed Ali after he found evidence against the accused cogent and the crime to be a rarest of rare cases, involving extreme cruelty.

Shocked by the depravity of the convict, the court rejected his plea for leniency.

However, the death sentence will not be executed till Gauhati High Court confirms it.

Additional public prosecutor Bhaskar Jyoti Dutta said the death sentence was pronounced after the accused was convicted under Sections 302 (murder) and 376 (rape) of the IPC.

“The court found that the case falls in the rarest of rare category. The circumstantial evidence established the depraved acts of the accused and he was convicted and sentenced to death,” Dutta said.

The accused, a petty criminal from Bongaigaon district, had committed the heinous crime under influence of alcohol.

The incident had sent shock waves among residents who turned their ire on the accused.

They gave him a thrashing before handing him over to police and demanded stern action against him.

The victim was the daughter of Sukur Ali, a rickshawpuller, and resident of Islampur locality here. Ali had told police that Seema had gone pandal-hopping with Sultana, when she went missing from a pandal in Paltan Bazar.

Sultana then rushed home to inform her parents. Ali, his wife and their neighbours rushed to the spot and started a search.

Ironically, it was the accused who led them to the drain where the girl was lying unconscious. When asked how he came to know about it, he sensed the gravity of the situation and tried to escape but was caught and handed over to the police.

The police investigated the matter and found him guilty.

Two days before Seema was assaulted, a seven-year-old girl was also allegedly raped by a 25-year-old youth in the city.

On October 25, the girl’s father filed an FIR at Noonmati police station, accusing his neighbour’s son of raping his daughter.

Some of the most sensational crimes of 2009

2009-12-21T23:31:00.000-08:00

By Sahil Makkar

New Delhi, Dec 22 The alleged rape and murder of two women in Shopian in Kashmir, the kidnap and murder of a call centre employee in Delhi, the gang rape of a management student in Noida, the mysterious death of a Muthoot house scion in Kerala, and actor Shiney Ahuja’s arrest for allegedly raping his maid were some of the
sensational crimes that hogged newspaper headlines in 2009.

Following is a list of some of the major crimes of the year:
The deaths on May 30 of Neelofar Jan, 22, and her sister-in-law Asiya Jan, 17, in Shopian town of Jammu and Kashmir state continues to hog the limelight. The deaths led to a massive furore in Kashmir Valley with allegations that the women were first raped and then murdered, with some pointing fingers at the security forces. The CBI in its Dec 14 report to the state high court ruled out rape and murder and said the women died due to accidental drowning in a stream.

The kidnap and murder of call centre employee, Jigisha Ghosh, 28, outside her south Delhi house on March 17 this year rocked the national capital. Jigisha was speaking on the phone and walking towards her apartment after being dropped by a cab hired by her office, Hewitt Associates, around 4.30 a.m. when she was pulled into a car by some men. Police say the killers made her give them her bank debit card secret identification number and withdrew Rs.20,000 from an ATM. They killed her and dumped the body near Bhatkal Lake in Faridabad and then went on a shopping spree with her credit cards. Four men were arrested.

The Aug 21 murder of Muthoot house scion Paul M. George, 32, shocked Kerala and grabbed national headlines. George, a bachelor, was travelling in a car at night with two men who have several criminal cases against them. His body was found in Alapuzha. Questions were raised about what George was doing with two known bad elements. Police have arrested 19 people on charges of involvement in the murder while his father, M.G. George Muthoot, has asked for a CBI probe.

The gangrape of a 24-year-old MBA student in the vicinity of the capital Jan 6 was among the most sensational crimes. The girl, a resident of south Delhi, was with her male friend inside a car parked near the Noida Expressway when a group of 10 youths, back from playing a cricket match, dragged her out of the car. They took turns to rape her. According to police, the rape was in celebration of their cricket victory. The youths were arrested.

Another case that hogged the limelight was the alleged staged shooting by police of 24-year-old MBA student Ranbir Singh in Dehradun July 3. He was allegedly shot at point-blank range 30 times by Dehradun police. The CBI said police personnel first beat up Singh in the lockup and then drove him to the Ladpur jungles near Dehradun where they fired 30 shots at him from close range.

Goa was very much in the news in 2009. A 25-year-old Russian woman was allegedly raped by a Goa politician. The woman, who was employed as a Russian liaison representative in a five-star resort in Goa was having dinner with a woman friend on Dec 1 night when she was offered a lift by John Fernandes. She alleged Fernandes raped her in the car. The politician will have to surrender before the Goa trial court as the Supreme Court on

Friday told him that he deserved no relief in the form of pre-arrest bail.

The coastal state was in the news in October too when 10 bodies, including that of seven young women, were found in a span of three days. The killings were the handiwork of two groups - a scrap dealers gang and two local goons, who along with women accomplices, would rob and kill their victims.
In another shocking crime, Orissa cadre Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Jagadananda Panda killed four members of his family ‘one by one’, firing at them from his service revolver before turning the gun on himself in his home in Deogaon in Bargrah district. The incident took place in July.

Panda was a 1983-batch IAS officer and had worked in several important positions in the Orissa bureaucracy before he left for Delhi on a central deputation in 2006.

The crime scene did not spare Bollywood. Actor Shiney Ahuja was arrested in June for allegedly raping his domestic help. Shiney has reportedly told the court it was not rape but consensual sex. He was in the lock-up for nearly four months and denied bail on at least two occasions. He had come to Delhi to his parent’s home. He is at present out on bail and back in Mumbai.

In Haryana, a young woman, Alka, consumed poison along with her husband outside the office of the Rohtak range inspector general of police, alleging she was raped by five men and the police were not taking any action. Alka died in a hospital in Rohtak while her husband, Sunil, survived. She allegedly took the extreme step after she failed to meet the IGP.

Eric Williamson was naked in his own home

2009-12-21T11:40:00.001-08:00

SPRINGFIELD, Va. - Erick Williamson says he thought he was just having an early morning cup of coffee in the buff. He got more than coffee.
On Friday, he got a criminal conviction for indecent exposure. A Fairfax County mom says Williamson made eye contact with her and intentionally exposed himself while she was walking her 7-year-old son to school one morning back in October.
Yvette Dean says she and her son were walking on this path. She says she first saw Williamson over there at the door by the carport. She says they then walked down the path and she saw him again at the front window.
"You're not moving around as if it's Martha Stewart's kitchen that's 20 by 30 with a 50-foot ceiling and Viking stoves. It's a very small kitchen," said lawyer Dickson Young.
All witnesses testified that Williamson never stepped outside his home and made no gestures. However, a judge said since Williamson was seen by more than one person over the course of several hours, the judge considered the behavior "indecent".
"Most people have done it or do it on a daily basis. I think it's a common thing to be naked in your home," said Williamson.
Young acknowledged it may have been foolish not to close the curtains. The judge responded: "I don't fine people for being stupid. We'd all be in jail."
Dean, the wife of a Fairfax County Police officer, told Fox 5 she is pleased with the conviction, but didn't want to say anything else.
"I feel the exact feelings that they're speaking - I've put onto other people. They're looking into my home. I live in a fishbowl, an ant farm. Everyone's looking inside my house now. That's ok," said Williamson.
The judge is not requiring Williamson to serve any jail time. He and his lawyer say they will appeal based on principle.

Killer Tripped Up by His Own Baggy Pants

2009-12-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK (Dec. 18) -- A career criminal massacred three members of a family in their apartment but fell to his death when he tripped over his own baggy pants.

The massacre occurred Thursday afternoon near a string of upscale shops on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Police said the attack apparently stemmed from botched drug ripoff.

"There is a significant amount of heroin found in the apartment," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told the Daily News.

David Karp, AP

Workers from the medical examiner's office carry the body of a murder suspect who fell to his death from an apartment building fire escape.

Police said Hector Quinones, 44, shot and killed Carlos Rodriguez Sr., 52, and his 24-year-old son, Carlos Rodriguez Jr., then stabbed to death the younger Rodriguez's grandfather, Fernando Gonzalez, 87, according to reports in the Daily News and the New York Post.

The elder Rodriguez's wife, Gisela Rodriguez, 49, and her daughter, Leyanis, 28, walked in on the carnage. Quinones heard keys in the lock and opened the door for the women, police said.

He shot the mother, who was grazed on the head by a bullet but managed to run from the apartment. The killer was just about the grab the daughter when his low-slung pants fell down and he tripped, the Post said. That gave the young woman the chance to run into a back room, where she found the bodies of her brother and father.

Quinones yanked up his pants and scrambled after Leyanis Rodriguez, who climbed onto a fire escape, screaming for help to construction workers on the roof of a nearby building, the Post said. The attacker followed her onto the fire escape, but once again his drooping pants fell and he tripped, plunging three stories to his death.

Estella Carrino, who manages a street-level bicycle store in the building, said she heard the body hit the ground.

"He had no jacket on and his pants were down. He was very dead," she told the Daily News.

Mexican navy kills top cartel kingpin

2009-12-17T02:14:00.001-08:00

Arturo Beltran Leyva. Photo courtesy:

Two hundred sailors raided an upscale apartment complex and killed a reputed Mexican drug cartel chief in a two-hour gunbattle, one of the biggest victories yet in President Felipe Calderon's drug war.

Arturo Beltran Leyva, the "boss of bosses," and three members of his cartel were slain in the shootout Wednesday in Cuernavaca, just south of Mexico City, according to a navy statement. A fifth cartel member committed suicide during the shootout.

Cartel gunmen hurled grenades that injured three sailors, the navy said. An Associated Press reporter at the scene heard at least 10 explosions.

During the gunbattle, sailors went door-to-door to evacuate residents of the apartment complex to the gym, according to a woman who said she was speaking by cellphone to her husband inside. She would not give her name out of fear for her safety.

Beltran Levya is the highest-ranking figure taken down under Calderon, who has deployed more than 45,000 troops across Mexico to crush the cartels since taking office in December 2006. The offensive has earned Calderon praise from Washington even as 14,000 people have been killed in a wave of drug-related violence.

The last time Mexican authorities killed a major drug lord was in 2002, when Ramon Arellano Felix of the Tijuana Cartel was shot by a police officer in the Sinaloa resort of Mazatlan.

Beltran Levya was one of five brothers who split from the Sinaloa Cartel several years ago and aligned themselves with Los Zetas, a group of former soldiers hired by the rival Gulf Cartel as hit men. The split is believed to have fueled much of the bloodshed of recent years.

One of the brothers, Alfredo Beltran Leyva, was arrested in January 2008.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says the Beltran Leyva cartel is key in the importation and distribution of tons of cocaine in the United States, as well as large quantities of heroin. Mexico considers the group one of its six major cartels.

The Mexican government had listed Arturo Beltran Leyva as one its 24 most-wanted drug lords and had offered a $2.1 million reward for his capture.

Born in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, the Beltran Leyva brothers worked side by side with Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, before they broke away after Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cardenas was arrested in 2003. They soon seized the lucrative drug routes in northeastern Mexico.

U.S. officials say the Beltran Leyva Cartel has carried out heinous killings, including numerous beheadings. The gang also has had great success in buying off public officials, police and others to protect their business and get tips on planned military raids.

The U.S government added Beltran Leyva and his cartel to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act last year, a movement that denied him access to the U.S. financial system.

The state of Morelos, where Cuernavaca is located, and neighboring Guerrero have seen a spike in violence in recent months, with dozens of people killed. Some of the mutilated bodies have appeared with pieces of paper signed "boss of bosses," Beltran Leyva's nickname.

Mexican authorities have been steadily closing in on the Beltran Levya over the past year, raising lavish parties thrown by cartel leaders even while they were on the run.

In one of the biggest blows to the gang, several top federal law enforcement officials were arrested in late 2008 for allegedly protecting and leaking confidential information to the cartel. They included former Mexican drug czar Noe Ramirez.

On Friday, sailors raided a party at mansion in the mountain down of Tepotzlan, near Cuernavaca, where they killed three alleged Beltran Leyva cartel members and detained 11.

They also detained Ramon Ayala, a Texas-based norteno singer whose band was playing at the party, on suspicion of ties to organized crime. His lawyer, Adolfo Vega, denied Ayala had ties to the Beltran Leyva gang, saying the singer didn't know his clients were drug traffickers.

In May, soldiers arrested one of Beltran Leyva's lieutenants, Rodolfo Lopez Ibarra, as he stepped off a plane in the northern city of Monterrey — fresh from a baptism party hosted by Beltran Leyva himself in Acapulco.

Months earlier, soldiers had arrested the deputy police chief of the resort town of Zihuatenejo who was allegedly protecting 14 Beltran Leyva members at a cock fight.

Mexico's drug gangs have fought against Calderon's crackdown with brutal attacks against security forces.

On Wednesday, the severed heads of six state police investigators were found on a public plaza in the northern Mexican state of Durango.

The Sin City VIP service that seduced Tiger Woods

2009-12-16T07:08:00.001-08:00

The art of adultery has been incorporated in the business models of Vegas clubs

By Guy Adams

Monday, 14 December 2009

AP/REUTERS

Rachel Uchitel and Kalika Moquin have both been linked with Tiger Woods

An On any given evening at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, a long queue will stretch from the floor of the casino to the entrance of a nightclub called The Bank. There, crowds of fashionable punters wait patiently in line, sometimes for hours, for the opportunity to set foot on its glass-cased dancefloor, which is occupied by acres of cleavage and overhung by endless chandeliers. It is the City of Sin's "most desirable, cosmopolitan nightclub," according to promotional literature, which grandly adds that "like its namesake, the Bank [is] a sanctuary for all things precious".

Every now and then the expectant crowds will part so that a headset-wearing hostess can march through, accompanied by wealthy men who are known in the industry as "whales". They are ushered to a cordoned-off area overlooking the main arena, where they are brought extortionately priced drinks and assigned a "mood advisor," whose duties include plumping up the cushions and offering, with the words "blondes or brunettes, sir?" to drag willing young women off the dancefloor to join the party.

Tiger Woods was a whale. In fact he was one of the biggest and most coveted (a blue whale, perhaps?) in a multimillion-dollar industry that stretches from London and Ibiza to New York, Miami, Dubai, Vegas and any number of global "party towns". And it is testament to the success with which the VIP nightclub scene quietly facilitates the indiscretions of not just Woods, but scores of other actors and sportsmen, that the scandal which prompted him to quit golf "indefinitely" to concentrate on being "a better husband, father and person" took so long to emerge.

Video: Tiger's caddie speaks out

For the five years of his married life Woods kept his spectacular philandering secret from the media and his wife, Elin, who has just bought herself a home on a private island in Sweden and is reported to be planning to seek a divorce in the new year. He was also able to keep it from many of his closest associates, including his caddy, Steve Williams, who told a newspaper in his native New Zealand that he had no knowledge of Tiger's "indiscretions".

We must presume that word never reached the corporate sponsors who are suddenly wondering what to do with their soiled investments in the once squeaky clean star. Last night global consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture announced it was ending its sponsorship of Tiger Woods, saying the golfer was "no longer the right representative" after the "circumstances of the past two weeks." Woods still has Nike's "full support," but Gillette said it was "limiting his role," Tag Heuer and Accenture have removed his image from promotional literature, and AT&T is "evaluating our ongoing relationship," with Woods.

Finally, what many pop psychologists, including the BBC's normally austere golf pundit Peter Allis called Tiger's "addictive sex problem" was hidden from the sponsors of major golf events. They are now coming to terms with having bought into an entire sport whose market value has dropped drastically. When Woods was injured last season, television audiences for golf events fell by up to 48 per cent. Whether he now stays out until March (returning perhaps, in the run-up to the Masters in Augusta) or seeks a longer lay-off, billions of dollars have disappeared down a tabloid sinkhole.

With this much at stake, and given the scale of his carousing, it seems unbelievable that Tiger Woods took so long to fall. In the era of kiss-and-tell, in a country where blogs and supermarket magazines compete, on an hourly basis, to lend credence to the unlikeliest celebrity rumours, it's difficult to comprehend how one of the most recognisable men on the planet can have managed, for five long years, to secretly maintain a harem of cocktail servers, waffle waitresses, beauty queens and pornographic actresses.

Until, that is, you lift the velvet ropes of the VIP nightclub industry, where Tiger picked up almost all of his birdies. Despite their decadent public face, venues like The Bank are able to attract celebrity clientele willing to flex black AmEx cards on $500 bottles of Belvedere vodka and $20,000 methuselahs of Cristal champagne precisely because they guarantee client secrecy.

Woods has so far been linked to 13 young women. But the surprising fact is that, even now, only eight have actually been named (the others have retained lawyers to keep their identities secret). Of those eight, just four have publicly confessed to affairs.

The most interesting women, however, are two of the four who continue to strenuously deny affairs with the golfer. One is Rachel Uchitel, the New York socialite who was the first of the alleged mistresses to emerge in the wake of the late-night car accident that set Tiger's downfall in motion; the other is called Kalika Moquin. She works in the marketing department of the Light Group, which operates The Bank.

In a remarkably astute article published early last week, which ought to now be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the sexual habits of the rich and famous, the US sports blog Deadspin claimed that the biggest misconception in the unfolding scandal is that Uchitel and Moquin were Tiger's full-time lovers.

Instead, the blog claimed, their primary function was to act as party organisers, securing his entrance to fashionable nightspots. They would also, as Deadspin put it, "provide women for Tiger during his globetrotting excursions to various tournaments, charity functions and private-jet weekends with his Fortune 500 party pals that he seemed to enjoy so much". For this, they earned retainers estimated at $15,000 a month.

The twenty- or thirtysomething women that Uchitel or Moquin allegedly provided for Woods were not prostitutes. They might be flown to Las Vegas (or Melbourne, where Uchitel was caught going about her business by the National Enquirer) and given free accommodation. But they are neither paid for their troubles, nor expected to sleep with a "whale" unless they particularly want to.

They are, however, required to be discreet, which is why so many have maintained a dignified silence, despite vast chequebooks being waved in their general direction.

In Britain, footballers and soap stars pick up women in high-street bars and pay for it in tabloid headlines. In the US, icons of sport and entertainment, from Elvis onwards, have instead paid people like Uchitel and Moquin to protect their lucrative reputations.

It's a valuable service. Last week, Ms Uchitel came within two hours of giving a press conference explaining her role at the office of her Los Angeles lawyer, Gloria Allred. When it was cancelled, at the last minute, many wondered if she had been compensated for her silence. But perhaps a different calculation was in play. Maybe, after years of earning vast sums to co-ordinate the exotic private lives of people like Woods, she simply decided that her market value as the world’s most famously-schtum celebrity party organiser was worth more than a single kiss-and-tell could ever provide."

Female armed robber stripped, beaten and set alight by angry lynch mob

2009-12-16T07:07:00.001-08:00

Stripped naked to the waist, she begs for mercy as she is savagely beaten by a lynch mob in the middle of the street.
Alejandra Maria Torres was part of an armed gang that tried to rob bus passengers in Guatemala City.

But as she tried to escape the passengers stripped and beat her before dousing her in petrol and setting her alight.
Police put out the flames and arrested her. Her three companions escaped.

Alejandra Maria Torres sits bloodied on a street after being beaten, doused with petrol and set on fire during a lynching in Guatemala City

Lynchings are common in Guatemala. In the last year, mobs have attacked more than 250 people, leaving at least 40 of them dead.

Criminals are a frequent target but officials are sometimes attacked, including a judge who issued a rape verdict thought by the public to be too lenient.
The practice stems from the civil war of 1960 to 1996 when civil defence patrols carried out many of the murders in the state-sponsored genocide of Left-wing rebels, many of them peasants.

About 200,000 people died.

Passengers of a public bus accused Torres and three men, who escaped on foot, of participating in an armed robbery

Black magic fears as boy, 2, is hospitalised with 50 sewing needles inside his body

2009-12-16T07:06:00.001-08:00

A two-year-old is seriously ill after being admitted to hospital with 50 sewing needles inside him.
Doctors in Brazil believe the needles were deliberately pushed into his body through his skin - including 17 discovered in his digestive system.
Police have launched an investigation to discover who carried out the attack amid fears the boy may have been used as part of a sinister black magic ritual.

An X-ray of the Brazilian boy which shows the 50 sewing needles which had been forced into his body

One of the needles perforated the youngster's left lung. Stunned medics admitted him to hospital in Barreiras in the state of Bahma, north east Brazil, after X-rays showed the 50 metal objects in his abdomen, neck, thorax and legs.
Today it emerged the macabre crime may be linked to a bizarre black magic ritual.
The boy, taken to hospital by a relative on Sunday with stomach pains, has not been named.
His mother, maid Marma Souza Santos, has told police she does not know who is responsible and said his gran used to look after her son while she was out at work.
But she has reportedly claimed in a statement the youngster's stepfather may have used the infant in a black magic ritual. He has denied the claims.
Police chief Helder Fernandes Santana said: 'We are certain someone introduced the needles because of the position of some of them in the child's body.
'At the moment we don't know who did it.
'It's such a strange situation. We could be looking at attempted murder, a serious assault or some type of revenge attack. We're not ruling anything out at the moment.'
Doctors at West Hospital in Barreiras where the boy is currently being treated, said they would considering trying to remove sewing needles just under the surface of the boy's skin.
But hospital director Luiz Cesar said none of the needles were endangering his life at the moment - and said he may have to live with them inside his body because of the risk involved in removing them.
He added: 'We're certain the boy didn't swallow the needles of his own accord.
'If he did, they would be in his gastrointestinal tract.
'I've never seen a case of its kind.
'Our priority at the moment is the boy's lung which was perforated by one of the needles.
'Fortunately his life is not in danger.' The boy's dad Gessivaldo Alves added: 'We have faith in God that he is going to get better.'

Stupidest Criminals Of 2009

2009-12-16T03:25:00.000-08:00

Two burglars took the prize for the worst disguise of 2009 after they were arrested trying to rob a home with permanent black magic marker scrawled all over their faces.

A 24-year-old Alabama man shot himself in the shoulder while cuddling up to a 40-caliber pistol.

A Wisconsin man faced arson charges after setting his apartment ablaze and failing to pull the fire alarm.

The retired police chief who was the victim said he was "probably the dumbest criminal in Pennsylvania." Probably?!

Harry Jackson escaped prison, stole cigarettes, then tried to sneak back in.

Police found this stupid criminal because he filled out a job application with his actual info before taking some shirts and pants from it.

A Wisconsin man thought he could loot a martial arts dojo before getting a private lesson in pain.

Twenty-eight-year-old Kile Wygle was charged with drunk driving after he wrecked a bar stool powered by a deconstructed lawn mower after drinking 15 beers.

A man was discovered dangling from a Blackjack Pizza oven vent yelling, "help me" after trying to rob the place.

Stephfon Bennett was arrested when he returned to the home he robbed about two hours later to ask the victim out on a date. The woman recognized Bennett as one of the robbers and had a relative call 911.

Keith Griffin of Jensen Beach, Florida was accused of downloading child pornography after detectives found more than 1,000 images on his home computer. Jensen's excuse? His cat did it by jumping on his computer keyboard while he was downloading music.

A couple in Kansas reported to police that armed men stole their drugs. They face possession charges.

A 20-year-old woman called the police twice in one night out of boredom reporting a fake fire and fake burglary.

John Szwalla stormed into an Internet cafe and demanded money, saying he had a gun. He didn't.

America's Most Wanted Teen-Aged Bandit

2009-12-14T05:48:00.000-08:00

Visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of the bald eagles on Camano Island in Washington State's Puget Sound are more likely to see a different bird in the sky: a police chopper skimming the cedar forests in search of an outlaw. Colton Harris-Moore, a gangly 18-year-old with furtive eyes and a dimpled chin, has been on police blotters since he was accused of stealing a bike at the age of 8. Since then, he is suspected of having committed nearly 100 burglaries in Washington, Idaho and Canada. Police allege that he graduated from bikes to cars, then to speedboats. Lately, he is suspected of stealing three small aircraft — all the more impressive given that he has never taken a single flying lesson.

Harris-Moore, 6 ft. 5 in. (1.96 m), has become a legend in the Pacific Northwest — T-shirts bearing his face or the words FLY, COLTON, FLY are big sellers in Seattle — and on the Internet. His Facebook fan club has 8,000 members, and a hokey ballad on YouTube sings his praises. Harris-Moore's supporters see a deeper meaning to his popularity: During hard economic times, they say, why not celebrate a poor boy who robs from the island vacation homes of Seattle's dotcom gazillionaires? But Harris-Moore apparently steals just as often from Camano's ordinary folk as he does from the rich.

He had a rough past. Harris-Moore's abusive father walked out after choking him during an argument at a family barbecue. His mother raised him in a mobile home dragged into the woods on the island's South End, which, as local writer and stained-glass artist Jack Archibald says, has "basically one main road, a two-lane blacktop that loops around like a belt on a skinny fella."

Some locals speculate that Harris-Moore burgles not for the money but to experience the fantasy of the happy home life he never had as a child. According to local sheriffs, he often slips into a house just to soak in a hot bath or steal mint-chip ice cream from the fridge — a "Goldilocks thing," one investigator says. Initially, Harris-Moore seemed to steal only what he needed for life in the woods. "He's a survivalist," says Archibald. The teenager allegedly used one homeowner's computer and credit-card information to order bear mace and a pair of $6,500 night-vision goggles.

His recent alleged crimes have been more brazen. He's been accused of stealing speedboats to travel to nearby islands to plunder empty homes. In November 2008, police suspect that Harris-Moore hot-wired a Cessna that belonged to a local radio DJ — he'd ordered a flying manual on the Internet — and crash-landed it 300 miles (about 480 km) east on an Indian reservation. Since then, he may have stolen two other planes, both of which were later found crashed. He apparently walked away from the wrecks, miraculously unharmed. On Fox News, Harris-Moore's mother Pam Kohler outraged her tut-tutting interviewer by saying, "I hope to hell he stole those planes. I'd be so proud. But next time, I want him to wear a parachute."
So where is he now? When police recently retrieved a stolen Mercedes-Benz on Camano, they discovered a camera with a photo that Harris-Moore had snapped of himself. The manhunt has become more intense. Before slipping away from a police raid on his mother's trailer, Harris-Moore left a note: "Cops wanna play huh!? Well its no lil game.....It's war! & tell them that." Authorities say he then broke into a deputy's car and stole, among other things, an assault rifle. He is now considered armed and dangerous. "He's not evil, but he's not Robin Hood either," says artist Jack Gunter, an island resident. "Unless he's stopped, chances are he'll end up a career criminal — or dead."
That, of course, would only add to his legend. To his young fans, Harris-Moore is known as "the Barefoot Burglar" because he once kicked off his shoes to flee deputies chasing him in the woods. One of his admirers — a young, tattooed waitress at the Viking Restaurant in nearby Stanwood, on the mainland — says that one night last month, she saw a tall young man sprinting down the street. "He was barefoot, and he was laughing. I wanted it so much to be Colton."

Tiger Woods' Accenture Sponsorship ENDED

2009-12-14T05:42:00.000-08:00

Accenture announced today that it is ending its six-year sponsorship of Tiger Woods. In a statement at its web site, Accenture says that "given the circumstances of the last two weeks, after careful consideration and analysis, the company has determined that he is no longer the right representative for its advertising." Here is the full statement:

NEW YORK; Dec. 13, 2009 - Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today announced that it will not continue its sponsorship agreement with Tiger Woods.

For the past six years, Accenture and Tiger Woods have had a very successful sponsorship arrangement and his achievements on the golf course have been a powerful metaphor for business success in Accenture's advertising. However, given the circumstances of the last two weeks, after careful consideration and analysis, the company has determined that he is no longer the right representative for its advertising. Accenture said that it wishes only the best for Tiger Woods and his family.

Accenture will continue to leverage its "High Performance Business" strategy and "High Performance Delivered" positioning in the marketplace. The company will immediately transition to a new advertising campaign, with a major effort scheduled to launch later in 2010.

The decision is the latest blow to Woods' advertising prospects. Previously, Gillette announced that it would limit the golfer's role in the company's marketing. Gatorade has discontinued its Tiger Focus beverage and Woods-related advertisements have vanished from network TV.
The AP has more:
Global consulting firm Accenture Ltd. has ended its relationship with Tiger Woods, marking the first major sponsor to cut ties altogether with the golfer since his alleged infidelities surfaced and he announced an indefinite leave from the sport to work on his marriage. In its first statement since the Woods' scandal erupted, Accenture said Sunday the golfer is "no longer the right representative" after the "circumstances of the last two weeks." The move ends a six-year relationship during which the firm credited its "Go on, be a Tiger" campaign with boosting its image significantly. Accenture has used Woods to personify its claimed attributes of integrity and high performance.
"After careful consideration and analysis, the company has determined that he is no longer the right representative for its advertising," Accenture said, adding that "it wishes only the best for Tiger Woods and his family."
The firm plans to immediately transition to a new advertising campaign, with a major effort scheduled to launch later in 2010. An Accenture spokeswoman declined to comment further. Advertising firm Young & Rubicam, which has handled the company's Tiger Woods ads, also would not comment on the move.
One of the risks of advertising tied to a celebrity is that "your image gets carried by someone you can't control," said Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management.
"They definitely understand there's damage," Bernstein said of Accenture.

Accenture's advertising campaign was almost entirely built around Woods and his success, portraying his ability to key putt or chip out of the rough. If Woods had acknowledged mistakes and said he would be back in a month, Accenture might be able to ride it out, said Rick Burton, a professor of sports management at Syracuse University, in an interview.
But Accenture can't afford to wait for what could be a long time before Woods returns.
"They had tied everything in their campaign to Tiger Woods it appeared," he said. "If he's not golfing, those ads don't make sense."
Burton noted that Accenture's billboards and airport advertising need to be replaced quickly. Without a backup plan, the company might will fall back on something simple and conservative that could highlight its logo.
"It is probably prudent to take a low-key, conservative approach until they determine what their next message is that they want to send," he said. Going forward, Accenture will have to determine whether it wants to stick with sports or whether its been too burned by what happened and will go another route, Burton added.
"Accenture has made a decision to not continue with their sponsorship. We are disappointed but respect their decision," said Mark Steinberg, Woods' agent at IMG. The PGA Tour said it would have no comment.
Accenture has been title sponsor since 2001 of the Match Play Championship, a lucrative World Golf Championship event that draws the top 64 players from the world ranking. Accenture earlier this year renewed its sponsorship of the tournament through 2014. The contract is separate from its business endorsement with Woods.
While not terminating their relationship completely, another major Woods sponsor pulled away this weekend. On Saturday, Gillette, which uses the slogan "The best a man can get," said it won't air advertisements featuring Woods or include him in public appearances for an unspecified amount of time. Woods was hired by Gillette in 2007 and has been in ads for Gillette Fusion Power razors with titles like "Phenom" and "Champions" with other stars including tennis great Roger Federer and soccer player Thierry Henry.
However, other sponsors continue to stick with Woods for the time being.
Electronic Arts, whose EA Sports division has been selling Tiger Woods video golf games for a decade, said Sunday, "We respect that this is a very difficult, and private, situation for Tiger and his family. At this time, the strategy for our Tiger Woods PGA TOUR business remains unchanged." The game's next edition featuring Woods comes out in six months.
AT&T said Sunday it continues to evaluate its relationship with the golfer. Watch maker Tag Heuer did not return a call Sunday, but its Web site continues to display photos of Woods' wearing the Link and Golf Watch models.
Nike Inc. said late Friday it supports Woods' decision to take time off. Gatorade, a unit of PepsiCo Inc., said previously it supports Woods.

Amanda Knox Jail Interview: 'I'm Scared, I Don't Know What Is Going On'

2009-12-14T03:43:00.001-08:00

PERUGIA, Italy — Amanda Knox sounded casual, surprised even, by the simple question as it came through the door of her prison cell in English on Sunday: "How are you?"
"OK, thanks. How are you guys?" said the American student, who had been sentenced eight days earlier to 26 years in prison for the murder of her British roommate. But minutes later, Knox confided, in answer to a question from an Associated Press reporter in her cell: "I am scared because I don't know what is going on."
The 22-year-old, who is a cause celebre in the United States among those who contend she was wrongly convicted by the Perugia court, received a 10-minute visit inside the cell by two Italian lawmakers, prison officials and a pair of reporters in Capanne prison on the outskirts of Perugia.
Knox has been jailed for two years since she was arrested a few days after the slaying of Meredith Kercher in the house the two students shared in this medieval town.
Kercher's body was found in a pool of blood with her throat slit on Nov. 2, 2007, in the bedroom of the house in Perugia, a university town in Umbria, central Italy. Prosecutors said the Leeds University student was slain the previous night.
Three people, including Knox's Italian former boyfriend, have been convicted of sexual assault and murder.
"I am waiting and always hoping," Knox said, switching from English into Italian for the delegation. "I don't understand many things, but I have to accept them, things that for me don't always seem very fair."
Knox immediately came to the door of the 9-square-meter (nearly 100-sq.foot) two-bed cell when she heard the first words in English.

Toward the end of the visit, the woman from Washington state recalled her emotions on Dec. 5, when shortly after midnight the judge read out the verdict after a nearly yearlong trial: "I was feeling horrendous" upon being convicted.
"The guards helped me out. They held me all night," she said.
Knox's ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who was given a 25-year-sentence, is now in another prison. Both insist they are innocent, as does a third defendant, Ivory Coast national Rudy Guede, who was convicted in a separate trial.
Defendants in Italian trials can pursue appeals, and Knox's lawyers have expressed hope she will be acquitted in an appeals trial.
Knox looked relieved when Italian parliamentary deputy Rocco Girlanda, in the delegation, recounted the unrelated case of a young man also convicted of murder at the first trial but exonerated during the appeal.
In Italian jails, inmates can wear their own clothing, and Knox wore a gray-and-white-flecked turtleneck sweater, black legging trousers, white socks and black slippers. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
The visitors, who included a reporter from the Italian news agency ANSA, were not allowed to ask Knox questions about the trial itself. No cameras or tape recorders were permitted.
Knox spoke about her affection for her family and her determination to continue her university studies, the reason she came to Perugia a few months before Kercher's slaying.
"I believe in my family. They are telling me to stay calm," Knox said. Her family, as well as a senator from her home state, Maria Cantwell, have spearheaded a vigorous campaign to convince Italian authorities she is innocent.
The visit was arranged by Fondazione Italia USA, which promotes close relations between the two countries, in an effort to heal any rift over accusations that Italy's justice system is unfair.
"My family is the most important thing for me. I also miss going to classes," she said. "I miss stimulating conversations."
She said she is in contact with her professors. "We are trying to work out how I can talk to them," she added, noting that while she can write letters from prison, e-mail access is forbidden.
Knox's cell mate, who has been identified by other lawmakers in previous visits as a 53-year-old American woman from New Orleans serving a four-year sentence for a drug conviction, wasn't present during the visit.
The cell includes a private bathroom with shower, toilet and bidet.
Shortly after her visitors left the cell, just before lunch time, Knox sat on her bed and was reading some handwritten papers. When she heard the delegation leaving the corridor, she looked up, waved and said, "Ciao."
TVs and newspapers are available, although Knox said she doesn't watch television or read the newspapers.
The prison was decked out for the holidays, with Christmas trees. During a short tour, the delegation saw a hairdresser, whose services inmates can use once a week.
A pingpong table is among the recreation facilities.

Dentist and work experience son jailed for £110,000 insider dealer scam

2009-12-11T05:28:00.000-08:00

Son fed tips to father in coded messages about food

A dentist with an interest in investing in shares and his work experience son were jailed for two years and one year respectively today for a £110,000 insider trading scam.

Neel Uberoi, 62, and Matthew Uberoi, 24, were told by Judge Peter Testar at London's Southwark Crown Court: 'It's cheating, and it's important for the economic and social wellbeing of the community that there should be clean markets, and the public rightly recoils from the idea of people treating the possession of inside information as a licence to print money.'

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Their trial heard that Matthew Uberoi, of Fulham, south-west London, was on a placement scheme with brokers Hoare Govett while using coded messages about Chinese food to feed his father secret takeover tips.
The information was then used to make a stream of lucrative but forbidden stock deals, the first of which racked up a profit of up to £101,000.
As the days and weeks passed, the business administration undergraduate gave his father, of Kenley, Surrey, two more pieces of information, netting just under £9,000.
The jury convicted them of 12 counts of insider trading between June and August 2006.
Six centred on 18,000 shares in Neutec Pharma Plc, one concerned 50,000 shares in Birse Group Plc, while the remainder involved purchasing 90,000 Gulf Keystone Petroleum shares.
The pair were cleared of a further five insider trading counts.
Judge Testar said that at the time it happened, Matthew was a student at Bath University and his father was a dentist in private practice and an amateur investor.
The total profit which was made in relation to the convictions was £109,804.82.
The judge said that Matthew was then 21 and not a professionally qualified employee of Hoare Govett.
'On the other hand, he was taken on by them as a work experience student,' he said.
'I am absolutely satisfied that Matthew was fully trusted to be privy to any confidential information that he may come across, and no special steps were taken to hide anything from him.'
The judge said that work experience was a great educational advantage and it never occurs to those who provide such experience that young men might abuse the trust reposed in them.
'But that is what happened here, and though the breach of trust was not a breach of trust by somebody who was employed in the City on a permanent basis, it was a serious breach of trust nevertheless.'
The judge said that both father and son had been dishonest in front of a jury.
He said of Neel: 'He procured his son to pass the information, and I'm sure he knew perfectly well that his son was acting in breach of trust in doing so.'
Because they had denied their guilt, the pair had caused there to be an expensive and painstaking investigation, and the subsequent trial, the judge said.

Millionaire broker 'hired private detective to spy on ex-wife and lover to fight £125,000-a-year divorce deal

2009-12-11T05:26:00.000-08:00

Lara Grey admitted that she was pregnant with her lover's child at a previous divorce hearing

A city broker seeking to overturn a £125,000-a-year divorce payout hired a private detective to prove his former wife was living with the lover who made her pregnant, a court heard.
Richard Grey, 36, was ordered to give his ex-wife Lara a £615,000 house and a lump sum of £454,158 as part of their settlement.
He was also instructed to keep up the £125,000 annual payments until she remarried - even though Mrs Grey admitted she was pregnant with her lover's child at a previous hearing.
She has since given birth to the baby. Mr Grey, who is worth more than £ 4million, has gone to the Court of Appeal in London claiming that his new evidence proves that his former wife is actually cohabiting with Liam Thompson.
He hired a private detective to watch Mrs Grey's house, while his father, John, who lives near her, also collected evidence about her relationship.
Martin Pointer QC, representing Mr Grey, yesterday argued his client should only pay a 'nominal maintenance' because of Mrs Grey's living arrangements.
'Where is the justice in the husband now paying 137,500 euros to a household which includes not only Liam Thompson but also Liam Thompson's child by the wife?', he said. 'If this is how the law is still to be interpreted, then the husband submits that to any outside observer such a situation is repugnant.'
Under British law maintenance is usually paid until the party who is receiving the payments remarries. However, this can be stopped or dramatically reduced if they are taken to court by their former partner in the event they set up home with a new lover.
Mr Grey and his 35-year-old ex-wife, who met in Dublin, moved to London in their 20s when he secured a well-paid broking job.
They initially 'married' in Spain in 1998 but had to renew their vows in London in 2003 when they discovered the first marriage was not valid under UK law. After their marriage broke down in 2005 the pair, who have an eight-year-old daughter, moved out of their home in St John's Wood, North-West London.
Mr Grey, who earns £750,000 a year working for ICAP, stayed in London and his wife moved into a four-bedroom home in an affluent suburb of Dublin.
The house is just a few doors away from her former in-laws.

In a previous hearing at the High Court, Mr Justice Singer refused to cut Mr Grey's maintenance bill, although the judge accepted that his ex-wife had been 'in a relationship' with another man since at least late 2006 and was 17 weeks pregnant with his child.
But he said there was 'no cut-and-dried test' for cohabiting and said Mrs Grey was entitled to her maintenance in full until she remarried.
While claiming a share of the assets of the marriage, Mrs Grey had written to her husband's solicitors denying she was cohabiting with Mr Thompson, saying he was 'not even a boyfriend'.
But at a hearing in the High Court, she admitted to Mr Justice Singer that Mr Thompson, a programme director for several Irish radio stations, had stayed at her home a few nights a week.
Nigel Dyer QC, representing Mrs Grey, claimed the payments should continue and it would be 'draconian' to stop them. He denied that she and Mr Thompson were cohabiting.
Insisting that 'cohabitation cannot be equated to remarriage', the barrister added that, even if she was living with her lover, her maintenance payments should continue 'without deduction'.
'Her employment history is in absolute contrast to Mr Grey's stellar career as a trader,' he said.
The three Appeal Court judges reserved their decision.
Speaking outside the court yesterday, Mr Grey said: 'I think there's a little bit of injustice or unfairness. The way society has changed over the last few years there's a far greater proportion of people who are cohabiting rather than marrying.
'We have a daughter together and I'm sensitive to that and my obligations towards them. Not for one moment have I ever considered balking that responsibility.'
He added: 'I provide a house and now they live there with Liam and it seems to me very unfair that it needs resorting to the court.
'[Mr Thompson] is not a poor man - nevertheless his child lives in a house I provide.'