The Associated Press reports on traveling escorts, or “Circuit Girls,” who are heading to Arizona this week to find customers in town for the Super Bowl.

Circuit girls are part of a clandestine sex trade that depends on their ability to blend with the wealthy. Unlike local street hookers, they’ll navigate the high-dollar crowd with ease, tapping men on the shoulder with little more than an innocent suggestion on their lips.

“I would walk up to them and ask them directions or some kind of help,” Miller said.

In Jacksonville, Fla., which hosted the Super Bowl in 2005, Roy Henderson, chief of narcotics in the Jacksonville sheriff’s department, said his officers arrested about a dozen circuit girls after staff at one of the city’s major hotels called to complain.

“I don’t know if you can spot them,” Henderson said. “A lot of times they’re very attractive. They dress well, where typically your street walker is in blue jeans, flannel shirt, rough looking. Those are the ones we’re picking up time and time again.”

The article quoted a prostitute stating the expected hourly rate that she was charging for the weekend.

“It’s a big deal this year,” said Tammy Marie Pagel, a 31-year-old local hooker who was recently jailed in Phoenix but was scheduled to be released the week before the Super Bowl.

Pagel said she had a number of high-paying clients waiting. She counted them on her fingers: one from Colorado, one from Massachusetts, one from Florida, one from Tennessee.

The johns saw her ad on the Craigslist Web site and set up appointments before setting foot in Arizona, Pagel said. Each will pay $500 to $600 for an hour with her — several times what she typically charges.

Authorities in London announced the breakup of an international human smuggling ring that brought Chinese nationals into the United Kingdom.

From the AFP:

The Turkish gang was allegedly responsible for the final leg of a journey that would take Chinese nationals — mainly from the south-east of the country — up to 18 months to complete, officers said.

Each person would pay up to 21,000 pounds (28,100 euros, 41,800 dollars) to be taken across Asia and western Europe to Britain. The traffickers are also suspected of involvement in drug smuggling and money laundering.

Tony Smith, the regional director of the Border and Immigration Agency, said some 18,000 potential illegal migrants were stopped every year, including as many as 13,000 concealed in lorries at major ports, particularly Calais.

Foreign Policy magazine has a list of 6 ways to rig elections to ensure that your favorite candidate continues to send international aid money and government contracts your way.

Among the tactics:

Manipulate the media

How it’s done: In countries with little or no independent media outlets, opportunities are rife for leaders to use state-controlled media to broadcast propaganda or discredit the opposition. Crackdowns on independent media are also common in the run-up to elections.

Real-world example: In the months leading up to the recent presidential election in Georgia, President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government shut down Imedi TV, an opposition-friendly television station founded by one of the president’s rivals and managed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Footage of Saakashvili’s campaign appearances dominated news programs on state television. The incumbent went on to win handily in an election deemed fair by international observers.

How to stop it:The proliferation of Internet news sources and text messaging can make it harder to control the flow of information, a fact exploited by Ukrainian bloggers during that country’s “Orange Revolution.” However, as bloggers critical of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak learned this year, they are not immune to government crackdowns or jail time. There are low-tech solutions as well. Since World War II, the U.S. government’s Voice of America service has provided relatively unbiased information to citizens without access to free media.

An organ trafficking network that is believed to have transplanted between 400 to 500 kidneys over 9 years was recently broken up by authorities in India.

From the International Herald Tribune:

As the anesthetic wore off, Naseem Mohammed felt an acute pain somewhere in the lower left part of his abdomen. Fighting off drowsiness, he fumbled beneath the unfamiliar folds of a green medical gown and traced his fingers over a bandage stuck on with surgical tape. An armed guard standing by the door told him that his kidney had been removed.

Mohammed was the last of about 500 Indians whose kidneys were removed by a team of doctors running an illegal transplant scheme, supplying kidneys to rich Indians and foreigners, police officials say. A few hours after his surgery on Thursday, the police raided the clinic and moved him to a government hospital.

Many of the donors were day laborers, like Mohammed, picked up from the streets with the offer of work, driven to a well-equipped private clinic, and duped or forced at gunpoint to undergo surgery. Others were bicycle rickshaw drivers and impoverished farmers who were persuaded to sell their organs, which is illegal in India.

Although several kidney rings have been exposed in India in recent years, the police believe the scale of this one was unprecedented. Four doctors, 5 nurses, 20 paramedics, 3 private hospitals, 10 pathology clinics and 5 diagnostic centers were involved, said the police officer in charge of the investigation, Mohinder Lal.

“We suspect around 400 or 500 kidney transplants were done by these doctors over the last nine years,” said Lal, the Gurgaon police commissioner.

Tim Wu of Slate Magazine writes about the lack of Sundance film festival movies on popular bit-torrent sites.

Film piracy, the conventional wisdom goes, is a threat to the film industry at all levels. That’s certainly the sense at the Sundance Film Festival, where both the festival and distributors invest heavily in anti-piracy measures, including undercover agents who attend screenings to capture illicit videotapers. But it turns out that they may be wasting their money. Sundance films, present and past, simply do not register in the online pirate world—unless they are one of the few that have already made it big (like Clerks or Little Miss Sunshine). This proves two things: When it comes to content piracy, obscurity, not security, is the best defense. It also demonstrates that movie pirates are fundamentally parasitic, not predatory.

Movie piracy is a $18.2 billion market.

In an article reporting on the arrest of a timber smuggling network, The Telegraph (India) quotes a villager who explains the impact that illegal logging has made.

“Till 1995, sunlight could barely penetrate these reserve forests. Now one has to search quite a bit for a patch of shade,” said a villager in Langting.

From Bloomberg News:

 China is one of the biggest sources of illegal downloads in the world, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in an Jan. 24 report. The industry group estimated that the rate of digital piracy in the world’s most populous country is more than 99 percent.

The Counterfeit Market in China is estimated at $60 billion.

Microsoft increases their quarterly revenues by cracking down on pirated copies of Windows and forcing users to pay for legitimate copies.

From the Seattle Post Intelligencer:

Microsoft’s recent jump in Windows sales can be traced in part to a basic concept — getting more people who use its programs to pay for them.

The company says efforts to curb software piracy have added to its revenue in each of its last two quarters, helping it exceed Wall Street’s expectations. One analyst says the trend may add a cumulative total of more than $1 billion to Microsoft’s PC Windows revenue over five years.

Computerworld is reporting that Microsoft gained $77 million by getting pirated uers to pay for licensed copies in the last business quarter.

Pirated Software is a $39.5 billion industry.

Since authorities in Iran began rationing gasoline last year, a black market has been created to meet the needs of drivers in Iran.

From the AP:

Iran is the world’s fourth-largest producer of oil. But its government imposed gasoline rationing last year in hopes of trimming extensive government subsidies. That has created a booming black market across the country _ feeding Iranians’ discontent with the economic policies of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In the capital Tehran and other cities, the black market thrives around gasoline stations and mostly at night as drivers looking to buy fuel approach others who have high gasoline quotas, such as taxis or vans.

But in this city on the Persian Gulf, the boulevard officially named Pasdaran Avenue after Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards operates as an open-air black market in broad daylight. Its new nickname is meant as a sneer by Iranians, bitter at the irony that their country, a leading member of the world oil cartel OPEC, has resorted to rationing.

Reuters reports on the organ trafficking market in the Philippines.

The Department of Health said the cost of a kidney in the country was estimated at 150,000 pesos ($3,600), with the donor getting only a third of the amount while two-thirds went to middlemen.

Several Web sites offer all-inclusive “transplant packages”, ranging from $70,000 to $160,000, the WHO said in a study last year.

The same WHO study showed increases in the number of foreign recipients in Pakistan and in the Philippines, where 110 out of 468 kidney transplants in 2003 were to patients from abroad.