A guest columnist in Marketwatch mentions the difficulty in finding counterfeit olympic merchandise in China. 

From Marketwatch: 

Smart official Olympic merchandise stores sell all manner of genuine, expensive knick-knacks. There’s clearly a market for these high-value goods, and if there’s one thing that China’s counterfeiters are good at, it’s spotting a gap in the market. So where are all the fake Olympic goods?

When I spoke to my colleagues about this, they thought it was hilarious. “You’d have to be mad to try making fake Olympic stuff!,” they said.

For once, it seems, China is actually enforcing intellectual property rights. For those of us who have been battling for years to protect our clients’ brands, this has come as something of a surprise. But at the moment, there seems to be little sign of this improved IP protection spreading from Olympic merchandise to the rest of the economy

The five families of five men who are being held hostage in Iraq are making a public appeal for the release of the hostages. 

From the BBC News: 

The civilian contractors were kidnapped by armed militants at the Iraqi Ministry of Finance in Baghdad.

Some of their friends and relatives marked the first anniversary of their capture by doing an interview with the BBC’s Frank Gardner.

Britain’s ambassador to Iraq also urged the hostage-takers to free their captives and appealed for information.

In the BBC interview the friends and relations were identified only by their first names. One of them, Lisette, made a plea on behalf of her brother Jason.

She said: “Give him back, let him come home to his family.

“We really miss him, there’s not a day, or a minute or anything that goes by without us thinking about Jason. We really want him home.”

A report highlights the art theft market that is occurring in Canada.

From Canada.com:

It’s a crime that captures the public’s imagination. But the reality of art theft – in the spotlight this weekend with the heist of 12 Bill Reid works – is quite different from the pop culture image, says an international expert.

“The theft upon order for some mysterious Dr. No who wants to have these items in his possession, that’s pure fiction,” says Karl-Heinz Kind, team leader of Interpol’s works of art unit, referring to the fictional James Bond villain.

More often, stolen works of art end up as bargaining chips in the criminal underworld, he says, used as collateral in drug or weapon trades.

Out the the total word market in art theft, Canada remains a small part of the total market.

nterpol, an international police agency with 156 member countries, maintains a database of stolen art objects. Of 32,000 items currently on the list, Kind says 516 were snatched from Canadian collections.

Art thieves are experts in eluding security systems but not in art appreciation, Kind says, though they may watch for high-profile exhibitions or trawl the Internet in an effort to sniff out the most valuable targets. But the lack of sophistication means thieves often simply nab what is easiest to carry or looks most impressive and stolen pieces are often harshly treated, cut out of their frames or stashed haphazardly, he says.

Japanese Customs Officials are asking the public to return a box of marijuana that was placed in a passenger’s bag for a routine security test that went wrong.

From the BBC News:

A customs officer hid a package of the banned substance in a side pocket of a randomly chosen suitcase in order to test airport security.

Sniffer dogs failed to detect the cannabis and the officer could not remember which bag he had put it in.

Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs officials.

According to the AFP, the five ounces placed in the bag has street value of $10,000.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s new website YouTomb collects and displays information about all of the clips taken down for copyright violations on YouTube.

From CNet:

Ever wonder how many YouTube videos vanish from alleged copyright violations? A Massachusetts Institute of Technology research project called YouTomb can show you some.

The site, an effort by the MIT Free Culture group, scans the most popular YouTube videos for the metadata Google inserts after a video has been taken down. YouTomb shows a list of recently removed videos (which you can’t actually view), who requested their removal, when they were taken down, and how long they were up beforehand.

Visit the website YouTomb here.

The BBC has an analysis on the current differences between Mexico and Colombia’s battles with the illegal drug trade.

From BBC News:

In Mexico, 1,378 drug-related killings have taken place so far this year, a rise of 50% compared with the same period in 2007. Acting chief of police Edgar Millan was among the victims.

In Colombia, authorities followed a series of successes against leading drug-traffickers by capturing one of the wanted Mejia Munera twins and shooting dead the other.

“These countries are at different stages of the timeline,” an unnamed US official told the BBC.

The New York Times has a report on the increase in corruption cases within the US Border Patrol. 

From the NY Times:

The pattern has become familiar: Customs officers wave in vehicles filled with illegal immigrants, drugs or other contraband. A Border Patrol agent acts as a scout for smugglers. Trusted officers fall prey to temptation and begin taking bribes.

Increased corruption is linked, in part, to tougher enforcement, driving smugglers to recruit federal employees as accomplices. It has grown so worrisome that job applicants will soon be subject to lie detector tests to ensure that they are not already working for smuggling organizations. In addition, homeland security officials have reconstituted an internal affairs unit at Customs and Border Protection, one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies, overseeing both border agents and customs officers.

The article mentions that there are about 200 open cases regarding corruption within the organization.

Smugglers are using attractive women to begin the process of compromising border agents. 

The smugglers use any ruse available to lure border workers but seem to favor deploying attractive women as bait. They flirt and charm and beg the officers, often middle-aged men, to “just this once” let an unauthorized relative or friend through. And then another and another.

Guinea-Bissau, a small West African Country, is becoming a major hub for the cocaine route between Colombia and Europe. 

From the Washington Post: 

Guinea-Bissau, one of the world’s poorest nations, has become a major transshipment hub and the epicenter in Africa for the cocaine trade, according to U.S., European and U.N. officials. The shift demonstrates how the flow of drugs adapts not only to law enforcement pressure but also to the forces of global economics.

Officials said some of the world’s richest criminal gangs are exploiting barely functioning countries such as Guinea-Bissau, which has 63 federal police officers, no prison and a population that still lives largely in thatched-roof homes on dirt roads with no electricity or running water.

See our previous post on Guinea-Bissau from The Observer in March.  

Although Russian Authorities have lowered piracy rates in 2007, the trade in counterfeit and pirated goods are still a problem. 

From the Moscow Times: 

Fewer Russians now buy pirated computer software and cheap bootleg alcohol, but pirated goods on sale in the country still make several billions of dollars per year for counterfeiters, the Higher School of Economics said in a report Thursday.

As a result of concerted efforts by rights holders and law enforcement agencies, the share of counterfeit products on sale has been cut sharply, the report said.

The Federal Customs Service apprehended 1,500 people trying to bring in counterfeit products in 2007, while over 10 million counterfeit products were seized, the report said. 

Vadim Radayev, the report’s lead researcher, said the government’s efforts to join the World Trade Organization had played a role in making government agencies more proactive in fighting against counterfeiting.

But Radayev estimated that revenues from just pirated software and bootleg alcohol totaled 525 billion rubles ($22.2 billion) over the last five years.

Corruption in the Mexican Police Force is a cause for the killings of police officers in the ongoing drug war that has killed 1,378 people this year. 

From the New York Times: 

The assassination was an inside job. The federal police commander kept his schedule secret and slept in a different place each night, yet the killer had the keys to the official’s apartment and was waiting for him when he arrived after midnight.

When the commander, Commissioner Édgar Millán Gómez, the acting chief of the federal police, died with eight bullets in his chest on May 8, it sent chills through a force that had increasingly found itself a target.

The police say the gunman had been hired by a disgruntled federal police officer who worked for a drug cartel in Sinaloa State, and the inside nature of the killing underscored just how difficult it is for President Felipe Calderón to keep his vow to clean up police corruption and end the drug-related violence racking Mexico.

Since coming to office in December 2006, Mr. Calderón has sought to revamp and professionalize the federal police force, using it, with the army, to mount huge interventions in cities and states once controlled by drug traffickers.

The result has been mayhem: a street war in which no target has been too big, no attack too brazen for the gangs.