A law enforcement official in the Philippines stated that hired killings and the use of children as drug smugglers are two key problems in the country. 

From the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

“Guns-for-hire [groups] have the complete ingredients of an organized crime. It is composed of two or more participants. There are connections with various influential pillars of society and money is involved,” he said.

He said there are some villages in the country where one could get assassins for P5,000 to P10,000. He said this problem would surface as the 2010 elections draw near.

Crime syndicates, particularly those engaged in the illegal drugs trade, are using minors as couriers, he also said.

These syndicates take advantage of the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act (Republic Act 9344), which exempts children, 15 years old and below, from criminal liabilities, he said.

An Asian Elephant has completed rehab after becoming addicted to heroin giving by wildlife traders. 

From the BBC:

The four-year-old animal, called Xiguang, received methadone injections for a year at five times the human dosage, state media said.

It was illegally captured by traders in 2005 in south-west China.

When police arrested the traders and freed the elephant, it was found to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms.

The elephant’s eyes kept streaming and he made continuous trumpeting noises, the Beijing News newspaper’s website reported.

It is thought that the traders fed the elephant bananas laced with heroin to capture and control it.

Mobile phone carriers new service of offering unlimited music downloads could reduce piracy in the United Kingdom. 

From the Guardian:

The introduction of unlimited mobile music services such as Nokia’s Comes With Music and Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow plus could result in British consumers downloading a staggering 2.1bn tracks a year, according to new research.

Services that allow consumers to download as many tracks as they want – and keep all, or at least some, of them at the end of their contract – are likely to reduce online music piracy but exacerbate the decline in sales of CDs, according to the market researcher TNS Technology.

A German student was caught by Custom Officials with $12.7 million in cash. 

From the AP (via IHT):

German authorities say they seized €8.7 million (US$12.7 million) in cash from a student this year and suspect the money came from cigarette or drug smuggling.

Customs spokesman Wolfgang Schmitz says officers found the money in May. He confirmed a report in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that the money — in €50 and €100 bills — was found in the student’s luggage.

Schmitz said Sunday that investigations so far indicate the money came “from smuggling deals — either narcotics or tobacco,” and there is no indication of a connection to terrorism.

A former drug tunnel found in Tijuana, Mexico has been turned into an art center. 

From the AP (via Google News):

 Artists and intellectuals now sip wine where drug traffickers once convened. Sculptures have replaced bundles of U.S.-bound marijuana.

Tijuana’s newest cultural center sits atop a former drug trafficking tunnel that ran from this Mexican border city to a California parking lot. Called The House of the Tunnel, the center opens Saturday to the public.

The building — once a house — abuts a steel border fence and is 200 yards from one of the world’s busiest border crossings.

There is little evidence of the tunnel. It is now largely filled in and the opening is covered by beige tile in the corner of a first-floor silkscreen workshop.

A new law signed in California attempts to treat underage prostitutes and human trafficking victims not as criminals but as victims. 

From the AP (via San Francisco Chronicle):

In Oakland, juveniles made up most of the 27 human trafficking prostitution cases investigated there in 2006 and 2007. A San Francisco Bay Area-wide prostitution sting in 2007 caught four girls under 18, including one who had brought her 8-month-old child with her to work.

The bill signed on Sunday creates the pilot counseling and treatment program in Oakland and the rest of Alameda County.

A second bill lets victims of human trafficking keep their names out of the public record and requires law enforcement to diligently investigate trafficking cases regardless of citizenship status.

India is facing a possible threat of home grown terrorists after a recent bombing.

From the CS Monitor:

The portrait of an Indian terrorist has long been a caricature: poor Indian Muslims indoctrinated in radical seminaries and funded by Pakistan, India’s neighbor and longtime enemy. But two of the suspects arrested Wednesday were software engineers, one ran a hotel.

It suggests that Indian terrorism is not motivated by dire poverty alone, but also by the perception of systemic prejudice against Muslims here. This is a bitterly controversial idea in the Hindu-majority nation sensitive to claims of intolerance, but the arrests are creating a small window for India to consider it more deeply.

“The role of Pakistan-based terrorist groups cannot be minimized, but the involvement of local elements in recent blasts adds a new dimension to the terrorist threat,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said this month after the New Delhi bombings.

New York Times Columnist Nichlos Kristof has a column on one woman’s fight against sex trafficking.

From the NY Times:

This is widely acknowledged to be the 21st-century version of slavery, but governments accept it partly because it seems to defy solution. Prostitution is said to be the oldest profession. It exists in all countries, and if some teenage girls are imprisoned in brothels until they die of AIDS, that is seen as tragic but inevitable.

The perfect counterpoint to that fatalism is Somaly Mam, one of the bravest and boldest of those foreign visitors pouring into New York City this month. Somaly is a Cambodian who as a young teenager was sold to the brothels herself and now runs an organization that extricates girls from forced prostitution.

Now Somaly has published her inspiring memoir, “The Road of Lost Innocence,” in the United States, and it offers some lessons for tackling the broader problem.

Somalia tops the list as the world’s most corrupt country, according to Transparency International.

From the AP (via IHT):

Somalia remains rooted to the bottom of a global corruption index that also features Iraq and Afghanistan among the world’s most corrupt countries, an international watchdog’s annual report said Tuesday.

Rich European countries such as Britain and Italy also have slipped, Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index said. The report said Denmark, Sweden and New Zealand share the honor of being the world’s least corrupt countries.

There was little change at the bottom from last year — with Somalia closely followed, as in 2007, by Myanmar, Iraq and Haiti. Just ahead of them was Afghanistan, which slipped to 176th place from 172nd.

Berlin-based Transparency said the index “highlights the fatal link between poverty, failed institutions and graft.” The ranking measures perceived levels of public sector corruption in 180 countries and draws on surveys of businesses and experts.

NBC is finding limited success in preventing its broadcasts to be shown without permission on sites like YouTube.

From cnet:

The company is seeing unprecedented success at removing unauthorized videos posted to the Web and cited last month’s Olympic Games and the recent SNL skit with actress Tina Fey as proof. More than 99 percent of all the Internet video views of the Olympic Games in Beijing were watched on NBC.com or NBCOlympics.com as opposed to on the likes of YouTube or Dailymotion, according to Rick Cotton, NBC’s general counsel.

Fey’s impersonation of Republican vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin was a smash hit. Within minutes of NBC’s airing of the show, attempts were made to post copies of the show to YouTube. It’s unclear, however, whether any of the full-length copies of the skit actually made it on to YouTube. All that is certain is that some clips of TV news coverage of the skit, featuring only snippets from the show, were available.