You are browsing the archives of 2008 January.

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

Illegal logging [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]