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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]