Vietnam gang accused of web rape ring

HANOI - VIETNAMESE police have accused a group of eight youngsters of gang-raping and robbing teenage girls they met through the Internet, a report said on Thursday.

The reputed leader of the Hanoi-based group was a 15-year-old girl nicknamed 'Wolf", who colluded with her 19-year-old male lover, the website of the Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper reported.

The pair 'made acquaintances with teen girls via chats on (the) Internet,' the English-language report said, citing a legal indictment.

'The couple later lured the teens to go out with them and then forced them into hotel rooms where the other male members of the gang raped them and then robbed their assets.' Police have completed their investigation, which will now be reviewed by prosecutors before deciding whether or not the case should go to court.

There were a total of five victims, beginning last July, Tuoi Tre said. It added that the other alleged gang members were aged between 19 and 23.

Concerns have risen in Vietnam about a perceived increase in youth violence and a breakdown of traditional family-centred social values in the rapidly modernising society. -- AFP

S.Korea's Shanghai consulate hit by sex scandal

SEOUL - SOUTH KOREA'S government said on Wednesday it has launched an investigation into an alleged steamy sex-for-favours scandal that has rocked its consulate in Shanghai.

Media reports say three Korean diplomats based in China's biggest city were suspected of having affairs with the same Chinese woman, who allegedly used her influence over them in seeking visas for Chinese workers.

She was also said to have received confidential information such as mobile phone numbers for leading members of South Korea's ruling party and other high-profile figures. The case of what one paper described as the 'sexy Shanghai siren' hit the headlines this week.

'Acting on tip-offs, we investigated the incident and gave the results to government agencies concerned last month,' an official of the Prime Minister's Office told AFP.

The three agencies that sent the diplomats to Shanghai - the foreign, knowledge economy and justice ministries - are now conducting their own investigations, he said on condition of anonymity. Reports say the tip-off came from the Korean husband of the Chinese woman, who wrote to the Seoul government to complain about the diplomats' allegedly intimate relations with his wife.

He presented pictures of her taken with each of the diplomats, which have now been splashed across front pages in Seoul.The three - who were summoned back to Seoul - have denied they had affairs with the woman, who reportedly acted as a conduit to senior Chinese officials and arranged meetings with visitors from Seoul. -- AFP

80% of Seoul's elderly living alone are women

Korean woman

ALMOST eight out of 10 elderly people living alone in Seoul are women, the Seoul Metropolitan Government said on Tuesday.

The city conducted a census on senior citizens aged 65 or older who lived alone without family over the past three months, aimed at assessing their welfare needs.

According to the survey on 214,506 citizens registered as single family households in Seoul, 82,766 were found to live alone and 77 per cent of them were women.

While 66.1 per cent said they didn't have their own house, less than half of them, or 36,000, responded they had an income. The monthly income per person was 460,000 won (S$506), just one-third of the national average.

Almost 80 per cent of the respondents said they were suffering from more than one medical condition. As they were allowed to give multiple answers, the most common conditions included arthritis, hypertension and backache. -- KOREA HERALD/ANN

13 million abortions a year in China

Couples in a Beijing hospital waiting outside an operating theatre where abortions are performed. In the past, older married women were the ones going for abortion. Now, it is young, unmarried women who are resorting to abortion. -- PHOTO: SIM CHI YIN

BEIJING - THE first time Ms Jenny Zhou had an abortion, she was only 20 and she remembered crying the whole time.

Her boyfriend did not accompany her. He was in the university dormitory, playing video games instead. They broke up eventually.

The second time Ms Zhou went for an abortion was in 2007. She was accompanied by her fiance, whom she married last year.

'Four years ago, he felt we could not afford to have a baby until we bought a big flat and a nice car,' said Ms Zhou, 28, now an IT manager in Beijing.

'I didn't mind. Abortion now is painless anyway - I was under anaesthetic. It's so easy, no wonder it's popular nowadays.'

Young women like Ms Zhou form the main group driving China's abortions, which number about 13 million annually or nearly a quarter of the world's total. Abortions in China peaked in the 1990s, with official figures saying 14 million were performed.

Man jailed for taking upskirt video in NUS lift

Ho Soo Kok, 30, pleaded guilty to insulting the modesty of the 30-year-old woman at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in Lower Kent Ridge Road on March 16, 2010. -- ST PHOTO : WONG KWAI CHOW

Singapore - A TECHNICIAN who filmed upskirt videos of a woman in a lift was on Tuesday, jailed for three weeks.

Ho Soo Kok, 30, pleaded guilty to insulting the modesty of the 30-year-old woman at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in Lower Kent Ridge Road on March 16, 2010.

The court heard that Ho got into the lift and stood behind the victim. As it was travelling to the second level, he took out his mobile phone, activated the video recording mode and put it towards her calf area with the intention to film her with an upskirt angle.

When the lift door opened on the third level, she felt a warm touch on her right leg. She turned around and saw Ho's mobile phone in between her legs.

She grabbed the phone and ran to the first level to seek help from a colleague. The victim went to the National University Hospital police post to get help.

Ho, who had his head bowed all the time, could have been jailed for up to one year and/or fined.

Mum uploads video of nude daughter to find a suitor

A DESPERATE Beijing mother who wants to find a boyfriend for her daughter has uploaded a video of the naked girl walking out of a shower while fielding questions on prospective boyfriends, reported Nanyang Siang Pau.

The 80-second footage begins with the mother speaking to the camera and declaring her intention of finding a boyfriend for her 26-year-old daughter.

The camera follows the mother towards the bathroom, where her daughter walks out in the nude.

When asked about her requirements for a boyfriend, the daughter replies:

'I'm all right, as long as (he) is nice to you (the mother) and nice to me. That's enough.''

The online community has speculated that the daughter in the footage is an actress named Ganlulu and the footage is genuine.


 

Philippines nabs Japanese in fake marriage scam

Japanese national Yoshifumi Fujii sits inside the Bureau of Immigration Detention Center at Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig City. -- PHOTO: AFP

MANILA - PHILIPPINE authorities said on Tuesday they arrested a Japanese man wanted over a fake marriage scam after he walked into the immigration bureau to renew his own visa.

Immigration deputy chief Ronaldo Ledesma said Yoshifumi Fujii, 49, was promptly arrested after a surprise appearance at the bureau's Manila headquarters last week to renew his expired visa.

'We were already looking for him after authorities in Tokyo requested assistance, but he basically walked into his own detention,' Mr Ledesma told AFP. 'Japanese police and Interpol agents will arrive soon to bring him back to Japan and he will also be blacklisted from returning here.'

Fujii operated a crime syndicate preying on Filipino women willing to pay money for fake Japanese marriages, Mr Ledesma said.

'He charges them money and arranges the marriages with Japanese men. Once the woman arrives in Japan, she can now work and the man later leaves or divorces her,' he said. 'It also works both ways, because the Japanese man can now stay in the Philippines and put up businesses.'

Mr Ledesma said investigations by Japanese authorities discovered that Fujii had entered fake documents in the marriage registries at several towns in Japan's Aichi prefecture. Some of the couples were arrested in May last year, but Fujii fled to the Philippines before police could enforce an arrest warrant issued by a local court. -- AFP

China dungeon rapist sentenced to death

BEIJING - A MAN was sentenced to death for kidnapping and caging two girls in a dungeon and raping nine other women, said a verdict of the Intermediate People's Court of Wuhan, Central China's Hubei province, on Sunday.

Zeng Qiangbao, a 40-year-old worker in a steel factory in Wuhan, was convicted of rape, illegally imprisoning, robbery and forcible seizure, according to the verdict.

The court heard that Zeng had caged two teenage girls in a dungeon for 590 days and 317 days as sex slaves until they were rescued by police on May 14 last year. He also raped another nine women from July 2007 to May 2010, the prosecutor said.

According to the prosecutor, on Sept 16, 2008, Zeng captured 16-year-old Hu and took her to a dungeon under his house and raped her. On July 2, 2009, Zeng kidnapped a 19-year-old girl surnamed Zhou and sexually assaulted her. The girl was also kept in the dungeon. The girls were repeatedly beaten and raped by Zeng, the prosecutor said.

The two were rescued on May 14, 2010, after a man surnamed Du visited his friend's electronics repair shop and found a note in a partially dismantled television. It read: 'Help. I've been held prisoner underground for more than a year.'

Along with the words was a hand-drawn map that showed where the girls were being kept, as well as the telephone number and address of Zhou's family. Du called the number and informed the father, who lived just 200m from where his daughter was being held. The father immediately called police and arrived at the scene a few hours later. -- CHINA DAILY/ANN

Indonesian singer jailed 3 1/2 years in sex-tape trial

Indonesian rock star Nazril Ariel (right) waits with his girlfriend Luna Maya, before his trial at Bandung court in West Java. -- PHOTO: AFP

BANDUNG (Indonesia) - AN INDONESIAN court on Monday jailed one of South-east Asia's biggest rock stars for more than three years after sex tapes of him with two television celebrities appeared online.

The trial for Nazril 'Ariel' Irham, lead singer of the band Peterpan, has made headlines and dominated chatter on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter for more than three months.

Fans insist he did nothing wrong, making the tapes in the privacy of his own home. But Islamic hard-liners warn that his actions have contributed to the country's moral decline.

The 29-year-old pop star - who said the videos were stolen and posted online without his knowledge - is the first celebrity to be charged with violating the country's strict anti-pornography law that came into effect in 2008.

'I wanna be free,' Ariel told reporters, smiling as he puffed away on a cigarette before being escorted into a packed and electrically charged courtroom before the verdict. 'I didn't distribute those videos.'

Outside the district court in Bandung, about 120km south-east of the capital, Jakarta, hundreds of protesters chanted his name and demanded he be punished. -- AP

'Facebook' prostitution as ring

JAKARTA police arrested a man suspected of running a prostitution business involving seven junior high school girls through Facebook, a police official said on Wednesday.

Central Jakarta police detective chief Yoyon Toni Saputra said that Dede, 28, who was arrested on Monday, had allegedly committed the crimes for two years, kompas.com reported.

The suspect, a resident of Manggarai, South Jakarta, allegedly recruited his neighbours to become prostitutes. The suspect allegedly used Facebook to solicit the girls, aged between 13 and 16 years old, at the price of 2 million rupiahs (S$283) each, sending them to meeting places as required by the buyers once the deals were made, according to Yoyon.

Yoyon said the case was discovered after a teacher checked the Facebook account of a student who was a classmate of one of the girls. The teacher told the girl's father about what he found, and the father reported it to the police.

The father said his daughter had changed in the past few months. 'She used to greet us before going to school, but now she never does. She is rebellious and often returns home late at night,' he said, adding that everyday he gave her 20,000 rupiah for pocket money.

On Tuesday the police also arrested one of Dede's alleged customers, Alay, 50, in his room at Puri Kemayoran Apartment, Central Jakarta. He was arrested soon after a girl sent by Dede entered his room. -- JAKARTA POST/ANN

Silvio Berlusconi scandal

SILVIO BERLUSCONI’S opponents have tried everything to get rid of him. They have manoeuvred against him, decried his policies, condemned his methods and, he has long claimed, incited left-wing prosecutors to try and jail him.

But since October 26th, a new possibility has emerged: that the 74-year-old Mr Berlusconi might just be laughed off the Italian political stage. Some of the details of the latest scandal to engulf him are such that even his most faithful supporters must realise he makes Italy an object of derision.

The girl at the centre of the affair—a 17-year-old Moroccan runaway—calls herself Ruby Rubacuori, or “Ruby Heartstealer”. On her Facebook page, her activities include belly dancing, and before she became involved with Italy’s prime minister she appears to have worked in Milan nightclubs.

The precise nature of their involvement is unclear. “Ruby”—whose real name appears to be Karima El Mahroug—said in an interview published on Saturday that she visited Mr Berlusconi’s home outside Milan only once, on Valentine’s Day this year, and that after giving him an account of her misfortunes, he gave her €7,000 ($9,770) and some jewellery. But, according to leaked details from an inquiry in Milan, she had earlier told police and prosecutors that she had been there three times, and that one of the parties ended in an erotic game called “Bunga, Bunga”.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to any number of jokes and even a  song performed on Italian network television to the tune of Shakira’s Waka Waka World Cup anthem.

However amusing to others, the affair is potentially serious for Mr Berlusconi. Three close associates of the prime minister are reportedly under investigation on suspicion of aiding and abetting prostitution on the basis of Ms El Mahroug’s depositions. She denies having had sex with the prime minister, but the investigators are looking into whether others did, and were rewarded for doing so.

That would not incriminate Mr Berlusconi. But it might be enough to bring charges against his associates, who are suspected of procuring the women. One, a former showgirl called Nicole Minetti who is now a regional parliamentarian for Mr Berlusconi’s party, collected Ms El Mahroug after she was released from a police station in May.

The young Moroccan had been detained on suspicion of stealing €3,000, but was let go. The station commander said in an interview on October 29th that one of his officers had earlier received a call from the prime minister’s office informing them, erroneously, that Ms El Mahroug was the grand-daughter of Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak.

As opposition politicians swiftly noted, that could mean Mr Berlusconi had abused his position and thus committed an offence under Italian law. Far from denying it, the prime minister appears bent on defiance.

On October 29th, he admitted he had sent Ms Minetti “to provide help to someone who could have been consigned not to a home or the jails... but fostered”. Mr Berlusconi added that he had no intention of changing his lifestyle or explaining what went on at his home.

That sort of brazenness got him through the last bout of sex scandals in 2009. But there are several reasons for questioning whether it will work this time.

Mr Berlusconi is much weaker now. His poll ratings have fallen as Italians have becoming increasingly sceptical about his blithe assurances on the state of the economy. That has made them less tolerant of evidence of corruption in his government. And since July, when his former ally, Gianfranco Fini, formed a separate parliamentary group, the prime minister has been without an assured majority in the lower chamber.

Last year, most of the prime minister’s supporters went along with him as he ignored calls for a parliamentary statement, shrugged off claims he had laid himself open to blackmail and jauntily admitted he was no angel. But it was expected that he would save them from future embarrassment by being, if not more virtuous, then at least more discreet.

Mr Berlusconi has confounded that expectation, calling into question not just his private life but his judgement.

Killings of newborn babies on the rise in Pakistan

Pakistani volunteers take the corpses of two infants from a private charity's morgue in Karachi during the burial service. -- PHOTO: AFP

KARACHI - THE lifeless bodies of two tiny babies are being given their final bath before burial in Karachi, after they were left to die in the southern Pakistani city's garbage dumps.

'They can only have been one or two days old,' says volunteer worker Mohammad Saleem, pointing at the two small corpses being gently washed by his colleagues at a charity's morgue.

In the conservative Muslim nation, where the birth of children outside of marriage is condemned and adultery is a crime punishable by death under strict interpretations of Islamic law, infanticide is a crime on the rise.

More than 1,000 infants - most of them girls - were killed or abandoned to die in Pakistan last year according to conservative estimates by the Edhi Foundation, a charity working to reverse the grim trend.

The infanticide figures are collected only from Pakistan's main cities, leaving out huge swathes of the largely rural nation, and the charity says that in December alone it found 40 dead babies left in garbage dumps and sewers.

The number of dead infants found last year - 1,210 - was up from 890 in 2008 and 999 in 2009, says the Edhi Foundation manager in Karachi, Anwar Kazmi. -- AFP

Indonesian police say toy salesman raped 96 kids

Police say an Indonesian toy salesman has admitted to raping at least 96 boys. -- PHOTO: AFP

JAKARTA - AN INDONESIAN toy salesman has admitted to raping at least 96 boys, police said.

The dirty deeds of the 34-year-old suspect, identified as Sartono, came to light after the family of one of his young victims reported the case to the police.

The 14-year-old boy, who went missing on Nov 21 last year, said Sartono had lured him to Jakarta from his village in Thousand Islands with the promise of a mobile phone, the Jakarta Globe reported.

Once in the capital, Sartono raped his young victim repeatedly and also forced him to perform sexual acts on other men for money, the newspaper added.

The police chief of Thousand Islands Hero Hendrianto Bachtiar said the salesman wrote to his victim's parents, claiming he and the boy were working together, so that they would not worry or report him missing, the Globe report said.

But the boy managed to run away and made his way back to his family on Dec 3.

Indonesia welcomes BlackBerry porn filter

JAKARTA - INDONESIA welcomed on Tuesday Canadian firm Research in Motion's (RIM) promise to filter its BlackBerry web services for pornography, after threatening to revoke the smartphone maker's licence.

RIM said on Monday it would start filtering web services in Indonesia after the mainly Muslim country threatened to restrict or block the company's domestic services in one of Asia's fastest growing telecommunications markets.

RIM is the world's fourth biggest smartphone platform, with global sales of 11.9 million units, according to research firm Gartner. It does not filter its web content in any of its other markets around the world.

'We've heard about RIM saying it will filter the Internet.... That's good news to us and we highly appreciate that,' communications ministry spokesman Gatot Dewa Broto said.

RIM said in a statement that it had been in talks with its partners and the government and 'continues to make it a top priority to implement satisfactory technical solutions as soon as possible'.

Communications and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring gave the company two weeks to comply or risk being kicked out of the country. -- AFP

Filming more than 500 sex clips

Chen Guilin (right) in a screen capture taken off an interview he did with The Straits Times Razor TV in 2009. -- PHOTO: ST RAZOR TV

WHILE he was engaged in sex with different women, the intimate moments were filmed with a video camera hidden in a plastic bag with a slit.

Some women were willing parties for the filming, but others were filmed without their consent.

Chen Guilin, alias Gary Ng, then posted some of the video clips on the Internet with the women's faces masked.

The 28-year-old on Tuesday pleaded guilty to possessing 507 obscene films, of which more than 480 were clips of him having sex with various women.

The items were seized by police from his flat at Yishun Street 22 in June last year. The police also found another person's identity card in his flat.

The former property agent on Tuesday also admitted to seven other offences, including breaking into the home of his client while she was away, forgery and criminal breach of trust.

Rape in his cab

A TAXI driver who allowed his cousin to rape a 15-year-old girl in his cab on Dec 31, 2009, in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, and helped him cover up his crime was caught on Monday, Wenzhou City Daily reported.

The driver, Wang Wenkai had evaded the police for one year. He said that he tried to tell his cousin not to rape the girl passenger, but he couldn't stop him, because he was afraid of what his cousin might do to retaliate.

His cousin was captured and sentenced to seven years six months in prison.

Wang said that he never had any agreement with his cousin about the crime and felt bad for the victim. -- CHINA DAILY/ANN

China shuts down 60,000 pxrnxgraphic websites

BEIJING - CHINA said on Thursday that authorities had shut down more than 60,000 pxrnxgraphic websites as part of a year-long crackdown on lewd online content, as Beijing moves to tighten control over the Internet.

'By the end of November, we had inspected 1.8 million websites, and closed down more than 60,000 unsound websites that spread pxrn,' Wang Chen, minister for the press office of the State Council, China's cabinet, told reporters.

He added that authorities had jailed 58 people for at least five years in the crackdown on lewd online and mobile phone content that was launched in December last year.

China, which has the world's largest online population with 450 million users, operates a vast web censorship system sometimes known as the 'Great Firewall of China'.

The government says it censors the Internet to curb 'unhealthy' content including pxrn and violence, but critics counter that it is mainly trying to prevent the posting of information that challenges the ruling Communist Party.

Mr Wang said the crackdown would continue as violence and pxrnxgraphy would not disappear from the Internet. 'This special operation to rectify online pornography and vulgar content has not come to an end - this is a protracted war,' he said. -- AFP

Malaysia court sentences 2 to jail over baby sale

KUALA LUMPUR (Malaysia) - A PROSECUTOR says a Malaysian court has sentenced a doctor and his assistant to one year in jail for selling a newborn boy.

Prosecutor Dzul Iswari Mohamad Jaafar says a court in southern Johor state found Robert Luk and his assistant Suleiman Salim guilty on Wednesday of selling the baby to a couple for 10,000 ringgit (S$4,185) in 2005.

The two men were accused of altering the birth certificate of the boy, born to a poor woman who wanted to give him up for adoption.

The offence - unlawful transfer of control of a child - carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail.

Dzul Iswari said on Thursday that it was the first such successful prosecution. Several people have been arrested in recent years over sales of babies to childless couples. -- AP

More sxx assaults reported at military academies

DENVER - The Defence Department says reported sxxual assaults at the three military academies that train future officers rose 64 per cent in the 2009-10 academic year compared with the previous year.

Officials said on Wednesday the increase could reflect that more students are reporting assaults, rather than a jump in the number of assaults themselves.

The Pentagon says 41 sxxual assaults involving students at West Point, the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy were reported to authorities in 2009-10. In the previous academic year, 25 were reported.

The Pentagon estimates fewer than 10 per cent of sxxual assaults at the academies are reported.

The statistics are in the 2009-10 Report on Sxxual Harassment and Violence at the Military Service Academies. It's issued annually. -- AP

Used pen to video records female thighs and underwear

Sales manager Soo Ee Hock will serve 9 months in jail for taking about 200 upskirt videos of unsuspecting women. -- ST PHOTO: AZIZ HUSSIN

A SALES manager who took about 200 upskirt videos of unsuspecting women with a camera pen was sentenced to nine months' jail on Tuesday.

Soo Ee Hock, 35, intends to appeal and bail of $20,000 was offered.

The married man had pleaded guilty two weeks ago, to 12 of 201 counts of intruding into the privacy of women between November 2008 and March last year.

He would clip the pen with a built-in video camera onto his laptop bag and place it under the skirt of the unknown female standing in front of him on an escalator, to capture an upskirt digital video recording of her thighs and underwear.

He was arrested at Junction 8 Bishan Shopping Centre on July 7, 2009.

District Judge Lee Poh Choo said Soo knew full well what he was doing and was a serial offender. She said he intended to keep those images for a long time as he had burnt them onto a CD, and 'that shows the extent of his perverted mind'.

Soo could have been jailed for up to one year and/or fined on each charge.