Free Republic

TEXAS CITY — A massive superhighway that Texans have protested at public hearings statewide drew heated opposition among Galveston County residents, who said they feared the toll road would cripple the local shipping industry and do nothing to improve insufficient hurricane evacuation routes. The Trans-Texas Corridor would wind from Laredo to Corpus Christi, wrap around the western edge of Greater Houston, parallel Interstate 59 through East Texas and leave the state in Texarkana. But residents at a public hearing Thursday night in Texas City questioned the real purpose for the road, which would also be part of a national Interstate...

NACOGDOCHES — The rows of extra chairs brought into the The Fredonia's biggest meeting room Thursday night were not enough to accommodate more than 750 people who attended an open house and public hearing on the proposed TTC-69 highway. Texas Department of Transportation officials heard hours of public testimony that continued late into the night overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new roadways through East Texas. Applause throughout the hours-long meeting never swelled as loudly as it did when the first speaker of the night, state Rep. Wayne Christian, told TxDOT representatives emphatically that "our answer is 'no' on the...

Editor’s Note: Women are active participants, and often the masterminds, behind the world’s third most lucrative illegal activity, after gun and weapons: people smuggling. In a four-part investigative series for the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión, reporter Claudia Núñez uncovers the lives of women involved in the human trafficking business in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. “Gaviota” (not her real name) has six phones that don’t stop ringing. Her booming business produces net profits of more than $50,000 a month. She has dozens of customers lining up for her in a datebook stretching three months ahead. Gaviota is not exactly...

Wisconsin would officially make human trafficking for sex or cheap labor illegal under a bill a legislative committee considered Wednesday. The measure, if passed, would mark Wisconsin's first steps toward confronting what President Bush has labeled "a perverse evil." State statutes don't specifically address human trafficking, and state justice officials don't formally track cases. "This is modern slavery. It cannot be tolerated and must be stopped," Tim Dewane, director of the School Sisters of Notre Dame Milwaukee Province's Office of Global Justice & Peace, told the state Senate Judiciary and Corrections Committee on Wednesday. "Help make a difference in addressing...

For years, the vast majority of politicians in the main parties have avoided having honest public conversation about the extent and consequences of immigration. The fear of appearing racist, or giving any ground to the arguments of the far right, has left most MPs and commentators in Pollyanna territory - extolling the economic and cultural benefits of immigration and glossing over problems. That has done the nation no favours, because the consequences of rapid social change have been scarcely studied, let alone addressed. And it has increased many people's distrust of the political universe, as the gulf between their own...

Large ring kept up to 120 women in virtual slavery The picture, with its implicit threat, was all it took. It was taken just before Christmas 2004. She had been thinking about running away from the windowless bar on Houston's northwest side, where he kept her and other women, forcing some of them into prostitution while they paid off their "debts." But Maximino "Chimino" Mondragon knew of her plans. Carrying a camera and Christmas presents for the woman's daughter, he had appeared unannounced at her family's home in El Salvador. The woman, who was not identified by authorities, told investigators...

Countries debating whether or not to legalize prostitution could learn from what occurred in the Australian state of Victoria. The state government legalized prostitution in 1984 and since then, the sex industry has flourished. With over 20 years of experience, many of the promised benefits of legalizing prostitution have not, however, materialized, according to a book published earlier this year. A detailed examination of the situation in Victoria was authored by self-declared “feminist activist” Mary Lucille Sullivan, in her book “Making Sex Work: A Failed Experiment With Legalised Prostitution,” (Spinifex Press). “Victoria’s legalized prostitution system assists in maintaining male dominance,...

Oct 17th, 2007 | MIAMI -- The teen slept on a rolled-up mattress on the dining room floor and bathed in the backyard with a garden hose. For six years, she washed dishes, made beds and cooked for a family that beat her and hid her in a closet when visitors arrived. She never went to school. Simone Celestin's story sounds like a slave narrative from another century, but federal prosecutors say it happened in South Florida. They say Celestin is one of an unknown number of children and teens called "restaveks," who are hidden as slaves within the Haitian...

Schoolgirls in Lancashire and Yorkshire are falling prey to sinister gangs of pimps. Two men have been sent to jail, but the girls’ mothers, not the police, are at the forefront of the crackdown. Why are the authorities so reluctant to get involved? Investigation by Julie Bindel A t the crown court in Preston on August 10, a trial involving two Asian men caused unusual interest across a number of cities in the north of England. The defendants, Zulfqar Hussain and Qaiser Naveed, were each sentenced to five years and eight months for abduction, sexual activity with a child, and...

A bodega owner was sentenced to federal prison for illegally shuttling more than $1M to Mexico and harboring illegal immigrants. Federal prosecutors said much of the money was earned by Mexican prostitutes smuggled into the US. Jose Luis Notario is the 13th person to be sentenced in a large-scale smuggling and trafficking ring.......Federal agents found families around San Miguel Tenancingo, Mexico, smuggled aged 17 to mid-20s Mexicans into the US to work as prostitutes......then gave their earnings to traffickers, who sent the money back to traffickers' families in Mexico.

PHOENIX (Reuters) - A criminal ring that Arizona police said used a shuttle service to smuggle drug and human trafficking profits to Mexico has been broken up with 47 people indicted, authorities said on Friday. Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said the firm shuttling passengers from Phoenix to Sonoyta, Caborca and Puerto Penasco in Mexico moved some $2 million a month in dirty money for at least 20 different human and drug trafficking organizations. The people indicted included drivers and other employees of the shuttle firm. They face a range of charges including money laundering, conspiracy and illegally conducting a...

1 August 2007 AMSTERDAM – The police in Zuid-Limburg have arrested a gang of Albanian human traffickers. The three men are suspected of human trafficking, hostage taking, abuse and rape. One victim, a 36-year-old woman of Yugoslavian descent, was rescued by police. She had gone into hiding months ago in Limburg with the help of police because she had been forced into prostitution by the gang. But the gang managed to find her and took her into their control once again. It was five months before she was able to alert her contact person with the police by sms text...

(CBS/AP) PHILADELPHIA -- Seven years ago, Russian courts convicted a wealthy American motel owner of molesting children and sent him to prison, but later decided to just expel him. The experience did little to keep Anthony "Mark" Bianchi stateside. Over the next few years, he traveled to Moldova, Romania, Cambodia and Cuba -- trips all designed, U.S. officials say, to recruit destitute boys for sexual trysts. Bianchi, 44, of North Wildwood, N.J., is scheduled to go on trial Monday on charges he assaulted nearly a dozen minors on foreign soil. And this time -- under a largely untested 2003 law...

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia dismissed on Monday possible U.S. sanctions over human trafficking and warned Washington of alienating Muslims after it blacklisted mostly Islamic countries. ADVERTISEMENT The U.S. last month ranked Muslim states -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Iran, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Qatar -- as among the worst human trade offenders, and said they may face sanctions. "We are not bothered about...the sanctions," Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said. "I don't think we need to respond to that sort of pressure." "The U.S. really needs to be friendly to Muslim countries...

British authorities have revealed their involvement in the rescue this year of 15 teenage boys working in Stockholm as "slave labourers". A Foreign Office spokesman told the Sunday Telegraph that the boys were threatened with beatings if they made any attempt to leave the prison-like conditions in which they were kept. They are desperately underpaid and often resort to stealing from supermarkets to make ends meet. "Lots of the boys come from a weak social situation. Some were born and raised in children's homes, with no education, no parents. Some were picked up in pubs or on the street," Robert...

Few police are seen at bustling Zhengzhou train station in central China, where people traffickers are believed to have abducted young boys and others for use as slave laborers at brick kilns. There is no shortage of tough-looking men approaching passengers with offers of work and accommodation, offers that frequently turn out to be a ruse to entrap people into forced labor. Uneducated and grindingly poor, China's 200 million migrant workers are among the most vulnerable to exploitation by phony job offers, and they are easily picked out by the animal feed or fertilizer bags they carry as improvised luggage....

Police say she passed out cards that offered the teen girls for sex A 16-year-old girl endured being sold into prostitution by her mother but finally went to Houston police after seeing her younger sister also forced to perform sex acts, investigators said Wednesday. The teenager had complied with her mother — who even distributed business cards offering her daughters for sex — but feared that her 14-year-old sister would be hurt, officers said. Nelsi Yolanda Latuda and her boyfriend, Pedro Espinoza-Escama, both of the 5500 block of Antoine, are charged with two counts each of compelling prostitution of a...

June 7, 2007ICE Operation Predator arrests of child exploiters top 10,000In four years, initiative has removed more than 5,500 child exploiters from the U.S. WASHINGTON - Just four years after the Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Predator, an initiative aimed at those who sexually exploit children, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced today that its arrests had topped 10,000. "Operation Predator is a great example of how our transnational partnerships and wide-ranging legal authorities can work to protect children," said Julie L. Myers, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for ICE. "In the course of this highly successful...

Search engine giant Google has slammed Sweden's proposed wiretapping legislation as illiberal and incompatible with Western democracy. Speaking on a visit to Sweden on Tuesday, the company's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, warned that Google would rule out making any major investments in Sweden should the controversial bill become law. "We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden's borders if the proposal goes through," Fleischer told Internet World. The proposal, which would allow the National Defence Radio Establishment (Försvarets Radioanstalt -...

U.S. 'Top 10' fugitive arrested in Montreal Updated Sun. May. 13 2007 9:29 PM ET CTV.ca News Staff A U.S. fugitive on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list will appear in a Montreal court on Monday charged with immigration violations. Richard Steve Goldberg, 61, was arrested early Saturday in suburban Montreal by a police tactical team. He is being held under the Immigration and Detention Act. Richard Goldberg is taken into custody early Saturday morning May 12, 2007 by a police SWAT team in Montreal. Canadian authorities will seek to keep Goldberg, who is on the FBI's 10 Most...

McALLEN — Human trafficking is an underreported problem that occurs in struggling economies and during times of war. Circumstances such as poverty and civil strife play off each other, taking away people’s rights and livelihoods, said some speakers during the first day of South Texas College’s Human Trafficking Conference at its Pecan Campus on Wednesday. Chandanie Watawala, a doctoral candidate at Mahidol University in Thailand, said the problem is persistent in her home country of Sri Lanka, off the coast of India, because of poverty, natural disasters and lack of employment opportunities even for the well educated. About 6,000 boys...

Gustavo Dominguez Found Guilty Of Smuggling Cuban Baseball Players A Beverly Hills-based sports agent has been convicted of smuggling five Cuban baseball players into the United States. Gustavo "Gus" Dominguez was found guilty yesterday of 21 federal charges, including conspiracy, smuggling, transporting and harboring. His attorney says they will appeal the convictions. Most of the charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years each in prison. Dominguez will remain out of jail on bond until his sentencing hearing July 9th. Federal prosecutors say Dominguez helped organize two smuggling trips across the Florida Straits in 2004. The first one failed. The...

Nevada measure targets human trafficking Tucson, Arizona | Published: 04.12.2007 CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — A state Assembly panel voted Wednesday for a bill targeting "coyotes" who smuggle people into the United States after hearing attorneys general from both Nevada and Arizona describe widespread problems such as beatings and rapes of victims and violence between rival smugglers. AB383, by Assemblywoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, was endorsed by Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and her Arizona counterpart, Terry Goddard, during an Assembly Commerce and Labor Committee hearing. The bill, which is similar to an Arizona law approved in 2005,...

Immigration officials are searching for a Mexican national they say forced young Mexican women — including a 14-year-old girl and a 19-year-old deaf woman — to work as prostitutes in Columbia, sometimes servicing up to 40 clients a day each. Guadalupe Reyes-Rivera, an undocumented Mexican immigrant also known as “Mama Martina,� paid salaries to at least two other undocumented Mexicans to smuggle young girls into America and oversee their work as prostitutes, Craig Hannah, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified in federal court Tuesday. Court officials said cases involving forced prostitution of undocumented aliens are unusual. The...

Who were the slaves? Millions of Africans, who were forcibly transported overseas over a period of about 450 years from the middle of the 15th Century. WHAT IS A QUICK GUIDE? Quick guides are concise explanations of topics or issues in the news. More Quick Guides The enslavement of people from west Africa by British, European and African traders, and their mass transportation to the Americas was known as the transatlantic Slave Trade. A similar slave trade, conducted by Arab and African traders over roughly the same period, saw millions of others transported from the continent's east coast and...

Busy At The Northern Border Investigators say that Albanian citizen Ermira Hatija was a leader in an Ecstasy trafficking ring based out of Detroit, Mich. Authorities also believe that Hatija has been involved in human trafficking along the Canadian-US border. This serious crime lets criminals like Hatija profit off the misfortune of others. But when human beings are treated like objects, the price in life can be high. Tragic Traffic Hatija first came onto the police radar in 2003, when police say that she arranged for a 13-year-old-boy and his mother to cross the Canadian-US border on a Wave Runner....

The teen then broke into tears and recounted that she had been beaten and kept against her will by a Greensburg family for more than six months, said Williams, who invited the teen inside and contacted authorities.

See for example this thread first. This story's both evil and sick Women are for sale in Gatwick "Come get jobs," they're told and then they are sold England, it seems, needs a swift kick!

Women are being sold into prostitution in modern day "slave auctions" at Britain's airports, it emerged yesterday. The illegal immigrants are sold to the highest bidder for up to £8,000 a time. They are then forced to work in brothels where they can earn up to £800 a day for their "owner". The chilling reality of human trafficking was spelled out yesterday by senior police officers at Scotland Yard. Detective Superintendent Mark Ponting, of the Metropolitan Police, said young women from all over the world are trafficked into Britain after being promised well-paid work in bars or cafes. But within...

Want a sexual slave? That is the question hundreds of thousands answer each year, as they purchase a child or young person from traffickers in a multibillion-dollar international business known as the global sex trade. When in many countries a young woman can be kidnapped for $500 and yield $250,000 annually from sexual servitude, it doesn't take much economic ingenuity to understand why corrupt capitalists crave some buy-in to this repulsive form of commerce. These victims of sexual slavery come from some of the most well-known sexually trafficked areas in the world, including Cambodia, Thailand, Latin America, Eastern Europe (countries...

PUEBLO, Colo. -- A woman was a accused of giving a 5-month-old boy to a couple in exchange for a down payment on a used car, police said Tuesday. A tip led police Monday to Nicole Uribe, 23, who got a Dodge Intrepid as part of the deal with Jose-Juan Lerma, 47, and his wife, Irene, 27, authorities said. The baby was allegedly switched for $1,500, only $500 of which was for the down payment. The couple was arrested Tuesday. The three are charged with suspicion of felony trafficking in children and were being held at the Pueblo jail under...

PUEBLO, Colorado (AP) -- Three people were arrested on charges of swapping a 5-month-old boy for a down payment on a used Dodge Intrepid and cash, police said Tuesday.

A mother from Mexico used her 5-month-old son to make a downpayment for a used car. Nicole Uribe-Lopez, 23, and the alleged buyers of the baby, Jose-Juan Lerma, 47, and his wife, Irene Lerma, 27, were arrested and booked in jail for trafficking in children. According to Capt. John Barger of the Police Department in Pueblo, Colorado, the baby boy was sold for $1,500, of which $500 went for a down payment on a car. The child is now in the custody of the Pueblo County Department of Social Services. [Snip] It's still unclear if Uribe, restaurant waitress, intended to...

Stolen kids turned into terrifying killers POSTED: 9:42 a.m. EST, February 12, 2007 Story Highlights• There are more than 250,000 child soldiers fighting around the world • Children are often brainwashed and drugged before they are forced to fight • Their vulnerability can allow warlords to make them into coldblooded killers • Child advocates see some signs of progress, but a long way to go By Ann O'Neill CNN (CNN) -- Warlords are forcing children in conflicts around the world to become killing machines -- nothing more than what one child advocate calls "cannon fodder." Some children are kidnapped...

(New Haven-WTNH, Dec. 29, 2006 Updated 5:55 PM) _ The former owner of several shoreline area Dunkin' Donuts restaurants and his daughter pleaded guilty Friday to charges of hiring illegal workers. The criminal case was promoted by a Team 8 investigation. Jose Calhelha and his 23-year old daughter Diana walked into New Haven Federal Court and pleaded guilty to charges resulting from our Team 8 investigation. The charges may land Jose Calhelha in federal prison for more than a year when he's sentenced. "We're looking ... to convince this judge to give the most lenient sentence possible," defense attorney William...

WASHINGTON - He met her in a Starbucks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. While the story she told was gut-wrenching, it wasn't unlike those he'd heard countless times over the past four years. Nour Miyati, an Indonesian woman in her 20s, had come to Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic servant. But her dream of supporting her family back home turned into a nightmare. Her employers abused and tortured her. She lost fingers and toes to gangrene when the wounds from her beatings went untreated and festered. When she finally escaped and sought justice in a Saudi court, she was...

NACHOD, Czech Republic: At a time when North Korea is under fire for its nuclear weapons program, nearly 400 North Korean women are quietly helping the motherland by working at humble jobs in Czech Republic and sending their wages home. The women, mainly seamstresses, are now themselves at the center of debate, with some critics contending that their work amounts to state-imposed forced labor. Vaclav Havel, the former president, is among those who have said that the Czech Republic should not be used as a base for filling North Korea's coffers. Although the Czech government stopped issuing new work visas...

Police have arrested more than 40 people and broken up a family-run smuggling ring that hauled illegal immigrants from Mexico to Arizona for generations, officials said on Monday. The operation, which began in 2001, broke up a ring that smuggled undocumented immigrants to Bowie, Arizona, southeast of Phoenix, from Agua Prieta in Mexico, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. Alonzo Pena, ICE special agent in charge of Arizona, said a grand jury handed down an indictment this month charging 55 people in connection with the operation. Eleven suspects remained at large. "This was an extremely significant smuggling operation and one of...

TUCSON, Ariz. – Authorities arrested more than 40 people accused of operating a smuggling ring that brought at least hundreds of illegal immigrants into the country and laundered their profits, officials said Monday. The 44 arrests culminated a two-year investigation into what officials said was a family-run ring operating out of the tiny southern Arizona town of Bowie, east of Tucson. Officials said a grand jury handed down a 50-page, 728-count indictment earlier this month accusing 55 people of being involved in the scheme. Many of those arrested are American citizens, officials said. Eleven suspects, including at least five Mexican...

SAN FRANCISCO — Many of San Francisco's Asian massage parlors — long an established part of the city's sexually permissive culture — have degenerated into something much more sinister: international sex-slave shops. Once limited to infamous locales such as Bombay and Bangkok, sex trafficking is now an $8 billion international business, with San Francisco among its largest commercial centers. San Francisco's liberal attitude toward sex, the city's history of arresting prostitutes instead of pimps, and its large immigrant population have made it one of the top American cities for international sex traffickers to do business undetected, according to Donna Hughes,...

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/thomas100806.htm Paedophiles, Cheb sex capital of Europe Captive market, "Girls who've shown signs of disobedience have had their feet cemented into washbasins before being dumped in the Aegean Sea. Others have been horrifically tortured. The Albanian gangs have a seemingly endless supply of women, and their power extends way beyond their homeland to the underworlds of Italy and parts of New York. The victims do not officially exist and are powerless to resist." Most Albanian gangsters are men in their twenties from the backward north of the country. Rather than being based around individual gangland bosses, they are organized in...

A Vietnamese mother, lured by the promise of a high-paying factory job, chased her dream of sending both daughters to college into a sweatshop far from home, with no exit. She fell prey to men who took her to the American territory of Samoa, where she was enslaved with about 250 other desperate women from China and Vietnam. Those who complained were beaten and starved. Freed when the garment factory closed in 2000, some of the women risked their lives to help U.S. authorities investigate and convict the kingpins of what federal authorities have called the largest human trafficking case...

Belgrade, 29 August (AKI) - Serbian police have broken up a human trafficking chain, arresting 33 people, most of them Albanians, the Belgrade-based daily Press reported on Tuesday, quoting police sources. The report said police who had been tracking the flow of illegal immigrants for some time, raided a house in Belgrade on Monday where they found 28 Albanian, and five Turkish citizens who had entered the country illegally. The police said that 13 were juveniles, aged from 11 to 17, and all of them will be returned to their home countries. According to police, the Turks were smuggled into...

ICE & FBI agents arrest 31Korean nationals throughout the Northeastern United States in federal human trafficking case Korean women were smuggled to U.S. work as prostitutes in brothels NEW YORK, NY -- Michael J. Garcia, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Julie L. Myers, Assistant Secretary, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Mark J. Mehrson, Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office, today announced that 31 individuals were arrested yesterday and charged in a wide-ranging human trafficking ring...

AUSTIN (AP) - Brothels in the Austin area and Oklahoma City that used immigrant women and catered mostly to undocumented workers were part of a multistate prostitution ring federal agents have partially broken up, court documents say. Women from Mexico and Central and South American countries worked in the prostitution houses and in some cases reported being held against their will, documents show. The brothel near Austin was the second in that area run by the same man, officials allege. Juan Balderas-Orosco, 34, escaped capture when authorities raided the first one four years ago, but he was arrested June 29...

Tue Jul 18, 2006 7:41 PM BST By Silvia Aloisi ROME (Reuters) - Italian police on Tuesday freed 113 Poles living "like slaves" in forced labour camps, where those refusing to work were raped, tortured with metal batons and attacked by dogs. Authorities in both countries said that at least four workers had apparently committed suicide in the camps in Italy's southern region of Puglia, but those deaths were being investigated as suspicious. "To call the situation revealed by the carabinieri investigation simply inhuman does in no way do it justice," Italy's national anti-Mafia prosecutor, Piero Grasso, told reporters in...

WOMEN are being sold off in "slave auctions" in the arrivals lounges of British airports, say authorities desperate to crack down on the burgeoning trade in trafficking humans. The Crown Prosecution Service said foreign women were being sold as sex workers as soon as they arrived, and police are appealing to men who frequent brothels to contact them in confidence if they believe the prostitutes may be there against their will. In one instance a slave auction took place outside a coffee shop in the arrivals hall of London-Gatwick airport, and it is believed similar auctions have taken place at...

LONDON -- Have you read Russian President Vladimir Putin's 2006 State of the Nation message yet? The one he gave last week? You should. You may have seen some references to it in the press. A lot was made of his statements that the Cold War is continuing and also that what the Russian Federation needs is love. Good media stuff that. But actually, when you read the whole thing (only 18 pages) it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that this is the testament of a failed state. Let me tell you why I reach that conclusion....

A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan. The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12. They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.

A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan. The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12. They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade. Khan was exposed in a sting organised by...