Free Republic

VENICE, Fla. — Students at a Southwest Florida high school told administrators that two teens tried to recruit them into a "prostitution ring" and that one 15-year-old boy had been "pimping out girls," according to an arrest affidavit. By Tuesday, detectives in Venice, a small community in Sarasota County, had charged three people in connection with the case. A 15-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl were charged with human trafficking and a 21-year-old man was charged with sexual battery on a victim older than 12. Police said he paid a 15-year-old girl from Riverview High School $40 and a bottle...

Authorities in Florida say a 17-year-old Sarasota High School student organized a prostitution ring of students from nearby high schools. The teen was arrested Friday on felony charges of human trafficking of a person under 18. [Snip] Documents indicate the teen and at least one other student concocted the plan over the summer to prostitute teens for money and alcohol.

A commission composed mostly of former world leaders will recommend Tuesday that governments move beyond legalizing marijuana and decriminalize and regulate the use of most other illegal drugs, including heroin and cocaine. The international drug-control system is broken, says a report to be released Tuesday in New York by the Global Commission on Drug Policy. Governments should be allowed wide latitude to experiment with the regulation of drugs, except for the most lethal, says the commission, whose 21 members include former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, and former presidents such as Brazil´s...

HOUSTON, Texas -- A teen's mysterious disappearance helped prompt the deciphering of an alleged sex ring, involving numerous family members in the back woods of Alabama. 19-year-old Brittney Wood is thought to have been with Donnie Holland -- her uncle, who was being investigated for disturbing sex crimes -- in May 2012, the night Holland died from a gunshot in his car. Wood has not been seen since, and many questions remain surrounding rampant incest in her family, which is being described by investigators as "the largest sex ring ever uncovered in Alabama." Eleven individuals -- eight of whom are...

Carmen Fluker, aka "Lucious" ST. LOUIS • A woman from north St. Louis County has admitted running a brothel and strip club out of a Ferguson home for nearly three years. Carmen A. Fluker, 43, pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to a felony charge of promoting prostitution. Fluker, according to an indictment against her in May, went by Carmen Simmons," "Carmen Lacy" and "Lucious." A tipster told police that Fluker hosted parties at the one-story brick bungalow in the 400 block of Warfield Avenue, search warrants revealed. The parties featuring nude dancers, a dancing pole, liquor sales, drugs and...

Two years ago a slew of Secret Service agents got busted for hiring prostitutes while on an official trip in Cartagena, Colombia. That scandal erupted after an agent failed to properly pay a woman for her services. They were fired and the White House denied aides had any involvement. Now, the Washington Post is out with a stunning report about the scandal not only detailing that former White House presidential advance team member and volunteer Jonathan Dach officially registered a prostitute as an overnight guest in his hotel room, but that White House aides knew about Dach's actions and interfered with...

Senior Obama administration officials knew about a White House aide's link to the Secret Service prostitution scandal and covered it up, according to a bombshell report that surfaced Wednesday night. Friends of Barack: Jonathan Dach (right) posed with then-Senator Barack Obama during a campaign staff 'family night' event in Springfield, Missouri on November 1, 2008. Also seen are Dach's father Leslie (2nd left), then a Wal-Mart lobbying executive, and his mother Mary Dickie (left) Jonathan Dach, the staffer implicated by the Washington Post, was never disciplined after an investigation found he had a prostitute in his hotel room during a...

David Nieland, who led the investigation for the DHS inspector general’s office, later told Senate aides examining the investigation that his superiors had asked him to keep those details out of the report. He also said that the request to leave the information out came from his superiors shortly after they met with Janet Napolitano, then the secretary of homeland security.Nieland also said that he had been told to delay the release of the report until after the election. A Washington Post story published Wednesday night alleges that the White House did not rigorously investigate information linking a volunteer for...

At first, this story from the Washington Post seems impossible to believe. After all, the White House insists that they were cleared of any involvement in the Cartagena prostitute scandal by, er, their own internal investigation — a claim that White House aide Eric Schultz repeated to the Post’s Carol Leonnig and David Nakamura. That settles it, right? Wrong: But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that...

As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved. But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged. The information that the Secret Service shared with the White House included hotel records and...

According to the Liberian Observer, a sex worker visited soldier Floson Louise at his army barracks in Liberia.“When she slept at the EBK (barracks), it was thereafter the soldiers contracted the disease, and could not survive despite “intensive treatment” at the various Ebola Treatment Units in Monrovia,” a source told the Observer.The sex worker was suffering from Ebola and passed the deadly disease to the soldier who unknowingly spread it to seven other soldiers. The Observer further reports that the army barracks are being decongested to ease the spread of the disease.

A student at Duke University started doing porn to pay for her tuition. She became a media sensation and liberals everywhere loved telling her story. She would do interviews and say things like porn is “empowering” and “freeing”. She is in a documentary coming up and now that she has been in the industry for a little bit her view of porn has dramatically shifted. “The sex industry has a way of making you very cynical and very bitter,” a tired-looking Weeks tells an off-camera interviewer, “In a way I’ve started to become kind of a bit bitter and a...

Baton Rouge police arrested 14 people Tuesday (Sept. 23) following an early morning prostitution sting. The sting, according to a press release from the Baton Rouge Police Department, was part of the department's effort to crack down in areas of high crime in the city. Detectives targeted street level prostitution, which resulted in the arrests, seizure of what they suspect was crack cocaine and the recovery of a missing person.

Spain’s National Statistics Institute says money generated by drug trafficking, prostitution, smuggling and illegal gambling contributed some €9 billion ($11.4 billion) to the national economy last year. […] The figures are being included in GDP calculations on the recommendation of the European Union, which is trying to harmonize estimates across member states and get a full picture of economic activity, whether legal or not. …

Authorities say Internet escort Amy Shoemaker and her friend, Thomas Hudgins, were hoping to repeat a previously successful armed robbery scheme: Shoemaker sets up a prostitution date and Hudgins robs the John. But their plans went to pot when they discovered their intended target was actually an undercover Gretna Police officer working a prostitution sting. "They didn't realize there was a police officer in the room and officers were outside conducting surveillance," said Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson. The date-turned-robbery-turned-bust occurred on July 11.Lawson said investigators were working an ongoing investigation into prostitution conducted via the Internet. They set up...

Los Angeles (CNN) -- "Django Unchained" actress Daniele Watts defended her refusal to show her ID to Los Angeles police before they handcuffed her last week. The African-American actress and her white boyfriend accused police of racism for questioning them in what they said was only a public display of affection. "I believe in America and what it stands for," Watts said Monday in an interview on CNN's "New Day." Police responded to a citizen complaint that "a male white and female black were involved in a sexual act inside a Mercedes" outside the gate of CBS Studio Center on...

SNIP “Morals don’t come into it,” Navai writes. “Lying in Tehran is about survival . . . when the truth is shared in Tehran, it is an act of extreme trust or absolute desperation.” SNIP

ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. — An undercover prostitution sting led to 14 arrests at a hotel in St. Johns County.

“My neighbour in Erbil has a two-year-old daughter. They said, ‘Give her to us. We will raise her.’ My neighbour cried and pleaded for half an hour. Then they forced the baby’s father to kiss their shoes, to humiliate him.” Stories of gang-rape by jihadists, a practice known as “jihad al-nikah” or “sexual jihad,” abound. It was allegedly “legitimated” by a religious leader in Tunisia to help the Islamic State recruit young men. Sunni girls in Mosul have reportedly died by suicide rather than accept multiple forced “marriages”. Kidnapped and raped Members of the Yazidi community who met French foreign...

For countries that choose to regulate prostitution, it remains a vexing question: What’s the best way to do it? Canada’s answer, as Colby Cosh writes in Maclean’s, is to “put the concept of prostitution back into the Criminal Code.” He adds: “For decades, we had these leftover Victorian laws against ‘living off the avails’ and keeping a ‘bawdy house’ without any actual ban on prostitution itself. There are economic reasons to legalize sex work, too. According to The Wall Street Journal (paywall), the sex trade contributed £5.3 billion (about $9 billion) to the British gross domestic product in 2014.