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A judge has dismissed charges against two New York men accused by state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of promoting prostitution through "sex tourism" in Asia. Douglas Allen, 59, and Norman Barabash, 58, were indicted last year on felony and misdemeanor counts of promoting prostitution in the operation of Big Apple Oriental Tours. Spitzer accused them of using their tour business -- run from Allen's Poughkeepsie home and Barabash's Queens home -- to solicit customers for prostitution rings operating in the Philippines and Thailand. Dutchess County Court Judge Gerald Hayes dismissed the charges, finding prosecutors failed to provide sufficient evidence that...

A year after a law change designed to get prostitutes off the street, a price war driven by teenage sex workers has flared up on the streets of South Auckland. Market forces appear to be driving street prostitution as teenagers, some as young as 12, compete alongside seasoned sex workers - with tumbling prices the result. Rather than pushing sex workers into legalised brothels, a Weekend Herald inquiry has found the new legislation has done little to discourage street prostitution. This is especially true in pockets of South Auckland, where the Manukau City Council has been forced to shelve plans...

Pornography is tearing apart the very fabric of our society. Yet Christians are often ignorant of its impact and apathetic about the need to control this menace. Pornography is an $8 billion a year business with close ties to organized crime.(1) The wages of sin are enormous when pornography is involved. Purveyors of pornography reap enormous profits through sales in so-called "adult bookstores" and viewing of films and live acts at theaters. Pornography involves books, magazines, videos, and devices and has moved from the periphery of society into the mainstream through the renting of video cassettes, sales of so-called "soft-porn"...

BELOIT, Wis. – Owners of strip clubs are putting a little bada-bing in the presidential campaign by asking patrons to turn their eyes away from the stage for a moment to fill out a voter registration form and then vote against President Bush. "It's not to say our industry loves John Kerry or anything like that," said Dave Manack, associate publisher of E.D. Publications, which publishes Exotic Dancer magazine. "But George Bush, if he's re-elected, it could be very damaging to our industry." Fearful that conservatives might turn off the colored lights for good, a trade organization for adult night...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California's multi-billion-dollar adult porn industry ground to a virtual halt on Thursday after a popular actor tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS (news - web sites). Industry advocates immediately called for a 60-day moratorium on filming so that others could be tested. Actor Darren James tested positive for HIV (news - web sites) on Wednesday in screening conducted routinely on the industry's 1,200 regular actors by the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare (AIM) Foundation, the foundation's Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell (news) said. They must show negative tests to keep working in the industry, Mitchell said, adding...

THE PORNO-IZATION OF AMERICAN MEDIA AND MARKETINGHow Hard-Core Sex Stars are Penetrating Mainstream Culture January 26, 2004 QwikFIND ID: AAP30D By T.L. Stanley LOS ANGELES (Adage.com) -- Ron Jeremy, the legendary star of some 1,700 hard-core porn films over the last two decades, steeps in the hot tub of a sweeping hilltop Los Angeles mansion, glass of merlot in hand, flanked Declaring the ascendence of porn is a 48-foot-high billboard of porn queen Jenna Jameson in Time Square, the symbolic heart of the U.S. advertising industry. She is now courted by TV producers, book publishers and marketers as a cultural...

A former Berkeley high school teacher charged with prostitution entered a not guilty plea, ending negotiations and setting the stage for a jury trial next month. Shannon Williams, 37, entered the plea on Wednesday in Oakland Superior Court, after which Judge Marilyn Greenberg released her on her own recognizance. Williams had been arrested Aug. 18 by an undercover Oakland police officer who allegedly arranged to pay her $250 for sex. In a scene similar to last week, a line of about a dozen Williams supporters, sporting leopard-print bustiers and stiletto hills, carried signs advocating the decriminalization of prostitution. "We're wearing...

Two flights are due into Montego Bay Airport, one from Toronto, the other from London. Clinton waits on the beach for the new arrivals, hoping that one of them will bring him good fortune. "I look for the milk bottles," he says, explaining how ultra-white skin is a giveaway, "the ones who've just arrived. Milk bottles that need filling ..." Negril, with its 11-kilometre stretch of pristine sand and turquoise sea, attracts the majority of Jamaica's 1.3 million tourists every year, primarily from the United States, Canada and Europe. It is known as a "swinging" resort. Many white Western women...

Sex for sale, legally Jul 11th 2003 From The Economist Global Agenda Though some governments are still trying to crack down on prostitution, others are realising that it is better to legalise and license it than to suffer the ill effects of driving it underground. New Zealand has just done so; Belgium looks set to be next Reuters An honest Dutch taxpayer at work THE selling of sex has been widely practised, and roundly condemned, throughout history. The Bible constantly rails against whores and whoremongers, from Genesis through to Revelation, and the book of Leviticus gives the stern injunction: “Do...

Virgins Meet in Sin City, Tout Abstinence By CHRISTINA ALMEIDA The Associated Press Sunday, June 29, 2003; 7:54 AM LAS VEGAS - In a city known more for sin than virtue, a group of virgins from around the country gathered this weekend to send a message: wait until marriage. It was a clash of the "Good Girls" and the sin-seekers as about 200 teens, parents and youth counselors descended on the Strip to pass out cards promoting abstinence. "What better place to bring this than Sin City?" said participant Deanna Grimm, 24, of Sioux Falls, S.D. "They need to hear...

<p>Colin Powell wants to do something about Castro's reliance on prostitution.</p> <p>Fidel Castro has a nasty sex problem. And he's livid at Colin Powell for exposing it to the world. "Despicable," "rude," "cynical" and "repugnant" are only a few of the words Fidel used during a recent tirade.</p>

Cheers, tears as prostitution bill passes 26 June 2003 Parliament erupted in cheers last night, as a landmark law to decriminalise prostitution passed by a single vote. Christchurch MP Tim Barnett's Prostitution Reform Act will become law next Monday and soliciting for sex and brothelkeeping will no longer be illegal in New Zealand from that day. In one of the closest votes in Parliament's history, the Act passed 60-59, on the abstention of Labour's Muslim MP Ashraf Choudhary. Had Mr Choudhary, who opposed the bill, not abstained the bill would have fallen because a 60-60 tie is counted as a...

Albanian connection to the teenage sex slaves in London By Jason Bennetto Crime Correspondent 19 June 2003 The Romanian girl was 15 when she was smuggled into Britain. She arrived in Dover, via Brussels and Ostend, on a hovercraft in July 2001 and was met at Victoria station and taken to a flat in north-west London. A day later, a man named Mustapha Kadiu, 31, arrived and made the girl, later known in court as Miss X, phone saunas and massage parlours to work as a prostitute. Kadiu, an Albanian who persuaded her to travel to Britain to start a...

Saratov's human rights commissioner urged skeptical State Duma deputies Tuesday to follow his region's lead in decriminalizing prostitution, arguing that regulating the country's growing sex trade would help crack down on disease and delinquency. The governor of the southern Saratov region, Dmitry Ayatskov, has given prostitution de facto legal status and hopes to further regulate the world's oldest profession to cut down on sexually transmitted disease and tuberculosis in the region, human rights commissioner Alexander Lando said. "This is about the health of the nation," he told reporters. Lando has helped draft a bill on legalizing prostitution that would oblige...

A 30-year-old Ypsilanti man is accused of running a small prostitution ring with girls as young as 13. Jesse Swanson, 30, was charged Thursday with six counts of prostitution -- pandering, accepting and transporting. He pleaded innocent to each. Police said Swanson arranged prostitution jobs for at least two Ypsilanti High School freshman, set prices, drove them to and from appointments and took half the money they were given. He also threatened to harm the girls if they told anyone of the sex acts, according to police. Swanson apparently kept a notebook that described the ways in which the...