A growing number of adolescent girls from eastern Europe are being sold into sex slavery in the west, charitable organisations told an international conference on child trafficking in Rome yesterday.
Every year more than 6,000 children aged between 12 and 16 are smuggled into western Europe to work as prostitutes and drug traffickers or to beg, the children's charity Terre des Hommes said.
Around 2 million juveniles worldwide fall victim to people-smugglers every year, it said.
Researchers have identified north-eastern Italy as a key sorting centre for girls from eastern Europe who are either sold by their parents, kidnapped by organised crime gangs, or lured abroad by the mirage of a better life.
There is a particularly high concentration of juvenile sex slaves in the area between Padua and Venice, with 20% of prostitutes under the age of 18, compared to 5% in other Italian cities, the charity said.
Last year 250 girls managed to escape from their exploiters and seek assistance from the Italian state.
Puppet Masters
Christele Bourre (L) and Florence Khelifi were locked away for exposing another high-level sadistic pedophile network
Christele Bourre and Florence Khelifi, known as Patricia and Fanny, were given three-year jail terms, but will appeal.
The women had claimed that politicians, judges and police had taken part in sex sessions at a chateau near Toulouse.
They said the parties were organised by Patrice Alegre, who was jailed for life in 2002 for six rapes and five murders.
Their claims led to a former mayor of Toulouse being investigated - but the case was dropped after prosecutors found no evidence.
Dominique Baudis, mayor of Toulouse from 1983-2001
Two prostitutes say that the former mayor joined in sadomasochistic orgies in which young women were chained to a wall and that he ordered the murder of a transvestite who secretly videotaped it all. The former mayor says that people in the pornography industry are out to destroy him, or that a local newspaper is bent on revenge.
New allegations surface almost daily from France's fourth-largest city, holding the nation spellbound and spinning a scandal of such expanding dimensions that one conservative magazine warned it "could turn our public life upside down."
The undeniable facts are few beyond a string of buried corpses, victims of a Toulouse psychopath named Patrice Alegre who was sentenced to life in prison a year ago for half a dozen killings. Police detectives, convinced that Alegre was responsible for other murders, continued to interrogate him and were periodically rewarded with a tip to another unsolved crime. It was while investigating one of those crimes - the 1992 murder of a woman in a seedy local hotel - that the police came across the two former prostitutes, who bit by bit have told their fantastical tale.
Toulouse on the Garonne river
The ingredients are said to include cocaine-fuelled orgies with underage call girls, prostitutes who turned tricks with robed magistrates inside a courthouse, sado-masochistic sessions secretly filmed by a transvestite blackmailer, and a string of murders by a psychopathic strangler.
Those who took part in the kinky sex, or helped to cover up the slayings, are supposed to have included local policemen, judges and public prosecutors, as well as a former mayor who is France's television censor and a powerful figure in President Jacques Chirac's party.
At the centre of this story is the enigmatic figure of Patrice Alegre, a 34-year-old pimp, former discotheque bouncer and drug abuser, who was jailed for life last year for the rape-slaying of five women and the rape of a sixth. The steel-eyed, remorseless killer has since admitted to two additional murders, but it is believed he may have carried out many more.
None of this is to the liking of tourism bosses in Toulouse, who prefer images of the snowcapped peaks of the nearby Pyrenees and the pink, sun-kissed buildings that give France's fourth-largest city its nickname of "la ville rose".
The high-level pedophile network in Belgium prevented spontaneous White Marches in 1996 from developing into a peaceful revolution by the careful sabotage of the initial police and judicial investigations, which was investigating the abominable crimes of judges, policemen, bankers, doctors, lawyers, aristocrats and members of the royal family. Careful perception management and historical revisionism has created the official story of Dutroux as the 'lone pedo', when documentaries such as the following prove otherwise.
© Rick Wilking/Reuters
Fun and Games: The Air Force Space Command Network Operations and Security Centre in Colorado.
Fun and Games: The Air Force Space Command Network Operations and Security Centre in Colorado.
The US and China have been discreetly engaging in "war games" amid rising anger in Washington over the scale and audacity of Beijing-co-ordinated cyber attacks on western governments and big business, the Guardian has learned.
State department and Pentagon officials, along with their Chinese counterparts, were involved in two war games last year that were designed to help prevent a sudden military escalation between the sides if either felt they were being targeted. Another session is planned for May.
Though the exercises have given the US a chance to vent its frustration at what appears to be state-sponsored espionage and theft on an industrial scale, China has been belligerent.
"China has come to the conclusion that the power relationship has changed, and it has changed in a way that favours them," said Jim Lewis, a senior fellow and director at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) thinktank in Washington.
Comment: This is a classic case of 'the pot calling the kettle black'. It is the US and its allies who are clearly the belligerents in the realm of cyberspace and cyberterrorism. As we wrote in our Connecting the Dots series in February 2009:
Cyberwarfare Against ChinaThe pertinent question at this point in time is why these two 'enemies' are engaging in war games together? It's unlikely that the US has suddenly 'gone soft on Communism'. Collaborating with 'the enemy' tells us more about their mutual interests than it does about their supposed antagonism. We wonder whether this prepping of the public mind for conflict between the US and China is part of a strategy by the Powers That Be to pitch them into a manipulated conflict?
In late 2007 the director-general of UK's MI5 sent a letter to 300 British CEOs and security chiefs warning them to be on the lookout for "state-sponsored Chinese hackers carrying out electronic surveillance attacks." This month Google Inc, following "close consultation with the US State Department",threw down the gauntlet to China by saying it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service.
The world's leading search engine said the decision followed a cyber-attack that it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists.Led by a US media chorus, commentators lauded Google's noble decision to make a stand for individuals' privacy rights when the corporate behemoth this month accused the Chinese government of launching a cyber-attack that enabled it to hack into the Gmail accounts of "dozens of human rights activists" in China, Europe and the US. The devil in the details was that there were not "dozens", but just two Gmail accounts breached "most likely as a result of phishing or malware attacks" which were limited to acquiring basic account information, such as the date the Gmail account was created, rather than the content of emails themselves. Furthermore these two accounts were actually breached in December, yet Google chose to publicize this January 13, on the very same day that its competitor Baidu, the most popular search engine in China, suffered a real and crippling cyber-attack that knocked it offline for 4 hours. The Baidu homepage was redirected to the "Iranian Cyber Army", which claimed responsibility for the attack!© Budi Putra
Screenshot of Baidu (China's most popular internet search engine) after it was hacked by ... ahem, "Iranian Cyber Terrorists"It seems that [Baidu] has had its DNS hacked by the "Iranian cyber Army", the same guys that hacked Twitter a few weeks ago. The process, called DNS cache poisoning, is the corruption of an Internet server's domain name system (DNS) table by replacing an Internet address with that of another, rogue address, in this case what the Iranian Cyber Army want you to see.The obvious(ly ridiculous) implication was that the attack came from Iran. Following an investigation, Baidu filed a lawsuit for damages in a court in New York against its domain name registration service provider, Register.com Inc, which it accused of "unlawfully and maliciously altering" software behind its domain, resulting in the DNS cache poisoning that corrupted Baidu's domain name system. Incidentally, Larry Kutscher, CEO of Register.com, once served as Managing Director of Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs.
Of course, this was completely ignored by the western media which praised Google's stand against the evil commie Chinese privacy-hating state censors. Yes, China does not allow Twitter into its networks, but who can blame them given its trojan capabilities on display in CIA "soft revolutions" in Moldova and Iran? China knows that certain governments' concept of "freedom of speech" amounts to a cover for bombarding targeted countries with carefully crafted propaganda intended to sow discord and unhinge populations. What Google, the US government and the western media condemn as "increasing censorship", the Chinese government says is its right to protect its networks from malevolent influence. Let's hear the Chinese side of the story:China on Friday firmly dismissed accusations by the United States that Beijing restricts Internet freedom and warned such claims were damaging to relations between the two nations.
"The US has criticized China's policies to administer the Internet and insinuated China restricts Internet freedom," said Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. "China's Internet is open and managed in accordance with law."
[...]
Fu Mengzi, a researcher for the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said sovereign nations must supervise Internet content to maintain social security.
"Every country has rights to protect its national security and the US is no exception," he said, adding that Chinese netizens have sufficient access to the information they need in line with laws.
What China did is to safeguard the security of information flow on the Internet, he said.
"It's wrong to set up a false dichotomy between Internet freedom and supervision," he said.
Fu also pointed out that Google has broken Chinese laws by providing links to pornographic sites and infringing intellectual property rights.The Chinese government, like all centers of power, is no doubt ponerised, but most everything we hear about it is US-centric propaganda filtered through compliant tools like Google. The psychopathic US establishment accusing China of doing what it is in fact engaged in clearly demonstrates this dissonance. Google further accused "Chinese hackers" of cyber attacks against 20 other major companies, yet strangely, none of them chose to step forward and confirm this. Next the Washington Post heightened hysteria by claiming 34 companies had come under attack, including death merchants Northrop Gruman, and that this was all part of a vast Chinese espionage campaign. All of it was fiction of course, supplied by "industry and congressional sources," a modern Red Scare generated to justify attacking "the enemy."© Unknown
By the time Hilary Clinton graced the stage to publicly support Google's specious accusations, the stench of hypocrisy reached unbearable levels. The US National Security State apparatus routinely monitors all electronic communications, not just in the US, but wherever its global surveillance tentacles reach. We have direct experience of Google's censorship, whereby search results from Sott.net being consistently omitted from Google listings. And what about Google StreetCam, anyone? Google doesn't give a damn about "removing censorship restrictions"; all it cares about is removing impediments to ownership of all information, while serving its masters along the way. This is what Google CEO Eric Schmidt, upstanding patriot that he is, really thinks of your privacy:"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. [...]If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."Google's quest for world domination goes unimpeded within the US Empire's sphere of influence (demonstrated just recently by a proposed ammendment in the UK that would essentially grant Google copyright immunity under English law) but struggles to make inroads into Baidu's 77% market share in China. And this is where Google's interests and the US government's interests dovetail.
The last time a "wave of cyber-attacks" against US targets was attributed to an east Asian country, it soon emerged that the source of the attacks was traced to servers in the UK. The Pentagon's new cross-agency cyber-army, "CyberCommand", had gone online just prior to the attacks, so it seems reasonable to suggest that it was testing its capabilities. We submit that Google's flare-up with the Chinese government this month was synchronized as a decoy while CyberCommand launched its real-time attack against Baidu using the "Iranian Cyber Army" as a false-flag proxy.
Was this American vengeance for being completely upstaged by the Chinese at the Nopenhagen conference in December, perhaps? Or a show of strength in the face of Chinese reluctance to endorse sanctions against Iran? Regardless, China responded to the relentless provocation in the best way possible; with the truth:© scroogle.org
NSA and Google blend into one... or were they on the same team all along?"Behind what America calls free speech is naked political scheming. How did the unrest after the Iranian elections come about? [...] It was because online warfare launched by America, via Youtube video and Twitter microblogging, spread rumors, created splits, stirred up, and sowed discord between the followers of conservative reformist factions."The naked political scheming came full circle with the news that Google, the world's largest Internet search company, is to form an unholy alliance with the NSA, the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization, in the name of cybersecurity against the cyberwar they have just covertly unleashed.
[...]
"We're afraid that in the eyes of American politicians, only information controlled by America is free information, only news acknowledged by America is free news, only speech approved by America is free speech, and only information flow that suits American interests is free information flow."
In an outspoken interview with The Times, the 78-year-old billionaire chastised contemporary politicians for their weakness and extolled the virtues of strong leadership.
Mr. Ecclestone said: "In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done."
"In the end he got lost, so he wasn't a very good dictator because either he had all these things and knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it . . . so either way he wasn't a dictator." He also rounded on democracy, claiming that "it hasn't done a lot of good for many countries - including this one [Britain]".
© Reuters/Philippe Wojazer
Official campaign posters for French President and UMP political party candidate Nicolas Sarkozy (R) and Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande, for the 2012 French presidential election, are displayed on a wall in Paris April 16, 2012.
Official campaign posters for French President and UMP political party candidate Nicolas Sarkozy (R) and Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande, for the 2012 French presidential election, are displayed on a wall in Paris April 16, 2012.
A day ahead of voting in mainland France, the first ballots were cast in overseas territories, from French Guiana on the northern shores of South America to the Pacific islands of Polynesia.
In France, the presidential campaign largely disappeared from the airwaves as the 10 candidates observed a one-day blackout imposed by law from midnight on Friday.
Final polls showed Hollande narrowly ahead of conservative Sarkozy for Sunday's first round and comfortably winning the May 6 runoff to become France's first Socialist president since Francois Mitterrand left office in 1995.
The prospect of record abstention loomed over Sunday's ballot, with many people complaining that none of the candidates appealed to them.
Under the banner "They Don't Represent Us", hundreds of young demonstrators marched through Paris.
"Not one of the candidate appears credible to me. Politics is controlled by finance," Duncan, a 19-year-old student, told Reuters as the protest converged on the stock exchange.
Kabul - Afghan security forces have arrested five militants with 10,000 kilograms (22,000 pounds) of explosives that they smuggled in from Pakistan to carry out a massive attack in Kabul, as well as another three suspects allegedly planning to assassinate the vice-president, an official said Saturday.
The reports of new planned attacks in the Afghan capital came a week after militants said to be part of the Pakistan-based Haqqani group launched co-ordinated assaults in the heart of Kabul and in three other cities.
U.S. officials say they have stepped up pressure on Islamabad to crack down on the Haqqanis, who specializes in high-profile strikes against well-protected targets.
Three of the five men arrested with the explosives were members of the Pakistani Taliban, while the other two belonged to the Afghan Taliban, National Director for Security spokesman Shafiqullah Tahiry told reporters. He said the men's orders came from militant leaders with ties to Pakistani intelligence. He did not say when the arrests took place, nor what their intended target was.
Tahiry said the seized explosives were packed in 400 bags and hidden under potatoes loaded in a truck with Pakistani license plates.
The reports of new planned attacks in the Afghan capital came a week after militants said to be part of the Pakistan-based Haqqani group launched co-ordinated assaults in the heart of Kabul and in three other cities.
U.S. officials say they have stepped up pressure on Islamabad to crack down on the Haqqanis, who specializes in high-profile strikes against well-protected targets.
Three of the five men arrested with the explosives were members of the Pakistani Taliban, while the other two belonged to the Afghan Taliban, National Director for Security spokesman Shafiqullah Tahiry told reporters. He said the men's orders came from militant leaders with ties to Pakistani intelligence. He did not say when the arrests took place, nor what their intended target was.
Tahiry said the seized explosives were packed in 400 bags and hidden under potatoes loaded in a truck with Pakistani license plates.
© Mail Online/Eddie Mulholland Rex Features
'Stressed': The cause of Richard Holmes's (left) death is still unknown. David Kelly (right) was found dead nine years ago.
'Stressed': The cause of Richard Holmes's (left) death is still unknown. David Kelly (right) was found dead nine years ago.
Police said there were no suspicious circumstances in the latest case but revealed that Dr Holmes had 'recently been under a great deal of stress'.
He resigned from Porton Down last month, although the centre yesterday refused to explain why.Inevitably, the parallels between the two cases will arouse the suspicions of conspiracy theorists.
Despite Lord Hutton's ruling eight years ago that Dr Kelly committed suicide, many people - among them a group of doctors - believe his inquiry was insufficient and have demanded a full inquest.
Some believe Dr Kelly, who kept an office at Porton Down right up until his death, was murdered. He was outed as being the source of a BBC report that Downing Street 'sexed up' evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify going to war.
Comment: This was ten years ago; the figures are undoubtedly far higher today. Nothing has been done about the problem because anyone in a position to do anything about the problem is generally implicated in the problem.
100,000 children go missing every year in UK
Beyond the Dutroux Affair: The reality of protected child abuse and snuff networks in a world ruled by psychopaths