'Sephiroth' and 'Reno' Arrested
Two German teens charged with murder.
Australia, January 16, 2007 - It seems that flavour of the week right now is covering videogame-related injuries, deaths and misdemeanours. Now, according to a translated report by Expatica, two 15 year old teenagers in Germany have been arrested for murder.
Although not mentioned in the initial translation, it has now been revealed that the two teens used the aliases 'Sepheroth' and 'Reno' - taken from the iconic Final Fantasy VII characters. They allegedly stabbed a couple to death in their home. They were arrested after kidnapping a female friend and holding her hostage for an hour before giving themselves up.
The damning part of this whole incident, beyond the tragic and gruesome nature of the crimes, is that the broader media caught wind that the teens had a copy of Final Fantasy VII installed on their computer.
In Germany, Final Fantasy VII is now being referred to as a 'Killerspiele'; which translates as 'killer game'. Now not even the sacred Final Fantasy brand name is free from the taint of violent crime.
RIVERHEAD, New York (AP) -- A man convicted of murder after nearly beheading his stepfather with a samurai sword was sentenced Wednesday to a term of 25 years-to-life in prison.
Zachary Gibian, 20, was convicted last month of second-degree murder in the February 2005 death of his stepfather, Scott Nager, who was killed as he slept on his living room couch.
Gibian testified that Nager had sexually abused him since age 15 -- a claim prosecutors termed "preposterous." He made no statement at his sentencing.
The victim's sister, Anne Leonardi, speaking on behalf of the family, had asked the court to give Gibian the maximum sentence.
Gibian took responsibility for the crimes in written and videotaped confessions to police just hours after the killing, but changed his story on the witness stand, insisting it was his mother who inflicted the fatal blows after she discovered her husband sexually abusing him.
Prosecutors contended that Nager, 51, a retired New York City police officer, was not a sexual predator but a concerned parent faced with a rebellious teenager.
Gibian, the lone defense witness, claimed that on numerous occasions, beginning when he was about 15, Nager got drunk and repeatedly forced him to perform a sex act -- sometimes at gunpoint.
None of the abuse claims were made in Gibian's written and taped confessions.
His mother, Laura Nager, has insisted through her attorney that she was not the killer. She has not been charged with any crime -- although investigators say the case remains an open investigation.
After the sentencing, her lawyer, Steven Wilutis, said prosecutors told him to expect an arrest, although he was not told on what charge. Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney John Scott Prudenti declined to comment, other to say "stay tuned."
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Jan. 18) - As participants in KDND-FM's water-drinking contest chugged bottle after bottle, a listener called in to warn the disc jockeys that the stunt could be fatal.
Attorneys for the family of Jennifer Lea Strange said they plan to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the radio station that held the drinking contest.
"Yeah, we're aware of that," one of them responded.
Another DJ said with a laugh: "Yeah, they signed releases, so we're not responsible. We're OK."
Those comments, and others made during the Jan. 12 "Morning Rave" radio show, appeared to give little regard to the risk of water intoxication. But just hours after the contest, a woman who guzzled nearly two gallons was dead.
On Wednesday, the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department launched a criminal investigation into the incident, and attorneys for the family of Jennifer Lea Strange said they plan to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the radio station.
The county coroner said preliminary autopsy findings indicate Strange, a 28-year-old mother of three, died of water intoxication.
Authorities decided to pursue the investigation after listening to a tape of the show, obtained by The Sacramento Bee, during which DJs joked about the possible dangers of consuming too much water, sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Tim Curran said. At one point, the DJs even alluded to a college student who died during a similar stunt in 2005.
Strange was one of about 18 contestants who tried to win a Nintendo Wii gaming console by determining how much water they could drink without going to the bathroom.
Several hours into the contest, Strange was interviewed on the air and complained that her head hurt.
"They keep telling me that it's the water. That it will tell my head to hurt and then it will make me puke," she said.
Eventually, Strange gave in and accepted the second-place prize: tickets to a Justin Timberlake concert. She commented that she looked pregnant, and a female DJ agreed.
"Oh, my gosh, look at that belly. That's full of water. ... Come on over, Jennifer, you OK?" a male DJ asked. "You going to pass out right now? Too much water?"
Several hours later, Strange was found dead in her home.
On Tuesday, KDND's parent company, Entercom/Sacramento, fired 10 employees connected to the contest, including three morning disc jockeys. The company also took the morning show off the air.
Station spokesman Charles Sipkins said Wednesday the company had not yet heard from the sheriff's department but that it would cooperate with the investigation.
A 9-year-old boy with a history of stealing cars and running away sneaked onto a plane bound for Texas, getting caught after flubbing an airport connection, officials said.
Semaj Booker apparently obtained a Southwest Airlines boarding card and made it through airport security Monday, hopping two separate flights but landing in San Antonio, Texas — short of his Dallas destination, police said.
The fourth-grader remained Wednesday in juvenile custody in San Antonio. He had been trying to get to his grandfather in Dallas, where he used to live.
The airline said in a statement said a young man approached the ticket counter at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport requesting a boarding pass and said his mother was already in the boarding area.
"The young man's information matched a paid, ticketless reservation for the flight. Based on the information he gave us, he was issued a boarding pass," the airline said. He was not listed as a child because he told the agent he was 12 years old, Southwest said.
Airline employees in San Antonio stopped Semaj from boarding another flight when he couldn't explain why he didn't have a boarding pass for that flight, said David Hebert, spokesman for the San Antonio International Airport.
The boy was unhappy after his family moved to Lakewood, outside Tacoma. His odyssey began Sunday when he stole a car that was left running outside a neighbor's house, only to be spotted by police near the interchange of Interstate 5 and State Route 512, authorities said.
Police pursued Semaj at speeds up to 90 mph until he took an exit and the engine blew, after which the car went over a curb and coasted into a tree. He refused to come out of the car, so officers broke a window to unlock a door and immediately recognized him as a frequent runaway and car thief, Guttu said.
He was released to his mother, but he ran away again, authorities said.
The Pierce County, Wash., prosecutor filed three charges against Booker on Wednesday in juvenile court, all related to the vehicle theft. The charges were sent to San Antonio, but Guttu wasn't sure what the next step would be.
Last month, the boy crashed a stolen car before being caught by police in Tacoma, and more recently he was caught in Seattle in a stolen car that had run out of gas, said his mother, Sakinah Booker. She believes he learned to drive from playing video games on a PlayStation.
Booker said she had hoped to soon move her four sons back to Dallas, but Semaj grew tired of waiting.
Semaj was "incredibly motivated to get to Texas," Guttu said. "He doesn't want to live in Washington state."
Edit: 9 year-olds don't learn how to drive from video games. They do, however, learn that pushing triangle in front of a car makes the owner get out of a running vehicle and run away. The rest is a process of trial and error for the child.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (CNN) -- At an age when most children might be preparing for their first day of school, Srey, 6, already has undergone trauma that is almost unspeakable.
She was sold to a brothel by her parents when she was 5. It is not known how much her family got for Srey, but other girls talk of being sold for $100; one was sold for $10.
Before she was rescued, Srey endured months of abuse at the hands of pimps and sex tourists.
Passed from man to man, often drugged to make her compliant, Srey was a commodity at the heart of a massive, multimillion-dollar sex industry in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
"It is huge," said Mu Sochua, a former minister of women's and veteran's affairs who is an anti-sex trade activist.
The precise scale of Cambodia's sex trade is difficult to quantify. International organizations -- such as UNICEF, ECPAT and Save the Children -- say that anywhere from from 50,000 to 100,000 women and children are involved. An estimated 30 percent of the sex workers in Phnom Penh are under the age of 18, according to the United Nations. The actual figure may be much higher, activists say.
Global sex industry
Around the world, more than 1 million children are exploited in the global commercial sex trade each year, according to the U.S. State Department. The State Department believes Cambodia is a key transit and destination point in this trade.
"Trafficking for sexual exploitation also occurs within Cambodia's borders, from rural areas to the country's capital, Phnom Penh, and other secondary cities in the country," the State Department wrote in a 2006 report. "The Government of Cambodia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so."
Sochua said that with millions of Cambodians struggling to live on less than 50 cents a day, many women turn to the sex industry. Poverty is also often what drives parents to sell their child or themselves on the streets.
"Always a child is left behind, often a girl, who is preyed on by traffickers," Sochua added.
An unlikely savior
Srey was rescued from the life of a sex slave by Somaly Mam, a former prostitute who runs shelters for the victims of Cambodia's sex trade. Somaly has rescued 53 children, so far. Many of them have profound psychological trauma. Some clearly are mentally ill.
"A lot of them, when they arrive, have psychological problems ... very big problems. ... And they never have love by the people, by their parents," Somaly said.
One girl at Somaly's shelter appears especially disturbed. She was rescued after being imprisoned for two years in a cage, where she was repeatedly raped.
She needs psychiatric care, but there is none available. Somaly says she does her best to give this girl love and support, but that it's not easy with so many other needy children around.
Somaly herself suffered terrible ordeals when she worked the streets, including seeing her best friend murdered. She is determined to build something positive out of so much despair.
Her work has caught the attention of world leaders, celebrities and religious figures. Her office in Phnom Penh is adorned with photos of her meeting Pope John Paul II and messages of support from governments and charities.
Despite the attention, Somaly said the situation on the street is not getting better. Gang rapes of prostitutes are becoming more common, she said, and many of the attackers don't use condoms. Instead, they share a plastic bag.
"Poor women, they have been raped by eight, 10, 20, 25 men ... they hit them. They receive a lot of violence," she said.
HIV-AIDS also remains a persistent, though declining, problem among Cambodia's female sex workers.
About 20 percent of Cambodia's female sex workers are HIV-positive, according to Cambodia's Ministry of Health. This compares with the 39 percent of sex workers who tested positive in 1996, according to the Health Ministry.
To help sex workers transition to a more normal life, Somaly is hoping to expand her refuge in the countryside outside Phnom Penh, where former sex workers attend school and learn skills like weaving and sewing.
Asked what the future holds for Srey, Somaly stroked the girl's hair and paused.
Srey is HIV-positive, she said.
In such a poor country, without decent hospitals or medical care, Srey's future is bleak. Somaly just hopes she can make this girl's life bearable for as long as it lasts.
Dakota Fanning
Hounddog premiered at the Sundance Film Festival Monday, despite controversy over its depicted rape of a character played by 12-year-old Dakota Fanning. Online petitions have demanded the arrest of Fanning's mother and agent, alleging that the film could be considered child pornography and asking federal prosecutors to investigate the matter. Is Hounddog kiddie porn?
No—it's free speech. According to federal law, you're not allowed to show anyone under the age of 18 engaging in a sexual act. You're also forbidden from creating a scene that even appears to depict a real kid having real sex; in legalese, you're in trouble if "an ordinary person viewing the depiction would conclude that the depiction is of an actual minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct." (Similar rules can be found in the penal codes for California, which governs most big-budget Hollywood productions, and North Carolina, where Hounddog was filmed.) Hounddog does contain a sex scene involving a real-life minor. But for the film to run afoul of the law, an average viewer would have to think that Dakota Fanning really did engage in sexual intercourse on the set during production.
A prosecutor hunting for a kiddie porn conviction would have to make this argument despite the fact that most people know that sex acts in mainstream movies are almost always mimed. Furthermore, the controversial "rape" in Hounddog takes place off-screen: According to writer/director Deborah Kampmeier, "you have a child yelling 'Stop it!' and only when you put that next to an image of a boy unzipping his pants do you see that it's rape."
If the filmmakers had included a very explicit sex scene—showing on-screen penetration, for example—they'd be in trouble. The movie would be illegal even if they used consenting adult actors and then digitally superimposed Fanning's face onto the woman's body. As long as the average viewer might be duped by the special effect, the scene would be child pornography. (The law doesn't apply to a child character that's 100-percent computer-generated—a la JarJar Binks or S1m0ne—as long as it's not supposed to look like a real, identifiable kid.)
A prosecutor might take a different tack and go after the film for the scenes in which Fanning appears to be nude on-camera. But that would be illegal only if the filmmakers intended the naked scenes to be sexy and stimulating. In any case, the film never shows Fanning in the nude; she always wore a flesh-colored suit while on set, and her genitals were never on display for any reason, prurient or not. Fanning's vocal defense of the film might also be taken into consideration: Child pornography laws are meant to protect children from exploitation, and she does not consider herself a victim.
Because Hounddog wouldn't be considered child pornography under federal law, a prosecutor could try to prove that it's obscene under the rules set out by the 1973 case Miller v. California, in which a pornographer appealed his conviction for distributing obscene material on First Amendment grounds. The Supreme Court ruled that a work is obscene only if it offends community standards, appeals to prurient interests and lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Since Hounddog deals with poverty and child abuse, it would be difficult to call it bereft of serious artistic value.
Similar uproars surrounded Brooke Shields' portrayal—at age 12—of a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, and Adrian Lyne's 1997 remake of Lolita. Actress Natalie Portman turned down the title role in Lyne's film, saying, "I don't think there needs to be a movie out where a child has sex with an adult." Lyne ran into further problems when potential distributors fretted over a 1996 law that contained more strict rules against simulated child sex. (You couldn't show any character appearing to be a child, real or not, in any sexual situation meant to be arousing.) The Supreme Court declared those rules unconstitutional in 2002.
Comments
When you and Will were lovable scamps trying to peddle your homemade coffee milk?
Everybody should pretend Jake's post happened two posts before it actually did.
Stepson gets 25 years for samurai sword murder
Mother dies in water drinking radio contest.
Runaway, 9, Sneaks on Flight to Texas
Zelda is!
Eew.
Edit: 9 year-olds don't learn how to drive from video games. They do, however, learn that pushing triangle in front of a car makes the owner get out of a running vehicle and run away. The rest is a process of trial and error for the child.
http://www.slate.com/id/2158152/?nav=fix