Asia | Taiwan | Crimes

Cops raid ‘killer exorcism cult’ hideout led by ‘female Buddha’ in mountains

Source:
Cops have raided dangerous "exorcism" cult led by a "female Buddha" in a secret mountain hideout in Taiwan. Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said 19 followers were rescued from the cult’s headquarters based in a monastery, in the island’s central landlocked county of Nantou in August. Reports say followers of "Zhonghua Rixing Yishang" – or "China Daily Virtue", were prohibited from leaving or speaking without permission and one was reportedly killed in a sick ritual. The death of Taiwanese national Ms Fang, 20, in mainland China sparked police investigations acro
Asia | China | Crimes

Report claims thousands of North Korean women sold into sex slavery in China

Source:
Thousands of North Korean women and girls are being trafficked and sold into sexual slavery in China, where many are sold as wives to Chinese men while others are forced into prostitution or to live stream sex acts against their will, a new report claims. The investigation, by the London-based Korea Future Initiative (KFI), includes shocking first-hand reports of girls as young as 12 being raped and women being forced to participate in cybersex for days without eating. Though female defectors have long been targets of human traffickers, the problem has been exacerbated in recent ye
Latin America | El Salvador | Crimes

Violence Against Women in El Salvador Is Driving Them to Suicide — Or to the U.S. Border

Source:
It’s hard to grasp the scale of El Salvador’s problem with gender violence. In the Central American country of just six million people, one woman was the victim of a femicide — a man murdering of a woman or girl because of her gender — every 24 hours in 2018. That’s one of the worst rates of femicide in the world, according to the United Nations. Sixty-seven percent of Salvadoran women have suffered some form of violence in their lifetime, including sexual assault, intimate partner violence and abuse by family members, a 2017 national survey found. But only 6% of victims had re
Europe | France | Corruption

IMF CHIEF LAGARDE TO STAND TRIAL IN FRENCH ARBITRATION DEAL

Source:
France's top court has ruled that International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde must stand trial in France over a 2008 arbitration ruling that handed 400 million euros to a politically-connected business magnate. Lagarde, who was French finance minister at the time of the deal in favor of tycoon Bernard Tapie, is accused of negligence in the case. She has denied wrongdoing. A special court ruled in December that Lagarde should stand trial, but she appealed. France's Court of Cassation on Friday rejected the appeal.
North America | United States | Crimes

F.B.I. Interviews Hillary Clinton Over Private Email Server

Source:
The F.B.I. interviewed Hillary Clinton on Saturday morning for its investigation into whether she or her aides broke the law by corresponding through a private email server set up for her use as secretary of state, a controversy that has dogged her presidential campaign and provided fodder for her political rivals. The voluntary interview, which took place over three and a half hours at the F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, largely focused on the Justice Department’s central question: Did the actions of Mrs. Clinton or her staff rise to the level of criminal mishandling of classified infor
North America | United States | Corruption

FBI’s Clinton probe expands to public corruption track

Source:
The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record told Fox News. This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton’s personal server. "The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts a
International | Corruption

Tapie Affair: IMF head Christine Lagarde ordered to face trial by French court over tycoon payments

Source:
A French court has ordered IMF boss Christine Lagarde to face trial over the part she played in the Tapie Affair, regarding a €400m (£291m, $433m) transfer to French business tycoon and entrepreneur Bernard Tapie. In September, France's main prosecutor recommended magistrates at the Cour de Justice de la Republique, which deals with crime allegations against government officials, drop the investigation. The magistrates were probing Lagarde's alleged negligence in regards to the affair when she was finance minister of the country. In 2008, when Lagarde served under Nicolas Sarkozy'sgov
Latin America | Brazil | Crimes

Number of women in prisons up 567% in 14 years

Source:
The number of women in Brazilian jails increased 567 percent between 2000 and 2014, according to the ministry of justice. Male inmates are up 220 percent over the same period. Brazil has the fifth largest population of incarcerated women in the world: 37,380 people. The prisoners are mostly under-educated young women with children. Often, they are also the only people in the family who bring money to the household. Approximately 58 percent of female prisoners are locked up for drug trafficking crimes, compared to 23 percent of men. Julita Lemgruber, a sociologist and former director gen
Europe | U.K. | Crimes

Police say UK journalist Jacky Sutton’s death in Istanbul airport was suspicious

Source:
The unexplained death of British journalist Jacky Sutton in an Istanbul airport is now being treated as suspicious after police discovered thousands of euros in her bag, adding fresh doubt to reports suggesting she killed herself due to lack of funds. In the early hours of Sunday morning, Russian tourists found Sutton, 50, hanged in a toilet cubicle at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport after missing her connecting flight to Erbil, Iraq. Sutton was the acting Iraq director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), a London-based non-profit media organization. Her death comes five
Africa | Nigeria | Corruption

Nigeria’s ex-oil minister Alison-Madueke arrested in London – sources

Source:
Nigeria's former oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke was arrested in London on Friday, a source from Nigeria's presidency circle and another with links to her family said. Alison-Madueke was minister from 2010 until May 2015 under former president Goodluck Jonathan, who was defeated by Muhammadu Buhari at the polls in March. Buhari took office in May promising to root out corruption in Africa's most populous country, where few benefit from the OPEC member's enormous energy resources. A police spokesman in London said he had no record of such an arrest. The National Crime Agency did no
Europe | Russia | Crimes

Ukrainian pilot tells court she was smuggled into Russia at gunpoint

Source:
Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko, on trial for the murder of two Russian journalists, said Tuesday she was captured by pro-Kremlin separatists and then smuggled into Russia by armed, masked men. "I am a prisoner of war and a hostage who has been abducted," Savchenko told the court in a dramatic speech, saying separatist rebels captured her in eastern Ukraine and told her they would "sell" her to Russia. The 34-year-old military helicopter navigator was testifying for the first time at her high-profile trial in the small border town of Donetsk in southern Russia. The case has made her a nati
Latin America | Mexico | Crimes

Politician Says Homeless People Should Be Put Down By Lethal Injection

Source:
A Mexican councillor has provoked outrage after that homeless people should be put down like animals to keep the number of them on the streets down. Olga Gutierrez Machorro believes that beggars should be culled with lethal injection, believing it to be in their best interests. She said: “Yes they’re a little crazy, but they’re harmless. “Which is why I think to myself wouldn’t it be kinder to just give them a lethal injection?” Unbelievably, Machorro, who is a member of the local government in Tecamachalco, Mexico, is also the councillor responsible for the Vulnerable Groups C
Europe | Italy | Crimes

Woman wakes from coma to deny she jumped from cruise ship; attempted murder investigation opened

Source:
An attempted murder investigation has been launched in northern Italy after a woman thought to have tried to commit suicide by jumping off a cruise ship awoke from a long coma and said she had not tried to kill herself. The 53-year-old woman, who works at a bank in the northern Italian city of Turin, told police she had argued with her partner in their cabin on the Costa cruise ship docked in the Norwegian port of Flam shortly before falling off the boat on July 19, the Turin daily La Stampa reported. She told the paper she could not remember how she managed to fall 115 feet from her bal
Europe | Russia | Crimes

Boxing world champion shoots 19-year-old in road rage incident

Source:
A champion of women’s Thai boxing gave a new meaning to the phrase “road rage” when she shot a passenger in the car next to hers at point blank range. Oksana Kizhnerova, 24, a member of the Russian national Thai boxing team, a gold medalist in the European championship and in the World Martial Arts Games, was driving in the Siberian city of Omsk when she was cut off by another driver. Kizhnerova caught up with the car and opened fire out of her ‘traumatic pistol’ – a non-lethal weapon that can still cause serious injury which has become quite popular in Russia. Though s