The man accused of bringing young girls from Mexico to the Atlanta area and forcing them to become prostitutes was sentenced to 40 years in prison Thursday.

Words from the street in Cairo echo in my mind, "It's time for change!" We need to legalize prostitution so that we can regulate it and protect children from being exploited!

A controversial campaign designed by a local ad firm aims to humanize the gritty image of those practising the world's oldest profession.

FORT LAUDERDALE — The little girl is standing beside an elephant statue somewhere in Thailand. She wears a pretty white dress with dark stripes and has a little girl's pretty, shoulder-length hair.

"Foreign visitors to Stockholm's lively bar scene might be struck by the assertiveness of the nation's women - the typical Swedish female seems to have no qualms about approaching men to start a conversation or initiate a romantic encounter.

"This bombshell wearing just black lace, a pearl necklace and a white dog is Tammy Banovac, a retired surgeon in a wheelchair. She got down to her lingerie while going through airport security and still got a pat down. Twice.

"Though I didn't agree or consent to it (it) was not rape." Does that sentence make sense to you? It shouldn't. If you don't agree or consent to sexual intercourse, that's called rape.

Well, hold onto your bonnets: The Puritans' value system remains lodged deep in our psyches, shaping our emotions, judgments and behaviors. And its effects can be seen regardless of one's political orientation or religious affiliation.

A Saudi Arabian court sentenced a man to five years in prison and 500 lashes for having sexual relations with another man, Jeddah-based Okaz reported.

"Editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible Michael Coogan recently applied his thorough knowledge of Scripture to a universal and eternally relevant topic: sex.

"Gay issues have been in the news a lot lately, from the debate over same-sex marriage in Congress to a sickening rash of gay-bashing here in New York City.

In Jerusalem, lying your way into a woman's bed can get you in big trouble. A court has convicted an Arab man of "rape by deception" and sentenced him to 18 months in prison after he posed as a Jew in order to have sex with a Jewish woman...

"Whenever Bangladeshi brothel owner Rokeya, 50, signs up a new sex worker she gives them a course of steroid drugs often used to fatten cattle.

"I was in the room playing with my cousin and they called us to come," Delan said. "They cut my cousin. I was very afraid. I was crying and crying. My mother is very fat; I knew if I could run she could not catch me, but she held me too strong. I could not get away.

Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder from Bioethics Forum have unearthed a 2007 study in which a doctor from Cornell University defends the practice of surgically cutting girls' clitorises. Disturbing, but his follow-up treatment is even worse..

"It was in 1968 or 1969, and I was a young intern counseling a girl from one of South Africa's townships, who'd been raped. She said, 'If only I had teeth down there,'" Ehlers told AOL News. "And I thought, God, it would be great to make something that could really be useful."

Some state representatives believe that the best thing we can do to help kids is give them a criminal record. House Bill 2189 makes sexting a crime. The bill is written so broadly that it walks all over young people's constitutional rights.

"There is such a thing as pussy power," Betty Dodson was saying last night. "Don't give it away. Understand it's your power and use it accordingly." She turned to a friend. "I just laid out pussy power," she said gleefully.

They were members of a modern-day swingers' club in China, where people met online and then gathered in homes or hotels for group sex parties involving dozens of men and women.

Last month, Ma Yaohai, a 53-year-old college professor and 21 others went on trial in the southeastern city of Nanjing, accused of "group licentiousness" - the first time anyone has been charged under a 1997 law in a case that has snagged huge public interest with its titillating details.

EDIT: Since STDCarriers was spamming Newsvine, and hence removed from the site, links to that site have been removed from this article.

Yesterday I stumbled across a user account on Newsvine which had me wondering. The account is STDCarriers, and the name was immediately intriguing. So I followed the link to the website being described in the profile bio, and found STD Carriers Disease Control and Prevention Services.

The site explains itself as follows:

STD Carriers was founded as and still is the first public early warning alert system for identifying potential sources of incurable sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The International Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Carrier Registry is database driven list of people with HIV/AIDS, Genital Herpes, HPV, Genital Warts, and Hepatitis C. Our automated content management system (CMS) utilized the power of modern information technology to provide a real time information storage and distribution service that is fully operational 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

So basically, the idea is that if you are thinking of having sexual relations with an individual you can type their name into the site to see if they are listed as suffering from any of the above diseases. This immediately raises some flags for me, so I thought I'd bring a discussion here to see what other people think.

London, Jan 8: A Brit woman, who went to the police after being raped by a waiter in a Dubai hotel, found herself arrested instead for having illegal sex with her fiance.