Colorado
6-year-old boy suspended for kissing a girl
CANON CITY, Colo. (AP) — A 6-year-old boy has been suspended from a Colorado school for kissing a girl on the cheek.
School officials in Canon City are accusing the boy of sexual harassment and they want it on his school record.
The boy’s mother tells KRDO-TV her son was suspended once before for kissing the girl and had disciplinary problems, but the girl did not object to being kissed.
A School District RE-1 official says the repeat offenses meet the school policy definition of sexual harassment and they hope the tough standards will force the boy to change his behavior.
California
Man gets 5 years in fed. prison for ‘sextortion’ case
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A 27-year-old Southern California man who admitted hacking into hundreds of social media and email accounts to get women to pose naked for him has been sentenced to five years in federal prison.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles says Karen “Gary” Kazaryan of Glendale was immediately taken into custody after his sentencing Monday.
In July, Kazaryan pleaded guilty to one count each of computer hacking and aggravated identity theft.
Prosecutors say Kazaryan illegally accessed the accounts and found nude photos and personal passwords that women had stored. He then posed as a friend, persuading them to strip while he watched via Skype, captured images of them, or both.
Once the women learned of the ploy, he often threatened to post their private photos if they refused to comply.
Texas
Firm to pay $32M to settle bribery charges
HOUSTON (AP) — A German engineering company has agreed to pay a $32 million fine as part of an agreement to settle charges it worked with a Texas company to bribe Nigerian officials in order to win a $387 million pipeline contract.
A U.S. Justice Department statement says Bilfinger SE conspired with Houston-based Willbros Group Inc. and others from late 2003 to 2005 to make more than $6 million in bribes to Nigerian officials.
Bilfinger was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
In court documents filed Monday in Houston federal court, the Mannheim, Germany-based company entered into a deferred prosecution agreement. If the company meets certain conditions within three years, the charges will be dropped.
In May 2008, Willbros agreed to pay more than $22 million in fines.
New York
Prosecutor says vintage wine dealer was greedy
NEW YORK (AP) — A prosecutor opened the fraud trial of a California wine dealer on Monday by saying greed motivated him to cheat wine collectors out of millions of dollars, but a defense lawyer said his client was the victim of widespread corruption in the resale market for vintage wines.
The differing views were offered to jurors in U.S. District Court in Manhattan during opening statements at the trial of Rudy Kurniawan, an Indonesian-born immigrant of Chinese descent who was arrested last year and accused of trying to sell more than $1.3 million worth of counterfeit bottles to other wealthy collectors.
“This is a case about greed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Hernandez said.
He said Kurniawan, 37, performed a classic bait-and-switch by letting his victims taste wines valued at tens of thousands of dollars at dinners he staged, only to later convince them to buy bottles of poor-quality French wine that he had poured into vintage-looking bottles in his Arcadia, Calif., kitchen.
Hernandez said Kurniawan, who’s charged with mail fraud and wire fraud, was driven by an “unquenchable thirst for luxury cars, designer clothing and the finest food and drinks in the world.” He said Kurniawan “loved living the high life and loved the attention.”
The prosecutor said Kurniawan had lived in luxury in suburban Los Angeles even after he was ordered in 2003 to leave the country.
Hernandez said that as Kurniawan’s fame grew in the business of rare wines, suspicions about him rose.
Some of his wines were pulled from a sale in 2007 after an auction house said they were fakes, and billionaire yachtsman, entrepreneur and wine investor William Koch sued him in 2009, saying several bottles he’d purchased from him were bogus.
Defense attorney Jerome Mooney portrayed his client as a scapegoat, saying he built a reputation as “the most prolific buyer of wines out there” before the dark side of the industry turned against him.
The millionaire businessman, held without bail, was deemed “responsible for all the horrible things that have happened to the wine market,” the lawyer said.
Indiana
30 years for man who let others have sex with son
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — An Australian man has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after authorities say he and his partner allowed at least eight others to have sex with their young adopted son for money.
The 36-year-old man is a resident of Queensland and is not being identified by The Associated Press to protect his son's identity. The man pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to sexually exploit a child and to conspiracy to possess child pornography and was sentenced Monday by U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker, the Indianapolis Star reported.
His partner, a 42-year-old American who had been living in Australia, was sentenced in June to the maximum 40-year sentence. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to sexually exploit a child.
According to court documents, the two men became romantically involved in the late 1990s and began trying to adopt an infant boy.
The men had been living with the boy in California, where they were able to use falsified records to legalize an adoption, according to court records obtained by The Associated Press. Court documents also said the men eventually paid $8,000 to adopt the boy from a woman whose husband had abandoned her.
The boy was between the ages of 2 and 6 when at least eight men had sex with him.
The men were arrested last year in Los Angeles.
U.S. Attorney Joe Hogsett says the case was prosecuted in the U.S. District Court in Indianapolis because images of the sex acts involving the young boy were found on the computer of an Anderson man in a larger child exploitation and pornography investigation.
