SEXUAL HEALTH: What You Need To Know About These 6 Common STDs

Sexually Transmitted Diseases or STDs are diseases that spread from one person to another via sexual contact. It spreads when a person carrying the disease-causing organism engages in any kind of sexual activity including, oral, vaginal, anal or genital with another partner without using protection.
The best way to prevent an STD is to practice safe sex at all times. Even so, the number of STD cases is on a rise as many people do not recognise the disease quickly and therefore continue to spread it further.
This article highlights some of the most common STDs one should watch out for.
Chlamydia - Chlamydia is one of the most common STD’s. It is caused by a bacterium called Chlamydia trachomatis which affects a man’s penile urethra and a woman’s cervix. Many times people don’t realise they’ve contracted the disease for months or even years. The most common symptoms to diagnose chlamydia include burning while urinating, abnormal genital discharge and pain during intercourse. A person can be best protected from Chlamydia by practicing safe sex. Chlamydia is also curable.
AIDS/HIV - AIDS/HIV is probably the most commonly known and feared STD. It is caused by a virus called the human immunodeficiency virus, which can be found in any bodily fluids including semen, blood, or breast milk. Most people who’ve contracted the disease show symptoms like flu, fatigue, swollen lymph glands, skin rash, nausea within two months. Although there is no complete cure for AIDS, if diagnosed early, it can be prevented from progressing with a combination of highly active anti-retroviral drugs.
Herpes - Herpes is a silent disease and one may not even know about it if your partner has it. It is contagious and can spread via skin to skin touch. For example, mouth to genital or genital to genital. There are times where people don’t show visible sores but the most common indication of herpes are sores that arise on the penis, vagina, anus or mouth. Even though there is no permanent cure to herpes, there are medical treatments to treat it. Once infected, this virus never goes away and keeps reoccurring two to four times a year.
Crabs - Crabs or pubic lice are mites that lodge themselves in your genitals, hands, fingers or chest hair. They appear as eggs or lice attached to the hair and can spread if left untreated. They cause a person to itch the affected area. Crabs are passed via sexual contact but they can also be contracted from infected bed linen, clothing or toilet seats.
Syphilis - Syphilis is a serious STD, which may not always show symptoms and can be very dangerous. It is caused by a bacterial infection called Treponema Pallidum and is transmitted via direct contact when there is no condom involved. Although symptoms are rare, sores around the rectum, vagina, mouth or genital area indicate the presence of the syphilis virus. There can be one or more sores that appear like big bug bites that are painless. They could also be accompanied by hair loss, sore throat or patchy white skin rash. The easiest way to diagnose it is by testing your blood. The good part is that it can be treated by penicillin or tetracycline. But if left untreated it can cause severe problems like blindness, brain or heart damage or death.
Genital Warts - Genital warts are the most commonly contracted STD. They are caused by a virus called Human Papilloma, which pops up in form of warts around the genital area, hence the name genital warts. Once a person is infected, it may take about three months for the warts to appear. These warts are highly contagious and can cause other symptoms like muscle aches, pain while urinating or swollen glands near the genitals. Even if a person doesn’t see any warts but experiences the following symptoms, he/she should visit a doctor immediately before it gets serious. Unfortunately, this virus cannot be permanently treated although the warts caused by it can be removed every time they appear.
READ MORE:  http://news.naij.com/54486.html

Seeing Skin in a Syrian Refugee Camp

All day long in Mafraq, an impoverished corner of Jordan that has been swarmed by Syrian refugees, women kept pulling me aside and unzipping their abayas. They spotted me amid the male aid workers, grabbed my hand and pulled me to a corner to reveal the scars on their necks, their stomachs, their hips.
I'd crossed the Jordanian border from Israel earlier that morning, on assignment to report about Israeli aid to Syrian refugees. I was ready to see hunger and homelessness. I hadn't expected, however, to be shown so much skin.
One Syrian woman named Asma revealed a gash along her belly that I thought was a scar from a caesarian section. "Baby?" I asked her, hooking my arms into an imaginary cradle to compensate for my lack of Arabic.
"No, not baby," she said. Then her fingers waved desperately and she lifted her arms above her head. "Boom!" she said. She pulled out a cheap cell phone and showed me a grainy video of her dying husband writhing on a Syrian street. She couldn't have been more clear.

At a tiny desert refugee camp of Syrians who had fled the crowding and disease of the larger tent cities of Zaatari and Mreijeb Al Fhoud, a teenaged girl named Firdous dragged me to semi-privacy behind a van and carefully unwrapped her hijab. On her breastbone, she showed me a smattering of thick purple bruises. They looked like berries, the kind that bleed into pancakes and turn the batter blue, but they were burst blood vessels. I told her in English that I would help her find a doctor, knowing that she couldn't understand me, which gave me an excuse to lie.
Our translator had been detained on the Israeli side of the border, held back from crossing with us thanks to an unpaid cell phone bill, which in these parts is enough to put a freeze on your passport. The Israeli aid workers who had brought me were pressed for time and walking a tenuous line in their coordination with Jordanian groups on the ground. I was an untrained witness to a chaotic dump of dried lentils and laundry detergent, with no medical skills and only a smattering of Arabic vocabulary. All I could do for these women was be a witness to their wounds.

Hours later, when I was back across the border in my clean, light-filled Tel Aviv apartment, eating takeout Chinese on the sofa and watching "Homeland" with my husband, I began to think about those women's bodies. My assignment that day had been to write about the food parcels the refugees were receiving from Israel, and I had gathered enough information to do so. But the nakedness had been so unbridled, and worst of all, it had been so very easy to leave behind.
It's simple in Israel to get into a car, cross a border, and in a matter of minutes find yourself in an alternate universe. For Americans at home, such culture shock usually takes a jet plane. Here, where the conflicts are compact and the borders more pockmarked, the world's headlines are always just a short drive away.

And I had a ride right to them. I was picked up in Israel at 6 a.m. by a carload of aid workers, and by 9 a.m. we were at the Beit Shean border crossing, our passports being scrutinized by a surly Jordanian customs officer. It wasn't even lunchtime yet when Asma unzipped her robe and pulled up the shirt beneath to show me her belly. By dinnertime, Firdous and her family were probably still huddled in their tent in an unmapped swath of Jordanian desert, gnashing out that afternoon's sandstorm while I was back home in Tel Aviv slurping wonton soup.
This fall, while U.S. President Barack Obama wavered over whether or not to exact revenge on Syrian President Bashar Assad for dropping chemical weapons on his own people, Tel Aviv braced itself. We are close enough, we know, to be the first line of attack. We are a western enclave in a region turning more and more eastern; the sacrificial lamb in a den of spring-stoked wolves. I love Tel Aviv because it is like a nation unto itself; a city of beaches and bohemians and non-kosher bistros that is my sanctuary from the Israeli headaches that beckon the moment you reach its outskirts.

So it made sense that I would touch the broken nerves of the Syrian conflict in neighboring Jordan and make it home to my Tel Aviv oasis in a handful of hours. That is the irony of life here; to live in Tel Aviv, one must stoke a willful ignorance of the ugliness of the Middle East. But our sanctuary is imaginary. After I had showered away the day's grime and joined my husband on the sofa that night, I spied the unopened cardboard boxes containing our gas masks stacked in the corner.
We will never have to open them, he assured me last month when he brought them home after hours in line at the distribution center. And we can always run to the shelter.
Better safe than sorry, I said in return, because there is strange comfort in adages.
Coming home from Jordan, however, those silent cardboard boxes seemed to mock me. Tel Aviv remains secure, our gas masks mere props in someone else's war. And I am left with the unsettling realization that I went to that refugee camp to take home a story, but brought nothing to give.

Maybe it was because of the shame that I lay in bed that night, straining my ears for the air raid siren. It's easy to say I was simply on edge after a long day, but I think a small part of me was hoping to hear it. Its wail would rise up in the night, shattering the silence like a gash across skin.
But the night remained still, and I, wishing for absolution, curled into my clean sheets and waited for sleep.

NOT KIDDING: Sen. Yerima Divorces 17-Yr-Old To Marry 15-Yr-Old

Three years after marrying a 14 year old Egyptian girl named Marian, former Zamfara state governor and serving senator of the federal republic of Nigeria, Sen. Ahmed Yerima, has divorced her to marry a younger girl, reports provide.

According to the information available, Sen. Yerima and four men, said to be members of the Zamfara State House of Assembly were in Egypt a few weeks ago for the wedding fathia of a new bride. It has been learnt that the girl is 15 years old.
Mr. Yerima has one child from Marian, who is 17 now. The reason he divorced her is to enable him take a new wife as he's not allowed more than 4 wives.
The Senator is alleged to have married and divorced a few women in the last few years but has never changed his first three wives, only the fourth ones.
It would be recalled tha Sen. Ahmed Yerima this year was strongly against the deletion of the section of the 1999 constitution which pegged the official marriage age in Nigeria as 18 year, saying it was anti-Islam.
READ MORE:  http://news.naij.com/54420.html?new_letter

THE WOMEN WHO SOLD THEIR DAUGHTER INTO SEX SLAVERY

Ngao, Ann and Neoung live amid poverty in the Cambodian fishing village of Svay Pak. When faced with a financial crisis, each made the extraordinary decision to sell their adolescent daughter to sex traffickers.

A neighborhood in Cambodia is a global hotspot for the child sex trade. The people selling the children? Too often, their parents. CNN Freedom Project and Mira Sorvino, award-winning actress and human rights activist, investigate.

By Tim Hume, Lisa Cohen and Mira Sorvino
Photography by Jeremie Montessuis for CNN

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN)

Watch "Every Day in Cambodia" on CNN International Saturday at 10 a.m. CET, 9 p.m. CET and Sunday 3 a.m. CET in Europe, and Saturday 5 p.m. HKT, Sunday 4 a.m. HKT and 10 a.m. HKT in Hong Kong.

When a poor family in Cambodia fell afoul of loan sharks, the mother asked her youngest daughter to take a job. But not just any job.

The girl, Kieu, was taken to a hospital and examined by a doctor, who issued her a "certificate of virginity." She was then delivered to a hotel, where a man raped her for two days.

Kieu was 12 years old.

"I did not know what the job was," says Kieu, now 14 and living in a safehouse. She says she returned home from the experience "very heartbroken." But her ordeal was not over.

After the sale of her virginity, her mother had Kieu taken to a brothel where, she says, "they held me like I was in prison."

She was kept there for three days, raped by three to six men a day. When she returned home, her mother sent her away for stints in two other brothels, including one 400 kilometers away on the Thai border. When she learned her mother was planning to sell her again, this time for a six-month stretch, she realized she needed to flee her home.

"Selling my daughter was heartbreaking, but what can I say?" says Kieu's mother, Neoung, in an interview with a CNN crew that travelled to Phnom Penh to hear her story.

Cambodia's hidden child brothels

Karaoke bars are a common front for child prostitution. Mira Sorvino details going behind the scenes of this illicit trade.

Like other local mothers CNN spoke to, she blames poverty for her decision to sell her daughter, saying a financial crisis drove her into the clutches of the traffickers who make their livelihoods preying on Cambodian children.

"It was because of the debt, that's why I had to sell her," she says. "I don't know what to do now, because we cannot move back to the past."

It is this aspect of Cambodia's appalling child sex trade that Don Brewster, a 59-year-old American resident of the neighborhood, finds most difficult to countenance.

"I can't imagine what it feels like to have your mother sell you, to have your mother waiting in the car while she gets money for you to be raped," he says. "It's not that she was stolen from her mother -- her mother gave the keys to the people to rape her."

Brewster, a former pastor, moved from California to Cambodia with wife Bridget in 2009, after a harrowing investigative mission trip to the neighborhood where Kieu grew up -- Svay Pak, the epicenter of child trafficking in the Southeast Asian nation.

"Svay Pak is known around the world as a place where pedophiles come to get little girls," says Brewster, whose organization, Agape International Missions (AIM), has girls as young as four in its care, rescued from traffickers and undergoing rehabilitation in its safehouses.

In recent decades, he says, this impoverished fishing village – where a daughter's virginity is too often seen as a valuable asset for the family – has become a notorious child sex hotspot.

"When we came here three years ago and began to live here, 100% of the kids between 8 and 12 were being trafficked," says Brewster. The local sex industry sweeps up both children from the neighborhood -- sold, like Kieu, by their parents – as well as children trafficked in from the countryside, or across the border from Vietnam. "We didn't believe it until we saw vanload after vanload of kids."

Global center for pedophiles

Weak law enforcement, corruption, grinding poverty and the fractured social institutions left by the country's turbulent recent history have helped earn Cambodia an unwelcome reputation for child trafficking, say experts.

UNICEF estimates that children account for a third of the 40,000-100,000 people in the country's sex industry.

Svay Pak, a dusty shantytown on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, is at the heart of this exploitative trade.

As one of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in one of Asia's poorest countries – nearly half the population lives on less than $2 per day -- the poverty in the settlement is overwhelming. The residents are mostly undocumented Vietnamese migrants, many of whom live in ramshackle houseboats on the murky Tonle Sap River, eking out a living farming fish in nets tethered to their homes.

Svay Pak, an impoverished neighborhood on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, is the epicenter of Cambodia's child sex trade. Many of its residents are undocumented Vietnamese migrants, living in a community of ramshackle houseboats connected by rickety walkways.

It's a precarious existence. The river is fickle, the tarp-covered houseboats fragile. Most families here scrape by on less than a dollar a day, leaving no safety net for when things go wrong – such as when Kieu's father fell seriously ill with tuberculosis, too sick to maintain the nets that contained their livelihood. The family fell behind on repayments of a debt.

In desperation, Kieu's mother, Neoung, sold her virginity to a Cambodian man of "maybe more than 50," who had three children of his own, Kieu says. The transaction netted the family only $500, more than the $200 they had initially borrowed but a lot less than the thousands of dollars they now owed a loan shark.

So Neoung sent her daughter to a brothel to earn more.

"They told me when the client is there, I have to wear short shorts and a skimpy top," says Kieu. "But I didn't want to wear them and then I got blamed." Her clients were Thai and Cambodian men, who, she says, knew she was very young.

Don Brewster, a former pastor from California, is the founder and director of Agape International Missions, an organization dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating the victims of child trafficking in Cambodia and smashing the networks that exploit them. He moved to Cambodia with his wife in 2009 after a harrowing investigative mission trip to the neighborhood.

"When they sleep with me, they feel very happy," she says. "But for me, I feel very bad."

The men who abuse the children of Svay Pak fit a number of profiles. They include pedophile sex tourists, who actively seek out sex with prepubescent children, and more opportunistic "situational" offenders, who take advantage of opportunities in brothels to have sex with adolescents.

Sex tourists tend to hail from affluent countries, including the West, South Korea, Japan and China, but research suggests Cambodian men remain the main exploiters of child prostitutes in their country.

Mark Capaldi is a senior researcher for Ecpat International, an organization committed to combating the sexual exploitation of children.

"In most cases when we talk about child sexual exploitation, it's taking place within the adult sex industry," says Capaldi. "We tend to often hear reports in the media about pedophilia, exploitation of very young children. But the majority of sexual exploitation of children is of adolescents, and that's taking place in commercial sex venues."

The abusers would often be local, situational offenders, he says. Research suggests some of the Asian perpetrators are "virginity seekers," for whom health-related beliefs around the supposedly restorative or protective qualities of virgins factor into their interest in child sex.

Whatever the profile of the perpetrator, the abuse they inflict on their victims, both girls and boys, is horrific. Trafficked children in Cambodia have been subjected to rape by multiple offenders, filmed performing sex acts and left with physical injuries -- not to mention psychological trauma -- from their ordeals, according to research.

In recent years, various crackdowns in Svay Pak have dented the trade, but also pushed it underground. Today, Brewster says, there are more than a dozen karaoke bars operating as brothels along the road to the neighborhood, where two years ago there was none. Even today, he estimates a majority of girls in Svay Park are being trafficked.

Virgins for sale

Kieu's relative, Sephak, who lives nearby, is another survivor. (CNN is naming the victims in this case at the request of the girls themselves, as they want to speak out against the practice of child sex trafficking.)

Sephak was 13 when she was taken to a hospital, issued a certificate confirming her virginity, and delivered to a Chinese man in a Phnom Penh hotel room. She was returned after three nights. Sephak says her mother was paid $800.

"When I had sex with him, I felt empty inside. I hurt and I felt very weak," she says. "It was very difficult. I thought about why I was doing this and why my mom did this to me." After her return, her mother began pressuring her daughter to work in a brothel.

Toha listens to her mother explain how she came to sell her to sex traffickers. She no longer lives with her family, opting instead to live in a residence for trafficking survivors run by Brewster's organization -- but still provides her family some financial support from her new job.

Not far away from Sephak's family home, connected to the shore via a haphazard walkway of planks that dip beneath the water with each footfall, is the houseboat where Toha grew up.

The second of eight children, none of whom attend school, Toha was sold for sex by her mother when she was 14. The transaction followed the same routine: medical certificate, hotel, rape.

About two weeks after she returned to Svay Pak, she says, the man who had bought her virginity began calling, requesting to see her again. Her mother urged her to go. The pressure drove her to despair.

"I went to the bathroom and cut my arms. I cut my wrists because I wanted to kill myself," Toha says. A friend broke down the door to the bathroom and came to her aid.

Mothers as sex traffickers

CNN met with the mothers of Kieu, Sephak and Toha in Svay Pak to hear their accounts of why they chose to expose their daughters to sexual exploitation.

Kieu's mother, Neoung, had come to Svay Pak from the south of the country in search of a better life when Kieu was just a baby. But life in Svay Pak, she would learn, wasn't easy.

Why Cambodia?

How has this Southeast Asian nation become a hotspot for pedophiles? Poverty, corruption and a brutal reign of terror have all played a part in making Cambodian children vulnerable to adult predators.

When her husband's tuberculosis rendered him too sick to properly maintain the nets on the family's fish pond, the family took on a $200 loan at extortionate rates from a loan shark. It has now ballooned to more than $9,000. "The debt that my husband and I have is too big, we can't pay it off," she says. "What can you do in a situation like this?"

"Virginity selling" was widespread in the community, and Neoung saw it as a legitimate option to make some income. "They think it is normal," she says. "I told her, 'Kieu, your dad is sick and can't work… Do you agree to do that job to contribute to your parents?'"

"I know that I did wrong so I feel regret about it, but what can I do?" she says. "We cannot move back to the past."

But she adds she would never do it again.

Sephak's mother, Ann, has a similar story. Ann moved to Svay Pak when her father came to work as a fish farmer. She and her husband have serious health problems.

"We are very poor, so I must work hard," she says. "It's still not enough to live by and we're sick all the time."

The family fell on hard times. When a storm roared through the region, their house was badly damaged, their fish got away, and they could no longer afford to eat. In crisis, the family took out a loan that eventually spiraled to about $6000 in debt, she says.

With money-lenders coming to her home and threatening her, Ann made the decision to take up an offer from a woman who approached her promising big money for her daughter's virginity.

"I saw other people doing it and I didn't think it through," she says. "If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't do that to my daughter."

On her houseboat, as squalls of rain lash the river, Toha's mother Ngao sits barefoot before the television taking pride of place in the main living area, and expresses similar regrets. On the wall hangs a row of digitally enhanced portraits of her husband and eight children. They are dressed in smart suits and dresses, superimposed before an array of fantasy backdrops: an expensive motorcycle, a tropical beach, an American-style McMansion.

Life with so many children is hard, she says, so she asked her daughter to go with the men.

She would not do the same again, she says, as she now has access to better support; Agape International Missions offers interest-free loan refinancing to get families out of the debt trap, and factory jobs for rescued daughters and their mothers.

For the children: Mira's journal

Mira Sorvino details her week spent in Cambodia with the CNN Freedom Project meeting victims, government officials and activists working to end child sex trafficking. Read more »

The news of Ngao's betrayal of her daughter has drawn mixed responses from others in the neighborhood, she says. Some mock her for offering up her daughter, others sympathize with her plight. Some see nothing wrong with she did at all.

"Some people say 'It's OK -- just bring your daughter (to the traffickers) so you can pay off the debt and feel better,'" says Ngao.

A new future

Not long after her suicide attempt, Toha was sent to a brothel in southern Cambodia. She endured more than 20 days there, before she managed to get access to a phone, and called a friend. She told the friend to contact Brewster's group, who arranged for a raid on the establishment.

Although children can be found in many brothels across Cambodia -- a 2009 survey of 80 Cambodian commercial sex premises found three-quarters offering children for sex – raids to free them are infrequent.

The country's child protection infrastructure is weak, with government institutions riven with corruption. Cambodia's anti-trafficking law does not even permit police to conduct undercover surveillance on suspected traffickers. General Pol Phie They, the head of Cambodia's anti-trafficking taskforce set up in 2007 to address the issue, says this puts his unit at a disadvantage against traffickers.

"We are still limited in prosecuting these violations because first, we lack the expertise and second, we lack the technical equipment," he says. "Sometimes, we see a violation but we can't collect the evidence we need to prosecute the offender."

He admits that police corruption in his country, ranked 160 of 175 countries on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index, is hampering efforts to tackle the trade in Svay Pak. "Police in that area probably do have connections with the brothel owners," he concedes.

Toha's nightmare is now over. She earns a steady income, weaving bracelets that are sold in American stores, while she studies for her future. Her dream is to become a social worker, helping other girls who have been through the same ordeal.

Brewster believes that corruption was to blame for nearly thwarting Toha's rescue. In October 2012, after Toha's call for help, AIM formulated plans with another organization to rescue the teen, and involved police.

"We get a warrant to shut the place down," recalls Brewster. "Fifteen minutes later, Toha calls and says, 'I don't know what happened, the police just came with the owner and took us to a new place. I'm locked inside and don't know where I am.'"

Fortunately the rescue team were able to establish Toha's new location, and she and other victims were freed and the brothel managers arrested – although not before the owners fled to Vietnam.

Toha's testimony against the brothel managers, however, resulted in their prosecutions.

Last month, at the Phnom Penh Municipal Courthouse, husband and wife Heng Vy and Nguyeng Thi Hong were found guilty of procuring prostitution and sentenced to three years in jail. Both were ordered to pay $1,250 to the court, $5,000 to Toha, and smaller sums to three other victims.

Brewster was in court to watch the sentencing; a small victory in the context of Cambodia's child trafficking problem, but a victory nonetheless.

"Toha's an amazingly brave girl," he says on the courthouse steps, shortly after the brothel managers were led down to the cells.

"Getting a telephone when she's trapped in a brothel to call for help, to saying she would be a witness in front of the police…. She stood up and now people are going to pay the price and girls will be protected. What it will do is bring more Tohas, more girls who are willing to speak, places shut down, bad guys put away."

Like the other victims, Toha now lives in an AIM safehouse, attending school and supporting herself by weaving bracelets, which are sold in stores in the West as a way of providing a livelihood to formerly trafficked children.

In the eyes of the community, having a job has helped restore to the girls some of the dignity that was stripped from them by having been sold into trafficking, says Brewster.

It has also given them independence from their families -- and with that, the opportunity to build for themselves a better reality than the one that was thrust on them. Now Sephak has plans to become a teacher, Kieu a hairdresser.

For her part, Toha still has contact with her mother – even providing financial support to the family through her earnings – but has become self-reliant. She wants to be a social worker, she says, helping girls who have endured the same hell she has.

"(Toha)'s earning a good living and she has a dream beyond that, you know, to become a counselor and to be able to help other girls," says Brewster. "You see the transformation that's happened to her."

Child sex trafficking: Why Cambodia?

Svay Pak is a poor fishing village on the outskirt of Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, known globally as a destination for child sex.

It's a place where mothers sell their own daughters to child traffickers, who supply them to brothels locally and across the country.

But how has such a perverse trade been able to take root, let alone flourish here?

Mark Capaldi, senior researcher for Ecpat International, an organization committed to combating the sexual exploitation of children, says several factors have made Cambodia a prime destination for child sex offenders.

"Insufficiently enforced laws, corruption, and the failure to address more overarching problems such as poverty and the negative side effects of globalization have made it a challenge for the country to shed the unenviable reputation as a destination for child sex," he says.

The authors of a 2011 Ecpat International report identified a number of cultural and sociological factors that made Cambodian children "particularly vulnerable to adult predators." "It has been observed that Cambodian children are indeed expected to abide by rules set forth by adults, and saying 'no' to an adult is not easily tolerated," reads the report.

 But what of the acceptance and willing participation of so many locals, including parents themselves, in the trade? For Don Brewster -- head of Agape International Missions, which aids Cambodian child survivors of the sex trade -- part of the answer as to why so many adults in Svay Pak are able to abnegate their parental duty to protect may lie in Cambodia's brutal recent past, which left behind a fractured society.

"What this country went through was unique in history," says Brewster, of the Khmer Rouge's systematic destruction of religious, educational and social structures -- not least of which the family unit -- during its genocidal 1975-79 reign.

When Pol Pot's maniacal experiment ended, 2 million people were dead, and society's institutions almost erased. "You lost your educated people and the system of educating them; you lost the moral compass that Buddhism provided," he says.

Nigerian Man who tried to behead UK soldier says he loves Al-Qaeda

A photo released by the Ministry of Defence on May 23, 2012 shows soldier Lee Rigby, who was killed in a street in Woolwich, southeast London on May 22

A man accused of the gruesome murder of a British soldier told his trial on Monday that he loves Al-Qaeda and considers the Islamic militants to be his "brothers".

Michael Adebolajo, 28, sat surrounded by security guards as he began giving evidence in his trial at London's Old Bailey court.

He and Michael Adebowale, 22, are accused of murdering 25-year-old soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight as he walked back to his London barracks in May.

The court has heard that the pair ran Rigby over with a car before attacking him with knives. Adebolajo attempted to behead him with a meat cleaver.

4 Saudi female drivers' detention varied by their locations

 

 

Four women were detained by traffic police in two Saudi Arabian cities this week for defying the Kingdom's driving ban, according to all the women stopped.

In the Red Sea port city of Jeddah Thursday, two women, Sahar Naseef and Tamador Alyami, were stopped by police after being spotted in a car on one of the city's main thoroughfares.

Alyami, who's been an avid supporter of a two-month-old campaign seeking to gain the right to drive for women in Saudi Arabia, told CNN she and Naseef were hoping to get caught.

"We did go driving on a main street where we know there's a lot of traffic police," explained Alyami, who was in the passenger seat.

"We're just trying to push and see how far can we go with this," said Alyami, "because two women yesterday were caught by police and detained for 10 hours. Today, in a different city it was totally different. We were caught and stopped for only two hours."

The woman who drove the car, Naseef, told CNN she was so convinced she and Alyami would spend the night in jail, she even packed a toothbrush, some shampoo and an extra set of clothing.

For Alyami, an author and columnist who's driven herself around Jeddah five times now, getting behind the wheel is no longer enough in an extraordinary campaign of civil disobedience that has seen dozens of women taking to the streets since October.

"We're asking girls in different regions to go out," she said, "because we're trying to see if police in different regions react differently to cases of women driving."

According to Naseef and Alyami, the traffic police officer who pulled them over was very kind to them and even supportive of their cause. They said he told them that due to protocol, he had to call for backup, and they were soon surrounded by several more police cars. In the end, Naseef had to sign a pledge not to drive again in the presence of a male relative before the women could be released.

One day earlier in the country's capital, Riyadh, which is in a far more conservative part of the country, two other women described a far more difficult experience after being caught driving.

Azza Al-Shamasi and Bareah Alzubeedy told CNN they were detained at a Riyadh police station for more than 10 hours after being caught and pulled over by traffic police.

Al-Shamasi, who was driving, said when they first started driving down one of Riyadh's main streets, many male drivers around them were giving them signs of support. Half an hour later, after a traffic police officer spotted them, they were pulled over.

"We were then surrounded by six cop cars, and the people who stopped us were quite rude," said Al-Shamasi.

According to Al-Shamasi, despite the fact that her husband came to the police station shortly after she was taken there, it still took at least eight more hours before she was released into his custody.

Alzubeedy explained they were not looking to attract the police's attention, just simply doing what they should be able to do.

"Freedom of movement is a right," said Alzubeedy, a human rights activist. "This is a right for women here. There's no law that bars women from driving in Saudi Arabia, and I hope more women will go out and drive."

Despite repeated attempts, CNN was unable to reach Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry for comment.

The issue of women driving is a particularly sensitive and controversial one in Saudi Arabia, the last country on Earth where females don't have that right. In recent years, though, more women have challenged the government, urging officials to overturn the ban and taking to streets in remarkable displays of civil disobedience. Although women are not allowed to drive in the ultraconservative Kingdom, there is, in fact, no law barring them from doing so. But religious edicts are often interpreted to enforce the prohibition.

In May 2011, Manal Al-Sharif was jailed for more than a week after posting a video of herself driving in Saudi Arabia online. She quickly became a hero to many and inspired dozens of women to drive throughout the streets of various cities in June of that year.

More recently, in September, a website for the October 26 Women's Driving Campaign launched, and within a few weeks, tens of thousands had signed an online petition calling for an end to the driving ban for women in Saudi Arabia. As October 26 approached, numerous women filmed themselves driving in the conservative Kingdom and uploaded those clips to sites like YouTube.

In the weeks leading up to October 26, one Saudi cleric gave an interview in which he warned that Saudi women who drove risked damaging their ovaries. On October 24, the country's Interior Ministry issued a statement telling women to stay off the streets.

Despite strong opposition by conservative quarters in the Kingdom, where a puritanical strain of Islam is practiced, October 26 saw dozens of women taking to the streets and driving. The campaign's backers insist the movement is ongoing and has been a success thus far, while its critics say it has failed.

In early December, two of Saudi Arabia's best-known female advocates for lifting the ban on women driving were also detained after being caught behind the wheel in the country's capital. Aziza Al-Yousef, who was driving the car, and her passenger, Eman Al-Nafjan, told CNN they were pulled over and spent a few hours at a police station in Riyadh until being released into the custody of their respective husbands.

 

Death for man who stabbed 22 children in China

Min Yongjun waves a knife at a child at a school on December 14, 2012 in Guangshan County, in central China's Henan province in this screen grab taken from a video released by China's Public Security Bureau

A knife-wielding attacker who stabbed 22 students at a primary school in China was sentenced to death on Friday, a court said.

The Xinyang City Intermediate People's Court said Min Yongjun, 37, was found guilty of intentional homicide and condemned to death, almost a year after he stormed a school in the central province of Henan and slashed dozens of pupils.

No-one was killed but 22 children were injured in the brutal attack, which took place on the same day that 20 children were shot dead at a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in the United States.

Surveillance footage showed Min pursuing a group of panicked children through an unguarded school gate, before a group of adults entered equipped with straw brooms and chased him out

Mass killings largely ignored in 2 Nigerian states, rights group says

Horrific ethnic and religious violence resulting in "mass murder" and other abuses in two central Nigerian states has largely gone ignored by the authorities, rights group Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

Its report, focused on Plateau and Kaduna states, is based on interviews with more than 180 witnesses and victims of violence as well as police investigators, prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges and community leaders.

Many of the victims, including women and children, Christians and Muslims, "were hacked to death, burned alive, or shot simply based on their ethnic or religious identity," said the report, "Leave Everything to God: Accountability for Inter-Communal Violence in Plateau and Kaduna States, Nigeria."

And a seeming culture of impunity has created a cycle of violence as individuals who find no recourse elsewhere seek retribution for wrongs done to them, it said.

"Witnesses came forward to tell their stories, compiled lists of the dead and identified the attackers, but in most cases nothing was done," said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

"The authorities may have forgotten these killings, but communities haven't. In the absence of justice, residents have resorted to violence to avenge their losses."

According to the report, communities in Plateau state have been plagued by sectarian violence for more than a decade, leaving thousands of Christians and Muslims dead.

"However, the Nigerian authorities have taken no meaningful steps to address underlying grievances or, until recently, bring to justice those responsible for the bloodshed," it said.

Human Rights Watch lays much of the blame for the culture of impunity at the door of "an already broken criminal justice system."

It points the finger at "systemic corruption in the Nigeria Police Force," exacerbated by political pressure to protect those responsible for violence.

The Nigerian police have not yet responded to repeated CNN requests for comment.

Complex root causes

Much international attention has focused on recent violent attacks by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, particularly Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states.

But the Human Rights Watch report paints a grim picture of life in Kaduna and Plateau states.

Their location in Nigeria's "Middle Belt," between the largely Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south, has put them at the intersection of sectarian strife in the large and unruly West African nation.

"Since 1992, more than 10,000 people in those two states have died in inter-communal bloodletting; several thousand of those deaths have occurred since 2010 alone," the report said.

The root causes of the violence are complex, it said.

While they often involve longstanding grievances and disputes, "they are exacerbated both by divisive state and local government policies that discriminate on ethnic or religious lines and by the failure of authorities to hold to account those responsible for the violence."

The strife pits Hausa-Fulani Muslims -- the largest and most politically powerful group in northern Nigeria -- against smaller predominantly Christian ethnic groups, which counted together make up the majority of the population in the region, it said.

Each side accuses the other of discrimination, oppression and violence to advance its position.

Rights group urges reforms

In Plateau state, episodes of mass violence in 2001, 2004 and 2008 left hundreds of people dead, the report said.

"Following this violence, federal and state authorities took no meaningful steps to address underlying grievances and brought no one to justice for the bloodletting," the researchers said.

The continuing tensions erupted in 2010, centered on the Plateau state capital of Jos, resulting in the massacre of hundreds of people, many of them Muslims in rural communities. While the federal authorities this time stepped in and prosecuted some suspects, most were not brought to justice, the report said. Many more sectarian attacks have followed.

In Kaduna state, bloody episodes of ethnic and sectarian violence in 1992, 2000 and 2002 left hundreds or more dead -- and few perpetrators were held accountable.

The authorities' response to different mass killings often follows a similar pattern, the report said. Police will round up hundreds of "suspects" but fail to gather evidence properly. This makes it difficult for prosecutors to file a case against any individual -- and ultimately most charges are quietly dropped, it said.

Witnesses who did report crimes said police often took no action; others told researchers they were afraid to report them or did not do so because they believed the police would do nothing.

The prosecution of suspects by federal authorities following the 2010 violence in Plateau state was an important exception to this pattern, Human Rights Watch said.

The right group urges the federal government to ensure mass killings are swiftly and properly investigated by the police, to bar discriminatory policies that help fuel ethnic tensions and to treat the intercommunal violence as a criminal, rather than political, problem.

Other recommendations include ordering a high-level review of police investigations into crimes alleged in the report, ensuring police are trained to do their jobs properly and reforming the police force. The Justice Ministry should identify why suspects in certain cases were not prosecuted and prosecute remaining suspects, it said.

"Nigerian authorities can and should take urgent steps to ensure that the perpetrators of communal violence, including mass murder, are investigated and prosecuted, and that victims are provided restitution or compensation for their enormous losses," the report said.

Arsenal need to find an extra gear against Manchester City

Arsenal will need to improve if they are to get anything from Manchester City on Saturday, with their midweek defeat to Napoli rendering them vulnerable.

It's an unfortunate point to consider that such mundanities might have a drastic effect on the location of silverware at the end of the season, but the fixture list can only be ignored for truly exceptional teams. For others, it almost comes to define a season. While talk of conspiracies and unfair dealings is ridiculous -- a difficult run at one point means an easy run at another -- it can never account for the timing of big games and their potential to influence seasons.