Pornography

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

A nine-year veteran of the Long Beach Police Department has been arrested on suspicion of felony possession of child pornography after reportedly meeting a teenager while on patrol and soliciting explicit photographs of the youth through electronic messages, police said. Noe Yanez, 40, was taken into custody Thursday evening by Long Beach police after an investigation that began earlier this month. The alleged victim had told a school resources officer about the messages and authorities were alerted.

On a recent Saturday night, Savannah Stern earned $300 to hang out for seven hours at a party in Santa Monica wearing nothing but a feather boa. The veteran of more than 350 hard-core pornography productions took the job to earn extra cash and to network. But the word at the 35th anniversary party for Hustler magazine was not heartening, especially among the roughly 75 other women working there. "At least five girls I haven't seen in a while came up to me and said, 'Savannah, are you working?

The FBI arrested a San Bernardino middle school teacher Tuesday on suspicion of child pornography for allegedly exchanging sexually explicit photographs with a 13-year-old girl in New Jersey. Eugene Ballantyne, 29, was taken into custody at his Running Springs home early Tuesday morning. Ballantyne told investigators that he also received sexually explicit pictures from a 15-year-old girl two years earlier and traveled 180 miles to have sex with a 17-year-old girl in July, according to a FBI affidavit filed in federal court.

Darren James saw the news flash on his TV screen last week: A porn actress had tested positive for HIV. James, 45, felt a moment of shock, then sadness. "I feel really bad for this girl," he said. "One thing I can say, I just wish her well. It's the worst thing to get that call." It's the call James got in 2004 when the well-liked porn star known for his courteous nature on set found himself at the center of an HIV outbreak in the San Fernando Valley's multibillion-dollar porn industry.

Michelangelo has been playing for 500 years at the Sistine Chapel, but a few hundred yards away at the Mercury Theater the show changes every afternoon. Recent attractions included "Cover Girl," "Love Me," and "The Touchables." The pornography industry, with nary a fig leaf, is booming in Italy today.

A state prosecutor encountered a barrage of skeptical questions Thursday from the California Supreme Court as she defended the precedent-setting use of an anti-pandering law to prosecute a Los Angeles sex-film producer. Court members repeatedly expressed concern that using the 1982 law against film makers would violate the constitutional right to free expression and threaten the movie industry in California. But state Deputy Atty. Gen.

Oscar-winning writer-director Steven Soderbergh isn't coy about his motive for casting Sasha Grey in his low-budget indie drama "The Girlfriend Experience." In a movie entirely populated by nonprofessional actors, who better to portray a $2,000-an-hour Manhattan call-girl than one of the most prolific and in-demand adult film stars working the so-called San Pornando Valley? Still, he cops to a certain degree of exploitation.

Pornography hurts all of us. Pornography is a central facet of women's oppression. Maintaining sexual access to women is the core motivation in patriarchy. Sex is the basic motivation for the suppression of women, unlike racism, whose basic motivation is economic. There is no doubt that pornography is often used in child molestations. It is also 100% accurate to say that pornography is a major source of information on sexuality for children. Anyone who has grown up in this society knows that viewing pornography begins at an early age. This fact is disturbing not only because children are very impressionable but because pornography is full of misinformation about sex and about women.

Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!" It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

In his private journal, Jason Michael Handy once described himself as a "pedophile, full blown. " Handy snapped more than 1,000 photos of girls at the elementary school across the street from his house, using a camera with a telephoto lens, according to court documents. He volunteered at a Malibu church, where he worked with 6-year-olds. And his job as a production assistant at one of the nation's most prominent producers of children's television programs, Nickelodeon, gave him access to child actors on and off the set, and allowed him to exchange email addresses and phone numbers with them.

An AIDS activist group will begin circulating petitions Tuesday asking Los Angeles County voters to require porn performers to wear condoms during filming. The move comes after the L.A.-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation qualified a similar measure for the June ballot in the city of Los Angeles. That measure, however, faces a legal challenge. "The county has a primary responsibility of protecting the public health," foundation President Michael Weinstein told The Times. Weinstein asserted that the county Board of Supervisors has "steadfastly refused" to take action against porn producers who don't use condoms in filming, putting performers at risk of HIV and other diseases.

A pastor and youth soccer coach has pleaded not guilty to charges that he molested an 8-year-old Huntington Beach girl and possessed child pornography. Christopher Raymond Olague, 39, of Westminster was arrested by Huntington Beach police in October after the mother of the girl reported the alleged molestation. Olague allegedly picked up the girl Oct. 5 for a play date at a park with one of his daughters. Instead, he took her to the parking lot of a grocery store and molested her, Huntington Beach Police Lt. Russell Reinhart said.

The Justice Department has charged 72 suspected members of an online child pornography ring that encouraged its members to engage in sexual acts with children 12 and under and submit gruesome, violent material to build a massive private database of images and videos on the Internet. The crackdown is the result of a joint effort by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security launched in December 2009 to target about 500 people in 13 countries on five continents for their suspected participation in "Dreamboard," a members-only online bulletin board that was created to encourage the sharing of graphic images and videos.

Stuffed animals, teen magazines and children's underwear were found in a raid of a Wilmington motel that was home to dozens of convicted child molesters and registered sex offenders, authorities said Monday. Eight people were taken into custody Friday for alleged parole violations, including possession of child pornography or narcotics. Most of those arrested were middle-aged men whose previous offenses included lewd and lascivious conduct with children or other sex crimes, said Det. Patricia Batts of the Los Angeles Police Department.

It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon in late December, and the Chinatown Branch Library was buzzing. While a line of children waited to check out books, other patrons surfed the Internet at a bank of computers nearby. At one computer, a man sat watching pornography. And parents complained. Every day adults across the city use library computers to do research, read news, watch YouTube videos and apply for jobs. And 1st Amendment protections give them the right to also access some pornography, city officials say. Regular library patrons say it is not uncommon.

I'm curious. After spending hundreds of hours immersed in pornography, what percentage of the Meese Commission members have become deviated perverts and what is to be done about them? TOM WEISS Paso Robles

The title of the evening event at a mosque in Corona was intended to provoke discussion, even as it raised an eyebrow or two: "The Islamization of Weed?" The unusual lecture at the Islamic Society of Corona-Norco in February drew about 150 people, most of them younger than 30. The idea, Imam Mustafa Umar said, was to encourage a dialogue and attract people who might be put off by a more traditionally religious theme. Not that the speaker, Sheikh Yassir Fazaga from Mission Viejo, was there to advocate marijuana use or say it was permissible in Islam.

Teachers who have been accused of showing pornography to children, kissing a student, or sexual harassment were not investigated in a timely manner by the state agency in charge of revoking education credentials, according to a state audit released Thursday. The state Commission on Teacher Credentialing also had a backlog of nearly 12,600 cases in the summer of 2009, about three years' worth of cases, according to a report by the California state auditor. The commission also did not keep good track of data, some of which was entered by hand, and it was often slow to look into allegations.