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MySpace removes 90,000 sex offenders...

About 90,000 sex offenders have been identified and removed from the social networking Web site MySpace, company and law enforcement officials said Tuesday. ABC News story here

The number was nearly double what MySpace officials originally estimated last year, said North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who along with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has led efforts to make social networking Web sites safer for young users.

Cooper said he wasn't surprised by the updated numbers, and demanded that MySpace and rival online networking site Facebook–which claim to have more than 280 million users combined–do more to protect children and teenagers.

"These sites were created for young people to communicate with each other. Predators are going to troll in these areas where they know children are going to be," Cooper said. "That's why these social networking sites have the responsibility to make their sites safe for children."

The attorneys general received agreements last year from MySpace and Facebook to push toward making their sites safer. Both sites implemented dozens of safeguards, including finding better ways to verify user's ages, banning convicted sex offenders from using the sites and limiting the ability of older users to search members under 18.

Blumenthal, who received MySpace's updated numbers Tuesday through a subpoena, said the information "provides compelling proof that social networking sites remain rife with sexual predators." A preliminary number of sex offenders found on Facebook was "substantial," but he said the company has yet to respond to a recent subpoena.

MySpace executives said they were confident in the technology they use to find, remove and block registered sex offenders. The company uses Sentinel SAFE, a database it created in 2006 with the names, physical descriptions and other identifiable characteristics of sex offenders that cross-references against MySpace members.

"Sentinel SAFE is the best industry solution to ensure these offenders are removed from social networks," Hemanshu Nigam, the company's chief security officer, said in a statement Tuesday. For more on internet safety and social networking sites, see eGuide/vol2_iss2.

Boy posing as girl gets 31 classmates to send nude pictures of themselves via Facebook...

An 18-year-old male student is accused of posing as a girl on Facebook, tricking at least 31 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves and then blackmailing some for sex acts. CBS News story here

"The kind of manipulation that occurred here is really sinister in my estimation," Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel said Wednesday.

The students go to New Berlin Eisenhower High School in New Berlin, which is in Waukesha County about 15 miles west of Milwaukee.

Anthony Stancl, of New Berlin, was charged with five counts of child enticement, two counts of second-degree sexual assault of a child, two counts of third-degree sexual assault, possession of child pornography, repeated sexual assault of the same child and making a bomb threat.

Stancl's attorney, Craig Kuhary, said Stancl plans to plead not guilty to the charges and hopes to reach a plea agreement with the district attorney.

"It's too early in the case for me to make a statement, other than the fact at some point we are going to go into events that had taken place earlier that might have had some impact on what he did here," he said. He wouldn't go into specifics.

The incidents allegedly happened from spring 2007 through November, when officers questioned Stancl about a bomb threat he allegedly sent to teachers and wrote about on a school's bathroom wall. It resulted in the closing of New Berlin Eisenhower Middle and High School.

According to the criminal complaint, Stancl first contacted the students through the social networking site Facebook, pretending to be a girl named Kayla or Emily. The boys reported that they were tricked into sending nude photos or videos of themselves, the complaint said.

Thirty-one victims were identified and interviewed and more than half said the girl with whom they thought they were communicating tried to get them to meet with a male friend to let him perform sex acts on them.

They were told that if they didn't, she would send the nude photos or movies to their friends and post them on the Internet, according to the complaint. Stancl allegedly used the excuse to get the victims to perform repeated acts, the complaint said.

Seven boys were identified in the complaint by their initials as either having to allegedly perform sex acts on Stancl or Stancl on them. The complaint said Stancl took photos with his cell phone of the encounters.

Officers found about 300 nude images of juvenile males on his computer, according to the complaint. Prosecutors said the victims were as young as 15.

Teenagers' habit of distributing nude self-portraits electronically– often called "sexting" if it's done by cell phone–has parents and school administrators worried. Some prosecutors have begun charging teens who send and receive such images with child pornography and other serious felonies. But is that the best way to handle it? Fox News story here

"Hopefully we'll get the message out to these kids," says Michael McAlexander, a prosecutor in Allen County, Indiana, which includes Fort Wayne. A teenage boy there is facing felony obscenity charges for allegedly sending a photo of his private parts to several female classmates. Another boy was recently charged with child pornography in a similar case.

In some cases, the photos are sent to harass other teens or to get attention. Other times, they're viewed as a high-tech way to flirt. Either way, law enforcement officials want it to stop, even if it means threatening to add "sex offender" to a juvenile's confidential record.

"We don't want to throw these kids in jail," McAlexander says. "But we want them to think." For more on cell phone safety, see eGuide/vol1_iss44.

Meanwhile, with an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet. MSNBC News story here

The new software will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends. The feature, dubbed "Latitude," expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.

ABC News has a story about teens who murder when their cell phones are taken away. ABC News story here

From the Michigan teen who reportedly shot both of his parents over a cell phone last year to the Ohio teen convicted last month of killing his mother over a video game, experts say a small subset of young people are ill-equipped to balance their electronic life with the real world.

When their whole world is wrapped up in text messaging or video games, being cut off leaves them frantic. Peter Sheras, a clinical psychologist and professor at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, said there's no hard evidence that points to why this sort of extreme violence has become the reaction for some teens as it's a fairly new phenomenon.

Teens, in general, often carry a lot of anger and "incredible levels of frustration as they are trying to flex their muscles," Sheras said.

And finally, a New York man who took his cell phone to a repair shop for error messages was arrested after images of child pornography were found in it, FBI officials say. Fox News story here

Robert Scharff, 45, of Brooklyn, was ordered held without bail following his arrest Tuesday. A service technician at a Manhattan Sprint PCS store found the images on a memory card while working on the phone on January 21.

When Scharff returned later that day to pick up the phone, he was told that it had been "sent out," according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York. A subsequent search of Scharff's apartment two days later yielded roughly 200 additional images of child pornography.

Scharff faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted of producing child pornography and receiving child pornography.

In other news...

A next-door neighbor of a Northern California couple accused of chaining up and torturing a teenage boy for more than a year was deeply involved in the abuse, authorities say in court documents unsealed Wednesday. Fox News story here The neighbor, 29-year-old Anthony Waiters, was the last of four people charged in a case that has horrified the California town of Tracy since December, when the boy escaped from his captors and showed up bruised, emaciated and wearing only boxer shorts at a local gym. Waiters' connection to the alleged abuse had been unclear until the documents were unsealed in San Joaquin County Superior Court. According to one search warrant affidavit, the teenager implicated Waiters and told detectives that he was "an active participant in his torture." The 16-year-old wandered into a fitness center on December 1, wearing a chain padlocked to his bloodied ankle and covered in soot. He told police he had been shackled to a fireplace grate, beaten in the head with a baseball bat, choked with a belt and denied food for days at a time. See more at vol6_iss75 and vol6_iss76.

A 10-year-old boy reportedly found hanging from a coat hook at his suburban Chicago school took his own life, according to a preliminary coroner's office ruling. CBS News story here A daily ledger released by the Cook County medical examiner noted "hanging" and "suicide" as the cause of death for fifth-grader Aquan Lewis, who was found unresponsive in a bathroom at the Evanston school Tuesday afternoon and was pronounced dead at a hospital Wednesday morning. Neither the medical examiner's office nor Evanston police returned messages Wednesday from The Associated Press. The boy's distraught mother, Angel Lewis, left a school district building hours earlier, not speaking directly to reporters but saying over and over, "He should have been accounted for. He should have been accounted for."

Police are trying to figure out how five South Philadelphia second-graders got their hands on heroin. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,487806,00.html A gym teacher at McDaniel Elementary School saw the kids, who ranged in age from 7 to 8, passing around what appeared to be drugs and called police, MyFOXPhilly.com reported. The substance later tested positive for heroin. The students were rushed to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where one parent told the station her child did ingest a small amount of the drug, but was going to be fine. "They gotta check them kids because there's so much stuff going on out here," said Latif Smith, who was picking up his grandchild from the school. "Thank God that the school dealt with the situation real quickly."

Ontario provincial police say they rescued two children and arrested 31 people in what they are calling the largest child pornography investigation in the province's history. Fox News story here Police said Thursday a 4-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl were rescued. Ninety-three charges were filed against 31 people following raids Wednesday. Provincial Police Commissioner Julian Fantino says the arrests are a direct result of improved tools to track down alleged child pornographers on the Internet. Police say the people arrested include three youths and a 60-year-old man. The charges include possession of child pornography and making child pornography.

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