Category Archive

Police are reporting that a 27-year-old transgender student at CSU Long Beach was slashed in a men’s room on campus earlier this month.

Although the attack took place ten days ago, the university only made it public this Friday.

The student’s assailant addressed him by name before the attack, asking him whether he was that person. The victim of the assault did not recognize his attacker, but was able to provide police with information enabling them to create a sketch.

Police have not said whether they are investigating the incident as a hate crime. The Long Beach Post has, however, reported that a Facebook entry on the incident claimed that the attacker carved the word “IT” into the victim’s chest.

The attacked student was treated for his injuries in a local hospital and released that evening.

Cal State Northridge Economics professor Kenneth Ng has shut down his website Big Baby Kenny in the wake of the site’s outing in the media, but the pages live on in Google’s cache.

The site, which promised to show readers “how to get banged better, cheaper, and more efficiently in the Thailand Girl Scene,” has been known to university administrators for months. Ng was initially defiant when approached by reporters last week, but backpedaled in the face of public outrage. University provost Harry Hellebrand released a statement on Friday thanking Ng “for his reflection and removal of the site.”

Although Ng now says he “never encountered any child prostitution” in Thailand, and denies that his site was a sex tourism guide, his own writings, now deleted, reveal these claims to be lies. In his website, Ng not only made a number of clear references to encountering girls whom he believed to be underage at places of prostitution, he provided his readers directions to, and GPS coordinates of, those locations.

Warning: The excerpts provided below include depictions of child prostitution and the physical abuse of women.

Pages that have been taken down include…

Read the rest of this entry »

Let us know what you’re doing, what you’re planning, what you’re reading!

Why Smonday? Because Sunday isn’t fabulous enough on its own.

A professor at Cal State Northridge has been revealed as the editor of a website that caters to men who travel to Thailand as “sex tourists” seeking prostitutes.

Kenneth Ng, a tenured associate professor of Economics, is himself a frequent sex tourist. He defends his site as constitutionally protected speech, but a former Justice Department expert on sex trafficking and child abuse says that federal law prohibits “enticing or coercing” individuals to travel internationally in search of prostitutes.

Ng started the “Big Baby Kenny” site after he was banned from blogging at a Thai website for encouraging men to seek sex from the “emotionally vulnerable girls” who congregated at a particular Buddhist shrine. (In that same blogpost, which he has posted on his site, he notes that “bruised up girls mired in abusive relationships” are among those who go to the shrine, if that’s your “personal preference.”)

CSU Northridge administrators say that there is nothing they can do about the situation without “evidence that [the site] infringes upon the work he does at the university itself.”

Inside Higher Ed, where most of the above info comes from, has a thorough rundown of the story.

Berkeley’s student government, the Associated Students of the University of California, is meeting tonight for what should be the final consideration of a resolution calling on the university to divest its holdings in two corporations that supply the Israeli military.

ASUC first passed the resolution last month, but it was vetoed by the association’s president. An attempt to override that veto failed in an all-night meeting last week, a meeting which ended with a further two hours’ debate on a motion to reconsider that decision.

Last week’s meeting was moved twice to accommodate the large numbers of students and others who wished to comment on the resolution. Reports on Twitter suggest that tonight’s meeting may be being held in closed session to speed debate.

I’ll be following this story as it develops, and bringing you more as I get it.

Late night update | At about midnight California time the Daily Cal student newspaper reported that the closed-session rumors were true — the ASUC senate voted without opposition to go into closed session to consider the veto override at 8:40 PM.

It is now 2:30 AM in California, and there has been no further word about the senate’s deliberations on the Daily Cal site. Similarly, Twitter — which saw frequent updates from the senate discussions throughout last week’s deliberations under the #UCBdivest hashtag — has been essentially silent on the subject since tonight’s meeting began.

Questions have been raised about the legitimacy of the closed session debate under the ASUC constitution, raising the possibility that tonight’s decision, whatever it may be, could be challenged yet again.

Thursday morning update | It’s not at all clear what happened at last night’s meeting — the Daily Cal hasn’t updated their story since midnight, Google News and Google Blog searches turn up nothing, and if anyone’s talking on Twitter, I can’t find it. But the website of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace is reporting that supporters of divestment will bring their resolution forward yet again next Wednesday, April 28.

Looks like they’re headed to round four.

Sunday update | The Daily Cal and the Berkeley Daily Planet have both published stories on Wednesday night’s meeting, and though some details are still fuzzy, the basic outlines of the situation are clear.

Supporters of divestment moved on Wednesday to suspend the rules to allow a new version of their resolution to be considered next week, in an attempt to address opponents’ criticisms, but their motion failed to receive the necessary two-thirds margin. Senators plan to take up the original bill one last time on April 28, at ASUC’s final meeting of the semester.