FREE homepage on KhmerCity.net!
Archive for the 'Society' Category
Pages (10): [1] 2 3 4 5 6 » ... Last »
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...Did you know that there are over 4,000 photos on Khmercity.net?
We now have over 1,100 members on our fast-growing Khmer community. Join the fun!
Comments (0) - Leave a CommentRelated Entries
(5 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...
(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5) Loading ...
Opening statements are expected today in the downtown Los Angeles trial of a jailed ex-Marine Corps captain accused of raping girls as young as 9 years old while living in Cambodia.
Michael Joseph Pepe, 54, is charged with seven counts of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in foreign places. The federal law that Pepe allegedly broke allows the prosecution of those accused of engaging in child sex tourism.
Pepe faces up to 30 years’ imprisonment if he’s convicted. He has pleaded not guilty to all counts.
Prosecutors allege that Pepe raped seven preteen girls at his Phnom Penh home beginning in the late fall of 2005 and ending shortly before his June 2006 arrest by the Cambodian National Police. In February 2007, he was extradited to Los Angeles — the last U.S. city he spent time in before returning to Cambodia after visiting his daughter.
The alleged victims are expected to testify at his trial.
Pepe, who moved to Cambodia in 2003 and married there, allegedly paid a prostitute a finder’s fee to bring him young victims, typically between the ages of nine and 15.
He also paid the young girls’ families a fee and monthly stipend for access to the girls for sexual gratification, prosecutors said. In one case, the prostitute admitted receiving $10 for finding a young girl, whose family received $300, prosecutors said.
Agents who searched Pepe’s home found rope and cloth strips used to restrain the victims, prosecutors said. They also found mind-altering drugs, condoms, Viagra, children’s clothes and newspaper articles about pedophiles, prosecutors said.
Pepe’s computer contained hundreds of images of nude and semi-clothed children, in some cases bound, performing various sex acts, prosecutors claim.
One witness expected to testify in Pepe’s defense is Dr. Michael Maloney, a defense witness in the 1980s McMartin Preschool child molestation trial.
In that trial, Maloney criticized police interview techniques of the alleged victims. He testified that they elicited erroneous information that the children had been sexually abused.
Related Entries
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ... (7 votes, average: 4.14 out of 5) Loading ...Oudam’s Comments:
Granted, this video takes a one-sided and simplistic view at Indochinese history and itself borders on racism. There is no way that red-blooded Khmer people are going to rally around the expansionist aspirations of Ho Chi Minh. He may be a hero to some Vietnamese. He’s not our hero.
The video does, however, make the point that as pawns in the game of chess played by much more powerful external forces, much of our history was beyond our control.
Perhaps the best way to understand the Cambodian tragedy is to liken our country to ant mound lying in the path of warring elephants. When the giant elephants fight, it’s the tiny ants that bear most of the destruction. No matter which way the ants run to try to avoid the conflict, they may get crushed anyway because they are simply too small to cover much ground.
So, the most important lesson to take from the video is not to hate the “white devils” for what they had done to us, but to understand the pettiness of our internal conflicts and to work together toward greater Khmer unity, strength, reconciliation, sovereignty and prosperity.
Discuss this topic on Khmercity.net
Related Entries
Pages (10): [1] 2 3 4 5 6 » ... Last »
