Over 100 advocates, including public health groups, LGBTQ organizations, civil and human rights nonprofits, and former sex workers, headed to Albany yesterday to encourage lawmakers to call on the New York State Senate and Assembly to pass legislation that would stop the confiscation and use of condoms as evidence of prostitution-related offenses.

Read More: New York's Condom Bait-and-Switch

The New York City Department of Health has been giving away free condoms since 1971, and condom distribution has been a centerpiece of its public-health program since the city created its very own condom in 2007. You can get free NYC Condoms virtually anywhere in New York City (there's even an app that uses GPS technology to find the closest distribution venue), and the Department of Health reports that it distributed 35.5 million condoms last year alone. Yet, as the Voice reported last month, police officers consistently confiscate condoms -- often times those very same NYC Condoms -- and prosecutors routinely use them as evidence to justify prostitution-related charges.

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As President Obama touched down in Colombia for the Summit of Americas yesterday, where he and 33 other world leaders would meet to discuss the economies of the Western Hempishere, his Secret Service agents might have been elsewhere. 
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The woman who was allegedly raped by Michael Pena, who was an NYPD officer off-duty, in August testified against him yesterday. The 25-year-old teacher explained that Pena asked how to get to the 1 train. After she did so, he still showed her he gun, brought her to an alleyway, forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, and raped and sodomized her. Pena's lawyer has said that while his client did assault the woman there was no sexual penetration based on DNA evidence. [NY1, NYT]

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If the book of choice for Upper East Side mothers is the salacious Fifty Shades of Grey -- now with its very own New York Times feature -- perhaps the Upper East Side story that's grabbing headlines should be Fifty Shades of Gristina. Anna Gristina, that is, the 44-year-old madam who ran a brothel out of an apartment in that neighborhood, and, as we've previously noted, had some notable friends. And the story keeps developing. Now, attention is focused on Gristina's connections to law enforcement officials, after a red flag went up following a picture in Friday's New York Post of Gristina with a bodyguard who was a former NYPD second-grade detective. The man, Sylvan "Sly" Francis, also had worked in the Manhattan DA's office.

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​With criticisms of stop-and-frisk practices on the rise, one piece of legislation is targeting a police practice that doesn't involve searches for drugs or weapons.

Lawmakers in Albany have sponsored a bill that would stop courts from using the possession of condoms as evidence of prostitution. Currently, if cops stop someone on the street that they suspect is a prostitute, search the person, and find condoms, those contraceptives can be used as evidence in criminal court that the person was in fact engaged in sex work.

Those working to stop this policy aren't just going after this practice because of what they see as a problematic argument -- that condom possession implies prostitution. The lawmakers argue that it's also a major health concern, because it discourages individuals from carrying condoms on them, which in turn promotes unsafe sex.

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Cash, money, gavel.

Anthony McCord, a 29-year-old pimp who's on trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court for rape and robbery has been denied his request to be qualified as an "expert witness" in pimping. McCord is acting as his own lawyer and had hoped to reveal to jurors the "relationships between pimps and hookers, so they could better evaluate the case." His qualifications for expert pimp-dom, via the Daily News:

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UPDATE: The site referred to in our original post below, as well as in the CNN report on the Phoenix Goddess Temple, cannot be confirmed as the website of the recently investigated temple in Arizona. Please refer to this post from the Phoenix New Times for information on the arrests and investigation.

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What, there were no hero cops today?

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Physics professor David Flory, who has taught at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University since 1969, also found the time to head a prostitution website that employed about 200 prostitutes serving around 1,200 clients, according to police. Flory was arrested over the weekend at a Starbucks in New Mexico, where he has a home in addition to his Manhattan residence. Flory was charged with 40 counts of promoting prostitution through the website Southwest Companions, a place "for prostitutes and johns to have a safe place 'to hobby,' as he called it, without fear of arrest by law enforcement," an Albuquerque investigations officer said. The website, meanwhile, is password protected, but still up.

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So Facebook is essentially a seedy motel in Times Square now, what with the spammers crowding your wall and all the prostitutes hanging out. Because according to a Columbia sociology professor, Facebook is the new Craigslist for hookers. So -- Facebook can't deal with arty nude drawings, but prostitution is A-OK?

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