A 19-year-old prostitute working in an apartment that doubles as a brothel said she has up to eight clients a day. Working in the southern boom city of Shenzhen, a special economic zone just north of Hong Kong, she told CNN she worries about getting AIDS, but has her own prevention measures. "I always use condoms or take an injection. The medicine can prevent sexually transmitted diseases," she said. "Some girls do not use prevention measures, but we don't talk ...

The number of swine flu cases is closer to reaching 30,000, the World Health Organization reported Friday, a day after declaring the start of a global pandemic. As of Friday, 29,669 cases of the H1N1 virus have been reported in 74 countries, the WHO said. The total number of deaths worldwide has reached 145. The latest figures come a day after the WHO said the virus was "unstoppable" and had become widespread enough to raise the global swine ...

A nervous calm settled over Peru on Monday night, three days after clashes between indigenous citizens and national police left more than 30 dead and 50 wounded. A 3 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew seemed to be holding, and both sides in the bloody episode said they wanted dialogue, not bullets. "The situation is much more tranquil," foreign minister Jose Andres Garcia Belaunde told CNN. "There's the possibility of entering into a dialogue." The violence started Friday when national police ...

The world's best female golfer, Lorena Ochoa of Mexico, has exclusively revealed to CNN that a meeting with Tiger Woods in her youth inspired her to become the player she is today. The pair first met at Tory Pines when both competing in the Junior World Championships, an event that Woods won a record six times and Ochoa has won five. The two then met again 15 years later at the Golf Writer's Association of America Awards where both were ...

Despite talk of economic "green shoots," more people around the world received pink slips last month. The jobless rate climbed to 9.2 percent in the 16 Eurozone nations of the EU, the highest rate in a decade. In the U.S. unemployment has hit a 25-year high of 8.9 percent and Hong Kong unemployment hit a three-year high of 5.3 percent in April. Meeting in Geneva this week, the International Labor Organization predicts global unemployment could eclipse 7 percent for the ...

Life imitated art in Paris on Saturday. A thief staged a brazen, daylight holdup in an upscale district of the French capital, stealing at least $8.5 million in jewelry from the prestigious Chopard store, police said. A spokesman for Paris police told CNN the man escaped after holding people inside the store at gunpoint. He provided no other details, but police investigator Olivier Lebon told CNN's Paris affiliate BFM-TV, "From the first elements we have, it would be a man ...

More than 20,000 civilians were killed in the final months of Sri Lanka's civil war -- nearly three times previous estimates, The Times newspaper in Britain reported Friday. The Times said it had acquired confidential U.N. documents that record nearly 7,000 civilian deaths in the no-fire zone up to the end of April. The toll then surged, the paper quoted unidentified U.N. sources as saying, with an average of 1,000 civilians killed each day until May 19, when the government ...

The atmosphere was tense in Cape Town on Friday after xenophobic violence that has left more than 40 dead in Johannesburg spread to South Africa's largest city. Clashes overnight resulted in one death and 15 arrests and the evacuations of 420 foreign nationals, a police official in Cape Town said. "Crowds of people went on a rampage, looting and carrying out acts of violence," said Cape Town Police Superintendent Billy Jones. They were charged with public violence and are to ...

The number of swine flu cases in Japan are escalating with surprising speed, and health officials are not sure why. The Japanese government on Wednesday confirmed the first two cases of the disease in Tokyo, the world's most populous metropolitan area. Meanwhile, the number of Japanese who have contracted the new flu has more than doubled since May 18 from 130 to 279, a rate of increase that is "without a doubt" the highest in Asia, says Peter Cordingley, ...

As sure as growth slides and employment tumbles, so cases of fraud rise during recessions. This time is no different. According to a report out today from The Network, a U.S. firm that runs compliance and corporate governance hotlines for about half of the Fortune 500, fraud-related calls amounted to 21% of all reports in the first quarter of this year, up from 14% in the same period in 2007. While reports of problems such as harassment, discrimination or ...