Major child porn ring busted

A global network that used social networking sites such as Facebook to distribute child pornography has been smashed after a tip-off from New Zealand authorities, officials yesterday said.
Investigators caught 55 people in 20 countries who were distributing child sexual abuse pictures and rescued 12 abused children, some of them babies, officials said.
New Zealand's internal affairs department said some of the suspects apprehended in the investigation, codenamed Operation Laminar, were involved in abusing the children depicted in the images.
It said the operation began in October 2010 when the department found significant amounts of images of child sexual abuse were being exchanged on sites including Facebook, Socialgo and gru.ps.