teen returns from myspace to mideast, unbelieveable. Options

[*Statistik*]

DETROIT - A 16-year-old honor student from Michigan tricked her parents into getting her a passport and then flew off to the Mideast to be with a West Bank man she met on MySpace.com, authorities say.

U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded her to turn around and go home before she reached the West Bank. She returned home Friday.

Katherine R. Lester is a straight-A student and student council member, her father
said. “She’s a good girl. Never had a problem with her,” Terry Lester said.

Claimed to be going to Canada
Katherine disappeared Monday after talking her family into getting her a passport by saying she was going to Canada with friends, sheriff’s officials said. She apparently planned to visit a man whose MySpace account describes him as a 25-year-old from Jericho, Undersheriff James Jashinske said.

The FBI traced the teenager to a Wednesday flight from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Tel Aviv, Israel. At a scheduled stop in Amman, Jordan, U.S. officials persuaded her to return home, FBI agent Robert Beeckman said.

Television news footage showed Katherine waving as she walked across a tarmac at Bishop International Airport in Flint late Friday. She was taken to a private area to be reunited with her family.

Katherine apparently contacted the man from Jericho about three months ago, Jashinske said. Jericho, a city of 17,000, is a relatively calm area of the volatile West Bank.

MySpace forbids youngsters 13 and under from joining and provides special protections for those 14 and 15 — only people on their list of friends can view their profiles. Older users also have the option of restricting certain personal data so it can be seen only by people they have identified as friends.

Unclear if any law violated
Shawn Lester told The Saginaw News that her daughter has “never given me a day’s trouble. ... I just don’t understand with all these new laws protecting America how a 16-year-old kid could get out of the country.” She said her daughter never had a boyfriend and seemed to be content with that.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said he could say little about the girl because of privacy rules.

Katherine and her mother live in Gilford, a village about 80 miles north of Detroit in Michigan’s agricultural Thumb region. Her father lives in Grand Blanc Township.

The age of consent in Michigan is 16; Katherine turns 17 on June 21.

“I’ll be honest with you, we don’t know if a crime’s been committed,” Jashinske said Friday.

“I’ll be honest with you, we don’t know if a crime’s been committed,”

[*mipadi*]

Newsvine has an interesting article that humanizes the Palestinian man involved in this case.

The Palestinian man who befriended a 16-year-old Michigan girl through the MySpace.com Web site and invited her to join him in Jericho said he is heartbroken by U.S. authorities' decision to send her back home.

Abdullah Jimzawi, 20, told The Associated Press that his love for Katherine Lester, of Gilford, Mich., was pure and they planned to marry. The music buff, who spends at least 10 hours a day on the Internet, decried attempts to portray him as an Internet predator.

"We love the same things, the same songs and we have similar dreams. I fell in love with her because she is innocent and goodhearted. We found ourselves as soul mates," he told the AP on Sunday at his family's comfortable house.

Read more…

Clearly it brings up issues as to whether you can love someone—enough to marry her—that you don't know in real life, but at any rate, the article does put another slant on the story.

[absinthe]

Newsvine has an interesting article that humanizes the Palestinian man involved in this case.

Clearly it brings up issues as to whether you can love someone—enough to marry her—that you don't know in real life, but at any rate, the article does put another slant on the story.

i still think its a crock of shiet. -_-'' i hope this girl got the ass whoopin of her life.

Did anyone see that one news story where some dumbshit kid traveled to Iraq because he apparently had a project on the war on Iraq and wanted to gauge the situation in IRL. F.cking dumbass. He used his college money to pay for the ticket and got his ass dragged back by the US embassy. DUMBASS. I think those two should get married.