When you’re a hot female spy, you can always rely on good ol’ sex appeal to get the job done - a lesson apparently not lost on 34-year-old Won Jeong-hwa, a North-Korean refugee who turned out to be an enemy agent.

According to prosecutors, Won confessed that she was a trained North Korean spy.

Originally, the suspect fled the North after stealing tons of zinc, which is a capital crime there. Won returned to the North in 1998 after hiding in northeastern China for years and later became a spy for North Korea’s National Security Agency, they said.

Her mission ― based in China ― was to kidnap defectors there for repatriation.

She later pretended to be an ethnic Korean Chinese woman and married a South Korean factory worker before coming to the South in 2001.

After her arrival, she reported herself as a North Korean defector and worked as a lecturer on anti-communism at military camps nationwide.

According to investigators, she maintained romantic relations with three to four officers and even shared an apartment with an Army First Lieutenant Hwang. The 27-year-old Hwang reportedly suspected that his partner was a spy, but ignored the fact and handed her classified military information.

Honestly, old people doing the horizontal bop isn’t all that odd. To be perfectly frank, I hope I’m spry enough to enjoy my golden years to the fullest…and compared to some of the wierd Japanese pr0n I’ve been subjected to in the past (’poop tempura’ should be first and last word on that account), old-people porn is downright mainstream.

Still, this TIME article about 74-year-old porn actor Shigeo Tokuda is fascinating in an ‘On Golden Pond Meets John Holmes’ kinda way. And seriously - you’ve got to love some of the names of these flicks…

Tokuda’s exploits have proved to be a goldmine for Glory Quest, which first launched an “old man” series, Maniac Training of Lolitas, in December 2004. Its popularity led the company to follow up with Tokuda starring in Forbidden Elderly Care in August 2006. Other series followed, and soon elder porn had revealed itself as a sustainable new revenue stream for the industry. “The adult-video industry is very competitive,” says Glory Quest p.r. representative Kayoko Iimura. “If we only make standard fare, we cannot beat other studios. There were already adult videos with Lolitas or themes of incest, so we wanted to make something new. A relationship between wife and an old father-in-law has enough twist to create an atmosphere of mystery and captivate viewers’ hearts.”

The OG (that’s ‘Original Gangsta’ for those not acquainted with urban patois) Shaolin Temple in China has launched an online outlet where fans can drop their hard-earned loot on a wide array of Shaolin goodies. The site, located at www.taobao.com, doesn’t look very Shaolin (let’s just say austerity is not the site’s prime design imperative) so I can see why some Chinese are a little peeved.

“Shaolin temple is getting less and less likeable,” one Internet user wrote in an essay posted on news site ifeng.com on Wednesday. “There’s a giant laughing buddha in Shaolin temple. If it saw what the temple is doing these days, I’m not so sure it would still be laughing.”

I have to say it seems a little on the chintzy side to me, too. Why don’t they go into something respectable, like gold farming?

This has ‘wrong’ written all over it - the UCLA Medical Center in California earned itself two $100,000 donations from a pair of Japanese gang members, one of whom is the boss of the Goto-gumi, a subsidiary of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate. The twosome received liver transplants somewhere between 2002 and 2004; an estimated 400 liver transplant patients died between those years. I trust you can figure out where this is headed…

A plaque on an entryway to a surgery office in the hospital reads, “In grateful recognition of the Goto Research Fund established through the generosity of Mr. Tadamasa Goto,” the Times reported.

UCLA confirmed the amount of the donation and also acknowledged it received a separate $100,000 donation from another man who the Times said had suspected gang affiliations. He donated in 2002, the year of his transplant. The Times did not name that man because it was unable to reach him or his attorney.

The Times’ original story cited several people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Goto had been barred from entering the United States because of his criminal history but with help from the FBI, he obtained a visa in 2001 in exchange for leads on potentially illegal activity in this country by Japanese criminal gangs, Jim Stern, retired chief of the FBI’s Asian criminal enterprise unit in Washington, told the Times. The FBI did not help Goto arrange his surgery with UCLA.

It’s worth noting that the Goto-gumi are the same gangsters that attacked Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami in 1992. Itami later committed suicide, an act which some believe was due to threats from the yakuza.