DEBBIE ROWE DROPS CUSTODY FIGHT

Michael Jackson's baby mama Debbie Rowe has sold her kids again -- this time squeezing about $4 million from her former mother-in-law in exchange for giving up her parental rights, a family source told The Post yesterday.

"It's one final payday," the disgusted Jackson confidant said.

The family isn't happy about the mega-payout -- which was set to be sealed in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon -- but they consider it a necessary evil, the source said.

"They felt it was like a ransom-type thing. [Rowe] jumped back into the picture because she wanted money," the friend said.

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Rowe -- a former dental assistant who bore a boy and girl for Jacko -- had forfeited her parental rights once before in exchange for big bucks.

After the birth of son Prince Michael, now 12, and daughter Paris, 11, she agreed to allow Jackson to raise them in exchange for a lump sum of $8 million, plus $900,000 annually for five years, the source said.

When Jacko was accused of child molestation in 2001, Rowe resurfaced to reclaim her rights. But she wound up giving her ex-husband full custody of the kids anyway -- in exchange for another $4 million plus a $900,000 home.

This time around, she is forfeiting her restored parental rights to Jackson's mom, Katherine, in exchange for yet another roughly $4 million, the family source said.

"This would be it. This takes away any rights she has to challenge custody at any given time," the source said.

"If something happens to Katherine, [Rowe] can't challenge the next [guardian], whether that be Diana Ross or someone in the family."

Neither lawyers for Rowe nor Katherine Jackson returned phone calls or e-mails.

While it had been thought that Rowe was demanding that Jacko's abusive father, Joe, have nothing to do with the kids, the source said there is no such language in the agreement.

Still, the family will keep him in check, the source said.

Joe Jackson is reportedly pushing his dead son's children -- also including Prince Michael II, a k a "Blanket," born to an unidentified surrogate using donor sperm -- to form a new group, The Jackson 3.

But "that's something the family would absolutely not tolerate," the source said.

The King of Pop's siblings are themselves involved in a venture that has become much more lucrative since his death.

Jacko's five remaining brothers were filming an A&E pilot for what they hoped would be a reality series about them launching a reunion tour.

While the five initially agreed to be paid a total of between $200,000 and $300,000 for the pilot, they now want to add footage of Michael's funeral into the mix -- and boost their take to "between $10 million and $20 million," the family source said.

Jacko's body -- still undergoing testing as part of a police probe -- was abruptly moved from its temporary resting place in a crypt at the famed Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills last week.

It now rests in a refrigerated unit in the basement of the cemetery's main building for security reasons, according to the site RadarOnline.com.

£60m Emmanuel Adebayor

MANCHESTER CITY are on the brink of completing a stunning £25million swoop for Emmanuel Adebayor.

Arsenal's Togo striker will be offered a five-year deal at Eastlands worth around £130,000 per week.

That all adds up to a staggering £60m investment.

City boss Mark Hughes moved quickly after pulling out of the race for Barcelona's Samuel Eto'o.

City's opening offer for Adebayor fell around £5m short but they are willing to agree a compromise to get the hitman, 25.

Adebayor has been eyeing a move to AC Milan even though he signed a new long-term deal at The Emirates worth £80,000 a week last summer.

Gunners boss Arsene Wenger could use the transfer funds to bring in Bordeaux's Morocco strike ace Marouane Chamakh.

Adebayor's departure is likely to be welcomed by some Gunners fans who see him as disruptive.

Indeed one supporters' group even put together a joke brochure - similar to the one produced by Michael Owen's agents - in a bid to see him leave North London.

But the City faithful will hope he can recapture the form of 2007-08, when he plundered 30 goals for the Gunners.

And if he does that then they will soon forget about Eto'o, whose dithering over his future saw the Premier League club pull out of a £25m deal on Friday.

Milan may be spurred into action by the latest developments.

But City - who jet out to South Africa tomorrow for a pre-season tour - are confident of landing Adebayor.

Gunners strike star Robin van Persie believes togetherness is the key to landing his first piece of silverware with Arsenal.

The Dutchman - who has committed his own future to the club - said: "We need to lift a trophy.

"Everyone needs to understand we have to do it together. If we do that we will."

Nervous China may attack India by 2012: Expert

A leading defence expert has projected that China will attack India by 2012 to divert the attention of its own people from "unprecedented"
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internal dissent, growing unemployment and financial problems that are threatening the hold of Communists in that country.

"China will launch an attack on India before 2012. There are multiple reasons for a desperate Beijing to teach India the final lesson, thereby ensuring Chinese supremacy in Asia in this century," Bharat Verma, Editor of the Indian Defence Review, has said.

Verma said the recession has "shut the Chinese exports shop", creating an "unprecedented internal social unrest" which in turn, was severely threatening the grip of the Communists over the society.

Among other reasons for this assessment were rising unemployment, flight of capital worth billions of dollars, depletion of its foreign exchange reserves and growing internal dissent, Verma said in an editorial in the forthcoming issue of the premier defence journal. In addition to this, "The growing irrelevance of Pakistan, their right hand that operates against India on their behest, is increasing the Chinese nervousness," he said, adding that US President Barak Obama's Af-Pak policy was primarily Pak-Af policy that has "intelligently set the thief to catch the thief".

Verma said Beijing was "already rattled, with its proxy Pakistan now literally embroiled in a civil war, losing its sheen against India." "Above all, it is worried over the growing alliance of India with the US and the West, because the alliance has the potential to create a technologically superior counterpoise.

"All these three concerns of Chinese Communists are best addressed by waging a war against pacifist India to achieve multiple strategic objectives," he said.

While China "covertly allowed" North Korea to test underground nuclear explosion and carry out missile trials, it was also "increasing its naval presence in South China Sea to coerce into submission those opposing its claim on the Sprately Islands," the defence expert said. He said it would be "unwise" at this point of time for a recession-hit China to move against the Western interests, including Japan.

"Therefore, the most attractive option is to attack a soft target like India and forcibly occupy its territory in the Northeast," Verma said. But India is "least prepared" on ground to face the Chinese threat, he says and asks a series of questions on how will India respond to repulse the Chinese game plan or whether Indian leadership would be able to "take the heat of war".

"Is Indian military equipped to face the two-front wars by Beijing and Islamabad? Is the Indian civil administration geared to meet the internal security challenges that the external actors will sponsor simultaneously through their doctrine of unrestricted warfare? "The answers are an unequivocal 'no'. Pacifist India is not ready by a long shot either on the internal or the external front," the defence journal editor says. In view of the "imminent threat" posed by China, "the quickest way to swing out of pacifism to a state of assertion is by injecting military thinking in the civil administration to build the sinews. That will enormously increase the deliverables on ground – from Lalgarh to Tawang," he says.

Indian student industry a study in shams and scams

AUSTRALIA'S lust for high-dollar Indian students has led to a thriving black market in sham marriages, forged English language exams and bogus courses, and turned a once-respected international education sector into a recognised immigration racket.

While the federal government and industry work to repair the damage caused by a recent spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, education agents say the violence has shone a light on a $14 billion industry riven with corruption.

An investigation into the overseas student industry has found thousands of Indians each year are being enrolled in dodgy courses at inflated prices and sold unrealistic dreams of cheap living and plentiful jobs.

The Australian has found operators across the Punjab, the main feeder community for Indian students in Australia, openly advertising "contract marriages" for aspiring immigrants to partners who have passed the mandatory English test for a student visa.

For an additional fee, agents will arrange bank documents and loans to satisfy Australian immigration law that demands students have the means to support themselves for the duration of their course.

Industry insiders say a flourishing market has also developed around the International English Language Test System, with students paying anything up to $20,000 for a good result.

Sonya Singh, a respected Indian education agent servicing the Australian market, says the myriad scams offered to foreign students each year have made "Australia a supermarket where people are buying stuff off the shelf".

"A good-quality Indian student notices a completely no-good student on the same flight as him to Australia and starts to wonder where he's going," she said. "Indians are so conscious of branding and Australia's reputation has suffered a lot because of the recruitment process.

"My own kids didn't want to study in Australia because they had a perception that poor-quality students go there and that if they told their friends they were going to Australia, they would be laughed at or thought of as lesser."

Corruption is now so rife among India-based education agents that Ms Singh says she has had to institute a new policy across all 24 of her agencies in India and Australia. "The first thing they must tell every student that walks through the door is 'We don't arrange funds and we don't arrange marriages'," shesaid.

"In Melbourne, we get lots of requests to arrange IELTS scores and work-experience permits (to satisfy new requirements that a student must have completed 900 hours of work before being granted permanent residency)."

Last week, police arrested three people in the Punjab city of Ludhiana for impersonation and forgery after they were found to be sitting the IELTS exam for aspiring foreign students.

A police spokesman told local media the scam was an "organised racket" and further arrests were expected.

Foreign students and a voracious Indian media have reacted angrily to the recent attacks, prompting government and industry to announce legislative reviews, investigations into student welfare and a 10-point plan to reform the sector.

A delegation of government, police and education officials will tomorrow) conclude an eight-city tour of India designed to assure agents, parents and an Indian government made nervous by intense domestic media coverage that everything possible is being done to ensure the safety of foreign students.

However, Ms Singh says the root cause of student tension is not the attacks but a deep disconnect between the life they were told would be theirs and the debt, loneliness and disenchantment they find is the reality.

Fifty-one foreign students committed suicide in Australia last year, a fair proportion of them Indians whose families had sold land and taken on huge loans in the hope their child's success would repay in multiples.

Robert Palmer, who runs the Overseas Students Support Network in Melbourne, says supplying students to Australia has become a gold mine for education agents.

While universities and TAFEs pay about 25 per cent commission on first semester fees, equivalent to about $1200-$1500 per student, private institutes will pay up to 30 per cent of the entire course fee, providing a clear financial incentive for agents to channel students their way, and even into courses in which they have no interest.

And there is no shortage of willing students. The Australian approached six young men on the streets of Jalandhar, three of whom said they aimed to be studying in Australia by the end of the year. Among them was Jaspreet Badhan, who said he hoped to get permanent residency in Australia after studying hotel management. He added that many of his friends were hoping to study overseas.

Harmeet Pental, South Asia director of the Australian university-owned IDP Education agency, believes the problem lies with Australia's immigration processes. "The US interviews every single student going there -- whether it's for two or five minutes -- and then makes a call on their fitness," he said. "For Australia, agents have a list of skill sets given by the high commission and of the documentation required. That's it. The process is driving the behaviour."

Ms Singh says the Australian government policy of giving priority visa consideration to students who train in fields listed on the Critical Skills Shortage register has turned "genuine" students away.

"Every time a new (critical skills) list comes out, education providers start introducing those courses."

But Colin Walters, the federal Education Department official leading the Australian delegation in India, says that should change following the Indian government's decision last week to regulate the agent industry.

"The sector has grown very rapidly and there are some criticisms about some providers, so we need a vigorous audit system so their outcomes can be carefully scrutinised," he said.

Woman fights off would-be rapist

A 46-year-old woman has courageously fought off a man who broke into her bedroom at night and tried to rape her.

The man, who Jane (not her real name) did not know, knocked on the door of her Preston unit, in Melbourne's north, at 9pm last Friday.

He was holding flowers and asked Jane, who lives with her adult daughter but was home alone, to see a woman with brunette hair, Darebin police Detective Sergeant Patrick Allen said.

"The man, who said his name was Joe, was told that he had the wrong address. He asked the female occupant if she would have coffee with him. She refused and closed the door," Det Sgt Allen told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.

Jane went to bed and fell asleep but was woken at 11pm by strange noises and the smell of alcohol and cigarettes.

She told reporters she turned on the light and found the same man on the floor in her bedroom, smiling at her.

Jane said he jumped on to her bed and tried to put a cloth over her mouth. He then put his hands around her neck and began choking her.

She fought back, kicking him off, biting his finger as hard as she could and screaming for help as loudly as she could. He dragged her by the hair and slammed her head into a wardrobe door several times but Jane kept on screaming and kicked him.

He then fled out the back door he had broken open to enter the unit.

"It was too much for him, the screaming, kicking, biting his finger, I tried to twist his finger and break it as well," she said. "I am very lucky to be here, very lucky I escaped and I am not in hospital. I have bruises, probably nothing broken. I had an x-ray of my hand and am waiting for the result."

Jane said she felt like she was fighting for her life and had to everything she could to survive.

"When I saw his hand over my neck, I couldn't breathe, I was choking. I knew I had to do something, anything," she said.

"I'm very fit and do a lot of physical activities. I know he was male, taller than me, a similar build, but I realised I had to try to fight this man.

"I worry about women in this situation, that live by themselves, that would not be not confident or weak or too shocked to act quickly. I think my quick action is the reason I am here."

Jane said the experience had changed her life and she was now terrified at the thought of being in her unit alone.

Det Sgt Allen said police were concerned about the "violent and brazen nature of the attack" and the man's failure to make any attempt to disguise himself.

He is described as Caucasian, 173cm tall, of medium build, short brown hair and blue eyes.
He was believed to have been wearing a blue-and-white baseball cap, dark blue top and blue trousers.