Curbing Child-Trafficking in Intercountry Adoptions: Will International Treaties and Adoption Moratoriums Accomplish the Job in Cambodia?

Over the past two decades an enormous increase in intercountry adoptions has prompted international concern over the victimization of children, birth parents, and adoptive families. Recently, the United States has closely scrutinized babytrafficking in Cambodia. Reports of widespread buying, selling, and stealing of Cambodian infants for international adoption prompted the United States to place a moratorium on adoptions from Cambodia on December 21, 2001. In addition, the international community has drafted treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ( CRC ) and the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption ( Hague Convention ) to normalize and systematize the process of international adoptions. After ratifying the Hague Convention, the United States enacted the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000 ( IAA ). This Comment argues that current U.S. and Cambodian initiatives to stem the rise of fraudulent adoptions from Cambodia are ineffective. Although Cambodia has ratified the CRC, it has not made significant efforts to implement its provisions. International treaties, such as the Hague Convention, which are designed to prevent black-market activities and protect children, do not provide the Cambodian government with adequate incentives or logistical and financial support and are thus unlikely to be adopted. The IAA, once implemented, will not apply to adoptions from Cambodia because Cambodia is not a signatory to the Hague Convention. Moreover, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ( INS ) ban on adoptions from Cambodia temporarily masks, but will not cure, the black-market trade of infants from that country. The INS may prevent baby-trafficking for the duration of the moratorium, but without substantive changes to the adoption process in Cambodia, the moratorium does little to protect genuine orphans or future baby-trafficking victims. Instead, programs aimed at improving specific areas of the foreign adoption process, such as a national registry of adopted and adoptable Cambodian children and implementation of the Adjudicate Orphan Status First Pilot Program, are more likely to succeed in protecting parents and children from becoming victims of the black-market trade in children

Curbing Child-Trafficking in Intercountry Adoptions: Will International Treaties and Adoption Moratoriums Accomplish the Job in Cambodia?

Over the past two decades an enormous increase in intercountry adoptions has prompted international concern over the victimization of children, birth parents, and adoptive families. Recently, the United States has closely scrutinized babytrafficking in Cambodia. Reports of widespread buying, selling, and stealing of Cambodian infants for international adoption prompted the United States to place a moratorium on adoptions from Cambodia on December 21, 2001. In addition, the international community has drafted treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child ( CRC ) and the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption ( Hague Convention ) to normalize and systematize the process of international adoptions. After ratifying the Hague Convention, the United States enacted the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000 ( IAA ). This Comment argues that current U.S. and Cambodian initiatives to stem the rise of fraudulent adoptions from Cambodia are ineffective. Although Cambodia has ratified the CRC, it has not made significant efforts to implement its provisions. International treaties, such as the Hague Convention, which are designed to prevent black-market activities and protect children, do not provide the Cambodian government with adequate incentives or logistical and financial support and are thus unlikely to be adopted. The IAA, once implemented, will not apply to adoptions from Cambodia because Cambodia is not a signatory to the Hague Convention. Moreover, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ( INS ) ban on adoptions from Cambodia temporarily masks, but will not cure, the black-market trade of infants from that country. The INS may prevent baby-trafficking for the duration of the moratorium, but without substantive changes to the adoption process in Cambodia, the moratorium does little to protect genuine orphans or future baby-trafficking victims. Instead, programs aimed at improving specific areas of the foreign adoption process, such as a national registry of adopted and adoptable Cambodian children and implementation of the Adjudicate Orphan Status First Pilot Program, are more likely to succeed in protecting parents and children from becoming victims of the black-market trade in children

Axions in string theory — slaying the Hydra of dark radiation

It is widely believed that string theory easily allows for a QCD axion in the cosmologically favored mass range. The required small decay constant, f(a) << M-P, can be implemented by using a large compactification volume. This points to the Large Volume Scenario which in turn makes certain cosmological predictions: first, the closed string axion behaves similarly to a field-theoretic axion in the pre-inflationary scenario, i.e. the initial value can be tuned but one is constrained by isocurvature fluctuations. In addition, the volume represents a long-lived modulus that may lead to an early matter-dominated phase. Finally, the decay of the volume modulus to its own axion tends to overproduce dark radiation. In this paper we aim to carefully analyze the cosmology by studying models that not only allow for a QCD axion but also include inflation. Quite generally, limits on isocurvature fluctuations restrict us to relatively low-scale inflation, which in the present stringy context points to Kahler moduli inflation. As a novel feature we find that the lightest (volume) modulus couples strongly to the Higgs. It hence quickly decays to the SM, thus resolving the original dark radiation problem. This decay is much faster than that of the inflaton, implying that reheating is determined by the inflaton decay. The inflaton could potentially reintroduce a dark radiation problem since it decays to lighter moduli and their axions with equal rates. However, due its mixing with the QCD-saxion, the inflaton has also a direct decay rate to the SM, enhanced by the number of SM gauge bosons. This results in an amount of dark radiation that is consistent with present limits but potentially detectable in future measurements

Home Defence and the Sandys Defence White Paper, 1957

Long understood as the key document in Britain's Cold War history, the Duncan Sandys Defence White Paper of 1957 nevertheless has a largely forgotten context: home defence. This article argues that understanding this context allows important new conclusions to be drawn concerning the drafting, presentation and the reception of the document and the deterrent strategy it expounded. It argues that the Paper failed to establish a new doctrine for civil defence which reconciled the policy with the wider deterrent strategy. In doing this, the Paper presented a muddled policy to the public: one which failed to justify the reductions in civil defence provision but which stressed the destructive power of thermonuclear weapons. This had the effect of encouraging the critics of the government's nuclear strategy to flag up the absence of adequate civil defence measures and highlight the 'admission' that there was no defence against the hydrogen bomb

Thromboxane A2 is a key regulator of pathogenesis during Trypanosoma cruzi infection

Chagas' disease is caused by infection with the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. We report that infected, but not uninfected, human endothelial cells (ECs) released thromboxane A2 (TXA2). Physical chromatography and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry revealed that TXA2 is the predominant eicosanoid present in all life stages of T. cruzi. Parasite-derived TXA2 accounts for up to 90% of the circulating levels of TXA2 in infected wild-type mice, and perturbs host physiology. Mice in which the gene for the TXA2 receptor (TP) has been deleted, exhibited higher mortality and more severe cardiac pathology and parasitism (fourfold) than WT mice after infection. Conversely, deletion of the TXA2 synthase gene had no effect on survival or disease severity. TP expression on somatic cells, but not cells involved in either acquired or innate immunity, was the primary determinant of disease progression. The higher intracellular parasitism observed in TP-null ECs was ablated upon restoration of TP expression. We conclude that the host response to parasite-derived TXA2 in T. cruzi infection is possibly an important determinant of mortality and parasitism. A deeper understanding of the role of TXA2 may result in novel therapeutic targets for a disease with limited treatment options