Trafficking in Persons: International Dimensions and Foreign Policy Issues for Congress

[Excerpt] Trafficking in persons, or human trafficking, refers to the subjection of men, women, and children to exploitative conditions that can be tantamount to slavery. Reports suggest that human trafficking is a global phenomenon, victimizing millions of people each year and contributing to a multi-billion dollar criminal industry. It is a centuries-old problem that, despite international and U.S. efforts to eliminate it, continues to occur in virtually every country in the world. Human trafficking is also an international and cross-cutting policy problem that bears on a range of major national security, human rights, criminal justice, social, economic, migration, gender, public health, and labor issues. Although there is widespread support among policy makers for the continuation of U.S. anti-trafficking goals, ongoing reports of such trafficking worldwide raise questions regarding whether sufficient progress has been made to deter and ultimately eliminate the problem, the end goal of current U.S. anti-trafficking policies. This report explores current foreign policy issues confronting U.S. efforts to combat human trafficking, the interrelationship among existing polices, and the historical and current role of Congress in such efforts

Counting contact terms in B→VγB\to V\gamma decays

We clarify the origin and cancellation of contact terms in the weak annihilation amplitudes contributing to $B\to V \gamma$. It is demonstrated that the photon emission from the final-state quarks vanishes in the chiral limit of massless quarks. The contact terms in the QCD light-cone sum rule evaluation of the weak annihilation amplitudes are also discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, Latex, ws-p8-50x6-00.cls, to be published in Sergei Matinian Festschrift ``From Integrable Models to Gauge Theories.'', Eds. V. Gurzadyan, A. Sedrakyan, World Scientific, 200

Trafficking in Persons: U.S. Policy and Issues for Congress

[Excerpt] This report focuses on international and domestic human trafficking and U.S. policy responses, with particular emphasis on the TVPA and its subsequent reauthorizations. The report begins with a description of key TIP-related definitions and an overview of the human trafficking problem. It follows with an overview of major foreign policy responses to international human trafficking. The report then focuses on responses to trafficking into and within the United States, examining relief for trafficking victims in the United States and discussing U.S. law enforcement efforts to combat domestic trafficking. The report concludes with an overview of current anti-trafficking legislation and an analysis of policy issues

Indirect search for supersymmetry in rare B decays

QCD corrections to the gluino induced contribution to b --> s gamma are shown to be important in order to extract reliable bounds on the off-diagonal elements of the squark mass matrices.Comment: 4 pages including 2 postscript figure