• Channel 4, UK: ‘I Am Slave,’ a TV drama on contemporary slavery in London will air on Monday as part of the channel’s “Slavery season.”: “From the director of Death of a President and the writer of The Last King of Scotland, and inspired by real-life events, I Am Slave is the extraordinary story of one woman’s fight for freedom from modern-day slavery.”

• CNET: Attorney Generals from 17 states want to ban Craigslist’s  adult ads. ”The attorneys general also accuse the company of a “blame the victim” mentality, claiming that it has been putting the onus on victims and law enforcement by criticizing them for not providing Craigslist with police reports to document alleged crimes.” Download a PDF of the letter here.

• Associated Press: Donald Tump files suit claiming copyright infringement by a Lithuanian “Mrs. Universe” pageant. “One of the main thrusts of the Lithuanian pageant was awareness of human trafficking, which continues to plague many East European countries. Participants held a discussion on the topic in Lithuania’s government, which helped sponsor the pageant, and presented a project, ‘Beauty Against Human Trafficking,’ as a possible idea to combat the problem.”

• The Epoch Times: A critique of China’s human trafficking policy: “China’s definition of human trafficking is narrower than the TIP Protocol. It does not prohibit forced labor. Also, Chinese law leaves out offenses committed against male victims.”

• Ace Showbiz: Dolph Lundgren plans to direct human trafficking film: “Lundgren is hoping his time in the spotlight will help him get his own movie off the ground – he has written a script for a picture called “Skin Trade” and is hoping to direct and co-star in the feature.”

• New York Daily News: Pakistan flood damage will take at least three years to fix: “Heavy monsoon rains in northwest Pakistan have put farms, roads and bridges underwater, crippling nearly one-fifth of the country.”

• Foreign Policy: Why doesn’t the world care about Pakistanis?: “Why has the most devastating natural disaster in recent memory generated such a tepid response from the international community? Something of a cottage industry is emerging to try to answer this latest and most sober of international mysteries.”

• Daemons Media: First Episode of the new season of NCIS: Los Angeles is titled “Human Traffic”: Synopsis: “When one of their own disappears while undercover, the team must work alongside LAPD on a case involving human-trafficking…”

The devastating flood that has ravaged Pakistan for almost a month, has left an estimated four million people homeless. An article in The Epoch Times last week warned that instances of human trafficking were likely to rise during these kinds of natural disasters.

In an email sent to Free the Slaves this morning, the Pakistani anti-slavery group, Green Rural Development Organization (GRDO) said “hundreds of thousands” of displaced flood survivors are living in camps around Pakistan—and that “Sindh is one of the worst affected areas.”

Read more about GRDO here.

Jamshoro city in the Sindh Province is where GRDO is based. The province is rife with human trafficking and debt bondage, even in the best of times. Experts predict the influx of displaced people in the region will likely be a target for traffickers. GRDO went out among campsites in the Jamshoro area, to assess the situation. They reported a lack of basic necessities amongst the displaced people—camps without toilets, drinking water or tents:

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Several celebrities—including Robert Pattinson (shown here), Sienna Miller, Kim Cattrall and Matt LeBlanc—gave artistic renditions of their handprints to The Body Shop, U.K., in support of the cosmetic chain’s anti-slavery campaign, “Stop Sex Trafficking of Children and Young People.”

See a slideshow of all the celebrity handprints here.

As part of this campaign, The Body Shop launched a petition calling for a “safe harbor” law that would protect victims of child sex trafficking from being charged with prostitution—and instead, given opportunities for rehabilitation through shelters and social services. The cosmetics chain also created the Soft Hands Soft Heart moisturizer cream and the Stop Sex Trafficking Bag for Life tote bag whose proceeds go to support the work of Somaly Mam and ECPAT.

(Editor’s note: Want to artistically declare your commitment to a slave free world? Write the word “Free” and snap a photo of it. Every Friday, we share a “Free” photo on our blog!)

Ron Soodalter, co-author (with Free the Slaves President Kevin Bales) of The Slave Next Door has posted a piece on Huffington Post, calling for support of the California Transparency in Supply Chains act. This bill would require California companies that make over $100,0000 a year to post what they are doing to ensure that slavery is kept out of their supply chain. The Slave Next Door investigates slavery within the US, and posits that slavery never really went away. The book is being released in paperback today, August 23—which just happens to coincide with the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade.

This past June, Free the Slaves, along with our partners in ATEST, endorsed this bill in a letter to the California Assembly Judiciary Committee. You can download our statement here.)

Here is Soodalter’s post from HuffPo:

In just a few days, we will commemorate the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade. Although most of us might be unaware that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade lasted some 350 years, we do tend to believe that slavery is a thing of the past — that the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment banished it forever from our shores and that America has been slavery-free ever since.

Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Most Americans are unaware of the extent to which both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens are victimized by human trafficking and various forms of slavery in our country today. And if we think that our own lives are untainted by the products of slave labor, we must think again. As Free the Slaves president Kevin Bales and I point out in the newly updated paperback edition of The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today (UC Press, 8/23/2010), there’s a very good chance that the clothes we wear and the food we eat have been tainted by slavery. Cotton, that symbol of bondage in the pre-Civil War South, is now being picked by slave labor on three continents, and marketed as clothing here at home. The orange juice and tomatoes we have with our burgers at lunch could very well have come from a Mexican or Guatemalan immigrant working under coercion. The rug we walk on at home could have been woven in India, Pakistan or Nepal by one of a hundred thousand child slaves, seven, eight, nine years old. Cell phones and lap tops require an element called tantalum; it comes from an ore that is mined in the Congo, often by slaves.

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• Texas Governor Rick Perry held a press conference yesterday calling for tougher laws against human traffickers, saying: “Human trafficking preys on the hopes and the dreams of the victims. They get promised better lives, not just for themselves but for their families. Unfortunately what awaits the victims is a life of confinement, hard labor, prostitution, physical and mental abuse, and in far too many cases an early death. Human trafficking is simply modern day slave trade.” Perry also says he will make $500,000 available to Texas cities and counties to help victims of human trafficking. Video of his press conference is here.

• CNN: Selling sex? Confronting Craigslist: This video report investigates the extent of juvenile sex trafficking done through Craigslist. A representative from DC-based anti-trafficking organization Fair Fund is quoted: “Most of the young people we work with who have been exploited online, they talk about Craigslist, they don’t talk about the other sites. Craigslist is the Walmart of online sex trafficking in this country… when they are being exploited by a pimp or a trafficker… the trafficker is keeping the money.”

• Guardian: Emma Thompson presents: Fair Trade: “If anyone doubts that young women are being brought to the UK and sold into sexual slavery, then this show based on the true experience of two women will change minds. Indeed, we’re all implicated…”

• Toronto Sun: Group fears child traffickers onboard Tamil boat: “OTTAWA—World Vision Canada is calling on the federal government to crack down on any child traffickers who might be on board the Sri Lankan Tamil boat that landed Friday in British Columbia. The aid agency says Canada is known as a haven for child trafficking, both as a transit hub and a destination country.”

Pakistanis sit on the floor of a U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter during an evacuation mission from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, August 4th, 2010. Photo by Horace Murray.

• The Epoch Times: Pakistani flood unleashes wave of human trafficking: “‘There are predators in this world who can take advantage of these terrible disasters and the chaos that ensues,’ said World Vision’s Connie Lenneberg on ABC Radio.”

• Hawaii, Alaska, among the “dirty dozen” US states with inadequate anti-human trafficking provisions. The list was compiled by anti-slavery organization (and like FTS, a member of Humanity United’s ATEST coalition) Polaris Project.

• The Christian Science Monitor: Columbia becomes new hub for human smuggling into US: “Colombia – long a starting point for much of the cocaine smuggled into the US – has now become a major hub for smuggling people from Africa and Asia to the US via Mexico.”

• BBC: Fear over Mali’s missing children: ”According to Mr Coulibaly, his four-year-old daughter Adjaratou was abducted from in front of his house in September last year. Four months later, in January this year, Adjaratou was spotted by a friend. She was with a German couple in central Bamako.”

• DispatchPolitics.com: Human traffickers supply nail-salon workers in Ohio: “What is described as a multimillion-dollar human-trafficking scheme is operating out of nail salons in Ohio, with immigrants from Southeast Asia – many of them illegal – being forced to work as “indentured servants” in exchange for passage to the U.S.”

Ron Soodalter is the co-author, with Free the Slaves President Kevin Bales of The Slave Next Door, exposing modern day slavery in the U.S. The book comes out in paperback August 23.

The American humorist Will Rogers once said, “It ain’t that we’re so dumb; it’s just that what we know ain’t so.”

Certain things we know to be true. We know that the South kept slaves, and the North fought a righteous war of liberation. We know that the slave trade was legal right up to the Civil War. We know that the Emancipation Proclamation freed all the slaves, and that the United States has been slavery-free ever since. These things we know—and none of them are true.

On the other hand, most of us do not know that slavery not only exists throughout the world today; it flourishes. Slavery is legal nowhere, yet it is practiced everywhere. With an estimated 27 million people in bondage worldwide, this is twice as many people as were taken in chains from Africa during the entire 350 years of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. In seeking to place blame, we’re tempted to point to the “emerging nations” as the culprits, whereas in fact slavery exists in such “civilized” countries as England, France, Spain, Italy, Israel, Ireland, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, China… and the United States. Most Americans are clueless that slavery is alive and flourishing right here, thriving in the dark, and practiced in many forms in places you’d least expect.

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• ABC News: Florida sting nabs 15 men looking for sex with children:”Nabbed at an undercover, surburban home rigged with cameras, the men now face a variety of sex-related charges. They drove from all over central Florida, Judd said, responding to ads placed on Craigslist or Internet chatrooms looking for men to teach children as young as 8 how to have sex.”

• Change.org: Reports of child labor rise in Namibia: “In general, the problem of child labor is slowly getting better around the world…So if child labor reports are on the rise in Namibia, is [sic] could mean a number of things. It’s possible that Namibia is just doing a better job of finding existing child labor, which would be a good thing. On the other hand, it could mean that for some reason Namibia is not benefiting from the overall decline in child labor.”

• The Independent: Police report into brothels dismissed as ‘amateurish’: “Of particular concern is the fact that no African victims of trafficking were found, despite a national shelter for trafficked women being at capacity with African victims.”

• The Independent: Revealed: The horrific trade in British children for sex: “information on the trafficking of young people for sex within Britain is so scant that experts say the first official figures confirming the trade…are just ‘the very, very tip of the iceberg’. Figures from the UK Human Trafficking Centre for April 2009 to March 2010 show only 38 Britons were registered as victims. This comes after a snapshot survey by the children’s charity Barnardo’s revealed it worked with 609 sexually exploited children last year, of whom 90 appeared to have been trafficked within the UK.”

• Murninghan Post: Pig Iron and Modern Day Slavery: Shareowner Activism Can Help Deter Human Rights Violations: “Nucor agreed to monitor the Brazilian government’s “dirty list” of employers found to use forced labor, and require its direct suppliers to certify that slavery was not involved.  Nucor also will require its top-tier Brazilian pig-iron suppliers to either join the Citizens Charcoal Institute (ICC), a regional industry monitoring group, or sign and adhere to theNational Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labor.”

• New York Times blog: Rolling Museum Casts Light on Current-Day Forced Labor: “The aim of the show, organized by a nonprofit workers’ group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, is twofold: to remind the public that people are sometimes still enslaved and to pressure produce companies to contract only with harvesters who treat workers fairly.”

Earlier this week, we reported that Nucor, the biggest steel manufacture in the U.S. and the the biggest buyer of Brazilian pig-iron, has agreed to take steps to eliminate slavery in its supply chain. Pig-iron is used by virtually every car manufacturer, including Ford and General Motors. The “Socially Responsible Investment” firm Domini worked, in part, with Free the Slaves partners Reporter Brasil and Comissão Pastoral da Terra to negotiate this agreement with Nucor. In an email today, Reporter Brasil President Leonardo Sakamoto sent us his thoughts:

“We expect good results on Nucor/Domini action. You can say that it’s an important step toward—finally—bring car industries to join the Brazilian National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labor. The Pact has been signed by important companies that promised to cut out business relationships with employers that used slave labour in their farms and charcoal camps. Companies like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Carrefour, Cargill, Bunge, Vale, Petrobras, Mahle, among others that represents 20% of Brazil’s GDP.

Until now, not a single representative from the car industry had signed the pact. And almost all car companies produce in Brazil, including Fiat, Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, Renault, Peageut, Scania and Volvo. It’s a challenge.”

Reporter Brasil conducted a comprehensive study that exposed Brazilian slave labor in the supply chains of several industries, including cattle ranching, coal, soy, cotton, lumber, corn, rice, beans, fruits, potato and sugarcane. With the results of this study, a “dirty list” of companies that use slave labor was created—and with it, the Brazilian National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labor. In its agreement with Domini, Nucor says it will only work with pig-iron suppliers that have either signed the Pact, or have joined the Citizens Charcoal Institute (an association of Brazilian companies that works to eliminate slavery in their supply chains).