  In this article I report on new and updated measurements of the CP-violating
parameter beta (phi_1), which is related to the phase of the
Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) quark-mixing matrix of the electroweak
interaction. Over the past few years, beta has become the most precisely known
parameter of the CKM unitarity triangle that governs the B system. The results
presented here were produced by the two B factories, BaBar and Belle, based on
their most recent datasets of over 600 million BB events combined. The new
world average for sin(2beta), measured in the theoretically and experimentally
cleanest charmonium modes, such as B -> J/psi K0s, is sin(2beta) = 0.685 +-
0.032. In addition to these tree-level dominated decays, independent
measurements of sin(2beta) are obtained from gluonic b --> s penguin decays,
including B --> phi K0s, B --> eta' K0s and others. There are hints, albeit
somewhat weaker than earlier this year, that these measurements tend to come
out low compared to the charmonium average, giving rise to the tantalizing
possibility that New Physics amplitudes could be contributing to the
corresponding loop diagrams. Clearly, more data from both experiments are
needed to elucidate these intriguing differences.
