Beauty queen in Miss World standoff with China over rights

Anastasia Lin, a 25-year-old actress crowned Miss World Canada in May

Ottawa: Canada's Chinese-born Miss World contender said on Monday she is being denied entry by Beijing to compete in the international pageant because of her human rights activism.

Anastasia Lin, a 25-year-old actress crowned Miss World Canada in May, says China is blocking her from travelling to the resort of Sanya for the contest finals on December 19.

"They haven't sent me an invitation letter that I require to apply for a visa," she told AFP. Other contestants received their letter at the end of October. Lin said she believes Chinese authorities are acting deliberately, concerned that she will use the event, set to be televised live in China, as a platform to speak out on Bejing's rights record.

The beauty queen has actively denounced human rights abuses in China, both in film and in public comments, notably its persecution of practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned in mainland China. Herself a member of the group that emerged in the 1990s combining Taoist philosophy, meditation and qigong exercises, she testified in July at a US congressional hearing on religious persecution in China.

She told US lawmakers she "wanted to speak for those in China that are beaten, burned and electrocuted for holding to their beliefs; people in prison who eat rotten food with blistered fingers because they dare have convictions." She claimed Chinese security agents also coerced her father, who lives in China, into pressuring her to abandon her human rights advocacy.

"When I was crowned Miss World Canada, my father was so proud of me," she said. "He received hundreds of congratulatory messages. But within a couple days, my father's tone changed. He told me nervously that I must stop my advocacy for human rights in China, or else he would have no choice but to sever contact with me.

"I understand my father was visited by Chinese security agents, who forced him to apply pressure on me in this way."

When US President Obama got personal to push criminal justice reforms

US President Barack Obama with his daughters Malia and Sasha

Washington: As US President Barack Obama has toured the country in a recent push for a criminal justice overhaul, he’s worried publicly about the possibility of his daughters’ teenage rebellion.

He’s mused about his own drug use as a wayward youth. He’s told stories of being pulled over for speeding - and not always deserving the ticket.

In the national conversation about crime and punishment, Obama hasn’t been afraid to identify with the people being policed, as well as with the police.

It’s a remarkable shift in tone after decades of politicians worrying more about being labeled soft on crime than too hard on criminals. Previous presidents have talked tough on the topic and heaped praise on police. They’ve rarely woven in personal encounters with the law.

Obama, speaking to police chiefs in Chicago last week, praised police for their work but also called for “serious and robust debate over fairness in law enforcement.” He used himself as an example.

“There were times when I was younger and maybe even as I got a little older, but before I had a motorcade - where I got pulled over,” Obama told the crowd. “Most of the time I got a ticket, I deserved it. I knew why I was pulled over. But there were times where I didn’t.”

Such comments stand out from the history of presidential rhetoric in part because of Obama’s place in that presidential history. Questions of racial bias in the criminal justice system are not merely academic for him, noted Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for sentencing reform.

“He’s the first African-American president and his life experiences are different than others. He’s lived it - directly or indirectly - more than other presidents have. The empathy is there,” Mauer said.

But Obama’s comments also reflect the moment, Mauer noted. The current political conversation about crime, justice, race and violence in America largely has been driven by a course correction. A push to overhaul sentencing laws has bipartisan support in Congress. Police killings of unarmed blacks have sparked outrage about racism and use of force in policing. All of this is playing out while crimes rates overall are down.

The contrast is stark from the conversation in the late 1980s, when Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for president, was pounded by ads all but blaming him for the crimes of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who raped a woman while out on a weekend furlough.

By 1994, President Bill Clinton was pushing for “the toughest crime bill in history” in his State of the Union address, and urging Congress to help him “reclaim our streets from violent crime and drugs and gangs.” Clinton referenced his days as Arkansas attorney general to boost his bona fides on the issue.

“There was an inclination in the old days to get tough, or at least not be a leader on this (criminal justice) issue. Now I think it’s much safer politically. Nobody is going to lose an election based on crime policy like they might have once,” Mauer said.

Obama isn’t facing re-election, which allows him to venture into a political danger zone. He was the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, where he sat with a handful of inmates and discussed their complaints about the system. He planned a visit Monday to Newark, New Jersey, to focus on efforts by formerly jailed people to re-enter society.

At a recent town hall meeting on drug abuse, he raised his own history of drug use and mentioned his 14 and 17-year-old daughters.

“They’re wonderful girls, but they’re teenagers. They do some ... things. And I remember me being a teenager - and I’ve written about this - I did some ... stuff,” Obama said. “What I think about is, there but for the grace of God, and that’s what we all have to remember.”

At each of these events, which are aimed at keeping pressure on Congress to pass reform legislation, Obama notes the role of race in law enforcement.

Obama’s remarks haven’t gone unnoticed by his political opponents - and may still affect his party’s bid to hold the White House.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie raised Obama’s remarks to police last week at the Republican primary debate.

“When the president of the United States gets out to speak about it, does he support police officers? Does he stand up for law enforcement? No, he doesn’t,” Christie, a former prosecutor, said. “I’ll tell you this, the number one job of the president of the United States is to protect the safety and security of the American people. This president has failed.”

PIO, 11, sells secure passwords

New York: An enterprising 11-year-old Indian-origin girl in the US has started her own business on Sunday selling cryptographically secure passwords generated by dice rolls.

Mira Modi, a sixth grader in New York City, has her own website and generates six-word Diceware passphrases for her customers at $2 each.

Diceware is a well-known decades-old system for coming up with passwords. It involves rolling a dice as a way to generate random numbers that are matched to a long list of English words.

Those words are then combined into a non-sensical string that exhibits true randomness and is therefore difficult to crack. These passphrases have proven relatively easy for humans to memorise.

“This whole concept of making your own passwords and being super secure and stuff, I don’t think my friends understand that,” Modi said.

Modi’s mother, Julia Angwin, a veteran journalist and author of Dragnet Nation, employed her daughter to generate Diceware passphrases as a part of research for her book.

That is when Modi had the idea to turn it into a small business. “Now we have such good computers, people can hack into anything so much more quickly,” Modi said.  

Arctic attracting new military scrutiny

  In 2013, US President Barack Obama said the Arctic was "peaceful, stable, and free of conflict" as he laid out a national strategy for the region.

But just two years later, the rapid retreat of ocean ice cover, a newly emboldened Russia and the covetous gaze of nations keen to exploit new shipping lanes and vast mineral wealth are putting the Arctic's longstanding stability under pressure.

"The Arctic is a region that is getting more and more important," US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said on Friday as he visited troops at Fort Wainwright in the Alaskan city of Fairbanks, about 320 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle.

"It'll be important to the United States, it'll be important to other countries. It'll be important that we keep the peace and a rules-based kind of order."
Alaska and the Arctic are of key strategic importance for the United States.

Missile defense systems are here and planes can overfly the North Pole to quickly reach destinations across the Northern Hemisphere. But budget constraints mean the Pentagon is weighing plans to slash the presence of some 2,600 specialized cold-weather troops at a base in Anchorage.

Meanwhile, Russia launched elaborate Arctic war games this summer involving thousands of troops as it tries to bolster claims to the region's vast hydrocarbon and mineral wealth.

And when Obama visited Alaska the following month, five Chinese naval vessels were spotted in the Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska. It was believed to be the first time Chinese military ships were seen in the area.

Critics of the Obama administration say the United States is failing to grasp an urgent need to boost US military might in the Arctic region.

"Am I predicting a Russian invasion of Alaska next week? No. But does it make sense to be withdrawing our well-trained Arctic warriors in the face of this? Strategically it doesn't make any sense," Republican Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska said.

A 2013 Pentagon strategy document for the Arctic warned against promoting a high profile for the US military in the region, saying it could trigger escalating rivalries with other armies.

"There is some risk that the perception that the Arctic is being militarized may lead to an 'arms race' mentality," it said.

A new 'cold' war?

After Vladimir Putin began his third term as Russian president in 2012, he started trying to boost his country's dominance in its Arctic region. Sullivan this week read out a list of alarming statistics to the Senate Armed Services Committee about Russia's military commitment.

He said a new Russian Arctic command will include four new Arctic brigades, 50 airfields by 2020, increased long-range air patrols by Russian bombers and a total of 40 conventional and nuclear icebreakers, with 11 more planned.

Many of the bases will be refurbished Cold War facilities that had fallen into disrepair after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the United States only has two icebreakers and one of them is broken, Sullivan said. He suggested America needs at least four more.

"It's a joke," he said of the Pentagon's current Arctic plans. "It's not a serious military strategy document." More than 20 percent of the world's hydrocarbon reserves yet to be discovered are situated in the Arctic, the US Geological Survey has said.

US emphasis on Asia-Pacific

Carter's visit to Alaska is his first stop on an eight-day trip primarily focused on the Asia-Pacific region.

He will meet with leaders from more than a dozen nations across East and South Asia. Officially, his mission is to help push the next phase of America's "rebalance" to the vitally important region.

But a central theme of the trip is likely to be China's continued construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea and claims of sovereignty. Last week, the US military sent a destroyer within a 12-mile zone of one group of islets claimed by China, in a move that infuriated Beijing.

Carter will attend a US-South Korea security meeting in Seoul, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations defense ministers meeting in Kuala Lumpur.