Congressman Questions Whether Dialogue with China ?Will Improve a Single Life?

ICC Note: Despite drastic improvements in the way Christians and other religious minorities are treated in China over the past thirty years, conditions remain alarmingly difficult thanks to a huge number of restrictions on religious freedom and ongoing efforts to control the growth of Christianity. ICC estimates that many hundreds, if not thousands, of Christians remain interned in labor prisons for refusing to join the government controlled "Three-Self Church." In this Press Release, Congressman Frank Wolf of Virginia questions whether the annual U.S. - China human rights dialogue currently being conducted will actually improve the life of a single Chinese individual, or if it is mere rhetoric. ?

7/31/2013 China (Congressman Wolf) - Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission and longtime leader on the issue of international human rights and religious freedom, today criticized the Obama Administration?s approach toward China, saying that too often, high-level bilateral discussions ? and even the annual human rights dialogue ? are ?cloaked in secrecy? and fail to produce discernible improvements in the deplorable human rights situation in China.

In a statement, which was submitted to the Congressional Record today, Wolf urged the administration to publicly prioritize human rights and religious freedom as part of its wider foreign policy agenda.

The dialogue, which is being held today and tomorrow in China, began after the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, where Chinese government officials employed martial law during peaceful student-led protests in Beijing.

Wolf said that according to Human Rights Watch, past human rights dialogues with China ?have been largely a rhetorical shell, lacking in accountability, transparency, and clear benchmarks for progress.?

In his statement, Wolf talked at length about the persecution of people of faith, the repression of political dissent and the brutal labor camps employed by the government.

He also described the ?Great Firewall? in China, which censors so-called ?offensive? speech on the Internet.

?It is estimated that China employs between 30,000 and 50,000 special Internet police,? he said. ?As far back as 2008, Amnesty International rightly noted that ?In China, the Internet has become a new frontier in the fight for human rights.? And yet the Obama Administration has paid mere lip-service to Internet freedom, boasting in speeches of the priority it places on the issue when in fact, nearly all of the money they?ve spent on Internet circumvention has been as a result of congressionally mandated funding targeting closed societies, and the State Department has actually sought to redirect the funding toward less threatening research initiatives as opposed to actual hard-hitting circumvention, which poses a real threat to authoritarian regimes.?

?Too often, it seems that this administration?s posture vis-?-vis human rights is one of caution to the point of silence,? he added. ?Silence in the face of China?s abysmal human rights record is indefensible.?

Wolf concluded his statement with a warning: ?Many have predicted that the 21st century will be the Chinese century, but absent dramatic reform at the heart of the Chinese government, such Chinese ascendency is deeply problematic, and America must be clear-eyed about its implications. This administration has been anything but.?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 31st, 2013 at 9:27 am and is filed under Asia, China, Countries, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Source: http://www.persecution.org/2013/07/31/congressman-questions-whether-dialogue-with-china-will-improve-a-single-life/

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Autographer wearable camera launches tomorrow priced at ?400, we go hands-off

It's been a long time coming, close to a year, but OMG Life's clippable, er, lanyard-able life-logging camera will be available to buy tomorrow. The Autographer launches in the UK (where the company's based) and most major European countries on July 30th, priced at a rather prohibitive £400 (we're still confirming a US dollar price, but a later launch has been promised) and pitching itself as "the world's first intelligent wearable camera." We'd position it as an addition to your smartphone and/or standalone camera, like Lytro or the incoming Memoto, for those that have the cash.

There's a curious appeal to it, helped by an attractive design that's predominantly plastic. We spent over three days wondering around, sometimes with it on a leather lanyard (included) around our neck, sometimes clipped to our belt or shirt pocket. For better or worse, it's a truly hands-off camera: there's really no way to frame or even time your captures. The Autographer itself chooses when to take a shot using its five sensors (monitoring changes in color, temperature, magnetometer, motion and acceleration), which means there's a hefty dose of luck involved in how your photos turn out. See whether Lady Luck was shining down on us (the sun certainly wasn't) and check out our sample images below and first impressions after the break.

Gallery: Autographer hands-on

Gallery: Autographer sample shots

Filed under: Cameras, Wearables

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This Life-Size Statue of Liberty Replica Shows Her Pre-Patina Shine

The last time France saw the Statue of Liberty, the copper sculpture was in pieces, being shipped to New York for permanent installation. But this summer in Paris, Vietnamese artist Danh Vo has installed his recreation of the iconic monument in 30 copper fragments, each an exact replica of the original?right down to her reading material.

Read more...

Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-life-size-statue-of-liberty-replica-shows-her-pre-934351990

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K-State wins grant to improve food security in Africa

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Transgender troops still serve in silence

As the military begins to embrace gays and lesbians, one group feels left out: transgender troops.

These men and women weren?t even a blip on the nation?s radar until former Navy SEAL Team 6 member Chris Beck revealed in a memoir released last month that he had become Kristin Beck, a woman. It?s unknown how many transgender troops are serving in the U.S. military, largely because they?d get kicked out for coming out. About 700,000 Americans in a population of more than 300 million are transsexuals, according to a 2011 study by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Another milestone in June: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel seemed to sanction their service when he addressed a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride (LGBT) event at the Pentagon. But there was a catch: civilians can switch sexes and keep their defense jobs. Troops can?t. Unlike allies Great Britain, Israel and Canada, the U.S. military disqualifies transgender troops for health reasons.

?I was at the Pentagon when Secretary Hagel was saying we?re here to celebrate LGBT service,? says an Army sergeant who is becoming a man. The sergeant spoke on condition of anonymity to stay in the service.

?I?m kind of looking around for the rest of Ts,? the soldier says, referring to transgender troops. Other troops could celebrate marriage equality, the sergeant says, but not the transsexuals.

Transgender pride extends to Defense Department civilian employees such as Amanda Simpson, a senior Army official who was a man. Simpson, named to her post by President Obama, is the highest-ranking openly transgender official. She declined to comment for this story.

That pride stops with troops transitioning to the opposite sex.

For now, the Pentagon has no plans to cross that line, says Navy Lt. Cdr. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman. They?re medically disqualified, according to Pentagon regulations. Army regulations, for instance, prohibit transvestism.

Advocates for transgender people say the prohibition has no merit.

?We shouldn?t single out transgender individuals,? says Anne Speckhard, a psychologist who co-wrote Warrior Princess with Beck.

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, a non-profit advocacy group in Washington, says all that should matter for the military is the ability to do the job.

Beck, in an interview, says the Pentagon should act soon to include transgender troops in its ranks or risk having the policy dictated by Congress or the courts.

?It should not be emotional,? she says. ?It needs to be well thought out.?

Beck acknowledges that the transition to a woman involves ?a lot of changes? physically and emotionally that would make it difficult to serve.

Beck suggests the military experiment with a pilot program that would give transgender troops a year to make the transition to the opposite sex. Their year of service, while under medical care, would be away from their home unit, perhaps at a military hospital. Once completed, troops would be committed to serving two more years of service to compensate for the cost.

Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand, the New York Democrat who chairs the personnel panel on the Senate Armed Services Committee, believes transgender troops should be able to serve if they?re capable of completing their missions, says Glen Caplin, her spokesman.

Here are the stories of two soldiers currently serving while in transition to the opposite sex. They spoke on condition of anonymity so that they can keep their jobs. USA TODAY confirmed their identities through public records and another servicemember who is in contact with them.

Rejected by family

The sergeant attended the LGBT event.

The sergeant joined the Army Reserves as a lesbian. As a Southerner, a black woman and a member of the Baptist church, she kept her sexuality secret and her sense that she was a man buried even deeper. The sergeant?s age is ?in the 20s,? declining to be more specific.

?I joined because I wanted to serve,? the sergeant says. ?I didn?t think of gender or the sexual-identity piece. My father was a soldier. I wanted to come home in a uniform like him.?

After a deployment to Iraq in 2011, the sergeant decided it was time to become a man.

?I was ready to match my outward appearance with my inner being,? the sergeant says. ?I wanted to start to transition. I knew that it was going to be a battle with my family and even my friends. But the worst came when I had to bypass my integrity ? lie to my soldiers and not bring my whole self to work.?

The transition began with working out, eating differently, bulking up. Then, under medical supervision, the sergeant began taking synthetic testosterone, the male hormone. The sergeant plans to have a mastectomy to remove breast tissue but is uncertain about surgery to change genitals.

As a reservist, the sergeant has a civilian job and goes to work dressed as a man. For Army drills on weekends, the woman must emerge.

?It?s kind of a double life,? the sergeant says. ?In my civilian life everyone just knows he, just him. I go in with my facial hair, and I?m just a guy. When I put the uniform on, I shave. The feminine voice comes out if I can. Whatever I can muster that?s feminine. That?s when the sergeant who?s supposed to be female comes out.?

The sergeant maintains femininity for physicals and has passed them as she has not had surgery. The sergeant has a girlfriend who is ?fine with it,? though they do struggle sometimes.

?She?s straight,? the sergeant says. ?We have a heterosexual relationship. She did not ask for any of this. It?s been a patient battle.?

For now, the fight to stay in the Army remains quiet. The sergeant hopes some day soon that the prohibition against transgender troops is lifted. For now, the soldiers rely on each other for support.

?Female to male, we have a band of brothers,? the sergeant says. ?There?s at least 300 of us connected. We talk quite often to each other. We serve as battle buddies in a battle that nobody knows we?re fighting.?

Taking on challenges

The second soldier, a lieutenant colonel, is a combat veteran, 45, with a background in special operations. He reports for duty by day in a man?s uniform.

At night and on weekends: skirt, heels, makeup.

?I might be a 45-year-old guy mentally, if I choose to think like that,? the lieutenant colonel says. ?But as a girl I?m like 16. Things I never learned as a little girl growing up that Mamma would have taught me in terms of all the feminine virtues.?

The choice is shattering the lieutenant colonel?s life. The lieutenant colonel is going through a divorce and has moved away from his children. Retirement from the Army looms in a few months. The lieutenant colonel acknowledges that his performance as an officer has suffered. Troops in transition might need to leave or take a break from service, the lieutenant colonel says. Once they?ve switched genders, they should be able to do the job.

?Three monstrous stresses: No. 1, transitioning from male to female,? the lieutenant colonel says. ?No. 2, transitioning out of the military and wondering what I want to be when I grow up. I just never realized that that was housewife. The third, the divorce.?

How does the lieutenant colonel cope?

?I drink a lot.?

For years, the lieutenant colonel has repressed his femininity.

?I always felt uncomfortable in my body and I didn?t know why,? the lieutenant colonel says. ?I was deathly afraid of being gay. That was the biggest sin you could have in my family. One thing that my dad hated more than anything. I was never allowed to have a G.I. Joe because my dad wouldn?t allow dolls in the house. I had no sisters. It was an all-male, all-the-time environment.?

Throughout his career, the lieutenant colonel chose the most physically demanding jobs and succeeded at them. He got married, had kids, deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The lieutenant colonel considers himself a conservative and ?constitutionalist? who viewed ?don?t ask, don?t tell? as illegal and was pleased it was repealed.

Since February, the lieutenant colonel has been leaving his one-bedroom apartment dressed as a woman and has started to use a woman?s name.

The lieutenant colonel would like to lose his baritone, but surgery to lose his penis requires more thought.

He finds some solace in his new identity.

?I was always afraid that I was gay,? the lieutenant colonel says. ?Now I know that I?m not. I?m a straight woman. That?s actually nice for me to feel. Not that there should be any stigma attached to any other set of gender identities or sexual preference. But I feel very comfortable that I?m a straight woman. Sits very well.?

Source: http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20130723/BENEFITS/307230023

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Here's why Intel announced a custom silicon business today - GigaOM

In what looks like a noteworthy shift for the chip giant, Intel says it is inside the custom silicon business, showing off its current efforts big customers, and its future plans at a media event Monday. The event featured Intel?s webscale and cloud executives Jason Waxman (pictured) and Diane Bryant discussing how Intel is now offering custom chips for customers: something that would have been unfathomable even a decade ago at the storied company.

Waxman detailed how Intel made a custom chip for eBay and said it was doing the same with Facebook. Customized chips are gaining ground as data centers grow larger and as efficient computing becomes paramount for companies at which compute is often the primary cost associated with their services. Companies are building out custom servers for different workloads and eyeing the use of different chip architectures ? from ARM to GPUs.

This represent a huge threat to Intel, which has struggled to release a credible massively parallel GPU-style chip (the Xeon Phi is what it has on offer today) and seemed to miss out on the benefits of using smaller, low-power cores for certain webscale workloads until it was pulled into the market by SeaMicro, a startup later bought by AMD. Intel?s biggest advantage in chips has historically come from its ability to churn out billions of them as cheaply as possible thanks to its massive economies of scale and huge investments in factories from the profits of the PC industry. Customization breaks that model.

Andrew Feldman, GM and Corporate VP, AMD Structure 2013 (c) 2013 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Yet as rivals AMD and ARM tout the benefits of building custom chips it makes sense that Intel is trying to jump on that bandwagon while not upsetting its own economic advantage.

Basically Intel is trying ? with its Xeon, Atom and Phi families of different x86-based processors ? to offer a modular set of capabilities that can be integrated onto a system on a chip (Intel touted its SoC capabilities today as well). But it?s unclear how customized Intel is willing to be for customers, especially when compared to the custom chips its rivals are making.

For example, AMD this year formalized a custom-silicon business that is making the chips inside the Playstation and the Xbox, combining different CPU cores with a graphics processor in a system on a chip. AMD said that the custom silicon business should make up 20 percent of its revenue this year.

It?s also not the same level of customization that GM and Corporate VP at AMD Andrew Feldman envisioned when he spoke of customers choosing to create custom chips using ARM cores. In that case one can build a unique ARM-based core for a customer.

Inside Facebook?s Lulea data center, the servers are Open Compute but the chips are not.

So what exactly is Intel offering? In an interview in May with The Register, Waxman mentioned its custom efforts, confirming that it was etching different features or instructions onto the silicon. As writer Timothy Prickett Morgan noted, this is not business as usual for the chip giant. From the story, and attributed to Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel?s Cloud Infrastructure Group:

?As far as the etching goes, we have done different things for different customers, and we have put different things into the silicon, such as adding instructions or pins or signals for logic for them. The difference is that it goes into all of the silicon for that product. And so the way that you do it is somebody gives you a feature, and they say, ?Hey, can you get this into the product?? You can?t do something that takes up a huge amount of die, but you can do an instruction, you can do a signal, you can do a number of things that are logic-related.?

But as far outside of Intel?s comfort zone this step might be, Feldman, who was the former CEO at SeaMicro, the startup that pulled into the microserver market, downplayed the impact of Intel?s change of heart. After I asked his thoughts on the topic he wrote in an email:

?These are minor tweaks of existing parts, predominantly, binning and soft strapping. What AMD did for the gaming business is create a fundamentally new chip?custom cores and different combinations of cores on a chip. What ARM enables is unique cores for a customer ? The Intel model can?t do that. What they can do is try to make a superset chip, and enable and disable features for different customers ? this is what they have always done.?

Even Patrick Moorhead, an industry analyst, questioned the depth of customization that Intel was offering, pointing out that it was very different from the customization that AMD is offering in its business.

When I asked for details from Intel, the company offered me an interview later this week with Waxman. So stay tuned.

While I wait, here?s why Intel talked about its custom chip business today. If Intel is really doing custom chips, it will do so because it has no other choice than to meet the needs of webscale customers, who are now in the position to demand changes in their data center infrastructure ?something the server vendors have already discovered. If Intel is just spinning small variations made by turning off features on a chip using software, it?s because it?s scared the competition will convince data center operators that the competition has something Intel doesn?t.

Source: http://gigaom.com/2013/07/22/heres-why-intel-announced-a-custom-silicon-business-today/

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