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Authorities in the Chinese region of Xinjiang are using predictive policing and human surveillance to gather micro clues about Uyghurs and empower neighbourhood informants to ensure compliance at every level of society, according to a report.

The research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) thinktank detailed Xinjiang authorities expansive use of grassroots committees, integrated with Chinas extensive surveillance technology, to police their Uyghur neighbours movements and emotions.

The findings shed further light on the extraordinary scope of the Chinese Communist partys grip on the largely Muslim and purportedly autonomous region, going beyond police crackdowns and mass arrests to ensure total control.

The report also revealed the identities of officials including two former visiting fellows at Harvard University and the organisations that make up the political architecture of the years-long crackdown by Beijing on Uyghurs, which rights organisations say has included the detention of an estimated 1 million people in re-education camps.

The report said the nominally voluntary local committees mirrored the Mao-era revolutionary neighbourhood committees, with daily meetings delegating home visits and investigations and assessing whether any individuals require re-education.

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However, according to ASPI, leaked police records showed the modern-day committees also received micro clues from Chinas predictive policing system, the integrated joint operations platform (IJOP). Such clues could include someone having an unexpected visitor or receiving an overseas phone call, and would prompt inspection visits modelled on neighbourly interactions.

Instruction manuals cited by ASPI showed committee workers in the city of Kashgar were advised to show warmth to their Uyghur relatives and give kids candy while observing the Uyghur targets.

Xinjiangs community-based control mechanisms are part of a national push to enhance grassroots governance, which seeks to mobilise the masses to help stamp out dissent and instability and to increase the partys domination in the lowest reaches of society, the report said.

It detailed the case of an 18-year-old Uyghur man, Anayit Abliz, in rmqi, who was sentenced to three years in a re-education camp after he was caught using a filesharing app that is used widely in China to share movies, music and other censored content. While he was detained, officials from the neighbourhood committee visited his family members six times in a single week, scrutinising the familys behaviours and observing whether they were emotionally stable, the report said.

The thinktank said the IJOP was managed by the political and legal affairs commission (PLAC). The PLAC, which the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has called the partys knife handle, is Chinas overseer of the national law and order system reporting directly to the CCPs central committee. The report found it wielded vastly expanded operational and budgetary control in Xinjiang, an expansion seen before in mass political campaigns.

Xinjiangs bureaucratic inner workings in the last seven years fit a wider pattern of authoritarian rule in China, wrote the reports lead author, Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, saying some tactics used in the campaign were conceived elsewhere, while others used in Xinjiang were being replicated in other regions including Hong Kong.

ASPI also collected basic information of more than 440 principal and deputy county party secretaries in the Chinese region since 2014, unmasking the individual officials implementing the CCPs crackdown, including at least two who had been educated at Harvard as visiting fellows.

The report said the vast majority of county party secretaries the most senior local officials over the last seven years were of Han ethnicity. It said not a single Uyghur could be identified among secretaries in September, but they often served as a ceremonial second-in-command figure. ASPI said its findings showed the CCP promise of ethnic self-rule for the nominally autonomous region were a fig leaf.

The report also alleged that, in addition to mass internment and coercive labour assignments, residents in Chinas far-west Xinjiang region were also compelled to participate in Mao-era mass political campaigns.

Responding to the report, Chinas embassy in London denied the allegations and accused the ASPI of being an anti-China rumour-maker. It claimed its re-education centres were vocational training schools operating as part of its anti-terrorism efforts no different from the desistance and disengagement programme (DDP) of the UK or the deradicalisation centres in France.

The ASPI report funded partly by the UK, Australian and US governments adds to a growing body of evidence of Beijings crackdown in Xinjiang. Chinas government has been accused by Human Rights Watch and legal groups of committing crimes against humanity, while some western governments have formally declared the government to be conducting a genocide. China has denied all these accusations.

The report said Xinjiang authorities expected extreme and repressive practices of the 2017 re-education campaign to become the norm by the end of 2021, a stage the party state calls comprehensive stability. A recent media report from Xinjiang by Associated Press revealed a reduction in visible means of control and repression, but a continuing sense of fear among the population and ongoing surveillance.

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Chinese effort to gather micro clues on Uyghurs laid bare in report - The Guardian

A cartoon of his face, showing him looking off into the distance like a superhero, hangs on a gallery wall in Scholastic headquarters, near portraits of Harry Potter and Clifford. Ms. Lucchese said that when the office was redesigned a few years ago, Mr. Robinson hadnt wanted any pictures of himself displayed but Ms. Lucchese said she sneaked that one in.

Mr. Robinson made it no secret that he wished Scholastic to remain an independent company, even as consolidation within the publishing business sped up around him. Penguin Random House, itself the product of a 2013 merger, is in the process of trying to buy Simon & Schuster. If approved by federal regulators, that deal would create a colossus far larger than any other publisher in the country.

But the remaining large houses will want to bulk up to compete, especially by acquiring rich backlists, catalogs of older titles that are reliable, long-term money makers which is sure to make Scholastic an attractive target.

The companys new leadership team appears to share what was perhaps Mr. Robinsons most precious goal: Ms. Lucchese and Mr. Warwick expressed no interest in selling.

Weve got the resources ourselves to go forward at the pace that we want to go, Mr. Warwick said.

Given Mr. Robinsons devotion to Scholastic, it was fitting that his memorial service was held there last month. A virtual event with just a few people in attendance, it included a video eulogy delivered by his son Reece. We will cherish the memories of the holidays and weekends we spent with him during Covid when he wasnt working 12-hour days, Reece Robinson said of his familys relationship with his father.

The service had all the star power of a Hollywood collaboration, with video messages from Goldie Hawn, Bill Clinton and J.K. Rowling punctuating remarks from former employees and board members. The final speaker, Alec Baldwin, described the friendship he had developed with Mr. Robinson as neighbors in a downtown apartment building and expressed his condolences to Mr. Robinsons family, the Scholastic community and Ms. Lucchese. He was the only speaker who mentioned her name.

Mr. Wallack, the portfolio manager for the companys second-largest shareholder, had twice contacted investor relations at Scholastic to request information about Mr. Robinsons funeral, he said. But no one alerted him to the memorial service, he said. I was hopeful to have been invited to that, he said, or at least sent a link. (In response, a company spokeswoman said the event was publicized on social media and the companys website.)

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Succession at Scholastic Seemed to Be a Shock, Even to the New Chairwoman - The New York Times

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testifies during a House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30. Powell's term expires early next year, and President Biden must decide whether to reappoint him. // UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Sarah Silbiger

The chair of the Federal Reserve has one of the most powerful economic jobs in the world, with the ability to move markets with a single phrase.

Under Jerome Powell's leadership, the Federal Reserve has been instrumental in steering the economy from the depths of the pandemic in a quest to claw back the 22 million jobs that were lost.

Now, President Biden has to decide whether Powell should keep his own job. It's a decision that has gotten more complicated as some progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wage a fight against his reappointment as a stock trading controversy dogs the Fed.

Here are some key questions as Biden decides what to do.

Powell's four-year term as Fed chairman is set to expire in February. Traditionally, U.S. presidents have not changed Fed leaders, even when the party in control of the White House changes.

That's meant to insulate the central bank from partisan politics. But former President Trump ignored that tradition when he dumped then-chair Janet Yellen and nominated Powell in 2017 (Yellen is now the country's Treasury secretary).

Before the pandemic, Powell was steering an economy near full employment. The Fed raised interest rates, a decision that made Powell a frequent punching bag for Trump, who worried it would slow down the economy and hurt the then-president's reelection prospects.

But once the pandemic struck, the Fed quickly slashed rates to near zero to support the economy. Powell launched a series of emergency lending programs and pumped trillions of dollars into the economy in an effort to avert a long recession and speed the recovery. He has been especially focused in recovering the lost jobs.

Some of those efforts fell short, but Powell has generally received high marks for his economic stewardship.

Lately, however, Powell has come under scrutiny as inflation continues to stay high. Powell has argued that the surge in price pressures will prove "transitory" as pandemic-related disruptions to the supply chain ease.

But some economists worry that inflation could prove harder to reverse.

Some of the arguments against Powell have less to do with interest rates and monetary policy than another vital function of the Fed: supervising banks.

Sen. Warren, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, is one of Powell's most outspoken critics. She accuses him of watering down the banking regulations that Congress adopted after the financial crisis.

"Over and over, you have acted to make our banking system less safe," Warren told Powell during a committee hearing last month. "And that makes you a dangerous man, to head up the Fed."

Former Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and former Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who authored the banking regulation law, have defended Powell and said he deserves a second term.

Still, Warren and other progressive Democrats want Biden to replace Powell with someone else. A top alternative candidate is Lael Brainard, a member of the Fed's board of governors who was appointed by former President Barack Obama.

Most recently, critics have also faulted Powell over allegations of unethical trading activity by other top Fed officials.

The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported last month that two regional Fed bank presidents were actively trading stocks and other securities in 2020 while the Fed was heavily involved in financial markets.

In addition, a Fed vice chairman sold bonds and bought stocks worth at least $1 million just days before the Fed announced an emergency rate cut.

All three men have defended their trades as permissible under existing ethics rules. But Powell has acknowledged those rules need tightening, and he has ordered a review of the trades by the central bank's inspector general.

It's a critical time for the economy, and whether it's under Powell or somebody else, the Fed will be navigating a policy minefield.

Job growth has slowed sharply in the past two months as the delta variant of the coronavirus hit the economy after strong job gains over the summer.

Meanwhile, inflation is still running well above the Fed's long-term target of 2%.

Fed policymakers are preparing to gradually scale back the amount of money the central bank is pumping into the economy, but they don't want to move too quickly and see the recovery stall out.

As chairman, Powell has steered the central bank toward a policy that is more committed to full employment, even if that means tolerating somewhat higher inflation in the short run.

However, he has stressed that the Fed will use its tools (namely, higher interest rates) to crack down if prices appear to be spiraling out of control.

It's doubtful that an alternative nominee would be any more aggressive when it comes to promoting jobs or keeping interest rates low. Any policy differences are more likely to revolve around things like bank regulation and the Fed's role in battling climate change.

Powell would almost certainly win bipartisan backing in the Senate for a second term, while a more progressive-friendly nominee might face a tougher battle.

Biden has to weigh how much blowback he's willing to tolerate from the left wing of his party and how much political capital he wants to spend pushing a Fed nominee through the Senate.

Additionally, Biden is likely to take heat from Republicans over inflation next year if rapid price hikes continue through the midterm election.

Having a Republican like Powell in charge of the Fed which is the government's primary inflation watchdog could give the White House a measure of political cover at a time when Republicans are using surging prices as an attack line heading to the 2022 midterms.

Oddsmakers say Powell is still the prohibitive favorite to be nominated for a second term, but his chances are not quite so high as they were in early September.

The White House has not said when it will make a decision, but previous presidents have typically made the call no later than November, to allow time for Senate confirmation.

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What's at stake as Biden decides whether to stick with Jerome Powell as Fed chief | NPR - Houston Public Media

In this image taken from video by Taiwans EBC, firefighters battle a blaze at a building in Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2021. A fire engulfed a 13-story building overnight in southern Taiwan, the islands semi-official Central News Agency reported Thursday. (EBC via AP )

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) A building fire that raged out of control for hours overnight in a major city in southern Taiwan left 46 people dead and at least 41 others injured, authorities said Thursday.

Flames and smoke billowed from the lower floors of the 13-story building as firefighters tried to douse the blaze from the street and aerial platforms in the city of Kaohsiung. A fire department statement described the fire, which started about 3 a.m., as extremely fierce and said several floors had been destroyed.

The death toll rose steadily during the day as rescue workers searched the combined commercial and residential building. By late afternoon, authorities said 32 bodies had been sent to the morgue, while a further 14 people who showed no signs of life were among 55 taken to the hospital. In Taiwan, official confirmation of a death is made at the hospital.

After daybreak, firefighters could be seen spraying water into the middle floors of the still smoldering building from high aerial platforms. One woman, who was not identified, said on Taiwanese TV that her 60-to-70 year old parents were still inside.

The buildings age and piles of debris blocking access to many areas complicated search and rescue efforts, officials said, according to Taiwans Central News Agency.

Many of the residents of the 40-year-old building were elderly and lived alone in apartments as small as 13 square meters (140 square feet), local media said. The building had 120 residential units on the upper floors, as well as a closed movie theater, abandoned restaurants and karaoke clubs below them, the Central News Agency said.

Fire extinguishers had been installed last month, but only three per floor because the residents could not afford to pay more, the United Daily News, a major newspaper, reported.

The fire appeared to have started on the ground floor, Taiwanese media said.

The United Daily News said that investigators were focusing on a first-floor tea shop whose owner reportedly fought with his girlfriend earlier on Wednesday. They had not ruled out arson, the newspaper said.

A 1995 fire at a nightclub in Taichung, Taiwans third-largest city, killed 64 people in the countrys deadliest such disaster in recent times.

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46 dead in raging overnight building fire in Taiwan - WGN TV Chicago

The editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Lisa Davies, has resigned after five years in the role and will step down immediately.

Davies did not reveal her plans, telling staff only that the time feels right for me to look towards whats next and handing her editing tasks to her deputy Cosima Marriner from Tuesday.

The resignation leaves both the Herald and the Sun Herald without an editor, following Marriners move from editing the sister paper to deputy editor of the Sydney Morning Herald a fortnight ago. Both positions will be advertised.

It has been an immense privilege to lead this newsroom, which is full of talented and passionate individuals wholly committed to delivering news our readers can trust day in, day out, Davies said.

The last two years in particular have tested us all in ways we couldnt have imagined so as things return to a more even keel, the time feels right for me to look towards whats next. Im going spend the next month finishing up a few projects.

The sudden resignation of Davies from the helm of the Herald has surprised and saddened staff who say she is a straight shooter and a good manager of people.

Davies, and her equivalent at the Age, Gay Alcorn, have two layers of management above them and little control over the national editorial agenda under the editorial structure.

Davies and Alcorn report to Tory Maguire, who was promoted in July to executive editor of the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, WAtoday and Brisbane Times, by Nine managing director of publishing James Chessell.

Maguire, whose new role was not advertised, joined the Fairfax/Nine group after Fairfax Medias joint venture with the Huffington Post came to an end in 2017.

Davies led the celebration of the Sydney Morning Heralds 190th anniversary this year and drove the papers coverage of Indigenous affairs, including securing a partnership with the Judith Neilson Institute to hire more Indigenous storytellers.

Five years ago there were conversations about whether the print products would still be around in five years, Davies told industry publication Mumbrella on the papers 190th anniversary. They are, and they are still huge revenue drivers. I think its a really encouraging sign. I cant see a time when there wont be a print product.

Maguire paid tribute to Davies as someone who has put her heart and soul into the masthead.

Over her five years as editor she led her team through the major disruption of the restructure, held the newsroom together during the biggest challenges of the pandemic, and was a crucial part of the huge team effort to ensure the long term success of the Sydney Morning Herald, Maguire said.

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Sydney Morning Herald editor Lisa Davies resigns after five years in the role - The Guardian