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China’s top leaders to be revealed as Xi Jinping cements grip on power | CNN

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China’s top leaders to be revealed as Xi Jinping cements grip on power | CNN



CNN
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China’s ruling Communist Celebration will reveal its prime management for the following 5 years right this moment, bringing to a climax months of closed-door preparations which might be anticipated to see chief Xi Jinping lengthen his iron grip on energy with a norm-breaking third time period surrounded by allies.

The brand new members of the celebration’s Politburo Standing Committee, China’s strongest decision-making physique, will make their first look in Beijing Sunday, strolling out so as of rank to publicly reveal for the primary time the faces that can sit atop of the celebration and drive the world’s second-largest financial system over the approaching half decade.

This 12 months’s occasion, which comes in the future after the shut of the five-yearly Celebration Congress, is among the most consequential and intently watched in many years.

A preview into the sweeping reshuffle anticipated to be unveiled Sunday was on present on the finish of the Congress, when two key heavyweights not in Xi’s inside circle – together with China’s present quantity two Li Keqiang – weren’t included within the celebration’s new Central Committee, which means they’ve left China’s prime ruling physique and can go into full retirement.

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This can possible go away Xi – who is predicted to interrupt with current precedent to take a 3rd time period in energy – presiding over a Standing Committee the place rivals have largely been eradicated, formally altering what for many years had been an entrenched power-sharing construction within the celebration’s prime echelon.

Saturday’s occasions have been briefly interrupted by an sudden scene when Xi’s quick predecessor Hu Jintao, who’s 79 and has been seen in frail well being lately, was escorted out of the Nice Corridor of the Individuals from his place seated subsequent to Xi, for causes that weren’t instantly clear, although Hu appeared initially reluctant to depart.

Whereas the shut of the Celebration Congress noticed Xi’s ideologies and priorities additional embraced and elevated by the celebration, Sunday would be the remaining flourish for the chief who’s broadly seen to have cemented energy by eliminating rivals and dampening the lingering affect of celebration elders lately.

“The ability transition within the twentieth Celebration Congress supplied (Xi) a possibility to utterly reshuffle the (Standing Committee) and to put his shut associates to most – if not all – positions. If he succeeds in doing so, he will definitely have full management of the ability construction,” Yang Zhang, an assistant professor at American College’s College of Worldwide Service.

The road-up of the Standing Committee, lately a seven-member physique made up of ethnically Han Chinese language males, will point out a lot concerning the state of Xi’s affect inside the black field of elite celebration politics, and whether or not he plans to carry onto energy for a fourth time period.

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The brand new standing committee, and the bigger 25-member Politburo of which it’s a half, are formally appointed by a rubber-stamp vote of the roughly 200 members of the brand new Communist Celebration’s Central Committee, which was fashioned on the shut of the Celebration Congress – although the true selections over who fills the celebration’s prime spots are made within the months earlier than, in closed-door discussions between prime celebration leaders.

From Mao to Xi: A historical past of China’s management

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One indicator of Xi’s energy was signaled Saturday, when it was clear that two present members of the physique who are usually not inside his inside circle, China’s quantity two chief and premier Li and Wang Yang, each 67, would retire, one 12 months earlier than reaching the usual retirement age. Xi, at 69, is one 12 months above that casual restrict.

A number of proteges or allies of Xi have been flagged by watchers of elite Chinese language politics as possible candidates to fill these empty seats and two others opened by the of-age retirements of Li Zhanshu and Han Zheng.

These embrace Chongqing celebration chief Chen Min’er, 62, one among Xi’s longtime shut allies and proteges, Ding Xuexiang, 60, who runs the Common Workplace of the Communist Celebration, a place just like being Xi’s chief of workers, and Shanghai celebration chief Li Qiang, 63.

A prime physique full of loyalists, would “weaken additional” top-level energy sharing, in line with Chen Gang, senior analysis fellow on the Nationwide College of Singapore’s East Asian Institute.

“(On this case) Xi is not first-among-equals, as his predecessors have been. But he nonetheless must share energy with different standing committee members, even when they have been loyal to him earlier than becoming a member of the committee,” he stated.

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Eyes may also be on Hu Chunhua, 59, a vice premier outdoors Xi’s orbit who had beforehand been touted as a possible successor to Xi. Hu was denied a promotion onto the Standing Committee in 2017, stalling his rise.

Specialists shall be watching whether or not there shall be a younger face – and potential successor – within the standing committee, which may sign whether or not or not Xi goals for a fourth time period.

The brand new energy dynamics additionally herald a triumph for Xi’s agenda in find out how to drive China ahead within the years to return.

“The headline story is clear – Xi Jinping and his group are consolidating their energy, the query is to what finish,” stated David Goodman, director of the China Research Heart on the College of Sydney.

He pointed to possible discussions amongst leaders lately over find out how to advance financial growth, together with the extent to which China has a state and personal sector and the controversy about quick financial wants versus “frequent prosperity” – a imaginative and prescient to slender China’s wealth hole.

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“What I take out of this convention is the (emphasis on) frequent prosperity, which is now enshrined within the structure of the celebration,” Goodman stated.

Along with Li and Wang, who’re related to the steadily diminishing Communist Youth League faction of elite politics as soon as presided over by former chief Hu, others who’ve been identified for a extra market-friendly stance – like finance officers Liu He, Yi Gang and Guo Shuqing – are additionally not longer a part of the Central Committee. The survival of Central Committee member Wang Yi, 69, additionally signifies assist for China’s aggressive international coverage stance.

However at the same time as Xi steps into an anticipated third time period – and doubtlessly one surrounded by allies – he won’t essentially have a clean path forward, given home financial challenges and strained worldwide relations, points Xi alluded to in an opening tackle to the Celebration Congress final Sunday.

A Standing Committee stacked with loyalists “doesn’t essentially imply that Xi will turn into an all-powerful supreme chief and may do something. His limitless energy shall be constrained by his restricted capability and lowering vitality as he turns older,” stated American College’s Zhang.

In the meantime, Xi’s personal associates will themselves divide into totally different blocs and compete for energy, whereas Xi’s full management additionally means his crew shall be totally accountable for any coverage mistake and will provoke stronger worldwide pushback from the US-led Western international locations, he stated.

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“All of those situations will make his third – and presumably fourth – time period not as simple as anticipated,” he stated.

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Trump keeps decrying rampant crime. Here’s how his misleading claim has shifted.

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Trump keeps decrying rampant crime. Here’s how his misleading claim has shifted.

By former President Donald J. Trump’s account, the country is awash in crime. But in fact, under President Biden, the rate of violent crime has fallen.

It is a refrain that dates to Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, when he often cited false statistics to claim historically high murder rates and record-breaking urban crime. After he was elected, those warnings waned, even though the country had its biggest one-year increase in murder in 2020, when he was in office.

Once he lost that election, though, Mr. Trump wasted no time in falsely claiming crime records, saying in a 2022 address that “our country is now a cesspool of crime.”

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In making the case for a second term, Mr. Trump has stuck to that message, though his argument has evolved this election cycle from false claims on crime rates to an attack on the credibility of any evidence that refutes him. Here’s how.

March 2, 2024

Mr. Trump selectively homes in on crime in cities, including at a rally in Greensboro, N.C.

Mr. Trump had a point that violent crime in Washington had increased in 2023. But it was one of few outliers. Violent crime overall decreased across the country by 3 percent, and the number of homicides declined on average by 10 percent across 32 cities tracked by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. In Washington and seven other cities, though, the number of homicides increased.

April 13, 2024

Mr. Trump, at a rally in Pennsylvania, falsely balloons the level of crime in New York.

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Crime, in fact, decreased in the year before March 2024 by 5 percent, and murders by 19.4 percent, the city reported just days before Mr. Trump’s remarks. And in 2023, overall crime declined by 0.3 percent and murders by 11.9 percent, to 386 in 2023 from 438 in 2022.

Those numbers also pale in comparison to the height of crime in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr. Trump was a mainstay of the city and when it regularly recorded more than 1,500 murders annually. Homicides peaked in 1990 at 2,245.

May 18, 2024

As the general election nears, his claims grow more hyperbolic.

“There’s too much crime in the country. We’ve never seen crime like this before.”

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Mr. Trump, in an interview with a Dallas news station, warns more broadly of a nationwide crime wave. That is false. Violent crime and property crime are near the lowest level in decades, despite public perception to the contrary. And while there was an increase in crime during the pandemic, violent crime was higher in 2020 under Mr. Trump than under Mr. Biden so far.

May 18, 2024

That same day, he attributes the increase to Democratic policies.

Speaking to the National Rifle Association, Mr. Trump vividly and baselessly casts blame on his political opponents.

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June 15, 2024

Mr. Trump wrongly blames methodological changes for obscuring crime trends.

The claim, made at a conservative gathering in Detroit, is misleading. Days earlier, the F.B.I. released a preliminary assessment estimating that crime had fallen in the first three months of 2024. But Mr. Trump insisted the data was fraudulent.

In 2021, the F.B.I. started relying on a new data collection system, aggregating crime data from local and state police departments. Many agencies had yet to fully transition, resulting in reporting from only 68 percent of agencies, which covered about 66 percent of the population. So Mr. Trump has a point that data collection in 2021 was unusually incomplete, but the reported national crime rate that year did not simply omit a third of the country, as he said. Rather, the F.B.I. used a standard statistical process to fill in the blanks and estimate crime for the missing jurisdictions to generate a national rate.

The F.B.I.’s national estimates included data from more agencies in subsequent years: 93.5 percent of the population in 2022 and 94.3 percent in 2023. Both years continued to show a decline in crime compared with 2020.

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June 22, 2024

At a rally in Philadelphia, Mr. Trump insists that the official statistics are “fake.”

“The F.B.I. crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake.”

Minutes later, he points to a different data set, also from the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump was cherry-picking those statistics and referring to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which showed a 43 percent increase in the violent crime rate, from 16.4 per 1,000 people in 2020 to 23.5 in 2022. (Unlike the F.B.I.’s crime rate, which relies on crimes reported to the police, this rate relies on responses to a survey.)

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Left unsaid: The 2022 rate was comparable to rates under the Trump administration (23.2 in 2018 and 21.0 in 2019) and still lower than rates in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, in 2023, that rate declined to 22.5 per 1,000 people.

Aug. 3, 2024

He repeats those percentages during a rally in Atlanta.

“Nationwide, there’s been a 43 percent increase in violent crimes since I left office, including a 58 percent increase in rape, 89 percent increase in aggravated assault and a 56 percent increase in stone-cold robbery.”

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Sept. 6, 2024

Addressing the Fraternal Order of Police union in Charlotte, N.C., he again cites those figures.

“Since Kamala Harris took office, she has presided over a 43 percent increase in violent crime, including a 58 percent increase in rape and an 89 percent increase in aggravated assault.”

Sept. 10, 2024

Mr. Trump reprises his claims during the presidential debate.

Sept. 18, 2024

In a Fox News interview, Mr. Trump inaccurately cites an analysis to claim a huge increase in crime.

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“I was right. The following day, D.O.J. announced numbers — I don’t know who it was in D.O.J., but somebody over there likes me — that crime is up 45 percent, murders up, numbers like you wouldn’t even believe.”

Since the debate, Mr. Trump has seized upon and further inflated an analysis repeated in conservative news outlets of revised F.B.I. statistics.

In its September report estimating that violent crime had declined by 3 percent in 2023, the F.B.I. released revised figures for 2022, as it does every year. The revisions, according to an analysis published by Fox News, show a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022.

But even that 4.5 percent figure is misleading, as FactCheck.org has noted. That is because crime data from 2021 was incomplete, as police departments across the country transitioned to a different reporting system. Moreover, the revised data still show that violent crime had declined overall since 2020.

This dark assessment of soaring violence and lawlessness under Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris has been central to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign — even though the facts show otherwise.

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Ukraine says it has attacked North Korean troops in Kursk

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Ukraine says it has attacked North Korean troops in Kursk

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Ukrainian officials said on Monday that their forces had fired at North Korean soldiers in combat for the first time since their deployment by Russia to its western Kursk region.

The clashes mark the first direct intervention by a foreign army since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, as well as an expansion of what was already the largest land war in Europe since the second world war.

“The first military units of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] have already come under fire in Kursk,” Andriy Kovalenko, Ukraine’s top counter-disinformation official within the national security council, said on Telegram. A senior Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed the military engagement to the Financial Times but declined to provide further details.

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In Kyiv, foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said he had discussed with his visiting German counterpart Annalena Baerbock the “need for decisive action” in response to North Korea’s deepening involvement in the war.

“We urge Europe to realise that the DPRK troops are now carrying [out] an aggressive war in Europe against a sovereign European state,” Sybiha said in a news conference.

The US on Monday called out Russia and China at the UN Security Council for “shamelessly protecting” and emboldening North Korea. South Korea and the EU also condemned the deployment and expressed concern that Russia could reward North Korea with transfers of nuclear and ballistic technology.

Another senior Ukrainian official told the FT that Moscow was already providing military technologies to Pyongyang to help with its missile programmes, as well as “money”.

In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin met North Korea’s foreign minister, Choe Son-hui, in the Kremlin on Monday.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and North Korean foreign minister Choe Son-hui meet at the Kremlin on Monday © Mikhael Tereshchenko/SPUTNIK/KREMLIN POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Choe passed on a greeting from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and signed a treaty with Putin in June that includes a mutual security assistance clause.

The foreign minister last week said that North Korea had “no doubt whatsoever that under the wise leadership of the honourable Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Russian army and people will surely achieve a great victory in their sacred struggle to defend the sovereign rights and security of their state”.

Putin has not confirmed the North Korean deployment but he hinted at it last month, indicating it fell under the security provisions in the treaty.

US and South Korean officials last week confirmed Ukraine’s assessment that around 8,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk last month to help Russia’s army push Ukrainian forces out of territory they have occupied since August. Senior Ukrainian intelligence officials told the FT that the forces were in barracks about 50km from the Ukrainian border and preparing to enter the fight within “days”.

Kyiv, Washington and Seoul said that Pyongyang had sent roughly 12,000 troops in all to Russia for its ongoing war effort, including 500 officers and three generals. The remaining forces are located in Russia’s far east, where they are undergoing training.

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The White House has said that the North Koreans would become “legitimate military targets” if they entered the fight against Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that Ukraine could see where Russia was gathering the North Koreans and urged western nations to lift restrictions on long-range weapons to “pre-emptively” strike them before they could attack his forces.

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The senior Ukrainian intelligence official declined to provide specifics about the first military engagement between his country’s forces and the North Koreans. But he said that it occurred within Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine controls some 600 sq km of territory, or a little more than half of what it previously held following the summer incursion that took Moscow by surprise.

Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, the GUR, said over the weekend that Russia had armed the North Korean troops in Kursk with 60mm mortars, assault rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles, anti-tank guided missiles and shoulder-launched anti-tank rocket launchers. The GUR said that some were also provided with night-vision devices and thermal imagers. A few hundred troops from North Korea’s special forces have also been deployed in Kursk.

Ukrainian officials and military analysts have raised questions about the quality and combat effectiveness of the North Korean troops, with most being described as inexperienced, low-ranking soldiers.

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“We will know soon” how well they can fight, said one of the officials on Monday.

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Both Candidates Exude Confidence, Trump Says He Doesn’t Mind if Reporters Are Shot

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Both Candidates Exude Confidence, Trump Says He Doesn’t Mind if Reporters Are Shot
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are exuding confidence as they head into Election Day. For Trump, that’s nothing new. He said over the weekend that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House at the end of his presidency – despite losing the 2020 election to President Joe …
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