
By BY SHARON LAFRANIERE AND MICHAEL FORSYTHE from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/3557Ejq



As political tensions flare back home, Hong Kong students on U.S. college campuses say they have been ostracized and in some cases threatened by fellow students from mainland China, and they suspect they are being watched from afar by Beijing. Some say they see the hand of the Chinese government working in ways that threaten academic freedom.
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Police say Tushar Atre was kidnapped from his California home around 3am and officers located vehicle that afternoonAuthorities say Tushar Atre, the 50-year-old owner of a digital marketing company, was abducted on Tuesday from his home in Santa Cruz. Photograph: APThe 50-year-old owner of a California marketing company was abducted from his oceanfront home in Santa Cruz and later found dead near his white BMW, authorities say.The Santa Cruz county sheriff’s office has released few details on the case. But on Tuesday, it reported it had received a 911 call early in the morning from the home of Tushar Atre, the owner of the digital marketing company Atre Net Inc.Atre had been kidnapped from his home around 3am “during a crime”, the office said, and he was last seen getting into a white BMW SUV.Deputies located the car on Tuesday afternoon in the Santa Cruz Mountains and found a body in the same location.“We have some unfortunate news, we have found the car associated with this case along with a deceased person,” the office said in a Facebook statement on Tuesday afternoon.On Wednesday afternoon, the office confirmed the body found was identified as Atre. “We have reason to believe the motive was robbery,” a sheriff’s office statement on Facebook said.Police are looking for at least two people in connection with the case, the local station KTVU reported on Tuesday.
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A career IRS official has filed a whistleblower complaint over inappropriate interference by at least one Treasury Department official in a mandatory annual audit of the president and vice president’s taxes.The House Ways and Means Committee was alerted to “possible misconduct” at the end of July, but The Washington Post shed more light on the situation Thursday when it reported that the individual was an IRS employee and revealed that the allegation pertained to Treasury Department officials.The whistleblower told the paper in an interview that he had filed a formal complaint, but would not comment on its substance.The White House has continued to push back on Democratic efforts to get the Treasury Department to release the president’s tax returns. Administration officials have dismissed Democrats' calls for Trump's tax returns as outside the scope of congressional oversight authority.Democrats fear the recent complaint suggests the independent IRS audit process has been compromised by partisan actors. But the whistleblower denied his actions were politically motivated.“I take very seriously the duty of career civil servants to act with integrity and perform our duties impartially, even at the risk that someone will make a charge of bias,” he said.The whistleblower also told the paper he feared the recent comments being made by President Trump and allies about whistleblowers. Trump told reporters Monday he was “trying to find out” the identity of the Ukraine whistleblower.“The focus should be on the facts that were presented,” the IRS whistleblower told The Washington Post. “I am concerned also by the relative silence of people who should be repudiating these dangerous attacks in the strongest terms.”Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D., Mass.) told reporters Sept. 27 he was weighing the release of the complaint with lawyers.
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An official from the National Transportation Safety Board says the pilot in a deadly Connecticut plane crash had more than 7,000 hours’ experience flying B-17s. The pilot, Ernest McCauley, was among the seven people killed in the crash Wednesday at Bradley International Airport. The wife of a man who died in a B-17 bomber crash in Connecticut says she had “a really bad feeling” the plane was going to go down.
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