The faithful don’t challenge the faith
Michael Coren, NP
It did, as it were, have to happen. A human rights body taking on the Roman Catholic Church. In this case the issues are still murky and confused, but it appears that an openly gay man who has been living with his partner for 19 years has been dismissed as an altar server in his Peterborough, Ont., parish. Several long-standing parishioners complained, and local Bishop Nicola De Angelis, one of the gentlest and kindest priests you are likely to meet, decided that the situation was inappropriate.
The man in question, spa-owner Jim Corcoran, claims that while he is homosexual he is celibate and a devout Catholic who observes Church teaching. Not, it seems, so devout and so observant of Church teaching that he is prepared to accept with Catholic humility and self-control the decision of that very Church to terminate an entirely voluntary (if important) position.
[...]
The true church is being driven underground and in the end it will separate the wheat from the chaff and the faith with be revived. The bottom line is that the true church will never bow to Caesar.
The murder of Natalia Estemirova is a dire warning
Kate Allen, Telegraph [UK]:
Our Russia research team say there used to be three key people when it came to uncovering human rights abuses in Chechnya – the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the lawyer Stanislav Markelov, and the human rights researcher Natalia Estemirova.In the space of less than three years, they’ve all now been murdered. These pivotal people supplied Amnesty with valuable information about Chechnya as well as neighbouring republics like Ingushetia, Dagestan and Kabardino-Balkari.
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Rogers: America Bordering On Communism
News Max:
Investor extraordinaire Jim Rogers has harsh words for the government’s interventionist economic policy.That policy, which he dates back to the Bush administration, verges on communism, he told Moneynews’s Dan Mangru in an interview.
“America now owns the car industry. America owns the mortgage industry. America owns a lot of the insurance industry,” Rogers said.
“Karl Marx must be somewhere standing up in his grave cheering.” And why is that? “America has become a socialist and maybe even communist nation in many ways,” Rogers said.
Why Europeans are turning against Obama
On the 6th of November last, I made a wager with some of my associates in London and Zurich that within a year they would be pining for the return of George W. Bush and his “cowboy presidency”.As of today, my friends have collectively conceded and are forwarding payment.
Why the sudden capitulation? Reality has begun to set in with a vengeance.
[...]
Ezra shines a light
TheDefence Research Establishment spent over 19 hours in one day on my site alone. Can you imagine?
Why is HMG misrepresenting international law against Israel?
Melanie Phillips:
When it was revealed that the British government had revoked five export licences for the sale to Israel of warships’ gun parts on account of its ‘disproportionate’ behaviour in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, which I wrote about below, one aspect of what the Foreign Office was saying jumped out at me. It appeared that Israel’s crime was to fall foul of Criterion Two in the Consolidated Criteria for Licence Decision Making. Criterion Two invites consideration of whether the proposed item for export would be
used for internal repression.
But Gaza is not ‘internal’ to Israel. It is not part of Israel. Not does Israel even occupy Gaza any more. So how could this be ‘internal repression’? I called the Foreign Office and asked them.
[...]
The U.K. will soon be the world’s backwater. Ask Jean Chretien.
Is Obama’s Science Czar a Crackpot?
By Cliff Kincaid, AIM:
Does Obama’s science adviser advocate compulsory abortions and putting chemicals into the water supply to sexually sterilize human beings? Some well-known conservative bloggers and columnists have recently been repeating this information, based on revelations on a website strangely called Zombietime. But an analysis by Accuracy in Media has determined that some of the most sensational charges against Dr. John P. Holdren fall short of the mark. Still, he has a lot to answer for, including his belief in a “Planetary Regime” to manage the world.
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Order-worthy?
NP:
We don’t want to blow a raspberry at Her Majesty the Queen, but it cries out to be said: Jean Chretien’s surprise Monday appointment to the Order of Merit is anomalous almost to the point of being ridiculous.
[...]
It’s well beyond ridiculous. It makes a mockery of the truly worthy who went before this clown. It also reduces the Crown to the status of a tawdry burlesque production.
Double standards on parade
Lorne Gunter, NP:
Still, the coverage of Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings should be of interest to Canadians for two reasons: First, American judicial trends — especially the liberal ones — have a way of creeping into our own legal system. An activist U.S. high court would encourage our own judges to be even more activist than they already are. Those Canadian judge who lean towards the interventionist side anyway would gladly use interventionist rulings from the States to legitimize their own here. “Well, if even the American court is doing X, Y, Z …”
So if Judge Sotomayor is as willing as her critics claim to make up rulings out of thin air and bend the law to suit an activist agenda, then Canadians already fed up with reading-in and other Charter-inspired judicial creativity had better brace themselves for even more when, as expected, Sotomayor is quickly confirmed by the Democrat-dominated U.S. Senate.
But mostly I think we should be fascinated with her confirmation for the insight it is providing into liberal legalthink.
If Sonia Sotomayor were a conservative white male, she could not be confirmed as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. At the very least, she would face a much tougher and more acrimonious confirmation process.
[...]
Russian activist Natalya Estemirova found dead
Telegraph [UK]:
The prize-winning Russian human rights activist Natalya Estemirova was found dead in Ingushetia on Wednesday after being abducted earlier in the neighbouring region of Chechnya, it has been reported.
Her corpse, which showed signs of a violent death, was found at 5.20pm (1320 GMT) near Ingushetia’s main city Nazran, ITAR-TASS news agency said, citing the regional interior ministry.
“The body had two wounds to the head, it was clear she had been murdered in the morning,” Madina Khadziyeva, a spokeswoman at the ministry, told Reuters. She did not specify the nature of the injuries.
The Interfax news agency quoted security sources as saying she had been murdered.
[...]
Al Gore and friends create climate of McCarthyism
Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian:
ANYONE who questions green orthodoxy is accused of committing treason.
DISCUSSIONS about global warming are marked by an increasing desire to stamp out “impure” thinking, to the point of questioning the value of democratic debate. But shutting down discussion simply means the disappearance of reason from public policy.
[...]
Barack changes tune in Ghana
Anne Bayefsky, The Australian:
Why couldn’t the US President talk tough in Cairo like he did to the Africans.
SPEAKING in Ghana on Saturday, Barack Obama lectured Africans on local repression, corruption, brutality, good governance and accountability. The startling contrast to his June speech in Cairo was revealing.
Stroking Muslim and Arab nations has become the hallmark of the US President’s foreign policy.
In Egypt, he chose not to utter the words terrorism or genocide. In Egypt, there was nothing “brutal” he could conjure up, no “corruption” and no “repression”. In Ghana, with a 70 per cent Christian population, he mentioned “good governance” seven times and added direct calls to “make change from the bottom up”. He praised “people taking control of their destiny” and pressed “young people” to “hold your leaders accountable”.
He made no such calls for action by the people of Arab states, despite the fact not a single Arab country is free, according to the latest Freedom House global survey. Before the Muslim world Obama donned the role of apologist-in-chief. Over and over again his examples of shortfalls in the protection of rights and freedoms were American: the “prison at Guantanamo Bay”, “rules on charitable giving (that) have made it harder for Muslims to fulfil their religious obligation”, impediments to the choice of Muslim women to shroud their bodies.
Jewish leaders get back of the bus treatment from Obama
Leo Rennert, AT:
President Obama held a one-hour meeting with more than a dozen U.S. Jewish leaders on July 13 — a session the White House tried to keep secret and off-the-record. The White House also was careful to exclude Jewish leaders it deemed too inimical to the president’s Mideast agenda.While the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations approached the White House to set up Obama’s first formal meeting in the Executive Mansion with a constituency that overwhelming voted for him in November, it turned out to be a belated, carefully orchestrated damage-control exercise.
The encounter of Jewish leaders with Obama came well after his far higher-priority outreach to the Muslim world during previous trips to Turkey and Egypt, when in each instance he avoided stopovers in Israel.
[...]
Seventh Grader Sues after Forced by School to Remove Pro-Life T-Shirt
LifeSiteNews.com:
The mother of a seventh grade girl has sued administrators at her daughter’s school after school officials allegedly forced the girl to remove her pro-life t-shirt.
Anna Amdor filed the lawsuit last week on behalf of her daughter over the 2008 incident at McSwain Elementary School, a K-8 school in Merced, California. Amdor says that Principal Terrie Rohrer, Assistant Principal C.W. Smith and office clerk Martha Hernandez violated her daughter’s First Amendment rights by mistreating the girl and instructing her to remove the American Life League (ALL) shirt.
The shirt in question depicted images of a fetus growing followed by a blank box, with the words “Abortion: growing… growing… gone.”
[...]
Struggle For The Hearts and Minds
The View From 1776:
If liberal-progressives keep the upper hand in establishing educational curriculum and textbook standards, the United States is doomed to loss of political liberties to the secular statism that characterizes much of Continental Europe.The following excerpt from an essay by Alan Charles Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the transformation since the 1960s of our schools into seminaries of socialism. Socialist collectivism entails inevitably the political tyranny of the statist Old World that led to our rebellion in the 1776 War of Independence.
[...]
Will Dems allow Goldman to manipulate a cap-and-trade market?
By William Tate, AT:
Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street leviathan that is heavily invested in the cap-and-trade carbon market scam, has admitted it has developed and used software that can manipulate such financial markets.The revelation came during proceedings in a legal case with enough plot twists to make even John Grisham proud; it was made, not by Goldman, but by an assistant U.S. Attorney.
[...]
Zuckerman: It’s worse than we think
AT:
This is why people are getting angry at Obama. He globetrots around the world being adored by foreigners while sticking to his plan to remake America by taxing and spending us into oblivion. Meanwhile, unemployment is spiraling out of control and he doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it. In fact, he says that he’s done everything he plans on doing because the stim bill is going to work – despite the fact that unemployment has already exceeded the percentage he set as a high if we passed the bill.
[...]
Not over yet
David Warren:
Certainly we may congratulate the mullahs for having muffled the BBC, and the rest of the western media, who, after losing their front row seats in Tehran, have retreated from reporting that they have nothing to report, thus leaving the rebellious people of Iran’s towns and cities to be beaten and butchered in decent silence. The U.S. and other western governments, who could be keeping the heat on the obscene Islamist regime, and therefore commanding the missing media attention, have themselves “moved on” to G8 public relations gestures towards the hungry in Africa.President Barack Obama, in particular, far from resorting to the “crude rhetoric” of freedom that his predecessor employed, when speaking up for the people of Iran, seems relieved to be able to forget about them now. He has moved on to selling out American security interests to Russia, with tantalizing promises to negotiate the U.S. anti-missile system away, in return for feelgood moments with the invaders of Georgia.
There is also the little matter of pressuring the people of Honduras to take their Marxist president back, and agree to let him overthrow their constitution, on the model of Cuba and Venezuela. And then, the need to caress Moammar Gadhafi.
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Fatah: “Our Goal Has Never Been Peace”
By: Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, FrontPageMagazine.com:
The PA will resume violence and terror against Israel when Fatah is “capable,” and “according to what seems right,” Fatah activist Kifah Radaydeh says in a PA TV interview. She states openly that peace is not a goal for Fatah:
It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine.
Radaydeh says that “armed struggle” has not been ruled out and will continue, depending on how “capable” the PA forces are.
[...]
It’s déjà vu all over again
Melanie Phillips:
So now the veil is well and truly ripped off. All the warning signs have been there for months: Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s boilerplate leftist agitprop about Operation Cast Lead in Gaza; Britain’s pressure on the EU to renege on the agreements it made with Israel and boycott produce from the settlements; Miliband’s statement that Jerusalem should be the capital of ‘Palestine’ as well as of Israel. Now there has been a step-change. Ha’aretz reports that the British government has revoked a number of arms export licenses to Israel following the Gaza war. Five export licences have been revoked over spare parts for ships’ guns. The decision apparently resulted fromheavy pressure by both members of Parliament and human rights organizations
The unhinged malevolence over Cast Lead can no longer be brushed off as the foamings of the far-left and its acolytes in the media, NGOs and fashionable society. This is the British government now acting to punish Israel for defending itself against relentless rocket attack by an enemy bent on its destruction.
[...]
A leftwing intellectual appalled at the reactionary left
Terry Glavin, NP:
For a properly rigorous assessment of the pathetically reactionary currents that have caused such stupefaction across the western liberal-left spectrum in recent years, with particular reference to solidarity with the Iranian uprising, here’s Saeed Rahnema.
The upshot: “The left has historically been rooted in solidarity with progressive movements, women’s rights and rights for unions and its voice has been first and foremost a call for freedom. The voices that we hear today from part of the Left are tragically reactionary. Siding with religious fundamentalists with the wrong assumptions that they are anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists, is aligning with the most reactionary forces of history. This is a reactionary left, different from the progressive left which has always been on the side of the forces of progress.”
[...]
Obama the Trickster
By James Lewis, AT:
Affirmative Action is the new American spoils system — and race, gender, and sexual demagoguery are always the key. It works by intimidating middle class whites. The Left has taken over Europe with the exactly same tactics. Just read the UK news.
Anti-white racists must be worried about their hold on power, because the US Supreme Court has heard of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Even Justice Ginsburg keeps saying that legalized racial discrimination is only temporary, because, yes, it’s obviously unconstitutional. It’s affirmative racism.
Well, you can bet that the race/gender/gay industry isn’t going to go quietly into that dark night. Sotomayor’s nomination is a sign to the racism industry that it is still in power, and that its future is assured if Obama has anything to say about it. It’s a payoff to the race industry, and an invitation by Obama to expand racial protections to Hispanics and illegals.
[...]
In the end all this will do is produce a backlash. This is not statesmanship which doesn’t surprise me vin the least as Obama is no statesman.
We have entered Satan’s Twilight Zone
NHS tells school children of their ‘right’ to ‘an orgasm a day’
Church accuses Government of favouring Muslims
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Telegraph [UK]:
The report says that there is a “great deal of inconsistency in the way individual [Government] ministers deal with religious groups”.
It continues: “Christian groups in particular have suffered irrational prejudice against their funding applications and a lack of understanding of the nature and sometimes fragility of the local church.
“There is a perception, perhaps justified, that it has been easier for Islamic groups to receive financial support than other faith groups.”
Bishop Lowe claims that there have been numerous examples of local authorities inviting consultation with local faith groups and failing to invite any Christians.
[...]
The Government should not be funding any faith groups – FULL STOP.
The Obama Mind Trick
Duane R. Patterson:
We all remember the famous scene from 1977′s Star Wars. Sir Alec Guinness waives his hand to the storm trooper and says, “These aren’t the ‘droids you’re looking for, they can move along.” Barack Obama is trying to apply the same technique to the American people in regards to whether the non-stimulus stimulus bill worked or not. The polls show the American people might finally have become immune to the Obama Jedi ways.
Back in February, when the Obama economic team did the full-court press for why we had to have the stimulus now, they said without the “stimulus” bill, unemployment might climb as high at 9%, and with the stimulus in place, unemployment would top out at 8.5%. Well, the Democrats got their stimulus, and the unemployment number sailed way past their dire prediction of 9%.
Remember when Barack Obama told Americans that Joe Biden would keep track of every dime of the stimulus? Remember when ol’ Joe himself appeared on television and announced the new website to help him account for the money, if he just knew what the “numbers” of the website address were to give to people? It turns out the one place that is going to see a major influx of stimulus money is Joe Biden’s stimulus tracking website. It is currently dysfunctional, and is slated to get an $18 million dollar taxpayer-paid for makeover. In case you aren’t in the website design field, let me tell you. $18 million dollars can not only build you a top notch website, it can build you about 20 top notch websites.
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It’s all good with Obami Yes-You-Candy
MORE
CHRISTIAN PIMPS
By Coach Dave Daubenmire, News With Views:
Oh, my intentions were good. I had hoped that as I exposed the “unfruitful works of darkness” that the churches would eventually awaken and begin to push back against the enemy. After ten years of trying to awaken “The Church” to the problem I have finally mustered the courage to say what I have known all along. “The Church” IS the problem. It has become a pimp, selling the works of “the body” for personal satisfaction. Most of the pulpits are filled by “hirelings” (more on that in a future commentary), men and women who stand in the pulpit without a calling, without an anointing, and without courage. They are man pleasers, living off of “the Body” as they sell it out for their own whims and pleasures. Greedy Dogs, Isaiah called them. Blind watchmen…loving to sleep…leading the flock astray.
[...]
Clarence Thomas: The courage of his convictions
By: Michael Barone, Washington Examiner:
Thomas’ willingness to write lonely opinions and to be guided by history has sometimes helped to change the law. For example, his 1997 concurring opinion setting out recent legal scholarship on the Second Amendment right to bear arms laid the groundwork for the court’s 2008 decision overturning the District of Columbia’s handgun ban. In setting his own course in case after case, Thomas has also done more than his detractors understand to change the course of the law.
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Justice Thomas is, in my opinion, possibly the very best justice ever to serve on the Supreme Court. Pity we have yet to see a person of his calibre serving on the bench in Canada (at least to my knowledge).
MORE
The hate behind the protest
Ottawa Citizen:
… it’s important to cast a skeptical eye on the strange campaign now underway in Toronto to disrupt an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scrolls are mostly ancient Hebrew manuscripts and are Israel’s greatest treasure. The Israel Antiquities Authority is allowing them to be shown at the Royal Ontario Museum.
An odd assortment of groups are protesting the exhibit on the grounds that the scrolls are stolen artifacts and really belong to Arabs, not Jews. Yes, you read that correctly: Hebrew manuscripts of the Jewish Bible that were written centuries before Muhammad was born are, apparently, Muslim property.
It’s easy to see what’s going on here. Just as Holocaust denial circulates in some corners of the anti-Israel movement, there is a parallel effort to deny the Jewish people’s ancestral connection to the Holy Land. The idea is to de-legitimize Israel by denying the indigenous rights of Jews. Some Israel-haters have even taken to arguing that Palestinian Arabs are the real descendants of “ancient Hebrews.”
[...]
Yes, this seemingly laughable revisionism is actually structured along the hideous aphorismm that “”A lie told often enough becomes truth” (Vladimir Lenin).
LAOS: OFFICIALS SEIZE, SLAUGHTER CHRISTIANS’ LIVESTOCK
Compass Direct News:
Last Sunday (July 5) officials and residents of Katin village in Ta Oih district, Saravan province, Laos, confiscated and slaughtered livestock belonging to nine Christian families in an effort to force them to renounce their faith.
In June village elders had warned the families, 53 people in total, to renounce the faith they had adopted in late May or face “serious consequences,” according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch for Lao Religious Freedom (HRWLRF).
When the Christians ignored this warning and attended worship services in a neighboring village, villagers broke into their pig pens and seized one pig per family, later slaughtering the animals and distributing the meat among themselves, according to HRWLRF.
Officials said the seizure of the pigs – each worth the equivalent of six weeks’ salary for an average laborer in the area – was a form of punishment for ignoring the order to abandon Christianity.
[...]
Even a compromised agreement to reduce emissions could devastate the economy – and all for a theory shot full of holes
By Christopher Booker, Telegraph [UK]:
The moves now being made by the world’s political establishment to lock us into December’s Copenhagen treaty to halt global warming are as alarming as anything that has happened in our lifetimes. Last week in Italy, the various branches of our emerging world government, G8 and G20, agreed in principle that the world must by 2050 cut its CO2 emissions in half. Britain and the US are already committed to cutting their use of fossil fuels by more than 80 per cent. Short of an unimaginable technological revolution, this could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economic activity: no electricity, no transport, no industry. All this is being egged on by a gigantic publicity machine, by the UN, by serried ranks of government-funded scientists, by cheerleaders such as Al Gore, last week comparing the fight against global warming to that against Hitler’s Nazis, and by politicians who have no idea what they are setting in train.What makes this even odder is that the runaway warming predicted by their computer models simply isn’t happening. Last week one of the four official sources of temperature measurement, compiled from satellite data by the University of Huntsville, Alabama, showed that temperatures have now fallen to their average level since satellite data began 30 years ago.
[...]
The dazzling hubris of the U.S. President
Rex Murphy, CBC
Mr. Obama has taken the real crisis of the U.S. (and world) economy and used it as the screen and lever for a massive agenda of transformation, a transformation that calls for expenditures on a scale never before seen in the history of government on this planet. The first expenditure, which began under George Bush’s tenure, was large, but it was very specific. The financial “infrastructure” of America’s economy was about to be exploded, and it was argued that government “had no choice” but to shore up the financial institutions without which there would be utter chaos in the overall economy. That was the genesis of the so-called bank bailout. After that came the stimulus package, the attempt to kick-start jobs, to get those “shovel ready” projects “out the door.” Both had to be done immediately. There was no time for review or oversight.
These initiatives, however, were almost instantly overlaid with the Obama agenda of massive government expansion, or attempted expansion, into everything from the auto industry to health care – all of them sold with cries of urgency and executed with reckless haste. Massive bills were passed before there were even copies of them to read. The U.S. government’s debt is being swollen beyond all previous records.
It is inconceivable that these ideas occurred to Mr. Obama postelection. His agenda is of such scale and particularity that it is evidence of design and previous contemplation. He knew what he wished to do when he was campaigning, but he was not going to whisper the scale and range of his designs while the campaign was on. It would have scared off people.
But daring is Barack Obama’s real middle name. When he borrowed the phrase “the audacity of hope” from his frightful mentor, most people fastened on the word “hope.” They should have highlighted “audacity.”
[...]
Gore Tips His Hand
The View From 1776:
Liberal-progressives’ drive to integrate the United States into a world government, a new socialist international under the UN, is a carefully concealed element in the man-made global warming scam.
Needless to say, Al Gore and other self-anointed intellectuals envision themselves in positions of great personal power in the forthcoming socialist world government.
Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, described what life was to be under such men:
[...]
Obama Grovels to Russia
By Pamela Geller, AT:
The press, true to form, is hailing Obama’s trip to Russia as statesmanlike. Reality, as usual, is different.When Obama took a pass on missile defense and agreed with Russia’s Medvedev to reduce our nuclear arsenal by one-third, he accomplished worse than nothing. He sold out our Eastern European allies, dumping a desperately needed missile defense plan for Poland. As he did so, he revised history, claiming we did not win the cold war. Obama said, “We don’t have to diminish other people in order to recognize our role in that history.” Yes, he said that. And it gets worse.
[...]
Old bow-n-scrape can’t help it – he actually believes the U.S. is morally equivalent (at best) to these thug regimes he low tows to.
God and Sarah Palin
By Stuart Schwartz, AT:
Sarah Palin loves God. God loves Sarah Palin.
And that is why they hate her…and Him.
And why she — and He — will be back.
That love, an essential part of her everyday life, holds out the hope of a return to the nation envisioned by the unapologetically spiritual generation that birthed the U.S. Like Ronald Reagan, of whom it was said that his relationship with God “had a profound affect on how he lived, on what he did, and on those around him,” Sarah Palin’s spirituality has affected every part of her life, allowing her to clearly recognize the evil that has leached into our political and media culture.
[...]
Why the sun is setting on England
by Bill Muehlenberg, Christian Tofay:
As has been documented here on numerous occasions, the UK is on the verge of giving it all away, renouncing everything that once made it great. Like so much of the rest of the West, it is committed to abandoning its Judeo-Christian heritage, and with it, all that makes for national greatness.
Three more links in a massive chain dragging the UK to its doom can be mentioned here. Each link in itself is not enough to destroy a nation, but when hundreds of such links are joined together, the heaviness of the chain around a nation’s neck is almost impossible to carry.
The three episodes all occurred in the past few days, and simply add to the oppressive burden of national self-destruction. The first concerns the ever widening grip of Islamic fundamentalism. A recent news item has noted that Britain now has 85 sharia law courts. One press report says this:
[...]
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