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The Pritzker Prize, Architecture's Most Prestigious Award, Gets Political | WIRED - 0 views

  • Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World Related Galleries Stunning Images Show the Earth's Imperiled Water Even Architecture Prizes Are Political In This Crazy World The FCC Graciously Sets Internet Providers Free to Sell Your Data Keeping Fentanyl Out of the US Will Take More Than a Wall Range Rover's New Baby SUV Will Swaddle You for $50,000
  • “Each building can only be in the place that it is located,”
  • “That place involves the climate, the topography, the history, the culture, and the landscape, including the sky and the stars. Yet you don’t have to be from that place to experience it, to feel uplifted, or feel at peace, or feel emotional, or feel good.” Put differently, RCR Arquitectes stands in as a metaphor for appreciating otherness in the world.
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  • Consider RCR Arquitectes’ choice to run its shop in a town of 30,000 people, instead of the nearby metropolis Barcelona. It’s quaint in that way—practically mom-and-pop. Yet, the firm’s three architects work collaboratively, building open structures that anyone can enjoy, the jury says. It’s a much lighter declaration than choosing, say, a woman like Jeanne Gang or an Iranian practice like Admun Studio.
  • RCR Arquitectes’s buildings evoke the same sentiment, by letting light and greenery inside.
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Bismarck's Voice Among Restored Edison Recordings - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn
  • The unlabeled recordings, all housed in the same wooden box, had been found in 1957. But their contents remained unknown until last year, when Jerry Fabris, the curator at the Edison laboratory, used a playback device called the Archeophone to trace the grooves of 12 of the 17 cylinders in the box and convert the analog electrical signals into broadcast WAV files.
  • Bismarck listened to recordings made in Paris and Berlin, and at his wife’s urging, he made his own. He recited snippets of poetry and songs in English, Latin, French and German. Perhaps surprisingly, given his involvement in the Franco-Prussian War, he chose to recite lines from the French national anthem. “Bismarck was a very, very witty man” and reciting the Marseillaise “would tickle him,
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  • The Wangemann cylinders are just the latest in an explosion of discoveries in early recorded sound over the last five years, said Tim Brooks, a sound historian in Greenwich, Conn. In 2008, Dr. Feaster and his colleagues at FirstSounds.org succeeded in playing a version of the French lullaby “Au Clair de la Lune,” deciphered from a tracing in soot-coated paper dating from 1860 — the earliest sound ever recovered. A trove of cylinders recorded in Russia in the 1890s was also recently uncovered.
  • The ability to digitize old recordings and the use of new imaging techniques to map the grooves of damaged cylinder records without touching them has contributed to the onslaught, Mr. Brooks said, adding, “You can actually hear history as well as read about it.
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Marco Rubio Struggles With Question on Iraq War - First Draft. Political News, Now. - N... - 0 views

  • Senator Marco Rubio of Florida struggled on Sunday to give clear answers about whether it was a mistake for the United States to go to war against Iraq in 2003, becoming the latest Republican presidential candidate to trip on the wisdom of the military invasion.
  • Mr. Rubio repeatedly said “it was not a mistake” for President George W. Bush to order the invasion based on the intelligence he had at the time.
  • Mr. Rubio chose instead to criticize the questions themselves, saying that in “the real world” presidents have to make decisions based on evidence presented to them at the time.
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  • At one point Mr. Rubio, in discussing the importance of hindsight on the Iraq war, raised a recent boxing fight to make a point. “Based on what we know, a lot of things — based on what we know now, I wouldn’t have thought Manny Pacquiao was going to beat, uh, in that fight a couple weeks ago — — ” Mr. Rubio said before Mr. Wallace interrupted.
  • Mr. Rubio’s readiness for the presidency has been questioned among some Republican voters, given than he is a 43-year-old first-term senator, and moments like the boxing reference seemed discordant on a subject like the Iraq war.
  • Last week, former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida was the one in the hot seat, giving four different answers to whether he thought President Bush, his brother, made a mistake going to war in Iraq. The former governor ultimately said he would not have ordered the invasion in hindsight given that intelligence about Iraq’s chemical weapons turned out to wrong. Mr. Rubio, in his interview on Sunday, chose not to pile on Mr. Bush.
  • “I think any president, regardless of party, probably would have made a similar decision to what President Bush did at the time with the information he had available,” Mr. Walker said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” That said, Mr. Walker added that knowing now that the 2003 weapons intelligence was flawed, “we probably wouldn’t have taken that tack” in invading Iraq.
  • “You can’t be on the fence on this one: You’re either for it or against it,” Mr. Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Mr. Sanders opposed the trade authority and has drawn support from liberals for his stances to the left of Mrs. Clinton. “No fence-sitting on this one,” he added.
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Eurozine - Multiculturalism at its limits? - Kenan Malik, Fero Sebej Managing diversity... - 0 views

  • part of the problem is confusion over what we mean by multiculturalism. It can mean one of two things. First: diversity as lived experience. Second: multiculturalism as a political process.
  • To talk of diversity as lived experience is to talk of the experience of living in a society that, through mass immigration, has become more open, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan.
  • But multiculturalism as a political process has come to mean something very different, namely the process of managing that diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes. It's a process through which cultural differences are institutionalized, publicly affirmed, recognized and institutionalized; through which political
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  • why is diversity good? Diversity isn't good in and of itself; it's good because it allows us to expand our horizons, to break out of the boxes – by they cultural, ethnic, or religious – in which we find ourselves. To think about other values, other beliefs, other lifestyles, to make judgements upon those values and beliefs and lifestyles. To enter, in other words, into a dialogue, a debate, through which a more universal language of citizenship can arise. It is precisely such dialogue and debate that multiculturalism as a political process undermines and erodes in the name of "respect" and "tolerance".
  • I think the very notion of multiculturalism is an irrational one. It assumes from the start that societies are composed of cultures that somehow relate to each other externally, as it were. Here is one culture, here's another, and there's another, and these cultures then interact with each other. In fact cultures aren't like that: cultures are living, organic entities that constantly change. There is no such thing as a multicultural society. There are societies with a variety of cultural forms, beliefs, lifestyles, values – in fact, virtually every society embodies such diversity – but to say that is to say something very different thing to the claim that a society is "multicultural".
  • Societies have always been conflictual, riven by class differences, generational differences, gender differences, ideological differences. But today we tend to see social clashes in a very narrow way, in terms of religion, faith and culture, because we have come to see identity in very narrow ways. The debate about multiculturalism is a debate in which certain differences – culture, ethnicity and faith – have come to be regarded as important and others – such as class, say, or generation – as less relevant.
  • There are two ways over the past half-century in which we've stopped treating people as citizens. One is through racism. The racist says "you're not a citizen, you don't have full rights in this society because you have a different skin colour, you are foreign", etc. The second is multiculturalism. The multiculturalist says: "we treat you not as an individual citizen, but as a Muslim or a Hindu or a Sikh or a black". The irony is that multiculturalism developed as an attempt to combat the problems created by racism. But it has recreated many of the problems by treating people not as citizens but as members of groups, and by formulating public policy in relation to those groups and not in relation to the needs of individual citizens.
  • we have to say that the multicultural policies were flawed from the very beginning: it wasn't as if this was a good set of policies that somehow eroded over time. The fact is that it was a lot easier to combat racism by saying to people "go on, follow your own values, cultures, lifestyles, beliefs, we will fund your festival, your dance troupe, your cultural centre"... we used to call it the "saree, samosa and steel band brigade".
  • What has happened is that the very notion of equality has transformed over the last twenty years. Equality used to mean that everybody was treated the same despite their differences. Now it's come to me that everybody is treated differently because of those differences.
  • There are two problems with granting people rights by virtue of their belonging to a group, as opposed to their being citizens with specific social, economic and other needs. First, the group becomes a focus not only for providing rights, but also for prejudice: you deal not with the problems of individual Roma, but the imputed problems of Roma as a whole. Second, you deny the same rights to other groups, to others who don't happen to be in that group, such as Muslims.
  • As for the relationship between multiculturalism and constraints on free speech, an argument has developed that runs something like this: we live in a society where there are lots of different peoples and cultures, each with deeply set, often irreconcilable, views and beliefs. In such a society we need to restrict what people say or do in order to minimize friction between cultures and to guarantee respect for people embedded in different cultures.
  • it is precisely because we live in a plural society that we need the most robust defence of free speech possible. It seems to me that in a plural society, the giving of offence is both inevitable and necessary. It is inevitable because we do have societies with deep-seated, conflicting views. But it's far better to have those conflicts out in the open than to suppress them in the name of respect and tolerance. But most importantly, the giving of offence is necessary because no kind of social change or social progress is possible without offending some group of other. When people say, "you are offending me", what they are really saying is, "you can't say that because I don't want my beliefs to be questioned or ridiculed or abused." That seems to me deeply problematic.
  • The real issue is not actually the threat of violence from Islamists. It is something much more internal to western societies, the sense that it is morally wrong to give offence to other groups and cultures. People are frightened of doing things because they fear the repercussions, but they are also frightened of doing things because they think it is morally wrong to offend other people and other cultures. And I think that is a much greater problem. We should say it is morally right to offend people. That is what a plural society is. If we want to live in a plural society, the price of a plural society – though I don't see it as a price, I think it is the value of the plural society – is that we confront each other. That is what is good about plural society.
  • We also need to make a distinction between colour blindness and racism blindness. The two have become confused, so that in France, for instance, arguments against multiculturalism have become an argument in defence of racism. Discriminatory policies, and not just against the Roma, but also against Muslims and others, have been defended on the basis that they are necessary for assimilation. The law outlawing the burqa, for instance. In one sense assimilation means treating individuals as citizens and not as members of a particular group. That seems to me to be a very good thing. But that is not what assimilation has come to mean in practice somewhere like France, where policies of assimilation have re
  • sulted in the authorities treating different groups of people differently by pointing up their differences, insisting that certain groups – Muslims or the Roma, for example – cannot belong to our culture, to our society, because their culture, their values, their ways of life are so different and inimical to ours. That is the way assimilation policies have developd and I think that is very dangerous.
  • Part of the problem of multiculturalism is that the distinction between the public and the private realms have become eroded. We need to defend the right of people to pursue their values, their lifestyles, their beliefs in private. By "private", I don't mean in the privacy of their homes, but in those areas of life distinct from the state and state institutions. But we also need to ensure that, in the public realm, the state does not treat people differently because of their particular values, beliefs or lifestyles. The ideal plural society is one where people have perfect freedom to pursue their beliefs, values and lifestyles in private but in public are treated as citizens, whatever those lifestyles, beliefs and values are. Multiculturalism has come to mean the very opposite: people are treated differently in the public realm because of their values, beliefs and lifestyles, but at the same time restrictions are placed upon the private realm, on what one can say or do, because of fear of giving offence.
  • Fighting racism doesn't mean I have to limit freedom of expression. I hate racist jokes, but I would protect the right of people to tell them. They are really ugly and stupid, but I wouldn't dream of regulating it by law. Actually, I do not believe in collective rights. I think everyone should be treated equally, but people also need to be free to live how they prefer. Fighting violent racism is something that should be done by law enforcement authorities. But it is also the responsibility of the cultural elites: to make racism something one should be ashamed of. It's a matter of education, I think. Not of laws limiting free speech.
  • The point about free speech is this: who is it that benefits from censorship? Is it those in power, or is it those without power? It seems to me that the only people to benefit from censorship are those with the power to enforce that censorship and the need to do so. Those who have no power are much better served by as little censorship as possible. Free speech is always the weapon in the hands of those who want to challenge power and censorship is always a weapon in those who want to preserve their power. That's why I think anyone who wants to challenge racism should support of the greatest extension of free speech possible.
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L'Hôte: all by yourself - 0 views

  • "I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity." freddie7 AT gmail DOT com My brother is a tailor and dressmaker. Check him out. Blog Archive ▼  2011 (81) ▼  April (6) seriousness and honesty are only conditionally vir... all by yourself straight fire failing students drop classes reason for optimism today in unfortunate yet amazing errors, Freddie e... ►  March (30) winning is fast, humanitarianism is slow we don't have a worker shortage quote for the day "you see an old woman...." amen sympathy for the juice box set first principles an open letter to Juan Cole on Libya they should have done a miniseries about Benjamin ... next big thing anniversary note the more things change ad hominems left-wing non-interventionism sorry about comments system how perfect is your knowledge? here they come France and the UK Libya gentrification involves more than the gentry the profession that wants to destroy itself they're bringing back all the classics marijuana legalization is a human rights issue Bobby Sands was an MP damn you, DVD clearance fees links and such a man from somewhere today in insanity the incredible naivete of the incredibly savvy ►  February (33) marked bodies What does it mean for a movie to be experimental a... subversion and containment IOZ on Reason's absurdity Reihan and progressivism/neoliberalism/leftism California good people are everywhere what I want submitted without comment welcome to lottery ticket America another perfect opportunity what's before us by the way the Atlantic and the working class ►  January (12) archivedate collaps
  • Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.
  • The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.
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Fuselage of AirAsia Plane Is Found, Indonesian Official Says - 0 views

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    An Indonesian official said on Tuesday that search teams had located the fuselage of the AirAsia plane that crashed in the Java Sea on Dec. 28, amid conflicting statements about whether the second of the flight's so-called black boxes had been pulled from the water.
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300 Veterans, Some With PTSD, Are on Death Row: Report - NBC News - 0 views

  • Courtney Lockhart's capital murder trial, the jury heard testimony that he had returned from a bloody 16-month deployment to Ramadi, Iraq, a changed man. His sweet nature was replaced by anger and paranoia, his ex-fiancee said. He hid in the closet at night, started living out of his car, drank too much and once put a gun to his own head.
  • defense argued that Lockhart, who was dishonorably discharged, was suffering from untreated PTSD and wasn't in his right mind when he abducted, robbed and fatally shot college student Lauren Burk in 2008. advertisement
  • The Alabama jury rejected the prosecution's call for the death penalty and sentenced him to life. But in a rare move, a judge overrode the panel's decision and put him on death row.
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  • The case of Lockhart — whose brigade had a dozen other men charged with murder or attempted murder after coming home from Iraq — is highlighted in a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that opposes capital punishment.
  • "At a time in which the death penalty is being imposed less and less, it is disturbing that so many veterans who were mentally and emotionally scarred while serving their country are now facing execution," said Robert Dunham, the center's executive director.
  • About 300 veterans are on death row nationwide, about 10 percent of all those condemned to die, the group estimates.
  • It's unclear how many have been diagnosed with PTSD or have symptoms, but Dunham says that in too many cases, a veteran's mental scars are not examined closely enough by defense lawyers, prosecutors, judges, juries and governors who can commute death sentences.
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Paris Terror Attacks: Officials Searching for Man Involved in Deadly Massacre - NBC News - 0 views

  • French authorities were racing Sunday to hunt down any potential accomplices to the wave of terror attacks unleashed in Paris as the investigation widened beyond this nation's borders.
  • A French man believed to be directly involved in Friday's massacre in Paris is on the run and the subject of an international manhunt, French security officials said Sunday evening.
  • Investigators said the man rented a Belgian-registered black Volkswagen Polo, which was allegedly used and abandoned by the hostage-takers who killed at least 89 people inside a Paris concert hall. advertisement He was identified by officials as Salah Abdeslam, 26, from Brussels.
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  • Abdeslam is allegedly the brother of another suspect currently in custody and being questioned — and of one of the deceased attackers, officials said.
  • French officials were working with authorities in Belgium, Spain and Serbia in an attempt to shed more light on the attack, which ISIS claimed responsibility for and which French President Francois Hollande described as an "act of war."
  • Less than two days after the attacks Sunday, French warplanes conducted raids in Syria, targeting ISIS' stronghold in Raqqa, the defense ministry said. Reuters reported that the operation was France's biggest strike against ISIS in Syria to date.
  • "The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped," the ministry said in a statement.
  • The airstrikes, which were carried out in coordination with the U.S., hit a command post, a jihadist recruitment center, a munitions depot and a militant training camp, the statement said.
  • Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said seven terrorists died in the attack on Friday. Officials initially said there were eight attackers — as did ISIS. It seems now Abdeslam is believed to be the eighth attacker.
  • A French prosecutor also said officials have identified two more assailants, whose names were not released to NBC News — a 20-year-old who was part of the attack on the Stade de France and a 31-year-old who was part of the attack on one of the restaurants in the 10th arrondissement. Both were French nationals living in Belgium.
  • "We consider this means they have a network," Francoise Shepmans, mayor of the town of Molenbeek where the individuals were detained, told Belgium's TV RTBF.
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Supreme Court Rules Juveniles Can Challenge Life Sentences - NBC News - 0 views

  • More than a thousand inmates in the nation's prisons who were sentenced as juveniles to life without the possibility of parole can now challenge those punishments, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday.
  • The decision extended a 2012 ruling, which invalidated future life-without- parole sentence for juvenile murderers, to all such offenders who were given life sentences in the past.
  • Monday's case involved Henry Montgomery, a Louisiana man who at age 17 killed a deputy sheriff in East Baton Rouge. The court in his trial was barred by law from considering arguments that his age should matter, "including evidence that as a scared youth, Mr. Montgomery shot in panic as the officer confronted him playing hooky," his lawyers said.
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  • As a general matter, rulings do not apply retroactively. The courts have long held that society has an interest in the finality of convictions. advertisement But by a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court said its 2012 ruling fit in a special category of exceptions applying to decisions that ban certain forms of punishment for a class of offenders because of their status.
  • Monday's opinion was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's four liberals, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
  • A total of 2,341 people are now serving mandatory sentences of life without parole for juvenile offenses. Roughly 1,000 of them would be affected by a decision in this case, according to a study by The Phillips Black Project, a non-profit law group that represents prisoners facing severe sentences. The remainder, the study concluded, were imprisoned in states that have already applied the ruling retroactively.
  • Monday's decision said the states do not have to hold new sentencing hearings if they allow juvenile homicide offenders the opportunity to be released on parole. Such a step "ensures that juveniles whose crimes reflected only transient immaturity -- and who have since matured -- will not be forced to serve a disproportionate sentence" in violation of the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
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The West's desire to 'liberate' the Middle East remains as flawed as ever | Voices | Th... - 0 views

  • The West's desire to ‘liberate’ the Middle East remains as flawed as ever
  • As General de Gaulle set out for the Middle East in April of 1941, he famously wrote that “towards the complicated Orient, I flew with simple ideas”.  They all did. Napoleon was going to "liberate" Cairo, and Bush and Blair were going to "liberate" Iraq; and Obama, briefly, was going to "liberate" Syria. 
  • And so they still must be.  But back in 1941, things went badly wrong for de Gaulle’s tiny Free French army. The "Army of the Levant" – officially fighting for Vichy France – did not surrender. Anxious to avoid the shame of the French military collapse before the Nazi Wehrmacht in April and May of 1940, it fought with great bravery against both de Gaulle’s rag-tag army and the British and Australians who accompanied them. 
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  • Back again now to the 1941 Allied invasion of Lebanon. Among the British forces was Sergeant Major Frank Armour, almost certainly fighting in a Scottish Commando unit that was badly hit in the first stages of the attack. He and his fellow officers arrived in "liberated" Beirut and were billeted on the top two floors of Salim Boustani’s home, and last week I walked through their rooms with their beautiful Italian architrave window frames and views over the Mediterranean, a glorious olive garden and banana plantation next door.
  • Dentz did not face the firing squad, but he died a slow death, deliberately brought about by a nation which imprisoned him in dank, freezing cells, dripping with water.  On 22 November 1955, he wrote in his diary:  “They have taken away my overcoat and scarf…I am writing absolutely numb in mind and body.”  December 13:  “The walls are running like little waterfalls…the best time is when one goes to bed…and, for a few hours, everything is forgotten.”  They were his last words.
  • Petain shared Dentz’s fate.  De Gaulle became president of France. Assad remains president of Syria. Better to be a small soldier, I suppose, like Frank Armour.  He, too, came to the complicated Orient.  Surely not with simple ideas.  I guess he fell in love with the place.
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Marco Rubio wins Puerto Rico primary | US elections | News | The Independent - 0 views

  • Marco Rubio is set to win the Puerto Rico primary.
  • With a quarter of the votes counted, Rubio received nearly 75 per cent of votes in the US territory, the Associated Press reports.
  • “The numbers are overwhelming,” Jenniffer Gonzalez, chairwoman of Puerto Rico's Republican Party, told the news agency. “This primary in Puerto Rico... will demonstrate that the Hispanic vote is important.”
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  • Rubio was the only Republican candidate to campaign in Puerto Rico. Voters in the US territory are not able to vote in presidential elections but they do participate in each party’s nominating process.
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Climate Deal Analysis: The Good, the Bad, the Still Unknown - NBC News - 0 views

  • First, the good news: On Saturday afternoon, world leaders ratified a universal pact to slow global warming, ending a decades-long political stalemate and, according to the best possible science, lowering the risk of ecological collapse.
  • The decisive moment arrived inside a high-security airplane hangar on the outskirts of Paris, where delegates from nearly 200 nations fought over the deal line-by-line for two weeks. Finally, the French foreign minister called an all-hands meeting, and asked if there were any objections to the final 31-page agreement.
  • Seeing and hearing none, he banged a tiny green gavel, sealing the deal into international law. The room erupted in a man-on-the-moon-like moment of rapturous applause. The online world followed.
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  • President Barack Obama praised the deal as "the most ambitious climate change agreement in history." "Beautiful," added French president Francois Hollande. "I used to say we must," commented Christiana Figueres, the United Nation's climate chief. "Today, we can say we did!"
  • The agreement commits the world to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." That's an ambitious goal here in 2015, which is expected to be the hottest year on record, amid the three hottest decades on record.
  • Finally, the agreement pledges a minimum of $100 billion a year for developing countries to adapt to the ravages of our already overheated climate. That's an acknowledgement of the vast inequities of climate change: The fact that the richest, most powerful countries have done the most to cause climate change, yet suffer the least as a result. advertisement
  • But there's a whole lot of bad news in this agreement as well: It's vague. It's aspirational. And critics say it's several orders of magnitude away from being enough to avert a crisis in the decades ahead.
  • "The Paris Climate Agreement is not a fair, just or science-based deal," said Erich Pica, president of the eco-watchdog group Friends of the Earth. "The result is in an agreement that could see low-lying islands and coastlines swallowed up by the sea, and many African lands ravaged by drought."
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India Temple Fire: Kerala Disaster Leaves Over 100 Dead, 200 Injured - NBC News - 0 views

  • A massive fire broke out during a fireworks display in a Hindu temple in south India early Sunday, killing more than 100 people and injuring at least 200 others, officials said.
  • The fire started when a spark from the unauthorized fireworks show ignited a separate batch of fireworks that were being stored at the Puttingal temple complex in Paravoor village, a few hours north of Kerala's state capital of Thiruvananthapuram, said Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, the state's top elected official.
  • Thousands had been packed into the temple complex when a big explosion erupted around 3 a.m., officials said. The blaze then spread quickly through the temple, trapping devotees within.
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  • Most of the 102 people died when the building where the fireworks were stored collapsed, Chandy told reporters at the temple complex.
  • Local TV channels broadcast images of huge clouds of white smoke billowing from the temple, as fireworks were still going off in the night sky. Successive explosions from the building storing the fireworks sent huge chunks of concrete flying as far as a half mile, according to resident Jayashree Harikrishnan.
  • The temple holds a competitive fireworks display every year, with different groups putting on successive light shows for thousands of devotees gathered for the last day of a seven-day festival honoring the goddess Bhadrakali, a southern Indian incarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali.
  • This year, district authorities denied permission for the fireworks display, Chief Minister Chandy said. advertisement The state's High Court had earlier mandated that fireworks must be stored more than 100 yards from temples — orders that were flouted at the Paravoor temple, said Loknath Behera, a top police official.
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Chess in a black box: China's five most powerful people - CNN - 0 views

  • The country is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, in a one-party system, making whoever occupies the highest positions in the party among the most powerful.
  • Power isn't just held by the politicians either -- influential businessmen and entrepreneurs, the pioneers of China's economic rise, are also fighting for a seat at the table.
  • the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party on October 18,
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  • Tencent's app, WeChat, is currently the largest and most commonly used messaging system in the world, with almost 1 billion users.
  • "He's regarded as being a sort of low-profile, not particularly interlinked or interconnected premier. He's got probably the worst job in China.
  • it's not a sort of political power. It's administrative power," he said.
  • "Power is about initiating, setting frameworks, setting the agenda. Well you can see people doing that, but Li Keqiang is more of an administrator."
  • The company's founder, Ma Huateng, is China's third richest man, according to Forbes, just behind Jack Ma and Dalian Wanda founder Wang Jianlin.
  • Ma, who is also known by his nickname "Pony," founded Tencent, the company which owns WeChat, in 1998 with his university classmates.
  • , Premier Li is number two in China's power structure, but his influence is far from assured.
  • It is those restrictions which make working in the world of China's internet so complex and potentially dangerous.
  • China's Great Firewall is rising higher than ever
  • "One challenge for tech titans like Ma in the coming years is whether they can keep on the good side of the authorities
  • Since then, Wang has grown to be a powerful, feared figure among Chinese officials.
  • Jack Ma is without a doubt one of China's most powerful people and possibly the country's most public face internationally next to President Xi.
  • As a result of Xi and Wang's crackdown, conspicuous spending and flaunting of wealth by officials has shrunk dramatically and as a result, Wang's political capital has continued to rise.
  • Wang's rise could be complicated by his age. He'll be 69 at the upcoming 19th Party Congress, meaning by custom he should retire.
  • he's the flamboyant and personable former English teacher who likes to dance to Michael Jackson tunes.
  • "He's been an essential lieutenant for Xi ... the president would be a weakened force without him at the top table," he said, placing Wang second
  • Ma, whose Chinese name is Ma Yun, is the executive chairman and founder of Alibaba,
  • Ma's peer on the China rich list, has had to abandon a series of major international deals after coming under scrutiny from Beijing.
  • Most people can't see the day after tomorrow."
  • China's president and, more importantly, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, analysts say Xi is already the country's most powerful leader since Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping
  • Xi's power is only set to grow.
  • far more than his predecessors,
  • most recently Chen Min'er who was promoted as party secretary of Chongqing.
  • Guo Wengui, the US-based businessman and perennial thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party.
  • and the chess game itself goes on inside a highly impenetrable black box," he said.
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Opinion | A World Without Partisan Gerrymanders? Virginia Democrats Show the Way - The ... - 0 views

  • Politicians rarely give up power voluntarily. They never give it up when they have free rein to lock it in for at least a decade, and exact long-overdue revenge against their political opponents.
  • But a group of Virginia Democrats did just that earlier this month, when they voted in favor of an amendment to the State Constitution stripping themselves of the power to redraw legislative district maps in 2021, after the decennial census.
  • Last fall, Democrats won majorities in both houses of the Virginia Legislature; with a Democratic governor already in office, they took full control of the state government for the first time in a generation. They had unlimited power to fashion the new maps in their favor, cementing their own grip on power just as Republicans around the country have done since the last redistricting cycle in 2011
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  • Some Republican maps are so biased that they have given the G.O.P. legislative supermajorities even when the party loses the statewide popular vote, which happened in Wisconsin in 2018. So it’s entirely understandable for Democrats who regain power to want payback — now.
  • And yet nine Virginia Democrats agreed to put down their partisan swords and join Republicans to support the new amendment, which would require that the state’s district maps be drawn by a bipartisan commission made up of lawmakers and regular citizens.
  • Republicans continue to find countless ways to block efforts to make voting fairer and more democratic. In Missouri, Utah and Michigan, Republican lawmakers are working to undo citizen-led ballot initiatives that were passed, in some cases overwhelmingly, by voters tired of being chosen by their politicians.
  • The Virginia amendment’s passage is all the more important in the present moment, when voters everywhere have been left at the mercy of self-serving state lawmakers, thanks to the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene to stop even the most extreme partisan gerrymanders
  • The ruling last June, by a 5-to-4 vote, asserted that redistricting was a political matter to be resolved by the states, not the federal courts. The justices thus enshrined one of the most corrosive and anti-democratic practices in American politics.
  • what of those Republicans? Aren’t they to be commended for voting in favor of fairer maps? Sure, but it was an easy call once they were out of power, or knew they were about to be. The better question is, Where was their public spirit when they held an unthreatened majority
  • The Democrats’ vote was a display of integrity and selflessness by members of a party with unified control of government.
  • And when Republicans do lose at the ballot box, they respond not by trying to appeal to more voters, but by stripping power from duly-elected Democrats — essentially looting the shelves on their way out the door
  • This is the behavior of a party that neither trusts its own popularity nor accepts its opponents’ legitimacy, a fatal combination for a constitutional republic.
  • why play fair when the other side doesn’t? The answer is that the alternative is a race to the bottom, where voters of both parties give up because they know whatever box they check at the polls, the politicians have already made their choices for them.
  • In far too many parts of the country, that’s the reality today. Partisan gerrymandering is a key reason millions of Americans feel the government is rigged against them.
  • The more the public learns about it, the more they oppose it. Virginia voters support the new redistricting amendment, 70 percent to 15 percent; according to a January 2019 poll commissioned by Campaign Legal Center, which pushes for electoral reform, 65 percent said they favored districts with no partisan bias, even if it meant their own party would win fewer seats.
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Growing number of Southern Baptist women question roles - ABC News - 0 views

  • Emily Snook is the daughter of a Southern Baptist pastor. She met her husband, also a pastor, while they attended a Southern Baptist universityYet the 39-year-old Oklahoma woman now finds herself wondering if it’s time to leave the nation's largest Protestant denomination, in part because of practices and attitudes that limit women’s roles.
  • Among the millions of women belonging to churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, there are many who have questioned the faith’s gender-role doctrine and more recently urged a stronger response to disclosures of sexual abuse perpetrated by SBC clergy.
  • popular Bible teacher Beth Moore said she no longer considered herself Southern Baptist. Moore, perhaps the best-known evangelical woman in the world, had drawn the ire of some SBC conservatives for speaking out against Donald Trump in 2016 and suggesting the denomination had problems with sexism.
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  • Yet she is among a number of SBC women publicly sharing their dismay about sex abuse and the vitriol directed at Moore.“Beth has been scorned, mocked, and slandered while doing exactly what the denomination has determined she could and should do: be a woman teaching other women,” Prior said via email.
  • “If these women leave, it won’t be because Beth left. It will be because the men the Baptist Faith and Message says are supposed to lead in Christ-like ways have failed to do so.”
  • espouses male leadership in the home and the church and says a wife “is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” It specifies that women cannot be pastors, citing the Apostle Paul’s biblical admonition, “I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; instead, she is to remain quiet.”
  • There are “painful, disorienting double-messages for women in the SBC,” she said. “You’re created in the image of God, but if you experience God leading you to be pastor, you get told there are limits to what you can do — sit down, go home, be quiet. There’s kind of a crisis where women feel shut down and dismissed and attacked.”
  • “Is it about protecting women — or is it really about protecting your power and covering up sexual abuse in the church?” she asked. “That’s caused a crisis of faith among a lot of women and men.”
  • “There are a lot of women who will never have the scope and reach of a Beth Moore but believed they had something to contribute because of her,” McCoy said. “It’s those women who look at the online vitriol and feel discouraged before they even begin, thinking, ‘If this is what they say about Beth Moore, what will they say about me?’”
  • “I have lost count of the number of times I have seen evangelical men on social media repeating that awful command ‘Go home’ to Beth Moore,” she said via email. “I wonder if they realize when they say those two words with such glee, they are sending a message to all women that our giftings and opinions and ideas may not be all that welcome in our denomination.”
  • “He explained to me, Julia, you can’t be a head pastor for the same reason I can’t have babies. That’s not God’s design,” Sadler said.Sadler, 33, directs a program at her father’s megachurch called Next Generation that develops ministries for teens, college students, single young adults and young moms. She says there are about 1,500 participants, with a 60%-40% female-male split.
  • Katie McCoy, a professor of theology in women’s studies in the undergraduate branch of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, tells her female students there are meaningful roles they can play in the SBC even if pastoring is off-limits. But she says many Southern Baptist women, including students of hers, were unsettled by the criticism of Moore.
  • Brown sees a link between the abuse and the doctrine that women should submit to male leadership.“It sets up interpersonal and institutional dynamics that help to foster abuse and cover-ups,” she said. “The SBC’s pervasive misogyny inculcates attitudes that, at best, are limiting of female potential, and at worst, are disrespectful and dehumanizing.”
  • In some cases, entire congregations have walked away. Joel Bowman, pastor at Temple of Faith Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, recently abandoned plans to move the congregation into the SBC fold. Bowman, who is African American, had differences with SBC leaders on racism issues and also gender roles — his wife, Nannette, is an associate minster at the church.
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Georgia voting bill: Republicans speed sweeping elections bill restricting voting acces... - 0 views

  • Republicans in Georgia sped a sweeping elections bill into law Thursday, making it the first presidential battleground to impose new voting restrictions following President Joe Biden's victory in the state.
  • The bill passed both chambers of the legislature in the span of a few hours
  • Kemp, who is up for reelection next year, had refused to give in to former President Donald Trump's demands last year that he overturn Biden's victory -- earning Trump's public condemnation.
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  • He predicted critics of the new law "will threaten, boycott, sue, demonize and team up with their friends in the national media to call me everything in the book."
  • The new law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, empowers state officials to take over local elections boards, limits the use of ballot drop boxes and makes it a crime to approach voters in line to give them food and water.
  • "It's like the Christmas tree of goodies for voter suppression," Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan said on the Senate floor
  • "In large part because of the racial disparities in areas outside of voting -- such as socioeconomic status, housing, and employment opportunities -- the Voter Suppression Bill disproportionately impacts Black voters, and interacts with these vestiges of discrimination in Georgia to deny Black voters (an) equal opportunity to participate in the political process and/or elect a candidate of their choice," the lawsuit states.
  • The package is part of a national Republican effort that aims to restrict access to the ballot box following record turnout in the election.
  • Voting rights advocates say the state's rapid-fire action -- and plans in other Republican-controlled states to pass restrictions of their own -- underscores the need for federal legislation to set a national baseline for voting rules.
  • "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights," she said in a statement.
  • Advocates said they were alarmed by measures that will allow any Georgian to lodge an unlimited number of challenges to voter registrations and eligibility, saying it could put a target on voters of color. And Democrats in the Georgia Senate on Thursday lambasted measures that boot the secretary of state as chairman of the state elections board and allow lawmakers to install his replacement, giving lawmakers three of five appointments.
  • Another provision shortens the runoff cycle from the current nine weeks to just four weeks
  • Republicans scaled back some restrictive provisions from earlier iterations of the legislation, including a proposed repeal of no-excuse absentee voting.
  • As of February, state legislators in 43 states have introduced more than 250 bills with restrictive voting provisions, according to a tally from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
  • 20,000 conservative activists it said had lobbied lawmakers to pass the overhaul.
  • Last November, Biden became the first Democrat in nearly three decades to win the state. And strong voter turnout in January helped send two Democrats to the US Senate, flipping control of the chamber to their party. One of those new senators, Raphael Warnock, captured his seat in a special election and will be on the ballot again in 2022.
  • And voters who seek absentee ballots have to provide a copy of their identification or the number of their Georgia driver's license or state ID to both apply for and return the ballot. The also prohibits the secretary of state's office from sending unsolicited absentee ballot applications, as it did before the 2020 primaries due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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'I've Never Seen Anything Like This': Chaos Strikes Global Shipping - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Around the planet, the pandemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery.
  • As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports.
  • Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected, because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.
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  • The pandemic and its restrictions have limited the availability of dockworkers and truck drivers, causing delays in handling cargo from Southern California to Singapore
  • Economies around the globe are absorbing the ripple effects of the disruption on the seas. Higher costs for transporting American grain and soybeans across the Pacific threaten to increase food prices in Asia.
  • Empty containers are piled up at ports in Australia and New Zealand; containers are scarce at India’s port of Kolkata, forcing makers of electronics parts to truck their wares more than 1,000 miles west to the port of Mumbai, where the supply is better.
  • Rice exporters in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are forgoing some shipments to North America because of the impossibility of securing containers.
  • Since they were first deployed in 1956, containers have revolutionized trade by allowing goods to be packed into standard size receptacles and hoisted by cranes onto rail cars and trucks — effectively shrinking the globe.
  • Unlike the financial crisis, when the economic recovery took years to gather force, Chinese factories came roaring back in the second half of 2020, yielding robust demand for shipping.
  • Viewed broadly, the volume of global trade dipped by only 1 percent in 2020 compared with the previous year. But that doesn’t reflect how the year unfolded — with a plunge of more than 12 percent in April and May, followed by an equally dramatic reversal. The system could not adjust, leaving containers in the wrong places, and pushing shipping prices to extraordinary heights.
  • Six months ago, he was paying about $2,500 to ship a 40-foot container to California.“We just paid $67,000,” he said. “This is the highest freight rate that I have seen in 45 years in the business.”
  • Given the prices fetched by containers in Asia, shipping carriers are increasingly unloading in California and then immediately putting empty boxes back on ships for the return leg to Asia, without waiting to load grain or other American exports. That has left companies like Scoular scrambling to secure passage.
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N.Y. Severely Undercounted Virus Deaths in Nursing Homes, Report Says - The New York Times - 0 views

  • ALBANY, N.Y. — For most of the past year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has tried to brush away a persistent criticism that undermined his national image as the man who led New York through the pandemic: that his policies had allowed thousands of nursing home residents to die of the virus.
  • He also asserted that the lack of data on hospital deaths of nursing home residents was due to concern and caution about the accuracy of data that nursing homes supplied — an issue also raised by the attorney general. “D.O.H. does not disagree that the number of people transferred from a nursing home to a hospital is an important data point,” he said.
  • The report also cast a critical eye on perhaps the governor’s most criticized decision since the beginning of the pandemic last year: a March 25 directive from the Health Department that ordered nursing homes to accept and readmit patients who had tested positive..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-1sjr751{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1sjr751 a:hover{border-bottom:1px solid #dcdcdc;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% - 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:'See more';}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}
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  • The Democratic chairman of the investigations and government operations committee in the State Senate, James Skoufis, who has accused the Health Department of stonewalling investigators, suggested on Thursday that he would use a subpoena to compel the release of data from Dr. Zucker’s office.
  • The attorney general asked 62 nursing homes — about a tenth of the state’s total — for information about on-site and in-hospital deaths related to the virus; investigators then cross-referenced that information with public reports of deaths issued by the Health Department. The deaths reported to the attorney general’s office at most of those facilities totaled 1,914, compared to the state’s much lower count of 1,229.
  • Under normal circumstances, the attorney general’s office “would issue a report with findings and recommendations after its investigations and enforcement activities are completed,” Ms. James said in her report. “However, circumstances are far from normal.”
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Opinion: The one issue that could bring Democrats and Republicans together - CNN - 0 views

  • Political commentators continue to wonder whether President Joe Biden can deliver on his promise of national unity and healing.While his prospects for doing so seem increasingly limited, there is one area that offers some hope: criminal justice reform.
  • In 2010, Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, a bipartisan bill that reduced the racist disparities in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. Over the course of his administration, he granted clemency to 1,715 people behind bars -- more than any president in US history, according to his administration. And to give people a fair shot at getting their lives back on, he signed an executive order banning federal agencies from asking about criminal records during the hiring process -- a reform known as "ban the box."
  • The result was the First Step Act -- a bill that addresses many aspects of the criminal justice system: curbing mandatory minimum sentencing, increasing compassionate and elderly release, reducing sentences for people who complete rehabilitative programs, and more. The bill, which passed in a bipartisan landslide during the Trump presidency, has already led to more than 16,000 people coming home early from federal prisons.
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  • Biden needs a way to begin bringing the country together. The past two administrations -- in different ways and for different reasons -- have left a door open for him to do so.
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