Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Trump’s United American Emirate

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President Trump in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, this month. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
SEOUL, South Korea — President Trump’s trip to Europe was truly historic.
He left our most important allies there so uncertain about America’s commitment to their security from Russia and to shared values on trade and climate change that German leader Angela Merkel was prompted to tell her countrymen that Europe’s days of relying on America are “over to a certain extent,” and therefore Germany and its European allies “really must take our fate into our own hands.”
No U.S. president before had ever put a crack in the Atlantic alliance on his inaugural tour. Historic.
Merkel is just the first major leader to say out loud what every American ally is now realizing: America is under new management. “Who is America today?” is the first question I’ve been asked on each stop through New Zealand, Australia and South Korea. My answer: We’re not the U.S.A. anymore. We’re the new U.A.E.: the United American Emirate.
We have an emir. His name is Donald. We have a crown prince. His name is Jared. We have a crown princess. Her name is Ivanka. We have a consultative council (Congress) that rubber-stamps whatever the emir wants. And like any good monarchy, our ruling family sees no conflict of interest between its personal businesses and those of the state.
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So any lingering Kennedyesque thoughts about us should be banished, I explained. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay no price, bear no burden, meet no hardship, support no friend, oppose no foe to assure the success of liberty — unless we’re paid in advance. And we take cash, checks, gold, Visa, American Express, Bitcoin and memberships in Mar-a-Lago.
The Trump doctrine is very simple: There are just four threats in the world: terrorists who will kill us, immigrants who will rape us or take our jobs, importers and exporters who will take our industries — and North Korea. Threats to democracy, free trade, the environment and human rights are no longer on our menu. Therefore, no matter how unsavory you are as a foreign leader, you can be the United American Emirate’s best friend if you:
1.) Pay us by buying our weapons. I warn you, though, Saudi Arabia has set the bar very high, starting at $110 billion.
2.) Pay us in higher defense spending for NATO — not to deter Russia, which is using cyberwarfare to disrupt every democratic election it can, but to deter “terrorism,” something that tanks and planes are useless against.
3.) Pay us in trade concessions. And it doesn’t matter how lame those concessions are. All that matters is that Emir Trump can claim “concessions.” See the recent “trade concessions” to Trump from China. (Pay no attention to that laughter from Beijing.)
4.) Pay us by freeing any U.S. citizen you arrested on trumped-up charges to annoy Barack Obama and to intimidate human rights activists. See Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s release of a U.S.-Egyptian charity worker, Aya Hijazi, who was working with homeless children.
5.) Pay us by grossly flattering our emir about how much of an improvement he is over Obama. See President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Bibi Netanyahu of Israel.
6.) Be Russia, and you pay nothing.
Now, if you do any one of these six things the United American Emirate’s commitment to you — and it’s ironclad — is that you can do anything you want “out back.” You can deprive your people of whatever human rights you like out back. You can be as corrupt as you want out back. You can steal as many elections as you like out back. Just keep the arms purchases coming, the NATO dues rising, the phony trade concessions flowing and the compliments gushing — or be Vladimir Putin — and anything goes.
Too harsh? Not at all. Being in Korea and seeing how much this country has grown out of poverty over the last 50 years by adopting all of our values — so much so that it just impeached its president for corruption after a peaceful “candlelight” mass protest based entirely on American democratic software — it makes you weep to think that virtually the only thing Trump’s had to say about Korea is that it’s a freeloader on our army (not even true) and needs to pay up.
Does Trump have a point that German economic policies have dampened its imports and disadvantaged southern Europe? Yes, he does. And NATO members should fulfill the alliance’s long-term spending targets. But how much is Germany spending to absorb one million Syrian refugees so they won’t be joining ISIS? How much security is that buying the world? The U.S. took 18,000 Syrians. Trump’s friend Putin took zero, but Trump never thinks about such things.
It took us decades to build the Atlantic alliance and it has brought us so many tangible and intangible benefits in the form of security, stability, growth and friendships. Trump could actually break it, not just crack it.
This week for the first time I saw the official photographs that now grace the entry halls of all U.S. embassies. Vice President Mike Pence is smiling warmly. Trump is actually scowling. If his picture had a caption, it would be: “Get off my lawn.”
It could also say: “Let all who enter this embassy know: We don’t do alliances any more. We only do Master Limited Partnerships. Interested? Call 1-202-456-1414. Operators are standing by.”

Trump Expected to Pull U.S. From Paris Climate Accord

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President Trump addressed American troops in Taormina, Sicily, on Saturday before returning to Washington. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
President Trump is expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, three officials with knowledge of the decision said, making good on a campaign pledge but severely weakening the landmark 2015 climate change accord that committed nearly every nation to take action to curb the warming of the planet.
A senior White House official cautioned that the specific language of the president’s expected announcement was still in flux Wednesday morning. The official said the withdrawal might be accompanied by legal caveats that will shape the impact of Mr. Trump’s decision.
And Mr. Trump has proved himself willing to shift direction up until the moment of a public announcement. He is set to meet Wednesday afternoon with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has advocated that the United States remain a part of the Paris accords and could continue to lobby the president to change his mind.
Even as reports surfaced about his decision, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that he would make his intentions known soon.
Still, faced with advisers who pressed hard on both sides of the Paris question, Mr. Trump appears to have decided that a continued United States presence in the accord would harm the economy; hinder job creation in regions like Appalachia and the West, where his most ardent supporters live; and undermine his “America First” message.

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The Stakes in the Paris Climate Deal: What Might Other Countries Do?

President Trump is expected to withdraw the United States from the first worldwide deal to address global warming. Where do other countries stand on the agreement?
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Advisers pressing him to remain in the accord could still make their case to the boss. In the past, such appeals have worked. In April, Mr. Trump was set to announce a withdrawal from the Nafta free trade agreement, but at the last minute changed his mind after intense discussions with advisers and calls from the leaders of Canada and Mexico. Last week, a senior administration official said Mr. Trump would use a speech in Brussels to make an explicit endorsement of NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense provision, which states that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. He didn’t.
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The exit of the United States, the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas polluter would not dissolve the 195-nation pact, which was legally ratified last year, but it could set off a cascade of events that would have profound effects on the planet. Other countries that reluctantly joined the agreement could now withdraw or soften their commitments to cutting planet-warming pollution.
“The actions of the United States are bound to have a ripple effect in other emerging economies that are just getting serious about climate change, such as India, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that produces scientific reports designed to inform global policy makers.
Once the fallout settles, he added, “it is now far more likely that we will breach the danger limit of 3.6 degrees.” That is the average atmospheric temperature increase above which a future of extreme conditions is considered irrevocable.
The aim of the Paris agreement was to lower planet-warming emissions enough to avoid that threshold.
“We will see more extreme heat, damaging storms, coastal flooding and risks to food security,” Professor Oppenheimer said. “And that’s not the kind of world we want to live in.”
Foreign policy experts said the move could damage the United States’ credibility and weaken Mr. Trump’s efforts to negotiate issues far beyond climate change, like negotiating trade deals and combating terrorism.

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Trump Is Hearing Plenty About the Paris Climate Deal. Who Will Have the Last Word?

As President Trump decides whether to stay or leave the international climate agreement, political and corporate leaders on both sides of the debate are lobbying him fiercely.
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“From a foreign policy perspective, it’s a colossal mistake — an abdication of American leadership ” said R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat and the under secretary of state during the presidency of George W. Bush.
“The success of our foreign policy — in trade, military, any other kind of negotiation — depends on our credibility. I can’t think of anything more destructive to our credibility than this,” he added.
But Mr. Trump’s supporters, particularly coal state Republicans, cheered the move, celebrating it as a fulfillment of a signature campaign promise. Speaking to a crowd of oil rig workers last May, Mr. Trump vowed to “cancel” the agreement, and Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, has pushed the president to withdraw from the accord as part of an economic nationalism that has so far included pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multilateral trade pact, and vowing to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Coal miners and coal company executives in states such as Kentucky and West Virginia have pushed for Mr. Trump to reverse all of President Barack Obama’s climate change policies, many of which are aimed at reducing the use of coal, which is seen as the largest contributor to climate change.
In a May 23 letter to Mr. Trump from Attorney General Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia and nine other state attorneys general, Mr. Morrisey wrote, “Withdrawing from the Paris agreement is an important and necessary step toward reversing the harmful energy policies and unlawful overreach of the Obama era.” He added, “The Paris Agreement is a symbol of the Obama administration’s ‘Washington knows best’ approach to governing.”
Although the administration has been debating for months its position on the Paris agreement, the sentiment for leaving the accord ultimately prevailed over the views of Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and close adviser, who had urged the president to keep a seat at the climate negotiating table.
Other countries have vowed to continue to carry out the terms of the Paris agreement, even without the United States.
President Xi Jinping of China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas polluter, has promised that his country would move ahead with steps to curb climate change, regardless of what happens in the United States.
During a telephone call in early May with President Emmanuel Macron of France, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Mr. Xi told the newly elected French leader that China and France “should protect the achievements of global governance, including the Paris agreement.”
But the accord’s architects say the absence of the United States will inevitably weaken its chances of being enforced. For example, the United States has played a central role in pushing provisions that require robust and transparent oversight of how emissions are monitored, verified and reported.
Without the United States, there is likely to be far less pressure on major polluting countries and industries to accurately report their emissions. There have been major questions raised about the accuracy of China’s emissions reporting, in particular.
“We need to know: What are your emissions? Where are your emissions?” said Todd D. Stern, the lead climate negotiator during the Obama administration. “There needs to be transparent reporting on countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. If the U.S. is not part of that negotiation, that’s a loss for the world.”

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Four Senators to Watch in the Trump-Russia Investigation

WASHINGTON — They are a disparate foursome: the chamber’s leading Republican centrist, a minister who embraces public service as a calling, a seasoned dealmaker and a high-profile presidential contender.
These four Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Roy Blunt of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida — are emerging as a bloc integral to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The investigation is widely considered the premier inquiry, the one with the necessary jurisdiction and the best chance of producing a credible outcome. These four senators loom large as a crucial element in getting there.
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Despite early skepticism about the Republican-led panel’s commitment to the investigation, the four have made it clear that they are determined to see it through to a conclusion that would satisfy the public and their colleagues in both parties. To get there, they will have to slog through thousands of pages of raw intelligence held by the C.I.A. and devote untold hours to grinding committee work behind closed doors.
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“This is not about the president, this is about the presidency,” said Mr. Lankford, who was a longtime Baptist youth minister before he entered politics. “This is about where we are as a nation.”
This is not to say that other members of the panel aren’t engaged. The committee’s seven Democrats are certainly interested in finding out whether Russians colluded with the Trump campaign and helped to elect him.
Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the panel, has shown an increasing zeal for pursuing the question after an uncertain start. He and Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, have forged a solid working relationship.
Three other Republicans are also playing a role: John Cornyn of Texas, who as the No. 2 Senate Republican brings a leadership perspective to the investigation, Jim Risch of Idaho and Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
But it is notable that the other four have quietly coalesced into something of an informal working group within the Intelligence Committee, pushing the investigation forward and consulting not only with each other and Mr. Burr, but also with Mr. Warner.
“We are working very hard and we talk a lot with one another, as well,” said Ms. Collins, who said the investigation would “take as long as required.”
“This is a complex investigation, and as you pull the threads, you find that it is connected to a whole lot of other threads in this tapestry that we are not yet seeing the whole of.”
Here is a look at the four and what is driving them:

Susan Collins

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Senator Susan Collins of Maine. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
Although she is known as the Republican centrist voice in the Senate, another role she has held in Washington may be equally important in this case: senior Senate staff member.
Ms. Collins was a top Senate aide and served in other executive posts before running for office. She is experienced in both conducting and overseeing inquiries.
“I really want to know the truth no matter who is implicated, no matter where the evidence leads,” she said. As a 21-year-old in 1974, she was an intern for Representative William S. Cohen, a freshman Republican congressman from Maine who helped draw up the articles of impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon.

James Lankford

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Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
His colleagues say it would be a mistake to underestimate this junior member of the Senate.
Mr. Lankford showed surprising political strength in a 2014 primary fight in a special Senate election in Oklahoma after compiling a conservative record and rapidly raising his profile during two terms in the House.
He objected sharply to recent reports that the Senate inquiry was understaffed and moving at a plodding pace.
“If you make a big staff, they get less access to the real documents for intelligence that you need,” he said. “You need to keep it with high-level folks in as small a pool as possible and give them the time they need,” he said.

Roy Blunt

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Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
Very few members of Congress make it into the leadership ranks; hardly anyone makes into leadership in the House and in the Senate.
Mr. Blunt, the former House majority leader and a savvy inside player, is now the fifth-ranking Republican in the Senate. He has been adamant that Congress pursue the investigation into Russian meddling — both to find out what happened and to allow Congress and the White House to move beyond it.
“Everyone would benefit if we do this job in the right way and do it not faster than we can, but as fast we can,” he said.
Mr. Blunt has been a consistent voice that the committee must be thorough. “When we are done, we need to have talked to everybody a reasonable person would think we should talk to and have seen everything a reasonable person would think we should see,” he said.

Marco Rubio

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Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
After his failed presidential bid, he almost didn’t return to the Senate, but a change of heart has thrust him into the middle of an inquiry surrounding the election of his Republican primary race rival.
In a recent appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Rubio suggested that committee work would not just lay out for the public what the Russians did, “but how they did it and what it means for the future and what we should be doing about it.”
A proponent of a hard line with Russia, Mr. Rubio dismissed Mr. Trump’s complaint that he was the victim of a witch hunt. “We are nation of laws and we are going to follow those laws,” he said. “The president is entitled to his opinion.”
There is no doubt that political conflict will erupt as the inquiry advances. These four senators will be crucial in determining whether it stays on track.

Saturday, May 27, 2017

Liberals Wanted a Fight in Montana. Democratic Leaders Saw a Lost Cause.

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Greg Gianforte, a Republican, celebrating his victory in Montana’s special House election on Thursday in Bozeman. Credit Janie Osborne/Getty Images
BOZEMAN, Mont. — The Democratic defeat in a hard-fought special House election in Montana on Thursday highlighted the practical limitations on liberal opposition to President Trump and exposed a deepening rift between cautious party leaders, who want to pick their shots in battling for control of Congress in 2018, and more militant grass-roots activists who want to fight the Republicans everywhere.
Rob Quist, the Democratic nominee in Montana, staked his campaign on the Republican health care bill, but he still lost by six percentage points, even after his Republican opponent for the state’s lone House seat, Greg Gianforte, was charged with assaulting a reporter on the eve of the election.
The margin in this race was relatively small in a state that Mr. Trump carried by more than 20 percentage points last year. But Mr. Quist’s defeat disappointed grass-roots Democrats who financed nearly his entire campaign while the national party declined to spend heavily on what it considered, from the outset, an all-but-lost cause in daunting political territory.
This tension — between party leaders who will not compete for seats they think they cannot win and an energized base loath to concede any contests to Republicans — risks demoralizing activists who keep getting their hopes up. It also points to a painful reality for Democrats: Despite the boiling fury on the left, the resistance toward Mr. Trump has yet to translate into a major electoral victory.
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In part, this is because the few special elections for Congress so far have taken place in red-leaning districts, where the near-daily barrage of new controversies involving Mr. Trump has not damaged him irreparably and where he remains fairly popular.
The Montana contest was the second special House election this year in a conservative district where rank-and-file progressives rallied behind their candidate only to see Washington-based Democrats shrink from the fight as Republicans launched ferocious attacks to ensure victory.
In Kansas last month — in a Wichita-area district that is even more conservative than Montana — national Republican groups stepped in to ensure that another lackluster candidate, Ron Estes, pulled out a win, while the Democratic nominee, James Thompson, waited in vain for his party’s cavalry to ride in.
“If the national Democratic Party would start getting more involved in these races earlier, then maybe we could flip them,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “It’s frustrating.”
For Republicans, the outcome in Montana, where Mr. Gianforte apologized in his victory speech late Thursday night to the reporter he had attacked, is likely to calm nerves at least for a while, staving off what the party feared would be a full-blown panic if Mr. Gianforte lost on such favorable turf. Washington-based Republican strategists had grown increasingly pessimistic about the race in recent weeks, bemoaning their candidate’s political deficiencies and predicting a narrow victory.
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Rob Quist, the Democratic candidate for Montana’s House seat, in May. Some locals were frustrated that the national party did not support Mr. Quist more. Credit Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
For Democrats, though, the contest pointed to an increasingly heated disagreement over where the party has a realistic chance to win. Party officials in Montana and progressive activists beyond the state’s borders grew frustrated last month watching outside Republican groups savage Mr. Quist as Democratic groups remained on the sidelines.
After a special House election in Georgia in which the Democrat Jon Ossoff received more than 48 percent of the vote — nearly averting a runoff and demonstrating the extent of voter enthusiasm on the left — Senator Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat facing re-election next year, called Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, and implored him to consider spending money on Mr. Quist in the final weeks of the Montana race, according to two Democratic strategists briefed on the call. Mr. Tester also contacted the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, to see if he would carry the same message to the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi of California.
But House Democratic officials make no apology for their prudence, believing they are more likely to claim the 24 seats needed to capture the House majority in suburban districts with highly educated voters, where anger at Mr. Trump runs high. That includes districts like the one in suburban Atlanta, previously represented by Health Secretary Tom Price, where both parties have poured tens of millions of dollars into a contest that looms all the more consequential after the Democratic defeats in Kansas and Montana.
Even this week, just two days before the Montana vote, Mr. Luján announced new spending in the Georgia race. And in private, Mr. Luján was telling other House Democrats that Mr. Quist stood little chance, based on private polls showing Mr. Gianforte with a healthy, consistent lead of about 10 percentage points, according to one of those present at a closed-door meeting of the caucus. After the election was called, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee circulated a memo declaring that it had “refused to waste money on hype.”
On Friday, Democratic leaders emphasized that Mr. Quist had performed better than the party’s past congressional candidates in Montana, apparently benefiting from the enthusiasm of rank-and-file Democrats even as he fell well short of victory. The party’s nominees, they noted, are outpacing their predecessors on fairly forbidding terrain, and Democratic voters are participating at higher rates than Republicans, despite being outnumbered in these districts.
But other Democrats acknowledged that they must work harder to make inroads with voters who live far beyond major cities and their suburbs, if they want to pick up seats like the one Mr. Gianforte just captured.
While both Mr. Trump and key Republican policy proposals, like the American Health Care Act, are broadly unpopular in public polling, the president and his party retain a strong hold over rural America, potentially limiting the map on which Democrats can compete next year.
Representative Joseph Crowley of New York, the chairman of the Democratic caucus, said that the outcome in Montana had come as little surprise, and that he took heart that it was “not an easy struggle” for Republicans to retain a normally safe seat.
But Mr. Crowley said that his party’s approach to competing in rural areas was a work in progress, and that Democrats were still honing a positive message on the economy and jobs ahead of the 2018 campaign.
“What it says is we can be competitive in rural districts in states like Montana,” Mr. Crowley said of the special election, adding: “With the right candidate, with the right resources.”
The first element of that formula was on the minds of many Democrats on Friday, looking back at the avalanche of opposition research Republicans used against Mr. Quist as a sign that party leaders need to intervene more in primaries to ensure better candidates.
“I’m for grass-roots politics, but if you’re going to actually win seats, you need to focus on helping candidates who will be the most potent for the general election,” said David Axelrod, the veteran Democratic strategist, holding up Mr. Ossoff as an example of someone party officials had coalesced around early. “That’s one of the reasons there’s a competitive race there now.”
National Democratic strategists were deeply skeptical of Mr. Quist from the outset: The party’s campaign committee and House Majority PAC, a Democratic “super PAC,” dedicated only modest sums to the contest. Both groups faced harsh criticism from the left for holding back while Republican groups pounded Mr. Quist early in the race, driving up his personal unpopularity and effectively disqualifying him in the eyes of many voters.
But by not finishing more closely, Mr. Quist mitigated the postelection grumbling on the left. Two groups that had stoked enthusiasm for him — Our Revolution, a committee backed by Senator Bernie Sanders, and Democracy for America, a grass-roots liberal organization — applauded Mr. Quist for his effort but declined to fan grievances against the Democratic Party establishment.
The party will face a more telling test of its favored strategy on June 20 in the Georgia runoff. Democrats are more optimistic about that contest, and the Montana defeat increases pressure on the party to deliver a special election victory at last.
“That race becomes more of an actual test of what might happen in 2018,” Mr. Axelrod said.
The good news for Democrats is that Republicans will be unable to replicate across the map next year the kind of multimillion-dollar spending blitzes they have mounted in this year’s special elections.
Yet while it may be possible for Democrats to win control of the House without staking their fortunes on states and districts like Montana’s at-large congressional seat, the implications of being less competitive in rural precincts could have graver consequences in the Senate, where Democrats are defending a cluster of seats in conservative, sparsely populated states — including Montana.
“Democrats have to compete in Western states and rural areas,” said Tom Lopach, a Democratic strategist and former chief of staff to Mr. Tester. “For Democrats to have a governing majority, they have to listen to folks in rural America.”
Mr. Lopach, who led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2016, said that writing off rural voters would be a betrayal of “our governing philosophy of standing up for working folks and all Americans.”

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