Category Archives: commentary

9-11 at 25

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Empty holes. Water flows into them like fountains into a bottomless pit. Names of the dead engraved in the stone ringing the perimeter. It is quiet, almost serene.

This is where the twin towers stood. Until the morning of September 11, 2001.

It is not quiet at the moment. As I watch the scene on television, the plaza is packed. The grieving are reading the names of the 2,977 people who died that day at the hands of 19 terrorists who commandeered two airplanes and drove them into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. They also hijacked two other planes and drove them into the Pentagon in Washington, 184 died there, and into a field in Pennsylvania, where 40 died.

On September 11, 2001, I was the Bureau Chief for public television’s Nightly Business Report. Our newsroom and studio were on Trinity Place, two blocks south of Tower #2. I lived on Rector Place in Battery Park City, a community built on land reclaimed from the Hudson River using landfill from the excavation of the Trade Center site. A view of the south side of Tower #2 filled my bedroom window.

Today I regularly teach students who had not yet been born in 2001 or were so young 25 years ago that they have no direct memory of what was the most traumatic day of my life. One third of the people living in the United States today were not here on that day.

I have written about these events several times. I will not do so again now. The memories bring back images that produce nightmares. I talk to someone about that. I’ve also put down my thoughts as well as I will ever be able to and you can, if interested, read them here.

The US stock markets never opened for trading that day. Since market news accounted for half of the content of our broadcast, we canceled our report that night, which allowed the PBS NewsHour, based in Washington, DC, extra time to produce an expanded report. But in midafternoon, before the police ordered us to evacuate our office building, we were able to get a transmission link to DC, and we transmitted the pictures our brave camera crews had recorded of the disaster.

Then we turned on the lights, and I sat down on our set, looking well worn, and described what I had seen in an interview with the NewsHour‘s Ray Suarez. As it turned out, that interview was the last transmission we made from that lower Manhattan location. You can watch the entire NewsHour program here. My interview is at 24:30. Six months later, I filed an expended look back, and look ahead, for Nightly Business Report, which I’ve uploaded here.

The rebuilding which I talked about in that six-month story, did take a very long time. But it did succeed. Lower Manhattan is booming and there is little, save for the memorial at the actual Trade Center site, to remind one of the tragic events of that day. A single new tower, One World Trade Center, is as of this writing the tallest building in North America and the Western Hemisphere. Battery Park City is revitalized and renewed, and in great demand. My wife and I moved to New Jersey in 2002. We lived for twenty years in Montclair. We are now in Princeton.

I still reflect on the events of that day from time to time. Here are several disjointed observations.

There was an amazing sense of unity in the nation following the tragedy. The political parties came together in a unified way pledging to rebuild and reform. As the process proceeded, we lost much of that unified spirit. The use of federal funds to help New York City recover dissolved into the usual partisan battles. Why, some wondered, should the nation have to “bail out” New York City? That question ignores that fact that it was not New York City’s foreign policy that had drawn the ire of the terrorists who perpetrated the attack.

The attack itself has changed in our collective memory. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in an internal memo leaked to the media advised its reporters not to refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as “terrorist attacks” without attribution. This political correctness is absurd.

The 9-11 attack was perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda. The ringleader, Mohamed Atta, flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower. The Central Intelligence Agency informed President George W. Bush that its Counterterrorism Center had identified the attacks as having been the work of al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden. In 1996 bin Laden issued the first of two fatwās (Arabic: “religious opinions”) declaring a holy war on the United States. His goal was to draw the US into a large-scale war in the Muslim world that would overthrow the existing order and establish a single Islamic state.

Intelligence services from around the world, including Russia, helped the US locate bin Laden. He was in Afghanistan and believed to be in a mountainous area known as Toro Boro. Yet he managed to escape. Bin Laden was finally located in Pakistan in 2011. He was killed there by US Special Forces. Al-Qaeda released a statement publicly acknowledging bin Laden’s death and vowing revenge. They are still out there. We should not forget.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, the US received unprecedented support from nations around the world. NATO invoked for the first time and only time to date its Article 5, acknowledging that an attack on one was an attack on all. This is the same NATO Donald Trump consistently ridicules, threatening to leave the alliance.

When the US closed its airspace on 9-11, Canada, in what came to be known as Operation Yellow Ribbon, took in between 225 and 240 flights at 17 airports and cared for passengers. One town, Gander, on the island of Newfoundland, took in 38 planes. Gander at the time had fewer than 10,000 residents. Yet it welcomed more than 6.,500 passengers and crews from around the world. This is what friends do, even if Trump insists on treating the Canadians as an enemy today.

Domestically, it was determined that failures by many in the US intelligence community to share information crippled efforts to detect the threat which led to 9-11. With little objection, lawmakers vastly overhauled the laws, eliminating restrictions on information sharing, creating a new super intelligence bureaucracy, and a Director of National Intelligence.

It also created a new national police agency, the Department of Homeland Security, moving into one department virtually all the federal police agencies in the nation. It also provided for an expansion of federal policing efforts to create a domestic police force which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Federal Emergency Management Agence (FEMA), the US Coast Guard, and the US Secret Service.

DHS employs more than 240,000 people. Its very existence reflects a new culture of anxiety and fear in the nation on which Bin Laden waged war. I would not go so far as some and say he won that war. But while he may be dead and gone, he has had a profound impact on the United States. We are different post 9-11. We are, for good or bad, forever changed.

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Mayor Mamdani of Hamas

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There he is, Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, appearing in a video produced with all the trappings of a State of the City address or another important civic event and at taxpayer expense.

If Mamdani looks annoyed, it is probably because he is. He found himself forced to admit one of his major campaign issues was a promise that he could never deliver. In other words, he had to admit he lied. Throughout his campaign Mamdani promised voters he would arrest Benjamin Netenyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, should he ever have the temerity to show up in New York City. Netenyahu is expected to do just that to make his annual speech to the United Nations General Assembly in September.

In his high-profile video address, Mamdani admitted that New York City lacks the legal authority to arrest Netanyahu. That is true and was well known even while Mamdani was scoring political points with his pledge. When he threatens the Israeli prime minister, Mamdani references an arrest warrant issued for Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court. But the United States is not a party to the ICC and does not recognize its jurisdiction, a fact which makes the warrant worthless in the U.S. The ICC’s selection of targets to investigate is demonstrably political and biased. And its leadership faces severe allegations of sexual assault and misconduct. A 2002 law broadly prohibits US cooperation with the ICC.

In addition, the United States is a signatory of the United Nations Charter, and to the “host country agreement,” No. 147 in the United Nations Treaty Series. The charter and the agreement guarantee access by diplomats to the UN Headquarters in New York City. Delegates to the UN also enjoy diplomatic status and diplomatic immunity. This is binding under federal law. Heads of state visiting the US are under protection of the Secret Service. Did Mayor Mamdani imagine that when Mr. Netanyahu’s motorcade leaves the UN, the NYPD can pull it over and kidnap a head of state? The idea is preposterous.

So why did Mamdani make his promise?

It might be that the new mayor of the nation’s most populous city is just ignorant of these details. A New York City mayor need not be schooled in the art of foreign policy. But Mamdani is an intelligent man. He is well-schooled. He is a charismatic speaker. His words are well chosen.

No, ignorance does not explain this. The explanation is much simpler. Mamdani is obsessed with Jews. His head is filled with Jews. Mamdani hates Jews. He has, in fact, made a career out of exploiting his hatred of Jews before, during, and after his election. And he channeled his hostility toward Israel and its people by attacking Netanyahu in front of the world.

His video statement makes his position clear. Mamdani called the Israeli Prime Minister a “war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people”. He accused Netanyahu of the deaths of over 73,000 people, targeting hospitals, blocking humanitarian aid, and starving civilians. He demanded that the United States federal government step in, join the ICC, and execute the arrest warrant itself.

“Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” Mamdani said. “While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon, and we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people.”

Each claim is simply the reiteration of the antisemitic tropes Jews have been subjected to for millenniums. And by far better men than Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani tries to make a distinction between Jew, Israeli, Zionism, and antisemitism. Those who believe that is possible have a fundamental misunderstanding of what each term means.

I have generally avoided getting into the discussion of those tropes mainly because I have found that people who repeat them are not willing to discuss history, facts, or even grammar. They have a view that rejects civilized debate. I should probably knock them down in future posts. For this post I’m going to stick with what Mamdani says and does. His words and actions show what he is and has always been.

Mamdani took office on January 1, 2026. You might think he would address New York City’s challenges. Housing affordability is a real issue with market-rate rents near historic highs. The rising cost of living is squeezing families, small businesses continue to struggle, and public safety concerns are on the rise, including an increase in reported sexual assaults. These are the things a mayor should focus on.

Instead, on that first day, he found it necessary to officially revoke Executive Order 52, which had formally adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. That stripped away key protections for Jewish New Yorkers amidst rising hate crimes. He has since boycotted cultural events involving his Jewish constituents like the city’s Israel Day Parade.

In July Mamdani announced appointments to an 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which screens and recommends judicial candidates for local courts. Mamdani did not appoint a single Jewish lawyer to the committee. He apparently could not a Jewish lawyer he felt was qualified. He did find Muslims to appoint.

Hate crimes against Jews have risen on Mamdani’s watch. NYPD officials reported 205 confirmed hate crimes against Jews between January and July 2026, up from 189 during the same period last year. Jews were targeted in more than half of all hate crimes, or 57%.

On August 14, 2026, a 46-year-old man named Larry Montes violently disrupted a Friday night Shabbat service at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. He shouted antisemitic slurs, struck a 63-year-old female congregant in the face, and assaulted a security guard. On July 23, 2026, a 51-year-old man named Raul Morales targeted and stabbed a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke near a synagogue on the Upper West Side. The attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the violent episode.

Yet Mamdani issued his first mayoral veto against a bipartisan City Council bill intended to combat antisemitism by expanding protest security around schools. He argued the bill would suppress free speech and harm labor, reproductive rights, and pro-Palestinian student demonstrations. He lifted the restriction on boycotting Israel. Nothing had happened yet. No crisis had landed on his desk. He walked in, and this is what he reached for first.

Manmdani has always had a perverse definition of “genocide.” While quick to apply the term to Israel, during a July 2026 press conference, he explicitly declined to label the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, as a genocide. As a New York State legislator, he formalized his alignment with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and openly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. He has denied Israel’s right to exist as a specifically Jewish state.

Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, has been active on social media since she was a teenager posting in 2015, “Tel Aviv shouldn’t exist in the first place.” She apologized when those posts resurfaced. Watchdog groups and publications like Jewish Insider reported that Duwaji’s personal account had “liked” multiple Instagram posts that appeared to cheer on or celebrate the Hamas attacks on Israel in which 1,200 Israeli civilians were slaughtered, and 251 hostages were abducted and taken into the Gaza Strip.

Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a academic whose work on colonialism and Israel has faced severe allegations of antisemitism. A Columbia University professor, Mahmood Mamdani’s academic writings, which his son Zohran has credited as a major influence on his own political worldview, frequently center on the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

We are not asked our ethnicity or religion when we vote in the United States. But exit polls consistently showed roughly 33% of Jewish voters supported Mamdani in the November 2025 election, with 63% supporting independent Andrew Cuomo, and about 3% for Republican Curtis Sliwa.

Go figure.

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That Damn Debt

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The official U.S. total public debt outstanding breached $40 trillion for the first time in history. It stands at $40,047,426,000,000 according to data released by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. It has increased by about three trillion dollars since January 20, 2025, when the current administration took office.

Considering how much he likes to brag about setting records you’d think Donnie Trump would be in front of the cameras proclaiming, “Biggest debt in history! No one has ever seen a debt as big as this. America is first! We’re winning.”

Instead, fearless leader is attending auto races and showing off his new helipad, $5 million dollars’ worth of big, ugly, granite adorned with his name and sitting on the White House lawn. Something else a future president will have to remove.

Trump left it to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to downplay the event, blame the record debt on Joe Biden, and insist the economy will “grow” out of it. The problem with that is obvious. The economy is growing at a rate of about 2%. The debt is growing at the rate of about 6%. As they say, the math ain’t mathin’.

To be fair, as the graph above makes clear, the debt has been growing steadily for decades under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Some of that is growth. Some of that is inflation. The key to watch is not the total debt amount but the ratio of debt to the nation’s total economic output, the GDP. The debt-to-GDP ratio compares a country’s total government debt to its gross domestic product (GDP). It shows a country’s ability to pay back its debts. The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is now roughly 124% to 125%.

Trump has stated dozens of times across his campaigns and presidencies that he would control, reduce, or completely eliminate the national debt and federal deficit, famously vowing during his 2016 campaign to wipe out the entire national debt within eight years. Despite these promises, Trump legislative actions, such as the 2017 and 2025 tax cuts, caused substantial increases in annual budget deficits and the overall national debt.

As this graph shows, there is a pattern which began in the Reagan years. The Republicans cut taxes without cutting spending. That increases the annual budget deficit and accelerates increases in the debt. Democrats take control and reduce the deficit, only to have the Republicans repeat the trend the next time they get in control. (By the way, I had AI assistance in doing the actual drawing, but I am responsible for finding the numbers and designing both graphs. The numbers come from the Federal Reserve and the Department of Commerce.).

While Republicans like to blame Democrats for the debt, the facts don’t bear that out.

This graphic summarizes the changes in the total debt going all the way back to the Reagan administration. It was then that I first heard the term “trickle-down economics.” The idea was that if you cut taxes for the top backets, they will spend more money, and the effects will pass down to the people in lower brackets. It sounded good to me at the time. But the evidence since has shown it doesn’t work. Nothing trickles. The rich just get richer and the gap between the rich and the rest of us grows larger.

To finance the debt the government borrows money., It does that by issuing securities, Treasury Notes and Bonds. The interest rate it pays is the “cost” of borrowing. More borrowing, more securities. To convince investors to keep buying trillions of dollars in new debt, the U.S. government must offer competitive interest rates. The 10-year treasury yield is currently about 4.7%. The bond market is struggling to meet the demand.

Bessent is doubling long-term government bond buybacks to curb rising rates and inject liquidity into the debt market. On August 19, 2026, the Treasury Department shocked Wall Street by announcing it will increase its buyback operations for 10-year to 30-year bonds to at least $4 billion per operation, up from the previous $2 billion cap. Bessent is executing a strategy he calls a “Treasury Twist“. By purchasing less-liquid, older (“off-the-run”) long-term bonds, the Treasury removes overall duration from the market. To fund these purchases, the Treasury issues short-term bills. This shifts supply to parts of the yield curve better equipped to absorb it. Critics argue that the sudden, unscheduled policy shift disrupts the Treasury’s traditional framework of being regular and predictable, causing further investor anxiety.

Bessent’s action is like putting a Band-Aid on a wound that needs a torniquet. He has joined Trump in an alternate reality. The market isn’t buying it.

When the government borrows hundreds of billions each month, it competes directly with private borrowers for capital. The massive government demand can push up overall interest rates across the entire economy. This means Americans end up paying significantly more for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and business loans.

And just like a household credit card, a larger balance means a larger monthly minimum payment. Net interest payments are quickly becoming one of the largest single components of the federal budget. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar that cannot be spent on infrastructure, national defense, scientific research, tax cuts, or programs like Social Security and Medicare.

If investors eventually begin to worry that the U.S. will never be able to pay back its debt through normal revenues (taxes), they may fear that the government will simply print more money to cover the gap. Flooding the global economy with dollars to inflate away the debt devalues the currency. For us everyday Americans, this manifests as persistent, long-term inflation, reducing the purchasing power of our hard-earned savings and wages.

Time for Donnie and Bessent to play another round of golf.

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The Supremes 2026

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The Supreme Court wrapped up its 2025-2026 term with a flood of high-profile decisions announced on June 26, 29, and 30th. The usual end of the session reviews quickly flooded the media. Most watchers of the Supremes tried to frame the session as a win or loss for Donald Trump. Or at least a win or loss for the conservation majority which has dominated the Court in recent years.

I see the term as a continuation of the conservative drive to remake, or at least change the direction, of constitutional interpretation in the United States. It featured major rulings on birthright citizenship, tariffs, transgender school sports, independent agencies, and election rules, while also producing some surprising coalitions in the final week of the term. The great online court watching service, scotusblog, has the numbers.

The term was more polarized than the one before it. The share of decisions that were 6-3 rose from 15.2% last term to 28.8% this term and ideologically split 6-3 decisions rose from 9% to 22.7%. Liberal justices also dissented together more often than before. The Court still had a conservative center, with Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett frequently in the majority. Yet some headline cases ended with the liberal justices in the majority. Although I would not make as much of that as some other commentators have done. I think their wishful thinking is not justified.

Major rulings

One of the term’s defining cases was the birthright-citizenship dispute, Trump v. Barbara. The outcome was expected, but the voting alignment was not. Roberts wrote the opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, while Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. That made it a major case in which the liberal justices were part of the prevailing coalition rather than the dissent.

The New York Times wrote the decision “capped a more than decade-long effort by Mr. Trump to use the issue as a political tool.” A relief, to be sure, but no cause for celebration. A plain reading of the 14th Amendment would bring anyone to the same decision. The court was split, however, with some justices unable to resist the temptation to dehumanize immigrants by calling them “foreign birth tourists.”

The outlier was conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who concurred in the outcome but dissented as to the reason. The five justices in the majority cited the amendment. Justice Kavanaugh said current immigration law grants citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, implying that Trump can have his way if he can get Congress to change the law. As for Alito and Thomas, they dissented with their usual outrage at any decision which upholds the rights and dignity of groups that they see as fundamentally less deserving of rights and dignity than themselves.

Another major case was Learning Resources v. Trump, the tariffs case. The Court rejected the administration’s tariff position, and the decision reflected the Court’s willingness to police the limits of presidential power where statutory authority is unclear.

Executive Power

The term also produced an important executive power ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, involving the president’s power to remove the head of the Federal Trade Commission. The Court overturned, in the majority’s words, whatever is left of Humphrey’s Executor, the 1935 precedent protecting some independent agencies from at-will presidential removal. SCOTUSblog described it as the term’s major overruling, because the Court made explicit a direction it had been moving toward in earlier removal-power cases.

While Slaughter seems to imply Congress cannot put any restraints on the president when it comes to firing officers of the executive branch, a majority did make an exception, for now, in the case of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. In Trump v. Cook, Trump had fired Cook, citing accusations regarding a home mortgage. The Court rejected that effort by a 5-4 vote, with Roberts joined by Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Jackson.

The case was sent back to the district court, where Cook will be given an opportunity to contest the allegations. I see this as only a temporary victory, because the president can fire Cook again without cause, as he did in the case of Slaughter.

In Slaughter, Chief Justice Roberts ruled that because the FTC exercises executive power, its commissioners must be removable at will. The statute governing the FTC allowed removal only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance”. The Federal Reserve Act (12 U.S.C. § 242) uses the exact same core standard, stating that governors may be removed “for cause by the President”. I don’t see how the Court can differentiate the two cases, should Cook come back before it.

Voting and social issues

In Louisiana v. Callais, Louisiana urged the Court to rethink Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and the case raised the possibility of further narrowing race-conscious redistricting rules. The Court continued its campaign to neuter the VRA, a lifelong goal of Chief Roberts, allowing Louisiana to redraw its Congressional districts to eliminate a Democratic seat, not caring that it also cut down minority representation from the state.

In Watson v. Republican National Committee, a 5-4 decision in which Barrett and Roberts joined the liberal wing, the Court rejected a position on late-arriving ballots that had been strongly supported by the Trump administration. The ruling allows Mississippi to continuing counting ballots which arrive by mail for five days after the date of an election, as long as the ballots are postmarked on or before election day.

The Court also dealt with transgender school sports litigation, including West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, decided together, the Court held that schools can separate women’s and men’s sports teams defined by biological sex. Those cases fit the Court’s broader recent pattern of closely watched disputes over gender identity, education, and equal-protection claims. Taken together with prior terms, they showed that the Court continues to use these cases to define the legal boundaries of state regulation in culture-war conflicts.

While progressives are beginning to believe there is a future down the road with a Democratic president arriving in two years, it will not be sufficient to change the direction of law in the nation. He, or she, will be up against a Supreme Court which continues to reenforce a conservative rule of law, empowering a president now with no promise it will continue to do so if a progressive occupies the Oval.

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Yearning to Breathe Free

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The poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor is a sonnet titled “The New Colossus,” written by American poet Emma Lazarus in 1883. Its famous lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” transformed the statue from a monument of generic liberty into a worldwide symbol of immigration, refuge, and hope.

Lady Liberty was the first thing millions of immigrants saw as they arrived in the New World. “Her name,” the poem declares, is “Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome.”

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It’s not Easy Being Green

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The economy, the war, the arch, the east wing, all of these controversies swirling around Washington these days seem to pale when compared to the saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The pool recently underwent a $14 million repainting project ordered by Donald Trump. However, within two weeks of refilling, the pool developed severe algae blooms that turned the water green, and its new blue paint began peeling in large chunks.

Trump insisted that the bottom of the pool be repainted “American flag blue” and that the work be completed well before the nation’s 250 birthday celebration on the Fourth of July. But the repainting did not address the well-known problems with the pool, which is more than one hundred years old.

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This is How It Should Be

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This is a great picture in these troubled times. All four of the living former Presidents of the United States, and First Ladies, gathering in Chicago for the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center. It was an uplifting event, full of hope and optimism for the future of a country about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its birth. The only downside was that we found ourselves noting how remarkable it was. This is how it should be.

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