Glasgow's Bloody Friday.

      This Friday, January 31st. marks the 95th anniversary of Glasgow's Bloody Friday. A day when the state showed its bare-knuckles and brought the military onto the streets of Glasgow, to quell what it thought were the sparks of revolution. It showed that the British state, like all states, will go to any lengths to maintain its power. Glasgow's streets saw troops with fixed bayonets, machine guns and tanks, as the state showed it willingness to crush any attempt to change the power structure of our society. 

     That event was sparked by the desire of the workers to better their conditions and bring down unemployment by introducing the 40 hour week. The state showed what it thought of that idea. From then until now the workers have continued to struggle to better their conditions. Now however, the struggle has changed and is less about bettering our conditions, and more about defending what we have.

    Since the "crisis" the state has whittled away at what conditions we had won over generations of struggle. We have seen wages frozen/cut, energy price soar, social services decimated, working conditions savaged. We have seen the widespread introduction of zero hours contracts, a system whereby the employee has no idea how much he/she will earn in any given week. You are classed as in full time employment but can be laid off without pay for days at a time.

     There have been other attacks on our standard of living with the bedroom tax, the withdrawing of disability allowance, implemented by the brutal ATOS regime, Workfare, whereby you are compelled to work for no wages, and so it goes on.

 

     What the workers of 1919 wanted was an improvement in their living conditions through the 40 hour week, and this could bring 60,000 to 70,000  to mass on George Square, to show their solidarity, and take on the brutality of the police.

    Today we are trying to defend our deteriorating conditions, our standard of living is being attack on several fronts, what our forefathers fought for is being taken from us. Where is the 60,000 to 70,000 forming up to show their solidarity, voice their anger and be prepared to defend their position?

This from Strugglepedia:

THE DEMONSTRATION, BLOODY FRIDAY.
     On Friday 31 January 1919 upwards of 60,000 demonstrators gathered in George Square Glasgow in support of the 40-hours strike and to hear the Lord Provost's reply to the workers' request for a 40-hour week. Whilst the deputation was in the building the police mounted a vicious and unprovoked attack on the demonstrators, felling unarmed men and women with their batons. The demonstrators, including large numbers of ex-servicemen, retaliated with whatever was available, fists, iron railings and broken bottles, and forced the police to retreat. On hearing the noise from the square the strike leaders, who were meeting with the Lord Provost, rushed outside in an attempt to restore order. One of the leaders, David Kirkwood, was felled to the ground by a police baton, and along with William Gallacher was arrested.
RIOTS AND ARRESTS.
     After the initial confrontation between the demonstrators and the  police in George Square, further fighting continued in and around the city centre streets for many hours afterwards. The Townhead area of the city and Glasgow Green, where many of the demonstrators had regrouped after the initial police charge, were the scenes of running battles between police and demonstrators. In the immediate aftermath of 'Bloody Friday', as it became known, other leaders of the Clyde Workers' Committee were arrested, including Emanuel Shinwell, Harry Hopkins and George Edbury.
TROOPS.
     The strike and the events of January 31 1919 “Bloody Friday” raised the Government’s concerns about industrial militancy and revolutionary political activity in Glasgow. Considerable fears within government of a workers' revolution in Glasgow led to the deployment of troops and tanks in the city. A full battalion of Scottish soldiers stationed at Maryhill barracks in Glasgow at the time were locked down and confined to barracks, for fear they would side with the rioters, an estimated 10,000 English troops, along with Seaforth Highlanders from Aberdeen, who were first vetted to remove those with a Glasgow connection, and tanks were sent to Glasgow in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Friday. Soldiers with fixed bayonets marched with tanks through the streets of the City. There were soldiers patrolling the streets and machine guns on the roofs in George Square. No other Scottish troops were deployed, with the government fearing fellow Scots, soldiers or otherwise, would go over to the workers if a revolutionary situation developed in the area. It was the British state’s largest military mobilisation against its own people and showed they were quite prepared to shed workers’ blood in protecting the establishment.

Read the full article HERE:

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Pete Seeger.

      Pete Seeger, May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014, A voice, a heart, Thanks for the memory.

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Just A Mirror Of America

      January 26 was Australia Day, when the colonial power raised its flag and pompously paraded as if Australia was an empty land found by the imperialists of the West. The parade showed no hint of the bloodshed, plundering, genocide ethnic cleansing and slavery that is the foundation of Australia.

     This article from Socialism Or Your Money Back helps to put that in perspective.

     The imperial wars and massacres (guns vs spears) such as those at Hawksbury, Nepean Richmond Hill, Risdon Cove, Appin, Bathurst, Port Phillip, Swan River (Battle of Pinjarra), Gravesend, Vinegar Hill, Myall Creek, Kinroy, Rufus R, Long lagoon, Dawson River, Kalkadoon, Cape Grim, the Black war, McKinley River, and West Kimberely were resisted by Aboriginal warriors like Pemulwuy, Winradyne, Multuggerah, Yagan, and Jandamarra. These wars, along with starvation and Western diseases decimated the dispossessed Aboriginal population to about 70,000 by 1920.
      Australia's First Peoples were marginalised onto reservations and missions, restricted entry into white towns, exploited as unpaid slave labour, their indigenous languages and sacred rituals forbidden, and mixed blood children (The Stolen Generations) were forcibly kidnapped from their parents for resocialisation - ie to be made "white". Until the 1967 referendum in Australia, Aborigines were government property: "The right to choose a marriage partner, to be legally responsible for one's own children, to move about the state and to socialise with non-Aboriginal Australians, were just some of the rights which Aboriginal people did not have."

Read the full article HERE:

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Finance Is A House Of Cards, And There's A Wind Blowing.

       More on that impending financial collapse, that flies in the face of the Cameron/Osborne, “you've never had it so good lie”, "the recession is over", "we are on recovery mode". The financial “experts" are telling people to pull their money out of the giant HSBC bank and advising shareholders to sell, as it appears to be going down the plughole. The whole money system is just a house of cards, monopoly money, an illusion, a world wide scam.
A couple of quotes that might help to verify that claim:

  1.        This used to be the way pretty much all of the money in circulation came to be.  That is, until Investment and Retail Banks got tired of this monopoly on debt based currency, and kicked off the commercial money supply.  You might assume that when you take out a loan or other form of credit, a bank gives you that money from its reserves, and you then pay back that loan to the Bank at a given interest rate – the Bank making its profit on the interest rate.  You would be wrong. The Bank simply creates that loan on a computer screen.  Let’s say you are granted a loan for $100,000.  The moment that loan is approved and $100k is entered on the computer – that promise from you to the bank creates $100k for the bank, in that instant.  This ledger entry alone creates the $100k, from nothing. Today, over 97% of all money that exists, is made this way.

And

2.          The world’s second richest man, Warren Buffet warned us in 2003 that the derivatives market was ‘devised by madmen’ and a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ and we have only seen the first blast in this debt apocalypse.The news that should have us all worried is: the derivatives market contains $700trn of these debts yet to implode.
          Global GDP stands at $69.4trn a year. This means that (primarily) Wall Street and the City of London have run up phantom paper debts of more than ten times of the annual earnings of the entire planet.
         Not only can the Bankers not pay it back, the combined earning power of the earth could not pay it back in less than ten years if every last cent of our productive power went solely to pay off this debt.

Both quotes are from an article on jacknowledge:

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State Repression.

An Appeal from labour start:

Imagine if this happened to you:

        Your union is in a dispute with your employer.  You call a strike.  The employer agrees to negotiate.  The strike ends, the workers return to work. And then the government steps in, announces that what you have done is illegal, and arrests the leaders of your union.
     That's exactly what just happened in Fiji.
Among those arrested was Daniel Urai, who is also President of the Fiji Trades Union Congress. I met Daniel (pictured above left) at the LabourStart Conference in 2012 in Sydney.
      This is outrageous -- which is why the International Trade Union Confederation and the International Union of Foodworkers have launched a joint global protest campaign on LabourStart here:
http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2169&src=lsmm
       We're demanding that the government release the jailed union leaders now. This is one of those campaigns that has a really good chance of having an effect because Fiji is dependent on tourism and goodwill from overseas.
    Every protest message we send can help ensure that Dan and his colleagues are freed.

Please make sure to share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members.

Thank you!

Eric Lee

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Change, Though Messy, Is Inevitable

      Our Oxbridge cabal of millionaires are singing in tune to the chorus of that fantasy song, “Growth, Growth, Growth”. We all know it is a fantasy tune, but for some reason or other, the singing crooks and liars, seem to believe their own words. Massaging dodgy figures to fit their illusions, and muttering, “You've never had it so good” from the confines of their pampered fantasy bubble, in a vain attempt to fool the public, this millionaire cabal live in luxury and denigrate those who suffer poverty at the hands of this system of corruption and greed. 

      The truth is that the world economy is still in crisis, the financial Mafia are worried. They see developing markets shrink and sovereign debt rising, and they start to sweat at the thought that they might lose their billions of ill-gotten gains. This would mean another attack on the living conditions of the already impoverished public, and even they realise that it would be a dangerous road to walk. In country after country, people are taking to the streets and doing their damndest to bring about real change. Riots, protests, occupations are the only road left open to the general public, as their lords and master, the financial Mafia, make brutal attempt after brutal attempt to get back their gambling losses. The next round of “austerity” could be a squeeze to far. How it turns out is up to us, it is also an opportunity for real change in the way we structure our society.

     This originally from Roar Magazine, and re-posted in Popular Resistance:

     This, in turn, raises another question: how will impoverished populations respond to the growing pressures on their livelihoods? Last summer Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia already experienced widespread social unrest. Thailand and Ukraine are currently witnessing massive anti-government protests. Just last month, Argentina descended into a bout of deadly rioting as policemen briefly went on strike. The International Labor Organization recently warned that a new global recession, by feeding already high rates of poverty and unemployment, will further contribute to the fraying of the social fabric.

      As Larry Elliot of The Guardian, just put it: “all the ingredients are there for social unrest.” It looks like the world will be in for a rough ride in 2014. Better fasten your seatbelts — the next phase of the global financial crisis may be about to get started. Cities will burn and there will be blood. It won’t be pretty.

Read the full article HERE:

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The State, Home Of Racism.

       A mixture of capitalist greed and religious differences has turned our planet into a world of poverty, misery and bloodshed. People fleeing the consequences of this festering toxic cocktail, face hardship, hatred and death. The journey of the migrant can, on occasions, be worse than the nightmare they are fleeing. Our system fosters racism by continually marking the immigrant as "different", "inferior", "scroungers", somebody to be feared, when in fact they are just like you and I, a collection of bus drivers, shop assistants, doctors, plumbers, taxi drivers, mothers, fathers, brothers and sister. All they are doing is trying to survive in an exploitative violent system, trying to do the decent thing by their families, or fleeing persecution. The state is the enemy of unity and solidarity between people, it is the protector of this inhuman, brutal system of hatred and exploitation.

   This latest incident by the Greek state, against a group fleeing from Afghanistan and Syria, although brutal and horrific, is by no means unique.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC STATEMENT

AI Index: EUR 25/002/2014
22 January 2014

     Amnesty International urges the Greek Government to carry out a transparent and thorough investigation into the circumstances which led to loss of life in the Aegean Amnesty International expresses its profound concerns over the loss of life of migrants and refugees including several small children near the island of Farmakonisi on 20 January 2014. In the early hours of Monday, 20 January 2014, a fishing boat carrying 28 migrants and refugees including many small children capsized and sank near the island of Farmakonisi. The group consisted of 25 Afghans including ten children aged between one and nine years old and three Syrians.
        Sixteen individuals including a child were rescued by the Greek coastguard. However, the bodies of a mother and a child belonging to the group were found by the Turkish authorities the next day. According to news reports, the bodies of two more women and two children washed up today on Turkish shores leaving six children still missing. Amnesty International has been informed that the survivors received medical treatment on the island of Leros and since then –except one- have been held in the Leros police station.
       According to the official statements of the Greek coastguard, the fishing boat carrying the migrants and refugees was found not moving and with no lights on near the island of Farmakonisi in the early hours of last Monday. The authorities said that in view of the bad weather conditions, a decision was taken to tow the boat to the island of Farmakonisi and that during the towing operation the migrants and refugees on board moved to the one side of the boat leading to its capsize and sinking. A search and rescue operation followed the incident which still continues.
     On the other hand, the testimonies survivors provided to the UNHCR according to a press release issued by the organization, resemble the testimonies Amnesty International has previously collected on push-back operations of the Greek coastguard – the practice of summarily turning back a group of migrants across the border towards Turkey. UNHCR press release reports that the survivors alleged their boat was being towed by the Greek coastguard with great speed towards Turkey when it capsized. The Greek coastguard, however, denied these allegations in a subsequent statement this afternoon and reiterated that the boat carrying the refugees and migrants was towed towards the island of Farmakonisi, not back towards Turkey.
      Push-back operations carried out by Greece deny people the right to explain their individual circumstances and raise any protection or other concerns. As such, they are in breach of Greece's international obligations and EU law.
     Amnesty International has continuously called on the Greek authorities to stop these push-back operations not only because they are completely unlawful but because they put people’s lives at risk as a result of the way they are being carried out. Testimonies collected by Amnesty and published in a previous report point to a blatant disregard for human life shown by the Greek coastguard during push-back operations carried out in the Aegean Sea.
       Interviewees who described being returned to Turkey from the Aegean said that their inflatable boats were rammed, knifed, or nearly capsized while they were being towed or circled by a Greek coastguard boat. They said their boats’ engines were disabled and their oars removed, then they were just left in the middle of the sea. Life-endangering practices were also reported by people caught after crossing Greece’s land border with Turkey along the river Evros.
      Amnesty International calls on the Greek authorities to initiate a thorough, transparent and independent investigation into the incident of 20 January 2014 off the Coast of Farmakonisi Island; bring to light the circumstances which led to loss of life and prosecute those who are responsible.
      The organization further calls the Greek government to investigate all allegations of collective expulsions (push-backs) and ill-treatment on Greece’s land border with Turkey and in the Aegean and prosecute officials involved. The recent loss of life on the Aegean is yet again another reminder of the dangerous journeys migrants and refugees have to endure to reach Europe. Since August 2012, at least 136 refugees, the majority of whom were Syrian and Afghan, lost their lives in at least twelve known incidents attempting to reach Greece by boat from Turkey. EU and member states should ensure effective search and rescue at sea by focusing their efforts into saving lives rather than protecting border

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Don't Drink From the Babbling Brook Of Bullshit.

       We all know that we can't believe what we read and hear in that babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, but we have to have a means of finding out what is going on in our world. We have to be our own media, a way of projecting our dreams our ideas, we have to know what the people are doing in countries across the world, to communicate and show solidarity with the struggles that are happening on a daily basis in country after country. We have to learn from each other's struggles and move our projects forward, to turn our dreams to a reality and free ourselves from this nightmare that is capitalism with it attendant deprivation, wars, misery, and exploitation.
From Roar Magazine:

Read more about this project HERE:

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Police And The Abuse Of Power.

     Scotland has a population of approximately 5 million, yet the Scottish police managed to carry out more than half a million stop and searches in eight months of 2013. Are they working hard to make sure they stop and search the entire population? Surely this number and nature of stop and searches can't be acceptable. We are already spied upon by an array of CCTV cameras in every street in every city, in pubs, buses, supermarkets, etc. and we have recently felt the horror of being spied on from the sky when it suddenly goes dreadfully wrong. We have to put an end to this snooping, spying, constant surveillance type of society. We are bring up a generation that will see it as normal to be scrutinised at every turn, to accept that privacy is a thing of the past. Everybody has the right to the dignity of privacy, and this can only be encroached on when there is "evidence" of wrong doing.

 Stop and Search in Scotland is an abuse of power

SACC Press Release

 

     Scottish police are conducting extra-legal stop and searches that have been banned in England and Wales and potentially violate the European Convention on Human Rights. The Scottish Government should ensure that police stay within the law and that people in Scotland have at least the same rights and protections as people south of the border. 

     SACC is alarmed by figures released by Scottish Police last week, which show that they carried out more than half a million stop and searches between April and December 2013. Worse still, police say that 70% of these stop and searches were not carried out under the statutory powers available to them. They claim that in these cases they had the "consent" of the people involved and therefore did not need statutory authority.

We would welcome any legal challenge brought by victims of non-statutory stop and searches, and we would like to see the public putting more pressure on the Scottish Government to bring stop and search in Scotland under proper legal control, as it is in England and Wales...

Read the full statement

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

 

See Through The Smoke And Mirrors.

        Do you not get really pissed-off listening to those pretty butterfly people who live in the rarified atmosphere of the political machine, spouting how the economy is growing faster than expected? All their meaningless phrases of dropping unemployment, economic growth, and falling inflation, seem like you are watching a fantasy movie, something far removed from the real world that you and I inhabit.

      Of those individuals who have come off the unemployment register, how many are in workfare schemes working for nothing? How many are on zero hours contracts getting four hours today, nothing tomorrow, and perhaps twelve hours next week? The truth is that in this country there are now more people in poverty and working, than in poverty and not working. While those pretty butterfly people in expensive suits, go on about the steady growth, they preside over a country that has more than 3.5 million children living in poverty, that's 27% of all children in the UK. Of course poverty isn't spread equally across the country, in some local wards the child poverty rate varies from 50% to 70%. Your post code will dictate the quality of your children's lives, no matter what illusions the political parasites spout. According to new research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the number of (childless) adults of working-age in poverty is predicted to rise by over 40% by 2020. It also shows that the 2020 child poverty targets will be missed and the number of children in poverty will increase unless drastic action is taken now.

      There is a kind of whoopin' and haulrin' from our political illusion weavers of the good times just around the corner, when in fact the whole global economy is tettering to a grinding halt, with all the attendant misery that this holds for you and I the ordinary people. Capitalism has succeeded in doing what it was set up to do, make a few people very, very rich, at the expense of the vast majority. It was never intended, nor could it possibly, see to the needs of all the people, they need to be exploited for that wealth to accumulate in the hands of the parasite class.

      The world is very rich in resources and skills, yet it is awash with poverty, this is no accident, nor unavoidable, it is the result of the economic system that is foisted on us by those who stand to gain the most from that system. Until we get rid of that exploitative system of greed, we are heading deeper into a world of deprivation, wars and misery.

This extract from an interesting article on A World To Win:

       With demand from emerging economies slowing, prices on the global commodities exchanges are dropping. The price of an ounce of gold – the universal measure of the value of commodities – dropped last year from $1,900 to $1,200.

      Deflation has another damaging result. The real value and cost of debt actually increases. Highly indebted countries, corporations and individuals around the world had better take note. Talk of a “recovery” is not only premature but entirely ignores what’s really happening in the global economy.

Read the full article HERE:

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Greece, A Plundered Land.

    Greece has been out of the financial news recently, creating the impression that the Troika solutions are working. Its double speak Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, was blowing smoke and holding mirrors, as he stated that, Greece would leave the bailout program in 2014. In a national Television broadcast he boasted, “In 2014, Greece will venture out to the markets again,-----there will be no need for new loans and a new bailout”. Well it seems that this is Alice in Wonderland economics. With large loans falling due this year, “experts” say that Greece will default by May, August at the latest.
      According to recent figures, Greece showed a surplus this year of €800 million. However, the payments that Greece has to make this year amount to €31.6 billion, the loan funds available for this are €17.5 billion, their €800 million surplus is no more than coffee money for the corrupt government that oversees the plundering of the people of Greece. The figures just doesn't add up.
      The bailout is no more than a financial Mafia scam, the Troika hands bundles of money to Greece, however the Greek government can't decide how it should be spent, it is simply hands it back to the Troika as interest and capital payments. The dregs left at the bottom of the bucket, can be spent by the Greek government.     

      There is no way out for the people of Greece if they stay with the present economic system, all they will reap is more misery, poverty and deprivation as their future. In the economics of the financial parasites, people don't count.

The people have to tighten their belts if we are to get through these difficult times

                                                                                                                                    What the bailout does guarantee however, is that the Greek government is forced to sell off all its public assets, at knock-down prices, to the corporate friends of the Troika. For Troika, read “financial mafia”, made up of the EC, European Commission, ECB, European Central Bank and the IMF, International Mankind Fuckers. You can rest assured that what ever solution that cabal of financial parasites come up with, will do nothing more than swell their already overflowing coffers, and it will all be at the expense of the ordinary people. In the end, Greece will be a busted, plunder country, all paid for by the deprivation of its people. Of course no country is immune from the festering influence of "the markets", we are all on the agenda for plundering.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Glasgow Against ATOS Monthly Picket.

       Glasgow against ATOS is a Grassroots disabled activist campaign opposing Atos (Atos HealthCare) and supporting rights of disabled people in Glasgow and beyond. On the last Friday of each month the group picket outside the ATOS offices in Cadogan Street Glasgow. The next picket will be Friday January 31 at 12:30.

    Ian Duncan Smith's "reforms" of disability allowance, is administered by ATOS and since they started their brutal campaign against the most vulnerable in our society, we have seen more than 1,300 people died after being assessed and told to start work related activities. Whichever way you look at this, it is unacceptable, Ian Duncan Smith has blood on his hands. Some disabled people have committed suicide after being assessed as fit to start looking for work. People who force vulnerable people into this sort of situation have changed the category from suicide to murder, and should be held accountable.

Photo From Glasgow against ATOS

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How Long Before It All Explodes?

      Spain is home to almost one third of the Euro regions unemployed, with an unemployment rate of over 25% and it has been at that for six quarters in a row. That's a lot of misery, poverty and deprivation, while the financial Mafia keep screwing the people and muttering about adjustments and growth.

         “I’m glad I don’t have any children, because I don’t need to worry when I go to bed without dinner,” says Nieto, a Madrid native who last drew a salary in 2010.

This from Anarchist News:

Riots in Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza,

Victory in Burgos

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 01/19/2014 - 13:04

     On January 10, riots began in the city of Burgos, Spain, when police attacked a protest against the gentrification of the working class neighborhood Gamonal.
http://anarchistnews.org/content/revolt-burgos-spain
     Riots continued for 4 consecutive nights, and afterwards opponents of the project to construct a ritzy boulevard through Gamonal continued mobilizing to block the construction.

   People in dozens of other cities organized solidarity protests. Protests were held in Madrid on the 14th and 15th, turning into riots both nights in response to the typically heavy handed response of Madrid police. On the 16th, solidarity protests also turned into riots in Barcelona and Zaragoza. In Barcelona, masked protesters smashed over a dozen banks, luxury hotels, Starbucks, Burger Kings, and other businesses, setting fire to a number of them, and pelting police with trash, bottles, and unprecedentedly potent fireworks that set the police jumping (in a city where riot police don't flinch when quarter sticks of dynamite go off at their feet). The protest/riot went all the way to the Generalitat, the seat of the Catalan government, where people continued to throw objects at police. Police reinforcements arrived, dispersing protestors, who subsequently attacked a police station on Las Ramblas and smashed more businesses in Jardinets de Gracia, a significant distance away.

Madrid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wXfagNGgLM
Barcelona (videos show attack on police station, don't show the heaviest damages)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcLvurz9Mv4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1o-tSNnqQA
Burgos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSDWJuOr9vY

   The same day, authorities in Burgos announced that the construction project was suspended.

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