Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features singer and slide guitarist Bonnie Raitt. Enjoy!
Bonnie Raitt - Love Me Like a Man
"Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage."
-- Ambrose Bierce
News and Opinion
Torture Report Fight Erupts In Chaos
The White House's briefing to Democrats on immigration Thursday erupted instead into a confrontation over the Senate's classified torture report, Senate sources told The Huffington Post.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, waited for the immigration discussion to end and then pulled out a prepared speech that she read for five or six minutes, making the case for the release of the damning portrayal of America's post-9/11 torture program.
"It was a vigorous, vigorous and open debate -- one of the best and most thorough discussions I've been a part of while here," said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.).
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who served as intelligence committee chair before Feinstein, was furious after the meeting, and accused the administration of deliberately stalling the report.
“It’s being slow-walked to death. They’re doing everything they can not to release it," Rockefeller told HuffPost. ...
Rockefeller said the administration's unwillingness to use aliases reflects a broader contempt for congressional oversight.
"The White House doesn't want to release this. They don't have to. And all we do is oversight, and they've never taken our oversight seriously," he said. (He then added that he did allow for one exception, the Church Committee.) "Under Bush there was no oversight at all. Remember the phrase, 'Congress has been briefed'? What that meant was that I and our chairman [...] and two comparable people in the House had met with [former Vice President Dick] Cheney in his office for 45 minutes and given a little whirley birdie and a couple charts."
"They had a specialty for being unforthcoming in our efforts at oversight," he added, "and therefore there is no incentive for them to change their behavior."
The CIA wants to destroy thousands of internal emails covering spy operations and other activities
A CIA plan to erase tens of thousands of its internal emails — including those sent by virtually all covert and counterterrorism officers after they leave the agency — is drawing fire from Senate Intelligence Committee members concerned that it would wipe out key records of some of the agency's most controversial operations.
The agency proposal, which has been tentatively approved by the National Archives, "could allow for the destruction of crucial documentary evidence regarding the CIA's activities," Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and ranking minority member Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., wrote in a letter to Margaret Hawkins, the director of records and management services at the archives.
But agency officials quickly shot back, calling the committee's concerns grossly overblown and ill informed. They insist their proposal is completely in keeping with — and in some cases goes beyond — the email retention policies of other government agencies. "What we've proposed is a totally normal process," one agency official told Yahoo News.
The source of the controversy may be that the CIA, given its secret mission and rich history of clandestine operations, is not a normal agency. And its proposal to destroy internal emails comes amid mounting tensions between the CIA and its Senate oversight panel, stoked by continued bickering over an upcoming committee report — relying heavily on years-old internal CIA emails — that is sharply critical of the agency's use of waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against al-Qaida suspects in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks.
An excellent essay well worth clicking the link and reading:
Who's Afraid of the Surveillance State?
Fictional surveillance states are thrilling and almost never subtle. Dictators are ubiquitously projected on vast public monitors, "thought criminals" are dragged away screaming from city squares, automaton armies visibly stand watch, and protagonists are tortured according to their deepest fears. Dystopian narratives of totalized surveillance bring its horror to the fore.
Our very real surveillance state contains no fewer dark elements. There is torture, targeting of dissidents, and armed enforcement aplenty. But the supposedly compelling story — that we are inescapably watched by a powerful corporate-government nexus — is, as a lived reality, kinda boring. ...
The importance of privacy cannot be overstated. Subjects who know that they are the targets of state observation are controlled and managed by this knowledge; dissent and creativity are foreclosed by the effect of being observed. Yet this is a creeping control and one that latches, perversely, onto the very freedoms ostensibly provided by contemporary networked communications.
While Snowden's revelations have certainly prompted a considerable uptick in the use of and demand for encryption technology, the surveillance state watches on, largely unscathed. The fight against it has not grown sufficiently in scale, I think, because the pernicious effects of totalized surveillance tend to be subjectively imperceptible and tacitly internalized. This variety of control isn't as visceral as the crack of a riot cop's baton or the slam of prison cell door.
The condition produces a new normality that doesn't feel like a constant affront to liberty. But it is, in fact, worse than the dramatic dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four — as Snowden himself noted, the totality of Orwell's surveillance state is preferable to our own because we choose to be oblivious of our subjection, happily continuing to use the very phone networks and websites that ensure our numbering among the tracked and watched.
Spy cable revealed: how telecoms firm worked with GCHQ
One of the UK's largest communications firms had a leading role in creating the surveillance system exposed by Edward Snowden, it can be revealed.
Cable and Wireless even went as far as providing traffic from a rival foreign communications company, handing information sent by millions of internet users worldwide over to spies.
The firm, which was bought by Vodafone in July 2012, was part of a programme called Mastering the Internet, under which British spies used private companies to help them gather and store swathes of internet traffic; a quarter of which passes through the UK. Top secret documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by Channel 4 News show that GCHQ developed what it called "partnerships" with private companies under codenames. Cable and Wireless was called Gerontic.
U.S. Firms Accused of Enabling Surveillance in Despotic Central Asian Regimes
U.S. and Israeli companies have been selling surveillance systems to Central Asian countries with records of political repression and human rights abuse, according to a new report by Privacy International. The U.K.-based watchdog charges that the American firms Verint and Netronome enable surveillance in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Verint’s Israeli arm provides those countries with monitoring centers “capable of mass interception of telephone, mobile, and IP networks,” the report says, as does the Israeli company NICE systems. Verint also enlisted California-based Netronome to give Uzbek agents the ability to intercept encrypted communications, Privacy International says, though it’s not clear whether the program was carried out successfully.
The report provides a broad picture of surveillance in a region that is marked by repression. Kazakhstan has been condemned for laws restricting free speech and assembly, flawed trials, and torture. As for Uzbekistan, Human Rights Watch bluntly characterizes the country’s human rights record as “atrocious.” Privacy International includes testimony from lawyers, journalists, and bloggers in Uzbekistan who had transcripts of private Skype calls used against them in trial, or had interactions with intelligence officers that made it clear the authorities had access to their private communications.
Privacy International relies on contract documents and confidential sources to finger the companies involved.
New Malware Tool Aims to Detect Government Surveillance
Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other groups are throwing their weight behind a new open-source software malware detection project called Detekt.
Unlike the more all-purpose antivirus and anti-malware programs, Detekt centers around detecting and warning end users of surveillance malware of the sort known to be used by government. ...
Detekt is available at resistsurveillance.org, and the source is available at github. The program’s authors warn it may not detect the newest revisions of government surveillance malware, but that it may help weed out some of the most common.
Some in NSA warned of a backlash in 2009
Dissenters within the National Security Agency, led by a senior agency executive, warned in 2009 that the program to secretly collect American phone records wasn't providing enough intelligence to justify the backlash it would cause if revealed, current and former intelligence officials say.
The NSA took the concerns seriously, and many senior officials shared them. But after an internal debate that has not been previously reported, NSA leaders, White House officials and key lawmakers opted to continue the collection and storage of American calling records, a domestic surveillance program without parallel in the agency's recent history. ...
In response, President Barack Obama is now trying to stop the NSA collection but preserve the agency's ability to search the records in the hands of the telephone companies — an arrangement similar to the one the administration quietly rejected in 2009.
Viggo Mortensen Helps Mark 10 Years of Howard Zinn’s "Voices of a People’s History"
U.S. troops going to Iraq before Congress agrees to funding
Some of the 1,500 U.S. troops authorized to advise and train Iraqi forces in their fight against Islamic State militants will deploy to the country in the next few weeks without waiting for Congress to fund the mission, the Pentagon said on Thursday.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said leading elements of the U.S. force would begin moving to Iraq in the coming weeks, even if Congress has not yet acted on a $5.6 billion supplemental request to fund the expanded fight against the militants who overran northwestern Iraq this year.
Officials initially indicated that they needed lawmakers to approve the funding before the Pentagon could start the mission, but Gen. Lloyd Austin, the head of U.S. troops in the Middle East, recommended starting by using available resources.
Use of drones against Islamic State changes the meaning of warfare
JOINT BASE LANGLEY-EUSTIS, Va. In America’s war against the Islamic State, many of those fighting sit in a dark, cold room and stare at computer screens for 12 hours at a stretch.
There are dozens of them, men and women, each wearing camouflage, looking for suspected Iraqi and Syrian jihadists scurrying across the screen. If something changes on the screen – a group of dark figures crossing a street, a string of vehicles racing down a road – they pass the information to another pilot, who might decide to open fire with a Hellfire missile or an electronically guided bomb. ...
With the Obama administration’s strategy of “degrading and ultimately destroying” the Islamic State without putting American combat troops – “boots on the ground” – at risk, much of the war against the group depends on remotely piloted aircraft with names such as Predator and Reaper that are guided from rooms like this one, at a base three hours south of Washington. The way the administration now talks about war is changing the nature of war itself.
Drones that in previous conflicts had been used to provide support to troops on the ground now have become a vital form of fighting. But with no one on the ground to corroborate what pilots think they see from the drones, the certainty of what’s happening is limited.
Four Palestinians arrested over alleged plot to kill Israel's foreign minister
Israel has arrested four Palestinians suspected of planning to assassinate its foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, with an anti-tank rocket while he drove to his Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, Israeli officials say.
The alleged plot is claimed to have been hatched during the July-August war in Gaza. The disclosure comes as ties fray between Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who is based in the West Bank.
A statement issued by Israel’s Shin Bet security agency late on Thursday identified three of the detainees as Hamas members and, citing alleged confessions under interrogation, said they had hoped that killing Lieberman “would relay a message to the state of Israel that would bring about an end to the Gaza war”.
Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip though it has formally submitted to a unity government under Abbas, did not immediately respond to the allegations. The Shin Bet said the suspects had been indicted by an Israeli military court but did not note whether they had entered a plea in response to the charges.
Ukraine president heckled at tribute to Kiev protesters as Biden visits
The Ukrainian president has been heckled by relatives of 100 protesters killed in Kiev’s Euromaidan revolution at a memorial ceremony for the victims.
The relatives, frustrated by Petro Poroshenko’s failure to bring officials of the previous government to justice, shouted: “Who is a hero for you, Poroshenko?”, “Where are their killers?” and “Down with Poroshenko!” They also attacked him for failing to keep a promise to confer the title of national hero on the victims, which would bring financial benefits to their families.
It was the first real public display of anger against Poroshenko, who was elected in May after the pro-Moscow Viktor Yanukovich fled the country.
The US vice-president, Joe Biden cancelled a planned visit to the area off Kiev’s Independence Square, apparently for security reasons.
G-20 Recommits to Lifting Private Sector Activity
Federal Reserve put financial system at risk, Senate report finds
The Senate has rapped the Federal Reserve on the knuckles for the central bank’s failure to oversee big banks who bullied their way into dominant positions in commodities like copper and aluminum.
A report released today by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations announced “subcommittee finds Wall Street commodities actions add risk to economy, businesses, consumers.”
Senate investigators found that banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan bought metals warehouses, crude oil tankers and other prospects in the physical commodities world, then used these businesses to gain unfair advantages and influence markets.
“It’s time to restore the separation between banking and commerce and to prevent Wall Street from using nonpublic information to profit at the expense of industry and consumers,” said retiring Sen. Carl Levin, who runs the committee.
The banks have objected to the report’s findings.
The Senate report faulted the Fed, the nation’s largest bank regulator, for not knowing how many commodities these banks owned and for allowing the banks to violate their regulatory limits. The report cited J.P. Morgan’s physical commodities business, for instance, for holding the equivalent of 12% of its regulatory capital in physical commodities -- more than twice the regulatory limit.
The Senate said that because commodities are mercurial in price, the excess holdings by banks posed potential risks to firms and the financial system.
Wall Street is Taking Over America’s Pension Plans
Coverage of the midterm elections has, understandably, focused on the shift in political power from Democrats toward Republicans. But behind the scenes, another major story has been playing out. Wall Street spent upwards of $300M to influence the election results. And a key part of its agenda has been a plan to move more and more of the $3 trillion dollars in unguarded government pension funds into privately managed, high-fee investments — a shift that may well constitute the biggest financial story of our generation that you’ve never heard of.
Illinois, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island all recently elected governors who were previously executives and directors at firms which managed investments on behalf of state pension funds. These firms are now, consequently, in position to obtain even more of these public funds. This alone represents a huge payoff on that $300M investment made by the financial industry, and is likely to result in more pension money going into investments which offer great benefits for Wall Street but do little for the broader economy.
But Wall Street’s agenda goes beyond any one election cycle. It has been fighting to turn public pensions into private profits for quite some time, steering retirement nest eggs into investments that are complex, charge hefty fees, and that generate big profits for management firms. And it has been succeeding. Of the $3 trillion in public assets currently in pension funds throughout the country, almost a quarter of that has already found its way into so-called “alternative investments” like hedge funds, private equity and real estate. That translates to roughly $660 billion of public money now under private management, invested in assets that are often arcane and opaque but that offer high management and placement fees to Wall Street financiers.
Elizabeth Warren Blasts FHFA’s Mel Watt: “You Haven’t Helped a Single Family”
Elizabeth Warren tore into FHFA director Mel Watt over his failure to develop a program for Fannie and Freddie to provide principal modifications to underwater borrowers at risk of foreclosure. She also got in a dig for his failure to stop the agencies from pursuing deficiency judgments. That means going after former homeowners when the sale of the house they lost didn’t recoup enough to cover the mortgage balance. In the stone ages, when banks kept the mortgage loans they made, they never pursued deficiency judgements. They knew there was no point in trying to get blood from a turnip. Not surprisingly, the sadistic Fannie/Freddie policy has also proven to be spectacularly unproductive in financial terms. An FHFA inspector general study found that recoveries were less than 1/4 of 1% of the amount sought. Moreover, since those mortgage balances were often inflated by junk fees and other dubious costs, and mortgage servicers have done a poor job of maintain properties (they are too often stripped of copper and appliances, or get mold), any deficiency might be significantly or entirely the servicer’s fault.
Like most Warren performances, this one is worth watching, particularly when Mel Watt offers utterly unconvincing responses and Warren will have none of them.
Food Chains: New Film Tracks How Immokalee Workers Won Fair Wages from Corporate Giants
Ferguson police arrest more protesters before Michael Brown ruling
Police have arrested more protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, during a second night of skirmishes in advance of an announcement on whether a white police officer who shot dead an unarmed 18-year-old will face criminal charges.
Officers snatched and detained three people after rushing on to the car park of a tyre shop across the street from the Ferguson police headquarters.
Demonstrators had retreated to the car park after being ordered to stop blocking South Florissant Road by police wearing riot gear. Protesters claimed that at least one officer used pepper spray.
Two young women arrested were identified by fellow protesters as Dasha Jones and Brandy Shields of Lost Voices, an activist group that says it campaigns to “end police brutality”. A man who gave his name as Mustafa was also arrested. “I ain’t afraid of cops,” he shouted.
The arrests followed five made on Wednesday night after officers charged into a crowd of demonstrators chanting and blocking vehicles on the street outside the police department, where officer Darren Wilson worked before fatally shooting Michael Brown on 9 August.
thirty three and a third sent along a link to this video to go with this story posted here yesterday:
Students in the UK March for 'Free Education'
In the streets of London on Wednesday thousands of students marched for publicly-funded ("free") education nationwide. The protest was also billed as a direct challenge to austerity cuts to higher education imposed by the conservative government led by David Cameron.
In his pain and grit, Jimmy Ruffin sang for all of us
Motown soul singer Jimmy Ruffin died in Las Vegas on Monday after entering hospital exactly a month earlier. He was 78 years old.
Jimmy Ruffin wasn’t the best singer at Motown, or in Detroit, or even at his own house, where he was eclipsed by his brother, David Ruffin of the Temptations. But Jimmy was impassioned and at his best, on What Becomes of the Broken Hearted, Gonna Give Her All the Love I Got and I’ve Passed This Way Before. He created hits that were stellar and sensitive.
He found his way to England in the 80s and stayed for much of the decade. In 1984, he collaborated with Paul Weller as leaders of the Council Collective, which made Soul Deep in support of striking coal miners. Ruffin told BBC Radio that he was there because he understood the suffering.
The Evening Greens
Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust
HASKELL COUNTY, Kan. — Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every minute.
Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and pumping up sand in order to do it. ... “That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said, “it’s over.”
The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.
Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers.
And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.
Documenting the Vanishing Rio Grande
"You mess with the Hudson River and millions of people will hear about it. You mess with the Rio Grande and few people notice," Colin McDonald, a 32-year-old writer who set out on June 19th to travel the entire 1,900 mile length of the Rio Grande, told VICE News.
The problem is, though, there isn't much river left for him to follow.
The point of McDonald's epic journey is to talk to people whose livelihoods depend on the river and to raise awareness of a resource that is rapidly diminishing. He is documenting his trek at Disappearing Rio Grande, where he has been uploading blog posts from the banks of the river via satellite and plotting his progress with a GPS tracking device. ...
If the Rio Grande had water consistently running through it — and at one point not so long ago it did — it would be the fourth longest river in the United States. The reality is, however, that upstream from Big Bend National Park a swathe of the Rio Grande more than 300 miles long is nothing but dry riverbed. In El Paso, Texas much of it has been diverted for irrigation. And at Boca Chica Beach, where the Rio Grande terminates at the Gulf of Mexico, and where McDonald's journey will conclude in late January, the river is so severely diminished it sometimes fails to reach the sea.
"There are so few people with eyes on this river," McDonald said. "No other major river in America is going to be impacted more by climate change than the Rio Grande because it spends most of its time running through desert and it's already way over-allocated."
The Race to Save the World's Chocolate
he world is running out of chocolate. In 2013, the world consumed about 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. And now, Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut—two of the world's biggest manufacturers of chocolate goods—are warning that by 2020, that consumption-over-production number could increase to 1 million metric tons (a fourteen-fold bump). "Chocolate deficits, whereby farmers produce less cocoa than the world eats, are becoming the norm," The Washington Post reported. We are in the midst of what may be "the longest streak of consecutive chocolate deficits in more than 50 years" and analysts say it's only going to get worse.
What will that mean for the average chocoholic? Chocolate could not only become more expensive; confectioners could also start extending their chocolate supplies by combining cacao with other ingredients like vegetable fat and flavor chemicals.
So why can't the world's chocolate supply keep up with its chocolate demand? Part of the problem—besides the combination of drought and disease mentioned above—involves the cacao plants themselves. Chocolate trees take an exceptionally long time to yield fruit. That doesn't just make for slow production; it also means that genetically selecting for high-performance plants can be a challenge. "A corn breeder," Bloomberg points out, "can raise three new generations of corn in a single year—three opportunities to select for desirable traits. A new cacao seedling, by comparison, won’t produce fruit for two years at the earliest, and it takes 10 years to reveal traits worth perpetuating."
Protectors of Burnaby Mountain vs. Kinders Morgan: Dozens Arrested as Inspiring Pipeline Protest Grows
Ongoing protests in British Columbia to stop a tar sands pipeline project by fossil fuel giant Kinder Morgan escalated on Thursday night after 26 protesters were violently arrested.
Those arrested also included protesters who refused to comply with an injunction issued earlier in the week ordering them to move from their encampment on the mountain.
In response, Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan promised that he was ready to fight a "war" in the courts with the federal government.
"This is going to be a war, and it’s going to be one that carries on for a number of years,” Corrigan told the Province. "The bigger argument that needs to be fought is: How much can the federal government impose its will on local governments and the ability of people to make local decisions? That’s really the quintessential issue that takes this beyond a merely local situation to being one that attracts interest from municipalities right across Canada."
In June, an independent poll found that more than 60 percent of Burnaby residents oppose Kinder Morgan's development proposal to invest $5.4 billion into expanding an existing tar sands pipeline and storage terminal—which the city says would lead to seven times as many oil tankers using the nearby Burrard Inlet each year.
Scientists Confirm: 2014 Set to Be Hottest Year in Recorded Human History
Don't let the winter cold spell fool you. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed Thursday that 2014 is set to be the hottest year in recorded history, with October setting another record for monthly temperatures.
This marks the fifth month out of the past six to set a record high global temperature, according to NOAA.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin' Is On Hiatus
New Scrutiny of Goldman’s Ties to the New York Fed After a Leak
New York Fed, Goldman in Criminal Investigation for Sharing Confidential Information
Kucinich: Weary Nation 'Must Not Cede to Forces of Destruction'
“Down Outright Murder”: A Complete Guide to the Shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson
How to Encrypt the Entire Web for Free
The Senate defeated an overhaul of the NSA. Here's what's next for surveillance reform.
Joan Baez Appears at Church on LES of NYC to Raise Money For #Ferguson Activists
Breaking: Kinder Morgan Pipeline Protestors
Transgender Day of Celebration: Unlikely Sources
A Little Night Music
Bonnie Raitt, Keb Mo - No Gettin' Over You
Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker - In The Mood
Bonnie Raitt - Richland Woman Blues
Bonnie Raitt - Write Me A Few Of Your Lines / Kokomo Blues
Bonnie Raitt, Ruth Brown, Charles Brown - Never Make Your Move to Soon
Bonnie Raitt - I Feel The Same
Bonnie Raitt - Let Me Be Your Blender
A.C. Reed (Feat. Bonnie Raitt) - Shes Fine
Eric Clapton, BB King & Bonnie Raitt - Have You Ever Loved A Woman
Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Chapman, Jeff Beck and Beth Hart - "Sweet Home Chicago"
Bonnie Raitt - Road Tested
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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