by Greg Piper Governments and private entities are using a small rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations and new viral variants to juice interest in bivalent boosters that only 1 in 6 Americans have taken and to urge a return to routine masking, if not outright mandating new jabs and face coverings. What they aren’t…
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Three and a half years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, American medical journals are still calling out what they consider commonly shared misinformation on vaccines, masks, transmission and viral origins, sometimes promoted by health professionals.
Yet voluminous research and real-world experiences over that span suggest the journals themselves are promoting outdated, unsupported or exaggerated COVID claims, if not outright misinformation.
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Louisiana federal Judge Terry A. Doughty shocked Americans with his July 4th restraining order against Biden’s digital team which was supposed to be fighting “disinformation” but was in reality just banning views online it didn’t like.
Doughty’s opinion is a jaw dropping expose of how White House staff bullied Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to remove content about election fraud, COVID concerns and other matters of public interest in blatant violation of the First Amendment. Governmental actors cannot demand that others do what they cannot under the Constitution, just as you can’t have proxies break the law for you. Yet that’s exactly what Biden officials did and that’s exactly what Judge Doughty stopped.
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The U.S. poverty rate rose for the first time in 10 years as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with job losses, especially in the country’s biggest cities, among the largest contributing factors, according to a recently released U.S. Census Bureau report.
The rate increased from 12.3% in 2019 to 12.8% in 2021.
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The quote from Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a useful way to begin addressing the Washington Post editorial board’s confident assertion that “’A collective national incompetence in government’” was at the root of the U.S.’s alleged failure vis-à-vis the coronavirus in 2020. According to the Post quoting from a recently released report (“Lessons from the Covid War”), “The United States started out ‘with more capabilities than any other country in the world,’ but “it ended up with 1 million dead.” Were he still around, one guesses Tolstoy would mock the conceit of the Post’s editorialists.
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by Betsy McCaughey Ready for another pandemic? New York City’s health commissioner announced last week that the influx of migrants from the southern border — more than 50,000 to New York City alone in the past year — is delivering contagious diseases, including tuberculosis and polio, to our neighborhoods.…
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Switzerland’s Federal Office of Public Health said no COVID-19 vaccination is recommended this spring/summer season, including for people at high risk of becoming seriously sick from the virus.
“Nearly everyone in Switzerland has been vaccinated and/or contracted and recovered from COVID-19. Their immune system has therefore been exposed to the coronavirus,” the Swiss health agency said.
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We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.
The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.
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Like most polls, Gallup polls are usually paid advertisements for whomever commissions them and therefore deserving of as little attention. However, the indefatigable Sharyl Attkisson recently reported on the results of one such survey and that did draw my attention. Evidently, 47 percent of Americans say life will never go back to pre-pandemic normal. I was somewhat stunned! How could 53 percent be thinking we could go back?
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Most Americans are likely pleased that when they turn on their television, no longer are there talking heads and public health figures breathlessly discussing COVID-19 case counts and deaths. Broadly, the media as a whole is no longer incessantly reporting on the topic, and nationally, the federal public health emergency declared for the COVID-19 pandemic terminates on May 11.
While the old signs of the pandemic have virtually vanished, Americans won’t forget what their governments did to them.
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The education disruption caused by mass school closures and prolonged remote instruction beginning three years ago this month led many families to seek other learning options beyond an assigned district school. Emerging research reveals just how significant and sustained that shift was.
In a new report, “Where the Kids Went: Nonpublic Schooling and Demographic Change during the Pandemic Exodus from Public Schools,” Stanford economist Thomas Dee reveals that more than 1.2 million students left district schools during the pandemic response. That exodus endured throughout the 2021/2022 academic year, as families continued to opt for private schools and homeschooling even though most district schools reopened.
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may still be mulling over a run for president, but the Republican looked and sounded every bit a contender for the GOP presidential nomination Friday evening in the first-in-the-nation caucus state.
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As negations move forward on an international pandemic treaty, Republican House members are pushing a bill that would check the pandemic powers of the World Health Organization.
U.S. Representatives Tom Tiffany (R-WI-07) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ-05) joined a dozen of their Republican colleagues in introducing the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act.
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Lawmakers are demanding that President Joe Biden declassify documents related to the origins of COVID-19, in particular federal investigations into the matter.
The Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent that would require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify documents related to COVID’s origins. Republicans have a majority in the House, giving the legislation a chance, but whether Biden would sign it is in doubt.
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Seattle Public Schools may have to close some of its schools over the next few years as the district battles budget shortages and plummeting enrollment after the COVID-19 pandemic.
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A U.S. government report released Monday estimates that there could have been more than $60 billion in unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic. The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office says that figure is an estimate spread over the entire unemployment system and should be “interpreted with caution.”
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Dr. Anthony Fauci’s questionable work leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and his equally questionable actions in managing the pandemic have raised a lot of eyebrows. Now, a majority of voters believe congress should investigate the former longtime medical adviser to the White House and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, according to a new poll by Convention of States Action.
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday ended pandemic-era proxy voting, delivering on a promise to require chamber members to vote in person.
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The S&P Global U.S. Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell at the fastest rate since May 2020 in December, a continuing sign that the manufacturing sector is on the decline, S&P Global reported Tuesday.
The U.S. Manufacturing PMI posted a 46.2 in December, down from 47.7 in November and solidly below 50, which signals that the sector is contracting, according to S&P Global. Production levels contracted in back-to-back months, with new sales plummeting at the end of December at the fastest pace since 2007, as companies cited weakening demand amid “economic uncertainty” and inflation weighing on customers.
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Employee turnover has surged since the pandemic, and the need to replace and train new employees at high volume has hampered productivity for businesses, according to The New York Times.
More than 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs in November 2021, the highest since the government began tracking this data 20 years earlier, and the turnover rate remains significantly higher than it was before the pandemic, according to the NYT. Businesses are struggling with the costs of high turnover; new employees take time to become productive, and existing employees lose productivity because of the time they spend training others.
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Twitter altered the COVID conversation by censoring information that was true but not in line with U.S. government policy, discrediting public health experts who disagreed and suppressing contrarian users, the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” showed Monday.
“[B]oth the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes,” reporter David Zweig said in the 10th Twitter Files release.
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Americans will soon get to cast their first votes since the science–denying COVID mask and vaccine mandates, the second wave of COVID-related blowout spending and subsequent inflation, and the COVID-related school closures that allowed parents to see what the public schools are really teaching their boys and girls – including that they can choose whether they are boys or girls. With all of these matters implicitly on the ballot, how are things shaping up going into Election Day?
Starting with the House of Representatives, six months ago Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report projected “a GOP gain in the 15-25 seat range.” At the time, I responded, “While things could change over the next six months (although the cake is probably largely baked), a GOP gain of 30 to 40 House seats appears more likely at this stage of the contest than Walter’s projected GOP gain of 15 to 25 seats.”
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On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published new data revealing the full extent of alcohol-related deaths during the roughly two-year lockdown period of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
As reported by CNN, the rate of alcohol-related deaths in the United States spiked by 26 percent between 2019 and 2020, with this one-year percentage increase being higher than the cumulative increase over the entirety of the previous decade. As a result, alcohol was the cause of death for over 49,000 Americans in 2020, which amounts to 13 out of every 100,000 people on average, up from 2019’s total of 10.4 people out of every 100,000.
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“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it often rhymes.” This is among the reasons we look to the past, straining as best we can through the deepening fog of time to discern lessons for our own day. Analogies to the events that came before are always imperfect, but nevertheless often useful for understanding our present moment. Thus, only a historical myopia can explain why it’s become so common to describe the events involving the covid pandemic as “unprecedented,” even though pandemics have tended to occur every hundred years or so. This nearsightedness is also perilous given, for instance, the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset Initiative” and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s recent pledge to spend $200 million on developing international biometric-based digital identifications.
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The latest snapshot of Wisconsin schools shows that kids are still not back to where they were before the coronavirus closed some schools for more than a year.
Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction on Thursday released the scores from the Forward Exam for elementary school kids, the ACT Aspire for freshmen and sophomores, and the ACT for high school juniors.
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President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic is “over” in the United States.
“The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s– But the pandemic is over,” Biden said during a pre-recorded CBS “60 Minutes” interview aired Sunday.
“As you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it’s changing,” he said.
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The Defense Department’s inspector general has alerted the secretary of defense to apparent blanket denials of religious accommodation requests (RAR) for exemptions from the military COVID-19 vaccine mandate, which would be a violation of federal law.
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Head Start, the federal program providing preschool and child care for low-income families, will require COVID-19 masks for children 2 and older this school year, which is inconsistent with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
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The majority of young adults who moved back home with their parents at the outset of the pandemic still live there, according to a new survey, a sign that the economic fallout surrounding pandemic policies in the U.S. continues to squeeze more and more Americans.
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The Biden education department announced Thursday that U.S. students’ plummeting scores in reading and math during the COVID-19 pandemic is all due to former President Donald Trump.
“Today’s data confirm the significant impact the prior Administration’s mismanagement of the pandemic has had on our children’s progress and academic wellbeing,” said Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Thursday, following the report that U.S. students showed their steepest decline in decades in math and reading scores during the COVID school shutdowns.
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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday called it “a mistake” the state switched to remote learning in schools at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic more than two years ago.
Hochul, a Democrat running to serve a full term in November, made her remarks during a wide-ranging speech at the University of Albany commemorating Women’s Equality Day. That included her calling on the Department of Labor to study the impact the coronavirus had on women in the workforce.
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Oversight Republicans have launched an investigation into how the U.S. Department of Education has handled billions of COVID-19 relief dollars, raising the alarm about the major learning loss experienced by students.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona demanding documents and answers as to why most of the money has reportedly remained unspent.
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In October 2020, the Michigan Supreme Court stripped Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of the unilateral powers she was using when she declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whitmer had been using a 1945 law – which was prompted by a three-day race riot in Detroit three years earlier – that had no sunset provision in it and didn’t require approval by the state legislature.
In May 2021, Whitmer told a news agency that if she still had that 1945 state-of-emergency law, she would use those powers, but not for anything related to a pandemic.
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U.S District Court Judge Steven Merryday issued a blistering rebuke of the Department of Defense and Marine Corps for refusing to grant religious accommodation requests to service members.
Merryday did so when issuing a 48-page ruling Thursday in which he granted class action status for all active and reserve U.S. Marine Corps service men and women in a lawsuit filed against the Secretary of Defense over the department’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
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While federal courts have ordered the Navy and Air Force not to take any adverse actions against military members seeking religious exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, the Coast Guard is seeking to discharge service members refusing the vaccine without allowing them to appear before administrative separation boards to defend their cases.
Federal courts in Texas and Ohio have granted injunctions against the Navy and Air Force vaccine mandates, respectively, for members seeking religious exemptions. Those injunctions, however, do not apply to any other military branches, including the Coast Guard.
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“School choice is good for everybody but unions, socialist bureaucrats and the tired education establishment,” libertarian John Stossel wrote Wednesday at the New York Post.
The author and journalist observed the “silver lining” of the COVID pandemic is that parents discovered alternatives to public schools and, as the statistics are telling us, they continue to act on that discovery by removing their children from them – in droves.
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Researchers from a nonprofit group released a report claiming that elementary school students will need at least three years to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and return to their pre-pandemic learning skills.
As reported by the New York Post, the report was released on Tuesday by the nonprofit group Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), which focuses on educational standards in K-12 grades.
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A skyrocketing number of home sales are faltering throughout the U.S. housing economy, with experts pointing to slower housing markets and higher mortgage rates as the main drivers of the turnaround.
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Hong Kong’s Ministry of Health announced it will soon require COVID-19 patients to wear electronic monitors as the pandemic continues to spread throughout China, Chinese media reported Monday.
Beginning on Friday, Hong Kong will require COVID-19 patients in quarantine to wear electronic bracelets in order to prohibit them from visiting “high-risk” places, Lo Chung-mau, Hong Kong’s health minister told reporters, according to China’s i-Cable News. Lo is a cabinet member within the administration of Hong Kong’s new chief executive, John Lee, who allegedly won 99% of votes after enforcing Beijing’s National Security Law.
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According to a recent survey, over 1.2 million students have abandoned public schools in favor of other alternatives in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, where many public schools shut down in-person learning in favor of “remote” learning.
The Daily Caller reports that the survey, conducted by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), discovered that over 1,268,000 students have fled public schooling since March of 2020. Enrollment initially fell by 2.5 percent in the Fall 2020 semester when lockdowns first began in the spring of that year. The following year, schools that returned to in-person learning restored some of those numbers, while the schools that remained on virtual learning continued to see steep declines.
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The majority of Americans feel they cannot keep up with the cost of living as inflation and the price of goods continue to rise, according to new polling data.
A poll from NBC News asked Americans, “Do you think that your family’s income is … going up faster than the cost of living, staying about even with the cost of living, or falling behind the cost of living?”
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Voters appear poised to clobber the party that brought us COVID lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and inflation. Indeed, rising inflation has largely resulted from COVID-related disincentives to work, disrupted supply chains, and blowout spending, along with federal restrictions on oil and gas production. It’s perhaps surprising, therefore, that the Cook Political Report foresees Republican gains in the House of Representatives as being only “in the 15-25 seat range,” while its projections suggest that Democrats have at least a coin flip’s chance of holding the Senate.
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As inflation rose last year to a 40-year high, Americans’ credit card debt also soared, according to analyses published by the personal-finance website WalletHub.
In its Credit Card Debt study, Wallethub found that consumers racked up $87.3 billion in new debt in 2021. During the fourth quarter of 2021, debt increased by $74.1 billion, the largest increase ever reported, Wallethub notes. It was also a 63% larger increase than the post-Great Recession average for a fourth quarter.
By the end of 2021, the average household credit card balance was $8,590. “That’s $2,642 below WalletHub’s projected breaking point,” the report states.
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While many government leaders sound the all clear message on COVID-19, dropping vaccine restrictions and mask mandates, some states and municipalities are clinging to the emergency powers that allowed them to govern people’s behavior in unprecedented ways.
Citing the need to direct emergency funding and oversee hospitals, they have held on to their emergency orders even as many restaurants, shopping centers, and sports arenas are once again packed and lingering pandemic concerns have faded into the background of a more normal life.
Emergency orders at the state level are usually issued in response to temporary threats, especially weather disasters, and are wrapped up in a few days or weeks. Soon after the new coronavirus exploded in March 2020, most governors issued broad executive orders. Under these powers, governors banned crowds, closed businesses, and imposed mask and vaccination mandates. They have also deferred to unelected public health officials in imposing restrictions.
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Despite promises from President Biden and top health officials that COVID-19 vaccines would prevent severe illness, death, and perhaps even transmission of the virus, data indicate that thousands of Americans are dying from the illness even after having been vaccinated.
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The real pandemic in this country is one of growing fascism from our so-called political Left.
The far-Left Democratic Party doesn’t care about your essential freedoms—from speech and the free flow of ideas to freedom of assembly—particularly when those freedoms stand in the way of their pursuit of power.
This is the party, after all, who opposed Abraham Lincoln and stood in the way of integration well into the 1960s. Where Democratic hatred of freedom has become glaringly apparent in recent times is with their obsession with COVID vaccine mandates and mask mandates, most especially for school-aged children. This “pandemic” has exposed what is truly afoot here, fascist authoritarianism at its most potent and dangerous.
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As the mid-term elections approach, a number of Democrat governors are now following in the steps of Republican Governors Ron DeSantis (FL) and Glenn Youngkin (VA) in support of dropping mask mandates.
Supported by their political and media allies, the governors of states, including New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, California, and Oregon are now announcing mask mandates in schools may be dropped soon, as the New York Times reported Tuesday.
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Gun sales reached a five-year high in Connecticut in 2021, the year that the FBI saw the second-highest number of recorded background checks.
According to Mark Oliva, director of public affairs for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, there were 21 million background checks for gun sales in 2020 and 18.5 million in 2021, nationwide. Those figures are the top two highest on record.
“Background checks skyrocketed in March 2020, when there were 2.3 million background checks recorded,” Oliva told The Center Square. “That was the most ever recorded in a single month. That, of course, was the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns. People became concerned for their safety when police were warning they would not be able to respond to all emergency calls because they were seeing COVID infections rise.”
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On New Year’s Eve of 2019, revelers gathered around the globe to ring in a new decade. Many jubilantly attended “Roaring Twenties” parties, adorned in elegant evening wear, cloche and Panama hats, and knickerbockers, harkening back to an exciting, culturally vibrant era of economic prosperity. But whatever veiled hopes partygoers had for a booming future soon met jarring realities: a once-in-a-century pandemic, global lockdowns, an economic recession, and widespread civil unrest stemming from an incident of police brutality. The Roaring 2020s were not to be, it seemed.
Take heart: Mark P. Mills, a physicist, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, faculty fellow at Northwestern University, and a partner in Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund, is out to rekindle our collectively dashed hopes. In his new book, The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s, Mills convincingly argues with verve, vitality, and – most importantly – evidence, that humanity is about to take a great step forward in the coming decade. And unlike the first Roaring Twenties, these won’t need to end with a Great Depression.
In the opening pages, Mills reminds us that the original Roaring Twenties didn’t start off so auspiciously, either. In fact, separated by a century, our situation seems eerily similar. The 1918 flu pandemic ran well into 1920, triggering a severe U.S. recession that lasted through summer 1921. Violent riots and political instability were also prevalent. Yet from this pit of public despair, Americans pulled themselves out. Propelled by remarkable advancements in mass production, medicine, electrification, communications via telephone and radio, movies, automobiles, and aviation, the United States saw its GDP rise by an astounding 43% between 1921 and 1929.
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Apple chief executive Tim Cook made nearly $100 million in compensation in the company’s fiscal year, according to SEC filings published Thursday.
SEC filings show that Cook took home $98.73 million in the 2021 fiscal year, more than 500% more than the previous year’s $14.8 million, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Cook’s $3 million base salary remained stable in 2021, but he received a $12 million bonus for hitting Apple’s financial and environmental sustainability goals, $1.39 million in other compensation and $82.35 million in stock awards.
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