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Foxconn to double size of iPhone factory in China

Foxconn is planning to double the size of their iPhone factory in China at a cost of $1.1 billion dollars, according to Chinese news site China Daily.
The base will be centered on the Foxconn Science Park in Zhengzhou, provincial capital of Henan, increasing its current production lines
...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/AmlwwJE3gpQ/story01.htm

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Chinese Investment In Europe Unlikely To Be Overwhelming

VENICE (Reuters) - The sign in a boutique selling glass hand-crafted on the Venetian island of Murano betrays an uncertain grasp of English. But the owner is very sure who is to blame for the tough times confronting the 700-year-old local glassmaking industry.

"Everything in this shop is not made in China," it proclaims. A few doors away, imported Murano lookalikes sell for much less. To the untrained eye, they appear identical.

With Europe drowning in debt and flirting with recession, China's influence can only rise further. Euro zone governments would love Beijing to plough more of its $3.2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves into their bonds.

China is also likely to chip in with a loan to the International Monetary Fund to provide a financing backstop in case Italy and Spain are shut out of the bond markets.

Last week's $3.5 billion acquisition by China Three Gorges Corp of the Portuguese government's stake in utility EDP is also a sign of things to come.

Financiers turn instinctively to fast-growing China as they try to flush out buyers for assets that are going on the block as European governments, banks and companies pay down debt.

But, despite Chinese leaders' expressing interest in diversifying the country's overseas asset base away from government paper, analysts do not expect a sea change in China's traditionally cautious approach to expanding in Western markets. Africa and Asia are likely to remain China's top targets for now.

"There are going to be opportunities, but we're not going to see China buying up Europe," said Thilo Hanemann, research director at the Rhodium Group, an investment advisory and strategic planning firm in New York.

TREADING SOFTLY

There are many reasons for the wariness.

Lengthy delays in obtaining the approval of regulators in Beijing put Chinese companies at a disadvantage in mergers and acquisitions when the seller wants a quick deal. Companies lack the management skills to integrate overseas acquisitions. And, perhaps most importantly, prospects are much brighter at home than they are in Europe.

"If you compare the rates of growth in China and in Europe, are you sensible buying into a brand that's seen its best years of growth? said Edward Radcliffe, a partner in Shanghai with Vermillion, an M&A advisory boutique that focuses on cross-border China deals.

Still, he said some larger Chinese groups, both state-owned and private, had started to explore opportunities in Europe and the United States.

The 27-member European Union is China's biggest export market. But foreign direct investment (FDI) has badly lagged, totaling $8 billion by the EU's reckoning or $12 billion on China's count - less than 0.2 percent of total FDI in the EU, according to Rhodium.

The firm has kept its own tally since 2003, but its total of $15 billion through mid-2011, though greater than the official data, is still small.

Hanemann said he was sure 2012 would see deals in Europe in technology and consumer products to enable Chinese firms to climb the value ladder and build their domestic market share.

"Ultimately, Chinese companies have to become true multinationals, like Japanese and Korean firms before them," he said. "Over the longer term, there's no reason to believe that China is going to take a different path."

But he was skeptical whether most Chinese companies would be able to seize the opportunities that were likely to crop up in the coming year. To do so, they would have to manage public perceptions in Europe and obtain quick regulatory approval at home.

"There are a lot of deals that the Chinese cannot take on. If the Chinese government sees a company making a bid for troubled assets that risks provoking a political backlash in Europe, I think they'd step in to make sure there's no embarrassment for the Chinese side."

POLITICAL OVERLAY

The failure of Chinese firms to buy Saab, the Swedish car maker that was declared bankrupt last week, was a telling example of the difficulties facing Chinese investors, Hanemann said.

But the picture is not black and white. After all, Volvo, another Swedish car maker, was successfully acquired by a Chinese rival from Ford Motor Co in 2010.

Christine Lambert-Goue, managing director in Beijing at Invest Securities China, said companies were not looking mainly for outright acquisitions but for brands, patents and technology that would bolster their position at home.

"Companies are only ready to pay for assets from Europe that will enable them to gain market share in China," she said.

Investment in Europe will take off eventually, but a deteriorating political climate represents an obstacle in the short term, said Jonathan Holslag of the Brussels Institute of Contemporary China Studies.

The EU, like the United States, is talking tough about Chinese "state capitalism" and is crafting a more assertive trade policy to counter what it sees as a playing field tilted against foreign companies.

For its part, Beijing smells protectionism in the air in response to its growing economic clout.

"The European Union is disappointed with the reluctance of Beijing to open its economy further, whereas Beijing complains about Europe being too reluctant to share its knowledge or to allow Chinese investors to expand their presence in important sectors like infrastructure," Holslag said.

And if Europe fails to snap out of its economic malaise, the risk is that a super-competitive China will be made a scapegoat.

"The more governments are confronted with high unemployment figures, the more we will start to see China as a challenger rather than as a savior," Holslag said.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/26/chinese-investment-in-europe_n_1169983.html

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Analysis: Russia's Putin risks losing touch amid protests (Reuters)

MOSCOW (Reuters) ? Vladimir Putin is looking increasingly out of touch in Russia after the opposition brought tens of thousands of people out onto the streets of Moscow for the second time in two weeks to demand a parliamentary election be re-run.

But the looming New Year holiday in Russia means there is likely to be a pause in the biggest opposition protests since he rose to power 12 years ago and he will hope they will now at least temporarily lose momentum.

The protesters say they are tired of his domination of Russia after eight years as president and now four as prime minister, and suspect the December 4 election, won by his United Russia party, was rigged.

First Putin dismissed the protesters as chattering monkeys financed from abroad, then he backed President Dmitry Medvedev's proposal for gradual political reform and later the 59-year-old leader had a former KGB spy appointed as Kremlin chief of staff.

The gulf between Putin and many of his people has convinced many that he has lost his popular touch and is refusing to take the protests as seriously as many of his closest allies do as he prepares to reclaim the presidency in an election in March.

"They do not understand," one person close to policy makers said of Putin and Medvedev. "One is weak and the other does not want to listen, though people have tried to explain the seriousness of the situation."

That could bode badly for the long-term stability of the world's biggest country and energy producer.

Opponents say Putin's inner circle is a small group of former KGB spies, businessmen and Kremlin officials who have little empathy with the Internet-savvy generation of younger, urban Russians who have come out onto the streets this month.

But Putin's portrayal of the protesters as pawns financed by a foreign power has also contrasted with the conclusions drawn by some of the other men at his court.

Kremlin deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, who helped Putin craft his tightly controlled political system, warned on Friday that some enemies wanted to provoke a revolution but that the protesters were among the best people in society.

PUTIN'S COURT

"The best part of our society, or rather the most productive part, is demanding respect," Surkov, one of Putin's most powerful advisers on domestic policy, told Izvestia. "You cannot simply swipe away their opinions in an arrogant way."

An even closer Putin ally, former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, joined Saturday's protest in Moscow, warning that Russia needed much more serious political reforms to ensure a stable development.

"I came today because I do not believe the elections were fair and I believe we need to hold an investigation and punish those responsible up to and including criminal responsibility," Kudrin, 51, told Reuters at the protest.

"There is a possibility today, without any sort of revolution, to make a transformation to ensure fair elections and real representation in parliament," said Kudrin, who helped Putin get his first job in the Kremlin in 1996.

But Putin has other powerful advisers too.

Nikolai Patrushev, the powerful head of the Russian security council and former head of the FSB state security service, said this month that Russia should impose "rational regulation" of the Internet.

Another former KGB spy, Sergei Ivanov, was appointed Kremlin chief of staff on Thursday and Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, a Putin ally, has voiced concern about the role played by the Internet in the Arab Spring revolts.

Patrushev, 60, Ivanov, 58, and Sechin, 51, are all old friends of Putin and though they may be divided by tactics and court politics, they are ultimately hardliners.

Medvedev, Russia's 46-year-old iPad-carrying president, may have more sense of the anger against Putin but he is weak, sources close to the situation said.

"Medvedev understands this all a little better because he is a person less prone to conspiratorial theories," said a source with close ties to the leadership, adding that Russia's leaders were hoping the protests would burn themselves out.

"Putin has realized his popularity is declining," the source said.

PUTIN'S POPULARITY

For Putin, who has used his popularity to justify his plan to run for the presidency in the March 4 presidential election, that may be a hard thing to accept.

Putin still remains Russia's most popular politician and though his ratings are high by Western standards, they are low according to Putin's own expectations.

Russia's biggest independent pollster, Levada-Center, said 63 percent of Russians approved of his activities as prime minister in a poll carried out on Dec 16-20.

But that is just three percentage points above the lowest level since August 2000, when he was dogged by the botched reaction to a naval disaster that killed all 118 crewmen aboard the submarine Kursk.

"They are worrying and they are nervous," said Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as prime minister under Putin for four years before joining the opposition. "And they really do have something to be worried and nervous about."

CHATTERING MONKEYS?

Putin seems intent on riding out the protests. While tens of thousands turned out for the second time on two weeks on Saturday, he is likely to take comfort from the fact that there was not a huge increase in the numbers.

Tens of thousands protested in cities across Russia on December 10. On Saturday, organizers said they had gathered 120,000 in Moscow though the police put the number at 30,000.

The truth may lie somewhere in between: Russia's Navaya Gazeta opposition newspaper said its reporters counted more than 102,000 while estimates from state news agency RIA put the crowd at about 56,000.

Putin appears to reason that even though the protests are much larger than any he has faced before, it is still a relatively small percentage of the population that is protesting in a country of more than 140 million.

He is counting on the support of the many millions in the provinces who regard him as the man who restored order to Russia after the chaos of the decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In a televised question and answer session with the Russian people, Putin used a reference to the chattering monkeys known as "Bandar Log" in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book to describe the protesters and said he thought the white ribbons which are the symbol of the election protests were condoms.

But Alexei Navalny, the most prominent leader of the divided opposition groups which refuse to negotiate with the Kremlin, turned Putin's comments back against the authorities.

"Hi all of you Bandar Logs and Internet hamsters: You were called Bandar Log but you came here today. But where is the chap who called us that?" Navalny, 35, told tens of thousands of people at the protest in Moscow's Sakharov Avenue.

Navalny's satire may excite the crowds and the thousands who read his blogs but there is still no leader of the fragmented opposition. As if to illustrate that, dozens of different leaders addressed the crowd in Moscow.

United or not, Navalny warned that there were enough people at the protest to take the Kremlin by force, though he quickly added that this was not the plan.

"If the authorities continue to cheat the people and thieves and if those two swindlers continue the usurpation of power - they have stolen it from the people - then the people will come and take it back because it is theirs by rights," he told Reuters.

So does he plan a revolution?

"It is not a revolution," he said. "The revolution, the illegal takeover of power, was implemented by Putin and Medvedev. Here there will be a legal return of power to the people."

(Editing by Jon Hemming)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/russia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111226/wl_nm/us_russia_putin

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Pions don't want to decay into faster-than-light neutrinos, study finds

Friday, December 23, 2011

When an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein's theory of special relativity and couldn't find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment.

Responding to the call was Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Online and in the December 24 issue of Physical Review Letters, Cowsik and his collaborators put their finger on what appears to be an insurmountable problem with the experiment.

The OPERA experiment, a collaboration between the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy, timed particles called neutrinos traveling through Earth from the physics laboratory CERN to a detector in an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, a distance of some 730 kilometers, or about 450 miles.

OPERA reported online and in Physics Letters B in September that the neutrinos arrived at Gran Sasso some 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have arrived if they were traveling at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Neutrinos are thought to have a tiny, but nonzero, mass. According to the theory of special relativity, any particle that has mass may come close to but cannot quite reach the speed of light. So superluminal (faster than light) neutrinos should not exist.

The neutrinos in the experiment were created by slamming speeding protons into a stationary target, producing a pulse of pions ? unstable particles that were magnetically focused into a long tunnel where they decayed in flight into muons and neutrinos.

The muons were stopped at the end of the tunnel, but the neutrinos, which slip through matter like ghosts through walls, passed through the barrier and disappeared in the direction of Gran Sasso.

In their journal article, Cowsik and an international team of collaborators took a close look at the first step of this process. "We have investigated whether pion decays would produce superluminal neutrinos, assuming energy and momentum are conserved," he says.

The OPERA neutrinos had energies of about 17 gigaelectron volts. "They had a lot of energy but very little mass," Cowsik says, "so they should go very fast." The question is whether they went faster than the speed of light.

"We've shown in this paper that if the neutrino that comes out of a pion decay were going faster than the speed of light, the pion lifetime would get longer, and the neutrino would carry a smaller fraction of the energy shared by the neutrino and the muon," Cowsik says.

"What's more," he says, "these difficulties would only increase as the pion energy increases.

"So we are saying that in the present framework of physics, superluminal neutrinos would be difficult to produce," Cowsik explains.

In addition, he says, there's an experimental check on this theoretical conclusion. The creation of neutrinos at CERN is duplicated naturally when cosmic rays hit Earth's atmosphere.

A neutrino observatory called IceCube detects these neutrinos when they collide with other particles generating muons that leave trails of light flashes as they plow into the thick, clear ice of Antarctica.

"IceCube has seen neutrinos with energies 10,000 times higher than those the OPERA experiment is creating," Cowsik says.."Thus, the energies of their parent pions should be correspondingly high. Simple calculations, based on the conservation of energy and momentum, dictate that the lifetimes of those pions should be too long for them ever to decay into superluminal neutrinos.

"But the observation of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube indicates that these high-energy pions do decay according to the standard ideas of physics, generating neutrinos whose speed approaches that of light but never exceeds it.

Cowsik's objection to the OPERA results isn't the only one that has been raised.

Physicists Andrew G. Cohen and Sheldon L. Glashow published a paper in Physical Review Letters in October showing that superluminal neutrinos would rapidly radiate energy in the form of electron-positron pairs.

"We are saying that, given physics as we know it today, it should be hard to produce any neutrinos with superluminal velocities, and Cohen and Glashow are saying that even if you did, they'd quickly radiate away their energy and slow down," Cowsik says.

"I have very high regard for the OPERA experimenters," Cowsik adds. "They got faster-than-light speeds when they analyzed their data in March, but they struggled for months to eliminate possible errors in their experiment before publishing it.

"Not finding any mistakes," Cowsik says, "they had an ethical obligation to publish so that the community could help resolve the difficulty. That's the demanding code physicists live by," he says.

###

Washington University in St. Louis: http://www.wustl.edu

Thanks to Washington University in St. Louis for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116312/Pions_don_t_want_to_decay_into_faster_than_light_neutrinos__study_finds_

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Missile mystery: Who owns 69 seized Patriots?

China denied on Friday any link to a batch of 69 Patriot missiles confiscated by Finnish authorities, saying the weapons were destined for South Korea.

"As far as we know these goods were made in Germany and were being sent to South Korea,"? Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin told a daily news briefing. "This is a British ship which left Germany carrying Patriot missiles for South Korea."

Some reports have alleged the missiles were destined for China, but Liu said that was not the case.

"I don't see what connection this boat has with China. We think it odd that some people always link certain things to China. The facts are all very clear," he added.

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A contagion of conflict in China?

The surface-to-air missiles were found on Wednesday when authorities searched the cargo ship Thor Liberty in Kotka, southern Finland. They also discovered 150 tons of explosive material called nitroguanidine, which was not stowed properly.

Markku Koskinen, the director of traffic operations at the port of Kotka, said they were deficiently packed in wooden boxes on open pallets and would be moved to metal containers in line with rules on the maritime transport of explosives.

Finnish authorities confiscated the missiles found on the ship and arrested its Ukrainian captain and chief officer on suspicion of trying to transport the missiles via Finland without permission.

"The missiles did not have the appropriate transit papers," Detective Superintendent Timo Virtanen said.

Story: China gives man 9 years in prison for arguing for democracy

Finland requires those seeking to transport defense material via its territory to seek permission. In the past six years there have been 20 cases of defense material being transported without the required documentation with the latest incident appearing to be one of the largest consignments.

A spokesman for Germany's Defense Ministry told The Associated Press on Thursday that the missiles were an official shipment that was fully declared and had all necessary clearings from German authorities. He also said they were being transported to South Korea.

The ship was sailing under an Isle of Man flag and had stopped to load anchor cables on board.

China is subject to an arms embargo by the United States and European Union imposed after the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Story: Christmas craze fills China's malls, not churches

American-made Patriot missiles are used to counter threats, including aircraft, tactical ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. They are part of the U.S. Army's weaponry and were extensively used during the 1991 Gulf war.

Manufactured by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Florida, Patriot missiles have been in service in several countries, including Egypt, Germany, Greece, Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and South Korea.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45774847/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/

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County Executive and County Council President Statement on PSC $1 Million Fine

The following information was sent to us by Neil H. Greenberger:

?

Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett and County Council President Roger Berliner said today that the County supports the $1 million initial fine issued to Pepco by the Maryland Public Service Commission (PSC) and that Montgomery County will continue to advocate on behalf of ratepayers.

County Executive Leggett and Council President Berliner said in a joint statement that the PSC made critical findings that Pepco?s service has been unreliable, that larger fines or penalties would be justifiable and that customers should not bear the cost of the improvements that Pepco needs to make because of its imprudence.

They went on to say the following:

?Montgomery County was instrumental in prompting the Public Service Commission to initiate this investigation into Pepco?s reliability. The Commission appears to have clearly heard the outcry from Montgomery County?s elected officials and customers and ruled in our favor on virtually every key finding.

?This was the first time Montgomery County provided extensive intervention in a case before the Public Service Commission. The PSC?s ruling in this case was clearly influenced by Montgomery County retaining a Special Counsel, establishing a Work Group to prepare recommendations and having County staff testify at a hearing.

?In issuing a $1 million fine, the PSC rejected Pepco?s excuses and stated that a larger fine or other additional penalties may be justifiable. More importantly, the PSC stated that it will not allow Pepco to charge customers for Pepco?s ?imprudence? in future rate setting cases. The Commission also stated that additional penalties may be imposed if Pepco does not improve its reliability.?

Montgomery County?s Work Group submitted a comprehensive report and the PSC adopted most of the Work Group?s recommendations including:

?????????Require Pepco to execute a multi-year plan for inspecting its distribution system.

?????????Create an ombudsman within Pepco to create a more customer-oriented culture and improve its pure communication with customers.

?????????Impose penalties to send a message to Pepco.

?We are grateful for the work of the Maryland People?s Counsel,? County Executive Leggett and Council President Berliner went on to say, ?and we believe the direct input from Montgomery County in this case was critical given the gravity of the situation.

"Our County has been asking the Commission to hold Pepco accountable?financially and in terms of service quality. ?We believe that this order represents a major step in that direction and commend the Commission for doing so.?

?

?The Commission has stated that it would not put the burden of Pepco's reliability expenses solely on the shoulders of ratepayers. ?That was a key request of the County, and we will expect the Commission to honor that pledge in Pepco's recently filed rate case.

?

?On almost every key recommendation made by the County?on finding Pepco imprudent for allowing its system to deteriorate to this state; on holding that Pepco failed to perform vegetation management properly; and in ruling that Pepco's communications with customers was inadequate, the Commission ruled in favor of the County and against Pepco. ?

?While we expect Pepco will continue its efforts to improve service, we are gratified that the Commission has made it clear that further fines will be forthcoming if they fail to do so.??

Source: http://laurel.wusa9.com/news/news/86541-county-executive-and-county-council-president-statement-psc-1-million-fine

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London's beloved Routemaster bus returns to streets (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) ? London welcomed a new open-backed double-decker bus on Friday, six years after the much-loved but ageing fleet of "Routemaster" vehicles were removed from the streets of the British capital.

The distinctive snub-nosed red Routemasters, popular with tourists and locals alike and as synonymous with London as Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, were almost totally withdrawn in 2005 because they were regarded as expensive relics of the past.

The sleek modern bus, which also features a conductor and the distinctive open rear boarding platform to allow people to jump on and off, was unveiled for the first time on Friday, gliding through busy traffic on its first trip through London.

Beaming London Mayor Boris Johnson, who had promised a modern Routemaster in his 2008 election manifesto, said he believed the new design would become as resonant worldwide as its predecessor.

Such is the international attraction of the bus that reporters from across the globe gathered in a chilly Trafalgar Square to see Johnson show off the gleaming "Boris Bus" as it has been dubbed.

"I think the magic thing about this bus is that domed appearance that it has," he told reporters, before launching into the flowery prose for which he is renowned.

"It reminds everybody of all those things that are iconic of London -- the design of an old taxi, or the design of a bowler hat, or the noble domed brow of a battle elephant.

"That's the thing that says London to loads of people. Just going along the streets just now it's been obvious how many people like it and what an eye-catching thing it is."

The original Routemasters were introduced in the capital in 1956 but production stopped in 1968. Some 2,760 trundled through London at their peak, and featured in countless films such as the 1963 Cliff Richard film "Summer Holiday."

The first eight new prototypes, designed and built in Britain, will operate from next February on the number 38 route between Victoria rail station and Hackney in east London.

Hundreds more are expected to be brought in if the trial is deemed successful.

"VANITY PROJECT"

However, not everyone is delighted to see the new look Routemasters, with Labour Party opponents saying Londoners would pay for Conservative Johnson's "shiny vanity project."

They argued it was wrong to spend 11 million pounds on designing and building the initial buses when fares were rising and money was tight amid Britain's economic difficulties.

The cost of a conductor alone would add 72,000 pounds per bus every year, they said.

Johnson was unbowed. "People who reject this bus ... have to answer a very simple question. Do they want a bus that is cleaner and greener ... that is built in Britain and delivers British jobs?" he said.

"Or do they want to go back to a German made bus that is not suitable for the streets of our city."

As a prominent Euroskeptic, Johnson could also not resist a swipe at the European Union as the new bus will be the only one in Europe to feature the hop on/hop off platform, according to London transport officials.

"This is not an anti-EU bus," Johnson said with a smile. "It is important we have been able to restore the open platform in defiance of a lot of skepticism. Obviously there was lots of eyebrows raised in Brussels but we were able to persuade them."

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/britain/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111216/lf_nm_life/us_britain_bus

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