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Scott Ross, animate candy corn

@skort.bsky.social
341 followers 623 following 254 posts

lecturer, wustl | africanist anthro | humanitarianism, infrastructure, war, media, sound | gwu phd | hella left | he/him | arizonan in exile | wants to be your friend

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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
Recent Anthropology News special issue in the aftermath of federal funding cuts, program closures, and political attacks on higher ed. What can no longer be researched? What of the anthropology that could have been? www.anthropology-news.org/issue/defund...
anthropology-news.org
Defunded - Anthropology News
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
"The most dangerous threat to Black studies right now is not coming from the federal government. It is coming from institutions that have decided, in advance, that accommodation is the same thing as survival." www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
chronicle.com
Opinion | The Erasure of Black Studies
A report from the undoing of a field.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
"Every weapon developed by Elbit Systems is first “tested” on Palestinians, before being sold on to international governments, expanding the empire built off the destruction of Palestine." From activists who burned down an Elbit factory in Czech Republic: earthquakefaction.net/one/
photo of a burning building
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Multiple county police departments have recently signed 287(g) agreements with ICE, formalizing the cop-to-ICE pipeline in the St. Louis area. Majority of deportations from the area have started via local PDs: www.firstalert4.com/2026/03/18/m...
firstalert4.com
More local police departments signing ICE cooperation agreements
More local police departments are signing agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with financial incentives and expanded enforcement authority among the reasons cited by department l...
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
“AI can never be AI without humans. It is not artificial intelligence. It’s African intelligence... Most of these are dirty jobs and most of these jobs have been done here in Africa.” Kenya's data labelers and content moderators are getting organized: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...
404media.co
'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back
Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
While covert ops and diplomatic sleights to divide enemies & foment sectarianism are still part of Israel's strategy, its approach is that of "a power not acting according to a ‘Western’ rational and humanist approach to politics but a fanatical ideology." newleftreview.org/sidecar/post...
newleftreview.org
Ilan Pappé, On the Warpath — Sidecar
Israel’s regional stategy.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
New @hrl-yalesph.bsky.social report uses remote sensing data to reveal RSF's intentional, systematic attacks aiming to depopulate area around El-Fasher and raze surrounding farmland to starve the city: medicine.yale.edu/lab/khoshnoo...
medicine.yale.edu
Special Report: Rapid Support Forces intentionally targeted agricultural communities to starve people in El-Fasher
A new food security study by HRL corroborates findings that RSF razed at least 41 farming communities in the first months of their siege on El Fasher, North
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Great @truthout.org report on faculty, students, and staff still fighting ongoing repression around Palestine—and their wins: truthout.org/articles/the...
truthout.org
The Fight to Defend Pro-Palestine Speech on Campus Isn’t Over
Targeted for pro-Palestine speech, these academics are refusing to back down.
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Bethany Letiecq @bletiecq.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Why is collective bargaining important to higher ed workers, you ask? Thanks Commonwealth Institute for this breakdown! It sucks to be kicked out of HB 1263 — the collective bargaining bill. There’s so much we could improve thru collective power @aaup.org @aaupmason.bsky.social @aft.org
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
"The Pentagon is sending the largest force of American warships and aircraft to the Middle East in decades." apnews.com/article/us-m...
Map of US airbases, destroyers, aircraft carriers, and combat ships in the region.
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Aaron Clauset @aaronclauset.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity www.axios.com/local/boulde...
axios.com
CU signs $2M OpenAI deal for ChatGPT access
Students and faculty will gain access to ChatGPT Edu starting in March under a three-year deal.
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Coyle "Barricade Material" Boron @fack.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
There's a prison revolt at a concentration camp in Texas in solidarity with Minneapolis:
21 minutes ago

Jazmine Ulloa

Hundreds of immigrant mothers and children detained at a South Texas facility on Saturday protested the killing of a 37-year-old man in Minneapolis, chanting "Let me out" and "Libertad," or "Liberty," according to an immigration lawyer who witnessed the demonstration.

Eric Lee, the lawyer, said he had been waiting for his client in the visitation area of the family detention center in Dilley, Tex., when detention officials abruptly asked him to leave. Once outside, he peered through a chain-link fence and saw hundreds of women and children walking out of the facility and chanting in protest.

Lee said his client later told him on the phone that he and other detainees were outraged over the latest killing in Minneapolis and the detention of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy from Ecuador detained with his father in Minneapolis and sent to Texas.
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Free DC @freedcproject.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
HAPPENING NOW: A massive crowd is gathered in freezing temperatures outside ICE headquarters in DC to demand ICE OUT OF ALL COMMUNITIES NOW.
An office building lit up in the dark with a crowd of people holding signs in front of it.
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Jeff Rueter @jeffrueter.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."
Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti
Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti

“We are heartbroken but also very angry.

Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact.

I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed. 

Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
It strikes me that at least some of the asylum parolees ICE is targeting to detain in northern cities and shipping to Texas detention centers may themselves have been bussed out of Texas border facilities to DC, NYC, and other cities beginning in 2022. Just a horrific cycle of state trafficking.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
In solidarity with the statewide shutdown in Minnesota protesting ICE/CBP, I'm sharing some of the most insightful reads about the powerful, beautiful community response there - these pieces should inspire similar collective action everywhere. please link to others.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
The horrors of ICE/CBP violence are very real - but the scale, organizing, beauty, and bravery of community defense and resistance are too.
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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
If you have read even a single history of fascism, you are already aware that one thing that its rise has in common in every case is an opposition party that refuses to intervene for fear of looking weak or putting the left into power
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Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
They didn’t want a university without cancel culture. They didn’t want to be criticized for their retrograde views so they created a pretend school funding by their rich friends. The only people surprised that this failed were credulous enough to believe the fairy tales these folks told.
politico.com
They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted.
Inside the civil war at the anti-woke university backed by Bari Weiss.
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St. Louis Public Radio @stlpublicradio.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
St. Louis University will now cover the tuition for incoming freshmen whose families earn no more than $60,000 per year and have assets of $50,000 or less.
stlpr.org
St. Louis University offers free tuition to incoming freshmen from low-income households
St. Louis University is offering free tuition for low-income students starting this fall.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
The scale and speed of state censorship of campus really is amazing. More than half of America's college students attend institutions in states that have passed laws censoring higher education since 2021. From @penamerica.bsky.social pen.org/report/ameri...
Map of state higher ed restrictions
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 16/01/2026
cold-blooded murder by the state.
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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Remember when everyone was concerned about DOGE sharing data between government agencies last year? This app for ICE is built on HHS data.
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ohhleary @ohhleary.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
A reminder that Lewiston, Maine was recently on a list of the ten safest cities in the U.S.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
"How does it feel to learn through a genocide? How does one teach on the same campus where student protest is forcibly quelled?" Eager to dive into this experimental dialogue in @amanthro.bsky.social on pedagogy and praxis from the grounds of the Gaza encampments: doi.org/10.1111/aman...
"From Intimacies of Trauma to Intimacies of Struggle: Gaza Solidarity Encampments as Sites of Black Feminist Praxis" by Savannah Shange and Island Gutierrez

How does it feel to learn through a genocide? How does one teach on the same campus where student protest is forcibly quelled? In this experimental dialogue between an undergraduate student and a faculty member, we answer these questions in a Black feminist call and response rooted in an ethics of mutuality and care. Drawing on Gutierrez's lived experience in a Gaza solidarity encampment collective, we conceive of encampments as antibodies—an adaptive response to the settler sickness of war and genocide. Thinking alongside Dána-Ain Davis, Christina Sharpe, and Tiffany Lethabo King, we argue that intimate pedagogical and political engagement across diasporas produces a necessary pathway to praxis that can disrupt the normativity of both anti-Blackness and Zionism.
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Bill Corbett @billcorbett.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
It’s great that 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is coming right out swinging. Not having a second of this bullshit! I think coddled hacks like Bari Weiss have no idea what to do with righteous fury like this except, if anything, somehow play victim. Let’s see!
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Mary Anne Franks @maryannefranks.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
CECOT segment correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi: Bari Weiss giving the government a "kill switch" for stories they don't like transforms 60 Minutes from an "investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state." www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
washingtonpost.com
‘60 Minutes’ correspondent says CBS’s Bari Weiss abruptly pulled segment on Trump deportations
CBS News postponed a ‘60 Minutes’ segment about El Salvador’s CECOT prison one day before it was set to air because the Trump administration declined to participate.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
"As of December 19, the known death toll from 28 lethal U.S. strikes on civilian vessels [in the Caribbean] is 104." www.wola.org/analysis/fac...
wola.org
Facts to Inform the Debate about the U.S. Government’s Anti-Drug Offensive in the Americas - WOLA
Fact sheet: U.S. military anti-drug strikes have killed at least 104 civilians in the Caribbean. Examines the operations' legal basis, justifications, and effectiveness.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
look, evil aside: his rhetorical strategies seem to hinge on hoping no one compares numbers at the gas station, confuses "TrumpRx.gov" with affordable coverage of their dialysis, or has ever been to Minnesota. if you ask me Trump is moving like a cooked guy moves
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Horror of horrors, this is absolute evil.
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Stacy Mitchell @stacyfmitchell.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
1. Amazon has become a major force in how cities, counties & schools buy basic supplies. Our new report finds Amazon is using opaque pricing algorithms to drive up costs and eliminate transparency—while harming competition by pushing out better-performing independent suppliers.
ilsr.org
Turning Public Money into Amazon’s Profits | Independent Business
Amazon has quietly captured a growing share of government purchasing. This major report explains how, and what to do about it.
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Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
it's not lowering the bar when you do it for men, it's actually a really important step toward addressing the male loneliness crisis
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Powerful piece about WashU international student frustrations with the university's lack of support in a time of immense uncertainty and potential danger: www.studlife.com/news/2025/12...
studlife.com
Graduate students call on WashU to expand support for immigrant students - Student Life
In the fall of 2024, Qimeng Duan, a third-year anthropology Ph.D. student, unknowingly reversed into a gate at an autoshop. As an international student, Duan was unfamiliar with U.S. reporting require...
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
A new pattern has emerged out of the repression of pro-Palestinian protests: "the Zionist provocateur spoiling for a fight, the police gunning for pro-Palestine students, a protester taken to the ER, and the university adopting wholesale the narrative spun by pro-Israel actors."
Jewish Currents article, "Portrait of a Campus in Crisis"

UCLA capitulated to its own hardline pro-Israel activists long before Trump came calling. As a result, it's students hand repeatedly become targets of vigilante and police violence
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
For Black Studies, Critical University Studies folks: Our AFAS Dept is looking for a postdoc (1 yr, maybe 2) as part of a seminar on “Black Studies, Academic Freedom, and the Future of the American University.” Due Feb 1, details here: apply.interfolio.com/177073
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Some good news that shows faculty can still shape the university when they move and act together. This move would have consolidated AFAS, WGSS, Global Studies, American Studies, Jewish Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, and Education
ArtSci dissolves task force considering departmental reorganization after resignation of task force members
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victoria scott @victoriascott.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
It’s kind of wild that after seven million people were in the streets protesting, the president posted a hallucinated video of himself wearing a crown and shitting on Americans and then proceeded to start demolishing parts of the White House
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
new zine circulating campus just hours after the Chancellor stated that WashU is engaged in "dialogue" with Trump admin about future of higher ed
Trump's Compact for higher education. What it is and why you should resist itZine pages explaining that the Compact is "the Trump White House's attempt to reshape higher ed by offering preferential treatment to universities that agree with government demands." The demands include banning DEI in hiring and admissions, viewpoint diversity, cutting programs critical of conservative ideas, bans of disruptive protest, defining gender based on biology, and limiting international student admissions.

No colleges have agreed to the Compact. MIT, Brown, Penn, USC, UVA, Dartmouth have publicly rejected it. WashU was invited to join the Compact on Friday.On Monday, Oct 20, WashU Chancellor Andrew Martin wrote to the university community stating that WashU had agreed to join conversations about higher education because "it is important to have a seat at the table."

The table is rigged. The Trump admin is attempting to dismantle higher education and purge universities of critical thought, challenging analysis, and dissenting voices. The Trump admin is attempting to exert federal control over university policy, personnel decisions, and curricula, violating every tenet of academic freedom and free inquiry.

Chancellor Martin wants to engage in dialog - it's not dialog if the terms are already set. The Compact is clear about interfering in higher education. 

We refuse any engagement with an administration that seeks to undermine higher education. We must reject Trump's vision for academia.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
Gross.
White House Meets With New Colleges About ‘Compact’ After Rejections
Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Kansas and Arizona State are invited to weigh in after MIT, others turn down proposal
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MisterJayEm @misterjayem.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
“They literally ushered us into the street to protest and immediately after started beating the shit out of us.”
blockclubchicago.org
State Police Led Broadview Protesters Into Street And Attacked Them, Demonstrators Say
Protesters have said state and local police officers have attacked them and tried to stifle their attempts to speak and protest freely outside the Broadview ICE facility. Police accused protesters of ...
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
"We now have armed soldiers from the state of Texas eagerly volunteered by their governor to impose the president’s will on the citizens of Illinois. I don’t want to be alarmist, but this is an emergency." www.thebulwark.com/p/emergency-...
thebulwark.com
Emergency Triad: The Chicago Rubicon and What Comes Next
We aren’t at the worst-case scenario yet. But if you squint, you can see it looming out there, just over the horizon.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 02/10/2025
Shit just comes coming
WashU Med labeled ‘DEI Indoctrination Training Camp,’ DOJ investigation requested | On Sept. 15, 2025, America First Legal (AFL) filed a complaint against WashU School of Medicine for its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices, asking the Department of Justice to issue an investigation into the medical school’s alleged “illegal DEI practices.”
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
"There is no doubt that the Trump administration has wielded Title VI with the goals of discrediting institutions of higher education, undermining academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and unmooring the Civil Rights Act from its foundational commitments to addressing structures...
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Another must-read response to Ezra Klein's "Charlie Kirk did politics the right way" argument, this from @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social in @bostonreview.bsky.social on political correctness, stigma, and shame as fundamental to living together.
The challenge for Klein and his fellow travelers is to specify what sort of ground rules could make life livable and social situations manageable for such a wide array of people whose values, commitments, and interests differ so sharply—that is, on terms other than various sorts of segregation or the most naked forms of domination and subjugation—if not precisely “social shame and cultural pressure,” now contemptuously referred to as “political correctness” or “wokeness.” We might more accurately call it exactly the “civility” that centrists like Klein otherwise pretend to champion, even while they seek to hollow out even this meager social protection of its efficacy. These codes of neighborliness or of common decency are, in other words, the bare minimum for us to exist peacefully as profoundly different people who nevertheless share the same time and place.

Common decency, then, stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
"Common decency stigmatizes people that do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply." me on why Ezra Klein should be ashamed / why shame is Good Actually www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...
bostonreview.net
How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review
Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.
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Scott Ross, animate candy corn @skort.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Oh nothing to see here, just a Missouri U.S. Senator spouting white and Christian nationalist rhetoric about how America is only for descendants of "Western" "European" "settlers" and non-white immigrants are not American: www.dailysignal.com/2025/09/02/s...
They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us.

America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.

If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true.

America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real—unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind.
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