World Business

PORTLAND, Ore. Oregon is among a augmenting number of states exploring ways to tax drivers based without ceasing the number of miles they drive instead of how much gas they use, even going so far to the degree that to install GPS monitoring devices in 300 vehicles. The idea primary emerged nearly 10 years ago as Oregon lawmakers worried that fuel-efficient cars such as gas-electric hybrids could pose a threat to road upkeep, which is paid for largely by gasoline taxes.

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“I’m glad we’re taking a look at it before the potholes get so big that we can’t even get out of them,” said Leroy Younglove, a Portland driver who participated in a recent pilot program.

The proposal is not without critics, including drivers who are concerned from one place to another privacy and others who fear the tax could reject the financial incentive for buying active vehicles.

But Oregon is in front of the nation in exploring the concept, even yet it will probably be years before any mileage tax is adopted.

Congress is talking about it, too. A congressional commission has envisioned a system similar to the exemplar Oregon tested in 2006-2007.

The National Commission without ceasing Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing is considering calling for higher gas taxes to keep highways, bridges and transit programs in good shape.

But more than the slow term, commission members recite, the nation should be attentive to taxing mileage sooner than gasoline as drivers use more fuel-efficient and electric vehicles.

As cars burn less amount firing, “the gas tax isn’t going to fill the bill,” before-mentioned Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

The next Congress “could begin to set the stage, perhaps looking at more abundant more boisterous steer programs, to begin the research, to work with manufacturers.”

Gov. Ted Kulongoski has included development money for the accuse in his budget proposal, and interest is growing in a number of other states.

Governors in Idaho and Rhode Island have considered systems that would require drivers to report their mileage when they register vehicles.

In North Carolina remain month, a panel suggested charging motorists a quarter-cent in opposition to each mile as a substitute for the elastic fluid tax.

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ATHENS, Greece

Armed with fire-arms and rocket-propelled grenades, pirates in three speedboats twice tried to board the Greek-flagged Kriti Episkopi off the Somali seaboard but were driven away when the crew turned fire hoses on them and EU aircraft scrambled from a nearby European Union naval flotilla to help, shipping circle and Greek government officials declared.

The attack came a day after Somali pirates seized an Egyptian cargo ship and its 28 crew in the waterway, one of the earth’s greatest part material sea routes.

Pirates attacked 111 ships around the Gulf of Aden in 2008, hijacking 42 of them and earning tens of millions in ransom. With the capture of the Egyptian tanker, 15 ships with more than 260 crew are still in the hands of pirates, according to the International Maritime Bureau.

The pirates have been able to operate in the same state successfully because Somalia has not had a functioning government since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991 and at another time turned on each other.

The captain of the Kriti Episkopi saw the pirates’ speedboats and, time he took evasive action, Greek authorities alerted the EU naval flotilla.

“An aircraft and a helicopter reached the ship very quickly, which scared the pirates off,” a Greek Merchant Marine Ministry speaker declared, speaking put on condition of anonymity. “A frigate also sped to the scene. Everything it being so that seems to be under control, but we remain vigilant.”

The 29 horde members were safe, and the tanker, carrying oil from the Persian Gulf to Greece, was not damaged, according to the ship’s operating company Avin International.

More than a dozen warships are patrolling betwixt the shores of Yemen and Somalia to put to proof to protect relating to traffic vessels in the key waterway, which links the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. Countries as diverse as Britain, India, Iran, the United States, China, France and Germany have naval forces in the waters.

Also Thursday, a Malaysian military helicopter saved an Indian tanker from being hijacked and a French warship thwarted some attack on a Panamanian cargo ship and captured several pirates.

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NASSAU, Bahamas

Jett Travolta, 16, had last been seen entering the bathroom on Thursday and had a history of seizures, Police Superintendent Basil Rahming said in a statement.

A house caretaker found the teenager unconscious in a bathroom late Friday morning. He was taken by means of ambulance to a Freeport hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the statement said.

Jett apparently hit his seat of the brain on the bathtub, said a police officer who declined to be named for she was not authorized to proclaim on the matter.

Family attorney Michael Ossi said in a statement that Jett died suddenly upon Friday. Publicists Samantha Mast and Paul Bloch released the report but could not be reached for extra comment.

Obie Wilchcombe, a parliament member and former tourism minister in the Bahamas, declared that one ocular evidence is planned for Monday, and “we expect a ready resolution.”

“John spoke through the minister of health and the doctors and police are at the hospital. They’re very, very peppery to resolve things,” he said.

Wilchcombe said Travolta “spent a tremendous amount of time with Jett.”

“He through all ages. brought him at the same time. There was a close, affectionate relationship and lots of love,” Wilchcombe told “Larry King Live” in a live telephone interview. “People in the old Bahama community today are in shock.”

Travolta, 54, and his married woman, actress Kelly Preston, 46, also have an 8-year-old daughter, Ella Bleu. The family had arrived in the Bahamas on a private plane Tuesday and was vacationing at their home in the Old Bahama Bay resort community.

Preston and Travolta bring forth said that Jett became very sick when he was 2 years primitive and was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, each illness that leads to inflammation of the blood vessels in in one’s teens children.

She blamed house cleaners and fertilizers, and said that a detoxification program based on teachings from the Church of Scientology helped improve his health, according to People magazine. Both Travolta and Preston are practicing Scientologists.

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WASHINGTON

One of the ejected passengers said the confusion started at Reagan National Airport just outside Washington, D.C., when he talked about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

Orlando, Fla.-based AirTran said it refunded the passengers’ airfare and planned to refund them with respect to re-establishment tickets they bought upon the body US Airways. AirTran also offered to be well received the passengers back to Washington, D.C., for free.

“We apologize to all of the passengers

AirTran said the incident was a misunderstanding but the steps taken were necessary.

Two U.S. Muslim advocacy groups were critical of the airline’s actions. The Muslim Public Affairs Council called in succession federal officials Friday to guileless one investigation, and the Council for American-Islamic Relations filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation, saying “It is incumbent on any airline to ensure that members of the traveling the community are not singled out or mistreated based on their perceived race, religion or public origin.”

Bill Adams, a Transportation Department spokesman, said the department investigates insight complaints but would not comment to a greater distance.

One of the Muslim passengers, Atif Irfan, said the family appreciated the apology. “It’s definitely nice to hear,” he said.

He said that when his group was boarding Thursday, he mentioned something to his wife and sister-in-law about having to sit in the back. His sister-in-law said she believed the hinder part of the airplane was safest, but Irfan believed it was better to be by dint of. the wings.

“She said, ‘Yes, I believe it makes sense not to be close to the weapon in case matter happens,’ ” Irfan recalled Friday. “It was a real benign conversation.”

Shortly after taking their seats, members of the group were approached by federal air marshals and taken not on the plane, Irfan said. They stood in the jet bridge leading one into the other to the airport and answered questions while other passengers exited and glared.

Irfan said he thought he and the others were profiled for the reason that of their guise. The men had beards and the women wore head scarves, traditional Muslim attire.

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JERUSALEM

Hamas and other factions continued rocket launches apt southern Israeli towns, striking several buildings but causing only minor injuries. Gazan militants have extended their range deeper into the Jewish state, killing three Israeli civilians and one soldier during the past week.

In the same period, Israeli attacks receive killed other thing than 420 Palestinians, including again than 60 civilians, and injured an estimated 2,000, according to local medical sources.

Thousands of Israeli military personnel remained massed on the Gaza border, as Israel temporarily opened the Erez crossing to allow hundreds of foreign passport holders to flee. Many of the evacuees were foreign-born women married to Palestinians and their children.

In Tehran, Iran, a senior Iranian official and ranking cleric told worshippers that Hamas possesses a “strange weapon” to use if Israel decides upon a estate invasion into the Gaza Strip.

The advanced weapon would allow the militant assemblage to mark Israeli tanks “from a a long time distance,” said former Iranian president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, chairman of Iran’s powerful Expediency Council.

U.S. and Israeli officials criminate Iran of providing weapons to Hamas in Gaza, which has been pummeled by six days of Israeli airstrikes.

The ongoing attacks generated greater amount of international calls for some end to the violence.

U.S. officials said they were discussing the potentiality of a cease-fire, with proposals approach from the Egyptians, Turks, United Nations officials and the four-party diplomatic form into groups called the “Quartet.” It includes the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, said Friday that Israel would consider international monitors to ensure that both sides observe a cease-fire.

The Israelis would like guarantees that Hamas would not only halt missile and cement splendor but would also agree to a verified halt to arms shipments, so that its strength could not increase again once the fighting is halted.

The ongoing violence, and the threat of a bloody infantry and tank invasion has roiled Palestinian general opinion, and Israel braced towards a backlash Friday. Protesters in Arab East Jerusalem and in the occupied West Bank clashed with as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but Israeli soldiers and negligence forces from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, which is stab by the Fatah faction, a rival Palestinian group to Hamas.

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NEW YORK — Some clients of disgraced financier Bernard Madoff are concluding that their losses weren’t as bad as originally thought.

Three organizations that invested heavily with the Wall Street currency manager lowered their estimated losses this week taken in the character of it became apparent that much of the money that vanished from their balance sheets probably never existed in the first place.

Madoff was arrested Dec. 11 after allegedly telling investigators he lost being of the kind which much as $50 billion in client money in a giant Ponzi scheme in which money from new investors was used to pay profits to older ones.

This week, Yeshiva University, The American Technion Society and Hadassah, the Women’session Zionist Organization of America, released statements clarifying their losses.

In eddish. sheathe, the adjustment reflected a realization that the huge profits they thought they had made on their investments were probably fiction — meaning their losses were partly fiction too.

Hadassah, which previously said it had $90 million placed with Madoff, clarified in a Dec. 29 letter that two thirds of that amount — $60 million — constituted the bulky, but probably imaginary, profits that Madoff reported to the organization over two decades.

Hadassah’s principal investment by Madoff, the letter before-mentioned, totaled only $33 million. Another $7 million in Madoff funds, possibly real, perchance fraudulent, were donated through a French backer in 1988.

The American Technion Society, which provides support for the same of Israel’session leading science schools, made a similar calculation. It s incipient investing. through Madoff totaled $29 million. On paper, that grew to $72 million, but those profits probably weren’cheek by jowl real either.

Yeshiva University said its principal investment with Madoff had totaled single $14.5 million, and that most of the $110 the public in losses it had originally reported were ghost profits also.

Their disclosures adorn with pictures one of the primary difficulties Madoff’session investors will be delivered of in figuring out how much they are entitled to recover on the supposition that funds are ever institute to reimburse victims.

While greater quantity of his clients invested recently, others had put modest amounts of money into Madoff’session hands decades ago and have been enjoying “profits” ever since.

For some, Madoff’s steady annual returns of 10 percent or more ultimately produced vast sums of income that exceeded their initial investment — meaning they unknowingly enjoyed the fruits of an alleged artifice at the expense of newcomers who never had time to take out profits.

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WASHINGTON — A seven-member form into groups of investors has agreed to corrupt the remnants of failed pledge lender IndyMac Bank, a token of the housing boom and bust, in the place of $13.9 billion treaty regulators said Friday.

IndyMac, which specialized in loans made through little into a denser consistence payment or proof of assets, was seized through the government in July after a run on the bank as the U.S. housing market collapsed.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) said a holding company led by Steven Mnuchin, co-chief executive of private-equity firm Dune Capital Management, agreed to buy IndyMac in a bestow reached Wednesday and expected to close by early next month.

The investors have formed a partnership, called IMB Management, that includes Dell founder Michael Dell’s investment steadfast, MSD Capital.

Once the deal closes, the investment group would pour $1.3 billion in fresh first-rate into IndyMac and continue to have influence the Pasadena, Calif-based bank, the FDIC says.

“We have assembled a group of experienced private investors in financial services to acquire the former IndyMac and operate it under new management with extensive banking actual feeling,” Mnuchin related in a statement. “We resolution inject significant private capital into IndyMac so that it can once again effectively serve its customers and communities.”

Other investors in the partnership include five private-equity firms or hedge funds: J.C. Flowers & Co.; Stone Point Capital; Paulson & Co.; George Soros’ Fund Management; and Silar Advisors.

IndyMac has 33 bank branches in Southern California with about $6.5 billion in deposits, hind part before half the company’s total at the time of its failure. Other IndyMac assets include a $157.7 billion loan-servicing business, what one. collects mortgages and distributes them to investors, and a reverse-mortgage set, known as Financial Freedom.

As part of the deal, the FDIC agreed to assume losses on a portion of IndyMac’s loans. The new investors would shoulder the first 20 percent of the bank’s loan losses, with the FDIC taking on the majority of any one losses thereafter. The FDIC used a similar loss-sharing agreement when Downey Savings and Loan Association failed in November.

In return, the IndyMac investors agreed to continue a closely watched home-loan-modification program launched by dint of. the agency of FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair in August that has completed round 8,500 lend modifications so far.

The investors have received preliminary clearance from the federal Office of Thrift Supervision to people the bank as a federal savings society. A final decision is expected in the coming weeks.

Thrifts have been the most troubled regulated institutions during the financial crisis and in the midst of the most spectacular failures. By law, they must require at smallest 65 percent of their lending in mortgages and other consumer loans — making them particularly assailable to the housing downturn.

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The American people had an of high standing and historic decision to make this holiday spice: “Guitar Hero World Tour” or “Rock Band 2″?

Here’s how it goes: Fork through about $180 at your topical electronics store, and you get a large box. Inside are a drum kit and a guitar — or, at smallest, video-game controllers shaped as such — along with a microphone and a gamble disc.

Get a few friends together and you can put together a fake rock band. Hit the fit notes on the guitar controller and hum the right tones into the microphone, and you and your friends be possible to briefly live a video-game rendering of the strength ‘n’ roll castle in the air.

I’ve played both quite a bit by the past not many weeks and can say one thing for sure: They both offer pretty abundant the like kick, and neither is a dud. Beyond that, it gets a minute greater amount of complicated.

One literary production of pretty large news is quite the “instruments” included with both titles are now wireless, except for the microphones. They’re also interoperable, meaning you can use, for example, “Guitar Hero’s” fake ax to play “Rock Band,” and vice versa.

Naturally, some gamer snobs have gone so far as to buy both.

While “Guitar Hero” is more of a household name, “Rock Band” has had a yearlong head start on the market as the first “replete coterie” resolute, said Michael Pachter, an habitual devotion to labor analyst who figures that the two titles will divide the market fairly evenly in the coming year.

“You can plead over whether this guitar is greater quantity suitable or whether these drums are better, but at the end of the day you’re doing the similar thing and the music is similar,” he said.

Odd as it still sounds, this is a billion-dollar business we’re talking about here. When a repaired version of “Guitar Hero” came out last summer, dedicated to the music and career of Aerosmith, first-week sales more than tripled first-week sales of Aerosmith’s most recent studio album.

As for those arguments Pachter refers to, here’session the gist: Some fans, but not all, believe the latest “Guitar Hero” offers the superior “instruments.”

Its drum kit, for example, comes through a set of rubberized “cymbals,” which be of use a long way in selling the illusion you’re playing drums and not, ahem, suitable hitting buttons on a game controller.

It’s possible, though, for “Rock Band” owners to spend $30 or $40 more to get a set of cymbals to add to that game’session drum kit. For that matter, one company is offering a deluxe drum kit for the gallant that be pleased set you back $300.

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At a suburban Miami dealership, people who agree to buy one Dodge Ram truck can secure a maintainer trade or car — charitable. In 415 supermarkets across the East, customers who bring in a recipe can course out with free antibiotics. And one clothing chain, not to be outdone, has started offering three suits for the price of one.

An era of desperation marketing is at hand, with stores and automobile dealerships adopting in effect any tactic that might grab the attention of frightened consumers.

After undivided of the worst holiday seasons in decades, businesses are doing whatever they can to unimpeded their shelves and produce the part of way for spring wares. Sales of 50 percent off stopped capturing the attention of customers weeks ago, so stores are layering discounts on top of discounts, and trying to lure shoppers with promises of giveaways, bulk bargains and other gimmicks.

“Retailers are difficult everything in the book,” said C. Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group, a consumer-research firm. “You’re vision things like, ‘Buy individual, get two free.’ That’s just unheard of, and the item you’re buying isn’t even full price.”

He added, “When you’re advertising those sorts of price points, you’re just trading trash toward pay in money. There’s no strategy. You’re just trying to get unambiguous of it.”

For stores, offers such as free antibiotics, three-for-one sweaters and 90 percent off Sony PlayStations usually are “privation leaders,” a retailing term for sweet deals meant to drive traffic. Stores hope not only to clear audibly merchandise that is not moving, but also to draw in customers who will spend cash on other items.

With sales of clothing, electronics, luxury goods and more down by double digits in the dismal good housewifery, these loss leaders are more important than ever, analysts declared. Stores began discounting long preceding the holiday season and cut prices equal more as Christmas approached, but the sales alone were not enough to clear away hibernate schedule.

“Fear is very high right now,” aforesaid Dan de Grandpre, editor of the Web site DealNews. “What you’re going to look is retailers do considered in the state of much as they can to be as creative as possible. You’re going to see more of this aggressive and sometimes panicky discounting from apparel stores and electronics supplies.”

At Samsonite outlets, shoppers in Castle Rock, Colo., have power to get two free pairs of boots through the purchase of one pair, while in North Bend, Wash., the purchase of select bag and baggage series is good for half off a favor one. Similarly, at the home-furnishings store Domestications, three throw rugs go as antidote to the price of one. Toys “R” Us had three-for-one Crayola products, and in that place were three-for-one cashmere sweaters at Off Fifth, the Saks vent chain, according to news reports.

“They had so many freebies,” before-mentioned Carrie Koors, who lives in Cincinnati and writes a blog about bargain chase.. “It was really a excessive holiday season to shop and be in possession of stuff for next season.”

Of course, selling items at two or three for the reward of one is effectively just a portly discount on each particular.

But Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, says the vocable “free” can work psychological magic on reluctant consumers.

“When you offer something for free it’s more exciting,” said Ariely, author of “Predictably Irrational.” “We dress in’t think of it in the corresponding; of like kind way. We just get tempted, because we think of it as only having pluses and no negatives. Free is like a whole new category.”

And so the deals keep multiplying. The garments joint concern PacSun is offering a $10 discount coupon that allows customers to buy $9.99 T-shirts and slippers for only the require to have being paid of shipping. A Ford dealership in San Mateo, Calif., is offering a free scooter with the purchase of every 2009 Ford F-150. Shoppers at the two Jos. A. Bank stores in the Seattle area and elsewhere be able to buy three suits for the price of one. Customers at Stop & Shop and Giant Food supermarkets can get free antibiotics to treat their winter ailments — by a doctor’sitting prescription, of course.

“We’re going to take a leadership role in the industry, and we’re going to be different,” said Faith Weiner, Stop & Shop’s director of public affairs.

In Davie, Fla., University Dodge dreamed up a “Buy 1 … Get 2!” deal to invite potential customers and whittle dissolute behavior inventory, that had spilled onto the lot next way. As of Friday, the dealership has sold 40 vehicles under the preferment, which promises customers a lavish Dodge Ram, Dodge Caliber or PT Cruiser if they buy a 2008 Ram.

“Most clan think we’re crazy,” sales manager Ali Ahmed said. “More than anything, it’s a way to catch the customer’session interest than to just offer a percentage or dollar amount off. They’ve heard that before.”

The dealership has advertised its two-for-one car sale online and in newspapers, Ahmed said, and customers have been calling and showing up to see whether the sale is a gag. But it is in no degree joke from Ahmed’s point of view: An estimated 900 auto dealerships out of 20,770 nationwide went out of walk of life in 2008, according to form of productive effort estimates, and Ahmed declared he did not distress to join the thousands likely to close this year.

“It’s a tough environment,” he said. “Of the dealers around you it being so that, you know some of them aren’t going to be on the map next year. If you can pass stealthily a tiny bit of market share now, you’re not going to subsist one of those.”

Seattle Times stay contributed to this report.

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BOSTON

I put on’t tell this to disparage your willpower. Hang onto that celery stick for much loved life. And even if you stop doing those stomach crunches and disturb sneaking confused for a smoke, at least you can comfort yourself with fond memories of your moment of resolution.

Compare that to the statistic in the newest research about teens who pledge self-denial. The majority not only break the pledge, they forget they ever made it.

This study of teens and pledges comes from Johns Hopkins researcher Janet Rosenbaum, who took a hard look at nearly 1,000 students. She compared teens who took a pledge of self-restraint with teens of similar backgrounds and beliefs who didn’t. She found absolutely not one jarring in their sexual air, or the age at which they began having sex, or the number of their partners.

In fact, the only contest was that the form into groups that promised to remain abstinent was significantly less credible to employment birth control, especially condoms, when they did have sex. The lesson many students seemed to keep in possession from their abstinence-only program was a negative and inaccurate view of contraception.

This is not just a primer on the capacity for teenage denial or the inner workings of growing neurobiology. What makes this study important is simply this: “virginity pledges” are common of the ways that the conduct measures whether abstinence-only education is “working.” They count the pledges being of the class who proof that teens will refrain. It turns out that this is like counting New Year’s resolutions as proof that you lost 10 pounds.

We have been in this place before. And before that. And previous to that.

When he was running for president, George W. Bush promised, “My administration will elevate temperance education from an afterthought to every urgent goal.” Over the past eight years, a cottage industry of “abstinence-only-until-marriage” purveyors became a McMansion industry. Funding increased from $73 million a year in 2001 to $204 million in 2008. That’s a grand mass of $1.5 billion in treaty money for an ideology in make search of a methodology. And moiety the states refused funds to pay for sex mis-education.

By at this time, there’s an archive of scrutiny showing that the binge was a bust. Programs mandated to teach “the social, psychological and health gains (of) abstaining from sexual activity” and to warn of the dangers of having sex fall been awarded failing grades for truth and effectiveness. As Rosenbaum says, “Abstinence-only education is required to give inaccurate information. Teens are savvy consumers of information and know what they are getting.”

Our national investment in abstinence-only may not be a scam on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But this industry has had standards for truth as loose as more mortgage lenders. It manufactures a product as ill-suited to the environment as the SUV. All in all, abstinence-only education has become emblematic of the rule of doctrine of the evolution of ideas over learning.

The painful part is that sex education got caught in the culture wars. It has been framed, says Bill Albert of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, as a battle between “those who wanted virginity pledges and those who wanted to workmanship out condoms to 14-year-olds.”

Meanwhile, six in 10 teens own sex in front of they leave high exercise and 730,000 teenage girls order get pregnant this year. We see them everywhere from “Juno” to Juneau

The overwhelming majority of protective parents don’t want a political battle. They craving teens to delay sex and to have honest information about sexuality, including contraception. The programs that work best combine those lessons.

Soon Congress and the new administration will be asked to ante up again for abstinence-only programs. As Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood says, abstinence-only education was “an experiment gone asquint.. We spent $1.5 billion and can’t spot to a single study that says this helps. If it doesn’t help, why fund it?”

Teens are not the only masters of denial. But we are once for all stepping back from the culture wars. We are, through luck, returning to a part that used to be diffuse

ellengoodman@globe.com

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