The Bureau Podcast

Sam Cooper

Investigative Journalism. Anti-Corruption. Counter-Disinformation. Whistleblowers. Sunlight. Connecting the dots on The Bureau's big stories with Sam Cooper and guests. www.thebureau.news

  1. 'Moral Hazard on Steroids': The Investor Who Called the Big Short Says Carney's Condo Bailout Is Worse Than 2008 Subprime Fiasco

    2d ago

    'Moral Hazard on Steroids': The Investor Who Called the Big Short Says Carney's Condo Bailout Is Worse Than 2008 Subprime Fiasco

    VANCOUVER — Marc Cohodes built his name and his fortune betting against frauds, from small public companies to the American subprime-mortgage machine that collapsed in 2008. This week, he returned to The Bureau with a blunt verdict on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plan to spend up to $3.2 billion absorbing Vancouver’s unsold condominiums: he has seen this movie before, and this version is worse. “This Carney buying back Vancouver condos is just really rich,” Cohodes said, “especially on the backdrop of him cutting a deal with China.” What makes it worse than 2008, Cohodes says, is not the size of the losses but the refusal to let them happen at all. In the United States, Cohodes notes, the government let housing fall — “everything went down 40 to 50 percent” — and only then stepped in to keep the banks and brokerages from failing, once the leveraged players had taken their hits. Painful, but the market cleared and prices found a level. Canada, he argues, is doing the opposite: propping up prices before anyone is allowed to lose. “Here, the Canadian government won’t even let the prices clear,” he said. The result, in his words, is “a moral hazard on steroids, which encourages these developers then to go and do this again, and do it again on probably a greater scale.” Moral hazard is the concept Carney, a former central banker, knows intimately, and Cohodes defines it the way a short-seller does: “people doing bad things and taking exceptional risk to benefit themselves. And the risk eventually gets subsidized by the federal government, aka the taxpayer.” Reward the people who built and bought at unsustainable prices, he argues, and you have taught the next cohort that the downside is socialized. His prescription is the mirror image of the bailout, and it is the same argument he has made for more than a decade. Let the towers sell for what the market will bear — but let that “market” consist of Canadian income earners and taxpayers, not foreign investors propped up by underground-banking flows. That is what my reporting on Chinese mortgage fraud and underground banking in Toronto, alongside the laundering apparatus mapped by British Columbia’s Cullen Commission, has exposed. The homes must sell to real home buyers, even at a brutal discount, Cohodes said, and the government must then protect the financial system rather than the developers. “If you’re asking a million three for these,” he said, “we don’t care if you sell them for half a million bucks. As long as law-abiding Canadians buy these, we don’t care.” The banks would take write-downs; some builders would go under; and Canadians shut out of the market would finally buy at prices tied to local incomes. “The winners are the people who buy at a low price,” he said. “The losers are the people who borrowed money and built things at a ridiculously high price.” Instead, he argues, Ottawa is subsidizing the losers and penalizing the people it claims to help. This is where Cohodes’s diagnosis converges with the reporting underlying The Bureau’s analysis of the bailout — and where his language runs ahead of it. I frame it in the podcast discussion like this: “I’m not saying any one developer or even casino owner is knowingly laundering money. I’m saying the structure of the money and the market is Chinese capital flight.” That structural claim is the one The Bureau has documented — through leaked bank files showing fabricated foreign-income mortgages, through a federal financial-intelligence study of roughly 48,000 diaspora transactions, and through the casino-and-real-estate apparatus mapped by British Columbia’s Cullen Commission. What gives the conversation its political edge is that the cast has not changed. The man Carney appointed as federal housing minister, Gregor Robertson, presided as Vancouver’s mayor during a period in which home prices doubled, and once dismissed the first study to flag the inflow of mainland-Chinese mortgage capital as racially divisive. Cohodes’s words for Robertson and for Premier David Eby are harsh. But the narrower point lands: the figures who waved away the warnings a decade ago are the ones now writing the cheque. Cohodes situates the bailout within a darker reading of the whole economy. He describes a country dangerously leveraged to real estate, with a banking regulator he considers compromised and a currency he expects to weaken sharply — to the point that he speculates Carney could one day resort to capital controls. He calls the country “Arctic Mexico,” a deliberate provocation meant to argue that Canada has become a haven where financial crime, narcotics, and laundered capital intersect with too little consequence. And he is scathing about why none of this is louder. The story, he notes, has barely registered in the national press. “This BC story hasn’t even been picked up in the mainstream media,” he said, tracing the silence to the federal subsidies that flow to large outlets — money he characterizes, in his trademark rhetorical style, as buying a comfortable narrative. Editor's note: The Prime Minister's Office frames the June 18 announcement as a new "Canada–British Columbia Partnership on Condo Conversion," delivered through Build Canada Homes and BC Housing using what it calls "innovative financing tools." The government states the partnership remains "subject to Treasury Board approvals," and the specific terms — including the price at which units would be acquired and the discount to be achieved — have not been published. The "up to $3.2 billion" cited here is the government's own figure for the announcement's housing stream; because the condo-conversion financing carries no published cost and remains subject to approval, the ultimate public exposure, and the price of condo absorption, are not yet clear. The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

    1h 11m
  2. Carney’s Surveillance Push Targets Canadians, Not Politically Connected Narco Kingpins — and Hands Beijing a Gift

    Jun 17

    Carney’s Surveillance Push Targets Canadians, Not Politically Connected Narco Kingpins — and Hands Beijing a Gift

    OTTAWA — In this episode with Jason James, I break down my criticisms of the raft of public-safety and surveillance laws Mark Carney’s manufactured-majority government is attempting to push through Canada’s Parliament before the summer break — a legislative push now drawing serious concern from privacy experts, media lawyers, civil-liberties advocates, and technology leaders including Shopify founder Tobi Lütke. I also reiterate my analysis that Canada’s failed trade dealings with the Trump Administration are now foreseeably snagged on Carney’s Chinese EV import deal. The Liberal government, I argue, is trying to have its cake and eat it too: securing the deeper trade flows with China that the party’s Beijing trade lobby has pushed for since Pierre Trudeau, while also trying to secure a favorable deal with Washington. I tell Jason, as I have before, that this is a non-starter for Washington. The United States will not be gaslit into accepting Chinese spy platforms and forced-labour trade goods dumped into North American trade — goods and platforms that undermine North American workers and security, among many other threats. But Carney persists in attempting to assuage his business backers, as Trudeau did before him, I tell Jason. Focusing on Bill C-22, the so-called Lawful Access Act, I start with an unavoidable observation: Ottawa is again confusing mass expansion of state power over ordinary Canadians with the targeted legal tools actually needed to confront Canada’s most serious threat actors. As a subject-matter reporter on Chinese Triad networks, Mexican cartel platforms, hostile-state proxies, fentanyl supply chains, underground banking, and foreign-interference structures in Canada, I argue that the problem is not that law enforcement lacks ways to collect more data from forty million Canadians. The problem is that the senior criminal actors driving these networks are already identifiable, already known to investigators, and often uncomfortably well-connected in Canadian political, business, and diaspora power structures. Bill C-22, I argue, does little to fix the real architecture of impunity: disclosure and trial-delay barriers that have helped collapse major organized-crime prosecutions; weak racketeering tools; limited financial-intelligence-to-prosecution pathways; and a failure to build deeper Five Eyes and DEA-style cooperation against the Chinese-Mexican-Canadian criminal ecosystem now running fentanyl, laundering, and encryption platforms through Canadian cities. Instead, the Carney government is advancing a surveillance framework that has alarmed Signal, Apple, Meta, Windscribe, NordVPN, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, U.S. lawmakers, and Canadian tech leaders. Critics warn the bill could damage privacy, journalism, encryption, Canadian tech viability, and even U.S. national security interests. The central argument: Canada does not need a blanket metadata and lawful-access regime aimed at everyone with a phone. It needs precise, aggressive tools to target the few thousand individuals and networks actually threatening national security — the cartel brokers, Triad financiers, hostile-state proxies, fentanyl logisticians, underground bankers, and United Front-linked intermediaries who have turned Canada into a platform for continental narco-finance. Bill C-22 gets the problem backwards. And in doing so, it risks handing Beijing and other hostile actors exactly the structural vulnerabilities they have been waiting to exploit. The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

    1h 3m
  3. “I Wonder How Many People Mark Carney Has Around Him That’s Actually Working for China": Rushan Abbas, author of Unbroken.

    Jun 10

    “I Wonder How Many People Mark Carney Has Around Him That’s Actually Working for China": Rushan Abbas, author of Unbroken.

    OTTAWA — Rushan Abbas, co-founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs and author of the memoir Unbroken, joined The Bureau Podcast from Istanbul, in the middle of a tour that has carried her from the Oslo Freedom Forum to the halls of the U.S. Congress — where, she says, countering Beijing is now one of the only things uniting Republicans and Democrats. In this conversation, Abbas delivers a direct warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney: that Canada is on what she calls a “suicide mission,” repeating a mistake Washington took decades to correct. She argues that Beijing is the hidden hand behind a long roster of the world’s crises — Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran’s proxies, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela — and that its real target is the Western democratic order itself. She explains why she recognized that strategy at once: because she was raised inside it, taught as a child that this would be China’s “century of retaliation” against the West. She recounts why a sitting Liberal member of Parliament sounded, to her ear, exactly like a Chinese official. And she predicts that the scale of foreign infiltration inside Western governments — Canada’s included — is about to be exposed. It’s a hard-hitting and deeply personal conversation about genocide, transnational repression, the price of speaking out, and her determination to “fight harder” against an amoral regime. The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

    42 min
  4. "There's a Whole Machinery that Could Not Want Me To Do What I Have To Do" : Grace Jin Drexel

    May 29

    "There's a Whole Machinery that Could Not Want Me To Do What I Have To Do" : Grace Jin Drexel

    WASHINGTON/OTTAWA — In this episode I connect with Grace Jin Drexel in Washington, as she pleads for the release of her father — and, almost in spite of herself, becomes a target of the same regime that imprisoned him. Her father is Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of Zion Church, once one of the largest underground churches in China. Last October, Chinese authorities arrested him along with dozens of his fellow leaders, in what Grace told the United States Congress was the largest takedown of an independent house church since the Cultural Revolution. His crime, in essence, was refusing to install facial recognition cameras inside his sanctuary — refusing, that is, to let the state mark and monitor those who pray. The most striking part of our conversation was not only the courage of a man now sitting in a prison cell in Guangxi province, his diabetes untreated, but the reach of the machinery arrayed against his family thousands of miles away. Pastor Jin comes from a lineage of great Chinese ministers and authors hardly recognized in much of the West — outside of biblical scholars — including Watchman Nee, the early twentieth-century teacher whose devotional writings shaped evangelical Christianity far beyond China, and who was imprisoned by the Communist authorities in 1952 and died in a labor camp two decades later, never released. Since Grace and her husband began speaking out, her mother near Chicago has had her tires slashed in her own garage and been threatened by callers impersonating American federal agents. Grace says she has been followed here in Washington. Her husband now sleeps with a metal bat beside their bed. There is a clinical term for this — transnational repression — but what it means, in human terms, is that Beijing’s fear of one pastor has crossed an ocean to land on his daughter’s doorstep. And yet Grace speaks without bitterness. She gave me this interview from a hospital, 38 weeks pregnant, balancing her own coming motherhood against the fight to free her father. She tells me her family has decided not to measure their work by results but by faithfulness — that they are, as she puts it, mere individuals, and the rest is the work of God. It is a posture I found genuinely disarming, and it runs through everything she says. We talk about her father’s improbable story: a poor farmer’s son who won a place at one of Beijing’s finest universities, watched the tanks roll into Tiananmen Square in 1989, lost classmates who were never spoken of again, and found Christianity in the rubble of that shattered worldview. We talk about the quiet, explosive growth of Christianity across China, the regime’s deepening crackdown, and why an officially atheist Party that seeks to control everything cannot abide a church that worships a higher authority than the state. This is, in the end, a Father’s Day story. It is about a daughter who has not seen her father in person since 2020, who is about to become a parent herself. I ask her finally, what message does she think her father would share with Americans, Canadians, and listeners across the free world now, if he could reach them on this podcast? Her answer applies not only to Pastor Jin, locked in a jail cell, but the cause of that, and every person now living in China, restricted from speaking freely. “How can you look away from that pain, if that is your own family member?” The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

    36 min
  5. Unexamined Conflicts: The PRC/Carney Brookfield Dealings Research Behind My Washington D.C. Panel Remarks

    May 22

    Unexamined Conflicts: The PRC/Carney Brookfield Dealings Research Behind My Washington D.C. Panel Remarks

    OTTAWA — This podcast discussion from late April was recovered from the cloud by Jason James, and was taped a month before my appearance this week alongside an incredible cast of national experts at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. At that event, Mike Doran — director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at Hudson and a former senior White House national security official — asked me to explain how China seeds its influence through elite financial institutions. My answer, it turned out, foreshadowed a bombshell congressional report released this week by the House Select Committee on China, which found that major Wall Street banks turned a blind eye to underwriting deals with Chinese military-linked and Uyghur slave labor-connected companies. In my answer to Doran, I argued that China invests across Wall Street, Bay Street, and Silicon Valley to forge bonds of obligation and influence with the most powerful, politically connected business figures in the West. Using the example of Mark Carney and Brookfield, I also explained how significant Canadian political leaders — and the business networks that back them — have been granted privileged access to China’s green infrastructure and real estate markets. I told Doran this is, in my view, United Front influence tradecraft. In Carney’s case, it could be said to have created the perception of a conflict of interest: that Carney’s private interests, and those in his orbit, may now benefit from his government’s deepening trade dealings with Beijing — including a significant electric vehicle arrangement that would likely raise the precise concerns now at the center of the committee’s investigation into JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. There are a few minor lags in this tape due to some tech issues we were having, but I think the discussion is one of the deepest ones Jason and I have had, and it was predictive also, of the stance taken this week by the Pentagon, pausing a generational defense board partnership, due to concerns with Canada’s laxity on national security and military spending. On the factors behind Carney’s dealings with China, I tell Jason that plausibly, it is circumstantially proven now, “that Mark Carney is making decisions that benefit himself, and the people that would boost him into the Liberal leadership, above Canada. From national security and economic sovereignty and our relationship with the United States, the moves that Carney is making for the strategic partnership with China, don’t make sense any other way.” “Investigative pressure from the United States, and national security pressure, I think will get stronger,” I continued to tell Jason in April. “My best answer is, I see horribly negligent or corrupt leadership in Ottawa, with regards to decisions they are making between China and the United States.” The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

    1h 4m
  6. Carney, Power Corporation, and Beijing's Quiet Elite Capture Via Trade: Breaking Down Carney’s Canada China Business Council Speech

    May 20

    Carney, Power Corporation, and Beijing's Quiet Elite Capture Via Trade: Breaking Down Carney’s Canada China Business Council Speech

    OTTAWA – This week, I appeared on a panel at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., alongside Mike Doran, Professor Brenda Shaffer, and Zineb Riboua — and one of the central themes that emerged from that conversation also runs through this episode with Jason James. It’s a question I’ve been investigating for years. How does Beijing cultivate the business and political elite networks that shape Canadian foreign policy from the inside out? We’re talking about the Canada China Business Council, the Power Corporation orbit, and the figures now surrounding Prime Minister Mark Carney — people who, through co-investments, trade relationships, and sustained engagement with Beijing, have become influential architects of Ottawa’s China posture. To understand how that influence operates in practice, I walked Jason through a close reading of Carney’s January speech in Beijing — delivered to the Canada China Business Council, in the presence of Olivier Desmarais, grandson of Jean Chrétien and a scion of the Power Corporation dynasty. What Carney said in that room, and who he thanked first, tells you a great deal about where this government’s China policy actually comes from, and the “green” Chinese EV deal that Carney has pushed under his new “strategic” partnership with Beijing. The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

    1h 12m
  7. Before Michael Ma’s Cross-Examination of a China Expert, The Bureau Warned Ottawa That Foreign Interference Witnesses Could Be Targeted

    Apr 8

    Before Michael Ma’s Cross-Examination of a China Expert, The Bureau Warned Ottawa That Foreign Interference Witnesses Could Be Targeted

    OTTAWA — In this discussion with Jason James, I break down the stunning rise of Liberal floor-crosser Michael Ma — a story The Bureau has led Canadian media on with at least 10 investigative reports since mid-December 2025, culminating in our coverage of his suspicious cross-examination of expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston. This is a wide-ranging conversation. I explain the earlier rise of Markham-area Liberal figure Mary Ng, who was selected to run in a by-election after Liberal heavyweight John McCallum left Parliament to become ambassador to China. Ng had quickly risen from an Ontario Liberal government staffer, to a powerful member of Justin Trudeau’s office, to a new member of Parliament in a safe Liberal riding heavily influenced by Chinese diaspora pressure groups, and ultimately to cabinet as trade minister. I tell Jason that Michael Ma’s trajectory — from elected Conservative, to floor-crosser helping give Mark Carney a near-majority, to joining Carney’s inner circle, to appearing to echo Beijing talking points denying Uyghur forced labour — could follow a similarly strategic path that raises questions about possible community pressure group chess moves. None of this has been proven. But I explain why I believe there are mounting signs that deserve serious scrutiny. I also tell Jason that what happened to Margaret McCuaig-Johnston struck me as similar to some of my own experiences in committee hearings. In the interview, I disclose that after a recent request to appear before committee, regarding implementation of the proposed foreign interference registry, I sent a formal letter expressing concern that some questioning directed at witnesses on foreign interference could be inappropriate or reputationally damaging. Because I discuss that letter centrally in the podcast, and because I later received an official response addressing parliamentary privilege and the sub judice convention, I am posting an excerpted copy of my November 2025 letter and part of the government’s response below, for public-interest reasons, so readers can assess it for themselves. As it turned out, I decided last November not to attend the committee hearing on Canada’s proposed foreign interference registry, and I have not since attended Canada’s parliamentary committee hearings as a witness. The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Letter to PROC Chair: November, 2025 To: PROC ChairVia: Committee ClerksRe: Request for assurances regarding protections for witnesses on foreign interference and the registry Dear Chair, I believe I have important evidence and relevant expertise regarding the registry and its implementation. I would like to ask the clerks to please convey this message to you and provide me with an official response. Depending on that response, I would be prepared to accept this request for testimony, provided that my concerns are adequately addressed. I have decided to include the media addresses of the RCMP and CSIS in this official note, as their representatives would also be able to testify to the facts I set out below, including the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) providing me with a judicially authorized notification shortly after my first testimony on foreign interference threats to Canadian politicians. In three prior instances of testimony, I have put myself forward to assist various Committees. In 2023, several days after one of my appearances—regarding PRC threats against Canadian politicians—an RCMP national security unit informed me that I was the subject of a serious safety threat related to my reporting on interference activities of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During some of my appearances, certain elected members have questioned me about civil lawsuits I face as a result of my reporting, even after I explicitly stated that I would not comment on such matters. I am increasingly concerned that certain questions directed at me may be inappropriate, and even designed to discredit my reporting on foreign interference and Canada’s present lack of capacity to counter it. As the Chair is, I am sure, aware, the NSICOP 2024 report found that some members of Parliament may be involved in foreign threat activities, including clandestine or opaque financial activities that could be contrary to the public interest and might even be unlawful—if Canada had modern regulatory structures and laws in place to address and prosecute such activities. Further to my concern about nefarious forces, I would note the publicly reported targeting of former MP Kenny Chiu after he raised the idea of a foreign influence transparency registry. My concern is that the same types of tactics used to discredit or punish elected officials who raise concerns about the PRC and a transparency registry could also be deployed against journalists who testify on these issues. For example, the 2019 NSICOP report documents intelligence indicating that: “A provincial Cabinet Minister responsible for the province’s dealings with PRC officials appeared to favor China’s interests in many of his activities. This individual provided political information to the PRC Consulate and offered to verbally attack other members of the Provincial Assembly who raised Chinese human rights issues.” (See my report: China clandestinely targeting First Nations and Parliament — https://www.thebureau.news/p/china-clandestinely-targeting-first.) [Excerpted for relevance.] After appearing three times before Committees, I continue to perceive that some questions I face are not relevant to the stated purpose of my testimony and may present various personal and professional risks. I therefore believe it is necessary to formally raise this concern with you and request that you consider how individuals called to provide evidence on foreign interference could themselves become targets of such interference through their testimony. Thank you very much for your attention to this matter. I respectfully await a response. Sincerely,Sam Cooper Committee Response The response confirmed: “Witnesses are also protected by parliamentary privilege during parliamentary proceedings and may speak freely without risk of prosecution or civil liability. The subjudice convention limits Members from making reference to matters before the Courts (pp. 632-636). This restriction exists to protect an accused person or another party from prejudice that would result from the public discussion of the judicial matter.” The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

    1h 5m
  8. The Bureau Podcast: Floor-Crosser, Alleged United Front Ties, and a Beijing Propaganda Blitz — Was Michael Ma's Attack on a Canadian China Expert Coordinated?

    Mar 27

    The Bureau Podcast: Floor-Crosser, Alleged United Front Ties, and a Beijing Propaganda Blitz — Was Michael Ma's Attack on a Canadian China Expert Coordinated?

    CALGARY — In this episode, I sit down with Brian Lilley to break down one of the most troubling moments in recent Canadian parliamentary history — Liberal floor-crosser Michael Ma’s attempt to discredit University of Ottawa China expert Margaret McCuaig-Johnston during a Commons industry committee hearing, and what happened in Beijing hours after the cameras stopped rolling. Chinese state-linked media didn’t just celebrate Ma’s performance. Within hours they published a detailed biographical attack on McCuaig-Johnston with a level of institutional knowledge about her career that raises an uncomfortable question: was this a coordinated operation, and does it trace back to Beijing? I also walk Brian through my prior reporting linking Ma to a political organization identified by the Jamestown Foundation as one of 575 United Front Work Department-affiliated groups operating in Canada — a group with a history of targeting Conservative leaders Erin O’Toole and Pierre Poilievre. To be clear: Ma’s connections to that group are not illegal, and they are not proof of wrongdoing. But when you set those connections alongside his stunning assault on one of Canada’s most prominent China scholars — and the speed with which Chinese propaganda apparatus amplified and weaponized that assault — you are left with very significant questions about whether Michael Ma is acting in Canada’s interest. That conversation is next. The Bureau is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thebureau.news/subscribe

    20 min
4.8
out of 5
74 Ratings

About

Investigative Journalism. Anti-Corruption. Counter-Disinformation. Whistleblowers. Sunlight. Connecting the dots on The Bureau's big stories with Sam Cooper and guests. www.thebureau.news

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