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Thursday, February 29, 2024
Stats For Those Like Me Who Used To Enjoy The Bill.
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Disgraceful.
US State Department criticised over failure to designate India a religious freedom violator.
The U.S. State Department's failure to name India to its "Countries of Particular Concern" list despite reports of increasing attacks on Christians in the country list has sparked criticism from Christian groups and a congressionally mandated watchdog. CT.
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Anti-Semitism Awareness.
If you don’t think that antisemitism has become magnified in recent weeks, then you’re definitely not Jewish, says Michael Coren
I was first aware of my Jewish heritage when I was 7 years old. I was at the home of a new friend I’d met in the local park. We were playing innocently when his father came home and began shouting. I only realised later what he’d been saying. “Is he a Jew? Get him out of here.”
I’m actually only half-Jewish, so perhaps I should have asked if I could at least stay until lunchtime…
In fact, I experienced very little antisemitism growing up in Britain and now living in Canada. I’ve three Jewish grandparents but my maternal grandmother was Anglican and I was raised with a limited Jewish identity.
Coren is a Hebrew name. People knew, and generally didn’t care.
I’d long considered hatred of Jewish people a pathology that while never dead, was confined to the largely irrelevant fringe. The reaction to Israel’s campaign in Gaza has changed that, however.
Of course there’s a vital difference between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, and of course the term is sometimes wrongly and politically applied, but if you don’t think that antisemitism has become magnified in recent weeks the one thing I can guarantee is that you’re not Jewish.
The basics first. I’ve lived in Israel, worked with Palestinian Christians in the peace movement, wrote my university thesis on pre-state Zionist terrorism, know the history and politics of the region rather well, and believe in a ceasefire, a two-state solution, justice for Palestinians, and peace for Israel.
TO CALL JESUS A PALESTINIAN IS RACIALLY AND POLITICALLY CRASS
I’d always assumed that most of my fellow Christians agreed with me on all this and I continue to believe that the vast majority still do.
But what of the Christian left?
I’ve a man of the left. Liberal, social democratic, an old-style Labour type of Christian. So, I was a little surprised to be blocked on Twitter by a cofounder of the Red-Letter Christians in the US and a prominent left-wing Christian. I’d objected to his reference to the “Holocaust hermeneutic”. I found it to be reductive and smug, especially as I’d grown up being aware of my great-aunt’s death camp tattoo.
I’m sure I’ll survive that social media excommunication but it’s indicative of a genuine problem. Gaza and the Palestinians have become a cause for the left, and that includes left-wing Christians. That’s entirely understandable and usually laudable, but for Christians there has to be a wider, deeper, more nuanced analysis.
One of, perhaps the main, motivation for Israel’s foundation in 1948 was the unparalleled agonies suffered by Jews in Christian Europe. Jews left the Arab, Muslim world later and weren’t the main protagonists in the early years. Centuries of pogroms, blood libels, expulsions, massacres, and finally the Holocaust took place in a continent that was overwhelmingly Christian. Good God, many of these atrocities were Church-initiated, and it’s only fairly recently that the wound of Christian antisemitism has begun to heal.
None of this should prevent a Christian from demanding justice and peace in Palestine, but it should inform our approach, understanding, and sympathies.
I also see a shameful lack of empathy in the depiction and description of Jesus as a Palestinian. I appreciate what is being attempted, but we should never forget the horrors that have been caused by the expunging of the Jewishness of Jesus and his family and early followers. He was a Jew, a Galilean Jew, with a Jewish mother. To suggest otherwise is not only bad theology and a denial of God’s plan but also racially and politically crass and dangerous.
I sometimes hear and read things from Christians that border on the racist, and make it appear that the entire Israel/Palestine conflict exists in a bubble without any historical and human context. “Colonial settlers,” they say. Where were the survivors of the Shoah and later the Mizrahi Jews supposed to go, and why does my paternal DNA go back not to Europe but the Middle East?
No authentic follower of Jesus can turn away from the slaughter of the innocents. But our commitment is not to a political ideology but to a relationship with God, and such a relationship rests on love for all people, understanding of our own brokenness and failings, and to a great, grand revolution of compassion and understanding. The Jewish Jesus teaches me that, and should teach us all. PC.
Still The Worst of The Worst.
North Korea is once again world's worst persecutor of Christians.
Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, the closed-off communist country.(Photo: Getty/iStock)Open Doors has released its World Watch List 2024 detailing the 50 countries where Christians suffer the most for their faith, and North Korea ranks number one for the 22nd time in 23 years.
Open Doors was especially critical of China's new policy of returning escapees back to North Korea.
It said that while the world's attention was focused on Israel and Gaza, China repatriated around 600 North Koreans back to the hermit communist country on 9 October 2023.
Most of them are thought to be women and all are likely to face a "living hell" upon their return.
"On return they face torture, sexual abuse and hard labour in the nation's infamous prison camps," said Open Doors.
However, other parts of the world are also causing Open Doors serious concern, including sub-Saharan Africa where it warns that a "double blow of violent instability and authoritarian control" could wipe out the Christian presence altogether.
It reports that at least 4,606 Christians were killed in the region last year because of their faith but it expects that the real figure is much higher.
"Christian minorities across east and west Africa face twin existential threats: violent disorder exploited by radical jihadists and autocratic governments backed by larger powers outside the region," said Open Doors.
Countries from the region on this year's World Watch List are Burkina Faso at number 20, Mali at 14, Mozambique at 39, Nigeria at number 6 and Somalia at number 2.
Open Doors blames the violence on "fractures in governance and security" that have "opened the door" for jihadist activities.
"Islamist militants are exploiting unstable political conditions across Sub-Saharan Africa," it said.
"Their aim is to sow disorder and ultimately seize power, turning regions or even nations into Islamic caliphates run under Islamic Sharia laws.
"The fractures in governance and security have opened the door for the jihadist activities seen."
Open Doors said it was most concerned about Nigeria, which accounts for over 82 per cent of Christians killed for their faith worldwide.
Christians have fallen victim to countless attacks by Islamist militants belonging to terrorist groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). Other perpetrators are radicalised Fulani herdsmen.
Christian communities have suffered successive raids with widespread killing, raping, maiming, destruction of property, and kidnapping for ransom.
"Attacks by Islamic extremists against Christians in sub–Saharan Africa have intensified as chaos and collapse besets the region," said Henrietta Blyth, Chief Executive of Open Doors UK and Ireland.
"Even in the IDP camps Christians feel fearful and unsafe since the very people who attacked them may be grazing their herds or robbing their crops just outside the camp.
"Governments in the region need to take meaningful action. Without this, once thriving Christian communities will disappear."
Open Doors reports an overall increase in the amount and intensity of persecution taking place worldwide, with 365 million Christians facing "high levels" of persecution and discrimination for their faith - up from 360 million last year.
In India, which ranks 11th again, there has been a nine-fold increase in Christian fatalities in the last year, rising from 17 to 160, after months of violence in the north-eastern state of Manipur.
Open Doors also noted an "extreme rise" in attacks on churches and Christian schools from 67 in the previous report to 2,228.
The violence in Manipur left 160 Christians dead, and displaced 62,000 people, many of whom remain in camps "with no hope of returning home safely".
"We discovered that many of the houses destroyed in the rioting had been marked with a red circle and cross a few months earlier by Meitei Extremists. This had been planned months before," said Chung Mang, a Christian leader from Manipur.
In other parts of India, Christians have been harassed and attacked for their faith. Much of the hostility has been attributed to anti-conversion laws which are in place across 12 states in the country. CT.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
So Much About Global Warming Is Total Pap.
Please do let Dr Robson explain just a few of the countless absurd anomalies, overstatements and - yes - outright lies, to aid your understanding!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jRUIxGqldB4&si=SkMJDYOZEEQkzRXk (12 minutes of non-stop rationality.)
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An Amazing Footballer.
Stan Bowles, brilliant maverick QPR and England footballer – obituary.
He was as famous for his colourful antics off the pitch as for his supreme natural talent on it
Stan Bowles, who has died aged 75, was a footballer whose maverick skills on the pitch were matched by his colourful antics off it; his flicks, dribbles and lay-offs were exquisite, while his drinking, gambling and womanising became the stuff of legend...
No Case For Mass Migration.
The economic case for mass migration has finally collapsed.
Rather than turbocharging growth, immigration is placing near-unbearable pressure on public services, housing and infrastructure
SAM ASHWORTH-HAYES27 February 2024 •
It was a delightful theory. Opening Britain’s borders would bring an influx of human capital that would leave the country richer, the tax burden lower, public services stronger and our culture enriched. And, as a theory, it had the great benefit of being all but impossible to falsify unless someone was daft enough to actually try it in practice.
Unfortunately, thanks to the Conservatives, this has now happened. And the resulting confrontation with reality has demolished a truly beautiful idea. Report after report, dataset after dataset, is hammering home a simple message: mass migration is not making Britain better off.
The latest entry in the list has taken a sledgehammer to the argument that immigration is desperately needed to prop up our crumbling public services.
As the Institute for Fiscal Studies argues, the “fiscal headroom” generated by immigration is largely illusory. Rather than the result of carefully selecting for high income, low-cost arrivals, it has rather more to do with the way the Office for Budget Responsibility comes up with its figures – plugging in spending plans that don’t account for the greater demands of a larger population. Once this is factored in, the migration dividend dissipates.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Even before the Conservatives reshaped the immigration system to bring in huge numbers of care workers and “students”, study after study showed that non-EU migrants were a significant fiscal drain.
This is as much about the generosity of the British state as it is anything else; the average UK citizen receives more in public services than they pay in taxes. But it does mean that in order for migrants to pay their way, they need to earn very high wages or leave after their working years. Unsurprisingly, many don’t.
The problems don’t end there. Adding more people to an economy will almost always make it larger, but that doesn’t mean it makes the people already here better off. Britain has a serious shortage of housing, congested infrastructure, and increasing conflict between communities with radically different visions of what the country should be.
Adding in large numbers of people from around the world does very little to improve any of this, and makes much of it actively worse. When national newspapers are running reports on the massive surges in investment needed just to keep pace with the influx of new arrivals, something has gone badly wrong. It’s hard not to think that Britain is following Canada into its third world-style population trap, where the cost of providing tools, housing and infrastructure for new arrivals has brought income growth to a halt.
With the economic argument for migration in disarray, its advocates have switched to emphasising the nebulous benefits of diversity, or arguing that it could be economic rocket fuel if we could just reform planning, taxes, benefits, policing, infrastructure, energy, education, water – the list keeps going. But arguing that this means we don’t need to cut current levels of migration is putting the cart well before the horse, even leaving out the point that many people may question whether reshaping their country to make immigration a small positive is desirable.
Time after time, the British public have voted to cut immigration. Elites have written this off as ignorance. They should consider instead that it is simply rational self-interest. DT.
Learn From This.
Jeremiah 17.
The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
10 “I the Lord search the heart
and examine the mind,
to reward each person according to their conduct,
according to what their deeds deserve.”
and examine the mind,
to reward each person according to their conduct,
according to what their deeds deserve.”
Our Anti-Christian Police Force.
Police admit attempt to 'silence' Christian street preacher for criticising other religions and atheism was 'disproportionate' as they back down in free speech row.
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A police force last night admitted its attempt to 'silence' a Christian street preacher for criticising Hindus, Muslims and atheists was 'disproportionate' Avon and Somerset Police tried to prevent Bristol-based pastor Dia Moodley from 'passing comments on any other religion or comparing them to Christianity'. It also sought to stop him displaying 'graphi c material'.The Evangelist fundamentalist had become known to the police after holding up signs saying 'abortion is murder' and mocking followers of other religions for failing to acknowledge 'God's truth'. Mail.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
No Money For The Hugely Under-Resourced Military!
Unbelievable! SOOOOO glad I can vote for Reform UK.
Blogger: interesting that so much of our military budget has been shovelled towards Ukraine with so many NATO nations giving zero.
The first duty of government is to protect its people. Our military is UNFIT FOR PURPOSE!
The Abomination Into Which The BBC Has Turned!
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1871011/bbc-trans-cat-killer-sentenced
Interesting.
10 Things You Should Know about Francis Schaeffer
April 11, 2016
This article is part of the 10 Things You Should Know series.
1. The Bible was central to his worldview.
Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984) became a Christian believer at the age of 17, after reading the Bible for the first time. As a bright teenager he had many questions about life and found the philosophy books did not help. The conviction that the Bible held basic answers for basic question would characterize his life and work. The slogan at l’Abri Fellowship was “I am not ashamed of the Gospel” (Romans 1:16). He defended the inerrancy of Scripture over against every spiritualizing hermeneutic.
2. He experienced deep spiritual crisis at one point in his life.
In the early 1950s, Francis experienced a deep, troubling spiritual crisis. While he had espoused and defended all the right doctrines, he found his spiritual life to have become dry. As a result he decided to revisit everything, from the basics on up.
He emerged with a new sense of the reality of Christian faith. He asked his wife Edith one day whether if all the passages in Scripture about the Holy spirit and prayer were removed whether it would make any difference in their lives. Deciding it would not, they resolved to develop a new dependency on the reality of God’s Spirit and the vitality of prayer.
3. He founded l’Abri based on a rich view of sanctification.
The community l’Abri, in the Swiss Alps, was founded in 1955. It was the fruit of the conviction that “God is there.” In his sermon series, followed by the book, True Spirituality, Francis developed his views on sanctification, centering on the reality and the power of Jesus Christ to lead us in his footsteps through three necessary stages: rejected, slain, raised. If you seek perfection or nothing, he said, you will get nothing every time. Instead, you can know substantial progress in the Christian life. This includes every area of human existence, social, psychological, the love of God till contentment and the love of neighbor without envy.
4. He believed in the dignity of all humans.
That mankind was made after God’s own image was central to the teachings of Francis Schaeffer. While fully aware of human sinfulness and brokenness, he nevertheless fiercely defended the nobility of humans, whether or not they were “little people” in the eyes or the world. He was sharply critical of B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, pointing us instead, Back to Freedom and Dignity (1972). He opposed abortion on demand, euthanasia, and infanticide, coauthoring Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1983) with Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. What's more, he viewed the creative arts as a testimony to God’s image-bearers, even when they portrayed distortion and rebellion. Against the dilemma of mysticism or nihilism, Schaeffer offered human dignity.
5. He affirmed the dual reality that there is no truth without love, but also that there is no love without truth.
A fundamental principle held by Francis Schaeffer, emphasized over and over again, was that “true truth” was tantamount, and yet was cold and cruel without love. “The local church or Christian group should be right, but it should also be beautiful,” he once said. He talked about orthodoxy complemented by orthopraxy. Anyone visiting l’Abri would soon discover this extraordinary balance.
A fundamental principle held by Francis Schaeffer, emphasized over and over again, was that “true truth” was tantamount, and yet was cold and cruel without love.
Schaeffer was passionate about the truth, and fiercely opposed to relativism in all its guises. Honest questions deserved honest answers, he averred. But both he personally, and the community generally, were bathed with grace and love. Each person, no matter how lost, counted as an object of God’s love. Such love is costly, requiring great sacrifice and risk.
6. He thought that the best apologetic method was presuppositional.
While never developing a step-by-step apologetic technique, Francis had an uncanny sense of the disconnect between what an unbeliever might profess and his or her deeply held convictions or practice. Believing every human being to know God (Romans 1:18-21), he understood that however bold their claims might be about meaninglessness or atheism, their lives betrayed a deeper awareness.
Presupposing God’s revelation to be unavoidable, and believing it impossible to navigate successfully as though God were not there, Schaeffer could probe until he found the place where a contradiction was manifest. He could then preach the gospel to a more receptive person.
7. He affirmed the goodness of creation.
One of Schaeffer’s principal diagnostic tools was identifying a split between what he called the lower storey and the upper storey. Inhabiting the lower were cold, hard facts—the world of mechanisms, the word of history. Inhabiting the upper storey were the irrational, the mystical, and the relative. Such dichotomies were characteristic of philosophy and culture. But they also characterized modern theology, both liberal and neo-orthodox. However, in Schaeffer's view, they suck the meaning out of the lower storey, God’s good creation.
In a famous conversation with Karl Barth, in 1950, Schaeffer apparently asked the great theologian if he believed God created the world. Barth answered that he did so in the first century AD. Schaeffer pointed outside and asked whether that included “this world,” the forest and the hillside. To which Barth answered, “This world does not matter.” To collapse the creation into the incarnation and then disparage the present world represented everything Schaeffer stood against.
8. He liked to trace the rise and decline of Western civilization.
Francis Schaeffer believed one could trace a line, from ancient Rome, through the Middle Ages, then the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and down to the present, which was one of a rise and fall. Similar to Gibbon, he believed the debacle unfolding before our eyes was the result of a cumulative process whereby the upper and lower storeys were increasingly disconnected. The decline is most clearly observed in the 19th and 20th centuries, where the “line of despair” is crossed, moving from the need for rationality to the possibility of the irrational. The book (and film) How Shall We Then Live? illustrates this historiography using music, art, philosophy, film, and theology. The ultimate result is brain-washing and treating people as machines.
Schaeffer on the Christian Life
William Edgar
Exploring the views of Francis Schaeffer on the Christian life, Edgar helps readers strive after the same kind of marriage of thought and life, of orthodoxy and love.
9. He applied the Christian message to all of life, including the arts, pollution, racism, affluence, and the destruction of life.
Francis Schaeffer applied the Christian message to many areas of life. The list is extensive. Particularly notable are his prescient views on ecology, where he criticized both the “pessimists” who blamed Genesis 1 on pollution and the “optimists” who were confident technology could save us (Pollution and the Death of Man, 1970).
He also addressed the issue of race in ways many evangelicals were not. He opposed reifying black folks and pleaded for others to treat all people as image-bearers. Schaeffer constantly opposed what he saw as the twin values of “personal peace and affluence,” asking instead for sacrificial involvement in social ills. And, as mentioned, he was a herald for the dignity of human life, opposing not only abortion and the like, but anything that reduced man to a machine.
10. He deeply loved his wife, Edith.
Saving the best till last, most of us would affirm that Francis Schaeffer could have done very little without his devoted wife, Edith Seville Schaeffer (1914-2013). Born in China, Edith met Francis in Philadelphia, and encouraged him to attend seminary and then go into the ministry. Starting with children’s work, together the Schaeffers found themselves in Switzerland, opening their home to thousands of people who wandered up the mountain with their questions, issues, and needs.
They eventually had four children of their own, whom they raised in a most challenging setting. The queen of hospitality, Edith became just as involved with their guests as Francis. Mealtimes were the principal place for deep conversations. The day of prayer was inspired by Edith's tireless commitment to cultivating the presence of God. A considerable author herself, she, more than anyone, could convey the spirit of l’Abri in words.
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Was Truss Right?
Truss had it right – there’s only one way out of this mess.
Investors are no longer willing to pay for Britain’s zero-growth, high-inflation economy
‘Trussonomics’ was branded crazy but Sunak’s ‘safe’ approach has triggered similar bond market turmoil CREDIT: Ben Stansall/AFP
When the bond markets dramatically turned on the UK in the wake of the disastrous mini-Budget last autumn, it prompted lengthy lectures on the crazy excesses of “Trussonomics”.
Wild and risky “unfunded tax cuts” were to blame. Lower rates for the rich would widen inequality. The mad dash for growth, which led to a disregard for fiscal caution, was tantamount to a full-scale assault on the anti-growth coalition.
But hold on.
This week we learned that a boring risk premium is every bit as worrying as the “moron risk premium” (as one City analyst famously dubbed the market ructions of last September).
With borrowing costs rising to the highest level in the G7, and the UK’s creditworthiness again under threat, one point is surely clear.
Britain’s reckoning with the bond markets has been a long time coming – and whoever is in charge can no longer fool themselves into believing that “free” money can be magicked out of nowhere forever.
The past week has been every bit as brutal for the UK gilt market as the drama of last September.
In the wake of another set of dismal inflation figures, which suggested rising prices are becoming as deeply embedded into the British economy as they were in the 1970s, investors moved decisively to sell off UK government debt.
Yields on 10-year bonds soared to 4.31pc, overtaking even Italy, and hitting the highest levels since last autumn.
As market expectations for the interest rate set by the Bank of England rose, so too did mortgage rates. It surely can’t be long before we see cracks in the financial system and, possibly, with wearying familiarity, emergency intervention from the Bank.
It is beginning to look like the sell-off last year was the early stages of something far bigger – and far more worrying.
The bond markets no longer want to finance the profligacy of the British state and our determination to live way beyond our means, at least not without a high fee in return.
Britain is increasingly becoming a poor country that acts like a rich one.
Rishi Sunak convinced the public – and possibly himself – that the Government simply needed to push through some unpopular tax rises, make some “tough choices” on spending, and let the “grown-ups” from the Treasury set policy.
Once that was achieved, so the logic followed, this period of economic turbulence would finally come to an end. But it was always a fiction.
The UK’s finances are unsustainable. The most recent Budget left departments’ spending totals mostly unchanged, with extra money for defence and childcare, but no meaningful cuts until after the next general election.
As the latest set of borrowing figures revealed, we are still a long way from balancing the books.
After a big jump in 2020, government debt as a proportion of GDP remains close to 100pc. Since the economy is looking incapable of growth, that is only going to go up, even if we don’t commit to borrowing more.
Our central bank has lost control of inflation, as evidenced by the rise, not fall, in core inflation in April.
Even the headline rate remains stubbornly high, at 8.7pc, with food prices alarmingly sticky.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said earlier on Friday he would be comfortable with a recession if it brought inflation down. This is the terrible choice the Government has left itself with: persistent inflation or an economic contraction.
Unless we kick our addiction to low growth and debt, the situation will only worsen.
The Treasury’s forecast that it will raise £17bn through higher rates of corporation tax will likely prove as inaccurate as many of its other predictions.
It will only take a handful of private businesses to relocate overseas for the sums to fall far short of what is expected.
Our marginal income tax rates, meanwhile, are now hitting an exorbitant 70pc for many couples with both children and student loans, once tapered allowances and child benefits are taken into account.
Perhaps worst of all, a looming Labour government would spend much more, with seemingly no idea how it is going to pay for it all.
Labour has big plans for a green energy giant, for an interventionist industrial policy, not to mention pay rises for some of its public sector trade union backers.
Yet apart from its plans to tax wealthy foreigners and slap VAT on school fees, it is hard to discern how it plans to pay for it. Against that backdrop, why would anyone want to own gilts with a negative real yield of minus 4pc?
This could be far worse than the crisis we faced last September. For all its flaws in terms of communications and execution, at least the Truss government was borrowing money to finance growth and reform.
The Sunak administration is borrowing to pay for stagnation, and Labour will be borrowing to pay for a massive expansion of the state.
The only genuine way out of this mess is to get the economy growing again.
This is not impossible. We could rip up planning restrictions to start building homes. We could finally diverge from EU regulations. And we could lower taxes on business and entrepreneurs to reboot investment, with personal tax cuts to follow from the proceeds.
Instead, we have chosen to carry on living in a magic money tree fantasyland dressed up as fiscal responsibility.
The bond markets appear to have twigged that the UK is stuck with zero growth, with sustained inflation, and has lost the will to reform itself. So long as this remains the case, they will keep demanding a higher and higher price to lend us money.
The sell-off in gilts last September was just the start: the British debt crisis is going to get a lot rougher in the future. DT.
Blogger: she was almost certainly on the right track but tried to do everything in one go. Lacked political nous.
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Franklin Graham preached in Glasgow, launches new fund to defend religious freedom in the UK. Staff writer Franklin Graham preaching at ...
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https://www.christianpost.com/voices/marys-magnificat-the-wait-is-over.html
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