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March 3, 1918

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

The Soviet signatories refused even to debate the final document. Sokolnikov announced that Russia was signing an ultimatum imposed by a stronger power.

Signed under protest

On 3 March 1918 at Brest-Litovsk, a Soviet delegation led by Grigory Sokolnikov signed a separate peace with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.

Sokolnikov told the final plenary session that Russia was signing an ultimatum imposed by the stronger party, and refused to negotiate its contents further. Leon Trotsky, who had run the previous phase of talks on a policy summarised as neither war nor peace, did not sign.

Trotsky had broken off negotiations on 10 February; Germany then launched Operation Faustschlag on 18 February and advanced rapidly, and Lenin secured Bolshevik acceptance of the harsher terms.

Fourteen articles, five originals

Article 1 declared that the state of war between Russia and the four Central Powers had ceased, but Article 14 made the treaty legally effective only upon ratification. The Fourth Extraordinary All-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified it on 15 March.

Russia relinquished sovereignty over territories west of an agreed line, promised to demobilise its army, and had to withdraw its forces from Ukraine, Estonia, Livonia, Finland and the Åland Islands. It also agreed to evacuate Ardahan, Kars and Batum and not to interfere in their reorganisation.

The treaty ran to 14 articles and was executed in quintuplicate.

Numbers and names that get misattributed

The listing's tidy roll-call of ceded countries does not match the text. Poland was not named in the treaty, only part of present-day Belarus lay west of the agreed line, and Ukraine was addressed through recognition and evacuation clauses.

A contemporary Russian statistical account reported the loss of 930,000 square kilometres and more than 56 million people — 32 percent of the then-current population — along with 89 percent of coal production. Baselines differ, and a modern scholarly summary gives nearly 30 percent of the prewar population.

The six-billion-mark obligation came from the separate supplementary financial agreement of 27 August 1918, not from this treaty, whose Article 9 renounced compensation for war expenses and losses.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The signing date is certain. The common statement that Russia left the war on March 3 is serviceable shorthand, but the treaty itself stipulated that it entered into force upon ratification.
Loss percentages vary according to whether the baseline is the prewar empire, the contemporary Russian state, industrial territory, enterprises, or output. The contemporary figures reproduced by the U.S. State Department report 32% of the population, while a modern scholarly summary gives nearly 30% of the prewar population.

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1918

Murder of the Romanov family

Eleven people were taken down to the basement — seven Romanovs and four attendants — and none of them came back up.

Woken with a lie

During the night of 16–17 July 1918, the prisoners in the Ipatiev House at Ekaterinburg were awakened on the pretext that unrest in the city required their evacuation, and were taken into a basement room.

Nicholas II, Alexandra, their five children — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei — and four attendants were killed there. The attendants were physician Eugene Botkin, cook Ivan Kharitonov, maid Anna Demidova and valet Alexei Trupp.

Yakov Yurovsky, commandant of the Ipatiev House and a Cheka member, directed the killing squad.

Who gave the order is not settled

The killings implemented a resolution of the Presidium of the Ural Regional Soviet, whose leaders had concluded they could not wait for a proposed trial as anti-Bolshevik forces approached Ekaterinburg.

They reported the decision to Moscow, but the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library notes that no central leadership response to that telegram has been found in the archives, and no surviving written order from Lenin or Sverdlov authorising the killing of the whole family has been located.

On 18 July the central executive presidium approved the local decision concerning Nicholas.

Two accounts sent the same day

Later on 17 July, Ekaterinburg sent Moscow a coded telegram saying the whole family had met the same fate as Nicholas — and a public account claiming the family had been evacuated.

Nicholas's execution was officially announced in 1918; what was concealed was the murder of everyone else. The claim that the Soviet Union first acknowledged the executions in 1989 is wrong.

The 1998 burial did not include everyone either: the remains attributed to Alexei and one daughter were absent from the original grave investigation and were not interred that year.

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Date corrected. The research places this at 1918-07-17.

What the sources leave uncertain

The killing date and victims are firmly documented. Because the operation began late on July 16 and continued after midnight, sources properly call it the night of July 16–17; the event date is normally given as July 17.
The Ural Regional Soviet's role is documented, but historians dispute whether Lenin or Sverdlov gave prior oral authorization. No direct written order from either has been found.
The surviving records do not justify the title-as-listed's unqualified claim that the Bolshevik Party as a national body ordered the entire family's execution.

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January 25, 1919

League of Nations

The purported founding took the form of a unanimous vote appointing a committee. The League had no members, no Council and no Secretariat yet.

A resolution and a committee

At 3 p.m. on 25 January 1919, Georges Clemenceau opened the Paris Peace Conference's second plenary session and presided over it. Woodrow Wilson addressed the delegates in support of placing a League of Nations at the centre of the peace settlement.

With no delegate requesting further debate, the conference unanimously adopted a resolution declaring a League essential to the settlement — one that should be an integral part of the general peace treaty and should possess periodic conferences, a permanent organisation and a secretariat.

It then appointed a representative committee to work out the League's constitution and functions.

What did not exist that afternoon

No operating international organisation came into being on 25 January. There were no member states, no Council, no Assembly and no Secretariat.

The commission was initially designed around fifteen seats — two representatives from each of five great powers plus five from powers with special interests. The smaller powers selected Belgium, Brazil, China, Portugal and Serbia on 27 January, and the commission began meeting on 3 February.

It held ten meetings before presenting a first draft Covenant on 14 February.

Which date the institution actually starts from

The Covenant was approved in revised form on 28 April, became part of the Treaty of Versailles signed on 28 June, and entered into force on 10 January 1920. The first Council met on 16 January 1920.

Different references therefore use different institutional birth dates, but the League's commencement is ordinarily tied to the Covenant's entry into force rather than to the January resolution.

The United States appeared in the Covenant's annex as an intended original member, never ratified the Treaty of Versailles, and never joined.

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What the sources leave uncertain

January 25 is firmly documented, but calling it the day the League was founded overstates the action. It was the date the conference approved the principle and authorized a drafting commission.
The Covenant was unanimously approved in revised form on April 28, incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles signed June 28, and entered into force on January 10, 1920. Different references therefore use different institutional 'birth' dates.

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March 23, 1919

Fasci Italiani di Combattimento

The movement later synonymous with mass spectacle began at ten in the morning, with about a hundred people in a borrowed upstairs room.

Ten a.m., Piazza San Sepolcro

At 10 a.m. on 23 March 1919, Benito Mussolini's gathering opened in a room of the Industrial and Commercial Alliance at Palazzo Castani, 9 Piazza San Sepolcro, Milan. The premises were made available by Cesare Goldmann, an interventionist industrialist and Freemason.

In the room were interventionists, former socialists, revolutionary syndicalists, republicans, Futurists and Arditi — not a single ideologically uniform bloc. Contemporary scholarship estimates attendance at about 100 people.

Ferruccio Vecchi, an Arditi leader, opened the assembly.

Three declarations, then a committee

The assembly approved three declarations presented by Mussolini: support for veterans' claims; a nationalist position concerning Italy's frontiers and Fiume and Dalmatia; and a pledge to obstruct electoral candidates who had supported neutrality in the war.

The detailed San Sepolcro programme commonly reproduced online was published in June 1919. It is not what this meeting adopted.

At the close, the assembly appointed a ten-member central executive commission, with Mussolini among them and Michele Bianchi as provisional secretary-general.

Not the party, and barely noticed

What the meeting gave national form to was the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, an initially loose "anti-party" coalition. The National Fascist Party was created in November 1921.

A Milan Fascio di Combattimento had already been organised at a preparatory meeting on 21 March; 23 March is conventionally treated as the national founding meeting.

Most newspapers ignored the event or relegated it to minor local coverage, and Mussolini's Il Popolo d'Italia published organisational instructions the next day.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The date and location are well documented. Attendance is less certain: modern scholarship commonly estimates about 100, while later lists and Fascist-era recognition schemes produced larger totals.
A Milan Fascio di Combattimento had been organized at a preparatory meeting on March 21. March 23 is conventionally treated as the national founding meeting of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento.

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April 23, 1920

Grand National Assembly of Turkey

Mustafa Kemal did not chair the historic first sitting. Its provisional presiding officer was the oldest member in the room, the Sinop deputy Şerif Bey.

Friday prayers, then a legislature

On 23 April 1920 the new assembly opened in Ankara after Friday prayers at the Hacı Bayram Veli Mosque, followed by prayers and the sacrifice of animals outside the assembly building.

The chamber combined newly elected provincial representatives with members of the dissolved Ottoman Chamber of Deputies who had reached Ankara. Only 115 of the assembly's eventual 324 members attended the inaugural sitting.

Şerif Bey, the Sinop deputy and oldest member present, presided provisionally and used the name "Grand National Assembly" in his opening speech.

Kemal convened it; he did not preside over it

Mustafa Kemal Pasha had set the process in motion with his 19 March call for elections to an assembly with extraordinary powers, after the Allied occupation of Istanbul and the dissolution of the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies.

He was elected speaker only the following day, 24 April. The assembly formed a provisional executive committee on 25 April and established an assembly government on 2 May.

"Atatürk" is anachronistic for this date: he received that surname in 1934.

What the first day did not do

The opening rhetoric did not repudiate Sultan Mehmed VI, whose government remained in Istanbul. It presented the assembly as acting to rescue the country, the caliphate and the monarch from foreign control.

No provisional constitution was declared. The 1921 Constitution was adopted on 20 January 1921.

Nor was this the formal beginning of the Republic of Turkey: the sultanate was abolished on 1 November 1922, and the republic was proclaimed on 29 October 1923.

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August 10, 1920

Treaty of Sèvres

A treaty designed to dismantle Ottoman sovereignty was signed in an exhibition hall at a porcelain factory — and never entered into force.

Three signatures at the porcelain works

On 10 August 1920, the Ottoman plenipotentiaries Hâdi Pasha, Rıza Tevfik and Reşad Hâlis signed the peace treaty with the Allied and Associated Powers at Sèvres, outside Paris, in a hall at the Sèvres porcelain factory.

The document contained 433 articles. Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha took part in the negotiations and is frequently pictured with the delegation, but his signature is not among the three.

Mehmed VI's Istanbul government had concluded that it lacked the power to resist and authorised the delegation to sign.

What the text would have imposed

The signed text proposed extensive territorial changes, mandates and foreign controls, and limited Ottoman armed forces to 50,000 gendarmes and special troops plus a 700-man guard for the sultan.

Its territorial provisions were not simply direct cessions to Britain, France, Italy and Greece. They combined cessions, renunciations, League of Nations mandates, zones of influence, autonomy proposals and conditional independence arrangements, including provisions concerning Armenia and a possible autonomous or independent Kurdistan.

None of those clauses ever became operative.

Signed is not ratified

The treaty was never ratified, so it never became an operative peace settlement. Nine days after the signing the Grand National Assembly in Ankara formally rejected it and declared the Ottoman signers and other collaborators traitors.

Nor did that rejection start the war. The Turkish nationalist struggle and the Greco-Turkish fighting were already under way before 10 August 1920.

Hostilities ended with the Mudanya armistice in 1922; the Treaty of Lausanne supplied a new settlement in July 1923, and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed separately on 29 October 1923.

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October 31, 1920

Discovery of insulin

Banting began the entry by misspelling "diabetes" — and first dated it 30 October before crossing that out and writing 31.

A note written in the night

Unable to sleep after preparing a lecture on the pancreas and reading Moses Barron's paper on pancreatic-duct obstruction, Frederick Banting wrote a proposed experiment into a small notebook in London, Ontario, on 31 October 1920.

He proposed ligating dogs' pancreatic ducts, waiting for the enzyme-producing acini to degenerate while the islets remained, and then extracting the islets' hypothesised internal secretion to relieve sugar in the urine.

He first dated the entry 30 October and corrected it to 31 October, and he opened it by writing "Diabetus".

No insulin that night

Nothing was isolated or administered. The immediate product was a research hypothesis, which Banting took to the physiologist J.J.R. Macleod eight days later.

Macleod supplied laboratory space, guidance, dogs and an assistant at the University of Toronto. The animal experiments did not begin until 1921, with Charles Best, who was not present when the notebook entry was written.

The duct-ligation mechanism at the centre of Banting's idea was ultimately shown not to be necessary for extracting insulin.

What "fifteen months later" compresses

The first injection into Leonard Thompson, aged 14, on 11 January 1922 used a crude Banting–Best extract. It was largely ineffective and caused an abscess; James Collip's purer preparation produced the first unambiguously successful treatment on 23 January.

Calling Banting and Best the first to isolate insulin also overstates the work: their early preparations were crude pancreatic extracts, earlier investigators had produced active extracts, and clinically usable purification required Collip and the wider Toronto team.

Insulin was not the first peptide hormone discovered either — secretin had been established as a hormone in 1902.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The physical notebook supplies strong evidence for October 31, but Banting first wrote October 30 and corrected it to October 31, reflecting that the idea was recorded during the night around the calendar boundary.

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July 23, 1921

1st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

The founding congress opened at night around an ordinary dining table, chaired by Zhang Guotao — while Chen Duxiu was not in the room.

Evening, 106 Rue Wantz

The First National Congress opened secretly on the evening of 23 July 1921 at 106 Rue Wantz in Shanghai's French Concession, now 76 Xingye Road — a plainly furnished shikumen residence belonging to Li Hanjun's family.

Zhang Guotao chaired. The opening session set an agenda, heard addresses from the Comintern representatives Henk Sneevliet and Nikolsky, and began hearing reports from the regional representatives.

Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were absent; Chen was later elected secretary of the Central Bureau.

Small groups, admitted plainly

The Chinese participants came from communist groups in Shanghai, Beijing, Changsha, Wuhan, Jinan and Guangzhou, and from members studying in Japan. Mao Zedong attended as the Changsha representative, not as the meeting's leader.

The regional reports, which continued into the second day, emphasised how small each group's membership was, the need to recruit, and work among labourers through organisation and propaganda.

An official formulation says the congress represented more than 50 party members; totals of 53 and 57 also circulate, so an exact 57 should not be stated flatly.

Counts and dates that will not pin down

Sources alternate between 12 delegates and 13 Chinese participants, because Bao Huiseng's status — delegate, substitute or non-voting attendee — is unclear.

The closing date is not secure either. A later Shanghai session was interrupted by an intruder and a police search, most likely on 30 July on contemporary newspaper evidence, after which the final meeting was reconvened aboard a boat on South Lake at Jiaxing; 31 July is likely if that followed immediately, but participant recollections conflict and later accounts give August dates.

The party officially commemorates 1 July as its founding anniversary, though the documented congress opening was 23 July.

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What the sources leave uncertain

The July 23 opening is well supported by a near-contemporary congress report and later documentary research.
The exact closing date is not secure. July 31 is likely if the South Lake meeting followed the July 30 disruption immediately, but participant recollections conflict and later accounts have also given August dates.
Sources alternate between 12 delegates and 13 Chinese participants because Bao Huiseng's status—as delegate, substitute or nonvoting attendee—is unclear.
Contemporary and later sources give different total party-membership figures, commonly “more than 50,” 53 or 57. An exact 57 should not be presented without qualification.

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November 9, 1921

National Fascist Party

The new "political party" wrote combat squads and their battle flags directly into its own organisation.

A vote inside the Augusteo

During the Third Congress of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, held at Rome's Teatro Augusteo from 7 to 10 November 1921, delegates approved Mussolini's proposal to transform the existing fascist movement into a national political party.

Italian parliamentary and archival chronologies place the founding of the Partito Nazionale Fascista on 9 November; Treccani gives 8 November, so the exact day is not agreed even among Italian institutional sources.

While the delegates created the party inside the theatre, Rome was convulsed by a general strike and street violence associated with the visiting fascists.

Organs, and squads

The organisation adopted at the congress included a National Council, a Central Committee, a Directorate and a General Secretariat, and Michele Bianchi was elected the PNF's first general secretary.

Local fasci kept their combat flags and combat squads, giving the party an explicitly paramilitary component. Formalisation as a party did not replace squad violence with ordinary parliamentary activity.

Umberto Pasella's congress report claimed 2,200 local fasci and more than 300,000 members, against only 56 fasci represented at the previous congress.

What the founding vote was not

The congress's immediate business was organisation, Mussolini's authority and the bitterly contested pacification pact with the socialists, rather than a tidy ideological pivot.

The new party's programme was flexible about institutional form. Mussolini's explicit tactical accommodation with the monarchy belongs principally to the run-up to the March on Rome in October 1922.

Nor did the PNF simply rule from 1922 onward: the Italian archival profile dates its status as the only recognised party to 1928.

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Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

Italian institutional sources conflict over the exact founding day. The Senate and state archival systems give 9 November, while Treccani gives 8 November.
The congress itself lasted from 7 to 10 November, so the organizational transformation was a multi-day proceeding rather than a self-contained meeting on one day.

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1921

BCG vaccine

The first BCG recipient did not get a shot. The newborn swallowed three doses mixed into milk.

Three doses in milk

At Paris's Hôpital de la Charité in July 1921, the paediatrician Benjamin Weill-Hallé, assisted by Raymond Turpin, began the first human administration of the BCG tuberculosis vaccine to a newborn boy.

Unlike modern BCG vaccination, the treatment was given orally rather than by intradermal injection: three doses of 2 milligrams each, suspended in milk.

Follow-up reported neither disease nor adverse events over the next five and a half years.

Why this infant

The baby's mother had died of tuberculosis shortly after delivery, and the child was expected to live with a grandmother who was also seriously infected. The perceived exposure risk was unusually high.

Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin had attenuated a strain derived from Mycobacterium bovis through 230 serial passages and believed it was safe enough for a human trial.

The developers and the bedside physicians were different people: Calmette and Guérin made the vaccine, while the administration is generally credited to Weill-Hallé with Turpin's assistance.

The day itself is not settled

The year and the Paris setting are secure; the exact day is not. Several modern scholarly reviews give 18 July 1921, a 2022 symposium paper gives 3 July, and a 1964 WHO magazine account gives 1 July.

Sources also differ over whether 18 July marks the first dose or the whole course, so the safest wording is that the first human BCG administration occurred in Paris in July 1921.

The survival of one highly exposed infant encouraged further trials — 120 more infants had been vaccinated by July 1922 — but did not by itself prove the vaccine worked.

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Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 1921-07-18.

What the sources leave uncertain

The year and Paris setting are secure, but published histories disagree on the exact day. Several modern scholarly reviews give 18 July 1921; a 2022 symposium paper gives 3 July, and a 1964 WHO magazine account gives 1 July.
Sources also vary in describing whether 18 July marks the first dose or the vaccination course. The safest wording is that the first human BCG administration occurred in Paris in July 1921.
Calmette and Guérin developed the vaccine, but the bedside administration is generally credited to Weill-Hallé with Turpin’s assistance.

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February 26, 1922

Leser v. Garnett

A nationwide constitutional attack on women's suffrage began with two names on one Baltimore voting list — one woman white, the other Black.

Decided on the 27th, not the 26th

The U.S. Supreme Court decided Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, on 27 February 1922. The official United States Reports records that date; the listing's 26 February is wrong.

The case affirmed a Maryland judgment rejecting an attempt to strike two women from Baltimore's voter register: Cecelia Streett Waters, who was white, and Mary D. Randolph, who was Black. Both had registered on 12 October 1920.

Oscar Leser, acting for himself and the Maryland League for State Defense, brought the challenge because Maryland's constitution limited suffrage to men and the state had refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

Three arguments, three answers

Justice Louis Brandeis rejected the claim that an amendment expanding a state's electorate without that state's consent exceeded Article V, reasoning that the objection applied equally to the already accepted Fifteenth Amendment.

He rejected the contention that state constitutional restrictions disabled state legislatures from ratifying, holding that ratification is a federal function derived from the U.S. Constitution.

On objections to the procedures used in Tennessee and West Virginia, the Court held that authenticated legislative notices were conclusive on the Secretary of State and, after his proclamation, conclusive on the courts.

What the ruling reached, and did not

The Court dismissed the writ of error, granted the separately filed petition for certiorari, and affirmed the Maryland Court of Appeals. Waters and Randolph stayed on the register.

It did not treat the Tennessee and West Virginia questions as moot or non-justiciable. Brandeis wrote only that the later ratifications by Connecticut and Vermont may have made them immaterial, and then decided the broader issue.

Nor did the judgment secure the vote on the same terms as men across the country: it barred sex-based exclusion under the Nineteenth Amendment while leaving racial disenfranchisement, citizenship exclusions, poll taxes and literacy tests in place.

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Date corrected. The research places this at 1922-02-27.

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September 9, 1922

Capture of Smyrna

The last Greek troops left on the evening of 8 September. Turkish cavalry rode into the same city at about eleven the next morning.

Eleven in the morning, along the quay

Greek troops completed their evacuation of Smyrna — modern İzmir — on the evening of 8 September 1922. Turkish cavalry entered at approximately 11 a.m. the next morning.

A surviving photograph in the Mark L. Bristol papers catches the entering soldiers on horseback along İzmir's quay. Units under Nureddin Pasha removed the Greek flag from the government building and raised a Turkish flag.

Mustafa Kemal Pasha was not with the first cavalry: the Turkish Ministry of Culture chronology dates his entry to 10 September.

The fire came four days later

The Great Fire was not part of the 9 September entry. U.S. records date the fire to 13 September.

By 10 September American officials were reporting the city occupied and relaying urgent warnings from relief workers: an estimated 150,000 refugees, about 20 percent of them needing sporadic assistance, and imported food cut off.

Responsibility for starting the fire remains heavily disputed and should not be attached casually to an account of the entry.

Control changed hands; the war did not end

Military control of İzmir passed to the Ankara-based nationalist movement and the main Anatolian campaign was effectively concluded, but hostilities did not formally cease. The Mudanya Armistice followed on 11 October.

The claim that Greece had been promised Anatolian territory for supporting the Entente during the war is also misleading. The May 1919 landing at Smyrna was authorised after the war by the Allied Supreme Council, and contemporary Allied documents described the occupation as provisional, creating no future territorial right.

"Liberation" and "fall" encode opposing national memories; what the record supports is the transfer of military control and the civilian emergency that followed.

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