POLITICO on the To The Stars Academy and UFOs

From Bryan Bender's 5-28-21 POLITICO article entitled "How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer From Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream":

The quarter-century saga stretching from [Senator] Harry Reid’s first attendance at one of [Robert] Bigelow’s NIDS [National Institute for Discovery Science] meetings to the forthcoming release of once-secret documents offers a modern case study in how marginalized ideas can make their way into the mainstream. Last summer, after a series of classified briefings for Congress, including Navy pilots giving direct testimony, the Pentagon announced it was creating the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force “to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs.” In a recent public forum, the Navy’s top officer said the military now has a “well-established process in place ... to collect that data and to get it to a separate repository for analysis.” The Pentagon’s internal watchdog announced this month that it is launching its own evaluation “to determine the extent to which the DoD has taken actions regarding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).”  

Other public and private entities are embracing a subject that once would have been fatal to their institutional credibility. “What if invisible aliens exist among us, already here but unseen by human eyes?” asks a recent blog post from Northrop Grumman, one of the Pentagon's largest contractors and a bastion of corporate orthodoxy. “Do aliens exist?” asks another entry. “Scientists wonder if extraterrestrial life has visited Earth.” It can sound like a cheesy trailer for a History Channel documentary, except the scientists they’re referring to are working at some of the nation’s most elite schools [...]. 

The mindset shift inside Congress, in many ways, is the most consequential because of its ability to back up its public discussion with legal mandates and taxpayer dollars. One needn’t believe UFOs are real to recognize that the money that might flow from the Hill very much is [...].

[T]here is no disputing the role [Tom] DeLonge played in moving UFOs into the realm of more serious discussion. When DeLonge was setting up To the Stars Academy five years ago, he began to assemble a team of consultants not unlike the group Bigelow had brought together some two decades before, who had connections in the shadowy recesses of the national security agencies needed to unearth new information to help prove his theories. In some cases, they were the exact same people. 

“From day one, I figured I needed knights of the round table,” DeLonge told me. “I needed a whole Camelot of scholars and each of them had a different piece that really helped me. It was the military, it was intelligence, it was engineering. It was executive branch.”

One of the first people DeLonge recruited as the academy’s vice president for science and technology was [Hal] Puthoff, the former Stanford engineer who had carried out experiments in the ’70s for the CIA. After NIDS shut down in 2004, Puthoff became one of the top consultants for Bigelow Aerospace, which, in time, became the primary contractor of Reid’s secret Pentagon program [...].

Another of DeLonge’s recruits was Jim Semivan, who retired in 2007 after 25 years in the CIA’s clandestine service, where he helped spy on adversaries such as Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Semivan met DeLonge through [John] Alexander, the Army officer who helped found NIDS with Bigelow. Semivan says he had no official role in studying UFOs for the government, “but I ran into a lot of things that were very strange.” He also told me he had a UFO encounter with his wife that he has never discussed publicly [...]. 

DeLonge also enlisted Steve Justice, an aerospace engineer who had spent decades overseeing classified development programs at Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works [...]. 

 

Another veteran of NIDS whom DeLonge brought on board to advise the effort was Jacques Vallee, a French-born astronomer and computer scientist. Vallee was the inspiration for the scientist in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, about alien abductions by a seemingly benevolent species that communicated with humans subconsciously. In more recent years, Vallee helped run a venture capital firm that partnered with NASA in 2006 to help the space agency explore emerging technologies.

To read Bender's entire article, click HERE.

Daniel Sheehan Talks to POLITICO About UFOs

 From Bryan Bender's 5-26-21 POLITICO article entitled "Ex-official Who Revealed UFO Project Accuses Pentagon of 'Disinformation' Campaign":

The former Pentagon official who went public about reports of UFOs has filed a complaint with the agency’s inspector general claiming a coordinated campaign to discredit him for speaking out — including accusing a top official of threatening to tell people he was "crazy," according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.

Lue Elizondo, a career counterintelligence specialist who was assigned in 2008 to work for a Pentagon program that investigated reports of "unmanned aerial phenomena," filed the 64-page complaint to the independent watchdog on May 3 and has met several times with investigators, according to his legal team.

 

The claim that the government is trying to discredit him comes weeks before the director of national intelligence and the Pentagon are expected to deliver an unclassified report to Congress about UFOs and the government’s strategy for investigating such encounters. The report is expected to include a detailed accounting of the agencies, personnel and surveillance systems that gather and analyze the data.

 

“What he is saying is there are certain individuals in the Defense Department who in fact were attacking him and lying about him publicly, using the color of authority of their offices to disparage him and discredit him and were interfering in his ability to seek and obtain gainful employment out in the world,” said Daniel Sheehan, Elizondo’s attorney. “And also threatening his security clearance.”

Sheehan, a public interest lawyer and activist, has a long history of taking on the federal government on behalf of high-profile clients, including defending The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case as well as one of the Watergate burglars.

He is also widely viewed as a provocateur who has an abiding interest in UFOs and has spoken publicly about alien visitations. He also served as counsel for the Disclosure Project, led by ufologist Steven Greer, that has sought to force more government transparency on UFOs.

When asked for comment, Elizondo referred questions to Sheehan.

Sheehan maintains the goal of Elizondo’s IG complaint is much bigger than clearing his name: He wants to compel the Pentagon to clear up all the ambiguity about what it knows about UFOs.

“Nobody seemed to be taking this thing seriously,” Sheehan said of Elizondo’s concerns when he left the Pentagon in 2017. “The different units and different groups that are responsible for responding to this particular phenomenon … they're not briefing each other on this.”

“The old dodge,” Sheehan says, “is ‘oh well, the real problem was that one shop wasn't communicating with the other shop.’ That’s the classic bureaucratic dodge. I’m trying to get the Defense Department to clarify for the public and media what exactly is the cartography inside the Defense Department for dealing with this particular phenomenon.”

To read Bender's entire article, click HERE.

NEW YORK TIMES: "QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests"

From Giovanni Russonello's 5-27-21 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests":

A federal judge warned in an opinion yesterday that Mr. Trump’s insistence on the “big lie” — that the November election was stolen from him — still posed a serious threat. Presiding over the case of a man accused of storming Congress on Jan. 6, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington wrote: “The steady drumbeat that inspired defendant to take up arms has not faded away. Six months later, the canard that the election was stolen is being repeated daily on major news outlets and from the corridors of power in state and federal government, not to mention in the near-daily fulminations of the former president.”

But it’s not just the notion that the election was stolen that has caught on with the former president’s supporters. QAnon, an outlandish and ever-evolving conspiracy theory spread by some of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers, has significant traction with a segment of the public — particularly Republicans and Americans who consume news from far-right sources.

Those are the findings of a poll released today by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which found that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters. The same share said it was true that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to depose the pedophiles and restore the country’s rightful order.

And fully 20 percent of respondents said that they thought a biblical-scale storm would soon sweep away these evil elites and “restore the rightful leaders.”

“These are words I never thought I would write into a poll question, or have the need to, but here we are,” Robby Jones, the founder of P.R.R.I., said in an interview [...].

Mr. Jones said he was struck by the prevalence of QAnon’s adherents. Overlaying the share of poll respondents who expressed belief in its core principles over the country’s total population, “that’s more than 30 million people,” he said.

“Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants,” he added. “So it lines up there with a major religious group.”

He also noted the correlation between belief in QAnon’s fictions and the conviction that armed conflict would be necessary. “It’s one thing to say that most Americans laugh off these outlandish beliefs, but when you take into consideration that these beliefs are linked to a kind of apocalyptic thinking and violence, then it becomes something quite different,” he said.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Mae Brussell on The Son of Sam

Netflix recently debuted Joshua Zeman's true-crime series, THE SONS OF SAM: A DESCENT INTO DARKNESS, which is based on Maury Terry's 1987 nonfiction book, THE ULTIMATE EVIL. In light of this fact, it might be illuminating to review what Mae Brussell (often referred to by admirers and detractors alike as "the Queen of Conspiracies") had to say about the Son of Sam killings way back in August of 1977 as the case against David Berkowitz was still unfolding.

Please note what Brussell has to say from around the 8:00 mark to 12:00... and keep in mind that this is well over a year before the vast majority of the world had ever heard of a man named "Reverend Jim Jones."

Mae Brussell: The Son of Sam

(Part 1: 8-15-77/Part 2: 8-22-77)

By the way, today would have been Brussell's 99th birthday. (She passed away due to cancer on October 3rd, 1988.)

The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness | Official Trailer | Netflix

 

 

Dead Boys: Son of Sam

 

"Old Man on a Bus" in THE MAILER REVIEW & "Her Wounded Eyes" in YEAR'S BEST HARDCORE HORROR

When I first began writing short stories as a teenager, the writers who impressed me most were those who shuttled back and forth effortlessly between a multiplicity of genres. For that reason, perhaps it's appropriate that I have short stories appearing in two very different publications in the same week: "Old Man on a Bus" in THE MAILER REVIEW VOL. 14 edited by Phillip Sipiora and "Her Wounded Eyes" in YEAR'S BEST HARDCORE HORROR VOL. 6 edited by Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax. I'm pleased to be sharing the same Table of Contents page in THE MAILER REVIEW with such luminaries as Legs McNeil, Robert Stone, and Barry Malzberg; I'm equally excited to be in YEAR'S BEST HARDCORE HORROR with Octavia Cade, Alessandro Manzetti, and Christine Morgan. The latter anthology ("...glutted with graphic scenes of torture, dismemberment, evisceration, and pornographic sex"--PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY) includes eighteen stories that originally appeared in publications with such colorful titles as THE ESSENTIAL SICK STUFF, VISCERAL: COLLECTED FLESH, and THE RADIOACTIVE BRIDE. 

To my surprise, THE MAILER REVIEW VOL. 14 also contains Michael Shuman's ten-page review of my second book, SPIES & SAUCERS (PS Publishing, 2014). This review, entitled "What Mad Universe" (this title is no doubt a nod to the great Frederic Brown, who--coincidentally--passed away about two weeks before I was born) is probably the most thoughtful and in-depth analysis of my work anyone has ever attempted.

Buy a copy of THE MAILER REVIEW VOL. 14 right HERE!

Buy a copy of YEAR'S BEST HARDCOVER HORROR VOL. 6 right HERE!

CRYPTOSCATOLOGY ON GERMAN RADIO!

Yesterday morning I appeared on Tarek Al-Ubaidi's popular Austrian podcast, CROPfm, and over the course of three hours discussed my five-part SALON series about QAnon, my EVERGREEN REVIEW article "Donald Trump's Operation Mindfuck," my nonfiction books CRYPTOSCATOLOGY and CHAMELEO, and my recent fiction books WIDOW OF THE AMPUTATION & OTHER WEIRD CRIMES and BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD. Most of Al-Ubaidi's shows are in German; however, he also does an occasional English interview from time to time. This is one of those occasions. Click HERE to listen to the entire broadcast (the interview begins about seven minutes into the show).

NEW YORK TIMES: "Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists"

From Barry Meier's 5-15-21 NEW YORK TIMES article entitled "Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists":

Big law firms in New York and London are clamoring for the services of firms like Black Cube, an Israeli company that worked for Harvey Weinstein. Dictators are using private spies as freelance intelligence agents, and off-the-shelf technology is making it easier for them to monitor cellphones and hack emails. Over the past decade, spies for hire have become more emboldened — just as their power to influence events has become more pervasive.

While I was examining the private intelligence business, it became clear that I needed to look at another profession, the one where my career had been spent — journalism. Reporters and private investigators long have had a symbiotic relationship that is hidden from the public. Hired spies feed journalists story tips or documents and use reporters to plant stories benefiting a client without leaving their fingerprints behind.

To read Meier's entire article, click HERE.

GIZMODO: "Pentagon Is Surveilling Americans Without a Warrant, Senator Says"

From Lucas Ropek's 5-12-21 GIZMODO article entitled "Pentagon Is Surveilling Americans Without a Warrant, Senator Says":

The Pentagon recently signaled to a U.S. senator that it could not publicly reveal if or how it was buying access to Americans’ car, phone, and online metadata, only that, whatever it was doing, it was not violating the 4th amendment and also definitely didn’t need a warrant to do it.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has been trying to get to the bottom of how and why the Department of Defense procures data through the private sector. Wyden became interested in the issue after multiple media reports showed that agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Special Forces, and, comfortingly, an agency in charge of drone strikes, have all been turning to the private sector to purchase data from ordinary apps. In January, the Defense Intelligence Agency admitted to buying access to the location data of phones based in the U.S.

Since he began looking into this, Wyden has apparently been engaged in an ongoing back-and-forth with the Pentagon, during which time he’s learned some things about the agency’s data collection practices. On Thursday, Wyden sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, asking the top defense official to share with the American public information that had recently been shared with his office. That letter, first reported on by Vice News and also shared with Gizmodo, shows the U.S. congressman urging Austin to publicly release “information about the Department of Defense’s (DoD) warrantless surveillance of Americans.” You can read the full letter here.

To read Ropek's entire article, click HERE.

NATURE: "Engineered Bat Virus Stirs Debate"

From Declan Butler's 11-12-15 NATURE article entitled "Engineered Bat Virus Stirs Debate Over Risky Research":

An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.

In an article published in Nature Medicine¹ on 9 November, scientists investigated a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China. The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them. It also caused disease in mice, but did not kill them.

Although almost all coronaviruses isolated from bats have not been able to bind to the key human receptor, SHC014 is not the first that can do so. In 2013, researchers reported this ability for the first time in a different coronavirus isolated from the same bat population².

The findings reinforce suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.

But other virologists question whether the information gleaned from the experiment justifies the potential risk. Although the extent of any risk is difficult to assess, Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that the researchers have created a novel virus that “grows remarkably well” in human cells. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” he says.

The argument is essentially a rerun of the debate over whether to allow lab research that increases the virulence, ease of spread or host range of dangerous pathogens — what is known as ‘gain-of-function’ research. In October 2014, the US government imposed a moratorium on federal funding of such research on the viruses that cause SARS, influenza and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome, a deadly disease caused by a virus that sporadically jumps from camels to people).

The latest study was already under way before the US moratorium began, and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed it to proceed while it was under review by the agency, says Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a co-author of the study. The NIH eventually concluded that the work was not so risky as to fall under the moratorium, he says.

But Wain-Hobson disapproves of the study because, he says, it provides little benefit, and reveals little about the risk that the wild SHC014 virus in bats poses to humans.

Other experiments in the study show that the virus in wild bats would need to evolve to pose any threat to humans — a change that may never happen, although it cannot be ruled out. Baric and his team reconstructed the wild virus from its genome sequence and found that it grew poorly in human cell cultures and caused no significant disease in mice.

“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” agrees Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and biodefence expert at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Both Ebright and Wain-Hobson are long-standing critics of gain-of-function research.

In their paper, the study authors also concede that funders may think twice about allowing such experiments in the future.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Dr. Alan Cantwell, R.I.P. (1934-2021)

A few days ago, I learned from Joan D'Arc (the co-founder of PARANOIA MAGAZINE) that Dr. Alan Cantwell passed away in January of this year. Cantwell's 1988 book, AIDS & THE DOCTORS OF DEATH, played a significant role in my development as a writer and researcher. The book partially ignited my interest in conspiracy theories and helped inspire me to view the field as a complex, ever-evolving art form. It was one of the first guideposts leading me down this strange and wonderful path of 1) studying the shape and shadow of consensus reality and 2) studying the shape and shadow of those who question consensus reality.

 

Cantwell and I shared the same Table of Contents page several times back when I was contributing regularly to such publications as PARANOIA and THE CONSPIRACY READER. Over the years, he sent me a few complimentary emails about my articles in NEW DAWN and other magazines. He even graciously gave me a blurb for my first book, CRYPTOSCATOLOGY: CONSPIRACY THEORY AS ART FORM ("A sane and penetrating analysis into the murky realm of contemporary conspiracy theory. Guffey is sure to inform and entertain you with Cryptoscatology."--Alan Cantwell, M.D.).

Cantwell particularly liked my article, "©onspiracy Inc.: Anatomy of a Discipline," which later became Chapter One of CRYPTOSCATOLOGY. When the article first appeared in the pages of PARANOIA in 2005, he sent me the following email:

Hi Robert:
I just finished your SANE article on conspiracies in the latest PARANOIA.
Thanks for the kind words about my research.
Like you, I sometimes wonder how much leg pulling is included in some of these really weird articles in conspiracy magazines.
However, I am very grateful to the P editors to print my stuff -----as it would be near impossible to get such unflattering articles in "real" medical journals.
Now what's your take on that fairy article in the same issue?????? Only kidding!!
Keep up your good work in trying to give conspiracy theories more "credibility"!!
Regards,
Alan Cantwell MD 

Here's what Joan wrote about Cantwell on her Facebook page:

I have just realized my friend Alan Cantwell has passed away. I sent him an email about a month ago and he didn't reply, so I checked. Readers of Paranoia Magazine will remember many articles written by Dr. Cantwell, author of Queer Blood, AIDS and the Doctors of Death, The Cancer Microbe, AIDS: The Mystery and the Solution, and Four Women Against Cancer. I met Dr. Cantwell on a trip to Los Angeles in the '90s where he lived in the Hollywood Hills with his husband, who was actually named Frank Sinatra! Alan made a delicious spaghetti dinner and played the piano.

And here's an excerpt from Cantwell's 1-10-21 LOS ANGELES TIMES obit: 

Alan R. Cantwell Jr., M.D., physician and author, passed away peacefully at home on January 1, 2021. Dr. Cantwell was always interested in research and throughout his career published many papers on dermatological problems. During the AIDS pandemic his interest concerning the many cases he was observing lead to a series of books on the subject which he authored and published through his own publishing company, Aries Rising Press. A fine pianist, good painter, generous host and a man devoted to his patients, Dr. Cantwell will be missed by all who knew him.

To read the entire obit, click HERE.

NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE REVIEWS BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD

I was pleased to see that Terence Taylor (author of BITE MARKS and BLOOD PRESSURE) has written a very laudatory review of my latest novel, BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD, for NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE. Here's a brief excerpt:

"The sensation [of reading BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD] is like being led deep underground while your flashlight grows dimmer and dimmer, until you’re left in total darkness. That’s when the lights of a subterranean crypt flash on to reveal that you’re not where you expected to be, and where you are is far worse than you could have imagined. The result is an ending that left me chilled and took me a few days to fully process. As shocking as it was, everything was set up from the beginning. I know, I went back and checked, and have to give Guffey credit for pulling off a literary sleight of hand that caught me by surprise. I won’t spoil it with more, except to say that like the frog in water that’s warmed so slowly it doesn’t realize it’s coming to a lethal boil, Guffey’s readers face an equally stunning conclusion."

You can read Taylor's entire review right HERE.

Havana Syndrome

From Katie Bo Williams and Jeremy Herb's 4-29-21 CNN report entitled "US Investigating Possible Mysterious Directed Energy Attack Near White House":

Federal agencies are investigating at least two possible incidents on US soil, including one near the White House in November of last year, that appear similar to mysterious, invisible attacks that have led to debilitating symptoms for dozens of US personnel abroad.

Multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that while the Pentagon and other agencies probing the matter have reached no clear conclusions on what happened, the fact that such an attack might have taken place so close to the White House is particularly alarming.

Defense officials briefed lawmakers on the Senate and House Armed Services Committees on the matter earlier this month, including on the incident near the White House. That incident, which occurred near the Ellipse, the large oval lawn on the south side of the White House, sickened one National Security Council official, according to multiple current and former US officials and sources familiar with the matter.

In a separate 2019 episode, a White House official reported a similar attack while walking her dog in a Virginia suburb just outside Washington, GQ reported last year.

Those sickened reported similar symptoms to CIA and State Department personnel impacted overseas, and officials quickly began to investigate the incident as a possible “Havana syndrome” attack. That name refers to unexplained symptoms that US personnel in Cuba began experiencing in late 2016 – a varying set of complaints that includes ear popping, vertigo, pounding headaches and nausea, sometimes accompanied by an unidentified “piercing directional noise” [...].

The attacks eventually led to a dramatic drawdown of staff at the outpost in Havana under the Trump administration. Personnel in Russia and China reported similar, unexplained incidents. Though there’s no consensus as to what causes the symptoms, one State Department-sponsored study found they likely were the result of microwave energy attacks.

To read Williams and Herb's entire article, click HERE.

From Julian Borger's 5-2-21 GUARDIAN article entitled "Havana Syndrome: NSA Officer’s Case Hints at Microwave Attacks Since 90s":

When the first reports surfaced of a mysterious disorder that was afflicting dozens of US diplomats in Cuba, Mike Beck’s reaction was one of recognition and relief.

Beck, a retired National Security Agency counterintelligence officer, was at his home in Maryland, scrolling through the day’s news on his computer when he spotted the story, and remembers shouting out to his wife.

“I got excited because I thought: well, it’s coming out now that it’s not a mirage,” Beck said. “I felt bad for the victims but thought: ‘Now I’m no longer one of one. I’m one of many.’”

Beck had been forced into retirement in late 2016 by a rare early-onset, non-tremor form of Parkinson’s disease, and he had evidence, supplied by the NSA and the CIA, that he could have been the victim of a deliberate attack from a microwave weapon.

After years of lonely struggle, he now feels vindicated. Last December the National Academy of Sciences published a report finding that the scores of CIA and state department officials affected by “Havana syndrome” in Cuba, China and elsewhere, were most likely suffering the “effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency energy”.

To read Borger's entire article, click HERE.

More on the Capitol Riot Arrests

From Olivia Rubin's 4-23-21 ABC News report entitled "Number of Capitol Riot Arrests of Military, Law Enforcement and Government Personnel Rises to 52":

As authorities investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continue to pore over images and video of the riot, they've encountered a distressing trend: A growing number of alleged perpetrators had previously served their country.

At least 52 active or retired military, law enforcement, or government service employees are among the over 400 suspects arrested for their alleged actions at the Capitol, according to an ABC News investigation based on military records, court records, interviews, and publicly available news reports. The arrests include over half a dozen ex-police officers and multiple former elected officials -- and represent some of the most significant and violent charges brought in connection with the deadly insurrection.

To read Rubin's entire article, click HERE.