Closing summary

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This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

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  Anthropic will caution investors that artificial intelligence could pose ‘catastrophic or existential risks to humanity’ in its IPO prospectus. As Anthropic prepares for an IPO listing, which could value the AI company at a monumental $2tn, it dedicated almost a third of its prospectus to discussing concerns around AI safety. The news comes as OpenAI has halted the release of its next AI model over safety concerns, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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  Donald Trump confirmed that the US negotiating team spoke with Iranian officials through mediators today. This comes after the president rejected the latest ceasefire proposal from Tehran over the weekend, and in response Iran said it has “no plans” to negotiate with Washington. However, in the Oval Office today, Trump was resolute. “We’re going to win,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s going to be one way or the other. It’s going to be it’s going to go pretty quickly.”

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  Trump will also be on the campaign trail this week – hosting rallies in Durant, Oklahoma, on Thursday, Mobile, Alabama, on Friday and Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday. The first two states are GOP strongholds, and Trump has pushed voters to turn out to the polls and pretend the president was at the top of the ballot this midterm cycle. There are now growing concerns from national Republicans that the party is facing stronger headwinds in otherwise safe seats and states, amid record-low polling for the Trump administration.

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  Pete Hegseth ordered the defense department to ‘protect and uphold the reliability of America’s voting mechanisms against external manipulation and disruption from foreign actors’ in a 22 September memo. Hegseth’s order comes as concerns about artificial intelligence are on the rise, but also as the Trump administration has spread misinformation about voter fraud. In July, Trump accused China of interfering in the 2020 election, which he lost.

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  Andrew Bailey said he is stepping down as one of the FBI’s two deputy directors after just over a year in the role – a short tenure that unfolded as he helped oversee several of Trump’s election‑related investigations. Bailey was appointed in August 2025 to serve alongside Dan Bongino at a moment of sharp tension between the FBI and justice department leadership over the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The move was striking because the bureau has historically had only a single deputy director. More here

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  Pope Leo addressed concerns about artificial intelligence and the war in Ukraine during a press conference onboard the papal plane today. Saying that concerns about AI are not “fake news”, the first US pope appeared to criticize Donald Trump, who called concerns about AI a “hoax” during a UN address last week. Leo also encouraged Russia and Ukraine to discuss an end to the war, and criticized leaders who are “beginning to speak about nuclear weapons and wars that are becoming ⁠ever more destructive”.

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  While the lawmakers in the US House have already left Washington to get a head start on midterm campaigning, the Senate is hoping to wrap up its legislative agenda this week. Today, we can expect a vote in the upper chamber on the Protect College Sports Act, which attempts to provide greater protections for university athletes in the US. The bill includes provisions for players to earn compensation from their name, image and likeness – known as NIL payments – and allow them to transfer schools (and teams) without being penalized or forced to sit out for a defined period of time.

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  The state department will revoke the visas of 27 Latin American officials, former officials and their families, over allegations of ‘corruption and narco-trafficking’. Those affected include Bolivian attorney general RogerMariaca, more than 20 other Bolivian prosecutors and judges, two Colombians, two Ecuadorians and one Peruvian judge.

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  Samuel Alito has recused himself from a major climate-change case before the supreme court after calls for him to step aside due to his stock holdings in oil companies. The court is expected to hear arguments from local officials in Boulder, Colorado, alleging officials at SunCor Energy and ExxonMobil deceived the public about the role of fossil fuels in climate change. After Colorado’s supreme court refused to dismiss the lawsuit, the defendants filed a petition with the US supreme court asking them to shut down the case.

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Anthropic will caution investors that artificial intelligence could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” in its IPO prospectus.

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As Anthropic prepares for an IPO listing, which could value the AI company at a monumental $2tn, it dedicated almost a third of its prospectus to discussing concerns around AI safety. The document highlights risks that AI models could exhibit “self-preserving behaviors”, including attempts to “resist shutdown” and behavior “resembling blackmail”.

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“Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further ⁠increase the risk that our models cause harm,” Anthropic said in the prospectus.

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As we reported earlier this month:

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Safety concerns have not slowed down Anthropic’s own IPO plans so far. Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest and complete the listing days before the US midterm elections in November, people familiar with the matter told Reuters this month.

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Samuel Alito has recused himself from a major climate-change case before the supreme court after calls he step aside due to his stock holdings in oil companies

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The court is expected to hear arguments from local officials in Boulder, Colorado alleging officials at SunCor Energy and ExxonMobil deceived the public about the role of fossil fuels in climate change. After Colorado’s supreme court refused to dismiss the lawsuit, the defendants filed a petition with the US supreme court asking them to shut down the case. In an appeal backed by the Trump administration, the fossil fuel companies argue the lawsuit is a serious threat to the industry and that state courts are not the proper venue to address a global issue.

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In a letter posted today, Alito did not specify a reason for recusing himself from the case, though he has recused himself from other cases involving companies where he holds stock in the past. While Alito does not hold stock in SunCor Energy or ExxonMobil, he does have holdings in other oil companies like ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66.

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Pete Hegseth ordered the defense department to ‘protect and uphold the reliability of America’s voting mechanisms against external manipulation and disruption from foreign actors’ in a 22 September memo first reported by Axios.

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In the memo, Hegseth directed the leaders of US cyber command and the combat support agencies to prioritize “intelligence and cyber capabilities to ensure foreign actors do notmeddle in our democratic system”.

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He also directed the Defense Intelligence Enterprise to “execute collection and production on foreign threats to our elections” and US cyber command to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security “to counter potential cyber threats from foreign actors targeting our elections”.

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Hegseth’s order comes as concerns about artificial intelligence are on the rise, but also as the Trump administration has spread misinformation about voter fraud. In July, Trump accused China of interfering in the 2020 election, which he lost.

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As my colleague Robert Tait reported at the time, Democrats warned that Donald Trump was trying to sow confusion, spread misinformation and lay the groundwork to challenge the results of the midterm elections, which polls suggest could deliver significant losses for the president’s party.

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  Donald Trump confirmed that the US negotiating team spoke with Iranian officials through mediators today. This comes after the president rejected the latest ceasefire proposal from Tehran over the weekend, and in response Iran said it has “no plans” to negotiate with Washington. However, in the Oval Office today, Trump was resolute.“We’re going to win,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s going to be one way or the other. It’s going to be it’s going to go pretty quickly.”

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  Trump will also be on the campaign trail this week – hosting rallies in Durant, Oklahoma, on Thursday, Mobile, Alabama, on Friday and Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday. The first two states are GOP strongholds, and Trump has pushed voters to turn out to the polls and pretend the president was at the top of the ballot this midterm cycle. There are now growing concerns from national Republicans that the party is facing stronger headwinds in otherwise safe seats and states, amid record-low polling for the Trump administration.

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  Andrew Bailey said he is stepping down as one of the FBI’s two deputy directors after just over a year in the role – a short tenure that unfolded as he helped oversee several of Trump’s election‑related investigations. Bailey was appointed in August 2025 to serve alongside Dan Bongino at a moment of sharp tension between FBI and justice department leadership over the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The move was striking because the bureau has historically had only a single deputy director. More here

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  While the lawmakers in the US House have already left Washington to get a head start on midterm campaigning, the Senate is hoping to wrap up its legislative agenda this week. Today, we can expect a vote in the upper chamber on the Protect College Sports Act, which attempts to provide greater protections for university athletes in the US. The bill includes provisions for players to earn compensation from their name, image and likeness – known as NIL payments – and allow them to transfer schools (and teams) without being penalized or forced to sit out for a defined period of time.

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  Trump also spent some of his weekend posting about his frustration with the US supreme court, after the justices repeatedly blocked Missouri from using a Republican-friendly congressional map for the upcoming midterm elections that the president had backed. “They continuously, three times now, overrule Judges who came to the correct decisions,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, in another stunning rebuke of the judiciary. The president has increased his pushback against the top court, particularly after rulings Trump considers unfavorable in the last year.

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Donald Trump confirmed that the US negotiating team spoke with Iranian officials through mediators today. This comes after the president rejected the latest ceasefire proposal from Tehran, and Iran said it has “no plans” to negotiate with Washington.

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Once again, Trump was resolute.

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“We’re going to win,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s going to be one way or the other. It’s going to be it’s going to go pretty quickly.”

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When asked what his message to voters is ahead of the midterms, as he prepares to campaign in Oklahoma, Alabama and Ohio, Donald Trump insisted that Republicans are “running against communists, lunatics, socialists”.

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“We’re running against people that are going to open up the border,” Trump said, while repeating that the US is going to win the war in Iran “very soon”.

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“That’ll be over, and the gas prices will come tumbling down,” the president said, as the average price for a gallon of fuel is more than a dollar higher than it was before the conflict began in February.

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Trump went on to blast the polls as “fake”, many of which show Republicans, like Hinson, in neck-and-neck races in states that Trump won by double-digits in 2024.

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This week, as part of his efforts to boost Republicans on the ballot ahead of the November midterms, Donald Trump will be on the campaign trail and hosting rallies in Durant, Oklahoma, on Thursday, Mobile, Alabama, on Friday and Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday.

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The first two states are GOP strongholds, and Trump has pushed voters to turn out to the polls and pretend the president was at the top of the ballot this midterm cycle.

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There are now growing concerns from national Republicans that the party is facing stronger headwinds in otherwise safe seats and states, amid record-low polling for the Trump administration. The president initially said that he would focus on campaigning for GOP candidates in 35 competitive races, telling supporters at the GOP midterm convention that his time was best spent in those battlegrounds in the run-up to November.

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Andrew Bailey announced that he was leaving his position as one of the FBI’s two deputy directors after just over a year on the job. He said he would be returning to Missouri to spend time with his family.

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Bailey was named co-deputy director in August 2025 to serve alongside Dan Bongino at a time of high tensions between FBI and justice department leadership over the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. The appointment was unusual because the FBI has only had one person at a time in the deputy director position, the bureau’s No 2 job.

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A former attorney general from Missouri and ardent Republican backer of Donald Trump, Bailey remained in his position after Bongino announced his departure and as the FBI in January added another deputy director, veteran agent Christopher Raia, to serve under director Kash Patel.

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Bailey announced his resignation from the FBI in a post on X on Monday in which he thanked Trump, attorney general Todd Blanche and Patel for “the opportunity to serve in the FBI”.

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Bo French, a Texas Republican running to lead a powerful state agency, has a history of making controversial social media posts, including calling for the public execution of Democratic leaders, according to a recent investigation from CNN’s KFile team.

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French, who is running to lead Texas’s railroad commission, has recently faced criticism from members of his own party after making a racist post on social media. Powerful Republicans, including the Texas senator John Cornyn, said they would not support French in the upcoming election.

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But the latest spat over French’s social media has led to a deeper look at his online history. In a review of old posts from social media accounts that seemingly belonged to French, CNN’s KFile team found that the Texas Republican repeatedly called for public executions of opponents.

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The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced a new policy restricting visas for foreign officials, judges and others deemed responsible for obstructing the return of American children abducted across international borders, as well as for their immediate family members.

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In a press release, Rubio said:

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When foreign government officials, judges, judicial administrators, law enforcement officials, and others intentionally obstruct the prompt resolution of these cases, they prolong family separations and block the return of children to the United States … This policy gives the Department a new accountability tool to press non-compliant countries to meet their obligations.

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The statement did not name any countries or individuals targeted.

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After the Department of Homeland Security said that it is actively tracking a so-call “migrant caravan” which departed San Pedro Sula, Honduras last week, and is traveling through Mexico for the southern US border, Marjorie Taylor Greene – the former congresswoman and ex-Trump ally, said that the news is a fear-mongering tactic ahead of the November midterms.

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“We have not seen a caravan headed to the U.S. southern border in several years, why now? Oh yeah, there is an election coming and the GOP needs to scare you into voting because nothing else is working,” she wrote on X.

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Greene has become a notable critic of her former party after she left Congress at the beginning of this year – breaking from Donald Trump and many of her colleagues on key issues like the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, US support of Israel and the Iran war. Subsequently, the president branded Greene a “lunatic”.

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While the lawmakers in the US House have already left Washington to get a head start on midterm campaigning, the Senate is hoping to wrap up its legislative agenda this week. Today, we can expect a vote at 5.30pm ET on the Protect College Sports act, which attempts to provide greater protections for university athletes in the US.

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The bill includes provisions for players to earn compensation from their name, image and likeness – known as NIL payments, and allow them to transfer schools (and teams) without being penalized or forced to sit out for a defined period of time. If the legislation clears the Senate it will still need to head back to the lower chamber before it can head to Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.

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Donald Trump offered to sell weapons to China while hosting its leader, Xi Jinping, last week, the US ambassador to China said on Sunday.

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David Perdue told Fox News on Sunday: “President Trump continues to say, hey, we sell arms to other people around the world. He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point.”

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On Monday, Chinese state media praised the “extraordinary level of courtesy” that Trump had shown Xi on the Chinese leader’s visit to Washington.

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The extraordinary claim came during an interview about US policy on Taiwan, which has been waiting for months for Trump to approve a new arms sales ⁠package worth $14bn (£10.5bn), after a record multibillion-dollar deal was announced in December last year.

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Trump’s level of commitment to protecting Taiwan has previously been questioned. At a meeting with Xi in Beijing in May, ⁠Trump said he was keeping the $14bn Taiwan arms sales package in abeyance, describing it as a “very good negotiating chip” in dealings with China.

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Washington has long maintained a strategically ambiguous stance on whether it would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. But under the decades-old Taiwan Relations Act, it is required to provide Taipei with sufficient military equipment to defend itself.

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Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

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State media in Iran has reported that Iran’s delegation to the UN general assembly had no talks planned with the United States, after Donald Trump said he expected more negotiations.

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“Iran’s delegation in New York has no plans for negotiations with the United States,” said the official Irna news agency, citing an unnamed source close to the group.

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The US president told media outlet Axios on Sunday that he expected talks to resume soon, a day after he rejected a proposal by Tehran to reopen the strait of Hormuz within seven days.

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“Iran’s views and positions were conveyed clearly and explicitly to the US side … via a Qatari mediator,” Irna said, adding that the Iranian delegation would return to Tehran on Tuesday.

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Iran says it presented seven conditions for ending the war and reopening the strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil and gas flowed before the war.

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The strait lies at the heart of the conflict that began with US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February. Following that attack, Tehran placed a chokehold on the waterway, and Washington responded with a blockade of Iranian ports.

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Axios said indirect talks mediated by Qatar could take place as early as today, less than a week after similar discussions between US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi.

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Iran demands a seven-day ceasefire across the Middle East, including in Lebanon, where its ally Hezbollah is regularly bombarded by Israel.

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It also demands the unfreezing of its foreign assets, lifting sanctions on its oil sector, and an end to the US naval blockade. Trump rejected their demands on Saturday.

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In other developments:

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  The Trump administration on Monday plans to release new fuel economy standards that would relax regulatory requirements for automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and light trucks. Donald Trump said on his Truth Social media account on Saturday that the less stringent mileage requirements would “take the waste out of building cars in America” and save families “thousands on a new, beautiful and safe car”, while boosting auto production in the US.

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  Donald Trump’s attorney general Todd Blanche argued on Sunday that the administration was permitted to ban three news outlets from the White House because “it is a privilege and not a right to be there”. Appearing on the ABC News program This Week during the second week of the White House’s dispute over press credentialing and access, Blanche also said that the administration took the decision to ban CNN, MS Now and Politico beginning on 19 September because the president was “sick and tired” of what he considered to be those media outlets’ inaccurate reporting.

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  US senator Thom Tillis on Sunday criticized Donald Trump, his fellow Republican, for the president’s support of Ken Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn in the Texas Senate Republican primary. “He made a colossal mistake,” Tillis, a frequent Trump critic from North Carolina, said during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union in reference to the president’s support of Paxton, who defeated Cornyn in the May primary.

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  The United States and China released Monday reciprocal lists of products worth about $30bn each that will see tariff cuts, in a deal expected to boost bilateral trade. The details came days after Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Donald Trump in Washington in his first state visit to the US since 2015.

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  Trump justified the pending US arms sale to Taiwan to Chinese president Xi Jinping by downplaying it as just one of many sales Washington makes around the world – even asking Xi if he’d be in the market for US arms, Trump’s ambassador to China said on Sunday.

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  House Democrats are preparing a vast oversight agenda, with investigations of Trump, his family and his administration if the party sweeps control of the chamber from Republicans in the November elections. The undertaking is as robust as it is daunting, spanning several House committees.

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Key events