Technical issue causes global flight disruption

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This is the global news podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Charlotte Gallagher and at 3.30 GMT on Saturday the 29th of November, these are our main stories.

Passengers around the world have been told to expect disruption and delays as airlines work to install urgent software modifications to thousands of Airbus planes.

President Trump says he'll pardon the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who's serving a long jail term in the US on drugs and weapons charges.

Also in this podcast, the WHO issues guidelines on infertility and how it could be treated. Infertility is far more common than people realize.

This can really lead to very difficult consequences and it can have, of course, severe mental health impacts.

You're listening to the newsroom from the BBC World Service with me, Charlotte Gallagher.

As we record this podcast, the European aerospace company Airbus has requested immediate modifications to thousands of its planes because of a technical problem.

About 6,000 planes were recalled after the discovery that an intense burst of radiation from the sun had affected one of the flight computers of a plane while it was flying over the US, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing.

Airlines around the world have warned that there could be delays and cancellations. Tim Johnson is from the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK.

Unfortunately, it may mean there is some disruption, maybe some delays, maybe some kind of cancellations over the coming days.

But, you know, the airlines, so my advice to kind of consumers would be sort of check the airline website and check the airline app for the latest information about what's happening.

Our global affairs reporter, Sebastian Usher, gave me more details.

Airbus essentially took this to the aviation authorities themselves after an A320 operated by JetBlue, which was flying over the US, had a sudden uncontrolled descent.

Several people were injured, it made an emergency landing, and that was due to a solar storm. And essentially, the computer software, which had recently been updated, wasn't up to dealing with that.

It was corrupted by that. So what Airbus has really, I think, suggested is that this is extra caution.

They don't think that this is an issue that's actually going to affect their planes right across the board, but they feel that this has to be dealt with now.

So 6,000, which is about half the fleet of A320s, will need to be looked at. And how quick can they fix this problem? I mean, can they fix this problem?

As far as we know at the moment, this can be fixed. And for most of the planes involved, around 5,000 of them, this should be a very quick fix.
This should be able to be done just in a few hours.

This is a software update. There are maybe a thousand planes which will need to have new hardware, new computer installed.
That means they could be grounded for weeks.

So that means that there is obviously a greater potential for disruption. But the A320 is the most popular plane that Airbus produces.

It makes up a considerable amount of the whole global fleet of planes. So the fact that it is that particular plane that this problem has been found with obviously has consequences.

And what kind of impact is this going to have on passengers?

Right, left and centre airlines are talking about their fleet of A320s. Some are saying we think that we can fix this problem within a matter of hours.
It shouldn't really have any disruption.

But at the moment what we're hearing from airports is that they don't expect any major disruption.

I mean this is obviously a very, very busy time of year in the US and elsewhere for people travelling.

So the potential for that disruption is there, but it doesn't look as if it's going to be a major, major worldwide incident that's going to essentially cause endless headaches and problems for people trying to get planes.

Sounds like it could be a major cost, though, for Airbus having to fix this. And also, the fact that so many of the fleet are not going to be operational.

That's an issue, but I mean, that's something that a company of that nature will have taken into account. I think reputationally is the issue.

People are hearing about problems with very popular jet planes, and it makes people concerned for their safety.

And this is an absolute workhorse of a plane, so that is bound to have a reputational effect on on Airbus.

If it's sorted out quickly, if there's no sense of any lingering danger, it may be something that all kind of disappears within a week or two. Sebastian Usher, make Honduras great again.

With those words, Donald Trump has again intervened in the country's upcoming presidential election.

Writing on social media, he urged people to vote for the right-wing candidate, saying the wrong leader can only bring catastrophic results. In the same post, Mr.

Trump also said he'll pardon a former Honduran president who was convicted of drug trafficking in the US. I've been speaking to our correspondent in Honduras, Will Grant.

But what seems to be at play is the idea that he's basically urging Hondurans to vote for the Conservative candidate, Nasri Asfura.

He has a favoured candidate and he's prepared to be very public about that ahead of an election, which in and of itself isn't the norm for Washington, which tends to sort of reserve its judgment under previous administrations.

But that's not Donald Trump's way. So, that much we know.

What has been so surprising is that in that same social media posting, he continued to say that he was planning to pardon the disgraced ex-president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been sentenced to 45 years in a US prison last year for drug trafficking and weapons smuggling.

So, the idea that Donald Trump, who was an ally with Juan Orlando Hernandez when the two men were in office at the same time during Mr.

Trump's first term, the idea that he would actually overrule a U.S.

federal judge on something this sensitive and say, I'm going to let him out, I'm going to pardon him, and one presumes he would come back to Honduras, is extremely shocking and worrying to ordinary Hondurans.

And I think what a lot of people will find surprising, Will, is this comes at a time when President Trump is launching these major operations against drug cartels in the region.

He's designating them as terrorist groups, and this ex-president is in prison for drug trafficking.

Yeah, it certainly raises serious questions about the strategy and the seriousness of exactly what's going on in terms of, if you like, the new war on drugs in the Americas.

You're right, the Trump administration is, of course, in the midst of this major naval and military build-up in the region.

It has involved the most important warship in their armada, in their military, as part of what is clear saber-rattling against the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, who they accuse of leading what they say is a narco-terrorist organization called the Cartel of the Sons.

Now, the idea that they would be doing that on the one hand while simultaneously pardoning Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is held up, if you like, in the Americas as the most egregious example in the modern context of drug trafficking and executive power, the relationship between presidential politics and organized crime in Latin America since essentially the Panamanian strongman, Manuel Noriega, in the 1980s.

That is a significant development, and as I say, would raise serious questions about the strategy of the White House and Washington more generally.

That was Will Grant. We stay with President Trump because he's taken another swipe at his predecessor, Joe Biden.
He says he'll terminate every executive order the former U.S.

president approved using a machine that duplicated his signature. Autopen is a system that's widely used all over the world, but Mr.
Trump says other people signed the majority of documents, not Mr.

Biden. Our North America correspondent, Nomir Rickval, reports.

Many presidents have used it, many politicians, many celebrities even to sign everything from correspondence to merchandise and so forth.

Now when President Trump says that he terminates it, he doesn't have the authority to do that. But he's had this fixation with President Biden and the Autopen.

He believes this conspiracy theory amongst conservatives that President Biden wasn't in charge in the White House, that everything he signed wasn't signed by him, there was a cover-up of his cognitive decline, and so therefore all the actions he took are null and void.

And he's had this particular fixation on pardons. So we know that President Biden preemptively pardoned a lot of people, including his own son.
And Mr.

Trump floated this theory before summer saying that those pardons were not legitimate. But he also said back in March that this wouldn't really go far, that it would go up to the courts and that's it.

But it's really hard to see how he would undo any of President Biden's work. I mean, what he can do is introduce his own executive orders to undo a lot of President Biden's work.

In terms of the pardon, when you look at the US Constitution, it's really hard to see what the mechanism is to undo a pardon.

So it's really hard to see where President Trump thinks he has the authority to do this, but he has been on somewhat of a social media splurger the last couple of days, making a lot of claims in his truth posts about things that he doesn't really have the ability to do.

That was Naomi Rikbau. The World Health Organization has issued guidelines on the causes of infertility and how it could be treated.
Its report also warns of the psychological and social effects.

Around one in eight people suffer infertility issues during their lifetime, and a third of infertile women experience violence from their partners.

Julie Barlin is a professor of global health at Canterbury Christchurch University here in the UK. She spoke to my colleague Andrew Peach.
It's a very important data.

It's really a milestone in infertility globally because, as you know, the WHO has launched, really was the first ever global guidelines on infertility.

And these guidelines address prevention of infertility, the diagnosis of infertility, and the treatment of infertility actually worldwide. And it's really a starting point.

What will come after the guidelines is also additional adaptation and also implementation tools to help countries and national health systems to implement the guidelines according to their particular specific context.

Give me a sense of what the most common causes of infertility are. So, causes of infertility

can can be female causes, they can be causes in men, they can be causes in both partners, and that can be, you know, regardless of sex or gender, and they can also remain unexplained.

So, these are how we categorize the different causes. And the important thing to know is that actually infertility is far more common than people realize.

Actually, a recent WHO study from 2023 shows that one in six people, that's 17.5% of the global population, experience infertility at some point in their lives. And also it's a shared issue.

So it's not necessarily a woman's issue. It's actually a shared issue.
Causes can be in men or in women.

I was going to pick up on that because there's a cultural perception is very much that if there's infertility it's the responsibility of the woman.

In some parts of the world the woman's even subjected to violence if that is the case. And even the medical treatment is usually focused on the woman.
And yet the cause of it could be on either side.

Absolutely. And there's a lot of focus and also attention and also stress and the stigma that goes with all of that that is focused on women.

That's true, I think, everywhere in the world, but particularly in some of the countries where I and my research group work in the global south.

In many of these countries, for social or for cultural reasons, women are expected to usually conceive within the first year of marriage. And if this doesn't happen, it's blamed on the woman.

And so this can really lead to very difficult consequences, interpersonal violence, divorce.

The women get excluded from family, from social events, and it can have, of course, severe mental health impacts, even leading to suicide. And men are a very, very important part of the picture.

We've done research on men who have had infertility within their couple, and they also say it's very, very difficult for them, but this remains a hidden issue.

And what we're working on is to try and transform this issue so that it becomes less of a gendered issue and more of a couple's issue. That was global health expert Julie Barlin.

Still to come, Russian scientists are reported to have launched a squadron of remote-controlled spy pigeons for secret missions.

They're claiming that these neural chips can be implanted in pigeons to allow swarms of them to be effectively steered and controlled in real time. We know how useful drones are.

I suppose the point about pigeons is they can blend in undercover.

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Now to Ukraine. As Chief of Staff Andrei Yermak was a key ally of President Zelensky and pivotal in the recent talks about the latest US proposals to end the war with Russia.

Here he is in Geneva last Sunday, alongside the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. We have very good progress and we are moving forward to the just and lasting peace.

And I hope that we can achieve the good progress today. Thank you.

Let's get back to work, and we'll be back to you pretty soon, okay? Thank you. Thank you.

But on Friday, Mr. Yermak resigned after anti-corruption investigators raided his home in Kiev.
This is part of President Zelensky's nightly TV address, voiced by a translator.

There will be a reboot of the office of the President of Ukraine. The chief of the office, Andriy Yermok, has filed a resignation notice.

I thank Andriy for representing the Ukrainian position in negotiations always the way it had to be represented.

It was always a patriotic position, but I want to ensure that there is no room for gossip and speculations.

Regarding the new head of the office, tomorrow I will have the consultations with those who can lead the institution. The President also appealed for unity.
Mr.

Yermak has been under pressure for his links to senior figures suspected of involvement in a massive corruption scandal, but he's not been named as a suspect and denies wrongdoing.

Our correspondent in Kyiv is Abdul Jalil Abdurasilov. The anti-corruption agencies that searched the house of Andrei Yermak didn't announce the reasons of that search and later on they said that Mr.

Yermak was not named as a suspect. However, this is happening amid the major corruption scandal that has engulfed the entire country.

And top government officials were allegedly involved in an embezzlement scheme that had certain kickback systems and that allowed these officials to enrich themselves.

And anti-corruption activists believed that this arrangement would be impossible without the knowledge of Andriy Yermak because top government officials and people close to President Zelensky were allegedly involved in this scheme and therefore they demanded his resignation.

Even though Mr. Yermak's name was not used in those tapes that were leaked and released by anti-corruption agencies, there is still understanding that Mr.
Yermak is still in the center of the scandal.

That was Abdul Jalil Abdurasilov. Oleksander Maresko chairs Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Committee and is a member of President Zelensky's Servant of the People Party.

Andrew Peach asked him what he made of Mr. Yermak's resignation.
Well, it was expected in a sense that Mr. Yermak has been for a long time not very popular.

And during, for example, the last meeting between the faction and the president, the issue was raised about his dismissal.

I understand that for president he was the right hand and to find another top manager might be quite a challenge.

But generally speaking, I believe that this is the right decision by the president because it's an attempt attempt to bring back trust.

Now, you say not very popular, clearly popular enough with President Zelensky, who sent him to do the all-important negotiation last weekend in Geneva about the possibility of ending the war with Russia.

So who not very popular with?

Well, I'm talking about Mr. Yermak in a sense that he was playing sort of the role of the light linrod, I would say.
He would attract all the criticism.

But, you know, he was in a way effective in terms of negotiating on the international arena.

But at the same time, he was suspected of being involved in the corruption scandal. And of course, so far, he was not charged officially.

But, you know, as the president himself has said, that it's important for all the people in Hezan Rush, and especially negotiating with our partners, to be above any suspicion and to get rid of the risk.

rid of any doubts with regard to people close to the president. But President Zelensky clearly had faith and confidence in this man a matter of days ago.

It's changed because of an anti-corruption raid. That basically shows us that the president put faith in the wrong person, doesn't it?

Well, it's hard to say because it's up to the president to decide. It was his decision.
He chose Mr.

Yermak, and Yermak was very close, I understand, even a friend of President Zelensky because he proved himself in a positive light right after the full-scale invasion.

So for this reason, he was in a way even indispensable for President Zelensky. But he's been dispensed of.
Therefore it's a huge loss. The government is in disarray.

This man is almost the vice president as I understand it and he's gone.

But it proves that for President Zelensky what really matters are interests of the country and he

even eager to get rid of his close associates and even friends for the sake of interests of the country. He puts interests of the country over his friendship.

If he was doing that, surely this would have happened a long time ago, because his allegations have been swirling around for 18 months or more.

When we had a conversation, a meeting with President Zelensky, and when the issue was raised about Mr.

Yermak, he said that if there is a proof that anyone was involved in corruption, there should be serious political and legal consequences, no matter who he is.

And I would like to remind that President Zelensky got rid of his first chief of staff. What happens now, though?

Because he's lost the person who is involved in this very crucial and delicate negotiation. He's lost his right-hand man.

I realize he's got to reorganise his office, but how does the government function without someone who is so central to it?

Well, as for peace negotiations, and for us it's now a top priority, I'm certain that Mr Yermak's resignation will not have negative consequences and everything will continue as it is.

How can you be certain of that? He was running the thing.

Well, a process of negotiations is a process related to a big machine, and there are lots of people who play different roles, and there are no, I would say, indispensable people in this process.

But if you're Vladimir Putin sitting in Moscow, you can't regard this as anything other than good news, can you?

I'm sure that if, for example, the situation remained as it is with all these suspicions and doubts, it would be definitely used by Putin because they use any weakness on the part of Ukraine or any issue, any problem, and it might have been used also for all kinds of provocations.

So that's why maybe the president decided to get rid of completely of even slightest doubts with regard to a negotiating team. Is corruption endemic in Ukraine?

Because some evidence of corruption was there long before the Russian invasion in 2022, and it still seems to be there to the same extent now.

Unfortunately, democratic states are not immune from corruption. But the key question is whether you have special agencies which fight effectively against corruption.

And for me, it's even a triumph of justice because it proves that our anti-corruption agency is truly independent and they're effective in fighting corruption even at the top of the hierarchy.

We're not so many months after President Zelensky was under fire for having tried to curb the independence of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and got quite a bit of grief for that.

Yeah, luckily, the president very quickly backtracked on this terrible mistake. And his reaction, luckily, was swift and he managed to rectify the whole situation.

Does this bring us any closer to elections in Ukraine?

Absolutely not, because even the opposition agree that while the war continues, while we have martial law, we cannot have elections from a legal perspective, of course, and politically.

We can hold elections only when the country will be safe. Nina Dos Santos is a foreign affairs commentator.
So, what of Oleksandr Moresko's point there? That the problem has been contained, has it?

Well, it's predictable that any government official of a ruling party would try and take that brace for impact and then move on position, Andrew.

Not least if it's a country like Ukraine that is at war with a bigger neighbor like Russia that's very aggressive.

But I would argue that this scandal has been coming for quite some time, and it's also one that presents some real political jeopardy for Ukraine's beleaguered President Zelensky.

There's a few reasons for that. One, as you heard there from Oleksanda Moresko, Andrew Yermak has been unpopular inside Ukraine and outside of Ukraine for quite some time.

There's been concerns that he's monopolised power and access to President Zelensky.

Remember, this is also a corruption issue and corruption is a tool that the Kremlin knows full well it can use to try and cleave Kyiv away from the very European institutions that can protect it in the future if it wants wants to become more pro-Western.

This could undermine Ukraine's ambition to become part of the European Union.

And I think the last reason why it's important is because it chimes with the Ukrainian people who right now are dealing with rolling blackouts and Russia targeting the energy infrastructure.

This is essentially part of a probe that is part of two investigations that the authorities in Ukraine are pursuing.

One surrounds military procurement of a country that's at war, and the other one involves energy that the beleaguered people in Ukraine can't get their hands on at the moment.

And plenty of negative impact then inside Ukraine from this resignation and the context around it. What about the impact on the negotiations over these U.S.
peace proposals?

That's a big unknown here.

It seems as though President Zelensky had to make this decision in rather hasty fashion, because remember, Andrei Yermak more or less acted as his praetorian guard ever since he was elected back in 2019.

Zelensky's presidency essentially has been dominated by two things. One was the impeachment saga in Donald Trump's first term.

And then secondly, it has been his country's attempt to defend itself after the Russian invasion in 2022.

And Andrei Yermak has been the person who has transformed President Zelensky from being this comedic actor, famous for playing the president, to the kind of Churchill of Ukraine of our time.

Who is going to have the president's back now? Who's going to act as his ultimate political fixer and try and defend him from further criticism?

And who will negotiate with the Americans when, of course, the United States has presented just a week or so ago this plan in very direct fashion.

Yes, it's been changed somewhat, but President Zelensky has said he wants to go to Washington, D.C. to talk about this plan.
And that offer hasn't yet been taken up by the White House.

But Steve Witkoff, who's also facing his own accusations after leaked conversations with Russian aides in the last few days, will still be going to Moscow.

So it does leave Ukraine and Ukraine's president bitterly exposed at a time like this when, of course, the conversations with the United States and the Kremlin are going to continue, even with somebody else who's facing his own accusations as well of bias, Steve Witkoff.

And Russia will be looking for absolutely any weakness to exploit, and they'd like to point to the corruption that's been around in Ukraine. Yes, that's right.

I was looking at Transparency International's latest figures for 2024, and Ukraine has slipped further down the ranks.

It currently stands at 105 out of 180 countries below the likes of the Dominican Republic.

And as I said before, corruption really is that Achilles' heel that Russia will continue to try and exploit to undermine President Zelensky's presidency.

And with Yermak gone, they may now be in a better position to do so, Andrew. Foreign Affairs commentator Nino Dos Santos speaking to Andrew Peach.

People have been getting tattoos for thousands of years, but even today, scientists still don't know exactly what health risks they bring with them.

A new study, though, suggests there could be a link between tattoos and a certain type of skin cancer, melanoma. The researchers say there's no need to panic, though.
Will Chalk has the story.

The link was discovered in a study done in Sweden by Crystal Nielsson, an epidemiologist at Lund University.

Before you think she doesn't have skin in the game, so to speak.

I noticed noticed from your picture on the university website that you yourself have a tattoo on your arm. I might have more tattoos than just the tattoo on my arm, I can admit to that as well.

But I mean, that sparked my interest.

It turns out, even though millions of us have tattoos, there's been surprisingly little research into them. And when you think about it, it's easy to see why.

It's not the type of thing that tends to be written in your medical records.

So for this study, Professor Nielsen and her team have to work backwards and and start not with the tattoos but with the melanoma.

In the Scandinavian countries we have this historical tradition of keeping population registries.

So what we were able to do was to track everyone who was diagnosed with melanoma at the age of 20 to 60 years during 2017

and we then matched them meaning that we identified individuals of the same sex and age but without melanoma from the population registries.

Her team sent out questionnaires both to the people with melanoma and to their healthy counterparts, asking about their lifestyles, how much time they spent in the sun, and also whether they had tattoos.

They found, once they'd allowed for the other factors, the tattoos represented a 29% higher risk of melanoma. So, if you've got an inking appointment coming up, should you cancel?

It's important to keep in mind that we're talking about a relatively rare disease, a disease that is rare to begin with. So, on an individual level, it's not a huge risk increase.

Professor Nielsen wants this research to be a starting point, and if a link is confirmed, there might be changes in the inks, say, that could alleviate it.

But exactly how much risk would put people off altogether? I went out here in London to find out. My name's Mariana, I'm a graduate master's law student.
Hi, I'm Alex. I'm a chef.

Do you guys have any tattoos? One myself. I have seven or eight.
And is it worth taking a slight risk, you think, on your health?

If there was enough research and studies to show that it actually has a proper impact, then yeah, I'd probably get a lot less or stop getting tattoos. But the signs would have to be there.

Drive cars, we smoke cigarettes, we drink alcohol, there's a lot of other things. Yeah.
Can't stop doing things in your life just because there's risks. Everything has risks.

Mariana and Alex, ending that report by Will Chalk.

Finally, how useful would it be when at war to have an airborne spy carrying messages while perfectly blending into enemy territory? We've had such a thing for over a century. Pigeons, of course.

They were used for communication during the First and Second World War, and some were even awarded medals for gallantry, as shown in this clip from British Pathé from 1944.

Mrs.

Alexander, wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty, hears from Wing Commander Rainer the exploits of Gustave and Paddy, two D-Day carrier pigeons, decorated with the Dicken Dicken Medal for Gallantry, awarded by the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals.

Paddy, an Irish pigeon, was trained in England by a Scotsman with a Welsh assistant.

And he carried his normal day message for the Americans.

But like military equipment, pigeons have moved on. It's reported that Russian scientists have launched a squadron of remote-controlled spy pigeons with brain implants.

Unlike the trained pigeons that helped the troops send messages in the First World War, these need no training, just some surgery to fly wherever they're directed.

Gordon Carrera is the author of the book Secret Pigeon Service. He's been speaking to Simon Jack.

Well, pigeons have a wonderful history because, of course, pigeons have a superpower, which is that homing pigeons can be trained to be released anywhere, somewhere that they've never been before, they don't recognise, and still, by this kind of superpower, find their way to their home loft.

So instantly, people realize, actually, from ancient times, that this was useful for communications, for sending messages, started to build up.

And you saw it, particularly actually in the First World War, it was used. And then in the start of the Second World War, you had fascinating uses for pigeons by British intelligence

used by commandos, dropped behind enemy lines when they needed to have radio silence.

Well, it now appears that this superpower can be just a bit of brain surgery and put a chip into the brain of a pigeon, or in fact, any bird.

What does this um what do we know about what these uh sort of bionic russian pigeons can do well bird biodrones is what they're being called in some of the reports this has come from a russian neurotechnology firm uh with some state links as with some tech firms i'm sometimes slightly skeptical about the uh the claims that are made by these tech firms but they're claiming that these neural chips can be implanted in pigeons to allow swarms of them to be effectively steered and controlled in real time.

Now, why would you do that? You'd say, well, you know, we know how useful drones are. I suppose the point about pigeons is they can blend in undercover.

You know, the whole worry is about, you know, drone shields to protect Eastern Europe. Well, I don't think it would be so easy to develop a pigeon shield.

So you can see the kind of potential risk for them. I'm slightly skeptical, slightly sceptical, that we've reached that stage yet.

But Russia is known to use a kind of lot of military experimentation and scientific experimentation on animals. Our enemies are developing pigeon capabilities, as we can see here with Russia.

China reported to have about 10,000 trained pigeons for the People's Liberation Army in case a cyber attack takes down communications. They'll use pigeons.

But when I ask senior national security officials here in the UK, and trust me, I've asked some of the most senior top people, do we have a spy pigeon capability? And I'm met with just blank looks.

I mean, absolutely blank looks, as if I'm asking something about, I hope that they're bluffing me. and there is a kind of secret, you know,

secret pigeon program. Yeah, which is being operated somewhere in the country, and they're just bluffing me.
But I fear we are falling behind on this capability. That was Gordon Carrera.

And that's all from us for now, but there will be a new edition of the Global News Podcast later. If you want to comment on this podcast or the topics covered in it, you can send us an email.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. You can also find us on X at BBC World Service.
Use the hashtag GlobalNewspod.

This edition was mixed by Chris Oblackwa, and the producers were Mazafa Shakir and Arian Kochi. The editor is Karen Martin.
I'm Charlotte Gallagher. Until next time, goodbye.

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