How Trump appeals to Americans who see themselves as victims

Kaddie Abdul wore her hijab at a Trump rally in Reno, Nevada, and writes: I attended Sunday’s rally with the intention to educate myself and, hopefully, to educate others. I didn’t go to shout at Trump’s supporters, no matter how passionately I feel about some of their claims. And it was interesting to hear Trump and his supporters’ viewpoints for more than just the few seconds offered by most soundbites.

His supporters are people, not caricatures. They feel marginalized economically, politically, and socially; they see a world different from the one they think should exist. Many non-Trump supporters are also concerned about the current economic and political state of our planet and its implications for a stabile future for our children.

What differentiates me from many of the Trump supporters I met this weekend is that their concerns for our future have led to an overwhelming need to see all of our problems as someone else’s fault.

To Trump and his supporters, Asian countries have “dumped” their goods in America and almost bankrupted our country by causing our trade deficit; Mexico won’t keep “illegals” (who are the “source” for Americans’ drugs) on their side of the border; and, of course, Muslims have “always” been fighting us, and come from countries populated by ingrates who are unwilling to pay for the wars that we started on “their” behalf.

But solving our trade deficit isn’t as simple as ending the supply of cheap Asian goods that Americans so happily consume. Mexico is not going to pay us to build us a wall. The rest of the world will not stand by and let the US seize Iraq’s oilfields (and thus control a significant supply of the world’s oil).

Trump’s supporters, though, love him for his outrageous suggestions; it provides them with a sense of empowerment and control. And his lack of specificity allows each person to hear what they want to hear. [Continue reading…]

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Fearmongering around Muslim immigrants echoes anti-Asian hysteria of past

Murtaza Hussain writes: On May 6, 1882, U.S. President Chester Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first in a series of discriminatory legal measures aimed at curbing immigration from Asia. Speaking at the time of its passage, California Sen. John F. Miller, a leading proponent of the law, declared that the Chinese were “an inferior sort of men” and that “Chinese civilization in its pure essence appears as a rival to American civilization. It is a product of a people alien in every characteristic to our people, and it has never yet produced and can never evolve any form of government other than an imperial despotism. Free government is incompatible with it, and both cannot exist together.”

There are echoes of Miller’s demagoguery, and of contemporaneous warnings about the supposed “Yellow Peril” posed by East Asians, in the warnings politicians and prominent media figures issue today about allegedly unassimilable immigrants and refugees from Muslim countries.

“The type of rhetoric we’re seeing today about Muslims is both very similar and also slightly different from that which was used to describe Asian immigrants in the past,” said University of Minnesota professor Erika Lee. A specialist in immigration studies, Lee is also author of the 2015 book The Making of Asian America, which chronicles in part the anti-Asian sentiment that new arrivals often had to contend with. “Like Muslims, Asian immigrants were characterized as a slowly creeping civilizational threat to the security and integrity of the United States, but today, with Muslims, there is also the additional allegation that they have a violent intent to overthrow the existing order.” [Continue reading…]

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It’s official: Sunnis joining Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units

Mustafa Saadoun reports: Sunnis are saying “sign me up” now that Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has approved the appointment of 40,000 Sunni fighters to the Popular Mobilization Units, a force that was once almost exclusively Shiite.

Samer al-Hamdani, who in 2014 fled from Baiji in northern Iraq to Baghdad, says he is ready to return to his liberated city and join up. He told Al-Monitor, “It is essential for the Popular Mobilization Units to include Iraqis of all spectra for it to become a national institution able to earn everybody’s approval and respect, away from sectarian labels.”

He added, “The presence of 40,000 Sunni fighters creates an important and necessary balance within the Popular Mobilization Units. But we hope the politicians’ positions and statements avoid sectarian incitement, so as not to offend the [group], which must be excluded from interventions and conflicts between the political blocs.” [Continue reading…]

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Russia accused of deliberately targeting civilians in Syria

The Guardian reports: Russia is breaching all the norms of war by deliberately targeting rescue workers, schools and hospitals in Syria, the UK foreign secretary has claimed, accusing the Russians of running return raids on targets inside Syria solely to hit civilian rescue workers.

Philip Hammond levelled his charges after meeting Syrian civil defence workers in Adana, southern Turkey. The rescue workers are being trained by the Turks to extract the injured and dying from the rubble of buildings struck by Syrian regime bombs or Russian raids.

In probably his toughest condemnation of Russian tactics since Vladimir Putin surprised the west by intervening militarily in Syria at the end of September, Hammond said: “The Russians are deliberately attacking civilians, and the evidence points to them deliberately attacking schools and hospitals and deliberately targeting rescue workers.

“If you go back for a second strike you know what you are doing.”

The west has long argued Russia is not targeting Islamic State but instead opponents of the Assad regime, but this is the furthest Hammond has gone in condemning the tactics of Russian pilots. [Continue reading…]

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What it’s like to live in the capital of the ISIS ‘caliphate’

Marwan Hisham (the pseudonym of a Syrian resident of Raqqa) writes: The Islamic State has worked hard to isolate Raqqa from the rest of the world. A few months ago, residents were deprived of Wi-Fi signals inside their homes, as the group had the signal extenders placed on rooftops removed. On Nov. 18, satellite Internet was banned, and Internet cafes were ordered to close. If the cafe wishes to reopen, it needs to gather two recommendations from Islamic State security forces, with their emirs’ signatures. You’ll need a license from the Islamic State’s intelligence office as well.

The Islamic State always describes any hardship or new restriction as resulting from the sins of those afflicted, and the Friday sermon that followed this decision was no exception. “People disobey God, and as such God inflicts upon them suffering,” a fighter preached.

However, it’s not only the Islamic State’s god who is dissatisfied. Raqqa’s citizens not only suffer from the group’s orders, but also the international war effort against it. Air raids have become practically a daily routine. On Nov. 3, the Russians joined the party. And then the French. Airstrikes damaged the main bridge on the Euphrates used by residents to enter the city and destroyed the other minor ones. It took an hour’s drive to get to the opposite bank. The West speaks of the necessity of cutting off Islamic State “supply routes,” but these are not Islamic State bridges — they are bridges used by everyone in Raqqa.

And yet, somehow life still goes on. Muhammad, who is 31 years old and displaced from Aleppo, and his fiancee are preparing for their wedding, as if in private defiance of the incredible challenges the world has thrown at them. A cousin’s little daughter reads a 9th-grade French book, trying to understand a single word.

Yet, when the jet fighters interrupt, all eyes turn to the sky. Everything here is a target, because the Islamic State is everywhere. But once the bombs are dropped, people go back to what they were doing. It’s no longer a moment of reflection about life and death, nor a moment of curiosity about what happened: It’s something that has no ending. [Continue reading…]

In the New York Times, Hisham writes: The Islamic State gives people one choice: Escape your poverty by fighting for us. The world has to offer people living under the Islamic State better choices. Stop the Assad government from bombing markets and bridges, and its Russian allies from bombing civilian infrastructure, as happened recently when a Russian airstrike reportedly hit a water main, cutting off water for the entire city.

Most of all, don’t dismiss as terrorists the citizens of occupied cities just because they were too poor to leave when the Islamic State took over. The people under this occupation present the best hope for destroying the jihadists. Without their support, the Islamic State can hardly be defeated. [Continue reading…]

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Istanbul suicide bomber went from dental school to ISIS

BuzzFeed reports: The man who blew himself up in Istanbul on Tuesday, killing 10 people, was a former dental student and member of ISIS who may have initially planned to carry out the attack on New Year’s Eve, sources told BuzzFeed News.

Nabil Fadli went from student at Aleppo University to anti-government rebel before casting his lot with ISIS radicals, people who knew him said.

“We fought for our revolution, but they wanted to build their Islamic state,” said one former rebel who fought alongside Fadli against the brutal government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, requesting anonymity because he feared retaliation from ISIS for speaking to the press. “We thought he was a good guy, but he’s a son of a bitch.”

Turkish authorities are still working to piece together a profile of Fadli, who entered the country as a refugee before attacking the heart of Istanbul, ratcheting up Turkey’s conflict with ISIS. But interviews with those who knew him in Syria provide new details about his path to terror — one that has become all too common over the course of the war.

They were still trying to come to grips with Fadli’s attack, which they saw as not only an act of terror, but also a bid to demonize 2 million of his countrymen who have been forced to take refuge in Turkey. “I was shocked when I heard what he did in Istanbul,” said Mohammed Bakir Hussein, who recalled studying with Fadli at Aleppo University, describing him as a well-liked student, quiet and conscientious. “It’s a very terrible thing.”

“He did it to make problems for the refugees,” the former rebel said. “He killed 10 people, but he put the 2 million Syrians in Turkey at risk.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkish prosecutors to investigate academics over Erdoğan petition

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The Guardian reports: Turkey has launched an investigation into academics who signed a petition criticising the military’s crackdown on Kurdish rebels in the south-east that angered President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

More than 1,200 academics from 90 Turkish universities calling themselves “Academicians for Peace”, as well as foreign scholars, signed the petition last week calling for an end to the months-long violence.

Entitled “We won’t be a party to this crime”, the petition urged Ankara to “abandon its deliberate massacre and deportation of Kurdish and other peoples in the region”.

It was signed by dozens of foreign luminaries and intellectuals, among them the US academic Noam Chomsky and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. [Continue reading…]

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Five years on, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution continues from the ground up

By Adnan Saif, University of Birmingham

Tunisians are marking five years since the culmination of their “Jasmine Revolution”. Since its longtime authoritarian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced out of office in January 2011, Tunisia has been embarking on a long transition to constitutional democracy – a transation that, although very bumpy at times, has nevertheless led to two successful multi-party elections and a new constitution.

The award of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize to the Tunisia National Dialogue Quartet, representing Tunisian civil society, was but one of many recognitions by the international community for the progress the country has made on its path to a stable and democratic new order.

During my many visits to Tunisia over the last four years, I witnessed the transition process through its highs and lows. My most recent visit was in August 2015, just after the terrorist attack in the coastal city of Sousse that left 38 people dead, mostly British tourists.

In spite of the tragic loss of life and the damage done to the national economy, Tunisians have developed a remarkable resilience and are able to pick themselves up and move on. That capacity is inspired in no small part by the country’s leaders, especially the two “sheikhs”, as some have now began to call them: president Beji Caid Essebsi and Rashid Al-Ghannoushi, respective leaders of the two largest political parties, Nidaa Tounes and Ennahdah.

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Palestinian citizens in Israel: A fast-shrinking civic space

Nadim Nashif and Raya Naamneh write: Israel still portrays itself as a Jewish and democratic state. Yet in practice, as its Palestinian citizens can attest, it functions as a Jewish ethnocracy, leaving small margins of freedom for its Palestinian citizens that have been steadily shrinking in the past few years. Now the Israeli state has come under the complete control of the far right wing, which sees no need even for such limited margins of freedom. This is evident in the wave of discriminatory legislation and the use of the Emergency Regulations against established non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and movements such as the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel.

The many laws that Israeli Knesset (parliament) and government have passed to constrain Palestinian citizens’ political participation and activism include, in 2011 alone, the “Anti-Boycott” law, which prohibits the public promotion of boycotts; the “Nakba” law, which prevents Palestinian commemoration of their catastrophe due to Israel’s creation in 1948; and the “Foreign Government Funding” law, which places onerous reporting requirements on NGOs. These laws have severely damaged the ability of Palestinian parties, NGOs, and activists to freely express their opinions and protest Israel’s crimes, both within and outside the Green Line.

More recently, a bill proposed by former foreign minister and current Member of Knesset (MK) Avigdor Lieberman would prohibit the Israeli Supreme Court from interfering in the Knesset’s Central Elections Committee decision to disqualify MKs based on their political stances. If approved, this bill would directly target Palestinian MKs, such as Haneen Zoubi and her party, “Balad – the National Democratic Alliance,” who have previously been faced with attempts to disqualify them.

In addition to targeting political participation at the government level, Israel has limited or prohibited the work of several NGOs at the municipal level. It is important to note that the NGOs impacted include both Palestinian and Israeli organizations fighting to expose Israel’s human rights violations and the apartheid regime it maintains in all of historic Palestine. [Continue reading…]

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Wikipedia at 15: In decline but condition isn’t terminal – so what may the future hold?

By Aleksi Aaltonen, University of Warwick

As Wikipedia reaches its 15th birthday, our perception of the free online encyclopedia feels quite different to when it launched. The controversy and excitement that surrounded the service in the early days has passed. This isn’t surprising. An encyclopedia is, after all, supposed to be merely a neutral collection of generally relevant knowledge.

Behind this sense of a coming of age are two opposing narratives – an incredible achievement, but also some signs of decline. First the positives: more than five million articles have been produced by more than 27m registered users in the English version alone.

The product that founder Jimmy Wales and his team have created is a story of explosive growth without the traditional foundations of organisations, such as managerial authority, contracts or revenue (donations aside). Wikipedia is said to be the seventh most visited website in the world.

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Happy birthday Wikipedia!

As Wikipedia turns 15 years old, it turns out that there is no richer source of information about Wikipedia than Wikipedia itself.

The circularity of being able to read about Wikipedia on Wikipedia, signals the intricate depth of this wonderful enterprise.

So, here’s a sampling of pages that provide doorways into the labyrinth (follow the links to read the complete articles):

Wikipedia’s description of itself: Wikipedia is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet’s largest and most popular general reference work.

History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia notability: On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article.

List of Wikipedias: This is a list of the different language editions of Wikipedia; as of January 2016 there are 291 Wikipedias of which 280 are active.

Wikipedia’s Top 5000 pages: This lists pages accessed during the last week (updated once a week).

Wikipedia’s contents overview: This is a portal that allows readers to explore content through a directory system.

Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia

Gender bias on Wikipedia

What Wikipedia is not

Wikimedia Endowment: “This Endowment will serve as a perpetual source of support for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. It will empower people around the world to create and contribute free knowledge, and share that knowledge with every single human being.

“With your support, we are only getting started. Help us ensure that Wikipedia lives forever!”

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Forgotten excrementitious humours of the third concoction shed by the English

Erica Wagner writes: Helen Maria Williams observed the French Revolution at first hand. A poet, essayist and novelist known for her support of radical causes, she entertained the likes of Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft in her salons. Among the things she perceived, in her accounts of political turmoil across the English Channel, were differences in national character when it came to expressing emotion.

“You will see Frenchmen bathed in tears at a tragedy,” she wrote in 1792. “An Englishman has quite as much sensibility to a generous or tender sentiment; but he thinks it would be unmanly to weep; and, though half choaked with emotion, he scorns to be overcome, contrives to gain the victory over his feelings, and throws into his countenance as much apathy as he can well wish.”

And so you would be forgiven for thinking that the stiff upper lip – the complete refusal of lachrymosity, no matter what disaster befalls us – has been paralysing the faces of Britishers since Stonehenge was raised on Salisbury Plain. But, as Thomas Dixon shows in his erudite and entertaining book Weeping Britannia, you would be wrong. Once upon a time and not so very long ago, this nation was given to paroxysms of sobbing at almost any opportunity. Dixon, a historian of emotions, philosophy, science and religion (phew!) at Queen Mary, University of London, asks what dried our tears and wonders whether the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 unlocked the floodgates again.

Both he and Tiffany Watt Smith, in The Book of Human Emotions, offer a reminder that “emotion” is a pretty novel idea. [Continue reading…]

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Humans inhabited Arctic 45,000 years ago

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Science magazine reports: In August of 2012, an 11-year-old boy made a gruesome discovery in a frozen bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean. While exploring the foggy coast of Yenisei Bay, about 2000 kilometers south of the North Pole, he came upon the leg bones of a woolly mammoth eroding out of frozen sediments. Scientists excavating the well-preserved creature determined that it had been killed by humans: Its eye sockets, ribs, and jaw had been battered, apparently by spears, and one spear-point had left a dent in its cheekbone — perhaps a missed blow aimed at the base of its trunk.

When they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: The mammoth died 45,000 years ago. That means that humans lived in the Arctic more than 10,000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study. The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere.

Most researchers had long thought that big-game hunters, who left a trail of stone tools around the Arctic 12,500 years ago, were the first to reach the Arctic Circle. These cold-adapted hunters apparently traversed Siberia and the Bering Straits at least 15,000 years ago (and new dates suggest humans may have been in the Americas as early as 18,500 years ago).

But in 2004, researchers pushed that date further back in time when they discovered beads and stone and bone tools dated to as much as 35,000 years old at several sites in the Ural Mountains of far northeastern Europe and in northern Siberia; they also found the butchered carcasses of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, and other animals.

The Russian boy’s discovery — of the best-preserved mammoth found in a century — pushes back those dates by another 10,000 years. [Continue reading…]

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The Middle East is now suffering from neoconservative sins of commission and realist sins of omission

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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes:  By now it is clear that US policy in Iraq and Syria is a disaster. In neither country has the situation been improved by the US military presence. In Iraq it empowers the same sectarian militias that forced alienated Sunnis into the arms of ISIS. In Syria it ignores, even accommodates, the regime whose brutality spawned the jihadi menace in the first place. In both its actions address symptoms rather than causes and alienate people without providing any commensurate security gains.

But would the situation improve if the United States were to withdraw? Ask the Yazidis of Iraq, whose tragedy would have been much larger had it not been for the timely US intervention; ask the Kurds of Syria, who would have been routed in Kobani had it not been for the sustained airstrikes that helped them repel an ISIS offensive. The Sunnis of Iraq might well ask who would protect them from the revanchist fury of the newly empowered sectarian militias, absent a US presence.

The issue then is not so much the fact of US military involvement as the nature of this involvement.

The United States bears responsibility for much of the current turmoil in the Levant. Had it not been for George W. Bush’s war and the fracturing of the Iraqi society, the region wouldn’t have turned into an incubator for jihadism. Had it not been for Barack Obama’s betrayal of the Syrian revolution — by making lofty promises and offering meager support; by following brave words with conspicuous inaction; and by demanding that Syrians submit their political aspirations to US security concerns — a quarter-million people would not have lost their lives, millions would not have been displaced, and thousands would not have drowned. The region suffers today from neoconservative sins of commission and realist sins of omission.

The United States could exit the Middle East and, in Sarah Palin’s immortal words, “let Allah sort it out.” But it would have condemned the region to perpetual war. Isolationism in the face of serious geopolitical challenges is not only an abdication of responsibility, but also a recipe for disaster. [Continue reading…]

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In Syrian town cut off from the world, glimpses of deprivation

The New York Times reports: Nisrine kept teaching school for months as the siege tightened around the Syrian town of Madaya, but had to give up a few weeks ago when her students got too weak to walk to class. A local medic has been surviving on the rehydration salts he gives patients, while a business school graduate picks grass to make soup for his 70-year-old father, consulting shepherds about which ones their long-since-slaughtered flocks liked best.

A dozen women waited anxiously in their doorways one recent evening as an antigovernment activist named Firas trudged slowly up their street handing out small batches of smuggled bulgur wheat.

Firas, though, was in shock. He had taken a meal to the house of Suleiman Fares, 63 and bone-thin, in hopes of saving his life, only to find him already dead. Frustrated, Firas declared that far to the north, rebels allied with those in Madaya ought to resume shelling two pro-government towns — towns full of civilians who are also suffering, tit for tat, a siege from the other side.

“Better to die fighting,” he said that night in one of a series of recent telephone interviews, “than to starve.”

The people of Madaya and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set of dynamics. There is the black market across blockade lines, for instance, and the quiet or unexpected ways this type of warfare can kill: heart attacks, stillbirths, a step on a land mine while foraging for food.

And there is the relentless physical and psychological contraction of their communities, only an hour’s drive from Damascus, Syria, and two from Beirut yet suddenly sealed off from the outside world. [Continue reading…]

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Middle East reality: An inconvenient truth for Obama

Joyce Karam writes: Characterizing events from Yemen to Syria to Libya as a “transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia” is not only a reality distortion by U.S. President Barack Obama, but also a dangerous fantasy that resigns American diplomacy to dismissiveness in the Middle East.

Shrugging off the Middle East’s largest upheaval in decades as a theological rift, and shying away from major diplomatic initiatives, is a slap in the face for U.S. role and stature, restricted today to responding and containing conflicts.

Blaming the chaos of the Middle East on centuries’ old battles is a perfect cop-out strategy for Obama, avoiding his legacy from being tarnished by the fragmentation of four states, two of which were bombed by the United States (Iraq and Libya).

Except, religious scriptures from a different era are not driving the current regional rivalry, or spurring ISIS. It’s oppression, civil wars, ISIS territorial gains, and unchecked regional bickering that is fueling the hellfire.

Obama’s narrative, however, is largely aimed at absolving his administration of any wrong doing in the Middle East, and attributing current infernos to a “transformation” across a whole generation that Washington apparently has little influence over. This claim self destructs in every conflict zone in the Middle East, three of them started on Obama’s watch four years ago. [Continue reading…]

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Obama ridiculed for saying conflicts in the Middle East ‘date back millennia’

The Washington Post reports: In his seventh and final State of the Union address, President Obama played up the state of the economy, played down the threat of the Islamic State, and introduced a new effort to beat cancer. He also found time for several not-so-subtle swipes at the Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

But for those versed in international relations, there was one line in particular that jumped out from his hour-long speech.

“The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia,” Obama said.

Thousands of years? Many of the conflicts in the Middle East don’t even date back a decade.

The Twitterati spotted the gaffe, and pounced. Obama was accused of peddling convenient falsehoods while others said he was espousing concepts unworthy of an undergraduate university student. Many said that Obama was not only excusing the conflicts, but in effect was making them seem normal and intractable. [Continue reading…]

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