In the coming week, the annual U.N. General Assembly debates take place amid global turbulence. Hezbollah reels from unusual and shocking attacks from explosive pagers. And President Biden hosts his last Quad Summit in September 19th, 2024 in time for the world next week. I'm Bob McMinn. And I'm Carlian Robbins. Well, Bob let's start in New York where I live and I am not today with the U.N. General Assembly high-level debate which spells an enormous amount of traffic and we hope some interesting events. Can we expect any big speeches or at least some performance art from the podium? Yeah, the performance art is rarely telegraphed ahead of time so it means you have to sometimes sit through some 40 to 50 minute speeches or in the famous case of Fidel Castro four-hour speech. Oh, in the case of Castro, he was somebody that people would watch just to see how much how far he would go sometimes or Gaddafi. Although not historically the longest speech but we can talk about that someday. Yes. What will be of interest this year, comings and goings, the last U.N. address of Joe Biden where he just seemed like yesterday coming to say the U.S. was back multilaterally and he laid out all sorts of markers. We'll get back to him in a second. They'll be the first U.N. address by the new Iranian president Pasekian who has been making overtures towards reviving the Iranian nuclear deal as well as opening up the country's economy. Even amid reports that Iran is beefing up its missile deals to Russia which Iran denies or certainly been backing its axis of resistance, encountering Israel. So that will be interesting because it's on the same day as Biden. It's the afternoon of the speech. Biden is going to speak early in the session of the first day on Tuesday. A couple days later there will be scheduled speech by the Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel which promises to be a doozy. There will also be the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaking that same day. That will be interesting. Ukrainian President Zelensky is scheduled to speak as well on day two, though Vladimir Putin as usual will not be representing Russia be setting his foreign minister. Putin has not appeared at the U.N. podium since 2015. Wow, 2015 really. He wasn't even under an indictment in those days. So Pasekian should be quite interesting because is he reformist? Isn't he a reformist? Given everything that's going on in the Middle East and all the deaths, is he going to get up there and make some offers or is he going to hue to the tougher line? I think that's probably the one that I'm most looking for. Zelensky is obviously quite unhappy with the U.N., which is a question I want to ask you about. Israel Netanyahu, of course, in the General Assembly has just really taken them to the woods and a really basic way this week. Almost nobody voting in Defense of Israel's occupation anymore. They have no friends left. So I would suspect he's going to be pretty in their face. And Abbas, does he still have it? He's really old and does not seem to be much of a player, so I suppose people are going to be watching that one pretty closely to see whether there's any leadership there because, of course, the Americans want the Palestinian PA to be a renewed PA, a reformed PA, a revised PA to take over leadership if there's ever some sort of a peace deal in Gaza. Who is Abbas? Where is Abbas? I think there's a lot to watch there. One of the questions that I'm hearing this from my students who actually are believers in the U.N. in part, they come to my program because our school at Baruch is so close to the U.N. But they are very frustrated because the U.N. has been able to do anything to stop the war in Gaza. They've been unable to do anything to stop the war in Ukraine. They ask a very legitimate question that a lot of people are going to be asking, "Why should we even pay any attention?" Yeah, it's a question that comes up and comes up appropriately every year. It seems to be much more to the point this year given everything going on in the world and the somewhat marginal role really the U.N. seems to be playing especially in the two really big conflicts, the Israel Hamas and Russia-Ukraine. It did play some mediating role in opening up some sea lanes for Ukrainian grain temporarily. That was the Secretary General Guterres, but Turkey also played a really important role there. Then Ukraine ended up taking matters into its own hands and has been delivering its grain in its own fashion without the help of any intermediaries. You have Russia sitting in the U.N. Security Council and routinely quashing any effort to provide serious scrutiny of its invasion of Ukraine and its conduct of that war. In a different way, but also drawing comparisons, is the U.S. defense of Israel and efforts in the Security Council and other U.N. bodies to try to bring about a ceasefire since Israeli actions again responding to the Hamas, the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7 almost a year ago, but what a number of observers, especially U.N. agencies say, has been a disproportionate response that's been killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza. So there seems to be a keen desire to bring that to an end once and for all. It is still proving elusive. The U.S. has been trying to drive through some sort of an agreement painstakingly. And it's proving to be a really tough one. And it continues to be this major concern, which we'll address a little bit later in the podcast about a real escalation, regional wide escalation of conflict in the Middle East, which is confounding the U.N. still plays a really important humanitarian role. It is a chief provider of aid to Palestinian refugees. There's still a U.N. peacekeeping contingent in Lebanon, which is in a kind of a fraught moment right now. But it's a reminder that even as it's marginalized, the U.N. system is a place where countries end up coming back to again and again, even when they tend to skirt it for other reasons, especially in terms of the U.N. political response, because they need it. They need its agencies. They need its humanitarian help. Sometimes they need its ability to step in as peacekeeping. I'll point to another difficult chapter. There's been a number of these difficult chapters. This one feels tougher than others, but then the lead up to the Iraq War. The U.S. was on Security Council. It must be said, the U.S. was trying to justify its pending invasion of Iraq through observance of Security Council resolutions about disarmament. At the end of the day, it pushed through and said it was invading because Iraq was presenting a grave and gathering threat. It was seen as a real blow to the U.N. system that the U.S. proceeded to push forward in that. Soon after, though, after Saddam Hussein was toppled and the U.S. was trying to set up some sort of rump government there, it came back to the U.N. to try to hold elections, to set up all sorts of administrative functions within Iraq. This happens over and over again. It's not to say that the U.N. is hyper relevant in this particular moment right now, but it is to say that it does play a role. I would just say generally, though, we're going to hear a great deal of storm and drama in the coming week about the U.N.'s role, but also the role of individual states. Because at the end of the day, the U.N. is the sum of its parts, and it's when these major states, especially Security Council states, are driving change through the U.N. is when it's most effective. The Security Council is sort of ground zero for why it's ineffective right now. There is major impasse going on there. There's real antagonism involving the United States and Russia, but also China and the number of occasions. And so it's a real difficult place right now. I'll finally add that the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas Greenfield, laid out some markers at a CFR event last week about Security Council reform, seemed to be very sensible, pursuing two permanent seats for African nations, pursuing rotating representation for island nations. But that's going to be a tough, as she acknowledged, a really tough road to Ho, especially as the Biden administration winds down, and we don't know what's coming next in the U.S. She's talking about perm seats, like veto-bearing seats? Not veto-bearing, because it's widely acknowledged that the current five veto-wielding countries are, first of all, would just never allow that. And she also called it a expanding the dysfunction of the council. She says the veto is a source of dysfunction, even while acknowledging the U.S. will not give up its veto power either. So, veto is staying with the five set up in the post-war. So a new definition of permanent. So a new definition of a permanent where you basically have, although it seems like weak tea to some, you do have countries that will have a permanent ability to be debating issues and raising issues on the agenda at the UN, raising a fuss in some cases, and certainly complaining if some of their initiatives are getting vetoed by other more powerful members. But it's still seen as a step forward to have some permanent membership in the Security Council, even without the veto power. I'd love that term about the dysfunction. I think that's a, you know, it sort of can't live where they can't live without it, certainly that, including the veto structure. Yeah, I mean, at the Security Council, even with this dysfunction, it must be noted, and we'll have a piece up on our website soon from Paul Stairs and Natalie Clocca pointing to areas where the council has continued to function through its problems, you know, setting up what is still a work in progress, which is some sort of a pacifying mission in Haiti, allowing Kenyans and some other forces to deploy there. And in addition to providing aid of various sorts, UN is said to have played a constructive role in Colombia. It could still play a role in Sudan, which is an absolute disaster. It is the world's worst humanitarian crisis right now. And big outside powers have been one of the reasons for that in terms of helping to support warring sides. But it could still play a role. It could still play a role in Myanmar, where it's been sidelined as well. But Myanmar seems to be coming to a head, the situation there in terms of threats to the central government, the military junta. So it comes back to what do the most powerful nations want? Do they see the UN as useful? And is there enough leverage from other countries to make the UN function in a way that can help in the way it was intended to be when it was set up? Even with its anachronisms and the way its composition is with Beto-wielding states and so forth, we come back to the refrain that if it didn't exist, that something like the UN would be created to kind of step into the breach. And as Adley Stevenson says, when you have that platform there, they're prepared to wait for response till health freezes over. So one of my favorite moments is security counsel. There's drama and security counsel as there is at the pulpit in the UN General Assembly. So stay tuned, Carla, for that. It's not just about the traffic next week. One other thing I should mention is that has accompanied this UNGA event now for the last 15 years has been a New York City Climate Week. It's just to say that climate activists have seen this as an opportunity to kind of focus attention, to raise their profile amongst the gathered diplomats about climate issues. And then those 15 years, all the climate benchmarks have only gotten worse in terms of consecutive months now of record setting temperatures, extreme weather events. The island nations that I mentioned before, they are trying to raise serious alarms about just their own existence with rising sea levels. And we've seen in the past year, also things like insurance companies are dropping homeowners because they can't support people who live anywhere near a flood zone, fire zone, you name it, and those zones are getting bigger. So climate is going to continue to be a topic on the sidelines, but still a topic. Carla, I want to take us back to the Middle East because it has been quite a week in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, where in the course of two days, hundreds of pagers and then walkie talkies exploded. These were most of them in the possession of Hezbollah members, if not fighters, but there were also bystanders who were killed. The UN and other news agencies believe Israel is behind the stack. Israel officials have not commented publicly, but they have said that the Israel Hezbollah war is entering a new phase. There's been movement of Israeli forces towards the north of the country. And so are we looking at a further escalation in what has been a low wattage Israel Hezbollah conflict? Well, this is sort of an extraordinary story. And watch this space right now. We're not clear. Certainly, what were the Israelis trying to do is one of the biggest questions out there. It's an extraordinary intelligence coup on their part. The Times reporting this morning says that instead of intercepting these pagers and walkie talkies that exploded in people's hands in an incredible carnage. Instead of intercepting them somewhere along the supply chain to insert explosives, Israeli intelligence actually manufactured them. They set up a front company. And as far as Hezbollah knew, they thought it was a Hungarian company under contract to a Taiwan manufacturer. And the Israelis produced the pagers and then sold them to Hezbollah. They started shipping these pagers back in 2022. After Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah told his operatives earlier this year that the Israelis were using their smartphones to track them and ordered them to replace them with these low tech pagers, which they believed were much harder to track. The Israelis stepped up production and delivery and these thousands of pagers and some walkie talkies were spread throughout Lebanon in the hands of the cadre of Hezbollah. And chillingly, according to the Times, Israeli intelligence officers called these pager buttons. They were referring them to buttons. They could be pushed whenever the order came. It's a pretty cold description there. So the question, of course, is why now? Why did they decide to use this pretty indiscriminate weapon right now? And whether these attacks and, you know, the damages, frighteningly widespread, will make us real safer or just spark a wider war, as you asked. The government announced before they pushed this button that they were going to shift their strategic focus away from Gaza and toward the north, which is their second front with Lebanon, and that they're determined to do whatever they can to stop the shelling from Hezbollah that has driven more than 70,000 Israelis from their homes since the start of the Gaza war. And, you know, we've talked about this before. They're an American and French mediator shuttling between Lebanon and Israel, but the assumption has always been that until there's some sort of hostage ceasefire deal, that there's not going to be any calm on that border as well. And these really seem to have decided that there's not going to be a deal, or at least not for a while. And Netanyahu is feeling an enormous amount of pressure from the families that have been displaced in the political scene. And Israeli Defense Minister Joav Galant, who may or may not be on his way out the door, said this week that, quote, military action was the only way to end the conflict on the northern border. Is this going to change anything? Certainly all the reporting people in Lebanon are completely freaked out as we would be as well. Some are comparing it to October 7th and its physical and psychological impact. Other people are talking about 9/11. I mean, if you can't trust electronic devices, because people aren't just worrying about patrons and walkie-talkies, they're talking, unplug your cell phones, unplug your TVs. They just don't know where it's coming from, because it's normal devices in their hands. It's killed off some unknown percentage of Hezbollah's cadre, certainly disrupted their communications for a while. How much of their actual chain of command has been disrupted? We don't know yet. We haven't seen any reports of major leaders being killed. We know that the Iranian ambassador in Lebanon was wounded, but we haven't seen major names beyond that. And Nuzrallah gave a speech just a few hours ago, and he obviously was furious about it, described us as an act of war. But he also acknowledged that it is a blow that is unprecedented in its history, and he said that Israel has a clear technological advantage, because it is not only Israel, and he said it's also backed by the United States. All the U.S. denies it had any involvement or any knowledge of it. He also sounded like a man who didn't know what he was going to do next. He vowed retaliation, but he also said not going to talk about the place or the time. So it's not clear what they're going to do. Once again, as we have said week after week, is this going to lead to that wider war that we're so terrified of? Some people in Israel are saying this is going to tell Hezbollah we can get you any time, any place. So back off guys and other people are saying that this is going to be the one that pushes them over the edge. Right now, all we know is that lots of people have been heard. Lebanon is an incredible disarray, and the Israelis are flying jets. Even when Israel was speaking, there were sonic booms, you could hear them over Beirut. It is quite an unusual moment, again, in a year, really, almost a year that has been extraordinary and has had extraordinary developments, one after the other, that we have talked about and have been flagged. But this use of the supply chain, as you mentioned, the front company and all of that raises a lot of concern about kind of, as we're seeing in increasing reports, the laws of war, aside from the threat that Israel is trying to hold off, and it's legitimate concern about its population near the Lebanese border. No, I'm not paying myself on right now and saying to myself, what can you trust? Exactly. So cyber experts are raising that concern. The unusual situation already preexisting, which you had an organization like Hezbollah, this militant organization that was taking the fight to Israel even, obviously, much earlier for decades than October 7th. But since then, regularly lobbying explosives, missiles, and so forth, and Israeli targets, and it's a movement that's embedded in the Lebanese society, Lebanese government. It's Lebanon itself, it must be said, it's like teetering near failed state status as it is. And when something like this happened, it was really quite shocking to the country, but also as Nasserallah admitted to Hezbollah itself, it has been deeply penetrated. It's clear. That was also the conclusion after a senior Hezbollah military chief was assassinated in a Beirut suburb last summer. And now you've seen this. It gives them pause in terms of what sort of response they would do. Is this, in fact, an opening salvo, the pushing and buttons, as you said, to an Israeli incursion, perhaps, where they would want to push Hezbollah forces back sufficiently that they feel like they have a safe zone. All of this is open for question, as is the extent to which Israel is sharing any information with the United States. It's a very dangerous time for a lot of the parties involved. And the US is going to be inevitably drawn into this. If the escalation gets much bigger, it's got a large footprint now militarily in the greater area. There are a lot of these Iranian linked access of resistance countries that are staying involved. The Houthis Hezbollah Hamas, obviously very weakened, as well as forces based in Syria and Iraq. So this can all mushroom really badly. And we mentioned earlier, the UN, perhaps there will be some useful sideline discussions that take place at the UN during that gathering of leaders there. One hopes that the US and the Israelis will be sharing more information for starters. And then some sort of movement towards really tamping this down because this is what the UN should be set up for. This is what the US has been striving and says it's striving to do for the last couple of months. Something has to happen soon because this had ripple effects really across the world, Karla. And for the reasons you mentioned in terms of the the new front opened in this war, as well as the ongoing concerns about what a mid-east expanded war will be. We've talked about this and we talked about this after the Haniya assassination during possessions and inauguration. Is Iran going to retaliate? Is it going to tell its proxies to retaliate? You know, it seems like we're there. And I will say that the Americans moved forces into the region to deter and in defense of a longtime ally, Israel. But boy, Tony Blinken in the region this week after these patrons started exploding, he sounded like a man who did not know what was going on and had no, he was in there trying to move this hostage for ceasefire deal forward and just had this sense of just cannot control an ally that we're providing all this military support for. It's just got to be extraordinarily frustrating and extraordinarily frightening. Well, Bob, with so many leaders gathered in New York for Anga, officials are maximizing their time and at least trying to leverage their carbon footprints. So there's going to be a lot of big jets lined up there with all those leaders. I like that reference leveraging your carbon footprint. That should be a new way of dealing with symmetry. So there are going to be a host of side readings and this Saturday in Wilmington, Delaware, President Biden is going to host a quad leaders summit with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Helpines, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio. So for Biden and Kishida, this is their final meeting of the so-called quad. And what are you looking for in this discussion, not to mention the fact that they get to experience Wilmington, Delaware? Yes. And I'll leave that part aside and mention what could be the crux of their discussions, which is first, it is significant that half of the leadership of this, we're going to be moving on shortly, very shortly, Kishida at the end of the month, Biden in January. And I'll be looking for, as one often does with these quads ever since it was set up, what are the references to China? Because it's the country that dare not speak its name at these summits, but in fact, it's hovering over all this. Whether you want to consider this setting up of a quad, the kind of partial counterpart to the Belt and Road Initiative China, which is just incredibly ambitious and in some ways really effective, a worldwide network that China has been trying to set up to expand its influence and soft and hard power, as the case may be, or is it also a military counterpoint, at least in terms of them, expanding maritime cooperation, for example, which has been discussed at these meetings. The quad did take on a separate role and sort of a new frontier under COVID in terms of sharing information about vaccines, about health and health infrastructure, which I think is a good use for this quad. And these are four consequential countries that bring a lot to the table and have a lot of insights from different perspectives into what is going on with China, how much of a threat is percolating in the South China Sea, for example, between China and the Philippines, one of the latest big issues. And what sort of threats are emerging or might be continuing to emerge in Taiwan, again, these countries can bring different insights into that. So it's significant that they're meeting ahead of the UN summitry, that they're going to have two of their key members moving on, and just sort of establishing basic practices that can survive these administrations. By all indications, if there was an incoming Trump administration, they would be behind the quad, they were behind the initial quad, setting up and obviously the same with Japan. So this has traction, it seems to be an organization that tries to have some tangible, practical coordination going on in maritime areas and supply chain securing and so forth. And so will this quad mention China as something that they are concerned about, that they have in under control? That'll be an interest to me. Well, it is because the Chinese haven't particularly aggressive this, you know, what they're doing with the Philippines ramming ships and all that has been going on, but at the same time, they've always insisted that this isn't all about China. It's pretty much about China, isn't it? So wouldn't Biden want on his way out to have a more clarion statement about this, or is he going softly, softly in China these days? Yeah, I mean, I think he would like to, on the one hand, the US, as we've discussed before, has had many, many stepped up contacts with China, which in general is a good thing, despite all of the differences in their antagonisms. And the US does not want to needlessly provoke China when they don't have to. Having this meeting in and of itself certainly gets China's attention. And I think they all realize that, but by the same token, I think if they're concerned about Chinese assertiveness, especially again, in this Philippines front, which is not going away, they might want to just reinforce their priors on that in terms of a big swath of the sea that China claims as its own, which the rest of the world does not. And the free and fair navigation of ocean waters, these sort of principles that have been stated again and again, I think they're going to want to state that again. And China is going to be one of the intended targets for that message. And so one of the really strange things is not only is the Japanese leader on his way out and the American leader on his way out, there is a possibility that the Australian leader could be on his way out as well, which would then leave next year at the end of next year. Yeah, then leave Modi, the only one standing in the quad. And Modi is a guy who plays all sides against the middle. So I'm not sure that the quad really will survive that. Modi is in the quad, but he's also always coasting up to the Russians. So he's not probably a great defender of Western values, is he? He likes to be in the room, let's say. We don't like to be in the room, Bob. And he's had his issues. India certainly has had its border issues with China, which are still percolating, for example, they are co-members of the BRICS group, too, which is going to have a meeting next month. But at the same time, Modi likes to hold a lot of cards. And I think he does have a good relationship with the United States. And whether or not it will be a Harris or Trump administration will likely continue to have a good relationship with the United States. So that relationship alone would, I think, would keep him in quad structures. And perhaps promising to use his leverage with the so-called global South and connections with Russia to potentially be serviceable. I don't know. You raise a really good question. India has seen this overall as useful. And Modi himself took a little bit of an electoral setback and has had to deal with a bit more of voices who are not all singing and unison behind him in his own country. So I think this is a meeting that serves him well. Modi is going to have an interesting week at the UN. It would be interesting to watch him, whether or not, for example, he meets with the new Bangladeshi interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, who he talked about, or he is also supposed to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu in the sidelines of the UN. So he's worth watching both beginning with the quad and through UNGA week. Well, Carla, it's the time of the podcast to discuss our audience figure of the week. This is the figure that listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR underscore orgs Instagram story. This week, Carla, our audience selected Putin orders up to 180,000 more troops. Why is this figure of the week getting attention? Well, first of all, why did they not choose Shogun winning the most amends? Unfathomable, don't know. Unfathomable. They exist to frustrate me. I'm clearly going to have to start lobbying all of my friends and all the people who watch as much television as I do to be voting. So it's important to note that the Kremlin has announced that it wants 180,000 more troops, but it also hasn't decided to draft them, at least for now. And that raises a host of questions, including whether and how they're going to pull that increase off. So when the Kremlin Institute, what it called a partial mobilization in September, October of 2022, calling up 300,000 reservists and former soldiers, remember they were just protests and recruitment offices were attacked and tens of thousands of draft age men fled the country. Some border crossings had to be closed. So this is a pretty sensitive issue here. And there are a lot of people who are suggesting they're not going to get to 180,000 without having a mobilization. So are they really going to get to 180,000? The way Putin has filled the ranks mainly since Ukraine started is by paying big bonuses. And emptying out the prisons. And emptying out the prisons. And both of those are probably not sustainable models. So why are they talking about 180,000? If they were to get it, they would have the largest active duty combat military, or the largest number of active duty forces in the world. Why does he think he needs that? I think it's not a sign of strength. It's an indication that the tough battles they're currently fighting, that very long front in Eastern Ukraine. And the fact that they haven't been able to marshal enough troops to push the Ukrainians out of course the first time Russian territories been taken since World War II. And an assessment that the war is likely to grind on for quite a bit longer. I don't think this is an admission of strength. It also could be posturing, or it could be contingency planning. They're betting that perhaps Trump will win, and then they won't have to fulfill that. They're talking about that number in December after the US election. Every analyst basically says they can't get there without a mobilization. And I think that's just politically unsustainable for him. And certainly the number one thing he has done up until now is insulate the Russian public from the cost of this war. Two great success by many accounts. And so I think it's an admission of weakness on their part. It has been presented in a lot of the coverage as a sign of look, they're going to have this biggest army in the world. I'm reading it as weakness, but there is another grim thought to keep in mind. As hard as this is for Russia, it still has a population more than three times out of Ukraine. But on the other hand, the Ukrainians have a much bigger reason to fight than the Russians do. It's the survival of their own country, which is why they can talk about mobilization and the Russians can't. Yeah, and that troop numbers are a concern on the Ukrainian side. Certainly if Russia was able to muster up anything close to this figure, it would be a real area of concern. We've talked before about Ukrainians are recycling and training up people who are typically older, who are going into repeat battle duty and are really burned out. And it's having a real toll. And it's one of the reasons behind some of their defeats in the Dunbas of the past several months. But at the same time, Russia's also thrown as many projectiles as it can that Ukraine and by all signs is going to continue to do that. So yeah, I think it is worth looking at whether or not behind the Russian bravado and everything else, there is a weakness there that is not going to be filled and mobilization is not going to be in the cards for them. And it is also a sign of just how many people are being killed. Yes. This is just a real so grinding, grinding war. The Brits are estimating that the Russian casualty rate is about a thousand or more a day right now. And neither side is giving actual numbers, but this is a grinding, horrible, horrible war. And that's our look at the world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Sri Lanka holds its presidential election and the 189th October fest begins in Munich. Beers next week. I've been there for a few of those years. Oh, man. That's all I'll say. In later, has it? Never. Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or any other favorite podcast source. And leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at TWNW@CFR.org. The publications mentioned this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts out of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's program was produced by Esther Fang, with director of podcasting Gabriel Sierra. Special thanks to Helena Copens-Johnson for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by the Redoubtable Marcus Zacharria. And this is Carla Robbins saying so long, and let's hope for better news next week. And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye. [BLANK_AUDIO]
