Lives and Crimes DONT Matter in Baltimore

Violent Racketeering Conspiracy: A Maryland gang member was sentenced to 188 months in prison today for conspiring to participate in a racketeering enterprise known as La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

The sentence was announced by Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division; U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein of the District of Maryland; Special Agent in Charge Andre Watson of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI); Chief Mark A. Magaw of the Prince George’s County, Maryland Police Department; Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Angela D. Alsobrooks; Chief J. Thomas Manger of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Police Department; Chief Alan Goldberg of the Takoma Park, Maryland, Police Department; and Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy.

Wilmer Argueta, aka Chengo, 23, of Hyattsville, Maryland, pleaded guilty on April 20, 2015, before U.S. District Judge Roger W. Titus of the District of Maryland to one count of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) conspiracy.

According to the stipulated facts agreed to in connection with Argueta’s guilty plea, MS-13 is an international criminal organization and one of the largest street gangs in the United States with branches or “cliques” operating throughout Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties in Maryland. Both to maintain membership in the gang and to enforce internal discipline, members are required to engage in acts of intimidation and violence, including against members of rival gangs.

In connection with his plea, Argueta admitted that from 2009 until at least 2012, he was a member and leader of the Peajes Locos Salvatrucha clique of MS-13, and that he and members of the Peajes and other MS-13 cliques committed crimes to further the interests of the gang, including murder, assault, robbery, extortion by threat of violence, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and witness retaliation.

Argueta admitted that on Jan. 3, 2010, he and other MS-13 members attempted to kidnap and assault two individuals with various weapons because Argueta and his co-conspirators believed one of the individuals was associating with a rival gang. After the individuals fled in different directions, several MS-13 members caught one of the victims and sexually assaulted her as retribution for associating with a rival gang.

In addition, according to the plea agreement, on Jan. 13, 2011, Argueta attended a Peajes clique meeting during which another MS-13 member criticized members of the clique for not committing enough violent crimes and encouraging clique members to target rival gang members with acts of violence. After the meeting, Argueta and other MS-13 members strangled and stabbed an individual whom the clique members believed to be a member of a rival gang. Although the MS-13 members left the victim for dead, he survived.

Argueta also admitted that between March and November 2011, he and other members of the Peajes clique extorted a former MS-13 associate under the threat of a “greenlight” (an order to kill). Argueta admitted that he ordered other MS-13 associates to relay the death threats to the victim, and he contacted the victim himself on multiple occasions to arrange extortion payments.

According to admissions made in connection with his plea, between September and November 2011, Argueta conspired to kill an individual who had been assaulted by Argueta and other MS-13 members and who had agreed to testify as a witness against Argueta in state court. Specifically, Argueta admitted that, while incarcerated in the Prince George’s County Corrections Facility, he ordered the “greenlight” by contacting a co-conspirator who then relayed the instruction to other MS-13 members. On Nov. 15, 2011, three MS-13 members drove to the victim/witness’ home, and one of the co-conspirators shot at the victim from a moving vehicle, striking the victim in the chest. The victim survived.

To date, five of the 14 defendants charged in this case have pleaded guilty to participating in the racketeering conspiracy.

The case is being investigated by HSI Baltimore, the Prince George’s County and Montgomery County Police Departments, the Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office, the Takoma Park Police Department and the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office. The Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Office, HSI Baltimore’s Operation Community Shield Task Force and the Maryland Department of Corrections Intelligence Unit also provided assistance.

The case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Kevin L. Rosenberg of the Criminal Division’s Organized Crime and Gang Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys William D. Moomau and Lindsay Eyler Kaplan of the District of Maryland. ***

Yes, there is more.

Former Baltimore prosecutor: Marilyn Mosby has a role in city’s violence increase 
It is only August, and Baltimore is staring at 200 dead men, women and children. Having been a prosecutor in this city for 12 years, four in the Homicide Division, I can no longer stand idly by and watch State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby avoid taking responsibility for her role in the increase in violence.

The most recent example of her questionable leadership is her decision to restrict the Homicide Review Commission to closed cases that occurred before she became state’s attorney. She claims the program is a waste of money, places witnesses in jeopardy and is pointless because she knows the reason for the increase in violence is drugs.

When I was involved in the commission in its early stages, organizers asked us to send one prosecutor, for one afternoon, once a month. It did not cost the state’s attorney’s office anything except time. Coming off the deadliest month in decades –— deadliest in our history per capita — is now really the time to be turning down free help? More to the story here.

Russia’s Silent Effective War Against the United States

There is no country that is better with propaganda tactics than Russia and they are in use today. The measure of the costs related to Russia’s tactics especially when it comes to the internet is not measurable.

This silent war is noticed even by Secretary of State John Kerry when he declared he was certain that both China and Russia have access or have read his emails. So why no declaration of war or prosecution of espionage?

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A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials, including 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses, security researchers say.

The records, discovered by Hold Security, a firm in Milwaukee, include confidential material gathered from 420,000 websites, including household names, and small Internet sites. Hold Security has a history of uncovering significant hacks, including the theft last year of tens of millions of records from Adobe Systems. More details here.

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Exclusive: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals – Ex-employees

Reuters: Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, tried to damage rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious, according to two former employees.

They said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), AVG Technologies NV (AVG.N), Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers’ PCs.

Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology, they said.

“Eugene considered this stealing,” said one of the former employees. Both sources requested anonymity and said they were among a small group of people who knew about the operation.

Kaspersky Lab strongly denied that it had tricked competitors into categorizing clean files as malicious, so-called false positives.

“Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing,” Kaspersky said in a statement to Reuters. “Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable.”

Executives at Microsoft, AVG and Avast previously told Reuters that unknown parties had tried to induce false positives in recent years. When contacted this week, they had no comment on the allegation that Kaspersky Lab had targeted them.

The Russian company is one of the most popular antivirus software makers, boasting 400 million users and 270,000 corporate clients. Kaspersky has won wide respect in the industry for its research on sophisticated Western spying programs and the Stuxnet computer worm that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010.

The two former Kaspersky Lab employees said the desire to build market share also factored into Kaspersky’s selection of competitors to sabotage.

“It was decided to provide some problems” for rivals, said one ex-employee. “It is not only damaging for a competing company but also damaging for users’ computers.”

The former Kaspersky employees said company researchers were assigned to work for weeks or months at a time on the sabotage projects.

Their chief task was to reverse-engineer competitors’ virus detection software to figure out how to fool them into flagging good files as malicious, the former employees said.

The opportunity for such trickery has increased over the past decade and a half as the soaring number of harmful computer programs have prompted security companies to share more information with each other, industry experts said. They licensed each other’s virus-detection engines, swapped samples of malware, and sent suspicious files to third-party aggregators such as Google Inc’s (GOOGL.O) VirusTotal.

By sharing all this data, security companies could more quickly identify new viruses and other malicious content. But the collaboration also allowed companies to borrow heavily from each other’s work instead of finding bad files on their own.

Kaspersky Lab in 2010 complained openly about copycats, calling for greater respect for intellectual property as data-sharing became more prevalent.

In an effort to prove that other companies were ripping off its work, Kaspersky said it ran an experiment: It created 10 harmless files and told VirusTotal that it regarded them as malicious. VirusTotal aggregates information on suspicious files and shares them with security companies.

Within a week and a half, all 10 files were declared dangerous by as many as 14 security companies that had blindly followed Kaspersky’s lead, according to a media presentation given by senior Kaspersky analyst Magnus Kalkuhl in Moscow in January 2010.

When Kaspersky’s complaints did not lead to significant change, the former employees said, it stepped up the sabotage.

INJECTING BAD CODE

In one technique, Kaspersky’s engineers would take an important piece of software commonly found in PCs and inject bad code into it so that the file looked like it was infected, the ex-employees said. They would send the doctored file anonymously to VirusTotal.

Then, when competitors ran this doctored file through their virus detection engines, the file would be flagged as potentially malicious. If the doctored file looked close enough to the original, Kaspersky could fool rival companies into thinking the clean file was problematic as well.

VirusTotal had no immediate comment.

In its response to written questions from Reuters, Kaspersky denied using this technique. It said it too had been a victim of such an attack in November 2012, when an “unknown third party” manipulated Kaspersky into misclassifying files from Tencent (0700.HK), Mail.ru (MAILRq.L) and the Steam gaming platform as malicious.

The extent of the damage from such attacks is hard to assess because antivirus software can throw off false positives for a variety of reasons, and many incidents get caught after a small number of customers are affected, security executives said.

The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals that were targeted because many smaller security companies followed the Redmond, Washington-based company’s lead in detecting malicious files. They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack.

Microsoft’s antimalware research director, Dennis Batchelder, told Reuters in April that he recalled a time in March 2013 when many customers called to complain that a printer code had been deemed dangerous by its antivirus program and placed in “quarantine.”

Batchelder said it took him roughly six hours to figure out that the printer code looked a lot like another piece of code that Microsoft had previously ruled malicious. Someone had taken a legitimate file and jammed a wad of bad code into it, he said. Because the normal printer code looked so much like the altered code, the antivirus program quarantined that as well.

Over the next few months, Batchelder’s team found hundreds, and eventually thousands, of good files that had been altered to look bad. Batchelder told his staff not to try to identify the culprit.

“It doesn’t really matter who it was,” he said. “All of us in the industry had a vulnerability, in that our systems were based on trust. We wanted to get that fixed.”

In a subsequent interview on Wednesday, Batchelder declined to comment on any role Kaspersky may have played in the 2013 printer code problems or any other attacks. Reuters has no evidence linking Kaspersky to the printer code attack.

As word spread in the security industry about the induced false positives found by Microsoft, other companies said they tried to figure out what went wrong in their own systems and what to do differently, but no one identified those responsible.

At Avast, a largely free antivirus software maker with the biggest market share in many European and South American countries, employees found a large range of doctored network drivers, duplicated for different language versions.

Avast Chief Operating Officer Ondrej Vlcek told Reuters in April that he suspected the offenders were well-equipped malware writers and “wanted to have some fun” at the industry’s expense. He did not respond to a request on Thursday for comment on the allegation that Kaspersky had induced false positives.

WAVES OF ATTACKS

The former employees said Kaspersky Lab manipulated false positives off and on for more than 10 years, with the peak period between 2009 and 2013.

It is not clear if the attacks have ended, though security executives say false positives are much less of a problem today.

That is in part because security companies have grown less likely to accept a competitor’s determinations as gospel and are spending more to weed out false positives.

AVG’s former chief technology officer, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, said the company suffered from troves of bad samples that stopped after it set up special filters to screen for them and improved its detection engine.

“There were several waves of these samples, usually four times per year. This crippled-sample generation lasted for about four years. The last wave was received at the beginning of the year 2013,” he told Reuters in April.

AVG’s chief strategy officer, Todd Simpson, declined to comment on Wednesday.

Kaspersky said it had also improved its algorithms to defend against false virus samples. It added that it believed no antivirus company conducted the attacks “as it would have a very bad effect on the whole industry.”

“Although the security market is very competitive, trusted threat-data exchange is definitely part of the overall security of the entire IT ecosystem, and this exchange must not be compromised or corrupted,” Kaspersky said.

U.S. Flag Raised in Cuba Today by John Kerry and Envoy

The weekend before Secretary of State John Kerry travels to Cuba with an envoy to raise the U.S. flag at the re-opening of the embassy in Havana, 60 Cubans were arrested in what is more repression. Arrested were Cuban Ladies in White and yet Barack Obama on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard had nothing to say and John Kerry was mute of the matter himself.

John Kerry leads delegation to Cuba for flag raising at U.S. Embassy

WaPo: The United States plans to raise the Stars and Stripes at its embassy in Havana Friday morning, kicking off a day of symbolism and carefully balanced outreach to both Cuba’s communist government and its restive population.

Two U.S. government aircraft are scheduled to depart Washington at dawn to carry Secretary of State John F. Kerry and dozens of others on the 2   1/2 hour flight to the island. In addition to a 20-person official delegation of officials and members of Congress, selected Cuban-Americans, entrepreneurs and a large media contingent will be aboard, along with the three retired Marines who last lowered the flag when relations were severed more than 54 years ago.

Speeches are to follow the raising of the banner outside the seven-story embassy building, built in the early 1950s on the Malecón, Havana’s sweeping waterfront boulevard. The U.S. Army’s Brass Quintet will play both country’s anthems.

President Obama’s inaugural poet, Richard Blanco, whose family left Cuba shortly before he was born in 1968, will read “Matters of the Sea,” a poem he has written for the occasion.

The embassy has been open for nearly a month, following the official July 20 re-establishment of U.S.-Cuba relations. But the flag has been kept under wraps for the arrival of Kerry, the highest U.S. government official to set foot in Cuba since Franklin D. Roosevelt was president .

After the ceremony, Kerry will meet privately with Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Havana. Ortega was instrumental, along with Pope Francis, in the success of nearly two years of secret bilateral negotiations that led to this day. Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced plans to restore relations last December.

In a carbon copy of last month’s official opening of the Cuban Embassy here, Kerry will meet with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez at his ministry, and the two will then hold a joint news conference.

Later in the afternoon, a separate U.S. flag will be raised at the oppulent estate in western Havana that is the once and future residence of the U.S. ambassador, currently occupied by Charge d’Affairs Jeffrey DeLaurentis. Members of Cuban civil society — including political dissidents — ave been invited to that ceremony and to a reception with Kerry will host.

In an interview Wednesday with CNN Espanol, Kerry rejected criticism Cuban government opponents were not asked to attend the morning events at the embassy.

“We just disagree with that. We’re going to meet,” he said. The embassy ceremony, “is a government-to-government moment. We’re opening an embassy. It’s not open to everybody in the country. And later we’ll have an opportunity where there is a broader perspective to be able to meet with … a broad cross-section of Cuban civil society, including dissidents,” he said.

While many dissidents support the U.S-Cuba opening, many also oppose it, charging that the administration is helping the Castro government stay in power while getting little in return. Since the restoration of relations was announced, the number of opposition demonstrations has sharply increased, along with government detention of dissidents.

“The truth is that this will not be the complete and total change everybody wants overnight. It’s going to take a little bit of time,” Kerry told CNN. “But I am convinced … President Obama is convinced, that by being there, we will be able to do more to help the Cuban people,” he said. “Their concerns, their issues, their hopes, their dreams will be better represented more directly to our government with accountability in that process.”

Human rights, Kerry said, is “at the top of our agenda in terms of the first things that we will be focused on in our direct engagement with the Cuban government,” including his Friday talks with Rodriguez.

In a Thursday letter to Kerry, the organization Reporters Without Borders USA noted that Cuba ranks 169 of 180 countries on its press freedom index. “Cuba’s information monopoly and censorship practices do not apply only to local media,” it said, “foreign journalists are also subject to restrictions, receiving accreditation only selectively” and “deported” when they displease “the current regime.”

Despite the restoration of relations, the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba remains in place. Obama has called for Congress to lift it, along with remaining restrictions on U.S. travel to the island, but lawmakers have resisted.

The eight members of Congress in Kerry’s official delegation include Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.); and Democratic Reps. Karen Bass (Calif.), Steve Cohen (Tenn.), Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Jim McGovern (Mass.).

The embargo continues to be a rallying point for the Cuban government. In an article published in Granma, the official Cuban Communist party paper, on the occasion of his 89th birthday Thursday, revolutionary leader and former president Fidel Castro criticized the United States for everything from dropping an atomic bomb on Japan near the end of World War II, to setting the stage for global economic crisis by amassing most of the world’s gold supply.

That crisis, Castro said, had battered Cuba’s economy, even as it is “owed compensation equivalent to damages, which have reached many millions of dollars” as a result of the U.S. sanctions.

 

Smoke Coming From the Hillary Server Fire is Worse

Strip the security clearance from this woman. There are many calling for this exact action and the State Department will not comment if she in fact still has it. At least during this investigation, her clearance should be suspended.

Posted on this site was a timeline and factual information when it comes to the Hillary Servergate affair. A few hours have passed and there of course is more to report.

More factual intrigue is listed below and it is not in any real date order given what and how information is being obtained. This comes as the FBI begins the data and material investigations.

1. Barack Obama drafted and signed a lengthy Executive Order #13526 spelling out the comprehensive conditions of all classified and top secret information. The Democrats and those supporting the Hillary camp in Severgate can NO longer claim restrictive laws are passed AFTER her term as Secretary of State. Further and quite important, Hillary was ONE of 20 who were designate with authority to apply classified codes to documents making it all the more curious on how she can claim ignorance in top secret or restricted documents.

2, It is now confirmed, the second server in question which held the material involved in Servergate, located in New Jersey and seized by the FBI was stripped of data. The FBI does in fact have the skills to rebuild and retrace all administrative actions in the server.

3, Now another at the core of this investigation is Huma Abedin who was and is Hillary’s personal confidant and aide de camp. To date, she has not signed nor turned over as order by Judge Sullivan the certification under penalty of perjury or the email materials which hovers in the range of 7000 communication transmissions.

4. As discussed before, not only was there 3 thumb drives of the Hillary email transaction surrendered to the FBI and 3 servers, but the FBI will likely need to obtain or gain a search warrant for 3 additional communication devices held by Hillary, those being her Blackberry, her iPhone and her iPad.

5. When it comes to the SIGINT or geo-spatial top secret email in question, it appears it was relating to a drone image of terror groups in Pakistan. This speaks to sources and methods such that the top secret designations would have originated with the original transmission of the critic (critical communications).

6. Platte River was NOT an approved facility to house or support classified material. Outside vendors are to be approved in the case of top secret material that have hardened rooms preventing espionage or eavesdropping.

7. There will be more Hillary personnel caught up in the investigation snare and those likely will include Mike Morrell, Deputy Director of the CIA; Phillippe Reines, Hillary’s gatekeeper; Jeremy Bash, former Chief of Staff for Leon Panetta; Andrew Shapiro, Hillary’s Policy Advisor; and several others now at Beacon Global Strategies, Hillary’s personnel policy think tank.

8. The contracted server company, Platte River is now raising deeper questions due in part to a lawsuit and investigation from November 2014. The lawsuit document is found here. They stole phone numbers and metadata from White House military advisors.

The Internet company used by Hillary Clinton to maintain her private server was sued for stealing dozens of phone lines including some which were used by the White House.

Platte River Networks is said to have illegally accessed the master database for all US phone numbers.

It also seized 390 lines in a move that created chaos across the US government.

Among the phone numbers which the company took – which all suddenly stopped working – were lines for White House military support desks, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, a lawsuit claims.

Others were the main numbers for major financial institutions, hospitals and the help desk number for T2 Communications, the telecom firm which owned them.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of T2 claims that the mess took 11 days to fix and demands that Platte River pay up $360,000 in compensation.

More to come for sure…..stay tuned.

 

Now Veterans Can Grade VA Facilities

Listen To A VA Employee And A Veteran Break Down On The Phone Over Access To Care, the full story is here.

The plight of veterans when it comes to the Veterans Administration continues and no one is really taking any action to clean up the mess while vets actually die waiting for an appointment for medical services.

Some disabled veterans go hungry and can’t afford basic resources for themselves because the disability rating they have been given by the VA isn’t high enough for them. They have to seek assistance from somewhere like these Georgia VA disability lawyers to help them get the disability rating they deserve. Few veterans are treated with the respect they deserve but now there are new platforms to make things better for them.

Now a new ratings platform has been launched to help vets navigate and even grade each facility, a new tool that is desperately needed. The Secretary of the VA ignores reports and the Congress has worked diligently to install cures and solutions that the VA is loathe to accept.

Washington ~ Stars and Stripes: More than 35,000 veterans have had their health care delayed by a Department of Veterans Affairs computer program that automatically put them in limbo — many for years. Yet the VA says it lacks the authority to override the system.

According to documents leaked to the Huffington Post, the veterans — most of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan — were erroneously put onto a “pending” list for failing to fill out a means test. But combat veterans are not required to fill out means tests to receive health care.

About 16,000 of the cases have been pending for more than five years, according to the Huffington Post. Under VA rules, combat veterans are eligible for five years of free health care after discharge, but the period begins the day of discharge. But VA spokeswoman Walinda West said combat veterans who are granted Veterans Health Administration benefits received them for life.

The VA has known about the problem since at least April, according to the Huffington Post. As of Wednesday, staffers were calling and mailing notices to affected veterans, telling them to fill out paperwork to agree to copays – which appears to duplicate paperwork they have already filled out — in order to enroll in the program.

VA website

New VAratings.com Healthcare Site Allows U.S. Veterans to Rate & Review VA Facilities Nationwide

Charleston, SC: VetFriends.com – the largest Website reuniting U.S. military veterans – has launched a nationwide online database of VA Hospitals with ratings and reviews at https://www.VAratings.com. The goal of the site is to allow veterans to share their experiences, rate their local VA hospitals and clinics and to help improve and provide awareness to Veterans Affairs facilities nationwide.

U.S. veterans and military personnel are the foundation of what has made America the symbol of freedom and opportunity that we enjoy today. The VetFriends.com Veteran Healthcare Resource Center is a free resource for all veterans and their families.

VAratings.com powered by VetFriends.com provides a free ratings/review system with a directory of all VA Hospitals, Outpatient Clinics, Veteran Centers, National Cemeteries and Intake Centers. The rating system consists of a 5 star rating process with questions about a veteran’s visit that deal with: Department, Ease of scheduling, Wait times, Treatment quality, Staff’s quality of care and more. A comment section is also available where veterans can add more information and others visitors can respond directly to posts.

VAratings.com was created to provide objective reviews of services provided by the VA from U.S. veterans and their families. It is important for veterans to know that their VA facility has the highest quality of care and expertise. VAratings.com is an ideal platform for information to be exchanged, questions asked and unbiased reviews are posted.

Each month a topic will be spotlighted in our awareness campaign featuring a specific health issue. The topic covered will coincide with the national awareness months such as Breast Cancer Awareness in October and American Diabetes Month in November. Additional resources include information on how veterans can obtain VA Benefits, along with a library of VA forms. Furthermore, health topics and articles address illnesses, new treatments and discoveries, along with healthy lifestyle tips plus a variety of others.

VetFriends.com offers additional services such as: search over 1,900,000 members to make contact with old service friends and relatives; information on how to obtain your own or a relative’s military records and medals; message boards; military veteran job boards; upload past and present photos; military jokes; search and post reunions, military pride merchandise and more.

VetFriends.com encourages all Companies, and all Americans to honor and support our U.S. veterans and active military of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard — All heroes of our nation.

Founded in 2000 by a U.S. military veteran, thousands of people have been reconnected through VetFriends.com, spanning from World War II through to Operation Desert Storm and the present. For further information and/or interview opportunities please contact VAratings.com at: (843) 606-2578(843) 606-2578