{
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    "relation": "topic-surface-only",
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  "dek": "The US budget deficit grew to almost US$2 trillion over the past year, government data showed Friday, reaching its highest level since 2021 despite President Donald Trump's promises to cut public spending and red ink. The deficit, which occurs when government spending exceeds its revenues, rose to US$1.99 trillion in f",
  "desk": "politics",
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      "item_id": "item-4fd53cd02d4bf2f71af06122",
      "published_at": "2026-10-17T00:33:06Z",
      "role": "media",
      "source_id": "rthk-finance",
      "source_name": "Radio Television Hong Kong",
      "title": "US budget deficit balloons to highest in five years",
      "url": "https://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1874266-20261017.htm",
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  "headline": "US budget deficit balloons to highest in five years",
  "lead": false,
  "lead_reason": "Current single-source metadata is retained but not promoted as a lead.",
  "limitations": [
    "Palimpsest retained only feed title, canonical link, time, and a bounded plain-text excerpt; it did not fetch the article body.",
    "The evidence-strength label describes source structure, not truth, intent, impact, or causation.",
    "Declared instrument links are topical pointers until a separate scan or economic observation is joined by time and method.",
    "Title-similarity clustering can miss differently worded or cross-language accounts and can join closely worded updates.",
    "This dossier currently contains one independent evidence group and remains explicitly attributed."
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  "published_at": "2026-10-17T00:33:06Z",
  "reported_facts": [
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      "attribution": "Radio Television Hong Kong",
      "evidence_item_id": "item-4fd53cd02d4bf2f71af06122",
      "published_at": "2026-10-17T00:33:06Z",
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}