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TECVAYLI®▼ (teclistamab) demonstrates potential as frontline combination therapy for patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma( MENAFN - Live Mint) A Police case has been filed against poll strategist-turned Political leader Prashant Kishor, leaders of his Jan Suraaj party, a few coaching centre owners and 700 unknown protesters over the student protests in Bihar held on Sunday. Kishor and others have been been accused of "unauthorisedly" gatherin g people, instigating them and creating a law and order problem, according to reports. Kishore joined the students protesting against the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) examination, and slammed the treatment of students by the Bihar government on December 29. He accused the Bihar governmen of turning democracy into "lathi-tantra," and emphasised the right to protest of the students in public spaces. Kishor's Jan Suraaj Party, the police said, held a protest march without permission and led the crowd near Patna's Gandhi Maidan, which turned violent, breaking police loudspeakers and clashing with magistrates and police officers on duty. "Despite repeated requests by the administration, these people violated the guidelines of the administration and disrupted public order," the police said. Police were seen using batons and water cannons to disperse the crowd of students gathered to protest against BPSC aspirants. The protesting students in Patna are demanding the cancellation of the Integrated Combined (Preliminary) Competitive Examination (CCE) 2024 conducted by the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) on December 13 The students gathered at Gandhi Maidan before marching towards JP Golambar, intending to proceed to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's residence. They wanted to meet him and discuss the issue. MENAFN29122024007365015876ID1109040138 Legal Disclaimer: MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, once called a 'pretty good Canadian,' dies at 100 Jimmy Carter, the self-effacing peanut farmer, humanitarian and former navy lieutenant who helped Canada avert a nuclear catastrophe before ascending to the highest political office in the United States, died Sunday at his home in Georgia. James McCarten, The Canadian Press Dec 29, 2024 2:19 PM Dec 29, 2024 2:20 PM Share by Email Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Print Share via Text Message Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter speaks after him and his wife Rosalynn, received honorary degrees from Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., on Wednesday Nov. 21, 2012. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Peace Prize winner has died at 100. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lars Hagberg Jimmy Carter, the self-effacing peanut farmer, humanitarian and former navy lieutenant who helped Canada avert a nuclear catastrophe before ascending to the highest political office in the United States, died Sunday at his home in Georgia. He was 100, making him the longest-lived U.S. president in American history. Concern for Carter's health had become a recurring theme in recent years. He was successfully treated for brain cancer in 2015, then suffered a number of falls, including one in 2019 that resulted in a broken hip. Alarm spiked in February 2023, however, when the Carter Center — the philanthropic organization he and his wife Rosalynn founded in 1982 — announced he would enter hospice care at his modest, three-bedroom house in Plains, Ga. Rosalynn Carter, a mental health advocate whose role as presidential spouse helped to define the modern first lady, predeceased her husband in November 2023 — a death at 96 that triggered a remembrance to rival his. "Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished," the former president said in a statement after she died. "As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me." Conventional wisdom saw his single White House term as middling. But Carter's altruistic work ethic, faith-filled benevolence and famous disdain for the financial trappings of high office only endeared him to generations after he left politics in 1981. "The trite phrase has been, 'Jimmy Carter has been the best former president in the history of the United States,'" said Gordon Giffin, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada who sits on the Carter Center's board of trustees. "That grated on him, because it distinguished his service as president from his service — and I literally mean service — as a former president." His relentless advocacy for human rights, a term Carter popularized long before it became part of the political lexicon, included helping to build homes for the poor across the U.S. and in 14 other countries, including Canada, well into his 90s. He devoted the resources of the Carter Center to tackling Guinea worm, a parasite that afflicted an estimated 3.5 million people in the developing world in the early 1980s and is today all but eradicated, with just 13 cases reported in 2022. And he was a tireless champion of ending armed conflict and promoting democratic elections in the wake of the Cold War, with his centre monitoring 113 such votes in 39 different countries — and offering conflict-resolution expertise when democracy receded. Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, nearly a quarter-century after his seminal work on the Camp David Accords helped pave the way for a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979, the first of its kind. "His presidency got sidelined in the historic evaluation too quickly, and now people are revisiting it," Giffin said. "I think his standing in history as president will grow." A lifelong Democrat who never officially visited Canada as president, Carter was nonetheless a pioneer of sorts when it came to Canada-U.S. relations and a close friend to the two Canadian prime ministers he served alongside. One of them, former Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark, once called Carter a "pretty good Canadian" — a testament to the former commander-in-chief's authenticity and centre-left politics, which always resonated north of the Canada-U.S. border. The pair were reunited in 2017 at a panel discussion in Atlanta hosted by the Canadian American Business Council, and seemed to delight in teasing the host when she described Clark as a "conservative" and Carter as a "progressive." "I'm a Progressive Conservative — that's very important," Clark corrected her. Piped up Carter: "I'm a conservative progressive." In 2012, the Carters visited Kingston, Ont., to receive an honorary degree from Queen's University. Instead of a fancy hotel, they stayed with Arthur Milnes, a former speech writer, journalist and political scholar who'd long since become a close friend. "He became my hero, believe it or not, probably when I was about 12," said Milnes, whose parents had come of age during the Cold War and lived in perpetual fear of the ever-present nuclear threat until Carter took over the White House in 1977. "My mother never discussed politics, with one exception — and that was when Jimmy Carter was in the White House. She'd say, 'Art, Jimmy Carter is a good and decent man,'" Milnes recalled. "They always said, both of them, that for the first time since the 1950s, they felt safe, knowing that it was this special man from rural Georgia, Jimmy Carter, who had his finger on the proverbial button." While Richard Nixon and Pierre Trudeau appeared to share a mutual antipathy during their shared time in office, Carter got along famously with the prime minister. Indeed, it was at the express request of the Trudeau family that Carter attended the former prime minister's funeral in 2000, Giffin said. "The message I got back was the family would appreciate it if Jimmy Carter could come," said Giffin, who was the U.S. envoy in Ottawa at the time. "So he did come. He was at the Trudeau funeral. And to me, that said a lot about not only the relationship he had with Trudeau, but the relationship he had in the Canada-U.S. dynamic." It was at that funeral in Montreal that Carter — "much to my frustration," Giffin allowed — spent more than two hours in a holding room with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a meeting that resulted in Carter visiting Cuba in 2002, the first former president to do so. But it was long before Carter ever entered politics that he established a permanent bond with Canada — one forged in the radioactive aftermath of what might otherwise have become the country's worst nuclear calamity. In 1952, Carter was a 28-year-old U.S. navy lieutenant, a submariner with a budding expertise in nuclear power, when he and his crew were dispatched to help control a partial meltdown at the experimental Chalk River Laboratories northwest of Ottawa. In his 2016 book "A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety," Carter described working in teams of three, first practising on a mock-up of the reactor, then on the real thing, in short 90-second bursts to avoid absorbing more than the maximum allowable dose of radiation. "The limit on radiation absorption in the early 1950s was approximately 1,000 times higher than it is 60 years later," he wrote. "There were a lot of jokes about the effects of radioactivity, mostly about the prospect of being sterilized, and we had to monitor our urine until all our bodies returned to the normal range." That, Carter would later acknowledge in interviews, took him about six months. Carter and Clark were both in office during the so-called "Canadian Caper," a top-secret operation to spirit a group of U.S. diplomats out of Iran following the fall of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. The elaborate ploy, which involved passing the group off as a Canadian science-fiction film crew, was documented in the Oscar-winning 2012 Ben Affleck film "Argo." Carter didn't think much of the film. "The movie that was made, 'Argo,' was very distorted. They hardly mentioned the Canadian role in this very heroic, courageous event," he said during the CABC event. He described the true events of that escapade as "one of the greatest examples of a personal application of national friendship I have ever known." To the end, Carter was an innately humble and understated man, said Giffin — a rare commodity in any world leader, much less in one from the United States. "People underestimate who Jimmy Carter is because he leads with his humanity," he said. "I read an account the other day that said the Secret Service vehicles that are parked outside his house are worth more than the house. How many former presidents have done that?" This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec, 29, 2024. James McCarten, The Canadian Press See a typo/mistake? Have a story/tip? This has been shared 0 times 0 Shares Share by Email Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Print Share via Text Message Get your daily Victoria news briefing Email Sign Up More Science News A 9th telecoms firm has been hit by a massive Chinese espionage campaign, the White House says Dec 27, 2024 5:55 PM Trump asks Supreme Court to delay TikTok ban so he can weigh in after he takes office Dec 27, 2024 4:22 PM Trump asks Supreme Court to delay TikTok ban so he can weigh in after he takes office Dec 27, 2024 2:45 PM
Jimmy Carter Net Worth: How rich was the late US President?WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Attorneys for Fox Corp. asked a Delaware judge Friday to dismiss a shareholder lawsuit seeking to hold current and former company officials personally liable for the financial fallout stemming from Fox News reports regarding alleged vote rigging in the 2020 election. Five New York City public employee pension funds, along with Oregon’s public employee retirement fund, allege that former chairman Rupert Murdoch and other Fox Corp. leaders deliberately turned a blind eye to liability risks posed by reporting false claims of vote rigging by election technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic USA. Smartmatic is for defamation in New York, alleging damages of $2.7 billion. It recently in the District of Columbia against One America News Network, another conservative outlet, over reports of vote fraud. Dominion also filed several defamation lawsuits against blaming its election equipment for Donald Trump’s loss in 2020. Last year, a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion in Delaware for $787 million. The shareholder plaintiffs also allege that Fox corporate leaders ignored “red flags” about liability arising from a 2017 report suggesting that Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, may have been killed because he had leaked Democratic party emails to Wikileaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. Rich, 27, was shot in 2016 in Washington, D.C., in what authorities have said was an attempted robbery. Fox News retracted the Seth Rich story a week after its initial broadcast, but Rich’s parents sued the network for falsely portraying their son as a criminal and traitor. Fox News in 2020 for “millions of dollars,” shortly before program hosts Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity were to be deposed, according to the shareholder lawsuit. Joel Friedlander, an attorney for the institutional shareholders, argued that Fox officials waited until the company’s reporting about Rich became a national scandal before addressing the issue. Similarly, according to the shareholders, corporate officials, including Rupert Murdoch and his son, CEO Lachlan Murdoch, allowed Fox News to continue broadcasting false narratives about the 2020 election, despite internal communications suggesting that they knew there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories. “The Murdochs could have minimized future monetary exposure, but they chose not to,” Friedlander said. Instead, he argued, they engaged in “bad-faith decision making” with other defendants in a profit-driven effort to retain viewers and remain in Trump’s good graces. “Decisions were made at the highest level to promote pro-Trump conspiracy theories without editorial control,” Friedlander said. Defense attorneys argue that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs filed their lawsuit without first demanding that the Fox Corp. board take action, as required under Delaware law. They say the plaintiffs also failed to demonstrate that a pre-suit demand on the Fox board would have been futile because at least half of the directors face a substantial likelihood of liability or are not independent of someone who does. Beyond the “demand futility” issue, defense attorneys also argue that allegations that Fox officials breached their fiduciary duties fail to meet the pleading standards under Delaware and therefore should be dismissed. Defense attorney William Savitt argued, for example, that neither the Rich settlement, which he described as “immaterial,” nor the allegedly defamatory statements about Dominion and Smartmatic constitute red flags putting directors on notice about the risk of defamation liability. Nor do they demonstrate that directors acted in bad faith or that Fox “utterly failed” to implement and monitor a system to report and mitigate legal risks, including defamation liability risk, according to the defendants. Savitt noted that the Rich article was promptly retracted, and that the settlement included no admission of liability. The Dominion and Smartmatic statements, meanwhile, gave rise themselves to the currently liability issues and therefore can not serve as red flags about future liability risks, according to the defendants. “A ‘red flag’ must be what the term commonly implies — warning of a risk of a liability-causing event that allows the directors to take action to avert the event, not notice that a liability-causing event has already occurred,” defense attorneys wrote in their motion to dismiss. Defense attorneys also say there are no factual allegations to support claims that Fox officials condoned illegal conduct in pursuit of corporate profits, or that they deliberately ignored their oversight responsibilities. They note that a “bad outcome” is not sufficient to demonstrate “bad faith.” Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster is expected to rule within 90 days. Randall Chase, The Associated Press
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I'll never get tired of praising dividend stocks as the market's unsung heroes. While they aren't as sexy as high-flying growth stocks, they can be just as effective at making investors money. The steady income from dividend stocks can also help cushion investors against the inevitable volatility of the stock market . Whether prices are up, down, or stagnant, you can count on receiving your monthly or quarterly payouts (in most cases). As we head into 2025, it's never too early to begin thinking about which dividend stocks could make sense for your portfolio, especially those with attractive dividend yields . Below are the S&P 500's highest-yielding stocks: Company Dividend Yield Walgreens Boots Alliance ( WBA 1.06% ) 11.8% Altria Group ( MO 0.72% ) 7% Pfizer ( PFE 0.12% ) 6.6% Source: . Dividend yields as of Dec. 6. Despite the high dividend yields, not all these companies are worth investing in heading into the new year. Let's take a look at where each stands. 1. Walgreens Boots Alliance On paper, an 11.8% dividend yield seems like an income investor's dream. However, when you look at why Walgreens Boots Alliance's yield is that high, you'll see where the problem lies -- especially considering the company cut its quarterly payouts by 48% to $0.25 early this year. Through Dec. 6, the stock price of Walgreens Boots Alliance has dropped by more than 68% in 2024. There hasn't been much encouraging news coming from the company lately. Its operating loss in its fiscal 2024 was $14.1 billion, it plans to close around 1,200 stores in the next couple of years, and competition from the likes of Amazon and Walmart is steadily increasing. Needless to say, none of those facts are sparking optimism among investors. The investment thesis gets even worse when you consider the appeal of the stock has been its dividend, and even that seems to be in jeopardy. Walgreens Boots Alliance distributed $1.3 billion in dividends in fiscal 2024 while being leagues away from making a profit. That's a recipe for another dividend cut to be on the horizon. WBA Total Dividends Paid (Annual) data by YCharts . Negative numbers represent payouts. Whether Walgreens Boots Alliance will dial back its dividend again or even suspend it entirely remains to be seen, but it's not a stock I'd feel comfortable investing in heading into 2025. 2. Altria Group Tobacco giant Altria has routinely been one of the S&P 500's highest-yielding dividend stocks. The stock is up by close to 37% this year (as of Dec. 6), which makes its yield of around 7% -- more than five times the S&P 500's average -- even more impressive. Some of Altria's stock success this year can be attributed to its progress in its non-cigarette categories such as vapor, with its recently acquired product, NJOY. That is important because adult smoking rates in the U.S. have steadily declined. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021, the percentage of U.S. cigarette smokers had dropped to around 11.5% (it was 20% in 2005). Altria is by far the country's largest cigarette producer, so this decline in smoking rates has a tangible effect on its business. However, it has offset the impact of declining cigarette sales volumes by raising its prices per pack. (Cigarette costs typically aren't the chief reason why people quit smoking.) That's far from a long-term solution, but it has kept the company's financials relatively stable. MO Revenue (Annual) data by YCharts. Altria is a stock you can feel comfortable buying going into 2025, but it will be important for shareholders to monitor its progress (or lack thereof) in its non-cigarette categories. How those businesses fare will be key to its long-term success. 3. Pfizer Pfizer's stock is down quite a bit since its late 2021 high of just over $61, but it's not time to ring the alarm bells yet. Much of Pfizer's recent financial success came from its COVID-19 vaccine and antiviral drugs, but the company has been continuing to diversify its lineup and expand its operations. Through the first three months of 2024, it spent $7.8 billion on internal research and development projects. When Pfizer hiked its dividend in December 2023, that marked its 15th consecutive year of increases, and there's no reason to believe it won't keep the streak going. Over the past decade, it has increased its payouts by 50%. PFE Dividend data by YCharts. Pfizer has a lot of long-term potential, especially as it continues to expand its business and become less reliant on a handful of products for revenue. If you're looking to get exposure to the healthcare sector, Pfizer is a stock with a lot of upside potential and relatively low downside risk. And its above-average yield should help investors practice a bit of patience as management works to find new sources for growth after the sharp sales rise and subsequent decline connected to its COVID-related products.
LA Times staff outraged and columnist quits over owner's plan to add ‘bias meter’ to coverage
Beirut, Dec 7 (AP) Insurgents' stunning march across Syria accelerated on Saturday with news that they had reached the gates of the capital and that government forces had abandoned the central city of Homs. The government was forced to deny rumours that President Bashar Assad had fled the country. The loss of Homs is a potentially crippling blow for Assad. It stands at an important intersection between Damascus, the capital, and Syria's coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus — the Syrian leader's base of support and home to a Russian strategic naval base. The pro-government Sham FM news outlet reported that government forces took positions outside Syria's third-largest city, without elaborating. Rami Abdurrahman who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Syrian troops and members of different security agencies have withdrawn from the city, adding that rebels have entered parts of it. The insurgency announced later Saturday that it had taken over Homs. The city's capture is a major victory for the rebels, who have already seized the cities of Aleppo and Hama, as well as large parts of the south, in a lightning offensive that began November 27. Analysts said rebel control of Homs would be a game-changer. The rebels' moves around Damascus, reported by the monitor and a rebel commander, came after the Syrian army withdrew from much of southern part of the country, leaving more areas, including several provincial capitals, under the control of opposition fighters. For the first time in the country's long-running civil war, the government now has control of only three of 14 provincial capitals: Damascus, Latakia and Tartus. The advances in the past week were among the largest in recent years by opposition factions, led by a group that has its origins in al-Qaida and is considered a terrorist organisation by the US and the United Nations. In their push to overthrow Assad's government, the insurgents, led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, have met little resistance from the Syrian army. The rapid rebel gains, coupled with the lack of support from Assad's erstwhile allies, posed the most serious threat to his rule since the start of the war. The UN's special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, on Saturday called for urgent talks in Geneva to ensure an “orderly political transition”. Speaking to reporters at the annual Doha Forum in Qatar, he said the situation in Syria was changing by the minute. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose country is Assad's chief international backer, said he feels “sorry for the Syrian people”. In Damascus, people rushed to stock up on supplies. Thousands went to Syria's border with Lebanon, trying to leave the country. Many shops in the capital were shuttered, a resident told The Associated Press, and those still open ran out of staples such as sugar. Some were selling items at three times the normal price. “The situation is very strange. We are not used to that,” the resident said, insisting on anonymity, fearing retributions. “People are worried whether there will be a battle (in Damascus) or not.” It was the first time that opposition forces reached the outskirts of Damascus since 2018, when Syrian troops recaptured the area following a years-long siege. The UN said it was moving noncritical staff outside the country as a precaution. Assad's status Syria's state media denied social media rumours that Assad left the country, saying he is performing his duties in Damascus. He has had little, if any, help from his allies. Russia, is busy with its war in Ukraine. Lebanon's Hezbollah, which at one point sent thousands of fighters to shore up Assad's forces, has been weakened by a yearlong conflict with Israel. Iran has seen its proxies across the region degraded by regular Israeli airstrikes. US President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday posted on social media that that the United States should avoid engaging militarily in Syria. Pedersen said a date for talks in Geneva on the implementation a UN resolution, adopted in 2015, and calling for a Syrian-led political process, would be announced later. The resolution calls for the establishment of a transitional governing body, followed by the drafting of a new constitution and ending with UN-supervised elections. Later Saturday, foreign ministers and senior diplomats from eight key countries, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Egypt, Turkiye and Iran, along with Pederson, gathered on the sidelines of the Doha Summit to discuss the situation in Syria. In a statement issued late Saturday, the participants affirmed their support for a political solution to the Syrian crisis “that would lead to the end of military activity and protect civilians”. They also agreed on the importance of strengthening international efforts to increase aid to the Syrian people. The insurgents' march Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, said insurgents were in the Damascus suburbs of Maadamiyah, Jaramana and Daraya. Opposition fighters were marching toward the Damascus suburb of Harasta, he added. A commander with the insurgents, Hassan Abdul-Ghani, posted on the Telegram messaging app that opposition forces had begun the “final stage” of their offensive by encircling Damascus. HTS controls much of northwest Syria and in 2017 set up a “salvation government” to run day-to-day affairs in the region. In recent years, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani has sought to remake the group's image, cutting ties with al-Qaida, ditching hard-line officials and vowing to embrace pluralism and religious tolerance. The shock offensive began November 27, during which gunmen captured the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest, and the central city of Hama, the country's fourth largest city. Opposition activists said on Saturday that a day earlier, insurgents entered Palmyra, which is home to invaluable archaeological sites had been in government hands since being taken from the Islamic State group in 2017. To the south, Syrian troops left much of the province of Quneitra including the main Baath City, activists said. Syrian Observatory said government troops have withdrawn from much of the two southern provinces. The Syrian army said in a statement that it carried out redeployment and repositioning in Sweida and Daraa after its checkpoints came under attack by “terrorists." The army said it was setting up a “strong and coherent defensive and security belt in the area”, apparently to defend Damascus from the south. The Syrian government has referred to opposition gunmen as terrorists since conflict broke out in March 2011. Diplomacy in Doha The foreign ministers of Iran, Russia and Turkiye, meeting in Qatar, called for an end to the hostilities. Turkiye is a main backer of the rebels. Qatar's top diplomat, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, criticised Assad for failing to take advantage of the lull in fighting in recent years to address the country's underlying problems. “Assad didn't seize this opportunity to start engaging and restoring his relationship with his people,” he said. Sheikh Mohammed said he was surprised by how quickly the rebels have advanced and said there is a real threat to Syria's “territorial integrity”. He said the war could “damage and destroy what is left if there is no sense of urgency” to start a political process. (AP) PY PY (This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)The phenomenal and exceptional rise of Donald Trump is comparable to US exceptionalism itself as his chequered presence and Trumpism of the last ten years can match any Hollywood blockbuster. Exceptionalism is caused by a number of factors. American exceptionalism, with primacy of economics over politics, is both a product of its history and geography. Trump’s rise and consolidation reflects a sea change in the political landscape of a nation that had Life Magazine describe in 1941 the 20th century as “an American century”. This psyche allowed a rank outsider with impressive economic success to occupy the position of the President of the US in 2016 and in 2024. Those who thought 2016 to be a freak event had to concede that Trumpism is a reflection of his support among a majority of voters. In the post Second World War period, the hegemony of the US based order supported by the containment theory was possible due to the decline of the great European powers in general and the exit of Germany in particular. The Soviet led bloc was never a match or a threat to American domination. Richard Nixon confidently declared that the US president was irrelevant for internal governance as the dominant social, economic and racial issues had been resolved perfectly well. Dahl’s theory of polyarchy and Lipset’s attribution that politics has become dull restricting it to decide ‘a nickel here and a nickel there’ aptly summarized this perception. So did the debate on End of Ideology and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. But this equilibrium was shattered in the 1990s with the inauguration of the Clinton presidency in 1993. In an upset election, Bill Clinton defeated the incumbent, George H. W. Bush. Ross Perot, the third candidate polled 19 per cent of the popular vote upsetting Bush’s apple cart and also propelling the little-known Democrat Governor of Arkansas, Clinton to the White House. The Clinton Administration’s initiation of NAFTA, an economic union in North America which included Mexico as well, contained grave implications for USA’s internal economic arrangements and concerns for blue-collar workers, the mainstay in a formidable democratic coalition since the New Deal. Perot opposed both NAFTA and the move of shifting the manufacturing base of the US to China. The collapse of communism saw the emergence of a unipolar world. Liberal triumphalism accompanied by extending democracy by force resulted in pushing the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to the borders of the post-Soviet Russian federation. George W. Bush refined the concept after 9/11 by fabricating falsehood in Iraq and elsewhere. He resurrected the Dulles doctrine that one who is not with the US is against it. Advertisement President Barack Obama continued with the major planks of both Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations with no indication of a significant policy shift even after the 2008 financial crash. Sandel blames the Clinton years for deregulation of the financial industry and for doing “little to address growing inequality and the influence of money on politics”. Obama “showed that progressive politics can speak a language of moral and spiritual purpose” but that wasn’t reflected in his presidency. He also appointed the economic advisers who supported financial deregulation during Clinton’s presidency. He bailed out banks without making them accountable and offered little help for ordinary citizens who lost their homes. “All these fuelled popular protest across the political spectrum. On the left, it prompted the Occupy Movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. And on the right, it prompted the Tea Party Movement and the election of Trump”. Cynicism has replaced the approval of inequality due to hard work, innovation and puritan ethics, and the corporatism of the US economy has raised suspicions of an unaccountable deep state machine operating against the majority convincing the latter of minority tyranny. This scenario was further complicated with the spectacular rise of China and its admission to the WTO in 2001. In 2016, Brexit followed by Trump’s surprise victory defeating Hillary Clinton challenged the aforesaid aggressive policy that was pursued vigorously for a quarter century. Hillary’s over-emphasis on identity politics moved the Democratic Party away from the coalition that made it a mainstream majoritarian party after having dismantled the Daley machine in its stormy Chicago Convention held in 1968. The social security and solidarity which was part of the New Deal was pushed to the background. In 2016, the Democratic party found solace in the fact that Trump, like other Republicans Nixon and George W. Bush, had secured victory by electoral college votes and not by popular votes. But that was shattered in 2024. Biden’s victory in 2019 and Trump’s antics after losing the presidency including the 6 January episode in 2020 convinced the Democratic leadership that Trump’s challenge was over and that it has regained its popular support. Trump’s four years at best were an aberration. But the euphoria was short lived as Trump despite fighting his legal battles continued to maintain his presence on the political scene, and clinched the nomination for 2024 presidency. He regained his importance with a formidable presence after effortlessly trouncing all the other Republican aspirants in the primaries. He demonstrated, in a political career of only a decade, that a rank outsider can occupy the pivotal position fighting all odds. Bravery and tenacity are valued attributes in a system that combines the position of a head of the state and that of the government. Biden as president ignored the economic issues that were affecting the overwhelming majority of his supporters. The wages of an American worker remained stagnant while that of his counterpart in China increased four-fold. An average American also perceives that there is no centre of power in Washington with an ability to deal with galloping inflation. While maintaining tariffs imposed by Trump on China there was no visible effect either on revamping manufacturing or on the expected consequent increase in the number of bluecollar workers. Trump reiterated the issues that he raised in his first term, namely revitalizing the manufacturing base of the US, along with the insecurity, isolation and alienation of the working class who lacked a college degree. He rejected the domination of an Ivy League meritocratic urban-based privileged elite that C. Wright Mills theorised in his notion of the power elite in the 1950s, as it has brought in a new caste system with its contempt for a vast under-class in American politics. As a result of all these factors Trump dislodged the Democrats in many predominantly Democratic states and also in the seven swing states to emerge as a leader of reconciliation committed to restoring American pride. (The writers, respectively, are retired Professors of Political Science of the University of Delhi and the Jesus and Mary College) Advertisement