NEW DELHI (AP) — India’s former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, widely regarded as the architect of India’s economic reform program and a landmark nuclear deal with the United States, has died. He was 92. Singh was admitted to New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences late Thursday after his health deteriorated due to a “sudden loss of consciousness at home,” the hospital said in a statement. “Resuscitative measures were started immediately at home. He was brought to the Medical Emergency” at 8:06 p.m., the hospital said, but “despite all efforts, he could not be revived and was declared dead at 9:51 p.m.” Singh was being treated for “age-related medical conditions,” the statement said. A mild-mannered technocrat, Singh became one of India’s longest-serving prime ministers for 10 years and leader of the Congress Party in the Parliament's Upper House, earning a reputation as a man of great personal integrity. He was chosen to fill the role in 2004 by Sonia Gandhi, the widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi . But his sterling image was tainted by allegations of corruption against his ministers. Singh was reelected in 2009, but his second term as prime minister was clouded by financial scandals and corruption charges over the organization of the 2010 Commonwealth Games. This led to the Congress Party’s crushing defeat in the 2014 national election by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party under the leadership of Narendra Modi . Singh adopted a low profile after relinquishing the post of prime minister. Prime Minister Modi, who succeeded Singh in 2014, called him one of India’s “most distinguished leaders” who rose from humble origins and left “a strong imprint on our economic policy over the years.” “As our Prime Minister, he made extensive efforts to improve people’s lives,” Modi said in a post on the social platform X. He called Singh’s interventions in Parliament as a lawmaker “insightful” and said “his wisdom and humility were always visible.” Rahul Gandhi, from the same party as Singh and the opposition leader in the lower house of the Indian Parliament, said Singh’s “deep understanding of economics inspired the nation” and that he “led India with immense wisdom and integrity.” “I have lost a mentor and guide. Millions of us who admired him will remember him with the utmost pride,” Gandhi wrote on X. Born on Sept. 26, 1932, in a village in the Punjab province of undivided India, Singh’s brilliant academic career took him to Cambridge University in Britain, where he earned a degree in economics in 1957. He then got his doctorate in economics from Nuffield College at Oxford University in 1962. Singh taught at Panjab University and the prestigious Delhi School of Economics before joining the Indian government in 1971 as economic advisor in the Commerce Ministry. In 1982, he became chief economic adviser to the Finance Ministry. He also served as deputy chair of the Planning Commission and governor of the Reserve Bank of India. As finance minister, Singh in 1991 instituted reforms that opened up the economy and moved India away from a socialist-patterned economy and toward a capitalist model in the face of a huge balance of payments deficit, skirting a potential economic crisis. His accolades include the 1987 Padma Vibhushan Award, India’s second-highest civilian honor; the Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Award of the Indian Science Congress in 1995; and the Asia Money Award for Finance Minister of the Year in 1993 and 1994. Singh was a member of India’s Upper House of Parliament and was leader of the opposition from 1998 to 2004 before he was named prime minister. He was the first Sikh to hold the country’s top post and made a public apology in Parliament for the 1984 Sikh Massacre in which some 3,000 Sikhs were killed after then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by Sikh bodyguards. Under Singh, India adopted a Right to Information Act in 2005 to promote accountability and transparency from government officials and bureaucrats. He was also instrumental in implementing a welfare scheme that guaranteed at least 100 paid workdays for Indian rural citizens. The coalition government he headed for a decade brought together politicians and parties with differing ideologies that were rivals in the country’s various states. In a move hailed as one of his biggest achievements apart from economic reforms, Singh ended India’s nuclear isolation by signing a deal with the U.S. that gave India access to American nuclear technology. But the deal hit his government adversely, with Communist allies withdrawing support and criticism of the agreement growing within India in 2008 when it was finalized. Singh adopted a pragmatic foreign policy approach, pursuing a peace process with nuclear rival and neighbor Pakistan. But his efforts suffered a major setback after Pakistani militants carried out a massive gun and bomb attack in Mumbai in November 2008. He also tried to end the border dispute with China, brokering a deal to reopen the Nathu La pass into Tibet, which had been closed for more than 40 years. His 1965 book, “India’s Export Trends and Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth,” dealt with India’s inward-oriented trade policy. Singh is survived by his wife Gursharan Kaur and three daughters. Associated Press writer Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi contributed to this report.
NoneParts of west already flooded, situation expected to worsen
U.S. universities have always been sites of contestation and political struggle. Today, their governing bodies are dominated by representatives of corporate power. Issues like the student debt crisis and military research are bound up with universities. The right wing, often joined by establishment Democrats, attacks college curricula and scapegoats students to score political points. Student activists today are challenging university ties to everything from fossil fuels to racist policing — and, of course, to the genocide in Palestine . They demand divestment and stage protests and encampments. In response, government officials and big donors are accelerating the machinery of repression against students and faculty . This tradition — of student struggle for justice at universities, of the deep politicization of university spaces — is far from new. A key turning point in its birth occurred 60 years ago, with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in late 1964. On its surface, the Free Speech Movement was a two-and-a-half-month struggle at the University of California Berkeley for free speech rights on campus. But more deeply, it represented a mass emergence of the university as an openly political space and students as political actors. It warmed the chill of 1950s McCarthyism on campus and helped usher in the wave of student protest that came to be associated with the 1960s era (The Sixties). All this generated a strong backlash from conservatives and business interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, the right began forging billionaire-backed counterinstitutions to reclaim dominance in higher education. Right-wing politicians from Ronald Reagan to J.D. Vance rode to power, in part, by denouncing universities and their students. Ellen Schrecker, the renowned historian of anti-communism and U.S. universities in the 1960s , says current attacks on higher education may be even worse than the days of McCarthyism. “It’s much more serious today,” Schrecker told Truthout , “because the whole system of higher education has been the target of a massive campaign of political repression that began with a backlash against the student movement of the 1960s.” With an incoming Trump administration floating harsh attacks that range from federal prosecution of campus demonstrators to deporting international student protesters, this repression stands to intensify. The United States emerged from World War II as a global hegemon. Postwar universities became a vital arm of U.S. empire during the Cold War, with the ascending military-industrial complex resting, in part, on university weapons research. An inextricable link between universities and militarization was born, a “connection that continues to this day,” says Schrecker. All this, combined with a booming postwar economy and policies like the GI Bill, drove a vast expansion of higher education in the U.S. The numbers of colleges and universities, and the students and faculty who populated them, skyrocketed in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of this growth was concentrated at huge bureaucratic state universities that were closely interlocked with corporate and military power. Berkeley, the flagship university of the fastest-growing state in the nation, was a pinnacle example of this. “Berkeley was considered the number one public university in the United States,” said Schrecker, and, as a major site in the development of the atomic bomb, “it was very tied to the military-industrial complex.” The 1950s Cold War U.S. also saw a wave of McCarthyist repression that stretched into universities, with many professors forced to take loyalty oaths. “What that meant,” said Schrecker, “was that a kind of chill pervaded the campuses.” Amid the political quiescence, pockets of student and faculty dissent existed, but they were few in number. UC Berkeley was no exception. “It was probably the most politically repressive of the nation’s major universities,” said Schrecker, noting that the Bay Area power elite who had influence over the campus were extremely right-wing and anti-communist. But going into the 1960s, the facade of conformity was starting to crack. More than anything, the civil rights movement broke the political dormancy. In early 1960, Black student activists kicked off a national wave of sit-ins that directly challenged segregation. Young people flocked to groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its ethos of direct action and bottom-up organizing. “Everything got absolutely galvanized by the civil rights movement,” Schrecker told Truthout . Berkeley students in the early 1960s cut their teeth protesting anti-communist hearings and organizing to desegregate Bay Area businesses. Key leaders of the Free Speech Movement, including Mario Savio, participated in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer before heading to Berkeley that fall. New groups like Students for a Democratic Society were lambasting bureaucratic universities and casting students as political agents who should live their values and practice participatory democracy. The “Sixties” were coming, and the stage was being set for the Free Speech Movement. There was a strip of land on the border of the Berkeley campus where students tabled for their causes. In late September 1964, University of California administrators, perhaps anxious over rising civil rights protests, banned political activity there. It was a big mistake. Students immediately defied the ban and eight of them were suspended. In protest, hundreds of students congregated outside the administration’s office on September 30 demanding they also be charged. A new sense of solidarity and collectively was being born. On October 1, Berkeley student and civil rights activist Jack Weinberg was arrested for refusing to remove his fundraising table for the Congress of Racial Equality civil rights group. But the police car holding Weinberg was soon surrounded by hundreds, then thousands, of students, demanding his release. The car didn’t move for 36 hours. Speaker after speaker hopped on its roof. It was a collective political awakening. “That thirty-six-hour siege marked a critical moment in my life,” wrote Bettina Aptheker later. “I had a sense of belonging to something, being on the inside of a community of my own making, on my own terms.” The Free Speech Movement was born. “Two-and-half months of crisis began,” said Schrecker, marked by marches, meetings and rallies against an intransigent administration. Students were demanding, simply, the right to engage in political activity on campus. The battle at Berkeley dominated headlines around the nation. Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr dismissed student demands, feeding a dialectic that only emboldened further protests. The impasse continued until the end of November, when several protest leaders were suspended. On December 2, students marched to Sproul Hall, a key hub of the Berkeley campus, and peacefully occupied it. It was here that the most iconic moment of the Berkeley Free Movement transpired when Mario Savio, the movement’s leading voice, and who was soon monitored by the FBI, gave his iconic, fiery “Bodies Upon the Gears” speech on the steps of Sproul Hall. “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part!” screamed Savio . “And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” The festive occupation of Sproul Hall stretched into the night, when the administration made the fateful decision to send in hundreds of police. Cops swarmed the building, cracking heads and dragging out students. Nearly 800 people were arrested in just a few hours. In 1964, this was a shocking spectacle to see at a major U.S. university. It was also the final straw. Graduate students serving as teaching assistants went on strike in response to the repression. Faculty swung to the side of the students. The crisis spread across the entire campus. Finally, on December 8, 1964, Berkeley faculty voted 824 to 115 in favor of a resolution declaring that “the content of speech or advocacy shall not be restricted by the university,” the core demand of the Free Speech Movement. This was a signal that the administration could not ignore. “At this moment many of us, faculty and students alike, understood that the days of the loyalty oaths and speakers’ bans and anti-Communist witch hunts were finally over,” wrote Aptheker. By mid-December, the fight at Berkeley was over, with student demands for free speech recognized on campus. But the movement symbolized the beginning of something bigger. “It was a moment in which the ‘1960s movement’ was born,” said Schrecker. The Free Speech Movement recast college students as political actors and reframed universities as political spaces tied to the larger power structure as well as sites of domination in themselves. It forged a nascent blueprint for campus organizing. In the years to come, thousands of student organizers would draw and build upon the analysis, language and tactics from Berkeley as campus activism against the Vietnam War ripped across the nation. The Free Speech Movement also laid the ground for a growing critique of the corporate university over the following decade. The student movement soon developed an analysis of higher education as a key pillar of the military-industrial complex and capitalist system. This legacy continues today, as students challenge fossil fuel and war profiteers at their institutions. Campus activism born out of the 1960s also expanded democratic governance at universities and democratized curricula. But 1960s campus activism also triggered a right-wing backlash that has continued to this day. Ronald Reagan ascended to the governorship of California in 1967 in part by depicting campuses like Berkeley as sites of chaos and demonizing students as rowdy ingrates. The attack on universities as bastions of liberal elitism became a mainstay in the right-wing playbook in the ensuing decades. Accompanying this, billionaire donors, especially from the Koch donor network, constructed a movement to reassert conservative hegemony in higher education. States like North Carolina and Florida have recently seen particularly repressive attacks on universities and, especially, their most marginalized students. “This is a very well-funded campaign to change American political culture and undermine the universities as a source of expertise,” said Schrecker. “The right-wing network saw universities as dangerously radical and so they created think tanks and other organizations to supplant them.” Schrecker says administrators today have joined in the repression of Palestinian solidarity activists on campus. “They are very much caving into pressures, especially from massively well-funded Zionist groups,” she said. “Universities have taken sides and are repressing people who are openly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.” As a recent report from the American Association of University Professors shows, attempts to “manufacture backlash” against universities are bankrolled by billionaire donors. These efforts largely focus on “critical race theory” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — covers for attacks on hard-fought gains won at universities by historically oppressed groups. At the same time, there are signs of hope — and counter-sources of progressive power at universities. Grad workers are unionizing en masse and there are inspiring examples of faculty labor militancy pushing back against austerity on campus and resisting the replacement of full-time professors with low-paid, precarious adjunct faculty. Students are politicized and emboldened around Palestine, and grad unions are often some of the leading voices on this. Free higher education is an incredibly popular demand. But there are dire signs that the ongoing repression against college students, particularly for speaking up for Palestine, will increase under Trump. This raises the question of how students today, 60 years after the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, should respond. “Where do we go from here? The only answer I see is collective action,” Schrecker told Truthout . “We need to mobilize students and faculty members and create a counter movement. We have the numbers. We are the only people who can stop the repression.”The PTI is not going to engage in negotiations with the government for an indefinite period. It has set January 31 of the next year as the cut-off date for the process. "The PTI is giving the government until the end of January to conclude the dialogue aimed at reducing political tensions. The party's negotiation team will formally inform the government committee about this deadline at our meeting on January 2," said Sahibzada Hamid Raza on Thursday. Raza, the spokesperson of the PTI's negotiation team, was speaking to the media after meeting with party founder Imran Khan at Rawalpindi's Adiala Jail along with Omar Ayub and Asad Qaiser. According to Raza, Imran is ready to forgive all the "atrocities" committed by authorities. However, he has not withdrawn his call for the overseas Pakistanis not to send remittances to the country The SIC chief, who is not officially a PTI member, reiterated the party's demands for formation of judicial commissions to investigate the incidents of May 9, 2023 and November 26, 2024 and for the release of all political prisoners, including PTI founder Imran Khan. "We categorically reject responsibility for the events of May 9," Raza said, demanding a judicial inquiry led by senior judges of the Supreme Court to establish accountability. On May 9, 2023, violent protests erupted across the country when paramilitary Rangers arrested Imran Khan from the premises of the Islamabad High Court in connection with a corruption case. He alleged that on November 26 authorities fired live rounds at PTI supporters staging a protest march in Islamabad, resulting in 13 deaths, 64 gunshot injuries, and 150 to 200 missing persons. "This was an assault on the people and democracy," Raza asserted, calling for a transparent inquiry into the violence. He held government authorities responsible for ordering the alleged use of force against peaceful demonstrators. Elaborating on the party's second demand, he said the PTI wants release of all its workers and leaders including Imran Khan. He, however, clarified that the release of Imran should not be part of a deal but a judicial process. "Imran Khan was acquitted by courts but the government formed new cases," he said. Raza decried the systematic victimization of the PTI, likening it to the treatment of political parties during the 1971 crisis. He alleged that PTI members had been subjected to torture and that their civil and human rights had been "suspended." Despite the persecution, Raza said, Imran Khan is willing to forgive the violence directed at him and urged the resolution of political grievances through constructive dialogue. He claimed that PTI-backed candidates who emerged victorious in the February 8 polls faced obstacles in joining political parties registered with the Election Commission of Pakistan. To circumvent these challenges, Imran Khan aligned PTI-backed candidates with the SIC, which remains a key ally of PTI. He said Imran Khan expressed his confidence in all lawmakers including Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur. The former prime minister also condemned airstrike inside Afghanistan, stating that Pakistan should resolve all issues with the neighboring country through dialogue. COMMENTS Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive. For more information, please see ourIt looked like a recipe for disaster. So, when his country's swimmers were being accused of doping earlier this year, one Chinese official cooked up something fast. He blamed it on contaminated noodles. In fact, he argued, it could have been a culinary conspiracy concocted by criminals, whose actions led to the cooking wine used to prepare the noodles being laced with a banned heart drug that found its way into an athlete's system. This theory was spelled out to international anti-doping officials during a meeting and, after weeks of wrangling, finally made it into the thousands of pages of data handed over to the lawyer who investigated the case involving 23 Chinese swimmers who had tested positive for that same drug. The attorney, appointed by the World Anti-Doping Agency, refused to consider that scenario as he sifted through the evidence. In spelling out his reasoning, lawyer Eric Cottier paid heed to the half-baked nature of the theory. "The Investigator considers this scenario, which he has described in the conditional tense, to be possible, no less, no more," Cottier wrote. Even without the contaminated-noodles theory, Cottier found problems with the way WADA and the Chinese handled the case but ultimately determined WADA had acted reasonably in not appealing China's conclusion that its athletes had been inadvertently contaminated. Critics of the way the China case was handled can't help but wonder if a wider exploration of the noodle theory, details of which were discovered by The Associated Press via notes and emails from after the meeting where it was delivered, might have lent a different flavor to Cottier's conclusions. "There are more story twists to the ways the Chinese explain the TMZ case than a James Bond movie," said Rob Koehler, the director general of the advocacy group Global Athlete. "And all of it is complete fiction." In April, reporting from the New York Times and the German broadcaster ARD revealed that the 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for the banned heart medication trimetazidine, also known as TMZ. China's anti-doping agency determined the athletes had been contaminated, and so, did not sanction them. WADA accepted that explanation, did not press the case further, and China was never made to deliver a public notice about the "no-fault findings," as is often seen in similar cases. The stock explanation for the contamination was that traces of TMZ were found in the kitchen of a hotel where the swimmers were staying. In his 58-page report, Cottier relayed some suspicions about the feasibility of that chain of events — noting that WADA's chief scientist "saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities." But without evidence to support pursuing the case, and with the chance of winning an appeal at almost nil, Cottier determined WADA's "decision not to appeal appears indisputably reasonable." A mystery remained: How did those traces of TMZ get into the kitchen? Shortly after the doping positives were revealed, the Institute of National Anti-Doping Organizations held a meeting on April 30 where it heard from the leader of China's agency, Li Zhiquan. Li's presentation was mostly filled with the same talking points that have been delivered throughout the saga — that the positive tests resulted from contamination from the kitchen. But he expanded on one way the kitchen might have become contaminated, harkening to another case in China involving a low-level TMZ positive. A pharmaceutical factory, he explained, had used industrial alcohol in the distillation process for producing TMZ. The industrial alcohol laced with the drug "then entered the market through illegal channels," he said. The alcohol "was re-used by the perpetrators to process and produce cooking wine, which is an important seasoning used locally to make beef noodles," Li said. "The contaminated beef noodles were consumed by that athlete, resulting in an extremely low concentration of TMZ in the positive sample. "The wrongdoers involved have been brought to justice." This new information raised eyebrows among the anti-doping leaders listening to Li's report. So much so that over the next month, several emails ensued to make sure the details about the noodles and wine made their way to WADA lawyers, who could then pass it onto Cottier. Eventually, Li did pass on the information to WADA general counsel Ross Wenzel and, just to be sure, one of the anti-doping leaders forwarded it, as well, according to the emails seen by the AP. All this came with Li's request that the noodles story be kept confidential. Turns out, it made it into Cottier's report, though he took the information with a grain of salt. "Indeed, giving it more attention would have required it to be documented, then scientifically verified and validated," he wrote. Neither Wenzel nor officials at the Chinese anti-doping agency returned messages from AP asking about the noodles conspiracy and the other athlete who Li suggested had been contaminated by them. Meanwhile, 11 of the swimmers who originally tested positive competed at the Paris Games earlier this year in a meet held under the cloud of the Chinese doping case. Though WADA considers the case closed, Koehler and others point to situations like this as one of many reasons that an investigation by someone other than Cottier, who was hired by WADA, is still needed. "It gives the appearance that people are just making things up as they go along on this, and hoping the story just goes away," Koehler said. "Which clearly it has not." Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox!
Royal fans all say the same thing as Princess Charlotte giggles with royal cousins
Reform UK now has more members than the Conservative Party and is "the real opposition" according to Nigel Farage, while Kemi Badenoch has called his numbers "fake". According to a digital counter on the party's website, Reform UK had gone past 131,690 members - the amount the Conservative Party declared before its leadership election in the autumn - just before midday on Boxing Day. Mr Farage, party leader and MP for Clacton-on-Sea, hailed the "historic moment" and said on X: "The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world. Reform UK are now the real opposition." But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused the party of issuing misleading figures: "Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas eh, Nigel?. It's not real. It's a fake... [the website has been] coded to tick up automatically." Posting on X, she added that the Tories had "gained thousands of new members since the leadership election". X X , which may be using cookies and other technologies. To show you this content, we need your permission to use cookies. You can use the buttons below to amend your preferences to enable X cookies or to allow those cookies just once. You can change your settings at any time via the This content is provided by, which may be using cookies and other technologies. To show you this content, we need your permission to use cookies. You can use the buttons below to amend your preferences to enablecookies or to allow those cookies just once....IRVING, Texas , Dec. 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Commercial Metals Company (NYSE: CMC) today published its sustainability report for 2024, showcasing the company's industry-leading environmental performance. 2024 marks the tenth year of sustainability reporting for the Company. The document, which can be found on CMC's sustainability website ( https://esg.cmc.com/ ), includes progress updates regarding the environmental goals that were established in the Company's 2019 / 2020 report. "The 2024 report highlights the progress CMC is making towards our social, environmental and governance goals," said Peter Matt , President and Chief Executive Officer. "We are committed to continuous improvement across all facets of our business, from the way we reduce our impact on our environment to how we engage with our employees, suppliers, customers and other stakeholders." About CMC CMC is an innovative solutions provider helping build a stronger, safer, and more sustainable world. Through an extensive manufacturing network principally located in the United States and Central Europe, we offer products and technologies to meet the critical reinforcement needs of the global construction sector. CMC's solutions support construction across a wide variety of applications, including infrastructure, non-residential, residential, industrial, and energy generation and transmission. View original content: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cmc-publishes-2024-sustainability-report-302330781.html SOURCE Commercial Metals Company
White House condemns violence against ‘corporate greed’ after UnitedHealthcare CEO shootingIndia's former prime minister Manmohan Singh, architect of economic reforms, dies at 92