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LUCKNOW: Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi will take final decision on alliance between Samajwadi Party and Congress for Uttar Pradesh assembly polls in 2017 to stop BJP coming to power in the state. Political sources say that already there is good understanding between the two young leaders on the issue of preventing BJP from taking over the control of the most politically important state in the country.

BHOPAL: Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan completes 11 years in office-a remarkable feat in itself. No Chief Minister of the state had such a long innings. Next to him is Digvijay Singh who had the distinction of completing two terms of five year each. In fact Madhya Pradesh has been ruled by 16 Chief Ministers since its inception in 1956. But among them only two could complete one full term of five years. The two were Dr. K.N. Katju and Arjun Singh.

Ahead of the GST Council meeting scheduled on December 2 and 3, the Finance Ministry put on its website on November 26 the revised drafts of the model GST laws, as well as the Integrated GST Act and GST (Compensation to the States for loss of revenue) Act Even as the ongoing row over the Modi government’s abrupt demonetization of high denomination currencies brought in its trail simmering discontent among several State satraps particularly from West Bengal and Delhi, the revised draft laws touch on raw nerves of the compensation issue. The dual control issue of how the Centre and the States would partake of administrative powers under the proposed GST regime is also bound to fray the tempers of many a State as most of them increasingly feel that their fiscal autonomy is being whittled down under the garb of cooperative federalism to stay dependent on the largesse of the Centre!

Before US president-elect Donald Trump goes back on his pre-election promises and reverses his rhetoric under pressure of the USA think-tanks and the elite ruling caucus, the Russian president Vladimir intends to extract an obdurate guarantee from him to his action in Syria.

For the first time, the Bangladeshi taka has surpassed the Indian rupee in informal exchange value in border trade at the Petropole-Benapole checkpost, in the wake of demonetisation.

Ever since Amartya Sen said that “as an Indian citizen, I don’t want Modi as my PM”, his fate was sealed as an academic who could play an institutional role in India when the BJP was in power.

Barring the infamous emergency of 1975 enforced by Ms. Indira Gandhi, India's millions had not been thrown into a convulsion on a scale wrought by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's demonetisation with its chaotic impact for the entire population and a distressed economy, neither job-creating nor inclusive.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Is Kannur district, which has been devastated by the politics of murder, set to witness the dawn of peace at long last?

The important thing of Mr Donald Trump is his inconsistency. He said in the election campaign that he would pull back USA from Paris Agreement for climate change. It was a “hoax”, he clamoured. After the victory, he said he had an “open mind”. He no longer intended to prosecute Hillary Clinton and abandon Obamacare.

If demonetisation could easily and effectively deal with black money, counterfeit currencies and terror funding, the United States of America would have probably used the tool at least periodically to combat these problems, costing the US government billions of dollars in their management. Of all the global currencies, the US$ is the most counterfeited. The existence of most of the world’s 29 known offshore tax-havens around the US indicates, if any, the share of black money held by individuals and companies based in the US in the global ill-gotten wealth generation. Counterfeit US Dollars and black money have been supporting crimes, criminals and terrorists of all sorts in the US for years. If the US, the world’s biggest of digitised economies, depended more on its secret service sleuths than using dollar demonetisation, it could be on account of the high economic risk involved in sudden currency withdrawal and an unfathomable impact of the local and global confidence in the world’s most popular currency. Why the US? In fact, no major democracy, other than India, has seriously tried with demonetisation to unsettle its economy and public confidence in its currency.