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“Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost, Our Founding Fathers, in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero action as this precious inheritance was stripped away — and that is where we have finally arrived.”

With such cutting critiques circulating in the corridors of power from Paris to Tokyo, Washington will soon be left with only the crudest kind of coercion as it tries to exercise world leadership.

In Delhi's corridors of power, the atmosphere was initially jubilant, an Indian government source told the BBC.

That is the painful lesson Tidjane Thiam is learning as he waits to see whether deal-making in the corridors of power and popular pressure from the street can rescue his bid to become president of Ivory Coast.

There was once a time when Irish-Americans were prominent at the top of US politics, with figures such as Senator Teddy Kennedy and House of Representatives Speaker Tip O'Neill promoting Irish interests in the corridors of power.