Europe

Global stocks were fractionally lower in early European trading, closed Asia mixed, while S&P futures were unchanged, as the dollar fell for a second day on concerns ahead of Trump's press conference on Wednesday. Oil rebounded after its Monday plunge, while commodity metals like iron ore rose limit up in Chinese trading. Top overnight stories include Valeant announcing the sale of $2.1 billion in assets to pay down debt; VW managers warned to stay in Germany as U.S. charges near; Yahoo! plans to shrink board, get rid of Marissa Meyer and change its name after Verizon deal.

Submitted by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

In what may have been this weekend's biggest surprise, and one which some have suggested demonstrated Beppe Grillo's true nature, in a blog published on Sunday, the founder of Italy's Five-Star Movement (M5S) said his political movement should ditch Nigel Farage's anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) in the European Parliament, and seek a hook up with the liberal pro-EU group Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, or ALDE, led by European Federalist Guy Verhofstadt, in an attempt to consolidated power in the European parliament.

In 1945, most French people thought that the Soviet Union deserved the most credit for Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II - even though the Soviets did not play much of a role in France's liberation, relative to the US and Britain.

By 1995 and 2004, however, the French had changed their minds, and were crediting the US as the biggest contributor to victory in Europe (survey data from the French Institute of Public Opinion)...

Source: Olivier Berruyer at Les Crises blog

Just days after we reported that the US had begun deploying some 2,800 tanks, trucks and other military equipment to Germany, from where they would be transported by rail and road to Eastern Europe as part of a buildup of NATO reinforcements against "Russian expansion", the next US deployment has made its way to Europe over the weekend, when some 4,000 US troops arrived in the German port of Bremerheven, on their way to Wroclaw, Poland under a planned NATO operation to "reassure the alliance’s Eastern European allies" in the face of what NATO has dubbed mounting Russian aggression.