Europe

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.

Martin Armstrong

Martin Armstrong is a controversial market analyst who correctly predicted the 1987 crash, the top of the Japanese market, and many other market events … more or less to the day.

Many market timers think that Armstrong is one of the very best.  Armstrong credits a computer program he created (which he calls “Socrates”) for the accuracy of his forecasting.

In what amounts to an 11th hour "gift" by the outgoing Obama administration to Tehran's leadership to keep the country, which on Sunday was involved in yet another shooting incident with a US destroyer, content and compliant with Obama's landmark "Nuclear deal", the AP reported that Iran is to receive a huge shipment of natural uranium from Russia to compensate it for exporting tons of reactor coolant. The move was approved by the outgoing U.S. administration and other governments "seeking to keep Tehran committed to a landmark nuclear pact."