general election

Germany's former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was elected as the country's next president on Sunday. Steinmeier, a Social Democrat who had served as foreign minister until last month, won 931 of the 1,239 valid votes by lawmakers of Germany's 16 federal states, becoming the 12th person to hold the largely ceremonial post in Germany's post-war era.

He will succeed current president Joachim Gauck, a 77-year-old former pastor and pro-democracy activist from east Germany, when he steps down on March 18.

Germany's new president Frank-Walter Steinmeier

Submitted by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

An analysis of the political setup in Italy shows eurosceptics are on the verge of taking control of the country.

The only missing ingredient is an early election. And early elections are now the odds-on favorite.

Let’s back up a bit to fill in the pieces as to how things got to this point.

Submitted by Soren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

In response to Trump's ban on refugees and blacklist from several muslim nations, the NY Times spent their morning offering inane anecdotal stories of exceptional people being blocked from reentering the United States. This is the very definition of dishonest reporting, as it draws on the emotional strings of empathetic people, deceptively supported by weakly sourced and illogical anecdotal stories designed to generate refugee sympathy.

While it is unclear what sparked Donald Trump's latest anger-filled tweetstorm, it is likely that the president read something in either the NYT or the WaPo which he violently disagreed with, and as a result on Saturday morning, Trump took to Twitter to attack two of the nation’s most prominent liberal newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, calling them "Fake News" and "Dishonest." Furthermore, considering the abnormally high ratio of (so far uncorrected) spelling mistakes to words, Trump must have been particularly agitated.