India's Congress-Led Coalition Seen With Strong Early Lead

Following my April 23 political prediction Merkel Loses Chancellorship in September as Support for AfD Soars, I received many emails from readers suggesting I was engaged in wishful thinking, German polls are unreliable, that I was following the wrong polls, etc. I am sticking with what I said. I simply do not see how any sort of stable coalition can form either with or without Merkel.

India's government said the economy will likely register its slowest annual growth in a decade and expand just 5.0 percent in the fiscal year ending in March, citing official estimates released Thursday.

Benjamin Netanyahu was poised Thursday to unveil a new Israeli government that will include Right-wingers strategically installed in key positions to further expand Jewish settlements. After 40 days of exhaustive negotiations, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister’s Right-wing Likud party said agreement had been reached, two days before a deadline. But talks hit a last-minute snag over whether or not leaders of smaller parties would be given the title of deputy prime minister.

Italy was pitched into chaos Monday night after early election results suggested that the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had surged back on to the political scene in a triumph that could enable him to undermine or even block a new government. The two houses of parliament were split between the billionaire tycoon’s conservative coalition and the centre-left Democratic Party, led by Pier Luigi Bersani, a 61-year-old former Communist and the son of a mechanic.

The Indian economy is coming back. After several years of disappointing performance, the authorities are shifting to policies aimed at boosting the annual growth rate closer to the roughly 9% level that India achieved from 2004 to 2008. That won’t be easy. India has many handicaps and lacks many of the things that are needed to sustain rapid growth.

India's public-sector banks and many government offices were shut Thursday on the second day of a general strike called to protest against the government's planned pro-market reforms. Eleven unions called the strike in protest at the measures which they condemn as "anti-poor" and likely to cost jobs and raise prices.

The Palestinian president will invite Israeli politicians to the West Bank to try to make sure peacemaking is on the new government’s agenda, a senior official said Thursday, even as a top Israeli hard-liner proposed sidelining the polarizing issue.