Top news: With elections in Italy approaching this weekend, the country's politicians are in an all-out sprint to the finish, as the most recent polls indicate that Italians are likely to vote into office a center-left coalition that may leave Silvio Berlusconi out of power.
Berlusconi, who was ousted from power to make way for the technocrat Mario Monti, has in recent months made a brief political comeback, exploiting a weak economy to cast himself as a tax-cutting savior of the Italian economy. So far, that pitch has fallen on deaf ears, and the most recent polls show the no-drama center-left candidate Pier Luigi Bersani in the lead, a scenario that will likely result in a coalition government with Monti.
But two upstart political movements make the outcome of this election difficult to predict. The anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, a group led by a former comedian named Beppe Grillo, and the Northern League, a group seeking greater autonomy for the country's north, a relative newcomers to Italian politics, and if they slightly exceed expectations at the polls they may torpedo the expected outcome of a center-left coalition that would include Monti.
If the center-left fails to cobble together such a coalition, the most likely outcome is a grand coalition, one that would in all likelihood include Berlusconi in some role, returning Il Cavaliere to European politics.
U.S. military: Marine General John Allen said that he plans to retire and will decline his nomination to serve as the supreme allied commander in Europe, one of the military's most prestigious posts. Allen, who has most recently served as head of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, said he planned to step down because his wife is suffering from a severe illness. Allen had been under investigation for emails sent to Jill Kelley, a Florida socialite connected to David Petraeus, the disgraced former CIA director, but Pentagon investigators cleared Allen of any wrongdoing.
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