BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centre-right coalition has enough support to win a parliamentary majority in a September 22 election, the first time it has taken the lead in nearly four years, according to a new poll.
The Infratest-dimap survey put Merkel’s conservatives on 42 percent, unchanged from a week ago, but a 1 point gain for their Free Democrat (FDP) coalition partners pushed their combined score to 47 percent.
That, said Infratest, put the centre-right partnership ahead of left-leaning opposition parties, who scored a combined 46 percent, for the first time since November 2009.
Seminarians expelled for Nazi salute, jokes
PARIS: An investigation into rumours of neo-Nazi activity at a seminary in Bavaria has resulted in two student priests being expelled for imitating the Nazi salute and making jokes about death camps, two bishops announced.
The commission probing rumours of neo-Nazi activity at the seminary in Wuerzburg also found a third student had said participants in recent anti-racism marches in the southern German state deserved “a smack in the face”, the bishops said. Rumours of a “brown (Nazi) network” at the seminary began circulating in early May, including talk of a party in its basement pub to mark the Nazi leader’s April 20 birthday.
Strauss-Kahn says political career over
MOSCOW: Former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn declared in an interview broadcast on Wednesday on Russian television that his political career was over and he was instead working as an economic advisor.
“Politics for me is in the past,” Strauss-Kahn, who resigned from the IMF’s top job in 2011 after being accused of sexual assault in a New York hotel, told state news channel Rossiya 24 in an interview.
“Today, I am working as an advisor to big companies in numerous countries in all the corners of the world — in Russia, Africa and Latin America,” he added.
Mali election
results today
BAMAKO: The results of a first round of voting in Mali’s crunch presidential election will be announced today, a day later than expected, the presidency said.
No explanation was given for the delay, announced by the presidency’s Twitter account on Thursday, but an official from the ministry of territorial administration said vote-counting had not been completed following Sunday’s poll. Agencies
