Britain may give more millions more pounds to the controversial European Court of Human Rights, despite the Government's promise to rein it in.
The Strasbourg court is asking countries to give it extra money in an attempt to deal with a backlog of 150,000 cases. Britain already pays £20million a year to the Council of Europe, which is responsible for the court, but is considering increasing this sum,
In an unusual move, the ECHR is even telling states that they can stipulate that they want their funds to be spent specifically on cases against them.
The request for more money has come just two months after ministers claimed to have secured lasting reform of the court at a summit in Brighton.
It is likely to prompt fresh claims that judges at Europe's most powerful human rights court are out of control, and that Britain should pull out of it.
[Haaretz] A gunman who had past psychiatric problems took four people hostage Wednesday in a bank in Toulouse ...lies on the banks of the River Garonne, half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The Toulouse metropolitan area is the fourth-largest in La Belle France... , claiming he was acting for religious reasons, then was captured in a police raid about six hours later, authorities said.
The hostages were released unharmed, and the hostage-taker was lightly injured, regional police official Frederic Tamisier said. Another police official said he was hurt in the leg, though the cause of the injury was unclear.
Gunshots were heard from the site around the time the gunman was captured.
The incident plunged this city in fear for the second time in recent months.
Tensions have been high in Toulouse since March, when a gunman who police said claimed links to al-Qaeda killed three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi and three paratroopers in the area. Those were La Belle France's worst terrorist attacks in years, and led to a crackdown on suspected Islamist hard boyz around La Belle France.
In Wednesday's incident, a man with a firearm entered a CIC bank branch in central Toulouse at about 11 a.m. (0900GMT) and took the bank director and three other bank employees hostage, police officials said.
Authorities started negotiations with the gunman, and he released one hostage mid-afternoon, a woman in her late 20s who was feeling ill, a police union official said.
French media reports say the gunman is claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda. Police officials who spoke to The News Agency that Dare Not be Named could not confirm this claim.
Toulouse Mayor Pierre Cohen said the gunman had been known to authorities for having psychiatric problems.
French Prosecutor Michel Valet said that during negotiations, the gunman said he wanted to advertise the religious motivation behind his act.
"The hostage-taker ... wants us to make it known that he is acting not for money, and that his motivations come from his religious conviction," Valet told news hounds at the scene. He did not say what faith the gunman adheres to.
French media reports say the gunman is claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda. Police officials who spoke to The News Agency that Dare Not be Named could not confirm this claim.
The neighborhood around the bank was cordoned off, and neighboring buildings were evacuated. Officers from GIPN specialized police units were brought to the scene from Bordeaux and Marseille.
The bank is in the same neighborhood where Mohamed Merah, the suspected gunman in the March attacks, was shot and killed by police. It is near the cop shoppe where authorities were overseeing the operation to surround and negotiate with Merah.
The mother of a child evacuated from a neighborhood school said on RTL radio that she had received a text message in the morning saying the CIC bank was being robbed.
Doriane Clermont, 23, lives across the street from the bank with her 3-year-old son ... and said she's "thinking of moving."
"I'm worried about the climate that reigns in this city," she said, waiting behind the police barrier to be able to return home after she was evacuated.
[Al Ahram] Austria's central bank head has issued an unusually stark warning about too much austerity, amid the eurozone's debt crisis, saying such an approach contributed to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
"The single-minded concentration on austerity policy (in the 1920s and 30s) led to mass unemployment, a breakdown of democratic systems and, at the end, to the catastrophe of Nazism," Wald Nowotny said in comments confirmed by his office on Wednesday.
The remarks were initially made at an event on Monday in Vienna.
Germany in particular has championed painful spending cuts to balance budgets and reduce debts as the principle way of restoring investor confidence in eurozone members' solvency and ending the bloc's sovereign debt crisis.
But as evidenced in recent elections in Greece, too much emphasis on cutting spending is hugely unpopular, and new French President Francois Hollande wants to water down Berlin's austerity drive with more focus on generating growth.
British historian Niall Ferguson and US economist Nouriel Roubini drew a similar historical parallel to Nowotny in the Financial Times on June 8, attacking Germany's "wait and see" approach to the eurozone crisis.
German policy, they wrote in a joint opinion piece, "risks a repeat of precisely the crisis of the mid-20th century that European integration was designed to avoid."
The said: "We find it extraordinary that it should be Germany, of all countries, that is failing to learn from history."
They also said: "Fixated on the non-threat of inflation, today's Germans appear to attach more importance to 1923 (the year of hyperinflation) than to 1933 (the year democracy died)."
#4
This is true but the left really fears nationalism. They (I have been told) believed that the route cause of nazism was nationalism. With the EU breakup nationalism will happen. That is why Europe and here fought the Tea party. They feared its strength. True grass routes not controlled like a union.
#6
BP & (g)romky, I, too, thought that the humiliation and looting of the ToV were the major issues. Those are what led to the rise of a leftist, nationalist dictatorship (aka Naziism).
Hmmm, leftist dictatorship in Europe? Now why does that sound familiar?
#9
I recall the expression Socialism Democrat conferred upon Europe. Well we have that here now.
I'd bet you many loyal Democrats will refuse to vote since they have no home to go to now.
#13
Reporters laughed when Pelosi said she could have had Rove arrested whenever she liked . Im not kidding. Theres a prison here in the Capitol If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could have arrested him.
They do have their dreams and fantasies which often get confused with reality.
The Dutch upper house, the Senate, on Tuesday rejected a bill that would have banned the ritual slaughter of animals and had been criticised by both Muslim and Jewish groups.
The bill, proposed by the small Party for the Animals, stipulates that livestock must be stunned before being slaughtered, contrary to Muslim halal and Jewish kosher laws, which require animals to be conscious.
Continued on Page 47
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Britain may give more millions more pounds to the controversial European Court of Human Rights, despite the Government's promise to rein it in. 
[Haaretz] A gunman who had past psychiatric problems took four people hostage Wednesday in a bank in 
Dutch upper house rejects ban on ritual slaughter
