Germany's constitutional court has delayed the creation of a new 500bn eurozone bail-out fund as Angela Merkel faces a series of legal challenges to measures seen as critical for saving the EU's single currency.
The legal block is embarrassing for the German Chancellor who expended large amounts of political capital in concessions to get the Social Democrat and Greene opposition to support the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) so it could enter into force on 1 July.
The ESM is urgently needed to fight European debt contagion over the summer and is Germany's preferred option for a bailout of Spanish banks because it is more secure for lenders than the existing, smaller eurozone fund, the EFSF.
Germany's parliament will ratify the ESM and the fiscal pact on 29 June after Chancellor Merkel was forced to offer the opposition new spending on growth and her full backing for a eurozone financial transaction tax in return for its support.
But in a humiliating setback on Thursday, judges in the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the country's constitutional court ruled that they would need "at least three weeks" to consider the "complex" ESM's legality after the vote and before it was signed Joachim Gauck, the German President.
"We assume that the president will, as he has done before, comply with this request, and that the court will therefore have enough time to conduct an examination," said a spokesman for the court, which is based in Karlsruhe.
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It's "embarassing" and "humiliating" when the supreme court of a sovereign federal republic bitterly clings to the rule of law, in defiance of the inevitable forward march of history? Nope, move along, no ideological bias here.
[Wall Street Journal] Prosecutors in the trial of Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik called for him to be considered insane and asked the court to sentence him to compulsory psychiatric care, prompting Mr. Breivik to smirk and raise his fist in a defiant right-wing salute.
Judges in the trial will have until July or August to deliver their verdict, after the defense finishes its closing arguments on Friday. The defense attorneys are expected to argue on Friday that Mr. Breivik is sane, and demand a prison sentence. Mr. Breivik has asked he be declared mentally fit and released.
Anders Behring Breivik has asked the court to declare him mentally fit and to release him.
Prosecutor Svein Holden told the Oslo District Court on Thursday that he wasn't entirely convinced Mr. Breivik was insane, but that there were enough doubts over his sanity to send him to psychiatric care rather than to prison.
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06/22/2012 00:52 ||
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#1
smirk and raise his fist in a defiant right-wing salute.
Those Olympian medal winners of ours in Mexico City would be surprised to learn they engaged in right-wing behavior.
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.
Prosecutors in the trial of Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik called for him to be considered insane and asked the court to sentence him to compulsory psychiatric care, prompting Mr. Breivik to smirk and raise his fist in a defiant right-wing salute.
