Portuguese Court Rule Against Govt's Austerity Plan Thursday Aug 29,2013

Portugal's Constitutional Court has struck down a key provision of the government's latest austerity programme, once again throwing the country's EU-IMF bailout into confusion.
Court President Joaquim Sousa Ribeiro on Thursday told a government plan that could lead to job losses for civil servants was against the country's "job safety guarantee" and therefore unconstitutional.
The plan is part of the latest round of austerity introduced by the government of Pedro Passos Coelho and is designed to cut 30,000 public jobs from a pool of 500,000, saving 4.7 billion euros by the end of next year.
But conservative President Anibal Cavaco Silva asked the court to decide wether a requalification push within that programme was in fact legal.