Italy's Silvio Berlusconi faces a potentially fatal challenge to his power, with a judge ordering him to stand trial on prostitution and abuse of power charges.
The 74-year-old billionaire businessman will go on trial in April on charges that he paid for sex with a 17-year-old Moroccan girl and then tried to cover it up.
The premier has called the accusations "groundless" and dismissed the case as a farce .. accusing prosecutors of seeking to oust him from power.
But Judge Cristina Di Censo says she believes there's sufficient evidence to subject Berlusconito an immediate trial.
The trial will be heard by a panel of three judges all of them women .. all picked at random.
Italy's economy misses growth target
Italy's economic growth continued to slow in late 2010, official data showed Tuesday, missing government targets amid a lack of reforms in a country where the leadership is mired in a sex scandal.
Gross domestic product (GDP) grew 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with 0.3 percent and 0.5 percent in the third and second quarters respectively, according to preliminary estimates published by the government.
Analysts had expected fourth-quarter GDP of 0.2 percent, according to a survey published by Dow Jones Newswires.
Meanwhile Italy's trade deficit surged to a record 27.3 billion euros last year.
The figures came as a judge ruled that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi will go on trial in April over allegations that he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex and abused his power by trying to get her cleared of theft.
Leaders in the dock over sex
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who goes on trial in April over allegations that he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex, is not the first world leader to find himself in the dock over his sexual behaviour:
- Then US president Bill Clinton escapes removal from office in a Senate impeachment trial in February, 1999, and apologizes to the American people for misleading them about his affair with ex-White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
- Israeli former president Moshe Katzav is convicted in December, 2010, by a Tel Aviv court of two counts of rape for assaulting a former employee when he was tourism minister, capping a four-year process that saw him resign his post.
- Zimbabwe's former president Canaan Banana is given a one-year prison term in May, 2000, for sodomy and other homosexual offences committed mainly against his male aides when he was president in the 1980s. He is released in January, 2001, having served eight months of his sentence.
- Malaysia's former deputy premier, turned opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim is sentenced to nine years in prison in August, 2000 for sodomy, but is released in 2004 after the sexual misconduct count is overturned, allowing him to make a comeback to politics. He now faces 20 years in prison if found guilty of sodomising an aide in a separate case.
- South Africa's current President Jacob Zuma, elected in May 2009, is in May 2006 found not guilty of raping an HIV positive family friend at his Johannesburg residence.
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