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Retired Couple Commit Suicide Over Eviction

A retired couple in Spain killed themselves on Tuesday because they faced eviction, police said, as lawmakers considered legislation to save ruined homeowners from being thrown into the street.
In the latest in a series of suicides reportedly linked to evictions, the couple, aged 68 and 69, killed themselves in their home in Calvia on the island of Mallorca, a police spokesman who asked not to be named said.
Hours later in Madrid, members of parliament agreed to debate a citizens’ motion to protect poor homeowners from eviction--a fate faced by hundreds of thousands in Spain, AFP reported.
The lower house of parliament agreed to debate the bill after lawmakers of the ruling conservative Popular Party threw their weight behind it despite earlier resistance, the party’s parliamentary spokesman Alfonso Alonso said.
In response to popular protests and reported suicides, Spain’s government in November passed a two-year moratorium on evictions--but campaigners insist that it go further.
The bill proposes to change the law to end evictions and to allow insolvent homeowners to write off their debts by surrendering their home.
Under the current law, a bank can pursue a mortgage holder for the remaining balance of a loan if the value of the seized property isn’t sufficient.
The new bill was brought to parliament by PAH, a popular campaign for housing rights that gathered 1.4 million signatures on a petition demanding that it be debated by lawmakers.
“People who undergo eviction not only lose their homes but get saddled with a large part of the debt, condemned for life to be excluded from credit,” the petition read.
The police spokesman said the couple in Mallorca “left a suicide note” saying they committed suicide because they could not pay their debts and were soon going to be evicted.
PAH says hundreds of thousands of people face eviction in the crisis brought on by the collapse of Spain’s housing market in 2008.
The resulting recession has driven the unemployment rate up to 26 percent, leaving many unable to pay mortgages on houses that are often now worth much less than purchased.
Dozens of protesters rallied outside parliament on Tuesday as lawmakers prepared to vote on whether to accept the bill.

US Withdrawing 34,000 Troops From Afghanistan

President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday that 34,000 troops - about half the US force in Afghanistan - will withdraw by early 2014, the move that was welcomed by Afghan president.
Obama announced the withdrawal in his annual State of the Union address, as he renewed his pledge to a war-weary American public that the 66,000 remaining US troops in Afghanistan would move into a support role this spring, Reuters reported.
“This drawdown will continue. And by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over,” Obama said to applause.
The announcement was limited in detail and appeared to give the White House time and flexibility before it answers bigger questions about its exit strategy from America’s longest war.
This includes the size of the US force that Obama will keep in Afghanistan once the NATO mission is completed and the war is declared formally over at the end of 2014.
Obama also must decide how large an Afghan force to finance, and for how long, as his allies in Congress press to keep them at their maximum strength.
No decisions on broader issues have been made, a senior administration official said, and Obama said only that the future US mission would be focused on training and equipping Afghan forces and combating Al-Qaeda.
“Beyond 2014, America’s commitment to a unified and sovereign Afghanistan will endure, but the nature of our commitment will change,” Obama said.
The Taliban dismissed the announcement, reiterating their position that the war would only end once all foreign troops had left Afghanistan.
“As long as invading forces remain in the country, the jihad will continue,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid wrote in a text message to reporters in the Afghan capital. “Decreasing or increasing the number of troops does not solve the problem.”
The Afghan government on Wednesday welcomed Obama’s decision to bring home half of the American troops, and said its forces are ready to take responsibility for the country’s security.

NATO Attack Kills 10 Afghan Civilians

A NATO airstrike killed 10 Afghan civilians, including five children, in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, local officials said, a toll that if confirmed is likely to raise tension between President Hamid Karzai’s government and US-led NATO forces.
The attack occurred about 10 p.m. Tuesday during a joint NATO-Afghan operation in the Shigal district of Kunar province, a lawmaker from the area said. The US-led military alliance in Kabul said it was looking into the reports, AP reported.
Wagma Sapay, a member of parliament from Kunar, said the civilians killed were in one house while four senior Taliban leaders were slain as they were gathering next door in the village of Sharpool in the Chawkam area.
She said the civilians killed included five children and four more civilians.
Provincial Gov. Sayed Fazelullah Wahidi said the local government had not been informed about plans for the strike. He put the death toll at eight--four women and four children. The conflicting casualty numbers couldn’t immediately be reconciled. “This operation was by coalition and Afghan forces,” he said. “We were not aware of it.”
The strike occurred in the village of Chawgam and the 10 dead civilians were from two local families, Wahidi said.
The killing of civilians at the hands of US and other foreign forces has been one of the most contentious issues in the 11-year war.
Jamie Graybeal, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, said the alliance was aware of the allegations of civilian casualties in Kunar but could not confirm any details.
“We take these allegations very seriously and we are in the process of determining the circumstances surrounding this incident,” he said.
The reported attack came as President Barack Obama announced in his State of the Union speech that he will bring home within a year about half of the 66,000 US troops now in Afghanistan in a step toward withdrawing all foreign combat forces by the end of 2014.
The UN body monitoring the rights of children said last week that attacks by US military forces in Afghanistan, including airstrikes, have reportedly killed hundreds of children over the last four years.
The Geneva-based Committee on the Rights of the Child said the casualties were “due notably to reported lack of precautionary measures and indiscriminate use of force.”
ISAF, which is composed mainly of American forces, dismissed that claim, saying that it takes special care to avoid civilian casualties.

16 Killed in Thai Army Base Attack

A pre-dawn raid on a Thai military base ended with 16 insurgents killed on Wednesday in the deadliest violence in the country’s south in nine years, marking a dangerous escalation in one of Asia’s least-known conflicts.
Acting on a tip-off, marines lit flares and opened fire as up to 60 insurgents wearing military fatigues approached the base at about 1 a.m. in Narathiwat province on the Malaysian border, said Internal Security Operations Command spokesman Pramote Phromin, AP reported.
He revised the death toll to 16 from an earlier 17. None of the Thai military defenders of the base was hurt, he said.
Violence is common in Thailand’s south but the scale of the attack and targeting of a marine base illustrate the difficulty Buddhist-majority Thailand faces in preventing the low-intensity insurgency from turning into a more dangerous conflict.
Although there is no indication of the fighting spreading beyond the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, just a few hours’ drive from some of Thailand’s most popular tourist beaches, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra appears powerless to quell the almost daily gun fights and bomb attacks.
The violence comes as Southeast Asia seeks to present an image of stability to foreign investors who have poured into its financial markets. A 2011 election in Thailand ushered in a period of relative stability after more than five years of sometimes-deadly street protests. Its economy is flourishing and its stock market was one of the world’s best performers last year, rising 36 percent.
Wednesday’s death toll was the biggest since security forces stormed a mosque, known as the Krue Se mosque, in 2004, killing 32 Muslims in a raid that intensified the insurgency.
Since then, more than 5,300 people have been killed in the three provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat where insurgents are seeking greater autonomy.
About 94 percent of the region’s 1.7 million people are Muslim, the main religion in neighboring Malaysia and in nearby Indonesia, and about 80 percent of them speak a Malay dialect as a first language, according to a 2010 survey by the Asia Foundation.

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