Story 1: Spain’s Politicians Pledge To Stop Evictions After Suicide
By Iciar Reinlein, Reuters – November 10, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/abz6y8n
(Reuters) – Spain’s conservative prime minister and the leader of the opposition aim to agree measures on Monday to stop banks evicting homeowners after a woman’s suicide before her property was repossessed caused public outrage.
“No one should be without a home for not being able to pay,” Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, leader of the opposition Socialist Party said on Saturday.
Northern Spanish mortgage lender Kutxabank said it was suspending repossessions after 53-year-old former Socialist councillor Amaia Egana threw herself out of her fourth-storey apartment window in Barakaldo in the Basque Country as court officials came up the stairs to evict her on Friday.
Egana’s death, the second eviction-related suicide in Spain in recent weeks, added urgency to an agreement reached on Wednesday between the ruling conservative People’s Party and the Socialists to seek a bipartisan deal over repossessions.
Graffiti accusing bankers of murder and calling for an end to evictions appeared on some bank branches in the Basque Country on Saturday, Spanish media reported.
“We are living through things that no one likes to see, situations that are competely inhumane,” Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told a political meeting hours after Egana’s death. “I hope that on Monday we’ll be able to talk about a temporary suspension of evictions for the most vulnerable families.”
One measure would be to grant grace periods, Spanish media reported. Rajoy said the rules would not be retroactive, while Rubalcaba called for previous evictions to be included.
There have been nearly 400,000 evictions in Spain since a property bubble burst in 2008. Unemployment hit 25 percent in the third quarter, a record high and the European Commission expects the economy to contract 1.4 percent this year and next as the second recession since the end of 2009 drags on.
Last week, European Union Advocate General Juliane Kokott issued a non-binding report concluding that Spanish legislation on evictions contradicts European norms for protecting consumer rights. Europe’s highest court will now have to deliver an opinion.
Jose Miguel Domingo, a newsstand owner in Granada, in southern Spain, hung himself on October 25, before he was due to lose his home, local media reported.
The same week an unemployed man in Burjassot, a town in the eastern region of Valencia, threw himself off a balcony on the day his family was to be evicted from their apartment. Reports said the man survived the fall.
Story 2: UAE Frees Hundreds of Emirati Debtors From Jail
By Amena Bakr, Reuters – November 10, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/a9u85js
(Reuters) – The United Arab Emirates has released from prison around 290 people convicted of bouncing cheques, the state news agency said on Saturday, the latest step by one of the world’s richest countries to help its citizens deal with their debts.
The drive to help debtors underlines moves by the government to expand its support to the population, as the UAE and other countries across the region boost welfare spending in the wake of last year’s Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East.
Signing cheques without sufficient funds to back them is a criminal offence under UAE law and the order to release citizens who had defaulted on cheque payments was given last month by President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan.
In May, the president allocated around 5 million dirhams ($1.4 million) to settle defaulted loans for each indebted Emirati.
The UAE central bank told commercial banks in August to extend maturities on certain personal loans held by UAE citizens by more than four years.
The state news agency said on Saturday authorities have given certificates to those released from jail protecting them from future criminal prosecution over their cases.
However, an official quoted by the agency said creditors could still try to recover debts through civil courts.
The latest amnesty does not extend to all debtors. A number of foreigners, most of them real estate developers and businessmen who worked in Dubai during its economic boom several years ago, remain in prison after being convicted and sentenced over bounced cheques.
Story 3: Pakistan Marks “Malala Day”, Poor Children to Get Cash For School
By Katharine Houreld, Reuters – November 10, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/bf8ttnq
(Reuters) – The families of more than 3 million poor children in Pakistan will receive cash stipends if their children go to school, the government said as officials prepared to mark “Malala Day” on Saturday in support of a schoolgirl shot by the Taliban.
U.N. officials declared Malala Day one month after 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai and two of her classmates were shot by the Pakistan Taliban. She had been targeted for speaking out against the insurgency.
In the days following the shooting, Yousufzai became an international icon and world leaders pledged to support her campaign for girls’ education. She is now recovering in a British hospital.
On Friday, Pakistani president Asif Zardari added his signature to petitions signed by more than a million people urging Pakistan to pay stipends to families who put their girls in school in honor of Malala.
“Malala’s dreams represent what is best about Pakistan,” said former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as he presented the petitions to President Zardari.
Tens of thousands of Britons have called on the government to nominate Malala Yousufzai for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work promoting girls’ education.
On Friday, the government announced that poor families will now receive $2 a month per child in primary school.
The program will be funded by the World Bank and Britain and distributed through the government’s Benazir Income Support Program, designed to give small cash payments to needy families. The families in the program already receive $10 a month for basic expenditure.
After a stipend program was put in place in Pakistan’s Punjab province, a World Bank study found a nine percent increase in girls’ enrolment over two years, said Alaphia Zoyab, the South Asia campaigner for internet activist group Avaaz.
Pakistan is struggling to overcome widespread poverty, a Taliban insurgency and massive, endemic corruption. Less than 0.57 percent of Pakistan’s 180 million citizens pay income tax, money that the government could use to educate poor children.
Instead, the Pakistani government relies on foreign donors to fund many social programs. Britain is due to spend around $1 billion on helping Pakistan educate poor children by 2015.
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