Pakistan-India bus links Punjab

India and Pakistan have launched a new cross-border bus service which directly links divided Punjab for the first time since partition in 1947.

Passengers travelling on the inaugural Lahore-Amritsar bus received a rousing welcome as they crossed into India at the Wagah border post.

Among the 26 passengers were 15 Pakistani officials and the famous folk singer, Reshma.

This is the rivals' third such link and is seen as a symbol of peace.

School children showered rose petals on the bus as it crossed the land border into India.

Earlier, the bus had left the Pakistani city of Lahore amid the beating of drums.

India and Pakistan restarted a Delhi to Lahore service in 2003 and a route across the disputed and divided region of Kashmir began in April last year.

Cultural ties

"It will promote tourism, understanding and stability between the two countries," Aslam Iqbal, a minister in the provincial Punjab government, told the Associated Press.

Reshma told the BBC her journey had been pleasant and comfortable.

"I was originally booked on a flight to India but cancelled my booking and bought a bus ticket instead," she said.

"Cultural ties are going to play a major role in improving ties."

She plans to give a number of performances during her stay in India.

The new service comes as a boost to India's Sikh population who will be able to use it to visit the holy site of Nankana Sahib in Pakistan, where the founder of their faith, Guru Nanak, was born.

A separate service connecting Amritsar to Nankana Sahib is also due to begin later this year.

Bus diplomacy

Next month, India and Pakistan will also relaunch a rail service between the Indian state of Rajasthan and Pakistan's Sindh province.

The service was stopped 40 years ago when the two countries went to war.

The bus diplomacy is one of the more tangible elements of the two-year peace process between the nuclear-capable rivals, who nearly went to war over Kashmir in 2002.

India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir in its entirety and have fought two of their three wars since independence in 1947 over the region.

Despite the increasing transport links, the two nations have still made little progress on a political solution for Kashmir.

The cross-Kashmir bus service was suspended indefinitely in the wake of the 8 October earthquake that killed about 75,000 people.

Source: BBC News

Google Rebuffs Feds on Search Requests

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer Thu Jan 19, 11:04 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading search engine — a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance.

Mountain View-based Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to hand over the requested records.

The government wants a list all requests entered into Google's search engine during an unspecified single week — a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks 1 million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases.

In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the
U.S. Supreme Court.

Yahoo Inc., which runs the Internet's second-most used search engine behind Google, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.

Although the government says it isn't seeking any data that ties personal information to search requests, the subpoena still raises serious privacy concerns, experts said. Those worries have been magnified by recent revelations that the White House authorized eavesdropping on civilian communications after the Sept. 11 attacks without obtaining court approval.

"Search engines now play such an important part in our daily lives that many people probably contact Google more often than they do their own mother," said Thomas Burke, a San Francisco attorney who has handled several prominent cases involving privacy issues.

"Just as most people would be upset if the government wanted to know how much you called your mother and what you talked about, they should be upset about this, too."

The content of search request sometimes contain information about the person making the query.

For instance, it's not unusual for search requests to include names, medical profiles or
Social Security information, said Pam Dixon, executive director for the World Privacy Forum.

"This is exactly the kind of thing we have been worrying about with search engines for some time," Dixon said. "Google should be commended for fighting this."

Every other search engine served similar subpoenas by the Bush administration has complied so far, according to court documents. The cooperating search engines weren't identified.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo stressed that it didn't reveal any personal information. "We are rigorous defenders of our users' privacy," Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said Thursday. "In our opinion, this is not a privacy issue."

Microsoft Corp. MSN, the No. 3 search engine, declined to say whether it even received a similar subpoena. "MSN works closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to assist them when requested," the company said in a statement.

As the Internet's dominant search engine, Google has built up a valuable storehouse of information that "makes it a very attractive target for law enforcement," said Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The
Department of Justice argues that Google's cooperation is essential in its effort to simulate how people navigate the Web.

In a separate case in Pennsylvania, the Bush administration is trying to prove that Internet filters don't do an adequate job of preventing children from accessing online pornography and other objectionable destinations.

Obtaining the subpoenaed information from Google "would assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current Web users, (and) to estimate how often Web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches," the Justice Department wrote in a brief filed Wednesday

Google — whose motto when it went public in 2004 was "do no evil" — contends that submitting to the subpoena would represent a betrayal to its users, even if all personal information is stripped from the search terms sought by the government.

"Google's acceding to the request would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its services. This is not a perception that Google can accept," company attorney Ashok Ramani wrote in a letter included in the government's filing.

Complying with the subpoena also wound threaten to expose some of Google's "crown-jewel trade secrets," Ramani wrote. Google is particularly concerned that the information could be used to deduce the size of its index and how many computers it uses to crunch the requests.

"This information would be highly valuable to competitors or miscreants seeking to harm Google's business," Ramani wrote.

Dixon is hoping Google's battle with the government reminds people to be careful how they interact with search engines.

"When you are looking at that blank search box, you should remember that what you fill can come back to haunt you unless you take precautions," she said.

___

On the Web:

http://www.worldprivacyforum.org

Electronic Privacy Information Center: http://www.epic.org

Source: AP via Yahoo! News

Palestinian Film Gets Thumbs Down at Home

By ALI DARAGHMEH, Associated Press Writer Tue Jan 17, 4:38 PM ET

NABLUS, West Bank - The Palestinian film "Paradise Now," which explores the lives of a pair of suicide bombers and just won the Golden Globe for best foreign film, got two thumbs down Tuesday in this tough West Bank city where it was filmed.

Although the film — which snared the Golden Globe in Los Angeles on Monday — has never been screened in Nablus, residents here said the clips they saw on satellite television portrayed the bombers as godless and less than heroic.

"This movie doesn't help the Palestinian cause," said an armed Palestinian militant who would not give his name because he's on the run. "People who go to carry out bombings do not hesitate so much."

The film tells the story of two Nablus car mechanics who are sent to carry out a double suicide-bombing in Tel Aviv. They shave their beards to blend into Israeli crowds more easily, pray and prepare farewell videos.

The movie has received praise around the world and has been played in about 60 countries, according to director Hany Abu-Assad.

Speaking during the glitzy award ceremony Monday, Abu-Assad said he believed the film's success stemmed from the world's recognition that the Palestinians deserve "liberty and equality unconditionally."

Most of the movie was shot in Nablus, a militant stronghold and the home base of many of the suicide bombers sent to attack Israeli targets in recent years. The conflict served as a constant backdrop for the film, which showed houses demolished in Israeli army operations, the sound of airstrikes against Palestinian militants and large crowds waiting at army roadblocks.

The violence even interrupted the filming — once when
Israel carried out a missile strike at militants near the camera crew and once when militants briefly kidnapped a cameraman in an effort to stop the filming of a movie they believed would portray them in a negative light.

The filming was then moved to an Israeli Arab city to avoid further interruptions.

On Tuesday, a group of Palestinians at the Sport Shoes store in the center of the city argued over a breakfast of humus and falafel about whether or not the film should be shown in Nablus, where movie theaters were closed more than five years ago for providing frivolous entertainment in light of the bloodshed with Israel.

"This movie wasn't interesting enough for us," said Ghassan Jbeileh, a shoe salesman. "We have enough problems with people who can't put food on the table."

A man with a pistol on his belt who would not give his name said the movie must be good for Israel or it would never have succeeded in Hollywood.

But Peter Samchan, a trader on the Palestinian stock exchange who saw clips of the film on the Al Jazeera satellite station and read about it in the newspaper, said the Palestinians have to foster openness and should not have interrupted the filming or prejudged the movie.

"We need to let them do their work and then decide if it's good or not," he said. "How can we be called a democratic people if we don't let someone film a movie in Nablus."

Some hoped the film's international recognition would help relieve the Islamic hard-liners' influence on society and allow the screening of such a movie here.

"I have a dream that one day we will see it in a cinema in Nablus," said Muthana al-Qadi, who helped coordinate the filming here.

The film has met with mixed success in Israel, having been screened only a few times at a handful of cinemas. Some Israeli viewers said it helped them understand Palestinian suicide bombers, although not legitimize them.

During the Golden Globe ceremony, the film's place of origin was announced as "Palestine." It's also in the running for the foreign film Academy Award as the entry for "Palestine." Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said that it was incorrect to refer to a Palestine before a Palestinian state has been established.

"There is a Palestinian Authority, but not a Palestinian state," Regev said.

Amir Harel, the film's Israeli producer, said the mention of "Palestine" in the ceremony did not bother him and he supported its presentation of a different, more human face for Palestinian suicide bombers.

"First and foremost the movie is a good work of art," Harel said. "But if the movie raises awareness or presents a different side of reality, this is an important thing."

Source: AP via Yahoo! News

How the suicide bomber saved Zionism

By Bradley Burston

It has been suggested that suicide bombings were a total failure. Maybe not.

True, as far as its stated objectives were concerned, the people who invented suicide bombing accomplished nothing.

They had hoped to see Israel, to paraphrase Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, collapse as weakly as a spider's web under pressure. They had advertised the suicide bomber to crowds in Jenin and Jabalya as the sole Palestinian defense against attacks by U.S.-made IDF weaponry. They had argued that the shahid salvaged Palestinian honor.

All they managed to salvage, in the end, was Zionism.

Think back. The 1990s, the decade of false dawns, nearly killed this country. The Oslo delusion of peace combined with the NASDAQ illusion of wealth-beyond-measure, to divide and alienate Israelis as never before.

Members of the secular left suddenly imagined themselves to have become citizens of the world, shackled no longer by tradition, parochialism, patriotism. Ultra-orthodox in their non-conventionality, cool to the point of anesthesia, their antipathy to Zionism bordered on the physical.

The very mention of Zionism had become a joke. The Hebrew words Tzionut [Zionism] and Tziniut [cynicism] had become interchangeable.

The religious right steamed down the opposite path. Betrayed by Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin, the very man who had brought them Greater Israel in 1967, many on the right plunged into a mindset that implied that settlements were the only genuine Zionism, and that Israel had been better off when the world had kept the whole country in diplomatic quarantine in the 1970s and 80s

As Palestinian armed groups vied with one another for the title of most vicious, least scrupulous, most likely to kill innocents - as terror gangs turned Palestine into Columbine by teaching children to worship weaponry and the death it manufactures - an unfamiliar sensation was felt across Israel. Unity. A renewed sense of mutual responsibility. A return to caring for one's neighbor, and for the stranger in distress.

In this place, where the banality of violence and the venality of leadership have rendered shock as rare as awe, suicide bombings shook Israelis back into caring about Israel.

For the first time in decades, a genuine consensus was felt in this country, a mass movement of the heart, identifiable not by the colors red, orange, or yellow, neither by round spectacles or head-coverings, dismissible neither by ethnic, religious nor class categorization.

There was quiet courage in this movement of the Radical Center, this breaking of tribal bonds that dictated voting, thinking, medical care, soccer allegiance. There's a quiet defiance in telling extremists that they can no longer speak and act in the name of the People as a whole.

For my Palestinian friends, this word:

At this point you hardly need to be told that suicidal policies are, well, self-destructive. But it might be prove instructive to see the effect that the last suicide bombing of 2005 had on this country.

It was Hanukkah, and a young IDF officer stood between a young Jihadist and the celebrating children next to whom the bomber planned to detonate his 33 pounds of explosives.

The day after the bomber hit the detonator at that last-minute checkpoint, killing himself, the officer, a Palestinian taxi driver, and another Palestinian, the headlines in Israel referred to the slain second lieutenant Binamo by his first name only, as if his loss was felt by nearly every household in Israel. Because it was.

This is the lesson that Palestinians would be well advised to learn about the people on this side:

You have made a new kind of martyr hero in the Holy Land, the kind who keeps the shahid from making Jewish infants and Jewish mothers into martyrs against their will.

You have demolished your cause by restoring our faith in the concept that there are those who believe strongly in the elimination of the Jewish people by violent means.

You may believe that you invented steadfastness and stubbornness. Think again.

Now is the time to decide. Hamas listens to public opinion. Make it known. You have a choice. You can play with your guns, or you can have a country.

There is a new kind of Israel, a better one, in fact, for which, perversion of perversions, we have the suicide bomber to thank.

This Israel will be harder to defeat that the enemy you faced five years ago. You have only yourselves to thank. You and your bomber.

Source: Haaretz