France, Spain take action against Google on privacy

Reuters - An illustration picture shows a woman holding her Apple Ipad tablet which displays a tactile keyboard under the Google home page in Bordeaux, Southwestern France, February 4, 2013. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau/Files

By Natalie Huet and Clare Kane

PARIS/MADRID (Reuters) - France and Spain led a Europe-wide push on Thursday to get U.S. Internet giant Google (GOOG.O) to change its policies on collecting user data.

News that the U.S. National Security Agency under the Prism surveillance programme secretly gathered user data from nine U.S. companies, including Google, to track people's movements and contacts makes the timing especially sensitive for Google.

France's data protection watchdog (CNIL) said Google had broken French law and gave it three months to change its privacy policies or risk a fine of up to 150,000 euros.

Spain's Data Protection Agency (AEPD) told Google it would be fined between 40,000 euros and 300,000 euros for each of the five violations of the law, that it had failed to be clear about what it did with data, may be processing a "disproportionate" amount and holding onto it for an "undetermined or unjustified" period of time.

The CNIL, which has been leading Europe's inquiry since Google launched its consolidated privacy policy in March 2012, said Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands would be taking similar action against the world's No. 1 search engine.

Google could face fines totalling several million euros.

"By the end of July, all the authorities within the (EU data protection) task force will have taken coercive action against Google," said CNIL President Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin.

Last year, Google consolidated its 60 privacy policies into one and started combining data collected on individual users across its services, including YouTube, Gmail and social network Google+. It gave users no means to opt out.

National data protection regulators in Europe began a joint inquiry as a result. They gave Google until February to propose changes but it did not make any. Google had several meetings with the watchdogs and argued that combining its policies made it easier for users to understand.

The CNIL's move is seen by legal experts and policymakers as a test of Europe's ability to influence the behaviour of international Internet companies.

Britain is still considering whether its law has been broken and will write to Google soon with its findings, the CNIL said.

And Google is due to answer allegations on the issue in a German court hearing late next week, a spokesman for the country's data protection regulator said.

Google said it would continue to work with the authorities in France and elsewhere.

Snowden's Resumé Raised Questions, but Booz Allen Hired Him Anyway

Snowden's Resumé Raised Questions, but Booz Allen Hired Him Anyway

As the private firm that vetted Edward Snowden in 2011 for the U.S. faces a criminal investigation, it looks like Booz Allen Hamilton hired the PRISM leaker despite noticing some discrepancies in his resumé. That's according to a scoop byReuters, citing anonymous sources. The development indicates that pretty much everyone responsible for screening the former employee of the NSA contractor is facing fine-toothed scrutiny after a series of disclosures revealing some of the depth of the government's data collection programs.

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Reuters has few details on what exactly raised questions about Snowden, and how those questions were answered, presumably by Snowden himself. He'd previously gotten security clearance after a USIS investigation — they're a private firm hired by the U.S. to do background checks. Snowden had top-secret clearance. As Reuters notes, Snowden was just one of 480,000 contractors with that clearance level, so the U.S. is probably looking for a way to avoid a repeat performance.

RELATED: America's Outsourced Spy Force, by the Numbers

Meanwhile, there's been a development in Snowden's plan to avoid extradition, maybe: An Icelandic businessman offered to fly the whistleblower to his country in a private jet, should Iceland guarantee Snowden asylum. Previously, Wikileaks had pledged nebulous help to help Snowden accomplish the same mission. According to Reuters, the private jet-sending businessman runs a company that processed payments for Wikileaks back when other institutions cut off their access to donations.

Analysis: Palestinian leader faces stark choices

FILE - In this Sunday, April 21, 2013 file photo, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, right, meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Istanbul, Turkey. Abbas is being propelled toward a stark choice that could come as soon as next week, define his legacy and set the course for his people in a decades-old conflict with Israel. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool, File)

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is being propelled toward a stark choice that could come as soon as next week, define his legacy and set the course for his people in a decades-old conflict with Israel.

Abbas' aides fear he's being pushed by the U.S. into dropping his conditions for negotiating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That includes a stop in Israeli settlement construction or acceptance that the basis of a future border is Israel's frontier before it captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in a 1967 war.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is returning next week for meetings with Abbas and Netanyahu, his fifth since taking office this year. It's not clear if he'll present U.S. ground rules for negotiation at that time. The sense in Palestinian leadership circles is that there is no significant pressure on Netanyahu to adopt the framework for talks accepted by his predecessor and that a high-stakes choice cannot be delayed much longer.

At the heart of the Palestinian dilemma is that despite the American eagerness for talks and their own desire to end Israel's 46-year-old occupation, they have low expectations of negotiations with Netanyahu. Most Palestinians consider the Israeli leader a hard-line ideologue who intends to drag out the process and never agree to anything close to terms they could live with.

Israel's current leaders "never believed in the two-state solution ... and will do everything on the ground to make it impossible to achieve," said Abbas aide Nabil Shaath, a veteran negotiator with Israel.

Public opinion complicates the situation: Fifty-six percent of Palestinians oppose a return to talks under Israel's terms, said Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, citing results from a yet-to-be-published survey. Shikaki's polls are based on more than 1,200 respondents, with an error margin of 3 percentage points.

Signaling the apprehension, top Abbas aides are already working on a day-after strategy for fighting attempts to hold Abbas responsible for a failure of the U.S. initiative. And a top think tank in the West Bank has run through a dozen scenarios in the aftermath of an inadvertent collapse of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas' self-rule government, which some consider possible if the status quo continues.

Netanyahu has said he supports the idea of Palestinian statehood, but stripped of east Jerusalem and key areas of the West Bank, and with a series of restrictions — parameters the Palestinians reject and which fall far short of previous Israeli proposals under Netanyahu's predecessors.

Kerry's peace proposal is expected to include financial aid to the Palestinians, security guarantees to Israel and assurances to the Palestinians that talks will be substantive.

There were hints this week that Abbas won't budge. The president's office said members of his Fatah movement urged him not to succumb to pressure. In that meeting, Fatah also prepared for damage control, naming four senior members to devise a plan to deflect expected international blame for saying "no" to Kerry.

International Mideast envoy Tony Blair warned this week that if Kerry's mission fails, the window of opportunity for a deal "could close forever."

Such warnings have been sounded repeatedly over 20 years of intermittent negotiations, but there's a growing sense that the door may really be closing.

U.S. mediation is key to success, but presidents from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and now Barack Obama have held off any serious push until their second terms, when they were less concerned about re-election. If Kerry fails, the next opportunity might only come around in eight years.

By that time, a partition of the land may no longer be possible. Nearly 600,000 Israelis already live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and Netanyahu has refused to stop building. Instead, there's been a record number of housing starts in settlements this year and thousands more apartments are in the pipeline, some deep in the West Bank.

The issue is deeply controversial in Israel itself, where Netanyahu critics believe partition is essential for Israel's own survival, because without it Jews will not for long be a majority in the areas Israel controls.

Last month, a group of mid-level Fatah activists, disillusioned after two decades of failed negotiations, urged Abbas to pursue a single state for Israelis and Palestinians between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River — essentially asking Israel to annex war-won lands. Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but Palestinians consider it still occupied because Israel controls access.

Palestinians must start pushing for equal rights in such a state, said Radi Jerayi, an ex- Fatah official.

Abbas has warned Israelis they might end up with a bi-national state — but that's been meant scare them into serious negotiations.

The single state idea hasn't caught on, largely because it runs counter to nationalism on both sides. Even with the lure of equal rights within the entirety of historical Palestine, only 30 percent of Palestinians would prefer that option, Shikaki said.

For Abbas, dropping the two-state option would mean conceding defeat to his nemesis, the Islamic militant Hamas, which seized Gaza from him in 2007, dismisses negotiations as foolish and wants to swallow up Israel in an Islamic state.

The Palestinians have said that without negotiations they would move against Israel at the U.N. Last year, the General Assembly recognized a state of Palestine in the 1967 lines, overriding U.S. and Israeli objections and giving the Palestinians a largely symbolic victory.

Earlier this month, Abbas aide Saeb Erekat said the Palestinians might pursue war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court, in connection with settlement building, if negotiations don't resume.

Going to the ICC is Abbas' most popular option, even if Israel and the U.S. Congress retaliate by cutting funding to the Palestinian Authority, Shikaki said.

"Almost three-quarters (of respondents) say, go to the ICC, regardless of what happens, even if it leads to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority," Shikaki said. "It is one way they can shake the status quo, which they reject."

The self-rule government, which feeds hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as the largest employer in the West Bank, would find it hard to survive without foreign aid and millions of dollars in taxes Israel collects for the Palestinians every month.

Shikaki's think tank, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, recently hosted a dozen workshops with experts to look at the aftermath of a collapse of the self-rule government. Participants predicted tremendous poverty, mass emigration, chaos and a return to the gang rule of the previous decade.

Yet they also noted an upside, Shikaki said: "This then becomes an Israeli problem."

___

Laub, chief correspondent for the Palestinian territories, has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1987. Daraghmeh, based in Ramallah, has covered the West Bank since 1996.

Gay rights bombshell: Why key 'gay conversion' group is closing

Exodus International, a leading practitioner of 'gay conversion' therapy, is closing after 37 years, as its president apologizes for causing 'pain and hurt.' A new ministry will replace it, leaving gay rights advocates wary.

In an extraordinary about-face, a leading Christian “gayconversion” ministry in the US – Exodus International – has decided to close its doors, after its president apologized for what he called the “pain and hurt” his organization has caused people.

For 37 years, Exodus International and affiliates have engaged in the controversial practice of “conversion therapy,” aimed at helping people curb their same-sex attractions or eliminate them altogether. The umbrella organization, Exodus International, is dissolving, the group announced during its annual conference Wednesday in Irvine, Calif., adding that its 50 affiliates are autonomous and plan to continue.

In Exodus’s announcement on closing down, the group said its board had spent a year of “dialogue and prayer” about its place in a “changing culture.”

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“Exodus is an institution in the conservative Christian world, but we’ve ceased to be a living, breathing organism,” Exodus president Alan Chambers said late Wednesday. “For quite some time, we’ve been imprisoned in a worldview that’s neither honoring toward our fellow human beings nor biblical.”

The Exodus move comes amid intense public discussion of gay rights in America and growing acceptance of gay marriage, even among young Evangelical Christians. On Wednesday, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska became the third Republican senator to back the right to same-sex marriage. The US Supreme Court is expected to rule in two highly anticipated gay marriage cases by the end of the month.

Mr. Chambers also posted online a 1,600-word apology to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning, or LGBTQ, community, a stunning repudiation of conversion therapy by one of its chief advocates – a man who is married to a woman and has children but openly acknowledges his own same-sex attractions. In January, California became the first state to ban conversion therapy for minors. New York is considering a similar move.

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In his apology to the gay community, Chambers said he was “deeply sorry” for the pain many have experienced and noted that some had committed suicide.

“I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change,” Chambers said. “I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly ‘on my side’ who called you names like sodomite – or worse.”

“I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know,” he continued. “I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart.”

Chambers then went on to say that he will not apologize for his “deeply held biblical beliefs about the boundaries I see in scripture surrounding sex” – a suggestion that he still believes gay sex is a sin – but will treat those who disagree with him with respect.

“I cannot apologize for my beliefs about marriage,” he said, suggesting that he still opposes same-sex marriage. “But I do not have any desire to fight you on your beliefs or the rights that you seek. My beliefs about these things will never again interfere with God’s command to love my neighbor as I love myself.”

An Exodus board member, Tony Moore, put a somewhat more positive spin on the organization’s work over the years. “We’re not negating the ways God used Exodus to positively affect thousands of people, but a new generation of Christians is looking for change – and they want to be heard,” Mr. Moore said in a statement.

The board announced that it is opening a separate ministry, providing a link to a website called reducefear.org, but the site says only that it is “in development.”

“Our goals are to reduce fear … and come alongside churches to become safe, welcoming, and mutually transforming communities,” Chambers said.

Gay media reacted to the news about Exodus International cautiously.

“Decades after leading US mental health organizations agreed that being gay is not a disorder, a small segment of American society, driven largely by religion, has persisted in saying homosexuality is something that can and should be ‘cured,’ " the Advocate newspaper wrote Thursday. “While there has always been ample skepticism about the ‘ex-gay’ movement, recent developments indicate the movement is becoming more marginal than ever – it’s not dead, but it’s certainly in critical condition.”

A leading social conservative organization, the Family Research Council, was dismissive of Exodus International’s announcement.

"The closing of Exodus International is probably for the best, since it had already ceased to perform its original function of offering hope for changing one's sexual orientation," said Peter Sprigg, FRC's senior fellow for policy studies, in a statement. "Many of its affiliated ministries had already left, and have now affiliated with a new organization, Restored Hope Network, whose first annual conference begins June 21 in Oklahoma City." "The ex-gay movement has nothing to apologize for. The message that 'Change Is Possible' is a modest one. It does not mean that change is easy, nor that change is mandatory. But to apologize for saying 'change is possible' is to deny both human freedom and the transforming power of the gospel of Christ."

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Saudi to expel Hezbollah supporters over Syria war

BEIRUT (AP) — In the latest sign of the fissures growing in the Arab world over the Syrian civil war,Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Beirut has announced that the kingdom plans to deport Lebanese who supported Hezbollah, one of Damascus' key allies.

The warning comes as the Lebanese Shiite militant group takes an increasingly prominent role in the Syrian war, fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's troops in a key battle earlier this month. Saudi Arabia is a strong backer of the mostly-Sunni Syrian opposition trying to remove Assad from power. Assad belongs to the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

It follows the decision earlier this month by the Gulf Cooperation Council — which includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — to crack down on Hezbollah members in the Gulf and limit their "financial and business transactions."

Hezbollah says it has no businesses in the Gulf nations. However, there are more than half a million Lebanese working in the Gulf Arab nations, including tens of thousands in Saudi Arabia, some of whom have been living in the kingdom for decades. Many of those Lebanese are Shiites.

Saudi Arabia will deport "those who financially support this party," Ambassador Ali Awad Assiri told Lebanon's Future TV late Wednesday. He did not elaborate on whether other actions could be also considered support for Hezbollah.

"This is a serious decision and will be implemented in detail," Assiri said, without specifying when the deportations would begin. "Acts are being committed against innocent Syrian people."

Lebanon's Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour told reporters Thursday he was in contact with Gulf officials over the matter. Hezbollah and its allies dominate Lebanon's current government, which resigned March 22, but continues to run the country's affairs in a caretaker capacity.

Syria's 2-year civil war, which has killed nearly 93,000 people, is increasingly pitting Sunni against Shiite Muslims and threatening the stability of Syria's neighbors. Assad draws his support largely from fellow Alawites as well as other minorities including Christians and Shiites. He is backed by Shiite Iran, Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiites.

U.S. officials estimate that 5,000 Hezbollah members are fighting alongside Assad's regime, while thousands of Sunni foreign fighters are also believed to be in Syria — including members of Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida affiliate that is believed to be among the most effective rebel factions. Public opinion in Sunni states is often sympathetic to the rebels.

Fighting between pro- and anti-Syrian groups has broken out in Lebanon, and Hezbollah's involvement in Syria is deepening tensions at home.

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, who has been increasingly critical of the group recently, said in remarks published Thursday that he is against Hezbollah's involvement in Syria and that Hezbollah fighters should return to Lebanon.

"I told them from the start that I am against this act," he was quoted by al-Safir daily as saying.

In Syria, activists reported violence between government forces and rebels in different parts of the country on Thursday, mostly near the capital Damascus and in the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest urban center and its commercial hub.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 11 rebels were killed in a battle with government troops in Aleppo, where the opposition has controlled whole neighborhoods and large swathes of surrounding land since last summer.

Pro-regime media outlets announced earlier this month that troops had launched an offensive to build on the momentum of their Qusair triumph to retake Aleppo and other areas of the north.

Another activist group, the Syria-based Aleppo Media Center, said rebels launched an attack on army positions in the city's Suleiman al-Halabi neighborhood. There were no immediate reports of casualties on the government side in the fighting.

Amateur videos showed gunmen shooting and firing rockets at army positions in the neighborhood. The videos appeared genuine and corresponded to other AP reporting on the events depicted.

Meanwhile, Syria's main Western-backed opposition group said 40,000 civilians in two northern districts of Damascus in which government forces have been operating are suffering food shortages and lack medical supplies.

"After six months of continuous siege, (and ) military checkpoints ... the neighborhoods of Qaboun and Barzeh are at risk," the Syrian National Coalition said in a statement. It said the government forces conduct frequent raids in the two districts and there is fear that such army operations will result in a "massacre."

Also on Thursday, the Observatory urged the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations to intervene and take medicine and food to Aleppo's central prison. Heavy fighting around the prison has raged for weeks and there have been casualties among the prisoners, the activists said.

The Observatory, which has a network of activists around the country, said three detainees died this week from tuberculosis and that scabies was spreading in the jail, which holds thousands of prisoners.

The prison, which is besieged by rebels, relies on food and medicine brought in drop-offs by army helicopters. The Observatory said more than 100 detainees have been killed since April when the fighting around the prison began.

Meanwhile, Syrian rebels and Kurdish gunmen reached an agreement to end a rebel siege of the northern predominantly Kurdish region of Afrin that triggered a shortage of food and medicine there, the Observatory said.

The Afrin flare-up began when rebels wanted to pass through it to attack the predominantly Shiite villages of Nubul and Zahra, controlled by Assad loyalists, the head of the Observatory, Rami Abdul-Rahman, said. After Kurdish groups refused, rebels attacked Kurdish checkpoints and laid siege beginning on May 25.