Internet, SMS easy, quick services to send greetings

Wishing New Year was never as easy as it has become now due to the advent of technology where people just pressed a button in order to wish their loved ones the good luck to be followed on coming year.

The internet and mobile phones have fast replaced the tradition of sending post cards and greeting cards, which is why there were just a few shops that bothered to display the cards of Happy New Year.

SMS being the most popular and cheap way of communication was largely adopted by the people where the messages comprising New Year wishes, quotes and poetry was forwarded to the dear and near ones in a large number.

“Its something really convenient to send a good message by a single click rather than purchasing a post card and posting it while spending a good sum of money and time,” said Shams-ul-Hassan.

Hassan said that it was not only the matter of time, but one has to take hassle by purchasing card days before the event and then making it sure that it has been received by the concerned person on time. People started sending new year messages from early morning of December 31, but the process gained momentum after evening where most of the mobile networks got jammed around 12.

“I intended to send New Year wish to all my friend at sharp 12:00 midnight, but to my utter disappointment I could only manage to send it at 1:00 a.m., as I was getting the message of ‘message sending failed’ each time I tried to send it,” said Nooria Ahsan, a student of BBA.

Ms Ahsan said that SMS were the true substitute of post cards and greeting cards rather it was better as it was fast, cheap and reliable.

Besides that people also sent greetings through internet via email and face book. “It is the quickest way to wish besides that it costs nothing,” said Usman Murtaza.

Murtaza said that internet was a convenient way of wishing some occasion as one could easily browse the suitable messages through the various websites and send it to the relevant person. However there are number of people who do not consider the technology as a substitute of fast declining tradition of greeting cards. “The pleasure of receiving some greeting cards was unexplainable, which can’t be achieved by thousands of SMS and emails that we receive on the occasions like new year,” said Ghousia Bangash, a housewife.

She said that the real feel of celebration was only felt when they used to head towards market to buy the greeting cards for the loved ones and would post it and then would wait for the cards to be received by them. “The joy of opening, reading and then decorating these cards was unimaginable,” she argued.

The new year messages that started from December 31 continued till the evening of January 1, which not only included the prayers for the receiver, but also prayers for the stability and progress of Pakistan.LINK

US closes its Yemen embassy after Al-Qaeda threats

SANAA — The American embassy in Yemen closed on Sunday after Al-Qaeda threats to attack US interests, as Britain and the United States vowed to support the impoverished country in its fight against Al-Qaeda.

The move came after US President Barack Obama blamed a Yemen-based Al-Qaeda affiliate for the foiled Christmas Day attack on a US airliner and a day after a visit by the American regional military commander, General David Petraeus.

Al-Qaeda's franchise in Yemen had called on Monday for embassies to be targeted as it claimed responsibility for the thwarted attack on the Detroit-bound Northwest airliner.

"The US Embassy in Sanaa is closed today, January 3, 2010, in response to ongoing threats by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to attack American interests in Yemen," said a statement posted on the embassy's website.

On Thursday the US mission sent a warden message to American citizens in the country reminding them of the "continuing threat of terrorist actions and violence against American citizens and interests throughout the world."

AQAP on Monday urged further attacks on Westerners in the Arabian Peninsula.

"We call upon every Muslim who cares about his religion and doctrine to assist in expelling the apostasies from the Arabian Peninsula, by killing every crusader who works at their embassies or other places, declare it an all-out war against every crusader on Mohammad's peninsula on land, air and sea," an AQAP statement said.

Both London and Washington have agreed to fund Yemen's special Counter-Terrorism Unit after Obama on Saturday for the first time singled out the Al-Qaeda franchise in Yemen for the thwarted attack.

The special force had in the past received US training and assistance.

On September 17, 2008, the US embassy was the target of an attack claimed by Al-Qaeda in which 19 people were killed -- seven attackers and 12 others, including Yemeni guards and civilians, one of them an American woman.

Last month the defence ministry newspaper said that a raid north of the capital on December 17 killed four suspects and foiled a plot to bomb the British embassy in Sanaa.

Yemen on Sunday welcomed the British and US decision to fund the special force.

"Any assistance provided to Yemen's counter-terrorism force will be most welcome," a government official who requested anonymity told AFP.

The official also said that Sanaa would need help to modernise its coastguard "in light of the danger coming from Somalia."

Somalia's Shebab insurgents pledged on Friday to send militants across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen to help the Al-Qaeda affiliate behind the failed US airliner bombing.

Obama on Saturday blamed Al-Qaeda's Yemen branch for the attack on the US jet by 23-year-old Nigerian suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

"We know that he travelled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies," Obama said in an address posted on the White House website.

"It appears that he joined an affiliate of Al-Qaeda, and that this group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America."

General Petraeus on Saturday personally delivered a message from Obama to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh on bilateral cooperation against terror groups.

Britain, meanwhile, has called an international meeting on combating extremism in Yemen for London on January 28, in parallel with a conference on Afghanistan drawing senior ministers or leaders from more than 40 nations.

Yemen is the ancestral homeland of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.LINK

Pirates seize second UK-flagged cargo ship

Handout

Somali pirates captured the Singaporean chemical tanker M.T Parmoni with 24 crew members aboard in the Gulf of Aden on New Year's Day.

A UK-flagged cargo ship with 25 crew has been seized by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

The Asian Glory was taken 620 miles off the Horn of Africa, the Bulgarian foreign ministry said yesterday. The vessel, which has many Bulgarian crew members, is the second UK-flagged ship hijacked in days, after chemical tanker St James Park was seized on Monday.

British officials said there were no UK nationals on board. The exact time and location of the hijacking are not yet clear. The 13,000-tonne ship was reportedly transporting cars from Singapore to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

It is estimated the ship could take up to three days to reach the Somali coast, from where pirates usually hold ransom talks....LINK.

Taliban: CIA Attack Was Retaliation for Drone Strikes

KABUL -- A senior commander connected to the Afghan Taliban and involved with the attack against the CIA that left eight people dead said Saturday that the bombing was retaliation for U.S. drone strikes in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.

"We attacked this base because the team there was organizing drone strikes in Loya Paktia and surrounding area," the commander said, referring to the area around Khost, the city where the U.S. facility was attacked. The commander, a prominent member of the Afghan insurgency, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The suicide attack, which dealt the biggest loss to the agency in more than 25 years, killed a woman who was the station chief along with six other CIA officers and one private security contractor.

"We attacked on that particular day because we knew the woman who was leading the team" was there, the commander said.

The claims could not be independently verified late Saturday night and the CIA was not available for comment.

Both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attacks. The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for attacks in the past that Western officials have later rejected.

Some drone strikes had been coordinated from the base, Western officials said. The strikes were to target senior leaders of al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and an Afghan group called the Haqqani Network. The CIA operatives located on Forward Operating Base Chapman, which is near the Pakistani border, were involved in cultivating informants to target insurgent leaders using ground raids and drone strikes.

A number of key leaders of these three groups have been killed by the strikes, which mostly occur on the Pakistani side of the border. Al Qaeda and the leadership of the Haqqani Network are believed to have bases in this area. The strikes have caused considerable anger in the tribal border areas triggered by claims that civilians have also been killed.

U.S. officials maintain that the strikes are necessary to target insurgent leaders who use the border area as a sanctuary.LINK

Battle Over Use of 'Allah' Continues in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR -- Malaysia is bracing for a bruising linguistic battle after its government vowed to challenge a court ruling allowing local Roman Catholics to refer to God as Allah.

NAJIB ABDUL RAZAK

The legal tussle is raising tensions between Malaysia's ethnic-Malay Muslim majority, who comprise around 60% of this resource-rich nation's population, and its large ethnic-Chinese and Indian minorities. Muslim groups already are preparing demonstrations against a High Court ruling on New Year's Eve to overturn a three-year-old government ban on the Catholic Church using the Arabic word Allah as a translation for God in its Malay-language newspaper.

Government spokesman Tengku Sharifuddin Tengku Ahmad said Sunday the government will file an appeal against the ruling. Among other things, the verdict potentially upholds the constitutional right of the Church's Herald newspaper to refer to Jesus Christ as the son of Allah -- something that might inflame many Muslims here and set back Prime Minister Najib Razak's efforts to bring Malaysia's different religious groups closer together.

The Arab word Allah has been used by Malay-speaking Christians for centuries, much as it is used by Christians in Arabic-speaking countries or in Indonesia, where, like Malaysia, the concept of a single God was introduced by Arabic-speaking traders. Rev. Lawrence Andrew, editor of the Herald, says there's no other appropriate term for God in Malay.

Many powerful Islamic leaders here disagree, however, and fear some Muslims could be misled by Christians using the word Allah. The say the word should be reserved for Islam alone.

Now the controversy is quickly becoming a lightning rod for dissent against what some minority groups and moderate Muslims see as part of a broader Islamization of Malaysia that could deter investors.

Malaysia was, and many cases still is, a moderate, Muslim-majority nation. Its large Chinese and Indian minorities have encouraged trade links and investment, while multinationals helped create a large technology industry to complement Malaysia's large natural gas and agricultural reserves and propel it into the ranks of the world's top 20 exporters.

Nonetheless, Muslim Shariah courts have spread quickly, encouraged in part by a government eager to co-opt the agenda of radical Muslims who hope to eventually turn Malaysia into Southeast Asia's first Islamic state.

Muslim-oriented lobby groups exert a strong influence over the government. In the last six months, a Shariah court for the first time sentenced a woman who drank beer in a hotel to be caned, while a group of Muslim men near Kuala Lumpur threw a severed cow's head onto the site of a proposed Hindu temple -- a gross act of sacrilege.

"Despite official boasting about the country's diverse population and commitment to pluralism, Islam and the government have essentially merged," says Maznah Mohamad, a Malaysian political scientist at the National University of Singapore.

The New Year's Eve ruling penned by Judge Lau Bee Lian was one of the few times that a secular institution has intervened to block the advance of an increasingly political interpretation of Islam in Malaysia. She ruled that under Malaysian law, Christians have "a constitutional right to use [the word] Allah."

The Herald newspaper filed a lawsuit in 2007 challenging a government ban on it using the word Allah as a translation for God, complaining that the prohibition discriminated against Malay-speaking indigenous tribes who converted to Christianity decades ago. The newspaper has a tiny circulation of about 14,000 and is only available in Catholic Churches, although Muslims have complained that it is possible to look up Malay-language material using the term Allah on the Herald's Web site.

Muslim activists were quick to mobilize as soon as the high court verdict was delivered on Thursday afternoon. The National Union of Malaysian Muslim students urged the government to take the case to the Appeals Court, arguing that Christian missionaries using the word Allah could trick Muslims into leaving their faith, and the influential Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement is planning a large demonstration against the verdict in Kuala Lumpur on Friday.

The Malay-language Utusan Malaysia newspaper, meanwhile, reported that the influential mufti of northern Perak, Harussani Zakaria, called the verdict "an insult to Muslims in this country."

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Saturday that authorities should set strict conditions for non-Muslims using the word Allah to avoid to provoking a Muslim backlash.

"What I am afraid of is that the term 'Allah' might be used in such a way that could inflame the anger of Muslims, if [non-Muslims] were to use it on banners or write something might not reflect Islam," the state news agency Bernama reported him as saying.LINK