Indonesian Export

Tags: Indonesian export

Indonesia has several highly competitive export commodities that have yet to gain a greater share in international markets due partly to lack of overseas promotion.

A recent study by the central bank has suggested 20 categories of products with high productivity and revealed comparative advantage (RCA) but having only minor shares in export markets.

RCA is defined as a macroeconomic concept for calculating the relative advantage or disadvantage of a given country in a certain technological field.

Among the commodities that fail to live up to their potential are rubber-made goods, pulp and paper.

"For non-favored export commodities, like pulp and paper products and rubber-made products we have small export market shares but high productivity and RCA levels," the central bank said in its study.

"Shares of such commodities against Indonesia's total exports can be further increased."

However, the Industry Ministry's director for forestry and plantation product industries, Aryan Wargadalam, and the Indonesian Pulp and Paper Association (Apki) chairman H M Mansyur said pulp and paper were already among the top 20 export commodities.

"Pulp and paper are part of our main export commodities, and it's there in our policy. Their exports even reach some US$4 billion annually," Aryan told The Jakarta Post recently.

The Industry Ministry and the Trade Ministry had both "supported" the development of the pulp and paper industry because the sector was competitive in the global market, with the country being "the ninth largest pulp producer and the 11th largest paper producer in the world". according to Mansyur.

He said pulp and paper exports amounted to $4.5 billion in 2008 and $4.2 billion in 2007.

By comparison, non-oil and gas exports amounted to $107.8 billion in 2008, 17 percent up from $92 billion recorded in the previous year, according to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS).

Unlike pulp and paper, rubber-based products, however, performed poorly in the international market despite their competitiveness.

The Industry Ministry's direc-tor for downstream chemistry industry Tony Tanduk said the rubber-made product industry was still underdeveloped.

"The issue lies in high precision and standards required by *rubber-made product* buyers.

*These requirements are hard to meet* as most rubber-made products are still produced by small and medium-scale companies," he told the Post.

"As a result, even our buyers tend to have their own suppliers, usually from overseas," he said.

Tony said a memorandum of understanding (MoU) arranging partnerships should be made between local producers and buyers as a first step towards addressing this issue.

Indonesia is the world's third largest rubber producer after Thailand and Malaysia.

Indonesia's top 20 export commodities

No. Commodities-------Average shares to total exports between 2000 - 2007
1. Crude oil and its products---11.5%
2. Natural gas and its processed products---9.3%
3. Garments---6.6%
4. Vegetable oil and fat---5.0%
5. Woven goods and textiles---4.6%
6. Metal ores and residue---4.6%
7. Telecommunication devices---4.5%
8. Electrical machinery and its devices---4.3%
9. Coal, coke and briquette---4.1%
10. Wooden and styrofoam goods---4.1%
11. Office machines---3.4%
12. Paper---3.2%
13. Raw rubber---2.8%
14. Non-iron contained metals---2.5%
15. Fish, clams and mollusk---2.4%
16. Tools---2.3%
17. Organic chemicals---2.1%
18. Footwear---2.0%
19. Other industrial goods---2.0%
20. Coffee, tea, chocolate, spices---1.8%

Cumulative shares of top 20 commodities---83%
Source: United Nations Commodity Trade (COMTRADE), processed by the central bank.

Obama Declaration

Tags: Obama, US

Barack Obama, making his first visit to a Muslim nation as U.S. president, declared Monday the United States "is not and will never be at war with Islam."

Calling for a greater partnership with the Islamic world in an address to the Turkish parliament, Obama called the country an important U.S. ally in many areas, including the fight against terrorism.

He devoted much of his speech to urging a greater bond between Americans and Muslims, portraying terrorist groups such as al Qaida as extremists who did not represent the vast majority of Muslims.

"Let me say this as clearly as I can," Obama said. "The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam.

In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical ... in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."

The U.S. president is trying to mend fences with a Muslim world that felt it had been blamed by America for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

For instance, at a news conference earlier with Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, he dealt gingerly with the issue of alleged genocide committed by Turks against Armenians during World War I, urging Turks and Armenians to continue a process "that works through the past in a way that is honest, open and constructive."

Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyia, two of the biggest Arabic satellite channels, carried Obama's speech live.

"America's relationship with the Muslim world cannot and will not be based on opposition to al Qaida," he said. "We seek broad engagement based upon mutual interests and mutual respect."

"We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country," Obama said.

The president spoke for about 25 minutes from a small white-marble-and-teak rostrum in the well of a vast, airy chamber packed with Turkish lawmakers who filled the sea of orange leather chairs.

Except for a couple instances of polite applause, the room was almost completely silent throughout his speech.

There was a more hearty ovation toward the end when Obama said the U.S. supports the Turkish government's battle against PKK, which both consider a terrorist group, and again when he declared that America was not at war with Islam.

Obama also heard applause in response to his statement that the U.S. supports Turkey becoming a member of the European Union.

Earlier, Obama said he stood by his 2008 assertion that Ottoman Turks had carried out widespread killings of Armenians early in the 20th century, but he stopped short of repeating the word "genocide."

Gul said many Turkish Muslims were killed during the same period. Historians, not politicians, Gul said, should decide how to label the events of those times.

In his 2008 campaign, Obama said "the Armenian genocide is not an allegation," but rather "a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence."

Now that he is president, the genocide question may not be Obama's best issue for taking a tough stand that antagonizes a key ally.

It is important in U.S. communities with large numbers of Armenian-Americans, but it has a low profile elsewhere.

In his speech to the parliament Monday, Obama said the United States strongly supports the full normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia.

Obama's visit is being closely watched by an Islamic world that harbored deep distrust of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

In talks with Gul and Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Obama hoped to sell his strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He hoped to find welcoming ears given the new U.S. focus on melding troop increases with civilian efforts to better the lives of people in both countries.

Obama recognized past tensions in the U.S.-Turkey relationship, but said things were on the right track now because both countries share common interests and are diverse nations.

"We don't consider ourselves Christian, Jewish, Muslim. We consider ourselves a nation bound by a set of ideals and values," Obama said of the United States. "Turkey has similar principals."

Obama's trip to Turkey, his final scheduled country visit, ties together themes of earlier stops.

He attended the Group of 20 economic summit in London, celebrated NATO's 60th anniversary in Strasbourg, France, and on Saturday visited the Czech Republic, which included a summit of European Union leaders in Prague.

Turkey is a member of both the G-20 and NATO and is trying to get into the EU with the help of the U.S.

Turkey has the largest army in NATO after the United States. It and tiny Albania, recently admitted, are the only predominantly Muslim members of NATO.

In 2003, Turkey opposed the war in Iraq, and U.S. forces were not allowed to go through Turkey to attack Iraq.

Now, however, since Obama is withdrawing troops, Turkey has become more cooperative.

It is going to be a key country after the U.S. withdrawal in maintaining stability, although it has long had problems with Kurdish militants in north Iraq.

Turkey maintains a small military force in Afghanistan, part of the NATO contingent working with U.S. troops to beat back the resurgent Taliban and deny al-Qaida a safe haven along the largely lawless territory that straddles Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.

Turkey's participation carries enormous symbolic importance to the Muslim world because of its presence in the fight against Islamic extremism.

Albania, one of the poorest nations in Europe, has a small contingent in Afghanistan.

Typhoon in Philippines

Tags: Typhoon, Disaster

A powerful typhoon dumped heavy rains, triggered landslides and left at least 10 people dead and four missing in the northern Philippines, officials said Friday.

Typhoon Cha-hom was packing maximum winds of 75 miles (120 kilometers) per hour when it made landfall overnight in Pangasinan province, north of Mania.

It rapidly weakened into a tropical storm after crossing the mountains of Cordillera and Sierra Madre, and continued to lose strength as it moved away from the country, forecasters said.

Nine people were killed in landslides in two villages in Ifugao province's Kiangan town, popular for its mountainside rice terraces, the National Disaster Coordinating Council reported. The dead include children ages 10-15 years.

Another person died of a heart attack in northwestern Zambales province, and 10 people were injured during the storm, while another four were reported missing, NDCC said.

Several areas in Pagasinan were isolated by flooded roads. Authorities moved hundreds of residents to safety, radio reports said.

Electricity in the area was cut but later restored.

In central Iloilo province, a passenger vessel ran aground amid strong winds and big waves, but the coast guard rescued all 80 people aboar, Radio DZBB reported.

Another 1,000 passengers and 71 vessels were stranded in ports because of the storm, which forecasters said was moving east of the Philippines toward southern Japan.

Cha-hom, a word for a tree in Laos, is the second cyclone to hit the Philippines in a week. At least 27 people die and 55,000 were forced from their homes during last week's storm that lashed the northeastern Philippines.

About 20 typhoons and storms hit the country each year, but forecasters said they usually do not appear this early and that the extreme weather may have been caused by global warming.

Google part a member

Tags: Google

BERLIN — Microsoft will argue against a European Commission proposal that it promote competing browsers in its Windows operating system on the ground that such a move would strengthen its rival Google’s dominance in the global search-advertising market, according to a person with direct knowledge of Microsoft’s legal defense.

The company will make the argument at a June hearing in Brussels as part of an antitrust inquiry about the packaging of its Internet Explorer browser with Windows, which powers more than 90 percent of the world’s personal computers.

The person with knowledge of Microsoft’s legal strategy, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the case, said that Microsoft would outline what it saw as the damaging effects to the search-advertising industry of incorporating competing browsers — like Firefox from Mozilla or Chrome from Google — into Windows.

Mozilla derives the bulk of its income from the fees it receives for driving Web traffic to Google’s search engine. Google makes most of its revenue with advertising aimed at search results.
Google dominates the search advertising sector.

“Not only would Google’s browser Chrome suddenly be on all Windows PCs, but it would strengthen Google’s dominance in search advertising,” said this person.Google, in a statement, did not directly respond to Microsoft’s argument.

“We believe more competition will mean greater innovation on the Web and a better user experience for people everywhere,” said William Echikson, a Google spokesman in Brussels.

By aiming at its rival, Microsoft underscores the stakes for both it and Google, which are increasingly clashing as personal computing moves from software to the Web.

Aside from competing in e-mail, online advertising and search, Google also makes an operating system used on mobile computers and cellphones.

The new European complaint over browsers, like the previous nine-year antitrust case centering on Microsoft’s media player and computer-server coding, has forced the biggest names in the global software and Web businesses to choose sides.

The complaint was brought in December 2007 by Opera, a tiny Norwegian software maker with 510 employees.

Since then, Microsoft’s main competitors — Google, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems, Nokia, I.B.M., Adobe, Red Hat and Corel — have all signed on directly or through industry groups to argue as co-complainants.

Google, Mozilla and the European Committee for Interoperable Systems, a group based in Brussels representing the other Microsoft rivals, each plan to testify during the closed-door hearing next month before Michael Albers, a hearing officer in the European Commission’s competition section.

On Jan. 15, the commission informed Microsoft that it might order the software maker to preinstall competitors’ browsers in Windows, while simultaneously disabling Internet Explorer.

Microsoft has warned investors that the case could lead to a “significant” fine. Microsoft paid more than 1 billion euros in fines and penalties fighting the first antitrust case, which it abandoned in 2007 after losing an important legal appeal.

According to the person, Microsoft will argue that Internet browsing is inseparable from the Windows operating system.

Microsoft will also emphasize that consumers can download and use any competing browser with Windows, and that Internet Explorer’s share of the browser market has been falling steadily.

An estimated 67 percent of computer users around the world use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, according to Net Applications, a researcher in Aliso Viejo, Calif.

In Europe, the Firefox 3 browser has overtaken Internet Explorer 7 as the most-used browser, according to the Web analytics firm StatCounter.

But it still trails Microsoft by 10 percentage points when all versions of the Explorer are counted.

The interoperable systems committee has said that it intended to present data at

the hearing showing that Microsoft’s browser market share was closer to 85
percent in Europe.

RI Hands over UNTOC doc

Tags: RI, ASEAN

Handing over: Rainer Louhanapessy (second left), Charge d’Affaires of the Indonesian Embassy/Permanent Mission to the United Nations and other International Organizations in Vienna, shows the ratified instrument of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crimes (UNCTOC) to the United Nations legal adviser from the Office of the Legal Affairs, Annebeth Rosenboom (third right), before handing over to her in Vienna recently, while Foreign Ministry’s director for international security and disarmament Desra Percaya (left) and other UN staff members look on. Courtesy of the Indonesian Permanent Mission to the UN in Vienna.

Indonesia has handed over the document of the ratification of the UN transnational crimes convention to the United Nations recently, during the 18th Session on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in Vienna, Indonesia’s Permanent Mission to the UN and other International Organizations in Austria says.

Under the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crimes (UNCTOC), Jakarta can seek international assistance in dealing with money laundering, corruption and terrorism.

The document was handed over by the Indonesian Mission’s Charge d’Affaires Rainer Luhanapessy to the UN’s Treaty Section legal adviser Annebeth Rosenboom.

Indonesian Foreign Ministry director for international security and disarmament Desra Percaya was also present at the handing over ceremony.

The convention, which was approved by the House of Representatives in January this year, will have binding power 90 days after the instrument was presented.

The UNCTOC will be an additional instrument to the UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), ASEAN Mutual Legal Assistance and other existing bilateral agreements that have been signed by Indonesia.

Hackers demand

Tags: Hacker

Days after a hacker claimed to have broken into a database and encrypted millions of prescription records at the Virginia Department of Health Professions, it remains unclear what happened.

Whistleblower Web site Wikileaks.org last Sunday carried a report from an anonymous poster who said that the secure site for the Virginia DHP Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) had been broken into by a hacker who made a $10 million ransom demand.

The alleged ransom note posted on the PMP site claimed that the hacker had backed up and encrypted more than 8 million patient records and 35 million prescriptions and then deleted the original data.

"Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh," the hacker is supposed to have said in his note, a copy of which was available on Wikileaks.

"For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password," for decrypting the data, the supposed hacker wrote.

The expletive-laden note goes on to say that authorities have seven days to decide if they will "pony up" the money.

If the ransom is not paid, "I'll go ahead and put this baby out on the market and accept the highest bid," the note says.

The hacker admits that while he is unsure about the worth of the data or who would want it, "I'm bettin' someone will.

Hell, if I can't move the prescription data at the very least I can find a buyer for the personal data," the hacker said pointing to the fact that the data included patients' names, ages, addresses, Social Security and driver's license numbers.

A call seeking comment on the incident from the Virginia PMP program office was not immediately returned.

A call to the Virginia State Police department seeking confirmation on whether it is investigating the reported incident also was not immediately returned.

As of today, the main PMP Web site and all links on the site were unavailable.

The PMP was set up in the wake of a spate of drug-abuse-related crimes and some deaths in the state involving the painkiller Oxycontin.

It allows pharmacists and health care professionals to track prescription drug abuse, such as incidents of patients who go "doctor-shopping" to find more than one doctor to prescribe narcotics.

According to a description of the program from a cached version of the site, there were more than 31.6 million records in the PMP database as of Jan. 1.

Doctors, pharmacists and other authorized users make requests for data from the PMP database via a secure Web page, the description said.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Tuesday that the FBI and State Police had confirmed investigations of a hacking incident at the PMP.

The story also quoted Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine as saying the compromised data was not the same as patient files from doctors' offices.

"These were not patient records, so it's not compromise of health-care information about particular individuals," the governor is quoted as saying in the Times-Dispatch.

The compromise comes at a time of heightened concerns about the privacy and security of medical data.

President Barack Obama's recently passed economic stimulus package includes a health care component that initially provides $20 billion for the creation of a national health records system.

The bill mandates new privacy and security controls for health care data that are seen as being long overdue.

The controls go beyond those mandated under HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and are expected to be more strictly enforced than HIPAA rules have been.

The breach at the Virginia health agency highlights the "overall lack of compliance" with HIPAA within the health care sector, said Peter MacKoul, president of HIPAA Solutions LC, a consulting firm in Sugar Land, Texas.

"HIPAA by and large has been ignored, not because it is unimportant, but because of a lack of will to really [enforce] it," MacKoul said.

"Much like all other regulations, if there is no real enforcement, this type of thing will continue to happen over and over again."

The reported incident in Virginia is identical to one reported by Express Scripts, a St. Louis-based prescription drug management company in October.

The company said it received an extortion letter from data thieves who threatened to release millions of patient records if the company did not pay up.

Windows 7 RC

Tags: Windows 7

Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) continues a long-running Microsoft practice that puts users at risk, a security researcher said today.

The new operating system's Windows Explorer file manager still misleads users about the true extension of a file, said Patrik Runald, chief research advisor at Helsinki-based F-Secure Corp.

Rather than reveal the full extension for a filename, Windows Explorer hides the extension for known file types, giving hackers a way to disguise malware by using those file types' extensions
and icons.

Windows Explorer, for example, will show the .txt icon and display "attack.txt" as the filename for a Trojan horse that's actually been named "attack.txt.exe" by the hacker.

The practice goes back to at least Windows NT, and has been criticized in the still-popular Windows XP and the newer Windows Vista.

"People typically look at the icon to know what the file is," said Runald. "If it looks like a Word doc or a PDF file, there's an implicit trust in it, and users are more likely to click on those files, even if they are actually an executable."

Windows, Runald continued, is smart enough to know the true nature of the file, and will, for instance, run an .exe even if the filename shows as "attack.txt" in Explorer.

"This has been used for years by virus writers -- maybe less than it used to be, since most attacks now are drive-by downloads [using browser vulnerabilities], and not email attachments," Runald noted. "But you still see it."

Microsoft should show the true filename in Explorer, urged Runald. "Bottom line, it's a still bad idea not to."

Windows 7 RC launched yesterday, and will be available for download until at least through the end of July.

Swine flu

Tags: Swine flu

Asian health officials gathered Thursday to draw up a game plan for dealing with an outbreak of swine flu that has sickened thousands worldwide, considering measures to develop vaccines and bolster medicine stockpiles.

The virus has largely spared the region. South Korea remained the only Asian country with confirmed cases of swine flu, or the H1N1 virus, while China on Thursday released a group of people quarantined for a week after being on the same flight as a Mexican man diagnosed with swine flu.

Dozens in Hong Kong were also expected to regain their freedom soon. But delegates at the Bangkok meeting said there was no room for complacency.

They said this two-day conference would be a chance to boost cooperation among governments that already are considered among the world's most prepared because of their experience responding to the SARS outbreak in 2003 and bird flu since then.

Hundreds of police and troops in battle gear ringed the hotel in downtown Bangkok where the officials met to forestall a repeat of last month's meeting of Asian leaders which was broken up by anti-government demonstrators.

There were no protesters in sight Thursday.

"In a more globalized and interconnected world, an outbreak of an emerging infectious disease is immensely swift.

To deal with it requires strong cooperative efforts," Thailand's Permanent Secretary for Health Prat Boonyawongvirot told delegates.

Prat said the health ministers from the 10 countries of Association of Southeast Nations along with China, South Korea and Japan will consider establishing mechanism for the development, holding and production of vaccines and anti-viral drugs and expansion of the ASEAN emergency stockpile of 1 million courses of Tamiflu and Relenza.

"This will ensure security for all people from the emergency threat of H1N1," he said.

The majority of swine flu cases have come from Mexico which has reported 840 of the nearly 1,600 confirmed cases of swine flu in 23 countries worldwide. There have been 44 deaths, 42 in Mexico and two in the U.S.

South Korea on Thursday confirmed a third case of swine flu, but said the 62-year-old woman already had recovered from the disease. She was released from a military-run hospital, the Health Ministry said.

The woman had been staying in the U.S. state of Arizona and was on the same flight back to South Korea as the country's first confirmed patient, a Catholic nun returning from a trip to Mexico on April 26. The nun recovered earlier this week.

China's tough measures have drawn complaints from Mexico and other countries that their citizens were being quarantined based merely on their nationality.

Mexico's president has called the Chinese measures discriminatory.

China defends the measures, which it says are needed to block swine flu virus from entering the world's most populous nation.

There has been one confirmed case in Hong Kong, a plane passenger from Mexico, but none on the mainland.

Dozens of people under quarantine across China were released or would be released later Thursday if they showed no symptoms of the illness, the Health Ministry said.

Many were put in isolation because they had been on an April 30 flight from Mexico with the traveler diagnosed in Hong Kong.

While some were released, others began new rounds of isolation.

In Shanghai, 119 Chinese who returned home from Mexico on Wednesday aboard a charter flight began a week of quarantine at a local hotel, while a vice health minister said the nation's aggressive prevention measures were working and would be maintained.

Tags: Google earth

When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn't expect a backlash.

The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, they were already posted on another Web site, and a historical map of Tokyo put up in 2006 hadn't caused any problems.

But Google failed to judge how its offering would be received, as it has often done in Japan. The company is now facing inquiries from the Justice Ministry and angry accusations of prejudice because its maps detailed the locations of former low-caste communities.

The maps date back to the country's feudal era, when shoguns ruled and a strict caste system was in place.

At the bottom of the hierarchy were a class called the "burakumin," ethnically identical to other Japanese but forced to live in isolation because they did jobs associated with death, such as working with leather, butchering animals and digging graves.

Castes have long since been abolished, and the old buraku villages have largely faded away or been swallowed by Japan's sprawling metropolises.

Today, rights groups say the descendants of burakumin make up about 3 million of the country's 127 million people.

But they still face prejudice, based almost entirely on where they live or their ancestors lived.

Moving is little help, because employers or parents of potential spouses can hire agencies to check for buraku ancestry through Japan's elaborate family records, which can span back over a hundred years.

An employee at a large, well-known Japanese company, who works in personnel and has direct knowledge of its hiring practices, said the company actively screens out burakumin job seekers.

"If we suspect that an applicant is a burakumin, we always do a background check to find out," she said. She agreed to discuss the practice only on condition that neither she nor her company be identified.

Lists of "dirty" addresses circulate on Internet bulletin boards. Some surveys have shown that such neighborhoods have lower property values than surrounding areas, and residents have been the target of racial taunts and graffiti.

But the modern locations of the old villages are largely unknown to the general public, and many burakumin prefer it that way.

Google Earth's maps pinpointed several such areas. One village in Tokyo was clearly labeled "eta," a now strongly derogatory word for burakumin that literally means "filthy mass." A single click showed the streets and buildings that are currently in the same area.

Google posted the maps as one of many "layers" available via its mapping software, each of which can be easily matched up with modern satellite imagery.

The company provided no explanation or historical context, as is common practice in Japan.

Its basic stance is that its actions are acceptable because they are legal, one that has angered burakumin leaders.

In this computer screen image taken from the Google Earth software, a feudal map of a village in central Japan from hundreds of years ago, superimposed on a modern street map, is shown. AP/Google Earth.

"If there is an incident because of these maps, and Google is just going to say 'it's not our fault' or 'it's down to the user,' then we have no choice but to conclude that Google's system itself is a form of prejudice," said Toru Matsuoka, a member of Japan's upper house of parliament.

Asked about its stance on the issue, Google responded with a formal statement that "we deeply care about human rights and have no intention to violate them."

Google spokesman Yoshito Funabashi points out that the company doesn't own the maps in question, it simply provides them to users.

Critics argue they come packaged in its software, and the distinction is not immediately clear.

Printing such maps is legal in Japan. But it is an area where publishers and museums tread carefully, as the burakumin leadership is highly organized and has offices throughout the country.

Public showings or publications are nearly always accompanied by a historical explanation, a step Google failed to take.

Matsuoka, whose Osaka office borders one of the areas shown, also serves as secretary general of the Buraku Liberation League, Japan's largest such group.

After discovering the maps last month, he raised the issue to Justice Minister Eisuke Mori at a public legal affairs meeting on March 17.

Two weeks later, after the public comments and at least one reporter contacted Google, the old Japanese maps were suddenly changed, wiped clean of any references to the buraku villages.

There was no note made of the changes, and they were seen by some as an attempt to quietly dodge the issue.

"This is like saying those people didn't exist. There are people for whom this is their hometown, who are still living there now," said Takashi Uchino from the Buraku Liberation League headquarters in Tokyo.

The Justice Ministry is now "gathering information" on the matter, but has yet to reach any kind of conclusion, according to ministry official Hideyuki Yamaguchi.

The League also sent a letter to Google, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press. It wants a meeting to discuss its knowledge of the buraku issue and position on the use of its services for discrimination.

It says Google should "be aware of and responsible for providing a service that can easily be used as a tool for discrimination."

Google has misjudged public sentiment before. After cool responses to privacy issues raised about its Street View feature, which shows ground-level pictures of Tokyo neighborhoods taken without warning or permission, the company has faced strong public criticism and government hearings.

It has also had to negotiate with Japanese companies angry over their copyrighted materials uploaded to its YouTube property.

An Internet legal expert said Google is quick to take advantage of its new technologies to expand its advertising network, but society often pays the price.

"This is a classic example of Google outsourcing the risk and appropriating the benefit of their investment," said David Vaile, executive director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

The maps in question are part of a larger collection of Japanese maps owned by the University of California at Berkeley.

Their digital versions are overseen by David Rumsey, a collector in the U.S. who has more than 100,000 historical maps of his own.

He hosts more than 1,000 historical Japanese maps as part of a massive, English-language online archive he runs, and says he has never had a complaint.

It was Rumsey who worked with Google to post the maps in its software, and who was responsible for removing the references to the buraku villages.

He said he preferred to leave them untouched as historical documents, but decided to change them after the search company told him of the complaints from Tokyo.

"We tend to think of maps as factual, like a satellite picture, but maps are never neutral, they always have a certain point of view," he said.

Rumsey said he'd be willing to restore the maps to their original state in Google Earth. Matsuoka, the lawmaker, said he is open to a discussion of the issue.

A neighborhood in central Tokyo, a few blocks from the touristy Asakusa area and the city's oldest temple, was labeled as an old "eta" village in the maps.

It is indistinguishable from countless other Tokyo communities, except for a large number of leather businesses offering handmade bags, shoes and furniture.

When shown printouts of the maps from Google Earth, several older residents declined to comment. Younger people were more open on the subject