American Buddhist Net

Five children poisoned to death in a village in India may have been "sacrificed", police say.

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Israeli archaeologists have announced that ruins long thought to be of an ancient synagogue are actually the remains of a palace used by Muslim caliphs 1,300 years ago.

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COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s hotel owners are racing to refurbish and add thousands more rooms as foreign holidaymakers pour into the country after the end of nearly four decades of ethnic bloodshed.

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A multi-disciplinary project launched three years ago has yielded archaeological evidence of Kerala's ancient glory. The official establishment plans to exploit the find to boost tourism but has little interest in identifying its creators.

Kerala has boasted of a long history on the basis of references in ancient Tamil texts and the accounts of foreign travellers. However, barring a stray find of Roman coins, no tangible proof of its antiquity was available until now.

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Like many Americans, Doug Pagitt grew up outside the world of organized religion. Neither his parents nor his grandparents were churchgoers, and there was no expectation that he would be any different. Today, with his goatee, ear stud and funky clothes, he could easily pass for the sort of Gen X hipster who lives an entirely secular life.

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Latino population growth over the past two decades has boosted numbers in the Catholic Church, but a new, in-depth analysis shows Latinos' allegiance to Catholicism is waning as some move toward other Christian denominations or claim no religion at all.

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DUBLIN – It often starts as a voice in the wilderness, but can swell into an entire nation's demand for truth. From Ireland to Germany, Europe's many victims of child abuse in the Roman Catholic church are finally breaking social taboos and confronting the clergy to face its demons.

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Hanoi - Vietnam has officially allowed exceptions to its longstanding two-child policy under certain circumstances, a government official confirmed Wednesday. A new decree details seven scenarios in which couples are to have the right to a third child, Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong, director of the Hanoi Population Department, said.

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It took just minutes for Naila Farhat to be transformed from a bubbly 13-year-old with plump, rosy cheeks, full lips and a sweet smile into a half-blind, disfigured survivor of acid violence. A spurned suitor, Irshad Hussein, and his friend, Farhat's science teacher Mazhar Hussein, ambushed the girl on her way home from school in 2003 in the Pakistani town of Layyah in Punjab province, and splashed corrosive liquid on her face. "I felt it burning. I couldn't see clearly, but I could hear them laughing," she says. "I wanted justice."

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Third acid attack in same Hong Kong district in 6 months, serial attacker feared
Cambodia: Ninth acid attack in 2010 shows need for tighter laws
Singapore: Man jailed for acid attack

A prostitution ring linked to alleged corruption in the awarding of public works contracts for the G8 summit in Italy involved as many as 350 women, investigating magistrates said yesterday.

The apparent scale of the “sex for favours” affair, which was previously said to involve three or four women, is a further blow to the centre-Right Government of Silvio Berlusconi.

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BEIJING — One of China’s top Internet regulators warned bluntly on Friday that any move by Google to stop censoring its Chinese search engine would be “irresponsible” and would draw a response from Beijing.

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The issue, simply stated, is Internet freedom or not. The Chinese model of a closed and restricted Internet is horrible. I hope they utterly and completely fail. I hope Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Europe also fail in their short-sighted and cowardly attempts at censorship. Right now, the USA is the only major voice in the world supporting an open, uncensored Internet. Americans should be paying attention to world trends and domestic ones and never allow anyone to abridge our freedom of speech. Do not give an inch on this matter because all of world history stands in the balance. ABN

Jesse Ventura on AlJazeera w/ Riz Khan (part 2)

A fairly large part of Indonesia's Aceh society feels ill-at-ease with the presence of transvestites. Religious circles even link them to the fable of Sodom and Gomorrah, a biblical story about the destruction of the towns because of their moral decadence, as indicated, among other things, by the emergence of transvestites, homosexuals and lesbians.

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AS A veterinarian, he should have known better than to have made such a suggestion. More so being the deputy director-general of the Veterinary Services Department.

Dr Ahmad Suhaimi Omar has landed in hot water for proposing that municipal council dog pounds be allowed to sell the animals to those who like eating canine meat.

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Chinese netizens have found a creatively flamboyant, sometimes off-color, new way to voice their discontent about the social dilemmas in China—with less chance of raising a red flag. They have invented slang Internet expressions in both Chinese and English.

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Australian officials investigate allegations of sex competition on board navy ship

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Found this on a blog which had posted it for another reason. I want to step way back from current politics or religion for a moment. I am not posting this for political or religious reasons and not because of its explicit meaning, but rather because the video seems so revealing to me about the depth of human violence and passion, be they religious or otherwise. The speaker - girl or young woman - seems to me to be like a Jungian archetype of tribal values, group values. How many times in history have crowds been roused by a young face like this speaking so passionately? ABN

As Mongolia struggles to overcome a devastatingly harsh winter, international development organizations, including United Nations agencies and the World Bank, are urging Ulaanbaatar to take a hard look at reforming the country’s nomadic agricultural practices.

Since January, temperatures have hovered around minus 30 degrees Celsius and snow has covered 90 percent of the landlocked nation. Known locally as a "dzud," the harsh winter weather has killed over 3.3 million head of livestock and has threatened food and fuel supplies in rural communities, aid agency representatives say.

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KUALA LUMPUR - MALAYSIAN religious officials in the northern state of Kelantan are investigating two cases of child marriage involving girls under the age of 12, according to reports on Friday.

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Girl, 10, forced to marry

BANDUNG: An Indonesian court jailed six people under the country’s anti-pornography law for performing an erotic dance at a bar in the early hours of New Year’s Day, a prosecutor said Friday.

The four female dancers, the show promoter and bar manager received a two and half months each for a performance in Bandung, West Java, which violated a controversial anti-pornography law that came into effect in October 2008.

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As the daily onslaught of traffic piled by on Street 178, I sat chatting with Professor Chan Sim about the mystery of chovea. This is the Khmer name for those familiar curving pointed forms seen on the roofs of traditional Khmer buildings. Also found in Thailand and Laos, in Thai the name is chofah, which roughly translates to “sky tassel”.

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Hundreds of Bangladeshi Buddhist student monks staged a peaceful rally outside the UN office in Bangkok, Thailand, on 5 March. The monks, largely members of the Jumma tribe from Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh, called for UN help amid a spate of violence against the country’s indigenous people.

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...“These sexualized images are all commercially driven. The younger the demographic advertisers target, the more they can create cradle-to-grave consumers.” (And gone-to-early-grave parents.) Tweens were already the “most powerful consumer group since the baby boom" -- a $335 billion market -- in 2004. By 2007, according to Durham, the tween market had reached $700 billion worldwide.

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Foreign and local media have reported that a Korean man had married a large pillow with a picture of a female anime character at a church in Japan.

Lee Jin-gyu, the guy who fell in love with his dakimakura -- a kind of large, huggable pillow from Japan with an image of a popular anime character on it -- however, told local press today that he has not yet married his "girlfriend".

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Phenomenon: Love in 2-D
Goodbye, Woman; Hello, Dolly!
Inventor spends Christmas with his perfect woman - a £30,000 custom-made fembot

Many Catholic priests and religious have abused children in their care. But is the church's record worse than the world's?

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A school in America has decided to cancel its prom dance after a lesbian student demanded she be able to attend with her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo.

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DETROIT | Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.

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Sumba Island, between Bali and Australia, was once renowned for its vicious clan warfare, slave raids and headhunting.

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Reports indicate that Australian archaeologists have uncovered a 40,000-year-old tribal meeting ground, which they believe is the world's southernmost site of early human life.

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