American Buddhist Net

JOS, Nigeria (AP) - Nearly 3,000 people have fled to a neighboring state after hundreds were slaughtered in several mostly Christian villages over the weekend, aid officials said Thursday.

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DOGO NAHAWA, Nigeria— The attackers came at night and surrounded this small farming village, firing shots in the air to scare residents from their homes. Men, women and children were hacked with machetes as they rushed out. Several houses were set on fire with residents still inside.

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Mass burials are being held for the hundreds of victims slaughtered in religious revenge attacks in central Nigeria.

The death toll from the raids on Sunday by machete-wielding Muslims on Christian villages rose to more than 200, including a four-day-old baby.

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Scores hacked to death in Nigerian sectarian clash

Scores of women and children were today hacked to death by raiders wielding machetes in a fresh bout of religious violence in Nigeria. Dozens of corpses were reportedly piled up in streets near the central city of Jos after pre-dawn clashes between Islamist pastoralists and Christian villagers. One report put the death toll at more than 200.

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In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours.

But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones.

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COULD these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells (see photo) be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?

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by Edward C. Corrigan / March 1st, 2010

There is a controversy raging in North America over Israeli Apartheid Week (March 1-7 2010).1 A resolution was passed in the Ontario Provincial Parliament which was unanimously supported (only 30 MPPs voted) and declared the comparison of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to apartheid as “odious.” To quote an article in the Toronto Star Canada’s largest circulation paper.

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BRUSSELS — A Danish warship, the Absalon, sunk a Somali pirate "mothership" in the Indian Ocean, a NATO spokesman said Monday.

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Archaeologists have discovered that wealthy black Africans lived in Roman Britain in one of the country’s earliest examples of multiculturalism.

Scientific research techniques have established that a lavish grave containing a woman’s skeleton, an ivory bangle, perfume bottle, mirror and jewellery, belonged to a North African member of York’s high society in the 4th century.

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Bamako — A husband and wife can keep separate homes, but only with the husband's approval. A divorcée can keep her ex-husband's name - if he agrees. A girl should be able to marry at 15. These and a dozen other changes to the family code are being proposed by Mali's top Islamic council, even though they were blocked last August after strong opposition from some Muslim leaders.

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BEIJING — China and Kenya plan to search for ancient Chinese ships wrecked almost 600 years ago off Africa's east coast.

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BANGKOK, Thailand - Thailand has seized two tons of elephant tusks from Africa hidden in pallets labeled as mobile phone parts in the country's largest ivory seizure.

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Pretoria — A South African delegation will depart for China later this week to strengthen cooperation and support in the economic, trade and political sphere.

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Special Report: China Storms Africa

China promises billions in aid, loans to Africa

Why China is trying to colonise Africa

The Congress of South Africa Students has asked traditional health practitioners to stop killing children for muti.

Thabo Nsako, a Cosas leader from Soshanguve, told traditional healers at a seminar held by the Gauteng legislature in Pretoria that they should never kill for muti.

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Muti: Traditional Medicine of Southern Africa

A four centuries-old mosque minaret has collapsed in Morocco, killing at least 16 people and injuring more than 30 worshippers, hospital officials and eyewitnesses said.

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Researchers have to prove claims that Chinese investments in Africa are driven by the Asian country's hunger for raw materials and energy, a senior Chinese conservationist said yesterday.

...[China]'s businesspeople are also on record as having colluded with some unscrupulous Tanzanians to defraud the country of revenues through smuggling of forestry products worth $58 million annually between 2004 and 2005.

Cases of cheap and fake products manufactured in China, which create an unfair competition with locally-manufactured products, are also rampant.

A survey conducted late last year by Dar es Salaam regional authorities established that most Chinese entrepreneurs were engaged in businesses other than which their TIC [Tanzania Investment Centre] certificates show.

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Six decades after assassination, family releases ashes of ‘great soul’

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NAIROBI — The founder of Kenya's former Mungiki gang, known for its beheadings, said at a funeral that gathered 10,000 people Saturday that the sect had made a new beginning by embracing Christianity.

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CAIRO (Reuters) - Relics in a newly discovered Greek queen's temple in Alexandria show how Egyptian deities were still revered by Egypt's later Greek conquerors, archaeologists said on Tuesday.

The temple of Queen Berenike, wife of Ptolemy III, dating back to the 3rd century BC, was discovered along with 600 statues in the Kom el Dikka area of the Mediterranean city, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said.

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The traditional parks model of closing off areas and keeping people out simply may not work in Africa, where human demands on the land are great. Instead, what’s needed is an approach that finds ways to enable people and animals to co-exist.

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By Wayne Madsen
Jan 18, 2010

(WMR) -- WMR’s intelligence sources in Asia and Europe are reporting that the CIA contractor firm XE Services, formerly Blackwater, has been carrying out “false flag” terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Somalia, the Sinkiang region of China, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq, in some cases with the assistance of Israeli Mossad and Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) personnel.

Fingers are being pointed at Blackwater/XE and Mossad operatives for the motorbike bomb in Tehran that killed Tehran University nuclear physicist Dr. Moussad Ali-Mohammadi.

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Thirty four Islamic scholars in Mauritania have signed a fatwa, or religious opinion, banning the practice of female genital mutilation.

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Burial sites are next to king, suggesting laborers were paid and not slaves

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ROSARNO, Italy (AFP) - – More than 900 immigrants fled a southern Italian town on Saturday after residents violently attacked African farm workers.The clashes which began late Thursday left 67 people injured in the Calabrian town of Rosarno, but calm was generally restored Saturday, with barricades erected by locals dismantled and shops open.

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By M K Bhadrakumar

A year ago, Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh made the startling revelation that his country's security forces apprehended a group of Islamists linked to the Israeli intelligence forces. "A terrorist cell was apprehended and will be referred to the courts for its links with the Israeli intelligence services," he promised.

Saleh added, "You will hear about the trial proceedings." Nothing was ever heard and the trail went cold. Welcome to the magical land of Yemen, where in the womb of time the Arabian Nights were played out.

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A reasonable analysis, far better than what you will see in US mainstream news about avenging the underwear bomber. ABN

A BBC investigation into human sacrifice in Uganda has heard first-hand accounts which suggest ritual killings of children may be more common than authorities have acknowledged.

One witch-doctor led us to his secret shrine and said he had clients who regularly captured children and brought their blood and body parts to be consumed by spirits.

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KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

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Reporting from Beirut - Yemeni officials on Sunday dismissed the threat posed by Al Qaeda in their country as "exaggerated" and downplayed the possibility of cooperating closely with the United States in fighting Islamic militants, even as the U.S. and Britain temporarily closed their diplomatic outposts in Yemen because of unspecified Al Qaeda threats.

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It is next to impossible to understand the day by day ins and outs of events in Yemen. What we can understand, though, is that the US war on terror has added yet another front, that Obama blames an "Al-Qaeda affiliate" in Yemen for the airliner bomb attempt, and that the basic plot of this story is all too familiar. It has been used against four different countries in the Muslim world already. ABN

"Neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger have an interesting article in Discover Magazine about the Boskops, an extinct hominid that had big eyes, child-like faces, and forebrains roughly 50% larger than modern man indicating they may have had an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to 'alien abductors' in movies. Naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote: 'Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain.' The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor, yet the existence of the Boskops argues otherwise — that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens — that is, ourselves. 'With 30 percent larger brains than ours now, we can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149,' write Lynch and Granger.

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Tarpley is always worth listening to. With incidents like this one, the facts get buried quickly. There is an eyewitness to a well-dressed man escorting the suspect to the plane; there are reports that the suspect's father had contacted US authorities about his son; the suspect did seem dazed; security in Europe does seem to have been lax or relaxed in this case. The US has been ramping up its involvement in Yemen. There were calls over the weekend from US members of Congress to "preempt" Yemen. It does seem that no matter what happens, more war is the US answer and more war, obviously, causes more terrorism. ABN

The Lap Bomber Mystery