American Buddhist Net

The Tibet-China talks are a sham, Sarkozy has said he won't go to the opening ceremonies if there is no progress, but after all that good food and wine, who knows? Now China tells him--with no apparent sense of irony--that he must not meet with the Dalai Lama in FRANCE because that would “would be contrary to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs.” ABN
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By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: July 9, 2008

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who is expected to announce on Wednesday that he will after all attend the opening ceremonies of Beijing’s Olympic Games, was warned by China on Tuesday not to meet with the Dalai Lama in France next month.

China’s ambassador to France, Kong Quan, told reporters there would be “serious consequences” for Chinese-French relations if Mr. Sarkozy meets the Dalai Lama, asserting that it “would be contrary to the principle of non-interference in internal affairs.”

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8 Jul 2008

After hundreds of years without them, prayer rooms are suddenly regarded as an essential requirement for the workplace. A guide produced by St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, in the City of London, says that employers should to take into account the “needs” of their religious employees. It says that that “the business case for providing prayer rooms and best practice on creating and managing effective space” makes good business sense by “helping to attract, motivate and retain staff, and building a reputation for diversity.”

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Monday, 7 July 2008
By Arifa Akbar

Perhaps, when the architect Daniel Libeskind produced his grand plans for an art museum and office tower designed to inspire civic pride in the heart of Milan, he should not have been surprised when Italy's gaffe-prone Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said the bent structure emanated a "sense of impotence" because it is not manly enough.

But Libeskind, an American born in Poland, was so outraged that he accused Mr Berlusconi of being a xenophobe who proffers "repugnant" politics, according to the The Art Newspaper. The war of words culminated in the premier's latest threat this month to withdraw planning permission for the museum.

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Sunday 6th July, 2008

The 73rd birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama is being marked by the University of Madras and Alliance Francaise here Sunday with a three-day festival of Tibetan culture.

The festival began with a presentation on an extraordinary French woman, who was one of the only two French explorers to be able to reach the forbidden land of Lhasa in the hundred years between 1846 and 1950.

Many foreign explorers, 'missionaries, army officers, diplomats, spies' wanted to have a look at Tibet at the time, explained Claude Arpi, French journalist and historian, speaking on the life Alexandra David-Neel whose numerous writings contributed to make Tibet and Buddhism known the world over.

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By Axel Bugge

CHAO DE PARADA, Portugal (Reuters) - Husband and wife Francisco and Casilda Figueiredo are among the last exponents of a traditional Portuguese handicraft -- making ornamental ceramic penises.

For more than three decades, the couple have carefully shaped thousands of ceramic male organs, moulding them into upright shapes and painting them in life-like colours for export to Germany, France and North America.

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See also this--Lessons of a Cyber Assault--about the cyber attacks in Estonia last year. Lithuania and Estonia are both very small countries that were once occupied by the Soviet Union and still have significant Russian minorities (often former Soviet military) living within them. Hence the tension over the Soviet symbols. ABN
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Hundreds of Lithuanian government and corporate Web sites were hacked and plastered with Soviet-era symbols and other digital graffiti this week in what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack launched by Russian hacker groups.

A New York Times story reports that Lithuanian officials did not directly accuse Russian hackers of initiating the attacks, but said they had come from foreign computers. However, iDefense, a security intelligence firm, based in Reston, Va., attributed the attacks to nationalistic Russian hacker groups protesting a new Lithuanian law banning the display of Soviet emblems, including honors won during World War II.

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By Chris Buckley
July 3, 2008

BEIJING (Reuters) - China made a barely veiled swipe at French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday and state media warned he can expect a cold public shoulder if he attends the Beijing Olympics after he threatened not to go over Tibet.

Sarkozy has said he will decide next week whether to attend the opening of the Games in August, with his choice depending on how talks go between Beijing and the Dalai Lama's envoys.

China often lashes out at foreign leaders for meeting the exiled Dalai Lama or criticizing its policies in Tibet, which it calls an internal affair.

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03 July 2008
By Heather Whipps

Ancient hunters painted the sections of their cave dwellings where singing, humming and music sounded best, a new study suggests.

Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics, the scientists found. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.

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July 3, 2008
By MARK LANDLER

FRANKFURT — When Roger Kusch helped Bettina Schardt kill herself at home on Saturday, the grim, carefully choreographed ritual was like that in many cases of assisted suicide, with one exception.

Ms. Schardt, 79, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, was neither sick nor dying. She simply did not want to move into a nursing home, and rather than face that prospect, she asked Mr. Kusch, a prominent German campaigner for assisted suicide, for a way out.

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July 2, 2008
By Chris Musson and Joanne Curran

THE Russian student who squatted in her dead lover's Scottish flat did a runner before being evicted yesterday.

The Record told in January how Tatiana Chebotareva had moved into the property while she battled James King's relatives for a share of his £250,000 estate. Chebotareva, 22, a failed asylum seeker, battled in court with 55-year-old James's Buddhist nun sister.

She lost her case and was ordered to be evicted from the one-bedroom flat in Stirling.

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WARSAW (AFP) — Polish President Lech Kaczynski announced in an interview published Tuesday that he will not sign the EU's Lisbon Treaty, saying it was pointless after Irish voters rejected it in a referendum last month.

"For the moment, the question of the treaty is pointless," Kaczynski was quoted as saying in the online version of the daily Dziennik.

The Polish parliament voted in April to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, a key reform treaty meant to streamline EU decision-making, but it needs the signature of the president to become definitive.

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1 July 2008

A last drink proved one too many for a 78-year-old Swede who fell asleep while trying to row home - from Denmark.

Reports say the man had been drinking in the Danish town of Helsingor but found he did not have enough money for the ferry home to Sweden.

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June 30, 2008

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) -- Unidentified hackers broke into several hundred Lithuanian Web sites over the weekend, plastering them with communist symbols, government officials said Monday.
Lithuanian law prohibits the public display of the Soviet flag, military uniforms and the five-pointed Soviet star.

The hackers posted Soviet symbols -- the hammer and sickle, as well as the five-pointed star -- and scathing messages with profanities on Web sites based in the ex-Soviet nation, officials said.

"More than 300 private and official sites were attacked from so-called proxy servers located in territories east of Lithuania," said Sigitas Jurkevicius, a computer specialist at Lithuania's communications authority.

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Thirty years after his murder we may finally get to know the truth about Aldo Moro, says Robert Fox

June 30, 2008

Thirty years ago this Sunday, the Italian statesman Aldo Moro was seized by the Red Brigades and eight weeks later his body was dumped in downtown Rome. It was the most spectacular assassination by the Red Brigades and the most significant killing of a leader in Europe during the entire Cold War.

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Shows how persistent and nasty so many of these chemicals are. ABN
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Gardeners across Britain are reaping a bitter harvest of rotten potatoes, withered salads and deformed tomatoes after an industrial herbicide tainted their soil. Caroline Davies reports on how the food chain became contaminated and talks to the angry allotment owners whose plots have been destroyed.

...It appears that the contamination came from grass treated 12 months ago. Experts say the grass was probably made into silage, then fed to cattle during the winter months. The herbicide remained present in the silage, passed through the animal and into manure that was later sold. Horses fed on hay that had been treated could also be a channel.

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28 June 2008

More than 60 persons have been arrested by the police for trying to attack and harass the participants in the gay pride parade, which took place in Sofia Saturday afternoon.

The arrested are mostly representatives of the skin heads and other extremist groups, who were throwing stones, bottles, squibs, and even Molotov cocktails at the procession.

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A Dying Breed? As the birthrate in European countries drops well below the "replacement rate" — that is, an average of 2.1 children born to every woman — the declining population will first be felt in the playgrounds.

June 29, 2008
By RUSSELL SHORTO

...The figure of 2.1 is widely considered to be the “replacement rate” — the average number of births per woman that will maintain a country’s current population level. At various times in modern history — during war or famine — birthrates have fallen below the replacement rate, to “low” or “very low” levels. But Hans-Peter Kohler, José Antonio Ortega and Francesco Billari — the authors of the 2002 report — saw something new in the data. For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”

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The scientific dictatorship is moving quickly towards its goal of a one world government nightmare police state.

http://www.infowars.com/?p=2908

EU Constitution Kingpin: We Will Ignore Referendums

Admits Lisbon Treaty was intended to confuse public into acceptance

Steve Watson & Paul Watson / Infowars.net | Friday, June 27, 2008

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, author of the rejected European Constitution, has effectively stated that the votes of citizens in EU member states will have no bearing on the future actions of the European Parliament.

The former President of France has told media that referendums, such as last week’s key Irish vote on the Lisbon Treaty, will simply be ignored by bureaucrats in Brussels as they may hinder the progress of European integration.

Finding sheds light on the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapods

June. 25, 2008

WASHINGTON - Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.

The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

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By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 1:20am BST 25/06/2008

The ultra-Europeans have overplayed their hand. We can now glimpse a chain of events that will halt, and reverse, this extremist push towards an Über-state that almost no one wants.

The attempt to override the triple "No" votes of the French, Dutch, and Irish peoples has brought the EU to a systemic crisis of legitimacy. A line too many has been crossed. Any sentient citizen can see that the process has become unhinged.

While "Europe" blunders on as if nothing has happened, it is now an open question whether the Lisbon Treaty - née Constitution - will ever come into force, whether the EU will ever acquire the machinery of an economic, diplomatic, and military power, and whether the euro will ever have a polity to back it up.

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25 June 2008 12:43

The British ministry of defence today faced calls to launch an official inquiry into a series of UFO sightings, including one filmed by a soldier on night patrol.

UFO experts believe the incidents, which happened in south Wales earlier this month, are 'particularly significant' because they included observations made by the crew of a police helicopter and military personnel.

The ministry confirmed today that it had been handed footage captured on a mobile phone by a corporal on guard duty at Tern Hill barracks, near Market Drayton, Shropshire, on 7 June.

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I feel sorry for this man if he really is a "victim of a miscarriage of justice", as he claims. Robyn
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By Graeme Hetherington

A POLICE officer who carried out sex offences against young women has vowed to clear his name.

John Blott made his claim when he appeared before Teesside Magistrates' Court to fight an order that bars him from entering into a relationship with a woman without informing police.

...In evidence, the converted Buddhist said: "I have been to hell and back. Whether people will accept that, we will have to wait and see. I did not do anything to (the woman) that would cause her offence. We will shortly be getting married."

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2008-06-23 15:26:08 -

ROME (AP) - Fiat said Monday it will keep running an ad featuring actor Richard Gere and a reference to Tibet that has angered some in China and prompted the Italian automaker to issue an apology.

Gere, a Buddhist who has been active in the movement to free Tibet, appears in the TV ad for Fiat's new Lancia Delta, using the car to whiz from Hollywood to the snows of the Himalayas, where he plays with a group of young Buddhist monks.

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By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: June 23, 2008

DOUGLAS, Isle of Man — Halfway down the suburban road that descends Bray Hill, past the traffic lights, between the elementary school and rows of homes with families relaxing in their front yards, there is a barely perceptible bump.

Crouching on their 1,000-cubic-centimeter Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha motorcycles, the race leaders hit the bump at 185 miles an hour, their machines rearing up like prancing horses before settling back onto the asphalt and continuing down the hill at full throttle, engines shrieking. Near the bottom they pass a 30-miles-per-hour speed-limit sign at 195 m.p.h., then sweep through a right curve and out of sight.

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By Scott Snowden ? More by this author
Published Saturday 21st June 2008 07:39 GMT

The pilot of a police helicopter was forced to take evasive action to avoid a collision with a UFO as the aircraft was returning to the Ministry of Defence base of St Athan, near Cardiff.

The three airmen described the unidentified flying object as "saucer-shaped", and proceeded to pursue, getting as far as the North Devon coast.

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