American Buddhist Net

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

At 7:17am on 30 June 1908, an immense explosion tore through the forest of central Siberia.

Some 80 million trees were flattened over an area of 2,000 square km (800 square miles) near the Tunguska River.

The blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and generated a shock wave that knocked people to the ground 60km from the epicentre.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

A Russian curator says she's developed a foolproof method of determining whether a piece of art was made before or after 1945 as a way of sniffing out fake paintings.

Elena Basner told The Art Newspaper that she has developed a method in collaboration with Russian scientists based on the idea that man-made nuclear explosions from the 1940s to 1960s released isotopes into the environment.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

June 23, 2008

This creature was found by Russian soldiers on Sakhalin shoreline. Sakhalin area is situated near to Japan, it’s the most eastern part of Russia, almost 5000 miles to East from Moscow (Russia is huge). People don’t know what is it. According to the bones and teeth - it is not a fish. According to its skeleton - it’s not a crocodile or alligator. It has a skin with hair or fur. It has been said that it was taken by Russian special services for in-depth studies, and we are lucky that people who encountered it first made those photos before it was brought away.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Moscow, June 16, Interfax - Monks of a largest Tibetan monastery will build mandala from sand in the Roerich museum in Moscow.

"It is for the first time that mandala in Russia is dedicated to Green Tara - one of the most venerated gods in the Tibet Buddhism - a god of long and healthy life who grants priceless vital energy and power to everyone appealing to it," the museum told Interfax.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

After 78 years, a set of 18 iconic bells rescued from a Moscow monastery will return home.

June 13, 2008
By Amy Farnsworth

Cambridge, Mass. - As the chiming of bells rang through Harvard University's campus among a field of caps and gowns last week, it was the final time they would be heard – the end of an era for the university, but also a new beginning.

For the past 78 years, the 18 bells have hung high above Harvard's buildings, chiming on Sunday afternoons and every year at commencement. This summer, the bells will return home to ring at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow from which they were rescued in 1930 at the height of the Stalinist era, at a time when antireligion campaigns sought to destroy monasteries and melt down their ironwork.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

May 26, 2008

...The Molokans are a community of Russian religious dissenters, which emerged in the late 18th century in Central Russia and was exiled to the South Caucasus starting from the 1840s. Presumably, there were several thousand Molokans in Georgia in the late 1980s, while today – due to emigration and assimilation – there are only around 300 persons left.

The Old Believers, another religious minority that emerged in the 17th century in opposition to the reform of the Russian Orthodox Church, was quite numerous in Georgia in the late 19th century but has practically vanished from Georgia today.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Sunday, May 25, 2008
By ROGER PULVERS

In Petersburg we will come together again As if we had buried the sun there. — Osip Mandelstam What city in the world can boast as many great poets and novelists as St. Petersburg? Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, the Bohemian Kharms, the satirist Zoshchenko, Brodsky (the poet who became an exile in the United States), to name a few . . . they created a mystique that became the real city. With its white nights, it majestic River Neva and Italianate architecture, this "window on the West," as it is called in Russia, St. Petersburg prompted Alexander Blok to write: Live yet another quarter century All will be the same, there's no escape.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

There's a cold rain falling today, so it seems appropriate to post a piece of classic Russian literature. The religious themes in "A Living Relic" should be of interest to anyone who bothers to visit a Buddhist website. For the politically inclined, this story will take you back to a time and place in history where the ownership of human beings by other human beings was open, explicit, and officially sanctioned. In America today, slavery is alive and well, although in perhaps a subtler form than that of Russian serfdom. Robyn
_____________

From "A Sportsman's Sketches" (1852-1874)
by Ivan Turgenev
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

‘O native land of long suffering,
Land of the Russian people.’
F. TYUTCHEV.

A French proverb says that ‘a dry fisherman and a wet hunter are a sorry sight.’ Never having had any taste for fishing, I cannot decide what are the fisherman’s feelings in fine bright weather, and how far in bad weather the pleasure derived from the abundance of fish compensates for the unpleasantness of being wet. But for the sportsman rain is a real calamity. It was to just this calamity that Yermolaï and I were exposed on one of our expeditions after grouse in the Byelevsky district. The rain never ceased from early morning. What didn’t we do to escape it? We put macintosh capes almost right over our heads, and stood under the trees to avoid the raindrops.... The waterproof capes, to say nothing of their hindering our shooting, let the water through in the most shameless fashion; and under the trees, though at first, certainly, the rain did not reach us, afterwards the water collected on the leaves suddenly rushed through, every branch dripped on us like a waterspout, a chill stream made its way under our neck-ties, and trickled down our spines.... This was ‘quite unpleasant,’ as Yermolaï expressed it. ‘No, Piotr Petrovitch,’ he cried at last; ‘we can’t go on like this....There’s no shooting to-day. The dogs’ scent is drowned. The guns miss fire....Pugh! What a mess!’

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Russian parents are even more overprotective of their children than American parents are.

May 22, 2008
By Fred Weir

Moscow - Russian parents often describe themselves as "overprotective" of their children and offer many reasons to explain why. First among these is the general instability of life in a country that saw the powerful state most current parents grew up in, the USSR, collapse amid social chaos and political strife in the early 1990s.

Another reason is that unlike the Soviet media in the past, Russian TV and newspapers today play up scary stories about crime, traffic accidents, terrorism, and – most frightening of all for parents – reports of kidnapping and other child-victim crimes.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Friday May 16, 2008

MOSCOW (Reuters) - All 11 remaining members of a Russian doomsday cult on Friday left the cave they had been living in since October, a regional official told local news agencies.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 05. 9.08
Business & Politics

When in Rome: Joining its fellow top polluters -- China, India and the U.S. -- Russia has signaled it would rebuff the imposition of tougher emission standards, casting doubt on the prospects for a future U.N.-mediated climate treaty, reports Reuters' Alister Doyle. Government officials said last week that the country wouldn't accept binding caps under a new deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, set to expire by the end of 2012.

This follows the debacle that was last year's Bali climate talks, in which the U.S. delegation was (rightly) criticized for its meek -- if not non-existent -- "leadership" role in pushing for ambitious new targets. It also neatly falls into line with President Bush's recent speech on climate change, which, as was noted here and many other sites, kicked the can down the road again.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

May 8, 2008, 13:47

The members of a Russian doomsday cult are reportedly refusing to talk with the outside world and will only communicate by singing or using written notes.

The claim about the religious fanatics, who have barricaded themselves in to a cave in the Penza region, comes from the RIA news agency.

It quotes authorities who say the only subject that cult members agree to discuss is about living conditions in the cave. They answer to all other questions by singing psalms or writing.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Scientists say Indigo children do exist – a new race with extrasensory abilities

Svetlana Kuzina — 01.05.2008

The film "Indigo" was recently released in cinemas throughout Russia. The film explores the Indigo phenomenon – an alleged new race possessing extrasensory abilities. “Indigo” children are said to be unusually sensitive and gifted. Each year, more parents and teachers come forward with stories about these children. The film's creators believe that Indigo children are a widespread phenomenon and a new breed that will lead mankind into the 22st Century.

Psychologist and member of the European Psychiatric Association Natalya Mikhaylovskaya spoke with KP about Indigo children after years of studying gifted youth

LINK TO ORIGINAL

May 1, 2008

MOSCOW (AP) -- For nine decades after Bolshevik executioners gunned down Czar Nicholas II and his family, there were no traces of the remains of Crown Prince Alexei, the hemophiliac heir to Russia's throne.

Some said the delicate 13-year-old had somehow survived and escaped; others believed his bones were lost in Russia's vastness, buried in secret amid fear and chaos as the country lurched into civil war.

Now an official says DNA tests have solved the mystery by identifying bone shards found in a forest as those of Alexei and his sister, Grand Duchess Maria.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By Volker Mrasek

Researchers have found alarming evidence that the frozen Arctic floor has started to thaw and release long-stored methane gas. The results could be a catastrophic warming of the earth, since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

...The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova, and already the shelf sea has become "a source of methane passing into the atmosphere." The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet's atmosphere would increase twelvefold. "The result would be catastrophic global warming," say the scientists. The greenhouse-gas potential of methane is 20 times that of carbon dioxide, as measured by the effects of a single molecule.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
Published: April 24, 2008

STARY OSKOL, Russia — It was not long after a Methodist church put down roots here that the troubles began.

First came visits from agents of the F.S.B., a successor to the K.G.B., who evidently saw a threat in a few dozen searching souls who liked to huddle in cramped apartments to read the Bible and, perhaps, drink a little tea. Local officials then labeled the church a “sect.” Finally, last month, they shut it down.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Wed Apr 23, 2008

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's super-rich love to flaunt their wealth. Soon they will have a magazine called Snob to help them.

Mikhail Prokhorov -- whose wealth is estimated at around $22 billion -- plans to spend $150 million setting up a magazine, website and television station called Snob, the general director of the new venture told Reuters on Wednesday.

"It's for people who are successful and those who want to be successful," said Andrei Shmarov, who will run Snob.

... Shmarov said Russians attach a different meaning to the word,

"Snob to us means a person who is a 'self-made man', a person who has gained a right to snobbishness," he said emphasising the main difference with the British meaning which he said referred to inherited wealth.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

17 April 2008

A Russian man trying to sleep off a night of after-work drinking failed to notice a six-inch (15-cm) knife in his back - until his wife woke him up.

Yuri Lyalin, 53, took a bus home, ate breakfast and apparently slept like a baby before his spouse noticed a handle sticking out of his back.

He was rushed to casualty but doctors found no vital organs damaged.

..."We were drinking and what doesn't happen when you're drunk?" he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

April 3, 2008
By STEPHANIE REITZ

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) -- Answers to the mystery of what befell the heirs of the last czar of Russia nearly a century ago may rest behind locked laboratory doors in Moscow and New England.

DNA test results to be announced within months on bone fragments found in Russia last year could prove that none of Czar Nicholas II's family escaped execution in the Bolshevik Revolution -- not even Anastasia, the teenage princess whose identity various women have claimed over the decades.

Evgeny Rogaev, who heads a genetic research team working in Moscow and at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, is not immune to the effect his work could have on how his fellow Russian citizens view that turbulent chapter in their history.

Monday, March 31, 2008
By Chris Baldwin

NIKOLSKOE, Russia (Reuters) - A Russian doomsday cult sheltering in a bunker say credit cards and food packaging bar codes are satanic, the official negotiating the release of children from the group said on Monday.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Monday, March 31, 2008
By Mark H. Teeter

...Asked to name a country that begins with the letter U, these citizens of the United States answer Yugoslavia, Utah and Utopia. One young fellow can't name the location of the Berlin Wall; another can't identify the religion of Buddhist monks (after first guessing Islam); a third maintains that Fidel Castro is a singer; a fourth locates Italy in the Middle East. A nice middle-aged woman recalls that the United States won the Vietnam War. Asked how many sides a triangle has, a thoughtful gent answers four, which is later disputed by an even more thoughtful teenager who initially claims none and then settles on one.

Now, would anyone else like to share dismay over Americans' confusion about Serbia, Kosovo and Chechnya?

Lest you fear that these responses signal a U.S. breakaway in some imagined "Cold War II" stupidity race, let me remind and reassure you of Russia's many demonstrations of ignorance as strength. This country celebrated its national reincorporation in 1922 by expelling 160 of its finest philosophers, scientists, scholars and writers, thus becoming the first modern state to voluntarily lower its national IQ.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Sat Mar 29
By STEVE GUTTERMAN

...The space-age cupola of the planetarium, which opened in 1929, embodied the Utopian dreams of a nation that saw science as the key to a glorious future.

Now it stands as a symbol of an era in which millions of Russians believe the good of society is routinely sacrificed to the commercial interests of bureaucrats and businessmen.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

New skyscrapers tower over the old landmark Stalinist buildings and onion-domed churches

Posted March 27, 2008
By Alastair Gee

Five miles south of the Kremlin and Moscow's touristy center, there's a trash-strewn peninsula in the city's river. Stray dogs live by a scraggy patch of woodland, and salespeople while away the days in a remote market. It won't be there much longer.

City authorities have approved the construction here of what they promise will be the world's biggest building in terms of floor space at a rumored cost of $4 billion. The 1,476-foot- tall Crystal Island, which resembles a giant witch's hat, will have 27 million square feet of floor space—more than four times the size of the Pentagon—and contain 3,000 hotel rooms, 900 apartments, and an adjustable skin to withstand extreme temperatures.

...The city's transformation is partly spurred by mundane concerns like real estate shortages and traffic gridlock. Moscow's roads were meant to handle 2 million cars; there are now 4 million. But by some accounts, it is also rooted in a desire to shake off Russia's post-Soviet loss of prestige. "In society, there's a feeling of long-held humiliation," says Mikhail Moskvin-Tarkhanov, head of Moscow's planning committee. "It comes from the disintegration of the 1990s, when we all went around as if we had been robbed and we lived on humanitarian aid."

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Wed Mar 26, 2008
By Natalya Sokhareva

BARNAUL, Russia (Reuters) - A shepherd is suing Russia's space agency for compensation after he said a 10-foot-long chunk of metal from a space rocket fell into his yard, just missing his outdoor toilet.

Boris Urmatov, who is asking for 1 million roubles ($42,000) from the Roskosmos agency, lives in a small village that lies underneath the flight path of rockets taking off from the Baikonur launchpad Russia leases in nearby Kazakhstan.

...Residents in the neighboring village of Ust-Kan said rocket pieces regularly rain down on their area. Parts of the surrounding countryside are designated special zones where people may not go during the launches.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

20/ 03/ 2008

NIZHNY NOVGOROD, March 20 (RIA Novosti) - Emergency service workers in central Russia have carried out an operation to prevent thaw waters reaching a cave where 35 members of a doomsday sect have been holed up for almost five months.

The sect, including four children, have been holed up in the cave in the Penza Region since the fall of 2007 waiting for the apocalypse, which they say will happen in May 2008. They have threatened to set fire to themselves if any attempt is made to force them out.

LINK TO ORIGINAL