American Buddhist Net

(CNN) -- An estimated 125,000 Western lowland gorillas are living in a swamp in equatorial Africa, researchers reported Tuesday, double the number of the endangered primates thought to survive worldwide.

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For African competitors, Scrabble competition against former colonizer France a serious matter

July 26, 2008

To compete in the Francophone World Scrabble Championship, 32-year-old Elisee Poka spent five days in a bus traversing Africa's potholed roads. His competitors from France arrived by plane.

To prepare for the game, he carried a diary in his satchel, spending every spare moment committing words to memory. His French competitors used computers to spit out anagrams, the game's key building block.

But in spite of all their advantages, France lost to an African player for the third year in a row this week in the one-on-one duel at the Francophone World Scrabble Championship.

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19 July 2008

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Archaeologists and scholars will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great pyramid. They will then try to reassemble the craft.

The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces in 1954 from another pit and painstakingly reconstructed. Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.

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18/07/2008

The astonishing spectacle of a leopard savaging a crocodile has been captured for the first time on camera.

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Pirates are terrorising the high seas off Africa’s east coast

Jul 17th 2008 | DAR ES SALAAM AND PORT VICTORIA
From The Economist print edition

ON A dazzling morning in April, the Playa de Bakio, a Spanish fishing boat, limped into paradisal Port Victoria in the Seychelles, damaged by grenades. Its crew of 26 was shaken. A Spanish military aircraft flew them to momentary fame in Spain. The fishermen had been held by Somali pirates for a week and freed after a ransom of $1.2m—so it was rumoured—was paid, in contravention of Spanish law.

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16th July, 2008

KABAROLE-The Omukama of Toro, Oyo Nyimba Rukiidi IV, has been invited to attend the 5th World Buddhist Summit scheduled to take place in Japan in November. The ceremony will involve the inauguration of the Royal Grand Hall of Buddhism, a temple constructed to serve as a spiritual centre for over 370 million Buddhists in the world. “We are much honoured and pleased to officially invite Your Majesty to these ceremonies. We sincerely hope you will enjoy and appreciate the beautiful autumn of Japan,” said a letter sent on June 1 by Dr. Kyuse Ensinjoh, an official.

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Sunday, 13 July 2008
By Hilary Andersson
BBC News, Darfur

The BBC has found the first evidence that China is currently helping Sudan's government militarily in Darfur.

The Panorama TV programme tracked down Chinese army lorries in the Sudanese province that came from a batch exported from China to Sudan in 2005.

The BBC was also told that China was training fighter pilots who fly Chinese A5 Fantan fighter jets in Darfur.

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Andrew Bossone in Cairo
for National Geographic News
July 2, 2008

A well-preserved mud-brick settlement in southern Egypt is providing a rare glimpse into nearly 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian daily life, archaeologists announced Tuesday. (See photos.)

The Tell Edfu site includes a public town center that was used for collecting taxes, conducting business, recording accounting, and writing documents.

The discovery paints a picture of a relatively advanced system of society during ancient times, with commerce playing an intricate part of daily Egyptian life, according to the University of Chicago and the Egyptian Supreme Council on Antiquities.

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June 25, 2008
By KATHARINE HOURELD

BUNGOMA, Kenya (AP) — Dozens of scared children filed silently into the bare room, their eyes on the cracks in the floor. One by one, in low voices, they told of being tortured by the Kenyan army because they were suspected of aiding rebels. They told of being beaten and made to shake hands with corpses. They told of being forced to crawl through barbed wire tunnels and of genitals squeezed by pliers.

Then the children took off their shirts. White scars crisscrossed the dark skin on their backs like grains of rice. Some were still bleeding.

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For more on this subject, see: Special Report: China In Africa. ABN
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by David Blair, Telegraph, Aug 31, 2007

No one alive at the close of the 19th century could have missed the "scramble for Africa". A motley collection of robber barons, imperialist ideologues, explorers, rogues and adventurers - the likes of Cecil Rhodes and the appalling Leopold II, King of the Belgians - carved up the continent in the name of five European powers.

Today, few appear to have noticed that a second "scramble for Africa" is under way. This time, only one giant country is involved, but its ambitions are every bit as momentous as those of Rhodes and company. With every day that passes, China's economic tentacles extend deeper into Africa. While Europe sought direct political control, China is acquiring a vast and informal economic empire.

Reliable information on Beijing's African adventure is hard to come by. But we do know that trade between China and the world's poorest continent totalled about £30 billion last year - a sixfold increase since 2000.

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The High Court in South Africa has ruled that Chinese South Africans are to be reclassified as black people.

It made the order so that ethnic Chinese can benefit from government policies aimed at ending white domination in the private sector.

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May 20, 2008

MARCHOUX, Ivory Coast (AFP) — Cured of their disease, the remaining residents of this Ivory Coast leper colony now face the plight of being abandoned by their government and most of their families.

"We're the last survivors, all alone, our families having abandoned us," says Dosso, 69, one of 20 cured leprosy sufferers still living in Marchoux or Gnankanassi ("Thank God" in the local Ebrie language).

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Different cultures view humility in widely differing ways. Traditional and usually very religious societies tend to value humility as a desirable trait. More 21st societies see humility as a wholly undesirable character. The issue is even more complex as there are contrasts even within segments of given societies…

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See also this for more on the forces behind the destruction today: Special Report: China In Africa. ABN
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The massive scale of environmental devastation across the continent has been fully revealed for the first time in an atlas compiled by UN geographers. Michael McCarthy reports

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

It was long shrouded in mystery, called "the Dark Continent" by Europeans in awe of its massive size and impenetrable depths. Then its wondrous natural riches were revealed to the world. Now a third image of Africa and its environment is being laid before us – one of destruction on a vast and disturbing scale.

Using "before and after" satellite photos, taken in all 53 countries, UN geographers have constructed an African atlas of environmental change over the past four decades – the vast majority of it for the worse.

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June 12, 2008
Jan Raath in Mhondoro

The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.

An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.

The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.

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By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: June 8, 2008

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — Samuel Mluge steps outside his office and scans the sidewalk. His pale blue eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, trying to focus.

The sun used to be his main enemy, but now he has others.

Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin.

“I feel like I am being hunted,” he said.

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June 1, 2008

LAGOS, (AFP) - Perching on a concrete slab under a motorway bridge, Jude Anyadike displays his pirated video CDs which titles such as 'Curve Enticement' and 'Interminable Pleasure'.

Anyadike, 34, is one of the hundreds of sellers of 'pornos' in the sprawling city of Lagos where people brazenly break the law and authorities very often look the other way.

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The Associated Press
Published: May 28, 2008

YOKOHAMA, Japan: Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda of Japan pledged Wednesday to double Tokyo's aid to Africa by 2012 to inspire growth and attract private investment - a model that helped propel postwar Japan into economic prosperity.

In particular, Japan will provide up to $4 billion in flexible, low-interest "soft loans" to Africa over the next five years for infrastructure projects, Fukuda said at the start of the three-day Tokyo International Conference on African Development.

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Excellent piece, well-worth reading. This six-part series is quite long but gives a very good overview current economic conditions in Africa and how they are influenced by China, and increasingly less by Europe and the US. ABN
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With its resource-hungry push into the sub-Sahara, Beijing puts the planet to the test.

By: Richard Behar

...During my recovery, I had time to dwell on parasites, how they invade and deplete their hosts, much as successive colonial powers have done over the centuries in places such as Africa. Anyone who thinks that kind of ravenous acquisition of resources is a thing of the past should take a close look at the suction China is applying in the sub-Sahara. The region is now the scene of one of the most sweeping, bare-knuckled, and ingenious resource grabs the world has ever seen.

...Oxford's Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and a former head of research at the World Bank, is a leading expert on African economies. "I think the sad reality is that although globalization has powered the majority of developing countries toward prosperity," he says, "it is now making things harder for these latecomers." In other words, he says, Africa "missed the boat." And on a divided, demoralized continent, one where the United States has lost both its economic leverage and moral authority, Beijing can cherry-pick almost at will. That spells trouble not only for Africa but also for our ability to outthink the global consumption death spiral we have all set in motion.

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By Wangui Kanina

NAIROBI, May 21 (Reuters) - A mob has burned to death at least 11 people accused of witchcraft in an area of west Kenya where traditional beliefs run deep, police said on Wednesday.

"Their houses were torched. Eight women and three men suspected of being witches died," Kenya's deputy police spokesman Charles Owino said.

Kisii district residents confirmed the killings, saying an enraged crowd had gone house-to-house on Tuesday night, using a list of supposed witches in the region.

"They burned them alive in their homes," one resident said, asking not to be named.

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20 May 2008
By Nico Colombant

African countries like Senegal, where journalists regularly get sentenced to jail for what they say and write, or where the quality of reporting is not good, comedians are playing an expanding role as government watchdogs in the media.

...[radio program director Antoine Diouf] says comedians can talk about things journalists are too afraid to investigate, like corruption scandals, or conflicts between government officials.

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11 May 2008

A formal reburial ceremony for the skeletons of slaves discovered on the Prestwich site in Green Point has had to be rescheduled because of simmering political tensions between city and provincial leaders.

...Eleven boxes symbolising the nation's diversity as reflected in its linguistic groups were received from the South African Heritage Resources Agency and carried into the newly built ossuary at the corner of Buitengracht and Somerset Road where they were laid to rest.

These boxes contained the remains of slaves who died around the city in the colonial period, people from often marginalised backgrounds who helped build Cape Town.

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By Richard Spencer
Last Updated: 2:31AM BST 10/05/2008

Chinese farming companies may be backed by the government to buy and lease tracts of land in Africa and Latin America to grow crops to feed its 1.3 billion people.

A proposal before the state council, or cabinet, proposes extending a business strategy known as the "go-out policy" to farmland.

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By KENNETH CHANG
Published: May 9, 2008

Six thousand years ago, northern Africa was a place of trees, grasslands, lakes and people. Today, it is the Sahara — a desolate area larger area than Australia.

Lake Yoa, in northeastern Chad, has remained a lake through the millennia and is still a lake today, surrounded by hot desert. Although little rain falls, Lake Yoa’s water is replenished from an underground aquifer.

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Sunday, May 4, 2008
Meredith May

Dr. Frank Artress looked down at his fingers. His nail beds were turning blue. He was running out of oxygen near the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.

A cardiac anesthesiologist, Artress knew the signs of high altitude pulmonary edema. He knew there was a 75 percent chance that he would perish on Africa's highest peak.

Artress led his wife to a rock, and they sat together above the clouds. Then it hit him. He wasn't afraid to die; he was ashamed. He had lived only for himself - practicing medicine in a Modesto hospital, traveling with his wife, purchasing luxury vacation homes and collecting art. He felt as if he had nothing to show for his 50 years. He felt as if his life had been a waste.

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