American Buddhist Net

Australian officials investigate allegations of sex competition on board navy ship

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SYDNEY : More than 90 authors, including Nobel winner JM Coetzee, have condemned China for refusing an HIV-positive Australian writer entry to the country for a government-sponsored tour.

Robert Dessaix revealed his health status in his application for a visa which was refused without explanation.

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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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The parents of a profoundly disabled 11-year-old girl have won a court case to have her sterilised, prompting claims that the ruling amounted to an "abuse of human rights".

The Australian girl, known only as Angela, suffers from an extreme form of Retts Syndrome, a neurological disorder. She cannot communicate and "acts as a three-month-old baby would".

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Ron Mueck is an Australian sculptor based in the UK. He produces hyperrealistic sculptures which look perfect from all angles

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A TEEN has been arrested for listening to what police deem offensive rap music.

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Americans, beware! This is where hate speech laws lead. ABN

NERANG is the wrong 'cultural' place for a 15m-high Thai Buddhist temple, say some Gold Coast councillors who asked if Buddhism was even a religion.

Councillors were alarmed by the proposed design which features a traditional steep-pitched roof.

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“FORGIVENESS is not a sign of weakness but of greatness” his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama once said.

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Melbourne, Mar 01 : A radical HSC English course in Australia has done away with Shakespeare and Wordsworth to make it more relevant for students who have to stay at school until they are 17 as per the law.

The Board of Studies have shunned the classical works and replaced it with contemporary texts such as Catcher In The Rye, The Motor Cycle Diaries and movies like The Matrix.

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THE minister in charge of the Government's web censorship plan has been caught out censoring his own website.

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SYDNEY — An Australian schoolgirl bidding to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world hit the home stretch Wednesday, passing South Africa's Cape of Good Hope for her final Indian Ocean leg.

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An extraordinary tale of debauchery among officers and passengers on a emigrant ship to Australia at the height of Empire has been revealed in a newly-discovered journal.

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THE vow of celibacy imposed on Catholic clergy is "cruel" and "archaic", a judge has said in jailing a priest for grooming a 13-year-old girl for sex over the internet.

During online chat sessions between July and August last year, Sydney priest Robert MacGregor Fuller used a webcam to show himself masturbating to a police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl.

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The judge in this case had this to say: In handing down the sentence, Judge Allan Hughes said the Catholic Church's vow of celibacy for priests may have led Fuller to become sexually frustrated. "I'm not a Catholic," he said. "I do not regard (that) celibacy (should be) imposed on people. That is because it is a suppression of human instinct. "The priest has to be so strong to suppress normal human instincts - it must be agonising to do this. "I don't know why they don't change their rules. It is archaic. It's cruel, cruel." Celibacy is definitely wrong for some people, but it is not either "archaic" or "cruel." It is also not an excuse for misdeeds like the ones described. That said, at American Buddhist Net, we believe that religious organizations should provide an easy way for celibate clergy to give up their vow of celibacy while otherwise keeping their status within their organizations and within their faith. It is not our place to comment on Catholic affairs, but I just did anyway. American Buddhist Net also strongly supports non-celibate priesthoods within Buddhist traditions because celibacy is clearly not right for everyone. In fact, many married couples have less sex and think about sex less often than celibates because they can get it whenever they want. Celibacy is a time-honored practice with many benefits for those who undertake it. We believe a vow of celibacy should be available to religious practitioners and clergy who want to take it, but that the vow should also be something practitioners and clergy can cancel if they believe they cannot rightly fulfill it. Another two points: 1) celibate communities should not tolerate gay sex among their members; and 2) celibate clergy should not have higher status than non-celibate clergy and they should not be in control of temples or other religious facilities just because they are celibate. ABN

Every time anti-filtering campaigners mention porn, they play right into Senator Conroy's hands.

Conroy obviously doesn't care what the online community thinks of his mandatory filtering plans. He will only change his mind about filtering if mainstream Australia turns against him, and that's never going to happen while the debate remains focused on porn.

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Internet uprising overturns Australian censorship law

Aussie censor balks at bijou boobs

Christian Lobby wants filter net cast wider

HE'S the skateboarding monk from Sydney who celebrated his world-first appointment as a Hindu leader by spreading Vegemite on his chapatis.

Jason Connelly, or Swami Jasraj Puri as he is known, will today have a parade staged in his honour in his adopted home of Rajasthan, India, to mark him becoming the first foreign leader of a Hindu monastic order.

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SYDNEY — Japan must cease its whaling activities in Antarctic waters by November this year or Australia will initiate international legal action against it, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Friday.

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Fans of petite women are likely lamenting the ban recently instituted upon porn films featuring ladies possessing flat chests. But no worries, mate, chirps Weekly Playboy (Feb. 22), the measure is being implemented in Australia, not in Japan, where the AV (adult video) industry is pondering its next move.

At the end of January, the Australian Classification Board (ACB) reached a decision to prohibit the use of actresses with breasts registering less than an A-cup.

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Mary MacKillop, a nun revered for her work with needy children as much as for her rebellious streak, is to become Australia's first Roman Catholic saint on October 17, Pope Benedict XVI said on Friday.

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CHILDREN with ADHD who use prescription drugs to manage their condition were 10 times more likely to perform poorly at school than ADHD kids who avoided medication, a new report revealed.

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TWO Buddhist monks have been assaulted and their monastery ransacked by two carloads of men in a violent robbery in the northern suburbs.

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Search giants Google and Yahoo have joined the Australian Library and Information Association and Inspire Foundation to create a coalition of online interests to lobby against Rudd Government plans to filter the internet.

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Project Freeweb is Anon's grassroots, global protest movement which aims to draw attention to and protest any government, corporation or person that would attempt to censor the Internets and/or meddle with the free flow of information it delivers through a series of tubes.

Project Freeweb recently launched its first protest -Operation Titstorm- in response to the Australian government's proposed state sponsored Internet 'firewall' ACMA -the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

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Red tape and onerous council conditions are threatening to derail a multimillion-dollar grand plan to construct Australia's first major Buddhist university campus on a former landfill site at Unanderra.

Wollongong City Council has approved the Nan Tien Temple's masterplan for a tertiary education centre (pictured) that would eventually cater for 3000 students.

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A Facebook page which appeared to advocate killing prostitutes has been condemned by sex industry workers.

The page, called "Killing your hooker so you don't have to pay her", has now been removed by Facebook. But not before almost 18,000 people joined the page, believed to have been set up by Catholic school pupils in Queensland.

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Australia is poised to introduce some of the most severe internet restrictions in the democratic world – and the hackers don’t like it.

Yesterday they vented their ire on government websites, shutting them down in co-ordinated attacks and plastering the Prime Minister’s home page with pornography. Kevin Rudd’s site became the home, temporarily, of “Operation Titstorm”, part of an assault targeting a range of government servers.

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The Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin joined the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker this morning at 0700 Hours (Sydney time). Both Sea Shepherd ships are now on the tail of the Japanese factory ship Nisshin Maru.

The Japanese fleet was running fast to the Northeast not knowing that the Steve Irwin was on a course of Southwest coming directly for them. With the fleet doing 15 knots, and the Steve Irwin doing 15 knots, the Steve Irwin and the whaling fleet closed the gap at 30 knots cutting the rendezvous time in half.

The Steve Irwin sat motionless by an iceberg for two hours at a distance of thirty miles to allow the Nisshin Maru to continue towards it. At a distance of only three miles, the Steve Irwin got underway and intercepted the Nisshin Maru.

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CANCER patients are offering themselves as human guinea pigs as researchers investigate a possible cure for cancer found in north Queensland rainforests.

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First cancer drug from the Australian rainforest to enter human clinical trials

Campaigns to save the job of an Australian banker caught viewing erotic images in the background of a live TV interview are growing on the internet.

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Here is the video in question. The story is only mildly interesting, but very much one of our times. ABN

Breast implants were keeping hurdler Jana Rawlinson from achieving her best performance on the field. Now the Aussie athlete has opted to downsize in anticipation of the 2012 Olympics.

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...The trial has been viewed by Australia's ISP industry as a major landmark case to help determine how ISPs will react in future to users using their networks to download copyrighted material.

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