American Buddhist Net

HAVANA — Looking in the mirror used to make Yiliam Gonzalez sick to her stomach.

"I would see myself, and my body didn't match who I was," said the 28-year-old wedding pianist, who went by William before receiving a sex change under Cuba's universal health care system.

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The Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the Tallahassee Buddhist Community is holding an event to raise money for Haiti from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Friday, March 5 at the Tallahassee Buddhist Community Center, 647 McDonnell Drive, in Railroad Square. Members will be offering free soup and bread during First Friday Gallery Hop, and they will be inviting the public to donate to the Red Cross. There also will be free chair massage by local massage therapy students.

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A Rastafarian church's 14-year bid for incorporation in Jamaica continues to be a major source of contention among the nation's lawmakers.

The Church of Haile Selassie I, which first submitted its petition for incorporation in October 1996, is yet to receive parliamentary approval despite pleas by the church and its legal representatives.

At issue is the church's use of certain herbs in its religious sacraments, which has been misinterpreted by some persons as promoting the use of ganja during worship.

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Barely 18 hours after an earthquake devastated Haiti on Jan. 12, the Rev. Pat Robertson supplied a televised discourse on the nation’s history, theology and destiny. Haiti has suffered, he explained, because its rebellious slaves “swore a pact with the devil” to overthrow the French two centuries ago. Ever since, he went on, “they have been cursed by one thing or another.”

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SAN DIMAS - While in Haiti on a charitable mission, Debra Boudreaux remembers meeting a man who came to pray near a medical clinic.

The man had lost his 4-year-old child in the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake and hadn't been to pray since. On the day he came to pray, he was overwhelmed with tears, Boudreaux said.

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LONDON: Criminal gangs have defrauded people out of funds intended for Haiti earthquake victims by setting up bogus charities and seeking contributions online, according to a BBC investigation out today.

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SANTO DOMINGO: The man providing legal advice to American church workers charged with trying to take children out of Haiti may have a string of legal charges against him in the US and has emerged as the key suspect in a child prostitution ring in El Salvador.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – A Haitian judge has decided to release 10 U.S. missionaries accused of kidnapping 33 children and trying to spirit them out of the earthquake- stricken country, a judicial source said on Wednesday.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haiti's government has raised the death toll for the Jan. 12 earthquake to 230,000 from 212,000 and says more bodies remain uncounted.

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CALLEBASSE, Haiti (AFP) - "I would like to give up my son again," says Anchello Cantave, a farmer here, who willingly handed over his five-year-old to US missionaries now facing charges of child abduction in Haiti's post-quake chaos.

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For survivors of the earthquake in Haiti, one horror may linger a lifetime: Many will never know for certain if — or where — their loved ones are buried in the mass graves around Port-au-Prince.

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Haiti's voodoo high priest has claimed believers have been discriminated against by evangelical Christians who are monopolising aid sent to the earthquake-stricken country.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE – Haitian police detained 10 members of a US Christian group after they allegedly tried to leave the country with more than 30 children who survived the country's devastating earthquake.

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Closing Guantanamo is emerging as a never-ending nightmare for President Barack Obama after he bowed to pressure and backed down from plans to try the accused 9/11 plotters in the heart of New York City.

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A "never-ending nightmare" for Obama???????? ABN

By Scott Horton

In February 2004, David J. Evans, a marine biologist and photographer, was engaged as part of a team working on the Pentagon’s Legacy Program, which documents the cultural and environmental aspects of Defense Department operations. His assignment was to survey and photograph the rich array of wildlife and vegetation at Guantánamo Naval Base. After publication of “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides,’” Evans contacted me. “I’ve seen the facility described in your article as ‘Camp No,’” he said, “and I can confirm that the description of its position and appearance is accurate.”

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by Thierry Meyssan

The controversy that followed the publication on our website of an article entertaining the possibility that the earthquake in Haiti was caused artificially, calls for clarification. Yes, seismic weapons do exist and the United States, among others, have them. Yes, the U.S. military forces were pre-positionned to be deployed to the island. These facts are not conclusive in themselves but they certainly warrant heightened scrutiny into this matter.

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Well-worth reading, especially because, as Meyssan says: In the end, we are not sure exactly who is behind the allegation, but what we know for certain is that this issue is being heatedly discussed at the highest level in several countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. ABN

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Rescuers Wednesday dragged a Haitian girl alive from the rubble 15 days after a devastating quake, in a rare moment of joy for a country where victims still face a desperate shortage of aid.

A French search team saved 16-year-old Darlene Etienne after neighbours heard a voice in the debris of a house in Port-au-Prince, ending what appeared to be the longest ordeal of any survivor so far following the January 12 disaster.

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Haiti's evangelical and voodoo priests are providing spiritual and material aid to the homeless and injured.

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A man buried for 11 days in the wreckage of Haiti's devastating earthquake was pulled from the rubble, as officials said they were shifting their focus from rescue to caring for the thousands of survivors living in squalid, makeshift camps.

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Use your mouse to click and drag around the video to change the view. You can also zoom in and out. Pause and explore at any time by pressing the play/pause button under the video to stop and look around. The video below was shot on Monday, January 18, at 9:52 a.m. EST in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

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Despite criticism for the US military presence in quake-stricken Haiti, Washington says it has a long-term plan to stay in the country.

“We are there for the long term, this is not something that will be resolved quickly and easily,” US Ambassador to the UN Alejandro Wolff said on Thursday.

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CITE SOLEIL, Haiti -It is hard to imagine, but drive half an hour north from the centre of shattered Port-au-Prince and the plight of the people gets even worse.

The wretchedly poor inhabitants of Cite Soleil, Haiti's biggest and most notorious slum, had desperate problems even before last week's earthquake destroyed many of its breezeblock and corrugated iron shacks. Now they have to contend with food, medical and water aid that is arriving even more slowly than in the rest of the city, but also with the return of 3,000 hardened criminals who fled the national prison when it was damaged in the quake.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE: A sixty-nine year old Haitian woman has been pulled from the rubble 10 days after Haiti's killer earthquake, but a doctor treating her says she is in bad condition and may not survive.

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By Scott Horton

1. “Asymmetrical Warfare”

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Naval Base “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners there are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

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The Official Response Begins

An elderly woman has been pulled alive and singing from the rubble of Haiti's Roman Catholic cathedral, one week after a killer quake demolished the building.

Rescue workers wept and hugged each other on Tuesday as the woman, caked in debris and dust, was placed on a makeshift stretcher, put on a drip, covered with a heat-conserving wrap and driven by truck to a hospital, witnesses said.

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Webster G. Tarpley
January 17, 2010

Just over five days or 120 hours after a major earthquake hit the area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, it is increasingly clear that the US approach to organizing the delivery of emergency assistance and supplies is so ineffective that the general directing the distribution of emergency aid needs to be fired without further delay. The catastrophic blunder involved is the decision by the US military in the person of Gen. Ken Keen to insist on routing all external aid through a single substandard, inadequate, and partially destroyed landing field, the Toussaint L‘Ouverture airport. This airport has a single runway, and room to park only about half a dozen medium to long range aircraft. The result is that once six aircraft are parked in the unloading area, all incoming traffic must be waved off until one of the six planes has taken off again, as a colonel on the ground explained in a press conference broadcast on C-SPAN radio here this afternoon. The control tower, radar, and other facilities have been destroyed by the earthquake. Even once cargo has been offloaded, it has been tending to build up at the airport because the streets and roads leading from the airport towards the main population concentrations are blocked by collapsed buildings and other debris. The result is an agonizing slowness in delivering vital supplies upon which the immediate survival of up to 3 million Haitians now depends.

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Taipei - Taiwanese Buddhists packed relief materials for Haiti earthquake survivors Sunday, while other civic groups were seeking donations and sending medical teams to the Caribbean nation.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Doctors and search dogs, troops and rescue teams flew to this devastated land of dazed, dead and dying people Thursday, finding bottlenecks everywhere, beginning at a main airport short on jet fuel and ramp space and without a control tower.

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