American Buddhist Net

Knut Haugland, the last surviving member of the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft expedition, has died in Norway.

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Lunch at the site of the future Ramu nickel and cobalt mine in the remote hills of Papua New Guinea is a hurried affair, food shoveled into eager mouths. But the menu is as divided as the two distinct groups of workers squatting in the heat, swatting away flies and filling their bellies before their nine-hour, seven-day-a-week shifts begin again. In one huddle are local laborers chewing chunks of sweet potato and the canned fish known in pidgin dialect as tinpis. In another clump are imported workers from China who dig into rice topped with pork belly and chili – black bean sauce. The Chinese, who were shipped in by the state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. that has invested $1.4 billion into this faraway outpost, can understand neither English nor pidgin, two of the national languages. The Papua New Guineans speak no Mandarin. Even at mealtime, an event during which both cultures would normally encourage community and hospitality, the air is weighted by mutual incomprehension. "How can we eat together if everything about us is different?" asks Shen Jilei, whose first overseas experience transferred him directly from China's Sichuan province to a South Pacific nation he hadn't even known existed.

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Pretty well-done story, worth reading. ABN

A group of men from Papua New Guinea have been rescued after more than two months adrift in the Pacific Ocean.

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"These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent"

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Six Chinese Uighur prisoners from the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay have been transferred to the Pacific island nation of Palau, officials say.

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Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- An Exxon Mobil Corp. executive overseeing the company’s $15 billion liquefied-natural-gas project in Papua New Guinea was beaten and stomped by a mob of 50 people in a dispute over landowner contracts.

Noel Wright, Exxon Mobil’s development officer overseeing plans to build a gas-export complex in the South Pacific nation, has returned to “normal duties” after the Oct. 20 attack outside his hotel in the capital, Port Moresby, said Margaret Ross, a spokeswoman for the Irving, Texas-based company.

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Oxygen depletion that is killing sea life off Oregon and Washington is probably caused by evolving wind conditions from climate change, rather than pollution, one oceanographer warns.

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More than three-hundred Agon-Shu monks from Japan are in Honiara to celebrate their Fire Rite ritual for World Peace.

Agon-Shu is a popular Buddhist organisation in Japan founded by its current spiritual leader Seiyu Kiriyama.

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JAKARTA, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Indonesia's earthquake-ravaged city of Padang remains at risk of being wiped out during the next decade by a more powerful quake that could match the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami for destructiveness, an expert said on Saturday.

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Second storm slams into northern Philippines

(CNN) -- Ketsana, downgraded from a typhoon to a tropical depression, is heading towards Laos Wednesday after leaving a trail of death and destruction across Southeast Asia.

By early Wednesday morning, the death toll from the storm's rage had crossed 293: at least 246 in the Philippines, 38 in Vietnam and nine in Cambodia.

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SYDNEY, Australia — A powerful tsunami generated by an undersea earthquake killed more than two dozen people and wiped out several villages in the tropical islands of American Samoa and Samoa early on Tuesday there, according to officials and local residents who were working to assess the damage.

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A tsunami caused by a powerful earthquake in the South Pacific has killed at least 14 people and injured 50 in Samoa, local media report.

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