American Buddhist Net

“If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” --Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
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August 7, 2008

Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed the horrors of Soviet slave-labor camps, was buried yesterday in a cemetery filled with evocations of Communist cruelty and the fight against it that defined his life.

Solzhenitsyn's death Sunday at 89 silenced one of Russia's most influential figures, a man regarded by mourners as critical in destroying the Soviet Union. His funeral and burial at Moscow's Donskoi Monastery offered evidence of his renown -- the Russian president was there as military honor guards fired rifles in salute and white-robed priests sang dirges.

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August 5, 2008
By JOHN MARKOFF

A criminal gang is using software tools normally reserved for computer network administrators to infect thousands of PCs in corporate and government networks with programs that steal passwords and other information, a security researcher has found.

The new form of attack indicates that little progress has been made in defusing the threat of botnets, networks of infected computers that criminals use to send spam, steal passwords and do other forms of damage, according to computer security investigators.

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: August 3, 2008

MOSCOW (AP) -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment.

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July 30, 2008
By ANNE BARNARD

MOSCOW — For many Russians, it is bad enough that Ukraine is pushing to join NATO and to eject the Russian Navy from its Black Sea port. But over the weekend, the confrontation over Ukraine’s attempts to shrug off Russian influence reached an even more emotional pitch — when the Ukrainian president sought to split his nation’s church from Moscow’s.

It was the latest round in an increasingly fraught tug of war over history, identity and power. The two governments have fought with many different political weapons — from Ukraine’s threat to join Russia’s cold war rivals to Russia’s ability to shut off the natural gas deliveries on which its neighbor depends. Both quickly made it clear that the struggle over the church — traditionally an institution closely entwined with state power — was at least as important.

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July 24, 2008
Tony Halpin in Moscow

Terrified workers at a mining compound in one of Russia's most isolated regions are refusing to go to work after a pack of giant bears attacked and ate two of their colleagues.

At least 30 of the hungry animals have been seen prowling close to the mines in northern Kamchatka in search of food, where the mangled remains of the two workers, both guards, were found last week.

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Scientists were amazed when a 20-year-old hay fever drug was found to be highly effective in treating dementia. Jeremy Laurance reports on a startling discovery

Tuesday, 22 July 2008

A hundred years after Alzheimer's disease was discovered, a cure for the degenerative condition that strips sufferers of their memory and personality remains a dream. The main advances have been in drugs to control symptoms such as agitation and restlessness. Restoring memory and cognitive ability has proved much harder.

That is why the publication last week of research showing that an old Russian drug once prescribed for hay fever may be the most effective treatment yet for the devastating condition has captured the attention of scientists and patients' groups.

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This is really weird. Only about 3 minutes long. Robyn
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By James Kilner Wed Jul 16, 6:26 AM ET

YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday that charred remains found in a pit belonged to Tsar Nicholas II's only son and his daughter, exactly 90 years after the Bolsheviks shocked the world by murdering the last Tsar.

Moscow's confirmation that the remains included those of Tsar Nicholas's 13-year-old heir, Prince Alexei, came as hundreds of Russians flocked to a church built on the site where the family was gunned down by Bolshevik executioners.

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KIEV (AFP) — US troops on Monday began military exercises near the Russian border in ex-Soviet Ukraine and were poised to launch them in Georgia, amid tense relations between Moscow and Washington, officials said.

A ceremony inaugurating the Sea Breeze-2008 NATO exercise was held off Ukraine's Black Sea coast, a Ukrainian defence ministry spokeswoman said, against anti-NATO protests and a hostile reaction from officials in Russia.

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Don’t mess with Russia is the message as customs claim $22.5bn from Bank of New York

July 13, 2008

On July 3, the very eve of America's annual celebration of Independence Day, a Moscow courtroom sizzled with acrid testimonials to the effect that the oldest bank in the US is internationally accountable on charges of money laundering and, if convicted, will have to pony up $22.5bn to the Russian Customs Service, said sum representing just over a third of the bank's capital.

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By Denis Pinchuk

ST PETERSBURG (Reuters) - A Russian woman in St Petersburg killed her drunk husband with a folding couch, Russian media reported on Wednesday.

St Petersburg's Channel Five said the man's wife, upset with her husband for being drunk and refusing to get up, kicked a handle after an argument, activating a mechanism that folds the couch up against a wall.

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July 9, 2008

SEOUL - A TRAINLOAD of food from Russia has arrived in North Korea, state media said on Wednesday, days after the United States delivered a shipload of wheat to alleviate severe food shortages.

The train carried food provided by Russia through the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) and arrived on Monday at the western border town of Sinuiju, the Korean Central News Agency said.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
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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!’

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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