Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, said Sunday that he would guarantee the safety of the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar if Mr. Omar agreed to negotiate for a peaceful settlement of the worsening conflict in the country.
Mr. Omar, a fugitive with a $10 million American bounty on his head, has been in hiding since the Taliban were toppled from power in 2001, and is believed by Western intelligence agencies to be living somewhere in the region of Quetta in western Pakistan....
Americans had to wait all this time to displace the liars?
Why?
The Bush/Cheney Executive Branch and the majority Republicans LOST the War against Global Terrorism. Do you know how this is going to resonate across the globe? Every nation's leaders needs to 'batten down the hatches.' Without a doubt in my mind ! Border security and strong alliances, NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Portraits of Grief (click here)
It was the day when the unreal became the unimaginable. Sept. 11, 2001, the crystalline morning when planes dropped from the skies and toppled the World Trade Center and punctured a hole in the Pentagon, was a demarcation point that shattered the security of the country and introduced a nebulous and virulent enemy previously unfamiliar to most citizens. Nearly 3,000 people died that morning, the vast majority of them in the gnarled rubble of the Lower Manhattan towers, others at the Pentagon and in a rural Pennsylvania field. A numbed country with red-rimmed eyes came to understand the ugly menace of terrorism....
...The echoes of that horrific day have radiated outward in myriad directions, indelibly altering peoples’ concept of what it means to feel safe in the modern world. Investigations were undertaken into how something of such magnitude could have happened, and conspiracy theorists trotted out diverging notions. A war on terror was set in motion that gravitated from the battlefields of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iraq. The long-running and problematic Iraq war has opened fissures in the nation and abroad, and advanced to the forefront of political dialogue.
Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama (click here), left, and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi walk after a lunch meeting in Dharamsala, India, Friday, March 21, 2008. Pelosi, called on the world community Friday to denounce China in the wake of its crackdown in Tibet, calling the crisis "a challenge to the conscience of the world." (AP Photo/Gurinder Osan)
Buddhist bishop spoke against injustice (click here)
Robert Davila
Sacramento Bee
Article Launched: 11/14/2008 08:12:25 AM PST
The Rev. Newton Ishiura, a former bishop of the Buddhist Church of Canada who retired at the Buddhist Church of Florin, has died at age 90.
He died Nov. 6 from complications of pneumonia, said his daughter Asoka Ishiura-Lluch.
The Rev. Ishiura's lifelong ministry followed a tradition of Buddhist priests in his family dating as far back as ninth-century Japan. He was born in 1918 in Kilauea, Hawaii, where his father ministered at a sugar plantation, and moved with his family to Japan in 1935.
He studied Buddhism at Ryukoku University in Kyoto and graduated and was ordained in 1941. He returned to the United States to serve in the Los Angeles area, where he was arrested under World War II internment orders and sent to the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona.
He went to Yale University in 1943 to teach Japanese to Army soldiers and served as a minister at the New York Buddhist Church. He ministered in Hawaii after the war and campaigned to allow the Buddhist wheel of life symbol to be placed on the headstones of Buddhist veterans....
Ram Bahadur Bamjan, 16, (click here) meditates under a peepal tree in the remote village of Ratanapuri village on March 8, 2006 in Bara district Nepal. Pilgrims and followers have been visiting the boy after word spread that he has been meditating without drinking water for nine months and that he will carry on for another six years until he gains enlightenment. Pilgrims from as far as Korea and Japan worship him as the reincarnation of the Buddha. Relatives and neighbours said Bamjan undertook meditation when he returned from a tour of Lumbini, where Buddha was born, and monasteries in Pokhara in Nepal and Dehradun in India. (Ami Vitale/Getty Images)
Burma, Myanmar: Young Female Journalist Jailed For 2 Years (click here)
By Ashin Mettacara A young female journalist from Econ Vision Wewkly Journal has been sentenced to 2 years in jail for covering Nargis cyclone news. Ma Eint Khaing Oo, 24, was sentenced today by a court in Rangon's Tar Mwe, said a witness. She was arrested in front of the head office of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Yangon on June 10....
August 2000: "It's nothing to do with ideology... It's about the culture and history of the country... We're not opposed to this exhibition in principle because the exhibits are part of our history. And everything which happens in the country becomes part of the country and the government is obliged to preserve it." - Naqibullah Ahmad Yarn, Taliban president of the National Museum of Afghanistan
February 2001: "It has been decided to break down all statues/idols present in different parts of the country. This is because these idols have been gods of the infidels, who worshipped them, and these are respected even now and perhaps may be turned into gods again. The real God is only Allah, and all other false gods should be removed." - Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar
