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Never mind that it was the creation of eight Tibetan monks who had spent two days cross-legged on the floor of Union Station, meticulously pouring the sand into an intricate design as an expression of their Buddhist faith. They were more than halfway done with the design — called a mandala — on Tuesday when they ended their work for the day and left. The little boy showed up sometime later with his mother, who was taking a package to a post office in the hall. "He did a little tap dance on it, completely destroying it," said Lama Chuck...

Spyros Staveris Differences with the other monasteries on Athos have led to violence, excommunications and criminal trials, exclusions and expulsions and the deprivation of fundamental human rights. ‘We recognize the Ecumenical Patriarchate but not the line the patriarchs are taking,’ the Esphigmenou monks say.By Nikos Vafeiadis - Kathimerini The Esphigmenou Monastery has frequently been in the news since last November in the form of scenes of violence at the Mount Athos port of Karyes, intervention by police, prison sentences for monks, expulsions from the Holy Mountain, riot squads on hand for a visit by the ecumenical patriarch and the...

Monks put their lives in focus with a silent film By Kate Connolly in Berlin Last Updated: 1:29am GMT 11/11/2005 The strictest monastic order in Christendom has opened its cloisters to a film director for the first time, allowing him to shoot a three-hour near-silent documentary about its life.What some critics feared would be this year's most boring movie turns out to be a strangely fascinating meditation on the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps.Into Great Silence depicts its Carthusian monks in the midst of their slow moving daily devotions and duties, from mending shoes to chopping vegetables. advertisement...

BREAKING NEWS -DECEMBER 22, 2006 We have just been informed that the Greek Foreign Minister, Ms. Bakoyianni has given the order to empty the Konaki of Esphigmenou Monastery at Karyes, the Capital of Mount Athos by Sunday. Christmas leaves for the local Police have been cancelled! The government is trampling on the civil rights of the monks and this brotherhood that have lived there continuously for over 1500 years. The monks simply want to be left alone to live out their commitment to a peaceful monastic life of prayer and the government wants to throw over 100 monks out of...

Michael Richards exploded in anger as he performed at a famous L.A. comedy club last Friday, hurling racial epithets that left the crowd gasping, and TMZ has obtained exclusive video of the ugly incident.

Thessalonica, Greece, October 20, 2006 - The Greek Government will move, as early as this weekend, to have armed police forcibly remove the monks of the Holy and Sacred Monastery of Esphigmenou from their monastery property. Over 150 police have been deployed on Mt. Athos, an unprecedented number in a community entirely populated by peaceful and defenseless monks. The monks, who seek only a life of peace and prayer in their monastery, have been subject to a non-stop campaign of official harassment and intimidation by Patriarch Bartholomew of Istanbul, Turkey, and his accomplices in the Greek government, because of a...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Reuters) -- A scuffle broke out Thursday between saffron-robed monks and anti-war demonstrators at peace rally in Sri Lankan capital. About six or seven monks from a right-wing Buddhist faction had stormed the stage during a peace rally attended by about 1,000 people in the capital, Colombo, shouting pro-war slogans, an AP reporter at the scene said. A member of Sri Lanka's parliament was addressing the crowd when the monks climbed on stage.

The embarrassing truth is starting to come out that the Clinton Administration lied to us about Kosovo atrocities which were supposed to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia. In five months of investigation and exhumation of the dead in Kosovo, United Nations war crimes investigators have found only 2,108 bodies. Before the bombing, Clinton and Defense Secretary William Cohen repeatedly tossed out figures of 100,000 dead, and the State Department even claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovars were feared dead. Clinton claimed that his bombing prevented Milosevic from "deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide." The chief prosecutor for the...

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) - The chief of Cambodia's Buddhist monks is cutting his charges some slack for the duration of soccer's World Cup: they may watch the matches on television, but no cheering or getting excited. And absolutely no betting. The country's holy men - more than 90 percent of Cambodia's 13 million people are Buddhist - normally aren't supposed to watch television, movies or artistic displays. According to Buddhism's strictest tenets, they should abstain from pleasurable activity. Gambling is a major no-no. But monks get as excited as anyone else at the chance to watch soccer's top stars,...

In a Northern California monastery, 25 monks following the teachings of St. Benedict rise hours before dawn to pray, work the land and make a serious syrah — a full-bodied red wine.The men at the Abbey of New Clairvaux have opened the first Roman Catholic Cistercian winery in North America, though their vineyard has a storied place in California's wine history.The 580-acre spread in this tiny town north of Chico was once owned by Leland Stanford — the railroad magnate, California governor and university founder — who ran what was considered the world's largest winery in the late 1800s, said...

Last Testament of Victim Prior Blesses Murderers TIBHIRINE, Algeria, MARCH 28, 2006 (Zenit.org).- A friend of the prior of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine is trying to stir interest in the spiritual legacy of those men who were murdered a decade ago. On the night of March 26-27, 1996, some 20 gunmen invaded the Monastery of Notre Dame of Atlas in Tibhirine and kidnapped its seven Trappist monks, of French nationality. A month later, Djamel Zitouni, leader of the Armed Islamic Groups, claimed responsibility for the kidnappings and proposed an exchange of prisoners to France. The following month, a second...

When Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger took the name Benedict XVI in late April, observers immediately speculated as to what it meant. Papal names often carry great significance.   The name John Paul, for example, indicated a profound sympathy with the pontificates of John XXIII and Paul VI, the popes of Vatican II. Although Benedict XVI has pointed to his desire to carry on the legacy of Pope Benedict XV (1914-22) as a primary reason behind the name, his choice of Benedict naturally calls to mind St. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480-547), by far the most important figure in the history of...

SPARTA, WIS. (FORTUNE Small Business Magazine) - Like many entrepreneurs, Father Bernard McCoy loves to talk about his industry. But as a Cistercian monk, he has a time frame longer than most. "Nine hundred years ago my brothers were making ink, making their own paper, and copying manuscripts," says McCoy. "We were the original social entrepreneurs. We were the first multinationals." McCoy is CEO of LaserMonks.com, an Internet retailer that sells discounted printer cartridges and other office supplies. Customers include individuals and churches, along with giants such as Morgan Stanley (Research) and the U.S. Forest Service. It's a lucrative business....

A Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka, who heads a religious party opposed to a Tamil homeland in the north and east, says the country would be better off if the reclusive rebel leader of the Tamil Tigers were dead. Venerable Ellawala Medhananda, head of the National Heritage Party, or Jathika Hela Urumaya, said the government should be prepared to fight the rebels, led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, to the bitter end if peace talks in Switzerland next week fail. "If Prabhakaran is dead, Sri Lanka is a better place," he told Reuters in an interview at a Buddhist center in the...

The strictest monastic order in Christendom has opened its cloisters to a film director for the first time, allowing him to shoot a three-hour near-silent documentary about its life.What some critics feared would be this year's most boring movie turns out to be a strangely fascinating meditation on the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps.Into Great Silence depicts its Carthusian monks in the midst of their slow moving daily devotions and duties, from mending shoes to chopping vegetables.There are even rare moments of jollity: two monks sliding down a snowy slope in their white habits, laughing hysterically, and an...

The medical world of medieval monks By Jane Elliott BBC News All that remains of the hospital Anaesthetics and disinfectants are thought to be a modern medical invention but evidence is coming to light that medieval doctors knew of them too. Evidence found at the ancient Soutra Hospital site, in Scotland, suggests the medieval Augustine monks also knew how to amputate limbs, fashion surgical instruments, induce birth, stop scurvy and even create hangover cures. The excavations at Soutra have also unearthed fragments of pottery vessels that were once used for storing medicines such as an analgesic salve made from opium...

MOUNT SINAI, Egypt (Reuters) - The world's oldest monastery plans to use hi-tech cameras to shed new light on ancient Christian texts preserved for centuries within its fortress walls in the Sinai Desert. Saint Catherine's Monastery hopes the technology will allow a fuller understanding of some of the world's earliest Christian texts, including pages from the Codex Sinaiticus -- the oldest surviving bible in the world. The technique, known as hyperspectral imaging, will use a camera to photograph the parchments at different wavelengths of light, highlighting faded texts obscured by time and later overwritings. It should allow scholars to understand...

FIVE Thai Buddhist monks have been defrocked and fined after a brawl with monks from a nearby temple, police and newspapers said today. The street fight was the culmination of years of antagonism between monks from the two temples who had often exchanged curses, insults and rude gestures as they collected alms on different sides of a road, the Manager newspaper said. "When an ordinary person is given a middle-finger sign, he will be mad. So am I," the paper quoted one of the defrocked monks, Boonlert Boonpan, as saying after the brawl in the north-eastern state of Nong Khai...

A Croatian thief got more than he bargained for when he ran into a pair of karate-trained monks as he tried to rob a monastery. The 35-year-old thief had posed as a beggar looking for a place to stay at a monastery in Zagreb but instead broke into an office there and stole almost £1,500 that had been donated by locals, Vecernji List reported. But he failed to make it out of the monastery after monks Pejo Orkic, 40, and Ivan Pajtak, 51, cornered him and used karate to first fend off his attacks and then force him to the...

Six Thai monks defrocked for drug and alcohol parties: police BANGKOK (AFP) - A group of Thai Buddhist monks has been arrested and defrocked after holding a spate of rowdy drug and alcohol parties, police said. The group of six monks at a temple in Ratchaburi west of Bangkok was arrested Friday night after local villagers complained about their wild behaviour and drug-taking, said Police Major Annop Nuamnaka. "Villagers are fed up with the monks at this temple as they always make loud noise when they drink and take pills," Annop told AFP. He said five of the saffron-robed monks...