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POPSFortresses Of Solitude And Sanctuary
Many of us have seen photographs of the Buddhist monasteries in Asia, perched precariously among the clouds. But, did you know that Greece, like Asia, has a number of similar architectural wonders? Today's San Francisco Chronicle ran the first photograph I clipped below, which I founded stunning. This particular monastery is known as Roussanou Monastery in Meteora, Greece. The word "meteora" is typically translated as "suspended in the air," a reference to the lofty sandstone pillars on which the monasteries are built. Roussanou is not the only such monastery in the region; in fact, there are 6. I clipped some additonal photos from Meteora, which I hope you will enjoy. They are, in the order presented: Agios Nikoloas Anapafsa Monastery, Agias Triados (Holy Trinity) Monastery, and the Grand Meteron Monastery. My personal favorite, however, is the last picture. Though it shows the scaffolding of repair-work, it also shows off the beautiful hues of blue I associate
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POPS2009 Leonid Meteor Shower More from the article below: ""We're predicting 20 to 30 meteors per hour over the Americas, and as many as 200 to 300 per hour over Asia," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "Our forecast is in good accord with independent theoretical work by other astronomers." "A remarkable feature of this year's shower is that Leonids will appear to be shooting almost directly out of the planet Mars," notes Cooke. It's just a coincidence. This year, Mars happens to be passing by the Leonid radiant at the time of the shower. The Red Planet is almost twice as bright as a first magnitude star, so it makes an eye-catching companion for the Leonids"
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POPSGrandmas help girls live longer, but not boys According to the research from Cambridge University, the survival rate of a granddaughter living in the same house as her paternal grandmother is higher than if she were just living with her immediate family, reports The Independent. To reach the conclusion, Molly Fox of Cambridge University and her colleagues analyzed the birth and death records of seven populations in Asia, North America, Europe and Africa
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POPSNidal Hasan Terrorist Threat 'Not That Big a Deal'....Matthew Yglesias
I think a pretty good case can be made that this kind of situation actually is the main face of the terrorist threat. Not a big well-thought-out plot centrally directed from a “safe haven” in South Asia and undertaken by brilliant covert operatives, but the desperate violent act of a clearly disturbed individual. It’s going to be very hard to prevent this sort of thing. As long as the United States remains a country in which firearms are widely available"for the foreseeable future, in other words"we’re going to be unusually vulnerable to mentally ill spree killers of various kinds, including spree killers who nod in the direction of Islamist thinking. But the larger point is that while these incidents are serious crimes and major tragedies for the victims, they hardly rise to the level of a major macro-level social crisis. They’re certainly not a first-order national security threat. And even put in the lower-stakes context of violent crime in America
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POPSfrom the Sacred Text Archive: Prophecy & Divination texts
What does the future hold? This is one of the big questions we'd all like answered. This page has links to resources at sacred-texts that relate to prophecy and divination. Prophecy The Prophecies of Nostradamus by Nostradamus. The complete predictions of Nostradamus both in English and Old French, with a biography of Nostradamus and some notes about the events of 9/11. Nostradamus: The Man Who Saw Through Time by Lee McCann . A biography and historical novel of Nostradamus, with many interpreted quatrains, written during World War II. The Oracles of Nostradamus by Charles A. Ward . The complete text of one of the best books about Nostradamus ever written. The Sibylline Oracles Tr. by Milton S. Terry . Read the mysterious (purported) predictions of the Roman Sibylline Oracle. The Book of Revelation-The most famous Christian prophecy. The Prophecies of Paracelsus by Paracelsus, tr. by J.K . The alchemist and esoteric philosopher issued a set of
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POPSFormer UK Ambassador: CIA Sent People to be ‘Raped with Broken Bottles’ Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan's natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. "The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan," Murray noted. "There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy."
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POPSGreat White Sharks Have Their Own Cafe
"Over an eight year period, nearly 100 sharks were electronically tagged, and even more had tissue samples taken by scientists working from a ship. Not only do the sharks consistently migrate along the same paths, they stick to a schedule too. Between August and December, the Great Whites -- which can grow up to six metres (20 feet) and three tonnes -- stalk waters off the coast of central and northern California, feasting on seals and sea lions. Their preferred hunting grounds in this area are known as the "red triangle", notes the study, published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Starting in January, they head for the deep blue around Hawaii some 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) to the west, where they are found in largest numbers between April and July. But some -- especially males -- loiter at a halfway point known as the "White Shark Cafe", with females coming and going for what scientists presume is a bit of shark intimacy. The new findi
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POPSPainstaking Baby Splitting to protect population centers, or one that makes counterterrorism the main focus of U.S. efforts in the country, which would rely on relatively fewer American troops. … The timing of Obama’s decision on Afghanistan remains up in the air. But his request for another meeting with the military chiefs " and the expectation that he will meet again with his top national security advisers before reaching a conclusion " may leave him too little time to decide the issue before he travels to Asia on Nov. 11. I’m afraid that’s just not enough time for him to recognize that he is the President of the United States, that the buck stops with him, that he’ll never make everyone happy, that his current direction is more likely to make no one happy, that extended indecisiveness is its own kind of decision and, in time of war, fundamentally, it gives him enough time to grow a set. Also that, no matter how he painstakingly he splits it, it’s his baby now.
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POPSStudy Finds Humans Still Evolving, and Quickly Human evolution has been increasing at a stunning rate since our ancestors began spreading through Europe, Asia and Africa, quickening to 100 times historical levels after agriculture became widespread, according to a study published today.
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POPSObama offers millions in muslim technology fund Yeah? Stupid. The results will be : a) 3/4 will be skimmed off by corrupt officials b) the rest will be spent on developing primitive tools to destroy us or prevent us from attacking them effectively. Please understand... muslims are incapable of building or creating anything. They only know how to destroy and kill.
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POPSGrameenPhone IPO Lottery Result published in 28 october 2009. IPO lottery draw of Grameenphone Limited (GP) will be held on October 28, 2009 at 11.30AM in Bangabandhu International Conference Centre (BICC) (previous Bangladesh- China Friendship Conference Centre), Sher-E-Bangla Nagar, Agargaon, Dhaka. GP IPO Lottery Result will be published in this page as soon as possible after draw. We provides Bank by Bank result. You can get the result of IPO lottery easily from here.
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POPSZinnie to Obama: Time's Up on Afghanistan Decision If Zinni is calling for more troops Now then things are more serious than we're hearing. And I bet he didn't use the word "dillydallying". I just read that 8 US soldiers were killed today by roadside bombs. Either support our people there or throw our integrity to the wind and leave.
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POPS Amazing Pictures, Pollution in China October 21st, 2009 by Key October 14, 2009, the 30th annual awards ceremony of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund took place at the Asia Society in New York City. Lu Guang from People’s Republic of China won the $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China.” August of 1993 he returned to post-graduate studies at the Central Arts and Design Academy in Beijing (now is the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University). During graduate school, he studied, traveled all over the country and carved out a career, became the “dark horse” of the photographer circle in Beijing. Skilled at social documentary photography, his insightful, creative and artistic work often focused on “social phenomena and people living at the bottom of society”, attracted the attentions of the national photography circle and the media. Many of his award winning works focused on social issues like, “gold rush in the west”, “drug
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POPSWorld Atlas List of continents, countries, dependencies, islands, territories, lakes, rivers, seas, oceans, mountains, and the highest, lowest, biggest, smallest, tallest, deepest, oldest, youngest, richest, poorest places on the planet here!
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