News

Two Tibetan monks are being held by Chinese authorities in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), five months after they were stopped on their return home from Nepal, RFA's Tibetan service reports.

Over 8,000 religious leaders and lay people gathered in Barcelona in Spain from July 7 to 13, 2004 and discussed the issues of religious violence, access to safe water, the fate of refugees worldwide, and the elimination of developing countries' debts.

Normally, it's just boys in blue pants and gray shirts playing pickup basketball on the concrete courts of the state juvenile detention center here. But on Tuesday, burgundy-robed Tibetan monks joined in.

More flights to Lhasa, capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, will be opened in July and August, according to the southwestern branch company of Air China, China's largest airline.

Hollywood movie star Richard Gere said the AIDS fight was more important to him than the Tibet issue, adding he had wept for the plight of infected youths since arriving here for a global summit.

India is moving northwards at a rate of around 5cm a year and pushing up the Himalayan massif. In theory, there should be a knock-on effect: Tibet should be moving eastwards at the rate of 2-3cm a year.

A group that sponsored a Tibetan monks concert in February in Grand Rapids says it has won a default judgment against a church in Allendale. The monks were scheduled to perform at the Basilica of St. Adalbert when members of the St. Margaret Mary Church in Allendale interrupted the event.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Nobel Peace laureate and spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan people, will visit Miami, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico from September 19 to October 7, 2004.

The authorities in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh have confirmed plans to build the world's biggest statue of the Buddha. The site will be the town of Kushinagar where Buddha died 25 centuries ago.

Tibetan medicine, apart from the Tibetan Buddhism, is perhaps the most well known Tibetan culture that benefits the world today. With surge of interest in herbal medicine and alternative healings the Tibetan medicine comes first among hundreds of alternative healing traditions.