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blog

Extra! Netanyahu On His Way To Fourth Term

Like most Israeli dailies, the Wednesday edition of Haaretz went to print too early to call Tuesday's election results, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was declaring victory. The 65-year-old is indeed heading to a fourth term as his Likud party defied final polls that had showed him trailing the centrist Zionist Union party led by Isaac Herzog.

With virtually all the votes counted Wednesday midday, Likud came out on top with 30 seats, followed by Zionist Union with 24 seats. The Joint List of Arab parties is the third-largest party at this point, though Likud is expected to ally with far-right and religious parties to form a new majority coalition.

Follow the latest on Haaretz"s live blog in English.

ABOUT THE SOURCE: Haaretz ("The Land") was founded in 1919 and is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It is published in Hebrew and English, and owned by the Schocken family, M. DuMont Schauberg, and Leonid Nevzlin.

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Society

A Refuge From China's Rat Race: The Young People Flocking To Buddhist Monasteries

Unemployment, stress in the workplace, economic difficulties: more and more young Chinese graduates are flocking to monasteries to find "another school of life."

Photograph of a girl praying at a temple during Chinese Lunar New Year. She is burning incense.

Feb 20, 2015 - Huaibei, China - Chinese worshippers pray at a temple during the Lunar New Yeat

CPRESSPHOTO/ZUMA
Frédéric Schaeffer

JIAXING — It's already dawn at Xianghai Temple when Lin, 26, goes to the Hall of 10,000 Buddhas for the 5:30 a.m. prayer.

Still half-asleep, the young woman joins the monks in chanting mantras and reciting sacred texts for an hour. Kneeling, she bows three times to Vairocana, also known as the Great Sun Buddha, who dominates the 42-meter-high hall representing the cosmos.

Before grabbing a vegetarian breakfast in the adjacent refectory, monks and devotees chant around the hall to the sound of drums and gongs.

"I resigned last October from the e-commerce company where I had been working for the past two years in Nanjing, and joined the temple in January, where I am now a volunteer in residence," explains the young woman, soberly dressed in black pants and a cream linen jacket.

Located in the city of Jiaxing, over a hundred kilometers from Shanghai, in eastern China, the Xianghai temple is home to some 20 permanent volunteers.

Unlike Lin, most of them only stay for a couple days or a few weeks. But for Lin, who spends most of her free time studying Buddhist texts in the temple library, the change in her life has been radical. "I used to do the same job every day, sometimes until very late at night, writing all kinds of reports for my boss. I was exhausted physically and mentally. I felt my life had no meaning," she says.

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