UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura has confirmed that Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers had destroyed two ancient giant Buddha statues in what he called a ”crime against culture”. The statues in central Afghanistan had been destroyed despite appeals from around the world to save the priceless examples of the country’s pre-Islamic art. The fundamentalist Taliban, who consider the famous statues carved into a cliffside in Bamiyan as heathen images, began destroying the statues last week. -Reuters