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London (CNN) — The Dalai Lama refused to answer a question Monday about whether Tibetan monks should stop setting themselves on fire to protest China’s occupation of Tibet.

“No answer,” he said.

“I think that this is quite a sensitive political issue,” the spiritual leader of the Tibetan Buddhist community said.

Self-immolation is becoming an increasingly common form of protest for Tibetans who want genuine autonomy from China and accuse Beijing of repression. More than 30 of them took place in the last year in China, Tibetan advocacy groups say.

Dalai Lama: China belongs to the people

The Dalai Lama was speaking in London, where he is accepting the Templeton Prize.

He said he did not want to manipulate or politicize the event.

“Last year, I retired from political responsibility,” he said.

The Dalai Lama broke with four centuries of Tibetan tradition by separating the political aspect of his role from the spiritual one, he explained. He handed over political leadership of the Tibetan community to an elected prime minister in 2011.

The Templeton Prize, an award worth £1.1 million ($1.77 million), honors “outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality.”

The Dalai Lama will give $1.5 million to the aid organization Save the Children, he said.

He is giving another $200,000 of the prize money to the Mind Life Institute, and $75,000 to his own monastic community.

New Delhi (CNN) — A New Delhi court Tuesday granted bail to India’s former telecom minister, who was at the center of one of the country’s biggest corruption scandals.

Last year, police arrested the former minister, Andhimuthu Raja, and more than a dozen other defendants as part of high-profile investigations into the suspected below-price sale of telecom licenses.

There are 17 defendants, including Raja and three companies, in the case.

The 13 other individual suspects are already out on bail.

Raja’s lawyer Ramesh Gupta told CNN that the court ordered his client be released on bail Tuesday .

The alleged scam has rocked the country’s coalition government and investor confidence in Asia’s third-largest economy.

Suspects are accused of participating in a scheme involving the underselling of cell phone licenses at the height of India’s lucrative telecom boom.

Police have also questioned several high-profile executives. The firm of business tycoon Anil Ambani is among three companies named in the charge sheet spelling out the accusations.

Politicians, bureaucrats and corporate officials linked to the probe have denied any wrongdoing.

According to a government audit, the treasury lost as much as $31 billion from the 2008 sale of the wireless spectrum. That audit report came on the heels of allegations of massive fraud in sports and real estate.

In February last year, prime minister Manmohan Singh accepted opposition demands for a wider, cross-party investigation into the massive scandal.

(CNN) — A Soyuz spacecraft lifted off from a launch site in Kazakhstan on Tuesday to ferry three new crew members to the International Space Station.

The Russian vehicle is carrying the three space engineers — an American, Joe Acaba; and two Russians, Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin — from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, according to the NASA website.

Once at the space station, they will join three colleagues already on board: Commander Oleg Kononenko, a Russian; and two flight engineers, Andre Kuipers of the Netherlands and Don Pettit, an American.

Crew of Soyuz docks with ISS

The six men form the space station’s Expedition 31.

The ISS is a joint venture between NASA, Russia’s RKA space agency, Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency, the European Space Agency and the Canadian CSA.

NASA is now reliant on the Russian space agency to ferry U.S. astronauts to orbit, since the grounding of the U.S. shuttle fleet has left the United States with no way to lift humans into space.

Plans are in the works for private companies to begin shipping cargo to the station, and eventually to carry astronauts as well.

(CNN) — Lady Gaga may have to disappoint a lot of her “little monsters” in Indonesia after Jakarta police recommended that her sold-out June 3 show not be issued a permit because of security concerns.

“Yes, it is for sure, the promoter will not get a permit to hold the concert,” National Police spokesman Saud Usman Nasution said Tuesday.

The concert promoter, Big Daddy Entertainment, declined to comment on the development.

“Please wait for further official information from us,” spokesman Alif Ramadoni said.

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There has been an outcry against Lady Gaga performing among Islamists and conservative Muslims, who say her revealing costumes and sensual dance moves are “haram,” an Arabic term that means “forbidden by Islamic law.”

The chairman of the Islamic Defenders Front, Habib Rizieq, said his group could not guarantee what might happen, as far as security goes, if the concert were held.

The pop star was given a thumbs-down in March by a “high-ranking member” of the country’s highest Islamic authority, according to The Jakarta Globe.

The report said that Indonesian Council of Ulema chairman Cholil Ridwan was urging Muslims not to attend the overtly sexy and controversial singer’s upcoming concert in Jakarta.

“[The concert is] intended to destroy the nation’s morality,” Ridwan told the Globe.

Ridwan is concerned that the singer’s revealing outfits and sexy dance moves will set a bad example for Muslim youths.

Newspaper reports said more than 25,000 tickets were sold in the first two hours after the concert went on sale in March. Police said the promoter should not have started selling tickets before getting a permit.

This isn’t the first bit of controversy during the singer’s “Born This Way” tour. Gaga also ran afoul of Christian groups in South Korea, prompting the government to ban kids under the age of 18 from attending her show.

Ahead of the concert in late April, detractors called it “pornographic” and a promotion of homosexuality.

Yoon Jung-hoon, a reverend who helped organize the “Civilians Network against the Lady Gaga Concert” movement, told the Chicago Tribune that his group collected 5,000 supporters on Facebook. He also advocated a boycott of the show’s sponsor, Hyundai Card, in addition to Hyundai Motor Co., Korea’s largest automaker.

“Some people can accept this as another culture, but its impact is huge beyond art and debases religions,” Yoon said. “Even adults can’t see her performance, which is too homosexual and pornographic.”

The show went on as scheduled.

CNN’s Kathy Quiano and journalist Tasha Tampubolon contributed to this report.

Madrid (CNN) — Chanting “they don’t represent us,” tens of thousands in Madrid railed early Sunday against Spain’s government and austerity cuts — venting their anger on the first anniversary of the so-called May 15 protest movement.

Many ignored a government deadline to disperse by Saturday night from the central Puerta del Sol plaza, prompting police to clear the square by 5 a.m. on Sunday (11 p.m. on Saturday ET), the interior ministry said.

About 30,000 attended the Madrid protest, and 18 were detained for resisting arrest or disorderly conduct, the ministry said.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, demonstrators were a loud and vibrant presence in the square — as a large number of police, stationed at a nearby government building and along side streets, looked on and let them be.

Throngs of like-minded demonstrators also gathered over the weekend in Barcelona and about 80 other cities around Spain.

Barcelona saw about 22,000 protesters, while Valencia had 8,000 and Seville had 2,000, authorities said. All the demonstrations were cleared by Sunday morning, the interior ministry said.

The coordinated events marked the return of the “indignados” — or the outraged, as the protesters became known — who led Europe’s first serious and significant grassroots movement against austerity and government budget cuts.

Similar demonstrations decrying governments’ attempts to get their budgets in order, sometimes by slashing public funding, later emerged elsewhere around Europe.

In Madrid this weekend, marchers from the north, south, east and west descended on Puerta del Sol plaza on Saturday evening.

For hours, demonstrators shouted, jumped, sang and waved white handkerchiefs. Their most dramatic moment, though, may have been their quietest: when they held their hands aloft, silently, in a “silent shout” before erupting in cheers.

The crowd is expected to return. The government has approved three more days of protests in Madrid, meaning similar scenes could play out into the middle of the week.

The number of demonstrators in Madrid over the weekend appeared to be slightly fewer than those who had gathered in the same spot — in what’s known as ground zero of the movement — a year earlier.

Back then, protesters encamped in Madrid and other cities made their voices heard. The tens of thousands of people who turned out in the initial days grew to an estimated 6 million protesters over the following months, in a nation of 46 million people.

Since then, Occupy camps around the world have come and gone.

The new protests organized by the May 15 movement are different in at least one key respect: a new conservative government is now in control, having taken over in December.

Spain’s economic crisis also has worsened since last year. The nation has slipped back into a recession, the unemployment rate has risen to 24% overall and more than 50% for those under age 25, and the government has enacted billions of dollars in austerity cuts, along with some tax hikes, to reduce the budget deficit.

“We are really tired of this situation,” said Madrid protester Paola Alvarado, a purchasing agent. “And the new government is the same. They steal our money and give it to the banks.”

Spain’s austerity protests have been largely peaceful to date, with only occasional clashes between protesters and police, and some arrests in cities like Barcelona and Valencia.

And prior the latest protests, the new government — which has vowed to maintain order and prevent a repetition of encampments in Madrid and beyond — urged police commanders to use “common sense” as to how they dealt with the latest round of public dissent.

In recent months, Spanish trade unions, traditionally the protest leaders, have been at the forefront of demonstrations against the austerity cuts and labor market reforms, with the May 15 movement barely visible.

“Maybe the most important thing is it awakened a consciousness, beyond concrete changes, to make historic change possible,” said Jon Aguirre Such, who was a movement spokesman a year ago but now spends more time on his architectural cooperative for urban planning.

“I think everyone who took part in the May 15 movement made history. They can take away from us many things, but not our memory and our dream,” Aguirre said.

The original May 15 movement is credited with helping stop dozens of housing evictions. Activists pressured bank and court officials to delay or stop foreclosures on delinquent mortgages.

But Ignacio Urquiza, a sociologist who has studied the movement for the left-leaning Fundacion Alternativas, said there has been little big-picture change as to government policies and operations.

“The demonstrations didn’t do more than expose — for a brief time — some issues. But Spain’s economic crisis and political system have not changed. They are the same as last year,” he said.

(CNN) — As German Gen. Erwin Rommel chased British forces across the North African desert, a stray Royal Air Force fighter crashed in the blistering sands of the Egyptian Sahara on June 28, 1942. The pilot was never heard from again. The damaged Kittyhawk P-40 — a couple of hundred miles from civilization — was presumed lost forever.

Until now.

In what experts consider nothing short of a miracle, a Polish oil company worker recently discovered the plane believed to have been flown by missing Flight Sgt. Dennis Copping. And almost 70 years after the accident, it’s extraordinarily well-preserved.

The fighter’s “state of preservation is incredible,” British military historian Andy Saunders told CNN. “The thing just landed there in the desert and the pilot clearly got out. … It is a complete time capsule really (and) an exceptionally rare find. These things just don’t happen.”

Most of the plane’s fuselage, wings, tail and cockpit instruments remain intact. For safety reasons, Egyptian officials have removed its ammunition and guns.

WWII plane wreckage found 70 years later

Copping, part of the RAF’s Egyptian 260 Squadron, was trying to get the American-built plane back in fighting condition in the run-up to what would prove to be the pivotal Battle of El Alamein.

The young pilot, according to Saunders, apparently became disoriented during the flight and headed in the wrong direction. Another RAF pilot flying nearby “tried all sorts of things” to get his attention, but Copping “bizarrely” ignored a series of warnings, Saunders said.

By the time Copping realized his mistake, he was too low on fuel to turn around. Several pieces of evidence at the crash site — including a parachute believed to have been used as shelter from the sun — indicate the strong probability Copping survived the landing. He almost certainly could not, however, survive the blazing Sahara heat for long.

Copping “would have stayed by the aircraft initially,” Saunders noted. While the plane’s glass valve radio was likely knocked out of commission by the crash, “the parachute gives him shelter and a means to be identified from the air. The guy also would have had a little silver signaling mirror to attract passing aircraft and a pistol with a limited number of flares.”

Why would Copping leave the wreckage? “Maybe he got desperate when he saw nobody was coming for him, and thought (the) only way to survive was to walk out” and look for help, Saunders speculated.

RAF pilots in North Africa at that time didn’t have much in terms of rations. Copping’s supply would have been very limited, assuming he had food or water at all.

Pilots were “flying with very basic life support systems,” Saunders said. “His chances of survival were not good.”

Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) — A small plane crashed after it was unable to land in a mountainous area of Nepal on Monday, killing 15 of the 21 people on board, aviation officials said.

The plane was about a mile from the airport at Jomsom, a popular tourist town in central Nepal, when it went down, said Purusottam Shakya, deputy director of air traffic service operations in Kathmandu. It was operated by Agni Air, a Nepalese carrier.

Six of the 21 people on board somehow survived the impact. They include an air hostess, two Danish passengers and three Indian passengers, said Bindesh Lal Karna, an official for the Rescue Coordination Committee at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu.

Of the Indian survivors, two are children aged 6 and 9, while the other is a man who is now in intensive care, according to Karna.

The thirteen other Indian passengers on the plane and the two other crew members were killed.

The survivors were airlifted to the town of Pokhara, about 200 kilometers (124 miles) west of Kathmandu.

According to Karna, the crash occurred after a technical problem prevented the plane from landing normally after a flight from Pokhara.

Karna said the pilot decided to turn the plane around and head back to Pokhara, but as he did so, the plane dropped out of the air.

Jomsom is the gateway to Muktinath Temple, a pilgrimage site for Hindus from Nepal and India. The temple is about six hours’ walk from the airport, in the Annapurna range of mountains, a part of the Himalayas popular among hiking enthusiasts.

The crash is the second disaster to hit the Annapurna region in less than two weeks.

On May 5, a flash flood swept away houses near a river that flows down from the mountain range. Thirty-one bodies have been recovered from the flooding, while 40 people are still missing, according to the local police.

CNN’s Samira Said and Harmeet Shah Singh contributed to this report.

London (CNN) — The Dalai Lama refused to answer a question Monday about whether Tibetan monks should stop setting themselves on fire to protest China’s occupation of Tibet.

“No answer,” he said.

“I think that this is quite a sensitive political issue,” the spiritual leader of the Tibetan Buddhist community said.

Self-immolation is becoming an increasingly common form of protest for Tibetans who want genuine autonomy from China and accuse Beijing of repression. More than 30 of them took place in the last year in China, Tibetan advocacy groups say.

Dalai Lama: China belongs to the people

The Dalai Lama was speaking in London, where he is accepting the Templeton Prize.

He said he did not want to manipulate or politicize the event.

“Last year, I retired from political responsibility,” he said.

The Dalai Lama broke with four centuries of Tibetan tradition by separating the political aspect of his role from the spiritual one, he explained. He handed over political leadership of the Tibetan community to an elected prime minister in 2011.

The Templeton Prize, an award worth £1.1 million ($1.77 million), honors “outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality.”

The Dalai Lama will give $1.5 million to the aid organization Save the Children, he said.

He is giving another $200,000 of the prize money to the Mind Life Institute, and $75,000 to his own monastic community.

Athens, Greece (CNN) — Efforts to form a unity government in Greece failed Monday, moving the country closer to a eurozone exit as the president called for another meeting Tuesday to seek a solution.

Talks between Greek President Karolos Papoulias and the leaders of three main parties ended Monday night without a resolution, the president’s office said.

Papoulias then called a meeting for Tuesday to discuss the possibility of a government run by technocrats with support from political parties, according to the leader of the socialist PASOK party, which attended Monday’s talks.

“We have no choice” but to support the idea of a technocracy, PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos said.

Papoulias had invited the leaders of the New Democracy, PASOK, Syriza and Democratic Left parties to Monday night’s meeting. Syriza was the only one not to attend; the party’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, said he wanted to talk with all parties or with just the president, and not with a selected group.

The far-left Syriza came in second in parliamentary elections on May 6, and polling since then has suggested it would come in first if the politicians call new elections because they cannot form a government.

The debt-wracked country has until Thursday to either form a government or call new elections.

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Absent a government, Greece could run out of money to pay its debts and might crash out of the euro, the currency used by it and 16 other European Union countries.

Greek government talks turn ugly

“If no government is in place before June when the next installment (of loan money) from the European Union and International Monetary Fund is due, we estimate that Greece will run out of money sometime between the end of June and beginning of July, at which point a return to the drachma would seem inevitable,” Bank of America/Merrill Lynch wrote in a report released Friday.

Political impasse continues in Greece

Syriza campaigned against the wildly unpopular government austerity measures that Greece — under the now-ousted coalition of New Democracy and PASOK — agreed to in exchange for loans by international lenders. The Syriza party’s goal, Tsipras said Monday, is to remain in the eurozone without those “catastrophic” measures.

Coalition talks continue in Greece

But although his party rode high in opinion polls immediately after the election, survey results released Monday suggested that many voters blame Tsipras for the current political deadlock.

About two in five people say he is most at fault, according to the Rass opinion poll of 1,002 people conducted by telephone on May 10-11. About one in five people blamed all political leaders equally.

About one in three people said Tsipras had taken the worst position during talks on forming a new government.

The meeting called by Papoulias came a week after angry voters punished mainstream parties by backing a range of fringe groups and parties opposed to the government bailout.

Seven parties won seats in parliament, but none captured more than 19% of the vote. That led to three failed attempts to form a new government.

Democratic Left leader Fotis Kouvelis held his own meeting with Papoulias late Sunday. So did Nikolaos Michaloliakos, the head of the far-right Golden Dawn party.
Michaloliakos emerged from those talks saying that any new government would need a premier with the international clout to reject the bailout package the previous government had signed, calling the deal “a crime against our country.”

Venizelos said his PASOK party would do everything possible to form a national unity government, but it was ready for new elections, if necessary.

The Communist party, meanwhile, called for new elections, saying it will not participate in a coalition government.

The gravity of the situation was underscored Sunday by Tsipras, who told leaders, “I am concerned that if we carry on with implementation of the bailout conditions in Greece, then Greece is at risk of facing a humanitarian crisis.”

His remarks were made in a private meeting, a transcript of which was released Monday.

In the meeting, Papoulias said the New Democracy party, which has supported him, had two conditions: to ensure that the country remains in the euro and to renegotiate conditions of the bailout.

In a poll published Saturday by the newspaper Kathimerini, four of five voters said they would vote the same way in a new election.

In a separate poll published Sunday by the newspaper Vima, seven of 10 people said they wanted the parties to form a coalition government.

Syriza would come in first if new elections were held, the Vima poll suggested, after coming in second behind New Democracy a week ago with 16.8% of the vote. But the results would still lead to a deeply divided parliament, the poll suggested, with no party getting more than 21% of the vote.

In the same poll, six of 10 voters said Syriza’s plans against austerity are not realistic.

Syriza is opposed to the terms of the bailout agreed to with the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. The country’s lenders have said that if Greece does not comply with the bailout terms, payments will stop.

The stakes are potentially huge, with concern stirring that the lack of leadership could jeopardize Greece’s bailout agreement. That could lead to a disorderly default by Greece and force the nation out of the eurozone.

A default by Greece also could drag down other troubled governments such as Spain and Portugal. Any financial shock of such a magnitude could plunge the region into a deep recession, with ripples being felt across the world.

CNN’s Antonia Mortensen and journalist Elinda Labropoulou contributed to this report.