It Leads To

“I have come to set the world on fire, and I wish it were already burning! I have a terrible baptism of suffering ahead of me, and I am under a heavy burden until it is accomplished. Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to divide people against each other!"

Luke 12, 49-51.

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"In videotaped confessions, the defendants said the motive behind the massacre was that the groom was Shiite and the bride was Sunni.

[snip]

"...the insurgents threw 15 screaming children into the Tigris River after hanging concrete blocks around their necks. Blindfolded men were lined on the river bank with their hands tied behind their backs and were shot dead execution-style.

Then the insurgents raped the women, including the bride, who had her chest slashed and was left to bleed to death in front of her husband."

15 Get Death for Horrific Iraq Wedding-Party Massacre.

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"The bombing started at 3am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

2004 American raid on an Iraqi remote village wedding.

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Barrett's encyclopedia sought to count each human being in each religion and religious subcategory in each country as of 1900, 1970, 1990, 1995 and 2000, with projections to 2025.

The 2001 edition, successor to his 1982 first edition, which took a decade to compile, identifies 10,000 distinct religions, of which 150 have 1 million or more followers. Within Christianity, he counts 33,820 denominations.

33,820 denominations.

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More than 100,000 people are putting their lives on hold, waiting for organ transplants across the U.S.

17 hundred of them are living in Arizona.

That's one reason why Governor Jan Brewer has deemed April, "Donate to Life Month." There are more than one million donors signed up in Arizona already but still 19 patients die every day waiting for their transplant.

Thousands of Arizonans wait for organ donations.

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Cystic Fibrosis is a nasty thing. It clogs up the lungs and pancreas with gooey viscous slime that eventually kills, usually before a person fully matures and despite even the best of care.

I am thinking specifically of one high-school-age person. They died a year ago today. Sometime before that they approached the Arizona state capitol accompanied by news cameras. They confronted our well-known state Senate leader Russell Pearce. Pearce, a Mormon like the young person under discussion, approved of legislative changes that would allow the youth to obtain a lung transplant with financial support from the state Medicaid program.

The young person then later received donated lungs. They remained quite sick however and they were hospitalized often. Somehow they managed to graduate from high-school. Their graduation took place in the hospital itself, though.

Shortly after this child (yes, they were a child, really,) died, Senator Pearce worked to rescind this sort of coverage for transplants. After all, the young person who shamed him into it was now gone.

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International Master Anna Zatonskih, rating 2493. Ukrainian-American. Her parents first taught her to play chess at age five.