SIDEWALK COUNSELOR LEFT WITH BROKEN LEG AFTER MICHIGAN ABORTIONIST RUNS HIM OVER… TWICE
from: LiveAction News

(26 Jun.) Mark Zimmerman, a pro-life counselor in Saginaw Township, Michigan, regularly prays outside the Women’s Center of Saginaw. Last week, however, he was run over twice by none other than the abortionist himself: Theodore Roummel.

Zimmerman spoke to Live Action News about the incident, which left him seriously injured. "I was standing in the driveway and the abortionist ran over my leg [using his vehicle]," he said. "And then he had to reverse to get off my leg, so he ran me over twice."

Though Zimmerman was on the ground in pain, a GiveSendGo campaign set up by friends to raise money for his medical expenses claims that after the attack, Roummel got out of the car and laughed at Zimmerman as he lay on the ground. Meanwhile, other pro-life counselors present called 911.

"He parked his car and came over when the police came, and was screaming at the police about how we always run in front of him – we don't," Zimmerman continued. "But I have four witnesses who saw what happened. So they gave a statement to police, and he was not arrested. He went about and finished his day by doing five abortions."

"I went today to the police station in Saginaw Township, and was told they didn't have the police report finished because it is still under investigation," Zimmerman said, later adding, "If the roles were reversed I would have been taken away in handcuffs."

This is reportedly not the first time Roummel has attempted to hit someone with his vehicle; in 2012, Lynn Mills, director of Pro-Life Michigan, was also run over by Roummel. In that incident, he was arrested and charged with assault and was placed on probation for six months. So far, there is no word if Roummel will face charges for assaulting Zimmerman.

This kind of violence is seemingly a part of life for pro-lifers looking to counsel abortion-vulnerable women at Roummel's facility – and Roummel isn’t the only one to be a threat, according to sidewalk counselors. "We have had [a different] gentleman, a single individual, he would come by and threaten to shoot us, and actually pepper sprayed one of my friends," Zimmerman said. "He was charged with a felonious gun charge, and got an $800 fine for the pepper spray."

[read more...]

COMMENTARY: It is hard to comprehend how people can treat other human beings as objects that can be used for one's own pleasure, or if inconvenient they simply need to be gotten rid of. If we do not love our neighbors as ourselves, we do not genuinely love ourselves: our neglect or harm toward others will come back upon ourselves.

UK SURGEONS GO 'NEUTRAL' ON ASSISTED DYING
from: BioEdge.org

(21 Jun.) In a significant public relations victory for the assisted dying lobby in the United Kingdom, the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS England) has voted to drop its opposition to assisted dying. The College is now officially "neutral" on whether doctors should be allowed to kill patients.

The change was made after 72% of members who responded to an online survey declared that they were in favour of changing the College’s position. However, the 3000 members who responded represented only 19% of the College’s membership. Of these, 52% backed assisted suicide and 20% the adoption of neutrality.

This development leaves the Royal College of General Practitioners as only Royal College which still opposed to changing the law to permit assisted suicide.

A report published by the College explains the methodology of the survey. The surgeons were promoted through emails in February and March. Those who did not respond were sent up to four reminder emails. Of the entire UK membership of 17,600, only 3,268 responded. According to the report, "This provides a large sample size for confident and robust statistical analysis."

Afterwards, the College Council debated the results in April and May. "A majority vote was cast in favour of adopting a neutral position on the issue," says the College. [read more...]

COMMENTARY: So in England if 52% of surgeons vote to kill you, it's OK because "robust statistical analysis" allows it. Stay away from England if you need surgery: the merchants of death are waiting for you! "The merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise any more; merchandise of gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk... sheep, horses, chariots, and people's bodies and souls" (Revelation 18:11-13). How human beings have become commodities!

BELARUS: DRAFT RELIGION LAW "PLAYING ON FORMAL APPEARANCE OF LEGALITY"
from: Forum 18 News Service

Hebrews 13:3 – "Remember those who are in bonds, as bound with them; and those who are ill-treated, since you are also in the body."

(15 Jun.) On 2 June, the regime made public the draft of the proposed new Religion Law, prepared by the chief state religious affairs official, Plenipotentiary for Religious and Ethnic Affairs Aleksandr Rumak. Only 10 days were given for comments, which Minsk's Lawtrend Centre for Legal Transformation criticized given the "exceptional significance of the draft Law for religious and social life." The proposed new Law is due to be considered by the non-freely elected Parliament in September.

The regime punished previous nationwide civil society attempts to improve the restrictive 2002 Religion Law currently in force. Belarus has not sought a legal review of the 2023 draft Law from the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), "but we would be ready and willing to do so if asked," ODIHR spokesperson Katya Andrusz told Forum 18.

In his justification of the alleged need for the new Law, Plenipotentiary for Religious and Ethnic Affairs Rumak claimed that the regime took account of various other Belarusian laws, as well as the Religion Laws of Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan. All these Religion Laws have been strongly criticised by human rights defenders for not complying with legally-binding international human rights obligations. The regime also falsely claimed that the draft Law "does not affect" international human rights obligations.

The man who answered Plenipotentiary Rumak's phone – who refused to give his name – also refused to explain to Forum 18 why Rumak made his demonstrably false claim, and refused to discuss the content of the draft Law.

Many people concerned about the impact of the proposed new Religion Law on freedom of religion or belief did not want to publicly criticise the new Law "as you could end up facing criminal responsibility," one person who wished to remain anonymous for fear of state reprisals told Forum 18.

Exiled human rights defender and Orthodox priest Fr Aleksandr Shramko commented that the regime "adopts new laws, corrects old ones - everything in order to somehow extinguish any pockets of not only possible resistance, but also any uncontrolled life," he wrote on the Christian Vision website. "All this looks somewhat absurd on the part of the authorities, which are 'not living by the law.' But after all, animals also want to be like people, playing on the formal appearance of legality." [read more...]

COMMENTARY: Belarus ironically justifies its new "Relgion Law" by comparing it to the anti-religion laws of post-atheist Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan. Are they really post-atheist and post-communist after all? And if you dare to criticize it, you will be treated as a criminal.

POSTSECONDARY PROGRAMS MAY BOOST IQ IN THOSE WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY
from: Disability Scoop

(23 Jun.) Participating in university-based postsecondary programs may help individuals with intellectual disabilities increase their intelligence, new research suggests.

Adults with intellectual disabilities who were enrolled in a postsecondary program saw “significant improvement” in IQ after 4½ years of participation, according to findings published recently in the European Journal of Special Needs Education.

For the study, researchers looked at 24 adults with mild intellectual disability. All of the participants had similar backgrounds, with the same intelligence level and lifestyle. But, half were enrolled in a postsecondary program known as the Empowerment Project at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and the others were not part of any similar program.

Researchers administered the Weschler Adult Intelligence Test with the participants during the third year of the study and again after 4½ years. While students who participated in the postsecondary program saw IQ gains, scores for the other group remained stable, the study found.

"Our study is the first to indicate the cognitive and intellectual benefits of a (postsecondary education) program for adults with ID, beyond adaptive behaviour, social and employment aspects," the study authors wrote in their findings.

The IQ improvement was seen for students with higher and lower scores at the outset, the researchers noted, but the most striking results were seen among those who were pursuing a bachelor’s degree through the postsecondary program.

"Among those students studying for a BA, IQ recorded the second time exceeded the cutoff point of the ID definition, which is between 70-75. They reached 80, and some higher. This is an amazing development," said Hefziba Lifshitz, a professor of special education at Bar-Ilan University who led the study.

[read more...]

COMMENTARY: Most people adapt their self-image to the image that others project on them. If a grade school teacher says – " Johnny, don't be so slow!" or if other pupils say – "Johnny, you're stupid!" very likely Johnny will think and act like they expect of him. On the other hand, if they encourage Johnny to attain his full potential, he will likely impove his self-image and abilities.

UOC OF THE USA DELIVERS AMBULANCES AND CHARITABLE AID TO UKRAINE AMID ONGOING ATTACKS AGAINST THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE
from: Religious Information Service of Ukraine

(22 Jun.) Heartbreaking stories continue to emerge from war-torn Ukraine, where millions of people have been forced to leave everything behind simply to survive. According to the United Nations, more than half of Ukraine’s displaced families include children and the elderly, and the threat of proper care grows by the day.

Even as they struggle through this great tragedy, Ukraine’s families are seeing signs of hope thanks to the generosity of the faithful, clergy and friends of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA - supporters like you who serve Christ in the vulnerable.

From the beginning of the unprovoked invasion attempt by Russian Federation, one of the biggest problems aid workers face in Ukraine is the lack of ambulances and other transportation to rescue the sick and injured from isolated or war-ravaged locations. On top of that, many hospital emergency rooms have reported a lack of basic lifesaving supplies. So even when patients manage to reach a hospital, they may not receive the care they need.

With the help of the Ukrainian Orthodox community of Munich, Germany, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA was able to purchase and equip over 100 ambulances and logistical vehicles in Ukraine. Most recently, while vising the Ukrainian Orthodox communities of Berlin and Munich, His Eminence Archbishop Daniel held a meeting with Archimandrite Onufriy of Holy Ascension of our Lord Ukrainian Orthodox Monastery in Hurbyn (Rivne region), Ukraine, who arrived Germany in order to facilitate the transportation of the medical ambulances purchased and donated by the generosity of the UOC of the USA.

Speaking with the clergy in attendance (Archimandrite Onufriy, Ihumen Luke, Very Rev. Fr. Valentyn Smoktuniwicz and Rev. Fr. Oleksandr Smoktunowicz of Munich, Germany) and the workers and employees of the medical aid distribution center in the suburbs of Nuremburg, Vladyka Daniel stated:

"These ambulances will save lives and go a step further in ensuring that timely access to emergency care during the war is strengthened and maintained… It is our prayer that these ambulances ensure that first aid can reach patients who need medical transportation… Our ongoing support to empower health-care workers will continue amid the war."

Archbishop Daniel emphasized that support from the Ukrainian Orthodox faithful from the United States of America is a powerful tool in sustaining the Ukraine’s medical system during wartime.

"…Emergency health-care workers are the first ones to arrive at the scene of an accident and do everything they can to save people’s lives. Thanks to these medical vehicles, health-care workers not only provide timely transport for people who are injured or in critical condition from the accident scene to a medical facility, but also stabilize their condition during transport," said Vladyka Daniel. [read more...]

COMMENTARY: It is wonderful to hear that Ukrainian Christians in other countries are coming to the aid of those in their former homeland. But all people in all civilized countries ought to aid Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invaders and its recovery from the mass murders, rapes, and willful destruction of the homes and businesses of innocent civilians.

BIAS IN HEALTH CARE STUDY REVEALS DISCRIMINATION TOWARD CHILDREN WITH DISABILITY
from: Disabled World

(27 Jun.) Children with disabilities, and their families, may face discrimination in the hospitals and clinics they visit for their health care, according to a new study led by researchers at University of Utah Health. These attitudes may lead to substandard medical treatment, which could contribute to poor health outcomes, say the study's authors.

"They mistreated her and treated her like a robot. Every single time a nurse walked in the room, they treated her like she was not even there," said one mother who was interviewed about her child's health care encounters.

The findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, are based on 30 in-depth interviews with family caregivers living in 15 states in the U.S. The children they looked after had medically complex conditions, with most needing health care more than 20 times each year. While the study did not measure how common it is for clinicians to show bias against children with disability, it exposes a serious problem that needs to be addressed, says lead author Stefanie Ames, M.D., a critical care physician at U of U Health.

"Our goal was to validate families' experiences and bring awareness to the issue," Ames says. She and the study's senior author, Nancy Murphy, M.D., are faculty in the Department of Pediatrics at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah. "Recognizing the problem is the first step."

Analysis of interviews with caregivers identified six recurring reasons for, and consequences of, health care provider bias against children with disability and complex medical conditions. Family caregivers perceived that the main drivers of discrimination were:

  * Negative assumptions based on the child's disability and quality of life.
  *A lack of knowledge of how to care for children with complex medical needs.
  *A lack of interest in providing health care or medical interventions based on a perception that the child may not be worthy of care.

The interviews revealed that family caregivers felt that discrimination resulted in:

  * Clinicians dehumanizing children with disability and treating them differently than they would typically developing children.
  * Limited accommodations, for example for wheelchairs, making it difficult for children and their families to access health care.
  * Clinicians not providing the same health care and medical treatments to children with disabilities as they would for those without disabilities.

According to family caregivers, these attitudes, at times, impacted patient care. One said that a doctor recommended against treating her daughter's cancer despite there being a high chance of success that the treatment would work. Another parent indicated that health care providers did not give her child adequate pain relievers before carrying out an uncomfortable medical procedure. [read more...]

COMMENTARY: The average person feels uncomfortable when interacting with another person with a disabiliity or an elderly person. The result is often to ignore and turn away those persons because it's difficult to interact with them. But we must not ignore the fact that there's an over 70% probabliity (vs. our sudden, untimely death) that each one of us will eventually grow old and be disabled too. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." What comes around goes around.

Unspeakable atrocities are taking place in various countries: This photo from the CNN article "Eleven killed in Manipur as new bout of ethnic violence grips India’s northeast" shows Indian soldiers calmly patrolling in Manipur, northwest India. But the intro "Eleven people have been shot dead and 14 injured in a fresh outbreak of ethnic violence that has gripped the northeast Indian state of Manipur" does not convey the horrors that Indian Christians are experiencing. Nor does the article "Manipur Christians: 'The Violence Has Shattered Us’ from Christianity Today shake us from our complacent neutrality.

An Indian pastor in our "Morning Prayers and Readings" Skype group posted some videos about the anti-Christian violence in Manipur, asked for prayers, for spreading this info, and any support if possible. After searching online to verify these reports and and finding the above articles, it turns out this anti-Christian violence has been ongoing for a few months now: I hadn't heard a peep about it in the news and the few articles I found don't convey the awfulness of these persecutions. So I downloaded these videos and saved them on my Google Drive. But Google notified me that 2 of these videos "may violate Google Drive's Violence and Gore policy." So I moved them from my Google Drive and uploaded them to my server. They are terrible to watch, but just reading about these atrocities doesn't make much of an impression: we can walk away and forget about it. Here are 5 of the videos:
www.agape-biblia.org/Christians-houses-destroyed.mp4
www.agape-biblia.org/Christians-beaten-with-slippers.mp4
www.agape-biblia.org/Christians-murdered-along-the-road.mp4
www.agape-biblia.org/Christian-woman-tortured-and-executed.mp4
www.agape-biblia.org/Christians-march-for-108-victims.mp4

The news media do not want us to see the actual "Violence and Gore" that's taking place in the world: they want us believe that we can all get along if we just go along, feeling "warm fuzzies" by being insulated from the truth. We can also allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency by the latest news about Russia's invasion of Ukraine: our eyes glaze over and our attention drifts away to the next news report about the weather or a warm-fuzzy, feel-good story. On February 18, 2023, Reuters reported that the "U.S. declares Russia committed 'crimes against humanity' in Ukraine" – why did it take 12 months to come to that official announcement, after the genocide in Bucha?

It is finally being covered in major news outlets: the BBC reported on June 27 – "Ukraine war: Russia executed 77 civilians detained by its forces, UN says" and showed a photo of an apartment building that was demolished by a Russian missile. It mentioned that "the UN documented 864 individual cases of arbitrary detention by Russia since it launched its invasion last February. Ukraine also violated international law by detaining civilians, though on a much smaller scale." We should be careful not to adopt a "moral equivalency" or "but Ukraine is as bad as Russia" view out of this: 91% of all atrocities in the UN report were by Russia.

The Guardian reported on June 27, 2023 – "UN says Russian forces have tortured and executed civilians in Ukraine" saying – "the UN human rights office... interviewed hundreds of victims and witnesses for a report detailing more than 900 cases of civilians, including children and elderly people, being arbitrarily detained in the conflict, most of them by Russia." It also stated – "Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, had implicated Vladimir Putin in war crimes by admitting the original invasion had not been justified by any provocative actions by Ukraine."

And Deutsche Welle also reported on June 26, 2023 – "Ukraine: German judiciary takes on Russian war criminals" describing how "hundreds of people in Ukraine have been sexually assaulted by Russian soldiers since the invasion of their country began. Now, for the first time, four alleged perpetrators are in the sights of Germany's justice system." Human rights lawyers in Europe are preparing cases against these perpetrators and their superiors, two high-ranking commanders.

Even before and especially since this war flared up on February 24, 2022, we learned that it has had a religious dimension: acccording to "How the Ukraine war is dividing Orthodox Christians" from over a year ago, March 7, 2022, "both sides of the conflict are not merely Christian, they are members of the same church, sharing a thousand years of religious history. Today, 71% of Russians and 78% of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians. In fact, until 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was part of the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), and many parishes remain there (UOC-MP), in conflict with a self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU)," At the war's flare-up in 2022, Metr. Onufriy of the UOC-MP denounced it as a "fratricidal war" and many of his parishes refrained from commemorating their mother church's head, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, just like Kirill and his subordinates stopped commemorating the Ecumenical Patriarch. This signaled a break in communion: schism. Since then, hundreds of UOC-MP parishes have switched to the OCU,

See also the article – "The Russian-Ukrainian War is Now a Theological Crisis" of April 30, 2023. It explains that "symfonia" – the ideal of a harmonious relationship betwee church and state – has become the theological justification for the Russian state using its captive Orthodox Church to provide the theological-ideological basis for Russia's invasion. Ukraine, on the other hand, although it has a higher percentage of Orthodox believers than Russia, doesn't exercise such tight bonds between church and state: all religious confessions can freely practice their faith.

"Russian Invasion Reveals Fissures Among Orthodox Christians," a March 3, 2022 article on "Religion Unplugged," tells how this war has provoked schism in Eastern Orthodoxy worldwide: "Statements from the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Church of Antioch and the Church of Jerusalem have asked for prayers for peace without naming Russia as an aggressor. On the other hand, statements from the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church and, of course, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine have more directly criticized Russia or President Vladimir Putin."

Our last issue of ARC-News closed with the quip – "Taking a middle of the road position is dangerous. You can get knocked down by the traffic from both ways." Some issues require a decision: "Not to decide is to decide." If we do not speak out and take action against atrocities that use religion as a justification, we are tacitly supporting these atrocities. Mouthing meaningless aphorisms such as "thoughts and prayers" or "pray for peace and harmony" is nothing less than meaningless religious mouthwash that you gargle, spit out, and rinse down the drain. War crimes are being committed in the name of religion. It is time to take a stand against this anti-Christian violence!

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