Word: left
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sierra Leone's eight-year civil war has settled into an uneasy peace. But it has left a cruel legacy. At the height of the country's chaos this spring, rebel soldiers intensified an ugly ritual of amputations, seizing civilians and chopping off limbs. Human-rights groups estimate that thousands have been maimed in this fashion. Two of them told their stories to TIME's Malcolm Linton...
...dark it was blue--you couldn't see any sign of laughter in it. He cut us with the ax one by one. I was number five. The adults were begging, and the children were crying. They put my hands on the ground and cut them off quickly, the left first. I didn't feel anything, or just something like a sting. Everything went dark, and I fell over on the ground. After a while I got up and walked a little way, but then I blacked out again and fell over. I don't know what happened...
...anything. If the government forgets about us, we'll take revenge. I can't do it myself, but I would tell my family to take revenge on the person who did this to me. We have no guns, but we have the traditional ways of revenging. I am left-handed, and it will be enough if they can just give me a prosthesis for my left...
...systems work together seamlessly. If you're taking a bicycle ride, for example, the memory of how to operate the bike comes from one set of neurons; the memory of how to get from here to the other side of town comes from another; the nervous feeling you have left over from taking a bad spill last time out comes from still another. Yet you are never aware that your mental experience has been assembled, bit by bit, like some invisible edifice inside your brain...
...horsemen are galloping across the smoky skies, and a third of the world's people will be slain--a third of those who remain, that is, following the recent Christian Rapture, which has literally snatched believers from cars and offices and carried them off bodily to heaven. Among those left behind to battle evil as part of the rag-tag "Tribulation Force" are Rayford Steele, a former commercial-airline pilot, and Cameron ("Buck") Williams, publisher of the cyberjournal The Truth. Their enemy: one Nicolae Carpathia, former U.N. Secretary-General, current Global Community Potentate and--some believe--the Antichrist...