How Do You Want Your Little Children to Live?

ouldn't it be nice if everyone could have the same chance to live in health and happiness on this planet?  It obviously could not be possible in these current circumstances. There are so many bad people that there is no longer any possibility for the average honest person to expect their children to live in peace and security.  To have the kind of life,  portrayed in the countenance of this thoughtful little girl, is almost lost.  Man has left his natural state.

"Art is man's nature: Nature is God's art."
        Philip James Bailey (1816 - 1902); English poet

Because of our current economic and environmental circumstances I believe we are in the final death throws of a culture that has squandered  it's opportunity to continue.  The evidence indicates there is no reason to believe otherwise. That is why there must be an external course correction to man's self-destructive nature.  That correction I believe will cause billions of people to perish, but some will be left alive.  If there were to be no future external intervention man could not survive. He cannot save his own future.

Mass Extinction is the Pending Climax to Man's Ruthless Rule

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution chemical and industrial manipulation of our natural environment has generated far more harm than good.  Still the purpose of creating consumer products demands that technology be directed towards the refinement of products for consumption, not a purposeful restoration of what is naturally lost in the process.  The profit motive dictates that economic gain must be at the expense of the Earth's ability to sustain itself.

The following news articles specifically outline why this must occur.  Common sense and the ability to do what is right must be restored. Why?  Because I believe that man is not alive simply for nothing (1).  He has better qualities than that. 

Those who do not want to follow or cling to a higher purpose for the greater moral benefit and further, to strive to do what is right, will not continue on this beautiful planet.  Why should they? Give me one clear and purposeful reason that they should be allowed to continue? After reading the following articles and if you have contrary comments I would like to read them.

Note: Go to the article by clicking on the red lettering below. 

The most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet concludes that human activities threaten the Earth's ability to sustain future generations.  Articles/world cant sustain itself .html

My E-mail address for your response >>>      mailto:frank@fetarts.com

Coptic family killed in robbery: police

BY AUSTIN FENNER and OWEN MORITZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

A Jersey City family slaughtered inside their home in January died for money - not their religious beliefs, prosecutors said yesterday.

An upstairs neighbor and his alleged accomplice were charged yesterday with the brutal murders of Hossam Armanious, 47, and his wife and two daughters.

Hudson County prosecutors revealed that the two paroled drug dealers bound, gagged and stabbed Armanious and his family because his daughter recognized upstairs tenant Edward McDonald during a robbery.

McDonald, 25, and Hamilton Sanchez, 30, were each held on $10 million bail on four counts of murder yesterday. Weeping as he was led away, the muscular Sanchez cried out: "I didn't do it. I didn't kill nobody."

Coptic Christians in Jersey City had believed that the Egyptian family was butchered in their apartment by Muslim extremists because Armanious posted anti-Muslim comments on the Internet.

But Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said, "the motive for these murders was robbery. This was a crime based on greed, the desperate need of money."

Authorities said Armanious, his wife, Amal Garas, 37, and their daughters, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8, were killed three days before their bodies were found Jan. 14.

Cops went to the family's home after relatives had not heard from them for days.

DeFazio said McDonald and Sanchez entered the Oakland Ave. home wearing masks. They allegedly bound and gagged the mother and her daughters and waited for the father to come home.

After Armanious arrived, Monica managed to loosen her bonds and recognized McDonald, DeFazio said. McDonald then killed the girl and Sanchez murdered her father, mother and sister, authorities said.

Even after the grisly murders, McDonald and his family continued to live upstairs.

It took authorities almost two months to obtain the slain family's bank records. When they did, they found McDonald had withdrawn thousands of dollars from Armanious' account using an ATM card.

Garas' brother, Eyan Garas, said he met McDonald at the prosecutor's office during the homicide probe. "When I saw him for the first time, he was with his kids and his wife," he said. "He was like an angel."

Asian community unites at trial

Rip attacks on deliverymen

BY SCOTT SHIFREL
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

The attack left Huang Chen's face nearly unrecognizable.

The 18-year-old was viciously pummeled and then stabbed to death as he delivered a $10 order of Chinese food - allegedly so the assailants could get enough money for a pair of Nikes, cops said.

As the trial of one of Chen's accused murderers continues in Queens this week, the verdict will be closely watched by the city's Asian community.

"People worry about a perception that we are not real people, that we really aren't Americans," said City Councilman John Liu (D-Queens).

"It's like killing a dog. The notion that an Asian person is not human is what permits two or three 16-year-olds to commit a crime of such brutality."

Defendant Charles Bryant, 17, faces 25 years to life if found guilty of the Feb. 13, 2004, slaying. Co-defendant Nayquan Miller, also 17, is awaiting trial.

As the bloody details spilled out of the Kew Gardens courtroom last week, reporters from three Chinese newspapers and two cable stations covered the trial for the New York, Taiwan and Hong Kong markets.

Asian leaders from as far as Chicago have showed up to support the Chens and to protest a series of attacks in recent years on Asian food workers. Rallies outside the courthouse didn't stop even after Queens Supreme Court Justice Robert Hanophy warned against them.

"The community is very concerned because we feel like Asians are being targeted," said York Chan, who heads the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a Manhattan-based coalition of 60 groups.

"These workers mind their own business and work hard and try to make a living, and they get murdered for such nonsense. We want to see a heavy sentence to send a message."

Chen's killing in a Rochdale Village apartment in southeast Queens was the sixth high-profile assault of a Chinese food worker in the past five years.

"It's just another in a long series of attacks," Liu said. "In the past there has been a perception, rightly or wrongly, that the criminal justice system has not pursued the attackers enough. That's why we came out so quickly after this happened."

But many also are shocked at the sheer brutality of the crime. Chen was pounded in the head with a hammer and a baseball bat, stabbed in the chest with a knife and then tossed into a nearby pond.

"He was tortured to death," his sister, Summer Chen, 21, said before the start of the trial. "I don't know how could they do this to my brother."

The worst for Summer, her sister Yvonne and their parents - who all have attended each day of the trial - will come Tuesday as the prosecution closes its case with testimony from the medical examiner's office, including gruesome autopsy photos.

Even seasoned newspaper reporters with the Chinese press have been moved by the case.

"A reporter is not supposed to get too involved, but this is such a tragedy," said Yu-Kwong Chan, who has covered the investigation, the trial and more than a dozen hearings for the Sing Tao Daily, the largest circulation Chinese daily in the United States. "It makes me angry."

Assaults vicious and deadly

·  July 18, 2003: Li Zhen Lin, 25, a worker at the Beautiful Garden restaurant in Far Rockaway, Queens, was shot and killed during a robbery.

·  Oct. 15, 2002: Jian Chun Lin, 36, delivering for Happy House restaurant, was shot and killed in the lobby of a Brownsville building.

·  March 20, 2001: Wu-Ching Wang, 51, who worked at the New Cheung Hing Restaurant near Chinatown, was beaten with a baseball bat. He survived.

Suspect Kills 3, Including Judge, in Atlanta Courthouse

TLANTA, March 11 - A man on trial for rape shot and killed the judge in his case, a court stenographer and a sheriff's deputy in a courthouse rampage on Friday morning, law enforcement officials said. The suspect fled, hijacking several cars and setting off a manhunt in several states across the South.

The shooting terrorized the city of Atlanta, where officials cordoned off blocks of downtown, evacuated the Fulton County Courthouse, where the killings occurred, and locked down more than 40 schools in three counties. Tearful court employees and lawyers stood on the sidewalk outside police lines, describing the pandemonium that followed the shooting as deputies with guns drawn ushered people to safety.

The suspect, Brian Nichols, 33, used a gun that he wrested from a sheriff's deputy, who was left in critical condition with head injuries, the police said.

Lillie Robbins, a juror in another case, had just passed the courthouse security checkpoint when she saw a group of officers chasing the suspect. "All of these deputy sheriffs broke out of the elevator in a dead run," Ms. Robbins said. "They were yelling, 'Get out, get out, get out of the building!'"

The shooting immediately raised questions about security procedures in the courthouse, in part because Mr. Nichols, 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, had been caught with two sharpened weapons in his shoes two days before. And it prompted a new wave of anxiety among judges and court officials nationwide, coming less than two weeks after the killings of the husband and mother of a federal judge in Chicago by a man who had lost a case in that judge's court. [Page A11.]

Sheriff Myron Freeman of Fulton County identified the victims as Judge Rowland W. Barnes of Superior Court; Julie Ann Brandau, the court stenographer; and Deputy Hoyt Teasley, a 19-year veteran. Deputy Cynthia Hall, a 16-year-veteran, was expected to survive her injuries.

About 9 a.m., Mr. Nichols was taken from a basement detention room in one part of the courthouse to a small room on the eighth floor so he could change into street clothes before being taken into court. Mr. Nichols, who was not free on bail, was escorted by a female deputy, said Alan Dreher, an assistant chief of the Atlanta Police Department. Defendants in Fulton County, as in many jurisdictions, do not appear in the courtroom in jail uniforms or handcuffs to avoid prejudicing juries.

Chief Dreher said investigators were not sure where the struggle over the gun took place.

Deputy Hall was left with a split-open forehead, facial fractures and a bruised brain, said a trauma surgeon at Grady Memorial Hospital, where she was treated.

"The suspect then made his way into the courtroom and held all of the persons inside at bay with a handgun," Chief Dreher said at a news conference. "He then shot and killed the judge, shot and killed the court stenographer and made his escape from the courtroom."

About a dozen people were in the courtroom for a civil proceeding, after which Mr. Nichols's trial was to have convened for the day. Prosecutors were preparing to cross-examine him about the rape accusation. Mr. Nichols is accused of binding his ex-girlfriend with duct tape and sexually assaulting her. Mr. Nichols's lawyer, Barry Hazen, did not return several phone calls to his office.

The first trial on the charges ended earlier this month in a hung jury. But this time, lawyers with business at the courthouse said, prosecutors were presenting a stronger case.

Mr. Nichols apparently agreed. "Yesterday, he did look at me and said 'You're doing a much better job,'" Gayle Abramson, the prosecutor on the case, said at a news conference. "I think in his mind he knew he was going to be convicted."

After the shooting, Mr. Nichols fled down eight flights of stairs and out of the building, witnesses said. "Me and my lawyer was coming out of the elevator and he was flying past," said Selina Brown, 36. But all the deputies were heading the opposite direction, toward the courtroom, she said.

Another witness to the shooting Friday, who refused to give his name because Mr. Nichols was still at large, said he watched from outside as the suspect ran down the stairs, visible through the building windows. When Mr. Nichols emerged from the building, the witness said, a deputy was coming out another door. Mr. Nichols saw the deputy, Hoyt Teasley, and shot him in the stomach, killing him.

He then crossed the street to a man who witnesses said was getting out of his car, took the keys at gunpoint and drove away. Mr. Nichols hijacked at least two other cars and a tow truck in quick succession, the authorities said. Two of the carjacking victims, in two different parking garages, were employees of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a spokeswoman for the newspaper said.

One was Don O'Briant, a reporter, who said later that the suspect tried to force him into the trunk of the car, a green Honda Accord. When Mr. O'Briant refused, the man pistol-whipped him, the reporter said. "I thought this was a routine carjack," he said after he was treated for a cut and released from the Atlanta Medical Center. The police released photographs of Mr. Nichols and asked people to be on the lookout for the Accord, with Georgia license plate 6584YN.

The deaths shook the close-knit courthouse community, where Judge Barnes, who had served on the bench full time since 1998, was respected by lawyers and employees alike.

"Judge Barnes was a good dude," said Winifred Fambro, a clerk who had worked in his court. "Of all the judges, to look at him, you'd just think he was a real redneck. But he was a good, all around man. He wasn't biased or anything. He could look past you, and see your heart."

T. Wayne Marshall, a defense lawyer, said: "I can't think of a better judge that I'd rather appear before, I'll tell you that. He was just easy to get along with, he was totally fair."

Ms. Brandau, the stenographer, had worked at the courthouse for a quarter century and brought home-baked treats to jurors every day.

"The staff and I are sometimes jealous of her attentions to the jury, and lament the usual lack of leftovers," Judge Barnes wrote of Ms. Brandau in The Journal-Constitution.

Dorsey Jones, a court clerk, said that when she started working at the courthouse a few years ago she was a security guard and Deputy Teasley was her first supervisor. "He took me under his wing and just showed me the ropes," she said. "He taught me how to take my job seriously."

Several lawyers and court employees said courthouse security had long been an issue. "I'm just surprised this hasn't happened before this," said Renee Rockwell, a lawyer who works often at the courthouse.

Nab beau for head in bowling bag