Mom sat in the car to wait while Dad took his four sons up to a house with a lit porch to do some final trick-or-treating. The neighbor hears what he believes to be fireworks, some Halloween mischief. The reality was that 22 year old Quentin Patrick fired at the family approaching the home in Sumter, South Carolina, about 40 miles East of Columbia.
One of the boys, age 12, was fatally wounded and later died in the hospital, while his father and brother sustained non-life threatening injuries.
Patrick, is charged with murder and assault and battery with the intent kill. He is currently in police custody.
"The investigation is continuing into what has been a very tragic evening," Ms Patterson was quoted by the AP as saying.
"Our sorrow and sympathy goes out to this family."
She said there were other people inside the house at the time of the incident, but she did not expect any of them to be charged.
What the hell is going on is this world when someone shoots a children trick-or-treating in South Carolina, when someone shoots a pregnant woman in the head at a stop light in Chicago, when some coward shoots an innocent 11 year old twice in the head after he's been kidnapped and probably seen his grandmother and uncle killed in Chicago, when a moron doesn't put a safety lock on his hunting rifle and a 9 year old is killed in St. Clair, or when gang members get involved in someone else's business and a stray bullet kills a 3 year old in LA? Why is it that when gun violence has consistently killed small children that people advocate the present standards to the ownership of guns? Why do we as intelligent adults want to have automatic rifles legal in the United States? Why is a poorly written amendment to our Constitution held to mean what it wasn't intended for? If you can answer those questions reasonably, you obviously know something I don't.
Next time someone tells you that guns don't kill people, trigger fingers do, ask them to attempt to bury that finger through a human skull or through a breast bone. When they tell you that it is impossible, remind them of their prior statement.
Why not? His approval rating is at 29% (According to "Faux News") so there's nothing to loose, and everyone in the country is addicted to the presidential race so noone will even notice.
Today is the first day that the US strike killing 8 in Syria *SUNDAY* has made it to the front page of any major news source, at least that I have seen, and that was only for a few hours on Google News. So if you haven't heard the US went several miles into Syrian
territory to the Abu Kamal border community, and had a firefight with a group on the ground with a couple of helicopters, then took the body of the one they were after. The target was Badran Turki al-Mazidih or "Abu Ghadiyah", a top al-Qaida in Iraq figure who operated a network of smuggling fighters in and out of the country. Now Al Jazeera reports that 4 of the dead were children.
Wait it gets better. Washington has yet to even formally acknowledge the raid. Even better, Syria has threatened to pull their troops off the border and basically screw any form of border security if the US doesn't formally apologize and knock it off.
So yesterday hundreds of riot police set a perimiter around the US Embassy in Damascus just before a crowd of tens of thousands headed to a central square for a 2 hour peaceful protest of the attacks. Now the preemptive riot police and the fact that in a counrty where you are arrested for protesting I can only assume that this was goverment-orchistrated. None the less the fact that is was peacefull still gives me hope that Bush hasn't started another fight that he can't finish.
I have recently decided that I wanted to learn Arabic. I love learning and I speak
Francais tres mal already, so I wanted to learn another. When looking at all the languages I could learn, I thought about why I would want to take the time to learn them.
I started with Spanish and that's the most reasonable option according to my life experiences. Many people around me speak Spanish and I have a hard time speaking to those Spanish speakers who do not speak English but I get by... barely. Also Spanish in my field Spanish is a smart choice because there are
alot of people I need to either question, help or get a statement from that I need a translator to get the whole story.
Then I looked at Italian. I thought that would just be a fun language to learn. It's very beautiful and there's
alot of history in the Italian language. It would also be a great advantage whenever I go to Europe to speak the languages in two of the major places I want to visit.
Chinese was another language that I thought would be fun to know. I picked up a few quick phrases to test the waters and thought that it was a beautiful language. I quickly decided that I would need to take a class rather than try on my own because I could very easily call
some one's mother a horse just by the inflection in my voice.
I
also looked into Arabic. Arabic has always
fascinated me. I loved hearing it in the
hookah lounges and at the local Middle Eastern shops I would visit. I know a couple phrases already and thought that it may be fun to learn.
The more I looked into Arabic the more I wanted to learn it. Arabic is the 5
th most commonly spoken language and is the official language of over 20 countries and there are well over 300 million native speakers of the language. These speakers are largely concentrated in the Middle East, but there are minority groups of native speakers throughout the world. It is also an official language of the United Nations. I found this great free site,
Madinah Arabic, that has lessons set up in both reading and speaking. I am currently still
learning the alphabet but I am very encouraged by how easy this site makes it to learn on my own terms.
The mother and brother of Chicago's Englewood native Jennifer were found dead at 3pm today in what appears to be a domestic dispute. J. Hud's nephew 7 year old Julian King was abducted as well during the incident at 71st and Yale on the city's south side.
Police have suspect William Balfour in custody, as well as several others but say that Julian is still missing. An AMBER AlERT was issued for a 1994 white Chevrolet Suburban with license plate #X584859. They might also be in a teal or green Chrysler Concord with a temporary license plate, a left front headlight hanging out and scratches on the left side of the vehicle, police said.
According to state records Balfour was paroled in 2006 after convictions for attempted murder, vehicular hijacking and receiving stolen property. Sounds a little to familiar. This douche bag extraordinaire claims to not know the location of the child or of the events that occurred.
Murders happen all to often in this city and it's saddening thing. But what bothers me is when the victims are truly innocent, not "He was planning to turn around and was a talented musician" or "He was a good kid but did some bad things," but a truly innocent person. Or when it involves a young child. These are things that don't need to happen and this scumbag should be quartered.
I love wine, I really do. I love the smell, the taste and how it can make a simple meal seem so much better. I just have two major problems with wine.
First I can never figure out how to pair most wines and that's where this great little tool I found comes in handy. Wine Web Central's
Food and Wine Pairing gizmo has taken alot of the headache out of pairing your meals with the perfect wine. You just select your dish and then the major spice/flavor that corresponds with that dish, and it gives you a Good, Better, Best rating on the wines to pair with that meal.
My Second downfall is the pronunciation of wines. REALLY?!?!? Is it completely necessary to name a wine made in California or Australia in French? Well, I found this little gem at
Wine Taste TV. The "
Pronunciation Guide For Wine Producers And Proprietary Brands" in their Wine 101 section has enabled me to stop sounding like a baboon when trying to pronounce wines I have never heard of.
I hope this makes someone's life just a tad easier as I know it has made mine. Good luck!
