Free Republic

HELENA, Mont. -- A jury on Wednesday found that the maker of Louisville Slugger baseball bats failed to adequately warn about the dangers the product can pose, awarding a family $850,000 for the 2003 death of their son in a baseball game. The family of Brandon Patch argued that aluminum baseball bats are dangerous because they cause the baseball to travel at a greater speed. They contended that their 18-year-old son did not have enough time to react to the ball being struck before it hit him in the head while he was pitching in an American Legion baseball game...

A walking bat in New Zealand took its marching orders from an ancestor, a new fossil-bat discovery reveals. Scientists had long thought that the lesser short-tailed bat evolved its walking preference independently. Since the bat's native habitat lacks predators, researchers reasoned that—much like flightless birds on isolated islands—the bat had adapted to its safer surroundings in part by walking. But the discovery of fossils of a now extinct walking bat in northwestern Queensland, Australia, suggests that the modern-day bats descended from 20-million-year-old Australian relatives. "We were amazed to find they were virtually identical to the bats in New Zealand today,"...

Scientists from Texas are batty over a new discovery which could lead to the single most important medical breakthrough in human history—significantly longer lifespans. The discovery, featured on the cover of the July 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal, shows that proper protein folding over time in long-lived bats explains why they live significantly longer than other mammals of comparable size, such as mice.

A West Columbia woman is undergoing several weeks of preventive medical treatment after handling a bat that tested positive Wednesday for rabies. She took the live bat out of her dog’s mouth Saturday with her bare hands, thinking it was a baby bird, said Department of Health and Environmental Control spokeswoman Clair Boatwright. It’s unclear whether the bat bit the woman, but she is receiving shots, just in case. DHEC would not release her name, citing privacy laws. It was the fourth confirmed rabid animal in Lexington County this year, according to DHEC. The others were raccoons.

GREENPORT, NY — A Rhinebeck man was charged with second-degree harassment by Greenport Police Wednesday after allegedly confronting anti-abortion activists at the entrance of the Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood on Route 9 in Greenport. Jake Freedman, 20, was pulling into the reproductive health care provider’s parking lot with his girlfriend and mother at about 11:15 a.m. when he confronted the activists. “Words were exchanged,” said Greenport Police Officer Joseph O’Connell. Freedman then allegedly exited his vehicle swinging a cricket bat. “Nobody was hit, but two signs were damaged,” O’Connell said. Freedman also pushed a protester into the roadway, according to...

The bat, seen clinging to the external fuel tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery before its launch on Sunday, apparently clung for dear life to the side of the tank as the spaceship lifted off. And what a ride. The shuttle accelerates to an orbital velocity of 17,500 milers per hour, which is 25 times faster than the speed of sound, in just over eight minutes. That's zero to 100 mph in 10 seconds. Did it make it into space? No one knows yet. But photos of Discovery as it cleared the launch tower showed a tiny speck on the...

Bat Hung onto Shuttle During Liftoff 03.17.09 A bat that was clinging to space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank during the countdown to launch the STS-119 mission remained with the spacecraft as it cleared the tower, analysts at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center concluded. Based on images and video, a wildlife expert who provides support to the center said the small creature was a free tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its right shoulder or wrist. The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit. Because the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge coexists...

Mother Gets 3 Months for Hitting Sex Offender with Baseball Bat Good for this Mom ...yes, an un provoked attack on a sex offender, and while that is a little over the top ...I say good for her. Isn't it amazing that criminally harmless gays are aware enough to find "gay friendly" communities and thus self segregate themselves ...but these sex offenders drop in where ever they want and bring fear to the life of families and young kids around them. Oprah needs to interview this woman and comp her 1M ...for her "statement" on behalf of society and our...

An Islip Terrace man is charged with fatally beating his 68-year-old father with a baseball bat after they argued Thursday morning about the son's messy bedroom, Suffolk homicide detectives said. Norman Murray, 33, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. After mortally injuring his father, Ainsley Murray, the son called police shortly before 8 a.m. to tell them what he'd done, police said. When officers arrived at the family home at 349 Oceanside St. they found Norman Murray sitting on the front steps. They found the father in a basement bedroom where the son had battered him with an aluminum...

Lake Wales, FL (AHN) - A Florida boy was bitten on the finger by a rabid bat while trying to get his dog away from the animal. The 12-year-old Lake Wales boy is receiving a series of shots to protect him from developing the fatal disease after the bat tested positive for rabies. Although human deaths from rabies are rare in the United States, many wild animals carry the disease, which can be transmitted to family pets and then to their human owners.

Flitting with disaster BY DAVE BARRY (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published Oct. 14, 2001.) A very important issue that we all need to be concerned about is global warming, and we will get to that shortly, but first we need to discuss what happened the other night in my kitchen. It began when I was in the bedroom, flossing my teeth (I keep my teeth in the bedroom). Suddenly my wife burst in and said: ''There's a bat in the kitchen!'' A snappy comeback line would have been: ''No, thanks! I already ate!'' But snappy comebacks are...

Good grief. The bizarre antisemitic propaganda being fed to the Iranian people would be funny in a dark way if it didn’t provoke such a sense of foreboding, of history repeating. (Courtesy of MEMRI TV.) (Video at link) Following are excerpts from an episode of an Iranian documentary series on Hollywood cinema, featuring “Saving Private Ryan,” which aired on IRINN – the Iranian News Channel on May 27, 2008: Narrator: The concentrated efforts of the Zionist lobbies in America have led the U.S. government to be the greatest supporter of the regime occupying Jerusalem. In recent years, following the exposure...

    To be exceptionally honest with you, Ultrasonic Batgoggles don't exactly need any pimping from us. What you see above is a homegrown device that enables humans to discover how bats must feel when using echolocation in order to judge how far away certain objects are. The main components are an Arduino microcontroller clone, Devantech ultrasonic sensor and a set of welding goggles -- oh, and a sick poker face to really round things out. Check out the links below to get a gist of the background as well as a step-by-step guide to concocting your own. EXCERPTED....

New And Deadly Viruses Passed Through Sweet Food And Domestic Animals ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2008) — Nipah virus is a new and deadly brain and lung disease that emerged from Singapore and Malaysia ten years ago. It is now spreading into rural India and Bangladesh killing up to three-quarters of the people who become infected in some outbreaks, scientists heard April 3, 2008 at the Society for General Microbiology's 162nd meeting. "People are catching this disease by drinking date palm juice or probably by eating fruit contaminated by the virus, or through contact with infected animals. We have seen nine...

A six-inch robotic spy plane modeled after a bat would gather data from sights, sounds and smells in urban combat zones and transmit information back to a soldier in real time. That's the Army's concept, and it has awarded the University of Michigan College of Engineering a five-year, $10-million grant to help make it happen. The grant establishes the U-M Center for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, called COM-BAT for short. The grant includes an option to renew for an additional five years and $12.5 million. U-M researchers will focus on the microelectronics. They will develop sensors, communication tools...

It's been three decades now since the ping of aluminum started drowning out the crack of a wooden bat on youth baseball fields across America. But that older sound of summer is making a comeback on some grassy diamonds these days — not for nostalgia, but safety. Some Illinois lawmakers, in fact, want to ban metal bats from youth baseball.

MANILA (AFP) - A new species of flying fox or fruit bat has been discovered on an island south of Manila, it was reported Monday. The orange-coloured bat with a distinctive white-stripped face was discovered in a protected wildlife area on Mindoro Island, the Philippine Star newspaper said quoting the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). The discovery was a result of joint research between the University of Kansas' Biodiversity Research Center and a team from the Comparative Biogeography and Conservation of Philippine Vertebrates (CBCPV), the paper said. Known as the Mindoro Stripe-Faced Fruitbat for its striking facial features...

(Two years after amazing recovery, Fond du Lac girl is graduating today) Fond du Lac, WI - Jeanna Giese stood in the middle of the atrium at Marian College, nervously twisting a sparkly ring and frequently touching a blue bracelet that symbolized her miraculous recovery from rabies. As she cycled between anticipation of her date's arrival and fear that he might not show up, it was hard to believe that doctors once questioned whether the teen would be able to return to school - let alone recover enough to dance with friends at her senior prom or graduate on time...

BALLSTON SPA, N.Y. - An upstate New York couple didn't think a few bats in the attic were much of a problem when they were buying a house last summer. Months later, they found out how wrong they were when they discovered more than a ton and a half of bat droppings up there. Nick LaBoda and Jenna Caputo say a home inspector informed them about the bats. They called an exterminator, who told them to wait a while before removing the bats because the babies were too young to fly. Then they forgot about the bats until they smelled...

Ouch....

Batboys usually don't get much glory. But Nate Reese has experienced, albeit briefly, the adulation that comes with completing a great play that gets shown again and again on television, sometimes in slow motion. On Wednesday night, the crowd at the Metrodome leapt to their feet with a roar when Reese leveled a fan who had scampered in from left field, done a head-first slide into home plate and was getting up to resume a rabbit run from security guards. "Play of the game," Minnesota Twins relief pitcher Joe Nathan said. In the aftermath of the tackle, Reese sat in...

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas teenager who was bitten by a bat while he slept in his home has died of rabies, the Houston hospital that treated him said in a statement. Zachary Jones, 16, died on Friday, a week after he became ill from the bat bite he received about a month before. According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control statistics, only 10 other people have died of rabies in the United States since 1998. "Rabies, which causes devastating neurological damage, is almost always fatal once symptoms appear, as was the case with this child," Texas Children's Hospital said...

Police questioned high school students about suspects caught on video beating a homeless man and said they expect to make an arrest soon.Fort Lauderdale police were questioning current and former students from South Plantation High School late Friday as detectives closed in on an arrest in the bludgeoning death of a homeless man and the brutal beating of two others. Police were investigating a tip that one suspect -- thought to be one of three males seen on a surveillance video savagely swinging baseball bats or sticks -- is a former student who graduated last year. ''Our friend knows...

Big brain means small testes, finds bat study 12:16 07 December 2005 NewScientist.com news service Gaia Vince Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences The brainier male bats are, the smaller their testicles, according to a new study. Researchers suggest the correlation exists because both organs require a lot of energy to grow and maintain, leading individual species to find the optimum balance. The analysis of 334 species of bat found that in species where the females were promiscuous, the males had evolved larger testes but had relatively small brains. In species, where the females were monogamous, the situation...

BRITISH American Tobacco (BAT) is to launch a controversial “safer cigarette” designed to cut the risk of smoking-related diseases such as cancer and heart failure by up to 90%. The cigarettes use tobacco treated to produce lower levels of cancer-causing chemicals. They also incorporate a new type of filter said to remove more of the remaining toxins. The company wants to launch the cigarettes in 2006 but has kept the move secret, knowing it would infuriate anti-smoking groups. Campaigners will dismiss any attempt to reinvent cigarettes as a less harmful product as a cynical ploy to recruit more smokers when...

VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) -- Tonya Harding tussled in her home with a man she described as her boyfriend, prompting an emergency call by the figure skater-turned-boxer and an arrest of the man. Christopher Nolan was charged with assault and pleaded not guilty Monday. He told deputies Harding threw him down and bit his finger when he said she had too much to drink on Sunday. The 27-year-old Nolan was ordered to stay away from Harding and to avoid alcohol.

Girl battles flying bat! By:De Anna Sheffield Seminole, Florida -- Last Friday night in Seminole, 17-year-old Teresa Shields was heading home after work, when she got a strange surprise. Teresa Shields, bitten by bat "I was driving down the street, and something flew in my window, I heard it come through, and it landed in the backseat. I wasn't sure, I thought a little kid threw something plastic, because it (the object) looked brown and plastic. I turned on the light, I reached back and it hissed. I said, oh my goodness! I dropped it. It spread its wings out...

MEADVILLE, Pa. - A man was accidentally killed by a sledgehammer his son-in-law was swinging at a bat that had flown into the home they shared, police said. Francis V. Mercier, 66, of East Mead Township, was hit in the head Friday by the three-pound hammer as his son-in-law, D. J. Delancey, was trying to kill the animal with it. Delancey and his wife had moved into Mercier's home a few years ago, neighbors said. Delancey accidentally struck Mercier, who was standing behind him, about 1 a.m. Friday, police said. Results of an autopsy performed Saturday were not immediately available....

School officials thumb their noses at California parents who object to a highly controversial musical being performed by students. You might expect to find musicals containing depictions of rape, incest and bestiality somewhere off-Broadway—not in a high school production. But at La Canada High School in La Canada Flintridge, Calif., this year's spring musical is the highly controversial "Bat Boy." The main character is a pointy-eared half-human boy with fangs who's discovered living in a cave in Hope Falls, W.V. While exploring the world, Bat Boy and the rest of the cast use drugs, alcohol and sex as tools for...

"Now You Know, Part I: What Is A Moonbat"People often ask me where the phrase Moonbat originated. I usually reply to them "buy me another drink or three and I'll tell you about it." Here is the condensed version (you can start stirring the martinis now, if you please - thank you). You know what the moon is, right? That big silver ball in the night sky? That neighboring planetoid that a million songs have been written about? The place Neil Armstrong took a giant leap? Home of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon? Well, the ancient Latin word for moon...

Step 1. Tie balloons to car. Step 2. Drive like a bat out of hell.... Step 3. Watch people freak out !!!!

How can you not like a musical where the very first tune includes the lyric: "Sink your fangs into my soul/Only you can make me whole?" That couplet actually captures "Bat Boy: The Musical" pretty well. Campy, kitschy, and even a little kinky, this is an irreverent, rollickingly funny musical that at once skewers the genre and provides plenty of mischievous entertainment on its own.

Rabid Bat Spoils Woman's Breakfast The Associated Press ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - A journalism professor received rabies shots after encountering a rabid bat while eating breakfast outside of a downtown cafe. Cheryl Koski said she was eating at a table outside the Dome Grill on Tuesday morning when she felt something crawling on her left ankle. "It was like being hit by lightning," said Koski, 47. "One minute, I'm eating breakfast, and the next, there's a bat crawling up my leg." Koski trapped the bat with a restaurant tray and called animal control. It tested positive for rabies Wednesday....

Britain's largest tobacco company has been testing chocolate and alcohol-flavoured cigarettes, which campaigners say are aimed at enticing children into smoking. British American Tobacco, whose brands include Rothmans and Lucky Strike, has been carrying out scientific trials on animals in Canada. As well as chocolate, wine and sherry, BAT has also experimented with cocoa, corn syrup, cherry juice, maple syrup and vanilla. Last night, the anti-smoking lobby group, Action on Smoking and Health, reacted with fury to the revelations. Deborah Arnott, director of Ash, said: "Adding sweets to tobacco is appalling. It shows that we need more tobacco regulation to...

Who would I be? I am a Southwestern myotis. That is I am a bat. I am very similar to the long-eared myotis, except my ears are shorter. How big would I be? I have an average wingspan of 10 1/2 inches. My body is about 2 inches long. Where would I live? I can be found in the ponderosa-pine mountain islands of Central and Southern Arizona and New Mexico. I like woods with mixed pine and oak, also chaparral and riparian forests. I am a summer resident in these states, but I am very secretive as to where I...

Las Vegas-AP -- Police in Las Vegas, Nevada, say a woman bludgeoned her two children to death with a baseball bat and then stepped into the path of a tractor-trailer, in an apparent suicide attempt. Sylvia Ewing is hospitalized in critical condition. Police say if she recovers, she'll face murder charges. Police lieutenant Tom Monahan says shortly after Ewing's husband went to work yesterday, Ewing took her four- and eight-year-old children to a nearby Wal-Mart and bought the bat. A few hours later, witnesses saw her step into the truck's path. Police say her husband found his children's bodies when...

A bat echolocation system, adapted for human ears, has been used allow people to locate objects in a virtual reality environment. The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks. "When you drive, you can't look at the speedometer and the road at the same time, but you can listen to the radio at the same time," says Dean Waters, a bat expert at the University of Leeds, UK. Humans cannot generate or hear the high...

This morning Brian Kilmeade took a shot at Bill Clinton while talking about Sammy Sosa. Brian:"Geez, we had Sammy Sosa doing this in 1998, then Mark Maguire with the steroids, and also Clinton. Was anything in 1998 real at all?" Then the other day he took a pot shot at CNN. He was talking to Michele Malkin, and she said that some critics tell her to go back to her own country. Brian responded.. "Well, those people are from CNN, and they are just jealous because you are here on Foxnews."

Woman convicted in beating death Posted on Sat, May. 10, 2003 By Judy Lin The Associated Press HOLLIDAYSBURG - A woman convicted in the baseball-bat beating death of another woman was sentenced to life in prison on Friday, despite a prosecutor's arguments that she deserved death because the killing amounted to torture. The Blair County jury deliberated less than an hour before returning with the sentence for Marie Louis Seilhamer, 21. Seilhamer's attorneys got the leniency they argued for, saying the defendant had no criminal record, was only 19 when the killing occurred and, most importantly, was under the influence...

A man, suspected of being a Fedayeen member, is beaten by a group residents on the streets of Basra, Iraq (news - web sites) Tuesday April 8, 2003. (AP Photo/Jon Mills, Pool)

HILLARY BOOK PAST DUE, PUBLISHER'S ANGST OVER NO MANUSCRIPT, NO TITLE; SENATOR TOOK LARGEST ADVANCE IN HISTORY...developing...breaking...sunday night drudge setup for show...breaking....

<p>DALLAS (AP) - A substance in the saliva of vampire bats could prove to be a potent new treatment for strokes, an Australian scientist says.</p> <p>That same substance -- Desmodus rotundus salivary plasminogen activator, or DSPA -- might someday be given to stroke victims to dissolve clots and thereby limit brain damage, he said.</p>

<p>BRADENTON, Fla. — Grant Griffin's one-bedroom apartment isn't big enough for him, and more importantly, bats have turned up in his shower, sink and sheets. So he is moving.</p> <p>Exterminators aren't allowed to kill the bats, which are considered native wildlife and can't be trapped or poisoned, said University of Florida assistant professor Mark Hostetler. They can only be killed if they are rabid, which county health officials are testing for after Griffin and his girlfriend discovered bite marks.</p>

<p>A Washoe County jury deadlocked Monday night on an attempted murder charge against a teen-ager who claimed he was insane when he and a friend used a baseball bat to beat two men outside a Sparks mosque last year. Scott A. Cannady, 17 years old at the time of the attack, pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to five felony charges — attempted murder and four counts involving battery with a deadly weapon, robbery using a deadly weapon and conspiracy to commit robbery. The jury rejected his insanity plea.</p>

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - The world has lost its largest colony of bats living in a man-made structure. They've been evicted -- to save centuries of Cambodian history. Visitors to the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh will no longer see the dusk flight of more than two million bats from the roof of the National Museum like billows of smoke stretched across the orange setting sun. The huge colony of wrinkle-lipped bats has been shut out of its old roost in the museum's roof, their home since April 1975 when the communist Khmer Rouge rebels emptied Phnom Penh of people at...