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CINCINNATI, OH—A catcher for the Cincinnati Reds was ejected from a home game today after he was caught flashing several racist hand signals to the pitcher. "We are shocked and saddened by this overt display of white supremacy from one of our players," said MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. "This is not who we are. We stand with the BIPOC community who is no doubt feeling so much pain and trauma after being forced to see such horrific racism during one of our games." According to witnesses, Cincinnati catcher Bugs "Sluggo" O'Callahan flashed several evil hand signals during the game, including:...

A team of scientists at the University of St. Andrews has been investigating the various gestures used for communication among chimpanzees and bonobos, which are two of the closest related species to humans. After discovering that chimps and bonobos share many of the same gestures, the researchers theorize that this language may have been inherited from our last common ancestor. Gestures may not be full-blown languages with grammatical rules, but these signals still have meaning. For example, chimpanzees stroke their mouths to request food or raise their arms to request grooming. While shooting and analyzing videos of wild bonobos in...

Koko, the thoughtful gorilla who captivated the world through her ability to use sign language and revealed an empathetic side to great apes, has died. She was 46. The western lowland gorilla passed away in her sleep Tuesday morning at the Gorilla Foundation’s preserve in California’s Santa Cruz mountains, the foundation said. “Koko touched the lives of millions as an ambassador for all gorillas and an icon for interspecies communication and empathy,” the foundation said on its website. “She was beloved and will be deeply missed.” Koko was believed to have had an IQ of between 75 and 95 and...

Koko, the gorilla who mastered sign language, has died. The Gorilla Foundation says the 46-year-old western lowland gorilla died in its sleep at the foundation's preserve in California's Sana Cruz mountains on Tuesday. Koko was born at the San Francisco Zoo, and Dr. Francine Patterson began teaching the gorilla sign language that became part of a Stanford University project in 1974.

A 3-year-old pit bull is headed to a new home with a special family that can relate to her. Both the dog and her new owner are deaf. Courtney Friel reports for the KTLA 5 News at 6 p.m. on May 11, 2014.

A MAN I KNOW, NED MARKOSIAN, teaches a doctrine called presentism. In presentism the past and the future don't exist. Aristotle is dead; therefore, there was no Aristotle. We meet to talk about this over coffee, maybe the ultimate nonpresentist drink. He has applied for and gotten tenure, and writes and publishes, hurling himself into that unreality, the future. I have been thinking about presentism lately, and consciousness, and language. Linguist Derek Bickerton wrote, "Only language could have broken through the prison of immediate experience in which every other creature is locked, releasing us into infinite freedoms of space...

Deaf people are making a profound contribution to the study of language Ann Senghas We all speak smile JUST as biologists rarely see a new species arise, linguists rarely see a new language being born. You have to be in the right place at the right time, which usually you are not. But the past few decades have seen an exception. Linguists have been able to follow the formation of a new language in Nicaragua. The catch is that it is not a spoken language but, rather, a sign language which arose spontaneously in deaf children. Ann Senghas, of Columbia...

Elephants understand humans in a way most other animals don’t, according to the latest research from the University of St Andrews. The new study, published October 10, 2013 by Current Biology, found that elephants are the only wild animals to understand human pointing without any training to do so. The researchers, Anna Smet and Professor Richard Byrne from the University’s School of Psychology and Neuroscience, set out to test whether African elephants could learn to follow pointing — and were surprised to find them responding successfully from the first trial. They said, “In our study we found that African elephants spontaneously...

You don't have to be a biologist or an anthropologist to see how closely the great apes—gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans—resemble us. Even a child can see that their bodies are pretty much the same as ours, apart from some exaggerated proportions and extra body hair. Apes have dexterous hands much like ours but unlike those of any other creature. And, most striking of all, their faces are uncannily expressive, showing a range of emotions that are eerily familiar. That's why we delight in seeing chimps wearing tuxedos, playing the drums or riding bicycles. It's why a potbellied gorilla scratching...

Israel on Friday announced a series of gestures to relax restrictions on the movement of Palestinian Arabs during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The measures, similar to those of previous years, were announced by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the unit which manages civilian affairs in Judea and Samaria under the auspices of newly-appointed Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. Up to 500 people from the Gaza Strip will be allowed to attend Friday prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque over the holy month, set to begin on Sunday or Monday, according to AFP. In addition, 200 Gaza...

The Columbus High School Mighty Cardinals had won the 4x100-meter relay--by seven yards, no less--and had a shot at the state championship. That was until Junior sprinter Derrick Hayes pointed to the sky. Hayes´s father, K.C., said that his son made a gesture of thanks to God, but raising a hand to the sky is considered excessive celebration according to the state scholastic rules. And with that, the team was disqualified.

Live from the Oval Office! It's Barack Obama and the State of the Sham Wow, Gulf Oil Spill edition!Starring TOTUS as Barack Obama! Featuring: Robert Gibbs in a special YouTube after the speech infomercial.

Reporting from Seoul Min Byoung-chul, a professor at Konkuk University, was recently having lunch with some Chinese students. This time, it was the teacher who was taking notes. The students were citing differences between Chinese and South Korean culture. Why, they asked, do Koreans look at them strangely when they lift their rice bowls to eat, or smoke in front of the elderly? And why do Korean teachers get insulted when they hand in their papers using one hand instead of two? And hasn't anyone told teachers that students from China would never bow like their Korean counterparts? Receive breaking...

Israel is willing to be flexible towards the United States following a crisis that erupted between the two countries during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel earlier this month, but will not give up on some core issues. A source at the Prime Minister’s Office said Friday Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agrees to carry out goodwill gestures towards the Palestinians, but not in Jerusalem. Netanyahu reportedly may agree, among other things to release Fatah prisoners as a gesture to the Palestinian Authority. Earlier this week, Netanyahu reiterated that his government’s policy in Jerusalem is no different than the policy...

For some time, I have been wondering how Obama has managed to fool so many people. This past week, with his strange speeches at the Dem getaway, the Prayer Breakfast, and his pseech on Friday for the stimulus package, it struck me that something very unorthodox is going on. The hyperconfidence, the anger, the strange gestures—something was very unusual. I chalked it up to being “unPresidential” but it is something more sinister. NLP—neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis, something is making rational people drool over this overrated clown. I found something that made sense to me: Zero is using hypnotic techniques in speaking...

If Kim Jong Il plays charades, his hand gestures might look just like George Bush's, a new study suggests. It seems that, regardless of the sentence structure of their native tongue, non-verbal communication is the same across the globe. English, Spanish and many other Western languages build most basic sentences around a simple blueprint: a subject followed by a verb and object; for example, "mice eat cheese". Other languages, like Turkish and Korean, tend toward subject-object-verb construction, or "mice cheese eat". "There's something pretty fundamental about these orders," says Susan Goldin-Meadow, a linguistic psychologist at the University of Chicago, who...

Give Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger credit for not rushing to follow his counterparts in Arizona and New Mexico by declaring a state of emergency over illegal immigration. No doubt the anti-immigration zealots would be encouraging such a move. Schwarzenegger surely knows, as all Californians do, that illegal immigration has an enormous impact on the state. There are an estimated 2.4 million undocumented workers working on the state's many farms, in restaurants, on street corners and in homes. This shadowy and unknown subculture - the largest of any state in the union - causes uncountable impacts on the state in terms of...

Early in John Kerry's life, it was only natural for him to associate his future as a convolution of Edmund Muskie, Stonewall Jackson, Gomer, and Mr. "Ed" as their appearances reveal.XXX=But after Muskie's defeat, John resorted to other images to make up for the devestation to his ego.John in his formative years teaching himself how to form the pointing gesture as a method to overcome his identification with Edmund Muskie's unsuccessful vice-presidential bid. A recent incident in a Wendy's indicates John Kerry and those around him have a propensity to shove their hands into those around themselves. One over-arching theme...

ROME, JUNE 1, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University. Q: 1) Is the crucifix essential to the celebration of the Mass? 2) When the priest comes to the altar, does he bow toward the altar? At the end of Mass, the priest venerates the altar; does he bows toward the crucifix or the tabernacle? 3) During the consecration prayer ("Take this ...") the concelebrants extend their hands, but they do not do this uniformly. Some extend the hand with palm downward, while others extend it with palm open toward the...

Abandoning TaiwanBy William Kristol and Gary SchmittWeekly Standard | December 3, 2003 SENIOR BUSH ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS may be engineering a dramatic and dangerous shift in American policy toward Taiwan as a gift to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is visiting the United States next week. There are two elements of this proposed policy change, both of which favor Beijing at the expense of democratic Taiwan, and one of which may actually encourage Beijing to take military action against Taiwan. Both policy changes are being pushed by the staff of the National Security Council over the objections, we understand, of...