They are hungry – and they won’t take no for an answer.

A fierce squirrel attacked a 4-year-old boy at Mountain View's Cuesta Park last week as the rodent tried to wrestle a muffin out of the boy's hands, leaving him with scratch and bite marks that prompted a series of precautionary rabies shots.

The skirmish wasn't the first time the park's numerous tree squirrels targeted picnickers.

Mountain View Community Services Director David Muela said today that as many as six people have been bitten or scratched by squirrels since May, and that the attacks have become more ferocious in the last month. One squirrel even went so far as to jump into a child's stroller.

So while the city says “Do Not Feed The Animals”, I’d recommend that you put down the sandwich and step away carefully in the that no one gets hurt by these furry felons.

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I won't stop for the cheapest gas in my town -- and not just because I can find cheaper gass on my way to school in the morning or on my way to my night class in the evening. Since every gallon I pump here in town would be money in the pocket of Hugo Chavez, I'm willing to spend a little more to register my distaste.

And Seven-Eleven (which does not, unfortunately, operate in the Houston area -- I need a Slurpee fix) has joined the boycott.

The devil might wear Prada, but will his fellow citizens fill up their tanks with Citgo?

One retail chain won't find out. Faced with a barrage of calls from customers and bloggers calling for a boycott of Citgo gasoline stations, 7-Eleven Inc. said yesterday that the Citgo signs are going to start coming down from its convenience stores.

The boycott calls were the result of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's fiery speech at the United Nations last week in which he called President Bush "the devil." 7-Eleven said that the end of its 20-year supply agreement with Citgo Petroleum Corp., owned by the Venezuelan state oil company, was not the result of that speech but rather that it had decided in the spring to launch its own gasoline brand and switch to three new U.S. suppliers.

But the chain moved up the announcement of those plans in response to the outcry over the Chavez speech. "We sympathize with many Americans' concern over derogatory comments about our country and its leadership recently made by Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez," 7-Eleven public relations director Margaret Chabris said in a statement that waded into the political fray. In an interview, she added: "Customers started calling last week and saying that they didn't like what Chavez said. And they wanted to know what we were going to do."

I'm glad to see a little corporate responsibility -- nd patriotism -- here. Wll done!

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And it seems that some criminals can't give up a life of fraud, either.

This case is just stunning, given why "she" was even on the streets to begin with.

A transgendered inmate freed from prison last year because she was dying of AIDS has been charged with using a forged Maryland death certificate to get new criminal charges dismissed.

Dee Deirdre Farmer, 41, was charged Wednesday with forging a Baltimore Circuit Court order to change the death certificate of a man named Charles Smith to reflect that Farmer was the person who had died. Charging documents showed that Farmer got criminal charges in Virginia dismissed using a forged Maryland death certificate.

In a landmark case, Farmer sued federal prison officials over a 1989 rape that occurred about a week after Farmer entered a federal maximum-security prison for men in Terre Haute, Ind. Farmer had arrived with male sex organs and breast implants, after undergoing estrogen therapy.

The lawsuit claimed the government had violated Farmer's constitutional right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment by ignoring the risk that a feminine-appearing inmate would be raped by other prisoners. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1994 that prison officials can sometimes be held liable for inmate assaults revived Farmer's lawsuit, which had been dismissed by lower courts. After the Supreme Court decision, however, she lost the case at trial.

Farmer was serving a 20-year federal sentence for credit-card fraud, followed by a 30-year sentence for credit-card fraud in Maryland.

In February 2005, Chief Judge Joseph F. Murphy Jr. of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals freed Farmer from a state prison near Hagerstown, saying the inmate, then described as blind, bedridden and dying of AIDS, was no longer a threat to society.

''When I cut him loose, my recollection is that it was on the basis of documentary evidence that he was HIV-positive and that his life expectancy was very, very short,'' Murphy told The (Baltimore) Sun on Wednesday. Murphy said he decided to release Farmer on probation ''in the hopes that that might encourage him to remain crime-free while he was out with what little time he had left.''

Well, we see how well that worked.

Lock this messed up individual away, and dispose of the key.

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More examples of the face of “pro-choice” America.

COLUMBUS, Ga. -- Police have arrested the mother and two cousins of a pregnant 16-year-old who are accused of forcing the teen to drink turpentine in an attempt to induce an abortion.

Rozelletta B. Blackshire, 44, was charged with criminal abortion and first-degree cruelty to children, Columbus Police Sgt. Debra Bohannon said. The teen's cousins, Shonda Y. Blackshire, 26, of Columbus, and Monica M. Johnson, 28, of Eufaula, Ala., also were arrested Friday and charged with criminal abortion.
Investigators haven't determined whether the turpentine harmed the teen, who is three months pregnant, or the fetus.

"There's no medical evidence that would support you could induce an abortion by giving her turpentine," Bohannon said. "Still, it's not made to ingest. It's not good to ingest."

Bohannon said the girl's mother and cousins twice forced her to drink turpentine between Sept. 12 and Sept. 20.

The women might have wanted the teen to have an abortion because her pregnancy could have exacerbated an unrelated health problem, Bohannon said. The girl is in protective custody.

Police were notified after the girl told her school counselor that her mother made her drink turpentine.

Bohannon said they already were investigating a sexual assault case involving the pregnant teen. Investigators believe the girl conceived during that assault.

I guess that some folks are “pro-choice” as long as the “choice” is abortion.

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More examples of the face of “pro-choice” America.

COLUMBUS, Ga. -- Police have arrested the mother and two cousins of a pregnant 16-year-old who are accused of forcing the teen to drink turpentine in an attempt to induce an abortion.

Rozelletta B. Blackshire, 44, was charged with criminal abortion and first-degree cruelty to children, Columbus Police Sgt. Debra Bohannon said. The teen's cousins, Shonda Y. Blackshire, 26, of Columbus, and Monica M. Johnson, 28, of Eufaula, Ala., also were arrested Friday and charged with criminal abortion.
Investigators haven't determined whether the turpentine harmed the teen, who is three months pregnant, or the fetus.

"There's no medical evidence that would support you could induce an abortion by giving her turpentine," Bohannon said. "Still, it's not made to ingest. It's not good to ingest."

Bohannon said the girl's mother and cousins twice forced her to drink turpentine between Sept. 12 and Sept. 20.

The women might have wanted the teen to have an abortion because her pregnancy could have exacerbated an unrelated health problem, Bohannon said. The girl is in protective custody.

Police were notified after the girl told her school counselor that her mother made her drink turpentine.

Bohannon said they already were investigating a sexual assault case involving the pregnant teen. Investigators believe the girl conceived during that assault.

I guess that some folks are “pro-choice” as long as the “choice” is abortion.

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Well over two years later, the two robot explorers of Mars continue their work, succeeding beyond the wildest dreams of NASA scientists.

When the Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit reached their distant destination in early 2004, NASA scientists hoped the vehicles would probe the planet's frigid landscape for 90 days before they pooped out or were undone by the harsh Martian environment.

More than 900 days later, however, both robotic explorers are going strong -- and Opportunity is literally on the cusp of what is likely to be its greatest accomplishment.

After enduring an 18-month trek through rugged terrain, dust devils and daily temperature swings approaching 200 degrees, the rover is scheduled to arrive today within easy lens view of a deep and geologically revealing crater. By tomorrow, if all goes well, the little robot that could will be right at Victoria Crater's edge and in position to peer inside and send back images like none seen before.

"Exploring Victoria is something we joked and fantasized about but never really thought we could realistically get to it," said Steven Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for the rovers' science instruments. "This is the absolutely highest-priority destination we could have reached."

The reason is that Victoria is an impact crater about 200 feet deep and half a mile wide, with sheer cliffs and layers upon layers of exposed rock. Before Victoria, the deepest crater the rover visited was Endurance, which is a mere 23 feet deep.

This mission could tell us much about the geology of the Red Planet. Well done, NASA!

On the other hand, a private space flight program was less successful in its attempt to launch yesterday.

The first rocket launched from New Mexico's spaceport failed to reach suborbital space Monday, wobbling and dropping back to Earth barely a tenth of the way into its intended journey.

The unmanned, 20-foot SpaceLoft XL rocket, among the first to be launched from any commercial U.S. spaceport, was carrying experiments and other payloads for its planned journey 70 miles above Earth.

The rocket took off at 2:14 p.m. and was supposed to drop back to Earth about 13 minutes later at White Sands Missile Range, just north of the launch site. But three miles from the launch site, witnesses saw the rocket wobble, then go into a corkscrew motion before disappearing in the clear sky.

Something went wrong shortly after takeoff. Officials with UP Aerospace, the Connecticut-based company that funded the launch, said the rocket reached only about 40,000 feet.

It was not immediately clear where the craft landed or what condition it was in. Launch logistical coordinator Tracey Larson said it was possible that the rocket and its payload could have survived the crash.

However, having seen the film of early NASA efforts, with rockets tipping over or crumbling on the pad, I still maintain hope for the private sector efforts.

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I don't even know how to categorize this story. It isn't a news story in the sense I usually think of it. Neither is it exactly an education story. It certainly doesn't qualify as entertainment, where I usually put sports stories. And it is something more than a religion or race peace. It is all of those -- and something more.

It is a story that moves the human heart, if one's soul has not been completely deadened.

It is a story to make one weep with joy, with sadness, and with hope.

It is the story of how one life can be changed, and how the acts of love and kindness that do so change all involved.

It is the story of Michael Oher.

When the file on Michael Oher from the Memphis City Schools hit his desk in the summer of 2002, Steve Simpson, the principal of Briarcrest Christian School, was frankly incredulous. The boy, now 16, had a measured I.Q. of 80, which put him in mankind’s ninth percentile. An aptitude test he took in eighth grade measured his “ability to learn” and placed him in the sixth percentile. The numbers looked like misprints: in a rich white private school like Briarcrest, you never saw single-digit numbers under the column marked “percentile.” Of course, logically, you knew such people must exist; for someone to be in the 99th percentile, someone else had to be in the first. But you didn’t expect to meet them at the Briarcrest Christian School. Academically, Briarcrest might not be the most ambitious school. It spent more time and energy directing its students to Jesus Christ than to Harvard. But the students all went on to college. And they all had at least an average I.Q.

In his first nine years of school, Michael Oher was enrolled in 11 different institutions, and that included a gap of 18 months, around age 10, when he apparently did not attend school at all. Either that or the public schools were so indifferent to his presence that they neglected to register it formally. Not that Oher actually showed up at the schools where he was enrolled. Even when he received credit for attending, he was sensationally absent: 46 days of a single term of his first-grade year, for instance. His first first-grade year, that is; Michael Oher repeated first grade. He repeated second grade, too. And yet the school system presented these early years as the most accomplished of his academic career. They claimed that right through the fourth grade he was performing at “grade level.” How could they know when, according to these transcripts, he hadn’t even attended the third grade?

Simpson, who had spent 30-plus years in area public schools, including 29 in Memphis, knew what everyone who had even a brief brush with the Memphis public schools knew: they passed kids up to the next grade because they found it too much trouble to flunk them. They functioned as an assembly line churning out products never meant to be market-tested. At several schools, Michael Oher had been given F’s in reading his first term and C’s the second term, which allowed him to finish the school year with D’s — they were giving him grades just to get rid of him. And get rid of him they did: seldom did the child return to the school that passed him. The year before Simpson got his file, Michael Oher passed ninth grade at a high school called Westwood. According to his transcripts, he missed 50 days of school that year. Fifty days! At Briarcrest, the rule was that if a student misses 15 days of any class, he has to repeat the class no matter his grade. And yet Westwood had given Michael Oher just enough D’s to move him along. Even when you threw in the B in world geography, clearly a gift from the Westwood basketball coach who taught the class, the grade-point average the student would bring with him to Briarcrest began with a zero: 0.6.

If there was a less promising academic record, Simpson hadn’t seen it. Simpson guessed, rightly, that the Briarcrest Christian School hadn’t seen anything like Michael Oher either. Simpson and others in the Briarcrest community would eventually learn that Michael’s father had been shot and killed and tossed off a bridge, that his mother was addicted to crack cocaine and that his life experience was so narrow that he might as well have spent his first 16 years inside a closet. And yet here was his application, in the summer of 2002, courtesy of the Briarcrest football coach, Hugh Freeze, who offered with it this wildly implausible story: Big Mike, as he was called, was essentially homeless and so had made an art of sleeping on whatever floor the ghetto would provide for him. He crashed for a stretch on the floor of an inner-city character named Tony Henderson, who at nearly 400 pounds himself was known simply as Big Tony. Big Tony’s mom had died and as her dying wish asked Tony to enroll his son Steven Payne at a “Christian school.” Big Tony had figured that as long as he was taking Steven, he might as well take Big Mike, too.

A school took this boy in. So did a family. And with a lot of hard work and determination, they helped this young man overcome a bad start and make it to college.

And, incidentally, become an All-American football player.

I hope that one day we get this young man on our team down here in Houston. Not just because I believe he will help the Texans out with his talent.

But because I believe he will be an asset to our community, and an inspiration to my students.

Posted by: Greg at 12:59 PM | Comments (25) | Add Comment
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This is just too weird!

A teddy bear has been implicated in 2,500 deaths. Of trout, that is. State officials say a teddy bear dropped into a pool at a Fish and Game Department hatchery earlier this month clogged a drain. The clog blocked the flow of oxygen to the pool and suffocated the fish.

Hatcheries supervisor Robert Fawcett said the bear -- who was dressed in yellow raincoat and hat -- is believed to be the first stuffed bear to cause fatalities at the facility.

"We've had pipes get clogged, but it's usually with more naturally occurring things like a frog or even a dead muskrat," he said. "This one turned out to be a teddy bear and we don't know how it got there."

The deaths prompted Fawcett to release a written warning: "RELEASE OF ANY TEDDY BEARS into the fish hatchery water IS NOT PERMITTED."

He said it's not known who dropped the bear, but urged anyone whose bear ends up in a hatchery pool to find a worker to remove it. "They might save your teddy bear, and keep it from becoming a killer," he said.

"It's kind of a cute little teddy bear and people wouldn't think that a cute little teddy bear would be able to kill fish."

But are teddy bears an endangered species?

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Private Francis Lupo was listed as "Missing, Presumed Dead" at the end of World War I. Now, nearly nine decades later, he is coming home.

Missing in action, presumed dead.

And eventually he faded from living memory. His generation passed away, with everyone who loved him, everyone who mourned him. Time rendered him faceless. He was just a name, one of hundreds chiseled in limestone in a cemetery chapel 4,000 miles from home.

LUPO FRANCIS PVT 18TH INF

1ST DIV JULY 21 1918 OHIO

A lost doughboy.

But now he is found.

Discovered by chance, unearthed in 2003 by archaeologists looking for ancient remains, Pvt. Francis Lupo of Cincinnati has returned from the front at last, nearly 90 years after boarding a troop ship for France. Tomorrow, the Army will bury him again, this time with honors at Arlington National Cemetery, laying to rest possibly the longest-missing U.S. soldier ever recovered and identified: a ghost of World War I.

Lupo, killed at 23, most likely on his first day in heavy fighting, will get a fine Arlington send-off, with all the Army's Old Guard solemn pomp: a horse-drawn caisson; a bugler; rifle volleys; a tri-folded American flag for his next of kin, a niece born 15 years after the armistice.

May the day come when there are no more American soldiers listed as "Missing, Presumed Dead".

Posted by: Greg at 10:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Some folks do really stupid things when they drink.

A drunken Chinese migrant worker jumped into a panda enclosure at the Beijing Zoo, was bitten by the bear and retaliated by chomping down on the animal's back, state media said Wednesday.

Zhang Xinyan, from the central province of Henan, drank four jugs of beer at a restaurant near the zoo before visiting Gu Gu the panda on Tuesday, the Beijing Morning Post said.

"He felt a sudden urge to touch the panda with his hand," and jumped into the enclosure, the newspaper said.

The panda, who was asleep, was startled and bit Zhang, 35, on the right leg, it said. Zhang got angry and kicked the panda, who then bit his other leg. A tussle ensued, the paper said.

"I bit the fellow in the back," Zhang was quoted as saying in the newspaper. "Its skin was quite thick."

Other tourists yelled for a zookeeper, who got the panda under control by spraying it with water, reports said. Zhang was hospitalized.

Newspaper photographs showed Zhang lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages and a seam of stitches running down his leg.

The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Zhang as saying that he had seen pandas on television and "they seemed to get along well with people."

"No one ever said they would bite people," Zhang said. "I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don't remember much."

Almost had ourselves a Darwin Award winner here – he’s certainly entitled to an honorable mention.

By the way, I think this story contains a line that can be used as a really great euphemism -- "touch the panda with his hand."

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Here are a couple of low-lifes who just need killing.

Two Baytown men have been charged with capital murder in the death of Barney Goodman, a disabled Vietnam veteran who was robbed and beaten with a baseball bat.

Kenneth Dollery, 22, and Hollis B. Buckley, 21, both unemployed, were arrested at a mobile home park in Baytown Thursday.

Both have given statements admitting their involvement in Goodman's death, said Liberty County Sheriff Greg Arthur.

Goodman, 57, who had served a stint in Vietnam in the U.S. Marines, lost both his legs last year to diabetes, said his brother, Richard Ford.

"My brother had just learned to walk again with artificial legs," Ford said. Goodman also recently survived cancer.

Before his health deteriorated, Goodman had been striving to become a country music singer.

As for the two suspects charged in the killing, Ford said, "They didn't have to do it. He had no legs. They just didn't want a witness left behind."

Arthur said the two suspects, who are cousins, told authorities they were angry with Goodman and "wanted to teach him a lesson" because he owed Buckley's mother a month's rent. Goodman and the suspects were living in the same mobile home with Buckley's mother, said Liberty County Sheriff's Capt. Chip Fairchild.

Goodman died Saturday at a Houston hospital from internal injuries after being beaten on Friday. According to investigators, Goodman agreed to go with the suspects in their car without realizing their intent.

Investigators say the suspects drove Goodman from Baytown to a bridge on FM 2090 just over the Liberty County line. Arthur said they beat him underneath the bridge, threw his artificial legs into the San Jacinto River, and left him there.

Goodman took several hours to claw his way up a 40-foot riverbank and waited until a motorist stopped to render aid. Taken to the hospital, he identified himself and gave a vague account of an attack by two men before passing out. He was unable to be interviewed by investigators before he died.

A capital murder conviction carries a possible death sentence. Goodman was buried Thursday in Baytown.

To the prosecutors -- No plea deal; no mercy.

Posted by: Greg at 10:22 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Maybe they will launch on Friday -- or have to wait until next month.

NASA hopes to figure out what caused the latest problem keeping Atlantis earthbound: an electrical short in a 30-year-old motor.

If the agency determines by Thursday night that the cause of the short is not serious, NASA can try to launch the shuttle Friday morning.

If it doesn't launch Friday, the space agency may have to wait until late October _ or relax daylight launching rules instituted after the 2003 Columbia accident and try again at the end of September. Once the Russian Soyuz comes back, NASA may attempt a launch as early as Sept. 28 or 29 even though the launch would be in darkness, spokesman Allard Beutel said.

NASA rules say shuttles have to be launched in daylight so that the big external fuel tank can be photographed for evidence of any broken-off pieces of foam of the sort that doomed Columbia.

There is a slight chance of a Saturday launch, but NASA would have to shorten its construction mission on the international space station, something Wayne Hale, space shuttle program manager, has said he would not like to do.

Here's hoping that all can be resolved in time for a Friday launch.

Posted by: Greg at 10:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Will someone explain to me why certain busy-bodies have a problem with the butchering-up of horses for sale as food abroad? I guess I don't see the problem -- except that it gives ranting liberals one more stupid "cause" to whine about.

Imagine if 100,000 dogs and cats were slaughtered each year in this county for meat to be sold for human consumption overseas. Imagine if the animals were purchased at dark auctions, transported to foreign-owned and tax-subsidized slaughterhouses in deplorable conditions, stunned with a metal bolt into their heads, and then sliced while alive into body parts.

Now, imagine there is a congressional effort to ban this barbaric treatment. But instead of becoming the political no-brainer of this or any other election year, it comes to the floor of the House of Representatives with its passage in doubt. Why? Because the slaughterers and their hacks in government scare people into thinking that stopping the slaughter actually is bad for the cats and dogs.

Actually, given the number of dogs and cats euthanized each year as unwanted, I would have no objection to some good coming of their deaths in the form of feeding the hungry -- or even sating gourmet palates in places like France. And I say that as a dog lover whose own canine companion is spoiled beyond belief.

The article I quoted from above is long on emotion and short on facts. Here's hoping that Congress ignores the liberal hysteria and gives the legislation it advocates teh deep-sixing it truly deserves.

Posted by: Greg at 10:25 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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This is a new and different excuse for speeding

A Swiss driver caught speeding in Canada explained that he had been taking advantage of the ability to drive fast without hitting a goat, police said on Wednesday.

The driver was caught traveling 161 km/hr (100 mph) in a 100 km/hr zone in eastern Ontario Sunday.

"A motorist from Switzerland, used to driving around hills and mountains, takes advantage of the ability to go faster without risking hitting a goat," read the traffic officer's notes of the incident.

Local police said it was the first time they had ever heard of such an excuse.
"I've never been to Switzerland but obviously they must have a problem with that there," said police spokesman Joel Doiron, adding that in his 20 years of service he had never found a goat on the highways of eastern Ontario.

In a related story, a Texas A&M alum was cited for moving too fast in a local singles bar. He claimed he was taking advantage of the ability pick up girls without hitting on a goat.

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It is hoped that the problem can be resolved in time for a Thursday launch.

NASA scrubbed plans to launch the shuttle Atlantis today on a long-delayed assembly mission to the international space station when it discovered problems with an onboard fuel cell.

The space agency made tentative plans to try again Thursday with a lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center at 11:03 a.m. CDT.

However, shuttle managers intended to spend several hours today trying to diagnose the cause of a voltage spike in one of three fuel cells that generate electricity aboard the shuttle once it lifts off, said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel.

* * *

The fuel cell problem was discovered just after midnight, before the launch control team began loading the shuttle's external fuel tank with liquid oxgen and hyrdrogen propellants.

If the problem cannot be resolved in time for a Friday launch, it will have to be delayed into next month to avoud conflicting with a Russian launch to the ISS.

Posted by: Greg at 10:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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This could result in the overturning of the big Vioxx verdict in Texas. You see one of the jurors owed money to the plaintiff, and had a history of borrowing large sums of money from her.Yet none of this was disclosed during jury selection. Furthermore, phone calls between the juror and the plaintiff appear suspicious.

Attorneys for Merck & Co. want to see bank and cellphone records that could show the extent of a juror's financial relationship with a plaintiff who won a $32 million verdict against the drug company in the death of a 71-year-old man who took Vioxx.

Jose Manuel Rios, a $22,000-a-year school janitor who served on the panel that found Merck liable for Leonel Garza's fatal heart attack after taking the painkiller Vioxx, testified in a post-trial deposition to borrowing up to $10,000 interest-free from Garza's widow, Felicia, the plaintiff in the lawsuit against Merck. He said the loans included $2,500 that was paid off just weeks before he was selected as a juror in the case.

He said Felicia Garza also loaned money to others in the community.

Tilden Katz, a spokesman for Merck's legal team, said Merck attorneys were hoping the documents would help them ``get to the bottom of" the financial relationship.

``Everyone is entitled to a fair trial," he said. ``A financial relationship with a juror raises a serious question as to whether the Garza trial was consistent with these vital principles."

Plaintiff attorney Joe Escobedo did not return a call for comment.

Rios produced cellphone records that showed calls from his number to Garza's. He told lawyers his wife, a teacher's aide, made the calls on school business. Merck lawyers say the timing of the calls, including evening calls made days after he received his jury summons and the day before jury selection, is ``highly suspicious."

Merck lawyers requested Rios's deposition in June, after a fellow school employee alerted the local attorney to the loans.

Oneida Saenz, a textbook data specialist for the Rio Grande City school district, said she observed the financial transactions beginning in the fall of 2003.

Saenz said that she spoke to Rios in March.

``He said, `I can't wait to get back to court,' and I said, `You don't want to get me started. You know you don't belong there,' " the affadavit reads.

The case, which ended in April, was the sixth to reach a verdict among more than 11,000 lawsuits involving the blockbuster painkiller . Plaintiff attorneys hailed it as the first in which a jury found short-term usage was one of the factors leading to a heart attack.

Merck attorneys said Leonel Garza only used the drug for a week, which wasn't long enough for it to cause heart attacks. Plaintiff attorneys said he took the drug for 17 days.

Garza was a smoker with a 20-year history of heart disease, but plaintiff attorneys said recent medical tests showed his veins to be clear and his heart attack risk to be low.

Sounds to me like this was an attempt to play the jury-lottery -- and that the plaintiff and her legal team sought to rig the verdict. Toss the verdict out -- and the suit along with it.

Posted by: Greg at 03:58 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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But I promise to continue calling him an @$$hole.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin vowed never again to call the World Trade Center site a "hole in the ground" during a visit to New York on Friday to let investors know his hurricane-devastated city is reopen for business.

Nagin stopped short of again apologizing for using that description of the Twin Towers site -- where 2,759 people died in the September 11 attacks -- during a U.S. television interview that aired last week.

"I tell you what I will never do again is refer to that site as a hole. It's a sacred site that is presently in an undeveloped state," Nagin told a news conference to launch the New Orleans Rebirth economic development tour.

Nagin had drawn criticism for his remarks in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" when asked why it was taking so long to clean up New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,339 people and caused $80 billion in damage.

"You guys in New York City can't get a hole in the ground fixed and it's five years later. So let's be fair," he said on "60 Minutes."

Nagin apologized for the comment on Sunday.

If the WTC comment were his only offense, I might give him a pass. But from his incompetent handling of the evacuation of New Orleans to his histrionic attempts to blame the Bush administration for the failures of his administration and that of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, to his "chocolate city" comment to this latest outrage, it is clear that the man is an idiot -- and that the people of his city are even dumber than he is because the reelected him.

Posted by: Greg at 03:38 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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A new launch vehicle has been chosen -- and it looks like we are eight years from flight.

Lockheed Martin Corp. won a multibillion-dollar contract yesterday to build a vehicle to replace NASA's space shuttles, put a human on the moon for the first time since 1972 and be the precursor to a manned spaceship to Mars.

The award marks NASA's most concrete step to fulfill President Bush's two-year-old, $230 billion promise that the space agency would return astronauts to the moon and restore excitement about space exploration. NASA has planned to replace the shuttles since the mid-1980s and has spent almost $5 billion to do so -- with little success so far.

"It's just thrilling, for all of us," said Skip Hatfield, NASA's project manager. The vehicle, known as Orion, is the embodiment of the "very future of human space flight," he said.

Orion will look somewhat like the three-man Apollo command module but will carry as many as six astronauts. Like the shuttle, Orion will be able to carry cargo to and from the International Space Station.

Orion is expected to make its first manned flight by 2014, four years after NASA's three operating shuttles are retired. NASA said it hopes for a moon landing by 2020.

Unlike the shuttle, which lands like an airplane on a runway, Orion will descend with the aid of a parachute to landings in the ocean or on land. NASA plans to build two of the vehicles, one for manned flight and the other for unmanned. After judging how often the spaceships can be reused, the agency will decide how many more to buy, Hatfield said.

Since this part of Houston is, in many ways, a company town, I'm particularly gratified to see that so many friends now have some idea of where the space agency is headed next.

First, back to the moon.
Next, on to Mars. . . and beyond.

Posted by: Greg at 02:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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