A US woman who was struck in the head by a broken baseball bat is in a serious condition in hospital.

THE grandson of the man supposed to have taken a deckchair from the Titanic poured cold water on the story last night ahead of its auction in America, where it’s expected to fetch up to €82,500.

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, a master of comic melancholy who in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift and other novels both championed and mourned the soul’s fate in the modern world, has died at 89.