NEWS HEADLINES
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Venezuelan opposition leader makes first public appearance after months in hiding
Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, who has been in hiding since January, arrives in Oslo after a secretive journey. read more
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US seizes oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, Trump says
Venezuela condemns the operation as an act of "international piracy", vowing never to be an "oil colony". read more
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Iceland becomes fifth country to boycott Eurovision
Iceland joins Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and the Netherlands in saying it will boycott the 2026 contest. read more
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Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia hit highest level since 1980
New figures show that 33 of the 113 deaths in custody between last July and this June were Indigenous read more
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Trump launches $1m 'gold card' immigration visas
The special visas will be awarded to those who can show they can make a "substantial benefit" to the US. read more
BIOGRAPHY
Stephen Jay Gould was born and raised in the community of Bayside, a neighborhood of the northeastern section of Queens in New York City. His father Leonard was a court stenographer, and his mother Eleanor was an artist whose parents were Jewish immigrants living and working in the city’s Garment District.[6] When Gould was five years old his father took him to the Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, where he first encountered Tyrannosaurus rex. “I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck,” Gould once recalled.[7] It was in that moment that he decided to become a paleontologist.
Raised in a secular Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice religion and preferred to be called an agnostic. Biologist Jerry Coyne, who had Gould on his thesis committee, described him as a “diehard atheist if there ever was one.

