NEWS HEADLINES
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Venezuelan Nobel winner emerges to collect prize in Oslo after months in hiding
María Corina Machado speaks to the BBC after her secret journey from her home country. read more
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US seizes oil tanker off Venezuela as Caracas condemns 'act of piracy'
Footage shows a military helicopter hovering over a large ship, and troops descending on to the deck using ropes. 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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More than 30 dead after Myanmar military air strike hits hospital
The junta has stepped up bombardments by air in an attempt to reclaim territory from ethnic armies. read more
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Goa nightclub owners held in Thailand over deadly fire
Brothers Gaurav and Saurabh Luthra fled to Phuket, shortly after the incident last week. 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.

