gedaliyah

A Wasilla cardiologist who was facing 10 counts of possession of child sex abuse material is dead after being found in the remnants of a house fire Saturday in Wasilla.

Alaska’s News Source confirmed on Tuesday that 46-year-old Ryan McDonough, who faced those allegations, was the only person inside his Wasilla home that burned down on Dec. 13.

The blaze occurred a day after McDonough was released on bail after being arrested on Dec. 11.

Looking only at genetic code, is it possible that there have ever been two genetically identical people who are not twins (or clones)? How many medically distinct human beings can their actually be?

I'm assuming that we're only talking about biologically modern human beings. So the genes that make us human cannot be eligible for variation.

If we don't include environmental factors and non-DNA genetic material, what is the actual number of genes that can vary from one person to another? Do we even understand the human genome well enough to make this kind of calculation?

I'm assuming from combinatorial math that it's more humans than can ever exist through the course of the entire universe. But what is the actual number? If those genes are varied at random, how many people will it take before they say a 50% chance that two of them are identical? For example, it only takes 23 people to have a 50% chance that at least two of them have the same birthday.

Edit: I found an interesting article about the complications with trying to calculate this number. The number seems to be on the order of 10^(tens or hundreds of thousands)

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Angry protesters stormed the offices of Bangladesh’s two leading newspapers late Thursday after the death of a prominent activist in last year’s political uprising in Bangladesh. The crowds set fire to the buildings of the dailies, trapping journalists and other staff inside.

It was not clear why the protesters attacked the newspapers whose editors are known to be closely connected with the country’s interim leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus. Protests were organized in recent months outside the offices of the dailies by Islamists who blamed the newspapers for their alleged link with India.

Hadi was a fierce critic of both neighboring India and former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, whose 15-year rule of Bangladesh ended in last year’s uprising.

Three people were killed and at least six others were injured on Friday in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, when a man threw smoke grenades in a crowded train station and lunged at bystanders with a large knife. The assailant later died after fleeing and then falling or jumping from a building, the police said.

Premier Cho said that it would take time to establish the man’s motives for his attack. Investigators in Taoyuan, a city near Taipei, later said he appeared to come from Taoyuan and had been being sought for evading military service, according to Wu Yi-ming, a spokesman for the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office in Taipei.

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The man authorities believe committed the deadly shooting at Brown University was found dead inside a Salem, New Hampshire, storage unit, authorities said Thursday night.

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown graduate student and Portuguese national, was also believed to have killed a renowned physics professor this week near Boston.

Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez said the suspect, whose last known address was in Miami, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and acted alone, “as far as we know.”

U.S. Southern Command posted on social media, “Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” though it did not provide evidence. It posted videos of each boat speeding through water before being struck by an explosion.

The military said three people in one vessel and two in the other were killed.

The attacks brought the total number of known boat strikes to 28 while at least 104 people have been killed, according to numbers announced by the Trump administration. President Donald Trump has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States and asserted the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels.

The former Harvard Medical School morgue manager who stole and sold pieces of bodies donated to the school has been sentenced to 8 years in prison.

A federal judge in Pennsylvania handed down the sentence to Cedric Lodge Tuesday, capping a two-and-a-half year scandal that ensnared the nation's most prestigious medical school and exposed a nationwide network of human-remains trading.

More than 400 families whose loved ones donated their bodies to Harvard were possibly affected by the thefts. Kathleen Barber, whose father Richard Lord donated his body to the medical school, told the court Cedric Lodge had stolen the family's peace. They don't know what parts of their father may have been stolen or where his remains may be.

A French anesthesiologist was sentenced to life in jail on Thursday for intentionally poisoning 30 patients, 12 of whom died.

Mr. Péchier, who worked as an anesthesiologist at two clinics in Besançon, a city in eastern France, committed the crimes between 2008 and 2017, the court said in a statement after a 15-week trial. Mr. Péchier has denied the charges since investigations began eight years ago. His lawyer said on Thursday that his client would lodge an appeal.

His youngest victim was a 4-year-old boy, Tedy, who fell into a two-day coma after the anesthesiologist inserted a toxic substance into the child’s intravenous drip during a routine surgical procedure, according to his family’s lawyer, Archibald Celeyron.

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In a significant escalation of Caribbean tensions, President Nicolas Maduro has ordered Venezuela’s navy to escort oil tankers departing the country’s eastern coast for the high seas. The maneuver serves as a direct challenge to the maritime blockade announced earlier this week by United States President Donald Trump, who has vowed to intercept sanctioned vessels trading with Venezuela.

The decision to deploy military escorts follows a week of rising hostilities, sparked when U.S. special forces neutralized a Venezuelan tanker in the Caribbean. Describing the seized vessel as “big, very big,” President Trump justified the measure on Wednesday, stating, “They took our rights. We had a lot of oil there. They kicked out our companies, and we want it back.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday unveiled a series of regulatory actions designed to effectively ban gender-affirming care for minors, building on broader Trump administration restrictions on transgender Americans.

The sweeping proposals — the most significant moves this administration has taken so far to restrict the use of puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgical interventions for transgender children — include cutting off federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to children and prohibiting federal Medicaid dollars from being used to fund such procedures.

The State Department announced the sales late Wednesday during a nationally televised address by the Republican president, who made scant mention of foreign policy issues and did not speak about China or Taiwan. U.S.-Chinese tensions have ebbed and flowed during Trump’s second term, largely over trade and tariffs but also over China’s increasing aggressiveness toward Taiwan, which Beijing has said must reunify with the mainland.

If approved by Congress, it would be the largest-ever U.S. weapons package to Taiwan, exceeding the total amount of $8.4 billion in U.S. arms sales to Taiwan during President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration.

Paramilitaries in Sudan killed over 1,000 people, one-third of them in summary executions, in an attack in April against a famine-stricken camp for displaced people, the United Nations human rights body said on Thursday.

The revised toll was over three times as great as earlier estimates from one of the most notorious episodes of Sudan’s atrocity-filled civil war.

The killings by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., which has been fighting Sudan’s military for nearly three years, “may constitute the war crime of murder,” Volker Türk, the head of the U.N. body, said in a statement.

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