NEWS HEADLINES
-
American and British ISIS brides Hoda Muthana and Shamima Begum plead to go home
Hoda Muthana and Shamima Begum fled to Syria to marry Islamic State group fighters. Now they want to come home.
-
Victims of Church sex abuse go global with fight for justice
After years of struggling alone or finding support in national groups, survivors of sex abuse by priests have formed a new international alliance to pressure the Catholic Church to face up to its crimes. The group, called Ending Clerical Abuse (ECA), brings together activists from dozens of countries on several continents, and will be mobilised in Rome this week when Pope Francis hosts a hotly awaited summit on tackling the wave of child sex abuse scandals shaking the Catholic Church. "It's a momentous and a historic movement... to bring a global and unified voice," one of its co-founders, Peter Saunders, told AFP.
ONTOGENY AND PHYLOGENY
STEPHEN JAY GOLD
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.
