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🔗 Biography 🔗 Canada 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Disability

Krista and Tatiana Hogan (born October 25, 2006) are Canadians who are conjoined craniopagus twins. They are joined at the head and share a skull and a brain. They were born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and are the only unseparated conjoined twins of that type currently alive in Canada. They live with their mother, Felicia Simms, in Vernon, British Columbia, have two sisters and a brother and often travel to Vancouver for care at BC Children's Hospital and Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 United States/Vermont

Ronald James Read (October 23, 1921 – June 2, 2014) was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant. Read grew up in Dummerston, Vermont, in an impoverished farming household. He walked or hitchhiked 4 mi (6.4 km) daily to his high school and was the first high school graduate in his family. He enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving in Italy as a military policeman. Upon an honorable discharge from the military in 1945, Read returned to Brattleboro, Vermont, where he worked as a gas station attendant and mechanic for about 25 years. Read retired for one year and then took a part-time janitor job at J. C. Penney where he worked for 17 years until 1997.

Read died in 2014. He received media coverage in numerous newspapers and magazines after bequeathing US$1.2 million to Brooks Memorial Library and $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. Read amassed a fortune of almost $8 million by investing in dividend-producing stocks, avoiding the stocks of companies he did not understand such as technology companies, living frugally, and being a buy and hold investor in a diversified portfolio of stocks with a heavy concentration in blue chip companies.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Hungary 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine 🔗 Project-independent assessment

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (German: [ˈɪɡnaːts ˈzɛml̩vaɪs]; Hungarian: Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp [ˈsɛmmɛlvɛjs ˈiɡnaːts ˈfyløp]; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures and was described as the "saviour of mothers". Postpartum infection, also known as puerperal fever or childbed fever, consists of any bacterial infection of the reproductive tract following birth and in the 19th century was common and often fatal. Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands. In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had thrice the mortality of midwives' wards. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

Despite his research, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.

His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, giving Semmelweis' observations a theoretical explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biology 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 India 🔗 Molecular and Cell Biology 🔗 Medicine/Medical genetics 🔗 United States/Asian Americans

Har Gobind Khorana (9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011) was an Indian-American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell and control the cell's synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.

Born in British India, Khorana served on the faculties of three universities in North America. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966, and received the National Medal of Science in 1987.

🔗 Biography 🔗 China/Chinese history 🔗 Italy 🔗 China

Katarina Vilioni (died 1342) was one of the first Europeans known to have resided in China. She was apparently a member of a Genoese trading family that lived in Yangzhou during the mid-14th century.

Vilioni is known through her tombstone, which was rediscovered at Yangzhou in 1951. It suggests that Vilioni died in 1342 and was the daughter of a man named Domenico Vilioni.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Wisconsin 🔗 United States/Massachusetts - Cape Cod and the Islands

Rose Marie "Rosemary" Kennedy (September 13, 1918 – January 7, 2005) was the eldest daughter born to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She was a sister of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. and Ted Kennedy.

In her early young adult years, Rosemary Kennedy experienced seizures and violent mood swings. In response to these issues, her father arranged a prefrontal lobotomy for her in 1941 when she was 23 years of age; the procedure left her permanently incapacitated and rendered her unable to speak intelligibly.

Rosemary Kennedy spent most of the rest of her life being cared for at St. Coletta, an institution in Jefferson, Wisconsin. The truth about her situation and whereabouts was kept secret for decades. While she was initially isolated from her siblings and extended family following her lobotomy, Rosemary did go on to visit them during her later life.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Australia 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Australia/Australian crime 🔗 Australia/Adelaide

The Somerton Man was an unidentified man whose body was found on 1 December 1948 on the beach at Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. The case is also known after the Persian phrase tamám shud (Persian: تمام شد), meaning "is over" or "is finished", which was printed on a scrap of paper found months later in the fob pocket of the man's trousers. The scrap had been torn from the final page of a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, authored by 12th-century poet Omar Khayyám.

Following a public appeal by police, the book from which the page had been torn was located. On the inside back cover, detectives read through indentations left from previous handwriting: a local telephone number, another unidentified number, and text that resembled a coded message. The text has not been deciphered or interpreted in a way that satisfies authorities on the case.

Since the early stages of the police investigation, the case has been considered "one of Australia's most profound mysteries". There has been intense speculation ever since regarding the identity of the victim, the cause of his death, and the events leading up to it. Public interest in the case remains significant for several reasons: the death occurred at a time of heightened international tensions following the beginning of the Cold War; the apparent involvement of a secret code; the possible use of an undetectable poison; and the inability of authorities to identify the dead man.

On 26 July 2022, Adelaide University professor Derek Abbott, in association with genealogist Colleen M. Fitzpatrick, claimed to have identified the man as Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in 1905, based on genetic genealogy from DNA of the man's hair. South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia have not verified the result, but South Australia Police said they were "cautiously optimistic" about it.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 Politics 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Journalism 🔗 California/Southern California 🔗 California/Inland Empire

Gary Stephen Webb (August 31, 1955 – December 10, 2004) was an American investigative journalist.

He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards, and building a reputation for investigative writing. Hired by the San Jose Mercury News, Webb contributed to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Webb is best known for his "Dark Alliance" series, which appeared in The Mercury News in 1996. The series examined the origins of the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles and claimed that members of the anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua had played a major role in creating the trade, using cocaine profits to finance their fight against the government in Nicaragua. It also stated that the Contras may have acted with the knowledge and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The series provoked outrage, particularly in the Los Angeles African-American community, and led to four major investigations of its charges.

The Los Angeles Times and other major papers published articles suggesting the "Dark Alliance" claims were overstated and, in November 1996, Jerome Ceppos, the executive editor at Mercury News, wrote about being "in the eye of the storm". In May 1997, after an internal review, Ceppos stated that, although the story was correct on many important points, there were shortcomings in the writing, editing, and production of the series. He wrote that the series likely "oversimplified" the crack epidemic in America and the supposed "critical role" the dealers written about in the series played in it. Webb disagreed with this conclusion.

Webb resigned from The Mercury News in December 1997. He became an investigator for the California State Legislature, published a book based on the "Dark Alliance" series in 1998, and did freelance investigative reporting. He died by suicide on December 10, 2004.

The "Dark Alliance" series remains controversial. Critics view the series' claims as inaccurate or overstated, while supporters point to the results of a later CIA investigation as vindicating the series. The follow-up reporting in the Los Angeles Times and other papers has been criticised for focusing on problems in the series rather than re-examining the earlier CIA-Contra claims.