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    Thumbprint on Cigarette Carton Cracks a 48-Year-Old Murder Case

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    A young mother told friends that she’d be “back in 10 minutes.” She never returned, and the police in San Jose have now charged a man in her death.Jeannette Ralston was at the Lion’s Den bar in San Jose, Calif., when she told her friends that she would be “back in 10 minutes.”She never returned.The next morning, on Feb. 1, 1977, police officers found the 24-year-old woman strangled with the long sleeve of a red women’s dress shirt and squeezed into the back seat of her Volkswagen Beetle in a parking lot a few minutes away from the bar.Almost 50 years later, the authorities believe that they know who strangled her.Willie Eugene Sims, 69, of Jefferson, Ohio, was arraigned on Friday on a charge of murder in San Jose, Calif., and held without bail, after his extradition from Ohio.He did not enter a plea and his next court date was set for August. It was unclear if Mr. Sims had a lawyer.The investigation into the killing of Ms. Ralston, a mother and resident of San Mateo, Calif., went cold after no credible leads were initially developed.The police found a carton of Eve cigarettes, a popular brand for women in the 1970s, and the shirt that she was strangled with. They also had a sketch drawn of an unidentified man that her friends saw her leave the bar with the night before she was found.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Florida Wildlife Officers Kill 3 Black Bears After Deadly Attack

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      The state’s wildlife agency will test the bears’ DNA to determine if any of them had attacked and killed an 89-year-old man.Wildlife officers in Florida have killed three black bears in the southwestern part of the state, less than 24 hours after a man was killed by a bear in the same area, officials said on Tuesday.It was not immediately clear whether any of the three bears were involved in the attack on Monday morning, in which Robert Markel, 89, was killed in a wooded, unincorporated part of Collier County.The bears’ remains were being sent to Gainesville, Fla., for DNA testing, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, to determine if there was a connection to what the agency described as an extremely rare attack.The attack on Mr. Markel was the first time a bear had killed a human in Florida’s history, Mike Orlando, the bear management program coordinator for the commission, said during a news conference on Tuesday.The commission is overseeing the investigation into the deadly encounter, which drew a heavy presence of wildlife officers to Jerome, Fla., just north of Everglades City, Fla. Mr. Markel’s dog was also killed the same morning by a bear, though it was not clear whether they were attacked by the same one.Mr. Markel’s daughter called 911 after she saw the attack on his dog and could not find her father, the local television station WPLG reported.Wildlife officers set up traps and cameras in the area where the attacks occurred, officials said during the news conference.Florida is home to more than 4,000 black bears, according to the wildlife commission. It has tracked them from the Panhandle and Ocala National Forest in the state’s midsection, to Big Cypress National Preserve in South Florida, which was near where the attack on Monday occurred.Wildlife officials on Tuesday reminded people of what they should do if they encounter a bear, which can come into contact with humans and pets while prowling for food.“Stand your ground,” Mr. Orlando said. “Make yourself look large. Talk to the bear in a calm fashion. Do not run. Do not play dead.”In a worst-case scenario, he said, people should take action.“Even if a bear is touching you,” he said, “you need to fight back.” More

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      Hamas Failed to Return the Body of a Hostage. What Now?

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      The Palestinian armed group said it had handed over the remains of Shiri Bibas along with her two young children and another man. Israel said forensic testing found that it wasn’t her.Israel said on Friday that one of the bodies Hamas handed over as part of the cease-fire deal did not belong to an Israeli woman taken hostage in 2023, as the Palestinian militant group had claimed.The revelation prompted further alarm over the future of the brittle truce and hostage-for-prisoner swap deal between Hamas and Israel. Here’s what we know so far.Who were the hostages?Hamas said on Thursday that it had handed over the remains of four hostages: Shiri Bibas, 32; her two children, Ariel, 4, and Kfir Bibas, less than a year old; and Oded Lifshitz, 83. All four were kidnapped from Nir Oz, a village near Gaza that was devastated in Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.For many Israelis, the Bibas family had become emblematic of the brutality of the Hamas attack. Footage of a terrified Ms. Bibas clutching her two children while being led away by Palestinian gunmen has been seared into the Israeli public consciousness.Hamas claimed that all four hostages were killed in Israeli airstrikes. But Israel said that three of the four returned on Thursday — which were identified through DNA testing as belonging to Mr. Lifshitz and the two Bibas children — had been murdered by their captors.What happened on Thursday?Hamas handed four coffins to the International Committee of the Red Cross in a televised ceremony. Each coffin bore the photo of a captive whose body was supposed to be turned over to Israel, including Ms. Bibas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      DNA on Discarded Cigarette Helps Lead to Arrest in a 1981 Homicide

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      A detective in Indiana helped crack a cold case more than 40 years after his father started working on the original investigation.The 1981 fatal beating of a steelworker in northwest Indiana remained unsolved for so long that the son of the original detective on the case started reinvestigating it in 2018 — and helped solve it.Blood from the crime scene and a discarded cigarette tossed out a vehicle window at a 2023 traffic stop in Illinois eventually led to the arrest of Gregory Thurson, 64, of Eugene, Ore., on Oct. 29 on a murder charge in the death of John Blaylock, Sr., 51, who was killed in his apartment in Griffith, Ind.That capped an investigation that began on Nov. 3, 1981. On Wednesday, Mr. Thurson, who was arrested in Oregon and extradited, is to appear in a Lake County, Ind., courtroom. His lawyer with the Lake County Public Defender’s Office could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.It is unclear what the motive for the killing was and what relationship there may have been between Mr. Blaylock and Mr. Thurson.“I can’t say enough about his hard work and how gratifying it is to me that he was able to come behind me some 43 years later and put this all together,” Retired Detective John Mowery Sr. of the Griffith Police Department said of his son, Detective John Mowery Jr. “When he sinks his teeth into something, he just he stays with it.”On Nov. 3, 1981, two worried steelworkers went to Mr. Blaylock’s building on a Tuesday afternoon, after he didn’t show up for his shifts on Monday or Tuesday morning. The Sunday newspaper was still outside his apartment door, which was locked, and they waited while two building employees used a master key to get inside.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      COP16 Talks in Colombia Adopt a Novel Way to Pay for Conservation

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      The meeting created a fund that would compensate countries for the use of genetic information.Diplomats from roughly 180 countries ended two weeks of environmental talks on Saturday after agreeing on a new fund that would shift some of the profits from nature’s DNA to global conservation efforts.The agreement calls for companies that make money from genetic information stored in databases, known as digital sequence information, to pay into a fund as a sort of fee for the use of biodiversity.Scientific advances have made it easier and cheaper for researchers to sequence genetic material. That means there are now vast amounts available in databases for pharmaceutical, cosmetic, biotechnology and other companies to analyze as they seek to develop new products.Delegates at the talks, known as COP16, shorthand for the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, called the agreement an important breakthrough.“Conservation is mostly funded by governments and philanthropy,” said Amber Scholz, who leads the science policy department at Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a German research institute that focuses on microbial and cellular biodiversity. “Now, businesses that profit from biodiversity will pay into a new fund.”The final declaration made the fund voluntary, saying that companies “should” contribute.The agreement lays out specifics on how much they should pay: 1 percent of their profits or 0.1 percent of their revenue, as a guideline. Governments are “invited” to take legislative or other measures to require companies to contribute.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hairballs Shed Light on Tsavo Man-Eating Lions’ Menu

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      The Tsavo man-eaters terrorized railroad workers in British East Africa in the 19th century, but their tastes went well beyond human flesh.In British East Africa in 1898, two lions living along the Tsavo River were hungry.This was bad news for the workers building a railroad there. They would retreat to their tents at night and, come morning, some of the men would be missing, the latest victims of big cats that had a hankering for human meat.“Bones, flesh, skin and blood, they devoured all, and left not a trace behind them,” wrote Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, a British Army officer leading the railroad project.During the nine-month reign of the Tsavo man-eaters, the lions, which like most males of the area lacked manes, devoured around 35 workers. Eventually, construction of the railroad stopped completely until Colonel Patterson shot the two cats.The lions’ bodies were initially fashioned into trophy rugs. In 1925, the Field Museum in Chicago purchased the rugs for display. The two skulls ended up in the museum’s collection.It turns out that the Tsavo lions had a taste for more than men. Using hair fragments preserved in the lions’ broken teeth, scientists discovered DNA from several species. Their findings were published Friday in the journal Current Biology, offering a snapshot of the surprisingly diverse buffet of wildlife once consumed by a top predator in what is today Kenya.In the 1990s, Thomas P. Gnoske, a collections manager at the Field Museum, got a chance to examine the Tsavo lions’ skulls. He noticed hair fragments in the cats’ cracked canine teeth. In 2001, Mr. Gnoske contributed to a paper positing that the lions had developed a preference for human prey because the cats’ teeth were damaged, and our species’ flesh was easier to chew.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Officials Confirm Body Found Near Site of Kentucky Highway Shooting Was Suspect’s

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      The identification, made through DNA testing, affirmed the belief of officials. The body was discovered Wednesday after a 12-day manhunt.DNA testing of a body found this week near the site of a Kentucky highway shooting that led to an extensive manhunt confirmed the identity as the suspect, officials said on Friday.Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said in a release that the body belonged to Joseph A. Couch, 32, who authorities said shot at passing vehicles on Interstate 75 near London, a city about an hour south of Lexington. The attack on Sept. 7 seriously injured five people and hit a dozen vehicles with bullets.Authorities had expressed confidence on Wednesday, when the body was discovered, that it had belonged to the suspect, but Friday’s confirmation officially brought closure to the case. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, the authorities said.The state’s chief medical examiner, William Ralston, said in the release that the commonwealth could now “move forward from this tragic situation.”The attack led to an intense manhunt of nearly two weeks across tens of thousands of acres of densely forested land near where the shooting occurred, leaving the local community in fear. Several schools canceled classes, and the police stepped up their presence at sporting events, bus routes and other places where people gathered.On the 12th day of the pursuit, the authorities announced that they, along with a married couple who had been searching for the suspect on their own, had found a body in a dense brush behind the highway exit where the shooting took place. Items were found with the body, including a weapon, that the authorities believed belonged to Mr. Couch.According to the release, officials were initially unable to identify the body through a soft tissue DNA test because of the “extreme decomposition” of the body. (It is unclear how long the body had been there before it was discovered.) Instead, they used DNA extracted from a bone to confirm the identity, the release said.The motive for the attack remains unclear. According to court records, Mr. Couch, who served in the Army Reserve, had several charges on his criminal record, including an arrest where he was charged with terroristic threatening in February. More

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      Lake Elsinore Serial Killer Confesses to 1986 Murder of 19-Year-Old Woman

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      William Lester Suff, 70, was already on death row for a dozen murders in Southern California. Now, he has confessed to killing a 19-year-old woman, shutting a 1986 cold case, officials said.A convicted serial killer on California death row for murdering a dozen people in the 1980s and ’90s confessed to the 1986 murder of a 19-year-old woman in Los Angeles County, the police announced on Tuesday.William Lester Suff, 70, confessed in May 2022 to stabbing Cathy Small to death and dumping her body on a South Pasadena, Calif., cul-de-sac, where her body was discovered by police on Feb. 22, 1986, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced at a news conference on Tuesday. Why the announcement came more than two years after the confession was not clear.Ms. Small’s body was found in the morning wearing a nightgown, and she died from multiple stab wounds and strangulation, Lt. Patricia Thomas said.Ms. Small’s body was identified three days later by a man who had read about the killing in the news and had called detectives to say he was concerned that the victim could be his roommate.He told detectives that she had worked as a prostitute in the Lake Elsinore area and had lived at his house for a few months, Lieutenant Thomas said.The man said that Ms. Small left their house on the night of Feb. 21, 1986 wearing a nightgown. Ms. Small, he added, told him that a man named Bill was paying her $50 to join him on a drive to Los Angeles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Mammoth DNA Discovery Helps Map an Ancient Genome in 3-D

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      In 2018 an international team of scientists — from labs in Houston, Copenhagen, Barcelona and beyond — got their hands on a remarkable biological specimen: a skin sample from a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth that had been recovered from the permafrost in Siberia. They probed the sample with an innovative experimental technique that revealed the three-dimensional architecture of the mammoth’s genome. The resulting paper was published on Thursday in the journal Cell.Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Canada, was “floored” — the technique had successfully captured the original geometry of long stretches of DNA, a feat never before accomplished with an ancient DNA sample. “It’s absolutely beautiful,” said Dr. Poinar, who reviewed the paper for the journal.The typical method for extracting ancient DNA from fossils, Dr. Poinar said, is still “kind of cave man.” It produces short fragments of code composed of a four-letter molecular alphabet: A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), T (thymine). An organism’s full genome resides in cell nuclei, in long, unfragmented DNA strands called chromosomes. And, vitally, the genome is three-dimensional; as it dynamically folds with fractal complexity, its looping points of contact help dictate gene activity.“To have the actual architectural structure of the genome, which suggests gene expression patterns, that’s a whole other level,” Dr. Poinar said.“It’s a new kind of fossil, a fossil chromosome,” said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a team member who is an applied mathematician, a biophysicist and a geneticist and directs the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Technically, he noted, it is a non-mineralized fossil, or subfossil, since it has not turned to stone.Erez Lieberman Aiden, director of the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesThe trunk of a 39,000-year-old woolly mammoth nicknamed Yuka that also yielded fossil chromosomes in the study.Love Dalén/Stockholm UniversityWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More