A month before one of the biggest sporting events in Pennsylvania, officials at the Pocono Raceway got an unusual call for help from the state's transportation department.

A Jamaican man who volunteered for the Royal Air Force and flew bombing missions in World War II was remembered at his funeral as a dignified, gracious, quiet man with an old-school charm

(Reuters) -Russia sought to restore calm on Monday after an aborted mutiny by Wagner Group mercenaries over the weekend, while

First Quantum Minerals Ltd. is winding down operations at its Panama copper mine as a blockade of boats

It’s well known that all humans alive today can be traced back to a common ancestor but a study may have found where that ancestor originates. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute mapped the entirety of genetic relationships among humans to create the largest human family tree ever. By combining modern and ancient human genomes data from eight different databases, the researchers were able to create a massive family tree. This allowed them to see how a person’s genetic sequence relates to another using the points of the genome. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “Essentially, we are reconstructing the genomes of our ancestors and using them to form a vast network of relationships,” Lead author Dr Anthony Wilder Wohns said. “We can then estimate when and where these ancestors lived.” Where they lived? Sudan, Africa. Dr Wohns told Reuters, "The very earliest ancestors we identify trace back in time to a geographic location that is in modern Sudan. “These ancestors lived up to and over 1 million years ago—which is much older than current estimates for the age of Homo sapiens—250,000 to 300,000 years ago. So bits of our genome have been inherited from individuals who we wouldn’t recognize as modern humans," Dr Wohns said. Researchers used 3,609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations and samples that ranged from 1,000s to over 100,000 years. By using a new method to compile the data, algorithms were able to predict where common ancestors were in evolutionary trees to explain some patterns of genetic variation. The results were a network of almost 27 million ancestors. “The power of our approach is that it makes very few assumptions about the underlying data and can also include both modern and ancient DNA samples,” Dr Wohns says. Not only does the data help us understand human geology better but the new method could help in other research, like medicine. “The underlying method could have widespread applications in medical research, for instance identifying genetic predictors of disease risk," Dr Wohns added. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

A legal battle over the U.S. government’s deadly capture of thousands of wild horses in Nevada is getting a hard look from a federal judge in Reno

White men have largely controlled American conservation policies for more than a century

A 98-year-old man has been charged as an accessory to murder at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. The man, who has not been named, is alleged to have “supported the cruel and malicious killing of thousands of prisoners as a member of the SS guard detail” at Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945. In operation from 1936 until April 1945, Sachsenhausen – also known as Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg – was a labour camp known for its medical experimentation area. After the end of the Second World War, when the area was Sovient-occupied, it was used by the secret police agency the NKVD, later renamed the KGB, as a special camp. More than 200,000 prisoners were held at Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945, where tens of thousands died of starvation, disease and forced labour alongside medical experiments and SS extermination operations, including shootings, hangings and gassing. Though the exact figures vary, upper estimates suggest 100,000 people died at Sachsenhausen. The accused man is a resident of the county of Main-Kinzig, near Frankfurt, and is charged with over 3,300 counts of being an accessory to murder between July 1943 and February 1945. Filed at the state court in Hanau, prosecutors will now decide whether to send the case to trial. Should the case move forward, the man will be tried under juvenile law to take into account his age at the time of his alleged crimes, with a psychiatric expert adding that the suspect is fit to stand trial at least on a “limited basis”. In recent years, German prosecutors have brought several cases to allow for those that helped Nazi camps to function to be prosecuted as an accessory to murder. In 2021, 96-year-old Irmgard Furchner was caught shortly after going on the run ahead of a court hearing on charges of committing war crimes during World War Two. The next year, Furchner was handed a two-year-old suspended sentence for aiding and abetting the murder of 10,505 people and for the attempted murder of five people during her time working as a stenographer and typist at Stutthof concentration camp. She was accused of being part of the accessory to the function of the camp, where she was alleged to have “aided and abetted those in charge in the systematic killing of those imprisoned there”. In July 2020, a court in Hamburg convicted 93-year-old Nazi camp guard Bruno Dey of being an accessory to murder over his time spent at Stutthof concentration camp during the final months of the Second World War. He was handed a two-year suspended sentence after being convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder - equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his time there in 1944 and 1945. Read More Teenage neo-Nazi defaced Windrush mural and had ‘race war’ fantasies, court told Former RAF cadet defaced Windrush mural with Nazi symbols ‘Neo-Nazi’ ex-prison officer jailed for possessing terrorist handbook Footage of Holocaust miracle rescue unearthed for the first time Putin puts ‘Satan II’ nuclear missile ‘on combat duty’ as Kyiv launches drone strikes Drone attacks inside Putin’s Russia will only increase, says senior Ukraine official Billionaires want to build a new city in rural California. They must convince voters first

A North Dakota Senate leader says a state senator, his wife and their two young children died when the small plane they were traveling in crashed in Utah

By Tyler Clifford NEW YORK (Reuters) -A smoky yellow haze generated by hundreds of Canadian wildfires hovered over a large

Donald Trump is in court today in Miami to face charges of mishandling classified documents.

'He was compulsively searching pictures of the victims, but not only pictures of the victims,' said District Attorney Ray Tierney