In early 2021, Dr. Michael Ombrello, an investigator at the National Institutes of Health, received a message from doctors at Yale about a patient with a novel genetic mutation—the first of its kind ever seen. A specialist in rare inflammatory and immune disorders, Ombrello was concerned by what first-round genetic tests showed: a disabling mutation in a gene, known as PLCG2, that’s crucial for proper immune functioning. It was hard to discern how the patient, a forty-eight-year-old woman, had survived for so long without serious infections. Even more puzzling was the sudden onset of severe joint pain and swelling she was experiencing after years of excellent health. He decided to bring her to the N.I.H. campus, in Bethesda, Maryland, to study her case first hand. That’s how I ended up as a patient in his clinic on a sweet, warming day in April, 2021, just as the cherry blossoms in the Washington area were in full bloom. As a historian and a biographer, I am used to conducting research, examining other people’s lives in search of patterns and insights. That spring, I became the research subject. At the N.I.H., Ombrello’s team took twenty-one vials of my blood and stored a few of them in liquid nitrogen for future use. Scientists outside the N.I.H. began to study me, too. In the past few years, my case has been examined by specialists at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania—by immunologists, rheumatologists, dermatologists, pulmonologists, and experts in infectious disease. It has been debated at hospital grand rounds and global medical conferences, and in high-powered conference calls. There are PowerPoint decks about it. All of which makes me lucky, in one respect. Far too often, women who present with hard-to-diagnose illnesses are told that the symptoms are no big deal, that the problem is in their head. They spend years going from doctor to doctor, in a desperate search for someone, anyone, who’s willing to help. This has not been my experience. From the first, doctors took my condition seriously, sometimes more seriously than I did. They pushed me along to the nation’s greatest experts, at the finest medical institutions. My insurance paid large sums for tests and treatments; my family and friends were patient and supportive. All the while, I was able to keep doing what needed to be done: write a book, raise a child, teach my classes. But none of this gets around a single, stubborn fact. “You are the only person known to have this exact mutation,” Ombrello explains. “I haven’t seen any reports in reference populations of this mutation, and I don’t have anyone that I’ve had referred to me or that I’ve seen in my patient cohort that has this mutation.” In other words, I am one of a kind, and therefore a medical curiosity. Doctors often blurt out that my situation is “fascinating” before catching themselves; they’re aware that nobody really wants to be fascinating in quite this way. Thanks to advances in genetic sequencing, though, researchers are increasingly able to identify one-offs like me.

Singer and performer, who had 73 Top 40 hits in the US and 52 in the UK, died at home in Los Angeles of natural causes

Gov. Kim Reynolds has unveiled a massive plan to whittle down Iowa's current system of 37 cabinet agencies to 16.

You’re not going to believe this, but Elizabeth Banks has never done cocaine.

Oakland Police Chief Leronne Armstrong was "not credible" when he denied knowing the details of a sergeant’s alleged misconduct in a case that’s at the heart of an unraveling scandal that could cost the chief his job, independent investigators found.

Hospitals across Massachusetts have agreed to enforce new codes of conduct to help shield health care workers from the growing threat of violence and abuse from patients. The new policies will ban violence, as well as offensive, abusive and discriminatory language and behaviors. Any patient who violates the rules could be asked to leave and seek care elsewhere. The commitment comes as the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association reports that every 38 minutes, someone is assaulted, verbally abused or threatened at a Massachusetts health care facility. Most of the violent and verbal attacks come from patients and are leveled at health care workers. This kind of behavior is on the rise. The hospital association surveyed its member hospitals, who reported 13,734 “abusive incidents” last year, a 28% increase from 2021. The numbers may represent an undercount since some incidents likely go unreported. Boston Children’s Hospital began upgrading security amid a barrage of harassment last year — including bomb threats — that was triggered by misinformation about its transgender surgery program. The harassment also included social media attacks and aggressive phone calls.

White Mississippi lawmakers moved closer Tuesday evening to creating a new system of unelected judges and prosecutors chosen by white officials to oversee a part of the majority-Black capital city. Lawmakers debated House Bill 1020, which would create a new court system in an expanded Capitol Complex Improvement District, for five hours before representatives passed it in a 76-37 vote. In remarks to the press at the Capitol after the vote Tuesday night, Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba described the bill as “oppressive” because it would take jurisdiction away from judges and the prosecutor elected by majority-Black Hinds County voters. Under the bill, the Mississippi Supreme Court chief justice would appoint two judges to oversee cases in the district; the Mississippi attorney general would appoint four prosecutors; the state public defender would appoint public defenders; and the Mississippi Public Safety Commissioner would continue to have authority over a Capitol Police force over the expanded CCID.

In the summer of 1999, police in the tiny town of Tulia carried out one of the largest drug stings in West Texas history. Nearly 50 people were arrested, almost all of them Black, and several were quickly sentenced to life in prison. "Tulia's Streets Cleared of Garbage," the local newspaper declared. Convictions in the remaining cases seemed all but certain, even though they were riddled with inconsistencies. None of the defendants had drugs on them when they were arrested and the allegations against them hinged on the often-contradictory testimony of a single undercover police officer. So in a last-ditch effort, one of the defendants’ lawyers asked for help from a prominent young attorney in Amarillo named Jeff Blackburn. Over the next four years, Blackburn exposed one of the country’s most celebrated drug busts as a sham. Together with a team of lawyers and activists, he helped prove that the undercover officer was a serial liar. He secured early releases for dozens of the defendants and even convinced then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry to pardon them.

A man accused of murder in April 2019 led the House Judiciary Committee in the Pledge of Allegiance on Wednesday, raising the ire of the family of the man who died. Corey Ryan Beekman, a retired staff sergeant for the Michigan Army National Guard, led the pledge while wearing his military dress clothes during the committee’s hearing at the invitation of U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida. Beekman was accused of the murder of Billy Buchanan on April 16, 2019, in Free Soil Township. He was also accused of shooting Katlin Buck at that time. Then-Mason County Prosecuting Attorney Paul Spaniola tried in vain to get Buck to testify in the circuit court trial of Beekman, but she refused. Without her testimony, both Spaniola and his successor, Lauren Kreinbrink, did not want to move forward because they felt they would not get a conviction. The charges were dismissed.

Tech lobbyists revised a repair bill before New York's governor signed it.

After the champions were charged with 101 rule breaches, we look at how we got here, what it means and what happens next

When he was six, his terrified face – photographed during a raid by armed immigration officers on his family’s Miami home – became one of the most memorable images of cold war tensions between the US and Cuba. Now 29, and more than two decades after he was forcibly deported from Florida to his homeland at the direction of the US supreme court, Elián González is poised to become one of Cuba’s most senior lawmakers. His nomination for a seat in the 470-member national assembly, announced in the Caribbean island’s government newspaper Granma on Tuesday, is seen as a high honor at a young age for González, who has long been critical of US policy towards Cuba.

The process is known internally as a "flattening,"

An outlandish guerrilla militant who drove a silver Hearse to Denver-area Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was secretly a federal informant with a sex crime conviction, a new podcast reveals. The informant, Mickey Windecker, pushed an activist to buy a gun for him, resulting in the activist’s guilty plea on weapons charges. Other Denver-area activists accuse Windecker of inflaming otherwise-peaceful demonstrations, encouraging people to break windows, and leading marches directly into police traps. Windecker’s informant status was first reported this week on the podcast Alphabet Boys, which explores Windecker’s case and FBI involvement in the Colorado protests. The Alphabet Boys podcast shared some of its documents, including recordings and an FBI summary report, with The Daily Beast, which corroborated those documents through court records and with other Colorado activists who’d encountered Windecker.

It was around midnight on a spring day in 1989 when two carloads of men sprayed bullets into a crowd of young people hanging out in front of the Bayview Opera House, wounding nine and killing two. The shootings in San Francisco’s historically African American neighborhood shocked the city and nation, with one emblematic newspaper photo showing SF school board member Joanne Miller consoling a sobbing neighbor whose 20-year-old daughter Roshawn Johnson was among the murdered. “I was determined to go out into the world to find the ‘medicine’ to heal my community,” she once explained in an autobiographical essay. What unfolded was a complex, often successful and sometimes confounding career in which Miller, a white woman, formed an identity firmly rooted in the African American community. Her career along the way was nurtured by a public official who was recently imprisoned on corruption charges unrelated to Miller’s work. Miller’s efforts are premised on ideas about the psychology of violent criminals, and have generated controversy amid accusations of harassment and assault by her workers, which she and her staff say is part of a bogus narrative meant to falsely villainize them. Miller includes in this category The Standard’s story about how the shooting of an Urban Alchemy employee raised questions about the company’s role providing unlicensed private security services. She’s won fans as a tireless social entrepreneur, entrusted with helping to keep the peace in San Francisco’s Downtown neighborhoods while offering jobs to people for whom full-time employment might have seemed out of reach. Mayor London Breed recently made Urban Alchemy a bedrock of her strategy to address Downtown homelessness and fallout from the pandemic jobs collapse. After starting with a $36,000 budget in 2018, Miller now oversees $62 million in contracts in San Francisco alone. She also runs operations in a half-dozen cities including Austin, which allocated $4 million for Urban Alchemy to run its downtown homeless shelter.

In response to frustrations over pay-for-play deals masquerading as NIL, the NCAA now “presumes” an infraction “if circumstantial information suggests that one or more parties engaged in impermissible conduct.” The approach should better detect disallowed NIL payments, but it will likely be challenged under federal antitrust law and state NIL statutes. The NCAA adopted “Bylaw 19.7.3 Violations Presumed in Select Cases” last October and it became effective on Jan. 1. Presumption of an infraction through circumstantial evidence means that direct evidence that wrongdoing occurred—such as an admission or a witness statement—is not required. A suspicious social media post or a journalist’s investigative story that raises questions could suffice.

A harrowing deep dive into the world of “kidfluencers.”

Our intrepid reporter camped outside the office of Congress’ most scandal-plagued freshman, so you don’t have to.

To legions of ‘Rick and Morty’ fans, co-creator Roiland was a quirky genius whose career was suddenly derailed by allegations of domestic violence. But to colleagues, his behavior has been troubling for years.

A former “Dances With Wolves” actor accused of sexually abusing Indigenous girls and women for two decades in multiple states has been charged in Nevada for crimes that prosecutors said occurred in the Las Vegas-area starting in 2012. Nathan Chasing Horse, 46, was formally charged Monday morning during a brief appearance in a North Las Vegas courtroom full of his friends and relatives who had hoped to see him released on bail. But a judge postponed hearing arguments about his custody status until Wednesday to give Chasing Horse's new California-based attorney, Alexandra Kazaria, additional time to obtain permission from the State Bar of Nevada to represent him in the case.