TWIN TROUBLE

Australian 29-year-old twin sisters were practising with small-calibre guns at the Family Shooting Centre outdoor shooting range south of Denver, Colorado, when they suddenly fell to the ground almost simultaneously from gunshots to the head.

Police Captain Perea said investigators are not sure who fired the gun or guns or whether the same bullet hit both sisters, who were in the same shooting lane.
One of the Victorian women died at the scene, the other was seriously wounded.

"Apparently the ladies were shot simultaneously or thereabouts," Mr Hamilton said."The how and the why, we really don't know."
Surveillance cameras show the women falling backwards out of their shooting stall.

OCTOPUSSY

Miss Suleman, before giving birth to her litter of eight.

Vivid's Sordid Plans for Nadya 'Octomom' Suleman

Nadya "Octomom" Suleman has been offered $1 million to star in a porn video.
Now Fox News' Pop Tarts has learned the "disgusting" details of what they want Octomom to do. They want Suleman, who gave birth to octuplets in January, to have sex in eight different scenes with eight different men.

[Someone at Fox is disgusted by this hot news story! Would it be the same if it concerned a Fox subsidiary? Fair and balanced.]

HUMAN BONDAGE

Sudan's slave voices

Twin: Abuk Atak Deng: "I was abducted along with my two brothers, Garang and Bol. But we were taken by different men and I have never seen them again.
Garang is my twin and I do not feel complete without him. A part of me is still missing.
I was forced to marry an Arab man, Abdoubhakir. I was 13 when I had my first child. He used to beat me and I always wanted to escape.
My chance came in November 2006. The first day back I slept the whole day - my first rest for ages."

MYSTERIOUS DNA

India's twins pose DNA puzzle

Scientists from around the world are flocking to a small Indian village to try to find out why an extraordinarily large number of identical twins are being born there.
One in 10 births in Mohammad Pur Umri, near Allahabad, involves twins, most of them identical. Looking at the faces of Umri's residents, you can be forgiven for wondering if you have stepped onto the set of a sci-fi film on cloning.
Scientists in hi-tech labs thousands of miles away from the village dust bowl of Umri will try to match DNA strains, seeking an answer to the baffling genetic puzzle.

MYSTERIOUS DNA

DNA puzzle of mother 'made of two women'

A mother-of-three has discovered she is not the biological parent of two of her naturally conceived sons and is in fact made up of two women.
Scientists came to the extraordinary conclusion that the 52-year-old was formed from two non-identical twin girl embryos which fused into a single person in her mother's womb.
Tests carried out on the woman - known as Jane - showed she had two distinct types of DNA in her body.

CONJOINED TWINS

Egyptian mummy gives birth to two girls sharing one body



A 26-year old woman from a village in upper Egypt has given birth to a health baby girl with two heads, the Cairo daily Al-Akhbar reported on Friday.
The baby can move both heads, according to the newspaper, which also published a photo of the child. The baby was delivered by Caesarean section in a hospital in Assiut after an uncomplicated nine-month pregnancy. The baby was then brought to a specialist clinic in Cairo 'to carry out further tests and to establish how to manage this unusual case'.

[Note the use of the word baby, singular, in this report. Perhaps it is closer to the truth to consider this case as the birth of two babies sharing a body as in the case of the UK sisters Abigail and Brittany (photo). A photo accompanying the story shows this point by giving the names of the pair, Huda and Manal Abdel Nasser Mohammed Mahmoud.]

Twins, 114, live and die together

Twin sisters born in Nagda village of Madhya Pradesh 114 years ago died together on Thursday. They have now been cremated side by side.
In a miracle of sorts, the women not only came into the world together. They also married on the same day in the same village, turned widows simultaneously and breathed their last on the same night at almost the same time.

Parallel Universes and multiverses

Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.
The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelg?nger any less real. The estimate is derived from elementary probability and does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite (or at least sufficiently large) in size and almost uniformly filled with matter, as observations indicate. In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices.