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What really happened to Nika Shahkarami? Witnesses to her final hours cast doubt on Iran’s story

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CNN
 — 

A black-clad Iranian girl stands on top of an overturned garbage bin, waving her headscarf as it is engulfed by flames, amid chants of “death to the dictator.”

A moment later, video shows, she crouches to collect another scarf, from a friend, which she will also set on fire in front of the protesters.

The girl was 16-year-old Nika Shahkarami, from Tehran. A few hours after these scenes were recorded on September 20, in videos exclusively obtained and verified by CNN, Nika went missing. ​And more than one week later, her family learned that she was dead.

​Iranian authorities claimed Nika’s body was found at the back of a courtyard on the morning of September 21. ​Her mother wasn’t given access to identify her until 8 days later. CCTV footage released by the authorities timestamped just after midnight ​as September 20 ​became September 21 ​showed the figure of a masked person they said was Nika entering a building ​that was uninhabited, and still under construction in Tehran.

Nika Shahkarami seen burning a headscarf at the protests on September 20th. Eyewitnesses said she didn’t seem scared of the riot police standing nearby. Credit: Obtained by CNN

​A Tehran prosecutor initially said she died after being thrown from the building’s roof, and that her death “had no connection to the protests” of that day​, but despite apparently declaring her death a homicide, he did not say whether there were suspects under investigation. State broadcasters reported that she “fell,” but did not provide evidence to support the claim it was an accident.

On Wednesday, after CNN asked the government to comment on the evidence in this investigation, an Iranian media report quoted a Tehran prosecutor as saying that Nika’s death was a suicide. Iranian authorities still have not responded to CNN’s repeated inquiries about Nika’s death.​​

​Authorities never explained why Nika would enter that building on her own, and Nika’s mother has said she doesn’t believe the masked person is Nika. Her mother has said she believes Nika was killed by the authorities, but the authorities have never said whether Nika was in their custody at any point.

But dozens of videos and eyewitness accounts obtained exclusively by CNN indicate that Nika appears to have been chased and detained by Iranian security forces that night. One key eyewitness, Ladan, told CNN she saw Nika being taken into custody ​at the protest by “several large-bodied plainclothes security officers” who bundled her into a car.

Moments earlier, this witness, while stuck in Tehran traffic, filmed a video that purportedly shows Shahkarami ducking behind a white car and yelling “tekoon nakon, tekoon nakon” – which means “don’t move, don’t move” – to its driver before running away from the brief shelter it gave her.

Seven people who knew Nika and spoke to CNN confirmed it was her. The same footage, filmed at 8.37 p.m. on September 20, also shows anti-riot police on motorcycles, patrolling the area.

“I wanted to save her, but I couldn’t,” said Ladan. “There were about 20 or 30 Basijis on motorcycles on the sidewalk​,” she said, using the local name for the paramilitary organization that has been at the forefront of the state’s crackdown on protesters.

​”Shahkarami was throwing rocks at them. I was scared and I even went past her and said, ‘Be careful dear!’ because there were a number of plainclothes police in the streets going through the cars looking for her.

“Fifty meters ahead they got her,” Ladan added.

Ladan came forward to CNN after realising that the teenager she had filmed and spoken to was the one whose death had been reported days later. CNN exclusively spoke to several witnesses who were at the Tehran protest on September 20 with the help of activist group 1500Tasvir.

Other videos, including the scarf-burning ones, are evidence that Nika was at the forefront of the protests earlier in the night, before the crackdown started – fearlessly leading chants and throwing rocks, according to several testimonies.

That would have made her a target for security forces, including members of Iran’s feared Basij militia, as they started to descend into the area around the University of Tehran and Keshavarz Boulevard where most of the protesters gathered that evening, witnesses said.

“I remember how brave she was because she would go up on the garbage bin and wouldn’t come down. She also burned her head scarf,” said Najmeh, a protester who was with Nika at the demonstration.

CNN is using pseudonyms for all of the witnesses quoted in this investigation, due to the risk to their safety.

Students had gathered near Laleh Park around 5 to 6 p.m. on September 20 to protest the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died last month ​in state custody after being detained by the country’s morality police​, allegedly for how she was dressed.​

The scene was one that has become familiar in Tehran in recent weeks: young people, mostly women, chanting “death to the dictator,” burning headscarves and throwing rocks toward security forces.

Nika Shahkarami is visible at the frontline of the protests, throwing rocks at riot police further down the street. Credit: Obtained by CNN

At one point, a trash bin was brought over and overturned to block the road. Nika hopped on top along with a couple of others, video footage showed.

“She burned her head scarf and waved it. I told her not to wave it because you could burn yourself, just hold it until it burns,” said Nima, who was also at the protest and saw the events unfold. “Then she took the headscarves of the two friends who were with her and burned those as well.”

In other videos ​from that evening geolocated and verified by CNN, Nika is shown hurling rocks at anti-riot police forces. She’s carrying a distinctive CAT rucksack and wearing a black mask and hat on her head. ​Sounds that appear to be gunshots can be heard.

From 7 to 8 p.m., the security forces’ crackdown intensified, witnesses said. “They were firing tear gas and pellet shots and grabbing protesters. Almost all of us were confronting them and running away,” said Reza, another witness.

As anti-riot police and Basij forces filled the streets, protesters started to move in all directions to escape the crackdown.

Another witness, Dina, who spent some of the protest walking alongside Nika, told CNN she saw Nika in front of a gas station not far from the University of Tehran, where the group of protesters had gathered after fleeing tear gas launched by the security forces. Others managed to capture on video those being detained by what appeared to be plainclothes officers.

Reza added: “I saw with my own eyes security forces hitting women with batons, and they grabbed many of them and took them to police vans.”

It is in this context of extreme repression of the protest that Nika ​was last seen by the witnesses who spoke to CNN – and nine more days would pass before her family was given official word of her whereabouts. Videos verified and geolocated by CNN prove that the girl, in the last witness footage provided to CNN showing her alive, was hemmed in by security forces on three sides.

“I think Nika got stuck that night when we were running away. Because she was very young,” Dina said.

While Iranian authorities insist Nika died ​on the grounds of that uninhabited building, her mother Nasrin told Etemad, an independent Iranian newspaper, in an interview published on October 10 that she believes her daughter “was at the protests and killed there.”

Iranian security forces arrested eight people who were workers in the building which Nika allegedly entered ​a few hours after eyewitnesses saw her at the September 20 protests, state-aligned news agency Tasnim reported on October 4. Tehran’s prosecutor Ali Salehi said a judicial criminal case had been launched and expressed his condolences to Nika’s family, state run IRNA said.

The last known video of Nika, filmed at 8:37 p.m. She is seen hiding between cars to avoid the riot police. Credit: Obtained by CNN

Mohammad Shahriari, the head of criminal prosecution of Tehran province, initially said Nika’s injuries corresponded with ​having been “thrown down,” citing an autopsy that revealed multiple fractures in the area of the pelvis, head, upper and lower limbs, hands​, feet ​and hip, Tasnim reported.

He added that “an investigation showed this incident had no connection to the protests. No bullet holes were found on the body.”

CNN has repeatedly sought comment from the Iranian authorities on whether Nika was detained at the protests that night and whether other women were assaulted and put in police vehicles. CNN also asked the Tehran prosecutor’s office about the status of the criminal investigation into Nika’s death. No responses were received prior to the publication of this story.

​On Wednesday, the online news outlet Mizan, which is affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, published a report saying that Nika’s death had been a suicide, citing a prosecutor from t

However, a death certificate first seen by BBC Persian and verified by CNN states that Shahkarami died from multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object.

In the Etemad interview, Nasrin said she had spoken by phone with Shahkarami many times on the day she disappeared. The background noise during the calls indicated she and the other protesters were fleeing from security forces, Nasrin added. ​

Nika also mentioned a few locations she was in – Enghelab Square, Keshavarz Boulevard and Valiasr street – according to Nasrin, which match the videos geolocated by CNN.

Nasrin last spoke with her daughter just before midnight, she said, and after that, all her attempts to call Nika indicated that Nika’s phone had been disconnected. Nika’s Instagram and Telegram accounts were deleted, according to Nika’s aunt and several protesters who spoke to CNN.

For days, her family says they went to police stations, jails, and hospitals looking for traces of her, all to no avail. Finally, on September 30, Nika’s mother and brother were asked to identify Nika’s corpse, she told BBC Persian. ​

​On October 6, in an interview with Radio Farda, Nasrin claimed that while she and other members of the family were looking for Nika in the days after her disappearance, one person gave her Nika’s national ID number and told her “the IRGC got her, they wanted to slowly interrogate her.”

That matches what Shahkarami’s aunt, Atash, told BBC Persian soon after she disappeared. “An unofficial source from the IRGC themselves got in touch with me and said, this kid was in our custody a week ago, and after we were done interrogating and building the case file, 1 or 2 days ago ​(she) was transferred to Evin prison,” Atash said.

Atash and Nika’s uncle, Mohsen, were subsequently arrested by Iranian security forces and forced to make a false statement, according to BBC Persian​, citing a source close to the family. Following the BBC’s reporting, when reached by CNN, Atash asked not to be contacted again, citing safety concerns.

While the family searches for answers, the people who were with Nika on that day are also still reeling from her death.

“The situation was very scary, and everyone thought of escaping,” Dina said. “I can’t forgive myself for Nika’s death. She was a child.”



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Technology

A True Teenage Horror Story

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It would come sooner or later. There was no escape.
Image: Microsoft / Evan Amos / Kotaku

Hidden from the bustle of Jamaica Avenue, down a winding flight of stairs, the shop looked like a mausoleum, with stacks of busted PS2s, OG Xboxes, and GameCubes lining the walls. That small store in the Jamaica Colosseum Mall was the same place I’d once purchased Splinter Cell on PS2, Doom 3 for Xbox, and the Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack, among many others. But the dead consoles served as a jarring reminder that as vivid as the worlds those boxes produced could feel, sooner or later our machines of dreams would cease to function.

Back in late 2005, standing on the cusp of a new console generation, I understood intellectually that, over time, some of the new, cutting-edge Xbox 360s and not-yet-released PlayStation 3s would die someday. Maybe after another decade that shop would be filled with hourglass-shaped white monoliths and glossy black Foreman grills. But not just yet. It was the beginning of a new era, after all.

Back then, my teenage social circle was busy bickering over silly console wars, arguing in fast-food restaurants over whether or not Killzone 2’s 2005 E3 demo was real, or our PlayStation friends’ assurances that once we saw the next-gen SOCOM, we’d leave Halo and Xbox forever. But we all agreed on one thing: We were all psyched for the wild new possibilities these new machines promised. HD graphics, better custom music playlists, a conclusion (finally!) to Halo 2, and the promise of true next-gen experiences like Gears of War. What a time to be alive.

And in an era of expensive texting plans and limited social media, the new HD consoles’ online functionality would soon mark a shift in our social lives. In fact, that was the very reason many of us sought out broadband internet. United online, our circle would surely stay as bright as the flashy rings on the Xbox 360 itself.

We all saved up enough from whatever random jobs we had at the time to buy 360s and fulfill the escapist desire that beckoned us after last period let out. Our afternoons were filled with round after round of Halo 2 (eventually Halo 3), trash talking, arguing over whether Korn was better off without Head, figuring out how to best apply Gears of War cover tactics to Halo, convincing someone to give Lost Planet a try, ordering Chinese takeout (leaving one friend in particular stuck with the bill. We’re good now, right?), trading burned Incubus and HIM discographies to rip to our 360 hard drives, blasting Lamb of God’s Sacrament, and saying things like, “oh my god, have you seen this Mass Effect game coming out?” “Oblivion looks nuts!” and “Would you kindly die so I can take your sniper rifle?” Single-player or multi, gaming never felt more exciting or promising.

Who knew that E-day would be the least of our fears?
Image: The Coalition

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But in between the hollering over killing sprees and chainsawing aliens, talk occasionally turned to the rumors surfacing on forums about Xbox 360s suddenly failing. It always went the same way: a black screen, a bunch of red lights around the power button, and silence. Soon this failure had a name: The Red Ring of Death, or RRoD for short. I started out a skeptic and soon became a denier. “It can’t happen to us,” I thought. We were all relying on the 360 to stay in touch and game together as we drifted toward adulthood. It couldn’t happen to us.

The apparent cause always varied: different people playing different games for different periods of time. Eventually it seemed like the only thing these stories had in common was that three-quarters of the power button lit up red like a stoplight. Surely, I thought, folks just needed to take better care of their machines. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t the 360’s time to start dying. We all thought it was still in its best day. In our best days even.

We thought wrong.

The first among us who fell victim had it the worst. Over the course of a few years, one friend in particular would go through four Xbox 360s. By then, our social circle was in panic mode. We tried to become experts on which models shipped when, trying to glue together the internet anecdotes with what we were hearing from victims we personally knew. Which 360s were most susceptible? Were launch models okay? The Halo 3 edition? The Elite? Does horizontal or vertical orientation matter? The panic of losing our machines made it hard to be sure. But it wasn’t just about missing out on Halo nights. The 360 had become central to how we socialized.

We all started to physically drift apart after high school. Sure, MySpace was a thing, but it was Xbox Live that really kept our social circle intact. That’s where we not only gamed, but also talked about music, movies, life. All of it. Live became somewhat of a digital safe space as we faced the challenges of becoming adults.

But the red rings followed us online. When one of us fell to them, a portion of that social circle, much like the error sign on the machine itself, went dark. Microsoft’s repair program was generous, but we also couldn’t shake the fear of needing to spend another three or four hundred dollars. We worried over how much time we should spend on the machine. How much time we should spend with each other.

We all feared that we were gaming on borrowed time. A game of Capture the Flag could be redly interrupted. Some, like myself, tried to dig into the denial. How could the problem possibly be so widespread? But when someone with a Halo 3 edition finally got the error, the inevitability of death was too naked to deny. Eventually someone even RRoDed on an Elite, which we’d been sure was bulletproof. I remember a brief text exchange. “I did everything to keep it safe! I had three feet of space around it and an intercooler! How does this keep happening?”

Repair turnaround took weeks. And in the hectic buzz of moving from high school to college and getting full-time jobs, those weeks made it hard to keep up with each other and stay in touch. A 360 dying meant you wouldn’t speak to someone for weeks. Forget about rounds of Halo. We weren’t just deprived of our favorite game, the red rings actively pulled us apart from each other.

Grenades were exchanged for tumbleweeds as my friends fell to the rings.
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Kotaku

The red rings of death became a fog that swallowed each of us, one by one. Somehow my launch console remained exempt, but the fear of it hitting me became too much. Toward the end of the decade I started exploring the PlayStation 3’s library, and tried to convince friends to do the same. But the damage was done. Time continued to pass and the Xbox 360, once central to my social circle, didn’t just fail us. It killed us, one by one.

In the blur of years during which everyone else I knew suffered red rings, things started to calm down. Newer Xbox models appeared to address the underlying overheating issue, but our online social circle was smaller by then.

Even so, the 360 generation was far from over. We’d been through the worst of it, and still had amazing games to look forward to. One evening, I, the sole survivor, sat down to start up a new Mass Effect playthrough to get ready for the sequel.

But it was not to be. A dreadfully familiar series of lights appeared on the face of my Xbox, denying me entrance to the sci-fi RPG futureworld. After tearing through all of my friends, the Red Ring of Death had finally come for me.

 

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Health

Mother of baby hospitalized with RSV tells story

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Story at a glance

  • Respiratory Syncytial Virus, commonly referred to as RSV, is spreading quickly across the country.
  • RSV is primarily linked to inflamed or infected airways in the lungs of children less than one-year-old.
  • “What’s a cold for us is something that could potentially be deadly for a baby,” said Allison Blocker, the North Carolina mother of a baby who contracted RSV.

GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) – Health experts warn Respiratory Syncytial Virus, commonly referred to as RSV, is spreading quickly across the United States, overwhelming numerous children’s hospitals. 

RSV is primarily linked to inflamed or infected airways in the lungs of children less than one-year-old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“What’s a cold for us is something that could potentially be deadly for a baby,” said Allison Blocker, the North Carolina mother of a baby who contracted RSV.

Blocker’s 8-week-old, Ava, was hospitalized, intubated, and on a ventilator battling the virus for more than a week. 

“That is something that no parent ever wants to see,” she said. “No parent should ever have to see.”

At first, Blocker didn’t think much when her daughter had a cough and runny nose on Oct. 12. She took her to the pediatrician. 

“I never would’ve dreamed we would’ve ended up in the hospital,” Blocker said. “The nurse practitioner took one look at her and immediately called an ambulance.”

Doctors quickly diagnosed her baby with RSV. Within a couple of days of showing symptoms, she started to wheeze and struggled to breathe.

Blocker told FOX8 that doctors put her baby on a high flow of oxygen within 24 hours after being admitted to the hospital.  

After a few days, her daughter was put on a ventilator on Oct. 16.   

“Seeing my child on it, it just rips your heart,” she said. “It makes you feel like … that you’re losing the ability to breathe because your baby can’t breathe.”

The 8-week-old was intubated for two and a half days while her little body fought the virus. 

Blocker said her baby had a “mucus plug” in her lung causing it to collapse. She was stuck with several IVs. 

“You can’t help but go to that place, you can’t help but go to, ‘I’m going to lose my baby,’ I just got eight weeks with my baby, I’m going to lose my baby,” Blocker said. “It was from something that can be preventable with mask-wearing, can be preventable with not sending your child to school sick where they are going to expose another family because it spreads like wildfire.”

Blocker was right by her baby’s side while she was undergoing treatment at the Moses Cone Hospital Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.  

“Knowing that she couldn’t move much on her own,” she said. “I couldn’t hold her; I could barely touch her.”

Moses Cone Children’s Unit Medical Director Doctor Suresh Nagappan told Nexstar’s WGHP that there’s a backlog of patients in the children’s unit, most under 2 years old. 

“We are seeing probably the worst RSV year that I’ve seen in my career,” he said.

Nagappan has seen RSV spread earlier in the year. He said his young patients have gotten sicker for longer.  

“We’re really just supporting them through until the virus gets better and unfortunately there’s no magic medicine that will make them better right away,” Nagappan said. 

Blocker’s daughter was one of the lucky ones, as she got better after a nine-day stay in the hospital.  

“I didn’t realize how blessed we were and how lucky we were that we were able to make it home,” she said. “It was not something I ever envisioned when I had this baby that I would ever have to deal with.”

North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services officials report an increased number of RSV cases, compared to the same times in previous years.

Most children experience a mild case if infected with RSV, according to the CDC. Symptoms of RSV usually develop within four to six days of exposure. 

Parents should look out for these symptoms in their children:

  • Runny nose
  • Decrease in appetite
  • Coughing
  • Sneezing
  • Fever
  • Wheezing

“If their infant or child starts to really breathe harder or breathe faster or just won’t eat or drink at all and you’re worried about getting dehydrated, that’s a time to really go to the pediatrician or the emergency room depending on the severity of things,” Nagappan said. 

Health officials encourage what people have learned during the pandemic to prevent the spread of a virus, including washing hands, using hand sanitizer, wearing a mask, and socially distancing. 

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Science

The 120-year search for the purpose of T. rex’s arms

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Persons explains that it was perfectly possible Osborn could have been right. If male T. rexes – which are notoriously difficult to identify – had turned out to have arms that looked different to female ones, it would make sense that they were using them for sex. “Now, that’s not the way things have gone down,” he says. Instead, as more and more individuals have been uncovered – there are now at least 40 – scientists have confirmed that they all have the characteristically small arms and they always look pretty much the same. 

Another, potentially comical, possibility is that T. rexes may have used their little arms to get up off the ground. With up to 15,500lb (7,031kg) bodies – equivalent to the weight of a large African elephant – they may not have found it easy to manoeuvre out of a resting position, or get back on their feet in the event that they fell over. (Many living animals struggle with this to this day, such as tortoises, which often rock themselves upright when they end up on their backs.)

“So when they were rising from a crouched position, they could use the arms to do a tiny tyrannosaur push-up,” says Persons. However, there is a small flaw with this theory – the carnivore’s arms wouldn’t actually have helped that much. “You’ve got to understand that that really only helps the tyrannosaur with the first two feet. And then it’s got like another 15 feet to go off the ground,” he says.

Another controversial idea, put forward by a single scientist in 2017, is that adults like the Wankel Rex may have used their stubby arms as weapons – perhaps holding their victim in their jaws or pinning it down with their bodyweight, before ripping and slashing at it. Underpinning the idea is that though they’re tiny, T. rex‘s arms are surprisingly muscular. He calculated that even with its 3ft (0.9m) limbs, these eviscerating actions could have done some serious damage, creating gashes several centimetres deep and at least a metre long in a matter of mere seconds.

“Now I personally think the arms are just too ridiculously short for that to make sense,” says Persons.

However, there is also the possibility that they had no function whatsoever – T. rex’s tiny arms were the last vestiges of once-useful appendages that had long ceased to be necessary. If they were simply hangovers from another time, like the human tailbone, the world’s most terrifying predator may have had an ever more bone-chilling future: eventually evolving to lose its arms altogether, to resemble a kind of horrifying land-shark.

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Health

The search for what causes SIDS

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When a healthy baby experiences either too little oxygen or too much carbon dioxide, explains Goldstein, their breathing halts (an “apneic pause”) before they start to gasp. “Those gasps, usually, in a healthy baby, will cause the heart rate to come up,” Goldstein says. “Those babies arouse, and arousal-related reflexes occur: they arch, they yawn, they turn, they wake up and cry, and that frees most babies from relatively modest obstructions and they survive.

“And the SIDs babies didn’t do that. They didn’t arouse and they stayed ‘uncoupled’ between these agonal gasps, which are driven by certain centres of the brain, and the cardiac response.”

That means a “vicious circle” where the feedback system doesn’t function, ending in a coma and death, says Rognum.

Why? In Norway, Rognum, together with paediatrician and neuroscientist Ola Didrik Saugstad, came up with the theory of the “fatal triangle”, which they defined as “a vulnerable period after birth, some genetic predisposition, and a trigger event”. In the US at around the same time, a team led by Goldstein and Hannah Kinney of Boston Children’s Hospital came up with a similar idea: the “triple risk model”.

It’s the latter label that caught on, and it’s this theory that is now the leading explanation among SIDS researchers. It gets to the heart of what scientists have suspected since at least the 1970s: SIDS is not caused by a single event, but several factors coming together. “There’s not just a single reason,” says Goldstein. “We put it more in the category of an expression of a rare undiagnosed disease where at least some of the time, at its initial presentation, it is incompatible with survival.”

Rognum had noticed that the highest-risk period for dying of SIDS, between the second and the fifth month after birth, is also a period where the immune system rapidly develops. “When something develops very rapidly, it’s also unstable,” he says. That’s the vulnerable period after birth. A trigger event could be a seasonal respiratory infection or sleeping prone, or both together – a pairing which increases the risk of SIDS 29-fold.

It is what the “predisposition” is, though, that may be the most enduring puzzle at the heart of SIDS. In recent years, however, this aspect too is becoming less of a mystery.

Researchers including Kinney have thought it might be an issue with the serotonergic system – the neurotransmitters centred in the brainstem that regulate a number of automatic processes, including sleep and breathing. Over the last 20 years, Kinney’s team have honed their hypothesis through multiple studies. An elevation of serotonin (5-HT) in the blood, in particular, is a biomarker for SIDS in around 30% of cases. And their findings have been corroborated by other teams. One study of autopsies, for example, found that serotonin levels were 26% lower in SIDS cases than in healthy infants – a biomarker discovered before Harrington’s finding.

Similarly, Rognum thought the genetic element could be due to varients, or polymorphisms, in the genes that make interleukins – which can be either anti-inflammatory, or pro-inflammatory molecules. They are usually produced in response to damage caused by infections or injuries, so variants in these genes can make this part of the immune response weaker or stronger than they should be.

“We found in the cerebral spinal fluid that the SIDS cases had significantly higher levels of interleukin-6. That’s the interleukin that gives us fever,” Rognum says. “Half of the SIDS cases have levels in the same range as children that died from meningitis and septicaemia, without having those diseases.”

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Entertainment

Leslie Jordan Dead: Will & Grace, American Horror Story Star Was 67

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Leslie Jordan, an actor, writer and singer best known for his roles in “Will & Grace,” “American Horror Story” and “Hearts Afire,” has died. He was 67.

Jordan was driving in Hollywood Monday morning and crashed into the side of a building at Cahuenga Blvd. and Romaine St. It was suspected he suffered some sort of medical emergency.

Jordan was a veteran actor whose credits also included “The Help,” “The Cool Kids” and “Call Me Kat,” which is currently airing its third season on Fox. One of Jordan’s most celebrated roles was his turn as Earl “Brother Boy” Ingram in the stage play “Sordid Lives,” which was later adapted into a 2000 cult romantic comedy film of the same name.

He appeared on television shows including “Ugly Betty,” “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” “Hidden Palms,” “Star Trek: Voyager,” “Caroline in the City,” “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” “Reba,” “Boston Public,” “Nash Bridges” and “Boston Legal.”

In 2020, Jordan became a social media phenomenon, gaining millions of Instagram followers due to his humorous videos posted throughout the pandemic.

Jordan released a gospel music album titled “Company’s Comin’” in 2021 and, later that year, appeared as a guest panelist on “The Masked Singer,” where he performed gospel standard “This Little Light of Mine.”

“The world is definitely a much darker place today without the love and light of Leslie Jordan,” said David Shaul, Jordan’s agent. “Not only was he a mega talent and joy to work with, but he provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times. What he lacked in height he made up for in generosity and greatness as a son, brother, artist, comedian, partner and human being. Knowing that he has left the world at the height of both his professional and personal life is the only solace one can have today.”

More to come…



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Technology

How a magician-mathematician revealed a casino loophole

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To study riffle shuffles rigorously, Diaconis used a powerful mathematical tool called a Markov chain.

“A Markov chain is any repeated action where the outcome depends only on the current state and not on how that state was reached”, explains Sami Hayes Assaf, a mathematician at the University of Southern California. This means that Markov chains have no “memory” of what came before. This is a pretty good model for shuffling cards, says Assaf. The result of the seventh shuffle depends only on the order of the cards after the sixth shuffle, not on how the deck was shuffled the five times prior to that.

Markov chains are widely used in statistics and computer science to handle sequences of random events, whether they are card shuffles or vibrating atoms or fluctuations in stock prices. In each case, the future “state” – the order of the deck, the energy of an atom, the value of a stock – depends only on what’s happening now, not what happened before.

Despite their simplicity, Markov chains can be used to make predictions about the likelihood of certain events after many iterations. Google’s PageRank algorithm, which ranks websites in their search engine results, is based on a Markov chain that models the behaviour of billions of internet users randomly clicking on web links.

Working with Dave Bayer, a mathematician at Columbia University in New York, Diaconis showed that the Markov chain describing riffle shuffles has a sharp transition from ordered to random after seven shuffles. This behaviour, known to mathematicians as a cut-off phenomenon, is a common feature of problems involving mixing. Think of stirring cream into coffee: as you stir, the cream forms thin white streaks in the black coffee before they suddenly, and irreversibly, become mixed.

Knowing which side of the cut-off a deck of cards is on – whether it is properly shuffled or if it still preserves some memory of its original order – gives gamblers a distinct advantage against the house.

In the 1990s, a group of students at Harvard and MIT were able to beat the odds playing blackjack at casinos around the US by using card counting and other methods to detect if the deck was properly shuffled. Casinos responded by introducing more sophisticated card-shuffling machines, and shuffling the deck before it is fully played, as well as stepped-up surveillance of players. But it is still rare to see a deck of cards shuffled by machine the requisite seven times at a casino.

Casino executives may not have paid much heed to Diaconis and his research, but he continues to have an enormous influence on mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists who study randomness. At a conference held at Stanford in January 2020 to honour Diaconis’s 75th birthday, colleagues from around the world gave talks on the mathematics of genetic classification, how cereal settles in a shaking box, and, of course, card shuffling.

Diaconis doesn’t care for gambling much himself – he says there are better and more interesting ways to make a living. But he doesn’t begrudge players who try to get an edge by using their brains.

“Thinking isn’t cheating,” he says. “Thinking is thinking.”

*Shane Keating is a science writer and senior lecturer in mathematics and oceanography at the University of New South Wales, Sydney

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Entertainment

Muppets in Moscow: the wild story behind Sesame Street in Russia | Sesame Street

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It was Big Bird diplomacy. In his days as a US senator, Joe Biden led congressional support for international versions of Sesame Street, the educational show with muppets that had transformed children’s television in America.

From Mexico to India, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, there have been co-productions of Sesame Street specifically tailored to a local audience. So when the cold war ended in the early 1990s, Russia and other former Soviet republicans beckoned like cookies to Cookie Monster. What could possibly go wrong?

The “unexpected crazy true story” of Ulitsa Sezam (Sesame Street in Russian) is told by Natasha Lance Rogoff in a highly entertaining and readable new book, Muppets in Moscow, which recounts a litany of cultural clashes, wild west-style assassinations and dashed hopes about the post-communist era.

“These stories are a deep dive into Russian culture and an experience where Sesame Street’s progressive values are pitted against 300 years of Russian thought,” Lance Rogoff, 62, says by phone from Aspen, Colorado, where she is attending a conference. “Through the experience of struggling to create a version of Sesame Street in Russia you’re able to grapple with the tensions that exist in post-Soviet society that we’re still dealing with today.”

Lance Rogoff was the perfect choice to become lead producer of Ulitsa Sezam and bridge the cultural divide. As a teenager in New York, she fell in love with Russian literature and even changed her legal name from Susan to Natasha. She studied Russian in college and, at 22, moved to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) as an exchange student.

She befriended artists and dissidents and wrote articles about underground culture in the Soviet Union for international magazines and newspapers. These included the groundbreaking Gay Life in the Soviet Union in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1983. That same year she married a gay friend to help him escape persecution by the government (“I just felt at that age that I had to do something,” she explains).

First day of shooting Ulitsa Sezam in Moscow’s ORT TV studio: the executive producer, Natasha Lance Rogoff, with puppeteers Elena Teschinskaya and Andrei Kuzichev with their Muppets Businka and Kubik. Photograph: Natasha Lance Rogoff

The marriage ended after three years but would change the course of Lance Rogoff’s career, effectively ending her ambitions to become a diplomat. Back in the US, she studied at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and was selected for a fellowship at the state department, which required high-level national security clearance.

But at FBI headquarters, she overheard the agent conducting her interview tell a colleague in a southern drawl: “There’s way this gal’s gonna work for the guver’ment of the U-nited States of America. She combined two things that are a no-no: commies and queers.”

Her clearance denied, Lance Rogoff returned to Moscow and found work as a TV producer. Then, in 1993, came the call from Sesame Workshop to make Ulitsa Sezam – the start of a four-year odyssey working with hundreds of directors, musicians, writers, producers, set designers, puppeteers, animators and actors.

She soon discovered things that had been divided by an iron curtain were still at odds. For a start, while Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev had discussed many things, including intermediate-range nuclear missiles, they never signed a muppets treaty.

“When we were developing the Slavic muppets, the creative team initially said, ‘We don’t want your muppets; we have our own revered puppet tradition dating back to the 16th century,’” Lance Rogoff recalls. “Eventually, after several months with the help of some of the team members who really loved the muppets, we got them to begin designing their own muppets.

“Their first design for Ulitsa Sezam was an old man with a beard who would tell children what they needed to know and how to behave in new Russia. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if the character was a child so children could really relate to the muppet?’ The head writer at that time said, ‘You can’t expect children to learn from children’. Everything was a process.”

There were also moments when capitalism collided with the legacy of communism. Lance Rogoff continues: “It was a very humbling experience because I realised how little I understood about Russia in the process of designing the content for the series.

“We were at a curriculum seminar in the Danilov monastery in Moscow and there were about 40 educators from across the former Soviet Union. Everybody’s talking about what do we want to teach? How do we teach our children about this new society? We’re all throwing around ideas and I suggest, what about writing a scenario where children are running a lemonade stand, and the reaction to that uniformly was it would be shameful to show children selling things on the street.”

She adds: “There was a whole argument about the word ‘business’ and should we be teaching children to engage in business? You cannot assume after 70 years of communism that we’re just going to flip a switch and people are suddenly going to be able to even conceptualise what a new, more open society looks like.”

Muppets Kubik and Businka sharing a moment with Katya Mikhailovskaya and Tiger in the Ulitsa Sezam studio neighborhood. Photograph: Courtesy of Irina Borisova

At first the head writer of the show only wanted to hire established authors of Soviet children’s literature. But these writers turned in scripts that were 10 pages long and too abstract for kids to understand. Lance Rogoff says: “The scripts that we got to teach geography were almost 100% about leaving Russia, like going off to France and eating foie gras.

“We were teaching the concepts of happy and sad and there’s a little boy and a little girl who are holding a balloon and walking together in the park, and the little boy accidentally lets go of his balloon.

“He starts crying and the little girl looks at him and he’s upset so she lets go of her balloon too. Then they stand there together and watch the two balloons go up in the sky. As an American looking at this I’m like, well, that’s kind of nuts, why don’t they just share the other balloon?

“Then I realised this script was a quintessentially Russian script. It was about the beauty in sharing having nothing together. It reminded me of the Tolstoy story Master and Slave. There were many moments related to script writing that were really unexpected.”

To top it all, production unfolded amid the whiplash of post-Soviet Russia’s sudden switch from communist to free market capitalism, an uncertain period of food shortages, lawlessness, lost livelihoods, political chaos and pitiless violence.

Several heads of Russian television, with whom Lance Rogoff was closely collaborating, were assassinated one after another. Among them was Vladislav Listyev, a prominent TV journalist and democracy advocate (his 1995 murder has never been solved).

Lance Rogoff had spent months negotiating – and drinking – with Listyev to get Ulitsa Sezam on air. “He was our confidante, sharing advice with us about how to navigate the Russian TV industry; advertising was very corrupt at that time. The day that we went to the TV station and discovered that that he had been gunned down the night before was absolutely shocking and left me wondering if it was really possible to continue.

“There were so many courageous men like him who were trying to create a free press and also trying to stamp out corruption and create a society for children.

“When I first met him, he said he knew about Sesame Street and then he said it’s never more important than now: our children need to develop new new skills and values in order to be successful in the world. He did as much as he could to help us as we were trying to assemble the team and raise the money and all the other things we were doing.”

On another terrifying occasion, Russian solders armed with AK-47 rifles descended on Lance Rogoff’s production office and confiscated scripts, set drawings and even the office mascot: a life-sized Elmo. “I asked the Russian executive producer, ‘Why did they do that?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, he probably has a son, you know?’”

Natasha Lance Rogoff. Photograph: Martha Stewart

Despite it all, Ulitsa Sezam made it to air in October 1996 starring Zeliboba, an 8ft-tall hound-like animal with floppy ears, long muzzle and keen sense of smell – he could even smell music. Lance Rogoff produced 52 half-hour episodes broadcast over two years. It was a big hit.

She recalls: “The night that the show airs, I go outside and I can see with my colleague all the colours changing in unison in the windows of the apartment buildings. We realise that they’re watching the show because there was so much press about it before it came out.”

Ulitsa Sezam ended in 2007 but the memory lingers on for a generation of Russians as Lance Rogoff, now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, discovered when she last visited the country two years ago. “I checked into the the hotel and I always ask people, if they’re in their 20s and 30s, do you know Ulitsa Sezam? The two women shrieked and started singing one of the songs.

“I’m so proud of what we accomplished there and it’s heartbreaking now to be in touch with my colleagues on WhatsApp. So many of them had to flee after the war [in Ukraine] started because of their opposition to it.”

McDonald’s arrived in Russia in 1990. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, famously featured in a 1997 TV advertisement for Pizza Hut. Looking back, it seems like too much too soon, another failure of western imagination. Gorbachev died last month but lived long enough to see President Vladimir Putin undo much of his legacy, culminating in the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and committing of heinous war crimes.

Lance-Rogoff reflects: “From my experience making Sesame Street there, I understood how important it was to take into account Russia’s historical background, their difficulties, the fact that they were transitioning and transition takes time. It takes time for consciousness to change and the expectation of doing shock therapy capitalism was very fast for average people living in post-Soviet society who were grappling with incredible pain.

“At that time, policy was very heavily focussed on macroeconomics and stabilising the ruble and there were many people in Congress, including Senator Biden, who understood the value of soft power in helping nations to develop the cultural capital to be able to make some of these larger changes.”

The author wonders: “Maybe it was our exuberance to see ourselves in the other and not recognising how historically different our experiences are: us with 200 years of democracy and Russia with their tragic history of turmoil and constant instability. People are human. People can only take so much turmoil.”



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Science

The computer errors from outer space

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Going to great lengths to shield a data centre from cosmic rays, say by lining it with lead, would be eye-wateringly expensive. It’s much easier and cheaper to just keep geographically distributed backups of data. If the worst happens, customers can be shifted over to the backup server, says Grayson.

But for some applications, cosmic rays are taken very seriously. Consider the pile of electronics in a modern plane that connects the pilot’s controls to the rudder, for example. Tim Morin, technical fellow at semiconductor firm Microchip, says major aerospace and defence manufacturers use components that are resistant to certain cosmic ray effects. His company is among those that supply these components.

“It’s just immune to single-event upsets caused by neutrons,” he says. “We are not affected by that.”

Morin declines to elaborate on exactly the approach his firm took to manufacture computer chips that are untroubled by neutron interference, except to say that it is to do with materials and circuit design.

Clearly, not every application requires such high-level protection. And it’s also not possible to achieve this with every kind of computer memory, Morin adds. But for organisations that put planes and satellites above our heads, it is obviously an important consideration.

The technology upon which practically all of us now depend has varying levels of risk associated with it. But it’s important to note that, as the transistors in computer chips get smaller in newer, more advanced semiconductors, they get more susceptible to electromagnetic interference, too.

“The charge needed to reverse a state is smaller,” explains Rech. If only a very tiny charge is required, the chances of a subatomic particle inducing such a charge go up, in principle. Plus, there are growing numbers of computer chips out there, in devices from phones to washing machines. “The overall area that can be corrupted is actually significantly increasing,” says Rech. The subatomic rain falling down on our devices has ever more targets to strike.

The consequences of that could conceivably be dire but, so far, it’s hard to known to what extent this could harm us or the systems that power the modern world. For Marie Moe, the strange behaviour of her pacemaker on that flight to Amsterdam six years ago led to a heightened knowledge of the device that is so important for the healthy functioning of her heart. It even aided her research into the cyber-security vulnerabilities of pacemakers.

If a stray neutron really was behind it all, that’s quite a chain reaction. So at least there can be positive outcomes from bit flips, as well as scary ones.

“I’m really happy, actually,” she says, “that this happened to me.”

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US

The story behind Trump’s claim that Bush senior stashed documents in a bowling alley

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Donald Trump accused former president George HW Bush of hiding classified documents in a “bowling alley” during a rally in Arizona on Sunday.

Mr Trump claimed that many former presidents had stored millions of pages of documents in warehouses “with damaged main doors”.

The former president said that senior Bush “took millions and millions of documents to a former bowling alley pieced together with what was then an old and broken Chinese restaurant”.

“They put them together. And it had a broken front door and broken windows. Other than that it was quite secure,” Mr Trump added.

In fact, he even demanded to know why the former president was not prosecuted for “hiding” documents.

Mr Trump himself is currently under investigation for taking government documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The US Department of Justice found 48 documents marked classified at his estate after the FBI conducted a search in August. The department suggested that Mr Trump could be holding many other classified documents.

Mr Trump’s reference to a bowling alley where Bush, according to him, hid classified documents was a likely referrance to reports from 1994 about the site of a future George Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. The Presidential Library and Museum was being considered in an old bowling alley and some of it was part of the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant.

The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The Bush Library and Museum’s archives hold more than 40 million pages of official records and personal papers documenting the life of the 41st president of the United States.

The website of the presidential library and museum mentions that the “presidential records of George Bush (1989-1993) comprise the core of the archival holdings. The library also contains the vice presidential records of both George Bush (1981-1989) and Dan Quayle (1989-1993) as well as donated historical materials that document George Bush’s private and public career”.

In addition to these records, the Bush Library has an extensive audiovisual collection containing more than two million photographs and 10,000 videotapes.

Mr Trump’s accusation that Bush hid the documents is rooted in the story of how the Bush library and museum came into being in the first place.

It was in an old bowling alley, that things from the former president’s life were gathered. In 1994, when the future museum and library were coming together, a news agency reported that stuff like “an old infielder’s mitt, the door of a Kuwaiti palace, even a huge likeness of Bush’s head from a Republican convention” were brought to the bowling alley.

Currently, the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum contains more than 100,000 artefacts in its three-dimensional holdings, housed and preserved for posterity, research and exhibit, the website notes.

The bowling alley was apparently not enough for the millions of pages of documents, so some of the documents were kept next door to the bowling alley in what used to be the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant.

All the stuff for the future library and museum at the time was not just from the Bush presidency years, but other items came from his eight years as vice president as well. Many also were from his tenure as a Texas congressman.

The documents and memorabilia were all guarded by security at the future Bush library. At the time Associated Press reported  that some of the “printed material is classified” and will remain so for years and that “it is open only to those with top-secret clearances.”

At the time when the National Archives was just setting up the library and the museum, the director of the Center of Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University, George Edwards said: “We’re not just taking a presidential library and saying, ‘Gee, isn’t this pretty and prestigious’. We want to integrate the library into the intellectual life of the campus.”

Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s comment about Bush and the bowling alley drew a sharp response on Twitter from Bush’s son, Jeb Bush. “I am so confused,” he said: “My dad enjoyed a good Chinese meal and enjoyed the challenge of 7 10 split. What the heck is up with you?”

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