When night fell on Uganda’s second-largest national park in early February, Jacob, a three-legged African lion, made several attempts to cross a dangerous channel with his brother, Tibu.
Automation Never Tasted So Good
They seemed to do so in retreat. Earlier, the siblings had strayed into the “established territory of several other male coalitions” in search of lionesses, but simply “got the hell kicked out of them,” Griffith University scientist Alexander Braczkowski told Gizmodo. The lions’ aquatic journey began in the aftermath of “at least two fights,” and after Jacob had lost his foot to a poacher’s trap.
The brothers repeatedly entered the Kazinga channel in darkness but doubled back three times, “due to what appears to be encounters with either hippopotamus or Nile crocodiles,” Braczkowski and his collaborators wrote in an upcoming paper accepted in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution. On their fourth try, the siblings successfully swam as far as 1.5 killometers, or 0.93 miles, to reach the other side.
The lions had made this crossing before, likely “due to sexual reasons” and the “strong” presence of humans at the only available land connection, the researchers said. Yet, this was the first time anyone’s captured such a swim on film. “Jacob was actually in quite a bad way when he did cross,” added Braczkowski.
Braczkowski led the expedition in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park, with funding from Queensland, Australia’s Griffith University and Northern Arizona University. “It was pretty dramatic,” Braczkowski told the New York Times. The lions look “like two tiny little heat signatures crossing an ocean,” he said, remarking on footage captured by Cape Town videographer Luke Ochse.
Researchers filmed the journey just after 10 PM local time, using a H20T thermal camera and a DJI Matrice 300 drone, while keeping a distance of 50-70 meters, or around 200 feet.
Image: Dr. Alex Braczkowski
Humans have documented African lions on shorter aquatic journeys, usually no farther than 100 meters, or around 0.06 miles, according to the paper. Members of the vulnerable species aren’t known to be big on swimming. Jaguars, on the other hand, are “well known for their swimming ability in wetlands like the Pantanal and in floodplain forests in Brazil,” the researchers noted.
Braczkowski thinks an unhealthy sex ratio inspired the channel crossings originally, due to poaching as well as farmers who poison lions to protect their livestock. The lead researcher estimated that around 60,000 people live in the national park, “mainly through 11 fishing villages that were demarcated in the 60s.”
Beyond Jacob’s and Tibu’s quests for sex and territory, the swim reflects how the planet’s “most imperiled and iconic wildlife are facing tough decisions under increasing human pressure,” the researchers wrote. “Swimming across rivers and water bodies filled with high densities of predators is one such example.”
The researchers ended the paper with a call for more research into the connection between long swims and the functional habitats of big cats in areas dominated by humans.
Nancy Iskander arrived at the graves of her two young sons a few hours after a jury on Friday convicted Rebecca Grossman of murdering them.
It was the end of a wrenching day. Three years after Grossman sped through a Westlake Village crosswalk in her Mercedes-Benz, hitting Iskander’s sons as she watched in horror, she had finally found some level of closure.
“Someone was held accountable for your murder sons. Sleep tight. Rest in peace,” she wrote on X along with a dusk photo of the marble headstone.
It took jurors a little over one day to convict Grossman on all charges.
In doing so, the jurors appeared to embrace the prosecution’s case that Grossman — the scion of a prominent medical family — was reckless and impaired by margaritas and Valium when she plowed through the residential intersection and hit the children in a marked crosswalk.
The jury convicted Grossman on two counts of murder, two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter and one count of hit-and-run resulting in death. Those were the maximum charges sought by prosecutors. The jury could have opted for lesser charges, such as vehicular manslaughter with ordinary negligence.
Mark Iskander, left, and his brother Jacob in a family photo.
(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
For Iskander, it was a moment of satisfaction and grief. She had been bearing witness for her boys, testifying in court and demanding authorities take the case seriously.
“My family has been waiting for this for 3½ years now. I’ve been waiting for the trust of the justice system. So today we’re just giving glory to God; the God of Mark and Jacob has been with us through that time and helped us through, carried us,” she said outside court.
She said sitting through the high-profile trial “felt like I am attending the funeral of the boys again, day after day. That’s how it felt, seeing the defendant and defense attorneys.”
But with the conviction, she felt, it was all worth it.
“We were trusting the justice system,” she said. “We have a justice system you can trust from our experience. It’s not a justice system where people get away with things just under the color of their skin or their wealth or anything. You commit a crime, you will be held accountable.”
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1.Mark Iskander2. Jacob Iskander.(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
On Sept. 29, 2020, when Iskander and her three sons approached the crosswalk, wearing inline skates, she began to cross Triunfo Canyon Road at Saddle Mountain Drive. Her youngest son, Zachary, was next to her on his scooter. Mark, on a skateboard, and Jacob, also wearing inline skates, followed a little over arm’s length behind.
Prosecutors accused Grossman of reaching 81 mph before lightly braking and hitting the brothers at 73 mph, based on the car’s data recorder and the distance Mark was found from the crosswalk.
Prosecutors allege Grossman, 60, had cocktails with her then-boyfriend Scott Erickson, a former Dodgers pitcher, and then raced with him — he in his black Mercedes sport utility vehicle and she in her white Mercedes SUV — along Triunfo Canyon Road until they reached a crosswalk.
(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
Prosecutors also alleged that Grossman traveled a third of a mile after hitting the children before safety features in her car automatically shut it down.
Iskander’s witness testimony was a highly charged moment in the trial, as she described watching Grossman’s SUV plowing into her sons.
“I heard the loud noise, and I heard the driver of that car kept going,” Iskander told jurors. “I started screaming, ‘I can’t find them.’”
“Nobody came back to help,” Iskander said. “She did not come back to the scene.”
“She killed my kids,” Iskander said of Grossman. “They aren’t at school. They are not playing sports. They are at the cemetery.”
Grossman was taken into custody after the verdict. She faces a sentence of 34 years to life in prison based on the conviction. Grossman’s lead attorney, Tony Buzbee, called the verdict unexpected and vowed to appeal.
Nancy and Karim Iskander with their children, Mark, Jacob and Zachary.
(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
Nancy Iskander said it didn’t bring her any joy to see Grossman in handcuffs. Grossman’s daughter was overcome with emotion and yelled, “Oh, my God,” as the first word “guilty” echoed across the courtroom.
“No one wishes that on anyone,” Iskander said. “I promise I do not have any hate for her. My heart broke for her children. … It wasn’t easy, but it will bring me closure.”
Iskander also took time to talk about her sons.
“Well, they were golden-age children. They loved God. They were raised at the church. They were hardworking. They were honest. They cared about the truth,” she said. “And they were spoken for by a prosecution who’s also just that hardworking, honest, who cared about the truth.
“Mark and Jacob didn’t die. Mark and Jacob were murdered,” she added.
She said her family was able to cope with the tragedy because of a large support group. “We’re thankful for our community. We’re thankful to everyone here.” Her son Zachary, who was 5 on the day of the crash, continues to deal with the trauma of losing his brothers.
Iskander’s husband, Karim, said he hoped the verdict would be a turning point.
Jacob, left, and Mark Iskander.
(Courtesy of the Iskander family)
“We finally can move on. Finally. We have been waiting for the closure,” he said.
He also thanked the jury, saying they saw past “the imaginary conspiracy theories and tricks…. and focused on the evidence and they took it seriously.”
A former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher and boyfriend of an L.A. socialite charged with murder in the deaths of two young brothers is responsible for the fatalities because his vehicle struck the boys first, defense attorneys told jurors Friday.
Tony Buzbee, Grossman’s lead attorney, told jurors “she did not do anything, but someone else did,” adding that authorities never examined Erickson’s vehicle after the deadly incident.
Witnesses are expected to testify they heard Erickson’s high-powered black Mercedes SUV racing down the street and saw it strike both boys, who were hurled through the air after the collision.
Buzbee said he will introduce video evidence showing that after the crash, the former Dodger was still traveling 70 mph, a speed the defense says was more than 20 mph faster than Grossman.
“We will prove that the black car was driven by Scott Erickson, who stopped down the road and hid in the bushes and watched,” Buzbee said. “Scott Erickson’s car hit those children. That’s what … the science in this case will show.”
Prosecutors, however, argued that Grossman, who was trailing Erickson’s SUV, sped through the marked crosswalk on Triunfo Canyon Road at Saddle Mountain Drive at more than 70 mph.
Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Ryan Gould said the 60-year-old Hidden Hills socialite had alcohol and drugs in her system, which impaired her driving. He said Grossman only stopped after her Mercedes was disabled by safety systems following the collision.
Grossman is charged with two counts of second-degree murder, two counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and one count of hit-and-run driving resulting in death. If convicted of all charges, she faces 34 years to life in prison.
Graphic testimony is expected from Nancy Iskander, who was crossing the street on Sept. 29, 2020, with three of her children when she heard the roar of approaching engines on the quiet 45-mph street. She testified during a preliminary hearing in 2022 that she threw up her right hand in a desperate effort to stop the oncoming vehicles and grabbed her 5-year-old son, Zachary, pulling him to safety. She could not reach Mark and Jacob, who were farther into the street. She said she and Jacob were on inline skates, Zachary was on his scooter and Mark was on his skateboard as the family crossed the residential boulevard. Her husband and daughter were jogging nearby.
Gould told jurors on Friday that Grossman, who prosecutors say was speeding home behind Erickson after the two had been drinking at a nearby restaurant, “knew what she was doing was incredibly dangerous.”
Two tests of her blood-alcohol level returned readings of 0.08%, California’s legal limit, and 0.074%/0.075%, court records show. Valium was also found in her blood sample. She is not charged with driving under the influence.
“She acted with implied malice,” the necessary element prosecutors need to prove second-degree murder, Gould said. “If she was doing the speed limit, she wouldn’t have hit Mark and Jacob; they would have had time to cross.”
Prosecution witnesses are expected to testify they saw the speeding SUVs, with one describing the sound of the powerful vehicles “like an 18-wheeler.”
“They make the right-hand turn, and then they punch it,” Gould told the jurors.
The black box on Grossman’s SUV showed she was going 73 mph at impact, and the distance the boys were thrown — Jacob about 50 feet and Mark 254 feet — supported a speed of more than 70 mph at impact, Gould said. Mark died of traumatic blunt force injury, and Jacob was internally decapitated, he told jurors.
Gould said Grossman did not stop for over a third of a mile from the intersection and only did so because her Mercedes’ airbag deployed, triggering a fuel shutoff and a call to a safety operator.
He played a tape of Grossman telling an operator: “I was driving down the road, all of a sudden, my bag exploded.” When a 911 operator on the line with the Mercedes representative asked, “Did they hit a person? They said the two kids were hit on Rollerblades?” Grossman replied, “No.”
But Buzbee argued his client was not the one to fatally strike the children, suggesting the Iskander brothers “weren’t in the crosswalk,” and instead were cutting a corner. He said the front-end damage to her vehicle was caused when one of the boys — first hit by Erickson — bounced onto her SUV. He also promised an expert would testify why Grossman’s airbag deployed while Erickson’s did not.
“We will show that the investigation was absolutely terrible,” the lawyer told a jury panel of nine men and three women. “We will show a black AMG Mercedes … is the car that hit the children first,” adding that “multiple eyewitnesses heard two impacts.”
He said Grossman’s driving was not impaired — she had “a drink and a half in two hours” — and the amount of Valium in her system was barely detectable. He previously argued the pedestrian crossing was a known danger and said video from a nearby home security system the night of the crash will let jurors “see how dark it was.”
Buzbee said Erickson, 55, lied to sheriff’s investigators about the vehicle he was driving that night, noting that he “stopped down the road and hid in the bushes and watched” as police investigated the crash before going to Grossman’s house, speaking with her daughter and then going home.
Erickson has denied any wrongdoing in the fatal crash and had a misdemeanor charge against him dismissed after making a public service announcement about the importance of safe driving.
“We will emphasize science over emotion,” Buzbee said.
Clad in a navy blue cardigan, white blouse and glasses, Grossman kept her gaze firmly on the jury during opening statements. She hugged her son, daughter and husband — Dr. Peter Grossman, director of the Grossman Burn Center — during a break. Peter Grossman has said he and his wife were separated at the time of the fatal crash.
“This case is about two families,” Buzbee said. “But no one from our side will try to minimize the tragedy.”
“Use your courage and find Mrs. Grossman not guilty.”
Bizarrely, after a biophage mutant, limbs falling off it as easily as scooping into a pudding, puts its hands into my mouth and rips my jaw from my face for the fifth time, it comes to me: Oh, this is a transportation game.
The Callisto Protocol takes place on a moon run by tentacled enemies with loose limbs, but Dead Space game designer Glen Schofield’s so-called spiritual successor would rather lead you by the hand through its squishy, wet, visually impressive labyrinth than let you revel in killing those enemies. Killing is never really the point, getting to the next location so that you can escape is. It’s more Death Stranding than Dead Space.
As cargo ship pilot Jacob—who I thought really looked like soap opera star Josh Duhamel before realizing it was soap opera star Josh Duhamel replicated in sweaty, heroic detail—you need all the help you can get in order to escape the Black Iron Prison on Jupiter’s moon, Callisto. You don’t know why you were thrown into one of its inhospitable cells to begin with, why something called a CORE device has been jammed into your neck, syncing to your thoughts and health, why there are monsters everywhere, or if you should trust inmates Elias (Zeke Alton) or Dani (Karen Fukuhara), the latter of whom crashed your ship and got you into this shit.
Screenshot: Striking Distance Studios / Kotaku
But when they tell you to meet them at the tram, or take an intimidatingly tall ladder underground, or activate this or that control panel, you listen, and you start running. What else are you going to do? You’re trapped, there’s blood everywhere, do you have a better idea?
No, not really. You do what Elias and Dani tell you, their voices crackling through your DualSense controller (or your CORE device) while the prison creaks and falls apart. The sound design is impressively meticulous—Black Iron is filled with an ambient whine, pieces of metal crashing and clanging, while your zombified enemies, or biophages, take on the low notes, the scuttling, screaming, and gurgling all around you.
I don’t think Callisto is a particularly scary horror game—watching Jacob’s neck get twisted around and cracked like a knuckle is entertaining the first time, then an inconvenience once I realize this death scene repeats and is unskippable—but its multilayered audio keeps me at a giddy low-level anxiety. Like waiting for a text, or looking at the sun and realizing you can’t see, for a moment, after you look away.
More hit or miss but still often admirable is the getting there, which the game is most interested in—fighting a biophage is a temporary distraction. Your plan to escape Black Iron sends you flying down sewer drains, trudging through a snowstorm, and through dim hallways glossed in organic matter, fleshy pods, sinuous tendrils, and slime. It sends you everywhere, in front of gorgeous lunar vistas and lit-up desktop screens and hurtling through space. Pristine white walls. Sticky floors. Air vents smeared with blood and loaves of glistening pink flesh. It makes you want to see more. And on the PS5, Callisto is able to deliver every high-shine, nitty-gritty detail with zero issues. Or, close to zero—sometimes my gun would mysteriously vanish before reappearing.
The CallistoProtocol also plays with the pace of this journey, often forcing Jacob to crawl quietly through tight cave walls or around blind biophages or thud his large, spacesuited body into a heavy sprint. Confronting so many different textures at so many different speeds feels great with haptic feedback—even grabbing an ammunition box or in-game currency, Callisto Credits, triggers a satisfying, unique thwack. Callisto is like tangible cinema in this way, slow and steady, which might require readjusting some expectations if you were hoping for on-your-toes horror.
But as varied and masterful as the getting there often looks and physically feels, I eventually tire of hearing my companions tell me I’m getting close only to fall through a collapsed walkway, or finally reach Callisto’s cold surface just to be immediately instructed back inside by the Herculean zombies. At these points, the game feels aimless, and I have no sense of the progress I’ve made. My frustration only heightens when I’m stuck in a room full of unrelenting zombies.
Nothing a little concealer can’t help.Screenshot: Striking Distance Studios / Kotaku
The zombies might be the least enjoyable part of Callisto’s journey, which is not ideal, considering they’re Jacob’s motivation for getting out, and presumably your motivation to be curious and find out where they came from. As I learn by dying so, so, so many times—so many times, that around halfway through the game, I turn on the easiest setting, which still inexplicably lets some enemies kill you in two lazy hits—the zombies are coming from everywhere.
I love Dark Souls, the famous benchmark for difficult games, but unlike a FromSoftware boss fight, you can’t “learn” how to progress past Callisto Protocol’s vitriolic biophage hordes because they seem to spawn randomly and out of nowhere. “Are they invisible now?!” I scream at my PS5, either before or after I screamed, “I hate this fucking game!!!”
Biophages will pop out suddenly from rattling vents or from an otherwise empty room. They will look like they’re frozen, encased in ice, and then suddenly be very alive, warm, and murderous. They come in many different shapes: standard decaying, decaying with armor on, decaying and projectile vomiting, wriggling at you with with snowball-sized, erupting pustules on their backs, coming at you looking like evil mutant axolotl and then turning invisible (?!).
You are given an arsenal to deal with them, primarily a sizzling stun baton for close combat, a hand cannon pistol and brain-blasting riot gun, and a gravity restraint projector (GRP) sleeve that bends gravity to hold enemies captive in the air until you throw them into a spiked wall, or spinning fan blade, or off a ledge.
In the game’s early stages, only the baton and its characteristic whack feel like they’re actually doing anything useful—enemies soak up your shrimpy default bullets like you’re flicking marbles into a funeral pyre, which also makes it impossible to efficiently manage hordes. But as you progress, you can find the blueprints for additional weapons like an assault rifle and skunk gun, and use Callisto Credits to buy upgrades from Reforge locations throughout the game which, much to my amusement, doesn’t let you buy more than one thing at a time. Before every boss fight, I’d spend five minutes individually buying ten ammo boxes.
Callisto wastes your time in small, unnecessary ways like that. Audio logs you collect from corpses throughout the game should help you unravel the story’s secrets, but they don’t play automatically—you have to enter your menu manually, select them, and stay in the menu. If you exit, they’ll stop playing.
But the most irritating waste of time that made me consider, at my lowest moments, throwing my PS5 controller into the sludgy depths of the Gowanus Canal, is Callisto’s sometimes faulty dodge mechanic.
When you confront any enemy, you are expected to dodge their attacks by holding your left stick in the opposite direction of their swing, or down if you’re blocking it. The game tells you that there is no timing window, just get it done, but I dodge so many times and get yet another long, unskippable death animation—Jacob’s skull getting stamped on and turned into an ocean spray of blood, Jacob’s eyes getting gouged by fat zombie thumbs, Jacob’s nose turning concave from all the fat zombie hits to the face—to know that can’t be true.
Callisto’s two-headed bosses are the worst at fumbling your dodge mechanic. So much as thinking about hitting them with your stun baton instead of staying far away and shooting them will lead to an immediate skewer through the chest. Make sure you spend five minutes collecting bullets or health top-ups from the Reforge, too. Found resources are limited, and manually saving the game starts you from your last checkpoint, so if you start a fight with low health and an unloaded gun, consider your fate sealed.
But for all these momentary irritations, I finish the game on a high. “There’s always a price to pay,” a villain repeats throughout The Callisto Protocol, reminding Jacob that making fallible, flabby humans great necessitates sacrifice. And in pursuit of video game greatness, I loved what I saw, so much so that I was willing to pay the price in faulty dodge mechanics. But as far as actual price goes, I don’t think anyone should buy a $60 game, full stop, but especially not one that currently seems to be running abysmally on PC and won’t get PlayStation’s New Game Plus until a free update lands on February 7, 2023. But.
I consider The Callisto Protocol one of the most ambitious games I played this year, maybe even the most next to Elden Ring (though I think Elden Ring is in a league of its own—I don’t know if anything will be able to approach its depth and sophistication for a long time). Its thoughtful attention to environment, sound, and touch is what, I think, next-gen gaming should be like: an experiment with the senses and with story. The game has its issues, too, which can’t be ignored. But at least it feels human.
