Critically lauded dance troupe, or sinister, human-trafficking, brainwashing, child-abusing cult? However you slice it, there is a lot more going on to Shen Yun than the glitzy public posters let on.

This week we open the curtain on Shen Yun, and the cult behind it, Falun Gong – whose founder Li Hongzhi believes he can levitate, predict the future and read his followers’ minds. So: what does Falun Gong want to achieve? What do we make of their claims of torture, at the hands of the Chinese government? And HOW exactly how do they sell out shows of traditional Chinese dancing in every major city across the world?

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A deadly virus that causes hydrophobia, frothing at the mouth and delirious aggression might sound more like science fiction than real life. But that’s what awaited 15-year-old Jeanna Giese when she was bitten by a rabid bat in 2004. This is the history of one of the oldest and most deadly viruses known to man – and how a 15-year-old girl and her doctor managed to overcome it, against all odds. This is the ShortHand.

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When the body of 18-year-old newlywed Michelle Schofield was found in a canal in Bone Valley, Florida, all eyes turned to her guitar-playing, heavy-metal husband, Leo Schofield.

But despite his protestations of innocence (and rock-solid alibi), the facts of this case couldn’t help but muddy those waters. Namely: a nosy neighbour with ever-changing stories; a hot-shot southern lawyer with exactly nothing to prove; and the body’s location being revealed through a message from God…

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Party favours full of drugs, a hose-down rubber sex balcony, and Bianca Jagger on a real horse. It’s often said that the brightest flames burn for the shortest time – and by god did Studio 54 burn bright. 

Under the helm of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, 254 West 54th was the single coolest place on the planet – and set the blueprint for exclusive nightclubs to this day. Bowie, Warhol, the Jaggers, and every other celebrity you could think of felt lucky to set foot on its gigantic dance floor. 

But what comes up, must come down, and it only took three years for the greatest club on earth to come unstuck. This is the story of sex, drugs, and disco – the rise and fall of Studio 54.

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Zombies, incantations and dolls full of pins… the version of voodoo that most of us get has been suffused with decades of Hollywood magic, and a dusting of light xenophobia.

But the reality of Haitian vodou is much more complex – and way more fascinating. So, how did slaves reconcile their own folklore and religions, with the Catholicism that colonisers were forcing down their throats? Who are the main lwa – or spirits – of vodou? And how can an offering of black coffee, rum and cigars help you to commune with the dead?

Find out in this week’s ShortHand!

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Trapped in a soundproof underground bunker, sleeping in a coffin-shaped box, abused and forced to watch news footage of her December 1992 disappearance on a loop, 10-year-old Katie Beers wondered if she’d ever see the world outside her makeshift prison ever again…

But one thing her captor didn’t know? Katie was a survivor. 

This is the story of a little girl who fought against the odds – and managed to escape a lifetime of abuse. 

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Rage-inducing viruses that spread through bites; a flesh-eating fungus that controls its host like a puppet; deadly pathogens trapped for millennia in Arctic ice… sometimes nature is more gruesome than fiction.

From the Walking Dead to the Last of Us, stories of contagion are never far from our screens. So what are the closest real-life scenarios that could turn our world into a full-on zombie wasteland? (And, what makes insects go on a sex-crazed, amphetamine-fuelled rampage until their literal butts fall off?) This is the ShortHand.

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Somehow, perhaps the worst deep-sea diving disaster in history – one that led to two men being crushed, three men boiling to death, and one man being liquified and shot out of a five-inch hole – happened above sea level.

How? Well, join us off the coast of Norway for a little explosive decompression – and find out what can happen when the pressure of diving just gets too much…

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In the summer of 2017, 26-year-old Anna Sorokin was arrested in Manhattan with a stack of unpaid hotel bills and fraudulent loan requests in her wake. She’d been calling herself Anna Delvey: an uber-wealthy German heiress. In reality? She didn’t have a penny to her (fake) name.

Armed only with an untraceable accent and a passion for fashion, Anna tried to pull the designer wool over the eyes of some of America’s biggest financial institutions, in her bid to secure multi-million-dollar loans… 

And the worst part? She almost got away with it. 

Was Anna a con artist? An inspirational Robin Hood in high heels? An insufferable wannabe? Or all of the above?

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Tens of millions of dollars flowed onto the canvas from the tip of Wolfgang Beltracchi’s brush. His talent? Unquestionable. His methods? Perfect. His ability to recreate the works of other artists? The greatest there has ever been.

Alongside his wife Helene, Wolfgang Beltrachhi sold an unknown number of paintings, passed off as the work of 20th-century artists, to some of the most respected galleries and collectors in the world. In the process they made millions of dollars, and created a scandal so deep that, even today, nobody wants to touch it.

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Intimate and explicit images of A-list celebrities – that’s what the world woke up to on the 31st of August 2014. “The Fappening” saw thousands of leaked celebrity nudes dumped onto 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter. It gave unprecedented access to the most overtly private images anyone could imagine – but how on earth did it happen? 

This week on ShortHand we’re taking a deep dive into the grubby world of AnonIB and leaked-nude “collectors”: users who hoard and circulate explicit images without the subject’s consent – celebrity or not. So how do these images come to be online? And how do we stop it from happening? 

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