Photo by Jake Kivanc

In 2011, a Toronto police superintendent ordered that Constable Desmond Bovell resign or be fired after he admitted to having sexual relationships with vulnerable women who were drug users and involved in sex work.

The police force had found that Bovell had also mishandled evidence, used a police database to query women he was seeing, and did not offer to help when a woman told himshe had been assaulted and robbed.

The service prosecutor, a fellow cop, had sought Bovell's dismissal, but noted some mitigating factors, according to a police document released by the Toronto Police Service (TPS) to VICE: "The charges drew no media attention, nor did they involve criminal charges or convictions."

When officers are found guilty of misconduct at Ontario disciplinary tribunals, their penalties can be based on over a dozen factors, including the seriousness of the misconduct, damage to the police service's reputation, and the effect of any publicity. So while Bovell's misconduct was particularly serious, the usual questions applied: Had there been any publicity of Bovell's behaviour? Had he shown remorse? What was his work history? (Gary Clewley, who represented Bovell, declined to comment.)

These considerations evolved from the case law surrounding police discipline, according to Ian Johnstone, a lawyer who prosecutes police at professional tribunals. As hearing officers make rulings, they cite previous disciplinary decisions to support their arguments; decisions from the Ontario Civilian Police Commission also shape the discipline process. Over time, certain factors become common considerations as lawyers, police prosecutors, and hearing officers cite certain precedents.

Read More: Why Toronto Police Go Easy on Drunk Driving Cops

Lawyer and author Paul Ceyssens outlines 15 disposition considerations in his book "Legal Aspects of Policing." Ceyssens' writing is considered a valuable resource at tribunals, according to a provincial spokesperson.

The effect of publicity and damage to the reputation of a police service are considerations that arise at tribunals, and they can seem out-of-place when police services are handling questions of serious misconduct: Yes, this officer showed poor judgment and shirked his responsibilities—but did it make the papers? This also means that reporters aren't entirely neutral observers in the discipline process.

And while many serious cases involving possible officer misconduct are handled by the province's Special Investigations Unit, which leads to at least some reporting, much police wrongdoing never sees media attention.

The case of Ontario Provincial Police Constable Kyle Kneeshaw is one example where media attention contributed to a harsher penalty. Kneeshaw was on general patrol in November 2014when a call went out about a seemingly impaired driver on Highway 9 in New Tecumseth.

The officer took the call and raced toward the scene, where the driver was said to be stumbling outside his vehicle. Kneeshaw's police SUV hit 153 kilometres an hour in a 60 kilometre an hour zone, according to a police disciplinary document. Kneeshaw drove over a hill and spotted a Honda Accord as its driver waited to turn into a driveway. He braked and moved left, hitting the Accord, as well as a westbound Dodge Caravan. When Kneeshaw's vehicle finally came to a stop, he had to cut his airbag to leave the SUV. The two civilians in the other vehicles were taken to hospital with minor injuries, but the driver of the Accord would later say she was dealing with the impact of the collision "on a daily basis," according to the decision.

" demonstrated a lack of respect for any other vehicles and any pedestrians who may have been in his path," OPP Superintendent Greg Walton said.

As Walton considered a penalty for Kneeshaw, who pled guilty to a charge of discreditable conduct, he worked through the usual considerations. Walton noted that police discipline decisions are"requested on a regular basis by the media."

"Public awareness of the officer's conduct of this nature is embarrassing to the OPP and damages the reputation of the OPP," Walton wrote. Kneeshaw's accident had been in the local press, and a collection of news clippings was entered as an exhibit during his hearing.

In the case of Kneeshaw, his strong work history was a mitigating factor to his ultimate penalty; the attention his case received was deemed an aggravating factor. Kneeshaw was docked 100 hours pay.

In another disciplinary case,Toronto police Superintendent Debra Preston ordered that Constable Gary Gould be dismissed for beating a handcuffed man in the back of a cruiser, and she focused sharply on video of the incident.

"The video was placed on a mainstream newspapers(sic) website and picked up by other media outlets," Preston wrote. A headline in the Toronto Star announced that Gould had avoided prison time, and Preston deemed the damage to the TPS's reputation to be an aggravating factor for Gould's penalty. Preston also noted that Gould's behaviour had affected the public's trust in the TPS. Gould, who had a long history of misconduct, has appealed the decision to the Ontario Civilian Police Commission.

Preston declined to comment for this story, but she also noted in the case of Enis Egeli that recent reporting on officers who drive drunk was noteworthy.

"Although these articles have not influenced my decision about penalty,they do highlight the concern and general intolerance of the community around impaired driving in general, and more so about this offence being committed by the officers who serve their community," Preston wrote. (Preston also wrote that "there was no publicity specific to this misconduct," though Egeli's accident was in the local media.)

David Butt, a lawyer who defends police officers, said media attention can have "a dramatic impact" on some discipline cases. Butt believes reporting on officer misconduct is a "legitimate consideration," as public mistrust makes effective policing more difficult.

"The effectiveness of policing depends on effective relationships with the community," Butttold VICE.

Not everyone agrees.

"Media attention is going to happen by happenstance, right? It's going to happen mostly because a case is sexy or not sexy," said Lawrence Gridin, another lawyer who defends police officers accused of misconduct."And the question is: Why should that really matter when it comes to informing a penalty?"

Hearing officers, lawyers, and the prosecution don't always consider media attention in their arguments, and lawyer and legal author Ceyssens notes that some question its place as a consideration.

A hearing officer may also choose not to assign weight to the issue. When Toronto police Constable Fievel Kan admitted to writing several bogus tickets to vulnerable people,a hearing officer deemed a lack of negative publicity a "neutral" factor, writing, "One cannot speculate in regard to future publicity."

With a long list of considerations, no single factor can tip the scales against an officer, and some may not apply in particular cases. But when reporters write about police, the police notice. Reporters are more than just observers when an officer makes a mistake—whether the reporters know about it or not.

Follow Stephen Spencer Davis on Twitter.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo by Matt Hazlett / Stringer via Getty

US News

USOC Apologizes for Swimmers' False Claims
The United States Olympic Committee has apologized on behalf of the four US swimmers who falsely claimed they had been robbed at gunpoint in Rio, describing their behavior as "not acceptable." Police in Rio have recommended that Ryan Lochte and James Feigen face charges of false reporting of a crime. The swimmers, and in particular Lochte, have been widely criticized over the incident. —ABC News

DOJ to End Use of Private Prisons
The Department of Justice will phase out use of privately owned prisons because of safety concerns. Contracts with 13 private prisons will be reviewed and allowed to expire over the next five years. "They do not maintain the same level of safety and security," said Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. This new directive won't affect state prisons or facilities run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. —The Washington Post

US Admits $400 Million Iran Payment Was Tied to Prisoner Release
The State Department has admitted a $400 million cash payment to Iran was used as "leverage" to negotiate the release of five US prisoners. Spokesman John Kirby maintained the payment was negotiated separately from the prisoner release, but conceded there was "some connection" between the money and the release. —NBC News

Clinton Foundation to Stop Accepting Foreign Donations if Hillary Wins
Bill Clinton has announced that the Clinton Foundation would no longer accept foreign or corporate money if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. He also said he would resign from the board if she wins. This follows concerns about relations between Hillary Clinton's State Department and foundation donors revealed in 2009 emails. —The New York Times

International News

Russia Agrees to 48-Hour Ceasefire in Aleppo
Russia has agreed to a United Nations (UN) plea for a 48-hour ceasefire in the Syrian city of Aleppo to allow aid to reach besieged areas. Moscow said it was ready to start the first "humanitarian pause" next week, but has not yet heeded a UN call for regular, weekly 48-hour halts in the fighting. —Al Jazeera

Medecins Sans Frontieres Pull Staff from Yemen Over Safety Concerns
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has begun evacuating its staff from six hospitals in northern Yemen after a Saudi-led coalition air strike hit a hospital run by the medical aid group on Tuesday, killing 19 people. MSF said there was an "absence of credible assurances" the hospital would be protected. —Reuters

Mexican Police Accused of Executing 22
The Mexican government's human rights body has accused police of killing 22 people in extrajudicial executions in a raid on a drug cartel last year. The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) says police killed a total of 42 people in a raid on a Michoacan state ranch, and afterward attempted to cover up the excessive force used by putting guns near the bodies of those who weren't armed. —VICE News

Fleeing ISIS Fighters Used Civilians as Shields
Aerial photos have been released showing ISIS fighters using civilians as shields to escape the northern Syrian town of Manbij. The Syrian Democratic Forces, who have taken control of Manbij with the help of US-led coalition strikes, said the pictures show a convoy of hundreds of vehicles with civilians inside. —BBC News

Everything Else

Bolt Wins Eighth Olympic Gold
Usain Bolt has claimed his eighth Olympic gold medal after winning the men's 200-meter final. It keeps alive his hope of winning the "treble treble"—three golds at three successive games, if he wins at the 4 x 100-meter relay today. —USA Today

Amber Heard to Give $7 Million Settlement to Charity
The actress will donate her $7 million divorce settlement from Johnny Depp to charity, half to the American Civil Liberties Union, "with a particular focus to stop violence against women," and half to the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. —Variety

NYC Parks Department Jokes About Trump Statue's Penis
NYC Parks Department has removed the naked Donald Trump statue (which featured a notable lack of, um, endowment) from Union Square, but still managed a decent joke: "NYC Parks stands firmly against any unpermitted erection in city parks, no matter how small." —CNN

Frank Ocean Drops Visual Album
Frank Ocean has unveiled a new, 45-minute visual album called Endless. Released on iTunes, it features entirely new music, but is a separate project to his proper follow-up album to 2012's Channel Orange. —Noisey

Twitter Unveils New Feature Intended to Filter Out the Trolls
Twitter has announced a new "quality filter" feature that will screen incoming tweets based on "a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior." The hope is that it will remove tweets from trolls who are trying to abuse or harass other users. —VICE News

Trump Ads Appear on Clinton Subreddit
Donald Trump's campaign appears to be paying to promote his campaign on Reddit, where he has an active fanbase. Promoted posts—linkouts to the Trump campaign's donation page—have appeared on the Hillary Clinton subreddit. —Motherboard

Photo via Jake Kivanç

One time I was walking down the street when this dude was jogging past me and stopped to ask me out. While I wasn't particularly interested, I took down his number. Still, my curiosity was piqued enough that I went home and spent a chunk of time that I'll never get back searching the dark crevices of the internet to find his profile.

All I knew about him was his first name, that he was from Calgary, lived down the street from me and was a jogger.

Dead set on deciding whether or not I should text him, I knew that his profile would alert me to any red flags—you know, like sexist and/or racist viewpoints, a subpar sense of style, children, or a significant other.

Long story short, I found nothing and didn't text him because my lack of knowledge about him just solidified my original lack of interest.

Even though you're judging me right now, we all know I'm hardly the only one who's put some effort into creeping. As children of the internet, we millennials grew up mastering the ins and outs of social media, and most of us can summon very specific personal information about someone with just a few taps.

Almost every interaction we have nowadays involves some sort of online digging. If you have a job interview, you find your interviewees on LinkedIn. If you want to find out if your crush is single, you retrieve their Facebook and dissect their profile photos. If you meet someone on Tinder, you swim to the depths of the internet to confirm they're not a serial killer.

While those former cases can be beneficial and fun, sometimes, like the latter case, creeping can be essential for safety.

As such, it's very easy to get carried away. But after asking around, it seems like I am on the lower end of the creeping scale.

Katie*

(Photos by the author)

A gargantuan Hells Angel smiles at me. Then his gaze travels south. His expression darkens. Wordlessly, he turns and strides off towards the bellowing bikes.

I'm at the Bulldog Bash, the Hells Angels' annual festival near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. Pint-toting bikers hug each other at stalls touting tattoos and drinking horns, race their bikes down the drag-strip and sway around to classic rock. Among them – and yet standing apart – are the Angels, their presence evident in the rows of black Harleys, in their trademark logo gleaming on leather waistcoats, in the clasp of hands and the murmured word "brother".

The Bash has garnered some bad press in the past, with the case of Angel Gerry Tobin – who was shot dead on his way home from the 2007 Bash – often referenced. Yet the Global Gathering dance festival, which takes place on the same site, has a much more scandalous history, with numerous thefts, plenty of drug use, sexual assault and a death as recently as 2012 – and does not share the same notoriety. The main factor, it seems, is the presence of the Angels themselves. Their officially trademarked name and logo conjure notorious legends both urban and historical. But what do we actually know about the Angels of 2016?

There's a brief history of the club on the official website. The first Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was founded in 1948 in San Bernardino, California, the name apparently having been suggested to the founders by a former pilot of the WWII Flying Tigers' "Hells Angels" squadron. Over time, a number of separate Californian motorcycle clubs united under the name and defined admission criteria. There are now over 400 charters worldwide, from Japan to Peru. The rest of the webpage is spent lambasting and debunking the "incorrect reporting" that has sought to tie the club to a military lineage.

My press pass is a leper's bell around my neck. Glancing down, I realise what made the huge Angel actively avoid me. The motto "When we do right, nobody remembers. When we do wrong, nobody forgets" may be as anti-press as it is pro-Angel. The vacuum created by the club's aversion to speaking to journalists has been filled with fear, ignorance and second-hand stories; a cycle of suspicion that I'm not sure is entirely unwelcome to the Angels and their reputation.

Take my friends, for example – some were unaware there are Hells Angels in Britain, while another says he knows one, a "lovely chap who lives next door to my uncle and helps with the gardening'. Others are alarmed that I'm attending the Bash alone, and a friend in the police will say nothing on record but quietly requests I let him know I'm OK. The Warwickshire police press office confirms that they still officially recognise the Hells Angels as an organised crime group.

So that leaves me watching face after inked face shut down. An Angel bearing a New York rocker (a curved patch generally signifying an Angel's charter) won't even slow down as I approach, curtly remarking, "I'm here to enjoy myself, not to talk to press."

Lucky, then, that a young Belgian Angel I get chatting to points out a figure at a food stall and suggests that "Robert would be the best guy to talk to... if he'll talk to you."

Robert turns out to be a charismatic 69-year-old Californian from the Daly City charter, who is showing the hotdog vendors a jar of his fiery chilli-garlic sauce. "I find their food a bit bland," he stage-whispers. He insists on buying me lunch, and we sit down to eat among a group of his brothers from several continents beneath a banner reading "Hells Angels support our brothers in jail."

Conversation is easy – until lunch is gone and my notebook appears. The Angels that fringed our bench draw in, their chatter replaced by silence. I tell them I'm only here to see and hear for myself what the club is about, and write only from my experience. They nod, although one or two snap pictures of me on their mobiles to show their brothers "the girl who's asking all the questions".

I ask if there's anything they would like to put out there, any idea or statement. "For the public?" asks Robert. "Yes: fuck off!" There's a chorus of laughter and agreement. "I don't want the exposure; it brings heat. People have biased opinions through the press, books, whatever... actually, we don't want to say too much, the public don't know and that's how we want to keep it – keep some mystique. We are the standard for motorcycle clubs. We are what others want to be; if they can't be you, they hate you and want to kill you.

"What we stand for is very simple: high standards in life. You treat people the way you want to be treated, you give and get respect. If you fuck up, though, you'll pay for it. In any organisation or walk of life there's some piece of shit that tarnishes a reputation. But it's a wonderful, wonderful brotherhood. I have a brilliant life. I can't explain what it does, but it works."

He and his brothers beam at each other, radiating genuine affection. I ask if there's been any significant changes in the club over time.

READ: Here's Everything a Drug Dealer Will Say to You

"Oh yeah – drugs used to be legal!" A resounding guffaw. "We're just more modern; cellphones, laptops, etc. In the old days, if you got into trouble and you couldn't remember phone numbers you'd be waiting a long time for someone to bail you out! We do that less now – say if you get into trouble, you sort yourself out." Robert hands me his phone and invites me to scroll through photos he's taken of old images, denim-clad Angels in the 60s and 70s. "The style, the clothes, the bikes have changed, but the people have remained the same."

The Angels line up for a photo, throwing their arms around each other. I ask them to turn so I can take a picture of the diverse charter rockers on their backs – "Only if you turn and shake your ass for us first!"

I wander up to the drag-strip to check out the action, where the wheelies and burnouts are nearly as entertaining as watching Angels submit to having sun cream applied by their wives and girlfriends. There's a missed call on my phone – I've got an interview with Taff, President of the Ashfield charter, who are the main organisational force behind the Bulldog Bash.

Taff, President of the Ashfield charter of Hells Angels

In a rare lull between responsibilities, Taff meets me at the back of the Custom Tent, overlooking scores of bizarre and beautiful bikes. He's tired, gruff and business-like, but takes the time to politely answer my unwelcome queries.

"We are purely and simply a motorcycling club. We have different charters all over the world – we fly and ride out to visit them; it's about getting together with our brothers. If we were gangsters, we wouldn't be out working every day! And why would you advertise that if it was the point of your organisation? The Mafia don't go around with 12-inch patches on their clothes."

I ask about membership and presentation.

"We've a range of ages in our charter, from twenties to fifties. And we wear our full kit when it's appropriate – you'd look stupid walking around Sainsbury's pushing a trolley in all your patches and leather."

He's happier talking about the Bash itself – small wonder, with the success of the festival under his charter's organisation. "It used to be run by HA England as a unit, but Ashfield took it over as we missed it, everybody else missed it... it's an opportunity for brothers worldwide to come together, but also for other people who simply love bikes."

He's not wrong. Though smaller than it used to be, with attendance nearer 5,000 than the 50,000 that showed up to party in 2007, it's cheaper, safer, more relaxed and focused on the main thing that brings everyone together, myself included – the bikes.

We shake hands and Taff's bubbly wife brings me a flute of pink prosecco. "Don't tell her anything," Taff warns her, flashing a grin. He's the second to ask to see my notes before publication.

I wander off towards the "adult entertainment zone", where B-Bob, the New Yorker who shut me down earlier, greets me enthusiastically. He's hanging out with Robert and a bunch of international brothers by the bar, largely ignoring the strippers up on stage. I'm introduced to Angel after Angel; handed drink after drink. I get chatting to a couple of Belgian brothers who take me to the members-only bar. Nico, a 35-year-old from the Belgian Coast charter, is quiet at first, but we bond over bikes, poetry and travelling.

"When they made me a full member I told them, 'I'm gonna ruin your reputation!'" he laughs. "I'm married with a five-year-old son, I went to university, have a pizza and pasta bar... and no tattoos. Every brother is different. You get some assholes, of course, but we just love to ride and hit the road with our brothers, and that's what being a Hells Angel is about for me. We know wherever we go in the world we will have a roof over our head, good company, good food... it's really humbling."

Drinks appear in my hands as if by magic, and I find myself feeling strangely safe. Perhaps I'm used to being physically and verbally harassed on Saturday nights in bars – but not here, where I'm comfortable in the knowledge that with these guys' simple philosophy I can give them respect and get it back. I'm invited to stay in the US, in Belgium, in Holland, and offered tattoo designs. The brothers are incredibly welcoming, and with the disappearance of my camera the younger ones especially are more open to chatting. At some point we move outside to hang out in the abandoned dodgems, before eventually passing out as the sun comes up.

The Hells Angels are a collective of individuals. While a few might wish some change of their reputation, many actively bolster it, and for their own purposes they hold on to their mystique – as do, for example, the Freemasons. The police's official stance is that there is "evidence to suggest they are involved in criminal activity", and there is one reported incident of an assault at the Bash this year – but I have personally witnessed no aggression among the thousands of drunken bikers.

And you can't forget the good that's done here, either – the Bulldog raises money for local charities, and historic Stratford itself is full of signs welcoming the attending bikers. I have experienced suspicion and distrust as a journalist, but only respect, generosity and good humour as a person.

More on VICE:

Hells Angels, Black Panthers, and Psychedelics: Criminal Defense Lawyer Tony Serra Is the Hippie Atticus Finch

Nazi Chants and Canned Cassoulet: Photos of Parisian Bikers in the 70s

Greased Quiffs and Flick Knives: Growing Up Teddy Boy in 1970s England

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The debate over burkinis on French beaches has spilled over into Quebec, but chances of the full body swimsuits being banned here are slim to none.

Follow Tamara on Twitter

Thumbnail photo of a different Boost Mobile store via Flickr user Mike Mozart

What's the criminal equivalent of that "crowded high school cafeteria wearing nothing but my underpants" stress dream? Probably something similar to what happened on Wednesday in Patterson, New Jersey, NBC reports.

It was supposed to be your textbook stick up: bust into a Boost Mobile store, gut the place for every smartphone in sight, and ride off into the sunset like you're Rihanna in the upcoming Ocean's Eleven reboot.

These armed guys, though, hardly made it through the phone store's door before the whole thing fell apart. After the guys pulled a gun, genius manager Tony Torrez fled through a back exit and cleared the other employees out. He then quickly locked the store's front and back gates, trapping the criminals inside the store. It wasn't long before an audience of bystanders formed to watch in awe as the two robbers frantically tried to escape, even pleading with the crowd for help.

Sadly, the ordeal did not end as one would have hoped—with the two men being escorted off the premises and into police custody, and Torrez being awarded the key to the city along with a comically large bottle of champagne. Torrez called 911 a whopping five times as the crooks rattled inside their Boost Mobile cage, but the police were too slow to respond. By the time cops arrived at the scene 20 minutes late, the criminals had been able to find a toolbox, jimmy open the back door, and escape.

According to NBC, the police department has since launched an internal investigation into why the cops couldn't manage to catch a couple of criminals who were literally already locked up. Torrez, on the other hand, is probably gearing up for a pretty significant pay raise.

Read: What We Can All Learn from One Cat-Hating Midwestern Dad's Pot Brownie Misadventure

Will you please sign our cheques, Justin? Photo via CP.

Being young and jobless isn't easy. And in an economy that's not exactly handing out jobs, students and recent graduates are automatically placed at the back of the walk-running race for employment, or at least for employment in your field. As it's been for years, young people have relied on internships for access into potential careers.

In the last few years, unpaid Internships have been under fire because people finally started to figure out this whole human rights thing. As it stands right now, every province has their own law against unpaid internships with varying exceptions, but there's still no national mandate. This year, the federal Liberal government actually proposed a regulation to permit them.

Until that happens, government agencies are supposed to be places where young people are guaranteed to be paid for on-the-job learning. However, a new, frustrating discovery in the world of internships reveals that some of the biggest federal agencies in Canada are not paying their interns.

If you've read the lovely title in my byline, I am in fact the current (paid, cough, cough) editorial intern at VICE Canada. And as an intern/student/young person who wants to be successful but not poor, this is exactly the struggle that I know many of my peers are fervently trying to avoid. And to be frank, it's bullshit.

The results of a review by Canada's Treasury Board released this week reveal that 12 federal agencies do not pay some of their interns.

Read More: Microsoft Tried to Get it's Bae Interns Wasted

The Treasury Board, which monitors how the government spends its money, has a policy that requires the government to pay all of their interns. The only exceptions are academic placements that forbid payment (side note: wtf is up with those schools?).

Some of the agencies that have unpaid internships include Global Affairs Canada, Public Safety Canada, Canadian Human Rights Commission, and National Defence.

Hello! These are not some novice startup companies or basement barbershops, they are real, profesh workplaces, which, I can probably guess, involve of lot of important shit. (It's also the government, which has piles and piles of our cash.)

To put this in perspective, most interns, like myself, are in university or college and are probably living on their own. So obviously they have to pay their own bills and rent and groceries and loans and oh my god, my palms are starting to sweat—basically interns usually have a lot on their plates and not being paid is ridiculous, especially when it's the government.

Read More: We Asked Our Interns About the Video Games Made in the Year They Were Born

While I am paid here at VICE—not only in experience but also in Canadian dollars—the reality is that this part time job is still not enough for me to live. On my nights and weekends off, I have to slave away at a service job in order to really front my bills and living essentials.

Until the government figures out a way to make tuition more affordable (dare we say free?), and rent returns to a reasonable rate in Canada's largest cities, maybe they can just pony up for the young people fact-checking their internal reports.

Follow Ebony-Renee Baker on Twitter.

Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

The number of environmental challenges facing the planet is daunting: There's climate change. Ocean acidification. Plastic pollution. Food wastage. The list goes on and on and on. And while plenty of young people want to leave the planet better than they found it, eco-consciousness can quickly get expensive, especially with the many upscale lifestyle brands who have co-opted green living.

Saving the planet ain't cheap. But it can be, according to Pandora Thomas, an environmental consultant and advocate. She's consulted with major brands like Toyota on eco initiatives and written curricula for teaching green building to children. She's also taught environmental mindfulness to inmates at San Quentin Prison, which is to say, her brand of environmentalism fits all budgets.

I spoke to Thomas about how to eat misshapen produce, find eco-conscious products, and other strategies to save the planet while on a tight budget.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: What would you say it costs you to living in an eco-conscious way? Do you find it to be more expensive than if you just defaulted to what everyone else is doing?
Pandora Thomas: Well, actually, a lot of what we call "environmentally friendly practices" are things people of low means do because they have to. You're saving things and you're trying to cut corners here and there, so you're using less products . It's a bulk product so then you can just add water and it lasts a lot longer.

What kind of eco-friendly products are cheap and easy to DIY?
Definitely cleaning products. You can make cleaning products with, like, three other products. Air fresheners are very simple and easy to make. Then beauty products, like scrubs and lotions. They're pretty easy to make.

How do you make a lotion?
We usually use a base of coconut or almond oil and essential oils. Essential oils are herbs, but made into oils like tea tree oil. You can take coconut oil and cocoa butter and cook it until it's melted and then you get aloe vera or essential oils and stir. You can also literally just use coconut oil. The same coconut oil you use in the kitchen. You can use it in your hair. You can use it all over your body. Actually, there's seven or eight things I think every home should have that you can just interchange.

What are those things?
Lemons, coconut oil, some type of Castile soap (like Dr. Bonner's), almond or olive oil, tea tree oil, some type of essential oil, witch hazel, aloe vera, and borax. You'll save a lot of money.

Do you think an eco-friendly lifestyle is at all at odds with a frugal lifestyle?
Not at all. I think frugality allows you to live a more sustainable life. We definitely are going to have to give stuff up. We can't continue consuming and living the way we are, but that doesn't mean that we have to give everything up. I often times tell people, "Start to track your spending. See where your money goes." I used to do this. I spent $50 on espressos in two weeks, whereas if I just bought an espresso machine or a coffee maker, I would shift that money.

To be frugal is when you're tracking and understanding your spending and then finding ways to meet your needs that aren't so expensive, but also saving money so that you can support the things that you really want to be doing.

Follow Zach Brooke on Twitter.

Still from Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (yeah right.)

I love trailers. They're often a distillation of the only truly watchable parts of a movie and the promise of something greater. Adam Sandler seems funny. You convince yourself Keira Knightley is charming. Trailers are hope, possibility, imagination. Where the final product is usually disappointment, unfulfilled dreams, reality.

More things should have trailers. Imagine if before you bought a vacuum cleaner you could watch a 30 second tease that showed you exactly how that vacuum would perform on your trash rugs? And then ended with an explosion? Definitely beats reading five pages of shitty Amazon reviews and then just giving up and buying the cheapest one.

Anyway, trailers are also a great way to kill some time at work on a slow Friday afternoon, so let's watch some shit blow up.

Follow Amil on Twitter

I've known Zoe Ligon since we were both hawking swimsuits at American Apparel in the summer of 2011. Back then she would make show posters for Brooklyn venues that don't exist anymore and talking about getting into sex education, all of which foreshadowed her future quite nicely. She has since become the CEO of her own sex-positive toy store in Detroit, Spectrum Boutique, amassed over 45,000 Instagram followers, become VICE Magazine's sex column illustrator, and appeared in several group shows with her porn-based collage work.

Everything she does is centered around promoting a more open attitude towards sexuality and self-affirmation—she is a renaissance woman of coitus. So when I heard she was coming back to her old stomping grounds for a solo show I got excited and wanted to discuss what inspires this very inspiring lady. See my interview with her below and if you're in New York come out to Superchief in Greenpoint to check out some of her pieces in the flesh.

VICE: How do you balance running a sex toy shop with your art?
Zoe Ligon: Honestly I'm stressed out ALL THE TIME. I have to be glued to my phone and email constantly, and I feel like my brain is always juggling several things at once. It's not a very conducive mindset for creating visual art. It's only been in the last month or so that I've learned to not freak out every time there's a little bump in the road. However, having to be so "on" all the time has made me much more productive overall, so I've slowly been returning to my collage work. In many ways my writing, art, and business all fuel each other since they're all sex-related. For instance, I'm going to be releasing an art book with Ain't-Bad in November, and having a stronger business background has made the entire publishing process much easier. Furthermore, writing articles is a very organic way to promote both my art and business without ever needing to formally advertise (which feels quite wrong to me since I'm really just trying to encourage folks to explore their own sexuality and pleasure).

Where do you source materials for pieces?
I go to a comic book shop in the suburbs of Detroit that has a hoard of porn in the back area. Just walking into the shop is an experience. The guy who owns it is quite a character—he'll yell at me to turn the pages more carefully, accuse me of stealing, or snatch a random porno out of my hands and tell me it's not for sale. I kind of love how relentlessly cranky he is toward me. Maybe I weird him out?

Working with porn can bring about all sorts of assumptions and stereotypes. How do you combat that?
I began integrating elements of nature into my pieces in order to give the women in my images the beautiful backdrops and surroundings they deserve. I see so many images of naked women shot in frat house-like environments, and I'll just think, Fuck no! This girl needs a majestic-ass waterfall behind her. The photographers (who are almost always men) shoot their spreads with the primary intention of providing sexual imagery for men. On top of that, female models and performers rarely receive the treatment and compensation they deserve, so in a way I feel like my collages are an homage to the beauty of the models that dismantles the photographer's original intention by obscuring it.

Do you hope to change people's taboos and hangups about sexual imagery?
Fuck yeah. Porn has such a bad rap. While I understand why society sees it as taboo, it is really no more than a sexual tool. While there's a whole lot of shitty porn, there's a lot of really great porn out there with an actual focus on the vulva where pleasure is mutually exchanged (that's why I only watch videos starring Danny Wylde). But like I said, most mainstream porn is geared towards heterosexual men and gives all viewers an unrealistic depiction of sex. In a world where our sex education is severely lacking, people use porn as a learning tool in addition to an arousal tool and consequently walk away thinking it's OK to go ass to vaj or some shit like that. So yeah, I want to promote the idea that sexual imagery has the potential to teach us a lot and help us conquer shaming attitudes.

If you could inject your collage style into a sex toy design, how would that look?
Whoa. There's definitely a potential for too many sharp edges. Stained-glass dildo! (Just kidding that would in no way be body-safe.)

What can we expect at Superchief tonight?
I have around 60 framed collage pieces that will be on display, and there will be some wacky music played by my friends. I think it's much better to see the collages in person, because it's easier to discern where the layers of paper begin and end, thereby giving them more depth. I also love how physical some people's reactions can be. It can be very difficult to stare at explicit images of sex in a public place, even if you're not shy around the subject, and observing the way different people behave around sexually explicit images can be quite fascinating.

Zoe Ligon is an artist and sex educator based in Detroit. Her solo show opens tonight between 6 and 10 PM at Superchief Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. See more of her work below.

You apparently can have too much of a good thing. Photo via Flickr user Katheirne Hitt

With the exception of a few sober stints, Jeffrey has been waking and baking every day for the last six years.

The 24-year-old script supervisor, who grew up in a small town outside of Seattle, told VICE he started smoking weed when he was 18, introduced to it by a friend at a campfire.

Within six months, he said he was going through a couple grams a day.

"For me it felt like about as classical of an addiction as you could get. It really kind of changed and took over everything. Every morning I woke up and it was the first thing you thought about."

Read more: I Faced My Psychological Weed Addiction

Marijuana is the most popular "illicit" drug in the world. With legalization set to take place in Canada next year, Dr. Jonathan Bertram, an addictions physician at Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, told VICE the "law of averages" means more and more people are likely to run into it at some point in their lives. Advocates point out that it is far less harmful than legal substances like tobacco and alcohol. But, according to Bertram, that doesn't mean it's immune to being abused.

While the idea of being addicted to marijuana is highly contentious—many people believe it's impossible—doctors actually have a term for people who have a weed dependency: cannabis use disorder. The diagnosis itself is only three years old—it was first referenced in the 2013 version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The US-based National Institute on Drug Abuse says 9 percent of marijuana users will abuse it.

According to Bertram, many of his patients say they started using cannabis either for recreational reasons or because it helped them with a physical condition—like insomnia—but that over time the benefit they received from cannabis began to diminish and in some cases the habit started having a negative impact on their lives.

"Their use ends up dominating a big part of their lifestyle and their day. Because of their use they can't carry out things they normally would," he said, including attending school, work, and completing homework or tasks. Teenagers are more susceptible to developing a problem.

"They have a lot of trouble keeping up with their relationships except for the ones that revolve around cannabis use."

Jeffrey said his chronic use led him to feel more depressed and emotional.

"I was just much more self critical. I had all these feelings of insecurity and they were very much heightened."

He also said he stayed indoors alone more, stopped hanging out with friends who didn't also smoke, and stopped caring about his diet or his interest as a musician. Three years ago, he posted a thread on Reddit titled How heavy-marijuana smoking ruined my life, where he described "scouring the disgusting carpet for weed crumbs, sneaking nugglets from my friends when they weren't looking, lying to my parents about needing more money, and having panic-attacks when I couldn't find weed."

Bertram told VICE he sees patients who use weed to ease their anxiety; it works at first, but eventually, as they build up a tolerance and consume more and more to achieve the same effect, some experience "rebound anxiety" where their symptoms actually worsen due to the marijuana. While it's rarer, he said people also have physical withdrawal symptoms stemming from marijuana dependence, including breaking into sweats and vomiting.

The primary treatment, he said, is cognitive behaviour therapy—a form of psychotherapy that helps people develop specific techniques to deal with their everyday thoughts and problems. A secondary option is a drug called nabilone which mimics the cbd effect of cannabis but not the psychoactive one.

But Bertram said there's far less evidence of the effectiveness of such treatments than there is for other addictions treatments, i.e. methadone.

When Jeffrey felt his weed addiction was out of control, he reached out to his family for help. He said his parents took turns living with him for a couple weeks at a time.

"I would get anxiety, but I'm with my mom so I couldn't smoke. So I had to just deal with that and talk through it."

He went cold turkey for a month and a half. But, more than three years later, he said he's still blazing every day.

"(Before) it was a lot more 'I need to normalize my emotions, I need to mask this pain.' Now I do it much more like 'Hey, let's throw on a trippy movie.' I'm kinda more just having fun with it."

Bertram said it is possible to treat people with cannabis use disorder by having them smoke up more moderately—but only if their reasoning, impulsivity, and ability to manage emotions haven't been impacted by using the drug.

Overall, he said he sees far fewer patients with cannabis use disorder than those dealing with other addictions, like alcohol and opioids. But he said more research on cannabis dependency is needed.

"It definitely has to be studied more because people are using it and people have all kinds of different opinions on it," he said.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

This presidential campaign has gone on for approximately 10,000 years. All across the republic, Americans are so, so tired. People are Googling things like, "Can we have an election right now, today?" and "Do other countries do this better?" and "What about if I tore down my house and used the wood to build a big raft and just sailed off into the sunset forever and ever, what would happen then?" And yet, as of this week Donald Trump, a man who reportedly wouldn't let his own wife see him naked, hadn't released a general election campaign spot. Some pro-Trump Super PACs had run ads, of course. But somehow, the alleged billionaire and star of popular TV show Celebrities You Have Never Heard of Are Shitty to Each Other had yet to inject his famous personality and verve into a commercial targeting the official Democratic nominee.

Well, on Friday Trump came out with an ad. Here it is:

People say that Trump is a different sort of presidential candidate, but the ad, which is running in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina, follows a pretty standard format. The first part is footage of various Bad Things with a grainy filter, then the second part is Good Things in full, vibrant color. It's like those informercials showing people struggling with tangled garden hoses in black and white before the amazing tangle-free hose appears in their lives and makes everything better. Except instead of watering a lawn we're talking about deporting people en masse.

Anyway, let's break it down.

A weird thing to do, if you are running for elected office and presumably encouraging people to vote, is to begin a commercial by implying that the voting process is rigged. Trump has been pushing the standard GOP narrative that voter fraud is common and needs to be addressed with voter-ID laws, but in the ad the whole argument gets reduced to a two-word blanket statement.

Another slightly weird thing is this holding up of Hillary Clinton's quote about admitting 65,000 Syrian refugees as a smoking gun revealing her true intentions or whatever. Sixty-five thousand is not a very big number of people in a country of 318 million. And while it's true that 65,000 Syria refugees would be an increase by American standards, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the 1 million refugees who settled in Germany last year. A million refugees would represent a massive influx of people, but 65,000 carefully screened refugees does not.

The only way you find Clinton's statement damning is if you are unsettled by the notion of Syrian refugees, period—a view that, judging by the comments of Trump and many Republican governors, is increasingly common. In his 1988 farewell address, Ronald Reagan went on a riff about his vision of the US as a "shining city on a hill" and said that, "if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here." Twenty-eight years later, the leader of Reagan's party is like, "lol, no, we need walls."

The Trump campaign also decided to include some footage of brown people being arrested.

The thing about campaign imagery is that it's almost always sourced from someplace else, and it's not always clear where it originated. (That's how Trump mistakenly tweeted a photo of Nazi soldiers, a story no one remembers because it happened 10,000 years ago.) Obviously, the above shot and the onscreen phrase "borders open" implies that these immigrants—on their way to commit crimes, no doubt—are crossing the American border on the top of a train.

Except that's probably not what's happening: This is almost certainly footage of La Bestia, or "the Beast," a nickname for the freight trains migrants ride from Central American countries through Mexico. (You'll get caught easily crossing the US border on top of a train; migrants have to find other ways to sneak past border security.) It's a hellaciously difficult and sometimes deadly journey that has been widely covered in the media—VICE did a documentary on it a few years back. In this ad about "Hillary Clinton's America," in other words, there is an image that may have well come from Mexico.

What does Donald Trump plan to do about all these bad things?

Helicopters.

Helicopters!

HELICOPTERS!

As a result of these helicopters, Americans of all races are once again secure enough to stand on their front porches looking at an American flag.

And heterosexual couples are once again kissing.

And here is a battleship.

This may sound like I'm cutting out the nuance of the "solution" part of the ad in order to be funny, but here is the entire text of the voiceover that's read over these images:

"Donald Trump's America is secure. Terrorists and dangerous criminals kept out. The border secure. Our families, safe. Change that makes America safe again."

This is where we are in the 2016 campaign: immigrants, bad. Trump, good. Secure, safe, men with guns. Verbs, no.

Only 80 more days until the election.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Images courtesy of Square Enix

Deus Ex was a formative moment for game design in 2000, laying the early foundation for the systems-driven games we now take for granted. The franchise should have been dead and buried after its disastrous sequel, Invisible War. It should have faded away gracefully, content with knowing it had a profound impact on the future of video games. But eight years after Invisible War, Eidos Montreal presented their take on a modern Deus Ex with Human Revolution. And in a world where sequels to successful games are pushed out the door as soon as possible, it's remarkable that Eidos Montreal was given five years to work on their follow-up, Mankind Divided.

Part of Human Revolution's charm was how decidedly unmodern it was, a janky but earnest cyberpunk game that worshiped at Deus Ex's feet—perhaps to a fault. And it's potent how similar, in ways good and bad, Mankind Divided feels toHuman Revolution. But sadly, the earnest but janky approach doesn't feel as fresh five years later, withMankind Divided doing precious little to move its promising design ideas forward.

The basic setup remains the same. In a universe of augmentations, transhumanism, and robotic fetishism, players are tasked with uncovering an international conspiracy. Like previous games in the series, players are dropped into open-ended environments where they're given apparent freedom to determine the outcome. Really, though, it's either stealth or shooting. It's possible to play with a mixture of the two approaches, but this isn't Dishonored, a game that encourages players to alternate between slinking through the shadows and out-and-out violence. In Mankind Divided, chances are you're either going in guns blazing or looking for an air duct to climb through—not shifting between the two effortlessly.

And that may be what's bugging me about this sequel: predictability. As someone who favors stealth, dumping all of my upgrade points into skills like hacking, the formula is well-worn. I'll approach an area, scour around for an air duct, seek out a computer terminal to hack, and leave through the same path. If that air duct isn't up on the wall, chances are it's hiding behind a conveniently placed box. Rinse, repeat. Perhaps it's my own lack of imagination, but I suspect it's deeper: there's an illusion of freedom in Mankind Divided. The game presents as though players have a plethora of options to solve a problem, but in reality, it's disappointingly limited.

Gord Downie, as he should be, in a denim jacket. Photo via CP.

When I was a teenager, my 52-year-old dad died of a brain tumour, leaving behind a heartbroken family.

Watching this beloved, dynamic man suffer through such a cruel and unforgiving disease is the hardest thing I've ever experienced, and even though it's now been more than a decade, I will forever be a little bit broken by his passing.

Finding out that Gord Downie, also 52, had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour was an echo of something all too familiar. And while I have never met him and cannot pretend to know what he and his loved ones are going through, I know that this cancer (any cancer, really) brings about a fresh kind of hell for all involved.

Last night, I had the privilege of seeing one of Mr. Downie's last shows, in front of a full house at the Ottawa Canadian Tire Centre. The show was incredible: energetic, emotional and Canadian as fuck. Everyone around me in the nosebleed section stood through the entire two-and-a-half hour performance, singing along through every song. I teared up when the first bars of "Nautical Disaster" rang out, and wept when Gord, singing the words "and we're heading for home," pointed up at the sky.

Sure, he was actually pointing at the metal ceiling of a sports arena, but the symbolism of this gesture cut through all of the artifice of a rock show and brought me right back to a place of intense vulnerability.

To just take a little detour back to my dad: he was an amazing man fueled by the great outdoors, politics, and his family. I was a total daddy's girl and loved our camping trips, bike rides, and rollerblading excursions (this was obviously in the 90s). But there is a moment in my early teens that will be forever seared into my memory. As he dropped me off at middle school, my dad told me that soon, I wouldn't want to hang out with him anymore because that would no longer be considered cool. That would be ok, he assured me, because all teens go through this and he would understand. I told him he was crazy, hugged him, and went to class.

As he predicted, I became a total teenage asshole, eschewing our hangouts in favour of bush parties and boys and often treating him like a nuisance who just didn't get me anymore.

If only I had known how little time I had left.

As I stood there, in a stadium with tens of thousands of people worshipping Gord Downie, I realized that in a way, a lot of Hip fans have been like ingrate teens. The band has been so ubiquitous on Canadian radio, a comforting if not overplayed soundtrack often resented for being too present (thanks CanCon requirements!). We didn't appreciate the Hip because we just figured they'd be around forever, putting out another album every two or three years, each one with at least one killer single.

My dad and me.

I had long been the band's target audience, a rural Canadian kid who grew up fishing and hanging out in Tim Hortons parking lots. My musical library was largely based on what local radio stations played, and so that meant a healthy dose of The Tragically Hip. When I left for the big city and met cooler people than I, my tastes evolved. Liking the Hip became as corny and embarrassing as my predilection for Tim's double-doubles and chocolate-chip muffins, and I needed to shirk my pseudo-redneck past to fit in with all the cultured, fancy city people I was meeting.

Read More: How I Learned to Love the Tragically Hip and Still Be Punk

Rediscovering the band's library in recent months has been a revelation. For one, the songs make me deeply nostalgic for the ski-doo trips and high-school parties they used to score. But it's also made me realize how much we take for granted, constantly.

Getting to last night's Hip concert was an absolute cluster fuck: I'd been out of town all day covering a medieval role-playing event for work (which I was forced to do whilst wearing a floor-length long-sleeved velvet princess gown) and got back home to Montreal (very sweaty, disgusting, and exhausted) with just enough time to make the two hour drive to Ottawa for the show. Then, I accidentally Google mapped us to the airport instead of the Canadian Tire Centre and walked into the venue just as the canteen ran out of beer and the band played the first chords of "Boots or Hearts."

But seeing Downie swaying around the stage in his metallic suits and assortment of tall hats made me (and I think, everyone in the arena) realize how lucky we'd been to have this brilliant mad poet composing the soundtrack to Canada all of this time. Seeing his chemo-puffed cheeks reminded me of my dad and made me think about all the pain Downie and his family must be going through at the moment.

After my father had his tumour removed, he became a completely different person; impatient, confused and meek. There was this one night near the end, however, where he had this incredible moment of lucidity during which he asked me about my dreams and told me not to worry about the future. In that moment, I had the occasion to really thank him for everything he'd done for me: the boat rides, the life advice, the bandaged knee scrapes...

The Hip in Vancouver earlier this summer. Photo via CP.

Last night, as the ravenous crowd pleaded for not one but two encores, Downie obliged and then told us (told us!) to take care. I realized this tour was like Canada's lucid moment, our opportunity to tell Downie how loved and appreciated he'd been. Despite our petulant and fickle fandom, despite our underappreciation of his words and magic, Downie has left an indelible mark on the people he's leaving behind. And though we are all, at times, like silly navel-gazing teenagers, his fading is a reminder that we should not wait for impending tragedy to express our appreciation for the people who shape us.

As Gord once put it, "all songs are one song and that song is Don't Forget."

Follow Brigitte on Twitter.

Even a week after a deluge put huge chunks of Louisiana and other parts of the South underwater, even after the water levels had begun to recede, it was almost impossible to find someone willing to make the normally hour-and-a-half drive to Baton Rouge from New Orleans. I spent two days trying to bribe cabbies and Uber drivers to take me to the places where the rains had displaced thousands of residents, but couldn't find any takers. That's how I ended up in the back of Jeremy Roussel's pickup truck.

Roussel was making his second trip of the week to Baton Rouge, with his girlfriend Jena Russell and his father David in tow. "I had heard about the flooding, and it wasn't even a question about getting out there to help," said Roussel, who owns a charter fishing company along with a construction company in the New Orleans area. "We just immediately got my boats and drove them up."

Roussel is just one among hundreds of Louisianans who turned themselves into a decentralized volunteer search-and-rescue organization to help residents whose lives have been upended by the massive rains that have turned a sizable portion of the state into a disaster zone. The volunteers have become known as the Cajun Navy—some of them brag that they were "born in the water"—and came out en masse after many became frustrated with what they describe as the government's slow response to the crisis.

"The cops and National Guard—they didn't know what the hell to do," said Roussel, who says that he rescued National Guardsmen from their trucks when they drove too deep in the floodwaters.

Rachel Giror of Morgan City and her husband Troy put their number on Facebook after being fed up with the slow police response. "I took 150 phone calls that day. In less than 24 hours. That's not including text messages," Rachel told me. She didn't wait for long for permission from authorities to get involved. "I said, we're not doing it their way. We went down a street, backed up on someone's driveway, and launched the boats."

"It's a brotherhood, it shows the South really does come together in a time of need," is how John Miller of Rayville described the Cajun Navy. "We care about our brothers and sisters in the South. There were people with paddle canoes with ten cases of water stacked in it."

A mailbox in Port Vincent. All photos by the author

Roussel doesn't necessarily like to be associated with the group. But his mission is obviously the same as theirs. On the day I was in his truck, he was headed to a village to the southeast of Baton Rouge called Port Vincent. They were equipped with rations to be handed out at the Port Vincent Community Center, and they also wanted to repair the home of a 35-year-old man named Chris Krumholt who single-handedly changed Roussel's perspective on altruism when Roussel and his father met him on their last trip.

"We picked up this guy on the side of the road—I have no clue why he was there—and he just wanted to help. He knew exactly where to go and how to get around when the police had no clue," Roussel said. "I didn't realize until he later pointed it out that we were on the same block of his own house that was flooded."

The view from the inside of Chris Krumholt's house

Even though Krumholt's home had been damaged, he was in good spirits. "I just saw this man jumping in waist-high water, going into people's homes looking to make sure they were alive and safe," Roussel said. "This guy's sacrificing his life and even though he has nothing left, himself."

As we drove off the I-12 onto the state highway and into Port Vincent, there were few signs of the flood. The only evidence was the muddy shoulders and the occasional motorboat docked on the side of the freeway. But as we drove closer, the piles of trash, furniture, and the guts from washed-out houses appeared next to the road.

David (left) and Jeremy Roussel inside Krumholt's house

On Krumholt's street, the floodwaters hadn't completely receded. A trio of Coast Guard members were just leaving after helping him throw out all his waterlogged furniture and electronics. As we approached the door, Krumholt yelled, "Can you do me a favor and wipe your feet before coming in the house? I don't want it to get wet."

Port Vincent is not in a designated flood zone, and like the vast majority of people living in those areas, Krumholt didn't have flood insurance—"I never thought I'd need it," he said. Since the rains came, FEMA estimates that 66,000 have filed for assistance from the federal agency. For now, though, the quickest source of relief seemed to be coming from friends, neighbors, and other good Samaritans.

While Roussel and his father began measuring the home for repairs, Krumholt told me about the things he had lost. Microwaves, sofas, pictures. But the most devastating loss was a stack of letters his mother wrote to him while he was enlisted in the military. He wiped tears from his eyes and choked up as he told me that the letters were found stuck together with no ink on them.

"Memories, you always have 'em," he said

Ernst Röhm—the gay German paramilitary commander executed in the Night of Long Knives—alongside Nazi leaders Heinrich Himmeler and Kurt Daluege in 1933. Photo via Wikimedia, courtesy Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives)

It is no secret that gay men faced violent oppression in Nazi Germany, but few people realize that the German persecution of gay men continued far after the Nazis' defeat in 1945, or that more gay men were convicted under Paragraph (§) 175, Germany's former anti-sodomy statute, in the first two and a half decades of the Cold War than ever were under Nazi rule.

Though Germany repealed the law in 1994, it has never atoned for this "monstrous disgrace," as Germany'sGreen Party representatives Katja Keul and Volker Beck called §175 two weeks ago in a demand for reparations on behalf of the over fifty thousand men convicted under the provision. And it wasn't until this May—more than 20 years since the law was repealed—that Justice Minister Heiko Maas introduced the idea of expunging those convictions, which ruined the lives of many gay German men, and stifled the development of what could have been a thriving national queer culture.

Understanding West Germany's extraordinary persecution of gay men first requires revisiting exactly how homosexuals were treated under Nazi rule. When the party came to power in 1933, gay men were among the first victims targeted—Nazi brown-shirts closed gay bars, stormed Berlin's famed Institute for Sexology, and burned gay texts, effectively stamping out Weimar Germany's renowned gay community. Gay elements within the Party, including Ernst Röhm, the commander of its Sturmabteilung (SA) paramilitary force, were purged in the 1934 Night of Long Knives, opening the way for more homophobic policies championed by, among others, Schutzstaffel (SS) chief Heinrich Himmler.

On June 28, 1935, Hitler's government introduced a new, bleaker version of §175, which had previously prohibited only penetrative intercourse—something difficult to prove in court. Under the new Nazi statute, any act construed to be homosexual was criminalized—a wrong glance could land a man in prison. This looser definition caused convictions to skyrocket from a few hundred per year to over eight thousand. A horror-house of punishments awaited those found guilty, from heavy prison sentences to concentration camps and castration.

Between 1935 and 1943, around 46,000 men were convicted under the provision. Of those, between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, where their clothing bore pink triangles, now a ubiquitous symbol of gay liberation. Fewer than half survived.

When the Allied Powers occupied Germany in 1945, they repealed particularly egregious Nazi laws, such as the infamous Nuremberg Laws that banned intercourse and marriage between Jews and those defined as Aryans. But the occupiers remained silent on the question of which version of §175 would stand—the harsher law passed in 1935, or the milder provision it had replaced. While East German courts quickly decided the 1935 version was an illegitimate Nazi law, West Germany continued to enforce it.

In 1950, a new wave of persecutions began in West Germany. In a mass action, the state's attorney in Frankfurt rounded up hundreds of men on the testimony of young male prostitutes, and charged at least 140 under the 1935 version of §175.

Most faced jail sentences; at least seven committed suicide. One nineteen-year-old man jumped from Frankfurt's Goethe Tower, while anotherpoisoned himself in a movie theater. The president of the American Civil Liberties Union, Roger Baldwin, visiting Frankfurt at the time, protested it was "incomprehensible that such treatment of innocent, adult persons was still possible in the 20th century," as reported in Der Spiegel.

At least seventeen hundred men were sentenced in 1950. Convictions peaked in 1959, when West German courts found almost four thousand men guilty under §175. Between 1950 and 1969, when §175 was finally reformed, West Germany would convict more men of sodomy than the Nazis had.

Throughout this period, an increasing number of legal and medical scholars insisted that §175 was inconsistent with democratic rule, but it took until 1956 for Germany's Federal Constitutional Court to weigh in on the constitutionality of §175, when it accepted appeals from two men convicted in Hamburg. The men's argument—that the law was a Nazi fossil that violated Germany's constitutional guarantees of "free development of personality" and equality between the sexes (§175 famously did not criminalize female homosexuality)—failed spectacularly.

The court declared that "congenital homosexuality is so rare, that it can be ignored for practical purposes"—an outrageous assertion from a democratic court that came a half-century before Iranian President Ahmadinejad's infamous claim that "we don't have homosexuals." The case settled the question of §175's legitimacy, ensuring that WestGermany would continue to pursue the most draconian persecution of gay men of any postwar democratic state.

As the 1960s progressed, sexual mores loosened across Europe, and conservative WestGermany was no exception. In 1966, the ruling Christian Democratic Union entered a so-called grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party, bringing socialists into the government for the first time since 1930. In particular, the left-leaning justice minister, Gustav Heinemann, began to push for reform of the criminal code. In 1969, the government finally decriminalized homosexuality between consenting adults.

The memory of over thirty years of violent oppression has helped gay Germans—in Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne in particular—develop one of the most vital gay scenes in the world today.

Homophobia remained ingrained in the German criminal code nonetheless. As part of the reform, the government had created a bizarre loophole, closed five years later, which criminalized any sexual acts between a man over eighteen with another under twenty-one; in other words, if two 19-year-old men slept together, they could still be prosecuted under §175. When that loophole was closed in 1973, the age of consent for gay sex still remained higher than that for heterosexual acts. Until the law was fully repealed in 1994, approximately 180 men would be convicted under §175 every year.

The damage inflicted upon Germany's gay community, though difficult to quantify, was great. It undoubtedly stunted Germany's gay rights movement, which only got off the ground in the early 1970s, after repressive censorship and aggressive policing shuttered earlier postwar attempts at organization and visibility.

Postwar Germany never developed the same vibrant, queer literary culture that came to characterize postwar Anglo-American letters. For every Tony Kushner or Alan Hollinghurst in the Atlantic world, there is a deafening silence in Germany. And, of course, Germany remains one of the few major Western countries where gay men and lesbians do not enjoy the right of marriage.

At the same time, the memory of over 30 years of violent oppression has helped gay Germans—in Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne in particular—develop one of the most vital gay scenes in the world today. The sheer exuberance of the gay rights movements that burst forth after the 1969 reform helped create the uniquely permissive and experimental gay culture that persists today—which The New Yorker in 2014 called Berlin's "most essential and distinguishing element."

The memory of those early postwar decades still weighs heavily on Germany and its queer communities. It is a persistent reminder that even modern democracies can exercise the most brutal repressions, and that free elections are no guarantee of minority rights.

Samuel Clowes Huneke is a doctoral candidate in Stanford University's department of history whose dissertation focuses on homosexuality in postwar Germany. Follow him on Twitter.

Screenshot from 'Endless.' Courtesy of Apple Music

For almost three weeks, Frank Ocean has been building something. Whether that physical structure is a set of stairs (to escape from the world's incessant nagging of fans expecting an album) or a musical note, no one knows, but the audio at least has come in the form of a 45-minute, 18-track film titled Endless. Numbers like "At Your Best" put Ocean's vocal abilities to the test via Isley Brothers' words, while elsewhere "Comme Des Garcons" uses brand names to talk about emotions. In an interlude titled "Ambience 001: In a Certain Way," though, the musician and Calvin Klein model turns to a black gay icon for assistance.

The 12-second track, "Ambience 001," recalls, in mood, an interlude in Channel Orange, where a mother rips on her son. In that skit, titled "Not Just Money," the unnamed mother etches out the difference between having money and happiness. In "Ambience 001," Crystal LaBeija's voice rings out clear: "Because you're beautiful and you're young; you deserve to have the best in life," she says. The line is pulled from a 1968 niche documentary titled The Queen, which tracks the production and staging of a Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant drag contest. In it, LaBeija faces off against a range of other contestants, all brought together by the organizer Miss "Flawless" Sabrina.

The documentary is quite dull to most. The only memorable scene occurs when LaBeija is crowned third runner-up, losing out to Rachel Harlow from Philadelphia, who is Sabrina's supposed protégé. LaBeija accuses the entire production of being rigged and walks off stage during the awards ceremony in protest. Once she's backstage, she delivers a blistering read. "This is why all the true beauties didn't come," LaBeija says of the rigging. "They told me Sabrina that you had it fixed for Harlow. Everyone knew that you had it fixed for Harlow for weeks and weeks." It's from that scene—which comes full of zingers like, "Take a picture of me and Harlow and see which one is more beautiful, darling"—that Ocean pulled his line. But Crystal is known for more than just a catty appearance in a documentary.

In the more popular 1990 ballroom documentary Paris Is Burning, Pepper LaBeija introduces herself a full decade after Crystal's film debut: "I am Pepper LaBeija, legendary mother of the House of LaBeija," she says before clarifying: "Not the founder! That was Crystal, I just rule it now." The distinction is important. The house Crystal founded is arguably the start of modern-ballroom culture, largely credited as being the start of "house" culture. It still exists today with her legendary children like Kia LaBeija in the mix.

Prior to the late 60s, "ballroom culture" revolved around drag pageants that were more like fashion shows or beauty pageants than what we come to know a ball as today. These events went back as far as the 1920s and included actual ballroom dancing. Drag queens of color weren't often involved—their color was expected to be lightened when they were—and rarely won prizes. Even when they did, they were almost always robbed of what many believed they deserved, as with Crystal in The Queen. Out of this, black queens in Harlem began hosting their own balls. One of the first events for queens of color was thrown by Marcel Christian in 1962. But as those productions gained tractions, the participants' looks grew more outlandish, and the audience of spectators swelled. Eventually this would lead a shift to the style of shows reflected in Paris Is Burning.

The move is a side-eye at any criticism about Ocean not "pulling his weight" for the LGBTQ community of color.

Crystal made her indelible mark in the 1970s when she, in a bit of a public-relations move, hosted a ball by the "House of LaBeija." Put on with the assistance of Lottie LaBeija, that ball at Up the Downstairs Case in lower Harlem, was the first of its kind. The concept stuck almost immediately. LGBTQ youth began to align themselves with houses like LaBeija's, taking on the house name as their own in a show of allegiance as Lottie had done with Crystal though they weren't related by blood. Before long all of the balls were being put on by houses, effectively changing the entire ballroom scene. Quite a few of those houses got facetime in Paris Is Burning: House of Corey after Dorian Corey, House of Xtravaganza after Angie Xtravaganza, House of Ninja after Willi Ninja, and House of Pendavis after Avis Pendavis. These houses were not just "teams" for competition, they were familial support systems for those displaced after coming out.

Frank Ocean's sampling of Crystal LaBeija says a lot. Sure, one could read into it for a messy subtext that could align with Crystal's full statement at the time—after saying "you deserve the best and life," she quips, "but you didn't deserve this." But to use such a specific clip nods to a recognition of his queer identity. LGBTQ visibility has long been linked to drag culture with their outsized presence in the Stonewall riots, but here Frank is aligning himself more specifically with ballroom culture, a source of pride, and for most unity amongst LGBTQ youth of color specifically.

The move is a side-eye at any criticism about Ocean not "pulling his weight" for the LGBTQ community of color. With "Ambience," he pays direct homage to a figure integral to the nightlife culture of the LGBTQ community of color of which he is and has always been a part.

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All photos by the author

About eight years ago, Bill Duval sold his monster truck and bought a hearse. Duval isn't an undertaker and doesn't have anything to do with corpses; he just like hearses. Today the Warminster Heights, Pennsylvania, resident drives a 1997 Krystal Koach Lincoln, complete with a 250-pound, solid-oak casket in its expansive rear. He finds it great for grocery shopping and particularly handy for frequenting yard sales.

Last Saturday, Duval's car, garnished with zombie heads, won the award for Best Display at the Eighth Annual Hearse and Professional Vehicle Show in Philadelphia, an auto show for funerary vehicles held, appropriately, in the cemetery of Laurel Hill. Hosted by the Mohnton Professional Car Club (MPCC), the show this year drew nearly two dozen hearses owned by hobbyists like Duval. ("Professional car" is a term used to describe hearses and some other vehicles like limos and ambulances.)

"We do it just to show off our cars and show people hearses are neat, how they're made, and that you can have all kinds of fun with them," MPCC's director Shawn Koenig told me. Koenig, who had two hearses and one flower car (a vehicle that transports flowers for a funeral) present, started the club eight years ago simply to meet other hearse owners. Today it boasts 44 members mostly spread across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, who own a total of 57 cars among them.

Below, see more photos of the hearse owners and their souped-up whips.

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'Grand Theft Auto III' screenshot via YouTube

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

They called it SPANK, and it was everywhere.

The streets of Grand Theft Auto III's fun-size facsimile of New York, Liberty City, seemed almost paved in it. Crazed enthusiasts called into the local talk radio station to sing its praises. Mob bosses hired me to steal bags of it, or sink ships carrying it, or deliver it directly to their seaside mansions.

I might have been a naïve ten year old, but even I could tell it was a drug. What I couldn't figure out was why so many people wanted it so badly. Or—and here's the kicker—whether or not it was even a real thing.

Considering video games' lingering reputation as a form of deviant escapism, the depiction of addictive drugs in popular titles shouldn't surprise anyone. Still, even the most prudish games enthusiast would be hard-pressed to avoid indulging in the occasional virtual substance. From BioShock's toxic mutagen EVE to the Fallout series' menagerie of euphemistic intoxicants, games protagonists have been shooting up, snorting, and smoking their way through their adventures for decades now.

Most of these games don't dwell on these substances, however. In fact, by and large, they're just neutered props, designed to give texture to a game's universe, or to justify long-simmering gameplay conceits to a more sophisticated audience. BioShock's EVE is a particularly clever example of this—by centralizing its Randian dystopia around the use of magical psychoactive drugs called Plasmids, the developers behind the game not only grant the player character fun superpowers, such as shooting lightning out of his hands, they also justify murdering the inhabitants of said dystopia with these abilities. After all, they're just Splicers, just drug addicts, the game seems to say. It's not like they're people.

Few games lend the issue even this much thought; most are content with using drugs as shorthand for simple power-ups. Mario might need to chomp down on a mushroom to become Super, but it takes a hero with the maturity and guile of Duke Nukem to pop a steroid every now and then for the sake of superhuman strength. Needless to say, the issue of Duke Nukem's latent "'roid rage" has yet to become a plot element in the franchise that bears his name.

A screenshot of 'Rockstar!' via YouTube

There are many video games with drugs in them, but only a handful that actually treat them with any sort of seriousness. Since these games are willing to prickle the audience where so many simply laugh along, they're often swept into the dustbin of games history, along with stacks of PSX demo discs and legions of homebrew software. One of the earliest examples is the "abandoned" (that is, not for sale anywhere legally) PC game Rockstar!, a bleakly realistic management game that simulates the life of a raucous rock frontman, where you must take drugs and party in order to build up your "creativity" stat, all the while hastening your assured and untimely death. (The game takes advantage of the latest in 1989 PC technology in order to depict said partying; it looks and sounds like your Sound Blaster is carpet-bombing your 486 processor.) Perhaps this austere message explains why nobody really remembers games like Rockstar!: the PC climate of the era decided that living the doomed life of a member of the 27 Club wasn't as fun as the clunky platforming of Commander Keen.

Some might roll their eyes at this sort of hang wringing. After all, they're just games. So what if a game developer wants to drop in a tiny bit of drug use into their sprawling hundred-hour role-playing game? Not everything has to be pregnant with meaning, right? Some developers certainly seem to think so.

"I think that people are able to distinguish between Plasmids and heroin, because Plasmids don't exist." – Alex Epstein

"I'm going to give you the standard response that everybody gives you, which is I think that people are able to distinguish between Plasmids and heroin, because Plasmids don't exist," says Alex Epstein, narrative director of the upcoming We Happy Few, a survival game set in an alternate 1960s Great Britain.

Developed by the new indie studio Compulsion Games, We Happy Few wears its Huxlean (Brave New World) influence on its sleeve, featuring a "happy drug" called Joy that all citizens are required to take, a policy the player character decides to stop following at the game's opening.

"In most games, drugs are basically magic," says Epstein, a self-proclaimed recovering screenwriter. "The gameplay designer says, 'Oh, wouldn't it be cool if you could do this?' And if the game doesn't have magic, then you have drugs."

'We Happy Few' screenshot courtesy of Compulsion Games

I ask Epstein if he views this desultory usage of drugs as problematic, or perhaps limiting to the medium. He hesitates, before replying: "I don't think gamers like to be preached at. And gamers certainly don't want the real world's morality to be thrown into their games.

"It's hard to do (realistic drug depiction) in games. Addiction represents losing control of yourself. Gamers hate that. I would love to see a game where your character is an alcoholic. Then, a certain number of times, when you go behind a bar, you wake up in a ditch with half your money gone. Then you say, 'Oh, shit! I shouldn't have gone by that bar.' Now you're thinking like an alcoholic."

I suggest to Epstein that such a game would be niche, but he disagrees. "I think it depends on how you do it. With our game, we want it to be there for both. You can go through it and smash a bunch of people with a cricket bat, or you can absorb the world and the moral implications of what you're doing. And one of those core questions is, 'If you're happy on drugs, are you really happy?' But you don't have to confront that if you don't want to."

"Who's gonna come out and say, 'I'm going to make a socially responsible video game that's going to empower'? There ain't too many people who can do that. When people are money hungry, they don't give a damn." – Andre L. Johnson

As I listen to Epstein talk, I find it hard not to think of Rockstar!, sitting on an abandonware portal somewhere, lonely and ignored. His line of thinking certainly makes good business sense, especially for a game as ambitious as We Happy Few, which has been featured on-stage at some of the gaming industry's biggest press conferences. But attitudes like this stoke the ire of substance recovery professionals, such as Andre L. Johnson, the President and CEO of the Detroit Recovery Project, a recovery agency.

"They don't care," he tells me, referring to games makers. "It's capitalistic society. They're trying to make their money. They see their competition, and they know they have to include this kind of stuff. Who's gonna come out and say, 'I'm going to make a socially responsible video game that's going to empower'?" He laughs a husky, charming laugh. "There ain't too many people who can do that. When people are money hungry, they don't give a damn."

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All this isn't to say that Epstein and the rest of Compulsion Games are craven capitalists trying to Frankenstein together the perfect indie hit in a lab somewhere. But segments of my conversation with Epstein seem to echo the same set of stale assumptions about games and the gaming audience that so many big-name developers like to parrot. And these assumptions are the same ones that kept games like Epstein's hypothetical alcoholic simulator from getting made. Luckily, that seems to be changing.

Austin Jorgensen, better known as Dingaling, didn't plan to be a game developer. But when his first game, LISA: The Painful RPG managed to clear a hundred thousand copies, he knew he had found his calling. "I guess this is what I do now," he says, chuckling. "Somehow."

'LISA: The Painful RPG' screenshot via the game's official website

Indeed, LISA is an unlikely success story. Released in late 2014, it's a delightfully nettlesome and punishing Japanese roleplayer in the style of cult classics like the Shin Megami Tensei series, featuring a cast of mostly irredeemable drug addicts and misogynists who can be killed at a moment's notice. An indicative scene: a few hours into the game, you're captured and forced to play Russian roulette with the lives of your party members. You pick the victim, and you have to win three times in a row; losing someone is almost a statistical certainty.

Similar to We Happy Few, the protagonist in LISA, Brad, suffers from a dependence on an apparent "happy drug," also called Joy. (Jorgensen laughs off any apparent plagiarism on the part of Compulsion: "What else could you call it?") However, Brad's disorder isn't just plot fluff—it's one of the game's core mechanics.

"I really thought the importance of the mechanic was first and foremost, and then the character came out," says Jorgensen. "He's a sad sack, so it made sense to make him a drug addict."

"I think about this stuff a lot, and for my next game it's going to be huge. I want people to see the positives and negatives and everything else." – Austin Jorgensen

In most battles, Brad is the best character in the game, able to deal unrivaled amounts of damage with ease. But as you explore the world, he'll occasionally go into Joy withdrawal, which totally debilitates his combat capabilities. While this may seem like a minor change, in a game as unforgiving as LISA, Brad going into withdrawal at the wrong time usually means certain death for the party. During the game, Brad can find Joy and take it to satisfy his cravings, but doing so has dire consequences.

"For me, it was like, if I was going to put a drug in a game, I think it was okay, because you take it, and it's clear the side effects are really, really bad," says Jorgensen. "In Fallout, I'm not sure if using the slow-mo drug even has negative consequences. Maybe that's the wrong message."

To me, this sounds like the sense of social responsibility that Johnson was talking about—perhaps not the purest strain, but certainly a variety of it. I ask Jorgensen if he feels that. His answer is quick and direct.

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"Living in the United States, in Colorado, I smoke weed; I live right next to a legal dispensary. For LISA, it was an afterthought. Now, I feel a huge responsibility. I think about this stuff a lot, and for my next game, Ninja Tears, it's going to be huge. I want people to see the positives and negatives and everything else."

Jorgensen sighs, and then laughs. He sounds exasperated. " wasn't 'good' game development. It sucked. It wasn't fun. But, dude. If it's gotta suck, it's gotta suck. You aren't gonna get the message otherwise."

Considering the current treatment of substances in big-budget games, it's hard to argue with Jorgensen's logic. As the medium matures, perhaps we'll get more Dingalings, more people willing to make games with these themes baked in, rather than just sprinkled on top. And while those games may not make much money, or garner much acclaim, I'm not sure they'll care. If the medium truly is the message, then it's fair to say that the Dingalings of the world have a dense, crusty layer of Super Mushrooms and Nukem-brand steroids to cut through before games like LISA or Ninja Tears can start to leave a lasting impression. As if they can't, to return to Jorgensen's sentiments, how else are we going to learn?

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Moazzam Begg's had a markedly unusual adult life. He spent years in some of the world's most notorious detention camps on suspicion of terrorism, without ever being convicted of any crime. He's since become one the most vocal critics of how the British and American governments have handled the post-9/11 "war on terror."

"I saw two men being executed in front me in Guantánamo. From then on, I couldn't be silent about it anymore," he tells me. "The only way I can talk about it is to do it in the public realm, as I don't know if I will ever be able to go to court about it."

The British-Pakistani now tells his personal history in new documentary, The Confession: Living the War on Terror. In the film, Begg describes how he signed what he now terms a false confession to being a member of Al Qaeda in 2002, at a time when he was said to be under duress while in detention at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. US officials have previously disputed such claims, claiming Begg was transferred to Guantánamo as a result of the information he provided. In any case, he was released in 2005 without charge, a year before the US Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration does not have authority to try terrorism suspects by military tribunal.

Begg's account goes back to his teenage years, around the time of the Gulf War in the early 90s, in an attempt to examine the root causes of what led him to seek his identity in Islam. Based primarily around an extensive interview by director Ashish Ghadiali, it was filmed in March 2015 after Begg's release from London's Belmarsh prison, when he was cleared of seven terrorism charges in October 2014. He'd been arrested in an "anti-terror raid" for having allegedly traveled to assist rebels in Syria but was held for seven months, despite laws outlined in the 2006 Terrorism Act that no terror suspect without charge can be held for more than 90 days.

In the film, a series of interviews shot in a dark room are interspersed with archival footage of Jihadist-related news reports and previous chats with Begg and his family. Blair and W Bush's speeches appear as flashbacks, creating "an allegory of a bigger a story" on the war on terror, director Ashish Ghadiali says. "It's a seduction into a world of things you don't believe in, such as the weapons of mass destruction which were never found."

The film also outlines Begg's complicated allegiances, the events that led up to his forced confession in Bagram and its aftermath. "So much has happened to me since that Guantánamo is quite an old experience for me now," Begg tells me, "but the landscape had changed." These include the host of Terrorism Acts have been implemented in the UK, as well as counter-terrorism strategies that critics believe have targeted the British Muslim community following the London 7/7 bombings, and more recently, the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS).

It's within this context that the film addresses whether it's possible for those like Begg, who believe jihad—but condemn violence associated with it—have a place in Western society today. In our conversation, Begg says that jihad is an aspiration "to rise above (conflict)" that should be about self-defense, not aggression, yet "the reality is that jihad has now become synonymous with terrorism." He acknowledges that Muslims may interpret jihad differently, but says that "violence is where the line has to be drawn" and that the brutal acts committed by groups like ISIS are "not my belief nor the belief of most Muslims."

He believes it's "completely wrong" for the British government to assume that all British Muslims traveling to Syria are going to join ISIS. Still, tracking jihadists has been a major MI5 priority since at least 2014.

"During my time in Belmarsh, there was only one guy who was connected to ISIS. But the others I had met had nothing to do with them—including two boys aged 18 and 19—who were thrown in prison for returning," he says. "Because the political system wants to label them as terrorists, they're locked up for 12 years. This is only going to increase their frustrations against the state, which would only make them more vulnerable to radicalization."

For now, Begg feels as though a cloud of suspicion from the intelligence community hangs over him. He was denied entry into Canada in 2011, reportedly for being on a US no-fly list. Because he has continued to investigate claims of others tortured with the complicity of the British government, Begg says he's been repeatedly harassed by the British state in retaliation for this activism. "I expect myself to be surveilled—I have absolutely nothing to hide. But it is frustrating that my movements are restricted," he says. In December 2013, his passport was confiscated at Heathrow Airport.

This hasn't stopped Begg reuniting with former Guantánamo prison guards "who weren't happy with what was going on there." Just last week, one named Albert Melise flew over from the US to speak at a screening of The Confession in Birmingham. "This is a man from the other side who stayed at my house and met my family. He gave his hat to my daughter when she started crying so she could wipe her nose because she didn't have a tissue," Begg says. "The film did play a part in bring us back together, but more importantly if we can be reconciled with each other then I think it sets an example of what could be achieved."

As the film continues its tour, Begg's fight for exoneration is far from over. He and his lawyers are waiting for a decision on £1 million worth of compensation from HM Treasury for using anti-terrorism laws to freeze his assets before charges against him were dropped. "There is no way that compensation isn't going to replace everything. My bank accounts that I had been using for 25 years are frozen, which no one in my family's able to access," he says, sighing. I ask him whether he's afraid if the police will arrest him again. "I don't want them to, it's not ideal. But if it does happen, I'm not afraid to face it."

'The Confession: Living the War on Terror' is playing at select UK cinemas from Friday the 19th of August.

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