The scene of the shooting. The middle vehicle was believed to be the shooter's. Photo by Tamara Khandaker

Known for defending Toronto criminals, particularly in drug cases, defence lawyer J. Randall Barrs was shot in the leg Tuesday afternoon in a broad-daylight shootout that also involved undercover cops.

According to witnesses who spoke to CityNews, plain-clothed police took down a man who had just shot the lawyer near his office in Yorkville, close to the downtown University of Toronto campus. Both men were taken to hospital, and the shooter was in surgery as of 9PM.

Criminal lawyer Clayton Ruby told VICE News he heard from another lawyer that two people had been shot—one was criminal lawyer Barrs, who was struck in his leg.

The other victim, shot multiple times by police, was the person who fired at Barrs, Ruby heard.

Lawyer J. Randall Barrs. Photo via his website.

Ontario's Special Investigations Unit remained at the scene Tuesday evening. Halton Regional Police, who serve western suburbs, were involved in the shootout, the SIU confirmed. SIU told media four witness officers, and one shooting officer are subject of the investigation, and that Halton police were conducting surveillance in the area.

An area restaurant employee, who declined to give his name to VICE, said he came outside after hearing what sounded like gunshots around 3:30 PM.

When he stepped out, he saw a man slumped over in the front seat of his car, which is still at the scene, boxed in by a black SUV at the front and a silver SUV at the back.

"He couldn't have been asleep, so I thought, he must've gotten shot," he said.

Barrs was a regular at his restaurant, Fieramosca, which is steps away from where the shooting took place, the man said.

The shooting occurred at Prince Arthur Avenue and Avenue Road, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Toronto, closing traffic Tuesday.

Barrs has a reputation among those involved in gang activity in Toronto for being the go-to defence lawyer for anyone charged with a crime, especially drug offences.

According to court records, Barrs has represented a number of Toronto bars and clubs in matters before the Alcohol and Gaming Commission.

With files from Rachel Browne

Follow Tamara Khandaker on Twitter.

All images courtesy of Clutch PR

The sped-up footage of snorting lines, having chemical-laden sex, stealing, dirty hotel rooms—there's no shortage of these images in Hollywood movies that feature heavy drug use. But what is often left out is the period of recovery that those who make it out from the other side of addiction must face. In Ashley McKenzie's first feature-length film, Werewolf, she tackles the unseen struggle of trying to get your life together when you're addicted to opioids and living life between methadone doses.

Image via "Magic Mike'

Most of us are sexual hypocrites. We consume porn and visit strip clubs while loudly condemning the nature and morality of the people working in these industries.

Erica Witt reacts to the ruling of Judge Gregory McMillan in her child custody case. Photo by Amy Smotherman Burgess/Knoxville News Sentinel via ZUMA Wire

Last year, when the Supreme Court made it legal for same-sex couples to marry nationwide, one might have expected the ruling to end thorny questions about the legal status of their 200,000-plus children. But as recent developments in a Tennessee court case have made clear, the religious right and its Republican enablers are now doing their best to deprive such children of legal parental attachments, giving the lie to decades of pious claims that their paramount interest lay with protecting children.

You'll find the latest example in a September 9 motion to intervene filed in a contentious divorce battle between two women by the Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT). FACT, which acted on behalf of 53 state legislators, all Republican, said in a statement that the case was about whether Obergefell authorizes judges to determine custody policies in divorce proceedings for individual states.

Which is one way to frame it. Another is that Tennessee law, like that of many states, is tilted against the children of same-sex couples because it only acknowledges the biological mother's parental rights—and Republicans are evidently invested in keeping it that way.

More than 100,000 American same-sex couples are currently raising children. But since children in same-sex-headed households usually have a biological relationship to only one parent, the legal status of the birth mother's spouse varies from state to state, even if they have fully co-parented the child from day one. (The legal situation of two-father families is a separate can of worms.) And in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage, that status is being tested in a variety of court cases that have emerged in the past year as the next frontier in LGBTQ family law.

One such case is the divorce of Sabrina and Erica Witt. Sabrina, the biological mother of the couple's baby girl, is seeking sole custody, even though the women were legally married at the time the baby was born via assisted reproduction. In June, a Tennessee judge ruled in her favor, saying that Erica "has no biological relationship with this child, has no contractual relationship with this child."

"I believe as a trial court I am not to plow new ground, but to apply precedent and the law," Judge Gregory McMillan added.

The Tennessee law governing parenting in the case of donor insemination dates back to 1977, and is accordingly stacked in favor of heterosexuals. It says that "a child born to a married woman as a result of artificial insemination, with consent of the married woman's husband, is deemed to be the legitimate child of the husband and wife." If Erica Witt were a man, she would be considered the child's other legal parent. As with similar laws in numerous other states, Tennessee's parenting law was designed to ensure that children born through donor insemination, which was then growing in popularity, would have legal ties to the person intending to operate as the father. At the time, few outside the lesbian community even considered the prospect of a woman giving birth by donor insemination while sharing her life not with a husband but a wife.

Yet we now live in a world where same-sex parents are commonplace, and where the Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriages are constitutionally protected. What, then, is the fate of laws that may conflict with the Obergefell decision?

Mary Bonauto, the lawyer who successfully argued the Obergefell case before the Supreme Court, told VICE there is only one way to interpret the Tennessee law. "As a matter of supremacy," she said, "the Tennessee statutes must be construed to comply with Obergefell's constitutional commands." Bonauto said that Obergefell applies retroactively, meaning that though Tennessee did not recognize same-sex marriage at the time the Witts wed, their marriage must now be considered legal in all states. The legal protection that state law provides to husbands must apply equally to wives, notwithstanding the gendered language of the existing law's language. "This is not rocket science," she said.

Though the judge didn't rule in Erica's favor, he put the action on hold while a motion to reconsider was filed. It was after that point that FACT, the conservative group, stepped in to offer its unsolicited opinion that "our state's sovereignty" required Erica to be denied the right to partial custody of her child.

What's crucial to recognize is that family law is designed to protect children, not to privilege some kinds of adults over others. LGBTQ family law experts who spoke with VICE were mystified that social conservatives appear so dedicated to stigmatizing same-sex couples that they've abandoned all pretense of concern for child welfare.

"This judge is keeping a mother from her child," Susan Sommer, director of constitutional litigation at Lambda Legal, told VICE. "It strikes at the very heart of what marriage carries with it, which is respect and recognition," not only for the couple's bond but "for parenting and family."

Indeed, Justice Anthony Kennedy's stirring decision in the Obergefell case states explicitly that marriage provides expansive protections that go beyond the needs of any individual couple, benefits that should accrue to tens of thousands of children with gay and lesbian parents. If the court failed to act, and instead allowed a "case-by-case determination" of whether every individual marital benefit should be offered to same-sex couples, he wrote, it would "deny gays and lesbians many rights and responsibilities intertwined with marriage."

Surely that should include recognition of the parental bond formed within a marriage—a point Kennedy himself alluded to, in writing that denying same-sex couples the right to marry would mean their children would be "relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life." In fact, several legal challenges that ended up rolled into the Obergefell case—including in Tennessee—began as parenting cases, in which lesbian couples sought to have the names of both mothers put on the birth certificates of their newborns. These cases were resolved by the Supreme Court's decision. Yet amazingly, in his trial-level ruling, Judge McMillan called Obergefell a "very limited decision" that addressed nothing more than marital status itself.

This is the horrific—and legally untenable—decision that Republican lawmakers in Tennessee have endorsed, in a radical departure from the proper duties of a state legislature.

"Normally, when there's a question of how to interpret a statute, legislatures don't insert themselves in private disputes and say, 'This is what we think,'" Nancy Polikoff, a law professor at American University Washington College of Law, told VICE. "That's not their role as legislators." Polikoff thinks it unlikely that the courts will allow the lawmakers to intervene.

The outcome of the Witt case remains in question. In the meantime, the world should know the true colors of the religious right and the Republican Party that remains in fealty to it. Now that same-sex marriage is the law of the land, and the family-values crowd is on the wrong side of the law, their effort to oppose LGBTQ equality is no longer a matter of protecting an idealized family configuration, but about prying apart the relationship between actual parents and children. This throws into stark relief their true priorities—homophobia for homophobia's sake—and the rank hypocrisy of claiming to care about kids while working to deprive children of legal ties to parents who love them.

Nathaniel Frank, director of the What We Know Project at Columbia Law School, will publish Awakening: How Gays and Lesbians Brought Marriage Equality to America in April 2017.

All photos by the author

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC IMAGES

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Alexandre silently moves around the body. He lifts it up, turns it over and back again. When he handles the scalpel, his movements are precise and calculated. Far from being an assassin, he's an embalmer—which means that his job is to prepare the dead for their funerals. "I make dead people, people who I don't know, beautiful," he explains a little too poetically. With his neat haircut, his impeccably ironed shirt, and his boy-next-door face, you can more easily imagine Alexandre at a business school than in a mortuary.

"In France, modern embalming took off in the 1960s and 70s," he starts. Even though rituals for conserving the body have existed since antiquity, in France they were rare until a man called Jacques Marette, the director of a company of funeral homes, founded an embalming school and turned embalming into a discipline. "Before that, people's focus was on the funeral ceremony. The presentation of the body was an afterthought."

The body before treatment

Generally, embalming means making sure that the body doesn't deteriorate—either by placing it on a refrigerated surface or by "invading" the vascular system with a cleaning agent—then dressing the body, applying makeup, and doing the hair.

Of course, the impression most people have of embalming isn't a particularly joyful one. Before arriving at Alexandre's lab, I sort of expected a smell of disinfectant and a cloud of flies hovering over a rotting corpse. Yet, the scene in front of me has turned out to quite tolerable. Even though this not my ideal way to spend a Friday afternoon, it's not a really depressing experience either.

"This one is an unusual case," says Alexandre, looking at the corpse. Part of the deceased's leg is rotten; apparently she died from cancer. After washing the body, Alexandre uses formalin solution, which stops the decomposition process. He doesn't fix anything—he only makes sure it doesn't get any worse by basically covering up the decay and the smells that come with it.

He puts a sort of rod in the abdomen and makes an incision at the throat, where he externalizes the artery and inserts a tube. Alexandre then hooks up a pump that injects some kind of conservation liquid and simultaneously withdraws the mix of blood, body fluids, and the formalin mix. This process takes about 20 to 30 minutes.

"The profession is getting tougher and tougher," he tells me as he works. He runs his own company and employs one embalmer, while he is hoping to be able to hire one more in the coming months. He works seven days a week, starting at 7 AM and finishing late on most nights, too. "It's the sort of work, where you bring your wife along on a Sunday so that you can spend some time with her," he jokes.

"The real problem is that you can never let yourself switch off," he continues. "If I take an afternoon off, I know that I could be called in at any moment for a treatment. I always keep my phone on me and my bags packed in the trunk of my car."

Alexandre isn't actually obliged to take the calls, but listening to him talk about his job, it feels like he is. "It's all I can do for the deceased and their families. Can you imagine waiting two days to see your father because the embalmer has gone on holiday?" It's true, I can't. "They often tell me that my 'patients' can wait. But generally, the families can't see their loved ones before I do my work."

The embalmer also has to dress the body.

As the pump continues to drain, Alexandre moves on to the next step, which is carefully cleaning the deceased's face. Using cotton wool, he blocks the various orifices to avoid any unexpected leaks. Then he sews up the mouth to make sure nothing moves out of place.

"I'm always scared of doing something wrong. There's no room for error in this job—you really only get one shot." This is not only an ethical necessity but also a financial one, since a mistake could cost him a client. Embalming is not obligatory in France, and it's the funeral directors that sell it to the families. However, "some funeral directors are lately including it in every package they offer, not giving you much choice." The biggest funeral homes hire embalmers full-time, but most of them outsource the service.

"Education is also important," he murmurs. "The schools in France work on a closed number basis, and they limit the number of diplomas they give out every year." Training lasts two years and is split into two parts: some months of theory and some months of practice. "It used to be that each student had to pay the embalmer who trained them," but since Alexandre didn't have to pay his mentor, he does not take money from his apprentices either.

By the time we finish talking, Alexandre has finished his work. The deceased is dressed and made up. He places the body in the coffin before giving the hair one final brush. He checks one last time that everything is perfect and then smiles, seemingly proud of his work. In just a few hours, the face of the patient has been transformed. She seems peaceful. Thanks to Alexandre, she will stay this way until her funeral, which will take place in a few days.

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Just before 4 PM on Tuesday, police fatally shot Keith L. Scott at a Charlotte, North Carolina, apartment complex while attempting to serve a warrant to another man. The 43-year-old was killed just one day after cops in Tulsa, Oklahoma, released footage of a white officer shooting an unarmed black man on the side of the road.

By late Tuesday night, 16 Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers and at least 11 civilians had been injured as protestors shut down a portion of Interstate 85 and some engaged in looting and arson, the Washington Post reports.

The hundreds of demonstrators were reacting to what by now—and especially this week—is an inescapable fact of American life: Police officers frequently shoot and kill unarmed black men. At least 700 people have been killed by American cops this year, according to a tracker maintained by the Post, with the paper noting that at least 163 of them were black men. Tuesday's tragedy in North Carolina wasn't a prototypical Black Lives Matter outrage, however, as Brentley Vinson—the officer who shot Scott—is himself a black man, and officials are adamant the deceased was armed and dangerous.

Cops maintain they observed Scott enter a car and emerge with a gun, rendering him an imminent threat. At a press conference Wednesday morning, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief Kerr Putney said Scott was given clear instructions to drop his weapon, which detectives claim to have recovered at the scene.

As is typical in these cases, family members of the slain man are challenging the official account, insisting Scott represented no threat at all.

"The police just shot my daddy four times for being black," a woman who identified herself as Scott's daughter countered in a Facebook Live video. Scott's brother told a local TV station that Vinson was not in uniform at the time of the shooting, and the family contends that Scott was reading a book when he was shot, although Chief Putney has claimed a book was not found at the scene.

As is standard procedure in police shootings, Vinson is on paid administrative leave pending an investigation. He was not wearing a body camera during his encounter with Scott.

About three years ago, a white officer with the Charlotte Police Department was charged with voluntary manslaughter for killing an unarmed 24-year-old black man named Jonathan Ferrell. The former college football player may have been running toward the police in search of help after a car crash.

The jury in that case was deadlocked, and it was declared a mistrial. Protestors took to the streets, and two people were arrested for allegedly throwing rocks at cops.

The reaction to Scott's shooting death has been even more intense. Officers fired tear gas into a crowd after individuals began targeting police cruisers, and other people reportedly tried to break into a Walmart, only to be thwarted by the cops. At least five people have been arrested so far.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, whose office has endured a busy week keeping tabs on police violence across America, is urging the people of North Carolina to demonstrate peacefully.

"Protest is protected by our Constitution and is a vital instrument for raising issues and creating change," Lynch said at a conference in Washington, DC. "But when it turns violent, it undermines the very justice that it seeks to achieve, and I urge those demonstrating in Charlotte to remain peaceful in their expressions of protest and concern."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Katie Li in her classroom at Charlestown High School, where immigration is at the forefront of the curriculum. Photo by Alexander Kalamaroff

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Shafaq Khan has taken dozens of classes during her time at Sewanhaka High School in Floral Park, New York, a diverse public school that sits just across the border from Queens in Long Island's Nassau County. But one elective she took during her freshman year stands out, mainly because it touched on a topic close to her heart: immigration.

Khan, a 17-year-old senior whose parents immigrated to the United States from Pakistan, remembers "advanced placement human geography" as a class where she could talk with other students about the joys and struggles of growing up in an immigrant family. The coursework explored the root causes of present-day migration trends and the contributions of immigrants to their new homes, among other global topics.

"It was nice to have a place to discuss something that wasn't about white people, to be honest," she told VICE in a recent interview. "We focused on everyone, the human race as a whole, instead of focusing on what Western Europeans brought to society."

While the wide-ranging demographic makeup of Khan's school—split between black, Hispanic, Asian, and white students—might not reflect every community across the country, American classrooms on the whole are growing more diverse. Figures from the US Department of Education found the percentage of white students was steadily declining, with minority students in K-12 public schools outnumbering their white counterparts starting in 2014, a trend expected to continue into the next decade.

At the same time, however, many history and social studies textbooks glance over modern-day immigration, according to interviews with nearly a dozen educators who focus on the topic in their own instruction. The American public may be hotly debating the need for a border wall and whether to accept Syrian refugees, but state curricula tend to place more emphasis on the experiences of families who entered Ellis Island in the early 1900s than those crossing into Arizona or fleeing Aleppo today.

Christopher Nelson's diverse class at Sewanhaka High School. Photo courtesy of Christopher Nelson

Christopher Nelson, who teaches the human geography course at Sewanhaka High School, said he saw a gap in the state's history curricula when he fashioned his version of the class.

"Kids sit down for global history and largely they're taking European history with the occasional mention of a country that France or England took over," the 35-year-old teacher told VICE. "My school, the demographic is primarily first-generation students and kids who are the children of immigrants... It just made sense to me to emphasize that."

"It was nice to have a place to discuss something that wasn't about white people." —Shafaq Khan

Some educators believe it's time to rethink how immigration is taught in schools across the country, both to better serve immigrant students and inform the native-born. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an assistant classics professor at Princeton University, argued the prospects of future immigration reform depend on today's high school students gaining a better understanding of the immigrant experience.

The professor has a personal (as well as professional) interest in the US immigration system: His mother brought him to New York City from the Dominican Republic when he was four years old. After they overstayed their tourist visas, he became an undocumented immigrant, an experience he chronicled in his book, Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.

Padilla would like to see high schools dedicate more time to exploring the history of the US immigration system, raising philosophical questions around the value and meaning of citizenship, and examining whether current immigration policy aligns with the greater goals of American democracy. When viewed from a broad enough perspective, he told VICE, "mobility is the core driving feature of how we talk about history."

While such themes could be explored within existing curricula, Padilla thinks schools should consider setting aside several days each year to discuss the topic. In an ideal world, he says, students would learn a common body of facts about immigration.

"It doesn't matter which side of the aisle one happens to be on," he said. "There does seem to be this gap, this chasm, in how people perceive the pros and cons of immigration."

Katie Li in her classroom at Charlestown High School. Photo by Alexander Kalamaroff

The ongoing presidential election—with Donald Trump stoking fear of immigrants from Mexico to the Middle East—also seems to have underscored the need for empathy in the classroom. Some teachers and parents have expressed concern about bullying as the Republican nominee has publicly vowed to deport "criminal aliens" and floated the idea of barring Muslims from entering the United States, among other hardline statements. An informal survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center of its readership found evidence of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in schools across the country since the start of the election.

The heated political rhetoric makes it even more important for teachers to expose students to a range of perspectives, according to Tatyana Kleyn, an associate professor in the bilingual education program at the City College of New York, teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). She has spearheaded several documentary projects that chronicle the lives of young people and families living without legal immigration status and posted the short films and related lesson plans online as a free resource.

While her films tell the stories of undocumented immigrants, Kleyn—who herself came to the US as a refugee from Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union, at age five—says she doesn't have a political agenda. "I don't think we should tell students how to think," she told VICE. "I think we should present them with different information and then let them form their own opinion."

Lesson plans such as these offer educators a way to open a dialogue around immigration—but first, teachers need to track down the right materials for their particular mix of students, according to Katie Li, a language arts teacher at Charlestown High School, just outside of Boston. Li's students hail from China, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and South America, among other regions.

"You kind of have to dig yourself and find networks of educators and share resources with them," Li told VICE. In her case, that has meant lesson plans pulled from instructional books like The Line Between Us, which focused on the history of US-Mexico relations and the roots of Mexican immigration, or a collection of Chinese poems scrawled on the walls of holding cells on Angel Island, where roughly a million Asian immigrants were processed between 1910 and 1940 en route to San Francisco.

"Really, there's never going to be an educator program that's going to teach you how to do this," she said. "You're going to have to figure out how to do this in a way that is actually meaningful to the people in front of you."

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Thumbnail photo from Open Air Preaching with Brother Dean

Christian University of Arizona student Dean Saxton, better known as Brother Dean, was arrested for assault on Wednesday after taking his anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-Muslim, anti-yoga pants message a bit too far on the Tucson campus, the Phoenix New Times reports.

Dean was out proselytizing on campus, taking a break from his usual "you deserve rape" routine to warn the masses of the ways that gay people are "destroying the country." When fellow student Mackenzie Brandt approached Saxton, the man of God gave her a swift kick in the chest.

"She took a pretty good kick," Sergeant Filbert Barrera, a public information officer for the campus police, told the Times. "There were shoe marks on her chest."

University police quickly handcuffed the wannabe preacher, who was proudly holding on to his bible and wearing a "No Homo" shirt. He was booked and has since been released from the Pima County Jail pending his court date for a misdemeanor assault charge. He's also been banned from the campus for a year.

Brandt took to Twitter shortly after taking the kick to the chest, saying, "Brother Dean thinks he's so invincible but I just got him arrested and banned from campus so HA."

Image by author

If you've been paying even the slightest bit of attention to this year's presidential shitshow, you've seen at least a few Donald Trump's insane Twitter attacks. But since there are almost 20,000 of them, it's been next to impossible to sift through them all. That's all about to change thanks to a new website, which lets anyone search through a comprehensive database of every shitty thing the Republican candidate has ever said on Twitter from 2009 on, the Atlanticreports.

The Trump Twitter Archive is the brainchild of a for-now-unnamed programmer and former Peace Corps volunteer who is funding the whole project with the help of donations. On the site, the treasure trove of more than 16,000 tweets that the politician typed out with his tiny, tiny hands is divided into categories, like Conspiracy Theories and Retaliation, or can be searched by keyword—like "lyin' ted cruz" or "loser," for instance.

Here, let's try it out. How about..."weak."

Now let's try "disgusting."

Yikes! OK, what about "wind turbines."

Here's one about Obama!

Now you try!

Read: A Hand Model Casting Agent Told Us Donald Trump's Hands Are 'Childlike' and 'Severely Weatherbeaten'

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner has once again found himself at the center of another sexting scandal, this time involving a 15-year-old girl, the Daily Mail reports.

According to the unnamed teen, she and Weiner communicated by text and over Skype after she first reached out to him on Twitter last January. Over the course of the next few months, the two exchanged explicit texts and photos, which the girl shared with the website. Weiner reportedly knew she was a sophomore in high school at the time. The girl doesn't plan to press charges because she believes the texting relationship was consensual, although at times it made her uncomfortable.

"He had some rape fantasies," the girl told the Mail. "It would just be him showing up at my house when my dad was out of town. And just start undressing me, being forceful, asking me if I want to be dominated, strange questions." She claims he texted her about taking part in some teacher-student role play and also admitted to trolling New York City gyms to watch women work out.

"He would also talk about going to different gyms, and getting different gym memberships, just to go watch 18-year-olds work out would go to NYU and different schools in New York," she said.

When asked to comment, Weiner did not deny the allegations. Instead, he said, "I have repeatedly demonstrated terrible judgment about the people I have communicated with online and the things I have sent. I am filled with regret and heartbroken for those I have hurt."

Just last month, Weiner made headlines after he was caught sending suggestive photos to a different woman, some that included his four-year-old son lying in bed asleep next to him. Huma Abedin, Weiner's wife and a top aide to Hillary Clinton, announced she would be leaving her husband after the New York Post broke the story.

"After seeing what he did with his son, having him in the picture that was released, I think that he's very disgusting and he needs help," the 15-year-old said.

Read: How to Be a Politician on Twitter

Still via 'DOPESICK'

As drug overdose deaths related to fentanyl continue to rise across Canada, Conservative members of Parliament are calling for "heavy" mandatory minimum sentences against people found guilty of trafficking the synthetic opioid. But legal experts warn that fentanyl should not be treated differently, and point out that mandatory minimum sentences are unconstitutional.

More than 400 people in Alberta are believed to have died from overdoses linked to fentanyl since 2015. The death toll in BC this year is on track to hit around 800. Much of the data on similar overdose deaths in other provinces and territories is scant or outdated.

"We need to send a message to these drug pushers who are poisoning Canadians with fentanyl that to do so is tantamount to a death sentence," Calgary MP Jason Kenney told the House of Commons on Tuesday, urging the Liberals to support mandatory minimums in these cases.

Health Minister Jane Philpott dodged Kenney's suggestion with familiar refrains: that her department takes the opioid crisis seriously and is working with authorities across the country. But Kenney pushed back and asked Philpott whether the issue of bootleg fentanyl being smuggled into Canada from China was brought up by Trudeau during his recent meetings with his Chinese counterparts.

Brad Trost. Photo via Facebook

If you're a Canadian whose brain hasn't been totally deprived of common sense from watching the American election unfold, you're in luck: Saskatchewan Conservative MP Brad Trost has tapped the well of stupidity and let it flow into our collective consciousness.

According to Twitter users and confirmed by VICE, Trost, a Tory leadership hopeful, compared Ontario's new sex ed curriculum to the way in which residential schools abducted Indigenous children from their parents, while speaking at a protest Wednesday.

"This is an illustration of incidents in Canadian history where parents' rights are not being respected. I don't think parents are being respected here at the sex-ed debate, and this is " he said. "Typical Canadians, they want to have a disagreement, they want things to go away quietly, but I'm here because I stand for my principles, and I am here to argue for them."

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On last night's Black Market: Dispatches, host Tania Rashid investigated the "sugar baby" industry, in which young women provide companionship to wealthy men in exchange for financial remuneration. In the episode, Rashid spent some time going undercover as a sugar baby herself, and what follows is an essay in which she recounts her experience in-depth.

I grew up in a traditional household, where my father was the breadwinner and my mother took care of me and my sister. They encouraged us to be fiercely independent and educated and put us through the best schools. Although I didn't do what would make any South Asian parent proud by becoming a doctor or engineer, they were proud to see me make it as an on-camera journalist.

But I failed them by not conforming to their traditional ideas about what a woman should be. I married once, only to get divorced a few years later, and being in my mid 30s with tattoos and short hair didn't help either. To my South Asian family members, I was "expired goods," and my chance to be a good wife with kids had passed. The fact I also had a substantial amount of debt from attending college didn't help either.

So I had nothing to lose by going on camera and seeing what it was really like to be a sugar baby. Sugar babies are usually young women who give their time to sugar daddies in exchange for money. The "daddies" are rich CEO types; the women are usually young, attractive, and looking for adventure. Seeking Arrangements is the biggest sugar baby dating website and claims to feature more than 3 million women—many of them college students or recent graduates trying to pay for their education or pay off debts. The number of people who are actually using the site to go out on dates is anyone's guess, but nonetheless, the site has become a cultural phenomenon, with coverage in CNN, the

Photo by Gabriella Lewis

E-commerce has ravaged industries more robust than the sex shop over the past decade—look to the grave of Borders (and bookstores more generally), or the woes of once-thriving retailers like Gap or J.Crew, or the decline of the American shopping mall for just a few examples. And it's easy to imagine that brick-and-mortar adult stores, traditionally a class of retailer where taboo products like dildos and pornography are purchased behind veiled storefronts, might be ravaged by the anonymity and purchasing ease offered by the internet, too.

But it hasn't been, as it turns out. We may live in an age when you can buy everything and anything from the comfort of your bed, but sex shops are one industry that will not be put down by digital convenience.

"Online's the best thing that's ever happened to us," Lolita Wolf, manager of Chelsea fetish store Purple Passion, told VICE. While it's true that the sex-toy industry is evolving in response to pressure from online retailers, like any other, it turns out the brick-and-mortar sex-toy industry as a whole is weathering the storm.

A March 2015 report on the adult-store industry by market research company IBISWorld found that brick-and-mortar adult stores, of which just under 2,000 stood in America last year, were projected to continue growing at an annualized rate of 2.6 percent over the next five years—roughly in line with our nation's GDP, an indicator of economic stability found in other retail industries like bridal stores and pharmacies.

The report points to the gradual proliferation of sex-positive entertainment over the past two decades as a key driver of the industry's steady growth, including the flogger-filled Fifty Shades series of books and films. David Keegan, general manager for the Adam & Eve Franchising Corporation, which oversees the 46-year-old adult goods retailer's 62 brick-and-mortar stores, pinned the shifting tide even further back, on a 1998 episode of Sex and the City, in which Charlotte (Kristin Davis) becomes intimately acquainted with a bunny-eared Vibratex rabbit vibrator.

" feel it" first. Ordering books and video games online is one thing; with products that you put on and in your body, things have to fit, and look and feel comfortable enough for intimate use. (That said, unlike clothing stores like the Gap, you're generally not going to be able to return a sex toy after you've purchased it—but having the ability to hold and see one firsthand, to scale and with physical perspective, may be a valuable experience in and of itself.)

Claire Cavanah, co-founder of Brooklyn-based sex toy retailer Babeland, points out that brick-and-mortar stores have something e-commerce sites almost never do: "a knowledgeable staff" with a bit more authority than anonymous online reviewers. Informed, sex-positive customer service at adult boutiques not only ensures customer satisfaction, it destigmatizes the entire sex-toy-purchasing process. As a result, retailers can often feel more like community gathering points than cold capitalist affairs; a store like Purple Passion offers a wide range of fetish workshops and support groups for loyal customers and curious beginners.

That's why Keegan and Wolf are unconcerned about the impact of sex toy e-commerce on their stores. Their brick-and-mortar shops, and others like them, won't be going anywhere anytime soon, and the reality of their industry in the age of online shopping is far from grim.

Follow John Walker on Twitter.

Looks like cocaine...? Photo via Flickr user Valerie Everett.

Weeks after nine British Columbians overdosed in a 20-minute span after taking what they thought was cocaine, the province's chief coroner released new stats today that show coke is detected in a significant amount of fentanyl deaths—more than any other recreational drug.

"There is little good news to share," BC's chief coroner Lisa Lapointe told media Wednesday afternoon. "We still see fentanyl taking an exceptionally high toll."

As of August 31, 488 people have died from drug overdoses in the province, up 61.6 percent over this time last year. Fentanyl has been found in 264 overdose deaths between January and the end of July, a 222 percent increase over the same period last year.

Fentanyl is a super-potent synthetic opioid many times stronger than heroin, and roughly 100 times stronger than morphine. While it was previously known to be cut into other opiates and painkillers like heroin and Oxycontin, recent spates of overdoses in Delta and Surrey suggest it's showing up in other party drugs. In July, 36 people overdosed in a 48-hour period in Surrey.

In 96 percent of this year's fentanyl deaths, coroners found other recreational substances. Cocaine was the most commonly-mixed drug, found in 46 percent of fentanyl deaths. That's more than heroin, which was found in just 30 percent of the deaths. Ethyl alcohol and meth were also found to be mixed with fentanyl.

Casual users aren't expecting their party drugs to be cut with a super-potent opiate, and they generally aren't prepared to deal with an opiate overdose. The province announced a new awareness campaign to warn people that "no one is immune."

Read More: It's Never Been Less Safe to Try Out Drugs

The province also deregulated the emergency opiate-blocking antidote naloxone, so it can be sold outside pharmacies, and without a prescription.

"We know from our health and public safety partners that many deaths are being prevented through the use of naloxone," said Lapointe. "Without the work that has been done to increase the availability of this antidote to opioid overdoses, I fear we would have seen many more deaths. But no one should ever assume that the presence of naloxone at a scene will automatically mean a good outcome."

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

Some happy condoms (Photo: Flickr user bnilsen, via)

A report published last week found that most children find sex education "irrelevant". Which is perhaps unsurprising, given that the last time the British government updated the sex and relationships (SRE) syllabus was in the year 2000. For context: that's when the PS2 was released, when Lenny Kravitz was topping the charts and when people had literally just realised that Y2K wasn't a thing and we weren't all going to perish in some far-fetched software meltdown.

Thing is, this guidance – this very old guidance, which pre-dates the existence of online porn and came out just as the age of consent for homosexuals had been lowered to 16 – isn't even compulsory in schools, despite pressure from a cross-party group of MPs. But maybe that's no bad thing? The syllabus seems determined to moralise sex. It refers to the "importance of marriage for family life and bringing up children"; says we all need to learn the reasons to "delay sexual activity"; and ominously warns that "early experimentation is not encouraged".

Speaking to Ester McGeeney from Brook, an independent sexual health and wellbeing charity, she says that schools still ask them to bring in giant scary pictures of diseased genitalia to "shock" kids away from sex. Problem is: there is almost nothing you can do to scare kids away from fucking. They're going to carry on fumbling around awkwardly for evermore, so maybe it's best to be a little more responsible about how sex ed is taught in school? Because in theory, better education means fewer teen pregnancies, less chlamydia doing the rounds, less bullying caused by ignorance and prejudice, and more orgasms for everyone.

So Justine Greening, Secretary of State for Education, if you're reading this, here are a few more realistic lessons that could be taught:

PUTTING A CONDOM ON A BANANA TO A CHORUS OF LAUGHTER IS (HOPEFULLY) NOT THAT REPRESENTATIVE OF REALITY

A lot of sex happens in the dark, or in cramped single beds, or after like 13 shots and an oily kebab that causes your fingers to lose the purchase they are naturally meant to have. All of this makes it quite hard to be dexterous with tiny little foil packets and transparent bits of latex, and calling a time-out to work out which way is up and – just fucking WAIT, Tim, I'm trying to make sure you don't put a baby in me – is a bit of a buzzkill.

That's why Brook's sex-ed classes try to mimic these conditions, with students asked to take part in blindfolded condom races. Because speed is of the essence: you don't want to end up in a situation where you get tired of trying to wrap up and turn to the "oh just pull out and I'll stand up for a really long time afterwards" method, because that is the opposite of reliable.

Also, remember to always carry. Having a condom on you doesn't mean you've automatically consented to anything, nor does it make you a "slut". You're just prepared. You're living your life the Scouts way! (Oh, and if money is an issue, go to a sexual health clinic – they will hurl bags of condoms at you if you're within a five-metre radius of the door).

THERE ARE STIS BESIDES CHLAMYDIA

For some reason I'm as scared of herpes as I am of sharks, which is to say: very scared. Of course, both of these fears are dumb – I don't live near any large body of water, let alone one containing sharks, and getting herpes isn't actually the end of the world. Problem is, I didn't learn that at school, because any mention of herpes was neglected in favour of a thorough scare lecture about chlamydia.

This focus on one particular STI – which is easily treated – leads to lots of misconceptions. Can you contract HIV from train station seats? Is it true that you can cure gonorrhoea by just swilling a load of salt water around in your mouth? Isn't syphilis something ancient princes used to die of? Ester says Brook still get these kind of questions from students at every school they visit.

A lack of education around HIV / AIDS in particular is a problem negatively affecting huge numbers of young people. Three out of five respondents to the Terrence Higgins Trust survey this year either don't remember learning about HIV, or definitely didn't ever get taught about it. And ignorance about HIV can result in the demonisation and social alienation of large groups of people, a lack of open and honest discussion, fewer people utilising available resources for treatment (like the prophylactic drugs that can halt transmission up to 72 hours after the event) and a rise in people contracting it as a result. All in all: it is a Bad Thing.

In an email, Kat Smithson from the National AIDS Trust pointed out that "the number of young men diagnosed with HIV has doubled in the past ten years, yet the government seems willing to continue to allow a situation where some schools simply don't have to discuss these topics beyond basic information in a science lesson".

SEX CAN ACTUALLY BE FUN! EVEN IF YOU'RE A GIRL!

(Photo: Julian Morgans)

The push for abstinence in schools means teachers never mention anything about the potential for pleasure, or intimacy, or desire – all the stuff that sex became famous for sometime in the early 18th century, when scribes first began to spread the word about how great it feels when you smash your junk against someone else's junk.

For boys, of course, it's easier to grasp: their dicks are right there and their bodies tend to do most of the teaching for them. I'd imagine you quickly learn what to do with a boner when you wake up with one. But for girls, there's much more need for education. "We see images of penises everywhere," says Ester. "They get drawn on the back of dirty vans and on desks. But we so rarely see images of healthy vulvas, and so rarely learn about them." So vulvas, it turns out, are a mystery to a lot of people in possession of one. In fact, almost half of all British women can't accurately identify the specific parts of theirs.

Because of this reluctance to talk about pleasure, girls are often only able to work it out during their sexual interactions with the opposite sex – and let me tell you, 18-year-old boys are not the best senseis to guide you through your sexual awakening.

"How are you meant to know what bad sex is if you don't know what good sex is?" says Ester. "If you don't know that it isn't supposed to be painful, and you're in a relationship getting told that this is what it should be like, then you might not know that you have alternatives. So it's important that people know what feels good to them before they start negotiating with others."

EVEN IF YOU DIDN'T VOCALLY SAY 'NO', DOESN'T MEAN WHAT JUST HAPPENED WASN'T COMPLETELY WRONG

Currently, teaching kids about consent isn't on the curriculum, and therefore it's at the discretion of the school whether or not to include it in PSHE lessons.

Universities are catching onto the idea that consent is a complicated issue and have started providing workshops where people can work through their misconceptions in a safe and supportive environment – but sexual assault happens way earlier than university age. The Office for National Statistics reported last year that 30 percent of female rape victims were aged under 16, so clearly lessons need to introduced much earlier on.

LITERALLY ANY INFORMATION ABOUT SAME-SEX SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

(Illustration: Dan Evans)

As many as 85 percent of gay and bisexual men have said they received no information about same-sex relationships in school, as reported by the National AIDS Trust. The focus of sex education is still undoubtedly on heterosexual relationships, with little regard for the fact that over half of young British people say they're not 100 percent heterosexual. And this heteronormative slant in education sustains ignorance and prejudice in schools towards LGBTQ pupils, with 66 percent reporting homophobic bullying in classrooms in 2012, and half of this number missing school as a result.

Kat from the National AIDS Trust says "the experience of an LGBT young person in an SRE class can be a very lonely one. Assumptions are often made about the body, gender, who people are attracted to, who people want to have sex with, the types of sex people might want to have. It leaves people feeling marginalised and means that they do not have vital information to support them with moving into relationships."

British schools desperately need same-sex sex education, but the government still hasn't made it compulsory. That clearly needs to change.

FINALLY: DON'T SEND DICK-PICS UNLESS SOMEONE HAS, FOR WHATEVER REASON, SPECIFICALLY ASKED FOR THEM

Not sure if this should be taught in sex-ed classes or not – just a handy reminder to not send people unsolicited photos of your dick and balls!

More on VICE:

How Do Young People Feel About Sex, Relationships and Love?

Does Having Casual Sex Make You Depressed?

Some Important Questions for 'Sex Box', the TV Show Where People Have Sex in a Box

Banter, banter, the unending stream of banter. Comb your hair back from your face and allow the banter to engulf you, gushing from your phone like a strong rope of piss. And you know where it's coming from, don't you: it's coming from your WhatsApp groups, the things you live in and swim around in like a fish, the things you ignore and look upon for support, the constant hum of non-chat that keeps your phone's image library constantly stocked with fresh memes, the thing that pops off at certain high flash points – audition episodes of The X Factor, lunch hours spent near the Meal Deal fridge, the commute home – and lays quiet when people have things to do. This is the modern world of chatter. You can ignore it or you can embrace it. You can never turn it off.

Anyway, unfortunately it is my duty to inform you of the worst news in the world: there is a new WhatsApp update that sends you a notification if you get tagged in a group chat even if you have that group chat muted. All you need to do is type an "@" symbol and it brings up a list of everyone you're involved with. This is the end for you. This is the end of your peace.

Remember the WhatsApp group they started two years ago to organise that stag-do, and you muted it on the day of the wedding? It's still going and they just figured out how to @ you. The family WhatsApp that somehow has three separate cousins all starting uni? Your aunts, their mums, just figured out how to @ you and "want to ask if you'd give them a call and just offer them some advice". Everyone you went to school with? Somehow they got your number and added you to their group because "it's a great laugh".

The moral of the story is staying in touch is awful. The moral of the story is: here's everyone who's in your WhatsApp group chat.

THE PERSON WHO LEAVES IMMEDIATELY

What I find with WhatsApp group chats is it's always the same eight people every time, just starting new chats when the previous one finally stutters to a lull, and during that phase – the "You have been added to this chat!" " has been added to this chat!" phase – the only person with any sense just immediately cuts out and leaves.

They are the real hero of WhatsApp group chats: they are un-bogged down, light and free. They do not have every meeting at work disturbed with some inane chat notifications. And also, because they left it means you really can't without it being awkward, so you're just stuck here now, forever, or at least until it stutters to a lull and gets restarted again.

PERSON WHO JUST SAYS 'HEHE'

Hard to ever tell if these people are just full-on murderer-level dead-inside emotion vacuums – "hehe," they say, then, six hours later, "hehe", and then again, later, "hehe" – or they genuinely do find every remote crumb of WhatsApp patter genuinely funny, which I suppose in itself displays its own special psychological maniac profile. What I am saying is: do not trust anyone who compulsively says "hehe" in the WhatsApp group with animals, heavy machinery or children.

PERSON WHO CONSTANTLY CHANGES THE GROUP ICON

In the uneasy hierarchy of the WhatsApp group chat, it goes like this: the person who founded the group chat is the King or Queen; they may appoint a deputy when the persons in the group hits the 20+ mark, and therefore maintaining the chat becomes a 24-hour round-the-clock administrative job; and the person who takes it upon themselves to constantly change the group icon is, whatever way you spin it, the princeling, the second or third-in-command.

This person is unelected: they are the ones with a separate folder or folders on their phone marked "gifs" and "memes". They are the ones constantly locked to WiFi, they are the ones who react fastest, tap the most messages out, have the cry-laugh emoji at the top of their recent emoji list. They are the people who look at their phone even when they're getting their hair cut. Whoever changes the WhatsApp group icon is the power user and must be respected. Occasional tussles over control will, like stags rutting together in the depths of the woods, threaten the balance – but ultimately the group icon changer will win out. Pay your fucking dues to them and kiss the ring.

PERSON WHO CONSTANTLY CHANGES THE GROUP NAME

Everyone hates this person. They are a pig.

PERSON WHO REPLIES TO EVERY QUESTION WITH A SELFIE

Nobody cares. Fuck your face and fuck you. Just say if you're getting the train with us tomorrow or not, Marcus. I don't need to see you doing a thumbs up with a fucking Lucozade while sat at your desk.

THE PERSON WHO JUST SENDS UNANSWERED MEMES SILENTLY INTO THE VOID

You have to assume that the subtle nuances of human conversation developed over hundreds and thousands of years – nods, blinks, pauses, tuts, breath control, eye contact, walking and/or running away screaming – are entirely fucking lost on the dude who just bombards the group chat with Harambe memes and contextless Spongebob Squarepants screenshots. Anyone who does this also tells people in the street to "cheer up, it might never happen" because they do not understand that human interaction isn't just "broadcasting noises".

THE FAMILY WHATSAPP

Your mum has only just got a smartphone somehow, so she thinks this is a good idea. Your dad just occasionally sends through the football score. Your sister's got 600 pictures of her kid going that she sends through without a caption. One of your mum's mates is in there, for some reason? Your mum keeps telling you off for "swearing in front of Barb". Your mum and dad are going to a BBQ today and there's nothing you care about less. A picture of the cat. A picture of the new oven. Life is changing without you. You're drifting further away from it by the day. Ah, yes, we are like the family off Gogglebox, you're right. Yes, you can repaint my old room. No, I won't make it up for your birthday this year. I can't, mum, work. Does anyone really care about you, you wonder, in the quiet moments. Does anyone care about what you do? Can you talk to these people anymore or are you just resigned to repeating the same family jokes about Aunt Maggie's messy house and how many times the dog needs walking?

Your dad: "I don't know how I'm alive with this bad cooking!" and a picture of a quite reasonable-looking ham. Your mum's figured out emoji and you hate the simple, old person-way she uses them. You loathe it. You loathe that she doesn't know technology the way you know what you know. God. Is anything more embarrassing than this. God. Will you miss them when they are gone? You realise with almighty sobs that you will. These people made you out of their blood and their energy and their money and just with sheer work. They are everything you are and nothing. You are an extension of their every flaw and note of genius. You are mark 2.0: the improvement. You are the great white beacon of hope to this family. You can be anything, they truly believe that. "One day you will," your mum says, when you slam into 25 and realise you've been doing the same shitty job you've done since you graduated and go home to literally cry about it while she makes you a roast. "You could go back and retrain," your dad says, hopefully. These people are the only humans alive who truly, truly have your back. You get the train home. Mum has packed a little foil thing of sandwiches. You watch the town melt into the countryside and then back into the city again. You eat the sandwiches. You do not retrain. Mum sends through a Minion meme. You fucking mute the group and never look at it again.

PERSON WHO REFUSES TO SCROLL UP

"lol what's this about guys???"

Dunno, mate, probably the conversation we've been having for the past 20 minutes. Probably that. It's kind of baffling I need to even explain that. Do you click on Simple Wikipedia links instead of Wikipedia proper because you need things explaining to you in very simple and plain words? Is that you? Are you who that website is for?

THE SILENT OBSERVER

And so, eerie like a voice whispering nothings in the night, it comes creaking out of the dark hole in which it has been dwelling: "It's been so long since I've seen you!" you say. "My god, where have you been? Did you just mute this group then, yeah? God, you've changed so much... I see you've been on holiday, I saw it on your Insta. Are you still in that same job? God, I have so many questions! I'm so glad you're alive! Haha, you just go to ground sometimes, huh? I sort of respect it in a way; it's cool how you can just unplug, I wish I cou—

"so guys is anyone actually coming to my birthday or not? I invited you all on Facebook"

And then they go again, vanished to the wind, nothing but a light swishing sound behind them, and that's it until next year, because fuck no are you going to their birthday, it's in a fucking wine bar in Canary Wharf.

THE PERSON WHO CAN'T POSSIBLY HAVE A JOB, SURELY

I just don't understand how this person is i. humanly capable of sending this many messages, full stop; ii. is capable of sending this many messages while working the shop floor at Topshop, where phones are banned? Like how have you sent 600 messages and four selfies in a two-hour period where you're explicitly meant to be sorting bomber jackets out in order of size? I don't understand? Have you somehow transcended the old fashioned idea of "an actual phone with a messaging app installed" and you're just blurting this crap onto my phone with the sheer power of your mind? If so, can you stop please?

GUY WHO GOES SILENT FOR FIVE MINUTES AND THEN WHEN HE COMES BACK IT TURNS OUT THAT AH: WHAT HE HAS DONE IS GONE AWAY, TURNED A JOKE FROM THE GROUP CHAT INTO A MEME, AN IMAGE MEME, CAREFULLY CROPPED AND EMAILED TO HIS PHONE, SAVED AND REPEATED AGAIN IN THE GROUP CHAT A FULL 300 SECONDS AFTER THE JOKE ITSELF DIED, AH, YES NO VERY GOOD, I REMEMBER THAT JOKE NOW

PERSON WHO ONLY CHECKS IN TO TELL YOU HOW BAD THEIR COMMUTE IS

Always thought the most boring conversation on earth was "person recounts the dream they had about you, to you", but no: it's actually some lad from your old school on WhatsApp sending through blurry photos of ticket stubs and a line of men in tanned jackets queuing in the exact place on the platform where the train door always opens along with the caption "fuming" and the emoji of a man blowing steam out furiously through his nostrils.

LAD WHO IS TRYING TO MAKE HIS OWN FACE INTO A REACTION MEME

Yeah we all laughed when that club photographer caught you gurning your jaw off, mate, but we don't need to see it 20 times in a row – especially not now: Ally's just been dumped.

PERSON WHO RESPONDS TO YOUR TEXTS AND EMAILS VIA WHATSAPP BECAUSE 'IT'S ENCRYPTED, SO IT'S SAFER'

I just need your bank details so I can send you the £15 I owe you for that cab last night, mate, stop acting like you're in the CIA. The only thing the police would find if they accessed your phone would be a hundred unanswered "u up?" texts and a basically embarrassing Candy Crush hi-score.

THE LAD WHO ALWAYS SENDS PICTURES OF HIS SHIT

For some reason the kid who thought he was really funny at school until he spectacularly bombed doing a loose five-minute slot at the sixth form talent show has only one joke left now, and it's "sending a picture of his shits to all of you". Thing is: that is not a healthy-looking turd he is presenting here. I mean, it is all knobbly and seems loose and swimming in a lake of too-lurid piss, and, like, does his diet consist of tree bark and Nutella only? Sir, please eat some fibre. The brass fact of this is: this man needs to go to a doctor quite drastically and there is no polite way to say it. The reality is: you somehow have eight pictures of someone else's unhealthy shits saved on your phone and it's not even 10AM yet.

THE GUY WHO ALWAYS TAKES THE JOKE TOO FAR, JUST A LITTLE TOO FAR, JUST EDGES THE JOKE OVER THE LINE FROM 'FUNNY' TO 'ACTUALLY TERRIBLE' THROUGH SHEER PERSISTENCE AND REPETITION

Yeah, we all thought that joke you did three days ago was good, mate, but you didn't need to get T-shirts printed up of it.

LAD WHO FINISHES WORK INEXPLICABLY AT 4PM AND SO GOES TO THE PUB, TAKES A SELFIE WITH A PINT AND SMUGLY SAYS 'JEALOUS MUCH?'

Not really, Ryan, you're sat in a pub drinking on your own. Like: every day. Every single day. On your own. Like: mate. Is this a cry for help? Because I'm at work and therefore I can't answer it.

PERSON WHO ONLY DROPS IN TO OCCASIONALLY SEND THE JUICIEST, JUICIEST CONVERSATIONAL NON-SEQUITUR YOU'VE EVER SEEN BEFORE GOING 'OOPS, WRONG CONVERSATION'

NOTHING YOU SAY IS INTERESTING APART FROM THIS. WHERE ARE YOU HAVING THESE INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS. MAKE ME PRIVVY TO THE OTHER SIDE OF YOU.

PERSON WHO IS LIKE, 'SERIOUSLY GUYS, WHAT TIME ARE WE MEETING TOMORROW?' WHEN THE BANTER IS IN FULL FLOW

This is me. This one is me. I can't scroll up to check because every time someone says "lol" again my place resets down to the bottom. Guess I'll just... not... see you.... ever?

GIRLS WHO SEND EXCEPTIONALLY LONG ASOS HYPERLINKS TO THE GROUP CHAT AND JUST SAY 'THOUGHTS?'

Hun it's £8 just fucking get it nobody cares xx

LAD WHO IS BORED ON A NIGHT OUT AND SO JUST SENDS THE WHATSAPP EQUIVALENT OF GRUNTS AND BURPS – 'WHAT U ALL DOIN?' 'LOL' 'COME OUT! IT'S BANGING' 'I'M TIRED, MATE, AND SOMETIMES I JUST WANT TO GIVE UP' – THAT LIGHT UP YOUR PHONE WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO JUST EAT A CURRY AND WATCHING 'X FACTOR'

Nothing quite so desperate as watching someone who's spent £40 on Jägerbombs tonight having a breakdown as he realises all his friends live inside his phone.

THE PERSON WHO BRAGS ABOUT HOW HUNGOVER THEY ARE AND PROVES IT WITH PHOTOS OF THEIR EMPTY BOOZE CONTAINERS

Ah, yes. How livid the recycling men will be, with you, for giving them so much work to do. A green see-thru bag of Fosters cans. What an evening you must have had. Hark! What light from yonder WhatsApp notification window? Wait for it to load, wait for it to load, wait for: ah. I see. A photograph of you in your pyjamas graphically eating a Big Mac. I'm glad I used my data to download that.

THE PERSON WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO GOOGLE EVEN ONE THING

"hi guys! where we meeting tomorrow and how do I get there??" IT'S CALLED CITYMAPPER YOU USELESS MOTHERFUCKER, DOWNLOAD IT. DOWNLOAD IT. DOWNLOAD IT RIGHT NOW. I WILL HOLD YOUR FUCKING PHONE WHILE YOU DOWNLOAD IT. DO YOU SEE THIS? DO YOU SEE THIS ICON BY YOUR HOUSE? IT IS A TRAIN STATION. IT'S WHERE PEOPLE GO WHEN THEY NEED TO GO PLACES. GET FAMILIAR WITH IT, YOU SUB-ORDINARY SHITWAD. HOW DO YOU GET ANYTHING DONE? HOW DO YOU EVER LEAVE THE HOUSE WITHOUT DYING? I HATE YOU WITH MY LIFE. SHIT YOURSELF AND DIE YOU ABSOLUTE TRASH HEAP OF A GARBAGE HUMAN

PEOPLE WHO ARE LIKE A HUNDRED YEARS BEHIND THE NEWS, A THOUSAND YEARS BEHIND THE NEWS, THEY ARE THE FACEBOOK NEWS DELAY ON STEROIDS, THEY ARE STILL A BIT IN SHOCK ABOUT DIANA

"Umm, guys?? Anyone heard of this #Brexit thing? Apparently we had to vote? Anyone know what time?"

PERSON WHO SENDS SCREENSHOTS OF THE SAME FACEBOOK MEMORIES NOTIFICATION WE ALL JUST GOT

Yeah, your hair did look mad, yeah. Yeah. We were different then in a way we could only know now. Weird how memory works the exact same way for everyone alive, isn't it.

THE ENTIRETY OF THE BRIDESMAID GROUP YOU GOT ADDED TO/'STAGS ON TOUR 2k16: NEIL TURNER'S VIRGINITY MEMORIAL GROUP'

Never been in a bridesmaid WhatsApp group, but I assume it's just a thousand consecutive photographs of dresses they are never actually going to buy and then the hurried notification "guys we're at the cupcake workshop like right actual now and they say they're going to cancel the class if more than three of us don't show up!" But I can tell you for sure that stag party WhatsApp groups are just 45 blokes called Lee saying "Wayne Rooney 3/1 first scorer ,, naughty!" and posting club photography from the night you all went out in Magaluf and he fingered two (two.) separate barmaids. This wedding can't come soon enough. They're not even in love, they're just doing it for the kid.

PERSON WHO LIVES FOR THIS WHATSAPP GROUP, WILL DIE FOR THIS WHATSAPP GROUP, THIS WHATSAPP GROUP IS EVERYTHING FOR THEM, PLEASE GUYS, DON'T FORGET TO CHECK IN EACH MORNING, PLEASE GUYS, WAKE 'N' WHATSAPP! GUYS, SOOOOOO NEED A COFFEE, LOL GUYS, COFFEE PIC COMING THROUGH, WHO'S READY FOR LUNCH? UGH: MEEEEEEEE, LIKE LOL GUYS, QUIET ON HERE TODAY, LOL LET ME KNOW IF ANYONE WANTS TO GO FOR LUNCH! ONLY JOKING, NO, LOL, JUST LIKE: I THINK I NEED A NEW JOB, LOL, SO BORED, I JUST FEEL LISTLESS, YOU KNOW? LIKE NO FOR REAL ARE YOU THERE GUYS, QUIET DAY! JUST ON THE COMMUTE HOME NOW, ANYONE ELSE PICK UP METRO? SHOCKING! SENDING A PICCY THROUGH NOW, LIKE LOL GUYYSSSS? IS THIS THING ON??? GUESS THERE'S A WHATSAPP OUTAGE, LOL OKAY, JUST LITTLE OLD ME, HAHA. NO FOR REAL GUYS I GOOGLED IT WHERE ARE YOU ALL, TEATIME! COURGETTI PIC COMING THROUGH, LOL GUYS, GUYS, GUYS. GUYS. PLEASE GUYS. GUYS I'M JUST SO FUCKING LONELY SINCE I MOVED TO THE CITY. GUYS. GUYS. GUYS. GUY—

Don't forget to have fun and be safe on WhatsApp!

@joelgolby

More! Lists! Please! God! Give me! Those! Lists!

Here's Every Type of Annoying Person You're Friends with On Facebook

Here's Everyone You're Going to Have Sex with at University

Here's Everyone You're Going to Meet at Freshers Week This Year

(Photo by Harsh Agrawal via)

Cheating, eh? Whether it be at a game of Monopoly or on a partner to whom you've made some kind of deep-rooted commitment, we've all done (or at least considered) the naughty.

Traditionally, men are accepted as the ones who cheat on their partners, thanks to some patriarchal idea that we're "evolutionarily programmed to be horrible to women because we have to spread our seed", or whatever. But there's a theory suggesting women also have an evolutionary reason to switch partners, too. This theory, and our ensuing articleabout the reasons why women have cheated, predictably pissed off a lot of men. We even got actual emails from very angry adult guys arguing the theory and our articlewere false just because they said so.

So in the interest of journalistic balance, I asked a load of blokes about why they decided to cheat, so both genders can compare reasons/excuses and we can wallow in our shared inability to stay faithful to each other. Hooray for gender equality!

"That feeling of being wanted by someone new is really fucking good"

I last cheated in a committed relationship this year – I was in love with her too, which is pretty fucked up. And it happened more than once. She also cheated on me, which doesn't excuse anything, but basically I have a self-destruct button that just kicks in before I consciously decide to go and fuck someone else. It's pretty awful and premeditated.

It wasn't a drunken mistake at a party: I was up at 3AM trawling through my list of online Facebook friends and decided that instead of messaging my then-girlfriend, I'd try to fuck someone else. Specifically, someone she didn't know and would never meet.

I guess despite being a functioning human I'm deeply insecure and need gratification from everyone, and that feeling of being wanted by someone new is really fucking good. I also think I'm a borderline sociopath because I felt bad, but only for a hot minute, then just blocked out the guilt and went about my life. You just need to separate the desire to fuck other people and the actual act of doing it. Just go for a wank, mate, and then the girl you wanted to fuck at that club night is all forgotten.

— Caspar, 23

"It was a mix of revenge and a sense of 'I don't need you anyway'"

I'd never cheated before; I thought cheaters were scum of the earth. I'd had it happen to me many times, and one of them proper affected me to the point where I was so sure I'd never do it because I knew how it felt on the receiving end.

So my girlfriend went on a girls' holiday not too long ago and while she was away I found out she'd cheated on me not too long before. I was going to end the relationship but decided I didn't want to do it while she was away. But I had a wedding a few days before she returned. I had no intention of cheating or anything, but a girl came on to me at the wedding, and alcohol happened, so we ended up back at my hotel room all night. At first I felt fucking awful: technically I was still actually with my girlfriend, and I tried to resist for a while – but this girl was stunning.

I had a well guilty conscience, but ended it with my girlfriend anyway when she got back, and left out what I'd done. It was a mix of revenge and a sense of "I don't need you anyway", which made me feel better at the time. Now I'm battling with the concept of becoming the thing I despised.

— Neal, 23

"I was bored in the relationship, I guess"

I'd been in a five-year relationship and met this other girl on a dating site. We went for drinks and I ended up being about an hour late due to work. After a few, she suggested we go back to hers as her parents were out for the evening. We went upstairs and were chilling on her bed with a shit movie on. She said she wouldn't have sex with me as I was over an hour late, but she would give me a blowjob.

I ended things with my actual girlfriend about a year later. I was bored in the relationship, I guess, because it was the only thing I'd known since I was 16. I'd got stuck in the routine. Looking back now, I definitely should have ended it earlier, but that's easier said than done when you're so comfortable and haven't ever experienced anything else. I don't think that cheating at any point in the relationship changed my feelings towards my girlfriend; I just think I must have quite a cynical approach to life and women and lack any real emotion – a bit like Dexter or something.

— Kevin, 26

"We're scared of women, so to keep some control we cheat"

I think cheating is the worst lie in the world, to yourself mainly. I realised this because, for once, I was forced to be honest with a girl. I didn't technically cheat, but I'd been messaging another girl for a while and getting quite deep into it with her. Anyhow, it all came out and the messages were read. It was emotional cheating, really, which could be seen as worse in some cases.

Our relationship wasn't working and I wasn't insightful enough, or good enough to confront that, so broke the trust. But we loved each other deeply so tried to make it work. People find it so hard to be honest with themselves and others, because it hurts to hear the truth. But the truth can be a tonic, despite how painful it is. And you can't ever be happy with yourself if you're cheating in a relationship.

A woman is like your backbone. The potential mother of your kids. A great friend. Your sexual intercourse-maker. Yet you'll treat them badly? We're scared of women, so to keep some control we cheat. Perhaps women should recognise men can be sensitive, though. Ultimately if you hurt your girlfriend behind her back or openly, you're doing something wrong. But it's probably a sign that something isn't right in yourself or in the relationship. Naivety made me cheat; I just didn't get that when I was doing it as a youth. I got made into a man by that girl.

— Isaiah, 29

@williamwasteman

More relationship stuff on VICE:

Sex Tips for Young People, from Older People Who've Been at It for Ages

We Asked People How Often They Have Sex

Why You Should Actually Look Forward to Being Alone Forever

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I honestly don't know a single person who would wear this. Photo via Trade.me

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