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

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump kisses a "Women for Trump" placard during a rally in Lakeland, Florida, on October 12, 2016, the same day women came forward accusing him of inappropriate sexual conduct. Photo via MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

US News

Trump Accused of Groping Women 'Like an Octopus'
Four women have come forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault after he claimed during debate Sunday that despite his "locker room talk," he did not inappropriately touch women without consent. The New York Times reported on two women having encounters during which Trump forcibly grabbed them. Describing an incident in the early 1980s, Jessica Leeds said, "He was like an octopus... his hands were everywhere." The Palm Beach Post reported on a woman saying Trump groped her 13 years ago at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and a People magazine writer accused Trump of "forcing his tongue down my throat in 2005." —VICE News

US Missiles Destroy Radar Sites in Yemen
The US military launched Tomahawk cruise missiles against radar sites in Yemen early Thursday, successfully destroying three radar sites in Houthi-controled territory, officials said. The strikes follow two separate cases this week in which missiles were fired at a US Navy ship from a Houthi-controled area of Yemen. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook called this morning's action "self-defense strikes." —AP

Wells Fargo CEO John Strumpf Steps Down
Wells Fargo's chief executive and chairman, John Stumpf, is done in the wake of the bank's fake account scandal. VICE News reported earlier this week that senior bank officials were told about the scheme as early as 2006. —VICE News

Two Boston Police Officers Shot, Suspect Killed
Two Boston cops were shot while responding to a report of a person with a gun late Wednesday, according to police, who said the suspect was killed in the incident. Both officers are in "extremely critical" condition at Massachusetts General Hospital. The Boston police commissioner described it as "possibly a domestic incident gone bad." —CBS News

International News

Syrian Terror Suspect Found Dead in German Prison
A Syrian refugee authorities believe was planning a bomb attack on a Berlin airport has killed himself in prison in Leipzig, Germany. The state justice ministry said an investigation has been launched after Jaber al-Bakr, 22, was found dead in his cell. He had been on hunger strike since his capture and arrest on Monday. —BBC News

Dozens More Civilians Killed in Airstrikes on Aleppo
At least 80 civilians were killed in a new round of brutal airstrikes on rebel-held neighborhoods of the Syrian city of Aleppo on Wednesday, according to a local rescue group. The White Helmets, which operates in the city, reported more than 50 Russian and Syrian government missile attacks throughout the day, which they said wounded at least another 87 people. —Al Jazeera

Thousands Take to the Streets to Call for Peace Deal Revival in Colombia
Colombians massed on Wednesday to insist a peace deal between the government and FARC rebel group be salvaged, despite its latest iteration being rejected in a referendum earlier this month. Thousands joined the so-called March of the Flowers in the capital Bogotá before congregating in front of Congress in Plaza Bolivar. —Reuters

Australian Teens Suspected of Planning ISIS-Inspired Attack
Two teens have been arrested in Australia under suspicion of being ready to commit an attack inspired by the Islamic State. The 16-year-old boys were apparently detained while carrying knives and were set to appear in children's court later Thursday. —CNN

Everything Else

Giuliani Apologizes for False Clinton Claim
Former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani has apologized for claiming Hillary Clinton was not in the city for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which she doesn't seem to have ever claimed. The then-New York US senator was there to survey the damage a day later, however, including a visit alongside Giuliani. "I made a mistake—I'm wrong and I apologize," the former mayor and Trump backer told the Associated Press. —Miami Herald

Star Wars Company Fined Nearly $2 Million
A production company behind the latest Star Wars movie has been fined roughly $2 million after a hydraulic door broke Harrison Ford's leg on set in June 2014. Foodles Production (UK) Ltd, owned by Disney, pleaded guilty to failing to protect workers. —Gizmodo

Skateboarding Legend Dylan Rieder Dies at Age 28
Renowned professional skateboarder and model Dylan Rieder has died at the age of 28 due to complications from leukemia. "One of the most talent and brave men," his friend Ozzy Osbourne tweeted. "I feel blessed to have known you." —VICE

San Francisco Police Disproportionately Targets Minorities
San Francisco's police department disproportionately targets minorities for arrests and traffic stops, according to a Department of Justice report that dropped Wednesday. Out of a sample of 500 reported incidents of force, only five officers properly recorded what happened. —VICE News

TSA Finds a Gun Hidden in Clay Inside a Computer
The US Transportation Security Administration, posting about seized items on Instagram under the hashtag #TSAGoodCatch, has revealed its latest discovery: a loaded handgun covered in clay and stashed inside a computer at a Houston airport. —Motherboard

Health Agency Wants Legal Weed Age to Be 25 in Canada
Ottawa's public-health agency is formally recommending that the minimum age to buy legal marijuana should be 25 once Canada's legal pot policy goes into effect in 2017. It says it wants to "to ensure that we're reducing access for youth." —VICE

Photo via Flickr user Jennifer Durban

When Liu* moved from Eastern Asia to study engineering at an Ontario university, her struggling family became unable to cover her tuition costs. To get by, she took a job in an erotic massage parlour, which provided both the flexible hours she needed for her studies and the income to pay for school.

File photo dated 27/02/2006 of a police officer taking a swab from a volunteer's mouth at a temporary police DNA screening station in the Brighton Road Baptist Church in south Croydon, Surrey. Photo via CP.

DNA—the most private and intimate of information—is being swept up in blanket canvasses by Canadian police, who say the samples are collected from individuals who meet either demographic or geographic profiles, and only with their consent.

But the process requires no court order, no legal oversight, and is subject to no comprehensive policies. And advocacy organizations are pushing back, warning that mass sweeps of this nature are inherently coercive and need regulation. They point to a 2013 sexual assault investigation in Elgin County, where the unidentified victim described her assailant using race, age, and height, as proof of the danger posed by the practice.

The OPP requested DNA samples from all black and brown men in the area—approximately 100 migrant farm workers from Trinidad, Jamaica, and Dominica—with the help of their employers. Because the men were in Canada on work visas, advocates say they were essentially scared into doing the DNA tests out of fear that they could be deported.

"We look at this as more than just simply the act of profiling migrant workers, we look at this as a form of racialized policing," Chris Ramsaroop, who works with advocacy group Justice for Migrant Workers, told VICE.

Abby Deshman, director of the public safety program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said while there may be instances where it is justifiable for police to use DNA sweeps, more oversight is required because of just how much it invades people's privacy. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been calling on police to stop using DNA canvassing since 2011 and has repeatedly raised concerns about the practice, like in early 2015, when Windsor police collected blood samples from hundreds of people in a bid to rule them out as a suspects in the murder of a pregnant woman

"Many people feel they do not have a meaningful opportunity to say no when the police ask them for their DNA," Deshman said in an interview with VICE News.

In previous cases, police have looked at refusals as inherently suspicious, finding ways to test those individuals' DNA by other means. The technique has yielded results in some cases.

The perpetrator of the 2003 murder of Toronto 12-year-old Holly Jones was identified through DNA testing of a discarded pop can. He was flagged for testing because he refused to participate in a DNA canvass.

And while statistics are not kept on how many canvasses occur every year in Canada, more cases appear to be popping up in the news. In the 2011 murder investigation of 42-year-old Sonia Varaschin in Orangeville, Ontario, for example, police swept an entire neighbourhood with a DNA canvass, but found nothing. The case remains unsolved. That year, taxi drivers in Prince George, British Columbia were asked for DNA as part of an investigation into the disappearance of three sex trade workers and one student along the province's Highway of Tears. Just last year, residents of a Prince Edward Island community were swabbed for DNA to help catch a burglar. Police said the "right tip" led to an arrest in that case.

The perpetrator in the Elgin County case was eventually identified through DNA testing of discarded items including a cigarette butt, pop can, pizza slice tray, and napkin—not through the DNA canvass. The suspect was flagged for testing because he was one of a few in the area without an alibi.

Toronto lawyer Enzo Rondinelli wrote about the perils of the "DNA dragnet" and has researched the topic extensively. He thinks the government needs to rein in the practice, and advises his clients against complying with a voluntary request.

"I still think police should have to get judicial authorization to take a DNA sample from someone," Rondinelli told VICE. "DNA testing isn't infallible. Labs make mistakes. The risk of such a mistake is too great and I would still advise against clients giving samples voluntarily."

Police were "overly broad" in their collection of DNA in the Elgin County case, according to a report put out by the Office of the Independent Police Review Directorate, an independent organization that receives, responds and follows up on police complaints in Ontario. It found that the practice could "reasonably be expected to have an impact on the migrant workers' sense of vulnerability, lack of security and fairness," but ultimately concluded that racial profiling did not occur.

"When it comes to the investigative results, we stand by our investigation, there's no doubt about that," said OPP Provincial Media Relations Coordinator Sergeant Peter Leon of the case. "In the end we were able to identify the person who was ultimately convicted of this very serious offence."

Read more: The Exciting and Terrifying Future of DNA Editing

But there were still consequences for the migrant workers, according to Ramsaroop. He said one Trinidadian worker who refused to participate in the DNA sweep was not called back to work.

"This, to me, speaks of control and sends a strong message to the workers that if they don't take part they're gonna be seen as criminals and be victimized by their employer," he said.

The OIPRD has recommended all Canadian police forces develop policy to govern how and when DNA sweeps are used and "identify and ensure best practices," institute new training, reassess consent processes and publicly report on storage of previously collected samples. The recommendations come with a model policy and a six month deadline until the OIPRD follows up on those recommendations. No police force is required to make changes based on the report and none have confirmed doing so at this time.

Leonardo Di Caprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street – every entrepreneur's wet dream. Photo via YouTube

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

Everybody knows those pop up ads promising that "you can make $2,000 every week online without ever leaving home!" are bullshit. They're just another fake get rich quick scheme—too good to be true.Except that's exactly 19-year-old New Zealander Aaron* is doing.

Right now, he's raking actually raking in $5,000 NZD a week, although it's not exactly legal. Using stolen credit cards, Aaron—whose name we can't disclose for obvious reasons—buys digital gift cards and sells them off on the dark web for less than they're worth.

With employees around the world, Aaron is living the hedonistic life most teenagers dream of—throwing parties with catered alcohol, booking five-star hotels with his friends. He even owns an Audi A5.

Most of us might think Aaron has got it made, but to him none of this is really enough. He says his failure to make his first million by 18 years old took a large "emotional toll." But Aaron has high hopes that he can grow his earnings to $50,000 a week over the next two years. His plan? To cement his status as his hero reincarnate by becoming the millennial Jordan Belfort. We asked him how the hell he's going to pull it off.

VICE: First of all, explain to me—someone of average technological skill with a very surface-level knowledge of the deep web—how you set up your business.
Aaron: It's fairly simple. All you have to do is download Tor Browser (it's a web browser just like Chrome or Firefox which can access .onion websites) and start exploring. Everyone thinks you have to be a guru or have talent to be "good with computers." Being able to code is not this magic thing. Learn how the internet works, learn how data is sent back and forward.

You don't have to have skill to browse the deep web or even make purchases, if you are careful and have common sense. But having any scaleable business on the dark web requires a hell of an effort and work. The stuff you can find on there is, honestly, no joke. I had been on the dark web making purchases and experimenting for close to a year with close to $2,000 NZD down the drain before I made any type of profit.

So how did it all kick off?
I got the idea to start selling the items when I bought some Calvin Klein shoes from Amazon with my first credit card info purchase on the dark web. A guy I knew asked me where I got my shoes from and if he could buy them. I bought the credit card details for $6.50 USD and sold the shoes for $199 NZD. I knew money was to be made from this.

You're modelling yourself after Jordan Belfort, which makes me think you would enjoy being flashy with your money. Do you have a cover job? Do your parents or friends have any idea where you get your money from?
I own and operate a legal e-commerce store. It's mostly a cover up with maybe two to five sales a week, but no one else knows about that. I just tell people that I am making thousands of sales a week and that's where my money comes from. I have one close friend who knows about this since he started out with me, but he decided this wasn't for him and left. It's just me now, but I do exchange ideas with him every now and then.

Being flashy with money is quite a trick. The key is to not overdo it, yet. Once I start making close to $50k a week, then I will start going all out. Until then, being flashy consists of booking five-star hotels on the Gold Coast for Christmas for four of my friends and myself, buying takeaways every day, and being able to throw parties that have free alcohol. And my Audi.

You mention you now have employees. How much do you tell them? How difficult is it to maintain a business where secrecy is of the utmost importance?
It is quite difficult and it can be quite nerve-wracking to maintain secrecy in my business. You become quite paranoid and start paying attention to even the smallest details. I try not to have any contacts within New Zealand. You are perhaps the first one.

But I tell my employees everything. These guys are employed remotely from outside the country. We communicate over encrypted software and e-mails for utmost secrecy. I'd have to say that my risk evaluation skill has blown through the roof because of this venture. I will never drink and drive or reveal any kind of identity because the risks associated are too high, you know?

I can't believe I'm your only contact in New Zealand. How frustrated do you get with not being able to tell friends the truth? Do you ever worry about getting too close to someone, romantically or otherwise, and them finding out?
It can get pretty frustrating to be honest but I found a way to deal with it. If I have to absolutely talk about it, I will just say things in my clean business terms. My last girlfriend thought I found a way to get free goods from a retail site because of a bug. When she saw a few iPhones, she flipped out and told me to return them because "it wasn't right." No, I wouldn't tell anyone romantically close to me. I do worry that someone close to me can find out about this and they will cut ties with me.

What's it like living with that kind of paranoia?
I don't mind living with the paranoia. It doesn't get to me as much because I'm an inherently calm and collected person. I don't freak out much in most situations and I am cold-blooded. I think that's another reason why both my clean and deep web businesses are succeeding.

Have you had any close calls in terms of security risk?
I've honestly not had any major close calls so far which makes me doubt how real the portrayal of the police and secret service is in real life compared to the movies. The closest was when my friend who worked with me threatened to go to the police if I didn't stop this. We are close friends again now but back then, that caused me major headaches.

Shit, how did that resolve itself?
He went to the station to file a report but I didn't know that at the time. He told me later on that he did that but he never handed it in because he thought he would get in trouble and it wasn't going to be doing anyone any good. We settled down as friends after that. He is one of the people coming to the Gold Coast with me for Christmas.

Okay, so what does a regular week look like for you?
Well, I'm studying a rather rigorous degree at university and I like to have high grades. So my week consists of studying, checking, and responding to emails about my e-commerce store and dark web business, creating listings for various items on sites such as eBay, dealing with both e-commerce clients and dark web clients, as well as creating new relationships with important people. It's all about who you know and how trusted you are on the deep web.

You don't feel any, sort of, moral dissonance?
Well, the process of me buying credit card details, buying items of major retailers, and selling them off might seem like I am "scamming" the innocent but it's quite the opposite.

See, banks are obliged to protect credit card holders in case of theft and fraud. When the credit card holders report that money is gone missing off their accounts, the bank will contact the retailer and chargeback their money or pay it back themselves. So in 99 percent of the cases it's either the major retailer who loses money or the major banks.

Is there a kind of Robin Hood element to it? Can you see yourself redistributing your money?
This is where the dilemma kicks in. I would call myself a pretty self-centred, selfish person. But, at the same time, I want to help people to the best of my ability. At this point I only use the money for good when I feel bad about myself. Two days ago I donated a hefty sum to an international charity because earlier that day I received a payment worth $3,000 from fraudulent goods, but I can certainly see myself helping out friends and family once I start to earn more.

What's the worst case scenario that might arise out of all of this?
To be honest, I'm most afraid of getting caught. I think that should be what everyone who does what I do should fear. The moment you lose that fear is when it's game over. Two years ago, we discovered that my father was this cold hearted scammer. He swindled a lot of people and when shit hit the fan, he committed suicide. We discovered all the bad stuff afterwards.

My mother is an honest woman who works in real high places, so I know how devastated she would be if she knew about what I'm doing. I guess you can say that, I am most afraid of becoming like my father. I have promised myself to never go as far.

I'm so sorry. Have you established any limits to prevent yourself from getting in too deep? An exit strategy for when it gets hot?
I told myself I wouldn't screw over any major institutions directly such as banks–unless we're talking about millions and had a solid plan. Also that I will never screw over friends and family, because if I ever do that, I lose all moral integrity. It just all goes downhill from there. I don't see an exit at this point because everything's going good. If shit ever hits the fan, I will think of something quick.

Illustration by George Yarnton

We stay in flat shares or with our parents, live hand to mouth and subscribe to a culture of anxiety. We struggle with self esteem and live our social lives online. We know what we should be because we learnt it from our parents, who got married when they were our age and had kids, a mortgage and a hatchback just a few years later.

But us? We're fully grown adults living in a state of suspended childhood. So what happens in 20 years when we're all nearly middle-aged? What happens when millennials grow up?

One image immediately comes to mind: a single 43-year-old burdened with mental health issues, living in a shoebox flat that costs £2,000 a month, scrolling obsessively through Tinder and tweeting about the latest Palace drop to an audience of desperately lonely peers.

But really, it's uncharted territory; no one really knows. Of the tens of academics, scientists and economists I emailed, most didn't want to hypothesise – although in many ways, this unsavoury tableau probably isn't too far off the mark.

We're skint now and we're likely to be living hand to mouth in later life, too. Ryan Bourne, head of Public Policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, says that our generation will go into our forties with far less accumulated wealth and be much poorer than we should be. "This lack of wealth is partly because millennials won't own housing, but partly because they'll have always paid so much for rent that it's quite difficult to save anything to even build up to a pension, or savings and investment. That is a big problem." Generational expert Jason Dorsey agrees: "We're expecting to have people in their thirties and forties still relying heavily on their parents – 30-somethings who still live at home and 40-somethings whose parents still pay for their mobile phone bill. That phenomenon is putting pressure on the older generation. Unless income increases dramatically we'll be in trouble."

Basically, if you thought being in your twenties was high pressure, look forward to the latter end of your thirties and your early forties. Bourne thinks we'll hit a point in our so-called middle age and realise the gravity of our situation. "The risk there is that a lot of people in our generation will get into their forties and panic that they really haven't got enough accumulated assets to live on in 30 years time when they retire," he explains. "So you'll get a lot of people worrying in their forties that they might not have a particularly happy retirement."

Will we ever catch up to our parents' standards of living and accumulated wealth? According to the economists I spoke to: probably not.

"The problem is we'll still chase many of the same things that other generations want, but it's more out of reach," explains Dorsey. "As our cohort enter their mid to late thirties, it'll be an interesting time to see if millennials achieve this idea of adulthood." VICE readers' number one fear is not finding love, which suggests we're not completely put off the idea of marriage, and our anger at the housing crisis shows – somewhat unsurprisingly – that we still value having a secure place to live. As we waiting for these traditional markers of adulthood going into our thirties, said Dorsey and others I spoke to, we're likely to continue to be frustrated and unhappy.

At this age, because we're not able to afford having children, we'll be looking to have them in our late thirties and early forties. "Having kids in your late thirties is more difficult and higher risk, and we believe there is going to be a lot of pressure around that time to get married and have kids," says Dorsey. "It's a perfect storm. The mood will be: if you are going to do it, you have to do it now. And, for the obvious reason that it's going to be more difficult and more challenging, it's going to create a different kind of conversation. You may end up with people having less kids overall, because if they start later maybe they can only have fewer."

The psychological burden of that will lay with women – some of whom will find they can't have children – but it'll be felt throughout society. As Dr Amy Kaler, professor of social structure at the University of Alberta, told VICE, if women stopped having children, "We'd first notice the collapse of economic activity that requires young children and parents, stores for babies, nannies, daycares. Then an upward ripple in elementary schools, kids' sports. We'd also become completely dependent on immigration to continue to exist, as a country. We'd see more efforts to attract immigrants – young immigrants – to bring more people in."

Dr Carole Easton – chief executive of Young Women's Trust, which supports and represents women aged 16 to 30 struggling to live on low or no pay in England and Wales – is particularly concerned for the future women. "The reason women will struggle more, in our view," she says, "is because over their lives they'll get paid less, they're more likely to be stuck in low paid and insecure jobs and, importantly, they're more likely to be the main carers for family members."

No one would ever be able to predict what our mental health and wellbeing will look like in 20 years, but it's likely that we'll remain a generation characterised by anxiety and mental health – particularly considering our openness when it comes to discussing these topics. But we should be concerned by the prevalence of mental illness in our twenties. As a general rule, the quicker mental health issues are dealt with, the more likely you are to recover and have better or more well managed mental health in the future.

"Leaving symptoms untreated can not only result in unnecessary suffering for the individual, but interfere with building a rich and meaningful life moving forward," says clinical psychologist, Dr Lisa Orban. With regards to the anxiety millennials report in their twenties, she says, "The brain is still malleable in young adulthood, and exposure to stress in one's environment early on can have an impact on the course of one's mental health. If young adults learn how to identify stress and develop adaptive coping strategies early on, chances are they will be more proficient at handling stress, which can prevent or mitigate mental health symptoms in the future."

But how successful have we been at developing coping mechanisms?

What mental health professionals are concerned about is that we don't know the long-term effects of living in our "suspended adolescence". Lucy Lyus at mental health charity MIND says, "We know that everything happening to young people at the moment contributes to a lack of wellbeing and can lead to anxiety. Obviously it's worrying to know what is going to happen when this generation grows up." Lyus adds that none of these contributing lifestyle factors are going to change soon. It's in the balance: if we want to improve the future mental health of millennials, changes need to happen now. "We know that the government will say that they are committed to making mental health as much of a priority as physical health, and have committed a billion pounds over the next five years to make that happen," she says. "But we don't actually know how it's going to go."

At least in our miserable middle age we can look forward to a long retirement, right? Not exactly. We'll work longer than any generation yet, partially because we'll be supporting the children we had late in life until much later – an issue compounded by the fact the government are hell-bent on us working right up to the brink of death. "The state pension age is going to have to rise dramatically for us because of an ageing population," explains Bourne. "The government essentially introduced this triple-lock mechanism which makes the state pension even more generous, and that makes no sense when you've got an ageing population. Something's got to give on that, and the most obvious thing to do would be to raise the state pension age very substantially."

Already, retirement ages are scheduled to rise to 66 in October of 2020 and, under current government proposals, 67 between 2026 and 2028, and 68 between 2044 and 2046. We don't know how much higher those could go.

This all sounds very doom and gloom, but conveniently we as a generation don't exist in a bubble. We can't be ignored, and these issues – housing, lack of savings, mental health and so on – left to fester. Eventually the knock-on effects will become a burden and our social and financial issues have to take priority. "The contemplation of what's going to happen if we don't fix all of these problems is almost too awful to think about," says Rachel Laurence from the think-tank New Economics Foundation. "I think if we really don't fix most of them, there will be a major economic crash and a massive depression. But I hope that with the huge amount of people moving into the second and third phases of adulthood with these situations, this is a tipping point."

As Laurence points out, our whole economy is powered by debt. If a generation isn't able to buy mortgages on properties for them or their children, while wages stay stubbornly and unfairly low and the economy grows, it's a "ticking time bomb" situation.

When will we leave our extended adolescence? Does dealing with all this mean we will have finally grown up by the time we're through the worst of it, if we ever even reach that stage? Dorsey predicts that we'll feel like we've reached adulthood when we're about 40 – and I'm inclined to agree. But all we do know with certainty is that what "adulthood" means and how it is defined will completely change with our generation.

Passing 18 could soon mean nothing; just an excuse for a party and the ability to buy a drink without fake ID. And many more traditional markers of adulthood could also be abandoned; "being an adult" might not mean owning a home or having a child any more. Just as our parents set the parameters for our idea of what adulting was, we'll decide what being an adult means for Gen Z and beyond.

@hannahrosewens

More on VICE:

Why Do We Talk About Millennials Like They're All Middle Class?

Millennials Have Discovered That Going Out Sucks

This Sad British Generation Doesn't Know When the Party Stops

Sketchy the Clown. Photo by author

In late August of this year, small blips of "killer clown sightings" began to appear on social media. It started with a cryptic letter to residents of a South Carolina apartment building, reportedly sent out by the property manager.

"There have been several conversation and a lot of complaints to the office regarding a clown or a person dressed in clown clothing taking or trying to lure children into the woods," the letter from Fleetwood Manor Apartment Complex read.

"At no time should a child be alone at night, or walking in the roads or wooded areas at night," the letter warned.

Whether the fear expressed in the note was legitimate or not, what's spawned since then is undeniably real. News about people dressed as clowns—ranging from the innocent sight of someone in white facepaint holding balloons in broad daylight, to people actually running around with weapons—has hit the internet like a tsunami.

If you type in "Clown" followed by any major city on Google, your search results will be flooded with articles about killer clowns, not actual clown websites. It's not surprising considering how long the caricature of the creepy, killer clown has been around: before the recent memeage of clowning, there have been YouTube prank videos of people in clown outfits terrorizing civilians at night on the internet for years now. Most of these videos, even prior to the explosion of the clown sighting trend, had hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of views.

Though, it's not as if the killer clown trope is anything new. Pop culture mainstays like Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King's IT, and even characters as nuanced and enjoyable as the variousiterations of Batman villain the Joker, have helped to solidify the idea that clowns—meaning pretty much anyone who wears fucked-up make-up and a colourful, ill-fitting outfit—are symbols of terror and fear.

" is not something I personally understand," Allan Turner, a longtime clown instructor (whose clown persona, Jean-Paul Mullet, is often just referred to as "Mullet the Clown"), told me during an interview at our Toronto office amongst a group of other clowns.

"The thing about will think, 'That's a clown.'"

Turner, out of costume.

To Turner, the issue of clowns being creepy really comes down to people not understanding the art of clowning for what it is—a performance of "one's true self." That phrase in itself sounds somewhat unsettling, but Turner says that it's less about clowns and more about people who don't respect the boundaries of others, and exist outside of societal norms.

"We look fucking weird, but it's us," Sketchy, a Toronto-based clown whose real name is Dave McKay, tells me. "I've had some people just absolutely lock up when they see me, and at that point, I go, 'OK, I'm not going to engage with this person.' The point of doing this is to not make people's lives a nightmare."

In Sketchy's case, his "mature" performances at burlesque clubs/adult venues are only good because he's a self-professed "dick," and people know that. However, he also notes that it's "vital" to maintain the consent of the people he interacts with. According to Sketchy, the pranks (or hoaxes, as some have suggested) that are happening across the world are not only failing to respect the right for people to say no, but are also working against changing the narrative around clowning.

"I got a lot of looks on the way here," Sketchy told me, relaying his story about taking public transit to VICE's Toronto office. "That's normal, but I think people are getting more paranoid."

Sketchy.

And he may be right. In some parts of the US, police have actually had to tell citizens to not go around shooting clowns that they see in public. On Twitter and Facebook, videos of clown pranks backfiring—usually with the fake-clowns getting their ass beat—have begun cropping up daily.

This trend isn't necessarily particular to clowns either. Individuals running prank channels online have used everything from Texas Chainsaw Massacre-esque pranks with weapon in hand, to haunted/dead little girls to scare the living shit out of people. In most cases, people run off at the speed of a freight train, with the prankster left laughing.

Other times, the videos are much more serious: Just yesterday, three people, who the police believe to be teenagers, broke into a Texas woman's home while she was sleeping. Armed with BB guns and decked in clown masks, they woke her and began to shoot up the room. She was hit in the face and the arm, and is expected to recover, but the suspects are still at large.

Marigold the Clown, a children's clown.

Last week, professional clowns told VICE that their job as a clown was being affected by the rising phobia of clowns. On a phone call before one of his US shows, internationally-renowned DooDoo the Clown told me that he's had to reassure numerous people about his intentions, but that he's grateful for all the support he's received.

"This whole issue has been so blown out of proportion...I was recently where there were thousands of kids and parents in attendance. A lot of them were compassionate, so compassionate, but I had to take the mic and just let people know that, y'know, the things going on, I denounce them," he said.

"The thing is that this isn't new. We've always been picked on. For better or worse, we're the laughing stock of the crowd, and now we're becoming sort of hated...If anything, I just hope people know that there's so many thousands of us with families and children who rely on the income we make. We feed and house people. It's real to us."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Bob Dylan speaks onstage at the 25th anniversary MusiCares 2015 Person of the Year Gala honoring Bob Dylan on February 6, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Michael Kovac/WireImage

A fun exercise I like to torture myself with: Think of a famous person over 70. Now imagine how insufferable Twitter will be with hot takes on the day they die. For as long as I have been playing this game, I have assumed Bob Dylan would be the apex. I woke up this morning to find that what I've been dreading: The laudatory superlatives and the actually, he's bad's have arrived. Ever the visionary, though, Bob Dylan didn't even have to die to have his day on Twitter. Instead, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I should say that, to me, Bob Dylan is good. I'm not a rabid fan, but I think that if someone wants to argue that Bob Dylan is the greatest songwriter ever, that's as acceptable of an answer as anyone. Even if you feel allergic to his iconic 60s folk ballads about changin' times (though I'd invite you to seriously listen to "Like a Rolling Stone" again and honestly say that it doesn't fucking rule), his output from 1970's New Morning to 1976's Desire is unparalleled, and even the early-80s records have moments of transcendence ("Lenny Bruce," "Jokerman," the photo on the front of Infidels). In my adult life, I've spent more free time reading than doing anything else, but I've almost definitely spent more hours listening to Bob Dylan than I have reading all but a handful of particular writers. Still, I'm not exactly thrilled that he won the Nobel Prize.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Bob Dylan is a musician. (Yes, Dylan has published a memoir and a book of prose poetry, but the award was given "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.") The "are lyrics poetry?" debate has been long and contentious. On the one hand, the revolving door between songwriting and poetry is a busy one, trafficked by critically praised poets like Leonard Cohen and David Berman, and also Billy Corgan. Plus, everything from YouTube comments on classic-rock songs to baseball-game transcriptions gets counted as poetry, so why not pop music? On the other hand, insisting that Dylan (or Kendrick Lamar, or whomever) are actually poets kind of implies that their chosen artistic mediums lack validity. Is music literature? Sure, but the more important thing is that music is music.

At its best, the Nobel serves to elevate one deserving writer to the level of greatness.

The larger issue is how we consume literature. Reading is an active experience, something that's meant to be challenging. Literature is often boring, or at least less immediately exciting than doing almost anything else. When I was trying figure out how to convey the point I wanted this sentence to make, I thought, Reading is like exercising in that it's not usually fun when you do it, but it makes you feel like a better person after. I apologize for passing along such a lame idea, but it's basically how I feel.

Listening to music is a much more immediate experience. Popular music is designed to be enjoyable. It's also passive. No matter how experimental or challenging a record is, you just have to press play. You might not like it, but you can finish it. You can listen to music in the shower, or while driving, or while typing an essay. If I've spent more time listening to Bob Dylan than I have reading the great writers, it's not because I like Dylan more. It's because my life is filled with situations in which it's appropriate to listen to music, but not appropriate to read books.

Music is everywhere in our society, blasting from cars, playing at the grocery store, auto-playing in banner ads. Our biggest celebrities are musicians, or at least married to them. There are numerous reality shows about discovering the next big act; meanwhile, America's Next Top MFA Student remains but a dream. Some have used Bob Dylan's win to suggest that there should be a Nobel for music; setting aside that this would be a complete clusterfuck, famous musicians already have the Grammys and capitalism.

Literature doesn't occupy nearly the same role in popular culture. Sure, there are plenty of authors who make decent livings, but it's not like Jonathan Franzen gets mobbed when he walks down the street. At its best, the Nobel serves to elevate one deserving writer to the level of greatness. In recent years, this has generally been people with fairly minor profiles in America, like Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich or Chinese novelist Mo Yan. The winner never pleases everyone—picking a single recipient from among all living writers never could—but it's at least a chance to remind the larger public that serious literature exists, and to give one person a nice boost in book sales.

In recent years, there's been a trend of art museums trying to attract mass audiences by appealing to popular tastes. Think of the Museum of Modern Art's much-maligned Björk retrospective, or the hours-long lines to get into the Rain Room. It's a way to bring new attention to an aging institution, despite the fact that they have to bend their purpose to do so. Today's decision by the Nobel Prize Committee certainly feels similar, like a ploy to make the prize seem relevant, rather than a celebration of an artistic career. No one has remained as famous, as artistically respected, and as commercially successful as Bob Dylan has been for the last 50 years. He doesn't need the Nobel Prize, too.

Follow Hanson O'Haver on Twitter.

For those people who already feel like this entire election has just been one big huge mistake and can't understand how a former reality TV star ended up running against... her? You're not alone.

Youtube hero NeverCaesar recently spliced together a video that turned the first presidential debate into just another joke-infested episode of Arrested Development and let the show's narrator, Ron Howard, do the fact-checking, using original audio from the sitcom.

Rather than have to follow a boring set of facts rolling across the screen as the two candidates scream at each other, Trump-rested Development holds up Trump's denials during the debate next to his past comments saying the opposite, paring down the debate into one easily digestible (and factually correct) short.

Even Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz gave the video a shout-out, tweeting Wednesday, "A sneak preview of Arrested Development Season 5: Thank you NeverCaesar!"

Although Gene Parmesan doesn't reveal himself to really just be hiding out as Trump in disguise this entire time, the video does make a callback to the elusive Mr. F, so that's something.

Read: Did Trump Make a Mockery of Our Political System Just to Launch a TV Channel?

First Lady Michelle Obama knows how to give a speech—just go back and watch the awe-inspiring address she delivered at the Democratic National Convention last July, arguably overshadowing both her husband and Hillary Clinton.

On Thursday, Obama used her commanding presence to finally tackle the incendiary comments Donald Trump was caught making about women and the many accusations of inappropriate sexual harassment that followed. While campaigning for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, the first lady sidestepped her planned speech to give a rousing, personal take on the Republican candidate—without ever mentioning him by name.

"I can't believe that I'm saying that a candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women," she said. "And I have to tell you that I can't stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn't have predicted."

"This was not just a lewd conversation. This wasn't 'locker room banter.' This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior," Obama continued. "This is not normal. This is not politics as usual. This is disgraceful, it is intolerable, and it doesn't matter what party you belong to. No woman deserves to be treated this way—none of us deserves this kind of abuse."

Read: Donald Trump and What Men Say When They Think Women Won't Hear

Gord back in 2012. Photo via CP.

When the Tragically Hip walked offstage at the end of their epic 30-song set in Kingston on August, legions of fans roared in approval. Though it had been months since Gord Downie's terminal brain cancer diagnosis had been revealed, and everyone assumed this would be the last performance he would ever give, 30 songs wasn't enough. They wanted more from the legendary poet/songwriter/frontman.

Downie had also spoken at length during the Kingston show, more than he had throughout the entire tour, addressing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (who was in attendance) directly: " is trying to bring out: Was this a policy that was beneficial? Could we have done things better? And in his own way, try to bring reconciliation and begin the talk and dialogue about a topic that is sometimes missing. There's blurbs about it in the media but as is the case, all too often, these things are forgotten. This is very important to our First Nation and the families involved."

That Downie has been embraced by many First Nations chiefs and artists alike suggests that his legacy as this country's pop-poet chronicler won't include the easily digested notion of Canada that many celebrated this past summer.

"It's making things uncomfortable," says Ian Campeau of Canadian hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Red. "It's confronting what Canada was based on. You can't have a colonial state where you come in and colonize these people without thinking you are superior to these people."

Read More: How I Grew Up and Learned to Love the Hip

Campeau, a member of the Nipissing First Nation believes the Indian Act is a perfect example of white supremacy being held as a Canadian value today. Downie himself said at the Kingston Tragically Hip gig that it will take 100 years to figure out "...what the hell went on up there" but for now, the conversation can only grow broader into places it's likely never been had before.

"These are things we need to talk about," Campeau says. "Through discussing the institutional oppression and abuse that Chanie Wenjack went through, it's paramount that we start confronting these dark, shady pasts and start having these conversations."

Follow Joshua Kloke on Twitter

All artwork by Adam Tan. Images supplied courtesy of his family, with thanks. See more of Adam's work on Facebook

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Our suicide rate hangs in our country's hall of shame. New Zealand has the highest youth-suicide rate in the OECD. In 2012, the most recent stats available, 549 people died by suicide, and there were 3,031 recorded intentional self-harm hospitalizations. One of the main contributing risk factors to suicide is a lack of social support. Since it's unlikely that 12.1 out of every 100,000 New Zealanders are living as hermits, part of the problem is that the people closest to those feeling suicidal don't know how to be there for them. Of course, there are still suicides in situations where people are surrounded by support, but the risks are lower.

It can be bone-chilling to think about the day a friend decides to let you in on the minefield that is his or her headspace. The sudden onus of support might be a drastic gear shift in your relationship, and you might even find yourself seeking out the wisdom of the search engine god of information Google to answer the pressing "what the fuck do I do now?" question. But its generic answers can only go so far. And so can this article. Everyone's an individual and will experience his or her mental-health issues in a different way. But as a starting point for you, we rounded up a few mental-health veterans to talk about what kind of support they needed from those around them when they were going through hard times.

"If I let someone in on what I was going through, it would throw them off," says George, 21. "Going through" is a euphemism for having overwhelming impulses to swerve into incoming traffic.

After such a big disclosure, many people end up feeling overwhelmed, and even ghosting their friend with mental-health issues. "I had family and close friends who didn't know what to do and didn't do anything—it was hard for me not to be resentful of that," says Liv, a 25-year-old who began to struggle with depression at 14, but didn't get diagnosed until she was 18.

It's hard to know how to react to the afflicted person, and what you need to do to support them. George says if someone has the courage to approach you and ask for help, the first thing running through your mind should be what to do to follow up. "It could be a text over breakfast the next day or asking them to catch up for coffee on the weekend, anything," says George. "What you do is nowhere near as important as just following up."

Not everything you do will help, but some of it might. "People react in different ways at different times, but also accept help in different ways. Some friends would try things and I would snap at them, and they just wouldn't try again. But others would keep trying until they found something that helped," says Liv. "Sometimes people, not even close friends, would surprise you and give you exactly what you need."

To Elle, a 25-year-old who became depressed in her early 20s due to a chemical imbalance in her brain, support meant "just acknowledging it. So when I cancel on friends because I can't leave my house due to crippling anxiety, they just go 'yup, sweet, let me know when you want to next catch up' and don't nag me."

For Liv, it meant knowing that she wasn't a burden to those around her and that she could rely on them, free of judgment, when she really needed them. "What helped me was knowing that there were people I could call at 3 AM in the morning, and they would come over and be there for me."

George just needed people to understand the tangible impact the mental illness had on his everyday life. "You don't want someone to 'feel sorry' for you that you haven't slept for days because of your anxiety. You want someone to be mindful of what you're going through and how it would impact you."

It's not always easy knowing what your friend might need, though. "It's just about knowing the person and picking up on non-verbal body signals," says Liv. "You can ask what they need too, but it depends on the person or how fragile they're feeling whether they can give you an answer."

If they're not giving you any indication of their needs, it's important not to just go Mayo Clinic on them just because you're feeling unsure what to do. Liv found people belittling you—giving generic googleable advice like "go for a run" or being dismissive of what you're going through because you're feeling horrible and you haven't done the "obvious things" like exercise—"incredibly annoying."

"With some people, it feels like there's a mental list they're going through in their heads, and they're checking off the advice they need to give you and the things you need to do to be 'healthy' again," says George.

"It is a fine line between being there to support you but not babying you," says Liv. "I would get defensive if they tried to spoon-feed me by saying stuff like, 'OK, it's time to get up and go for walk'—I'm an adult. Don't take away my autonomy. Don't make me feel like a victim."

Doing all the right things won't necessarily always help anyway. "I do all the right things, I exercise, eat well, go outdoors, but it doesn't help. It's frustrating," says Elle.

People going through mental-health struggles also don't expect you to know how they feel; they actually hate it when you pretend you do. "You can't assume how someone feels, even if you've had depression before. I used to hate people saying, 'I know how you feel, this is what we'll do.' It's better instead to say, 'This is shit, what can I do?'" says Liv.

"Distinguish between facts and your opinion," says George. "Assuming you know what's going on isn't helpful. Instead of saying, 'You're this and you should this,' you should say something like, 'I can't understand what's going on, but what I see is this and I think this.'"

Ultimately, supporting people is about understanding that what they're going through has a tangible effect on their lives and their mental state, and helping them through it by being there for them. It doesn't mean constructing them as victims, and it doesn't give you a license to control their lives and choices for them—they're the only ones who are able to get themselves through it.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, contact the Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Follow Laetitia Laubscher on Twitter.

Still via 'Cut-Off'

Back in April, VICE travelled to Shoal Lake 40 and Cross Lake, two isolated Indigenous communities in Canada's north. The people of Cross Lake were dealing with a wave of suicides, while many First Nations across the country were suffering from a lack of clean drinking water—some living under boil water advisories for decades. The resulting documentary,Cut-Off, highlighted both the struggle and hope in these communities. As part of the doc, we brought Canada's newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau face-to-face with these realities during an historic visit to Shoal Lake 40.

Photo via Flickr user Tony Webster

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

Six years ago, I was killed by a guy with a baseball bat. The worst part was a cop yelling at me afterward, "Didn't you consider the bat a deadly weapon?"

I hadn't, and having my head bashed in assured that the lesson has stayed with me ever since. I'm around to talk about it because it was, of course, a simulation. The Duluth, Minnesota, police department had invited me, as then-editor of the local paper, and other prominent people in town to take the department's training on the use of force.

We were outfitted with nonlethal and lethal weapons, including a Taser and handgun (unloaded, shooting a laser beam), taking turns reacting to characters on a giant screen. Situations included an active school shooting, encounters with vagrants, and domestic calls, with an officer selecting the scenarios.

In one, I shot a baby in the leg. Everyone shot it—only some shot it in the head. In another, I tried talking the subject down, which didn't work because the simulator wasn't interactive. The officer operating it gave me credit for trying, even if I ended up dead that time, too.

The main take-away that day was the department protocol: Always use the next-highest level of force than the person confronting you. That was my mistake with the baseball bat guy: I was trying to Tase him—to no avail; the probes bounced off—after he'd introduced a deadly weapon.

"It gets to gun very quickly," Scott Lyons, Duluth's police chief from 1992 through 2002, says of the next-highest-level policy. A person using his fists is answered by a baton or pepper spray; for a hammer or knife, it's the gun.

But such policies—often referred to as the "use of force continuum"—are by no means universal. In the years since my time at bat in Duluth, simulators have become ubiquitous, and police trainers have expanded their repertoire, with an emphasis on ways to ramp down the level of force. If I say, "How about those twins?" and the bat guy decides to hit fly balls instead, I can re-holster my firearm.

"The buzzword right now is de-escalation,"says Mike Duke, a former Mesa, Arizona, police sergeant now with VirTra, a maker of high-end simulators. "Create an opportunity to use your verbal skills. That's your biggest tool." Trainers operating the new equipment can raise or lower the degree of threat depending on the participants' responses.

"Not all the scenarios are 'shoot/don't-shoot,'" Duke says, adding, "All are winnable. They're not 'gotcha' scenarios."

The use of force isn't just about choosing which weapon to use but whether to engage with a subject in the first place, says Lyons. Following his tenure as chief in Duluth, Lyons headed the law enforcement–training program at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in nearby Cloquet, Minnesota, for 11 years. There, in addition to simulations, he ran his students through cases of actual police-involved shootings.

A now-textbook case is the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The most critical decision point, says Lyons, may not have been the scuffle between Brown and Officer Darren Wilson at Wilson's squad car window, or later when Wilson shot the (reportedly) approaching Brown.

Rather, says Lyons, it may have been Wilson's decision to pursue Brown right after the initial struggle, when Brown was walking away from the squad car.

"In that case, maybe the best decision is 'I'm going to wait for some backup,'" says Lyons, instead of Wilson's decision to try apprehending Brown by himself.

(In an interview for an August 2015 article with the New Yorker, Officer Wilson is quoted describing his 2008 police academy instruction in terms that sound reminiscent of the training I took: "Wilson found the classwork fascinating, especially when he and other cadets role-played at handling stressful situations. If they made a mistake, Wilson said, the instructors pounced: "They're—bam!—in your face. Done. 'You're wrong.' 'It's over.' 'That person just died.'")

Refraining from giving chase may run counter to an officer's urge to stop a bad guy from getting away, especially if the officer is focused more on controlling the situation than preserving the peace.

In fact, says Maria Haberfeld, a professor of police science at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, policing in America is all about control.

"As much as people say it's about protection, the first thing that police officers learn about is the use of force," she says. Regardless of a department's policy, as long as officers have guns, "If things go the way police officers do not want them to go, they can use force."

Haberfeld is also less than impressed by simulators.

"With all due respect to all these simulations, you can never, ever, in a million years replicate the sense of fear that enters a police officer's mind when they're on the street," she says. The machines also promote unhelpful competition, she adds, as my group exhibited in comparing who shot the baby where.

"It's not just about training. It's about personal maturity and your personal background," continues Haberfeld, who served in the Israeli Defense Forces and later the Israel National Police. "People with military backgrounds are (wrongly) considered prime targets for recruitment. The only thing that military people are trained for is to kill. Nobody teaches the soldier to de-escalate."

To find candidates better at de-escalation, she says, "The only solution is to look at recruitment and selection."

Or look to police chiefs. A page from history suggests they could get their officers to practice de-escalation more often by mandating it.

In 1961, Albany, Georgia, police chief Laurie Pritchett learned that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was planning a mass protest against racial segregation. Unbeknownst to the civil rights leaders, Pritchett studied King's nonviolent techniques and ordered his officers to respond in kind.

"No violence, no dogs, no show of force," Pritchett recalled telling his officers in a 1985 interview for the documentary Eyes on the Prize.

"I said, 'If they do this, you will not use force. We're going to out-nonviolent (them.)'"

King left town with segregation in Albany unchanged. It would be two years before authorities in Birmingham, Alabama, turned police dogs and fire hoses on marchers, sparking worldwide outrage against the segregationists.

If Pritchett could use nonviolent tactics to thwart a campaign against oppression, what's stopping modern chiefs from employing similar methods for more routine policing?

"Laurie Pritchett shows backing off the use of force can be directed to any police force, at any time," says the Reverend Kristin Stoneking, executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The group trained King and earlier civil rights leaders in nonviolence as far back as the 1940s.

Stoneking says there are myriad ways to disarm a subject nonviolently if one is encouraged to do so. Police hostage negotiators do it routinely, and some of those skills, she says, could be taught to officers on the beat. Coming at it from a different perspective, Lyons agrees.

"There's a training called Verbal Judo. Look it up. It's very good," Lyons says. "It's what to do in conflict situations."

Maybe even when responding to the guy with the baseball bat.

This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Fotoblog Rare

Canadians flying with prescription marijuana should be prepared to show medical documentation and expect screening officers to verify it with on-site police, according to guidelines from the country's air transport authority.

Screenshot via Facebook

As the opioid crisis continues to claim lives daily across the US and Canada, media outlets are increasingly publishing reductive stories about people who have struggled with addiction and those who have lost loved ones. If you've been following along, you probably saw the viral photo of the Ohio couple overdosing in a vehicle with a small child sitting in the backseat that police released. But this week, a man in Ohio posted a video on Facebook of him telling his 8-year-old son that his mother has died from a drug overdose. His post has been shared over 700,000 times and has been picked up by numerous major media outlets.

The ferry that connects Shoal Lake 40 to the mainland broke down earlier this year, leading the chief to declare a state of emergency

The federal government has announced $4 million to expand a pilot program that ended unsafe drinking water advisories on three First Nations by training young Indigenous people to operate water treatment plants in their communities.

On an all new episode of Fuck, That's Delicious, Action heads to Italy to eat at the world's best restaurant, taste shellfish on the street, and hang out with Mario Batali.

Fuck, That's Delicious airs Thursdays at 10 PM ET/PT on VICELAND.

My Alex Hunter plays for Crystal Palace and is locked in a fearsome anti-banter contest with the club's latest signing, Harry Kane. Your Alex Hunter is almost certainly different. Such is the nature of Alex Hunter. Alex Hunter is all things to all people. Alex Hunter catches and refracts light in a thousand different ways.

Sample: perhaps your Alex Hunter scored on his debut for Manchester United, earned a gruff but appreciative nod from Anthony Martial about it, saw José Mourinho once in a corridor. Or: perhaps your Alex Hunter is at Everton, struggling to jack his plane seat backwards while Ross Barkley, behind him, stares blankly out of a Jetstream window. Alex Hunter is out there, currently, multiplied a hundred times, a million times, living a hundred thousand unique little lives. My Alex Hunter is trapped with Alan Pardew and Harry "perhaps his mo-cap performances could've been better if his jaw wasn't wired on upside-down" Kane. Such is life.

And so we unfold the odd-shaped crevices and ravine-like depths of FIFA's latest play mode, "The Journey".

The Journey begins with Hunter as a tiny child on a football pitch, doing tricks, and then he gets fouled so hard his father immediately leaves him. This is not even hyperbole on my part: he gets dispossessed, falls to the mud, and then his dad gets so mad that he leaves him forever. The Journey is built around two core concepts – daddy issues, and the complete fucked upness of the new FIFA penalty system – and both of these are evident within its first three minutes. Alex Hunter's father leaves, and that leaves Alex with me. He is the son I never thought I'd have.

It is important in The Journey to divide Alex Hunter from you, because you are not Alex Hunter (you are, as we have discussed, his emotionless and distant father, a god with cracks in his façade, manipulating his fate from afar). Alex Hunter is a gifted footballer who does not know whether he is mad at everything or very cool about everything. You are a fool with a controller. Alex Hunter is CAM with incredible growth potential and a Hovis advert for a grandfather. You are a gamer who cannot quite master free kicks. Alex Hunter isn't real, he is just the illusion of reality. You are the person trying to escape yours by diving into his.

My Alex Hunter is currently on loan at Newcastle and is too afraid to make a tackle in case he mistimes it and it affects his overall match rating. Your Alex Hunter could be different. Your Alex Hunter could be heaving Norwich up the league with a series of braces and cold, distant post-match interviews. Your Alex Hunter could be living in a hotel in Birmingham, trying to restore Aston Villa to its former glories. Every Alex Hunter that is born and dies within the FIFA multiverse is bound by the same struggles: form, game time, and the fact that he only has a choice of two best friends, a white guy with brown hair who is a dickhead and a white guy with brown hair who is ever so slightly less of a dickhead. Alex Hunter is cursed to spit "Yeah? Well let's see how you talk ON THE PITCH!" over and over and over, forever.

The confines of The Journey allow for this to feel important, because The Journey is essentially a quite bad episode of Hollyoaks mixed with literally every boy's fantasy, ever, and then played out with 20-minute game appearances and tedious training montages in between. You score on your debut then go and practise through balls in weird silence. You have a snarling match in the dressing room with another youngster then go and do dribbles. You play a game and you are told to look out for your match rating in the corner, don't fuck it up, don't misplace passes, and then you realise: who's really being trained, here? Alex Hunter or you? You pull out of a tackle you weren't 100 percent sure you were going to make, you contort an entire team's attacking move so the apex of it is Hunter: you are bending the will of the universe to make your tiny boy look better in front of Sean Dyche. You are playing FIFA, but you are also playing against FIFA. The Journey teaches you to play a form of the game that is technically useless.

The point of The Journey, of course, is for FIFA to assert dominance over PES, make a land grab on the football franchise battlefield, and to that end it is entirely pointless. You are either FIFA or you are PES in the same way your eyes are green, or you are left-handed, or you like rock music: it's not a choice, it's a hardwired preference, which you can try and explain away with logic but ultimately you know deep down it's completely based on fortune. I was PES through university and then somewhere around 2010 I switched to FIFA and that is me now, locked in. I do not think it is possible to be clear-minded and fair about this. You can have reasoned debates about it in the pub or on the sofa, but the point of it is: you can explain your preference for FIFA or PES the same way you can explain why you love a country just because you were born it in. There's no logic behind the connection, but the connection is strong enough for you to defend until you die.

My Alex Hunter is Özilesque – although first-season-at-Arsenal Özil, before they'd figured him out, roving eyes over the entire field, making passes to nobody because there wasn't anyone on the pitch on his level, nobody making runs only he saw. My Alex Hunter has assisted all five of Adam Armstrong's goals this season and he hasn't once run over to celebrate with him. My Alex Hunter is leaning closer towards being friends with the dickhead who legitimately says "BOOM!" instead of the dickhead who tweets him now and again with some lifeless banter. My Alex Hunter misses his father but doesn't realise his father is me, in another world, holding a PlayStation controller. My Alex Hunter stays cool in interviews throughout, and Puma won't give him a sponsorship deal because of it.

I suppose I am trying to find the point of The Journey, and there isn't one. It's sort of corny and shit and slow: FIFA is at its most frustrating when it is actively stopping you from playing FIFA, rolling you through layer upon layer of menus, making you do a training drill while the game loads, playing its infernal music, and The Journey is a lot of Not Playing FIFA occasionally intersected with A Bit Of Playing FIFA. It is telling me that playing FIFA the way I have always played FIFA isn't good enough, and that the realisation of every boy's dream of being a footballer is actually shit: picking a team, making allegiances on and off the pitch, endless training, the persistent need to acquire Twitter followers, the admin of being a superstar.

Where game modes like FIFA Ultimate Team – and you have to assume whoever invented FIFA Ultimate Team was given whatever the closest thing they have to a knighthood is at EA, essentially inventing a way to make FIFA players invest more money in a game they only play for a year anyway, somehow making a facet of the game that KSI can do videos of, yelling endlessly on YouTube while opening pack after pack after pack and saying "SWEATY BEAST" a lot – actively improved the franchise, The Journey doesn't. It's an odd, stilted game mode where you spend a lot of it being gently chided by a not-real French full back and getting supportive messages from your not-real mum.

But did I cheer like I'd hewn him out of clay myself when my Alex Hunter scored his first Newcastle goal? Yes. Do I hold my breath when he is in front of goal because it matters more, because he has a star over his head, because he's mine? Also yes. You are my son, Alex Hunter, and your intensely supportive mum my sexless bride. You are my son, Alex Hunter, and your success means everything to me.

@joelgolby

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Reconstruction of Geirfinnur's death, January 23rd, 1977.

Photographer Jack Latham's new book, Sugar Paper Theories, explores the infamous and still tantalising "Gudmundor and Geirfinnur" case, one of Iceland's most perplexing criminal investigations.

The disappearance of two seemingly unconnected men over the course of ten months in 1974 led to widespread conjecture and fear across the then-young nation, and ultimately to a problematic police investigation that resulted in the confession of a group of six young people to the murders of the missing men. The case touched on issues as diverse as Iceland's folkloric elves and 20th century fears of drugs and counterculture. The real issue, however, was that it turned out that none of those who confessed seemed to have any memory of the events in question.

Today the case seems a textbook example of police coercion, false confession, mass hysteria and scapegoating. Latham's book beautifully touches on the case's many aspects – capturing the island's stunning beauty, the murky archival police evidence, the conspiracies that still swirl around the case and the key figures involved. Alongside the photographic aspects of the book is an account of the case written by Gisli Gudjonsson, a forensic psychologist involved in the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four cases, and an expert on false memory.

I spoke with Latham about the project.

Shortly after his retirement in 1996, chief superintendent Gísli Guðmundsson made a formal declaration that, in 1977, he had been prevented from investigating a possible alibi for Sævar for the night of Guðmundur's disappearance.

VICE: How did you come to be so fascinated by the case? I remember reading a BBC feature on it some time ago and finding it fascinating, but clearly your level of engagement is something altogether different.
Jack Latham: I was doing a lot of research at the time into Icelandic folklore, in particular the stories of huldufolk that kidnap people without a trace. I spent some time talking it over with some of my peers, and a friend pointed me in the direction of the case. The BBC piece was a great resource at the start of the project, and it just developed on from there. All the suspects served sentences, were released about a year later and got on with their lives. Public opinion has shifted dramatically since the 70s – the country is now largely aware of what happened to them during the investigation. At the time of me doing this interview the case still hasn't been reopened.

How long did this project take you to complete?
I first started shooting the work in 2014. Actually, VICE followed me around for the first five days to make an episode of Picture Perfect. In December of 2015 I was awarded the Bar Tur Photobook Award, which enabled me to turn the work into a book, but I continued shooting up until June of 2016.

Disappearance #2

From a photographic point of view, what is it about the case that offers so much? I suppose it opens up so many avenues for your work, from the use of archival imagery to portraiture and landscape?
It's an interesting and challenging thing to photograph. I think right at the start I was met with the problem of "photographing the past". A lot of the landscapes and places have changed so much since the time of the arrests that at times it seemed almost impossible to find certain areas. It was only when I started to think more about memories and how details are often misremembered that I used the case files to structure the narrative. It was this grey area of truth and fiction that I set out to make the work – almost retelling a story, the same way the police told the suspects what had happened. With a foundation of truth, but with blurry details.

How did traditional folklore come into the case and the coverage of it? And how did you go about bringing that into the book? It's a peculiarly Icelandic concern to have around a double missing persons case.
Storytelling in Iceland is used as a method to teach children important lessons: the idea of elves kidnapping you during a snowstorm translates to the fact that blizzards are dangerous. It's this idea of storytelling within the culture of Iceland that I initially found so interesting. This case in particular, where six people were told a story under such strenuous conditions that they eventually believed it, I think it holds a certain reminiscence of folklore.

Conspiracy theorist #3

There are a number of portraits of conspiracy theorists in Sugar Paper Theories – are these people still actively working on the case, or were they more opening up their long-sealed archives to you? And what are some of the conspiracies that persist?
Yes, absolutely . They've actually become really good friends of mine at this point. To be honest, their conspiracies are so long and detailed you'd really need to know all of the key players to make any sense of it. Even then, some of it is quite out there! It's a really hard case to summarise, unfortunately. There was a moment while making the book that we thought of not using the term "conspiracy theorists", as it has negative connotations. What they have done is truly incredible. Some have spent decades going through case documents, police reports and eyewitness testimonies, to try to piece together what had happened. One of them mentioned to me – which you can see in the VICE video – that my starting on this case is like walking into the woods, and that once I find myself deep enough I'll never be able to find my way out.

I do have my own theories about the case but they are kept close to my chest.

The photos in the book break down into distinct groups – the silver prints of archival images, still lives of evidence and materials, the portraits, the landscapes... Was there anything behind that decision beyond distinctly differentiating the archival images from your own? Was the obfuscation that came with the printing process a reflection of your feeling about the investigation itself?
I think the book's design is largely a reflection of the amount of source material I managed to gather while making the work. When Ben and Harry Ruby Russell and Gisli, we were able to make sense of it all. We worked with the conspiracy theorists to curate the newspaper clippings. The archival silver prints were taken directly out of the case files. This idea of faded images was something that kept coming up in conversations while making the work.

To us today this case looks like a textbook example of young, marginal people being forced into false confessions without legal representation. But what was the feeling around those people you spoke to? The key suspects still seem surprisingly reticent about much of what happened, less angry than one might expect. And is there a sense of guilt among those involved in pushing them toward their guilty pleas?
I agree – I think there was a certainly feeling of, "Well, these kids will do." It's actually amazing getting to know them. They are all remarkable in their own ways. Erla, who I'm probably closest to out of them all, is a huge inspiration, and while I wouldn't want to speak for them about them feeling angry or embittered, I just hope that if I'm ever faced with a similar situation in my life I can show the same resilience and courage. I spoke to ex-prison guards and police officers who worked on the case. A few of them acted as whistleblowers, speaking out about the mistreatment of the suspects. I think there is a collective feeling of wanting this case re-examined – it's a mark on the history of Iceland's police force.

What was your aim with the book? Is there an aspect of your wanting to warn people about these sorts of situations, or is the project more anchored in an artistic ideal?
For me, Sugar Paper Theories was an attempt of telling a very complicated case about false memories in a way that reflected the notions of memory. Hopefully the book gets people to engage with the subject matter in a way they wouldn't normally think to. The ultimate goal was to make more people outside of Iceland aware of the case, and it seems to be working.

Gísli Guðjónsson

Do you see the case – and the book, by extension – as having a part of its narrative being general demonisation of youth culture or "others"? It seems relevant that these young people were odd by the standards of their elders, one of Polish extraction, rockers or "longhairs" with criminal records for minor crimes. Or do you see it more as being about a microcosm – this tiny island and its fears?
It certainly played a part. But you have to understand that at the time of the case, Iceland was under strict alcohol laws, and for a very small nation I imagine being different was quite the radical thing. The reason the first chapter in the book is about the cultural landscape of what Iceland was like in the 70s is because only there, during that time, with everything going on in the political and judicial systems, could this happen on such a scale.

The book also includes excerpts from the diary of Gudjon, one of the suspects. This was only made public fairly recently, but his entries seem to clearly illustrate his diminishing faith in his own mind, memory and certainty that he was not involved. How did you come to have access to the diary for the book, and how central to the case do you feel this personal account is?
His diaries were only discovered in the past few years and have had huge implications on the case. Gisli was really key to us reading them. They've only been translated into English, and this is one of first times that the diary entries have been made public. Gudjon became a minister when he left prison, and his churches feature throughout the book. This idea of a red leather-bound diary being discovered: that is the thing that has reignited the case and is something quite poetic. The diary entries in the book are the clearest form of memory distrust syndrome Gisli has ever seen. So the implication of coercion and false memories on the case is huge.

You can buy 'Sugar Paper Theories' from HERE Press, here.

See more photos from the book below:

Kristján #6. Reconstruction of Geirfinnur's death, January 23rd, 1977. "Kristján Viðar shows police how they held Geirfinnur". From original police archive.

Ragnar Aðalsteinsson, the lawyer who launched Sævar's appeal in 1996, now representing Erla and Guðjón.

Police artists made a clay portrait of the man seen at the Harbour Shop on the night of Geirfinnur's disappearance. The head was nicknamed Leirfinnur – "leir" being Icelandic for "clay".

Sighting #2

Kristofer Weston at Mr. S Leather in San Francisco. Photo by the author

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Kristofer Weston has a boy, two sirs, a pup, and a pig, and he likes to push them to their limits. "Once your hand is inside," he said, "you can feel their heartbeat."

The pup is not literally a pup, and the pig is not literally a pig—they're men, whose kinks range from playful to filthy. And they're certainly not the typical friend group of a man enjoying his middle age, but Weston's life is anything but typical. He's been a fixture of the gay porn and BDSM community for decades, and these days he's reflecting on his comfortable transition from a "boy" to a "daddy," terms that mean different things to different people. It's a popular arrangement in the gay community, one that plays out much as it sounds: younger gay men paired with more mature partners. It can refer to anything from a romantic relationship that bridges decades to formally recognized community leaders to a hybridized mentor-and-student arrangement.

When Weston entered the kink community, he was decidedly a boy.

"It kind of was by accident," he said. "I was a horny exhibitionist teenager, and answered an ad in LA for wrestling porn." It was 1988, and he was blond, thin, and hairless. He was billed as a water polo player and made $150 for his first gig, to be followed by many more. "It paid for college," he said.

But he was after more than just money. He found kinky sex cathartic and sought out a mentor who could show him the ropes, discovering an eager daddy in legendary porn director Mikal Bales. Also known as Daddy Zeus, Bales brought young Weston to a cabin outside San Francisco with whipmaster Fred Katz and a handsome leather titleholder named Henry Romanowski for an early BDSM experience.

"They tied the three of us with our elbows together in a circle," Weston recalled, "and Fred went around and flogged us. And just being with our three faces right there next to each other—I was 22 with these two big, beefy daddies, taking it as hard as them, and they're blowing their energy into my face, and I'm feeling the energy from the whip and blowing it back into theirs. When it was done, the high that I felt was like, Holy shit. Oh my God. It just made me want more."

"I think lots of people don't have the opportunity to experience the things they want to," he said, sighing contentedly. Instead of merely watching or reading about something like that flogging fantasy—an experience many would love to take part in—he went out and did it.

Daddy Zeus tutored Weston from 1992 to 1995. "It was comforting to have a male figure in my life, especially in my early 20s," he said. "He was very protective. Especially when you're leaving college, going out into the big world and there's a lot of fear and self doubt, it was nice to have someone older and wiser."

Whether it's called daddy/boy today, or philetor/parastates in ancient Crete, it's an arrangement that's been a mainstay of same-sex-attracted men for centuries. In Weston's case, the daddies in his life discovered that he had an aptitude for the business side of porn, and he was soon managing an adult store before founding a porn-distribution company in the mid 90s. He moved to directing porn full-time at gay porn studio Falcon studios in the late 90s and stayed until earlier this year; now he runs social media for San Francisco adult store Mr. S Leather and still regularly directs porn.

Being a successful businessman over the past several decades has come at a cost—that is, the passage of those decades.

Just as his beard was turning gray, Kristopher left an unfulfilling decade-long relationship that had kept him monogamous. He was ready to explore again and worried that his age would be a barrier.

But then: "There was this pup," Weston said—an increasingly popular queer identity involving canine roleplay—and for a moment he flashed the shy grin of a boy. "Amp. We hit it off, and I told him flat out: 'I can't do a relationship right now, I just got out of a bad one...' And he said, 'That's OK, I'm a puppy. I'm just here to make you happy.'"

Weston poses alongside Pup Amp. Photo by the author

After they'd been playing together for a few months, Amp asked, "What do I call you? Sir doesn't sound right... can I call you daddy?"

"NO! What do you mean, 'daddy?'" Weston had responded, aghast. Then he realized that he was two years older than Amp's biological father, and tentatively adopted the title. Before long, every pup in San Francisco was calling him Daddy Weston, and he found that the title lent him an air of authority and command. He now wears it with pride.

"It just kind of crept up on me when I wasn't looking," he said. "I'd always been the Boy. And then I looked in the mirror and was like, OK—I'm the Daddy... I'm bigger now, I've got more of a beer belly. Growing a beard put me over the top on that one."

Being a daddy, Weston learned, comes with perks and responsibilities—chief among them training younger boys to appreciate classic culture. Early on, Weston discovered that Amp had never seen the 1987 movie Moonstruck. "I didn't know what to say. 'What? How could you not? That's impossible.'" Working with another mentor in Atlanta, he developed a list of 97 films he insists his charges watch, from 1950's All About Eve to 1983's Yentl. They span a wide range of genres, but in general, the films are touchstones that he feels are necessary for having grown-up conversations.

Besides Pup Amp, today Weston also has his boy, two sirs, and a pig who likes humiliation (during one recent escapade, Weston staked him out in the sun, pissed on him, and inserted his fist into the man's ass). So are they boyfriends? Not exactly.

"That's one I'm still trying to figure out," he said, haltingly, as he thought through his feelings. "What I like about this is—when I get into relationships, that two-year-in mark where everything gets mundane... I don't have that with any of these people. I get to have these fun sexually intimate experiences for a weekend, and I get to move on to the next one. I never get tired of any of them."

When I wondered if any of those relationships could become more serious, Weston looked down. "Maybe I've been so hurt by my last relationship that I'm not allowing that right now," he said.

He may be a Daddy, but that doesn't mean he's above learning something new about himself.

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