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This Quebec Gamer Clan Really Wants You to Know They Hate Gay People

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The photo taken of Clément on Halloween. Photo via Facebook

The members of ATG don't have any qualms about people knowing they "hate gays."

Sporting shirts that say "If you're gay, don't approach me, I'll kill you" in public and dropping quotes like "I hate gays for real" in interviews with media, this Quebec-based gamer clan really want you to know they don't like gay people.

On Halloween, one of their members, Julien Clément, was spotted wearing the anti-gay shirt at a haunted farm event in Ottawa. A woman, sitting behind him, shocked by the blatant and violent homophobia on his T-shirt took a photo and threw it up on Facebook. The post quickly went viral.

Dr. Kristopher Wells, the faculty director of the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies at the University of Alberta, called it "very concerning" to know that this isn't just a lone wolf situation.

"The shirt goes beyond being offensive," Wells told VICE. "I think the Ottawa police and the RCMP domestic terrorism group should be investigating this kind of shirt.

"With this kind of rhetoric, it puts citizens on edge wondering when or if this kind of language turn into actual violence. What would actually happen if a gay person went up to these people and did want to, you know, shake their hand?"

Wells said that the shirt in itself is violent and some critics, including lawyers, have said they believe it violates Section 319 of the Canadian Criminal Code which governs hate speech.

This is a bunch of winners right here. Photo via Facebook

"These are not Canadian values," said Wells. "These kinds of actions put terror and fear into an entire group of people. What would happen if those t-shirts said 'I want to kill black people?' What about Jewish people or Muslim people?"

Clément told Metro Ottawa that the name ATG comes from the name of his "gaming clan," and his Facebook pages features a number of men who sport the acronym. Clément did not grant VICE's request for an interview.

Another member of the group, Yan Miller, said that he believes he should be allowed to sport the T-shirts because of freedom of speech.

"It sucks we're not allowed to have what we want," Miller told CTV. "They're allowed to have a flag and have a parade but we can't have a shirt?"

Two of the men pictured in Clément's profile with ATG hoodies did not have private Facebook pages have been trolled with photoshopped pictures of Clément with a cartoon dick in his mouth and links to sites like Lemon Party and Meat Spin.

Ottawa police have said that they are investigating the incident.

Follow Mack on Twitter.


Liquid Fentanyl Has Been Discovered in Canada For the First Time

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Hamilton police found liquid fentanyl in the city in May. Police handout photo

Hamilton police have discovered what they believe is a first in Canada: liquid fentanyl.

During a raid that took place in May, the force seized what it believed to be GHB, but this week Health Canada tests revealed the translucent substance is actually fentanyl, according to a police news release.

"In consultation with various Health Canada labs, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, it is believed that this is the only identified seizure of Fentanyl in a liquid state within Canada," Const. Steve Welton said in a recorded statement.

Fentanyl overdoses were responsible for 555 deaths in BC and more than 150 in Alberta so far in 2016. They were the leading cause of opioid-related deaths in Ontario last year, with more than 190 fatal overdoses.

The opioid, which is exponentially stronger than morphine, is currently being sold on the black market in powder, pill, and patch form. It's also increasingly being cut into drugs like heroin, cocaine, and MDMA, often without the user's knowledge.

Read more: We Asked Experts How to Solve Canada's Opioid Crisis

Speaking to City News, Detective Const. Adam Brown said the substance, "wasn't mixed with anything, no heroin, strictly the fentanyl solution in liquid, which was troubling."

Brown called the discovery "scary" but said its potency isn't yet known.

Regardless, he said fentanyl is "extremely toxic to the human body." Cops reportedly had to handle the drugs wearing protective suits.

Michelle Arnot, a pharmacology professor at the University of Toronto, told VICE the main concern with liquid fentanyl would be dosage.

"Fentanyl is very potent therefore small increases in dose can have significant adverse effects i.e. overdose," she said, noting that a person using liquid fentanyl would have to be extremely certain about the concentration in their particular batch.

As it stands, Arnot said most fentanyl on the street is injected, but the extraction process (i.e. from a patch) can remove some of the potency. This wouldn't be the case with a liquid.

"Small errors in the injection of liquid fentanyl may result in significant 'leaps' in response."

Brown said an additional concern is that liquid fentanyl doesn't have any visible red flags.

"People see translucent liquid, and it could be anything: water or liquid fentanyl."

Sam Gutman, a BC-based emergency doctor and founder of Rockdoc Consulting which provides harm reduction services at music festivals, said he could see liquid fentanyl potentially being used to spike drinks or being confused with GHB.

But other than that, he doesn't think the discovery is that big a deal. He pointed out that inconsistent potency is an issue regardless of which form of fentanyl is being consumed.

"To me it's just another form of the same drug that just makes it a little more troubling and easier to do bad things with," he said.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Why This Club Owner Is Organizing Sex Parties for HIV-Positive Men

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Richard Keldoulis. Photo by Rebecca Camphens

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

Since 2012, Amsterdam's Club Church has been hosting an event called Hello Pozzums, targeted specifically at gay men who are seropositive for HIV. Recently, they also started welcoming "negative" men, who take the HIV prevention drug PrEP (or Truvada) to these parties.

Club Church is a bastion of free sex—the only real sex club in Amsterdam, where the parties are all about getting some no-strings-attached action. The club is full of cruise spots where people can fuck, and for those who prefer to do that in the dark, there's a dark room as well.

The club was founded in 2008 by Australian Richard Keldoulis and his business partner Wim Peeks. While the Dutch capital is undergoing intense gentrification, with a number of its gay bars and saunas closing down over the last few years, Keldoulis and Peeks remain intent on keeping the scene alive. Besides Club Church, they also run the city's last gay sauna, Sauna Nieuwezijds. I spoke to Keldoulis about PrEP, sex parties, and Amsterdam's changing gay scene.

VICE: How did you become a club owner?
Richard Keldoulis: Before I started Church, I had a kiosk near the Homomonument, which I opened in 1998. We sold souvenirs and organized events on Queen's Day, Gay Pride, etc. We did that for about ten years. During those years, we occasionally threw parties in Club LA, which used to be located right here in this building. Eventually we got the opportunity to buy the club, and that's how it all started.

How has the city changed since you arrived, 18 years ago?
Things are awful now. With every year, the number of gay spots that are closing grows. It feels like there isn't anyone doing anything new at the moment. When I arrived here, in 1990, there were 34 dark rooms in Amsterdam. Nowadays, the only dark rooms are situated in gay bars. And there are no other clubs like ours. Some people think that's a sign of growing equality, because gay people have started to go to mixed bars. I think it's a shame.

Why?
I think a lively gay scene fuels creativity in urban environments, as Richard Florida once wrote. I think there's always going to be a clash between cultures, where one side goes: "Just act normal" and the other side goes: "Normal makes life dull." But a big gay scene fuels the creative class and questions what "normal" is. You shouldn't strive for uniformity—that's bad for the city.

"After the discovery of penicillin, there was a sweet period when people were not afraid of deadly STDs and sex was free. Then AIDS came along in 1981, and fucked it up for everyone. Hopefully now with PrEP we can pick up where we left off with the sexual revolution."

Was the lively gay scene at the time the reason that you came to Amsterdam?
Absolutely. I lived in Japan for a while until my visa ran out. So, I thought about where I wanted to go next. In Amsterdam, I found freedom—I could smoke weed and just be myself. The Netherlands was very progressive at the time. When I got here, I saw dicks on the local TV channel! You'd never see that in Australia. The Dutch are much more open about sex. And a club like Club Church wouldn't be able to survive, where I come from.

Don't you think that gay clubs are disappearing because of apps that help you find a fuck buddy with the touch of a button?
That may be a factor, but they also have the internet in Madrid and Berlin, and those cities still have a huge gay scene.

What's the best part of owning a sex club?
The dark room is sort of my natural habitat, my playground. I started working in this business out of personal interest. And sex sells, right? Now I can combine a successful business with my battle for sexual freedom.

When you started throwing parties for seropositive men in 2012, you wrote: "'People with HIV are still being discriminated in the cruising scene. HIV-positive men want to be able to enjoy an event, where having HIV is the norm, where there's no stigma. Club Church wants to create a space where HIV-positive men can feel physically uninhibited, where one's HIV status is not an obstacle." Now you also welcome seronegative men that take PrEP. Why?
We want to do away with the taboo around HIV, also within the gay scene. We wanted to create a space for men that are seropositive, so they too can have unprotected sex. But we've also known for a number of years now, that when you're positive and you're taking your meds, you're not at risk of infecting others. Moreover, people that take PrEP cannot get HIV. So gay sex keeps getting safer. In the end, the most dangerous men are the young guys, who don't know their status.

Do you feel responsible for the well-being of your guests?
I've always felt responsible for their safety. We have free condoms lying around everywhere in the club, and we actually used to go around checking if people were using them, but we don't do that anymore because, as I said, PrEP makes things less risky. But at the end of the day, it's not for me to tell you how to have sex.

How do you feel about HIV becoming less and less of a threat thanks to those new drugs?
It's fantastic news, obviously. You know, when penicillin became available during the Second World War, syphilis suddenly became much less of a problem. That's why until the 1980s there was a sweet period, when people were not that afraid of deadly STDs and sex was pretty free. Then AIDS came along in 1981, and fucked it up for everyone.

Hopefully now we can pick up where we left off with the sexual revolution. I'm already enjoying more freedom now. I used to religiously use condoms, but ever since I got on PrEP, I got rid of the condoms and, most important, the fear.

Nearly Half of Canadian Students Can Barely Afford to Eat

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Get used to this kids. Photo via Flikr user Marc Tarlock

While jokes about students only eating ramen packs and KD seem to be as old as education itself, a new survey suggests it's not a laughing matter.

About 40 percent of Canadian students are considered "food insecure" meaning that they have "limited or inadequate access to food due to insufficient finances," according to the survey.

The survey, entitled Hungry for Knowledge, was conducted by Meal Exchange, a non-profit organization seeking to"eradicate hunger in Canada." The report was published last month and included data from five Canadian university campuses.

Over half of the students surveyed reported that they skip buying healthy food in order to cover essential expenses like rent and tuition.

The results found that "nearly two in five students surveyed experience some form of food insecurity." Of the 4,013 students that completed the survey, 31 percent were found to be "food insecure" while 8.3 percent were fell in the category of "severe food insecurity."

Only 31.5 percent of respondents cited employment as their primary source of income, while 58 percent said that they "regularly rely on a few low-cost foods in order to avoid running out of money to buy more food."

The Meal Exchange has identified 104 hunger relief programs on Canadian university campuses that aim to combat food insecurity faced by current undergrad students. The various programs consist of "physical food banks or pantries, anonymous food lockers, free grocery store gift cards, and hunger related financial aid," an increase from 51 in 2004

The decades-long shit spiral of rising tuition and increased costs of living have finally started resulting in some government action, although not the kind that puts food on your table. The Ontario government revised their student loan policy so that, as of November 1, recent graduates are not required to begin repaying their fees until they earn at least $25,000 a year. Provincial governments across the country have begun revising their student loan programs, with Newfoundland and Labrador switching its loan program entirely over to grants.

Despite such minor concessions, the survey concluded by saying that "as the cost of tuition and living continues to increase, along with the demand for highly educated and skilled workers, food insecurity among post-secondary students will continue to be an important health, social, and economic issue."

Until then, KD and no-name ketchup it is.

Follow Lisa Power on Twitter.

Meet Donald Trump's Grassroots Campaigners

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On an all new episode of BALLS DEEP, Thomas Morton meets Ralph Case, Trump's top volunteer in southern Ohio, and the band of Trump supporters he's mustered to get out the Trump vote.

Then, on an all new episode of Dead Set on Life, Matty Matheson heads to Hanoi, Vietnam, to check out the capital's growing restaurant scene and meet up with a few French ex-pats to sample some of the best French-inspired Vietnamese dishes.

BALLS DEEP airs Thursdays at 10 PM followed by Dead Set on Life at 10:30 PM on VICELAND.

Want to know if you get VICELAND? Head here to find out how to tune in.

Gun Violence Researchers Actually Got Some Federal Funding

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Photo via Flickr user Peretz Partensky

This post originally appeared on the Trace.

Federal dollars for research into gun violence are hard to come by, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reluctant to step over a 20-year congressional restriction on funding firearms studies.

A rare bright spot emerged last week, however, when the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) awarded more than $3.3 million to five private institutions for firearms research. The funding will support inquiries into some of the most pressing questions regarding gun violence, including what leads some young people to carry guns, which state laws might reduce or increase firearms deaths, and how often civilians are shot by law enforcement officers.

The funding is encouraging, "but it's still very small potatoes," says David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, whose plan for a study of police shootings was awarded more than $650,000. Hemenway said he applied for the funding after the NIJ, the Department of Justice's research arm, put out word earlier this year that it wanted to back more gun-related projects.

"It's a nice grant," Hemenway says. "But in terms of the size of the gun problem in the United States, the total amount of federal research dollars is minuscule compared to HIV or obesity."

Researchers have been stymied by the scant federal dollars available for supporting research into firearms and gun violence. The CDC—with $5 billion in funds to give away annually—has avoided the issue since 1996, when Republicans in Congress, spurred by the National Rifle Association, passed a legislative amendment stipulating that none of the agency's budget can be used to "advocate or promote gun control." The agency fears that any perceived violation of that rule could result in cuts to its overall funding, though critics close to the CDC say it could do more without risking running afoul of the provision.

In 2012, the National Institute of Health became subject to its own restrictions on gun violence research, but has nonetheless cautiously supported some new studies on firearm-related deaths and injuries. Over the past four years, the agency has awarded a total of $3.2 million for gun violence research. As the Trace has reported, a single cancer study can cost twice as much. (The NIJ did not respond to requests for comment.)

"While $3 million worth of research is going to contribute, it's not going to solve the problem, and we shouldn't kid ourselves," says Mark Rosenberg, who served as the founding director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control in the 1990s. "Putting very small amounts of money into research isn't going to make a very big difference with this problem. It's a problem of life and death, and we should treat it as such."

Every year, more than 118,000 Americans are injured by firearms, resulting in more than 33,000 deaths.

Researcher Karen Abram and her team at Northwestern University were awarded $425,000 by the NIJ to investigate if an adolescent's exposure to firearms can affect the likelihood of being shot or committing a gun crime later in life. They hope to identify what factors—like marriage, education, or a change in socioeconomic status—might alter a child's path toward safer outcomes.

Abram says she pursued the grant because no similar research exists. "We looked in the literature, and there are very few studies—certainly longitudinal studies—investigating firearms violence over time," she says. "A lot of researchers were excited about this solicitation by the DOJ."

Calls for reinstating government-backed gun violence research have come from as high up as the White House. Shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, President Barack Obama issued an executive order instructing the CDC to relaunch gun studies. The agency ignored the call. In his last three budget requests, Obama has also requested $10 million specifically for the CDC to study the issue. Each was refused by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

In April, a consortium of 141 medical organizations sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to restore funding for gun violence research at the CDC.

Linda Degutis is one former CDC official who believes the agency's aversion to gun violence research won't change soon. She resigned from her post as Injury Center director in 2014 over her employer's unwillingness to study firearms. "It may be that perhaps the CDC isn't the place to put a lot of the funding for this kind of research," she says. "It may be that it's better to have it in other agencies, and the DOJ is certainly one place."

Degutis now thinks that proponents of federally funded studies of gun violence might find more success advocating to shore up other government resources that can be utilized by academic and private researchers, pointing to the National Violent Death Reporting System as one example. Widely considered the most comprehensive surveillance program for violent deaths, NVDRS nonetheless currently does not operate in ten states. In March, researchers using the program found that the FBI and CDC have been drastically undercounting the number of fatal police shootings. Degutis argues that the program would be an even more powerful tool if expanded to all 50 states and the territories.

But other experts, like Susan Sorenson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies violence and firearms, aren't ready to give up on the CDC. She says the agency needs to work in conjunction with the DOJ and NIH: The agencies have different missions, and can only do so much on their own.

"There's opportunity for wonderful collaborations across these federal agencies," Sorenson says. "But you need to have all the partners at the table to really address these issues."

A version of this article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow the Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

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Relapse: Facing Canada's Opioid Crisis: A Young Woman Recounts Her Fentanyl Addiction and Painful Recovery

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A'lisa Ramsey was just 16 when she first started using opiates. She started with painkillers like Tylenol with codeine and Percocet and eventually moved on to Oxycontin. Or at least she thought she was using oxy, when in reality, she'd become unknowingly addicted to fentanyl.

The powerful drug took over her life, eventually leaving her homeless and isolated from friends and family. In this animation, she recounts how the slow creep of addiction consumed her and her painful journey to recovery.

Read her full story

Follow Amil on Twitter

Why are Virginity Auctions a Thing?

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The site auctioning off Katherine Stone's virginity. Screenshot

Her name is Katherine Stone.

Stone is 21-years-old, has long black hair, speaks in a shy voice and if you have the right amount of money, you can take hervirginity.

The virginity auction—being done through the Kit-Kat brothel where Stone works in Nevada—currently sits at more than $400,000. Stone's says she's selling her virginity to help her family after an electrical fire took their home.

Virginity auctions are nothing new. Every few years or so a new one seems to pop up in the mainstream media but few, if any, ever come to fruition. The most recent high profile example is that of Elizabeth Raine, a medical student who announced in 2014 that she was selling her virginity online and was offered $801,000 but cancelled at the last moment.

There was also a Peruvian woman who turned down $1.5 million for her virginity.

More than a few questions spring to mind. Why would people pay so much to be someone's first? How did virginity become so fetishized that some people are willing to pay over a million dollars for it?

READ MORE: Things You Learn as a Virgin in Your 20s

According to sexologist Shan Boodram the main reason is control.

"Virginity auctions are outdated and antiquated," Boodram told VICE.

She said that the reason men are attracted to virgins in a primal sense is that if a man sleeps with a virgin he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a child he has with that woman is his.

"Virginity has such a high price on it because we still have that need to identify. It's outdated... the idea and obsession around virginity is just stupid and I wish people thought thoroughly on why people put such a high price on it, literally and figuratively."

This element of controlling a woman's sexuality is why male virginity auctions are practically non-existent.

Therese Shechter, the director of the documentary How to Lose Your Virginity, said that our culture defines virginity in a certain way which brings along built-in value judgements. Almost all of these judgements are based around the idea of women as property—property that loses its value when it is "used."

"There is a prevalent belief that a woman's worth is genuinely calculated on her sexual history," said Schecter. "That is whether a woman has pledged virginity to her father at a purity ball or is being slut shamed because her shorts are too short. All of this goes into the idea that a woman's worth is based on her sexual choices."

"It prevails because this is still the way our culture is structured. It's only recently that women have been able to make their own decisions in their sexual lives. It's prevalent for the same reason that other things—racism, homophobia—are still prevalent"

In her videos and on social media, Stone says that she is taking control of her sexuality not losing it. Boodram says that may be the case and, in the long run, it isn't Stone who she is worried about.

"People are industrious and they will always look for ways to make money," said Boodram. "A carpenter is going to build something, and a woman if she has something that is a value for society and you can make money you're going to be inclined to sell that off.

"When you're thinking about industries in right and wrong terms, I always err on the side of the users as being the ones that we should be trying to reform versus the supplier."

But those "users" who are super into virgins exist, and they exist in droves. Think of all the abstinence balls, the sex education programs promoting virginity, the movies where the gorgeous female virgin comes walking down the hallway with a badass 80s soundtrack behind her, Madonna's biggest hit, the Barely Eighteen pornos and the super weird Silver Ring Thing.

A woman's virginity is still held at an almost mythical status in western society.

"I think there is definitely still a large aspect , as you can see from the current election, fixated and obsessed with owning and controlling a woman's sexuality. And I do believe the kind of people that find bidding on a virgin alluring fit into that category," said Boodram.

Schecter said that if she had to guess why the idea is still around is because of the culture men grow up in.

"Our movies, music, our utter lack of sex education where people don't even know how many holes a woman has," she said. "It's all around us, it's everything."

READ MORE:I Went to a Promise Ring Show and Took an Abstinence Pledge

"I think it's more interesting to ask guys why do they think they have magic penises. Like what are they thinking, what do they think they're doing, what do they think they're taking? They must think they're taking something if they're going to pay that much money to do this."

Katherine Stone and Ron Jeremy. Photo via twitter

On the website auctioning off her virginity it states that Stone "has the one thing that every man in the world wants—and that's her virginity, and it's that priceless female commodity that this brave and selfless girl is putting up on the auction block to rescue her family from ruin and destitution."

The men who are advocating for other men to sleep with virgins are, obviously, a little hard to find. But on some of the less fun websites on the internet you can find it if you are so inclined.

The majority of pro-virgins are focused on finding one and making her their wife, which is a little different than virginity auctions. The latter is more about being someone's first sexual encounter—but Boodram says the underlying drive is the same.

READ MORE: Inside the Group of Straight Men Who Are Swearing Off Women

"I feel often when it comes to sexuality we attribute things to magic and feeling as opposed to biological motivators and we don't assess or give enough weight to them," she said.

"I think that the initial draw towards virgins is, again, a biologically motivated decision and because we don't acknowledge has made men want to know how many partners they have had."

"Why do people talk about it, saying she's giving away her 'most precious gift.' Like the greatest thing about her is that she has an undisturbed vagina. Why is that her most precious gift? Maybe she's a great pianist or maybe she is just really good with dogs," she added.

"I don't think her most precious gift is the status of her vagina."

Follow Mack on Twitter.


Some Folks Really Want to Deport Maryam Monsef

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Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Mosef. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

There are lots of dangerous games.

Hockey. Football. Man.

But I have to say that the most dangerous game is the one that the Toronto Sun is currently playing.

In column after column, Sun writer Candice Malcolm has built an elaborate conspiracy theory whereby Democratic Reform Minister Maryam Monsef has concocted a false personal history to further her career: One where she was born in Afghanistan but moved to Iran, instead of being an Afghan citizen born in Iran.

Since the end of September, Malcolm has written 14 articles going after the minister for her supposed birthplace duplicity. Along the way, Malcolm has picked up a troll army of furious alt-right Twitter denizens who have spun their own version of Donald Trump's unhinged "lock her up" chants: #DeportMonsef.

In her most recent column, "Why the Maryam Monsef case matters," the columnist has gone after myself (a "popular blogger") and CTV correspondent Glen McGregor for keeping our readers in the dark about this superduper important story. She paints herself as a hardened journalist who just wants to report the truth.

OK. Let's start with what we know.

Monsef's original version of events was that she was born in Herat, Afghanistan and that her family frequently travelled back-and-forth across the border. Her father, when she was young, was killed at that Afghan-Iran border. After that, she and her family fled to Iran, where they were unable to work, and then travelled to Pakistan, Jordan, and finally Canada. They arrived here when she was 11.

Thanks to some reporting from the Globe & Mail, we know that Monsef wasn't born in Herat, Afghanistan but instead in Mashhad, Iran.

The drive between the two cities is about 370 kilometres, or four hours and 40 minutes. Monsef's citizenship is still Afghan, as Iran did not offer citizenship to refugees who came across the border in the initial fighting that plagued Afghanistan with the rise of the Taliban in the 1980s.

And so, for sure, Monsef's original story got a crucial detail wrong. She didn't travel to Mashhad as a child to become an Afghan refugee, she was born in Mashhad as an Afghan refugee. There is zero evidence that Monsef, as a pint-sized ne'er-do-well, mistakenly filled out her refugee application herself in 1996. There's nothing to suggest that Monsef would have had a harder time applying for refugee status as an Iranian-born Afghan citizen, either.

Just so we're clear: Monsef didn't become a Canadian citizen because her birthplace was listed as Herat.

Enter Malcolm, the hard-boiled private eye.

"Monsef case raises security concerns," Malcolm wrote in mid-October, where she quotes an anonymous "intelligence source" who basically concludes that "things were missed. And that can happen" and uses that to conclude that national security is at risk as a result, despite even her own anonymous source never claiming such a thing.

On October 21, Malcolm broke the story that Monsef travelled to Iran in 2014. This story adds nothing beyond that. Nevertheless, she writes this same column three more times.

But, finally, on October 31, Malcolm dropped the A-bomb: "A file's been opened on Monsef, sources say" before admitting that the "file" comes from a tip line where a mere half-dozen called in to complain.

"Much like Crime Stoppers, the line allows private citizens to anonymously contact the government and relay information relating to citizenship cases involving false representation, fraud or knowingly concealing material," Malcolm writes.

I encourage everyone to call the line and report me. Hell, maybe I was born on Saint Pierre and Miquelon instead of Cape Breton. I can't wait to find out.

Malcolm has proven exactly nothing about Monsef's nefarious plot to cover up the fact that...uh...someone help me out here—that she is a secret Iranian spy? That she is actually the Lindbergh baby? That she was the one who let the dogs out?

Her entire thesis amounts to the idea that Monsef should have known the truth before it was exposed by the Globe. She writes: "If rumours were spinning around Peterborough about Monsef's life story, and if anonymous tipsters were encouraging journalists to investigate, how is it that Monsef herself was the last to know?"

The reality is that these rumours are being pushed by one or more individuals claiming to be distant relatives of Monsef. This one section of their story turned out to be true, but other claims they've made, sent to VICE, fell apart when put under scrutiny.

Nevertheless, Malcolm has been incredulous that other journalists all won't join her in the witch hunt, here, writing that "far-left commenters from Vice and the Toronto Star in comparing Monsef's controversy with the 'birther' movement."

Which, to be fair, is exactly what it is. It's birtherism. It's race-baiting fear-mongering about the scary refugees coming from faraway lands.

But the underpinning of Malcolm's arguments, and the #DeportMonsef campaign, is a law that strips Canadians of their citizenship if it can be proven that they filed misrepresentations on their citizenship application.

There, she's not wrong.

That law—which is not, as many have reported, "Harper-era," and actually goes back much further—is draconian. It can, and has, ordered the deportation of Canadian citizens because their parents made mistakes, or lied, on documents from decades prior.

That law does not give a shit if the falsehoods were minor, or accidental. And the Trudeau government has been more aggressive than any of its predecessors in stripping citizenship for exactly this reason. Courts have, however, applied the law inconsistently.

It is possible that the government could win if it went after Monsef. It could deport her. But that's exactly the problem: that's ridiculous.

Malcolm's point isn't that the minister, who was a child upon coming to Canada, ought not to be punished for a single inaccurate line on her citizenship application. Her point seems to be that Monsef deserves to be investigated to see what else she's been keeping secret from the Canadian public and perhaps even shipped back to Afghanistan.

Exploiting a badly-written law to deport your political opponents is, I think we can all agree, not great.

Nobody can prove that Monsef herself has ever done anything wrong. So maybe, just maybe, we can drop the schtick to have her arrested, strip her citizenship, and sent to a country that she hasn't stepped for in for decades.

And maybe we oughta stop doing that to other Canadians, too.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

There’s A Secret Canadian Spy Database That We Just Found Out About

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Photo via CP.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, better known as CSIS, has found itself in trouble with the legal system once again after a federal court discovered the existence of an "illegal" database full of information on Canadians, held at a secret data centre.

The information came to light in a federal court judgement, released Thursday, that takes aim at the previously-unknown Operational Data Analysis Centre and a program whereby CSIS was storing large amounts of data that had nothing to do with its investigations.

The judgement is heavily redacted so it is difficult to determine the exact nature of the investigation, the warrants, or the data collected.

But Justice Simon Noël is unequivocal: "this retention of associated data is illegal."

His ruling outlines how the collection of the data, its storage, and the data centre itself were all part of a large program that CSIS kept under wraps.

Over the course of a normal investigation, CSIS may obtain information, intelligence, and data pertaining to an individual. The agency has the power to run through that information to determine if the person is a national security threat, relevant to an investigation, or has something to do with international affairs.

If that data—such as an email between two law-abiding individuals—isn't useful in any of those respects, CSIS is required to delete it.

Except, according to Justice Noël's ruling, that's not exactly what they were doing.

While CSIS was deleting the data, they were saving and storing the metadata from the information, but renaming it "associated data," mostly in an effort to skirt rules around data collection, and keeping it for as long as they want. This data, the court adds, was "non-threat, third-party information."

Screen Shot 2016-11-03 at 4.56.00 PM.png

A table created by Justice Noël to explain the intelligence program.

The information would be stored in the secretive Operational Data Analysis Centre, whose purpose is to "retain all data collected from investigations and warrants in order to exploit that information in ongoing and future investigations."

Metadata could include everything from your phone number and email address to your search history and GPS location.

This is big data analysis is the job of CSIS' signals intelligence sister, the Communication Security Establishment, but not in CSIS itself.

There has been virtually no reporting on the Operation Data Analysis Centre since its inception in 2006. The only online mentions of the centre come from a now-deleted job post on the CSIS website, and a LinkedIn page for a former manager of the centre.

The LinkedIn page refers to it as "the CSIS centre of excellence for big data exploitation."

"The end product for the disclosure and safeguarding of information shared between the parties." That agreement sets out a host of conditions for how to share and store information, data, and intelligence.

This isn't the first time that CSIS has gotten in trouble for pulling the wool over the court's eyes. In 2013, another federal court judge chided CSIS' efforts to get around its own domestic mandate by contracting out to CSE and the American NSA to conduct foreign surveillance. That problem was resolved after the federal government authorized international CSIS operations.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Exclusive: Canada Paid More Than $855,000 for Will and Kate to Visit

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Photo via Facebook

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge balled out on Canada's dime when they visited their former British colony in late September, spending an estimated grand total of $855,600 on their week-long trip to BC and the Yukon, according to numbers obtained by VICE News through an access to information request.

Will and Kate's last visit to Canada in 2011, just after they got married, cost a total of $1.2 million—about $113,000 per day. A year before that, the Queen embarked on a nine-day tour of the country that totalled $2.79 million—or around $310,000 per day.

During their lavish week on the west coast, Will and Kate spent about $13,000 on hospitality, which included flowers and refreshments, according to numbers provided by Heritage Canada.

The budget includes a $500 gift from Justin Trudeau to the Royal family. The list doesn't say what the gift was. About $2,000 was also spent on a "legacy gift," though the budget doesn't specify what it was, or who it was for. Another $100 was dropped on a bouquet at the end of the trip.

Trudeau announced on the last day of the tour that the government would give $100,000 as an official gift to mark their tour, to be divided evenly between Prince's Charities Canada and the Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia.

The royals also spent an estimated $20,000 on media room rentals and travel for the trip. And they shelled out $20,000 on their official photographer, and another $5,000 on a photo album and group photos. While they paid $10,000 to translate the media guide into both official languages, and $30,000 for translation of "program dailies, web etc..."

Accommodations for their 16 staff cost $40,000, and accommodations for Department of National Defence drivers cost $10,000. The per diem for the royal household was $16,000.

The couple also rented two float planes in Victoria for $50,000, and a boat in Haida Gwaii for $5,000. And the budget also appears to include a $20,000 royal visit to the Young Vancouver Reception at the Telus Garden building.

In the lead-up to the trip, staff for the royals made three preliminary visits to suss out the west coast, spending $39,000, $116,300, and $5,150 on each trip.

The royal budget allocated a mere $40 on royal cellphones for the trip.

The Department of National Defence covered their international flights to and from London, although the cost of the flights isn't listed. The visit to Haida Gwaii on September 30 was covered by British Columbia "and/or organization involved." It's not clear whether Haida Gwaii incurred any costs from the trip.

The total cost sharing for the provinces was $30,000 — $15,000 each for BC and the Yukon.

According to a government Q&A, the tour is paid for by "cost sharing agreements" between the Government of Canada and the governments of British Columbia and Yukon.

But it's not clear from the ATIP what those arrangements were. The spreadsheet of the royal tour indicates that cost sharing expenses with the province are indicated in green, but the spreadsheet was sent by Heritage Canada in black and white.

It was the first time the duke and duchess made a royal visit with both children in tow. In 2014, the couple travelled to Australia with Prince George.

In BC, William and Kate visited Vancouver's downtown eastside to meet with staff from a charity for mothers with addictions. They also took in volleyball and a wine tasting in Kelowna. Before they left, Prince George and Princess Charlotte attended a children's party with military families.

A video to commemorate the visit released by Kensington Palace and the Department of Canadian Heritage received mixed reviews on social media for its use of dark tones and eery music.

Article 50: What Happens Next in the Great Constitutional Brexit Meltdown?

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Gina Miller speaks to the media at the High Court in London after three judges ruled against the Prime Minister's decision to trigger Article 50 and start the UK's exit from the European Union without the prior authority of Parliament. (Photo: Dominic Lipinski PA Wire / PA Images)

When Theresa May was all set to flick the switch on Brexit in the spring of 2017, it was because of something called "Royal Prerogative" – once a dusty legal term, now about to become the buzzword of the hour.

What it means is that there are lots of things that a government does that it doesn't need to talk to Parliament about. Theresa May doesn't need a fresh vote every time she wants to do something. So long as legislation isn't required – Parliament's business – then she can do it. Even when it comes to going to war, she can simply instruct the Armed Services. Technically, it was Royal Prerogative that took us to war in Iraq – the vote was merely consultative.

Unfortunately, in the case of negotiating Britain's withdrawal from the EU, it turns out we do need to think about passing laws. In this instance, it's the 1972 European Communities Act – which took Britain into what is now the EU – that's at the centre of the judgment released yesterday. Leaving will mean tinkering with that. So Parliament needs a role. All of which probably has government ministers laying out their hara-kiri toolkits; Thursday's ruling was a big blow to their ability to steer through already complicated waters.

Already, some are teasing the idea of an early election – the idea being that, with a Parliamentary mandate from the electorate, the PM would be unshackled from her present bind.

In reality, this decision reduces that prospect to vanishing point. When the issue is this big, a potential "Let's Elect a Parliament to Decide Whether or Not to Do a Brexit" election opens a Pandora's box of counter-schemes, pacts and shocks. No one – especially no one with the natural caution of May – would try it on.

For now, though, there's an immediate lull. What happens next is that there's a re-match. Only, this time, it's personal. Most likely on the 5th of December, the government will have a chance to re-state their position in the only court higher than the High Court – the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has only been around for a decade, replacing the Law Lords, and it's a mark of just how significant a constitutional crisis this whole thing is that this may well be the first time all 11 Justices will be considering the same case.

Should they rule against Gina Miller, the chief plaintiff in this case – a lawyer from the firm Mishcon de Reya who helped crowd-fund an anti-Brexit group called The People's Challenge – then everything goes back to roughly what it was, except with a few more grey hairs and crow's feet among government ministers.

How likely is that? Well, the Constitutional Law Association seems to think it's a long-shot.

Put simply:

"The government cannot take away rights given by Parliament and it cannot undermine a statute. For the courts to hold otherwise would place the rights of British citizens at the mercy of the government and would be contrary to Parliamentary supremacy."

In fact, as much as the Leaver commentariat might rage at yesterday's outcome like Democrats at an FBI Director, lawyers seem to see it as an inevitable part of the way our Constitution is structured. But that doesn't mean that our Constitution isn't about to be tested to its limits by the tectonic forces this decision has unleashed.

In one sense, it would be to risk a real molotovs-n-roadblocks revolution for Parliament to actively vote against triggering Article 50. Yet, there are already MPs at the margins who claim they will defy the result of the 23rd of June. Most notably, Tottenham's David Lammy, who has already popped up on BBC News claiming the vote was merely "consultative". If members like Lammy could change the terms of the debate into one in which, in accordance with what the High Court said yesterday, that Parliament is where sovereignty resides, they could potentially extract concessions from a skittish government that would fear losing the Article 50 vote.

READ: The Vote on Article 50 Gives Labour a Chance to Make Brexit Less Terrible

The pro-Remain majority in the Commons is 454 to 147. If Labour, scenting blood, could force a last-minute defeat onto the government along the lines of Ed Miliband's sudden about-turn on Syria, that would be devastating. Like Miliband, they could couch it in subtle procedural arguments rather than sticking a simple two-fingers up. Already this has been Corbyn's strategy – endlessly nagging Theresa for a "blueprint", then trying to pull it apart in a death by a thousand cuts.

At least after Cameron resigned there was a plan-about-how-to-get-a-plan. This time around, The Courts, The Government, Parliament and The People would all be at loggerheads. The will of The People would be to Leave. Of Parliament to Remain. Of The Government to Leave. And of The Courts to side with whatever Parliament said. Who wins? Who knows?

But that's only the threat, mainly hypothetical. What MPs want – and what they now hold some cards of getting – isn't to reverse the decision entirely, but to have influence over its direction. They could agree to vote the government's way in triggering Article 50 in exchange for a deal over the terms: that we remain members of the EEA (and thereby abide by free movement), that we stay inside a customs union, anything.

The distinction being made is that the public has voted on the need for Brexit. But Parliament – as their representatives – gets to decide the kind of Brexit. This could effectively make any negotiations an intensely unwieldy three-way shuffle, where the PM goes to Brussels with certain things she is allowed to ask for, and then Europeans tell her she can't have any of them, and then Parliament has to re-approve fresh demands.

All of which would utterly screw Theresa May's negotiating strategy. Precisely the reason that Brexit can only mean Brexit-squared is that the PM needs to go into Brussels with a Nuclear Option with which to threaten the EU into offering more favourable terms. If she has only a potato gun for threatening purposes, we will be crushed under the EU's superior economic weight.

The outside-option remains, though: Theresa May has push-back because the moment Article 50 is triggered, a clock is running down on Britain's EU membership. If, two years on, negotiations have proved inconclusive, then we'd get a Hardest of Hard Brexits, the immediate imposition of WTO tariff levels,and a nasty snarl of temporary economic chaos.

All of which is still unlikely, because no one has an incentive to get there – not May, not the Remainers and not the EU. So at the very end, they'll do a much more sensible deal. What Lammy, Miller and the many heartsore Remainers around them would like to see is a re-frame in the language around whose Brexit this is.

Yesterday, they got that, and whatever the legal machine spits out from now, it's still a big win.

This article was updated on Friday morning to take account of new developments.

@gavhaynes

More from VICE:

I Tried to Find Out What Brexit Means at Tory Conference

When Politicians Talk Democracy and Brexit, They're Just Trying to Get Their Own Way

The Vote on Article 50 Gives Labour a Chance to Make Brexit Less Terrible

I Made a Personalized Mouth Piece That Helps You Give 'Better Blowjobs'

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Being able to see people naked just by putting on Google Glass! VR shags with people on the other side of the world! AI sex robots that look inconspicuously like Scarlett Johansson! The future of sex is wild and imaginative, and although we don't know what shit currently being thrown at the wall will stick, it's certain that the physical experience of sex is going to get better, even if the emotional, psychological and human side doesn't.

The focus has been on virtual reality and robotics for the last couple of years – poor old sex toys seem antiquated now, don't they? The humble butt plug a remnant of the 1990s; the iconic Hitachi Massage Wand no longer the the Cadillac of vibrators, but mistaken by children watching Sex and the City reruns for a retro microphone. As for sexual body modification, the last we heard was dick pumps from mail order catalogues and myths about Marilyn Manson's missing ribs.

But one man wants to change that. Artist and dentist Kuang-Yi Ku brought his Fellatio Modification Project to London and held a workshop that promised to explore ideas about how dentistry could change the future of sex. Participants in this three-hour session would use the London Dental Education Centre in conjunction with the Science Gallery London to design and make dental retainers in whichever ways they thought would most increase sexual pleasure during blowjobs.

I couldn't really imagine sexily grinning and popping in a mouthguard pre-coitus, but still, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to make the best BJ mouthpiece this city had ever seen.

The author having a nice little squash before making her blowjob mouthpiece

People attending the event were a mix of legitimate dentists, horny students and people with a lot of piercings. Naturally, I fit right in. My only concern was that I don't have a dick, so don't know what size and shape of rubber would feel good on one.

That said, the room was kitted out with anything we might ever need to perform sexy dentistry: probes, scalers, even some nasty fake heads that looked like those slobbery first aid dummies at school no one wanted to kiss. With their mouths already wide open, they were ready. And with my gloves and apron on, so was I.

Ku explained that his idea for the Fellatio Modification Project came from his dentistry lessons. He realised that in his chosen field there are only three main functions of the mouth: aesthetics, pronunciation and chewing. But that's just not true – we all know that there's another main function, and that it involves other people's genitals. Why, Ku wondered, is sex undiscussed in his dentistry textbooks? It was this that inspired him to work towards extending the function of the mouth: to make it better at giving blowjobs.

I'd assumed this whole thing wouldn't have been a woman's idea, and would have put money on it being the passion project of a straight man, but it turned out I was wrong. Ku, who's gay, said that because blowjobs are usually a central part of sex for gay men, he'd designed the project with them in mind.

These mouth guards were only the beginning of his project. He showed us a video of his imagined future of body modification, in which people could get textured patterns like those we were making for the retainer, only made of their cultured skin tissue, inserted under the roof of their mouth.

Seeing as we were going to be wearing our own designs, we had to get a mouth guard made. You wouldn't want to be giving a BJ with someone else's mouth rattling around in your own, would you? Ku came and shoved some of that gummy plaster in my mouth in a green mouth guard tray while I sat back and thought of England.


Honestly, it felt like the oral activity had already begun; I was huffing and breathing through my nose with my mouth full. But after my DNA and lipstick were smothered all over the putty, I had my imprint.

Looking at my skeletal mouth and the quite creepy texture of my muscular tongue in my hand, I thought about how much work that little mouth had done in 25 years. Ku was right: we do so much nasty stuff to it – terrible, unprintable things; throwing items in it this way and that. As such a key piece of equipment, why don't we upgrade them? They're so prehistoric.

I've had wisdom teeth taken out so I can chew food better; I've had hideous braces put in so my overall mouth looks better; why shouldn't we get some extra attachments to enhance other parts of our lives?

Anyway, dental students made up some plaster and put my mould in there to set.

While that was going on we had to get busy designing our mouthpieces. I was completely stuck.


The idea was to add little bumps, ridges and beads for added texture, but I had no idea where to start. Ask me to design a cunnilingus mouthpiece and I'm there, but I suppose there's still a lot about penises I don't know.

My eureka moment was remembering those Tenga wanking eggs that had the textured patterns inside – a bit like Fleshlights, but smaller. Those were fun, and the layout of the bumps inside seemed completely arbitrary. So I just guessed. How wrong could I be?

A few tears here, a few tears there. A fun sad face. Inspired by the cult classic Teeth, I designed one special edition with an angry ridge right up the front – surprise, guys! Pain!

To make the textured shapes we mixed two types of putty material together to make the mould, and grabbed whatever we could see to make the indents and bumps – wooden beads and a pen to make some spikes; that'd feel good, right?

Next we mixed together some powder and water that was supposed to replicate the texture of skin. I would love to give you the chemical names of these things, but I can't remember any of them. Either way, the mixture started to set very quickly, so I poured it into the little moulds and stabbed it a bit to get rid of air bubbles.

Meanwhile, the plaster cast of our mouths had set. Tragically, mine came out ruined. God must have seen my Teeth design and used his patriarchal might to punish me. Air bubbles had got in and left a lumpy mess. I had to redo it, which set me back more than half an hour.

Thankfully, the next one came out perfectly. It got put in a machine that inserted a piece of plastic between it and the cast, and got sucked into an exact replica. We got the little modifications out of their moulds and stuck them onto the plastic.

Some bastard had stolen the majority of them by the time I'd got my second plaster cast, so I just had to work with what I had.



I have to admit, it didn't look great – more like something I'd found collecting dust babies at the back of the work stationery cupboard than a sex tool. I was also concerned about those fleshy lumps throwing themselves down my throat and choking me mid-head. But once Ku had chiselled away the finished mouthpiece from the plaster and I was holding that little thing in my hands, everything was different.

Here she was: the final product, my personal ultra-BJ Nimbus 3000. One of the spoil sport team organising the event, for health and safety reasons, had to tell me I couldn't use it "too much" because it hadn't passed safety checks. Who was she to tell me I couldn't use my invention how I wanted? How many blowies is too many, anyway?

Hello, boys!!

I wanted to know what else Ku had in store for our sex lives. Turns out: a lot. Firstly, he's already created the Cunnilingus and Anilingus Project. This was what I'd been waiting for – a tongue modification that both prevents the spread of STIs and increases sexual pleasure for women. He envisages a world in which effective protection methods for oral sex don't prevent women from orgasming – a true modern hero.


With the LGBTQ community in mind, Ku is also working on a body mod that involves surgically extending the jaw so that a whole penis can fit into the mouth for deep throat oral sex.

Neither of these advancements seem out of the ordinary. In fact, I think they feel far more human and naturally progressive in the new territory they cover than VR sex. In the meantime, while we wait for the world to catch up with Ku's brilliant brain, it's just me and my ad hoc mouthpiece.

@hannahrosewens

More on the future of sex:

WATCH: The Digital Love Industry

The Future Of Sex Is Orgy Domes

How the A1 Became Britain's Sexiest Road


The Attacks That Never Happened: Inside the UK's Foiled Terror Plots

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(Collages: Marta Parszeniew)

On the 6th of November, 2014, Nadir Ali Syed, a 23-year old from Hounslow, appeared in Ealing Magistrate's court relating to a minor offence committed in September of that year. On his way home from the hearing, he stopped at a hardware store and bought large knife and knife sharpener. That evening, detectives swooped on his home, arresting him for planning to carry out a terrorist attack.

What Syed didn't know was that for months a team from the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command had been following his communications on social media. The previous January, Syed and another man had tried to board a flight to Istanbul. Syed had been blocked from travelling – his companion ended up in Syria fighting for Daesh, or the so-called Islamic State. Since then, police had followed Syed's activity across instant messaging, encrypted cloud-based apps, social media networks and "secret chat rooms" as he shared footage of beheadings and urged others to commit terrorist attacks around the world.

The police watched and waited as his plans came together. He had decided on an attack on Remembrance Sunday, a few days later, mirroring the murder of Lee Rigby by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale in 2013. Buying the knife was the final trigger for the police to make their move. In June of this year Syed was jailed for life, with 15 years before he is eligible for parole.

The case generated a few headlines, but chances are you never really heard about it. Most likely it just drifted into the general cultural background noise: attempted plot, extremism, radicalisation, police surveillance – the buzzwords that have come to make up the vocabulary of the home front of the British War on Terror.

Working in counter-terrorism must kind of suck, in the same way that working as an air traffic controller must kind of suck. You can safely land 100 planes a day for years without anyone taking notice, but the one time you slip up – well... Still, according to Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, British authorities have prevented 12 terror attacks over the past three years.

The security services are understandably protective of those involved in fighting terrorism. When I was finally granted an interview, the officer I spoke to chose to only be identified as a "spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police with knowledge of this area".

The first issue that immediately jumps out when looking at recent failed terror plots is the role of social media. Terrorism, extremism and radicalisation have followed everything else that young people do in going online (and it is usually young people – and specifically young men). When I ask my police contact about rooms full of cops trawling through people's Facebook and Twitter feeds, she laughs.

"Well, we're always working on a shoestring, so maybe not rooms – but every investigation has a serious online data investigation element. Social media has changed everything. In the old days, pre-internet, it would have been much more about physically watching people and seeing who they are meeting. Now people don't even physically meet up. As an investigator you still need the same legal authority, though. With phone calls it's relatively easy to plot out that A talked to B – you know that conversation has taken place, even if you don't know exactly what was said. But online there are whole encrypted areas we can't even look at. I know a lot of people are worried about the new Investigatory Powers Bill going through Parliament, and I understand that – but from our point of view, we're just trying to keep up with technology".

This type of data-based evidence was certainly key in the case of Shazib and Junead Khan, who in May of this year were jailed for 13 years and life, respectively. Officers from SO15, the Met's counter-terrorism unit, trawled through 66,000 texts, emails and social media messages to put together the Khan's plot to stage a road accident near a US military base in order to lure soldiers out of a car, in order to then attack them with knives and a homemade bomb.

"Digital forensic analysts" tracked a conversation between Junead Khan and a Daesh contact in Syria who offered to help him locate American soldiers in the UK as targets. Khan described how he had previously missed an opportunity on his rounds as a delivery driver in Bedfordshire.

"When I saw these US soldiers on road it just looked simple, but I had nothing on me or would've got into an accident with them and made them get out the car," he said.

His contact replied: "That's what the brother done with Lee Rigby."

The Lee Rigby murder seems to have become something of a touchstone for other would-be terrorists. My contact explains, "We're a lot busier than we used to be – a lot of that has to do with the growth of Daesh versus al-Qaeda. There may not even be plots that are directly instructed by Daesh – but plots that are inspired by them. It all changed after the al-Adnani fatwa. He has had a lot of influence on the cases that we've seen going before court. Internationally, there was a spike of activity after that speech."

What she is referring to is a speech on 22nd of September, 2014 by the Daesh Deputy Leader, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, in which he first set out the principle that if devotees could not make it to Syria to fight for the caliphate, then they should try to kill unbelievers in their home countries. The fatwa is thought to have been a significant influence in recent terror attacks in France and Belgium, but also signified the beginning a broader shift in counter-terrorism – from spectacular 7/7-style attacks that take massive co-ordination and months of planning, to more random, so-called "lone wolf" attacks: one or two guys rushing someone with a knife, or a crowd with a hijacked truck.

This shift has necessitated an expansion of the co-operation between the various branches of the security services that are involved in stopping terror plots before they happen.

"We work very closely with both MI5 and MI6," my contact explains. "MI5 do their own investigations, a lot of the big data analysis takes place there. They watch and collate information, but when there is evidence of criminal activity the police take over and begin to gather evidence towards an arrest and prosecution. But if we get information from a member of the public ourselves, we would immediately target that individual. It is very targeted – we don't just hang around trawling the internet going, 'Oh, what shall we look at today?' We work on specific information."

This taps into another concern that my source feels is urgent to get across. That for all the noise about "big data", and the fights over how the security services harvest digital information, what the vast majority of counter-terrorism operations are built on is the old fashioned business of policing: officers on the street, in communication with people as they go about their lives.

"It's still about working with communities at grassroots level, and maintaining relationships," she says. "Working with the public is absolutely paramount, whether that's people talking on social media, or person-to-person. It's about maintaining the confidence of the public to report stuff to us wherever they've seen it. And we are lucky as, by and large, we do have excellent working relationships with the community."

In a way this claim surprises me. Having been involved in discussions about the balance between security and civil liberties in the War on Terror for the last decade or so, and reading extensively about controversies surrounding the government's Prevent strategy, I am skeptical about how rosy the relationship between the security services and "the community" really is. But the officer I am speaking to is insistent.

"The Prevent Strategy is a Home Office programme around extremism, which is hard to get absolutely right – but there's also a dangerous myth that Prevent is only to do with Muslim extremism. It includes all types of extremism, particularly on the far-right," she says. "But the wider picture is not just about Prevent – it's about community police officers talking to people every single day. And people do ring the anti-terrorism hotline with information; they do ring 101; they generally have the confidence to come forward."

And, in fairness, the evidence does somewhat bear these claims out. The anti-terrorism hotline averages about 30 calls a day, and one-in-five referrals under the Prevent Strategy have been for non-Islamic extremists.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me about our conversation is the extent to which counter-terrorism intersects with other branches of policing.

A court artist sketch by Elizabeth Cook of (left to right) Tarik Hassane, 22, Suhaib Majeed, 21, Nyall Hamlett, 25, and Nathan Cuffy, 26, who were on trial at the Old Bailey in London. (Picture: Elizabeth Cook PA Archive / PA Images)

When Tarik Hassane and Suhaib Majeed went on trial for terrorism offences last April, they were tried alongside two other men, Nyall Hamlett and Nathan Cuffy. Hassane was a medical student who had studied in Sudan, and operated online under the codename "the Surgeon". On his return to the UK, he and Majeed began planning an attack on Shepherd's Bush Police Station and the Territorial Army Centre in White City. But part of what alerted the police – along with the usual mountains of texts and emails, etc – was that they bought the gun for the attack from local petty criminals, Hamlett and Cuffy.

Hamlett and Cuffy both pleaded guilty to the firearms offences, but managed to get off on terrorism charges by claiming didn't know what the pistol, silencer and ammunition they sold to Hassane and Majeed were going to be used for. However, my contact is keen to use the case to point out the key intersection between the policing of organised crime, drugs and financial crime with counter-terrorism.

"People who are involved in the supply of illegal firearms need to think about who they're selling to," she says. "If they've supplied a gun to someone, and we can prove they knew of terrorist links, then chances are we would charge them with terrorism offences. Even when there's not enough evidence for terrorism offences, we may arrest someone for possession of a weapon, just to interrupt their activities."

And this is borne out in the stats: earlier this week, senior police officers revealed that half of the foiled UK terror plots over the past two years have involved extremists trying to buy guns.

This dynamic is not just confined to street level weapons dealing. Many terror plots are foiled by following the money. "We have the National Terrorism Financial Investigation Unit, which investigates the financial links to terrorism," says my contact. "Often people will be nicked for fraud. There's one huge case that I can't talk about too much, where people were actually pretending to be coppers and conning money off others. That started out as a terrorism investigation, but we ended up getting them on fraud."

When I ask how many counter-terrorism operations the security services have going at any one time, I am met with a curt "we don't give away capabilities or numbers". When I press a bit, I manage to get "dozens... high dozens... everyone is aware that right now there is an issue with people returning from places like Syria... we need to be constantly reviewing the threats".

And when I try out my "air traffic controller" analogy, asking if counter-terrorism forces feel like they don't get enough credit for the plots they do intercept, my contact laughs, but then gets very serious again. "I've worked in almost all areas of policing," she says. "In terrorism you have far more eyes on you, and there's different concerns – but really, whatever area of policing you're in, you can't underestimate the impact that crime – any type of crime – has on the victims."

@JSRafaelism / @martaparszeniew

More on VICE:

Is the Government's Anti-Terror Strategy Damaging British School Kids?

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How a Terror Attack Can Destroy an Entire Tourist Industry

VICE Long Reads: Was Girl Power Just a Lie?

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(Illustration:Marta Parszeniew)

This article was originally published in VICE UK.

I was 11 when I first heard the Spice Girls shouting about Girl Power. I lived on one of the poorest council estates in the UK, neighbour to powerless, often jobless, people who'd been weatherbeaten by 17 years of Conservative rule. I idolised the art school crowd: Blur, Suede and Pulp. I clung to the aspirational swagger of Oasis. It was rock music made by men that liberated me, not mainstream pop.

But then Girl Power jolted me. "Silence is golden but shouting is fun" was the Spice Girls' mantra. "Feminism needs a kick up the arse!"

I didn't need to know what feminism was. Here were ordinary girls – daughters of window cleaners and insurance clerks – on the TV saying that it was OK, as a girl, to make noise, to take up space, to be bold and brash and louche – and to do it all with other women.

Twenty years later and I meet Geri Halliwell – now Horner – to talk about the slogan she made famous. By now, it's long become one of the most divisive terms in modern feminist history. It's mostly academically scorned and mostly popularly adored and, depending on who you read, it's either the saviour of modern feminism or its death knell.

"Girl Power was a mission," she says. "It was like, 'We feel like this, and we believe there is a whole generation of girls who feel like this, too.'"

But that generation grew up. And we grew up entitled. We were the girls who were told we could all have it all, but were tossed into a world where we couldn't. It's no coincidence that, 20 years – to the week – after the Spice Girls released their debut album Spice, feminism has never been more championed, scrutinised, picked apart, marketed back at us by big brands and hailed by celebrity ambassadors. But where has Girl Power left us? Was it a slogan that awakened millions of young girls to basic ideas of gender equality, or a vapid catchphrase used by marketing men to sap their pocket money, turning the political gains made by feminism into cheap consumerism.

After it all, was Girl Power just a lie?

§


The term Girl Power was born in Olympia, Washington out of a fervent feminist punk scene that would become known as Riot Grrrl. Its philosophical bedrock was a vision of "Revolution Girl Style Now!" – a radical call to use the untapped, revolutionary potential of girls as a "force that can, and will, change the world for real".

Riot Grrrl developed in part as a reaction against increasingly anti-women facets in the DC punk scene; in part as a way to drag to light the hidden horrors of sexual abuse; but also simply the frustration of being shut out, degraded, mocked and laughed at for being a girl trying to make music.

Riot Grrrl had no leaders, but Bikini Kill were at the spine of the movement. Singer Kathleen Hanna remembers that she first used the term Girl Power in the early 1990s, when her and Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail were naming the band's second fanzine. "Tobi and I discussing what word just felt totally wrong next to girl," she says over email. "And we came up with power."

The trailer for the reissue of Bikini Kill's first release, 'Revolution, Girl Style, Now'

Her goal, she told me a few years ago, was to make feminism something that could be approached by all women – not just well-off white university grads – in an era where magazine covers were heralding its death.

"In the 90s, there was this huge backlash against feminism," she said. "There was this belief that women were already equal. I was worried about feminism. Me and my sister were the first people in my family to go to college. It felt really important to share the knowledge I was getting at school with people who wanted to go to school – even people who believed that feminism is only about having hairy legs and hating men. There's a stereotype that all feminists are kind of joyless."

Soon, Riot Grrrl would attract the attention of mainstream media; after the first article in LA Weekly in July of 1992, everyone wanted a piece of them – Rolling Stone, New York Times and even Playboy. But while the press attention gave the movement a global audience, it also ridiculed its vision. In one Melody Maker interview, Kathleen compared it to being reduced to Riot Barbies. Other times they were made out to be some sort of witches coven. Pitchfork writer Matt Kessler remembers rumours from his high school: "Supposedly, a couple of riot grrrls had tied a boy to a tree and 'sucked his dick till he started bleeding'. This was the lore."

The intense scrutiny was tough. "People would just be like, 'So, did your father rape you? Is that why you're so angry?'" Kathleen told me. The result was her calling a media blackout in 1992 – a decision that seems ludicrous now in an internet age, and would ultimately cause the movement to fragment. But its impact would live on long after Bikini Kill disbanded 1997.

I ask Geri if she'd ever heard of Kathleen Hanna and Riot Grrrl. She grimaces, pulls a confused face and shakes her head. "No." So where did Girl Power come from? "The band Shampoo," she says. "I saw them and I thought, 'Oh my god, that is so good.'"

Shampoo, in some ways, were a kind of bridge between Riot Grrrl and the pop mainstream. They dressed like a pastiche of candy-pink girlhood. They wore T-shirts that said "tart" and "dolly bird" on them (a more PG, Live and Kicking-friendly version of Kathleen Hanna scrawling "slut" across her chest). They were wild, rude, aggressive and lazy. In one Melody Maker interview they got wasted, smashed up a hotel room, chucked curry all over the bed and then slept in it. They were everything two teenage girls had been told they shouldn't be. The title track for their 1996 album Girl Power began: "I don't wanna be a boy / I wanna be a girl / I wanna play with knives / I wanna play with guns / I wanna smash the place up just for fun."

"Shampoo were outrageous," says Peter Levine, who was editor of Top of the Pops magazine at the time and now manages bands including The Saturdays. "I went to interview them in their house in Shepherd's Bush and they'd smashed it up the night before. They were so rebellious, they just weren't likeable to a wider audience," he says.

Does Geri feel she ripped Shampoo, and Riot Grrrl, off? "I think we all get influenced," she says. "When you're a writer, you're looking around and absorbing life. It's just passing the baton on." Does she regret it? "It was a punchy term," she shrugs. But for those involved in Riot Grrrl, this was less relaying a snappy slogan, and more about an outright commodification and co-opting of its most radical tenants – for massive profits.

"They had a lot more money behind them, the Spice Girls," says music journalist Sylvia Patterson, who worked at Smash Hits and later NME. "Shampoo started out on a really small indie label , and because they were sullen and miserable, no way could they be as relatable as the back-flipping, in-your-face-ness of the Spices."

The Spice Girls hit exactly the right key at exactly the right moment. "Feminism, at the time, was a word that no one really used," she says. "It just wasn't in the atmosphere then, as a word – or as a force. Certainly, during the Britpop period, there were very few really kitschy, colourful female voices at all. It was very male-dominated."

"Between 1990 and 1996, there was a real lull when it came to female pop stars," says Peter Levine. "If we put a female on the cover of Top of the Pops magazine, our circulation would drop."

The rise of 90s lad culture (in 1997, the circulation of the three leading lads' mags, FHM, Loaded and Maxim, was over 1.2 million) had spread to a moral panic about so-called "ladettes" – lager-yard swigging women who used pinching men's arses and dirty gags as a way of self-determination. If you wanted to give boys a run for their money, why not act like them?

"Girls were out there, drinking as hard, drugging as hard, having as great a laugh," says Sylvia. "Dance music had a lot to do with it as well, and ecstasy. It felt like a very free time, like we could do anything. We all just thought the party was there to be had as much as it was for the lads, for anyone, because it was – it really was."


An FHM cover from October, 1995

Geri claims she was something of a stalwart in the rave scene – and this went on to influence her politics. "I watched the first female prime minister get elected to power. I got a scholarship to an all girls school. Then I went to raves and watched thousands of people of all races, all cultures, all stature, come together in a field and dance together," she says. "When I met the other girls, I was pursuing a career as a solo artist, but it suddenly occurred to me that there was something so powerful in the idea of 'we' – when women, or people in general, really support each other."

In 1996, the Spice Girls did an interview with the Spectator, in which Geri and Victoria came across as pro-monarchy, anti-Europe and pro-Tory. "'We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites," Geri said. "Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology — Girl Power."

That Geri could have come out of the collective enlightenment of the rave scene and ended up championing Britain's first female prime minister – who, in 11 years of power, promoted only one woman to cabinet, had no regard for such feminine trivialities as rights to childcare, had to have her arm twisted to introduce breast cancer screening, and claimed that there was "no such thing as society" – felt, at best, ignorant; at worst, a complete betrayal of the sisterhood she so proudly shouted about.

"The Spice Girls were unmanufacturable, we were unmanageable." – Geri Horner

I ask her if she looks back now and cringes at what she said, and she pauses for a long time. "I think using her is a touchy one," she says eventually. "Because obviously she's like Marmite. There's an extreme polarity between people who do or don't like her because of what she did as Prime Minister. But for me, I'm not really judging that – let's put that to one side. For me, it was more about watching a woman where there'd never been a female before – as Prime Minister. That's massive in itself... I wasn't old enough to understand what she was doing or who she was upsetting."

Can you really "put that to one side", though? How can you judge a politician separately from their policies? "I think whenever there's the first of anything – be it Obama as the first black president, and now there might possibly be even the first female president, it's always change," she says. "When you're in a boys club and you're the only female, to stand your ground, it's not that easy in any walk of life."

The Spice Girls meeting prince Charles in 1997. (Photo: John Giles / PA)

In many ways, the Spice Girls had much more in common with Blair than they did with Thatcher. The academic backbone of Blairism (and, in the US, Clintonism) was an ideology known as the "Third Way", which aimed to marry socialism and neoliberalism. In essence: you could get rich, as long as you were paying enough taxes to help out those who weren't rich. It was a similar thread to Girl Power's mantra of individualism and self-emancipation matched with sisterhood and friendship. Take the Spice World movie, in which the group's best friend gets pregnant by a boy who left her as soon as he saw the double line on the pregnancy test. The girls are supposed to be playing the biggest gig of their lives; instead, they're in the hospital helping her give birth.

Feminist politics was also going through a rebrand in the 1990s, which Girl Power was integral to. "When I was growing up, I got the feeling that the feminist movement was so extreme to the left that it wasn't something I could connect with, so I didn't understand what it truly meant," says Geri. Girl Power was something that could "speak to everybody" – that was "palatable, that could be translated".

§


Outside of the pop charts, the Spice Girls' catch-all repackaging of the feminist momentum that had been building not only in Riot Grrrl, but in the British alternative rock scene, was seen as a retrograde step.

"The 1990s was the first time alternative female voices had broken into the mainstream. All of a sudden, women like me were on the front cover of magazines," says Shirley Manson, lead singer of Garbage, whose single "Stupid Girl" – a scathing attack on the depoliticisation and sexualisation of women in the pop world – was a huge hit in 1995. "All these different types of alternative voices from a female perspective were being aired. And it wasn't just the 'one outrageous punk rocker'. Instead, we were hearing from people like Fiona Apple, Missy Elliott, Lil Kim, Gwen Stefani, Elastica, Hole, the Breeders... It felt like, finally, here are all the women who are not playing by the traditional rules that have been set for women, and we're winning, and that felt exciting."

But the Spice Girls had won over the so-called alternative press, too. In 1997, NME put the band on the cover. "The NME are here and even they think we're fucking credible," Mel B shouts to a room full of journalists in the feature. "And the thing is, we do," the magazine retorted. "We really do."


Shirley Manson (Photo: Yui Mok / PA Archive)

"I always hated the term Girl Power," Shirley says. "At the time, I found the Spice Girls abhorrent." That said, she openly admits that she wasn't exactly the target audience for them: "I was 30 when they came out, I guess... I felt they were written for – and controlled by – men, who had come up with a marketing slogan and put these girls together. It was pretending to be women taking control, but none of them took control – they weren't writing, they weren't producing, they weren't playing... I found it a sham."

Suggest to Geri that Girl Power was a construct of record labels and marketing companies, and she gets visibly riled. "That's absolutely laughable," she says. "We were unmanufacturable, we were unmanageable."

§


The Spice Girls were, technically, built by a management company in 1994, after a round of auditions. But they were aggressively ambitious. " knew exactly what she wanted and how it was all going to look, probably even more so than I did at the time," their original manager Chris Herbert has said. In 1995, the band broke into Chris' office, stole the master recordings of their songs and did a runner in Geri's car. Geri became the band's manager for a while. Later, in 1998 – at the peak of their career – they sacked their second manager, Simon Fuller. It was a move far more conniving and savvy than you'd expect from the "Pop Tarts" (as one Rolling Stone cover put it) they'd been painted as.

Fuller had definitely helped the Spice Girls get rich. As the journalist David Sinclair points out in his book on the band, by 1997, Fuller had signed them deals with Pepsi, Walkers crisps, Impulse body spray and Playstation, and licensed their image for any piece of merchandise you can imagine – from dolls to bed linen and BT phone cards. "A lot of money was made, but my thinking was, 'If we can get Pepsi to spend $40 million basically running what was a commercial for my group, then Hallelujah!" Fuller said.

"The Spice Girls were abhorrent... It was pretending to be women taking control, but none of them took control – they weren't writing, they weren't producing, they weren't playing... I found it a sham." – Shirley Manson.


For the Riot Grrrls who had conceived Girl Power, that a movement which campaigned on hard issues like rape and sexual violence had been co-opted for profit was devastating. Perhaps nothing sums it up better than the song "#1 Must Have" by Sleater Kinney – whose singer Corin Tucker's previous band Heavens to Betsy were part of the Riot Grrrl movement. "They took our ideas to their marketing stars / Now I'm spending all my days at girlpower.com / Trying to buy back a little piece of me," she sings.

"I was exactly the target demographic for the Spice Girls when they came out," says Lauren Mayberry, lead singer and songwriter in the band Chvrches. "It's strange, now I'm an adult, to see how something that, on one level, could be really empowering and exciting for young girls was kind of all about selling shit."

"We were 90s girls who'd been brought up by that influence of money and productivity," says Geri when I ask her if they really needed that much merchandise. Earlier in the interview, I quote her a line from the Girl Power Spice Girls book, in which they claim, "Feminism needs a kick up the arse." She says she can't remember it. There was so much stuff, so many products, it was impossible to keep tabs of it all.

I imagine it would have been a very different thing interviewing Geri back in the 1990s. More braggadocio, less enlightened therapy speak – "I think that education and a spiritual kindness is important," she says; " was a mixture of altruism and materialism." Her politics at least seem to have changed over the years. In 2001, she came out in support of Labour.

She talks about work after the Spice Girls, where she become a goodwill ambassador for the UN promoting women's reproductive rights. "When you educate girls, you help population control, you help the economy, you help people's health, everything starts to thrive," she says.


The Spice Girls at the BRITS in 1997. (Photo: Fiona Hanson / PA)

In that sense, Geri was ahead of her time. We now live in a golden age of celebrity altruism. And women's liberation is the latest cause, championed by the world's biggest pop stars – Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Pussy Riot, a niche feminist art collective that at one time would have been assigned the kind of witches coven status of Riot Grrrl, became a global cause célèbre. Feminism is sold back to us in advertising campaigns and sent down catwalks with Chanel models, Bikini Kill's iconography has been ripped off on the high street. Even Barbie is in on it. But the core issue that Girl Power raised – if feminism can withstand going mainstream without its message being watered down – has never been more relevant.

"Whenever people ask me how I discovered feminist ideas, I wish I had more profound stories to tell them," says Lauren Mayberry. "But most of the stuff I picked up on was through pop culture." Lauren is now a vehemently outspoken activist against sexism in the music industry, and runs a Riot Grrrl-inspired club night and fanzine. "Taking feminism out of books and putting it into real life, and into pop culture, is really important," she says. "We spend a lot of time fighting between ourselves when we should be looking outwards and sending the fight that way."

"It's strange, now I'm an adult, to see how something that on one level could be really empowering and exciting for young girls was kind of all about selling shit." – Lauren Mayberry.


I'd be lying if I said I remained a diehard Spice Girls fan. By the time I was 12, I thought Baby Spice was just lame infantilisation. I later got into PJ Harvey and Hole and Elastica – whose singer Justine Frischmann's lyrics about fucking boys in cars ("Every shining bonnet makes me think of my back on it") felt way more emancipatory than the "shouting is fun!" sloganeering of the Spice Girls.

But I never forgot about Girl Power. Critiques of Spice Girls are valid and necessary, but what they so often miss is a very simple fact: that Girl Power was never intended to be an academic feminist perspective; it was never meant to promote a poststructuralist vision of a utopian future where male hegemony was overthrown. It was pop music made for little girls to inspire them to be confident and believe in their abilities and support their friends. It was shallow, easy to understand and very basic. And that was exactly the point.

Geri gets up to leave for her next job – a photoshoot for a broadsheet. I tell her that I like her Instagram account. Mostly, I appreciate the baking pictures. I genuinely find it inspiring that a woman who has suffered for a large part of her life with bulimia can find joy in food again. She was a late adopter to Instagram, she says. "People are so airbrushed and perfect. I don't really understand it all. I just try and keep mine real, you know?" But then, she says, "I guess it's a different generation, isn't it?"

I ask her what she thinks the real legacy of Girl Power has been. "There were braver voices before the Spice Girls and there were braver voices after us," she says. "I hear other artists saying, 'I listened to your music and I listened to your message and it meant something to me,' and it makes me feel very proud. But it's not just artists. It's the woman with her gloves deep in the kitchen sink going, 'Actually, your music helped me get through something and made me take charge of my life.' That's what really matters."

And as corny as it sounds, she's got a point.

@jenny_stevens

More on VICE:

The Evolution of the Bitch

Women Talk About the First Time They Felt Powerful

Revisiting 'The Craft', the Movie That Realised the Monstrous Power of Teen Girls


The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Four States at the Centre of the Gun Control Fight

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Gun control advocates have little hope of making progress in DC after Election Day. Even if Hillary Clinton beats Donald Trump, the Democrats will not likely take control of the House, and may not even win the Senate, leading to a hopelessly divided capital. House Republicans have already vowed to investigate a president Clinton for various alleged misdeeds—meanwhile, the rest of America will have the pleasure of at least another two years of gridlock.

But that's not the case on the state level. On Tuesday, important gun safety measures will be on the ballot in four states: California, Maine, Nevada, and Washington. This shows how the fight over gun control has shifted since Congress failed to pass gun legislation in response to 2012's Newtown massacre. According to USA Today, seven states have passed or expanded background checks since that school shooting.

"Newtown changed the gun debate," Adam Winkler, a professor of Second Amendment law at UCLA, told me. "Newtown, and the failure to pass federal gun control laws, encouraged gun control advocates to focus on the states, and state-level reforms."

"We have this sense that it's totally stalled, when, in truth—while nothing is really functioning in Washington at all—we are seeing a very vibrant gun reform movement at the state level," he added. "And frankly, the NRA is active there, and in some states, it's looking to make the gun laws more loose. But in a lot of states, we're seeing gun control advocates really assert their power for the first time in many, many years."

Winkler has a point: Although the NRA has spent money against all four of these measures—the group opposes pretty much any measure that would limit anyone's access to guns—the polls show that a majority of voters in these states support them. Here's what these ballot items would do:

California

The "Safety for All" Proposition 63, devised by Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, would prohibit the possession of large-capacity ammunition magazines. The proposition would also require customers to be subject to a background check and obtain California Department of Justice authorization before buying ammo—a permit that, legally, must be checked by a dealer, who must also undergo a background check to sell ammunition. Lastly, it'd create a court process to prevent those who are prohibited from using firearms from continuing to buy them.

California already has some of the toughest gun laws in the country. Actually, Winkler says, most of what's in Prop 63 was enacted by the state legislature earlier this year, after the Orlando shooting. Restrictions on high-capacity magazines and background checks for ammunition purchases already exist in California; the proposition's new features include the background checks for ammunition dealers, and the court process for keeping guns away from felons during their probation process.

High-capacity magazine bans tend to be favored by those who back restrictions on assault weapons—critics of those policies, including Winkler, have pointed out that they don't have much of a bite. "We've had was protective of basically having fewer homicides, fewer suicides, and even fewer law enforcement officers shot in the line of duty." He admits, though, that "there is not much research that extend background check requirements to private transactions without a licensing provision—not solid research."

"We had published research showing that having such policies in place is associated with fewer guns being diverted for criminal use shortly after sale," he continued.

The latest polls show the measures have 54 percent approval in Nevada, and 52 percent in Maine.

Washington

The measure up for a vote in Washington State, known as Initiative 1491, would allow immediate family members or law enforcement officials to notify and urge a court to issue what's known as an "extreme risk protection order," which would disarm an individual who they strongly believe to be dangerous to themselves or those around them. A similar civil court procedure already exists in cases that involve domestic violence, or restraining orders. Not coincidentally, the "extreme risk protection order" is also known as a "gun violence restraining order."

This measure is the most popular of the four, with a July poll finding that 73 percent of Washingtonians supporting it.

According to Webster, data on this specific type of law is scarce, but the research done on states that connect firearm prohibitions to domestic violence or restraining order cases show a "significant reduction" in a partner homicide. "So that supports the general idea," he said. "I think the logic is sound, the procedures are something that most would consider to be fair, and there's reason to believe that this could be impactful."

Webster added that the most common crisis situation where an "extreme risk protection order" would be necessary is with suicide risks, so, specifically in Washington, an initiative like this could have an impact. "Suicides with guns outnumber homicides with guns almost two to one," he explained. "This could be a mechanism in states where—this is the case in Washington—the ratio of suicide to homicide is more stark. Such measures could help them reduce suicide rates."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Life Inside: Guards Like Trump and Inmates Like Clinton at New York's Notorious Attica Prison

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This article was published in collaboration with the Marshall Project.

Those conversations you overhear in the coffee shops and at the water coolers? I overhear them on the tiers and at the guards' station. Everyone is talking about the 2016 election, Hillary or Trump. Most black and brown prisoners are for her, and most white guards are for him.

The day we heard Trump talking about groping women on a hot mic, a young Blood member yelled down the tier to one of his homies, "Yo... this dude Trump is outta line! Trump sounds like a straight-up creep."

In prison, we have a social hierarchy, and rapists and child molesters are at the bottom. It's one of the only things Attica guards and prisoners agree on. But while some prisoners thought Trump's words were inappropriate, the guards I talked to didn't.

"Come on, Lennon, that was pure guy talk," one said.

I don't want my president to be a creep, though—I want his or her words to represent an ideal.

In June 2015, a hate-filled white boy shot and killed nine loving black folks attending a Bible study in their church in Charleston, South Carolina. Afterward, it was uncomfortable for me, a white boy in Attica. "Fuckin racist white mothafucka!" I heard tumble through cell bars, down the tier. "That's the kind of hate these crackas up in here have."

The tension was palpable in the days that followed. Then President Barack Obama went to Charleston and gave a moving speech, soothing America, singing "Amazing Grace." We watched in our cells. I had tears in my eyes.

Attica guards dig that Trump proclaims himself the "law-and-order" candidate, because that's the ol' lock-em-up language—and that's their livelihood. To a lot of guards, Trump's words have resurrected the us-versus-them climate, validating the idea that things ain't like they used to be. This comes at a time when Attica guards have had to show restraint because the historically hands-on prison has recently been fitted with cameras and mics after intense media scrutiny.

Check out our VICE News Tonight Dispatch on the election in North Carolina.

But most prisoners don't want things to be like they used to be. Anthony "Jalil" Bottom, a former Black Panther who's been behind bars for 45 years, is one of the New York Three convicted in 1975 of killing two cops—one white, one black. The Nixonian "law and order" era, Jalil said, was a shameful part of American history. Take the 1971 Attica uprising: President Nixon supported then governor Nelson Rockefeller when he sent armed federal and state authorities to take back the prison. That raid resulted in 39 people—29 prisoners, ten hostages—being shot dead.

"Make America Great Again, huh," Jalil said, smiling. "Yeah, we remember those days—it was great for some people, not so great for others."

And, I should add, there are a few guards who agree with him. "Hey Lennon, I think it is the law-and-order thing with these guys," said a guard with kind eyes, whom I'll call Mr. Smiley. He's an anomaly. Recently, I suggested he should take the sergeant's exam—we need more people in power like him. "I was for Bernie," Smiley told me, "but now I'm undecided between Hillary Clinton and the Green Party. I'll never vote for Trump."

I asked him about another guard, one of the only black ones at Attica. He's a nice guy who says hi to me when I see him in the corridors, which is very uncommon. "I know for a fact that he is not for Trump," Smiley told me.

In 2006, I was in solitary in Upstate Correctional Facility, a prison built with federal grant money from the 1994 crime bill—also known as the Clinton crime bill. Most of Congress voted for it, then senator Joe Biden was the lead sponsor, and President Bill Clinton signed it. But because the bill also pulled Pell Grants for prisoners, 300-plus college programs that operated in prisons nationwide vanished.

Upstate prison was a shiny new hell. I arrived there a decade ago to do 90 days in solitary, and had another four months—120 days—added for a minor infraction. There seemed to be a system in place to keep us in the hole, keep the beds filled. Around the same time, then senator Hillary Clinton toured the prison. She must have seen the hopeless eyes on faces plastered against plexiglass squares in the metal doors while walking the tiers. Perhaps it was then that she began to evolve on mass incarceration.

After I got out of solitary, I began to evolve, too. I landed a spot in a small creative writing workshop at Attica, voluntarily taught by an English professor, and then got into a community college program. But these privately funded programs are scarce. Last year, the Obama administration approved a pilot program, called Second Chance Pell, which allows some prisoners to once again receive Pell Grants. It seems likely that a President Trump would scrap it.

My Blood neighbor, the one who called Trump a creep, came to prison when he was 19 years old. He's 29 now, and getting out soon. This guy is part of prison's lost generation—an uneducated have-not who's languished for ten years watching TV, bangin' with his homies, blowing bud in the yard, and making a few pit stops in solitary.

The good news is he won't be violating any women when he gets out—that's just not his MO.

"I love women," he told me. "I'm a gangster and a gentleman."

John J. Lennon is serving 28 years to life for second-degree murder at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Quartz, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Hedgehog Review, and other publications.

Illustration by Matt Rota

Should Men Be Able to Opt Out of Fatherhood?

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Image by Sarah MacReading

Matt Dubay and Lauren Wells had broken up by the time she discovered she was pregnant. The two had only dated for a few months and had polar opposite views on parenthood: Wells wanted to keep the child; Dubay didn't want to become a father. When the state of Michigan pressed him to pay child support, he refused.

The resulting legal battle became one of the most high-profile cases on men's reproductive rights to date. But since the case, which reached its ten-year anniversary this year, not much has changed.

In court, then 25-year-old Dubay put forward a novel legal argument: When a child is unplanned, men should have an equivalent right to a woman's right to abortion. In other words, women can choose if they want to opt out of the legal and financial responsibilities that come with parenthood—by aborting a fetus—and therefore, so should men.

To be clear, Dubay wasn't arguing that a man should actually be able to decide whether or not a woman should have an abortion. Rather, if a woman decides to have the child, the man involved should have the ability to opt out of the legal obligations of fatherhood. That means no legal relationship with the child and no liability to pay child support for the next 18 years.

The presiding judge ruled against Dubay, noting: "If chivalry is not dead, its viability is gravely imperiled by the plaintiff in this case."

The case was dubbed "the male equivalent of Roe v. Wade," with both the National Center for Men and the National Organization for Women chiming in as a media circus unfolded.

"Roe v. Wade gave women control of their reproductive lives, but nothing in the law changed for men," Mel Feit, Director of the National Center for Men, wrote in a press release at the time. "Women now have control of their lives after an unplanned conception but men are routinely forced to give up control, forced to be financially responsible for choices only women are permitted to make, forced to relinquish reproductive choice."

Kim Gandy, then president of the National Organization of Women, told CNN, "Men have been trying to get out of responsibility for their children for years. This one shouldn't get away with it."

Dubay, for his part, would explain his side of the story in a live interview on Dr. Phil:"Forcing me to be a father financially, mentally, and physically is definitely not something that I feel is fair," he said on the show. When grilled about the elephant in the room—contraception—Dubay said they had used condoms initially but not towards the end of their brief relationship. Wells also told him she was on the pill.

By the time of that interview, Wells had given birth. She stayed well out of the limelight but issued a written statement saying her focus was on providing a nurturing home for baby Elizabeth. "I am disappointed that Matt has decided not to participate in Elizabeth's life so far, and has instead chosen to contest any responsibility from our consensual actions last year," she wrote. "I believe life begins at conception and blossoms. I take responsibility for my acts and will do my best, as an adult and a mother, to protect and provide for our daughter."

Dubay appealed, but was again denied. Nancy Gibbs, then a staff writer and now editor of TIME, described the case as a "legal stunt"—but pointed out that "as a way of calling attention to double standards and unintended consequences, the campaign makes sense."

In other words, Dubay never had a shot at winning, but the case sparked a debate worth having. Should men have as much of a right to control their reproductive lives and financial futures as women do?

On the one hand, there's the argument that there should be a level playing field—women and men should both have the right to opt out of parenthood if they want to. A woman can choose whether to have an abortion to keep the child, without the man involved interfering with her choice. However, if she does decide to keep the child, the man should have the right to choose whether he wants to become a father and take on the legal rights and responsibilities that come with that. Both should be able to decide what they want to do, based on their own individual circumstances and beliefs, and neither should be able to interfere with the other person's decision. Essentially, reproductive equality and autonomy, for both genders.

The way this would work in practice is a little murkier. Frances Goldscheider, a now-retired sociology professor at Brown University, was one of the first academics to put forward a proposal for what she called a "financial abortion." It would work something like this: A man would be notified when a child was accidentally conceived, and he would have the opportunity to decide whether or not to undertake the legal rights and responsibilities of parenthood. The decision would need to be made in a short window of time and once the man had made his decision, he would be bound by it for life. This means a guy couldn't decide to opt out of fatherhood a few years down the track when it no longer suited him. The decision would also be recorded legally—perhaps on the child's birth certificate, or in a court order.

But critics point out that equal reproductive rights for men and women are simply not realistic. As the judges in Dubay's case concluded, a woman's right to abortion and a man's right to reject fatherhood are not quite analogous. With abortion, a woman decides whether or not to bring a child into existence. The right of the child to a legal relationship with his or her father—and in particular, the right to financial support to help with the child's upbringing—should trump the right of a man to opt out. Plus, at the end of the day, both parents were responsible for the conception of the child, so both should take responsibility for the child, should that child be born.

Susan Appleton, a professor at the Washington University School of Law, has written extensively on reproduction and regret, most recently for the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. She told me that in family law, there is a strong policy of "personal responsibility." Or, in other words, "Dubay made the choice to engage in heterosexual intercourse without using contraception himself; he assumed the risk of becoming a parent when he ejaculated."

Appleton teaches cases like Dubay v. Wells to students in her Family Law course who she says love discussing it. "They appreciate Dubay's arguments about unfairness and inequality, but they almost always reach the conclusion that no other outcome is possible."

Ten years later, the status quo that Dubay challenged in Dubay v. Wells remains in place today. And there haven't been many similar lawsuits since, in part because of the precedent set by the outcome of Dubay v. Wells.

Politicians have also declined to propose legislative changes that would allow men to have reproductive rights, perhaps due to the assumption that doing so would open the proverbial floodgates and result in an unprecedented number of men opting out of fatherhood. For the foreseeable future, at least, the idea of a man's right to choose will continue to gather dust in the legal history books.

Zoë Lawton is a legal researcher and writer who specializes in family law. Follow her on Facebook.

When Will People Finally Accept Interracial Dating?

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When Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter fell in love in rural Virginia in the 1950s, they had no idea that one day they would become the subjects of a landmark civil rights case. Loving, a white man, and Jeter, a black and Native American woman, grew up together in Central Point, an integrated small town.

At the time they wanted to marry, Virginia—along with dozens of other states—was still under strict anti-miscegenation laws that made it illegal to marry someone of a different race. On June 2, 1958, the Lovings traveled 100 miles to Washington, DC, to wed. However, just a few weeks after the couple had returned to their hometown, they were charged with breaking the state's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and were thrown in jail. In exchange for a guilty plea, the judge suspended their potential one-year sentence as long as they left the state for 25 years—a difficult deal the Lovings agreed to.

The couple's decade-long fight for their right to be married in the State of Virginia is chronicled in the new movie titled Loving. Directed by Jeff Nichols, the film follows the Lovings' journey all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where the outcome of their 1967 case finally deemed the country's anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional.

"I think this case shows how central interracial sex and relationships are to discrimination. You can connect it to the lynchings that occurred after black men were accused of either raping white women, or as was the case with Emmett Till, allegedly whistling at a white women," said Dennis Parker, the racial justice project director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York. "There was something elemental about that type of discrimination."

Even though the story takes place in the midst of the civil rights movement, the focus of Loving is to highlight the unbreakable bond between the couple without getting too deep into the politics. But at a time when protestors are still crowding the streets in the name of equal rights, the story of the Lovings is a reminder of how much work still needs to be done to improve the country's issues with race.

As a mixed-race woman myself, Loving helped put in perspective just how recently interracial marriage was legalized. Less than 50 years ago, the same racist laws the Lovings were fighting against could have kept my own family apart: In the same year that the Lovings' case concluded in the Supreme Court, my father was born to an interracial couple. My grandfather was Filipino and my grandmother was white; in California, where they were married, the anti-miscegenation laws forbade whites from marrying blacks, Asians, and Filipinos until 1948. In other states across the West such as Utah and Wyoming, similar anti-miscegenation laws were on the books until the early 1960s.

Children were a common justification for upholding these laws. In one particular scene in the film, before the couple embarks on their legal battle alongside ACLU-appointed lawyers Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, Richard (Joel Edgerton) asks how the state could defend such a law. Hirschkop (Jon Bass) explains to them that the state would likely use their mixed race children as a defense: "They believe the children are bastards."

"I think it is not uncommon when people are trying to support what strikes me as an insupportable law like this that they raise these sort of extraneous outside concerns about actually caring about the impact on children," said Parker. "In the wake of school desegregation in the 50s, it was common for school districts to say they were doing it for the protection of black children, because they didn't want them to be overwhelmed when they are suddenly thrown into schools with these white students who are better prepared and smarter."

Unfortunately, this false sense of concern for mixed race children didn't end with the Supreme Court's ruling. As recently as 2009, Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Louisiana, refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple. Bardwell told a local paper that he was not racist, but that he was concerned for the children born from the relationship. These ideas were even ingrained in my biracial father, who had once discouraged me from dating other races by warning me of the discrimination and identity issues my kids would have to face. It's that kind of dangerous thinking that could have prevented my dad and even myself from ever being born.

In 2016, with celebrity couples like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West gracing the covers of magazines like Vogue and a biracial president in the White House, it may seem that interracial relationships are an accepted part of life in the United States—especially since from 2000 to 2010, the US census found that interracial marriages increased from seven percent to 10 percent. But that isn't exactly the case.

"The decision voided all those laws in the country, but the law stayed on the books in a lot of states. Even though they could not be enforced, they still stayed there, and the last one wasn't removed until 2000 in Alabama," said Parker. "What is interesting is they took a poll to see whether the law should be repealed, and the majority of folks in the state were opposed to repealing the law."

A study published this past July in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that people—even those who don't consider themselves racist—were disgusted by interracial relationships and were more likely to associate the couples with animals than actual humans.

While those results might seem extreme, my own experience as an Asian woman dating a black man has proved that not everyone is tolerant. Even in 2016, my boyfriend and I have to deal with disapproving glances and racial slurs, not to mention the overall fear that we could end up at the wrong place, at the wrong time just because of our race.

Our fears are justified: Just two months ago, a black man and white woman were the victims of an unprovoked attack in Olympia, Washington, stabbed simply for kissing on the street. While Loving tells an uplifting story about one couple's triumph over racism, the reality is that almost 50 years later, many people still hold dangerous views on interracial relationships.

Follow Erica Euse on Twitter.

This Was the Worst Week for Mass Shootings Since the Summer

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Over the past seven days, America witnessed 13 mass shootings that left eight dead and 56 wounded. These attacks bring the US mass shooting body count so far in 2016 to 351 dead and 1,283 injured.

Meanwhile, Europe suffered one mass shooting over the same period of time: At about 7:40 AM Sunday, a large man with a red beard got into a dispute with a group of people who'd been hanging at a club in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The fight escalated as the bearded man took out a gun, opened fire, and injured five people. This attack brings the continent's mass shooting toll so far this year up to 46 dead and 158 injured.

A significant chunk of the latest American mass shootings were linked to parties over Halloween weekend. Around midnight Friday, a dispute at a fraternity party in Jackson, Mississippi, led to a shooting in which six were injured. Just over a day later, at 1 AM local time, an altercation at a party at a shopping center in Riverside, California, left four shot and injured. Later on Saturday, at about 9:45 PM, a shooting near or at a party in Los Angeles left five hurt. Then, on Sunday at about 12:40 AM local time, a dispute at a Halloween party in Newburgh, New York, ended with a shooting that left two dead and five injured. And finally, several hours later—in one of the most headline-friendly and bluntly Halloween-linked attacks of the week—two men in costumes crashed a party in San Antonio, Texas. They got into a fight with some attendees, and when asked to leave by the home's owner, one man dressed as Freddie Krueger pulled a shotgun out of his costume and opened fire, leaving five more people with gunshot wounds.

Even without these Halloween weekend party shootings, this week was already much bloodier than the rest of the month—although most of the other recent large-scale gun attacks were routine by American standards. At about 1:30 AM on Friday, a shooting from the street onto a porch in Miami Gardens, Florida, left four injured. About 23 hours later, a shooting outside of an apartment complex in Dayton, Ohio, left one dead and three injured. Then on Sunday, at about 2:45 AM, another shooting outside an apartment complex—this time in Capitol Heights, Maryland—left two more dead and four more injured. Less than an hour later, a shooting near a nightspot in Toledo, Ohio, left another four people hurt. About a day later, yet another shooting outside an apartment complex—this one in Shreveport, Louisiana, and reportedly triggered by a social media dispute between two women—left four more injured.

As November got underway, a seemingly targeted shooting at a group of teens in a Memphis, Tennessee, park at about 8:15 PM Tuesday left one dead and five injured. The following night, at about 11 PM, a street shooting in Little Rock, Arkansas, left five more injured. And just after midnight on Thursday, an altercation believed to have been linked to some sort of domestic dispute saw two killed and two more injured in the south side of Chicago.

As VICE has previously learned from experts, big holiday gatherings tend to correlate with incidents of large-scale gun violence—especially when the weather is warm. The past week saw fewer shootings and attendant deaths and injuries than that of July 4th, but it still featured the greatest total number of mass shooting victims since mid-summer, suggesting there's nothing innately seasonal about mass gun violence.

That celebrations may lend themselves to mass gun violence is a grim thought as America heads into the holiday season, with its many parties and other large gatherings—often in confined spaces. The last months of the year could pass with little violence (by America's cruel standards), or they could see a flurry of death and injury. That inescapable, chaotic nature of large-scale gun violence ought to be enough to keep America's mass shooting epidemic at the forefront of our minds, holidays and a chaotic election season notwithstanding.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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