Who needs mailmen when you've got drones? That's what France thinks, anyway.
The French postal service is beginning an experimental drone delivery program to deliver parcels on a nine mile route once a week. After the program gets approval from the French aviation regulatory authority, the federal postal service will be the first to ever use drone delivery on a regular route.
Read more on Motherboard
It happens to everyone: A weird bump shows up on your butt, leg, or any fill-the-blank body part. First thing you do? Start Googling. One hour later, you've emerged from the black hole of medical minutiae circulating the internet convinced that you have a rare form of cancer and only months left to live.
"Prior to internet content, we had to go to the library to check all this stuff out," says Jay Parkinson, founder and CEO of Sherpaa, an online healthcare company that fields thousands of patients' inquiries on a weekly basis. Now we can cut straight to panic without even leaving the house.
We asked Parkinson and Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, to reveal the health scares that strike the most irrational fear into the hearts of misinformed people everywhere.
Read more on Tonic
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
It's late December, which means you're probably fresh from the horror of your office Christmas party. Free booze and awkward chit-chat with people you actively avoid the rest of the year means you likely drank a lot and possibly did some very awful things. Got off with a colleague, perhaps? Spilt your wrap on the toilet floor and hoovered it up anyway? Told you boss loudly and vividly that normally they're a prick, but now it's 2:07AM and you're mellowed by a keg of mulled wine, actually, you know what, maybe they're not that much of a prick?
Either way, chances are there were other people who witnessed whatever you did. People who were sober. People who are paid to be sober. Bartenders. Your contact points for more alcohol, serving you drinks and quietly observing your awfulness.
Here are some stories from those people about the worst things they've ever seen while working at Christmas parties.
Once we did a party with a social media company. They were fine at the start, just like a usual party where people are still a bit awkward and too sober. Then, as soon as it hit around 11PM, that's when they all went mental. And it wasn't just them; people from the company that organised the party with us and worked the event as cloakroom staff were caught shortly after it began taking coke in the toilets.
One of our bartenders started talking to someone from the party, just asking how her night was going, but one of the organisers came up and told him "not to speak to anyone at the party". After that, a guy at the bar stripped off and got his dick out at one of our female staff members, then he started doing the windmill with his very limp dick. That's when we started chucking people out.
We rewrote our terms and conditions because of those guys, and now make sure every single party reads them so they know not to take the piss – but they still don't care.
Working in Loughborough, we had a load of student or society or office Christmas parties. There would be 40 to 50 of them – which is a lot to cram into a pub for a three-course meal. We had some groups who would be respectful and helpful, but one that sticks out in my memory is one where nobody knew what they had ordered, so service was a nightmare.
They got drunker and drunker, pulled down all of our Christmas decorations, ripped the wallpaper, mashed food onto the tables, broke pieces off the picture frames. I refused to serve them any more booze and one girl threw a proper fit and started crying. In general, that was the most ridiculous Christmas party I worked. And did they tip? Nope. So they destroyed the pub then pissed off without a word of thanks. Merry Christmas!
The other night we had a party of ten who told the staff they were offered their dinner for £17.95 instead of £18.95 because they were a party of ten. This wasn't true, but they kicked off at us anyway, argued with the staff and threatened to take the £10 out of the tip.
We also had a group who took a load of decorations that we put aside for another group and basically started destroying everything with their bare hands because they were so wasted. I had to grab the decorations from them when they wouldn't listen. That same table spent over £500 and didn't leave a tip at all, which is a bit shit.
When I worked at a bar in Leicester we hosted a party for the office of a big high street clothing chain, so all-in-all about 80 people. We cooked them a three-course meal but most of them refused to eat because they wanted to get pissed as quickly as possible on the free bar tab. They did just that, and before 9PM were dancing on the tables, throwing food around and sexually harassing the staff. This went on for a while until one woman fell down the concrete stairs and cracked her head open. All of her co-workers ignored her, and when we tried to get them to move to let the ambulance staff through they shouted at us for ruining their fun because it was the "only time" they got to let loose. They continued the party as soon as all the blood was cleared up, but not one lasted past midnight.
There was one Christmas where it was really busy in the first bar I worked at, and there was one dude who was out with a load of his lad mates giving it the big one about getting smashed. He was a polite enough dude but obviously had something to prove. He ordered himself and his mates shots, then proceeded to talk about Gas Chambers [shots where you down the drink then inhale the remaining alcohol vapour with a straw] and asked if I could sell him one. I did, and fair play to him he smashed it back.
Anyway, later that night we had shut and were having drinks at the bar for a good two hours after we closed. I went into the customer toilets and, as a last check of the building, opened the door to find him at the urinal using his head to balance himself. He was rolling all over the place, dick in hand, so safe to say we got him tooled back in and into a taxi home.
Last night, at around 8:15 PM GMT, a truck drove directly into crowds at Berlin's Breitscheidplatz Christmas market. Twelve people are confirmed dead and 48 more have been hospitalized with injuries, some of which are serious. Police have said they are treating the incident as a "presumed terrorist attack," and have confirmed that a Polish man found dead inside the truck was not the driver.
Right-wing politicians in Europe have already seized on the news, with Nigel Farage tweeting: "Terrible news from Berlin but no surprise. Events like these will be the Merkel legacy." In a statement, Chancellor Angela Merkel said "we must assume it was a terrorist attack," and described it as a "terrible deed." She will visit Breitscheidplatz on Tuesday after meeting with her cabinet, she said.
Last night, VICE Germany's staff photographer Grey Hutton visited the scene of the crash.
Read the rest over on NoiseyThere are many reasons to love Rihanna, as both an artist and a spiritual presence that has adopted the form of a human. The Barbadian star has been releasing albums and making music videos for over a decade now – each of them timeless and influential in their own way, and all of them selling millions. During this period, she has gradually transformed from "pop star" into straight up music icon; the kind that sets trends as quickly as she breaks them, and whose picture will be mounted next to the likes of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston in the future music hall of fame.
The reason there are so many reasons to love Rihanna is because there is no singular Rihanna. There are multiple Rihannas. There are "slapping your vagina on stage" Rihannas and "nice pic of me and my dad" Rihannas. There are collaborating with Paul McCartney Rihannas and touring with Eminem Rihannas. There are Rihannas who shoot their own magazine covers and Rihannas who set a child's drawing of their face as their Instagram icon. The Rihanna of the past is not the Rihanna of the present or the future. Sometimes, it's as if there are parallel Rihannas, in parallel universes, who are all being simultaneously viewed through the kaleidoscope of infinite time. So, to get some sort of scientific grasp of all this, we decided to definitively rank all the Rihanna personas in all their shades of brilliance.
A mammoth task, to be sure. But to make sure this list had a definitive order and end, like the conceptual inversion of The Life of Pablo, we decided only to analyse Rihannas who have appeared on more than one occasion, and in more than one space in time. For instance, we didn't count "dexterous with umbrellas Rihanna" because that was a brief blip on the timeline. As for our ranking system, everything is itemised in order of most to fewest fucks given.
Earlier this month a middle school teacher set up a gigantic pentagram in a public park in downtown Boca Raton, Florida. The city had approved the installation, which was placed next to a nativity scene and featured the words "May the Children Hail Satan." Police have responded to vandalism reports at the display eight different times, according to the Palm Beach Sun Sentinel.
Preston Smith, the English teacher who created the installation, is an atheist and believes that the city should allow all forms of religious expression. "We are here to call out Christian hypocrisy and theistic bias in taxpayer-funded public arenas while advocating for the separation of church and state," he told the Associated Press.
The president of Boca Raton Community Middle School's parent teacher association appears to be on the other side of that argument, and thinks Smith should be fired.
"A teacher we entrust our children with should not be putting a sign like this anywhere," PTSA president Kim Bremer told WPTV. On Wednesday, about a dozen protesters and counter protesters held signs and stood outside of the school, many of whom were parents calling for Smith's dismissal, the Palm Beach Post reports.
"He had a blatant disregard for the feelings of the kids and how this would effect them," Lauren Kalina, a parent, told the Post. "He's undermining our beliefs, that's what I have a problem with."
Smith, though, said that his personal beliefs don't make it inside the classroom and he doesn't "disparage any child's personal faith." Although he was absent from school Wednesday, he does not plan to step down.
"Students have an uncanny ability to be more tolerant, respectful, and educated about diversity than most adults," he said in a statement to WPTV. "There is a mutual understanding not to discuss the display with me on campus."
For his part, the school's superintendent, Dr. Robert Avossa, seems to be siding with Smith. "We certainly can't micro-manage what an individual does outside of the schoolhouse," he told WPTV. "This isn't the first time this individual has participated in an activity like that. What we do is answer any questions as they come up at the school."
Smith is an avid activist for keeping church and state separate, something the Satanic Temple has stepped in to defend in fights all across the country.Satanic Temple co-founder and spokesman Lucien Greaves rallied behind Smith by sending his own email to Bremer. Greaves explained that situations like this send a specific message to non-Christian members of the community, in this case young kids.
"If the PTSA were to be successful in destroying Preston Smith's career, it would send a very clear message to the children: that one religious voice enjoys exclusive preference while others are not allowed," Greaves told VICE over email. "That's why I've vowed to place an After School Satan Club in the middle school if the PTSA and parents continue to harass Mr. Smith...Installing an After School Satan Club will counter-act the message of exclusive religious privilege and reassert constitutionally protected pluralism."
If Avossa's statement is any indication, it looks like Smith will get to keep his job, but his holiday display has suffered at the hands of angry community vandals once again. On Tuesday morning, the pentagram had been physically ripped out of the ground, left in a crumbled metal mess surrounded by large tire tracks carved in the grass around it. And for some Boca Raton residents, the vandalism is the most offensive outcome in this fight.
"As a marine, I served to protect our freedoms. I served to protect the freedom of religion and freedom of speech," Tom Beal told the Sentinel. "It's interesting to see how humans respond to things they don't agree with or understand."
Follow Lauren Messman on Twitter.
It's news to no one that 2016 has been pretty horrific. Tens of thousands of people lost their lives unnecessarily in conflicts across Africa and the Middle East, the North Pole is melting off the face of the planet, the US had a joke of an election, and at least three of the world's most innovative and beloved musical poets have abandoned this disintegrating world.
On the public health front, things haven't been any better. As we wrap up the disaster that was this year, let's wallow in the horror one last time before we try to put it behind us.
Read more on Tonic
When cops have a phone to break into, they just might pull a small, laptop-sized device out of a rugged briefcase. After plugging the phone in with a cable, and a few taps of a touch-screen, the cops have now bypassed the phone's passcode. Almost like magic, they now have access to call logs, text messages, and in some cases even deleted data.
State police forces and highway patrols in the US have collectively spent millions of dollars on this sort of technology to break into and extract data from mobile phones, according to documents obtained by Motherboard. Over 2,000 pages of invoices, purchase orders, communications, and other documents lay out in unprecedented detail how one company in particular has cornered the trade in mobile phone forensics equipment across the United States.
Read more on Motherboard
The candy cane is the Christmas equivalent of the Easter egg.
While candy canes are made year-round—to the tune of 1.76 billion produced annually—they are inextricably and, for many, inexplicably linked to Christmas. On the surface, a peppermint hook seems to have as much—or as little—to do with the birth of Jesus Christ as a chocolate egg has to with his death.
And yet, every year, the halls are decked with red and white spiraled sugar sticks intended to be sucked on until they become pointy, minty daggers.
But why the upside down "J" shape? Why the spiral lines? Why the peppermint flavoring? This food is such a basic part of Christmas imagery that we rarely question its existence or relevance.
We spoke to Ace Collins, an expert on all things Christmas and author of The Stories Behind The Great Traditions of Christmas and The Stories Behind The Best-Loved Songs of Christmas . He's also written more than 70 thriller and mystery novels (including The Fruitcake Murders) and won the Christy Award for "novels of excellence written from a Christian worldview."
Obviously, he was the man for the job. We caught up with him in between radio interviews, because, he says, December is a time where his writing takes a backseat to media appearances requesting his expertise.
Read more on MUNCHIES
A version of this article was originally published by the Trace.
On December 13, Sade Dixon's ex-boyfriend banged on the door of the Orange County, Florida, home she shared with her family. When Dixon answered, police say, he shot and killed her before shooting Dixon's brother, who had rushed to her aid. Dixon left behind two children, ages five and seven. She was three months pregnant.
A few weeks earlier, Kortni Thornton's estranged husband allegedly shot her 18 times at her grandmother's Milwaukee apartment. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
And two months before that, in a neighborhood not far from the scene of Thornton's murder, Nya Hammond, a teenager, was gunned down, allegedly by the father of her three-year-old child on the way to work. Hammond had showed her mother pictures of bruises Pierre Gardner left on her body after he beat her with an extension cord two weeks before the shooting.
When a woman is murdered in the United States, an intimate partner—a former or current dating partner or spouse—is often to blame. Black women like Dixon, Thornton, and Hammond are especially vulnerable. One government report found that African-American women were four times more likely than white women to be murdered by a boyfriend or girlfriend. Researchers say the phenomenon can be largely explained by the position black women occupy on the socioeconomic scale.
Intimate partner homicides of both whites and blacks of either sex declined from 1976 to 2005, but black women are still dying at a disproportionate rate.
Using data provided by the FBI, a report by the Violence Policy Center, an organization that conducts research on American violence, analyzed every instance in which a lone man killed a woman in 2014. During that year, black women were murdered at more than twice the rate of white women. Of black victims who knew their killers, 57 percent were killed by an intimate partner.
In more than half of cases where the weapon could be identified, black women were killed with a firearm, according to the report.
Oliver Williams, a professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota and co-director of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community, has been studying domestic violence in the black community since the 1980s.
"African Americans are disproportionately low income, and statistically, folks who live in low-income environments show higher rates for domestic violence," Williams told The Trace.
Research from the National Institute of Justice shows that domestic violence is more prevalent and severe in disadvantaged communities and occurs more in households facing economic distress. The unemployment rate for African Americans is nearly twice the national average. Black men are unemployed at a rate about twice as high as the rate for white men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 92 percent of incidents where a black woman was killed in a domestic violence situation, her intimate partner was also black.
Distrust of law enforcement could be another contributing factor to the disproportionate rate of domestic violence homicides among black women, according to Carolyn West, an associate professor at the University of Washington and editor of Violence in the Lives of Black Women: Battered, Black, and Blue. Tensions between African Americans and law enforcement, she noted, can keep black women from reaching out to police and the legal system for help.
"The only source of help [in domestic violence situations] seems to be the legal system, which has never been friendly to African Americans regardless of abuse status," West said. "Not to say that there aren't some police officers who are helpful, and want to be helpful, but I think when there's that tension there, [black women] certainly may not see the police as a source of help. Then the violence just escalates."
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.
There are Christmas fairy lights hanging on every magnolia tree that lines the long central avenue of Ioannina, a university town in the Epirus region of north-west Greece. The empty shops that dot its backstreets are evidence of the country's unending economic crisis. But the centre of this city of a little over 100,000 people – situated by a large lake and overlooked by snow-capped mountains – is a lively place, full of busy bars and restaurants.
Go five miles south along the road out of town and you'll find Katsikas refugee camp, where it's the glare of floodlights that illuminates the December nights. Established in March on the site of a disused military base, Katsikas was filled with refugees who had made the sea-crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands, the last arrivals before the EU-Turkey deal came into place, effectively barring the route to the mainland. With the land borders of the countries to the north closing, Greece has become a holding pen for an estimated 60,000 people who are now stuck in limbo, waiting to have their asylum applications processed through an EU relocation programme that is grindingly slow.
With the initial emergency over, and with Brexit and the US presidential election dominating the news agenda, the situation in Greece seems to have drifted from people's consciousness.
"At the end of 2015 it was incredible how much support we got," says Mimi Hapig a volunteer at the camp for German relief organisation Soup and Socks. "The topic of people coming to Europe looking for asylum was everywhere. But keeping the interest and the awareness is very challenging."
Temperatures on the camp are hitting below zero at night
"Between April until July there were so many volunteers coming to the area – around 100 monthly – and there were a lot of donations flowing during this time," says Stephanie Martinez, another volunteer who has set up a school here. "But into October, as the American elections became the main focus of the world and there was barely any coverage of the refugee situation, the volunteers became fewer and fewer."
This happened just as weather conditions began making life even harder for people forced to live in camps. Now, winter has set in and temperatures are dropping to below zero at night.
The Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called his country a "warehouse of lost souls". It's a powerful phrase, but it's not the whole truth. As Yannis Anagnostou, a psychologist working for Médecins du Monde, tells me when I speak to him in one of the portacabins of the medical facility at Katsikas Camp: "They are survivors. These people are strong. They have many more coping skills than I do. I see them as people who are much stronger than I am." While the level of human suffering is profound, there is also spirit and resilience, humour and grace to be found here.
In this mountainous region of the country an atmosphere of permanent and exhausting uncertainty reigns for refugees and aid workers alike. Rumours and misinformation are everywhere, while life is improvised as best as it can be.
The people here have little information about where they might be going, and when.
The Greeks know something about this themselves. Spiros Kapsalis, a local taxi driver who drives me out to the camp, has a smart business card with a Mercedes on it. These days, he tells me, he's also driving the local buses to make ends meet. He feels for the people forced to live out here, their powerlessness, the anguish of not being able to provide for their children, "They need to live, they need to find work, to live in peace," he gesticulates into the rear-view mirror. "It's logical." It seems to be the overriding attitude of local people in this region of Greece, where the far-right party Golden Dawn has little to no presence.
Despite the best efforts of many of the people working here – the Greek army, the UN refugee agency, Oxfam, the International Organisation for Migration and many smaller NGOs – Katsikas has barely provided minimum standards of human dignity for the thousand or so refugees who have passed through it in the last nine months. When the displaced people arrived off the buses from Athens, following harrowing journeys over land and sea, they were shown to basic, unheated army tents and simply handed a blanket. The days became weeks and the weeks became months, with little information about when or where they might be going. The army tents were cold at night and stiflingly hot in the day; when it rained they flooded. The food provided by army contractors in plastic packets is dire. The site is covered in large, jagged stones that make the simple act of walking across it painful.
Refugee camps in Greece are like London tube carriages: they contain people from all walks of life. Factory workers, poets, shop assistants, engineers, students, builders. In a bleak irony, I was told that earlier in the year Syria's former minister of tourism ended up here. There are nice people and a few nasty people.
And like the tube carriages, everyone is uncomfortably squashed together. With no internal authority, unofficial power structures develop. Tensions and divisions have led to violence drawn down ethnic and national lines. There have been Syrians, Afghans and Yazidis here. In the summer, the Yazidi population of some 450 people – forced from their homeland in northern Iraq by ISIS – were moved en masse to a site the other side of Ioannina, citing threatening behaviour from elements of the Syrian community. In April and August protests broke out about conditions in the camp and the lack of information regarding its residents' situation.
Javid, an Afghan still living in a tent after nine months, with another Afghan family
The camp I visit has quietened down and slowly emptied over the last few months. Most of the residents are now in ISO Boxes – converted shipping containers – and regular buses take more people to accommodation in down-at-heel hotels rented by UNHCR. Many have dates fixed for interviews next year that will decide which country they are to be relocated to.
Among those left are the Afghan community, who after nine months are still in tents. In the freezing cold. Unlike Syrians, Afghans are not eligible for the relocation emergency programme adopted by the EU last year, and their future is highly uncertain. I speak to Javid, whose family fled to Iran to escape the war in Afghanistan, and where he then found himself dismissed from his job at a pharmacy by the authorities and barred from taking any other employment. He's bewildered and upset, worn down by unfulfilled promises. "Why? Why?" he asks, circling repeatedly round the same point. The UNHCR had promised him a container. Then they said they would go to a hotel. Then there was a container but it had no electricity. "They're just helping the Syrian people and not the Afghan people. Every organisation. I don't know why. There's been 15 years of fighting in Afghanistan. Why do they not help the Afghan people?"
On the outskirts of Ioannina, in a makeshift camp on a hillside that overlooks a petrol station, the Yazidis from northern Iraq are being asked to go to UNHCR hotels in Athens and Thessaloniki. The strain on the face of the powerfully built community leader, Ibo, is evident as he pulls on a cigarette, his other hand rolling prayer beads between thumb and forefinger. The Yazidis, with their incredibly tight community bonds forged through the difference in their religious and cultural practices from the wider Iraqi society, are desperate to be together. Currently they are spread out in camps across Greece. Ibo says the UN has given an assurance that they will be reunited, and asks me whether I believe them. I say I don't know and ask him what he thinks. He shakes his head grimly. He's heard too many of these empty promises already.
Yazidi community leader Ibo (right) at the camp in Fanoremeni, on the outskirts of Ioannina
Beside him a young man in a leather jacket holds out his phone with a YouTube video playing. It's a BBC News report of the flight from Sinjar mountain in August of 2014, when ISIS drove the Yazidis from their ancestral lands, massacred them in their thousands and kidnapped women to be gang-raped and sold as sex slaves. They want me to see this, to understand. The video plays on the small screen as we sit in silence. An elderly woman breaks down beside me, sobbing.
I visit a weekly camp coordination meeting of all the organisations involved that takes place in one of the military hangars on site. The cadaverous ex-mayor of Ioannina, Philippos Filios, who has oversight of the camp, sits wrapped up in an overcoat, methodically chain-smoking cigarettes, alongside Georgios Kontakis, a stocky, well-meaning former army officer who is the site manager. They run through the issues of the week. Rats in the camp. The floodlights are not being turned off in the morning. Frozen pipes. "Everything costs money," says Kontakis sadly. There is the issue of flu and hepatitis vaccinations, which are being constantly delayed. The ex-mayor says there are shortages in Greek pharmacies. "The winter will end and the flu vaccinations will not have taken place," reflects Kontakis. It's unclear whether this is resignation to The Fates or a warning-call.
A knock-on effect of the lack of vaccinations is access to the Greek education system, which refugees are entitled to under Greek law and which has been promised for months. Vaccinations are a minimum requirement for students to attend school. Having apparently made positive noises the previous week, the woman from the Ministry of Education who's come along to the meeting can only shrug embarrassedly when asked when access to the school system will start.
Seeing that the traditional relief models were providing so little beyond simply keeping people alive, it's independent organisations that have been able to innovate to make life temporarily better for those stranded here. They are, of course, completely unaccountable, but they have been free from the bureaucratic constraints that restrict larger organisations.
Mimi Hapig, a volunteer for German relief organisation Soup and Socks
German relief organisation Soup and Socks, which had previously run a community kitchen here, has now taken over a disused furniture showroom that stands across the road from the camp entrance as a space for carpentry and metal-working workshops.
"We noticed that during our time in the camp people were constantly coming up to us to ask for tools," Mimi Hapig, one of the volunteers tells me. The vibrant atmosphere is so different from the grim desolation of the camp across the road. There's a buzz of purposeful activity.
"We know that what people actually want is to get to the countries where they have family members or where they imagine their future is," Mimi says. "But we cannot open the borders. We simply can't. But what we can do is try to make sure that within the time they need to spend here they gain new skills, they are empowered; that the time they need to spend here is not completely wasted or lost."
A candle-making workshop at Habibi Works
On a quiet suburban street on the other side of Ioannina, not far from the Yazidi camp, Stephanie Martinez, another so-called "graduate" of the Soup and Socks' summer community kitchen at Katsikas, has started a school called the Habibi Centre. Running since August, she and a small team provide classes in English, Maths, Geography and whatever specialisms particular volunteers might have. Around 60 refugee children up to the age of 15 attend in a series of rented shops they have modified. I ask her how they're able to operate in an environment where no one seems to know what is happening from one day to the next.
"Part of our vision or philosophy in all this is to be the most constant thing available for the children. Many NGOs have a new volunteer every two weeks, or an NGO comes and sets something up and, one month later, they leave. So that's something that we've decided: to be constant. We've only been closed for one day."
Stephanie Martinez, who has started up a school called the Habibi Centre
Sitting in front of brightly painted walls covered in drawings by the children, she tells me how they started in August. "I didn't ask permission from anybody. UNHCR, UNICEF, Oxfam. I got into a little bit of trouble for that," she says. "If I ask permission then I am restricted completely in the way we do things, or who comes and who doesn't. But if we just provide something and make it available for anyone – if Greeks want to come, it's free, and it's open and they can come."
Both projects are funded purely by donations, many of them from family and friends, and the volunteers themselves can only be there by virtue of dipping into their own pockets, quitting jobs and putting careers on hold. The desire to be fully independent is partly a determination not to give into demands for separation on lines of nationality or religion, which is often made by the various different refugee groups. "We want to structure something like it would be structured in Germany, for example, where they're not going to be separate into special schools." This has been a struggle, she says, but with time and stubbornness most of the critics from the established organisations working here have come round to the idea.
The main problem bigger organisations have with the independents is the lack of background checks on staff, their bolshiness towards the bigger organisations and a general cavalier attitude towards normal humanitarian aid protocols. But the fact is that within this chaotic and highly imperfect situation, without their entrepreneurialism these children would certainly not be receiving an education, and would have had little structure in their lives over the last five months. Provision on this scale just isn't coming from anywhere else.
But it came at a cost. The summer influx of volunteers brought with it some pretty dodgy characters, by all accounts. I heard stories of sexual relationships between volunteers and refugees, a "sex tent" being organised for teenagers and one volunteer illegally smuggling a refugee family to Spain. There are huge moral questions here: in the context of humanitarian relief, is there equality of status between a passport-holding European university student on holiday and someone stuck in a refugee camp? The influx also brought with it the uneasy introduction of permissive Western attitudes into a largely Muslim setting.
But this element appears to have drifted away as summer turned to autumn. From what I see, those who have remained for the long-haul are impressive and committed people, whose energy and integrity is making a huge difference to many people's lives, even if they are finding themselves supported by dwindling numbers of fellow volunteers.
The wider issue of vulnerability, protection and predatory activity is very real, though. Several volunteers tell me they have seen cars coming into the Katsikas camp at night to pick up young boys. Just half a kilometre down a track from the camp there's a brothel calling itself "Studio 69", in whose direction girls in the camp have been seen driven off on the back of mopeds. At the camp at Doliana near the Albanian border, where all the bigger NGOs have pulled out over security concerns, it was suggested to me that the sustained sexual abuse of children may have been taking place.
Refugee camps, with their concentration of the powerless and the traumatised, are even more susceptible to the abuses that occur in villages, towns and cities everywhere.
Lighthouse Relief is a Swedish NGO that tries to make these camps safer. Morgan Tipping, from south-west London, is the manager of the Female Friendly Space at Katsikas, which is a closed-off area for women and adolescent girls that offers privacy and a safe, communal environment away from some of the hardships of camp life. Here they have organised yoga, fitness classes, painting, jewellery-making and sewing workshops. Morgan also feels it's vital to develop connections with the local community and has organised an exhibition in Ioannina for a Kurdish painter, Toni, who has been producing dozens of paintings in the camp. "In my mind the aim now is to support and enable a full integration into European life," she says.
She is assisting another exhibition organised by a bustling Syrian electrical engineer Firas, which will showcase the artistic and handicraft talents of a range of people in the camp at a venue in the town. Firas encourages me to meet Abdullah, a teacher and poet from Aleppo, living with his wife and three children, who has managed to write a novella about life at Katsikas called Neighbours of the Cows. When we meet he shows me the manuscript: 200 pages of tiny, neat Arabic script written on an A4 pad. It seems to me a miracle of creation in these circumstances. Almost as miraculous as Firas' wife, Hala, who has given birth to a baby girl.
Syrian electrical engineer Firas, with his wife Hala and their newborn baby girl, Marie.
Some refugees have been given hotels, which offer more security and warmth, even if there is a chronic lack of anything to do there. In the lobby of a faded hotel in the centre of Ioannina that has been taken over by the UN, the air is loud with screaming children as they tear around the dingy corridors, snapped at by harassed mothers. Mahmood, 17, a gregarious, fast-talking kid from Aleppo, grins and points out to me a new English phrase he likes in his exercise book: "Running amok."
He, his mother and four younger siblings were in a tent at Katsikas for eight months. This marathon of endurance was just the culmination of a long and arduous effort to get to Greece. Leaving their father, a former hotel receptionist, behind in Aleppo, they made two failed attempts to cross the border at night between Syria and Turkey.
The slightly-built Mahmood carried his youngest sister across the mountains himself, constantly afraid of losing the gun-carrying smuggler who marched ahead of them. Twice they were discovered by the Turkish army and returned to Syria. The third time they managed to cross the border before finally getting across Turkey – surviving a police inspection of their bus (bribes from the driver), a week holed up in a safe house and a journey in a truck packed with fellow refugees in which they almost suffocated, before the sea-crossing to Chios on an inflatable boat with a faulty outboard engine.
Abdullah, a teacher and poet from Aleppo
It was a frightening ordeal but Mahmood is in good spirits and making the best of his time. If he was in Syria he would be fighting in the war, he says. And he gives me an animated account of all the horrors that would involve. Here he's learning English, Greek and German at classes run by the local university. He proudly tells me he knew almost no English before he was in the camp and, as we talk, assiduously notes down any words that are new to him in his exercise book.
A 40-minute drive south from Ioannina takes us to the camp at Filipiada, which – like Katsikas – has seen a fall in its numbers since the policy to place refugees in hotel accommodation came into effect. It's telling, though, that the place is covered in newly dug trenches – only now are they laying cables to provide heating and lighting for the 200 or so people who have been living here since March. In her unheated metal container, furnished only with blankets, we meet Masoomah from Baghlan, a province in northern Afghanistan that has seen Taliban insurgents make inroads this year in that country's unending war. Like many of the women we meet, her husband is in Germany.
An Afghan woman at the camp
"I'm alone here with my three daughters and I am afraid, and will feel the same until we're settled," she says. "When they are in the tent or container, I don't feel safe."
"My hope for the future is to unite my family again, children and parents, to have a friendly and warm family again, in one home, at one place. To have a peaceful life, to have peace of mind – so when my children go out and leave in the morning, they come back at night, God willing.
"I didn't have this feeling in Afghanistan; didn't have the hope they'd come back home. Even when I'd go to the market, I didn't know whether I'd come back alive or not."
As we walk down the stony track through the camp, the sun dipping below the mountains and the temperature falling, she sighs and jokes with her teenage daughter, Anakita, and a young aid worker, Leoni. They're all laughing in the fading light. "Women are much stronger than men," she says. "Women are much stronger than men…"
Camp lights at Katsikas.
Relocation and reunion with family members will hopefully happen in 2017. Sadly, a lot of these brave people will still need all the strength they've got. And there will likely be many more to join them. The camps look set to continue. The detention centres on the islands are at bursting-point. The European Commission has announced that, from March, EU states will be able to return asylum seekers to Greece if it was their first country of entry. The EU-Turkey deal hangs in the balance, with President Erdogan threatening to drop the drawbridge to Europe once more. Rumours swirl about Katsikas itself: some say that the camp will be closed in a month, others that it will be filled with single men brought from the islands.
Few know yet where they're going, and no one knows where this is all heading. But the fairy lights of Europe are still a long way off for many in Greece this Christmas.
@JoePBanks / tommychavannes.com
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Virginia Vidal wasn't expecting to have any more children when she became pregnant with triplets.
Vidal, now 46, her husband, and their three children, took a Mexican vacation in 2006. A few weeks after they came back to Toronto, Vidal was the only one feeling ill. She found out she was pregnant but unlike with her previous three pregnancies, she had severe morning sickness.
"I would throw up five to seven times a day and I would be nauseous constantly," Vidal told VICE. When she was about 14 weeks pregnant, she took an ultrasound and discovered that she was going to have triplets.
"I remember being very frustrated with being sick all the time to the point where I was considering not continuing on with the pregnancy." A friend recommended she try cannabis.
Vidal ended up with the munchies, eating everything in her cupboard. She was ecstatic.
"I was able to eat, I was able to keep the food down, and I had energy," she said.
A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that among pregnant women, the prevalence of past-month marijuana use increased 62 percent from 2002, when it was 2.37 percent, to 3.85 percent in 2014.
"Although the prevalence of past-month use among pregnant women (3.85%) is not high, the increases over time and potential adverse consequences of prenatal marijuana exposure suggest further monitoring and research are warranted," reads a discussion on the study, which was headed up by a researcher from Columbia University medical school.
The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse says cannabis is the most popular "illicit drug" used during pregnancy and that prenatal exposure has been linked to adverse effects on cognitive development and academic achievement. It has also been linked to premature birth and low birth weights.
Alan Bell, a clinical researcher and professor at the University of Toronto who sits on the medical advisory board for medical marijuana producer Tweed, told VICE using weed during pregnancy is a "remarkably terrible idea and should be strongly discouraged."
"The little information we have about use of cannabis during pregnancy points to poor fetal outcomes, particularly in regard to neurocognitive development," he said.
But research on the subject is scarce. One study, that tracked Jamaican babies born to mothers who used cannabis found that there was no significant difference in developmental outcomes of those babies and babies born to non-users, except that the cannabis babies scored higher on reflex tests at 30 days old.
Vidal told VICE she was told to take Diclectin, a morning sickness drug, during her pregnancy but she couldn't keep it down. She later found out that the drug was not as safe as it was purported to be. Throughout her pregnancy, she drank cannabis-infused teas, ate edibles, and vaporized, rather than smoking.
"I don't think I got high. I felt I got pain relief and the mental calmness that my mind really needed," she said.
Her triplets were born in February 2007, at 34 weeks—full term for a multiple—and each weighed more than four pounds. She said she continued to use weed while breastfeeding and her babies were "very hungry."
Fellow Toronto mom Katie also turned to cannabis during her pregnancy with twins last year.
Katie, who doesn't want her last name to be used due to privacy concerns, told VICE she was unable to get out of bed and felt like she had vertigo. She'd been using cannabis for anxiety and depression since she was a teenager but thought she would have to stop when she was pregnant.
Instead, it wound up being the only thing that allowed her to get out of bed before 2 PM.
"Once I figured that out it became my daily regime," she said, noting that she made her own edibles, including a cannabis-infused coffee, and focused on low dosing.
"Never during my pregnancy would I say I felt high. I just had enough of the medicine so that it curbed my nauseous feelings."
Her twins were born in July at 34 weeks and five days; one weighed 6 pounds and the other 5.5 pounds.
"They're happy, healthy, relaxed. They do great with people," Katie said. "I had really chill babies."
Katie, a freelance producer in advertising, is now working on a book about her experiences. She thinks there's too much of a stigma around women using cannabis during pregnancy, when really she believes it should be looked at the same way as taking Tylenol or Aspirin.
"I don't think there is enough information out there because I don't think they've been allowed to do proper studies," she said, citing the current prohibition laws and lack of funding as barriers.
"Do I think there could be side effects of using marijuana during pregnancy? Likely yes, but it's no different from using other drugs."
Meanwhile, Vidal has started her own line of cannabis teas called Mary's Wellness.
She said her triplets, now 9, are very smart and social and she hopes that acceptance is building for mothers who choose to use cannabis during pregnancy.
"Look at other cultures who have been doing this for thousands of years," she said. "We're just catching up. I think we're quite behind."
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Kody Carlson is the perfect candidate to donate part of his liver to his ailing grandfather: he's young, healthy, and a male relative. But since he's gay, there's a chance he may not be able to.
Carlson, who lives in New Brunswick and is the representative for the federal NDP LGBT Commission, recently discovered that he may be unable to donate to his grandfather because of a Health Canada policy that prohibits men who have had sex with another man within the last five years from donating organs without the approval of a physician.
"I think that the policy is completely homophobic and it's an ancient policy started by the AIDS epidemic but I don't think that Health Canada or Canadian Blood Services has caught up to the times," Carlson told VICE.
"There are a lot of other groups that have statistically higher rates of HIV because of their lack of access to health care, like racialized people," he continued. "[But] Health Canada would never make policies against any other group because it would be too politically dangerous."
The policy, in accordance with Safety of Human Cells, Tissues and Organs for Transplantation Regulations, notes that evidence of anal intercourse is something that "may be associated with the presence of a transmissible disease" and should be examined in the interest of determining if the potential donor is considered high risk.
"Donors are assessed for a variety of risk factors (including MSM activity within the past 5 years) connected with the incidence of infectious disease transmission," Health Canada wrote in a statement to VICE. "If a potential donor has a risk factor, the regulations allow for their organs to be used based on the judgement of the transplanting physician and with the informed consent of the recipient."
The question surrounding the hard science behind the decision to exclude MSM without exception remains vague. Typically the rationale revolves around ensuring that Canada's blood supply system is protected from any potential contamination.
Health Canada did not provide access to the medical literature for which the policy is based on, and the Canadian Hematology Society was reluctant to discuss any medical findings that might shed light on the issue.
In the past, VICE Canada has attempted to investigate the matter further and was met with similar responses.
"I think the policies are archaic and they're rooted in bad science," said Carlson.
Blood Services Canada says that it abides by the policy set forth by Health Canada when considering potential organ donors.
"In Canada, living organ donation is under the operation of local transplant programs," a CBS representative said in an email to VICE. "Men who have had sex with men, or 'MSM' donor candidates, are not excluded from living organ donation as there is a process in place to make an 'exceptional distribution' for any organ at the discretion of the attending physician and with the consent of the patient. This requires specific testing to exclude certain infectious diseases prior to donation."
The "exceptional distribution" rule means that while hypothetically anyone can donate an organ, if the donor questionnaire issued by Health Canada gives any indication that the person's behaviour or lifestyle may qualify as high risk, the physician and potential recipient will be notified.
"It's a little bit out of the guideline," explained Jessica Bonnelly, Nurse Manager for the New Brunswick Organ Donation Program. "So do you still accept the organ or not? The patient and the doctor are still gonna make the final decision."
When asked why gay men are considered high risk, Bonnelly admitted she didn't have an answer, only that there are a lot of inconsistencies with what is considered high risk and why. At the end of the day, donation programs across Canada are obligated to follow the policy.
The reality, Carlson says, is that there's always a risk that the physician is homophobic.
In 2014 the NDP proposed Motion M-516 which called "for an end to discriminatory policies on blood and organ donation from gay men," while the ban on blood was softened earlier in 2016 when the deferral period was reduced to one year.
But more often than not, men who've have had sex with another man within the past five years are still made to jump through (seemingly arbitrary) extra hoops. The 2013 case of Rocky Campana—a gay organ donor—showed that some men considered high risk may have their potentially life-saving organs rejected.
"As we've seen with Justin Trudeau, I know he made a commitment to end the blood ban but a lot of people don't know about the organ ban as well and I don't think it's in the Liberal Party's policy—or any of the parties' policies—to end the organ ban," said Carlson.
Fredericton Liberal MP Matt DeCourcey told VICE that the reduction in the deferral period for blood donors is the first step towards "updating Canada's donor eligibility criteria for MSM." He said that there are several research initiatives and investments that the Government of Canada has put forth to "build an evidence base to support sound decision making on this issue."
A review of the current policies is set for January 2017.
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Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's former campaign manager and one of his most outspoken allies, has accepted a White House position as counselor to the president, the New York Times reports.
The cabinet position makes Conway the highest-ranking female member of Trump's new administration. As counselor, she'll have close access to the president and will be tasked with helping his administration carry out his top priorities and effectively deliver his political message.
"Kellyanne Conway has been a trusted advisor and strategist who played a crucial role in my victory," the president-elect said in a statement. "She is a tireless and tenacious advocate of my agenda and has amazing insights on how to effectively communicate our message."
As the first female campaign manager to win a presidential election, Conway quickly became a member of Trump's inner circle. She's made many TV appearances in an effort to smooth over some of Trump's bumpier moments on the campaign trail, defending him even after the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tapes. On CNN's New Day, she told host Chris Cuomo that she'd be using some of her experience as a spokeswoman and background as a pollster in her new role.
"It is likely to include communications, and is likely to include data and strategy," she said Thursday. "I'm just really pleased and frankly very humbled to take on this role in the West Wing."
Adam Maier-Clayton lines up five pill bottles on the table at a restaurant in downtown Windsor, Ontario. He glances out the window toward the bar he used to work at a few years ago, before the pain from his mental illnesses made it nearly impossible for the 27-year-old to get out of bed.
Every day he takes a combination of at least 15 of these prescription pills. Sometimes more if he needs to talk to people longer than an hour or do things like drive or grocery shop. He recently added a potent dose of medical cannabis oil to the regimen, but Maier-Clayton says it's made no difference, like everything else he's tried.
"I took extra Ativan today because I expected the pain to interfere," he said. "Usually I'm wrecked."
Read more on VICE News Canada.
In a stark reminder that assholes don't take a break for the holiday season, an elderly Halifax lady said she was badly beaten by two "young punks" who hit her up for money earlier this week.
Jeanette MacDonald, 85, told the Canadian Press she answered her door Tuesday night to two young men who said "Do you want to live? You better give us the money." She replied that she didn't have any money. Halifax police said a male suspect "immediately punched the victim in her face, knocking her to the ground. The suspect then punched her again in the face, grabbed her by the arm and pulled the victim out of her residence."
"They hit me, knocked me to the pavement," MacDonald told CP, noting that her leg was also bloody. She said the men fled once a neighbour came out after hearing her scream.
Photos of MacDonald show bright purple bruises around her eyes and on her chest.
According to MacDonald, the attackers warned her, "We'll let you go this time, but the next time we come here you better have some Do-Re-Mi for us." (We hope these dickwads are caught just so they can explain WTF Do-Re-Mi means.) She described the men as "young punks."
Halifax police only noted one suspect—a light-skinned black man who was wearing a red sweater and a red toque. MacDonald told the Canadian Press she later remembered that there was a second attacker.
According to police, another elderly lady in Halifax was robbed Wednesday night. The 86-year-old woman answered her door to a masked man who went into her bedroom and demanded money. She gave him money and he left.
Cops say the two incidents could be linked. A 43-year-old man is currently being held in custody and questioned in relation to the break-and-enter.
MacDonald said she'll be moving into a retirement home in the new year.
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Blackface and minstrel shows have largely been deemed unacceptable and racist by most. But while instances of blackface make headlines in North America (usually in the form of a celebrity dressing up as a black person and subsequently apologizing), in some parts of Europe the practice is considered a holiday tradition linked with cultural identity. In the Netherlands and Belgium, the annual return of Sinterklaas (a white-bearded figure similar to Saint Nicholas) and his sidekick Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) means December turns into a battleground between those fighting racism and those who view the donning of blackface as a harmless tradition.
The story of Sinterklaas is not unlike that of Santa Claus in North America, except that instead of a troupe of industrious elves and a fleet of flying reindeer, Sinterklaas delivers his presents with the help of Black Pete. And just as Santa Claus gives coal to children who have been naughty, Black Pete takes bad children away to Spain, where he's from. Although Black Pete is depicted as a black man with dark skin, curly hair, and full red lips, he is only ever portrayed by a white person in blackface.
Read more on Broadly
The Obama administration has moved to shut down the Department of Homeland Security's Muslim national registry program, a vestige of post-9/11 policy that's been sitting on the books since 2002 but unused in the past five years. It's the same program that President-elect Donald Trump and his team have indicated they'd like to revive.
The action, taken Thursday, follows Trump's comments in response to the Monday attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, which the Islamic State group claimed to have inspired. Asked whether he still planned to impose a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants entering the United States and establish a registry for Muslims (as he said on the campaign trail), Trump replied, "You know my plans."
Read more on VICE News
Home Alone is a bad movie. If you're a frequent visitor to this site, seeing this opinion stated here won't surprise you—we've said it before—but considering its deathless presence in the holiday film canon, it bears repeating. A film that arguably represents the exact moment that the late, legendary storyteller and lifelong Chicagoan John Hughes's talents started to fade, Home Alone is a mean-spirited and outlandish (even for movies) tale of a family who hates their child just enough to forget to take him on vacation, and a child that spends time in solitude and increasingly panics without bothering to directly contact the authorities until the end of the film. It is a terrible movie for terrible people.
In my nearly 30 years of existence, however, I have not been able to stop watching Home Alone or the sequel Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. This is partially because, similar to holiday movie counterparts like Love Actually, Jingle All the Way, and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, watching Home Alone once every year has become a satisfying constant amidst the sturm und drang that the holiday season can sometimes be. Family members may act reckless, travel plans may be a pain in the ass to schedule—but Home Alone is always there, and comparatively it asks nothing of you.
I'm also continually drawn to Home Alone because, at its rotten core, the film functions as a study of some truly awful characters—the type of anti-heroes who make Breaking Bad look like, well, Heroes. Our protagonist, Kevin McCallister, is a child whose base instincts apparently include shoplifting, terrifying pizza delivery boys into thinking they're being held at gunpoint, and the type of sadistic violence that even the Saw filmmakers would likely blanche at.
His mother and father are truly awful human beings—let's set aside the whole child-abandonment issue and focus on the fact that they made their children sit in coach while they enjoyed the luxury of first-class airfare—and there's also the risible cheapness of Uncle Frank, the pointless cruelty exhibited by Buzz McCallister, and the cashier at the supermarket store who doesn't even bother to question why a child is buying a ton of groceries by himself. None are more arguably horrible, though, than Old Man Marley, the eerie man with the shovel lurking outside the McCallister's house in the beginning of the film.
Sadly, dear readers, you've been fooled by Hughes and director Chris Columbus's masterful emotional manipulation—for Old Man Marley, in reality, is a total piece of shit.
I know what you're saying: Old Man Marley is a saint! The only reason he exists in the film is to teach Kevin to have a broader sense of compassion toward others, and not to judge a book by its cover! OLD MAN MARLEY IS THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS—OF GIVING, KINDNESS, AND LIGHT—PERSONIFIED. Sadly, dear readers, you've been fooled by Hughes and director Chris Columbus's masterful emotional manipulation—for Old Man Marley, in reality, is a total piece of shit.
Let's consider the evidence by tracing Old Man Marley's character development throughout the film. In Home Alone's opening minutes, we first see him shoveling snow and looking slightly menacing as Buzz, Kevin, and Jeff McAllister talk trash and spread lies about how scary he is. Kind of mean! As the film's hijinks kick in, Marley takes a narrative backseat until resurfacing around the film's midsection when he runs into Kevin in the drugstore, triggering the toothbrush shoplifting chase scene that so many know and love.
Now, the way this scene plays out is truly bizarre: when Marley and Kevin lock eyes, the latter's face carries a distinct look of terror—the kind of terror that a small child feels when seeing a stranger they find threatening. This look is unmistakable, and you'd think that Marley—a grown adult, with several generations of children under his family tree—would be able to recognize it and at least address, maybe even defuse, the situation. Instead, he essentially stares Kevin down wordlessly, in a manner that would scare me, a fellow grown adult who should also know better than to intimidate a child that is clearly out of his element.
Old Man Marley's penultimate scene in Home Alone is meant to essentially defang the character itself—to show that he's not all bad, and that both he and Kevin have lessons to teach other. So he takes a seat next to Kevin in church, tells him that all the rumors about him being a spooky-ass old man aren't true, and starts going off about how he's here to secretly watch his granddaughter sing in the church choir because he said some ill shit to his son and they haven't talked to each other in years. In the midst of all this solipsism, not once does Old Man Marley ask himself, "Why is this child alone in church, on Christmas Eve? How come this child, who is my next door neighbor and definitely has a family, is constantly alone every time I've seen him in the past few days?"
Obviously, no one at this point would accuse Old Man Marley of proper "adulting"—but it's his behavior during Home Alone's explosive Rube Goldberg-cum-Itchy and Scratchy burglar-trap centerpiece that cements him as a truly, bafflingly amoral human being. If your memory's rusty, I'll set this one up for you: after Kevin enacts his master plan against "The Wet Bandits," he places an anonymous phone call to 911 before luring the robbers to the house next door. (I could dwell on the logical fallacies of this plot point, but time is money.) The WB's find Kevin at the house and, for a brief moment, have him right where they want him—that is, before Old Man Marley shows up and bonks both of them on the head with that fucking shovel before whisking Kevin away from the scene.
So he's a hero, right? Here's the thing, though: in the following scene, Kevin McAllister is sitting comfortably in his own home watching the robbers get carted away by the cops. He looks comfortable, and he even waves tauntingly at them behind a curtain. There's no indication that he's spoken with the cops—who, arguably, could also help him out with the whole being-home-alone-without-his-parents deal—or that the cops are even aware of his role in this bizarre plan he's realized. We're led to believe, by extension, that Old Man Marley has also aided and abetted Kevin in hiding his involvement in the robbers' downfall, and that he likely didn't bother to ask Kevin why he was in his flooded neighbors' apartment alone with two strange men—or, more importantly, where his parents are in all of this.
And that arguable apathy is what makes Old Man Marley's actions throughout Home Alone so highly detestable. Kevin's parents truly screwed the film's ultimate pooch, yes, but they at least show a measure of emotion toward their situation as well as a willingness to find a solution. Old Man Marley, on the other hand, is maybe the only adult who has a fraction of a chance in helping Kevin reunite with his family or at least find the adult supervision he so clearly needs—several fractions of a chance, really, all of which he doesn't even attempt to take. At the end of Home Alone, Kevin looks out his window once more to see Old Man Marley reuniting with his own family, which makes for some nice narrative symmetry that is nonetheless an undeserved resolution: the film's ultimate lesson is that Kevin needs his family, but when the credits roll, it's hard to believe that Old Man Marley even deserves his.
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