If it weren't for the hundreds of "Defund Planned Parenthood" signs scattered everywhere, the annual March for Life in Washington, DC, could have been mistaken for a family-friendly country music festival. Thousands of people, mostly families and church and school groups, gathered by the base of the Washington Monument on Friday as a DJ blasted pop-country songs onstage and guest speakers discussed the importance of the fight against abortion.
For the past 44 years, the March for Life has taken place in DC on or near the anniversary of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. The event, organized by the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, has had a steady attendance over the decades, but this year there was an added feeling of excitement. President Donald Trump earlier this week promised to name his nominee for Supreme Court justice next week, someone dedicated to overturning Roe v. Wade, and the administration's commitment to the cause was demonstrated by an appearance by Vice President Mike Pence, a longtime abortion foe who as governor of Indiana signed some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation.
"It's the best day I've ever seen for the March for Life, in more ways than one," Pence told the crowd. "I am humbled to stand before you today to be the first vice president of the United States to attend. Today, because of all of you and the many thousands who stand with us in marches like this all across the nation, life is winning again in America."
The Dutch government says it is taking up an initiative to fill the gap in funding for international abortion services following Donald Trump's executive order to reinstate the so-called Mexico City Policy. And it has found a partner in Canada, whose policymakers say they will be throwing their support behind the global effort.
On Monday, Trump reinstated the Mexico City Policy, or "global gag rule," which freezes U.S. federal funding to any NGOs that offer abortion services or promote it for family planning guidance. The Reagan-era policy has been rescinded and revived according to party lines since it was introduced in 1984. Experts say Trump's move actually broadens the scope of the global gag rule so that it applies to funds from all government departments and agencies, not just U.S.A.I.D. and the U.S. State Department.
Dutch minister of foreign trade and development co-operation Lilianne Ploumen responded by launching an international fund that would "give women in developing countries access to clear information, contraceptives and abortion."
Ploumen says she has been in talks with as many as 20 countries interested in supporting the fund, which seeks to plug an estimated $600-million gap left by Trump's order. Belgium is the only country officially on board.
"We have to make up as much as possible for this financial blow, with a broad-based fund that governments, companies and civil society organizations can donate to," the Dutch minister said this week. "So that women can continue to make their own decisions about their own bodies."
In an interview with CBC Radio show As It Happens, Canada's minister for international development Marie-Claude Bibeau confirmed the country is on board.
"Yes, we will support the [Dutch] effort," Bibeau said. "Will it be directly through the fund or indirectly, this is not clear yet. But, I assured my colleague, the Minister from the Netherlands, that we will increase our funding to sexual and reproductive health and rights. This is definitely a very important priority for our government."
An experiment reported on Thursday in Cell, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, announced a purported breakthrough in bioengineering: the successful creation of an embryo with both human and pig DNA (and to be clear, the artwork above is just a photo of a sculpture). The results, "raise the possibility of xeno-generating transplantable human tissues and organs towards addressing the worldwide shortage of organ donors," according to the paper. But while the embryo was only allowed to develop for a few days, the genesis of this early-stage creature revives an uncomfortable debate about whether animal-human hybrids are, well, horrifying monsters waiting to happen.
In November 2015, shortly after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put a hold on its own experiments that combined human and animal cells, the federal government hosted a meeting of the minds to discuss that very question. More specifically, the NIH feared "the specter of an intelligent mouse stuck in a laboratory somewhere screaming 'I want to get out," NIH ethicist David Resnik, told Technology Review magazine.
NIH may have been acting out of an abundance of caution, but there are still potentially icky dilemmas to work out. We still don't know how these early-stage bundles of fetal cells translate into human parts on or inside a pig. Some areas for human cells, like the stomach, are less troubling than if they materialized in, say, the brain. To find out we're on the verge of a horror movie scenario, I talked to medical ethicist Arthur Caplan of New York University's Langone Medical Center. He told me more oversight for scientists like Wu might be a good idea, but not for the reason I thought he would. He also said we're kinda-sorta, already animal-human hybrids.
VICE: What concerns have ethicists raised when they saw the human-pig hybrid embryo? Arthur Caplan: People go, "Well, is this adequately regulated? Did they have enough approval or oversight to do the experiment?"
Did they? I think they did, but that's certainly a debating point: whether there ought to be [more governing bodies] examining what's going on in a more transparent way.
"People aren't expecting it and all of a sudden they hear someone say 'Now they're making animal-human people.'" — Arthur Caplan
What would those groups be looking for? They wouldn't be looking for much different. They would just be making it known to the public that these experiments were coming. They have much more of a shock value. This reminds me of when Dolly the sheep was cloned. It just got kind of announced in the newspaper. And people were like, "What the hell? Who did that? Why'd they do that? What's going on?" This has some elements of that: shock value because people aren't expecting it and all of a sudden they hear someone say, "Now they're making animal-human people."
OK, so was this tantamount to making animal-human people? No. Certainly there's a risk that something could go haywire, and cells going where you don't want them, like the brain, or some other place. But that's a pretty low-risk phenomenon. It's a risk, but it's low-risk. And you could certainly stop the development of the animal if you had any reason to think that was occurring.
The brain cells would still be physically inside a pig, so... And with a pig's nervous system, so I don't know! It's hard to know what the hell that would be. It certainly wouldn't be human. It wouldn't be like there was a homunculus inside the pig. [And] having some cells that are partly human in the brain undoubtedly isn't going to be a fully formed brain.
If that's not the worry, then what is? I think what we don't want to happen is making cross-species people. We all agree on that. That's the good news. I don't think anybody's particularly interested in making minotaurs, or griffins, or other types of cross-species animal. There's just a shortage or organs and tissues and things for transplant. So I think the motivation is good, and I think the scientists who did the work are very competent.
Well, someone might have an interest in making griffins... More to the point, there's not much money in that. If you want to make money, make something you can transplant. If you want to make headlines, run around saying you're going to make animal-human chimeras.
Won't there be new dilemmas at the phase where we're harvesting what are supposed to be human organs, but getting them from a pig, and possibly making ourselves into animal-human hybrids? Yes, that would be much more dramatic and interesting and would raise more boundary questions than the current experiment. [But also], there are a lot of objections coming up about having cells from humans inside animals, but most of us have this experience every day when we have breakfast: animal cells coming into our bodies, and getting incorporated into us—becoming us—in the form of bacon or whatever.
You're saying eating meat makes us pseudo-hybrids already? When you eat meat—or for that matter, cauliflower—it's transforming into you. [Or] to put it another way, when you eat bacon, it's pretty far removed from the animal it came from, but then you pull the bacon off the pig, cook it, and eat it, people get the sense that they don't engage with animals in a critical way every day.
Ever since President Trump launched an offensive against government transparency—first, by personally complaining about a retweet from the National Park Service that drew attention to his small inauguration turnout—Twitter has been a hotbed for burgeoning political dissent.
One of the most visible channels for this discord has been an account called @AltNatParkSer, which started as a reaction to the muzzling of a National Park Service Twitter account for sharing facts about climate change. About a dozen other alt accounts have popped up in the last week.
Yesterday, Motherboard's Jason Koebler argued that "rogue" Twitter accounts claiming to be owned by off-duty federal employees should verify themselves. The point being, if you're communicating with millions of followers under the guise of being an insider, it's sort of on you to prove it. Otherwise, there's no reason for anyone to believe you're actually helping government scientists stand up to President Trump.
The story was met with criticism from @AltNatParkSer, the two-year-old Twitter account that recently claimed to be helmed by "several active NPS [National Park Service] rangers and friends." For the record, Motherboard pointedly said, "this doesn't mean Twitter checkmark verification," only that it would be easy for whoever is operating the account to verify their identity to a third party and still remain anonymous.
More than 1.2 million people currently follow the account, and it's doubtful most of them know it's since switched to the authorship of alleged environmental activists and journalists.
When Becki McGuinness was diagnosed at the age of 21 with osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of bone cancer, she was anxious about the impact treatment could have on her future fertility. "If I'd known then what I know now, I would have pushed further," she says, "but my concerns were brushed off by the doctors."
Now 30 years old, and infertile as a result of the intensive chemotherapy that saved her life, McGuinness is campaigning to ensure all young cancer patients have access to the fertility options she was denied.
"A fertility specialist told me later that there had been enough time to save my fertility before I started treatment, but I feel like [the cancer specialists] made the choice for me," she adds. "Being young and infertile is such a hard thing to take. There's no chance for me now; once you're infertile you can't go back."
Cancer treatment, and particularly chemotherapy, can have this devastating impact on women like McGuinness because "the drugs are designed to kill cells which are dividing," explains Dr. Anne Rigg, a consultant oncologist at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital. "It affects your hair follicles, the cells in the lining of your cheeks and, for pre-menopausal women, your ovaries."
The extent of the impact, she adds, will depend on the type of cancer, how aggressive your treatment is, and your age when you start treatment. "For a 25 or 35-year-old, it would be much less likely to cause infertility than in a 45-year-old, because they'll have younger ovaries which will be less damaged by chemo," Dr. Rigg says. "Not all chemotherapy drugs do affect fertility, but the cocktail of drugs used for cancers like lymphoma and sarcoma is particularly aggressive."
President Donald J. Trump has been in office for just over a week, and already the view from south of the American border looks grim. Threats to dismantle trade deals and impose import taxes have been called a looming "catastrophe" for Mexico's economy.
In El Tapatio, a slum on the outskirts of Mexico's second largest city Guadalajara, economic uncertainty and drug hustling go hand in hand. Life moves more slowly than the bustling city surrounding the community, but for José Marquez, 19, work never ends.
Marquez lives in a two-room concrete home with his mother, wife, and their two children. Next door lives his friend and business partner, Martin.
Jobs are scarce in El Tapatio, and without the ability to read or write, Marquez's options are limited. He travels to Zapopan, a neighbouring municipality most days of the week to wash cars at intersections for change, and sells weed and meth with Martin to make enough money to feed his children.
Martin, 23, covers his face from the camera because he's worried I may be involved with the police.
Marquez, 19, retrieves a soccer ball from his two-room house to kick around as they wait for clients on a Tuesday afternoon.
Marquez's wife Janet worries that if more jobs leave Mexico, her children will be more likely to get involved with drugs and join cartels.
"It seems like America is ready to wage economic war on us. There are very few jobs right now and if more of them leave, people will inevitably get involved in drugs, because it offers opportunity," she told VICE.
Janet laughed when she was asked about the prospect of America building a wall along the Mexican border.
"I don't know why they would want to keep Mexicans out when we go to their country to work and provide services," she said. "We have so few restrictions to keep Americans out of our country that it just seems like a double standard."
Jesús shows off a tattoo of the Mexican coat of arms.
Trump, however, made steps toward one of his signature campaign promises on Wednesday by signing an executive order to start construction on his "great wall" along the U.S. and Mexico border, according to Reuters.
As Martin and José take part in a friendly game of soccer with some neighbourhood children, waiting for clients, they play in the shadow of a wall plastered with graffiti which reads "Trump loves Peña," referring to a perceived romantic relationship between the new American president and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Asked about his perception of Trump, Marquez shook his head and scoffed. Despite a language barrier, he managed to communicate that he thought the new president was a "crazy idiot."
"The 100 Greatest NHL Players" for all its pomp and circumstance is a marketing tool for the league. It's important to extract as much enjoyment as possible from this without getting too angry about the snubs that littered the list revealed in Los Angeles on Friday night.
Everyone on the "Blue Ribbon" panel who curated the list, however, should have to answer for the omission of Evgeni Malkin because there's no excuse for it on any level.
There were a handful of decisions that will leave you shaking your head, but Malkin—who coincidentally withdrew from the All-Star weekend Wednesday when it was announced he had a lower-body injury—failing to make the cut calls into question the legitimacy of the list, the panel and the league itself.
Why even bother if you're ignoring Malkin?
Let's consider all the subjective reasoning that could be used for placing someone on this "esteemed" yet arbitrary list, and how Malkin passes with flying colors in all of them.
On Friday night, College Street Bar's doors were locked, dark curtains blocked its front windows and a handwritten note on its door announced it would be temporarily closed. This was the same case—save for the note—on Thursday night too, despite its website stating open hours between Thursdays through Sundays every week.
The closure comes after its owner and an employee were appeared in court this week, both charged on four counts of gang sexual assault, trafficking a schedule 1 substance and forcible confinement.
It's been just over a month since Gavin MacMillan, 31, and Enzo De Jesus Carrasco, 41, (the owner and the employee respectively) allegedly drugged, sexually assaulted and trapped a 24-year-old woman inside the bar from the evening of December 14 until the morning of December 15.
While the men were first arrested the day after the alleged assault, they were released on bail on Christmas Eve and the bar reopened a week later for New Year's Eve.
The day before the alleged suspects were released, protesters held a peaceful demonstration in front of the bar. This past month has seen locals expressing anger with the establishment remaining open and reportedly egging the bar's front windows.
College Street Bar Friday. Photo by the author
Located in Toronto's Little Italy, College Street Bar is a spot that's popular for its flair bartenders, and live music. But instead of its regular Friday night crowd last night, a small group of protesters were standing outside the bar, this time celebrating a victory. Protesters told VICE the bar had been open last week.
As they held signs advocating for a safer service industry, some teared up with joy and other's yelled, "We believe her."
The demonstration was organized by a local advocacy group called the Sexual Assault Action Coalition. On Thursday, Viktoria Belle, one of the group's co-founders, met with Toronto Councilor Mike Layton about their concerns with College Street Bar remaining open.
"Right away, [Layton] said he would to put a motion together to have their liquor licence and their live music licence taken away," Belle told VICE. According to Belle, the Alcohol and Gaming Commision of Ontario (AGCO) are now reviewing and the bar's liquor and business licenses.
"College Street Bar should be closed until after the trial and [when] there's a verdict met because it has remained open to the patronage without any sort of transparency or any knowledge of what's going on inside or who's working the bar," Belle told VICE.
Service industry workers say the alleged sexual assault is not an isolated case. Neesha Temple, one of the protesters and a current service industry worker, told VICE the industry must do more to protect employees.
"I've been assaulted in this industry before and it's unfortunate to say that I did keep my mouth shut and I didn't feel like I had a voice," Temple said. "It's really unfortunate that, when we want to let loose on a Friday night, this is what happens."
The alleged assault at College Street Bar comes after changes to Ontario's Occupational Health and Safety Act required employers to implement protocol for dealing with sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. As establishments continue to fail these provisions, service industry workers and activists including the Sexual Assault Action Coalition plan to bring awareness of these very prominent issues to Toronto's government.
Canada is facing pressure to scrap an agreement that prohibits anyone who is entering the country by way of the United States from applying for refugee status.
The Safe Third Country Agreement, established in the aftermath of 9/11, is taking on new implications in the wake of Trump's immigration crackdown, with advocates, lawyers and border guards saying it endangers migrants by pushing them to cross the border illegally.
The number of people making clandestine crossings to Canada has already shot up in recent years, and that trend is expected to increase following a sweeping executive order from the Oval Office that targets Muslim-majority countries.
On Friday, the president indefinitely suspended refugee admissions from Syria; banned admissions from all countries for three months, while the government decides which countries to allow; and prohibited entry—immigrant and nonimmigrant—from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen for 30 days.
"That's going to put more pressure at the border with this unfortunate Safe Third Country agreement, which forces most people to cross illegally," said Janet Dench of the Canadian Council for Refugees. "That's bad for them but good for smugglers because they take advantage of people in this situation."
Meet the female porn star of the future. She's blonde, beautiful, and busty with just one catch: There's a good chance she's not human.
Experts predict interactive and virtual porn—along with super-realistic computer generated "actors"—will become the next big thing in the world of adult entertainment. But as the technology becomes cheaper, more user-friendly, and socially acceptable, it's poised to become (literal) stiff competition for the adult movie industry and the people who work in it, according to futurists, innovators, and porn executives.
In yet another example of automation making traditional jobs obsolete, there will soon be fewer film porn actors, directors, and even gaffers, several experts told Motherboard.
"A human won't be able to compete in this world. A studio will be able to hire a porn actor for a thousand dollars or just rent the software and create one for less," said Ian Pearson, a senior futurologist at the communication agency Futurizon, a former British Telecommunications engineer, and a chartered fellow of the British Computer Society.
The millions of people who marched last Saturday got the national headlines. But the two dozen protesters holding signs in an icy morning rain outside the Best Western in Kingston, New York, last Wednesday may matter just as much. They were there because freshman Republican Congressman John Faso was addressing a local chamber of commerce—they wanted him to know he'll be seeing more of them if his party moves forward in dismantling the Affordable Care Act.
Faso has just entered Congress, but holds a key spot—he's been named to the House Budget Committee, which will play a key role in ACA repeal efforts. Those who want to keep Obamacare intact know how important he is. Four days earlier, 150 sign-waving activists had appeared at his district office in Kingston, complete with a brass band. A Faso staffer told a local town supervisor that their phone lines are being "inundated" with calls about the ACA.
Last October, Faso had signed a repeal pledge put forward by a conservative group. But at the chamber breakfast, he had a different message: "They talk about repeal and replace. I prefer reform." He told the group that any changes should "hold harmless" those who currently get coverage through the ACA, that he wants a long lead-in period for any revisions, and that any new plan must have the support of Democratic leaders. (Faso's office didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.)
Faso, like many Republicans, is in somewhat of an awkward place politically. A January CBS poll found that only about one in five Americans want to see the law repealed entirely—and among those who do want full repeal, half want a replacement ready to go. Under the GOP's "repeal and delay" plan, however, they would pass a bill scrapping the ACA, then put off the effects of the repeal until they figured out their own health insurance reform plan.
Local protests are turning the pressure up on members of Congress weighing this plan. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, the year's first town hall with Republican House member Justin Amash on January 17 was so jammed that many constituents were turned away at the door. The 250 who did get in made for a restive crowd. Interrupted frequently, Amash wasn't ten minutes into his remarks before audience members demanded that he refer to the "Affordable Care Act" instead of "Obamacare." About a fourth of the questions that followed were about the ACA.
Amash told them that he supports a plan that wouldn't repeal the ACA until individual states replace it with their own plans. (He was one of nine Republicans to vote against a January 13 reconciliation bill that was one of the first steps toward ACA repeal.)
House Republican Tom MacArthur of New Jersey also voted against the reconciliation bill. "I'm getting a lot of calls [about health care]," he told the Washington Post. "What I'm hearing from people is, they're much more concerned about the substance of the fix than the timing of the fix."
The effects of these calls were obvious inside a private meeting of Republican lawmakers, where many of them were having doubts about repealing too quickly without a replacement, according to audio leaked to the Washington Post.
In some cases, the protests won't likely change Republican positions but are creating YouTube moments reminiscent of the anti-ACA Tea Party protests of 2009. On Martin Luther King Day, Washington State House Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers had part of her speech drowned by chants of "save our health care." On January 18, 58 people showed up with signs at a district office of Virginia House Republican Barbara Comstock. They included a ten-year-old with a life-threatening genetic condition whose insurance might stop paying for her treatment if the ACA's lifetime coverage caps were repealed.
In Aurora, Colorado, House Republican Mike Coffman ended his January 14 constituent meeting early, leaving through a back door after reportedly getting many questions about the ACA from angry voters.
Many of those showing up are part of local organizations networked through national groups like Indivisible, MoveOn.org, and Our Revolution. Indivisible's action plan, written by former Democratic congressional staffers, seeks to replicate elements of the Tea Party's approach. It emphasizes a local strategy that targets members of Congress by having constituents show up at town halls and other local public events, do in-office visits, and organize mass call-ins.
"This is a nationwide movement that's very locally driven," said Indivisible's Ezra Levin. "We have 3,700 or 3,800 groups in nearly every congressional district in the country—it's not just Brooklyn and Berkeley. This isn't a slacktivism movement. We're seeing people physically do things."
The advocates have already succeeded in doing something elected Democrats failed to: bring attention to the law's widely popular components, said Dean Baker of the Economic Policy Institute. "The Democrats thought the clever thing was to not talk about [the ACA]. I know that based on talking to Democratic staffers. Their pollsters said, 'People hate it—you can't talk about it.'" Now the activists are pointing out what people will lose, he says.
That's why 70-year-old Caroline Paulson showed up for the January 15 protest at Faso's office. She carried a sign reading, "Without my affordable insulin, I will die. Save the ACA." She doesn't want to do anything to get herself arrested—as a diabetic, she'd be vulnerable if she went to jail, she says. But she vowed to do something when she saw ACA repeal coming. "Individually we're just a droplet, but collectively we can doing something. We're trying to make a tsunami here," she said.
If the repeal effort does get turned back, it will probably happen in the Senate, where Republicans only have a 52-48 majority, and some GOP lawmakers have already said they won't repeal the ACA without a replacement. "The more it looks like a slow-motion debacle, the more likely it is that Senate Republicans will get cold feet," says Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute. "[The protests] are helping to illuminate the fissures in the Republican coalition." Baker believes it's "virtually certain" that local organizing efforts will have an impact.
One former Republican congressional staffer agrees that targeting legislators gets their attention. "I think that informed communication in any form gets noticed by representatives," said Emily Ellsworth, author of the book Call the Halls: Contacting Your Representative the Smart Way and a former staffer for House Republicans Jason Chaffetz and Chris Stewart. "They recognize that their constituents are watching and paying attention to the work they are doing."
But she's skeptical of tactics that don't promote a dialogue with legislators and their staff—like showing up unannounced en masse at the door of a legislators' district office, which can alarm the few staffers usually present. "If you want to have a dialogue with your representative or their staff, small in-person meetings about a specific issue will get you in the door and heard," she suggested.
And Marshall says to create lasting change, the advocates have to replicate a key part of the Tea Party's success: winning primaries, as happened when insurgent Dave Brat defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014. Winning elections matters—"it concentrates the mind," said Marshall.
Steven Yoder writes about criminal justice and domestic policy issues. His work has appeared in Salon, Al Jazeera America, The American Prospect, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter.
On Friday, President Donald Trump pledged to "keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America" by signing an executive order aimed at creating stricter vetting for immigrants from countries plagued by terrorism.
According to Yahoo News, Trump signed the document at a swearing-in ceremony for Secretary of Defense James Mattis at the Pentagon.
Trump's order calls for a temporary ban on all refugees seeking entry to the United States for 120 days, as well as a 90-day visa ban for visitors and immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen and other "areas of concern." Refugees from Syria will be barred until "significant changes" that are "consistent with the national interest" are made.
Furthermore, Trump's order gives precedent to Christian Syrians who apply for refugee status in a provision that gives preferential treatment to minority groups seeking asylum "on the basis of religious-based persecution."
Though not mentioning Islam by name, the order seeks to keep out "those who would place violent ideologies over American law."
"In addition," it continues, "the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including "honor" killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation."
The order also suspends the Visa Interview Waiver Program, a service that permits certain legal immigrants from renewing their documents without a face-to-face interview.
"We are establishing new vetting measures, to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America," Trump said Friday. "We don't want 'em here. We want to ensure we aren't admitting into our country the very threats that our men and women are fighting overseas."
Many organizations, including the ACLU, denounced the order as Islamophobic.
UPDATE 8:36 PM EST: This post has been updated with newly released text from the executive order.
We're tracking the laws and executive orders Trump signs in his first year in office. The updated list is here.
Just 24 hours after Donald Trump signed an executive order banning citizens of seven Muslim countries, we've learned that ban also extends to Canadians with passports from Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Libya and Yemen.
According to a statement from the US State Department, the order does not affect dual-nationality Americans, but does apply to non-American dual citizens of the seven banned countries. That includes those with work visas or permanent residence status, and remains in effect for 90 days.
"Those nationals or dual nationals holding valid immigrant or non-immigrant visas will not be permitted to enter the United States during this period," reads the statement. "Visa interviews will generally not be scheduled for nationals of these countries during this period."
The news came as a shock to immigration lawyer Raj Sharma, who called the move "mind blowing."
"No one predicted he would take away the rights of individuals already in the US who already have permanent resident status, who have the right to work and travel," he told VICE. "Just like an earthquake, this Trumpquake is going to have unforeseen and unintended consequences."
Sharma said it's still unclear exactly how dual nationality is being defined by the Trump administration. "What is a dual national? It doesn't necessarily mean to have two passports," he said.
Global reported that Canadians born in one of the seven countries without dual status appear not to be affected by the ban. That would have extended to two elected Canadian politicians born in Iran and Somalia.
Canada's transport minister tweeted that the government of Canada is now in contact with the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Transportation to get more clarity on the travel ban and the implications. "We will be providing further information to Canadians as it is available," Minister Marc Garneau wrote.
"These leaders will have to take this up with Mr. Trump, and say that segments of their population are being discriminated against," Sharma told VICE. With so many unknowns at the highest levels of government, Sharma said to expect legal challenges to come. "The courts are going to be engaged on this."
Harsha Walia from the group No One Is Illegal called the order blatantly racist. "This ban targets people based on religion and country of origin and must be fought," she told VICE. Walia called on Trudeau to revoke the Safe Third Country Agreement with the US, which requires refugees to make a claim in the first nation they arrive in.
Sharma told VICE people with passports from the seven banned countries should avoid travel to the US if they can help it, and to seek help from Canadian consulates if detained.
"The problem is going to be the green card holders that might have jobs and families and have been residents for decades," he said. "Those are the poor guys I feel bad for."
Asylum-seekers and ordinary travelers from around the world—including dual citizens and U.S. green card holders—faced detention and were denied entry to the United States on Saturday, as security officials began to implement President Trump's executive order temporarily barring all refugees and immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries.
In response, protests broke out at airports in several U.S. cities, continuing days of pro-immigrant and pro-refugee actions under the banner #nobannowall, and the ACLU sued the government in an effort to block the order. At J.F.K. airport in New York City, a crowd protesters continued to grow and reached nearly a thousand people by the late afternoon. Security corralled the group outside Terminal 4 and locked down the building. Protesters chanted messages of welcome to refugees as taxi drivers honked in support.
Charlie Travis
Actions were also scheduled for the S.F.O. airport in San Francisco and at Dulles airport outside Washington, D.C. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, appeared at Dulles to announce that the state's attorney general was looking into ways to help the people detained there.
"You board a plane to come to America, you have the right to come to this country, yet when you land you are detained," McAuliffe said.
A few minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve, three giant, digital clocks count down behind A-Trak. "Ten minutes," the New York DJ announces, breaking in over a remix of Kanye West. "Five minutes." He climbs up on top of the booth and waves his arms at the thousands of people before him, who twirl glow sticks and dance with hula hoops. Finally, the screens turn blindingly white, and the room explodes with balloons, confetti, and streamers. One girl to the side of the stage, unsteady in heels with a drink in her hand, falls over.
For most of the year, Dallas Market Hall plays host to conventions and trade shows, but tonight, A-Trak is playing day two of Lights All Night, the longest-running EDM festival in Texas. With the room's rows of vendor booths and neon lights—and a roster of performing artists that includes Above & Beyond, ASAP Ferg, and Zedd, Nero and RL Grime—the scene feels like a mix of a state fair midway and a bottle service club in Las Vegas. But it's also a kind of spectacle that's becoming increasingly common in the Lone Star State, where events like Sun City Music Festival, Ultimate Music Experience, and Day for Night have helped transform Texas into a hub for EDM.
There is a certain kind of bro who is always wearing a fedora, even if he isn't wearing a fedora. I can smell a fedora-bro from 10,000 miles away. I can detect him via email, internet comment, or even a particular avatar. It is what I call the aura of fedora: a distinct doucheyness that manifests on the metaphysical plane. It is not so much what the bro says, but the way he says it that beckons my intuition to cry: Watch out! You're in fedoratown!
Recently, I received an email from one such bro. The email read:
If you are so mentally ill how is it that you are still writing?
Obviously, I deleted the fedora fuckhead's email. But it also made me wonder how and why I've been able to be creative and productive, even in my darkest times. I decided to take a stab at answering this—not for the fedora fucker—but for anyone who might be thinking about the relationship between their own mental illness and creativity. Actually, I decided to take 13 stabs at answering the question, since the intersections between anxiety disorder, depression, and productivity are, in my experience, not a single crossroads.
1. The world is not enough for me. I have always wanted more out of life than life has to offer. I remember looking at friends of mine, the morning after a night of heavy drinking or drugs, and thinking, How are they so OK with returning to reality? Are they just going to go on living their lives again? Don't they want the high to go on forever? I didn't know then that I was medicating my anxious perception of reality. Of course, the medicine only lasted as long as it lasted, and then the anxiety returned, often in a worse way. Through writing, I now get to create an alternate universe that diffuses some of the tension of living in this dumb world by allowing me to live in a fantasy world. In that fantasy world, I can even partake, on the page, in what will ultimately destroy my life without actually destroying my life. Writing is one of the only ways of self-soothing that hasn't tried to kill me.
2. I wouldn't call myself brave. I would, however, call myself compulsive. Anxiety tells me that I am never going to produce anything again (it speaks in absolutes and worst-case scenarios, its native language), especially when depression has me wanting to do nothing but sleep. In some ways, I am powered by anxiety, a fear of never being enough. And it's often this anxiety that compels me to write, so as to avoid the terror of becoming nothing.
3. The question of "what's the point?" comes up for me a lot in life: as a symptom of depression, a symptom of existence really, an underlying cause of anxiety regarding my place in the world, and what the world even is. The act of writing provides a framework of meaning: not in an active or conscious way (like OK! this is why I'm here! I'm going to stay alive to write!), but because when I get in the flow of it, I stop asking that question quite so often.
4. Writing is a way of validating my own bizarre worldview. Like, let's face it, I think it's fucking weird that we exist. I don't understand how everyone at Quiznos isn't just dropping their sandwich and being like, What the hell is all this? Feeling this way can be lonely. But through writing, I have companionship in my worldview—my own companionship. There becomes two of me. I get to make the weirdness of the world—the way I see it, the way it is.
5. There isn't much else I know how to do. I don't play piano, I can't cook for shit, and anxiety makes it hard for me to sit still and watch a movie. I seem to always go to writing organically, and it seems to always be there. So the question is more, "How do I not write?"
6. Often I do act out so as to self-regulate my feelings of anxiety and depression, i.e. I'll fuck someone I don't know very well. This is a great thing for other people—I think everyone should be out fucking if they want—but, for me, it gets complicated the following day. The potential of a new sexual experience will lift me temporarily out of a depression. It will give me a reason to go on living. What's more, it provides a tangible place for me to project my anxiety—alleviating, temporarily, the existential nature of it. But once the experience is over, I sometimes feel more depressed because the sex wasn't great. Or, if the sex is magic, I am propelled to a whole new intensified realm of anxiety while waiting to hear from that person the following day (or week). I might give that person more power than they really have, or perceive them in a heightened, romanticized way, because I have used them as a drug for my anxiety. And once you have a drug, you just want more of the drug.
I don't understand how everyone at Quiznos isn't just dropping their sandwich and being like, "What the hell is all this?"
The antidote to this isn't necessarily to stop fucking randos. I've continued to make the same mistakes over and over throughout my life, and while I didn't get different results, I did write a lot of poems. Writing is where I have put my longing and channeled my emotions over the things that I used (erroneously) to self-regulate. And now that I'm currently in a phase of not fucking randos (which I'm sure will end, as all things must pass), my writing provides me with a place to fuck whomever I want, on the page, with no repercussions.
7. For me, writing means reading and reading means the discovery of kindred spirits. Let's face it: What is called "mental illness" is nothing new among writers and other creative people. There have been times in my life when I only felt understood by fellow sufferers I'd never met like Janet Frame, William Styron, or Emily Dickinson. There is nothing like discovering someone else's experience and having it resonate with your own to make you feel less alone. And for me, the feeling that I am not the only one quells the anxiety that tells me I am more doomed than anyone. Having said that, all human beings are different, and it would be ableist of me to say that something worked for me so it should work for you. I can only share my own experience. If it resonates, amazing.
8. In times when I felt like I could not live in the world, writing gave me a framework or schema with which to put things in context. When I was going through it with my psych med changes, I decided to report on the horror, and this made me feel somehow less stuck in it. I also feel this way about cognitive behavioral therapy and its focus on worksheets, journaling, and charts. CBT helps me to feel like I am working on a project in which I am a casual observer rather than a terrified person constantly taking my own temperature.
9. I'm not at peace unless I'm torturing myself. My writing is always there for me as something I can torture myself over.
10. One element of anxiety disorder is the desire to control everything around us: especially shit beyond our control. What's nice is that we can't control shit beyond our control, because that would be really exhausting if we could. What's hard is remembering that this is an impossible feat. But I find writing to be a nice place to practice no control (the mystery of poetry, the journey of it, and the not knowing what you know until it's over) and also a realm where one can have total control over an entire universe (as is the case with fiction). So in this way, it sates that desire.
11. When my internal world is at its most frightening—when I go through a period of panic attacks that feel like they are never going to abate, and every day am forced to walk through a multitude of new deaths—writing lends me the ability to be the hero of the story, rather than the victim. In spite of my long-term relationships with therapy, psych meds, and meditation, the act of writing is still sometimes the only thing that allows me to direct what otherwise feels like an uncontrollable narrative.
12. Writing is like a palliative for the present moment. I know that we are supposed to "embrace" the present moment, or whatev, but I find the present moment to be annoying. I have far too much anxiety to want to stay in my body for any prolonged period of time. But writing is like a little treadmill within the present moment (in the same way that the Dog Whisperer will put dogs on a treadmill when they have too much energy at a given time). I need it to burn shit out of me that is hard to just sit with.
13. If I'm calling myself "a poet" in the 21st century, there has to be something wrong with me.
I've worked behind bars on-and-off for much of my adult life, and while serving booze to different sections of society I've noticed that, generally, each has an unspoken drink of choice. At rock and metal gigs it'll be lager and craft ales; at Soca nights it's brandy with a single block of ice; for TV production company Christmas parties it's endless gin and tonics.
Trying to guess what customers are going to order is always a fun way to break through the monotony of pouring liquid into a glass for eight straight hours, and it makes you wonder how these drinking patterns emerge. Surely the same people don't head home after the club and eat the exact same food, smoke the same cigarettes and use the same toothpaste?
Dr Thomas Thurnell-Read, a lecturer in Cultural Sociology at the University of Loughborough, edited a book called Drinking Dilemmas: Space, Culture & Identity, which covers the drinking habits of various chunks of the population. I caught up with him for a chat.
VICE: Firstly, how much research has gone into group drinking habits? Dr Thomas Thurnell-Read: There's a long history of interest in this in academia, and anthropologists have long been fascinated by how alcohol plays particular roles and functions in different parts of society. In the 1930s there was a study by [research organisation] Mass Observation where they sent out observers across a northern city they called "Work Town" – which we later found out was Bolton – to study the habitual nature of drinking and what it tells us about a community and how they live their lives. There was a deep interest in the minutiae of the drinking setting from a social perspective. In the last few years the world of sociology has been increasingly drawn to returning to these themes of collective drinking and social habits around alcohol.
How much of what we drink is linked to socioeconomic factors, beyond, say, only super rich people being able to afford expensive bottles of wine? Academic interest, media interest and political debate is often focused on working class drinkers and how they drink, and middle class drinkers have long been invisible in these debates. You can trace a lot of this concern with working class drinkers back to the 19th and 20th century, with mass industrialisation and urbanisation. The ruling classes had concerns with how productive the labour force was – as in, if they're spending all their time in the pub drinking, is this going to be a threat to factory work and productivity? I think gender and social class have long been the most important divisions in our understanding of how we drink and the role alcohol plays. There is still a double standard where we widely accept that men drink heavily, or that drinking heavily is a particularly masculine thing to do, but women drinking heavily or drinking in public tends to challenge our binary notion of gender. Women who drink heavily, or in a particular way, may be subject to social taboo or social pressures.
Are we social chameleons when it comes to drinking? I think it's true that we change our drinking habits depending on our context. Drinking is always socially contingent; there's a lot of conformity involved. If you go home to your old village and drink in the local pub with old school friends, you drink in a particular way that you might not with colleagues from your work. We are increasingly adept at being able to change our habits and tastes depending on context.
Is everyone pretending they like the same drinks for a sense of belonging, or do they genuinely like it, in a kind of mind-over-matter way? Drinking alcohol, just like any other activity, is a learned, socialised process: we are taught how to drink at a certain age. I think we learn how to drink and, within that, our tastes and predispositions are shaped.
The book you edited touches on the extreme metal music scene in Leeds. Are music tastes indicative of alcohol tastes? The author of that chapter, Gabby Riches, was doing a wider ethnographic study of that subculture and she noticed how set and patterned the drinking habits were. It had to be real ale, beer or cider at these metal gigs. In certain subcultures and youth subcultures, alcohol can be as important as clothing in linking people together, and can symbolise an attitude – a sense of belonging to that subculture. We want to use all aspects of consumption to give ourselves a sense of self or identity, whether that's food or clothes or alcohol. This is central to my approach to studying alcohol.
Yeah, that whole real ale and craft beer scene doesn't seem to be going away. The interesting thing about real ale is when you look at the branding it draws on images of the industrial era; small breweries often focus on local heritage and incorporate famous landmarks or local figures that are associated with the town or city they're from. They're using that, in a way, to offer a sense of reassurance; they're depicting the "glory era" of industrial Britain. People are clearly drawn to those types of ales in our current time of uncertainty and dislocation because these ales can give us a way of consuming locality in an interesting way. There's a growing trend of people liking the idea of something being made locally, instead of big companies that might feel faceless and corporate. In many ways, it is exciting and new, but it's a return to how things were historically, where the vast majority of the British population would have once been drinking what was local to them.
Where does drunkenness and the amount that people drink come into it? Drunkenness has become really politicised over time. If we look at the contemporary situation, drunkenness is seen as threatening to the stability of society. The media has a fascination with portraying young people – and particularly working class drinkers – as deviant and problematic. In tabloid newspapers they'll have two dozen photos of 18-year-old students drunk and falling over, which pushes the idea of drunkenness as chaotic, disorderly and destabilising. At the same time it perpetuates the idea that young people are irresponsible and naive. What is lacking from that is that some universities themselves encourage freshers week and frame it as alcohol-centric. Local pubs and bars will exploit that, too. The "studentification" of British towns and cities means that a lot of them are dependent on the student body to bring money into the town, usually spent in bars and clubs. It's a complex picture that is wider than simply blaming the individual for drinking too much, or too little, or in the wrong way.
What does this view of drunkenness say about our society? Norbert Elias talked about a civilisation process, where European societies have tended to move towards greater self-regulation and self-control. Arguably, the concerns about binge drinking are concerns about how society thinks about controlling itself. They are different things, alcohol and drunkenness. Modern societies develop out of a sense of control, rationality and bureaucracy; they tend to be ordered; and there tends to be high degrees of social control. The appeal of drunkenness is that it offers you a way out of that, a momentary escape from the mundane, the everyday.
I think the lives we lead when we are not drinking have an intimate relationship with how we approach drinking and whether we get drunk at the end of the week. It could be that the jobs available are increasingly precarious and poorly paid – in that case, who wouldn't want a drink on a Friday night to get some sort of release from the working week? If we continue to hammer this drum of "there are problem drinkers and it's their fault, it's their problem" I feel it doesn't get us very far. There are obviously some people who don't drink and some people who drink heavily, and every shade in between, but we can't abstract that from the social context.
How much responsibility has the industry got for encouraging excessive drinking, or shaping drinking habits? The industry is hugely important; the managers and owners of bars, and different alcoholic brands, they take conscious steps to keep people drinking. We talk about "high volume vertical" drinking, which is when a bar owner consciously takes out the tables and chairs from a bar or club because people will drink at a more rapid pace if they can't put their glass down and get lost in a conversation. Or the owners play music loud enough so that the drinkers can't have a conversation at all. The industry's branding of alcohol is selling it as something more than it really is. Carling as a brand has long positioned itself as a beer that is somehow a totem of male friendship. Their successful campaign of "You know who your mates are" was selling a moment with friends, homo-sociality, all males having a laugh and being part of a group. It should be quite clear that it is not the only strand and cause of changing drink practices, but it is significant and often forgotten about.
Big companies capitalising on these types of things isn't anything new, right? You're right, but I think we can benefit from reinstating it sometimes. Also, in some ways the industry actually struggles to have an influence. Over the years, with the closure of pubs, people try to pinpoint different reasons for this. Statistics show that young people are drinking less and there are more abstainers from alcohol now in the cohort between 18 and 25 than there have been in generations. Young people will use social media to promote the fact that they've just been to yoga class and are drinking a smoothie, rather than showing themselves getting drunk in a pub. They also may be limited by their finances.
How linked is the sociology of people's drinking habits to their eating habits? I think there is a link there. When I asked real ale and craft brewers where they think the trend came from, they thought it was linked to people's move towards a different kind of eating. With many showing an interest in local produce, provenance, quality, artisan food, caring about what you eat, the flavours... the brewers thought that approach had seeped into their drinking habits. A lot of high street venues where you just stand and drink, they're struggling. The profits and the interesting developments in that field are at venues where they successfully combine these two trends: what people are drinking and eating.
What do you think the next trend in drinking will be? I think craft beers will continue. In terms of changing trends and practises, people aren't going out as much – they're drinking at home and binge-watching box sets on Netflix, in the same way that when televisions first came into the living rooms of British homes it had an impact on regular pub-going. If I was to be brave I would say that the drinks industry, having watched the trend in healthy eating and clean living, might not be able to resist coming up with some beer that's maybe fortified with Goji berries, or green tea extract. I can see "smart booze" or fortified beer coming out, which is actually a return to how beer was historically seen, as wholesome and almost like a foodstuff. We could be going back to a "Guinness For Strength" – alcohol as nourishing and sustaining.
However, I can't see it working. A lot of people drink because they want an escape from control – a blowout at the end of the week where they don't have to worry about counting calories or how many kilometres they've walked on their Fitbit. I think alcohol will retain that appeal. It offers a space of spontaneity and fun, and for many people that isn't on offer in other areas of their lives. There's a common discourse that we're not meant to talk about the pleasures of drinking. I want to state unequivocally that there are huge dangers and damages that can be caused by heavy drinking – it ruins lives. But for many people, if we put the friendships, fun and pleasures of drinking against their struggles to get by in the world, I think they're very difficult to untangle.
A federal judge in Brooklyn blocked part of an executive order that President Donald Trump signed Friday barring visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries. The emergency stay, issued Saturday night, temporarily prevents people arriving at U.S. airports with valid visas from being deported.
The ruling, issued by Judge Ann Donnelly of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, temporarily stalls President Trump's plan to block visitors—including visa and green card holders—from Syria, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan and Libya for 90 days. The order also suspended the refugee resettlement program for four months.
But on Saturday, Judge Donnelly halted the deportations ruling "there will be substantial and irreparable harm to refugees, visa-holders, and other individuals from nations subject to the January 27, 2017 Executive Order."
When Judge Donnelly granted the stay, the courtroom erupted in cheers but she immediately shouted "No! No!" and the room returned to silence.
The American Civil Liberties Union estimated that the stay will temporarily spare 100 to 200 people from deportation. After the ruling, ACLU asked if their clients would be put in detention until their status was resolved. U.S. Attorneys seemed not to know. Judge Donnelly said, "If someone is not released, I guess I'll just hear from you."
Thousands of protesters descended on John F. Kennedy International Airport on Saturday in response to President Trump's executive order barring citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries for the next 90 days, and the admission of all refugees for 120 days.
Chants of "Let them in!" and "No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here!" rang throughout Terminal 4 until late Saturday evening before New York federal judge, Ann Donnelly, ruled to block the deportation of refugees who had been detained at JFK overnight.
Amidst chaos and confusion, people took to social media to help fuel the city's swift response. The Women's March organizers were especially vocal about organizing resistance to the executive action at JFK as well as several other major airports across the country. An estimated 2.6 million people around the world joined the Women's March last weekend, displaying a forceful and historic solidarity between progressive organizations representing everything from DACA students to transgender equality to black economic empowerment to refugee rights.
