On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will meet to vote on whether or not Alabama senator Jeff Sessions will become the next attorney general.
Tuesday's vote follows Trump's firing of acting attorney general Sally Yates Monday after she refused to defend the president's immigration ban on refugees and people from seven countries with large Muslim populations. She's been replaced by another Obama appointee, US attorney Dana Boente.
If the committee approves Sessions, he will still need a vote from the full Senate by the end of the week, where Republicans hold the majority.
You can watch the hearing live below via livestream.
One of the most patriotic tourism tickets in New York City is the boat that takes you to Ellis Island and Liberty Island (home of the Statute of Liberty), both of which are run by the National Parks Service. You can read the lines about the huddled masses, visit the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, and search for your ancestors' names on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor. The tour is a tribute to America's openness, to the idea that the US is a place that people come to start new lives, where those who have faced persecution and oppression can find freedom.
For decades, this was an idea that American presidents paid tribute to, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. But this week a visit to Ellis and Liberty islands feels oddly partisan. Donald Trump's executive order banning citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US—and temporarily blocking all refugee admissions—has led to waves of protests and legal challenges, but to many, it's also been a stain on the ideal (not always lived up to) of America as a welcoming place.
Curious to see how this new political climate was coloring the experiences of visitors to Ellis Island, VICE sent photographer Jason Bergman out to talk to tourists and take their portraits. Here's what they told him.
All interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Corey, from Boston, 30 years old (left): I've lived here my whole life. My great-great-great grandfather came from Ireland—probably through here. I don't know all of the stories. I'm in New York because I'm on vacation.
Mostly simply put is we're a nation of immigrants, all of us. Even the Native Americans, their ancestors came over the land bridge. You can't just say, "We're done, thanks. Go home."
Jeff Garza, from Jacksonville (right): I wanted to see the rich history. Everyone's come through here for the past 200, 300 years, this has always been a main point of entry. We're a country of immigrants—this is something you have to see in America.
It's kind of disheartening to see what's going in this country over the past couple weeks when it comes to immigration policy. I get why we're doing some of that stuff, but at the same time, we're a country of immigrants.
Mitch Kuhman, from Orlando, 30 (left): I had family from Germany and Italy that came through this way. I'm third or fourth generation, I believe. To me, it's sentimental to be able to see this.
Garza: I just want to learn more about the process back then. I've heard so many stories of people coming from all over the world. This is a symbol of hope, and this is the first thing you see: the Statue of Liberty, which is supposed to be a beacon of hope. The first thing you come into is Ellis Island, which is the first step to a new life. Getting that perspective, how it was walking in their footsteps, was something.
Roger Florentino, from California, 32: This is my first time on the East Coast, and we're sightseeing. We went to check out the Statue of Liberty, so we came out here. It's real interesting to see all this immigration history. You learn about it in school, but it's not as detailed as it is here—you've got so much background.
I don't know my ancestry that much, but I know most of us are on the West Coast. It's very interesting, though. You get the vibes of all the souls that have passed through here.
I think Trump is appealing to his crowd and people who think like him, but there are a lot more people who have very strong opinions because they're immigrants, or they've dealt directly with immigrants and real-life issues. He doesn't deal with real-life issues. He's part of the One Percent. His reality isn't our reality. I understand what he's doing but... there's more of us than there are of them. I think the next four years are going to be monumental for society as far as standing up and really showing what we're thinking.
Coming here made me understand immigrants on the East Coast—I see the Czechoslovakian people, the Irish people. I met really great people from different parts of the world, and they're immigrants as well, and they're like, "What Donald Trump is doing is old, it's an outdated mentality."
I think this is our time to speak our opinions as to where we want the country to go.
Siobhan, from San Francisco: We're only visiting a few days; we're originally from the East Coast. I had been here as a kid tons of times, but with everything that's happening, it was symbolic for us to come today. It's always been on my mind to come, but it resonated more today. My mother's family is from Italy, and my father's family is from Ireland.
Douglas, also from San Francisco (right): Trump's view on immigrants is abhorrent. It's not just a threat to immigrants, but it's a threat to democracy. The way they're using the ban—everything from that to voter suppression—is setting up a constitutional crisis and what will end up being an electoral crisis and probably a national security crisis.
I think people have to realize that some of the stuff we've seen over the last week we've been through before. People have fought through these kinds of anti-immigrant feelings before—so maybe take some lessons from that.
Siobahn: I'm emotional just going through the Statue of Liberty again and reading the words. It brought me to a spot where I was a little verklempt. I'm not sure if this is going to be around much longer! I could go on and on about it.
Jon, from Ohio, 22: I actually don't know at all if my family went through here.
Tiffany, also from Ohio, 25: My family did come through here. My family were Irish immigrants. My great-great-great-grandfather is in the book and stuff—my grandfather did a bunch of research into it.
Obviously this whole Trump thing—I'm not for him. All these immigration policies are just crazy to me. We're supposed to be a country about freedom and equal rights and everything. It's crazy that we're in the 21st century, and we're going to go back to not allowing immigrants in our country.
Jon: Now we're going to go back 100 years. I'm trying to get a whole new perspective on everything. I don't think I like it at all.
Mitch Hendrickson, from California, 42: We have family that were immigrants—from Denmark, back in the 1850s or 1860s. I honestly was thinking of the irony of being here. I don't know if it gave me any new perspective.
To be honest, we've been in a little bit of a bubble, being here on vacation, but we've been hearing a little. I haven't formed a complete opinion [of Trump's policies] because I don't know all the facts, but I will say it's hard to find the facts because everything is so hyped, on both sides of the aisle. Lots of bias. That's my biggest problem right now, the bias.
Alexis Hendrickson, 13: All the protests are on Instagram. They're everywhere. We haven't quite gotten to Ellis Island in school yet, but I found it really interesting. Immigration, it's shaped our nation pretty much, and we're trying to limit it? Really?
On Tuesday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions convened to vote on whether or not Betsy Devos will become the next education secretary.
Devos, a billionaire conservative donor and advocate for charter schools, faced scrutiny from the committee during her confirmation hearing about her lack of experience in higher and K–12 public education. According to the Washington Post, Democrats have also voiced concern about her failure to disclose information about certain investments that could be potential conflicts of interest.
During her confirmation hearing, Devos also said that she rejects a ban on firearms in schools, because some might need guns to protect themselves against "potential gizzlies."
On Tuesday, the Washington Post and Huffington Post also reported that Devos had apparently taken several direct sentences from various sources without attribution in her written responses to senators' questions. Devos appears to have used phrases from Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division under Obama, and an education magazine, specifically when answering questions about students' LGBTQ rights.
Should the committee confirm Devos's nomination, she will still need a vote from the full Senate, where Republicans hold the majority.
You can watch the hearing live below via livestream.
Daryn Caister was like a lot of coffee drinkers in Toronto. Young and socially conscious, he got his daily fix at the Green Beanery across from Honest Ed's in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. A popular café advertising organic "fair trade" beans, it also boasted that profits went to the environmental work conducted by Probe International.
For Caister, a 34-year-old chef and videographer, the café became his regular stop, in part because of its proximity to his home, but also because of its apparent ethical superiority to the corporate coffee shops that line the streets of Toronto. Upon closer examination, however, the environmentally-friendly façade of the Green Beanery began to wilt. Caister spoke to a barista about appearing on his CIUT radio show, The Green Majority, to discuss the café's work. "The employee was the one who told me that they were terrible and that what they were doing was actually quite upsetting," recalls Caister. It turned out that Probe International is a division of the larger Energy Probe Research Foundation, which in recent years has gained notoriety for its anti-science agenda of climate change denial. Since this inconvenient revelation, Caister has not set foot in the café.
Tonight, the Green Beanery will play host to a debate over vaccines (despite the science being settled) between a well-known Toronto psychiatrist and Lawrence Soloman, a controversial columnist for the National Post and the founder of the Energy Probe Research Foundation.
Green Beanery in Toronto (photo via Facebook)
The Energy Probe Research Foundation maintains a strange space within Canada's environmental community. Beginning with a single division devoted to domestic energy policy (Energy Probe), it has grown into a hydra-like body that, among other things, addresses foreign aid and investment (Probe International), government policies relating to Canadian natural resources (Environment Probe), and regulatory matters that affect cities (the Urban Renaissance Institute). These tangentially connected operations are linked by two things: a common emphasis on property rights and free markets, and Lawrence Solomon.
The Energy Probe Research Foundation has been active since the early 1980s, and Solomon's work within Toronto's environmental community predates that. While the foundation has some renown, in recent years this pales in comparison to the notoriety generated by Solomon. Billing himself as "one of Canada's leading environmentalists," Solomon's free market environmentalism has always been viewed with suspicion. However, he completed the transformation from an environmental outlier advocating on behalf of free trade, deregulation, and the privatization of our natural resources, to an outright pariah due to the release of his 2008 book The Deniers, which established him as one of the world's leading climate change skeptics. For evidence of Solomon's strange stance on environmental issues, one need look no further than his comments in the conservative National Review where he argued that the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty dedicated to reducing carbon emissions, was "the single biggest threat to the global environment."
Any examination of the Energy Probe Research Foundation must begin with the realization that it is inextricably linked to the work of Lawrence Solomon. While there was an Energy Probe–the division, not the foundation–before Solomon, what existed in the 1970s bore little resemblance to what exists now. Having conducted interviews with Solomon and a dozen of his former colleagues, I've come away with a better understanding of how the Energy Probe Research Foundation was created in his image while utilizing his gift for rhetoric, a talent for securing funding—albeit from questionable sources, such as the oil industry—and a never-waning vision of free markets and property rights as an all-encompassing panacea.
Lawrence Solomon first became involved in the environmental movement in the late 1970s. A Romanian-born journalist with no training in ecological matters, he secured a Canada Council of the Arts grant to write The Conserver Solution (1978), a treatise that argued technological and policy innovations could lead to an improved environment without sacrificing our high standard of living. As he explained, "I approached Energy Probe and Pollution Probe," two sister organizations operating in Toronto under the Pollution Probe Foundation umbrella, "to see if I could collaborate with them in producing the book. I thought that having them as a resource would help me in writing my book." They agreed, taking him on as a volunteer. The Conserver Solution, featuring the organization's endorsement on the dust jacket and cover page, went on to become a critical success and a bestseller.
"One thing about Larry [Soloman]—he was very good at getting funds."
Right away, Solomon created controversy. Chris Conway, an Energy Probe staffer at the time, told me that there was considerable discussion about whether the Pollution Probe Foundation endorsement would appear on the final product. "It's creative, it's insightful, it's funny. It's a lot of really good things, but it didn't present the themes and the issues the way at the time a lot of people thought Pollution Probe wanted to present its public face. It's a little too much of a polemic, a little too casual with the facts."
Offending passages included proposals to eliminate the minimum wage and social welfare programs—matters generally unrelated to the environment, but obvious points of contention for a free market enthusiast—that appeared alongside more mainstream ideas about reducing waste and promoting energy conservation. Given the prevailing notion within Pollution Probe and Energy Probe that government intervention in environmental matters was of the utmost importance, there was talk of the organizations withdrawing their formal endorsement of the book. Eventually they relented, under the premise that they should be the conveyors of fresh ideas. Following the book's release, Solomon continued at Energy Probe as a full-time volunteer.
As the 1970s came to a close, the Pollution Probe Foundation was in a state of financial disarray, in large part due to the general economic malaise of the time. Funding for programs was low and there was a constant struggle to meet the payroll. (A non-hierarchical organization, all Pollution Probe Foundation employees received $600 a month.)
Dissension between Energy Probe and Pollution Probe began to rear its head. While there were three fundraisers on staff, there was a perception that they spent most of their time working on Pollution Probe initiatives. This led Solomon, still a volunteer at Energy Probe, to advocate in favour of separating from the Pollution Probe Foundation. As he told me, "I think some people were afraid of losing the $600 [monthly salary]. It wasn't much, but it was something." By the close of 1980 the group had split, and the following year they incorporated with charitable status as the Energy Probe Research Foundation. (While there was some talk of adopting a name more distinguishable from Pollution Probe, Solomon told me that "we also feared having to re-introduce ourselves with a brand new name." The similarity of these two Toronto-based ENGOs' names has resulted in much confusion over the years.)
"He's a right-wing ideologue who is [also] a brilliant writer."
Independence led to greater financial security for the staff at Energy Probe. "One thing about Larry [Solomon]—he was very good at getting funds," former co-worker David Brooks told me in an interview. "And he was getting funds from new sources, like oil companies. They [the oil companies] thought they had found their environmentalist." Not coincidentally, at this time Energy Probe launched a campaign "to educate Canadians to the social, environmental and economic benefits of less regulation in the petroleum field."
Solomon's ability to secure funding led to increased influence within the organization. This, in turn, led Brooks to tender his resignation in 1982. "He's a right-wing ideologue who is [also] a brilliant writer," Brooks explained. While Brooks enjoyed his early years at Energy Probe, which featured a diversity of approaches, he recalls that as Solomon's influence grew "it became increasingly less an environmental organization than an economic one." Chris Conway also left Energy Probe at this time, citing discomfort with the increased focus on free market solutions. Whenever there was staff turnover, they were replaced by those that were ideologically in tune with Solomon.
By the early 1980s Energy Probe had evolved into a veritable libertarian stronghold. This position is clearly illustrated in Solomon's 1984 book Breaking Up Ontario Hydro's Monopoly, in which he argued the case for privatizing the province's publicly-owned utilities provider. Four years later, when the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement was signed, Energy Probe was the lone ENGO that supported the deal. While most environmentalists feared fewer regulations would result in free rein for polluters, Energy Probe's suspicion of government planners was in line with the neo-liberal agenda that brought Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Brian Mulroney to office.
The Energy Probe Research Foundation continued to carve out its ecocapitalist niche throughout the 1980s. In a move that saw it expand beyond its original focus on the Canadian energy sector it became a fierce critic of Canadian foreign development policy. Finding many of Energy Probe's supporters were confused by its interest overseas, in 1986 it created a separate Probe International project under the Energy Probe Research Foundation umbrella.
Solomon's interest in the marketplace would not be confined to policy work. In the late 1980s he established a short-lived mutual fund that invested in "green" companies. In 2004 he founded the Green Beanery, the Annex café whose profits continue to fund the work of Probe International.
In 2008 Solomon took his most controversial step yet with the release of The Deniers. Based on a series of columns written for the National Post (a newspaper that gives a tremendous amount of space to climate change deniers ), the book purported to highlight research that dissented from the scientific consensus that climate change, caused by human activity, is a severe threat to the planet. Dismissed by environmentalists and scientists, The Deniers nonetheless enjoyed brisk sales due to support from right wing circles in Canada, the United States, and beyond that embraced it as proof that the issue is a liberal hoax.
While the ensuing fame increased demand for Solomon as a speaker and "expert" panelist within the fossil-fuel funded skeptic community, two things jump out as particularly strange about the book. In the introduction, Solomon notes that Energy Probe had long been engaged in the fight against climate change. His inspiration for writing the book came from a co-worker that casually mentioned one day that the science on the matter had been settled. Solomon took this as a rhetorical challenge, and began searching for evidence to cast doubt on the statement. Second, scientists whose work was profiled in the National Post columns and the ensuing book were quick to point out that their research had been misrepresented by the author, leading to at least one public apology from Solomon.
Four decades into his environmental career, Lawrence Solomon remains busy. Today, the sixty-eight year old is the managing director at the Energy Probe Research Foundation, while also serving as executive director of its Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute divisions. (At present the other divisions are Probe International, Environment Probe, the Environmental Bureau of Investigation, and the Consumer Policy Institute, all of which are based out of its red brick headquarters on leafy Brunswick Avenue.) He also writes weekly opinion pieces for the Post where his topics range from critiques of foreign aid to spirited defenses of the anti-vaccination movement. His work also reaches beyond Canadian borders, as he serves as a Policy Expert with the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank based out of Arlington Hills, Illinois. (Coincidentally, the Heartland Institute's position denying the reality of human-induced climate change harkens back to its work in the 1990s, funded by Philip Morris, that disputed the negative effects of second-hand smoke.)
Clearly there's an audience for what Solomon, and the Energy Probe Research Foundation, is shilling, but perhaps tellingly, he leaves behind a trail of former coworkers that are critical of the ideologically-charged takeover he mounted of the formerly moderate Energy Probe. Barry Spinner, whose time at the organization overlapped with Solomon, described the latter's creeping power grab as "a kidnapping through his intellectual ability." But the root of their critiques echo the words of David Brooks. "Some of the Pollution Probers, and a number of the Energy Probers, saw the simplicity of it [market-based solutions] and just absorbed that as if that was all there was to it, that the whole thing was just getting the prices right and letting government get out of the way." Brooks, who holds a masters degree in geology and a PhD in economics, noted that "I'm very much in favour of using market instruments," but was quick to add the famous statement from John Maynard Keynes: "The market is an excellent servant, but a terrible master."
Back in the Annex, coffee drinkers continue to patronize the Green Beanery. That said, the word has started to spread about its dubious environmental credibility as a result of media coverage and discussion on the Toronto subreddit. Nonetheless, environmental do-gooders that were taken in by the café's green market continue to feel betrayed.
"I felt really dumb for not checking further earlier, but I got caught too, just assuming they were doing good work because I never had any reason to doubt it," Caister explained to me. "Much less that they were fuelling science denial."
Ryan O'Connor is the author of 'The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario' (UBC Press), which won the Ontario Historical Society's J.J. Talman Prize in 2016.
If you're a woman in your late 20s/early 30s, you've no doubt hit, or started to hit the stage of life when your Instagram explore page is full of baby bumps and pregnancy announcements. Like sands through the hourglass, so go the stranger's sonograms of our lives. Whether you want them or not, once the constant feed of engagement pics and wedding posts cease, prepare for a lifetime of baby/toddler/teen photos that you are under every obligation to at least smash that like on, and every once in awhile leave a comment somewhere in the vein of "aww." And the awws are usually deserved, babies are cute (they biologically have to be!) Hell, it might even be enough to convince you that procreation is a good idea. But as we all already know, social media and especially Instagram, is a giant lie. Pregnancy isn't all sun-dappled bump photos and frosted baby shower cakes. So what really happens to your body should you decide to play host to a foreign organism for nine months? I talked to Batya Grundland, a maternity care lead and family physician to find out the physical reality of pregnancy.
VICE: So to start, what kind of major life changes should you make before you even start trying to have a baby? In terms of like drinking, and smoking? Batya Grundland: If you're thinking about having a baby, you would want to start on folic acid or a prenatal vitamin. All prenatal vitamins have 1 mg of folic acid in them, so that's easy. That would be number one. And number two you do want to, as you alluded to, certainly reduce your drinking if you were trying to get pregnant.
Well, what does that mean? Like, what does reduce mean? So, the trick is there's no real guidelines, I mean other than regular low risk adult drinking guidelines which for women, is 10 drinks spread throughout the week. The problem is that most women don't know they're pregnant the minute they get pregnant. If you were actively trying to get pregnant, you probably actually at that point want to abstain from alcohol because you don't want the impacts of alcohol to happen in the very early stages of pregnancy if you can avoid it, in that period when you may not realize you are pregnant. I would say that recreational drug use and smoking we obviously recommend reducing and avoiding if possible, in general because there are general health effects for people even when you're not pregnant. But sometimes people need pregnancy as motivation to make those lifestyle changes. Whatever changes you can make prior to getting pregnant are obviously desirable. Because both of those behaviours, recreational drug use and smoking, can have impacts on the fetus even from the early stages. Having said that, if someone is engaging in those behaviours and gets pregnant, there are mechanisms for harm reduction and reducing the impact that it would have on the baby. So we certainly wouldn't recommend terminating a pregnancy if you smoked a joint before you knew you were pregnant.
Nope.
So, in terms of like, the physical changes that happen, maybe we could just kind of go into trimester by trimester? Like, just that first three months, I think that the myth is that you'll throw up a lot when you feel nauseous but other than that, it's kinda chill. Yeah, no. The first trimester is actually often the hardest trimester of pregnancy. So, as you mentioned, many women struggle with nausea and some women struggle with profuse vomiting during the first trimester. We do have medications and things to help manage that so most of the time, that's sufficient but those medications are actually a little bit sedating. So, it's not a perfect fit. Even for women who don't have bad nausea or vomiting, many women feel profound fatigue in the first trimester. And remember for most women, they aren't really telling too many people that they're pregnant in the first trimester. They don't look pregnant in the first trimester so you're still trying to carry on your daily activity with this profound fatigue. So that is a huge change that many women struggle with. The other things that you might notice right away in the first trimester are significant breast tenderness and already some growth in your breasts. The tenderness can actually be quite uncomfortable and again that happens in the first trimester.
Some women will get some irregular spotting as well and sometimes that can be normal and sometimes that can be the sign of a concern. So that could be something that you'd wanna talk to your medical provider about. I guess the other thing that happens in the first trimester, since we're having kind of a frank conversation, is for most women, their bodies do start to change. They start to get a little more bloated and they get a little softer in the mid section, they may already start getting lower abdominal pains but they don't at all look pregnant. Again, they're often not telling people that they are pregnant. So that's often something women are really struggling with is that they don't feel the same. They can feel that their bodies are changing but it's not a huge difference yet, right?
What about mentally in the first three months? Are you still operating on all cylinders? No, well, you're exhausted. Right? Most women are exhausted. So, I would say it's the exhaustion more than the other mental stuff. At that point, it all kind of runs into it. So you kind of finish your day at work and all you can do is sleep. If you can get through a day of work without a nap.
OK, so then moving into the next three months. So the next three months, the second trimester, that is usually a much better time for women in their pregnancy in terms of the physical symptoms of pregnancy. Usually by the second trimester, after the nausea and vomiting settles down, you might still be fatigued in that you're not quite at your baseline but you're able to get through the day and you're still able to enjoy a little bit of social time in the evening. Towards the end, there are things like the development of lower back pain, or chest pain, or reflux (so a little bit of heartburn) that can worsen. The other thing actually, I didn't mention for the first trimester and this is across both trimesters is some women notice more shortness of breath with basic activities that they previously would have been able to do without question. So, climbing a flight of stairs, or walking briskly. In the second trimester this can get exacerbated because as the uterus grows, it can start to compress the lungs a little bit. That's the other thing that people start to notice in their second trimester but usually the second trimester is actually a pretty good time.
What about weight gain? Weight gain is obviously something that will happen. The target for weight gain in pregnancy varies a little bit based upon women's baseline BMI. So for a woman of an average BMI prior to pregnancy, the expected weight gain throughout the pregnancy is between 25 to 35 pounds. How that happens in an individual woman's bodies will vary tremendously. So, if you are someone who's vomiting like crazy in the first trimester, they may actually lose weight in their first trimester and then gain it later. Other women, the only way they can manage their nausea is by eating simple carbohydrates all day so they tend to gain a lot in their first trimester and it kinda settles out as time goes on.
There's no going back now
What about stretch marks? Do they show up now? They can start to show up towards the end of the second trimester and then into the third trimester.
Going back to that mental change, what's happening for your brain right now? Yeah, the fatigue tends to improve in the second trimester but it's true. Usually throughout the pregnancy and certainly in the second and third trimester, there's a subjective phenomenon of what we call "pregnancy brain" where you're just not quite as sharp. I don't think I've got a good physiological explanation for why that happens but it's certainly a described phenomenon that women will notice and talk about and complain about. Thankfully for most people, it doesn't get to a point where it significantly affects their ability to do day-to-day activities. It's more like simple, you know, word-finding difficulty, getting a name here or there, getting a little less efficient than you might be normally. That's usually how it manifests.
The popular narrative is really like, "oh, it's the most beautiful time and you feel amazing" and some women are starting to speak out against that. Is there an average experience? What do you tell women who don't feel that way? So, there's no average. Some women have like a really good pregnancy experience where they do love being pregnant. Then there are women who have terrible experiences and we don't know what predicts these things. We have women who are vomiting throughout their pregnancies, we have women who are in pain throughout their pregnancy. We have women who just don't feel right throughout their pregnancy. But no one, very few people go out and write and brag about that. That's just not what people are gonna get out there because no one wants to say you know, how terrible their pregnancy was and how they're wondering if they really made the right decision doing this whole thing. No one's gonna talk about that but it is absolutely a normal experience.
OK, so you're rounding the bases of the final three months, is this when things irreparably change forever? Some of the things that you can expect as you progress through the pregnancy—first, more muscular aches and pains. So my joke is, it's like a glimpse into your life with osteoarthritis 20 years down the road. It's kinda like that. There's like a bit of stiffness, everything kinda hurts or can hurt. Common areas for people to have pain are their lower back, and women get chest wall pain just because everything is expanding to make room for the baby, so lots of joint pains and aches are really, really common. Often by the third trimester, sleep is really disturbed because it's hard to get comfortable. That's a common thing. If it hasn't happened already, I didn't mention this and this can happen through the trimesters is changes with your urinary pattern. So urinary frequency, urgency and certainly as you get along, certain things like incontinence especially if you cough or sneeze, you've got a baby sitting on your bladder. So that's certainly something and that's often something that's very difficult for women, especially younger women dealing with this. You mentioned earlier, stretchmarks, not everyone gets stretch marks but certainly if you will get them, they usually pop out by the third trimester.
Do you know why some people get them and some people don't? No.
Can you prevent them? Not really. There's a lot of luck of the draw stuff when it comes to pregnancy. So yeah, there's aches and pains, stretch marks, pressure on the bladder. Other skin changes—this can happen. Some women will notice a darkening of their skin in general actually where they kind of walk around looking a bit tanned throughout their pregnancy. Certainly as it goes later into the pregnancy, some women will get individual marks that are dark. There's a line that can go down the middle of the abdomen and often become present during a pregnancy and get darker. Usually the biggest change in the third trimester is really around the mobility and general comfort. If you had heartburn, it's likely to get worse in your third trimester. If you are short of breath, it's likely to get worse in the third trimester because the baby's compressing more. Ankle swelling is another thing—so it's quite normal to have swelling of your lower limbs, especially if it's symmetrical and bilateral, that's really normal. To have both ankles swelling up is really normal and an unpleasant part of pregnancy.
What about the actual birth? Most people's context for their birth experience is what we see on TV which is someone's water breaking dramatically, someone rushing like crazy to a hospital and five minutes later, there is a baby and it's a normal vaginal birth. That is actually never how it happens. The first thing to understand is that there are different stages of labour. There's early labour which is where you are starting to have contractions and you are starting to feel uncomfortable but they are not strong enough or regular enough that you are admitted to the hospital. Some women just experience little things here and there and they don't know what to make of it. Other women can be in that process where they are actually uncomfortable with contractions for a couple of days prior them to being regular when we can admit them to the hospital and continue on with their labour. You can actually have labour for a while at home and like you can imagine, it's really uncomfortable. You're pretty exhausted by the time you're sitting in the hospital.
Once you are in what we call 'active labour,' which is where you are having regular, strong contractions that are changing your cervix to the point where you'll actually be able to birth the baby, for the average, for most first babies, women's cervixes change at one centimeter an hour. You usually hopefully are admitted around three to four centimeters and we want to get you to ten. Textbook first baby birth, once you're admitted to the hospital, is at least six hours. Of course not all women progress at that rate, some women are slower, other women are faster. But that's kind of average. If that's not going well, there are things that sometimes your medical provider will need to do to help augment the labour and help encourage it to move faster just so the baby can tolerate the labour and the mom can tolerate the labour. The next stage of labour is from the time that you're ten centimeters to when you actually have the baby and push the baby out and again, that is not like it's three pushes and the baby comes out. It would be considered completely normal for a woman in her first pregnancy to have to potentially push for two hours to actually birth the baby. Despite the beautiful, vaginal births you see on TV, the vast majority of women do tear as part of that delivery, not with a cut, just naturally tear their pelvic floor. There are other scenarios. You can have what's called an assisted vaginal delivery where we need to use a vacuum or forcep to help get the baby out vaginally. For those interventions, often we do need to control the tear because there is a risk of a worse tear and that's when we might do the episiotomy and obviously those can be—it's certainly not what you envision on television.
The third mechanism that people do tend to know about is the possibility of a cesarian section which is an abdominal surgery to get the baby out and there are a number of times where that can happen. It can happen despite all interventions, the woman is not dilating, the labour is not progressing, and keeping the labour going is no longer safe.
The other myth perpetuated by popular culture is that you have it and then you're home and you're walking around and you're just like this amazing creature. I mean, if you've had major surgery or an episiotomy, there's recovery, right? Well even if you've had a normal vaginal delivery, I think the biggest message for this postpartum period is that there are two patients. The new baby that needs to be cared for and fed and taken care of and who isn't sleeping consistently, and the primary caregiver for that person is going through their own significant physical and emotional recovery. So it's a very tricky time in that sense. It is not the bliss that you see on TV.
What's the physicality of that time? The first thing is most women will bleed postpartum and most women will bleed four to six weeks. The first couple days are just a heavy period and then eventually it should taper off into spotting but you may be bleeding for up to six weeks. Often women will have pelvic pain if they had a vaginal delivery. Some women more than others but their usually is a feeling of fullness and discomfort in the pelvic region. Some women will have pain with urination for quite a while. I mean we obviously repair the tears but there's still, you know, for lack of a better term, scratches and things like that can be very easily irritated. So peeing can be quite uncomfortable for the early postpartum days.
Some women actually struggle with regaining urination independently. This is a very, very small proportion of women but it does exist. Essentially the urination does come back but it can take a while and some women actually have to be sent home with a catheter in place.
On the flip side, with bowel movements, the process of labour slows down your bowels so many women will have pain with the initial bowel movement and they will be constipated for the initial postpartum period as things recover. For women who have had a cesarian section, obviously there can be pain around the wound. So lots of soreness and pain potentially. There's of course normal wound pain and concerning wound pain but often it's just normal and they have to avoid heavy-lifting, they have to walk very carefully, stairs can be difficult.
One of the other things that I always love telling people about that happens in the postpartum period that no one tells you about is night sweats. So what happens is women often are retaining some food throughout their pregnancy and they need some IV fluids during their labour so they're getting a whole bunch of fluids as part of their pregnancy and then that ankle swelling that happens in the third trimester, before it gets better, it gets worse. So it's not like you have a baby and all of the sudden there's no swelling. Usually, the 48-72 hours after you give birth, your ankles actually look worse and your legs can look quite swollen. And then eventually that tends to improve over the next couple of weeks but as all of that is improving, part of what is happening is your body having night sweats to get right of that extra fluid. So that's something that often freaks women out 'cause they are awake in the middle of the night having to peel off layers of clothes as if they're having a hot flash but it's actually normal. For women who are trying to breastfeed, which we often encourage, that is a whole other change that's happening. So you're trying to teach your baby how to breastfeed and that often takes some time. Women can get some cracked nipples and it can be very painful. As the milk comes in, which is usually two to three days postpartum, women can get quite engorged in their breasts which again, can be quite painful and uncomfortable. So lot's of breast pain and fullness. Some, a small subset of women, that pain and fullness will lead to a blocked duct which is more painful and a portion of those women will develop an infection of that duct called mastitis. That's obviously very painful and you actually feel unwell and that's because that's an infection that needs to be treated.
What about the shape and size of your breasts? Do they change? Oh yeah. I mean for all women, they will change because most women will produce milk, whether you choose to breastfeed or not so they get larger, they get more engorged and fuller. The other thing that happens is that they will change with feeding, they are not constant through the day. So if you feed the baby, they will get smaller and softer and then when it's time for the next feeding, they will get larger and more fuller. For many women it won't be to the same extent but the change maintains through the period of breastfeeding. Even for many women after they stop breastfeeding, their breasts are not what they were before.
What about your vagina? If you've had a vaginal delivery obviously that whole area has been stretched out and you've been pushing and even within your pregnancy, your pelvic floor muscles have been stretched and weakened so the more vaginal deliveries you have, the vagina can become more stretched out. You are at risk for things like incontinence, especially with coughing and sneezing.
Why don't more people have this conversation more often in the public sphere? Why not prepare women for what really happens so they don't feel wrong when they feel bad? You're right, I don't know why we don't talk about that part of it. Maybe it's because we don't want to scare women off? For everything that I've said, most of this is for actually a relatively short-lived period of your life. You're really looking at the nine months of pregnancy, the postpartum period. Some women transition through those things very easily, some women struggle. But if you enjoy parenthood, I don't know if you forget about all of this happening but the parenthood, which is a lifetime commitment, is worth it.
Follow Amil on Twitter, she never posts baby photos.
This weekend, something extraordinary happened. In the words of Wayne Campbell of Wayne's World, it was "something big, something mega, something copious, something capacious, something cajunga."
Stan Mikita's All-Star Cafe became a reality.
For 18 glorious hours, fans of hockey and Wayne's World were able to gorge on complimentary doughnuts and coffee while overlooking downtown LA's skyline, all while meeting some of their favorite hockey players and celebrities in the process. The pop-up doughnut shop was complete with air hockey tables, an autograph booth, and even a "Wayne Gretsky 3-D Hockey" arcade.
The free event was held in front of the Los Angeles convention center in celebration of the 2017 NHL All-Star game. It was presented by Honda, in collaboration with Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the beloved film and 100th anniversary of the NHL. On opening night, thousands drove in from all around Southern California to relive their favorite scenes in the movie, including many parents who were passing on their love of Wayne's World and doughnuts to their children.
I don't know about you, but I am absurdly incompetent, as a human. And that's the tricky part with The First Week of a New Job: hiding that incompetence from the people who just hired you. You need to present a face that says: you have made the right decision, here, in hiring me. You need to be able to say: please match my pension contributions, for I am a competent man. You need to avoid embarrassment and, wherever possible, make the new place – those new places, those new offices, those unbreakable cliques and impenetrable office in-jokes you need to navigate – know you're there. You, the new guy, with the stink of newness on you, an alien seed in a place of otherwise calm, need to make that new chair your own. But also you really want to go home at 5PM on the dot and you're still not 1,000 percent sure of your new commute. It's tricky. It's hard to get that balance right.
I've been on the first week of many a job, because I have been let go from a number of jobs, due to the aforementioned incompetence. I have been where you are, multiple times. And here, with years of wisdom gleaned, is some advice to get you through these tricky times. Come, take my hand, as I show you where the bathrooms are and give you the quick tour of the office, then get you quickly into HR just to sign some forms and give you a notebook with an embossed logo from your new place of work on it and take a quick scan of your passport, just for our files.
DO: BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO WEAR ON YOUR FIRST DAY
Friends, I once turned up in a full suit for an interview at Zoo magazine. I'll reiterate that one: I once turned up in a full suit for an interview at Zoo magazine. Zoo magazine, in case you were unaware, was a small glossy pamphlet that came out every week, and contained anywhere between 35 and 56 individual titties, and four pictures of a supercar with the caption "Phwoar!" underneath it, and a letters page that always had a vivid photograph of some reader's leg injury, two adverts for hair transplants and one for Lynx. It was exclusively bought by 14-year-old boys at motorway service stations during a school coach trip to the Imperial War Museum and overseas-stationed members of the Army. That's it. Nobody else bought this. It is no longer published in any way, shape or form.
Now imagine me, in a full, grey, ironed suit and shirt, and shoes, sat in a small meeting room trying to say I'd be a good web writer for that. Ridiculous.
Similar for the first day of a new job: you want to look smart, sure, but you don't want to overdo it. What if you turn up in a full suit when everyone else is on more of a "shirt and jeans" kind of vibe? What if you turn up in shirt, tie 'n' shoes when everyone else is in tees and trainers? What if it's a cardigan kind of place? Lord help you if it's a cardigan place. My advice: during the interview, when you walk in and out, try to get a good read on what the office people are wearing so you don't stress it too much on the first day. See what shoes they're wearing. They rolling the sleeves of their shirts? What's the blouse situation? How casual, on the ten-point smart-cazj spectrum, is this office? How long do they wear their ties? Just simple stuff. Simple stuff to ease you into the first day.
DON'T: START QUESTIONING THE INTERVIEW PROCESS THAT LITERALLY JUST GOT YOU HIRED, I MEAN OH MY GOD
Listen, nobody quite knows how you've done it, but you've done it now so no point discussing it: you – actual you, you – you have a new job. Which is crazy, because the interview process these days is just so absurdly involved: they are always "calling you back to do a presentation", aren't they? There is interview day after interview day, and there are just so many opportunities throughout to crack the facade of dignity. Also, two out of the three people you interviewed with kind of wanted the other candidate more. But listen, you've done it now so no point discussing it.
You, during your interview (Photo: Alan Cleaver, via)
DO: MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE IT DEPT
The first half of your first day at a new job is basically spent setting up a new email and just staring at the inbox as it fills up with exactly three messages from HR ("New form I forgot to get you to sign! Thanks!") and literally nothing else, because nobody trusts you enough to do any work yet and nobody knows your surname so they can't type an email to you, so you just sit there, clicking idly, behaving yourself enough not to blatantly look at Facebook at your desk (that's some real "week three" shit) but not, actually, having anything to do. This is a good time to get IT over to set you up with a printer, to give the illusion of you having work to do but not being able to do any because you can't print yet. Also, it's good to have IT on-side for when you click on an email phishing scam or accidentally tweet your password, or something like that.
DON'T: HOLD HANDS WITH THE WEIRD CRAGGY LADY FROM THE OVERSEAS BRANCH OF THE OFFICE
Should be in the documents HR gave you on the first day, but if you need a refresher page eight has a whole bit about how holding Theresa May's hand in a death-like grip is one of your three strikes before they have to hold a meeting with you and recommend you spend a day at a sexual harassment training seminar.
DO: REALLY PAY ATTENTION WHEN SOMEONE INTRODUCES THEMSELVES
It Happened to Me: I spent my first 18 months of this job discretely G-chatting the only person in the office whose name I knew, repeatedly asking them what the person who just came to my desk and spoke to me was actually called. And let me tell you: it is not worth that kind of aggro. Keep a notebook. "Blue shirt, keeps going to the vendo for Kit Kats, think he works in sales??? JOHN" – that sort of thing. "Got on the same piss cycle as me one day, made weak joke about Brexit, BEN," &c. "Stood in kitchen together for five entire minutes before saying 'uhhh… this toaster! WENDY". Keep notes.
DO: TRY TO KEEP SLAGGING THE OLD GUY OFF TO A MINIMUM
A lot of people quite liked the guy who had the job before you and you're still trying to adjust your desk chair so it's no longer built for the dimples of his particular body, so try not to make a big deal of slagging him off really loudly in front of everyone while taking a shit – a near-literal turd – on some of the work he did do. Do your own thing, maybe, first! How bout dah!
Everyone at this meeting knows each other and nobody has ever seen you, so practice your signature on your notebook a lot and try and keep your head down (Photo: WOCinTech, via)
DON'T: ASK 'WHERE'S GOOD AROUND HERE FOR LUNCH?'
1PM: You've done no work yet today. Stretch your arms out. Yawn. Stand up at your desk. Make a show of picking up your wallet, your phone, your keys. Slowly pull your coat on. Look up to the person opposite. "Hey," you say. "So, uh… where's good around here for lunch?" Don't do this.
The only answer to "where's good around here for lunch?" is just "someone very slowly describing to you where Pret is". That's it. That's the only option. They could describe to you the Chinese buffet place a few people go to every Friday, but that's not really a Monday kind of meal. They could tell you about the shop a few roads over that does cheap curry boxes, but honestly it's not worth hand-drawing you a map on the back of an A4 envelope. Just go to fucking Pret like everyone else, then eat it, alone and scrolling through your phone for an hour, sat on a bench by a canal, desperately avoiding going back to work until every minute of your lunch hour is spent up because you have nothing to do.
(This one doesn't really apply to Trump because he's almost certainly got White House chefs doing charred-black steaks on the regular, but I'm trying to hide some actually useful information in this here fun goof. This is about Trump, by the way. This article. Donald Trump. The President of the United States.)
DO: TRY NOT TO BE SO BAD AT YOUR JOB THAT THERE ARE TWO INTERNATIONAL PROTESTS ABOUT YOU DOING IT WITHIN TEN DAYS OF YOU STARTING
I dunno, man! The worst I fucked up in my first week of a new job was when I didn't know how to mute someone on the telephone when I was passing them over to a colleague, so they heard me say "there's some woman on the phone to you, are you here or nah?" and had to formally apologise in a follow-up email, and in the grand scheme of things – the scheme of things now ranging from "minor landline related fuckoo" to "barring the citizens of seven countries and let's face it one religion from the US for 90 days, no questions asked, chaos reigns" – doesn't, now, in hindsight, feel quite so bad. I don't know. Listen: I'm in no position to talk. I just feel like if there are two international protests within ten days – ten days! – of you starting, then maybe it's not going so well. Ten! Days! That's one every five days! That's so many international protests to happen to you! More than one a week! How hard are you fucking up that people are marching the streets in countries you don't even reside in to say how bad you are at your job and that is happening more than once a week!
Other things to note: don't spit chewing gum in the urinals (the Office Manager had to send 25 separate all-office emails about this last year, don't start it up again); don't bother asking about the 10 percent Fitness First discount advertised on the office noticeboard (nobody actually knows how to activate it); if you need a wrist rest you have to fill out a form; and sometimes people knock off early with a beer at 4PM on a Friday, but you have to wait for the email to go round before you can drink it. Oh! And try not to start any wars. Okay now. Good luck and have fun!
No question, it's been a brutal couple of years for Canada's oil patch.
You have a province of devout capitalists sitting on top of Earth's third largest oil reserve, yet we know burning all of it would make the planet irreversibly less habitable. Throw in an oil price crash, surprise non-conservative takeover, and a tragic wildfire, you have the makings of a binge-watchable Netflix drama.
I know Albertans probably don't want me—a nature-loving Vancouver coastal elite or whatever—worrying about them. But watching all this unfold from west of the Rockies, I can't help hoping and cheering for Canada's Texas to overcome job losses AND existential climate threats. (Recent "phase out" misspeakings aside, I think we all agree both would be ideal?)
Anyway, this is why I was excited to discover that Edmonton's airport, of all places, will soon host the world's biggest weed grow-op. A Vancouver-based company called Aurora Cannabis has announced plans to build an indoor medical marijuana production facility the size of nine football fields.
The company is selling the project as an economic boost for a still-struggling province. Aurora's CEO told Business in Vancouver he's proud of the plan because "it will become an important contributor to the local economy, both through investments and job creation."
Rendering of the "world's most advanced cannabis facility." Image via Aurora Cannabis
Let's try to appreciate how massive this thing is for a second: at 800,000 square feet, it's more than four times the square footage of the nearest Costco. Alberta's only other legal grow op (also owned by Aurora) is one-sixteenth the size. It's basically the weed version of the West Edmonton Mall.
The Aurora plant will be capable of producing 110 metric tons of cannabis per year. For some perspective, the government expects Canadians as a whole will consume about 655 tons of weed by 2018, once a legal market is in place.
If anyone is going to take weed to corporate extremes, it's going to be Alberta. Which makes it somewhat easier to imagine an alternative universe wherein a multi-billion-dollar weed boom saves the economy.
I know oil is back over $50 a barrel and Alberta might do just fine this year. But for an an experiment in extreme wishful thinking, I reached out to Western University economist Mike Moffatt to figure out how plausible this "weed patch" reality would be. He told me it could definitely become a major part of Alberta's economy, but it's not catching up to the oil sands anytime soon.
Our first task was to figure out how big Alberta's weed market could possibly get. A recent study by Deloitte pegged the Canada-wide maximum at $22 billion, including lab testing, security, and other related fields. According to the study's author Mark Whitmore, that's similar to the size Canada's entire alcohol industry.
Accounting for Alberta's population, Moffatt and I settled on somewhere between one and two billion for Alberta's homegrown weed market. "Which is not nothing," he told VICE. But next to Alberta's oil sands and related industries, it's pennies on the dollar. "Compare that to $60 billion just from oil exports, and billions more in services around that," he said, "we're talking maybe one or two percent of the size."
Now, some weed advocates do contest the Deloitte figure. Craig Jones, executive director of NORML, suggested there would be a much larger opportunity if Canada was allowed to export to the US and other countries. Though British Columbia probably has a stronger brand opportunity, Alberta could stake its own claim on the global scene.
But Moffatt pointed out that getting into the global weed market might not shield Alberta from the kind of price fluctuations its oil sands industry has been fighting against these past two years. "I would treat it as any other agricultural commodity, so you probably would have the potential for price volatility," he said.
This is something we've already seen happening in Washington State, where weed has been legal for a few years now. In fall 2014, a massive crop of sun-grown weed flooded the Seattle market. Prices at dispensaries dropped from over $20 to $4 a gram, lots of pot went unsold, and growers called it an "economic nightmare." That's nothing compared to crude's tumble from $120 to $30, but a potential headache nonetheless.
That, and pot industry leaders might not stick around if the climate or economic conditions aren't ideal. "It's going to be grown where the best conditions are. I don't know why Alberta would have an advantage over Vancouver Island or southwestern Ontario." One great thing for Alberta, is that there would be a sizable stream of government revenue, mostly from taxing the consumer side.
I asked Moffatt to come out on a limb with me, and imagine what would have to happen to for weed to surpass the oil sands as Alberta's biggest money maker. What if, say, 50 years down the road, oil sands production has been scaled back to meet real, enforceable international climate targets, and weed has taken off as a new centrepiece of Alberta's economy?
Though highly improbable, Moffatt agreed this would have to be part of a post-carbon economy, where oil sands have been closed down almost entirely. "We're probably talking about pretty much shutting down the oil sands. If you shut that down and just kept some conventional oil, that would probably be comparable."
But realistically, if anything is going to replace the oil sands as Alberta's cash cow, it's going to be some kind of alternative energy, says Moffatt. There just isn't enough demand for weed to sustain that kind of single-resource market. Then again, cannabis activist Jodie Emery told VICE hemp biofuels have the potential to shake things up in coming decades. And based on events of the last week, truly nothing seems impossible.
"I think it can become a significant part of the economy," Moffatt told VICE. "Is it going to be the dominant industry? Probably not. But that might not be a bad thing."
Municipal politicians in London, Ontario, unanimously voted for a motion to convert to a sanctuary city (a municipality that protects undocumented immigrants) Monday, following the social and political chaos caused by President Donald Trump's ban on refugees and travel to/from Muslim-majority countries.
According to the National Post, the proposal gained near-full support from city council before being transferred through to the final process—approval by city staff. The meeting, which took place less than day after the terrorist attack in Quebec that left six mosque-goers dead and a handful of others injured, drew heartfelt support from Coun. Mo Salih, who is Muslim.
"I want to thank London. As a Muslim. As a Londoner," Salih said. "I love you, London."
The motion—which gives access those without documentation access to municipal services, but not to education or healthcare—was pushed through by Coun. Tanya Park, who described city services as "basic human rights." Toronto is the only other city in Ontario to offer the same type of service.
"With this motion, it's my intention that the City of London officially (become) a sanctuary city where people can access municipal services without fear," she said. "It's so important that we stand against discrimination, exclusion and hate, and that we welcome individuals . . . from Syria, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Somalia."
Only a few members of council, such as Coun. Phil Squire, criticized the motion. (author's note: Squire said he didn't oppose sanctuary cities, but had "concern" about allowing undocumented immigrants to access city services, which is literally what sanctuary cities do). On the other hand, Mayor Matt Brown put his full support behind the move, arguing that Islamophobia and xenophobia are not acceptable in London.
"There is no room for Islamophobia, for racism, for hate of any kind in our community or in our world."
Based on what we know about London's relationship with race and identity (for context, read this, this, and/or this), this seems like a step in the right direction.
In Michael Schur's sitcom The Good Place, much attention has been given to two of the leads: Kristen Bell as Eleanor, a bad person who somehow ends up in what she thinks is Heaven, and Ted Danson as Michael, the "architect" of her afterlife neighborhood. Danson's performance deserves the hype, but I don't tune in for him.
The reason I watch is because the show revolves around people of color and their romantic entanglements. These complex depictions are very important in a world where interracial relationships are still taboo. Although I benefit from passing privilege, that has not shielded me from dealing with people commenting and critiquing my own interracial relationship. I appreciate The Good Place, because by putting real interracial relationships on the screen, it's helping normalize them in real life.
Everyone in the titular Good Place has a soulmate. Eleanor quickly learns that hers is Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), a Nigerian ethics professor. When he learns that Eleanor spent her life on Earth as a depraved and narcissistic sociopath, Chidi decides to teach her how to be a good person, which results in their relationship slowly blossoming. Next door lives Tahani (Jameela Jamil), a Pakistani-born, London-raised daughter of aristocrats who dedicated her life to raising money for charity. Her soulmate is supposed to be a Taiwanese monk who took a vow of silence named Jianyu (Manny Jacinto)—but it turns out he's a fake. In reality, he's Jason Mendoza, a Florida-based amateur DJ.
Early on, there's a joke about how a drunk Eleanor can't say Chidi's name correctly—the look on his face says that it's a tiresome and irritating routine. The joke is rooted in how inconsiderate Eleanor is, not that Chidi's African name is "strange." And that's just about as in-depth as the show goes into addressing the character's racial backgrounds.
The Good Place, which was renewed for a second season just yesterday, doesn't praise itself for being brave enough to have a white woman fall in love with an African man, or for depicting a British Pakistani woman try desperately to get her believed soulmate to talk to her. Their relationships aren't presented as out of the ordinary. The Good Place doesn't self-righteously pretend it's the first television show in history to explore interracial romance. The characters don't bring up one another's racial backgrounds (except when Eleanor is trying to remember what country Chidi was born in), which allows the characters to develop naturally, without being pigeonholed by racial cliches.
By almost never addressing race, the show normalizes the fact that diversity is a part of life. In the afterlife—just as on Earth—there will be people of color. They exist, and they are just as capable of falling in love as white people. And by presenting these relationships so simply, so matter-of-factly, The Good Place reinforces how commonplace interracial relationships are.
Of course, the interracial relationships that The Good Place rely on are the natural result of casting a diverse group of actors. Scrolling through Manny Jacinto's Twitter account, you'll see fans praise the fact that a show featuring a Filipino actor who doesn't indulge in any of the stereotypes about Asian men that are so common to Western media. With diverse casting, The Good Place hammers home the point that representation matters. Until very recently, I thought the only South Asian celebrities working in America were Michelle Branch (she's a quarter Indonesian) and Mindy Kaling. Now I see two of them—in prominent romantic roles, no less!—in the same show; Indian actress Tiya Sircar eventually joins the cast as a second Eleanor, complicating original Eleanor's relationship with Chidi.
It is admittedly sad to still get so excited about this small step up in diversity on television, but this excitement is the result of years of frustration—of always being forced to relate my struggles back to white women who look nothing like me. There is no denying that it feels good, even in small doses, to see myself and other women of color reflected in the media—to see that our presence in the world is normal, that we are not outliers in our own culture.
The Good Place doesn't necessarily deserve a pat on the back for doing the bare minimum. Diversity should be a no-brainer. And yet, here we are, expressing disbelief that in 2017, it's a show about dead people that can seamlessly pull off racial diversity without white people—either the characters or the creators—taking all the credit for being so open-minded. As happy as I am that a show like The Good Place is on the air, it's very existence tells me how easy it would be for so many other shows to air the same content, but out of laziness or fear of low ratings, they choose not to.
All you have to do is allow people of color on the screen. Give them space to be selfish, confused, indecisive, in love—just regular human occurrences. What makes The Good Place work is that it doesn't get trapped by its politics. There are no sanctimonious plotlines about how accepting Michael is, or how progressive Eleanor must be. In the reality of The Good Place, diversity and acceptance are already the norm. There's no need to explain it.
Chris Kelley and his colleagues had already rented apartments and collected furniture for their next batch of arrivals to Texas. These were refugee families who'd languished in camps for years while being screened by the US State Department, but had finally been approved to come to America.
Then, on Friday, President Donald Trump issued his executive order halting refugee resettlement for 120 days, and indefinitely when it came to refugees from Syria. All at once, everything changed.
"We were just notified this morning that these trips were canceled, and we have received no instructions or guidance as to what happens after the 120-day ban," Kelley, the communications director for Refugee Services Texas resettlement agency, told me Monday. He wasn't sure if those families would ever be allowed in the country, and noted that almost all of the refugees were women and kids and were joining relatives already in Texas. "There are many long faces and lots of tears," he said.
Trump's four-month moratorium dashed the hopes of about 20,000 refugees—mainly women and children—slated to enter the US, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has estimated, and his indefinite ban on Syrians denies countless other desperate individuals protection. The sweeping order prioritizes refugees who are religious minorities (which has been taken to mean Christians), reduces the overall number of refugees the US will accept in 2017, and blocks visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries. The Trump administration claims these measures are necessary to protect the nation from terrorism.
But what critics have derided as a "Muslim ban" has been met with global protests, lawsuits, and dissent from State Department employees. Meanwhile, the rejected refugees are stuck in limbo—uncertain whether they'll end up in Canada, Europe, the US, or just remain in the camps for the rest of their lives.
Historically, the US has resettled more refugees than any other nation. But the president has the power to dictate numbers and even put a halt on the program, Chris Boian, senior communications officer for the UNHCR, told me. He said his organization was "deeply concerned about the uncertainty" of those assigned to resettle in the US and willing to negotiate with the Trump administration, but had not been approached.
"People are overwhelmed—their question is now, what are we living for?" a humanitarian aid worker in southeast Turkey's refugee camps, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me of refugees' response to the ban.
Increasingly, refugees feel they have no options to relocate, the worker told me, since the US has followed other countries in limiting its aid. Many refugees now have "zero hope" to enter Europe since Macedonia closed its borders and Turkey stopped allowing refugees to travel west. Even Canada decreased its quota for 2017, the aid worker noted.
"The accumulative effect of all these laws against refugees is taking a toll on their mental health," the worker said. "There's a lot of sadness, isolation, and feeling lost." She said some refugees whose resettlement was halted may attempt to travel by boat to Italy, but she doubted many would make the perilous journey if they believed they still had a chance to enter the US. More than 5,000 refugees died on boats headed to Italy last year alone.
Noor (who asked I not use his last name), a Syrian refugee living in the Turkish city of Gaziantep who has always wanted to live in the US, told me he would not consider the boat ride because of its risk, even though he felt "trapped."
"Living in the US is the dream of the dream, but to me, it was impossible even before Trump's ban," said Noor, 28, an Aleppo native with a degree in English literature, said, explaining that he understood the US only accepted families and very vulnerable individuals. Noor said he had instead tried to gain entrance into Canada—to no avail. "I'm in constant uncertainty, fear of the future," he said.
VICE News Tonight goes inside a refugee camp:
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has implied he wants to step up the country's efforts, tweeting in response to Trump's ban that "to those fleeing war, persecution and terror, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith." (Trudeau is reportedly planning a visit to the White House soon, where he will discuss Canada's policy with Trump.)
Canadian immigration expert Sharryn Aiken, an associate law professor at Queen's University in Ontario, told me it was clear Trudeau "is behind-the-scenes crafting a policy response" to Trump's order, and said she was "cautiously optimistic that Canada will step up."
Boian would not say whether Canada had presented a concrete resettlement proposal, but he told me UNHCR was searching for solutions for those refugees denied resettlement by the US. Still, finding an alternative home is a challenge, since he said it was "unclear which countries have a capacity for more" refugees.
As international partners scramble to support shocked families, US immigration experts remain convinced that at least part of Trump's order can indeed be dismantled in court. Trump has legal authority to halt overall resettlement, but his apparent intention to favor Christian refugees violates the First Amendment, immigration attorney Ally Bolour told me.
"If you talk to any attorney, really, the text of the executive order is unconstitutional," Bolour, who represents asylum seekers in Los Angeles, told me. "The First Amendment, separation of church and state, applies to everyone and every activity the US government does, so you can't have a religious test."
The "Muslim ban" also violates international law, said Jim Hathaway, the director of refugee and asylum law at the University of Michigan's law school. He told me that the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the US has signed, prohibits discrimination of any kind.
No lawsuit has yet been filed on the grounds of religious discrimination, those the order has been challenged by five different suits so far. The first four only applied to refugees who had already arrived in US airports, not to those awaiting resettlement. The fifth lawsuit, filed by Washington State's attorney general and joined by several large tech companies, argues that the president's actions are harming the state's families, residents, and economy.
Establishing discrimination would be the most promising legal challenge to the order, said Andrew Schoenholtz, deputy director for Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Migration. But he said proving discrimination would be much more difficult than it seems.
"There's evidence from when the president was a candidate [that the order was intended to ban Muslims]… but the order itself doesn't read that way—it uses national security [as its justification]," Schoenholz said. He claimed Congress would be more successful at drawing up an eventual political solution, particularly if Trump continued to suspend the refugee program. "If the president said he's totally ending the refugee program Congress could push back—they created the program. But would there be enough pushback from both the House and the Senate? We'll see."
"Can't we resist a demagogue by trying to make beautiful things?" Rememory writer-director Mark Palansky recently asked me. He posed the question as a gentle challenge, intimating that he wanted the answer to be yes. But, as I sat next to Palansky and star ofthe film, Peter Dinklage, in Park City last week, I realized that, for the first time in my life, I wasn't so sure I agreed. Sundance exists, ostensibly, because artists and audiences alike believe that art matters, both personally and politically. But Palansky's question articulated what many of us who attended Sundance had been asking ourselves throughout the festival, which was, in the face of a week that confirmed the worst fears of those who stand in opposition to Trump, does art matter enough? Rememory provides a theory on why, even in the darkest days, art still matters by forcing viewers to meditate on the value of self-reflection in the face of grief and anger.
Alongside Dinklage, Rememory stars Julia Ormond, Martin Donovan, and the late Anton Yelchin. The plot is set in motion when Gordon Dunn (Donovan), the inventor of a machine that can record memories, is found dead. Dinklage, as Sam Bloom, investigates Dunn's death after initially seeking him out in an attempt to remember more clearly the details of his own trauma. Dinklage befriends Dunn's widow (Ormond), whose new grief is layered by a past loss, and interrogates members of the machine's trial group, two of whom (Yelchin and Orphan Black's Evelyne Brochu) have motive to murder Dunn. The memory machine's primary value comes from its ability to play back one's memories in perfect detail, allowing the user to cathartically heal from traumatic events by becoming, as Dunn explains, "audience to the theater of the mind." The film productively complicates this hopeful premise, and, to my surprise, Palansky and Dinklage, who've been close friends ever since working together on the former's first film Penelope, also slightly differ on the value of reliving one's past.
"The saddest, most narcissistic people deal in the past," argued Dinklage. "They deal with what's been said about them. We all come from pain, and it's what we do with that pain moving forward that matters. I really do feel like I have to immediately get beyond something difficult; otherwise it clouds the present and future. We all have to grow constantly."
"But there's a difference between getting stuck in the past and reflecting," Palansky added, turning to his friend. "Oftentimes, we're not self-aware until we see something reflecting back at us that we recognize. When I was a kid, there was a man who worked for my parents, and he always took care of me and was really cool and gave me skateboards and he died of AIDS. Years later, I saw a film that dealt with AIDS, and I'm watching that film and I was a mess. I'm not dealing with that pain every day, but when I saw it on the screen, I was bawling my eyes out. I think good art shows you who you are if you can't find it yourself. I hope."
"We're alone, and we don't want to be alone. But art doesn't want us to feel that way. Art does the opposite. It allows us look and say, 'Wow, I share that. Great, I'm not alone.'"—Peter Dinklage
The film achieves Palansky's definition of good art most convincingly in scenes between Ormond and Dinklage, where deception, guilt, and grief run around the current of every line of dialogue. Palansky puts a tremendous amount of trust in Dinklage's ability to draw in the viewer, even as we're unsure of his character's intentions. This trust is fully justified as Rememory further confirms what we already knew: Peter Dinklage is simply one the best actors alive. "I wrote this role for Peter," Palansky said. "There's a gentle openness to Peter that allows you to come close to him even though he's lying to everyone in the film, and I don't think another actor could do that. We withhold so much information for so long, you'd lose patience with another actor."
For better or worse, the primary effect of Rememory will likely be a reflection into the interior of your own mind, as it is hard not to sift through your own formative memories as the characters are sifting through theirs. The visual representation of memory constitutes film's biggest risk and greatest artistic success. Palansky leans on his fine-arts background to create stunning tableaus that tell the stories through meticulous sensory details like the sound of skateboard wheels echoing through a tunnel, the roughness of sand between one's fingers, the close-up claustrophobia of being lost among tall hedges, the small light given off by candles on a cake. These images reveal not just the characters, but also the director himself, showing who he is as an artist, and what he's capable of giving to an audience. Lost in these scenes, I tunneled within myself, locating the details of what mental images I've clung to most and what that might say about who I am now. "That's the best response I could ask for, just that you'll walk out the theater thinking instead of just wanting Chinese food," joked Palansky when I recounted my experience to him, then continued, saying, "The movies we remember the most are the ones where you are sort of just slammed into self-reflection. What's it all for if you can't start to think about your own existence and how you deal with things?"
In another time, the fact that Rememory allowed me to rethink parts of myself, to dredge up and re-feel with startling clarity sensations of my life, would have been reason enough to be grateful for this film. But in this uncertain political moment, I needed more. Unfairly, I looked to Dinklage to defend art and its current value, and he didn't disappoint. "We're alone, and we don't want to be alone," he said, smiling at me. "But art doesn't want us to feel that way. Art does the opposite. It allows us look and say, Wow, I share that. Great, I'm not alone."
VICE spoke with Sam Mendez from the Cannabis Law and Policy Project in Washington and he offered some helpful legal advice to keep in mind if you're pulled over with weed.
The first major sentencing in BC related to fentanyl since the onset of the opioid crisis happened Monday, with a dealer being given 14 years in prison. Though the Crown was seeking an unprecedented 18 years for defendant Walter James McCormick, who is described as having "personal significant responsibility for hundreds of fentanyl-detected deaths in British Columbia," the judge's decision granted less than the requested sentence, CBC reports.
McCormick's trial serves as one of the first examples of the government's move to figure out sentencing procedures around fentanyl trafficking. Fentanyl-related deaths have surged in British Columbia in recent years, where a record-breaking 914 people died of drug overdoses in 2016.
"I recognize that a sentence above any established range will not lead to an end to the fentanyl epidemic," Judge Bonnie Craig wrote in her decision.
Though the decision and those that follow will inevitably be hailed by some as a win in fighting the opioid crisis, the reality is that some of those participating in the fentanyl trade are suffering from addiction themselves.
Last year, an accused fentanyl dealer was charged with manslaughter in the neighbouring province of Alberta, setting a precedent for how those selling the opioid are treated in the legal system. The accused dealer, Jordan Yarmey, was also suffering from opioid addiction. At the time, addiction and public health specialist Dr. Hakique Virani told VICE, "I think bereaved families can blame us [doctors] all for the crisis that has claimed the lives of their loved ones—not just drug dealers."
McCormick was arrested as part of Project Tainted, which was a police operation created in response to a spike in overdoses in October 2014 that resulted in ten arrests and the seizure of tens of thousands of bootleg fentanyl pills. McCormick's lawyer, Lawrence Myers, argued that an increased sentence wasn't the answer to the fentanyl crisis: "The suggestion is that giving people severe sentences is going to solve the problem. That simply isn't the case."
However, the judge said that the court must "exercise its responsibility to denounce the unlawful conduct and attempt to deter others from engaging in offending of this nature."
"When determining the appropriate sentence for Mr. McCormick I must take into account... that an increasing number of people are dying due to the illegal sale of fentanyl," Craig stated. "McCormick did not create the problem with opioid addiction in the community. He is just one of the players in a far more complicated problem."
As one of the worst mass shootings in Canada unfolded Sunday evening in Quebec City, news outlets around the world struggled to get a handle on the facts. Hours before names of suspects were made public, media reported that at least two masked gunman stormed the mosque that was the scene of the carnage, one of whom was said to be a Muslim of Moroccan descent. That man would eventually be revealed to be an innocent bystander who got caught up in the chaos.
That was just one part of the misinformation that would take hold. Fox News and others circulated false statements about the attack, and White House press secretary Sean Spicer even used it to justify President Trump's ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations. We trace how a narrative morphed and was exploited to suit right-wing interests at a time when there are heightened fears around Islamophobia and the credibility of journalism is at stake.
In the early 1990s, when Donald Trump was still basically just a loud real estate tycoon, New York City had a policing problem. But this one had nothing to do with panhandlers or squeegee men or the Central Park Five, the preferred boogiemen of tabloids like the New York Post. The NYPD—or at least a number of its officers—was dirty; a mayoral commission claimed to expose widespread corruption in America's largest police force, including allegations of cops stealing drugs and protecting high-level traffickers. Still, it was practically an article of faith among rank-and-file cops that anyone associated with Internal Affairs—the police department's own watchdog—was the enemy.
Enter Charles Campisi, who served 41 years on the force, and was drafted into Internal Affairs against his will by NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly in 1993. He initially hoped to get out of there as fast as he could, but the hard-nosed cop became Internal Affairs chief a few years later, and ultimately made a career of going after bad guys who wear a badge.
In his forthcoming bookBlue on Blue: An Insider's Story of Good Cops Catching Bad Cops, Campisi details how the old Internal Affairs division evolved into a legitimate—if far from perfect—check on rogue cops. By stressing basic integrity and trying to incentivize the best and brightest to join what is now the Internal Affairs Bureau, Campisi thinks he helped turn things around. From the horrifying 1999 case of Amadou Diallo—an unarmed 22-year-old black man police fired 41 rounds at in the vestibule of his apartment building—to the "Cannibal Cop" in 2012, Campisi tried to keep tabs on the worst of New York's finest.
VICE chatted with the former chief by phone to find out how he went about probing corruption in such a massive police force, what he thinks of the Blue Wall (or Code) of Silence, and the possibility that gang members or even terrorists might make their way inside police forces like the NYPD.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Charles Campisi. Photo by Cyberdiligence courtesy Simon and Schuster
VICE: What was the climate like when you were first thrust into Internal Affairs work in the 1990s? Charles Campisi: When we first started the new Internal Affairs Bureau, we did a series of focus groups, interviewing cops from all over New York city—different precincts, ranks, positions and assignments. What became clear was there was a distrust of the old Internal Affairs division. That distrust manifested itself in the belief that if you were in Internal Affairs, then you weren't a good police officer. Cops back then looked at it like only three types of people go into internal affairs—I don't know if it was true or not, but this was their perception, so you have to take it into consideration.
Number one on the list was that IA officers were cowards. They were afraid to go on the street and be real police officers, so they went and hid in Internal Affairs. Or they were rats—people who were caught with their hands in the cookie jar or caught dirty, and in exchange for not going to jail, being arrested or losing their job, they would exchange information on other cops and become IA investigators. The third type were zealots who thought that they could go out and change the world by just going after cops, despite being cops themselves, whether it was for some personal reason or professional one.
If any of that was true or not wasn't important. What was important was that was what many cops they believed. What we did was ask: How can we get around that? How can we not have [the perception be that it's all] cowards and rats and thieves and zealots in the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau?
OK, so what was your approach? We tried to institute a policy where you could no longer volunteer to become a member of Internal Affairs. You had to be selected and drafted. Now, when people were drafted, they didn't want to be in the Internal Affairs Bureau—they tried to resist it as best they could. They had similar feelings to the ones I had, when I was drafted. I really didn't want to go there. But I had no choice. We looked at people who had exemplary records, people who had excelled in other investigative units, and we drafted them into the Internal Affairs Bureau, slowly but surely.
But even if you have great investigators, you still need to build cases against cops. What role do whistleblowers play in helping uncover abuse? A whistleblower is a great thing, but it's tough on the individual and tough on the organization. The organization must protect its whistle blowers, and the rationale of why the person is blowing the whistle is not as important as the facts that they are giving. If those facts are true, the reason for them coming forward is secondary. You can't dismiss an allegation of corruption just because the person who's reporting it seems to be an offended person. You have to take it on its merits.
Former NYPD Officer Charles Campisi, right, accompanying former Mayor Ed Koch early in his tenure with the force. Photo by John Penley/courtesy Simon and Schuster
Right, but there's been a lot of talk in the press since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement about the Blue Wall or Blue Code of Silence. The idea is that cops just look the other way when their fellow officers do wrong. And some extensive reporting suggests lying is sort of baked into the cake of many police departments. That seems like an enormous obstacle. Law enforcement officers depend on each other for their very survival. And even further than that, there's a socialization process in law enforcement where there are events and parties that, if you're not considered trustworthy, you won't be invited to, you will be shunned. The concept that the blue wall of silence or an occupational wall of silence exists within the police agencies of the world only is a grave misconception because we've seen it in other professions. There was a case where two firefighters got into an argument and one firefighter hit the other with a chair, causing very serious injuries that led to that firefighter being hospitalized. By the time the police responded, the crime scene was completely cleaned and sterilized and no one saw anything.
Many times doctors make honest mistakes and people are injured and not often do other members of the medical profession come forward and say that the doctor or nurse or caretaker did something wrong. Do you call that the White Wall of Silence? Would another lawyer say that one of their fellow attorneys did something wrong? That can be the Pinstriped Wall of Silence. My point is just that in any profession, there's a camaraderie, and it [does] exist in the police profession. But, I mean, how many people come running forward in the sports worlds to tell about their colleagues taking steroids? What is that—the Locker Room Wall of Silence? It exists in in all walks of life. It's a human thing.
Sure. But the public perception of police these days among many Americans is that, way too often, they open fire on unarmed African Americans and, in the Eric Garner case, for instance, choke people to death in public. What's your sense of the scope of this problem, having worked at weeding out bad apples? Within the African-American community, there's a distrust and in some cases a fear of the police. And that's something that police agencies around the country have to get over. They have to sit down and meet with the community and work with them to solve crimes. People need to know that police are here to help protect and work with them. If the police and community come together under mutual understanding and mutual respect, things will be so much better.
What the police departments across the country need to do is be as transparent as possible. If we can just focus on our similarities, which outweigh our differences, we can bring our similarities to bear on that problem. There's been great strides in New York where they are reaching out to the community as much as possible and getting them involved.
Watch Carmelo Anthony reflect on protesting police brutality in his home city of Baltimore.
What individual episode of police brutality stands out to you, looking back on your history as a watchdog? The most horrifying case I've been involved in is the assault on Amadou Diallo, because it was such a horrific thing for anybody—not just a police officer, but for any human being—to do. Many people did not believe that it occurred, and they didn't believe it occurred because it was so horrific and completely out of the norm of what you would expect to happen. People would see me and say, "Hey, come on, tell me the truth, did that really happen?" And naturally I'm sworn to secrecy and all I can say is "Give me the time to do what has to be done and keep your eyes on the newspapers, because things will be public as soon as we can." And then they would take from that that, Oh my God, maybe this really did happen.
That was a very tough case, and I was very pleased how quickly we were able to identify people and how quickly we worked with the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office and then later with the United States Attorney's Office to the Eastern District of New York, to bring those cases. We were working on the case like three or four days before it hit the paper and the thing that annoys me about it is that some members of the press said that we were sitting on our hands when we couldn't speak about it.
(Editor's note: Four white officers implicated in Diallo's death did ultimately face second-degree murder charges but, as so often happens in America, were eventually cleared in court. In 2015, one was even promoted.)
Do you think the NYPD fails on the job application side—that gang members, criminals, or terrorists might somehow make their way onto the force? I'm sure that like any other large organization, there were people who entered the NYPD for the purpose of infiltration—whether they were a gang member or a relative of someone involved in a gang and corrupt behavior—and tried to gather information to be an intelligent source for them. It's not unlikely that someone has infiltrated the NYPD from the terrorist stand point. These are people who have radicalized leanings toward the overthrow of our government. They've joined the NYPD just like they've joined the military or any other organization with the intent of causing havoc from within. It's a very real fear that infiltrators might get in and cause a lot of trouble and damage.
Stepping back for a second, how has policing—and the responsibility and gravity of the job—evolved since you joined the profession decades ago? When I first started, we were understaffed, underfunded, and undertrained. We did the best we could under the circumstances with the limited resources we had, but policing has made great advances. I've seen a big change in the attitudes of the police officers who often felt that they had no effect on what was happening. Remember that with police officers being the most visible part of government, sometimes we are treated as if we are the cause of the many problems like poverty, under-education, drug abuse and people living in poor conditions. And those things are way beyond one single agency. All the city government has to come together. We have housing issues, we have healthcare issues, we have childcare issues, we have education issues. The police are not responsible for some of the conditions, but they are held responsible for some of the solutions.
Learn more about Campisi's book, which drops February 7, here.
VICE meets a few surviving members of Los Frikis, a Cuban punk movement, who purposely infected themselves with HIV in the early 90s. The punks used this method as a way to get sent to government-sanctioned sanatoriums where they were given better resources than they had on the streets.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's spokesperson is demanding that Fox News delete or amend a false tweet the news outlet released yesterday regarding the identity of the man who allegedly opened fire into a mosque Sunday evening in Quebec City.
On Monday, police charged Alexandre Bissonnette, a 27-year-old Quebec man who appears to hold right-wing sympathies, with six counts of first degree murder and five counts of attempted murder. He is believed to be the only shooter. Earlier that day, police had said there were two suspects, and a number of media reports identified the second man as Mohamed Khadir, a Muslim man who, it later emerged, was actually helping victims of the shooting and had nothing to do with the attack.
A screenshot of the tweet.
Well after it was widely reported that Bissonnette was the only suspect, Fox News tweeted: "Suspect in Quebec mosque terror attack was of Moroccan origin, reports show." The tweet wasn't taken down until Tuesday evening. In a statement Fox News said they "regret the error."
"FoxNews.com initially corrected the misreported information with a tweet and an update to the story on Monday," read the statement. "The earlier tweets have now been deleted."
A number of media outlets who had published Khadir's name deleted or amended their reports on Monday.
"These tweets by Fox News dishonour the memory of the six victims and their families by spreading misinformation, playing identity politics, and perpetuating fear and division within our communities," Trudeau communications director Kate Purchase said in a strongly worded missive sent directly to the media outlet.
"If we allow individuals and organizations to succeed by scaring people, we do not actually end up any safer," she continued. "Ramping up fear and closing our borders is not a solution."
If there's one thing to take away from Economics 101, it's the fundamental rules of supply and demand. When the supply exceeds the demand, prices tumble, which is exactly what's happening right now in the legal weed market.
According to Forbes, the prices for marijuana in the states where it's legal have fallen precipitously. In 2015, wholesale pot plummeted from $2,500 a pound to only $1,000 in 2016. In Colorado, prices went from $8 a gram for marijuana flower (what the rest of us call "bud") in mid 2016 to a current price of $6. The drop was more dramatic in Washington, where prices decreased from $25 a gram to just $6.
Experts believe this is a result of heavy investment in the marijuana business, which is causing pot production to exceed demand as big-money speculators try to cash in on the emerging market. In the short-term, this market saturation means that prices at the dispensary will be down. But as it becomes more difficult for small growers to turn a profit, they may go out of business, possibly leaving kush fiends with fewer options.
A crowded market might not be the worst thing for consumers, though. When there is a lot of product vying for tokers' attentions, brands are forced to differentiate and go beyond coming up with cute strain names like "Steve McGarrett's Hair" or "God's Vagina 2.0." Some strains will likely rely on celebrity endorsements, like Willie Nelson's Willie's Reserve or Snoop Dogg's Leafs by Snoop. Others will go the Whole Foods route, making organic and pesticide-free bud available at a premium. Some may just try to make their pot stronger.
Still, there are parts of the marijuana market that are holding steady, particularly edibles, concentrated oils, and concentrates made for vapes. There's also the high-end weed market with its $200 blunts that shows no sign of slowing down.
Of course, this is only a concern to those in the eight states where recreational marijuana is currently legal. While the legal weed market is worth about $6.9 billion a year, 87 percent of all marijuana purchases are still made on the black market, which is estimated to be worth, annually, about $46 billion. Some might argue that we're currently living in the Golden Age of Illegal Weed, where dealers are still seeing large profit margins.
Whether you worship him as your God-Emperor or hate his guts, it should come as no surprise that a lot of Americans and large swaths of the world are freaking out about America's new president. After the flurry of controversial decisions crammed into his first week in office, exacerbated by a diminishing relationship with the free press, there's growing concern that Trump can and will do irreparable damage to the planet, international relationships, and individual humans' lives.
Anxiety brought about by the Trump presidency has been a frequent topic of conversation in therapist offices around the country since November 9. But what does one do when their waking fears follow them into hours of rest?
From even the early days of his candidacy, people have been reporting a variety of nightmares featuring Donald Trump, with the reality star politician doing everything from attempting to assault them in the manner he described to Billy Bush to simply filling in as their Uber Driver.
Simone Turkington, a woman in Los Angeles who recently dreamed of Trump stalking her around the Magic Castle (a private magician's club of which she is a member) before sexually assaulting her, feels that this sort of dream is a manifestation of her concern over the new president's corruptive power. "If I were to assign meaning to it," she told me, "I would say I would fear he's infiltrating the things I hold dear."
It's not just Americans who are seeing Trump in their sleep. Andrew Lea, who lives in Leeds, England, reported a scary Trump dream of his own because, as he put it, "the guy is a nightmare worldwide."
I spoke with some medical professionals to try and discern if we're all just being melodramatic babies and crying dumb, liberal tears in our sleep or if something more psychologically concrete is at play here.
Dr. Sue Kolod, a psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York City, told me that Trump dreams are "multi-determined," or coming from a multitude or sources. In particular, these Trump dreams are a mixture of the external factors surrounding the dreamers all day, often called the "day residue," and the dreamer's internal factors like wishes, fears, and conflicts.
"I think we have an unusual and possibly unprecedented situation right now," says Kolod, "where the boundary between what's going on outside and inside the dreamer is getting blurred. One of the things I've heard more recently than I can ever remember is a patient saying, 'I feel like I'm in a nightmare, and I can't wake up.'"
According to Kolod, the majority of her patients complaining of Trump dreams self-identify as belonging to groups unlikely to be directly impacted by worrisome policies enacted by the Trump administration. Though they are less vulnerable, Kolod says these patients may be grappling with moral dilemmas about how far they may be willing or forced to go to stand up for those they consider oppressed at the expense of their own time, money, and comfort.
Conversely, Kolod indicates that these dreams could indicate feelings of guilt over the dreamers' safe status and potential unwillingness to make sacrifices for causes they know to be important.
"They're experiencing a moral dilemma," says Kolod. "Like how far would I be willing to compromise myself to stay out of anything that I find scary that's happening to other people? How much would I be willing to do something I find morally abhorrent or disgusting in order to protect myself?"
On the other side of the country, in Oakland, California, Dr. Michael B. Donner, a psychoanalyst and clinical and forensic psychologist, thinks many of these Trump dreams have a practical therapeutic purpose for the dreamers.
"Freud said that 'dreams protect the sleep' and what he means by that," continues Donner, "is if you can dream about something, you don't have to be awake."
Freudian psychology regards dreams as a sort of coping mechanism for the conscious mind. The school of thought posits that, when we spend our waking hours bottling up anxiety over certain issues, our dreams act as a release valve for those worries while we're subconscious so that the anxiety doesn't compound over time.
Donner makes it clear that these dreams are not necessarily overblown hysteria, especially in the case of first- or second-generation Americans who have grown up hearing stories of tyrannical homeland regimes from family members who escaped for America. For them, fears of what's to come from a Trump administration may be founded on firsthand or secondhand experiences with comparable regimes abroad.
"Trump may represent the general scary frightening figure, like the monster under the bed," he explained. "Trump is coming to symbolize all their fears. One could imagine people from families of immigrants who have come from countries where there's been a genocide, whether it be the Jewish Holocaust or any number of traumatic experiences, are carrying the stories of the previous generations. Something like a Trump presidency is bound to stir up echoes of the past."
Donner points out that this type of fear can be just as "real" on the other side of the political spectrum, offering empathy to those on the right who earnestly believed that Obama was "coming for their guns."
"If you're exposed to those things over and over, it stirs you up and makes you afraid. So, if you have anxiety in your background that something like this could happen—the federal government is coming for you, the Northerners are going to attack the South—those intergenerational fears do stick."
It stands to reason that the Trump team will inspire a few more nightmares in the remaining years of the presidency. Hopefully none will visit you, but, if you do happen find yourself waking up in a cold sweat screaming "MAGA," maybe you'll take some comfort in the professionals here telling you that Trump nightmares are not an irrational reaction to what is happening to your life and the world.
