If the Trump administration was vexed about sanctuary cities' resistance to participating in federal immigration enforcement efforts, it's really not going to like the latest development: sanctuary states.

State senators in California approved a bill last week that would block local law enforcement agencies from helping federal authorities to target and detain undocumented immigrants residing in the state.

California isn't the only state to propose immigrant protections on a state level. Similar bills are pending in Maryland, New York, Illinois, and Nevada state legislatures.

Proponents of the California bill argue that sanctuary state status would mean undocumented immigrants would be able to live without fear of deportation. Under new federal immigration policy, committing even the most minor of infractions, like driving with a broken taillight, can be grounds for deportation.

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After years of battling an undisclosed illness, Glenn O'Brien passed away last week at the age of 70 due to complications with pneumonia. Few cultural critics have had as enduring an influence on the intersections of art, music, fashion, and pop culture as the Renaissance man. He's especially important to me because his work helped shaped the way I view the world and my role as a writer.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1947, O'Brien traveled east to Washington D.C. to study at our shared alma mater, Georgetown University, before moving to New York City and becoming an essential part of the downtown scene. In my life, I've followed a similar trajectory: Born in Chicago, another urban outpost in the Midwest, I studied in our nation's capital before finally settling in New York with the dream of writing for many of the publications that he once contributed to. In that sense, O'Brien's life has been my roadmap.

Despite all of his years of schooling, O'Brien didn't have a day job, which is something I can relate to. Of course, it wasn't that common or accepted to be a wayward wordsmith in the last century. But the approach paid off, because it allowed him the flexibility to be at the center of the most vibrant cultural happenings, which he celebrated and highlighted throughout his career.

In the 1970s, he was a member of the factory, and ultimately became the first editor of Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine—a publication I write for today. Later, he became the New York Bureau Chief for Rolling Stone. He even used to hang out with Madonna, for whom he co-authored and edited Sex, her 1992 tome. In the 80s, he wrote an important column on advertising for Artforum, served as Barney's creative director of advertising, and hosted TV Party. The television show featured legendary guests like David Byrne, Klaus Nomi, Fab 5 Freddy, Amos Poe, Blondie, and the Clash. TV Party will certainly go down as the coolest public-access program of all time (you can watch archival episodes of it on VICE.com). As its influence continues to be felt, it is likely to be the thing O'Brien will be remembered for the most.

But for me, the most impactful thing O'Brien ever did was his "Style Guy" column for Details and GQ. He shaped what I thought was possible with his words, which effortlessly mixed politics with art and exemplified the possibilities and the seriousness of fashion. With his columns for GQ, he proved again and again that style was a way of transforming the body into something new, more interesting and powerful. Each new entry gave me something to consider and make my own: He guided me in how to determine my personal scent. He schooled me on how to get a sharp suit on a budget. He informed me on what not to wear at Art Basel Miami Beach. And in a 2010 column titled, "Dressing Beyond Cool," focused on "foul weather pussies," he helped me recognize the importance of dressing chicly irregardless of the weather, which is to say all the time.

When I reflect on O'Brien's writing and it's impact on me, I think a lot about the first day I arrived at Georgetown. This was many decades after he had completed his studies there. Because it was 2007, I was wearing black skinny jeans and a yellow, deeply-cut V-neck T-shirt from American Apparel. I vividly remember my first walk along the red brick path from the University's front gates across Haley Lawn to Darnell Hall, my freshman year dorm. In that outfit, I was completely at odds with the rest of the student body's unspoken dress code.

My new classmates were preppy without any edge. I suspected they got dressed in the morning to blend in and communicate a collective wealth, a finishing-school seriousness, and the fact that they intended to gasp power just like their parents had done before them. At Georgetown, these kids are referred to as "Jack" and "Jane Hoya," and they are always draped from head to toe in Ralph Lauren or Vineyard Vines. The Janes accessorized their looks with it-bags to carry their books to class, while the Jacks favorited tan khakis and polo shirts.

I remember seeing the Jack and Janes of Georgetown gawking at me as I took that first stroll across campus. In that moment, I wondered if I had made a mistake by enrolling at the university altogether. Later, I would realize that clothes can be transformative. But on that first day, I only thought about the way clothes can oppress you as a visual representation of what you do and don't have. It's something that was painfully familiar to me, having grown up in a city where you can get a gun pulled on you for rocking a new pair of Jordans.

Photo by Steven A Henry/WireImage

I knew I needed to find a way to survive. I needed to find someone like myself who had made it out of Georgetown alive. I searched the internet for alumni who had attended the school and shared my interests in writing, art, fashion, and culture. When I finally discovered O'Brien and read his GQ style column, I used his work as a guide for the exciting ways you could blend the cultural and political education I was getting Georgetown with the style that I so fervently cared about.

In my head, O'Brien became a mentor. I took writing notes from him and joined The Hoya, the campus newspaper, editing several issues of the newspaper's bi-annual fashion issue. For one of the Spring issues, in a nod to his leather coat-cladded 80s look, I staged a shoot of friends wearing leather biker jackets and Ray-Bans. I had them walk around Red Square, protesting Vineyard Vines with a sign that appropriated the brand's logo and read, "Free the Whales." That's the power of the influence of Glenn O'Brien.

In 2011, when I moved to New York and became a writer in the art and fashion world, I would see O'Brien on the scene at openings and parties. He was always adorned in sharply tailored suits, holding court in a corner with the artists and those people who appear to be endlessly interesting. I approached O'Brien at one of these events. It was a party thrown by Peter Brant, the publisher of Interview Magazine, at his estate's art foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. There, on the polo greens, near the large scale silver, Urs Fischer "Big Clay" sculpture, I told him about his influence on me during college. And I thanked him for inspiring me to write and take fashion and art as serious as they are. Naturally, he was gracious. Walking away, I yelled our rallying cry in solidarity: HOYA SAXA!

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With a blue paper sheet covering her pubic hair, a 30-year-old woman is lying naked from the waist down, with her legs spread open on an examination couch in a hospital room. A trainee doctor opens her vagina with a speculum and gazes inside to find the cervix.

But this is no ordinary pap smear. The woman being examined is in fact a teacher, and she's here to show the medical student how to do a gynecological exam which is painless and stress-free for a patient—by allowing them to practise on her own body.

The University of Oxford medical school is one of several which have pioneered a groundbreaking feminist way of teaching medical undergraduates gynecology, in which women from the general public are trained to teach medical students.

Many women dread cervical screening tests and similar examinations after having had less than comfortable experiences, both physically and emotionally. And vaginal exams are of course especially hard—sometimes traumatic—for women who have experienced rape or sexual abuse. One in three British women between 25-29 don't attend smear tests, often because of fears they are embarrassing or painful, which has led to a rise in cases of cervical cancer. The medical profession urgently needs to make these tests less daunting for women.

Continue reading on Broadly.

When we think of prestige television, it's easy to keep our scope within the frame of network dramas. Shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad come to mind . To me, there's entire category of television most snobs ignore when discussing prestige drama—reality TV. And within reality TV, one franchise reigns supreme: Bravo's The Real Housewives.

Banking on the success of ABC's Desperate Housewives, in 2009 The Real Housewives franchise began in the O.C. with The Real Housewives of Orange County (known to fans as RHOC) which followed the "real" lives of a bunch of stupidly rich women. That's more or less the entire concept of any of the Real Housewives shows—the daily lives of people with too much money, time, and botox. As of now, the franchise has followed gaggles of extremely wealthy women in 17 cities from Beverly Hills to Athens, Greece.

I've shamelessly been watching the series on and off since 2009, after my pregnant sister began binging the The Real Housewives of New Jersey because she had nothing else to do. We grew up loving trashy TV, so I knew I'd be into it. "This will change your life," she told me. After watching the now legendary clip of Teresa Giudice (a housewife who recently spent time in prison for fraud) flipping over a table and calling another housewife a "prostitution whore," an insult I'm still trying to parse eight years later, I was hooked.

From my first introduction I've dipped my toes into various Real Housewives iterations, trying to figure out exactly what has made the show endure so many seasons. I can only conclude the show has lasted so long and spanned so many cities because rich crazy people with no real substance will never be boring. But after watching the first few episodes of Slice's The Real Housewives of Toronto, I'm no longer so sure of my theory.

Once I heard there would be a Toronto chapter of The Real Housewives, I was ecstatic, since I live in Toronto and am very excited anytime popular culture acknowledges Toronto. Did you know Drake is from Toronto? I am required by city bylaw to mention this. But back to Housewives.

For so long, I've watched totally batshit women fight over nothing in front of dozens of guests at parties in locations I couldn't imagine. I've watched these women hock products or try and promote their children (Gigi Hadid, anyone?) I never have a chance of bumping into. I've watched them walk down unfamiliar streets and fight in equally unfamiliar dimly lit restaurants over tiny plates of salad. Finally, I had the chance to get to know these privileged, awful women in a city I live in, hopefully making the experience of watching the housewives more intimate. Only, the Real Housewives of Toronto is SO BORING. The show currently airs only in Canada, and Americans — you're not missing out.

The show follows the same format of any of its sister cities. First indication of how tired it would be: the show's tagline is "Follow the six from The Six." It's a fact that nobody from Toronto has ever called it "the Six" despite how hard Drake has tried to make it happen. (Remember, Drake is from Toronto.)

The first episode introduces us to the various "housewives" and all their roles on the show. If you know nothing about reality TV or the housewives—the villains must be established from the first episode at the very least. Villains are the only reason a show can exist and thrive. In The Real Housewives of Toronto, we learn immediately this will be Kara Alloway—a stylish born-again Christian. She is rich because she is old money, and also her husband owns a law firm. While that sounds like it was formulated by some kind of Real Housewives Villain Generator, she just ends up being annoying and boring. Her voice is grating and her Christianity also isn't much of character device.

The rest of the housewives—a French-Canadian former TV star, the owner of a fitness company, a CEO and real estate tycoon, and two women who married rich—are extremely normal. They're just rich, and not even the fun kind. They don't have weird dark pasts, they probably aren't the kind of rich that belongs in jail. They frequent the same strip of King Street West (the faux trendy area of Toronto) and hang out on rooftop bars. They aren't flipping tables or yelling at each other, they just talk shit and have lukewarm confrontations about talking shit.

In one episode, they go to Muskoka (which they call the Hamptons of Toronto even though THERE IS NO HAMPTONS OF TORONTO!), which is when I thought the drama would really start. Anyone who watches a Real Housewives series knows a location change means some kind of verbal or physical altercation, guaranteed. The climax of this shitty trip at their lakefront cottages was, I shit you not, Kara breaking her rib after going tubing.

While the lack of drama is astounding, the worst thing about RHOT is how real it is in a bad way. I wanted to see a side of Toronto I was unfamiliar with that would make feel like a true voyeur. Only the show highlights the same kind of people who likely drive past streetcars as they're stopping to let people off, or the type of person who begs a barista to let their dog into a Starbucks for "just a second." These women don't know Toronto at all, they have no real ins or socialite status. A location scout probably got them to meet up at Portland Variety to gab about Muskoka. I keep waiting for my Lisa Vanderpump (the ultimate star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills) but instead I'm given this boring ass born-again Christian shit. If any of these women went to a REAL Real Housewives city, they'd get eaten alive within seconds.

While the series is still young, maybe this is a lesson. Canada can't do reality TV right (our version of Jersey Shore got canceled before it even started). In fact, we had our shot at a Real Housewives franchise with Vancouver which was cancelled after just two seasons. I barely remember a single face from that show, though I imagine they're currently watching RHOT and thinking, Hindsight is 20/20 bitches.

Perhaps the issue is that we just don't have it in us to be the type of reality "crazy" only Americans and British have perfected. Maybe it's because Canada isn't really a place where people become famous the way they do in America—we have very little outside reach. The only thing that can save RHOT is if it comes out that one of them lied about their past (secretly American/British) or has a secret evil twin who stirs shit up during one of their boring brunches. Or, at the very least, Drake makes a cameo.

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On Tuesday, Donald Trump signaled he approved of adding Montenegro as a new member of NATO. It was an entirely anticipated move that didn't make much of a splash during a busy time—at the moment, the Trump administration is talking tough on both North Korea and Russia, and could also escalate US involvement in the Syrian Civil War. But the admission of Montenegro to the world's most powerful military alliance is still important. For one thing, it's opposed by Russia, who disapproves of NATO's expansion into the Balkans; for another, it shows that despite Trump's vaguely anti-NATO rhetoric during the campaign, he's yet to do anything to reject the 28-nation alliance that stretches from Canada to Turkey.

But Trump's ascension has exposed some grievances American leaders have with US allies. During his time in office, Barack Obama criticized European countries for being "free riders"—not spending enough on their own militaries and relying on the US—and Trump has largely repeated that idea, though in his garbled and simplified version it's a matter of Germany owing the US. Meanwhile, in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel's electoral opponent has said he would stand against increased military spending, potentially complicating matters still further.

The average American doesn't think about NATO that much though, other than during the occasional military intervention where US forces are joined by those of other countries (the Balkans in the 90s, or Libya a few years ago). But as the world becomes a more uncertain place, the mutual defense pact NATO countries have with each other is bound to loom larger and disagreements among members are sure to matter quite a bit. In order to unpack the important issues surrounding the alliance, I spoke with Charles A. Kupchan, an expert in transatlantic relations at the Council on Foreign relations. Here's how that went:

VICE: My first question is very basic: Why do we have NATO in the first place, and what makes it a worthwhile institution?
Charles A. Kupchan: NATO was formed soon after the end of World War II to serve as a military alliance to protect the Western democracies against potential Soviet aggression. So it emerged in step with the ideological and geopolitical rivalry between East and West. And throughout the long years of the Cold War it was the main vehicle through which the United States and its allies prepared for the possibility of a Soviet invasion and took the military steps needed to deter that invasion—and, if necessary, to defend against it.

When the Cold War came to an end, NATO then transformed itself into a broader vehicle for expanding stability in Europe by expanding eastward and integrating former members of the Warsaw Pact [the Soviet counterpart to NATO]. It also served as a general tool for organizing coalitions to engage in military action beyond NATO's borders. It also serves as a vehicle for what you might call softer missions, like education missions in the Middle East. NATO is now involved in training members of the Iraqi army as part of the counter-ISIS coalition, and it has been involved in the counter-migration mission in the Aegean, and is now looking to to do the same in the central Mediterranean to help mediate the flow from Libya to Italy.

To what extent does the US dominate the alliance?
The US has always been the leader of the alliance, and that stems in part from the reality that the US military is much stronger than the militaries of other NATO members. And that has meant that the supreme allied commander, the top military commander at NATO, has always been an American. On the other hand, the NATO secretary general has always been a non-American as a means of trying to balance between American and Europe.

Watch: How a viral video sparked protests in Russia

During the campaign, Trump talked a lot about how other member nations of NATO have been not paying into the alliance like they should. Can you unpack that criticism a little bit? Is there any validity to it?
There's been a debate about burden-sharing that goes back to NATO's founding days. The United States, as a global superpower, has always spent more on defense as a share of GDP than its NATO allies. And the US has complained about that and said that its allies are free riding on its defense spending, and that they need to do more to defend their own security and shoulder their fair share of the tab.

Is that a criticism that's been leveled by Republicans and Democrats?
Yes, across the aisle. In fact President Obama was very concerned about this issue, and he's the one that led the charge at the Wales Summit in 2014 to convince all NATO members to commit over time to spend 2 percent or more of GDP on defense. Presently there are only five NATO members, including the United States, that meet that 2 percent target. There is a separate category of spending, called the common budget, and that is the allocation that is owed by each member state to joint infrastructure. There, all countries are paying their fair share—but that is a drop in the bucket compared to national defense budgets.

If Trump's concerns mostly echoed Obama's, why did his criticism of NATO countries make headlines?
It was really the tone. The central concern was really no different than that of President Obama, but Trump said that he thinks that NATO is obsolete, and he said that whether or not the United States defends allies will depend on their readiness to spend what's required on their own defense. It was the threatening nature of that statement, as well as calling into question the value of NATO, that caused so much political consternation on both sides of the Atlantic. Article V—the clause that says an attack on one is an attack on all—is probably the single most important treaty obligation that the United States has. To have a president call that into question is to call into question the foundations of American strategy abroad.

What's the counterargument to Trump's assertion that NATO is obsolete?
Well, number one, that NATO has adapted itself in an impressive way. It has carried out military missions in the Balkans, in Afghanistan, and in the Mediterranean; it is involved in preventive security steps, such as training and advising partner countries; it enables the United States to share the burden with others by having an integrated military structure at the ready. And now that Russia has returned to a more ambitious and dangerous foreign policy, as demonstrated by its illegal annexation of Crimea and its invasion of eastern Ukraine, all of a sudden we're back in a world in which NATO is focussing on its traditional agenda of deterring and defending against Russia.

Speaking of Russia, what is that country's major concern about NATO expansion to places like the Balkans?
The debate about NATO enlargement, which took off in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union was falling apart, was very controversial. Some argued that it was important to expand NATO and extend a security guarantee to the Baltic countries, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and others that had been the target of Soviet oppression. This was a way of protecting them against a resurgent Russia, and also a way of locking in democratic reform. Then there were those who argued against that move because it would mean moving the world's most capable military alliance closer and closer to Russia's borders, which might threaten Russia and impinge upon its legitimate security interests. And that debate continues to this day. I would say that the Russians are justified in being concerned about NATO's eastward enlargement. Because even though NATO does not have aggressive ambitions, it nevertheless brings considerable military capability closer to Russia. And international politics is about perception as much as anything.

Does it seem so far like Trump is following through on any of his rhetoric about distancing himself from NATO, or has it been mostly talk?
No, he just sent Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Defense James Mattis to Europe, including to an important meeting called the Munich Security Conference, emphasizing the continuing importance of NATO and America's commitment to NATO. When [German] Chancellor Merkel was visiting, President Trump himself affirmed the importance of NATO. And so in that sense there has been a course correction since the beginning of the administration.

Here's a wild hypothetical: What would happen if the US actually left NATO?
The United States is the military backbone of NATO, and if the US left the Europeans would be hard pressed to carry out significant military missions on their own. That having been said, the European Union is attempting to acquire both the institutions and the capability to act on its own. And it does have some missions that it undertakes on its own. They tend to be more anti-migration missions, things that are at the lower end of the conflict spectrum. So in that sense, if the United States left NATO, it would raise very troubling questions about European stability and security, and also whether the US was ending its days as a team player. You know, heading down a path of not "America first" but "America only." And that would cause great uncertainty, both politically and militarily. Not just for NATO, but for all American allies.

But we are a very long way from that scenario.
A very long way.

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Ah, Vaughan, Ontario: a well-off Toronto suburb full of youths who enjoy hanging out in shopping plaza parking lots and whose main claim to fame is an amusement park. That very amusement park, Canada's Wonderland, played host to a "crime scene" of epic proportions recently when a police helicopter (yes, a fucking helicopter) caught three candy-stealing kids as they hid under a tree.

We're still not really sure why a heat-detecting helicopter, police dogs, and multiple police officers were used to catch kids—two 16-year-olds and one 15-year-old—who had apparently stolen candy, but police budgets must be spent:

At 10:30 PM on Thursday, April 8, police were deployed to the park, which was closed after security reported three people were on the property.

"The York Regional Police helicopter Air2 arrived on scene and a short time later, with the use of the FLIR camera, officers located the suspects hiding beneath a tree," York Regional police wrote in a statement. "Officers in Air2 directed officers with the Canine Unit to the area where the suspects were hiding and they were taken into custody without further incident."

According to police, kids had broken into the park and stole an undisclosed amount of candy. Reportedly, all were "cooperative with police and were remorseful for their actions." Their names have not been released since they are underage; they will be serving community service for their actions.

Police added the following to the end of a statement about the incident: "Video of this incident captured by Air2 is being released as a deterrent to anyone that is considering trespassing onto private property."

Damn, York Regional is so extra.

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On Tuesday, the White House National Security Council released a four-page declassified report about the recent chemical attacks in Syria that not only stated it was "confident" the Syrian government was behind the sarin attack, but also accused the Syrian and Russian governments of working together to try to cover the whole thing up.

More specifically, the report says the Kremlin tried to mislead the world about what's really going on in Syria by pushing disinformation, "false narratives," and "a drumbeat of nonsensical claims." According to the New York Times, those accusations revolve around Russia's earlier assertion that the April 4 attack was actually a strike on a terrorist chemical weapons hub, rather than targeted at rebel groups. The report cites video evidence that counters Russia's claim.

It's ironic that the Trump administration would accuse Russia of spreading false information considering the debt the president seemingly owes to Russian propagandists. The FBI is currently investigating the country's alleged involvement in the 2016 election, including Twitter bots that spewed anti-Clinton propaganda during that time.

The report also could be the final blow to US–Russia relations, which have been rapidly deteriorating since the attack last week. After Trump bombed Syria on Wednesday night in retaliation, Russian prime minister Dmitri Medvedev said ties were "completely ruined." Then the Associated Press published a thinly-sourced story about a US official who suspected Russia might have known about the sarin gas attacks in advance—though no officials who spoke to the Times Tuesday would comment on that. Now it's unclear if Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will even meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin during his trip to Moscow this week.

"We hope that the Russian government concludes that they have aligned themselves with an unreliable partner in Bashar al-Assad," he told reporters before his departure. "Is that a long-term alliance that serves Russia's interests? Or would Russia prefer to realign with the United States, with other Western countries and Middle East countries that are seeking to resolve the Syrian crisis?"

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After the ratings bonanza of M-103, which resulted in far-right media created protests receiving national coverage, the usual suspects are back trying to rile up their base around another law.

This time, it's Bill 89, by Ontario's Liberal government, that has sparked their ire (you can read the full bill here but I warn you, it's a long read.)

The bill is a sweeping overhaul of the province's child aid and youth justice systems. It has just recently passed its second reading in the legislation without anyone voting nay (this includes the Tories,) and, this week, will be going through it's final committee review. It has been dubbed by the Liberals as "historic" and criticized by youth advocates as being too weak.

Alongside many other changes, the bill has updated the criteria for analyzing the wellbeing of a child to match the human rights code. These include "a child's or young person's race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, family diversity, disability, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression."

It's "gender identity and gender expression" that the far-right is focusing on, obvi.

The main issue the crew has seems to be that the protection of gender expression and identity is extended to the home in the same sense that sexual orientation is. In essence, these groups are worried about the government, under Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, swooping into religious homes and stealing kids who have been "brainwashed" into believing they have a new gender.

The theory made it's way through the religious media like ARPA (who you might remember from such hits as the Ontario sex-ed clusterfuck) before being picked up by the Canadian champions of far-right conspiracy theories, Rebel Media. The folks at the Rebel started a petition, bought a URL, and released a breathless video in regards to it. The video and petition have since popped up in 4chan and the pizzagate forum on VOAT.

"Bill 89 is an unprecedented government intrusion into Ontario homes," Faith Goldy, a Rebel correspondent, states in the video. "It is an unprecedented government intrusion into how families wish to raise their children. It pushes gender identity onto Ontario children. It makes unscientific gender theory the law of our homes."

She goes on to call it a "sick social experiment" at the end of the video. There are other things that the articles, bloggers, vloggers, and forums are churning outrage over, but gender-identity in the home is the hook.

The anti-anti-islamophobia rally spurned on by far-right media in Canada. Photo by author.

In the end, it is a transparent excuse to use transphobia to rally up rage induced page clicks and donations from the angry—this is the business model for many of these outlets. Now, in terms of the outrage that's hoping to be generated here, Bill 89 will probably not be the hit that M103 was—the bill is province specific and Islamophobia is the hot button issue of our time.

The bill is so massive that Ontario Children and Youth Services Minister Michael Coteau, in conversation with the Toronto Star, said it was "one of the most comprehensive pieces of legislation that this government has ever put forward." Now, while the bill clearly isn't an Orwellian plot to steal kids from the religious that some are making it out to be, the sheer size of it means that Bill 89 won't be free from criticism, and deserves to examined closely.

In an interview with the Toronto Star, Kiaras Gharabaghi, director of Ryerson University's School of Child and Youth Care, said the bill is full of "weasel words."

"It is a bill that completely lacks courage," Gharabaghi said. "In every section it builds in limitations that suggest this is what we are hoping for, but it's OK if it doesn't happen. Everything is 'should be,' 'may be,' 'could be,' 'ought to be,' 'where appropriate,' 'if necessary.' "

That's the real problem with making attempts to work up the crowd into a frothy frenzy of anger over easily exploited prejudices—in the midst of all the shouting we miss the actual things that should be remedied.

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Sixty percent of Americans think marijuana should be legalized, but that support isn't easily distributed—most important, the man who has the most power when it comes to federal drug policy is not a fan of letting people light up. In February, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that "states can pass whatever laws they choose" but maintained that the drug is nevertheless harmful. "My best view is that we don't need to be legalizing marijuana," he continued. He has made private assurances to a handful of Republican senators indicating he will not direct the Department of Justice to interfere with states that have legalized marijuana, but advocates are still nervous. They might very well have reason to be.

On Saturday, the Washington Post reported on Sessions's plan to undo much of the work of the Obama-era DOJ, which worked to reduce long sentences for prisoners with nonviolent drug charges. Significantly, Sessions recruited Steven H. Cook, a prosecutor and longtime drug war hardliner, to be a part of his team at the DOJ.

During the last few years, the war on drugs has come to be widely regarded as a massive failure. It unfairly targeted minorities and is in part responsible for the US prison population increasing 500 percent over the past 40 years. Many people, from liberals to small-government conservatives, think that locking up people for nonviolent pot offenses is morally wrong and insanely expensive—that sentiment is partially why more than two dozen states have legalized at least medical marijuana. But people like Cook and Sessions aren't necessarily part of that consensus. Last year on a panel, Cook said, "The federal criminal justice system simply is not broken. In fact, it's working exactly as designed," according to the Post.

So what happens if Sessions comes for weed? Firstly, remember that while states have legalized marijuana, it's still prohibited under federal law. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Gonzales v. Raich that the federal government is allowed to criminalize producing and using homegrown marijuana. The interpretation of the 2005 ruling is still unclear though. Law professor Randy Barnett, who worked on the case, explained in a Washington Post op-ed, "In no way did [Gonzales b. Raich] say or even imply that Congress had the power to compel state legislatures to exercise their police power to criminalize the possession of marijuana, or to maintain their previous legislation criminalizing such behavior." While pro-cannabis activists were hopeful that the Supreme Court would hear another case regarding the cannabis legalization last year, perhaps clarifying that 2005 ruling, they declined, leaving the future of legal weed in further limbo.

Though Sessions hasn't announced what specific changes he plans to make about how the DOJ handles drug cases, Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard professor who is also the director of economics at the Cato Institute, told me that Sessions has a lot of power when it comes to interfering in states that have legalized weed.

"Sessions can direct federal resources from the DA and other agencies to target the medical marijuana dispensaries or the legal retail outlets in those states that have already medicalized and legalized it. More broadly, he could just carry out federal enforcement efforts against drug trafficking in any state," Miron explained. "In the most extreme case, they put them under arrest and prosecute them for violating the federal law. Less extreme, they simply tell them they have to close down and seizes their property, inventory and cash."

It's nevertheless difficult to imagine Sessions actually going after well-established dispensaries. Not only is legal weed popular, it's profitable—Colorado has raised more than $200 million in tax revenue from marijuana sales. The idea that marijuana isn't bad and shouldn't be illegal has gone mainstream in a way that would make a crackdown on weed seem even more anachronistic than some of the Trump administration's other policies, like that big border wall. Moreover, it's an issue of states' rights, a cause often championed by the right. The federal government interfering with state laws endorsed by the majority of voters would be at the very least be a PR disaster for Sessions and the Trump's administration in general.

The attorney general could simply come out and say, publicly and on the record, that he's not going to interfere with the way states' weed markets work. He hasn't done so yet—all we can do is wait and see if he will.

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After labeling the United passenger who was ripped from his chair and dragged down the aisle of a plane on Sunday "disruptive and belligerent," the airline's CEO released another statement Tuesday, calling the event "horrific."

"Like you, I continue to be disturbed by what happened on this flight and I deeply apologize to the customer forcibly removed and to all the customers onboard," CEO Oscar Munoz wrote. "No one should ever be mistreated this way. I want you to know that we take full responsibility and that we will work to make it right."

In a now-infamous story of violence and corporate insensitivity, doctor David Dao was forced from the plane after refusing to give up his seat for a company employee. The incident quickly went viral on social media after a few passengers onboard the plane took a video of the violent altercation.

After first standing behind his employees' actions, Munoz now says United will mount a review of how it manages "oversold situations" and incentivizes volunteers to give up their seats on overbooked flights, as well as how the airline works with airport security and local law enforcement.

"It's never too late to do the right thing," Munoz wrote. "I have committed to our customers and our employees that we are going to fix what's broken so that this never happens again."

Munoz's flip-flop—from essentially placing the blame on Dao to taking responsibility—isn't the only one United made Tuesday. After saying publicly that the flight from Chicago to Louisville was overbooked, the airline "clarified" that the flight was actually just sold out, USA Today reports.

According to Munoz, the airline will let folks know the results of its investigation by April 30.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Exam season is upon us. I know what you're thinking: who cares? This is perhaps, not coincidentally, the way many of us also feel about British Columbia's upcoming election.

Well, now that the writ has officially dropped, it might be time to stop willfully ignoring all those issues that professor-types seem to care about. We're frankly going to embarrass ourselves if we walk into that English final and/or voting booth on May 9 without at least attempting to understand what the hell has been going on outside of our own dimly-lit basement suites.

Yes, this is our chance to have a say in the direction of a province that houses the richest rich and the poorest poor people in the country within spitting distance. Will your decision invite or delay the region's coming dystopic class war? Let's meet the players and take a look at the issues to find out.

The prevailing story about New Democrat leader John Horgan is that nobody knows who he is. There have been so many headlines asking this question one has to wonder why we haven't yet moved on to what is John Horgan, or does John Horgan even lift? Despite having a questionably electable beard, he's heading the only party in the race capable of unseating BC Liberal Premier Christy Clark, who is seeking a third term. BC Green leader Andrew Weaver does not have a beard, but has seriously considered splitting from the federal Green party which he sees as "hijacked" by "extremist fringe."

Election spending

Even the New York Times is confused by BC's campaign finance rules, which one critic has called a "system of legalized bribery."

Despite having so few limits on donations—no cap on donations or limits on corporate, union or foreign contributions—the ruling BC Liberals appear to have broken them, and the RCMP is currently investigating.

The BC Liberals have pledged to review campaign finance law. Both the Greens and New Democrats want to ban union and corporate donations.

Real estate regulation

For the better part of 2016 Vancouver's real estate market was inflating wildly—up 40 percent in a single year—supposedly flooded with overseas investment in luxury houses. After setting record after record for cost of living and number of sales, BC finally brought in a 15 percent tax on foreign buyers in August of last year—something critics said came several years too late.

The NDP has pledged to expand the foreign buyers tax, while Greens will double it to 30 percent.

Homelessness

Metro Vancouver's homeless count released this week showed a 30 percent increase in street homelessness since 2014. Related: it's been ten years since the province has raised its social assistance rates.

Overdose epidemic

On page 103 of the BC Liberals' new platform comes first mention of the epidemic that has killed more than 1,000 people in the past 12 months. The party has touted its creation of a task force, bragged about opening 500 treatment beds (exactly zero percent of the ones in Vancouver count as detox or residential addiction treatment), and promises to spend the feds' money.

Frankly none of the parties have given much political priority to a situation that, I repeat, has killed more than 1,000 people in the past 12 months.

Energy projects

The Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain expansion is a massive sticking point for British Columbians—a pipeline that will push hundreds more oil tankers through the Burrard Inlet. People in the interior tend to see Trans Mountain as a money-making project, but BCers on the coast tend to see it as a marine disaster waiting to happen.

BC Liberals maintain they've worked with the feds to ensure "world class spill response" (Heiltsuk Nation may disagree) while the NDP and Greens join Vancouver and Burnaby mayors in opposing the project.

Silicon Valley North

The BC Liberals are straight up wooing young people with the promise of Uber and tech start-up culture; the biggest chunk of Clark's platform is devoted to "tech strategy." Horgan has said he's all for ridesharing as long as it doesn't hurt small business, and released his own tech plan last month.

Lead image via THE CANADIAN PRESS.

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In a baffling move on Tuesday, the Alabama Senate voted 24–4 to allow Birmingham's Briarwood Presbyterian Church to form its own police force, the Associated Press reports.

The church, which has more than 4,000 members, originally wanted its own police force as a way to protect its K–12 school and theological seminary. Back in March, Briarwood administrator Matt Moore told NBC News that the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting justified the need for a church-led force.

"After the shooting at Sandy Hook and in the wake of similar assaults at churches and schools, Briarwood recognized the need to provide qualified first responders to coordinate with local law enforcement," Moore said in a statement.

A private institution having its own police force is potentially dangerous and leads to important questions like: What happens if and when a church police officer breaks the law? And who is allowed to police private law enforcement?

"It's our view this would plainly be unconstitutional," the acting executive director of the ACLU, Randall Marshall, told NBC News. "These bills unnecessarily carve out special programs for religious organizations and inextricably intertwine state authority and power with church operations," he later said in a memo.

Another church protection bill, the Alabama Church Protection Act, is scheduled to be debated in the state legislature next Tuesday and is in some ways even more controversial than the one passed Tuesday. That bill would allow churches to have armed security guards, and moreover, give those guards legal immunity if they were to shoot anyone, so there's that.

Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.

As the people responsible for communicating their organizations' messages to the world, PR representatives have hard jobs. But if there's a bar they have to clear at bare minimum, it's this: don't make things worse. Three high-profile PR nightmares over the past week have really hammered this point home.

On Monday, United Airlines faced a serious, visceral backlash to a video of a man being literally dragged from one of their planes after he refused to give up his seat—which turned out to be because United needed room on the plane for additional employees. United's initial strategy was to merely describe the event, and acknowledge it wasn't great, followed by a staff letter that smeared the passenger as "belligerent." Shortly after the airline's stock price plunged. Eventually, on Tuesday, United issued a basically normal apology that—and I'm just speculating here—probably would have been more effective if it come earlier in the timeline of events.

United's horrors were sandwiched between two other self-inflicted brand disasters. Last week, Pepsi released a TV spot featuring Kendall Jenner that tried (and completely failed) to make its brand message rhyme with the messages of recent political protest movements. The soda company's PR department eventually issued an apology, but, somewhat hilariously, also apologized to Jenner in the process. Then on Tuesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer—the PR rep for the Trump Presidential Brand—attempted to make Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sound kinda-sorta worse than Hitler by claiming that Hitler didn't use chemical weapons—despite the Holocaust having been a thing that happened. Spicer then sputtered, backpedaled, proffered four clarifications, and then finally an apology.

To find out what sort of demon has possessed some of the most powerful PR operations in the world, I got in touch with Ron Culp, who has headed PR efforts for major brands such as Sears, and fashioned himself into a guru of his trade, with a teaching position at DePaul University. Culp emphasized the importance of trusting your gut, and also, the importance of not mentioning Hitler when you don't have to.

VICE: It's now a pretty unanimous belief that United turned a serious mistake into a total catastrophe. Is there something special about United that led to this PR disaster?
Ron Culp: United has come a long way under the current CEO in rebuilding bridges with employees, and relationships that had really been tattered in the past. I'm confident that the initial statement was constructed with human resources and legal having heavier hands in the decision as to what would be said than what prevailed [in the later statement].

What do you mean when you say "United has come a long way"?
The employee relations are better there than they have been in decades, and they're working as a team, meaning the entire organization. [But] the interpretation of some rule that very much was in their operational manual, [that] went beyond what was humanly logical, created this incident.

With that as the backdrop, why would United's initial non-apology have seemed like a good idea?
[Because of] the speed at which something had to be said. Legal will always err in favor of protecting the company—meaning financial responsibilities, and making sure that we don't admit to something that we're going to end up paying [for] or saying something that legally binds us. If they could—and certainly this was the trend back in the 1990s and early 2000s—[saying] "no comment" could be better received. They need to respond very quickly, especially if you're a consumer-facing company.

What's it like in the office when a company does that?
You get all the parties in the room, and somebody takes responsibility to draft it. When I headed communications in companies, I always wanted to be the one to draft the statement because he who controls the editing controls the final message in most cases. Initially, we've got to be thinking about liability. [In] this case I think it was both a liability issue as well as wanting to show support for employees, who—I'm sure at the point that it was unfolding—said, "these are our policies!" And yes, they are. At that point they're not [yet concluding], well, those are the policies, but it still shouldn't have been this way.

What could have saved them from PR oblivion at that phase?
This is where gut instinct plays a critical role. Sometimes the mind that is trying to rationalize all the ramifications needs to give way to the gut. Anyone seeing that—to your point—would be saying, "we need to do something other than this legalese-sounding response." I headed PR at Sears for a number of years, and we learned early on that you don't make friends with customers by not treating them as if they're very important to you.

Would you say a similar gut-check could have saved Pepsi last week?
You might be the lowest person in the room, but at what point is it is your obligation to speak truth to power? And to do it in such a way that you raise a question that would help protect that company from making that blunder. Clearly no one did that. I don't know if Pepsi's communications department was involved. I can't imagine that they were—you just had to see the ad.

Who fares worse from a PR standpoint? United or Pepsi?
Pepsi got a lot of publicity out of this, and there are people who were subliminally listening to Saturday Night Live the other night, and have no idea what this issue is about. All they saw was three minutes about Pepsi, so, "Oh, I'll have a Pepsi, that's fine!" It's a flash-in-the-pan moment for a brand that is as advertising-driven as Pepsi.

One place I don't think that any-publicity-is-good-publicity approach works is the White House. Do you have any sympathy for Sean Spicer right now?
There's no doubt that he has the toughest public relations job in the world. In the old days we had two news cycles! I loved it. I could say, let's see here: I know that Mike is on deadline for a morning paper. I'll call him back around 5:00 today, or 5:30, and if it's the afternoon paper, then I've just got to call you before noon. That's not the case anymore. I don't know when he gets time to sleep. You've gotta stay on top of all the issues, and you've got a sizable staff whispering in your ears, and you've got all the policy people around the president, and of course you have the president, who's doing his own thing. As currently construed, it's an impossible job.

But then again, as a public relations officer, what did you think of that Hitler comparison?
You don't make one evil worse by referring to another, because you open—as he did—the door to misinterpretation of what he intended to say, and to a level that was embarrassing. You just don't go there.

Is there a PR rule of thumb about this?
I try to never compare anyone to anything. Describe the situation! He clearly was trying to make the situation in Syria stand apart as really as maniacal and evil as it possibly could be, but it's hard to make any comparison to what went down in the 1940s.

This conversation has been edited and compressed for clarity.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The eco-friendly water bottle of the future could be an edible, drinkable, compostable bubble. From London-based creators Skipping Rocks Lab, Ooho! is poised to be an antidote to the wasteful and manipulative world of plastic bottled water.

Since 2014, it's been surging through the UK startup scene, and already Ooho! has raised £605k in two days of crowdfunding on Crowdcube. Half of the money will be used to develop Skipping Rocks Lab machinery, and the other half will pay for research and development into making the material, which is already comparable to plastic in cost of production, cheaper, faster, and better.

Continue reading on Creators.

Sometimes I wish I were a bit more desensitized, because whenever a grainy viral video of police brutality hits the internet, I can't help but internalize it. After seeing so many of the same nightmare scenarios play out on YouTube, I sometimes envision myself being shot by the cops and the cameras: slumped in the front seat of my car with blood spreading across my white T-shirt like Philando Castile; bullets spinning me around like a ballet dancer before I topple to the asphalt like Laquan McDonald; or failing to win a fatal footrace with three bullets like Walter Scott.

The most recent addition to our nation's shameful library of violence perpetuated by the state isn't as grotesque as those previously mentioned—in fact, it wasn't even lethal. But it has still managed to sear its way into my psyche. And a big part of that isn't just the abuse documented, but the way it's being covered by my colleagues.

On Sunday, as you've almost certainly heard by now, an Asian-American doctor from Kentucky named David Dao was in his seat on a United Airlines flight in Chicago when the airline forcibly, and brutally, removed him. The carrier claimed to have randomly chosen Dao and three other passengers to vacate their seats so employees could travel in their place on an overbooked flight. But when Dao refused to give up his spot, reportedly claiming that he felt targeted because of his appearance, police officers violently accosted him.

A cellphone video of the screaming doctor being dragged down the airplane aisle with his belly exposed promptly went viral. But just when the visual of the bloodied middle-aged man being manhandled by the cops started to inspire a genuine conversation around the misuse of force by police, traffic-chasing media companies started running click-y articles with headlines like: "Doctor Dragged Off Flight Was Convicted of Trading Drugs for Sex" and "David Duo, Doctor Dragged Off United Flight, Was Convicted of Multiple Felony Drug Charges in 2004."

Naturally, it was internet tabloids like the New York Post and TMZ and a local newspaper in Kentucky, the Courier-Journal, that first dredged up Dao's "sordid history." But plenty of others soon followed suit, presumably chasing traffic. After glancing at a host of these stories overrunning my newsfeed, I couldn't help but wonder how the public is served by learning about the legal and criminal issues faced by Dao more than a decade before he became the victim of one of the most sensational abuses of force by officers documented on video this year. What about the still-unnamed officers who lifted Dao out of his seat and caused him to bleed all over himself like the Penguin in Batman Returns?

After all, as depressing as the video of Dao is, it is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the legacy of violence perpetuated by law enforcement in the city of Chicago. Last year, the city had to pay out more than $5 million in reparations to 57 mostly black people who had been victims of state-administered torture. These people were beaten, suffocated, and had their nuts shocked with cattle prods. And let's not forget the police shooting of 17-year-old Chicagoan Laquan McDonald, who police hit with 16 shots as he was apparently moving away from them.

The fact that some journalists have chosen to focus on Dao's personal character as opposed to the records of the officers who mercilessly humiliated him or the tax-payer funded department for which they work has helped upend my self-flagellating habit of internalizing these news stories. Today, I'm not just thinking about myself potentially being in one of these violent altercations with the state, I'm also thinking about what they would say about me after it all went down.

If I were to be knocked around and humiliated like Dao on a plane; or worse, pumped full of lead like John Crawford was in a Wal-Mart, how would they frame me? As a young man from a loving family with a promising future, or a degenerate alcoholic who promoted gross sex acts and drug abuse in his work? I wonder which Instagram photo they would chose to be the thumbnail to all of the articles detailing my police-involved clash. Maybe it'd be the one of me standing with my arm wrapped around my mom on the morning of Easter Sunday just after I begrudgingly accompanied her to church. Or perhaps it'd be that ironic picture I took once at a Crown Fried Chicken in Brooklyn, mugging in front of a smuggled 40 oz. of Ballentine and a plate of glorious golden wings and fries, rocking a skully and some overpriced and oversized streetwear.

It's in playing this macabre game of what-if that I realize: Even in death, a realm that ought to be stripped of all of life's bullshit, there is still a difference in the way I see that photo with the 40 oz. and the chicken and the way they would see it when it came sliding down their newsfeed paired with a headline about "resisting arrest." I can hear the analytics homies in any given newsroom now, chiming in on their Slack group chat about which pic is going to get the most clicks. And besides the grainy cell phone video, most of the information about the shooting and me would come straight from the police themselves—the fools who just lit me up.

Who is Wilbert L. Cooper and did he get what was coming to him? The answer might ultimately come down to the whims of a white editor dude who hadn't heard of Rick James before watching Dave Chappelle and always laughed at that skit for the wrong reasons.

Throughout that process of turning brutality into content, every choice matters. Because when a story breaks, it's the writers and editors who have the power to shape and shift the narrative to the point that a tragedy can no longer seem like a tragedy. In Dao's case the story of police abusing their power transmogrifies into a tabloid about a doctor with dubious ethics and peculiar sexual proclivities.

This kind of thing has been going on forever, but the first time I wrestled with it was in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin. While Martin was not killed by the police, George Zimmerman's ultimate acquittal reflects the same institutional propensity to brutalize people of color with the impunity that we see in extrajudicial violence across the country.

This year marked the fifth anniversary of Martin's murder. And many people continue to mourn it. Unsurprisingly, there are many others who are still proselytizing the idea that the candy and beverage the kid bought before he was gunned down were intended to be mixed up in a batch of "purple drank," a codine-laced cocktail. If it wasn't the "lean" to harp on, it was his hoodie, a garment that when worn by black boys is apparently as just threatening as waving a deadly weapon. The goal of all the hoodie and lean chatter on forums and right wing websites is to try to portray Martin as some kind of hardened gangster, who's untimely death makes the world a better and safer place. This lie is built on a myth that has been sold since the days of chattel slavery, that blacks are inherently criminal. It's a falsehood that we have contend with everyday, whether we are staring down the barrel of a police officer's gun or our life is being boiled down to a handful of misbegotten transgressions in a New York Post column.

Although Martin was the first time I actively recognized this phenomenon, he and Dao are far from the only people whose characters have been put on trial. In 2014, they did it to Michael Brown, too. A Missouri cop conspicuously shared a random photo of a young black man totting a gun in a menacing manner, claiming that it was Mike Brown when it was clearly not to anyone who doesn't believe that all negroes look alike. The New York Times buoyed this narrative when they went on about how Brown "was no angel," as if his alleged criminal history had any sensible bearing on whether or not the unarmed teenager deserved to be shot and killed in the street by the Ferguson Police Department. Even the question of whether or not he robbed the bodega the day he died is unrelated to whether his shooting by police was justified. If past transgressions were a legitimate reason for police to kill (or in Dao's case, rough up) a citizen, then how does Dylann Roof, a white guy who mercilessly murdered nine black folks in a Charleston church, make it safely back to the police station?

I could rattle off scores of other names of brutalized people and the corresponding red herrings rolled out to scapegoat the police violence they suffered, since these smear campaigns happen like clockwork any time everyday people actually start to critique our justice system. And how could we not be critical of it? American cops manage to kill black people at 2.5 times the rate they do whites. And they kill more people of all races in a matter of days than most countries kill in years.

Despite what our new Attorney General Jeff Sessions purports, this pattern of violence is not the result of a few "bad apples." Instead, it is systemic—the justice system is rotten to the core with racial bias and general brutality towards all of its citizens, people like you and me. And the biggest problem with character assassinations like the one currently being waged on Dao is that they they derail us from having frank conversations about how to finally break that system down.

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Charlie Murphy—a comedic luminary and the master storyteller behind Dave Chapelle's Rick James and Prince sketches—has died at 57 of leukemia, TMZ reports.

The stand-up comedian, actor, and screenwriter first got his start in show business as a bodyguard for his brother, Eddie Murphy. He went on to appear in films from Harlem Nights to Roll Bounce, but he's best known for his work on Chappelle's Show. His true-to-life tales about hanging out with Rick James and Prince back in the day, adapted into skits featuring Chappelle, left an indelible mark on the world of comedy—and millions of viewers with cries of laughter.

Murphy had been receiving chemotherapy for leukemia at a hospital in New York, and passed unexpectedly on Wednesday, his publicist Domenick Nati told the Hollywood Reporter. He had recently just gone on tour with Cedric the Entertainer, George Lopez, D.L. Hughley, and Eddie Griffin, New York Daily News reports.

A number of celebrities who admired Murphy's work took to Twitter to offer their condolences.

"At the end of the day, a million-dollar diamond will fucking rot," Murphy told Esquire in 2011. "Don't take life for granted. Don't take people for granted."

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Top photo: Rosario Dawson (Georges Biard, via); Emma Watson (David Shankbone, via); and Amanda Seyfried (Courtney, via), all of whom have had hacked images shared online.

Three years ago "The Fappening" brought porn into the evening news headlines. Hollywood stars – Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence among them – had their iClouds hacked, and almost 500 photos were published – showing mostly women, mostly naked – none of which were intended for the public's eyes.

Now we have Fappening 2.0, a new trove of stolen photos posted to 4chan, Reddit and anywhere else you'd expect to find hacked naked images being shared. First, in mid-March, the victims were Amanda Seyfried and long-term target of sexually frustrated Potterite trolling, Emma Watson. Today, it's Rosario Dawson, Suki Waterhouse and Miley Cyrus.

It was always claimed that there would be more to follow after "The Fappening's" first wave. These new images might have been excavated from the original hacker's collection, they might have been stolen by a completely different person, or be the result of a collective working together. Watson and Seyfried have already begun legal action against "Celeb Jihad", a site currently refusing to take down the images.

After the first Fappening, stars described the leak as "devastating" and "degrading" (Scarlett Johansson) and "a sex crime" (Jennifer Lawrence). Meanwhile, Apple stressed that the iCloud had not been breached, and that the actresses had been targeted individually. The FBI traced the hack to a number of sources, before eventually charging Ryan Collins, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for phishing schemes run between 2012 and 2014.

This fallout did little to deter an army of fap-hunters. Fappening-themed blogs and forum threads have persisted over the last few years, and the new hack takes up where the previous one left off: users are sharing the images just as before, assessing them for their legitimacy and teasing the next "promised" wave of photos.

WATCH: The Digital Love Industry

What surprises me about these "Fappenings" – aside from, you know, the horrendous disregard for all these celebrities' privacy, and the fact some people feel perfectly entitled to breach it – is that so many of the women had already appeared nude onscreen. We knew Emily Ratajkowski as the topless star of the "Blurred Lines" video; Rosario Dawson did a full-frontal nude scene several years ago in Danny Boyle's film Trance; Paz de la Huerta has appeared without clothing in pretty much all of her best-known roles.

To me, it seems this signals a move away from the pornography of content – i.e. a fully-naked image being more valuable than one where the subject is only topless – and toward a pornography of context. With a stolen image the value is doubled: the woman is naked and the viewer isn't supposed to be seeing what they're seeing.

4chan has a habit of tracking down nude pictures of even the non-famous women who irk them. Below image posts the users call for "sauce", slang for "source", i.e. personal details of the woman in the picture. Where does the picture come from? Was it taken from a hacked account, against the subject's will? The greater the struggle to acquire it, the more valuable it becomes. If the subject is judged to be annoying, a feminist or an "SJW", the "sauce" will be more delicious still.

The dialogue around Emma Watson is especially relevant here. What makes the prospect of her pictures so powerful? Yes, she's beautiful, and famous, and the legacy of her role as Hermione Granger appeals to Potterite fanboys. But there's more to it: Watson has spoken in the past about how fame impacted on her growing up, how tabloids rushed to sexualise her and how photographers lay out on the ground outside her 18th birthday party to get upskirt pictures. She has also repeatedly aligned herself with a very moderate, media-friendly brand of feminism, antagonising n00d-hunters even more.

And now her photos have leaked, except that they haven't: the "private" images are from a clothes fitting several years ago, and in them the actress is fully clothed. This isn't the first time Watson has been targeted by a plot that turned out to be wishful thinking: in 2014, a site appeared with a countdown clock and the message "Emma You Are Next". It turned out to be a hoax concocted by a viral marketing firm.

One of the images announced as a "hack" on multiple "Fappening" websites, which was actually a cover shot for 'Candy' magazine

Conventional porn reached its saturation point years ago, back when women started to claim it for themselves and openly enjoy it (some will remember this as an era of empowerment, others as a time of "Female Chauvinist Pigs"). Perhaps in response, and fuelled by the "desensitisation" of which so many porn addicts mention, fap connoisseurs moved into more dangerous territory. Themes of "cucking", aggression, humiliation and rape-simulation have endured.

Armchair pillagers get off on what is stolen. Revenge porn, hacked images and "creepshots" captured without the subject's knowledge are more powerful than mass-produced porn, because they are taken without the subject's consent.

It's telling that, during his trial, Ryan Collins – the man behind the first Fappening hack – was also found to have run a modelling scam which involved tricking his targets into sending him nudes. Ordinary girls were as good as celebrities for his purpose, as long as each had been violated in some way.

People will argue that these women "shouldn't have taken the pictures in the first place", a position as futile as arguing they should give up on owning smartphones, too. Through sexting, flirting, dating apps, late-night DM exchanges and encrypted missives sent between lovers, technology is now bound up in human sexuality. This practice is certain to continue, and just because these people have a public profile they shouldn't have to stop doing what the rest of us are up to.

It's likely that the leaked photos will continue, too. But what can change is how we regard those who publish and share them, and how we respect the privacy of the victims. Consider one of the "leaked" images of Miley Cyrus, which ironically enough turns out to have been lifted from a magazine photoshoot. In it, Miley's wearing a white swimsuit, high-cut and tight fitting in an almost pornographic way. It's printed with a slogan: "My pussy my choice."

@roisinkiberd

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This week, famously gaffe-prone White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is in hot water after comparing Adolf Hitler favorably to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and in the process saying that Hitler didn't use chemical weapons—when in fact he gassed millions to death in concentration camps. (As of Wednesday, Spicer was still apologizing.) This is just the latest in a long string of humiliating mistakes from the Trump spokesman. But are Spicer's stumbles just a problem for the administration, or should ordinary people care that the press secretary can't get his foot out of his mouth? Politics writer Eve Peyser and politics editor Harry Cheadle debated that question today. Here's Eve's point:

Much like the man he ostensibly speaks for, Sean Spicer can't get a damn thing right. The press secretary is effectively the public relations representative of the administration, and Sean Spicer is a terrible PR man. A good publicist massages the situation to make whomever he represents look good; incapable of subtlety, Spicer is barely able to utter a sentence without causing a national crisis. And his litany of alternative facts, corrections, and blunders reveal the devastating disorganization of Trump's White House.

In a press conference on Tuesday, while attempting to explain Donald Trump's decision to strike Syria by comparing Hitler to Bashar al Assad—or "Bashad al al Asee" as the press secretary pronounces it—he falsely purported that unlike Assad, "Hitler...didn't even sink to using chemical weapons." (For the record, yes, Hitler used chemical weapons in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. In fact, it was the Nazis who developed Sarin, the gas Assad used in the attack earlier this month.)

Read the counterpoint to this article here.

After pushback from the press, it took Spicer four tries to muster up a quasi-acceptable apology, in what became a sort of bizarre defense of Hitler. He called concentration camps "Holocaust centers" and managed to assert "[Hitler] was not using gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing." This didn't earn him any good will with those accusing him of anti-semitism. After more outrage and a slew of classic Spicer fuck-ups, where he suggested that unlike Hitler, Assad used chemical weapons "on innocent people," he landed on this response:

In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust. I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.

The Anne Frank Center, along with several Democrats including Nancy Pelosi, have since called for Spicer to be fired. Spicer might be shamefully offensive and reliably unreliable, but so is the administration he represents. It is nearly impossible to coherently justify a foreign policy as erratic as Trump's. Though the president enthusiastically spoke of "bomb[ing] the hell out of ISIS" throughout the campaign, he also said "we should not be focusing on Syria," and warned that Hillary Clinton would cause "World War III over Syria." If Spicer's inability to articulate Trump's stance on Syria indicates anything at all, it's that the president doesn't really have one.

In other words, the president's decision to attack Syria cannot be justified because Trump has no ideology. (Trump's communications officer recently told 30 White House staffers, "There is no Trump doctrine.") Spicer's train wreck of a press conference indicated that the president is making major military decisions on a whim. It was a thoughtless act—one that, according to Eric Trump, was influenced by Ivanka telling her father she was "heartbroken and outraged" at the atrocity. Your daughter's heartbreak is not a valid reason to start a war.

An inadvertent beacon of horrifyingly entertaining gaffes and flubs, Spicer is bad at smoothing over controversy that shouldn't be smoothed over to begin with. Like when he tried to argue that Trump's executive immigration order wasn't a Muslim ban, even though both Trump and Spicer himself had previously identified it as such. Admitting the executive order is in fact a Muslim ban is obviously not in the best interest of the administration, but perhaps a more competent press secretary wouldn't have undermined himself by telling a group of students that "the ban deals with seven countries" the day prior.

These fuck-ups don't do the administration any favors, but do we want a press secretary who makes the administration look better? Do we want another person spinning blatant racism or an unnecessary war into something digestible to the press and the American people? If we want an accurate look at the Oval Office from the briefing room, we need a press secretary as incompetent as the administration itself. On that point, Spicer delivers.

Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.

This week, famously gaffe-prone White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is in hot water after comparing Adolf Hitler favorably to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and in the process saying that Hitler didn't use chemical weapons—when in fact he gassed millions to death in concentration camps. (As of Wednesday, Spicer was still apologizing.) This is just the latest in a long string of humiliating mistakes from the Trump spokesman. But are Spicer's stumbles just a problem for the administration, or should ordinary people care that the press secretary can't get his foot out of his mouth? Politics writer Eve Peyser and politics editor Harry Cheadle debated that question today. Here's Harry's point:

Sean Spicer, whatever his faults, has a tough job: Every day, he has to go out and explain what the Trump administration is doing and why. Considering that administration is often in conflict with itself and is helmed by people who have a habit of saying things that are flat-out wrong, his task is a difficult one. Spicer started the gig having to defend a ridiculous claim by Donald Trump about the size of his inaugural crowd; his statements on the Republican healthcare plan were denounced by the left and the right; last month he had to back up his boss's bizarre (and still unproven) claim about being wiretapped by Barack Obama. To mangle a Game of Thrones quote, Trump eats and Spicer takes the shit.

As the White House press secretary, Spicer was always going to get raked over the coals by both the media and the Democrats for Trump's unpopular positions and odd tweets. That's the job, of course—he gets nearly $180,000 a year to be the mouthpiece of an administration that has made a muddle of its first three months. Spicer has added to that muddle by constantly committing gaffes, misspeaking, and at time misrepresenting the administration's positions in important ways. That's a problem for White House officials tired of "Spicer Fucks Up Again" headlines, but it's also a problem for the American people.

Read the counterpoint to this article here.

The job of a press secretary is to spin whatever the president does, but even that spin has a purpose—the public deserves an explanation for why missiles were launched, or why a piece of legislation is supported by the White House. Those explanations are going to be self-serving, but they can be a starting point for analysis and debate. So far, the administration hasn't done a good job of describing, for instance, its stance on Syria, which naturally confuses people, and it's at moments like these when Spicer's incoherence is actually dangerous.

Spicer claiming that Hitler didn't use chemical weapons was bad—as was his accidental claim, while apologizing for that gaffe, that Trump was trying to "destabilize" the Middle East—but he's made worse unforced errors. Earlier this week he implied, wrongly, that Trump would attack Syrian strongman Bashar Assad for using barrel bombs, which would be a major shift in policy, since barrel bombs are used daily in that conflict. He later "clarified" that statement, just as he had to "clarify" in January after saying incorrectly that the White House was endorsing an incredibly harsh import tax on goods from Mexico. Or how about the time he repeated a baseless rumor that the British spied on Trump for Obama, then denied that the White House apologized to the UK over the remark?

In all those cases, Spicer failed at the basic level of communicating what the White House was thinking—and that's his one job. Journalists depend on a press secretary who can represent an administration's positions accurately. Foreign governments want to know what the president's policy is on war and peace and trade. The public would presumably like to hear the White House's side of the story, even if that side of the story isn't the whole truth. When Spicer can't get through a press conference without spouting obvious nonsense that he has to take back hours later, he's failing all those constituencies. By adding an extra layer of incompetence to the already fraught relationship between the White House and the mainstream press, Spicer is helping no one, and looking like a moron to boot. Is that really worth paying him $180,000?

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.