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Violent Protests Turned Berkeley into a Battleground

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Protesters clashed in the streets and parks of Berkeley, California for a third time Saturday, and the violence between the far-left and the far-right led to more than ten injuries, seven hospitalizations, and over 20 arrests.

The incident began as a "Patriot Day" rally organized by Trump supporters and held in a park near the University of California campus. Soon anti-Trump counter-protesters appeared. Individuals on both sides were wearing helmets and goggles and appeared ready for a fight. Months ago, when the alt-right blogger Milo Yiannopoulos showed up to speak at the university, a similar outbreak of violence resulted; a pro-Trump rally last month also ended in a fight. For those who sought blood, Saturday's event did not disappoint.

At the start of the rally, according to CNN, police separated the two groups at first with a makeshift barrier of an orange mesh fence, but over time the members broke through the line and fight after fight broke out. From there on the rally became a chaotic mess. In one scene, captured from several angles by numerous news sources, you can see a young Trump supporter get swarmed by a group of black-clad people with their faces covered, an outfit often worn by antifascist "black bloc" protesters; one strikes the the man with a skateboard. Antifa protesters used fireworks and bear spray against Trump supporters, physical fighting between the two groups was common, and some weapons were employed—one of the hospitalized victims had reportedly been stabbed.

Adam Wold attended the event to take photographs and said that the intensity depended on where you were. Outside of the front lines you could find "people discussing ideologies and civil policy" but out in front things were permanently heated.

"Two people would be involved in a shouting match with people around them staring intimidatingly at each other. They would just start getting closer and closer," Wold told VICE. "When the initial contact would occur then people would start really throwing fists, I saw some sticks being used, there was some pepper spray."

"When those bouts of violence would occur most of the people would start running away, but that wasn't always the case."

Wold heard from people in the crowd that during several of these moments knives were pulled and, at times, he heard shouts of "knife" and would see a group of people scatter.

Both sides seemed to be attempting to occupy downtown Berkeley. By the end of the fighting the location was full by Trump supporters where they declared victory in "the Battle of Berkeley."

One lasting image to emerge from the clash is a screenshot from a video of a man—allegedly Nathan Damigo, a self-avowed white supremacist—punching a female Antifa protester in the face. The image has already become a meme on the right, where it's celebrated, and on the left, where it's used to showcase the alleged brutality of the right. (Damigo was not among those arrested.)

Several prominent members of the alt-right, like Lauren Southern and Tim "Baked Alaska" Treadstone, made an appearance at the "Patriots Day" rally, where they gave speeches, livestreamed the event, and marched with their fellow Trump backers. A small collection of Trump supporters were pictured sieg heiling and posing with anti-semitic signs at the rally.

Wold explained that, from what he saw, the violence could emerge from either side—primarily from the black bloc on the anti-Trump side, and the people decked out in protective gear on the Trump backer side. According to him it seemed that, for some of the people in the crowd, violence was a forgone conclusion and that's why they were there.

"I heard some of the pro-Trump people say that they drove eight or nine hours to come beat up some liberal city kids," said Wold. "I heard the same from black bloc people hiding their identities."

"Overall I just thought it was unproductive," he added. "It was definitely the most violent protest event that I've ever seen and I didn't understand what anybody thought the value of [the violent parts] were going to be."

During and after the clash, police were roundly criticized by both sides for a hands-off approach. According to Berkeley police, 11 people were treated for injuries, and seven had to be be sent to the hospital.

The city had imposed a one-day rule in the park where "anything that could be used as a weapon" was prohibited. "The strategy helped police to confiscate dozens of weapons, including a slew of sticks, wooden dowels and poles," the Berkeley Police Department said in a statement after the event. "Confiscated items included a stun gun, mace, knives, bear spray, an axe handle, pepper spray and a can filled with concrete."

Several of those arrested face felony assault charges, including one charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The police added that they will be reviewing footage shot at the event and more charges are likely to come about as a result.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.


'Lucy the Confused Girl Goes to Barcelona,' Today's Comic by Akvile Magicdust

Undercut: Rising Tension in BC’s South Asian Community

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Barbershops and hair salons have always been cultural safe spaces where people from different generations can speak frankly about tough issues. In our new series Undercut, we send three young skaters to get their haircut in different parts of town to explore what it means to be part of a diverse community in the current political climate.

Eight years ago Hersh moved with his Muslim family to Canada from Bangladesh. But reports of Islamophobic acts have been on the rise in Vancouver since the 2016 American election. While many members of the South Asian community feel safe in the city, some feel threatened by harassment and daily discrimination. Hersh headed to Kohli's Hair Stylists in South Vancouver to get a haircut and to discuss his experience in the current political climate.

Undercut episode 1: Being Black in BC
Undercut episode 2: Racism in Richmond, BC
Undercut episode 4: Moving Forward

From Corsets to Kardashians: Women's Power and the History of the Silhouette

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At this year's Paris Fashion Week, Comme des Garçons designer and haute couture's favorite bog witch Rei Kawakubo said her new collection was about "the future of silhouette." Kawakubo then presented a series of women whose shapes were obscured by insulation foam. The collection and koan prompted The Cut's Cathy Horyn to wonder, "Was Kawakubo saying we're all going to be horribly fat in the future?"

This is the wrong question. The women inside Kawakubo's trash cyclones were still very thin models—they just weren't alerting you to their shape. Presumably a woman exists under this white blob with the hair of beloved Rugrats doll Cynthia, but communicating feminine sex appeal is clearly not her highest priority.

Many of fashion's all-time greatest moments—the panniers of Marie Antoinette; Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali's skeleton dress; Rihanna at the 2015 Met Gala—have concerned the shape of women. Not necessarily the shape of their bodies, but how much space they occupy, and each change of silhouette reflects the time in which it originated. "There were so many silhouette changes during the 20th century," says Nancy Diehl, director of the masters program in costume studies at NYU. "Women's fashion definitely reflects societal priorities."

Continue reading on Broadly.

Undercut: Moving Forward

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Barbershops and hair salons have always been cultural safe spaces where people from different generations can speak frankly about tough issues. In our new series brought to you by Vancity, we send three young skaters to get their haircut in different parts of town to explore what it means to be part of a diverse community in the current political climate.

In this final episode of Undercut, our hosts gather together to show each other their fresh cuts, discuss what they learned from their experiences, and talk about how to move forward.

Undercut episode 1: Being Black in BC
Undercut episode 2: Racism in Richmond, BC
Undercut episode 3: Rising Tension in BC's South Asian Community


I Married an International Con Man

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The following is an excerpt from Lee Mackenzie's 'The Charming Predator' in which the former CBC journalist reveals her marriage to Welshman Kenner Jones, who has committed crimes across in the world under a series of different names. He headed a medical hospital in Kenya with no medical background, ran an evangelical program in the UK catering to convicts and has been convicted of more than 60 crimes. He is still on the run and was last spotted in Portugal. The following takes place shortly after Mackenzie married Jones. 

Soon it was summer then autumn, and the trees in our little Buckinghamshire village were turning to golds and browns. All along Fagnall Lane the air was filled with a soft, leafy smell. The nights were closing in. We had established a rhythm to our days of work, long walks and weekends.

I learned many things about my new husband. For example, he told me one day that he was a member of the Royal Naval Reserve. Kenner appeared to be quite proud of his commitment and patriotism. He explained that he had been serving in the RNR as much as possible in between various travels and contracts. Since our lives now had a pattern and predictability, he felt he could pick up his training and service again, and so he did.

Kenner would disappear every Wednesday evening for a few hours. He told me he was off to meet, train, learn, whatever was on the agenda that night in his reserve group. When he came home, he always had some information to share about what had gone on that night. It was very interesting and a part of life I knew nothing about. I didn't question; I just supported him. He didn't have a uniform at home. When I asked about that, he explained that the uni- forms were kept in lockers at the barracks and only brought out for ceremonial purposes. I realize now that it didn't make sense. At the time I experienced zings of fear and doubt, but I didn't challenge him. Besides, I thought, I have no experience with anyone doing any sort of military service, so maybe what he's telling me is right. But a nagging feeling wouldn't vanish. It kept tapping me on the shoulder. It lodged in my gut and tried to make me pay attention. I found myself wondering if he was up to something. Was this explanation of military commitment just a cover for something else?

I couldn't prove that he was telling me the truth—and I couldn't prove that he was lying.

There was nothing in the house, in his personal possessions that linked him to time with the Royal Naval Reserve. There were no pictures, mementoes, schedules. Yet surely he wasn't lying to me. I would watch him when he came home, but he would easily describe the events of the evening. I stifled the doubts.

Just before Remembrance Sunday that year, Kenner arrived home from an evening with the reserve carrying a uniform. He told me he was required to wear it for the ceremony at the local war memorial. We planned to go to the parish church early on Sunday and then on to the memo- rial service in the nearby town of Beaconsfield.

The day before the service Kenner suddenly reported that he had sprained an ankle. He said didn't really know how this had happened, but he claimed that his ankle was very sore and that he couldn't put any weight on his foot.

I offered to wrap his ankle for him, but he didn't want that because he wouldn't be able to put his shoe on. Instead he opted to use a cane. I didn't remember us having such an item in the house, but he produced one out of a closet. He practised hobbling about and decided he would be able to navigate his way around adequately.

Sunday morning, we arrived at church. Kenner looked smart in his Royal Naval Reserve uniform. People noticed that he was struggling to walk, but he put on a brave face. After the service a number of parishioners came up to him to offer sympathy about the sprained ankle and to admire him in his dress blues. Then off we went to the war memorial.

For everyone there the Falklands War was still top of mind. It had begun in the South Atlantic in April when Argentina invaded and occupied the Falklands, a British territory. Britain wasn't sitting still for that and the conflict was under way. By the time it was over, 649 Argentine and 255 British military personnel had died, along with three Falkland Islanders. So it was no surprise that when Kenner arrived at the war memorial, he drew attention.

I tried to feel proud but instead was incredibly uncomfortable. Again and again I would cringe as people walked up to him to shake his hand and commiserate with him about his limp and his cane. They thanked him for his patriotic contribution. They assumed he had been injured in the Falklands conflict. He did nothing to set them straight.

Courtesy Penguin Random House Canada

As we drove home, I wanted to speak up. I wanted to challenge him. Why had he let everyone believe he was a war veteran? Why did he offer a smile of quiet courage to those who expressed concern? Why was his ankle suddenly much better when we got home? This was a perfect opportunity for me to confront myself, too. Why was I refusing to face what was right in front of me? The only answer I can give to myself now, so many years later, is that deep down I knew the answer. Somewhere in my heart and in my mind a part of me did recognize the imposter. I simply didn't have the skills or confidence to face it. And I was too afraid.

Kenner continued working at the Institution of Electrical Engineers in Savoy Place in London. I had now been hired by CBC Radio, based in Little Titchfield Street near Oxford Street, and was enjoying everything about my new job, including the commute. Each morning I would board the train at Beaconsfield, which was the nearest station to Winchmore Hill, and only a few kilometres away. It was always source of amusement to me how everyone just politely took a seat with barely a "Good morning" to the person sitting right beside. Then out would come the news- papers. Kenner taught me how to fold them into a tall format that allowed you to turn each page in such a way that you didn't bump elbows with the person next to you. All the way to London the train was full of silent people holding up these narrow newspapers. It was so precise, so dignified and, to me, so British.

Once I left the train at Marylebone Station I had a twenty-minute walk to Oxford Street. My route took me down Baker Street and I always looked for the sign for 221B, the fictional address of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

On the days I was not working at CBC I would bustle around the house in Winchmore Hill, cleaning, cooking, enjoying domestic life. Winchmore Hill was really just a hamlet, but it was as sweet as its name. The village square was actually a triangular green, with a combination general store, butcher shop and post office. Just around the corner from the square was the village pub, The Plough.

Was he just a harmless eccentric or a fraud? I had no answers.

Kenner was his usual attentive, loving self. We would go for walks in the evening, church and a special lunch out on Sundays. But I could still feel my rising doubts about what he was really up to. The conflicting thoughts continued creating a quiet argument in the back of my brain, and I lived with an undercurrent of internal tension.

Was he really the person he seemed to be? What about his unwillingness to discuss or share responsibility for our family finances, and that strange display of participation in military service? I had eventually challenged him on that, somewhat gently, and his only response was to give up attending Naval Reserve meetings, claiming they were requiring too much time away from me. Was he just a harmless eccentric or a fraud? I had no answers. I couldn't prove that he was telling me the truth—and I couldn't prove that he was lying.

Early in the new year the phone rang in the evening and Kenner answered it. I could hear him engaged in a lengthy and apparently amiable conversation. When it ended, he explained that James, his friend from Ashwell prison, was coming to visit next weekend with his wife, Anne. James, he reminded me, had been his one true friend during that time—a gregarious Yorkshireman who had mishandled funds while managing a bank.

When they arrived, I watched in awe as two very large people extracted themselves from a compact car.

"James!" Kenner looked like a child as they greeted each other. His hand disappeared in the grasp of his gigantic friend.

The visit was a huge amount of fun. James and Anne were wonderful company. They were friendly, entertaining and thoughtful houseguests. I can't remember ever laugh- ing as much as I did that weekend. As the time came to leave, they squeezed themselves into the car. James turned the key in the ignition, but instead of a healthy rumble of readiness, the result was an unsatisfactory whining sort of effort from the engine.

With a look of chagrin and a half-smile, James glanced at us and then turned his attention back to the dashboard and the key. Again and again he tried—to no avail. Then suddenly his geniality disappeared, replaced by rage. I instinctively took a step back, frightened by what I saw.

He was now screaming at the car. He doubled up his massive fist and smashed it through the dashboard. The act was shocking, scary and lightning fast. Eventually the car did start and he and Anne drove off. But my lasting memory of James wasn't of his friendliness and fun but, rather, of a huge, powerful man who was easily provoked into anger and violence. I would soon have reason to remember this.

On the first of March the Welsh celebrate St. David's Day. The patron saint of Wales died on that day in AD589. Dewi Sant, as he is known in Welsh, was educated in Cardiganshire, and founded religious houses across Wales and in England. He went on pilgrimages as far as Jerusalem, where he was made an archbishop. Many miracles are attributed to St. David. It is said when he was preaching, he caused the ground to rise beneath him so that everyone could see and hear him.

One of the national symbols of Wales is the daffodil. It got to be that in a roundabout way. The leek, a long, green, onion-like vegetable, became the Welsh symbol when soldiers going into a major battle were told by their leader to wear leeks in their caps so they could tell friend from foe. The Welsh word for leek is similar to the word for daffodil, so there was a bit of confusion. Eventually the daffodil became a national symbol, too.

Going home from work on St. David's Day, I arrived at Marylebone Station with time to spare. Each day I'd see this lovely old lady sitting on the platform, surrounded by buckets of flowers. We were watching our pennies, I believed, so I didn't often splurge. But today was an exception. I bought five bunches of daffodils before boarding the train for home.

During the journey I practised my Welsh and thought about my life. We still hadn't begun to search for a house. Kenner explained that the City of Liverpool bonds he had purchased for us with the money I'd sent from Canada were being held longer than expected. I didn't really know what that meant and I had decided not to push it. He had insisted at the beginning of our marriage that he would handle all the banking and the household accounts. He became grumpy if I questioned things. There always seemed to be enough for food and rent, and that seemed reasonable, as both of us were working.

I pushed any concerns aside because I had something more important on my mind: I was sure I was pregnant.

Part of my dream when marrying Kenner was to have a family. I had five children lined up in my imagination. I could see their shoes by the front door. I had a house filled with laughter, music, love. I desperately wanted a baby and now I was certain one was on the way because I could feel the presence. There was something about the energy, the warm sense of life and excitement.

We had decided that if ever we had a boy, we would name him Risiart, the Welsh version of Richard and a name that Kenner loved. But I knew this was a girl. I was going to name her Robin. For now, though, I would have to be patient. I didn't want to bring Kenner the news until a doctor confirmed it. I had an appointment coming up.

When I got into the station, Kenner was waiting. As I stepped down, laden with yellow blooms, he began walking toward me.

"Dydd gwyl Dewi Sant hapus, cariad! Happy St. David's Day, sweetheart," I said, smiling and holding out the arm—load of daffodils.

I had been concentrating so hard on my surprise gift of flowers and getting the Welsh right that I hadn't really noticed that Kenner was staggering a bit. He looked flushed. He had never met me like this before. In fact, I'd never seen him drunk.

"What's going on?" I asked when he came close. "You smell of whiskey."

He gave me a half-hearted smile as he saw the daffodils. "Oh, very good. For St. David's Day."

The fun of the moment had vanished. I was worried. "What's happening, Kenner? Listen, give me the car keys.

"You're not driving like this." I handed him the armload of flowers and took the keys from him. "You're going to have to explain what's going on." We walked to the car.

"I'll explain later," he said. "It's Friday night. Let's just have a good weekend and I'll tell you all about it on Monday." As I drove us home, my heart was aching. "Come on, what's going on?"

"Let's just have a lovely few days and I'll tell you all about it later."

"No. Tell me now. I'm not waiting until Monday. There's something wrong and you have let me know what it is. What is it?"

"I've written it all in a letter for you and I'll give you the letter on Monday."

"A letter? I don't need a letter. I need you to tell me right now."

I couldn't get another word out of him. When we arrived home, he required my help getting out of the car, into the house and onto the bed. There he passed out. I pulled off his shoes, covered him with a blanket and began to search.

A letter, a letter. Where would he put a letter? Nothing in the bedroom. I checked all the drawers and cupboards. A sideboard stood in the entry. We kept various things there, including what small stock of liquor we had. The whiskey bottle that had only just been purchased and had been full the day before was nearly empty. I rummaged through the drawers and came across an envelope addressed to me. I sat down on the chair by the hall table and opened it. There was the familiar handwriting, the bold turquoise ink:

This is going to be a long and rambling note. It is not going to be easy to write. Please do not stop until you have read it all through.

M y life has not been the same since you came into it. I did not think it possible that I could find the kind of love I share with you.

Let me go back a bit. For over 12 years my life was dedicated to politics. I was uniquely successful. I walked the corridors of power and was tempted many times to stray over the ill-defined line which separates bending the rules and breaking the law. I never did stray over. After all these years I had to make a fundamental choice. I could go ahead, probably enter Parliament or work as a senior official at the EEC, the UN or some such body, or I could quit the political scene.

I could not stay as I was. Pressures were being put on me by senior and influential people— Gis card d'Estaing, Soares, Genscher, etc.—to move out of the back stage and move into the public lime- light. My fellow agents were jealous of my contacts. I had to go up or drop out. I decided to drop out.

Why? you ask. Well, the cost of fame is all too often paid with one's self-esteem, one's independence, even one's soul. I have seen too many good men turn when the public's glare shone on them. Fame and high regard among one's peers is one thing, but public adoration is another. I thank God that I had the courage to say no to the adulation of 'power'. I wanted to be who I was—not what the backroom boys made of me. I had spoiled too many good men by moulding them into a saleable package to want it done to me.

I was wealthy then—politics can be a lucrative business. I lavished money on friends—most of whom never repaid their loans—and a mother who was given everything she asked for. In 1976 I had over 100,000 pounds in my bank. By 1979 I was left with under 1,000 pounds. Oh, I had creditors totalling over 40,000 pounds but I never saw more than a couple of thousands of it. My conscience is a lot clearer than that of a number of my relatives and so-called friends of that time.

Then I met you. I knew the moment I saw you that we were to be wed. No one deserves you, me less than many. Your eyes glow with kindness. You overflow with care, love, simplicity. It shows in your smile how good, truly good, a person you are.

Never , never, never will I leave you in soul, even i f we may be parted in body. When we are both at God's right hand, I will leave you only to thank our Father for showing you to me.

You were not yet touched with the feelings which were in my heart, and I was afraid to tell you of them. If I had lost you, then I could not have faced the future. A feeling within me told me to bide my time.

I started work with British Leyland. Again, my unlearning stupidity let me down. I lent money to friends, acting as a middleman between them and a holiday company. They ran off with the money, leaving me with a fraud charge. My world seemed all darkness. From a leading international politician to a convict in under a year! Only the sure knowledge that you were there kept me going.

Prison— I'm not going to talk about that. I'll say just this. I'll never go back. You kept me going then, Don. Your letters, your care, your love and the certain knowledge that you were to be mine.

When I came out, I decided that I must pull myself up by my laces. No feeling sorry for myself— the wronged innocent bit. I would still succeed in life. Sure, I lied about my past, covered up my time in prison, but I did get a job. It didn't pay highly, but it got me by.

Now I felt confident to pop the question. You said yes, of course. I'll tell you this now, Don, what- ever happens in our lives, insofar as I have a choice, I'll always go the way which I feel will hurt or harm you least. Nothing will ever come between us, but also nothing will be allowed to put you through the agonies I experienced three years ago.

No w comes the crunch. I am finished now, my dear Don. I cannot go through all this again. You have your family to support you and I am ever thankful to God for that. I must somehow get you away. I never really deserved you and it is time that my year of bliss ended. You must return to Canada.

Why this now, you ask. I have been black-mailed regarding my past. The man involved has nothing to lose. He has lost his job and now lives on me—or did. He will not threaten me again. I had some rough friends who owed me favours. I called them last week and my blackmailing friend has a rearranged face, two broken hands and a fear which will make me forever safe. But too late.

B y last week James—yes James—had milked me of 25,000 pounds. Up to that sum I thought it worth trying to keep him satisfied to safeguard my job and future references. When he asked me for more I called a stop and called in my indebted friend.

How did I pay James? Believe it or not, American Express. I issued a fraudulent cheque— something I learned at Ashwell. Within a few days AmEx will know and the police will call.

I cannot ask you to face this. Indeed, I cannot face it myself. I am going to send you back to Canada after this weekend, a last weekend together. Then I shall face the situation without dragging you through the mire.

I love you, darling Donna. I didn't want this for you. Please forgive me. I should not have forced myself into your life. Go now, please, and make a better life for yourself. My only regret is that now there'll never be a Risiart.

Your devoted, Kenner

Excerpted from The Charming Predator: The True Story of How I Fell in Love with and Married a Sociopathic Fraud. Copyright © 2016 by Lee Mackenzie. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Does 'Annie Hall' Actually Suck?

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Does It Suck? takes a deeper look at pop cultural artifacts previously adored, unjustly hated, or altogether forgotten, reopening the book on topics that time left behind.

It must have been wonderful watching Annie Hall in 1977. There was neurotic, little Woody Allen as Alvy Singer, seen in a childhood flashback, panicking to a bemused shrink about the universe expanding (and then still obsessed with his own mortality as an adult). There was tall, WASPy Diane Keaton, all fashionably deployed menswear and folksy aphorisms. You'd have sighed, perhaps, as Alvy, an overeducated two-time divorcé pushing 40, molded this lively and naïve younger woman after his own irreparably flawed image. But you might just have let out a sigh of relief (while sobbing) when, instead of devolving into some smug male fantasy, the film ended with Annie dumping him for the last time, because she'd evolved past his antisocial worldview. A perfect ending to one of the saddest stories that can be fairly classified as romantic comedy.

Although his early sex farces had already earned Allen a reputation as one of cinema's smartest, funniest voices, Annie Hall proved he was also a keen observer of real relationships. Decades before Rebecca Solnit's work inspired the "mansplaining" meme and Sheila Heti made a refrain out of "he's just another man who wants to teach me something," in her novel How Should a Person Be?, Allen understood how destructive men's urges to educate and shape women could be. Forty years ago, Annie Hall's Best Picture and Best Director Oscars would've felt like a pure triumph for charming, intelligent filmmaking—even, one suspects, among some of the feminists who'd found Philip Roth's sex-obsessed bestseller Portnoy's Complaint alienating.

But those of us who grew up in the 90s (or later) never got to know a benign, subtly progressive Woody Allen with an untarnished reputation. By then, he had split with his longtime partner, Mia Farrow, and ended up with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, who was 35 years younger than Allen and had presumably once viewed him as a sort of father figure. The darker allegations that emerged during his and Farrow's breakup—that he had sexually abused the couple's seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow—got buried in tabloid confusion, willful public denial, and widespread ignorance about how kids process trauma.

I'm just a year older than Dylan and never heard her story when it first surfaced. So I became a Woody Allen fan, vaguely aware that there was supposed to be something not-right about him, but disinclined to seek out enough information to confirm my worst fears. I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't until Dylan started repeating her accusations, a few years ago, in interviews and a harrowing open letter, that I fully grasped the case against him. And by then, the damage was done: I had seen and, in many cases, loved his films. Especially Annie Hall.

It would be so easy if, viewed from the distance of 40 years, Annie Hall sucked. Unfortunately, it does not. On its own merits, the movie is a masterpiece. Constructed as a jigsaw puzzle spanning nearly two decades of Alvy's love life, it locks together scenes from his previous failed marriages with the story of his charming, then troubled, then death-spiraling affair with Annie. It is full of moments that are quotable because they are so relatable, from Alvy shutting down an art-house cinema snob by conjuring Marshall McLuhan out of thin air to his speech equating his and Annie's relationship with a dead shark. The performances—not just the leads, but also Tony Roberts as Alvy's creepy best friend, Rob, and Carol Kane, Janet Margolin, and Shelley Duvall as his other lovers—are portraits of people who feel real. At just more than 90 minutes, an ideal rom-com length, the script's economy is astounding.

The film has also aged surprisingly well. Annie is the kind of slightly androgynous instant icon whose boyish outfits and gawky mannerisms never feel outdated. Alvy's morbid pessimism seems right at home in this catastrophic second decade of the 21st century. Its depictions of two equally ridiculous cities, New York (rainy, morose, masochistic) and LA (sunny, shallow, bubble-headed), ring as true as ever. A Hollywood party scene where people say things like, "All the good meetings are taken," and "I forgot my mantra," could be relocated, without much of a rewrite, to the contemporary tech industry. And it would be reductive to proclaim Annie Hall's gender politics "feminist," but at the very least, there's quite a bit of nuance to them.

Of course, there are retrograde bits if you're looking—and it's on Allen that no conscientious viewer can watch his movies without assuming the worst. When Rob complains, toward the end, that a call from Alvy interrupted him in bed with 16-year-old twins, an otherwise unremarkable one-liner about Hollywood depravity becomes a callous joke about incest and exploitation (if not quite statutory rape). How could it not?

Less egregiously, there's some lazy "men are like this, women are like that" comedy. In a famous scene where Alvy and Annie have just met, their true thoughts appear on the screen as they feed each other pleasantries. "You're a great-looking girl," he thinks, while complimenting her photography. Meanwhile, she's just hoping he's better than the assholes she's dated before.

For the most part, though, Annie Hall is a sharp dissection of heterosexual romance because Allen understands what Alvy Singer doesn't: that women don't exist purely to fulfill male needs and assuage male insecurities. More than once, Annie shuts down Alvy's dismissal of her complaints as merely a sign that she has her period. Her ultimate rejection of him, over his insistence that she still loves him, is framed not as an essentially feminine act of cruelty, but as the inevitable result of his stunted capacity for personal growth. The play he writes about their relationship, with a "happy" ending where Annie has an epiphany that she loves him, comes across as transparently pathetic. Allen even gets that men and women can unwittingly hurt their partners in similar ways. Just as Alvy slowly tires of Kane's Allison, Robin slowly tires of him.

I'm not sure if Duvall's rock journalist is necessarily meant to mirror Alvy, babbling confidently and at length about topics that clearly don't interest her date. But the Marshall McLuhan guy, with his glasses and distinctively Allen-style haircut, is surely a doppelgänger and a clue that Alvy is more of a pretentious windbag than he realizes. He is, in fact, a totally unreliable narrator. In the film's opening monologue, he casually mentions he's always had "some trouble between fantasy and reality." Alvy may love to talk about himself, but other people's assessments of him are sharper than his own, and most of those other people are women.

Not that any of this somehow renders Allen innocent of crimes against women and girls, or counterbalances any of the allegations against him. Behind the camera, he may be the enlightened version of Alvy—who, as a comedian who's had two marriages and a transformative romance with a character based on Diane Keaton, is among Woody's most autobiographical protagonists. You can't accuse him of failing to meditate on his shortcomings, but you also can't assume that his films are an entirely accurate reflection of who he is.

Just because Allen demonstrated an evolved perspective on gender politics doesn't mean his behavior matches those beliefs. We live in a country that elected a president who bragged openly about his groping exploits, then declared April "National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month." When it comes to famous white men accused of sexual violence, there is no limit to the hypocrisy we'll tolerate. If anything, Allen's understanding that women are discrete, complex individuals, and that men often behave like monsters toward them, out of entitlement or immaturity, makes his personal history even more upsetting.

Unless you're comfortable denying real people's pain and suffering, there is no way to experience Annie Hall as audiences 40, or even ten, years ago did. But erasing the film from the canon wouldn't help anyone, either. We can't pretend it's misogynistic or flat-out bad. Even former fans who've stopped seeing Allen's new movies, because the idea of putting money in his pocket makes us queasy, can't deny the impact his earlier work had on us.

The decision to keep revisiting Annie Hall isn't merely selfish, though. It also forces us to remember that the man facing a serious, long-standing child sexual assault accusation, the man who married his former partner's young daughter and the man who gave us one of cinema's most vital depictions of love and heartbreak are the same person. In that sense, Annie Hall is a work of art whose meaning has surpassed its creator's intentions. What was once an untarnished classic is now a record of an artist's failure to live up to his own worldview.

Follow Judy Berman on Twitter.

Meet the Hackers Taking Pokémon into Their Own Hands

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Pokémon Prism was just days away from release when developer Koolboyman was hit with a cease and desist from Nintendo. At that point, the Pokémon fan-game had been in development for eight years and some change.

Prism, a ROM hack of Pokémon Crystal, featured a Pokémon league with 20 badges to collect, an entirely new region—the Sevii Islands—and introduced Pokémon from more recent generations in old-school 8-bit form. It was an impressive undertaking that gained attention after the game first appeared on Twitch Plays Pokémon and various gaming publications.

When Nintendo brought its DMCA down on the project, though, Koolboyman was quick to comply, though an early build of the game was leaked on 4Chan and picked up by a team of new developers who continue to work on the game, providing updates on the Pokémon Prism subreddit.

Continue reading on Waypoint.


How Trump's Inaction on Climate Change Could Lead to Impeachment

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Since 1984, a history professor named Allan Lichtman has used a set of "keys" to predict presidential elections—a set of 13 true-false statements like, "The economy is not in recession during the election campaign." This rudimentarily system hasn't been wrong in three decades, and it was even correct in 2016 when so many pundits and polls misfired. That track record makes it hard to dismiss his latest project out of hand, even though it sounds crazy as hell: It's a book titled The Case for Impeachment that lays out a case for how and why Donald Trump will get removed from office, which Lichtman sees as an inevitability.

The beginning of the book is like CliffsNotes on the history of presidential impeachment––very helpful for someone like me, a byproduct of Florida public schools. A quick civics lesson for the similarly uninformed: Any member of the House can draft what's known as an article of impeachment, and if a majority of the House votes for those articles, the president is impeached. After that, the Senate puts the president on trial, and if a majority of senators vote guilty, the president is thrown out. There have been three impeachments or near-impeachments in American history, none of which directly resulted in the president being removed. Andrew Johnson's downfall was being headstrong (he was acquitted and remained in office), Richard Nixon's was his paranoia and the need for total control (he resigned before he could be impeached), and Bill Clinton's was the inability to tell the truth on the stand (Clinton, like Johnson, was acquitted by the Senate). Anyone who's been following the news since January can see that Trump displays all three characteristics, often all at once. But will any of the scandals or upsets of the young administration lead to Trump losing the White House?

I called up Lichtman to find out why he thought the answer to that question was yes and how he imagined Trump getting impeached.

VICE: It would take a very long time to go through every possible cause for impeachment in the book, but one that I thought was interesting was the idea of him taking the stand in a civil case and perjuring himself.
Allan Lichtman: Civil suits can go forward during a presidency. It's not a guarantee that they will, because judges have to decide on a case-by-case basis, but I think there's a fair chance the suit stemming out of allegations of sexual harassment will go forward. [Feminist lawyer] Gloria Allred has already talked about wanting to get Trump into court and hold him accountable. And it's going to be very difficult if he is in court in a case like that, because his first tendency is to lie. He's also going to have a very difficult time eating the words he's already said.

What happens to get the wheels turning for impeachment if he perjures himself?
Impeachment begins in the House, and it's their sole responsibility under the Constitution. There's no review of what the House does—you can't appeal to a court or any other authority. So if Trump is found to be lying under oath, the House would have to hold an impeachment inquiry and draft articles of impeachment and vote on them, first in the House Judiciary Committee and then in the full House. By the way, if he's impeached and has committed a crime, he's then liable for prosecution. Of course, he could be pardoned by the next president.

The president doesn't even have to commit a crime to be impeached, right?
It can be any transgression that the House decides is serious enough to impeach a president. It's clear the framers of the Constitution meant for impeachment to broadly cover any transgression from a rogue president. It doesn't have to be an indictable crime under law––that's why they put impeachment in the hands of a political body, not in the courts.

I thought the most surprising concept you brought up in the book was that he might be impeached for failure to take action on climate change.
Typically crimes against humanity tend to be genocide or violence against a particular group of people, like what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s. But the International Criminal Court has recently prioritized crimes against the environment, which could deal with climate change. After all, climate change could be interpreted as a kind of genocide. Catastrophic climate change threatens our survival on this planet, or certainly our well-being, and is in a sense violence against all human beings. "If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet." That quote is from a 2009 open letter to Obama from various business leaders, signed by among others, Donald J. Trump, Donald J. Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump. The irrefutable scientific evidence has not changed since then; it has, in fact, gotten stronger. The only thing that changed for Donald Trump was his political calculations.

How does the International Criminal Court have any say in our presidency?
The United States is not part of the Rome agreement that set up the ICC, but a complaint could be made from another nation on the effects of Trump's policies, and that could lead to a criminal investigation and prosecution by the ICC, which could lead to an impeachment investigation here in the United States. There have already been successful lawsuits in other countries based upon climate change, and there's that children's civil lawsuit going on in the United States. Those can be a prelude to the more serious charge of impeachment. I understand this is pretty far-fetched, but this is serious, this is real, this is our life on this planet.


Meet one of the young climate activists suing the federal government:


Ultimately though, Congress would have to take action. We live in such hyper-partisan times, I wonder if impeachment is even possible today.
Well, it's difficult in our very politicized political environment. But the recent results of the congressional election in deep-red Kansas show that even Republican partisans might be turning against Trump. That was a district that Trump won by nearly 30 points, and the Republican eked out a victory there with virtually no effort being made by the national Democratic Party to help their candidate. Moreover, understand that Trump has no strong relationship with the Republican Party. He's a bit like Andrew Johnson, a kind of a maverick in his own time. If Trump becomes a liability to the House, they may turn against him. After all, every one of them has to stand for reelection in 2018, and the Kansas results are certainly a warning shot.

Let's also not forget that the Republicans in the House love Vice President Mike Pence. He is a down-the-line, standard-issue, Christian conservative instead of an unpredictable maverick like Donald Trump. And if Pence gets to be president, he gets to appoint a vice president, which means we could have a Pence-Paul Ryan administration, which is a dream team for Republicans. And remember, not every Republican has to turn. Assuming Democrats would vote to impeach him, only approximately two dozen Republicans would have to turn against him. And in the Judiciary committee, about one-third of Republicans turned against Nixon back then.

He can also be kicked out for being plain crazy, right?
The 25th Amendment provides a mechanism for removing a president when he's too disabled to serve, and that could refer to mental disabilities. Additionally, mental health professionals follow the so-called Goldwater rule, way back from 1964, which comes from when psychologists were blasted for diagnosing Barry Goldwater. But they've now broken that rule. More than 30 mental health professionals published an open letter saying they didn't think he was fit to carry out the duties of a president. You can see that in those late-night or early-morning tweets, when he just feels compelled to lash out to say irrational things against his so-called enemies. The majority of the cabinet, the vice president, and two-thirds of Congress would have to agree, but this is possible.

That definitely seems like the most remote possibility. What's the most likely?
Russia. One of the explicit grounds for impeachment under the Constitution is treason. And we don't know yet what the extent of the collusion is between the Trump team and Russia is. There's certainly a lot of smoke, and I believe there is some fire behind that smoke. We have an FBI investigation, and we have two congressional investigations, and so far the Trump team has shown all the signs of a cover-up: conceal, deny, lie, deflect, and then when you're caught, claim that the contacts with Russia were innocuous—kind of like what Nixon's administration said about the Watergate burglary. They said it was a third-rate burglary, but we now know it was the tip of the iceberg in a series of serious, serious transgressions.

The end of your book is a guide for Trump to save himself. Given all that's come out about Russia in the past few weeks, can he even be saved at this point?
He can't get himself out of Russia. He can deflect all he wants, and he's a master of deflection, and he's done that all his life. But what happened happened. You can't erase history.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

We Were on the Ground in Pyonyang Ahead of North Korea’s Failed Missile Launch

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PYONGYANG, North Korea—It's been an eventful weekend in Pyongyang.

On Sunday morning, North Korea conducted a failed medium-range missile launch from a site near the northeastern coastal city of Sinpo. Apparently timed to coincide with the parade and the arrival of a US Navy strike group in the region earlier in the week, the missile "blew up almost immediately" after launch, according to US Pacific Command.

On Saturday, huge crowds gathered for the 105th birthday of Kim Jong Un's late grandfather Kim Il Sung, who is considered to be North Korea's founding father.

Following a forceful speech by Choe Ryong Hae, one of Kim Jong Un's closest confidants, thousands of Pyongyang residents marched for hours in lockstep chanting devotional mantras to a smiling and seemingly relaxed Kim Jong Un, seated in a balcony high above.

Continue reading on VICE News.

Here’s How Many Humans You Would Need to Hunt to Survive the Apocalypse

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A few weeks ago a study confirmed exactly how many calories there are on a human frame, so naturally I had one question: how many people would I need to eat to survive the coming apocalypse?

In the study, published in Scientific Reports, University of Brighton archeologist James Cole, while studying Paleolithic cannibalism, took it upon himself to figure out the actual caloric value of the human body in an effort to counteract the claim that ancient humans ate each other for nutritional value. Cole found that humans have similar caloric value to creatures our size, but that compared to larger game, nutritionally we just don't pack the same punch. Using what he gleaned from that data, Cole concluded the effort of hunting humans wasn't worth it when compared to big game (like, say, mammoths) that one could hunt at the time, given that big game is easier to catch. He reasoned that, other than in times of famine and opportunism, bouts of cannibalism were most likely the result of social, cultural, or religious reasons.

In the modern era, cannibalism has fallen out of style due to obvious factors—but who knows when it could become trendy again (you read The Road, right)?

If the nutritional value and moral quandaries of eating man are shucked to the side, however, the question remains: how many of your fellow man or woman would you need to hunt and kill in order to sustain you and yours? Well, we can now figure this out with Cole's caloric evaluation of the human body.

Note: I'm going to use a hypothetical apocalypse for this article so I don't come off like a raving maniac who is pro eating other people for taste or something.

So, I'm going to need you to picture a scene where say, two unstable world leaders have doomed the world to nuclear winter and, somehow, this has caused all the non-human animals to die off or become inedible—also all canned food and the like went bad for, uh, reasons. Everyone is fair game now and, yes, that includes hunting, killing, and eating your nice but annoying neighbour, Tim.

Hello Tim, long time, no see. Photo via screenshot of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.

According to Cole's calculations, if Tim weighs around 66 kg he has about 32,000 calories of muscle meat on his bones. And it's estimated that an average person needs around 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day to sustain their body weight. So, with that in mind, we can now figure out how long you can feast off Tim's corpse and thusly how many more Tims we would need to kill to keep our belly full. Isn't math fun, kids?

To start, we need to take in mind how many calories you're burning in the hunt. Obviously if Tim is wily and you have to chase him for miles upon miles you're not going to get the best bang for your Tim buck. Since you've survived this long in the apocalypse, I'm going to assume you're crafty and so are your hunting techniques.

So, you pull off a Tim Trap™—luring him out of his pad with a pile of smutty mags and then popping him off from a distance with a well placed crossbow shot—and bag yourself a Tim. Most likely you won't be able to squeeze out every single on of those 32,000 calories out of your freshly skinned Tim, which means that his meat will sustain you for almost two weeks. Cole also did the math to figure out what the caloric value a human teenager, toddler, and baby hold but that's just too dark to write about. Back to our man Tim, he may be able to help you out for a little longer if you pickle his organs and turn his meat into jerky to avoid spoilage so you can get the full value out of him.

I would eat Eddie Izzard's leg medium rare. Photo via Hannibal screenshot.

So, with all that in mind, if you were hunting for yourself you would need to take down around 26 of your fellow homo sapiens a year to survive. Since we're not all as sad and lonely as the sweet and supple Tim, and humans instinctively group together, we most likely are going to be hunting for a family or group which could easily multiply that number to great heights. For example, in his studies, Cole found that one adult male would give enough calories to a group of 25 humans for about half a day.

To complicate things further, a hunt wouldn't take a day or so, you would have to constantly be on the lookout for your crafty grub. Cole reasons that hunting humans would be, obviously, a lot difficult than hunting the average fauna. In his piece, he writes that, even in the Palaeolithic days, "the mental and physical effort to hunt a hominin would presumably be much greater than that required for small game given the hominins ability to fight, run and think their way out of the hunt and pursuit in a way that a saiga [antelope] (for example) simply could not."

Essentially, with this in mind, you would need to build your entire life around hunting humans in this post-apocalyptic wasteland. So, start formulating your plans and traps now, friends, because you never know what the post-apocalypse eating situation is going to look like, other than the vegans will be the first to go.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Facebook Is 'Reviewing' Its Reporting System After a Video of a Homicide in Cleveland Went Viral

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It took about two hours for Facebook to take down video of an apparent homicide Sunday, and more than 24 hours for Facebook to say what it was going to do about the reporting system that allowed that kind of delay.

Facebook Vice President of Global Operations Justin Osofsky said in a blog post Monday afternoon that the company is "reviewing our reporting flows to be sure people can report videos and other material that violates our standards as easily and quickly as possible."

On Easter, a Cleveland man named Steve Stephens appeared to record and post multiple videos to Facebook, one of which included his alleged killing of 74-year-old Robert Godwin. The incident wasn't isolated; in the last few months, videos of alleged torture and rape have also been posted to the social media site.

Continue reading on VICE News.

Does Drake Even Know How to Smoke Weed?

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It's no secret that Drake sucks at smoking weed: He rarely raps about it; he routinely claims to only do it in moderation; he never posts the late-night smoked-out Instagram. He's such a lightweight that he recently made headlines for allegedly getting too stoned to perform at a concert in Amsterdam, which, buddy, come on. Now, maybe Drake is so weed-averse because he just wants to be a good role model—after all, he's the biggest rapper in the world, and many people of all ages and backgrounds listen to his music. Or maybe he's being fiscally responsible because of the high price an extravagant weed lifestyle can cost musicians. Maybe he's even concerned about the legal consequences and doesn't want to spend his peak years facing drug charges.

But maybe there's something darker and more sinister at play. Maybe the reason Drake rarely smokes weed is that... Drake doesn't know how to smoke weed at all.

That's right. We here at Noisey are hereby putting forth the conspiracy theory that despite his money, his fame, and his connections, no one ever showed Drake how to smoke weed and, as a result, he is a 30-year-old man physically incapable of properly hitting a blunt. He may have started from the bottom, but, contrary to his lyrics, he definitely stayed there because he has absolutely no idea how to get high.

Continue reading on Noisey.

Louisiana Is Trying to Fix Its Uniquely Terrible Justice System

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Cammie Maturin got involved trying to change Louisiana's famously dysfunctional criminal justice system for two reasons. First, as a teacher, she was sick of seeing public schools short-changed while the state spent hundreds of millions in taxpayer money keeping the bloated prison system afloat. Second, she thinks that people can change and deserve a second chance, a philosophy glaringly absent in the only state that automatically denies any opportunity for parole in murder cases.

"Charles Manson gets consideration, but people in Louisiana don't?" she asks.

And that's just people who were put away for violence. 86 percent of people sent to prison in 2015 were there primarily or solely for nonviolent offenses, according to the Louisiana Department of Corrections. It's hard to get students to take school seriously, Maturin says, when the state's message seems to be "that you'd rather see them incarcerated."

Like many other activists, prisoners and lawmakers, Maturin hopes Governor John Bel Edwards's recently-announced reform package, based on recommendations offered last month by the Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force, might put a dent in the state's incarceration rate, which is even higher than those in Texas and Florida. In fact, Louisiana carries the distinction of holding more people prisoner per capita than any country in the world. Even relatively conservative business groups like the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, eager for fiscal sanity, are on board with reform, which in this case means lowering penalties for drug crimes and expanding who might be eligible for parole, among other changes.

But tough-talking prosecutors, perhaps emboldened by the election of a loudly and consistently "law and order" president in Donald Trump, are standing in the way. The only question is if the frustration in some parts of the state at Louisiana's reputation for how horribly it treats suspected and convicted criminals can overcome its long penchant for nightmarish punishment.

"I would … encourage you to be alert to efforts to undermine the strength of our criminal laws by easing penalties or weakening criminal procedures," Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III warns on his website. "In my 32 years-plus as a district attorney, I've never seen anything like this," Sabine Parish DA Don Burkett recently told NOLA.com. "I've never seen such an undertaking."

"We're drawing a line at violent crime," Pete Adams, the Louisiana District Attorneys Association (LDAA) executive director, told the Times-Picyuane in mid-March. (Over email, Adams told me that this includes people who have been sentenced to die in prison for crimes they committed as juveniles.)

This month, the LDAA drew a line in the sand, promising to fight reforms that "endanger the public or hinder the administration of justice." As the Times-Picayune reported, the group looks ready to contest or at least not back 18 of the 27 changes backed by the Governor. "Unfortunately, many of the Task Force recommendations go far beyond the group's mission and recommend release of murderers, armed robbers, rapists, and sex offenders," the LDAA wrote.

The idea that murderers and rapists would be let loose on the streets of Louisiana is apparently a reference to the governor's proposed expansion of parole eligibility. Among other things, that change would help the state comply with the Supreme Court's Montgomery v. Alabama decision, designed to give prisoners who were sentenced to life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles another chance.

But getting a shot at parole is not the same thing as getting paroled. "What you're talking about is not someone getting out, it's someone getting the opportunity to go before a parole board," State Public Defender Jay Dixon says. And going before a parole board isn't a guarantee of release—it just means that prisoners who have shown growth might get another shot.

45-year old Bobby Wallace, who spent 22 years in Louisiana's infamous Angola prison, goes back to vouch in the parole hearings for the guys he thinks deserve a second chance. He doesn't understand why lawmakers who claim to be Christian seem to be so short on forgiveness. "Nobody knows what mercy is anymore," Wallace says. "Some of these [prisoners] … they're over 60 years old, 65 years old, they're geriatric. That's crazy."

That most violent crimes are committed by young people—ages 16-24, according the federal Bureau of Justice—makes it tough for law and order types to argue prisoners who are released decades later are likely to re-offend.

For his part, Wallace got 66 years in prison for an armed robbery he committed when he was 22. Half a lifetime later, at 45, he got out thanks to the 20/45 law that offered early release for prisoners over 45 who'd served over 20 years. Now he works as a counselor and wants to see more people have the same opportunity. Despite the usual difficulties of getting used to life on the outside, he's made it work. "'I'm a productive citizen," he says.

Former prosecutor Marty Stroud has his own issues with the system. In 2015, he publicly apologized for putting an innocent man on death row—Glenn Ford spent 30 years in prison before he was exonerated. Despite Stroud's advocacy on his behalf, the state denied Ford money for the three decades he spent behind bars.

"Sentences are way too long," Stroud says. "The bail system is messed up, there's a problem with funding indigent defense... We put too many people in jail, and it doesn't solve the situation, it just increases our debt."

"On some points we're little more than a banana republic," he adds.

We tried to find the real 'True Detective' in Louisiana.

That Louisiana has driven itself into a uniquely Kafka-esque hole of despair and suffering for alleged and convicted criminals alike is no secret—winning it major, award-winning coverage from national outlets and, at least under the Obama administration, scrutiny from the feds.

"We're outliers, everyone's looking at us like we're crazy," State public defender Dixon says. "The idea is to be more in line with the other Southern states, because we're not even there. I think there is a realization that we can't afford to do what we're doing."

Dixon, who describes working as a public defender as "triage" due to the crushing caseloads and lack of funding, suspects that the way Louisiana prosecutes and jails people is so wasteful and expensive that it might actually have to change. After all, the state spends two-thirds of a billion dollars on corrections, the task force found. Yet the rate at which released prisoners end up back in the system suggests it's not exactly working in the public's best interest.

Estimates from the task force say that if the recommendations are implemented, the state could save $305 million in the next decade.

"It's more a fiscal question now than it even is whether it's right or wrong," Dixon says.

Stroud, the former prosecutor, commends the governor for embracing an ambitious reform agenda. But given the vibe emanating from his old colleagues, he's not exactly optimistic about meaningful reform getting through the legislature.

"The DAs usually win,' he says, "because everybody likes to beat their chest and say, "We want to be tough on crime."

This story was reported with support from the Fair Punishment Project.

Follow Tana Ganeva on Twitter.

Neo-Nazi Website Daily Stormer Is Being Sued for Unleashing 'Troll Army' on Woman

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The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) and a woman who suffered for months at the hands of anti-Semitic trolls are suing the infamous neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer .

The SPLC alleges in the lawsuit that the website organized a "troll army" against Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent in Whitefish, Montana, and her family. The nonprofit states that Andrew Anglin was set off when Gersh was accused by the mother of white supremacist Richard Spencer of attempting to extort money by forcing her to sell her home.

In response to Ms. Spencer's claims, the SPLC states that Anglin published over 30 articles targeting the real estate agent. The first article was published one day after Ms. Spencer made these claims. In the articles Anglin urged his followers to target Gersh and her family. One of the articles featured the headline "Jews Targeting Richard Spencer's Mother for Harassment and Extortion – TAKE ACTION!"

"Mr. Anglin encouraged readers to call Ms. Gersh 'and tell her what you think. And hey—if you're in the area, maybe you should stop by and tell her in person what you think of her actions,'" reads the statement of claim.

None of the allegations made in the lawsuit have been proven in court.

Two of the stories published by the Daily Stormer that focus upon Gersh. Photo via Screenshot

The SPLC alleges in further articles Anglin released Gersh's cellphone number and the address of her husband's office. The articles and doxxing prompted followers to launch what the SPLC calls, a "troll storm" against Gersh. The SPLC alleges that these trolls inundated Gersh and her family with over 700 threatening messages, phone calls and emails since December.

"The calls that most disturbed Ms. Gersh consisted only of the sound of guns being fired," reads the lawsuit.

The SPLC says these messages contained death threats and were primarily anti-Semitic. One of them sent from the email address "youfuckingkike@hotmail.com" stated "You have no idea what you are doing, six million are only the beginning." The lawsuit also alleges Anglin targeted Gersh's son by sharing his Twitter handle. It also claims Anglin called the 12-year-old boy a "creepy little faggot" and a "scamming little kike." They also sent messages to her colleagues and superiors at work calling for her to be fired.

One of the images directed towards Tanya Gersh. Photo via Twitter.

Since the trolling has began, Gersh has said that she fears for the safety of herself and her family, and has not been able to continue her work as a real estate agent.

"This attack has been one long nightmare that has changed me forever in so many ways," Gersh said in the release. "No one should endure what I've experienced. And with the love and support of my family and others, we will take a stand against hate."

The Daily Stormer was founded in 2013, and it's unknown where Anglin lives. The website takes its name from the Der Stürmer, a neo-Nazi propaganda paper in Hitler's Germany. For its role in the Holocaust, Der Stürmer's editor, Julius Streicher, was executed for crimes against humanity. The Daily Stormer gets around 2 million sessions per month and routinely organizes what it calls its "troll army" to swarm people online. It has targeted politicians, journalists, and activists.

The SPLC says that they launched the lawsuit with Gersh to discourage racist mob tactics like this from occurring the future.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.


What Does Another Election Mean for Scotland?

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(RUSSELL CHEYNE/PA Wire/PA Images)

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Nicola Sturgeon should be delighted. Just weeks after the Scottish First Minister caught everyone off guard with a surprise 11AM statement to the media of plans for a second independence referendum, Theresa May followed suit this morning with her own shock declaration of a snap General Election.

But Sturgeon is probably delighted for other reasons, too.

"In terms of Scotland, this is a huge political miscalculation by the Prime Minister," she said of this morning's announcement. For the SNP, their election campaign script has already been written: only they will "stand up for Scotland" in the face of a "right wing, austerity obsessed Tory government with no mandate in Scotland but which thinks it can do whatever it wants and get away with it".

Brexit is the raison d'etre of Theresa May's government, and she has already put it at the core of the case for a snap election. But Scotland, like Northern Ireland, didn't vote for Brexit, and both nations have been thrown into constitutional chaos by its consequences.

Every Scottish constituency voted to remain in the EU, and it follows that the SNP will be making resistance to a hard Brexit a central focus of their campaign. In 2015 they won all but three of Scotland's 59 Westminster seats; reaching those heights once again may be difficult, but they can still expect to win the vast majority.

Scotland already feels like it's in the midst of another independence referendum, largely thanks to the Scottish Tories who – you must understand – really hate referendums. With every council up for grabs on the 4th of May, the Tory strategy in recent weeks has been to keep screaming NO MORE REFERENDUMS into the void, in the hope that this will win them over a base unionist vote that dislikes the SNP more than it understands the decision-making powers of local councils. Scotland doesn't need another referendum that will just create more "uncertainty and division", cry the leaflets that they've been posting through every door (for an election that is entirely about bin collections and primary schools).


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Clearly, the Scots Tories didn't get the memo from Theresa May. As of this morning, it turns out that another bitter election with the constitution at its centre is exactly what Britain needs, because only that can allow our government to get on with the important work of delivering the outcome of our last constitutional uproar. Once Brexit is out the way, we can then all come together and get on with building the "vicarage values" of Empire 2.0, as though May's intentional blurring of Englishness and Britishness is a deliberate attempt to alienate voters north of the border.

While England is explicitly being told to vote in June on how much of a Brexit government it wants – hard, soft, clean – the dimensions of the vote in Scotland will be very different. With Scottish Labour struggling and the Lib Dems being outpolled by the Greens, the Tories under Ruth Davidson will be hoping to make gains, with the council elections as a dry run for their single issue anti-independence campaign. The result will probably be a handful of rural seats, but it could still put a dent in Scotland's self-image as a nation of Tory-haters.

Whatever happens, though, the June election will see the Scottish National Party win a large majority of Scottish seats and see repeated calls for Theresa May – if she is still the PM – to respect the Scottish Parliament's vote for a second referendum. Her previous outright dismissal of negotiations for a new vote was enough to annoy even many devolutionists opposed to independence.

A high stakes game then ensues as May and Sturgeon try to outmanoeuvre each other based on their respective mandates, one mid-morning press conference after another. I'm not sure what May is expecting, but it seems like a long way off the "guaranteed certainty and stability for the years ahead" that she craves.

One day after the election results become clear, Scotland and England will then face each other in a World Cup qualifier in Glasgow, on Saturday the 10th of June. Usually a high point of cross border rivalry, it might pale in significance to the constitutional wrangling going on in the background that weekend.

@parcelorogues

Right-Wing Commentators Don't Even Believe Their Own Bullshit

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On Monday night's episode of the Late Show, Stephen Colbert donned a varsity-style USA jacket, lowered his voice about three octaves, and told the audience he was a skeleton wrapped in angry meat. His performance as "Tuck Bedford"––the fictional host of "Brain Fight"––killed on two levels. First, it was a timely and obvious dig at Alex Jones, whose lawyer had just claimed the Infowars host was actually a performance artist. Then there was the obvious nod to the fact that Colbert himself became famous by portraying a right-wing pundit who at one point blurred the lines between fiction and reality.

It's sometimes difficult to remember that when The Colbert Report first came out, its host was so convincing, and the concept was so novel, that some interviewees didn't know what they were signing up for. While Sasha Baren Cohen benefitted from ambushing unsuspecting subjects as Ali G, his successor Colbert was able to famously own some early guests who didn't think that he would ask serious questions.

Last year, author Lee Siegel claimed in the Columbia Journalism Review that Colbert's brand of punditry paved the way for the fake news of today. But Colbert's winks were always obvious, and his core audience always understood his meaning. The most successful conspiracy-mongers working in America today have a different strategy entirely—they say whatever they want, and if they're called on it, they can always claim they were joking. Call it the "Colbert Defense." It's the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card and a way for people who cross the line to never have to take responsibility for their actions.

A particularly blatant example of this came this week during Alex Jones's custody battle with his ex-wife, who claimed Jones was an unfit father because of the insane things he said on his popular radio program, Infowars. In response, Jones's lawyer said the host was just "playing a character," albeit a character who shared the real Alex Jones's name, occupation, and general outlook on life.

Jones is far from the first rabble-rouser to fall back on the Colbert Defense. We first got a whiff of this back in 2011, when Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain gave a speech in Tennessee calling for an Mexican border fence that was "20 feet hight with barbed wire" and "electrified." The crowd cheered loudly as he also suggested it would be able to kill Mexicans. After people got pissed, Cain backtracked on Meet the Press, claiming that his comments were just a joke and that "America [needed] to get a sense of humour."

Cain wouldn't be the last right-winger to complain about being taken too literally. During an extremely ill-considered appearance on Colbert, FOX News diatribe machine Bill O'Reilly was asked who would win in a fight between him and fellow FOX host Sean Hannity. "I'm effete. I'm not a tough guy," he said. "This is all an act." Colbert responded with a meta commentary on things to come: "If you're an act, then what am I?"

Since then, political commentary has become increasingly like pro wrestling—except no one breaks kayfabe. And though Colbert's audience was largely liberals who wanted to laugh at the right-wing blowhards the comedian was satirizing, O'Reilly and Jones are playing "characters" that appeal to people who mostly share their views.

This can get very confusing. Rush Limbaugh has been relying on sensationalism and bombast for decades, but almost no one would question whether he believes what he says. In 2008, Glenn Beck moved over from CNN to FOX News and made a splash for being even more provocative. In constantly railing against progressivism a "cancer," he basically invented the kind of punditry that birthed stars like Milo Yiannopoulos, who would later use the same word repeatedly to describe feminism.

Notably, Beck went on full-blown apology tour after realizing he helped create Donald Trump. "I could excuse it, to some degree—I won't—but I could excuse some of it by saying that I was trying to, in some ways, accomplish what Jon Stewart can accomplish: draw huge crowds, make points and then encourage you to do your own homework," he told the New York Times. That fits the pattern of right wingers distancing themselves from their most hateful rhetoric. After Yiannopoulos got fired from his job at Breitbart for appearing to defend pederasty, he claimed that his schtick was a joke.

"The videos do not show what people say they show," he said in a Facebook statement. "I did joke about giving better head as a result of clerical sexual abuse committed against me when I was a teen. If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an internet livestream with a crime I was the victim of that's my prerogative. It's no different to gallows humour from AIDS sufferers."

It's doubtful that many people turn to Yiannopoulos or Jones for satire. Certainly the guy who showed up at a DC pizza restaurant with a gun to "investigate" the pizzagate conspiracy that Infowars helped spread didn't think he was watching a comedy program. (Jones later apologized for his coverage of the nonsensical theory.)

Of course, it's one thing if the average Infowars listener doesn't know if he or she is being sold entertainment or news. It's much more terrifying when the president of the United States (himself a Jones fan) is playing the same game where it's unclear how seriously or literally we're supposed to take him. During a campaign event in July, Trump suggested that Russian hackers should go looking for Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, then after an outcry claimed he was being sarcastic.

Maybe he was. But sarcasm and politics don't mix well, and not everyone is equipped with the same joke radar. Colbert, for one, knew this. In a 2006 interview on 60 Minutes, he was asked if his kids watched his show. "Kids can't understand irony or sarcasm," he told Morley Safer. Maybe neither can Jones's audience?

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Arkansas Vows to Go on with Planned Execution Spree After Courts Stop First Two Lethal Injections

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Minutes after the US Supreme Court prevented the state of Arkansas from executing a death row inmate Monday, state Attorney General Leslie Rutledge vowed just after midnight to proceed with two other executions as part of the state's original plan to kill eight death row inmates in 11 days.

"The families have waited far too long to see justice, and I will continue to make that a priority," Rutledge said in a statement.

It was a long day for Rutledge (pictured above) and the inmates' attorneys, who have been battling in state and federal court since Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced in February that the state would speed up executions before its supply of the controversial lethal injection drug midazolam runs out at the end of April.

Continue reading on VICE News.

Trump's Latest Order Could Make It Harder to Hire Foreign Workers

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On Tuesday, President Trump signed another executive order, aimed at preventing the tech industry from hiring foreign talent, the New York Times reports.

Although the order Trump signed during a trip to the headquarters of Snap-on Tools in Wisconsin doesn't change any of the country's existing hiring practices outright, it asks federal agencies to reexamine Obama-era rules and regulations in an effort to push companies to pursue a "Buy American, Hire American" approach.

"Both 'buy American' and 'hire American' rules have been enormously diluted over time, resulting in many lost job opportunities for American workers," one senior Trump aide told reporters Monday.

The order asks that agencies review the regulations surrounding H-1B visas, which about 85,000 foreign workers use each year to nab a job in the US. The administration wants to make sure companies aren't abusing the visa rules and hiring foreign workers willing to work for less money than workers here at home. It also asks that federal funds go toward America's steel and iron projects, and that the federal government buys up more US-made products, CNN reports.

Tech advocate groups like the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) say that aside from making it difficult to secure foreign talent, threatening the H-1B program could prompt many tech workers in Silicon Valley to leave the country.

"The effect would end up being exactly the opposite of what Trump wants," ITIF president Robert D. Atkinson told the Times. "Companies would go offshore, like Microsoft did with Vancouver, Canada."

The executive order gives agencies 220 days to review the country's existing policies surrounding foreign workers and trade and could potentially lead to the US renegotiating some of its trade deals with other countries. That being said, Trump is relying on his Cabinet heads to offer guidance on what the administration can legally do, rather than push actual legislation through Congress, something that he's already failed to do when its come to some of his other campaign promises.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

What It's Like to Party When You Have One Arm

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The first thing I learned at college was that you need two hands to operate a keg. I only have one; I was born missing my left arm just below the elbow. You might think that adolescence was hell for someone like me, but once my classmates knew who I was and that I had one hand, they barely teased me about it. It wasn't until I started partying that people made comments about my disability.

It's complicated being someone that likes attention, dressing up, and talking to strangers but is also made uncomfortable by those same things. I was always aware that I was different; even beyond my disability, I have a pretty distinct style. (Today, I always dress in black and top off my outfits with a choker and thigh-high boots.) But I wasn't profoundly aware that other people saw me that way until I got to college. Leave it to drunk people to say whatever they think.

I attended my first Hofstra University frat party with my suitemates, Karina and Alexa. Upon meeting me, they didn't say anything about my arm, presumably because they had already figured it out from Facebook. On the first night of Welcome Week, I was putting in my earphones and getting ready to watch Sex and the City reruns when they burst into my room and shoved a beer in my hand. I didn't have a choice: I was going out. I got decked out in 2011's best—ripped jeans, Uggs, a stretchy nylon tank top, a rhinestone choker that said "kiss," and a trucker hat that said "Just Be A Queen." To say that I was shy and didn't like being looked at would be a lie. I was excited—until I saw the keg. I would have to pump, pour, and hold my red Solo Cup at the same time. I could have scooped my cup into the huge tub of jungle juice, but I was warned not to.

Continue reading on Broadly.

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