This article originally appeared on Noisey Australia on September the 25th, 2017, but we're republishing it today because Charles Manson has died.

Music has long been a powerful tool in the dissemination of religious propaganda and the recruitment of followers and worshippers. As true as this is for the hymns in the big church, so it's been for the fringe dwellers of religious freedom – the cult leader. It's appropriate that some individuals with God/prophet complexes have such ego-driven aspirations as rock stardom – rock and roll being the real cult of youth since The Beatles.

But not all were as successful creating quality jams as they were in brainwashing and sex crimes. Here is a look at the varying quality of some of the most successful American cults since the 1960s, from worst to best.

Click through to Noisey to see the rest of the article.

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation the cult leader of the so-called Manson Family has died of natural causes aged 83 in Bakersfield, California. He’d first been hospitalised with gastrointestinal bleeding back in January, from which he never properly recovered.

Manson is remembered as a serial killer, although he never physically committed any of the murders for which he was jailed. Instead his followers carried out the murders under his direction, most infamously killing Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife who was eight months pregnant at the time.

Watch Charles Manson answer the question "who are you?"

Throughout 1969, Charles Manson sent his followers to commit nine murders at four separate and seemingly unconnected locations, baffling investigators for months.

For Manson, and his group of dropouts and petty criminals, the murders were about provoking a race war that Manson referred to as “Helter Skelter.” This event would give rise to a new social order over which Manson would supposedly become a prophet and saviour.

Manson was eventually convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1971, although the sentence would never be implemented. In 1972, the state of California outlawed the death penalty, and his sentence was changed to life in prison. Over the course of his 46-year sentence, Manson applied for parole 12 times and was denied every time.

Throughout his time in prison Manson was considered a problem inmate, setting fires and attempting to flood his cell. He’d spent long stints in solitary confinement.

Dealers in Durham selling Class A drugs to support their own addictions will no longer be prosecuted, according to Durham Police Chief Constable Mike Barton.

This scheme is a new addition to Checkpoint, Durham Police's groundbreaking approach to drugs policy, as revealed by VICE in October of 2016. Initially, the programme applied only to drug users, with people arrested for possession having their prosecutions "suspended", subject to the successful completion of a four-month "contract" – during which offenders must attend a series of drug awareness, restorative justice and community work programmes.

The thinking behind the scheme is pretty straightforward: focus on rehabilitation rather than punishment, and help drug users avoid another notch on their criminal record that might later make it more difficult for them to find work. At the time VICE's article was published, only three of the 74 drugs offenders who had been diverted to the Checkpoint had failed to complete their contract and have their offences expunged.

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday about the next step of the programme, Chief Constable Barton said: "From next month, anyone caught in possession of any drugs will go on Checkpoint. If they agree, they will not face prosecution or go to court. They are technically dealers, but if they are sad people rather than bad, we want to stop their addiction. Then we can focus on the really bad people. If they are selling heroin to feed their habit, we do not want to send them to prison."

WATCH The UK's DIY Ecstasy Makers at Work

He then made an objectively correct point about the inadequacies of the current approach to the policing of low-level drug offences: "What's the point in an addict going to court and getting a £50 fine? If they pay it at all, they will only steal or sell five bags of heroin to fund it. How does that help us?"

Of course, not everyone is so keen on the approach. Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, who founded drugs charity DrugFAM after losing her son Nick to heroin addiction, told the Mail: "This is absolutely wrong. If you are an active drug dealer, you are dealing in death."

The counter-argument here, however, would be that in trying something new – helping drug-reliant users get clean – rather than reverting to the failed tactics of the war on drugs, you'll continue to take smalltime dealers off the streets, while freeing up more time and resources to target the traffickers and wholesale drugs sellers who bear a much larger responsibility for fuelling the drug trade.

Either way, drug deaths in the UK are the highest they have been since records began, and the government doesn't seem to want to even trial any different approaches to sorting this mess out. So at least we have people like Barton who are brave enough to try something new.

More on VICE:

Britain's Drug Dealers Are Getting Younger and Younger

When Drugs Fuck You Up Forever

This Is How Long It Takes to Get Cocaine Delivered in Cities Around the World

Grandma Shirley, my father's mother, died riddled with cancer and regrets. It was sad and horrible in the way cancer, and the majority of deaths, tend to be. I found it particularly upsetting though because, up until that moment, I’d always thought she'd been fiercely and eccentrically happy. One of those rare people who forge their own weird and selfish and contented path—the kind that makes no sense to anyone else. Instead, I realised what I'd romanticised as individuality was likely just fear and anxiety. She had, I found, essentially lied about her own happiness.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. One of the things I loved most about her was how she twisted, modified, and pruned all that happened to her. For years, she would tell us proudly about our relative "Uncle Hercules" who had been made the mayor of his town at the age of 20, only to tragically die of glandular fever at just 25.

Only after grandma's death did we discover "Hercules" was actually Hector—he’d never been mayor, just a civil clerk. And he was very much alive. To me, this manipulation of facts seemed utterly random and pointless.

But today a lot of popular psychology celebrates people like Grandma Shirley—revolving around the vindication of your own choices. Want to spend a week in your room watching Netflix? That's fine. Want to skip Christmas with your family because it's too windy? Grandma Shirley once did. She was fiercely independent and seemed to love her own company. She divorced my grandfather in her 30s and never remarried, distinguishing her from most women of her generation.

Her life didn’t make much sense to people—it mostly involved daytime TV and writing down facts in notebooks kept under her bed. She lived in a little studio apartment that smelled of cigarettes and musk lollies. She baldly claimed that she hadn’t smoked in 40 years while reeking of smoke.

And during the week that she died, I left a music festival after just one day, after realising that I fucking hate music festivals with all my heart. I skirted the truth with my friends, telling them I had to go because my grandma had just died. At that point, this was untrue. But using my grandma as both a convenient lie and a justification for doing what I wanted (read: not dealing with hippies, tents, or lukewarm gin) may just have been the perfect tribute to her.

Later in her life, Shirley started rewriting her own history. She talked about my grandfather as if he’d been the most wonderful husband in the world; as if they’d remained married right up until his death. On her deathbed, in between long periods of unconsciousness, she was also fixated on all the things she hadn’t done. Her regrets were much like her lies—there were lots of them, with little to connect them. She regretted not travelling, not pursuing her career, not learning more. She regretted and regretted and regretted.

I understand that dying on a hospice bed in pain isn’t exactly conducive to positive recollections about her life, but it shook me. It appeared that instead of living the life she had wanted, she had instead been lying to herself to coat the regret.

I’ve started wondering if I’m doing the same in my own life. Things that have seemed too big, too hard, have suddenly become things I'm just not "interested in." I find airports extremely stressful, so I find reasons not to travel. And I've never admitted to it—rather, I've told myself my choice to stay home was the empowering option. Even now, I realise I’ve been lying about not driving; telling people it's environmentally criminal to own a car in the city. But, actually, I just really hate driving.

And yet, even being aware of the fact that you lie to yourself isn’t a surefire guarantee that you’ll stop. I’ve found that the person most susceptible to my own bullshit is myself. But my all new philosophy is to die with as few regrets as possible, so I guess it's time to try to stop.

Follow Patrick on Twitter

New research from Uppsala University provides yet more compelling evidence that dog ownership is one of two, maybe three, aspects of modern life that remains pure and good. The study, published in Nature, shows that dog owners both live longer and are at a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Swedish scientists took into account data from more than three million individuals aged between 40 and 80 in order to find out whether dog owners had higher or lower mortality rates than non-dog owners. Even owners with no other love in their life showed a marked advantage—those with dogs clocking a 33 percent reduction in risk of death and an 11 percent reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease compared to single non-dog owners.

"A very interesting finding in our study was that dog ownership was especially prominent as a protective factor in persons living alone, which is a group reported previously to be at higher risk of cardiovascular disease and death than those living in a multi-person household. Perhaps a dog may stand in as an important family member in the single households,” the study’s lead author Mwenya Mubanga said in an accompanying media release.

The study also showed that larger breeds of dog are more beneficial than smaller breeds—something I have been arguing for a long time. According to the data, owners of larger dogs that were originally bred for hunting purposes were more protected from disease. Although the study doesn't indicate what aspect of dog ownership improves human health, the scientists do speculate that all the walking has something to do with it.

“We know that dog owners in general have a higher level of physical activity, which could be one explanation to the observed results. Other explanations include an increased well-being and social contacts or effects of the dog on the bacterial microbiome in the owner," said another study author, Tove Fal.

"There might also be differences between owners and non-owners already before buying a dog, which could have influenced our results, such as those people choosing to get a dog tending to be more active and of better health,” Fal added.

So there it is: get a dog, you lazy piece of shit. They’re nice and they’re cute and they are, frankly, cheaper than therapy.

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I was late to the Snapchat party: I didn’t "get" the dumb filters and the dog faces. It all seemed a little pointless.

But suddenly – I don't remember when exactly – I was into it, Bitmoji and all. Next thing I knew I was only taking selfies using the Snapchat camera. When I’d use the iPhone camera, with no flowers or goggly eyes obscuring my actual face, I’d think to myself, 'You look hideous.' So I just stopped using it altogether.

A couple weeks ago I took part in my first proper photoshoot – an hour or so of awkward posing that the photographer coached me through. Afterwards, I changed and we went through the portraits together. I was genuinely mortified. What I saw wasn’t at all what I expected. I hated them all: every single picture. I cried on my way home and wondered why nobody in my family, or any of my friends, had ever told me I was ugly.

I’ve had a complex about taking photos for years; all Tyra Banks' training via America’s Next Top Model has taught me nothing – I can’t smize and I definitely don’t know my angles. I've always told myself that I was just one of those people who looked better in person. But Snapchat changed that. It made me feel like I looked good, and it’s all thanks to its reverse camera.

While regular cameras and the one on your smartphone show you more or less what you really look like, the Snapchat camera shows you what you see in the mirror, i.e. a flipped version of your face. Turn a filter on and your flipped face gets thinner, your lips get plumper and your eyes get bigger – three characteristics of a generally more "appealing" face, according to the beauty ideals of various cultures across the world.

"I do think Snapchat filters change your facial features," says 26-year-old Dayo. "It’s like the perfection app." Over time, it’s difficult to forget that’s not what you really look like.

WATCH: Snapchat Plastic Surgeon

This disparity between the real and staged is nothing new: anyone in their twenties can remember, after years spent honing their selfie skills with early digital cameras, how uncomfortable it was to see their first tagged photos on Facebook – catching a glimpse of what everyone else sees. But now, with the level of alteration Snapchat and selfie editors like Facetune provide, combined with using the apps to document ourselves multiple times a day, it isn’t a stretch to presume some of us are at risk of developing an unhealthy self-perception.

JME tweeted last year, "Snapchat 'filters' will be linked to body dysmorphic disorder in the near future. Making everybody look like MJ, with a wreath as well. Mad."

"Snapchat filters are the devil," agreed YouTuber Reed from the sexual advice duo Come Curious, over WhatsApp. "We are in the age of inadequacy with social media, and it’s just not fair or addressed enough."

Writer Arushi feels similarly, and has written about the way Snapchat has started to make people view themselves. "I’ve found myself becoming dependent on filters to validate my appearance in selfies on more occasions than one, and honestly it scares me, because that’s so screwed up," she said through Twitter DMs. "We’d rather have a digitally obscured version of ourselves than our actual selves out there. It’s honestly sad, but it’s a bitter reality. I try to avoid using them as much as I can because they seriously cause an unhealthy dysphoria."

"This behaviour supports the vision that a social body – self objectified – is more relevant than the real felt body."

Some, of course, won't relate to any of this. Mary from south London, for instance, believes the Snapchat camera is essentially just digital cosmetics. "Snapchat works the same way makeup does," she told me. "But, to be honest, I can’t remember the last time I took a picture without using Snapchat. The camera quality is better."

You can see whether you're more Arushi or more Mary by seeing how you feel when your control is taken away. "I was a bit more than displeased when I got sent a picture of myself from a rave I attended on Facebook. I was literally disgusted," said Josephine, an avid Snapchat user. "My pose was horrid – I was smiling way too much. Everyone that knows me knows I avoid people taking my picture like the plague. I hate it. Most of my pictures are selfies."

Ever since the creation of chat-rooms, forums and early social media sites like Myspace, we’ve wanted to control the way we’re viewed using technology, forging our own version of reality. But what happens when our forged avatars are what we believe is real?

"Some guys I speak to say stuff like, 'You don’t look like your Snaps.' It’s like, 'Mate, I’m not walking around with a headband of sparkly stars around my head.'"

Dr Giuseppe Riva, a professor of Communication Psychology at the Catholic University of Milan, told VICE that social media activity promotes self-objectification. "This is particularly true for Snapchat and Instagram, which provide a mirror-like vision of young women’s selves which is also altered and shared," he said. "This behaviour supports the vision that a social body – self objectified – is more relevant than the real felt body."

It’s not just those taking Snapchat selfies who are experiencing the real-world effects. Talullah, from Kent, described how men were starting to believe that Snapchat-filtered photos were accurate portrayals of the people in them. "Some guys I speak to say stuff like, 'You don’t look like your Snaps,'" she explained. "It’s like, 'Mate, I’m not walking around with a headband of sparkly stars around my head.'"

These apps are too new for any proper scientific studies to have been carried out on the potential long-term consequences for some users. But Professor Riva has flagged eating disorders, alongside Body Dysmorphic Disorder, as possible knock-on effects. "Self-objectification – thinking about and monitoring the body’s appearance from an external observer’s perspective – is the largest contributor to both the onset of eating disorders and its maintenance. This is what we discovered in our research," he told me.

Whether all heavy Snapchat users have forgotten what they truly look like is hard to say. I clearly had. But the question of whether this issue matters has an obvious and easy answer: yes.

Model Keri Claussen Khalighi has accused Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons of sexual assault. The allegation was reported this morning by the Los Angeles Times. Khalighi claims that she was coerced into performing oral sex on Simmons in 1991, while the director Brett Ratner watched on. Khalighi alleges that Simmons then penetrated her without consent.

According to the LA Times, Simmons and Ratner took Khalighi to a restaurant in New York for dinner before inviting her back to Simmons’s apartment “to show her a music video they’d been working on.” Simmons, however, began to make sexual advances towards Khalighi, “yanking off her clothes.”

In a statement, Simmons denied the allegation. “Everything that occurred between Keri and me occurred with her full consent and participation,” he said.

The LA Times piece details a number of other allegations of sexual assault by Ratner, who directed Red Dragon and the Rush Hour series.

Continue reading on Noisey.

Gather ‘round, my friends: it is time for another sordid tale about free speech on campus. Sadly, this one seems to be a true story.

The latest horror story centres on Wilfrid Laurier University. Teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd is facing censure from her department because she showed two tutorial groups a year-old video clip of Jordan Peterson debating Nicholas Matte over the use of non-binary gender pronouns on an episode of The Agenda.

Specifically, Shepherd is being sanctioned because she failed to pre-emptively denounce Peterson’s views. According to Shepherd, her professors told her that a student had complained, and that presenting Peterson neutrally was comparable to presenting Adolf Hitler neutrally. Shepherd wasn’t sacked from her TA position, but her superiors are allegedly demanding that she submit all her lesson plans in advance, and allow them audit her classes at will.

The university has been reluctant to comment about anything specifically (I mean, look at how vague their statement was), including what was said to Shepherd. Instead they are convening a task force to look into the situation.

Unfortunately for the Laurier comms division, Shepherd clandestinely recorded her meeting with her supervisors. It is a pretty damning audio clip.

Here is a young graduate student asking her superiors for some explanation for why she is being censured and they will not tell her how many students complained, or even what the complaint was. Instead, they calmly berate her for showing a clip of Jordan Peterson without sufficiently denouncing the man, and inform her that it is akin to an act of violence that is also against the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Again, this is a teaching assistant being brought to heel by the university administration for facilitating a (delicate) discussion in a seminar. Which is her job. It goes without saying that these measures are punitive and definitely out of proportion to the situation in the classroom.

For the record: Jordan Peterson is a transphobic YouTube crank with basically nothing interesting to say about free speech or gender expression, and who very obviously has no idea what any part of the phrase “post-modern neo-Marxist” means. He is a bad political and social thinker, and many of his ideas about gender roles are genuinely dangerous. (Tabatha Southey has already written his intellectual obituary by clocking him as “the stupid person’s idea of a smart person,” which is immediately obvious to anyone who listens to his awful honking voice for more than thirty seconds.)

But the response from the administration is totally off the mark. Obviously there is a clear tension between Shepherd’s approach to pedagogy and that of her academic superiors, but that doesn’t warrant this kind of crackdown on what can or cannot be discussed in the classroom.

It’s worth telling Shepherd to consider maybe issuing a content warning prior to making students listen to a sad-sack middle-aged man get upset that the public existence of non-binary people is an unreasonable infringement of his right to be an arch asshole. The university is, after all, maintained largely by tuition, and the much-maligned “trigger warning” actually is a really good compromise between the demands of a critical education in the humanities and the genuine needs and sensitivities of students on a given day. Say what you will, but it gives sensitive students some leeway while also waiving the instructor’s liability for dealing with potentially triggering material.

Should you choose to pass beyond the content warning, the classroom—especially the seminar setting of most undergrad tutorial sessions—is a sacred place for expressing and debating any and all ideas. That is what it’s for. That is the space in which you wrestle with ambiguity and learn to dissect and reassemble arguments, where you can go as thoroughly into and through an idea to really grasp why it is good or bad, right or wrong, useful or trivial or emancipating or dangerous.

It’s mostly boring, but it can get heated or awkward or horrifying. Students should be given an out from engaging in that if for whatever reason they can’t handle it at a given time. But you have to balk at the prospect of limiting what can or cannot be said in the classroom. It is a bad idea for Laurier to martyr a grad student for her questionable taste in public intellectuals for roughly the same reasons why it is a bad idea to let Jordan Peterson go through with launching a website aimed at getting his ideological rivals doxxed and fired.

Academic freedom cuts both ways. But it is usually the left who loses when intellectual free spaces are foreclosed, precisely because the seminar room is one of the few places on earth where you can express genuinely radical ideas counter to the interests of the people who bankroll, say, right-wing semi-national newspapers or Steve Paikin’s tedious television show.

So, congratulations are in order to officials at Laurier University. You have immolated your institution’s credibility by putting Lindsay Shepherd through the wringer and, thanks to your efforts, now more people than ever will take Jordan Peterson seriously. Bravo to everybody involved. This is the reason people hate academics.

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I’m sitting across from Kevin Drew and Ben Kowalewicz. Earlier this month Drew and his band Broken Social Scene sold out Toronto’s Air Canada Centre alongside Arcade Fire. Kowalewicz, for his part, recently completed a slew of European festival dates playing to crowds of thousands as the frontman for veteran punk act Billy Talent. Unquestionably the two are at the upper echelon of the Canadian music scene and have been for years. But tonight they’re ecstatic to talk to me about a limited run play that’ll be performed in a two hundred seat house in an unfashionable part of Toronto. A & R Angels, the first script form Drew, premieres later this November at Crow's Theatre. The frontmen play the leads in the comedic drama, two angels who pull people back from the brink of eternity through writing hit songs. Drew and Kowalewicz are funny and self deprecating while discussing their acting debuts. When we get into the themes of the script—how the show is partially about the pitfalls of growing older and the consumptive nature of the entertainment industry—they’re thoughtful and reflective. It’s obvious how excited the musicians are to put on the play, but the entire time they’re talking I’m trying to figure out why anyone would shift from the pinnacles of indie rock to the considerably less glamorous world of indie theatre.

Ben Kowalewicz and Kevin Drew in rehearsal on A & R Angels | Photo by Dahlia Katz

“Whenever you go to concerts now people experience the whole things through their phones,” Kowalewicz said. “They’re Instagramming. They’re Snap fucking. Whatever. But when you’re sitting in a theatre it’s a chance to share in the moment with the people who are there. For an hour and a half it’s not an updated status. You’re present. I’m extremely grateful that the people at Crow’s and the other actors have let me into their world. I’m so happy to cross pollinate and create something new. And I’m really excited to see what energy the audience brings to it.”

“In these times of questionable idealism you don’t have any business doing this unless you’re ripping it all open,” added Drew. “If you look at the Social Scene career we were our beautiful selves and our beautiful mistakes. We were this group of friends who believed in an idea and in music. There was value to that. The value of art in general is something that gets embraced in this play. It’s a comedy. But the play at large is a conversation about how one fits in in today’s day and age if you remember what it was like [before the internet]. I’m tired of my art being swiped. I wanted to make something that you actually had to make an effort to go see if you wanted to.”

The idea of creating an actual community around the theatre has been pivotal to Crow’s artistic director, and director of A & R Angels, Chris Abraham. Since opening the east end location of Crow’s in January, Abraham has put his company at the forefront of the Toronto scene with a concerted effort to engage theatre and non-theatre audiences through opportunities for emerging creators, kid’s events, and ambitious programming. It’s been working. His leadership has made Crow’s one of the only companies in the city with growing ticket sales, though it certainly doesn’t hurt that recently he’s had the creative backing of Canada’s foremost music collective to help everything along.

A & R Angels is the second collaboration between Crow’s Theatre and a member of Broken Social Scene. Earlier this year the company produced a play written and performed by Torquil Campbell, best known as the frontman for Montreal dream pop act Stars. In the show, True Crime, Campbell blended personal storytelling with the murderous history of notorious impersonator Clark Rockefeller, for a compelling performance equal parts Serial and The Moth. True Crime was Campbell’s return to the stage after a long absence. The singer had spent his youth as an actor, most notably appearing alongside the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in the off-Broadway production Shopping and Fucking. But for Campbell the theatre has always had a specific draw that other art doesn’t.

“When I’m playing music each night it’s like I’m preaching to the converted. People know the words and they sing along. But when you’re doing a play every night is like trying to create a new religion...which isn’t to say we all have to take it so seriously,” Campbell told me in a phone interview. “Theatre, like veganism, is an easy target for people to make fun of and dismiss. But it’s play. We’re playing and it’s a lot of fun. The audience just needs to take a leap of faith.”

While you might think the concept of creating a community and understanding through a bunch of actors saying lines on a stage seems naive or lame, sitting at the table with Drew and Kowalewicz it’s easy to get behind their grandiose ideas. The singers’ desire to have their script/performance connect is infectious, and as we order our second round of drinks I remind myself that from a creative and financial standpoint neither Drew or Kowalewicz need to do this. Making this artistic choice at this stage of their careers—especially something with such a high potential for failure as theatre—is both ballsy and inspiring.

As our conversation starts to wrap I casually drop that I split my days between freelance writing, producing at a mid-sized indie theatre in the west end, and writing plays. When say this both singers come alive with encouragement and advice.

Photo by Dahlia Katz

“There is going to be this fucking moment where people turn their phones off in this town. The people want it. They want to be fed,’ said Drew. “The arts are about to rise above the addictive idea of moments and starting to make memories. That’s the business you and I are in. And if you’re honest enough you can do it. ”

Solid advice that I’m sure you are reading on your phone, while half watching Netflix.

A & R Angels begins previews November 20.

Graham Isador occasionally uses his twitter account to troll prestige Canadian playwrights about the television show Ballers. @presgang

On a packed Vancouver party street a party bus burned brightly in front of a myriad of drinkers just trying to forget their shit week.

The bus went up in near Granville and Smithe streets at 10 PM Saturday evening. According to a report by the CBC, the fire started in the tail end of the vehicle before spreading to the front. The engine was still running as the fire raged forcing first responders to shut off the airflow to the engine to shut it down. It's unclear how many people were on the bus at the time of the fire, but no injuries were reported.

Every city has a place like Granville, a packed club strip where there’s a concentrated amount of so-called pickup artistry going on and fights are just one roughly-jostled $10 street hot dog away. If this party bus was sentient, it might choose self-immolation over spending the night getting peed on by the people waiting in unnecessarily long lines.

No doubt this particular bus was hired to bring a group of partiers—possibly a stag party, oh god—from one club to the next, kind of like a pub crawl. (I’m not going to explain a pub crawl to you because if you don’t already know what one is you’re doing your early 20s wrong).

One dramatic video, taken by Kearwood Gilbert who lives in a nearby tower, shows the bus in flames as as a thick black smoke rises. Gilbert told the Vancouver Sun that the fire spread quickly from the rear of the bus to the front.

It is still not known if the fire was started by accident or by a reveler lighting up in the back of the bus (which tends to happen in party buses) but the cause is under investigation.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

Mueller Wants Emails on FBI Director's Firing
The special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign asked the Department of Justice to hand over all documents related to the firing of James Comey. This is the first time Mueller has formally requested records from the department, and strongly suggests Mueller is probing possible obstruction of justice on part of the White House.—ABC News

The notorious cult leader behind a series of brutal killings in 1969 died of natural causes Sunday night, having spent more than 45 years behind bars. Manson was convicted of ordering nine people killed, including actress Sharon Tate. His death sentence was changed to life in prison after California briefly banned capital punishment. Manson was refused bail 12 times.—VICE News

One Border Patrol Agent Killed, One Injured in Texas
The 36-year-old agent Rogelio Martinez died Sunday after sustaining injuries along the Big Bend Sector of the American border with Mexico. His partner was also injured in the incident, which apparently did not involve gunfire, and was said to be in serious condition. Donald Trump responded on Twitter Sunday night, stating: “We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!”—CNN

Russell Simmons Accused of Sexual Assault in Collusion with Brett Ratner
Keri Claussen Khalighi alleged the music mogul made her perform oral sex against her will when she was 17, and said director Ratner watched it happen. She claimed Simmons then sexually assaulted her in the shower. Simmons recalled time spent with Khalighi 26 years ago, but said the acts “occurred with her full consent and participation.”—Noisey/LATimes

International News

Mugabe Still Refusing to Step Down
Officials from the ruling party Zanu-PF are expected to launch impeachment proceedings against Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe after he defied an ultimatum to resign. Following last week’s military takeover, the party officially ditched Mugabe as its leader Sunday. But the 93-year-old made a strange, defiant televised speech in which he vowed to carry on.—VICE News

Coalition Government Talks Fall Apart in Germany
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plan for a new governing coalition was in in ruins after the Free Democrats (FDP) abandoned negotiations. The FDP’s Christian Lindner said it would be “better not to govern than to govern badly.” Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Christian Social Union (CSU) sister party could now try to form a minority government, or face another national election.—The Guardian

South Korea Concerned North Korean Missile Threat to US Surging
South Korea's intelligence agency expressed ongoing concern Pyongyang's intercontinental ballistic missile program is is becoming more dangerous to the US this calendar year. At a private conference with South Korean lawmakers, the agency also said the Northern regime has imposed a new crackdown on dissent in its military's political arm.—Reuters

Kenyan Supreme Court Endorses Kenyatta Election Win
Every judge on the panel ruled President Uhuru Kenyatta’s victory in October’s election re-run was legitimate—despite opposition leader Raila Odinga refusing to take part in the vote, after claiming the initial election was subject to corruption. Kenyatta will be officially inaugurated as president November 28.—Al Jazeera

Everything Else

Jeffrey Tambor Denies Sexual Harassment Allegations
Following multiple allegations of sexual harassment (by both a co-cast-member and a former assistant), the star mourned the “politicized atmosphere” on the set of Transparent and said: “I don’t see how I can return.” Tambor also claimed “the idea that I would deliberately harass anyone is simply and utterly untrue.”—The Hollywood Reporter

‘Justice League’ Underperforms at North American Box Office
The movie took in $96 million during its domestic opening, the first in the DC Extended Universe franchise not to debut to more than $100 million. Thanks to a solid international showing, the film commanded $281.5 million globally.—CNN

Bruno Mars Triumphs at American Music Awards
The singer won seven awards at Sunday’s AMAs in Los Angeles, including artist of the year and favourite pop/rock album for 24K Magic, though he didn't attend the ceremony. Diana Ross closed the show after being given the lifetime achievement award.—Billboard

Steve Mnuchin Happy to Resemble Bond Villain
The treasury secretary told Fox News: “I guess I should take that as a compliment that I look like a villain in a great, successful James Bond movie.” He was commenting on the backlash against a recently released photo showing Mnuchin and his wife holding a sheet of newly-printed bills.—Bloomberg

St. Vincent Drops New Video
The artist released a music video for "Pills" off of Masseducation exclusively on Tidal. Directed by Philippa Price, the video blends old advertising footage with a series of robotic-looking models popping pills.—i-D

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we take a close look at what it's like to go through a gang initiation.

If people were hoping Quebec would be a bit more lax in its weed regulations than other provinces, they must now be sorely disappointed.

The province known for selling booze in corner stores has decided to open only 20 government-run dispensaries for people to purchase weed when the drug becomes legal next year. That works out to roughly one store per 300,000 people. Ontario, by comparison, is opening 40 stores by next summer, increasing to 80 by 2019, and 150 by 2020.

The SAQ (provincial liquor corporation) has more than 400 branches across Quebec and 840 points of sale.

Quebecers will also be allowed to buy weed online. The legal age for purchasing weed will be 18.

Quebec is also outright banning growing weed at home; the federal government’s proposed laws allow for up to four plants per home for recreational pot users.

When it comes to driving, Quebec is going with zero tolerance for drivers who have any drugs in their system. Ontario is planning on going with zero tolerance with young and novice drivers. In Quebec, cops will be able to demand saliva samples and issue 90-day license suspensions to drivers who test positive for THC.

According to CBC, Transport Minister André Fortin said, “The message we want to send is: if you consume cannabis, don't drive.”

Standardized THC tests for drivers don’t yet exist in Canada. Beyond that, the federal government has admitted it's difficult to determine how much THC has to be consumed for a person to be impaired. One could assume the tough driving penalties will present an issue for medical pot users, who may consume weed daily.

Of the other provinces who’ve announced rollout plans, Alberta and Manitoba are allowing private stores, while Ontario and New Brunswick are going with government monopolies.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

After two women accused Jeffrey Tambor of sexual misconduct and Amazon launched an investigation into the allegations, the star of Transparent announced Sunday he's leaving the show, Deadline reports.

“Playing Maura Pfefferman on Transparent has been one of the greatest privileges and creative experiences of my life,” Tambor told Deadline. “What has become clear over the past weeks, however, is that this is no longer the job I signed up for four years ago.”

In a Facebook post earlier this month, Tambor's former assistant Van Barnes claimed the actor repeatedly groped her, propositioned her, and blasted pornography while she was within earshot, Vanity Fair reports. He once allegedly told her she "should be sleeping with him if I want a Hollywood industry appropriate pay." After Barnes's post went viral, Amazon Studios—which puts out Transparent—launched an investigation into the allegations.

About a week later, Tambor's Transparent co-star Trace Lysette accused him of regularly making inappropriate, sexually charged comments about her appearance—once allegedly telling her, "I want to attack you sexually," according to the Hollywood Reporter. Lysette also claimed Tambor backed her into a corner and dry-humped her during a scene the two shot for Transparent's second season.

"He came in close, put his bare feet on top of mine so I could not move, leaned his body against me, and began quick, discreet thrusts back and forth against my body," Lysette told THR. "I felt his penis on my hip through his thin pajamas and I pushed him off of me."

Tambor has denied the allegations against him. But on Sunday, the actor announced he would be leaving Transparent in light of them.

“I’ve already made clear my deep regret if any action of mine was ever misinterpreted by anyone as being aggressive, but the idea that I would deliberately harass anyone is simply and utterly untrue,” Tambor told Deadline. "Given the politicized atmosphere that seems to have afflicted our set, I don’t see how I can return to Transparent.”

What the revelations mean for the future of Transparent is still up in the air. According to Deadline, the show's writers have been workshopping a way to keep the show going without Tambor's character. Several transgender actors (including Lysette) star in the show, and with Tambor gone, there's potential for the series to continue without a cisgender lead.

The writers behind Transparent aren't the only ones wrestling with how to move forward when a star is accused of sexual misconduct. After House of Cards' lead actor Kevin Spacey was hit with several allegations of sexual misconduct, Netflix put the show's upcoming season on an indefinite hiatus, and word broke that he'll be edited out of his latest movie.

There's still no word on what the allegations against Tambor might mean for the new season of Arrested Development or his part in the star-studded The Death of Stalin.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

In the wake of Charles Manson's death Sunday night at the age of 83 has come a new wave of stories about Manson, his "Family," and the horrific murders he committed. Though he spent most of his life in prison, Manson has exerted a strange pull on American culture. Partly this was because of how famous the killings became, partly this was because Manson did lots of interviews from prison—you can easily watch him fuck with Geraldo Rivera or make some goofy faces—but partly it's because it's so hard to understand why Manson's followers did such horrible things.

The definitive Manson footage isn't footage of Manson, who spent his live trying to manipulate people—it's the chilling interviews of his Family in the 1973 documentary, Manson.

This seminal Manson doc, directed by Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick, is mostly made up of verité footage of the Manson Family doing their daily routines around their commune, intercut with interviews with them. In one of the film's early moments, Manson Family member Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme—who would later serve time for her attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford—lazily spells out the Manson Family values.

"Whatever is necessary to do, you do it," Fromme says. "When somebody needs to be killed, there’s no wrong. You do it, and then you move on. And you pick up a child and you move him to the desert. You pick up as many children as you can and you kill whoever gets in your way. This is us."

Later, Fromme shows off a vest made of locks of members' hair, which they cut off to prove their loyalty to Manson after his head was shaved in prison. These chilling moments are made even more effective by the mundane way Fromme discusses killing and her faith in Manson. The rest of the doc gives plenty of screen time to members—many of them young women—letting them show off their rifles and talk at length about the garbled hippie beliefs instilled by Manson and their moral relativism about murder.

“We are what you have made us," a Family member named Brenda says at one point. "We were brought up on your TV. We were brought up watching Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, F.B.I., Combat. Combat was my favourite show."

The film was shot by Hendrickson and Merrick between 1969 and 1972—after Manson and a handful of Family members had been arrested for the murders but before the story had been cemented as a cultural touchstone in the 1974 book Helter Skelter—with the Family footage filmed primarily at the Western film-set-turned-Manson compound Spahn Ranch and in Death Valley. The whole thing was scored by Brooks Poston and Paul Watkins, two former Manson Family members.

According to AFI, Manson debuted in 1972 at the Venice Film Festival and went on to be nominated for an Academy Award that year, but didn't get anything close to a wide release until the mid-1970s. These days, Manson is difficult to track down unless you buy an autographed DV-R copy from the director himself. Or you could just watch it on YouTube.

Canadian-born and New York-based artist Chloe Wise has made a career from tongue-in-cheek work that riffs on consumer culture and the insufferable social media trends that dominate feeds around the world. In the first episode of Question IT, Wise discusses not thinking twice about your creative instincts, the crippling insecurities that can prevent great work from being seen, and how “good” and “bad” are really just oversimplifications in the art world.

Richard Nixon’s first sit down came before he ran for Congress in 1946. Tricky Dick was later said to deal with the mob primarily through intermediaries like his bagman Bebe Rebozo or the attorney Murray Chotiner. But at this early stage, the military veteran and aspiring politician felt safe meeting face-to-face with Mickey Cohen, the notorious Jewish gangster based in Los Angeles. Despite Nixon's notorious anti-Semitism, Cohen was an important figure in California politics. Cohen, for his part, later said he got approval for the meeting, a lunch at Goodfellow's Fisherman's Grotto, from Cosa Nostra bosses in New York and Don Santos Trafficante in Florida.

With corruption rampant and looking increasingly unstoppable in today’s political landscape, it's worth reflecting on the storied tradition of American politicians galavanting with the mob. Thanks in part to the release of tens of thousands of classified documents related to Richard Nixon’s term as president, it's clearer than ever that his legacy should not be confined to Watergate, the War on Drugs, and his weird obsession with the peace sign. On the contrary, Nixon may also have been the president who most unabashedly rubbed elbows (and did business) with the mob at the peak of its powers.

Of course, it's no secret that Nixon, despite his constant protestations to the contrary, was in fact a crooked guy. But in his new book, The Mafia’s President: Nixon and The Mob, veteran White House reporter Don Fulsom digs into just how deeply Nixon got tied up with the mob. VICE talked to Fulsom by phone about the president's alleged plot to kill Castro with Mafia help, details on the $1 million deal to spring union boss Jimmy Hoffa from prison, and what it all means for Donald Trump—a president with his own history of business ties to organized crime.

Here’s what he had to say.

VICE: Nixon being shady and even having ties to the mob isn't a brand-new concept. How did you break new ground here?
Don Fulsom: I heard about these rumors many years ago in 1968 when I first went to Key Biscayne, Florida to cover Nixon. He went down there about 60 times during the campaign and following his election and swearing-in. I got to know a lot of people in Key Biscayne and they told me about rumors [concerning] banks, laundering money, and casinos run by the Mafia. I was so busy with the President and Watergate and the trip to China and all of that, that I didn’t have time to look into possible Mafia connections.

More tapes and more documents have [since] come out linking him to the Mafia. One document that was found recently instructs John Mitchell, the Attorney General, something along the lines [of]: No more indictments of Mafia [figures] or Italian-Americans before the election. That was written in 1970 and just came out within the past couple of years. There have been other hints in recent years on the [Oval Office] tapes. They conspired to help [get] this mob gangster’s union leader [Jimmy Hoffa] out of jail about four or five years earlier than he should have. (There was a threat by [Jimmy] Hoffa against Frank Fitzsimmons of the Teamsters. Hoffa said, "Frank, you better get me out of here by Christmas or you’re a dead man.")

Basically, there’s been a lot of recent discoveries that led me to check into this a little further to come up with what’s now the book.

It seems like a key relationship here was the one Nixon had with Murray Chotiner, a lawyer who knew his way around the criminal underworld. How did they connect?
Chotiner was Nixon’s first campaign manager and he had 221 Mafia clients. He dressed like one of the Mafia people: He had the white-on-white shirt, silk tie, pinky ring, monogramed shirts, and cufflinks that were little clocks. In other words, he was a fancy dresser and tied into the Mafia like no one else in the Southern California area. Nixon, through Murray Chotiner, was able to get in touch with Mickey Cohen, the boss of LA, and through Cohen, got some big contributions from the Southern California underworld in his [first] race for Congress way back in 1946.

I assume the mob threw lots of money around in politics back then. Were their donations to Nixon really pivotal or unusual?
[The mafia contributed] millions of dollars over the years, including at least a million dollars to get Jimmy Hoffa out of prison early. Then another possible million dollars to keep him from running for reelection through union office so that Frank Fitzsimmons could retain his leadership [of the Teamsters] for the Mafia. Fitzsimmons was much more pliable than Hoffa and, as far as Nixon was concerned, he was easier to deal [with]. Over the years I don’t know how many millions of dollars went from the Mafia to Nixon, but it was a considerable sum, and something that I think is worth noting for future generations. It’s not good to have a man in the White House who is in the pocket of organized crime.

You report that Nixon had some kind of role in an alleged Mafia-infused plot to invade Cuba. Leaving aside the potential fodder for JFK-related conspiracies, it seems like part of his connection to Cuba was personal—he liked to gamble.
Nixon was quite a big fan of the Cuban dictator Batista. He spent a lot of time down in Cuba when gambling was legal and run by the Mafia. They gave him a special room at the Hotel Nacional, which was owned by [gangster] Meyer Lansky. Nixon met with Lansky. The room was comped and Nixon ran up some big debts at Lansky’s gambling casino.

His Mafia-connected friend Bebe Rebozo went on many of these gambling trips to Cuba [too]. One of the trips occurred just before Nixon was to be nominated for vice president—when he was [still] a senator. To have this revealed wouldn’t have gone over too well with the voting public. Nixon [also] praised Batista’s government, which was very corrupt and tied in with the Mafia.

Batista apparently got millions of dollars from the Mafia for allowing them to run their gambling casinos down there. When Castro took over, all of that was gone. The Mafia was looking for some new place to operate. One of the places they found was not only Las Vegas, but the Bahama Islands. They had gambling casinos there and Meyer Lansky was a big behind the scenes mover and groover. Nixon also spent some time there—he was at the opening at one of the Mafia’s gambling casinos.

The comparison between Nixon and Trump is a common one these days, but mostly because both are facing special counsel investigations and have committed impeachable offenses. Do you think Trump's reported mob ties are fair game like Nixon's, though?
Yes, I definitely do, because anyone who’s been in the businesses that Trump’s been in must have had contact with the Mafia. I hope that one of these two congressional probes that’s taking place will look into possible Mafia ties.

The fact that it’s possible for murderers and purveyors of prostitution, illegal activities, drugs and so on to get their hooks into a political figure—who’s not only a governor and senator, but someone who’s the actual President of the United States—that’s a horrible thing to happen. I hope people recognize that this was a major problem and took our country down a very dangerous path during those years when Nixon was in office—including his congressional senatorial, vice presidential, and presidential years. [It's amazing that] someone so high in the government could be a tool of organized crime.

What can we do in the future to uncover and prevent these type of abuses by our elected officials?
Being alert to all kinds of possible corruption. Congressional oversight is very important. I don’t think they had the proper oversight when Nixon was clearly running around with the Mafia and the Mafia was funding his campaigns over the years. Even the Senate Watergate Committee was not able to reveal all of Nixon’s ties with the Mafia, but at least it made a good start in preventing him from continuing crooked activities in a lot of other areas for which he was ultimately expelled from office.

Learn More about Don Fulsom's book, out this month from St. Martin's press, here.

Follow Seth Ferranti on Twitter.

Midterm elections are always important, but the 2018 contest—just a mere year away—carries even more weight than usual. These races are shaping up to be both a referendum on Donald Trump and a chance to check his power, not to mention an opportunity to reassure the Resistance that change is possible. The Senate races are likely to garner a lot of attention, but Democrats have only a small chance to take back Congress’s upper chamber. The real action is going to be in the House, which the Democrats will regain control of if they flip 24 seats. That would allow Democrats to block Republican efforts to slash healthcare and cut taxes on the wealthy. It would also give them power to investigate any corruption or conflicts of interest in the Trump administration.

So you really should care how Democratic efforts to take back the House are going. You might have seen that Democrats are leading the generic congressional ballot 51–37. That’s good to know in the abstract, but is that enough to regain the House? Where would those gains occur? Which candidates should you support with your time or money? It’s tough to get those answers all in one place.

While a lot of sources do a good job of covering Senate races, there are fewer outlets that do comprehensive coverage of Houses. There are places like the Crystal Ball at UVA and the Cook Political Report that provide nonpartisan handicapping of elections, but don’t generally cover the day to day of campaigns. There are activist groups like Swing Left, Our Revolution, and Flippable, but they are obviously not interested in sharing news that is unfavourable to Democrats. And then there are sites like Daily Kos Elections and Decision Desk HQ that try to cover all elections and forecast them, but given the stakes, there is certainly room for more focus on the House in particular.

So welcome to House Party, a new column that will track how Democrats are doing in the races for the House of Representatives. I’m a lawyer in New York who doesn’t work for any campaign so I have no interest in hiding bad news or overemphasizing the good. To be fair, I am a partisan who would like to see more Democrats, liberal Democrats in particular, in office. If I think a candidate is bad, I’ll let you know. If I think a seat isn’t winnable, I’ll do the same. But if Democrats have learned anything from 2016, it’s to always be skeptical of how campaigns are telling us they’re doing. Self-delusion is not our friend.

Eventually this series will be a digest of news in House races over the previous week. But for now I want to give you the lay of the land and show you where Democrats have to fight to cobble together a 24-seat gain. Right now 12 Democrats sit in seats that Trump won while 23 Republicans sit in seats that Clinton won, so those will likely be among the battleground districts. Most of the 36 Republicans who sit in seats that voted for Trump but also Barack Obama at least once will merit mention as well. But Republicans have eight congressmen who sit in seats that voted for Obama both times and Clinton, and there are still three Democrats in districts that voted for each of the last three Republican presidential candidates, so the presidential vote isn’t necessarily the last word on whether a district is winnable. I’ll try to note any race that has a credible Democratic candidate or an endangered Republican one. And almost any open seat (one where the incumbent isn’t running) will be vulnerable in a wave election.

We’re still a year away from the actual election, and quite frankly we don’t know how good most of the candidates who have announced so far are. All we really have to go off are a) their biographies (including whether they have meaningful ties to the district), b) some introductory advertisements and media coverage, and c) fundraising totals.

I hate that I have to mention fundraising, but I do. A congressional campaign is like any business in that you have expenses like staff, rent, marketing, etc. A viable campaign needs hundreds of thousands of dollars just to make it through the primary, and most Democratic challengers will end up needing more than $2 million in total. The national party and outside groups help pick up some of the slack, but for now the amount of money a challenger raises is a good proxy for how serious their campaign is. That also means I’ll largely avoid mentioning candidates who aren’t raising credible money unless they’re getting prominent endorsements or media coverage. It’s not unheard of for a candidate to win a contested primary and general election on a shoestring budget, and sometimes a weak fundraiser starts pulling in big donations after they make it past a primary, but it’s rare. And with so many Democrats raising enough money to run viable campaigns, it makes little sense to dwell on those who aren’t.

So today, we’re going to look at the Democrats’ top targets—districts that Obama won in 2008 and 2012 and Clinton won in 2016.

Florida’s 27th District (Upscale Miami)

Presidential Vote:
2016: Clinton 59–Trump 39
2012: Obama 53–Romney 46
2008: Obama 50–McCain 49

With all the talk of how Democrats are clustering in urban areas it might surprise you that downtown Miami and South Beach are represented by a Republican. That’s mostly because Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has been able to cultivate a moderate reputation and Cuban Americans, who lean Republican, dominate the electorate here.

But Ros-Lehtinen is retiring, and Democrats haven’t had any trouble attracting qualified candidates: State senator Jose Javier Rodriguez is probably the frontrunner for their nomination, but State Representative David Richardson, Miami Beach City Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, Judge Mary Barzee Flores, Miami City Commissioner Ken Russell, and nonprofit director Matt Haggman are all keeping up with him on the campaign trail and in fundraising.

Republicans do have a good (on paper) candidate in Bruce Barreiro, a Miami-Dade County commissioner. There are a lot of Never Trump Republicans here who’ll still vote for the GOP down-ballot. But Barreiro’s fundraising has been paltry, so for now this seat’s on track to be a gimme for Democrats.

Florida’s 26th District (Miami Suburbs and Florida Keys)

2016: Clinton 57–Trump 41
2012: Obama 55–Romney 44
2008: Obama 52–McCain 48

If Ros-Lehtinen hadn’t retired, the 26th might have been Democrats’ best pickup target. They actually won this seat in 2012 but lost it in 2014 because their incumbent had some ethical issues. Naturally they renominated him in 2016 (Russian hackers did a beta run for their presidential meddling in the primary), and Republican Carlos Curbelo won reelection. Curbelo has tried to tack to the middle on some issues but he still voted for the the Republican Affordable Care Act repeal bill, sure to be unpopular in a district where almost 100,000 people get insurance through the ACA. But his saving grace may be that most of the good Democratic candidates in the area are running in the 27th instead. The line between the two districts cuts through a cohesive community; both Haggman and Flores were rumored to be looking at the 26th before announcing runs next door.

So Democrats are trotting out Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. She lost a state senate race last year 54–46, but apparently she impressed in a losing effort. She’s raised $177,000 so far, but Curbelo is sitting on a war chest of more than $1.3 million. Considering Democrats’ recruiting successes elsewhere, the fact that a retread like Mucarsel-Powell will likely be their nominee has to sting. But a recent poll showed Curbelo losing 53–39 to a generic Democrat, and Mucarsel-Powell seems generic enough to me.

Washington’s Eighth District (Seattle Suburbs and Cascades)

2016: Clinton 48–Trump 45
2012: Obama 50–Romney 48
2008: Obama 52–McCain 47

The Eighth is almost two different districts in one: the Seattle suburbs in King County, which backed Clinton, and the more rural parts of the district, which backed Trump. The district has long been represented by Republican Dave Reichert, a former King County sheriff with a moderate reputation—though he’s not running for reelection.

State senator Dino Rossi, who narrowly lost statewide races in 2004, 2008 and 2010 (races which he won among voters in the Eighth) will likely be the GOP nominee, and he was able to raise $575,000 in the nine days after he announced his candidacy. Democrats have a slew of candidates running here but pediatrician Kim Schrier and attorney Jason Rittereiser (who lives in King County but grew up in the more rural part of the district) are the only ones who appear to be able to keep up with Rossi.

The last time Democrats won a midterm wave election, in 2006, they improved on John Kerry’s 2004 performance in every open seat district that they contested. So if they can’t win the Eighth, they’re likely not winning the House. To show you how far Democrats have to go here, a recent poll showed Trump’s approval at 40–55, but a generic Democrat was only leading 43–42 on the congressional ballot.

Colorado’s Sixth District (Denver’s Eastern Suburbs)

2016: Clinton 50–Trump 41
2012: Obama 52– Romney 47
2008: Obama 54–McCain 45

Mike Coffman used to represent a safely Republican district (it sent proto-Trump Tom Tancredo to Congress for a decade before Coffman took over), but 2012’s round of redistricting put him in a swing seat that wraps around eastern edge of Denver like a scarf. But Coffman managed to pivot to the center and dispatch three different state legislators in the past three elections

Sensing a pattern, Democrats have decided to ask someone other than a state legislator to run against Coffman in 2018. Former Army eanger and veterans advocate Jason Crow is backed by the national party, but former Department of Energy staffer (and clean energy executive) Levi Tillemann is running to Crow’s left in the primary. Notably, Crow actually lives outside the district boundary in the city of Denver and is already being painted by Coffman as a carpetbagger. That said, Crow is far outpacing Tillemann in raising money, making him the prohibitive favorite in a primary.

While Trump’s approval here was 41–55 in a recent poll, Coffman was still beating Crow 43–36 on the congressional ballot. While it’s not great for an incumbent to be polling at 43 percent a year before an election, it shows the electorate is still plenty fluid.

Minnesota’s Third Congressional District (Minneapolis’s Western Suburbs)

2016: Clinton 51–Trump 41
2012: Obama 50–Romney 49
2008: Obama 51–McCain 47

Erik Paulsen is another Republican who’s managed to get a reputation as a moderate, though he did back Trump’s agenda with votes for both the AHCA and his tax bill.

He won his seat with an impressive 48-40 over a touted Democratic opponent in 2008, a year that was awful for Republicans nationally. Since then he’s never gotten less than 56 percent, even against a strong candidate last year. In this seat, as in many others, I suspect a lot of moderate voters backed Republican congressional candidates as expected checks on Hillary Clinton. He’s never had to win re-election while a Republican was president. And a recent poll showed him trailing a Democratic challenger 46-42.

So who might beat Paulsen next year? Dean Phillips, who has run his family’s liquor company and a bunch of food-related businesses. He’s never run for office before but he raised more than $500,000 in May and June 2017. He followed that up with another $300,000 over the next three months. I hate using money as a proxy, but thanks to the Supreme Court that’s the world we live in. Money is speech and Phillips is really fucking good at speech.

California’s Tenth Congressional District (Modesto)

2016: Clinton 49–Trump 46
2012: Obama 51–Romney 47
2008: Obama 50–McCain 47

Republican Jeff Denham has managed to hold onto this swing seat through three heavily contested elections, though never with more than 56 percent of the vote. So he was always going to be a top Democratic target, and voting with Trump on ACA repeal and tax cuts won’t help.

The frontrunner for the Democratic nomination is Josh Harder. He grew up in the district, moved to Silicon Valley (an hour and a half drive and a world away), and then moved back this year to run for office. He’s not particularly left wing (he doesn’t support Medicare for all), but he’s raised far more money than any other Democrat—his war chest is sitting at over $500,000. Unless progressives can unite around a single non-Harder candidate (there are four right now) and pour resources into the district, it’s hard to see how he isn’t the nominee.

California’s 21st Congressional District (Central Valley near Fresno and Bakersfield)

2016: Clinton 55–Trump 40
2012: Obama 55–Romney 44
2008: Obama 52–McCain 46

David Valadao has been able to survive politically because Democrats have never nominated a strong candidate against him. He’s also benefitted absurdly low turnout: Only one other district in America had fewer people vote in 2016. The heavily Latino district is also very rural, making it more difficult to organize than urban areas where Democrats tend to do well.

So Democrats are faced with a dilemma. Do they run a left-winger who can organize those nonvoters and turn them out to the polls? But many of those nonvoters aren’t eligible to vote because they’re noncitizens or felons (the district is home to 5,000 prisoners at Avenal)—maybe Dems should go after the people who voted for Valadao and Hillary Clinton, which would be enough to win. Emilio Huerta, son of legendary activist Dolores, is running for the seat and appears to favour the former option. The problem is that he’s the guy who ran here in 2016 and lost by 14 points.

Democrats do have other candidates that could run here: Assemblyman Rudy Salas, Kern County Supervisor Leticia Perez, and Bakersfield Councilor Andrae Gonzales among them. The problem is that Huerta’s mother is still a powerful figure in the district and it’s unwise to cross her, even if that means deferring to her son’s lackluster campaign. That’s not to say Democrats should lose hope if Huerta is their nominee: Sometimes first-time candidates have marked improvements in their second try. As with most things in life, you get better at running for office the more experience you get and learning from mistakes. But Emilio’s anemic fundraising numbers show that he might not have picked up on that part of learning for office just yet. Democrats’ best hope to improve on 2016’s results here may be a new law that makes it easier to collect absentee ballots.

New York’s 24th Congressional District (Syracuse)

2016: Clinton 49–Trump 45
2012: Obama 57–Romney 41
2008: Obama 56–McCain 42

The Syracuse area has a history of voting for Democratic presidential candidates but electing moderate Republicans to Congress. John Katko has carved out a reputation as such a moderate, even though he just voted for the GOP tax bill, which hits New York particularly hard. Democrats are eager to tie him to the president in an attempt to knock him off.

The issue is that a strong Democrat hasn’t declared yet. Syracuse mayor Stephanie Miner froze out more prominent candidates while she dithered over whether she’d run for Congress or governor in 2018. She announced on October that she won’t be running for this seat (leaving the door open for a gubernatorial run), and Democrats are scrambling to find another option.

One year before an election is still plenty of time to recruit a solid candidate. And Onondaga County legislator Chris Ryan is the type of blue-collar union Democrat (he’s a member of the Communication Workers of America) who should do well in upstate New York. He just wrapped up his reelection campaign to the county legislature so his window for announcing has opened. Meanwhile, Katko is sitting on over $900,000 and his current Democratic opponents are unimpressive, so let’s hope Ryan makes up his mind soon.

Next week we’ll look at the seats that flipped from Obama in ‘08 to Romney in ‘12 to Clinton in ‘16

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the titles of Kristen Rosen Gonzalez and Ken Russell.

Robert Wheel (a pseudonym) is an attorney who lives in New York. He tweets here, and his DMs are open.

Indonesia's lost treasures keep going missing. Conservations say that a flood of illegal treasure hunters are digging up artifacts in rice paddies in the Central Java district of Sukoharjo—a region about 62 kilometers outside Yogyakarta—and selling the valuable items on the black market.

Local officials declared a site in Sukoharjo's Joho village a conservation zone three years ago after evidence of an ancient Buddhist temple was discovered nearby. But the classification has only increased the appetite of looters who are willing to pay local farmers as much as Rp 3 million ($222 USD) a day for the right to dig for buried treasures under the cover of darkness.

"We haven't calculated it, but if this has been happening since the 1990s, then we have lost so much money," Darno, the head of the local culture and heritage foundation, told VICE. "The government doesn't seem to realize the potential of historical sites."

The money is a vital windfall for the village's rice farmers, who would typically make nothing off their paddies during the dry season. But it's also proven to be a difficult crime to prosecute. And with little risk of being caught there are few reasons for farmers in Joho village to not offer their fields up to cashed-up treasure hunters.

"I know nothing about the heritage," one farmer, a man named Mariman, told the Jakarta Post. "Someone says they want to rent my field... I just allow them."

The antiquities vanish into a murky black market worth, worldwide, an estimated $1.6 billion USD annually, according to the think-tank Global Financial Integrity. Only 10 percent of these stolen cultural artifacts are recovered by authorities, Rosinta Hutauruk, the spokesperson for UNESCO's Indonesia office, told VICE.

"The illicit trade in cultural objects continues to increase because there's stable demand," she said. "This is also due to inconsistent law and weak border policies."

The looting in Joho village is just the latest in a long list of antiquities to disappear from Indonesia. In the 1960s, local residents in a village on the outskirts of Cirebon, West Java, discovered 80 sculptures dating back to before 400 BC. The sculptures were reportedly from an ancient Hindu kingdom that once ruled parts of West Java. But since the discovery, at least 55 of them have gone missing without a trace.

It's a similar story in Lamongan and Pacitan, in East Java, where historically significant sites have been discovered, then abandoned, and under the sea, where scuba diving scavengers made off Rp 4.2 billion ($310,490 USD) in Chinese ceramics from a single shipwreck.

The situation is so bad that even artifacts locked away inside of museums have gone missing. Nearly 9,000 priceless historical artifacts had vanished from Indonesian museums by 2010, according to reports in local media. A few year later, four golden pieces from the Mataram empire vanished from a museum in Central Java.

These antiquities typically pass through multiple sellers, crossing international borders before then end up in the hands of wealthy private collectors and museums. The Archeological Institute of America estimates that as much as 90 percent of the artifacts sold on the legal market don't have any paperwork listing where, and how, they were discovered.

Add in the fact that the black market for stolen antiquities is also full of forgeries and it's easy to see how difficult it is to track down missing artifacts like those that vanished from rice paddies in Joho village. And even these counterfeit antiquities pose a serious threat to the world's heritage, explained Edouard Planche, UNESCO program specialist, in an email to VICE.

"You also have to take into consideration the importance of counterfeited objects in the economic impact of the illegal activities related to cultural heritage," Planche told VICE. "If they do not represent a direct threat to cultural heritage, their presence on the market makes it more difficult to find the real cultural goods which are circulating all over the world."

So once Indonesia's historical artifacts go missing, they may be lost forever. Or to put it simply, the country's history, is, well... history.

Two days after a gunman fatally shot 26 people and wounded many others at a church in rural Texas, the pastor of a Florida congregation hopped on Instagram to show off the signs posted on every door of his church. If you've come to breach the peace, it warns, be ready for a firefight.

The signs have been up for about a year at The River at Tampa Bay Church, associate pastor Allen Hawes told the Tampa Bay Times. But in light of the Sutherland Springs shooting earlier this month—along with the Las Vegas mass shooting that killed 59—The River figured it was a good time to publicize the fact that its congregants are packing.

"It is a deterrent," Hawes told the paper, later adding, "Because we are a church that is on television, we are very involved in the community. We want people to know that this is a safe zone."

The church draws upwards of 1,000 people to its Sunday services, which are broadcast on social media, according to local affiliate FOX 13. A number of those in the crowd are liable to carry weapons—whether that's a worshipper with a concealed-carry permit, a plainclothes guard, or a cop hired to patrol the property. Hawes himself has a concealed-carry permit; he told the Times he likes to stay strapped with a Springfield handgun.

"We are not a soft target," he told the paper. "People here will defend their families."

The massacre in Texas came to a close after two locals shot and chased down the perpetrator, inspiring a wave of wannabe "good guys with guns"—essentially, people who believe the answer to gun violence is more firearms, except in the right hands. The argument is still a central talking point for the gun rights movement, even though research strongly suggests the theory is bogus.

As Hawes asked the local FOX affiliate, "Would I rather ruffle a few feathers, or do I want to count bodies?"

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The most beautiful thing about the first 15 minutes of Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman) is that the couple at the center of the film’s narrative—one a transgender woman named Marina (played by trans actress Daniela Vega), the other a much older man named Orlando—seem to exist, at least for a few moments, outside the pressures and prejudice of society. As the film opens, we find Marina celebrating her birthday with a date night and dinner, dancing, a little ordinary lovemaking. Maybe you entered the theater having read headlines that pit Marina as a sole force against a “bigoted world,” or scenes rife with “grief and otherness”—and while those will come, it’s refreshing to walk into a world where Marina’s life and relationship are all but normal, where they simply exist.

Una Mujer Fantástica made its Oscar-qualifying theatrical debut Friday, a short run to gain eligibility as the Chilean entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. (It will return for a longer theatrical run next year.) I was able to see it at its Mexican premiere at the Los Cabos Film Festival, where it screened alongside other LGBTQ films that have made 2017 one of the most exciting for queer cinema in a while, like Beach Rats and Thelma. But Una Mujer Fantástica’s reviews thus far, which almost uniformly laud Vega’s performance as the film’s white hot center, cement it as a standout among them—and have snowballed into buzz that she could be the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for an Oscar in history. That would not only make history at the Academy Awards, but it would mean a bounding leap for transgender representation in mainstream cinema, not to mention an unexpected victory from a place as conservative as Chile.

The film follows Vega’s character through the aftermath of her lover Orlando’s death from a serious illness. Orlando’s family, however, suspects it was a murder—with Marina as culprit, after Orlando’s wealth and material assets. She endures interrogation at their hands rife with hate speech and discrimination, and the film uses the conflict to tackle the polarizing isolation of transgender living, particularly in Chile, where there is little government or cultural support for the trans community.

That’s made clear by the onslaught of microaggressions and harassment Marina endures as the film goes on. In one scene, police officers mistake her for a sex worker, reflecting a reductive stereotype; in another, hospital staff ask for her “real name,” as in her birth name or deadname. Marina is later banned from her own lover’s funeral, and when she shows up in defiance, she faces an ugly uproar from those there. But while the film dives headfirst into the experience of transgender womanhood, it’s also rooted in the realism of a tragic love story and the complex, resilient personality of its title character.

Watch as Broadly followed Danica Roem on the road to becoming the first transgender person elected to state legislature:

The film follows a long and unfortunate legacy of transgender films at the Academy Awards. Unlike other films about transgender characters that have made it to the Oscars winner’s circle, like Boys Don’t Cry, Dallas Buyer’s Club and The Danish Woman, Una Mujer Fantástica’s transgender lead is actually played by a transgender person. The past few years have brought widespread criticism for the rampant Hollywood practice of casting cisgender actors in trans roles; Daniela’s nomination would be a step forward against it. Given how much attention has been paid to other ways Hollywood and the Academy are widely discriminatory—#OscarsSoWhite and its lack of gender equality, to start—that step would be a huge one.

If nominated, Vega would follow in the footsteps of Angela Morley, who became the first openly trans Oscar nominee in 1975 for Best Original Song in The Little Prince, as well as Anhoni, nominated just last year in the same category for the documentary Racing Extinction. Anhoni publicly boycotted last year’s ceremony because she was one of only two nominees not invited to perform, due to “time constraints.”

"I know that I wasn’t excluded from the performance directly because I am transgendered. I was not invited to perform because I am relatively unknown in the US, singing a song about ecocide, and that might not sell advertising space,” Anhoni said in a subsequent statement. “But if you trace the trail of breadcrumbs, the deeper truth of it is impossible to ignore. [...] It is a system of social oppression and diminished opportunities for trans people that has been employed by capitalism in the US to crush our dreams and our collective spirit."

Her point rings more true in the context of Vega’s performance, which confronts the various ways transgender Chileans face mistreatment at the hands of their government, like its slowness to pass transgender citizens’ rights to legally identify themselves and change their names, or struggles parents have faced in having their transgender children recognized. (To be fair, what protection exists in the United States varies widely and is often lacking, too.) Vega herself attests to a lot of “psychological violence” in her personal life, as she put it in her LA Times interview, explaining that after she first transitioned, she couldn’t find work for a long time and grew depressed.

“There are a lot of Orlandos and a lot of Marinas in the world,” Vega told Indiewire . “Love doesn’t escape a trans body. We think that love is as genuine as any other, so we wanted to show it. So that we ask ourselves — ‘Why we don’t see it more often?'” With Vega’s nomination, representation for trans actors and trans narratives to be championed and mainstreamed “more often” could be made a reality much sooner—and that love could be made a lot more visceral around the world in a supremely powerful way.

Follow Fran Tirado on Twitter.