This article is part of "Safe Sesh", a VICE harm reduction campaign produced in collaboration with The Loop and the Royal Society for Public Health. Read more from the editorial series here.

Like most people who are fond of smoking weed, my knowledge of the topic has increased significantly since the days when I'd sit on a park bench with a tenner's worth of squidgy. For instance, these days I'm aware that different strains can produce vastly different experiences; from finding a nature documentary mildly more interesting, to eating six packets of Space Raiders, getting lost on a YouTube trail and ending up with targeted ads for "conspiracy T-shirts".

Over the years, I've also learned that cannabis is a complex plant with hundreds of chemical entities. The two best known are THC and CBD: THC gets you high, CBD is the compound that's been found to help in the treatment of a dizzying number of illnesses and conditions. Interestingly, given weed's reputation as psychosis-inducing, some studies have indicated that CBD can act as an antipsychotic – although more research needs to be done in this field.

So: it's probably better to get a strain that contains a decent amount of CBD, right? Right. However, because I can't be bothered to grow my own or work out how to use Tor, BitCoin or the dark web drug markets, I pretty much get what I'm given – and what I'm given is whatever my dealer decides to give me. So am I putting my mental health at risk?

WATCH: Weed-Growing Grannies and Drone-Operating Grow-Op Thieves – Inside the UK's Weed Industry

Jade is a member of Hempen, a not-for-profit organic hemp co-operative, based on a hemp farm in South Oxfordshire. They grow hemp, produce CBD products and food, and tour festivals extolling the virtues of using CBD. They think it's a good idea to supplement your diet with as much CBD as possible.

"We extract CBD from our hemp flowers," she says. "It's a really good painkiller, anti-inflammatory and it's not psychoactive, but it is antipsychotic." The co-op was at Boomtown this summer "doing hemp workshops, spreading knowledge of CBD and serving our CBD products".

Jade believes that taking CBD at a festival can be important. "Being an anti-psychotic, CBD is perfect for a festival," she insists. "Because if people are partying a lot it can do wonders with recovery. It's good for anxiety, so if you're getting a bit anxious after smoking a lot of high grade or partying for days, taking CBD can be helpful."

If I'm smoking weed generally, should I also be taking CBD? "It's probably a good idea," Jade suggests. "Any of the possible side-effects of the high-THC strains that are manmade – memory problems, paranoia and stuff like that – can be mitigated by CBD. But the strains available have been bred to have more THC, because that is more commercial."

A Hempen stall at a festival. Photo courtesy of Hempen

It's a school of thought that has become more popular recently, and one unsurprisingly endorsed by a co-operative that produces CBD products. But does it tally up with the science? Before deciding to vape CBD day and night, I call Chandni Hindocha, a researcher at the University College London. She is currently investigating the potential application of CBD to treat nicotine addiction and has conducted "a lot of research investigating the interaction between THC and CBD".

Chandni agrees with Jade, that taking CBD with THC could be a good idea. "We know that pre-treatment with CBD in studies where participants have taken THC intravenously has protected against the effects of THC," she says. "But the best thing for users to do is have a cannabis with more balanced CBD / THC ratio, instead of using skunk. Unfortunately, street cannabis at the moment is all high-potency, and all the research suggests that it's worse for your mental health. In parts of the US, for instance, where we are seeing regulated markets, people can go in and buy strains that have an equal ratio."

Chandni is quick to point out the importance of getting in the correct dose of CBD when it comes to unlocking its therapeutic potential. I ask about the current nicotine withdrawal study. "We are giving participants 800mg in a capsule," she explains. "You have to consider that 800mg is a lot; in some of these CBD oils you are getting around 2mg."

What would the prospective benefits of taking CBD, if you've got a weed habit, look like? "Taking CBD as a pre-treatment – so taking it before you smoke skunk, for instance – can protect against some of the negative effects, such as increased paranoia or anxiety, without interfering with the stoned effect."

"In Colorado, there are people whose job involves going to conferences and completing quality assurance tests on cannabis. They all take CBD supplements beforehand in order to maintain good mental health. That's an industry standard practice there."

Dr Henry Fisher, Policy Director at drug policy think-tank VolteFace, is of the same school of thought as Jade and Chandni, but he's also keen to point out the limitations.

"Taking CBD with THC is certainly not going to do any harm," he says. "But there is no clear guidance on how much should be used, and there's very little regulation on what you are consuming. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that consuming CBD alongside THC can reduce some of the anxiety and paranoia that some people experience. At the moment, almost all the cannabis you can buy in the UK is high-THC and low-CBD. Unless you have a bit of money and a bit of knowledge to seek out specific strains, that's what you are going to get."

Henry cites emerging cannabis markets operating in a legal space as a reasonable indication of best practice. "In Colorado, there are people whose job involves going to conferences and completing quality assurance tests on cannabis," he points out. "They all take CBD supplements beforehand in order to maintain good mental health. That's an industry standard practice there."

So it seems that taking CBD products alongside THC is most likely going to be good for your mental health. But, at the same time, while the benefits of CBD are being researched and gradually becoming better understood, it could be tricky to get it right. Trying to find an elusive 1:1 strain is still the preferable option – but in the UK, where prohibition means most of us are forced to take what we get, that's a little tricky, too.

@oldspeak1

More from Safe Sesh:

We Need to Talk About Our Generation's Xanax Problem

All the Dodgy Stuff Found in the Drugs at Boomtown This Year

Paul Flynn MP: We Must Legalise Medicinal Cannabis

Last week, I was talking with my friend, a queer DJ named Mateo Segade, about gay nightlife here in LA. I work as a doorman at the Eagle, a gay bar, and Mateo is a DJ who plays queer events all over; between us, we’ve seen all sides of the gay nightlife industry, both for better and worse (sometimes much, much worse).

One of the worst parts of gay nightlife is how it can internalize and regurgitate the worst tendencies of queer communities. Queer people, especially gay men, are known for dealing with a slew of self-doubts and anxieties in noxious ways. Gay men are liable to feel incredibly insecure over their masculinity, a kind of internalized homophobia that leads them to idolize “masc 4 masc” “gaybros” and shame and oppress femme men. They’re sometimes sickeningly racist; it’s still not uncommon to see guys publicly declare a “preference” for white guys on their dating profiles, or openly exoticize and tokenize certain races. In various other ways—a resistance to the presence of women and non-cis gay men in their bars; a tendency towards groupthink in the way they dress, look and act—gay men often wear the trauma they’ve experienced from society and each other on their sleeves (or biceps, as it were).

So Mateo and I decided to make fun of it, and photoshop a fake poster for a night reflecting all that bullshit. Clint Yeager, one of my coworkers at The Eagle, threw out the name “Tox-Masc.” Soon enough, we were spitballing all kinds of funny taglines: “You Say Genderqueer, We Say Get Outta Here,” “Midnight Performances of Men Punching Each Other,” “No Drag Queens, Women Or Anything that Represents Them,” and “Only the Straightest Gogo Dancers Taking Your Gay Dollars.”

The next afternoon, Mateo’s flyer was on Facebook, and it seemed to really resonate. Gay publications wrote about it. Friends and strangers began emailing me about it, both with praise and condemnation. And those responses probably said more about gay nightlife than the poster ever could.

People sent me stories about their experiences with nights not dissimilar from our hyperbolic poster. “A few months ago I showed up at a gay bear bar here in San Francisco,” wrote a friend who identifies as genderfluid. (They asked I not disclose their name because of the nature of their story.) “I was dressed as a woman but I had my beard on, and was giving them gender-bending realness. The guy at the door told me I wasn’t welcome. I was stunned. Not welcome? Bitch, this is San Francisco. This is the one place I should always be welcome. The bar manager came out and literally told me to calm down, then to come back another time. That this wasn’t the ‘appropriate night’ for me. What the fuck does that even mean?”

“If that can happen in San Francisco, imagine what’s going on out there in the real fucking world,” they concluded. “It made me want to show them my big dick, wag it around at them in my dress, let them know where reality really is.”

“I once got a fifteen minute lecture at the door of a gay bar here in San Diego for even setting foot in there,” wrote Jess Keys, a.k.a. artist Xanadu Rocketship, who identifies as a bisexual woman, performs at local drag shows and is a well-known drag ally. “I was meeting a friend after he was done [performing]. The door guy said things like, ‘Keep your gross hands to yourself. Don’t even make eye contact with anyone. If they get aggressive with you, security is gonna let them.’ Etc. Etc. ‘If we could legally ban women, we would. Most men in here hate women.’”

“Like I’m just gonna wander into the back room and start grabbing dicks!” she wrote.

There were also angry emails that decried the rising presence of women, drag queens and femmes at gay parties, which were infuriating, to say the least.

“I personally know of a few promoters who won’t hire me because of my work with drag, trans and queer audiences,” Mateo told me in a conversation during the aftermath. “They think it somehow lessens my appeal to hyper-masculine partygoers if I play for more inclusive crowds. Or that my music will be too ‘soft’ and ‘feminine.’”

Now, it should be noted that Mateo and I both often work at bars and nights that play into our poster’s tropes, places that sometimes have bear or masculine-leaning themes. And it’s not that those themes or communities are inherently bad. The bear community started as a home for gay people who felt rejected by the beauty standards imposed by the larger gay community, which are often so keenly felt that they cause body dysmorphia and worse. And at first glance, I myself am exactly what my poster is making fun of: I present as “masculine,” a reality I acknowledge but one that makes me feel silly, because I hate referring to myself with labels. I have a beard, I work out five days a week, and people construe me as a “bear” (again, a label I hate).

The thing is, I don’t think masculinity or one’s attraction to masculine attributes are necessarily evil or bad. It’s when that masculinity or attraction becomes toxic—when it leads to toxic behaviour, becomes the penultimate way one defines what they’re attracted to, and leads them to marginalize others or erect divisions and walls between people—that it’s a problem. I might be masculine, but the word “masculine” alone is problematic to me. Like by saying “I’m masculine,” I’m somehow separating myself from other members of my community, calling attention to things that have very little to do with who I am as a human being.

Watch therapist Zach Rawlings discuss body image issues in the gay community:

“People who have reacted negatively towards the flyer are guys who don’t know the difference between masculinity and toxic masculinity,” Mateo said. “They think we’re saying everyone should be wearing a dress or something. That’s not what this is about. There are plenty of ‘cool’ parties that celebrate conventional masculinity in a positive way. What we’re talking about are a set of stereotypical, fucked up behaviors that stem from negative influences from straight, white culture—and they’ve come to invade gay nightlife in lots of gross ways.”

I’m not trying to tell anyone who they should fuck or find attractive. Fuck who you want. That’s none of my business. What is my business—and should be all of our business—is how we treat each other as a community.

I’ve said this a lot, and I mean it: we’re living under enough oppression as it is in our society. We need to treat each other with extra kindness and beauty as a result. We should defend every member of our community—and this means the larger queer community and our allies—and their right to be the fucking amazing people they are. Did we really survive AIDS, centuries of religious and political intolerance, decades of overt intolerance across America and the fight for basic civil rights only to write “masc 4 masc” on a dating profile? We should celebrate the rights and acceptance we’ve seen by championing diversity. Be as masculine or femme or gender-bending as you want. Be who you are, and celebrate who we are, together. Because divisions only weaken our community, and that impulse to divide, more often than not, is one we inherit from those who have sought to oppress us for ages. We’re only as strong as the strength and cohesion of our community.

And fuck anyone tries to tell you you don’t belong in a queer space. To paraphrase my friend: Bitch, these are places we should all always be welcome.

Follow Jeff Leavell on Twitter and Instagram.

Women are overlooked far too often in photography. How can we continue to combat this erasure? My answer is this column, “Woman Seeing Woman.” While it’s just the start of solving this problem, I, a female writer and photographer, hope to celebrate the astoundingly powerful female voices we have in photography by offering a glimpse into their work.

Whenever I think of Zora Sicher’s work, the first image that comes to mind is a young woman in a burgundy swimsuit sitting on the stoop of a Brooklyn brownstone. The woman stares into the lens unperturbed by, and even challenging, its presence. I was captivated and unable to look away, a difficult experience to engender in me as a person who sees so a lot of photography professionally and lives in our current, highly visual landscape.

The image was published during the summer of 2016 in a print spread and online slideshow by New York Magazine’s The Cut. It was part of a feature that tasked photographers with photographing their friends in the season’s best swimwear. Sicher had gathered her friends in that Brooklyn brownstone. And she shot them on film as they sat and talked and laughed and leaned and stared with their swimsuits wrinkling and their hair frizzing.

All the photos in Sicher’s contributions to the slideshow feel like a look inside a person’s life. They're a pleasant deviation from the made-up faces and well-oiled bodies in swimsuit spreads usually foist upon us. This, I would learn, was not just a directive from The Cut, but Sicher’s own style. Her work for Pringle of Scotland, Dazed, and Allure all evoke this sentiment. It's as if the person you’re looking at isn't just a hanger for advertising.

“I don’t feel good walking into a situation where there’s no conversation. It has a lot to do with the relationship between me and the person I’m photographing,” Sicher told me over the phone. She was in Mexico, where she's spent time on and off for the last few months and where she will be curating an exhibition this coming February. “I think you can tell that there’s a conversation between how the person wants to be represented [and] my lens.” She wondered if some male photographers don’t question, respect, or explore that dialogue between subject—especially female subject—and photographer the way some women do. “I’m so sick of this thing where I don’t feel like there’s any conversation between the man who’s photographing the woman. It’s like, This is the way I want to see you, this is what’s happening.” Sicher, when we spoke, was over it.

For a long time, she said, that dialogue was missing in her own work. But as she began to develop conversations with her subjects, meaning began to develop, too. “I’m in a part of my life where I just want to talk to people all the time. I want to understand where all these different people come from,” Sicher explained. “I never really wanted to be the quiet photographer.”

Follow Zora Sicher on Instagram. and see more work on her website.

Follow Elyssa Goodman on Twitter.

After her sexual assault, Kristina Cressman had no idea how to cope with constant reminders of the incident—and they were everywhere.

“I'll be scrolling on Facebook and all of a sudden I’ll see a picture of my rapist. And I just don’t know how to deal with that,” she told VICE. “It brings everything back to me.”

Cressman said her attacker was part of her friend group, and after she called him out online, many people took his side. She was devastated. After a year of struggling to cope with the assault, a friend suggested she contact Women Against Violence Against Women, or WAVAW, a feminist-oriented rape crisis centre in Vancouver. WAVAW helped Cressman with filing a police report, and set her up with a case worker. But Cressman wanted help processing the incident and the loss of her support network, so she signed up for their one-on-one counselling service.

Eight months later, Cressman is still waiting. As the only organization offering free sexual assault crisis counselling in Vancouver, the waitlist can be up to 18 months. This is an improvement from previous years, as a recent fundraiser helped the organization raise over $20,000—which allowed them to hire more counsellors and reduce wait times down from two years.

In the meantime, Cressman has been trying to cope on her own.

Kristina Cressman photo via Facebook

“I want a way to deal with triggers that randomly happen that cause me to basically relive my whole attack, to learn to trust men again. And a way to deal with when I see their faces and social media,” said Cressman.

In the wake of the #metoo and #timesup movements, WAVAW has seen an increase in people seeking counselling to process sexual assault or harassment.

"I think whenever people speak out and they take space and identify as survivors it makes more room for other people to speak out,” Jordan Pickell, a counsellor at WAVAW, said.

“Every time there’s sexual assault in the news we get a huge increase in calls. "

Pickell has worked as a one-on-one counsellor and also runs group therapy sessions. While the group therapy can be helpful for people in finding supportive community, she says that having to wait months for the one-on-one can make survivors feel unsupported. For many, it takes courage to ask for help, and then having to wait months can make them feel unsupported or invalidated.

"When people wait a year and a half for counselling, they are in a completely different place. The way they see themselves, they way they are in relationships, and [they have] anger and despair towards institutions who failed to support them,” Pickell says.

While there are other support services available to survivors in Vancouver such as the Vancouver Rape Relief crisis line, WAVAW is the only organization providing free personal counselling to help survivors process trauma. Once a person is enrolled in WAVAW’s program, they usually receive 16 individual counselling sessions, though there isn’t a limit on the number of sessions.

Sambriddhi Nepal, the manager of fund development at WAVAW, said that crisis services are helpful in the short term, but they do not replace the need for individual counselling. She explains it through the analogy of a backpack.

“People who access the crisis line can patch up small tears in the backpack, but counseling support helps you take that backpack off and look at everything inside—it helps you carry that backpack," said Nepal.

As of November 15, 2017, there were 213 survivors on WAVAW’s waitlist for one-on-one counselling. WAVAW receives core funding from the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General under the Stopping the Violence program, which funds anti-violence initiatives throughout BC. But a large portion of that funding was cut in 2012, and WAVAW has been struggling to keep up since then.

"Twelve years ago under the previous BC Liberal government we used to have core funding, which pays to keep the lights on—but that was cut for many social service organizations,” said Nepal.

“It was fully agreed the province was responsible for it and they were before, in fact they took away they responsibility, and its not acceptable.”

Compared to other cities in Canada, wait times for sexual assault counselling in Vancouver seem to be extreme. In Winnipeg, a city that the CCPA reports as having a higher than average rate of reporting sexual violence, wait times at a major downtown clinic are almost zero.

Mary-Jo Bolton, clinical director at Klinic Community Centre, says that the wait time for counselling is usually about three weeks—but that is simply due to finding a time that works for both the survivors’ and the counsellor’s schedule.

“We don’t have much of a wait. Part of that is because we use this unique model of staff counselors and trained volunteers counselors, so we have a good capacity to be responsive,” Bolton said.

Klinic has an average of 50-60 volunteers and three full time staff counselors, and receives most of its funding from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. They get donations for small items like clothing.

In Ontario, Hope 24/7 is the central sexual assault crisis centre in the Peel region. This agency is completely provincially funded, and is connected to hospitals in the region in order to provide services to survivors as soon as possible. Their waitlist is about three months for counselling.

Arvinder Lakhi, a social worker at the centre, says that their availability and outreach into the community has proven effective for many survivors.

“The model we use here has [definitely] been the most effective in the way that people who used to be frequent callers for the crisis line were able to come in for in person services and eventually stop having to come in altogether,” says Lakhi.

Back in Vancouver, Cressman is not the only one waiting for counselling and support. She has joined a Facebook support network of survivors helping each other to find resources and just vent their feelings in safe space. Cressman says it helps a little, but ultimately needs one-on-one support.

“It’s definitely been rough not having anyone to speak to,” said Cressman. “At the end of the day [friends] are helpful but they’re not counsellors, they can’t really check in with you all the time. ….most people can’t do that.”

Follow Cherise Seucharan on Twitter.

In more evidence that 2018 won't be any more sane than 2017, the polling company Rasmussen Reports went boldly where no other pollster thought to go and actually asked voters if they'd vote for Oprah Winfrey over Donald Trump in 2020. The finding: They sure would.

Rasmussen called up 1,000 likely voters on Monday and Tuesday, immediately after Oprah's powerful Golden Globes speech had a lot of pundits and others asking if the self-made billionaire and media mogul would run for the White House. Forty-eight percent of respondents favored Oprah, 38 percent backed Trump, and 14 percent were undecided. Notably, a surprising 22 percent of Republicans would vote for Oprah even though she'd presumably run as a Democrat.

There are a few big caveats here. For one, this is only a single poll. For another, the question asked voters, "If the presidential race in 2020 was between Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey, who would you vote for?" and a lot of respondents would presumably vote for almost anyone or anything running against Trump in 2020. Then there's the fact that according to her friend Gayle King, Oprah isn't considering running for anything. Finally, if Oprah did run, she'd presumably face a Democratic primary field crowded with senators and other politicians—who knows if she would make it past Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, or any of the other dozen or so potential contenders?

But if nothing else, this poll shows that the Oprah 2020 speculation isn't dying down. People may not be taking it quite seriously yet, but people didn't take Trump seriously either. Trump himself didn't seem to be worried, judging by his response to a question about her on Tuesday: “Yeah, I’ll beat Oprah. Oprah would be a lot of fun.”

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Gators, though terrifying beasts, have a great many talents. They make great pets, can propel you to social media fame, and have even been known to politely ring unsuspecting homeowners' doorbells. But one of their most spectacular (and most horrifying) skills has to do with how they survive in frigid temperatures, like the ones a recent bomb cyclone brought to the East Coast.

On Sunday, a North Carolina "swamp park" that takes care of rescued gators uploaded footage of the critters weathering the storm that brought some rare snowfall to the southern states. While the temperatures proved too brutal for some animals, the gators were just fine—frozen alive in their pond with their snouts sticking out of the water, just enough so they could still breathe.

George Howard, general manager of Shallotte River Swamp Park, took some footage of the frozen reptiles, explaining that gators have an uncanny ability to know just when the water is about to freeze—wiggling themselves into position to survive when it turns to ice. They stay that way, shutting their bodies down, until warmer weather comes through.

The swamp park's videos took off on Facebook, where folks who were worried about the alligators' well-being asked how entombing one's reptilian self in ice could possibly be a good idea. "If there is a heavy snow and covered their nose would they then die?" one commenter asked. "Why don't you break up the ice for them?" another wondered.

The swamp park assured everyone that the gators had evolved to act this way, and that they'd be fine. Once the ice had melted, the park posted a video of the beasts freeing themselves from their wintry prisons, and they began basking once more in the North Carolina sun.

Next to showing no qualms about eating one another, the whole phenomenon illustrates how gators will do just about anything to survive. If only humans could simply dive into a freezing pond, have their bodies shut down, and wait out this arctic hellscape in peace, too.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Justin Trudeau is taking another cross-country trip to do town halls again. He did this last year and he’ll probably do it again next year. This is a thing the Canadian prime minister does now, I guess. Every January he’ll go around the country and lend the people his ears in little off-season campaign rallies. What’s going on in the House? Who cares! Justin Trudeau might come to your town and give you his talking points directly.

To be fair, the events in question don’t appear to be cynically stage-managed. Yesterday in Halifax, a woman straight-up asked the guy how it feels to be “the first prime minister ever found guilty of a federal crime.”

“Guilty of a federal crime” is a rather dramatic way of phrasing Trudeau’s recent knuckle-rapping from the federal ethics commissioner. His Christmas 2016 vacation to the Aga Khan’s private Caribbean island breached sections of the Conflict of Interest Act, which is distasteful but not actually criminal. The optics are terrible and the prime minister’s “apology” was uncomfortably awkward, but it is ultimately a non-issue in the scheme of things. It would probably never have registered if it wasn’t part of a long series of optically terrible non-issues from high-profile Liberals that make the party seem like a hobby club for obnoxious millionaires.

The prime minister laughed it off and let the woman continue on to tell him that he shouldn’t take bribes. He responded by stressing how getting busted by the ethics commissioner means that “the system works” and promised that he would make sure to clear all his family vacations in the future before fumbling the rhetorical football into the endzone with something about how he’s going to work hard for the people of this country. His answer was a little weird, but his answers to everything are a little weird.

The exchange was quintessentially Canadian, in that even his heckler was very polite when asked to clarify her inflammatory statement. Credit where it’s due to Justin Trudeau: if something like that happened to Stephen Harper in front of a live studio audience, he’d drop a smoke bomb and disappear.

At no point does the prime minister bother to clarify to this woman that he never “committed a crime.” I thought this strange at first, but on reflection the only thing the man could do is not even let the word “crime” pass his lips. Anyone already convinced he is a criminal is unable or unwilling to listen to an explanation, and I’m sure his handlers stressed how bad a short video clip of Canada’s PM ‘addressing his alleged crimes’ would be.

It’s obvious to the point of banality to observe that this stink about ethics and elitism is going to continue to dog the Trudeau and the Liberals as long as they keep running afoul of the ethics commissioner through ultimately benign (if offensively decadent) ignorance. It is, after all, one of the few partisan lines of attack where the Conservatives and the New Democrats can work together and still manage to sleep at night.

More interesting is the fact that the Aga Khan Affair has already been distorted into the spectre of a criminal prime minister and his cabinet of robber barons. (This would more closely describe the John A. Macdonald government(s).) The substance of the issue will fade from the memory of most voters—recall that time the Harper Tories were ‘the first ever to be found guilty’ of contempt of Parliament and then won a majority government anyway—but it will settle somewhere in the shadows of Canada’s right-wing social media.

Our crooked prime minister, the illegitimate son of Castro and secret convert to Islam who is bankrolling Big Khadr after getting sleeper-cell instructions from Joshua Boyle about how to establish a homosexual eco-caliphate on the Ottawa river. I can already hear the furious fantasies cobbled out of a hundred half-remembered headlines. A lie gets halfway around the world before truth has time to put on its pants, or however the saying goes.

In the long run, it probably won’t make too much of a difference; if Trudeau falls in 2019, it is unlikely to be connected to riding in the Aga Khan’s helicopter no matter how sensational the fanfiction gets. It’s just neat that the country’s political discourse is slowly filling with the same kind of hyper-partisan detritus that broke the rest of Anglo-America.

At least, if the confrontation caught on video is any indication, it’ll all be handled very politely.

A diner at an Arizona restaurant slapped Harvey Weinstein and called him a "fucking piece of shit" on Tuesday while his buddy recorded the incident, TMZ reports.

Weinstein, who's reportedly been in therapy in the state, was dining at an upscale Scottsdale restaurant with his sober coach on Tuesday when apparently someone recognized him. According to TMZ, a patron named Steve walked up to the disgraced mogul during his dinner, saying that he loved his movies and asked for a picture, only to be turned down. The two shook hands and Steve went back to his seat—but when Weinstein got up to leave, the man stopped him.

Steve—who told TMZ he'd had "quite a bit to drink"—asked his friend to start recording him and marched up to Weinstein. In the cellphone footage, the man tells Weinstein to "get the fuck out of here," calling him a "fucking piece of shit" and backhanding him twice in the face.

Weinstein left the restaurant and declined to report what went down to the cops, but a Paradise Valley police spokesman told the Hollywood Reporter his department knew about the incident. If Weinstein decided to press charges, the cops could slap Steve with misdemeanor assault. On Wednesday, a Weinstein spokesperson confirmed TMZ's story to the Reporter, saying the narrative the tabloid laid out "is accurate."

Police in at least three cities are currently investigating Weinstein after more than 80 women came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment, assault, and rape. The LAPD recently made headway, sending two sex crimes cases to the LA district attorney for review.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

It's 2018 and robots are already driving cars, writing symphonies, and even penning news stories like this one. Now, apparently, our silicon friends are going to start stripping for us, too. According to the New York Post, a Las Vegas strip club will feature a pair of android dancers on the poles in honour of the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show this week.

The robot strippers are more of a publicity stunt than an actual attempt to be titillating, since they have the heads of security cameras and look like bad Banksy graffiti come to life. But the Sapphire Gentlemen's Club apparently figures it'll be a fun way to bring in some folks from CES this year.

"Come watch sparks fly as the Robo Twins shake their hardware and leave everyone wondering if those double Ds are real or made in 'Silicone' Valley," the Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club wrote in a recent announcement about their android additions.

Peter Feinstein, a managing partner at Sapphire, told the Daily Beast that the club was "looking for something creative to do during CES" that would cater to both male and female CES attendees, and decided to ship the dancing bots in from the UK for the week.

"The majority of strip clubs are not appealing to people through CES," Feinstein continued. "We’re offering a different place to go. If you’re six people from a company and there’s two women and four guys, you can still [come] here and have some fun and see the robots and not feel like you have to be part of a strip club."

As potentially silly and fun as it could be to watch some robots strip—depending on how scared you are of the looming technological apocalypse—it doesn't look like Sapphire's "Robo Twins" are particularly fancy dancers. In a video from one of their performances this week, the robots seem to mostly just bob up and down and gyrate slowly on the pole. Ex Machina, this is not.

In any case, if you're in Las Vegas and CCTV-headed robot strippers are your thing, they'll be dancing all week at Sapphire. Or just watch them boogie in the video above and marvel at how mediocre the future really is. Long live the new flesh!

Despite all the headlines about fentanyl, some Canadians still don’t really know what they’re doing or how to help in the case of an overdose, according to new Statistics Canada data.

Even though it’s predicted that 4,000 people in Canada died from opioid overdoses in 2017, only just over a quarter of Canadians know the signs of an overdose. Even less (seven percent) know how to get and use the opioid overdose antidote naloxone. The “Opioid Awareness” survey these results draw from was conducted in November and December 2017.

And though we don’t know why there is still so much ignorance, certainly stigma surrounding drugs and people who use them—which exists in societies with prohibitionist drug policy, such as Canada—can’t help.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy released a report entitled "The World Drug Perception Problem” on Wednesday that highlights the immense issue with stigma of drug use around the world. The report is presented by a number of global leaders and warns of the “vicious cycle” between the perception of people who use drugs and failed drug policy.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy is a panel of world leaders and intellectuals based in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Under a prohibitionist regime, a person who uses drugs is engaging in an act that is illegal, which increases stigma,” part of the report says. “This makes it even easier to discriminate against people who use drugs, and enables policies that treat people who use drugs as sub-humans, non-citizens, and scapegoats for wider societal problems.”

A chart shows how to de-stigmatize language surround drug use. Image via Global Commission on Drug Policy

Though cannabis will be legal this year in Canada, which the Global Commission on Drug Policy’s report points to as a “change in perception,” opioid-related deaths in the country continue to soar. When called out by a Toronto frontline worker, Zoë Dodd, on government inaction on the opioid crisis last year at a VICE talk, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said he was “not there yet” when it came to alternative drug policy such as decriminalization.

Sir Nick Craig, former UK Deputy Prime Minister and one of the presenters of the Global Commission report, said in a press release, “Current drug policies are all too often based on perceptions and passionate beliefs, not facts… Those who do develop problems [with drugs] need our help, not the threat of criminal punishment.”

Awareness in Canada of the country’s overdose crisis, at least, seems to be on the uptick, despite its prime minister’s current stance on drug policy. Statistics Canada showed that, overall, 77 percent of Canadians are aware of “the opioid issue.” However, 36 percent of those surveyed said would not want family or friends to know if they were using opioids without a prescription; 14 percent said even with a prescription they wouldn’t want people to know.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report outlines how media also contributes to public perception of drug use. “Two narratives of drugs and people who use them have been dominant: one links drugs and crime, the other suggests that the devastating consequences of drug use on an individual are inevitable,” the report reads.

The report also calls out of the false narrative of “moral failing” surrounding drug use—assumptions that a person who uses drugs is “weak” or “immoral.” The reality of drugs, it claims, is that people use them for a number of reasons: “youthful experimentation, pursuit of pleasure, socializing, enhancing performance, and self-medication to manage moods and physical pain.”

The Global Commission recommends a number of measures that could be taken to counter prejudices about people who use drugs, including: that policy makers try to change the perception surrounding people who use drugs by providing consistent and reliable info; that leaders “live up to their responsibility in shaping public opinions and perceptions,” such as promoting destigmatized language; and that citizens take part in debate and activism. It also calls for the end of harassment of people who use drugs by law enforcement, such as unwarranted searches and racial profiling.

Ruth Dreifuss, former president of Switzerland and chair of the Global Commission, said that we must stop stigmatizing people who use drugs because it leads to discrimination and “supports repressive drug laws” based on the aforementioned moral judgment.

“Whether you think of someone and refer to them as a person who uses drugs or a ‘junkie’ makes a huge difference in how you and society will treat them,” Dreifuss said. “This vicious cycle, which has been fueled for decades, must be broken. Opinion leaders should live up to their responsibility in shaping public perceptions on drugs, promoting non-discriminatory language, and respecting the full rights of all citizens.”

On an all-new episode of VICELAND's MOST EXPENSIVEST, 2 Chainz gets ready for the end of the world with the team behind Preppi, a company specializing in emergency survival kits. He sifts through a $10,000 luxury bag called the "Prepster Black" item by item—checking out a 24-pack of "special survival water," a $350 satellite communicator, and a $2,500 bar of solid gold meant to keep you stacked even if global currencies collapse.

MOST EXPENSIVEST airs at 10:30 PM on VICELAND. Find out how to tune in here.

If you’re a young person living in a major North American city, chances are you’re salty as hell about how expensive it is to get by.

From rent to transit to take-out food and booze, shit adds up. If you’re not careful, you’ll very likely end up thousands of dollars in debt and living in a glorified closet (literally me.)

But according to a recent report by MoveHub, an organization that promotes moving abroad, all hope is not lost. MoveHub recently ranked 30 cities around the world to see which ones are best for broke millennials, factoring in things like cheap food, transit costs, and rent versus monthly income. They gave each city a score out of 100.

Unsurprisingly, eight of the top 10 cities are in Europe, with Edinburgh topping the list.

Apparently Edinburgh, which got a score of 82.95, has the “highest density of cheap eats” and monthly rent—roughly $950 a month for a one-bedroom—takes up 32.5 percent of monthly income. Scotland’s capital also has cool architecture and is relatively safe.

Berlin, famed for its insane nightlife, is number three on the list with a score of 78.25, won the housing affordability category, with residents spending 25.6 percent of their income on rent, which is only $790 a month for the average one-bedroom. Vienna, Prague, and Madrid also cracked the top five.

Mumbai, India is one of only two non-European cities in the top 10. (The other one in Melbourne, Australia.) According to MoveHub, monthly transit in Mumbai is dirt cheap at $15.

As for cities to avoid, it’s all the usual suspects. London’s monthly transit costs approximately $240 and its rent takes up more than 52 percent of monthly income, which is why it came in 30th out of 32 cities.

San Francisco, where the average rent is $3,268 a month for a one-bedroom, came in 29th place. New York City came in 26th with the average one-bedroom costing over $2,256.

Toronto, the only Canadian city on the list, placed 18th, with the average rent for a one-bedroom clocking in at around $1,300, according to MoveHub data. (We have a feeling if Montreal had been in the running, it would've done a lot better.)

Sao Paulo, Brazil came in dead last, scoring poorly in cheap eats and safety, while renters there spend around 64 percent of their income on their homes.

In a nutshell, if you’re sick of living paycheque to paycheque, move to Europe.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

One of my favorite shows growing up was the early 90s sketch comedy series The State. It was like a proto–weird Twitter, and the actors that comprised the troupe went on to create a lot of my other favorite shows and films, including Wet Hot American Summer, Stella, and Reno 911. A standout of the pack, for me at least, was Michael Ian Black—a boyish and bubbly oddball who appeared in all these things, as well as being a regular guest on I Love the 90s. (He also contributed to VICE back in 2012.)

Unfortunately for me, this particular hero of mine happens to have a Twitter account, and uses it—a lot. Although he has always been known for his vaguely liberal opinions online, on this occasion Mike used the passage of the insanely ghoulish GOP tax bill to uh, defend conservative commentator Meghan McCain? Given her politics and the fact that her family (she’s the daughter of Arizona Senator John McCain and businesswoman Cindy McCain) likely stood to gain millions from this tax bill it was unsurprising that she was full-throatedly supporting it, and attacking those who dared defy her on this. But what was surprising (even though I guess it shouldn’t be), was a member of the so-called #resistance refusing to call out a Republican friend.

Michael Ian Black and Meghan McCain actually co-authored a book about getting along despite having different politics or some dumb bullshit back in 2012. When I poked fun at this, mostly out of annoyance with one of my comedic idols, Ian Black snapped: He accused me of being a coward for using a cartoon avatar, of being too judgemental, and eventually capped it all by (bafflingly) trying to use to the ongoing genocide of Rohingya Muslims as uh, an attempt to dunk on purity politics? I honestly couldn’t figure that one out.

The whole interaction, which admittedly saw many of my followers piling onto Mike (who has millions more followers and is much more rich and powerful than I am), saw Mike having a bit of a meltdown. It was genuinely a large bummer for me, but it also caused some of my friends and followers to share some stories of interacting with their own heroes online, almost all of which went uh, poorly.

The most amazing of which was now-defunct user @nasboat and his years-long feud with Blues Traveller frontman John Popper. Everything started when in 2014, Buzzfeed published a story that brought up an old Behind the Music nugget about how at one point Popper was supposedly to fat to masturbate.

Popper responded by hurling invectives at the Buzzfeed writer from the official Blues Traveler account, which unsurprisingly brought on a storm of people making fun of this rich famous person and their hilariously thin-ass skin, including the guy behind the account @nasboat.

Here's where things get more complicated: In 2015, one of his friends created a Twitter bot, @assbott, a little piece of code that sent tweets complied of phrases it pulled from @nasboat’s tweets. This account apparently tweeted a gibberish version of the “John Popper can’t honk off” rumor, and Popper came across it (presumably while obsessively searching his own name online). At this moment, something in his brain broke, and the lead singer of Blues Traveller spent the next two years obsessively seething against @nasboat eventually getting to the point where he posted @nasboat’s address, name, employer, and aerial photos of his house.

While this is definitely an uh, intense example of this trend online, it's far from an anomaly. In 2011, James Franco (like Ian Black, another onetime VICE contributor) responded to a poor review of his Oscar hosting duty with a picture that said “FUCK THE YALE DAILY NEWS”, setting off a mini-online storm. That same year, then Arizona Cardinals quarterback Derek Anderson got an insomniac late-night fight with a fan over pass coverages. More recently, last year the (white) reality star Kendra Wilkinson photographed herself picking cotton on a road trip, and when people (correctly) called her out on this she melted down, yelling that her father-in-law is black or some shit. This stuff happens pretty much every day now—as you read this, a moderately famous person is getting into a pointless spat that’s insulting for everyone involved.

Before the internet, we could reasonably believe all of our heroes—or our beloved celebs, same difference really—to be dignified and generally better people, capable of staying above the fray. Their politics didn’t matter; and nobody was demanding to know what the lead singer of the Goo Goo Dolls thought about immigration reform. If they were a big enough celebrity, they could hire a team of PR people and handlers who would prevent the world from knowing about their suckier qualities—think about how many people made a living in the 90s simply by keeping world from knowing how shitty a person Michael Jordan was.

But that’s over now. We are free to interact with our idols, who are all too often brought down by the weight of their own shitass opinions and rants. The thing is, I still love Michael Ian Black’s work. I will never stop loving The State or Wet Hot American Summer. They both rule and nobody can convince me otherwise. I’m sure Michael Ian Black is a cool guy to hang out with. Hell, I still like that one Blues Traveller song from 1995 that slaps. But I’m not quite sure yet how to square these things with the fact that Twitter has given us an endless feed of reasons to stop liking these people all together.

K.T. Nelson tweets as Krang.

On The VICE Guide to Right Now, VICE's daily podcast, we delve into the biggest news of the day and give you a rundown of the stories we're reading, working on, and fascinated with.

Today we talk about Trump's possible interview with Robert Mueller, the 200,000 El Salvador immigrants getting kicked out of the country, and North Korea's Olympic athletes. Then we talk about how the world's largest biometric ID system—India's Aadhaar—keeps getting hacked, putting millions of people at risk.

You can catch The VICE Guide to Right Now Podcast on Acast, Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Earlier this week, Action on Armed Violence released a report detailing a staggering jump in civilian casualties from explosive ordinance in 2017 – more than 15,000 were killed, up by 42 percent from 2016. The report suggested that this increase was largely caused by airstrikes, primarily in Iraq, Syria and Yemen – so I got back in touch with Chris Woods, the man behind Airwars, an independent monitoring group tracking civilian casualties in the war on Islamic State (IS), who we first spoke with in 2016.

I wanted to get a better idea of the factors that made 2017 an especially deadly year for civilians, and what – if anything – the US-led coalition has done to stem these deaths.

This interview has been edited for length.

WATCH:

VICE: First off, do the alarming findings of the report from AOAV tally with what you have seen in terms of civilian casualties in 2017?
Chris Woods: Our focus at the moment is only on Iraq and Syria, and just in that theatre, 2017 was a terrible year for civilian harm. Certainly there was a significant rise in civilian deaths that we tracked from international military actions in those two countries, which entirely chimes with the very bad news that other NGOs and international agencies have been reporting.

When you see an uptick in reports of civilian casualties, what are the key factors you would usually expect to be driving that?
Whether you are looking at allegations against Russia, the coalition or Iraqi ground forces, there are always a few strong determinates when it comes to civilian harm. Allegations are usually clustered around specific offences, so with an attack on a particular town or city or region we will always see a spike in civilian harm. But what we also saw very strongly in 2017 was a correlation between the intensity of bombardment and outcomes for civilians. So, bluntly, the more bombs and missiles dropped in a particular area, the greater the risk to civilians. That sounds obvious, but it’s actually quite difficult to get data that supports that. But we got a lot of it in 2017.

So there were more airstrikes overall, but what were the other factors that led to this alarming rise in civilian casualties?
The biggest issue we saw in 2017 – particularly if we look at the US-led coalition – was that the war moved very heavily into cities. That, more than any other single factor, resulted in the deaths of many more civilians and casualty events. We saw a similar pattern at the back end of 2016, when Russia and the Assad regime heavily bombed east Aleppo. There’s a very strong correlation between attacks on cities and large numbers of civilian casualties. And frankly, it doesn’t matter who’s carrying out those attacks. The outcome for civilians is always dire.

Which changes to the way the war was prosecuted last year led to this move to urban areas and this increase in airstrikes?
One of the criticisms the Trump administration levelled at Obama was that he was too cautious in his war on [the Islamic State]. But there was a reason for that caution, which was about limiting civilian harm as much as possible. We saw far fewer civilian casualties, relatively speaking, for the number of strikes under Obama than Trump. The one moment at which that shifted a bit was in the battle for east Mosul, which began in November, 2016.

About six weeks into that campaign, the Americans and Iraqis took stock. It had been a very tough campaign for Iraqi ground forces – some accounts put casualties in Iraqi special forces as high as one in three. That’s a very high toll indeed for elite troops. The reason those casualties were so high is that they were going in and clearing houses by hand. One reason the Iraqis gave for having to do that was that it was too hard to call in airstrikes. In the closing weeks of the Obama administration the rules of engagement were changed, meaning it was far easier to call in airstrikes. We saw an immediate transfer of risk from Iraqi forces onto the civilian population.

When Trump came in we saw a significant continuation of that. Things didn’t get any better under Trump for civilians – in fact, they got a lot worse. One of the reasons for that was the intensity of the bombardment. We saw an absolutely ferocious bombing campaign by the US and its allies in both Mosul and Raqqa in 2017. Between those two cities, the coalition alone dropped 50,000 munitions. One bomb or missile was dropped on Raqqa every 12 minutes, on average, for the duration of the four-month battle.

You said earlier that it doesn’t really matter who’s doing the bombing, which might surprise some people, given the criticism levelled at Russia in the past for its wide use of dumb-bombs over guided munitions… can you talk more about the weapons used and how that impacts civilian casualties?
When Russia and the Assad regime were bombing Aleppo in late 2016, we had assumed that a key reason for the large number of civilian casualties was down to the fact they were primarily using dumb-bombs. We have actually changed our modelling since then, based on what we have seen with the coalition in places like Raqqa and Mosul. The reason is that even when you use precision bombs on cities, really, the outcome for civilians is the same as a dumb bomb. You can’t control for what the bombs do when they land.

We saw very little difference between Russian and coalition strikes when it came to bombing cities. This is the big problem we have with a shift to urban warfare – it’s really taking us to the limits of any benefits we might have in terms of protecting civilians by using precision munitions.

So the whole post-Gulf War Western military narrative of "surgical strikes" is effectively out the window when those strikes are on built-up areas?
Yes. The single clearest example of that was in March, 2017, when the US conducted a very precise airstrike on IS fighters, dropping two 500lb bombs on the roof of a house in an area of Mosul called Al Jadidah. They didn’t know, however, that there were more than 100 civilians sheltering in the basement of that building, who all died when it collapsed. So that was a very precise strike, but precision didn't help at all there – in fact, precision was part of the problem; it was the absence of intelligence that led to those deaths.

The first time we spoke there was, you said, a huge disparity in terms of coalition members’ levels of transparency and accountability. Has the mounting civilian death-toll forced any improvement in that area?
It's been a surprise for us just how little transparency and accountability we've had from most coalition members, including countries like the Netherlands, France and Canada – countries you might have expected better from. Perhaps the other big surprise has been that the United States has been by far the most accountable nation in the war. Indeed, accountability significantly improved for the majority of Trump’s first year in office. That was against expectations and a very positive thing. The US admitted the civilian casualty event at Al Jadidah. Had the strike been from one of the US' allies, we may still have never had any formal recognition of that harm.

How does the UK rate on this?
The UK is a real problem, as is France. Between them, they have conducted more than 3,000 strikes. In 2017, most of those strikes were in urban areas. During the battle of Mosul, Michael Fallon put out a statement boasting that British aircraft had destroyed 750 targets inside Mosul, second only to the United States. And yet the UK claims zero civilian casualties from its strikes. The AP recently released a report suggesting that as many as 10,000 civilians died in Mosul – at least a third of them killed by air or artillery strikes. So something is clearly going very wrong with British monitoring of civilian harm.

Interestingly, the UK are one of the most transparent members of the coalition – they give us far more information about what they're doing, where and when. That's a good thing. But transparency hasn’t led to accountability for the British. We have been pushing for a proper independent inquiry into British battle-damage assessments. We just don't think they are fit for purpose – they are, it seems, incapable of detecting civilian harm.

In terms of the raw numbers of casualties, just how bad was 2017?
This has been a long, hot war. We're in the fourth year of the war on IS, and it’s still not over. More than 100,000 munitions have been dropped, more than 30,000 airstrikes and artillery strikes. It’s a very intense war. It has seen the highest numbers of civilian casualties from Western actions – for the US and Australia – since Vietnam. For the British and European allies, probably the highest numbers of civilian casualties in a conflict they have been directly involved in since Korea. These are levels of civilian harm we have not seen in generations.

Looking toward 2018, I assume there’s a predicted dip in civilian casualties with the effective end of the battles for the key urban IS strongholds?
The war – especially in Syria – is cyclical. And coalition actions there have now declined. But Russian actions have accelerated. There have been 30 alleged Russian casualty events in the last week. The UN is reporting that 70,000 Syrians are on the move right now because of the Russian and Syrian offensive. So while coalition strikes might be going down for the moment, from the Russian-led side they have gone up.

We are also worried that in 2017 there were some extremely worrying precedents set. There is no doubt that war is moving deeply back into cities in a way it hasn’t for decades. According to the UN, the attack on Mosul in 2017 was the biggest urban assault since WWII and resulted in thousands of civilian deaths.

I think we are becoming far too complacent about this kind of shift in warfare. And our militaries and governments are not taking this seriously enough. There is no way we can protect civilians when war moves into cities. Yet, here we are, with our governments bombing in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan pretty much day in, day out.

This is not something any of us should be comfortable with.

In the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, economic experts and TV pundits were incredulous.

In a testimony to a government committee in 2008, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, one of the key proponents of bank deregulation and a titan of neoliberal economics, confessed he didn’t "fully understand why [the crisis] had happened". Scrabbling around to make sense of the chaos, many experts blamed a few "bad apples". Others, like Greenspan, were more honest, admitting to the committee that there was a "flaw in the model of how I perceived the world works". As our television screens, our radios, our broadsheets and our tabloids communicated this collective meltdown, voices that were truly critical of the economic system were absent.

Things are different now, with an increasing number of left-wing voices appearing on TV news and across the airwaves. That’s no coincidence.

Founded in 2013, the New Economy Organisers Network (NEON) is dedicated to training up a new generation of media pundits to shift the national discourse on economic inequality, racism and migrants’ rights, as well as coaching organisers and connecting activist groups. Where, before, TV producers and commissioning editors might not have had the networks to find left-wing voices to talk on these issues, NEON’s training and infrastructure have provided a roster of experts ready-made for media appearances. Since its inception in 2014, NEON-trained spokespeople have made over 700 appearances on shows such as the Today programme, Channel 4 News and Sky’s Morning Papers.

"We’d often hear a recognition from TV news producers that [in the past] there was a lack of progressive voices on their shows," says Rosie Baines, 33, Press Officer for the NEON. "But then they’d say this was because they’d struggle to find people willing to go on TV – and I think there’s an element of truth in that."

Originally a part of influential left-wing think-tank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), NEON was co-founded by Daniel Vockins, 32, as a reaction to "progressive causes losing across the board" in the wake of the financial crisis. From his experiences organising against the marketisation of education at the University of Sussex, to campaigning against climate change for organisation 10:10, Vockins came to believe that the left were fractured around single issue campaigns and needed to coalesce around broader, more systemic answers to the problems they were trying to solve. Moving onto the role of the Head of Campaigns in NEF, Vockins began working on a project called "The Great Transition", where the seeds of NEON were planted. Tasked with researching social movements to find the best solutions and forms of organising to create fundamental change, Vockins and his team found much of its inspiration in the very ideology it was trying to replace.

"The amazing thing about the neoliberal project – for example, the Mont Pelerin society and the Atlas Network – was how methodical they were," says Vockins. "They created 450 think-tanks around the world, about 80 of them who shared the same mission statement. They had thought really consistently: how do you do the policy, how do you influence the politicians, how do you have the civil society groups that are going to be out there opening up space around this stuff? They systematically created the infrastructure to essentially rule the Western world."

"The civil rights movement is a great example of the kind of organising that we aspire to," says Vockins. "Very few people know that there were training institutes that trained Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King to be the organisers and spokespeople that they were. Parks didn’t just sit down on the bus one day – there was a whole movement ecology and infrastructure that happened there."

New Economics Foundation spokesperson Alice Martin appears on the BBC World Service. (Photo courtesy of NEON)

Expecting another economic crash around the corner, NEON’s spokesperson plans to capitalise on right-wing economic failure and develop a left-wing hegemonic project in its wake. "We thought, and still think, based on what trusted economists are saying out there, there’s going to be a financial crisis on the way at some point," says Vockins. "So from the start of NEON our thinking was: what’s going to put social and economic justice campaigners in the best position so that the next time there’s a crash we don’t get another lost decade?"

For NEON, the problem hasn’t just been a lack of progressive voices, but a lack of range and diversity. "Our main focus is shifting the debate in the mainstream media," says Rosie Baines. "But it's also about diversifying the voices – we really wanted to get away from the position we were in, where producers and bookers would only go to [Guardian columnist] Owen Jones to get a progressive perspective. He’s obviously great, but he can’t be on every news channel."

NEON’s two-day programme ranges from basic technical knowledge – where to look while being filmed, how to sit, how to project your voice – to the more tricky prospect of conveying radical ideas in a way that is digestible for wider society. "If you move in lefty circles, there’s often a lot of jargon that people wouldn’t understand and would make them switch off," says Baines. "Our job is to teach the spokespeople how to convey these often complex ideas in ways that are common sense."

One technique that NEON teaches is what’s known in the game as the pivot – essentially acknowledging the question that an interviewer asked before moving to what you actually want to talk about. "You see politicians do this quite frequently, and it can get annoying," says Ashok Kumar, a lecturer in International Political Economy at Birkbeck University, a NEON trainee and a regular pundit on Sky News and the BBC’s World Business Report. "Someone asks a question, you immediately see an acknowledgment, a pivot, and then they’re able to get their political point across, which may be more relevant, or something they might be more comfortable talking about."

However, this tactic is put under much less scrutiny, Kumar says, if you’re an academic, rather than a politician who a presenter feels they need to hold accountable. "On the BBC World Business Report they’ll ask me questions where the hegemonic terms of debate are this unalloyed commitment to profit and capital accumulation," says Kumar. "But I’m often taking what they’re saying, pivoting and trying to get a political point across that isn’t completely left field, but is perhaps something more radical and outside the terms they have set. I’m perhaps able to get away with it, where maybe presenters would be a little harsher on elected politicians."

Not all guests on rolling-news get an easy ride, though, and NEON has drafted in Ed Miliband’s ex-spin doctor Tom Baldwin to role-play as a tough interviewer.

WATCH:

Polly Trenow, 32, a member of the management committee of the Women’s Budget Group, has, with the help of NEON, developed a routine to get her through appearances on shows such as Women’s Hour, the Today programme and perhaps the most demanding of all, Nick Ferrari on LBC. "One of the most important things we learnt was to be able to fit all your prep on the back of an envelope," says Trenow. "I write down the name of the presenter, a reminder to smile, three key points, two stats to back it up and a memorable ending line that’ll sum up my argument."

Physical warm-ups are also an essential part of the pre-interview routine. "I’ll do this thing called a power pose, where I’ll stand with my arms raised aloft," says Trenow. "I look like a dick, but the psychology is that by standing there and taking up space you boost your endorphin levels and raise your testosterone levels. It’s silly, but I really like it."

For Trenow, though, the most important way to nullify an interviewer like Ferrari is light-heartedness. If you lose your cool, he’s won. "He tries to rile you to make you come across like a squawky, angry feminist," says Trenow. "But if you maintain good humour, smile, make some jokes, take the piss out of him a bit, he’s normally manageable. It’s important to remember that’s his job, and to not take it personally."

Kumar also sees humour as an underrated tactic. "Being able to have a bit of bants isn’t really respected enough on the left," he says, "but it allows you the space to then come quite hard in, say, critiquing imperialism. I’m going to make fun of a presenter’s love of cats – or whatever dumb thing we end up talking about on the Sky morning paper review – and then I’m going to talk about how British colonialism was a monstrosity. You want to be personable, but then give a very understandable, palatable story about something that’s tangible."

If another crash does come, thanks to organisations like NEON, maybe there’ll be a constructive way out of the chaos. For organisers like Daniel Vockins, the response to such a catastrophe will have been years in the making. "People think that large scale political and economic change comes about at the point that the election happens, or at the point that you get some seismic shift," he says. "But there is normally ten or 20 years of history that have led to that moment being possible."

If the stock markets crash, and the world stands still again, the ground has been readied for change that could determine the course of history.

@casperhughes2

“No sugar, no cream, Tim Hortons don’t be mean.”

This was just one of the catchier slogans the group of about 25 strong standing in front of a Toronto Tim Hortons on Wednesday chanted. This protest wasn’t unique; throughout the day on Wednesday, at least 15 demonstrations took place across the province. After a week of Canadians being extremely mad online, VICE visited several of the rallies in Toronto to see just how pissed off Canucks were at their favourite coffee shop.

Organized in less than 48 hours by activists with Fight for $15 and Fairness and Workers' Action Centre, the rallies were held across Ontario in major cities like Toronto, others in small towns like Cobourg. The unifying factor among the various protests was anger over the way in which a number of Tim Hortons franchises were treating their workers.

The rallies were sparked by the news that some Tim Horton franchisees, in response to a recent minimum wage hike, decided to claw back their worker's benefits and paid breaks. The minimum wage hike—introduced by the Ontario government in November—saw Ontario’s wage go from $11.40 to $14 at the start of the new year and will jump to $15 next year.

The main catalyst for the discontent was the franchise in Cobourg run by Tim Horton's heirs Jeri-Lynn Horton-Joyce (Tim Horton’s daughter) and Ron Joyce Jr. (the son of Ron Joyce, who co-founded the chain). According to Forbes, Ron Joyce Jr.’s father is worth is about $1.4 billion and the stark difference between the net worth of the owners and their treatment of the workers pissed off a hell of a lot of Canadians.

Pam Frache is the coordinator behind the 15 for Fairness movement in Ontario and was a key figure in putting together the rallies across the province. Frache told VICE she felt "revulsion and disgust" upon hearing about the Cobourg franchise employees and believes that many Canadians feel similar.

"If you imagine what it was like for ordinary working people to read the story about how the heirs to the Tim Hortons fortune sitting poolside from their villa in Florida to be issuing a memo to the workers in Cobourg saying 'as a result of the minimum wage increase, we're no longer going to be giving you paid breaks and we're going to make your basic health and dental benefits more expensive It's such a cruel and callous thing to do,” said Frache outside a Bloor Street Tim Hortons.

"People are outraged across Ontario, across Canada and actually, increasingly, internationally as well.”

A little later in the day, another action took place in a York University food court—a place that isn’t exactly conducive to protests or rallies. Despite the awkward setting, which, admittedly, allowed the protesters escape the cold weather, about 30 people handed out leaflets.

Alex Hunsberger, a 27-year-old law student at the university, helped organize the campaign. Hunsberger told VICE that the focus of the rallies was to get Restaurant Brands International (RBI), the owners of Tim Hortons (as well as Burger King and Popeyes) to “put their money where their mouth is and actually force their franchisees to keep their hands off their workers wages, benefits, breaks and other things workers have received.”

After backlash against the franchisees cutting benefits reached a fever pitch, RBI released a statement saying, “These recent actions by a few restaurant owners, and the unauthorized statements made to the media by a ‘rogue group’ claiming to speak on behalf of Tim Hortons, do not reflect the values of our brand, the views of our company or the views of the overwhelming majority of our dedicated and hardworking Restaurant Owners.”

Due to the number of rallies, many protesters attended more than just one. A familiar face at several was Beixi Liu, who was accompanied by a sign made specifically for selfies. As the rain came down outside yet another Tim Hortons—this one on Bloor Street in Toronto—Liu told VICE that the rallies weren’t going to stop and that one was already planned for next Monday outside of RBI’s headquarters.

"Tim Hortons should take responsibility, look at CEO Daniel Schwartz,” Lui told VICE. “He makes over 300 times what the average Tim Hortons [worker] makes in a year. He makes almost $7 million and workers barely make $20,000 a year, that's outrageous. He should show leadership to do things fair and treat workers fairly.”

Next to Lui, chanting away, was a man named Dante Pettapicce, a student at the University of Toronto who said he has managed a cafe in the past. Pettapicce told VICE that he feels for the franchise owners in regards to the changes but that the onus is on them to not take it out on their workers and for the corporate side of the business to help the franchisees.

"The drive for profit shouldn't be shifted back onto the workers,” said Pettapicce. “If the business owners want to band together, if they want to go protest against a property tax they can do it, don't shift it back to us, we're the ones trying to get out from under everything."

"It's really disappointing that today there still isn't compassion,” he added. “I don't know how to label it, but there isn't a lot of appreciation for where everyone else is, where the working class is.”

The protests did seemingly little to affect business, however, as there was a steady stream of customers going in and out of Timmy’s throughout—although some would hide their face from the protesters. While the point of this particular action wasn’t a boycott—a popular meme on social media called for one on Tuesday—some of the protests did weakly yell “c’mon guys, boycott” but they were, obviously, fighting a losing battle.

That didn’t bother the organizers, however. They believe the damage has already been done to Tim Horton's reputation.

“You’ve seen all the commercials of people dropping their kids off at hockey practice or politicians saying they’re a ‘Tim Hortons person’ as a synonym for a common person,” Hunsberger told VICE. “They’ve tied themselves to Canadian identity. What we’re saying is that we don’t think the values that are being shown here by the franchisees are Canadian values in terms of fairness, decency, honesty—those values that are important to Canadians.”

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It's really not a good idea to get on an Uber driver's bad side—a lesson one DC couple learned the hard way. Apparently things got a little heated in the car, and halfway through the ride, one of the passengers started recording, capturing a fight of epic proportions.

On Wednesday's Desus & Mero, the hosts reviewed the insane footage, applauded the driver's zingers, and judged the riders' petty retorts during the wildly uncomfortable ride. While it's still unclear what prompted the fight, it's safe to say the housewife and her hesitant hubby are probably switching over to Lyft.

You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

Gold-mining sites in northern Niger tend to have an origin story, exaggerated with each retelling. In the case of Emzigar, located in the shadow of a mountain by the same name, it was an ethnic Tuareg nomad named Cherif who, as he tended to his camels and goats, found an interesting-looking rock.

Cherif thought it might be one of the stones that Tuareg artisans use to make jewellery. He brought it to a friend, who recognised it as gold. Cherif, legend has it, had stumbled upon 40 grams of what locals have come to call "a gift from God",” valued on the local market at roughly $1,400 (£1,036), more than three times Niger’s per capita annual income.

Within days, hundreds of people had come to Emzigar. Within weeks, the previously uninhabited plot was a tent city of several thousand, replete with shops, restaurants and a private health clinic. Emzigar is only one – and by no means the largest – of hundreds of encampments that have proliferated throughout Niger’s mountainous, desert north.

WATCH:

Niger’s current gold rush began in 2014, when, according to another legend, an ethnic Toubou herder in the Djado plateau, near Niger’s northeast border with Libya, discovered a large stone the size of a date, or – depending on who you ask – an orange. The news spread throughout the region, and tens of thousands of men, young and old, descended on Djado, leaving behind livelihoods as farmers and herders which are increasingly tenuous due to climate change.

Closer to the Algerian border, a site known as Tchibarakaten also exploded, with businessmen installing infrastructure such as water towers, shops, restaurants, a field hospital and light fixtures to meet the demands of thousands of new arrivals. A new class of gold barons emerged, many of whom are familiar names associated with smuggling and narco-trafficking who enjoy close relationships with high-level government officials.

The last miners working the pit in Tazizalete, which has largely been abandoned. According to a captain in the National Guard, there were at least 2,000 people at this site four months ago, and the amount of 4X4 vehicles and large trucks was “incalculable”.

The Nigerien government closed the Djado gold fields in April of 2017, citing security concerns amid stories of armed Chadian and Sudanese groups active in the mining areas. The region’s governor, Sadou Soloké, says the government wants to re-open Djado to the public in an organised and regulated manner, but rumours abound that foreign companies are working to secure permits, which activists are already comparing to the deals that allowed French and Chinese companies to corner the uranium and oil markets in Niger.

With the closure of Djado, the gold rush expanded south to the base of the Aïr mountains. Shop owners and equipment vendors from as far as Sudan and Mauritania have come to these once secondary mining sites, while hundreds of people from Niger’s urban centres and towns in the south arrive daily, hoping to get rich quick.

A truck belonging to the Nigerien National Guard approaches Emzigar, a mountain at the base of the Aïr mountain range in southern Niger.

Northern Niger, a place of rebellions and uprisings in recent decades, has long embraced a spirit of freedom from state control. The transport of licit and illicit goods – fuel, foodstuffs, weapons, people and drugs – through the desert and across borders is a way of life for entire communities. The recent gold rush only reinforced images of a lawless "Wild West". Armed bandits intercept gold convoys, and the area is awash with weapons that have been circulating since stockpiles in Libya were looted during the chaos that followed Muammar Gaddafi’s demise.

The gold rush comes at a time of extreme uncertainty for a country trying to cope with the aftershocks of civil wars in neighbouring Mali and Libya, the Boko Haram insurgency in neighbouring Nigeria and a recent spate of attacks by jihadist groups in its own territory (including the attack on the 4th of October, 2017 in which four American soldiers were killed).

Northern Niger once boasted a thriving tourism economy, but when Western embassies deemed the area unsafe for their citizens in the late-2000s – in part due to a Tuareg-led rebellion in 2007 – the tourism sector collapsed. For a time, the local economy was kept afloat by jobs related to uranium mining, remittances from Nigeriens working in Libya, and later by the fledgling gold economy.

A truck full of prospective gold miners arrives in Tabelot, at the gates of Gidan Daka.

There was also a robust migrant smuggling industry, with Niger serving as the principal gateway for migrants and asylum seekers from West Africa travelling to Libya with aspirations of boarding boats to Europe. Local officials welcomed the economic boom driven by migrant smuggling, but amid pressure from the European Union to stem the flow of migrants passing through its territory, the Nigerien government cracked down on the industry in late 2015 and early 2016.

The move has proved massively unpopular among locals in the city of Agadez and other smuggling hubs, and although migrant smuggling continues, the Nigerien government estimates that more than 6,000 people working in the migrant smuggling industry have lost their livelihoods. The US is building a drone base on the outskirts of Agadez, adding a new layer of inquietude as locals fear that freedom of movement will be further restricted as they prepare for life with armed robots flying overhead.

Gold, locals hope, will be a lifeline amid economic collapse.

"Agadez is tourism and migration. Both have been cut off, so it is total misery," says Mahamane Elhadj Souleymane, who represents over 90 tribes throughout the region as chief of the Kel Eweye Tuareg confederation. "Now, people go work themselves to death looking for gold."

A gold miner in Emzigar smiles as he finds what might be a piece of earth containing several grams of gold.

The gold fields are in locations which Western embassies have designated as unsafe for their citizens to travel, and the Nigerien government often restricts the movement of "western" foreigners as a result. I'm able to access certain gold sites by embedding with Niger’s national guard, who periodically patrol the area to keep tabs on security.

The patrol begins with a visit to Emzigar and continues along the interior of the Aïr mountains, passing by new sites that are yet to be named and old ones that were picked clean and abandoned before they received a moniker.

Issouf Djibril, left, peers into a pan that contains a mix of water, soil and mercury, to see if a prospective plot contains gold, in the tent city of Fasso.

In the encampment of Fasso, 28-year-old Issouf Djibril peers into a murky mix of water, earth and mercury. Djibril left his work as a gardener in southern Libya three years ago as soon as he heard about the gold rush outside his native city of Agadez. He has established himself as an expert in finding undiscovered plots. "I liked my work in Libya, but I like gold better," he explains. "I make more and I'm closer to home. I made enough money to get married, so I am happy."

The military patrol finishes in Tabelot, a once sleepy market town whose population has swelled from 4,000 in 2014 to 38,000 and counting. Merchants in Tabelot once served the needs of nomads, pastoralists and farming communities that live atop the Bagzane plateau which overlooks the city. Now, they cater almost exclusively to the artisanal mining economy, which has transformed the town into a hub of industry.

On the outskirts of Tabelot, an area known as "Gidan Daka" – which translates from Hausa, the region’s language of commerce, to "House of Grinders" – hosts 6,000 men and boys processing bags of earth for a few dollars a day. The work is gruelling, and it's not clear that the payoff is worth it, but grinders like Ahmed Ibrahim say they have little choice.

Ahmed Ibrahim

"There is no work in Maradi so I came here," explains the 24-year-old father of two daughters aged two and four, who has been in Gidan Daka for one week. Ibrahim talks through a Turban caked in dust, and the incipient crows feet around his eyes are accentuated by dirt and sweat. "If I find money, I'll send it back home," he says.

While stories of people who have made a fortune in gold ricochet throughout the Aïr mountains, one has to squint to see anything resembling wealth and prosperity. Whatever process is taking place here may be feeding mouths, but it hardly looks like sustainable economic development.

Wealthy locals and foreigners with access to capital are moving in on the industry, which is already rendering people like Ibrahim obsolete. Just outside the walls of Gidan Daka, two hangars installed by Sudanese technicians – funded by Niger’s Arab business elite and investors from Sudan – loom over 40 gold processors powered by six massive generators. These factories process soil for 24 hours a day on an industrial scale, making grinders in Gidan Daka an afterthought.

A "grinder" in Gidan Daka shovels earth into a machine that is normally used to grind millet.

Whether or not the "gift from God" will last, or benefit ordinary Nigeriens in any meaningful way, remains an open question. But at least for now, at this time of extreme anxiety, it is better than any alternative the local imagination can muster.

"I hope this continues forever, because it brings peace," says Effad Alhouwas, an elder from a nearby town who functions as an unofficial mayor and mediator at Gidan Daka. "All of these people do not have work," he continues, putting together his hands and then dropping them down as if opening a book. "They can't make money any other way."

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

US News

Senators Claim Progress on Immigration but House Looms
Republican Senator Jeff Flake said a bipartisan group of lawmakers were “very close” on key issues comprising a broader agreement over border security funding and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said any deal must include a citizenship route for all undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children. Republicans in the House, however, have put forward their own immigration bill that would at least for now not provide DACA recipients with the ability to become US citizens.—NBC News / The New York Times

Trump Says Interview with Mueller ‘Unlikely’
The president insisted once again that there had been “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia, and said it “seems unlikely” he'll be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller. In June of last year, Trump said he was “100 percent” willing to testify about firing former FBI director James Comey.—AP

Missouri Governor Denies Blackmailing Woman with Nude Photo
Eric Greitens admitted he had an affair with an unnamed woman, but refuted an allegation he blackmailed her with a nude photo taken after blindfolding and tying her up. The woman’s ex-husband accused the Republican politician of threatening to release the photo if she ever spoke about their affair. “There is no 'blackmail,' and that claim is false,” Greitens's lawyer said.—VICE News

YouTube Backs Away from Logan Paul over Controversial Video
The company has canceled the vlogger’s forthcoming movie and pulled him from its web series Foursome over a much-criticized video depicting a suicide victim in a Japanese forest. YouTube also removed Paul’s channels from the lucrative ad service Google Preferred. “We expect more of the creators who build their community on @YouTube,” the company stated.—USA Today

International News

South Korea Wants to Ban Cryptocurrency Trading
The South Korean government is preparing legislation to prohibit Bitcoin and other digital currencies from being traded on the country’s exchanges. Bitcoin fell more than 12 percent following the announcement about the proposed bill from South Korea’s justice ministry. A government spokesman said there were “great concerns regarding virtual currencies.”—CNBC News

Eight Earthquakes Rock Iraq-Iran Border
Seven separate quakes registering at least magnitude five were detected near Mandali in Iraq early Thursday morning, according to the US Geological Survey. Another one took place over the border in Iran in the vicinity of the city of Mehran. Four people were injured, according to Iranian state TV. Tremors were reportedly felt as far away as Baghdad.—AP

Assange Shows Up on Database of Ecuadorian Citizens
The WikiLeaks founder’s full name “Julian Paul Assange” has been found on Ecuador’s registry of citizens. Assange tweeted a photo of himself wearing the national soccer team’s shirt on Wednesday, as reports spread he had been gifted citizenship from his residence at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The country’s foreign ministry had yet to confirm whether Assange is a citizen.—Reuters

Japanese Gang Boss Held After Tattoo Spotted Online
Thai police detained Shigeharu Shirai, a yakuza gang leader accused of killing an adversary over a decade ago, after Japanese detectives noticed his distinctive tattoos in photos taken in Thailand and shared online. Thai police said the 74-year-old will now be extradited to Japan.—BBC News

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Obama Tells Letterman He Danced with Prince
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Jack White Releases New Music
The singer-songwriter dropped new tracks “Connected by Love” and “Respect Commander” on Wednesday. He also announced that a brand new solo album, Boarding House Reach, is on the way.—Noisey

El Chapo Trial Delayed Until September
Judge Brian Cogan moved the Brooklyn federal trial of alleged Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán from April to September. Guzmán's legal team had asked for more time to prepare.—VICE News

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’re talking about depictions of masculinity in the golden age of TV.