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This Is What My Life's Been Like Since I Won the Lottery

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Three years ago, I made a VICE documentary about Melissa Ede, a trans woman who worked a 60-hour week as a taxi driver in Hull. The film followed her as she prepared to say goodbye to life on Earth and relocate to the planet Mars as part of the Mars One Project – a trip, unfortunately, that she didn't end up qualifying for. Mind you, the film wasn't just about that: it also showed Melissa to be funny, kind and hard-working, and demonstrated how making life better for trans people was really what drove her.

Last month, after buying a scratchcard at a petrol station before her shift, she won £4 million. The news made me cry and my heart fizz, and reminded me that, sometimes, good things happen to good people. This past weekend, I called Melissa up to see how her life has been since the win.

VICE: Mel! It's me, Daisy.
Melissa Ede: Hello, my lovely. How are you doing, stranger?

Can I just say, congratulations! I was so made up, Mel.
It’s unbelievable, really, isn’t it? Only in my world.

Has this made you believe in a higher power or anything? Is this divine intervention?
To be honest with you, I do truly, truly believe it is. If you believe in something enough, you can materialise it. Obviously there has been someone up there helping me. Who knows – none of us will know this until we leave our time on Earth.


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It's not a small amount of money, either. I mean, if I won £100,000 I'm pretty sure I'd be swanning around like a big shot.
So far, in cash, I've only spent £20,000 since I won. I'm thinking, 'I've got another £80,000 before I've spent £100,000. Then I’ve got ten of those before I've spent one million, and then I've got four millions' – and it's like, hell, that is a lot of money! Me and my partner still go out shopping for bargains. We'll go into the supermarket and we'll go, 'Ah, we’re not having that, we can get it down the road for cheaper.' We laugh, 'cause we think, 'Why are we even doing this, we're millionaires!' But we might as well save money, mightn't we. The first thing people would normally do is go out and buy a big flash car. I bought a 2011. My friends say, 'Mel, this money hasn’t even changed you.' But why should it? I’m still the same person, but I've got £4 million in the bank – that's not going to change me. It's like, I can’t wait for summer to go round all the car-boots and that, like I normally do, looking for that ultimate bargain, because I enjoy that.

Can you describe the moment you realised you'd won?
I'd gone into the garage, was stood in the queue and I needed cigarettes for the night. I don’t know why, but this scratchcard kept catching the corner of my eye. When I got to the front of the queue, I had the decision to make: do I buy that scratchcard, or do I buy my cigarettes? I don’t know why, but I just said, "I'll have the number one scratchcard please, the £10 one." So I got it, walked out, sat in my car and started scratching away. I'm sat there thinking, 'Please, please be £100.' It was New Year's Eve and I was planning on going to my partner’s to see the new year in. In 25 years I haven't taken a New Year's Eve off because, as a taxi driver, you cant really afford to do it. So I was saying, "Please, please, please be a hundred pound to cover my loss of earnings."

So I scratched it, and I saw a number four with "mil", and I thought, 'No.' I looked at it again and thought, 'That's not real.' I held it up to the car light and I'm thinking, 'That does – that says four mil.' So I jumped out my car, ran back into the garage, cause I knew the woman who was serving, and I just said, "Coleen, you’re not going to believe this, but you’ve just given me £4 million." She said "fuck off" and "let me have a look", and then she tried to pull it off me. I said, "No, you’re not having it!" I ran out, and it's like, 'What do I do next? I need somebody else to see this.' I thought, 'I've got to verify this is real.' So I got the number for the National Lottery claim line, rang it, and that was that. I got through to my partner and said, "You're not going to believe this, but I’ve just won four million pound." She said, "Fuck off, dickhead." So I went to meet her and she saw it herself. We had a fabulous New Year's Eve!

I know it wasn't always easy, was it? What was your life like before you won?
It was survival, that's all it was. I survived. I got through day-to-day, sometimes just living off breakfast cereal. That was my life. Sixteen, 17 hours at work. Work, sleep, get back up and go to work. Just struggle and struggle to pay the bills. That's all it was. Survival. Honestly, how it was, I wouldn’t wish my life on anybody. Work did get very dangerous, because I was known. I’ve been attacked three times over the last few years. Two of them were charged with assault, but each time they got away with a police caution because they’d never been in trouble with the law before.

These were trans hate attacks you were subjected to?
They wouldn’t admit to that, because they knew that was an offence that could put you in prison, so they admitted to the assault only. They wouldn’t admit to the hate. That was hard. But it didn’t stop me being me.


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You decided to go public with the win, didn't you, which is fairly rare.
I decided to go public, Daisy, because there was no way on this Earth that I was ever going to keep that quiet anyway. So I told National Lottery that I did want to go public on it. So they arranged the press conference. That was one of the most amazing moments of my life. I’ve never ever felt anything like that. All these people so interested in everything that I was doing. It was an amazing moment. Me being able to tell people my story. It was such a nice time.

Did you go straight to the shops to buy loads of stuff?
No, because at the time I didn’t have any money. The day before the press conference, the lottery people came down to verify everything was right with the scratchcard and check out who I was – background checks, etc. They bring down a private banker of your choice, who sets up the private bank for the £4 million to go into. But because it doesn’t go in immediately I still had absolutely no money. I said, "I haven’t even got anything to wear for the press conference tomorrow," so he said, "What about an overdraft?" I couldn't get an overdraft because my income is so irregular. Up until that day, it was a matter of pounds to get us food, even though I'd won the money. So the banker got me an overdraft. That was the moment, when I got that £800, that I was like, 'Woah, here we go!' We went shopping, got some clothes, then we got McDonald's on the way home.

Did loads of people from your past pop up again after you'd won?
They did, yeah. Sadly, both my parents died last year, so they didn’t see me win. But they’d never even spoken to me before they died. I didn’t even find out they died until after they’d gone, because it was in their wishes for me not to be at the funeral. Quite sad, really, but nothing I can do about that. Since it has been announced, my children have been back in touch. Is it because of the money, or is it because they’re trying to get back in touch? I have left all of them in my will. I made a will because, with that sort of money, if anything happened to me, it wouldn’t go to the places I want to. They have all been thought of. I'm going to take the financial burden off my friends and family, too. I think that’s the beauty of having this money, is being able to help the people that have supported you in their hard times.

So, the big question: are you going to use any of your money to get up to Mars?
Daisy, what I’ve realised since I applied for it is that trying to go to Mars is like trying to put a gerbil in a microwave. I’d just explode and burn up. I’m too young to do that and I enjoy life too much to do that now. Even NASA can’t land on Mars. I might have been a little bit oblivious to it all at that time, but not anymore. I’m not going to be that gerbil.

Plus, you're busy making your mark on Earth.
At the time, I would have done it. I would to have loved to have been the first trans person in space. I would have loved to be the first transgender person to set foot on Mars. Just for the help it could give others in a hateful world. That was my message. But I think my message can go a lot further by staying on Earth and sharing my life with people.

Thanks, Melissa.

@dsyhdsn

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.


Life as a Former ISIS Bride

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This article originally appeared on VICE Arabia

"I have no idea whether I'm married or not," says NS*, a 22-year-old woman from Mosul, northern Iraq. "And that uncertainty is really ruining my chances for the future."

According to Human Rights Watch officials I spoke with, NS is one of at least 1,600 widowed Iraqi women who were issued marriage certificates by an ISIS court in Mosul during the terrorist organisation's three-year occupation of the city. Now that Mosul is liberated and their husbands have died, the Iraqi government doesn't recognise the legality of their marriages.

Most of these women were either forcibly married to ISIS fighters during the group's control of the city, or married family members to avoid that fate. Although the Iraqi government says it is willing to recognise weddings officiated under ISIS rule, they will only do so if both husband and wife confirm the marriage in person. For widows like NS, that's clearly impossible – and without an official marriage certificate, the government won't issue her kids the identity cards they need to use public services like schools and hospitals.

This is exactly what happened to Nada*, 20. She was married to an ISIS fighter who was killed during Mosul's liberation, after which the Iraqi government refused to acknowledge the marriage. She tells me she appealed the decision at her local district court, but that too was rejected, at a cost of $350 (£250) in legal bills.

Three years ago, Renad*, 25, was married off to an ISIS member. She had two children, a boy and a girl, before her husband was killed in January of 2017. Renad says there is so much she can't do without a marriage certificate. "The government has left us in a very difficult situation," she says. "My two children can't go to school, or to a government-run hospital." On her government-issued identity card, Renad's marital status is still marked as "single".


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Like NS, Nada and Renad, many of these widows are now treated as ISIS sympathisers, even though they had no say in who they married at the time. Some of them now receive death threats and are forced out of their communities and neighbourhoods, while Iraqi security forces have sent up to 170 families with any alleged ISIS ties to "rehabilitation camps" outside of the city. According to Mosul's district council, in these camps the families "receive psychological and ideological rehabilitation, after which they will be reintegrated into society if they prove responsive to the rehabilitation programme". Human Rights Watch claims these camps amount to nothing more than forms of "collective punishment".

"Too many young women are being punished for something that is not their fault," says MP Rizan al-Sheikh, a member of the Iraqi Parliamentary Committee for Women and Children. Rizan is working with a number of her female colleagues to put pressure on the government to find a solution – most likely one that involves allowing witnesses to come forward and testify on behalf of the widows, or the use of DNA evidence to prove family links. "If this problem is not resolved now," Rizan tells me, "it could have negative effects on our society for many years to come."

Lawyer Ismail Al-Fatlawi thinks the government should go even further. "We need to establish a special court to solve this problem," Al-Fatlawi says. "The court should be able to consider previous marriage certificates and other documentations, like family pictures and eyewitness reports from friends and family. Temporary, politically-motivated solutions will not fix the problem. We need a strong judicial response, in line with the negative impact this could have on future generations."


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The law not only impacts women who were married to ISIS fighters, but any widow who obtained her marriage license from an ISIS court at the time the group controlled the region. This includes Iraqi women who married relatives and friends as a tactic to avoid being forced to marry an ISIS fighter. Roa'a*, from Mosul, tells me that throughout ISIS's occupation, her parents banned her and her friends from going out on their own for fear of being picked up by ISIS and married off.

Roa’a married her second cousin in an ISIS court, but two years later he was conscripted by the Iraqi army to fight against ISIS. She hasn't seen him since the 13th of December, 2016. "We never had children," she tells me. "We wanted to wait until we had escaped Mosul, or until the city was liberated."

Shortly after ISIS took over Mosul, in 2014, Ola*, 21, quickly married her cousin. "ISIS were forcing so many girls into marriage," Ola says. In May of 2017, Ola and her husband were separated during an ISIS raid on their neighbourhood. She hasn't seen him since. "ISIS gunmen attacked our neighbourhood and separated many families," Ola explains. "We all just ran, and that's when I lost my husband. I have no idea whether he is alive or dead." Still, she’s grateful that they never had children, as she doesn’t know how she would cope with kids today if the government refused to acknowledge their status as a family.

On top of her marital status not being recognised, Ola may never be able to re-marry. According to many family traditions in the area, women should to be able to prove that they're virgins or widowed before they marry into the family. For now, the Iraqi government refuses to help Ola and thousands of women like her prove exactly that.

*Names were changed to protect identities.

This article originally appeared on VICE AR.

There's Now a Dating Site for Trump Supporters

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There are plenty of dating sites out there catering to niche demographics—from Christian Mingle to Farmers Only. But for super far-right Republicans, it can be hard to find that special someone to scream "Fake News!" and "Build the Wall" with in the same fervor as Donald Trump. But now that's history, thanks to a new dating site called Trump.Dating, a place where every snowflake-hating, MAGA hat–wearing single can finally find a partner to own the libs with.

On Monday's Desus & Mero, the hosts visited the website vowing to "Make America Date Again" and checked out the profiles of some of the people looking for love.

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.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Watch This 'Jessica Jones' Trailer

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The angry, self-loathing, but still lovable Jessica Jones is back and doing things her way.

In anticipation for the highly-awaited second season, Netflix has just released a franchise trailer for Marvel’s second season of Jessica Jones. With flashes back to the first entry, the trailer explores Jessica’s path towards season two, showcasing the healthy dose of private-eye'ing, argument-having, super powered, but aggressively-blunt heroism that made the season the hit that it was.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones officially returns for a second season on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2018 on Netflix.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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

US News

Gun Control Polls Well but Not That Well
A new Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 58 percent of Americans think stricter gun control legislation might have prevented last week’s mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It also revealed 77 percent of voters don't believe lawmakers in Congress have been doing enough to prevent mass shootings generally. Meanwhile, at least some survivors of the shooting said they would not attend a White House “listening session” with President Trump planned for students this Wednesday.—The Washington Post/CNN

Trump and Mitt Romney, Friends Again
The president said the Utah Senate seat candidate has his “full support” in a Monday night tweet. Romney, who is aiming to succeed the retiring Orrin Hatch in the Senate, thanked Trump “for the support.” The Republican politician previously called Trump a “phony” and claimed his post-Charlottesville comments “caused racists to rejoice, minorities to weep, and the vast heart of America to mourn.”—VICE News

Pennsylvania’s New Electoral Map a Win for Dems
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court published redrawn congressional boundaries following a ruling against the gerrymandering enabled by the previous map for the state. It appeared to give the Democrats a much better shot at winning in the suburbs around Philadelphia—and boost their chances of retaking the House generally. “This is pretty close to a Democratic wet dream,” one GOP consultant said. Republicans were still expected to appeal.—Politico

Political Scientists Deem Trump America's Worst President
The 45th president got last place in a survey of “greatness” compiled by the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Trump was awarded an average score of 12.34 out of 100. Obama was considered the eighth best president, having been 18th the last time the study was done in 2014.—CBS News

International News

Dozens Killed in Latest Brutal Attack on Syrian Rebels
At least 100 people were killed in the recent wave of Syrian government strikes on Eastern Ghouta, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Four medical facilities were struck during air strikes and shelling Monday, which reportedly continued into Tuesday.—VICE News

At Least Five Killed, Hundreds Arrested at Protest in Iran
Three riot police officers and two pro-government militia members were killed when a protest by the Gonabadi Dervishes group turned violent in Tehran Monday. More than 300 people were also arrested after hundreds of Sufi (Muslim minority) demonstrators converged outside a police building to protest the detention of some members.—Reuters

South Korea Teases Next Joint Military Drills with US
Defense Minister Song Young-moo said the next exercise would be announced in the weeks after the Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games end on March 18. The annual drills were delayed by the games in PyeongChang, but Song said they would be rescheduled by April 1.—The Korea Herald

Third Competitor at the Winter Olympics Fails Drug Test
Slovenian ice hockey player Ziga Jeglic tested positive for the banned substance fenoterol, the Court of Arbitration for Sport announced. He was the third athlete suspended after a Japanese speedskater and a Russian curler also failed official tests.—AP

Everything Else

‘Black Panther’ Kills at Box Office
The superhero movie took in a mammoth (estimated) $235 million at North American theaters over the three-day weekend. It was the biggest opening ever for a film directed by a person of color, the biggest ever February opening, and the fifth-biggest domestic debut weekend in history.—Forbes

Fergie Explains Strange Rendition of the National Anthem
The singer said she wanted to “try something special” with her version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the NBA All-Star Game, but conceded it “didn’t strike the intended tone.” Fergie responded to all the flak by stating: “I love this country and honestly tried my best.”—AP

Justin Bieber Supports March for Gun Control
The singer was one of several stars to show support for next month’s “March for our Lives” event organized by survivors of the Parkland high school mass shooting. “All of your bravery is amazing,” Bieber tweeted. “I stand with you guys.”—Billboard

Jordan Peele Rolling on His Next Project
The director of Get Out revealed he was writing a movie he hoped to shoot later this year. Peele said “tonally it should resemble Get Out” but would “address something different than race.”—The Hollywood Reporter

Steam to Start Selling ‘Pick-Up Artist’ Video Game
The platform was slated to release a new game next month called Super Seducer, billed as the world’s “most realistic seduction simulator.” It features self-styled “pick-up artist” Richard La Ruina and claims to offer “hidden secrets” in attracting women.—Motherboard

Former Crystal Castles Singer Speaks Out About Defamation Case
Alice Glass, who has accused her former bandmate Ethan Kath of abusing and sexually assaulting her, said she would “refuse to be intimidated” despite a defamation lawsuit. “You shouldn’t be able to waste everyone’s time and money to have a lawsuit that I’m going to win,” Glass said. Kath has denied the allegations.—Noisey

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we’re discussing a landmark lawsuit that represents a decisive victory for street artists in the fight to legitimize and protect their work.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

FFS, Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro's Bastard Son!

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If you’re getting a little bit of deja-vu seeing this article you’re not crazy.

Frankly, the reason it feels like we’ve been here before is because we have. Like two years ago we here at VICE wrote this exact same fucking article in which we debunk this looney tunes conspiracy that Justin Trudeau was sired by not Pierre Trudeau but by communist hero/dictator Fidel Castro.

The first time came in late 2016, when this theory was all the rage among the far-right conspiratorial types after Canada’s PM praised El Jefe after his death. The idiotic theory was even pushed by pretty big outlets and figures like Ezra Levant and his hype machine, the Rebel—so, in response to this, my esteemed colleague Drew Brown investigated the rumours and found them to be super stupid and fake. But, nooooooooooo, that wasn’t good enough for some people who had to keep pushing this goddamn conspiracy. It just kept going and going and going and new “evidence” was presented and everything is so dumb.

The latest “break” among the smooth brained theorists came when they all unanimously decided to believe a fake report that Fidel Castro’s eldest son Fidelito, who died on February 1, left a suicide note that indicated Trudeau’s Papi was Fidel.

In this particular instance the hoax can seemingly be traced back to the site Your News Wire (a site well known for fake news stories) and was penned by a writer who goes as Baxter Dmitry—other recent hits by Dimitry include “Bill Gates Outlines 2018 Plan To Depopulate The Planet,” “Multiple Witnesses Say Valentine’s Day Shooting Was ‘False Flag’,” and “Chihuahua Serial Killer On The Loose In South Carolina.”

The story, entitled “Cuba Claims Justin Trudeau Is Fidel Castro’s Son,” was published on February 10 and outlines a tale that a suicide note which was found next to Fidel Castro’s son in which he states that Castro's son complained that his father repeatedly and unfairly compared him to Justin Trudeau and then states, “but what was I to do? I am Cuban. My brother is Canadian.”

The Your News Wire story claims that a Cuban news site Cubadebate originally published the article but does not link to any and VICE could not find any story relating to this suicide note which is not surprising because, again, it is fake. The conspiracy was of course then amplified by 4Chan trolls, far-right blogs, and the worst people on Twitter who all took this as fact and worked to further the theory. The theorists went deep, like trying to approximate Margaret Trudeau’s menstrual cycle deep, and it is all very, very stupid.

A screenshot from an incredibly stupid corner of the internet.

If you ever needed any more evidence that the internet has melted our brains and there is no return from this current hell world, the Associated Press—THE ASSOCIATED PRESS!!!—took it upon themselves to write a goddamn debunker entitled “No, Fidel Castro is not Canada PM Trudeau’s father” around this conspiracy. Thanks AP!

OK, so I guess I should list some evidence on why this is all bupkis and again, we’ve already done this, but here goes nothing. This is the big one, Justin Trudeau was born on December 25, 1971, a solid five years before Pierre and Margaret famously became the first western leaders to visit Cuba. Also, the Canadian government denied it and Cuba never claimed it but, you know what, I have a feeling that doesn’t matter to these theorists—they’re just going to keep going and when a website called something like fActChezkers.biz claims they’ve found a message in a bottle which washed up in Ireland proving this to be true we will all do this song and dance all once more.

What I’m really trying to say is: check back here in 2020 or so when we have to write this goddamn article again.

I am so tired.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.

Beyond 'Black Panther': You Need to Know These Black Comic Book Creators

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Arguing for the validity of comics is already an uphill climb for artists, publishers, and fans who care about the medium. But arguing for the validity of black comics—comics featuring black characters, black creators, or black politics—is a much more nuanced discussion, with far fewer people in positions of power able to start a dialogue.

Luckily, Brooklyn-based educator and community activist Deirdre Hollman has formalized her effort to expose more young people to the work of black artists and storytellers. “I really wanted to pursue the racial literacy, historical literacy, and cultural dialogues that are coming out of comics—the stuff that gets me excited about comics—so I created the Black Comics Collective,” Hollman said. “The idea was really to become a mediator among the creators and the community.”

On February 11, Hollman teamed up with the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to put on the first BAM Black Comix Expo. The fair came at a perfect time, lining up with the release of Marvel’s Black Panther and opening up the conversation about black comics beyond how they fit within blockbuster superhero films.

Deirdre Hollman, founder of the Black Comics Collective

The Black Comix Expo isn’t the first large-scale black comic convention. In January, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—an institution Hollman used to work with—hosted their sixth annual Black Comic Book Festival in New York City. On the West coast, the San Francisco Public Library hosted the Black Comix Arts Festival (BCAF) in January as well.

What set the BAM Black Comix Expo apart is the institution's long history of celebrating black cultural achievements. BAM approached Hollman about organizing an event to coincide with their Fight the Power: Black Superheroes on Film series. "It’s a means of showing everyone—young and old—that there are positive images out there and that you can dream, and dream big. You can be a writer, an illustrator, a publisher, or a leader of a great nation. That’s what this exploration of science and fun is all about," said Schawannah Wright, BAM’s Director of Community Programs.

Illustrations by Blossom Blair

Being a black creator in the comics community myself, I was curious to see how the expo differed from other comic fairs I’ve attended. The BAM Black Comix Expo had a strong bent towards superhero narratives but was successful in showcasing a wide range of exhibitors who came to comics for many different reasons. I felt a mix of delight and shame not knowing a bulk of the artists featured at the expo, but ultimately I left the fair with a greater appreciation for a movement that’s been going on for as long as comics have been made. While at the expo I strolled between the aisles talking to exhibitors, asking them about their thoughts on the release of Black Panther, what it’s like tabling at an all-black comic convention, and why they chose to tell stories through comics.



Regine L. Sawyer, creator of The Ripper, Ice Witch, and Eating Vampires and founder of the Women in Comics Collective NYC

Regine L. Sawyer

VICE: When did you initially get into comics, and which series left a big impression on you?
Sawyer: I’ve been reading comics since I was about five years old, from the Sunday funnies to Archie to X-Men. But X-Men really kicked it off for me in terms of superhero comics, and it made me want to create my own.

Yeah, X-Men in particular is a series that seems to have resonated with a lot of people from marginalized communities. It’s so much about the experience of being othered in society.
It was! It’s a series that had so many women—and particularly women of colour—with characters like Storm or Psylocke or Jubilee. Storm just jumped out to me because she was so regal and strong and beautiful. She will forever be my favourite character because of those aspects of how she carried herself. I knew, This is for me. I have to create comics.

I created my first series, The Rippers, when I was about 17 years old. I created it because there were books that I was seeing where I really didn’t like how women were portrayed. So I created a character named Rhiannon O’Cair who’s an intergalactic bounty hunter that’s accused of a crime she doesn’t remember committing.

Do you feel like your identity, gender, or ethnicity made it difficult to break into the comics community?
As a woman of color, starting out I wasn’t really considering who I was in that sense. I just felt that I was a writer—I had written comics and prose my whole life—and I just felt like I had something to give. So when I came into the community, and it became a "thing” that I was a woman and that I was black—it’s not that I wasn’t prepared for it, but I just felt like, "Oh man, are you serious?" I just really wanted people to read my books and not worry about what I looked like. When I realized that that was an issue a few years later, that’s when I founded Women in Comics and said, “OK, well if you’re going to look at me, you’re going to listen to me, too.” I had a lot to say about who I am and what is important to me. It’s so important that us as women of colour have a say about how we’re portrayed in the media. So, now you can’t shut me up.

Do you feel excited about being in a fair that’s celebrating black creators?
I feel very fortunate to be a part of this movement. I’ve been going to shows and doing this for about 12 years, so I’m just very happy to see so many people that are here at this particular show who are out supporting not only us, but getting excited for Black Panther. To see this turn out is really really amazing, and again, I’m so happy to be a part of the movement.

Greg Anderson-Elysee, author of Is’nana the Were-Spider

Greg Anderson-Elysee

VICE: Can you tell me a little bit about the book you’re selling at the expo today?
Anderson-Elysee: It’s based off of the stories of Anansi the Spider from West-African and Caribbean folk tales. My character is his son, so it’s a father and son story of them working together to stop these creatures of horror from different universes from causing chaos in the world while trying not to drive each other crazy at the same time. I’m using this as a way to introduce more black mythological gods and deities. In school we’re only required to learn about the Greek gods or the Norse gods—we’re not required to learn any of the black gods.

Do you feel like there’s any sort of significance around the release of the Black Panther film?
I’m a huge Black Panther fan. I’ve been a fan since Christopher Priest was writing it. Seeing Black Panther coming out now is so awesome—especially because I feel like now, more black people are trying to feel connected to their roots. Whether it’s finding different stories, or finding what country they came from in Africa, more and more people are starting to “get woke.”

I feel like Black Panther coming out now is perfect. There are some people who are upset about the popularity of this Black Panther movie, talking about, “Oh it’s not the first black superhero. Why is everyone stressing about it?” In mainstream comics, he is the first black superhero, but he’s not the first to get his own movie. But this is the first black film of this scale. For it you have a black director, black designers behind the scenes, and it’s a 90 to 95 percent black cast. There hasn’t been a superhero film of this scale whatsoever. Right now, the celebration is a big thing, and I just hope that more people start looking for more black characters outside of the norm, just to showcase that there are a lot of black creators who have been doing this for a long time. We need as much support as there are people who are excited for Black Panther.

Ronald Wimberly, cartoonist and author of Prince of Cats and Black History in Its Own Words

Ronald Wimberly

VICE: When did you first get into making comics?
Wimberly: When I started out I went to school for advertising. But then I realized that it was evil, so I decided I needed some other way to make money. I liked to tell stories, so I got into comics around 1999 or 2000. I think I was maybe published for the first time in 2002 or 2003.

What has your experience been like working in the mainstream comics world? Have you seen a change in the reception towards black comics?
I think in many ways I’ve had an exceptional career and I’m very lucky. Part of it is because of talent, but a lot of it is just because of luck. There should be more space for creators out there. One of the things that’s great about comics is that you don’t have to really wait for anyone to give you a platform. You can Xerox your comics, you can put them on Instagram or Tumblr—monetizing it is something else, but there are a lot of professional cartoonists who haven’t monetized their work yet.

As far as black comics—I don’t know what a black comic is. I’m questioning, “Is it a comic that sort of leverages the spectacle of black identity? Or is it a comic made by politically black creators, regardless of who they are?” I don’t know, man.

Tonya Raymond, cosplayer known as the Haitian Wonder Woman

As an artist coming from a niche or marginalized group, it’s sort of difficult to determine which opportunities come because of a sincere love of your work and which are because of what you represent.
Yeah! You become a commodity. That’s how a lot of this stuff works, right? Sometimes I feel like my identity has more of an exchange-value than a use-value. You know what I mean? It can be hard to capitalize on it myself. I think when it gets to that point, you have the identity of blackness traded beyond the actual benefit of people who are maybe radicalized as black, right? It’s a real thing, and sometimes it feels like chopping off a piece of yourself.

With all of that in mind, do you feel like there’s value in being included in an expo specifically for black creators?
I was telling a homie earlier today, I said to her, “You know what, maybe the aspect of community here is more important than even the work.” If the books and bringing this stuff together leads to this sort of interaction with other people, then that’s what is most important. That’s my take on it. I like to make the comics, but I don’t care enough about selling comics to come out here. You can just put them in a bookstore for that. It’s more about having this dialogue and hanging out with people.

Hank Kwon, owner of Bulletproof Comics in Brooklyn, and Chiaka Naze

Chiaka Naze and Hank Kwon

VICE: How did you get into comics and when did you open up the store?
Kwon: We opened up the store in 1992, but I was a big collector for about 20 years before that. I was an avid collector, and my collection got so big that I had to open up a store.

How have you seen the community and neighbourhood around your store change while it’s been open? Do you feel like a lot of what you stock in the store is reflective of the community where you are?
Oh yeah, definitely! When I first opened up, the street I was on was a little bit dangerous and it was a little bit out of the way. But now it’s been gentrified, and now it’s much safer and a different crowd is coming in. It’s definitely reflected in the stuff I carry. We promote mostly black comics in the store. We have a signing every month, and we definitely cater to our customers.

What did you decide to feature and bring out for your table here? Are there any black comics that are particularly popular with your customers?
All black comics are really popular. It doesn’t matter what publisher, if there’s a black character and it’s well done, it’s very popular. People gravitate towards quality, and if it’s a reflection of them they’ll pick it up. Today, we’re featuring our own version of Black Panther #1. This is our store exclusive that was made specifically for us. You can only buy that book from us, and you can’t buy it anywhere else.

AK Lovelace, co-creator of City of Walls

A.K. Lovelace

VICE: How did you initially get into comics?
Lovelace: I got into comics when I was very young. My grandmother bought me a Spiderman comic in a train station in Brooklyn, and I read the hell out of that comic book. Then I drew the hell out of that comic book, until the pages fell off, and I don’t know what happened to the comic book. I’ve always loved the medium. It’s the best of literature and illustration in a single medium, so I just love it.

Do you feel any significance around being included in an expo celebrating black creators?
The black aspect of the situation is definitely a thing, because being black is a thing. There are a lot of systemic problems that have not been addressed that we’re trying to deal with, so it’s definitely something that I’m mindful of. All of my creative projects involve main characters of colour. There aren’t only main characters of colour, but it’s important to me that it be as normal to see a main character that’s black as it is to see a main character that’s white. We have a long way to go, but early on in my career I realized how bizarre it was that I take for granted that the main character is usually white when I read a comic book. All of the main heroes are white, and it didn’t even register to me that I didn’t see characters that look like me. Once I became aware of that, it became really important to me to switch that up. It can’t be that way.

It’s the same thing for women. There’s not enough great female characters out there. One of the main characters in City of Walls is a black girl. I don’t point my finger at it throughout the series, but it’s something that’s there. I think that that’s part of the process of making a more inclusive creative environment.

Antwone Coward, cosplayer dressed as Sho’nuff “The Shogun of Harlem” from The Last Dragon

Are you excited at all about the new Black Panther film coming out? Does it feel like a milestone in culture for you as a black creator?
It’s a process, man. This situation is not going to change over night. It didn’t take a day for it to get this way, and it’s not going to take a day for it to not be this way. I have a lot of respect for what Marvel did with the Black Panther movie. They made a movie where the superhero is black—and not only that, but an overwhelming majority of the cast is black. They’re doing it in a way where they’re trying to market it to a majority white country, and I respect them for having the courage to do that. Hopefully it’s not the last film like it that we have. It’s going to take time and persistent effort. But I go to conventions now and I see little white kids dressed up as black characters, and that is a really eye-opening thing. If we keep it up, we can get there.

Virginia Monger and Prescella Monger, authors of Nia’s Sick Sense

VICE: Could you give me a little bit of backstory for the book you're featuring on your table today?
Virginia Monger: Nia’s Sick Sense is a book about a young girl named Nia who’s starting her first year in high school. She develops the sense of foresight that allows her to sense when a young lady is being abused. The reason why we call it “sick sense” is because she can actually feel like she’s going through it. She eventually begins to fight crime and becomes a modern day shero in her community.

How did you decide you wanted to tell this story?
We developed the idea for it about two or three years ago. We decided that, with the #MeToo movement, it’s definitely important that we educate our young—not only female—preteens and teenagers, and let them know that Nia is someone who can probably relate to what they’re going through. It’s a fun story, and it’s very Afrocentric, being that our father is Liberian. We tried to infuse that culture with urban culture since she’s from Brooklyn. I think the kids will enjoy reading her story, and will realize that we all go through our own struggles. Nia was brave enough to become a pillar in her community because of her gift.

Who were the artists you worked with to turn the story into a comic?
With Nia’s Sick Sense we have three amazing young black female artists. We did that on purpose so that we could shine a light on different women in the business. One is from New Jersey, one is from Atlanta, and the woman who did that main first book is from New York. They’re all college students, so we felt like we were giving back to the community by including them, and they helped us tell a very important story.

Do you feel excited about being in a fair that’s celebrating black creators?
I am so pro-Afrocentricity, it’s ridiculous. It’s definitely humbling to see the excitement behind the Black Panther film and the whole melanin movement. It’s just awesome. I’m so happy and thankful that all of this is happening at this moment and that we’re a part of it.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

These Three Billboards Outside Marco Rubio's Office Demanded Gun Control

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After last week's school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Senator Marco Rubio said "none of the gun laws that have been proposed here in Washington would have prevented" the massacre that left 17 students and teachers dead. But that hasn't stopped activists from demanding stricter gun control in the state—like the group trying to grab the senator's attention by taking a page from Hollywood's playbook, the Washington Post reports.

On Friday, the social justice group Avaaz sent three trucks on a nine-hour tour of Miami, each carrying a billboard inspired by Martin McDonagh's award-winning film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. "SLAUGHTERED IN SCHOOL," "AND STILL NO GUN CONTROL?" the signs read. "HOW COME, MARCO RUBIO?"

Photo by Jesus Aranguren/AVAAZ via Flickr

The trucks reportedly spent about an hour circling Rubio's office in Miami hoping to catch the senator's eye during his trip to visit the site of the shooting. Although Rubio hasn't responded to the billboards, Avaaz's deputy director, Emma Ruby-Sachs, hoped he noticed them.

"The senator has taken fire across the country for his toothless response to the shooting, calling it 'inexplicable,'" Ruby-Sachs said in a press release. "We call that 'inexcusable.'"

Avaaz's billboards were modeled after the billboards an outraged mother (Frances McDormand) puts up in Three Billboards, months after no arrests have been made in connection to her daughter's rape and death. Real-world activists have also adopted the fictional tactic in London, where three billboards were used to raise awareness about the slow-moving investigation into the Grenfell Tower Fire, which left dozens of people dead last June.

Photo courtesy of Justice 4 Grenfell

Meanwhile, activists in Florida are clamoring for lawmakers to take action on gun control, with some of the strongest pleas for reform coming from survivors at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. A group of teenagers at the school are now organizing a rally in Washington, DC, against gun violence in March, coinciding with other protests planned across the country.

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Related: We Spoke to a Survivor of the Florida School Shooting

This article originally appeared on VICE US.


This Woman Skiing Poorly at the Olympics Is My Tuesday Inspiration

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I haven’t been following the Olympics closely this year. Even the hysteria over whether or not Canadian ice dance champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are fucking has mostly skipped over my head.

But as I sat in the office on a rainy Tuesday morning after a long weekend, contemplating what I’m doing with my life and feeling cranky about having to file a story, Olympian Elizabeth Swaney’s exceedingly mediocre freestyle skiing run—in which she didn’t perform a single trick while going down the halfpipe—caught my eye.

“What can she deliver on here in Pyeongchang?” asked one commentator in a clip of Swaney’s brief and basic run posted to Youtube. Though the answer was "not much," another commentator attempted to describe the run in the following colourful terms:

“Just getting up to the top of the wall, going for these grabs, the safety grab that you’ll see there… Cruising up to the top of the wall, showing the judges she can make it down this halfpipe clean.”

Swaney, 33, who is representing Hungary in the games, apparently qualified for the Olympics by gaming the system; she went to world events that featured fewer than 30 competitors and essentially tried not to fall down. According to Deadspin, in December Swaney cleverly attended a halfpipe event in China when more serious competitors were at a different contest in Colorado.

The footage of Swaney’s Olympic halfpipe run has gone viral, and she’s being thoroughly dragged for sucking. But I actually think the idea of a woman failing up is a nice change. Sometimes not falling on our asses is the best we can hope for.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

I Asked Centrists Why They Love Compromise So Much

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In these highly divisive times, moderates seem like an endangered species who mostly inhabit think tanks and op-ed pages. Donald Trump's rise was a product of decades of extremism rising on the right, while a growing contingent of lefties, up to and including Bernie Sanders, are trying to push the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction because they think the way to fight Trumpism is to offer people an ideology that is just a powerful and strident. Activists on both sides demand politicians who are prepared to fight.

Centrists say this is all wrong, that partisanship itself is the problem and moderation and compromise is the solution. The most prominent centrist organization is probably Third Way, which acknowledges that we are "in a time of polarization and populism" and believes that "Americans deserve better than what they often get from the extremes" and we should focus on reforms "that empower the middle."

But what does "the middle" mean these days? The Republicans in charge of government are full of extreme right-wingers, and the Democratic Party includes everyone from centrists to social democrats. When debates over everything from abortion to guns inspire apocalyptic rhetoric, what compromises are actually possible?

I spoke with five centrists in an attempt to figure out what exactly they would do that isn't being done already. Spoiler: A lot of them are effectively Democrats who think they'd be able to foster bipartisanship if they got into power.

Neal Simon, businessman running for Senate in Maryland as an independent

"Electing more non-partisan moderates to a divided Senate will tip the balance of power away from the partisan extremes and into the hands of independent leaders who will get the job done," Simon said in a press release announcing his run.

VICE: How do you define your political philosophy?
Neal Simon: I view myself as a moderate independent. I am in the big middle of the country, politically, where a lot of people today feel homeless because they feel like the leaders of the two parties have pulled them to the extremes.

It seems like the Democratic Party is more open to having centrist members, why do you feel like you don't want to be a part of that?
Both parties have been pulled to the extreme. I think the Democrats may be interpreting some of the recent election results as a movement towards Democrats, but I think a lot of it is just anti-Republican. The number of unaffiliated voters has doubled in the last 15 years. It's increased by 46 percent [in Maryland over] the last ten years. A couple of weeks ago, Gallup had a poll that says now 42 percent of America self-identifies as independent, up from 39 percent [in 2016].

Younger voters are the ones being hurt the most by this partisanship, because the partisanship means we have a dysfunctional government. We get very little done, and we're not investing in our future. We don't shore up social security for them, we don't invest in infrastructure, we don't improve our education system, we're sticking them with a healthcare system that costs too much, [as well as] a ton of debt. A lot of these things are not too hard to solve if the two parties would focus on working together instead of just arguing with each other.

I'm curious about how someone who identifies as a moderate thinks we should solve issues like our healthcare system. Do you have any ideas on how to do that?
The parties have spent an incredible amount of energy and created a ton of disdain by arguing about how to pay for an inefficient system. We spend double the costs of what the average industrialized company spends. What we need is a system where we are incentivizing wellness. Our politicians don't spend time thinking about how we are going to reduce those costs, they're really just arguing over how are we going to pay for it.

An argument for Medicare for All is that it would decrease costs by putting everyone into a big pool. I imagine you don’t support that. What do you think the government's place in healthcare should be?
I'm not a proponent of a single-payer system. I believe in the private sector and I think they should be able to [make] healthcare more efficient. At the same time, the government needs to play a role because every American has a right to basic healthcare. We have a moral obligation to provide that to people. The government needs to play a role in creating, in structuring the system so that everyone gets covered. The Affordable Care Act brought another 20 to 25 million people into the system that needed to be in the system. It was the biggest piece of social legislation in decades and because it was a straight party-line vote, it just contributed to this partisanship and divisiveness that has gotten even worse since the Affordable Care Act passed.

Do you think that the partisanship that happened during the debate over the ACA was just the Republicans' fault? Or do you also blame the Democrats?
I blame them both. Listen. The United States Senate is only a 100 people. It's a hundred human beings. If these guys cannot develop relationships and trust among each other so that they can have civil conversations and reach reasonable solutions to things like healthcare, then we don't have the right people in that body, and we certainly don't have the right leadership there.


Jonathan Cowan, president of Third Way

Third Way, a centrist organization, was labeled the "radical center" by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 2011.

VICE: What does it mean to be a centrist to you?
Jonathan Cowan: Like with liberalism and conservatism, there are many different strands and brands of centrism. We are centrist Democrats, which is very different than other strains of centrism.

I would say that our ideology is a very good mix of the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They were Democratic centrists, though they dealt with different issues obviously because they were presidents decades apart.

Why shouldn't the Democrats move further left, as so many people want them to?
Every single time Democrats have run someone for president who was perceived as not able to speak to the center of the country, not able to speak persuasively speak outside the base of the Democratic Party, they've lost. The answer, the response to Trumpism, which is basically a backward-looking right-wing populism that says it's going to take America back to the 1950s, the best answer to that is not a left-wing version of nostalgia.

We have to be adamant and angry about our opposition to Trump, and give no ground on that, but we also have to offer the country a modern economic vision of where we want to go. The fundamental problem that concerns most Americans is how are they and their kids going to have the opportunity to earn a good life. "Earn" being the most important word. People want work to pay off for themselves and their kids so that they can earn a good life, and that is in deep jeopardy now, in as much jeopardy as it was during the Progressive era.

Robert Levine, columnist for the Moderate Voice

Robert Levine is a doctor who advocates for centrism in his spare time, and has self-published multiple books calling for a centrist third party. You can read his columns on the centrist website The Moderate Voice.

VICE: How did you become a centrist?
Robert Levine: I used to be a New England Republican, but the Republican Party has been taken over by Texas and the Deep South and they no longer meet my standards, in terms of the way they want government to operate. The Democrats just don't seem to have any leadership, and I think a new party that's not enthralled with lobbyists and special interests could really be very successful. The two-party system, which is called the duopoly, really doesn't work.

Something I've been struggling with in my interviews with other centrists is understanding what it even means to be a centrist when we live in such highly partisan times, when the Republicans are on the extreme right while the Democrats encompass a wide range of center-left political thought.
Centrists, or moderates, are really people who are willing to compromise. They are pragmatists, common-sense people that you don't find on either side. Part of the problem is the primary system. Only the active Republicans and the active Democrats participate in the primary system, and they're the ones who pick out the people running for office. So the most extreme people on both sides have a leg up in terms of running for office. When decisions are made, politicians try to assuage their bases, and their bases are the extremists in both parties. Even in the regular elections, only 60 percent of registered voters vote in presidential elections, and in off-year elections, only 40 percent vote. That's awful. People don't want to vote because they feel their votes are meaningless and there are no candidates who represent them.

How does your philosophy of moderation plays into like the biggest political questions facing our time? What about an issue like abortion rights or gun control, where it seems impossible to not have a partisan view of those issues?
A majority of the population, when questioned about guns, wants a lot of common-sense laws passed, in terms of a waiting period and background checks. Republicans are afraid of the NRA, even the moderate Republicans are afraid of the NRA. You start off slowly, and by starting off slowly you have background checks and a waiting period before people can get guns. Abortion is a more difficult kind of thing because it's really based on religious values, but once abortion is allowed, it's really hard for women not to have control over their own bodies.

It seems like a lot of the policies you’re advocating for is the same as the Democratic Party.
The Democrats are more rational. I mean, how can the Republicans reject climate change when 95 percent of climate scientists believe that it's absolutely what's happening and it's a danger to the planet?

Nick Triano, executive director of the Centrist Project

The Centrist Project is an organization that “aims to reshape and reform our political system—not as a traditional third party, but as America’s first Unparty.”

VICE: Can you tell me about your personal political philosophy? How do you define centrism and what does that actually mean?
Nick Triano: I consider myself a centrist because I am willing take the best ideas, no matter where they come from. Often times, centrism is confused with being in the middle, or splitting the difference between both sides. Centrism is about using reason and logic and common sense to evaluate policy on its face and to make a determination of what pragmatically is the solution to any given problem.

During the Obama years, the Republican party made it very clear that they would not compromise at all, and I hear a lot of centrists say, "If we were like in power, unlike the Democrats, we would compromise and get things done." So I’m wondering how that would play out in reality?
The Republicans weren't [compromising] under Obama and the Democrats aren't under Trump. It is very much seeing what George Washington warned about—he said the ultimate domination of one faction over another sharpened by the spirit of revenge is a frightful despotism, and that's what we have today. What both parties do not want, under any circumstance, is to give the other side a win.

Returning Democrats to Washington would be the sort of definition of insanity because we know how that goes, we've tried every combination of party control over the last decade between the White House and both branches of government and it's only trending in a more dysfunctional state. That's why we think some new competition is needed to actually disrupt that.

Charles Wheelan, author of 'The Centrist Manifesto'

Wheelan's Centrist Manifesto is what prompted the creation of the Centrist Project in 2013. He is a senior lecturer in economics at Dartmouth.

VICE: What’s your definition of a centrist?
Charles Wheelan: Being a centrist means that I do not fit neatly into either current political camp. The word centrist isn't great, I wish we had a different one. It is not because I find myself directly between the two parties, it's because I'm much more attracted to some ideas from the Republicans, and some much more from the Democrats.

How do you think we should solve some of our biggest issues facing our nation, like healthcare, taxes, and our wars abroad? I've talked to a bunch of centrists now and I'm still having a hard time understanding the difference between being a centrist and being a more conservative Democrat.
So part of it is just your approach to problem-solving. Are you empathetic to other people's views, are you willing to compromise? In this environment that's every bit as important as having views that are less extreme than the two parties.

There is no healthcare problem. There are about 57 different problems related to the unique nature of delivering something where most people don't have the capability of determining how much quality is being provided—do you really think you can tell a good heart surgeon from a bad heart surgeon? That's married to the fact that someone else is paying the bill. My approach would to listen to the various constituencies, study what we know about what drives healthcare costs, and then begin making the necessary compromises. There just aren't two flavors of healthcare. There's not simply, Do you like the ACA or do you want to scrap Medicaid? Those are bizarrely superficial, potentially ignorant approaches to something as complex as healthcare.

In The Centrist Manifesto , you write, "Our two political parties are increasingly dominated by their most vocal members, leaving little room for compromise." Do you think that's as true for the Democrats as it is for the Republicans?
Currently no. But part of that is because Republicans are governing. When you're out of power, you don't really have to do much.

In your book, you say that the answer is a third centrist party—
We've moved away from that. What we do with [The Centrist Project] is support independent candidates, we do a lot of things that parties do. So we recruit candidates, we try to find their messages, but we are not a party.

What made you change your mind on the idea of a third party?
Part of it was this remarkable hostility to political parties. People view the parties as the problem, and I'm persuaded that may be the case, so then creating just another third interest that would create its own interest above kind of politics didn't seem consistent with what we're trying to do.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A lot of your questions are rightfully skeptical, but I think that anyone looking at the situation is obligated to ask, What happens if we don't course correct? What happens if we continue between this enormous division between Republicans and Democrats?

Either they can't get anything done, in which case problems like climate change, the explosive debt, some of our foreign policy problems, just continue marching along and we can't act, or we just careen from the Republicans to the Democrats, and Democrats pass the ACA with no Republican votes, and the Republicans repeal it, and the Democrats and win it back and reinstate it, and neither of those is a functional way to govern.

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Inside the Repulsive World of 'Hurtcore', the Worst Crimes Imaginable

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WARNING: This article contains disturbing content some may find upsetting.

Torment and humiliation used to be a very public spectacle. But in the modern world there are new ways to be cruel, and many of them are conducted from behind a computer screen.

It started for "Victim 5" in 2013, when she placed an advert on Gumtree saying she was looking to buy a pet dog. One of the emails the 15-year-old schoolgirl received was strange. It was from Liz, an artist, who promised to pay for any dog she chose. In return, Liz wanted the girl to email her a topless selfie as inspiration for a charcoal drawing. They got chatting over email. The girl confided to Liz that she lived in foster care, was being bullied by other girls and had a young disabled brother who "meant the world" to her. She found a dog costing £275, and Liz told her she would buy it for her in exchange for a photo that "absolutely nobody besides myself would ever see". The girl emailed over a photo. As soon as she did, Liz turned nasty.

The girl was told that if she did not send more photos immediately, the one she had sent would be emailed to her bullies. The trap quickly tightened: the more photos Victim 5 sent to Liz, the more she was blackmailed and the more explicit Liz's demands got. "I will do everything I can to make your life awful," Liz told her. She threatened to mail photos to everyone in her street and school. She would speak to social services and get her disabled brother taken away and put in a home, unless the girl photographed herself in a series of degrading naked poses, holding up signs bearing messages such as "I am a slut" and "I look after my disabled brother, and now I am being forced to strip". The girl told Liz she wanted to kill herself, but Liz continued demanding photos. The girl ended up in hospital after overdosing.

At the same time, Liz was blackmailing others: a schoolgirl was coerced into sending videos of herself eating dog food while naked on the floor, licking a soiled toilet brush and a used tampon, alongside photos of herself with her legs apart, exposing her genitals, and holding up a hand-written sign with the words "I hate niggers".

But Liz wasn't a teenage girl; she was Matthew Falder, a middle-class Cambridge graduate in his mid-twenties living a double life. When he wasn't researching geophysics, out with university friends or with his long-term girlfriend, 29-year-old Falder was using encrypted email addresses to blackmail vulnerable people into taking photos and videos of themselves performing humiliating acts, which he then circulated around the darkest corners of the internet.

According to prosecutors, Falder – who grew up in a well-off part of Cheshire – treated his victims "both as sex objects and as objects of derision". On the dark web, his particular preference was for seeing children in positions of degradation and pain. On one extreme porn forum, in a thread titled "100 things we want to see at least once", he suggested "a young girl being used as a dartboard", a video depicting a child's bones being "slowly and deliberately broken" and the abuse of "a paralysed child".


WATCH:


Today, Falder – who joked with detectives when they arrested him, in June of 2017, that the charges against him sounded "like the rap sheet from hell" – was sentenced to 32 years in jail at Birmingham Crown Court. He admitted over 100 offences between 2009 and 2017, covering a host of sadistic online crimes against 48 people aged from their early teens to their thirties.

During his sentencing, Judge Philip Parker QC described Falder's crimes as "a tale of ever increasing depravity". The judge told him: "You wanted to assume total control over your victims. Your behaviour was cunning, persistent, manipulative and cruel."

The case marks the first successful UK prosecution for crimes linked to "hurtcore" – an extreme form of porn focusing on the non-simulated, hardcore affliction of pain, torture and humiliation, mainly on children, including toddlers. Even though Falder was a prolific offender, he was a bit-part player in a world that is about as dark as you can imagine.

British police were first alerted to Falder – or at least to his online identities, "Inthegarden", "666devil" and "evilmind" – by the FBI during a 2013 investigation into a site called Hurt2theCore. Then the dark web's most notorious hurtcore site, Hurt2theCore had thousands of members, hundreds of whom were actively involved in sharing abuse materials. Falder was a regular on the site's chat forum, which had discussion topics including "Producing kiddie porn for dummies", "Toddler childporn star", "Three Men and a Baby", "Butchered Bitches", "Young'uns bound", "Crying rape" and Falder’s own thread, "Need ideas for blackmailed girl".

This was also where Falder posted many of the images and videos he had managed to blackmail his vulnerable young victims into sending him. It explains why he forced some, including Victim 5, to hold up hand-written Hurt2theCore signs, not only as a sick in-joke for his hurtcore peers, but also as a way of branding and authenticating his content as the "original blackmailer".

"Hurtcore is a fetish for people who get aroused by the infliction of pain, or even torture, on another person who is not a willing participant," explains Eileen Ormsby, who investigated the dark net hurtcore scene for her forthcoming book, The Darkest Web. "It can be so sadistic that even most paedophiles are repulsed by it. Videos and photos generally come out of poverty-stricken countries, but the market is worldwide."

Matthew Graham. Photo: handout

The mystery online figure behind Hurt2theCore, and much of the hurtcore dark web zone, was an online personality called Lux, who became known as the "King of Hurtcore". When police finally identified him in 2014, it turned out he was 22-year-old nanotechnology student Matthew Graham, who had been running a host of hurtcore sites under his "PedoEmpire" zone from his bedroom at his parents' house in suburban Melbourne.

Graham admitted to encouraging a Russian paedophile to kidnap, rape, torture and murder a five-year-old girl, although no one knows if the Russian actually went through with it. Graham also shared a video so dark that many on the internet had presumed it was an urban myth. "Daisy's Destruction" showed a screaming 18-month-old girl, tied upside down by the legs, being subjected to a gruesome ordeal of violence, rape and torture by a masked woman. The film was sold to paedophiles and hurtcore enthusiasts on the dark web for $10,000 (£7,140) before Graham got hold of it and – in the name of freedom, as he would later claim – put it on Hurt2theCore.

"At first I felt ashamed in myself for being attracted to such a thing," he told the Daily Dot before his arrest. "But as time went on I slowly grew more accepting of myself. It wasn't until I came across the Tor paedo community that I was able to truly feel comfortable with attractions."

In 2016, Graham was sentenced to 15 years in jail for crimes the judge described as "pure evil".

Another Australian, businessman Peter Scully, who is accused of making "Daisy's Destruction" with his assistant Liezyl Margallo, is in jail in the Philippines, charged with child murder, torture and abuse, linked to videos he made for his production company, No Limits Fun.

The cruelty is relentless. Since Graham’s PedoEmpire was shut down, new sites have popped up and children continue to be blackmailed and abused for the entertainment of a faceless horde of online molesters using new technologies to fulfil their desires. A report published in November of 2016 by the Australian National University Cybercrime Observatory raised concerns that a rise in the use of virtual reality and sex robotics could motivate offenders to seek offline victims and to "enhance their experience by incorporating live-streaming of child sex abuse with the tactile experiences promised by such technologies".

Matthew Falmer. Photo: NCA

Policing the most shocking parts of the dark web is a daunting task, says Ormsby: "The dark web creates a lot of problems for law enforcement because they can't track users through the usual computer methods. They have to rely on old-fashioned detective work – trying to identify users through features in pictures and videos, or through social engineering [the use of deception to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential or personal information]."

She says that unlike other dark markets, such as guns and drugs, most illegal porn is shared among participants for free, so there is no money or cryptocurrency trail to follow. Going in undercover is often the best method, but, as Ormsby says, "To get access to the most extreme sites, members have to provide original material depicting child abuse, so obviously law enforcement can’t participate in that."

One of the hardest elements to comprehend when it comes to hurtcore crimes is motive. Both Falder and Graham were barely out of their teens when they got involved in the hurtcore scene. Neither trial has mentioned either suffering a major trauma or humiliation in their childhood that may have prompted such delight in seeing others being hurt and humiliated. It's also surprising that while wading knee-deep in a landscape which depicted almost Biblical levels of evil, Falder in particular was able to keep this side of himself completely insulated from his day-to-day life.

Senior detectives in the Falder case said that while most crimes are committed because of sex, passion, money, revenge or hate, Falder's main drive was to cause suffering and humiliation in others. "In 30 years of law enforcement I have never come across such horrifying offending, where the offender's sole aim was to cause such pain and distress," said Matt Sutton, the NCA's senior investigating officer.

"I think it just comes down to sadism," says Ormsby. "The cruelty required to participate in hurtcore is simply unimaginable for most of us. The dark web has provided a place for like-minded individuals to meet safely, and the fact that there is a 'community' – for want of a better word – might normalise their urges and acts, to a certain degree. There is an element of trying to outdo each other in depravity."

Modern day cruelty is conducted remotely, but it has the power to put its victims in a chokehold. Perpetrators are hidden in a web of online encryption, while victims are left to suffer in silence. Many of the people Falder targeted, despite being so degraded, showed amazing bravery in coming forward. They expressed relief that he had been captured and punished, but what they also remarked upon was how this particular species of cruelty, administered by someone they had never seen in the flesh, had left such an indelible mental scar.

In the words of one of Falder’s 15-year-old victims: "I think about what happened to me every day. I think I always will."

@Narcomania

More on VICE:

Why One of the World's Biggest Rockstars Got Away with Child Abuse

I Spent a Weekend with a Deep Web Drug Dealer

Sexual Abuse in Football: How a Flawed System Still Places Youngsters at Risk

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Someone Did a Fart So Bad On a Plane That it Had to Land in Austria and the Police Were Called

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It is 2018 and someone's rotten guts have brought a plane to a solid standstill again.

This keeps happening: in 2015, it happened, the notorious Poo Plane OG; in 2016, it happened, when a man on a plane to Paris pissed on another passenger and started a plane-wide brawl; in 2017, in precious little August, a plane rose from the holy ground of Oklahoma City airport but turned right back again and landed because it stank too badly of some unnamed funk. And this weekend, when you were just trying to get on with your life, a plane grounded on its way from Dubai to Amsterdam because one of the passengers refused to stop farting.

Let's just quote the actual news about it, then we can dive deep into the usage of the word "refused" in all reporting of the incident:

An unnamed older gentleman on a Transavia Airlines plane was forcibly removed from the aircraft after it made an unscheduled stop in Vienna, Austria.

According to reports, two men who were sitting next to the person in question asked the man to cease passing wind, something which had allegedly been going on for some time.

Whether the man had a medical condition or was just doing it to annoy those around him is unclear but it was so bad and smelly that a fight reportedly broke out.

After warnings from airline staff and even an intervention from the pilot, the plane was forced to land so police could come aboard and deal with the situation.

Austrian police officers responded to the request by coming onboard with dogs to remove the flatulent individual. Footage of the incident was shared on social media by Alfred Dekker.

The Independent, or at least the Indy 100, 17 February 2018


Two sisters on an adjacent row were also removed from the aircraft as part of the Fartageddon, and the quotes given to De Telegraaf about it do rather suggest there was something more going on than some lad aggressively farting in a middle row seat to rile and antagonise the people around him:

It was crazy that we were included, we had no idea who these boys were, we just had the bad luck to be in the same row and we didn't do anything.

They did not do anything to justify the bizarre behaviour of the Transavia crew.

Do they sometimes think that all Moroccans cause problems? That's why we do not let it sit.

We had to find our own flights home with another airline.

All I will say is that the crew were really provocative and stirred things up.


Listen, here are my main takeaways from this, and there are only four of them so you can sit tight, this will only take another 50 to 1,000 words:

  1. I am pretty composed, anus-wise. I think I have a pretty composed anus. We have a nice symbiotic relationship, my anus and I, built on a solid foundation of trust, and basically what I am saying is I very rarely shit or fart unless I actively want to. I don’t really like passing gas in front of anyone, ever, so I will excuse myself to a bathroom to do it if I absolutely have to. (A lot of people would argue that I am actually pathologically uptight about farting and should seek therapy and/or medical help). It’s been a fair while since I shat my pants. I think that, if you need to fart, up to a very certain point: you can suppress that need. You do not need to be farting up a storm on an aeroplane. You do not need to be farting at all on an aeroplane. If you have farted so many times that the people around you have complained, about the farting, then you have farted too many times by far.
  2. Equally, an exercise: how many times would the person in the middle-seat next to you on a plane have to fart before you dinged the "Call Hostess" sign and made a complaint? One fart: I would have to tolerate. Accidents happen. Two to three farts: I am going to, in my head, start to think escalatingly bad thoughts about the person next to me. Dubai to Amsterdam is a 7.5hr flight, and the average human person passes wind 14 times a day, or 1.7 times an hour. The flight allows for an average fart rate of 12.75 per person per anus. But also I think about my own inherent Englishness – two opposing forces: the need to complain, and the need to not complain – driving against each other like high revving tractors. How many farts would I tolerate before I complained? Farts six through 12 would see me eye-rolling and tutting. If the farts exceed 12 I’m going to think violent thoughts. But am I ever going to complain about it? To another human? So much so that the flight is landed in Austria? I’m not sure that number of farts even exists.
  3. I think if someone asked me to stop farting, I would stop farting. I would not refuse to stop farting. Can you imagine the intense and burning feeling in your chest when someone – a stranger! – asks you to stop farting because you are farting too much. Sometimes you have to fart: I appreciate that. But if someone has locked white-eyed with you and asked you directly, "Please, sir: you have to stop farting or I will land the plane" — if the captain had got on the intercom and asked everyone to stop farting — I would stop farting. I understand farting. I have farted, in my life, before. I have had incidents when I have wanted to fart but chosen not to. If someone asked me to stop farting, I would stop farting so hard my body would clench in on itself, wholly inverting, and I would die.
  4. I think it is time to admit that we, humanity as a whole, are not physiologically designed for air travel. We need to knock this on the head. We keep shitting and fighting and pissing and farting to an absurd degree on it. We go dehydrated and deranged. I recently flew 12 hours to the west coast of America on one of these so-called "aeroplanes", and I nearly lost my entire mind in doing so. The human mind cannot occupy itself for 12 straight hours before going mad. Elon Musk recently sent a car into space as some sort of elaborate Bond-villain level goof, and all I can think when I see that spaceman mannequin locked in there is: what if that was a human person? Would they explode themselves to death with the sheer force of their suppressed farts? Would they be up there, like I was, genuinely enjoying two random episodes of New Girl? Would they eat a heavy beef-based meal and feel salty and sick about it for 18 straight hours? We can barely deal with flying a few thousand feet above the ground. We are not, collectively, ready for space. The Fart Man of Austria–Dubai is a warning for mankind and its future: do not go into that great, dark frontier. You’ll shit yourself madly to death up there.

@joelgolby

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

These Cops Are Sorry for Telling Students ‘Doobies Make Boobies’

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Reefer madness is nothing new, but recently some police officers from Ontario’s York Region came up with a pretty novel pile of bullshit when they told high school students that using cannabis causes boys to grow boobs.

As reported in York Region News, officers from York Regional Police recently participated in a panel on weed legalization for Catholic school students in the area. At the event, held at the headquarters of licensed producer Aurora, one of the officers told students a downside to smoking weed is it makes you grow “boobies.”

“You have peer pressure and drug dealers telling you about the great effects of marijuana, but I’m here to tell you there are some very negative effects,” said Nigel Cole, a drug recognition officer for York region. “There are studies that marijuana lowers your testosterone; we call it ‘doobies make boobies.’ We’re finding 60 percent of 14-year-olds are developing ‘boobies.’”

In an email to VICE, York police said some of the information provided by their officers “was not accurate.”

“We have just become aware of this and have sent a tweet out apologizing. We will be looking into it further to determine what exactly occurred and identify the most appropriate ways to remedy the situation,” the email said.

Earlier, the department’s Twitter account issued the following tweet:

“We’re no health experts, but we’re pretty sure getting high does not cause enhanced mammary growth in men. We are aware of the misinformation about cannabis that was unfortunately provided to the community by our officers. We’re working to address it.”

CNN previously touted the “smoking weed causes man boobs” theory back in 2013, when they featured an article by surgeon Anthony Youn who said there is a link between THC and a decrease in testosterone in men.

He said smoking weed could cause gynecomastia—a condition where men have excessive breast tissue and noted the condition affects 60 percent of 14-year-old boys. But even Youn admitted at the time that no conclusive studies proving a link exist.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Here's a Trailer for a New Netflix Special That Tries to Trick People into Murder

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Do you like reality TV but wish it involved more psychological torture? Did you watch The Truman Show and think, Man, I'd love to see this in real life? Are you eagerly anticipating a gritty reboot of Candid Camera? Well, great! Netflix has the perfect, fucked-up hidden camera show for you.

On Tuesday, the streaming service released the first trailer for its upcoming special, The Push, where a British illusionist named Derren Brown tries to coerce an unsuspecting victim into committing murder—since it's apparently no longer entertaining to watch prank shows that just involve hiding Frankie Muniz's car or whatever.

In the special, Brown puts together a "meticulously planned and rehearsed scenario" starring 70 actors to push the victim, Chris, to his breaking point. "Chris is enmeshed in a web of lies, and that’s important," Brown says in the trailer. "I need him to feel like there’s only one way out." That way out? Pushing another actor to what Chris believes is his death.

"The question we're considering is simple," Brown says. "Can we be manipulated through social pressure to commit murder?"

According to Entertainment Weekly, The Push is the first of three Netflix specials from Brown, a guy who has built his career off torturing everyday people by convincing them that the world has ended or their plane is crashing. This new special looks like a standard recreation of the Milgram experiment you learned about in high school Psych, except with more moving parts and filmed with hidden cameras for your viewing pleasure.

It's unclear from the trailer whether Chris succumbs to the social pressure and winds up committing the fake murder, or how much therapy it will take for him to deal with his inevitable psychological damage. For that, we'll have to watch the whole special when it debuts on February 27 on Netflix.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

China Is Pretty Pissed Someone Stole Its 2,200-Year-Old Statue's Thumb

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One night last December, Michael Rohana allegedly snuck away from an after-hours ugly sweater party at a Philadelphia museum and crept into an off-limits exhibition. Guided by the flashlight on his phone, he ambled through the dark toward a room housing 2,200-year-old warrior statues on loan from China. According to the FBI, Rohana threw his arm around one and took a selfie, then snapped off the statue's thumb and took it home, the New York Times reports.

It took the museum a few weeks to realize the stone digit was missing, and to tell the Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relic Exchange Center—which sent the terracotta warriors to Philly—that one of its $4.5 million statues had been desecrated. Now, understandably, Chinese authorities are pretty pissed about the stolen party favor.

"We call on the American side to severely punish the person who committed this destruction and theft of mankind’s cultural heritage," an official with the center told the state-affiliated Beijing Youth Daily.

In an affidavit, the FBI's art crimes unit claims to have security footage of the moment Rohana—outfitted in a Phillies cap and an ostensibly hideous green sweater—stole the thumb. They tracked him down at his home in Delaware and reportedly found the digit in his desk, before booking him on charges of theft, stolen artwork concealment, and transportation of stolen property. According to the Times, the suspected thumb thief has since been released on bail.

It's tough to say what Chinese authorities have in mind when it comes to "severely punishing" the statue's amputator. A thumb for a thumb, perhaps? Or would it be more fair to encase the perpetrator in concrete and force him to spend all eternity guarding Emperor Qinshihuang's tomb? Realistically, Rohana could end up facing a fine or jail time, like others who have been accused of fucking up UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

While we wait to find out, the Relic Exchange Center has offered to send two experts over to Philly to repair the damaged warrior at the Franklin Institute in an effort to fix just one of many priceless pieces of art some idiot ruined last year.

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Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.

Related: Inside Nick Cave's Massive New Art Installation

This article originally appeared on VICE US.


Why These People Took Drug Combinations That Nearly Killed Them

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28-year-old Andrea* works as an embalmer at a high-end funeral home, where every two weeks or so, she prepares the body of a young, white, rich person who died of overdose for burial or cremation. She knows she could just as easily be the one on the cold metal table herself: she has OD’d at least four times, she said, with paramedics telling her she was “clinically dead” during the last one.

Until recently, however, Andrea was not aware of a likely cause of those near-death experiences. Each time she needed to be revived, she ultimately realized, came on a day that she’d injected opioids shortly after taking her morning dose of (legal) anti-anxiety medication. Her story illustrates why America’s so-called “opioid overdose epidemic” may be more accurately defined as a kind of “multiple drug poisoning” crisis, one that needs to be much better understood in order to save lives.



Although the numbers vary by location and by year, a large proportion of opioid overdose deaths in recent years have involved not just one drug but many. One CDC report found that nearly half of such ODs nationwide involved consumption of drug cocktails, and in New York City, the local health department has repeatedly reported that upwards of 90 percent of overdoses involved the interaction of multiple drugs. In Ohio, meanwhile, a study in 2015 found that the cause of death for 73 percent of overdose victims was linked to more than one drug—and nearly a quarter had four or more drugs listed.

All of which means that grasping how drug mixing occurs, why some people do it deliberately, and how to reduce or mitigate it, is critical. In Andrea’s case, part of the problem was lack of awareness: she didn’t realize that her prescribed medication could interact so dangerously with illegal drugs, she said. In fact, taking opioids along with other drugs in the “depressant” class is uniquely dangerous.

Depressants include alcohol, benzodiazepines like Xanax and Klonopin, Z drugs for sleep and other drugs that have a sedating effect. “We talk about benzodiazepines a lot, but we don’t talk about alcohol,” said Jon Zibbell, a senior public health scientist at RTI International, a nonprofit research group. “It’s important.” (Oddly, a lot of research that tracks opioid overdoses fail to include alcohol in the data.)

Taken with opioids, depressants can have a synergistic effect that slows breathing—their individual propensity to suppress respiration is multiplied when they are taken together, not just added. Of the roughly 8500 overdoses linked to benzodiazepines in 2015, roughly 90 percent also included an opioid.

But mixing opioids with stimulant drugs like cocaine or methamphetamine—commonly called speedballing—can also kill you. While their opposing effects on wakefulness and heart rate can sometimes cancel each other out and may even reduce risk in some instances, in other cases, this can simply overload the system.

Unfortunately, little research has been done on the motivations of people who mix drugs. From interviews with people like Andrea and those who study what is known as “polydrug use,” however, several important issues become clear.

The first, as Andrea discovered to her cost, is lack of awareness. While she had heard mixing depressants was risky, she didn’t realize just how intensely these substance, taken in combination, could magnify the respiratory depression each produced on its own. “I was aware that I was combining, but most of the time I didn’t even think about it,” she said, adding that she was not suicidal.

“I felt like I was cautious to a point, but there were a good handful of times, right before pressing down the plunger, I was thinking, ‘You know, this might kill me,’ and kind of being a little concerned—but not caring that much.”

Andrea, who grew up in a household that she describes as being “in the top 1 percent,” said she never felt comfortable with her status. “I felt like I could never fit into this perfect life I was supposed to live, so if I couldn’t go to that extreme, I might as well go to the other and just fuck everything up.”

Her mental health problems started early. She became so depressed during elementary school that she refused to leave home, she said, and by ten she was taking Zoloft. After that, she began cycling through different medications and periods of institutionalization, including being held in a program that she said used harmful and abusive tactics. During adolescence, she recalled, she began misusing a friend’s ADHD drugs. By her 20s, she’d discovered opioids, cocaine and crystal meth.

Even with the lack of data on polydrug use, we do know that for opioid users, drug mixing is the rule rather than the exception. And while childhood trauma and pre-existing mental illness are ubiquitous among people with addiction in general, they are even moreso here.

For example, studies suggest 75 percent of people with heroin addiction have another mental illness, with a full 50 percent showing psychiatric problems before age 16 and up to half meeting criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At least half were abused or neglected as children, with especially high rates of sexual abuse as well as other traumatic exposures: researchers have described the typical experience as a “shattered childhood.”

Elizabeth Brico, who has written for TONIC and now has five years in recovery, comes from the opposite end of the economic spectrum as Andrea. Her single mother was a refugee from Cuba. By 15, Brico said, she was using methamphetamine with an abusive partner, a man who got her pregnant and regularly choked her so badly that it caused seizures.

“After that, I had PTSD,” she said, describing how she discovered opioids seemed to relieve her symptoms. “It did something it hadn’t ever done for me before. It made me feel better and able to do things,” she added of her post-PTSD opioid use. But, in order to “potentiate the high,” Brico said, she often added Xanax or Klonopin. The combination “made everything just black out or go away, which is what I wanted.”

That is the most dangerous type of polydrug use—where the goal is to extinguish consciousness, at least temporarily. Although Brico said she had times when she did want to die, mostly, her aim was escape. “Making myself go away for a while seemed like a great idea,” is how she put it.

36-year-old James Brewer from Campton, Kentucky, has also mixed opioids, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines. He said bluntly that he, too, sought “oblivion.” He added, “I wasn’t purposefully trying to kill myself. I just didn’t want to live life.”

But he stopped combining Xanax and opioids after friends began dying from that very mixture in the bathrooms of rest areas and gas stations in his community. In the rural area where he lives, he continued, “About 13 people I know have died from OD.” He has now been in recovery for three years.

Several additional motivations for mixing also seem to be in play here, with one centering on using other drugs to extend the opioid effect in hopes of avoiding withdrawal. Robert*, who is 40 and lives in New Jersey, took benzodiazepines and alcohol to try to cut down on opioids, he recalled. “I didn’t want to use such large amounts,” he told me, adding that his overdoses began when he could no longer illegally obtain prescription opioids, and counterfeits—which likely contained fentanyls—came on the scene. (He is now six months free of opioids.)

While “speedballs” have always been common among heavy opioid users (I was a big fan in the past), the current trend of mixing opioids with stimulants is being shaped in part by the explosion of fentanyls. Noting that the latter have such a strong sedative effect that they are used as anesthetics, Zibbell said, “More and more people are saying they are using stimulants just to stay awake” rather than seeking the mixed rush of the combination.

Disturbingly, this same impulse may be part of why meth and coke overdose (and use) have also risen so sharply in recent years. Overdose deaths including cocaine and opioids more than tripled between 2000 and 2015—but cocaine deaths without opioid involvement actually declined.

Still, a great deal remains unknown about how fentanyls are re-shaping the illicit opioid market and what proportion of overdose mixtures that contain these drugs would have been deadly even if the fentanyl was taken by itself.

In Rhode Island, for instance, less than a third of overdoses involve mixtures, according to Traci Green, associate professor of emergency medicine at Boston University. That’s down from nearly 40 percent, she said, due to the fact that “fentanyl on its own is more lethal.”

Green has conducted research over the last few years surveying over 300 drug users in three different states about their drug preferences. “75 percent did not prefer or seek out fentanyl,” she told me. However, some said they took it because dealers were selling it cheaper than substances they labeled as heroin. Her interviews also picked up the trend of people adding coke or meth to fentanyl in order to stay awake, function, and raise money for the next high.

In this complex and fast-moving crisis, a better understanding of why people engage in the riskiest behavior is crucial to save lives. While some people do deliberately take deadly mixes to blot out consciousness, many others appear to be doing so because they don’t realize the danger, because they want to save money, or to counteract over-sedation.

To help, we need to recognize and address each of these motivations—and reach out to people who are often seeking relief, not death.

“It wasn’t until I woke up with the paramedics saying, ‘You were dead,’ that I realized that I did care about living,” said Andrea, who recently started taking the anti-addiction medication naltrexone (Vivitrol).

*Some last names have been omitted to protect the identities of people in recovery.

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Follow Maia Szalavitz on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

How Politicians Used Metaphors to Sell Us Austerity

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On Tuesday, Brexit secretary David Davis told a waiting press corps not to fear Britain being plunged into a "Mad Max-style dystopia", following an increasingly dismal and eccentric performance in his EU negotiations. Just to be clear: do NOT worry that Brexit will turn this country into something resembling Mad Max.

Whether Davis intended only to suggest, against all previous evidence, that his party would not be engaged in an "Anglo-Saxon race to the bottom", or that a whole range of other dystopias were available, this is a classic political framing disaster.

"Don't think of an elephant" was the classic advice given by the linguist George Lakoff when discussing how to frame political messages: when you’re told not to think of something, it becomes hard to think about anything else. So if I tell you to think of anything but a pink elephant, a rosy Dumbo will likely tap-dance across your brain. If I assure you that the UK after Brexit won’t be an arid hell-scape populated with improbably dressed marauders, well, the imagination is already halfway there. Hence the perhaps apocryphal but celebrated exchange between Lyndon B Johnson and an aide during a fierce election battle full of dirty tricks: "Christ, Lyndon," said the aide, "we can't just call the guy a pig-fucker. It isn't true!" "Of course it ain’t true," said LBJ, "but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it."

Lakoff’s interest in the political use of imagery and framing comes from a life spent thinking about metaphors. He co-authored a widely celebrated book with Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, in which he argued that metaphors are fundamental to the way human beings think.

For instance, the metaphors we use for argument are closely linked to war or struggle – but what effect might it have on politics if, say, we thought of arguments as the sharing of ideas? Metaphors are especially obvious around social taboos – death is referred to with metaphors of travel or rest. Sometimes metaphors can make social phenomena seem natural rather than political – for instance, in the pervasive metaphor of poverty as a disease: "the blight of poverty". So, language is powerful. If that’s so, then political activists should be paying attention to the way they use language, and studying the effects it has. Funnily enough, a recent study, "Framing the Economy", is based on exactly that. Using fieldwork, researchers from a group of progressive think-tanks and organisations – NEON, NEF, the FrameWorks Institute and PIRC – analysed people’s responses to economic metaphors.

They found that in the wake of the financial crisis, government politicians hit on a story that really worked – that we’d maxed out the national credit card and it was time to trim back on fripperies like social justice. That story provided the rationale for austerity.

Despite being a misleading way to think about national finances, it struck a chord. This story proved resilient to both reasoned analysis of eminent economists and the sustained mobilisation of anti-cuts campaigners. The same thing could be seen in Michael Gove’s derided but effective attack on experts during the EU referendum – an expert bit of playing on a widely-shared resentment at perceived elite condescension. The report also notes that last year saw some cracks in this edifice. Jeremy Corbyn’s success in the general election and the groundswell of popular support on which he rode outlined a very different vision for British politics and the economy.

To understand how to build on that, first we need to understand what people already think about the economy. Above all, the study suggests people see the economy as a container, with some people contributing and others draining – and governed by mysterious, hard-to-understand forces, which make it unstable. It’s not hard to see how a pervasive sense of the economy as a storehouse of money makes it easy for politicians to win by suggesting a certain class of people (benefits claimants or migrants) just intend to drain it – or how much-repeated claims about its complexity might make ordinary people feel fatalistic and powerless about it.

These basic assumptions gave rise to strong senses that the economy might be rigged, or that press and politicians lie constantly – but that there was nothing that could be done about it, and in any case, greed was just a part of human nature. Despite senses that the government should do something about it, and nostalgia for a fairer past, the overwhelming sense that emerged was one of fatalism.

The researchers suggest two stories that campaigners – or anyone wanting to bring around their right-wing relatives over Sunday lunch – might use to route around this ingrained sense of powerlessness.

The first is about resisting corporate power: it says that the economy is broken and unfair, and lays the blame squarely at the feet of the few – big corporations and wealthy elites – and says their economic manipulation is the source of its problems. It uses a programming metaphor to talk about the economy – highlighting that, like a computer, the economy has been deliberately programmed one way, and we can programme it in another.

The second story focuses on individual and social needs, and talks about our political choices like railway tracks. For decades, we’ve been building tracks which take people in pursuit of profit, rather than towards our real needs – but we can choose to build them in a different direction, toward what we really want, rather than just making money for the few. The left is sometimes scared of thinking about the stories we tell. There can be a sense that designing language so that it resonates with people is just another form of political lie, or that being concerned exclusively about language can lead us to obscure real, deeper political questions.

Clever language without real answers is a vacuous power play, and poisonous to real political change. But in the hands of committed activists who want to change the world, there’s no doubt these two stories, complementary and put with passion, could be powerful weapons for change.

@piercepenniless

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

People Scrawl Graffiti and Walk Over the Body of a Beached Blue Whale

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Vandals have graffitied the body of a blue whale that washed up on a beach in southern Chile. The words "Ana Ti Amo" (I love you Ana) were scratched onto the whale's skin, and photos shared widely on Twitter also show a couple posing for a photo while sitting on the whale's head.

The dead whale – over 66 feet in length – has since been removed by the Chilean authorities. Initial reports suggest it could have died from an illness, as its body showed no signs of obvious physical injury. Marine life specialists are currently conducting an investigation into the cause of death.

The photos have sparked alarm and upset across social media, with users describing it as "disgusting" and "so stupid". One user, Xieman Hernandez, wrote: "So stupid, every day we get worse. How would the people who did this like to have their dead bodies written on? They do not respect anything!"

The blue whale is the largest animal ever known to have existed. There are only 10 to 25,000 of them remaining in the world.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

How Four West London Boys Became the ISIS 'Beatles'

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They were British, all four of them. It was undeniable. They kept their faces hidden and talked about their hatred of the West, but the unmistakable accents meant the Raqqa prison captives knew one thing about their ISIS jailers. They were British, so they called them "the Beatles".

The hostages were not to know it, but their jailers had much more in common than the way they spoke. The four grew up within a few miles of each other in west London, walking the same streets in and around Ladbroke Grove, mixing mosque attendance with football and video games.

All four would become enraptured by extremist ideas in their twenties. Having failed to find a satisfying role in adult life in London or to reconcile their Muslim and British identities, each headed for an almighty battle overseas – one that would end all possibility of building an ordinary life back home. In Syria, they would turn to brutality and mayhem. The US government has stated that the group were responsible for beatings, mock executions and the beheading of more than 27 people.

So just how did four British boys come to wage violence so despicable their nation would disown them? And what can their stories tell us about the fatal steps people take on the road to radicalisation?


WATCH:


The four identities of the notorious ISIS cell were finally disclosed earlier this month when American officials revealed US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had seized the last two members of "the Beatles" still at large: 34-year-old Alexanda Kotey and 29-year-old El Shafee Elsheikh.

Aine Davis, a previously identified member, remains in a Turkish jail. The 34-year-old was convicted of being a member of a terrorist organisation and handed a sentence of seven-and-a-half years in November of 2015. Mohammad Emwazi, the member better known as "Jihadi John", was killed the same month, wiped out in a US drone strike at the age of 27.

Alexanda Kotey, who was not raised as Muslim, appears to have been the most outwardly devout and zealous about his religion. Raised in Shepherd's Bush by his Greek-Cypriot mother, having lost his Ghanaian father when he very young, he was a big fan of Queen’s Park Rangers, and neighbours remember him playing football in the garden with his older brother.

At some point in his teens or early twenties, Kotey converted to Islam. The mix of newfound religion and a simplified politics that viewed Muslims as global victims of oppression at the hands of non-believers would prove intoxicating. Before long, Kotey was a key influencer of other, younger Muslims, sharing his us-versus-them worldview from his own street stall not far from the Al-Manaar mosque, near Westbourne Park station.

"He would meet people in the social atmosphere of the mosque, make friendships over innocuous things like football and the gym, and then [he would] suck them into [his] orbit," according to an acquaintance.

Emwazi and Davis also attended the Al-Manaar mosque, leading to some lazy descriptions of it as the place they were radicalised. The huge mosque acts as a focal point for a wide cross-section of the Muslim community in west London – 3,000 people attend every week; it is not the sort of place an intimate clique would be schooled in jihad.

The mosque has been at pains to distance itself from the actions of individuals who may have come and gone there. "We do not profile worshippers on the basis of their ethnicity or the sort of ideas that they might have in their minds," says a spokesman. "This is something that we would not be able to know of or control."

El Shafee Elsheikh. Photo: Facebook

Like Kotey, El Shafee Elsheikh loved football and Queens Park Rangers. He too was raised by a single mother, originally from Sudan, and grew up in White City, not far from QPR's Loftus Road stadium.

Elsheikh's mother has previously explained how he changed very suddenly, in 2011, as he began listening to CDs of sermons by Hani al-Sibai, a radical Egyptian cleric who lived in west London, and who remains on UN, US and EU sanctions lists for suspected support of al-Qaeda.

Yet, there are good reasons to believe Elsheikh's radicalisation did not happen overnight. Disappointments accumulated. He had married in Canada in 2010, but his wife had not been able to obtain a visa to come to the UK. He was unable to move on from his job at a local garage, despite studying engineering at college. And his older brother was imprisoned for gun possession following a gang feud.

"Radicalisation can seem to happen rapidly – it can seem that way even to the family members, but the underlying psychological crises tend to take a much longer time to develop," explains Dr Afzal Ashraf, at expert in terrorism and extremist ideology at The University of Nottingham. "Frustrations build over a long period, then suddenly you find a group offering a black and white worldview that makes sense of everything for you."

Mohammed Emwazi, AKA Jihadi John

Mohammed Emwazi is also believed to have been influenced by the fierce lectures of Hani al-Sibai, and would come to embrace a crude form of political Islam without any prolonged period of religious study.

Raised by Kuwaiti immigrants in different homes around North Kensington, a pupil at Quintin Kynaston Academy, he was not known to be particularly devout as a teenager. A Manchester United fan who loved rap music and wore baseball caps, he told school friends how much he hated Tony Blair and George Bush. Teachers helped him with his anger management issues.

Emwazi became friendly with Bilal al-Berjawi and Mohammed Sakr, two slightly older guys from North Kensington who went to fight with the Islamist group al-Shabaab in Somalia. They would be killed in drone strikes there in 2012.

"Emwazi came out of a bigger network of young Islamists in that west London area," explains Raffaello Pantucci, author of We Love Death as You Love Life: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists. "Al-Berjwai and Sakr were very prominent among people going back and forth to Somalia, and Emwazi was hanging out in that circle. There was overlap of petty gangsters and people who drifted into jihadism."

In 2009, while still only 21 years old, Emwazi travelled to Tanzania, claiming he wanted to go on safari. MI5 agents questioned him there, accusing him of attempting to reach Somalia to fight with al-Shabaab. He then spent some time moving between Kuwait and London before immigration officials prevented him from returning to Kuwait. In early 2013, he managed to leave the country, telling his parents he was going to Turkey to help refugees.

Aine Davis. Photo: Metropolitan Police

Aine Davis grew up in Hammersmith with his mum, his father absent from home – but little else is known about his childhood. As a young adult he gathered a string of convictions as a drug dealer before being sent to jail in 2006 for firearm possession. He is believed to have converted to Islam either in prison or soon after his release.

If Davis was the most experienced criminal in "the Beatles", he may – perversely – have headed to Syria to stay on the straight and narrow. His wife, Amal El-Wahabi, suggested at her 2014 trial (she was convicted of trying to move money to Davis in Syria) that leaving London was supposed to be good for his "body and soul". But he would fly out of the UK in 2013 for something far more disturbing than drug dealing.

The four men would take different paths to Syria and the northern city of Raqqa. Kotey is only known to have travelled there at some point after ditching an aid convoy trip to Gaza in 2009. Elsheikh is believed to have gone to Syria sometime in 2012 and initially joined al-Qaeda's affiliate before moving over to ISIS. Emwazi and Davis got to Syria in 2013, the year ISIS – initially established in Iraq – began claiming serious territorial victories inside the country.

Is it possible that any of them travelled with non-violent intentions, driven only by the idea of helping the victims of Bashar al-Assad’s regime?

"If you went in 2011 and 2012, I can probably believe you might have started off believing you were Che Guevara, doing good and saving the oppressed," says Rafaello. "But when the cause becomes establishing a caliphate with ISIS, and you'll stop at nothing for that cause, then it’s obviously become a very different thing."

At any rate, the four Londoners stayed and thrived. Much has been written about the culture of martyrdom among jihadists, the willingness to seek out death, but Dr Afzal Ashraf thinks we have underestimated how thrilled many young Islamists were to be on a team that was winning. "These guys were attracted to a credible promise of success," he says. "The spectacular success of ISIS when they were gaining ground meant people living with a grievance narrative were excited to be part of something that seemed to be succeeding."

While some foreign recruits would become disillusioned about being used as frontline fodder by ISIS's mainly-Iraqi commanders, the four Londoners found a key role in Raqqa. They were tasked with guarding western hostages in a place the captives called "The Quarry".

"They might not have been useful fighters, not having much battlefield experience, but they would have been a natural unit able to work together," says Pantucci. "Being English speakers, what better way to get a message across to the English-speaking world? They became useful for propaganda purposes."

Alexanda Kotey after his capture in January by Syrian Democratic Forces. Photo: Democratic Forces / handout

The group did more than simply hold people in place. Surviving hostages have described their aptitude for tormenting them. Javier Espinosa refers to their "psychopathic" character. The Spanish journalist has recalled how Emwazi whispered in detail what would happen if he was to slit Espinosa’s throat: "The first hit will sever your veins. The blood mixes with your saliva."

Danish hostage Daniel Rye Ottosen has described how the British jailers played games with them, making them sing songs about Kenneth Bigley, the al-Qaeda hostage beheaded in Iraq. "They were not told to go in and beat us up… but they did it because they wanted to, they enjoyed it."

In his memoir, Ottosen describes "George" as the one who gave the orders, and as the one who was also the most unpredictable. "Ringo" did the filming when it was needed. But it would be "Jihadi John" who would assume the starring role, becoming infamous around the world.

In August of 2014, ISIS released a video showing a figure dressed in black: Emwazi, beheading the US photojournalist James Foley. In September, he featured in another video – the beheading of US journalist Steven Sotloff. More murders followed: the deaths of British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, the US aid worker Peter Kassig and Japanese journalists Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto.

The US government says the cell beheaded 27 captives in all. The group’s victims are believed to include Syrian fighters seized on the battlefield.

With Emwazi now dead, it remains unclear which of the three living Londoners was "George", which was "Ringo" and which was "Paul". The French journalist Nicolas Henin, a surviving hostage, tells me he cannot clarify their identifies. He cites the legal process that might still lie ahead for Kotey and Elsheikh. Although the UK has reportedly stripped them of their citizenship, American and British officials are still discussing where they will be held and how they will face trial. Yesterday, Home Secretary Amber Rudd hinted that they could be returned to the UK, despite Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson previously saying, "I don’t think they should ever set foot in this country again. They turned their back on Britain, our values and everything we stand for – they are the worst of the worst."

Even now, with everything we know, it is strangely tempting to believe at least one of the group had some sense of decency, that not all four were equally and entirely wicked. But there is little evidence of decency to cling to. The US State Department says Kotey "likely engaged in the group's executions and exceptionally cruel torture methods". Elsheikh "earned a reputation for waterboarding, mock executions and crucifixions".

We can dismiss the four as outliers, as deviants, but their journey into darkness was not entirely freakish. The security services believe 800 British citizens ran away to join ISIS. Potentially, there are lessons to be learned from all 800 stories.

We have to better understand why so many second generation and third generation Muslims feel so unsure of their place, and why this debased, politicised Islam offers such clarity and purpose.

Ultimately, Britain will have to come up with more compelling counter-narratives if it wants to make the story of the London jihadists a footnote in history, rather than a sign of things to come.

@adamtomforrest / @dan_draws

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask a Sommelier

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This article originally appeared on VICE Italy

When it comes to tasting and valuing wine, most of us couldn't tell a 2009 Chateau Latour from a boxed Tesco red. And yet, we uncomfortably play along when a waiter in a nice restaurant offers a taste of a newly opened bottle, while all we're really thinking is, 'Ah, right, alcohol. There is alcohol in this.'

To find out how to be more convincing without actually having to make the effort to actually learn anything about wine, I got in touch with Matteo Bernardi, who works as a sommelier at Le Calandre, a three-Michelin star restaurant in Padua, northern Italy.

VICE: Hi Matteo. How do you become a sommelier?
Matteo Bernardi: There are loads of qualification courses you can take. I got my diploma from the Italian Sommelier Association (AIS), which took me about a year-and-a-half. The course was split into three parts. First, you learn how to look at wine, taste it and identify different unique characteristics. Then, you're taught how to recognise different grapes from various regions around the world, and the final stage is all about learning how to pair wine with food.

Why do sommeliers spit out wine after they've tried it?
If you drink all that wine, you're going to end up pretty drunk. At some tastings, you might try up to a hundred different wines. But I actually think that if you're only tasting seven or eight, it's a shame to waste good wine by spitting it out – especially when the person who produced it is standing right in front of you. It's just not very nice, is it?

Can you give me some tips on how to pretend to be a wine connoisseur?
Firstly, you should hold the glass by the stem and not the bowl. That’s a sign you know what you're on about. Don’t hold it at the base – that's just wrong. Next, it always looks better to swirl the wine around a bit, smell it, and then talk about the aromas you can pick up. You can mention the intensity, complexity and minerality, even if you have no idea what you’re talking about.

And if you ever come across a vintage red, perhaps a 20-year-old Barbaresco, you could smell it and bring up the notes of "goudron" – which means "tar" in French.


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What's the deal with the medallion sommeliers wear around their neck?
It’s called a tastevin. It’s not really around anymore, but in the past, sommeliers would use the facets on the inner surface to gauge the colour and intensity of the wine, which would help to describe it better.

When should I send back a bottle of wine in a restaurant?
There could be lots of reasons, but most people would rather claim a wine is corked than just that they don't like it. I once had a customer who wanted to show off to the girl he was with, so he complained that the wine was corked. Of course, I apologised and complimented him on his nose, but I should have told them that the bottle was a screw top and therefore could not have been corked.

Do you ever drink really poor quality wine?
Yes, of course – though today it's hard to find really bad wines. When I have dinner at friends' houses, the wine isn’t always excellent, but I would never complain about it.

For me a so-called "poor quality" wine is one that is actually corked, has a bad smell due to oxidation or the colour isn’t bright. Wine is a living liquid – it breathes, grows and ages like people do. So if I look at it and see the colour isn't right or it smells mouldy and rotten, then I know something is wrong.

What is the most expensive wine you have ever drunk?
I think it was the Leroy Corton-Charlemagne, which sells at around €3,000 a bottle.


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Is being a sommelier well paid?
Obviously it depends on what level you work at. You could work exclusively as a sommelier, or you might be a waiter in a restaurant who's in charge of the wine there. Alternatively, like me, you could manage the cellar. I make a good living from it, but, generally, the business is not like it was back in the 90s, when sommeliers made a lot more money.

When you're out, are people interested in what you do?
Yes, friends always ask me to try their wines at parties, because they want my expert opinion. But the question people ask me most often is whether I want a lift home, because I'm usually too drunk to drive after trying a lot of wine.

So it’s a job that gets you loads of free drinks?
I have free access to the cellar and I can taste as much as I want. But I never take advantage of that. I’ve seen colleagues at tastings down litres of wine and get so drunk they can barely remember their own names. As I always say – "I don't drink, I taste." The guy who first told me that was drunk when he said it, but that's another matter.

This article originally appeared on VICE IT.

This article originally appeared on VICE IT.

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