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

US News

Stephen Hawking Dies at 76
The beloved and renowned British physicist died at his home in Cambridge early Wednesday. Internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee was one of many prominent scientists to pay tribute. “We have lost a colossal mind and a wonderful spirit," he said. Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote: “His passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake.”—Motherboard / The Guardian

Conor Lamb led Republican rival Rick Saccone in a photo-finish for the state’s 18th congressional district seat, up 641 votes with 99 percent of ballots counted. But Saccone hadn't conceded the race and was likely assessing his legal options.—NBC News

Trump Considers Starting a Militarized 'Space Force'
The president said he believed space to be a “warfighting domain” and suggested setting up a new branch of the military called the “space force." Speaking to service personnel at the Marine Corp Air Station Miramar, Trump said he was not “really serious” when he initially suggested it. “Then I said, 'What a great idea, maybe we’ll have to do that.'"—VICE News

YouTube to Pair Conspiracy Videos with Wikipedia Articles
The tech giant’s CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company would place information from Wikipedia and other sources next to conspiracy theory videos. Wojcicki unveiled the new “information cues” at SXSW in Austin, Texas. “People can still watch the videos but then they actually have access to additional information, can click off and go and see that,” she said.—Reuters

House Democrats Pressing On with Russia Probe
Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the Intel Committee, said his party would continue to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, despite a Republican report that found no evidence of foul play. The Democrats’ own update document cited 30 witnesses who had not yet been questioned.—CNN

International News

UK Police Probe Apparent Death of Russian Businessman
The Metropolitan Police counterterrorism unit was examining the death of a man who appeared to be Nikolai Glushkov after a body resembling the Putin critic was found in London. Although there was no apparent connection to the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, police said they were interested in Glushkov’s “associations." He was reportedly a friend of Boris Berezovsky, another Putin critic found hanged at his UK home in 2013.—BBC News

Violence in Congo Leaves Dozens Dead
At least 40 people have reportedly been killed in a battle between the Hema and Lendu people in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri area since Sunday. Authorities feared the precise death toll could be higher. “There are certainly other bodies out in the bush," an official said.—Al Jazeera

UN Says Facebook Played Role in Purge of Rohingya
Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights, said the social media platform had been used to spread hate speech and incitements to violence against the Muslim minority group in Myanmar. “I’m afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it originally intended,” Lee said.—VICE News

Everything Else

Seth Rich’s Family Sues Fox News
The family of the former DNC staffer fatally shot in Washington, DC, in 2016 filed a lawsuit against the network, reporter Malia Zimmerman, and pundit Ed Butowsky. The family alleges “false and fabricated facts” published by the outlet fed conspiracy stories about Rich and led to “emotional distress."—ABC News

Netflix Under Fire for Gender Pay Gap on ‘The Crown’
Producers for the Netflix series caught flak after admitting lead actress Claire Foy got paid less than co-star Matt Smith on seasons one and two. “Going forward, no one gets paid more than the Queen,” said executive producer Suzanne Mackie.—The Hollywood Reporter

Miley Cyrus Sued for Alleged Breach of Copyright
Jamaican artist Michael May filed a lawsuit against Cyrus, alleging her hit “We Can’t Stop” rips off about half its material from his 1988 song “We Run Things." May, better known as Flourgon, was reportedly after $300 million in damages.—Reuters

Flying Lotus Drops Seven New Songs
The acclaimed electronic/hip-hop artist put out unreleased material on Soundcloud. Six songs were outtakes from the animated film Blade Runner Black Out 2022, while “Choo Choo” was an outtake from the score for Stephen Soderbergh’s new flick Perfect.—Noisey

Shia LaBeouf Says He Gave Kanye West Clothes
The actor revealed the full extent of the rapper’s apparent obsession with his style, explaining he gifted West some of his clothing. “The dude has a lot of my shit,” LaBeouf said in a new interview. “I fucking love Kanye West. He’s going through a lot."—i-D

Make sure to check out the latest episode of VICE's daily podcast. Today we're looking back at the radical labour organizer behind International Women's Day.

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What crosses your mind when I say the word “queef”? For my mum, it means absolutely nothing; for my sister, it induces uncomfortable silence. For a gay male friend, it’s a delicate mystery; for a straight female friend, it elicits a knowing smile. On the internet, it seems to cause embarrassment, or bring up relentless references to a certain South Park episode. And—as with many body parts, objects and bodily functions—queefing can also be a source of sexual arousal.

For the uninitiated, queefing refers to the involuntary emission of air from the vagina (that said, there are some women who can queef on demand). Although the squeezing of air through a small space creates a sound that we most regularly associate with farting, queefing is odorless and entirely unrelated to the butt. In spite of this, other terms for queefing tend to refer to its anal neighbour: there’s vaginal flatulence, vaginal wind, vaginal fart, and the neat contraction vart.

Queefing was first examined by the scientific community in mid-1990s Sri Lanka, where the clinician JA Attapattu coined the rather intimidating phrase “garrulitas vulvae” (which—once we get past the Latin—translates to the much friendlier “chattering vulva”). Since then, there have been general population surveys on Dutch and Iranian women, the latter of which delivers an interesting stat: the most common activity leading to vaginal flatulence was sexual intercourse. This is reflected in the majority of other academic papers that examine queefing. Whether it’s a deep dive into doggy, a fast finger-bang, or some cunnilingus bliss, any penetrative action that lets air into a vagina can also result in that air coming back out. Indeed, it may be the steamy carnality of the queef that leads some people to fetishize it.

Teodora*, a 27-year-old IT specialist, doesn’t describe herself as a queef fetishist. Nonetheless, she can’t escape the feeling that there’s something pretty sexy about a lusty queef. “It doesn't happen very often and in my case it’s mostly after very intense fucking,” she says. The turn-on for Teodora lies in both the mental satisfaction of a passionate fuck and the physical sensation of queefing itself. “My imagination focuses on the idea that so much air came into my pussy,” she says. “When it’s releasing, even if it’s really loud, I don’t really care—it’s still tickling my pussy. So it’s really nice.”

Although fetish porn performer Allison* isn’t aroused by queefing, she’s well aware of the male propensity for a queef between the sheets. A few years back, she was struggling to make ends meet and decided to top-up her income by creating and selling videos online through her studio Thy Fetish Kingdom. After discovering the market for burping clips, Allison decided to give queefing a crack. “It comes naturally to me,” she explains, “and I couldn’t make farting videos due to embarrassment. For some reason queefing seemed less embarrassing.”

Allison tells me that her burping content “sells like hot cakes”, but she still has a steady stream of queef connoisseurs—her videos top the “queefing” category on the Clips4Sale website. When I ask Allison why she thinks that there’s a niche for queef clips, she speculates that it may be connected to childhood experiences, both negative and positive. “A young boy could have been molested by a girl he heard queef during a traumatic moment for him,” she suggests. “Sometimes it could be positive though, like a teacher he liked queefed once. But I’m no Freud.” Either way, Allison isn’t turned on by queefing herself: it’s business rather than pleasure.

Thirty-eight-year-old Jacob* certainly is turned on by queefing and believes his fetish originated during childhood. However, his understanding of his fetish doesn’t quite fit the negative/positive dichotomy. “My first girlfriend queefed a lot. I could hear her vagina taking in air during fingering, and sometimes around the sides of my penis during intercourse,” he says. “We were in our mid-teens, so this imprinted on me. My sexual template was still forming.”

Jacob’s explanation for his queef fetish appears to fit the classical conditioning theory of sexual preferences. This theory suggests that if we repeatedly experience a specific body part, object or bodily function prior to and during sexual arousal, we will eventually start to get turned on by it, even in seemingly non-sexual situations. In Jacob’s case, the pairing of his first sexual encounters with queefing may have had a significant effect. In fact, his first queefing experience still sticks with him decades down the line. “I could hear air slowly gurgling into her,” he recalls. “We thought we heard my mom get home, so we got out of bed quickly. As [my girlfriend] pivoted on her butt on the bed to scoot her feet off, she queefed a lot.”

Of course, the classical conditioning theory doesn’t quite fit everyone, nor does the idea of childhood experiences imprinting on the sexual psyche. The owner of the @WeLuvQueef Twitter page is an African-American man in his late-twenties. A casual lover switched to doggy one night and he found himself incredibly aroused by both her raised ass and her queefing. He was already running a regular porn Twitter account, but started to realize the occasional queef during videos. “I thought to myself, I can’t be the only one who likes this,” he recounts. “That’s when I turned this into a Twitter page for people like me who want to skip the long movies and go straight to the queefing.”

A large part of @WeLuvQueef’s fetish seems to be grounded in the visceral aspects of queefing. He frequently talks about his attraction to loud, wet and noisy queefs. For @WeLuvQueef, queefs are a natural by-product of fucking and therefore add an authenticity to his sexual experiences, something that he bemoans the lack of in conventional porn. “It’s better to hear the noises people actually make, rather than cut them out of scenes,” he says. “It’s much more real….it’s live, raw and uncut.” Jacob feels a similar pull to the link between queefing and sex. Since queefing is often stimulated by a digit, dick, or dildo, it forms part of his broader erotic experience: “I love that it's a sign of penetration. It's part of the atmosphere of sex.”

Benji*, a 30-year-old American man who has experienced queefing solely through porn, finds a specific thrill in the primal nature of noisy, queefy sex. “I never saw it happen in porn in any other position, only face-down, ass-up,” he recalls. “That position in itself is quite animalistic.” When a woman queefs, it suggests to Benji that both sexual partners are hungrily enjoying each other’s bodies. He asks me to imagine a ravenous man visiting a restaurant and being served a big plate of pasta. Once he tucks into the food, he starts to audibly slurp it up. “[The man] may be embarrassed, but the chef may hear it and beam with joy, seeing that his dish caused the man to lose his manners,” Benji explains. “That’s how sex is meant to be enjoyed, with all its sounds and squishy noises.”

Both @WeLuvQueef and Jacob can easily integrate queefing into their sex lives, largely because it takes little extra effort from themselves or their lovers. Jacob doesn’t look specifically for women who queef – he prefers to leave it to luck. He has a range of other kinks, such as group sex, large dildos, and rimming, so women aren’t usually that surprised that he’s into queefing too. “Queefing is just a very nice cherry on top of my kinky ice cream,” Jacob explains.

@WeLuvQueef says he has developed a sort of “queef embarrassment” radar, so doesn’t necessarily discuss or insist on his fetish with all sexual partners. “I don’t completely turn someone away if they don’t queef,” he says. “Some respond saying they hate it, others respond saying ‘hey, she’s talking to you.’” Although he acknowledges that queef fetishism isn’t normalized and is difficult to bring up with others, @WeLuvQueef is quietly confident of the future. “I think it has grown over the past couple of years and I want to see more people come out and say they enjoy it.”

*Names have been changed to protect anonymity.

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A24's horror movie Hereditary wasn't the craziest movie to premiere at Sundance this year—that honor goes to Sorry to Bother You—but it was definitely the scariest. Time Out called it "a new generation's Exorcist" and the Hollywood Reporter immediately dubbed it the "most effective domestic horror chiller since The Conjuring and The Babadook." Even the trailer is fucking terrifying, full of little girls cutting the heads off birds and what is probably the most unnerving use of a dollhouse ever.

Now, according to AV Club, A24 has found an entirely new way to traumatize people with its new movie—namely by secretly leaving weird dolls on the doorsteps of Hereditary audience members.

Multiple people who attended a late-night screening of Hereditary at SXSW this week—including Moonlight director Barry Jenkins—reportedly woke up to hand-delivered packages outside their front doors featuring nightmare-inducing toys and strange notes. Because nothing is better than going to see a movie that is "life-ruining levels of scary" and then waking up to a horrifying package someone definitely left on your doorstep while you were sleeping, right?

A24 went on to post photos of the whole collection of dolls on Twitter, and each of the 15 freaky figurines is uniquely weird in its own way, including one particularly fucked-up guy who has a wine cork for a hand and a plastic pumpkin face permanently stuck mid-howl. They look like the kind of haunting, handmade dolls that Sid from Toy Story would sell if he grew up and opened an Etsy shop.

Unfortunately, not everyone was lucky (or unlucky) enough to wake up to one of A24's gifts. Elijah Wood, who reportedly bugged out about how scary Hereditary was during a SXSW Q&A, really wants one, too—so whichever A24 intern was responsible for the first batch better fire up the glue gun and start working on round two.

Hereditary was written and directed by first-timer Ari Aster and stars Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, and Milly Shapiro. The movie is set to hit theaters on June 28, but it's unlikely A24 will launch some kind of nationwide, freaky-ass doll giveaway like when the Pokémon movie gave away those Mew cards. Honestly, that's probably a good thing.

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As students across America geared up to walk out of class for 17 minutes to honor each person killed in last month's school shooting in Parkland, Florida—and demand gun reform—some did so knowing they might be punished. Across the country, rogue local school officials have teased a hardline approach for those who ultimately take part in the walkout, with threats ranging from students being slapped with unexcused absences to undisclosed disciplinary.

Harford County Public Schools in Maryland warned of "disciplinary action" for any student who left campus for the walkout, citing it as a safety threat, the Baltimore Sun reported. Students in New Jersey's Sayreville School District were also slated to face reprisal unless their parents signed them out. And Bentonville Schools in Arkansas said the plan was to give participants detention.

Numerous school districts in Atlanta appeared to take a similar approach, with Gwinett, Fayette, Fulton, Hall, and Cobb County students facing possible discipline, a local Fox affiliate reported. Although the school officials in Georgia, like those in other states, were vague about what that punishment might look like, plenty of students expressed willingness to take the risk. Some 280 Pope High School students under Cobb County's jurisdiction planned to walkout regardless, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, though the number that actually did so early Wednesday was not clear at the time of publication.

"The reason we are doing this is because we love our education so much" Pope senior Madeleine Deisen told the paper. "We want to be able to focus on reading literature, on playing the violin, on learning calculus. We don’t want to be sitting in those classrooms and worried about what would happen... We are doing this because we want the safety to learn."

In its 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision, the Supreme Court held that public school students don't "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." Still, experts say schools are likely well within their rights to punish students for what they can claim amounted to an unexcused absence or disruptive demonstration.

Some students have already faced suspensions ahead of the March 14 walkout, which was largely organized by an arm of the Women's March called Empower. Last month, the superintendent for Needville Independent School District outside of Houston, Texas, threatened to suspend kids for three days should they try to organize or participate in "any type of protest." And dozens of students at Ingleside Middle School in Phoenix, Arizona—where, full disclosure, I attended—were suspended in February for walking off campus during a protest organized nearly two weeks after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.

"It's important for me to speak my mind on this topic," Ingleside eighth-grader Layla Defibaugh, told the Associated Press. "At the end of the day, they shouldn't be able to punish us for exercising our First Amendment rights."

Students at those schools were on spring break this week, but will still have their chance to join in on the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, DC, and various satellite cities on Saturday, March 24. There's also another slate of school walkouts planned for April 20, the 19th anniversary of the school shooting at Columbine High in Colorado.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

It’s 2018 and Facebook has turned to shit. It’s basically just full of your mum’s blurry pictures of the dog, engagement announcements from your friend’s friend who added you after a night out in 2011, and 800-word political rants from that guy from uni halls who was always trying to "recruit" you to the "Communist Soc" and dresses in a style that can only be described as "Soviet Union Cosplay". All that, and in the not-so-distant future it will basically just be a giant digital graveyard full of dead people.

Probably best to just get rid of it, right? But you’ve been thinking about doing that for the past three years and yet here you are, in all likelihood reading this on Facebook and oh, look, you’re an hour and 12 minutes into your lunch hour, the past 47 of which you’ve spent mindlessly scrolling like your life depends on it.

Yeah, you should definitely get rid. Shouldn’t you…? You should. Should you, though? You probably should. But should you? Here: shall we weigh up the pros and cons? We should, we should.

PRO: AN EXTREMELY CONVENIENT WAY OF AVOIDING ALL SOCIAL OBLIGATIONS
Oh: some girl from your school who you were at-best-OK friends with in your earlier teens before she got all actory has sent you a Facebook message for some reason. Ah! She’s coming to London for drama school auditions next week, and her Airbnb just cancelled her booking and she can’t find a single other place to stay in the whole city. Good thing you’re still in touch via the modern miracle of social media! Don’t worry, she’ll only be with you for four fucking nights, all of which involve her dragging you to Soho and end with her literally singing out loud in your kitchen.

CON: YOU DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS NOW, SORRY
Despite the best efforts of RA, Dice and whatever other app you’re going to last-minute buy all your festival tickets from when you get drunk during the late May Bank Holiday and forget about the concept of rent (just me?), Facebook is still probably the most useful way of finding out all the stuff you actually do want to go to. If you delete it, you’ll spend the rest of your youth retrospectively finding out about house parties because you’re not important enough for anyone to realise you’re missing from a guest list until after they’ve happened. Plus, if you have Facebook you can click "Interested" in "SOLD OUT: Fabric Live presents Dixon (127 hour set)", or "Going" to "Southeast London Clothes Exchange @ Boxpark Croydon" even though you have no intention of attending either of these events, and everyone else will think it’s because you have actual friends IRL and occasionally you really do leave the house and go to social functions with them. You see now how popularity is just an elaborate con, now? You see how it is just an illusion?

PRO: THE LACK OF FREQUENT EMBARRASSMENT
Your housemate got bored one hungover Sunday afternoon and scrolled all the way back through your timeline until they found an extremely "Lynx Africa" picture of you from Freshers’ Week and liked it so that it went back on everyone’s News Feed, and they all had a good lol at your neon face paint and your glow-sticks and your mad, mad emo fringe, and now this happens roughly every six-to-eight months, and it would be good, wouldn’t it, if everyone cool and hot that you have met in the years since you stopped wearing a Jack Daniels belt buckle didn’t get to see photographic evidence that this happened. Yes, that would be quite good.

CON: THE LOSS OF A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY FOR EMBARRASSING OTHERS
On the flipside, is there anything better than finding a sneaky little June 2007 status on your friend’s timeline about how much they "Can’t wait for new Doctor Who!!!!! XD" and then proceed to comment on it twice an hour until it gets 200 likes and they just absolutely lose all their chill and report you? No, no there is not. See also: memes.

PRO: I MEAN, IT’S KINDA EVIL
Hate to sound like your Uncle Brian who stockpiles hundreds of tins of Heinz Spaghetti Hoops in his garage so he’s prepared “when they come”, but I think we can all acknowledge, in 2018 A.D., that Facebook has done some pretty bad things, from destroying democracy and spreading hate speech to numerous cases of livestreaming assaults.

CON: YEAH, IT’S GONNA MAKE YOU LOOK LIKE A WEIRDO TBH
Getting rid of Facebook now is the online equivalent of being a gluten-free prior to the invention of gluten circa 2012; everyone is just gonna think you’re a preachy weirdo. Yes, it sucks that nobody under the age of 45 posts anything anymore and thus Facebook is now dominated by your mums’ colleague’s results for "Which collective noun is used for these animals?" quizzes ("19/25 not to bad!!!"), but equally, the only people who don’t have Facebook in 2018 are men’s rights activists, mass murderers and your dad. Wait a couple more years until the act of quitting makes you look like less of a Reddit power-user.

PRO: SO MUCH TIME FOR OTHER FUN ACTIVITIES!
Remember books and television? Remember going to bed before midnight? Sometimes I’ll be watching a thing on my laptop and I’ll realise that I’ve gone half an hour without checking Facebook and it will give me palpable anxiety and I’ll have to pause the thing I’m watching to have a little scroll-break. Just to log on and see that some girl I know from Brownies has checked into Wagamamas. Just suck at the blue-and-white teat a second and see some lad I met in Fresher’s Week and never again is looking for city recommendations for Berlin. It’s getting so bad that even its own creators want us to spend less time on it. I haven’t even read a single word of White Teeth by Zadie Smith . I haven’t really, properly tried to get into The Beatles. I haven’t watched The English Patient. Maybe I’d watch The English Patient if I didn’t spend four hours a day scrolling through "ANYONE KNOW A GOOD CHEAP PLACE TO GET WOOD CUT TO SIZE?" and "Tag somebody who owes you a trip to Disneyland" posts. Maybe I’d fucking love The English Patient.

CON: SO MUCH TIME FOR GENUINE HUMAN INTERACTION AND SELF-REFLECTION
What, so you’re just gonna spend your time, like, talking to people now? You’re just gonna have a chat with your colleague while you queue for the kitchenette microwave? You’re going to strike up a conversation with that old lady who you see on the train some mornings? You’re just gonna just, like, have some time to yourself to work through your emotions and have a good hard think about your goals for the future, and how to achieve them? Absolutely no. Honestly, I just feel like it’s a bad idea. You’re keeping Facebook. We’re all keeping Facebook.

@RosieHew

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

On the night of March 16, 1993, 16-year-old Somali Shidane Abukar Arone was caught trespassing by Canadian soldiers deployed in his country. Shortly after midnight, he was dead.

At the time, Somalia was in the midst of a brutal civil war that had sent more than 1.5 million refugees—a fifth of its population—fleeing beyond its borders. Thousands were dying every week from starvation and lack of medicine. Desperately needed humanitarian aid was being stolen by militia leaders and sold on the black market. In December 1992, Canada sent a 1,400-strong force as part of a UN peace-enforcing mission to ensure the food got to Somalis in need.

Four months later, Arone snuck into the perimeter of the Canadian base in the town of Belet Huen, 341 kilometres north of the Somali capital of Mogadishu, and was found hiding in a portable toilet by a Canadian Airborne Regiment (CAR) patrol. Arone didn’t resist arrest, claiming he was looking for a lost child. The patrolmen suspected he was a thief. Arone was taken to an underground bunker in the Canadian encampment, tied up and blindfolded.

What happened next is surely one of the ugliest incidents of modern Canadian history.

Over several hours, Arone was savagely tortured by Airborne soldiers. Subsequent court-martial testimony revealed he was waterboarded, punched in the jaw, hit by a metal bar, repeatedly kicked, and the soles of his feet burned by a cigarillo. According to several accounts, he was sodomized by a stick that was also used to beat him.

Upwards of 80 soldiers could hear Arone’s screams over the roar of a nearby electric generator. One soldier later testified he heard a “long dragged out howl”—before returning to his Game Boy. Others stopped by to comment their fellow soldiers had a nice trophy. Arone’s last words were a moaning repeated intonation of “Canada, Canada.”

Shidane Arone’s name shouldn’t be forgotten in 2018. There is a clear throughline between his demise and the fate of people such as Abdoul Abdi, a Somali former child refugee now facing deportation from Canada back to a country he fears only offers him certain death. Arone and Abdi are just some of the many names that have fallen through the cracks. We need to remember these names so their fates aren’t repeated.

Clayton Matchee near a wounded Shidane Arone at gunpoint. He subsequently died of his injuries. | Image via CP.

Two men were eventually charged with Arone’s murder and torture: Master Corporal Clayton Matchee and Private Kyle Brown, members of the 2 Commando section of the Airborne. Matchee, a Cree man, was later reported to have bragged that “the white man fears the Indian and so will the black man.” Sixteen photographs were taken by the two men that night, with both Brown and Matchee posing with the bloodied semi-conscious Arone. The same day Matchee was arrested, he was found hanging by his bootlaces in his cell, and was left irreversibly brain-damaged. Brown, who was part Cree, was eventually sentenced to five years imprisonment and dismissed from the armed forces. Seven others were charged, including a major who issued the order that thieves caught sneaking into the camp could be “abused” as a deterrent, an order that was taken to a grotesque extreme. Most of the soldiers court-martialed were acquitted or only reprimanded.

Canadians back home were shocked, especially when a video surfaced featuring members of 2 Commando spouting racist remarks, with one stating Somalis “never work, they’re lazy, they’re slobs, and they stink.” Days later, footage of a hazing video emerged in which Airborne soldiers appeared to be smeared with human feces that spelled out “I love the KKK.” A 1994 Washington Post article noted the affair “dealt a blow to Canada's image as the postwar era's preeminent international peacekeeper, and to Canadians' self-image as a people naturally adept at mediating and stabilizing foreign conflicts.” Arone’s death sparked a military internal inquiry and, in 1995, the federal government commissioned a public inquiry. The questions on Canadians’ minds were: How could this have happened? And why did none of the soldiers do anything to stop it?

Clayton Matchee is assisted by family members as he arrives for a military hearing at Court of Queen's Bench in Saskatoon, Tuesday, July 23, 2002 | Image via CP.

Canadian peacekeeping had been riding high at the time after a successful decades-long UN-led mission in Cyprus that came to a close in 1993. Somalia proved to be a challenge of a different order; the crises of the Rwandan genocide and the Yugoslav Wars were still ahead. Over the course of several inquiries, the Canadian public discovered Arone’s murder was far from the only troubling incident.

From the start, the Canadians had issues with thieves and looters in and around their base, many of them children. Firing their weapons in the air didn’t work; the conflict-accustomed locals didn’t flinch. There was no real Somali authority in place to punish or incarcerate prisoners the Canadians apprehended. So a number of morally questionable measures were employed to deal with the problem. Children caught stealing were bound, blindfolded, and left in the sun for hours, with a sign bearing the word “Thief” in Somali hanging around their necks. Twelve days before Arone’s death, Airborne troops used bait to snare thieves, a dubious action that ended with two Somalis shot, one fatally in the back. All told, six Somalis were killed by Canadian soldiers during their deployment.

As these details were revealed, allegations of multiple cover-ups also emerged, from shredded Department of National Defense documents to “trophy” photographs of soldiers posing with bound Somali prisoners being ordered destroyed. The CAR, a proud elite regiment since its creation in 1968, was disbanded in shame in 1995.

But the public inquiry never heard testimony on Arone’s murder. The inquiry was prematurely shut down in 1996 and ordered to produce a report the following year. The report’s conclusions didn’t focus on racism in the military that seemed inherent in the actions of Matchee, Brown, and others. It blamed a lack of understanding of Somalia culture, the harsh climate, as well as the demoralizing toxic environment created by locals who were known to throw rocks and spit at the Canadians ostensibly there to help them. Many soldiers felt the Somalis were ungrateful, as Somalis largely saw the UN involvement being motivated by Western self-interest. A lack of education within the armed forces officer ranks was also found to be problematic. Only 30 percent of officers at the time had university degrees; Matchee and Brown’s non-commissioned section commander had only completed eighth grade.

In 1997, 100 recommendations were presented to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to reform the military, including making post-secondary education mandatory for all officers, putting an emphasis on ethics in military college curriculums, and the creation of an independent military journal. Racism in the military became one element in a complex situation, rather than the central issue demanding tackling.

Even before these recommendations, the Somalia Affair narrative had transitioned from the horrifying acts perpetrated by Canadian soldiers towards the national trauma they caused. Its victim shifted from Arone and other Somalis to Canada’s self-identity. In 1996, Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno wrote: “How typically Canadian that we become more animated and reactive, and outraged over the chain of responsibility, or the chain of collusion, or the chain of concealment, then we did over the original crimes and deplorable conduct of Canadian peacekeepers.”

It’s impossible to say Canada’s legacy of residential schools and colonialism didn’t rear its ugly head on March 16, 1993, when two Cree victims of racism—Matchee was nicknamed “Geronimo” by his fellow soldiers, a moniker he loathed—perpetrated acts of brutality when they believed they had free licence to do so. Right before the March 16 torture started, Matchee was advised by his section commander to beat Arone with a phone book to avoid leaving marks, a practice some policemen in Saskatchewan, Matchee’s home province, were alleged to have used on First Nations men. Matchee’s family got hate mail and bomb threats after Arone’s murder went public, with one letter stating: “Indian, welfare bum. You deserve to die.”

Even if it arguably hasn’t eliminated racism within its ranks, some of the Canadian military’s changes seem to have worked. In Afghanistan, a case arose in 2008 where a Canadian soldier mercy killed a severely wounded Taliban soldier, and was subsequently court-martialed. But nothing nearly as grotesque as Arone’s murder has occurred since.

Canada’s involvement in peacekeeping has still steeply declined since the Somalia Affair. To distance himself from the Conservatives during the 2015 electoral campaign, Justin Trudeau pledged a renewed commitment to peacekeeping, to the tune of $500 million and 600 Canadian troops. Not much has happened since; potential involvement in a UN-led mission in Al-Qaeda-threatened Mali never came to anything. Back in the 2015 electoral campaign, there were only 68 Canadian peacekeepers in the field. Jump to February 2018 and the sum of Canadian peacekeepers is 40, half of them policemen.

And yet, peacekeeping remains popular with the Canadian public. The Somalia Affair has become a minor blip in what Canadians feel is an otherwise unblemished history of peacekeeping. Almost 70 percent of Canadians support deploying Canadian Forces on UN peacekeeping missions in active fighting areas, according to a 2016 Nanos poll.

Trudeau’s Liberals don’t seem to be interested in peacekeeping. They’ve already gotten grief over multi-billion dollar arms sales to Saudi Arabia, including vehicles which may have been used on Yemeni civilians, and seem keen to avoid the kind of quagmire that Somalia and Afghanistan proved to be. Their peacekeeping initiatives have been more or less limited to things like devoting $21 million to increase the number of women in the field. Meanwhile, they've reduced the initial promise of a 600 to a strong task force for temporary deployments.

And what of Somalia now, 25 year later? The endless cycle of violence ravaging the country since the 1980s continues. On February 23, two car bombs killed 45 in Mogadishu in an attack claimed by the Al-Qaeda affiliated Al Shabab. But Canada is staying out of Africa for the foreseeable future, despite plans to increase the military budget from the current $18.9 billion to $32.6 billion by 2029.

As for Arone’s family, the Canadian government compensated his clan the value of 100 camels (approx. $15,000 USD), which they had demanded as blood money. Arone’s parents later sued the Canadian government for $5 million, but the suit was dismissed in 1999. The judge wasn’t convinced the government had a care of duty towards Somali citizens and ruled there was no evidence Arone’s parents had suffered because of their son’s death.

Twenty-five years on, Arone’s death still raises more questions than it answers. The world has problems and Canada does have a lot to offer to help. But are we willing to pay the price for getting involved, for more convoys of fallen soldiers rolling in procession down the Highway of Heroes, for more potential Rwandas and Somalias? Are we ready to do things differently in the future? These are questions we have to ask ourselves. For the time being, we’re avoiding them and staying put.

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I've only seen my father, Carmine, a handful of times since my parents divorced when I was 18, about a decade ago. He lives in the South now, and I have no idea what he does for a living. He's never told me, and I've never asked. One of the last times we hung out, I picked him up at a Courtyard Marriott in Central New Jersey and drove him to my brother's graduation. This was in 2013. He kept telling me to slow down for fear I'd get pulled over—he had warrants out for his arrest. (For what he never told me, and I never asked.) He didn't have a ticket for the commencement ceremony, and instead of getting one, he "snuck" in by climbing a chain-link fence on the opposite side of the assembled stadium crowd and onto the football field. After it ended, his friend drove him to the train station. Two years later, he was randomly in New York City, where I had moved, and we got drunk at a dumpling place in Chinatown. I haven't seen him since.

We don't often speak, either. When we do talk on the phone, it's usually him ranting, almost always sparked by some major life event. For example: We had an hour-long chat about six months ago, when he called to say my grandfather had died. The talk dovetailed nicely into a story that involved an old friend of his and a prostitute on Craigslist. This is fairly typical: a serious discussion followed by his lengthy tangents.

These conversations—for better or worse—always bring me immense joy. So when I learned David Chase, at long last, officially had plans to make a Sopranos prequel called The Many Saints of Newark, I knew Carmine Norcia would have a lot to say about it. For one, he fucking loved the show. More importantly, he was born in Newark to Italian American parents, and for most of my life, worked at the scrapyard on Malvern Street between Adams and and Jefferson that my mom's family has owned since the 70s.

Chase's film reportedly takes place in Newark during the 1967 riots, when the African American and Italian communities feuded for five days after it was believed cops had murdered a black cabdriver inside a precinct house. It was just one riot among hundreds across the nation during what came to be known as the Long, Hot Summer of 1967. This was the season my grandparents left Newark for the suburbs with my father and the rest of the family.

So I called my very Italian father from Jersey up and asked about his experiences watching the show and his predictions for the movie—plot, casting, setting. I tried my best to keep him on topic.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: What was watching The Sopranos like when it came out?
Carmine Norcia: Everybody in Jersey was watching it. I watched the first episode, and I was like, I'm going to watch this fucking thing until it ends. It just grew. I remember when they were doing the promotions. At that time, I was still working down in Newark. You remember like the seventh episode of the first season? Tony's playing catch with Uncle Junior when he's a kid.

Yes.
And they were Down Neck*. They were on like fucking Walnut or Elm Street. Right near Jefferson Street. At that point, I couldn't tell where they were, and then they were on Oliver Street, right by the bridge to the Ironbound, there is this company—I recognized the awning on the fucking building. I got up off the sofa, and shouted to your mother, "They're Down Neck!" I passed that place going to work all the time.

[*The Ironbound is a working-class neighborhood in Newark's East Ward, also known as "Down Neck," because of the way the Passaic River curves. The term "Ironbound" is said to come from the area's metalworking industry. In the 60s, it was predominantly Portuguese and Italian. The North Ward was also largely Italian.]

And then later on in the episode, Tony's father is on the bus, riding somewhere—he's on a diagonal from Nasto's ice cream. You know that place?

Yes.
Good, cause it has great fucking ice cream. But they're in front of Palumbo's, the hardware store, right by Amelia's, an Italian restaurant I used to go to all the time. She's long out of there, too, Amelia.

I guess that's really the only time the show flashed back.
Yeah, that's a good one, for the prequel. That's why I'm bringing all of this up.

What do you think this film is even going to be about?
It's probably going to be about Tony's father, and Uncle Junior, and Tony's mother—especially how controlling she was. I think that's it—that's what I would do. Explore how much control Livia had over her husband. Like, he never grew in the ranks because Livia was pulling the fucking strings on everything. Behind the scenes, doing fucking this, that, and the other. I mean, James Gandolfini can't be in it. He's dead. Remember that photo I had?

The photo he had. From left to right: Christopher, Tony, Paulie Walnuts, and Silvio. Signed by each.

Yeah. Where did you get that thing? It's hanging in the bathroom now, in Mom's basement.
Beth Ann got it for me. [Beth Ann is my father's cousin.] Beth Ann worked at Paramus Catholic High School. She used to, not anymore. The head janitor at Paramus Catholic High School was James Gandolfini Sr. So Beth Ann's known—go to her fucking Facebook. She's got all kinds of photos. You know when Phil Leotardo was on the lam? They used Beth Ann's friend's house on Lake Street in Newark, up in the North Ward, for when he was supposed to be in Brooklyn or whatever the fuck. They filmed it all in Newark. All of that shit. All those scenes.

I was living in Kearny around then, for a while, you know. All of that—they filmed at Stewart's Root Beer, all along Kearny Avenue, the fucking ports. They shot on the bridge, near Tops Diner. The Clay Street Bridge. I don't know why I'm saying all of this. You probably don't know where any of this shit is.

James Gandolfini and my father's cousin Beth Ann. I followed his instructions and went to her "fucking Facebook." Courtesy of Beth Ann Del Vecchio

I don't.
It's up off the MacArthur Highway, north on 21, toward Belleville—there's a bridge. It's called the Clay Street Bridge. Uncle Junior walks on the Clay Street Bridge. You want to really know about shit, call Dolores. [Beth Ann's mother, my father's aunt.] She lived in Newark forever. She's old now. Talk to her. She doesn't have shit to do.

I'll call her one day.
Call Cousin Jimmy, too. I wish fucking Uncle Paul and Uncle Jerry [my great-grandfather's brothers/my grandmother's uncles] were still alive. They were mob guys fucking back then, when this prequel shit is supposed to be happening. They lived all through the shit. When I was working in Newark, they were still alive. I'd see them. I'd see them at the fucking hot dog stand. All the social clubs were by the scrapyard, too. The one was across the street from Ralphie [my father's friend, whose name has been changed here for reasons that will soon reveal themselves]—that's not there anymore, though. That used to be the Ironbound GOP. They killed a fucking guy on Van Buren Street in Newark. Look that one up. In front of Ironbound GOP in the car. Google that, too. They shot him. So you had that club right there, and then you had another club on, like, Chestnut and Adams. I forget, exactly. But right around there. That was the Bruno-Scarfo's, and the other one was the Lucchese family's, I think.

You should talk to Ralphie**, too, because his father was locked up for years. You can call Ralphie up. Actually, I don't know what happened to him. Do you? Did he go off the deep end?

I haven't heard anything. Wasn't he always on the verge of going off the deep end?
Pretty much, yeah. Fucking wild man. Remember when we would go skiing? He was slamming vodka and smoking weed and never slowing down. He smoked weed going up the lift every run. He'd have two Grey Gooses on the rocks for lunch and a side of soda. He'd have a joint in the morning, too. This is the shit they should be putting in the fucking movie.

What was the Newark this prequel is supposed to take place in like?
You see what happened in Newark was, during the 50s and everything... Just compare the statistics between the black population in the 1950s and 1960s. It probably went up 50 percent. There was a huge "white flight" after the riots, and it had started even before they happened. Let's put it this way: I was born in fucking '62—we moved to Watchung [at the time, a working-class town] when I was five. I just remember these stories from when I was younger. The blacks never came into the Ironbound—they never came into the Ironbound even during the riots, because the fucking Italians were standing on the roofs with shotguns. In the North Ward, you know where like Bloomfield Avenue runs, where The Sopranos basically takes place, they were doing it up there, too.

But the Portuguese and the Brazilians obviously went into the Ironbound?
Yeah. The Portuguese have been in the Ironbound for a long time. That's nothing new. Grandma and Poppy [my grandparents] grew up in the Ironbound with the Portuguese—the continental Portuguese have been in the Ironbound forever. A lot of them, second- and third-generation dudes, they're out in the fucking suburbs now, too. Social mobility. That's a whole other story. People leave.

I mean, you've seen Newark—you saw what I dealt with for 20 fucking years. The drugs, the crime. Shit's still not pretty. Imagine dealing with that all fucking day. Write about that some time. Running the fucking scrap line. [For three months, before moving to New York, I worked at the scrapyard for my uncle.] Get out of that fucking bubble you're in.

You think David Chase is going to get it right?
He's all North Ward. It's going to only take place in the North Ward. That'll probably be a mistake. But David Chase is awesome. He changed TV forever. This'll be great. Get that down.

I thought the TV broke the day The Sopranos ended. That ending, man—this'll be great. I'm glad this is happening.

Who's going to be cast? Isn't James Gandolfini's son acting?
I won't get casted, so who cares.

**Ralphie's name is a pseudonym.

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Matthew Heimbach, the chief of the Traditionalist Worker Party and one of the the most prominent leaders of the American white nationalist movement, was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly attacking both his wife, Brooke Heimbach, and her stepfather—fellow party leader Matt Parrott. According to a police report obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the bizarre events leading to his arrest stemmed from a tryst gone awry.

Apparently, Heimbach and Parrott's wife, Jessica, had an affair that lasted three months. But Heimbach's wife reportedly wanted to see if her husband would continue the fling despite having said it was over, Talking Points Memo reports. On Tuesday, Matt Parrott and Brooke Heimbach reportedly stood on a cardboard box outside a trailer home and spied on their significant others from the window.

According to at least one account in the report, the two began to have sex and Parrott went inside to confront Heimbach. Parrot said he poked Heimbach in the chest, and then Heimbach allegedly "choked him out" and caused him to lose consciousness. When he came to, Parrott took his younger step-daughter to a Walmart and called the cops, telling them that Heimbach's wife may have taken a recording of the encounter. Meanwhile, Heimbach allegedly attacked his wife Brooke, grabbing her face and throwing her onto a bed. He was carted off to the Orange County Jail in handcuffs.

When the police arrived, all four people involved in the incident listed some variation of "white nationalist" as their occupation in statements, the Washington Post reports. For years, Heimbach has been trying to build a coalition of American white nationalists and make their ideas more acceptable in the mainstream discourse. He became famous for starting a white student union at Towson University, and was called the "affable, youthful face of hate in America," after he pushed a Black Lives Matter protestor at a Trump rally and got sued. He continued to drift even more to the right, and was a presence at Unite the Right in Charlottesville. Most recently, he was set to speak alongside Richard Spencer at a Michigan State University event that descended into a clash between racists and protestors.

Heimbach is now free on bond, but all is not well for the white nationalists of Paoli, Indiana, according to the SPLC.

"I’m done. I’m out," Parrott apparently told the hate-group tracker. "SPLC has won. Matt Parrott is out of the game. Y’all have a nice life."

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This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Tuesday night, Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon visited Desus, Mero, and honorary host of "the number one show in late night," Boombox, making his first appearance on the VICELAND show. This time, Jimmy took his turn in the hot seat, and the three talked all about ice cream—from Carvel to Ben & Jerry's to DIY pints straight from a Williams-Sonoma ice cream maker—among other equally pressing topics, like pickles and Robert De Niro.

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.

Right before he was sentenced to 84 months in federal prison last Friday, “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli broke into tears. Ultimately, the man convicted on three counts of fraud did not get the maximum possible sentence he faced—much less the 21 years I endured in the feds for drug crimes. Even so, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) will be Shkreli's home for the foreseeable future, and the New York Daily News reported Wednesday he's hoping to land in a minimum-security "camp" facility in Pennsylvania best known for a salmonella outbreak.

I’ve been out of prison for over three years, but still have plenty of friends inside the belly of the beast, albeit mostly for crimes that have nothing to do with hedge funds or biotech. Still, after Shkreli’s sentence was handed down, I couldn’t help soliciting current federal inmates' expert opinions on how the "most hated man in America" might get treated behind bars. What emerged was a general consensus that the nature of his crime, along with Shkreli’s money and high-profile, meant he was unlikely to land in a facility where Oz-style brutality was endemic. Even so, his unique role as a cultural lightning rod—and especially his status as a pharmaceutical price-gouger—could cause him some extra trouble.

“I think that Martin Shkreli will slip between the cracks in prison, because he will more than likely go to a camp where there is no violence," Walter “King Tut” Johnson, a New Yorker doing life at FCI Otisville on a federal three-strikes law conviction, told VICE in an email. “He will hate being locked up period, though, and probably do a little protesting. If he cries in prison like he did at sentencing, it better be genuine, because tears in prison are taken seriously.”

In Tut’s experience, prison tears are for the loss of a loved one, incurable illness, or grieving by a person who is truly innocent. Which is to say sobbing from Shkreli over the state of his new digs could be seen as an insult to seasoned convicts—an act of selfishness that might become a “jacket” hanging over him for his whole bid.

“Once he gets to prison, he’ll be minimum security,” agreed Christian Fannon, a former Ohio resident doing five years at FCI Beckley in West Virginia for forging drug prescriptions. “Most federal prison camps are super soft. He will be able to actually live decent. If he went to higher security, they’d eat him up. He’d have to pay protection and his money would be his safety."

No matter where he lands, thanks to his saturation media coverage and propensity for thumbing his nose at the public, Shkreli will face the possibility of being singled out for abuse. But even at low-security camps, every inmate has something to lose, and no one wants to go back behind a fence (a.k.a. a higher-security facility) for smacking up a "lame," as Shkreli may be dubbed.

The man's profile as a professional troll, however, could complicate his stay.

“Given Shkreli's inexperience as an inmate, the fact that it's public knowledge that he still has a lot of money, and his overall spoiled-brat, rich-boy attitude, he’ll make a nice target for the press game,” Robert Rosso, a former prison gang member doing life for drugs at FCI Terre Haute in Indiana and has written for VICE, told me in an email.

In other words, Shkreli may well find himself inclined to pay someone or a group of people what amounts to protection money. And he could be charged more for everything—sheets and blankets, food, contraband—all because of who he is.

Of course, with extra money comes plenty of advantages.

“He’s gonna breeze through the system and sleep easy at night,” offered Tommy Rutledge, a former Illinois resident doing life for a cocaine conspiracy, also at FCI Terre Haute in Indiana. “Rich people always win, even in prison.”

It’s true: I’ve seen plenty of high profile dudes with money coast in prison. Cash is the great equalizer. What Shkreli needs to watch out for is how his price-gouging of live-saving drugs might shape his status in an institution where there is a moral code—a hierarchy—albeit not one most Americans are familiar with.

“Shkreli was an true-blooded capitalist until he knowingly and intentionally price-gouged a pharmaceutical that he knew people depended on to stay alive,” Rosso told me. ”In that sense, he turned into the worst kind of drug dealer there is: someone who got off on playing God.”

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After five years touring the world, David Bowie Is, the juggernaut retrospective organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is now in its largest and final iteration at the Brooklyn Museum. Meanwhile, the relentless program of reissues and re-masters of the Starman’s work is being re-upped this spring with eight more records receiving the vinyl treatment. After his passing in January 2016 inspired tributes from loyal fans, Bowie’s cross-cultural presence looms large. His son, filmmaker Duncan Jones, has even launched an international book clubbased around his father’s hundred favorite tomes.

That we were going to be confronted with a swelling expression of warmth to Bowie’s memory was plain early on. A few weeks after he died, my wife and I were waiting in line at a supermarket in Austin. At the tills, among the last-minute gewgaws, was a rack of Blackstar CDs. Record company opportunism? Maybe. But a good proportion of our fellow customers were adding the terminal masterpiece to their weekly shops. This was a long way from the only connections I had previously made between Bowie and Texas: 1) He adored crackpot outsider The Legendary Stardust Cowboy; 2) Stevie Ray Vaughan played on Let’s Dance; and 3) When promoting The Man Who Sold The World in a flowing silk gown at a Houston radio station on Wednesday, February 10, 1971, an outraged local pulled a gun on him.

I come armed with the exact date of the last factoid because a few years back, I spent nine months marshaling a 300,000-word manuscript by British Bowie archivist Kevin Cann into the heavyweight Any Day Now, a blow-by-blow diary of Bowie’s life in the UK capital between his birth in 1947 and his departure from the country in 1974. The first copy was duly sent to its subject; word came back that he was knocked out (and subsequently inquired what he’d been doing at specific times in his life)

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In compelling evidence that soulmates are real, a Chinese husband and wife have discovered that they unknowingly appeared in the same photograph almost 20 years ago, a decade before they were to meet. And by the way, 1.379 billion people live in China.

As reported by Channel NewsAsia, the Chengdu-based couple were going through old photos earlier this month when the husband recognised himself standing in the corner of his wife’s tourist snap at May Fourth Square in Qingdao. The photograph was taken back in July 2000, and the duo would eventually meet and fall in love in 2011.

"When I saw the photo, I was taken by surprise and I got goosebumps all over my body ... that was my pose for taking photos. I also took a photo, it was the same posture [as captured in my wife’s photo], just from a different angle,” the husband, Mr Ye, told a local news outlet.

Ye was visiting May Fourth Square after his mother fell sick at the last minute and he was able to take her place in a tour group. His wife, Xue, was visiting the site with her own mother.

The couple, who have subsequently gone viral on Chinese microblogging site Weibo, now plan to return and take a new photograph of themselves with their children at the same spot they crossed paths.

“It seems that Qingdao is certainly one of the most special cities [for us]. When the children are older, we will go to Qingdao again and the family will take a photo again,” Mr Ye said.

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands

On the night of 18th February, 17-year-old Orlando Boldewijn disappeared in the Dutch city of The Hague, after a Grindr-date he hadn't told his friends or family about. The student's body was found eight days later in a pond in the Ypenburg neighbourhood of the city. It's still uncertain what exactly happened to Orlando Boldewijn, but the case has started a conversation in the Netherlands about the safety of gay teenagers exploring their sexuality through secret meet-ups.

Apps like Grindr are often a refuge for teens looking for a way into the gay scene – because they're either yet to come out, or they don't really know anyone else their age who is openly gay. On top of that, there's the fear of being bullied at school if they're spotted on dates or in gay bars. While dating sites and apps are a way for gay teens to explore their sexuality with acceptance in a sometimes hostile society, they can mean users find themselves in a vulnerable position, agreeing to meet older men they haven't met before, in unfamiliar places.

To find out more about the effect that can have on queer kids' lives, we spoke to four young men about their experience with secretly dating through sites and apps.

Robin, 19, Utrecht

VICE: When was your first time on a gay dating site?
Robin: When I was about 13 years old I visited a website for gay teenagers. The site created a safe space to meet other young people who hadn't come out yet – it made you upload a photo of your ID and someone on staff was on hand to check your identity via a webcam. By the time I turned 18 and was out of the closet, I had already tried dating apps like Grindr and Tinder.

What were your experiences with Grindr like?
It was completely different to what I was used to. I was suddenly getting unsolicited dick pics and the tone of the messages was much more aggressive.

Were you meeting up with people when you were still a minor?
I was about 16 when I went on my first date with a guy, but he was around my age. And I've gone on dates with men who turned out to be older, but had catfished me by pretending they were my age. At that point I was still in the closet, so I would go on these dates in secret. But actually, about a month ago, I had a particularly bad experience with an older man who had used a fake profile.

Can you tell me about that experience?
He told me he was 19, but when he arrived at mine he looked about 40. He sort of pushed his way into my house and forced me to do some sexual things that I didn't want to do. I was just in shock, but I got the feeling that it would be better to cooperate than risk things getting worse if I resisted. Afterwards, I found out that this guy had approached me several times before and had probably planned the whole thing for a while. Since then, I’ve become even more careful than I was before. Dating is very difficult as a young queer person – it’s awful how some older men try and abuse us.

Souffian*, 24, Amsterdam

VICE: When was your first time on a dating site?
Souffian: I was 15 and still in the closet. I knew that I was attracted to men, but at that time I just wanted to discover and learn more about my sexuality and experiment with it. I ended up on websites like Bullchat and GayRomeo, where I mainly chatted to older guys.

Didn't you know people your age to date?
No, I didn't know anyone who was out. But then at the same time I also hadn't told people that I was gay. I was afraid that it would get back to my parents and everyone in our Moroccan community would find out. That's why I had to date in secret.

Where were you going on these dates?
The guys I was meeting were a lot older, so they would invite me over to their houses. When I think back on it now, I sometimes feel so abused. A 30-year-old knows that dating a 15-year-old is wrong. In my opinion, apps and sites like GayRomeo, Bullchat and Grindr are not the right way for gay teenagers to learn about the gay scene. What I was doing was really dangerous, but at the time it didn't feel like I had any other options. I couldn't go to a bar to flirt like my straight friends did, because I was afraid that someone would see me in a gay bar and tell everyone. I was taking these risks just to get some kind of a connection with the gay scene.

Did you ever tell anyone where you were?
No, and now I realise how dangerous that was. I was deliberately going on dates in neighbourhoods where nobody knew me. It felt like I was living a double life and I never spoke about what I was experiencing with friends or family members, which made me feel really lonely. And then to suppress that feeling of loneliness, I would just meet up with another guy. But once I came out of the closet, I was able to get in touch with guys my own age.

Kürsat, 21, Amsterdam

VICE: When was your first time on a gay dating site?
Kürsat: When I was 17 years old. I hadn't come out yet and I didn’t want to go to local gay spots. But even though I was a bit scared, I created an online profile using my real name and photo because I figured that anyone who found me there had to be gay as well. I soon noticed that the chats were mainly focused on sex and there was also a lot of drug dealing going on. I don't think these kinds of sites are safe enough for gay teenagers. For me, it lead to some very bad experiences dating older men.

What were some of those experiences like?
When I told this one date who was in his late 20s that I didn't feel comfortable anymore, he ignored what I was saying and kept on touching me. I was so shocked and left as soon as I could. This other time when I was 19, a guy locked his front door while we were inside. It was the second time I had met up with him, but he suddenly started behaving weirdly so I eventually had to sneak out.

Did anyone know where you were?
No. At the time I felt so ashamed about my sexuality, which is why I didn't dare say anything. But that experience made me realise I needed to talk about what I was up to – and ever since then, I've always told someone where I'll be.

How do you think the gay dating scene can be made safer for young men?
The abuse of young boys who haven't come out yet is so common that we need the entire community to come together and support each other better. Gay teenagers are fragile – apps like Grindr should block minors from using it.

Watch: Pre-Wedding Tinder Session

Jasper, 20, Utrecht

VICE: When was your first time on a gay dating site?
Jasper: I was 16, and it felt like my only way of connecting with the gay scene. At the time, some family members and good friends knew I was gay, but I didn't know a lot of gay guys that I could date.

What was your experience like on these websites?
Just lots of older men talking to me in a sexually aggressive way. Some have even offered me money to have sex with them.

Did you meet up with any of them?
No. I was living in a small town and it wasn't really possible. But I was very careful and only started dating once I was living on my own.

When you went on dates, did you tell anyone where you were going?
Not at first, but I quickly learned my lesson. When I was 17, I arranged a date with this guy, but when I arrived at his place there were a bunch of other guys there all taking speed. I texted my parents to come pick me up. I would have been happy to meet in public, but a lot of guys on these sites only want to meet at their place. Sometimes it's because they're only focused on having sex, but sometimes they haven't come out yet and are still struggling with their sexuality.

How do you think the gay scene can be made safer for young men?
I think it's up to parents and schools to teach queer young people to be more careful about dating. We only seem to warn girls about meeting up with strange men. With boys, we generally assume they're tough and can take care of themselves, which is unfair. Most people don't know anything about how dating works in the gay scene. Within that scene, we should be talking about sexual harassment and abuse a lot more.

*Name has been changed to protect identity

This article originally appeared on VICE NL.

A day before thousands of students marched out of their classrooms to rally for gun control after 17 people died at a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, a teacher in California brought a firearm to school for a lesson about gun safety, CNN affiliate KSBW reports. Dennis Alexander, who also serves as a reserve police officer, was in the middle of teaching students at Seaside High School how to disarm a gunman when he accidentally wound up firing a shot, wounding three kids.

According to KSBW, Alexander told the students he wanted to make sure his firearm wasn't loaded—something you'd imagine one would do before bringing it into a high school—and pointed it into the air. That's when the gun went off, sending a bullet into the ceiling and bringing pieces of it tumbling to the floor.

Fragments from the bullet bounced off the ceiling and lodged into a 17-year-old boy's neck, leaving him bloodied. According to the kid's father, Fermin Gonzales, it wasn't until his son got home that he noticed his injury and took him to the hospital.

"He's shaken up, but he's going to be OK," Gonzales told KSBW. "I'm just pretty upset that no one told us anything and we had to call the police ourselves to report it."

Luckily, no one suffered any "serious injuries" during the gun safety demo gone wrong, according to the Seaside Police Department. The cops are investigating what happened in Alexander's class, and the school and the police department have both placed him on leave.

But Alexander's gun mishap wasn't the only potentially deadly shot that went off in one of America's schools on Tuesday. A school resource officer with five years of law enforcement experience accidentally discharged his weapon at a Virginia middle school that same day, though nobody was hurt. Both mishaps occurred just days after the White House made a public policy push to arm more teachers, rather than raise the age restriction on gun purchases, following the tragic Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting—a move not all educators are thrilled about.

"We had this happen with someone who's a highly trained officer," Alexandria Public Schools interim superintendent Lois Berlin told NBC 4. "I think that speaks for itself."

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A Calgary man who raped a passed out 17-year-old girl, recorded the sexual assault on the victim’s phone, and posted it to Facebook has been sentenced to 26 months in jail.

Drayton Dwayne Preston, 20, pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault which took place in July of 2016 and received his sentence Wednesday morning. CBC reports that, according to an agreed statement of facts, Preston and the victim, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, were partying with some friends in a Calgary home on July 29, 2016. The group included Preston, his girlfriend, the victim, and the victim’s boyfriend. As the night wound down, the victim and her boyfriend, who were drunk at the time, went to a bedroom, had sex and passed out.

Early in the morning, while the victim was sleeping, Preston broke into the bedroom through a window. He then raped the victim, who woke up during the attack but passed out again before the assault ended. About an hour later she woke up again to Preston beside the bed and pretended to be asleep. According to the CBC, Preston then sexually assaulted her twice more. Afterwards Preston left the house while the victim got up and tearfully told her friends what had happened.

Later on that night, the victim found out that Preston had stolen her phone, taken nude pictures of her, and recorded himself sexually assaulting her. He posted the images and video on Facebook and deleted them from her phone after posting them. The victim found out about this as Preston’s girlfriend, who had seen the posts, mistakenly thought the victim had sent them to Preston.

According to the CBC, the video shows Preston walk up to the victim’s bed “remove the blanket and spread her legs, all while her boyfriend is asleep next to her.” The video goes on to show Preston sexually assaulting her—he also took photos of the victims genitals. In handing down his decision, provincial court Judge Gord Wong, described Preston’s actions as disrespectful.

"It's a fundamental lack of respect for others that you demonstrated," said Wong. "You're not satisfied with committing this sexual offence, you go ahead and use someone else's phone to take photos ... send it back to yourself and post it to Facebook."

While the videos and photos were deleted from both the victim’s phone and Facebook by the end of the night of the assault, they were recovered by computer forensics experts.

The case is just the latest in a string of crimes in which evidence found on social media plays a key role in attaining a guilty verdict or plea. In recent years, a manslaughter sentence was handed down after a selfie was used as key evidence, a Kitchener man allegedly confessed to killing his girlfriend on Reddit, and a Virginian woman posted a selfie of herself with a bloody knife in front of her murdered father-in-law.

But photos don’t necessarily secure convictions or even charges. In 2013, Coal Harbour teen Rehtaeh Parsons killed herself after she was allegedly gang raped two years prior and a photo was taken of the alleged assault and circulated amongst her classmates. The photo resulted in Parsons being bullied, however in the immediate aftermath of the alleged rape, Crown prosecutors decided not to press charges. The man who took a photo of himself penetrating Parsons while she vomited was eventually given 12 months of probation in 2015.

Lisa Watson—a criminal defence attorney who recently defended a Saskatchewan woman who was found guilty of manslaughter partly due to a selfie showing her with the murder weapon—said evidence like this is becoming more and more common in a courtroom.

“When I first started out, Facebook was around, but it certainly wasn’t something that was common to be seen referenced in court,” Watson previously told VICE. “You would often see judges and more senior lawyers struggling to explain what social media was and how it worked, particularly when we had younger people coming before the court—witnesses and accused.”

“It was all very foreign when social media kind of started exploding onto the scene. Courts now, at least in my experience, are much more familiar with the various social media platforms.”

Preston’s sentence was a joint submission by both the defence and prosecution. Alongside his two-year prison sentence, he will also spend 20 years on the sex offender registry.

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When Duncan Hannah arrived in New York in 1971, he could have walked out of the pages of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. With big eyes and high cheekbones, Hannah’s androgynous beauty attracted the attention of the city’s prominent women and gay men, who didn’t let his resolute heterosexuality get in the way of their relentless pursuit.

As an aspiring artist coming of age during a mythical time when glam rock, punk, and new wave transformed the underground, Hannah found himself at the center of it all, feeding an insatiable appetite for the finer things in life: sex, drugs, alcohol, parties, and art. Whether partying with Television at CBGB, starring in Amos Poe’s underground film Unmade Beds, or serving as a muse to Patti Smith, Hannah was always in the mix.

Throughout it all, he kept a series of handwritten journals filled with cameos by everyone from David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Richard Hell, and Debbie Harry to Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Nico, and Lou Reed. Their pages, filled with gritty, evocative memories from the 70s, were collected and edited into Hannah’s new book, Twentieth Century Boy: Notebooks of the 1970s (Knopf, March 13).

VICE asked Hannah to take us on a tour of New York through its most debauched decade—an era when punk became a catalyst for cultural revolution.

Duncan Hannah with his painting My Funny Valentine, 1981

VICE: You note that you hadn’t read your journals until you sat down to transcribe them. What was it like going through your archive more than 40 years later?
Hannah: Reading them again, I felt giddy and amused and ashamed and kind of amazed that I am still here. Towards the end of the decade, I was wondering, “How did you manage to make it through?” It must have been a close call because a lot of my friends didn’t.

Did you discover any stories that weren’t how you remembered them?
Oh yes—like the Lou Reed story, which I got a lot of mileage out of, because it was in the book Please Kill Me 20 years ago. I was having a tequila with Lou in a booth at Max's and talking about Raymond Chandler. Things quickly transgressed into him asking if I'd like to be "his little David Cassidy,” and if I'd like to shit on his face.

There was more stuff [about that encounter] that I hadn’t remembered even though it was one of my best stories. “Walk on the Wild Side” came on the jukebox while I was talking to Lou, and the chorus girls were going, “doop-dee-doop.” I said, “Hey Lou, let’s sing it together!” He said, “What?” I said, "C'mon, let’s do it." And he did it.

That part I completely forgot. All I remembered was what a gross-out he was, because it ended in such an odious fashion. We had been having fun together and I got him to be semi-playful, which is very un-Lou Reed. I thought, “Wow! This is a goldmine.”

The Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and Duncan Hannah (second from right) at The Factory. Photographed by Lance Loud, 1976

The 70s are a period in cultural history unlike any other. How did the DIY ethos inspire creativity?
If you wanted something to happen, you had to make it happen. When I got here, there wasn’t a big youth culture: There was CBGB’s, Max’s, and a few other crummy rock bars. If you wanted to find each other, you’d follow the bands. The audience at the New York Dolls shows was just as fabulous as the band.

I used to read Interview at Bard and think, “I’ve gotta get in there!” Then I got here and it was still hard to get in—even at the back room at Max’s, there was a velvet rope. You’d look inside and there’s Alice Cooper, and Lou Reed, and Warhol superstars. Someone you knew would have to wave you in and you’d try to stay as long as you could.

Did you have a sense of the significance of the era while it was unfolding?
I never expected the music to cross over the way it did, because its reference points like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Syd Barrett hadn’t been successful [by the early 70s]. There were these bands like the Talking Heads and Blondie who were clearly influenced by that. They were great and fun, but how could you compete with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon?

Especially the Ramones. I thought, “They don’t have a chance in hell.” Even seeing Bowie in ‘72 and ‘73, it was so phenomenally good, but it was still so strange. Maybe it’s just that if you’re close to something, you don’t see it.

[EXCLUSIVE] Autographed photo of David Bowie from Bowie's New York debut at Carnegie Hall, 1972

There weren’t that many people in the scene, so I get how you might not think it’s going anywhere.
The lag time between underground and the mainstream was long, maybe five years. The media, the internet, and money changed everything. None of this was about money.

Even in the art world, there were a few famous artists but if you were going to be an artist… I had this picture in my head of a coldwater flat, bricks, candles in Chianti bottles, Beatnik girls in black leotards, and bongo music. I never thought of Picasso living in chateaus. I just thought, “La vie boheme! It’s not for everybody, but it’s going to be for me.” I just didn’t want to have a job. I wanted to scrape by. If I could do that, I would be a success.

In the 70s, you had all the benefits of sexual liberation: the “Free Love” movement, Women’s Liberation and the Pill, and the Gay Liberation movement.
It was part of the wave of things. I loved the way "venturing into Eros" was like entering a different realm where you would see a completely different side of someone. Well not always. We’ve all gone to bed with the wrong person and you just collided—there was nothing there. But then, when there was—it’s another high, isn’t it?

In the 70s, nice girls had sex. Not only were they on the Pill, but they were sick of being put in the passive thing of, “Who’s going to ask me out?” They thought, “I’m liberated. I can pick him up if I want to.”

The 70s were so polysexual. The gays did seem to be having the best time of all. I thought, “It’s really too bad I’m not attracted to men at all because clearly this is where the party is.” I got hit on by a lot from men. That was OK, but sometimes it was too persistent and they’d go from trying to be seductive to being hostile.

[EXCLUSIVE] Duncan Hannah in Venice, 1978

I was impressed that you told the stories about the way men treated you, sharing both the verbal abuse and the physical assault. Straight men often keep these stories to themselves.
I didn’t resent it. I just thought, “Well, that’s life.” There’s a bad scene in the book where I almost get raped. It was a terrifying evening, but it oddly wasn’t traumatic. I thought, “That’s what happens when you’re living a wild life.” It’s dangerous. I never even thought to go to the police, even though the guy said he was going to kill me. I thought, “He will, too.”

That scene was horrific. Things can go very bad.
That’s exactly it. You’re up, you’re down—you just go through it. A lot of my artwork is about a vision I had of the world when I was ten and what was going to be good about being a grown up. By the time I became an adult, the world wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I thought, “You were incorrect, but the way you were incorrect is interesting, because it is filled with desire and flights of imagination.”

I never want to lose that. I’m clearly not innocent anymore, but I didn’t want to tarnish that part of me. I almost did. Bad romances and a barrage of drugs and alcohol isn’t really good for that part of you. You can’t kill hope.

Max's Kansas City, 1973

There are moments in the book that seem like you were nose-diving, but rather than crash, you pulled up at the last minute.
The book has a happy ending. I get sober in this book, but it took me another four years to stay sober.

I thought living an extreme life with drugs, alcohol, and sex would turn me into a better person and a better artist. Then there comes a point where you realize: “I am doing a lot more of that than actually working, and it’s not going to translate into anything.”

David Hockney told me, “You’re selling yourself short in an attempt to be stylish. Don’t worry about that. That will come by itself. Just work hard, and you will evolve into yourself naturally. Don’t choose who to be—grow into yourself through hard work. And all will be revealed.”

Wayne County and Duncan Hannah in Rock Scene magazine, 1974

I am reminded of the passage where you mention Artforum had declared painting dead in the 70s. Did you have any awareness of the art world then?
Not a bit. I don’t like reading about painting very much. I just like looking at it. I like reading a biography of the painter, but I’m not really interested in ideas. My painting is love-generated. I follow my passions. I just thought, “I’ll figure it out.” And I did.

E.M. Forester said, “Only connect,” and I think that’s a really good philosophy. You don’t have to do it right. You don’t have to reach your goal. All you have to do is start and just see where it goes and who you meet, and then react against what’s happening, make mistakes, react to those mistakes, and fix them, et cetera, et cetera. Then, at the end of your life, you can look back and say, “Oh that’s what it was all about. I get it.”

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When Key and Peele ended back in 2015, Keegan-Michael Key told the Wrap that the duo's plan was to "make a movie and then do our own thing for three years and then come back and do another movie." Well, it's been three years, and both Key and Jordan Peele have been busy winning Oscars and teaching the world about the intricacies of crypto, but it still looks like the duo is sticking to their promise.

On Wednesday, Deadline reported that Netflix has officially signed on to finance and release Wendell and Wild—the first movie to get Key and Peele back on the big screen together since 2016's Keanu. Wendell and Wild is reportedly a stop-motion film directed by Henry Selick, the dude who directed James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas—so don't expect another accidental John Wick parody about mowing down a legion of drug dealers to safely reclaim a treasured pet or whatever. It doesn't exactly sound like any of Selick's past projects, either, since James never had to go to war with a pair of evil goths.

"Wendell and Wild is a comedy about two scheming demon brothers who must face their arch-nemesis, the demon-dusting nun Sister Helly, and her two acolytes, the goth teens Kat and Raoul," Selick explained to Variety back in 2015, when the movie was first announced in development. Key and Peele, naturally, will lend their voices to the demon brothers. Peele is also on deck to pen the script alongside Clay McLeod Chapman and Selick, who have also written a children's book based on the same concept.

We're probably a long way away from seeing Wendell and Wild hit Netflix, but it's nice to know that Key and Peele are still finding time to pal around on movies together in the midst of the almost inhuman number of interesting projects they've got cooking individually, from that Nazi hunter series to a Twilight Zone reboot to playing a hyena in the new Lion King movie.

Hopefully, this new Netflix connection will mean that Key and Peele will get a shot at pitching some ideas to Obama, too.

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After two fatal overdoses in Saskatoon last weekend, police said they are considering manslaughter or murder charges for the alleged dealers they believe are responsible. The overdoses occurred as a result of suspected fentanyl-laced cocaine. But are murder charges against dealers whose clients die from overdoses realistic?

“You would need to show that not only the drug dealer knew there was fentanyl in the drugs, but knew that the fentanyl could cause bodily harm and that they intended it to cause harm,” Michael Spratt, an Ottawa-based criminal defence lawyer, told VICE. Charges for manslaughter or criminal negligence causing death are more realistic, Spratt said. Manslaughter charges for dealers in particular have been on the rise in Canada as the opioid crisis has taken hold of the country.

Jagmanjot Grewal, 21, and Azam Kabani, 19, of Calgary and Shervin Beeharry, 19, of Saskatoon were arrested are facing trafficking and weapons charges in relation to selling what police said was fentanyl-laced cocaine in Saskatoon last weekend.

Proving that a dealer intentionally cut a drug and intended it to cause harm to someone, though, would likely be difficult. Spratt said that proof would be needed, for example, “through a statement or text messages” that show the fentanyl was not in the drugs to increase potency or yield and that it was intended to cause bodily harm to the person or people who consumed it.

According to Nick Boyce, a harm reduction worker with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society, it’s most likely that fentanyl getting into other drugs such as cocaine is happening accidentally. For example, a dealer might be selling multiple drugs and not cleaning surfaces properly while weighing and packaging substances. Fentanyl contamination of non-opioid drugs, like cocaine or crack, can be especially dangerous because the person consuming it is less likely to have a tolerance for opioids.

To help dealers protect their customers from potential fentanyl contamination, the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society released a list of tips. Some of these recommendations include wiping down scales and surfaces with alcohol wipes and using unique packaging for different drugs. (If you’re someone who uses drugs, you can read about how to use more safely here.)

“The idea of charging dealers with murder for the death of their clients I think is a waste of time and resources,” Boyce said. “We’ve had over a 100 years of drug prohibition and criminalization, and it’s achieved absolutely nothing.”

Drug prohibition and criminalization of drug use is considered to be directly related to the overdose crisis. In Canada last year, it’s estimated that at least 4,000 people died from opioid overdoses. Just last week, the City of Vancouver called for decriminalization of personal drug possession in Canada amidst rising overdose deaths.

Boyce said the dealers who would potentially be facing homicide-related charges are likely low-level and may even be using drugs themselves. However, he said the warning Saskatoon police issued about an alleged dealer (and his phone number, which has since been disconnected) after multiple ODs had occured in one day from suspected fentanyl-laced cocaine is a move that has the potential to prevent overdoses.

But, according to him, it’s unlikely that charging alleged dealers with murder would prevent overdose deaths.

“The time and effort should be focused on regulating the drugs, as we do with alcohol, cigarettes, and we soon will be doing with cannabis,” he said.

In the US, murder charges for alleged dealers are increasing during the opioid crisis.

Though we may not have had the same trend yet in Canada, sentences for manslaughter and criminal negligence causing death can be just as lengthy as those for murder, Spratt said.

“It’s completely within the judge’s discretion,” Spratt said. “Certainly the presence of fentanyl and the opioid crisis would be viewed as aggravating factors… If you’re dealing cocaine and you know there’s a presence of fentanyl—and you know the dangers of fentanyl—it can be aggravating that you engaged in that conduct anyway.”

Despite spending my teen years in a pit of depression and despair, I have largely fond memories of them. I look back now on adolescence as a rare stretch in life when I could focus on what I was most passionate about, like taking art classes and seminars on postmodernist theory, free of the responsibilities and cynicism that come with adulthood. Of course, my alma mater, Bard High School Early College (BHSEC), isn't your average high school. A specialized public school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, it's a partnership between the NYC Board of Education and Bard that allows students to complete four years of high school in two, and then take two years of college courses before the real thing.

But when I returned to my high school Wednesday, it wasn't to reminisce about or indulge again in the liberal arts. Nor was I trying to make cool teen friends in a futile effort to hold onto my waning youth as part of some 21 Jump Street-style sting operation. Instead, I wanted to tag along with current students engaged in the nationally-coordinated school walkout over gun violence in America—and maybe get some sense for just how radicalized young people with no connection to Parkland were by the mass shooting there last month.

According to Women’s March Empower, the group that helped organize the walkouts at schools across America, the action amounted to a collective demand that Congress “enact an immediate resolution declaring gun violence a public health crisis, and dedicating federal funding to research solutions and implement violence intervention programs." The walkouts were also at least ostensibly geared toward more controversial—and politically volatile—measures like a ban on assault weapons, a requirement for background checks for all gun sales, and some kind of gun violence restraining-order law.

At BHSEC, the notoriously precocious student body—true to form—didn't even wait for the official walkout start-time of 10 AM to get started. A few minutes before the hour, dozens and dozens of teenagers poured out of the school doors, some holding signs with messages like "Our Voices Will Not Be Silenced Stop the Gun Violence" and "We Refuse to Be Another Statistic," gathering on the astro-turf field across the street. New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman—whose daughter was in my own graduating class—was in attendance, along with an entourage of staffers and security, though the protesting students didn't take much notice of the powerful politician.

As we made our way onto the field, I overheard one student sporting a wide smile that revealed her braces tell a friend, “I’m just so happy there are so many people here."

Once the kids had finished assembling, a student organizer stood on a chair and explained to the crowd that, at the top of each minute, a group of them would take turns saying the name and age of one Parkland victim. The crowd was asked to repeat each name back, along with the word "enough."

As an ex-teen who attended this very school, I'm confident it remains a rarity to have a crowd of over 100 students stay totally silent. Yet, for the next 17 minutes, in between the slow and rhythmic call and response naming the victims, that's exactly what happened.

Teenagers make effective and well-organized protesters—maybe it's because they were still technically at school and there were teachers everywhere, but the walkout eluded the chaos typical of a political rally. And as Parkland survivors like David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez showed us over the past month, high-school students can speak about gun violence with a combination of biting honesty and optimism that eludes many adults.

"It’s a big issue that the government doesn’t feel it needs to protect the people who are the future, and... if no one else is going to do something about it, it’s my place to," Sophia, a 16-year-old BHSEC student, told me of why she took part in the walkout Wednesday.

Gus, a 14-year-old freshman, explained that the "real protest" will happen on March 24, when the Parkland's survivors "March for Our Lives" rally is scheduled to take place in Washington, DC, and other cities. But he walked out Wednesday "to commemorate those who lost their lives."

Declan, 15 and a member of BHSEC's student government, said, "I helped organize the event, which was surprisingly easy, in large part due to the fact that so many students at this school are in favor of preventing gun violence and people’s ability to buy assault rifles, which they don’t need when they’re hunting for deer."

Although New York has much stricter gun control laws than many other parts of the country, 16-year-old Sophia insisted she was not totally unfamiliar with the annals of gun culture. "A good portion of my family lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, and I have photos in my phone of the guns at Walmart that are painted according to gender," she said, explaining that traveling to Texas allowed her to see her own "privilege."

"I’m in a relatively secure and safe place, so it’s my job to say something for students in Florida and Texas and Georgia and North Carolina," she told me.

That most of the work needs to be done nationally, rather in New York City or Albany, didn't exactly rob the kids of their urgency. "The fact that [New York] has much stricter [gun control legislation] helps us get a better grasp on how the system could be better," said Heaven, an 18-year-old senior.

For the most part, these city kids didn't necessarily seem newly radicalized by the Parkland shooting so much as freshly emboldened to insist that of course America needs stricter gun legislation—even if their parents' generation hasn't figured that out yet.

Felix, a 16-year-old junior, told me he thought there needed to be some legislation in place specifically to put a check on the NRA's power over American politics. "How are you going to let someone [reign] who stands for violence and stands for murdering?" he asked. "Because that’s all a weapon is. The only purpose a gun has is to murder. You can’t just let a group whose only intention is to murder control so much in our life."

A professional politician like Marco Rubio, or even Bernie Sanders, might have used more careful language. But Felix and his peers had no patience for the vagaries of the national gun-control debates that have floundered in recent years. The fact that the adults who have traditionally run America aren't too keen on the younger generation's vision of a less violent culture hasn't fazed Parkland activists. It didn't seem to be a stumbling block for teens in Manhattan, either.

As Declan put it, "Regardless of whether your state has gun laws, I think everyone with a soul and with morals in general are able to see the fact that this is completely horrible."

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Comedians put themselves in situations no one else will. They stand up in front of crowds of people who don’t like them and talk about how sad and weird they are on the inside, then hope everyone laughs. It’s no wonder that sometimes people don't.

So what happens when someone in the audience isn't just unimpressed, but mad? Like lawsuit mad? Or “I’ll see you in the parking lot” mad? To find out, we spoke with four professional comedians about their very worst hecklers.

Nath Volvo

Years and years ago I used to use a PowerPoint presentation for some of my shows. I wrote a show called Grindr: a Love Story? about all of my Grindr escapades and all the weird shit that had been sent to me and my friends from other people using the app. At one point of the show, I give a little TED Talk on the art of the dick pic. It was basically a piss-take on how to take the perfect dick pic— good lighting, cleaning your mirror before you snap the pic, etc. It ended with a penis mural. I used Google Images to find the dick pics for my content.

After a show one night I received a Facebook message from a guy saying that he had recognised his own dick pic and he was threatening legal action. I spoke with my manager and we decided to remove his dick immediately. Imagine recognising your peen on stage in a comedy show! What are the chances? But I often wonder if, had the legal action gone any further, he would have proved in a courtroom that it was his dick.

I was a very young and fresh comedian to the scene and I wouldn’t pull a stunt like that again. Now I just concentrate on embarrassing myself, not taking the piss out of random dicks from the internet.

Nath is touring Adelaide at the moment.

Fergus Neal

It was my very first gig in Hollywood. I was fresh off the plane from Australia and I had a short little seven-minute set which I thought went well. So I went to the bathroom after my set and a guy stopped me at the door. He was huge, as big as a boulder. Scary stuff.

“I paid $15 for this show and I didn’t laugh,” he said. I panicked massively and tried to run back into the toilet stall. But he spoke again and yelled, “Make me laugh! I paid fucking $15!” I really didn’t have too many options. So I did my full routine in the bathroom of this shady comedy club in Hollywood. And the crazy thing was, people came in and out of the bathroom during this impromptu seven-minute set. I can’t imagine what they were thinking, but they definitely couldn’t have known that this may have been the most important stand-up comedy gig that I, or any comedian had ever performed. I mean, my life was at stake and I was trying to survive!

Finally he let out a grumbled laugh after my routine and that was the Caesar’s thumb that let me know I’d live another day.

Lauren Bok

I was doing one of your sticky-floor pub gigs in Melbourne. One night there was a back row of big, bald guys who had decided that once the comedy started, they were the main act.

They heckled the MC mercilessly, and most of the other acts. It felt like something was really brewing in them and I could feel the sweat collecting on me, part terrified, part wanting to put them in their place. When I stepped on stage, the fellas were a bit shocked because I was only female on stage that night.

They held back initially, until I decided I didn’t want to be treated differently and yelled out, “You all okay back there, mates?” and one of them said, “I could be your Dad!” and so I yelled, “You could all be my Dad! He bolted!” And then one said, “Yeah and I could be your Mum!” and they had a good chuckle at that and before I knew what was coming out of my mouth I said, “That’s true, because you’re both little cunts!”

I wanted to actually say that my Mum’s little cunt reminded me of this man’s little cunt. But what happened is I directly insulted both my Mum and this man... and not very well. The c-word rang out over the speakers and travelled in slow motion until it hit the mate in the face. A great gasping silence followed as the air hung low, sweaty and hairy like an actual cunt. A shiver passed over me that I was the one that got it wrong and these men were going to violate all of their “never punch a girl” codes.

Later on they called me over and I checked that the bar staff were watching me, potentially free to protect me if need be, but instead of bashing me—which I was waiting for—they told me I was a legend and beers were bought for me as a round of “good onyas” rained down like they were all my Dads and were very proud ones at that.

Moral of the story: never be afraid to sacrifice your family’s dignity to get beers.

Doug Chappel

One time, Chopper Read asked me to come out and do some stand-up comedy with him. (This was during Chopper’s brief tenure as a stand up comedian). He picked me up in his car and I sat in the back with these huge blokes next to me. The car had a sunroof and the guys were shooting their guns out the top of the sunroof. Chopper asked me, “You all good mate?” and I said “Yeah, all good!” and then he passed me his gun and said, “Here, try mine!”

At the show, there were sometimes guys who didn’t like Chopper who would come down to the show and try to start shit. They’d be calling him a dog and other names and Chopper would be giving them shit back. Things got really heated and one guy was yelling and screaming and tried to get up on stage. I was trying to push the guy off and I noticed he had a huge buckle with a gun bobbing out of his pants. The crowd starting turning on this guy, so his mates came up to grab him and tried to take him away. He was definitely there to just cause trouble for Chopper.

I was pretty worried. Chopper had security around but these guys weren’t the kind of people you’d want to mess with and I was just trying to make people laugh!

After I finished the show, we went back out to the green room and saw that a brawl had started from an argument with the guys outside. People were bashing each other so Chopper and I ran outside and ducked past the brawl as sirens sounded and the police arrived. We got back into the car quickly and Chopper got me out of there. That was a pretty tough crowd.

Interviews by Sam Howard

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.