Every year around now, the Webby Awards announce their nominees, and we happen to be one those nominees. But, as is the case every year, in order to win, we need your votes. We know the internet is confusing, so here are some handy FAQs to help you make sure we get the Webbys we deserve.

You: What's a Webby?
VICE: A Webby is an award that's given to websites. This year we've been nominated in eight categories.

Cool. Have you ever actually won any?
Yes, we have a modest amount of Webbys that we keep on a shelf (see above photo). We're currently looking for a bigger shelf. But that comes down to you. Unlike the charades that are the Academy Awards and the US presidential election, your vote actually matters. You like (love?) us, right? So vote for us!

VICE is up for Webbys in four categories: In Saddam's Shadow and Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor for best Individual Episode in the News and Politics category, Child Workers of the World Unite for best Individual Episode in the Documentary category, Far Out for best Long Form in the Branded Entertainment category, and the VICE Mobile App for best Handheld Device App in the Entertainment category.

If you include our extended family, we're up for a few more: Motherboard's Click. Print. Gun. for best Individual Episode in the Documentary category, Noisey's Guitar Moves for best Unscripted in the Branded Entertainment category, The Creators Project for best Art in the General Website category, The Creators Project's The Collaborators for best Music in the Online Film & Video category, and The Creators Project's This Must Be the Only Fantasy for best Scripted in the Branded Entertainment category.

I enjoy voting for people and things. How do I vote?
Head over to the Webby Awards site. Then register to vote with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or any email account.

OK, now what?
Click on each of the links below to jump directly to the categories we’re nominated in: 

-Online Film & Video: Documentary: Individual Episode: (Motherboard/VICE Media: “Click, Print, Gun”)

-Online Film & Video: Documentary: Individual Episode: (VICE Media: “Child Workers of the World Unite”)

-Online Film & Video: Branded Entertainment Long Form: (VICE Media: The Creators Project)

-Online Film & Video: Branded Entertainment Long Form: (VICE Media: "Far Out")

-Online Film & Video: News & Politics: Individual Episode: (VICE Media: “Sisa: Cocaine of the Poor”)

-Online Film & Video: News & Politics: Individual Episode: (VICE Media: “In Saddam’s Shadow”)

-Online Film & Video: Music: (VICE Media: “The Collaborators”)

-Online Film & Video: Branded Entertainment Scripted: (VICE Media: “This Must Be the Only Fantasy”)

-Online Film & Video: Branded Entertainment Unscripted: (VICE Media/Noisey: “Guitar Moves”)

-Web: Art: VICE Media: “The Creators Project”

-Mobile & Apps: Entertainment: (VICE Media: VICE Mobile App)

And then?
To cast your vote, click your choice and then click again to confirm. If you see a voting tally with percentage, you have voted successfully, and we love you.

Yeah, sure. Anyways, something's been bugging me, and I gotta ask—why does a Webby look like a duck penis?
When you win a Webby, they tell you why. But it's a secret.

The male duck dick is quite the evolutionary feat. Did you know it helps facilitate rape on unsuspecting female ducks? Besides, aren't award ceremonies all about who has the biggest dick anyway?
Whatever, guy. Just go vote for us.

Screenshot via.
Indigenous people who use community clinics in Toronto have an average age of death of 37 years.

That’s right. Toronto—home of pricey condos, Rob Ford, and organic pet food—is also home to a group of citizens who regularly die by 37 years of age. To put that into perspective, the average age of death for all Torontonians is 75. 37 is closer to the average age of death for a failed state like Yemen (35) or the former host of an American drone base, Djibouti (38).

This shocking finding was made in a new report published by two physicians and a clinical psychologist entitled: “Early deaths among members of Toronto’s Aboriginal community.” Dr. Chandrakant Shah, Dr. Rajbir Klair, and Dr. Allison Reeves studied the ages of death for 109 urban indigenous people who accessed four GTA health and social service centres. They also investigated the earlier life experiences of 20 of the deceased. What they heard led them to conclude there is a common root cause behind many of the early deaths.

“It started with colonization—particularly Residential Schools, the Indian Act and the 60s Scoop,” says lead investigator Dr. Shah. “That’s the real root cause.”

Dr. Shah has thought a lot about colonization. Since coming to Canada from India in 1965, he has devoted much of his career to working with indigenous peoples. Reflecting on his birth country’s history, he conceded that many in his generation saw the British as superior. “We still had a colonized mind,” he says. “But my children... Their minds are free. They think they can do anything.”

Witnessing that transformation might be why today you can find an “Idle No More” poster on the door to his office at Anishnawbe Health Toronto. AHT, located in a brick building at Queen and Sherbourne, is one of the four GTA sites in the report. It is funded by the Province of Ontario.

Dr. Shah describes the mechanism by which colonial policies result in early deaths as a “delayed Tsunami effect. The effects are slow, but big,” he told me. Residential schools and other similarly damaging policies cause trauma in individuals, which often leads to lives marred by high-risk behaviours like violence and substance abuse. Those high-risk behaviours in turn lead to early deaths.

At 51, Doll Pangowish has outlived many of those in the study, but the “delayed Tsunami” struck her all the same. After 25 years in Toronto, she knows what it is like to be poor, urban-dwelling, and indigenous. “Homelessness became a part of our life because I was drinking,” she says, acknowledging her youngest son, now 17. Pangowish avoided the streets by couch surfing. She adds: “The amount of money we had, we couldn’t afford a proper home.”

That lifestyle eventually caught up with Pangowish. A diabetic, the drinking complicated her condition, leading to nerve damage in her legs and ulcers on her feet. “I couldn’t apply pressure on my foot,” she recalls. “There was always pain, there was bleeding.”

Today Pangowish speaks bluntly about her experience: “I’m not ashamed to talk about it any more.” When asked what led her to such a self-destructive lifestyle, she refers back to her childhood on the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island. “We were very dysfunctional,” she told me. Many in her mother's family went to Residential Schools. “That played a great big role,” Pangowish says. “And my father was abusive physically.”

“Anyone with a sense and knowledge of Aboriginal lives would see that their circumstances contribute to their outcomes,” explains Dr. Evan Adams, a Coast Salish Medical Doctor and Deputy Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia (you may also recognize him as “Thomas Builds-The-Fire” from the classic Native American film Smoke Signals).

Turning to the “Early deaths,” report however, Dr. Adams urges caution. “This is a disturbing, but tiny set of data,” he says. “I think they’re describing an at-risk urban Aboriginal population, not the entire urban Aboriginal population.” To understand his perspective, compare the 109 deaths Dr. Shah and colleagues examined to the overall Toronto indigenous population of 37,000.

Dr. Adams is familiar with the challenges of many urban poor having worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for five years. Still, he is concerned that focusing only on the most vulnerable indigenous people in Canada’s cities will obscure the reality that many other First Nations, Métis, and Inuit are thriving. It is of course very hard to forget the urban indigenous success stories when you are speaking to an Actor/Physician with a Master’s in Public Health degree like Dr. Adams.

He says this study helps underscore the need for better data on the health of urban indigenous people. “We know more about First Nations people on-reserve, who are the minority, than we do about urban First Nations people.” He is right about First Nations people on-reserve being the minority. Some 55% of First Nations people lived off-reserve in 2011, according to Statistics Canada. The off-reserve figure is closer to 75% if you include all Aboriginal people (First Nations, Métis and Inuit).

Better data, including an analysis of the causes (and not just ages) of death, would help provide better solutions according to Dr. Adams.

So how do we fix the problem of early deaths among vulnerable urban indigenous people?

Pangowish found a way to solve her most pressing personal issues when she went to treatment. It helped her change her life for the better, and led to a renewed focus on her health. She improved her diet and her ulcers are gone, at least for now. Her teenaged son was a big help too, becoming a live-in caregiver while she was bedridden. “He was my legs,” Pangowish remembers. She would like to see more urban, indigenous-based, support and health services. “People need somebody they can trust. I had to go to another community to understand what I was doing to my body and my children,” she says. “We need that in our own community.”

For Dr. Shah, he hopes reports like his will motivate mainstream Canadians to educate themselves on indigenous issues. “If you have no knowledge of the impact of Residential Schools or the 60s scoop, you don’t have empathy,” he says. “If you don’t have empathy, you don’t have good policies and programs.” Dr. Shah also believes reconnecting with indigenous culture is key to healthier outcomes for indigenous people.

Dr. Adams goes further, arguing that medical practices need to change too. One of his recommendations is that a patient’s history with Residential Schools should be included in their charts. “It can be important,” he says. “We need to make room for clinicians like Dr. Shah to look at those social determinants of health.”

Pointing to similar rates of health care spending in Canada and the US, Dr. Adams argues that having a more egalitarian health system does not necessarily mean a more expensive one.

“You can let people die in the streets, but it will cost about the same,” Dr. Adams concludes. “Or you can do what’s morally right.”


@wabkinew

Image via Flickr user San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive

Australia’s alliance with the US is a linchpin of its defense policy. And to have a close relationship with the US is to have a close relationship with the American arms industry. On Tuesday, Australia’s record-breaking $12 billion purchase of 58 stealth fighter jets made headlines. Politically the timing seemed poor. The government of Prime Minister Tony Abbottis planning on making cuts to health and welfare in next month’s budget and a large military purchase looks bad. But Australia’s budget is not the driving force behind the decision.

Last week the Dallas Morning News reported that Lockheed Martin is stepping up efforts to sell foreign nations its 5^th generation jet, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF.  Lockheed needs foreign sales to act as a sort of financial cushion due to growing concerns about the size of the US Defense budget. Washington is winding down the war in Afghanistan, and automatic budget cuts—caused by the 2013 government shutdown and the Budget Control Act of 2001—are set to keep defense spending capped over the next five years. This is especially bad news for the F-35 because of the program’s reputation for budget blowouts.

As reported by Bernard Keane on Crikey, the F-35 Lightning II has been a ‘procurement nightmare’. It’s cost more than double the initial expected investment, been burdened with poor management (the program’s head was recently sacked), been delayed so much that last year Australia bought more of the old Super Hornet jets to address a shortfall in operational capacity, been derided by numerous official reports, and—to top it all off—last year the fleet was grounded because one of the planes had cracks in the engine mounts, fuselage stiffeners, and bulkhead and wing flanges. To translate for non-technical people, they're not all that great, which the Pentagon all but confimed when they rewrote its performance test so that the dumbed-down superjet could pass.

If the automatic budget cuts go through in the US, the Pentagon is planning on reducing spending on the F-35 by $1.7 billion, buying 13 fewer than planned. Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan, the officer who oversees the F-35, explained to National Defense magazine (which is run by the National Defense Industrial Association or NDIA) that the fewer F-35s ordered from Lockheed, the greater the cost of each jet. According to the magazine, “Bogdan predicted that an expected surge in orders from foreign buyers will help bring production costs back down."

In other words, Australia to the rescue! Just as other countries—such as Italy, Turkey, and Canada—are considering scaling back their purchases of the jets, Australia is ramping up its acquisition. Not that this is a splurge or an impulse buy; on the contrary, Australia has been involved in the development of the F-35 since 2002. And, except for a hiccup in 2008 when then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd commissioned a report into whether the F-22 might better serve Australia’s needs, the plan has always been to update Australia’s aerial arsenal with F-35s.

This is why Opposition Leader Bill Shorten didn’t make political hay out of the purchase, and went the other direction, going so far as to tell ABC radio that the F-35 was "tthe right way to go,” and that “these defence purchases are necessary for our forward security plans over a number of decades.” If there’s one thing that will always have bipartisan support, it is Australia’s military relationship with the United States government (and, by extension, its armament industry), a fact the Department of Defense’s White Paper makes clear: “Our defence policy is realistic about the limits to self-reliance. Australia continues to rely on significant support from the United States…” and, “ it is very unlikely that a major power would attack Australia without entering into conflict with the United States…” not to mention, “as long as nuclear weapons exist, we rely on the nuclear forces of the United States to deter nuclear attack on Australia.” And to keep the United States on its side, Australia will offer constant support.

At this point you might be wondering why Australia needs fighter jets at all. Perhaps it’s as Abbott said, that we need them as a deterrent and because, “You just don’t know what’s around the corner.” But we can get a better idea of how we’ll use them in the future by examining when and how we’ve used them in the past. The most recent conflicts Australian jets have flown in have been Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, all in a supporting role for wars conducted by the US.

So before you question Australia’s need for 5^th generation stealth fighter jets, understand the purchase was never really a debate about “if”, it was, “how many?” And the answer is up to one hundred. Australia has ceased to question its ties with the US; for better or worse the alliance is the bedrock of its foreign policy. If that entails spending a record amount of money on planes while cutting back on grannies, kids and sick people, so be it.

Follow Girard on Twitter: @GirardDorney

Before VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky was detained on April 21 and held by pro-Russia separatists in Sloviansk, he filed this dispatch featuring an interview with his future captor, the city's self-appointed “people’s mayor,” Vyacheslav Ponomarev. Simon was released on Thursday.

Simon went to Sloviansk to investigate reports of a shooting at a checkpoint outside of the city on Easter Sunday. At least three people were reportedly killed in the incident. Pro-Russia forces and Russian media outlets quickly blamed the Ukrainian nationalist group Right Sector for the assault. After interviewing local Ukrainian police, who couldn’t confirm the number of deaths, Simon attended a press briefing where he questioned Ponomarev directly about the alleged shooting.

Photo via Wikipedia Commons

The calls started when I was a junior in high school—always in the evening, always after The Simpsons and always with an older gentleman on the other end of the line.

“Charles, there's someone who wants to speak you,” my mother would yell from the kitchen. She showed no concern as she handed me the phone, no alarm in her eyes over all the calls she was getting from strange middle-aged men looking to chat up her vulnerable teenage son. That's because these creepers called themselves “colonels” and “sergeants,” which lent authority to their predation. These men were military recruiters – and the bed they wanted to get me in was housed in some barracks.

A few weeks earlier, a uniformed Marine had come to my high school, set up an efficient little booth in the cafeteria and, in exchange for a stupid hat or a bumper sticker, convinced me and some other boys desperate to be men to give him our names and home phone numbers. After that, at least once a week I had to deal with a recruiter calling me “dude” or “man” while promising that military service would allow me to see the world and sleep with many of its women.

I never did join up, but the recruiters kept calling—once they have your information, it's pretty hard to get them to admit defeat. And they have a lot of people’s information.

More than 30 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 25 have details about their lives stored in a Pentagon registry called the “Joint Advertising Market Research Studies” (JAMRS) database, their names, phone numbers, email addresses, ethnicities, and other identifying information available to recruiters 24 hours a day. Since 2001, any school that receives federal funding is required under the No Child Left Behind Act to provide the Pentagon such data on all students in 11th and 12th grades, as well as grant recruiters access to their campus.

By filling out a form, parents can stop schools from sending information on their children to military recruiters. But the military has another means of getting that information: the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), an aptitude test that requires students to provide even more information than required by No Child Left Behind Act to recruiters.

Administered by the Department of Defense at over 12,000 schools, the ASVAB assesses a student’s fitness for both civilian and military careers; the score you get determines which branches of the armed forces you can join. In some school districts, taking the exam is voluntary, but in others it’s required, meaning teenagers have no choice but to give their personal information over to the US military. If a student’s district is one that mandates the test be taken and the results forwarded to the Pentagon, there is no way to opt out, for either students or their parents.

The official Army manual for recruiters makes says the ASVAB is a treasure trove of useful material, noting that the exam provides the sort of information “not available from any other source,” such as “military aptitude composites, and career goals,” as well as “the most current contact information for each student.” Recruiters should encourage students to take the exam, the manual says, ostensibly “to help them prepare for postsecondary school or the job market,” but the real motive is generating “academically prequalified leads” and “the best potential prospects to contact.”

Schools have long been used as military recruitment centers—as training grounds, in fact, with “hundreds of thousands of secondary students” undergoing military instruction on high school campuses well before they can legally consent to enlist.

High school students in the Junior ROTC. Photo via Wikipedia Commons

“Our position is, in brief, that schools should not release person information about students to the military or anyone else without parental permission,” said Jeanne Leblanc, the spokesperson for the ACLU of Connecticut. As it is now, she told me, “Even when parents or a student over the age of 18 file a form instructing schools not to release personal information to military recruiters, the form doesn't apply to ASVAB test results or the accompanying personal information.”

In March, the Connecticut state education committee advanced a bill that would forbid schools from automatically handing the military ASVAB results or any information on those who take it. The 22 to 10 vote was along strict partisan lines, with every Republican voting no. The law would have been a partial return to the 1990s, when Connecticut had a law barring schools from handing over student contact information to recruiters; that was overturned by No Child Left Behind, which included a provision that specifically overturned “Connecticut State law.”

After passing the committee, the bill, SB  423, should have been put to a vote in the Senate, where Democrats control 22 out of 36 seats, and then the general assembly, where they hold 98 of 151. In other words, Republican opposition couldn’t have stopped the bill from becoming law—but they didn’t need to, because the Democrats did that themselves.

“The Veterans' Affairs Committee met this morning and killed the bill,” said state Representative Jack Hennessy, the Democrat who chairs that committee. “To my knowledge, parents already have this ability to limit the dispersal of information and thought it unnecessary,” he said.

Hennessy is wrong—if students are forced to take the ASVAB by their school, parents have no way to stop the military from getting their information.

“Our understanding is that the military lobbied hard against it,” Leblanc told me. “While it's not unusual for a bill to be referred through multiple relevant committees, this bill was not relevant to Veterans' Affairs,” she added. “It's about student privacy and parental rights, not veterans.”

Connecticut would not have been the first state to ban schools from giving recruiters data from the ASVAB. Maryland and Hawaii have enacted statewide bans, while the nation’s largest school districts—New York and Los Angeles, as well as Oakland and San Diego—have likewise stopped administrators from automatically handing recruiters test results or any other information on students who take the exam, though a federal judge overturned voter-approved initiatives in California that would have barred recruiters from contacting minors.

The military has not been happy about the push to protect student privacy. At a March 10 hearing before the Connecticut Education Committee, Lieutenant Colonel Michael D. Coleman of the US Army Recruiting Battalion in Albany urged lawmakers to reject any restrictions on his recruitment efforts.

“When scores are not released to military recruiters, parents and students miss out on a valuable career exploration tool and may not receive information about opportunities available to them in a civilian career field or career in the military,” Coleman said, adding, “Participation… is voluntary and is not a ruse to gather personal information on students for recruitment purposes,” though he conceded that the Pentagon does of course “benefit from the enlistment eligibility information for military service.”

Coleman didn't convince any Democrats that day—at least, none on the committee—but his words may have persuaded those in leadership positions to put a halt to any reform.

“It's not a good day for transparency or democracy,” said Pat Elder, director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy, when I asked him what he made of the Pentagon intervening in Connecticut politics to defeat a reform that, as of March, enjoyed significant support in the legislature.Still, according to Elder's organization, 40 percent of Connecticut schools have already opted not to provide the military ASVAB data.

But as Coleman pointed out in his testimony, the “primary lead generation source for the military services” is not that data, but the directory information—names, addresses, telephone numbers—that No Child Left Behind requires schools to hand over, unless parents remember to opt their child out, which few do. (Many likely don’t even know it’s an option.) And even if that form is filled out by a student's legal guardians—in case you’re wondering, what the student wants doesn’t matter, as the law does not respect the agency of minors—the Department of Defense will still include in its recruitment database whatever information it can gather elsewhere on that student, unless yet another opt-out form filled out, in which case the Pentagon promises to delete what it has (though who really knows if it does or not).

If we want to protect young people in America, more needs to be done to protect them from military recruiters, who we know deliberately target teens with limited life experiences and few career opportunities in order to manipulate them into making a life-altering decision at the confused age of 17. They devote years to this con and go about like any other predator, with the Army recommending that recruiters linger at all the “popular hangouts” and start young, noting that “establishing trust and credibility with students—even seventh- and eighth-graders—can positively impact high school and postsecondary recruiting efforts.” Meanwhile, all those blockbuster movies and desensitizing video games made with the direct assistance of the Pentagon ensure those 12- and 13-year-olds will have heard variations of the pitch long before they meet their first recruiter.

Since effectively doing away with the draft, the military has been forced to fill its ranks with volunteers. However, not many people are willing to kill for a bachelor's degree—and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have given potential recruits a reminder that military service is more than just a way to pay for college. That has in turn forced the Pentagon to adopt data-mining tactics, using aptitude test results and racial and economic backgrounds to determine who is most likely to buy what it is selling. But if the government is going to prohibit tobacco companies from marketing to young people, reasoning that such people are too immature to legally kill themselves with cigarettes, there's no reason the military can't wait until they are legal adults before it tries to kill them too. Unfortunately, in our democracy, it appears the military gets the final say one what's appropriate.

Charles Davis is a writer in Los Angeles. His work has been published by Al Jazeera, Inter Press Service, the New Inquiry, and Salon.

A recent study has rated the beautiful cities of Canada on a scale of how friendly they are for women to live in—and, congratulations Quebec, three of your cities ranked at the top, with Quebec City taking home the top prize. Edmonton is dead last. Try harder, Oilers fans.

In other news, I discovered a new intellectual crush this week in Erica Williams Simon, who tells us to stop assuming black girls all face exactly the same struggles with self esteem, and that they can only be saved by the amorous attentions of dudes. She is this week’s Queen of the Internet, in my books.

So without further ado:



Screenshot via Ebony.

Ghetto vs. Creative: Challenging Predominant Colour Narratives

Erica Williams Simon wrote one of the most important pieces I’ve read in some time this week. The article, “5 Things You Need To Know About Colorism,” addresses the harm in subscribing to one particular, harmful narrative about women of colour, which, she says, goes like this:

“Black America has a problem: Dark girls have low self esteem because boys don’t find them attractive. To end colorism, men need to tell them that they’re beautiful. The end.

That story is not my story. It is also intellectually lazy, sexist, and racist.”

She lists corrections and provides an explainer of why this idea, though it’s often coming from a well-meaning place, only serves to silence and typify people, ignoring their true stories.

Here’s an example she provides of one way we can challenge our thinking: “Ask why, in your mind, a white woman with tattoos is edgy, a light woman with pink hair is creative, but a darker woman with either is ghetto.”

Williams Simon also suggests real ways to make a difference, and she does all of this despite experiencing immense frustration in participating in public discussions on complexion and colourism.

Williams Simon overcame that frustration to write this explainer, and in doing so, she did us all a favour. Return it and read the piece.



Game of Thrones creator, George RR Martin, at Comic. Photo via WikiMedia Commons.

Game of Thrones Fails People Everywhere

This week on Game of Thrones, the most problematic part of a sex scene wasn’t its incestuous nature, or even the presence of a dead body in the room at the time. It was rape. Jaime raped Cersei, and it was a rape that did not happen in the book. HBO writers Dan Weiss and David Benioff just figured it was an appropriate and necessary thing to invent.

Director Alex Graves claimed that, while it may have started out as rape, it “ended up being consensual by the end.”

No. Sex ceases to be sex and becomes rape if:

1.)  One party says no

2.)  One party does not say yes

3.)  One party struggles and clearly does not want to engage in the act

Etc.

Graves’s explainer is as damaging as the scene itself. Clearly, there’s no grasp of what rape even is and is not, let alone acknowledgement of why it might be counterproductive—if not hateful—to invent rape scenes in which the rape eventually becomes “okay.” And on a show so widely watched by impressionable, gooey-brained young people, no less.

The persistent sexualization of rape in media needs to end. Rape is not about sex, as Graves implies. It is about power and control, and that mode of asserting power cannot continue to be glorified.

The one ray of hope here is the relative care and attention that mainstream media outlets have given to critiquing the scene. Time, the National Post, The Atlantic, and even some tabloids have all written about it, and the continuation of that kind of media criticism will hopefully contribute toward some semblance of a difference in the portrayal of rape and sexual assault on TV.


 

Screenshot via.

Love Thy Sexual Harassers, And Thy Life Shall Flourish

“…smart women don't file formal complaints against ordinary harassment. They either ignore it or handle it on their own.”

Ordinary harassment. At the end of the day yesterday, I was lounging around my apartment and about to pour a whiskey when I came across this article posted by The Belle Jar on Facebook. I immediately became possessed with rage and needed a cigarette and wondered was there a way to remove this propaganda from the Internet? Penelope Trunk wrote “Why You Shouldn’t Report Sexual Harassment” for CBS News. I will quote it widely to spare you the pain of a full read:

“Another thing is that it's very easy for the company to fire a woman who complains,” she continues, adding that therefore, reporting the harassment would be a preposterous idea.

Is this a fucking joke?

Things just stay the same, so uphold the status quo? Willingly permit some balding, slobbering old fuck drool over your tits all day so that you don’t get in trouble?

“The bottom line for a woman, though, is that if you want to have a career of increasing power, you are going to have to keep quiet about the harassment.”

Well, that clears it up. She continues on to say that in some countries, France, for example, harassment is widely tolerated, and women “will have to put it up with it as a form of cultural diversity.If you want to be good at working with a wide range of people, you need to be good at brushing off harassment.” Uh, how about men need to be good at just… not harassing? Why does that idea seem so far-fetched?

This argument that men are crazed beasts who are led around by their dicks just kills me. Trunk’s argument is insulting to everyone—what, women should have career aspirations, but in order to do so, must always act like slutty secretaries and never serious businesspeople who assert themselves?

Men, because they have all the power now, should be allowed to keep it by overtly objectifying whomever they please; because they’re truly just stupid creatures who require continual female indulgence lest they, understandably, fly into a rapey rage?

This train of thought is so pervasive, and it’s only an attempt to further indoctrinate complete cultural misogyny, traditional female obedience, and servitude. Just say no when you hear this shit. If we continually allow ourselves to be harassed and maltreated at work, nothing will change. If we all stand up and say “fuck you,” we will all leave and start a giant humanist compound where capitalism goes to rot and freedom of the soul reigns supreme, okay? 

Let’s Start A Feminist Compound in Quebec

And in case you were wondering “What’s the best place to live if you’re a woman in Canada?” Try Quebec. Three of its cities rank as some of the best cities in Canada for women according to a new study, with Quebec City at the top. Montreal and Sherbrooke were also in the top ten.

You might want to avoid Edmonton, however, as it comes in dead last, according to The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The findings weren’t too shocking. Across the country, women are more successful in school than men, but there’s still a glass ceiling. Women are also more likely to be sexually assaulted. Plus, only one in four seats in both provincial and federal politics is occupied by women.

While the work of looking at which cities are most woman-friendly is important, there are issues with the methodology of this study. The use of the word “women” doesn’t apply to all women—it doesn’t examine gaps between women with disabilities and women without. It doesn’t include women who are here on work or school permits, or refugees. And I’d also be curious as to where the trans* experience fits into the picture.

This disparity is through no fault of author Kate McInturff, but rather a lack of municipal data. I’m happy to see McInturff is picking up the slack Harper dribbled all over the floor, but ideally she would have data at her fingertips that recognized the doubly marginalized women in society for further examination.  

One study at a time, I guess.

@sarratch

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of one to RACIST, with “one” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

–Avril Lavigne—perhaps the most boring pop star of her generation—is back; redesigned and remixed for another run at glory. At the advanced (for the music industry) age of 29, Avril seemingly has no idea what kids are into, which led her to making a tone-deaf, idiotic music video that the media quickly branded as racist.

When Let Go, her massively popular debut album, came out in 2002, she was 17. "Alternative Rock" radio was still dominated by shitty nu-metal. Teenagers into rebellion wore flared jeans with fucking buckles all over them, and pretended to know how to skateboard. If you bought a CD copy of the Daredevil soundtrack, wore Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirts to church, and could name more than one member of the band Staind, you probably also liked Avril.

Under the guidance of heavyweight production duo, The Matrix (not related to the equally dated movie), Let Go tapped into a generation's butt rock-tinged disillusion and "fuck you" attitude. Mall punks finally had their moment of glory in the early 2000s. Let Go sold 18 million copies worldwide and also totally fucking sucks ass. Avril was of her time and has never quite escaped it, like a pixie-punk Han Solo in carbonite. Her most recent, self-titled album pretty much sounded identical to everything else she's ever done. There were a few girly pop songs, plus some fake attempts to seem sincere in the form of overwrought, mopey ballads about introspection. I don't see a lot of people expressing sincere nostalgia for the lyrical ingenuity of "Sk8r Boi," and that's because her music has always been vapid.

Since she never melted down or did anything remotely interesting outside of prouncing David Bowie's name in a way Americans were not used to, Avril's stuck around the public consciousness. There's been just enough going on in her personal life to allow her to stay semi-relevant. She married—and eventually divorced—fellow Canadian wastoid Deryck Whibley of Sum 41. She magically ditched him for someone even lamer: Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger. Nickelback, despite being the audio equivalent of cutting your dick off and leaping from a rooftop, is one of the biggest selling bands of all time; a modern-day equivalent of the Eagles. They're a successful group no one you know admits to liking.

Avril appeared as though she was just going to disappear from the spotlight, content to pop up on the cover of People every time she decided to spawn a new press release... I mean, child. Instead, she started the comeback no one asked for on Wednesday with the release of a new music video for a song titled "Hello Kitty." The video, embedded above, depicts a fun, carefree Avril frolicking through Japan flanked by a gaggle of stoic Asian accessories.

In place of turgid navel-gazing, Avril's song is a would-be club banger. The song is Katy Perry without all the "witty" double entendres. The raccoon eyeliner that has become synonymous with her "brand" remains, but now she's dressing like a cartoon version of a raver in 2006. Only a person who became a multi-millionaire (and totally lost track of trends) before turning 18 could think that fetishizing Japanese culture was still cool. It's been a full decade since Gwen Stefani caught a big pile of shit for the Harajuku Girls. Eastern "curiosities" like omakase, Pokemon, Godzilla, and tentacle porn are pretty mainstream in America now. 

Maybe that's why it's so jarring to see Avril flail around in this video. It's calculated, but the formula got all screwed up. The girls in the background might as well be animatronic bears at Disneyland, but that's true of all back-up dancers. It's that she picked this shit to steal, after we've already gone through an identical debate 10 years ago.

The tone-deaf insensitivity of the video is typified by the scene with Avril—sporting a retro plastic camera, which like Avril, is a cultural anachronism from the early 2000s—taking a photo of the four unmoving, scowling Japanese dancers as though they were, themselves, a tourist attraction. I'm sure she really loves Japan, but what Japan clearly represents to her is an aesthetic to commodify, just like any celebrity who engages in cultural tourism. It makes for a motif for your video. It gives the designers working on your world tour a template to follow. It's a way to brand yourself, to give people like me an excuse to talk about you.

What's sad about this isn't that Avril is making a farce of Japanese culture. Americans have been doing that for 70 years. It's sad that she totally whiffed when she picked a culture to appropriate. While Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey, and Sky Ferreira shoot videos with spectacularly handsome black men sporting implied criminal records, Avril is freaking out over a plate of sushi. It's the pop culture equivalent of wearing board shorts to a funeral.

Instead of getting people talking about how edgy and forward-thinking she is, Avril's going to get a few more down votes on YouTube and a couple embarrassing appearances on late-night talk shows. Not racist, but also not worth it. 3

–Nevada cattle "baron" and conservative icon Cliven Bundy, the man thumbing his nose at the rule of law by refusing to pay the government over a $1 million in federal cattle grazing fees, did his cause a major disservice by getting caught by the New York Times using racially charged language:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids—and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch—they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

In addition to the Times revelation, New York magazine claims the above video is of Bundy spouting rhetoric identical to the aforementioned quotes. Republican Senators Rand Paul and Dean Heller, previously supporters of Bundy, have come out against his rather antiquated opinions on race relations. I guess Paul and Heller were surprised that a guy who raises cows in the middle of nowhere would advocate for black people to go back to an agrarian way of life, even if that way of life included bondage and violence. Who would have guessed that a man flagrantly defying federal law would think that government subsidy is antithetical to freedom? Maybe Rand Paul and Dean Heller just never thought about it. Oops. RACIST

–Gil Voigt, a Cincinnati teacher we previously covered for telling his student that "we don't need another black president," has been officially fired for his actions. He'd been suspended pending review, and I guess the review came back. Voigt claimed he was misquoted, and actually said, "I think we can't afford another president like Obama, whether he's black or white." One version of this incident is racist, one isn't. We'll never know the truth, yet espousing political views of any sort is probably a bad call when you're a public school teacher. He may not actually be a racist, but Ol' Gil is out of a job either way. Hey Gil, you know who else is gonna be unemployed soon? Barack Obama. 7

The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:

Pass out the role sheet, Dune Coon McGoon, I need to fucking leave for my job.

— Smith (@metalheadCDN) April 18, 2014

Lol see why ion like Angie's wetback ass ? Get on my nerves

— Jackie♥ (@xoxo_jackie100) April 24, 2014

Bout to wash the boo with my little brother. If he helps me good I'll buy him chink food. I'm a good ass brother lol

— VEAH! (@DbSniff) April 24, 2014

If the word nigger offends you, leave right meow.

— Andy (@Offroadornah) April 24, 2014

Beyoncé hasn't done anything special to change the world but be a overrated nigger

— WEST COAST (@LanaDaiIy) April 24, 2014

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Vancouver's downtown eastside. Photo via Flickr user Yaokcool.
Dave Rouleau and Monika Benkovich were hired to gentrify the York Rooms. And it seems to have worked. The 36-room hotel was one of many run-down SROs (single-room occupancy) now peppered among the high-end restaurants and trendy shops popping up throughout the quickly changing Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. The DTES is known casually as "Canada's poorest postal code;" a majority of its residents live below the poverty line and struggle with addiction and mental illness alongside a lack of access to proper housing and the services they need. While "cleaning up the neighbourhood" might sound like a noble endeavor, it often comes at the expense of residents.

Wendy Pedersen, a long time DTES resident and housing advocate, says that the rent at the York Rooms went from $375 per month to around $600, pointing out that welfare rates are only $610 a month. SROs previously occupied by the poor are now being advertised as “trendy Gastown buildings” suitable for “musicians, artists, and students.” Unaffordability aside, Pedersen says landlords at are explicitly discriminating against welfare recipients and Indigenous people in their efforts to create a different "culture" in the building.

“Renovictions” are a strategy that has been adopted across Vancouver, but most concertedly in Gastown and the DTES, wherein landlords kick renters out of their suites in order to renovate them and increase the rent for the next tenants who move in. Tristan Markle, a member of The Coalition of Progressive Electors' (COPE) housing committee, says he doesn't believe these tactics are even legal and wants the city to step in and stop renovictions.

The York Rooms is not the only SRO engaged in efforts to displace marginalized renters and rebrand, but they are representative of the gentrification that is rapidly consuming the  DTES (and, really, Vancouver at large). Glass towers emerge at an astounding rate, but remain full of empty suites (many of which are owned by people who don't live in them), mocking those who can't afford to live in them as they are pushed into homelessness.

The irony of a city full of empty apartments contrasted with a dramatic increase in the number of homeless in the past year feels inhumane. Expensive restaurants full of middle to upper class, youngish white folks, trying with embarrassing desperation to join communities that they are slowly pushing out, are opening in locations that allow those living outside to stare in at their new, wealthier, neighbours. Last summer, activists picketed outside of Cuchillo, the high-end restaurant that opened below the York Rooms, signaling to residents that their housing situation was about to change.

Which brings us back to Rouleau and Benkovich. Hired by Living Balance, a company described by activists as "professional gentrifiers," they are part of a strategy used by many landlords wanting to cash in on the newly gentrified area, which often involves intimidation and manipulation in order to force tenants to vacate. Pedersen says "they hire people like Dave because they need ruthless bullies," adding that Rouleau was "an angry and aggressive character" who she was scared of. She claimed he targeted activists like her in particular, as she was part of a group that picketed daily outside the York Rooms. "Some people think it's bad that we were picketing, but people's lives are being ruined," Pedersen says.

When Mathieu Pierre Youdan reported for The Mainlander that the very same people whose job was to evict impoverished people from their homes and jack up the rent were raising money to produce a documentary about their experiences, many were appalled. "It's completely exploitative," Pedersen says. "Some of those people [in the York Rooms] were in such a vulnerable mental health state." Rouleau's position of power as manager makes the whole film "unethical," she adds.

One would think the City of Vancouver could cap this kind of development and commit to creating affordable housing. But part of the problem may be that they are creating social housing that is not actually affordable. It appears that the ruling civic party, Vision Vancouver, defines "affordable housing" in a questionable way in order to justify rezoning and development projects. Last year, under the guise of ensuring "affordable" rental housing, the city set a maximum rent developers can charge: $1,443 per month for a studio, $1,517 for a one-bedroom and $2,061 for a two-bedroom apartment. To pretend as though these rents are "affordable" to those struggling to survive in this city—particularly the working class or the poor—is disingenuous..

"Gentrification is a real thing," Markle says. "This process, wherein wealthy people are recruited to replace poor people, is a widely recognized urban phenomenon. The way that it's happening in Vancouver is not much different than how it happens in other places and the City absolutely facilitates it." Pedersen agrees: "Vision wants to gentrify Vancouver." If this continues, Markle says, "the city will become more exclusive, more polarized, and more violent towards poor people."

Kerry Jang, Vision Vancouver city councilor, feels stuck. "We're asked all the time to put in rent controls, but we can't. That's a provincial jurisdiction." Beyond that, one of the most pressing issues that is going unaddressed by the Province is that welfare rates haven't gone up in seven years. "Until people have more money to spend on rent, this problem is going to persist," he says.

But Pedersen and Markle say there are measures the city could take if they wanted to stop the renovictions, displacement, and the growing homelessness problem. "The main thing the city should do is buy the hotels at risk for renoviction and buy property for social housing," Pedersen says. That would ensure it was protected from developers who will simply build more condo developments or renovict tenants.

Jang says the City has been consistently asking the Province both to buy SROs in the DTES and turn them into government housing and to build low-income housing on the land the City donates to the Province. "The City just doesn't have the money to buy all these properties," Jang says. "We buy land when we can and donate it to the Province so they can build on it," he says. "But they need to commit to doing that."

Pedersen says that the City has control over licensing and that they could stop renovictions by refusing to give licenses to operate to new hotel owners and to their retail spaces. "Even if they did that once or twice it would send a strong signal that SROs are not profitable, which would stop companies like Living Balance from purchasing them and converting them."

Markle adds that "the City can stop renovictions right now by banning renovictions on renovations permits," Markle says. "You don't give a renovations permit to anyone unless they show that tenancy will be protected."

It's clear Rouleau and Benkovich aren't the problem. But they are symptomatic of something larger—a particular group of people who see DTES residents as simply a problem to be solved or, better yet, erased from view and a government that prioritizes business over people. If Vancouver wants to cater only to those who can afford fancy meals and $500,000 faux-bohemian lofts, it's certainly on the right path.

@meghanemurphy

A demonstrator at the justice for Sammy Yatim protests in downtown Toronto, August 2013. Photo via Michael Toledano.
James Forcillo, the police officer who has been accused of pulling his trigger nine times on 18-year-old Sammy Yatim last July, is back at work for the Toronto Police Service.

In August, Forcillo was charged with second-degree murder for killing Sammy. In February, his suspension, which was required by Ontario law to be paid, was lifted and he returned to College St. police headquarters in a full-time administrative role, on the same salary as the one he had before the killing.

And on Thursday, the third day of a preliminary hearing, set to determine whether there is adequate evidence to proceed with a trial for Forcillo, wrapped up.

If there are people who don’t agree with Forcillo’s return to work, Peter Brauti is not one of them. And no one would expect him to be, as Forcillo’s lawyer, and the best in the biz for preventing cops from getting busted. When it comes to Ontario officers who’ve been charged with second degree murder or manslaughter, Brauti has a perfect record of keeping cops out of jail and he’s counting on that record to remain intact, even with video evidence of Sammy’s violent death. Yesterday Brauti told the Toronto Sun that Forcillo should be getting up every day and going to work as a police officer, because he feels that Forcillo’s actions “ultimately will be justified.”

Brauti and president of the Toronto Police Association Mike McCormack are insisting there is more to the story than what appears in aforementioned cell phone video Trinity Bellwoods neighborhood resident Martin Baron took of the scene, and surveillance video that shows the shooting. A publication ban is preventing media from reporting evidence that has and will be presented at Forcillo’s preliminary hearing, and possible trial.

So, I called up McCormack to see what he could tell me about what he is calling the larger story, and Forcillo’s return to work. 

VICE: The Canadian Press quoted you as saying: "Our officer should be judged in this incident based on what the facts and the evidence are, not just a video or not just what somebody saw on YouTube, but looking at the larger, bigger picture.” Explain what you mean when you say the larger, bigger picture.
Mike McCormack: A video is only one piece of a larger story. If we were just to judge on the video we wouldn’t see courts or evidence or anything else. The video just presents one viewpoint to speak to what people were feeling, what was happening, what happened before the video, what the officer’s perceptions were.

What is the larger story?
It’s all part of the publication ban, so I can’t get into evidence of what’s to be presented at the preliminary hearing.

What would you say to people who think the video shows Const. James Forcillo fatally shooting Sammy Yatim, who, standing with a small knife before 23 police officers, did not appear to be a threat, and that is evidence enough to convict Forcillo?
What you’re speaking to is exactly the problem here. The public is seeing the video and [the video] has entrenched the public’s perception or feelings. They [the public] have already judged and convicted Const. James Forcillo, for the most part, and that’s a pretty troubling scenario to me.

What troubles you most about the reaction the public expressed through protesting James Forcillo’s killing of Sammy Yatim last July and again in August?
The public’s already seen the video and they’ve already made their judgment. That creates a problem: The public is jumping to conclusions, making assumptions about this officer and the way the officer behaved and what happened that night. [Those assumptions] are based on an incomplete picture. I shouldn’t be the only one that’s troubled by that. Everyone should be troubled by that.

The video doesn’t paint an honest and forthright or full picture of what happened and it [the case] should be transparent and people should have the evidence and should hear the facts. But then [the public] ‘make an opinion,’ because everybody’s got an opinion. They could make their judgment based on facts—the total facts around an issue, not just [facts that are] one-sided. I don’t think anybody can say it’s a good idea to do that.

Will the publication ban be lifted after the preliminary hearing and, if there is enough evidence to proceed, the trial?
If he gets committed to trial, at the completion of the trial if the publication ban is lifted then it will all become public information. We’ll see how the appropriate forum to assess the evidence, which, right now, is the courts, we’ll see what they come back with.

Toronto police chief Bill Blair made the decision to lift Const. James Forcillo’s paid suspension, and Forcillo returned to work in February. Currently, he is working in a full-time position with the same salary he had before he shot and killed Sammy Yatim. What is he doing at work?
He’s not doing any police duties whatsoever. He’s on what I will call a super restricted duty, an administrative duty with no use of force options, and what I mean by that is no gun, no handcuffs. He doesn’t do any policing. He’s not involved with the public. He’s involved with doing tasks that are administrative in nature, that don’t jeopardize investigations, that don’t put the corporation at risk, that don’t put the public at risk. [His position] allows him to go into work, it allows taxpayers to continue paying him until the courts judge him for his actions.

Setting his particular role aside, how should Sammy’s parents interpret that the officer who is charged with the murder of their son is back at work for the Toronto Police Service?
It’s not up to me to tell them how to interpret the return to work. All I can say is that I totally understand the way they feel. I empathize with that, and that’s an emotional feeling based on what has happened. [They way they feel] is a subjective thing without having all the facts surrounding that fateful evening, so I’m not going to try to take away from it.

I have to work on facts and evidence. Const. James Forcillo is facing an allegation that’s before the courts right now. He hasn’t been convicted of anything. He’s being judged and people are saying, “Oh my god, how can this guy come back to work?” Well, he hasn’t been found guilty of anything.

On the Toronto Police Association’s website, it says its fundamental purpose is to protect those who protect others. Who was Const. James Forcillo protecting when he shot Sammy Yatim?
This guy is a police officer who is out there responding to a call for service. He was responding to a call where it was a very high priority call with a weapon involved. He was protecting the public. Whether he made the right or wrong decision in how he did that, that’s up to the courts to decide. So don’t diminish what he did as a police officer, or his role as a police officer.

Unfortunately, it’s a reality of policing. We’re forced to make decisions and forced into situations because we are out there working for the public, and then we’re going to be judged on those decisions.

@kristy__hoffman

For last week's episode of Band for Life, click here.

Dancing girls in Pyongyang (Image via Flickr user Leef_Smith)

North Korean meth is the bomb—at least, according to US officials who tested two batches last year. The packages of sharp, ice-like crystals measured 98 percent and 96 percent for purity, respectively. According to an indictment against the suppliers, who were arrested in 2013, the drug was so pure that “people in New York, they went crazy… the places that we put it in the States, New York… Boston, all these places, I mean, they went crazy.” 

According to a new report by Dr. Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, the North Korean government has used drug manufacturing and a host of other nefarious activities to raise funds since the 1970s. The regime defaulted on its international loans in 1976 and Dr. Greitens describes how that same year “a dozen members of North Korea’s diplomatic corps, including the North Korean Ambassador to Norway, [were] ejected… for smuggling illicit goods" including "4,000 bottles of booze (mostly Polish vodka) and 140,000 cigarettes" in Sweden, and "400 bottles of liquor, 4.5 million cigarettes. and 147 kilos of hashish in Denmark.”

After the collapse of the USSR, North Korea lost its communist financers and that, combined with tough sanctions and disastrous policy decisions, resulted in the famine of the 1990s where an estimated one million people died. Factories were not operating and fishermen starved in the harbor, as they had no oil to power their boats. Desperate to survive, the Kim regime forced community farms to cultivate opium poppies and demanded as much as 132 pounds of raw opium per harvest. “We should be growing grain, not poppies,” said one defector quoted in Dr. Greitens' report. “But the instruction from the central government was that if we grow poppies we can sell the product for ten times as much to buy grain.”

After the famine ended in the 2000s, North Korean factories began to produce a more modern type of drug: methamphetamine. “Officials from North Korea’s various security agencies were reportedly involved in guarding the plants and factories,” writes Dr. Greitens. Within the factories, real-life Walter Whites were hired to school local chemists in the art of synthesizing pure, potent meth crystals. “Experts were brought in to advise on production."

A line of crystal meth or "bangdu" in Chinese (Image via Flickr user Digitalcolony)

North Korean meth and heroin was highly prized on the black market and Triad and Yakuza gangs were lining up to distribute the drugs across China, Japan, and the US, according to Dr. Greitens. “The gangs would pick up packages of drugs dropped at sea... Drugs were also transported by train (and other methods) across North Korea’s northern border into China."

But why rely on desperate gangsters when you have a host of agents stationed legally inside target nations with diplomatic immunity? Indeed, North Korean embassy staff continued to be thrown out of their host nations on various charges. As well as drugs, North Korean officials have been caught smuggling such things as rhino horns and ivory, 500,000 counterfeit cigarettes and counterfeit $100 bills so convincing that US treasury officials dubbed them “supernotes.”  

“Given the variety of products involved in these incidents and the repeated presence of North Korean diplomats in them, these incidents appear to be primarily the result of a ‘self-financing’ policy,” writes Dr. Greitens, “by which embassies are expected to finance their own operations, and contribute money back to the regime in Pyongyang.”

Since 2005, the regime has apparently scaled back official meth manufacture. “The North Korean government already burned all the labs to show the Americans that they are not selling it any more [but] then they transferred it to another base,” one of the meth importers arrested last year was quoted as saying in the indictment. Elsewhere in the document, he claims, “only [North Koreans] can get the real North Korean product now.”  

The closure of government meth labs has left a lot of talented meth cooks unemployed and many continue to operate in what Dr. Greitens calls “a hybrid space between public and private.” In these gray markets, political elites grab a share of the profits raised from evil-smelling meth kitchens constructed in broken-down houses and abandoned school buildings.

While the regime asserts that “North Koreans with healthy mental and moral qualities have no intention of turning out or exporting narcotics,” it’s clear that no large-scale economic activity happens in North Korea without officials knowing about it—I mean, what kind of totalitarian regime would they be if they didn’t?

North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, and some generals (Image via) 

Unsurprisingly, domestic use of meth has skyrocketed. Suited elites in Pyongyang restaurants offer each other a “nose” after dinner, the middle classes take it as a cold cure or remedy for back pain, and the poor take it to ease the emptiness in their stomachs. The drug is apparently so common that the attitude of North Koreans has become blasé. “When meeting people we not infrequently swapped drugs to see whose ice was more potent,” said one defector in Dr. Greitens’s report. “We just did it naturally as if we were exchanging cigarettes.” Another defector said, “If people in the countryside take ice, their back pain is cured... And if you give it to people who have had a stroke, they recover.”

While the regime denies exporting meth, large amounts continue to leave the country. In 2011 Chinese authorities reported that they had seized over $60 million worth of drugs coming in from the hermit kingdom. In the Chinese border province of Jilin, the number of people addicted to drugs has leapt from a registered 44 in 1991 to an estimated 10,000 today.

North Korea's involvement in the drug trade is a result of economic necessity and the ideology of self-reliance. The tragic fallout of these policies has led many of the country's own citizens to become addicted to the drugs their country is peddling abroad.

Follow Nathan on Twitter.

Alex (center, in the black T-shirt) with some of his Libyan teammates. All photos courtesy of Alex Owumi

There are a few things to expect when you start playing basketball at an international level: a gruelling training regime, competitive teammates, and maybe some kind of sponsorship deal involving toiletries or luminous drinks. Stuff you generally don’t prepare yourself for, however, is almost starving to death while the army shoots at civilians just outside your apartment, being forced to survive on cockroaches and toilet water and fleeing a country by way of a border occupied by rebel guards.  

That’s what happened to Alex Owumi, an American ball player who moved to Benghazi, Libya after being recruited by Al-Nasr, a team owned by the Gaddafi family. Alex arrived at the end of 2010 and enjoyed a few months as the team’s point guard, before the revolution broke out in February of 2011 and he found himself trapped in his apartment—a lavish place owned by Gaddafi’s son, Mutassim—without any food or electricity.  

With little contact to the outside world, he survived by eating worms and drinking toilet water – his teeth turning rotten and the pigment on his face discolouring—until he got a call from his former coach, who smuggled him over the border to Egypt. After arriving in Alexandria, he recovered and started playing for the city’s El Olympi, helping them win 13 games in a row and eventually take the championship.  

I gave him a call to talk about his experience, the Gaddafi family and how the revolution changed his outlook on life.

Alex in Libya

VICE: So, that's quite an experience you went through. Can you tell me how you ended up in Libya?
Alex Owumi: It was a pretty bad time for me as a player, then my manager phoned me up and told me there was this team in Libya that wanted me to play for them. At that point it was either doing this for me or going back home. And I was welcomed there with open arms.

Did you know at that point that it was Gaddafi's team you were going to play for?
I didn’t find out it was Gaddafi’s team until I first got into my apartment. It was all beautiful and state of the art, but I noticed there were also quite a lot of pictures of Gaddafi and his grandkids. That’s when I finally asked my team captain whose apartment this was, and he told me it belonged to the Gaddafi family.

Did that scare you?
I wasn’t really scared. I grew up in Nigeria before my family moved to America, and we all sort of looked up to him there. Also, at that point I hadn’t really heard about all the bad stuff he was doing—probably because I was too busy playing sports.

Right. So what happened next? How was playing for Al-Nasr?
The training wasn’t really that unusual, but when I got there they had lost a few times in a row and some of the players weren’t getting paid or were being physically abused by the guards. There were always armed security guards around. I remember, when I was a kid, playing basketball and just having fun—even when I went to high school and started playing professionally. But that’s kind of hard when you have a guy with an AK-47 standing in the corner during training. And when you play a game you just can’t lose.

Was your life controlled outside of training at all?
No, I could basically go anywhere I wanted. At that time the city was still very pro-Gaddafi, so when I went to the market to buy food or went to a restaurant I never had to pay for anything. It was all provided for. And I had a driver, too. There was just nowhere to go, really; Benghazi isn’t a very exciting city.

The view from Alex's apartment in Benghazi after the revolution had broken out

Had you anticipated the violence at the beginning of the revolution at all? Where were you when everything started kicking off?
There had been protests going on for a few days. I was on my roof, looking over the city and the main square, where there were about 300 people protesting. I was supposed to meet my coach, Sharif, later on. I went downstairs to get a bottle of water and then went up again to see how things were going. Suddenly the military arrived and started shooting into the crowd, and that was the beginning of it all. I ran back downstairs into my apartment and tried to call my teammate, Moustafa, but the phone was dead—everything just stopped. I was trying to call my parents in the US, but nothing was working.

And what happened next?
My apartment was basically in the middle of the fighting zone and I couldn’t get out. The food I had lasted about two days, and I had no electricity, no running water—nothing. I eventually started drinking out of the toilet, and when the hunger pains got really bad I started eating cockroaches and worms that I picked out of the flowerpots. The shooting and fighting in the streets continued all the time.

How did you eventually get out of there?
I still had my mobile phone, but I had it off most of the time to save the battery. One day, after almost two weeks, I heard this strange noise and suddenly realized it was the phone ringing. It was Moustafa; he was asking me how I was, and I think he could hear the pain in my voice. He told me he had found a way for us to get out, but I was just like, "We’re never gonna get out of here." The important thing for him was just to get home and get to his family, but he didn’t know that I hadn’t eaten at all or that I had witnessed certain things, so he thought it would be easy. He told me to meet up with him the next day at the coach's office.

I'm assuming it wasn't too easy to get over there.
I was really struggling to make it downstairs as I was so weak already, but I met a group of kids outside the building who I used to play football with. They were now carrying guns themselves and they helped me navigate my way through the city. At the office, our team president, Mr Ahmed, had organized a car to bring me and Moustafa to the Egyptian border, a six-hour drive. It took us 12 hours in the end, with so many rebel checkpoints to pass, but we made it eventually.

Alex holding the Egyptian championship trophy

How come you stuck around in Egypt for a while rather than going straight home?
My coach in Libya, Sharif, was Egyptian, so I first went to stay with him when we arrived, and the plan was that he would put me on a plane back home. But then he saw me, and looking the way I did and talking the way I was he kind of predicted that it would have been bad for me to go home at that point. He knew that I had people at home who loved me, but he didn’t want my family to see me like that. It was hard enough for him to see me like that.

Then you played a season for El Olympi in Alexandria, right?
Yeah. Sharif predicted that basketball would help me to rehabilitate, and it actually worked—even though people were saying, "This kid is crazy."

The game saved you.
Yeah, basically. Basketball is kind of my safe haven. My father and my uncle both fought in the civil war, so they kind of understood the things I was going through. But what happened to me in Libya really opened my eyes to what’s going on in other parts of the world. I look at things differently now. And I’m just trying to keep moving.

Alex is now in the UK, playing for the Worcester Wolves, and has written a book, Qaddafi’s Point Guard, about his time in Libya.

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: A mystery Call of Duty player. 

The incident: Someone lost a game of Call of Duty.

The appropriate response: Shouting obscenities into your headset. 

The actual response: They allegedly called 911 and had a SWAT team sent to the other player's home. 

On Tuesday, an unnamed teen in Long Beach, New York, was playing an online multiplayer game of Call of Duty.

According to reports, the teen won the game. 

This apparently didn't go down so well with one of the other players. Police in Long Beach received a call around 3 PM from a man who reportedly told them, "I just killed my mother, and I might shoot more people." He gave them the address of the teen who'd just won at Call of Duty. 

The police sent multiple vehicles, an ambulance, a SWAT team, and hostage negotiators to the house.

When they arrived and entered the home, they found an unharmed family and a dude playing Call of Duty.

"Everybody was scared to death," said a neighbor who witnessed the raid. 

Police are attempting to track down the person responsible for the 911 call, who they say probably got the teen's address after tracing his IP. If caught, they face "serious charges" and may have to pay back the cost of the police operation, which was probably a lot.

The teen's mother says he is "not allowed to play that game ever again."

Cry-Baby #2: VA Medical Center

The incident: A man failed to pay for his soda refill.

The appropriate response: Asking him to pay.

The actual response: He was fined $525 and lost his job. 

Earlier this week, Christopher Lewis was working his construction job at VA Medical Center in North Charleston, South Carolina. 

While eating lunch in the center's on-site cafeteria, he refilled his soda cup at the soda machine. 

According to Christopher, after he did this, a man who identified himself as the chief of police approached him and asked if he was going to pay for his refill. "I told him I wasn't aware that I had to pay for that," Christopher told WISTV.

He claims that he tried to pay the 89 cents on the spot, but was not allowed to. Instead, Christopher says, he was taken to a back room where he was given a $525 citation for shoplifting. He was also told he was not allowed to return to the property.

As he works on the property, this meant he was out of a job.

"I'm done there, at the VA hospital. I'm not allowed to go on the premises anymore. I asked him can I still work on the job site and just bring my lunch and not go to the cafeteria and he said he wanted me off the premises," he said.

Christopher says that he never noticed the signs, and had always refilled his soda without paying in the past. 

"Every time I look at the ticket, it's unbelievable to me," Chris said. "I can't fathom the fact that I made an 89 cent mistake that cost me $525."

In a statement about the incident, the hospital said:

"Today a Federal citation was issued for shoplifting in the VA cafeteria to an individual who stated to VA police he had not paid for refills of beverages on multiple occasions, even though signs are posted in the cafeteria informing patrons refills are not free. Shoplifting is a crime. The dollar amount of the ticket is not determined by VA as it is a Federal citation. The citation may be paid or the recipient may choose to appear in Federal court to contest it."

A hospital spokesperson also referred to the free refill as "Theft of government property."

After local news reported on the story, the charge was downgraded from a citation to just a warning. It's unclear if Christopher has been allowed to return to his job. 

Which of this lot is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A guy who claims to have a phobia of the Kardashian family vs. a homophobic store owner.

Winner: The homophobe!!!

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