Politic365 editor-in-chief Kristal High, left, with US Rep. Bobby Rush and another telecom advocate. Photo via Flickr user CongressmanBobbyRush

Have you ever read the comment section of a blog post or news article and thought, Damn, these trolls must be paid by someone?

On the pages of VICE and an investigative website I help manage called Republic Report, I've covered the net neutrality debate—whether Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be able to create internet fast and slow lanes, or if, instead, all content should be treated equally. A writer and attorney named Kristal High has been attacking me in the comment section throughout the year.

For a story about how civil rights groups with funding from Comcast and other telecom companies wrote a letter to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) supporting the agency’s proposal to gut net neutrality, High showed up in the comment section to call me "paternalistic." After I published a story last week about how a Comcast-affiliated African American news outlet decided to delete a story I wrote about net neutrality upon being contacted by an advocacy group tied to the telecom industry, High appeared in the comment section once again to troll me. She claimed that I am wrong to be critical of the FCC's plan and that I have been wasting my time by focusing on the "lobbying dollars" spent in the debate.

Well, speaking of lobbying dollars, High just admitted on-air that she is being paid by the DCI Group, a lobbying firm founded by Republican operatives to defend the tobacco industry. DCI Group now represents many current net neutrality opponents, including Verizon and Broadband for America, a front for major cable companies we previously investigated at VICE.

High's disclosure went down in a fairly unusual way.

On his program yesterday, radio host David Pakman discussed how he has received pitches from the DCI Group to have commenters on the show to discuss telecom policy—and noticed that these commenters have largely regurgitated industry talking points against a free and open internet. Pakman said he became suspicious of the DCI Group and decided to look them up. After receiving the next pitch from the firm, this time to have Kristal High on to discuss the issue, he invited her to the program and asked point blank if she was being paid by DCI.

"Are individuals like you and Everett Ehrlich, are you paid by DCI?" asked Pakman.

"I think you have to really consider what it is you're suggesting, you're asking there" High responded. "If people are working on different issues, there could be, say, a consulting arrangement that's separate and apart from whatever it is people are advocating for."

"So in other words," Pakman said, "DCI may be paying you as a consultant, but they're not paying you for the media appearances or being a spokesperson for the point of view that their clients espouse."

"Right," said High.

The entire interview, which is posted on YouTube, is worth checking out.

High is the editor and co-founder of a website called Politic365, which calls itself the "the premier digital destination for politics and policy related to communities of color." High's colleagues at the website, including writers Jeneba Jalloh Ghatt and Justin Vélez-Hagan, have also shown up in the comment section of my pieces to defend the FCC's plan to end net neutrality. But a closer look at the group reveals deep ties to the telecom industry, well beyond the revelation that its editor is paid by lobbyists.

Politic365 was "incubated" by the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, a group profiled last year by the Center for Public Integrity. They found that the outfit takes huge checks from telecom giants to mobilize African American and Latino support for industry priorities, like opposing net neutrality or supporting corporate media mergers.

A look at the archives of Politic365 reveals a laundry list of articles that could be charitably described as friendly to industry objectives. This op-ed on the Politic365 website attacks municipal broadband—which cities have used to provide fiber optic broadband for a fraction of the cost of what traditional cable companies offer—as a "false promise."  Another news article on the site muses that the proposed Comcast merger with Time Warner Cable could "benefit minorities." When Comcast merged with NBC, Politic365 also celebrated that conglomeration as somehow beneficial to communities of color.

Politic365's content is distributed widely, and High has published a slew of anti-net neutrality op-eds at the Huffington Post. High has not disclosed her financial relationship with the DCI Group in either of her professional biographies.
 But there have been hints about the funding in the past. 

"We found that African Americans are overwhelmingly satisfied with their wireless phone service," High says in a video distributed by MyWireless.org, a group controlled by CTIA The Wireless Association, a trade association for companies such as Verizon and AT&T. The latest tax return for the group shows a contribution of $10,000 to Politic365. 

As the debate over net neutrality rages on, we've seen a number of unseemly tactics from the telecom lobby, like duping random environmental groups and librarians into joining pro-industry coalitions. During a discussion last week on Bloomberg TV, Columbia University senior fellow Alec Ross wondered out loud if  "phone companies and the cable companies flat out own Congress?” Recent events suggest they do. But the policymaking process is much bigger than simply having a few hundred congressmen in your pocket. You also need an army of comment trolls.

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Child of God is Cormac McCarthy’s third and oft overlooked 1973 novel, ostensibly about a necrophiliac serial killer who lurks and creeps in the narrow hollers of deep-backwoods Tennessee. As of last Friday, it is also a 104-minute feature film—directed by James Franco and starring Scott Haze in the role of the story’s wholly unredeemable protagonist, Lester Ballard—that Americans in major cities can watch in a movie theater.

For a film with a relatively limited release, reams of reviews rolled in over the weekend—no doubt fueled by Franco’s involvement. On the whole, they were not good. The movie currently holds an aggregate 38 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a slightly more acceptable score of 5.9/10 on IMDb. As Ballard himself might grumble upon hearing this news, “Das’um fuckin’ goddamn bullshit.” I guess this is why I don’t typically read movie reviews, or any reviews for that matter. How is this still a job anymore, with the internet and all? But I digress…

I suspect that most of the individuals who are paid actual money to be film critics these days have never read McCarthy’s book, or even heard much about it before sitting down to write their pithy—and many times blatantly misinformed—reviews of a film that, for once, has submitted itself to what is virtually perfect source material and just shot the thing pretty much verbatim without some flunky smearing his or her greasy fingerprints all over it. As Rotten Tomatoes critics’ summary aptly points out (albeit in a completely misguided interpretation): “An obviously reverent adaptation that fails to make a case for the source material being turned into a movie, Child of God finds director James Franco outmatched by Cormac McCarthy's novel.”

Duhhhhhh. It’s Cormac Fucking McCarthy, simpletons, and the book is about a mentally unstable, crushingly lonely, and unholily nasty shell of a human being whose nose constantly drips with viscous snot and whose only solace is found in murdering women, dragging their bodies back to his lair, dressing them up (at least at first) in a disturbing interpretation of date-night outfits, and having sex with their corpses.

If someone can cite a screenwriter—or even, more generally, a filmmaker—who can tell a story with the singular conviction of McCarthy’s prose and, what’s more, is capable of “improving” it with the big screen in mind, I will gladly retire to some remote ridge of the Appalachians and live out the rest of my days hunting vermin for sustenance and taking dumps in the woods knowing that I am dead wrong. Just email me.

Except I don’t have to do that because Scott Haze already did. As just about every review of substance has pointed out (I suspect because the press packet included ruminations from Haze on his preparation for the role), Haze became Lester Ballard long before the cameras started rolling. He lurked in Tennessee’s deep backcountry for three months in isolation, losing some 30 pounds and living off the land like a true creature of nature.

Another thing almost all of these reviews mention, including last Thursday’s mostly positive write-up in the New York Times, is a quote from the anonymous, omniscient narrator who defines the novel’s moral parameters and opens the first act (of three) in the film. In reference to the story’s principal, the narrator says, “He was of German and Irish bloods. His name was Lester Ballard—a child of God, much like yourself, perhaps.”

What’s curious is how much of this masterfully crafted sentence seemed to be lost on those who were disappointed with the few things that differ between the source material and Franco’s adaptation. Namely, their charges that the film makes a ham-fisted attempt to stoke sympathy for a wild and sociopathic murderer. It makes me wonder whether these people have ever been camping alone in the deep woods, isolated with only their thoughts, a campfire, and a few cans of franks and beans. For many from the more remote and rural regions of America’s Southern wilderness, this is a seminal rite of passage and something people do when they are fed up with the world. For the majority of Yankee and West Coast film critics whose job relies on air-conditioned screening theaters and cushioned seats, this is probably a foreign concept that I suggest they try sometime. Maybe you will revert to a primal state such as Ballard’s and come out the other side with a greater understanding of yourself. If you end up killing and raping corpses, well, you’re probably not a good person. But at least you’ll know!

While I do agree that the scenes that attempt to humanize Ballard are among the film’s weakest, I also believe they are wholly necessary to stomach what is essentially almost two hours of an animalistic hermit who steadily sinks into the depths of humanity’s most base activities. And I also believe, or at least it’s my interpretation, that McCarthy’s books serve as a mirror to look into whenever we forget that we are human beings birthed from the primordial mud of Planet Earth, on which our ancestors foraged and fucked and murdered and raped and pillaged so that we can now vote within the construct of democracy, buy our fianceés cheap diamonds plucked from the ground by some doomed child miner in Africa, and drive big SUVs that are literally fueled by war.

I guess, for reasons of “full disclosure” or whatever, I should mention that James Franco writes a regular column for VICE.com. (I will also take this chance to mention that he never misses a deadline, which, as any editor who handles a high volume will tell you, is pretty much a fairy tale when it comes to writers.) As anyone who opens a newspaper or looks at pretty much any site on the internet knows, Franco likes to work, and he works a lot. That’s an admirable—and, some may argue, definitively American—quality. And like most people whose work I admire, I think much of his output is flawed. But also, like most people whose work I admire, the guy unapologetically takes risks others are afraid to take in the name of art. Sometimes it works perfectly; other times it doesn’t.

Hence my hesitance to watch the screener of Child of God when he sent it to me a few months back, and my delight in discovering that he did it just about how I would’ve done it. A couple days after receiving the screener DVD, I sent an email to Franco and his production partners: “Oh, what a great movie! Thoroughly enjoyed it.” I lied. I hadn’t watched it; I was positive that the book could not be made into a movie. And not for logistical reasons, such as the lack of a film adaptation for McCarthy’s sprawling epic masterpiece Blood Meridian (which Franco is also adapting into a feature, of which I am equally preemptively dubious).

Instead I gave the screener to my creative director and longtime VICE colleague Annette Lamothe-Ramos. She is my creative counterpart for both the magazine and VICE.com, and the reason for this is because she grew up in New York City and is responsible for helping to define the visual and cultural aesthetic of VICE as much as anyone else at the company. She does not, however, regularly read Cormac McCarthy (I think she mentioned that she had read The Road), nor did she spent her childhood hanging around the sorts of characters—or, perhaps, the offspring of the characters—who inhabit the universe of Child of God. So if she liked it, I figured that said something.

Before sending the lying email to Franco & Co., I asked Annette what she thought of the film. “Well…” she said, trying to get a read of how I would react to her encapsulated review while I stayed poker-faced, “I think the main character is so fucking creepy, and he shits on camera and you see his shitty ass, and he wipes it with a stick within the first five minutes.” I cut her off: “Great! Sounds like what I was hoping for!” And after finally seeing the film in theaters, I am happy to report that it was. 

I’m dubious of anyone who claims to have a “favorite” book or movie or piece of artwork, but if Lester Ballard were to hold his rifle to my head and force me to make a list, Child of God would be way up on the list of books I would want to have with me on a desert island. Those who have read it will think that my selection is either supremely disturbing or spot-on. But I would choose this book because in my opinion there is no other work, literary or otherwise, that so thoroughly explores the extreme isolation of the Deep South, which can literally and figuratively chill to the bone. I have been there many times, rooting around those deep woods and those of nearby Mississippi and Arkansas. And believe me when I say that darkness still abides there, way out yonder among the pines and beetles and fox dens. In fact, in this modern world, it may be darker than ever. 

As I can attest after recently filming a follow-up to my documentary on the Ku Klux Klan and Crips' aborted showdown in Memphis, which examines how the KKK and other hate groups in the region are actively recruiting veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, isolation breeds anger—and self-imposed isolation breeds the type of anger that can only be tempered by killing, maiming, and destruction. This is what Child of God is about; it’s the primary continuum of the entire tradition of Southern Gothic. It is here to remind us that if, as it has so many times in the past, greater America refuses to listen to the heartbeat of its most rural, impoverished, and depressed regions, evil will prevail.

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Image via Nigerian Tribune

The Ebola virus is imaginatively cruel. What starts as a sore throat and a headache, develops into catatonic fever with victims hemorrhaging from the eyes and rectum, before a final breakdown of essential organs. This is the situation currently fanning across Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, claiming some 932 people since march in the worst Ebola outbreak to date.

We wanted to get an interview with someone who’s survived Ebola, an illness which generally kills 90 percent of sufferers. After reaching out to various NGOs, we spoke to Saa Sabas, former medical worker from the southern Guinean city of Gueckedou. With the help of a French translator, he described how he contracted the virus at work, became dangerously ill, and then survived—only to face suspicion from his terrified community. Here’s what he said:

VICE: Hi Saa, thanks for talking with us. Can you tell us about your background?
Saa Sabas:  Okay, we are going to do it little by little. I was born in 1962, on the Ivory Coast in the little town of Bouake. My father was an ex-serviceman in the French Army where he worked as a war nurse. He was the one who taught me about medicine, so I worked at the pharmacy at the Gueckedou hospital. I worked there as an auxiliary nurse.

And this is where you got sick?
Yes, and as you know, it was contamination that led to my infection. I was looking after a patient who was also a retired nurse. I stayed with him for quite a long time. He was one of the first people to get sick, and I washed him, fed him, and held his hand.

So you contracted Ebola from him?
Yes. I started to get bouts of fever. Usually when I feel sick I just take an acetaminophen and get better, but this time the fever did not go away. I remembered what the doctors told me about the first signs [of Ebola], so I went directly to the hospital without even stopping at home. The doctors said I should be kept under observation for 21 days, and then they did some medical tests. The morning after, they told me I was infected with the Ebola virus and they put me in medical care.

How were you feeling by that point?
I was having irregular bouts of fever, going from 38 to 39.6 centigrade (100-103 degrees Fahrenheit). This fever lasted two days, then the third day I got a diarrhea. That lasted four days until on the seventh day, I got dysentery. Then finally I had hiccups for four days. I was very worried at that point.

Ebola patient receiving treatment. Image via Simusa.org

What was the worst part of all this?
The most difficult thing for me was the hiccuping stage. I remember also that my throat was so sore that I couldn’t eat. I’ve had fever before, and I’ve had diarrhea before. All of that, of course, made me weak. But the hiccuping stage really scared me. I’ve heard that lots of people die at this stage of the illness.

All in all, how long were you sick for?
Two days of irregular fever, four days of diarrhea, three days of dysentery, four days of hiccuping. That makes thirteen days of illness. I was very well fed. I was very well treated. I was also kept under observation until I started to feel better.

So what happened when you got better?
When they let me go, they gave me clothes and Doctors Without Borders gave me a lift back home. When I was getting out of the car, they took my hand to prove to other people that I wasn’t contagious anymore, in prder to avoid stigmatization. Some people were scared and holding my hand was a great symbol of my recovery. They also gave me a certificate that proved that I was fully recovered and that nobody should fear me. Then my friends started to cheer me and shake my hand. I thank God for that. Some people now call me “the survivor,” “anti-Ebola man,” or "The Revenant."

Could you tell a bit me more about the stigmatization of Ebola survivors?
My family was stigmatized when I was in hospital. Stigmatization comes from the fear of contamination and when I realized that, I started to be socially self-confident again. I want to give you a concrete example: I now work raising awareness about Ebola alongside people from Germany, France, the United States, England, and so on. If any of them knew I’d been infected with the Ebola virus, they’d still be comfortable working with me. That’s why it’s important for me to go from village to village with the Red Cross, and fight against discrimination. I can use myself as an example. I say to people, “Look at me. Do you think these people from all over the world would work with me if I were contagious?” People often answer, “We get it, but it’s still frightening.” The discrimination against those who have been sick and have recovered is decreasing.

And what message do you want to spread with your work?
We tell people to break the chain of contamination. We say, if anyone feels any symptoms, go as fast as possible to the hospital because you have more than fifty percent chance of survival if you go there in the first stage of the illness. And for you and your colleagues, you must not stop talking about us. You should encourage the medical scientists working on treatment for the Ebola virus.

Last question Saa, how has Ebola changed your life?
Since I got a sick and survived, it has brought me a lot. I have become an awareness raiser. I go to see other men in communities and I raise awareness about the Ebola virus. Now if anyone from anywhere in Guinea is looking for some information about Ebola, you have to ask Sabas your questions. Like you, people are coming to me. All that, of course, has changed my life. There is a saying: “Sometimes misfortune is good.”

Follow Julian Morgans on Twitter

The sort of beautiful buds Washington, DC, residents will be able to cultivate in their homes if Initiative 71 passes in November. Photo via Motherboard

Forbes just put out a list of the coolest cities in the US, and against all odds, DC won the top spot. The honor may be more deserved come November, when residents of the District will decide whether to join Colorado and Washington in legalizing marijuana.

The DC Board of Elections certified a ballot initiative Tuesday by the DC Cannabis Campaign to legalize marijuana for personal use. Ballot Initiative 71 would legalize possession of up to two ounces of marijuana outside the home, allow DC residents to grow up to three plants in their homes, and restrict use to residents 21 and over.

The campaign submitted roughly 56,000 petition signatures to get the initiative on the ballot, more than twice the threshold number of 22,000. Organizers were expecting a challenge from the board of elections, and there was palpable relief in the room when the board announced about 27,000 of those signatures had been deemed valid.

Now that the initiative is officially on the ballot, the biggest hurdle for the campaign may be over. A Washington Post poll earlier this year found that 63 percent of District residents supported legalization, compared with 34 percent who were opposed.

However, standing outside the Board of Election meeting shortly after the vote, DC Cannabis Campaign chairman Adam Eidenger said victory was anything but certain.

“I really hope today will wake up big donors,” Eidenger said. “If we don’t raise money for a war chest, there’s a good chance we could lose this one.”

So far, the DC Cannabis Campaign has been joined by the national Drug Policy Alliance, but Eidenger wants other large organizations to chip in.

“I believe this is the Waterloo for the war on marijuana,” Eidenger said. “Why would you not want to be in the last great battle?”

Legalizing marijuana in the federal government’s backyard would not only be a significant symbolic victory for advocates, but also a loud statement from District residents who have been disproportionately targeted by the war on drugs.

An ACLU report found that, between 2001 and 2010, 91 percent of those arrested for marijuana possession in the District of Columbia were black.

“It is clear from the number of signatures the campaign was able to submit that the citizens of the District would like to have a say in reforming the marijuana laws of the District,” said Malik Burnett, the DC policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance. “The policies of prohibition have been borne on the backs of black and brown men for decades, and residents can put an end to this failed policy.”

Even since DC decriminalized small amounts of marijuana in mid-July, Burnett said police have mostly issued tickets for possession in Wards 7 and 8, the poorest and blackest wards in the District.

The initiative does not address sales of marijuana. The legalization campaign sees the initiative as the first step in a two-part plan, the second part being a tax-and-regulate bill introduced by DC council member David Grosso.

Congress could still try to throw a wrench in legalization efforts. Representative Andy Harris (R-MD), who tried to block funding for DC’s weed decriminalization efforts, told Roll Call he would also work to block legalization if the initiative passes.

But busybody congressmen would face stiff resistance from both the White House, which threatened to veto the House bill with Harris’ amendment, and the DC city government. Both of the council members leading the DC mayoral race—Democrat Muriel Bowser and independent David Catania—have signaled support for legalization.

“In private conversations, there are some council members on our team,” Burnett said. Organizers said they are planning an education and get out the vote effort for September and October.

DC will be the third state (or pseudo-state in this case), along with Oregon and Alaska, to consider marijuana legalization in the 2014 election cycle. Florida voters will also decide on a measure to legalize medical marijuana.

Follow CJ Ciaramella on Twitter.

In The Hidden Language, Nat Towsen interviews an insider of a particular subculture in order to examine the terms and phrases created by that subculture to serve its own needs. This is language innate to an insider and incomprehensible, if not invisible, to an outsider.

Jeff Teller is a bit hoarse on Monday afternoon, though he speaks fluidly, with a genial familiarity. Tuesday is his one day off from working 13 or more hours per day as the head chef at M. Wells Steakhouse in Queens, New York, where running an open kitchen visible to diners keeps him in the spotlight.

“The major communication in any kitchen comes from the chef,” he explains. “You can be the greatest cook in the world, but you need to be able to communicate what you want and how to do it with the [fewest] words possible. When a kitchen runs really well, you don’t even have to speak.”

Jeff sat down and talked to me about the times when he does have to speak, and the shorthand that helps him achieve that desired economy of language.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Brackets denote paraphrasing by the author. All other text is directly quoted from Mr Teller. Verbs have been conjugated to match common usage, rather than the infinitive form.

Covers: n. [The number of people that you’ll serve in a night.]

e.g.  “Last night we did 115 covers.”

Four-Top: n. A table [for four.]

See also: Two-top, three-top.

Deuce: n. A two-top, [two people seated at a table.]

The pass: n. The area where the chef stands to check all food that leaves the kitchen before it goes to the dining room.

POS: n. Point of Sales. Where you’ll put all your tickets.

Expediting: v. Running the service. The waiter will tell you when the guest is ready for their next course, and you tell the cooks when and what table you’re going on.

Fired/Ready to be Fired: adj. When I fire a ticket that means that we are plating it or are finishing the item, so each station knows what they need to do at that particular time. When I tell the kitchen what is fired, it is a basic summary of all things we should be working on at any given time.

e.g. “You are fired on three steaks, two fish and five fries.”

Going: Just another word for “fired.”

e.g. “We’re going on table 23.”

Working: [Another synonym for] fired.

86'd: 1. adj. [Out of something, canceled, removed, or terminated from employment.]

e.g. “We’re out of fish for one day, so we're 86'd it.” “86 that.” “Can I 86 this plate?” “Patrick got 86'd.”

Ordered In!: exc. The chef has received an order from the waiter and the cooks should either begin to prepare it, or have it ready to cook depending on the station they work.

Two minutes!: exc. You’re plating up and everybody’s going at the same time. Everybody knows that in two minutes, we’re going up on this full order, and every single person has their role that they’re playing.

On the fly: adj. Right away.

Make it soigné: v. Make it nice. Make sure we’re really taking care of it.

e.g. Presentation. Don’t overcook the meat. Make sure to taste [along the way.]

PPX: n. VIP. A person of interest. 

e.g. A friend of the house. Another chef. A purveyor. The owner of the restaurant.

In the shit/In the weeds: adj. When you’re really busy.

Behind: syn. Excuse me. You don’t say "excuse me", you say "behind."

The guy: n. Any object, at some point. You call everything "the guy." Comes from Andrew Carmellini. The guy could be this glass of water. When you explain that to a guy that’s worked for you for a while, they understand what guy you’re talking  about. That comes from working with somebody for a long time.

e.g. “Let me see the guy. Let me get guy. Let me get a piece of that guy. Cut me a piece of that guy.” 

Chocolate teapot: n. A useless person.

e.g. “As useless as a chocolate teapot.”

THE TAKEAWAY

Having never met Andrew Carmellini or worked in one of his restaurants, I have been using "guy" to refer to any inanimate object (or person, or cat) since my childhood action figures. It’s a practice I thoroughly support. In the weeds is a great way to describe being so busy you can’t think about anything other than what is in front of your face. “86 it!” is a nice alternative to 30 Rock’s popular no-questions-asked “shut it down!” (or my personal favorite, “nuke it!”). And when you need a way to say “VIP” that’s more VIP than “VIP”, PPX will do quite nicely.

FURTHER READING

As Jeff explained to me, each restaurant develops its own set of terminology, so each could have its own glossary, but there are terms that are used in almost every kitchen. We chose to focus on these broader, pan-restaurant terms, as they reflect function and necessity across the industry.

To read about the specific terms unique to different New York City restaurants, read this piece from the New York Times. To see Jeff in the shit, visit M. Wells Steakhouse on a busy night.

Follow Nat Towsen on Twitter

The view from the Freddie Mercury Bar in Stone Town, Zanzibar. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous island off Tanzania, where the street sellers are in the business of pushing Freddie Mercury instead of crack. Shortly after I arrived, a man with a gleaming gold tooth jogged up the road and stopped in front of me. He asked “You want these, Miss? You want?” while rubbing a package of counterfeit Queen CDs emblazoned with Freddie Mercury's face. 

My guidebook was rammed with information on Freddie’s association with the country. As far as I could tell, it was a relatively loose one. Although Mercury was born in Zanzibar’s capital city, Stone Town, he divided his time between there and India until his mid-teens, when his family relocated to England. This was 1964, when the Zanzibar archipelago was in the throes of a political revolution.

Mercury and his family were never to return to Zanzibar, but as soon as Freddie rose to fame the archipelago was quick to claim responsibility for producing him—a practice that endures today, almost 24 years after his death. Getyourguide.com offers Freddie Mercury walking tours that take in the Shangani area where he grew up and the Zoroastrian temple where he and his family worshipped. Many tours end up in a place called "Mercury’s Restaurant."  

Mercury House in Zanzibar. Photo via Flickr user Brian Heath

A building known locally as "Mercury House" has covered its frontage with photographs of the singer in various on-stage poses.

But what’s ironic—hypocritical, even—is that locals on the largely Muslim island are so taken with the idea of selling you Freddie Mercury, even if they don’t like what he stands for: Homosexuality and Western liberalism. I visited Zanzibar and Tanzania in the months following the passing of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, which criminalized homosexuality, and homosexuality was a raging discussion point in Zanzibar's cafes and bars.

More gay tourists are starting to visit the island, in part thanks to the rise of gay marriage in Europe and the resulting honeymoons. Kirsty, a spokesperson for Gay Unity Abroad says that she often has couples asking to arrange honeymoons in locations like Zanzibar—“but I generally try to sway them towards more gay-friendly destinations,” she told me.

As tourism in Zanzibar increases, so does everything that comes with it; a more relaxed dress code, alcohol consumption, and (in the eyes of locals, at least) homosexuality. The growing Westernization of the island has been cited as cause for sectarian tensions on the island by East African press, including the Daily Nation. The roads running alongside the beaches display both tank-top wearing tourists and those clad in billowing black abayas. Two strains of Zanzibar continue to co-exist: The growing tourist industry and the traditional fishing way of life.

Freddie Mercury. Screencap via VEVO user QueenVEVO

Mo* comes from a long line of fisherman from the eastern side of the island. He works with a tour company, ferrying visitors from Zanzibar to Prison Island, where tourists get the chance to gawk at giant tortoises and roll around on pristine white beaches. He’s obsessed with both the Queen of England, as well as the band Queen. But like many people in Zanzibar, he cannot embrace every aspect of Westernization.

“I like Freddie Mercury very much. He brings much money to this island, because many Americans and British people come to visit his birthplace," said Mo. "This is good because it means I can buy my sons a television that they want. But in my religion it is not good to be a man with a man. The new laws in Uganda are right. These people should be punished because what they are doing is ungodly. But my big worry is that these people will come from Uganda and into Tanzania.”

Despite the buzz around Uganda’s anti-gay laws, Tanzania’s legislation against gay people is hardly any more lenient. Zanzibar, the island that celebrates Freddie Mercury’s "flamboyant" personality and music, threatens male same-sex acts with a life-sentence in prison. Perpetrators of same-sex acts between women are punished with comparatively light prison sentences of up to five years.

An advert for Freddie Mercury tours 

Toto* is a guide who makes a living taking tourists up Kilimanjaro on the mainland. I took a walk with him, during which we spoke of many things, including Zanzibar and Tanzania’s reliance on tourism. “Me, I like the tourists," he said. "They bring me money and business so I can support my family. I don’t want to be a fisherman because there are no fish. It’s tough in this climate. But although I love the tourists coming, I do worry about the way of life here. Will it become the West? Who knows.”

I asked him how he feels about homosexuality, considering the Ugandan gay bill is still a popular talking point. “Gays?” he laughs. “It doesn’t happen here. If people are gay they are no longer part of the community. It’s not what God hoped for from mankind.”

Our conversation again brought to mind the dichotomy between the entrenched traditionalism of Zanzibar’s conservative Muslim population and the growing tourist trade. If Zanzibar embraces Freddie Mercury and uses his name to make money on the island, then maybe the local government needs to be more transparent about why people celebrate the singer, or else Zanzibari society needs to embrace all gay people the way they do Freddie Mercury.

*Names have been changed. 

Follow Eleanor Ross on Twitter

Photo by George Rose/Getty Images

Susan Sontag closes her seminal book On Photography with a “brief anthology of quotations”—compiling remarks from various brilliant people on the topic. Sontag writes:

The final reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use up—and, therefore, to need to be replenished.

There’s always a new thing to look at, the same way there’s always a new way to say that. The following statements are a variation on Sontag’s original collection of quotes—misheard, translated, or reimagined for the year 2014 and for replenishment’s sake. This isn’t what they said, but it’s what they meant.

Beauty, you’re under arrest. I have a camera, and I’m not afraid to use it.
—Julia Margaret Cameron

I love looking at famous people. Because of the way they look. Because of the way photography makes them look famous.
—Arthur Schopenhauer

I can only see beautiful things when I’m fucked up.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

If you can take photographs with language, I’m taking one right now.
—Lewis Hine

In Marseille, I went around with my Leica like a wild-game hunter hoping to capture a baby T. rex and bring it back alive. It was like Pokémon Snap. It was like looking at life with the eye of God, which rises from your pyramidal core and creates a likeness of the living thing seen stopped.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson

GET A CAMERA: It’s like having a hand that’s a camera.
—Advertisement, 1976

It’s hard not to tell the truth with a camera. Artists are particularly good at that.
—Edward Weston

Nothing can be like, “No photos!” anymore.
—Robert Frank

Rooms are my favorite places, because they’re not places. When people aren’t anywhere, they’re in a room. If you’re in a room, you’re like a heartbeat in a silence chamber. You’re like someone who likes putting yourself in a room. I like meeting people in rooms. Some rooms are like places. Nowhere’s kind of like a place. People are different when they’re nowhere. I feel like a lot of people want to go where they’re nowhere—like in a doctor’s office, or the sky. They ask me, Richard Avedon, to show them who they are. I say, “You’re who you’re.” Richard Avedon exists only in Richard Avedon’s mind. Richard Avedon’s mind exists only in your mind as you read this or when you look at what Richard Avedon made—which is a way of thinking about being with someone temporarily, in a moment, forgettably, except by a medium, through which you are seen, and thus kept. Richard Avedon still exists.
—Richard Avedon

Ansel Adams does Nature better than Nature does itself.
—Advertisement for a book of photographs by Adams, 1974

Most of my photos don’t speak English.
—Bruce Davidson

Daguerre really fucked up French history when he invented the selfie.
—Charles Baudelaire

Don’t get me wrong—painting’s all right. But now that we have photography, what’s the point?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Everybody wants to cuddle with “the object.”
—Walter Benjamin

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do—while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.
—Dorothea Lange

If I didn’t have a camera, the things I do would be crazy.
—Diane Arbus

That time I took pictures of dying children, some of the other children tried to kill me.
—Alf Kumalo

Photography is choosing where to point your eye-cone.
—John Szarkowski

I like to hide my camera and use a remote control, because then no one knows when I’m actually imprisoning their souls in the visual plane of thought or just sitting there, waiting, and then making time stop. The printed film is like a bell used to symbolize its hour. Except it stands for both that hour’s and everything’s sudden stopping.
—Margaret Bourke-White

I don’t get straight people, but I understand what they look like.
—Duane Michals

There are three reasons why people collect photographs. It’s either a picture of them looking good in it, a picture of someone they love looking good in it, or a picture of someone they will one day seek a pure and utter revenge upon looking like they probably deserved it all along.
—From Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, 1951

A photograph of your enemy’s corpse is the best way to remind yourself that he’s dead.
—From Euclides da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands, 1902

Photography is going to bring about world peace, maybe.
—László Moholy-Nagy, 1925

The best way to survive terrorism is to make a profit off of its depiction.
—From the New York Times, October 29, 1974

I want my photographs to say: “Look—there’s this thing you haven’t seen that you should see.”
—Emmet Gowin

The only way to recover the old world is to induce the media into vomiting it back up.
—Marshall McLuhan

True villains are extremely photogenic.
—Wallace Stevens

Everyone looks the same to me in a photograph: stupid.
—Søren Kierkegaard, 1854

Note to self: KALEIDOSCOPE.
—William H. Fox Talbot (miscellaneous note dated February 18, 1839)

This anthology originally appeared in the 2014 VICE photo issue. See more of Paul Legault's work on his website.

On the third episode of The Jim Norton Show, Jim sits down with Whitney Cummings, comedian and co-creator of the CBS series 2 Broke Girls, for a discussion that could never happen on a traditional talk show.

Why?
Business. It’s a good place to get pills and heroin. I’ve been addicted for a while and it’s been a long, hard struggle. I looked up to my big brother, who went into treatment, a lot. Then he OD’ed this January.

I’m so sorry. How do you feel about the music playing at Central Station?
The marches? In the beginning it was excruciating, and they played it very loudly. You hurried through. It was so fucking loud. Even regular people would cover their ears.

What’s so intolerable about marches?
Marches, classical, overtures – whatever it is, it’s really annoying. Is it German or something? If it’s cold though, people will still hang out there. Folks can get used to anything.

And if you’d have to grade it?
Well, sometimes they play some good tunes – can’t deny that. Sometimes you’ll whistle along without realising it. The worst is when they play those 30 second loops. Wait, on a scale from 1-10?

Whatever you like.
Some are all right, and others are complete shit. You can’t even talk to each other some times.

Vintage sweatshirt from Beyond Retro

PHOTOS BY  ғ ʀ ᴇ ᴇ ʟ ᴀ ɴ ᴅ ɢ ᴏ ʀ s ᴇ 人間 キャプチャー
STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Hair Stylist: Leire Barrenetxea
Illustrations: Johnny Ryan

Beach Riot bikini, Adidas pants, Freedom choker

Armani dress, bandana from Beyond Retro

Vintage T-shirt from Beyond Retro, Woolrich pants

Steven Black T-shirt, Nordic Poetry overalls

Armani dress, bandana from Beyond Retro

DKNY sweatshirt, Urban Outfitters pants, Dr. Martens sandals, Freedom choker 

Vintage T-shirt

Spencer Hamilton. Photos by Carl Wilson

Spencer Hamilton knows what’s up. Off the board, the Canadian pro—sponsored by Supra, KR3W, and Shake Junt, among others—can keep you hyper-engaged by talking through just about any of his beliefs, whether that involves food, education, or skateboarding. I met up with him a few weeks ago in Hackney, London, just before the Supra demo at the Frontside skate park, for a chat about some of that, the joys of touring, and how important it is to understand what the fuck is going on.

VICE: Hey, Spencer. How's Britain for skating? Does it beat Canada?
Spencer Hamilton: It’s certainly no Barcelona [laughs]. But it’s really fun—the good spots are really good.

What do you like to do when you’re not skateboarding, both on and off tour?
I like cooking a lot. Going out for food, shopping for food, eating food. Mostly vegan stuff.

Is it hard to eat healthy when you’re on the road?
I think you just have to lower your standards. I’m not vegan right now because of that. On the road you either have to be upset the entire time, which I’ve done and it sucked, or you can just accept that you’re not gonna be able to eat good, raw vegan food and just go with it.

Where’s the best place you’ve visited food-wise?
I swear to god, Vancouver or LA. In the summertime Vancouver is the best. They grow everything, and it’s all fresh. There are tons of little farming towns around it.

OK. This is all well and good, but you’re sitting here in front of me drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. Do you make allowances for these?
Fuck, 10 AM interviews? Yeah, I’ll make an allowance for beers and smokes [laughs]. I’m not a perfect human by any means. I love drinking and hanging with my friends and socializing. I love that whole aspect to my life. Cigarettes—I don’t plan on doing them forever, but I’m hooked on them at the moment.

Spencer Hamilton for Supra, 2013

How often do you have moments where the reality of what you're doing strikes you?
Oh, yeah, plenty of times. I’ve watched Muska, Jim, and Stevie skateboard my entire life, on the first videos I ever had, and now I’m touring with them. So there’s that. Also, last year we went to some pyramids in Teotihuacan, Mexico—they were awesome. We just went to Stonehenge on the way over here.

What did you think of it?
Oh, it’s awesome! I jumped the fence and got kicked out immediately [laughs]. The big ones are fucking massive! And to think they dragged those things. You never know how that shit panned out, you know. I read something about the Rapa Nui people and the Easter Island statues recently that they’d found some historical evidence that suggests that they pretty much killed themselves off. They used every last resource on the island to build these things. They cut down trees and used everything. Which is similar to our society, right? We’re ruining our goddamn environment.

Agreed. So what’s tour life like generally?
It’s just a fucking blur, man—there’s always something going on. Asia is always crazy. The Philippines… Manila is always a fucking trip. It’s the Third World, man, savage poverty, and there’s extreme overpopulation for the city. The one skate park over there is like three car-parking spaces for 25 million people. We did a demo there, and there were kids grabbing every fucking thing you have. You leave every signing and demo with nothing because you give it all away. They’ve got nothing over there.

I’ve read in other interviews that you’re a big reader. What are you reading at the moment?
I was just reading this book called The End of Overeating, which was neat. It’s not just applied to food; it’s about all forms of consumption and addiction, and the way your brain reacts to rewards and things that are stimulating. It’s important to understand what the fuck is going on rather than just blindly going through life.

Have you ever thought about writing yourself?
Absolutely, but it’d be hard for me. I quit high school, so I’d have to get a little help from my old lady on that one. But I’ve got tons of ideas floating around in my head—stuff about what we’ve talked about: society and personal experiences.

Do you disagree with the education system, or did you just not like school?
I absolutely disagree with it. I think in all aspects of the world today we are so fucking out of date. The curriculum is shit. You have teachers who are underpaid and don’t want to be there. When I quit I was being given career advice by a 70-year-old girl who wouldn’t even answer questions. There’s something fucking wrong with this shit. Then you get out of school, and you learn all this stuff and you realize, Woah, we didn’t learn any of this shit. When it comes to food, politics, world affairs—the whole thing is out of date. Am I against education? Not at all. The school system today is insane, and it’s sad that we have that upbringing for kids. The schedule is outrageous.

I agree. I think the hierarchy of subjects need to be reworked.
Exactly. Who’s to say that if you got an A+ in Science you’re going to get a high-paying job? There’s no guarantee. Or then this guy from the bottom who quit high school to start painting, he could be a millionaire. They switch one side of your brain off and flick the other on. It’s a molding.

I think people are questioning the system, but how do you think it can actually change?
There are ways. Civil disobedience goes a long way. There are also alternative schools—there’s one in Vancouver…

There’s one in Sweden where their playground is a skate park. It’s insane. They do classes in videography and photography at an early age, when they’re at school. Their play time is at a skate park, if they want, and there are loads of girls going to it now as well, because it’s got a great ethos.
And then what do you have? You have a group of brilliant people. They’ll have personal preferences for art, or whatever, or sport. It’s all to do with how your early life is and how you’re brought up.

Yeah. What’s the worst thing about skateboarding right now? Penny boards?
Oh, those things are pretty rough [laughs]. But it’s fucking skating, you know. It always goes through stages: girls skating, weird guys skating, guys in business suits with longboards—there’s always shit going on. Is it bad? It doesn’t fucking bother me. Do whatever the hell you want.

And what’s the best thing about skateboarding right now?
It’s so diverse. There’s a lot of cool shit going on. You never know what the future is going to hold. It always goes through dips; throughout history, skateboarding has always gone under and come back up. I don’t know if we’re up or down at the moment, but I know I feel pretty up!

What makes you happy?
Traveling around with my friends. I’m fortunate enough to live in a place that I love—Vancouver is an awesome home. I get to go back and forth to Hollywood to see my boys. Skating as a profession is insane. It’s the same story that everyone’s got; you quit high school, you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, and eventually, somehow, you end up here.

What advice would you give your 13-year-old self—the one sending out sponsor-me tapes to companies?
[Laughs] I don’t know. There’s so much stuff. Maybe lay off the drugs? But then, if I had, it wouldn’t have been so much fucking fun getting here.

Follow Jak on Twitter.

Screenshot via TVA.
Whenever I think about Saguenay—a bucolic region five hours north of Montreal—I remember swimming, almost drowning in Lake St-Jean, and trying to wash purple stains off my fingers after stuffing myself with the best blueberries in Quebec. But now Saguenay’s status as one of the most stunning and friendly regions in the province is slowly giving way to a nasty racist reputation.

Last week, controversial stickers started popping up around Chicoutimi—one of Saguenay’s biggest boroughs—that said (in French): “0% halal, 0% kosher, 100% Québécois." The stickers were distributed by a well-known xenophobic organization called Fédération des Québécois de Souche (FQS), which roughly translates to “old-stock Quebecois” (read: pureblood Quebs). The FQS has not responded to VICE’s request for an interview, but their website claims that the driving force behind their campaign of hatred stems from one very serious problem: these religious groups are disrupting and negatively influencing one of the most sacred of all Quebec institutions: the maple syrup sugar shack. Wait, what?

The site goes on to talk about the restrictive halal and kosher certifications of food, as well as one instance in 2007 where one sugar shack had to prepare halal chicken to accommodate paying customers who (gasp!) happened to be Muslim. This obviously validates distributing racist stickers around a neighborhood populated mostly by foreign students and immigrants, right?

To make matters worse,  a few days after the sticker incident, spray painted signs which read “Ville Saguenay, Ville Blanche” (Saguenay, a white town) were posted at the entrance of the city by anonymous individuals. The FQS denies being behind this, but Christian Bélanger from Coexister Saguenay, an organization aimed at creating a dialogue between people from differents faiths, finds it hard to believe both incidents aren’t related. “It’s like saying there’s a noted pyromaniac standing next to a fire holding a gas tank in his hand," Bélanger said. “But swearing he’s not responsible.”

While it’s unclear if the signs and stickers came from the same, racist and bigoted minds, they do follow a series of unfortunate events that have occurred in La Belle province recently. A halal butcher in Sherbrooke was vandalized in February, a mosque in Gatineau was also targeted, and of course there’s that time a Moroccan-born Quebec businessman was arrested for being a terrorist after excitedly telling his co-workers that he was going to “blow away the competition” at a telecoms tradeshow.  Specifically in the Saguenay, in February 2013, the FQS was caught distributing leaflets denouncing mass immigration and multiculturalism, claiming that immigration posed a threat to our national identity.

A few months later, a local mosque was splattered with pig’s blood. The vandals left a note which read in part: "You just moved here to our country to flee dictators, war, violence, hatred, and death to live happily and in good health away from all you left. Why do you come to this country if it's not to change the way you were living?" To show that not all Saguenay residents were pig blood-spraying racists, some locals gathered the following Friday to hold a vigil in support of the Muslim community.

While the FQS is openly recruiting new militants to help out the pureblood Quebecois cause on their Facebook page, locals are getting worried that their town is getting an unfair reputation for being super racist. However, Christian Bélanger doesn’t believe the situation is becoming worse in Saguenay. “People here are just like the rest of Quebec and the rest of the world,” he said. “We are not perfect, but racism and intolerance are not part of our culture.”


@smvoyer

Self-portrait by a macaque. Photo via Wikimedia

Some old Greek guy once said that the law is reason, free from passion. If that old chestnut held up under scrutiny there'd be a lot fewer pissed-off humans hand-pounding license plates in our sprawling prison-industrial complex. This contradiction inspired us to repurpose an old Noisey column, Ask a Lawyer, to give us the opportunity to hit up one of our lawyer buddies and get him to drop the gavel on the weirdest legal issues of our stupid time. He'd only agree to speak with us anonymously, because lawyers are pussies. Enjoy!

Monkeys have a long and storied history of mischievous behavior. Curious George, Bonzo, that Nazi monkey from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and, more recently, some crested black macaque in Indonesia who grabbed photographer David Slater’s camera and started shooting #selfies in the jungle. When the photos were first released in 2011, they attracted a level of global attention that should make us all ashamed. The (admittedly very cute) monkey’s doofy grin was plastered on what seemed like every website in the world and even made the rounds on a number of national news programs. David Slater was happy. Presumably, he was making a lot of money off of that monkey and its impressive ability to capture the essence of what it was to be alive and a monkey in the Indonesian Jungle in 2011. Life was good.

But then Wikimedia, parent company of Wikipedia, uploaded the pictures to their library of public domain images, complete with a link to download hi-res files of the photos. The images have been uploaded and removed by different editors after Slater complained several times over the years, but he has finally decided to take legal action. “If the monkey took it, it owns copyright, not me, that’s their basic argument. What they don’t realize is that it needs a court to decide that,” Slater told the Telegraph.

That’s actually a pretty succinct explanation of Wikimedia’s position. On the images’ discussion page one of the editors who uploaded the photos wrote that “This image was shot by a monkey who picked up a camera that a photographer had dropped” and was therefore not eligible for copyright. Most of the written accounts of the event seem to support the claim that the camera was “dropped” or “hijacked” by the monkeys. When the Telegraph wrote about the story three years ago, they said that “the crested black macaque hijacked the camera and started snapping away sending award-winning photographer David Slater bananas.” But yesterday, in a new video uploaded to that same publication’s website, Slater said "I wanted that one shot full in the face […] but it wasn't going to happen, not unless they took the photograph themselves. And I did that by setting it up on a tripod with a cable release, walking a few meters away, allow them to come in, watch their own reflections, play with the camera, play with the cable release, and bingo, they took their own shots." 

Is the photographer inflating his role in the photos, or did the monkey take the glamor shots on his own, without any prompting from the human? Does it even matter? Does Slater own the copyright, or is a photo taken by an animal in the public domain? For that matter, is a painting by an animal in the public domain? We asked a lawyer.

Photo via Wikimedia

VICE: True or false: Traditionally speaking, the person or entity who presses the shutter button on a camera is considered the owner of the resultant photograph.
Anonymous Lawyer: Generally true. The creator of a photograph is usually the owner of the copyright in the photograph, unless there is a contractual relationship that assigns that copyright to a third party. For example, an employee can assign his/her photograph to an employer via an employment agreement in a “work for hire” scenario.

David Slater has said that "A monkey pressed the button, but I did all the setting up," which is like arguing that photographer's assistants should be able to claim ownership over all the images they helped create. Does that argument hold water?
Typically the person who pushed the button owns the copyright, absent any contractual relationship that may assign the copyright to a third party. Slater’s argument is probably more contingent on whether animals can own the copyright in a photograph under copyright law.

US copyright law says that "non-human authors" cannot hold a copyright. Is there a precedent for this case? Why would the non-human caveat exist?
I do not believe there is direct precedent under copyright law. Other areas of law, such as law related to wills and estates, typically recognizes that animals do not have the legal capacity to own property. Thus, if you wanted to bequeath personal property to your dog in your will, you would most likely need to bequeath it to a person who would take care of your dog, or you would need to make the dog a beneficiary. Applying that logic to this case, it seems as though animals would not be able to own copyrights.

Is there anything in copyright law that implies that if an image doesn't have a clear or "human" photographer that the image is the property of the camera’s owner?
I’m not aware of any precedent that suggests a photograph with no human photographer becomes the property of the camera owner, by default.

Would Slater have a stronger case if he had been intentionally trying to coerce the animals into taking their own photographs instead of them just picking up a stray camera that he had left unattended?
I don't think there is any legal precedent on point for that situation, but Slater could potentially argue that he was directly dictating the actions of the monkey and therefore he was ultimately responsible for the photograph, and thus he is the owner of the copyright. As if the monkey was a tool through which he captured the photograph. At the very least, he could attempt to pursue that chain of arguments.

These images were taken in Indonesia. Would they be subject to Indonesia's copyright laws?
If a copyright infringement suit was brought by a plaintiff, the relevant law would be dependent on defendant’s contacts with a particular forum, not where the photograph was taken. In this case, it doesn’t seem that either party had significant contacts with Indonesia to justify Indonesian law governing.

If Slater wins the case, would he be entitled to any money from all the publications that have used his image under the assumption that it was public domain?
Yes. Slater would be the owner of the copyright and would have standing to sue third parties who used the photograph without a proper license and without a proper fair use defense.

Wikimedia, in response to Slater's claim, has said: "To claim copyright, the photographer would have had to make substantial contributions to the final image, and even then, they'd only have copyright for those alterations, not the underlying image. This means that there was no one on whom to bestow copyright, so the image falls into the public domain." How substantially would an image have to be altered for someone other than the photographer to claim ownership?
Since the creator of a photograph typically owns the copyright, the third party would need to add something original to the photograph that would significantly alter the aesthetics, in order to try and claim ownership over those original elements that were added. Even so, the person contributing would have a difficult time claiming ownership over the photograph, but they could have a chance suggesting that they are entitled to jointly own the copyright.

Let's say, theoretically speaking, that someone owned the monkey. Would the copyright transfer to the monkey's owner?
Most likely not, because the monkey would not have the legal capacity to own the copyright, so between Slater and the monkey owner it seems that Slater would have the better claim to copyright ownership.

Do all artistic works created by animals reside in the public domain? For instance, does an organization like the Elephant Art Gallery have any legal ownership of or right to profit off of paintings made by elephants?
I do not believe that courts in the US have ever directly addressed this issue. There’s a bit of a factual difference between an animal pressing a button and a camera automatically taking a picture, and an elephant generating a painting on its own behalf—presumably it involves more free will on the part of the elephant. That said, the Elephant Art Gallery could try to claim that their human trainers trained the elephants to paint, and the painting process is an automatic recreation of the training. Thus, the elephants are part of the medium through which the trainers themselves are painting. Again, this would be a threshold issue as I don’t think it has been directly addressed under our current copyright regime.

In your professional opinion, do you think Slater has a case?
It seems as though he did contribute significantly to the capturing of the photograph. Since the monkey cannot claim ownership over the photograph, because it lacks legal capacity to own copyright, I would not totally discount Slater’s argument.

Our lawyer friend wanted us to tell you that these articles are for informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. They should also in no way be taken as an indication of future results and are not intended to create (and the receipt does not constitute) an attorney-client relationship. Whatever that means.

Neither Slater nor Wikimedia responded to a request for comment.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

Toxic sludge spilling through a forest. Screenshot courtesy of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure

The scale is hard to imagine: grey sludge, several feet deep, gushing with the force of a firehose through streams and forest—coating everything in its path with ashy gunk. What happened on Monday might have been one of North America’s worst environmental disasters in decades, yet the news barely made it past the Canadian border.

Last Monday, a dam holding waste from Polley gold and copper mine in the remote Cariboo Region of British Columbia broke, spilling 2.6 billion gallons of potentially toxic liquid and 1.3 billion gallons of definitely toxic sludge out into pristine lakes and streams. That’s about 6,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water and waste containing things like arsenic, mercury, and sulphur. Those substances are now mixed into the water that 300 people rely on for tap, hundreds from First Nations tribes rely on for hunting and fishing, and many others rely on for the tourism business.

“It’s an environmental disaster. It’s huge,” said Chief Ann Louie of the Williams Lake Indian Band, whose members live in the Cariboo Region and use the land for hunting and fishing. “The spill has gone down Hazeltine Creek, which was 1.5 meters wide and now it’s now 150 meters wide... The damage done to that area, it’ll never come back. This will affect our First Nations for years and years.”

The waste came from a “tailings pond,” an open-air pit that mines use to store the leftovers of mining things like gold, copper, and, perhaps most notably in Canada, the tar sands—the oil-laden bitumen composites that have made the Keystone XL Pipeline so controversial.

The term “pond” can be a little misleading, as the structures can grow to be the size of Central Park.

As Canada’s industry-friendly government has sold off hundreds of square miles of forests for mining over the past few years toxic tailings ponds have become a regular feature of once-pristine Northern Canadian landscapes.

Environmentalists say they’re disasters in the making, and they say the Polley spill is proof. While this week’s incident was notable for its size, Canadian environmentalists and indigenous activists say it may be a sign of things to come for the country, and perhaps the rest of the world as well, as mining for everything from rare earth metals to coal increases globally.

“Any time you you rely on a dyke to contain something, whether it’s water or tailings, it’s going to fail some day, sooner or later,” said Henry Vaux, a resource economist at the University of California Riverside. “To think they’re bullet proof is to fool yourself.”

It’s too early to tell just how extensive the damage from Polley mine is, but environmentalists like MiningWatch Canada’s Ramsey Hart are calling it an “environmental catastrophe,” bigger than the country has seen in years.

The tailings pond contained up to 85,000 pounds of lead, 152 tons of copper, and about 1,000 pounds of mercury, among many other heavy metals and potentially toxic substances, according to a government report. Now, many of those metals may be sitting in lakes and rivers, including one that’s home to one of the biggest salmon populations in the world.

Brian Kynoch, the president of Imperial Metals, which owns the mine, tried to calm an angry crowd at a meeting near the disaster area on Tuesday by saying the water was likely safe. “I’d drink the water,” he said.

But those who live in the sparsely populated area near the mine aren’t taking his word for it. They say the area is now completely ruined for drinking water, hunting and fishing.

“Our economy swims in the river and walks by the ground,” said Chief Bev Sellars of the Soda Creek First Nations Tribe. “There’s not any amount of money in the world that’s going to fix what’s happened.”

First Nations communities near the Polley mine say they’re devastated by the loss of the habitat, but some say they saw it coming.

A 2011 report commissioned by two First Nations tribes and funded by Imperial Metals found that the tailings pond was structurally deficient to hold as much waste and water as it did. In 2012, the British Columbia Ministry of the Environment found the Polley mine had failed to report that the pond was holding more water than it was legally allowed to.

Photo by Dru Oja Jay, Dominon, via Flickr

“We had concerns specifically about the tailings ponds for years,” said Sellars. “I hate to say it, but it wasn’t a total surprise to us.”

The size of the Polley mine breach may be unprecedented, but whether it’s gold and copper mining in British Columbia or tar sands mining in Alberta, the environmental impact of the process has become a near-constant controversy in Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party government.

In 2006, his first year in office, Harper declared his intention to make the country an “energy superpower,” and he’s done just that: Canada is now the fifth-largest oil producer in the world, thanks mostly to tar sands mining in Alberta.

Over 1,000 square miles of land, including rare boreal forest, have been turned over to energy companies to mine for tar sands (which are not actually made of tar but bitumen). The viscous, oil-rich sands are processed using a variety of toxic chemicals and the leftovers are put in tailings ponds, which currently take up about 70 square miles in Alberta.

The tar sands could grow to 50 times their current size if Harper’s government gets its way. If they did, the development would rival the state of Florida in size. 

“Massive areas have essentially been transformed into an industrial sacrifice zone,” said Ramsey Hart.

While it’s relatively rare for a tailings pond to fully collapse like the Polley one did, researchers say that tailings ponds near the tar sands also have the potential for environmental disaster—just a slower, less visually compelling one. Research from Canada’s environmental agency has shown that tailings ponds in the tar sands region have leached potentially deadly toxins into land and groundwater, and First Nations tribes and environmentalists have blamed those leaching chemicals from the tar sands on rare cancer clusters.

The issue extends far beyond Canada. There are an estimated 3,500 tailings ponds worldwide. And, thanks to lax government regulation in the US, an estimated 39 percent of tailings pond dam failures happen in the states—a rate higher than anywhere in the world.

Just six months ago, a pipe at a coal slurry pond in North Carolina opened, leaching 1.1 billion gallons of sludge into a river.

The problem in Canada, the US, and elsewhere is that no one knows exactly what to do with these ponds. Much of the sludge they contain is too toxic to remediate and let back into the environment. As of now, the plan is to just let them sit there and hope they don’t fail.

Many of the ponds will likely exist long after their corresponding mines close, and therefore long after the people who were financially responsible for them are nowhere to be found.

“There’s really no long-term plan for these tailings ponds, and that’s where the risk comes in,” said Hart. “These places might be there forever.”

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In our latest dispatch from Ukraine, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky arrives at a scene in Kiev where a group of Euromaidan activists are being detained by a group of men from the Kiev 1 Battalion—a volunteer policing unit made up largely of former Euromaidan activists. The activists have held their camp at Kiev’s Independence Square since this past winter, and were apparently also occupying a restaurant near the square—until the Kiev 1 Battalion was called upon to remove them.

Amid differing versions of the story, it becomes clear that a twist in the Ukraine conflict is emerging, as players in the revolution are showing signs of turning against each other.