This post originally appeared in VICE UK

First came garage, then came grime. First came the ​garage re​vival, now comes the ​grime revival. Or is it a revival? Whatever the reason for the increased profile of grime in the last year or so, the scene's place in the annals of British popular culture is perhaps only now being truly appreciated. The cultural cognoscenti have realized that the movement stretches way beyond the Mercury-approved, ground-floor entry point of "Boy in da Corner", and the heads have learnt to forgive that ​strange​ Ed Sheer​an phase. 

From ​Nove​list and Mumdance's ​stormin​g collabs, to "German Whip", to Rollo Jackson's ​excellent Slimzee documen​tary and the Royal Rumble-esque "​On ​A Level", to ​Stormzy using the phrase ​"wicke​d skengman" on Jools Holland and Noisey programming their own special ​Grime Week, grime is very much back in the popular consciousness. ​The City Of London Police aside, everyone's riding that greezy wave into the future. 

So when Ewen Spencer, a renowned pop culture photographer who's worked with everyone from So Solid to New Order, said he wanted to talk about his new documentary and reader-book (both called Open Mic), as well as share some exclusive photos of some of grime's biggest names in their halcyon days, I jumped at the chance to hear his unique insight into the scene. 

VICE: Hi Ewen. You'd been documenting the garage scene for some time before you started what became Open Mic. How did you first come across grime?
Ewen Spencer: ​​Well, grime wasn't called "grime" when I first I heard about it, it didn't really have a name, which is often the case with any kind of subculture or genre like this. I actually heard about it through Mike Skinner, who I was working with at the time, having already shot the sleeve photos for Original Pirate Material.

By the time of Mike's second album in 2003, I'd finished with the garage project, and was working on one about British teenagers. It was really well received but it was a bit more generic; it was missing something specific, a bit more fresh, and Mike said to me, "I'm working with some quite interesting people at the moment," which turned out to be Tinchy, Kano and a couple of others. He said there was these young guys in East London making these sounds, and I should go see what's going on. I just became quite invested in it from then on, really.

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Pirate Radio, Old Kent Road 2004

What was your first proper interaction with the scene? Did you go along to nights and raves?
​Raves and what have you weren't that accessible at the time; they were quite small and infrequent. They weren't really distinguished as "grime raves" then either, they were just "raves." You'd get a lot of garage being played, and I'd really given up on garage at that time because it'd become a bit lairy and overground.

So I kind of came at it from a different angle, which was through Ratty and Capo who were making these amazing DVDs called Lord of the Mics. They were just a couple of guys going around filming a lot of clashes: pirate radio, meeting various crews around East London. Eventually they agreed to meet me, and I'd just get into the car and we'd go to Jammer's basement, or some pirate radio station and just make pictures while they were shooting the DVDs. 

How did they react to an older, white guy from Newcastle hanging about with a camera?​​
​At first they were reluctant and a bit suspicious. I mean, they're a lot younger than me. They were a lot younger in their outlook, too and it was clear that I was a bit of a nuisance. But I don't really believe in the kind of folk-devil way of looking at things; I don't believe in the fearful stories that you hear. I'd been on the garage scene, I'd been on the northern soul scene, and before that I'd just been a kid in Newcastle doing things that were comparable to what was going on in their world. It wasn't really a massive departure for me, and I don't really subscribe to a massively bourgeois existence in my day-to-day life. It didn't scare me, basically. 

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Jammer's basement, Leystonstone 2003

​ And what about the Lord Of The Mics guys, were they coming from a similar place to you?
​​They were normal kids, very normal kids. They could very much hold their own wherever they went; they were young, black kids from East London who were just using what they had available to them, with no real further education or college course rammed down them, or even the specifics of how to handle a camera. They were literally just pressing record and "go," but that was what was so exciting about it. 

How did you earn your right to be there, as it were?
​Well as soon as the pictures were done I'd print them up, so I could show them. It was like, "This is how I'm working," and the MCs began to see what I was doing and word got around. They'd be like, "Fuck, I look good. Let's get him back," and from then on we had this kind of unspoken agreement. Very soon after that if I called Ratty he'd pick up his phone, but it took a lot of time, being this unlikely co-conspirator, if you will. 

So it was kind of about gaining trust, in some way?
​​Yeah, and I'd go anywhere with them. I had to lie down on the backseats of the car sometimes, because if the police saw a guy like me with two young black lads they'd pull us over. So it was a lot of things like that really; you move slowly, you're careful.

How much aggro was there at the early battles?
​​Of course. They're young, excitable men, so you'll see moments of posturing, bravado and all that kind stuff. I mean, that was part and parcel of the scene really. You'd see it all the time, but it depends on whether or not you wanna let it permeate what you're doing, because a lot of it is just bullshit, really. 

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Choong Youth Centre, Romford 2004

So it never spilled over into anything too nasty?
​​No, because if you've got any sense and you've seen that happen before you know to get out quickly. Usually you can see it coming, so I'd leave. There were a few occasions when people would mention that someone's got a gun, some bullets and I'd be like, "I'm not gonna hang around for very long, then." It wasn't what I was there for. 

A lot of photographers would want the shot of the gun in the dance though. Is that decision to get out partly ethical?
​I don't like guns, and thank god we don't have too many of them in this country, but as soon as you start taking pictures of them everyone gets trapped in that state of "Oh Dearism," as Adam Curtis would say. A lot of people like to labor that negative point, and that's not really part of my vision. I'm not interested in doing that, I'm interested in young people, people making interesting music and style and what have you. 

Talking of style, there's always been a strong theme of fashion and style in your work. What kind of looks were you seeing in the early days? I remember from being a teenager around that time it was all powder blue Air Force Ones, and fitted caps had just started to take off.
​Well, it was comfortable sportswear—"streetwear," if you like. Fresh trainers, Akademiks, Ecko Unltd was absolutely massive. Avirex leather jackets and bombers were all over London, Nike TNs were still knocking about in the early days. Adidas was really huge on the grime scene as well.

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Pirate Radio, Old Kent Road 2004

That look is much less dressy than the garage look, which was all about Versace shirts, Gucci loafers, etc. Why do you think that is?
​It's a much softer silhouette. It's about turning up stoned, MCing, making music but then being on the move and going places. It's a kind of a combination of those two things. There wasn't really a rigid "I'm getting ready to go out" mindset like there was with garage, it was more, "I've been in these clothes most of the day, but now I'm at the rave, sweating, MCing to loads of kids who are leaping around." It was definitely a more relaxed approach.

That's interesting. Were people actually having a good time at these kinds of things, because you look back at Lord of the Mics and Channel U, and everyone's screw-facing pretty much constantly. How much of that was show? Did the camera go off and everyone's laughing, smoking, chirpsing and what have you or were they as aggressive as they seem in the vids?
​Most places I went there were a lot of jokes. In Jammer's basement people would rib each other and have a laugh. Jammer's a very affable, charming sort of man who spends a lot of time taking the piss, so it was a lot of fun. There were one or two places that felt a bit aggy, but on the whole it were a right hoot.

Among the MCs, which ones stood out?
​ Kano was hugely talented, he really stood out. He was young, he had a face for Hollywood and he really could MC; he had a really expansive vocabulary. You could tell he had something about him when he was performing, or on radio, or even just being with him. You could see it from miles away.

There was another guy called Earz who I really liked, but I don't remember much happening for him. He was always around in Jammer's basement, he was really, really good. 

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Jammer's basement, Leystonstone 2005

You worked with Crazy Titch, who's currently doing a life sentence for murder. What was he like?
​He was a real character. Sometimes he could be a bit mean, sometimes he could be absolutely hilarious. I was only around him on a couple of occasions, and he was pretty unpredictable. You see, lots of these guys are very, very creative and that often comes with a big character, quite an unusual and different way of doing things. They're quite brave, really. 

Did you get the impression that Titch was capable of doing what he did?
​Well, I don't know if he did that or not, that still remains a little bit of a question. But, no. I went to school with a lot of people who've since been convicted of doing similar things, and you just don't know what's gone through their head. A lot of people at the time were saying that he'd taken the rap for something, but I really don't know. The sad thing is that somebody died. 

You also photographed Wiley, who's held up not just as one of the most eccentric and difficult characters in grime, but in the whole of British culture really. What was he like to work with?
​Again, I only worked with him once or twice. He was elusive and didn't really like to be photographed too much. He'd be awkward, and at times a little bit obtuse and difficult. But again, he was a huge character, he never felt pretentious but he'd do quite odd and peculiar things. If I was taking a photo he'd try and avoid the frame, and do things like putting his watch up in the middle of the frame. Was he making a comment about time? I'm not sure, really.

How long did you spend shooting the scene, as a whole?
​From 2003 to 2005, so about two years and a little bit after that as well.

Were there any pivotal moments when you started to notice the mainstream creeping in?
​Yeah, of course, people were getting signed to major labels, A&Rs were getting in touch a lot more. People started making proper videos, it became less about Channel U, and more about making something which would be comparable to something coming out of the US. You heard people discussing what videos were going to cost, there was a lot of excitement and anticipation about things moving to a higher level in terms of support and finance.

But they wanted that; these were young guys from working-class situations, they're not going to turn down these tens of thousands of pounds.  

Do you think most MCs and producers planned on making a lot of money out of grime, or was it more like something they couldn't say no to?
​I think it was probably a mix of both. I think most people probably weren't thinking about it as some kind of fiscal end product. I think they were just thinking about creating something.

Initially, the excitement was probably more seductive; the anarchy, the music, the noise, the lifestyle around that scene. It was people having the opportunity to make music, people having more of a sense of association and belonging, giving them some kind of worth. They were communicating with their own people if you like, and I don't think that'd really happened since punk or rave; that's what really enticed people.

But when money comes knocking, a lot of people got enticed, whereas others weren't really that bothered. Often, those who weren't too bothered were persuaded into things when they got managers and what have you. 

Can you see any parallels with what happened to garage?
​Well, garage became mainstream much quicker, because it was always for the dancefloor, it was always being played in clubs. Garage had to go through changes to become something else, but I don't think it survived them very well. What came out of it that was more interesting, I think, was grime. 

Grime's still kind of existing now, it's just gonna keep changing and becoming something new and hopefully getting more exciting as time goes on. My son's 16 now, and he's interested in aspects of grime and grime artists, but you have people from the grime scene in Top Boy now, so it's not just about the music, it's a total lifestyle, and garage never had that. It was always just about the dancefloor. 

How do you think grime will be remembered in a few decades' time?
​Well, hopefully, in the early days as a fun, creative time. But I don't think we should talk about it being "remembered," because it's probably experiencing something of a renaissance at the moment. Hopefully Open Mic has kind of crystalized that early moment from when it went from pirate radio to something a bit more mainstream, but I don't think we can be that retrospective about it yet. It still seems to be forming and becoming something else.

So you'd say it's more like a genre of music that can keep evolving—like rap or rock, as opposed to a short-lived scene?
​Absolutely. If you think about it, the big sounds this year have been "That's Not Me" and Meridian Dan, they've been huge. Grime's still bringing up some pretty exciting sounds and moving forward. 

More widely, do you think there was a kind of sociological shift in the years when garage became grime? It seems to me that garage came of age in a time of optimism, New Labour and Cool Britannia and what have you, whereas grime was birthed in an era of disillusionment, and perhaps is gaining traction again in a time of even greater social ill feeling?
​Yeah, absolutely, that's what happens. People feel a little bit left out, put to one side, and you get civil unrest. People aren't going to be utterly and completely placated by their iPhones and staying indoors watching shit telly, people are always going to want to go out and do something different with their lives. It wakes people up, people think, I don't wanna stay in any more, I wanna write lyrics, I wanna clash. Dizzee talks about it in the film actually, the problem of the youth clubs being closed down recently.

I also think there was a lot of bad press about those communities at the time, a lot of very negative attention, with the death of Damilola Taylor and all sorts of horrible things. That definitely contributed to the feeling that came with grime. 

Do you think that played into the territorial nature of early grime, the repping your ends, shouting out postcodes and what have you? A sense of, "Fuck this, we're from the ghetto and we're proud of it."
​Yeah, I think there was a kind of celebration of being from the 'hood, but the territorial thing has always been in existence in Britain, just look at football. It's just how much you buy into it, really.

Open Mic (Conversations in Grime) is available as part of a limited run of 500 copies to pre-order ​here.

Follow Clive Martin on ​Twitter

Ana Lily Amipour's directorial debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, is a brooding, minimalist vampire flick set in Iran. The film's female vampire stalks the streets in a hijab and rides a skateboard, crossing paths with junkies, prostitutes, and other creatures of the night. The movie feels like a Middle Eastern take on the spaghetti western, with a gloomy, lady Nosferatu filling in for Clint Eastwood. 

The film premiered at Sundance a few weeks ago to glowing praise from the ​New York Times, ​Hollywood Reporter, ​New Yorker, and more. It deserves every accolade thrown at it, and VICE Films is happy to help distribute it worldwide. 

In preparation for the film's theatrical release on November 21, we sat down with Amipour and some of the other people who helped make A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night possible. 

​ Nobody knows what the fuck was going on in that ​interview with Jaden and Willow Smith in T Magazine yesterday. Time travel? Babies breathing? Quantum physics? Vulture called it "Zen gibberish." The Guardian called it "utter nonsense." Lacking something constructive to say, Time magazine instead created a ​poetry generator using phrases from the interview, so you can make haikus that go something like:

​Babies remember /
​The opposite of an apple /
Because living

It was an interview that everybody read yet no one fully understood, kind of like a Thomas Pynchon novel. So I asked a professor of philosophy (who didn't want to have his name on the record for this subject) if he could translate the gobbledygook into plain English and if anything from the interview was rooted in actual philosophy.

VICE: Willow and Jaden talk a lot about time travel in the beginning. Willow says she can make it go "fast or slow, however I please" and Jaden says that "how time moves for you depends on where you are in the universe." What's that about? 
Philosophy Professor: There are two things going on there. Jaden seems to be aware of the famous consequence of relativity theory, which is sometimes encapsulated in the "​twins paradox." It's illustrated by a pair of identical twins on Earth, one of which goes in a rocket ship and travels super fast—approximating the speed of light—and the other of which stays on Earth. The theory of relativity says that if this one goes fast enough and stays away long enough, when he comes back, he will be very young but everyone [he left behind] him, including his other twin, will be very old. So there's a sense in which the passage of time is relative, and this is completely uncontroversial—or, at least, as uncontroversial as a scientific theory can be. So it sounds like he's well informed about this fact about physics there.

And Willow's idea of slowing down and speeding up time?
​That has more to do with the phenomenology of time. Relativity theory doesn't really say anything about how time feels to us; it just makes predictions about the objective passage of time. Both of the kids, in their respective comments, seem to be making familiar observations about how the same intervals of time can seem, to the subject, to pass more or less slowly. Time flies when you're having fun; if you're in a boring class, it seems like a minute lasts an hour. That's all familiar and true enough, but it has to do with our human psychology, not the objective nature of time itself. So you can delineate the subjects—one is the physics of time, the other is the phenomenology of time.

Wow. What about when they're talking about being part of a "holographic reality"?
​The holographic reality hypothesis is just the ​Descartes dream scenario in new garb, i.e. life in a Matrix. That's definitely something philosophers have been ​talking about for a long time.

Later in the interview, Jaden says, "What's your job, what's your career? Nah, I am." Is that a Cartesian thing, too—I think, therefore I am? Or is it an existential thing?
​I see why you'd be tempted to draw either of those parallels, but it sounds to me more like flat-footed social commentary. I mean, at a cocktail party, the first thing you ask somebody is, "What do you do?" That can get tedious, and I think he's just pointing out that human beings get up to a lot of stuff besides what they're paid to do nine to five, and there's something backward about a culture that forces us to define ourselves by our job.

The holographic reality hypothesis is just the Descartes dream scenario in new garb.

Oh. Yeah, that's a good point.
​Yeah, I think it would be a reach just on the basis of that one two-word sentence to try to draw a connection to the existentialist tradition. Though in existentialism, there are two kinds of bad faith: One kind of bad faith is not owning what you've been and what you've done, and the other kind of faith is not owning the fact that you're a free agent who has the power to do things differently in the future. So the second one sounds sort of like what he's saying, but the first one sounds sort of like what he's resisting—namely, being defined by the job that you have, what you spend your life doing. An existentialist might encourage you to own that just as much as you own the stuff that you do beyond the path that you've been pigeonholed into.

What's "Prana energy"?
​Prana energy sounds like Eastern philosophy, which I don't know much about.

Fair enough. What about when Jaden talks about "double consciousness"—where does that come from?
​"​Double consciousness" is from Du Bois. 

Oh, true, but I'm not sure he's referring to that kind of double consciousness. He's says something like, "your mind has a duality to it" and "when you think about an apple, you also think about the opposite of an apple." What does that even mean?
​That's... really weird. It seems like he's going off in a bunch of different directions at once—which you might expect, given that he's a child. But one interesting ​epistemological idea is that you might think that if you're not capable of thinking about the opposite of something, then you're not capable of thinking about the original thing itself. For example, the idea of counterfeit currency wouldn't make any sense in a world where all currency is counterfeit. Or, a better example: I might be dreaming right now, but does it make sense to suppose that all of my experience has been a dream?

Down the rabbit hole we go...
​Yep.

Can we go back to Du Bois's idea of "double consciousness" for a minute. Willow mentions her song "​Whip My Hair." Are you familiar with it?
​Oh, yeah. Sure.

So, she's talking about the song and something she says in reference to it is that it "did so much for young black girls and girls around the world. Telling them that they can be themselves and to not be afraid to be themselves." Does that ring true with Du Bois's ideology?
​Well, when you're "being yourself" in the relevant sense, you're not being caught up on how you're being perceived by other people. You're trying to transcend the double consciousness; you're not trying to see yourself through the lens of the third person, be that white colonialist or whomever. You're just trying to see yourself through the perspective of the individual that you are. So yeah, I guess there's some sort of connection there. But I'm no expert on Du Bois.

All in all, you don't think Willow and Jaden are totally full of shit?
​No, sound like they're pretty well educated, if a little New Age-y.

Follow Arielle Pardes on ​Twitter.

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Girl very obviously wearing a fat suit in the 'Fat Girl Tinder Date' video

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Just as the dreaded fear of waiting for a train and unwittingly appearing in a T-Mobile flashmob ad has started to subside, there's a new incriminating viral video trend in town. Only this one's bit less jazz hands and more "Why does it feel like someone replaced my heart with a human turd while I was asleep?" When it comes to pointing out the terminal ills of society, YouTubers are currently busy proving they aren't afraid to get serious—especially if there's a healthy wedge of ad cash in it for them once their clumsy morality virals have been unfurled.

Tackling misogyny is a deservedly hot topic right now. Following the glaring media attention and 36 million-plus views clocked up by the recent  ​10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman YouTube video, one thing is clear: The collective outrage of the internet has sent folk clamoring to recreate the same video all over again.

One such guy is Stephen Zhang, creator of the video "Drunk Girl In Public," in which three men attempt to take home a girl who is pretending to be wasted in what appears to be a hidden camera experiment. Zhang was supposedly inspired by the "10 Hours" video, and it's easy to see why: If there's one thing people hate more than sidewalk sexists, it's the threat of rape. Most of the internet, understandably, does not like rapists.
​

Of course, the video was quickly exposed as complete bullshit. As it turned out this week, the poor buggers featuring in the video had been ​conned into roles as enthusiastic would-be rapists by Zhang and his co-pilot Seth Leach. They were pretty fucking furious. Yet, despite the fact that the whole thing played out like a weird GCSE drama improvisation, it was watched over 7 million times. Basking in his internet success, Leach slung his stooges a cheeky message on Facebook telling them to "just go with it dude," ​adding, "we will take care of you." By "it," he seemingly means the whole "being recognized forever as a wannabe rapist" thing.

Taking another tack in a bid to turn over new patriarchal stones and scatter men like the sexist little woodlice that they are is a video sensitively named: "Fat Girl Tinder Date." In a sort of Shallow Hal meets Beadle's About mashup, a fit, saccharine girl and her cheesy directors make a Tinder profile, sets up a bunch of dates and then—TWIST ALERT!—she turns up in a fat suit.
​ 

The girl in the fat suit then goads these men into looking at her chubby face by asking them for compliments and posing leading questions like, "Appearances don't matter though, do they?" Most of the guys make their excuses and piss off either a) because they don't want to ask this weird woman why she's clearly wearing a fat suit or b) because they're (arguably, quite reasonably) annoyed she's grossly misled them about her appearance.

At the end, the beautifully thin woman reveals she's not actually a hideous, fat mess and (ohjesusthankgod) informs the only guy who's stayed that she's an undercover babe in a genuinely breathtaking display of smuggery. Omg Guyz r such shallow dicks, aren't they?

Take another example of how these "social experiment" videos have shit up the internet recently—last week's Swedish domestic violence video, which racked up 3.7 million views. The gang of merry men responsible for this video are pranksters called STLHM Panda, whose usual kooky schtick, ​they say, is "doing social experiments, joking with people and documenting the society we live in." 
​

Last week STLHM Panda went in search of new clicks, moving away from their usual ​sunbathing close to people lols and Halloween costume ​japes. In the tape, set to evocatively troubling piano music, an actor screams at and slaps his girlfriend in a lift. The fact that only one woman out of 53 witnesses intervenes in the conflict is pretty bothersome.

Much of the public enthusiasm for these experiments seems to be hinged on a sort of life-affirming moral disgust, which internet psychologist Graham Jones says "is a means of an individual checking that they are 'OK' and that they would or would not behave the same way." Psychologists believe that we receive some kind of vicarious edification from our own aghast reactions to these videos, and our speculations about how we would have totally stepped in had we been there IRL rather than just registering our own disgust while eating pizza hungover in bed.

Pizza itself was the chosen prop for the producers of yet another dubious "experiment" carried out with the intention of exposing something shitty about humanity and then lapping up the hits. Raking in 23 million views for their " Asking Strangers for Food" video, the guys at OCKTV—two sincere looking blokes with studded belt buckles—go round rudely asking strangers eating pizza if they can have some. They then give a whole pizza to a homeless guy and, when they ask him for a slice, he gives them one back. "This video will change the way you think!" promises the blurb. Truly it is a scene of visceral humanity only improved by the heavily branded self-promotional T-shirts worn by the OCKTV at all times.

Clinical Psychologist Tom Baker admits this grim Punk'd sequel "is a bit troubling." He says that, in order to find our place in society, "We tend to seek out other people to compare ourselves with—these 'reference groups' help us decide how to feel and behave." Basking in the moral failure of others "is often moderated in real life, as we know it's wrong to be pleased about other people's difficulties, but perhaps viewing on YouTube releases us from such inhibitions."

This relatively new wave of "morality virals" are united as a standalone genre of film-making by their cynical foregone conclusions. If there's something undeniably compulsive about the moral disgust and ensuing superiority that the videos' makers trade upon, then it's the ease with which it is possible to manipulate the buttons of our soul that is arguably the most depressing element in all this. Even if you're happy to be availed to all the 100 percent authentic arseholes out there, you can't say there isn't something chilling about the thought of a pair of nerds pulling together a cast of fake rapists in pursuit of cold hard YouTube revenue.

I never thought I'd say this, but if flashmobs had to die to make way for this, then for God's sake bring them back. Even if it means personally learning "All You Need Is Love" on the trumpet, I am willing to take one for the team. Because if flash mobs exist to remind us, in their own nauseating, corporate-sponsored way, that lots of people are united in their desire to listen to gospel choirs, then these grim social experiments are the anti-flashmob: here to tell us that people can also be united in their tendency to behave like awful, self-seeking dicks.

Follow Lucy Hancock on ​Twitter.

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(£7.62) "I think this sums up the entire series of photos in one," says Mike. "A representation of reality—of a community—in South Wales."

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

You meet all sorts of people driving a taxi. It's the nature of the job. If you don't meet lots of people, it's a pretty good sign that you're doing something wrong and should probably reconsider the choices you've made.

Mike Harvey is a man from South Wales who started driving a taxi to fund his trips around the world. A few months ferrying lots of people in and out of Swansea; a couple of months in Brazil. Half a year meeting lots more people on the night shift; three months touring Egypt, or Nepal, or Kathmandu.

In 2010, Mike started to document some of his taxi journeys, building a rapport with passengers, taking their photo at the final destination and waiving the fee as a thank you. He stopped taxi driving a year or so ago, but has  ​compiled his favorite p​ortraits from the project, all of which are named after the price of the journey, and unique, intimate insights into the social makeup of South Wales. He is currently exhibiting them at the Monkey Cafe & Bar in Swansea.

I met with Mike yesterday for a chat.

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(£4.00)

VICE: Hi, Mike. Why did you start taking photos of your passengers?
​ Mike Harvey: I just found the job so fascinating. I never knew who was going to get into my taxi next—I'd learn so much from the passengers because there were so many predicaments I was put in. So I got a DSLR and started taking photos. I wanted the pictures to represent the journeys we'd shared, because the taxi was occupied by so many people throughout that period.

Were most people happy to have their photo taken?
​ Well, I documented roughly 130 journeys altogether, and I'd say only nine people said no. I'd always do it at the end of the journey, so we'd have built a rapport by then. I see it as one of the best educational experiences of my life, really, because whether it was giving someone CPR by the side of the road, a pregnant woman running away from my taxi, not paying, barefooted...

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(£2.87) "This guy used to be a bit of a regular customer, but he's passed away since I took this photo, so there's some poignancy there for me."

What happened there?
​ I was driving out of Swansea at about 3AM, and this girl who was full-term pregnant—you know, ready to go—was sat at the side of the road, barefoot, flagging me down. So she got in and... it's a bit of an impromptu counselling service sometimes, driving a taxi. I said that maybe getting hammered when you're pregnant isn't such a good idea, but, you know, we had a nice chat. Then, when I dropped her off, she legged it. I'd usually chase after someone, but she was fully pregnant, you know? She was the one that got away, but I let her get away.

People would also offer me drugs—ketamine. I mean, I don't do drugs anyway, but who does ketamine when they're driving?

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(£3.82) "I know these kids' mum, and she said I could take their photo because I was keen to represent every part of the community—old people, young people and everyone in between."

People who want to cause pile-ups? Was that instead of money, or just to party?
​ Just as an aside. You know, "Do you mind us doing coke in the back, drive?" People would proposition threesomes, foursomes... it was a constant source of entertainment. Also, because some people were inebriated, they'd divulge a lot of their life to you, telling you about affairs they were having, problems in their life, that they were considering suicide. So you'd have to try and give them as best of a reflective time as possible in the taxi so they didn't reach the wrong conclusions about stuff.

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(£3.06)

How did that affect you? I'd imagine you have some idea of what you're getting into when you start driving a taxi, but not that people will be sitting in your back seat saying, "I want to commit suicide."
​ I don't think I did know what I was getting into, to be honest. I remember my first taxi journey being a very nervous one, because I was always very concerned about crashing and the passenger getting injured. I always felt very responsible, and I think that responsibility lent itself to situations where people would start to divulge stuff like that. I wasn't fazed by it—I just wanted to help people in whichever way I could. The funny thing is, most of these people I've never seen again—some of the people I've spoken to and hopefully helped, I don't know where they are now.

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(£5.72)

Are there any journeys that stand out to you as particularly meaningful?
​ There was one when I found somebody who'd just been knocked over. I gave them CPR, but they didn't make it. That was an unusual experience—quite harrowing, really. On the other side of things, the company I worked at used to have a contract with the local brothel, so it was always fascinating giving the working girls their lifts home. I got to know some of them quite well, so they'd be like, "Busy night tonight, Mike?" And I never knew whether I could ask the same question back.

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(£4.66) "This lady is a relative of my stepmother. I love her to bits. She's one of the few people in the project I actually know."

Did you learn anything about your hometown that you didn't know before?
​ I could probably pinpoint specific things if I thought about it more, but I think, overall, it just gave me a wider appreciation of the way people live—the things they think about, the interests they have, the worries they have. The conclusion I came to is that everybody is essentially the same—they all have their worries and hang-ups, no matter who they are.

Do you think driving a taxi made you more observant? Able to pick up on personalities quicker than you had before?
​ Yeah—a mixture of taxi driving and then going somewhere like Delhi or Kathmandu, and then thinking back to Swansea. I think it definitely made me look at people a lot more closely, but then I've always been an observer of people anyway. I think that's what drew me to this project, and why I love taxi driving so much.

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(£42.94) "I like the pose in this one—it's like they're displaying themselves."

Do you think you learned any wider lessons about humanity?
​ Not to put a negative spin on it, but there are people who are nice out there, and also people who aren't so nice.

Did you have much trouble?
Hardly ever. Although, there was one guy in the back of my cab having a heated argument with a girl—I assumed it was his girlfriend—and he started headbutting her. I was like, "Guys, this has to stop, or I'm going to have to drive to the police station."

The guy then turned his attention to me, trying to grab me round the neck and going, "Stop the car, stop the car." So we stopped, then he got out and was preparing to drag me out, so I just drove off. The girl was in the back, crying her eyes out. I said, "Are you OK for me to just drive and drop you home?" And she was like, "Yes, please don't stop."

That was a very rare occasion, though, to be fair. 

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(£5.15) "These two are lovely. They wear the same clothes and have their own dialect. I've seen them around—in the queue for Tesco and stuff—but I don't think they remember me."

Finally, am I right in thinking that you weren't going to show these? That it was just going to be a personal project?
​ Yeah. They were all sitting on a hard drive for years, and it was my partner Tim who said, "You should really let people see them." I wouldn't mind extending the project now. I'd love to do it in other locations, if I could manage to find a cab driver who'd allow me to drive around with them and take photos of the passengers, just to show other cultures in a similar space.

Yeah, the space plays a big part in the photos—it's very intimate.
​ It's very close for a stranger, yeah. I used to just say, "Relax, be yourselves – you don't have to smile or anything." It sounds really cheesy and cliched, but I did see some of the real vulnerability in people's eyes, or was able to get a sense of their nature from their eyes and their expressions. And I love that.

Another thing about the space is what you can see outside the window—the socioeconomic side of it. Because the photos were always taken at the end of the journey, so more often than not they would capture where someone was from. I like that side of it, too.

And me. Thanks very much, Mike.

See more from Mike's "Taxi" project at ​his website, and get your hands on prints of the photos ​here.

The "Taxi" exhibition is currently running at the Monkey Cafe & Bar, 13 Castle Street, Swansea.

Follow Jamie Clifton on ​Twitter

[body_image width='1065' height='799' path='images/content-images/2014/11/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/19/' filename='put-your-hands-in-the-motherfucking-air-for-world-toilet-day-body-image-1416396893.jpg' id='4994']Surprisingly hard to find a photo of a toilet without piss in it. Photo via ​d​bf

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

Have you ever wondered how much one of Beyoncé's turds would cost? Like, on eBay, if eBay loosened up its frankly archaic turd-selling policies. I can tell you: $449. Now let's play a game of higher-or-lower: Is Beyoncé's shit worth more or less than one that came out of Ringo Starr's body? The answer is: less. A shit that came out of Ringo Starr's body would apparently be worth $826 on the open market.

Yeah, you knew there was a reason why you woke up this morning with a smile on your face: It's World Toilet Day, motherfuckers. Which means that there are a lot of weird press releases knocking about where some advertising agency has given an intern a calculator and a list of net worths and made them price​ some shits.

But it's also, like, an actual day. Not of celebration, per se, but of awareness, at least. Of respect. You don't think about the humble toilet much, do you, when you're retching the bad end of a tandoori into it, or filling it with piss? But it does an important job, and—as is the whole point of World Toilet Day—a lot of people don't have access to them.

Of the seven billion odd people on earth, 2.5 bil​lion don't have access to improved sanitation (i.e., a device like a toilet that separates them from their shit), and 1 billion people still defecate in the open. That weird dude at uni who moved out halfway through the year and left behind a wardrobe full of stagnant piss bottles? That maniac literally had it better than large swathes of the third world.

But sometimes we, uh. How to put this? We use toilets a little bit wrong. Like: " carefully ​disconnecting the plumbing in the back of a chain pub urinal and then putting your head and shoulders in it and getting wildly pissed on by unwitting strangers" wrong. Or using public toilets to find romance. Or by having sex standing up in a haunted toilet while ghosts watch ​on, ethereally aroused. Basically: Toilets are proof that no matter what the inanimate object, no matter how much it smells literally of piss and crap, someone will find a way to have sex on, near, or with it.

Either way: When you're having a tinkle later, turn round and look your toilet deep in the sort of eye bit and whisper, "thank you." Thank you, toilets. Thanks.

Follow Joel Golby on ​Twitter

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Artwork by  ​Nick Scott 

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

​ I'd like to say I always tell the truth but that would be a lie. 

In fact, one of my first jobs was to lie. About six years ago, while working on the food magazine at a national newspaper, my job was to ring up restaurants pretending to be a celebrity agent with ridiculous requests. I remember the first time I did it. I found myself a beanbag in a quiet corner of the office and, cradling my Nokia 1100 in one sweaty palm, told the manager of Wagamama in Soho that I had a couple of Daleks in town for the weekend to do some promo, and I wanted to check the branch had sufficient wheelchair access. 

I sat and waited, shifting my position nervously, the beans crackling around my arse. Would this sweet man really believe me? What's more, would he buy that one of the party was vegetarian? Well, with enough conviction, if you really "go method," turns out you can make pretty much anything sound legit. The manager promptly went outside, checked the lift and came back to the phone to confirm that it would indeed transport a metric tonne of steel so "that would be fine." He then listed the tofu options from the menu.

There are no words to describe the relief of realising that you are a highly efficient alchemist of bullshit. Consequently, I spent the next six months terrorising the mid-level catering industry in order to pay my rent. 

From asking the manager of Bodeans' in Soho for a booth wide enough to accommodate Grace Coddington's hair, to explaining with adequate candor to the manager of Gaucho that a vegan activist called George Clooney would like a table for two but wouldn't sit within 100m of red meat, as each month passed, the requests grew more outlandish. But I never failed to peddle my crap. I was an excellent liar.

After six months they canned the column and guess what? I was relieved. Lying is hard work. I had grown sickened; sickened by the managers' unswerving guilelessness, but ultimately by my own relentless creativity. After all, being a good liar is nothing to be proud of.

So why do we do it? Often for no money, day in and out, to the point of habit, and to the ones we love even when it's not necessary? 

At risk of sounding like a twat, Wittgenstein nailed this latter point, observing the habituality of lying—how often we tell a fib when the truth would have sufficed. My job notwithstanding, we do it in part because we want to narrow the gap between the fantasy of ourselves—punctual, high-achieving, faithful, whatever—and the reality. 

In retrospect, I justified lying for money by reminding myself that the man at the end of the line was equally complicit. This might sound odd—like it's their fault—but it's actually the crux of a TED talk argument by Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting. As she explains: "We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history."

That's not to say we all care to admit it. It is thought that 91 percent of us regularly embroider events with twaddle, but I bet you wouldn't brand yourself a liar.

Take the author, journalist and documentary maker, Jon Ronson. "I'm shit at lying," he tells me. He should know. He's built a career by effectively detecting when others spout crap. His inability to lie is not entirely his choice, though. "My entire nature is a mix of anxiety, guilt and remorse, so lying is counterproductive."

"Everyone I've met is a spectacular liar," he explains, "and one of the items I've written about at length is pathological lying. Proper, high scoring people, that, if you catch them lying, don't feel bad. They just don't care. If you interview a psychopath, they just switch like that—there is an absence of emotion."

The example that springs to Ronson's mind is an interview he conducted for  ​The Psychopath Test with a Haitian death squad leader called Emmanuel Constant. Constant—aka Toto—was the co-leader of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, also known as Fraph, who routinely hectored supporters of the Haitian exiled president. His crimes were more vast and varied than my word count will allow but suffice to say, he was a cock. 

"But all he wanted to do was protest his innocence despite the atrocities he had definitely committed," says Ronson. "It was frustrating because it hindered the process [of interviewing]. He was pretending to cry. It was weird, like hammy acting." Ronson suggests that people always assume liars are Machiavellian people who lie to be liked. But, once confronted, Constant was unrepentant. He didn't give a shit.

It makes for an unusual dynamic when you know the person is lying. But what about the day-to-day fibs so many of us tell? Well, truth be told (or not), explains Meyer, it's a co-operative act, and one whose true power only emerges when someone agrees to believe the lie. 

Some of the most famous people we know lie extensively. We are fascinated with liars. Some people are famous because of lying and we just swallow it. For example, some have suggested that the extensive use of personal pronouns in her court statement ​indicate she was embellishing the truth.

Language is one of the most effective lie-detectors we have. But we suck it all up. We know lies happen every day and we just accept it. From PRs embellishing the truth to sell something (or doing that annoying "Re." thing in the email subject line—mate, we haven't ever had a conversation about your natty Christmas stocking fillers), to politicians bullshitting their way into power, we've come to expect and accept it. Without lies, society as we know it wouldn't make sense. A good, decade-old New Yorker cartoon about a politician talking to press surmises it neatly: "​I'm not s​pinning—I'm contextualizing."

Politicians are a good entry level into the world of lying. Because, although it's thought most politicians enter the game with ideals, a sense of truth and justice, before long they are presented with the dilemma of being truthful or winning, and subsequently lie. What's more, we have come to expect endemic deceit, despite being understandably upset when people do lie.

Ralph Keyes, author of The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, thinks lying has reached pandemic-levels, and suggests we are living in a "post-truth society," one in which "casual dishonesty" has morphed into the quotidian. He thinks it's a modern issue: "Trends [range] from the postmodern disdain for 'truth' to therapeutic non-judgment that encourages deception... and as the volume of strangers and acquaintances in our lives rises, so do opportunities to improve on the truth," he says.

Of course, the flip side of living in a post-truth society is that, with social media, lying has a very different status now. It's harder to lie and easier to get caught. This is one of the key issues raised in the much-hyped podcast Serial. This podcast follows a 15-year-old American murder case, in which a 17-year-old student, Hae Min Lee, was strangled to death. Lee's ex, Adnan Syed, 17, who broke up with her a month before her death, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison, where he has been ever since. Journalist Sarah Koenig thinks he was wrongly convicted and has set out to prove his innocence, but since events took place in 1999, i.e. pre-Facebook, this proves doubly hard. 

Can you remember what you did on a Friday night six weeks ago—let along 15 years—without the crutch of social media or even Smartphone technology? And if not, what would you do if pushed? 

Do you guess? Or, worse, lie? The latter is probably (possibly—I haven't finished the podcast yet) what happened.  According to psychologist Dr. Bella DePaulo, chances are she won't find out. Why? Because humans are pretty rubbish at detecting lies. "People are right about 54 percent of the time at knowing whether someone is lying or telling the truth," ​she told New York magazine. "That's when, by chance (just by guessing), they would be right 50 percent of the time." Furthermore, people who can readily detect lies tend to be less trustworthy.

There are, of course, moments when lying is OK. Not good, necessarily, but there are times when we should be a little less hasty with judgment. We generally call these "white lies" and they work when deployed with an honest, utilitarian intention—i.e. "the greater good." For example, I lie to my mum about what time my train gets in because she's always late. Call me a dick if you want, but it really pisses me off, so, in my eyes, this vanilla act prevents a row. TARS, the robot in Interstellar, operates at 90 percent honesty, which the programmer believes is the optimum amount.

"I'm shit at lying. My entire nature is a mix of anxiety, guilt and remorse, so lying is counterproductive" –Jon Ronson

If you're struggling to take in the truth behind the world of bullshit in which we live, Meyer gives us some relaxing facts about lying in her TED talk. You will lie to your spouse during one in ten conversations, apparently, and, if you're not married, you're likely to lie more. ​Men lie more than women (Ronson thinks men are more afraid of the consequences of telling the truth and being reprimanded), while women, ever benevolent, tend to lie to protect others. Research suggests we are ​more likely to lie or cheat in the afternoon and evening, when our brains are tired.

Of course, I've been lied to in some horrific ways both by a parent and a partner. But, as a writer who sometimes writes about herself, I am fortunate enough to be able to offset the damage by writing about it, mining the acts of others in return for—yep—money.

Not everyone is this fortunate. Psychotherapy has taught us that liars have a comparatively easier run. The less sociopathic ones may experience self-loathing at having lied, but, having realized this, they at least have the power to turn shit around for themselves, rebuild their narrative. Bully for them. For the victim of the lie, it's a very different story. 

Lying is damaging, devilish and expensive. In fact, one of the functions of therapy is to reconstruct a patient's life narrative after they've been lied to. Lies undermine our memory, making us question every truth on which our life has been built. The victim of the lies—from a partner hiding debt to having an affair— ​has an incomparably worse experience than the liar. What's more, says a therapist friend, "they tend to blame themselves for what went wrong."

If you've been lied to, you'll know that being lied to sucks. "I had a guy lie to me in a work situation," says Ronson. "It was hurtful. He made false promises. I didn't call him out and it got worse. I began to feel victimized."

That said, the flip side is tricky. For Ronson's next book (out next year), he took a course on radical honesty. "You tell people the absolute truth. Radical honesty was weird. Replacing lying with something quite aggressive. It causes trouble."

So what's the answer? Confront the liar and risk revealing your fiancée to be a sociopath? Or buy their lies? Or, simply accept that this is where we are. Liars in a lying world, lying through our teeth. I'd like to say the former of the three but I'd probably be lying.

Follow Morwenna Ferrier on ​Twitter

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​Some guy screaming. Photo by Nina Aldin Thune​

This post originally appeared in VICE Sweden

Don't you just love stumbling upon things that apparently are common in your native country even though you've never experienced them yourself?
​
​That happened to me last year, when the Daily Mail ​broke a​ story about it being legal to publicly masturbate in my home country of Sweden (​it's no​t true), and yesterday it happened again as the ​Flogsta ​scream suddenly went ​vir​al.

The Flogsta scream is a tradition where students living near universities open their windows and shout at around 10 PM or 11 PM, depending on where they live. It got international attention over the weekend, however, when ​MTV posted a year-old video in which a student opens the window in his student flat at Lappskärrsberget in Stockholm, screams out into the night, and in return hears screams from all over the place as if he had just summoned something occult. The headline on the post says, "​if someone screams out their window in Sweden, Sweden screams right back."

No, the entire country won't scream back. But students living in ​Sernanders väg in Uppsala will at around 10 PM every day, as will the kids in  ​La​ppkärrsberget, but only on ​Tuesdays ​at 1​0 PM and students in Lund at 11 PM. 

​And it's not like "no one really knows why it happens" as the Huffington Post  ​claimed in a post about the scream last year that noted it might have started as a ritual to remember a student who committed suicide in the 70s. 

A couple years ago archivist Fredrik Tersmeden at Lund University ​told the Sydsvenska newspaper that the most common explanation to the screams comes from a bunch of students at the Delphi campus in Lund. Apparently they saw a documentary about primal screams and decided to express the agony they felt around their exams through shouting. Tersmeden also says that the Flogsta scream was first known as the "Delphi scream" before it spread from Lund to other university cities, where the name changed depending on the area.

In the  Uppsala and Lappkärrsberget neighborhoods of Stockholm, students would scream out their pain and agony in the 1970s and 1980s. The tradition had mostly died out there by 2006, when a couple of kids hosting the show Lantz on a student radio station ​brought it back in an attempt to break a world record.

These days,  ​universities r​emind their students of where and when they should scream, ​film​s have been made about these primal yells, and local newspapers generally have a few articles about them every year around the time schools kick off.

But foreigners reading these stories should note that misleading headlines aside, all of Sweden doesn't get together and scream: It's just a weird  student thing—just like ​putting drinks on your head, singing weird songs, wearing ​weird hats, or having weird sex with your classmates.

Follow Caisa Ederyd on ​Twitter

[body_image width='703' height='392' path='images/content-images/2014/11/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/19/' filename='these-disturbing-videos-from-vancouver-underline-a-deeper-problem-of-homeless-abuse-578-body-image-1416419690.jpg' id='5146']​Screencap​ ​via YouTube.

​​Last week, a disturbing video in which a homeless man lights his hair on fire at the behest of some bros offering him a cigarette understandably outraged people a​cross the country.

While Const. Brian Montague told th​e Province that the video doesn't show anyone forcing the man to light his hair on fire, but given the obvious edit points in the video, it's impossible to corroborate that claim.

As disturbing as it is, this is unfortunately not the first video to show Vancouverites abusing their less-fortunate peers. A similar video surf​aced in February showing a man offering money to a panhandler under the condition of being able to attack him. In the video, the man is shown yelling at the panhandler, asking if he "wants the fucking money" before kicking him, hard, in the groin. Another man steps forward for the same treatment but backs off when the assailant prepares to kick him. His retreat is unsuccessful, and he not only gets two shots to the crotch but is then chased down the street, with the kicker demanding his money back.

When asked if these sorts of incidents were common, Vancouver homeless outreach and support group Raincity H​ousting communications director Bill Briscall told VICE that these two videos are the only such incidents he's aware of, writing that "ignoring homeless folks or crossing the street to avoid panhandling is common, but not these kinds of incidents."

But before we break out the champagne to celebrate Vancouver's seemingly limited thirst for humiliating the less fortunate, The Tye​e has some sobering evidence that highlight the dangers of being homeless. The site mentions a report, cited in a University of Ottawa study, which found that 78 percent of homeless people in Canada said they had been victims of crimes, though only 21 percent reported the crimes. In a society where sleeping outdoors is often illegal and homeless people are, according to Pivot Leg​al Society, "more likely to be charged with minor property offences, drug offences, and violations of bylaws compared to those with a fixed address," it's hardly surprising that homeless people don't feel comfortable going to police, or reporting unfortunate encounters.

As crimes against homeless people are underreported, (a University of Ottawa study found that while 78 percent of homeless people had been victims of a crime, only 21 percent reported it to the police) there's no way of knowing how many homeless people suffer attacks like the ones on those videos, or worse. What we do know is that US studies suggest violent attacks on the homeless have been in​creasing.

"Bum hunt​ing," the disturbing term for attacking homeless people, has led to homeless people being beaten and sometimes killed across Canada. The CBC documented several high-profile cases in the last few years: Harley Lawrence was beaten to death in Berwick, NS; a man was "badly beaten" in Burnaby, BC in 2009; and in 2004, two 19-year-old men beat and urinated on Kelly Littlelight, a homeless man in Calgary. In 2012, at least six ​men were attacked in Vancouver's Stanley Park.

But beyond drunk bros paying to kick other less-fortunate men in the crotch, the mistreatment of homeless happens at the institutional level as well. In an apparent effort to force the dispersal of an unofficial homeless campsite, the city of Abbotsford, BC consistently sent out a dump truck to confiscate any possessions the people living there couldn't carry. On the final day, they instead dumped chicken manure on the site. They later apolo​gised.

The fact that these two videos came out of Vancouver may not be surprising. Vancouver, like most large cities, is home to starkly contrasting demographics. Some of the country's richest and poorest people flock to the city, enjoying its beauty and—vitally important for people with no permanent home—temperate weather. But the coastal city is host to even more extreme highs and lows than others in Canada.

The wealthiest 10 per​cent of British Columbia residents control more than half the province's wealth, while the poorest half control just three percent. Additionally, the median net worth for BC families is the highest in the country at $344,000; the national average is $244,000.

Yet living among the wealthy in the Metro Vancouver region are nearl​y 3,000 homeless people (per Vancouver's 2014 Homeless Count), who are inherently more visible than others by dint of, you know, not having a home to go to. Adjusted for population difference, Vancouver has more homeless people than Toronto, which had just over 5,200 homeles​s people in 2013.
​
​Briscall wrote that "the distribution of wealth in any society can exacerbate homelessness," but added that "any perceived difference... can lead to the mistreatment of others." Many homeless people are also part of other marginalized groups—people of colour, queer people, those with mental illnesses or physical disabilities—that can increase their stigmatization.​

​Videos of people abusing homeless people may be relatively rare, but it's clear that the abuse itself is not. While the end of poverty and homelessness remain elusive goals, we need to work towards a society in which fellow humans, no matter how vulnerable or exposed, are still seen as humans with the dignity and respect that entails. 

​
​​@tyelland

[body_image width='900' height='675' path='images/content-images/2014/11/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/19/' filename='why-werent-sexual-assault-charges-laid-in-the-case-of-name-redacted-903-body-image-1416429218.jpg' id='5192']Protesters outside last week's trial. Photo by Hilary Beaumont.

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​​​​​The case surrounding the alleged rape, bullying, and suicide of a Nova Scotia girl, whose name we all know, is slowly coming to a convoluted conclusion.

Back in November 2011, the girl, then 15, was allegedly gang-raped. A picture was taken, in which a boy grins while penetrating her from behind. He is giving the thumbs up. Her head is hanging out of a window, and she's vomiting. The photo circulated around her school. She was bullied so badly that she attempted suicide in April 2013, and died shortly after. She was just 17.

A 20-year-old man pleaded guilty to child pornography charges last week, as he was the one who took the infamous photo. That man ​was able to walk free and given a conditional discharge, provided that he write an apology letter to the girl's family, and that he takes a sexual harassment course. But that verdict didn't mark the end of the legal proceedings surrounding this tragedy—a teenager is due to appear in a Halifax youth court Monday for a four-day trial.

This new defendant is the boy in the photograph. He also faces child pornography charges. Two counts, to be specific, for distributing child pornography.

For now, none of those involved can be na​med. In a farcical attempt at ​anonymity, the court decided to "protect" the girl after she died by enforcing a publication ban even though her story had been widely publicized in a variety of Canadian media outlets (including this one). Her attackers are protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

The question just begging to be asked here is: Why isn't anyone facing sexual assault charges?

I got in touch with the girl's father to hopefully clear some of this up. Since his daughter's death, he's become a passionate activist working to educate people on sexual assault and violence against women.

"It was rape," he says. "There's no other way to describe what's going on in the picture. [She is] throwing up out a window... she's throwing up, how is she capable of giving consent?"

He speculated that the lenient charges were due to the two being tried in youth court. But it's next to impossible to get answers. The investigation has since been handed to Murray Segal, the former chief prosecutor of Ontario, who is currently conducting a thorough review of the Nova Scotian investigation. Both the police and the province's public prosecution service will be examined. Segal will look at the length of time taken to investigate the case, as well as parameters for investigating child porn, sexual assault allegations, along with cyber sexual assault and bullying. The only hope for more serious charges pertaining to the alleged sexual assault is riding on that review.

Segal told me he can't comment, as the case is before the courts. But in the review, the father sees a glimmer of hope. He says Lena Diab, Nova Scotia's minister of justice, has indicated that once the review is complete, the case could be reopened if Segal believes sexual assault charges should have been laid. "That's kind of what we're waiting for—his review. It's a review of the first police investigation to see how they could have all of this evidence and still fuck this up. It's our last hope to get answers to a lot of questions that we have," he told me.

I spent two days trying to find someone who could tell me whether the father's hopes might come to fruition, or provide context as to why no one was charged with sexual assault in the first place. But those who I reached wouldn't comment, or couldn't as the matter was still before the courts

I eventually was able to speak with Chris Hansen, the director of communications for the Nova Scotia Public Prosecution Service. She told me police were looking at possible child porn charges along with the potential for sexual assault charges during the first investigation, and they came to the service for advice.

"They came and said, 'What do you think?' We said there's no realistic prospect of conviction... There has to be sufficient evidence for realistic prospect of conviction. And there was not.

"Our test for prosecution is two questions. One, is there a realistic prospect based on the evidence? And if yes—is it in the public interest to proceed? In this case, there was no realistic prospect."

So, according to Hansen, there are zero grounds for sexual assault charges. This, presumably, has a lot to do with the photo in question. If the girl's head is hanging out of the window as all accounts suggest, it would presumably be difficult to verifiably identify her. And, even worse, it's hard to prove that the encounter was not consensual simply based on that photograph.

But the girl's family alleges that the person who took the picture, who just walked free on child porn charges, also sexually assaulted their daughter. Despite that, he is being directed to take a course on sexual harassment.

To the girl's father, his punishment doesn't line up: "That sexual harassment course? He didn't sexually harass her. He raped her. It's not like he made rude comments. He actually sexually assaulted her."

The prospect of an apology is not especially appealing, either: "He's just going to apologize for taking a picture, right? We know he did a hell of a lot more than that."

The father hopes the police will change their approach to these cases in the future. His family was told, when his daughter was still alive, the photo was not a police matter, but rather a "community matter." The school board, also, was unable to act. He insists that kind of blasé attitude is dangerous.

"How could you conclude this and say it's not a [police] matter when it was child porn? I don't think that person should be able to make that [kind of decision anymore]," the father told me. "They investigated for a year and a half, and they didn't talk to any of the four of them. What the fuck is that, right? The only person who was investigated in this case was [my daughter]."

Many are hoping that the current outcry surrounding the father's daughter, Jian Ghomeshi's alleged assaults, and other vicious crimes against women will halt the practice of discrediting survivors. And while the justice system is not, by any means, solely responsible for our culture that passively condones sexual assault, it would be a good place to start when it comes to correcting it. 
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@sarrat​ch

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

"This was never my intention... I'm extremely sorry for everything that happened."

So formed the crux of the on-screen apology from newly-exiled Canadian pick-up "artist" Julien Blanc yesterday. He shifted in his chair in his suit, his shirt unbuttoned, profusely swallowing, trying to keep his darting eyes on the anchor, Chris Cuomo. 

"Unfortunately a lot of it got taken out of context."

Right-o.

"I don't hear you owning it," said Cuomo. Pretty much ​no one else thought Blanc was owning it, either—not least ​those who have campaigned against him, and clearly not the UK Home Office ​​who today have denied Blanc the visa​ he needs to enter the country. To an extent, Blanc might have yielded. He might have admitted that yes, grabbing the necks of strange women and holding up T-shirts emblazoned with the truly, staggeringly hilarious phrase: "Diss Fatties, Bang Hotties" was "a horrible attempt at humor." But anyone with even the lowest-wattage bullshit detector will not have been convinced by his show of remorse.

The opportunity for public apology is a great way of owning your behavior and actions, of proving that you're at least attempting to address any conflict and hurt you may have caused. Good examples are  ​David Letterman and ​Hugh Grant . A bad example is ​Alec Baldwin. But it's an arena that has its pitfalls. Get the apology wrong, deviate from the original objective—which is, usually, to start with hands open, saying you're sorry for doing wrong, not making excuses, suggesting that other people are at fault, too—and you can potentially cause even more offense. 

CNN is one of the biggest news networks in the world. It is a pretty huge platform upon which to own your bad behavior. But Blanc resembled the confident, capable man he purports to be able to turn any loveless idiot into about as much as I resemble Harry Redknapp. He looked like a desperate student caught by the principal in the bathroom with a handful of cherry bombs and a roll of plastic wrap. Only, we're miles away from talking benign schoolkid nonsense here. 

Blanc's apology immediately calls another recently pariah-ed, wanton woman-objectifying figure to mind: Dapper Laughs, a.k.a. Daniel O'Reilly, who recently appeared on Newsnight to say sorry for his "boundary-pushing" brand of street harassment comedy.

If you compare both public apologies, what can you see more or less immediately is that O'Reilly's body language is more direct. He's leaning forward in his respectful black roll-neck, pointing his torso (and gaze) towards interviewer Emily Maitlis. He's engaged and purposeful. Which is the least you'd hope a man who told a female audience member she was " ​gagging for a rape" might be while trying to build even the smallest bridge towards public redemption. In comparison to Blanc, who can't seem to keep his eyes or body still, he just looks a bit more... present. Less like a ​jibber jabber that's about to shit itself.

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That O'Reilly was given a public platform like Newsnight brought a storm for the show's editor, Ian Katz. "Dapper Laughs joins the Cookie Monster in the list of recent illustrious Newsnight guests (sound of a barrel being scraped)," said ​some journalists, but he did his best to clear his name. Or did he? 

"I didn't think so many people would end up seeing it," he said, referencing his leap to ITV2 from the relative obscure safety of a catalogue of Vine videos that generally center around the phrases "moist" (what a woman gets when she sees him), "cock" (why she gets moist), and "she knows" (...he's got a big cock. When she sees him. She knows so she gets moist.)

"I kind of got a bit carried away with it, to be honest with you," he says, before going on to talk about his "demographic" and the audience that "received" him, and inferring, basically, that it was only human nature to ride the wave of notoriety as it swelled beneath him. In the BBC studio, O'Reilly maintains that the separation between him, the normal bloke, and his character's exaggerated, cock-and-fanny-orientated lolz should have been evident. "I was taking the mick," he asserts, pleadingly, "out of what men think."

So still, like Blanc, there is no, "I'm so sorry for being a shit." 

O'Reilly's main strategy on Newsnight was to argue the gulf between him and his character, as if we somehow should have separated them from the off. But isn't that the aim with good immersive comedy? That you want people to believe the character is real? It's why Chris Morris was so polarizing with Jam—you utterly believed his warped, frighteningly reprehensible characters were real, such was the deftness with which he and his cast played them (see: "​Disinterested Parents of Missing Child"). 

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I'm not sure whether saying: "I was pushing the boundaries with the character because it was popular," is a wise choice of words in a public apology, because it implies that he was aware of how rank the stuff in the Vine videos were, and made them ranker still as the shares and likes racheted up. He can hold open his palms (see above) towards Maitlis and shake his head all he likes—the defense is flimsy. He probably knows it is, too. 

O'Reilly said over and over again in his apology, when pushed, that he didn't think Dapper Laughs incited sexual violence, because he thought people were laughing at how ridiculous it was. Fine. But again, he'd already said that he knew the stuff he had the "character" saying was awful and that he made it more awful the more popular he got. So, in terms of creating a solid, public admission of guilt, it doesn't hold up. He tied himself in knots. 

So, too, did Blanc. After telling Cuomo about how many people—sorry, "clients"—he's brought together, how people have legitimately used his services to meet their "spouses," he collapses when Cuomo points out that some of his suggested techniques include men grabbing women's heads and shoving them into their crotches. He laughs and closes his eyes, saying, "This is where some of the confusion is coming from." It says, ah, ye of little knowledge. You couldn't possibly know how it works. 

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But Blanc's biggest problem in his apology is the line: "I'm not going to be happy about feeling like I'm the most hated man in the world," in response to Cuomo saying the only possible way that he can emerge from this whole shitstorm with any dignity is to "own it." But all Blanc appears to be grappling with is pride. He's being right royally picked on, OK?

Furthermore, the repetition of the phrase "horrible attempt at humor" becomes void if it's book-ended with repeated reference to things being "taken out of context," because, as Cuomo rightly points out, when an image of a man with his hand around a woman's neck surfaces and is shared far and wide on the internet, there is no room for context. No one gives a shit about context. Particularly if the perpetrator admits, as he did on CNN, that he was "trying to provoke a shock." 

At the end of the interview, on his  ​reappropriation of a domestic abuse chart into a male empowerment checklist, he said he "stupidly thought" it would be "funny to mock it" and that he's going to be "reevaluating everything he's putting out" in the future. However, this idea of "future" is the real issue at play. 

Because while O'Reilly loses his cool slightly like Blanc did when his words and actions, too, are pointed out to him ( Maitlis repeats the "get some duct tape and rape the bitch" line back to him, slowly and purposefully), telling his (female) interviewer to "listen" while he tries to keep making his point of distance, he ends his opportunity for public apology by saying that Dapper Laughs is gone. He doesn't want to carry on the Dapper Laughs tours. He says he's "ruined everything" for himself and you sort of believe him, because, well, of course he fucking has. He says his family have spoken to him about it, and, when he does, his eyes redden. His voice wobbles. 

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Blanc, however, leaves it open-ended. His interview—and opportunity to take ownership—ends with him suggesting that, despite being willing to address some of his material, he wants to carry on doing his seminars. He "hopes" that people will still come. He wants all this to go away so he can carry on being the benevolent, romantic, all-seeing auteur he sees himself as in his head. 

The benefit of both these men's public airings is that they were controlled by another person, someone acting as the public voice of reason, picking out things they'd probably purposefully ignore were they to have a few minutes to read a pre-prepared speech (like the one  convicted rapist Ched Evans gave, in which he apologized to everyone but the girl he raped) on camera. 

Neither of these men's apologies trump the other. They are both different shades of diarrhea brown. Both claim they had no idea how much of a problem they were causing, which they should just not have said. It reeks. O'Reilly, though, is saying he'll kill Dapper Laughs completely. Which is great for everyone. 

Maybe, as Julie Bindel so rightly  ​pointed out in the Guardian yesterday, we'll be able to start to take our attention away from him and focus on the root causes of inequality. It is to O'Reilly's credit that he acknowledged that it had to end. Because too much focus on one individual, however misogynistic and foul their act is, is ignoring the dark expanse of iceberg beneath the water's surface. It casts shade on the hard task of making government accountable for groups like ​Justice for Women, that Bindel founded, which managed to ​change the law that prevents men claiming that "nagging" was an alright reason to kill their female partners. It just doesn't help. 

The only favor O'Reilly could do himself after his Newsnight appearance is to disappear. His merit can only be judged now by his ability to do that and, if he meant what he said in his public apology, he might just follow through. He didn't really own his actions—too many excuses, too much talking about capitalizing on his newfound fame with fresh material—but he acknowledged he had to stop. And that's something. 

Blanc, however, left an ominous fart surrounding what shit he might do in a similar vein in the future. And while he won't be doing it in the UK any time soon, that's no way to acknowledge doing wrong. 

Follow Eleanor on ​Twitter.

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(Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

You'll be well versed in the kind of grand proclamations of bullshit politicians tend to make before an election. They'll say they're going to ​save the NHS, or ​slash taxes for the people who need their taxes slashed the most—promises they inevitably end up reneging on once all the votes are in. 

This year, David Cameron has ​added one more pledge to be enacted if the Tories are re-elected in 2015: he's going to beat Britain's booze epidemic.

Under new plans announced on Monday, judges will have the power to strap an anti-alcohol bracelet to your ankle if you're found guilty of a drink-related criminal offence. The device samples the wearer's sweat every 30 minutes and tests it for alcohol, leaving them no choice but to put the bottle down and meditate on their crime from the depths of some joyless, boozeless, clear-headed limbo.

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A SCRAM bracelet in action (Photo ​via)

The Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitoring System (SCRAM), built by Colorado-based SCRAM Systems, is already in use throughout 48 states in North America, and is currently being trialled on a voluntary basis in England and Scotland.

"What we've invented in the States is a trans-dermal monitoring device that tests a person's perspiration [for alcohol] once every 30 minutes. It provides 48 tests per day, it goes wherever they go and it provides accountability, visibility [and] traceability to ensure individuals are compliant with a court order," says SCRAM Systems spokesman Matthew Mitchell. "The general philosophy behind it is that if the courts are going to order something and there's no way to enforce it, then there's no need to order it in the first place."

Today, SCRAM is used by 18,000 jurisdictions throughout North America, their central database monitoring the daily alcohol consumption levels of over 400,000 individuals, and around 400 in the UK.

However, like all preventative methods, the people subjected to the technology usually very much enjoy what it is they're being prevented from doing (in this case, drinking). That's led to a wash of online tips on how to beat the bracelets—some of which I've listed here for you to enjoy.

THE BEVERLY HILLS COP II

Remember that scene in Beverly Hills Cop II where Axel Foley "completes the circuit" by sliding tinfoil into the alarm system to shut it off, before opening up a window with a flick knife? I don't know a huge amount about rewiring alarm systems, but I'm assuming there was a bit of movie magic at play there.

Mind you, that hasn't stopped people from trialling a similar technique with the booze bracelets—sliding a piece of foil or plastic between their skin and the device, and believing for half an hour that they've outsmarted the system with a method my barely-sentient nephew could draw up. 

Only, once that half hour's up, you'll have a police officer knocking at your door to find out why SCRAM's database isn't registering any perspiration readings. No good.

THE SKIN HARVEST

The tag's main anti-tamper mechanism is an infrared beam that calculates the reflective degree of the surface between you and the tag. A few anti-SCRAM die-hards suggest harvesting an old blister and sliding it between your skin and the sensor, covering your sweat glands. But dead skin dries fast, so ensure you're packing a pipette full of moisturizer to spritz it up every time it starts to flake into nothingness.

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This is what ham looks like (Photo by Staecker ​via)

THE SLEIGHT OF HAM

If blister harvesting sounds like too much work / the most disgusting waste of time imaginable, you could try something that a number of US parole officers have actually caught people doing: wedging a slice of ham under the sensor in an attempt to simulate sweat-free human skin.

"This is much less effective. It more often than not interferes with the hourly readings the device takes, and we'd notice when we get the daily report and would definitely contact you," an unnamed officer  ​told The NY Daily News, adding: "And it must smell pretty bad when you cram baloney in there."

I guess the lesson from that is, if you're going to give this a go, use some of that high-end ham from the deli counter so at least you look mildly classy while you're walking around with meat trimmings stapled to your leg. 

THE CAT STRAP

You could also try strapping your SCRAM unit to something else, just like the guy in Cheyenne, Wyoming who attached his ankle tag to his cat. Unfortunately, this technique wasn't as foolproof as it sounds; the machine went haywire trying to send the readings back to SCRAM's central database, alerting those monitoring the technology.

"The machine said, 'I ain't buying this: that's not a human heart,'" Bob Moeller, a subcontractor for Polygraphs Etc,  ​told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

So take it from Bob—attaching a device built for humans to a cat is not an effective route to unhindered boozing.

There is one method that's proved to be pretty effective, but I'm not going to include that here, because—as invasive as they sound—the bracelets have actually helped law enforcement with one very worthy cause: the fight against alcohol-related domestic violence.

"Over the past 12 months, we've had tags on about ten individuals," says Sergeant Nigel Parr of the Cheshire Police. "And that's been on a voluntary basis as part of our 'root cause' problem-solving, where alcohol often plays a major factor in domestic violence."

According to  ​a 2011/12 study by Britain's Institute of Alcohol Studies, there were 917,000 incidents where the victims believed the offender (or offenders) to be under the influence. Of these cases, 280 individuals were killed and 1,290 suffered serious injuries. These stats account for 47 percent of violent offences committed that year.

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Someone enjoying the beach with their ankle monitor (Photo by Logan ​via)

"Where alcohol is obviously a major contributing factor towards an offence, clearly the concept of where David Cameron wants to take it would be of benefit," says Sergeant Parr. "But it's not just about the police putting a tag on people. Alcohol-dependent individuals have got to be supported and mentored by other agencies as well."

So there it is: while they might be a slightly oppressive form of punishment for people guilty of just getting a bit too pissed on a Friday night out, they could be very useful in curbing more serious alcohol-related crimes, like GBH, criminal damage or drink driving. 

So the best course of action, if you do find yourself fitted with an anti-boozing bracelet, is to just keep it on—it'll inevitably help you out in the long run. And if it's the aesthetic value you're worried about, don't fret, ​​Chanel have you covered​.

Follow James Rippingale on ​Twitter

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Women in Sub-Saharan Africa. Image ​via Wikimedia Commons user Diksha4​1

Last week's ​revelation that Indian women are being sterilized for ​as little as $13 to meet targets set by state officials and at risk to their lives has rightly seen a collective, international outcry.

It's been reported that women targeted for sterilization are typically from the very poorest parts of the country are under pressure to comply and offered no other form of contraception. But coerced or forced sterilization happens in other nations for a wide range of reasons, not just brutal and misguided efforts at population control.

In fact, earlier this year, the UN and the World Health Organization released a ​statement making clear their opposition to the practice, an acknowledgement of how widespread its use is. It said sterilization should be, "free from discrimination, coercion and violence," and the procedure based on the "full, free and informed decision-making of the person involved."

Sadly, for many women being sterilized is a less personal choice and more by order of the state. Coerced or forced sterilization is better seen as a way of stopping women deemed "unfit mothers" from breeding. And it's part of a broader problem of lawmakers, politicians, and medical professionals the world over being too eager to take responsibility for women's reproductive systems for their own economic ends or personal beliefs.

These decisions have a grave impact on people's lives. In Chile, the Dominican Republic, and across sub-Saharan Africa, women with HIV are routinely sterilized despite the fact that with the correct drugs the mother-to-child transmission rate is less than 5 percent. These are all countries where a woman's ability to bear large numbers of children is highly prized and the loss of that capability can jeopardize her very life.

I spoke to Jody Fredericks from the Women's Legal Centre in Cape Town, South Africa. She's representing three women who all say they were advised by their doctors to be sterilized because of their HIV status, and asked to consent while in labor, a clear breach of national and international law.

"We can't understand why this practice is taking place, there is no justification for it," said Fredericks. "These women are so traumatized, it's difficult to even get a statement out of them." None of the women have told their partners or their families that they've been sterilized for fear of being ostracized. One of the women's husbands has already had children with other women in light of his wife's inability to conceive.

Up until now, the South African government has settled all cases out of court, admitting to negligence, but not to HIV being the reason for the procedure. This time Fredericks wants the doctors held accountable. It's not the law that needs changing, she says, but the paternalistic attitude of the medical profession.

This attitude is also found in countries that otherwise don't trouble Amnesty too much. Many countries, including France and Belgium, require transgender people to undergo (often unwanted) sterilization surgeries in order to have their preferred gender recognized. Intersex people are ​freq​uently irreversibly operated on as infants to assign them a sex, which doesn't always turn out to be the sex they want to be when they're older. Sterilization of people with disabilities is still contested. In Australia just last year, a ten-month inquiry ​concluded that the sterilization of people with disabilities without their consent should be banned.

The reluctance of countries to look in their own backyards when it comes to invading a person's right to give birth, and piecemeal progress in acknowledging that right, is mirrored in the reluctance to condemn others' practices.

In Uzbekistan, there has been a sustained program of forced sterilization since 1999 in a bid to control population growth. A 2013 ​report by journalist Natalie Antelava for human rights group ​Open Society Foundations found doctors under pressure to meet government targets and unable to provide proper medical examinations or sterile environments.

Women say they are often unaware of the nature of the procedure. One woman, "Shahida," a mother of two, was told it was reversible and only discovered the truth when those children died in a car crash and she was unsuccessful in conceiving more. Her husband left her.

Other women aren't asked at all. Uzbekistan women's rights organization Ozod Ayol (Free Woman) has recorded cases of involuntary hysterectomies. Khulkaroi Abdullaeva told them what happened when she went into hospital to deliver her third child:

"They tied a sheet around my stomach and started pulling on it until it tore. They tormented me and I lost consciousness." The baby was stillborn, and afterwards doctors performed a hysterectomy. She also only discovered the extent of the operation later, when she realized she had not been fitted with the standard IUD.

But despite persistent reports of these abuses, the international community has stayed silent on the matter. In fact, Uzbekistan has received praise for its meeting of Millennium Development Goals on reducing infant and maternal mortality rates, despite its disregard for all other human rights treaties.

Steve Swerdlow works for ​Human Rights Watch, investigating and advocating for a wide range of issues in Uzbekistan. He described the use of forced sterilization as a "sick and twisted way of improving their statistics." But he also says that the strategic importance of the country now prevents countries from condemning its policies.

"The west—and the UK and the US in particular—have gone very soft on human rights abuses in Uzbekistan," he told me. "They seem very concerned about Uzbekistan not cutting off cooperation in Afghanistan, namely the use of its territory to transit military supplies in and out of the country."

Swerdlow added that, rather than the country being positively affected by its cozier relationships to Europe and the United States, reports of torture have increased in recent years, including instances of people being sterilized against their will. And when it comes to some of the worst offenders for tampering with women's reproductive rights, it would be remiss to not mention the record of America, which, along with the UK, helped fund India's sterilization program.

Just ​last year it was revealed that, as recently as 2010, women in California prisons were being coerced into sterilization by doctors who believed it was their duty to save the state money and prevent women in the criminal justice system from having more children. In September this year, Republican Arizona legislator Russell Pearce had to resign after making comments about sterilizing poor women who claimed welfare payments, while Project Prevention continues to pay those with substance abuse problems to be sterilized.

On the flip side, women are routinely denied access to contraceptive choices and forced to carry to term unwanted or unsafe pregnancies. Professor Alexandra Stern of Michigan University is an expert in the history of eugenics in the United States. "Women's reproductive health is as contested now as it's ever been in the US," she told me.

One of her biggest worries was the growing criminalization of pregnant women, in particular by the use of "fetal harm" laws. In Montana, 21-year-old Casey Gloria Allen was charged with criminally endangering a child after testing positive for illegal drugs while three months pregnant. In Iowa a pregnant woman was arrested after falling down the stairs and accessing medical treatment.

Professor Stern said these instances are likely to become more regular as Republican governors, emboldened by success at the midterms, seek to advance the anti-abortion movement state by state. 

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Photo of Peruvian women via ​Wikipedia Commons by Dr. Eugen Lehle

These reproductive horror stories give a grave picture of women's rights internationally, but vibrant campaigns for justice are being fought from Slovakia and the Czech Republic—where Roma women were being sterilized as late as 2001—to Peru, where 300,000 indigenous women, mainly poor and illiterate, were coercively sterilized between 1995 and 2000. In October this year, North Carolina began sending out compensation payments to victims of its eugenics policy that saw thousands of men and women sterilized between 1929 and the late 1970s.

The decision on whether to have children is one of the most personal someone can make, not something to be forced or prevented by those with their own motives. The shocked coverage generated by the deaths of those 13 women in India last week is a positive sign that people don't want to live in a world where that choice is removed. 

Follow Cat McShane on ​Twitter

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​Photo  ​via Facebook.
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​ As you may have read yesterday, there are a variety of re​asons why Uber is "the worst." The company's CEO, Travis Kalanick, recently had to apologize for one of his execs, Emil Michael, who threatened to hire investigators solely to dig up dirt on the personal lives of journalists who criticize Uber, the all-important, taxi-hailing app. Despite apologizing on Michael's behalf, Kalanick is the same guy who referred to his own company as "Boob-er," presumably because he was able to leverage his fancy taxi-app into sexual encounters with women who normally would not have paid attention to him.

On top of that, Uber France came under fire for luring in male customers with "hot chick" drivers who would taxi them around Lyon for up to 20 minutes at a time. A media investigation quickly triggered the removal of that particular promotion, but it speaks to the kind of corporate culture Boob-er must have for campaigns like this to be greenlit.

So, apparently the men who run Uber are frat bros at best, and journalist-threatening American Psycho-level megalomaniacs at worst. As a journalist and a human being, I'm offended. But as a frequent user of taxis, I'm torn.

Uber does make the process of hailing a taxi much easier than the regular ol' taxi cartel's infrastructure currently provides. Not having to negotiate with a taxi driver who is pretending like their debit/credit machine is broken at the end of a ride is a glorious privilege that only a taxi-hailing app like Uber can provide. Which is why the City of Toronto, who is currently picking a fight with Uber, should tread lightly.

Yesterday, Toronto's municipal government filed an injunction, which aims to have all of Uber's services outlawed from  ​"The Six." The city's ​claim​ alleges: "The taxicab and limousine industries are regulated by the city to ensure protection of residents and visitors, and to ensure the health and safety of passengers and drivers. Uber has been operating in Toronto since 2012 without a proper licence."

But it seems as if the majority of the city's complaints pertain to Uber's ridesharing service, UberX, which allows customers to get a ride from a non-licensed taxi driver who uses their own vehicle to shuttle users around. This service obviously opens up all sorts of wormcans for regulators, and it's a big reason why Uber has had problems all around the world, not the least of which were brewing in the nation's capital recently.

As Joel Balsam pointed out for our sister-site Motherboard, however, UberX brought some much-needed competition to the o​verpriced Ottawa taxi market. And if you can get over the somewhat uncomfortable reality that your drivers aren't licensed taxi drivers, it makes for a pretty great deal.

Also, let's not act as if the City of Toronto is only allowing responsible individuals to drive cabs. I had a cab drag me for half a block down a street in Kensington Market after my jacket got caught in the door. I've had cab drivers who were obviously drunk behind the wheel. Not to mention all of the sketchy route-planning decisions that were obviously designed to stretch out the meter. I also once witnessed a cab driver purposely ram his taxi into another cab driver after the two had an argument in front of Union Station. He was arrested.

Then there's the 2013 investigation from the Toronto Star, which found that the city currently has drivers behind the wheel who have histories of sexual assault, drunk driving, failing to stop for school buses—so how well is the city's regulation system even working? At least with Uber, you can get a heads-up rating of how other drivers have performed with past Uber clients. If a driver's score is too low, they're booted from the system.

Our mayor-elect, John Tory, went on CBC Radio's Metro M​orning today to talk about the City's crusade against convenient taxi-hailing. Tory says Uber is "here to stay," but recognized that Uber needs stop ignoring the municipal regulations they do need to abide by. He said it's "not realistic" to approach the Uber problem from the city's current standpoint of: this new-fangled technology needs to get out of town. He maintains that there is probably a more civil way to negotiate these issues.

For example, to get a taxi-brokering licence in Toronto, a company only needs to pay $300 a year. Uber has apparently neglected to pay that fee, but if they did, it would presumably render most of the city's issues (with Uber's services that hail licensed cab drivers, anyhow) moot. Tory recommended that Uber get some help with their government relations department, which is actually really good advice. Though he reminded the CBC audience that "I'm not even the mayor yet."

As for the more controversial UberX, which the city's injunction warns, provides "increased safety risk to the drivers due to lack of training and vehicle security equipment, normally governed by city bylaws," one would think that there must be some kind of middle ground between Uber not rampantly ignoring the city's bylaws, while still offering a competitive service within the taxi market.

Frankly, the idea of UberX still kind of weirds me out, as I've had enough negative experiences with "licensed" taxi drivers as it is. Plus, I suspect there are plenty of people who are willing to pay a little bit more on their fares to avoid UberX, just to have that added level of assurance about the quality of their driver. I mean, UberX allows Deadmau5 to drive people ​around, so clearly their quality control is questionable.

After reaching out to Uber about what they intend to do about their new legal battle in Toronto, I was told via email: "Any attempt to restrict consumer choice and limit economic opportunity does nothing but hurt the thousands of residents and visitors who already rely on Uber for safe, affordable and reliable transportation. We look forward to continuing to provide the people of Toronto with the Uber they know and love, as we continue to work with city officials to create a permanent home for Uber in Toronto."

And this brings us back to the initial issue of Uber being run by, as the Washi​ngton Post implied, jerks, who are in need of better government-relations skills. The company has brought a necessary dose of competition to the archaic taxi market, which has long-suffered from a host of problems that have been smoothed out wonderfully by apps like Uber.

But to continue down this stubborn path of ignoring regulations seems like it's more trouble than its worth, which is why I hope that Uber execs can learn to keep their mouths shut when it comes to being sexist, journalist-threatening weirdos and start developing a more reasonably strategy for partnering with governments; and likewise, it would be nice if municipal governments could learn that technology doesn't come from the bowels of satan himself.

That way, consumers could continue hailing cabs in the reasonable and efficient manner that our taxi-apps provide, without having to deal with all this high-level bickering between Silicon Valley and municipal governments about how the taxi system should work. Because if I have to deal with one more cab driver whose debit machine is "broken," I might just have to call up deadmau5 on the UberX bat phone to shuttle me around.
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​​@patrickmcguire

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Maria Jose Alvarado is crowned the new Miss Honduras in San Pedro, Sula, Honduras. (AP Photo)

A missing Honduran beauty queen and her sister were found dead on Wednesday, having apparently been shot to death by a jealous asshole. The corpses' identities have yet to be 100 percent verified by forensic evidence, but local police are suggesting this was a savage episode of domestic violence just ahead of the Miss World pageant in London.

María José Alvarado Muñoz, 19, was crowned Miss World Honduras 2014 in April. She and her sister Sofia Trinidad, 23, were last seen on Thursday at the La Aguagua spa in Santa Barbara, Honduras, after attending the birthday party of Sofia's boyfriend, Plutarco Ruiz, 240 miles east in Tegucigalpa. Their bodies were discovered close to the spa, buried in a riverbank.

"Witnesses said my daughter left the spa with three men," the mother, Teresa Munoz, ​told reporters last week. "I tried repeatedly all night to call their cellphones without any response."

General Ramon Sabillon told the Associated P​ress that Ruiz, who was detained last week, eventually confessed to killing the sisters, apparently shooting at Sofia because she was dancing with another guy and then turning on the beauty queen when she attempted to flee. Alvarado was shot at least twice in the back. 

As the AP reported, brutal killings are not exactly rare in Honduras—often called the murder capital of the world—but this one could resonate more than most. Alvarado had been a popular TV personality, appearing on the talk show of former presidential candidate Salvador Nasrallah.

"A lot of girls die this way, but because they're not famous, it doesn't get the attention and the crimes go unpunished," Nasrallah told the wire service. "She was a girl of good principles who fell into a trap, a game with guns, and ended up a victim of a violent system."

Alvarado is not the first Miss World contender to meet a horrific demise in the final stages of the competition; in 2009, Mariana Bridi of Brazil ​contracted a bizarre urinary tract infection that left her dead a month later.

Honduras police have detained an alleged accomplice of Ruiz's, Aris Maldonado, though the any role he might've played in this latest incident is not yet clear. Ruiz apparently had the gall to call Munoz, the victims' mother, the morning after the murders and express uncertainty about where her daughters were, suggesting they had left with strangers. 

But as this horrific crime reminds us, ​women are ​usually killed by men they know, and sexually charged violence is generally committed by intimates rather than random newcomers.

Follow Matt Taylor on ​T​witter.

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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has been out in the wild for a while now, but can this year's offering win over those who feel that the series has grown tired and turgid?

No. So let's just get this out of the way—we need one comment below this article saying that the Call of Duty series is total shit; one arguing that it's actually great and that people are just being asshole snobs; and, for good measure, we might as well have one more pointing out that the author of this article is a prick. The holy trinity of comments. Good. Now we can move on. 

Universally tainted as the lowest common denominator, the brash reputation the series has developed makes it remarkably difficult to win over new fans. It's a series stuck in an impossible rut that's entirely unrelated to the actual quality of what's being made, which makes writing about whether Call of Duty games are good or not seem unbelievably futile. I can't imagine how it must feel to be one of the poor developers making these games—playing the classics to a conservative audience, releasing more cover versions of someone else's album.

The campaign story trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Advanced Warfare is a pretty fun game, but there's something faintly sad about the way the series continually seems to double-down on tired, tried-and-tested formulas. To the trained eye it seemed pretty clear that they also handled most of Modern Warfare 3, but, officially speaking, Advanced Warfare is the first Call of Duty headed up by Sledgehammer—a fresh team of shit-hot talent brought in to add a bucket of fresh spunk to the series. The ideas and passion they've brought to the table are evident throughout the game, but often fail to gel with the rigid rules that apparently define what Call of Duty should be.

The frustrating thing is that those rules are total bullshit. Somewhere along the line somebody decided that the blueprint for Call of Duty campaigns was Modern Warfare 2—so now we're stuck with ludicrous chains of set-pieces tied together with painfully linear, hand-holding guff. The multiplayer—thankfully—is a different and vastly exciting beast, but the campaign feels old-fashioned right from the offset.

The series has been like this for a while, but the futuristic gadget funsies on offer in Advanced Warfare certainly make this more frustrating. You can leap into the air with your robot suit! Hang on, though, that's quite dangerous. No, no—you should probably mostly stay behind cover. Wait for that red jelly to fade away from your face.

The game's arsenal of silly gadgets are often used well on one-off occasions, but mostly they just amplify how ancient the cover-shooter formula now feels. After months of hopping around with jetpacks in Destiny, there's something deeply dull about returning to the days of popping up from behind cover to safely secure headshots. I can't help but feel like it's a system that only satisfies when used in a setting that feels gritty and authentic—in a land of personal mech suits and robotically-enhanced fun, I don't want to spend hours lying prone behind a plant pot.

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Kevin Spacey is probably the campaign's biggest draw, and he turns in an enjoyably hammy performance.

Leaping from plant pots to roses to unexpected shower-wanking, Kevin Spacey's leading role as probably-the-bad-guy-yes-definitely-the-bad-guy weirdly doesn't come across as a total waste of money. The core of the plot remains cheesy and brash, but the delivery and execution aren't always awful. Crucially, I spent the entire game completely aware of what was currently happening—which is something of a triumph for a series that, not long ago, had you inexplicably firing rockets while riding a camel.

Exposition between missions is snappy and smart, but despite strong potential for a memorable story the narrative eventually drives off a cliff in quite a spectacular fashion—swapping out intoxicating fuzzy moral questions for black-and-white kill-the-bad-man bullshit. It's tough to tell if Sledgehammer just tonally cocked it all up, or whether there were concerns that the domestic US market might not react all that well to a story that didn't make it explicitly clear that the guy you were killing was a Bad Man.

The story's themes and mo-cap performances are both quite good, but it's horribly let down by shark-jump revelations and hyper-crass "OMG OPPRESSION!" sections. No one leaps into Call of Duty expecting top-notch Orwellian stuff, but sections of Advanced Warfare feel like an am-dram reenactment of Half Life 2's City 17.

In terms of how the campaign actually plays, it's a lot like being on a school trip. You get in and out of vehicles when you're told to, spend most of it being dragged around against your will, and get slapped on the wrist if you wander too far away from where you're supposed to be. As a consequence, I lost count of the times that the game's campaign left me feeling like a stroppy child.

The problem with this particular school trip is that your teacher is a total dickhead. The game encourages you to look for laptop "intel" so you can unlock upgrades for your character, but it also routinely ends the mission if you wander down the wrong corridor. "You aren't allowed down there. You shot him too early. You went the wrong way." It's like the entire game has been designed to be a killjoy, stepping in to fuck up the fun when you're otherwise having a blast.

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See this handsome guy? This is Mitchell, AKA you in the campaign. Not that you actually see your own face all that much.

And for what, exactly? When it isn't telling you off for "playing it wrong," Advanced Warfare seems happiest when it can just play the game for you, popping you onto a rollercoaster and taking you on an explosive adventure. I can still recall a time when these sequences were a surprise—with brief moments in the original Modern Warfare game suddenly wrenching away all control in a way that was unexpected, almost shocking.

Advanced Warfare locks you into cut-scene mode so frequently that every trick it pulls feels par for the course. Buildings collapse, men punch you in the face and the ground beneath you routinely crumbles. These have simply become the parts in which you put the controller down and have a sip of tea. It's like they've entirely forgotten how to create suspense, or tension. It's a universe in which nobody actually knows how to park cars—you only ever get out of a vehicle after flipping it and / or crashing it into a wall.

The best part in Advanced Warfare doesn't actually involve guns. Handed a wrist-mounted grappling hook and sent to spy on a private estate, you can quickly whizz around between nearby ledges and generally behave like a mega-sneaky assassin. Whistling at guards draws their attention, getting them close enough to use the grappling hook to yank them in for a deadly embrace. 

Pretending to be Mortal Kombat's Scorpion as you relentlessly murder strangers in a bush makes up a part of this mission's appeal, but mostly I loved it simply because it felt like the game wasn't actively working against me. The rules here are simple: don't let the guards raise the alarm. The path you take through the outdoor complex is largely up to you, offering a brief jaunt in a tiny sandbox that ends up being a vast amount of fun. It's a reminder that Call of Duty campaigns aren't fundamentally bad—they've just developed some terrible habits.

Sections like these, where the dreaded "out of bounds" areas are clearly marked by thick jungle or cliffs, allow you a framework to chill out and enjoy yourself without needless frustration. But as with previous Call of Duty games, the urban environments here are a total mess—a modern hall of mirrors where only one path is usually real. Matters get confused when areas suddenly offer you freedom, only to snap back to the bottleneck without any warning.

It's like trying to play the right role in a game that's being invented by a child: the rules change without warning. Forget about what we did last time; I know that worked then, but that doesn't work now. There's an urge to shrug off Call of Duty's weird, controlling tendencies as just being a part of what the series is now—some people love it; millions can't be wrong; people who hate it are just being snobs. That's partly fair, but there's a difference between aspiring for simple design and treating players as simpletons.

When it isn't carefully nudging you through a gauntlet of pre-canned explosions, the campaign often seems to forcibly slow you down. It creates walls made of invisible jam that stop you from running too far ahead, making it feel like you're moving through glue, or getting you to follow body-blocking characters down corridors while they move at a geriatric pace. I particularly struggled to find the patience to put up with this infuriating bottleneck crap, which left me wondering how Call of Duty fans reacted in the face of this patent nonsense. Peek into the rocket-paced freedom of the multiplayer mode and it's like you're looking at an alternate reality.

The multiplayer reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

In contrast to the asphyxi-coddling of the single-player campaign, this year's multiplayer pops a firework in your pocket and kicks you into a box full of vipers. Fuck. What's going on? Fuck. FUCK. There's a mode that lets you mess around with bots until you're comfortable, but basically you're looking at trial by fire. On the surface it seems to be CoD-by-numbers, but the exo-suit movement makes for some simple but dramatic changes.

Double-jumping is easy to grasp, but you can also boost-dodge when you're on the ground by clicking in the left stick while moving in any direction other than forward—which naturally remains reserved for activating sprint. Getting into the habit of boost-dodging behind cover at the first sight of a fight you can't win is a process that took me a good few hours, but that's just the tip of this delicious iceberg.

You can also boost-dodge in any direction once you're physically in the air, allowing for vastly accelerated movement at the cost of, visually, being a psychotic jumping bastard. You can still skulk around on the ground hiding behind cover if that's what you're into, but honestly I've given up on that game. I'm leaping around the multiplayer maps willy-nilly like an aroused praying mantis at the ugly bug ball, gleefully capping suckers with a silenced SMG before firing off into the sky to pounce on my next unwitting victim.

Adding these vastly useful maneuvers into your brain's blueprints for "How to play CoD" took me quite a long time to achieve, but once it clicks into place Advanced Warfare is glorious. Forget about chasing that dude up those stairs—leap over the building and shoot him in the chops when he gets to the top of them and pops around the corner. Old tactics aren't entirely irrelevant, but most of what you know goes out of the window, creating a familiar-looking game that feels furiously fresh.

Call of Duty has always been fast, but this new stuff accelerates things even more. If you stay still for more than a couple of seconds there will invariably be a man who shoots you in the back. A man will then shoot him in the back, and then a man will shoot that man in the back, too. It never stops, it never rests, it never sleeps. Crouch behind a wall if you want, but don't expect to be there for long.

The score-streak stuff in Advanced Warfare is the neatest selection I've seen so far, ensuring that the destructive toys that the best players earn don't just offer bonus points in the background. Team support stuff like the classic UAV can simply be switched on and forgotten about, but almost everything that actually kills stuff needs to be manually controlled. Brilliantly, these don't always need to be controlled by you.

The Paladin— Advanced Warfare's most expensive streak reward—simply gets called in when you activate it. If you'd rather carry on shooting folk normally, you can let someone else on your team have a go. This, and some of the other streak rewards, also offers up a co-pilot role to the rest of your team on a first-served basis, giving shoddy players a chance at glory that they'd otherwise likely never attain. It's a nice touch, and one that stops the score-streak rewards from feeling like silly god-like gimmicks.

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This guy's named Gideon. He's British. He wears that hat through the whole game, except for when he's around Kevin Spacey.

Frankly, though, you can ignore that stuff entirely. The class creation is top-class this year, allowing you to ruthlessly trim bits of the game that you can't be bothered with. Grenades feel significantly less useful this year, so I tend to ditch them in favor of other stuff. Every score-streak can be tweaked or buffed to provide bonus features at the cost of requiring more points to activate in game, with every pure support-based ability allowing you the option to significantly bump up the cost required in return for a cumulative score that won't be reset upon each death. Personally, I like to go all-in on a MEGA UAV that kicks in once toward the end of the match, highlighting foes right across the map in a number of incredibly useful ways.

Prestige chasing feels a little old these days, so it's cool to see them mixing things up in terms of progression between matches, too. Supply Drops are crates you earn at seemingly random points during games that can then be opened to unlock a handful of new loot. Temporary XP boosters are common, as are different rarities of cosmetic items. Rationally, I should really be rolling my eyes upon finding an "Epic" helmet for my character, but fuck it—this stuff is brilliant fun. Check it out dude, my gloves match my shin-pads.

You can also unsurprisingly find guns in these crates, pre-packages with cool camo skins, fixed attachments, and slight tweaks to the base statistics for the usual gun. Oooh, a bright orange SMG with less range but slightly increased damage? Don't mind if I do. If you don't want something you find in a crate, you can choose to break it down into bonus XP. Again, it's a neat system that offers you the option to simply not care about it at all.

Oh, and you've even got cosmetic unlocks that are directly linked to your skill as a player, with the "Bloodthirsty" outfit progressively unlocked by achieving kill streaks. Five kills earns you the lovely red helmet, ten gets you lovely red gloves, etc. In a stroke of cruel genius, these items are temporary—fail to chalk up the same streak again within half an hour and your goodies will evaporate. On a pragmatic basis, this knowledge is useful: if you're spotted by a player in lots of red gear, it's probably best to just run away.

You only need entry-level cynicism to see that these Supply Drop crates are likely Activision scoping out the possibility of adding FIFA Ultimate Team-style microtransactions in the future, but the current setup is pretty fantastic. Advanced Warfare's multiplayer iterates on previous ideas while avoiding anything that feels like a gimmick, creating a brilliantly fast-paced online shooter that isn't muddied with fluff that detracts from the basics of moving, aiming, and shooting.

The elegance with which Sledgehammer has nailed Advanced Warfare's online multiplayer leaves me bemused at why the game's campaign remains so oddly tedious, a mish-mashed mess of new ideas failing to gel with an antiquated formula. A total refresh would be too much to ask for, but it seems reasonable to expect something better than this. Call of Duty might have been the series that defined its genre, but 2007 was a long time ago.

Follow Matt Lees on ​Twitter