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Not the author

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

I spent five and a half years of my life drifting through the corridors of a southeast London university that still trades on the fact that a few artists also traipsed through those same corridors roughly 25 years ago. During that time I accumulated a pointless BA and an even more pointless MA. I also spent four years working in the student union shop doling out cut-price Guardians, Mars bars, ten decks of Silk Cuts, biros and Ginsters slices, occasionally worming out from behind the till to replenish flapjacks and bottles of Orangina.

Eventually, my hard work and diligence saw me receive a post-postgraduate graduation promotion to the heady ranks of office management and reception work. I spent a few hazy months half-arsedly ordering toilet rolls and bin bags, guiding lost exchange students to their flats and listening to the rugby team talk about who they spitroasted the night before while waiting for their Wednesday afternoon minibus. As supine as this job was, I was working full-time hours on a zero-hours contract which meant I got no sick pay, holiday allowance, or pension plan. Given that the university I was working for prides itself on being a liberal, open, creative space, I decided to stand up for myself and asked to be given the employment rights of a proper employee, rather than those of what the bosses clearly viewed as student skivvies.

In a microcosmic tale of Cameronian Broken Britain, I was forced to reapply for my own job and then interview for a position I already held. After the interview I went back down to my reception area and awaited a call that'd determine my financial fate. I was told that I was "arrogant and inexperienced" and was replaced by a timid Scandinavian who just happened to be the best friend of the student union president. Said Scandinavian went on to make a monumental fuckup that cost an already overstretched union over £20,000 ($31,000).

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Some friends I made when I skipped work and went to Field Day

Now, if this sounds like the mollycoddled moaning of a cossetted crybaby who had to be torn, screaming, from the bosom of higher education, then I must assure that it isn't. My unceremonious sacking—I was presented with a bar of Dairy Milk as a parting present—led to the best thing that ever happened to me job-wise: I ended up working in a call center.

The obvious effect of unemployment on the soul goes without saying: My days passed in a sapped state of self-pity and financially rooted deep sadness. The occasional solo jaunt to the local Wetherspoons to enjoy a quiet 3 PM pint among other people with nothing to do at that time of day except silently nurse a Doom Bar, their gaze flipping between their hands and the muted telly above the bar showing BBC News 24 with subtitles, becomes a source of regret and shame. That £2.40's never coming back.

So you spend your days hammering out substandard covering letters in a hope to fill the cracks in a creaky CV. Automated rejections and the howling silence of non-acknowledgement are all you get back, or don't. Eventually I crawled back, in a way, to the institution that had got me into this mess, the place that had forced me into a life of trackie bottoms and chickpea curries. I signed up for the University of London temp agency and within five minutes of applying for a job I'd secured an interview. The job description was vague. The interview itself was just as vague. Having told the panel a bit about myself, and endured questions that asked me to identify myself as a type of animal, theme park ride and biscuit, I left the office feeling blankly hopeful. I got home, unpeeled my too small Primark school trousers, got back into bed waiting for 6.45 PM to roll round so I could beg a mate for a pint. The phone rang. Would I like to start work the next day? It'd only be for the next 12 weeks. Just over a tenner an hour.

The next day I sat in my new office in those same too-small trousers with a too-small shirt and suitably sized shoes. I didn't really know what the job was or what the company did. I was greeted by my interviewer, a young Polish woman with a PhD from Oxford in second language acquisition and a passion for horse riding. "This is your phone, Josh. You'll start making calls this afternoon."

I'd accidentally got myself a job in a call center.

SEE YOU ALL HERE TODAY RIGHT!? pic.twitter.com/lGkCILqPOZ

— Baines (@bain3z) May 9, 2014

And here's where the experiences of myself and Owen Shipton, ​the guy who wrote the hate letter to call centres on VICE earlier this week, begin to differ. It turned out that I, luckily, wasn't being asked to sell solar panels to the elderly in Norfolk; I wasn't chugging over the phone. What I was doing, I was told, with some pride, was enabling prospective student's to change their lives for the better. It turned out that the company I'd joined specialized in what they termed "Student Lifecycle Management Solutions." In real terms this translates to employing people like myself to ring up students who've either expressed interest in studying at a particular university, or have received offers to study at said institution, and either begging them to apply or accept. In my head this seems completely separate from the low level harassment that most traditional call center employees are asked to engage in on a daily basis for a wage that barely covers the rent at the same time as it perforates the soul.

The clients we dealt with were universities that were experiencing lower than expected place-filling. My first major task, and the primary reason I was employed, was to attempt to convert just over 2000 offer-holders to firm-acceptors in a 12-week period that involved making around a hundred calls a day. A few days into the job I was whisked just outside of London to visit the client's campus in order to build the real world rapport necessary to persuade 17-year-olds to click a button on the UCAS website and embroil themselves in a backbreaking amount of debt they'd never be able to pay off. I was shown gyms, music studios, the bar. I was run through the library as if I'd been mad to ask to see it in the first place. I met with haunted looking recruitment and admissions staff. Car park spaces were prioritized in conversation over student success rates or the quality of academic research being conducted at the university. I left with a rucksack full of prospectuses and a sense of trepidation.

It turned out that my client was, according to the Guardian league table published two weeks into my tenure in the call centre, the worst university in the United Kingdom. This took the pressure off me.​

This was as close to heaven as one can get in a dark office off Old Street

So there I sat, day after day, turning up at 10AM in Darkthrone T-shirts and Vans, swigging Relentless and troughing down on croissants from the Sainsbury's over the road, headset on, my Client Management System humming in the background ready to log the info from the calls I'd make with a minimum amount of fuss. I'd methodically work down that day's call list in Excel, stopping every minute or so to check Twitter. I'd usually ploughed through enough calls by lunch that I could nip out for a falafel safe in the knowledge that the afternoon could largely be spent browsing the same three websites in a state of near catatonic bliss. This was as close to heaven as one can get in a dark office off Old Street.

Like Owen, I worked to a script. I'd breezily ask them how their day was going—girls, I found, were far more responsive to this method of developing a casual intimacy with a stranger trying to sell them a product. Teenage boys often sounded like you'd woken them up or interrupted a decent wank. Once we'd established that both of us were fine, thanks, I'd move down to the nitty gritty. You had to work with what you were given but there was always a bit of leeway. You'd find ten new ways a week to ask them if the data you had in front of you, the personal information (home and mobile numbers, addresses, their entire UCAS application form including personal statement and employment history) you were privy to was accurate. Due to the nature of data mining, it always was.

The key to cold calling of this nature was to always keep things subtle. You couldn't just straight up ask these applicants to accept an offer there or then. It became an exercise in persuasive linguistic power. You'd ask them if they had any questions about the university and, before they'd had a chance to stumble out an answer, you were already telling them about the cheap booze and squash courts on offer. You'd hit them with USPs galore. Most of the time this wouldn't make a blind bit of difference because they were either decisive—which was great, because it made life easy for both parties—or they were shy and unsure, always asking for a little more time to reflect on the biggest decision they'd ever had to make. With those people you pencilled in, at management's request, a follow-up call, usually 14 days after the opener. For the more querelous students I'd pretend that call had been made, not wanting to cause them any more anxiety than I already had.

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A live on-phone conversion was what we all lived for, regardless of what client we worked for. Getting an acceptance on the spot and checking that it had been confirmed officially through UCAS gave an enormous sense of well being. You'd smash the next ten calls, practically walking on air. You'd changed someone's life. Magic.

The job was perfect. Prior to starting I thought I wanted stability, a salary, a job that was more than a job—I thought I wanted a career. It turned out that what I actually wanted was to be able to come into work in joggies late, with a hangover and no desire to talk to colleagues. I actually wanted to complete repetitive mundane tasks with the minimum of effort. I actually wanted to be paid weekly at 6 on Fridays so I could leave the office at 6 on the dot and be spending that week's easily-earned cash by 6:30.

Perhaps I was lucky—my coworkers were of a similar age and all incredibly friendly, which helped, as did the money being OK for the line of work I was in, as did its proximity to where I lived – and having seen five minutes of BBC3's horrifically real doucusoap on the profession, I'm positive that I was very lucky, but I loved my time on the phones. I spent days talking to interesting, engaged people, I got over my inability to make calls to friends when I'm running late for the pub and, most importantly, I had an absolute blast doing it.

Follow Josh Baines on ​Twitter.

[body_image width='2500' height='1648' path='images/content-images/2014/11/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/24/' filename='harald-hauswald-captures-erich-mielkes-hooligans-876-body-image-1416834696.jpg' id='6194']All photos provided by Ostkreuz

Harald Hauswald is the co-founder of Ostkreuz, one of the most important and well respected German photographic agencies. Hauswald is such a legend that his pictures would appeared in West German magazines in the 1980s, even though he lived in the East. Today he still lives in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, accompanied by a gigantic archive of over 10,000 rolls of film. 

By capturing stories that put the lives of workers, farmers and hooligans into a bizarre new light, Harald has basically shaped my generation's perception of East Germany. I met up with him to discuss state-sponsored hooligans, smuggling rolls of films from the West to the East of Germany and his Stasi files.

VICE: Ostkreuz was founded in Paris not Berlin, right?
​Harald Hauswald: In February, 1990, France's cultural minister, Jack Lang, invited 200 East German artists to Paris, including bands, performance artists, and painters. There was a café in this huge exhibition hall. There were four or five photographers sitting there and we decided we needed an agency. So we started talking to about ten people. Three of them weren't interested and the rest of us founded the agency. The most difficult part was coming up with a name. We all really liked the name Ostkreuz (East-crossing) because there was so much in it: East, Berlin, crossroads, intersection, meeting point.

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You were able to show your photos in the West even though you lived in East Germany. How did that work?
​Berlin was a special case. There were about 15 journalists from the West with accreditation that had a workspace in the East or actually lived here. I knew a few of them. Primarily Peter Pragal, from Stern, who had an office on Leipziger Straße in the East and lived in the West. And Hans-Jürgen Röder from the Evangelischer Pressedienst actually lived here in East Berlin. Both of them had special border papers—kind of like a diplomatic status—which meant they could take material across the border without being checked.
​
​Of course we knew their offices were bugged so I would always prepare a handwritten letter, and include no return address. Then, as I would leave their place, I would pull the letter out, and if they nodded, then I knew that they were going back to the West that day and could bring my photos with them.

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Did you publish the photos under your real name?
​Not in the beginning. Not for years actually. In 1986, I did two reports for GEO, the Berlin special. 1987 was Berlin's 750th anniversary and I photographed the East Berlin scene and the city. I published that under my own name. They threw me out of the Berlin Verlag for that, which was the only place you could develop films from the West, because it had a different developing process. I had a user card for the laboratory there. GEO had sent me 100 rolls of Kodak film back then.

And that wasn't entirely legal, right?
​No, it was actually forbidden. I was charged with breaking four laws: Passing on non-classified news (non-classified news was everything that didn't have to do with the military), acting as a foreign agent, subversive agitation, and breach of exchange control regulations.

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How did it play out?
​They searched my house several times and put together about five kilos of Stasi files, but I never went to jail. The fact that the journalists from the West were here was my protection. East Germany was very anxious about international recognition. And if it was mentioned in a French or Italian newspaper that a "photographer goes to jail for publishing pictures in neighboring country," nobody would have understood why.
​
​So that was my luck. I thought that's what happened but I never knew. It was all in the files though. There was warrant for my arrest in there and the highest boss of that Stasi division had noted with a pen: "Not advisable at the moment for political reasons."

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What did the lack of freedom in East Germany feel like?
​Being young and knowing that you'll never go to a Led Zeppelin concert or see New York was pretty depressing. Photography was what liberated me. I also wanted to be provocative. And here in Berlin you clearly saw the discrepancy between pretense and reality. Like, Honecker would dedicate the millionth apartment in Marzahn, while stucco rained down from the buildings onto the sidewalk.

How do you feel in a re-unified Germany?
​Money governs today, you have to be skeptical of that. There are still insider deals, and new insider deals. Apart from that, I feel good. I have my freedom. I can think and do what I want, and I don't do anything differently than I did back then. Nothing really bothers me, except for taxes. The taxmen are the new Stasi.

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You work a lot with hooligans, even though you've never been into football, right?
​I was never into football. In 1988, Monika Zimmermann came to East Germany for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She asked me if I'd photograph her every once in a while because otherwise she had to have a photographer flown in from Frankfurt. And our first date was a local derby between Union and BFC. She'd gotten the tickets. We were standing in a really stupid block where nothing was happening, but I saw some people walking around filming. I told the police that had blocked off the area that I was with the film team and they let me through. I knew the team through other people. They were making a documentary about Union fans. And during that filming we met a few hools.

It's actually pretty hard to imagine hooligans in East Germany.
​What do you think was going on in the 70s? Huge brawls with almost 1,000 people on each side. When BFC was in Leipzig there would be 600, 700, 800 people on each side and it would go off. But none of it was official and it wasn't named anywhere. I got a contract to work on the film taking the stunt photos. A few of the hooligans asked if I could go around with them. That's how it all started. I accompanied them for five years and made a book out of it. Nowadays, I still go along with them sometimes.

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And what are the people like?
​One of the Union hooligans was a medical student at the time. These people are really all over the place. There are idiots here and there, sure, but there are also really intelligent people. You can only tell who they are at the games by their sneakers and that they aren't wearing any of the club's gear. No flags or scarves or stickers or patches or anything, so they can't be identified.

There was a rivalry between Union and BFC Dynamo that dates from back then in East Germany.
​Yeah. Union was the workers' club and BFC was the Stasi.

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Then why did hooligans want to go with the BFC?
​The BFC had around 1,000 hooligans during their best times. Many people went to BFC because Berlin was hated in the rest of the East, because it got special treatment in terms of provisions. And the BFC was the Stasi club. So trouble was guaranteed in the rest of the country.

And the Stasi knew that?
​Mielke was proud of his hooligans because they all went to work. These weren't anti-social people, they were proper Germans. When the club was playing in Karl-Marx-Stadt, and the cops pulled a few of them out, the Stasi would come and tell them to let their boys go. That happened a lot. They were friendly with the police and would sometimes break out a bottle of Schnapps with them.

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Is there a theoretical superstructure to what you're doing?
​When I do workshops or seminars, I always tell the kids, "You have to imagine that when you wake up early, your film starts rolling and it continues all day long. But when you take a photo, the film stops for a moment. But you guys see what happens before and after, so try to pack that in there too. Then an outsider has the chance to be able to understand your image, or to get their own film rolling. That's what it's about. If you achieve that, then you have a good photo. If other people get the film, then it works."

Ostkreuz has recently opened a new ​Fine Arts Store, where you can purchase the most impressive Ostkreuz photography in limited editions.

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The concert hall steps

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

Glasgow has long had an appetite for destruction. Visit Edinburgh and certain parts of its center look as if they were preserved in aspic, whereas Scotland's largest city is constantly chopping and changing its appearance like a hairdresser preparing for a work night out.

This demand for reinvention has been partly driven by social necessity—such as the 1960s clearance of slum housing in districts like Townhead—but often Glasgow's enthusiasm for the wrecking ball is economically motivated or just plain misguided. No one forced the city's leaders to drive a motorway through its beating heart at Charing Cross in 1968, but they went ahead anyway in the belief that the age of the car demanded it. By 1980 it was  ​real​ized that nobody wants a motorway in a city center and the remaining sections of the Glasgow Inner Ring Road were abandoned.

There are numerous examples of planning decisions which may have seemed sensible at the time but have left subsequent generations appalled. For example, the city's fine 17th century university buildings were deemed surplus to requirements and flattened to make way for... a goods depot. There are dozens of  ​websites and ​message boards dedicated to pictures of "Old Glasgow," providing visual reminders of what has been lost.

Think of the city as a giant Monopoly board—houses and hotels are swept aside so the game can begin all over again. But in recent years there has been a growing tendency among residents to loudly oppose the latest development wheezes. A £15 million ($23.5 million) plan to redesign George Square—an almost sacred site to Glaswegians—was unceremoniously dropped in 2013 following a well-organized online campaign.

Now a similar movement has sprung up in defence of another, more recent city center landmark which is under threat. A flight of steps leading to a music venue might not seem that big a deal, but plans to demolish them have led to more than 12,000 people signing a petition in favor of their retention.

The Glasgow Royal Concert Hall opened in 1990 and was seen as a symbol of the city's rebirth after the economic pain of the mid-20th century caused by the closure of its heavy industries. The building occupies a prominent position at the top of Buchanan Street, the busiest shopping destination in Scotland, and the steps leading to its entrance are a popular meeting place for workers, shoppers and tourists. During the independence referendum campaign they were the scene of rallies by Yes and No supporters, becoming a familiar image in the news in the run up to the vote.

But the steps could soon be demolished and replaced by a glass atrium under a £400 million ($627 million) plan to significantly expand the adjacent Buchanan Galleries shopping center. A planning application for their removal has been submitted and will be considered by councillors in the new year.

LS Buchanan Ltd, owner of the shopping center, sees little merit in the steps. "We are of the view that the existing steps do not provide any aesthetic benefit to the city center, and are of little townscape value," it stated in its application.

The company proposes building a "new rotunda structure allowing pedestrians to enter the concert hall and shopping center." This will provide a "more user-friendly, modern entrance to the Royal Concert Hall."

A "gathering place" will be built in front of the rotunda, close to the existing statue of the late politician Donald Dewar, with new seating and a public art installation.

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Oisin Murray busking by the steps

Ben Bookless feels there is no need to build such a meeting place as the steps already provide one. The 25-year-old journalist, along with students Stephen Eve and Aileen McKay, is leading the campaign against its demolition. A protest rally has been arranged for the 6th of December.

"T hese steps are a symbol of Glasgow life," he said. "It's a great place to sit with a sandwich and talk with friends. Apart from George Square, where else can people meet and sit in the city center? In the height of summer, you're hard pushed to find a seat on the steps for the number of people sunbathing and relaxing.

"We want to make the council see that these steps are part of Glasgow life and reject the plans to demolish them and build a glass atrium—which will look like any other UK shopping center."

As so often in life, Ben reckons that the pursuit of money is to blame. "Ultimately, the plans for the atrium are financially driven—to generate more money from Buchanan Galleries by adding further shops and restaurants. Glasgow has so many shops as it is, so why is there a need for more?" he asked. "I believe the council is treating Glaswegians as shoppers rather than citizens."

A spokesman for Glasgow City Council was less chatty when I called, saying, "There is now a live planning application for the proposed development, which will be considered in due course."

Given the formal nature of the application process, many councillors are keeping their opinions to themselves ahead of the meeting to discuss the development. But one, Nina Baker of the Green Party, will not take her seat on the committee so she can actively campaign against the removal of the steps.

There is some concern among councillors that the steps could become another PR disaster if the demolition is rushed through. Susan Aitken, leader of the opposition SNP group of councillors, said: "Glasgow can't afford another George Square. It's important that the council and the developers listen to the public during the consultation period."

Another councillor I spoke to stressed they supported the principle of the wider expansion of Buchanan Galleries, but added they had reservations about what was proposed for the steps and feared many Glaswegians had not yet realized what was planned for the area.

I visited Buchanan Street on a typically busy Saturday afternoon to find out if that was the case. Although the steps were damp from an overnight downpour, there were still a few people sitting on them and the familiar sight of a large crowd of school kids hanging around. There was no doubt that the steps are a popular meeting place, even in the depths of a Scottish winter.

Hilda, a 65-year-old Glaswegian, was sitting enjoying a cigarette break. When I introduced myself as a journalist, she immediately offered her views on the development. "It's terrible they want to get rid of the steps. They're lovely—just look around you. I've heard that the council doesn't like them being used as place for political rallies."

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Left to right: Chaz Murray, Jonny Mackie and Maximus

Further up the steps, Jonny Mackie and his pals Chaz Murray and Maximus were enjoying the view of Buchanan Street. They were aware of the development plans, and each was against them. As members of the Glasgow Anonymous Movement, they said were keen to support any campaign to protect the steps.

"There's something about this spot, I've known it all my days. I write my own music, and sometimes I come up here just to listen to music," said Mackie. "If they build the atrium, they'll probably just stick some stupid overpriced café in it."

"I would be upset if the steps went," added Maximus. "Not just for me, but for the families who like to sit here in the summer and watch the street performers. These steps are the people's steps."

The foot of the steps is considered by local buskers as one of the two best pitches in the city center. Oisin Murray had arrived at 10 AM to claim it for the day. The 17-year-old singer was unaware of the plans to redevelop the area.

"You do get a lot of people sitting here, so it's a good spot for musicians. I was lucky to get this. If the steps went there would be less open space, it would feel more claustrophobic, with less room for performers."

Opinion on the streets seems to be firmly against the removal of the Royal Concert Hall steps; whether that will be enough to save them remains to be seen.

Follow Chris McCall on ​Twitter

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Photos courtesy of  Sportsheets

When a man enlists in the military, he accepts the risk of losing an arm, a leg, or even his life. But what does a soldier do when he's sent home from combat, still young and lascivious, but no longer able to feel his dick? Does that mean his sex life is over forever?

Tom Stewart says no. The founder of California-based sex toy company Sportsheets has developed a line of customized harnesses, straps, and strap-ons for wounded veterans who have lost feeling in their lower body or have difficulty doing it doggy-style because of combat injuries.

"Dealing with an injured spouse is stressful enough," Stewart said. "When it comes to the effect it has on their sex lives it can be devastating for couples. To get a small piece of their former sex life back is a huge gain for these couples that had thought that they would never be able to have intercourse—or be in an intimate position like the missionary position—again."

Stewart's thoughts on the subject developed in the 1980s, when he spent his days flying helicopters for the Marine Corps and thinking about sex. One night, his friends turned on the TV and saw David Letterman stuck to a wall wearing a s​uit of Velcro. Cool, they thought, but it would be better if you could stick your girlfriend to that wall—and then stick it to her.

Stewart's friends were kidding, but he took the joke seriously. The idea evolved from a Velcro wall to Velcro bed sheets; what began as a sex sheet startup became a f​ull-blown sex toy​ company. Today, Stewart and his wife, Kimberly, are shifting their focus toward customized contraptions that allow wounded veterans to get it on.

Interested in learning more about how Stewart plans to help veterans, I called the 59-year-old to discuss his new devices, masculinity, and why he likes Velcro so much.

VICE: When you first created the sex sheet, how did you test the device?
Tom Stewart: We had a bunch of people come over to our house, and somebody volunteered to try it. They're all standing around the bed, and we're all looking at each other, and one girl went, "Alright, I will." So she got down and we put the cuffs around her wrists and ankles and spread her out—with clothes on—and it stuck, and she couldn't get out. It was kind of tense, like, What's she gonna do? And she just started cracking up, and then she peeled up one of the corners, and she just ripped the anchor pad right off the Velcro sheet. Within 60 seconds it was confirmed that this thing totally worked like we had envisioned it.

Isn't Velcro a little scratchy?
Most people think so, but I got together with the guy from Velcro, and he showed me these two different materials. Velcro's a hook-and-loop system, and this loop stuff is kind of softer. If you touch the ceiling of your car, the headliner, it's fuzzy like that. That's how the sheet feels.

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Originally, the BDSM and swinger communities used the device. How did you go from producing a sheet for those people to creating toys for disabled veterans?
One of the products we came up with was what's called a thigh harness, and it's like a neoprene knee brace. If you slide that up your thigh with a dildo inside the little hole, all of a sudden you've got a dildo mounted on your thigh.I took this thigh harness and other strap-ons to a [retail sex] show in Canada, and there was a guy in a wheelchair who came up and said, "Hey, I want to try this." We put this thigh harness on him, and we put this dildo on his right leg.

I said to his girlfriend, "Come over here. Squat down on this thing —imagine you're naked and this dildo's going inside of you." So, she was kind of grinding on his thigh—you know, simulating—and she's going, "Oh my God, this is phenomenal. We can have intercourse like this!" This was really the beginning of products for people who have disabilities.

Was the disabled man a veteran?
No, he was just in a wheelchair, but as I've grown up in the industry, I've met a lot of sex therapists, and they introduced me to a woman named Linda Mona, who works with a lot of wounded vets. She said, "Y'know, some of these products might work for my clients." And then, five years ago, they had a Coalition to Salute America's Heroes Road to Recovery ​conference​. I got invited to come and just hand out my sex toys. I had all these different products, and I handed them out at the end of the thing, and I almost got run over. It was very positive. 

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Tom flying a helicopter

Why do you custom-make most the sex toys you now sell to veterans?
Cause everybody's got a different capability or incapability. Linda introduced me to a couple about four or five years ago. This guy was a quadriplegic. He'd taken a bullet in the neck, and he could only move his neck. They can have intercourse—he can take a shot right into the base of his penis and he gets an erection. He can't feel it, but he can have an erection. But the wife was always on top, because she can't roll the guy over.

For a young guy who's in the military, you know, man on top, dominate my female—that's pretty typical. And that's how this particular guy identified sexually: "I want to be on top of my wife." So I talked to them and I came up with a sling that he can lie in, and we hoist him up. We worked on it together for about a day. It puts the guy face down, flying like Superman. So he takes an injection and gets an erection. She rolls him over into this thing face down, hits a button, hoists him up, scoots underneath him, and he can penetrate her—and they can look at each other in the eye. That intimacy—when you're nose to nose with your lover—those are some of the most intimate times. This guy can't feel anything below his neck. So when they're touching noses or kissing, when he's on top, it's like, Oh my God, it's not that great, but it's certainly a lot better than what I had.

So what are you developing for veterans now?
Something we've started developing is a hollow dildo strap-on harness for guys who are having erectile difficulties —you know, paraplegics or quadriplegics. It helps create the connection. We can't give a guy the feeling back in his penis, but we can stimulate the mental connection between the spouses.

A lot of these guys can't do doggy style anymore because they have to bend over. They can't hunch. So we say, "OK. Bring your partner to end of the bed, put this doggy strap around her, and now you can hang on and stabilize yourself, and bring her to you—and you don't have to hump, and you don't have to hunch."

That's so sad, though: You're already disabled, and then you can't even have sex.
I know. When these guys get injured, the first thing they say to their buddies is "Check my junk. I don't care if my legs are gone—check my junk." A young twentysomething, man, the masculinity is translated and identified through the penis. You get goosebumps when you see people [able to have sex again]. When you go to one of these conferences, and you see these burned guys with no ears, no nose—you can't even imagine. I want to work with these guys and do whatever I can.

Follow Erin Peace on ​Twitter. 

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Over the weekend, the websites belonging to the Toronto Police Service, the Ottawa Police, the Canadian Parliament, the Supreme Court, and the City of Ottawa were all hit with distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks by a hacker group that goes by the name Aerith. 

According to a press release published by Aerith earlier today, these attacks are meant to call attention to the arrest of a teenage boy in Ottawa, who was charged with 60 criminal acts after being accused of fabricating em​ergencies to get the attention of authorities (otherwise known as swatting). Aerith claims the Ottawa Police have the wrong guy.

Reached by VICE earlier today, Aerith told us they will be posting their proof of the boy's innocence "shortly." In a particularly bizarre twist, the father of the accused, whose identity is being protected under a publication ban in accordance with the Youth Criminal Justice act, read a statement on Aerith's behalf, to delive​r a stern warning to the cops:

"We will not rest, we will not stop until police admit their mistake, and drop all the charges against this innocent youth."

Aerith's own press release hints at what kind of information they claim to possess, which they insist would prove the accused swatter is innocent: "The FBI sent a case file to ottawa police and said something along the lines of "arrest him" and that's exactly what they did, without doing a proper investigation. The basis for arrest? A IP address. The police say that IP addresses cannot be faked, when infact, they can be faked, it's child's play. Anyone with a few minutes spare time can GOOGLE it and find out how to fake your IP address."

To further complicate things, a Twitter account, @ProbablyOn​ion2, which is believed to belong to the individual who had committed the swatting acts that led to the arrest of a teenager, was also hacked by Aerith, who left the following message in ProbablyOnion2's feed:

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Aerith told us they believe this account belongs to the person who framed the accused teenager, who they insist is innocent.

The hacker group also told VICE that their attacks against Canadian government websites won't stop "until charges are cleared." They also indicated that they are helping the boy's father because he's "a nice guy" and "we are helping clear his sons name."

At press time, the Ottawa Police's website was still offline. Reached for comment, the Ottawa Police were not able to comment on the specifics of the swatting case, though a tweet from the @OttawaP​olice account assured its audience the attack from Aerith on its systems was only skin-deep: "We are working to resolve the [sic] sevice issues affecting ottawapolice.ca. Our systems remain secure."

Aerith, conversely, has claimed that they obtained the email logs of the Ottawa Police force. VICE cannot verify this claim. Aerith is also targeting one specific constable, the one who arrested the accused swatter, who they claim has been involved in wrongful arrest incidents before.

Regardless, for the time being we will just have to wait and see if these attacks continue and whether there will be a document dump to substantiate Aerith's claims. While this string of DDOS attacks has certainly caught the attention of the Canadian authorities they have targeted, and most of the mainstream media as a result, Aerith's claims are grandiose, and to back them up will require some serious proof.

Update 11:43 AM: Aerith has confirmed that they are in fact a hacker group and not an individual. They also claim the @ProbablyOnion2 account belongs to the individual who framed the teen accused of swatting, and not the teen himself.

Follow Patrick on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user ​Peoples World

On August 9 in Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown. Besides that basic fact, pretty much everything else is in doubt. Did Brown fight back? We he justified in doing so? Was he running away? Were his hands up, as his supporters—and several witnesses—have long been saying?

For the past three months people in Ferguson and across the nation have been arguing about these things. The town has been rocked by massive protests and  ​remain​s on edge in advance of a grand-jury verdict on whether Wilson will be indicted. The grand jury is reconvening today, but the deadline for them to decide isn't until the first week of January.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency in advance of the grand jury's decision, and everyone seems to be gearing up for potentially violent protests—in other words, we're all assuming that Wilson won't be charged with anything. That's how it goes with police shootings; even when officers have committed what appear to be egregious, obvious crimes, they rarely get punished. Think of the BART cop who shot Oscar Grant in the back of the head on New Year's Day 2009, then swore he thought he was reaching for his Taser. Johannes Mehserle spent less than two years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. Or consider the fact that every cop present for the 2011 beating death of Kelly Thomas got to go home, even Manuel Ramos, who had been charged charged with second-degree murder. Darrien Hunt, holding a blunt samurai sword, was shot six times in the back while running from​ cops in September. A grand jury didn't bother to indict the officer who pulled the trigger. If cops get as far as a courtroom—and that's rare—they have a 50 percent chance of not being convicted. But they don't usually get that far. Cops nationwide continue to have a long leash in terms ​of using deadly force. If a police officer reasonably believes someone, including himself, is being threatened, he is totally justified, the law generally says, in firing his weapons—even if he's wrong.

If Brown was running away when Wilson shot and killed him, he has less of an excuse. A Supreme case called  ​Tennessee​ v. Garner (1985) says that cops may not shoot fleeing suspects just to stop their escape. However, according to Wilson the two men had just fought and Brown had tried to grab his gun, making the cop's fear that Brown was a lethal threat more credible, or at least a decent legal defense strategy.

With no footage of Brown's death, and with Wilson being a cop, chances are that the grand jury won't indict him. A lot of angry people will take that decision as further proof of a fundamentally racist, corrupt power structure in Ferguson and the US. But a non-indictment won't be unusual—when the police shoot people, they generally walk away.   

Now for the rest of this week's bad cops:

–On Saturday, a 12-year​-old boy holding an Airsoft pellet gun was fatally shot by Cleveland police. On Sunday, Tamir E. Rice died after surgery. The rookie cop who shot him has yet to be identified, but he and his partner are both on administrative leave. Tamir's mother, Samaria Rice, claims police refused to let her see her son when she ran to the rec center where he had been shot. Police say that the boy did not listen when he was told to put his hands up, and then he reached for his waistband, leaving the officer no choice but to fire. The boy had an Airsoft gun with its orange safety tip removed, which led to someone calling 911—the dispatcher who took the call was told that it was "probably fake" yet did not tell the officer this important detail. Nor, it seems, did the open-carry laws of Ohio come into play.

–This is not a g​ood month for the Cleveland PD—or rather, it's not a good month for suspects they encounter: On November 13, a 37-year-old mentally ill woman was killed after scuffling with the cops. The family of Tanesa Anderson say they called police to ask for help getting Anderson a psychiatric intervention. According to the family, she passed out after police threw her on the ground. For their part the cops say Anderson struggled and suddenly lost consciousness after she was put in their cruiser car. Whether the officers were fully trained for mental-health crisis intervention is now the question, and is something the Cleveland PD has yet to confirm.

–According to a lawsuit filed by the Ho​me Scho​ol Legal Defense Association on behalf of Jason and Laura Hagan of New Hampton, Missouri, the family was subjected to an unlawf​ul police raid in September 2011. The Hagans, who homeschool their kids, had a Child Protective Service official look at their home over reports that it was "messy." They say they allowed the CPS official to look at the place, but wouldn't let them inside for a follow-up visit. CPS called in Sheriff Darren White of the Nodaway County police department and Deputy David Glidden, who were also refused access by Jason Hagan. Glidden hit both Hagans in the face with pepper spray, and Tasered Jason multiple times as Laura shut the door. Glidden and White then forced themselves into the home, pepper-sprayed the Hagans and their dog, then threatened to shoot the animal. The Hagan children were taken to the hospital to be treated for exposure to pepper spray and were reportedly taken from their parents "for months," according to​ one source. The Hagan parents were arrested and charged with child endangerment and resisting arrest, but a judge later dismissed the charges against them and found that their Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. 

–There are a lot of important questions about US Customs and Border Patrol, such as whether the agency is using the appropriate amount of force in various circ​umstances. But it's a lot more difficult to answer such questions when​ CBP puts 12,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in a box and neglects to answer them. According to the Government Accountability Office report, 11,000 other FOIA requests were closed incorrectly, and had to be reopened. That's some bang-up accountability.

–Cops in Orange County, Ca​lifornia, have decided to post the mugshots and names of men arrested for solicitation online. This isn't a unique practice, but in other California jurisdictions that have decided this technique of naming and shaming is a good deterrent, like Oakland and Fresno, these records are kept online only for a fortnight. However, Orange County keeps them online permanently—185 of them are on the internet right now. And as the LA Times noted, this is not part of the official punishment for solicitation, so you can't plea-bargain it away. It's just a bonus meanness.

–Our Good Cop of the Week is a New Jersey officer who responded to a 911 call on November 16. Guttenberg, New Jersey, officer Steve Pelaez arrived at a house just in time to revive a two-year-old who had fallen unconscious after choking on food and was turning blue. He was in the right place with the right training at the right time, and he saved a life—which is what the police are supposed to be doing.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on ​Twitter.

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Susie and Elizabeth are not the victims' real names, which have been changed in this article for privacy reasons. The names of the alleged perpetrators have been changed for legal reasons.

​ Susie didn't know she would become a victim of sexual exploitation when she first met 24-year-old Tariq. 

It was the summer of 2001 when their eyes across a crowded shopping centre. Susie (then 14) and her mates used to hang out there after ballet class on a Saturday afternoon. She knew Tariq's younger brother, Sajid, from school, and kissed Sajid when she was drunk. She didn't like him in "that" way, but with Tariq it was different.

Susie couldn't have known that the handsome, charming, older Tariq was a serial groomer. But agencies were aware that Tariq and his three brothers were linked to the sexual exploitation and trafficking of dozens of young teenage girls in Rotherham, Sheffield and Bradford.

She probably wouldn't have listened to their concerns anyway. Within 24 hours, Susie was in love. After 48 hours, she went missing. Susie said: "My parents tried everything to keep Tariq away from me, but I thought I was in love with him." 

Twelve months later, Susie was in the care of Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, where her foster family would let Tariq pick her up outside their door.

Tariq was a heroin dealer with big connections. "He was involved in anything that would get him money. He was the one to go get the big deal and give it to his workers. He didn't have people ringing him and asking him for this and that. He never got his hands dirty," says Susie.

Susie occupied a special place in the hierarchy as Tariq's "girlfriend"—along with 18 other girls who had caught his eye—and was subjected to relentless sexual abuse, resulting in two pregnancies. At 14, Susie became immersed in a drug culture where sexual exploitation was the norm. At 16, she became a sex worker and had already had two pregnancies.

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"Susie," a victim of CSE

Over the last few months, it has become clear just how many children were subject to similar atrocities. To those who understand what's going on, the string of disclosures that have emerged since the Rotherham sex scandal won't be surprising. Perhaps the most disturbing fact, though, and the one that the government seems determined to ignore, is that, in towns and cities across England, Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) is just one franchise within a multimillion-pound organized crime network.

Professor Jenny Pearce, Director of ​the International Centre, which researches CSE and trafficking, said: "One of the scandals of our time is that we haven't embraced CSE fully as a form of organized crime. It has lots of different levels and complexities. The trafficking of young people is being organized by very manipulative and sophisticated adults." 

When I asked the Home Office if Theresa May, the Home Secretary, had ever made this connection in any speeches about CSE, they couldn't point me to any.

Searching through newspaper cuttings, the horror of child prostitution in Northern towns first hit the headlines in the 1990s, when it was revealed that children from care homes in Bradford were being sold for sex in the city's notorious red light district in Manningham, right under the noses of the authorities. Barnardo's opened Streets and Lanes in Manningham in '94, which was the first agency in the UK dedicated to working with children involved in sexual exploitation, and, within a few years, similar projects were operating in Sheffield and Rotherham. Twenty years on, the problem remains.

Susie's story isn't extraordinary. Across the board, the grooming of children for sex follows a gradual but startlingly similar pattern to involving young people in the sex and drugs industry. In 2000, The Home Office issued statutory guidelines quoting research by Streets and Lanes, saying, "A girl is identified by an older man who becomes a 'boyfriend.' Gradually, the boyfriend ensures the girl becomes emotionally dependent on him, initiates her into sex and detaches her from other influences in her life—friends and family—using emotional and physical violence. This abuse progresses into the older man selling her for sex."

I've been taken to derelict houses in Rotherham and Keighley by victims who had no connection with each other, and yet all had been abused at the same addresses at various times over the past ten years. These were known as "party houses." A mother trembled as she told me how her daughter had been injected with heroin by her abuser while under the influence of date rape drugs. She went on to develop an addiction not by choice, but by force. She was 14. 

Susie knew that the "parties" she was taken to were not what they initially seemed. Apart from a mattress on the floor and some condoms, the party houses were completely empty. They were well known to the local community as brothels, and, of course, drugs and sexual exploitation went hand in hand. "Tariq said he was going to put crack in a spliff and get a girl addicted," says Susie. "You might just think you are having a bit of weed, but dealers are soaking it in heroin. That's how they make the money—you get addicted."

Shakeel Aziz is a youth worker with the Star project in Keighley and has been delivering ​anti-grooming strategies for over ten years. To him, child grooming and other organized crime are deeply intertwined. "Grooming is an extracurricular activity to an already criminal lifestyle," he says. 

Children are inducted into this criminal world at a very young age. In Keighley, I encountered boys of about eight or nine who appeared to be playing innocently in a local park. The kids told me they were "employed" to provide unobtrusive surveillance to alert dealers to any strangers or unusual activity around the "party houses." By the time the spotter kids reach their teens, they are immersed in the predatory culture of exploitation.

Aziz told me how it works. "During the day, young 'Mr. A' works as a drug dealer for a local drug supplier supplying cannabis and cocaine. 'Mr. A' has a friend who rides with him, and helps him out. He's selling drugs and making about £200 per day for his own profit. The grooming starts when Mr. Street Dealer is cruising in his car with a big wad of cash, a couple of bottles of vodka, some cocaine and cannabis. 'Mr. A' sees two young girls walking on the street, or in town, and it's as easy as parking next to them and sparking up conversation."

Mothers in Rotherham told me how their girls are targeted from the age of 11, in the primary school playground. By the time they transfer to secondary school, they are befriended by older, charming boys handing out soft drinks laced with vodka to unsuspecting children. 

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Angela Sinfield

From 2001, ​Angela Sinfield successfully campaigned with Ann Cryer, MP for Keighley, for changes in the law to enable prosecution of CSE. Sinfield's daughter was embroiled in exploitation and, for four years, and she spent every waking moment trying to protect her daughter from a powerful, violent gang who, it seemed, were immune to prosecution. As a councillor for Keighley on Bradford Council from 2006 to 2008, she continued to raise her concerns with police, the council, social services, Barnardo's, Parents against Child Exploitation and the Home Office.

Sinfield walked me through the deserted Keighley alleyways where she says children are still being groomed. Hidden in the bushes were discarded pizza boxes, sweet wrappers, fag packets and broken vodka bottles. Innocent enough on face value, but Sinfield said: "I've seen girls in school uniforms sat waiting to be picked up. I've seen the older men passing bottles to the girls out the car windows. The dealers and the girls sit on the wall and it's obvious they are together. You can hear the girls on their mobile phones arranging to meet. Once the girls are drunk, the cars pull up to take them to a nearby deserted school playground. The school caretaker goes every day to clear the yard because there are always bottles, cans and used condoms—it's still a very big problem."

We visited the alley at night in torrential rain, but prestige cars still flew up and down the modest terraced streets, eyeing us with suspicion. When we retreated to observe from a distance, we saw the cars visibly slowing down to crawl the kerbs.

For all the progress she made, Sinfield's campaigning hit a brick wall when she claimed it was organized crime involving prominent members of the community. "An agency told me I was on my own," she said. "I said, 'That's fine, love, I've always been on my own.'"

"If they [the gangs] didn't have the money from the drugs, there wouldn't be half the exploitation," she continued. Why? "Because it needs the money. They need it to treat the girls, to buy the flash cars and all the things they give them. They wouldn't be able to do it [without drugs money]."

Two years after Susie met Tariq, another victim, Elizabeth, also came to him through Sajid. Elizabeth told us how she "accidentally" bumped into a group of young Asian lads—including Sajid—during a Saturday afternoon shopping trip. They were introduced by a friend who was already involved in exploitation. Elizabeth—then 13—and her friends began to meet the men regularly, having a drink and a laugh in Rotherham's town centre and Clifton Park. There was always a bottle of vodka and a spliff in the glove compartment of the sports cars driven by Sajid and his brothers. She felt part of a group of older, more exciting friends, who had money, cars and time to shower her with attention.

Taken in by the intimidating charisma of the gang, at 14, Elizabeth was subjected to a horrifying initiation. She was gang raped while another friend looked on in terror, fearing she would be next. The men—a group of about six or more—began filming. Such videos fetch good money when uploaded to international porn sites.

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Teenagers in a Rotherham park

Beyond getting girls to drink and drug themselves by choice—or pure brute force—the groomers have other tactics, too. On one occasion, Tariq took 14-year-old Susie's drink to a "party" and her drink was spiked. "I can't remember much about it, to be honest," she told us. "It went on all day and all night. We just had sex, to the point that I became really, really sore. That's all I remember about it, the sex. I don't even know how long I was there for. Later, I was moved to a house down the road."

Elizabeth was sold for sex to men in cars, parks, alleyways, hotels, and party houses across Yorkshire. The deals were always done away from the eyes and ears of the victims. Sometimes it was for cash, sometimes for favours. She was passed around gang members for "fun," while anyone else would have to pay. 

"They used to come and get loads of Asians to come and have sex with me. Older ones, too," she said. The money was made from the men that the gang supplied girls to. Elizabeth was en-route to yet another party house when the driver told her, "We've made a lot of money from you." She was told that blow-jobs from kids were worth more than blow-jobs from adults.

Elizabeth received texts from the gang all day and all night. She would have sex with whoever, wherever she was instructed to, for fear of what would happen if she didn't.

"They used to go on the phone and say, 'Oh we've got a lass here. Come round, and we'll have a right laugh, have a party,'" Elizabeth said. "So there might be eight or nine of them walking through the door, all in high spirits. They've got the Jack Daniels, the fags, and a bit of cocaine. Then you realize, Shit, I'm in this house and there are loads of them. You're the only girl and they're here for you. They are running around naked, getting right excited because it's their turn next to have a shag. And you can't get out of the situation."

Girls would often take someone—another girl—with them for safety. "If they're bringing 20 men with them, it means I'll only have to do ten," says Elizabeth. "It's easier: Get in there, give them what they want, and get out. Because they are not going to allow you out of the house otherwise." 

She pauses, looking up for reassurance. "I were 14. I were a kid."

It's been ten years since Elizabeth's abuse stopped, but she's clearly still fighting her demons. Half an hour prior to our conversation she had been a self-assured, confident young professional, determined to speak her mind about her experiences. Afterwards, she couldn't say a word.

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An alleyway in Keighley

In child exploitation—and other areas of organized crime—intimidation is used to keep people compliant, and it went far beyond the girls themselves. Their families and communities were affected, too. It only takes one firebombing, one bad beating, to guarantee years of silence. In their communities, these men are known to be powerful and violent. One father told me that his daughter begged him not to say anything for fear of what the gang would do: "She said you will end up getting killed, you'll end up getting burned." She was 13. 

Gill Gibbons of Parents Against Child Exploitation confirmed what other agencies had told me—that there was frustration that the same perpetrators in Rotherham and Bradford had been identified by dozens of different victims time and time again and yet none were brought to justice.

Sinfield and a group of mothers identified over 50 alleged perpetrators that they claimed were exploiting their daughters. The list of names were handed to a local councillor, the MP, and the police. None of the men were ever investigated or prosecuted, nor were the victims interviewed. The men on the list were the sons of important members of the community.

Aziz says he has noticed the business becoming more streamlined and sophisticated, with refined front operations through which to launder money and political and community influence to protect the assets. For exploitation to operate successfully, it needs an infrastructure. Like the Keighley gangs, Tariq's extended family own a string of businesses—taxi companies, takeaways, and properties. The family had—and still have—powerful political connections and family members are serving police officers, councillors, magistrates and solicitors.

The Rotherham sex scandal, though, has catalyzed the hunt to bring sex gangs to justice. Both West and South Yorkshire police have re-opened investigations into allegations of historic CSE. In Rotherham, two major investigations are underway involving 283 victims and 18 suspects. This time around, of course, victims seeking justice are older and less malleable. They won't be silenced so easily. Currently, three men are under arrest for offences that took place in 2001.

Councils, social workers, the police and the Home Office have known that children from across the North have been sold for sex for decades. However, there is real reluctance to admit that CSE is just one franchise within a multimillion-pound organized crime network dealing in sex and drugs. 

This year, Britain ​offset £10 billion ($15.7 billion) in revenue from drugs and prostitution against the national debt. Yet no one wants to recognize how much of that figure has been generated, or at what cost, by children like Susie and Elizabeth.

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Image ​via Wikimedia Commons

This post originally appeared in VICE UK​

"I remember not getting out of bed other than to use the loo. My friend had to stay with me just to make sure I was eating," says ​Niyi Maximus Crown, a 25-year-old man who was diagnosed HIV positive in December 2011. "I didn't even recognize my own thinking voice. I felt like I was going to be single for the rest of my life. The feelings of worthlessness made me angry and I started to hate myself."

Last week, ​Public Health England (PHE) released its ​latest report on HIV. "In the UK there are 107,800 people living with HIV," says Eleanor Briggs, Assistant Director of Policy and Campaigns at National AIDS Trust. In London, almost one in eight gay and bisexual men are HIV positive. Based on the stats from PHE, Briggs adds, "We can say about a third of people living with HIV infection, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, were resident in London."

What's more frightening is that PHE estimates that 24 percent of the people in the UK with HIV are currently undiagnosed. 

Early diagnosis of HIV is crucial. Briggs states that a late diagnosis can mean treatment becomes less effective, reducing a person's lifespan. Medication also helps stop the spread of HIV by lowering the amount of HIV virus in a positive person to undetectable levels so they are ​unlikely to pass it on. 

And yet few people are talking honestly about HIV. In terms of everyday knowledge on the gay scene, HIV exists somewhere in limbo between the grim ​tombstone adverts of the 80s, statistics that get bounced around annually from numerous health organizations and the raw realities of chemsex-fuelled bareback sessions. The subject usually makes an appearance in the media once a year when ​World AIDS Day rolls around. A leading HIV consultant ​told the BBC that there's a "complete lack of awareness" of the risks among many gay men in the UK.

As gay venues up and down the country prepare to mark World Aids Day (on December 1) with fundraising events for various LGBT charities, though, how many people do you know are comfortable with talking openly about being HIV positive? Do you even know anyone that's openly HIV positive? 

The truth is that, as a community, we still drive people who live with HIV into the closet. It's not surprising that most gay men feel they want to keep their status private. Many struggled during their lives to come out as gay to their friends, families or work colleagues, and they may not even be out in all aspects of their lives. Having to then deal with the stigma that still exists around being HIV positive is akin to having to deal with a second coming out and, once again, another round of judgement and shame. 

I asked a few HIV negative people I know to share their thoughts. "If you get HIV from unprotected sex you deserve it," said one. Many might privately agree with him. But does that mean they deserve to feel forever alienated by society?

Niyi is better known in London's gay clubs as Maximus Crown. He is one of the only DJs that is publicly out about being HIV positive, which is a big deal. The UK gay scene has very few openly HIV positive DJs, drag queens or promoters. But Niyi didn't really have the choice of whether he should put his status out there—his best friend at the time decided to go public with it on Facebook for him.

"My best friend stayed with me every day to make sure that I wasn't alone, didn't starve or try and kill myself," Niyi recalls. "Six months later I decided to distance myself from him because I started to notice things about our friendship that I wasn't OK with. To get back at me he went onto the Facebook event page for a party I was booked to DJ at and posted a series of comments about me being HIV positive."

The comments included accusations that Niyi had been having unprotected sex while aware he was HIV positive. "When it happened I wasn't angry, I just wanted to log out of the universe. If I could have closed my eyes and stopped existing I would have, but it forced me to own my status, which in turn made me more comfortable discussing it publicly."

If you are old enough to remember ​the campaigns of the 80s, then safer sex and the issues around HIV would have been drummed into your consciousness. But with the advent of combination therapy and the dramatic development of antiretroviral drugs that revolutionized care over the last fifteen years, AIDS-related deaths dropped substantially. Between 2001 and 2011, the rate of new infections ​dropped by 20 percent. 

As the number of deaths fell, though, so too did government resources that educated people about HIV. Schools barely touched on the subject. To most people, it was seen as a disease that only affected poorer countries. It's no wonder that the number of infections in young people has risen comparatively steeply compared to other age groups. As the ​United Nations Population Fund say, young people remain at the centre of the HIV epidemic in terms of rates of infection, vulnerability, impact, and potential for change. The young have grown up in a world changed by AIDS, but so many still lack the correct knowledge about how to prevent HIV infection. ​

For many recently infected guys, getting their head around living with HIV is one of the biggest challenges.

I spoke to a young man, James Hanson-McCormick, 24, who was 18 when he was diagnosed with HIV. "I had no idea what HIV was or how it was contracted. I have had six years to think about my status, and not a single day goes by without me thinking about it. It's so hard. I wish I knew more [then], I wish I had been better educated and that I knew enough to try and prevent it happening."

It might sound naïve, but James isn't alone in his experience. ​Luke Alexander is from Oldbury, a small town outside Birmingham, and was diagnosed HIV positive in June 2013. He was 18. "If I was in a sexual relationship with a guy when I was 15 or 16 it was monogamous," he tells me. "When I hit 18 I treated myself to a fancy phone and discovered these apps and clubs. You're new to everything and people say 'download this' and you find people want to hook up with you. It's validation. You become quite promiscuous."

Luke's candidness took me aback. "I became incredibly egotistical and quite narcissistic," he admits. "Add drugs and alcohol into the equation and it becomes quite a habit. One thing led to another and I didn't take any precautions."

Will Harris, Head of Media for ​Terrence Higgins Trust, says that while research shows that most gay men use condoms most of the time, it only takes one instance of unprotected sex for HIV to be passed on. "Condom use has to be consistent... It's basic human nature to under-estimate risk, so our community needs to keep finding ways to reinforce the message that 'He looks fine, it'll probably be OK' won't give you the protection that a condom will."

Earlier this year, Luke ​made headlines when he went on ITV's This Morning to discuss his HIV status. "I never heard anything about HIV in school," he said. "You can become a bit reckless when you come of age, but it's far worse if you have no basis of knowledge to refer to."

Like James, Luke's ​sex and relationship education in school was virtually non-existent. "It lasted a few hours. If people weren't there, they didn't receive it. While they stressed the importance of contraception, it was for pregnancy. When I asked about anal sex, they said, 'We don't recommend it.' I felt embarrassed. I just wanted to hear their perspective."

Harris agrees that the education system has failed in this regard, saying that young gay men are "generally frozen out by the current approach to sex education in schools."

"The past is the past, though, and you can't change that," James reasons. "The great thing now is I'm healthy and happy. I've been on meds for five years now and doing so well. My health, in general, is alright."

But living with HIV isn't just about monitoring your physical wellbeing. The emotional strain of the constant check-ups and coming to terms with the virus can also present its own psychological strain."Physically I'm fine," James says. "I do suffer with depression, but that's down to several things—not just my HIV. Sometimes it's difficult juggling lots of meds every day. Often my depression gets bad and tells me I'm worthless and to not take it. But I have faith in medicine that one day there will be a cure." His biggest wish is more altruistic still: "More knowledge and understanding around HIV and AIDS."

For many recently infected guys, getting their head around living with HIV is one of the biggest challenges. Stigma is a major issue.

"Robert," 29, who asked not to be identified by his real name, has been HIV positive since 2007. A casual partner sexually assaulted him when he was passed out after a heavy drugs session. Only his closest friends and immediate family are aware of his status. He puts this down to the assumptions that people make about those who are positive. "It's not the fact that it's an unattractive quality [to be HIV positive], it's that people think you had a choice. You hear a lot about bareback parties and people who think that those who have a lot of condom-less casual sex 'deserve' to get HIV. I don't judge anybody but I don't want to be put in that category. I'm not ashamed of being HIV positive, but it does affect how people perceive you if they don't know you."

Robert has told around ten partners about his status when they've asked about barebacking. "I don't have unprotected sex unless we are both aware of our status," he says. Even so, he says it's still common for HIV positive guys to be afraid to disclose their status to others in the same position: "I've even met positive guys who I've been honest with, but they have lied about being positive because they don't want to say they are."

It's upsetting to think that we are forcing so many thousands of gay men into a situation where they feel alienated by their own community. It takes a strong person to rise up against a tide of possible condemnation and be among the first to speak up.

Luke lost friends after going public about his diagnosis. People stopped answering his calls. He believes it was because they were afraid to be associated with somebody that was openly HIV positive. Similarly, when he confided in a friend about his status, she was more concerned that she'd shared his wine glass than how Luke was feeling. (Incidentally, if you labor under similar misconceptions, HIV cannot and ​will not be spread by sharing glasses.) 

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HIV particles infecting a human T cell. Image by the National Institute of Health ​via Wikimedia Commons

Sadly, despite it now being considered to be a very manageable long-term health condition, HIV is still widely misunderstood. "You can sit on a park bench and talk for two hours with someone about your diabetes," Luke says. "But you can't do that with HIV because you'll often get a look of fear and shock."

Niyi eventually reached a point when he had enough of feeling ashamed. "I woke up one day and was like, life isn't always going to be easy. Self-pity isn't fierce and it isn't fun. Doing things and being around people that encouraged me to feel good about myself was such a big help."

There is one hurdle that remains for him, though, and that's relationships. He's been single for seven years. "The thought of being rejected by a guy because of it terrifies me. I feel that it will always hold me back until I am able to get past that final fear."

James has been luckier in love. He met his boyfriend 18 months ago and they married last August.

Niyi, Luke and James are heroes to me. They have decided that it's time to challenge the stigma that looms around HIV for no other reason than people are not talking about an issue that affects us all. The education system is broken, so they've taken it upon themselves to speak out about it. They have taken a situation that could have stripped them completely, that could, if they let it, absolutely define them, but instead have turned it into something powerful. 

As his fears subsided, Luke was inspired by another HIV activist and started blogging about his experience. "It got a lot of attention. I wanted to help people understand and it was a feeling of empowerment. The good reactions that followed confirmed it was the right thing to do," he says. He now also writes monthly about the subject for Gay Times.

Niyi agrees. "There are so many people suffering unnecessarily because they feel that being HIV nullifies everything good about who they are, but it really doesn't. Everybody deserves to wake up feeling like they are of value and if all I have to do is talk about my situation in order for people to see that, then that's what I will do. People need to know that someone's HIV status is not an indication of what kind of person they are."

Follow Cliff Joannou on ​Twitter

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Image via Stoned Girls

How much is a year's worth of weed, exactly? According to Julie Anthone of the North Carolina-based website ​Stoned Girls, it's an eighth of pot every two weeks. That's enough to keep most daily smokers high as fuck until the end of 2015, and that's exactly how much kush Anthone's website is going to rain down on one of its loyal readers. 

The free weed contest was created to celebrate the September launch of Stoned Girls. The 13 women who run the site (yes, it's an all-woman business) decided that, should the winner reside in one of the four states where recreational weed smoking is legal, a Stoned Girls representative will fly out to personally deliver the goods. For those of you who don't live in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, or Alaska—sorry, but you'll have to settle for a cash prize and buy your own bud.

Stoned Girls is part of the emerging market of fetish sites devoted to pictures of hot, often naked, ladies hitting the bong. As marijuana legalization ripples across the states, both the ability to shoot such material legally and the pubic fascination with sexy potheads are on the rise. While a fetish related to smoking ( ​capnolagnia) has likely existed for as long as tobacco has been inhaled, the weed fetish market is just finding its footing.

" I think that there are a lot of reasons why people get off on images of girls smoking pot," Stoned Girls staff writer Rebecca Hourselt told VICE. "The 'bad girl' image appeals to a lot of men."

Ironically, the market for sexy "bad girls" smoking weed on camera only grows as weed becomes a more acceptable, less "bad" thing of which to partake. Sites like Girls​ Toking and Tits and ​Hits, and books like Richard Kern's ​Contact High cater to weed fetishists—but one thing that sets Stoned Girls apart is Hourselt's self-exploratory writing​s on sex, weed, and the fetish lifestyle.

"I paid many tens of thousands of dollars to go to a major university to learn how to write, but I also spent a significant amount of time in women's studies classes," wrote Hourselt in a Stoned Girls  ​post titled "Is What We Do Objectifying Women?"

"What can I say, I love vaginas," Hourselt wrote.

Since launching two months ago, traffic on Stoned Girls has grown to 175,000 visitors a month, according to the site's media kit, with tens of thousands of followers on  ​Facebook and ​Instagram.

The weed smoking fetish porn market is emerging. But it has a direct relative in cigarette fetish porn, where sites range from the personal ( Smo​kingVanessa.com) to the Smoking Ladies Lung Damage message​ board, where "ladies who love making their lungs as black as possible" can chat and maybe meet up with "men with a fetish for damaged lungs."

But weed fetish sites don't set out to fetishize lung cancer. Instead they play on varieties of bad girl appeal and on that most basic of male turn-ons: the phallic symbol. When sexy girls put oversized joints between their lips and fiercely suck the smoke into their mouths, guys naturally think of blowjobs. That is, when those guys aren't already watching a video of a girl giving a blowjob with a mouthful of pot smoke—because that's also a thing.

Blowjob symbology aside, Hourselt says that in the fetish world, bad girls are queens.

"I have met several women who are the dominants in their BDSM relationships, and I think there is something about a powerful bad girl that really gets men off," Hourselt told VICE. "The other side of the 'bad girl' image is the thought that this girl is doing something illegal and 'naughty' and needs to be punished."

Follow Mary Emily O'Hara on ​Twitter.

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Photo by the author

There's a big empty space where Shawn Landa's house used to be.

Driving through Moon Township, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, middle-class homes come in a steady, orderly succession, like a tracking shot out of American Beauty. But then there's the gap between 1654 and 1658 Charlton Heights Road, where only a toolshed remains at the far back end of the property behind a large patch of grass. A sign from the realtor trying to sell the empty lot flaps in the wind.

About a year ago, Landa, a 47-year-old inconsistently employed construction worker fresh from a stint in rehab, went into the basement of the home he once shared with his now-estranged wife and children and uncapped a gas pipe. He flooded the house with gas and then took a nap, hoping that he would die before he woke. When Landa came to, he lit a cigarette, and his house promptly exploded.

Later, from his hospital bed, Landa would tell police he had been depressed over his lack of work, lack of a car, and lack of contact with his wife and kids. He had apparently cut his wrists a few weeks before the October 12 explosion. This latest, more spectacular suicide attempt was inspired by a movie about the Hindenburg, the hydrogen-powered German airship that burst over New Jersey in 1937. Last week, Landa was sentenced to ten years i​n prison on a host of charges including arson and reckless endangerment charges.

According to the police report, Robert and Jackie Kwolton were walking on Charlton Heights Road just before the explosion and smelled gas. The blast slammed Robert to the ground as Jackie took cover behind a car. Richard Ruffing, who lived two doors down from Landa, returned home from a wedding with his wife to see police and firefighters evacuating their street. 

"There were wood and shingles hanging from all the trees," Ruffing told me. He also saw Landa's high school diploma, completely unharmed, in a nearby yard.

When they were finally allowed back home, the Ruffings discovered Landa's chimney had landed in their living room, creating an eight-foot-wide hole on its entrance. In total, nine homes around Landa's were damaged and one neighbor sent to the hospital with cuts and bruises, according to the police report.

The explosion also literally blew the cover of a marijuana g​row house. As they evacuated the street, police apparently got a whiff of pot coming from the house of 61-year-old William Amend. He later attracted attention by sneaking back into his house and hauling out a large trash bag, police say. A few days later, the cops came back with a search warrant and allegedly found a whole operation: fertilizer, insecticides, grow lights, a filtration system, and seven recently harvested plants.

A few days after the incident, Ruffing went to the hospital to visit Alan Lisica, the neighbor injured in the blast, as well as Landa. Ruffing said that though he'd never been close to the Landas, he knew there had been tension in the house with the sudden disappearance of the wife and kids and a front window that had been broken and boarded up. (Ironically, Landa fixed the window shortly before blowing up his house, according to Ruffing.)

When Ruffing went to visit, Landa was still unconscious and covered in white bandages. "He looked like a polar bear sitting down," Ruffing said. "Tape and gauze were even over his eyelids."

Things got worse when he woke up. On October 24, Chief Deputy Fire Marshall Don Brucker and Allegheny County Police Detective Jason Costanzo visited Landa in the hospital. From Constanzo's affidavit:

"After CDFM Brucker explained the scene investigation, I explained to Landa what I had discovered while talking to his wife, employer, neighbors, injured victims and witnesses. I informed Landa that I knew that just before the explosion, he had spoken to his wife on the phone, was hung up on, and called back to leave a voice mail, expressing his love for her. As I was relaying this information to Landa, I noticed that he had dipped his head, appeared to tear up and began taking deeper breaths. In an attempt to understand what was upsetting Landa, I explained to him that he would feel much better once he got what was bothering him off his chest. Landa looked up and explained, 'I did it.'"

When the case went to court, Landa was up against 26 ​charges; the police and prosecutors multiplied the counts of arson and criminal mischief for every home in range of the blast.

But does it make sense to put Landa in the hellhole that is America's prison system for a decade? To be sure, his recreation of the Hindenburg in suburbia caused thousands of dollars in property damage and put nearly a dozen lives at risk. He should be punished for that. But this wasn't an act of vindictiveness or terrorism, but the desperation of an addled, suicidal mind.

Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist and the author of Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It, told me that before the 1970s, someone like Landa would have likely been committed to a state mental hospital.

"Those all closed and people were discharged with the promise they would get the same level of care within the community," Kupers said. "That has been false." In fact, according to Kupers, funding for mental health services has been reduced across most states for the past few decades.

​As the inmate population has ballooned in that time, the prison system has scooped up a large population of the mentally ill, Kupers added. Numbers vary from study to study, but in 2006, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 56 percent of federal inmates, 45 percent of state ones, and 64 of those in local jails had a psychiatric disorder of some kind.

Kupers doesn't expect that Landa will get much treatment inside. "People think prison is where the mentally ill finally get treatment. That is also false," he says. In most facilities, mental healthcare is limited to quick visits to a psychiatrist and daily meds, "which are mostly used to sedate," according to Kupers. The violent and aggressive take up most of the system's stretched resources. Depressives are mostly ignored.

Richard Ruffing, whose living room was impaled by Landa's chimney, has perhaps the most reason to be angry at him. If not for a last-minute change of plans, Ruffing's grandkids would have been at his house that day. Still, he was surprised to learn Landa is doing time.

"Huh," he said. "I would have assumed there would have been more of a hospitalization response for that."

Nick Keppler is a Pennsylvania-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, Nerve.com, Slate and Pittsburgh City Paper.

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​Photo ​via Flickr user viajor.

After discovering that a Quebec provincial police officer would be getting off scot free after killing a five-year-old in a fatal car crash, the reaction from both the child's family and the Canadian public was clear: ​shock and disbelief. But the growing distrust between Quebeckers and law enforcement comes amid several other questionable traffic-related verdicts that suggest that police get different treatment than civilians when it comes to breaking traffic laws.

The question on many people's minds was: How could a cop get away with fatally injuring a child while 26-year-old Emma Czornobaj was recently ​convicted of criminal negligence and dangerous driving after stopping her car on a highway to rescue a family of ducks in 2010 led to an accident that killed a 50-year-old man and his 16-year-old daughter? In that case, the Crown prosecutor asked for a nine-month prison ter​m.

On top of that, a few days before Czornobaj's initial court hearing, two Quebec City police officers were involved in the suspicious death of cyclist Guy Bl​ouin, who died after being run into by a police cruiser on September 4. He was allegedly riding his bike the wrong way down a one-way street when the police car backed over him at high speed. Given the information that has ​been made public about the SQ's independent investigation, it is likely no criminal prosecution will come from it.

Three days after Blouin's death, a man was arrested for ​armed assault after rolling over a policeman's foot with his car—allegedly on purpose. The man was apparently angry with the officer because he had been issued a highway safety code violation ticket as part of a traffic control operation.

But in an unexpected turn of events, Quebec newspaper La Presse published a story quoting confidential documents that indicate the accident leading to the five-year-old's death ha​ppened during a surveillance o​peration. The independent investigation report filed by Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) investigators to the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DCPP) states the Sûreté Du Québec (SQ) officer was trailing a person of interest during a major Unité permanente anticorruption (UPAC) investigation targeting "provincial MPs, very influential businessmen and high-ranking government official." The leaked report also says "a physical surveillance was necessary" to keep track of the suspect's movements, essentially clearing the unidentified 29-year-old officer involved in the crash. Even though the name of the subject was redacted, police had forgotten to omit the name from a photocopy of one of the investigating officer's notebooks. La Presse then confirmed the person of interest as Robert Parent, former director of the Quebec Liberal Party.

In a statement published Fri​day afternoon, Quebec's DCPP stated that it didn't believe there was enough evidence to lay charges against the SQ officer, suggesting that if there were any violations to the Highway Safety Code, they were justified, explaining that agents in a surveillance operation "must act promptly and are authorised to exceed the speed limits if the circumstances allow it." The DCPP also hinted that the father of the child who died, Mike Belance, who was also driving the car hit by police, might have been partly responsible for the accident.

But while this may conveniently take some of the heat off the SQ for their decision not to charge the as-yet-unnamed officer, the report seems to bring up more questions than answers.

In a press release published Friday evening, advocacy group la Ligue des droits et libertés raised even more questions "casting doubts on the independence of the very process of the investigation," including how and when police determined that the father was, as the DCPP suggested, partly responsible.

"From my perspective it doesn't change much," says police expert Stéphane Berthomet. "This has always been a problem for all police forces: to decide what to do when there is an accident and a third party is injured." In this particular case Berthomet questions the risk assessment that was made.

It might be OK to cross on a red light or to skip a stop sign, but in his opinion there was "no reason to take such extreme risks" as driving over 120 km/h to catch up with a target who could easily be found again later on.

"We wonder how this [leak] could have happened," Jean-Philippe Guay, press secretary to Minister of Public Safety Lise Thériault, told VICE. "This is not supposed to happen," Guay said. While he fears the information made public by the media—which includes the name of a high-ranking target in a UPAC investigation—might hinder a long-lasting investigation into corruption and illegal political financing, he also recognizes that this story reminds us that public perception of "police investigating police" is still very negative.

According to Berthomet, the information about the recent case must have come from "someone really well-informed," either close to SPVM investigators or from within the DCPP's office. "It can't be someone from the outside."

But withholding compromising information and leaking positive information to the media is a damage-control strategy that police have used for decades, according to the Collective Opposed to Police Brutali​ty (COBP), who identified this as one of 12 systemic problems with police investigations into police-related incidents.

Guay told VICE that the Minister of Public Safety has made the implementation of an independent investigation bureau a "priority," and that the bureau should be functional by the end of 2015 or early 2016. Until then, the Minister does not want to interfere in police-led investigations, which Guay reiterated are "independent and rigorous."

The outrage over this case is further fuelled by continuing evidence of a widespread culture within police forces to bend rules, and of police officers' ability to ignore their responsibility for decisions they make while on duty. It speaks to larger concerns about a culture of abuse of authority and a lack of accountability, in a system where Quebec police officers most often than not have total impunity when they kill or injure civilians while in service—even when they take unnecessary risks, as illustrated recently in the Villanu​eva case.

Indeed, while the burden of proof is always in favour of police officers, the same cannot be said of civilians. "We understand that police are not ordinary citizens, and that's not right," former Justice Minister Marc Bellemare told La Presse on Sunday about the recent incident. "I'm convinced anyone else would have been accused."

Independent investigations are a key part in a system where police officers more often than not have total impunity when they kill or injure civilians while in service—even when they seemingly take unnecessary risks as in the most recent case. That it took the death of an innocent five-year-old child to make it obvious shows how deep the roots of police impunity actually runs.

SQ spokesperson Christine Coulombe declined VICE's request for an interview. A Ministry of Justice public relations officer directed us to the DCPP for comments, the DCPP hadn't returned any of our calls before publication.

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Let's start with a thought experiment: You're making an argument, for some silly reason, that Danny DeVito is the Antichrist. For proof, you can only use publicly available information. In this scenario, you can't, for example, claim a friend of a friend worked wardrobe on Throw Momma from the Train and saw 666 carved into his taint. Your challenge is to pool an array of decent examples from his known past to support the idea that he is Beelzebub. To this end, maybe you'll touch on his ​death scen​e at the end of Batman Returns, every moment of his performance in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or whatever #TrollFoot is... What I'm sure wouldn't end up on your evidence stack is that music video for One Direction's single "Steal My Girl," where the DeVito plays an eccentric director trying to urge the boy band to "lose their inhibitions."

But that's not how William Tapley, self-proclaimed "Third Eagle of the Apocalypse" and "Co-Prophet of the End Times," plays this game:​

If you didn't watch all 12 minutes and 39 seconds of the the video, that's fine. No one should. The main thrusts of his arguments are encoded in the music video's symbolism, specifically how it's proof of an Illuminati conspiracy to bring about the Apocalypse. "The scene begins in the desert and ends with rain," he says, which is clearly symbolic of the Antichrist bringing rain to a parched Earth. He points out that DeVito's El Dorado has three sixes—not together—on its license plate. And that two dudes carry a red couch, a stand-in for the Second (Red) Horseman of the Apocalypse.

This isn't Tapley's first rambling rodeo—no one makes just one video like this. In his examination of a scene with two sumo wrestlers, he gets self-referential by claiming it's "reminiscent of the scene in 'Gangnam Style' where the man in yellow, representing Pope Benedict after he is defeated by the Antichrist [duh], drives off in a car with a license plate with three fives on it." (The fives are symbolic of the Catholic Church, apparently.) It's all confusing, and best left to the mental septic tank.

But one thing I couldn't stop asking myself after watching this video  was, What's the whole point of creating and posting this video at all? If it were pushing an idea like "9/11 was an inside job," or "The government puts mind-control drugs in the country's water supply," the goal would obviously be to expose the nefarious schemes of the evil men (or lizards) who control the world. And, sure, this video is ostensibly attempting to expose the Illuminati. But if you're a true believer like Tapley, isn't the approaching Apocalypse cause for celebration? Christians have been waiting for it to jump off for 2,000 years, after all.

"People have an ambivalent relationship with that kind of conspiracy," said Dr. Michael Wood, a professor of psychology at the University of Winchester who's authored numerous studies on conspiracy believers. "Secular theories categorize what 'they' are doing as bad. But when you get into the more religiously themed ones, things get tricky. Ultimately, the endgame of this is Jesus coming back and everything being great."

However, there's another thing going on here. That symbolism in the video—DeVito's triple-sixed license plate, the couch-horse of the apocalypse—may not just be an announcement about Doomsday, or gloating by the Illuminati because they've usurped the Vatican. This could be a case of the Powers That Be trying to use sympathetic magic, the performing of a shamanistic ritual that brings about, well, pretty much whatever they want.

This idea goes way back, beyond Voodoo dolls, all the way to cavemen. Some theorize that the paintings of animals being hunted down on cave walls were painted before the hunt actually took place as a ritual to ensure the hunters' success. So to Tapley, Danny DeVito shown biting into an apple in the video is an attempt by the Illuminati who created the video to (*fingers crossed*) bring the real Antichrist to life, who will then bite into the apple of our souls! Highlighting this fact will, theoretically, expose the sympathetic magicians and get them to stop their wicked deeds. (Although, again, if you're a believer, wouldn't you not want them to be stopped?)

But these conspiracy videos aren't cute bits of  harmless inanity for all. They're hurtful to one very specific group—other conspiracists.

"Ask your average high school student what the Illuminati is, they'll tell you it's this secret society of celebrities and rap stars," said Mark Dice. "What's been lost is the real Illuminati."

​Dice is a conspiracist who's self-published a slew of volumes about the Illuminati, including 2013's Illuminati in the Music Industry, which focused on the belief that musicians such as Rick Ross and Christina Aguilera are members of the shadow government. "I used the celebrity phenomenon as bait, really, to rope people in and them feed them real issues," he said. Issues such as the vast, shadowy network of power brokers who introduce global policy and decide when wars are waged and who fights in them.

But being allowed to use social media to get his message out is a double-edged sword. While Dice's YouTube channel has received more than 85 million views, the social media landscape has polluted the message he's preaching. "Pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube, someone interested in the Illuminati would have to search for themselves," said Dice. "They'd have this burning desire to figure out this world we live in, to see these organizations that shape the political landscape." But now? "They're introduced to this material on a surface level, and it's blown into this mythological fairytale. The truth has been lost in this viral explosion of data."

This infighting amongst Illuminati conspirators isn't unique, either. The 9/11 "truth" movement, for instance, can be thought about as a Venn diagram. The big circle is anyone who believes whatever happened on September 11, 2001, is not the "official" story the government's given us. But within that circle are plenty of smaller ones—those who think Building 7 was a controlled demolition, those who think there were no planes at all, those who think Bush personally assassinated the victims. Sometimes, those smaller circles don't overlap. And that's when the finger-pointing starts.

"There are accusations from the No Plane People that the Controlled Demolition People are 'controlled opposition,'" said Wood. "They're planted by the government to distract people from the truth." That kind of thing works both ways. "The Controlled Demolition People say that the No Plane People are planted 'to make us look crazy.'"

Tapley's "Danny DeVito Is the Antichrist" hypothesis is a perfect example of this kind of infighting. His YouTube video is, in fact, a response to another video posted by someone named the Groxt, who originally put it together that the One Direction's music video was full of New World Order symbolism. But whereas the Groxt believes a monkey in the video symbolizes Ebola, Tapley knows that "the monkey symbolizes Darwinism." Those tiny disputes are where grand schisms begin.

"It's almost the perfect cover," said Dice. "The general public is focusing on what Jay Z or Beyoncé is wearing. Meanwhile future wars are being planned, the economy is being shaped, and Orwellian illegal spying is happening."

So how do the conspiracists consolidate their muddled message? Is there any common ground to be found?

"Celebrities are evil. Most of them are demonic dirtbags," said Dice. "And this is what our culture mimics. So, in a sense, they are Illuminati puppets."

Certainly that's a sentiment the Third Eagle of the Apocalypse can get behind.

Follow Rick Paulas on ​Twitter.

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Photography by ​Caroline Mackintosh
​​Styling: ​Fani Segerman
​​Model : ​Phoebe Jane Klopper 

A lot of old-timers claim that pregnant women "glow," but we're not sure what's the explanation behind this saying. Maybe it's a result of the sort of mystery and wonder that comes with the idea that a little person is growing inside of another person? Or maybe it's all the changes—from the wild hormones to acquiring a beautiful round baby bump? Whatever's the reason for the glow, we know it really happens thanks to these pictures by photographer Caroline Mackintosh featuring a radiating Phoebe Jane Klopper just before her bundle of joy popped out. 

​

In 1978, Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet Thomas Bernhard published Der Stimmenimitator (later to be translated into English as The Voice Imitator), which consisted of a collection of miniature works bizarre even for him. As the legend goes, Bernhard was known for spending hours alone in the back room of his favorite local café reading the newspaper and listening in on conversations between those around him. Having been a reporter at various times himself, he would make note of the strange local occurrences that struck him in the reports or among gossip, pulling odd details and scenarios out of the text like a sort of mental curio box full of the strange. The Voice Imitator, in effect, then, is a condensation of 104 orchestrations of little windows into evil, parsed together in Bernhard's own stylized way of telling. The result is a bit like so:

"Care"

A post office official who was charged with murdering a pregnant woman told the court that he did not know why he had murdered the pregnant woman but that he had murdered his victim as carefully as possible. In response to all the presiding judge's questions, he always used the word carefully, whereupon the court proceedings against him were abandoned.

Page after page of these minor delicacies recounting such nuanced tales of murder, suicide, robbery, destruction, and other such misfortunes when played in queue together amass a kind of Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not meets modern-day Dante of what goes on between humans. The end result is one of the most subtle and creepy of Bernhard's career, made even more prominent when viewed against the backdrop of his usual nonstop-run-on-paragraph style, if not less cranky when it comes to unveiling the behavioral plagues people are capable of, ongoing every day.

I bring all of this up on the occasion of John Dermot Woods's new book,  ​The Baltimore Atrocities, which takes its essence from Bernhard's model and then extends that mode into new territory, with compelling effect. The battery of the book, like Bernhard's, sculpts hundreds of sad, haunting miniatures into a museum of their own, though here all circling around the terrain of Baltimore rather than Austria. Woods's ability to imitate The Voice Imitator's tone is compelling, and also runs on blood of its own feel; his anecdotes are somehow more personal than Bernhard's, more guttural, and leave behind the feeling of opening a gift wrapped in black paper to find a smaller box inside it, also wrapped.

Woods is a subtle writer, even when dealing with such morbid subjects as murder, abuse, and death, and the details he uses to illustrate the tiny horrors of daily life might be even more disconcerting than the former. Weaving between stories such as a surgeon who falls asleep while driving and kills a mother and daughter; a suicide line operator who gives up on her job in the middle of a call, resulting in a caller's death; a woman who kills her dinner guest with a stun gun in front of a small crowd, a very dark and somehow heartfelt energy combines, builds stronger and stronger the deeper one reads into it, creating a kind of morbid arc.

And yet, where Bernhard left his museum open and devoid of momentum outside the miniatures themselves, what really wakes The Baltimore Atrocities into its own is the narrative that pierces its heart. Outside the framework of the terror, Woods constructs the story of a man searching for his lost sister, who had been abducted from a park in Baltimore decades back. Between the array of little terrors, we return to the narrator in his search, each time weighing a bit more as a result of the darkness surrounding his path. By alternating between the two modes, Woods builds a dark momentum otherwise lost in all the hell. Each cryptic occurrence is also illustrated with its own equally peculiar portrait of a moment, like little windows into the book's world, which somehow grounds the sprawl into something more palpable, recognizable as acts our neighbors are capable of, our friends and family, ourselves.

The result is an engrossing and unnerving collaboration between the grotesque miniature and a larger heart behind the darkness, reaching and reaching to come out into some kind of light. Woods is smart to take care with any certain form of resolution; readers looking to be absolved of these atrocities won't find any clear comfort along the way, nor should they, because why? And yet, though I can't quite put a finger on what binds it, there is a deft heart to Woods's orchestrations; the eye is warm, and beneath the blood there is a flesh. Like most great books, the experience provided by The Baltimore Atrocities is one you won't quite have a name for afterward, though you might start sitting with your back to the wall when you go to the bar.​

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Excerpt of Two Atrocities from The Baltimore Atrocities

"Mother's Intuition"

My companion and I used to end up in the first hours of many Sunday mornings at a club called the Flamingo on East Baltimore Street. One such morning, we shared a bottle of bourbon with a particular exotic dancer, who told us about the near horrors of her school years, horrors that made us wonder if our long-lost brother and sister were better off for having gone missing while still so young. On the day of the Rumson Street Children's Massacre, as the newspapers called it, fifteen members of the dancer's third-grade class were killed and six others fell ill, all because of poisoned cupcakes an angry father sent his daughter to school with on her ninth birthday. Then, in high school, four members of the volleyball team, of which she was the captain, were raped by a bitter young math teacher, who imprisoned them in the girls' locker room and held them at gunpoint (the gun, it was later learned, was a fake). I asked her how she had avoided these notorious tragedies, and she gave all the credit to her mother (for whom she had no other kind words), who often claimed to receive premonitions from her television set. They were almost always inaccurate, but on both of these occasions, the messages told her to insist that her daughter stay home from school the next day. Ultimately, the dancer admitted, although she had not fallen victim to these crimes, the debt her mother expected from her for her lucky intuitions was so unreasonable, and had created so much anger, that she often wished she had not been spared on either of those horrible days.

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"Legs"

The more time we spent in Baltimore, the more we came to understand the city's unique ability to take children from their parents in increasingly indirect and unforeseen ways, as in the case of a high school English teacher, whose choice to conduct a relationship with his seventeen-year old student must have been a result of poor judgment provoked by his anxiety about turning forty. The girl was an only child of a single mother, and an aspiring track star with the promise of a full scholarship to any number of universities. Her mother always saw her daughter's legs as her most valuable asset, and she understood that she might never be able to use them again, so, when she was moved to exact revenge on the English teacher who had taken advantage of her daughter, she decided that a set of legs was the exact reparation she deserved. She hired a man who visited the teacher in the faculty lounge and explained that he was going to cut off his legs, and he did, calmly and surgically. After the details of the affair came out, the English teacher had not only his legs taken from him, but his job as well. At the time that he was attacked, he didn't understand why anyone would wish such a cruel punishment on him, until he learned a week later, as he emerged, legless, from the trauma of the event, that his seventeen-year-old student and lover had swallowed several bottles of pills after her mother had learned of their affair and pledged to get both school and legal authorities involved. The girl put herself into a coma from which she never woke.

Excerpt is reprinted by permission from The Baltimore Atrocities (Coffee House Press, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by John Dermot Woods.

Follow Blake Butler on Twitter.

As the long-awaited grand jury decision on whether police officer Darren Wilson will be charged with anything for killing Michael Brown gets closer, the world's media is once again descending onto Ferguson, Missouri, to report on what everyone is assuming will be a spirited round of protests followed by an intense crackdown by the police. With an indictment looking highly unlikely, there is a strong feeling in St. Louis that the response from protesters won't be as peaceful this time around—and the dirty not-so-secret secret is that even if individual reporters don't want the town to turn into a seething mess of Molotov cocktails and tear gas canisters, if that wasn't a possibly they probably wouldn't be there.

As Detroit-based Fox TV reporter Charlie LeDuff tweeted last ​week, "Truth be told...the media, including myself...are on riot watch. Let's hope it aint so."

And if things do get out of control, it's likely that many will place blame on the media for making matters worse by exacerbating the already tense situation.

As a local reporter in St. Louis for the Riverfront Times at the time of the shooting, I saw the first wave of protests rapidly grow from a predominantly local phenomenon with mostly local reporters to a full-scale "media circus." I watched as the news vans swarmed, CNN anchors yelled at me for standing in front of a police siren they were using to light a shot, and it became seemingly impossible to take a photo of protesters without two or three other reporters in the frame.

But speaking strictly for myself (I know at least a few reporters don't agree with me), I didn't really see much of a problem with the influx of outside media. It definitely made my job more difficult, of course—who's the grandma-esque protester with the interesting backstory going to talk to first: a scrubby-looking alt-weekly reporter or the shiny news anchor in a designer suit? And yes, it did feel a bit tacky to be a member of the media when the protester-reporter ratio was hovering at around one-to-one. But it was also exhilarating to see what I believe to be some of the most important issues of our time—racial profiling, police brutality and police militarization—being brought to the forefront of the cable news giants' programming, getting almost the same coverage a bad Ca​rnival cruise gets. And St. Louis County's other problems—such as the way traffic tickets and court fees disproportionately impact the black community—would never have received national attention if not for the media invasion.

But some Ferguson protesters have mixed feelings about the increased media coverage, including Dr. Cornel Fresh (sadly not his real name), who goes by @wyzechef on Twitter.

"This was already big on social media," he told me. "People on Twitter were already on top of it, but the mainstream media let everyone else know about what was going on, even if it was being sensationalized."

That sensationalization Fresh is talking about is the focus on the "riots." Although there was very little rioting in August, it's still a predominant image of the protests and the word that got used to describe what was happening. And as LeDuff noted, it's what the media is back in Ferguson to see.

"The drawback with all the mainstream media being there was that they were always only looking for action," Fresh explained. "And if there was nothing, they would just abort and come back when the violence did kick off."

I know that's true because I did exactly that once or twice.

But without the so-called riot porn—or more accurately, the police brutality porn—it's unlikely the Ferguson story would have got the traction it did. After all, police shoot people all the time, and it usually doesn't lead to such a massive story. Truthfully, the cops themselves helped the process along by the way they mismanaged the situation. People in Ferguson were angry after Michael Brown was killed. They came out to protest police brutality. And the police met them in a brutal, intimidating manner. This wasn't the media that did that—it was the St. Louis County Police Department. The media just reported it. And now they're back to report it again if it happens again.

There will probably be some sensationalism in the next round of stories. There are definitely journalists out there trying to look for new angles and, in the process of doing so some inevitably come across as biased and ignorant. But that's the price of publicity. Ferguson is one of those rare news stories that truly deserves the amount of coverage it's getting. Policing in America is dangerously flawed and must be fixed. And the protesters in Ferguson have pushed the issue onto TV screens and computer monitors around the country. There are many who are uncomfortable with the racial questions that have arisen, but there are also many people who have gained a deeper understanding of systemic racism and police violence. No longer is it a conspiracy theory to talk about police militarization and the sad truth that people of color are overly victimized by police departments across the country. These are conversations that are long overdue and must be had.

The coverage hasn't been perfect and there will be more gripes from people on all sides of the spectrum as the grand jury announces its verdict and people take to the streets—possibly in jubilation, but more likely in anger. But the media will be watching, and I can only think that that's a good thing.

Ray Downs is currently a reporter at the Broward-Palm Beach New Times. Follow him on Tw​itter.​

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Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan interviewed by local news. Photo via ​Flickr user Mark Klotz

​"This is going to be a war." In the context of recent clashes between police and protesters on Burnaby Mountain over a proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, you might guess this was said by one of the 73 people who were arrested over the weekend.

In fact, it's what a recently re-elected mayor told a major BC newspaper on Friday (on his 63rd birthday, no less) adding to the politician's long list of badass comments about resource extraction and risk. "I didn't look for the fight. But like any good east end boy, if it comes to me, I'm not going to back down," Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan told the Province, referencing a legal challenge Burnaby is waging against Kinder Morgan for violating the city's bylaws. Earlier this year he also told Global BC he would stand in front ​of a bulldozer to stop the expansion.

Why is this guy, whose bristly silver mustache looks like it belongs on the RCMP side of the caution tape, taking such a radical stance on a resource project? For starters, Kinder Morgan oil has already spilled down the side of Burnaby Mountain while he was running the city in 2007, and he says the response was less​ than spectacular. "It was my first time working with Kinder Morgan and Kinder Morgan's approach to the issue," he said. "When the line broke, instead of turning off the line at Burnaby Mountain, they turned off the line at the tanker. That meant all the oil backed up from the tanker, and the oil kept flowing down the mountain.

"If you want to see the Keysto​ne Cops in action, try the people that were put in charge of this emergency," he said.

His city council has done a cost-benefit analysis, and the dollars and sense just don't add up. "There's nothing in this for Burnaby except potential damage," Corrigan told a town hall in 2012. Kinder Morgan's total Canadian tax contribution averaged just $1.5 million a year from 2009 to 2013—not even enough for a Point Grey home, as author John Vaillant pointed out i​n the Tyee.

Of all the pipeline projects happening across Canada, Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain expansion was flying under the radar until last week. The company wants to triple the capacity of a 60-year-old line that currently pipes refined oil from Edmonton through the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The new pipeline would ship 890,000 barrels of unrefined bitumen through the city of Burnaby—a capacity 59 percent more than the controversial Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, by the way—increasing tanker traffic in the Burrard Inlet six-fold.

As the project winds its way through the National Energy Board's review process, the company has tried to get a head start on some geotechnical survey work inside a Burnaby conservation area (something that violates Burnaby bylaws, Corrigan says). Since September an alliance of indigenous land defenders and environmental activists have camped out on Burnaby Mountain, standing in the way of Kinder Morgan workers. The company filed an injunction against the protestors, and the RCMP have enforced the order beginning Thursday, November 20. Since then, we're averaging a dozen arrests per day.

Mayor Corrigan has yet to join the protest line, but such a move wouldn't hurt his popularity among Burnaby residents. Last week he got reelected, scoring three times more votes than his nearest competitor. You might expect a resource critique from Vancouver's bike-riding, juice-selling mayor, but Corrigan's unwavering critique of corporate corruption lands like your uncle's weird opinion rather than a lefty talking point.

"More and more I'm beginning to feel like British Columbia is becoming a banana republic," he told an environmental hea​ring in January this year, sounding more like a Dead Kennedys song than a politician. Corrigan was speaking out against a Port Metro Vancouver decision to allow companies to appoint their own environmental review contractor. "This is crazy. This is completely losing control of any public interest in these kind of projects whatsoever."

​@sarahberms

​In the 1930s, students at Ole Miss were tasked with choosing a new name for their football team. Although "Ole Massas" (the slave term for masters) w​as a close second, "The Rebels" narrowly won out. Their leader was Colonel Reb, a white-haired, plantation-owning cartoon with a prominent jaw and a cane.

But while the NFL is still trying to figure out how to deal with the whole Redskins problem, the Southeastern Conference sorted shit out with their most controversial logo years ago. In 2003, students voted to replace Reb with an innocuous black bear—an homage to William Faul​kner's story "The Bear."

Considering that Faulkner's story is about a bear that gets shot, the new mascot kinda sucks. Or at least, a Southerner who ruthlessly bought and sold human beings is more intimidating as a mascot. But Arnold Randallson isn't mad because a dead animal now represents his alma mater. He's mad at the principle of the matter.

Randallson is the executive director of the Magnolia State Heritage Foundation, a group that used to work with the Tea Party but which he said became independent in 2012. Inspired by the loss of Colonel Reb, Randallson and his group have decided to pursue passing ​Initiative 46, a series of measures that would keep political correctness out of Dixie. The proud member of the Sons of Confederate Soldiers is currently working to make Christianity the official religion of Mississippi. He's in the process of collecting signatures and wants to get the Heritage Initiative, as he calls it, on 2016's ballot.

"We're the most religious state, something we like to bring that up whenever we can," Randallson told me. "People say were last in everything, but we believe we are first in the most important statistic." In fact, it's true: The latest Gallup poll shows 61 percent of Mississippians consider t​hemselves "very religious," making it more religious than even Utah.

The Heritage Initiative would also preserve the cultural icons of Mississippi that many people consider racist symbols, lest there be another loss like Colonel Reb. Of course, Randallson doesn't see anything wrong with wanting to make Dixie, which was popularized as a minstrel performance, as the state song ("If Abra​ham Lincoln enjoyed the song, I don't see how it could be a problem.") He also feels the liberal media has unfairly maligned the Confederate flag: "Blacks, Indians, and even some Chinese and Hispanic immigrants fought under it."

And while some might wonder "why bother?" when it comes to making English the official state language, given that only 0.2 pe​rcent of the U.S.'s Hispanic population lives in Mississippi to begin with, Randallson has an answer for that, too. "Why wouldn't you just come to Mississippi and learn English?" he asks, noting that printing forms in one language would also save money.

Randallson said his amendment is bipartisan and has something for everyone, considering it includes a clause about historically black colleges not being required to merge with other universities. While that's a little tricky, he does bring up some decent points about symbols like the flag, which Americans were still divided on, according to a 2000 G​allup poll. For instance, Randallson reminds me about the treatment of Native Americans during Westward expansion, which occurred under the Stars and Stripes. But that doesn't mean the Confederate flag doesn't stand for something shitty—it's just a reminder that most flags do.

Randallson's arguments haven't stopped a lot of people from hating on the Magnolia State Heritage Campaign. "We get a lot of hateful comments directed toward us," he told me. "A lot of liberals or atheists or left-leaning people have communicated with us that they'd be perfectly happy with us seceding and getting Mississippi's representation out of Congress."

Of course, Mississppi could never secede. For one thing, it's the poorest ​state in the union. And for as much as some of its citizens may distrust the federal government, they couldn't do without it. In 2012, ​Dixie got $2.47 dollars back from the federal government for every dollar it paid in taxes.

But Randallson said he's not interested in secession. He's just focused on getting the 107,216 signatures he needs to get his constitutional amendment on the ballot for 2016.

"We've already cleared over 8,000 signatures and our official tally will be on the site on December 1^st," he said. "We have more than 100 volunteers and captains for 50 counties out of the 82 as well as a lot of optimism and hope that Mississippi will vote to save her heritage."

This post originally appeared in VICE Romania

Romania hasn't been very creative when it comes to choosing presidents so far. We've only been a democracy since 1989, so I guess we're still figuring it out. So far three of our leaders have had names that ended in "escu," while most of them were former members of the Communist Party or had something to do with  the "Securitate," Romania's secret police force. But a few weeks ago something weird happened—a German citizen named Klaus Iohannis won the Romanian presidential elections.

This is even stranger when you consider that Romania has a rather deep-seated racism issue. Also, Iohannis is rather somber and straight-faced, a stark departure from the populist, Berlusconi-esque personalities we've traditionally been drawn to.

Other than the fact that he used to be the mayor of a city called Sibiu, which was a European Cultural Capital in 2007, I didn't really know much about Iohannis. I feared most Romanians my age didn't either, so I followed him on the campaign trail and took the below photos.

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See more photos from the series on Mugur's site.

​

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2014/11/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/24/' filename='joel-golby-young-people-poverty-2014-905-body-image-1416834927.jpg' id='6203']All aboard the poverty train. Photo via Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Hey, are you young? Well enjoy being lithe and sexually viable, then, because an influential new study has found under-25s are now more likely than pensioners to be living in poverty. Take that, old people! Best hope someone spells "WANKERS" out on Countdown soon so you've got something to talk about, right? Because young people are poor as fuck.

New research from the Joseph Rowntree F​oundation (JRF) has found that—thanks to the rise of ​zero-hour contracts and general doom—those in the 16-to-25 year age bracket are finding it harder to cobble together a living wage than they did in 2003. The poverty rate in 2013 was 31.5 percent. Ten years ago it was 25 percent. The pensioner poverty rate—16 percent—is the lowest on record, but under-25s are getting pretty shafted right from the off. 

Should probably clarify here: No one on this earth wants to see an OAP huddled over an electric bar fire, swaddled in every single blanket they have collected in their life. So let's not begrudge over-65s—they pump a substantial amount of money into the economy just from ordering slippers out of the back of Reader's Digest, plus they vote as regular as clockwork. Let's leave them to their hustle.

But what the JRF study does show is that having a job is no longer a means to work your way out of poverty, which is doubly worrying when the figures show that half of all people in poverty now live in a family with someone in paid work. It's now thought that 40 percent of adults in employment are now also in poverty. 

Poverty isn't dirty-faced Victorian children cheerfully offering to shine your shoes while hacking their consumptive lungs up into a shredded hanky: It's happening to people you know.

"This comprehensive analysis paints a bleak picture. Families have long been told by politicians that work is the answer but are finding that it isn't," Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said of the study. "As long as the only work they get is insecure and low paid, they will continue to face hardship and financial misery."

[body_image width='800' height='529' path='images/content-images/2014/11/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/11/24/' filename='joel-golby-young-people-poverty-2014-905-body-image-1416834969.jpg' id='6204']A hopeful image of a UK Job Centre. Photo via quixotic54

Which is weird, because UK employment rates are currently at a record high.  ​DWP figures published in July found that the employment rate now stands at 73.1 percent, with 30.6 million people in work—1.8 million more than there were this time in 2010. 

But the advent of zero-hour contracts and the employees who take advantage of them means thousands of people are technically employed—ticking a box for the government while they are at it—but struggling to get enough work to scrape together a living wage, all with a complete lack of job security. 

Add to that the rising cost of food, travel and bills, and the fact that many are living in rented accommodation (which comes with it's own insecurity—there were 17,000 landlord repossessions in 2013 compared to 15,000 mortgage repos) and boom: you're one boinged paycheck away from oblivion.

The great looming specter of any debate about poverty is somehow the idea that those who can't find work are suckling at the great, milky teat of the benefits system and are too busy wearing jogging bottoms or screaming their heads off on  Jeremy Kyle to actually go out and get employment. 

What the JRF study shows, though, is that now,  with declining wages failing to keep pace with costs, the number of people who are working but also claiming housing benefits is on the rise. In the past 12 months, two-thirds of those who had moved from unemployment into work have failed to make a living wage. Also, those claiming benefits are more likely than ever to be punished—i.e. by having said benefits suspended, which seems only a couple rungs up from water-boarding on the "cruel and unnecessary punishment" scale"—for not attending things like welfare-to-work sessions. 

The benefits system is an increasingly vital safety net that happens to be stuffed inside a bear trap.

It's not like this problem is brand new, either. Earlier this year VICE covered the UK's increasing h​idden homelessness problem, and the a hom​elessness epidemic in London. A broken working culture in the UK means call center​ supervisors regularly time their employees' piss breaks, and the lack of decent prospects for young people means holding up a sign at a train station is now a legitimate recruitme​nt tactic. Eating 22 p​ackets of ketchup for £20 ($31) is a pretty good source of income and nutrients when you're fucking broke. Going to the Wa​tford job fair isn't.

Obviously, unless you're Myleene Klass getting mad about mansion tax and the possible cost of water, this all makes for exceptionally grim reading. And with the report not just suggesting, but signaling in big, looping swirls of fire, that young poverty isn't going to get better without tackling core  problems such as low pay and the high price of essentials (including housing), the near future sounds like a barrel of shit for us.

Still, at least there is an election next year, right? Which will definitely sort all those problems out forever? Yeah?

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