On Tuesday, police in Dothan, Alabama, fatally shot a reported member of the loosely-defined "sovereign citizen" movement after he refused to show a government-issued ID to employees at an animal shelter. Robert Earl Lawrence, 30, allegedly became combative when told he had to show ID to drop off a stray animal, and tried to use a paper indicating he was a sovereign citizen instead.

Police were called, and after an unspecified struggle over Lawrence's refusal to be calm, he was shot in the stomach and died that night in the hospital. Lawrence had a bit of a nasty rap sheet, and there might be good reason to require people show ID at an animal shelter. All the same, an unarmed man who appears to have initially been trying to do a nice thing for an animal was killed by police.

Did this really need to happen? Ever since the December 20 ambush killings of two NYPD officers in Brooklyn, police and their supporters have been stressing the fact that cops are in danger when they're on the jobs, not to mention disrespected by the public. Though the number of cops killed in 2014 was up by 56 percent, that number is more dramatic because 2013 saw a unique period of safety for agents of American law enforcement. Police shouldn't panic, and they shouldn't use tragic deaths as an excuse to get itchy trigger fingers—not even when dealing with weirdos and extremists.

Sovereign citizens are feared by police—though according to Free Thought Project, Lawrence's family disputes his status as one—because they basically don't believe in cops, and have occasionally ambushed them. However, disbelieving in authority doesn't magically translate to homicide. Some of these guys are content with being passive pains in the ass, like the Idaho dudes who, in 2012, made police cut them out of their seat belts.

Regardless of how unsympathetic Lawrence turns out to be, nobody unarmed should end up dead because they were a loudmouth—or even if they believe the government isn't legitimate.

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

-It's hard to know whether the NYPD slowdown is bad police behavior or not. Arrests for drug crimes, citation-worthy offenses, and other petty things are way down. This has been portrayed as the NYPD's revenge for the lack of respect they have been afforded by the public and by their mayor. But it's also a step back for "broken windows" policing, and other disputed crime-stopping tactics. Many critiques of the police want fewer arrests, especially for minor offenses. So who is this hurting? Not most New Yorkers, who commit small infractions, if any at all. Barring a violent crime wave that might prove that the NYPD needs to harass more people more often, this is doing nothing except perhaps marginally diminishing the amount of revenue the city of New York gets.

-The NYPD had been looking for the man who choked a 28-year-old public transit employee on December 23, only to realize the suspect captured on surveillance video was an off-duty officer. Officer Mirjan Lolja reportedly choked the woman after she tried to take his phone and swore at him for asking a question. The woman disputes this, and says she was horrified to discover her attacker was a cop. She was briefly hospitalized after the incident, and is still on leave from work. The officer turned himself in after seeing himself (smirking) on video, but no charges have been filed.

-On Saturday night, police in Wichita, Kansas, fatally shot a 23-year-old man who was drunk and had previously been in possession of a knife. An uncle of John Paul Quintero called 9-1-1 because they wanted help dealing with the man they called JP, but the police ending up shooting him. Now the family is saying they wanted help, but Quintero was shot when his knife was in the back of his car, far out of reach—he was no threat, in other words. As in other cases we've seen, a family wanted help for and protection from a loved one, and they ended up with him dying tragically.

-The November death of 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson while in Cleveland Police custody was ruled a homicide on Friday. According to the medical examiner, Anderson died from being restrained by police, who had been called to get her to a mental health intervention. Anderson's family had said that a police officer put their knee on Anderson's back when she was thrown to the ground, which sounds like the moment the medical examiner is citing as key here. Anderson, who had a history of heart disease, fell unconscious soon after being placed in the squad car.

-On Sunday, a member of the Boston Police Department was arrested for assaulting an Uber driver and, after claiming the driver dropped him off in the wrong place, driving the man's car away. Michael Doherty, a 16-year-veteran of the department, has been put on paid administrative leave.

-Also on Sunday, NYPD Officer Wenjian Liu was laid to rest in a funeralattended by thousands of police officers from around the country. Sadly, even though Liu's widow asked that officers refrain from protests, hundreds of them still turned their backs when Mayor Bill de Blasio made his remarks, the latest symbolic protest against a public official who has been deemed excessively critical of cops.

-Yonkers, New York, police officer Neil Vera was fired on Tuesday for lying on a search warrant that lead to the death of a man in March. Vera had not been charged with a crime yet, but he appears to have committed numerous acts of misconduct. Allegedly, he lost contact with his undercover drug buys, and his flawed information led to a narcotics raid during which Dario Tena (who wasn't a suspect) climbed out a window and then fell to his death. The suspect Vera named on the warrant didn't even live there anymore, and his supposed informant wasn't even in the state. Once these problems came to light, Vera had another informant falsify reports of additional drug buys. The officer has ten days to appeal, but God knows why he would bother.

-The mentally ill Ezell Ford was shot three times by LAPD officers on August 11, and now the official autopsy report notes that one of those times was in the back. There was also a muzzle imprint on the 25-year-old's skin, suggesting very close range shots. Ford was unarmed during the confrontation with Officers Sharlton Wampler and Antonio Villegas, and police say he wrestled with an officer's gun, forcing his partner to fire twice. The back shot came from the officer on the ground. Both men are on administrative leave. Whatever happened, it's worth noting that yet another mentally ill individual has been killed by police, and that witnesses dispute police accounts of the incidents.

-"A helicopter and K9 unit were called in to help search for the suspect... The suspect is still on the run." Sounds dramatic, right? Actually, not at all. Turns out a Lee County, Florida, deputy was after a man who was riding a bike without a light at night on January 2, and then pedaled away from police. During the chase, a K9 deputy shot a pit bull who attacked his dog. The owner of the dog says it was within his yard and behind an invisible fence.

-Our Good Cop of the Week is spiffy new Pittsburgh Police Chief Cameron McLay, who on New Year's Eve tweeted a photo of himself holding a sign that read: "I resolve to challenge racism @ work #endwhitesilence". This horrified local police unions, who accused McLay of accusing his department of racism. He's not. Tweeting the photo was a risky move in an atmosphere of NYPD officers turning their backs to their mayor. But McLay has more to say: He wrote in an email to fellow cops that police are supposed to uphold the Constitution (well, yeah) and he has also noted that minorities have less trust in police. To wit: "The reality of US policing is that our enforcement efforts have a disparate impact on communities of color."

McLay even expressed regret for his past crime-fighting efforts, writing, "My own street drug enforcement efforts were well intended but had an impact I would not have consciously chosen." Finally, McLay noted he and supports are working on "restoring the legitimacy of the policing profession." This is just talk for now, but it bodes well for the new chief, and sure makes him sound like a good cop.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

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All photos courtesy of Strike! magazine via Faceboook

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

This morning, many sleepy, grumpy, bloated people across the country returned to their jobs for the first time since before Christmas. Some of those people in London—the country's largest hub of early morning misery—were made to stop and consider the numb feeling inside of them by 200 posters that someone had plastered up in ad spaces on the tube, with depressing quotes such as:

"It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working."

"Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed."

"How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one's job should not exist?"

The quotes were taken from London School of Economics anthropology professor and activist David Graeber's article "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which explained that much modern employment is pretty much pointless, and the toll having to do them takes on everyone's mentality. The article went viral in 2013 and hasn't lost its relevance since. The poster campaign seemed to be a rerun of the anti-police posters that went up before Christmas. Just like back then, the Bullshit Job posters were designed by Strike! magazine, which ran the original article.

Nobody knows who put them up though, least of all Graeber, so I decided to call him up and chat about why everything I do is a meaningless waste of time.

VICE: Apparently 200 "counter-propaganda" posters have been put up on the tube today quoting an article you wrote on "bullshit jobs." How do you feel about that?
David Graeber: You know to be perfectly honest, I didn't even know in advance about the action. I was thinking of going in to work today myself. Oddly, I was going to bring a picture with me—the one from the "Bullshit Jobs" piece—that someone gave me as a birthday present, to my office, to use as a "Do Not Disturb" sign.

It was a very pleasant way to wake up: to check Twitter and see pictures of phrases that I had said. I guess the idea is that today's the first day people are going back to work, so I'm assuming whoever did it wants people, after having spent time with their families and doing things that they truly care about, to reflect on whether the job they're going to is meaningful—what they actually think about it, and also the value of what they're doing.

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Can you explain what you mean by "bullshit jobs"?
When I came up with the phrase, I was particularly interested in what the subjective value of one's work is. There are millions of people who go to work everyday, and feel that maybe one hour of their work is actually contributing something to the world, and maybe not even that—maybe they're actually subtracting from the world by what they do. I was interested in the effect this has on people.

So do you think someone is just making up pointless jobs to keep us working? One of the phrases on the posters suggested that.
Obviously it's not like people are sitting around in a room saying, you know, "Let's think up pointless jobs!" but it is true that people who talk about economic policy talk about creating employment but never talk about whether that employment is meaningful or not.

This completely contradicts what should happen in a capitalist system. You know, we're used to thinking of the Soviet Union as an economy where they had an ideology of full employment and they had to make up jobs for people that were completely unnecessary and pointless; you'd go to a cashier and one gives you a ticket and another does something else and another something else—they were constantly making up these pointless jobs. It's understandable that this would happen in an economy that is based on the principle of work as a value unto itself and full employment and so forth and so on. But in a capitalist society, paying somebody to do nothing is the very last thing you'd expect a firm to do, but in fact they do and often you can observe it.

In a lot of the responses I got on blogs, people would talk about how they had figured out a way to automate 90 percent of their job or whatever, and they'd say, "I showed it to my supervisor and they said, 'Don't do that! If you do that, I'll need three workers instead of eight workers and I'll be much less significant within the corporation.'" The corporate bureaucracy is not that different to what happened in the old Soviet system.

Why do you think many people are unemployed and actually wish they had any job—even a bullshit job—to do?
I think one thing that's really significant is an ideological shift, away from the idea that work is valuable in that it produces stuff. It's kind of self-evident that, in the 19th century, work was important to produce the world around us.

But over the course of the 20th century there's been a huge effort to re-imagine the world; it's the imagination of these great entrepreneurial geniuses that create all these things—workers are just robots, working in the factories, doing what they're told, extensions of the minds of these quite great people. It seems there has been an increased emphasis on work as of pure value unto itself.

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You say bullshit jobs do moral and spiritual damage. How come?
There's this idea that work is discipline—you can't become a mature, responsible, self-contained, proper person without basically working more than you want to at things you don't really like. The more unpleasant work is, the more moralizing it is. And that logic has become stronger and stronger and stronger, so anybody who doesn't work you can revile as a parasite.

But we have this weird thing now where even people who enjoy their work are viewed a bit suspiciously. We have this weird situation where the more obviously your work contributes to the world, the less they pay you, with a few exceptions like surgeons, airline pilots, things like that. But for the most part the people who get paid the most are people who it is entirely unclear what they contribute to the world at all. Meanwhile people like say, a nurse—the people who, if they disappeared, the world would immediately be in trouble—those guys get the least.

How does that happen? I think one of the reasons is passive morality—that, like, work is valuable because you don't wanna be doing it and there's no meaning or value in it at all. It's really hard to get a company to pay people to do something when they have any reason to do so other than the money. So even if it's like transformation work or artistic work—anything that's in any way fun—they say, "Is there some way we can get people to do this for free?"

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So for society, what's the alternative to creating bullshit jobs—how should we organize so that people have to do fewer hours of work in a job that has a point to it?
I think there are any number of different ways. One interesting program would be a basic minimum income system—they're playing around with that in Switzerland. Instead of your wage being dependent on your work, you just give everybody a flat rate and have them decide for themselves how they want to contribute to society. And people do want to contribute in some way.

We have this idea that people left to their own devices will just be parasites—they'll lounge about and not do work—but that's clearly not the case. The example I go to is prisons, even here [in the UK], they actually use work to reward people. Here are people who are not particularly altruistic—they're criminals, after all—and they're in a situation where they get food and shelter and they could just sit around all day but actually they're so eager to do something rather than just sit around that they'd rather work. I think people really do want to do something.

I remember being very struck by Dostoyevsky, who was in a Russian prison camp, and he said if you really want to destroy someone psychologically, much worse than through physical torture, just make up a completely meaningless form of work. You know, have them take water from some giant vat and then move it back to the first vat again. Have them do that all day and before long even the most hardened criminal will be utterly despairing of life, because there's nothing more horrible than devoting one's life to something completely meaningless. I mean, you know, sure, there will be some freeloaders, but we've got more freeloaders right now.

What would you suggest to people reading this, or who saw excerpts of your article on the tube today, and are wondering if their jobs are bullshit?
I'm not really there to tell people what to do with their lives. But if you can find something that actually helps other people and you can still afford to feed your family, you might want to consider that. I think that's most people's dilemma: I remember this very clearly from Occupy Wall Street—people would tell the story of their lives on little post-it notes, and the vast majority complained about their lives a lot. [They'd say] "I want to have a job where I actually contribute something to society, I want to be in education, I want to be a nurse, I want to help society."

What is a non-bullshit job?
A job that isn't bullshit should have concrete benefits to other people. But we can't do jobs that aren't bullshit because of debt. That's a great dilemma from which that movement actually started I think. I would say to unions and organizers, think about that, redefine what is valuable about work—work is valuable if it makes other people's lives better. It would be nice if we were rewarded for making people's lives better, not punished. From an individual point of view, think about the way that you can navigate that with your own conscience.

Follow Charlotte England on Twitter.

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A photo of the pills that seem to be killing people in Ipswich, Telford, and beyond

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

There is a central mystery behind the batch of pink, diamond-shaped Superman logo "ecstasy" pills that appear to have caused the torturous deaths of four young men in England over Christmas and New Year. And that is: Why would anyone make these things?

Over the holiday break, two Lithuanian men from Ipswich—Justas Ropas, 22, and Gediminas Kulokas, 24—died on Christmas Eve and New Year's Day, respectively, after taking the Superman pills. The deaths of John Hocking, 20, from Rendlesham in Suffolk, and Daniel Bagnall, a 27-year-old from Telford, who both died on New Year's Day, have also been linked to the batch. Police in Suffolk acted quickly and printed flyers in four different languages warning people about the pills. But for these guys it was too late.

If, as suspected, the pills that killed these men are from the same batch that first surfaced in the Netherlands and Belgium a month ago, they are some of the most dangerous pills masquerading as ecstasy known to man. Their existence is mystifying because drug suppliers, like any other businessmen, have always tended to avoid killing off their customers.

It's strange for two other reasons: The first is that MDMA is easier and cheaper to get hold of right now than it has been for a decade. The second is that whoever made these could've cut them with half the amount of PMMA and they still would've got users high. (PMMA is a derivative of the highly toxic MDMA substitute, PMA, a drug that even its inventor Alexander Shulgin shunned.)

The pink Superman pills found in the Low Countries contained extremely high levels—173mg—of PMMA, effectively turning them into deadly pills. Ecstasy pills containing PMA and PMMA usually contain 50mg of the drug. Even at these levels, there were 29 deaths connected to PMA last year in England and Wales. For reference, this compares to 41 MDMA deaths over the same period, when the vast majority of pills in England and Wales contain MDMA.

Police in Suffolk have charged Adrian Lubecki, a 19-year-old from Ipswich, with supplying class-A drugs. Police uncovered Lubecki's stash of 400 Superman pills but believe that Lubecki is not the only dealer in the UK who is selling them. They believe Daniel Bagnall bought his pills from a different seller than the Suffolk victims. Usually batches of pills run into tens of thousands, and the police say they will only be able to tell if the publicity around these deaths has hit home by the end of the weekend, when Britain's ecstasy users start popping their pills.

Police say they will only be able to tell if the publicity around these deaths has hit home by the end of the weekend, when Britain's ecstasy users start popping their pills

I spoke to Daan van der Gouwe, of the Drugs Information and Monitoring System at the Trimbos Institute in Utrecht, which put out an alert about the PMMA Superman pills on December 19. He told me: "We have never seen a pill with such insanely high concentrations of PMMA or PMA. As to why someone has made this, either they are completely idiotic and made a mistake or it is a professional manufacturer who knows what they are doing and is taking advantage of the fact PMA and PMMA are cheaper to source than MDMA."

It's been a common and shady practice in the fickle world of pill branding for decades, but what makes the manufacture of these deadly pills even more cynical is that they mimic a pink Superman branded pill that has previously been popular because of its high MDMA content. The same thing happened with Mortal Kombat pills last year.

Van der Gouwe told me the Superman pills had popped up several times in the Netherlands in December. The Trimbos Institute decided to issue a red alert because of their "historically high" levels of PMMA. Despite this, and the fact virtually all UK ecstasy pills are supplied via Liverpool-based traffickers from the Netherlands, the only alerts put out in the UK were by the Loop, a community-based drugs information group, and the Warehouse Project, a Manchester club that provides testing facilities for pills.

The tragedy highlights the urgent need in the UK for a similar pill-testing scheme to that in place in the Netherlands. It might not realistic that every E-dropper will have their pill tested before they take it—but what's important, as illustrated in this case, is that once a bad batch has been detected, public alerts can be issued at a more attention-grabbing, nationwide level.

Follow Max on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

There would be no build-up play. It did not start with an intricate passing move. It was not a slow and careful deconstruction of the opposition. It was a detonation. He would receive the ball 30 yards out and then bang. The window pane had blown in and piss was running down your leg. To those watching on television, his surname would sound out like an air-raid siren. It was the only thing they could hear above the screams of thousands.

This was Steven Gerrard. He was an explosive player, running on seething rage, radiating everything your stomach spits up when it's not sure of its survival. His trademark long-range strikes, often executed in a match's dying moments, went down like a shot of nitroglycerine.

It was in these moments that he built his name, and as they grew in number, their sense of boyish effrontery was replaced by one of crushing inevitability. Each of these strikes was a reminder of the sport's stinking, primal base. Each one told you that your double pivots and high presses cannot always overcome pure, raw, visceral energy. There are no aesthetes in injury time. There is no enganche in the 89th minute.

He was, briefly, the continent's best midfielder. He was this despite criticism for playing like an impatient egomaniac, sometimes to the detriment of the team. Ask his critics, however, about the last time they watched their 11 players struggling to string a pass to one another. Ask them if, in that moment, they wanted one of their number to sniff blood, bypass their teammates and spank one into the top right-hand corner. They will either say yes or they will lie.

Steven Gerrard was power, dynamism, and deliverance. He was, simply, a superman. And yet, this is all past tense now. There's a fine line between a superman and somebody who wears pants on the outside of their trousers.

§

Whereas most players in the elite bracket become imitations of their former selves, Gerrard has become a parody of a lesser player. He is a pound-shop Andrea Pirlo. An incontinent water-carrier. He sits in front of the defense, in his seat of power, shuttling the ball between whichever of Liverpool's center-halves are tripping over each other that week, having little impact on open play other than the occasional long ball. He scores still, but only really from set-pieces; the co-ordinated rather than the chaotic.

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His "quarterback role," if that really is what we are calling it, requires a light touch. Yet when Gerrard attempts to control a match with anything but iron will, it's awkward. The style does not come naturally. The bombast eventually rises from beneath. After all, nobody who's refined and discerning drives to work listening to No Jacket Required.

When the Liverpool captain was emerging on the scene, Sir Alex Ferguson described him as "physically and technically precocious;" a quote that is perhaps most interesting because of the area it omits. Mentally, there was less that seemed extraordinary about Gerrard at first. He seemed like a typically ambitious but shy young player; he was sure he had ability, but unsure where it would take him. As a 17-year-old, he was asked to fill out a self-assessment by Liverpool's academy directors. "I am easily approachable but not the best at conversation although I do try and I am improving. Try to get on with everyone," he wrote. "Do tend to worry about certain things."

In those early days, if he made a mistake during a match, it brought out a bad habit. When he misplaced a simple pass, even if the ball was still only yards away from him, he would stop dead in his tracks and put his heads in his hands. No matter how many times, no matter how much spit and speckle would land on him from stands, he would stand there for a few seconds, gormless, telling himself that he's still just a skinny lad from the Bluebell.

It was a tic that he eventually suppressed, and it seems unkind in the extreme to doubt the mental credentials of a man who went on to single-handedly haul his team to victory in the best final in Champions League history, but as other aspects of his game developed exponentially, this anxiousness was a constant. It is consistent with his self-absorption, which many thoughtlessly interpret as egotism. It is certainly visible in his near-pathological tendency to self-criticize, to turn up at post-match press conferences with three-day stubble and a thousand-yard stare. It has always been there, daring him to attempt the audacious, reminding him of every failure's consequence. The only time it is not present is when he runs off in a random direction, beating his chest and screaming while the ball nestles in the back of the net.

Each of those strikes, each net-busting, bloodletting surge of brilliance, is a brief release. All that nervous energy explodes in an earth-flattening crescendo. He would temporarily spin the globe back on its axis; allow himself some small respite. This is why, when Liverpool beat Manchester City at the end of last season, he looked as if he had achieved religious transcendence rather than merely opened up a two-point gap at the top.

That year, with his legs tired and his average position behind the halfway line, those explosive moments had been harder to come by, but the anxiousness, the restlessness, the impulse to put things right seemed to be receding. It was not only on him if the team were to succeed any more. For the first time since his emergence, he had teammates who were better than him. It was nearly over. He had almost won. But in the end he didn't and the neuroses remain. They are stronger than ever.

§

The slip will always be with him. It came against the club he could have joined to win the title, after he'd demanded that Liverpool's challenge should "not fuckin' slip," to the direct benefit of a player whose name fits perfectly into the meter of "Que Sera Sera." That cliché, "you couldn't write it," does not apply. You could write it and you would write it. It will most likely, one day, play as an endless .gif loop in a Barclays Museum of #EPLBanter, clocking up more views than "Gangnam Style" and the Zapruder footage combined.

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But if the irony is irresistible then Gerrard's agony is insurmountable. His need to atone for the error is the reason why he did not retire at the end of last season. His inability to atone for it is, you imagine, the underlying reason why he has decided to leave Liverpool when his contract expires this summer.

At Anfield, sentimentality comes with the ticket stub. He will always be their irrational, feverish romanticism incarnate. Those saliva-boiling long-rangers and scruff-of-the-neck salvations are too numerous and too emotive to be dominated by any single memory.

To the rest of us, however, and most likely in the mind of Steven Gerrard himself, it seems that a spring afternoon late last April will outweigh them all, and a career that lived on immense and devastating moments will die by one.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

On a Saturday afternoon just before Christmas, as Manchester City's diamond-encrusted side carved out another seemingly inevitable win, I was at Champion Hill in South London, where 800 Dulwich Hamlet fans are in full voice. "We're the famous Dulwich Hamlet and we look like Tuscany!" they shouted. The Pink 'n' Blues were taking on Witham Town FC in an Isthmian League Premier division clash—it would take three promotions from here to reach the soccer league and six to reach the Premiership.

As fan alienation with the upper echelons of soccer grows, many are turning to non-league clubs to watch the sport—and Dulwich Hamlet is one of the most popular. In this part of South London, you're within easy reach of a game further up the soccer pyramid, so why do hundreds bother with such seemingly inconsequential soccer? After all, Dulwich are leagues below teams that can be seen as a by-word for lower league insignificance—Accrington Stanley, Dagenham and Redbridge, and Morecambe, for instance, are all three leagues above.

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For one thing, money. Soccer ticket prices are increasing at twice the cost of living. At Dulwich I paid £4 ($6) at the turnstile, £2 for the match program, and £3 on a locally brewed Hamlet lager. That's another attraction—you can drink and smoke on the terraces. If you plan ahead, you can even sneak in a stock of cheap tinnies from the nearby Sainsbury's for an even more economical experience. Compare this to Arsenal's £97 ($148) on the gate and £4.40 ($6.70) for a Carlsberg.

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But Louis Daly, editor of the club's fanzine The Moral Victory , told me it's about more than just the cost of a ticket. It's the difference between getting involved and just being a customer. "The role of a football club is for the people and the fans in a community. You want to do things to make your community better with activism. It's a really hands-on way of supporting the club," he said.

In 2012 a group of Dulwich supporters set up the 12th Man Scheme, raising funds to sign fan-owned players. The fans that help fund their wages can then appreciate their direct influence on the pitch in a way that doesn't involve vaulting the turnstiles and abusing the manager or shouting at a fellow fan on fan TV. Mishi Morath, of the Dulwich Hamlet Supporters Trust, said, "I genuinely do believe that without the help from the 12th Man we would not have won the league," referring to the 2012-13 Division One South winning season.

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The fans are known as the Rabble, and most of them are to be found behind whichever goal Dulwich is shooting into—at half time you can simply walk to the other end of the pitch. Attendance has risen 250 percent in the past five years.

A sub-division of the Rabble is the ComFast Chapter. Their red-star adorned scarves are numerous and they were the noisiest group on the terrace. Their combination of Buckfast-infused chanting and ultra-left politics seems to be the logical conclusion of this rebellion against commercialized soccer culture. They have slogans such as "Communism is inevitable" and "Ordinary morality is for ordinary football clubs."

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Chatting to Robert Molloy-Vaughan who runs the group, his critique extended to modern society in general, rather than just soccer. He told me about one of the group's slogan's, "For Future Football." It's "a more positive spin on Against Modern Football"—the protest group and general slogan against the commercialization of the sport's highest tiers. "The most dedicated fans have to miss games because of work. It breaks my heart every time," he said, before spelling out what football would look like in a communist utopia. "Let's get robots, automated factories and 3D printers doing all the labour. Let's have—at most—ten-hour working weeks. Let's have more leisure time for people to spend watching Dulwich Hamlet. That, for me, is hopefully what the future of football will be."

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Jarring somewhat with the club's reputation for having a left-wing fan base and low gate-price, Dulwich fans have been accused of actually gentrifying soccer. With the Dulwich area having become a haven for those familiar middle-class whipping boys the yummie-mummies and expensive furniture shops over the last few years, Hamlet fans are sometimes seen as the yuppie-hipsters of non-league. Morath took issue with that label. "It's not overtly political. We get a lot of lazy comments from opposition fans saying we're hipsters, students or lefties. But it's more a case of doing things that are right. If somebody were to be racist, we'd just tell them to fuck off."

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This held true on the day I turned up. In the crowd there were a few people who wouldn't look out of place in a pop-up craft beer shop, but to call them football gentrifiers would be to confuse gentrification with the wearing of desert boots or the drinking of decent coffee. There was an anti-homophobia banner on display, as well as a ComFast Chapter one claiming to have won the "Moral Victory." There were no songs about anyone's mum being a whore or the opposition's keeper being gay. The lack of shitty racist, sexist and homophobic "banter" didn't make it a killjoy affair by any stretch. If anything the fans were more inventive with chants than at other grounds, for instance singing "Dulwich Über Alles" to the Dead Kennedys' "California Über Alles." There were further appearances by songs from the Specials, Fleetwood Mac, and KRS-One.

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In February, as part of LGBT month, Dulwich will play a friendly game against Stonewall FC, the world's most successful gay team. Following the match the Supporters Trust will go out with Stonewall fans into LGBT pubs and clubs to give away tickets to their league game against the Metropolitan Police. Morath told me, " Other football clubs say they're against things, but in many cases it's just lip service. We're not just saying 'We're against homophobia,' we're trying to welcome gay fans to Dulwich. That sums up the ethos of the club, we try to go that bit further. We've got a mixture of everyone. The atmosphere is buzzing at games. More and more we have become the talk of non-league football."

Incidentally, I'm told that last time Hamlet played the Met police, a left-wing anti-cop crowd turned up and used the opportunity to bait the hated police. When a Dulwich player was fouled, the chant went up, "He fell down the stairs, he fell down the stairs! All Cops Are Bastards, he fell down the stairs!" Also, someone threw sausages at the Met players (police = pigs—get it?), although some of the Dulwich faithful took exception to this.

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As for the game itself, the only goal was a superb 59th minute strike from Xavier Vidal, which fizzed gloriously into the top corner, winning the match for Hamlet. The bending strike wouldn't have been out of place on Match of the Day. It sent the Rabble crazy and into another round of chants. The appeal of shouting praise from right at the side of the pitch for the guy who just smashed it into the net, was obvious.

As Molloy Vaughn told me, "Football is an art form. Coming here is like going clubbing or going to a gig. But when it's good, as it's based on uncontrollable factors—you might have been waiting for months for it to happen, so it's more euphoric. It's a bit like going out but sometimes your MDMA is a bit shit, or the DJs crap, but every once in a while both are really good and at Dulwich for the past few years it's been good more than most."

It wasn't quite Tuscany, but shoulder to shoulder, singing, dancing, hugging, united, the Rabble at Champion Hill was much closer to soccer's promised land than some of the alienating, echoing cathedrals of the Premiership.

Follow Rob McCallum on Twitter.

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Photos courtesy of the author

I fucking hate high school from my first day in 1963 on. I've got behavioral issues and don't live up to my potential. My sophomore year, the varsity basketball team is number one, and Friday-morning rallies take up the time I could be sleeping in English class.

I get to school an hour late one Friday morning, and a bunch of kids are leaving at noon, driving or busing up to St. Louis for a big championship game. I guess I haven't been paying attention, because this is all a surprise to me. I have less than a dollar and spend a dime to call my parents and tell them I won't be home for dinner. I bum a ride 215 miles in a car full of idiots with a bottle of scotch.

St. Louis is kind of scary, but in a good way. Everyone is booked into the same hotel. It's a big party. Kids go in together—two, three, four to a room. I bounce from room to room, keeping an eye out for uneaten food and alcoholic beverages. Early in the evening, a glee-club girl has an epileptic seizure in the lobby and a little crowd stands there, watching. I go out and take a walk around the block to look around. The city vibrates like an onset of nerves. The people are cooler and the shadows are darker and I feel lost.

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Back at the hotel, nothing is happening and people start going to bed. The party is over by ten. I finagle my way into a room with three guys I know and a couple of St. Louis girls. I'm not sure why the St. Louis girls are here, but they have blankets on the floor and look to be unattached. I introduce myself and climb under the cutest girl's blanket. She's got really big hair and smells like roses and mud. We start kissing and she puts her tongue in my mouth and keeps it there, the whole thing. It feels like it's flexed. When we break she tells me I'm a horrible kisser so I go and get under the other girl's blanket.

Around midnight the lights are low and people are sleeping. I'm telling the girl under the blanket how cool I am when a guy I know named Tommy shouts for me to shut the fuck up so he can go to sleep. I tell him to suck my butthole and he gets up and turns on the light and tells me he's going to shut me up. Tommy's about my size and a year younger. We hang with a lot of the same people. Once, when I was playing around with a pocket knife I accidentally stabbed him in the arm. I like him OK, but I don't think he likes me very much.

He takes a swing and misses and I take a swing and miss and then he pops me in the jaw. I say, "OK, fine. This is boring anyway." I borrow a pint of Bacardi rum from a guy who is sound asleep and go out and cruise the hallways, knocking on doors.

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I drink the pint and go into a blackout with little sparks of memory. I wake up late in the afternoon, naked on the floor of a room with a headache and a hard-on and a couple of school friends who find me amusing. They tell me I rode the elevator down to the lobby naked at 4 AM. I don't know if they're telling the truth or not, but I'm going to claim it as my own and add it to the legend.

In the hotel restaurant I go from table to table mooching nutrients. A group of girls tell me that a couple of hours ago my friend Bruce fell out of a sixth-floor window and landed on the roof of the building next door. Bruce and I have been friends since kindergarten. He's an honor-roll student and not generally one to rattle the cage. I'm thinking falling out a window is a bigger deal than taking a naked elevator ride, so I'm kind of envious.

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Bruce is in bed in his room and pretty scraped up and battered. He tells me he didn't fall but snuck out the window to hide by holding onto the ledge because, in his drunken state, he thought the police were coming in to search the room. When he couldn't pull himself back inside he let go, hoping to land on the air conditioner on the next floor down. Instead he landed on the roof next door. I tell him that's pretty funny and I'm glad he's OK and can I borrow five bucks because I'm fucking starving.

The big game is half over when I get there. I don't know what the score is, but my school loses and it feels pretty good. A team member, a kid who used to live across the street from me, is crying like a baby. I don't like him very much and even less after this display. I can't play basketball, but at least I know how to lose.

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Back at the hotel, a girl who I've been falling in love with, Suzy, shows up with a friend and her friend's boyfriend, who drove them up for the game. They're driving back, so I go with them. He's driving a station wagon, so Suzy and I put down blankets in the back and get serious for the next four hours.

On Monday I learn that after the game on Saturday night, a bunch of sore losers got way too drunk and trashed a couple of rooms and a hallway at the hotel. It sounds like great fun and I'm sorry I missed it, but it's 1965 and I've got a future of riots and restlessness to look forward to. My time between the blankets with Suzy, however––motor running, radio playing the Beatles and the Stones, car lights passing by—that's once in a lifetime.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released in 2011, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

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Margalit Fox

Per the CDC, more than 2.5 million people die in America annually. By contrast, a mere one thousand will have the privilege of getting an obituary about them published in the New York Times in any given year (note: not that's not the same as a paid death notice ).

One of the people who's had the opportunity to write over 1,200 obituaries in her 20-year career is Margalit Fox, senior writer for the New York Times. She got her start in 1995, writing obituaries as a freelancer before joining the staff full-time in 2004. She is currently on leave to write her third book but was kind enough to spend some time with me on Skype to talk about her experiences in the profession.

VICE: What would you say is the biggest misconception about obituaries?
Margalit Fox: Most people have some awareness that many newspaper obituaries are written in advance. But a common and very understandable fallacy is that they are all written in advance. Would that that were so, but if you think about it in pure numbers, the number of people who will one day die is literally in the billions. Even if you consider only those that would be newsworthy for our pages, it's still in the hundreds of thousands if not the millions.

We have only four or five writers on our staff, so therefore 90 percent of my job, and that of my colleagues, is handling the breaking news daily obits that are reported and written on deadline just as articles elsewhere in the paper are. When we have some downtime if there's nothing breaking, or when our editor wants to give us a little reprieve, then we turn our attention to working on advances, where by newspaper standards we have the luxury of incredible amounts of time, meaning maybe two days instead of one, or for really complex people maybe a week. But that's the exception to the rule.

How about things people say about obituary writers themselves?
It's that we are these dour, morbid, depressed, death-haunted people. I think that people who think that clearly haven't read our pages. Because if they read our pages, it's pure narrative. And the stories of course, they are not about the death, they are about the life. In an obit of 1,000 words, the death is just the "news peg," as we call it. It might be one or two sentences. So it really is about the life.

Some might argue cause of death is unnecessary info to include. How would you respond?
Historically, the cause of death was either never reported in deference to the family's sensibilities or it was couched in these thinly veiled euphemisms that, weirdly, everyone a little bit older than I was kind of born hard-wired knowing how to read. So if an obit said someone died of a "long illness" you knew that meant cancer. "Short illness" meant heart attack.

Interestingly, one of my colleagues who was raised in the South said in Southern papers if it said someone "died at home," everyone knew that meant [they] committed suicide. But because we are reporting the news, we have to have complete fealty to the truth. Believe me, we're human. We're all good people. We're not in the business of wanting to add to the pain of of newly bereaved families, trust me. But, the whole newspaper answers the question, "What happened?" and obituary articles are no different. Happily, these days people are much more relaxed in talking about cancer, that talking about it isn't the great taboo it was even 40 years ago. Even AIDS, people will tell us, and sometimes suicide as well.

What are the most enjoyable types of obituaries to write?
The ones that all of us love best are these what I call "history's unsung backstage players." One that comes to mind is a woman named Ruth Siems. She was a largely anonymous home economist who worked for General Foods at their plant in Indiana; not somebody we would normally have covered, except for one thing. One of the things she did in the course of her job for this company years before was to figure out that you could take a bunch of bread, cut it into cubes, dehydrate it, add some spices, put it in a box, and have people just add water and egg and voila—Stove Top Stuffing.

And God bless her, she did us a solid—this was a few years ago—by dying right before Thanksgiving. We were able to run the obit on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving week in that year, and of course we did our due diligence in terms of reporting. I called the company, and Thanksgiving season alone, they sell something like 60 million boxes of the stuff. So there's this unsung [woman], she changed the culture. And I've had the great pleasure of writing about many such people. I've done the inventor of Twister, the inventor of Etch-a-Sketch, the inventor of the Frisbee, the inventor of the crash-test dummy, all sorts of people. How cool is that?

What are the criteria that you employ when prospecting for people to write advances on? I would imagine it's not just a factor of importance, but of likelihood to die, no?
We sort of have our eye on famous people, important people who are getting up in years or if we hear that someone has been in the hospital, has had an accident, has been ill. These are people whose body of work is so long, so rich, and so complex that we don't want to get have to get caught short writing it on deadline. It's a like a batter getting caught looking the other way when a fastball whizzes by his head. Of course, it inevitably happens because you can't account for all of the pre-dead. And there's always going to be the rock star that dies young from an overdose. But we have over 1,700 advance obits on file, and they range from several hundred words to 10,000. And trust me, no journalist wants to get caught writing 10,000 words or even 3,000 on deadline. Although 3,000, we've all done. I've certainly done it.

What makes for a good obituary?
Obits are the most purely narrative form in any daily paper. I think more than the sports game story which is also chronological. So, with obits you have this nice narrative structure giving you the arc from cradle to grave. But on the other hand you don't want to be too much at its mercy either. And so sometimes you want to—for structural reasons, for thematic reasons—withhold information to surprise the reader at the very end. You want to reorder things. So that's really kind of a pleasure in this day and age. With the modern, more feature-like obit, it's a pleasure to make those kind of craft decisions. Tough to make them on deadline sometimes, but it's what we're trained to do. So ideally, it has to have lively writing, and above all it had damn well better be accurate.

One of the great things about writing obits in the 20th century is we're allowed to be lively writers, even humorous writers where it's appropriate to the subject. And we are so happy to say that at the New York Times, obits is one of the most writerly sections of the paper.

Do you have any pet peeves when reading obituaries written by others?
Well, there is one. In a small town paper—by no means all, but in some regional papers—you will still see run as a news article what is clearly just a re-printed press release from the family home. And the way you can tell is they are all full of these Victorian cliches which are always the same: "He died doing what he loved." "He touched the lives of everyone he ever knew." "He died surrounded by his loved ones."

And we occasionally get families of some of these unsung heroes who are not conversant in dealing with the press who will say very earnestly, "Please put in 'He died surrounded by everyone he loved,'" and you just kind of say "uh-huh" politely and of course you know that's going to go right on the cutting room floor. We are not in the business of producing eulogies. We are obliged, even with obituaries as they now stand, as good as they are to read, to produce balanced news stories that show warts and all. So if I do have a pet peeve, it's something one still sees in regional papers where it seems as though everyone who died in whatever town was some kind of a saint. Statistically, how likely is that?

There was recently an article in the Guardian where Idi Amin's son wrote in to request corrections to his father's obituary from 2003. Do you have any similar stories?
We do still have to educate the public and families to the fact that we are obliged to present people as they really were, no matter how many things the family would like us to suppress, and how many things they would be able to get suppressed in their local paper by comparison. So we do sometimes have irate families calling us. I've certainly been called a bitch, a bad journalist, every name in the book. For the last ten years, whenever I have a story in the paper, whenever I come in and I see the red message light, my stomach goes tight. And often it's one of these ranting, abusive, invective-laden messages from families.

Is there a way to prepare families or at least set expectations?
The absolute best example of this I ever heard was from my new retired colleague Dennis Hevesi. Dennis is the sweetest man who ever walked the earth, but he was also a good, solid newsman of 40-year standing. I forget what he was working on, but it was clearly some sort of disgraced politician who had died, and he was on the phone with the guy's family. I heard him say very gently, but also very firmly, "You know, I will have to have a paragraph in there about the four months your dad spent in jail."

God bless him, he did his due diligence. I'm sure the family didn't like it, but what I say is, we're not in the veneration business. And the world has not necessarily caught up with that because even in the 21st century, in all but the biggest papers, you can still see these kind of misty-eyed, Victorian obits.

Have you had situations where you interviewed people for their own obituary?
I have had the strange pleasure of doing it on the phone,and as I say elsewhere, there is nothing in Emily Post for this. It's the most bizarre social situation you can imagine; where you're calling up someone and saying, in effect, "Hello, you don't know me, but we think you're going to die someday, and we'd like you to talk to us so that when you do die, we can put what you say where a million people can see it."

So one has to be very delicate, and I do, in fact, borrow these wonderful euphemisms that Alden Whitman used like, "We're updating your biographical file," and then people can take in as much of that as they can handle. So, I think some of them know what we're up to and some of them don't, and that's fine.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

"Once they get you, they are always going to get you," Love* told me this November at a greasy spoon in the Bronx. "The sad thing is that nobody ever stands up there and fights them."

Love is a 48-year-old black woman. She has high cheekbones, and her full lips smirk easily, especially when she hears something dumb. For several years, Love did sex work in Hunts Point, the Bronx red-light district made famous by the HBO documentary Hookers at the Point. Needing rent money, and sick of welfare's bureaucracy, Love went out one night with a friend hoping to make some cash. They took precautions: Love's friend kept an eye on her from the next block and wrote down the license-plate numbers of cars that picked her up. That night Love made $400.

Police arrested her repeatedly, but she kept working. She liked the money, and she had a daughter to support.

In 2009, however, Love was raped while working. The attack left her with post-traumatic stress disorder. With the help of social services organizations, Love quit sex work and started taking classes to become a surgical technician.

But she kept in touch with some of her Hunts Point friends, especially Sandra,* whom she considered a second mother. Then, this summer, Sandra stopped answering her phone. Fearing the worst, Love decided to track her down.

In Hunts Point, the two friends caught up, hanging out on the corner of Edgewater Road and Lafayette Avenue. When a car circled the block several times, Love assumed it was an acquaintance. She waved.

"Hop in," the man in the car demanded. "I've got thirty dollars for a blowjob."

"OK, officer, have a nice day," Love shot back. As she walked away, the man shouted, "You must be a cop. You're calling me a cop."

Love forgot the man, until, as she walked back to the train station, three police officers swarmed her. They arrested Love for prostitution.

Love sat handcuffed in a sweltering, pitch-dark police van. For two hours, police drove around Hunts Point, looking for enough "bodies" to justify a trip back to Central Booking. Confused and furious, Love spent the night in a cell—missing a day of classes. The whole process took 24 hours.

The court system Love found herself in this year was supposed to be different from the one she'd dealt with during her previous prostitution arrests.

New York State's Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs) are the first of their kind in the nation. Launched with great fanfare in September 2013, these courts redefined prostitutes as trafficking victims rather than criminals.

"Human trafficking is... a form of modern-day slavery that we simply cannot tolerate in a civilized society," Judge Jonathan Lippman, the court's creator, said at a press conference announcing the formation of the special courts. "We now recognize that the vast majority of individuals charged with prostitution offenses are commercially exploited or at risk of exploitation. By offering vital services instead of punishment to these defendants, the Human Trafficking Intervention Initiative will act to transform and save lives—and, in turn, enable law enforcement to identify, investigate, and punish the traffickers."

Prostitutes might be called victims, but they're still arrested, still handcuffed, and still held in cages.

Despite the claims of reformers like Judge Lippman, HTICs are as controlling as any other court. Prostitutes might be called victims, but they're still arrested, still handcuffed, and still held in cages. The only difference is that they're now in a system that doesn't distinguish between workers and trafficked people. To the courts, anyone who's been arrested for sex work is raw material, incapable of making his or her own choices. Those like Love, who did sex work out of financial necessity, before leaving of her own volition, might as well not exist.

At HTICs, district attorneys offer most defendants the option of attending six sessions with intervention programs. If they complete the sessions, they are eligible for an ACD (Adjournment for Contemplation of Dismissal). If they're not rearrested for six months their original charges are dismissed. This could be a blessing for those on their first arrest.

But Love had many arrests behind her.

"The prosecution figured that because she had prior prostitution convictions, she must be guilty this time too," Zoe Root, the dedicated HTIC attorney for the Bronx Defenders, the office that represented Love at trial, told me. The prosecutor was unwilling to make Love an offer of anything less than a plea to the top charge and seven days of sessions with Bronx Community Solutions.

Love was baffled. "I've been working in the medical field for over ten years," she told me. "Due to circumstances and a bad relationship, I ended up in the street. But I just completed school. I've completed programs you're offering... I'm forty-fucking-eight years old. I don't have a drug habit. What the fuck are you offering me?" She would take her case to trial.

* Name has been changed.

I visited HTICs in the Bronx and Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn HTIC is held in the Brooklyn Criminal Court at 120 Schermerhorn Street, in the same room where judges see those charged with domestic violence. Alleged prostitutes sit next to men accused of punching their wives.

The Bronx's airy courthouse sees a half-hour-long line of defendants each morning. Outside the HTIC courtroom, a middle-aged black woman screamed into her cell phone: "This is ball-busting shit. Why do I got to go to classes and shit? Do they want me to tell my life story?"

Looking at those charged, one might assume there were nearly no white prostitutes working in New York. Though they make up only 16 percent of the population of Brooklyn, black women represent 65 percent of the Brooklyn HTIC's defendants, according to a study done by sex-workers-advocacy group RedUP. In Brooklyn, there's a sizable minority of Asian immigrants who need Mandarin interpreters. But inside the Bronx courthouse, the only white faces are cops, judges, or lawyers.

The Bronx courtroom is tiny. When I entered, Judge Shari Michels called me to the front. She seemed nervous about the press. In 2013, the New York Daily News lambasted her for telling a child-molesting cop to send a letter to his victim.

When I asked Judge Michels how she differentiated sex workers and trafficking victims, she accused me of asking a loaded question. "No little girl dreams of being a sex worker," she pronounced, loud enough for defendants to overhear. She then added that most sex workers had been molested.

The courts processed defendants with a mechanical briskness. If it's a new case, the judge asks the DA what their offer is. The DA recommends a service provider and a number of sessions. While the women are in services, they need to keep returning to the court, for check-ins designed to make sure that women are attending their sessions. Judge John Hecht, of the Brooklyn HTIC, wished each woman luck, while Judge Michels seemed to expect a performance of gratitude.

If a woman has been rearrested before she completes her sessions, the judge tacks on yet more sessions.

The judge never asked the defendants if they were trafficked.

According to Jillian Modzeleski, a staff attorney at a project within the Legal Aid Society's Criminal Defense Practice that specializes in the defense of those facing prostitution-related charges, clients are already treated as criminals by the court. So they're understandably reluctant to open up to lawyers they meet for the first time at their arraignments. This makes it difficult for lawyers to tell which of their clients are sex workers and which have been trafficked.

A trafficking victim is defined as someone who performs labor coerced by force, debt bondage, or fraud. According to the International Labor Organization, 21 million people are victims of forced labor—mostly in construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and domestic work. Trafficked workers pick strawberries and build skyscrapers. In Thailand, slaves work shrimp boats, with captains murdering them as punishment, then throwing their bodies into the sea.

Of these 21 million, 4.5 million are forced to work in the sex industry.

A trafficking victim might be a migrant saddled with an ever-mounting debt to smugglers, or a woman forced to do sex work and turn over earnings to an abusive partner. Many are rape victims by another name.

Attorney Kate Mogulescu, also with the Criminal Defense Practice, told me: "Our clients coming through [HTICs] face a vast range of needs—so much so that the question of whether or not they have been trafficked often assumes less importance."

One sex worker told me: "I don't want to go to jail. I just want to get this over with. I don't want to stand here being humiliated."

Courts do not provide emergency housing—something anyone escaping a trafficker would presumably need. There are only the same shelters that house battered women and the homeless. Nor do courts offer monetary support, or even protection from a trafficker.

In the Bronx I saw one trans Latina, arrested on misdemeanor drug charges, who had been referred to sex-trafficking court because of previous prostitution convictions. She'd already done extensive services for substance abuse, which saved her from homelessness. Despite this, the DA insisted she plead guilty to a misdemeanor to resolve the case—the same bargain he'd offer if she hadn't done any services at all.

One sex worker told me: "I don't want to go to jail. I just want to get this over with. I don't want to stand here being humiliated."

But Mogulescu insisted that the courts wear down clients who maintain their innocence, by adjourning for months on end. Eventually, clients take the court-mandated services out of frustration.
And that's if they're lucky enough to be free.

If a defendant has previous drug charges, she may spend weeks in jail, waiting for an overburdened agency to "evaluate" her. Though she's being held on prostitution charges, to get services DAs often recommend months in an inpatient drug-treatment program that differs little from prison.

While someone on her first arrest usually gets released after ten hours with a desk-appearance ticket, the judge often holds that person on bail if she has a criminal history. For the impoverished women public defenders represent, even $250 of bail is enough to keep them locked away on brutal Rikers Island.

Since one can wait months or years for a trial, bail forces the poor to enter a plea bargain, just to have a date on which they'll be released.

Since Love lived in eastern Brooklyn, she had to wake up at 5 AM to get to each of her five court appointments on time.

At the pre-trial hearings, Love had become increasingly confused. Undercover officers are supposed to wear a recording device in order to have proof that solicitation took place. Since Love never solicited anyone, the police department had no recording to present. Yet Judge Michels would not throw out the case. It would be Love's word against a cops.

Love decided to testify. She spoke about the kidnapping and rape she had survived while working and her PTSD, which was devastating enough to put her on disability. She spoke about how she cared for Sandra, about how they just stood against a car, chatting like old friends.

But when the undercover cop took the stand, Love began to panic. She'd never seen this guy in her life. His story was filled with inconsistencies, but the prosecutor later said this only proved he was honest.

The stranger on the stand testified that at 3:30 PM, on the same block as Hunts Point Riverside Park and Valencia Bakery, Love offered him a $20 blowjob.

For $30, he said, she'd fuck him in the street.

"Rescue—my ass," Love laughed, later, when I asked her if she felt the police had saved her. "Drug dealers, prostitutes, illegals... we are an easy paycheck for them. We look good for them. That's what we are to them."

Mogulescu held a similar opinion: "I do not believe that the officers making these arrests have bought into the rescue narrative at all."

Police are violent in general, and violent specifically to women they think are sex workers. According to a 2012 study by the Young Women's Empowerment Project for young people who have sold sex, a third of all reported abuse came at the hands of the police. Sources told me officers had called women "sluts," groped them during arrests, even made jerking-off motions with their batons in court. In the Brooklyn HTIC, RedUP saw a black woman who claimed to have been beaten so savagely by police that she landed in the hospital.

Undercover officers tricked women into their cars by offering rides and then hauled them off to jail.

"They got to make their quota at the end of month," said Lucy,* 19, whom police arrested after she accepted a man's offer of $100 for "hanging out"—not, she emphasized to me, having sex. During the arrest, police accused her of smoking crack.

Women who HTICs hope will find legal employment are yanked back into jail by police who assume that once someone is a prostitute, she's a prostitute for life. Police arrest women they've profiled on sight.

"My clients rarely—if ever—tell me that their interaction with the police was good or helpful," said Abigail Swenstein, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society's Trafficking Victims Advocacy Project. "Rather, I hear quite often that clients have been verbally abused by the officers involved in their arrest. On multiple occasions, my clients have reported inappropriate sexual conduct by an officer. Trust is never really fostered." Other lawyers echoed these allegations of sexual abuse.

Police took special advantage of sex workers with addiction issues. "If you're one of those girls who's begging, crying, and doesn't want to go to jail," Love told me, some officers will offer freedom in exchange for sex. But it's always, said Love, "a deal with the Devil." Afterward, cops will keep shaking you down—for information, easy arrests, or more sex.

What would otherwise be called rape at gunpoint is, because the victims are sex workers, given the euphemism "sexual favors."

Police do not have to witness someone offering to exchange sex for money in order to arrest her on a prostitution-related charge. The suspicion of loitering with the intent to commit prostitution gives police the right to arrest someone for waving at people of the opposite gender, standing outside in a neighborhood known for prostitution, or, until recently, carrying condoms. Love told me that new officers frequently arrest young women who are not working but just walking to Hunts Point Riverside Park.

Racial profiling is epidemic. African Americans make up 94 percent of those in Brooklyn charged with "loitering for the purposes of prostitution."

Police depositions contain blank spaces to describe a woman's clothing. Police arrested one woman for pairing a peacoat with jeans that "outlined her legs." If they can't find a scantily clad woman, they invent one. Cops arrested one of Modzeleski's clients on claims she was waving while wearing a low-cut top and miniskirt. But the woman's attorney found her in a jacket and pants at her arraignment. The case was dismissed after the attorney presented photos, but the cop suffered no consequences for lying.

Racial profiling is epidemic. African Americans make up 94 percent of those in Brooklyn charged with "loitering for the purposes of prostitution."

Trans women of color are disproportionately profiled as prostitutes—and treated with unique cruelty during their arrests. In 2011, a trans woman named Ryhannah Combs was arrested for loitering for the purpose of prostitution while running errands. An officer lied on the report to say she was carrying nine condoms even though she was carrying none. Rather than putting her in a cell, police chained her to a wall near an elevator for "an extended period of time." Combs later settled a lawsuit with the city.

In the back of the Brooklyn courtroom, a group of trans women of color, obviously friends, sat together. One woman wore her hair coiffed like Jayne Mansfield's. She curled a string of pearls around one finger, saying that, because of fear of arrest, she doesn't even go outside alone.

When I told the group I was looking for stories about police profiling trans women, one woman replied, "That's us."

* Name has been changed.

During my observations of HTICs, the courts mandated five days of services for most defendants. The nonprofits that offer services vary. Some, like the Urban Justice Center, have deep ties to sex-worker communities. Others serve certain ethnic groups. Still others have their roots in a virulently anti-sex-worker strain of feminism.

Providers hold yoga classes and offer art therapy or group therapy. Social workers help clients sort issues with immigration, housing, or child care. There are few statistics on what happens after clients complete their mandate.

Women I spoke with described these social workers as kind and helpful. But the services they provide are available without having to go through the trauma of arrest.

I interviewed the heads of two service providers: Jimmy Lee, director of the Christian Restore NYC, and Judge Judy Kluger, the director of the feminist Sanctuary for Families (and one of the main architects of the HTICs).

In addition to counseling sessions, Sanctuary offers pro bono legal help, and Restore provides a safe house for 11 women. These services alone have no doubt improved many lives. But both Kluger and Lee believe that while the sex industry is violent against women, police are not. Restore, which sees raids as essential, even partners with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Both believe sexual abuse by police is the exception. Both believe the system holds abusive cops accountable.

"I think, like any vast bureaucracy with a legal recourse to violence, there are abuses, and sometimes they are horrible," Lee told me. "But similar to the police, I feel like ICE, FBI, law enforcement, and the court system do and can play a very good and beneficial role in our society. And they're often led by people with a lot of honor and integrity."

Women I spoke with described these social workers as kind and helpful. But the services they provide are available without having to go through the trauma of arrest.

Both Lee and Kluger support Sweden's "Nordic model," which criminalizes clients and managers but not sex workers themselves. Its goal is to "end demand." Swedish sex workers condemn the Nordic model as deeply stigmatizing. Sex workers' landlords, drivers, and even fellow sex workers risk being charged with pimping. Fewer clients means poorer workers, who are less able to negotiate for their safety.

This wouldn't give anti-trafficking advocates pause.

Kluger told me that sex work is inherently degrading—not something anyone could freely choose. She doesn't buy the articles whose writers say they paid for college by working as escorts. She claims sex workers have sex with 30 people a day and calls Amsterdam's red-light district the "saddest sight [she's] ever seen."

To Lee and Kluger, the willing sex worker is either fictional or self-deluding. They prefer the term "prostituted woman."

According to Kluger, the HTICs are decriminalizing prostitution in the court system, despite the arrests and incarcerations that underpin the courts. Her perception of sex workers comes from the women who have stood before her bench. To her, they seem "comatose," emotionless, controlled by traffickers and pimps. To validate their emotions, Lee and Kluger both rely on long-discredited statistics that are mantras in the anti-trafficking world: "70 percent of trafficking is sex trafficking"; "the average age of entry into prostitution is 12 to 14 years old."

When asked, neither could cite their sources.

But even if you believed all prostitutes were raped and trafficked women, the way police treat them makes about as much sense as arresting battered wives.

In 2009, the Sex Workers Project released a report on the sort of brothel raid anti-trafficking advocates like Nicholas Kristof support. "These raids are ugly and horrible," one trafficking victim told SWP. "Being afraid never goes away." One trafficked woman said police pistol-whipped her. Others were handcuffed, threatened, or hauled off in skimpy work clothes.

When in November 2014 the New York Times profiled the Queens HTIC, the author summarized the feelings of more than a dozen Chinese migrants in court: "They did not feel like trafficking victims, but victims of the police."

On November 1, I returned to the Bronx courtroom to hear Love's verdict. She'd been deeply shaken by the undercover officer but promised to talk to me later, when she was "less tired and less pained." Before the lawyers began speaking, Judge Michels called me to the bench. She told me nervously that journalists filter things through a prism and sometimes very ordinary things are blown up.

In her closing remarks, Love's lawyer stated that the prosecution had no evidence she had solicited the undercover cop. She talked about the big raid the police had planned that day, with ten officers, four cars. They had been out for five hours with no arrests. To them, Love was just a body to fill the prisoner van.

The prosecutor began his statement: "'I can give you a blowjob for twenty. If you want to fuck it's thirty. We can do it on the street,'" he said, mocking Love. He ridiculed her PTSD and kept describing her blond hair and gold shirt. He doubted why Love would be in an area where she neither lived nor worked. He said her previous prostitution arrests undermined her credibility, while police would have no reason to lie. He even denied she felt humiliated. He called the case a simple one. "It's fitting," he drawled. "The crime of prostitution has few elements. Two people. Money."

Love stared at the prosecutor, her face a mask of anger. Tears gathered below her eyes. She wouldn't let them fall.

In the name of helping women, the anti-trafficking movement has endorsed surveillance.

The 19th century saw the rise of a pious, middle-class feminism, devoted to the moral uplift of the poor. By ministering to prostitutes, middle-class women got both respectable jobs and the frisson of proximity to vice. But as Northwestern University professor Ellen Carol DuBois has written:

The catch was that the prostitutes had to agree that they were victims. The "white slavery" interpretation of prostitution—that prostitutes had been forced into the business—allowed feminists to see themselves as rescuers of slaves. But if the prostitutes were not contrite... they lost their claim to the aid and sympathy of the reformers.

Those reformers are the grandmothers of today's anti-trafficking movement. But the pity many anti-trafficking advocates feel for sex workers is not conducive to respect. Sex workers and trafficked people remain projects, not equals—to be forced into help they didn't ask for by the threat of police violence. Their hearts ache for these women. They won't listen to them speak.

In the name of helping women, the anti-trafficking movement has endorsed surveillance. They've shuttered websites where sex workers advertise or organize. They support brothel raids, police, and NGOs that have chucked overseas prostitutes into sweatshops. They have created a false dichotomy: weeping victims and the rare "Happy Hookers" who pair their white privilege with Louboutins.

They have denied the existence of women like Love.

When Love heard the not-guilty verdict, she waited until she'd left the courtroom to fall into her lawyer's arms.

When I met Love the next week, in a Bronx diner with her lawyers, the pain of the trial had faded from her face. In a bright red dress and rhinestone-studded necktie, she looked strong and rested, ready to start her internship as a surgical technician.

"Almost everyone who is charged with prostitution enters a plea bargain, but you chose to fight the charge. Why?" I asked Love.

"Because it wasn't... not this time. Nuh-uh," she said, pausing.

"When will prostitution be legal?" Love asked, sipping the last of her soda. "These are petty crimes. It's a waste of taxpayers' money. It's a waste of manpower. It's just a freaking waste."

An interactive map showing the countries Canada does arms trading business with.

Ottawa may have been none too happy with now-ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, but the Canadian government didn't have much of a problem increasing weapons shipments to his government by 182,819 percent.

It's all part of how Canada's military exports have re-oriented in recent years, as more and more Canada-made weaponry heads into shaky territory. When those less-than-stable regimes eventually crumble, like Morsi's did, figuring out where those Canadian-made armaments end up is a real crapshoot.

These figures, which cover 2012 and 2013, show that Canada is hiking weapons shipments to its NATO allies—England, Italy, Germany—but also to less stable nations with questionable moral records.

Aside from the now-jailed Morsi, the power-hungry Saudis, the democracy-quashing Bahrainis, and the communist regime in China all bought significant amounts of military goods from Canuck suppliers.

Canada, overall, had its best-ever arms-exporting year in 2012, bringing in more than $1 billion. Canada's total exports slid a bit the year after, to a still-high $680 million. That figure puts Canada near the list of top 10 arms exporters worldwide.

The figures don't include Canada's sales to the United States, as the Yanks aren't subject to the same export controls, and therefore the data isn't captured. The government estimates that exports to States "account for over half of Canada's exports of military goods and technology each year."

Generally, Canada can still brag that it mostly ships its goods to peace-loving modern nations. If you break down Canada's clients by HDI—the Human Development Index or, basically, a way of ranking states based on a variety of factors that includes their human rights record—you'll see that 95 percent of Canada's sales go to countries ranked "very high" or "high." In 2012, it was 98 percent.

On the other hand, shipments to less developed countries have skyrocketed. Sales to those states with a "low" HDI ranking quintupled over the year prior, totalling over $12 million.

Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria, China and Colombia are all big recipients of Canada-made armaments.

But it's not just tanks and machine guns that Canada is hawking to national armies all over the world, it's high-tech military gear. Sales of weapons sights, bombing equipment, and targeting software tripled since the previous year. Chemical agents—especially those used for crowd control—and military technology also became hot-ticket items over the course of 2013.

Not all of the weaponry exported by Canada is destined for militaries or security services. Included in this data are some export-restricted goods that may end up in private or corporate hands, especially rifles and guns. But the data is generally about military goods, and not just a sum total of every peashooter and rocket launcher sold to the average global citizen.

The exports naturally come from private Canadian companies, but the government in Ottawa reviews each of these sales and nixes any that it feels aren't in line with its export policies.

"A key consideration in the review of each application is the end-use of the export. Careful attention is paid to mandatory end-use documentation in an effort to ensure that the export is intended for a legitimate end-user and will not be diverted to ends that could threaten the security of Canada, its allies, or other countries or people," a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs told VICE.

Worth noting in the data is that, because procurement tends to involve multi-year contracts, annual numbers could be either inflated, if the contract cost is factored into a single year, or misleadingly low, if one contract is spread over a series of years.

The classifications for the exports are, at best, vague. The export details are broken down into categories such as "electronic equipment, military spacecraft and components not controlled elsewhere" and "energetic materials and related substances." Often, it's nearly impossible to tell exactly what the exports actually consist of, when cryptic number designations like 2-11 and 2-12 are applied to weapons classifications.

Also: the government only publishes this data every two years without any stated reason. So you'll have to stay tuned until 2016 to see just how much Canadian military exports are ramping up—given that Ottawa is trying to knock down barriers to ship arms to a half dozen other nations, expect the numbers to be pretty high.

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Pratt & Whitney jet engine. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Middle East
Everyone's favourite Wahhabi dictators come out on top of Canada's export list again.

The Saudis scooped up a good $153 million in Canadian military goods in 2013—albeit, a marked decline since 2012, when they peeled off over $422 million in bills to improve their absurdly well-financed military.

Most of that is tanks. The Canadian wing of American arms manufacturer General Dynamics got a $13-billion contract to assemble light armoured vehicles for the royal family's desert kingdom. (That information is conspicuously missing on their Industry Canada profile page.)

Some of that money is going to Waterloo-based Aeryon Labs, who has developed a mini-surveillance drone that the Saudi military has taken a liking to.

Afghanistan also found $8 million in the couch cushions—or, more likely, it used foreign invested dollars to rebuild its war-torn country—to buy parts for its air force. From the vague categorizations given in the government report, it appears Canada is selling Kabul imaging and surveillance technology for their aircrafts. Afghanistan could use some good equipment—America just scrapped a $486 million fleet of cargo planes because they were dangerously bad.

Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan also joined the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey in contracting out for jet parts to Pratt & Whitney, which mostly deals in aircraft engines.

Then there's Egypt, where Canada shipped more than $7 million in arms in 2013. Much of that appears to have been radar and infrared equipment. In years past, Canada has hawked millions in airplane gear to its military.

Given that Ottawa does have a considerable amount of say over who-gets-sold-what, it's rather surprising anyone was vending to then-president Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood government was often derided by the Canadian Government.

Meanwhile, Ottawa also approved nearly $5 million in exports to Israel—most of that is bombs and missiles. Quebec-based Alphacasting is supposedly the go-to Israeli exporter in that field.

Finally, there's the $3 million in exports of military ground vehicles Canada exported to Libya in 2013. While exports had been forbidden in the autumn years of Muammar Qaddafi's insane regime, Canada opened the floodgates after he was ousted thanks to a NATO-backed military campaign.

Now, of course, rebels have basically toppled that government Canada supported. Making it worse, ex-Qaddafi and maybe-CIA-connected Libyan army commander Khalifa Haftar, probably in control of some Canadian goods, launched his own campaign against the Islamist rebels and decided the government was illegitimate. A new parliament has now endorsed him, and he may well be en route to becoming Libya's new strong-arm general.

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IAV Stryker land combat vehicle produced by General Dynamics. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

North America
The data released last month doesn't touch the multi-billion dollar arms trade between Canada and the United States—that's covered elsewhere. The new data does note, however, that Ottawa's exports to Mexico City, already insignificant, have slipped further.

Canada's sales to Mexico in 2013, totalling around $900,000, mostly comprised of surveillance equipment and military ground vehicles. Down a bit from the year prior but, generally, up in the last few years.

The Mexican army, of course, is in the midst of a bloody war with the drug cartels that effectively run huge swaths of the country. The police, on the other hand, have been implicated in a mass-killing of protesting students. So weapons are likely in pretty high demand.

The Caribbean nations, meanwhile, only picked up a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Canadian equipment.

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A CF-18 Hornet in Cold Lake, Alberta. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

South America
While Canada has never shipped much in the way of military goods to South America, four countries are on their way to becoming crucial clients of the Canadian defense industry.

Colombia is at the back of the pack, having picked up nearly $800,000 worth of goods last year, while the Dutch Antilles spent $1.5 million. Both nations were behind Chile, which spent $3.5 million. The Colombians mostly purchased aircraft and parts, while the latter two purchased only surveillance and imaging equipment.

Then there's South America's economic powerhouse: Brazil.

While Canada usually ships a good chunk of arms to Brazil, things have declined in recent years. The data shows that sales to the country amounted to about $275,000—usually it's between somewhere in the one-or-two-million range.

That may change. Canada is contemplating putting Brazil (as well as India, Kuwait, Peru and South Korea) on an arms-export short-list to facilitate the movement of weapons.

Colombia is already on that list, for some reason.

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M777 Howitzer field artillery gun. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Europe
Obviously, thanks to NATO, Canada's military hardware is in ample supply in Europe.

We're talking $85 million to Austria, $11 million to Belgium, $5 million to Denmark, $1 million to Finland, $46 million to Germany, $14 million to the Swiss, $50 million to Italy, $12 million to Luxembourg, $28 million to France, $14 million to the Netherlands, $5 million to Norway, $6 million to Spain, $9 million to Sweden, and more than $100 million to the United Kingdom.

For those European countries that aren't NATO members—namely, the post-Soviet countries—there's the Wassenaar Arrangement, which facilitates weapons trades between liberal non-NATO countries on the continent.

Overall, Canada consistently ships anywhere between $200 and $400 million in military goods to Europe in any given year.

One notable absence in the list of big Canadian buyers is Ukraine. Given that the data stops before 2013—Viktor Yanukovych, Putin's deposed ally that didn't step down from the presidency until February 2014—it's not surprising the data doesn't show an uptick in weapons flow to the country. Expect that to change when 2014's numbers come out, given Canada's Operation REASSURANCE is boosting Ukraine's military in the face of Russian aggression.

That said, the same trade data shows Canada still furnished Ukraine with nearly $300,000 in rifles and automatic weapons. Those weapons, hopefully, didn't go to Yanukovych's trigger-happy police state, but there's no indication one-way-or-the-other.

The other interesting Canadian client was Russia. Canada shipped some $400,000 in rifles to Russia in 2013. While Canada has slapped round-after-round of sanctions on Putin's aggressive regime, Ottawa still has yet to impose an arms embargo.

Europe has imposed a formal embargo, going so far as to ice a massive French contract for amphibious assault vehicles.

A spokesperson for the government, however, says Canada is not helping out the Russian military in any way.

"Canada has no bilateral military exports to the Russian Federation. Any export permit applications destined for Russia are suspended and under review," the spokesperson told VICE. "Nothing will be approved which could benefit the Russian military in any form."

Most of the military hardware designated chemicals and crowd-control sprays sold by Canada, went to pretty liberal European states—Austria, France, Germany, and the like.

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Aeryon Labs' Scout micro-drone. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Africa
South Africa and Nigeria are two of the only nations in Africa that are boasting Canada-made armaments. The former rang up nearly $4.5 million in 2013, while the latter bought more than $3.5 million.

It's no big surprise that South Africa is scooping up Canadian arms—$45 million worth from 2010 to 2013—as the country has spent more than a decade trying to upgrade its military to a real fighting force, all the while facing the strain of repeated deployments to various regional conflicts.

Most of South Africa's purchases were for ground vehicles and airplane parts.

Nigeria, on the other hand, is Africa's largest economy, its most populous nation, its largest oil producer, and one of its go-to sources for military personnel and hardware for peacekeeping missions. Its president, however, has been accused of botching a response to the upstart, child-kidnapping Boko Haram rebels. The fast-moving, well-financed Salafist militia has captured various towns in the North, and managed to take over a Nigerian military base.

Here's hoping that, while perusing through that base, those terrorists don't come across any of the military vehicles that Canada sold to the Nigerian army in 2013—$4.5 million worth in the last two years alone.

If Muhammadu Buhari wins Nigeria's next election in February, he'll likely make good use of those arms. Buhari was the country's military dictator for a few years in the 80s, and is largely basing his campaign on the idea that current president Goodluck Jonathan is doing a poor job of stomping out the Islamist insurgency.

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Pratt & Whitney Falcon 2000S. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Asia
You know what they say: keep your friends close, and sell your enemies $990,000 in military training hardware.

Well, that's the adage that Ottawa goes by when dealing with China, apparently.

While Canada had barely sold any sort of military hardware to the world's largest military, things changed in 2013 as Canada—right after chastising the Communists for being a target of their cyber warfare— inked a military partnership agreement.

So things will probably ramp up to that end in 2014. Right now, it's just the million dollars for military training and simulation, and $300,000 in rifles.

The region's altruistic do-gooder, South Korea, also shops in Canada. The less-hermit-y of the two Koreas purchased $13 million worth of jets, spacecraft and ships—or, at least, parts for them. That makes the Republic of Korea the 10th largest importer of Canada arms.

Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Taiwan all spend upwards of a million dollars a year on Canadian military goods.

Another one in the "oops" category is Thailand—an otherwise stable nation that got thrown into turmoil in 2013 as protesters shut down the capital, and got sprayed with bullets for their trouble. Now, the military is in charge, and they've got millions of dollars in Canadian weapons at their disposal.

Exports to Thailand topped $10 million in 2013, mostly in military aircraft. In years prior, Canada did send over hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of "chemical or biological toxic agents, riot control agents, radioactive materials, and related equipment, components, materials."

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Photo courtesy Laura Cole, change.org petition "LET US TOBOGGAN!!!!"

A threat to one of Canada's iconic pastimes—tobogganing—recently made waves as it was reported that some US cities are banning or restricting the activity on certain public slopes following some expensive litigation, and that a few Canadian cities have also taken similar measures to reduce liability.

Judging by the comments in the original National Post report—which call the restrictions everything from "pathetic" to essentially an all-out assault on our freedom—it's clear that Canadians take sliding down a hill on a piece of plastic very seriously.

But before we get our snow pants in a twist thinking that we're about to lose our right to have good, clean Canadian fun because of a bunch of safety-obsessed scaredy-cats, it's important to note that most Canadian cities are still fine with citizens hurling themselves down snow-covered hills at uncomfortable speeds. Some public health entities in Ottawa and Alberta not only promote the winter activity, but also post helpful safety tips like wearing a helmet, and not improvising difficult-to-control sleds made out of garbage bags.

But in places like Hamilton—which in 2013 was forced to pay lawyer Bruno Uggenti $900,000 after he injured his spine on a toboggan run—the price of going for a quick rip on your special edition Brett Hull GT Snoracer could result in a hefty fine of up to either $2,000 or $5,000 in different areas of the city, according to this bylaw.

To raise awareness of this egregious municipal buzzkill, Hamilton resident Laura Cole started the change.org petition "LET US TOBOGGAN!!!!" When reached by phone to comment, Cole told VICE, "I do understand there's risk involved [with tobogganing] but there's risk involved in everything we do... Of course we accept the risk when we go down that hill. We're all aware of that."

Cole's petition has garnered more than 1,000 signatures since it began in November, and this includes support from people in places as far off as Louisiana and London, England.

"Some of [the people who have signed] want to come visit Canada and go tobogganing, and to not have that ability... I just don't understand why," explains Cole. "Yes, people get hurt, but that's just like playing any organized sport, like hockey."

Although official studies on toboggan-related injuries in Canada aren't readily available, according to this Alberta Health Services website, from 2004 to 2008 there were an average of 410 sled-related injuries treated annually in Alberta emergency departments. According to this news report, Montreal Children's Hospital says its emergency department treats 125 tobogganing injuries a year. Half of those involve brain traumas.

Cole says that neither the dangers nor the bylaw have stopped some Hamiltonians from whipping out their krazy karpets on the city's hillsides (in fact, Cole says she's actually seen police encourage wayward tobogganers to have fun on the slopes), but she still believes the bylaw is sending the wrong message to the public, who may be missing out on some much-needed outdoor time.

"I don't think it's fair to deprive these kids of [tobogganing] while most of them are playing video games and watching TV indoors during the winter. And it's especially unfair for parents who can't afford more expensive winter sports like hockey." Cole continued, "We're Canadian. We play in the snow. I think it's important to keep this in our heritage."

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Photo courtesy of Joey Thibodeaux and Kevin Foster. All other photos by the author

Two years ago, after Joey Thibodeaux and Kevin Foster watched a dolphin show at Discovery Cove in Orlando, Florida, animal trainers beckoned the two men into the water. A trained dolphin swam toward Joey clutching a wide buoy in its mouth. Joey took it and turned it over. "Joey, Marry Me?" it proposed. Joey said yes, and they vowed to spend the rest of their lives by each other's side.

But those vows weren't official until shortly after midnight Tuesday morning, when Foster and Thibodeaux and 27 other same-sex couples legally married in Osceola County, Florida, the second in a wave of Florida counties issuing the licenses after US District Court Judge ­­­­Robert Hinkle officially lifted a stay postponing the reversal of Florida's 2008 ban on same-sex marriage.

"It's peace of mind," Foster, 39, told me. "If one of us is in the hospital, the visitation rights thing is big. The state recognizes us as—" Thibodeaux cut him off: "It's real!"

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Inside the Osceola County Courthouse , the office turned marriage hall hummed in anticipation. Security guards seemed happy to be working past midnight on a weekday. Outside, friends held signs in support of same-sex marriage, silently competing with about 20 protesters whose signs displayed messages like "Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman" and "Sodom and Gomorrah."

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"What they're doing is sin," Osceola resident Barbara Jones said. "What they're doing, God hates." Complaining to me about what she sees as a recent decline of the American society, Jones said she worries about her six grandchildren's fate in a world where gays can marry.

Inside the courthouse, Osceola County clerk of court Armando Ramírez, a supporter of gay rights, led a packed room in a 10-second countdown before Osceola County Commissioner Cheryl Grieb and longtime partner Patti Daugherty became the commissioner and her wife.

"It's very easy to judge other people," Ramírez said as he waited for 12:01 to strike. "This nation has been evolving. You have demonstrated tenacity."

When Grieb and Daugherty exchanged their vows shortly after midnight, wearing embroidered matching white dress suits, they became the first couple to marry in Central Florida.

"I wanted to dramatize the waiting period," Ramírez said.

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It's clear that Florida gay marriage opponents like Barbara Jones have lost. In a last-ditch effort to save the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, however, at least five Northern Florida counties have decided to cease all courthouse ceremony performances rather than perform them for same-sex couples.

Some claimed the ceremonies were an impractical use of taxpayer dollars, but others were less circumspect: "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman," Duval Clerk of Courts Ronnie Fussell told the Florida Times-Union. "Personally it would go against my beliefs to perform a ceremony that is other than that."

None of the members of his office felt comfortable officiating same-sex ceremonies, he said, so rather than discriminate, they decided to simply cut the practice for everyone.

Most Floridians feel comfortable with gay marriage, though. Although unconditional love between two adults freaked out more than 60 percent of Florida voters in 2008, when Florida Family Action's ballot initiative banning the marriages passed, that number has since dropped to 39 percent according to a 2014 Quinnipiac poll.

In the meantime, Florida's first married gay couples are preparing for their big ceremonies after their legal midnight weddings. To Kim Wagar and Janet Barchuk, the decision to marry Tuesday was only on paper, a show of support for their friends in white, Grieb and Daugherty. Their real wedding would come in a month, they said. They worry about wedding day complications, like any homo- or heterosexual couple would. When it comes, though, they'll be able to enjoy thrilling legal benefits like filing joint taxes and making the decision, if necessary, whether to pull the plug.

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Notice the emblem on the helmet. Photo via International Ice Hockey Federation

While Hockey Canada had a partnership with a Canadian Tire kids charity, the Russian national junior hockey team—in what almost feels like a throwback to the Cold War—had helmets emblazoned with the symbol of the largest arms exporter in the country.

Rosoboronexport, a subsidiary of the Rostec State Corporation, the same company that counted Bashar al Assad, the Iranian regime, and the late Muammar Qaddafi, before his ouster, as clients—had its text emblem streaked across the helmets of the young Russian hockey players.

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One of Rosoroboronexport's company taglines. Image via Rosoroboronexport

The final, between the two hockey superpowers, likely attracted millions of viewers who no doubt saw the white and blue corporate etching atop the red Russian helmets. The team wore the same advertisement throughout the tournament beginning in late December.

Rosoboronexport advertises itself as "the sole state exporter of defense products, technologies and services," selling arms in over 70 countries accounting for 80 percent of Russia's overall arms exports. The company complies with all UN arms control treaties and in 2014 its CEO said Rosoboronexport did $13.2 billion in business.

The company, known for its mortars, fighter jets, and rocket propelled grenades, is also a major sponsor of Russian hockey, pumping millions into the popular sport in the petroleum rich state.

"Rosoboronexport is the Official Partner of the Russian Hockey Federation and the Official Partner of the Russian men's national ice hockey team," said General Director Anatoly Isaykin in a company release on its website from 2014.

Last year, the company congratulated the 2014 World Championship winning senior men's team, heralding the Russian victory as proof of the success of its "investments in infrastructure development, holding children and youth tournaments."

The Rosoboronexport hockey sponsorship comes on the heels of several high-profile sanctions against Russian arms sales worldwide. The European Union imposed a full arms embargo against all future contracts with Russian firms in the summer, while the US banned imports of the popular AK-47 assault rifle.

At the same time, Russia entered into a heated standoff with France after Rosoboronexport signed a deal for Mistral class assault ships due at the end of 2014. The deal is suspended indefinitely over Russia's ongoing support of armed Ukrainian rebel groups.

But Russia's largest arms exporter evaded American sanctions, as the Washington Post reported, after signing deals with the Pentagon to aid its ongoing presence in Afghanistan.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

British comics killed it in 2014. From THE WICKED + THE DIVINE's gods of pop culture to Raygun Roads' gonzoid tales of insobriety, independent British publishers have fought for the fact that we no longer have to look to the US for all that's great about graphic novels.

As host of the British Comic Awards (BCA) Lisa Ward (Tula Lotay), puts it, "There's never been as many British comic publishers. New ones have sprung up—like Blank Slate Press, Nobrow, and SelfMadeHero—and many were nominated for Eisner Awards this year. It's all helping to fuel this incredible creativity that is going on with British writers and artists."

The question is, though: can 2015 match up? We asked the British comic artists that triumphed in 2014 what, exactly, made it such an awesome year and the titles we should watch for in the year to come.

ALISON SAMPSON, GENESIS
Sampson has been steadily building a name for herself over the last few years with a style that manages to make every page as intoxicating as some shamanic hallucinogens. Managing Think of a City, an endless source of the some of the finest graphic artwork out there, she won this year's BCA award for Best Newcomer.

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Excerpt from Deeply Strange and Brokenly Ethereal

VICE: Why has it been such a good year for British comics?
Alison Sampson: The variety gets better and better every year. There is an increasing market for all sorts of stories—not just superheroes—and there are people here who can fill that gap, bringing a new voice to the conversation.

Collaboration and publishing internationally is easier than ever, allowing people unprecedented exposure, wider markets, and the ability to sell anywhere. You don't need to be signed off by a publisher. All you need is an internet connection, some kind of scanner, paper, and a pen.

What British comics should we be excited about next year?
Ian Culbard's adaptation of The King in Yellow—Robert W. Chambers' short stories depicted in the grimacing crime drama True Detective—is a 144-page graphic novel based on the supernatural tail of a forbidden play that induces madness in those who read it. Kinda like a pagan version of The Ring.

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Excerpt from The King in Yellow

Liam Cobb's Death of a Crow must be the most surreal ode to a Kia Ora ad ever to grace the printed page. His dystopian work has lead to him being asked to do a guest issue on the apocalyptic Spread series. The combination is a Lynchian wet dream.

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Excerpt from Death of a Crow

OWEN MICHAEL JOHNSON, RAYGUN ROADS
Raygun Roads tells the story of Vince Paradise and his cosmic punk band. It was almost offensively vivid in its graphic style but saved its conscientious side for an all-out attack on capitalism. Johnson is working with Leeds-based artist John Pearson on Beast Wagon next year, an anthropomorphic comic book set in a zoo with a homicidal goat called Abacus. It explores the violence we inflict on one another, both physically and psychologically.

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VICE: Why has it been such a good year for British comics?
Owen Michael Johnson: British comics are challenging and challenged right now. I find that restlessness electrifying. 2014 saw an explosion of diverse comics across the country. For an industry not always historically willing to evolve, 2014 saw key debates occurring on topics ranging from diversity to gender equality. And fantastic micro-publishers like Avery Hill Publishing and Dogooder Comics are originating, printing, and distributing great comics.

How do you think British and American comics differ?
British comics have a tendency to be nastier and grimier than their bigger brother, with a healthy antiauthoritarian bent. Perhaps it's telling that the monolith of UK comics, 2000AD, was born from the frustration of 1970s Britain and the nihilism of 80s Britain. 2000AD was punk and—like the birth of punk—found its roots in the disenfranchised. I see a resurgence of this sentiment recently, a call for something to change.

What can we expect in 2015 for Raygun?
There are no more issues planned. The comic was unconsciously and without ceremony created as a vigil; our will-power antidote to the apathy and despondency felt during the time it was made.

What British comics should we be excited about next year then?
Freak Out Squares by Harry French, Garry Mac & Harry Saxon from Unthank Comics. Following a similar neon visual trajectory to Raygun Roads , the four-issue series's main crux is that music's biggest rebels are government-controlled tools of suppression. That punk was all a Tory lead initiative to quell the disenfranchised youth. Number three hits in spring.

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Earlier this month The Motherless Oven landed in comic shops; a simple tale of growing up, but told with the awkwardness of your teenage brother. Throw in a tripped out narrative that includes the main character's mom as a hairdryer and you've got one of the most intensely unhinged graphic novels of the year. Davis is already working on an as-of-yet-unannounced book for 2015, so I'd look out for that.

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Excerpt from The Motherless Oven

An finally, Iain Laurie is a Scot that makes weird-out horror comics. Next year brings issue #5 and #6 of his series And Then Emily Was Gone as well as a follow up with writer John Lees, a guest spot on psychopath killer comic Oxymoron and a new series of Undertow with Steve Orlando.

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Excerpt from And Then Emily Was Gone with Megan Wilson

KIERON GILLEN AND JAMIE MCKELVIE, THE WICKED + THE DIVINE

Gillen and McKelvie seem to have taken over the comic book world with THE WICKED + THE DIVINE . With McKelvie set to take a break from the comic to continue the pair's affliction for anglophilia in Phonogram #3 (see below), the third arc of WikDiv, due later this year, will feature a guest artist per issue. Brockley has never had so much attention.

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Excerpt from the forthcoming THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #7

The long anticipated Phonogram 3, Gillen and McKelvie's Ying to THE WICKED + THE DIVINE's Yang lands next year alongside the second and third arc of THE WICKED + THE DIVINE. The Phonogram series started in 2006 and was last published in 2008, with each issue taking inspiration from album art ranging from Black Grape to Pulp and the Knife to TV on the Radio.

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Excerpt from Phonogram

VICE: What were your influences on WikDiv? Did you expect it to boom as much as it did?
Kieron Gillen: Our general opinion of comics as a medium is that it takes from literally everything. All the serious creators that I like aren't just comics purists. I've got a background as a culture critic; I used to write about music, video games and all kinds of crap. Jamie's really into music so picks up the design of the people. We essentially did this big, brash statement of everything we ever loved in pop culture and it seemed to find an audience, which was kind of shocking.

Why have British comics had such a great year?
Kieron: It's an apex of a series of trends. When we started, our books were black and white and looked really photocopied and crap. Then the British small press got really fucking serious.

Jamie McKelvie: When there's really high quality and curated work on display, it fires people up. Every year there seems to be more energy. People get together; see what everyone else is doing and it pushes them.

What's coming next year that we should be excited about?
Julia Scheele Kickstarted her Riot Grrrl fanzine Double Dare Ya, a collection of comics and essays on radical feminism earlier this year alongside a guest slot on Punchface, as well as illustrating VICE UK's top secret meeting with one of Silk Road's biggest drug lords . Check out her One Beat Zines.

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Excerpt from Doube Dare Ya

John Allison's web comics have been garnering him praise for his writing all year. With the third collection of the Bad Machinery series landing in comic stores this month came the news that Boom Box will be releasing a new collection of Giant Days . The new story is that classic combination of Fresher's Week students and women's boxing.

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Excerpt from Giant Days

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A dead coyote is thrown into a pickup truck at the Wolf and Coyote Derby. Photos by Brian Ertz, Wildlands Defense

On the third day of the wolf-killing contest, an earthquake shook the mountains near Salmon, Idaho. "It's Mother Earth revolting against the cruelty, the violence, the madness, of what's happening here," said Brian Ertz, president of the non-profit advocacy group Wildlands Defense. A year ago this week Ertz and I went undercover for VICE in Salmon to infiltrate that town's annual Wolf and Coyote Derby, an event as primitive as it sounds: Dozens of contestants compete to mow down as many wolves and coyotes as quickly as possible, piling up the cadavers in their trucks, vying for $1,000 prizes for most animals killed. Kids as young as ten are invited to join in the slaughter with their families, with special awards handed out to the children who shed the most blood.

This is not hunting for meat. It is not hunting to prevent threats to human safety. It is killing for the sake of killing. To join in the derby was an unnerving experience for me, an immersion into the ugly side of rural mountain folkways in the American West.

I had thought, quixotically, that exposure of Salmon's atavistic blood rites in an international magazine would have helped put an end to it. After all, much of the derby hunt occurs on federal public land, which is subject to federal law and oversight by agents of the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. A year later, however, the derby was on again, and with great fanfare. Government regulators had done nothing to stop it, and environmental groups had failed to galvanize public opinion against it. The event's organizer, the ironically named Idaho for Wildlife, had announced, proudly, that the derby would be expanded to four days from the previous year's two. By the end of day one, derby-goers brought in 17 coyotes to a warehouse in Salmon where their bodies were measured, weighed, and skinned, the pelts sold to fur buyers on hand for the nightly bringing in of the dead.

Not a single representative from the environmental groups that had publicly criticized the derby—and litigated unsuccessfully to shut it down—showed up to confront the bands of hunters. The sole exception was the ad hoc crew of eight hungry young activists that Ertz, 32, had organized, among them a staff member of the ACLU of Idaho, Ritchie Eppink, who joined in the mission as a legal observer, and Stephany Seay, media director of the Buffalo Field Campaign in Montana.

There was good reason to shy away from confrontation: The folks in Salmon hate environmentalists. It's a small town, and the people, thin-lipped and narrow-eyed, easily sniff out strangers. On the first day of the derby, Thursday, Ertz stood at a gas station in Salmon when a local ranch hand approached to offer a warning. "All these people know you're here," said the man, according to Ertz, "and they're gonna be looking for you. I'd keep your head down, and, if I were you, I'd get out altogether because what they're gonna do to you ain't good." By Friday, one of the activists had fled a hotel in Salmon after Idaho for Wildlife organizers called the owner and warned about environmentalists holing up there.

I asked Ertz why he was taking the risk when he could've tried again to go undercover. Last year, disguised as hunters in camouflage, rifles on our backs, blood thirst in our mouths, we had been welcomed in Salmon. This year, he and his colleagues broke up into teams of two; armed with video cameras, they trawled the hills in their cars to document the slaughter for a future lawsuit.

"The objective," said Ertz, "is to be very much in their face, to let them know we're out here on patrol, looking for violations of federal law. We want to project the image that we could be anywhere, everywhere."

A related objective was to stand in open defiance of what Ertz described as "a culture of death." Salmon, like many small towns in the rural West, is a ranching society. Ranchers who run their cattle on the open range have historically regarded wild predators not as majestic creatures but as vermin to be exterminated. Investigative journalist Jack Olsen, writing in his 1971 book Slaughter the Animals, Poison the Earth , concluded that the livestock industry's hatred of predators—wolves and coyotes foremost, but also cougars, black bears, grizzlies, wolverines, lynx, bobcats, hawks, eagles, and on and on—went "so far beyond the dimensions of reality as to be almost pathological in origin." Indeed, the desire to annihilate the enemy is not based on a rational assessment of the threat to cows and sheep. The number of rangeland livestock lost each year to carnivore depredations is insignificant—less than a half of a percent, according to the Department of Agriculture.

"These people honestly believe that sterilizing the landscape of predators will enrich their economy and preserve their culture," says Ertz. "Events like the derby validate those who have been conditioned to believe that their way of life, or more accurately their way of death, is under assault by environmentalists. They've got a point. Americans in general are becoming more compassionate toward non-human animals, and our appreciation of ecology and the contributions of wildlife communities is growing. This awareness and compassion threatens any culture that predicates itself on wanton destruction and an appalling disregard for the suffering of sentient beings."

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By the final day, Sunday, the hunters had killed 30 coyotes, according to the event's Facebook page. (No wolves were taken, either by trap or gunfire.) At the awards ceremony that afternoon, Ertz's crew in separate parties attempted to enter the warehouse where the cadavers had been hung on meat hooks. One of the teams, which included Eppink of the ACLU, carried a hidden camera. They were stopped by an imperious little man in a big cowboy hat. "Are you guys entered in the contest?" he asked.

"No, we just came to see the ceremony," said Eppink.

"Out!" said the cowboy. "There's all kinds of animal terrorists here taking pictures and harassing us!"

When Natalie Ertz, Brian's sister, approached to capture the spectacle of the awards with her Nikon, one of the members of Idaho for Wildlife, a woman with funny blackened teeth named Billiejo Beck, cut off her passage. "No cameras, this is private property," she said.

"What are you hiding?" asked Natalie.

"Absolutely nothing," said Beck.

"Where's the property line?"

Beck pointed beyond the fencing of the parking lot, and yelled for assistance to a county sheriff who was standing nearby. So Natalie and her brother and the rest of the crew stood at the fence line. Natalie howled three times like a wolf and smiled.

When Beck again emerged, Natalie called to her: "Billiejo! I'd love to talk to you. What does wildlife mean to Idaho for Wildlife? What does wilderness mean? Wolves and coyotes are wildlife! Where's your ethical line in killing?"

There was no response. "Why won't you talk to me if you're so proud of what you're doing?"

The protesters had a partial view into the warehouse—they could spy the coyotes tossed from trucks and hung on the hooks—but Beck at last placed a bloody tarp across the doorway to obscure the line of sight.

"It's no different than last year," said Brian Ertz, "except in one way: This year they were forced to hide their carnival. This year they feared the cameras and scurried like cockroaches to avoid the light."

This year, in other words, there was shame. That's progress.

Christopher Ketcham is a contributing editor at Harper's magazine. Write him at Cketcham99@mindspring.com

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"Fracking" is becoming something of a dirty word. Photo via Flickr user Poster Boy

The price of oil—specifically West Texas Intermediate crude, the gold standard in oil pricing—has been falling steadily since June of last year, and is currently sitting just north of $52 per barrel. That's a far cry from the record high of 2008, when it topped out at $147 per barrel. The 2008 price surge saw hysteria about moving North America toward energy independence reach fever pitch; John McCain even called it a "national security issue" during the presidential election. It's also quite a ways from the $65-per-barrel point at which fracking is economically viable. That low price of oil is a huge problem for the burgeoning fracking industry, which is largely composed of small, over-extended businesses that can't afford to wait out a dip in profits.

In the last decade, fracking (short for hydraulic fracturing) has built up quite a reputation for itself in North America. While it was used as early as the 1940s, fracking didn't come into its own until the 21st century's relatively high oil prices and the fear of an incipient global oil shortage made the costly method more appealing. It's currently a much larger industry in the US, but companies have been making trying—with varying degrees of success—to get at the frackable shale oil and gas in Canada, especially in Quebec and New Brunswick.

Since the boom began, there's been growing opposition from environmental activists and from people living near fracking sites. Both groups allege that fracking comes with a series of negative effects, including contaminated and flammable water, myriad health problems, and small earthquakes. Indigenous activists have been particularly vocal in Canada, and have been instrumental in stopping fracking from becoming the booming business here that it already is in the US.

Members of the Mi'kmaq first nation organized in 2013 to prevent oil giant SWN from conducting seismic testing on Mi'kmaq land, a necessary step before the company could begin fracking there. The RCMP showed up, heavily armed and dressed for action, and the confrontation turned violent—which protesters and witnesses attributed to the RCMP, though law enforcement officials later claimed the protesters had Molotov cocktails.

After months of such actions, SWN decided to stop its push to frack in New Brunswick and the province placed a ban on the practice. Just last month, in another blow to fracking in Canada, Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard announced that he won't pursue shale gas development—though he hasn't yet acted to formally ban fracking. Even the thoroughly mainstream governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, has banned the practice, possibly signalling a new, less frack-friendly day in the US.

And while the hard-won victories of aboriginal and environmental activists are nothing to overlook, the current dip in oil prices might be a final nail in the coffin (for now, at least) for the practice that was so recently considered a saviour of North American energy interests.

"If the price of oil stays low, then high-cost energy is in trouble," said Terry Lynn Karl, Stanford University professor of political science specializing in oil-exporting countries. "And that means tar sands, and it also means most frackers."

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Protesters demonstrated against the tar sands in 2011. Photo via Flickr user Peter Blanchard

However, most tar sands business isn't really in immediate danger, according to Karl.

"Tar sands are a long-term scenario because there is substantial oil involved in tar sands," she wrote in an email. "Fracking varies considerably in cost, investment, and borrowing among the frackers. Where they have borrowed heavily, especially in junk bonds, they are in trouble, which gets worse the longer the price is low."

The financial difference between fracking and tar sands is that most tar sands projects are undertaken by large companies with longer timeframes for profitability, whereas most fracking operations are run by small companies, many of which are overextended and need to cash in immediately.

"[In] fracking, you produce your oil and you need to get it out of the ground fast, you need to sell it fast, you need to reinvest fast," Karl said. "Oil sands—once you get an oil sands project going, it can just kind of continue, because it's better to produce than not produce."

In fact, both Karl and CIBC chief economist Avery Shenfeld agree that the reason (or at least a major reason) Saudi Arabia has refused to prop up the price of oil is to drive its American fracking competition out of business. Many close to the industry expected—or hoped—OPEC would reduce its oil production following its November meeting, thereby reducing the supply and, hopefully, increasing the price of oil for all sellers. That hasn't yet happened, and it's widely believed Saudi Arabia wants to put pressure on the many small firms that now make up the American shale oil and gas behemoth.

"The biggest price drop [in the price of oil] came after Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC countries announced that they would not cut production, as some had hoped they would, to try to support the price," Shenfeld told VICE.

One quarter of Canada's export revenue comes from the oil and gas industry, and the high prices oil has fetched for most of the 21st century have led to a national economic dependence on the product. But most of that comes from tar sands, and as problematic as they may be, the profitability of tar sands projects isn't quite as precarious as fracking.

Although Karl thinks "anybody who predicts the price of oil is a fool," she was willing to say she suspects the price will remain either depressed or volatile for the foreseeable future. Either of those outcomes presents a problem for the small companies that make up the bulk of American frackers.

If the volatility of oil prices skews low over the next few years, that could have serious consequences for tar sands business as well as fracking. In the Globe and Mail, Jeff Rubin envisions Canada a few years into a $40-per-barrel future: a startlingly low number, but as the current situation should remind everyone, price volatility is bound to involve some startling numbers.

Rubin writes that in this hypothetical future, the current "have" provinces will lose out to Ontario and the other non-oil-producing regions. Provinces that have seen sluggish growth during times of high oil prices will, with low oil prices and the depressed loonie Rubin assumes will accompany them, once again be attractive as manufacturing sites for international companies.

Of course, Rubin is no more capable of seeing the future than Karl, Shenfeld, or anyone else. The only things we can know for sure about the future are that the price of oil will be uncertain for some time, and that that uncertainty will seriously impact the North American energy sector.

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