Hundreds of New Yorkers converged on Union Square in the bitter cold on Wednesday evening to show support for victims of the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris.

We sent photographer Pete Voelker to the scene, where he found a healthy mix of French expats and sympathetic Americans. A rendition of the French national anthem La Marseillaise broke out. Also on hand was at least one copy of the satirical weekly at the center of this tragedy.

Just as they did in London and Los Angeles—and plenty of other cities around the world—attendees displayed their indignation at such a flagrant assault on freedom of expression, not to mention the absurd loss of life over a bunch of drawings. (Leading French newspaper Le Monde dubbed this slaughter the French 9/11 on its cover Thursday.)

Whether the crowd members were fans of slain cartoonists Jean Cabut and Georges Wolinski, or just fellow humans determined to defy those who would stamp out controversial satire, attendees did everything they could to demonstrate solidarity with their brethren across the Atlantic.

Check out the photos below, and follow Pete Voelker on Twitter.

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_{A fracking operation in northeastern Pennsylvania}

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made headlines at the end of last year when he announced a ban on hydraulic fracking in his state. That was unquestionably a victory for environmentalists, but in neighboring Pennsylvania, however, fracking is still underway. This summer, I visited the northeastern region of the Keystone State to see what the the front lines of America's shale gas boom looks like.

Far off the radar of Google Maps, I found Craig Stevens mowing the front lawn on his 115-acre property in Susquehanna County. Craig, a former National Rifle Association recruiter, hasn't had a drink from his faucet in about a year and a half, and for good reason.

"Blood started shooting out of my face," he told me at his home, licking the sweat off of his gray mustache. "The water started tasting like metal. Slightly at first, then it got stronger. I had spontaneous nosebleeds. Eight of them over two weeks. I couldn't figure out what it was, but the day I stopped drinking the water is the day the nosebleeds stopped." Craig had the water tested. "Barium and strontium levels are through the roof," he said.

Back in 2007, representatives of Chesapeake Energy visited Craig's now deceased 95-year-old grandmother in a nursing home. For $50 an acre, they convinced her to sell the mineral rights to the property, which has been in Craig's family for six generations. Craig and his siblings later negotiated the fee up to $8,000 an acre and a 20 percent cut of everything that is extracted, but he's still pissed that Chesapeake had the gall to hustle his grandma. And he's bitter now that his water has gone bad.

"They won't do anything about it, because they won't admit they did anything wrong," he said.

Chesapeake, which declined to comment for this article, has since sold off portions of its mineral rights to others. "Now," Craig observes, "the state of Norway owns a third of the mineral rights under my property"—a reference to Statoil, an energy company principally owned by the Norwegian government that possesses a non-operational stake in the miniature goldmine of gas beneath his home. WPX Energy, which operates the well beneath Craig's property, declined to comment for this piece, as did most of the other companies mentioned here. Statoil is the exception—a spokesman would not comment on the specifics of Craig's allegations, but I was told that the company works with operators to ensure drilling is conducted "in a safe, responsible, and profitable manner."

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_{Metallic silt rises to the top of a jar of frack water as Alex Lotorto presses a magnet against it}

Craig isn't the only person in the neighborhood with questionable drinking water. During my visit Alex Lotorto, who grew up in nearby Milford, held up a jar of water in Craig's kitchen. "Watch this," Alex said as black silt at the bottom of the container rose to the surface, coagulating at the magnet he pressed against the glass. "This sample was taken from next property over. It's full of heavy metals."

Craig has turned his house into a base for activists like Alex, who are documenting the extraordinary process of industrialization underway in this agricultural community. They're taking water samples, collecting the stories of people whose water and land has turned foul, and organizing the local citizenry to protest the drilling.

Pennsylvania has been an epicenter of fracking because it sits on the Marcellus Shale Formation, which is sometimes described as the "Saudi Arabia of natural gas" due to the rich deposits of methane it contains. Natural gas production in Pennsylvania has increased from less than 2 billion cubic feet per day in 2007 to surpass 15 billion cubic feet per day this July, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

As we talked around Craig's kitchen table, Vera Scroggins, who has been helping Alex monitor the local water, stopped by to pick up a few more testing kits. The retired nurse and longtime resident of Susquehanna County offered to give me a tour of the surrounding area so I hopped in her Prius.

Along Susquehanna's narrow country roads, we passed numerous derricks and long stretches of land that had been excavated and patched back up with mud and straw outlining where pipelines passed beneath. Vera has given these tours to school groups, conservationists, and reporters in the past—so many, in fact, that Cabot Oil and Gas, one of the region's most prolific drillers, has an injunction against her, obtained from a local judge last October, that prevents her from setting foot on company-owned property.

"They got tired of me sniffing around," Vera told me.

When we came upon an active worksite with a Cabot sign in front of it, Vera held up a video camera and drove slowly past, filming. We looped back around for another look—by then the workers had lined up along the roadside to stare us down. A derrick, perhaps 30 feet high, towered over the shoulders of the regiment in orange construction vests.

[body_image width='2000' height='1339' path='images/content-images/2014/12/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/24/' filename='meet-the-insurgents-in-americas-ongoing-fracking-war-456-body-image-1419390909.jpg' id='14085']_{Vera Scroggins films a fracking operation in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania}

I'd spent the previous night drinking with drill rig operators and listening to their stories at the Shadowbrook Inn and Resort, a country getaway surrounded by a golf course about 20 miles away in Tunkhannock, a town that has turned into a de facto encampment for migrant gas company workers.

The bar attached to the hotel was elbow-to-elbow with men fresh from the gas fields. Quite a few were veterans of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. They traveled to Shadowbrook from across the region in search of the six-figure salaries promised to those who are willing to work the grueling 12-hour shifts that drilling companies demand.

"When I head out on a job, I tell my old lady, 'This might be the last time you see me,'" one worker told me.

The pay is high, especially for those without a higher education but, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, oil and gas workers are 7.6 times more likely to die on the job than the national average. Documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity and released last month show that the oil and gas industry, including the American Petroleum Institute, sought for decades to cover up the toxic effects of benzene exposure, a chemical solvent in used in drilling. But the men I spoke with at Shadowbrook in August tried to dismiss the risks they faced.

"Everybody is like, 'Environment this, environment that,'" one said, wiggling the digits on his callused hands. "I've been doing this for years and I've still got all my fingers and toes."

The workers were friendly, but now that I was with Vera, who was filming, we were eyed with suspicion. If she were to park, exit her vehicle, or attempt to speak to them, she would be in violation of Cabot's injunction.

Though the court order was amended in March to include only active fracking sites operated by Cabot, it originally barred Vera from the 40 percent of Susquehanna County—312.5 square miles—where the company owns mineral rights. This prohibited her from entering local grocery stores, going to the nearest hospital, even from visiting old friends—wherever Cabot owns a stake in the gas beneath the ground.

As we drove along, a brown SUV sped by and the driver snapped our picture. Needless to say, Vera is a bit paranoid, because drillers in the industry view activists like Vera as insurgents.

In audio recordings of a 2012 oil and gas industry conference in Houston obtained by CNBC, Matt Carmichael, manager of external affairs for Anadarko Petroleum, advised attendees to read Rumsfeld's Rules (Donald Rumsfeld's guide to life and war), and to download the Army's counter-insurgency manual. In a separate recording from the same conference, Matt Pitzarella, director of communications for the gas exploration firm Range Resources, bragged that his company employed several former Army psychological operations specialists, noting that they had been "very helpful" in Pennsylvania.

It hasn't hurt the industry either that it's been given a royal welcome by lawmakers, who have cut the Department of Environmental Protection's budget by 40 percent since 2009. A 2012 executive order from Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has compelled the Department to approve drilling permits "as expeditiously as possible," which they have done by the thousands. A 2012 law passed by the state legislature allows drillers to keep the chemicals used in the fracking process secret. Under a medical provision in the measure, doctors treating patients can see the list of chemicals, but only after signing a nondisclosure agreement.

Frustrated with the lack of will to police fracking they have encountered locally, many of the insurgents in Pennsylvania's fracking war have turned their attention to halting the transmission of the gas, targeting a slew of new federally regulated infrastructure projects aimed at getting methane pulled from the ground in their backyards over to markets on the Eastern seaboard and abroad.

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_{Holding maps of drilled wells in northeastern Pennsylvania on July 14, demonstrators were arrested by Homeland Security in front of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and charged with misdemeanor trespassing; they were released a couple of hours later. Alex Lotorto is on the far right}

Before I went to Susquahana, I visited Alex Lotorto this July in Washington, DC. When I met him, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) employees were stepping over him and his friends, trying not to make eye contact.

He and a number of other environmental activists had planned to disrupt business as usual at the commission's headquarters in DC on July 14. Homeland Security and local cops succeeded in preventing an all-out barricade of the federal building, but the activists continued to sit about four feet from the entrance until they were dragged off to jail. Instead of protest banners, they held several large county maps of northeastern Pennsylvania, each speckled with little green dots representing the more than 7,600 wells that have been fracked so far in the region.

Coinciding with the fracking boom, FERC has given its stamp of approval to 451 natural gas transportation projects since 2006—pipelines, compressor stations, storage facilities, and multiple export terminals. Alex's logic goes that if companies lack the means to transport their product from the remote gas fields of Pennsylvania they will be less likely to drill.

This new generation of gas infrastructure could carry with it many of the same pollution risks associated with drilling. Perhaps the largest project approved by FERC yet is a $3.8 billion liquefied natural gas terminal owned by Dominion Energy in Cove Point, Maryland, that by 2016 will be exporting gas from places like Susquehanna County.

"If we can't stop this thing, I just hope we can sell our house and get the hell out of here," said Rachel Heinhorst, a literature professor at the University of Southern Maryland who lives with her husband and two children across the street from Cove Point. A giant wall designed to act as a sound barrier to the massive turbines the project requires now obstructs the view from Heinhorst family's front porch where they used to sit and watch deer eat from the pear tree on the other side of the road.

Natural gas is highly combustive and Rachel worries she and her family could die of an explosion in the middle of the night if the 800 million cubic feet of gas Dominion is transporting goes boom.

Cove Point will be the first natural gas export terminal built in this country in 30 years and more are slated to follow in Texas and Louisiana. Meanwhile, in New York earlier this month FERC approved the Constitution Pipeline, which will carry gas fracked in northeastern Pennsylvania through the state. In May of 2014, the commission green lit plans by Texas-based Crestwood Midstream to store natural gas in abandoned salt caverns in upstate in Seneca Lake. (Forty people were arrested for trespassing on Crestwood property one day before Governor Cuomo issued a ban on fracking in the state.)

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_{Anti-fracking protests in northeastern Pennsylvania on July 14}

When I was among the anti-fracking activists holed up at Craig's house in Susquehanna County, I asked them about their endgame strategy. I wondered what they saw as an alternative to all this drilling, considering we do need fuel, after all. Assuming it doesn't leak into the atmosphere, natural gas burns cleaner than coal or oil, making it more appealing to some from a climate change perspective.

"There's solar and wind power," said Allison Petryk, a 27-year-old volunteer from New Jersey. Looking up from where she sat in front of a map of wells spread on Craig's living room carpet, she added: "But you can't lease the wind. You can't frack the sun."

Follow Peter Rugh on Twitter

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Photo via Flickr user alexandre

On December 24, a group of French scientists published what is probably the first medical journal article on squirting. They gave pelvic ultrasound scans to seven women who previously reported emitting about a cup full of liquid (!) when they had sex. By administering the scans after the women peed, and then twice during sexual stimulation, they were able to conclude exactly where the liquid was coming from and what it consisted of—and, spoiler alert, it was pee.

Although there have been plenty of studies done on female ejaculation, this is the first one, as far as I can tell, to specifically explore women who expel great gushing quantities of fluid when sex is happening. Since at least the 80s, there's been a lot of debate around whether or not women ejaculate at all, or if any instance of it is just an adult version of bedwetting.

It should be noted that there are papers that say, yeah, there is something that comes out of vaginas during sex that definitely isn't urine. (It's supposedly liquid from the "female prostate.") But in this specific study—the first to focus on women who soak the sheets—the answer is nah. "The present data based on ultrasonographic bladder monitoring and biochemical analyses indicate that squirting is essentially the involuntary emission of urine during sexual activity, although a marginal contribution of prostatic secretions to the emitted fluid often exists," is how the researchers put it.

For a debate that can essentially, and crudely, be boiled down to "cum or piss?" it's surprisingly fraught with important implications. Some feminists say that reducing the physical manifestations of their orgasms to urine diminishes the importance of female pleasure during sex. Other feminists say the opposite: Claiming it's more than urine perpetuates a male fantasy.

In recent months, this uncertainty has even given ammunition to censors in the UK, where squirting was one of a number of practices that was banned in porn . Because no one could say definitively whether it was piss, government busybodies were apparently bound to assume it fell under the category of "urolagnia," which is considered obscene.

One thing that's for sure, though, is that people love watching it. Mike Williams, who works for PornHub's communication team, told me it's the seventh most searched term worldwide.

But why? Justin Lehmiller, who edits the popular blog Sex and Psychology, has a couple of theories. "It probably stems from a desire to know that the woman enjoyed herself and was sexually satisfied," he told me. "A lot of guys actually care about this and they want to know the sex was mutually enjoyable." He also adds that it's just as likely an ego thing, or a validation of masculinity.

As for the "do ladies ejaculate or is it just pee?" debate, I'm sure there'll be more to, uh, come.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

By now, you've probably seen the video of Bill Gates drinking a Kerr jar full of water derived from human poo. The machine that cranked out the butt-juice, terrifyingly called the Omniprocessor (or OP), uses human waste to generate potable water and electricity that can be sold back to the grid, with ash as the only byproduct. It was produced by Janicki Bioenergy and funded by the tech mogul's foundation.

To get a better sense of how this project works, I spoke with Doulaye Koné, senior program officer in the Gates Foundation's Water and Sanitation Division, who appears in the video announcing the technology.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

VICE: How did this project start?
Doulaye Koné: In 2011, when I joined, one of the questions we were debating was how can we help solve additional crises. If we were to rethink sanitation as a service that would work for everyone, what can we do in terms of the service model and business model? On the technology side, we're working on the only processor technology that could make the private sector work in this field. Besides this, we're also doing a lot of work on how you set up successful business relationships for entrepreneurs and communities to get fast-track access to sanitation services.

So the main point is to get poor communities to dispose of their sewage? The electricity generation is just an added benefit?
There are different ways to dispose of waste today, but human waste is loaded with pathogens. In Seattle, the sewer treatment and wastewater treatment system works very well. The US can pay for that. In many other countries, in poor communities you don't even get the necessary funding to build those things. And once they're installed, the operation is so poor that the system doesn't remove the pathogens from the environment. So even where you can get rid of the waste from the community and just put it somewhere, it will still spread disease. So people tend to live in a very polluted environment. You have flies, you have bacteria, you have viruses breeding on waste. What we wanted to do is build a suite of technologies that would remove that pathogen contamination.

Second, for those systems to be operational, to really incentivize government, you have to find a way to make them profitable. This means if it's a technology where someone—a government entity, a private company—can recover additional revenue, it provides a great incentive to maintain the system. Sustainability is key.

In the OP, we went for electricity and potable water as potential commodities. You can also tune this to produce fertilizer.

So these can be modified to suit local needs?
Yes, this particular OP, you can choose to optimize power production or water production. We're working on other technologies that are also focusing on different types of products: oil, or biodiesel from human waste.

But we haven't gotten enough confidence that biodiesel can be a lead market, because the production costs are still very high. We haven't found a way to make the system profitable at this point.

How much electricity could one OP produce?
The Unit Two version makes 300 kilowatt/hours. Of course, you can scale up or scale down, depending on the client's request. If you talk scaling up, you're targeting metropolitan areas. This is actually well-suited for small towns where you don't have grid service arrangements for dealing with sanitation.

Can you tell me about the ash?
When you burn organic materials, like wood, you have ash as a residue. The ash that's a residue of the feces doesn't have a lot of organic [content]. It's purely mineral. It's not toxic. I keep reminding people, we don't eat heavy metals, we don't excrete heavy metals, and we don't excrete those nasty pollutants. The concentration in human feces is very, very low.

Is there a specific country where you have a pilot project?
We have an agreement with the government of Senegal to do the next demonstration there. In February or March, we will dismantle here and reassemble the unit in Senegal, in an existing facility. This would be a partnership with the national sanitation utility there and a private partner who is operating a treatment plant. That private partner would be involved in the day-to-day operations, so we can understand the cash flow and the revenue, what an entrepreneur can make, and how we can optimize the profits based on data we'll be collecting there.

And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is involved with not only funding the development, but getting it to where it needs to be?
Inventing is one step, but what is critical is access. What we want to do is make sure that the right system or service model gets deployed to communities that don't have service today. Senegal is the best case, and we're working in other places as well: India, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa.

So who's paying for it: the Senegalese government or the Gates Foundation?
We're paying for the first one, because obviously it's hard to sell when people haven't seen it. The next unit will be a direct business between the Janicki team and any potential client who wants to acquire it.

How much does it cost?
Around $1.5 million, but I would not focus too much on that. This machine is a great profit center compared to many waste processing systems we have. They'll recover it very fast.

Do you see any logistical hurdles to worldwide distribution?
There are many hurdles. A lot of existing procurement processes are based on technology that is known. We need to make sure that those procurement processes are flexible enough to accommodate new ideas and new technologies. Tax regulations and business practices are one of the issues that the Janicki team will have to figure out when negotiating with entrepreneurs and governments.

What would be the best case scenario five or ten years from now?
That this was a solution which had a lot of communities living on pit latrines, to have a good service. Today many cities don't even have one single sewage treatment plant. The waste is dumped into the street, and a lot of times, it's done manually. The OP is a great improvement. In addition to processing human waste, this also collects garbage. The more garbage you throw in, the more power you get. I hope ten years from now we'll see a lot of improvement in quality of life, reducing the death toll due to disease.

So you did drink the water?
I did.

Was it warm? It can't be very cold, coming out of that.
The way the system is set up, when it comes from the tap, it's good enough for you to drink it.

Follow Peter Lawrence Kane on Twitter.

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Photo by Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

Public swimming pools are gross— this is known. Swimming in one is basically like taking a soapless bath with a dozen strangers, some of whom are secretly peeing in the water, all of whom are shedding fragments of skin and hair. Most people hop into the pool without any regard for whether or not they're reasonably clean; I once saw a girl full-on blow her nose into a pool, then continue flopping around on her pool noodle as if nothing had happened.

So what's floating around in that water, besides sweat and snot and pee? Researchers from Purdue University, the Georgia Institute for Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences sought to find out by testing water samples from public swimming pools in Georgia and Indiana. In their samples, they found the presence of DEET (the chemical commonly used in insect repellant), TCEP (a type of flame retardant), and caffeine. There were also traces of pharmaceutical drugs like ibuprofen, naproxen, and acetaminophen floating around. (These findings were published in the journal for Environmental Science and Technology Letters.)

So how the fuck does all of that get into the pool? Some of the chemicals—like the insect repellant—come from people's skin, which is why you should all rinse yourselves off before taking a dip. Others, like the drugs and caffeine, are secreted through swimmers' sweat and urine. The researchers had no idea why there was TCEP in their water samples. Maybe someone had been doused with flame retardant before jumping into the pool?

The Purdue study noted that most swimming pools in the United States recycle their water through a closed-loop system, so the same water can stay in a pool for weeks, months, or even years. Years. And although there's chlorine to kill off most of the germs in the water, the chemicals found leftover in swimming pools still survive because they react slowly with chlorine.

If you swim in pools, you may end up swallowing water, which means not only ingesting traces of sweat and urine but possibly gulping down DEET or TCEP as well. Maybe just take a bath instead?

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

In this week's VICE Meets, Meredith Danluck sits down for a rare one-on-one interview with director Paul Thomas Anderson to talk about his most recent feature, Inherent Vice. The film is an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel, the first time the author's work has been set to screen.

Set in the 1970s, Inherent Vice follows the paranoid, drug-addled misadventures of an LA detective (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who is chasing a case brought to him by an ex-girlfriend about her boyfriend, his wife, and a plot to kidnap a billionaire.

Inherent Vice will be released nationwide on Friday, January 8. Watch an exclusive trailer below.

[body_image width='778' height='517' path='images/content-images/2015/01/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/08/' filename='one-extra-second-328-body-image-1420737395.png' id='16585']Photo via Wiki Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

A lot can happen in a second. People can die, babies can be conceived, you can almost eat a small biscuit. It's long enough for the traction to leave the balls of your feet and for gravity to take over. Dramatic stuff.

This year, maths—or a lack thereof—will give everyone an extra unit of time. As announced by the Paris Observatory this week, at midnight on June 30, 2015, we will all be indulged with an extra second—a "leap second," if you will. It's all to help sync the world's atomic clocks, to keep them in step with the vagaries of astronomical time, and, although it causes a Y2K-esque headache for some computer programmers, is fairly common—the last one occurred in 2012. Bet you didn't even notice, did you? Maybe you want to take your second to think about what you're doing with your life, pal.

Anyway, with all these extra seconds coming up, we asked the people of East London how they planned on spending theirs. Ironically, they all spent more than a second wasting their time talking to us, thus wholly negating their precious leap second. Actually: If you've read this far, you've technically pre-wasted yours. Oh well. Sorry.

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VICE: What would you do with an extra second, Juanita?
Juanita: I think I would take in extra deep breath, because I think life is fast-paced and we don't take time to pause. I would just breath in. We wouldn't have much time to do much else would we?

That's profound.
Sometimes we need extra time to think properly. It's the new year, so I guess sometimes we just need to focus on what we already have. Sometimes we just need to be grateful for that.

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What would you do with your extra second, Hossain?
Hossain: I'd go to Bahamas for a holiday. Actually my dream is to do a world tour.

You must a have amazing time management skills or you didn't really understand the question.
It's cool, calm, and I'd love to go there.

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What would you do with your extra second of life, Claire?
Claire: Be with the people I care about. Say I love them very quickly.

Could you do it in one second? Tell me you love me and I'll time you.
No!

OK, say "I love you" indiscriminately and I'll time you...
Iloveyou!

Thanks, I think you're pretty great, too.

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Pat?
Pat: I'd probably be studying or I'll be out when the second passes.

The second still counts if you are outside, Pat.

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What will you do, now that life is giving you more time?
Sally: I will probably dance to Michael Jackson.

Oh that's kind of cool, what song? Or what part of the song, more importantly?
Mmm... "Thriller"? The part where there's a good beat.

Nice one. I would suggest 2 minutes and 34 seconds in.

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How would Lola spend her extra second?
Lola's owner: I don't know. Maybe sleep? No, probably chase rabbits.

One second counts as seven dog seconds, so that's a good amount of rabbit chasing.

[body_image width='800' height='270' path='images/content-images/2015/01/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/08/' filename='ukip-party-evictee-of-the-week-rozanne-duncan-332-body-image-1420723846.jpg' id='16482']Apparently only one photo of Rozanne Duncan exists, and it isn't very big

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Every time I see, hear or read about Nigel Farage these days, he seems to be apologizing for someone else. UKIP now dismiss their members with such regularity that, in the run-up to this year's general election, I decided to keep tabs on just who is being dumped this week for calling a guy a "fucking carpetbagger asshole" or insisting that gays love sex with children and animals.

Who's Been Dismissed: Rozanne Duncan.

UKIP rank: Independent councillor in Nigel Farage's constituency of South Thanet, Kent.

What She Did That Was So Wrong That Even UKIP Had to Kick Her Out: She told a BBC film crew that she had a problem with "Negroes" because "there's something about their faces."

Standard Back-peddling Quote About How Unracist She Is Because She Has Exactly One Black Friend: Duncan got a full house on her UKIP apology bingo card by claiming she is "not a racist" and that she had "many Asian shopkeeper and local business friends." Because buying an emergency onion from a corner shop once a week gives you carte blanche to go in two-footed on non-white bone structure.

What Happened Next: Rozanne was actually booted from the party back in December, after party chiefs revealed she made "jaw-dropping remarks" in a BBC documentary about Nigel Farage's attempts to keep his South Thanet seat in the upcoming election. The comments in question weren't revealed, presumably because they'd be a right downer over Christmas, but today the Times reported them in full. And, predictably, they are the exact kind of bigoted shit your weird drunk aunty might come out with at the last family meal she is ever invited to.

What UKIP Said: At the time of her firing, a UKIP spokesperson said of Duncan: "UKIP is expelling Cllr Rozanne Duncan under rule 15 of its constitution for bringing the party into disrepute. She has 28 days to appeal." To say UKIP is headed up by a man who goes on talk radio to sincerely defend his god-given right to say "chinky," you've got to work pretty hard to bring it into disrepute.

What She Said: At the time Duncan said: "I was not expelled for having an 'association with or membership of an organization incompatible with membership of the party,' nor have I links with a far-right or any other group. The only group I've ever belonged to is the Conservative party—unless you count Mensa, the Women's Institute, or the Order of Women Freemasons." Once again proving that the only people who ever apply to be in Mensa are the worst smart people ever. The kind of people who think doing a riddle is better than watching TV. People who need a laminated card in their wallet to tell them they're better than others.

I guess she's got one less of those now.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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All photos via Flickr user michael_swan

If Stephen Harper has a right-hand man, it's probably Jason Kenney.

The 46-year-old ex-Reform Party wunderkind and top-ranking Conservative minister is the prime minister's go-to communicator for selling the government's low-tax, freedom-loving agenda.

The Calgarian is admired in his party for his tenacious dogma as much as he's reviled by partisans of other stripes. He's as gregarious as he is ruthlessly partisan. He's dangerously effective in political debates and notoriously hard to fluster.

In his back pocket is no short list of achievements.

As Minister of State for Multiculturalism, he was a driving force behind Ottawa's harsh criticism of China, thanks to some close ties with Tibetan-Canadians. After moving over to the Ministry of Immigration, Kenney overhauled the system and sped up processing times. As the employment minister, he crafted a $15,000-per-worker training fund everyone has come around to, and he made changes to the generally terrible Temporary Foreign Worker Program, which had allowed employers to pay immigrants miserably without giving them a path to citizenship.

Throughout all of it, he's acted as the government's one-man outreach team to cultural communities—a key to the Conservatives' majority win in 2011. It's a job that keeps him flying around the country, glad-handing with ethnic and religious organizations for a good part of the year.

But Kenney's tenure as top-tier minister hasn't been without controversy. He once called former Alberta Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk a "complete and utter asshole." He also introduced legislation that would allow for the detention and fast-track deportation of immigrants who arrive in Canada by boat, although he later bowed to criticism and softened the bill.

He retooled the immigration system to cut down on application times and appeals, leading many who deal with immigrants and refugees to accuse him of creating a system that more readily deports vulnerable would-be Canadians back to their home countries, where they could face jail, violence, and even death.

But, considering he's been an MP for nearly 18 years—and a minister for six of them—he's escaped largely unscathed. He's largely well-liked by journalists on the Hill (he's one of the few ministers unafraid of doing interviews) and is at least generally respected by opposition parties. A good number of MPs from all parties can recount stories of Kenney calling their office to intervene personally when a constituent has an immigration problem.

It's also no big secret that he's well-placed to take over from Stephen Harper once the prime minister vacates the job.

His riding association in Calgary Southeast has turned into a fundraising juggernaut, with a bank account the envy of any sitting MP looking to the 2015 election. Should Kenney decide to run, that money could be transferred to the coffers of his leadership campaign. He's also been sending funds to cash-strapped riding associations across the country, which could curry a lot of favour when it comes time to vote. Of course, when you ask him about it, he laughs and brushes off the idea.

Whether or not he'd win is another question altogether. He's long been viewed as the captain of the religious right, and has had a hard time winning over moderates in the party. While he's spent virtually his entire time in government trying to play down his social conservative bona fides—he had opposed gay marriage and abortion access for women—he has largely shied away from the issues in recent years.

He did, however, vote for a motion to crack open the debate about when life begins—a backdoor to the abortion debate—openly defying the prime minister.

But, with Harper taking one last kick at the can, Kenney is still a trusty lieutenant. He spoke with VICE to discuss nearly a decade in power, the next election, what it means to be a Conservative, and why only about 15 percent of Canadians under 29 want to vote for his party.

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VICE: So you've been in power for nearly nine years. It'll be a decade by the next election. Looking back for you, what do you think you can say about this government's legacy?
Jason Kenney: Strong economic management, reducing the tax burden on Canadian families, a strong principled foreign policy, making our streets safer are the top things that come to mind. If you look at this from 30,000 feet, we've done a lot of really important reforms that have gone under-reported, like addressing the big demographic shift by changing the age of cut-off for Old Age Security—this is something that caused riots in Eastern European countries, but every other developed country is doing it because the math requires them to do so. We also achieved some fundamental root-and-branch immigration reform. It's actually been a pretty ambitious government.

Your party came to power after merging the very conservative right and the centre-right. After ten years of this unified Conservative Party, what can you say about the conservative movement?
I think generally we've managed to find just the right balance of making conservatism more mainstream and making the mainstream more conservative, in a sense. We've managed to change the debate. I know in the most recent Hamas-Israel conflict that our government's view—that Hamas is the aggressor and that Israel has the right to defend itself—has increasingly become conventional wisdom in the public debate in Canada. This was an idea, just 15 years ago, considered well outside the foreign policy consensus in Canada. Our immigration reforms in 2007 were condemned as anti-immigrant and xenophobic, yet, now I think they're broadly accepted. What I'm working on these days is re-tooling our vocation training and labour market training. Again, it seems to have pretty wide support across the spectrum. I think we've done a pretty effective job of moving the debate in the direction of mainstream conservative policy solutions and at the same time, I think we've demonstrated to our worst critics that we are not a bunch of wild-eyed ideologues. The worst fears about some ideological hidden agenda have proven to be really unfounded.

Your government came to power on a policy of improving transparency. But, since then, just about everyone who deals with this government says that transparency is at an all time low. How can you justify this government's record?
In terms of transparency, I honestly don't understand where the critics are coming from. I was a bit taken aback to hear the widely-held view about the lack of accessibility and transparency in this government. That's not been my own experience, I keep putting more and more data online proactively, departments for which I'm responsible keep processing ever-growing volumes of access to information requests, and we try to be responsive as possible in a timely way to media requests. We can't do all that perfectly. In my own gambit, we try to push the dial to greater transparency as much as feasibly possible. Look, it's fair to say that sometimes media relations in this government have been, in my view, a little too risk averse. Responding in a timely, professional way to requests only makes sense. I can't speak for every office around town.

Other conservative governments, like England's, have taken up the mantle of climate change. Yet our Prime Minister called pushing for more CO2 reductions right now: "crazy." Both on the public policy, and on the political side, how do you respond to the criticism that you're not doing enough to tackle climate change?
First of all, the PM didn't say more climate change initiatives are crazy. He said that unilaterally imposing significant costs on the Canadian energy economy during a period of low energy prices without coordinating such costs with the United States would be crazy, because our energy industry is completely integrated. If people sitting on Parliament Hill don't understand that, they should go down and visit the Bakken reserves in Southeastern Saskatchewan and North Dakota and see how integrated the industry is. If we were to unilaterally impose some carbon tax on gas producers, what would happen to the Bakken reserves? The rigs and production facilities would just pick up and move South of the border to drill the same oil in South Dakota. It would be completely shooting ourselves in the foot economically. Nevertheless, we managed to see a significant reduction of gas emissions during a period of economic growth. We've set stringent car fuel standards and regulated greenhouse emissions in the transportation sector, and set tough regulations around the coal sector, which is the world largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Yes, it's true, we have not unilaterally attacked one of the most vibrant parts of the economy, which is oil and gas, but I would argue that our record is a pretty good one. For some ideologues on the environmental left, they won't be satisfied until we virtually shut down our industrial economy. That's not our approach. Our approach is economic growth and a prudent environmental policy.

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Youth generally don't vote conservative. Part of the reason is that climate change matters more to youth, and this government doesn't look so hot on climate change. The same with transparency. Does this government need a make-over, or are you just not going to win those votes?
Look, there's no such thing as a monolithic youth vote. I'll tell you this, those hard-working kids who go through trade school and who are marking $40, $50 an hour in the oil patch are overwhelmingly voting Conservative. There are a lot of young Canadians who are more interested in finding a good career, a good job, and economic stability than in pursuing Elizabeth May's ideological fancies. Those are the youth who are more prone to support us.

In that same vein, your government has gotten clobbered recently on the privacy issue after introducing legislation to make it easier to obtain people's cellphone or email records without a warrant. Is this another image problem for your government?
On some of these things, yes they may be an image problem because they get misconstrued. We're not proposing to expand arbitrary search powers for police. Every government in the world is wrestling with the fact that laws designed in the 19th century don't apply to the modern world. We have no interest in compromising people's online privacy in any way shape or form, but if crimes are being committed online, law enforcement agencies need tools to address that. So, on some of these things we've done a very bad job of communicating this, we recognize that, which is why we suspended a couple of bills and narrowed the scope of some of these powers. But we disagree with this notion that, just because it happens online, it can't be illegal. One thing we challenge libertarians to do is to think seriously how to deal with the challenge of online crime, some of which may pose national security risks.

The Prime Minister is facing someone much younger, someone much more dynamic. How do you continue knowing that Justin Trudeau is simply more likeable?
I think that Canadians are pretty civil-minded people. Most Canadians don't cast their ballot based on who has the nicest smile or superficial personality characteristics. Canadians realize this is a tough world with a very uncertain economy with all sorts of very serious security risks. That requires an experienced, competent leader. I'll tell you, I travel around the world to meet with political and business leaders—they really regard Stephen Harper as a star performer. I think we need to re-introduce this prime minister to Canadians in terms of the scope of what we achieved in the past nine years during some very difficult times.

After this Prime Minister, assuming he decides it's his last, what do you see happening to the Conservative Party post-Stephen Harper?
I think one of his greatest legacies, whenever he decides to leave, will be the creation of a broad unified, electorally-effective Conservative Party. We're not going to be a permanent government, we don't aspire to be anything as pretentious as a natural governing party, but thanks to Stephen Harper we will be a strong force in Canadian politics for the long-term. Hopefully we never step back to being a Tory party that's just an echo of the Liberals. Hopefully we're more than the pursuit of power for its own sake. I hope that our party will remember that, whenever Stephen Harper leaves, he was able to create this kind of mainstream party that is also deeply grounded in conservative principles. In the long-run, I'm pretty optimistic.

We're staring down the barrel of another election. Governments in Canada don't usually last a decade. How can you convince Canadians that change isn't necessary? What else do you actually intend to do?
Evidently the budget next spring will give some shape to that, and the platform too. One thing that cannot be said of this government by its critics is that we've lost our energy or ambition. We continue to be an activist government. We have kept virtually all of our election promises in some cases, we've had to modify them based on input or new realities, but we've established a pretty good reputation of keeping our word on our election platforms. Obviously, economic growth will continue to be job number one. There remains a lot of unfinished work for us to do. I would just say: stay tuned for 2015.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Follow Justin on Twitter.

On Wednesday morning, extremists attacked the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people and leaving many more seriously injured. According to witnesses, the gunmen shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and "The Prophet is now avenged!" as they were leaving the scene.

We asked our European offices how their nation's far-right and conservative parties had reacted to the massacre in Paris.

FRANCE

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Marine Le Pen. Photo via Flickr

An estimated 100,000 people gathered spontaneously across France yesterday to pay tribute to the journalists and policemen who were murdered. These tragic events, which unfolded on what is being called the "the French press's darkest day," have sparked off many emotional reactions from Charlie Hebdo's contributors, readers, and mourners, as well as French politicians.

The political bureau of the far-right group Bloc Identitaire responded by publishing an article on their website that said that "no one could pretend they were fighting jihadism without questioning massive immigration and Islamization." When we asked for a comment, they refused to speak to us. The same goes for Égalité et Réconciliation, the far-right group led by the strongly anti-Semite polemicist Alain Soral.

As of now, the Front National—France's biggest far-right party—have been pretty quiet about yesterday's events, keeping to the relatively politically correct position that they've been using since Marine Le Pen replaced her hard-line father as head of the party.

In her speech yesterday, she described the events as "an awful attack." In a three-minute video she published in the evening, she said: "These attacks are the work of a murderous ideology that currently kills thousands of people around the world... It's my responsibility to say that this attack must release our word against Islamic fundamentalism. The absolute refusal of Islamic fundamentalism must be loudly proclaimed by whoever holds life and freedom among their most precious values."

She also strategically put an emphasis on the fact that "no one wanted a confusion to be made between our Muslim compatriots and those who think they can kill in the name of Islam. But this obvious denial of any amalgamation should not be an excuse for inertia." During an appearance on France public television, she stated that she " wanted to offer a referendum on reinstating the death penalty," adding that she personally thinks that "such a possibility should exist," which provoked many outraged reactions from French Twitter users decrying a tacky attempt to score political capital from yesterday's events. Shortly after, she expressed anger on Facebook when she learned that her party had been excluded from the Republican march that will be held in Paris next Sunday, stating that the other parties "have managed to transform a national unity moment into a symbol of division and pious sectarianism."

GERMANY

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Germany has been strongly divided over the subject of Islam in recent years. A study published today claims that 57 percent of the population take a "skeptical" attitude towards Islam, either viewing it as "dangerous" or "very dangerous." Growing anti-Muslim sentiment has given birth to the PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Western World), who attracted a whopping 18,000 protesters to a march against Islam in Dresden last Monday. Luckily, the rest of Germany seems to be incredibly shamed by this xenophobic movement and takes to the streets in counter protests, showing solidarity with Muslims. Dresden aside, all other German cities saw counter-protesters outnumber PEGIDA, rendering their claim: "We are the people" ridiculous.

Unsurprisingly though, PEGIDA is already starting to use the Hebdo attacks as a means to swell its support, as are others. Erika Steinbach, the German soulmate of Marine Le Pen, just took to Twitter with a winky face and a bad joke (I think?) about the Catholic Church being the only institution anyone could criticize. And obviously the NPD—Germany's far-right party—and other right-wing extremists had to jump on the bandwagon too, co-opting the "Je suis Charlie" Facebook banner and condemning the attacks while claiming they've seen it coming. In the video, their chairman Frank Franz says that "what happened in France is exactly what the NPD has been warning about for years... Islamization and foreign infiltration have to be stopped."

What might be the most cynical aspect of the far-right reaction to the Hebdoattack so far is that normally they're all so quick to slur the media as a bunch of corrupt lefty propagandists. Now, they're using an attack on what they call the "Lügenpresse" [a Third Reich term that translates as "lying press"] to justify their racist agenda.

UNITED KINGDOM

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The main political story of the last year or so in Britain has been the ascent of UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party). Their main schtick is their hatred of the EU, mainly because the UK's membership in it allows immigrants to come to the UK to seek work and housing. They also possess a full house of reactionary opinions; their members generally don't like gay marriage, women who have jobs, or human rights, and they think climate change is a big ol' hoax.

While not being overtly racist, they seem to constantly need to kick out their own members for making racist remarks, such as the councillor who recently said she had a "problem" with "negroes" because there was "something about their faces." Yet they never seem to wonder why these people are attracted to the party in the first place.

And so, when two or three Islamo-fascists carried out their murderous attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices yesterday, it was only a matter of time before Nigel Farage, the party's cig-mad, ale-mad, hey-I'm-just-an-ordinary-bloke leader, was going to say something inflammatory.

Sure enough, he made an appearance on last night's Channel 4 News, putting the attack down to, "having a fifth column living within these countries... holding our passports, who hate us." And perhaps, when it comes to these extremists, that's true enough. Obviously, these guys hate the West. Less convincing is Nige's theory as to where that hatred stems from: "It does make one question the whole really gross attempt at encouraged division within society that we have had in the past few decades in the name of multiculturalism."

That's right: All those non-white, non-Christians who have been trying to live here while maintaining links to their culture, and any Brits who have been cool with that should all be having a long, hard think about what they've done. Look what's happened—all those multi-faith prayer rooms in airports and Eid celebrations on Manchester's "Curry Mile" are somehow culpable. With each rubber-stamped planning application for a new mosque, the attack on Charlie Hebdo became more and more inevitable.

With the exception of those on the extreme-right fringe, everyone else was quick to condemn Farage's statement. However, to his many fans, this will probably further solidify his image as the only public figure brave enough to "tell it like it is."

ITALY

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Matteo Salvini in Milan, photo by Marco Valli. The T-shirt says "stop the invasion"

Almost as soon as news of the Hebdo shooting had broken, the Italian right-wing began hurling abuse at the entire Islamic world. The politician seeking to take maximum advantage of the situation is Matteo Salvini—a member of European Parliament, secretary of the xenophobic Lega Nord party, and one of Marine Le Pen's primary Front National allies. Within just 24 hours of the attack, Salvini was being broadcast across Italian TV and flooding his social networks with statements such as: "We are housing our own enemies." If it needed any underlining, he declared that he thought Europe should: "Block the illegal immigrant invasion, NOW!"

Salvini's "we are housing our enemies" claim was endorsed by right-wing newspapers: Libero, for instance, put the screenshot of the policeman's execution on its front page beneath the headline, "This is Islam." Meanwhile, another politician appearing on every TV channel and news show was the Egyptian-born journalist Magdi Cristiano Allam—a former Muslim converted to fundamentalist Catholicism. He declared, "We have to hit the very heart of terrorism's supply chain: mosques, websites, Islamic schools."

The massacre was also exploited by openly fascist movements. Roberto Fiore, the leader of Forza Nuova, said that "the Paris massacre is an act of war against Europe. It is mandatory to respond adequately." In order to do so, Fiore suggested "shutting down Saudi Arabia and Qatar's embassies in Europe" because these countries are "major financial supporters of ISIS." Fiore also wanted to conduct a census of all the Muslims living in Europe, before finally expressing his wish for the creation of PEGIDA-like movements across the continent, declaring that "the days of indulgent chatting are over."

While widespread violence against Muslims seems unlikely, this cumulative level of seems likely to end up producing a sort of collective "cultural" punishment for Muslims in Italy—and that's obviously the last thing that a minority which is already quite marginalized in the country needs.

GREECE

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Antonis Samaras. Photo via Flickr

The blood at the Charlie Hebdo offices was still fresh when a new wave of xenophobic rhetoric was emerging in Greece. With the national elections just three weeks away, some of the politicians there saw the massacre as a great opportunity for political gain.

Antonis Samaras, Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing New Democracy party, stated in a public speech: "You see what is happening in Europe: Everything is changing dramatically... In France, the Socialist [Prime Minister] Hollande has sent his army onto the streets... there was a massacre in Paris today and in Greece, some people [his opponents, the left-wing SYRIZA] are inviting illegal immigrants and handing out citizenships."

Former Minister of Health and New Democracy MP, Adonis Georgiadis, tweeted: "Some didn't even want the fence on Evros," referring to a fence that runs across the Greek-Turkish border to prevent undocumented migrants from entering Europe. A few minutes later, he tweeted again: "The attack on Paris could mean the end of the innocence of Europe about Islam. SYRIZA want to open the borders." Many users condemned his comments, saying that it's a shame to use such a tragic event for political purposes.

It's not the first time that Islamophobia or xenophoba has prevailed in the country. Greece is the gateway to Europe for millions of immigrants. It is facing an economic meltdown and is unstable politically. It seems obvious that certain conservative political forces will try to exploit public anger and fear for political gain. Within just a few years of existence, the fascist Golden Dawn—in prison for the time being—managed to increase its share of the vote to 7 percent.

On the 25th of January, Greeks will be called upon to take part in one of the most important elections in the modern history of the country. With the polls currently giving a lead to SYRIZA, conservative powers are using everything—even such a tragic event—to win themselves more votes.

AUSTRIA

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Yesterday evening, around 300 people gathered in front of the French embassy to offer their condolences to the victims' families, a few thousand feet from the VICE Alps office. The crowd weren't fearful about the prospect of domestic attacks by Islamists. They were more concerned with the welfare of Austrian Muslims. We saw a woman wearing a hijab being guided across the street by young men, as if to protect her from possible assailants. The tension was palpable.

Even though the "Je suis Charlie" crowd were united in their cause, their couldn't have been less of a consensus on what had caused the massacre and what should be done about it. Besides journalists and others showing their solidarity, there was also a block of members of the Identitarian movement on the scene. One the one hand, they were participating in the silent show of respect towards the victims. On the other, they were taking part in their own protest against "the Islamification of the contintent."

"We condemn this cowardly attack that cost 12 lives," Alexander Markovics, chairman of Austria's Identitarian Movement, told us. "This is not only an assault on freedom of speech—it's an attack on all Europeans that defend themselves against the Islamification of their homeland. For decades, we decided to ignore the threats of mass immigration, especially when it happened under the pretext of asylum seekers. This is the final consequence of our Europe-wide politics of ignorance." According to him, the time for "humanity" and "more of the same everybody's-welcome culture" is up: "Jihadists are attacking our freedom with Kalashnikovs—this calls for a defesce of what's ours. It calls for self-preservation." However, he wasn't any more specific when it came to actual political action—just as the War on Terror was all about rhetoric, so are the current slogans of IM.

Meanwhile, the leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, tried to tiptoe around the issue and simply shared an article about the massacre on his Facebook page (notably from Austria's largest left-wing newspaper), along with the message "Wake up!"—as if to please all parties involved. Sadly, this also tells us something about the state of political discourse in Austria: As long as you are only remotely Islam-critical and latently xenophobic, you're on the safe side of public debate. Just as the far-right's support throughout Europe continues to grow, their ideology seems to arrive at the political center.

In another posting, Strache went on to say, "The PEGIDA movement gains more and more followers all over Europe. People are asking for a clear division line between Europe and radical Islam." Of course, this division line already exists. But so does the vague feeling among the frustrated, saddened people that something still has to be done and some statement needs to be made against the invasion of our freedom from unknown groups with unknown goals and even less well understood ideologies.

Virtually no party or political movement throughout Europe asks for tolerance of radical Islam or Islamic terror. However, this fact is beyond the point. It just needs one Heinz-Christian Strache and a couple of disillusioned Identitarians to call for a division line that already exists, to make everybody believe that it doesn't.

DENMARK

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Pia Kjærsgaard and a painting of herself.Picture courtesy of the Danish Peoples Party press section

The Charlie Hebdo attack really snatched at the heartstrings of Denmark, a country where the immigration debate rages and the right-wing Danish People's Party recently topped the polls. It's less than ten years since newspaper Jyllands Posten published the Mohammed drawings—a series of 12 satirical cartoons that were supposedly intended to contribute to the debate surrounding the criticism of Islam and media self-censorship but led to violent protests throughout the Middle East.

The events of Wednesday brought about great sorrow from bystanders and media folks alike, and, unsurprisingly, re-ignited the debate on whether or not it's appropriate to publish such cartoons. On whether it is a matter of freedom of speech or just provocation for the sake of provocation.

Pia Kjærsgaard, founder and former leader of the Danish People's Party, told TV2 that given the tragedy in France she believed the cartoons should be reprinted in order to "show who we are" and that "we wouldn't be threatened." Newspaper BT's editor-in-chief Olav Skaaning Andersen strongly disagreed and insisted that there was "no journalistic grounds" on which to do so.

The right wing have been quick to link the incidents to religious fanatics and claim it as an attack on free speech. Kristian Thuelsen Dahl, current leader of the Danish People's Party, was unavailable for a quote but his Facebook status left no doubt as to his opinions:

There's barely any doubt that the attack on the magazine happened in order to suppress freedom of speech and is based in religion. It shows, that we're up against terror-types, that will stop at nothing in their war against freedom and the freedom of speech

[...]

But for the rest of us, the fear is that this will, again, compromise freedom of speech and that the assailants will be successful in their endeavor. This must never happen! We must rethink our method of defense to secure our right to freedom!

His sentiment in rethinking "our method of defense" was echoed by Pia Kjærsgaard in an interview with tabloid Ekstra Bladet. When she asked what to do if current laws couldn't prevent such atrocities, she responded: "It's quite possible that we have to start using other methods. Maybe we need to resort to necessity. It isn't reasonable that Danes in Denmark need to be under police protection. We're the ones locked up, as if we're in a prison."

This need to "resort to necessity" and to "rethink our method of defense" is disconcertingly vague and hard to fathom in any setting other than vigilantism, a path that is not known for its ability to foster social integration. The immigration debate here in Denmark has been given credit for raising the Danish People's Party to new levels of popularity and imaginably the Charlie Hebdo tragedy may act as a scapegoat that will only further their agenda.

SPAIN

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Poster of Democracia Nacional

Spain's extreme-right parties don't possess any real power (for now), but of course they feel justified by the Charlie Hebdo massacre. "Multicultural societies are multi-troubled societies," declared Robert Hernando from Plataforma per Catalunya, a Catalan extreme-right party. "This is something that everybody can see except the guys who are in charge." Hernando was speaking last night at a solidarity demo in Barcelona that was also attended by leftist parties. "I am ashamed to be in this demonstration with people who are accomplices of this shameful colonization we are suffering in Europe. I am not used to being surrounded by such hypocrisy and opportunism."

Manuel Candela, President of Democracia Nacional, also declared: "What happened yesterday in France only strengthens our thesis. Multicultural societies have failed. A society can't live with its enemies. It is just a matter of time that this conflict between Europe and Islam will tear our continent in a bloody war. And there is only one solution: Muslims should return home. EUROPE FOR EUROPEANS!"

But in Spain these far-right groups resemble crazy preachers in the desert. The main political parties—even the moderate right-wing People's Party, who are in government and have been investing millions into strengthening Spain's borders to Africa—haven't publicly sought to use the massacre to their advantage.

Spain has a long and sad tradition of terrorist attacks: 191 died in the Islamic attack in March 2004 in Madrid, and more locally we had ETA to contend with for many years. The response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre has been the same as always—condemn and unify.

POLAND

[body_image width='1000' height='664' path='images/content-images/2015/01/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/08/' filename='how-europes-conservatives-reacted-to-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre-body-image-1420733565.jpeg' id='16557']Ruch Narodowy demonstration, April 2014. Photo courtesy of Fisty Photography

The drawings of Charlie Hebdo showed us the exact world we live in, but with an added punchline. No one is enough of a saint and no one is safe, either. Twelve people are dead because of the way they used to express themselves. It's a tragedy and we mourn those deaths.

But in Poland, for some right-wing parties like Ruch Narodowy, the attack was just another reason to blame everything on Western Europe because they "tolerate the growth of Salafi movements, allowing Wahhabi sect mosques to be built throughout the continent." Another conservative party, Kongres Nowej Prawicy, has its own problems to deal with; two days ago their leader was accused of having two illegitimate children, so they didn't have much to add to the discussion.

Life goes on in Poland, and no political parties have really concerned themselves with the attack.

SWEDEN

[body_image width='800' height='1067' path='images/content-images/2015/01/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/08/' filename='how-europes-conservatives-reacted-to-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre-body-image-1420733645.jpg' id='16559']Richard Jomshof. Photo: Riksdagsförvaltningen / The Swedish Parliament Administration

When Sweden's general election took place in September 2014, the far-right Sweden Democrats became the country's third most popular party, taking 13 percent of the votes. The party is often mistaken for an anti-immigration party, focusing only on one political question. However, journalists such as Niklas Orrenius at the newspaper Dagens Nyheter maintain that Sweden Democrats is nationalist and its that concerns with immigration are based on a nationalist ideology.

At a press conference in December 2014, Richard Jomshof—an MP and the editor of the Sweden Democrats' in-house magazine said, "We [SD] look at Islam and Islamism as a threat. There is something very problematic with Islam."

Christmas and New Year's in Sweden saw a series of arson attacks on mosques in Eskilstuna, Eslöv, and Uppsala. The motives are not yet confirmed, but they don't appear to have been coordinated. They should nevertheless be viewed extremely seriously. As "Je Suis Charlie" is becoming the saying on everybody's lips, it's also a reminder of how society is splitting apart. Sweden Democrats' growing popularity walks hand in hand with a growing normalization of Islamophobia, which could divide the country in devastating ways.

ROMANIA

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The French Embassy in Bucharest this morning. Photo byAlex Mihăileanu

Last night and this morning, small groups of Romanians went to the French embassy and left a few candles in the snow, in front of the building, to commemorate the people who were killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

One of the first political reactions to the attacks was a moderate status posted by president Klaus Iohannis, which culminated with the idea that "religious and ethnic tolerance, as well as free speech, are the basis of modern civilization, which is built on democratic principles." After that there were several reactions from the local Muslim community who went on TV to distance themselves from the terrorist attacks. Thankfully, Muslims are pretty well integrated in Romania and there haven't been any conflicts with them for over a century. A lot of them run businesses here and the person who now runs the country's Medical Emergency Services and once led the Ministry of Health is a Palestinian.

Far-right movements in Romania are very obscure. Most of them steer clear of Muslims, and are more preoccupied with the Roma and the LGBT communities. But there were some members of the right-wing media who had racist reactions towards the attack. Lucian Mîndruță, a libertarian journalist, posted: "Allowing cultures which demolish churches and kill Christians to build mosques on our soil and impose their laws here is a suicidal idea." His ideas are also shared by Dan Tapalagă, another right-wing journalist who thinks that "they have no right to force us to think otherwise with death threats, from under a veil or a turban, or while reciting verses from the Qu'ran."

Surprisingly, there were more xenophobic reactions from Christian politicians against French secularism, which they see as the cause of the attack, than against the Muslim community. Adrian Papahagi, a Romanian politician, whose movement is a part of the European Popular Party, said that, "Making fun of sacred things is popular in secularist [anti-Christian] France," as a sort of excuse for what happened at Charlie Hebdo. He was seconded by another conservative Christian politician, Iulian Capsali, who commented on his Facebook page that "in France, Christians are persecuted by the secularist state, not by Muslims." These reactions were backed up by a large number of people who say the journalists at Hebdo provoked the French Muslim community.

SERBIA

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/01/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/08/' filename='how-europes-conservatives-reacted-to-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre-body-image-1420734211.jpg' id='16563']Last night's vigil outside the French Embassy in Belgrade. Photo by VICE Serbia

A group of Belgraders gathered outside the French embassy at the center of the city last night to lay flowers and light candles honoring the victims of the attack. Another vigil is planned for tonight—this one called by the Independent Union of Journalists.

After a decade of war in the Balkans, Serbian society has changed radically. The once far-right extremists pledging to ethnically cleanse neighboring Bosnia of Muslims find themselves in power these days as moderate pro-Europeans, preaching tolerance and Western democracy. Those who remained loyal to nationalism are largely ignored, only paid a small amount of attention when the government of conservative centrist Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic needs a scapegoat to mask unpopular decisions.

Those who did mention the massacre in Paris on social media or their websites mostly blamed the West and the "unjust and merciless" 1999 NATO bombing campaign on Serbia, launched to end Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

THE NETHERLANDS

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Geert Wilders and cat. Photo via Nufoto.nl

Today in the Netherlands, everyone thinks back to the local war between free speech and Islamic fundamentalism that took place ten years ago. In 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a Muslim extremist, an event that gave rise to a decade-long discussion about radical Islam.

In the intervening years, politician Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), has set the tone for the debate about Islam in the country. By packaging his message in witty soundbites and memorable quotes, he has managed to insert his message of Islamophobic and anti-EU sentiments into the mainstream political debate. Because of his fiercely populist politics and tactics, his more traditional opponents find it difficult to handle or react to him.

Wilders adheres to strict media blackouts, waiting for the shit to hit the fan before he shows up for a few minutes to tell anyone with a microphone how right he turned out to be. He started his media blitz about the attacks in Paris yesterday with the tweet: "When will Rutte and other Western government leaders finally understand: This is war."

While Wilder is declaring an all-out war, his opponents are pleading for moderation and peace. Some local Muslim organisations such as the Dialogue Between Muslims and Governments (CMO) and the Cooperation Moroccan Dutchmen (SMN) have rushed to condemn the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices. Spokesperson Farid Arzakan branded the attacks "terrible" and called on everyone to choose their words carefully when responding to the event. "We shouldn't be using terms like 'war'; that seems very inappropriate."

After the murder on Van Gogh, a "shouting demonstration" organized by Amsterdam's mayor took place in the city to show the country's anger. Yesterday, on the same Dam Square, people quietly chanted "Je suis Charlie" and emphasized that they were there to commemorate, not demonstrate, and most certainly were not anti-Muslim.

Previously – Europe's Leading Satirists Respond to the Charlie Hebdo Massacre

[facebook_card href="https://www.facebook.com/VickyOfficial2014/photos/a.590320684397705.1073741825.590319367731170/590321497730957/?type=1" width="466" user_href="https://www.facebook.com/VickyOfficial2014" byline="Andressa Urach"]

Andressa Urach was considered one of the most beautiful women in a country known for its beautiful women. The 27-year-old had shoulder-length hair, almond eyes, and full ruby lips. But she was mostly known for her ass. She was the runner-up in Brazil's Miss BumBum contest. Her butt inspired such fanfare that braces-clad preteen girls greeted her at airports as if she was a Beatle or a Backstreet Boy. And like Bieber with his Beliebers and Lady Gaga with her Little Monsters, the beauty queen had a term of endearment for people enamored with her hump: Urachers.

But now, a series of gauze-filled holes dots her thighs. Urach's most precious asset is literally rotting away. Her medical catastrophe was the result of the hydrogel and PMMA that she had injected into her thighs and ass to make herself more curvaceous. Those fluids began to fuse to her muscles and caused her body to go into septic shock.

Her condition highlights the intense body-modification trend in Brazil, a country that was second only to the US last year in the number of plastic-surgery procedures performed. Although it might seem odd that a developing country is so focused on something like plastic surgery, it's worth noting that people there consider beauty a right. There's absolutely no stigma placed on getting a nose job, for instance, because it improves self-esteem the same way seeing a psychoanalyst might.

However, the procedure Urach had done to her ass is not something offered by legitimate plastic surgeons anymore. The filler she used was banned in Brazil in 2010 by the regulatory agency AVISA, well before she underwent the black-market procedure.

Injections of foreign substances (of any kind) should not be confused with what has become known as the Brazilian butt lift, a popular procedure that involves filling a person's buttocks with his or her own liposuctioned fat. Right now, that and implants are the only legal methods of butt augmentation in the US. And it will be that way in Brazil by 2018 as some other methods are phased out, according to certified Brazilian plastic surgeon Antonio Graziosi.

While we know that Brazilians are certainly into augmenting their bodies, due to a dearth of statistics we don't have a clear idea of how many women are going to the black market for butt-enhancing procedures as Urach did. This kind of thing isn't isolated to Brazil, however. Thousands of women across the globe have pumped their butts and suffered the consequences. In the US, people have even turned to using grotesque fluids like cement and Fix-a-Flat to get bigger booties. But no matter what chemical these people are injecting themselves with, the result is almost always the same: an initial boost in plumpness, followed by disastrous disfiguration.

WARNING: This next photo is real messed up. Don't say we didn't warn you.

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Urach was injected five years ago in her bottom and thighs. On November 30, she started to feel a pain in her legs and was admitted to a hospital in Porto Alegre. She was given an isolated room in the ICU unit with no label on her bed, to prevent harassment. A hashtag, #ForçaUrach, was started to wish her strength in recovery. Although she was at one point in a coma, and rumors floated around about a possible amputation, the model seems to have pulled through. Two days ago, she posted on her Instagram, "God is so wonderful that gave me back my life!"

That a high-profile person like Andressa Urach is struggling with this problem helps combat a misconception that only poor and impoverished women go to the black market for plastic surgery. It's true that in the US, once the FDA made butt and breast injections illegal in the 60s, a network of black-market "pumpers" seems to have first developed around women in the adult industry and trans women in transition. However, these shady procedures are being increasingly used in the States by people of all races and classes who want a big butt but don't want to suffer the invasive surgery and lengthy recovery time of implants or a fat transfer.

As women in the spotlight like Urach strive to #breaktheinternet à la Kim Kardashian, it's likely even more will break their bodies instead. Given that it took five years for Urach to seek medical attention, we could be looking at a wave of similar but less famous victims down the road.

On November 27, just two days before Urach's mother announced her daughter's health problems, the model posted a front-and-back image of her famous posterior. Although these comment appear to have been deleted in the wake of the tragedy, a Portuguese-language gossip site has catalogued some of the now ironic posts left by fans.

"What's the secret of that butt?" asked one follower, with another replying: "It's from another planet."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Still via this YouTube video

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Six. That's how many times I cried at the cinema while watching Pride, the Oscar-nominated film about a group of Welsh miners who were, during the strikes of the mid 80s, given the unlikely support of a group called Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners.

With the music (Bronski Beat-heavy), the accents, and the still-relevant in-jokes (lesbians love lentils!) I had a great time, lucky me, flanked by a girlfriend and an elbow-deep carton of the sort of freshly-exploded popcorn that's all sugary puff and no husk. But still, lucky privileged me with this blessed life cried with euphoria; to see people on screen like me doing stuff for people like me. And I cried to learn the society I was born into was no society, just disparate near-disbanded groups of people clinging to one another across counties like two huffing commuters who glance at one another just after running for and then missing the same bus. Except the bus wasn't a bus. It was food, shelter, and self-worth.

The moment I cried hardest, though, was at the end (this isn't a spoiler—it happened in real life) at 1985's London Pride march. You see the cast, a troupe of cobbled-together lefty queers with their banners aloft and their pink balloons wobbling about, triumphant, simply for their right to march and be supported by thousands of straight allies.

A still from this moment adorns the cover of the UK DVD release. It also appears on the cover of the US DVD release. However, it's been altered. The banner reading: "Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners" has been digitally removed, and the blurb which used to refer to "a London-based group of gay and lesbian activists" to "a group of London-based activists."

This has pissed people off, especially the gay press, which has referred to the adaptation in marketing as "straight-washing."

"Straight-washing" is the marketing equivalent of grabbing a Vauxhall bear by the scruff of his neck at about 9 AM on a Sunday morning, replacing his chaps with chinos, his boots with loafers then feeding him milk and tickling him under the chin until he lets out a TV-friendly camp giggle and loses the, "Look at me right and I'll wank on you," frown. It's making something ostensibly gay a sweeter pill for straights to swallow.

LGBT people are a minority. It's what's special about us and our culture but it's what's fragile about us, too. It's why homophobia is the enemy—not homophobes, or even safeguarding from potential homophobes.

In response, AllOut has done what activism does 30 years from the picket lines and created an e-petition. We can't see the number of e-signatories, but AllOut demand "we need to build a massive outcry" over this issue of re-branding the film.

Do we, though? Statistics released today show that, in the past year, sales of DVDs and BluRays in the US have dropped by 11 percent. Meanwhile, the use of video streaming sites like Netflix (friendlier to gays than Chaka Khan in a shimmering gold jumpsuit) has jumped by 16 percent. The importance of a DVD cover is dwindling even as I type.

And then Matthew Warchus—the director of Pride—has been prompted to say that, although the marketers had been "clumsy and a bit foolish," they did so with a mind to get the film the broadest scope: "But this is a film that is loved by people of all political persuasions and sexual orientations. I'm just keen for as many people who have yet to see the film to see it."

He also added that he "didn't want to preach to the converted."

Queer role models can help make queer people feel visible and counted and relevant and important. But take Joe, Pride's earnest teen rebel who has to return to dismal Bromley suburbia after every gad about with his gay mates. He so desperately needs a decent family around him to feel secure. This film can offer a temporary familiarity to a young LGBT viewer, but if this "straight-washing" means thousands of Joes, scattered across the US, can open the door of their secret life to find their families who, too, were affected by the Thatcher-Reagan years—already watching Pride on the flat-screen TV, then who is it hurting?

LGBT people are a minority. It's what's special about us and our culture but it's what's fragile about us, too. It's why homophobia is the enemy—not homophobes, or even safeguarding from potential homophobes. If you've been able to blink away tears to actually see the screen during the parade scene in Pride you'll remember the "what happened next" bit. In 1985, at the Labour conference, politicians and think tanks were toying with lending their long-term support to LGBT people. The only reason they eventually had to was because of block voting from the National Union of Mineworkers. Exactly the sorts who once couldn't bear the LGBT activists.

It's easy to discard someone—anyone—for their moments of ignorance, and no one should have to pander to the sensibilities of a pig to get them onside. But, in the same way, the Gays & Lesbians Support The Miners shouldn't have had to get Bronski Beat along to sing at their gig to get their community to care about the miners. We dress things up for the people who want them. And with marvels like Pride to help convert those unconverted—to get them to realize that gay people deserve precisely the same rights as them—who are we to get in the way?

Homophobia—much like sexuality—is a spectrum. If we can kindly drag the right-on hetero out of the habit of using "gay" as a slur in passing, or playfully make a guy think twice about why he's really worried about a poofter shaking his hand, well, it's worth that teensy, extraneous "straight-washing."

Follow Sophie Wilkinson on Twitter.

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_{Birmingham, Alabama, residents viewing the bomb-damaged home of a civil rights attorney in 1963. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko}

Last Tuesday, the Colorado offices of the NAACP were targeted with homemade explosives. The FBI has been looking for a balding, middle-aged white man in a dirty pickup truck. If this man turns out to be the perpetrator, his act of terrorism fits neatly within an established American tradition of white people bombing black churches, homes, and community centers—a tradition so prolific that Birmingham, Alabama, was often called "Bombingham" in the 1960s.

In the wake of the bombing, there wasn't any question as to whether the incident represented the inability of white people to live peacefully within a diverse society. Nor did sparse commentary on the attack make use of terms like "barbarism" and "civilization," speculate on what it meant to be modern, or question whether white people had sufficiently expressed their grief and outrage. The media did not ask for collective statements from an imaginary "white community" or cite European and American histories of conquest and destruction as proof that white people cannot be trusted.

Violence only poses a threat to civilization, apparently, when it is inflicted upon certain bodies. In US policies and practices both domestically and abroad, the torture and murder of people of colour finds institutional support. In Europe, violence against Muslims is rising. Hate crimes against Muslims reportedly increased in London by 65 percent in 2014. In the past decade, 40 percent of the Netherlands' 475 mosques have been subjected to violent acts. A recent wave of attacks have been directed at mosques in Sweden. But somehow, white and Islamophobic terrorism cannot seem to find adequate recognition as a global crisis.

Mike Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA, said on CBS Morning News, where he is a senior security consultant, that the Charlie Hebdo shootings were "the worst terrorist attack in Europe since the attacks in London in July of 2005." He conveniently forgets white nationalist Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 murder of 77 people, which Breivik performed in the hopes of saving Europe from Muslim domination.

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_{Graffiti by Thierry Ehrmann of the Norwegian assassin and convicted murderer Anders Behring Breivik. Uploaded by Wikimedia Commons user Jamiri}

Terrorism is perpetrated against Muslims around the world, but Muslims overwhelmingly respond to the violence, harassment, and calls for their mass annihilation by explaining over and over again that they are peaceful and rational people. Similarly, in the aftermath of the NAACP bombing, African Americans did not make #killallwhitepeople trend on Twitter. However, the #killallmuslims hashtag was posted all over social media after the Charlie Hebdo attack, exemplifying the reactionary response some whites have when faced with isolated acts of violence perpetrated by members of a group of people who don't look or worship like them.

I have written more than my share of offensive material. Particularly in my earlier work, I blasphemed against everything that my Muslim sisters and brothers hold sacred. For this reason, following the Danish cartoon controversy, the UK edition of my novel, The Taqwacores, was published in a highly censored form. I allowed for these editorial purges on the condition that every instance of censorship was marked within the text by an asterisk, turning the censorship into a kind of performance piece. My history with The Taqwacores leads some to assume that I stand with racists and xenophobes, but I can defend freedom of expression without upholding white supremacy. I am not Charlie.

I am, of course, horrified by mass murder, whether performed in the name of my religion or my country or my skin. I am also horrified by what comes next. Violence in retaliation for bigoted art gives bigotry the power of a courageous and principled stand, and freedom of artistic expression will now find its chief defense in another wave of racist caricatures. To further dehumanize others and promote the prejudices that affirm military invasions, drone attacks, mass incarceration, and "enhanced interrogation" will be positioned as righteous defiance in the face of fanaticism, and Muhammad cartoons will be imagined as occupying some noble station independent of empire and war. As with the Muhammad cartoons and Innocence film, violence has produced more violence. The Charlie Hebdo shootings will provide a rationale for more brutality from states, mobs, and individual maniacs alike. The next Breivik is on deck somewhere, perhaps wearing a uniform or signing executive orders.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

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Dominic: Missguided skirt, Nordic Poetry fur, Ambush necklace, Missguided top, shoes model's own

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

PHOTOGRAPHY: REBECCA ZEPHYR THOMAS

Casting: Makda Iyasu
Make-up: Florence Teerlinck

Next Thursday, January 15, the Joiners Arms is set to close. London, as we all know, is in desperate need of more luxury housing, and the Hackney Road boozer—without a doubt one of best gay venues in the capital—is being shifted so developers can plough all that history and character down, before replacing it with lots of nice new sterile housing.

The pub's been looking for a new premises for months, but are a bit up against it at the moment, so if you have any tips make sure to let them know here. For now, we thought it would be nice to photograph some of the regulars for the fashion shoot you can see above and below.

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DOMINIC: Ambush choker, Missguided top, Mipac bag, Kickers shoes, Rokit skirt, Rokit jacket

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MAKDA: Rokit jacket, Nordic Poetry skirt, shoes model's own

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CESAR: All clothes model's own

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CHEMA: Vintage T-shirt, Nike sweatbands, vintage leggings, Buffalo shoes

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URSULA: All clothes model's own

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DAVID: All clothes model's own

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KEN: Rokit cardigan, vintage T-shirt and pants, Buffalo shoes

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LOZ: Billionaire Boys Club sweatshirt, jeans and shoes model's own

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CLAUDIA: Missguided playsuit, bag from Rokit

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ALVIRO: All clothes model's own

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SAMANTHA: All clothes model's own

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Photo courtesy WFTS/ABC Action News

It was just after midnight, and all William Vickers wanted was to get home. But when a white PT Cruiser rushed past him at nearly 100 miles an hour, the St. Petersburg, Florida, police officer knew he had to make one more stop before calling it a day. He turned around and chased the vehicle, ultimately pulling up behind it near the Dick Misener Bridge.

A man got out and approached the police car. Vickers drew his gun. But John Jonchuck, Jr., a puffy-faced 25-year-old with side-swept bangs and an angular, tiny mouth, apparently went into the passenger side of his car instead of going after Vickers. When Jonchuck emerged, Vickers's report said, he was pressing his daughter to his chest. Then he walked to the side of the bridge and dropped Phoebe, his five-year-old, over the side—a 62-foot drop. Her body was recovered an hour and a half later.

"She is deceased. She did not survive the fall," spokeswoman Yolanda Fernandez of the St. Petersburg PD later told the Associated Press. "It is quite cold out here, and it was probably extremely traumatic." (Initial reports conflict as to whether the fall was what killed her, or if the child was already dead.)

Because Officer Vickers decided to start the search for Phoebe immediately, Jonchuck was able to drive away. He was later apprehended in Manatee County, where an empty pink car seat was found in his PT Cruiser. He was arrested on charges of first-degree murder, aggravated fleeing and eluding, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer, according to a press release issued by the police.

Jonchuck's court records point to a troubled past. He's been charged with domestic battery six times since 2008, records from Hillsborough County show, but never prosecuted. Records also show that he's divorced from his ex-wife, Michele Kerr, who has accused him of stalking. Yet somehow he had custody of Phoebe.

Appearing in court Thursday afternoon, Jonchuck told a judge he didn't want a lawyer, preferring to leave things "in the hands of God."

But even if he's determined to leave the judgment up to some higher power, officials are aghast at the man's alleged crime. "You just throw this baby away like it's nothing," Police Chief Anthony Holloway said at a news conference Thursday.

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Photo via CPAC digital archives

The man credited with taking down ISIS sympathizer and infamous Ottawa shooter Michel Zehaf-Bibeau is being given Canada's top diplomatic job in Ireland.

Kevin Vickers, the current House of Commons sergeant-at-arms, is being named ambassador to Ireland by the Stephen Harper government, where he'll hold residence in Dublin in a prestigious diplomatic position in Europe.

Vickers was labelled a hero by everyone from Canadian members of parliament and the prime minister to the Israeli Knesset and Stephen Colbert, who boldly lauded Vickers for putting the "'eh' in 'yippee-ky-eh, motherfucker'" and compared him to action movie star Bruce Willis.

"Kevin Vickers has shown profound leadership and dedication to the security of Canada and its national institutions," said Harper in an official statement. "His extensive experience working with Parliament, as well as his bravery and integrity, will serve to deepen close bilateral relations between Canada and Ireland in the years ahead."

After Zehaf-Bibeau killed a soldier at the national war memorial and stormed Parliament Hill, firing his hunting rifle wildly, Vickers reportedly grabbed his handgun in pursuit of the suspect.

Creeping around the corner of his office with his sergeant-at-arms garb still on, Vickers surprised the shooter from around the corner, diving while delivering the fatal gunshots to Zehaf-Bibeau.

Though even esteemed sergeants-at-arms aren't always offered such prestigious appointments, Vickers has a strong track record of public service.

Serving in his current position since 2006, Vickers was also an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, where he served a decade in First Nations communities in the Northwest Territories, worked in major crime units, and then helped create the National Strategy for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation on the Internet.

Vickers is known as a stoic and measured individual. The day after the shooting, Vickers famously walked into the House of Commons to a standing ovation, lips quivering, while remaining stone-faced during one of the highest orders of public respect ever delivered to a Canadian citizen.

Vickers will be familiar with Celtic culture as an Irish-Canadian, while this legacy appointment is already warmly received on the other side of the Atlantic: the Irish Independent is reporting the appointment of a Canadian shooting "hero" to the ambassadorship in Dublin.

For Canada, maintaining strong Irish relations is just as much a historical as it is a diplomatic tradition. With more than 4.4 million Canadians claiming Irish ancestry, making it the fourth-largest ethnic group in Canada, the country maintains strong diplomatic relations—Ireland being a key United Nations ally for Canada establishing treaties together. The two countries also enjoy employment and immigration programs with one another.

Vickers will soon present himself to Irish President Michael Higgins. He will replace former Conservative cabinet minister Loyola Hearn, who has served in the post since 2011.

Though ambassador appointments can sometimes be viewed as political rewards for donors or party insiders—especially lush European locales—Vickers clearly deserves the appointment. After all, it's not every day you find a Canadian with the swagger of John Wayne, and the professional background of an RCMP officer, who has a penchant for First Nations relations and boasts a heart of gold.

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