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Misoprostol, an "abortion pill." Photo via Women on Waves

Health Canada was reportedly expected to make a decision on whether or not to approve mifepristone—colloquially known as the abortion pill—this month. Last week, however, the federal department announced it wouldn't be making a decision on the pill until later this year.

This is the second time Health Canada has pushed back its decision on mifepristone, also known as RU-486, the first time asking the European drug company Linepharma International to re-submit its application in 2012.

VICE did not receive a direct answer from Health Canada by the time of this writing, but the department's website lists an average timespan of around 18 months, or roughly 550 days, to review a new drug. Mifepristone has already been under review for more than 750 days.

The drug is available in more than 50 countries, including France (since 1988), Australia, and the United States. It is listed on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.

Taken orally and within nine weeks of a pregnant person's last menstrual period, mifepristone blocks the action of progesterone—a hormone that supports the development of pregnancy. Combined with the ingestion of the drug misoprostol (which is already available in Canada) a couple of days later, the pregnancy is then expelled, mimicking a miscarriage.

Because the drugs can be taken at home, mifepristone advocates say the drug would make abortions safer and easier for Canadians living in remote communities—or on PEI—where surgical abortions are not available. The accessibility of the abortion pill would allow people to have abortions sooner, and the sooner a person has an abortion, the safer it is. (Because some trans men can become pregnant, the language in this piece reflects that women are not the only people who make use of abortion treatments.)

In Canada we have one form of medical abortion, the combination of the drug methotrexate and misoprostol. But methotrexate is used for various treatments and wasn't designed specifically for abortions. Dr. Sheila Dunn, an associate professor and clinician investigator with the Department of Family & Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, studied the use of mifepristone and methotrexate for terminating early pregnancies in the early 2000s. She said that for 25 percent of people who choose to use methotrexate and misprostol, it can take weeks to terminate the pregnancy, whereas after using mifepristone and misoprostol, 95 percent of people expel the pregnancy within 24 hours. Furthermore, methotrexate is generally administered as an injection, making it a far less accessible option than the drugs that can be taken as pills.

Critics have claimed that medical abortions are rife with risks, but research thus far appears to show mifepristone has a pretty decent track record. In the US, where mifepristone has been available since 2000, the US Food and Drug Administration has reported that several people have died from sepsis, a severe illness caused by infection in the bloodstream, after using mifepristone and misoprostol for medical abortions. But sepsis is a known risk related to any type of abortion, and the FDA couldn't verify that using mifepristone and misoprostol specifically caused these deaths. The FDA also states that reports of fatal sepsis in those undergoing medical abortions are very rare (approximately 1 in 100,000). They estimated that 1.52 million people used mifepristone in the US between its introduction in September, 2000 through the end of April, 2011. There were 14 deaths recorded, but even several of those had other contributing factors.

One argument against mifepristone is that its accessibility in rural and isolated communities could result in people who do suffer complications having a lack of medical resources to help them. But Dunn disagrees with this logic.

"If you can have a miscarriage in a community, you can have an abortion in a community," she said. "What you need is access to an emergency department or an emergency facility. It doesn't have to be a downtown, big-city hospital. Many small communities have their own local hospitals that would be well able to deal with this kind of situation."

It seems peculiar that a drug with decades of safe use and substantial research behind it should be subjected to such an inordinately lengthy review process in Canada.

As of this writing, a spokesperson from Health Canada told VICE that the department doesn't provide details about its approval process, and would only say that some paperwork still needed to be filed properly.

With Health Canada's stringent policy of secrecy, which is an issue in and of itself, Canadians are left to speculate. Without a candid explanation from Health Canada, it's possible the delay could be a move by the Harper government to put off approval of a controversial drug until after the upcoming election. It seems a little over the top, but Health Canada's lack of transparency makes it difficult to shut down even the most far-reaching of theories.

Regardless of the reasons, Canadians are being denied a method of abortion accepted world-wide, and we still don't know why.

Follow Grace Lisa Scott on Twitter.

Mitrovica is a city in the partially recognised state of Kosovo. Naturally, Mitrovica is also a place where simmering ethnic tensions and political instability often come to a head. Add a Hitler doppelganger who fraternises with international peacekeepers to the mix – and you've got an alarmingly high dose of eccentricity, as our writer found out on a recent trip there.

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This post originally appeared on VICE Serbia

"Kosovo's own reincarnation of Adolf Hitler," as he refers to himself, definitely looks the part. Emin Gjinovci, 55, is a veteran of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), who currently lives off of his veteran's pension and the money he makes as a Hitler lookalike.

At all times, Gjinovci carries with him what he calls "Hitler trinkets" – a few badges with swastika imprints, swastika necklaces and a copy of Mein Kampf.

"People have called me Hitler since my army days," he says showing me a photograph of himself in an army uniform. "They say I look a lot like him – unlike that English guy who plays him in the movie," he adds in reference to Charlie Chaplin's role in The Great Dictator.

He hands me his business card, which also carries a swastika, saying that people often invite him to events – even weddings and funerals – in "both a personal and a professional capacity."

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Gjinovci's bussiness card

"I go to funerals dressed as Hitler. That sometimes has a negative effect – those who've come to mourn, stop crying to talk to me instead."

As we walk around his hometown of Mitrovica, no one seems to be genuinely bothered by his presence. In fact, a lot of people stop and raise their hand to greet him in a salute that would warrant criticism – if not arrest – in most parts of the world.

Even the NATO peacekeepers stationed in the city as part of the Kosovo Protection Forces (KFOR) stop their cars to say hi. Easily recognisable in their uniforms and with flags emblazoned on their shoulders, I wonder if these guys would be greeting Gjinovci as warmly in their respective home countries.

"People respect me here. Young, old, men, women, children. They all greet me with a 'Heil Hitler'." I witnessed this as we walked through the city, although Gjinovci seems to have missed the snickering and laughter it is usually followed with.

Gjinovci seems to take his job very seriously: "Hitler didn't smoke," he says when I offer him a cigarette. He continues by criticising me for arriving late to our meeting, saying that he works on "German military time." However, he doesn't seem to be a vegetarian because he suggests we go to eat at his favourite kebab place.

"Girls like to touch my face. They think it's a mask. They pull my hair and ask if they can kiss me on the face. When I'm out of the house with my family, people stop to talk to me. But my wife is not a jealous person – she doesn't mind."

I ask him if he sees any parallels between himself and the detested historical figure. "That's easy," he replies. "I can identify with Hitler because he fought my enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend," he replies looking pleased with himself. Something tells me however that he is unaware of the weight his statement might carry.

-"Who is your enemy? The communists?" I ask.
-"Yes. The Serbs," he replies.

The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was a guerrilla force that rose up in the highly volatile 1990s – which is now remembered by most Kosovo Albanians as a time of oppression led by late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.

Due to the situation in Kosovo that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the period of that socialist federation is not remembered fondly. In fact, many equate their memories of Yugoslavia with the difficulties they experienced in the lead up to the NATO bombing of 1999.

Gjinovci himself came to Kosovo in early 1998 – from Germany of all countries – to contribute to the war effort. "I left my family in Germany to come here and join the KLA," he says. Later, his family also joined him in Kosovo.

He hasn't been to Germany since, except for one time when he had to travel for surgery to treat multiple wounds he received in the war. "It was when I was there for my operation that I was forced to grow out part of my moustache. The doctors would come into my room and just look at me."

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Realising the potential for profit, Gjinovci soon started charging for photos. "I can earn between 20 and 80 Euros per photo. Sometimes, I earn even up to 200 Euros per day if there's an event or if there are international tourists hanging around Mitrovica," he explains.

Gjinovci lives in Mitrovica with his wife and five daughters, who at school are referred to as "Hitler's children". He insists they have no problem with that.

"I go to parent-teacher meetings like this, and the parents don't mind. Every time I go to pick up my girls at school, schoolchildren surround me and want to talk to me."

With that disturbing image in my head, we near the bridge on the Ibar river and stop for a photo-op with the Italian Carabinieri stationed at the bridge. I ask him whether he goes to the north of the city, where the ethnic Serb population of Mitrovica lives.

"If I went there, I'd have to go with a gun," he replies. Before the conflict, Mitrovica's various ethnic groups, mostly made up of Albanians, Serbs and Turks, lived on both sides of the river. Now, the southern part of the city functions as a part of independent Kosovo, whereas most of the North swears allegiance to Belgrade.

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"I am disappointed with post-war Kosovo. I thought we'd all be hugging each other by now," says Gjinovci. Just like many other Kosovars, Gjinovci has found it hard to find employment. He opened a restaurant after the war, but was soon forced to close it. He is reluctant to talk more about that.

So far, Gjinovci hasn't faced any strong criticism for what he does. In a recently independent country struggling to transition – where war crimes trials, corrupt politicians and unemployment are the name of the game – a whacky Hitler impersonator hardly makes waves.

The locals have written him off as a weird fluke. "I have a lot of other things to worry about in my life. I might look at him if he walks by, but that's it," says Arsim Peci, 43, a carpenter living in Mitrovica.

As for Gjinovci, it doesn't look like he'll be hanging his Hitler boots any time soon. "I am proud of what I look like and I have no intention of changing it until I die. This is what people will remember me by," he says.

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A march to express solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. Photo via Flickr user Ben Ledbetter, Architect

While the debate over freedom of speech swirls in the wake of the attacks on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, it turns out Canada has its own blasphemy law on the books—and a group of secular advocates are pushing to have it abolished.

Last Sunday, world leaders of all stripes congregated in the streets of Paris in a show of solidarity against the terrorists whose attack left 17 dead and the ideal of free speech wounded. But while the march brought together an unlikely combination of statespeople—Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu included—Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was missing from the array. It's perhaps a fitting metaphor for a country that, despite speaking out against restrictions on freedom of expression worldwide, continues to uphold its very own blasphemy law.

Section 296 of the Criminal Code of Canada states: "Every one who publishes a blasphemous libel is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years." True, no one has been prosecuted under the law in over 70 years; charges against the Canadian distributor of the Monty Python film Life of Brian in 1980, for example, were later dropped. But secular advocacy groups say it's plainly hypocritical for Canada to keep an anti-blasphemy law on the books when it accuses other countries of using similar laws to justify human rights abuses. The United Kingdom abolished its blasphemy law in 2008; the United States has never had one at the federal level. Meanwhile, Canada's law has expanded in application beyond Christianity to religion in general.

Last month, the heads of Humanist Canada and the Centre for Inquiry (CFI), a national organization that promotes "skeptical, secular rational and humanistic inquiry," met with Ambassador Andrew Bennett of Canada's Office of Religious Freedom to note the inconsistency of the law with his office's policy of supporting religious freedom abroad. But Bennett's mandate doesn't include domestic issues. So the two groups, with the support of lawyers, are now taking their case to the Department of Justice.

"There are certain parts of the world where apostasy will get your head removed. We don't have that issue here but why would we even have this on our books?" said Eric Thomas, president of Humanist Canada.

Case in point: Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1,000 lashings over his online political debate forum, Free Saudi Liberals. Beginning last Friday, the lashings are to take place over the course of 20 weeks. The charges? Insult to Islam and violating Saudi Arabia's information technology laws.

On Thursday, the CFI called on the federal government to seek Badawi's immediate release and urged the repeal of Canada's own blasphemy laws.

"It is time the Canadian government actively opposed blasphemy laws and the brutality and violence they precipitate," said Eric Adriaans, national executive director of the CFI, in a statement. Keeping Canada's law, he says, undercuts any credibility Canada has in denouncing blasphemy laws abroad.

Following the calls, Bennett released a statement denouncing the flogging— but made no mention of Canada's blasphemy law. This week, Foreign Affairs minister John Baird appealed on Badawi's behalf to the Saudi ambassador in Ottawa. Canada's ambassador in Riyadh is also reported to be seeking a meeting with the Saudi Arabian government.

This isn't the first time Canada has spoken out against punishments for blasphemy. When a Christian couple was beaten to death by a Pakistani mob in November, Bennett said, "This is only the latest in a long series of religiously motivated, violent attacks on individuals who are accused, often falsely, under Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws. It underscores the need to support Pakistani civil society to strengthen pluralism, human rights and the rule of law, and for the Pakistani government to reform the blasphemy laws to prevent their abuse, as they are used disproportionately and often opportunistically to target religious minorities."

But that's not enough for Iman Willoughby. A self-described ex-Muslim living in Halifax, Willoughby supports the repeal of Canada's anti-blasphemy law. "Never in a million years," she says, did she expect to find such a law here. "I had to go do my own research out of disbelief."

Some argue that the law is dead, a harmless historical relic. But that's little comfort to Willoughby, who emigrated from Saudi Arabia. "Will a judge say, 'Nah, I won't use this law. It's too old'? Is that enough protection for those like myself who speak openly against gods and religion?"

Lawyer Derek James From of the Canadian Constitution Foundation argues that while it's unlikely anyone would be charged with blasphemy in Canada, the very existence of the law is a violation of our freedom of expression. He says the law was considered dead in the UK, too, until it resurfaced in 1977. It's therefore not dead, but dormant, he says.

Willoughby agrees. "If it is truly a dead and unused law, then let us bury it."

Follow Shanifa Nasser on Twitter.

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Canadian special operators teaching Iraqi soldiers effective sniper tactics. Photo viaCanadian Forces

The Canadian government is clear when it comes to its Special Forces operators in the Iraqi theatre of war: they're not actively killing ISIS militants in a combat role.

In a military update today on Operation IMPACT—Canada's official mission against the Islamic State—Canadian military officials confirmed the country's top trained special operators were not engaging in attacks on militants, but rather, acting in support of Iraqi missions. They also denied the military is engaging in a direct "combat mission."

But today's update comes on the heels of an undisclosed incident involving Canadian soldiers receiving direct fire from ISIS militants for the first time, with the last official briefing coming in October.

Within the last seven days Canadian officials say there was an incident following a battle planning session with Iraqi forces. After Canadian operators approached the front lines to better understand the physical battle space, ISIS forces ambushed their convoy with "effective mortar and machine gun fire."

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Photo via Flickr user Rennett Stowe

For a man who believes the government has the right to kill American citizens, outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder has been on something of a libertarian streak. First came the directive to refrain from certain federal mandatory minimum sentences in the war on drugs. Then President Obama and Holder hammered out the beginnings of a system of appeals for drug crimes in April.

On Friday, Holder's office made another splash, announcing that he was ending the Department of Justice's plush Equitable Sharing program, dealing a brutal—if not fatal—blow to the system of formalized police corruption that is civil asset forfeiture.

For a refresher course, asset forfeiture basically comes down to taking money and property from (mostly) drug suspects, or anyone found to be carrying a large amount of cash. Sometimes this results in possessions being seized from the family of someone who sold drugs, or just someone who is allegedly suspicious enough to warrant snagging their money. The cops don't need a conviction, or even a charge, to do so.

The amount of money or assets that law enforcement can keep from a seizure varies from state to state, but as these are civil and not criminal proceedings, the standard of proof is always shockingly low. This can lead to people having to pay money in order to fight a seizure, and desperately trying to prove that property or cash is not guilty of any crime.

Since 2008, the DOJ has funneled $3 billion through Equitable Sharing—a neat way of getting around state forfeiture law. If you're a police officer in a state that happens to be one of the stricter ones, just involve a token fed in your drug investigation, thereby making it federal, and your department will get to keep up to 80 percent of the profits. This has been a major source of law enforcement funding for years, and it incentivizes prioritizing drugs to an alarming degree. Why focus on violent crime when low-level drug offenses puts money in your pocket?

Holder's plan sounds good, and it is, even if there are some exceptions for property related to explosives, ammunition, and child porn. As Holder put it, "The Justice Department is taking an important step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except for public safety reasons."

Of course, like most many grand government plans, this reform could potentially fall victim to a loophole. Perhaps most concerning is the apparent allowance of continued seizures and funding by multijurisdictional drug task forces, which often engage in some of the nastiest drug war business, such as residential raids. The Washington Post's Radley Balko asked forfeiture expert attorneys to interpret Holder's language, and they had no idea about the precise meaning of the exemptions, suggesting we shouldn't get too pumped just yet.

Still, Holder's announcement is a real sign of progress after decades where authorities seemed to calculate that the profits from the war on drugs far outweighed the costs.

Now onto this week's bad cops:

-On Thursday, we learned more about federal spying thanks to a court order. The DEA has apparently been issuing administrative subpoenas to phone companies, collecting records of calls between the US and abroad for a while now. The judge demanded the program be disclosed as part of an investigation into an Iranian-American man accused of violating export sanctions. Somehow, this surveillance is being done under the banner of the 1988 Controlled Substances Act, but that shouldn't be terribly surprising. Powers granted to the government over terrorism are frequently used for drug investigations (see the PATRIOT Act legacy of so-called sneak and peek warrants), but many privacy violations people associate with the war on terror actually began decades before 9/11 thanks to the existential threat that was narcotics.

-Cheers for bulletproof vests: On Thursday, a man identified as Dallas Horton, 29, shot the police chief of Sentinel, Oklahoma, during a 4 AM police raid conducted over a bomb threat. After entering Horton's home, Chief Louis Ross was shot, saved by the vest, and was treated and then released for arm injuries. No explosives were found. Shockingly, Horton was released after several hours of questioning—police agree he probably didn't know who he was shooting at. Information is still a bit sketchy, but the media are definitely trying to smear Horton as a guy who "wears black," posted something about the Islamic State, and might be a big survivalist. Horton could be an asshole—he might even be an attempted murderer—but considering the history of 4 AM police raids, there's a damn good chance he was a just a dude with a gun who was surprised by police.

-On Thursday, police in St. Ann, Missouri, handcuffed and beat the wrong man, a guy whose car was in fact smashed by the actual suspect. Joseph Swink, 22, suffered bruising and cuts on his face after police confused his car with that of Anton Simmons, and beat him accordingly. Simmons's record includes charges of assaulting a police officer, among among outstanding warrants. Rather pathetically, chief Aaron Jimenez will not reprimand the officers who did the deed because "it was an honest mistake," because Swink may have been injured on his airbag instead, and because Swink was resisting arrest. Well, yeah he was resisting—he didn't do anything.

-According to a new Reuters poll, almost a third of Americans—and 45 percent of black people—think cops "routinely lie." That doesn't bode well for trust in law enforcement. Then again, two-thirds of respondents—and even 56 percent of black folks—approve of their local police. That suggests fear of disorder is still strong enough to drown out some peoples' concerns about police misconduct.

-After a major public outcry, the North Miami Beach Police Department has announced that they will stop using real photographs for sniper-training target practice. The photos were discovered after a solder saw a photo of her brother being used. She said that all the photos appeared to be of black males, making the practice even more unnerving.

-Our good cop of the week is a Chicago officer who rescued what seems to be a Polar Bear Club–type who underestimated the frozen waters of Lake Michigan on Sunday. The 58-year-old man took off his clothes, was dressed in swimsuit, and seemed quite prepared for his effort, but a bystander called 9-1-1. It's a good thing they did, since after crossing onto the ice, Officer Wadell Hardy found the guy in serious trouble. Hardy reached out and held the man's head above water until divers and the fire department arrived. The would-be swimmer is in critical condition, but hopefully he'll recover. For saving some reckless guy's life on a weekend, Officer Hardy is a fine cop indeed.

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

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Photos by Amy Lombard

If Liza Minnelli rerecorded her cult classic Pet Shop Boys–produced album Results with Le Tigre and three loud, hairy queens, the record would probably sound like bottoms, a new gay dance punk band headed by former Teeth mastermind Simon Leahy. This week, the bands releases their first EP, Goodbye, on JD Samson and Inge Colsen's new label Atlas Chair.

In anticipation for the record, we sent photographer Amy Lombard to follow the Brooklyn-based band around their queer stomping grounds in Bushwick. They showed Amy their favorite art space (Secret Project Robot) and tried to convince her to huff poppers with them backstage at their show at Palisades. Amy said, "No, thank you," because she's a professional who never does sex drugs on the clock, and then shot all these glam portraits of the band.

For more bottoms, read Mitchell Sunderland's profile of the band and then head over to Secret Project Robot on Friday for their EP release party. To buy a ticket to Friday's event and the vinyl of Goodbye, visit Secret Project Robot's website.

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The gay punk band bottoms huff poppers backstage before their concert. From left: Jake Dibeler, Simon Leahy, and Michael Prommasit. Photos by Amy Lombard. For more pictures of bottoms, check out our complete photo gallery

Backstage at Palisades, a tiny music venue in Brooklyn, a gay punk dance band called bottoms huddled in bathroom huffing poppers. This week, they release their first EP, Goodbye, on JD Samson and Inge Colsen's Atlas Chair label, but they've already built a bit of a following, with The Fader and Pitchfork praising their blend of throwback electro and politicized lyrics about HIV and self-hatred.

The band seemed more playful than nervous or grim before their show. "Publicity stunt!" Jake Dibeler, the self-proclaimed "lead screamer," shouted as he inhaled a popper and struck a fierce pose for our photographer, showcasing his socks and high heels. Simon Leahy, the keyboardist and songwriter, who was rocking a dirty blond Jennifer Aniston–style wig, followed his lead. "Quiche!" he said in a thick Manchester accent. "I keep saying 'quiche.' Everyone says I sound like Ja'mie [from Summer Heights High]!"

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Dibeler, the "lead screamer," bites on a bottle of "designer" poppers

The band formed a year ago after Leahy and Prommasit's previous band, Teeth, broke up because their other band members found "real jobs" or moved away from New York.

"We started [bottoms] because we wanted to get laid," Leahy said. He was joking—he's married—but his bandmates are still on the prowl.

"I'm terrible at being a boyfriend," Dibeler joked, "because I want every dick inside me—pull quote!"

The real inspiration behind the band stemmed from Leahy's interest in the AIDS crisis and "music made by faggots [during that time]." He started making loud, brash dance music with Prommasit and asked Dibeler to audition to be their lead singer, or "lead screamer" as Dibeler calls himself, at Secret Project Robot, an art space in Bushwick. Dibeler had been making highly choreographed performance art, but growing up wanted to become a singer, despite his lack of vocal talents. He screamed for Leahy and Prommasit, scored the job, and began writing dark lyrics inspired by David Wojnarowicz to go along with the instrumentals.

"It's a part of our world," Dibeler said about the lyrics' grim subject matter. "All the death and the sex and the disease and the despondency and the fucked-up childhood stuff is natural to all of us."

Leahy grew up in Manchester and Prommasit spent his youth in South Carolina—both places where homophobia was simply a fact of life—and Dibeler experienced a more gay-friendly childhood in Philadelphia, but all of them were eager to recount their early interest in gay sex. "I've had a dick in my mouth for the past 23 years," Dibeler said.

"I used to always spy on people," Prommasit added. "I'd would stand at the urinal for two hours, not peeing and just staring at dicks."

"I do it now," Dibeler interrupted.

"I do it for [shorter periods of times]."

"I do it till they come."

For all the dirty jokes, Dibeler takes the band and his performance art seriously. Lately he has tried to distance himself from the bear community, despite his obvious bear-like appearance, because some bears saw his performance art, where he occasionally gets fucked with a dildo in an art gallery, and started posting photos of Dibeler in armpit porn Tumblr blogs.

"I get fucked up bloody to a Mariah Carey song, and people are still like, 'Woof," he said.

Leahy also simultaneously makes jokes about his art while taking his work very seriously. "We started bottoms to make shitty shit house music, basically, for faggots," he said. "Being the bottom [is also like being] the bottom of society."

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Leahy applies makeup to Dibrell's face

The band only expected to perform for their "community" at Secret Project Robot, the art space where they rehearse, perform, and hang out with friends. Then JD Samson, of Le Tigre and MEN watched the band perform. She showed their music to Inge Colsen, with whom she runs Atlas Chair, and they met with bottoms at the gay bar Phoenix for a meeting and then signed the band.

"Bottoms to me totally inhabits [being simultaneously angry and celebratory] for me," Samson told VICE earlier this month. "I remember being at some of the first Gossip shows and feeling the same way, like screaming and being around your family and being angry and happy at the same time. Sharing a discontent is something that feels incredibly ecstatic."

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Bottoms performs at Palisades in Brooklyn

At their show at Palisades, I witnessed this clashing energy firsthand. The first number resembled a Cat Power show. Leahy hovered over the table in a black dress and his bad blond wig, playing music on his laptop, as Prommasit worked behind the drum kid. Wearing a dress that said "I Hate My Body" on the front and "GOODBYE" on the back, Dibeler stared at the table, speaking into the mic as if it was a telephone and he was Sandy from Grease.

As the second song started, though, Dibeler jumped up and ran into the crowd. Screaming like Courtney Love at the height of Hole's power, he unleashed a voice that sounded angry and exuberant and happy and sad all at once. The audience mashed and danced along, buoyed up by his incredible voice.

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The band, of course, demonstrated its campy sense of humor during all this angst. When Dibeler spotted Amy, our photographer, taking pictures of him, he smiled and struck a pose against the column holding up the building's roof. As he sang "My Body" (sample lyric: "I hate my body), he lay on the ground and humped the floor, seeming both confident and insecure at the same time.

At the end of a song, he sat on the bottom of the stage like Judy Garland performing at the Palace Theatre. He then spat into the audience. "I"m sick and have flem!" he screamed. Then he went back into action. He sat on the floor in the middle of the audience with the mic in his mouth like it was a dick and let out a wordless roar.

To the gays in the audience, this sounded cathartic—his voice was releasing our anger about all the bullshit we have to deal with on a daily basis. As we danced along to Leahy and Prommasit's instrumentals, we too were shedding our feelings about everything that pissed us off. When the show ended, I found myself remembering the band's lyrics as if I had just watched a Katy Perry stadium show. As the lights rose and Prommasit collected their instruments, Dibeler looked into the crowd. "There's some things I'm telling you," he said. "I'm a Gemini, I'm a bottom, and I have an album for sale on a table."

Follow Mitchell and Amy on Twitter.

For more bottoms, listen to the remix of "Becoming Real" below and check out our complete gallery of pictures of the band.To see them band live in Brooklyn on Friday night, buy tickets to their album release party at Secret Project Robot.

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The skatepark while still under construction. Photo by Ben Hay

This post first appeared on VICE UK

In August 2013, a group of friends decided to build a skatepark on Margate seafront. They called it "Little Oasis Crazy Skate" after the derelict crazy-golf course they built it on top of. According to Dave Edwards, a skater and builder, the idea for the park wasn't really a community project to begin with but it quickly became one. "We were just sort of fed up waiting for the council to build a skatepark," he told me. "They'd said 'next summer' for the next six years. So it was like, 'We need to do something'... It was just a little skater clique at the start, but later it was like, 'wow' at how many people have we introduced to skating."

Margate is one of the most deprived areas in the country. The Centre for Social Justice called it a "dumping ground" for vulnerable people such as ex-offenders and children in care. The district is made up of the top five most deprived areas in the whole of Kent. It's a community crying out for help—help which the local council often struggles to give. In the case of the Little Oasis skatepark, the community was helping itself, but its efforts have been destroyed.

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The skatepark under construction. Photo courtesy of Little Oasis Crazy Skate

Local kids were some of the first to take an interest in what Dave and his friends were building. "They were hanging out there at the skatepark because it was safe and it was fun. It was cool." Dave told me. "There's literally nothing for them to do in Margate. I'd say to the English kids, 'why don't you go to the youth clubs round here?' And they'd say things like, 'It's full of Czech kids' and this and that. And I'd be like, 'Really? You young kids are saying that to me? Woah...' the beautiful thing with it was that it broke down those barriers, giving those kids something to do." The area is part of the South Thanet constituency that UKIP is targeting in the general election, with party leader Nigel Farage standing as candidate.

On the first day of construction, Dave told me, a group of bricklayers came and gave them a hand and the community involvement built from there. Eventually, the residents were so on board with the scheme that local businesses were ordering them hundreds of pounds worth of cement to finish the park. People came with barbecues to feed them and others brought their lawnmowers to cut the grass.

"Watching 50 people all in one line helping and carrying stuff. All of those sort of moments, with young kids and their dads bringing them down to get them to help out, it was magical" said Dave. "People who were normally reclusive in the area were coming along... We were breaking down barriers with Roma gypsies, people from the Czech republic, Poland—we were teaching kids skateboard tricks in exchange for Polish. And they were all cool and willing to give it a go and we were sharing boards and this was the last area you'd let someone have a go on your board."

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Photo courtesy of Little Oasis Crazy Skate

When Thanet District Council found out the park was being built they fenced it off citing health and safety concerns—though they quickly took the fences down following a public backlash. Despite very few of the councillors actually visiting the park, it was deemed a safety hazard.

The skatepark was functioning for about six months from the summer of 2013. The council bulldozed the park in March last year—Dave and his friends had been building it for eight months. "The council was forced into a very difficult position and regrettably had no other choice... the council received legal advice that it was required to remove the skatepark in the interests of public safety," a press release said at the time. A public outcry followed. Nearly 4,000 local people signed a petition demanding the park be rebuilt. "It was just a bit snide how they did it—they turned up at six in the morning, everyone in hi vis, with big building equipment and lorries, police were standing there making sure no one got it. It was like 'no way!'" said Dave.

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Photo Courtesy of Little Oasis Crazy Skate

Since knocking it down, Thanet council have held the line that they had no choice because the park was badly built and unsafe. Those who built the park say that's not true. Dave showed me a safety report commissioned by the council and carried out by Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). Both the council and the skaters recognise this report as accurate. The report said that with a bit more work, the park could have been brought up to an insurable level of safety. "The finish of the completed items is very good and gives an indication that the site will provide a well built area with risks within the normal level for this type of facility," it said. Parts of the park that were deemed unsafe had been fenced off by the community in-between inspections.

However, council Leader Iris Johnston—who told me that she was one of a small number of councillors to see it in person—said that the workmanship on the park was shoddy and potentially dangerous, seeming to contradict the council-commissioned report. I asked her if the RoSPA report was legitimate. She affirmed that it was, before saying that, "RoSPA saw [only] what was on the surface."

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"When it was dismantled, there were some areas where people had done their best but you could see that it actually was a very thin area [of concrete], so that if a child or person crashed through it they were in danger and there were nails and whatever [underneath]," she said. "If someone had got injured... then we'd be in for even further criticism."

The council's planning document detailing the decision notes another, more mundane reason for turfing out the skaters: "The skatepark is unlawful and the occupancy of the skaters amounts to trespass. To allow the current position to subsist is in effect endorsing breach of planning law and by taking this position the Council would by default be encouraging this type of illegal activity."

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Photo courtesy of Little Oasis Crazy Skate

A further nail in the skatepark's coffin may have been business interests sniffing around, Dave suggested. "They think that Margate is the costa del Margate and that it's worth loads of money, but it's not," he said. Councillor Johnston said a desire to sell off the land was not a consideration in deciding to demolish the park but she did say that the council was aware of businesses interested in the land and admitted that, "Council's have to go for best consideration. That's the rules"—essentially saying the council would have little choice but to sell the land to the highest bidder.

The site the skatepark was on has been derelict for a year since the demolition, as it was before the skatepark was built. Dave Edwards and his friends put in a business proposal to build a new skate park on the site but it hasn't gone anywhere. "It's been swept under the carpet, we haven't heard anything." The Council point out that they're building two new skateparks in other towns in the Thanet area, but neither of them are in Cliftonville.

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Photo by Ian Driver

Dave is not impressed. "They're supposed to be supporting this kind of thing," he says, "The skatepark was full of our sculptures – it was community built and you would have thought that they'd want to look after it but no, no, like a small kid, they wanted to smash it down. It's all small time little council politics but it's hilarious."

As if having a skatepark torn down wasn't enough, there's a hypocritical aspect to Thanet Council's destruction of the Little Oasis. "Margate will be a town of youthful exuberance," reads the council's "Cultural Vision for Margate 2008–2018." It goes on to say Margate, "will be a Town where new youth cultures flourish and where young people congregate to express their identities." Nothing seems to express those ideals more than this community built skatepark that the council demolished. Now all that remains are some bits of smashed up concrete and some graffiti on the wall of a shuttered kiosk: "RIP Skate Park Fuck You Thanet District Council."

Follow Oscar Webb on Twitter.

The first time I crashed a car, it was gently. The car was my parents', a tasteful, superannuated European station wagon. I was 18, late to fetch our dumb blond terrier from the groomer, and I swung into a parking lot too fast, misjudging my wingspan and sideswiping a deserted Japanese sedan. Our silver paints commingled, and our bumpers were embracing in a way I hoped was an optical illusion, like a heat shimmer on the highway. I had no idea what to do next and was relieved by the prompt appearance of the other car's owner, a cool mom who took pity on me and my quavery face. She told me not to worry and to back up slowly. Separating the Siamese machines was less horrible than I'd feared. Now that we could see the side of her car with its new decorations, she shrugged, declining with equanimity to swap contact info—it was too much of a hassle. Hers was an old car, I was a new driver, and I should think of this as a lesson: Slow down!

At 30 years of age, I had not learned my lesson, not at all, since my second car crash had much in common with my first, though the sound was louder, the stakes higher, and the repercussions steeper now that I lived in New York City. The car still wasn't mine; I had impressively backstitched a Maserati GranTurismo—low-slung and snouty, like a Disney cartoon—into a snug spot on 18th Street. Pulling out, I winched the wheel all the way to the right and gave what I thought was a bit of gas. The acceleration was superb. In one or two seconds it shot out from under me and scorched a diagonal across the clear street, merging with two parked cars on the other side. The speed of this action actually outpaced my eyesight; when I heard the big boom, I thought a nearby crane had dropped something, and it was only the many people shouting around me to put the car in park that broke my trance.

I felt the engine churning low and insistent beneath my feet. One of the cars I'd struck had jumped the curb and knocked clear a parking sign, which fell just short of shattering the glassy front of a West Elm store. I put the car in park and sobbed, afflicted by whiplash, the caterwaul of car alarms, and dreadful thoughts of vehicular homicide. It was a Sunday and the start of Fashion Week, and the street was full of tourists. People were taking photographs. A friend later forwarded me a tweet, "Yooooo old white woman crashes Maserati," and it wasn't off the mark. I looked elderly with cowering posture, frail hunched shoulders, grandmother sunglasses. When the auto blog Jalopnik put up a blind item—"Which Journalist Crashed This Maserati During NY Fashion Week?"—I was by the grace of God unidentifiable.

Before the cars and the crash there was Fred (not his real name). He was the reason I was driving a $140,000 Maserati, at least the main one. Until Fred I'd barely driven in New York, sensibly afraid of its darting pedestrians, stalled delivery trucks, and hungry taxis.

My first encounter with Fred was voyeuristic. This was in college, when I spent a weekend at the summer house of his then girlfriend and walked in on a few seconds of accomplished sex in broad daylight. An awkward and innocent person, I was impressed by their upright position and sophistication but most of all by their unfettered rapture. I recalled this primal scene eight years later when I met up with Fred in a bar on the Lower East Side. I'd been in a sportier bar a month or so earlier and, on a whim, texted him something dumb like "I'm watching a baseball game." Now we were facing each other in red velvet armchairs and smiling in pleasant surprise. Fred had become a professional baseball player, though he was taking a break from the big leagues to recuperate from injuries to his wrist and shoulder. Afro-Cuban with a Greco-Roman physique, he sported dreds and tats, amulets on thin chains and rings on his fingers, Bambi eyes and enviable lashes. He'd written a novel from the perspective of a rad bisexual rap critic. He was lighting up the drum machine, reading Annie Dillard. I was in the quick grip of love at second sight. I demanded a kiss.

After we started dating, he taught me how to parallel-park in his old BMW. "Sorry," I kept saying as I tried and failed from the hard side—the driver's side—of a one-way late at night outside his apartment in Bushwick. I tried six times, I failed five and a half, he fixed it up for me, and as we walked the little block back to his fluorescent-lit stairway he put his arm around me and said, "Don't worry, you'll get it."

From my sunken position, it was then 50 miles of spooky nighttime highway to Gonzales along marsh and bayou that I drove at about 90 miles per hour.

With the intention of getting back in the game, Fred went off to Louisiana to train, just him and a former teammate juggling, lifting, eating right, and heading to the cages to hit off the tee. I missed him, and I missed driving. To visit him I rented a car from a shady outfit that was fine with my debit card and responded to my happy banter with an upgrade to an appalling cobalt Mustang, its bucket seats so low that even fully forward I could barely see over the deep neon-studded display. From my sunken position, it was then 50 miles of spooky nighttime highway to Gonzales along marsh and bayou that I drove at about 90 miles per hour, leaving the airport at midnight and reaching Fred by 12:30. His teammate ribbed him the next morning about a dorky purple convertible, but he didn't mind—he just laughed.

Once the season started, I went to many an away game, all away games for me. I siphoned a Zipcar subscription to reach one stadium on Long Island. I took the New Jersey Transit to Camden, bringing the Pom Wonderful–brand pistachios his father and I liked, whose shells he said it was OK to toss under the seats.

We were en route when Fred texted to say he had hurt his shoulder during the warm-up and would not play. Dutifully, we watched the game and then the firework finale flaring and floating in front of the Philly skyline. We waited for our guy while he showered unnecessarily and chowed down with the team, the sportsmanly action. At last he got in the back of his mom's Toyota and his dad drove us home. It was raining. Fred's dejection hung on us, and his mom put on some Cuban music to lighten the mood. He took my hand. I understood how he felt, at least I imagined I did—another at-bat squandered by a new muscle that had given up.

I too was floundering and feeling out of my depth. I'd left a worthy creaky institution for a big slick one, where I couldn't quite fathom the rulebook. Still, glossy-magazine life had certain perks, and when presented with the chance to check out posh cars like library books, I ran with it. It got me out of the office and nearer to Fred. I incorrectly fancied he would appreciate my showing up in style.

It all started when my employer sent me to the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, where I met a delightful aristocrat named Charles Gordon-Lennox, the Earl of March and Kinrara and heir apparent of the 10th Duke of Richmond. Lord March was good enough to invite me to Goodwood, his magnificent Georgian pile in Sussex, where rich men in period dress gather annually to admire early automobiles in spectacular motion. I was fetched and ferried for the occasion by Rolls-Royce, whose unrufflable driver I liked and whose buttons I pushed, the car's and the driver's, by asking politely for drive-through French fries. At one point the driver and I swapped places, and I took the reins of the Ghost or the Wraith or the Phantom, interchangeably oxymoronic names for the most ostentatious cars in the world. On the wrong side of the road in a £200,000 behemoth with the suspension of a meringue, I shyly approached a roundabout and my phlegmatic companion erupted, barking at me to "Make a decision!" I gave an inch of petrol and we nipped around a hatchback onto the skinny motorway, a neat and clean maneuver for which I was congratulated.

Back in New York, I wrote a fawning column that had the desired effect, not to nudge a sheikh toward a purchase (though who knows) but to inspire rival manufacturers to woo me with new offers. When Bentley invited me to tour their factory in Crewe, England, I proposed instead that they supply me with a range of Bentleys to test on the streets of New York City. They obliged with a hat trick, the Continental, the Mulsanne, and the Barnato, the last a handbag rather than a car but still a deal I could live with.

We'd been biggish fishes in biggish ponds, and now we'd entered strange waters and were having private identity crises.

In a Bentley Continental GT, ladylike and relatively understated at $250,000, I drove six hours south to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Fred had been unhappily traded to a minor league team. It was a downgrade with an upside—he was closer to New York City. I parked in the players' lot, a dark triangle of asphalt overlaid by the stadium's undergirding. The guys had the nice rides of relatively recent stints in the big leagues—a lot of Audis, Lexi, an M-Class Mercedes truck. Butch Hobson, Fred's coach, emerged with him from a side door and made his way over to a steroidal pickup parked next to me, a Ram I think, puffed up on platform wheels and painted Tonka red. I searched for the button on the walnut console that would make my passenger window go down. I found it. The window went down, very slowly. Butch, who had coached the Red Sox for a hot second before being fired for receiving cocaine in the mail, gave me and the car the once-over. "Nice," he pronounced, as Fred rolled his eyes and I searched for the button to unlock the passenger side.

Fred being the better driver, after we had properly reunited across the cushiony leather divider in an abandoned lot lit by factory floodlight, I improperly let him drive. We were breaking all the rules on our way to his extended-stay hotel. We passed the Amish whipping a high-beamed horse-drawn buggy and reached the hotel, which boasted an ambitious bar, a kind of Ye Olde jungle gym with wooden turrets and a little footbridge, now rocking and roaring with weekend revelers.

"Do you want to have a drink?" I asked Fred. I thought it looked a little bit fun, bad dancing to irresistible anthems.

"Definitely not," he said.

He told me he preferred the loaner Audi he'd driven a year ago, when his own was in the shop, to the Bentley I'd brought.

Though it was difficult to discern at the time, we were both out of sorts in new jobs we didn't want to adjust to. We may have shared the fear that our best days were behind us. We'd been biggish fishes in biggish ponds, and now we'd entered strange waters and were having private identity crises. I went on joyrides and took up smoking. Fred had tasted fame and was gritting out the comedown. On a triple-A team he found less free equipment, fewer pretty girls peddling performance-enhanced hydration, and fewer plane rides. We each hated to be unhappy around the other, though he was more honest about it.

The Bentley knew to lock its own doors as we carried off the key toward the lobby. "What a smart car," I nearly said, but no one wanted to hear it. How difficult it was to combine showing off with cheering up.

The next day, searching for his phone or mine in my non-Bentley handbag, Fred stumbled on the minty Dunhills I'd stashed at the bottom, along with a foot-long Rice Krispie treat. Not very rhetorically, he asked what was wrong with me.

I couldn't answer, so I stopped at a gas station—the car was often thirsty and its tab was triple-digit obscene. Some unemployed drunks hanging out in front ambled over to inspect our moon landing. Gallant Fred was paying for this round. "This is your car?" asked a drunk.

"He got it for me for my birthday," I said.

"Can you open the hood?" asked a different grizzly fellow. "We don't see a lot of stuff like this around here."

I struggled with the latch for a long minute until Fred came to my rescue. The engine block was topped with burnished metal that looked expensive and hid a lot of pistons, but collectively we couldn't make much sense of it.

Vanilla in color and flavor, it was more boring than a Prius, so boring that I fell asleep at its wheel on one of Michigan's very wide highways for a few seconds.

Next up was Cadillac, a big quick Escalade with invisible fencing sewn into the seats that zapped you in the hindquarters if you drifted too close to the margin. We drove it upstate for a dismal weekend of rain and weeping babies. I got a different Caddy for Detroit, where we flew for the first of three summer weddings. Vanilla in color and flavor, it was more boring than a Prius, so boring that I fell asleep at its wheel on one of Michigan's very wide highways for a few seconds, and luckily, or frighteningly, the car didn't drift at all. The wedding was in Homer, and afterward we drove to the bottom of the Upper Peninsula to stay in a town called Manistee. Although it was the height of the season, no one was there. Even the casino was empty. Our historic inn was totally silent. It was like The Shining, only boring. We walked along a Great Lake, arguing about aliens. We returned to Detroit, arguing as we reached the outskirts of the city on the brink of bankruptcy. "Blight is only poetic to white people," Fred said, and I conceded he was right.

The next car was better, a Maserati Quattroporte—that's four doors—for another wedding, still not ours, in Newport, Rhode Island. The car looked like a shark, gray and understated with a muscular torso and pale interior, and moved like one, nosing swiftly into lanes of traffic that scattered like so many dinky minnows.

The wedding was at a yacht club on the water near a big bridge. White sailboats eddied underneath. The groom was a friend from little league. His mother seemed to think my celebratory car was upstaging the nuptials. Fred, easygoing and accustomed to my gaucheries, said we'd be driving his friend and gorgeous bride to the downtown bar where the reception continued. I was a good chauffeuse: The slow crawl of traffic showed off the happy couple, and I played upbeat love songs, though I did not shuffle past "Material Girl."

The next morning, Fred announced he was leaving straightaway for the desert. I feigned nonchalance. "So you aren't coming with me to meet my family?" We were expected for lunch on a beach in Massachusetts.

"I'm really sorry," he told me, hastily packing a duffel bag. His friend Ty (not his real name) had scored two tickets to Burning Man, an unmissable opportunity.

No phones on the playa. Burning Man is breaking up, said friends of mine who knew all about it, but I was committed to him and to my role of cool girlfriend. I tried to focus on the psychedelics instead of the fluffers and other dumb new vocab like FOMO, fear of missing out.

Ten days later, I arranged to borrow his favorite marque and waited at the airport in a peppy Audi R5, blue and cute. I hoped he would greet me with extra fondness, but he seemed depleted, stowing his dusty pack in the deep trunk and staring out the passenger window. Fred's Burning Man name—everyone gets one—was King Louie, as in Satchmo, after he did a Louis Armstrong impression while working behind the makeshift bar. He had served a nondescript hippie kid a drink, and the kid had opened a briefcase. Fred said he was a "wispy-looking" guy who gave him some of the strongest acid imaginable. He and Ty tripped all night, then hitched to Reno, but Fred had forgotten his laptop in the back of a truck belonging to someone named Hagie. Now he was missing both the laptop and the Burn, returning to New York for another wedding, to which I had not been invited. In a desiccated state, he had overslept and missed his lift to the Hudson River Valley. I was miffed about everything, but having wheels and raring to go, I agreed to drop him off on my way to a vintage-car rally taking place in Lime Rock, Connecticut.

Fred had the worst hangover of his life. It probably wasn't fair to torment him for 1.5 hours up Interstate 84. "How was the tent?" I asked passive-aggressively. He'd bought it a few weeks before, in Vermont, and we'd slept in it together one time on my parents' sloping lawn.

He said he had a splitting headache. "I don't know what it is you are asking me."

"Think of it like an Amazon product review," I said. It went on like that for a while. I drove up a long driveway of pines to a lodge-like facility, and he got out and slammed the door.

At the car rally, I sat in a stationary E-Type Jag from the early 70s, and it calmed me down for an hour. I called Fred later from the R5 he had cruelly spurned. He told me he was contemplating quitting baseball and moving to Nicaragua for a while. Fred was no fly ball, he was a Jeet-ish line drive I was kidding myself I could catch, and there's only so long a lady can tell herself that wanderlust isn't about her.

My first, perhaps my only, legitimate religious experience took place in my last borrowed car.

The Friday after we broke up, I woke up flush with the intermittent magic that has made my life sparkle darkly from time to time. I felt Fred's mind flickering at me; I wondered where he was going and what he was doing. I dressed carefully. I went into the office and edited an article about Japanese keratin treatments that reshape the hair follicles for incredible Roz Chast–to–Rapunzel results. Then I texted my buddy at Maserati to see whether they had a spare. The veneer of my title meant that such a preposterous ask did not get me laughed out of the bank. On the contrary, the producers and purveyors of astronomically priced items tended to bend over backward to oblige my fickle whims. I was in luck. My friend had a zippy little number he could give me for the weekend, though they needed it back by Monday, when it would travel south by flatbed to an auction block in Miami.

In 24 hours I did a variety of crazy things in this car. I drove a man named Ray Christiano Irving, whom I'd met in a restaurant when I mistook him for the rapper T. I., to the airport. We chatted speedily on the highway. He'd penned a self-help book, The Formula, and spoke movingly about his brother and mother, whose lives, he said, demonstrated the thin line between madness and genius—brilliant people whose forthright insights made it difficult for them to participate in mainstream society. He was seriously impressed by the Maserati, I liked his Norf London accent, and when his flight was delayed, we kissed briefly and watched Doc Brown and Ricky Gervais spoof-rapping on the tiny screen of his phone. My phone had been dead for hours, and I felt untethered and free.

Driving back to the city over the Williamsburg Bridge, I was humbled by the presence of the divine. The skyline was backlit by sunset, the on-ramps and arteries mingled like tendrils, a smooth ribbon of asphalt streamed out from under me, and driving was scarily easy. I was aware of the city's moving parts and firm edifices as beautifully coordinated components of a celestial clock. It wasn't an accident, so much beauty, it was by design, and how lucky I was to be alive to behold it. Who dreamed this up? was my thought. The radio was playing all the right songs, and the sky behind the buildings was a pure shade of pale gold. My first, perhaps my only, legitimate religious experience took place in my last borrowed car.

After I parked in front of my apartment on East 108th Street in Harlem, I found my brother and his love interest sitting on my fire escape. It was early fall, and the night was warm and lovely. Since my phone was off, Fred had called my brother. "Yeah, she just got here," said Ben, handing me his cell.

"I tried calling you," said Fred. "I missed you. I'm in the city."

"You are?"

"Do you want to meet in Williamsburg?"

Did I ever, but on the way there I got a bit lost. I asked a guy where Berry Street was, and he pointed to his crotch.

Fred was with the unshakable Ty in a place called the Levee—"a fake metal bar for tourists, a weekend bar," Ty said. We drove to another place called the Woods. We drove to an after-hours dance party. Fred and I kissed in public, which we never did. We kissed in a way we didn't usually in private. We watched the beginning of the sunrise. We were parked in front of a bank of Citi Bikes. He slept as I drove home. Ever the masochist, I read his phone. Text messages described his indecision and sadness. When he woke up, I dropped him off at his friend's house near Union Square, and an hour later I crashed the Maserati.

After crumpling two cars, the Maserati was towed away to get its nails done. Fred left for Managua. I parted ways with my glamorous job.

It was all fun while it lasted, a time-stamped high I had to give back, beautiful but unreal, not mine to keep. After crumpling two cars, the Maserati was towed away to get its nails done. Fred left for Managua. I parted ways with my glamorous job.

I re-quit driving for the rest of the year, but in the summer, I briefly entertained a deadbeat for access to his wheels. He had seven of them: a Piaggio MP3—a three-wheeled scooter that looked like Adam West's Batcycle—and a beige Toyota Sienna in which both rows of back seats had been replaced with a short stack of Oriental rugs. For a little while I drove the van around town and sat on the back of the bike like a morphed Power Ranger. I've been a borrower through and through, but I'm finished with it. The dude was dumb, he just made me miss Fred, and I kicked him to the curb. I won't be getting on a motorbike unless it's mine and I'm driving.

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A fresco depicting four superheroes committing what has been interpreted as a gang rape is currently the subject of a huge scandal in France. The mural—which is painted on the wall of a hospital in Clermont-Ferrand—depicts Wonder Woman having anal sex with Batman while Superman comes in her mouth. Supergirl is there, fisting, and the Flash is getting a handjob. It's causing its fair share of controversy in a country still dealing with the emotional fallout of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The outrage kicked off on Saturday, when the Facebook page Les médecins ne sont pas des pigeons ("Doctors aren't dupes") published a photo of the fresco. The mural was first created 14 years ago (according to a comment on the page), but a recent addition has turned it from a mere rape mural into an overtly political rape mural.

These speech bubbles—it's unclear whether they were added in Photoshop or if someone actually painted them on the wall—read, "Take it deep," "Take that health reform," and "You should inform yourself a bit better!" They're thought to be intended as an attack on the reforms proposed by the French Health Minister Marisol Touraine last November. Those reforms—which proposed to clamp down on doctors charging over the odds for consultations by outsourcing the payment to health insurance companies—were rejected by the French National Medical Council (CNOM) on the grounds that they "didn't answer the needs of doctors on the ground, and of the patients."

Fans on the Facebook page have been defending the fresco by referring to the recent Charlie Hebdo case and to the principle of "freedom of expression," with many suggesting it was hypocritical to say the Prophet Muhammed could be depicted in cartoon form but that you shouldn't create an image implying the rape of the health minister. One of the comments reads: "Does [Marisol Touraine] feel above the Gods? 'Cause apparently, it's fine to caricature Gods..."

Others blamed the Facebook group for publishing the image, saying that such frescoes are "part of our [medical students] traditions and had never caused problems before."

The French feminist association Osez le Féminisme ("Dare Feminism") was quick to react to the Facebook post, publishing an article on its website asking for the fresco to be erased and for measures to be taken against the authors. The post also called the mural "misogynistic" and said that it wrongly used "rape as a means of showing discontent towards a Minister and her law." It warned that such representations could "eroticize extreme violence" and contribute to building a "degrading image of women."

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Photo via Facebook page Les médecins ne sont pas des pigeons

The post was painted over early on Monday and Clermont-Ferrand announced it had decided to "erase the wall painting" and take "disciplinary, or even judiciary action against the presumed authors for their unacceptable behavior."

For Osez le Féminisme, however, this is not the end of the fight, as the incident in Clermont-Ferrand is not an "isolated case." Claire Serre Combe, a spokesperson for the association, spoke to me on Monday.

VICE: Hi Claire. Can you explain for anyone who is a bit slow on the uptake and might not get it, why you wanted the fresco to be erased?
Claire Serre Combe: It represents a woman who is the victim of a collective rape. When you know that each year in France, 75,000 women get raped, that only 10 percent of them make a complaint, and that it leads to a sentencing in only 2 percent of the cases, while at the same time future doctors find it acceptable to paint such frescoes in their waiting room, it means there is a huge problem with attitudes. What's even more shocking about this fresco is that it was used for political purposes. It's a very degrading and humiliating message, and a clear attack toward the health minister.

Do you know who the artist is?
We don't have exact information as to who the artist is. But it doesn't change the nature of the problem: Young students—medical interns—are being exposed to a humongous painting that is disrespectful to women. This painting is completely inappropriate.

How is it relevant to the current minister's project if it was painted more than a decade ago though?
The fresco itself was painted a while ago, and entitled, Internes de Clermont-Ferrand: les super héros ("Interns of Clermont Ferrand: the superheroes"). In order to protest against the legal reforms that are currently being discussed, the comments in the bubbles were added. What we don't know is whether the comments were actually added on the wall itself, or whether they were added in Photoshop.

Have you had direct contact with the university?
No. We sent a letter to the CNOM [medical council] in Puy-de-Dôme [a region in the center of France] on Sunday, asking for the fresco to be painted over, and for sanctions to be taken against the authors. We've also asked them to take relevant measures in order to raise awareness among doctors and aspiring doctors about the issue of violence against women, and to make sure that such drawings disappear from all universities.

Have you or your organization come across similar issues in other universities in France?
In general, in the student world, there are quite often problems like this. It's not the first time we've noticed this sort of drawing, except this time it's a more serious case, as it touches upon rape, which is a crime.

Very often we have to step in, especially for posters advertising student parties. For example, in Grenoble, two years ago, a party got canceled by the university's dean as the poster advertising it was deemed sexist and degrading by feminists and other associations. In Toulouse, two or three years ago, students organized a "DSK party"—referring to ex-IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was accused of sexual assault—suggesting that it was going to be a kind of rape-themed party.

How can you tell if your interventions work?
They have proven useful. What we regret, however, is that we constantly have to keep an eye out and warn people. Attitudes do change among students, but not fast enough. Removing or suppressing things is one thing, but what we really need to do inside universities is work on raising young people's awareness on these issues, to make them understand why it's dangerous to represent women in certain ways.

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A demonstrator at the London vigil for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Photo by Chris Bethell

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Within hours of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, internet forums were buzzing with alternative explanations for the attack. "The official story doesn't add up," people typed furiously into their keyboards. "We're being lied to."

Over the next few days, the rumors spread. Apparent glitches in reporting—as well as the "suspicious" suicide of the detective in charge of the investigation—were taken as evidence of subterfuge.

Most doubters, however, focused on scrutinizing amateur video footage of the event, asking whether policeman Ahmed Merabet was really shot in the head.. The questioning makes for grim reading. "Where's the blood? Why no splatter?" asked Reddit users. Others offered rebuttals, posting videos of bloodless shootings and suggesting: "Heads don't explode like watermelons."

A long, imaginative list of alternative explanations was offered: It was a false flag attack, executed by Mossad to fuel anti-Muslim sentiment; it was carried out by the CIA for the same reason; it was French Jews; it was a "black-op power bloc operation" to back up the war on terror; Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that the West "playing games with the Islamic world."

Regardless of their source, the Charlie Hebdo rumors have all the hallmarks of a classic conspiracy theory. Apparent discrepancies in the way the story was reported are jumped on, and the official version of events is discredited. From there, a leap is made to another, alternate, explanation, and evidence is gathered in support. The same thing happened after the murder of journalist James Foley, when critics suggested that the video was staged. Debunkers, in this case, asked why the West would bother faking an Islamic State beheading when the group has already carried out so many.

But how unique is the conspiracy theory-creation process? Plenty of bad journalism follows the same formula, and many an article is based on flimsy evidence and pseudoscience, or distorted by exaggerations. In the case of Charlie Hebdo, for instance, we were misled by pictures of world leaders apparently heading up the march in Paris, when really they'd just gathered in a cordoned-off street to have their photo taken.

Of course, "conspiracy theorists" is a blanket term, lumping together those who believe we're ruled by scaly lizard people with those who simply question the role of Big Pharma. Some—perhaps unsurprisingly—would like to see the name ditched altogether.

"It's a loaded term," says Chris, a friend of mine with a penchant for what most would call conspiracy theories. "It's merely a label applied to certain stories, usually to distinguish them from stories which the user of the label wishes to promote or defend by limiting the parameters of debate.

"I doubt most of what I am told, especially by those in authority, who may have an agenda to advance. The circumstances of the Charlie Hebdo attacks seem very suspicious to me, and the evidence for the official theory lacks credibility. Historical precedent also suggests that alternative narratives may be more likely."

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The most recent myth to have been debunked on metabunk.org

In the US, Mick West runs the website metabunk.org, pulling in 10,000 unique visitors a day. He reckons the Charlie Hebdo rumors were predictable.

"It's nonsense," he says. "But sadly it seems like the expected response now. People pick up normal inconsistencies in the initial reporting of a chaotic situation and claim these things are significant. They always make claims about blood and injuries, but seem to be basing their expectations on the depictions of violence in movies and video games.

"It's just cherry-picking, with a strong confirmation bias. The people telling you these things have only one goal: to convince you it was fake. They amplify every little thing that seems to help their case, and they ignore everything that does not."

Conspiracy theories have been around for as long as human beings have been able to articulate the feeling that someone is trying to stitch them up. In living memory, theories have been espoused around the assassination of JFK, Hitler's death, the moon landings, Area 51, Princess Diana's death, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, climate change, Obama's birth, whether Obama is in fact the Antichrist, AIDS, cancer, 9/11, chemtrails, the MMR vaccine, the Sandy Hook massacre, FEMA camps, the beheading of James Foley, Ebola, the Islamic State, the Scottish independence referendum, the Rosetta mission, and, of course, the Illuminati. And that's just a handful.

Academics, too, have been trying to get their head around it.

"People who believe in conspiracy theories tend to feel they don't have a lot of control over their lives," says University of Winchester psychology lecturer Michael Wood. "It's reassuring to believe the world can be controlled, even if that means it's not a nice place."

Wood says that being a conspiracy theorist is just another world view, no different from being a diehard liberal or a full-on, fox-killing Tory. While right-wingers might see the Charlie Hebdo attack as evidence that uncontrolled immigration leads to problems, and those on the left suggest it's what happens when a group is marginalized, conspiracy theorists are more likely to go for the false flag explanation.

Robert Brotherton, Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, says believing in conspiracy theories fits with the way our brains make sense of the world.

"One of our psychological biases is that, whenever anything ambiguous happens, we connect the dots," Brotherton says. "The basis of many conspiracy theories is simply connecting the dots. Another is proportionality bias. When JFK got shot, people wanted to think that something big caused that, not just that some guy you'd never heard of could have killed the president."

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A protester at the Anonymous Million Mask March in London, which is often attended by people espousing all sorts of conspiracy theories. Photo by Jake Lewis

But are there any factors that could signal a propensity to believe? Metrics like gender and income haven't been correlated with a belief in conspiracy theories, and there really isn't enough data available on the topic to say for certain whether—statistically—you're more likely than somebody else of a different socioeconomic group, for instance, to believe.

The advent of the internet is not thought to have swelled the ranks of conspiracy theory believers because, as quickly as the theories can be shared online, so too can their rebuttals. Some theories are plain stupid, others are less easy to dismiss.

Innate paranoia can't be a good starting point, but then not all conspiracies are a figment of the paranoid imagination. The black ops, coverups, and covert missions carried out by governments and secret services around the world are too lengthy to list in full. But to throw out a few, we've had Operation Gladio, the CIA and MI5's role in the overthrow of democratically elected governments around the world, Watergate, the Hillsborough cover-up, the Wikileaks revelations, the NSA scandal, and the discovery that, in 1990, PR firm Hill and Knowlton was behind fake testimony from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti "refugee," Nayirah, who swore she'd seen Iraqi troops killing babies.

Problem is, you can't believe every theory you hear, because many are clearly bullshit. Most of the "OPEN YOUR EYES SHEEPLE" stories you see being shared on Facebook come from sites with just as transparent an agenda as Fox News; conspiracy theories are an industry and a handful of people are doing very well out of it.

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Alex Jones at the 2013 Bilderberg Conference. Photo by Matt Shea.

Alex Jones, who spews forth conspiracy theories from Infowars and other platforms, is estimated to make more than $10 million a year. Right-wing mogul Glenn Beck—who's spawned a number of bizarre theories—reportedly earned $90 million in the year from June 2012 to June 2013. Back in the UK, David Icke isn't exactly on the breadline, with an estimated $9 million net worth, much of which will have been generated through book and merchandise sales, and from tickets to the live shows where he rambles on about reptilians from the fourth Dimension ruling the world.

Plenty of conspiracy theory-espousing websites are making money through pay-per-click advertising, and you're as likely to come across a pop-up window for online gambling as herbal remedies. Make no mistake—for some, "discovering" conspiracies is a job. This isn't to say they aren't true believers, but it is in their interest to "uncover" a constant stream of conspiracies.

And all these conspiracy theories they're "uncovering" can do real harm. Antisemitic hoax document the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claims to be a plan for global Jewish domination, has been reprinted across the globe, most notably by the Nazis in 1933. The Protocols not only served as a model for conspiracy theories—some now claim that the "Jews" depicted in Protocols are a cover identity for other groups such as the Illuminati, or, according to Icke, extra-dimensional entities—but the document's message still reverberates around conspiracy theory forums, on which Jewish groups are posited as conspiracy masterminds with depressing regularity.

In 1998, The Lancet published a study suggesting a possible link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The article was discredited and the author banned from practicing medicine. Numerous other studies have shown no such link. Nonetheless, 17 years later, many parents still subscribe to the theory that the government is trying to give their children autism in order to appease Big Pharma and, as a result, whooping cough and measles are on the rise.

Individuals have been targeted as a result of these theories. There's a movement of people who don't believe the Sandy Hook massacre really happened, suggesting it was an operation designed to revoke rights to gun ownership. Fanatics have harassed the parents of murdered children and stolen memorial signs.

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A man at Occupy London 2014 who figured the best way to get his theory across was to scribble it on a sheet of cardboard in pretty much completely illegible writing. Photo by Oscar Webb

A questioning of the mainstream press seems sensible—there are direct pressures from shareholders and advertisers, there's sloppy reporting and there are agendas—but knee-jerk disbelief of anything reported by a major news source is misguided. Mainstream outlets frequently question the government and publish things those in power would rather they didn't.

Meanwhile, slavishly agreeing with everything you get from WorldTruth.tv is as sophisticated as pinning a "FUCK THE SYSTEM" badge to a branded sweatshirt made in a Bangladeshi sweatshop.

Perhaps Chris is right; the term "conspiracy theory" covers too much ground to be useful. David Cameron recently described those concerned about the alleged coverup of a VIP pedophile ring as "conspiracy theorists." His intention: to instantly discredit them.

But danger lies in using the small amount of energy you have for politics on chasing illusions. There are plenty of real problems to confront. Question mainstream news, sure, but don't fall into the trap of believing everything you read on Infowars and its ilk. Everyone has an agenda.

Follow Frankie on Twitter.

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This post originally appeared on VICE Alps.

Lausanne, Switzerland is a city of students, which means that weekends often begin on Wednesday nights—once the Olympic bigwigs have gone to bed. Unfortunately, to protect those lousy diplomats' beauty sleep, our politicians have come up with safety regulations that demand clubs and bars close early.

So we had to become creative and set up our parties outside the taxable realm of the city center—in forest cabins, studios, and squats. Here's some photographic proof that we are not as boring as you think.

Does your town or city qualify for paradise status? Feel free to send your pitches to ukphotoblog@vice.com. Don't be shy.

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Karen Roberts, founder of the menswear line HauteButch, never felt comfortable in her clothing. From the moment she got dressed in the morning, anxiety about her appearance would linger in her mind. She constantly had to roll up her oversized jacket sleeves and hide the boxy shoulders of the button-ups she wore underneath.

Before creating her company in 2012, Roberts was shopping in the men's department, where she could find pieces with masculine detailing that went with her "butch" style. But the disproportionate garments, which are designed for male bodies, left her feeling frustrated and self-conscious.

"I was a full-time realtor working for investors and it put me in corporate settings, where I really felt uncomfortable in my own attire. I just started fantasizing about HauteButch and searching Google to see if other people were having the same issues and frustrations as I was, and sure enough they were," said Roberts.

Now for the past two years, she has been designing clothing for individuals who want to depart from frilly and feminine clothing, by creating "handsome fashion" that fits different body types. Her company caters to a community of butch and androgynous women, as well as trans men. With the success of a recent Kickstarter campaign, Roberts is hoping to continue to empower customers through HauteButch by bridging the gap between identity and style.

"People feel invisible and like they don't matter. Our community is underrepresented and underserved in that way," said Roberts. But with the advent of new lines like HauteButch, Roberts beleives that her customers are starting to feel "more like themselves and more visible."

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According to Lillian Faderman, a scholar on lesbian history who first came out in 1956, the term butch was first used to describe masculine little boys before being applied to the lesbian subculture and eventually a style of dress in the 1950s.

"In the early 20th century, when women first started to work in business, they often wore styles that emulated men. Later in the 20th century, middle-class women who saw themselves as butch would often disguise their sexual identity when they went to work," said Faderman. "I would hang around the working-class bars and it was almost a uniform. Butch women would wear chinos, fly-front pants, and a T-shirt underneath a button-down shirt and very often penny loafers."

A week or so after speaking with Robert, I met with Daniel Friedman, the founder of Bindle and Keep, a custom suit shop in Brooklyn, who made a life-changing decision to start catering to women's and trans bodies.

Daniel was unaware of this previously ignored market until 2011, when he was contacted by Rachel Tutera, a self-described feminist and gentleman who runs a blog called the Handsome Butch, about a position with the company. She soon suggested that Friedman create suits tailored for women and trans men, but with the same masculine detailing.

What Friedman did was tap into a community consisting of 700,000 transgender and 8 million lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals he didn't even know existed. Now, the LGBTQ community makes up 85 percent of his business.

"There is such anxiety attached to clothing," said Friedman, who has listened to hundreds of women's and trans men's stories. "If we can solve that, they can focus on other parts of their lives like everybody else. It shouldn't grab the kind of real estate it does in people's preoccupations."

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Although Friedman admits to only knowing a few members of the LGBTQ community before Rachel came along, he said that his encounters with his new clients give his life meaning. As I sat across from him, he thumbed through his emails, reading me quotes from grateful customers.

"There are so many stories. A few months ago I put a suit on a woman who was around 55 years old. When I dropped off the suit it looked great on her, but I asked her if there was anything that was triggering or uncomfortable," Friedman said. "She was stone cold, and just wanted us out of there. About two weeks later, a courier service came to my apartment building with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label and note [from her mother] that said, 'I have never seen my daughter look so good and feel like her aesthetic and identity is finally correct. I am just so happy I got to see this in my life.' She wanted us out because it was such an emotional experience for her."

Although the response has been overwhelmingly positive for HauteButch and Bindle and Keep (the latter even caught the eye of Lena Dunham, who is currently working on an HBO documentary about the tailor titled Three Suits), many of the business that have tried to break into "butch" clothing have simply failed. But with the help of crowdfunding and loyal customers these brands are hoping to expand to international retailers.

"We no longer talk in terms of lesbian and gay, or male and female. We talk about LGBTQ, it is a huge alphabet soup. I think we are really opening up to those possibilities. I think styles are opening up to those possibilities too," said Faderman. "It is an acceptance of the huge diversity that we know exists. If there is a significant enough market to make it economically interesting to stores, it will be there."

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Last month, dapperQ, a website for masculine women and trans people, hosted its third and largest semi-annual fashion show for the unconventionally masculine at the Brooklyn Museum. The event showcased brands catered to androgynous dress like Angie Chuang and Sir New York, while Goorin Bros. and Jag & Co. showed how brands that don't specifically target the LGBTQ community can still serve that community.

As society begins to recognize the rights of LGBTQ individuals, Roberts and Freidman hope that one day the lines separating women's and men's fashion will be blurred and individuals can have access to the kind of fashion that can truly change their lives.

"There are 10,000 clothing companies in the male and female spectrum, there has to be a couple that are willing to cross that boundary. We aren't talking about a radicalizing gender or sexuality," said Freidman. "Clothing companies should be about people expressing their own feelings."

Follow Erica Euse on Twitter.

There was something particularly poignant about this year's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Besides lining up with the release of Selma, the movie about his signature voting rights protest in Alabama, the commemoration of the country's most beloved civil rights hero comes at a time when the national conversation on race relations has been heating up again, to say the least.

So it's only natural that police reform protesters would seize on this moment as a chance to revive the Black Lives Matter movement—albeit tentatively—in the streets of New York and other cities around the country.

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All photos by Jason Bergman

In a three-hour, 60-block-long march, over a thousand protesters made their way down from Harlem to the United Nations in Manhattan, stopping traffic on Lexington Avenue as they were followed by a cavalcade of officers in blue. The well-organized procession was led by a blaring speaker that played "We Shall Overcome" speech, "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now," and the more recent "Glory," culminating in a massive die-in in front of Bloomingdale's in Midtown.

The march was the most substantial collection of anti–police brutality activism since Mayor Bill de Blasio called for a temporary pause in protests after the tragic murder of police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in Brooklyn last month. But can the reform crowd actually force changes to the criminal justice system?

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"There will always be bumps in the road, but this is definitely not a flash in the pan," Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham Law professor and former Democratic candidate for New York State Governor, told me Monday. "What I think is exciting is that we see new leadership here. And they have an intelligent, moral, thoughtful, and serious message."

Those "bumps in the road"—an NYPD counter-protest, the deaths of Ramos and Liu, and the subsequent police slowdown, where arrests plummeted—were evident in the turnout on Monday; the "Dream 4 Justice" march, as it was dubbed, was relatively tame. Still, a significant crowd, both old and young, showed up—enough for one to think this grassroots movement might have a sufficient residue of momentum to stick around a while. And the quickly approaching deadlines for the grand jury decision on the accidental death of Akai Gurley and the release of Eric Garner's grand jury proceedings provide the building blocks for longevity.

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To that end, it remains to be seen whether or not this crowd will listen to voices like that of City Councilman Jumaane Williams, the co-sponsor of the Community Safety Act, when he told them, "If you celebrate with us today, you should be struggling with us tomorrow."

"We are back in numbers, but there's actually more numbers than you can see all over New York City, hidden in camouflage but waiting for change," Sudan Abdus-Salaam, a 50-year-old participant, said at the front of the march. "We don't want people dying or police officers dying, so that's why we need to end the negativity we've seen. I think the legislators are taking heed of that and paying a little more attention."

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Later this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will decide whether or not to veto a bill that would transfer responsibility for disciplining police officers from local commissioners to independent arbitrators. He will also have to respond to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's request to be the special prosecutor in cases like that of Officer Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who placed Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold this July. The City Council could soon vote on the Right to Know Act and a chokehold ban, both of which are opposed by the NYPD and Mayor de Blasio.

Out on the streets, Joseph Guzman wasn't so optimistic. "They're fighting for indictments here, but it doesn't matter," he told me, "because even when you get to trial, you realize the whole system's rigged."

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Guzman would know.

In November of 2006, he attended a bachelor party for his best friend, Sean Bell, at a club in Queens. As they began to head home, a team of undercover NYPD officers unleashed 50 rounds (one of them emptied and reloaded his clip) at the car carrying Guzman, Bell, and their friend Trent Benefield. The cops apparently thought the men had weapons—they didn't, though Bell was legally intoxicated and apparently drove into a police van—and the barrage killed Bell, who was to be married the next day. Guzman and Benefield were seriously wounded.

Bell's murder ignited raucous protests across the city—including one that saw Guzman himself get arrested. Three of the five detectives responsible for killing his best friend were indicted, but then acquitted of all charges. They were all later fired or forced to resign. Guzman, who still has four bullets lodged in him from that night, settled for $3 million.

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On this cold Monday afternoon, Guzman walked up a hill beside me, tired from the steep incline (he had a cane and a leg brace for some time after the shooting). I asked him if he feels any different about this push for police reform, but he seemed exasperated by it all.

"Nothing's changed," he said, shaking his head.

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RCMP headquarters in Surrey, BC. Photo via Flickr user waferboard

Canada's federal police continued to snoop on Canadians' cellphones and computers for at least a month after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, new documents prove.

Financial records obtained by VICE through the Access to Information Act show the extent to which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used federal legislation to obtain information on Canadians from all major phone companies without warrants. Instead, police paid small fees for each of these requests.

The Supreme Court ruled that practise illegal in its June 13, 2014, decision on R. v. Spencer, writing that police need judicial authorization before making those sorts of requests.

However, the records show Telus and Bell both continued to fork over Canadians' information even after that decision was handed down.

The Newfoundland and Labrador detachment of the RCMP made 51 requests for a "phone search" to Telus between July 1 and August 1, 2014. They paid $76 for the searches. Over the course of July, the British Columbia detachment also made 129 phone search requests to Telus, and another 27 to Bell—two phone searches and 25 Service Profile Identifier (SPID) requests—running the west coast RCMP division $258.

SPID information is used to help police identify which phone lines they are able to put taps or traces on.

Many invoices cover the entire month of June, so it is unclear if the requests stopped exactly on June 13, or whether they continued later into the month.

VICE's analysis of the records show that the RCMP paid over $1.6 million to Canada's cellphone companies since 2010 in order to skirt the normal process of having these requests approved by a judge.

The documents only deal with the RCMP, which is primarily tasked with federal investigations like child pornography and terrorism, but also do basic criminal investigations in many towns and cities. The documents do not include data from provincial police forces, who likely made the bulk of these Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) requests. Nor do they include the spy agencies Canadian Security Intelligence Service or Communications Security Establishment Canada, or the Canada Revenue Agency, which have also been known to use the process.

Spokespeople for both the telecommunications companies and the government deny that any sensitive information was being handed over through this process. Law enforcement often refers to the information provided as "tombstone" or "phonebook" information—usually a name, address, and phone number. All law enforcement needs to show the company in order to access this information is an IP address.

However, previous VICE investigations revealed that, thanks to the informal process and lack of oversight, police often used these powers to ask for, and obtain, users' passwords, GPS location, and other other personal information.

Copy of an invoice for RCMP data requests to Telus. Document acquired via ATIP

The government had been adamant that this warrantless disclosure process was legal under PIPEDA, which came into force in 2000.

The documents show that the warrantless disclosure process went back until at least 2004, a full decade before it was stopped by the courts.

Standard operating procedure for the RCMP would be to compensate companies if they voluntarily offered up the data. The fee structure would vary from company to company, but there was rarely a fee applied if police had a warrant.

If a request for a subscriber's information was sent via email to Rogers, the RCMP would pay the company $1.50. The fee jumped to $10 if the request was made over the phone, or if it was an "urgent email."

Bell had a similar fee structure. Bell Aliant, however, which operates in the Atlantic provinces, charged a flat fee of $150 per month, without detailing any breakdowns for specific requests. That agreement lasted until the end of June, 2014.

Some charges on the invoices were for requests that would almost certainly have had to come with a warrant, like phone intercepts, for which Telus charged $1,500 per request. Those sort of requests could detail specific call information, or even the content of the conversations, as well as metadata and other pertinent information. They are required to be approved by a judge.

VICE asked the RCMP for clarification on when exactly the warrantless requests stopped, but did not receive a response.

Overall, the records document hundreds of thousands of informal requests made by police over those four years.

No detachment reported any invoices from August until November, when the documents were released to VICE. The RCMP did not report any costs at all in that time, not even for things like phone intercepts, which require a warrant but for which the phone companies still charged a fee. Either those requests stopped outright after the Spencer ruling, the companies stopped charging fees, or they were paid with a different RCMP budget.

Transparency reports released by Rogers and Telus provide some context for this data.

Telus says that in 2013 it received more than 100,000 requests from law enforcement for subscriber information, and the vast majority appear to have been warrantless requests. Rogers received nearly 175,000 requests, but only half were made without a warrant.

Bell, Canada's largest telecommunications provider, has refused to release any information on the matter. When VICE asked a spokesperson for Bell when the company discontinued responding to these PIPEDA requests and how much they charged to fulfill the requests, the spokesperson refused to answer, responding only that "Bell always follows the law in disclosing information to government and other law enforcement agencies."

Companies usually admit that they voluntarily coughed up sensitive information in child exploitation cases, or in emergency situations.

Both Telus and Rogers say they assumed the cost of most requests that came with warrants, but charged for some voluntary requests. They declined offers to expand on that.

The big three phone providers weren't the only ones using this system. Smaller providers like WIND, Sasktel, Public Mobile, and Iristel all voluntarily provided documents under this process.

"Following the Spencer decision we stopped providing any subscriber information to law enforcement without a warrant except in emergency situations, such as when a customer calls 911 for help or is lost at sea, or when the information is already published in a phone book," a Telus spokesperson told VICE in an emailed statement.

VICE requested documentation for all RCMP costs paid to telecommunications companies under the relevant sections of PIPEDA. The records provided were spotty at best. Some departments kept running spreadsheets of their requests and costs. Others simply kept a file of their monthly invoices.

It seems likely that the $1.6 million figure is significantly lower than the real dollar amount, given the haphazard nature by which the records were submitted by the RCMP.

Some departments provided records dating back to 2004, while others only went back to 2010. Several neglected to include 2014 numbers. While Ontario kept a central database, the Alberta RCMP was split between Calgary and Edmonton. The Ontario office detailed a decade of numbers, but information from the 2010-11 fiscal year was missing. Several pages from different provincial detachments were redacted to hide descriptions of the operations under which the information was being requested, while other pages had the type of request, cost, and date all blacked out.

The three territories did not provide any records.

While the RCMP provided over 1,000 pages of records, it's impossible to tell how much is missing.

RCMP Access to Information Request

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As rock bottoms go, mine was laughably anticlimactic. It made for what I thought was an amusing story, one I related to friends in a jovial tone despite the fact that the more plot points I revealed, the more their faces contorted into masks of horror and concern.

It, like most mistakes, happened on a Friday night. I was ineffably drunk, so much so I lost one of my prized possessions—a VHS tape labeled "Reasons for 9/11/01" (The tape and I were eventually reunited, as God looks after those too careless to look after themselves). After making what I've been told was (but cannot recall, yet still apologized for) a scene, someone less drunk than I drove me home. It was not yet 9 PM.

A fella I'm sweet on was scheduled to come over that night. When I informed him, via sloppy text message, of my level of intoxication, he decided to stay in. This development upset me in the sort of irrationally nihilistic fashion drunkards and petulant teens know all too well. In my muddled mind, I couldn't understand why he, a former addict, didn't feel like driving across town to babysit my belligerent ass.

In protest, I sat on my hardwood floor and cranked up the space heater. While staring at the cover of a Martin Mull album I was not listening to (I was, as befitting the scene, sitting in vacuous silence), I fell asleep—when I awoke, my hands, which apparently had been resting against the grill of the space heater, had a black honeycomb pattern burned into them. It was an impossible-to-ignore reminder that, Hey, Meg, you should probably do something about this whole drinking thing before you fucking kill yourself.

I got blackout drunk a few more times before I addressed the issue.

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My problem with alcohol, I recently told myself while trying (and failing) to cut down, was that I drank alone too much. The key was to imbibe in moderation, and solely when others were around. I wrote a bullshitty, self-righteous piece to this effect, which seemed to placate all those who had expressed concern for my well-being after I had publicly outed myself as a drunk.

For the first few weeks after this declaration, I stuck to it. And by "it," I mean, "Staying out extra late getting drunk in mixed company in lieu of going back to my dry apartment." This was not a solution—rather, it was simply a loophole to continue business as usual. I'd drink until I could no longer speak, stumble home, and wake up the next afternoon, ruined. But hey, at least I wasn't drinking alone, right?

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And if I stopped completely, what would that mean? Drinking was a crucial part of my personal brand, as valuable as smoking and judging others. If I got sober, would I still be able to relate so heavily to Billy Joel lyrics? Would I never be able to enjoy a glass of champagne again? Wait, I realized. You've never enjoyed a glass of champagne in your entire life. A bottle, sure, but a solitary glass? Impossible.

Despite the fact that I was getting more than enough hooch outdoors, walking past the liquor store on the way back to my apartment quickly became a struggle. I knew what was in there (booze) and what was in my apartment (loneliness and self-pity, which turns out are even better mixers than tonic water).

One evening, my lizard brain finally got the best of me—I broke down and bought a bottle of $4 table wine, the kind impoverished single mothers drink to feel fancy. I justified the purchase by telling myself I was doing it in secret—no one would know! If no one knew about it, it wasn't a problem! And anyhow, I was only doing it just the one time! It was a hard fucking week, OK?

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The cork had been popped. I soon devolved into my old habits, drinking a bottle of wine—or, if I was feeling especially self-pitying, liquor—alone every night. I was going hard after going home. Attacking each bottle with aplomb, I drank like a 19-year-old coed who had just experienced her first taste of freedom (and Bacardi). I drank like it was my job. I drank even more than I did when I was a drunk.

The time in which I found it acceptable to start drinking kept slipping ever forward. I mean, hey—it's 2 PM somewhere! I drank while driving. The recycling piled up. But I was doing it in private, all the while keeping appearances up in public—hell, I even lied to my therapist about it. Out of sight, I figured, meant out of mind.

Despite my grand, sweeping declarations, and the show I put on for the world that existed beyond the one-room bubble that was my apartment, nothing had changed. I was still killing myself.

Moderation, it turned out, wasn't a solution. Because it wasn't possible. I lived with a mind that could not be trusted, and urges that could not be controlled. I felt pathetic, weak. Aww, baby can't dwink just one gwass of wine at dinner like the rest of the big girls? I told myself mockingly. Baby has to dwink the whole ba-ba?

The Martin Mull space heater incident was my rock bottom, but it wasn't enough to make me immediately quit. To be completely honest, I don't know when or how I decided to do so. I was drunk at the time. But quit I did. The only alternative was death, and I'd already aged out of the 27 Club. Christ, I didn't even have headshots. The picture they'd run of me on the news, if my death even warranted media attention, would probably be my driver's license photo. I couldn't go out like that.

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So, I stopped. Just stopped. Completely. To say this was difficult would be an understatement. Initially, I didn't know what to do with myself—having drank every night for years, slamming the brakes made me feel like the airbag would malfunction, beheading me. But stop, I did. And guess what? I kept my head. Arguably, I regained it.

With the veil lifted, I now felt alert, present—almost unsettlingly so. The nerves that plagued me when I wore a younger man's clothes returned. I struggled to be a good conversationalist, but feared I was too guarded, too thoughtful. I hate thinking. I hate "living in the moment." That is why I drank. Sometimes I think I can't do it. And yet my head remains.

The only thing I'm doing to keep from drinking is not drinking (and occasionally commiserating with friends who no longer drink). I'm not doing AA, as the only thing I hate more than group conversations is anonymity. I'm not taking one of those newfangled medications that makes you ill whenever your lips touch demon alcohol. Should I be doing one, possibly both, of these things? I'm sure one of you will send me an unsolicited email saying yes, I should. And I might. Right now, however, I am not. I am existing on sheer force of will.

A friend of mine left less than a shot's worth of off-brand whiskey, in a plastic bottle, at my apartment the other night. Staring at its resting place next to the sink, I knew what I had to do. I unscrewed the cap and held it above the sink; if I cocked my hand to the left, it would go down. To the right, it would go in my mouth. For reasons I cannot explain, I chose the latter. I consumed it all in one swig; afterward, I felt nothing. It was a nominal amount of liquor, certainly not enough to get me drunk or even buzzed.

I stifled the urge to go out and procure more. Instead, I stared out the window and wondered why I had drank it, grateful it was all gone.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

[body_image width='1280' height='848' path='images/content-images/2015/01/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/19/' filename='astronauts-gourmet-food-in-space-alain-ducasse-876-body-image-1421689039.jpg' id='19212']The STS-110 crew enjoying a meal aboard the ISS. Photo via Wikimedia commons

Most of us losers who've never left this planet often imagine space food to be strictly rehydratable pasta and freeze-dried ice cream. While that is partly true, there have been numerous advances in the culinary field for astronauts in recent years. The tubes filled with meat puree from the Yuri Gagarin era are out, and more appealing, some might even say bougie, meals are in. This is largely thanks to the NASA Advanced Food Technology Project, which helps astronauts enjoy dishes that are more or less similar to what we eat on Earth.

In 2013, commander of the International Space Station Chris Hadfield showed us that living in a capsule orbiting at 250 miles from the Earth's surface didn't mean he couldn't celebrate Easter. During the same trip, he also posted videos of himself preparing tacos with honey and shrimp cocktails. Today, NASA plans to print 3D pizzas, German engineer Daniel Schubert is looking into growing vegetables on Mars, and some students in Colorado are working on a robot gardener capable of growing lettuce. A few months ago, chef Alain Ducasse sealed a partnership with the French National Centre of Space Studies (CNES) and French brand Hénaff—who are renowned for their pâté.

I had a chat with Quentin Vicas, the project manager for Alain Ducasse's company, to learn more about the gourmet meals that will be eaten a few hundred miles above our heads.

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One of Alain Ducasse's festive meals—spicy supreme of chicken, thai-style sautéed vegetables. Photo by Pierre Desgrieux

VICE: How did you start working with the CNES and Hénaff?
Quentin Vicas: We started working with the CNES in 2004. It took us about two years to send the dishes into space . Since that day, we haven't stopped developing food menus for astronauts. Our dishes are currently being developed in the laboratory for Research and Development at the Hénaff factory located in Pouldreuzic, Finistère [a department of French Brittany].

Turns out that all the food that goes in outer space must be certified by Russians and Americans, who have extremely high standards. In France, only one company had the USDA certification, and it was Hénaff. That's why we got in touch with them.

So it's not your love of Breton pâté that led you to work with them.
No, but I must admit that it was a pretty good fit—chef Alain Ducasse has known the brand for a long time and he adores it. And people from Brittany tend to be extremely pleasant, which is a bonus.

What kind of food will you be sending to outer space?
It will be exclusively cooked meals—we try to do things that would appeal to an astronaut that has been trapped in space for a long time— someone who would have a certain nostalgia for earthly food. So we're basically cooking tasty family dishes.

The CNES understands that food has a real moral and physical impact on astronauts. There is something depressing about eating freeze-dried goods every day . After six months in space, it can even cause atrophy of the muscles.

We started by sending roast quail, swordfish, lemon confit, and tuna casseroles—loads of dishes that were strong in taste, just so astronauts could have the pleasure of getting together for a nice meal.

Our program is called "special events meals," because we are not trying to replace the daily food provided by the Russians and the Americans. We just try to celebrate special events—the arrival of a new astronaut, a spacewalk, a birthday... They are basically meant for exceptional circumstances, although our meals can also be used in the context of physiological experiments .

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Carrots with orange and cilantro. Photo by Pierre Desgrieux

What are these experiments?
There isn't a specific research program at the moment, but I do not exclude the possibility. We did it back in 2008 for a research on the precise definition of astronauts' nutritional needs and the monitoring of nutrients in the astronauts' assimilation process.

They used our recipes, so we knew the nutritional content and energy intake of each meal. This simply allows scientists to refine the experience of living in space.

Are there specific CNES instructions you need to follow?
Of course. It is absolutely necessary that our meals don't make anyone sick. During the manufacturing process, we must be very careful about anything that has to do with hygiene, even more drastically than in a professional kitchen. We sterilize and disinfect everything we can to minimize the risk of bacteriological contamination. We also avoid watery foods that can damage the cabin, as well as dry ingredients that can make crumbs.

What are the steps between the planning of a meal and it actually being sent to space?
First, Ducasse works on the recipes. After a phase of validation and tasting by astronauts and CNES officials, we start working on a menu. Then, we produce the meals. Once the courses are completed, we send them to the CNES, who are in charge of getting approval from Russian and American authorities.

Depending on the departures of the supply ships, the dishes are sent to Baikonur or the United States, from where they will be taken to the station along with supplies, equipment, etc. This means that astronauts have the option to eat properly between each refueling every three months, or something like that. But when their cargoes are empty, they are forced to return to a somewhat daunting diet.

What have you planned for the next shipment?
Recently we cooked lamb shoulder with sage and tomatoes. We also tried a Breton lobster with quinori, seaweed, and lemon. And we prepared a beef bourguignon as well as a meager fillet from the Arcachon basin with mashed potatoes. We must have 25 recipes like this, which also include side dishes and desserts. There's even a chocolate cake and a cheesecake.