VICE CA

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The prosthetics lab at the Nabih Berri Rehabilitation Compound. Photos by Sophie Chamas

Nadine offers me the seat closest to the modest electric heater struggling to warm her damp living room in the Lebanese mountain town of Bhamdoun, about 20 kilometres east of Beirut. She sits across from me, cradling her right arm. She appears sedated, her eyes glazed over as she monotonously narrates her escape from Aleppo, Syria almost two years ago.

By now, the Kurdish-Syrian refugee has recounted these memories hundreds of times. She lost a house, a leg, and two of her four children to an air strike, she states matter-of-factly—too burdened, it seems, by the concerns of the present to allow herself the luxury of mourning the tragedies of the past.

Nadine, not her real name, is about to become an illegal resident in Lebanon and is worried about being exposed.

Nadine spent her first four months in Lebanon living on the streets. Missing a leg, her body riddled with shrapnel, damaged nerves and fractures crippling her arm, her husband carried her on his back from one welfare association to another, begging for medical assistance. "That's what we've become," she tells me. "Beggars."

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They were eventually discovered by the NGO Basma wa Zeitouneh, which relocated them to their current apartment, covering their rent and referring Nadine to a doctor. He recommended her to the World Rehabilitation Fund, an international nonprofit that ran a six-month emergency rehabilitation program in 2014, providing disabled Syrian refugees with prosthetics, orthotics, eyeglasses, and hearing aids.

Nadine was fitted with an artificial leg, but her medical needs were far from satisfied. She also requires physiotherapy. And now, her prosthetic has widened, no longer fitting comfortably onto her knee—it needs replacing. Her arm has needed surgery for over a year. "Show it to her," N's husband urges. She reluctantly lifts her sleeve to reveal a disfigured limb. A thick band of scar tissue hugging her elbow makes her forearm look like it had been severed and sewn back on. "She can barely move it," he says.

The funding for these kinds of needs is sorely lacking. "The problem is, things like prosthetics aren't seen as a life-saving priority," explains Amani Saleh, manager of the Emergency Response Fund. The body was established by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in 2012 to respond to Syrians' most urgent needs by collecting money from donor countries and allocating them to relevant initiatives in Syria and refugee host countries.

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While Nadine's injuries keep her from being able to leave the house, adequately look after her household, or take on a job, they fall outside the narrow definition of "life-threatening" that donors have adopted. A previous regional fund, the ERF, was recently de-centralized into country-based funds. "Before, it was more attractive to donors," explains Saleh. "We would receive money for Syrians in general and distribute them based on need to the different countries. Now, we have to convince donors why they should send money to Lebanon versus Jordan, for example."

Right now, winterization is the priority. Convincing donors to fund an expensive rehabilitation program in a particular country is a difficult feat. Since the beginning of 2015, Lebanon has only managed to raise $2.5 million US. The WRF's 2014 program alone cost $500,000 and was only able to assist 738 people. A single prosthetic can cost up to $6,000, and hearing aids cost $280 a piece.

The Nabih Berri Rehabilitation Compound

The problem, explains Toufic Rizkallah, Assistant Director of the WRF, is that the UN has failed to thoroughly assess the state of disabled refugees or to provide a reliable estimate of their numbers, in order to highlight the urgent need for response programs designed especially for them.

A Vulnerability Assessment Report issued by Soldarités International in 2013 that looked at 575 of the around 6,300 households registered by the UNHCR in two districts of North Lebanon found that 13.9 percent reported a member with a disability. While the UNHCR reports that 1.3 percent of registered refugees in Lebanon suffer from some kind of disability, the WRF believes this number is a gross underestimate.

"You have to remember, a lot of people don't report their disabilities, especially if they're mental," Rizkallah explains. "According to the WHO, persons with disabilities usually form around 15 percent of a population. In a conflict, these numbers will be much higher," he says. "If we adopt the more conservative 10 percent that some countries ascribe to their population of PWDs, or persons with disabilities, and apply that figure to Lebanon, the number of disabled refugees in the country would be at least 100,000."

A 2013 report by the Women's Refugee Commission revealed that a large number of Syrians were draining their limited savings to pay for rehabilitation services. Those residing outside the camps in isolated, rural locales like tumultuous Arsal receive haphazard treatments for injuries that leave them, at best, incapacitated or, at worst, suffering from serious infections.

The tragedy, Rizkallah says, is that the Lebanese are uniquely equipped to assist disabled Syrian refugees. Fifteen years of civil war, cyclical clashes with Israel, and a landscape littered with landmines and cluster bombs have allowed them to cultivate an expertise in rehabilitation. The Nabih Berri Rehabilitation Compound, for example, has been operating since the 1990s in south Lebanon, the region of the country hit hardest by conflict. It not only offers medical treatment, but physical, psychological and vocational therapy as part of a long-term rehabilitation plan for patients.

"When the Syrians came, we were well-prepared," says Dr. Maha Gebai, director of the NBRC. As part of its program, the WRF partnered with local nonprofits like the NBRC, supplying the prosthetics while the nonprofits provided maintenance and rehabilitation for a year. But the support they received from this short-term program was quite limited, Gebai explains, severely hindering their ability to assist refugees.

Nadine's husband, a taxi driver back in Aleppo, has only been able to pick up odd jobs in Lebanon. As registered refugees, they receive $19 US per person from the United Nations—down from $30—in the form of a Visa card they can only use to purchase food from designated locations. "We can't even buy cleaning items or winters clothes," Nadine complains. They introduce me to their son, Guevara. "A strong name," Nadine's husband says. "They stopped funding his education," Nadine tells me. "I don't know why."

In a few months, they'll have to renew their residencies at $200 US per person—money they don't have. For now, all of their hopes rest on the UN approving their request for asylum. The arbitrary process can take months or years. Their priority is treating Nadine's ailments, and there's no chance of that in Lebanon, they say.

I catch a glimpse of Nadine's husband's tattoo peeking out from beneath his sleeve as he gesticulates. I think it reads "Oh God," in Arabic, but I can't be sure.

Follow Sophie Chamas on Twitter.

On Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress, and what he said was more or less what you'd expect: Basically, Iran is untrustworthy and dangerous, and allowing it to continue even a limited version of its nuclear program is going to lead to an "arms race" in the Middle East. The audience was dominated by Republicans, and they clapped like crazy as they listened to the speech.

The fact that the speech even happened was bananas. Netanyahu was invited by House Speaker John Boehner, who declined to ask the White House if it would be OK for a foreign head of state to come preach to Congress about the dangers of the administration's impending nuclear deal with Iran. Obama didn't meet with Netanyahu during his visit, and Democrats—including usually staunch defenders of Israel—didn't hide how upset they were over the Israeli prime minister's heavy-handed slight.

But it was also a powerful reminder that no matter how tense things get between the US and Israel, it is virtually impossible to untangle the the two countries, or roll back US support for Israel. According to the Congressional Research Service, for the 2015 fiscal year the Obama administration requested $3.1 billion in aid for Israel from the United States Foreign Military Funding program, plus another $282.7 million from other funds the US pays out. And thanks to America's long history of turning loans into free money, funds originating in the US constitute a thick slice of Israel's total defense budget.

So what would happen if that were all gone?

It's not as though the US is actually itching to cut off money. Obama is sure to keep aid flowing for the rest of his time in office, and it's hard to imagine any future president taking a harder line with Israel than he has. But what if some irrevocable schism forced the US government's hand, and the funds vanished tomorrow and never came back?

I ran the question by Rob Pinfold, former researcher at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a freelance explainer of Israeli politics. And his answer scared the shit out of me.

VICE: Hi Rob! What would happen if the US stopped sending money to Israel?
Rob Pinfold: I think it would be a mess for Israel basically.

Would it be good for the US?
The US would have a lot less traction over Israel. It would be a downside for the US and it would also be a downside for the [Middle East]. For a long time the US has been trying to use its aid politically to change Israel's behavior.

What behaviors wouldn't the US be able to control?
I think any end to this aid would mean that Israel would be much more likely to take radical moves that would not necessarily have the support of the international community. I think it would be dangerous.

What are the likely events in the short term?
I think that the big difference you'd see straight away is an escalation in settlement building because the Israeli right would really be able to unleash it.

You see a lot, the Israeli government in particular, they've announced some big settlement-building initiatives of several thousand homes in East Jerusalem over the green line. And then the Americans say, "Na-uh, sorry, this is not happening," and then the idea is quieted for another five years and then it happens again, ad nauseam.

But without any American influence over Israel, especially with this aid, I think you would see a drastic exploration in settlement building.

Would they attack Hamas targets in Gaza?
I think they would need to be provoked. Very, very rarely does Israel just willy-nilly launch itself into a conflict, not just because of influence from the US but also at the end of the day, Israel is a democracy—so actually instigating conflict has to have that legitimacy otherwise it becomes a big issue.

But what if they were provoked?
Israel in the future would be much more unpredictable and any war would be likely to go on for a lot longer, because there wouldn't be one big power to really exert the pressure and squeeze both sides into a ceasefire.

And how would the US react if they couldn't influence them with money?
Military action is somewhat unfeasible, in my eyes, against Israel. It just wouldn't happen. You might have some sort of short-term sanctions against the regime by the US on Israel, and maybe on other belligerents as well.

And what would the outcome be?
Israel wouldn't lose the conflict, that's for sure. They get a lot of money from the States in terms of support in terms of the Iron Dome anti-missile program, but at the end of the day they have enough hardware already in the sheds to be able to thoroughly defeat any belligerents—for example, non-state-level actors like Hamas or Hezbollah, but also state-level actors like Iran.

I don't think it would be a question of turning the tide of battle it would just be a question of how long the war would go on, how bloody it would be, and who would get dragged in.

Who would get dragged in?
I think the US, even if they really fell out with and really strongly dislike[d] Israel, would probably still work toward a cessation of hostility as a superpower. I think that no matter what happens, we would go back to some sort of paradigm representing what we have at the moment. But the fighting would probably be longer and bloodier, and the US would have less of an ability to stop it straight away.

Would Israel make moves on Iran?
I think the Saudis would be ready to turn a blind eye to an Israeli attack [on Iran], which has been suggested before. So I think again the probability of mass-casualty warfare and violence would be much higher if the US, tomorrow, said "Screw you guys. I'm going home. This is too much effort."

What kind of warfare would we see?
In terms of Iranian retaliation, Iran has a lot of medium- to long-range missiles. They're not very accurate, but they stopped firing them at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, so they do have a very hefty stockpile that they could then fire at Israel. Israel would inevitably retaliate with their stock. So it'd be quite hard for them to launch a bombing campaign against Iran because they'd have to go through unfriendly territory on the way.

What might the targets of Israel's military action be?
I think you'd see one Israeli strike, one very pinpointed, strategic attack on Iranian nuclear assets. Then afterwards Israel would basically try to hold its own, because Iran would unleash its proxies on the region, which are primarily Hamas in the Gaza strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

I think we'd see fighting very close to Israel's doorstep and I think you'd see a lot of devastation of both Gaza and Lebanon. But on the flip side you'd also see a lot more damage to Israel's home front than you've seen in a very long time.

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Would Iran have any luck?
The missiles that Iran has have overwhelmed the Iron Dome system. The Iron Dome system can shoot down the missiles that you saw [from] Hamas [during the war this past summer]. The Iron Dome can deal with that, but it wouldn't be able to do with the stockpiles of rockets that Iran has.

Would things escalate beyond exchanging missile attacks?
If there is more damage to the Israeli home front, the Israeli domestic scene would be more willing for the Israeli military to go all out on flattening large parts of Lebanon and Gaza. There would be much less resistance to a ground invasion, and much less resistance to moving troops in. Israel historically has very quick campaigns and very decisive victories. So I think the leashes would be off, so to speak. I think the Israeli army would be going en masse into Lebanon and into Gaza and wherever else they'd be getting attacked from. But the fighting would be mainly restricted to the area around Israel, unless they do some sort of massive campaign into Iran.

Does Israel have the fire power to successfully cripple the Iranian nuclear program?
That's a tough one because it's anyone's guess really. I don't know exactly where and how the Iranians are hiding all their material.

They probably know.
It would still be very hard for Israel. Their planes would have to refuel in midair, in enemy territory. Their equipment is very limited. It's not known if they actually have any bunker-busting missiles, like the Americans have, that can penetrate deep underground. I think we'd probably have to see Israeli forces in Iran—special forces teams, demolition teams, that kind of thing.

It would have to involve some sort of covert support from the Saudis to have a very good chance of success. It would be very, very difficult and it would end in a lot of casualties on both the Israeli and the Iranian side. If the Israelis want to do it, there is nothing stopping them from doing it. If they see them as a potential threat, they will go in and they will go in hard.

Would the fighting be limited to just Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza?
I think it would definitely trigger a whole powder keg in the entire region. You look at the Middle East today, and it's the most unstable it's been in absolutely years. You have the Islamic State operating out of both Iraq and Syria. They're making headway in Lebanon as well. Egypt has its own problems with iihadists in the Sinai. It's very unstable... in Libya. [And] any conflict with Iran would not just be limited to Gaza, it would also spread to the West Bank where there are a lot of Iranian agents.

But in the long-term, if a terrible war weren't immediately sparked, how would a halt in funding from the US affect Israel's military budget?
In Israel, the military budget is very much sacrosanct. Any cut to the military budget, and you're putting the state in existential danger. Personally I think you'd see cuts to many other social, welfare, or educational programs within Israel before you'd see massive, damaging cuts to the army. They'd try to keep the military budget as steady as possible. So you'd see a damaging of Israeli society.

Could Netanyahu stay in power?
I personally don't think so. If any Israeli leader were willing to seriously jeopardize their ties [with the US], [causing] a complete cut off of all military and financial aid, I personally—and I could be proven wrong—I don't think the government would be able to withstand the pressure within Israel that would result from that.

What political change do you think the country would see internally?
If it happened today, I think you would see the rise of the Labor Party in the Israeli election.

What kind of economic impact would this have on the US and other countries?
I think the US would survive. The European Union is Israel's biggest trading partner, not the US. In Europe, they would cut off all money because they have been more critical of Israel than the US has been, traditionally. I think the crisis would be more on Israel's side than on Europe or the US.

Is there a possibility that any of Israel's enemies would look more favorably on the US's presence in the region?
I don't think that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria would be welcoming the US, and developing ties with Uncle Sam...

Well not them...
It might make a difference. It might make some sort of short-term blip, but I think the countries in the Arab world have enough reasons to be mad at the US the next day for whatever reason.

But speaking of the Islamic State, would they make a move?
I doubt that. They talk a lot about Jews in the world, and Jewish money, and Jewish power, and how much they hate Israel. But generally they have very little to actually do with Israel, in terms of fighting or invading Israel. They go for Jewish targets but they're not so much in the movement against Israel itself. In any one-on-one confrontation between the Islamic State and Israel, Israel would completely wipe the floor with them.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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Look at Lane Milburn's website and get his book from Fantagraphics.

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'Watch Dogs'

After several years of writing about the bloody things, I can confidently say that the bits I like best from video games are those I'm exposed to long before release—in the form of trailers, press releases, and closed-doors presentations, when the game is an emerald of potential unsullied by the greasy palms of Mortal Man. Sometimes, while walking home from the pub, I drunkenly look up old announcement videos, snuffling for a whiff of that departed glory. Ah, Watch Dogs. How marvelous, nay, epoch-defining you seemed in 2012. Now look at you: a surly pretender to GTA's throne, armed with little of note besides a jailbroken phone and a pocketful of dried-up memes. Look at you, damn it. Look at what you became.

Such disappointments have been very prevalent in the biz of late, with games like Destiny falling well short of their hoped-for critical and enthusiast reception. I suspect that's down to people not having as much disposable income, which naturally makes us pickier about things like launch-month bugs, while being sand blasted with hype via the internet. To arrest this headlong slide into ennui, please accept this list of ways to keep your expectations at a manageable simmer, rather than a raging boil.

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'Dragon Age: Inquisition'

DON'T TRUST THE VERTICAL SLICE

As the name implies, the "vertical slice" is a supposedly representative chunk of mission or scenario, taken from the middle of a work-in-progress game. You know, just like how you'd show off a beef calf to a cattle trader by carving out the organs that look most developed and putting them under a spotlight. Vertical slices can be very informative, but they're also the worst kind of pre-order bait—something that feels like a finished product, but which has been artfully arranged to show what hasn't yet been created in the best possible light.

Moreover, vertical slices often consist of parts that will get the chop as work continues. Consider Dragon Age: Inquisition. I like that game a lot, but it sure as sherbet isn't the RPG they showed me back in summer 2013. Where's that mission where I get to choose between defending a keep and saving Crestwood? And what happened to all that vaunted terrain destruction? This isn't to suggest that developers BioWare has been telling fibs—I don't doubt that these features were seriously intended for inclusion once upon a time, and that tears were shed over their cancellation. But billing them as part of the package a year or two out is asking for trouble.

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'Dungeon Keeper'

LOOK FOR DISTURBANCES IN THE FORCE

A few basic rules of thumb. If a game's review embargo is the day of launch, it's probably a bad game. If a game was announced a year ago and they're still showing hands-off demos, it's probably in trouble. If they've pushed the release date to January or February—the post-Christmas dead zone—they're expecting it to sell bugger all even if it does prove to be a decent play. If the game's out in the middle of summer, they're clearly aware that the slightest breath of competition would shatter it like a sandcastle. If there's more concept art than there are screenshots, hold your horses. If you know what the microtransactions are like before you know how to play the thing, start running and don't look back.

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'Godus'

DON'T LET CELEBRITY DEVELOPERS CHARM YOU

To kick the elephant in the room squarely up its ass, I have a certain lingering affection for Peter Molyneux—the ex-Microsoft, ex-Lionhead chap behind the strategy sim Godus, which has failed to meet key development goals despite hundreds of thousands of pounds of consumer investment. Molyneux's radiant, elbow-flapping conviction of the greatness of everything he works on makes a pleasant change from the leaden, PR-approved evangelism of the average senior producer. But good gosh does he have a knack for not following through on his promises. Now that social media is ubiquitous, and calculating sorts like #LetMarkSpeak Kern are able to pander directly to thousands of people, the odds of succumbing to Molyneux-style charm offensives have risen. Stay frosty.

'The Order: 1886'

DON'T LET INDUSTRY POLITICS SHAPE YOUR BUYING DECISIONS

Just think—right now, thousands of people around the world are determinedly telling themselves that The Order: 1886 is a fantastic game, because it's exclusive to Sony's PS4. "Critics and their tittering egghead sympathies be damned," they fume, having taped up the corners of their mouths to form a rictus of enjoyment. "This is the best shooter on a console since Resistance 3. Anybody who says otherwise is a backslider who hates games and secretly wants to review caviar or something."

Friends, I know them feels. I was once sincerely of the view that Gex 3D: Enter the Gecko was a better game than Super Mario 64, just because it came out on PlayStation. Fuck, I might have actually said that out loud in the playground—it's a wonder I still have fingers to type with. But there comes a time to put aside such childish ways, to face sternly up to manufacturers and declare: "No. Never again. I am more than the console I own. I am a real human being with genuine emotions that show up on a lie detector. I will not be part of your sinister drone army. I will not be fuel for your word-of-mouth campaign."

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'SimCity'

HEAR WHAT THE PREVIEWS AREN'T SAYING

Contrary to popular opinion, when games journalists wax lyrical about iffy games it's not because they're doing so from the comfort of armchairs stuffed with EA bonds. Generally, it's because they don't want to shit on other people's hard work without sampling it in full. Previewers are enthusiasts too, don't forget—they'd much rather champion what the game does right than apply a toilet brush to the stuff it royally chuffs up.

This has led to some nasty clashes between overweening writers and readers who've blown the bank on special pre-order editions (see below), as gushing previews percolate down into so-so reviews. It's definitely a process the press could handle better—I'll hold up my hand and say that I was wrong to hail Need for Speed: The Run as a great racer, weeks before a colleague with superior automotive knowhow slapped it with the 5/10 stick. Still, it's possible to glean hints of an impending disaster from even the most ecstatic first impressions piece. Be sure to memorize these telltale phrases:

"Fans of the genre will certainly have nothing to complain about, because those slovenly sorts would buy nuclear sludge if it came as part of a FIFA bundle."

"This game is total balls right now, but there's still two months until launch. Providing Activision invades Thailand and turns the whole country into a QA lab, it'll be a flying success."

"It's shaping up to be a visceral and polished experience that ticks all the boxes, because it is in fact a series of visceral and polished boxes."

"This game is a bucket of cack, but then again what isn't? Maybe the secret to happiness is just to be content with the things we have."

"Badness is relative. I mean, what if you had to eat wasps?"

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DON'T PRE-ORDER

Because it's silly. You're effectively gambling on an unfinished game – what better recipe is there for disappointment? You want a 10 percent discount on the Hyper-Mega-Special Edition, with its "exclusive" pre-order goodies? Give it a few days or weeks after release and I guarantee that all those downloadable hats and brittle statuettes will be available separately. In the meantime, you can enjoy the show as incautious mates struggle to justify the $200 they've spent on a silver-rimmed plastic crate with a copy of this year's Call of Duty in it.

Follow Edwin Evans-Thirlwell on Twitter.

Illustrations by Jacob Everett

See you at the next massacre. See you the next time bloodshed brings everyone together. All the attention, all the closeness, that followed the Charlie Hebdo shooting has already begun to fade, and soon we will find ourselves at the next attack, hugging one another and declaring that free speech must be defended as the foundation of all other rights. But where was everyone before the slaughter?

The person reading this article may live in the US. Perhaps he considers freedom of expression to be his birthright. He may be unable to imagine the possibility of dying for a book, an article, or even a turn of phrase. Of course, several American journalists have recently died for telling the truth: Steven Sotloff, James Foley, Daniel Pearl, and Luke Somers, to name just a few. But they perished in Syria, in Pakistan, in Yemen, not in New York or Texas. Such a risk is always associated with a war zone. But freedom of expression is under siege everywhere.

Sergei Dolgov, editor of a Russian-language newspaper in Ukraine, has been missing since June of last year, and some say that he is dead. The Russian photojournalist Andrey Stenin was killed in Russia in 2014, as was Andrea Rocchelli, an Italian photographer. Sedef Kabas, a Turkish writer, currently faces five years in prison for tweeting criticism of the Erdogan government. The list goes on and on. In America, libel suits are the most important instrument for stopping a journalist; elsewhere the tools are bullets and prison bars.

I was struck by the prophetic sentence spoken by the late editor of Charlie, Stéphane Charbonnier, a friend of mine: "I am not afraid of retaliation. I have no children, no wife, no car, no credit. It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I'd rather die standing than live on my knees." Charbonnier, or Charb, drew cartoons; he was the editorial director of a satirical weekly. Yet his words seemed like the declaration of a warrior monk, a go-it-alone firebrand, who is aware that each of his choices may come back down on those around him.

Blackmail and fear are the tools used to destroy freedom of expression. And beware, it is being destroyed. I don't believe in the idealistic position of people who say, "Now that their message has arrived everywhere, those journalists have won." No, no, and no. Life is more precious than a right that can only be defended through a sacrifice like that. And yet the risk was underestimated.

Charbonnier's protection was not a real security detail, just a driver and an armed man. And when his colleagues moved offices, they lost their guards at the entrance and were instead provided with a security patrol making occasional rounds to check on things, which is hardly effective in these cases. The public seldom takes imperiled writers, artists, and editors seriously unless their blood waters the ground; in fact the public is often suspicious of them. Take Salman Rushdie, to whom British writers have repeated words I know all too well from my own experience: "You should bring flowers to Khomeini's tomb because without him you wouldn't be so famous." Threats against someone almost never bring about real solidarity with the threatened, just suspicions that he has found a clever way to stand out. Yet freedom of expression is not an acquired right to be carried out only in newspapers and courtrooms. It's a principle that transcends all legal papers and embodies the substantial characteristic that makes the Western world free.

I was in New York when the attack took place. In Washington Square, where they held a memorial for the people slain by the terrorists in Paris, almost everyone was French. Few people in America understood that the bullets fired on innocent cartoonists and others had also limited their own freedom of expression. Here in the US most newspapers "blacked out" the cartoons. Respect for freedom of religion camouflaged what was actually fear—fear that publishing a cartoon would trigger a vendetta. I understand the belief that a cartoon can offend, but in the face of a death sentence handed down for a cartoon, the need to defend the right to blaspheme is more important than the need to be courteous.

Though France responded much better than other European governments (in similar situations) to the threats and subsequent attack, declaring that anyone who claimed to be offended by their work could take legal action, violence ultimately rained down on the French people. The complaint against Charlie was filed not in a lawsuit or a request for damages but in the only court these fanatics know and frequent: the firing squad.

Criticisms of the cartoons were whispered, and sometimes shouted, everywhere. The magazine was accused of raising the limits to try to get out of the red. Yet blasphemy becomes a right, even an obligation, when certain questions of principle arise. We should remember that the same newspapers that deemed Charlie's sacrilege indecorous have published all kinds of gossip photos and violated privacy without reservations, something that Charlie's editors never did. The reason they didn't publish the cartoons wasn't piety but cowardice. No one should ever make silence or self-censorship a practice out of the fear of being killed, threatened, blackmailed, or simply hated.

These days, in the months following the attack as much the months leading up to it, Europe has forgotten the right to free expression. Europe hasn't erased the right but has left its defense to habit, has neglected it and will continue to neglect it until someone again attempts to bury it in a mountain of bullets. Beyond Islamic terrorism, the complacency is also reflected in the case of mafias. In my own experience, governments hesitate and courts rarely consider threats to be crimes in themselves but rather mere corollaries—or they recognize them only in the presence of blood. I wonder: Do you know how many journalists died last year across the world? Sixty-six were killed, and 221 were jailed.

How is it possible to forget that in Turkey, a candidate for membership in the European Union, 23 members of the media are in prison for producing news that is critical of the government? How have we largely ignored Raif Badawi, the blogger whom Saudi Arabia, a United States ally and its most lucrative arms client, sentenced to a thousand lashes for opening an online discussion forum on Islam and democracy? In Italy many investigative reporters, including myself, are forced to live under 24/7 police protection while the mob flourishes with impunity. In Denmark fanatics have tried on a number of occasions to kill cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for having drawn a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, and his plight has become little more than a footnote even as he sits at the top of al Qaeda's Most Wanted list. Have we already forgotten the Dutch director Theo van Gogh, assassinated in 2004 after releasing Submission, a film dealing with violence against Muslim women? Several months ago, María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio was slain in Mexico for her anti-cartel campaigns on Twitter—and tens of students met the same fate for participating in a protest—but no one in the press, least of all the government, appears to care. The fact that these things didn't happen in Paris or Berlin seems reason enough to ignore them. Whether or not we're all Charlie Hebdo, we march in solidarity only after blood is shed. And that's only some of the time.

Charlie had been unable to reach millions of people; it was always in crisis and on the brink of closing. We're not talking about an attack on CNN, or on the largest newspaper in France. But the biggest is not necessarily the most frightening to the extremists. Instead they focused their aggression on one of France's most unflinchingly honest publications, on a magazine that created new, instantly intelligible, highly visible ways of lampooning the contradictions of fanaticism. With increasing frequency, rather than shooting up a military base or a government office, terrorists are gunning down artists, intellectuals, and bloggers in an effort to suppress thought itself. Drug traffickers and tyrannical regimes are equally immersed in the war on ideas. It means intimidating everyone, creating an immediate identification between public opinion and the person who was slain.

We're facing an assault not on offices or institutions but on the last space that separates the West from its discontents: the freedom of expression. For the past ten years I have lived under police protection because of threats from the Neapolitan Mafia, and there are countless others like me throughout the world. Echoes of the indifference to these risks can be heard in any political meeting I attend. Whoever is reading this right now can make a difference by understanding and giving voice to all those who are condemned to death for a word: those like María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio and the many brave students who followed her to the grave. Governments should establish freedom of expression as a requirement for commercial exchanges, but Saudi Arabian oil and the low cost of Chinese labor will prevent this from ever happening. Where governments fail, civil society can do a lot: open up news programs to keep these stories in circulation, dedicating to them the space and time they deserve. My own story shows just how important the response of readers and the public is. I would have been forgotten completely if it hadn't been for the public attention given to me. The compromised, deeply corrupt Italian state would have never defended me without pressure from the outside.

We talked about freedom of the press as the streets of Paris filled with a million people. But soon, if we don't act, the silence will return—and fade into the most perfect silence of all.

Translated from the Italian by Kim Ziegler

Tattooing Away the Pain

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Mistress Morrigan Hel. All photos taken before the start of the party (obviously)

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

"This thing isn't working," says a man in a harness and PVC pants, gesturing at his dick.

I nod in sympathy. After all, having sex in front of an audience must be tough.

"It's not that. I've done three pills and a shedload of Charlie," he says. "Four Viagra and the old chap's still not playing."

It's 11 PM in a lavish Georgian townhouse in West London. It's unlikely that the other residents of this upmarket enclave a stone's throw from Oxford Street know that Torture Kittens is going on. The inaugural combination of famed swinging party for the "sexual elite," Killing Kittens, and Torture Garden—London's premier fetish blow-out—takes place here tonight. And a quiet lamp-lit street that boasts foreign embassies and the Royal Institute of British Architects as neighbors provides the perfect Eyes Wide Shut backdrop for such an event.

Thanks to the recent exploits of Dominique Strauss-Kahn—currently in the dock in Lille for aggravated pimping—posh orgies are very much in the news. Whatever the realities of the DSK case, it's not surprising that we're all interested. There's something incredibly seductive about the idea of these kind of gatherings—beautiful socialites wearing ornate Venetian masks and meeting in expensive hotel suites or private houses to get nose-deep in mounds of gak before stripping naked and knocking boots, is the stuff of many people's fantasies.

Killing Kittens cornered the UK's classy orgy market when Emma Sayle, famously friends with Kate Middleton, set up the night in 2005. To ensure a safe, sexy place for women, rather than a perv's paradise, the following rules are firmly enforced: "Men must not approach women. Men must not talk to women (unless invited). No means no. Only the kittens can break the rules."

Oh, and everyone has to wear a mask.

The main bed

"This is the vanilla playroom," Killing Kittens' Courtney tells me and Jake, the photographer, as she shows us around the venue just before the action starts. She's worked for the company since 2014 and is in charge of the Torture Kittens parties. Like all the crew she's posh, has a naughty laugh and is very, very organized—grade A fuck-fests don't come about by themselves, after all.

We're in a large stateroom framed by intricately patterned wood paneling. Soft candles burn and there's the sweet smell of incense. The centerpiece is a huge bed covered with black satin. Soft rock plays quietly on the stereo. Hard to believe that, in a couple of hours, the kind of people who make it into Tatler's "Little Black Book" are going to be in and around each other's various orifices in this very spot.

Downstairs, the other playroom is presided over by London dominatrix Mistress Morrigan Hel, who runs the Murder Mile dungeon in east London. It's anything but vanilla. Curious-looking lumps of metal and plastic hunker down on the floor: spanking tables and a whipping frame. Morrigan shows us her torture implements, to be used later. Prosaically, they're tucked away in a supermarket carrier bag.

"I had to pop to the shops on the way here," she explains.

This is Torture Garden's domain. David TG, the promoter, now wearing a rubber suit, straightens his mask in the mirror and then wanders around checking that everything is OK. Torture Garden has been a fixture on the London club scene for an incredible 25 years, but anyone who's under the impression that it's tamed should have been at the recent Valentine's ball, where its brand of banging EDM and high-octane banging in the couples room was as potent as ever. Its coming together with Killing Kittens is a momentous occasion for fans of PVC, complicated-looking lingerie, and public displays of penetration.

A red staircase leads down to the small club area through a dimly lit corridor, at the end of which is a huge mirror with "We Are Watching You" graffitied on it. There are twinkly blue lights wrapped around a bar serving spirits, Prosecco, and soft drinks. A DJ plays techno while a cocktail reception lubes up the crowd.

"At about midnight, Killing Kittens switches—the lights go down and the clothes come off," one regular named Rob tells me. Certainly, it's easy to pick up on the changing mood of the night. For those uninitiated to sex parties, the biggest eye-opener is probably how what initially looks like a normal club night gradually transforms into a cornucopia of jacked, hairy-assed guys pounding girls in lingerie so intricate and expensive as to make Agent Provocateur look like something you'd pick up on the last day of a Primark clearance sale.

Two girls wander the room silently in cat and devil masks. They pause before a male-female couple and paw at the guy seductively for a second before moving on. As per the rules, girls definitely rule the roost. But Torture Kittens is nothing if not all-inclusive. Downstairs by the bar a bulky bloke in a dress slurps champagne, while a guy in a suit jacket and red leather panties, stockings, and suspenders is led around on a chain by his girlfriend. In the jacuzzi, a heavily-tattooed guy in a Sergeant Pepper's jacket maneuvers himself between two girls, his erection waving around in front of him like one of Portland Place's ambassadorial flagpoles.

You might think that there would be a clear divide between the Killing Kittens and Torture Garden aficionados, and what with some of the more outré outfits it's tempting to guess people's affiliations. But, in fact, this is harder than it first appears.

"We thought everyone here would be Killing Kittens," says Rob, as though assessing a football crowd. "But actually there's loads of TG. We're KK."

"Don't ask if people are TG or KK," says an intense guy in a studded-leather dog collar, his eyes shooting all over the place, like snooker balls after the break. "The question should be, 'Where is the music better?' Here, the DJ is pretty good."

He appears to be something of a nightlife connoisseur. Like another man in an eye-wateringly expensive transparent suit jacket and designer jeans, who's flanked by two glossy-haired aloof-eyed ladies in shimmering underwear, there is no shortage of the uber-rich international demimonde looking to board the public fuck train.

Rob and his girlfriend Cressida, slender in red lingerie, are friendly, and exactly the sort of couple you would expect to find at an event like this. Beautiful, in their early 20s, and posh, Rob has boy band muscles while Cressida has the expensively-cut blonde hair of a Vogue intern who spends most of her free time hanging out with horses.

Have they been to Torture Garden?

"Not yet. We were going to go to the Valentine's ball, but Cressie wanted to stay home and watch The Notebook," says Rob. He shrugs. "Apparently an orgy just wasn't romantic enough."

But things get romantic here pretty quickly, and after midnight there is no shortage of naked people keen to get to know each other. Upstairs, six couples are fucking on the huge black bed with a crowd standing around watching, as though this were a spectator sport. Downstairs, two Asian girls in matching purple knickers take turns in attending orally to a spannered guy in designer boxer shorts with a Duncan James haircut. In Morrigan Hel's lair a fat bloke in a leather thong is pinioned to what looks like a gym horse, being spanked with a leather paddle. Two gay guys make out in a corner while a man lies prostrate on the floor, licking a girl's Louboutins.

What's surprising is how quickly one becomes accustomed to the revised mores that this event presents. Wall-to-wall boning may be disconcerting at first for newbies, but pretty soon you get used to it, and more interested in checking out the make of people's PVC pants. But that such a party exists at all in London is a major shot in the arm for the capital, where puritanical conservatism and, as in Soho, the interests of property developers have led to its gradual sanitization, placing it far behind great European hubs of decadence, like Berlin or Amsterdam.

Later on, Courtney passes me in a dark corner of the club. She shows me her riding crop. The leather tag on the end has come off: "I broke my whip spanking someone. You just can't get the toys these days!"

An occupational hazard, maybe. But judging by the success of tonight, Torture Kittens is here to stay, and it hits hard.

Follow John and Jake on Twitter.

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Natural gas piping. Photo via Flickr user Barb Crawford

At this point, most Maritimers would agree that local opposition to shale gas development has done an admirable job in repulsing industrial designs on hydraulic fracturing in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Granted, the McCully gas field of southern New Brunswick, where Corridor Resources has been actively hydraulic fracturing since the early 2000s, remains operational, but this was arguably more a question of the company getting its foot in the door before anyone quite knew the dangers associated with the extraction technique. Resistance to hydraulic fracturing in New Brunswick, at that point, was highly localized, and by the time groundswell opposition to shale gas extraction began to take shape, Corridor already had multiple tens of millions of dollars of infrastructure in place. It remains a sore spot, but things could have been far different had activists not organized and employed a wide variety of tactics against the fracking industry, especially in the past two years.

If the threat of turning Eastern Canada into a fracked gas field has been partially mitigated through newly-legislated provincial moratoriums, the natural gas industry still has a particular pipe dream for the Maritimes' coastline—one that appears to involve the construction of several liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities. Though said facilities are still in the early design stages, the provincial governments of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have so far shown themselves to be entirely amenable, if not outright encouraging, to the process.

North America, for the immediate moment, has become awash in hydraulically fractured shale gas. The technique of fracking—all health, water, environmental, atmospheric and earthquake-related issues aside—has undeniably altered the energy consumption landscape of the continent.

Whereas a decade ago, LNG import facilities brought in a steady diet of natural gas from local offshore drill rigs, as well as from Trinidad and Tobago, Qatar, and elsewhere, these same import facilities now generally operate well below capacity. This is due, in part, to dwindling reserves, but also to fracking and new horizontal drilling techniques that have liberated otherwise unobtainable gas deposits. Indeed, a new trick is to try and get the hydraulically fractured gas off of the continent, and towards more lucrative European and Asian-based markets. Towards this end, companies have lined up applications for LNG export facilities along the East and West coasts of North America. Some of these applications involve retrofitting existing import facilities with export capabilities, some have piggy-backed onto decade-old applications for import facilities that never got built, while others are for new facilities entirely. At the moment, the federal department of Natural Resources has received applications for upwards of 20 export facilities, the vast majority of them being on the British Columbia coast. But don't completely discount the Maritimes in the race to get Canada's first LNG export facility built.

So far, three as-yet unconstructed East Coast LNG export facilities have applied to the National Energy Board, Canada's third-party regulator, for a licence to export natural gas. Two of the proposed projects are slated to come out of Nova Scotia. These are: Pieridae Energy's Goldboro LNG (for which the Nova Scotia government has granted an environmental approval with conditions), and the Bear Head LNG facility in Richmond County (for which the Nova Scotia government has granted an environmental approval, sort of, based on a ten-year-old application for an import facility). A third project, H-Energy's proposed Melford, Nova Scotia plant, keeps hinting at filing an application with the National Energy Board. In hopeful anticipation, the Nova Scotia government has pre-emptively welcomed H-Energy with open arms.

In the spring of 2014, Nova Scotia's process of approving Pieridae's proposed LNG export facilities with the rather vague requirement that Pieridae develop a greenhouse gas emission mitigation plan didn't fill environmentalists with much faith. Emissions from export facilities, where natural gas must be compressed before being shipped out to overseas clientele, are seen as a big deal in British Columbia. There, the provincial government has highlighted greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from proposed LNG export facilities as a real stumbling block in terms of meeting total provincial emissions targets.

Nova Scotia has its own legislated greenhouse gas and air quality emissions targets (10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020), targets that any one of these export facilities would likely undermine. Pieridae, for example, self-reported that by 2020, their Goldboro LNG facility alone would likely cause an 18 percent increase to Nova Scotia's total provincial greenhouse gas emissions.

"As outlined in the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, Nova Scotia is committed to reducing greenhouse gases to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020," Heather Fairbairn, spokesperson for the Nova Scotia Environment department writes to VICE.

"Focused action on reducing GHGs from the electricity sector, Nova Scotia's largest source of emissions, has resulted in significant progress towards that target. With regard to LNG projects, the EA (environmental assessment) approvals include terms and conditions to reduce the potential GHG impacts, such as requiring the proponent to develop a detailed GHG Mitigation Plan.

"Nova Scotia Environment is committed to minimizing the potential GHG emissions associated with LNG projects. We have recently commissioned a study to better understand the industry, its carbon footprint, and opportunities to mitigate emissions."

With an as-yet undetermined mitigation plan for what might become the single largest GHG emitting facility in the province (and before the provincial environmental assessment had been drafted), Pieridae's CEO Arthur Sorensen accompanied Prime Minister Stephen Harper on a 2013 trade mission to Germany. There, Sorensen signed a deal with German energy providers E.ON Global Commodities SE, who committed to take half of all the gas that the Goldboro plant might export. At the time, Sorensen noted that the deal, in 2013 market values, was worth a cool $35 billion.

"These are ﬂimsy conditions for such a hugely polluting project," warned Catherine Abreu, Ecology Action Centre Energy Coordinator, in a March 2014 press release responding to the Minister of Environment's approval of the Pieridae project. "The proponent should have been required to develop acceptable emissions management plans prior to the project being approved. At minimum, the Department of Environment should set limits for the project's output of GHGs (greenhouse gasses) and other pollutants."

The fourth proposed East Coast LNG export facility is a different beast entirely. The Saint John, New Brunswick, Canaport LNG proposal is owned by Irving Oil Ltd. and Spanish gas giant, Repsol SA, both of whom are flush with cash.

While Repsol SA looked like a loser in 2013 when it couldn't find a buyer for its 75-percent interest in the Saint John's LNG facility, the company's fortunes seem to be turning. At the time, Canaport LNG was one among the many pricy import facilities along the East Coast of North America whose functionality had been pushed aside, thanks to the North American shale gas bonanza sweeping North America. But Repsol, earlier in 2014, settled with the Argentinian government for $5 billion after having its assets there seized in the 1990s. Now, with oil and gas prices seriously devalued, Repsol is snapping up assets for a song from overextended energy companies in need of cash; the company recently inked a $8.3-billion takeover of Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc. With an only weeks-old application before the National Energy Board, Repsol is now also seeking approval to export LNG from Canaport.

As for the Irving family, their businesses have enough contentious history in New Brunswick to fill a book. As it relates to their Canaport facility, the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Review Board (EUB) most recently slapped Irving Oil's wrist for applying for a permit to build an oil pipeline, six months after they had already built the pipeline. By the time the EUB claimed to have learned of the 900 metre pipeline, Irving Oil had already begun using it. The CBC has also reported that Irving Oil has recently been buying up real estate in the Red Head area of Saint John, adding to the 1,000-odd hectares it owns around the current Canaport facility. Irving did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

Repsol and Irving might well have the jump on the proposed Nova Scotia facilities. Energy economist Kenneth Medlock recently suggested that "greenfield" (built from scratch) LNG export facilities in Canada were a "distant prospect" due to the recent downturn in fossil fuel prices and the more advanced projects from other global players. Canaport LNG, however, would involve retrofitting already existing infrastructure. This would still cost an estimated $3 billion, but again, Irving and Repsol have quicker access to this kind of cash than do the Pieridae, Bear Head, or H-Energy.

Current New Brunswick premier, Liberal Brian Gallant, who gained the premiership based largely on his "no shale gas" stance, has noted that he's all for the retrofit, which would involve piping in gas to Canaport LNG from the United States. Gallant has even gone so far as to accuse former provincial premier, Conservative David Alward, of stalling on pushing through the Canaport retrofit for export, based on his single-minded focus on developing a New Brunswick shale gas extraction industry.

"They probably didn't focus on it because it would have undercut their message that we have to focus on shale gas," Gallant told the CBC in early December 2014. "'Say yes' was obviously the pivotal point of their campaign so I believe they didn't pursue it because it would have undercut that message."

While going forward with the retrofit of the Canaport LNG facility was not a key election issue, New Brunswick voters might be surprised to see their new premier no longer opposed to shale gas development.

All talk of exporting LNG from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick to the outside world, also precludes a serious discussion as to where exactly this LNG is going to be sourced from. Initially, Pieridae suggested that its Goldboro plant would source up to one-third New Brunswick shale gas. This is now doubtful, considering the treatment SWN Resources Canada received in the province in 2013 (tire fires, destroyed equipment, blockades, etc), and seeing as how development in New Brunswick is currently under a moratorium.

The frontrunner option, in terms of proximity and supply, is that the gas will be sourced from the Marcellus shale, the holy grail of shale plays in the United States. Whether the amount of gas derived from each well drilled in the Marcellus (which stretches across Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and into New York) has already peaked, is highly debatable. Corruption, controversy and the impacts of hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus are also serious issues that have been covered for years by such sources as National Public Radio's State Impact. Yet the number of wells being drilled in the Marcellus continues to increase (think many, many thousands of active wells), and the United States Energy Information Association estimates that production has steadily increased to a current high of about 171 million cubic feet per day. According to an August 2014 statement from the US Energy Information Association, the Marcellus shale accounts for "almost 40 percent of US shale gas total production."

Getting Marcellus shale gas across the US/Canadian border is the key issue that has yet to be seriously tackled by any one of the proposed projects. In February 2015, Bear Head LNG filed an application to the US Department of Environment to export natural gas to Canada, towards the purpose of exporting this gas to Free Trade Agreement and non-Free Trade Agreement countries (like gas-hungry India, for example). Fossil fuel pundits hailed the application as another step forward in the East Coast LNG "gold rush," but the Bear Head application is treading untravelled ground, and there isn't any telling how various levels of American bureaucracy will take to it.

There is also deep, unfilled, domestic demand—in the state of Massachusetts for example—for Marcellus-sourced shale gas. Pipeline and infrastructure shortages towards accessing natural gas, upon which the New England states have become increasingly reliant, showed itself to be a key problem in the winter of 2013, when gas shortages in the Boston area and elsewhere led to severe price spikes. Pushing through a Marcellus-to-Canada pipeline approval while much of New England continues to rely largely on imported gas from Qatar and elsewhere might be too hot of a political potato.

With a fairly strong opposition to exporting shale gas out of the eastern United States, the game afoot is to see whether the "Come on in!" governance of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick is enough to woo an international export pipeline out of the United States. If it goes through, we might then see whether Nova Scotians and New Brunswick activists, many of them now veterans of various campaigns, are truly opposed to shale gas, or just opposed to shale gas development in their respective backyards.

Follow Miles Howe on Twitter.

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Sensual Solutions customer Dave. Photo by Jen Munaretz

"It's unusual to be in a room with three naked people lathered up with oil and having a massage with candles and soft music."

Seated in his wheelchair, Dave recounts a time he had a sensual threesome with two sex workers.

"I basically went to everyone, from escort to massage to body work," he lists off some of the services he's visited over the last decade to meet his intimacy needs. "I had some really, really good experiences, I had some really negative experiences."

Dave, who asked us not to publish his last name, hasn't always turned to the sex trade. He tells stories of long-lasting girlfriends and spontaneous relationships, but when you have a spinal cord injury, the options are limited.

"My injury is considered complete," says Dave, who has only minor mobility below his shoulders. It was a diving accident that put him into this state 40 years ago, depriving him of his independence, sensory functions, and, in turn, his sex life.

Trish St. John has heard countless stories similar to Dave's. She worked as a receptionist for a Vancouver escort agency for seven years, answering many phone calls from disabled men, women, and couples. With every call came the voice of someone admitting to loneliness, pleading for affection, and craving companionship.

"Most of the ladies this company represented didn't feel comfortable going out and seeing someone with a disability," she says. "Plus, it could be a whole different body type that you're dealing with."

Yet the calls kept coming and the thought lingered in St. John's mind that these people deserved to be treated like whole sexual beings. So in 2010, she started Sensual Solutions, a Vancouver business that hires intimacy "coaches" to help people with physical disabilities looking to explore their sexuality.

"What kind of services do you offer?" I asked.

She pauses before saying, in her most diplomatic voice, "educational services." A laugh follows, hinting to the hands-on approach that is practiced.

Priced at $225 an hour, their website lists three different "educational" practices: massage and body work, coaching and healing, and tantra. This essentially means anything from caressing, massaging, or kissing to unclothed body play.

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Taryn is one of Sensual Solutions' intimacy coaches. Photo courtesy Sensual Solutions

One of Sensual Solutions' intimacy coaches is 22-year-old Taryn, who chooses to use a pseudonym to protect her day job. She admits the difference between her work and the work of a prostitute is "blurry," with the defining factor being that an intimacy coach doesn't necessarily partake in intercourse or perform oral sex. Instead, Taryn describes the most common work she does as cuddling and body mapping, which means using physical touch to help people find erogenous zones on their body.

"Often these are places I think most people would find pleasurable if they weren't so hyper-focused to achieve orgasm through genital stimulation," she says.

For Dave, it's his ears.

He tilts his head to the side, his hand instinctively cupping his right earlobe as he talks about the biting, nibbling, and scratching sensations he considers erotic. "Which is not why I'm touching my ear right now," he clarifies, before playfully adding, "but maybe it is. Would you just tug on that a little bit?"

Dave's had a total of eight coaching sessions with Sensual Solutions, but he refers to the most recent meetings as "training sessions" for an advocacy group he co-founded several years ago. Dave's goal is to use his time with the intimacy coaches to develop informed orientation sessions for anyone looking to get intimate with a person who has limitations.

"So we'll talk about things like how to assist with a transfer, what a urinary bag is like, or things to be aware of: spasticity, sensation, pain, communication, how to use certain types of equipment, general functional traits."

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Sensual Solutions founder Trish St. John. Photo by Jen Munaretz

The subject matter of sex for the disabled community is viewed differently around the globe. In the United States, for example, surrogacy partner therapy has been legal since 2003, whereas in Canada, surrogacy is only recognized if you're trying to get pregnant. (Surrogacy in the US was explored in the 2012 film The Sessions, based on the life of Mark O'Brien, a Berkeley, CA poet who was paralyzed from polio and wrote about sex for people with disabilities, eventually detailing his own experience losing his virginity in his 30s to a sex surrogate.) In Israel, the topic of sex for the disabled is looked at from a medical perspective, using established sex therapy clinics to offer "experiential learning." In some European countries, such as the Netherlands, people with a disability are eligible for government funding to have a visit from a sex worker 12 times a year.

"So it would be great if there was something in the middle here," St. John says, although she considers it wishful thinking at this stage because of the newly implemented Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act. Made law in November 2014, this legislation is based on the Swedish prostitution laws, making it illegal to buy sexual services but not to sell them.

"I know the law," St. John says, with one of the new clauses making it illegal to advertise the sale of sexual services for other people. "I don't feel that we fit into that category per say, and that's because we do get a lot of referrals from relationship therapists, from doctors."

One doctor working in the field of sexual medicine is Dr. Stacy Elliott. She's quick to express compassion for her patient's sexual needs, yet mindful of the legalities around the topic.

"Hiring a sex trade worker is still an illegal act," she says, before adding almost regrettably, "We are not allowed to suggest off-site sexual services, but we certainly encourage [patients] to reach out to potential resources they find themselves. But we have to, by the law, be hands-off on that."

Instead, Dr. Elliott emphasizes the efforts being done at Vancouver's GF Strong Sexual Health Rehabilitation Service, the only sex therapy centre of its kind in Canada where a team of doctors and nurses work together around sexual health. "I think our best work is done within the medical system, the patients have access to it without cost."

Even though Sensual Solutions comes at a heftier price, St. John believes the experience of physical touch comes with great reward. She says that, for the clients, it's a confidence booster—especially for people who've had little to no sexual experience.

That wasn't the case for Dave.

He was 19 when he acquired a disability, in the "prime of his sex life," as he describes it. Still, he takes a moment to pause and glance out the window before giving me an ironic look. "I've had more satisfying experiences post-injury, sexually, than I had before."

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Photo courtesy RCMP

Staring directly at the camera last October, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau explained to Canada why he was about to launch an attack that would rattle the entire country.

"To those who are involved and listen to this movie, this is in retaliation for Afghanistan and because Harper wants to send his troops to Iraq," Zehaf-Bibeau says. His beard is untrimmed, and his brown hair is pulled back.

He filmed the video sitting in his car, parked in a lot in downtown Ottawa. He had a serrated combat knife tied to his wrist and a Winchester .30 caliber rifle by his side.

Clocking in at under a minute, his rambling manifesto laid out the 32-year-old's reasoning for the murder he was about to commit.

"We are retaliating, the Mujahedin of this world," he says. A few minutes later, he would step out of his car at the National War Memorial and open fire on Corporal Nathan Cirillo, killing him. He then would get back in his car, drive to the front gates of Parliament, and continue on to front steps of Centre Block.

The RCMP released the video before a parliamentary committee on Friday after months of pressure from politicians, the media, and the public to disclose the manifesto that explains why the Canadian-born Libyan national tried to kill as many Canadian Forces personnel as he could.

"Canada officially became one of our enemies by fighting and bombing us and creating a lot of terror in our countries and killing us and killing our innocents. So, just aiming to hit some soldiers just to show you that you're not even safe in your own land, and you gotta be careful," he said.

The video was introduced by RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson who underlined that the federal police service had agonized over the decision to release the video for months. While the initial plan was to release the propaganda video nearly immediately after the attack, Paulson said he was dissuaded by investigators who feared it could boost recruitment, radicalization, and fundraising for radical elements in Canada, and that it could inspire copycat attacks.

"On this point, we remain concerned," Paulson said.

Evidently, the video confirms Zehaf-Bibeau's terrorist inspirations. "He did not come to this act alone," Paulson said.

"Canadians should not be afraid, but engaged."

The RCMP, however, decided not to release the entirety of the video. Of the nearly minute-long video, 18 seconds—13 at the beginning, five at the end—were edited out from the clip shown to the public on Friday.

"I am confident that there are reasonable and sound operational reasons for the edits," Paulson said, explaining that "for the very same reasons that we have edited the video," he would be unable to explain why the entire video was not screened.

Paulson added that 130 investigators were committed to the Zehaf-Bibeau case, following leads on his motivation, his actions and any possible accomplices that he may have worked with.

Those national security investigators have tracked the attacker's movements across the country, from the lower mainland of British Columbia, to Vancouver, Alberta, Quebec, and, eventually, Ottawa.

Investigators are confident that Zehaf-Bibeau was in Ottawa in order to renew his Libyan passport, ostensibly to travel abroad to link up with terrorist groups.

One thing they have not done yet, however, was confirm whether Zehaf-Bibeau had an accomplice in his attack. They've also not traced the origins of the rifle that he fired repeatedly in the halls of Parliament.

Paulson released a photo of that rifle, broken in several places, calling the long-barrel rifle "unique."

He also showed images of the knife, which was covered in Zehaf-Bibeau's dried blood.

Speculation was rife that the attacker, who has a documented history of mental health issues, had been using hard drugs in advance of the attack. Security guards on Parliament Hill were convinced that he was using meth or speed, given the speed and resilience he showed in barrelling down the main hall of Centre Block, even after he'd been shot repeatedly.

But Paulson said a tox screen showed that Zehaf-Bibeau had no drugs or alcohol in his system when he died.

In the video, Zehaf-Bibeau was lucid, but his thoughts appear jumbled and slightly frantic.

"May Allah accept from us. It's a disgrace you guys have forgotten God and you have let every indecency and things running your land. We don't, we don't go for this. We are good people, righteous people, believers of God and believing his law and his Prophets, peace be upon them all."

It's not clear when, or if, the RCMP will release the rest of the video.

Paulson said he originally wanted to include the whole thing. Eventually, he compromised. Before committee, Paulson wouldn't get into detail about the decision process, only going so far as to tell a Liberal MP during the committee hearing that the police service wanted to "ensure that the integrity of the investigative process is preserved."

He went on to say that the amount of anti-terror investigations have grown exponentially in the past year. While he wouldn't put a number on how many individuals were being investigated—previously, Paulson said that number was around 90, though he said on Friday that releasing number was a "rookie mistake"—Paulson said the number has gone up. One statistic he did offer was the number of investigators pulled from other units to focus on anti-terror investigations—in October, that number was 300. Now, it's 600.

Canada has been pushing to lay more charges in anti-terror investigations. Recently, they charged noteable ISIS fighter John McGuire in absentia, even though he might be dead. The Harper government has also rushed to get Bill C-51 on the books to expand the powers of the RCMP to detain and investigate terrorism suspects, and for CSIS to disrupt possible threats.

Paulson, before the committee, said that the current powers that the RCMP hold do let them target suspects like Zehaf-Bibeau, but that the courts often drag their feet in actually taking action.

Asked by the NDP whether the issue is one of resources, or whether it's a lack of powers under the law, Paulson shrugged: "I dunno."

Members of Parliament on the committee said that watching the video weighed heavy on them. During the attack, most of the MPs were locked down in adjacent rooms to the one they sat in on Friday. After four months, they finally heard from the man that died in a shoot-out just meters away.

"That's my message to all of you in this, Inshallah, we'll not cease until you guys decide to be a peaceful country and stay to your own and I-, and stop going to other countries and stop occupying and killing the righteous of us who are trying to bring back religious law in our countries."

Zehaf-Bibeau signs off in an eerily Canadian way.

"Thank you."

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

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Many of Henry Hargreaves's photos could be described as an odd form of portraiture: Instead of trying to capture a person's essence by pointing a camera at them, he composes artful shots of meals that they have eaten. In the past he's done this for famous musicians and death row inmates, and the resulting advertisement-quality shots of usually simple foods have a strange power thanks to the contexts surrounding them. A pile of fried chicken is an ordinary enough sight—until you imagine it's Busta Rhymes or John Wayne Gacy eating it.

Hargreaves's latest project focuses on people who are preparing for the end of the world. Commonly known as "preppers," they're famous for stocking up on guns, gold, and the other necessities of life in anticipation of a "shit hits the fan"–type event that cripples communication and transportation infrastructures and ushers in a new age of scarcity. Thanks to a chance encounter with a producer for National Geographic's Doomsday Preppers TV series, Hargreaves was introduced to many of the show's subjects and had the chance to talk about what they would cook after the end of the world. He then put together the meals in his New York studio, and the resulting photographs are paired with descriptions of the individual prepper's quirks and how he or she thinks the shit will hit the fan.

Scroll down for the rest of the images and an interview with the photographer, who will be giving a TED Talk in Manhattan this weekend.

VICE: What did you learn by talking to these people? Did they change your mind about anything?
Henry Hargreaves: When I started it I thought it was going to be a bit more of a sensational-type thing, like, Here are these radical people who are essentially a little bit crazy, and then as I spoke to them I was like, Actually, a lot of this makes sense. There are certainly a lot of bits and pieces that I totally agree with. Just with the food aspect, there's this sort of self-sufficiency that actually is kind of impressive when you distance yourself from all the other aspects of it.

Could you tell me about John Major, the guy who is represented by that plate of bugs?
He's basically worried about dirty bombs going off, so what he does is he has all his stores underground because dirt is one of the best insulators against radiation. He's all about foraging bugs and cooking them for the nutrients and also all about sprouting seeds. He's actually got a business where he supplies seeds to preppers and all sorts of people. On Doomsday Preppers, he actually cooks [the bugs] up with Parmesan and feeds them to his kids.

Was there something that you learned in doing this project that took you totally by surprise?
I realized I'm totally unprepared for any little occurrence, personally. [ Laughs] I mean now I got a shitload of MREs in my storage unit. So at least I've got some shitty canned food to get me through a little bit. But I guess I hadn't really thought too much about how everyone's personal experiences and beliefs taint what they prep. If you're an Orthodox Jew, you've got a certain set of rules that you gotta go by. If you're a diabetic, there's another set of rules that you've gotta go by. Some people were like, But there's gonna be radiation that gets leaked so then you've gotta bury things underground. Everyone had their own story based on what they thought was gonna happen.

You've done a few of these sorts of series; do you think what someone eats reveals something about them?
I guess that's what my TED Talk is going to be about: We are what we eat. What I just find really interesting is that we don't know anything about these people personally—but through their culinary choices, because we know what these things taste like, it kind of draws you in and you get that human element. Instead of looking at a picture and staring into someone's eyes and being mesmerized for a moment, I can connect with their belly.

The Only Way to Survive Bartending Is to Get Drunk

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Love is pretty much the main theme of most novels, songs, and movies. It's complicated and weird and fun and terrible, so it makes for good inspiration. It's no surprise then that when you've got a new talent searching the horizon for stories, they'll undoubtedly land on love as a topic. This is the case with bright-eyed young filmmaker Michael Lukk Litwak, who took on the daunting task of distilling all the absurdity and passion of love into ten minutes for his NYU undergraduate thesis film.

How does Litwak pull this off? If I told you it was with the help of gigantic, prehistoric sharks, spaceship submarines, and T. rexes armed with lasers, would that make sense? No, probably not. But love doesn't make sense either. Litwak's film is delightfully theatrical and wins you over with over-the-top costumes, fantastical set pieces, a swirling folk opera score, and deadpan dialogue. The film is imperfect, like your first love—but like your first love, you'll remember it fondly despite its flaws.

Below the film, check out my interview with Litwak. If you like the film, I highly recommend going over to Michael's website and checking out his behind-the-scenes featurette. Over 100 students worked on this short film. That's crazy.

VICE: Hey Michael. Are you a romantic?
Michael Lukk Litwak: Yes, it's a blessing and a curse.

Your film captures the same awe and wonder that the collective Court 13 conjures in their work. Were their films like Death to the Tinman and Beasts of the Southern Wild big influences on you?
I remember seeing Death to the Tinman when I was a freshman at NYU and being blown away by the energy and vibe of it. But quickly thereafter I also saw a lot of people that were trying to imitate it. I made a conscious effort to make sure my film was different, but that the awe and wonder that is inherent to all of my favorite movies still made it through. I think both of those movies are inspiring because they tell a great story, and they do it simply and with a low budget, which is what every filmmaker wants.

Can you talk a bit about your process?
It's something that is constantly evolving, but I usually start with an emotional experience and then ask myself a series of questions: "What kind of experience do I want to share with my audience? What are the juxtapositions and contradictions that I'm trying to explore? How do I say what I want to say without being didactic or simplifying anything? What are the different thematic angles that need to be there in order to fully represent the emotional experience?" I start on an emotional level but I also try to keep in the back of my head, "What resources do I actually have access to? What is in my filmmaking toolbox that I know I can do for the amount of money and other limitations I know I have?"

For this film, I knew I wanted to explore the duality of love and long-term relationships and how they can be so exciting and fun but also so boring and frustrating. At the same time, I knew I had access to the NYU soundstage, and I'd built a couple of sets out of cardboard before, so I thought, Using what I have, how do I tell the story I want to tell? and just let things bounce back and forth in my head from there. Lots of writing and rewriting and testing out different elements and adapting to circumstances in order to get the best material out of my collaborators.

Dan Romer's score for Beasts of the Southern Wild is absolutely infectious—full of crescendos, handclaps, and horns. How did you land him for your film?
It was the night before my birthday and my friend who was my composer had to drop out because of previous obligations. I thought about who had done my favorite soundtracks and just said "fuck it" and emailed Dan's manager. I didn't tell him I was a student at the time. Literally 15 minutes later, Dan called me and said, "Who are you? I love your movie!" It was surreal.

I explained to him my vision for the project and he got excited and eventually agreed to do it. Dan is one of the most talented people I've ever met—he's unpretentious, kind, generous, and has become a close friend. He's one of the first people that really could have ignored me and instead chose to believe in me. For that, I'll be forever grateful. I think he saw an opportunity for a canvas that he could go crazy with. We wanted to make a score that felt like a combination of Western and Eastern European folk music with a backdrop of minimalist classical music, and we worked closely for two weeks to get it to something that we were really proud of.

What was the most difficult part of making The Life and Death of Tommy Chaos and Stacey Danger? Did you have any major fuck ups or major saves?
It was a huge process, but we took it in baby steps. Figuring out how to do the dinosaurs and models was hard because I'd never done that, but once we found the right people it all came together. Our biggest fuck-up was that we pre-built an ice trench out of Styrofoam and plaster in my backyard and were planning to bring it into the NYU studio, but when we got there the studio told us it was too messy to bring inside. Our whole set building plan was based on the idea that we would be able to bring the trench in the first day, then spend the first three studio days building the spaceship and submarine. At the end of day one we had no trench and no progress made on any of the sets.

I remember sitting in the stairwell with my production designer while 20 people were upstairs, waiting around to be told what to do. People started leaving and it really felt like everything was collapsing. But we rallied, threw away the set plans and storyboards, and redesigned a whole new trench overnight that we made out of wood, space blankets, and tarp. Once the crew saw how we were able to bounce back from certain death, I think they were inspired. After that it was smooth sailing.

As this was your senior thesis film at NYU, did your teachers ever tell you to reel it back in, that it's getting a little too epic, that your scope was insane?
I had a really supportive professor named Pete Chatmon who never censored my vision for the project and was supportive the whole way through. I think everyone in the class was like, "OK... What?" But when I presented my pitch and explained how the aesthetic wasn't supposed to be "realistic," everyone seemed to understand a bit more. People were excited too—no one else was making a laser-dinosaur movie.

I hear you're working on a feature version of this story. How's that coming along?
We are! It was a hard story to adapt since it all happens so fast, but I finally cracked the nut and figured out how to expand it into a universe that can live inside a 90-minute movie. I have another feature that's smaller that I want to make first. That'll hopefully be shooting this fall and I'm releasing my web series, EAVESDROPPING, in the next couple of weeks. I have a website with a mailing list that will keep everyone posted on my upcoming projects and also has a Behind-the-Scenes breakdown of the short that will be sent to you when you sign up!

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the Senior Curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

The Guy Who Ruined Dogecoin

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Charles Mann and a baggy of mephedrone.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

This week, the world's media went mad for a story about a student from Sussex who, apparently fueled by "miaow miaow" (or mephedrone, for anyone who's not your nan), stabbed his mom 11 times before chopping off his own dick with a pair of scissors.

Hove Crown Court heard on Monday that when police arrived at the bloody scene in the West Sussex town of Haywards Heath, Charles Mann—who was 19 at the time—said: "I am a pedophile. I do not want to live. Take me to the light, I can see the vampires."

Judge David Rennie accepted the defense's plea that Mann, although not mentally ill, committed these extreme acts of violence (his mom survived the frenzied attack after locking herself in the bathroom and call the cops, and surgeons managed to sew his dick back on) because he was in a temporary state of "drug-induced psychosis."

He was jailed for 16 months for grievous bodily harm, although time served in custody means that Mann, now 21, will be out next month. Judge Rennie said that if he had been convicted of the original charge of attempted murder he would have been sent to prison for "very many years."

I sympathize with Charles' mother, who mouthed "I love you" to her son at court, because getting stabbed in the chest, head, and neck by your naked son at 6 AM can't be a pleasant thing to experience. I also sympathize with Charles, who seems like an average guy who suddenly found himself, eyes open, in the midst of a nightmare so grim even Clive Barker hasn't dreamt it up yet.

But can mephedrone, or any other drug, really warp people to the point where they commit crimes this gruesome and seemingly out of character? Should the sight of a kid emerging from a student bar toilet with dribbly nostrils and a demonic grin on his face make us tremble instead of laugh?

Drugs play a key role in many court cases because they are a curve ball. Most elements of a crime can be analyzed, sifted, and proven beyond doubt in court, but when drugs come into play, so does a fair bit of guesswork and hyperbole. How "out of it" someone was—how much they took and to what extent this influenced their behavior and mental state—is almost impossible to measure retrospectively. Sometimes the offender won't even have a clue themselves.

In court cases across the UK, drug users are quick to blame narcotics for their behavior, exaggerating their effects and their power. In an attempt to reduce their clients' level of guilt or punishment by claiming their judgment was clouded by intoxication, defense barristers often utilize the classic "it was the drugs wot dunnit" tactic, either to plead diminished responsibility or as a mitigating factor in sentencing.

Judges and juries are not blind to this tactic. On the same day Mann was sentenced, teenager Lewis Dale was jailed for life after murdering his grandmother in Hull last year. Dale's defense had claimed diminished responsibility because he was high on mephedrone at the time. However, the judge said that although Dale would not have committed the crime had it not been for the drugs, "a drug-intoxicated intention to kill is still an intention to kill."

One of the by-products of the drugs defense, whether it works or not, is that any mention of drugs being used by a perpetrator gets magnified in the media and the "killer drugs" machine whirrs into action once more, despite a distinct lack of evidence that illegal drugs miraculously transform people into killers. In fact, the drug most closely—and legitimately—associated with violence is alcohol.

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The Daily Mail headline after it was mentioned that murderer Matthew Hardman had smoked weed one time. Image courtesy of John Frost Newspapers.

There are endless examples of the killer drug story. One of the stupidest was the case back in 2002 of Mathew Hardman, a mentally-ill satanic vampire fantasist who brutally murdered a pensioner. During Hardman's trial it was mentioned by a witness that he had once smoked cannabis, some years before the murder. The Daily Mail's headline? "THE VAMPIRE MURDERER WHOSE MIND WAS WARPED BY CANNABIS."

Of course, drugs can also be used in court to taint character, a witness, defendant, or a victim of crime. If someone is a drug user they are a corrupt individual, a criminal, a liar, not just in eyes of judge, but some jury who may have been fed a diet of drug scare stories, around half of whom will have probably have read either the Sun or Daily Mail before rocking up at court.

How culpable was mephedrone likely to have been in Mann's case, and did it really tip him over the edge? He was a long-term drug user and had been sent to the Priory rehab center and a kibbutz in Israel in an attempt to get wean him off a problematic use of mephedrone, cannabis, and alcohol. So it wasn't as if he was taking it for the first time.

The friend who Mann was getting high with in the early hours before the attack told the court they had not used any more mephedrone than usual and that Mann "seemed fine" when he headed home at 5 AM. Toxicology tests carried out on Mann after his arrest found mephedrone present in his body, but not at high levels. The test found very low levels of cannabis in his body and virtually no alcohol. So there wasn't much of a cocktail.

Until the night of the attack he had never had any mental health problems associated with his drug use, and the most violent he had become after taking drugs in the past had been kicking doors.

Despite all this, three separate psychiatric reports—carried out by experts requested and paid for by the defense—into Mann's inner workings at the time concluded that the attack had been caused by "drug-induced psychosis."

"The lack of total awareness and capacity to form intent was the direct result of drug-induced psychosis," Judge Rennie told Mann. "If there is one lesson to be learned from this tragedy, it is that young people who take drugs or mix drugs of this sort could suffer a psychotic episode or an episode worse than your own."

"Sometimes people do bad or bizarre things after taking drugs. It doesn't mean drugs have caused them to act in this way." –Ian Hamilton

Psychosis is a severe mental disorder involving delusions and hallucinations that disrupt perception, thoughts, emotions, and behavior. There are significant links between drug use and short or long-term psychosis, but Ian Hamilton, a lecturer at York University with a special interest in the relationship between substance use and mental health, describes drug-induced psychosis as a "woolly concept."

"You can't be certain of the link between someone's drug use and a particular problem. Often drug induced psychosis is what we called a working diagnosis, or in other words, speculation," Hamilton told me.

Many people smoke cannabis, but very few suffer from psychosis as a result, so there is no direct link. The same goes for mephedrone. At the very least, there are 200,000 people who used mephedrone in the last year. From a quick cuttings search, only one of them ended up stabbing his mother and cutting off his own penis, and his name was Charles.

A quick search of the internet reveals that most people who cut off their dicks do so because they are cuckolded, feel sexually bereft, have mental health problems, or have taken drugs. Last year, for instance, Wu Tang Clan-affiliated rapper Andre Johnson was rushed to hospital along with his penis after cutting it off and then jumping off a second floor Hollywood balcony. He blamed PCP. In another case, a man cut off his penis with a steak knife in a branch of Zizzi in London's Strand. He was later detained under the mental health act.

"Sometimes people do bad or bizarre things," said Hamilton. "Sometimes they do these things after taking drugs. It doesn't mean drugs have caused them to act in that way. People presume that odd behavior can't just be that, odd behavior; it has to be connected to something, an explanation, and drugs are often the fallback position."

Follow Max on Twitter.

Tinder Plus and the Business of Online Dating

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Fuck this. Photo via Flickr user Ian Lamont

The revelation that Hillary Clinton used a personal email address instead of a .gov one while serving as Secretary of State has raised all sorts of questions. Did keeping her correspondence private violate State Department rules about preserving emails? Did she break any laws? Did she put herself at risk of a security breach that could have had massive consequences for the country? Did her aides redact certain information when they recently sent 55,000 pages of her emails to the State Department?

Those are important issues, and I'm sure we'll all hear more about them than we can stand in the days to come. But let's not lose sight of the real issue here: Hillary Clinton should not have been sending emails on any account, ever. No one should be sending emails, because emails are awful and everyone hates them.

Emailing came into existence in 1971, when a programmer named Ray Tomlinson invented a way for people on different computers to send messages to one another. "At the time there was no really good way to leave messages for people. The telephone worked up to a point, but someone had to be there to receive the call. And if it wasn't the person you wanted to get, it was an administrative assistant or an answering service or something of that sort," Tomlinson told the Verge in a 2012 interview.

Back then, of course, not many people had much use for email, because not many people had computers. But as desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets proliferated, email became the preferred method of communication for more and more people. All of a sudden, wonder of wonders, instead of calling your friend to describe a photo of a cat smoking a cigarette accompanied by the caption "Thank God It's Friday," you could simply shoot him an electronic version of it.

But once everyone had email everyone was more or less expected to be on it all the time, and what looked at first like an ingenious way of making communication more efficient turned into just another inbox you had to check when you got to work. In the span of a couple decades, email went from being a novelty to an innovation to a convenience to a necessity to a nuisance.

Today, unless you wield such influence that you can get away with aggressively technophobic habits (like famed nonfiction writer Gay Talese), you have to be able to send and receive email, and your job may demand that you do so at all hours of the day and night. You don't need me to describe to you how this can grind you down—the constant stream of outright spam, the inboxes that runneth over with messages from people you don't know or care about, the never-ending chains you are cc'd on unnecessarily, the office-wide emails that you can almost always ignore, the newsletters you signed up for in optimistic moments but now simply trash without reading.

In 2011, Thierry Breton, the CEO of French technology company Atos, announced that he wanted to eliminate intra-company emails entirely. He expanded on his reasons to the BBC:

I started an in-depth study with our consulting practice to see how many internal emails the 80,000 employees of Atos were receiving.

We found on average it was over 100 emails per day.

After further analysis, we realized they found 15% of the messages useful, and the rest was lost time.

But they had a fear that they would miss something.

We checked at work and at home also—and we realized they were spending 15 to 20 hours a week checking and answering internal emails.

Unsurprisingly, this move reportedly cut costs and increased earnings. How many hours have you wasted having slow, laborious email conversations that could have been wrapped up with a ten-minute instant messaging session or a five-minute phone call? How much time do you waste squinting at Gmail trying to determine which messages with the subject line "Re: Re: Fwd: Re: Question" you actually need to reply to? If something is important, you'll send someone a text, or an IM, or you'll pick up the phone, or you'll actually walk across the office and talk to someone IRL about it—and if it's not important enough for that, do you really need to send that email?

Email is a dopamine-rush-providing distraction; it is a way to keep ourselves busy pinging each other back and forth about things that need to be done instead of actually doing anything; it is a great way to circulate racist anti-Obama memes among your colleagues in the Ferguson city government. Email is bad at everything else. This is a known fact. Important people with big-time responsibilities are now actively trying to avoid email and the incriminating paper trail that can result, as this bit from a Politico story on Hillary Clinton's emails illustrates:

"My approach as chief of staff was to try to minimize [email], period, and certainly minimize email exchanges with the governor," said Ray Sullivan, who worked for former Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry. Asked whether that was out of concerns about how the emails would look to the public, he laughed and replied, "Yes. Look, when you're in the heat of decision-making, in the heat of crisis communications or natural or manmade disaster situations, it is easy to be really blunt, or use shorthand, or use language that can be misconstrued, or could offend people."

Your emails are probably not coming in the heat of any kind of crisis; no one really gives a shit about your emails. They are just the flotsam bobbing on the sea of someone else's inbox, the garbage some poor NSA intern has to sort through while he looks for subject lines about the Islamic State. At every step of the way, email is a waste of time, a chore no one likes doing but that everyone resigns themselves to. It's not much more than an annoyance, of course, but it's an annoyance that has been inflicted on everyone with a computer and a set of fingers.

It's reportedly going to take months for the State Department to go through the 55,000 pages of emails Hillary Clinton's staff has dumped on it. What will presumably happen is that some low-level drone is going to have to read all of them, then pass the pertinent documents to a slightly higher-level drone, who will read them again, and so on up the chain until everything is properly classified and organized. It's an awful job, reading thousands of emails and tossing aside the vast majority of them as worthless. Of course, it's also not too different from what a lot of us do every day.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

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Photos: Anny Lutwak
Makeup and hair: Boomie Gjidija
Styling: Maggie Dunlap
Assistant to Photographer: Emma Christ

Note: Some of these photos of Stoya are topless, so don't scroll down if you don't want to see that.

Though it's been a couple years since Stoya has written for VICE, that doesn't mean she hasn't been busy. On top of winning an XBIZ award for Best Scene in a feature adult film last year and doing a regular advice column for Refinery29, the increasingly popular actress is getting into the start-up game. On March 4, she launched a new model for buying porn with TRENCHCOATx.

Created by Stoya and adult film star Kayden Kross, the site is a "curated platform for a collection of episodic, pornographic videos." Similar to iTunes or Vimeo Premium, the TRENCHCOATx offers an à la carte porn experience through a pay-per scene model. There will be original series such as one called Fluid ("Spit flies everywhere, people fuck underwater, and everybody gets off... except the gimp") and another called Graphic Depictions, featuring "genderqueer hero" Jiz Lee. There will even be product placement in an upcoming video called Screwing Wall Street: the ArrangementFinders IPO—possibly a game-changer for monetizing pornography.

I got the chance to meet with Stoya and catch up about what she's been working on, as well as take some charming photos of her in the bath (because fuck it, it's Stoya). We discussed her newfound love for directing porn and creating new platforms to share that porn with eager masturbators like you and me.

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VICE: Do you think we're starting to live in a world where porn stars can be considered artists and branch off into different areas of art?
Stoya: I would like to hope that we're getting to a point where a porn star can also do other things and have that be kind of normal. Like James Franco does everything. So I'd like to think that we might be at the point where the fill-in-the-blank porn star won't be the token professionally naked person. But if you look at the history of modern pornography, the media's only choosing one star at a time, and they're like, "Here's this special creature who is a porn star and... or a porn star but..." You can't fight what headline gets slapped in the article, and you can't fight what gets quoted and republished and then further circulated. I think it just has too much mass. And so it would be nice—but maybe I'm just old and tired.

So I know you don't claim to do feminist porn, but you're totally a feminist figure—and terms like "genderqueer hero" are appearing on your new site. Why do think people view you like that?
I'm really wary of ever allowing myself to be framed as feminist or ethical because the second you say that, you're waving a big red flag that says, Everybody on Tumblr tear me apart! Feminism has all of these different strains, and in no way is the work that I did for Digital Playground an act of feminism. But the first thing that I directed, I showed it to one of my friends, and she had this comment which was like, "You realize that at the end of every scene, we see the woman, and she's very happy, and the men have faded into the background. Like you basically made a very sexy statement about the limited usefulness of men." So that in some ways might actually be feminist porn, but there wasn't much body diversity. So, feminism... very complicated.

What's your favorite thing about directing porn for TRENCHCOATx?
I'm sure it'll change with time and more experience, but right now my favorite thing about directing is the entitlement to experiment. If my instinct is to do something, I can try it. If it goes awry, the only person I have to answer to other than myself is Kayden. Since we're peers more than bosses of each other, I can get her input on stuff beforehand in a workshopping kind of way—as opposed to the typical, permission-based relationship with an employer.

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Can you tell me about what sets apart TRENCHCOATx from other adult film websites?
The consumer experience is meant to be very à la carte: pay a single—we think fair—price for exactly the video you want, no automatic rebilling. One of the upsides of the pay-per-scene model is that it allows us to pursue any single series for as long as it needs to be, and no longer. If a story only needs four episodes, we aren't under any pressure to stretch it. If a concept is still fun after 79 episodes, we can do an 80th. This gives us more room to play around and try different things compared to a membership site supported by members who would— because they're paying a monthly fee—reasonably expect regular updates with similar formulas, activities, and aesthetics. I'm excited to find out what parts of the business model work and figure out where it can be improved.

Who's your audience?
I'm not entirely sure. I don't believe in "porn for women" or "porn for men," and we're operating more broadly than the successful but very niche categories of, say, "people who are really into POV with lots of eye contact into the camera," or "people who love feet a lot, specifically feet that probably have a strong smell as evidenced by the fresh sweat stains on the socks they are encased in." So we'll be finding our audience and figuring out who they are as we go.

Is this website the future of porn?
Ha! Maybe. The cool thing about the future is once we get to it there's an entirely new set of possible futures. Historically, one of the biggest strengths of adult entertainment has been its ability to adapt quickly to changing tastes, trends, and technologies. Either we'll be part of the future of porn or we'll crash and burn and someone will pick the good ideas from our carcass and do something nifty with them.

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What do you hope to achieve with this website?
Right now, the site is super new and the focus is on the immediate goal of getting our legs under us, recouping the initial investment in content and programming, and starting to break even. We basically just like our jobs as pornographers and want to be able to keep doing that professionally. What with capitalism and all, owning the production and distribution seems like the best way to keep doing adult stuff.

You seem to be taking the porn industry by the balls.
I don't want the balls of the adult industry. I want part of its heart.

I was looking through your website, and I feel like I can watch the videos simply for the cinematic experience, and like not have to masturbate to them. Although they do seem sexy.
I don't know how to respond to this other than to say thank you.

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TRENCHCOATx.com is officially live and can be browsed here.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday I stood and watched as men doused Israeli flags with lighter fluid and set them alight at a busy intersection in the heart of Stamford Hill's Hasidic Jewish community. You would be forgiven for thinking that this was a menacing pre-cursor to the much-hyped neo-Nazi "Anti-Jewification" demonstration that's supposed to be happening in the area on March 22, but the guys doing the burning were in fact Hasidic Jews themselves.

Black smoke billowed down the street, past their confused neighbors at the North London Mosque who looked on in disbelief, as one Hasid blasted klezmer music from his car stereo. Twenty others danced in a circle around the flags, shouting, "Down with Zionism!"

"The whole state of Israel is not legal from the Jewish viewpoint," said the flag burning's organizer, Rabbi Elhanan Beck, adding, "The Messiah will not be [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu."

Rabbi Beck and his followers are adherents of the Neturei Karta, an anti-Zionist Orthodox sect that sees the very idea of a Jewish state as heretical. They planned it to be a cutting rebuke of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to US Congress on Tuesday. The flag burning coincided with the Jewish festival of Purim.

Some Orthodox Jews in passing cars beeped their horns in support. But it wasn't all cheers and dancing as some very angry neighbors confronted them. Members of London's wider Jewish community see their actions as doing more harm than good at a time when anti-Semitism in the UK, stoked by the the 2014 war in Gaza, has reached an all-time high.

"Israel can't represent us. Netanyahu is secular and doesn't believe in God," said Rabbi Beck, who has lived among Stamford Hill's 20,000-member Hasidic community for 28 years. "When you are looking at Judaism, you have to remember Judaisim is a religion: It's not a nation, it's not a race—it's a religion," he said, adding that "if somebody doesn't believe in God he's not Jewish."

In a nutshell, the Neturei Kata's beliefs are rooted in a deeply religious fundamentalist reading of the Torah, taking to heart its more than 600 laws. They believe the Jews were exiled from the Holy Land more than 2,000 years ago by divine decree after being warned to repent. What they're waiting for is a Messiah to bring them back.

"But going by force is a rebellion against God, against the wishes of God," Rabbi Beck explains. "It's like if you have a child and he's bad and you say, 'Stay in the corner for ten minutes!' If he refuses, what that says is he couldn't care less about your punishment." If it were up to the Neturei Kata, the state of Israel would be dismantled.

As the smoke from the burning flags cleared, Jacob Weisz, a member of the Neturei Karta, said he is saddened by the state of Israel's transformation of Judaism into a political, rather than a spiritual, entity. "On two levels we are against Zionism," Weisz said, both in "what they have done to the Jewish people and what they are doing now to the Palestinians. That's why we burn the flag."

The Neturei Karta chose the festival of Purim to make their stand because it represents the triumph of good over evil, Weisz said. The festival's roots lie in the Book of Esther, the story of a courageous Jewish Queen who exposed the Persian viceroy Haman's plot to destroy her people.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed Congress Tuesday, he said Iran represents a similar threat today as the Persian Haman did in the Old Testament. Iran poses a grave threat "not only to Israel but also the peace of the entire world," Netanyahu said, underscoring his belief Iran is striving for nuclear weapons. "In this deadly game of thrones," Netanyahu continued, "there's no place for America or for Israel, no peace for Christians, Jews, or Muslims who don't share the Islamist medieval creed."

But Rabbi Beck said that "really the Jews have the best of times in the Muslim lands," citing Iran's treatment of its 8,756-member Jewish population, who have their own schools, their own synagogues, and a sitting MP, despite their population dwindling from 150,000 since 1948 and consistent marginalization. "Just the state of Israel," Rabbi Beck said, "creates all the hatred and all the problems that come out today."

Rather than a heroic Esther, Weisz called Netanyahu "a warmonger," who "wants to bring more bloodshed, more war into the Middle East," the thought of which he says is "heartbreaking and outrageous."

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As Weisz spoke, an angry Stamford Hill resident confronted him. "I understand if you don't like Israel, but why do you go there?" she asked. "Don't go to Israel and get social security and get your children married there and get all the benefits and then come and burn the flag," she continued. "You are using manipulation," she finished before storming off, refusing to give her name.

"I don't go there to be honest," Weisz countered, and Rabbi Beck holds a Canadian passport. But the actions and stance of the Neturei Karta is of grave concern not just to some of their neighbors but also to the UK's broader Jewish community at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise in Britain.

The "Neturei Karta is obviously a Jewish group, but burning an Israeli flag still carries the risk of inciting anti-Semitism in others," said Mark Gardner, director of communications with the anti-Semitism-monitoring group Community Security Trust (CST) in an email.

"Those who get excited by such things do not make neat distinctions between people and states," Gardner adds, calling the link between hating Israel and attacking Jews "particularly evident."

Anti-Semitic incidents more than doubled in the UK in 2014 from 2013 according to CST's latest tally. Of 1,168 incidents, 39 per cent were driven by far right, anti-Israel or Islamist beliefs. And CST found the violent conflict in Israel and Gaza between July 8 and the 26th of August, 2014, which left 2,100 Palestinians and 72 Israelis dead, was the "biggest contributing factor."

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Rabbi Elhanan Beck inside the Neturei Karta synagogue in Stamford Hill

Mainstream Jews reject what they see as the Neturei Karta's extremism. "Neturei Karta are a fringe group with extreme views," wrote Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, seniorrRabbi of the Movement for Reform Judaism, in an email. "The vast majority of British Jews," she added, "like the vast majority of all Brits, reject religious fundamentalism of any kind."

The Neturei Karta's rejection of a Jewish state has seen them form some weird alliances with people who don't like Israel for different reasons. Their members traveled to a Holocaust-denial conference in Iran in 2006 and spoke to an ultra-nationalist group in London called the New Right in 2012.

But people who believe Jews want to take over the world are "crazy," said Rabbi Beck, who wants to open a dialogue with an antisemitic group planning a march in Samford Hill at the end of the month.

"Anti-Semites try to make Jewish people into racists [who] think that they are the master race and all the others are the slaves," Rabbi Beck said, "but this is completely wrong."

Holocaust-denial, Weisz insists, is only a result of Zionists using the Holocaust for their political means. "This is why we seek a dialogue," he added.

"Jews seek peace with everyone," Weisz continued, "whether it's right-wing, whether it's left-wing—we seek peace."

The group's interpretation of "peace" is one that a lot of people would have trouble going along with, and burning flags is a weird way to convey that message, but the Neturei Karta seem happy to confound expectations.

Follow Graham on Twitter.

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One of São Paolo's water reservoirs. Photo via Flickr user Clairex

Fun fact: I grew up thinking Canada has the most freshwater in the world. Not true. That title belongs to Brazil—home of the Amazon and hundreds more rivers.

Yet São Paulo, Brazil's biggest city, is bracing for a full-scale water disaster this summer. The megacity's 20 million residents are already facing daily tap cut-offs thanks to years of poor management and a changing climate. With the city's main reservoir now at five percent, São Paulo is way short of the water it needs to last until the next rainy season in November. If uncharacteristically dry weather patterns continue into April, city officials have confirmed a rationing program could limit running water to just two days per week.

What got the megacity into such deep trouble? When I put this question to my friend and colleague Pedro Inoue in São Paulo, he tells me a myth of abundance left the city high and dry. "The more you have, the less you care," he explains. "With many natural resources here, there's not a culture to take care." Experts point to many contributing factors over the decades: large-scale deforestation shifted weather patterns, irrigation-intensive agriculture drained the water table, and rapid population growth coupled with political corruption added more stress to a fragile system.

Inoue tells me his tap usually runs dry about one in the afternoon, and doesn't come back on until seven the next morning. After hearing of the city's water rationing plans, his family is hatching an exit strategy—just in case things get really bad. "When you mess with water, you mess with people's dignity," he says. "You can't cook, you can't wash your dishes, you can't bathe. The whole city stops, pretty much."

Some good news: Canadian cities aren't likely to face a water crisis of such magnitude anytime soon. "We have much greater access and smaller populations," says Brian Mergelas, CEO of WaterTAP in Ontario.

But São Paulo's collapse does raise a few red flags for some water researchers and campaigners here in Canada, where a similar "water rich" narrative and natural resource-based economy could pose risks down the road. VICE Canada spoke with nearly a dozen water experts in different parts of the country to find out Canada's most pressing water issues and what Canadian cities can learn from São Paulo's mistakes.

For starters, Oliver Brandes, co-director of the Water Sustainability Project at the University of Victoria, tells me Canada's "water-rich" narrative needs to be debunked. With the vast majority of Canadians living along the southern border, some areas of BC, Alberta, and southern Ontario are approaching water-supply limits. "We're water-tight where people live," he says.

Made even more volatile by climate change, water issues are not adequately studied and recorded in Canada, Brandes adds. "We don't know how much we have, who is using it, how much they use, how it's changing," he says. "How can we make evidence-based decisions without a sophisticated monitoring and reporting approach?"

Canada's top water threats span from tar sands pollution in the Athabasca and Mackenzie Rivers to massive algae blooms in Quebec and Manitoba. Here in British Columbia, near-record low snow atop Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland mountains could mean municipal water shortages in the late summer season.

This winter, Vancouver Island and Metro Vancouver mountains have received only 30 percent of average snow cover. Mountain snowmelt feeds into streams, rivers, and city reservoirs, acting as a buffer between rainfalls.

"I've never seen it quite like this," says Mark Angelo, former chair of BCIT's Rivers Institute. After the sunniest February in recent memory, Vancouver's North Shore mountains don't have any visible snow. With two weeks until the first day of spring, Angelo says salmon and other fish could suffer from low rivers.

"We're very close to a record low snowpack. I think on one hand there's a chance things could improve a bit, but every passing week it becomes a bit more unlikely."

City officials say it's too early to tell if the missing snow will result in water conservation advisories. Metro Vancouver spokesperson Don Bradley said the lack of snow on the mountains was "unfortunate for skiers" but "there's absolutely no need for concern." Bradley said rainfall in the next months will also increase reserves. He pointed to the success of the city's revised lawn sprinkling regulations in reducing water demand in the summer.

Both British Columbia and Ontario still value water based on the fact Canada has a lot of it. In BC, it costs Nestle $2.25 to extract one million litres of groundwater. In Ontario, the same amount of water costs Nestle $3.71. Council of Canadians water campaigner Emma Lui questions the valuation, calling on the province to prioritize home users first, especially in times of drought.

Both Lui and Brandes point to a need for a national water policy in Canada. In general, the feds haven't done much for water in the last decade. But in the wake of São Paulo's crisis, a big lesson for Canadian cities is we're in a rapidly-changing environment, and a "wait-and-see" approach won't cut it—even for water superpowers.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.