In the very early run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton is so ahead of the rest of her presumed competitors for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination that it felt more like watching someone out for a jog than anything like a race.

That is until this week, when Hillary ran into the first possibly serious roadblock on the path to a second Clinton presidency. On Monday, the New York Times reported that Clinton had, in defiance of State Department regulations, exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business during her time as Secretary of State. To make matters worse, she had been doing so by way of what the Associated Press referred to as "home brew" servers run out of the Clintons' compound in Chappaqua, New York—not exactly Pentagon-level security. Was it illegal? Maybe. Could it actually stall Clinton's all-but-inevitable stroll to the general election, though? Well, let's discuss.

It's hard to overstate just how large Clinton's 2016 lead has been in the run up to her official campaign announcement. Real Clear Politics, which aggregates many of the leading opinion-poll results, had Clinton's advantage over her opponents at a staggering 44-point average from January 18 to March 2—the day the news about the emails came out.

Her advantage is even greater thanks to the fact that her two closest rivals have given little indication that they actually plan to run in 2016. In second place, behind Clinton's 58.8 percent, Vice President Joe Biden is polling at an average 12.8 percent. When asked about 2016, Biden said in January "there's a chance" he'll challenge Clinton. But at 72 years old, Biden would be the oldest person ever elected president by a significant margin, were he to win the White House.

Unsurprisingly, Biden has so far stayed quiet about the email controversey. But Biden backers have seized on the news of Clinton's misstep, albeit clumsily, as you might expect from Biden backers. Leading South Carolina Democrat Dick Harpootlian told the Washington Post that the emails will mean Clinton will "die by 1,000 cuts," before slipping into a little casual misogyny with, "If the e-mails were just her and her family and friends canoodling about fashion and what they're going to do next week, that's one thing."

But Biden's lukewarm comments about running are far stronger than those of the third-highest-polling Democrat, though. At 12.4 percent, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren continues to attract passionate support for a presidential bid, inspiring a Run Warren Run movement among lefty activists and Hollywood celebrities. But the Senator herself continues to repeatedly and emphatically deny she has any interest in staging a campaign.

That leaves three men who have expressed explicit interest in a 2016 run—even going so far as to drop in on early-primary states to show they are serious—as the main individuals who could capitalize on Clinton's stumbles. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described "democratic socialist" from Vermont, Jim Webb, a former one-term senator from Virginia, and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley are each polling in the low single-digits in early 2016 surveys, with very little name recognition or national profile to speak of at this point. Sanders and O'Malley have positioned themselves to the left of Clinton, Webb to the right.

For any of them to actually pose a threat to Clinton's near-stranglehold on the nomination, it would take far more than just a scandal on her part: They'd need to somehow insert themselves into the minds of voters, and prove they are actually credible candidates for leader of the free world. Perhaps tellingly, all three have stayed silent on this week's email revelations; Sanders basically assaulted reporters who dared ask him for his take on the scandal, and the others have so far declined to comment.

Their silence–compounded with the fact that none of the three has managed to make a serious case for why they should be president—suggests what everyone has long assumed: that Clinton will face only a perfunctory primary challenge, from politicians looking for a boost in book sales, or a possible Cabinet appointment.

Still, assume, just for fun, that the Clinton scandals went so nuclear they actually forced Hillary out of the race. In that case, after an initial, and likely prolonged, panic, other Democrats would presumably start coming out of the woodwork. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, for example, has said she won't challenge Clinton if Clinton runs, but has also firmly declared that she wants to see a woman elected president. If that woman isn't Hillary—well, then it has to be another woman, doesn't it? And what better woman than Senator Kirsten Gillibrand?

There's also New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was once thought to harbor presidential ambitions. But Cuomo hasn't made any moves for 2016—and as the New York Times reported Thursday, he has his own email problems to deal with.

If Clinton's nearest challengers are long shots, the real long shots are basically outside the Earth's orbit. Former Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer made noise last year about making a run, before dropping several pianos on his foot in an interview with the National Journal. Any dreams of a cowboy President in blue probably died when he compared California Senator Dianne Feinstein to a hooker. Other surprise candidates have so far yet to make themselves known, a sign that Clinton's presumed inevitability has crippled the Democrats' bench.

Of course, any conversation about a non-Hillary nominee is so premature, it can be chalked up to fantasy—as of right now, it still doesn't look like the email problem will be more than a bump in the road for her campaign, and the chance that it will become so serious as to actually deter her from running seems preposterously thin. If the worst does come to pass, though, it would mean a major opening for someone. Who that person will be, though, remains the real mystery.

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Image via Gilberto Santa Rosa

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We're all pro-choice aren't we? All us reasonable people anyway. Not religious extremists or UKIP voters, but everyone else. But while I imagine people reading this probably consider themselves pro-choice, but not everyone knows what the term should really mean.

People talk confidently about choice, but the small print on their "My Body, My Choice" T-shirt often reads: "Some choices only." We are big on " no means no" until the dissenting voice is a woman in labor railing against a caesarean section that doctors say may be best for her baby.

When we move beyond talking about the choice not to be pregnant (valid and important) to a choice within pregnancy (as valid, as important) the message that women should be guardians of what goes on in their uteruses seems to get lost. But whether or not you ever have children, the right to be treated with dignity during pregnancy and birth should matter to you if you're pro-choice.

Why is it that women find themselves treated as second-class citizens across societies? That we can become pregnant and give birth (whether or not we ever do) has been used as the excuse to hold women back and, often, to hold them down for a very long time. The end results of that (discrimination, abuse, control, and societal barriers) stem from our perceived status as wombs with legs. That's why advocating for pregnant women is advocating for every woman—it provides a strong platform on which to insist these barriers are broken down elsewhere.

The violation of human rights during pregnancy and birth is no imaginary first world issue—it's frighteningly real across the world. As ever, those who also endure discrimination because of poverty, race, immigration status, or disability will suffer the most, but a disregard for women's basic humanity binds us all. There are Tanzanian women bleeding to death because they can't pay for the necessary drugs, African-American women dying in childbirth at four times the rate of their white counterparts, and Indigenous Australians being flown hundreds of miles against their wishes to give birth alone.

Less dramatic, but profound for many who experience it, are the everyday failures to obtain consent for invasive procedures in UK maternity units. If you are an undocumented woman in London you may well find yourself chased by bailiffs for the thousands of pounds you owe the NHS for your life-saving caesarean. Or you might decide to give birth alone on the bathroom floor to save yourself from being hounded for money you simply don't have.

It's hard to successfully assert the importance of women's basic human dignity elsewhere—to deal with the numbers who are being raped, having their genitals mutilated, or are unable to choose if and who they marry—if there's a socially acceptable sideline of this rumbling along unchecked in pregnancy and birth.

Take the story of Kelly, a two-time rape victim who was given a vicious, unnecessary, and gratuitously large episiotomy (cut in the perineum) as she repeatedly shouted "no." It's all captured graphically on video here. Despite the video evidence, she has had little success taking legal action. Though you'd be unlikely to find the same thing happening in a UK hospital, Birthrights (the charity I co-chair) surveyed women in 2013 and found that 25 percent of those whose babies were born using forceps felt they hadn't given consent. Forceps are akin to large, metal salad servers in the vagina so, yes—we should definitely be asking first.

If you still can't get worked up about all of this, perhaps the most compelling reason to champion women's reproductive rights collectively rather than selectively is the very real negative impact that a lack of protection of pregnant and birthing women has on our right to abortion.

Once we start interfering in, dictating to, and punishing women for their choices, choice itself becomes a sharp and dangerous political weapon.

Human rights are interlinked and interdependent; to protect one we have to stand up for them all. If that sounds like empty rhetoric then consider how, in the US, the anti-abortion movement is making damaging progress every day. So effective are they that activists believe there's a very real chance of abortion becoming illegal in the not-too-distant future. One particularly effective strand of this attack on women has come through what the anti-choicers have realized is a weak link in the reproductive rights chain: the rights of pregnant and birthing women.

By repeatedly pitting mother against fetus outside of the abortion debate they have made huge legal inroads. Women in the US are being arrested, prosecuted, and jailed for stillbirths, for drinking during pregnancy and for trying to end their lives while pregnant. Mentally competent women like Laura Pemberton are being dragged from their homes, while in labor, to have court-ordered caesarean sections. The number of these legal attacks is escalating rapidly and this is no coincidence. Anti-choice judges and prosecutors are pushing cases through deliberately and explicitly because they've realized it furthers an anti-choice cause. A recent case in England around fetal alcohol syndrome had significant involvement from the Pro-Life Research Unit for similar reasons.

Individual women are the initial casualties of these violations, but the stamping on their individual choices eventually impacts on us collectively. That's the thing about reproductive choice: it should belong to the individual and remain outside of the political to-and-fro. There should be an acceptance that, although my choice may well be different from yours, I'm the only person who can make it. Once we start interfering in, dictating to, and punishing women for their choices, choice itself becomes a sharp and dangerous political weapon.

To avoid that we need to stand by women throughout their lives and protect them as they exercise their right to say what happens to their bodies. We need to accept that they might not always make what others think is the right choice but that there is no one else better placed to try.

I've called my book on women's rights in childbirth All That Matters, because a healthy baby is not all that matters. It all matters. We all matter. All the choices matter. And if you don't believe that then please don't call yourself pro-choice.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter.

All that Matters: Women's Rights in Childbirth is published as an ebook by Guardian Shorts.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It seems somewhat fitting that Chrono Trigger's 20th anniversary (the game was first released in Japan on March 11, 1995) should fall in the same year that Doc Brown and Marty McFly went back to the future. I like to think this happy coincidence is in fact the work of some powerful force beyond our mere mortal reckoning—that the world's quintessential time travel movie has some sort of cosmic accord with its preeminent time travel video game.

Perhaps not, but in the same way Robert Zemeckis' perennial time-hopper defined a genre in 1985, Chrono Trigger redefined a spectrum some ten years later. To hell with the space time continuum, though—Square's reimagining of the classic JRPG formula demanded the past be interposed, in order for the future to be set free, displaying a level of technical sophistication that's cemented Chrono Trigger as one of the best video games of all time.

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It was 1995 when I learned that my local Electronics Boutique had a used games section. I still remember the huge sign that hung tentatively above the single shelf near the back of the store, next to the register. "Swap Shop" it read, in the same garish white and red of the EB masthead. At nine years old I naturally had no source of income, and thus saving my pocket money for fully priced retail games was an arduous, and at times seemingly impossible task. Convincing my dad to half me in for such luxuries was a task harder still.

The second-hand games shelf changed that. This playground of unwanted titles was a monolith of opportunity, and a bargaining tool as far as I saw it. It was the Game Genie code that enabled me to get my mitts on semi-new games for a fraction of the price, so long as I was willing to part with some of my own. I was fed up with Donkey Kong Country anyway.

On a rainy and windswept autumnal Glasgow afternoon, I waited by the window for my dad to get in from work. Equipped with an old SNES game of mine, he'd promised to visit the Electronics Boutique on his way home, and would return with the much sought-after Yoshi's Island. I could not wait.

As his car pulled into our driveway, my stomach hit the ceiling. As his key turned in the lock, I thought I was going to explode. I hurriedly fumbled the plastic bag he handed me, with raucous "EB" logos plastered on either side, only to discover not Yoshi but Ch... Cr... Chro...

" Chrono Trigger," said my father. "I couldn't get that one you asked for, but the boy in the shop said you'd like this. He plays it every day, apparently."

I felt devastated.

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In mid-2008 Chrono Trigger was announced for the Nintendo DS. I'd been given a DS as a Christmas present a few years prior by an old girlfriend, but after failing to be taken by the launch line-up, it'd sat in the top drawer of my bedside cabinet for the last two or three years. This would finally bring it out of early retirement.

"Remember that game Chrono Trigger I was mad about when I was younger?" I asked my dad as we sat at the breakfast table—him reading the Sunday Herald; me, Official Nintendo Magazine. "I remember the fit you had when I went out of my way to get it for you," he replied.

"Uh huh..."

"And I remember when you then wouldn't shut up about it for the next year and a half after that. And the posters and drawings you had plastered all over your walls."

"Yup..."

"Yer auld da', eh? I did well with that one, didn't I?"

He did do well with that one, and I might not have played Chrono Trigger to this day had he not picked it up in lieu of Yoshi's Island in '95. This was a game that changed the landscape of RPG games forever. The way it managed to make the genre-staple turn-based combat freer flowing than its peers, how it shied away from grueling level-grinding, how it delivered its comprehensive but never foreboding storylines: all ensured its classic status.

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'Chrono Trigger' trailer (for the DS release)

The team behind Chrono Trigger was also as impressive as the legacy it's gone on to enjoy. Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, worked alongside Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy. And these guys were flanked by the famous anime artist Akira Toriyama and renowned composer Nobuo Uematsu. All at once. If an RPG were to announce a line-up this this formidable tomorrow, the internet would break faster than Kim Kardashian can get her ass out.

I'd missed the PlayStation iteration of Chrono Trigger that came out in America and Japan in the late 1990s, but getting to grips with the handheld port almost a decade on was like meeting up with an old friend. I'd changed quite a bit in the interim, but the game remained the same and we reconnected in a way that I can honestly say I've never done with any other game (and most likely any other person) since.

At nine years old, I couldn't possibly have understood the profound affect Chrono Trigger would have on not just the JRPG genre, but the games industry as a whole. At 22, I was only beginning to appreciate its worth.

My return to the Millennial Fair was as exciting as it was the first time round, and my journeys through the fabric of time to 2300 AD, 65,000,000 BC, and 1999 AD were as entertaining and as terrifying as I'd remembered. Meeting Frog and Robo and Lucca and Marle again was like attending a school reunion, and Uematsu's overworld themes and in-town jingles were once again burned into my brain.

What's more, I was uncovering sophisticated traits I'd missed the first time around. I was altering seemingly trivial events in the past that'd have profound consequences in the future, and I better appreciated the jokes and innuendo that were clearly over my head all those years before. I'd grown up since our last rendezvous, and my emotional maturity made this outing even more thrilling.

I felt elated.

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In 2011, Chrono Trigger made the jump from handheld games systems to mobile phones under the banner of Square Enix. At the time, I had no real desire to try it on iOS—I already owned what I'd considered the game's definitive version for the DS—and I couldn't be sold on its touch-screen interface. Two weeks ago, however, on the cusp of Chrono Trigger's 20th anniversary, I decided to download my beloved JRPG from the App Store.

Recently, I've been in a bit of a lull as far as video games are concerned. Nothing has caught my eye for quite a while, and I've found myself increasingly apathetic towards the "next big thing" or "this year's most anticipated game" thus far. It's all gone a bit flat, and I was therefore cautious of dragging Chrono Trigger into my beleaguered state of mind. What if I'd outgrown it? What if it wasn't as good as I remembered? It's been 20 years: perhaps my fond experience seven years ago was fueled purely by nostalgia? These were questions I became scared of, but ones I felt I had to answer nonetheless.

The Millennial Fair, the End of Time, the Epoch—it was better than I'd remembered. Even the iPhone's fiddly touch-screen control pad couldn't put me off. Chrono Trigger had stood the test of time.

I felt vindicated.

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Which leads me to today. After writing the majority of this article, I popped round to my dad's to mention what I was writing about. "Remember that game, Chrono Trigger?" I asked. "Mmmh, vaguely," he replied.

I didn't bother jogging his memory. His memory is fine—but Chrono Trigger has now passed him by. He's pushed it out of his head to make way for more important memories, things that mean more to him. Which is fine, because Chrono Trigger is my thing. Perhaps one day I'll pass it on to my kids, should I ever choose to have them. Perhaps we'll have the same relationship with another game. Either way, Chrono Trigger means a lot to me—its time travel mechanic mirrored by its recurring existence throughout the generations of my life thus far, and no doubt the ones to come.

I feel contented.

Follow Joe on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user walknboston

This week, a man from Dunedin, New Zealand, forcibly removed the car keys from a Chinese tourist. The altercation began when the tourist couple stopped on a narrow stretch of mountain highway to take photos of the Otago Peninsula. This backed up the traffic behind them, and the couple continued to drive slowly along the highway and eventually pulled into a private driveway. That's when the aforementioned vigilante, Robert Penman, got out of his car and took their keys.

"I told him you're not going anywhere mate, and he said 'out of the way', but I told him I've called the police and they can come sort it out," he told stuff.co.nz.

It's just the latest in a string of testy interactions between tourists and locals. In January, an Australian family was left stranded on an isolated part of the South Island when a Queenstown motorist witnessed a near accident and took their keys. In February a European driver was punched in the face after a minor car accident in Greymouth. Then, on Sunday, a Christchurch man filmed a foreign driver repeatedly drifting into an oncoming lane. When the tourist finally stopped at a petrol station, the local seized the keys and told the driver he could collect them from the police station. The driver was later issued an infringement notice for failing to keep left.

This all begs the question, how has this become a thing? In an effort to find out, VICE spoke to a driver from Wanaka, Ben Wilkinson, who witnessed a local vigilante remove a driver's keys and throw them into a roadside bush. According to him the whole trend may just be latent nationalism bubbling to the surface.

"We've had problems with tourists on the roads for years and I think the first confrontation has encouraged others to do the same," he said. "Heaps of New Zealanders have a bit of a thing about Asian drivers, so that might have started it too."

Numbers from 2013 cited in local media reports show overseas drivers have been responsible for 11 fatal crashes, 90 accidents that caused serious injury, and over 400 accidents causing minor injuries.

While acting Road Policing Manager Senior Sergeant Steve Larking agrees that while foreign drivers do cause more accidents in tourist hot spots, he doesn't want to overstate the problem. "It is important to not forget that the vast majority of crashes are still caused by New Zealand drivers," he tells VICE.

This week, in response to both an increase of poor driving and vigilantism, the Associate Transport Minister Craig Foss announced that the South Island would be installing an additional 50 kilometers (31 miles) of rumble strips throughout Otago and Southland, as well as an additional 140 solid yellow lines as well as some 200 kilometers (124 miles) of road to be marked with "keep left" arrows. And although the initiatives are targeted at keeping tourists safe, Cross assured the media that "vigilante enforcement is not the way to go."

This came two days after Prime Minister John Key issued a public statement warning people against key snatching. "People taking the law into their own hands is not sensible," he declared. "The very sensible thing to do is ring 111 and advise the police where you are because you just never know what could happen next. Some terrible incident could occur as a result of it."

Follow Tim on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy WSB-TV

American society has long placed a special value on rising early for a hard day's work. But this is apparently not always the case in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, where a sanitation worker was sentenced to 30 days in jail for picking up the town's garbage before 7:00 AM and thus violating a local ordinance.

Last month, Kevin McGill thought he was simply going into court to pay a fine for his early-morning trash collecting. But he was soon face to face with a prosecutor and he quickly took a plea deal to prevent his case from going to trial. Before he knew it, a Sandy Springs judge had given McGill an entire month behind bars.

No other charge factored into the sentence—just the violation of a rule aimed at keeping garbage trucks from disturbing the morning peace

Today is McGill's 48th birthday. His wife was hoping for a big evening together. But instead, McGill will report to a Sandy Springs jail at 6:00 PM. (He is serving his time on the weekends so that he can continue working during the week.)

Before last month, McGill had never seen the inside of a jail cell.

"It was terrible—I didn't want to go in," McGill told me. "I didn't know what to expect, and when I got in it was worse than anything I could have imagined."

In addition to spending long weekends in jail, according to his lawyer, McGill will also spend six months on probation, during which time he will pay a set of monthly fees to the city.

Sandy Springs spokesperson Sharon Kraun says that early-morning garbage truck noise is not something the city will tolerate.

"Our residents, they like their quality of life," Kraun told me. "And that means not waking up at 5:00 AM to hear the trash can."

Sandy Springs has garnered attention in recent years for being on the cutting edge of privatizing nearly all aspects of municipal government. The city's trash collections are outsourced and, as the New York Timesnoted in 2012, it even privatized its entire municipal court system.

McGill's attorney Kimberly Bandoh says that when McGill arrived at the Sandy Springs court to plea two weeks ago, he had not prepared at all for the prospect of facing jail time. Before he could properly asses what was happening, she says, the judge handed down the month-long jail sentence.

"He didn't realize until he finished everything that you're actually going to have to go to jail for going to work early,"Brandoh told me. "You don't sentence a guy in jail for 30 days for picking up trash. It's egregious."

Bill Riley, the city prosecutor, emphasizes that McGill took a plea deal and both acknowledged his guilt and understood the harshness of the potential sentence.

"This was a negotiated plea," he said. "It was ultimately the judge's decision as to whether that was an appropriate sentence... I just made a recommendation, he didn't have to take it."

In the wake of a Department of Justice report that described how Ferguson targeted black residents and handed them harsh penalties for minor or manufactured violations, the topic of aggressive policing and prosecution has received a fresh dose of national attention—but Riley rejects the idea that McGill's punishment is excessive.

"We look for the minimum punishment what will deter the crime,"Riley said when asked whether the Department of Justice's report on Ferguson would make him second-guess his own office's treatment of cases like McGill's. "We tried forever not to put anyone in jail for these cases, but it wasn't working."

According to Kraun, McGill worked for Waste Management Inc., a publicly-traded company that cleared $14 billion dollars in revenue last year. Riley said that this is not the first time his office has penalized Waste Management personnel for violating the early-morning garbage collection law. But he asserts that in McGill's case, blame falls on the individual.

"We had meetings with the company and the company had actually done the things they were supposed to do,"Riley said. "They had trained him. They told him not to come here before seven."

Brandoh says that although McGill might have had some awareness of the Sandy Springs statute, he had been running that route for only three months. She adds that early-morning construction in the area gave him the sense that trash collection in the wee hours of the morning might also be permissible.

McGill has scheduled an emergency motion hearing for March 27 to attempt to invalidate his plea. But for the time being, he will have to continue spending less-than-restful weekends in a jail, where he struggles to sleep.

"It gets so hot it's unbearable,"McGill said. "I don't want to go back."

Follow Spencer Woodman on Twitter.

Some song titles are subtle, and other song titles are, "The Only Good Condo Is a Dead Condo." That's the name of this new track from Needs, a Canadian band who play angsty punk tunes that sometimes veer into math, noise, and hardcore territory. There's something invigorating about this band that's difficult to convey without listening to them—it's a genuineness that most punk bands have abandoned today in favor of paint-by-numbers tropes.

Needs does their own thing and ends up with a sound that's as exciting and energetic as it is depressing. Their self-titled debut is slated for release in May. You can't preorder it yet, but you can listen to another song, "We Forgot the Records to Our Record Release Show," here.

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The author in her new apartment

Until now, I've always lived with other people. For the first 18 years of my life, I was legally obligated to do so. After that, roommates replaced my family, easing me into adulthood via passive-aggressive Post-It notes on my dishes saying "wash me :)". I've endured nearly the full spectrum of roommate living: I've shared a dorm, lived in a two-bedroom with four other girls, blissfully suffered in an always-filthy "party house," briefly cohabitated an apartment with the girlfriend of the man I lost my virginity to, and, most recently, lived with a couple.

Of all these roommate dynamics, the last one was by far the worst. Living with two people stubbornly in love made me despise emotional attachment. Like Pavlov's dog, hearing the word "babe" conditioned me to salivate at the thought of living alone.

I fantasized often about what it would be like without them. No more silent judgment for having a different man in my room three nights in a row. No more walking in on boring-ass dinner parties where you and your "couple friends" sip on wine and play goddamn charades pretending you're enjoying yourselves (that's the real charade, if you ask me). It doesn't help that I'm weirdly possessive over my shit. I don't care how petty it makes me seem, but that's my grapeseed oil. My blood would boil at the sight of one of them using my Sodastream. Just because I said you're allowed to use it doesn't mean you're actually allowed to use it. Why is that so hard to understand?

Finally, I made the decision to just do it. I saw a listing for a studio in a neighborhood adjacent to the neighborhood I actually want to live in but can't afford, and put a deposit down that same day. Thirty-six hours later, I moved in. The owner of the building didn't even run a credit check. He called two of my references and apparently just asked them if I was a "good person."

I was so eager to move in that I failed to notice they hadn't cleaned the place at all. Stains covered the tile in the kitchen, and the oven didn't even work. I found mouse droppings in the cupboards. The shower head was (and still is) merely a pipe with holes in it. But I refused to let any of this bother me. As long as this was my place for me and only me to live in, it was perfect. I cleaned everything myself, bought an inordinate amount of mouse traps, got a new oven, and learned to love my PVC shower head (it actually feels a lot like a waterfall).

For the most part, living alone has exceeded my expectations. All the little things I can do now that I couldn't do with roommates make me feel immensely more at peace. I can put the ketchup anywhere in the fridge that I want. I can take my bra off while cooking in the kitchen and place it on the counter. I can masturbate on the couch and leave my vibrator on the coffee table. Not only can I leave the door open while pooping, but I can get up mid-poop and run to my phone with my pants still down without fear of anyone catching me. This is everything I've ever wanted—yet at the same time, something about it all makes me feel a bit pathetic.

As much as I love all the wonderful things I can do thanks to my newfound independence, I'm also finding that some of these things—many of which I've been doing for many years while living with roommates—suddenly feel pitiful. Because I am now a single woman who lives alone, I feel like I'm perpetuating a stereotype that I never before felt I was perpetuating.

I'm more hesitant to maxi skirts and eat non-fat yogurt. I have yet to forgive myself for buying crystals two days ago. I can barely get through the most recent season of Girls without hating myself—and it's all because I live alone. I now feel like the target audience those body-wash commercials aim for when they urge women to find their inner beauty while not forgetting to moisturize.

To make matters worse, my mom calls me about three times a day. Sometimes she'll lecture me on how to cook chicken. At other points, she'll remind me that she thinks my living alone is a bad idea. The way she sees it, this is the first step of my transformation into full-fledged spinster. The first night she called, she told me a story about a woman she worked with who never married or produced offspring. This woman lived alone for decades, and instead of acquiring a family she acquired an extensive hat collection.

"She had a whole room just for her hats. She called them her children," my mom said. "She wanted to be a writer, too." I responded by telling her I look good in hats.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder why it feels so bad to embody the cliché of a single woman. Why is it that a woman who lives alone is more likely to be depicted as depressing—or as my mother might put it, "doomed"? The fact is, I'm not lonely. I'm not miserable either. Not one ounce of me yearns for anything more than what I have right now. I'm quite happy finally managing to obtain my ideal living situation, and know that I'll be a lot happier once I just wear the goddamn maxi skirt on my way to the crystal shop unafraid of what it people think it might say about me.

Yes, there is a lot of chocolate in my kitchen right now. No, I'm not wearing pants while microwaving leftovers. So what? If you want to label me as pathetic, I will no longer try to stop you.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Hiram Jiminez

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Photos via Google Maps and Wikimedia Commons

The incident: A guy burned himself after attempting to pray over some of Applebee's sizzling fajitas.

The appropriate response: Being less stupid in future.

The actual response: He attempted to sue Applebee's for not warning him they were hot.

Way back in March 2010, Hiram Jiminez and his brother Rafael visited an Applebee's restaurant in Westampton, New Jersey.

Jiminez bought a steak fajita, which was brought to him in a sizzling skillet.

According to court records, the waitress did not warn him that his food was hot. Presumably because that's not a thing that waitresses do, as, generally, if you're ordering food in a restaurant, you are doing so under the assumption that it will be served to you hot. Especially if that food is brought to you making an audible sizzling sound and emitting smoke, as Applebee's fajitas generally are.

After getting the food, Jiminez says he bowed his head over the dish and began to pray. As he was doing this, he claims that there was a "grease pop" from the fajita plate, which burned his face.

Jiminez then panicked and pulled the fajita skillet into his lap, causing burns to his legs, according to court docs.

According to a report on NJ.com, Jiminez attempted to sue Applebee's in 2013. The case was dismissed after the judge ruled that the danger posed by putting your face next to a pile of smoking, sizzling meat and vegetables was "open and obvious."

Jiminez appealed the case, and, earlier this week, almost five years after the incident, was told that he would not be getting any damages.

Cry-Baby #2: Kezia Perkins

[body_image width='1000' height='673' path='images/content-images/2015/03/05/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/05/' filename='cry-baby-of-the-week-333-body-image-1425519430.jpg' id='33146'] Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A woman with no handicapped tags lost out on a handicapped parking space to a woman with tags.

The appropriate response: Parking in a regular space.

The actual response: She allegedly chest-bumped the other woman to the ground, seriously injuring her.

Earlier this week, 32-year-old Kezia Perkins was attempting to park her car in a handicapped spot at a Walmart in Greenfield, Wisconsin.

As she tried to maneuver her car into the space, another car, driven by a 71-year-old woman, pulled into it.

The 71-year-old who took the spot had valid handicapped tags. Though Perkins had handicapped tags on her car, they were neither valid nor registered in her name. Her license had also been suspended.

Surveillance footage shows that, despite this, Perkins approached the other car and began shouting at the elderly driver through the passenger window for taking the space.

It's not clear exactly what was shouted, but the 71-year-old attempted to exit her car and make her way into the store. As she did this, Perkins can be seen on the surveillance footage knocking her to the ground. One witness said that Perkins had chest-bumped the woman.

According to a report on Fox 6, Perkins told police "It's not my fault the elderly woman bounced off my big [chest]."

As a result of being pushed to the ground, the woman required five hours of surgery to treat a fractured femur and fix a hip replacement that was messed up in the fall.

In a statement Perkins's attorney said that she is innocent: "This was an unfortunate accident that came about after a misunderstanding between two individuals. Ms. Perkins is, herself, disabled, however the fact that her disability is not immediately noticeable led to confusion between the two women. More than anything, this case highlights the need for individuals to be aware of and sensitive to the fact that many people may suffer from disabilities and ailments that are not always readily noticeable. We believe that the facts will come out as this matter progresses and that ultimately Ms. Perkins will be cleared of the charges in this case."

The attorney did not specify which unnoticeable disability Perkins has that causes her to knock old ladies to the ground.

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A guy allegedly trashed a hair salon because he didn't like his haircut and another guy was accused of beating a baby for crying during Jerry Springer.

Winner: The guy who allegedly beat a baby :(

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

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A sex worker on Hull's Hessle Road. Photo by Ryan Fletcher.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

According to a new study, seven in ten UK sex workers previously worked in care jobs. The research, carried out by Leeds University, revealed that 71 percent of those surveyed had left health, social care, education, childcare, or charity roles to take up sex work. Financial hardship was the usual reason for the switch.

Given that most sex workers aren't in it for life, it seems fair to assume that a proportion might eventually choose to go back to their previous line of work. The problem is, for many, this will be impossible.

Sex workers in the UK are subject to a particular type of non-statutory reprimand: the "prostitutes caution." As the name implies, it's not quite the same as the regular kind of caution you might be landed with for shoplifting or being caught with a bit of weed.

Regular cautions require that:

- There must be evidence of guilt sufficient to give a realistic prospect of conviction.
- The offender must admit the offense.

In the case of a prostitutes caution, neither of these is required. According to the Crown Prosecution Service:

- The behavior leading to a prostitutes caution need not itself be evidence of a criminal offense.
- There is no requirement for a man or woman to admit guilt before being given a prostitutes caution and there is no right of appeal.

So sex workers suspected of soliciting (it's legal to buy and sell sex in the UK, but illegal to solicit or work together as a group in a flat) can be slapped with a caution, even if there's not enough evidence to take the matter to court. Want to call foul? Tough: there's no right of appeal.

Cautions remain on your record. If you want to go into work that requires you to interact with children or vulnerable adults (i.e. most care jobs), cautions will show up on an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check (previously called a Criminal Records Bureau, or CRB, check). And if a potential employer sees you've got cautions, there's a good chance you won't get the job. In some cases, it's probably not even worth applying.

Joanne, in her 40s, is the primary caregiver for her severely disabled daughter. Sex work, she says, is simply a way of putting food on the table when choices are limited.

"I've always said I was a part-time prostitute and a full-time mother," she tells me. "I used to go out working when I had bills to pay or things I needed to buy for my daughter."

Joanne's been working on the streets for 25 years. In that time, she's been stopped by the police and has ended up with a record. This record meant that, when Joanne was offered another job, she had to turn it down.

"Social services approached me and asked if I'd be an emergency carer," Joanne says. "I have a daughter who's severely disabled so I'm used to giving injections and tube feeding. I'm used to looking after adults with multiple disabilities. Because my council house has a spare room, I could have done emergency care.

"But because the job involves working with vulnerable kids and adults I'd have to have a full police check. The job would have been ideal for me, but I couldn't even say I was interested or I would have lost my own daughter. As she's classed as a vulnerable adult and I have a record for prostitution, they could have said my house wasn't a suitable environment for her."

It's galling to imagine a qualified, eager caregiver forced to feign disinterest when approached for work by social services. And Joanne's story isn't unique.

"Many sex workers want to go into the caring professions when they leave prostitution," Cari Mitchell from the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) tells me. "Understandably, they often feel uniquely qualified for jobs that require empathy and resilience. Having a caution on your record bars you from any job working with children or vulnerable people. Teaching, nursing, and care work are virtually impossible to get into."

The implications of these cautions are far reaching.

"Cautions undermine sex workers' safety," says Mitchell. "Women who report rape to the police with a caution on their record are more likely to be dismissed or even threatened with prosecution for prostitution offenses. Fear of getting a caution drives sex workers into side streets away from the police, isolating women from the community and any prospect of help if they're attacked."

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Photo by Chris Beckett via.

And it's not as though these cautions are handed out sparingly. In the West Midlands alone, 800 were dispensed during a two-year period ending in 2014. In a single London borough, 94 were issued between 2012 and 2013.

Nigel Richardson, a criminal defense lawyer with Hodge Jones and Allen, isn't impressed.

"These cautions are a bit odd and anomalous," he told me. "They have no statutory basis and I think came about in the 1950s as part of a police scheme not to prosecute women who were allegedly loitering. But they do not require any admission from the woman, just the record of two officers who believe her to be."

The apparently flimsy basis of these cautions is worrying, given that they remain on your criminal record. Richardson points out that a caution could be brought up during a subsequent prosecution and used as "proof" that a sex worker had persistently loitered.

Liz, another sex worker I spoke to, told me that her son is in jeopardy of losing custodial rights to his child because of her caution, which was mentioned in court. As Liz's son lives with her, the home has been deemed an unsuitable place for a child.

Liz got her caution four years ago. She was working as part of a co-operative of sex workers in a flat and thought she'd be doing everyone a favor by taking the blame and putting her hand up to brothel-keeping.

"There wasn't enough evidence to charge me, but my solicitor said I should accept the caution so it wouldn't go any further," Liz said. "You always accept what your solicitor tells you. I'd happily fight against it now, but at the time I was a bit naïve. It's only four years down the line, but it's too late now."

"Once you've got a record you're stuck on the streets. It's a vicious cycle."

There's no point pretending that having prostitution on your record doesn't carry a particular stigma. The thought of a potential boss having this information about you would be enough to put most people off applying for a job in the first place. But if care work is a field into which sex workers are likely to migrate, and if thousands of cautions are being handed out every year that prevent them from doing so, what amounts is a crisis.

"I don't know many career prostitutes," Joanne says. "I don't know many women who do it through choice. They work on the streets at certain times of their life because they need to. But it takes so many opportunities away and they don't realize it at the time. Once you've got a record you're stuck on the streets. It's a vicious cycle.

"The only thing we can do is decriminalize and clear people's records. It's the only chance people have got for coming off the streets and into other work. At the moment we're treated like criminals, like second class citizens. If the things that happen to us happened to office workers, there'd be an outrage."

Mitchell agrees that decriminalizing sex work is the only way out of this mess. When New Zealand decriminalized prostitution in 2003, sex workers' records were expunged. So why not here?

Some names have changed to protect interviewees' anonymity.

Follow Frankie on Twitter.

Nickelback has somehow managed to be universally reviled while also maintaining a successful career long after their contemporaries like Three Doors Down and Creed have slipped away. How has the band been able to sustain this long? The New Yorker pointed out that our collective loathing has something to do with it, and the band is good at recycling their own ideas, but ultimately, Nickelback is one of the biggest rock bands in the world because they're not afraid to experiment. They keep striving for more, like true artists should. They've really forged some new ground in their latest song, "She Keeps Me Up," and that ground is disgusting faux-disco pop with a chorus that includes the phrase "Coca-Cola roller coaster." Give it a watch and really soak in the surreality.

Want Some In-Depth Music Stories from VICE?

1. A Place to Bury Strangers on the End of Death by Audio and Their New Album 'Transfixiation'
2. The Final Frontiers of Private-Issue New Age Music
3. The Worst Music Video Ever Starring the World's Biggest Dickhead
4. Watch a Documentary About Norwegian Black Metal

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A police escort helps former universities minister David Willetts escape from angry students in London last year. Photo by Jake Lewis.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In Britain today, you don't have to look far to find people getting rich helping vampiric institutions feast on society. From the tax-dodging bankers at HSBC to the ever-available shills in Westminster, if there's a fast heap of pounds to be made at the expense of others, the modern British professional is your man.

"I do want to have the standard of living that my professional background would normally entitle me to have," was the former MP Malcolm Rifkind's justification for using his publicly funded job as a calling card for private enrichment. All he did was inadvertently sum up the staggeringly entitled and arrogant carelessness of a whole class of individual who have ceased to see anything more in work than the number of zeros on their bank statement.

This week, a survey published by UCU, the University and College Union, secured the place of corporate university executives in the pantheon of Great British Wealth Extractors. The survey reveals that university vice-chancellors, who recently voiced their opposition to Labour's proposed cutting of tuition fees, are paid an average salary of £260,000 [$390,000] a year. In the last five years, their salaries have increased by 26 percent, while the academics teaching students and doing research have seen their significantly lower pay drop 12 percent in real terms.

The top ten earners among the vice-chancellors received between £392,000 [$590,000] and £623,000 [$938,000]—that final salary being pulled in by the outgoing head of Nottingham Trent, Neil Gorman. To be fair, he probably earned it. After all, Nottingham Trent is definitely in the top three universities in Nottingham. A special shout out must also go to Exeter University's Sir Steve Smith, who last year somehow managed to spend £23,749 [$35,786] on flights (99 percent of them business or first class) and £20,329 [$30,632] on hotels. Even Vince Cable has called this level of pay "hard to swallow."


Why does this matter? Because these executives are implementing a corporate system that is turning universities from places of learning, designed to turn students on to the many wonders of the intellectual life, into businesses providing a service to paying customers. In doing this, vice-chancellors and their fellow administrators have become hated by the very people who, along with the students, are meant to be at the heart of any university: the academics.

While the debate about tuition fees is an ever-present in British political discourse, the effect that the corporatization of our universities is having on the people who teach in them and how this process is destroying a higher education system that Britain could once take justifiable pride in is less talked about.

Since 1998, when Tony Blair's Labour government introduced fees of £1,000 [$1,500] a year for students, the "real world" benefits of an education—getting a job, earning more money—have become the only things university administrators push onto their students and professors. The idea that you might go to university in order to learn new things or for an "enlightening experience," as the dictionary defines "education," is an idea that is being crushed in favor of an anxiety-inducing corporate model that sees students saddled with debt and teachers angry and depressed. It is an educational model that perfectly fits the bland, soul-crushing, privatized world we live in, one that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

In this world, university education is all well and good for those who can afford it or for those who come from a class that expects it, but for the rest, a kind of monotonous training will simply have to do. The British government and its backers in business seem to favor a model laid out in 1909 by US president and then president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson:

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

The mass, then, will toil for the elite. To bring that about, the introduction and hiking of fees that burdens students has been complemented by cuts in funding, the axing of courses, attacks on academics' pensions, demands to produce more work and the importing of managers from the private sector employed to control the direction of the university. "Lecturers and university teachers are becoming more like knowledge workers," Waseem Yaqoob, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge told me, "pumping out the hours to meet student expectations, which are in turn set, not by the students, but by the corporate university."

The managers being brought in because of their experience in the private sector are used to climbing the corporate ladder and moving from one job to the next, something that is anathema to the traditionally settled life of the university. They've got a hard-on for a model they imagine is American but which, while it may exist in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, doesn't exist in the Ivy League universities whose success they long to emulate because at those universities, the academic faculty controls the direction of the institution.

Corporate university administrators are valued for taking the "tough decisions," which often means firing people. As Paul Gilroy, the author of a number of groundbreaking works of British scholarship, including There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack, put it to me:

"The neo-liberal churn means that a university is changed just for the sake of changing it. There's no thought that actually a university might need to be a quiet, still place, with a library that functions, a place for curiosity and contemplation and with access to books that may go unused for years."

Last October, at King's College London, the irony of the new reality of life in Britain's universities was on full display when David Willetts, a Conservative politician best known for implementing the rise in tuition fees, was appointed a visiting professor. King's College's president, Ed Byrne, trumpeted the arrival, though not by students, who took his car hostage when he turned up to give a speech.

Byrne then decided that the university, which was founded in 1829, needed to be renamed. In an internal email to staff, he explained that King's College London will now officially be known as "King's London": "I believe that in today's highly competitive global marketplace, King's needs to be bold about its ambitions and shout about its many achievements," Byrne wrote, as he prepped some ambitious hashtags.

To academics, all of this feels like a sick joke. With students increasingly anxious about debt and future employment, one senior professor told me that Willetts' appointment was a slap in the face of the students. Teachers everywhere have noted this increased anxiety among their ranks. "My students are lovely and very bright but they're very fearful of failure and they're wanting us to give them a template of what to do in the future," Andrew Warnes, a professor in the English department at Leeds University, told me.

Warnes and other professors at Leeds compared this to students from earlier years who, they said, hadn't been imprisoned by the need to make their education immediately service their debts. At a number of universities, teachers have been told they are no longer allowed to accept Christmas presents from their students. That would spoil the client relationship teachers are now supposed to have with their students.

Administrations will brook no dissent. Thomas Docherty, a professor of English at Warwick University, was suspended last year for making "ironic" comments during job interviews, for sighing and for using negative body language. Like a parent throwing a tantrum, the Warwick administration had sent Docherty to the naughty step because he dared to indicate his dissent.

As ridiculous as suspending someone for "irony" is, though, Docherty's protest also seems desperately futile. Like much of the workforce, Britain's academics are bereft of any real power and have been left wondering how to resist the changes being made to their work. They see their departments cut, their libraries meddled with and their time eroded but they struggle to find a way to stem the tide.

What is clear is that the disparity between what politicians and administrators think an education should be for and what students and academics think it should be for is becoming increasingly stark.

David Russell, a lecturer in English Literature at King's College London who has previously held fellowships at Harvard and Columbia universities, spoke to me about this philosophical divide. He feels as though there are too few conversations about a university's role in society:

"Are they institutions that everybody feels they have a stake in, whether they are students or not? Are they entrepreneurial businesses, hunting out new streams of profit? Are they training centres for employable skills? Are they places that train thinking, particularly the critical thinking required if we are to live in a healthy democracy? Do they introduce students, and so the wider culture, to resources of history and art and literature that could make them feel more alive... And if some of these descriptions have come to seem expendable, or luxuries, affordable only by the wealthy few, then I think that's a serious problem for all of us."

At Britain's oldest and most renowned seats of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, the college system gives academics much more power over their students' education and the wealth and prestige of the institutions protects them from some of the more desperate measures universities take to market themselves.

Away from these two elite institutions, Britain's universities, once places of radical learning and intellectual curiosity, are being turned into bland corporations designed to churn out workforce drones with safe middle-of-the-road opinions and harmless middle-of-the-road minds. This process leaves the institutions themselves neutered as vital voices of dissent in our society, something that is bad for our democracy.

A number of Britain's universities have long been regarded as some of the best in the world. This can't be said about Britain's big corporations and yet it is the corporate model being brought to the university, not the other way round.

At the end of my conversation with Andrew Warnes, I asked him if there was any hope. "My students have a passion for the books and I still have fantastic discussions with them, so there is some optimism," he said. "I'm waiting for common sense to prevail and for people to realise that treating a university like a business is not a good idea... I have a young family, I have to feel optimistic."

Follow Oscar on Twitter.

[body_image width='1600' height='1067' path='images/content-images/2015/03/04/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/04/' filename='ematch-fixing-why-poverty-and-chaos-is-driving-pro-gamers-to-risk-everything-105-body-image-1425468051.jpg' id='32849']

Photo from Intel Extreme Masters, Poland 2013 via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"I felt like absolute trash. I was really, really upset. How do I explain this to my family and friends? I've spent so many years sacrificing so much for this, whether it be going out with my friends, moving to Europe... It took its toll on me but I wanted to play in the high-intensity matches. It was never about the money.

"How do I tell people close to me that all this that I worked so hard far, that I love doing more than anything else in the world, is over? And how do I explain to them that I did match-fixing?

"I wouldn't say I was suicidal. But I didn't want to do anything, or talk to anybody. I had no energy, I was self-destructive. It's hard to describe how shitty you feel."

If you follow sport, this account might take you back to the South African cricketers convicted of throwing games in the early 00s, or the snooker player Stephen Lee, found guilty of the same offense and removed from the sport's world rankings a few months ago. But this testimony doesn't come from snooker, cricket, or any other physical sport. It comes from one of a new breed of fallen heroes: the e-sports match-fixers, professional video gamers whose lives have been ruined when they are barely out of their teens.

The name of this particular fall guy is Joshua Nissan, or "Steel" to give him his e-sports handle. Just over six months ago he and his iBUYPOWER teammates were feted as the best Counter-Strike players in America. The team name may have left a bit to be desired, but these guys were on their way to becoming gods of their sport, their gung-ho play style and charismatic personae attracting legions of fans.

On 21 August 2014, iBUYPOWER were due to play a tournament match against the even more catchily named NetcodeGuides.com in Philadelphia. Steel and his comrades were knackered, having just flown in from Cologne. There was nothing on the game as both teams were already in the playoffs. Steel's captain, Sam "Dazed" Marine, owned both teams. If you wanted to seduce someone into fixing a match, you couldn't have wished for better conditions.

Having checked the odds, Marine and his players started plotting. They asked a friend to place multiple bets against them online using "skins," in-game accessories that could be sold for real money elsewhere. Gamblers are only allowed to bet four skins at once, but this proxy had numerous accounts. The players reckoned they would make $1,200 each.

"WE THOUGHT IT WAS THE PERFECT SCAM"

Many insiders have accused Marine of manipulating his charges, but Steel insists otherwise. "All of us agreed to it. He did raise it, but it's something that every player's been tempted by. He was the one who was serious about it. The rest of us were like, 'Ah, what could happen?'

"Of all the games we could have done, this made the most sense. It was a regular season, the win/loss had no effect on either team, and it was a map we hadn't practiced because we'd been overseas. We thought it was the perfect scam."

When the match started, iBUYPOWER were atrocious, launching kamikaze forays one minute, then hanging back with the opponent at their mercy. Some have suggested Marine's team were laughing as they lost, but Steel denies this, claiming the approach was more subtle.

Recalling the tactics his team employed, Steel says: "You do plays that aren't textbook. You peek when you shouldn't, you hide when you peek, you don't push a bomb when you're supposed to. It's basically a positional and timing thing."

iBUYPOWER might even have got away with it, too, despite all the innuendo, were it not for the Daily Dot, which obtained screengrabs of a pre-game chat with professional player Shahzeb "ShahZam" Khan, who knew Marine's guys and predicted the fix. Subsequent texts posted online by the girlfriend of Steel's colleague Derek "dboorN" Boorn corroborated this, and eventually Counter-Strike developer Valve banned all seven iBP players from any of its future tournaments. In effect, this finished their careers.

Valve's punishment has ruined the professional lives of seven young men, all still in their 20s, and has been widely hailed as tough but fair. Yet, in reality, this is just the latest in a slew of scandals to tarnish the burgeoning world of e-sports, which have snared some of the biggest players on the planet and brought about appalling real-world tragedies.

SHOCK AND SUICIDE

In April 2010, a cabal of 11 professional Korean StarCraft players received life bans for conspiring to rig matches. The dirty almost-dozen included Ma "sAviOr" Jae-yoon, reputedly the best StarCraft player in the world. This was like Michael Jordan or Lionel Messi being outed as crooks.

Last year another Korean superstar, League of Legends player Cheon "Promise" Min-Ki, revealed he had deliberately killed his character in the Champions Spring 2013 tournament. Creaking under the weight of his shame, Promise tried to kill himself for real, jumping 12 stories out of his building and only surviving because he landed on a sheltered recycling area.

Sadly, it seems the problems are actually getting worse. Just a month ago, in the wake of the iBUYPOWER scandal, Valve suspended a further 19 Counter-Strike players across three European teams. The Filipino e-sports community has been stained by allegations of match-fixing against a pair of Dota 2 teams, and Korea's StarCraft II scene is a fixer's paradise according to revered manager Olivia Wong, who suggested the problem was rooted in the proliferation of smaller competitions offering paltry prize money.

Wong's diagnosis appears to cut to the core of the issue. While audiences for e-sports can be huge—the final of a 2013 League of Legends competition pulled in 32 million viewers—this is rarely matched in player earnings. Marquee stars such as Carlos Rodriguez, recently described as the "David Beckham of e-sports," can boast annual earnings approaching seven figures. But most earn a pittance, and there have been several examples of start-up teams going bankrupt and withholding payment from the players who have dropped everything to join them.

Steel, who began playing professionally in 2008, claims he earned somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 in prize money during his e-sporting life, and had to sleep on friends' couches when his team went bankrupt in 2012. One of those friends was Daily Dot journalist Richard Lewis, who, with caustic irony, ultimately played a major part in breaking the match-fixing story.

Lewis says: "That's one of the saddest parts of the story for me personally, that I knew the player it was going to affect. I had seen Josh at several events and he'd been rendered homeless and had nowhere to go, I felt compelled to put him up on my sofa.

"It was really sad for me to have to do that to him because he's already been through so much, chasing that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I think it's fair, but still sad."

"YOU CAN DIAL IT DOWN BY 2 Percent"

Lewis, who's been covering e-sports since the late 1990s, says fixing taints all kinds of e-sports games. The precise method of fixing will vary according to the game, from a brainless foray on Counter-Strike to an open goal miss in a soccer tournament. But the core principle is the same: just play to lose, and, unlike the iBUYPOWER crew, use your professional prowess to ensure it isn't obvious.

"There are two principal ways to achieve the fix," Lewis says. "The safest way is to simply say, 'Let's play badly and lose, no need to tell anyone, we just play badly and say we've had a bad day.' The other way is when you get two teams, you have a conspiracy and share the proceeds. That can be a bit more dangerous because the more people that know, the more potential for a leak. But, in both cases, if you're a really adept player, you can just dial it down by 2 percent, and that's enough."

Sometimes they bet using skins, like Steel and his teammates. In other games, they use real money; this is particularly prevalent in Dota 2, a game whose fan base is concentrated in Russia and Eastern Europe. Often, the fix is conceived by the players themselves, but not always. Fallen League of Legends icon Promise claimed he was forced to fix by his unscrupulous manager, while sAviOr and the StarCraft 11 were approached by illegal betting websites.

Like Olivia Wong, Lewis believes financial hardship is a major reason why so many players cheat, and even sympathizes with them to some extent, suggesting they are often employed in conditions of virtual serfdom.

"Where does match-fixing thrive in football?" asks Lewis. "It thrives in leagues where you have two things. The first is poverty. If you are a professional athlete and not making a lot of money, you'll always be tempted to make a little bit more through nefarious means.

"The other factor is disparity of wealth. The average Premier League wage in football is something like £80,000 [$120,00] a week, but in the Championship it's £8,000 [$12,000], so these Championship players get told, 'Look, you're never going to be Wayne Rooney,' and that's how they tempt them (as happened when five League Two players were found guilty of betting against their team).

"In e-sports these people, in a lot of cases, make next to nothing. [iBUYPOWER] were considered the top team in the US and yet they weren't even salaried. How can you expect them not to want to make money on the side?"

The average age of an e-sportsman is seriously young: The majority of players start at 17 and are on the scrapheap by their mid 20s. Lewis says, "You've got such a short amount of time, the attitude is, 'Grab what I can, when I can.' And that makes you more susceptible. You've got to think, 'Me, me, me,' all the time."

"THEY CAN'T HAVE EYES EVERYWHERE"

But, if the lure of match-fixing is so powerful, why is it not more effectively policed?

It seems that the e-sports world has almost outgrown itself. What began as a cottage industry is now a fully fledged global enterprise, and the administrators are unable to keep up. This is reflected in the sheer number of competitions: there are almost 1,300 tournaments for League of Legends, and over 2,200 for StarCraft II. Yet e-sports still doesn't have its own codified set of rules, or its own regulatory body. There's no e-Fifa or e-IOC.

Lewis says: "When you create a computer game you have no idea, even as the developer, how popular it's going to get, or whether people will host their own tournaments. In most cases there's no licensing required—the developers actually want people to create their own tournament, because it draws attention. A lot of them rely on volunteers.

"There are some structured leagues. Riot Games has the LCS, ESL has lots of leagues and ladders, and they even have the Pro Series, which runs in every country. They used to have the Major Series, the equivalent of the Champions League. But when you've got such a huge organic community, they can't have eyes everywhere.

"It's always been a very competitive industry, and because it's a fledgling industry everyone was looking at everyone else. There was no opportunity to have a regulatory body and so all of these smaller leagues get to operate with complete autonomy. If they don't have the resources to monitor what's going on properly, they will get caught out."

The other side of the problem is the sheer number of websites used to place bets. The site used by iBUYPOWER's proxy was perfectly legal, and agreed to help Valve with its inquiry. Yet it seems there are also swarms of back-alley bookmakers scrambling for a slice of the pie.

Lewis admits there's no way to measure the number of websites, adding: "I've come across a few private ones, particularly Korean ones, because obviously all forms of gambling are illegal there. How do you even know what's going on? [The iBUYPOWER] incident is probably the tip of the iceberg. There's probably people who are getting away with bigger sums of money."

"HOW DO YOU FIX HUMAN GREED?"

Thankfully, it seems e-sports will soon have its own regulatory body. Preliminary roundtables have taken place between key stakeholders, with a view to setting up a global body capable of imposing a uniform set of standards on a world currently hamstrung by its commitment to autonomy.

Lewis is playing a key role in these discussions. However, he doubts that a global regulator will be able to police the entire e-sports realm effectively.

"We haven't grown enough as an industry to really figure out how [the global body] would be funded, how it would work, what sort of powers it would have. And you'd have to have a reason to cede to the power. If you're a small league and want to operate outside the overseer, there's no way they could be forced. A lot of people don't want to lose autonomy over their business.

"Eventually we'll get there but it won't be able to govern everything. I don't necessarily think the problems will get worse, but how do you fix human greed? You can be as proactive as you want, but there'll always be people who slip through the crack."

When I ask Steel for his advice to would-be fixers, he is unequivocal. "Don't do it. Not because of the punishment, but because it's wrong. Just because you think you can get away with something doesn't justify anything. Don't piss away your dreams."

But will the cases of players like Steel, the stories of career ruin, remorse and even suicide, wipe out match-fixing in e-sports? If you were a betting man, you wouldn't put money on it.

Follow Gareth on Twitter.

Last month, Vice President Joe Biden visited VICE to tour our Brooklyn office and meet with Shane Smith as well as the rest of our staff. Between giving a speech about the importance of young people reading the news and speaking to VICE News's field reporters via Skype, Biden sat down with Shane Smith for a discussion about the devastating impact of climate change.

The interview will be airing tonight on HBO as part of the season premiere of VICE, and we're happy to share an exclusive clip here before you watch the episode. Check it out above.

The new season of VICE premieres tonight—Friday, March 9—at 11PM on HBO.

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Toronto ambulance. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

On the morning of April 10, 2012 Sgt. Douglas Marshall, a 22-year veteran of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) entered the Highway 12 detachment for the start of his shift and found it empty. The 45-year-old father of two drew his weapon, turned it on himself, and pulled the trigger.

Sgt. Marshall had been acting erratically since the summer of 2011. After responding to a number of traumatic calls, including a suicide and the death of a four-year-old, the veteran officer began suffering from nightmares and insomnia. Once a proud athlete and competitor, Marshall stopped running, missing the annual Terry Fox run for the first time in six years. He became impulsive, waking his son up late at night to ask about school or his hockey team. He also started suffering from flashbacks to previous trauma.

Sgt. Marshall was diagnosed with PTSD and briefly sent to a clinic for treatment in October 2011, but by mid-January, he was back on the job, and had his service weapon returned to him by February. It was that pistol he used to kill himself.

Sgt. Marshall's story is a tragedy, but it isn't a rare one in Canada. First responders across the country struggle with PTSD and suicide every day. Just how widespread this trend was remained unknown for years because no one was keeping track of the numbers. Furious at the lack of record keeping, one group is starting to shed some light on first responders' struggle with PTSD.

In 1988, Toronto paramedic Vince Savoia was called to the brutal rape and murder of Tema Conter. That call changed his life. Conter's body was covered in stab wounds, however, she looked exactly like Savoia's fiancee, so much so that his partner asked if it was her. He left the profession after that and suffered from the memory for 12 years before being diagnosed with PTSD.

Recognizing he wasn't the only one struggling, Savoia founded the Tema Conter Memorial Trust (TEMA) in 2001 to raise awareness for PTSD. Frustrated with the lack of available numbers, TEMA began keeping track of suicides in the first responder community on Apr. 28, 2014 and releasing them to the media.

"We felt that this needed to be done because we felt that this needed to be on the radar," Savoia told VICE. "Whether or not provincial governments are keeping track, again, we haven't been made aware. If they are smart they should be keeping track of what's happening in their provinces because it is an issue."

The numbers that TEMA reports are tragic. Every month, first responders all over the country are hurting themselves, sometimes fatally, to escape their PTSD. While the majority of media outlets have been recently been reporting this information as a shocking spike in suicides, the reality is far more unsettling.

This isn't a spike. It is an ongoing trend in Canada that has been quietly accepted as the norm in the first responder community. In 2014, there were more suicides among police, fire, and paramedic divisions (22) than in the military (19). Since TEMA began keeping track of first responder suicides in April of 2014, that number has risen to 26, including six paramedics, five firefighters, and 15 police officers. All but one of these were men, and the majority (17) happened in Ontario. What's more shocking is that those numbers would have gone unreported if it wasn't for TEMA.

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Infographic by Chris Bilton

If Savoia hadn't started recording and distributing these statistics, the public would still be ignorant of the actual price our first line pays for PTSD. The organizations that should have been keeping these numbers, and keeping Canada's uniformed safe, have failed to do so. According to Alberta Health Services, employee suicides "haven't been a statistic [AHS] has tracked since it began providing EMS service in 2009. We don't believe the previous providers tracked that either." WSIB keeps the number of PTSD claims approved in Ontario but not who filed them or what department they came from. The OPP did not to respond to numerous request to talk about this story and their policies.

We have a responsibility to the men and women in uniform to keep them safe, because they would do the same for us. By not keeping the numbers, we haven't kept our side of the deal. Accurate statistics on first responder suicides could have been used to implement better policies and protect more members, but no one in government is recording these numbers. TEMA, with their limited resources, is effectively doing someone else's job.

Roméo Dallaire, retired lieutenant-general and the honorary head of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Association of Canada, agreed with Savoia that accurate statistics need to be kept. Dallaire led United Nations peacekeepers in Rwanda during the brutal genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus and his experience there left him suicidal and depressed. Dallaire struggled with his PTSD for years, attempting suicide four times, and has since become an outspoken advocate for better mental health treatment in the armed forces.

"There was this philosophy for a long time that the less you talk about suicide the better," Dallaire says."You didn't want to give the give the impression it might be OK or even glorify it.

"That, to me, was one of the most horrific mistakes we made. We have to tell people that good people are killing themselves and that there is a reason for it. We had better get at it and make sure others don't suffer the same fate."

He says the military had come a long way since he started advocating for better PTSD treatment in 1997. Dallaire believes the treatment of first responders in Canada is still years behind the military's practices.

"First responders are still at stage one," Dallaire explains. "They've just made the realization that these people are vulnerable, that they are being taken for granted, and that they won't be able to carry on."

Despite the shockingly underreported statistics TEMA has collected, Dallaire remains optimistic that changes are coming in first responder organizations.

"In police forces, firefighters, medical, even teachers, there's a desire to provide much more," he says. "The difficulty is convincing people that the injured aren't sick, they're injured, and that you don't get rid of them, you support them and you can bring them back."

It's a small but significant difference. Dallaire explains that first responders and military personnel exist in an atmosphere that is, "in essence, Darwinian." The men and women in uniform are proud of their responsibilities. In those organizations, admitting to mental health issues can be seen as showing weakness. He compares the stigma of reporting PTSD as a first responder today to the stigma faced by military personnel 18 years ago.

"PTSD is tolerated even less in these organizations than it is in the general population because they demand such a high standard. It makes it hard for these guys to feel like they're being supported," says Dallaire. "One of the things we did in the military was we called it an 'operational stress injury.' An injury. These people aren't sick, they don't have a disease—it's an injury. So how do you treat an injury? You treat it with the same sense of urgency as a physical injury. You get in there early and you take care of it.

"Secondly, you treat it as honourable. There's no shame in being injured psychologically. It took a lot of work to convince people who said, 'You know, I was injured, I've lost an arm.' This guy has lost his mind, he's injured too."

The stigma is real and it is dangerous. In 2012, Ontario Ombudsman André Marin released a report that investigated suicide and depression in the OPP. The 158-page document, titled In The Line Of Duty, found that 23 OPP officers had committed suicide from 1989 to 2012. Excerpts from "Over The Blue Wall," the personal memoir of an officer named "Henry," were published in the report.

"Everything from picking up people's parts from under subway trains, to kids' pieces from under cars, to checking dead and suicide victims for identification or evidence... I had seen and done it all, and like a good policeman, putting personal feelings up on the emotional shelf where it belonged, to be dealt with later, much later, when that time would be... no one, including me, knew..."

Officer Henry applied for and successfully received benefits from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) to treat his psychological injuries, but in 2005 his benefits were challenged by fellow officers.

"We respectfully point out that this case once more illustrates the urgent need for review of entitlement for traumatic mental stress benefits, and demands that the WSIB stop wasting the taxpayers' money in this fashion," a unit commander wrote to the WSIB after Henry began attending community events again. Prior to this, Henry had spent months alone in his bedroom, only leaving when recommended by his doctor. He kept his benefits, but the accusations hurt.

Officer Henry killed himself in 2009.

Marin supplied the OPP with 28 recommendations in 2012. Echoing Dallaire and Savoia, Marin called for accurate statistics to be kept regarding officer suicides and slammed the OPP for not keeping them sooner. Unfortunately, the majority of Marin's recommendations have not been followed.

As noted above, the OPP did not respond to requests to talk about this story.

On January 26 of this year, Greg Turner, husband, father of two, and paramedic of 16 years took his own life after a shift at Edmonton's Kildale neighbourhood dispatch station. He was 41. It was the fourth first-responder suicide in Canada that month.

"I am broken," wrote his wife, Bridget, in an emotional Facebook post. "I know in my heart that this was not a choice. He did not choose death over us. Depression made that choice for him and it was a battle he was too sick to fight. It is a disease that kills without the right treatment, just like cancer."

An anonymous letter from an Edmonton first responder published online by the Edmonton Sun in February brutally reinforces the fact that this problem is widespread in the community. In it, the author struggles with his own PTSD and praises Turner for his bravery.

"I wish I could tell you today that after all I've gone through with the mental health system (I've barely scratched the surface of my experience of the system in this letter) that I've been cured but the honest truth is that I will never be cured," the letter read.

"I will live with my depression and other mental illness until the day I die, I will forever be plagued by the thoughts that I should have done my wife and kids a favour and went out like Greg did long ago instead of subjecting them to a life lived with a person who no longer has emotion happy or sad thanks to depression and or the drugs that treat it. I will continue to feel a bit of jealousy each time a news story airs of a first responder who has committed suicide or was killed in the line of duty, and I'll continue to wish that I too could have been killed in the line of duty so my family would have the memory of all the uniforms at my funeral and they could be proud of how I left earth.

"Instead even though the real me died at work years ago my family is stuck with an empty shell of the man I was, and even though I try my best to be the man they deserve I always feel they deserve more."

Stress injuries cause tremendous strain on the victim and their families. But experts point out that support from those closest to the victim—their family and peers—is critical to treating the injury. Dallaire explains the relationship between professional treatment and peer support.

"If you have a meeting with a psychiatrist once a week, and you are feeling the hurt during the week, the peers are there to listen, to respond, to fight those urges to self-destruct because a lot of people forget that those urges, and PTSD, can be terminal."

Dallaire goes on to explain the stigma from the point of view of someone who had battled with mental health injuries in the past.

"Those who are in uniform, they wear that uniform because they want to be distinctive and do a job," he says. "They feel they are part of an organization and that they have a responsibility to that organization. That they have a responsibility to perform."

That sense of responsibility drives first responders to do brave and heroic things every day. But that same sense of responsibility, that determination to keep working and keep saving and keep ignoring the psychological damage, is killing them.

Twenty-six first responders that we know of have taken their own lives between April 29, 2014, and today. That statistic isn't cherry picked. It's currently the only number we have, and it's an average of one suicide every two weeks.

There will be more. And most won't be reported. There is an officer, a paramedic, a firefighter, who is struggling right now to hide their injuries. They are suffering and will not survive the year.

Tomorrow, all over the country, Canadians will dial 911 and call for help.

And even though it's killing them, help will come.

Follow Mack Lamoureux and Alex MacPherson on Twitter.

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Photo by Jan Groover, courtesy Janet Borden, Inc.

Still-life photography has become an epidemic. As a quick scroll through Tumblr will tell you, any 13-year-old with a camera flash can throw some pineapples onto a brightly-colored backdrop and call it art.

Not that all of these photos are bad—the British Journal of Photography featured a still life by Catherine Losing and Anna Lomax on the cover of its most recent issue, and the FOAM Museum's show Under Construction: New Directions in American Photography , (which opens in Brooklyn next week) is primarily composed of studio work. I myself curated a show on the topic of visually indulgent still-life photography at the Camera Club of New York in 2013, and VICE's 2010 photo issue was still life–themed, with a Roe Ethridge cover featuring a moldy bowl of fruit. Writer Christopher Schreck was the first person (to my knowledge) to put this trend into words, in his 2012 article " On the Still-Life New Wave."

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This resurgence of still life photography makes sense—subjects are cyclical, like everything else. Ways of photographing go in and out of style, and I like that most of these new photographers are generally not trying to imitate the look of Dutch still life paintings, as so many have before. Even so, I have heard older photographers call the trend cowardly. Some claim it represents an unwillingness on the part of young photographers to go out and confront the real world. My problem is not that still-life photography is cowardly, but that most of the still lifes being made today are extremely lazy. This genre has a history in painting and other media upon which to draw, but its photographic lineage is rich as well. For this reason, it's been encouraging to see a number of photography shows cropping up that focus on the great historical masters of the photographic still life. On view now are two exhibitions of incredibly relevant still life photographers, both of them women known for the work they produced in the 80s and 90s.

[body_image width='1000' height='707' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='still-life-photography-405-body-image-1425670289.jpg' id='33891']Documentation of Barbara Kasten working in her studio, New York, New York, 1983. Photo: Kurt Kilgus. Courtesy of the artist.

Barbara Kasten: Stages, will remain on view at ICA Philadelphia through August 16. Although Kasten is recognized as a pioneering photographer and interdisciplinary artist, this is the first-ever major survey of her work. Looking back, her intricate studio constructions may remind viewers of a certain age of the funky-fresh designs of Trapper Keeper™ covers, but it's important to remember this was all done in-camera.

[body_image width='1000' height='1261' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='still-life-photography-405-body-image-1425670431.jpg' id='33892']Barbara Kasten, Construct 32, 1986, Cibachrome, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist

New York is currently host to dual exhibitions of seminal photographer Jan Groover's work currently being staged by Janet Borden, Inc. On view only through this Sunday, March 8, at the Park Avenue Armory as part of the ADAA's presumptuously titled art fair, The Art Show, are large-scale vintage prints of Groover's studio constructions and kitchen still lifes. This is the work she is best known for, but Borden has staged a simultaneous exhibition of Groover's large-format street photographs of Brooklyn, called Industrials, at her gallery's permanent residence on Prince Street in Soho. In a 1997 catalogue essay, MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski wrote of Groover, "Only a fool would argue with the success of so excellent an artist." It's interesting to compare Groover's gaze turned onto the real world versus the studio, if for no other reason than to marvel at the versatility of her genius.

[body_image width='978' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='still-life-photography-405-body-image-1425670714.jpg' id='33894']Jan Groover, Untitled, 1978. 16x20" C-print, courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

One of the first strictly fine art photography galleries in New York, Janet Borden, Inc. has seen trends in the medium come and go. So I went to the Armory to talk to Janet to get her thoughts on the work for sale, as well as the current state of still-life photography.

VICE: Tell us about Jan Groover.
Janet Borden: Jan Groover is the best still-life photographer of the latter half of the 20th century. After [Edward] Weston, and [Edward] Steichen... John Szarkowski of MoMA wrote that, repeatedly. She was born in Plainfield, New Jersey (the same town that Irving Penn was born in, I might add). She was originally trained as a painter at the Hartford Art School, where she eventually became a teacher. She married Bruce Boice, who was a painter. He showed at Sonnabend Gallery. Then she just started doing photographs, but thinking about the same things. She started making triptychs, which is a format that Boice also liked to use. We sold one to the Met a couple years ago, when she was still alive. She would stand in one place, and wait for a blue car, a red car, and a yellow car to come by. After she got tired of doing triptychs, she didn't know what to do, and her husband literally said, "Go photograph the kitchen sink." He managed to shut her up, but she took him quite literally, and started photographing just the shit that was in the sink.

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Jan Groover, 8x10" platinum print, courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

That's what I know her for—the kitchen implements.
And then she put it in the studio and started making these arrangements. The amazing thing is how abstract the photographs are without being abstract. That's conceptually a really hard thing to do.

They're also very complicated camera techniques. I remember in large-format class, we would look at Jan's photographs and try to deconstruct how she had made them.
She learned how to do platinum printing, and made a lot of platinum prints. Since that requires contact printing, it was good she used a large format camera, an 8x10 or 5x7.

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Jan Groover, 30x40" C-print, courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

I'm specifically interested in you showing this work now, because there's a trend of young photographers making still lifes.
Right.

Have you noticed people looking to Groover as a model for this kind of work?
Walead Beshty did that show that was at Petzl last summer, and he borrowed some Groovers for that. So she's become this grand old dame. Wallspace did a show last month that included her with some younger people. I don't know that they're interested in the same things. I love Instagram and all the wacky stuff, but it's not the same as this kind of formalism.

A view camera also allows you to draw with space in a different way than a phone camera or digital camera does.
And I do like a big 8x10 negative.

People are losing track of how large-format photography looks. It looks different.
They don't know it because they don't see it. Unless you're trained, you might not recognize the difference. People cannot believe that the negatives are actually this size.

[body_image width='982' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='still-life-photography-405-body-image-1425671266.jpg' id='33897']Jan Groover, 8x10" platinum print, courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

Platinum printing is a contact printing process, so the negatives are exactly the size of the print. This is a photo I studied in art school. There was a lot of discussion about the way the flower lines up with the table.

There's also a Barbara Kasten show up right now in Philadelphia.
Right, at the ICA. The curator stopped by last night.

[body_image width='1024' height='740' path='images/content-images/2015/03/06/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/06/' filename='still-life-photography-405-body-image-1425671602.jpg' id='33900']Jan Groover, 30x40" C-print, courtesy Janet Borden, Inc.

I mention this because it seems like there is a revival in interest in this kind of work lately. Are people more interested in the masters of still life photography these days?
I think that's true. I have a theory about genres, that's it's sort of a sine wave. Recently people were interested in the landscape stuff, like New Topographics. Portraits will be next.

Vintage prints of some of Jan Groover's best still life work can be seen at The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory though this Sunday, March 8, at Janet Borden's booth. Her Industrials will be on view at Janet Borden, Inc. through March 28.

Barbara Kasten: Stages will be on view at Philadelphia's Institute for Contemporary Art (on the UPenn campus) through August 16. The installation looks really spectacular.

Follow Matthew Leifheit on Twitter. See some of his collaborative still life work in last year's VICE photo issue.

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An Ontario wind farm. Photo via Flickr user Chris Lee

Four families from rural southwestern Ontario are wondering if they'll have to sell their farms and homes to pay the huge legal bills of the wind turbine companies they took to court in efforts to stop construction of the giant electricity generators.

Three companies are demanding almost $340,000 in total from the families, who challenged the construction of three different wind projects in Huron County, around an hour's drive north of London, Ont. The families lost their case, heard last fall in divisional court, and are seeking to appeal the matter to the Ontario Court of Appeal.

"In the end, we may have to sell the land that we're fighting to preserve," says corn and soybean farmer Shawn Drennan, whose family has owned their farm near Seaforth, ON for almost a century. "We'll try and go back to the bank to borrow first, but we're not rich," he says from his home.

Court documents filed by the families' lawyer, Julian Falconer of Toronto, say that by simply exercising their right to use the courts, they now face the "disheartening prospect of financial ruin." The documents state the most recent financial statements available to the public from Veresen (St. Columban Energy) show assets of over $3 billion, Pattern Energy Group (Armow Wind Ontario Inc.) over $2 billion, and Capital LP (K2 Wind Ontario Inc.) of over $5 billion.

"It is both punitive and prohibitive" for the companies to seek such large amounts from "farming families of average financial means," the documents claim.

According to Drennan, the families hope to argue that their case is in the public interest, so they shouldn't have to pay the companies' expenses. In the court hearing last November, the wind opponents had three lawyers as opposed to at least 15 lawyers from the provincial government and the companies. "If that doesn't scream 'this is public interest,' I don't know what does," he says.

K2, builders of a nearly-completed wind farm near Goderich on the Lake Huron shore, claim in the court documents that the families represent "only one element of the public interest," and that there is a "strong public interest" in renewable energy such as wind power. The company says the Drennans were warned they would be held responsible for legal expenses before the four-day London hearing, and that they have "political motivation" for their opposition.

While she knew the companies might go after her family, Jennifer Dixon of Huron East says the cost recovery attempt is "a bullying tactic," designed to deter the families and their supporting community groups from appealing the court decision at a higher level.

Dixon's eight-year-old daughter is highly sensitive to noise, and has had headaches her mother claims were caused by vibrations from the erection of a turbine less than 550 metres from her bedroom. She fears the girl will suffer continuously from the infrasound—inaudible low-frequency sound waves—when the giant windmills are up and running.

A major Health Canada study found no link between wind turbine noise and negative health in people.

Some of the Dixons' supporters believe the courts won't force the families to pay. "All we can do is have faith in the justice system. How could any ordinary person bring any case forward if they know they face a threat of being completely broken like this," asks Gerry Ryan, a member of the community group Huron East Against Turbines (HEAT) that sides with the family. He says a judge in an earlier court hearing said their case is not frivolous and needs to be heard.

In general, the losing side of a civil case pays for the winning side's legal expenses. In this case, the owners of the St. Columban site, near the Dixons' home, also claim they have suffered financial damage from the project being delayed a full year by the opponents' legal moves.

The company says the families are not acting in the public interest, but "they simply don't want the project to be built near their homes," and are concerned about private money matters such as the value of livestock and other property.

While the Dixons and the Drennans watch the wind farms reaching completion and brace for the future, they enter a waiting game: waiting to see if they'll be allowed to ask another court to keep the blades from whirling, waiting to see what they may experience if the windmills are allowed to start up, and also waiting to see if the justice system will make them pay the legal bills for the companies that are bringing such changes to their rural landscape.

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Green Party leader Elizabeth May. Photo via Flickr user Barrie Greens

Stephen Harper's wide-ranging new anti-terrorism legislation will let the Canadian Government detain and deport people based on information obtained by ostensibly hooking up someone's genitals to a car battery, says Elizabeth May.

C-51, or the Anti-Terrorism Act 2015, is omnibus legislation that, among other things, expands information sharing, gives police more power to preventively detain terror suspects, infiltrate threats to Canada (or its economy) and, it seems to the Green Party leader, use tainted intel.

May is pointing to a section of the legislation that she says throws out all of Canada's well-established rules that prevent police from using illegally-obtained information.

"For years now, I have been worried about whether CSIS uses evidence obtained through torture in security certificate cases," May said in a news release.

She has right to worry. The federal government has already confirmed that it will use any actionable intelligence, even if it was obtained from holding an illegally-detained person's head underwater for long periods of time.

Security certificates are the mechanism that the federal government can use to detain and deport foreign nations deemed to be a security threat to Canada. The process has been around since the early 1990s, and it has been applied to dozens of individuals—some have been deported back to countries where they almost certainly face torture.

May is pointing to clause 54 of the legislation: language in that section states that the government can introduce just about any intelligence they have in their possession relevant to kicking the person out of the country. Currently, the law says that the government must provide evidence pertaining to the certificate itself—May, and University of Victoria law professor Donald Galloway, both say that change means law enforcement agencies like CSIS can withhold critical information about where the intelligence was obtained and through what means, like holding frequent mock executions of prisoners.

"Bill C-51 modifies the processes of removing people from Canada by permitting the minister to withhold evidence relating to the credibility of its source, including evidence that information was obtained by torture," Galloway says in the release.

"I am extremely troubled by the possibility that this subtle change in wording could let CSIS introduce evidence obtained through torture," May adds. "Almost by sleight-of-hand, this removes the burden of the minister to give complete context about the reliability of the source and instead only requires the minister to give the information relevant to the ground of inadmissibility."

And that is not the only section that opens the door to illegally-obtained intelligence. When it comes to putting Canadians or non-citizens on the no-fly list, "the judge may receive into evidence anything that, in the judge's opinion, is reliable and appropriate, even if it is inadmissible in a court of law, and may base a decision on that evidence," the law reads.

Add on top of all that new powers listed in C-44 (the other spying bill) which allow CSIS to keep their sources confidential, and there are lots of new ways that Canada's spies can use information obtained by tactics that included forcing prisoners to play Russian roulette and keeping them awake for days at a time.

Using information garnered by, say waterboarding, wouldn't be entirely without precedent. Former Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day previously told a Vancouver court that he believes intelligence used in one security certificate case was obtained via torture.

C-51 also wildly expands the ability of government agencies to share information with each other, meaning that once shady intel reaches one desk, it can spread very quickly through other departments.

The fight over C-51 is ongoing.

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