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Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

It seems like all the cool mentally ill people are on Wellbutrin. OK, maybe not cool, but like, my mentally ill friends.

My friend Chris said Wellbutrin is good for people like us, because instead of thinking about death for 14 hours a day he now only thinks about it for three. It doesn't stop death, but it stops death thoughts.

My friend Lauren, a therapist who gets panic attacks while seeing patients, is on it. One time, Lauren had a panic attack so bad while seeing a patient that when the patient revealed she hadn't eaten all day, Lauren used it as an excuse for them to go outside and get a sandwich. She cloaked this exodus in teaching the patient a lesson in self-care. "You have to eat," she said. But in her head Lauren was like, Thank you, Jesus. If they didn't leave the room she thought she was going to die.

Wellbutrin isn't the panacea. Nothing can take away your humanity, your peculiar fears and twists. But it seems like a better drug than what I'm on, which is Effexor XR: the fucking dinosaur of SSRIs and SNRIs.

I've been on Effexor for about 11 years. I started taking it a year before I got sober. At first I was so fucked up that I would forget to take it half the time, or when I did take it I would get even drunker. The Effexor, coupled with the benzodiazepines I was prescribed and the opiates I was not prescribed, had me blacking out all over town.

Since I've been sober, I have chosen not to take benzos for my generalized anxiety and panic disorders. But I don't rule it out should the day come when I have to choose between being prescribed a benzo by a doctor who monitors my usage vs. self-medicating with unprescribed shit (and/or suicide). Like, I wouldn't consider it a relapse. For today though, I choose not to take them.

But Effexor has definitely been a key component of my sobriety. Psychiatrists have lowered my dosage to almost nothing when I was in periods of chemical balance and they have increased my dosage when I entered cycles of panic attacks and depression.

Two years ago my psychiatrist raised the dosage when I was finding metaphoric bats living in my chest. The increase prior to that occurred when I witnessed the death of a relative, firsthand, and you might say it "fucked me up" a little to discover, viscerally, that death is real. Both increases worked. They left me feeling more functional, less alone, less like the only people who understood me were Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre (and them just barely).

I know that meds can stop working over time. Recently, my panic attacks have been so bad that I wondered if Effexor hadn't just stopped working altogether. I asked my psychiatrist about switching to a newer, sexier med. But she said we should try increasing the Effexor first. Stay with the dinosaur. Take more of it. More than I've ever taken.

Do I trust my psychiatrist? She's better than other ones I've seen. Like, at least she talks to me. I once saw a bro who was so terrified of social interactions that he would just sort of thrust prescriptions at me in horror. I called him the Turtle. The Turtle's body language was like "I'll do anything you say if you get out of my office." This was convenient, because I was still drinking and using then. I got really fun drugs from the Turtle.

At the same time, I appreciate that my current psychiatrist doesn't try to be my friend, or like, have teatime. I once saw a woman who wanted to talk about everything except anxiety and depression: poetry, feminist superheroes, New York Times articles about fetal alcohol syndrome. I was like, "Gurl, the Times is basic and I'm sober so I don't give a shit about fetal alcohol syndrome." I didn't say that. Instead we talked about sestinas and Wonder Woman for four years.

I trust my current psychiatrist more than the other ones: at least enough to up my meds this high. But I feel disappointed. Like, it's kind of been a point of pride for me that I've never gotten close to the maximum FDA-approved dose. Like, there was always room for me to get crazier. Now I'm inching closer to the limit. Am I getting worse?

Effexor is notoriously hard to get off of. If you Google people's experiences you get the horror stories of withdrawal: nausea, diarrhea, hallucination, electric shocks to the brain, sadness, extreme anxiety. Now that I'm on a higher dose will the electric shocks be double? Don't I take this shit for anxiety?

Also, if I ever want kids my psychiatrist says that I will have to transition to another drug like Prozac. To be sure, I don't think having children is for me. Like, you can probably see why I might not be cut out to be a mother, but still, just in case, can't we just transition to Prozac now? If I have to transition while pregnant I will definitely have my head in the oven. I feel like I'm moving in the wrong direction or something.

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Then there are the Effexor nightsweats, which I've pretended to ignore for about 11 years. I value my mental health over my sheets, and I guess, my allure to others who might share my bed. But on the higher dose, my bed has gone from a nightly swamp to a lagoon. I already slept naked. I can't get more naked.

A secure person might voice these concerns to her doctor. But it's hard for me to push back against my psychiatrist. I have trouble advocating for myself in situations psychiatric and therapeutic because, well, I never want anyone to think I'm crazy. This is, in itself, crazy. If you're gonna be nuts, your psychiatrist or therapist's office is the place to let that freak flag fly. But I guess I want to be the least needy patient. Like, if I have less needs it means I'm less fucked up. What I want is to have no needs. What I want is not to be there.

Mental health professionals aren't always the most stable people themselves. There's a reason why certain people go into the mental health field. They often have a very personal, vested interest in it. They aren't always the best with boundaries. Have you ever tried breaking up with a therapist?

I saw a "therapist and creativity specialist" who was so crazy that when she left a message for me, people would be like, "Some weirdo called you. Who the fuck was that?" She was in her 70s and was always giving me bad, tangible advice about problems rather than, like, insight. Of my eating disorder, she said: "You should eat an egg." Of my obsession with chin zits: "You should try calamine lotion." She wasn't a dermatologist. It wasn't about the zits. It was about me freaking out over the zits. She didn't get that. It took me seven years to break up with her.

Even when it's not about breaking up, they manage to make everything about them. Like when you're late for a session. It's never just that you were late. The lateness must be analyzed in a Jungian schema. It must be held up to the light and dissected for subconscious passive aggression. I've definitely been late for sessions because I was avoiding talking to them. But usually it's because I'm going deep on Twitter and shitty with time.

Even my current therapist, who is probably the best I've ever had, takes everything personally. I recently told her that I might want to try a cognitive behavioral therapist, because our work doesn't seem to be cutting the mustard when it comes to my panic disorder. As much as I enjoy doing the grand tour of my childhood, infinitely, I think I might need someone to retrain my mind. She was like "Why don't you just try a cognitive behavioral therapy app?" Therapists fear abandonment.

I'm kind of relieved that my therapist won't let me break up with her. I don't really want to have to go to yet another person and retell my childhood. And I am sort of scared to change meds, when Effexor has worked in the past. But it's tiring advocating for myself—especially when the trouble is in my own brain. It's like, you're the professional. Just fucking fix me.

If you're struggling or just need someone to talk to, the Samaritans offer 24-hour support.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its anonymous author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website.

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Every few months, at the Glendale Convention Center in Los Angeles, there is a cat show. The cats are fluffed and primped before competing for prizes, and for national titles in the Cat Fanciers' Association. The energy is intense and the place smells like a giant litter box. Here are some scenes from the recent cat shows, and the people who return to the competitions month after month.

See more of Michelle Groskopf's photography on her website and on Instagram.

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Follow Patrick Kyle on Twitter, look at his blog, and get his books from Koyama Press.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Jeremy Clarkson, a horrible vision of what your dad would be like if your mom let him buy that Porsche he wanted, has been suspended from the BBC following a fight with a producer. As a result, this Sunday's episode of Top Gear has been cancelled. You're going to have to go somewhere else to watch three walking midlife crises talk smack about an RV, sorry. Going to have to go elsewhere to watch an actor with a film to sell make awkward banter then drive a slow car around a track in the rain.

Details are thin on the ground at the moment—it's not yet known whether the Clarkson-producer set-to was a fistfight, a mouth fight, or if they both just unzipped their dicks from their pissed-on dad jeans and jousted at each other. The incident could have been a brouhaha or fisticuffs. That could be shenanigans or a good old fashioned dust-up. Maybe they got in a circle of high schoolers, all chanting "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!" and spitting at each other's book bags. Maybe they had one of those undignified old man pub fights, where they both go puce in the face and someone has their shirt pulled up over their head, their palely wobbling back fat coolly jiggling about in front of the BBC headquarters.

In a statement, the BBC said: "Following a fracas with a BBC producer, Jeremy Clarkson has been suspended pending an investigation. No one else has been suspended. Top Gear will not be broadcast this Sunday. The BBC will be making no further comment at this time."

It's about time Jeremy Clarkson was punished for being a shitlord, to be fully honest, because its something he's been for a while—or, arguably, all of his life. In the last year, though, he's really rammed home the concept of being suspended by the BBC: in the Christmas Special he said a bridge they'd built in Argentina wasn't straight because it "had a slope on it" when an Asian man walked over it, a wink-and-nudge-to-the-camera act of offensiveness that was swiftly punished by OFCOM; he also angered Argentina so much while he was there by driving around with a Falklands-referencing numberplate that the whole crew had to escape to Chile. Also, he only has one way of delivering a sentence ("Going up at the top like this... then growling a really shit simile") and he's friends with both David Cameron and Alex James. He's had this coming for a while.

Still, Clarkson is a BBC institution: this suspension is on a level with them binning Bruce Forsyth for having too big a chin, or putting Wogan out to pasture because his hair isn't real enough.

With Clarkson on suspension, the BBC old guard dwindling down through retirement to death and Radio 1 stalwarts such as Fearne Cotton and Zane Lowe fucking off, what's left for the BBC? Matt Baker and Alex Jones—two curiously sexless presenting robots designed in a lab to keep your nan awake enough to make it through to 8 PM—fronting up every TV show the BBC has to offer? Sue Barker's Generation Game? Shane Ritchie's Robot Wars? Good luck charging us license fees for that, BBC. Apart from the gritty Shane Ritchie Robot Wars reboot, actually. That could work.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

It is hard to recall a game in recent history that dealt with more dismissive pre-release rhetoric than 2013's Ninja Theory developed DmC: Devil May Cry. "Casual" was a word spat with particular venom by an internet hate brigade accustomed to the series' frenetically precise combat, forecasting a watered-down "DINO"—(lead character) Dante in Name Only—butchered frame rates, cynically engineered art direction, and shattered dreams.

The game's creative lead Tameem Antoniades suffered fan ire for his aggressive stance on the direction of the Devil May Cry reboot, rustling jimmies when he claimed in an interview that he didn't care if the game sold "a thousand units or two million units" and calling it a creative crime to pander to a "perceived demographic that, in all likelihood, doesn't exist." Further alarm bells rang for fans afraid of change with news that Japanese publisher Capcom was also keen for a new direction following the tepid reception to Devil May Cry 4, a sub-par entry that had placed the series on moratorium after its release in 2008.

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'DmC: Definitive Edition' trailer

DmC certainly possessed its share of issues, but they weren't creative ones. The game was more accessible (read: easier) than its Japan-developed predecessors, which pissed off the faithful as the once-elusive "SSS" combat rank became achievable without the risk of RSI. And the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, while serviceable, were slave to the same frame rate hitches that befell Ninja Theory's previous title, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

But as time's passed, so criticisms of DmC's artistic direction have, for the most part, been revealed as the opinions of a vocal minority, and the game ultimately won both mainstream critical acclaim and relative financial success. And now that it's been released in a "Definitive Edition" for Xbox One and PS4, unimpeded by the older consoles' hardware limitations, it may finally attract the reassessment from series fans that it certainly deserves.

Like Enslaved, which employed the script-writing services of Alex Garland, DmC perhaps shined brightest in the story department. It weaved a sharp tale of millennial fear and austerity angst in a way that stamped a sense of time and place firmly on the aging franchise's face. The architectural hostility of Limbo City made for a triumphant setting; aptly named after that "other" Dante's first circle, here was an insidious, transmutational playground trying to scupper the game's protagonist at every turn.

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While DmC's themes were contemporaneously compared to the David Icke-baiting (and all-round cult classic) movie They Live, the storyline is perhaps more reminiscent of Grant Morrison's comic series The Invisibles. In the Scottish writer's bizarre opus, a Liverpudlian teenage delinquent named Dane reluctantly joins an underground resistance of occultists and psychics after discovering that the world is under the control of demonic cabals keeping the populace sedate and compliant.

Morrison intended his work to become a sigil for the burgeoning conspiracy theory culture of the 1990s, and DmC follows suit in this regard; deuteragonist Kat uses witchcraft throughout the game to literally spray paint sigils to create a gateway for Dante to cross between Limbo and the human world to aid his fight against the demonic Mundus, who has cast a shroud over the blinkered population who fail to see the infernal influence around them.

Reimagined from his former incarnation as a more traditionally demonic figure into a sharp-suited corporate executive ripped from the pages of a superhero comic, DmC's primary villain is burly, cunning and ever-so-slightly camp. His opening salvo, where he puts the President in place in suitably Dr. Evil fashion ("One trillion dollars!"), sets the megalomaniacal tone of his character perfectly. The satirical "one-percenter" villainy of DmC's antagonists was far from subtle, but it didn't need to be; Mundus and company stand proud as enjoyable punching bags for the current-day collegiate set, their debt-addled older siblings and, yes, their parents too.

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Aesthetically, there was a bold 90s vibe to DmC that seemed to stir up a love-it or loathe-it reaction among the series faithful, cribbing the goth stylings of Neil Gaiman and Alex Proyas—and some of Vivienne Westwood's sartorial sharpness —with aplomb. It was a style that put an inescapably British stamp on the franchise, in spite of its characters' predominantly American accents.

Ninja Theory also employed expert use of color in DmC, bucking the developmental trend for grey and gritty pessimism. The explosive shifts into the game's take on Limbo also played with gravity and perspective in innovative ways, standing in marked contrast to the muddy medieval look of the older Devil May Cry worlds.

In an interview with PlayStation Access, Antoniades claimed that the team "purposely went against the grain" with their conception of Dante and his world, considering elements they could add to DmC that were generally unseen in games at that time: "We thought about how people dress, and what music do people listen to? What do we listen to? What environment do we live in? What's the concept of evil in the real world today that we want to fight back against?"

The corporatized brand of evil Antoniades stressed in his script—supervised again by Dredd screenwriter Garland—brought a freshness to the series. This approach further cemented DmC's British credentials, its newfound satirical purpose ripped straight from the pages of a classic 2000 AD comic. Indeed, this knowing tone arguably peaks during the game's most memorable boss fight—a battle fought within the vibrant digitized confines of a TV news ident against the Tron-like head of a ranting Bill O'Reilly stand-in named Bob Barbas.

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The Bob Barbas boss fight, from the original 'DmC' release

This new Dante also made for a refreshingly sexualized presence. The former white-haired version, while full of confidence and capability when it came to fighting, always came off as slightly inept with women, his impotent hip thrusts hitting the empty air with all the frustration of a rotoscoped Frank Booth. In contrast, Nu-Dante was decidedly casual about sex—indeed, gaming hadn't seen a main character so straightforwardly carnal since The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia.

Dante's relationship with his brother Vergil was also expanded in interesting ways, with Vergil portrayed in DmC as a more sympathetic figure than before, an approach that sold his relationship with Dante more effectively than Devil May Cry 3. The decision to show the pair's development as allies throughout DmC helped to emphasize the later tragedy of their eventual falling out, building to a climax that set the scene for a promising but unlikely to ever be realized second chapter.

Devil May Cry has never been a series for everyone, but neither is it so precious that it should be above reinvention. In an artistic sense, DmC did anything but dumb the series down; it succeeded in attracting gamers put off by the technicalities espoused by the frame-counting fanboys, as well as those less au fait with its coiffured anime excess and increasingly convoluted plot.

It is safe to say that had DmC been a reboot of a film or comic series, it would have been accepted far more readily, and both Capcom and Ninja Theory deserve praise for sticking to their guns in the face of criticism. It is interesting to think of where a sequel could have gone had it escaped its own developmental limbo with the same fervor and style as Dante himself.

Follow Ewen on Twitter.

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Jack Herer chocolate for Penn's mum, who has sciatic pain.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Penn Chan is the British Willy Wonka of weed. Working in and around London, he creates an array of delicious sweets and infuses them with cannabis—perfect for any medicinal users who don't like relieving their pain by inhaling burning plant matter.

His medical edibles—or "medibles"—are on a par with what's being produced in weed-legal states in the US, as any of his 1,600 Facebook fans would probably tell you. Only, it's not like you can just walk into a dispensary and pick up one of his creations, because actual time and money is still being spent on enforcing the UK's primitive cannabis laws, Penn has to ensure that he only helps those he knows and trusts.

He also, for obvious reasons, can't go by his real name. "Penn Chan" is a character in Japanese mythology who appeared to be high all the time, which seemed kind of fitting.

I met up with Penn recently to find out more about him and his confectionary.

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Ten-milligram indica OG Kush chocolate drops, used to treat insomnia and sciatica

VICE: Hi Penn. Can you take me through what you do?
Penn Chan: I make medicated cannabis treats for people with ailments, helping people sleep or relax, or for recreational purposes. I'm not a chocolatier or a chef in any way, but I really enjoy creating medibles. It began about six years ago, when I started to help my mum with her sciatic pain; I made some chocolates for her, and that was that. I was on my way.

You medicated your mum?
Yeah. I remember when I was 17 and my friend turned up with some purple buds. I found two seeds, which I planted, and my mum found this little cress growing in a 35mm film case on my windowsill. She went apeshit and kicked me out the house. Fast forward 15 years and she was on loads of painkillers for her condition—all these horrible things that were messing her up. They turned her into a vegetable. She was always really anti-cannabis, but she's kind of come to accept it more over the last ten years because I've been using it for so long. She's come to see that I haven't lost my job, I'm employed, I'm married and have a family—a complete functioning member of society.

Anyways, I made her some cannabis-infused chocolate to have before she went to bed. Now she's only on one medication; before, she was on 12, and she's on about an eighth of the dose of painkillers from the beginning.

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Salt water taffy made using Jack Herer sativa. This is a daytime low-dosage medication for an MS sufferer

Did you have any contacts in the UK's medicinal cannabis activism scene when you started making your sweets?
Not really – I've always been a bit of a lone wolf. Because of the nature of what I do, I like to keep to myself. And because of the current laws in the UK, I can't operate here, even though I don't sell any of the sweets I make.

Because the sweets contain THC?
Yeah. It can be cannabis or any of its derivatives that are illegal, and THC falls into that category.

What kind of clients do you have? And how does someone go about getting meds from you?
Firstly, I wouldn't call them clients, as I don't make meds to make money. I also wouldn't really say they were patients, either. I'd say they were friends I know on a first-person basis and have been introduced to, or acquaintances. It always has to be on a first-person basis, just for my own safety.

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Cherry and lemon twists made with "J1 shatter," Jack Herer crossed with Skunk Number 1, making it a perfect 50/50 indica/sativa cross

Yeah, it's not like you can just put your name out there.
That'd be suicide, especially in our community—I'd be bombarded by everyone who wants to try it, and I don't have the resources or the materials to do that.

What kind of help do you provide, specifically?
I've helped people from all walks of life with all sorts of conditions. A lot of my patients are friends with my mum, then there are my older relatives and acquaintances, because they suffer from a lot of age-related aches, pains, and illnesses. I've also helped people who suffer from [ALS] and MS; there are three people with MS who I help regularly. There's a multitude of different things that my sweets and cannabis can be useful for.

Do different sweets help with different things? Say, if someone suffered from aches, you wouldn't give them the same thing you'd give to someone with insomnia?
Certainly. Everybody will have personal preference. With some people I try three or four different strains or combinations and it won't have any benefit at all, but suddenly we hit one on the head. It's trial and error with a lot of people. I can try to guide them when I hear what their ailment is, to a certain point, but you have to play and tinker with it a little bit.

There's a chap who has a nerve problem that I've been trying to help for about a year and a half. He hates the feeling of being stoned; it makes him very paranoid. I'm trying a high CBD [cannabidiol, a substance in cannabis singled out for its medical properties] dosage at the moment, but it's not working—he finds it's too much of a psychological experience for him.

I guess you have to be careful with the dosage.
Yeah, you have to be very careful with dosing; people often have negative experience when they first try it. They eat too much, or they're greedy. They'll eat a piece of cake or a piece of fudge and say, "Oh, that tastes beautiful!" and go and smash another four pieces, then it's game over.

I like to keep the dosage fairly low so people can medicate without having a big psychedelic experience.

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One of Penn's instructional videos

How do you keep your "dispensary" viable if you're not being paid for anything?
I have people who grow cannabis and will give me their trim, oil, or hash. And I will then use that in my recipes and they can have some tasty treats in return.

What types of sweets can you produce?
My first foray into making sweets was medicated chocolate, because it's just so simple. Then it went from chocolate to different fudges, toffee, boiled sweets—imagine: pear drops, rhubarb and custard, cola cubes, pineapple chunks. There's the toffee, which is a bit like a Werther's Original. There's also stuff like medicated cinder toffee covered in medicated chocolate, which is like a Crunchie bar.

That's quite a selection.
Yeah, there's a massive range and I'm still building. At the moment I'm just playing with everything, trying to figure out how things are made; a lot of it requires industrial equipment.

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Dark chocolate and sea salt ganache. Heavy indica OG kush for pain relief, sleep, and appetite

Do the doses vary depending on the sweet?
That's the thing I'm trying to figure out, looking at what's going in Colorado, as they're kind pioneering this new way of thinking. They're saying that chocolate doses should be about ten to 20 milligrams for a whole bar of chocolate, and the same for different edibles. So if people are looking to have a pick'n'mix experience, everything should be around ten to 20 milligrams, meaning you can have a piece of chocolate, or jelly, or fudge while being able to gauge the dosage.

When you say ten milligrams, how would that compare to smoking a joint?
It's always different. The up and down with smoking is relatively quick, but with an edible it's going to keep you happy for about four to eight hours. At a guess, I'd imagine that ten milligrams would be like three big hits on a "big" joint. That's the high you'd get, but it will last about five hours.

What's the demand like in the UK for your edibles?
I get dozens of messages from different people every day. There are people who obviously have a lot of medical issues, who I really wish I could help but just can't because of the supply and demand thing, plus the legal side of things. It's kind of hard to separate the people who are trying to just use my candy to have a fun time and those who really need it medicinally, which is why it has to be on a first-person basis with me.

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Raspberry gummies made with an indica/sativa hybrid. A very buzzy, energetic high with great pain relief.

Have you ever had any trouble with the law?
No. The only troubles I've had are with people I've medicated who haven't taken my advice and have ended up sleeping for 14 hours straight, waking up and destroying the fridge—demolishing everything in there. I've been a cannabis user for 25 years and I've not had any trouble with the law. I've never sold anything; I've always given edibles away.

Finally, what are your three favorite products?
For me, personally, sea salt and chocolate ganache. Everybody who tries those instantly thinks they're amazing. I've even done a wedding reception before with those; 50 medicated, 50 unmedicated—they went down a storm. They're probably number one, plus they look quite glam, like the petit fours you'd get after a posh meal.

Follow Jake Lewis on Twitter.

By now it should be very clear that Republicans in Congress are violently allergic to any kind of nuclear negotiations with Iran, and will put on whatever diplomatic circus act they think will prevent the Obama administration from reaching a deal. Last week, they welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Capitol Hill, going behind the White House's back to invite a foreign head of state to publicly rebuke Obama's foreign policy from the floor of the US Congress. That didn't work, so this week, they went a few steps further, straight to the mailbox of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In what has got to be one of the most bonkers attempts at nuclear diplomacy ever, 47 Republican Senators sent an open letter to Tehran on Monday, warning the leaders of the Islamic Republic that any deal with the US will be swiftly destroyed by Congress or whatever non-Kenyan socialist wins the White House in 2016. The letter was spearheaded by junior Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, apparently as some kind of war caucus hazing initiation seemingly designed to undermine not only the Obama administration's diplomatic efforts, but US foreign policy itself. Cotton has not been shy about his desire to scuttle an Iranian nuclear deal in favor of "regime change"—a policy that would be difficult to achieve without war. All but seven Senate Republicans signed the letter,including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and 2016 hopefuls like Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz.

Democrats and other GOP dissenters predictably lost their minds, accusing the Senators of trying to undermine the president, and possibly committing treason. "Let's be very clear: Republicans are undermining our commander-in-chief while empowering the Ayatollahs," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said in a floor speech Monday.

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Vice President Joe Biden was only slightly more measured. "In 36 years in the United States Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which Senators wrote directly to advise another country—much less a longtime foreign adversary—that the President does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them," he said in a statement Monday night. "The decision to undercut our President and circumvent our constitutional system offends me as a matter of principle." Even the Wall Street Journal was turned off by the letter, calling it "the security blunder of the young century." By this afternoon, #47Traitors was trending on Twitter.

All this outrage would be understandable if the letter itself weren't so ridiculous. Written in the same tone one would use to address friendly extraterrestrials, Cotton gives the unnamed "Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran" a little civics lesson.

"It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system," the letter begins. Sadly, Cotton does not explain how or when he came to this realization. He goes on to inform readers that the US Constitution requires any international treaty to gain two-thirds approval by the Senate and majority approval by both chambers of Congress. Anything else, he writes, is just an executive deal that can be overturned with "the stroke of a pen."

When explaining the idea of term limits to the term-limited Iranian president, Cotton lets Tehran know where the real power lies in Washington. "The president may serve only two 4-year terms, whereas senators may serve an unlimited number of 6-year terms," he writes. "As applied today, for instance, President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then—perhaps decades."

(You can read the whole thing here.)

Setting aside the fact that many of Cotton's Iranian pen pals are American university graduates—and likely have a pretty good idea of how the US conducts foreign policy—it's also worth noting that Cotton's interpretation of the Constitution isn't totally accurate. As Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith pointed out, the Senate doesn't technically ratify treaties.And the majority of modern international agreements are actually executive orders—but contrary to Cotton's assertion, presidents usually decline to overturn deals signed under previous administrations.

Rather than run away from the bargaining table, Iranian leaders mostly just laughed at Cotton and his little note. In a statement, pointedly posted in English, Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif dismissed the letter as "mostly a propaganda ploy."

"It seems that the authors not only do not understand international law, but are not fully cognizant of the nuances of their own Constitution when it comes to presidential powers in the conduct of foreign policy," the statement reads.

Zarif then correctly points out that not only do American presidents tend to abide by international agreements entered into by their predecessors, but any nuclear deal between the US and Iran would not be bilateral. Instead, it would include all five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany. It also could not be modified by Congress under international law. Cotton's letter, Zarif adds, "in fact undermines the credibility of thousands of such mere executive agreements that have been or will be entered into by the US with various other governments."

Despite the partisan outrage in the US, so far Cotton's stunt doesn't seem likely to have much of an effect on the negotiations, which are set to conclude at the end of the month. But Obama mused Monday that the move could still end up giving Iranian hawks ammunition to undercut a bargain on the grounds that the US is untrustworthy, giving them "common cause with the hardliners in Iran." Beyond that, critics have suggested that the intrusion on the White House's diplomatic power could undercut any president, Democrat or Republican, signaling that any international agreement the US enters could be undone at the slightest shift of political winds.

The GOP doesn't seem to have a problem with this. Even as the rest of the world erupted in outrage over the letter, Republicans doubled down and defended it. 2016 hopefuls Rick Perry and Rick Santorum clamored to add their names to the note Tuesday; Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal even went so far as to suggest that the letter had been his idea all along. ""I've been saying it for some time now," he told the New York Times Tuesday. He mentioned it in a secret speech at the American Enterprise Institute World Forum just this past weekend. Cotton "was in the audience," Jindal said, "when this discussion came up."

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A few months ago, my students at New York's School of Visual Arts were assigned to make knockoffs of famous nudes from the history of art. They're all studying photography, so it came as no surprise that many of the works they chose to reconstruct were photographs. The school provided figure models of all shapes and sizes to pose for students as they learned lighting and practiced studio techniques. At the very least, restaging these classic images required students to reverse-engineer good pictures and figure out how they might have been made. At most, I think there was something to be understood about the impossibility of true plagiarism in photography. When I was in art school I remember becoming discouraged, believing any worthwhile image had already been made. The goal of this assignment was to teach that even if you try very hard to remake someone else's work, your photographs can only be your own. Artsy Nudes will be presented as an exhibition at the School of Visual Arts from March 9 to 20.
—MATTHEW LEIFHEIT

On Tuesday, for the first time ever, legislation that would liberalize federal medical marijuana laws was introduced in the US Senate, proposed by a trio of bipartisan lawmakers in what activists are heralding as a historic first for the legalization movement.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, along with Democratic Senators Corey Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, introduced the Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States, or CARERS Act, at a Capitol Hill press conference. The legislation would amend federal law to allow states to set their own policies on medical marijuana, and allow doctors to prescribe medical cannabis to military veterans.

The legislation would also change the federal Drug Enforcement Agency's classification of weed from a Schedule I to a Schedule II substance, opening up opportunities for expanded study of the drug and its effects. Currently, marijuana research is tightly by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, or NIDA, the country's only supplier of marijuana to scientists in the country. Critics have long complained that NIDA blocks or drags its feet on applications from researchers interested in looking at possible benefits of the drug.

Recently, however, there has been a thaw. In January, the federal government finally approved a long-delayed study on the potential use of marijuana as treatment for PTSD. Mike Leszewksi, director of government affairs for Americans For Safe Access, said the new Senate bill could push the number of marijuana suppliers for medical research up to three.

The legislation would also open up the banking system for marijuana businesses, giving"safe harbor" to banks and credit unions who provide service to legitimate marijuana firms. Right now, banks and other financial firms are mostly off-limits to the burgeoning legal weed industry, leaving business owners to conduct most transactions in cash. "I just came back from Colorado," Paul told reporters Tuesday, "and the biggest thing people are asking me is we want banking to be legal. My guess is that even more taxes will be paid if they're allowed to keep their money in banks instead of brown bags"

Modeled on some smaller amendments and bills introduced in previous sessions of Congress, the legislation is the product of several months of behind-the-scenes work between Paul, Booker, Gillibrand, and several weed advocacy groups, including Marijuana Policy Project, the Drug Policy Alliance, and Americans for Safe Access.

"This is a significant step forward when it comes to reforming marijuana laws at the federal level," Dan Riffle, director of federal policy for the Marijuana Policy Project, said in a statement. "The vast majority of Americans support laws that allow seriously ill people to access medical marijuana. Several marijuana policy reform bills have been introduced in the House of Representatives. The introduction of this legislation in the Senate demonstrates just how seriously this issue is being taken on Capitol Hill."

The measure faces an uncertain fate in Congress, where GOP leaders have mostly resisted efforts to ease up on the drug war. In the Senate, the new bill is likely to move through the Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration's hands-off approach to legal pot in Colorado and Washington.

At the press conference Tuesday, the bill's three sponsors made a hard sell to their colleagues and the public, bringing in medical marijuana patients to drive home an emotional message. "I dare any senator to meet these patients here and say they don't deserve the medicine their doctors have prescribed," Gillibrand said.

Sandy Faioli, a wheelchair-bound New Jersey resident diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, said she used marijuana to treat insomnia and nausea. "I didn't sleep for about four years," she told reporters Tuesday. "Then I remembered that the reason I didn't smoke in college was because it made me go to sleep. So I picked some up and tried it. The next thing I knew, it was morning. I cried when I woke up."

The common thread among the advocates' stories was a desire to be free from the fear that they would face federal prosecution for seeking medical marijuana. Kate Hinz, whose daughter suffers from a rare disorder that afflicts her with about 100 seizures a day, talked about other parents of epileptic children who'd moved to Colorado to obtain cannabinoid oil for treatment—"marijuana refugees," she called them. T.J. Thompson, the Navy veteran, introduced himself as a "father, husband, employee and a criminal in the Commonwealth of Virginia."

"I'm also a criminal in the United States of America, the county I decided to volunteer six years of my life to stand up and fight for freedom and the pursuit of happiness," he said.

Regardless of whether it passes, the legislation is a sign that the legalization movement is becoming increasingly difficult for politicians, even in the insulated Senate, to ignore, said Don Murphy, a former Republican state lawmaker from Maryland who is now an analyst for the Marijuana Policy Project. Medical marijuana is now legal in 23 states and the District of Columbia, and four states, plus DC, have voted to legalize the drug for recreational use. As the 2016 campaign season approaches, Murphy added, the issue is likely to become a staple of the national political debate.

"The timing is just perfect," said Murphy "It raises the issue in the presidential election, and for Republicans, it's now beyond just a states' rights issue. This legislation is going to go before a bunch of Republicans who are running—Paul, Cruz, Rubio—and they're all going to have to vote on it."

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Last Wednesday, the Boston Bomber trial began with a startling admission: Lead defense attorney Judy Clarke, speaking on the behalf of her client, 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, used her opening statement to clear the air and lay out her intentions.

"It was him," she told the jury.

With the pesky matter of the 30 federal criminal charges largely brushed aside, Clarke posed a rhetorical question: "So why a trial?" Her mission, it became clear, is not to prove the innocence of her client but rather to keep him alive.

In order to keep capital punishment off the table, Clarke is taking on the uneasy task of making a jury feel sorry for a guy she's already admitted is a homegrown terrorist.

So Clarke must illustrate that Tsarnaev was more of a typical college kid than a radicalized anti-American. She wants to prove that one of the perpetrators of the April 15, 2013, attack was influenced by the other—while Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a pothead who looked like a member of the Strokes, chased girls, and geeked out at Game of Thrones, it was his brother, Tamerlan, who talked him into filling pressure cookers with shrapnel and wreaking havoc on an unsuspected crowd. After all, it was Tamerlan, as Rolling Stone reported in 2013, who brought religion into the household and who never quite assimilated into the American mainstream.

Assistant US Attorney William Weinreb opened arguments by showing photos of the people who died in the attack, hoping to anger the jurors and to paint Tsarnaev as a monster deserving no sympathy. On Monday, he continued with that strategy by having FBI Special Agent William Kimball showcase some of Tsarnaev's social media output, and specifically his tweets. There was a picture of a city the agent identified as Mecca, and Cyrillic text that he translated as "I shall die young." Perhaps most damning was a quote he said came from Anwar al-Awlaki, the prominent al Qaeda terrorist killed by US drone attack in 2011.

The agent insinuated that a Twitter account under the name J_Tsar (Tsarnaev's nickname was Jahar) showed the defendant hated America and was planning jihad well in advance of the 2013 Boston Marathon. But cross-examination by defense lawyers quickly made the feds look incredibly silly.

For instance, the account's cover photo that was supposed to be Mecca was actually a mosque in Grozny, the capital of Tsarnaev's homeland, the Chechen Republic. That ominous tweet that was interpreted as a death wish? That was actually a lyric from a Russian pop song—something that Kimball might have figured out had he bothered to follow links on the account, one of which led to the music. The alleged al-Awlaki quote came from the Koran.

Perhaps most embarrassing for the US Attorney's office and the FBI is that both agencies are apparently oblivious to American slang. That became blatantly clear when a Tsarnaev attorney named Miriam Conrad tore the whole testimony apart, asking him to define the phrase "mad cooked."

"Crazy?" the agent replied, incorrectly. (It means high.)

He had also misinterpreted references to Comedy Central shows Tosh.0 and Key and Peele. In fact, according to the Guardian the only slang the agent could identify correctly was "LOL."

On Tuesday, the jury also got to see the very-not-normal note about martyrdom that Tsarnaev scrawled while awaiting capture. But when you're trying to prove someone hates America, it's not great for your case if the accused ends up knowing more about the country's youth culture than you do. And these goofs show that the prosecution is also painting Tsarnaev as a "stereotypical" terrorist when the reality is much more complex and terrifying. After all, what, in 2015, does a normal terrorist act like? And if he or she can go from riffing off of Comedy Central to murdering human beings—how scary is that?

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HBO premiered the third season of our show last Friday. The episode tracked global climate change from the melting glaciers in Antarctica to the decision makers in the United Nations to the communities in Bangladesh losing their homes to the steadily rising sea levels. We even sat down to chat with Vice President Joe Biden about the seriousness of climate change. We're ecstatic about how it turned out.

The episode aired at 11 last Friday night and is available to stream right now on HBO Go. It's a pretty sobering look at the irreversible changes facing our world today and we want to make sure everyone has a chance to see it—even if you don't have HBO or a TV. So for the rest of week, we're streaming the full episode on our YouTube channel. You're welcome.

Watch VICE Fridays at on HBO at 11 PM, 10 PM Central.

I've been trying to work out what it is that troubles me about Ori and the Blind Forest, a marvelous action-platform game from the independent developer Moon Studios, released for Xbox One via Microsoft's ID@Xbox self-publishing program. I think the problem, at root, is that you don't need me to tell you that it's an indie game. Every aspect of Ori screams this—from the deliciously florid, Ghibli-esque visuals through the studiedly "evocative" and "emotive" storytelling to the late 90s tenor of the puzzle design, which leans heavily on ideas from Metroid and Castlevania.

I've had an absolute blast playing it, and so have the reviewers—going by reactions at the time of writing, this is a strong contender for Xbox One's game of the year. But Ori is also a reminder that "indie" is no longer a simple statement of fact about the circumstances of a product's creation. In the eyes of the market, at least, "indie" gaming has become something rigid and quantifiable—a distinct set of aesthetics (pixel art, high-color, non-naturalistic), design influences (a lingering fondness for old platformers and shmups) and plot themes (anarchic, nerdy humor or teary-eyed earnestness).

It's something you can appreciate at a glance, before you've been told anything about the game, much as you can spot the influence of Call of Duty in a first-person shooter's reliance on an iron-sights view. And it's thus something that a ponderous, risk-averse corporation like Microsoft can get behind in the confidence that it'll find an audience, because everybody vaguely knows what they're in for when they pick up on the "indie" stylings. This is good news inasmuch as it means games as great as Ori have more hope of seeing daylight, but it's also problematic, because the whole point of the "indie" ethos as hitherto understood is surely to make a game that eludes categorization.

Ori's beating heart is a timeless feedback loop of exploration, discovery, and retreat, perfected by other developers in decades past. The game's hallowed forest—all graceful twists of runestone and blazing sweeps of foliage—is a single colossal environment, broken up not by artificial-feeling level transitions but by hazards and barriers that can only be overcome using specific powers. These powers aren't "unlocked" in the same dreary, pound-per-hour sense as a Call of Duty perk; they're uncovered, earned, after following a chain of puzzles and challenges to its conclusion.

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Ori's tiny fairy companion is able to shatter foes and objects with magic

One of the consequences of this is that you get a genuine kick out of retracing your steps—backtracking to obstacles that once seemed impassable after acquiring the relevant ability, such as a triple jump. This fosters a completeness of action and insight that linear games can't hope to offer, however fiendish the tools they place at your disposal: every power you dig up is an opportunity to learn more about somewhere you've already visited. The abilities themselves are also brilliant fun to wield. Special mention goes to the "Bash" skill, which allows you to deflect projectiles at enemies or interactive objects while simultaneously punting yourself in the opposite direction—a trick that can be used to travel great distances without touching down.

If Ori is spectacular and intelligent, that doesn't mean we shouldn't raise an eyebrow at the extent to which it leans on conventions—particularly when it professes to push boundaries. The game was unveiled as a piece of "unique" art—a game that would make us cry, that would be "ever-changing and fresh." This reached a peak of absurdity for me in February, when a senior producer tried to bill Ori's use of manual checkpoints and an RPG-style ability upgrades tree as "innovations," rather than standard procedure for action games of all stripes. You could lob similar complaints at the vaunted emotive storytelling, which boils down much of the time to "watch this cute thing suffer while listening to soulful orchestral music." It's affecting in a starchy, unsubtle way, but a bolt from the blue it ain't.

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The game tells a tale of environmental decay and rejuvenation

The same is true of many of the ID@Xbox games Microsoft chooses to spotlight. Also last month, I was shown the Xbox One version of State of Decay—the charmingly rough-edged zombie survival sim that took Xbox 360 by storm in 2013. I enjoyed the original's intricate NPC psychology and base management systems, but I suspect that it succeeded largely because it looks and plays rather like the much-feted and very venerable PC sim DayZ, which has yet to arrive on console. It was, in other words, a game green-lit by Microsoft with one eye firmly on what already works.

When the publisher has courted outright weirdness from indie releases on Xbox, it has often approached the situation with the heavy-handedness only a massive public corporation is capable of. The key title here is barmy time-traveling detect 'em up D4, one of the few Xbox One games to make extravagant use of the Kinect peripheral. It's the work of legendary Japanese auteur Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro, designer of the equally odd Deadly Premonition. Speaking to Gamasutra over Christmas, Swery revealed that Microsoft had pushed him to write things into D4 that "would become internet memes."

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More challenging puzzles play games with gravity

The publisher's thirst for ultra-viral gags and memorable surreality was a "huge obstacle" during development, he told the site. "I overcame it by rewriting the script seven times. To overcome it personally, I just kept drinking tequila and believed that what I was doing was right." Such fumbled attempts at creating edgy, "viral" products speak to Microsoft's insecurity about brand perception—it has always been regarded as the faceless, profit-driven suit alongside Sony's bulletproof hipster chic and Nintendo's carnival of whimsy. The pressure to look "cool" must be particularly acute right now, as the publisher struggles to regain traction among hardcore players after shooting its own foot off with the announcement of a broad entertainment focus for Xbox One.

I'm aware that I'm guilty of retreading old ground here myself. There's nothing all that strange about Microsoft's struggle to find a balance between the orthodox and the odd: the evolution of every creative industry or art form is defined, in large part, by the fluid relationship between twitchy, unpredictable visionaries on the periphery and cautious or complacent moneymen in the center. Still, if these kinds of growing pains are natural and inevitable, it's important to resist efforts to sell us fundamentally safe ideas in the guise of free-spirited invention.

What I want from Xbox One's independents aren't sublimely executed gems that look "indie", but games I simply didn't see coming. There are, in fairness, a fair few genuine surprises to be found on Xbox One—Press Play's Kalimba is particularly worthwhile, a 2D platformer in which you steer two characters at once down parallel, color-coded routes. But for too much of the ID@Xbox portfolio, I get the sense that "indie" is just a commercially convenient label. A touch more boldness is necessary.

Ori and the Blind Forest is released on March 11 for Xbox One and Windows, with an Xbox 360 version planned for later in 2015.

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A retired New York City corrections officer fatally shot a man after an argument in Brooklyn's borough hall subway station around 6:45 PM on Tuesday.

According to witnesses who spoke to local papers and the NYPD, the 69-year-old retiree was wearing a 9-mm handgun in a holster. As he boarded a Brooklyn-bound 4 train at the Bowling Green stop in lower Manhattan, he stepped between two friends in the middle of a conversation. The two men promptly began "talking mad trash," as one witness told the Daily News. One spit on the former guard, according to the New York Times, and when the older man tried to get off at the Borough Hall station, one of the younger men punched him.

"He just clocked the guy," a witness told the Daily News. "The older man was taken back. I saw him pull the gun out of the pocket."

Subway passengers screamed "gun!" and took flight, but the confrontation wasn't over.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/UpJFF0jjkoU' width='1280' height='720']

Popping a clip into his handgun, the former corrections officer reportedly gave chase, and, on the mezzanine level, scuffled with a man cops are identifying as Gilbert Drogheo, a 32-year-old from Harlem. In the ensuing struggle, the handgun went off once, striking Drogheo in the torso, killing him.

The NYPD has yet to identify the 69-year-old—who was taken to Long Island College Hospital after the incident—nor Drogheo's friend, who was arrested on scene.

It was not immediately clear where the retired officer had worked in the city's corrections system. But Norman Seabrook, the president of the New York City Correction Officers' Benevolent Association who has long opposed reforming Rikers Island, is standing by his man, according to the Times.

"I believe that we should wait until all circumstances are in before rushing to judgment," Seabrook said, adding that the retiree was "forced to use his weapon."

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

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Naz Shah, Bradford West Labour candidate. Image via Facebook.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The General Election is 57 days away—it's squeaky bum time for MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates up and down the country. But aside from heavy media debate over whether the UK's current Prime Minister will deign to argue with other party leaders on telly for an hour, it still feels strangely distant. Like it's not really happening. The disconnection between voters and politicians still feels, at this point, pretty absolute.

Something has happened over the last few days, though. A fire has been lit. Naz Shah, PPC for Bradford West (elected last week to stand against Respect MP George Galloway), shared her harrowing life story with Urban Echo on Sunday night, International Women's Day, in an open letter explaining why she wanted to become an MP.

Within hours, Shah's account of become politicized through a life of abject poverty, abuse, destitution, and fear went viral on social media. Every media outlet in the country seemed to pick up on it, and for good reason—her story is about as far away from the braying, men-standing-at-lecterns-in-suits Westminster politics as you can get. Here's a person who actually knows what change means and exactly why it is needed, who has fought incredibly hard against the odds from a very early age. It feels revelatory that a voice like hers might find a place in the Establishment.

To get more women to vote— 9.1 million of us didn't in 2010—we need politicians, women, who can speak authoritatively on day-to-day survival. Women who are proof that having a voice can make a difference. Women like Shah. "I know the struggles being faced by families across Bradford West because they are struggles I have had to experience myself too," she says.

Speaking to VICE from her home in Bradford this morning, Shah sounds frazzled but fired-up. "My sleeping pattern has gone out the window," she laughs. "The last couple of days have been completely overwhelming. I'm a 41-year-old woman with adult acne and it's all flared up—I looked in the mirror this morning and thought, 'Oh god.' My throat is sore because I haven't stopped talking, d'ya know what I mean? I'm supposed to be giving a conference in Cardiff tomorrow but I'm going to have to do it over Skype."

Bradford West is an important seat for Labour, and Shah has a fight on her hands. She's come in late after Amina Ali, the previous candidate, dropped out because she didn't want to relocate her family to Bradford from the London borough of Tower Hamlets, amid rumors of so-called "biraderi" interference [a hidden, traditional system of clans that seeks to limit the power of those not deemed worthy of it by the network]. Of course, everything that makes Shah a fantastic Labour candidate—politics of survival, her gender, her ethnicity, her history—will eventually be used against her, some way or another, because that's how the British political system works. Right now, though, at the beginning of her political climb, she's galvanized as hell. Her voice might be rasping, but she can't stop talking.

"When Galloway came into town he made a lot of false promises," she says. "He let people down. I actually believed he would do something here and my feminist friends were dead against me, but you know what, parliament is inherently patriarchal. It takes so much confidence to become politically active with our system, but everyone has to start somewhere."

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George Galloway. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Shah, now a mother of three, grew up in abject squalor in the area after her pregnant mother, Zoora Shah—who already had two small children—was abandoned by her father when Shah was six. Her mother struggled to support the family, and they moved 14 times in under two years—places infested with huge rats and toilets in the garden. Hope came in the form of a local man, Mohammed Azam, who offered Shah's mother a bigger, better home. Only, the caveat was forced sex. A decade-long cycle of relentless abuse began.

Azam was a married man, which, in Bradford's conservative Muslim community, meant Shah's mother immediately became a pariah. Over the next decade, she discovered that Azam was both a drug dealer and a gangster and, eventually, as well as the violent sexual abuse, he attempted to make her a drug mule. When his plans were thwarted, he took her to the cemetery where two of her children were buried and raped her.

At 12, Shah was sent by her mother to Pakistan to escape the abuse, where, at 15, she was forced into marriage. Meanwhile, her mother was desperate. After attempting to take her own life several times, she finally cracked and laced Azam's food with poison. It killed him, and she was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Shah spent 12 long years campaigning, with the support of Southall Black Sisters, for the release of her mother—a woman imprisoned (she wound up serving 14 years) for murdering the man who beat, raped, and pimped her for over ten years. Shah survived because she didn't feel like she had a choice, but she did it through channeling her anger and upset into caring for children with disabilities, working for the Samaritans ("helping others took my pain away"), and, latterly, working in a major commissioning role in the NHS ("I chaired the NHS's black and minority ethnic staff network for NHS Bradford and Airedale and commissioned 88 projects—my delivery is second-to-none"). She is now a chair of the mental health charity Sharing Voices (the largest BME mental health charity in Bradford West) whose mission statement is: "Prejudice builds walls, care brings them down."

There is a natural idealism that comes with any exciting new parliamentary candidate (Shah says she's been "assigned an MP who is going to help me run a very different kind of campaign"), and the flip-side to that is cynicism, the question: "What does this person have to back it up?"

In Shah's case, years of proven leadership, activism and fearlessness on issues of gender, race, disability, and mental health.

"I fell in love with leadership when I attended the Transformative Leadership Programme (TLP) in 2008," she says. "I didn't realize that I'd been leading until that point, but I had." Shah then became a regional director for a leadership director program with Local Government Yorkshire and Humber. After two weeks though, she "realized things weren't clear," and wound up whistleblowing.

"We will only change things if we have frank discussions about violence against women on a day-to-day basis, and if that's at the expense of my own emotional response, that's the reality."

"The press haven't reported on that yet, but I lost my career," she says, avoiding going into specific details other than that the union didn't support her when she had to take on the regional government in a tribunal. "At that point I had a pregnancy, too. My marriage broke up. It all really messed up."

Today, Shah says she "owns" her experience—even her darkest years as a child—"in an objective fashion." She shares her story frequently at women's groups and as a keynote speaker in seminars, but, as she says, it's all been "thrust into the limelight" overnight, and will continue to be reported on the closer we get to May 7. She tells me that she's going to be visited by several TV crews over the course of the week, but that she's completely ready for the circus. "It's good, because it raises the issues I want to raise immediately. There's nowhere to hide."

How so?

"We will only change things if we have frank discussions about violence against women on a day-to-day basis, and if that's at the expense of my own emotional response, that's the reality. Of course I am an emotional being, and it can be upsetting re-visiting stuff that's happened, but I had to own my own narrative. That's why I wrote the article for Urban Echo—I was on my way back from London on the night I was selected and my friend turned to me and said, 'How do you feel?' I got emotional, because it's about my mom's dreams more than anything else."

So you wanted to get in there before anyone else could?

"Exactly. Like my friend said at the time, everybody is going to write about it. I had just been selected as a candidate, needed to think of a way to address it, and just thought: 'Why not?' I wrote it while the kids were asleep on Saturday night—I think there's still at least four grammatical errors in there."

Since her story has gone viral there has, naturally, been some backlash. "I have had a lot of people posting things about there being another family—the victim's—involved, and I have to think about that. Us three kids weren't the only victims—his [Azam's] three kids were victims, too. Regardless of who the perpetrator is or isn't, these kids have also lost a father, and I must keep that in consideration."

"I am not a polished politician by any means, and may say things that aren't on the party line."

At this point in our conversation, her doorbell goes. It's someone from the Daily Mail, doorstepping her. I can make out her saying, "That headline was a bit much, wasn't it? Even for a right-wing newspaper like you. Did you have to go with murder?" (Their headline yesterday read: "The murderer's daughter bidding to become a Labour MP: Candidate tells extraordinary upbringing after mother served 14 years".)

She appears to close the door abruptly, without much of a goodbye.

Further backlash has come from people suggesting Shah was "the third choice, the bridesmaid," but she's very keen to point out how incorrect this is. "I went through a proper interview process to get a proper job—because that's what this is. It's a job. You have to deliver. I have to make targets and try and achieve them."

Unlike Galloway, then, who has been widely accused of absenteeism, along with inciting racial hatred.

"You know what," she says, her voice rising slightly, "I know the guy spins it, but yesterday, when I saw him stand in front of a television camera and say, 'I've never heard of Naz Shah,' it was the first time I've ever seen someone lie as blatantly as that. He does know who I am—I lead the biggest mental health charity for the constituency he is MP for. He's also retweeted several articles I've posted to Twitter. Bit baffling, really. Maybe if I got into a pussycat dress and ask him to pretend to lick milk out of my hands, I'll get the fame and fortune I really deserve, eh?"

What is your biggest fear currently? Because it's obviously not saying the "wrong" thing.

"I am not a polished politician by any means, and may say things that aren't on the party line," she says. "But I am going to raise the bar in Bradford. I'm not scared that I can't do the job—I can, I know I can put my money where my mouth is—but I am scared of letting people down. I never want to be that person. You can't please everyone but you can have absolute conviction.

"Politics can provide a platform to say, look, I am living proof that change can happen. I am that endorsement. People—women—feel let down, marginalized, and disenfranchised and they need tangible proof that a corner can be turned, that the system can be trusted. Because right now, it can't."

Follow Eleanor on Twitter.

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Ministers Peter MacKay and Steven Blaney walk into a committee room on Tuesday. Photo by Justin Tang

While Canadian warplanes are bombing ISIS in the Middle East, two of the main Canadian political parties have developed a bad habit of breaking Godwin's Law while debating anti-terror laws back home.

On two separate occasions over the course of just 12 hours, both Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney managed to take something that has absolutely nothing to do with Hitler and make it all about Hitler.

"None is too many."
Kicking off a two-day set of inappropriate references to the Holocaust was aspiring prime minister Trudeau.

The Liberal chief was delivering remarks on liberty Monday—though conspicuously not on the civil liberties-infringing legislation that he's supporting. Trudeau used part of his speech to underline other kinds of liberty. Namely, he doubled down on his already full-throated support of a woman's right to choose—birth control, abortions, the niqab—and the ability of religious and sexual minorities to express themselves.

But he wasn't there to focus on promoting increased access to abortion services. He was there to talk about Muslims.

The Liberal leader began by introducing a history of Canadian racism—the Chinese head tax, the internment of Japanese, Ukrainians and Italians during the World Wars, the discrimination pitted against Franco-Quebecers, and so on. From there, he took a long jump to the current political climate.

"We should all shudder to hear the same rhetoric that led to a 'none is too many' immigration policy toward Jews in the '30s and '40s, being used to raise fears against Muslims today," Trudeau said.

That " none is too many" line is a reference to Canada's policy of turning away Jewish refugees before, during, and after the Second World War. One such example, the S.S. St Louis, was forbidden from even docking in Canada—most of its nearly 1,000 passengers were sent to concentration camps after returning to Europe, where about a quarter of them died.

Part of Trudeau's basis for comparing state-based racism of 70 years ago was the recent decision of the Harper government to appeal a federal court ruling.

The Conservatives have become quite adamant that immigrants—specifically Muslim women wearing a niqab—have to show their faces at citizenship ceremonies. (Even though women sporting the niqab are already willing to do that, so long as it's only in the company of women.)

The courts have already called the policy illegal, and struck it down. The Conservatives' appeal doesn't have much of a chance of succeeding. Still, Trudeau forged on.

"Fear is a dangerous thing. Once stoked, whether by a judge from the bench or a prime minister with a dog whistle, there is no way to predict where it will end," he said.

"The Holocaust didn't begin in gas chambers, it began with words."
Meanwhile, in the most flagrant abuse of the correlation-doesn't-equal-causation rule, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney went around blaming words for mass murder.

"Holocaust did not begin in the gas chamber; it began with words, so we have to be careful. That's why I feel this measure is so important," Blaney told a Parliamentary committee.

The minister made the comment while defending his much-maligned anti-terrorism bill, C-51, which would criminalize the dissemination of terrorist propaganda—and, also, give spies the power to spy on groups of Canadians without warrant, and possibly use information obtained by torture.

Without it, the public safety minister warned, we'd be in trouble.

But the opposition wasn't having any of it. NDP public safety critic Randall Garrison asked the minister to walk back the remarks.

"I would assert that there is no equivalence to anything we're talking about here today to the Holocaust. At best, the reference seems to trivialize the Holocaust," Garrison said. "I'd like to offer the minister an opportunity to withdraw that comment."

Blaney did not.

"Violence begins with words. Hate begins with words. I could talk to you about the genocide in Rwanda, which started on the radio and contributed to a horrible genocide," Blaney said in French. "If it's a cat, it's a cat."

Blaney then repeated his original Holocaust statement.

"It's for this reason why it's important to respect the rights and liberties of Canadians, but we will not tolerate inciting violence."

On the issue of rights and liberties, the government has finally admitted that, no, CSIS won't need a warrant for most of its operations under this new legislation.

While different ministers have riffed on the theme, the government had consistently insinuated that CSIS will need to go before a judge every time it wants to "disrupt" a possible threat.

"If there are any legal implications, the intelligence agency will have to obtain a warrant and judicial authorization," Blaney said in February.

But VICE asked the minister if that was really the case or whether, as experts have said, a warrant is only required if CSIS plans on ignoring a Canadian's Charter rights. Blaney admitted, yes, that's the case.

"Any time that the activity conducted by CSIS could infringe the rights of Canadians, they will have to seek a warrant," he said on Monday outside of a committee where Senators were studying his other bill to widely expand CSIS' powers without increasing oversight.

Of course, CSIS itself will decide whether or not it thinks its operation might infringe someone's rights. Since they won't, necessarily, have to go before a judge after the fact, we'll probably never know.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.