Tusks: The Orc Dating Sim is a game that invites players to wander the Scottish Highlands as part of an ensemble of gay male orcs. Aside from being a mashup of words that aren't usually seen together, the game explores diversity in a way that feels more natural than overly conscious. One orc suffers from a mental illness. Another is missing a limb. There is "a polyamorous trio of orc chieftains."

Tusks isn't out yet, but it sounds fascinating, so to learn more we talked to the game's mastermind, 26-year-old Mitch Alexander, a gay Glaswegian freelance writer and game design graduate.

VICE: First question: Why orcs?
Mitch Alexander: One of the reasons I wanted to explore orcs is because they're almost always the outsiders. The language used to describe them, their physiology, their culture, their relationships is constructed to emphasize how inhuman, how other they are. But a lot of those traits are most strongly connected with members of marginalized groups.

How so?
Race is the most obvious one. Fantasy tends to be built around some kind of racial categorization system: human, elf, orc, dwarf. Often you'll find orcs are unthinkingly given traits that are harrowingly similar to real-world ideas rooted in racism. You'll also find ableism, misogyny, homophobia, cissexism, and classism presented in one big bundle that's justified because orcs are "inherently evil." It's an uncomfortable connotation for the folk that share similar traits.

[body_image width='816' height='638' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='orcs-are-the-future-of-gay-gaming-culture-body-image-1429069017.png' id='46058']

To be honest, I never really considered orcs so much, but I suppose that's true.
It's extremely loaded and can't just be dismissed by saying, "It's just fantasy, it's meaningless." For a lot of people, it's easier to identify with the monster of a story than the hero we're supposed to root for. The hero often brings with them a kind of entitlement due to their ability, their independence, their legal/moral/religious prerogative, their race, their class. That tends to cause trouble rather than reduce or solve it.

Is Tusks personal in that sense?
A lot of the scenarios in the game do touch on the personal and the political. You find out, for example, that one of the orcs has problems with mental illness which caused him to believe he was inherently, unfixably weak, and how he deals with that. That's both me wanting to show mental illness isn't a hyperbolic and grim, but something that happens to people we should be able to talk about. Also it touches on my own experiences with mental illness too so maybe I'm a little less afraid of talking to people about it as well.

Can we talk about your mental illness?
I have depression and social anxiety—which, as mental illnesses go, are fairly common. I have a fairly good handle on both in my day-to-day life, which I'm very thankful for, because it means I can make games like Tusks without just giving up out of a sense of fatalism. It also means I can do interviews like this one without freaking out that I've said something stupid. Brains are weird, weird things.

[body_image width='816' height='638' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='orcs-are-the-future-of-gay-gaming-culture-body-image-1429069041.png' id='46059']

So how has your background informed Tusks?
The most obvious is the setting: I live in Scotland, and Tusks takes place in a semi-mythical version of the country. I also wanted Tusks to be a game that people could play and see recognizable elements. Most of the characters in Tusks are fat is because I'm fat as well. It's hard to see positive images of fat people in any medium, let alone queer games.

A lot of the characters have scars, physical and mental disabilities, markings, body hair, and stretch marks. Again, those are things that inform the life of a lot of gay men like me in very specific ways, but rarely get represented positively. There are even small personal elements, the orcs of Tusks travel the country and assemble with others like them every so often. That's reflective of my own family's history as fairground travelers.

The character I find fascinating is the orc with one arm.
Ah, that's Ferdag. We so rarely see characters in games with disabilities—even in the ones that are all about war, violence, shooting, maiming, stabbing, and slashing. That's partially due to perceived issues with modeling characters. But it's also due to well-meaning but self-defeating worry about not representing disabled people perfectly, of the feeling that disabled bodies are taboo, dangerous, and non-sexual. Ferdag is your typical mercenary warrior whose arm had to be amputated due to severe injury, and who has had to find new ways to adapt to the warrior life.

Are LGBTIQ games a growing market?
They definitely are a growing market. There's a surge of interest in exploring games by, for and about members of marginalized groups of all kinds, including those who're members of marginalized gender and sexual orientations.

It's interesting also that the focus isn't primarily on sex.
There are probably more games that aren't specifically about sex. But it's important to recognise that sex is still an important thing a lot of LGBTIQ individuals want to explore.

What do you feel Tusks is providing that other games in this space aren't?
Tusks provides a story and a mythology that's usually centered around straight folk but in this case is unequivocally gay. And without any caveat attached to it like, "It's gay if you kinda read it this way," or "It's gay, but it's a tragic love story that ends horribly," or "One of these characters is gay and it's not like, A Thing, and also you never see them kiss anyone so it's not all in your face about it." I hope it doesn't remain unique in that respect for very long, though, if it ever was in the first place.

Tusks will be available in "a few months, barring any intrusion of real-life horrors and distractions!"

Follow Toby on Twitter.

All images via

[body_image width='1200' height='979' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='taipei-is-a-paradise-389-body-image-1429107109.jpg' id='46241']

If you have no clue what Taipei is like, it's kind of like Tokyo with cheaper taxis and less tourists. It's a city where you'll find a karaoke bar full of passed-out locals a five-minute walk from a Confucius temple.

Conveniently, if you're not about spending your entire time surrounded by neon advertisements, the Taiwanese capital is also just a short journey to some of the most beautiful wilderness I've ever had the pleasure of visiting.

Below are some of the photos I've amassed from my time taking pictures in and around the city.

See more of Leo's work on his website.

News of Hillary Clinton's official entry into the 2016 White House race fell like a divine revelation upon Nashville's Music City Center this weekend, where more than 70,000 members of the National Rifle Association had gathered for the annual meeting of the nation's largest and most powerful gun organization. After years of warning that President Barack Obama is coming for America's guns, the NRA eagerly embraced a new target, directing its doomsday predictions toward the new Democratic presidential candidate.

NRA Executive Vice President and leading gun-rights agitator Wayne LaPierre gleefully led the charge, with a 20-minute speech devoted almost entirely to deranged, almost poetic Clinton-bashing.

"She's been coming after us for decades, degrading law-abiding gun owners all over this country and trying to dismantle our Second Amendment freedoms," he told a packed auditorium Friday. "Gun bans, magazine bans, import bans, federal licensing and registration of every gun and gun owner in America. Hillary Clinton hasn't met a gun-control bill that she couldn't support. She even used the White House to run Rosie O'Donnell's so-called 'Million Mom March!'"

He was just getting warmed up. "Whitewater-gate, Cattle-gate, Gennifer Flowers–gate," he chanted, ticking off Clinton scandals, some long forgotten by most of the general public. "Monica-gate, Benghazi-gate, Email-gate, Wiped Server–gate. Hillary Clinton has more 'gates' than a South Texas cattle ranch, and Americans know it.

"She will not bring a dawn of new promise and opportunity," he concluded ominously. "Hillary Rodham Clinton will bring a permanent darkness of deceit and despair forced upon the American people to endure."

The apocalyptic message was repeated everywhere this weekend, by the parade of Republican 2016 presidential hopefuls who showed up to woo gun voters—"If Hillary Clinton is going to join with Barack Obama and the gun-grabbers that come after our guns, then what I say is come and take it!" roared Ted Cruz—and by the rank-and-file NRA members who descended on Nashville for the three-day confab. Wandering between the tactical weapons vendors and antique firearms auctions, it wasn't hard to find those who despised the Democratic heir apparent.

"I don't even want to talk about her, I'll just get too upset," said Dick Pagel, an NRA member from Michigan. "I'm hoping that 2016 won't bring another president who wants to take away our Second Amendment rights. I think that some Democrats think gun owners are the enemy, and they want to take away our constitutional rights. You're already seeing them caving on the East Coast."

"I don't think you're going to find a person here who supports Hillary Clinton," laughed Larry Corbett, an NRA member who had come down from Ohio with some shooting buddies to hear the GOP candidates. "I liked Bill Clinton," he added, "but now I don't understand why Republicans are on our side and all of the Democrats are against us."

There are lots of reasons why gun-rights activists might be skeptical of Clinton. As a senator, she supported a national gun registry and a reinstatement of the assault-weapons ban, both of which have been staunchly opposed by the NRA and other Second Amendment–centric groups. More recently, she has come out in support of universal background checks and said last May that she believes US gun laws are "way out of balance." It doesn't help that her husband signed the most significant gun control measures in recent history, including the 1993 Brady Bill, which mandated federal waiting periods and background checks for handgun purchases, and the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban.

Surprisingly, though, none of this came up at this weekend's NRA meeting. In interviews and onstage, Republicans mostly ignored Clinton's record, resorting instead to vague attack lines about Benghazi and Big Government. "I'm not pro-gun, per se," said Chris Holdren, an autoworker from Pennsylvania. "A gun is part of American culture. But I'm looking at a broader spectrum of issues—nationally, foreign policy." He added that he doesn't like Clinton because of Benghazi. "We need to watch what's coming at us," he explained. "I don't want no Obama for a third term."

At a conference entirely devoted to guns and Second Amendment cheerleading, policy issues were remarkably absent from most of the political speeches. As more than a dozen likely GOP presidential candidates took turns revving up the crowd Friday, the NRA meeting became virtually indistinguishable from any other gathering of Republican voters. Guns, ostensibly the main issue of the event, became merely a vehicle for other conservative themes: American exceptionalism, border security, the nanny state, and so on.

To most people, the fact that the NRA has become synonymous with the GOP isn't new. But it hasn't always been the case—at least not to the extent seen at this year's NRA meeting. There is nothing inherently Republican about liking guns or supporting the Second Amendment. In fact, many of the NRA members I spoke to in Nashville admitted that they'd voted for Bill Clinton and even Al Gore and John Kerry. But if there were any liberal-minded Democrats in the audience this weekend, they were drowned out by cheers for Indiana's religious liberty bill, and likely fled for the hills when Rick Santorum started warning about that Marxist Howard Zinn.

"Even ten or 15 years ago, there would have been plenty of Democrats on that podium—It wasn't as partisan as it is today, and I think that's very dangerous for gun owners," said Richard Feldman, a veteran gun industry lobbyist who worked for the NRA in the 1980s. "It's one thing if one group isn't going to help you, it's something else if they are out to hurt you. It's nice to have friends in both parties. And that does seem to have changed, dramatically."

Some of the shift, Feldman explained, can be attributed to the decline of pro-gun Democrats. In Congress, members of the Blue Dog coalition—more moderate Democrats who tend to fall to the right of their party on issues like gun control and economic policy—has shrunk dramatically in recent years, falling from more than 40 members in 2010 to just 14 after the 2014 midterms. In the meantime, support for gun control continues to be strong among Democratic voters, with 71 percent now favoring stricter firearms laws, according to a recent Gallup survey.

"A lot of the craziness in the gun issue is now a result of the fact that the Democrats, not intentionally, are without a constituency of gun owners... that kept the issue grounded," Feldman said. "When there's no more Democrats to care about, all of a sudden, it allows the issue to drift into this ideological purism. You heard it at the convention, everybody's trying to be more pro-gun than the next guy."

At the same time, the NRA has swung to the right. Since Obama took office in 2008, the organization and its leaders have claimed that that the president harbors a secret desire to confiscate American guns and freedom. The fearmongering has ginned up gun sales and contributions—the NRA grossed $348 million in revenue in 2013, up $92 million from the previous year. But it also solidified the divide between pro-gun conservatives and the left, alienating moderates and liberals who might otherwise support gun rights.

"The NRA itself has been pushed farther to the right, I think further than the leaders would want to go," said political scientist Robert Spitzer, who has written five books on gun policy, including Guns Across America, which will be released by Oxford University Press next month.

"The reason why is because the NRA in the last 20-plus years has fed its followers a steady stream of angry, defensive, apocalyptic rhetoric about the government, about gun laws, about Democrats, about liberals," Spitzer added. "It has really worked aggressively to fan the flames of what I would label paranoia among its base, and they are now a captive, to some extent, of that base."

A turning point, Spitzer said, came amid the bipartisan push for new gun control measures in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. When news came out that NRA lobbyists were giving input on a bipartisan bill to expand background checks, the organization's members freaked out, forcing the group to withdraw its support from the measure. Since then, the NRA has fervently opposed anything that even smells like gun control, most recently forcing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives to abandon its plan to ban so-called"green tip" ammo.

"This base of their movement, their organization, is so hard right that to a great degree the leaders are captive to it," Spitzer said. Within the GOP, he added, "the gun rights movement has been a fairly important part of the Tea Party movement and other very hard right-wing elements of the Republican base, so they've become very much fused with that movement within the Republican Party."

For the most part, the alliance has been mutually beneficial, with the NRA propping up Republican candidates who in turn help block any new attempts at gun control. After successfully quashing attempts to expand federal gun control laws, the NRA has recently gone on offense, calling on the GOP-controlled Congress to pass a bill that would require state concealed-carry permits to be recognized nationwide.

Public support for tighter gun laws has also dwindled since the days after Newtown. A December survey by the Pew Research Center found that, for the first time in two decades, more Americans now support gun rights than gun control, and nearly six in ten say gun ownership protects people from violent crime. According to Gallup polling, the percentages of Americans in favor of tighter gun sale laws and handgun bans have also dropped to near-record lows.

Given these numbers, it's not surprising that Republicans have turned Clinton into a Second Amendment bogeyman. "The NRA needs somebody to hate, whether it's Obama or Clinton or whoever," said Spitzer.

But at the annual meeting this weekend, there were signs that the NRA, with its one-party loyalty and insistence on ideological purity, could run into the same problems that have hurt the GOP in recent years. No one I talked to would go on the record criticizing the gun-rights group, but a few told me privately that they were turned off by the overtly partisan politics on display at this year's event.

"I think eventually it's going to end up hurting them," said one NRA member, who declined to be named for fear of hurting his company, an online gun retailer. "They're going to end up alienating young blood like me, who are not that conservative, particularly on social stuff like gay rights."

The comment underscores a broader demographic problem for the NRA: Most gun owners are white people over age 50 who primarily live in the South, Midwest, and rural areas—a shrinking group that the GOP is desperately trying to look beyond as it tries to broaden its appeal in 2016.

As NRA members flooded out of the auditorium after Cruz's speech Friday, one woman I spoke to pointed out this problem: "Look around you—what do you notice?" she asked me. "It's very white isn't it? And very old. Where are the young people? Where the Asians? Where are the Latinos? If this is the audience of the Republican Party we're not going to win."

Paradoxically, this could actually open space for Clinton to carve out a more moderate position on gun rights—provided she can balance public support for gun rights with the left's sustained demand for stricter laws. "I think you'll find that when she talks about the issue it'll be fairly sympathetic to gun owners, and she may have some success at defusing that—partly because unlike Obama she has shown some strength among blue-collar, white voters, and that may be helpful to her," said Spitzer. "So she has the opportunity to appeal more as a friend to gun owners in a way that Obama could not."

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

It's Tax Day, so there's a good chance you're in a bad mood right now. Maybe you waited too long to file, or wish you saved more receipts. Maybe you were sure you qualified for the earned income tax credit, but when you did the paperwork, realized you didn't even come close.

Feel like staining some 1099s with fresh blood? Take a few deep breaths, and try not to turn militant. Dozens of tax protesters over the years have started out as nonconformists, taking a political stance by not paying their taxes, but when the chickens came home to roost, some of them turned violent.

Nonviolent opposition to tax collection started up almost as soon as the federal income tax came into existence, back in 1913. During the Vietnam War, pacifists protested against being forced to pay for people to be killed. That group is still around, actually. And it isn't just hippies. There were—and are—peaceful right-wing tax protesters as well, who have tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to overturn the federal income tax in court. It's also not hard to find pranks against the IRS online, although it is pretty hard to find good ones.

But actual, physical violence against the IRS and the stiffs who work there really got underway in the 1970s, reaching its peak (hopefully) in 2010 with a deadly suicide attack. Here's the story of all that violence—if you're a psychopath who just had to write a huge, unexpected check to the government, please don't get any ideas:

Posse Comitatus and Fred Chicken, 1970s and 1980s:
A right-wing group calling itself "Posse Comitatus"—Latin for "Force of the Country"—came along in the 1970s. The Wisconsin chapter was hijacked by a Christian zealot and white supremacist named Thomas Stockheimer, at which point that group's idealism curdled into militancy. Stockheimer and his crew most famously assaulted and briefly kidnapped an IRS agent named Fred Chicken. The story, as written by Daniel Levitas in his book The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, makes for delightful reading because the victim has a hilarious name, and he doesn't get seriously injured:

[body_image width='426' height='338' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='a-brief-history-of-people-attacking-the-irs-992-body-image-1429053338.jpg' id='46026']

Essentially, Stockheimer punched Mr. Chicken, mainsplained politics to him for a while, and then let him go. Stockheimer was later convicted of assault.

It bears mentioning that many of Stockheimer's Posse Comitatus comrades carried out attacks and failed plots against other IRS agents as well, the most notorious of which was Posse leader Gordon Kahl's 1983 rampage in which two US Marshals—not IRS agents—were killed.

Potentially Dangerous Taxpayers, 1990s:
The IRS initially notified the public of militants with tax rage in 1991, handing law enforcement a list of 8,800 "potentially dangerous taxpayers." The title "potentially dangerous taxpayer" may sound like a hilarious badge of honor for your tax-hating uncle, or a possible Twitter bio for Wesley Snipes, but shortly after the list came out, members of the "Tax Protest Movement" showed they were serious by stepping up violence against the IRS. Fortunately, the 1990s was an era of rampant incompetence among members of the militant tax protester community.

In 1992, a mystery gunman-or-woman shot out the window at the Hayward, California IRS office. The following year, a mystery bomber tried to blow up the office in Santa Barbara, a few hours south of Hayward. Fortunately, their plan was idiotic, and involved emptying several consumer-grade propane tanks into the building. The scheme was predictably foiled when someone smelled gas. In 1996, a guy named Joseph Bailie tried to cobble together a fertilizer bomb and blow up the IRS office in Reno, Nevada, but the bomb failed, and Bailie went to prison.

In 1997 and 1999, the Colorado Springs, Colorado IRS office was targeted for nighttime arson attacks that were more competent than the propane bomb fiasco. The strategy in both cases was to smash a window in a lower floor, spread gas around, and then light the place ablaze, hoping the fire would consume the whole empty building. The first time they tried this, the plan worked, caving in the roof on the original building. But the new IRS offices were built of tougher stuff and they're still standing today. In 2001, a man named James Floyd Cleaver was convicted of the 1997 bombing, but not the very similar second one.

The Recent Horrors, 2008 to Today:
Something must have happened to upset the far-right in the late summer and fall of 2008, because people started to get furious at the IRS again, and this time, the acts of violence were uglier than the ones that took place in the 1990s.

In August of 2008, Ernest Milton Barnett got off the phone after a heated conversation with someone at the IRS, hopped into his Jeep Cherokee, drove up a grassy knoll to an area behind the Birmingham IRS building, where he did donuts for a while before driving through a window. When IRS agents tried to scramble away from the lunatic in the Jeep, Barnett backed up and rammed the window a second time. Employees were reportedly injured, and Barnett got four years in prison.

The following month, Randy Nowalk, a businessman in Lakeland, Florida whose friends and relatives said he had a history of theft and lies, hired someone he thought was a contract killer to assassinate the IRS agent who was auditing him. The hitman, who was also supposed to burn down the local IRS office for good measure, was actually an FBI agent.

Two years later, in 2010, a guy named Joe Stack, who was in the middle of an audit, penned a tedious, self-pitying manifesto, before lighting his Waco, Texas house on fire. Then he got into his plane and piloted it into the Austin IRS building, killing himself and an IRS employee, and injuring 13 others. It was the worst attack on the IRS in history.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

[body_image width='968' height='664' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='fake-weed-mamba-in-uk-prisons-596-body-image-1429030615.jpg' id='45969']

Someone rolling up some synthetic weed. Screen shot via.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In the past, inmates might have got the traditional kicking after arriving at a prison for the first time. However, in 2015, in a number of British jails, there's a new kind of welcoming ritual: a trip in the "mambulance," a.k.a. receiving medical treatment after getting too fucked up on synthetic weed.

There are plenty of brands of the stuff, but prisoners have chosen Black Mamba—something you'd find in most of the UK's head shops—as a catch-all name, and therefore inspiration for the mambulance, while prison officers have settled on Spice, a different brand that does exactly the same thing but sounds less like a glam rock covers band.

The huge rise in popularity of Mamba is down to it being untraceable in urine tests, which, if positive, can result in prisoners losing their jobs, withdrawal of privileges, or the addition of extra days onto a term. Dogs sniffing visitors have not been able to detect its scent either, so the stuff is theoretically available in every prison in the country. With many not having tried it before, the strength of strains like "Annihilation" is what's catching new prisoners off guard, landing them in the mambulance after they try to roll up the same amount as they would in a weed spliff. Because the thing is, synthetic weed is nothing like real weed; it's dried plant matter covered in chemicals that are supposed to—but almost always fail to—replicate the effects of a cannabis high.

Read: Meet the UKIP Candidate Who Wants to Bang Female Students Out of Their Overdraft

New prisoners are usually egged on by others eager for the ensuing entertainment of a synthetic weed whitey. Or, in some cases, the inmate is robbed of whatever possessions he has on him while his brain completely fails to register what's going on.

An inmate who recently served time in HMP Hewell and HMP Birmingham told me: "It's all about Mamba inside now, and it's sending people mad. But it sends people mad in different ways—unlike weed, coke, or heroin, which you know how you're gonna act or how a brother will be high, this stuff is nuts."

He added: "People look straight through you, then head butt a wall or try to fight you or officers, then the next day they have no idea what they've done. There's a saying in the nick: 'If you're gonna smoke the Mamba, you better phone the mambulance.' And it's true—after a few pulls I was convulsing on the floor. And the whole wing knows, too, so the cheers go up when the mambulance comes."

Ambulance crews and prison medics have been trained to treat the slew of conditions a Mamba overdose can bring on, which include hypertension, accelerated heartbeat, high blood pressure, blurred vision, epileptic fits, hallucinations, acute psychosis, and a total loss of control of one's bowels. The danger of Mamba is that its effect on different people is so unpredictable; to many it causes instant depressive thoughts or a comatose state. However, others can experience extreme anxiety and paranoia, which often leads to attacks on prisoners, screws, or inanimate objects.

The popularity of Mamba may even have contributed to a recent increase of violent incidents between prisoners and with guards. A Parliamentary report published in March of this year revealed assaults on staff and other inmates rose by 7.1 percent when comparing the first nine months of 2014 with 2012. Self harm also shot up by 9 percent.

The Prison Officers Association cites synthetic cannabis as its members' number one problem. Michael Rolfe is a prison officer at HMP Elmley in Kent and deals with the effects of the substance on a daily basis. He said: "Spice is affecting every single jail in this country and is a widespread problem. Prisoners take spice, and other prisoners who sell it will sometimes lace it with chemicals like LSD and stuff like that, which sends prisoners into a frenzy. They then become a control issue for us and a danger to themselves, so we can't not intervene."

While the LSD claim seems a little dubious, there's no doubt the synthetic weed alone causes problems. Rolfe added: "Quite often they present themselves to us in a frenzied state and we have to do something."

Officer Rolfe blamed the drug for turning prisoners into a screw's worst nightmare—erratic, stronger, and with a higher pain threshold.

He said: "They fight with us because of the intoxication of spice. They have a heightened strength and heightened adrenaline, so it makes them a lot stronger than they normally are, and they fight for longer."

[body_image width='800' height='599' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='fake-weed-mamba-in-uk-prisons-596-body-image-1429029925.jpg' id='45961']

Spice-branded synthetic weed. Photo by Lance Cpl. Damany S. Coleman via.

Many prison officers have a tale of Mamba violence against themselves or a colleague, and Michael is no different.

He said: "We had a senior officer assaulted by a prisoner under the influence of spice; he was knocked unconscious and then continued to be punched by the prisoner. It was only the bravery of another member of staff that saved him. He has lost his hearing in one ear and is unable to get his balance [back]. He's unlikely to return to work, and that is a result of spice, so there's a real fear factor for staff now as it's leading to more assaults and more serious assaults."

The rewards for selling Mamba in prison are astronomical, which has led to some dealers committing offences inside to extend their stay, or criminals at liberty offending just to get locked up for a piece of the action. An ounce of Mamba, which costs £100 [$147] on the outside, can earn you no less than £1,800 ]$2660] inside. I was told one jail kingpin has even boasted of ordering gang members on the outside to burgle legal high shops to keep his supply lines; he's believed to have amassed over £50,000 [$74,000] in less than three months.

There were 15 seizures of spice in 2010, compared to 430 confiscations in the first seven months of 2014, according a recent report by the Centre for Social Justice. Alongside this huge rise in usage, government cuts have compounded the problem, leaving a depleted number of officers to face the crisis.

Peter McParlin, chairman of the Prison Officers Association, said: "We always had incidents [of violence] in prison, but the level is now more than any in the last 32 years. We have less staff, so you can't manage [the violence]. Staff have saved staff, and there are even incidents of prisoners saving staff."

As it stands, it doesn't seem that too much can be done about the synthetic weed issue. Until dogs are trained to sniff the stuff out—or every prison introduces those full-body scanners you get at airports—it looks like many more British prisoners will be taking a trip in the mambulance.

Follow Steve on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='708' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='local-governments-say-vancouver-fuel-spill-response-was-too-slow-259-body-image-1429109606.jpg' id='46292']

Shore cleanup at Second Beach in Vancouver. All photos by Richard Lam

Cleanup is still ongoing and a half-dozen Vancouver beaches remain closed after a grain freighter spilled an estimated 2,700 litres of fuel into English Bay last week. The MV Marathassa ship was brand new, on its first voyage from Japan to Vancouver when its fuel tank began leaking Wednesday, April 8.

On Monday, the Canadian Coast Guard hosted an "operational update" defending its spill response against harsh criticism from Vancouver's mayor, BC's premier, and a former Kitsilano Coast Guard commander.

"The Canadian Coast Guard's response to the Marathassa spill was exceptional by international standards, a fact corroborated by a US oil spill expert," said coast guard commissioner Jody Thomas in a press statement, neglecting to name the American expert. "80 percent of the spill was not only contained, but was recovered within 36 hours."

[body_image width='1200' height='746' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='local-governments-say-vancouver-fuel-spill-response-was-too-slow-259-body-image-1429110026.jpg' id='46299']

Retired Coast Guard commanding officer Fred Moxey launched the first round of blame last week, telling a local radio station the Coast Guard base he oversaw in Kitsilano would have responded to the spill in minutes, not hours, if it was still open. He questioned why it took six hours to start skimming and 13 hours to get a boom around the leaking ship.

The feds closed the Kitsilano Coast Guard station in February 2013 to save $700,000 in yearly operational costs. "Now we have this spill right out in the front door of the station," Moxey told CKNW. "We would have been on the scene in several minutes, we would have been able to do an assessment, and also we stored 1,000 feet of oil spill boom."

Government officials maintain the Kits base "never provided these types of environmental response operations" and the six-hour reaction time was "consistent with established practices."

[body_image width='1200' height='687' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='local-governments-say-vancouver-fuel-spill-response-was-too-slow-259-body-image-1429110037.jpg' id='46300']

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson piled on during a Friday morning press conference, again questioning why responders waited hours to call for emergency boats, and overnight to inform city officials. "The response to what is a relatively small oil spill by historical standards has been totally inadequate to date," he said. He blamed both federal and provincial governments for a "lack of leadership."

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark joined the critic chorus Friday suggesting the federal government hand over its oil spill responsibilities if it's not going to deliver "world-leading" marine oil spill response, prevention and recovery. "Somebody needs to do a better job of protecting the coast, and the coast guard has not done it," she said.

It's worth noting major budget cutbacks closed an Environment Canada office in Vancouver specifically tasked with responding to oil spills. The Vancouver emergency response outpost closed along with similar regional offices in Edmonton, Toronto, St. John's, and Dartmouth back in 2012.

Vancouver's vocal pipeline opponents often cite these cutbacks as proof the Burrard Inlet can't handle more oil tanker traffic. Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain megaproject, for example, would put 29 more heavy oil tankers in the inlet every month.

"What I see is a city and a province that is not prepared for this at all," said one cleanup volunteer on English Bay shores last week. "We're just not ready for it."

[body_image width='1200' height='842' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='local-governments-say-vancouver-fuel-spill-response-was-too-slow-259-body-image-1429110050.jpg' id='46301']

Despite the storm of criticism, Coast Guard commissioner Thomas said she was "enormously pleased" with the response which has already entered a new phase focused on shoreline safety and cleanup. Signs at English Bay, Sunset Beach, New Brighton, Second and Third Beach now warn people not to swim or attempt to clean up the spill.

Though officials initially estimated the spill was under 3,000 litres—with only six litres left on the surface Friday—Thomas said Monday these were "conservative" estimates and it's still too early to know the spill's exact volume. So far the coast guard isn't releasing how much money has been spent on cleanup, but said the company is cooperating and will pay for the mess.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

[body_image width='800' height='446' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='sex-tools-for-the-handicapped-secreta-gil-726-body-image-1429084036.jpg' id='46078']
Photo courtesy of the Gothenburg Cooperative for Independent Living (GIL)

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden.

It's been about two years since we last heard from the Gothenburg Cooperative for Independent Living (GIL). Back then, the disability rights group wanted to shine light on shitty pub circumstances for the handicapped with the help of their own brewed beer, which seems to have worked out pretty well: "Our beer has won several prizes since we last spoke," Anders Westgerd, spokesperson for GIL tells me over the phone. But the reason we're talking this time isn't because of a beverage. It's because he sent me a dildo with a weird yellow handle in the mail last week.

The dildo—as well as the fake vagina and the "Fist of Adonis" that complete the set—are supposed to be disability-friendly and come with a special manual (you can watch it below).

As laid out by the manual, the sex tools, as GIL calls them, make sex a pretty awkward business—both for the disabled and the assistant. The process includes sanitary clothing and mechanical jerking off movements. It's probably one of the least sexy situations you could ever imagine.

However, these toys aren't hitting sex stores any time soon. The invention of sex toy manufacturer Secreta AB is rather GIL's way of communicating that people who need assistance have the same needs as everyone else. I had to talk with Westgerd to get my head around how a dildo, a fleshlight, and a plastic fist can become activism.

VICE: Hey Anders, thanks for the dildo!
Anders Westgerd: No worries. I'm happy you like it.

Your sex toys, I mean tools, have been especially developed for the Live and Function fair, an assistive technology exhibition for the disabled in Sweden?Yes, exactly. It began yesterday and will continue until Thursday, April 16. It's Scandinavia's largest fair that deals with care and assistive technology. There's a lot of focus on assistive technology, but not so much on how to actually live when you are disabled. That's something we want to change.

This campaign isn't really about sex. It's just a way for us to reach out to people. Sex and disability is a taboo. It all comes down to escaping from the idea that other people decide how we're supposed to live our lives. We're like anybody else and we want the opportunity to live like anybody else, too.

What are the most common preconceptions about the sex lives of people with disabilities?
Sex is something that takes up a lot of space in our culture, but no one ever talks about sex in relation to individuals with disabilities, and if you do, it's more from a perverted or freak show-ish point of view. Having sex as a disabled person isn't something that we talk about. Also, there are plenty of people who think that sex isn't something that we do.

In what way will this campaign change that mindset?
I hope that people will understand that we're normal humans who experience lust and not sexless objects. This isn't only about sex—it's about how everything about the life of a person with a disability seems to be scheduled and dictated by everyone else.

[body_image width='1800' height='1161' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='sex-tools-for-the-handicapped-secreta-gil-726-body-image-1429005556.jpg' id='45661']Anders holding one of Secreta AB's sex tools.

What about your "Fist of Adonis"? Isn't it possible that it will drive the focus away from what you're actually about?
People will probably misunderstand, but sometimes you need to shock people to make sure they get involved. Looking back at our previous campaigns—like the beer and the retarded doll—it's usually people without disabilities who become offended and like to tell GIL how things are supposed to be. But usually when we get the chance to have a conversation with them, they start to reconsider things.

How are these tools going to be presented at the fair?
We're going to have a really dull booth where you get a feeling of authority in the same way we experience our situation. We'll be dressed up as representatives of Secreta AB.

How did you come up with this idea?
Our work has always been focused on trying to reach the general public—not so much towards politicians and other authorities. I believe democracy starts with the individual. We need a collective change of view if we are to be regarded in the same way as any other citizen. Campaigns like this one helps GIL reach out to people who normally wouldn't pay that much attention to our situation. Sex is a way of opening up doors.

Good luck, Anders!

Find more information at Secreta AB's website.

Follow Caisa on Twitter.

Arriving in Ben Gardane, a tiny area in Tunisia just minutes from the border with Libya, feels like crossing into a bona fide rogue state. Gone are the tourist-friendly resorts, the open-minded attitudes, and the patriotic "new democracy" feeling that swaddles the rest of the country. Even Tunisian flags are a rare sight.

As Saad, a local schoolteacher, tells me, "Ben Gardane is only a part of Tunisia because we carry the same passport. It is like a different country here."

In Ben Gardane, the local economy is made up largely of smuggling contraband goods, weapons, and jihadists across the Libyan border, where Islamic State training camps were established late last year. The Tunisian government invests most of its funds in the north, which is located on the Mediterranean Sea and is a relative hotbed of tourism. As a result, areas such as Ben Gardane, which provide little return on government investment, are often overlooked. Saad, pulls no punches about the effects of the government's blind eye. "They don't want to help us with education, financially like they do with the north and the coastal areas," he says. "This pushes people to do something else. They will deal with Libyans instead."

As an educator of the town's youth, Saad sees firsthand the struggle many face while attempting to survive. "Children here in Ben Gardane quit school as young as possible because there is no incentive to stay in education," he explains. "They can make more money by smuggling on the border. Life here is a dead end."

[body_image width='1439' height='1088' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='inside-ben-gardane-tunisias-jihadist-enclave-414-body-image-1429035268.jpg' id='45984']

All photos by Mohamed Abdelkawi

As a foreign journalist, one is immediately eyed with suspicion here, and there is some justification for locals to be wary of outsiders. Just weeks before my visit, two major weapons caches were unearthed by Tunisian security forces in the town. Reports vary about the possible destination of the double haul, which included rocket launchers and ammunition. It is unclear whether the weapons had been stashed and perhaps forgotten about during the Libyan revolution in 2011, or destined for jihadist groups inside the Tunisian state.

Jihad is big business around these parts, where decades of government underinvestment has forced people to eke out a living in any way that they can. One man I spoke to, Mohamed, knows the problems caused by the lure of terror, which has drawn in many of the town's youth.

Related: The Rebels of Libya

"My cousin went to Syria in 2012 and right now even his family don't know if he is dead or alive. It is heartbreaking," he says.

The Tunisian interior ministry estimates that at least 2,400 of its citizens have joined external jihadist groups since 2011, though other estimates put the figure at well over 3,000, with the conservative south and center of the country providing fertile breeding grounds for terrorism.

Anti-government feeling runs deep in the weather-worn town, where a recently-imposed border tax has left many struggling to survive. "The government says that we must pay the 30 dinar ($15 USD) tax every time we cross the border but this leaves many people, especially small-time traders, struggling to cover their costs," Mohamed claims. "But the government is blind to Ben Gardane—they don't listen until people take to the streets and cause trouble."

Since the 2011 revolution, locals have learned to depend on themselves rather than those in power in the Tunisian capital.

[body_image width='1436' height='1241' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='inside-ben-gardane-tunisias-jihadist-enclave-414-body-image-1429111573.jpg' id='46348']

"Everything here is fixed by local people and not the government in Tunis," says Mohamed. "People raise money themselves to fix the streets, pavements, everything, because the government won't help us."

Most interestingly, Ben Gardane makes it easy to send cash out of the country via wire transfer, a process that takes place outside the law and without banks or traditional transfer services. One of the first things one notices upon entering the town is the street lined with non-descript blue wooden booths. The thrown-together huts are used by illegal money-changers to process currency coming from Libya, Algeria, or elsewhere in the world.

The entire operation—which allows for funds to be sent as far away as China—works on an informal global network of underground money dealers, and a long-term relationship of trust.

Ahmed, whose name has been changed, is one of the many so-called "money men" who operate on the streets of Ben Gardane. "You can send money from here," he explains, "and it is available in your country of choice in about 30 minutes."

He is discrete when ushering me into his ramshackle place of work. "The transfer network is entirely based on trust—we don't use banks," he says. "But from Ben Gardane you can send money to anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes. A lot of my customers come from Libya but also there are requests to send money to Egypt, Europe, and China."

The illicit transfer trade works in tandem with the town's lucrative smuggling business and allows traffickers to pay for goods purchased abroad.

Despite his profitable work, Ahmed admits that life in the dusty southern town is far from easy. "There are no other opportunities for people here, that is why the police allow the illegal trade to continue. If I could get any other job or any other way to make a living, then I would happily do it," he says.

While many transfers are used for relatively innocuous reasons, Ahmed tells me, "We must be careful that the money isn't used for terrorism. For me, I always ask what the purpose of the transfer—I use my own judgement, and if I don't believe that the person is being truthful, then I will refuse to carry out the deal. We don't want to give money to terrorism or terrorist groups here, otherwise the police will come here and cause big problems for everybody."

Ahmed believes that the scores of Ben Gardanian youth who choose to join jihadists in Libya, Syria, or Iraq have far more than money on their minds. "They go because of the way that Britain and America treat Muslims. The problem here is not economic—it is a religious decision," he argues, even as he is quick to denounce the extremists joining the fight abroad. "Many of them come back after a few months because they discover the truth about these groups: They are traitors on the name of Islam."

[body_image width='1436' height='1295' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='inside-ben-gardane-tunisias-jihadist-enclave-414-body-image-1429056585.jpg' id='46044']

Some of the local recruits turn to terrorism after being radicalized by extremist preachers and fellow hardliners online. Ali, who owns an internet cafe frequented by many of the town's youth, has a firsthand view of the methods used to recruit jihadists from the town. As he explains, "People don't recruit from the mosque anymore because they are afraid of the security services. They recruit from the marketplace, or from the internet. These recruiters can spot impressionable targets and then they make it their mission to warp their minds."

Security forces face a daily game of cat and mouse with terror groups who use the area as a pit stop before joining the jihad elsewhere. However, those who return are left facing an identity battle of their own. According to Ali, "Going to fight in Syria is like going to live in Europe for people from here. They will stay there for a few years and then they will come back."

Of course, the process is not quite that simple.

"Those who return are never the same again," Ali says. "They go there with thoughts of paradise and thinking that everything will be easy, but then they see that the reality there is different.

"When they come back they feel as though somebody has used them. But it is normal here—people accept it."

Follow Conor Sheils on Twitter.

Miliband: Oxford. Cameron: Oxford. Clegg: Cambridge. Yet despite most of our political leaders being pumped out by Britain's elite Oxbridge universities, whenever an election rolls around, no one wants to hear about the elite—instead, the newspapers are full of the proles, with their NHS and their benefits and their city babies attacked by rats.

So, to give the elite the chance to add their voice to the political discourse, VICE host Gavin Haynes went to this year's Oxford-Cambridge boat race to question high-spirited yuppies on their hopes and fears for Election '15.

[body_image width='1094' height='547' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='spoke-romanian-women-that-killed-their-men-202-body-image-1429018094.jpg' id='45784']

Illustration by Sorina Vazelina

This article was originally published by VICE Romania.

"Maybe when they release me, I can find my own old fella," Magdalena tells me after we are disturbed by a prison guard. The officer excuses himself awkwardly: "I didn't place you in the right spot. You are blocking the way to the conjugal visit room."

He motions toward a door with a bad paint job through which a female prisoner is presumably about to go and make love to her visiting husband.

Magdalena is 55 and still hopes that someday, somebody can love her without beating her up. Until now, she's lived with two men, and both have beaten her savagely. She left the first, and separated from the second after the blade of her knife put both of them on one-way tickets to different places: her to jail and him to a coffin.

He was called Marcel, and Magdalena had met him in the summer of 1987, in Mătăsari, a small town around the valley of the Jiu River that back then was a flourishing El Dorado but now a ghost town filled with empty blocks. At that time, it was cool to be a miner. You made good money, you got respect, and the Communist regime made songs about you. So Magdalena, a thin woman with muscles of steel, decided to leave her village in Iași County and traveled to Mătăsari to dig for coal.

The miners must have wiped the sweat off their blackened brows in astonishment when they saw this petite girl using a shovel shoulder to shoulder with them. They made her work on the surface—she would deliver coal to a conveyer belt as a sort of open-air miner. Marcel, her future husband, worked a few hundred feet under her, in the dark bowels of the earth. He would wink at her after his shift ended and she would smile in approval. Dark as he was, when he exited the mine shaft she thought he was incredibly beautiful. So one day, Magdalena took the underground miner into her above-ground world.

"The first thing he told me was that he liked me," Magdalena tells me in a playful voice, while lowering her chin and blushing like a young girl, as if the date happened yesterday.

[body_image width='820' height='547' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='spoke-romanian-women-that-killed-their-men-202-body-image-1429018434.jpg' id='45790']

Magdalena still has six months left out of her seven year prison sentence. Photos by Alex Nedea

Not even the first slap she received from him could diminish her love. One day, Magdalena fell in the mine and ended up with her leg in a cast. She couldn't go out, so she sent Marcel to grab some food.

"He took the money and spent it on himself," she explains. "He came home after a while, drunk as hell."

That was when they had their first fight. It was also the first time that he reshaped her face with the back of his hand. She was beaten and hungry.

"I said to myself, 'Eh, it will pass, he must've been upset,'" she recalls.

But not long after that, she received the second slap.

"You've gotten used to hitting me. What am I—your punching bag?" she recalls asking him. This is what she kept asking him for the last two decades. After 23 years, she would still pretend to be surprised when she was beaten.

She might have stopped this nightmare earlier, if she would have just listened to all those around her who told her to break up with him. Even her father-in-law told her: "Run away from my son, for your own good. You can't build a home with him. He has a problem with alcohol." The old man even gave her money for a train ticket so she could leave.

Magdalena took the money and got on the train, but there she met Marcel, who had followed her. He took her in his arms, like in the movies, spoke sweet nothings to her, and kissed her. He couldn't live without her! So they both went to Iași County. There, she received some free land from a communal mayor's office. She built a house and the years started started rolling on by. But they didn't just fly by—life with her husband was harder and harder. She got beaten more often and it was harder and harder to take. And it wasn't slaps, like when she was young, but fists and kicks— even pitchforks and axes.

"The police were tired of me and my complaints." –Magdalena

When she realized that her life was in danger, she went to the police. They weren't legally married and the house was in her name, but the cops still refused to kick him out.

"The police were tired of me and my complaints," she says. "They said that if I wanted justice, I should sue him. That's all they said: 'Magdalena, file a complaint in court, not with us.'"

But Magdalena couldn't afford to go to court. Her only goods were some chickens. She would have to sell them just to pay for the trips to the courthouse. Then there was the problem of money for a lawyer. She was a day laborer. He didn't work at all, having managed to receive a monthly pension for being disabled, even though he was healthy as an ox. She felt like a prisoner in her own village, in her own house. Especially when she saw the local policemen in the pub, drinking with her boyfriend.

Time after time, once he came back from the pub, he hit her.

"He only hit me in the head, I don't even know how this head of mine can keep working enough for me to talk with you," she says. "Lately, he'd beat me so hard that I passed out. This one time I was lucky my brother-in-law rescued me, or I wouldn't be alive. He was above me, throwing punches. I lay on the floor, to cover myself, I felt something warm on my eyes and cheeks, and realized it was blood. Then I felt this sharp spike under my rib, which left me breathless and I fainted."

So Magdalena changed her strategy. Instead of going to the cops, she would hide. A few months before the murder, she spent Christmas eve in the henhouse. Her boyfriend was looking for her, so she hid among the fowl, out of fear. She sat there, like a hen, on a mat of frozen chicken droppings with her ears on high alert for any screeching doors—or the sound of a boot.

Through the half-open door of the pen, she could see her husband going out either to find her, or to find booze. When he got back inside the house and all was silent again, she could hear the carolers in the village singing. As she lay there next to the chickens, she thought maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to sell them and go to the court in Iași City.

But Christmas passed. and then came Easter—that was the day it happened. Marcel lay dead in the house, with a small stab wound between his ribs. To this day, Magdalena says she didn't do it, but the prosecutors had undeniable proof and the judges sentenced her for murder. The evidence and the witnesses from the village who spoke of the torment Magdalena had to endure under her spouse got to the judge, who gave her a small sentence. It was about as big a sentence as she would have received if she filled her henhouse with her neighbor's chickens—seven years of jail time.

Micșunica, another woman sentenced for murdering her husband, came crying to our interview. And she cried even harder when she had to tell the guard supervising us why she was in tears. A roommate of hers, a 24-year-old girl that they just brought in, had proclaimed herself chief of the cell. She decided to make and break everybody's schedule—she said she would be deciding who takes a shower and when.

Micșunica stood up to her. Wearing the rubber shoes she has to use while doing kitchen duty, the short woman tells me that she could be that girl's mother at 43. How can she take orders from a girl the same age as her daughter?

So she tried to talk things out with the new inmate before the girl cut her off: "You should shut up because I didn't kill someone like you did."

Micșunica started crying in the hallway, she cried all day in the kitchen too, and now she's crying in front of me.

"God forbid, anybody would have done the same if they were in my shoes," she says.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='spoke-romanian-women-that-killed-their-men-202-body-image-1429018906.jpg' id='45792']Micșunica was sentenced to eight years for murder. Photos by Alex Nedea

Micșunica stuck a knife in her husband during a holiday—Saint George's Day, to be precise. About 17 years before that, on that same day, they were getting married. On their wedding night, they had their first kiss. It was also on her wedding night that Micșunica received her first punch. It happened after midnight, when her husband, Ion, grew jealous that some in-laws had abducted his wife—as is sometimes tradition in Romania—and kept her hidden for half an hour.

"That was too long!" the groom apparently thought, as the booze vapors rose to his head. So after the traditional stealing of the bride came the less-traditional punching of the bride.

Micșunica had learned that life was tough growing up, so she shut up and endured—that's what her parents taught her to do. She spent her childhood with a hoe in her hands.

"My parents were sick so I had to do their share of the work at the collective work station, so we could buy some cereal," she says. "I would wake up at 4 AM and would return home at 7 PM."

At 18, she thought her life would finally get better. That's when her big brother came to her and said he'd found a man for her to marry, in another part of the country— Brăila County. Her big brother knew her future husband, a tractor driver, from his collective work station. She left her parent's village in Vaslui county and went off to get married. After the wedding, her brother changed jobs, so Micșunica was left alone in a family of near strangers.

"When my mother-in-law saw her son climbing on me and kicking me, she would say: 'Attaboy, son, hit her!'" –Micșunica

The beatings got worse and worse, and she had no one to complain to. "When my mother-in-law saw her son climbing on me and kicking me, she would say, 'Attaboy, son, hit her!'" Nobody in the whole village supported her. The husband was seen as a nice guy—they had all known him since he was little, he would say hello on the street, he was a respected citizen. Who would believe this stranger who came from God knows where anyway?

The police also took Ion's side. Each time Micșunica went to the police station to file a complaint, they told her there was no point in doing all that paperwork, because the cops weren't allowed to intervene in family feuds.

So Micșunica kept enduring, while trying to raise the three kids she had with her abuser. She had a hard time doing it alone—especially since, besides the kids, she had to take care of her sister, who was mentally ill, as well as Ion, who got fired because of his drinking problem. Out of anger, he started drinking even harder.

"I was both the man and the woman of the house," she recalls. "I went out in the field, I cooked, I did day labor in the village to make some money because our eldest daughter was going to high school in the big city and it cost us a lot to keep her there."

Two weeks before the murder, Micșunica received her worst beating yet. She thought she wouldn't make it out alive. She managed to run away in her nightgown on the dark village streets, get to a pay phone, and call the police chief on his cellphone. She said that her husband almost killed her, and the chief allegedly replied, "Micșunica, it's 10 PM, I'm off duty. If you want me to come to your place it will cost you 225 euros."

Micșunica would have to endure it again. She waited for the sun to rise and went back home to her children.

One day, Micșunica got home from work and Ion—who had just woken up—was complaining that he was hungry. "I put some beans in his plate, but he started yelling at me—how can I serve him food without any meat in it? He has already cleared out all the meat at midday. I asked him to wait for a while, so I could fry some fish. 'Woman, I will kill you and carve you into pieces,' he threatened."

"'Woman, I will kill you and carve you into pieces,' he threatened."

Around that time, there was a famous murder trial making the media rounds in Romania TV about a husband killing his wife and disposing of her body. That's apparently where Ion learned that men who kill their women can hide their crime easily, then show up on TV and say they did nothing.

"I asked him, 'Why would you cut me and carve me into pieces, Ion? Because I worked all day while you slept?'" He answered 'Shut up, or I'll cut you and carve you into pieces!'

In the end, it was Ion who shut up, not Micșunica. The woman never fried those fish. She saw some kitchen knives sitting on the table, perfectly aligned in the same place she carefully placed them every day. She grabbed one and threw it at him. The blade got stuck in the his liver. Ten minutes later, police lights lit up their dark street in red and blue. It was the police chief and his deputy. They had finally come to see Micșunica, even though their shifts were over.

Editor's Note:According to a study by the Romanian National Institute of Criminology ten years ago, half of the 350 women imprisoned in 2004 for murder were victims of physical or sexual violence.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Since the coalition came to power in 2010, food poverty in Britain has risen dramatically. For those struggling to exist because of low pay, zero-hour contacts or delayed benefit payments, food banks aren't just helpful—they're a lifeline. They've also been one of the key points of contention in the build up to the imminent general election.

It's not hard to see why. Year after year, the numbers of people turning to food banks have continued to rise. There are no government stats, but the Trussell Trust, which runs more than 430 food banks in the UK and is the only source of routinely collected data from the last decade, says 913,138 people were given food parcels by its volunteers last year—an annual increase of nearly 300 percent.

VICE heads to Newcastle to go inside one of the busiest food banks in Britain, where food is being distributed for free to more than 1,000 people a week. We meet the dedicated volunteers and the locals for whom poverty has become a part of everyday life after decades of industrial decline and years of austerity cuts. Inevitably, in such a situation, the system will occasionally falter.

Statement from the Trussell Trust:

"Newcastle West End food bank is working hard to meet an incredibly high level of demand in an area where large numbers of people are struggling to feed themselves and their families. The challenging local situation meant that, at the time of filming, the foodbank was not operating to the standard Trussell Trust foodbank model. We have been partnering with the foodbank over the past few months to successfully develop new systems to meet these challenges and to help people break out of crisis faster."

[body_image width='1024' height='683' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='science-vs-politicsthe-real-problem-with-the-premiers-climate-summit-296-body-image-1429117104.jpg' id='46421']

A Shell manufacturing facility in Scotsford. Photo via Flickr user Pembina Institute

When I was in tenth grade I played one season of high school football. I hated it, mostly because of my coach. He was the type of guy who would, without a hint of irony, declare that second place was really just first loser. I despised that attitude, which is why today I'm frustrated as a climate activist trying to respond to the recent Canadian Premiers' Climate Summit—I find myself saying the same thing he did about my blocking: that it's just not good enough.

At first glance, there's nothing offensive about the outcome statement from the summit. It's refreshing to know that Canadian provinces all believe in a "scientific consensus calling for significant reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming to less than 2C and that they recognize that "the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action." For climate activists in Canada, who are frankly desperate to see any political action, it makes sense that these kinds of statements are applauded. After all, they're a far cry better than the positions of our federal government. The problem is that climate change requires a sort of absolutism, that Canadians are by and large uncomfortable with, and it shows in our politics. It's a lot easier to commit to a cap and trade scheme or a carbon price—like Alberta's, which effectively recycles a paltry $15-per-tonne fee back to oil companies—than it is to commit to leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

Unlike many other issues, climate change has a clear red line. According to the best science we have, about 80 percent of the world's oil, coal, and gas needs to stay underground for us to have a good shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2 degrees. Here in Canada, the numbers shake out pretty much the same, with one study published in the scientific journal Nature estimating that at least 85 percent of Canada's tar sands need to remain underground and unburned.

The challenge is deceptively simple. Imagine our atmosphere as a bathtub that is partway full and has the tap running full blast. At some point we need to turn off the tap and stop filling up the tub or we're going to create an awful mess. The same is true of fossil fuels, and the sooner we acknowledge that at some point the tap needs to be shut off, the more time we have to do it gradually. In other words, if politicians admit now that we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground, that gives us more time to figure out how much we can safely burn and figure out a strategy so we transition into the new energy economy, not crash out of the one we're in now.

This is the fundamental problem with the outcome of the Premier's Climate Summit, that when faced with the climate crisis, politics—notorious for working in the grey area of society—seems unable to grapple with the black and white reality of physics. In Quebec, despite 25,000 voices echoing the scientific reality that tar sands and climate leadership don't mix, Canada's premiers not only failed to acknowledge that we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground to tackle the climate crisis, they failed to even use the words "fossil fuels," "oil sands," or even "oil, gas, or coal" in their entire declaration.

So how could this summit have ended differently?

Shortly before the summit, two studies were published, one from the Pembina Institute and the other from Greenpeace and Environmental Defence. Both came to roughly the same conclusion: until Canada puts a freeze on tar sands expansion we can't meet our global climate responsibility. Since permitting for new tar sands extraction projects isn't something that the premiers who gathered in Quebec could tackle—that's something either the federal or Alberta government would need to lead on—they could have focused on pipelines, which they are uniquely positioned to weigh in on. If the summit's two major power brokers, Kathleen Wynne and Phillipe Couillard, joined together to oppose the Energy East project, it would have been game-changing leadership. It also would have made perfect sense, given that building Energy East would facilitate enough carbon emissions to undo the emissions reductions from Ontario's coal phase-out. A statement of opposition to Energy East would have broken that quintessential barrier to climate action in Canada—political admission of the scientific reality that stopping climate change means leaving tar sands in the ground.

They didn't though, and once again confirmed the unfortunate reality that politicians don't have the backbone to stand up to Big Oil. Right now in Canada, even with a collapsed price of oil costing thousands of jobs and delaying a federal budget, there is a vacuum when it comes to leadership calling for a real—not just economic—transition away from fossil fuels. It makes sense: the fossil fuel industry in Canada is one of the most powerful lobbies around. Despite representing a mere 2 percent of Canada's GDP, the tar sands companies have a massive impact on our democracy. These companies have been linked to the gutting of environmental protections and regulations. They have been backed by multi-million dollar government ad and lobby campaigns in the US and Europe, and most recently been revealed to be briefing Canada's police and security agencies on the so-called "anti-petroleum movement."

Climate change demands more from our political leaders than they seem ready to give, and so in many ways the hard work still remains. Thankfully, we know that on the other side of Canada's oil addiction there is plenty to look forward to. Already, despite the power of the fossil fuel lobby, more people across Canada are working in clean energy than working in the tar sands—it makes sense given that job creation from clean energy investments outpaces fossil fuels by a rate of 15 to two. We know that leaving tar sands in the ground isn't just good for the climate, but necessary to uphold the treaty relationship with indigenous peoples in northern Alberta. We know that movements opposing each and every pipeline proposal that pops up are only building political power, but winning victories like the cancellation of TransCanada's port in Cacouna, QC and forcing tar sands producers to face the prospect of constrained production. We know, or at least I hope we know, that as people we are greater than the tar sands, and if we keep fighting we can build a most just, clean, and vibrant Canada together.

Cameron Fenton is the Canadian Tar Sands Organizer with the global climate campaign 350.org who just launched a summer mobilization project called We > Tar Sands calling for real political leadership for a new energy economy in Canada. Follow him on Twitter.

Today's video - VICE founder Suroosh Alvi investigates allegations of radicalization in Calgary, Canada commits troops to train Ukraine's military, and the hidden Darknet's market for illegal goods.

Exclusive: Homegrown Radicals, Part 1

ABOUT DAILY VICE
Over here at VICE Canada, we've been working like crazy to bring you DAILY VICE: the first mobile show in the VICE universe. Now, after plenty of relentless R&D, we're finally ready to let you all in on our newest creation.

From Monday to Friday, DAILY VICE will bring you the top news and culture stories from across our network. You'll also get a first look at our newest documentaries before they hit the internet at large. And, every Saturday, we'll take a closer look at one of the week's top newsmakers.

DAILY VICE is the best way to keep up on all of our best stories while you're commuting to work, waiting for a doctor's appointment, or any other time you need a roughly six minute diversion from your ordinary life.

DAILY VICE is a Fido customer exclusive. If you're with one of those other providers you can access DAILY VICE here for the month of April. After that, only Fido customers can continue watching with the DAILY VICE app. Learn about the app here.

Browse the video archive

View the French Content

[body_image width='640' height='358' path='images/content-images/2015/04/14/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/14/' filename='johnny-rockard-ukip-porn-views-students-194-body-image-1429016316.png' id='45777']

Screenshot courtesy of Huw Sambrook

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last week, it came to the world's attention that a UKIP candidate in Bristol is a porn actor and baron who goes by the screen name "Johnny Rockard." Real name John Langley, the local election candidate organizes orgies and has paid Hungarian girls to let him rail them on camera when he's not railing against the evils of immigrant workers.

Since then, a VICE-reading filmmaker has been in touch with some rarely-seen footage of Langley scouting for performing porn talent around Bristol University. It shows him giving further insight into his views on porn, why he likes working with students, and his views on domestic violence.

When the news came out last week, Langley said that his work is "no big deal." "I cannot see why there should be any problem with any of this," he told the the Bristol Evening Post. "What people do in the privacy of their own homes is nothing to do with politics."

Maybe he's right about his work being "no big deal." I'm not here to pass judgement on one man's decision to set himself up in the porn industry. However, Langley's assertion that his work has "nothing to do with politics" jars with what he says in the footage below, which suggests that he knew full well the political context in which his videos were made—that of students struggling to have enough money. He implies that he targets female students because they already work multiple jobs and therefore are more likely to take up his offer of porn work.

Johnny walking around Bristol University looking for talent. Footage shot by Huw Sambrook

The student vote is always highly sought after, and luckily Langley has plenty of experience working with students. Here he is explaining why:

I got into filming students from a political perspective because I had a conversation with a girl who was basically doing three or four jobs a day just to try and make ends meet and on top of that she was doing her studies as well and I said to her, 'This is crazy,' you know. So that's when I decided to do stuff around the universities and feature 'fantasy students.'

Students always sell on films—young people, younger people—always sell on films because they appeal to a wide audience, such a wide audience. How much girls can earn is always a very interesting question that I'm always asked because the amount of money the girl earns is dependent on how committed she is.

The producer of the footage is Huw Sambrook, a researcher and videographer who at the time was making a documentary about student sex work for his final-year project at Bath Spa University. I called him for a chat. I asked how he reacted to the news that his former documentary subject was now a UKIP candidate. He said: "Yeah, I saw it pop up and I was like, 'What the fuck is he doing?' I was like 'What?!' and just shocked... it was crazy."

Later on in the footage, Langley is handing out flyers to girls when he is challenged by a male student who calls him a "pervert."

"I think you should leave these intelligent young women alone," says the student. "'Johnny Rockard'? Not any of them would go near you. You're fucking disgusting."

Another student interjects, "You shouldn't be going around university students. It's completely inappropriate."

The student then asserts that the porn industry Langley works in contributes to domestic violence.

"Not everybody shares your view," argues Langley.

"I'm perfectly sure of that," replies the student. "That's why you're here with an arse on your T-shirt."

Langley then dismisses the number of people who carry out domestic violence because of porn as, "a very small minority of people," adding later, "You can't sanitize life—you can't."

I got in touch with the Bristol branch of UKIP for comment. Branch chairman Steve Wood reaffirmed that, "What [Langley] does in his private life is entirely up to him," and that, "He's a stalwart member and he's done a lot of good for the branch.

"As far as we're concerned the matter is closed," he said. I pressed him about some of the comments in the videos—don't they suggest that Langley's work is exploiting broke students more than he let on previously? He told me to email him the quotes and that he would get back to me. I haven't heard from him since.

Hard up students, your troubles are over: This UKIP candidate wants to bang you out of your overdraft.

Follow Simon on Twitter.

[body_image width='1500' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='why-are-there-so-few-gay-male-headlining-comedians-415-body-image-1429060046.jpg' id='46047']

Guy Branum is a homosexual. This is not his defining characteristic, nor should it be, but it is an undeniable fact. It is both his prison and his meal ticket.

Well, that's not entirely true. His meal ticket is his unrelenting wit, his incorrigible intelligence, and his undeniable charm. A writer and stand-up comedian, his new album, Effable, just opened at number one on the iTunes comedy charts. We linked up with him at a tasteful brunch spot of his choosing to discuss the state of gay comedy. He told me about his preferred venues, the ways queerness plays into his jokes, and that one time he went to jail.

VICE: What's your mission statement as a comedian?
Guy Branum: To be understood and thereby make it possible for people to realize that their perspective isn't the only perspective—to push people's heads a bit and [...] and make people see from my eyes, which [are] just as self-absorbed as every comedian's, but they're weird.

Do you ever tire of your eyes being construed as weird?
God, yeah. But it's so much fun. A lot of people are scared of having their own take. I just think it's fun. Sometimes it's annoying when it becomes conventional wisdom that things are good or bad or this or that way. That doesn't work for me, but I'd rather do this than just submit to someone else's construction of the world.

Do you ever tire of being the "other"?
It's weird, because I grew up being insistently told I wasn't the other, being insistently told I was the right perspective. But then things stopped working for me—social practices, the media. There's something so nice about understanding why it doesn't work. Did I tell you about being arrested?

No. What happened?
I got a warrant for not going to court for a traffic violation. I was arrested and put in West Hollywood jail, which was fine. But then they took me to county with everyone who committed a crime last night. It was all these dudes being terrible; power games and all that. Before they put me away they asked, "Do you need to be segregated? Are you gay?" and I was like, "Yeah." They put me in a room with four homeless meth-addicted gay guys and four homeless meth-addicted trans women. And we had a lovely time. It was just a situation of not being expected to be in a room with straight guys who are doing their straight guy power games and who would be ready to identify that we were doing them poorly. It was so not bad. There were definitely power games in there, and I definitely had to feel other people out, but...

Sounds like a jailcation or something.
Yeah, it wasn't bad. There was just something lovely about being in a space where my perspective was the same as everybody's. It's nice to have moments being around people you don't have to explain yourself to.

Do you think your life would be better, in comedy at least, if you weren't a homosexual?
It's weird, because I feel like—I feel self-conscious about how much I talk about it. I feel like any gay person in any situation feels self-conscious about how much they talk about being gay, whether it's a lot or whether it's a little. Because you're kind of not supposed to. And I think, if I weren't me, would I still be a comedian? What would I have to say? I just know that being me was a very long period of having thoughts that were different from the people around me and not being able to express them—or, when I expressed them, not having anyone really understand. Once I got to a place in this world where they did understand, and once I got comfortable talking about all of myself, I almost started getting drunk on it. I did not have that for 23 years. And now that I've got it, I love it too much.

Why do you think there aren't many headlining gay male comedians?
It's an interesting situation. [James] Adomian headlines, but other than that, you don't really have anybody. It's interesting because most of the gay female headliners were closeted and not talking about their inner lives for most of their career—with the exception of Wanda Sykes, who is doing amazing work. It's not like Ellen talks that much about being a lesbian or how that experience impacted her. Now she just sort of gives us Portia [de Rossi] as an echo of heterosexual domesticity. And I think there is something a bit more threatening about gay guys or that seems a bit more alien.

Why is that?
I think gay guys are less present in comedy clubs because they're hostile environments. There's also a bit of—we're not used to being represented in media, and there's a little bit of difficulty there, of looking at some gay guy who's not a super hot go-go boy and not a drag queen, and being able to say, "Oh, he's like me," without that reflecting on some aspect of yourself you find terrifying. I think most of it is nobody's seen it happen before, so the intermediate people in the industry just don't understand how it could happen. They don't take a young gay comic and set them on the path of being a real club comic. They say, "Oh, you're a writer, or you're an actor, whatever." And the fact that gay comics are going to start out in New York or LA where those things are possible, you're less likely to have somebody really grinded out as a gay comic.

How did you get going?
When I started out in San Francisco, there came a point where the more-established Latino comedians started taking the less-established Latino comedians out on the road to open for them. The black guys took the Jews out. That sort of thing happened, but there was no one there to extend a hand down to me. You need to have that process of being taught how to go on the road, especially since the road is more hostile to us. You have to learn how to deal with someone [in the crowd] yelling, "You're a fag." You learn terribly, terribly valuable lessons along the way, but a lot of people are just going to be like, "I don't want to deal with it."

That's understandable.
I think that there are such valuable lessons to be learned from performing stand-up comedy for an audience that doesn't necessarily know that you're what they're looking for. And club wise, so many people show up expecting comedy. They don't know who the headliner is. They just show up for comedy. And when it's somebody who is a straight white guy, who may have a very specific perspective, who may be a lovely, glorious creature, it's easier for them to be like, "Ah, yes this is comedy." And for me, in my own head, and in other people's heads, there is an anxiety that this may not be what they're looking for.

I just did a week at Stand Up Scottsdale, in Arizona. And I went into it like, "Am I going to be what these 20-something professionals are looking for from an evening?" And the answer was fuck yes, because it was a glorious evening of comedy. It maybe wasn't what they were expecting, but they sure as fuck had a good time.

Generally, is it easier to perform in alt rooms?
God, yes.

What are the differences?
The audience showing up to an alt show understands that they are getting a grab bag of interesting things. They know it's going to come from varying perspectives. And those situations always feel like a lovely breath of fresh air.

Presumably, you cater the set to the audience—a set in an alt room would be different than a set in a club environment.
One thing that's nice now is having people know me well enough in alt rooms that I can go up and not have to spend two minutes of time and goodwill explaining that I'm a homosexual; we can just start off from a place of some basic assumptions about who I am. It's so easy to be like, "But Guy, you talk that way and you dress that way, wouldn't people assume?" The answer is no. It needs to be addressed or else they will be confused by it because there is just a presumption that everyone is heterosexual and thinks dicks are gross.

I imagine you would need to explain yourself even more in a club environment then.
Yeah, but you usually have more time and space to do it. And that's lovely. What it takes is communication for them to realize who I am. I'm not able to start off with the basic assumptions and goodwill that a comedian who looks and acts like a comedian has. But we also get to go on a more interesting adventure, and I never wanted to do comedy that didn't delve into my soul. There are a lot of people who tell very funny jokes and don't give you a lot of who they are—that's a school of comedy, but that's not what I do.

The other thing is, I'm not doing a fucking one-person show, but I also want to get to know my audience, which I think a lot of comedians don't. I feel like over time I've learned that it's better to be listening and attentive—not in a pandering way, but just to sort of understand where they're at, as an audience, and let them know that I'm hearing them. I tell big mean jokes sometimes and I want them to understand that I'm there for fun. There's something nice about showing a basic degree of respect for your audience.

Do you think your ability to empathize like that has anything to do with your sexuality?
I think I had to learn it, because when you start out in comedy, you're just trying to do what the people you admire do. In a lot of ways, you can lionize a "take no prisoners" approach. Of course I'm not going to be for everybody. There have definitely been people who have watched my set and didn't like it. A girl once told me I was too dark and unsettling, and that I should quit comedy. I told her I read what she said, but comedy's the thing that pays my bills, so I'm gonna keep doing it. We may have different aesthetics, but I'm not going to tell someone it's not their right to have a thought or a reaction.

I don't think gay guys are inherently more empathetic. We just don't have women present to be empathetic, as women have been trained to do, so we learn to pick up the slack. It's like human interaction camping.

What's the future of gay comedy?
The thing is, our numbers are never going to be amazing. Even living in a world where there are probably more closeted than out people right now, the best bullet we have is that 2.5 percent of Americans are out gay people. But I think part of what we're trying to learn in America right now is that you should listen to people regardless of [whether] they're going to bring in the most numbers or not. God knows we have a long way to go, because we still haven't figured out that women are people yet. But I think [...] gays will benefit from us learning women are people and certainly vice versa. We're a solid demo. We have nice disposable income because we don't accidentally make babies.

Has there been any progress?
It's so hard to seem as grateful as I am to comedy and the comedy industry while at the same time addressing its shortcomings and difficulties. I don't want to be one of those people whose always whining. I just want to be undeniably funny and respected for it. I also think that if Sheryl Sandberg taught us nothing else, it's that doing a great job and waiting for someone to notice that great job is never gonna happen. So, yeah, I do point out things I have a problem with. But I try to not linger on them, and I try to not use them as an excuse, so I'm not just bitching and whining about an industry I don't think has done well enough by me because God knows I've had so many lovely opportunities and so many straight white guys who are very funny don't succeed. We all understand that, but we can't let it get in the way of understanding that there are real structural problems facing people that aren't straight white guys.

Right. Just because you're consistently employed as a comedy writer and you have the number one comedy album on iTunes right now, it doesn't mean things are fine.
Yeah. But it means things are getting better.

You can find Effable, Guy Branum's latest comedy album, on iTunes.

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.