A still of Bill Cosby performing decades ago. Photo via Flickr user Kate Haskell

On Wednesday, a California judge ruled that Bill Cosby must provide testimony about a sexual encounter that allegedly took place between himself and a 15-year-old girl in 1974. The Atlantic reports that the lawsuit, brought by Judy Huth, 56, is past the criminal statute of limitations, but in light of the recent onslaught of sexual assault charges raised against Cosby, the California Supreme Court ruled last month to let this civil suit—which claims psychological damage—proceed.

Huth is alleging that Cosby forced her to perform sexual acts when he took her to a party at the Playboy Mansion. Her deposition is set for October 15, while Cosby's testimony—his first since 2005—will come on October 9. The 2005 case, raised by a former basketball star and Temple University Athletics employee named Andrea Constand, was among the first of more than 40 public allegations of sexual assault against the once-beloved television star. After she detailed her alleged drugging and sexual assault, women of various ages, races, and backgrounds came forward with strikingly similar accounts.

Cosby has still never been formally charged for any crimes. But last month, a judge ordered the release of his deposition in that 2005 suit, wherein the comedian owned up to a habit of dishing Quaaludes to young female love interests. The allegations against him largely faded from the headlines after Constand's settlement, at least until Katie Baker's Newsweek interviews in February 2014 with victims Tamara Green and Barbara Bowman. And ever since comedian Hannibal Buress went off on Cosby in a stand-up bit that went viral last fall, the comedian has faced a seemingly constant deluge of allegations.

For their part, Cosby's lawyers are calling the Huth suit—which can proceed despite centering on events from decades ago because the alleged victim was a minor—an attempt at extorting their client. Of the 46 women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, Judy Huth may have the best shot at landing the next blow.

The eruption of Alaska's Mt Redoubt in 1989 almost brought down a 747. Image via Wikicommons

As Mount Raung continues to belch volcanic ash into Indonesian airspace, Jetstar and Virgin have again cancelled all flights in and out of Bali. The problem, of course, is that volcanic ash clogs jet engines and can bring down planes. But that's not reason enough to cancel flights, according to dozens of irate posts over Jetstar's Facebook wall.

Fitri Julicia spoke for the masses when she told Jetstar "This is supposed to be a short holiday for my family. Never have I thought it turns into such nightmare." A similar line came from Tracey McCrea who wrote "Great. Our flight has been cancelled to depart Bali to Brisbane tonight... the earliest flight home is Monday night!"

So why can't planes withstand flying through ash clouds? The problem begins with their composition. Unlike regular clouds, which are all water, volcanic ash is made from tiny pieces of abrasive rock and glass. Flying an airplane into a cloud of this stuff is like blasting your car with sand. All outer surfaces get scoured, and the windshield can become so badly damaged that pilots can't see out. While these are mostly cost considerations for the airline, the main issue is that jet engines are sufficiently hot to melt ash particles into a viscous clumps of glass, which quickly seize up engines.

There have actually been no fatal crashes attributed to volcanic ash, but there have been some very close calls. In 1982, British Airways Flight Nine flew into an ash cloud from Indonesia's Galunggung volcano. As the cabin filled with sulphurous smoke, all four engines on the 747 flamed out, and the pilots set the plane to glide. As they assessed whether they'd have enough altitude to clear Indonesia's mountains, Captain Eric Moody made this beautifully understated announcement to the passengers.

"Good evening ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are all doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress."

As luck would have it, the inoperable engines cooled, which solidified the molten glass over the engines' walls. This cleared the combustion chamber and all four engines began working again. The plane was able to land but idiotically Indonesian authorities didn't close the flight path. Less than three weeks later a second 747 was forced to shut down three of its engines while flying through the same area.

The most recent case of volcanic ash causing engine failure was KLM Flight 867, over Alaska in 1989. As the plane descended into Anchorage International Airport, en route to Tokyo, the plane entered a cloud of ash coming from Mount Redoubt. All four of the plane's engines died, but the pilot managed to restart two and landed safely.

Off the back of these two events, an organisation was formed specifically to advise airlines about volcanic activity. Called the International Airways Volcano Watch Operations Group, the group has nine offices internationally, each monitoring a section of the planet's skies.

Based in Darwin, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology Ash Advisory Centre monitors air quality over South East Asia, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. "When we find discernable ash we send the information along to the Meteorological Watch Office, which then issues a warning that the airlines can use," explained Emilie Jansons, who is the manager in Darwin.

Surprisingly, whether an airline decides to run flights is somewhat up to the discretion of management, as some stranded passengers have observed. "Why is it that only Australian flights are cancelled!!!???" Fumed Eva Andrianopoulos on Facebook.

As Emilie explained, Australian airlines generally err on the side of caution. Other airlines will probably make it back; it's just a question of how desperate you are.

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One of the author's weekly games. All photos courtesy the author.

"If you would read a man's Disposition, see him Game; you will then learn more of him in one hour, than in seven Years Conversation, and little Wagers will try him as soon as great Stakes, for then he is off his Guard."

-Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University Concerning His Behaviour and Conversation in the World, Richard Lindgard

"Dungeons & Dragons is some of the most crazy, deep, deep, deep nerd shit ever invented."

-Ice T

Playing Dungeons & Dragons after going through the polished and shoulder-padded world of the more normcore gateway drugs—Warcraft, Skyrim, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, whatever blockbuster thing with hit points and constitution scores that's keeping you from going outside—is like cracking open Revelation after a year of Sunday School. Unlike today's digitized RPGs, D&D was not designed to be accessible or even (to the chagrin of child psychologists) meaningful because, basically, it wasn't designed. Like all real art, the target audience for the first D&D rulebooks were the people who made them.

When D&D was thought up by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax in 1974, the idea was there'd be a loose set of rules for how to pretend to kill people in the fake middle ages, and anything not in the official rules you could just make up. In theory, anything could happen. That kind of sandbox-style freedom made D&D its own unique thing to everyone who played it, niche-adapted enough to survive without being subsumed into any of the other visions of pop fantasy it would inspire over the coming decades. It's Game of Thrones but it's also Adventure Time—and everything in between. Aside from attempts to scrub away the unconscious racism and sexism of its 70s campus-nerd roots, the current game has survived with most of its genuine eccentricities intact—not in spite of how out of step they are with what people expect from a wizardgame in 2015, but because of it.

The Christians were right. D&D is still—even in a world with Grand Theft Auto, spice, ISIS, global warming, and Donald Trump—completely fucked up. It is a game with talking floating eyes that want to disintegrate you, stats for the devil and the Buddha, a three-headed god that carries a panther-skin bag and throws a magic brick for 5-50 points of damage, magic teeth, the chance to play as a teleporting dog or a badger if you die, planets that aren't round, and psionic priest vampire manta rays.

But beyond all that, the reasons that D&D is still worth playing are the people you play it with. As opposed to online RPGs where players interact through screens or headphones, when you sit down for a game of Dungeons & Dragons you do it with your people. In the same room. With snacks. Without the rest of the bar watching. There's a story about three witches and a pack mule, which you all not only watched but invented, and then the witch threw a Dorito at you and drank your scotch.

Like nerd stuff? Watch our documentary on Magic: The Gathering

You learn things about your friends during these times, too. Who are these people when the stakes are low and wagers are little and no one is cool? Poker night gives you permission to get into your friends' wallet; D&D night gives you permission to get into their heads. Sometimes it's no surprise: Patton Oswalt played a drunken dwarf, Marilyn Manson says he was a dark elf, VICE international atrocity expert Molly Crabapple played a thief—but would you have pegged our porn correspondent, Stoya, for a druid with a dog named George? It's important to know when there are hippies in your house.

The game is meant to reflect the people playing. D&D came out of the mimeographed, amateur-press wargame scene and reached the height of its popularity in the mid-80s, when zines had staples in them, Metallica didn't suck, and computers had not yet quite eaten the world—and it still carries a heavy debt to the handmade and the DIY. Every rule in the game has been crossed out and rewritten thousands of times by thousands of pencils in thousands of ways by thousands of Brads, Steves, and Marcys for tens of thousands of tables who wanted to do it this way instead of that way, and none of them needed to learn code to do it.

D&D gives you not only a reason to make real actual stuff, but a reason other people should care. At conventions you can see LED-lit mazes that make the Jackson Hobbit SFX team look like hacks, but the heart of the game is palace towers made from coffee cans and pig men painted with nail polish and crossing "winter wolf" off the wandering monster chart and writing in "warsnail." The nearest equivalent is the culture around the post-50s decadent-psychotic era of homemaking magazines when Woman's Day would show you how to make, like, shirred herring salad in the shape of an igloo on the rim of a lake of blue Jell-O. And for good reason: these distant scenes are both, at heart, about the ephemeral art of throwing parties. The eight-layer raisin-pineapple compote carousel and the foamcore Skull Fortress of the Hate Toad will both be gutted in 40 minutes, but right now it's fun and right now it's weird and that's a party. And when it's dead you spend a week planning the next one.

"Weird" was always key to D&D's continuing survival. On paper, the game should look and feel no different than any of the mechanized orc-killing toys you can get for your PC, Playstation, or XBox, or like the special effects blockbusters we're getting more and more now that Hollywood's figured out how to make armor and tentacles look right on a screen—but it doesn't. Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax and other architects of the early RPG scene had read Tolkien and Howard's Conan books, but their fandom was crazy deep and genuinely literary, embracing the wisecracking and oddly adult sensibility of Fritz Leiber's medieval noir, the anti-mythic experimentalism of Clark Ashton Smith, and the amoral freakshow wordplay of Jack Vance—pulp fantasy's Nabokov, who inspired spell names like "Oitluke's Freezing Sphere" and "Leomund's Lamentable Belabourment."

D&D's weirdness is always the weirdness of people, put on the spot and making things up all by themselves. It's the kind of 3:00 AM weirdness that video game designers have to dial back in order to have a plot or snare a big enough audience to justify their budget. It's the kind of weirdness that can be exactly as interesting as the people playing it, and the later it gets the weirder the storyline becomes. It's a manifestation of the players' collective imagination, and it's a formula that—despite mind-blowing advances in graphics and gameplay innovation—can't be replicated on a screen.

Zak Smith is an artist and occasional adult film performer whose paintings have appeared in many major collections public and private, including the MoMA and the Whitney. He lives and works in Los Angeles, where he runs a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for a group of friends consisting mostly of porn actresses and strippers. He is also the author of two multi-award-winning tabletop RPG supplements: Vornheim and A Red & Pleasant Land and was hired as a consultant on the latest edition of D&D.

Tim Grayburn and Bryony Kimmings performing. Photo via

For most of Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn's show Fake It 'Til You Make It, Tim's face stays covered. Bryony says her boyfriend is hiding behind binoculars, jumbled up rope, and clouds of cotton to avoid looking into the eyes of the audience because he's nervous to be performing for the first time. In truth, it's because Tim has been hiding for much longer. Tim suffers from severe clinical depression, and Fake It is the first time he's revealed the depths of it to the world.

While the way Tim tells his story is unique—most sufferers don't deal with their illness through interpretative dance—the fact that he's suffered in silence for so long definitely isn't. In 2014 three-and-a-half times more men committed suicide than women. Despite this, women are still 75 percent more likely to seek professional help in the case of depression. Men are dying because they feel like they can't speak up. Some guys like Tim however, are using comedy to come to terms with their problems, and in doing so encouraging other men to break their silence.

Tim used to work in advertising and Bryony made performance art about things like chlamydia. Unsurprisingly, it was Bryony who talked Tim into making a show about his illness. She first discovered his depression six months after they met, when she found his medication tucked away in a backpack. Tim thought that would be game over: finding out the person you've spent half a year falling in love with is on a medley of prescription drugs can't be easy.

In fact, Tim told me that Bryony was the first person to really understand: "She was amazingly supportive. Because she had another family member who was struggling, I think she was a bit more aware about it—a bit more understanding."

As Tim continued to struggle, Bryony came up with the idea for the show. Throughout Fake It, the couple address their own problems, as well as driving home the point that millions of men and women suffer, but men tend to suffer alone. Tim's now reduced his medication, and is hoping to come off it in the near future. I asked him how getting up on stage has changed the way he deals with depression and anxiety: "I had no idea how helpful this was going to be for me. I honestly just thought it was going to be worse after I got up on stage in front of everyone. I thought, That's not going to do me any good, not with my anxiety. I had no idea the whole process would be so therapeutic."

Tim and Bryony

Tim thinks that researching the show has been a massive help, too. Now that he understands his illness, he feels more prepared for when it strikes. Before his diagnosis in his early twenties, he just thought the headaches, sickness, fatigue, and even his suicidal thoughts were normal.

"I thought I was being a pussy, basically. I didn't actually believe in depression myself, I thought it was just people who couldn't hack life." In reality things were beyond his control. "It's why I got so bad, because I ignored it. I didn't take any medication, I drank to hide the way I was feeling. It all got too much and I got really ill. We're trying to encourage [people to open up], blokes especially, because we're idiots and we don't talk about it."

I spoke to Dr. Joyce Benenson, a psychology professor based in the US, who carries out research into why men are less willing to appeal for help when something's wrong. She's observed behavior in boys as young as three that shows they're more stubborn than girls, and believes this could be biological, rather than simply stemming from society's image of the strong, resolute male.

According to Benenson, "It's not that much of a leap to posit that females are just wired biologically to take better care." No matter what causes men to go it alone with their problems, Benenson sums it up alarmingly frankly when she quotes another suicide study: "Women seek help. Men die."

Related: Watch our film about mental health services in the UK, 'Maisie'

Phil Wang is a stand up comedian who's used to revealing his deepest anxieties to rooms full of strangers. He suggests comedians and performers are naturally more honest: "I think because our job is to think about ourselves all the time, we do get to some harder truths about ourselves." Despite this he admits men often hide their feelings, telling me "They want to keep it under wraps, don't want to talk about it at all. Men are probably in touch with their emotions, but they're not expressive with them. And it's traditionally seen as emasculating to be so."

For Phil, as for Tim, performing helps him to come to terms with what goes on inside his head: "It's a release, a form of therapy. That's a bit of a cliché but talking it out—establishing a recognition from the audience of what you're talking about—it makes you feel less crazy and alone." Even as a professional comedian, though, the nerves still get to him, and he'll push his glasses down his nose until the audience's faces are blurred. "People think it's condescending but it's just because I'm too nervous to look them in the eye."

Carl Donnelly is another stand up, and he's spent the last few years making people laugh while living on antidepressants. He's off medication now, but still finds it easier to speak about his illness on stage rather than with friends. Humor is a way to explore his issues, but he sees too many men hiding behind humor. "I think too many guys use it as an end point, if something's upsetting them and someone asks if they're all right they'll just make a joke about it."

Carl reckons that a male reluctance to talk about mental health issues could be a hangover from a previous generation: "A lot of men at the minute feel quite lost. I think since the roles of each sex have changed, most guys have made the transition quite well, but the older generation are still like, Don't talk about your feelings. I think there's still a part of the new generation that's very similar." According to him, attitudes might have changed, but the way a lot of men behave hasn't. "Although now you're allowed to accept that you're broken and to talk about it, I'm a bit worried that there's a new wave of old school blokes coming through."

Phil Wang

Tim doesn't know exactly what makes men go it alone, but he does think society's gender roles are stopping guys from speaking up. "I can't help but think that it comes from centuries of conditioning. At the end of the day, [men and women are] made the same, we've got a cock and balls and that's the only difference [...] I don't think there needs to be any emotional differences."

One of the best outcomes for him has been the reaction of his friends and family. Tim used to be a roofer, and he tells me how loads of his mates are builders and carpenters: "I was terrified they'd treat me differently, be more sensitive around me because they didn't understand what depression was, they'd just think, He's a bit sad, we better not take the piss out of him."

In reality little has changed, and Tim's given his friends the courage to confront their issues. "I've started getting messages from loads of friends telling me they're going through this or that, or they have done like five years ago but they didn't want to tell anyone. And it's not just mental health problems either; it's any kind of problem. A mate had a gambling problem and he feels now that he can completely open up and talk about it."

Male stubbornness surely goes some way to explaining the shocking suicide rate, which keeps increasing despite a steady erosion of the stigma surrounding mental health. Whether this is down to Dr. Benenson's biological theory or, as Carl suspects, the legacy of his Dad's generation, humor has long been used to hide anxieties and fears. For Tim, confronting his problems through humor hasn't smothered them, but it has made them manageable: "It doesn't make you feel so alienated." If comedy makes more men realize they don't need to alienate themselves, they might finally seek help, too.

'Fake It 'Til You Make It' is playing in the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, from August 6 – 30.

Both Phil Wang and Carl Donnelly are playing in the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, from August 5 – 30.

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Photo via the Franklin County Sheriff Facebook page

A Kentucky sheriff posted a flier on Facebook with the goal of getting local drug dealers to rat out their competitors, the New York Times reported Thursday.

The flier kindly asks its presumably shady readers how their businesses are going, and whether they might need some police help in widening profit margins. Somehow, despite the ad's genuine tone and charming use of exclamation points, a number of people have reservations about this low-tech tactic, including the rapper Ludacris, who reposted the flier on Instagram.

But at least one purveyor of illicit goods apparently likes to keep up with their county sheriff's Facebook page: In a true triumph for both law enforcement and whatever old-school graphics software they used to make this thing, a tip sent to the phone number advertised on the flier helped sheriff Pat Melton track down a local drug dealer. In addition to arresting the dealer, who has yet to be identified, Franklin County authorities found crack, coke, weed and guns.

Franklin County isn't alone in implementing this kind of scheme. As the Times reported, Georgia and Massachusetts police departments have also used versions of it, albeit with decidedly less rad font choices.

Doña Norma rests and watches TV after a tedious workday as a janitor in a Mexico City hospital. Photo by Ernesto Álvarez

"Are you looking for my grandma? She's not home. But if you want stuff, I can sell it to you," said the boy who opened the apartment's door. He was gone for a while and then brought along a wooden box which he carried with so much pride—as if it were new toy. His faint movements showed that he kind of knew what he was doing was wrong. The box contained little plastic bags marked with the words "Cristal" [crystal].

We had reached the fourth floor of an apartment block in downtown Mexico City, where 60-year-old Doña Norma (not her real name) lives with three of her grandsons (aged six, four, and one). Doña Norma is a drug dealer, but when she's not at home, the children take over the business.

To get there we crossed the building's entrance and walked along a narrow corridor leading to a flight of decayed cement stairs. Some of the apartments have metal railings in their doorways, while others have curtains instead doors. The whole block smells of piss.

You can barely hear the sounds of the street on the fourth floor—as if they were a whisper blended with music coming from different flats. I knocked on the metal door and was greeted by a bald headed six-year-old child in an Angry Birds T-shirt.

One of the children offered us crystal meth. Photo by Emilio Espejel

"My grandma went to the store. But if you want stuff, I can sell it to you," he insisted. Another kid stuck his head out of the door. Inside the apartment, a small TV showed a cartoon and a pile of laundry on the floor next to an old sofa filled the room with a humid smell.

The kids did not seem to know what exactly they were selling, but they sure knew the price well: 220 pesos [$13] for half a gram of meth. They also said they sold cocaine, weed, and MDMA.

We told them we would wait for their grandma. We sat on the stairs outside their apartment and 20 minutes later, the children's stepfather arrived. He is 22 and the third husband of Doña Norma's daughter. The young couple lives in a little room in the same flat. He takes care of the children, although he's rarely around. He invited us in.

The apartment is quite small and its walls are painted blue. The ceiling has been eaten away by moisture, showing several leaks. On a squeaky bed, in the first room on the left, lay an one-year-old toddler looking attentively at everything that surrounded him.

Doña Norma's one-year-old grandson. Photo by Emilio Espejel

We took a couple of pictures and our cameras became the center of attention. The children insisted on borrowing them to take some pictures themselves. Then, they pulled us one floor up, to the deserted rooftop.

They ran, climbed, and played as if they were in a park. When you're a kid, everything's a game. When we went back downstairs, Doña Norma received us lying indifferently on her bed. She told us a bit about her business without going into detail.

Related: Watch our documentary 'Mexico's Land of Sorcerers'

Doña Norma works as a janitor in a hospital in Mexico City, but she's also been dealing for the last 15 years. "It's always money troubles that push people into crap jobs like this one. If you live in this city, drugs are the easiest thing to get your hands on."

She said she knows that by dealing she messes with "sick people," as she calls them, and that she feels very sorry for drug addicts. "They're people that don't love themselves, and that makes them evil. You can't love anybody if you don't love yourself and God," she continued.

The kids kept playing while Doña Norma told us that the business is getting harder and harder because the supply chain has increased. "These young kids, all they know how to do is show off. It is because of those dumbasses that business is so bad. One asshole's business takes off and I have to risk my life by carrying all that shit or by having to work with the same assholes. This gig is very dangerous. If I get caught, no one's going to have my back or take care of the children," she said without taking her eyes off the TV.

One of Doña Norma's grandchildren walking along a corridor inside the building. Photo by Ernesto Álvarez

The kids playing with toy cars in the living room. Photo by Emilio Espejel

Photo by Ernesto Álvarez

On the building's rooftop, one of the kids pretends to be a superhero.

On the rooftop, another kid pretends the metal container is his house. Photo by Emilio Espejel

The two brothers look towards the street. Photo by Emilio Espejel

On the building's rooftop, one of the kids pretends to be a superhero and jumps over the water tanks. Photo by Emilio Espejel

This is the face of a pro-choice man. Photo vis Flickr user Alex Guibord.

Some Canada Post letter carriers in Saskatoon are upset with the graphic anti-abortion flyers they've had to deliver that feature a picture of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and an aborted human fetus.

The flyer reads "A vote for Justin Trudeau is a vote for this," referring to an aborted fetus. The flyer is delivered in a sealed white envelope that says "important election notice information enclosed." This is not the first time that Trudeau has been faced with this kind of attack ad.

The flyers came from the campaign No2Trudeau, which is a joint initiative between the organization Life Coalition Youth and Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR). CCBR also feature graphic images on their site, and they describe their focus as "making the killing of pre-born human beings unthinkable."

According to CTV News, at least four workers have refused to deliver the same flyers that were already circulated before, in June. The majority of the one million flyers sent out have been delivered by staff and volunteers from the CCBR. However, because they could not deliver to condos and apartments, they has Canada Post deliver those for them.

VICE spoke to Maaike Rosendal, the campus outreach director at CCBR about the campaign.

"Justin Trudeau publicly supported abortion during all nine months of pregnancy and then also has required his MPs to do so, regardless of what their constituents wants them to do. We decided to initiate the No2Trudeau campaign so people could see what he supports," Rosendal told VICE.

She said that flyers were sent to 20 ridings across five different provinces, and although they have wrapped up the campaign since they are not registered as a third party, they might decide to continue to do more work as the elections continue.

Julee Sanderson, president of Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 824, has said that workers are upset about the graphic imagery displayed on the flyers.

"CUPW supports our members who feel they have a legitimate concern that a corporation like Canada Post should work to preserve family values," she said on Wednesday.

But letter carriers who refuse service could face consequences from Canada Post.

A spokesperson for Canada Post, said that "We are responsible for the physical delivery of all mail in Canada. We do not have the legal right to refuse delivery of a mail item because we or other people object to its content."

Rosendal has said that Canada Post has assured CCBR that their mail will be delivered. She says that the organization chose the graphic images without a trigger warning to show the truth about what Trudeau believes in.

"If people are concerned about the graphic nature of these images and about how difficult it is to look at these images, my questions would be why are we allowing this in the first place?" she said.

One of the workers who is refusing service, Alicia Morin, has said that her choice is not based politically, but she does not feel comfortable delivering the sensitive content to families. She has also made clear that she is willing to accept any discipline that may result from her actions.

She could be suspended for three to five days without pay.

Follow Sierra Bein on Twitter.

Photo taken by Nicor, image via

READ: An Interview with a North Korean Defector Living in London

In a move presumably designed to quell a rare twinge of boredom, Kim Jong-un has decided to create his own timezone, called "Pyongyang time." Next Friday, clocks in North Korea will be put back by half an hour, meaning that North and South Korea are no longer on the same local time, as they have been since 1910.

In a dispatch, the world-famous Korean Central News Agency announced the change, which will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of Japanese rule over the Korean peninsula. Japanese forces left Korea after the Second World War, but both North and South remained on Japanese time.

Relations between the two countries improved slightly last year, when Japan eased sanctions on North Korea in exchange for information about citizens abducted in the 1970s and 80s. Recently though, Japan strongly condemned Pyonyang's missile tests, and—clearly—Japan's occupation still weighs heavily on North Korea's national conscience.

The real world implications of the new timezone likely won't be very significant, although it could create problems for the workers of a factory jointly run by North and South Korea, situated near the border. A South Korean spokesman was quoted in the Guardian as saying that North Korea's new timezone could threaten efforts to reduce the widening gap between the two countries.

Related: Watch 'The VICE Guide to North Korea'

For this episode of VICE Talks Film, we sit down with the indelible Kevin Bacon. We discuss his acting process and how its evolved through his career, revisit the immortal Tremors 25 years later, and chat about his latest turn as a crooked, mustachioed lawman in upcoming indie thriller Cop Car.

Cop Car hits theaters Friday, August 7 and is available On Demand August 14.

In the immediate aftermath of the February 2011 earthquake, which killed 185 people and virtually destroyed Christchurch's central business district (CBD), the New Zealand government sealed off the inner city. Guarded by the New Zealand army and police, and later by international disaster relief workers, even business and property owners couldn't get in.

In spite of this, somehow a well-known Christchurch photographer named Sabin Holloway was granted a pass. This week he opened an exhibition of large-scale prints of photos he took from inside the red-zone. It's the first time any of them have been seen in public.

VICE: Hi Sabin, how come you've sat on these images so long?
Sabin Holloway: It's still really raw for me and a lot of other people who lived through the quake.The CBD was my playground. I lived and worked there, partied there, and knew it like the back of my hand. When I was allowed in after the red-zone went up, it was deathly quiet—spooky even. Going into a place where you were used to noise and activity, and finding it silent and deserted, it felt like you were underwater. It was surreal—that's why I've called the exhibition Deep Water.

Was there a process involved in photographing the aftermath?
Not really, I'm a professional photographer and director of photography, so I use some kind of order or process every day of my working life. Something like this though, it's so overwhelming that you've just got to run on instinct. It was destruction on a massive scale, so I did make sure I covered the whole central city. That was all on foot, by walking around.

Having access to a wrecked city when there's army and police keeping everyone else out must have been a pretty unique experience. Tell us about that.
Yeah, it was pretty horrific for so many people who couldn't get in. I tried my best to help out friends. People who owned businesses or apartments couldn't get in to grab anything. There were hard drives with everything on them—tax records, property deeds, business records. I salvaged what I could and helped out where I could.

How many prints are there?
I've printed up nine on a large scale. They need to be large-scale to convey the scope of the event. Those will be on display at The Tannery, a great art-deco inspired space that was the first major retail rebuild after the quake. The exhibition will be hanging until September 4, which will be the five-year anniversary of the first earthquake.

So what happens to the rest of the photos after the exhibition?
I don't know. I guess it's kind of a unique documentation, because there were very few photographers granted access.

I've archived all the digital files. I was never in a hurry to get them out there and seen, and I guess I'm still in no hurry. It's nice to know that there is a large body of work safely stored though. Maybe they'll gain more significance with time.

Deep Water will be hanging at The Tannery, 3 Garlands Road, Woolston, in Christchurch New Zealand until September 4.

Interview by Grant Bryant

Screencap via Fox News.

When the Republican presidential candidates took the stage at Thursday primary debate, the night seemed poised to devolve into a political three-ring circus. Ten sweating and suited men lining up to spar in the middle of the basketball arena, egged on by a trio of gleeful Fox News anchors with giant teeth. And in the center of it all, Donald Trump, the celebrity ringmaster whose campaign success continued to defy all normal political logic.

In the end, the debate was a circus, of sorts—and Trump was the main attraction—just not in the way we anticipated. Because rather than derail the debate, as many had expected, Trump himself was derailed—blindsided by Fox News moderators apparently fed up with the real-estate mogul and his gonzo presidential campaign. All of which is to say, it was two very entertaining hours of political theater. We've compiled the best moments below.

A SHOW OF HANDS
The first indication that Thursday might not go smoothly for Trump came within seconds of the start of the debate, when Fox moderator Brett Baier asked the candidates to raise their hands if they would not support the eventual Republican nominee.

On cue, Trump's lonely hand went up in the middle of the stage. "Mr. Trump, to be clear, you're standing on the Republican debate stage," Baier noted, "and that experts say an independent run would almost certainly hand the race over to Democrats and likely another Clinton." Trump was clear.

What Baier was trying to show was that Trump isn't really in the 2016 race for the Republican Party, or even to beat Hillary Clinton, but for Donald Trump (which, of course, has always been very clear).

More interesting, though, was what this little litmus test said about Fox News. Like most media organizations, Fox has stirred up the Trump frenzy, and even implicitly propped up his presidential campaign. But faced with the possibility that Trump could make a mockery of the debate—and potentially fuck up the GOP's chances of winning the White House—the network did an abrupt about-face. And with none of the other Republican candidates likely to take on Trump, the Fox moderators just did it themselves.

DONALD TRUMP VS. MEGYN KELLY
The extent to which Fox had turned on Trump was made brutally clear with a question from host Megyn Kelly, about the reality-TV mogul's history of referring to women as "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals." ("Only Rosie O'Donnell," Trump interjected unhelpfully.)

"For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O'Donnell," Kelly said. "You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?"

Screencap via Fox News

'WE NEED TO BUILD A WALL, JEB'
Fox's attempts to break Trump fever aside, he is still the Republican frontrunner—and while that may defy all conventional campaign logic, his improbable lead has had an influence on the rest of the GOP's 2016 field. This was particularly clear last night when the debate turned to the issue of immigration.

"If it weren't for me, you wouldn't even be talking about illegal immigration," Trump told moderator Chris Wallace, during a segment on immigration. "This was not a subject that was on anybody's mind until I brought it up at my announcement."

Obviously, this is an exaggeration. But rather than look down awkwardly when Trump started talking tough about a giant border fence, and suggesting that the "cunning" Mexican government is "sending the bad ones over," the rest of the Republicans on stage Thursday rushed to talk about their own hardline immigration policies.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who previously supported a pathway to citizenship, said that he'd learned "there are international criminal organizations penetrating our southern-based borders, and we need to do something about it." Florida Senator Marco Rubio, part of a group of Senators who authored a 2013 immigration reform bill, said he agreed that the US needs a border wall, but that it also needs to stop "El Chapo from digging a tunnel under that wall." Even Jeb Bush, a relative moderate on immigration issues, called for a crackdown on so-called "sanctuary cities."

"Donald Trump is hitting a nerve in this country," Ohio Governor John Kasich told the debate audience. "He's hitting a nerve. People are frustrated. They're fed up. They don't think the government is working for them. And for people who want to just tune him out, they're making a mistake."

CHRIS CHRISTIE VS. RAND PAUL
One of the biggest non-Trump moments of Thursday's debate was a clash between Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie over the NSA surveillance program. It was a substantive, important debate over a policy issue that continues to divide the Republican Party.

Christie, a former federal prosecutor who, as he reminded the audience Thursday, was appointed in the weeks following 9/11, argued that Paul was wrong to bring up civil liberties concerns over the dragnet surveillance program. Paul in turn accused Christie of trampling on the Bill of Rights, specifically the Fourth Amendment. And it devolved into a nice little shouting match.

"I don't trust President Obama with our records," Paul shouted. "I know you gave him a big hug, and if you want to give him a big hug again, go right ahead."

"The hugs that I remember are the hugs I gave to the families who lost their people on September 11," Christie responded. "Those are the hugs I remember."

Paul just rolled his eyes.

'WITH HILLARY CLINTON, I SAID BE AT MY WEDDING AND SHE CAME TO MY WEDDING'
By far the most fascinating comment of the night was Trump's startling distillation of the power of money in politics. Asked by Wallace to explain his donations to Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi, Trump explained:

"I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give.

And do you know what?

When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me."

So what did Trump get from Clinton? "Well, I'll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding," he said. "You know why? She didn't have a choice because I gave."

On the surface, Trump's remarks—combined with his later admission that he has taken advantage of the US bankruptcy system—seem like a vigorous endorsement of crony capitalism. But there is also an underlying honesty—an admission that, yes, you are right to think the political system is fucked, that it is essentially based on bribery—that may help explain why his billionaire populism seems to be resonating with a surprising number of Republican voters. Trump is basically asking if they would rather vote for the guy who's getting bribed, or the one doing the bribing.

Whether they heard anything other than "[Hillary Clinton] came to my wedding," though, is anyone's guess.

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F. Gary Gray was only 23 when he directed the fantastically literal video for Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" in 1993. Its sun-kissed, deadpan style transferred beautifully to his debut feature Friday (1995), which Cube cowrote and starred in as the straight(er) foil to Chris Tucker's more animated pot dealer. Friday quickly achieved cult-classic status, and Gray spent the next two decades racking up an impressive body of action cinema, from bank-heist thriller Set It Off (1996) to the surprisingly fun remake of The Italian Job (2003), and the brutal vigilante flick Law Abiding Citizen (2009).

Gray's latest project is Straight Outta Compton, a biopic of N.W.A, the controversial LA rap outfit comprising Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, MC Ren, and DJ Yella. It traces the group's origins in the late 80s, their early successes—which became turbulent and fraught with drama thanks to the financial duplicity of manager Jerry Heller—and concludes with the premature death of Eazy-E in 1995.

The movie is mostly a delight. It's a sweeping, incident-packed drama that traffics in humor, emotional force, and sociopolitical insight, even if its charms sadly don't extend to portraying women—save for Dre's mother and Eazy-E's wife—as anything other than barely-clothed eye candy.

The film's bona fides are clear. It was produced in part by Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E's widow Tomica Woods-Wright; and features Cube's son O'Shea Jackson Jr. as his father. Gray's affinity with his subjects is evident, as well—he also shot the videos for Cube and Dre's "Natural Born Killas" (1994) and Dre's "Keep Their Heads Ringin".

I recently spoke to the LA-based Gray over the phone to get the inside track on the film.

VICE: This must be a genuine passion project for you. Could you talk about how excited you must be to seeing it come out now?
F. Gary Gray: I've known Cube since the beginning of my career as a director, and it's all come full circle. For me, to be able to tell the story of N.W.A. and their lives—their rise, their fall, and then their rise again—it's the film of a lifetime for me. I grew up in Los Angeles in that era, so a lot of things that they rapped about I witnessed and experienced firsthand. A lot of the elements of the story intersect in ways that have never intersected for me in other films I've directed.

I was struck by the film's scale. When I saw the running time (150 minutes) I was like, "Wow, OK." We've seen running times like this for films like Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, but this is the first rap biopic in that vein. That's significant.
You know, I never thought about it like that. But since you put it that way, I guess it is the first. [That scale] is so important. You could make three movies out of the N.W.A. story. The runtime is something I don't really think too much about because everything in the movie, I believe, is intriguing and compelling. You learn a lot, you laugh, you cry. We've gotten a lot of great feedback from people from all walks of life. They say, "I want more, I wanted more."

You can't just google "N.W.A." and get these details. You can't experience the brotherhood that you experience in the movie by going on to Wikipedia. –F. Gary Gray

The length is totally justified. It was great to see something that had sufficient space for the story to unfold in.
There may be a director's cut that's even longer [laughs]. We'll see, but I'm very happy with epic nature of the film. It's an epic story. It goes far beyond the group and the music created. It's relevant creatively and artistically. It's just a... [pauses] major story. I'm sorry I'm just choked up because it's just so many things for me on a lot of levels. But it's a major story.

What you're doing is quite radical. The film reverses the stock media narrative of the guys being thugs and agitators. It's complicated because they were serious men, whose work was informed by serious events, but they also had an aggressive persona that they deliberately projected. Your film takes us beyond that persona and into their lives.
Absolutely. There's a humanity to the story that you wouldn't normally associate with this genre of music. That was important to me. I want you to get to know the guys behind the tracks, behind the lyrics and beats, and get a sense of them as human beings. That's what makes this special, because you can't just google "N.W.A." and get these details. You can't experience the brotherhood that you experience in the movie by going on to Wikipedia. It's very easy to dismiss these guys as edgy street rappers who talk about controversial things. But when you experience the brotherhood and the family ties that bind them and the motivation behind the music, you can't help but have a different relationship with N.W.A.

Image courtesy of Universal

It's also very light in places—I think that element might surprise people. There was a lot of laughter in the screening I attended. How important was it for you to include humor?
Well, I grew up in an environment where there were dangerous times, but there were a lot of funny moments too, you know? My first movie was Friday, and it was a very funny movie about weed-dealing. So you will always get that, I believe, in my movies—some sort of humor, it helps the drama. This is a bunch of kids who came together, who spoke their mind about things that they were passionate about, about things that affected their lives. Even from their perspective, when you listen to their albums, a lot of their shit is funny. The movie takes the same track and you get a sense of the rawness, the authenticity, the humor, [and] pain. These are all the things you experience when you listen to Straight Outta Compton.

I wanted to make it feel raw, real, and authentic as opposed to comedic. –F. Gary Gray

The film pulls no punches in depicting police aggression and violence. In particular you use the backdrop of the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, the acquittal of the officers, and the subsequent uprisings in LA. It's sadly very topical today. I watched the film on the same day I heard about the Sam DuBose case in Cincinnati, and it was just a few days after the madness with Sandra Bland and that cop in Texas. In this way your film doesn't feel like a period piece at all...
We didn't know that this would coincide with all the headlines regarding police brutality. I've been involved with this movie for four years, and those weren't the headlines back then. When we finally finished the movie and these headlines started to creep up... You feel sad about it. You wish you could say, "Hey listen, remember back in time where these things used to happen and they no longer happen?"

It's unfortunate that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I've been saying this lately, and I'm optimistic that these headlines will put pressure on the people who make changes—our lawmakers, our leaders. Law enforcement that has a tendency to go that way, or workers within a culture that forgives these types of things, I think they will feel the pressure. Because now every time that kind of thing happens, it's not going to be slipped under the rug in the way that it was in the past.

Image courtesy of Universal

Tone-wise, you play it pretty straight—it's very respectful of the guys, and despite the humor, it's dramatic and even quite stately. Straight Outta Compton could be the first of a potential second cycle of films about this era, because there were spoofs like CB4 (1993) and Fear of a Black Hat (1994), which parodied gangsta rap and made it all look pretty silly. How do you feel about those films?
I don't remember them, but I remember when they came out. I remember that they were parodies, which puts you on alert to a certain extent. If you make a movie like this, there are so many ways to get it wrong. It's very easy for people not to take this story seriously and view it as a parody of the 80s, and of the group. I wanted to make it feel raw, real, and authentic as opposed to comedic.

I'm glad I had Dre, Cube, and Yella, and Ren around to help with the details. Eazy's widow, Tomica, also helped with the details. The group involved—the technicians, my team—we pulled this movie together and you feel the weight and the importance of the story and the group.

The costumes are amazing, too. Can you talk a little about them?
Our costume designer, Kelli Jones, worked on Sons of Anarchy, so she's used to working in these subcultures with rough guys. She had to individualize each character and convey their progression as they started to make money. When you have five guys that live in Los Angeles who weren't any slaves to fashion... to find ways to individualize them and help tell the story with their costumes was really a challenge. She stepped up in a major way—I think she deserves an Oscar nomination for this.

On Noisey: Watch an Exclusive First Look at Straight Outta ComptonStraight Outta Compton

It seems there's something happening in the culture now with West Coast rap. I noticed it in Dope, which is set in Inglewood, and the main character writes his thesis on the lyrics to Cube's "It Was a Good Day," the video that you directed. Do you see your film as part of a West Coast revival?
You know, I really don't think in those terms. I heard Dope was dope... [But] I've been so immersed in the N.W.A. world that I haven't had a chance to see that movie. I just focus on what's going to make this story great. I know that sounds really cliché, but for me it's the universal story. I think that whether you live in LA, you live in New York, or if you live in Sweden, you can identify with some of the universal things that we touch on.

Straight Outta Compton opens in theaters nationwide Saturday, August 18.

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IS fighters. Photo courtesy of VICE News

For much of the 90s and especially after the 1998 US embassy bombings, whenever the world talked about Islamic terrorism, the conversation inevitably turned toward al Qaeda. They loomed as the big daddy of jihadi violence, the brand rogue militants wanted their little insurgencies affiliated with if only to tap into the group's global network of funding and training. The 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 only burnished their influence. But in 2014, the world got to know the Islamic State, and Americans started to panic about the new threat.

Once an al Qaeda affiliate, the Islamic State has been at odds with their old buds for a while now, and US counter-terrorism officials are split over which represents the greater threat, as the New York Times reported earlier this week.

Al Qaeda could never get behind the Islamic State's obsession with purging those Muslims they deemed apostates, often focusing more energy on this endeavor than on fighting Western powers. Nor were al Qaeda leadership all that hyped about what they saw as the Islamic State's alienating style of violence. Al Qaeda formally severed ties with the Islamic State last year, and ever since, the two organizations have been in hot competition for ideological and physical control of numerous splintering militant groups across the Islamic world.

The jihadisphere, in short, is in turmoil.

To get a better idea of who will win out in the long-run, VICE reached out to Patrick M. Skinner, an ex-CIA officer and counterterrorism expert currently serving as director of special projects for the security intelligence firm the Soufan Group. We asked Skinner to tell us about the current contours of the conflict between the Islamic State and al Qaeda, to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the groups when squaring off against each other, and to give us his best predictions as to which organization will come out on top.

VICE:

The Islamic State is a political entity as well—it's concerned with infrastructure and holding territory. Does that make them more of an easy target, more vulnerable, than al-Nusra and other mobile, cell-based [al Qaeda-affiliated] organizations?
Yeah, they have something to lose. And they have lost. They've lost a couple provinces in Syria. To be a state, you have to have physical control. You can't melt away. And they're fighting rebel groups that can do hit-and-run. And the Islamic State can't do hit-and-run.

In Syria, they can't leave Raqqa. They have supply lines. That's a big deal. That's probably going to be one of their downfalls in Syria because they really are grounded. They have two avenues into Turkey and when those get shut, which they will, they're in trouble.

That's a strategic weakness for the Islamic State, but which group has the tactical advantage? As I understand it, the Islamic State is more about traditional massed force attacks—shows of force—while al-Nusra [and al Qaeda at large] are more focused on insurgencies. How does that dynamic play out between the two of them?
The one interesting thing about the Islamic State is that they do both when they have the ability. When people do terrorism, it's because they don't have the strength of a traditional army. So where they have that strength, they do pretty effective infantry attacks. Militarily speaking, the [Islamic State] attack on Mosul was pretty good. Where they don't have it, they still do terrorism. They'll do a lot of suicide bombings.

But they've kind of merged it, like [in] Ramadi, they had 27 huge truck bombs. They softened up the defenses—there is no defense against that many massive car bombs. And then they went in with small arms.

Al-Nusra kind of does the same thing. They're a serious fighting force. They tend to do one thing more than ISIS: They infiltrate other groups and then they do sleeper cells, which ISIS doesn't. So al-Nusra basically collapsed two moderate rebel forces last year, Harakat Hazm and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, because basically it put in a bunch of sleepers and then they attacked.

Tactically, they're not that far apart. It's just that in some places, ISIS doesn't have to be a terrorist group, like in Mosul or Ramadi or Raqqa, because they control all the levers of power. So they're not a terrorist group, they're a state army there.

Check out the National Magazine Award-winning Islamic State documentary from VICE News:

It's a matter of strategy rather than tactics that will settle things between the Islamic State and al-Nusra in Syria, then? And the Islamic State's strategy is weaker?
Yeah, they can't leave Raqqa. It's their capital. Everyone focuses on, Oh my God, they established a caliphate (or said they did), and they have this capital . The thing about having something is that it can be taken away from them. But the other groups can just leave Raqqa. They can come and go. They can move in and out. But if you want to be a state, you can't do that.

They're going to lose Raqqa sometime. It's not imminent. But when they do, it's going to be very notable.

But if they're making a state, couldn't they just build up a strong enough army with enough numbers to repel any threat from al-Nusra's terrorist strikes? Or couldn't they become hyper-aggressive and just cleanse al-Nusra out of the region?
They've actually done pretty well. Their foreign fighter numbers are going to go down. All of the Western countries have cracked down on travel so they're not getting those massive numbers. But they've done a pretty good job of local conscription or recruitment or volunteers (it's hard to tell). They've been able to replace their numbers. Right when you think that they're at their weakest, they strike somewhere else. That's what happened in Ramadi.

They're going to come at rebel groups in Syria as hard as they can. They're already hyper-violent. I think that as pressure comes, yeah, they're going to rage and strike out as much as they can. They're not in any danger of collapse. When we talk about how they're getting hurt, these are long-term concerns.

They're going to try to prevent being encircled, especially in Syria. Which makes them vulnerable, because you know that they have to do that, and the other rebel groups are going to be taking advantage of that.

Beyond the Syrian front, where the most direct conflict is taking place between the Islamic State proper and al Qaeda's local affiliate, both sides have their branches all over. How does the conflict between the two groups look, or could it look, in these other theaters?
What [the Islamic State] is trying to do in places like in Libya, they established their own little line. Then they got kicked out of Derna. They're not there anymore, because the other groups... these are some real, strong groups and ISIS fights everybody all the time. It's just what they do.

Now, Mullah [Muhammad] Omar's death [the Taliban supreme commander to whom al Qaeda and its affiliates had sworn their allegiance] is going to have a big impact. People need to wait a couple of months to see how it plays out. But the big divide between ISIS and al Qaeda has been over allegiance. And now that Mullah Omar's dead (and may have been dead for years), other groups have yet to explain what they're going to do. Some Mullah Omar affiliates might say: You know what? We're going [with ISIS]. ISIS is going to try to poach as many of those affiliates as they can. They're already saying: Hey, come join the winning team.

But the fighting is really in Syria. [Elsewhere] I think ISIS is going to wait and see over the next couple of months and include as many affiliates as they can over the Mullah Omar debacle. It's a big deal that that happened. They're not going to get into open conflict in many places, because when they do, they tend to lose—because al Qaeda has been in these places for a long time.

Well, there were those reports about confrontations elsewhere, like against the Taliban in Afghanistan, but [the Islamic State] didn't make much headway there I guess, did they?
They'll increase [there]. The original Taliban, they were fighting to get something back. They wanted to return to what they used to have. But the younger fighters are just fighting. And ISIS appeals to that. But it's like Libya: each province is so different that it's going to be hard for them to establish that homogenous group that they always want to do. Afghanistan resists that. Even at their height, the Taliban didn't control the whole country. They'll make advances, but Afghanistan is very different from Iraq.

So Syria's the big theater for a conflict with the Islamic State then. You've said that strategically they're weak because they're locked into their territory. But how long does it take al-Nusra or a similar group to hammer away and defeat them?
Well, last year we would have thought they would have burned themselves out [quickly]. The governance was so bad that someone would rise up. That has not happened. They've managed to balance insane violence against some level of social services. It's a low bar in Iraq and Syria. Basically all they had to do was be better than chaos, which they are in some ways. So I don't think they're going to burn out. They're going to have to be pushed out. If left alone or contained, they'll stay there forever. They're going to have to be strangled.

There's going to be a lot of fighting. It's going to be very difficult. Unless the US just goes all-in, which they're not going to do, right now nobody is strong enough to take them out themselves. If all of the rebel groups can work together, they can end ISIS control. But they're not a group.

If we have to boil it down, between al-Nusra/al Qaeda and the Islamic State, you're saying that al-Nusra doesn't have the strength to take down the Islamic State, but that because of how al-Nusra is structured, the Islamic State can't beat them either?
Yeah, right now neither of those guys can beat the other. Al-Nusra's in a better position because they tend to make alliances. So of the two, in Syria, al-Nusra has the better long-term forecast. ISIS, they shoot themselves in the foot every day, because they shoot everybody all the time. Al-Nusra can't kick them out of Raqqa, but they can do a lot of damage in a lot of other places, because Syria's a very, very large country. And they can just keep working with other groups.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.