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DAILY VICE, September 15 - Arcade Fire, Election Snapshot, Yemen

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Today's video, Daily VICE talks to Arcade Fire about who they're rooting for in the federal election, Justin Ling checks out a candidate debate in Calgary, and the UN calls for an independent inquiry into violence in Yemen.

DAILY VICE is the first mobile news and culture show in the VICE universe. Every day, through the DAILY VICE app, we deliver the top stories from across the VICE Network in Canada and beyond.

Aside from being a really awesome overview of amazing stories, from our brains to yours, DAILY VICE also provides a first look at our newest documentaries before they hit our websites. And every Saturday, we lighten up with a culture story from the realm of travel, music, food, sports, or technology.

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Meeting the Creator of Manchester's Unauthorized Camp for the Homeless

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Manchester is an English city in the midst of a homelessness crisis. A lack of both temporary and long-term housing, as well as cuts to government funding, have severely affected the number of people sleeping rough in the area, causing a situation that has led to homeless people not only moving to dismally unsuitable, out of the way places, but setting up camp right in the city center.

Since early this year, various homeless camps emerged in bustling areas of Manchester. However, at the end of July, the council was granted an injunction that bans the homeless from entering, sleeping, or setting up camps in the city center. The penalties for flouting this ban include a possible two years imprisonment, plus a fine of up to 5,000 ? You can have a thousand of them under your feet, you turn the light on, and it's just "Urgh!" No washing machines or dryers, but you've just come off the street and you need that stuff. They just stick you in a building.

You've repeatedly described the Ark as not a protest, but isn't there a political aspect to it for you?
It's made me more... aware. To me, this is personal. I'm not a political person; that's for people in suits and ties to fight over. I used to judge people. My opinions used to be a lot different. But from just talking to everyday people, people giving me the time of day, asking questions or being curious, it's changed for me.

If the land possession order is carried out, would you start all over again?
If we're not here, we're going to be cold and wet... I built this... to see it get destroyedyou're crazy.

Follow Fin on Twitter.

Volunteers Find What Could Be Human Teeth Along Winnipeg’s Red River

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Drag the Red volunteers fan out. Still via Searchers: Drag the Red

A team of volunteers have recovered what appear to be human teeth from the banks of Winnipeg's Red River, where nine bodies have been found in the last year.

Drag The Red uses borrowed boats and handmade gear to drag the bottom of the river looking for missing Indigenous women, but Winnipeg Police won't help them search, saying it's not a good allocation of resources.

On Monday, Drag The Red co-founder Kyle Kematch uncovered four teeth in the mud along the river bank.

"I said, 'Holy! Look at this!'" he told VICE.

When he found the first tooth, he immediately texted a photo of it to a forensic anthropologist who had offered to identify any remains the draggers find. Kematch said the anthropologist identified the teeth as human.

"When I found the fourth tooth, that's when she sent the message back that they were human, and said stop what you're doing and call the police."

When VICE contacted the anthropologist, she declined to comment.

Winnipeg Police also wouldn't say whether the teeth were human.

In an email, Winnipeg Police spokesperson Terry Kolbuck confirmed Drag The Red had turned in what appeared to be teeth.

"The items were delivered to our Forensic Identification Unit, who will process the items further," Kolbuck said. "Once completed, a determination will be made on how we are to proceed or not."

Kematch and Drag The Red co-founder Bernadette Smith told VICE they called police at 3:15 PM Monday afternoon but said they didn't show up until about 9 PM.

Kolbuck said Drag The Red contacted the Missing Persons Unit during the day but they were told to contact the non-emergency police line. "There were not any units available until later that day due to the types and priorities of the calls that day," he said.

"For me, it doesn't seem like they're taking us seriously," Kematch said of the police response.

In their last year of searching the river, Drag The Red has not recovered any human remains. The discovery of the teeth could be their first human find.

"It's a possibility it could be one of the missing," Kematch said. "It's got me wondering who it is."

Drag The Red started searching the Red River after the body of15-year-old Aboriginal girl Tina Fontaine was pulled out of the river in August 2014. Another Aboriginal girl, Rinelle Harper, was dumped in the river after she was brutally assaulted, but she survived and became an advocate for missing and murdered Indigenous women.

More than 1,200 Aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada since 1980a rate much higher than for non-First Nations women.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

Outlaw Director Jia Zhangke Remains Critical of China While Working with State Approval

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Still from Mountains May Depart courtesy TIFF

Jia Zhangke's new film, Mountains May Depart, opens to the strains of the Pet Shop Boys' 1993 cover of "Go West": it's New Year's Eve 1999, in a small coal mining town in China, and the clubs are filled with revellers looking to get down. "I chose this song because it imprinted on me in the late 1990s," says Jia in an interview ahead of the film's first screening at the Toronto International Film Festival (it premiered earlier this year in Cannes). "At that time there were a lot of discos that sprung up in China, and at midnight, the DJs would all play 'Go West.' So the song gives me a connection to that time in my life."

It's also possible to see this soundtrack choice at shorthand for the director's themes. Set in three time periods ranging from 1999 to 2525the latter year already immortalized in another cheesy pop hitMountains May Depart dramatizes China's steadily accelerating shift to late capitalism. Its main protagonist, Tao (Zhao Tao), makes the fateful choice as a young woman to marry an entrepreneur whose obsession with money is expressed in the name he gives their son. No sooner is the boy out of the womb than his father dubs him "Dollar."

"My inspiration for the film was to examine a series of social changes in China," says Jia, whose previous film, A Touch of Sin, was similarly comprised of a series of interconnected stories. "I think that there have been major changes in our lifestyle, and in our values. In our consumer culture, we have slipped into a state of mind that allows us to think that money is going to solve all of our problems."

Mountains May Depart isn't the first film Jia has made that criticizes Chinese society. in the 90s, he emerged as the outlaw hero of the country's film culture, producing a series of independently financed, street-level masterpiecesincluding the epic drama Platform (2000)that were deemed un-releasable by the country's censors for a variety of reasons, not least of all their despairing imagery of social and economic inequality. Mountains May Depart hearkens back to this early work in more ways than one: the scenes set in 1999 include documentary footage shot by Jia at the time, which gives the evocation of the past a sense of handheld authenticity. (Each time frame has its own aspect ratio: by the time the film gets to 2525, the images loom huge in widescreen, perhaps suggesting a larger, more globalized worldview.)

Since 2004's The Worldan allegory of globalization shot in the country's largest theme parkJia has been working with state approval, but his work hasn't grown any less subversive. The bleak and graphically violent A Touch of Sin, which was inspired by classic martial arts films,so enraged certain parties that China's propaganda department instructed media not to write about ita dictate complicated by the filmmaker's increasing visibility on the world stage.

"I think that I have freedom now, and that it's a complete artistic freedom, which I've earned myself" explains Jia. "It's a freedom which is external from the censorship boards. I think that the subject of freedom itself is still sensitive in China, and that's why it's important to talk about it." With this in mind, the use of "Go West" in Mountains May Depart is double-edged; the song expresses a yearning for escape, while also hinting that the literal and philosophical destination contains its own built-in trap. Not that Jia is willing to take this reading too far. "I didn't choose the song for the lyrics," he insists, laughing. "I chose it because of the rhythm."

Jia is also at TIFF this year to sit on the jury for the festival's inaugural Platform programme, which gathers together 12 films by comparatively unheralded directors (the winning filmmaker will receive $25,000). The idea of one of the world's biggest festivals naming their competition after one of Jia's films indicates just how long his shadow looms just two decades into his career. "Of course I'm honoured that TIFF named after my film," he says. "I think that new international cinema offers the possibility for a new language, and for new art."

Follow Adam on Twitter.

What We Know About the 37 Frat Guys Facing Charges for the Hazing Death of a 19-Year-Old

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As part of a hazing ritual two years ago, Chun Hsien "Michael" Deng was ordered to cross an icy expanse while blindfolded and carrying a heavy backpack. The 19-year-old was deep in "the Gauntlet," a rite of passage for Baruch College members of the Pi Delta Psi fraternity, who were on a retreat at a cabin in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains.

After being tackled, as well as picked up and dropped onto the ice, Deng complained of a headache. No one helped him, according to police, and even after the freshman tapped out, his tormenters did not act for an hour, instead calling former frat President Andy Meng, as the Associated Press reported. Now a grand jury in Pennsylvania has decided they should be held accountable for his death in the hospital a day later.

In an unprecedented case, 37 fraternity brothers are facing charges in Deng's death. According to the Monroe County District Attorneys Office, five young men and the frat itself will be up against charges of third-degree murder. As reported by the AP, police are staggering arrests and first going after lesser offenders, who have been charged with things like hazing and conspiracy.

The Pi Delta Psi organization could get fined, but Charles Lai, Kenny Kwan, Raymond Lam, Daniel Li, and Sheldon Wongwill face up to 20 years in prison if convicted for Deng's murder, according to the New York Times.

Sean Callan, a partner at Fraternal Law Partners, a firm that specializes in legal maters involving Greek organizations, says that he's seen fraternities charged with crimes related to underage drinking in the past, but that they usually just result in the frats in question being dissolved.

"Kind of like with there seems to be a type of euphoria in the presence of groupthinkor Greek-think, as I call it. People will participate because they, like many athletes, believe the old adage: That if you cannot play with pain, you can't play."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: The Woman Who Wore a Fake Dick to Catfish Her Friend into Sex Has Been Found Guilty

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Photo via Flickr user Tyler Merbler

Read: A Woman on Death Row and the Neighbor Who Put Her There

The woman who duped her best friend into thinking she was a man and then had sex with her has been found guilty, reports the Mirror. She'll receive a sentence in November.

The offender, Gayle Newland, originally plead not guilty to five counts of sexual assault after the friend accused her of impersonating a man named Kye Fortune first on Facebook and then IRL.

Posing as Fortune, Newland allegedly told the woman that a car accident and a brain tumor had left "him" self-conscious of his body, a lie she then used to coerce the woman into donning a blindfold during sex. They had sex about ten times like this until the friend pulled off the blindfold, discovering Kye was a womanher buddywearing a fake penis.

In court, Newland maintained the charges against her were bogus, and that the complainant knew she was a woman the whole time: Kye Fortune was just a role-playing fantasy that they used to cope with their sexual identities.

"My main reason why I spoke as Kye was for her," Newland said according to the Mirror. "I knew better than anyone... if she wanted to hide her sexuality I would allow her to do that." Newland even claimed her accuser told her to buy the fake penis in the first place.

After the judge announced the verdict, Newland reportedly yelled, "How can you send me down for something I haven't done?"

Follow Scott on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: Documenting the Barren but Beautiful World of the ‘Mad Max’ Game

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All screenshots taken by the author

The world of Avalanche Studios' recently released Mad Max is desolate even by the standards of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Where a game like Fallout 3 puts you in and around a recognizable major urban space, packed with the crumbling ruins of skyscrapers, large office buildings, and even the Pentagon, Mad Max's expansive environment is essentially a fucking massive desert with very few identifying features to inform the player about the civilization that stood here before everything went dramatically south.

What this does is heighten the sense of this world being a wasteland rather than just a bunch of buildings that were blown apart by some bombs. It works brilliantly well. Just like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the game of Mad Max doesn't waste its time establishing what actually ended the world, and instead thrives on a sense of mystery. What came before this sand, this dust, this nothing is an unknown, highlighted only in (admittedly crap) relics that the player-controlled Max finds dotted around, which attempt to give some environmental storytelling to the world. There is threat all around: from other humans, doing whatever they can to survive, their minds fixed on mayhem, to the scorched land and the devastating storms that blow across it. Mad Max establishes your car, the Magnum Opus, as the safest place in the game, in a way that reminds me how Elite: Dangerous treats its shipyour ship. When you get out of your car, you're immediately in danger. Exiting the driving seat is a risk, always.

When danger eventually and inevitably arrives, it's fast and explosive. The chase can be long, stretching across entire portions of the desert as multi-car convoys converge for battle. Metal crunches metal. Entire cars get blown to smithereens, drivers still in their seats. Max satisfyingly whips out a shotgun, goes into slow-motion, and shoots a gas canister on a car's rear end. It ignites. So good. Photo Mode does the rest.

The Big Nothing that Max finds himself in is, well, big. And despite being virtually empty, the wastes of the Great White are incredibly dense. Everything is sandy, dusty, and hotMad Max has the best video game sand since Journey, only this time there are explosions. Exhaust fumes and heat haze makes the air feel thick, and the clever people at Avalanche swirl it all up into an arid dustbowl that makes you sweat just watching Max trek up a gigantic dune. I suppose it had to pop. With nothing but sun, sand, and sky to look at, there needs to be a reason to stick around in this world. But it's not without variety: Max's journey takes him from the bottom of an evaporated seabed, through coastal towns to highways and canyons.

New on Noisey: It's the Ten-Year Anniversary of Realizing 'Garden State' Sucked

The air changes as you travel further inlandnot that there's a sea shore to comprise a starting point. It's almost clean at the bottom of what was once the seabed. It feels light, serene, and the only thing that disturbs it is you, revving through it in an armored war-machine traveling at 80mph. It's a weird sense of connection with the world, sand, but making the lovely hot clean air thick with dust is one of Mad Max's most satisfying elements. So many gamesdriving gamesput you on asphalt roads with recognizable physics and tire degradation. It's rare you get to race through something as thickly resistant and alive as sand and dirt and mud. It drifts and it billows and gets in every crack and crevice. I fucking love it.

Sand and dust is never more apparent when a sandstorm sweeps in. These are violent, apocalyptic random events that your on-board mechanic, Chumbucket, will spot in the distancetowering dust clouds that move toward you at relentless speed. Trying to outrun one is pretty much impossible, and when they hit driving around becomes a case of trying to avoid lightning strikes that'll rip your car to shreds. Find shelter, or be prepared to struggle.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Sitting Down with the Director of 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

The sky changes everything, too. Skyboxes are wonderful tools for making you feel absolutely tiny, and Mad Max uses them bloody brilliantly. Dawn, day, dusk, and night all feel completely different, and cloud cover affects the mood as you travel from point to point. Even with a ginormous, practically empty play space, the fact that the manual act of driving feels so good, beneath these widescreen skies, keeps your attention locked.

You rise above sea level the further north you travel. Up in the Heights you can turn around and look over the entire landscape, all the way to the horizon. And drive into the northeast of the game's ample map and you'll reach The Dump, an endless scrapheap with mountains and mountains of scrap metal and unwanted shit. The structures of the old world provide some of the only means of traversing across the dump, forming tunnels through the hills of rubbish. Furthest north is Gas Town, a perpetually smoggy industrial hub that plays host to a warlord.

With so much of the world a barren waste, Avalanche makes incredibly good use of its rare larger landmarks. These are the wasteland's reminder that this was once a populated and bustling place. Crumbling towers, wide overpasses, wrought iron oilrigs and abandoned docklands are all that protrude from the dense dust. And just like the desert itself, they feel huge.

But as well as shrouding civilisation, the apocalypse uncovered things, too. Once-underwater sulphuric vents are now exposed on the evaporated seabed, and one particularly brazen warlord has fashioned a fortress from a vast volcano that rises out of the sand like a rocky Godzilla, craggy and angular. The world has been drained.

Avalanche has created so much with so little. The inhospitable nature of Max's world never stops. Even after the sun sets, the world continues to change. It feels dynamic, and despite so much nothing it's unquestionably a living, breathing place. Great world building in games is often separate from great game design, and this is certainly one of Mad Max's problems. Repetition creeps in. It falls victim to the usual open-world game traps of running around on fetch quests and taking out mostly meaningless small objectives to progress the story proper. But when you're driving, just driving, through Max's world, all that stuff doesn't really matter. It's simply one of the best road trips I've ever taken.

Mad Max is out now. If you want to win yourself a PlayStation 4 copy, a box of related goodies, and a PS4 to play it on, click here to enter our competition.

Follow Sam White on Twitter.

Exploring Bobby Fischer's Maniacal, Racist Genius

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Tobey Maguire as Bobby Fischer in 'Pawn Sacrifice.' Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street Films

Bobby Fischer, the most compelling chess player of the lastcentury by a great margin, stumbled through a chaotic fuckery of an existence.The apex was his decisive victory in the 1972 World Chess Championship held inReykjavik against the reserved Soviet Boris Spassky, an event that continues togain in significance the longer it remains the only time an American has gottenanywhere near the game's top prize. The various nadirs include nine months in aJapanese prison, two destitute decades shuffling around Southern California,and a lifetime of hatred and vicious antisemitism.

Posterity has cracked his biography into two halves, thebreak coming when he finally became world champion six months after his 29thbirthday. It's a natural distinction. The first part is marked by thesmooth, sweeping movements of a Brooklyn child who is devoted to chess,transitioning into a chess prodigy, then becoming a chess champion. This half fits snugly into a traditionalJoseph Campbell molding of heroics and mythology and comes to a comfortable and logical conclusion. Thathe won amidst the obvious political tensions of the era, against a nation whosechess infrastructure supremely exceeded his own, and with a temperament thatcould be most favorably described as "smugly eccentric" continue to add to hislegend. As is, his achievements on the chessboard cannot be understated, andhis championship performance remains one of the most singular triumphs inrecent American memory. He is our Mozartat least until someone better comesalong.

Fischer had an IQ of 181 and a devastatingly beautiful sensibility over a chessboard, but he was also a creep and a Holocaust denier who kept boxes of Nazi propaganda.

Pawn Sacrifice,a new film directed by Edward Zwick (TheLast Samurai, Blood Diamond) andfeaturing Tobey Maguire as Fischer, carefully draws out that initialtrajectory, hitting the familiar beats of his prodigy and uneven psychosis,culminating with the win in Iceland. It's a tidy distillation, and not entirelybad in a good sports-movie kind of way, but ultimately Pawn Sacrifice refuses to engage with the deeper weirdness thatcolors the discourse on American Hero Bobby Fischer, the stickier parts thatdon't really go anywhere but in a sad circle.

In the 30 some years followingReykjavik, Fischer played only one competitive match, winning again versusSpassky, this time in Yugoslavia for five million dollars, in 1992. He livedfor large chunks first in Los Angeles and Pasadena, by all accounts out of aseries of one-room apartments and shopping carts, before making his way toSerbia for his professional comeback. His participation in the match, whichtook place during the heart of the Bosnian war and violated US sanctions, ledto a lifelong exile from America for fear of prosecution. As a result, hewandered the world in various increments, largely residing in Budapest and Tokyo. After a nine-month incarceration in Japan for attempting to use aninvalid passport, he went back to Iceland, the place of his much earlier coronation and the only country that would offer him political asylum. He died there ofkidney failure in January 2008.

It's hard to argue that Bobby Fischer was not a creep,because Bobby Fischer was a creep, and alienated virtually any friend,associate, or family member with a ceaseless combination of egregiously selfishbehavior and an irrational antisemitism that bordered on maniacal. He was aHolocaust denier, kept boxes of Nazi propaganda, and on 9/11 he took this tothe airwaves, via a public broadcast in the Philippines: "I say death toPresident Bush! I say death to the United States! Fuck the Jews! The Jews are acriminal people. They mutilate their children. They're murderous, criminal,thieving, lying bastards. They made up the Holocaust. There's not a word oftruth to it... This is a wonderful day. Fuck the United States. Cry, youcrybabies! Whine, you bastards! Now, your time is coming."

Fischer had an IQ of181 and a devastatingly beautiful sensibility over a chessboard, but it's prettyimpossible to get past vile shit like that. And yethe's still hard to dismiss,partially because even those who knew and loathed him characterize his hate asconfused and misguided as opposed to malicious. It's as if his anger was directedmore toward the sun and the stars than to any actual people and partiallybecause, oh yeah, he's a human being, not a revolting chess-playing robot.

On Motherboard: The Slow Race to Solve Chess

According to Frank Brady's recent Fischer biography Endgame, Fischer had four seriousrelationships with women, all relatively late in life, and all unsurprisinglybizarre in their own way. The first was a young woman named Petra Stadler,introduced to him by Boris Spassky in 1988. They were involved for much of1990; two years later she married Russian grandmaster Rustem Dautov, and in1995 she wrote a book, published in Germany as Bobby FischerWie er wirklich istEin Jahr mit dem Schachgenie(Fischer as He Really Is: A Year with a Chess Genius).

The second was with a young Hungarian chess player namedZita Rajcsanyi, who sent a letter to Bobby in 1991, when she was 17. They beganto correspond, and at some point in the next three years, he fell into a lovethat was ultimately unrequited. He proposed to her at least twice, even aftershe had a child with another man. There is nothing more humanizing thanheartbreak, and it is hard to not feel a twang of empathy upon this 1994 noteof apology, written to Zita after what one imagines a typically awful night:"Please forgive all of the prideful mistakes I have made regarding you, I amnow paying for everyone a thousandfold. I still hope to win you back somedaysoon and if I do I'll never let you go, to be sure. I'm sorry I behaved likesuch an ass with your sister. I never seem to learn. That's why I'm such aloser in the game of life."

In 2000, he appeared to have had a child with a youngFilipina named Justine Ong (although his name was recorded on the birthcertificate as the father, a posthumous DNA test overturned his paternity), andfor the last decade of his life he maintained a relationship with a Japanesewoman named Miyoko Watai, president of the Japanese Chess Association. In 2004,Time Magazine ran a piece aboutFischer's Tokyo detainmentthe lede read, "To the average lonely heart, BobbyFischer, erstwhile chess champion, virulent anti-Semite, and fugitive from theUS justice system might not sound like Mr. Right. But to hear Miyoko Wataitell it, he's a dreamboat." Fischer, displeased with his characterization asanything but an ideal lover, lashed back in an interview with aPhilippine radio station. "I wear size-14-wide shoes, just keep that in mindwhen they say I'm not a dreamboat, or not Mr. Right," he said, before relatingan anecdote which ended with two old men gesturing emphatically about the sizeof his cock in a Japanese bathhouse.

On VICE: Watch 'The Real Wolf of Wall Street':

None of this makes its way into the film, and that feelslike a missed opportunity to explore an extremely complex interior life, even atthe risk of running into some structural dead ends. Recent films like Love & Mercy (Beach Boy Brian Wilson) and The End of the Tour (David Foster Wallace)have grappled with the natural difficulties of portraying the tortured geniusthrough experimenting with time, either by drastically shortening it, as with EOTT, or by disintegrating it, as in L&M. Both efforts feel aestheticallyfresh, looking their subjects square in the eye, and the net effect issurprising and humanizing. Here, Fischer is elevated to the point that he'slost in the clouds, and Pawn Sacrifice isexactly what one would have expected this movie to be and could easily havebeen predicted 40 years ago as America's freshly minted chess prince cutthrough a European sky en route back to his home in New York City.

There was no precision to theprocession of Bobby Fischer's life, and it's only now that it's all over thatany part of it even begins to make sense. It never will, not really, but everything ismore digestible under history's widening lens. Of course there is no singleline, no tangle of yarn gracefully unspooling from Iceland back to a tinyapartment in Brooklyn, but it's easier to make a movie that way, to simplify the chaos of his life into a beginning, amiddle, an ending; an opening, a middlegame, an endgame. In truth, Fischer's existence was more like an explosion than anything resembling order, a game of chess, or a Hollywood biopic.

Cody Wiewandt lives in Brooklyn.

Pawn Sacrifice opens in theaters nationwide tomorrow.


The Eastern European Gay Rights Movement Is Struggling to Be More Than a Western Cause

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Photos by Joseph Wolfgang Ohlert

This article appearsin the September Issue of VICE

When he was three years old, Daniel Timofeev started draping himself in his mother's scarves and dancing around his bedroom in the Latvian village of Balvi, about 20 miles from the Russian border. His parents were horrified and screamed at him to stop. Though they didn't discuss it openly, they saw his behavior as the first signs of homosexuality, which they regarded as a disease. At school, his peers were more explicit, taunting him and calling him a faggot and girl when he tried to go to the boys' bathroom or play sports.

As a teenager, Timofeev started to sneak off to Riga, the capital, in pursuit of some people who might be like him. It was the early 2000s, and with just a decade of independence from the USSR behind it, the country was still trying to distance itself from its Soviet past. In Riga, going to clubs and meeting other queer men, Timofeev experienced gay culture for the first time. "Riga was like a wonderland compared with where I came from," he said. Even so, he was mugged on his first trip to the city, and when a man he had arranged to meet for a sexual encounter failed to show up, he had to sleep on the street. Unlike the rest of the country, Riga had two gay clubs where the LGBT population could find momentary refuge. But once beyond the walls of the high-security clubs, Timofeev was back on his own and encountering the same verbal violence that he did in Balvi.

Once Timofeev graduated high school, he started looking for a way to get out of his hometown, where he could tell almost no one who he really was. On the social networking site Draugiem.lv, he started chatting with an older man in Riga who wanted to meet him. Timofeev half-jokingly asked if the man would come pick him up in Balvi, and five hours later he arrived. Timofeev told his mother he was going out for a while, packed up his things, and moved to Riga that afternoon.

When Timofeev arrived he encountered a post-Soviet gay community whose members made great efforts to keep their lives secret. The official myth in the Soviet Union had been that there had been no homosexuals within its borders. Yet under its criminal code, sex between men was punishable by five years in prison. According to the Soviet Union's first and only sex manual, In the Name of Love, written by the Latvian psychotherapist Janis Zalitis, homosexuality was a sickness but could be cured with hypnosis. A newly independent Latvia had overturned the Soviet criminal code and seen the opening of Latvia's first official gay clubs in the early 90s. But because of hundreds of years of occupation, its own history of fascism, and a newly powerful church, the new Latvia was deeply nationalist and xenophobic, and suspicious of what they regarded as outside forceshomosexuals chief among them.

In 2003, Latvia held a referendum on the question of joining the European Union as part of the group's expansion to include many states from the former Eastern Bloc the following year. Those advocating a no vote argued that the country shouldn't give up its sovereignty so soon after gaining independence, but supporters won out, arguing that the move would provide further protection from Russian influence. When a small gay activist community started to emerge after the EU accession, politicians were eager to dismiss them as the influence of Western forces, as there were still officially no gays in Latvia.


Daniel Timofeev in drag

The climate in Riga remains one in which gay people are encouraged to live in hiding. With an androgynous style of silvery lavender hair, tailored feminine clothing, and an ever-present touch of blush, foundation, and bronzer to highlight his delicate features, Timofeev doesn't blend in. A few months ago he discovered RuPaul's Drag Race on Facebook and began experimenting with drag. "My drag is very fishy," he said, using language he learned from the show. But as comfortable as he is with himself, he still has to fight to walk down the street. "Someone in a car drove by me this week, rolled down the window, called out 'faggot,' and drove away. And if I'm on public transportation it's a constant, 'Is he boy, is he girl, why is he gay?'" he said. "I have to live with that."

This January, Latvia assumed the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU for the first time. Leading up to the ascendency, the country's gay activists decided they should use the occasion to make a statement. While gay rights have rapidly made advances in Western Europe in the past decade, Eastern Europe has lagged behind, feeling the pull of its reactionary nationalist movements and Russia's outwardly homophobic regime.

Gay groups successfully lobbied to bring EuroPride, an annual weeklong celebration of Europe's LGBT community, to Rigathe first time in its 24-year history that it would be held in a post-Soviet nation that shared a border with Russia. Besides the symbolic pushback against the oppression that is happening across the border, the event was to provide a place for queer people from across many post-Soviet states, including Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia itself, to draw attention to their cause and organize. EuroPride Riga was to be a "historic" event, with a "human rights march" as a focal pointthe biggest showing of LGBT people and their allies in Latvia's history.

Within days of the announcement, the event met with extreme resistance. Local politicians and anti-gay groups, who call themselves "no homo" activists and "anti-globalists," began trying to shut EuroPride Riga down. With no support from the government, the organizers were forced to launch a crowdsourcing campaign to offset the massive costs.

But when he heard about EuroPride coming to Latvia, Timofeev was unimpressed. He wanted the big Riga event to be more of a celebration "with drag queens and angel wings and feathers," not an understated human rights march. In his everyday presentation and flouting of gender norms, he was already risking everything. For Pride he wanted something better than survival. "I'm already making my political statement every time I leave the house," he said. "I'm already protesting every day."


Kaspars Zalitis, a Mozaka organizer

Riga had its first Pride march in 2005, after Gabriels Strautin came home from volunteering at a Pride event in Stockholm with the idea that it was time for gay Latvia to have its own party in the streets. The intention wasn't to be political; like Timofeev, Strautin and his friends were hoping for a celebration. Latvia had just officially joined the European Union the year before, and the permit application was quickly approved. That was all it took for the reality of the country's homophobia to show itself. Latvia's prime minister, Aigars Kalvtis, publically opposed the event, telling a local television station, "For sexual minorities to parade in the very heart of Riga, next to the cathedral, is unacceptable." Soon the Riga city council withdrew the organizers' permit, citing fears that the parade would spark violence, but a court eventually reversed the decision, allowing the marchers to make their way through the old city. Riga's deputy mayor, Juris Lujans, resigned his post in protest.

When the approximately 70 supporters convened at the Anglican church in the city center for the march, they faced a group of 3,000 protesters who pelted them with eggs and tomatoes. Police formed a chain around the marchers and redirected their route to protect them from the opposition, but homophobes still broke through the barriers and violently attacked the participants. Kaspars Zalitis, who had come as an activist, was punched in the stomach by the current parliamentary secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Janis Iesalnieks. "He probably doesn't remember that," he said, "but I remember it."

For Kristine Garina, the horror of the first Pride came as a total shock. Garina, a straight woman from Riga, had gone to Prides in other cities and had a great time. She didn't attend the Riga parade with the intention to march, but she quickly changed her mind. "When I arrived, I saw that there was this small group of Pride marchers and a huge crowd of protesters around them, and I thought, There's no way I can watch this, I have to join," she said. One of the biggest shocks to Garina was seeing one of the heroes of the movement for Latvia's independence from the USSR, Elita Veidemane, reach into her bag to hurl eggs at the marchers. "This was a woman I respected!" she said. "I thought she was an intelligent, smart, inspirational woman."

At the parade, Garina met Zalitis and a few other horrified participants. They exchanged numbers and, over the next few months, came together in cafs, restaurants, and their homes to discuss how to improve the lives of LGBT people in the country. By February of the next year, they decided to form Mozaka, Latvia's only LGBT rights organization, with the goal of strengthening the country's queer community.

Watch Our Documentary, 'Young and Gay in Putin's Russia

After that first Pride, the political climate in Latvia around LGBT issues became even more hostile. Parliament refused to implement a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace, which had been a condition of its joining the European Union in 2004, and it amended the country's constitution to define marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman. Neo-Nazi, ultranationalist, and Christian anti-gay organizations also strengthened their grassroots efforts. They were helped by the arrival of Scott Lively, an American Evangelical famous for promoting Uganda's "Kill the Gays" law, who teamed up with a local church to warn Latvians about Western infiltrators spreading a gospel of homosexuality.

In 2006, Mozaka petitioned to have a second march under the more innocuous name of Friendship Days. By that time, the organizers of the first Pride had left the country, disavowing the event as a shameful spectacle that made Latvia an international laughing stock. The Riga city council again tried to ban the march, but Mozaka appealed the ruling, settling for an indoor rally on the second floor of the Reval Hotel Latvija. This time, it was even worse; protesters blocked the hotel entrance for hours, taunted and attacked people coming in and out, and eventually infiltrated the event, all as the police stood idly by. After a church service celebrating Riga Pride that morning, participants were showered in rotten fruit, feces, and holy water.

Undeterred, Mozaka organized marches again in 2007 and 2008, the first of which attracted 800 participants and a thousand protesters. In both marches, the international participants far outnumbered the locals. In 2009, Mozaka collaborated with partner organizations in Lithuania and Estonia to initiate a rotating Baltic Pride starting with Riga; the city council again tried to ban the march, but a court reversed its decision. For Baltic Pride Riga 2012, there were around 600 participants and no court ban; about 100 people showed up to protest. The dream of something bigger for the 2015 Pride began around then. "This was the year Latvia had the EU presidency, the ten-year anniversary of the first Pride, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union," Garina told me. "We thought, This is a good time for EuroPride to come to Riga."

EuroPride began in London in 1992, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, as a way for Europe's gay communities to assemble in one place each year to show their collective power. Riga's local Prides had raised awareness about the gay population in the city, but their impact had been limited and stifled by the country's homophobia. Bringing in EuroPride and its cadre of loyal attendees had the potential to bring the scrutiny of Europe to the struggles of Latvia's LGBT community. Up against cities like Barcelona, Manchester, and Milan, Riga did not seem the obvious choice. "We didn't have the government support that Manchester had. And we weren't going to bring the big party that Milan and Barcelona would. And as you can see, the weather in Riga is crap!" Garina said.

With no corporate or state support, the organizers had to rely almost entirely on the political urgency of their bid. Mozaka decided to frame the proposal as a chance to make Latvia a "beacon of hope to other Eastern European countries," said Hans De Meyer, the president of the European Pride Organizers Association (EPOA), which runs EuroPride. They wanted to say to their own government and the governments in the region, despite so much insistence to the contrary: "We exist." Eager to make a statement as well, EPOA selected Riga, crap weather and all. And in case anyone unused to Pride being anything but a party should feel overwhelmed by all the duty and urgency, EuroPride Riga made a promise: "Changing history is hot!"


RIGA'S FIRST PRIDE MARCH
Riga had its first Pride march in 2005. 70 supporters faced a group of 3,000 protesters

The Kanepes Culture Center is located in central Riga among the city's many cultural landmarks: St. Gertrude Old Church, the Jewish Museum, and the former KGB building. For EuroPride's weeklong celebration, Mozaka had transformed the center, originally used by Russian and Baltic aristocrats as a bohemian gathering spot, into Pride House, a central meeting place for the celebration's participants. In the courtyard, they had hoisted the rainbow flagthe first time in Latvia's history that it had been flown in a public space, according to EuroPride's website.

I met Zalitis and Garina there on June 17, which was both the third day of EuroPride and an official Latvian holiday commemorating the beginning of the Soviet occupation in 1940. In honor of the day, every property unit was required to hang the Latvian flag with a black ribbon tied to it. Many Latvians who opposed EuroPride were angry that it had been arranged to coincide with the holiday. One Lutheran pastor had hung a black flag outside his church to protest EuroPride, comparing the LGBT community to communists and Nazis and promising that there would come a time when they too would have to answer for what they'd done to society. Zalitis, who had met a Dutch princess at the National Library that morning and was on his way to a television appearance that afternoon, was unmoved by the condemnation: "I'm sick of crying all the time. Latvians are champions of suffering. If they want to live in that mental Soviet Union, fine. But I want to make my country better. I want people to come to this place and see how beautiful it is."

While gay rights have rapidly made advances in Western Europe in the past decade, Eastern Europe has lagged behind.

A couple thousand international guests had already taken him up on the idea, coming from all over Europe to participate in a week of eventsLatvia's first-ever LGBT history exhibit, its first queer art show at a major gallery, performances, film screenings, and workshops on topics such as trans rights and LGBT organizing in Eastern Europe. Of course, there were also the almost nightly parties, including two that would last until the early hours of Saturday's major event: the Pride Parade, which, no matter how many LGBT locals or counter-protesters turned up, was sure to be the biggest Pride parade in Baltic history.

In addition to bringing EuroPride to Riga, Mozaka had been pursuing a legal and social campaign to make gay rights a reality in Latvia. In the past ten years, it has created an LGBT youth group, Skapis (which means "closet" in Latvian), organized an LGBT library, and started Latvia's first women's basketball team. Mozaka is also advocating for the adoption of a civil-union law, which would apply to all cohabiting couples, regardless of their gender, and has been building a database of LGBT hate crimes, which are not recognized as such by the government.

Parliament eventually banned workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation in order to secure the country's place in the EU, but that remains the only segment of society in which such discrimination is illegal. Today the law, passed in 2006, is rarely invoked because in order to claim its benefits you have to be out. "This often makes it impossible to document the discrimination," Garina explained. So Mozaka has also made it part of its mission to give queer people the "self-confidence" to come out. In their view, if people don't come out, the LGBT community can't make progress as a whole. "I think our biggest struggle right nowbecause the political mood is changingis the community who just doesn't come out," Garina told me.

There are about 50 local EuroPride volunteers, and by Garina's estimation, they are probably the only 50 people in the entire country who would be comfortable enough to openly associate themselves with the LGBT movement. At least half the LGBT activists in Latvia are straight, Garina said. To her mind, there are maybe 150 people who go to the gay bars, but most of them are not out and are living in secret. She told me about a trans woman who calls Mozaka about once a year very drunk. "This is her only way to express herself, because nobody else listens," she said. Mozaka's volunteers always encourage the woman to come visit them at their office, but she makes sure to get so plastered that if she did for a moment lose her mind and give into the urge to come, she'd be too drunk to walk.


EDGARS RINKVIS
Last November, Latvia's foreign minister, Edgars Rinkvis, came out on Twitter, becoming the country's second openly gay public figure. His approval ratings have dipped by 20 percent since he came out.

Before I came to Latvia, I put a friend of mine to work on the gay networking site DudesNude.com to find me some Latvian men to interview. Out of seven men he wrote to, only one responded. "I would never go to Riga Pride, too much hate," he said. "I will be in Barcelona." When I told Garina about it, she was silent for a moment and then said, "That hurts me a little bit, because he is just waiting for other people to fight his battle. But I can also understand the hesitation."

On the first day of EuroPride, Tlivaldis Kronbergs, a cultural worker and editor of the site Pride.lv, published an open letter online titled "Out of the Closet, at Last and Publicly: Why I Grew Tired of Krlis Streips's 'Dominance' as the Only Homosexual Man in Latvia." For many years, Streips, a liberal journalist and television commentator, was the only officially out person in the Latvian media. Last November, Latvia's foreign minister, Edgars Rinkvis, came out on Twitter, becoming the country's second openly gay public figure. Mozaka helped organize support for Rinkvis on Twitter, but his approval ratings have dipped by 20 percent since he came out.

Soon after, the director of the Latvian National Opera, Zigmars Liepi, published an article mocking the foreign minister, in which he came out as a straight white Christian man, an identity he said was becoming endangered. In Latvia today, homophobia is virulent in the hatred spewed in online comments. "If you log in to the most popular websites, like Apollo.lv, you read five comments and it's enough," Annija Sprivule, a 27-year-old Mozaka youth-group leader, told me. What's harder to measure and perhaps more dangerous is the way in which most Latvians don't speak up against it. "It's a culture of silence," Sprivule said.

I think our biggest struggle right nowbecause the political mood is changingis the community who just doesn't come out.

In Kronbergs's letter he wrote that he was "sick of keeping quiet and listening to idiocies... about myself and other homosexual people." He decided that the week of EuroPride was the time to come out. "Many of you will probably ask, 'So what?'" he wrote, but he reminded his readers that Latvia is not Western Europe. People in Latvia have been forced to live in secret, leading double lives out of a very realistic fear of losing their jobs. According to Kronbergs, Latvians need to be free to come out because the country is in danger of losing "a whole other village of emigrants... We will that I can't even say the word 'feminist' to. If we push a more leftist agenda, we will be less understood. We have not solved this."

Still, the blueprint for improving the lives of gay people in Eastern Europe, and the ideas in circulation at EuroPridecoming out, Pride parades, and public visibility campaignsare Western strategies. Eastern European LGBT activists find themselves in a vicious circle: Take up Western strategies for gay rights, and get criticized by the right for being too Western and by the left for being too mainstream. But in a region where participating in Pride is sometimes criminal (at this year's unofficial Moscow Pride, at least ten marchers were arrested, including two organizers who had to serve ten-day jail sentences), gay people coming together to say "we exist," in any formation, remains radical.

Before arriving for EuroPride, the last time I had been in Riga was in 2008, to visit my grandparents. My grandmother often called me an old maid, carefully scrutinizing my face and body before exclaiming: "I don't know what it is, men just don't like her!" Under their care, not only was I not allowed to go out at night, I wasn't allowed to be gay.

Before that trip, I'd found a bar online called Purvs, which means "swamp" in Latvian, advertised as a club for "gejiem, lesbietm, biseksuiem, transvesttiem." I was fascinated by the potential subversiveness of queer spaces, and I was set on visiting Purvs when I got to Riga. In the days before I arrived, I scoured MySpace for Latvian lesbians. Most of the women I found looked like porn stars, until I came across Marina, a feminist-anarchist punk much more my speed. Even though she told me that she was in fact straight (she wrote lesbian on her profile to keep men away), she agreed to go with me.

Purvs was on the first floor of an apartment building near Ziedodrzs Park on Matsa, a residential street with a cable-car line. A window of rainbow stained glass crowned the door to the club. Once I was past the thick Plexiglas entrance, where I was required to check my bag, Purvs was resplendent in fluorescent pink and blue and purple. Glow-in-the dark flowers lined the walls of the dance floor, mixing with disco lights that danced like fireflies.

Purvs felt otherworldly to me, like a future dreamed up by a queer imagination, and I was quickly reminded that it was not at all indicative of life outside its walls. One woman on the dance floor told me, "It is so fun for you to come and visit. But we can't even hold hands once we leave here. We will be beaten." It was at Purvs that I first heard about the feces at the 2006 Pride, the human rights violations, and the homophobic churches. Still, I danced all night with Marina, secretly hoping that she would change her mind and decide to be gay for me.

Riga's early gay clubs were informal, occupying spaces at night intended for something else entirely during the day. During the Soviet era, people met at a bar nicknamed the Closet, near the Freedom Monument downtown. The first post-Soviet gay bar in the city opened in 1991 on the top floor of someone's house, and the second one appeared in 1992 in someone's basement. Then came the gathering place in a conference room of a toy factory. "To get there, you had to climb up this set of stairs with people peeking through their doorways," Karlis Streips, the TV personality, told me. "Then you got to this hallway, where the pipes were overhead, so you had to walk, like, low, low, low." The next bar, called Apceina, meaning "little pharmacy," was in the basement of the Museum for the History of Medicine, which made sense because the director of the museum was gay.

Riga's first formal gay clubs were Purvs and a bar called 818, both of which opened in 1995. Next came XXL, a Ukrainian-owned gay disco, in 1999, and then Golden, a lounge and club, in 2005. According to Streips, who has been around long enough to know, Riga can only support two gay clubs at any given time, so within a few years of Golden's opening, Purvs shut down.

Though XXL is now Riga's oldest surviving gay bar, it wasn't host to any EuroPride events or mentioned in any of the tourist materials. I decided to visit to see what part of Riga's gay culture unapproved for European visitors looked like. Outside the bar, a sign with a rainbow and the word "SAUNA" hang above the door. Like Purvs, it is high-security: Guests had to ring a doorbell labeled "FACE CONTROL" and then pay a ten-euro fee, a discounted rate in honor of EuroPride, to enter. In the corner of the bar, a muscular male dancerdecked out in a black wig, bustier top, short jean shorts, fishnet stockings, and Toms slip-onsdid an idle sidestep in front of a stripper pole. Down a hallway were black rooms with glory holes and labyrinths, a room where free HIV tests were being administered, and a dance floor with a mural featuring an image of Madonna, in profile, shoving her face into a very white ass.

I heard from more than one local that you can see the divide between ethnic Latvians and Russians playing out in the gay bars. "XXL has more of a Russian-speaking crowd, with black rooms, and more people living in secret," one gay Latvian told me. "At Golden, the drinks are expensive, it is lighter, more of a lounge, no sordidness, and the people are quite open." XXL plays Russian music, which many Latvian clubs refuse to do, evidence of the lingering animosity over Soviet occupation. Golden is one such club and, for its part, hosted a few nights of Baltic music as part of EuroPride.

For Ruslans Kaflevskis, a co-owner of XXL, both Latvian nationalism and pro-European feeling are too prevalent in the gay community in Latvia. "Gay is gay. Whether you are from Russia, Latvia, Ukraine, America. Gays have no nationalities." His Latvian boyfriend, Sergejs Rimss, who got up every couple of minutes to let "nonaggressive" people in, said that Mozaka only worked with Golden "because we aren't nationalistic enough for them." Mozaka told me that XXL had a reputation for ripping off European tourists, which was very much substantiated in online reviews of the clubdefinitely not the side of gay Riga that EuroPride wanted to showcase. XXL's atmosphere, for all its fun smuttiness, was also so clandestine as to feel vaguely threatening. Within a few minutes of arriving at the club, a sunglassed patron tried to attack the photographer I was with after he asked if he could take his picture. Evidently, many people at XXL did not want their queerness known beyond its walls.

Purvs had served as an intermediary space where anything felt possiblea home for Latvian gays in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the early years of the country's longed-for independence. XXL and Golden, in contrast, show a Latvia that is gripped by nationalism and the regional demand to choose between Russia and the EU. This masculinist showdown between the two clubs has left little space for queer women to meet. Purvs had been mixed gender, but neither XXL nor Golden felt particularly inviting to women. In the month before EuroPride began, H-People, a new gay bar, and the first aimed specifically at lesbians, had opened. It's only a "project" right now, open on Friday and Saturday nights in the old city, and so far it's attracted an ethnically mixed crowd. It will be interesting to see, following Streips's theory, which of the current gay bars H-People supplants.

On the Saturday morning of the parade, participants gathered in Vrmanes Park, which the organizers renamed Pride Park for the week. Vrmanes is big, central, and easy to safeguard. All along the park's perimeter were barricades and police stationed in riot gear. Local bystanders with inscrutable looks on their faces peered through the fences at the steady stream of colorful marchers making their way into the park. There were representatives from the European Union and the American Embassy, Stonewall 50, and political organizations like Amnesty International and ILGA-Europe, as well as various PridesCopenhagen Pride, Hamburg Pride, Queens Pride, replete with rainbow and EU flags. Many of the Eastern European LGBT activists I met earlier in the week arrived in traditional costumes. One group held a banner that read "EUROPRIDE, COME TO MOSCOW NEXT!" Near them was a group of Russian men in tiaras and pink and blue tutus who assured me they were not activists, just there to have fun.

Big street displayswhether as celebrations or protestsare not common in Latvia. "Latvians aren't used to marching in the streets for rights," one gay government worker who asked not to be named told me. "They are more interested in flower-laying ceremonies and quiet commemorations." Political marches are still associated with Soviet times, when people were obligated to participate in celebrations of the State or risk losing their jobs. Because the movement to claim one's gay identity publicly, either in the form of coming out or marching for rights, has no precedence in the country, many activists were eager to see just how many Latvians would feel comfortable participating in such a big display. "The most exciting thing would be to see a lot of local people," Annija Sprivule told me.

As the march left the park, I met a young woman with long white hair, a spiky choker, and purple contact lenses. She said that she had come with a huge group of similarly clad straight women to support her gay friends, who were too scared to come. "They don't want to have shit thrown at them," she said.

Around the first corner of the route, a small handful of counter-protesters holding signs that said "DON'T TOUCH OUR ASSES" and pointing their thumbs down came into view. Marchers had to step around a spot where a lone cracked egg lay on the cobblestones, but the person who threw it had been quickly arrested before he had a chance to throw more. It was clear that many more than the 2,000 people Mozaka had been expecting were there for the parade, and the protesting contingent, only about 40 people, barely registered in comparison.

Political marches are still associated with Soviet times, when people were obligated to participate in celebrations of the State or risk losing their jobs.

By the time the march had been going for 30 minutes, the crowd had become decidedly blissful. Cars blared Queen, Beyonc, and ABBA along the route, as people from groups from all over the world chanted and showed their signs: "ANGRY QUEER FEMINISTS AGAINST CATEGORIES;" "QUEERS AGAINST AUSTERITY;" "DON'T SWAP STRUGGLE FOR PRIDE. DON'T SELL PRIDE FOR THE EURO." When the march passed Outlet Optika on Trbatas Street, Daniel Timofeev looked on from inside. Though he hadn't planned on joining, seeing the sheer size and vibrancy of the parade compelled him to run out of the shop where he worked and dance along to Pharrell's "Happy."

In the end Riga didn't have the violent Pride that many had braced for, but the global gay community wasn't entirely spared. Just days after EuroPride, riot police used a water cannon and rubber bullets on marchers peacefully participating in a Pride parade in Istanbul. And in Jerusalem in July, an ultra-Orthodox settler from the West Bank stabbed six people participating in the city's annual Pride event, killing one. Israel has made huge efforts to sell itself as a beacon of gay rights in the Middle East, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since promised to bring the perpetrator to justice.

When the parade finally snaked its way back to Vrmanes Park, Zalitis made a triumphal speech from a stage. "Ten years ago we were seventy versus three thousand protesters. This year, we were five thousand and maybe forty protesters," he said. "In two thousand six, they were throwing different stuff at usthis story is going down with the closet."

Zalitis encouraged all the Latvians in the crowd to sign a petition Mozaka was circulating for the cohabitation law it had been advocating for. If the petition garnered at least 10,000 signatures, parliament would be obligated to debate it. A government worker in the crowd told me that even though it looked like Mozaka would get the signatures it needed, it was very likely that the law would just be dismissed. Dzintars Rasnas, the country's Minister of Justice, has made it clear that he would do what he must to stop it. "Partnership registration is the first step toward recognizing same-gender marriage," Rasnas said in an interview with Latvian media. "And that will probably be followed by the next stepadoption of children by such couples."

After the parade, I met some Latvian expats who had returned to their home country for EuroPride at a nearby bar. Liene Dobraja, a Latvian costume designer living in New York and the best friend of Zalitis, was almost in tears. "This is the most important day of my life," she said. Margo Zlte, a queer opera director who moved to Berlin mostly because of the conditions of LGBT people in Latvia, said that the parade made her think she could live in Riga again. But Kaspars Vanags, who had returned to curate EuroPride's queer art show, spent most of the evening engrossed in his phone. He was fighting with some people who opposed the march on Facebook. Perhaps the protesters had stayed home, but that wasn't going to stop them from making their voices heard on the internet. EuroPride had succeeded in making Latvia's LGBT community visible and in bringing them out in unprecedented numbers, but the homophobia didn't just disappear overnight. As gay people have come out of hiding, homophobes have gone into it. They may have pushed from the center of the conversation, but they weren't gone. Within a few days, Dobraja had written me that she was embroiled in a familiar fight with her family: The day after the parade, she was back to explaining the difference between a pedophile and a gay person. "It just shows how large the gap is that still needs to be sealed," she said.


CO-HABITATION LAW
Mozaka was circulating a petition advocating for a civil-union law, which would apply to all cohabiting couples regardless of their genders. If the petition garnered at least 10,000 signatures, parliament would be obligated to debate it.

On my flight back to New York from Riga, I was seated between a Ukrainian man who lived in Westchester and a Russian teenager who was on his way to an English-language immersion camp in Connecticut. Once the plane took off into the night, the Ukrainian and I started chatting, with the teenager intermittently removing his headphones to chime in. The Ukrainian told me he was in the process of closing his businesses in New York so he could move to Russia. His reasons were political. "America is not a place I can stand to live any longer," he said. "Why are American troops in Ukraine? A lot of people are thinking we will go to war, and if we did I would fight along with Russia against the United States." He and the teenager launched into an explanation of why Ukraine belonged squarely in Russia's domain. When I told him I was Latvian, he criticized Latvia's decision to go with the EU and sanction Russia. "No one in the EU wants to buy those fishes and things Latvia has to trade," he said. "It's the biggest mistake it could have made."

Though bombastic, I found his critique of EU imperialism refreshing, and I told him so. I wondered if it meant that he was progressive in other areas and asked him about his stance on social issues in Russia, like the anti"gay propaganda" law. "This subject I hate," he said. "There are no gay people in Russia." I thought of the Russians in tutus and tiaras at the parade, and a group that chanted "Russia will be free" as they marched with Latvian gays. "I met a bunch of Russian gays in Latvia," I told him. He leaned forward, restless in his seat. "Have you even read the law? Have you? Nothing it says is bad." I regretted having brought the subject up. "Yes, the law is just so that children don't have to see it," the teenager earnestly chimed in. A sign from the march that read "I AM NOT PROPAGANDA" came into my head.

The Ukrainian became more heated and told me a story about punching two men who had came on to him at different times in his life. "At one time, I was very handsome," he said. If I got violent every time I got some unwanted attention from men, I explained, I would be in jail. He was genuinely shocked: "Svetlana, how can you compare these? Let me ask you, are you gay? I don't mind lesbians, I even like them sometimes." I didn't want to answer the question. "I'm an activist," I told him. His blue eyes burned with rage, and he spoke without restraint: "If a gay man came near my child I would kill him." He was attacking me, and he knew it. The teenager stared out the window. I was crying and trying to hide it. "I don't want to talk anymore," I said.

In Riga, I wanted to listen carefully to the distinct and varied voices in Latvia's LGBT community. I made a considered decision to avoid interviews with bigots and homophobes, but for the last eight hours of my trip, I sat couched between verbal violence and enabling silence. EuroPride had made it its mission to clearly say to the region that gay people exist. In that gaping moment, when I sat stuck between two Eastern European men who wanted to tell me it wasn't true, I realized how impossible that was to say alone.

Inside the Lebanese Camps Where Syrian Refugees Are Struggling to Eke Out a Living

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The stench of the tannery in which 12 Syrian refugee families are living is almost impossible to fathom.

The abandoned structure is located in a dusty field just outside of Saida, Lebanon. Partially decomposed animal skins decorate the ground in reeking heaps. The air is thick with decay and the stinging chemicals used to tan the hide into leather. It's a place most people would avoid spending even ten minutes inside, but human beings are eating, sleeping and breathing there every day. Dozens of thin, grimy-faced children scamper about the two-story building, playing among the rotting furs and machinery. They all cough frequentlydeep hacking noises better suited to heavy cigarette smokers than kids.

At ten years old, it's already clear that Rima is going to be a beauty. She has fine, delicate features, thick brown eyelashes, and an elegance that belies her soiled pink Minnie Mouse T-shirt. Her eyes are bright with tears as she recounts how her family woke around 2 AM Monday to the camp they had just moved into being bulldozedwhile they were still inside.

"We were so frightened," she tells me. "They demolished the building right on top of us, while we were sleeping. The kids started crying and screaming. I hurt my hand, it was covered in blood. The cops took all the men away, they said our daddies would be right back but my brother ran away. We were crying and the police were taking pictures of us with their phones and laughing at us. When I fell down, one of them laughed at me and called me a dog."

While European countries are just now beginning to register the scale of the migrant crisis created by horrific Syrian civil war, Lebanon has been struggling to cope since the beginning of the conflict. The country's already-fragile economy is straining under the weight of these people, and the government seems to be growing resentful of their presence.

On VICE News: Drowned Migrant Cartoon Pisses People Off Just as 'Charlie Hebdo' Likely Intended

There are currently over 1.1 million Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations living in Lebanon, and the number of unregistered refugees is estimated to be much higher; one village in Lebanon is reported to be housing more refugees than are living in the entire United States. While refugees could previously enter Lebanon with relative ease, laws instituted earlier this year now require Syrians to obtain visas upon entering the country. Those who already live here must have their residency renewed every six months, and in order to do so, they have to provide documents including a signed pledge not to work and a rental agreement with their landlordas well as a $200 fee.

Meanwhile, anti-Syrian violence in Lebanon has been documented with increasing frequency in recent years. Residents of towns near the informal camps that have cropped up across the country have been known to torch the tents of their new neighbors. Reports of Syrian women being raped or sold into forced marriages with Lebanese men stretch back years. In 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report detailing many cases of abuse and mistreatment of refugees, sometimes by Lebanese security forces.

Rima and her family were thrilled to hear that a man named Fadi Chamieh, who runs a local NGO called the Humanitarian Association Collaboration, had found them some land on which he was erecting a caravan-style camp made of bricks, plastic containers, and corrugated metal. So they left the tannery, moved into the new structures, unpacked, and settled in for the night. Then they were awakened by the roar of bulldozers leveling the buildings. The family claims that the camp was being demolished by the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF).

One of the refugee women took a video of the mayhem, documenting another woman fainting as her children shriek and cling to her while their shelters are destroyed.

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"I wasn't going to let them take this from us too, our homes and our pride," the woman who took the video says, triumph in her voice. "They've taken everything else, but I wanted the world to see them this time."

"In general, Lebanon is like a big prison for the Syrians. It's not a safe haven for them." Nabil Halabi

According to Nabil Halabi, executive director of the Lebanese Institute for Democracy and Human Rights (LIFE), an NGO that documents human rights abuses, there's no coherent Lebanese policy for Syrian refugees.

"One of the new laws prohibits Syrians from working in Lebanon, but they have to pay money for the papers in order to stay," Halabi says. "Where are they going to get the money from? So some of them turn to crime, because they have no other choice. Then the Lebanese say, 'Look, they're all criminals.'

"Many people are giving land and helping them as well," he adds. "Not all the Lebanese treat the Syrians badly... but in general, Lebanon is like a big prison for the Syrians. It's not a safe haven for them."

Security forces often raid the camps under the pretense of preventing terrorists from infiltrating the settlements, which are usually on privately-owned land since the Lebanese government has prohibited the construction of official refugee encampments. But at a small camp in the Barelias village of the Bekaa Valley, a young man snorts at the idea that there could be terrorists there.

"They say they're looking for guns and terrorists," he chuckles. "I've been trying to find enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes for two days. How am I supposed to buy a gun?"

An elderly man explains why his children took the enormous risk of being illegally smuggled aboard a boat from Lebanon to Europe. His small tent smells of sweat and grease, but he has a straight-backed dignity at odds with the squalor surrounding him.

"My children went to Europe Sunday morning by boat," the man says. "They stayed 90 hours trying to get from here to Cyprus. They almost died in the sea two or three times, but that would have been better than the misery they were facing here... The Lebanese people treat us as though we're less than zero. They don't think we are human beings. The army and police stop us at checkpoints and if we don't have IDs, they beat us. One of them threatened to kill me."

Asked about the spate of media attention for the refugee crisis in Europe, the old man gives a bitter laugh. "The Europeans woke up very late. We've been suffering and dying for years, and they only notice now? But better late than never...all I hope for right now is that the Lebanese government leaves us alone and changes these new rules and laws. It costs so much money to get a residency or even to be able to live here legally. I have no money, I can barely feed myself. How can I pay them?"

A woman a few tents down points to another young woman in a hijab. "That girl was six months pregnant until the soldiers came into the camp and beat her so badly she lost the baby," she whispers. "She'll never talk about it though. They scared her so badly. But we all saw it."

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At the tannery in Saida, another elderly man is shouting about how their homes were bulldozed while they slept. "They came, destroyed our camp, humiliated us in front of everyone," he thunders. "I can't stand it anymore. They think we're terrorists. We're not terrorists! We're not daesh my permission to use my land to house refugees on the condition that they would obtain permission from the municipality," he tells me. "They told me they had a verbal agreement from the municipality...I wasn't there when they destroyed the camps."

As she cries in the tannery, Rima remembers what happened in Syria, before the casual indignity of their situation in Lebanon.

"My sister had just been born when the war started," she says. "We used to put her under the bed to protect her from the bombing. The snipers would shoot at our house. Then we came to Lebanon for safety, but my brother became sick and died, and since the day my brother died, my father is sick. He has heart problems.

"When we walk down the street here, they insult and disrespect us," she says in the weary voice of a grown woman. "We pray every day and read the Quran so there is peace and we can go back to Syria. In Syria, we used to play and have nice clothes. Here, we have nothing."

Follow Sulome Anderson on Twitter.

Who Is Watching All the Porn Marketed to Orthodox Jews?

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Screenshot via frumvids.com

If you look hard enough on the internet, you can find just about any porn microniche. There's incest porn, amputee porn, Mormon porn, and porn that takes place exclusively on trampolines. Rule 34: If you can imagine it, the pornographic version already existsincluding the emerging category of "frum porn," or porn for ultra-Orthodox Jews.

The term "frum" comes from the Yiddish word meaning "devout" or "pious," and is generally used to describe the most Orthodox Jewish communities. The popular webcam porn site clips4sale.com currently has 74 videos tagged "frum fetish," plus another 31 tagged "frum lesbians." That puts the frum genre somewhere between "Arab MILFs" (196 videos) and "albino fetish" (6 videos).

Many of the videos listed on clips4sale.com come from another site frumvids.com. The site is pay-to-play, but in a teaser video on the homepage, you can see a pair of women in ankle-length skirts and headscarves (a display of modesty) making out and then undressing each other. The whole thing gives off an amateur vibe, with poor lighting and bad video quality.

Modesty is considered a paramount virtue among Orthodox Jews, so the fact that frum porn exists is strange. Frum sects have adopted an ultra-conservative interpretation of the Torah, and adhere to a strict set of Jewish laws governing dress, behavior, and any contact between the sexes.

"In the face of modernity, Orthodox JewsHasidic Jews, in particularhave become even more insistent on modesty with respect to sexuality," said David Biale, a Jewish studies scholar at the University of California, Davis. "Insofar as they resist the modern world, they resist any kind of sexual license. Women are supposed to dress modestly and not reveal the flesh of their legs or their arms; if they're married, they don't reveal their own hair."

If that's the case, then what kind of Orthodox Jew would watch frum porn? I asked Nathan Abrams, a Jewish studies scholar who edited the 2008 anthology Jews & Sex. Abrams, who currently teaches film studies at Bangor University, said he'd heard of frum porn, but that he wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

"When I first came across are pretty weak and the chances of meeting someone are even less," making porn a more viable outlet.

I asked what made him choose to search for frum porn in the first placewatching pornography on the internet is a serious offense in the Orthodox world, and you don't get brownie points if the porn you watch involves Orthodox Jews. He replied that he felt "more comfortable with someone from the same background."

Biale suggested that, for people making their foray into the vast world of internet porn, there's something comforting about searching for what you knowin this case, the frum world.

"In a world where modesty is such a high value, if these people are indeed Hasidic Jews, they are breaking out of that in the most radical way possible," he told me. "But what's fascinating about the internet is that all these things that are private are suddenly out there. It turns out that there is an infinite variety of fetishes, and what the internet does is it allows us to see their existence."

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

I Walked Around a Music Festival Asking to Test People's Drugs

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Landing on the Isle of Wight, I jumped in a cab with two guys from London. We were all on our way to Bestival, the last big British festival of the summer, and my fare-sharers were obviously anticipating a big one, having each taken a couple of pills before crossing the Solent.

"We've still got plenty left," one of the guys told me, proudly. "I'm going to hide the baggies by strapping them between my cock and balls. Do it every year. Works a charm."

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Arriving at the festival on the Friday, a day after it had kicked off, I made my way past the drug amnesty bins lining the entrance, peering inside as I got closer to the gates. Most were pretty much empty, or full of cardboard. Clearly, those planning to deplete their serotonin over the long weekend were willing to risk the heavily advertised bag searches and sniffer dogs in order to do so.

I too was interested in all the bagged-up stuff strapped to people's genitals, but not for the same reasons as the police and security officers manning the entrances. I'd brought with me a pile of home drug testing kits, which allow you to measure the purity of your narcotic substance and see what else it's been cut with. Reason being: I wanted to find out exactly what young people are ramming into their bodies at high speed during British music festivals, and if they care that it might all be full of nasty cutting agents used to de-worm farm animals.

Having pitched up my tent, I headed straight into the campsites, ready to convince hungover strangers to give me bits of their drugs so I could ruin them in a test tube.

"Are you a cop?" was the most common response I'd get. "Because if you're a narc, you can fuck right off."

"Nope, not a cop," I'd reply, which consistentlyand surprisingly easilyreassured people that I was safe to be trusted; that I wouldn't handcuff them and confiscate all the drugs they'd spent the past week painstakingly WhatsApping about, before one of them handed a man named "Frosty" $1,000 in an Aldi car park.

Cocaine didn't seem too popular, with only six groups of the 35 I asked claiming to have any. Three of the samples were from London, and all of it was exactly as good as I'd expectedi.e. not very good, given that the coke you buy in London is almost definitely not high-purity. Each sample came in at "medium cocaine content," which, according to the experts behind the tests, puts it somewhere around the 40 percent purity mark.

The major cutting agent in these samples was benzocaine, a pharmaceutical drug used in dental anesthetic and throat sprays. It's regularly used to cut cocaine because it numbs your gums when you rub it on them, whichas you'll know from televisionis a sure sign that what you've been sold is the genuine article.

One guy who'd picked up his coke in Reading got a nasty surprise when the sample turned green, signaling the presence of Levamisole in the $120-per-gram flake. In 2014, a government minister claimed that up to four-fifths of cocaine in the UK was cut with this veterinary medicine, used to de-worm livestock like horses and cows. Latin American producers use it to bulk up coke because it elicits vaguely similar effects to the drug when used by humans. Thing is, it also has a nasty habit of suppressing our white blood cell production and making our skin rot.

"I've been buying coke from this dealer for months now, and if I'd tested this shit before then I'd have never gone near it again," the man from Reading told me. "I'll probably still do it this weekend, mind, as I've got it alreadybut once I'm back I'll be looking for someone new."

Unsurprisingly, this field in the Isle of Wight wasn't a hotbed for high-purity cocaine from anywhere else outside the capital, either; the remaining tests showed little cocaine content and substantial levels of lidocaine, which, like benzocaine, numbs the skin and gums. Benzocaine and lidocaine can be purchased for as little as $15 a kilo, with resale value up to $77,000 when mixed and sold as cocaineso you can see the appeal for dealers.

When testing pills, we were looking to see if they contained pure ecstasy or were cut with other chemical compounds. Three groups from Brighton each turned up with some bright yellow pingers, samples of which went purple in the test tube, confirming high levels of ecstasy. Two samples from Manchester also seemed clean.

All of this lot seemed very pleased that they'd let me chip away at their drugs.

I can't say quite the same for others.

Harry from Catford had got his hands on some pills late the previous night. "I nabbed some off a bloke in the Big Top last night while Action Bronson was smoking a spliff up on stage," he told me.

At $30 a pop, his three pills were convincingly pricey, but he'd taken one there and it'd had no effect. After some extensive testing (I tested every other sample over the weekend three times to ensure I was getting the right results; I tested his six times) and a trip to the chemist, we concluded it was almost definitely half an orange-flavoured Rennie, a heartburn pill that's never made anyone hug a complete stranger before telling them, in excruciating, emotional detail, about their parents' divorce.

"To be honest, it tasted a bit like a Rennie," sighed Harry, before heading off through the guy-ropes to sell his pills on to someone else.

Another pill sample showed up a mix of ecstasy and DXM (dextromethorphan), which was a little worryingDXM is a substance you'll find in cough syrup that, in high doses, can make you feel a bit out of it, and when mixed with ecstasy and a night of jumping around leaves you much more prone to heatstroke.

"To be honest, I definitely won't take this," said Sarah from Portsmouth, whose pill tested positive for ecstasy and what appeared to be traces of PMAa chemical that may be responsible for more than 100 deaths in the UK, including those of three men earlier this year. PMA is far stronger, and far more toxic, than the MDMA compound (the stuff you're supposed to find in ecstasy pills), proven to kill at lower doses. It can also take much longer to come up on PMA, meaning people will often take another pill before the effects of the first have kicked in, compounding the danger.


Having tested 15 samples from around the UK, the purity of most people's MDMA powder was high. Two groups from Wales came back with low MDMA content, but none of our tests could decipher what else was mixed in their wraps.

Alice from Cornwall's sample didn't show as having any MDMA whatsoever. "I'm a little bit worried now," she said as we stared at the liquid in the test failing to identify her powder. "I took half a gram of this stuff last night and I did feel something, but now I've got no fucking clue what exactly I've been taking."

Unlike some of the people we spoke to, Alice knew her dealer well, so took out her phone and started sending him angry snapchats.

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There were amphetamines in one MDMA sample, which apparently made the owner "reconsider" taking itthough he didn't sound all that convincing.

I planned on testing ketamine while I was there, but only two people I approached admitted to having some with them. Perhaps Bestival-goers were just too embarrassed to admit they still take K? Or maybe the ketamine drought of 2014 is somehow still profoundly affecting availability in 2015? Or perhaps everyone with some on them was just K-holing in their tents as I did my rounds?

I suppose we'll never know for sure. However, one thing I do know is that the two samples I tested didn't seem to react whatsoever, which presumably means they were either 100 percent pure or just ground-up chalk. Or the tests weren't working. Or I didn't do it right. The long and short of it: Testing ketamine was a massive washout.

While they provided some insight into the kind of drugs people were taking, my tests were by no means comprehensive, and the kits I used are just a start; machines costing thousands can be used to work out exactly what's in a compound. In fact, Dr. Adam Winstock of the Global Drug Survey has argued that home-testing kits, like the ones I used, are simply not suited to giving a foolproof reading. "There's real limitations to what it can tell you," he's noted in the past.

So should festivals be doing more to get this testing done, providing facilities for people to ensure that what they're taking is safe?

Nick Jones, the director of EZTestthe company that provided us with the kitssuggests there's a real grey area when it comes to what he and others can do. "They could be much more readily available, but we haven't pursued this hard, through fear of landing ourselves in hot water," he told me over the phone, adding that selling the tests explicitly as harm minimization kits would be "arguably against the law."

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When I asked Jones why they've not been out testing at UK festivals, he said that people don't want to lose their licenses and that conversations with local authorities and the police have led to organisers holding back. "By admitting you have a drug-testing facility, it admits there will be drugs on a site, which the police and council don't like," he told me.

Of course, regardless of what makes the police and councils happyas has always been the case when it comes to drugs, and will be forever, in perpetuitypeople are going to continue putting chemicals in their bodies that make them feel weird and energetic and loved-up. And they're going to keep doing it at festivals all over the UK, like they have for decades. And without some sort of harm prevention methods in place, some people are going to suffer.

This year at Kendal Callinga 12,000-capacity, three-day festival in the Lake Districtan 18-year-old attendee died after taking dodgy pills. The same batch left eight other people hospitalized. In total, we only tested 22 different samples, accounting for the drugs just 100 Bestival guests were taking. But even in that small number we found some alarming results.

The testing kits themselves are ridiculously straightforward and can be purchased legally online for just a few quid a go. They could almost definitely save lives, and I'd encourage all drug takers to invest in them before boshing a fistful of mystery pills.

But something also needs to be done by organizers, much like the drug testing pilot scheme Manchester club the Warehouse Project rolled out a couple of years ago, allowing clubbers who'd got their drugs past security to have them purity-tested by professionals. Thing is, the authorities' current attitudes epitomize the UK's farcical approach to drug policy: Make people to scared to talk about drugs; pretend they're not there; and do nothing to protect and support people from the potential dangers of taking them.

The people I spoke to were pleased to know what they were taking. Some chucked their dodgy purchases away, and yes, others snorted the powders anyway, but at least they knew what they were doing and were able to make informed decisions.

I learnt a few things at Bestival this year. British festivals need to reconsider their approach to drug testing and follow the lead of some American festivals, which have already allowed these kind of tests to take place. Companies like EZTest also need to know that they won't be prosecuted for distributing their kits, aswith the right amount of exposure they may well end up preventing deaths.

Oh, and never buy pills off a bloke in a tent at 3AM unless you've got some serious indigestion that needs seeing to.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

VICE Vs Video Games: The BBC’s Grand Theft Auto Drama, 'The Gamechangers,' Wasn’t Very Good

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All stills courtesy of the BBC / Moonlighting NNN Productions

The Gamechangers, broadcast last night (September 15) on BBC Two, was supposed to be a "factual drama" telling the story of how the makers of Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games, and their publishers 2K butted heads with Florida attorney Jack Thompson over the connections between video game violence and actual acts of murder. The 90-minute film, starring Bill Paxton as Thompson and Daniel Radcliffe as Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser, centered on the case of Devin Moore, who killed three people in an Alabama police station in June 2003. Moore was a fan of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which had been released to great critical acclaim and commercial success in the autumn of 2002. On his arrest, Moore is reported to have said, "Life is a video game. Everybody's got to die, sometime."

So far, so accurate. Devin Moore really did murder three men. Rockstar Games really did make a shitload of money off of Vice City, which set the company up to make 2004's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the three-cities-spanning open-world crime caper that was, at the time, its crowning achievement. Another fact is that Rockstar Games wanted nothing to do with the production of The Gamechangers. Thompson, though, was happy for the show's writer, James Wood, to visit him at home and talk at length about how he stepped into the Moore situation, in 2005, and began to clutch at the straws connecting the young man's killings to Vice City. Thompson went on to file a $600 million civil case against Rockstar on behalf of the victims' families. It was thrown out of court. To this day, no study has concluded that the playing of violent video games alone can influence a person to commit real-life crimes.

Again, facts. But watching The Gamechangers, even from the perspective of someone who wasn't there, it was clear that fiction had quickly enough overtaken the truth behind the tale.

Paxton as Jack Thompson

There was no mention of Thompson's previous altercations with Rockstar. The Gamechangers' story shows the disbarred attorney reading online coverage of Moore's actions (what's presented as) the day after they happened, over his breakfast, and reacting as if he's never heard of video games, let alone Grand Theft Auto. Moore wasn't charged with murder until 2005, and Thompson certainly did know about Rockstar prior to his failed civil suit.

In February 2003 he'd tried to represent teenage murderer Dustin Lynch after learning that he'd been obsessed with 2001's Grand Theft Auto III. In October of the same year, he filed for $246 million in damages from Take-Two Interactive (the owners of 2K and the GTA series) and others after two kids arrested on homicide charges claimed they'd been inspired by GTA III. The case was closed via a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal from the plaintiff's side.

This program was aired as part of the BBC's Make It Digital campaign, encouraging kids to get into coding; but the actual making of the games was glossed over incredibly. To watch The Gamechangers as an informative insight into how video games are made would be like looking at the Leaning Tower of Pisa and concluding that every other architect had got this 90-degrees-from-the-ground thing all wrong, that this was the way to do things: pissed, botched, badly. While the notorious crunch time was shown to an extent, with employees looking shattered and stress levels running high as deadlines loomed, there was very little explanation as to how the games were actually made.

'The Gamechangers,' trailer

Once the story had moved beyond the Moore case, and onto the infamous Hot Coffee debacle, Radcliffe's Houser tells his lawyers that creating video games is "a little more complicated" than they're making it out to be, and to remove the offending scene completely would have been "hard, (as) if you fiddle with the code it can have a knock-on effect on a lot of things that are very hard to predict." That's about all we get on the subject, beside a very brief scene where a new game engine is being discussed, which pops into life as if by magic, and some montages of people tapping on keyboards. Admittedly, coding is not very sexy"Imagine someone typing algebra... for years," is how Positech Games' Cliff Harris summarized it on Twitterbut still, this was an opportunity missed to better portray the hundreds of hours that hundreds of people put into making games on a GTA scale.

And if the Hot Coffee thing passed you by at the time, allow me to briefly recap. Rockstar left code for a sex scene in retail copies of San Andreas. It wasn't accessible to players but could be revealed by modders, and very quickly was, leading to a stink at the American games rating board, the ESRB, who'd given it a Mature certificate (17+) while a graphic sex scene qualified it as a Walmart-offending Adults-Only release (18+). Footage of the scene was shared online, and shit hit the fan. Copies of San Andreas were pulled from shelves at great cost to 2K, and an edited version of the game was re-released, meeting the Mature guidelines. Watching it now, after the fantasy humping of The Witcher 3, it's amazing that it was ever a fuss in the first place. It looks like two Stickle Bricks in a wrestling match.

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The Gamechangers showed the development of San Andreas primarily taking place in New York. The game, for real, was mostly made in Scotland, at Rockstar North. It was there, when the studio was still known as DMA Design and based in Dundee, that the first Grand Theft Auto was born in 1997. Original developers amongst the DMA team took to Twitter last night to comment on the show, as it aired, posting photos of the building where the magic happened, and calling out certain costume choices made in the name of entertainment. "I seriously fucking doubt anyone from Rockstar dressed up as East fucking 17 to pop out and film in Compton," posted Brian Baglow, the writer of the first game, referring to a terrible scene where Radcliffe and pals don streetwear to film in the infamous LA city. Steve Hammond, one of DMA's first employees, criticized how everyone in the show's Rockstar office wore branded clothing. Others were quick to pick up on a distinct lack of Scottish accents, anywhere.

Rockstar Games' official Twitter account switched on, tooalthough maybe it shouldn't have, given the lingering threat of legal action based on the BBC infringing its trademarks. It posted two tweets directly to the BBC's account. The first: "@BBC This new Rentaghost isn't as good as I remember." The second: "@BBC Was Basil Brush busy? What exactly is this random, made up bollocks." They're yet to be deleted, so presumably they're legit, rather than the result of a hack, which had been suggested.

Made up bollocks would have been fine from the viewer's perspective if The Gamechangers had been entertaining. It wasn't. As a piece of drama it was wholly ineffective. Desperate to not paint either Rockstar or Thompson as the villain of the piece, the show never truly finds a point or purpose. When we get to the climax, we're left wondering what its intention had actually been. The best I can come up with is that maybe this Thompson character isn't the crackpot that gamers think he is. Maybe he was right all along, which is a pretty dangerous direction to take. Otherwise, it just veers from side to side without any weight, without inviting its audience to pick who was right and who was wholly out of touch.

Paxton did what he could with some woefully cheesy, Bible-bothering materiala scene on a putting green, where he kneels and asks God what he should do, had me in tears of disbelief. I'll always have time for Hudson, so credit where's it's due, there. Radcliffe sported an impressive beard, much like Sam Houser did at the time. He called Dan "little brother" in that way that older brothers never do to their younger siblings. He threw some shit around the office and, disappointingly, didn't get his knob out once. (I was led to believe that's what he does now.) Wood's script depicted Rockstar as, effectively, just Sam, his brother Dan, and a couple of close confidantes. Nothing much was made of the hundreds of other hard-working employees. Game of Thrones and Skins actor Joe Dempsie was the standout performer as another Rockstar co-founder, Jamie King, who left after San Andreas to set up 4mm Games. He smoked a cigarette really well, managed to look properly pissed off when the crunch came, and was one of the few three-dimensional characters on the show, behaving like a Real Life Human Being. At one point, a single female coder was shown at work.

That is a lovely beard

The Gamechangers was corny, contrived, blissfully detached from the reality of Rockstar's history, and misleading for viewers with little previous understanding of the video games industry. At one point Radcliffe exclaims that he's going to explain how Rockstar works to the feds "because obviously they don't have a fucking clue" about gaming. The same could be said of this film's makers. It ended with on-screen text explaining what happened next. Moore remains on death row. Grand Theft Auto V became the best-selling entertainment product of all time. "There is still no conclusive evidence that video games make people violent," read the final slide, concluding: "The debate continues."

If you're Jack Thompson, perhaps it does. The rest of the world has moved on. Games don't kill people, people do. And if those people are already fucked up in the head, then there's not much that the most vanilla of video games can do to distract them from going outside and doing something stupid. The Gamechangers, for me, wanted to stir that controversy again. That seemed to be its remit. It had next to nothing to do with encouraging kids to get into games making. It wanted to make Thompson out to be a crusader. "You are winning," his wife tells him, as he questions whether his efforts have all been in vain, as gentle piano keys play around the couple. "The law is changing."

Overdue change did happen in gaming in the wake of Hot Coffeevideo games became better scrutinized, and sales to minors were restricted like never before, as they should have been in the first place. But that's nothing to do with Thompson. Gaming just grew up. It had to, and it did, and Rockstar's titles were a massive part of that process. It's about time that television programs and motion pictures drawing on gaming culture for dramatic inspiration did the same. Grand Theft Auto is the UK games industry's greatest success story, and the BBC spectacularly blew what was their one chance to really celebrate this British-born phenomenon.

You can watch The Gamechangers on iPlayer, if you like.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

'The Bastard Executioner' Tries to Keep Up with the Throneses

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All photos courtesy of FX

If you want a show to be a smash hit from the get-go, with no chance for failure, you stack the deck. You get an award-winning showrunner like Kurt Sutter, fresh off a multi-year run with Sons of Anarchy. You hire respected television actors like Stephen Moyer (True Blood), Katey Sagal (Sons of Anarchy), Matthew Rhys (The Americans), and Timothy Murphy (True Detective) to lend a veneer of professionalism. Next you come up with an catchy elevator pitch: It's like Game of Thrones and Braveheart had a baby! As icing on the cake, you ring up British pop star Ed Sheeran, wherever he is, to add a little pop-cultural cachet as Sir Cormac, described by FX's press materials as "an ambitious and deadly protege of a high ranking church elder."

The Bastard Executioner takes place in 14th-century Wales, as the Welsh are struggling against their English overlords for independence. The English have responded with "uncompromising brutality," as a title card tells us, which is Prestige TV-speak for "they murdered a fuckton of people." We meet our hero Wilkin Brattle (Lee Jones), a deserted soldier who gets roped into executing people by a despotic baron and his advisor. Throw in some black magic here, some Brattle-as-Jesus stuff there, and presto, you've got another barbarous, Eurocentric, post-Game of Thrones action drama like Vikings and Spartacus from networks who've figured out that in 2015, violent nerd shit with a pair of tits thrown in is what gets fans to watch.

Of courseGame of Thrones, as its fans will tell you, has more to it than violence and sex. It's managed to tell a compelling story involving multiple nations and dozens of characters, without losing the point. Wisely, The Bastard Executioner doesn't try to bite off more than it can chew; from the start, it's about citizens, not nations. There isn't a range of morally questionable personalitiesonly a few guilty people suffering through situations they have little power to affect. It's a very Catholic show, set in a time and place when the whole population believed they were headed for fire and brimstone should they violate the Bible. The show's obvious villain, the baron's advisor, is also the most Biblically immoralaside from plotting his rise to power, he's shown freely fornicating with men and women, committing fratricide, and instigating extrajudicial murder.

As moral actors go, Brattle is no Jesus (let alone Ned Stark). He's perfectly willing to commit villainous acts in order to achieve his ultimate purpose. Here, he's attempting to root out all the English villains who murder and torture the noble Welsh, even if it requires murdering and torturing anyone who gets in his way. An early moral dilemma is easily resolved in the second episode when Brattle is instructed to rip a fingernail out of a teenage girl in order to get her to squeal on the rebel forces... and immediately does it. He gets this look on his face that lets you know he feels bad about it afterward, but still: He pulls out her fucking fingernail. I watched with mouth agape at how easy it was for the hero of the show to straight-up torture someone. It doesn't end there: By the end of the episode, Brattle has not only ripped out this poor girl's fingernail, but chopped off her nose.

It wouldn't matter that The Bastard Executioner's titular hero doesn't act so heroic if the show told a compelling story with interesting charactersif it's a good yarn, plenty of viewers are ready to abandon their ideological complaints. But Brattle, glum face and all, just seems like another conflicted male antihero, modeled after Walter White, Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and many of the other guys who have come to define the so-called golden age of television.

Sutter told Rolling Stone that he was extremely concerned with capturing the authenticity of an era when everyone talked like a traveler from The Canterbury Tales, but the Arthurian cadences that must have screamed "Emmy!" on paper sound stiff when earnestly spoken by the cast. (Sample dialogue: "Ventris is sly and cruel. It's only time and chance before you feel his blade!") They talk all fancy on Game of Thrones, too, but those writers are better at balancing the drama with a mordant, rapier wit to balance out all the guts and gore. The Bastard Executioner doesn't make a real attempt at levity; the bulk of the first three episodes' jokes concern whether or not a half-wit might be sleeping with his pet sheep.

On VICE: Medieval Warfare:

The show does take pains to look and feel like an accurate depiction of the very grim Middle Ages. Most characters' teeth are brown, their faces dirty. There are no flashy, choreographed action scenesinstead, what we're shown are burly, agrarian lumps trying to poke in the pointy ends of their swords. The baron shits in a hole, and bends over so his servant boy can wipe his ass with a rag. For some reason, the camera lingers on the brown, butt-stained cloth after it's been thrown away, as if to say: Sucks, right?

On Motherboard:How Butter-Flavored E-Cigs Are Fueling a Vaping Controversy

As an aside, I'm shocked at what they can get away with on basic cable these days. We see the skin flayed off a man's back, a dead baby pulled out of his dead mother's womb, and an MFF threesome featuring bare breasts airbrushed of their nipples and sexual motions as raunchy as anything on HBO. The first time we meet the show's most important female character, she's on her knees, getting railroaded from behind by her evil husband. FX also broadcasts explicit shows like The Americans and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but this is a step above: It feels like an overt attempt at repositioning the network as a junior HBO or Showtime. If none of it is particularly fun, it's at least eye-catching in a grotesque way.

Which is what makes it disappointing that for all the production values, they couldn't come up with a reason to make us care. Squint your eyes and you imagine how, without the gore and sex, The Bastard Executioner might have embraced chintzy, cheesy, high fantasy melodrama like a Xena, Hercules, or Legend of the Seeker. Instead, they've been enlisted to make a Hollywood-style hit that helps people justify paying for cable every month. There's plenty of time for the show to redeem itselfthe rest of the season, and beyond that, whatever clever new directions might be found after some soul-searching. (AMC's Halt and Catch Fire was once mocked for its obvious ambitions as high drama, but following some creative rejiggering, the show has won acclaim in its second season.) At the very least, it'll make another network executive pause before saying in a meeting, "Why don't we try to make the next Game of Thrones?

Follow Jeremy on Twitter.

The Bastard Executioner airs Tuesday nights at 10 PM on FX.

We Asked Foreign VICE Offices What They Think of Malcolm Turnbull

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Illustration by Michael Dockery


Australia has seen three sitting prime ministers ousted via party coups since 2010. In the past eight years, we've enjoyed five PMs. Not to brag, but we're the Tiger Woods of political discontentjust without the whole disrespecting women thingoh wait, no, with that.

This week we've welcomed lucky number five, Malcolm Turnbull, who, while being comparatively popular at home has none of his predecessor's infamy. Through a tendency to eat raw onions, wink at elderly sex-workers with cancer, and be lampooned by late-night programs, that predecessor, Tony Abbott, achieved the uneasy level of global fame typically reserved for reality TV stars.

With Mr. Turnbull's appointment, we wondered what the wider world thought of himor if they thought of him at all. To get a better sense of his global profile, we reached out to our international offices for their thoughts on our shiny-new PM.

Is Malcolm Turnbull just Tony Abbott in a better flesh suit?

VICE US

Like most people, I knew Tony Abbott from that time a reporter asked him a question and his human suit malfunctioned, and also that time his human food sensor mistook an onion for an apple. I studied those clips about 3,000 times, and learned a lot about Abbott's speciesso it's good to see him finally vanquished. But your new guy Turnbull seems even less like an actual human, if that's even possible. That is to say, rather than looking evil or stupid, it seems like the pinkish suit he wears to mask his true reptilian form is top-of-the-line, and in good working order. It looks like the reptilians tried to make him look trustworthy and concerned, like Hugh Bonneville from Downton Abbey. But underneath that thing, I think he might actually be the exact same creature Abbott was. Not just the same species, but the same specimen. Be careful, Australia!

- Mike Pearl

Photo via

VICE Canada

Malcolm Turnbull is the kind of man who's all smiles and pats on the back until the moment he loses his temper, or can tell the wind isn't blowing his way. Looking at his face you sense a man who was once a temperamental child, the only thing stopping him from being among the most popular boys in school being his habit of periodicallyand for no discernible reason growing very angry at everyone around him, shouting about nonsense for a few minutes, and taking his ball home in a huff. That child has grown up but the urge to throw things and yell if he doesn't get his way is ever hidden just under the surface, waiting to overpower Malcolm's hard-won calm, adult demeanor. These don't necessarily seem like traits one would want in a national leader, but on the other hand, can anyone be worse than Tony Abbott?

No. They cannot.

- Tannara Yelland

Malcolm Turnbull is "absolutely fucking nothing at all." Image via

VICE UK

Nobody ever knows what to buy Malcolm Turnbull for Christmas. His daughter is on the phone to her mom. "Does he like ties?" she's asking. "I'm in a tie shop, and I swear I've seen him wearing a tie." His wife does not know. He is essentially a gas that has been formed into the shape of an extremely by-the-numbers politician. "I have been married to him for 35 years," his wife is saying, "and I do not know his true feelings toward ties." Malcolm Turnbull is only able to make one man on earth laugh, and that is his pastor, Rick. He learns a single joke every week from a number of Joke-A-Day email newsletters, and he always hits Rick with a zinger when he's glad handing after Sunday prayers. "Got a good one for you this week, Rick," he's saying, and secretly Rick is thinking: please don't be another rude one. I cannot pretend to laugh at another blue joke. I love God, not this. "My motorcycle wouldn't start today," Malcolm's saying. "He was two-tired!" Rick smiles. "See you next week, Malcolm." His son's on the phone now. "What about belts?" he's saying. "Does Dad like belts?" Dad does not like belts. Dad likes tax loopholes, and the little click his BMW makes when he starts it up. He is absolutely fucking nothing at all. Looking at him is like looking at a cloud. It's like looking at a stock image of a plug. It's necessary, and it's there, but that's about all you can say about him. "Get him the tie," his wife's saying now. "He can always take it back if he doesn't like it." He will take it back. He will keep the money in his glovebox and, when necessary, spend it on parking. Malcolm Turnbull: the sure hand on the tiller of the good ship Anonymity.

- Joel Golby

Is the PM connected with the average person's expenses?

VICE Poland

Coming from a country which has its fair share of political bigots, xenophobes, and opportunists, I've been feeling for you guys for some time. My Australian friend is struggling to have his Schengen visa extended right now, I always found that ironic in light of your country's tough stance on migrants. With the little information on Australia that gets through to the local news, I haven't had a chance to get to know your new PM. The fact he's been leading a liberal party doesn't say much these daysthose who praise liberty often mean the liberty of money transfers rather than personal liberties. For all I see, this guy doesn't seem to be ethnically Australian, perhaps he'll be more sympathetic toward migrants than his predecessor? Quick research doesn't give me any coherent political program. It does tell me he's a millionaire. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not. He's not there for the money, apparently, but is he going to be helpful to people who aren't as well-off as himself? Does he know how much it costs to rent a room in Sydney? The price of an average lunch? I hope so!

- Maciek Piasecki

School principal vibes. Photo via Flickr user Edmond Wells

VICE Serbia

This guy reminds me of my high school headmaster, with such tight lips and an "I'm sorree" face. My headmaster never smiled, but this was because his teeth were like he was chewing glass. Hope this is not the case with Turnbull. These faces somehow don't seem very self-confident for someone who until two days ago has been a communication minister. Good luck!

- Aleksandra Niksic

VICE France doesn't know much about our politics, but they dig our horror movies.

VICE France

To be honest, we don't know a lot about Australian politics, except that John Howard seemed to be a huge douche and that he forbid seropositive people to immigrate in your countryor something like that. To be completely honest, we don't know much about Australia either, except that you guys are great at making horror movies and producing hip indie-rock bands that everyone will have forgotten about a year after their inception. Same goes for Malcolm Turnbullwe don't know much about him, except that his name is the anagram of Ball Cunt Mum Roll and that he looks like the kind of guy who would cheat on his wife if every seductive attempt he made wasn't met with disdain and mockery.

- Julie Le Baron

We kind of hope Turnbull does have a Louis CK inner monolog going. Image via Flickr user Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

VICE Denmark

With a name that conjures up images of a 19th century general store owner, we were surprised a superficial image search of "Turnbull" revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The bloke seems to be the human equivalent of The Avenger's Hawkeye: undeniably an entity that exists, but neither remarkable or repulsive in any way. Turnbull is a very Average Joe-looking salt-and-pepper-haired fellow, with the gusto of a man at the pinnacle of his ambitionsin a comfort zone in which he neither has to, nor is bothered to give a fuck about anything or anyone slightly outside his jurisdiction. His smug gaze tells the tale of a man who smiles, shares tedious limericks and shakes hands on cue, but has a constantly hateful Louis CK-style inner monologue, in which he berates and belittles those around him for sport. This primarily happens bumping into people at prestigious water polo events or while standing in line at artisanal cheese shops. He's also ballsy enough to just shrug off social slip-ups that would cripple lesser men, like farting loudly at scarcely populated urinals or fumbling a high-fiveand he knows it.

- Alfred Maddox


The VICE Guide to Right Now: Australia Has Launched Its First Airstrike on Syria

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A three-ship of F/A-18 Hornets, Royal Australian Air Force. Image via

On Monday, the first successful airstrike by the RoyalAustralian Air Force was carried out in north-eastern Syria, destroying apersonnel carrier hidden in a IS-suspected compound.

The strike was first mentioned on a daily report publishedby the United States Central Command. The bottom of a page dated September 15simply reads, "the coalition nations which have conducted airstrikes in Syriainclude Australia..." Although tiny, this is a dramatic addition to an updatepage that's read the same for months.

Australian Defense Minister, Kevin Andrews, confirmed the attackthis morning. "Two days ago, the Air Task Group completed its first strikeagainst a Daesh strike in eastern Syria, destroying an armored personnelcarrier," he said.

"Two of our Hornets identified the personnel carrier, whichwas hidden in a Daesh compound. That information was reported back to thecombined operations center by our Wedgetail command and control aircraft, andupon receiving authorization to proceed, one of the Hornets employed aprecision guided weapon to destroy the target."

The target in this case was an IS operated armoredpersonnel carrier, which is similar to a tank, but with rubber tires. TheHornets refer to two of Australia's 24 BoeingF/A-18E Super Hornets, which are the country's go-to strike fighters,usually deployed with a range of air-to-surface missiles.

When a reporter asked Andrews why the airstrike hadn't beenpublicized, the Defense Minister insisted Australia doesn't have a policy of announcingdaily events. "On this occasion, I was planning to make a ministerialstatement, which is a six-monthly update of our operations in the Middle Eastand that's due today," he said.

It's unknown whether anyone was in the vehicle, but KevinAndrews later conceded to 3AW's NeilMitchell that, "if they were, they were certainly killed."

This comes as Australia has pledged to take an additional 12,000 refugees from Syria, as well as expanding Iraqi airstrikes across the border. At the commencementof the aid project, Tony Abbott inferred that the decision to expanded airstrikeswas made with "head," while the intake of refugees was made the "heart."

When asked to describe what success looked like, Abbott admittedthat installing a democracy was ambitious. "What we want throughout the MiddleEast is governments that do not commit genocide against their own people, norpermit terrorism against ours," he said.

Australia currently has 330 troops training inIraq, but there is currently no plan to deploy troops to Syria. Monday's airstrike also included 15 in Iraq.

Netiquette 101: Don't Feed the Trolls

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Image via Wiki Commons

Welcome to Netiquette 101, in which we'll be using cyber-case studies to teach you basic but valuable cyber-lessons in being a better cyber-citizen. Today we discuss not getting mad.

Case Study: Earlier this month, the city of Peoria, Illinois, had to pay a man named Jon Daniel $125,000 as a result of a lawsuit over a SWAT raid launched to shut down a Twitter parody account mocking Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis. Town officials' aggressive, over-the-top response to a low-follower joke account made the story national news in the summer of 2014; now, as many have predicted from the get-go, Daniel and the ACLU were able to get a payout from Peoria, in the process humiliating Ardis far more than the original jokes did.

For more on that scandal: How a Power-Mad Illinois Mayor Launched a Police Crusade Against a Parody Twitter Account

What We Can Learn: If you're a public figure, you may get parodied on social media. It might be malicious, but most likely whoever's behind the fake account just likes to hang out and joke around on Twitter dot com. Rule number one, then, for being famous or semi-famous, is Don't Get Mad.

This will give you peace of mind, but there's a more practical reason for ignoring jokesters: Nothing riles up satirists like cracking down on satire. The SWAT raid, for instance, led to more Ardis parodies, and at least one of themfeaturing a photo of Ardis with a Hitler stacheis still active.


Recommended: Meet the Man Behind @DadBoner

VICE Vs Video Games: What's the Greatest Soccer Video Game of All Time?

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A screenshot from 'PES 2016'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Two critics argue, sort of, over what the greatest football video game of all time is. It's a fairly self-explanatory format, really.

Mike Diver: Chris Schilling, you say that the newly released Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 might be the greatest football game of all time. I am all ears: Please do explain why this is the case.

Chris Schilling: If you think about it, every year we should probably be getting the new greatest football game of all time. As tech advances, developers can theoretically make something that gets closer and closer to the real sport. For a variety of reasons that's not always the case.

But PES 2016 is genuinely fantastic. Last year's game was very good, but it's clear after playing this year's that player response time wasn't as quick as it could be, passing wasn't as crisp, and the whole thing still had a slightly rigid feela holdover from its PlayStation 2 heyday. This time, it's wonderfully physical without losing any of the responsiveness you associate with PES at its best, and it feels more fluid and dynamic than ever before. And it's a game where you can really learn the strengths and weaknesses of individual players, because they all feel subtly different.

MD: OK, I hear you, but what about accessibility? Don't you feel that the joy that modern football titlesand I certainly include FIFA in this conversation, toocan provide is locked away behind controls that take such a long time to master? I did play a bit of PES 2015, and I'm looking forward to this one, too. But, personally, these gamesfor all their graphical prowess and impressive engine dynamics and TV-like presentationare too "sim"-like to provide the immediate thrills that kicking a ball around in the park can. They're an oddly sterile depiction of a sport that has perhaps the very lowest barrier for entry of anything other than running: you need a ball, and someone, or some ones, to kick it around with.

Which is why, I suppose, I can always play the now fairly ancient Sensible Soccer and love it like I did the first time. One button, that's all it needs, and it does everything. You've told me it's your second-favorite football gamepresumably you played it to death in the 1990s, too? Do you think if such a game came out today, arcade-style versus the realistic depth of FIFA and PES, it'd stand a chance?

CS: I'd definitely like to see an arcade-style alternative to PES and FIFA, and it's been a while since we saw onebut none of the ones that tried seemed to catch on. I always thought it was a pity SEGA dropped the Virtua Striker seriesthat had its problems, but it was certainly accessible, and I loved that it awarded each goal a score based on the number of uninterrupted passes in the build-up, with bonus points for volleys and scissor kicks. I think if anyone tried an arcade football game, it'd have to be a relatively cheap downloadable game. Something on a similar scale to Rocket Leaguein fact, that's probably the closest we've got these days to a modern arcade-style footy game.

And yeah, Sensi will always hold a special place in my heart, not least for being the only video game I've ever managed to get my dad interested in. We'd play for hoursme on a Powerplay Cruiser, him on a Cheetah 125+. There's something really special about hitting a cross from deep with impossible swerve, and launching yourself at it to score with a diving header. Remember that goal van Persie scored against Spain at the World Cup last year? I think the reason I love that so much is that it's basically a Sensi goal.

I take it you weren't a Kick-Off 2 fan, then?

MD: I always found Kick-Off 2 to be a very tough game to enjoy. I appreciated, even then, that it was a fun two-player game, and it moved so fast, but its perspective felt too close to the pitch for me, making the action feel sort of claustrophobic, whereas Sensi's more distant view opened up greater passing opportunities, leading to some sweet plays in the build up to superb flying headers. To be honest, it always felt like a rarity, for me, to score a "normal" goal in Sensiit's possibly the only football game in which it's easier to score from 30 yards than it is three.

And of course, then came Sensible World of Soccer, with all of its international leagues and player trades. Do you think that set something of a precedent going forward, in terms of how players of football games moved on from simply using the teams made available to them, to shaping their own squads? FIFA Ultimate Team is now a massive deal, possibly the draw for any new FIFA title, and PES has its Master League mode.

I've got to slip a shout out in for the Amiga's Manchester United Europe, or European Club Soccer as it was on the Mega Drive, I think. Do you recall many other side-on football games from before that release? As to look at it now, it's like a precursor to the FIFA and PES we know today.

A screenshot from 'Sensible World of Soccer'

CS: Looking back, SWOS definitely seemed like it pioneered the shift towards more managerial optionsnot least because you could simply watch the game in Coach mode. I'm not sure whether it was the first, but with hindsight it probably popularized that approach. I think FUT is a slightly different beast, in that it has the hooks of a collectible card gameit reminds me a bit of collecting World Cup Panini stickers. (I've still got my complete Mexico '86 album somewhere.)

The first side-on footy game I can recall playing is Match Day 2 on the old ZX Spectrum. It looks horrible now but before Kick-Off and Sensi came along, that was maybe the best we had. I remember Actua Soccer looking like the future of video game football, but it never came close to replacing SWOS in my affections.

Do you think we'll ever see anything like Namco's Libero Grande, where you controlled one player rather than the entire team? FIFA's Be A Pro mode owes a massive debt to that game, though I'm not sure it was ever acknowledged. I'd love to see that kind of game with a narrative structure to it, taking in the highs and lows of the career of an up-and-coming playera bit like New Star Soccer on iOS crossed with Fight Night Champion, perhaps.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the first ever match between AFC Wimbledon and MK Dons

MD: I think that's a natural step for a new game to take if it wants to break into the football marketto adopt a very RPG approach and control that one player through, I guess, 20 years of their career. I'd be keen to play it, but one of the best things about FIFA, and PES, is that on-the-sofa local co-op factor. We ran a piece recently about how playing football games with mates lets men share their feelingsdid you see that, and is that something you can relate to?

CS: I can definitely relate to that. A few years ago, I had a friend who lived just around the corner from uswe used to play PES 5 on the PS2 together, share a pizza and a few beers, and talk about all sorts of stuff. He's since moved away and we both have families now so we've kind of drifted apart, but these games do offer a comfortable environment for men to get together and talk, and I think that's incredibly useful.

MD: And, to take things back to the best-football-game-ever discussion, this new PES, then. It's out now. FIFA isn't. Do you think the positive critical reception to it will be enough to sway some gamers away from EA's monolith, or are we going to see PES struggle to match its fiercest rival's commercial form, again? While I trust a lot of what I've read about PES 2016, given the people who are talking about itSteve Burns at Videogamer, for example, knows his football gamesI can't help but feel that in the UK at least it's on a road to nowhere, however brilliant it is to play versus FIFA.

CS: I'm not convinced the qualities of the new PES will be enough to drag most players away from FIFA, though from anecdotal evidence there are definitely some people who feel that FIFA is stagnating a bit, and they've been impressed by the PES demo to consider making the switch this year. But in general, I think FUTand the new FUT Draft modeis such a huge draw that it hardly matters whether or not PES plays a better game. A lot of players have acclimatized to FIFA's quirks (if not entirely accepted them) in recent years. FIFA might not be as good, but it's good enough that they don't feel the need to change.

MD: So all the improvements in the world can't reverse PES's fortunes? Seems a shame, but that's where we are, I suppose. Do you remember when PES began to go "wrong"? It was as soon as John Terry made the cover, wasn't it?

And, let's say I come over to yours today. I have the new PES with me, and a copy of Sensible Soccerlet's say on the Mega Drive because I'm not carting an Amiga that far. What are you keenest to play, first? As, really, that's the sign of what's the better of the two, isn't it? What you most want to play, rather than what the critic in you says is the more comprehensive experience?

New on VICE Sports: Sexism Still Rules in British Football

A screenshot from 'FIFA 16'

CS: As someone who would happily blame John Terry for most of the world's ills, I'd be inclined to agreewere it not for the fact that PES 5 and 6 were the best ones until PES 2013. The downturn really began with PES 2008, which had Michael Owen on the cover. So it's all his fault.

And Sensi, obviously. Much as I love PES, it's been far too longso for nostalgia value as much as anything else, that'd be what we put on first. And it still has the best diving headers ever.

MD: Poor Michael Owen. Such slight shoulders to carry such a great burden. But yes, the PES games have been on a turnaround for a few years now, and I'm happy that the new one's the best yet, and excited to play more of it.

So, what are we concluding here, then? That the greatest football game of all time is the new PES? Unless your head's buried in nostalgia, in which case Sensible Soccer is the king? That feels right to me. I'm a grown adult, so I can have both games, can't I? Which brings me to a final point: why won't anybody release Sensi, or at least a very good clone of it, nowadays? I would play the shit out of that, at home and on handhelds, which is where I see such a title working best. Or is there such a game, and I've gone and missed it?

CS: I think they're so different that you can make strong cases for both being the best. If I'm slightly reluctant to claim PES 2016 is the outright winner, that's mainly because my thoughts need more time to percolate. In the coming weeks and months when I've played it online against friends and strangers, then I might be able to state its case with more confidence. Either way, it's brilliant. (As a side note, isn't it weird that in a year Konami's had some of the worst press it's ever had for its working practices, it's released two of the games of 2015?)

In theory, I'd be well up for a new Sensi, but I wonder if it's very much a product of a time and place that's gone forever. Sensible Soccer 2006 tried and failed to recapture the old magic, and you're probably best off just sticking the original on every so often for a nostalgic kick-about. That said, if they ever stick a SWOS HD on PSN and Xbox Live? Day one.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 is out now. FIFA 16 is released on September 22. Sensible Soccer is really old but bloody brilliant and I will thrash you at it, just name the time and place.

Follow Mike Diver and Chris Schilling on Twitter.

We Wrote Ten More Boutique Tax Credits for the Conservative Party to Announce

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"Look, Laureen, look at all the people on the internet waiting for my generous tax credits." Photo via Facebook/Stephen Harper

Today, Stephen Harper announced that, should he be re-elected, the Patty and Selmas of this country will have their tax bill reduced by up to $300.

That's thanks to the new Pension Income Credit, which will allow single and widowed seniors to claim up to $2,000 in pension revenue per year as tax-free.

This game changer is on top of a home renovation tax credit that was announced in August, and another tax credit for people who belong to clubs and/or secret societies.

I, for one, think that is a wonderful idea.

At some 3,000-odd pages, the Income Tax Act is only going to get better as we keep adding boutique tax credits to it.

Between the tax credits for parking, being a volunteer firefighter, enrolling your kids in art classes, and being part of a search and rescue team, these tax credits mean those various people (voters) who are engaged in oddly-specific activities will avoid paying dozensDOZENS!of dollars in taxes.

The Conservatives, just like the NDP and Liberals, would do well to continue adding those needlessly complex boutique credits.

Because, even though only 42 percent of the families who were able to claim the Child Fitness Tax Credit actually did so, these tax credits are obviously encouraging good behaviour, like becoming a volunteer firefighter or killing your husband.

This, of course, is what the Conservative Party was founded oncreating specific loopholes in the tax base to encourage good social behaviour, instead of just lowering taxes for everyone to encourage spending, saving, and job growth. Because that would be foolish.

So we here at VICEas big fans of the previous Conservative efforts to create a complex web of tax rules that seem to only benefit a small subsection of parents with kidswould like to suggest a few more tax credits and benefits that the Conservatives could announce as part of their campaign to reduce the tax base on lonely old exercise junkies who own driveways. We even wrote the press releases for you!

The A Great Game Tax Credit
Hey, do you like books? Well this tax credit will make books FREE. Well, it will make one book free. The tax credit will refund the full cost of A Great Game: The Forgotten Leafs and the Rise of Professional Hockey is a highly educational book about the rise of professional hockey in Toronto during the early 20th century, despite opposition from early hockey purists. The book has been lauded for its academic rigor and its effort to catalog an oft-forgotten period of hockey history. The book was authored by Stephen Harper (no relation).

The Walk-It-Off Tax Credit
Everybody knows that hospitals are becoming a tad strained, what with the cost of all of you wangs living longer. So, in order to reduce the burden on our doctors and nurses, we'll be introducing a $200 tax benefit for each time you sustain an otherwise serious injury, but decide to forego medical treatment. Break your arm? Set it yourself, and you'll get 200 big ones. Heart attack? Pop a few aspirin and lie down, and you've just earned yourself a-fifth-of-one-month's-rent. Hit by a car? Bounce back, and you'll be able to rent your own car for a week.

The Kid Birthday Tax Benefit
As part of our effort to send infuriatingly small benefit cheques to families with children, we will be implementing a benefit that will be mailed to every family on the day of their kid's birthday. The amount of the benefit will be the number of children you have multiplied by the age of your celebrating child divided by the average age of your other children (divide by 1.2 if that child is an only child) multiplied by the number of kids at the party, subtracted by cost of total entertainment for said party.

The Addiction Tax Credit
For those Canadians struggling with addiction and financial destitution, our government will be introducing a tax credit that will help pick them off the street and get their lives back together. The Addiction Tax Credit will be a 100 percent refundable tax benefit to get back every dollar the government has made off your liquor, gambling, and cigarettes purchases.

The AM Talk Radio Tax Credit
Everybody knows that the media is full of Liberal elites who want to claw back the boutique tax credits you haven't actually done anything to earn, so we want to encourage you take in some other kinds of news. For every 100 hours of talk radio you listen to, we'll knock off $2heck, call it $3from your tax bill. So sit back, turn on your ol' squawk box, and listen to an endless stream of elderly voters call in to your local host (his name is probably Rick) and complain about how immigrants are ruining Christmas.

The Conservative Backbencher Tax Credit
It's not easy sitting in the farthest reaches of the House of Commons, abandoned not just by your leader and party, but by time itself. You sit, forlorn, forsaken, and ultimately forgotten. Legislation passes, but not for you. You read questions to your more successful superiors, but the words are not your own. Everyday you return to your office and stare into the hopeful eyes of your college-age staffer, wondering how low a Member of Parliament can sink before they become simply part of the gothic etchings on the exquisite marble of Centre Block. You read briefing books, absorbing only the letter of the talking points, knowing that deviation from the script is not only forbidden, but beyond your long-deflated ambition. You stare at the fresh-faced parliamentary secretaries on TV, wishing you could return to that moment where you felt strong enough waves of either optimism or cynicism so as to motivate you to believe in something. Your eyes are dead. Your career is over. You will be able to claim $800 from your pension as tax-free.

The Not-Joining-ISIS Tax Benefit
We will mail you $500 if you don't join ISIS.

The Tax Credit Tax Credit
Are you not able to claim any of our marvelous tax credits? Well this tax credit is for you! If you don't qualify for a single tax break in the tax code, use this one to claim $450 dollars of your income tax-free!

Anyone claiming the Tax Credit Tax Credit will be ineligible for the Tax Credit Tax Credit.

Follow Justin Ling

Man Arrested After Missing Nova Scotia Police Officer Found Dead

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Catherine Campbell. Photo via Facebook group Please Help Us Find Catherine Campbell

Police in have arrested a 27-year-old man in relation to the death of a Nova Scotia police officer who had been missing for nearly a week.

The body of 36-year-old Catherine Campbell was found just after midnight in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia, in a wooded area near the Navy dockyard and the MacDonald Bridge. Police say they believe she was murdered.

Campbell was reported missing on Monday after she did not show up for work.

Investigators revealed Wednesday that Campbell was at a bar in downtown Halifax until the early morning hours of September 11.

Police are currently questioning the man suspected in her death.

At a press conference Wednesday morning, Police Superintendent Jim Perrin told reporters they arrested a 27-year-old man at 1:20 AM Wednesday morning after a vehicle stop.

They have not released the man's name.

Police think Campbell knew the person who killed her. They are waiting on search warrants for two addresses in Halifax.

Perrin said police used video footage to further their investigation. They have not laid any charges.

Campbell was an officer with the Truro Police since 2009, the Chronicle Herald reported.

Her sister, Amy Campbell Garneau, posted on Facebook early Wednesday morning: "As I write this it breaks my heart, we have found Catherine. My family would like to thank everyone who sent out prayers, hope, and support during this time. My sister has gone home to be with the angels."

An autopsy was scheduled for Wednesday. Police said they will have an update later in the day Wednesday or Thursday.

Follow Hilary Beaumont on Twitter.

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