Photo by Olly Day

I'm not going to sugar-coat it: I'm lazy. I'm lazy, and I'm greedy, and no diets ever work on me because I'm too lazy and greedy to either exercise or stop eating. Trust me, I've tried: I've stumbled through all the workouts you could hurl a dumbbell at and tried every miracle, no-fuss, "just liquify a cabbage and drink half a pint of that every 40 minutes, then spend the next 20 minutes skinning grapes with your teeth, seriously it's super simple" diet thrust at me by countless women's weeklies.

At least, I thought I had, until I came across a video that had the potential to change my life. It was Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president and prime minister, working out togetherlifting weights, spotting each other, eating steak for breakfast, and generally being alpha as all living fuck.

Since the video montage made its way across the world, Putin's exercise regime has become something of a phenomenon. A fitspiration Instagram page"Putinspiration"was set up in his honor, and a number of men's interest magazines ran stories on everything from the effectiveness of Putin's weight-lifting regimen to the ludicrously expensive gear he wears while he's at it.

Read over on VICE Sports: Vladimir Putin's Workout Routine Is Shit

Having tried my share of peppy, upbeat workout videos over the years with little to no success, I thought I'd give the Putin routine a go for a week. I was ready for a completely joyless experience, full of hard work and blank facial expressions. No music. No atmosphere. Just hardcore intensive body workouts and meat.

Photo by Olly Day

Monday

As my pesky tits prevent me from being topless in public, I couldn't go shirtless like Putin has in the past. Instead, I had to opt for the casual white-T-shirt-tucked-into-gray-joggers look he models in his workout video.

As far as I can tell from that clip, the "Putin routine" is basically just expressionlessly doing weights for a long time. So that's what I did, until the veins on my forehead were visible and I could hear my heartbeat loudly in my ears.

Once home, as per the video, I ate steak. At first I left the thick line of gristle that meandered through it, but then decided to have a go on that too, because I figured it's one of the things Putin might do: Rule Russia for longer than Yeltsin, enact grossly homophobic policies, not leave any food to waste.

The half-masticated meat lay lodged in my throat for a good couple of hours.

Photo by Daniel Lewis

Tuesday

After hitting the gym, I took the morning off work to go horse riding, because there are all those photos of Putin on horseback online, so I guessed that might be one of the ways he gets his cardio done. Walking into the stables, I felt a little out of place. It was not the sort of place you go wearing joggers; it was the sort of place you go if you can afford to get your dog weekly manicures.

The horse-riding part itself was all right; great on the thighs, terrible on the genitals. I did briefly wonder how Putin deals with that, but quickly remembered he's made his name being hard as nails (and, obviously, leading a country that covers about an eighth of the world's land surface), so presumably doesn't have a lot of time to worry about bruised testicles.

Again, for dinner, a steak.

Wednesday

On Wednesday evening I took the bus to a judo class, another pastime Putin famously enjoys. On the way there I grabbed some pistachio ice creama Putin favorite, apparentlywhich made a nice change from the cheap, dry steaks I'd been subsisting on.

I was greeted at the class by Sensei Dave. He was a stern man who was somehow loud and quiet all at once. I was paired with his number two, the only other adult in an under-ten judo class. I'd watched "Let's Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin" (yep) on the bus, so I was mentally prepared, but felt physically sick; I'd eaten so much pistachio ice cream that even changing into my Putin clothes had given me a stitch.

Read on VICE News: Russia Keeps Trying to Spend Money on Bunk Science Projects

"Should I tuck in my shirt?" I wheezed. "No," barked Dave, quietly somehow. I had to give it to him: He didn't fuck around. I respected Sensei Dave's wishes more than I respected anyone's anything ever, because he scared the shit out of me. He had muscles in his neck that I didn't know existed in humans.

Then the throw-down began. The ice cream churned in my stomach, and it was rising fast. I was panicking. Was there any way I could vomit over a bunch of school kids and come out of the situation looking like the victim? Probably not. Luckily, the class was soon over, and it was time to leave.

Seeing the muscles bulging from Sensei Dave's arms and neck, I could see why Putin was so into judo. It makes you swole and it's probably pretty helpful if Hollande or Obama get feisty at a UN General Assembly.

Thursday

Thursday morning, like every other morning since Monday, I was back in the gym for some more arm torture. Again, I went at it for as long as I could before my arms gave out, and I slunk off home to eat more breakfast steak.

At this point, the steak was perhaps the hardest thing about the whole experience. I was doing Putin on a budget, which meant a lot of pretty grim meat, so that wasn't a great start. Also, I remember reading somewhere that eating too much red meat doesn't do wonders for you if you're averse to developing stomach cancer. Desperately searching for an alternative, I read on a very unofficial Vlad fan page that he has a penchant for toothfish.

Watch on MUNCHIES: Huang's World Moscow

Googling toothfish, I wasn't sure whether or not it was actually legal to eat. My local fishmonger didn't know either, and certainly didn't have any for sale, even after I'd repeated it louder and slower for him, like a British tourist trying to settle an argument in an Italian Europcar office.

Back to the steak it was.

Friday

Friday, otherwise known as "leg day" (for people who allocate days to their various body parts). But not for me. Because, again, it was arm day. Arm day the fifth. My biceps hating me five times over. A quintuple hit to my 'ceps. And I was fucking sick of it. Sick. Of. It.

My arms were no longer functioning as arms in my everyday life. At one point on Friday afternoon I struggled to lift a pen in a meeting and everyone saw.

Saturday

My breath escaped me as soon as I dove into Hampstead Heath pond, and I didn't fully get it back until I'd completely thawed out on the grass half an hour later. There was only one other woman in there, swimming serenely through the murky water and making me look like a whiny little bitch. She swam over and said, cheerily, "Hey, we're wearing the same costume!" But I couldn't respond, because I was mostly just thrashing my arms around and gasping.

As has been established by the framed photograph currently hanging next to my bed, Putin's favorite stroke is the butterfly. It is, after all, the most challengingand therefore the most alphaof all the strokes. It's also the worst thing to attempt when you're in a freezing lake and your arms don't work because you've intentionally worn them down to lifeless, pointless twigs.

When you are this weak, there is no way to make it look like you're not drowning. There are only a certain amount of reassuring smiles you can give a lifeguard before he just forces you to get out because you're making his job really stressful.

Related: Watch 'Young and Gay in Putin's Russia'

Sunday

I noted that, in the exercise video, Putin gives Dmitry Medvedev an encouraging pat on the back. So for my last day of arms (probably ever) I walked around the weights section like a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen, trying to pat some sweaty men.

"Good job!" I called out. No one acknowledged me.

The week was full of highs and lows, but mostly lows. Putin's workout is an unrelenting and unrewarding one; my biceps only grew 2 millimeters over seven days, which is pathetic. And, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure that growth was even muscle. It makes more sense that it was extra fat from all the steak and ice cream I'd been eating. Incidentally, the sheer amount of creamy/greasy food I was shoveling into my mouth each day also meant my weight didn't change. So I swam in a freezing lake for nothing.

Sometimes you just have to accept that your physique is not made for certain activities. For instance, it's been a whole week of arms, and I still can't do a push-up. If this article makes its way to a body-building forum, I will no doubt be inundated with kegel tips and people being weirdly aggressive about how I was doing the weights wrong, but I don't care, because I'm over all that forever.

Follow Pascale Day on Twitter.

All screens via LandsEnd.com

While the possibilities for virtual reality in gaming are fairly far from limitless, there's certainly plenty of scope, and excitement, for what the wholly enveloping medium can provide in terms of interactive experiences. This year alone I've engaged in explosive space battles, taken part in futuristic Wipeout-like races, explored secretive underground bunkers, stuck my face into pterodactyl nests, and been terrorized by a disturbingly photo-real ghoul-like figure with an attachment to knivesall with a headset strapped to my face, mostly from the (relative) comfort of a chair.

Land's End, by London studio ustwo, the same team that put out the mobile hit Monument Valley in 2014, is perhaps the most wonderfully relaxing, invitingly meditative VR experience I've had yet. While Capcom's horrifying Kitchen (covered in detail here) represents the closest any VR title, be it a commercial proposition or a tech demo, has come to replicating my nightmares on a screen mere millimeters from my pupils, Land's End is all of my dreams of flying over fantasy landscapes made as real as they're ever going to be. It is sold, if you will, as a "VR adventure," and while there's gameplay to itlight physics puzzles need solving in order to progress, joining dots to open new pathways and (invisible) beams of light that you travel on through the airit's not a challenge. It's supposed to be enjoyed by everyone, regardless of gaming skill or previous VR exposure.

The scale of these puzzles fluctuated across the development of Land's End, as ustwo's director of games Neil McFarland explains: "There are game elements in it, but we didn't have them in there for a long time during its production. We wanted it to be a pure experience, but we found that we lacked something to keep people engaged, so introducing slight gaming elements, and finding the right balance, is what we've really been doing recently. A lot of the initial time was spent on the experience, and making sure people didn't throw up."

I spend something like 15 minutes making my way through a slice of Land's Endfar from the complete gameand don't feel the slightest bit nauseous. It's created for use with Samsung's Gear VR, and doesn't require the use of a separate controlleryou simply focus on a point to go there, or on an object to grip it in order to move it by moving your head. I play it while sat on a spinning chair, and every time I fly between outcrops or peaks I do a complete 360-degree turn, looking down at the sea, back at where I've been, up at the seagulls soaring overhead. Visually, this is not the most realistic VR title you'll ever see, but its aesthetic works perfectly, landing somewhere between Monument Valley and Journey to feel at once welcoming and somewhat alien. The music is also like ustwo's mobile puzzler, gentle drones and chimes steadily adding to the overall ambience, bubbling beneath the scraping of rock against rock and the sound of waves. There's a story hinted at too, with shadowy figures appearing at two junctures of my sessionbut like Monument Valley, that aspect of the game probably won't be clear until its credits roll.

'Land's End,' trailer

"We want to provide a good VR experience," says artist Jonathan Topf. "I feel there are a lot of other people pushing VR into areas that it doesn't really work, whereas we took a step back and thought about what really worked on the platform. It's what we took from Monument Valley. That game was designed to work on an iPad. It wouldn't work as well with a controller, and there's a reason why it's not been ported to other platformsit's designed for touch screens. So this is about designing something that just fits the medium, and evokes the feeling of a presence in a space."

Another artist at ustwo, David Fernndez Huerta, expands on the point: "We're at a stage now where we can be one of the first to establish a language for this new medium; but the medium is so immature that we've had to start over a few times, to make the most of the opportunity."

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on Japan's extraordinary record breaker, Mr. Cherry

McFarland confirms that the team did indeed scrap everything and start again on Land's End a few times in pursuit of achieving a goal of utmost accessibility. "To make something that is accessible is close to all our hearts," he tells me. "We'd take the game home with us, or have dinner with people and pass the headset over, and it's amazing to see people respond to this for the first time. And it's also great to be able to give them the headset without explaining what you need to dowhat you need to shoot, where you need to go. With Land's End, it's just: here, try this. My mum had a go with it, and she was fine."

Land's End is unmistakably an ustwo production. It just feels like the work of the same people who shaped Monument Valley and its subsequent Forgotten Shores expansion, from its ease of playabilitywhere Monument was all taps and swipes, this is simply stares and sweepsthrough to its look, and the palpable physicality of the moving objects in the environment. It's the next album from a favorite band, sharing DNA with what came before it but categorically its own thing, too.

New on Motherboard: The Video Games That Are Good for Your Brain

The studio didn't need to move into VR, and the team certainly had its doubts"We didn't sign on straight away," says Topf, "as there's too much pride here, I think, to not want to put out something that isn't going to look good against all the other things we've done"but from what I've seen, what I've moved so sweetly through, it's a risk that's paid off. Naturally, Land's End won't reach as many players as Monument Valley did, due to it being a VR product, but it's far and away the most instantaneously appealing virtual reality experience I've encountered so far.

"We wanted to make something that you can talk about when you go home," says Topf. "Sometimes it's fun to nerd out, and sometimes it's nice to do something that you can share with anyone. And that's as big a reason as any for us to do something different each time." Different, Land's End certainly is, but it's nothing to get uncomfortable over. You won't throw up. Your eyes will be opened. And it's the sort of game, or experience, or adventure, which should encourage those who are yet to give VR a chance to explore more of what this rapidly emerging platform for games, movies, tourism, and more has to offer.

Land's End is released for Samsung Gear VR on October 30. Official website here.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

For decades there's been an active volcano on the Greek island of Kalymnos. It isn't a geological phenomenon or a natural formation, thoughit's an illegal dump on the picturesque island where garbage is burned nearly every day.

The problem isn't unique to Kalymnos. According to the latest data from the Ministry of the Environment, Greece has 39 active illegal landfills, 21 of which are on the Greek islands.

The country has been fined millions of euros by the European Union, but the problem persists. When garbage and plastics are burned like they are in Kalymnos, they release toxic substances into the air, wreaking havoc on the environment and public health.

VICE Greece recently headed over to Kalymnos to check out the trash volcano and try to figure out why illegal dumps like this one are burning across the country to this day.

Photos by Jake Kivanc

When I got word a few days ago that former national buffoon/Toronto mayor Rob Ford was starring in a mockumentary set to premiere this week, I knew had to attend. After spending four hours in a VIP theatre with a boozed-up Ford Nation, I can assure you that the entire experience lived up to Ford's epic standards for inanity.

Pegged as a "dysfunctional comedy" set in the vibrant scenery of The 6ix, Toronah is a film created by Rick Smiciklas, founder and former owner of chicken wing franchise Wild Wing Restaurants. (To get an idea who he is, when asked about Drake's recent success in putting the city on the map, Smiciklas expressed distaste at Drizzy being from "the left"). Quite unsurprisingly, the film is a sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic escapade that seems to have been created by a group of old guys with way too much money and time on their hands. Loaded with jokes about Asian men's penises and being sexually assaulted by a transgender person, the film was, at best, mildly smirk-worthy due to its utter ignorance; at worst, it was highly-offensive and a gross waste of the format it exists on.

Despite the call time for media being at 7:30 PM, I arrived at the theatre at 6:45 in order to get a head start in hopes that I could possibly nab a one-on-one with the disgraced mayor, who still has yet to answer a number of questions about his time in office and general tomfuckery.

Stepping into the press lounge, I noticed that I was the only person there aside from the staff. It was at that moment I realized that I had either got ahead of everybody or there was no media coming. I knew Ford's star had fallen since the crack-fuelled heyday of insane press scrums and campouts outside his office, but I figured a bizarre film like this might attract a little more attention.

I sat down at a window-side chair to charge my phone. While fumbling with a bent USB cable, I began to toss my hand around the gift bag they had gave me. What I pulled out surprised mea bobblehead of one of the main characters, Ricky: a fat, tropical shirt-wearing sleazebag who wears a fedora, of all things. There were also four more bobbleheads included, one of whichobviously touted as the prize possession, being that it was in a special boxwas of Rob Ford himself. They also threw in a watch that seems to sell for $500 (like, thanks, but don't they usually give out Snickers or Starbucks cards in these things?), right beside a pair of cheap sunglasses, which is a good analogy for the production quality of the film compared to its actual contents.

By 8:15the time Laura, the film PR person, assured me Ford and his cohort would be showing up atdozens of overweight men wearing poorly-matched blazers and button-ups filled the lounge to sip on wine and gin while yelling loud affirmations of friendship and manliness at each other.

There were more than a few people who seemed to be fervent Ford fans. One guy, a man with a mullet and a baseball cap, made a loud yelping noise as Councillor Ford himself swooped from around the corner with his chief of staff Dan Jacobs. Jacobs, a tall, loafy-looking man, seemed to scan the audience like a hawk as Ford looked toward me as I snapped a picture of him talking to a fan.

While doing the usual round of greetings, selfies and signature awkward faces, Ford was showing clear signs that he's still recovering from his recent surgeries. His energy seemed low, his eyes fluttered, and he appeared to struggle to keep up pace with the various people berating him for attention.

When it was announced that the screening was about to begin, I caught up to Ford as he was heading into the theatre with one his friends and nabbed a seat right behind them. For the next two hours, I was essentially a sponge for everything Ford and his pal had to say, which surprisinglydevastatinglywasn't much.

About 20 minutes later, Smiciklas leaned into Ford's row to ask him if he was ready to take questions. "What questions?" Ford asked, seemingly unaware that there was a press panel involving him on the schedule of the invitation. "Just follow my lead," Smiciklas told him.

The former wing chain owner then fired up the mic and hobbled down to the front of the theatre where he welcomed the audience and thanked them for coming out.

After giving us his life story and the absolutely absurd journeywhich involved him waking up in the middle of the night to "take a leak", during which he dreamed up the name of the movie and his plan to become a filmmakerthat led to him creating Toronah, it was time for questions. Looking to see if I could evoke a reaction out of Ford himself, I raised my hand and asked, "If Rob wins in 2018, will you give him permission to rename the city Toronah?" Both Smiciklas and Ford laughed while noting that they have plans to insert a reference to the film when Ford wins the next municipal election, an outcome they said they were confident was going to happen.

After Smiciklas stepped down from the mic, the crowd placed their orders for the various food and alcoholic items that were available on the VIP menu. The smell of wine, margaritas, and burgers began to fill the theatre as the lights dimmed and a blue screen reading "HDMI OUT" blared in our faces. Smiciklas then raised his voice to note that the film was only "85 percent finished" and that if anyone wanted their name in the credits, all they would have to do is approach him afterward to get a spot in the movie.

As the film began, I was immediately taken aback at the quality b-roll: Beautiful flyovers and pans of Toronto's urban core as classic rock blared in the background. The signature car in the film, a blue 1977 Pontiac Grand Prix, cruised through the streets with camera angles that would make a Drive fan swoon. Truly, the filmmakers hired to shoot Toronah were skilled, which makes it such a shame that the rest of the film turned out to be a monstrosity.

Only occupying a cameo role in the film, Ford played himself as the Mayor of Toronto and was the first face to fill the screen. The catalyst for the ensuing (albeit incoherent) plotline, Ford's "character" lends his friend Ricky (played by Smiciklas) his blue Grand Prix in order for Ricky to find his cousin Mickeya bumbling European man who is in need of serious financial help. After giving Ricky a hug and handing him the keys, Ford really isn't seen in the film again. In fact, his role was so minor that it became incredibly apparent that Smiciklas had probably just got Ford on the cast list in an effort to draw media attention to his attempt at filmmaking. (OK, yes, you got me.)

As you can probably expect from a cast of people who use the word "gay" as an insult multiple times within the first 20 minutes of the film, the entirety of Toronah (which was apparently unscriptedsuggesting that the people in the film weren't just playing assholes) consisted of a dozen or so old, white men living out their dreams as wannabe Trailer Park Boys: Boozing it up, spending lots of money and yelling obscenities at each other while making jokes about fucking various women.

I love a good edgy comedy as much as the next guy, but I couldn't help but feel dirty and squeamish while watching the film, which was essentially a showcase for the barside jokes of the middle-aged men who ran the show. Throughout the entire film, the level of race jokes, extreme sexism, and blatant trans/homophobia was appalling.

For starters, a character central to the film and pegged as a token comedy piecean overweight Asian man by the name of Johnny Kimwas used as a wall for the all-white cast to bounce jokes off of for the entire film. From making cracks about the the length of an Asian man's penis, to having him be secretly (and, according to the audience, laughably) bisexual, all the way to one of the most offensive scenes in which he was essentially raped by somebody the film refers to as a "transvestite," the whole of his character was, in essence, the embodiment of the various prejudices and deeply-rooted ignorance that the actual people who played them actual selves in the film have.

Sexualized women were also key to the film, and there were a lot of them. A new blonde model with big breasts in a skimpy outfit was introduced every ten minutes or so, and usually with a camera leeringly panning up from her ass to her face. There were many moments in the film in which the characters called the women bitches and told them to shut up. The only character who notably fought back was Mickey's wifethe same character who turned out to be trans and had emphasis placed on her masculine features.

Other characters in the film, such as Boss Hogg, a bowling-ball shaped man dressed in an all-white suit and large cowboy hat, shouted "Fuck" as much as possible while hiring prostitutes to service his friends constantly. It was clear the women who were in the film had no interest in being there aside from being paid for their role, as their unenthusiastic acting was evidence in itself as to how much of a ragtag operation this whole production was.

By the end of the film, I was so lost with how many characters had been introduced that I basically just stopped caring about what little storyline there was left. What I do remember is that the word "backdoor" was used incessantly as a way to plug in another gay joke, something that I suspect was done in an attempt to retain audience attention, and that Doug Ford made a brief appearance at the end to retrieve his brother's car, because Rob had shot the opening scene a mere two days before his surgery back in May and was not actually able to complete the rest of the film, according to Smiciklas.

And like that, it was over. The audience rose and gave applause, with people shouting things like "Fantastic job" and "That was hilarious," all of which I had a hard time believing. With a look to Ford's row, Smiciklas motioned for the former mayor to approach the microphone. It's at this moment that the media finally appeared from the shadowsrecorders and a TV camera flipped on throughout the audience. Wanting to get a few questions in, I pushed my way out of the row and approached the podium where Ford was standing.

Although Smiciklas said that Ford would be taking only a few questions, the former mayor has always been a talker. After answering some questions from what seemed to be conservative bloggers and/or Ford's yes men in the audience, I cut in and asked him the question I had burning me for the entire night.

"Rob, with all of the stuff that's happened to you in the last year...continuing with politics despite the fallout from being mayor: do you ever think that this is going to affect your health? Why do you keep doing it?"

"I don't think of my cancer," Ford told me. "They say go home and relaxthat's just not my nature. It's to get out there and help people out. Y'know, if people call, I'm at their front door. It's all about customer service and I sincerely love my job."

After confirming to me that "it's no secret" he is preparing for a 2018 run at reclaiming the mayoral seat, I came to the obvious conclusion of the night: beside his sobriety and health issues, Ford is the exact same guy he always has been and probably always will be. He is the guy who will star in a shitty, horribly-offensive b-movie mockumentary with his friends despite (still!) holding public office in Canada's biggest city.

In a way, while he doesn't play a large part in the movie, Toronah is a peek into Rob Ford's life. It's a peek into the man who rode international headlines like a mechanical bull until his deteriorating health forced him out of office. It's also a very sad testament to the fact that, despite all the privileges and power the men involved in the film presumably hold, their lives can be reduced to a depressingly embarrassing two hours of gluttony, discrimination, and childishness.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Outside the Chateau Vino. All photos by the author

Australian states regulate sexual freedoms with a surprising amount of inconsistency, and nowhere is this truer than Queensland. For example it's legal there to sell R-rated videos, but not R-rated magazines. Laws around the legal age of consent are also a little strange, with 16 being the standard, but anal sex banned until18. And then there's all the red tape around swinging.

Watch: The Ten Best VICE Documentaries About Sex

Swingers clubs in Queensland must be in commercial areas withspecific zoning. They can't charge for entry unless they're alicensed brothel. If alcohol is for sale, there can't be any sex, nor can there be any unwrapped food. There also can't be any sex in public areas, such as dance floors,and properties must open themselves up to frequent council inspections. The upthrow of allthis is that unlike NSW or Victoria, swingers in Queensland have only a handful of venues, andjust one on the Gold Coast: the illustrious Chateau Vino. (The club makes money through a complicated system of memberships).

The best little bar in Molendinar

Hidden away in the industrial suburb of Molendinar, ChateauVino boasts a BYO bar, a dance floor, a stripper pole, an outside area for smokers, and11 "play rooms" for their patronage of people aged 20 to 55. And whileswinging isn't really my thing, I went along on a Saturday night to see howSunshine State laws have affected the local scene.

The guy in the white shirt works at Chateau Vino almost every night,despite not swinging. The pirate is Mick's wife.

It was Pirates of theCaribbean night at the Chateau and I arrived to find some wenches watchingporn and gossiping at the bar. Off to the side, a group of Captain Jacks shot pool and eyed off the wenches.The atmosphere had an unmistakable sexual charge but I was surprised by how comfortable I felt.

As mentioned, there can be no sex or nudity in Queensland's publicclubs. If a single nip slips in a Queensland bar the club owner is liable fora $4,000 AUD fine. Consequently "playing" is restricted to the playrooms, which isactually sort of futile as the doors to these rooms are often purposely left open. As I talked to a guy called Mick, who owns the bar, it was impossible not to notice a bunch of fake Jack Sparrow dreadlocks flailing through an open doorway.

This is Mick's best friend, Wayne, who is alsothe marketing manager for the club.

"The swinging scene on the Gold Coast is unique because it'ssocial," Mick told me while sipping a chardonnay, his arm curled around his wife's waist. "Most places around Australia, and most other parts ofthe world, are much more hardcore. You go to a club or a gathering and by 10 PM everyone's naked and fucking."

Mick explained that because of this difference, Muggles (whatswingers call non-swingers) don't feel completely out of place at Chateau. This in turn creates an oddly platonic side to the place.

Food from packets

"People go to most organized orgies with one thing in mind,"said a scantily-dressed woman named Sherry, standing next to her husband. "Butwhen we come to this place, we don't arrive with expectations. We come tosocialize and feel sexy, and if something happens, then something happens."

The DJ told me he very rarely works at Chateau Vino but always has a good time. He was also quite shy though, and the music was loud, otherwise wewould have chatted for days.

The Gold Coast swinging lifestyle isgeared towards middle-aged couples. That'swhy Mick says that Chateau Vino offers two thingsa place to play, and aplace to party, even if you're not there to swing.

By 12:30 AM I was standing at the bar with two couples, onefrom Melbourne, one from South Africa, both fully clothed. The Melbourne couplehad just flown up for school holidays. "We found a babysitter for the kids,went out for a few drinks in Surfer's Paradise and came here," theyexplained. They told me they knew most of the people as they came through the door,greeting them with kisses and longish hugs. "We come almost every time we'reup here. It's like one big family, and it's neat because not all places arelike that."

Sex harness in a play room

Of course there's another side to Chateau Vino. As the nightwore on more and more people dispersed to the private rooms and soon the barwas mostly empty. Couples still loitering in the main area began leaning in alittle too close for comfort, whispering sweet tales of their exploits. Outof curiosity I wandered past some playrooms, checking out how many roomswere occupied and by how many people. I was surprised by the sheer quantity ofbodies; it seemed to me that a lot had walked straightpast the bar and and got into it.

Bed in a play room

So what do swingers reallythink of Queensland's sexual restrictions? Throughout the night almosteveryone I spoke to mentioned that, whenever possible, they seek out a morehardcore experience. One couple even described their annual trip to a three-daysex retreat. "Yeah, we go to this retreat every year," the woman said. "It'sdefinitely what we look forward to. I mean, by the end of the weekend I canbarely stand up!"

Rules of entry

And that's the crux of it. Swingers don't go to clubs like Chateau just because they want to socialize. I don't think sex should be governed but if Queensland wasn't a such nanny state and nudity was permitted in public spaces, the entire club would have been hammering away right on the bar. I guess that's where my preconceptions about swingers get a bit snooty. I might be too judgmental or close-minded to appreciate the highs of sexual maturity, but for the purposes of my Saturday night I appreciated some lawfulness. Even if all signs of modesty were only a facade.

Photo via Underworks.com

An Ottawa sex shop that was penalized for selling a chest binder to a trans teen has sparked calls for a review of the city's "outdated" adult entertainment bylaw.

Venus Envy on Bank Street was fined $260 this week for selling a chest binderan undergarment that compresses breasts to the chestto a trans boy. It wouldn't be illegal but for the fact that Venus Envy is considered an adult entertainment store from which minors are banned.

Still, owner Shelley Taylor said plenty of teens come into the store, usually accompanied by parents.

"If youth come in and they're mature and respectful and they're buying something for their sexual health, we don't even stop to think of it," she told VICE, noting this is the first time the shop has been written up for this offence.

In light of backlash sparked by media reports, Taylor said the fine against Venus Envy has been waived.

The city is also looking to relax its rules around adult entertainment establishments.

"The bylaw was drafted 30 years ago at a time when corner stores were one of the few places where people could access erotica," Coun. Catherine McKenney told the Ottawa Citizen.

Taylor is hopeful the bylaw will be amended in council next spring. In the meantime, she's planning on pulling porn from her shelves. Without it, she said Venus Envy can be open to all ages.

Taylor believes hers is the only store in Ottawa that sells chest binders and gaffsunderwear for those undergoing MTF transitions.

"It's really affirming for them to have an appearance that aligns with that identity," she said.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

A picture of a couple on the street that we found. Photo via Flickr user Jesse Acosta

Want more social experiments? Try these:

How I Infiltrated a White Pride Facebook Group and Turned It into 'LGBT Southerners for Michelle Obama'

The Westminster Dog Show... On Acid!

I Played 'The Boys Are Back in Town' On a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

One Saturday night, while waiting for my train at Paris's Rpublique Station, a stranger asked me if we "should get to know each other a bit better."

"OK," I replied.

The guy froze, like a horny deer in headlights. "Really? You're actually up for it?" he said, laughing. "I'm not used to that!"

To be fair, I wasn't either.

You see, I had decided to conduct an experiment wherein I would say "yes" to and engage in conversation every stranger who hit on me for two weeks. I wanted to get into their heads, find out who these men are, if their tricks worked and, perhaps most importantly, if they are aware that the majority of women find what they are doing incredibly fucking annoying and more than a little bit creepy.

I did, of course, reserve the right to say "no" or to simply ignore anyone who I felt legitimately threatened by. It's important to always listen to that beep-beep echoing in your head and bolt from any situation that makes you feel uncomfortable (beyond the awkward discomfort of small-talk with strangers)even if the person you are with is telling you that everything is normal. This guy at the metro station, however, didn't set off any of my alarm bells.

So, we started chatting. Things were a little weird; me standing stiff as a lamppost, him sitting on a little chair with his hands joined.

"I love Paris because you ladies always wear classy pink dresses like that," he told me. Through a bit of forced small talk I discovered he came from Picardie and enjoyed playing soccer. He seemed normal enough, but when I told him my age the conversation went into a tailspin.

"What? You're 29? I don't believe you," he said, disappointed. It was obvious he was losing interest fast, so I just started firing random questions off in a desperate attempt to revive the conversation. "Is being an athlete hard? Where are you from in Picardie? Do you like, um, stuff?" By then, he was only answering in mumbled single-syllable words. Punishing.

"I won't hold you back, Judith. Your man must be waiting for you," he said, finally ending the conversation. We stood next to each other in silence for the next two minutes as we waited for the metro. It was one of the longest two minutes of my life. When the train finally arrived, I got into my carriage, put my headphones on and watched as he chose a seat as far away from me as was humanely possible.

This "I'm just going to say yes to everything" adventure was off to a miserable start, but I had to keep going. Surely being 29 isn't a deal-breaker for every street urchin who might approach me.

That Sunday, while returning from a particularly sweaty jog, a guy came up to me as I was putting my keys in the front door.

"Into sport, darling?" he asked.

"I try."

He was in his 40s and wearing a beige parkathe "dad look."

"That's great! I certainly hope you're wearing enough support? Because it seems like there's a lot to support there, if you know what I mean!" Here he began grabbing his man-tits and pouting his lips, for reasons that remain unclear. "If I were brave enough, I'd ask if I could touch them. Fuck it. I am brave enough! Can I? I have money if you want!"

This guy was the reason I inserted my "right to say no" clause into this experiment. He was a fucking asshole. Still, I tried to be polite but firm.

"No," I said. "I'm just trying to go home and you're making me feel very uncomfortable."

"Oooh, you should have said that you weren't feeling confident about your body," he replied.

I got inside and slammed the door shut. Every woman has encountered a creep like him before. Thankfully, I've noticed that the older I get, the less perverts I attract. Between the ages of 14 and 18, I was a creep magnet. People would ask me to go to their hotel with them or mime cunnilingus with their fingers while staring at me. To mortify me further, they would even do it while I was with my mom. There must be something about the fragility of teenagers that gets these guys off.

This asshole aside, the experiment needed to continue.

The next guy I met was named Yacine. He was an Arab, like the majority of the men who approached me over the course of those two weeks. I contemplated mentioning that tidbit because I don't want to feed into whatever ridiculous racial prejudices people might have, but it's the truth, and I used it as an icebreaker with Yacine.

"Oh yeah, a lot of them hit on you? That might be because they have better taste in women!" he told me, laughing.

I can confidently say that Yacine was by far the most charming man I met during my experiment. As I sat with him on a rusty metal bench above Belleville Park, the whole of Paris spread out in front of us, I completely forgot that I was conducting a sociological experiment.

It didn't hurt that Yacine was hot as hell. Caramel skin with long black eyelashesit looked like he was wearing mascara. His approach was more original than the rest, too. He just walked right up and asked if I'd like to smoke a joint.

"I'm in detox, but I'd like to smoke a cigarette," I lied.

There were plenty of people around us, children playing, touristsso I felt safe. I felt good, even. So much so, I let myself have a toke of the joint. Yacine said he lived in a small suburb called Les Lilas, in Seine-Saint-Denis. He told me that he never really hits on girls in the street, only "on exceptional occasions, when a woman is as beautiful as you are." Probably a line, but hey.

"I am trying to settle down and be serious. I want a little family and a nice house just like my parents have. I guess it's natural, I am getting old. I'm 30 now." He admitted that he doesn't think he's going to meet the woman of his dreams in the street, but he finds it amusing. Sometimes it works, sometimes he gets a straight "no."

"I'm sure it can be annoying for girls to be approached like this. Some guys are really disrespectful. But I think I understand things better. You see, my ex would always complain about 'annoying guys' approaching her, but she would also complain when she didn't get approached, because it made her feel ugly. Seriously!"

This couple might have met on the street. Probably not, though. Photo via Flickr user Keith Gallagher

It wasn't at all unpleasant to listen to Yacine talk about the complexity of the male-female relationship. He was constantly laughing and cheerful. I really appreciated his talkative side because it helped avoid awkward silences. He didn't ask me many questions about my work, but he was interested in small details: asking me whether or not my feet were hurting because of my high heels and what kind of sports I liked playing. I think that's why it was so nice to hang out with him: he actually had something to say. We talked for a good 40 minutes, kissed each other on the cheek as we left, and I even went as far as to give him my number.

With all the other guys I met, the conversational tone shifted as soon as I told them I was a journalist. Abdelkarim, a guy I met on a Tuesday night while sitting on a bench waiting for a friend, opened with "Please don't tell me you are waiting for your boyfriend. Please!" It actually made me laugh. He was 23 and lived in Saint-Denis. Unfortunately, we may never know more than that because as soon as I told him what I did for a living, he closed up.

"Oh really? You're a journalist? So you're a Freemason? Stop lying. You're a Freemason. Or your dad is?"

I tried to explain that most journalists are in fact not members of shadowy frateneral organizations, but he wasn't having any of it and I ended up just aborting the conversation.

The following day, I was approached by two students next to La Sorbonne University. I was sitting at the terrace when they came up and asked if I wanted to have a beer with them. The kidsboth history and political science studentswere extremely surprised that I accepted. Once again, the conversation's tone changed after I told them what I was doing. "You're doing an article for VICE? I only read international papers. They're much better. Le Monde is right wing, and let's not even talk about Lib," one of them said, the other nodding along.

Related: Watch actress Bel Powley on 'Diary of a Teenage Girl'

When we finished the beer, one of them left to take a bus and I walked the other to the train station. We had nothing to say to each other so I just kind of laughed nervously. He kept on mumbling about the trivialities of 24-hour news channels, the "dictatorship of emotions," the "same images broadcasted all day long," etc, etc, to infinity. Despite the obvious lack of chemistry, as we were about to part he gave it a shot, god bless him.

"Do you want to come to my place? I live close by. We would be more..." he paused.

I stood there, silent, wondering how he'd muster up the courage to finish that sentence. If I were a nice person, I could easily have smiled to imply that I got it, or just declined without leaving him the time to finish his sentence. I could even have had the tact to act as if I didn't get it and simply escape by blurting out, "Oh my God, I'm late!" But I am not a nice person, and even took some pleasure in watching him trying to get his words together.

"More... more... well... it will be more quiet," he concluded.

As you can probably guess, I politely declined.

"So, why did you have a drink with us?" he mumbled while leaving. "Anyway, Judith is a slutty name."

He certainly had no problem getting that sentence out.

Find Judith on Twitter.

UPDATE: Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin announced that the suspect in Thursday's shooting was killed after a confrontation with law enforcement, as the Associated Press reports.

An alleged campus gunman is dead after going on a horrific shooting spree at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon on Thursday. Oregon's Attorney General has confirmed 13 fatalities and local reports have placed the number of additional wounded at about 20. Earlier Thursday, a state police spokesperson told VICE the suspect was in custody, leaving the exact timing and nature of his death unclear.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown said at a press conference Thursday afternoon that the shooter was a 20-year-old man.

According to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, the shooting was called in to 9-1-1 around 10:38 AM Oregon time. Local news outlets are reporting that the shooting occurred in the campus's science building, Snyder Hall.

Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg was treating six wounded at least people, according to local broadcaster KATU, with more victims reportedly arriving. A representative from that hospital told the outlet that emergency medical staff are available, including mental health service. The school newspaper reported earlier in the afternoon via Facebook that the Ford Childhood Enrichment Center, a campus daycare facility, would be evacuated shortly.

Three people had to be airlifted to Riverbend Hospital in neighboring Springfield, Oregon, according to a local NBC News affiliate. A spokesperson for that hospital called it a "disaster level" response.

Reuters reported at 12:45 PM local time that Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco had briefed President Obama on the shooting.

An 18-year-old witness named Kortney Moore spoke to The News Review on Thursday afternoon, saying the shooter asked people in her writing class to state their religion before opening fire. She also said that the teacher of that class was one of the victims, suffering a gunshot to the head.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder was among the first major figures in politics to broach the topic of gun control in the aftermath of this shooting when he tweeted "Now Oregon. We weep again as a nation. Is the answer to our gun violence epidemic to do nothing? Again? Come on America! We solve problems."

This post has been updated throughout.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

With Mexican drug cartel action thriller Sicario out today, we decided to revisit our "Inside El Chapo's Escape Tunnel" doc to check out the complex realities of dealing with drug lords.

Infamous drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who daringly escaped prison on July 11, utilized a tunnel leading from the only "supermax" maximum-security prison in Mexico, where he'd been held. At least that's the explanation Mexican authorities have given as to how the leader of the Sinaloa cartel escaped prison for the second time.

In the aftermath of the escape, VICE News went to Almoloya de Juarez to inspect the exit of the tunnel that "El Chapo" allegedly used, and spoke with an activist and former inmate of Altiplano prison who claims to have discovered flaws in the authorities' version of events.

Stateville Correctional Center, in Illinois, 2002. Photo by Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photos

This article appears in VICE magazine's upcoming Prison Issue, which will go online Monday, October 5

The United States of America locks up more people than any other country on the planet. Over the past 50 years, an era of mass incarceration took shape as politicians raced to erect a sprawling detention system. Now, with nearly 2.2 million of its citizens behind barsor 1 in 99 adults on any given dayAmerica's grim labyrinth of federal and state prisons, local jails, juvenile correctional facilities, and immigration detention centers represents an unprecedented effort to isolate criminals from society.

Some nations may also be at fault for human rights violations in their prisons, but America's mass-incarceration syndrome islike the country's attitude toward just about everything elsesuper-sized. If states were countries, Cubawith 510 per 100,000 persons behind barswould rank 37 in the world for the highest percentage of its population in prison. Rwanda, at 41, would fall just behind the state of New York.

"The United States accounts for five percent of the world's population," President Barack Obama remarked after visiting the overcrowded cells of the Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, in July. "We account for twenty-five percent of the world's inmates."

Over the past few decades, the United States has built more jails and prisons than colleges; there are now more than 5,000 of them across the 50 states, to be precise. And as the Washington Post reported in January, there are more Americans shipping off to prison than to two- or four-year degree programs in some parts of the country. Mass incarceration is now a signature of Americana like cowboy westerns, reality television, and cheap romance novels.

Yet the story of how the United States got to this dystopian placethe Atlantic once called it "perhaps the greatest social crisis in modern American history"is more than just a statistical one. This machine has been more than half a century in the making, the byproduct of fear, racism, and social upheaval. And cracks in the foundation of the prison-industrial complex are becoming more visible every day: With low crime rates and rising support for reform, elected officials and the American people are starting to wake up from their decades-long nightmare.

Read on Broadly: Transgender Inmate Wins Historic Case Against Prison Guards Who Assaulted Her

After the crest of the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s, the United States sank into a deep economic stagnation. Cities verged on bankruptcy, modern ghettos expanded, and a tangible violent-crime wave broke out nationwide. Seemingly overnight, fear seeped into American homes. Nightly news reports were increasingly laced with ominous stories, encouraged by Hollywood magic that portrayed a new inner-city insanity and suburbanites terrified of the burgeoning rap culture.

In Americans' eyes, the chaos of crime was everywhere. And it had to be stopped at any cost.

Politicians answered the call to arms, waging two interconnectedand roundly bipartisanbattles: the War on Crime and the War on Drugs. Federal, state, and local governments began to spend more than a trillion dollars to combat what the majority saw as a crisis: the grungy outgrowth, in their minds, of the counterculture from the previous decade.

Mandatory sentencing guidelines, harsh drug laws, and public safety initiatives seeped into policy as both prisons and police forces soared in size. A heavy crackdown on "quality of life" crimes in minority-filled neighborhoods, or what's known as "broken windows" policing, would go on to sweep the nation, perhaps most notably in New York City. And the overt flexing of authority, even with a dash of institutionalized racism, was welcomed: This was an America that not only watched Cops regularly but applauded it.

Over the past few decades, the United States has built more jails and prisons than colleges.

Thus emerged a prerequisite for public office: being "tough" on crime. In 1988, George H. W. Bush arguably won the White House with a now infamous ad that accused his opponent, Michael Dukakis, of being soft on crime. The surprise star of the campaign was a black man named Willie Horton who, while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, got released from state prison on a weekend furlough program and raped and murdered a white woman. To dig his party out of the wilderness, Bill Clinton had to rebrand the Democratic Party as crime hawks. "We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back," he intoned on the 1992 campaign trail.

In 1994, Congress went so far as to explicitly encourage states to be tougher: Under a bill known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by then-President Clintonwhose administration would oversee the largest expansion of the prison population in American historythe more people a state threw behind bars, the more money it received. It was a race to the top, and 28 states, as well as Washington, DC, dived right in, passing tougher sentencing laws.

So the 5,000 jails and prisons America now has were a simple matter of supply and demand. And since 1970, the detained population in the United States has increased by 700 percent. This is why there's been such a boom in the more controversial practice of for-profit imprisonment. Incarcerationwhether it's for natural-born citizens, immigrants, or anyone else behind bars in Americais recession-proof.

But in recent years, the cities that served as the epitome of everything that was dangerous and scarylike New York and Los Angeleshave become safer than ever. If anything, our time is defined more by terrorism or mass shootings than by street crime. Which begs the question: If crime nationwide is at an all-time low, why does America still have a monstrous prison system? And why is it spending all of this money on it?

The answers have launched a tidal shift in the nationwide consciousness toward mass incarceration. A poll last year found that 77 percent of Americans disagreed with mandatory sentencing for nonviolent offenders, while another poll conducted by the ACLU pegged American support for prison reform and reduction at 69 percent. Similar numbers are apparent for efforts to decriminalize marijuanaa substance that has landed millions of people in prison or jail over the years, more so than any other drug.

Over on i-D: Photographing America's Pregnant Prisoners

That reevaluation of the past several decades' worth of imprisonment has also been felt on a cultural level. It's not hard to believe that a Willie Horton ad nowadays would be chastised as race baiting rather than a one-way ticket to the White House. Or that the country would rather watch The Wire or Orange Is the New Blackseries that explore the more emotional complexities of criminal justicethan Cops.

For both parties in Washington, it is now orthodox to believe that what America created was an overwhelming, costly behemoth of a system. And it is quickly emerging as a requirement in the coming presidential election that candidates have some kind of stance on how to fix it. After all, even former President Clinton recently admitted that what his administration did was, well, bad.

"Most of these people are in prison under state law, but the federal law set a trend," Clinton told a NAACP convention this past July. "And that was overdone. We were wrong about that. That percentage of it, we were wrong about."

The setting of an NAACP convention for his mea culpa is telling, as the Clinton administration's policies did more to imprison communities of color than ever before. To this day, that racial divide is stark: According to the NAACP's statistics, one in six black menthose who are "missing" from our society, as the New York Times describes themis locked up, a trend that, if it continues, will soon balloon to one in three. They and Hispanics constitute the majority of those behind bars (58 percent as of 2008), even as these groups represent just a quarter of the American population.

The current rate of incarceration for African American men is nearly six times as much as that of their white counterparts. In fact, of the 2.2 million people in the American correctional system, about a million are blacka total that is larger than the entire prison populations of England, Argentina, Canada, and six other countries combined.

If crime nationwide is at an all-time low, why does America still have a monstrous prison system? And why is it spending all of this money on it?

Figuring out how to deal with these consequences and downsize the prison system is now a national project. A day before Clinton spoke, President Obama said, "Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it." He visited El Reno later that week, and also granted clemency to 46 nonviolent drug offendersthe largest single act of presidential forgiveness since the 1960s.

In the meantime, the Obama administration has sought to clog the federal prison pipeline by deferring nonviolent offenders to alternative programs, while doing away with mandatory sentencing guidelines. Last September, outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder declared that 2013 was the first year since 1980 in which the federal prison population decreased. And in 2014, that downtick continued: According to figures recently made available by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the nationwide prison population decreased by 1 percent last year, with 5,300 fewer people in federal facilities. Even state prisons shrank, with 10,100 fewer inmates than in the previous year.

Yet if Congress were to pass any sort of reformwhich, unlike everything else, it actually seems hell-bent on doingit would only affect federal prisons right away. And since the era of mass incarceration has set its foundation statesidedata from the Prison Policy Initiative makes clear that it's the state and local facilities that house up the bulk of those behind barsthe responsibility falls on municipalities that established their own ecosystems of criminal justice to inflict real damage on the numbers.

In order to pull this off, Dr. Joan Petersilia, a professor at Stanford Law School and a faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, argues that Washington, DC, must lead like it did more than 20 years ago. Just in the opposite direction.

"There is symbolism in closing federal prisons, and that symbolism is very important," she tells me. "But there is also a financial incentive that can exist. And could Washington use this to keep people out of jail? Yes."

In other words, it has to be financially alluring in the most self-consciously capitalist nation on the planet for states to put an end to the era of mass incarceration. So rather than forcing them to be tough on crime, Washington, DC, can encourage localities to provide alternatives to imprisonment by dangling federal funds as leverage. This has already been achieved on a small scale, Petersilia points out, with federal-state initiatives like giving Pell grants to outgoing inmates to reduce recidivism, and the Second Chance Act, which boosts states' reentry programs for those coming out of prison.

A system as large as this one, Petersilia admits, will not disappear overnight. It'll take time to unravel 50 years worth of law enforcement overkill, especially in a way that is both just and sensible to the general public.

"There have been movements in the past for reform, but something about this moment is unique," Petersilia said. "It's about government getting out of people's lives. It's about what criminal justice is doing for the rest of us."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

A graduating class from Gina's Team, an inmate reentry program for female prisoners in Arizona. Photo courtesy Sue Ellen Allen

Sue Ellen Allen went toprison when she was 57 years old. She and her husband were convicted of securities fraud, and she served seven years at the Perryville prison in Goodyear, Arizona, near Phoenix.

"I went in as an anomaly," Allen toldme over the phone. "I was a 57-year-old, well-educated white woman, and Iwas struggling through stage three breast cancer."

On the day Allen surrendered, guards requiredher to strip for a full-body inspection.

"I folded my black gabardine slacks andpink knit sweater, then complied with the guard's order," sherecalled. Allen started from the top, first opening her mouth widely sothe guard could see that she wasn't hiding any drugs. Then she leaned forwardto show behind her ears. She had lost her hair to chemotherapy, which made theguard's order to "move your hair to the side" irrelevant.Another guard told her that just because she had cancer, she wasn't going toget any special treatment. Allen went through the rest of the motions,spreading her toes, showing her the bottom of her feet, then squatting andcoughing three times.

Within a few months of settling in to theprison, her roommate, Gina, died. "She suffered from leukemia and yet the systemrefused to treat her appropriately, or even give her a blood test," Allentold me.

Gina's death had a profound influence on Allen. Soon after she died, Allen approached a deputy warden and requested permission to host whatshe called a "breast cancer walk."

"The warden looked at me as if I'd askedfor champagne and caviar, but she eventually authorized the event," Allensaid.

With permission, Allen set out to work, organizing other woman in the camp. They decorated the yard with pink paper andpeople actually signed up, generating sponsorship pledges from family andfriends to raise money for each mile walked.

"That breast cancer walk was the first ofits kind in the state of Arizona's prison system," Allen said. "Sincethen, it's spread to different yards and it has raised tens of thousands ofdollars to assist in the fight against breast cancer."

Allen went on to use her time in prison to fightagainst what she saw as routine degradation. Instead of feeling like a victim,she chose to apply her education and experience in ways that might empower thewomen serving time alongside of her. She even designed a curriculum to teachlife skills.

"Most of the women who served time had toendure daily doses of humiliation," Allen said. "Repeatedly, staffmembers would tell the women that no one cared. Prison officials don't wantothers to know what goes on in there, but prison life degrades people in waysthat influence them forever." Her description reminded me of everything I'd experienced during 26 years of incarceration in federal prisons of everysecurity level.

Watch the VICE HBO documentary on America's incarceration system, featuring President Barack Obama's first-ever visit to a federal prison:

Upon her release, Allen kept up her passion of working to empower women. She became the cofounder of Gina's Team, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving outcomes forwomen who experience imprisonment. The organization's motto: "Education,not incarceration, is the cheapest form of crime prevention."

"I wanted to do something to help thosewomen, because no one else seemed to understand or care," she said.Through Gina's Team, Allen said she providesdirect services to more than 1,000 people each year in different facilities.She has partnered with community leaders to teach skills based on the ATHENA Leadership Model and works to help womenthrough their imprisonment and upon release.

After being confined, female inmateslike mengenerally transition to halfway houses. There, they are required topay fees that block many from ever being able to build lives of stability;subsistence payments amount to more than $100 per week, and the paymentsmake it next to impossible to accumulate the savingsnecessary to pay for deposits on housing. When they, like all felons, reveal theirfelony convictions on applications for apartments or jobs, thewomen encounter immediate resistance, if not total rejection.

"I was lucky because I found passion inprison," Allen said. "I want to help women and girls in prisonbecause the women are the foundation of the family."

By working with thousands ofincarcerated women, Allen has become acutely aware of their problems. She described a homeless man as being the only individual who couldexpress empathy to her after her release. He approached her asking for change, and when she told him thatshe'd just been released from prison, the man threw up his arms andsaid, "Welcome home."

With an annual budget of less than $35,000, Allen and the other volunteers at Gina's Team bring guest speakers to teach thewomen skills they'll need to overcome the challenges that await them insociety. Through those classes, Gina's Team vets the participants and thenmatches them with prospective employers. The employers have an opportunity toreview the women's resumes and interview them before they are released from the system. Gina's Team strives to open employment opportunities so that when these women walk out of prison, they have a job secured.

The longer people are exposed to America's "corrections" system, the less likely those people become to live in societysuccessfully. That's why people like Sue Ellen Allen and me work to bring about prison andsentencing reforms.

Follow Michael Santos on Twitter and check out his website here.

Castle Romeoan atmospheric nuclear test carried out by the United States on March 1, 1954 at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. It was the third largest test ever detonated by the US.

It's been a great week for the end of the world. At theLabour party conference in Brighton, delegatesincluding, prominently, thosefrom Unite, GMB, and other major unionshave voted against debating theparty's position on the Trident nuclear weapons program. Of course, this is asmall victory: the motion wasn't for Labour to oppose Trident, but for them tohave a debate about the possibility of opposing it, and with a Tory majority inParliament it's likely that the program would have been renewed anyway. Forthe next five years, at least, the lives of every single person on the planetwill remain where they belong, in the hands of whoever has been chosen to leadthe Conservative Party. But for those of us who eagerly await the fierydestruction of all human life, it's a victory nonetheless. Because, as we know,the end of the world is good for Britain's economy.

It's not entirely clear why Jeremy Corbyn is so opposed toBritain's nuclear deterrent. (After all, in 2004, he sponsored a motion in Parliamentto officially welcome "the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into earth"and wipes out humanity forever. Maybe it's the means, not the ends, that he's concerned about.) Hisanti-Armageddon stance certainly isn't making him many political allies. He'srecently come under attack from senior Labour party figures for claiming onRadio 4 that, were he Prime Minister, he'd refuse to push the big red button. According to shadow defense secretary Maria Eagle, "a potential prime ministeranswering a question like that in the way that he did" is not "helpful." Atleast someone's saying it how it is: What's the point of spending 20 billion , their new lives of unimaginable wealth and luxurywould soon start to feel like a hollow sham; without good honest work they'dsoon become bored and restless, wishing for a nuclear apocalypse just to savethem from the sheer ennui, and tragically impotent to bring it about.

In any case, laying off British workers just because whatthey do has the potential to kill every living thing on the planet is aslippery slope. The British arms industry is one of the few manufacturingconcerns that this country still has, and much of its output is exported torepressive states like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Should that be scrapped too,along with the thousands of jobs it provides? What about the BBC, which makes asignificant profit selling Top Gearand Doctor Who around the world,subjecting millions to programs so terrible that any honest tribunal wouldclass them as war crimes? Some countries base their economies on oil orminerals; Britain's is based on monstrous, inexplicable evil. Nobody likes it,but any attempt to change that is just not feasible.

Over on Noisey: Ambient Music Isn't BoringIt Changed My Life

NUCLEAR DEVASTATION HELPS THE WIDER ECONOMY TOO

It's not only those workers directly employed by Tridentthat might feel its benefits. For decades, there's been a severe lack of good,dependable, unionized industrial work available in this country. This has beenthe result of numerous factors, but by far the most significant is theindustrialization of the Global South. It's simply cheaper for Britishemployers to open up factories staffed by Malaysian slave-laborers than it isfor them to invest in communities at home. Our attempts to deal with thishistorical shift haven't been entirely successfulwhile there's been someinvestment in the formation of a high-tech workforce, and an effort to drivedown wages to competitive levels through zero-hours contracts and othermechanism for casualizing labor, unemployment is still high, and productivityis still flatlining. Trident offers an effective alternative. It'll be mucheasier for hardworking British people to compete with workers overseas whenthose workers have been turned into gently drifting clouds of dust by theungodly heat of a thermonuclear explosion.

Watch: SOFEXThe Business of War

The tourism sector is another vital component of the Britisheconomy that could be helped out by the irradiation of much of the world'ssurface. As things stand, our traditional seaside resorts are in steep decline,thanks to a combination of cheap air travel and the fact that they aren't verygood. Rather than doing their bit for the economy by pretending to have fun asthe rain lazily spits its displeasure at Weston-super-Mare, thousands areinstead choosing to fly out to more enticing destinations overseas. It's verylikely that targeted nuclear strikes on popular holiday destinations, turningpristine beaches and charmingly rustic hotels into a silent span of black glassthat bubbles underfoot as the radiation-burned survivors pathetically crawl forthe sea, will be a much-needed boon for our traditional hospitality industry.Many voters in seaside towns have abandoned Labour for UKIP, and a newfoundcommitment to the systematic eradication of all foreigners might be what ittakes to lure them back. A fairer, better, full-employment economy is almostwithin reach: all we need to do is push the button.

THE ANNIHILATION OF ALL LIVING THINGS CAN SOLVE THE DEFICIT CRISIS

All this is assuming that Britain itself emerges unscathedfrom any nuclear war, which isn't likely. But if a future Prime Minister'sdecision to deploy Trident ends up being the last decision anyone ever makes,it could still be great news for our economy. The millions we're currentlyspending on welfare payments to scroungers, smackheads, and the rest of theundeserving poor can finally be put to better use. Unemployment will instantlybe wiped out, at the small cost of the unemployed. Admittedly, overcrowding at NHShospitals will briefly become an extremely serious problem, butwithin a few days it will recede into utter insignificance. Britain's balanceof payments will be perfectly even and its debts will fall to zero. There'll beno inflation, no credit crunches, no dropping share prices. And the Labourparty will never lose another election.

Follow Sam Kriss on Twitter.

Image courtesy Lynlea Combot (@lynleabinly)

Monica Heisey is a longtime VICE contributor and an editor-at-large at Broadly. Earlier this month she released her first book, I Can't Believe It's Not Better. A guide to life from the perspective of a 26-year-old comedian, it's about sex, food, and how to get fired from work. Rob Delaney likes it. You should too. Here's an excerpt to get you started.

Getting a Job, a Short Story by Your Parents

You rise early, despite having gone to sleep late at 10PM the night before. "Good morning, world!" you, their sweet daughter who they love and cherish, so talented the world is your frickin' oyster, shout out your window as morning radio plays in the background. The world mirrors your enthusiasm.

You pick out a sensible outfita pair of slacks (you call them slacks, everyone does) and a blazer with that kicky blouse your mom got you. She's very thoughtful, and the blouse is a perfect balance of professional and fun, because you artsy types like to be a bit different and she knows that. She gets you.

You eat a balanced breakfast because you were listening when a very wise someone told you that was important. You make sure to drink some milk, because of your bones. You remember your mom has forwarded you an article about milk and wonder what studies show lately. You double-check that the oven is turned off, lock your front door, then head out into the world with the air of a soon-to-be Employed Person. It's all happening. Today you're going to knock on some doors.

Heading into the city's neatly delineated, easy to define "downtown" area, you think to yourself glad I'm not here at night and will be able to take the subway home before dark. You're Danger Aware. You're also packing a hot Duo-tang full of printed resumes that do NOT include your Twitter handle because why would that be necessary? This is your moment. You have a university degree in English Literature and Language. You deserve this.

The first door you knock on is that of a Business Office. Everyone inside looks very respectable and stressed. They are thinking about their families and drinking coffee and one guy is making such a good joke, oh my god you should hear this joke, you wouldn't believe it, he should be a comedian. Later when you try to tell the joke to your friends you will get lost somewhere around "so the duck says to the chicken," go silent for a bit, and then just leave it. Fine.

You're not sure where in The Office to go, so you ask the receptionist to help you. She is young (40) like you (23) so she gets what you're going through. "Nice blazer," she says, genuinely impressed. "Very work appropriate." Everyone around you is wearing a blazer. This blazer is the best thing you have ever bought. The job is basically in the bag. "I've never smoked pot and there are no pictures of me drinking on Facebook," you tell her. She looks like she might pass out.

Regaining her composure, she leads you to an area marked "Interview Space." "We're basically always hiring," she says. "It's so weird to me how few people go out knocking on doors. They just don't know what's out there!" You wait for a while and read exciting magazine articles about the warming planet. You're not worried, and you're not mad at your parents or their friends or the system. You're not even thinking about sexting, which is what's been holding you back from a job this entire time. Between thinking up clever hashtags, doing selfies, and photographing your genitals for just whoever, you haven't had time to get a job. You're not mad at yourself, you're just disappointed. That's on you.

You know this, in your heart of hearts, but you only really feel it now, looking at this New York Times article about youth culture. How do they know? How do they always know?? It's like looking into a mirror, if people were constantly predicting the death of mirrors. You consider getting out your phone to update a post on your Facebook page, but remember something your dad said about professionalism. And he's right, because he's still with it. You're glad you never got those tattoos all your friends seem to have these days.

Finally, the boss comes out of her office. "Please, step into my office," she says. She is also wearing a blazer, but you can tell hers is of a better quality. She probably listened to her mother when she said that it makes more sense to spend money on fewer items of clothing that are better made. It does.

Inside her office are the hallmarks of the life you want: a novelty mug, photos of her kids doing various activities requiring an upper-middle class income to participate, a computer, a motivational poster (advertisement for mortgages), and a landline. She sits down at her desk, your resume in front of her. She looks like that actress from that thing... Gennifer Gerswhin? She's got hair. You know her. From the film.

"Great resume," the lady boss begins. "Thanks!" you say, politely. You feel good because manners are their own reward. "And you're on LinkedIn," she says. "That's good, very good. We can't hire anyone these days without a LinkedIn profile." You're killing this. Could you be any more prepared? (That's a reference to popular Matthew Parrish character Charnler Bing, from the show with the couch.)

"Wow, a university degree?" She raises her eyebrows, blazer-level impressed, and makes some notes on her pad. "English language and literature? You might be over-qualified..." You hold back on telling her about your minor in Roman history, lest she be overwhelmed. In a gesture of extreme interest, your future boss Leans In. She looks over your extracurriculars, tutting thoughtfully as she pictures the contributions such a talented amateur canoeist might make in a corporate setting.

The interview is zipping along nicely when you hit a snag. "It says here you stopped taking science in 10th grade," the boss says, flipping through her detailed notes. "Why'd you shut that door?" You don't have a good answer. You should have continued taking science, and you know it. "Mostly, I'm just eager to learn, and ready to do whatever you need. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty, and I work well independently and as part of a team," you say, with a poise and intelligence suggestive of a person who could have easily passed grade eleven science if only they'd applied themselves. The interviewer smiles.

"Well, of course you can have the job. All we're ever looking for is a motivated self-starter who's willing to take initiative," she says. Normally, your twentysomething hands would be straining at the fingertips to avoid tweeting your good news, but even the sweet allure of Tweeter can't pull you away from the joy you feel at this new position. "It's a competitive salary, with full benefits, obviously, and a pension, and full-time hours. You know, a job! That's what a job is."

A quick handshake and a signed contract (which you read in its entirety), and your new status as an employed person is secure. You're heading out into the sunshineputting your headphones in before you're even out the door, naturallywhen the boss lady's voice stops you in the hall. "Hey kid," she says. "I think you'll be needing this." She takes off her blazer and throws it to you. "See you Monday," she says. "Wear that scarf your mother got you, it looks so good with your hair."

Follow Monica on Twitter and buy I Can't Believe It's Not Better here.

They set out west from the Sonoran Desert in the dead of night. The college guys, armed with cash, crammed into a car after a party and drove six hours until morning, when they reached a strip mall doctor's office in a suburb of Los Angeles.

It was two weeks before Christmas in 2009, and April Rovero noticed her 21-year-old son Joey had withdrawn $480 in cash from his bank account. He had told her about his impromptu trip to LA, and she decided to wait until he came home for winter break to ask about the money. But the Arizona State University senior never came home.

He died of a lethal combination of alcohol, Oxycodone, and Xanax on December 18, 2009a day before he was supposed to fly to his parents' house in Northern California, and nine days after he drove with friends to visit Dr. Hsiu-Ying "Lisa" Tseng, the Rowland Heights, California physician who prescribed him the painkillers.

"Parents send their kids off to school like we did," April Rovero said. "We sent him off and look at what we got: a dead child. The environment and the culture there absolutely contributed to what happened to him."

Joey Rovero's use of prescription painkillers was not unique to his fraternity party scene, nor was he the only one of Tseng's patients who died that year. There was also Vu Nguyen and Steven Ogle, both Southern California men who were in their 20s when they fatally overdosed on painkillers prescribed by Tseng, a general practitioner.

Tseng has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder charges related to the three deathsan exceptional case that went to trial in Los Angeles County at the end of August and could drag on through mid-October. She is the first physician in the stateand one of few in the countryto be charged with murder simply for writing prescriptions.

The case comes four years into a nationwide epidemic of prescription overdose deaths. Prescription opioid-related deaths rose more than 300 percent between 1999 and 2011, and have since outpaced car accidents as the leading cause of injury death, according to data from the Centers for Disease and Control. The numbers have prompted an aggressive response by the Obama administration, which earlier this year proposed investing $133 million toward opioid overdose prevention efforts ranging from data collection to treatment programs.

As federal and state officials look for ways to fight the opioid scourge, Tseng's trial has become a flashpoint in the national push to better regulate pharmaceuticals and reduce overdose deaths. And it represents a major shift in the way government is prosecuting drug cases.

Related: How Big Pharma Hooked America on Legal Heroin

"The national policy is turning away from just the users and starting to look at the doctors," said Tracey Helton, a San Francisco-based addiction counselor and former heroin user who was featured in the 1999 HBO documentary Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street. A cult figure in some drug circles, Helton traces her opioid addiction back to the Vicodin she was prescribed after getting her wisdom teeth pulled as a teenager.

"I'm sure it's an effort between all of these agencies to try to get this doctor as a test casebecause it's a really, really good one," said Helton, who is now a 45-year-old mother of three. "The money to be made here, I mean, she must've made hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. She had to have."

Tseng, who has spent three years in jail awaiting trial, was arrested in 2012 after undercover federal agents paid several visits to Tseng's practice and found it alarmingly simple to obtain a prescription after just a fleeting consultation. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Tseng wrote an average of 25 prescriptions a daya total of more than 27,000 between 2007 and 2010. A 2010 Los Angeles Times investigation linked those prescriptions to the drug overdose deaths of at least eight people, including Rovero, Nguyen, and Ogle. In addition to second-degree murder, Tseng has also been charged with 21 felony counts related to writing prescriptions for people who didn't legitimately need the drugs.

"We can't start charging people with first-degree murder, or whatever murder it is, when it's an overdose that happens ten miles away." Dr. Nathan Kuemmerl

Her trial follows a similar case in Florida, where a doctor was charged tried for first-degree murder in the prescription drug overdose death of 24-year-old Joseph Bartolucci. The doctor, Gerald Klein, was acquitted of the murder charge by a Palm Beach County court on September 16, but is expected to be sentenced to prison for illegally selling Xanax to another patient.

The millionaire owner of the pain clinic where Klein worked did not get off so easy. Jeffrey George, who operated several Florida pain clinics with his twin brother Chris, pleaded guilty in 2011 to second-degree murder in Bartolucci's death, and is now serving a 15.5-year sentence under a plea deal. Chris George is also in prison, following the FBI's 2010 raid on the brothers' clinics, the largest of Florida's notorious "pill mills" at the time. An FBI investigation following the crackdown found that 53 patients of the Georges' clinics had died of overdoses.

Other high-profile cases involving similar charges have resulted in even more lax sentences. In 2013, Conrad Murray, the Los Angeles doctor convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 overdose death of Michael Jackson, was released after serving two years of his four-year jail sentence. And earlier this year, psychiatrist Khristine Eroshevich escaped jail time in a case related to the 2007 overdose death of Anna Nicole Smith. Instead, a Los Angeles County judge reduced the conviction to a misdemeanor, slapping Eroshevich with a $100 fine and a year of probation.

The Other Side of Addiction: VICE investigates the troubling for-profit addiction treatment industry:

Whether it's a celebrity coping with fame or a college student facing finals, nearly two million Americans either depend on or abuse opioids, according to the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Helton said she sympathizes with addicts who see doctor-prescribed painkillers as a safer, cleaner way to get high. "Heroin has all this stigma attached to it. You usually have to go to a shady part of town and deal with a bunch of fucking assholes," she said. "There's so many prescriptions out there, and if there's no stigma really attached to taking an opioid, people seek those out."

Outside of her job at a health clinic, Helton serves as an advocate for addicts, moderating a Reddit community of drug users who frequently seek advice and education. With Tseng's case, she says the challenge of holding someone accountable for an overdose is particularly complex. "It's like, 'I have a drug problem. Can you help me be safer in some way?'" she explained. "But on the other hand, it's like, why are we making it so readily available?"

"There's a whole generation of kids that are dying from overdoses. And the parents are like, 'I never knew.'" Tracey Helton

But Dr. Nathan Kuemmerle, a psychiatrist based in San Diego, says the legal consequences of Tseng's case could do more harm than good. "I think that she deserves to get some kind of punishment, but I think that the idea of murder charges is horrendous," he said. "We can't start charging people with first-degree murder or whatever murder it is when it's an overdose that happens ten miles away."

Kuemmerle insists that Tseng's patients "were goal-oriented. It's not like they didn't know that opiates were addictive, so to completely mitigate any of their responsibility is ridiculous."

Watch on VICE News: Back from the Brink, Heroin's Antidote

Kuemmerle is himself a recovering methamphetamine addict, better known among DEA agents as "Fame Monster." The National Geographic show Drugs Inc. nicknamed him Doc Hollywood for his reputation as a willing prescriber. In 2010, Kuemmerle was arrested after a federal probe not unlike the one launched by undercover agents in Tseng's office around the same time. Like Tseng, Kuemmerle was accused of running a "pill mill" trafficking large numbers of pharmaceutical drugs to make a buck. But unlike Tseng, he was not charged in connection with the death of any of his patients.

Kuemmerle maintains that OxyContin prescriptions comprised less than 1 percent of his practice, which is why he believes he isn't in jail today. Instead, he mostly prescribed Adderall. When one of his patients began peddling the tiny orange pills on Craiglist in 2009, the feds traced the supply back to Kuemmerle, who was described in court records as California's most prolific prescriber of Adderall. In 2009, according to the criminal complaint, Kuemmerle wrote more prescriptions for the stimulant than any other doctor in the state.

He pleaded guilty to felony drug dealing charges related to prescribing Adderall. Despite its prevalenceabout a third of college students use Adderall recreationally, according to one recent studythe ADHD medication is classified as a Schedule II drug, alongside methamphetamine, cocaine, and yes, OxyContin. According to the US Attorney's office in California, undercover agents who visited Kuemmerle at his clinic were prescribed Adderall or Xanax in exchange for cashone officer received prescriptions for both drugs for $150 in one appointment that lasted less than ten minutes.

Read: In a World of Opiate Addicts, the Internet Plays Doctor and Therapist

And yet Kuemmerle had his license reinstated by the Medical Board of California in 2013. He's now a practicing psychiatrist at a physician's group in San Diego. But since his arrest, life hasn't been easy for the recovering addict. In fact, he says the past five years have been something of a nightmare.

"They tried to make it out in the media like, 'Oh yeah, they just let him go and he's writing scrips again," Kuemmerle told me, cackling wildly at the thought. "Heck no. Heck no!" he exclaimed, detailing the terms of his continued probation: supervision by a board-certified psychiatrist, a series of medical ethics courses, and drug tests conducted randomly up to six times a month at his own expense, which he said sometimes comes out to $700 a month. Not to mention, he added, there was the "absolutely brutal" five-day exam he had to retake to get his license back after a federally-mandated six-month stint in a "cockroach-infested" rehab where he claims the conditions were worse than prison.

"There are more and more people being impacted there are more and more people being impacted and that includes the leaders of our country."

Grief can be a powerful motivator for Rovero and her army of dozens of parents who have lost children to prescription drugs. Next month, she said, she'll be joining the third-annual FedUp! rally to push for federal action to combat opioid addiction at the National Mall in Washington, DC. But for now, she's spending her days in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom, hanging onto every word in the prosecution's case against Tseng, the woman who prescribed her son painkillers.

No matter the verdict, there's no prescription to relieve Rovero's own pain. "You learn how to cope with the death of a child but you don't get over it," she says. "You will never get over it."

Follow Jennifer Swann on Twitter.

French President Francois Hollande (Photo by Matthieu Riegler via)

Welcome to the VICE Morning Bulletin. Here you'll find a roundup of the day's most important stories from around the world, all in one handy blog post, like a multivitamin of interesting stuff to start your day. With contributions from our global offices, the VICE Morning Bulletin will feature the biggest headlines in the US as well as internationally, and offer a handpicked crop of culture stories, long reads, weird news, and a VICE documentary each morning.

US News

• Ten Dead in College Shooting
  The small Oregon city of Roseburg is in mourning after a 26-year-old gunman opened fire on a community college classroom, killing at least ten. Reports say the killer asked victims about their Christian faith before shooting them. NBC News
• T-Mobile Hack: 15 Million Exposed
  Hackers have accessed personal informationincluding Social Security numbersof 15 million people who recently applied for T-Mobile services. The data breach occurred at credit agency Experian. "I am incredibly angry," said T-Mobile's CEO. CNN
• CIA Pulls Officers Out
  The CIA has withdrawn officers from the US embassy in Beijing, fearing data stolen from American government computers will leave agents vulnerable. US officials "privately" blame the cyber-theft on the Chinese government. The Washington Post
• Kansas Removes 31,000 Voters
  According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Kansas is about to become exceptionaland not in a good way. State election officials will today begin removing names of more than 31,000 prospective voters from their records, part of a tough new voter identification law. USA Today

International News

• France Criticises Russia
  French President Francois Hollande fears Russia is making "indiscriminate" bombings in Syria and is failing to target the Islamic State. Hollande spoke out ahead of talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Paris today. BBC
• Cambodia's Facebook Trial
  An opposition politician in Cambodia faces up to 17 years in prison for comments he made on Facebook. Accused of treason, Hong Sok Hour was arrested by the government for posting comments that criticized a 36-year border agreement with Vietnam. Bangkok Post
• Israeli Couple Shot Dead
  An Israeli couple have been killed by Palestinian gunmen while travelling with their four children in the occupied West Bank. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack was the "result of Palestinian incitement". Haaretz
• Australia's "Abhorrent" Detention
  Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been urged to shut down his country's offshore detention centers for asylum seekers. Nearly 450 academics have signed an open letter demanding an end to Australia's "abhorrent" treatment of asylum seekers. The Guardian

George RR Martin (Photo by Gage Skidmore via)

Everything Else

• Serial Turns to Television
  NPR's surprisingly huge murder investigation podcast is to be turned into a TV show. The writer-producer team behind The Lego Movie will develop a cable series following the making of the podcast as it investigates a case (but not the murder of Hae Min Lee). Deadline
• 'Game of Thrones' Movie Rumors Not Entirely Bullshit
  George RR Martin has dismissed rumors that a movie spin-off is being made, but then admitted that "it would be a great way to end". Martin wrote in an online blogpost: "Rumors is all they were... at least for now." Wall Street Journal
• Peeple, Smeeple
  Yes, there is definitely going to be a "Yelp for people" called "Peeple" that will let you award star reviews to romantic partners and colleagues. Here's why you actually shouldn't be too worried about it. Motherboard
• America Incarcerated
  The US locks up more people than any other nation on Earth. This article, from VICE magazine's upcoming Prison Issue, explains how the justice system got so messed up. VICE

If that's enough reading for this morning, you should watch A Good Day to Die, our documentary on fake funerals in South Korea.

The awfulness of Rebecca Black's "Friday" made sense to you. She released it when she was 13 years old. Her mom had paid a production company $4,000 to write her two songs and do one big mad video about how exciting it is to sit on or in or around cars on the best day of the week. And then, long story short, the internet found it and went in. Now Rebecca Black ekes out a sort of sub-famous existence with lots of cheery vlogs and promises of new music; lots of leaning into microphones on cable-access TV and saying, "No, it won't be like 'Friday'," and, "No, my new music is nothing like 'Friday'," and, "Yes, 'Friday' was quite bad. Anyway, my new album is dropping 2k15, look out for it online because it won't be a sort of 'sells in shops' thinggoing to be very download-centric."

So you sort of understood how Rebecca Black ended up making the worst music video of all time. We were all teenagers once, dreamy-eyed and autotuned. We all had hopes and dreams and nagged our moms to spend money on our insane acts of hubris.

But imagine being an adult and doing it. Imagine thinking that is good.

Like an Incan princess approaching a vengeful sun god with the flesh of a slain virgin, I bring to you today a gift, and that gift is this: "Let the Sun Shine" by Martti Sewell. The first thing you are going to think is, Hold up, is that dude rocking two T's in his first name? Push through this feeling. It is natural. The second thing you are noticing is, Sorry, pause and rewind: Did my man Martti just make a model walk very slowly towards him because apparently his editor doesn't have access to a slow motion function? Be quiet and just know that he did. Do you share the murky feeling that the two girls in this video are exceptionally uncomfortable? you are thinking. I absolutely do, yes.

Here, watch the video in full and then come back to me:

I'm going to have to break this video down into component parts, because watching it all at once is too overwhelming. I mean, first fucks, look at this pool fallis this not the most depressing pool fall in human history?

And then about 40 seconds into the video comes a quick one-two-three punch of audio-visual despair, which starts with Martti having a sung conversation with himself in a visibly empty room, presumably because they only realized they needed this shot once the models had packed up their shit and gone home:

And then there are a couple of other quick shotsMartti, topless, jiggling by a pool; Martti leading Sad Rashida Jones through a rented apartment and grandly gesturing towards the balcony... And then there is this moment of pure realization. Sunshine Sally looks like she's stoically dancing along to the 3AM beats being blasted out of a kebab van while the drunkest man in Nottingham tries to cop off with her mate. Then Martti looks around to realize that these girls are paid to be here, and this is his life: He's 32 years old and he's making his own music video. If you look closely, you can see his heart break slowly through his face:

And I mean there's this shot, where Martti looks around as though someone has just called his name and, as he started turning, also shouted "WANKER!" so he's had to style it out by just pretending he's touching his shades, Sad Rashida having definitely heard the wanker call-out:

And then there's this shot, where it looks like he's just remembered his parents died in that crash while he hover-hands two different models at once while a cameraman falls over in front of him. It's possibly the saddest moment of human reality ever captured on film, everything just all going wrong at once.

And then there's the constant looping back to pool shots where Martti is clearly teaching Sadshida and Sunshine Sally some on-the-fly dance moves, lots of hands in the air, Martti giving the sincere vibe that every single shot in this video started with the words, "Have you got your camera on you? Maybe I could do a bit of pool dancing," or, "Have you got your camera on you? Only I thought we could do a bit where Sad Rashida looks like she's reading a book."

And then, finally, there's the high conclusion, Martti doing his teaching-a-dance-routine thing againhe's doing ghost castanets, a favorite move. But then, out of nowhere, he snaps and goes fully mad in a jacuzzi, chucking water in the air, and diving into a swimming pool. Finally, we see the faade of Martti Sewell (song-of-the-summer-penning pop giant) slipping from the reality of Martti Sewell (man who paid two models and a director to spend their Sunday afternoon making a three minute and 41 second music video on an overcast day), the real Martti Sewell fully formed in front of us and diving out of a jacuzzi and into a pool, his sins and his frantic madness all washed away:

When I see Martti Sewell dive into a pool I ask myself, Would I enjoy hanging out with Martti Sewell? I think I would. I have a thing where I like hanging out with wounded egotistical men, because I am destined to become one, and for now they make me feel better about myself. Plus, by all accounts, Sewell is a privately-educated son of a multimillionaire who decamped to Colombia to pursue his music career on the side of having some well-paid job in security solutions, so you'd imagine he knows how to party.

But is there redemption in "Let the Sun Shine"? I think that there is. Listen closely to the rap breakdown, which starts circa 2:35 with the tennis court set-to:

So it's time
To let the sun shine
Gimme a minute to contemplate whether I try
To put into words
What I can't describe
I'm so high
Yeah girl it's true but then
Some will call me a fool but when I'm with you
Well that stuff it don't matter
Love, peace, fun, and good banter

Love. Peace. Fun. Good banter. Can anyone argue with that? Love. Peace. Fun. Good banter. The four central tenets of our society. You can build cathedrals on love and peace and fun and good banter. You can build cities and you can build gods. Does our generation have hope? Not a whole lot of it. Housing prospects? Career opportunities? This world is a lottery. Do we have love and peace and fun and good banter? We do, in spades. When the world is rolling hard against you, when it's an overcast day and you can't hit a tennis ball cleanly and you're talking to yourself in an empty room while an amateur cameraman watches wobblingly onwards, just remember to open your arms to the sky and thank the universe for giving us all we have, for giving us love and peace and fun and Martti Sewell, and thank it most crucially of all for giving us good banter.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Canada has the world's second-largest supply of fresh water, but 169 First Nation communities have limited or no access to it. Nearly a quarter of the First Nations communities administered by Health Canada are currently without clean water. The alerts issued by the federal government range from "boil water advisories" going back more than 20 years to crippling "Do Not Consume" orders.

VICE goes to Shoal Lake 40, a reserve only a few hours from Winnipeg that sits on a manmade island. The lake the reserve sits on supplies Winnipeg's drinking water, but Shoal Lake 40 has been under a boil water advisory for 17 years.

In part two, we go to Neskantaga, a remote fly-in where the federal government opts to deliver rations of bottled water to rather than repair the treatment plant that would provide jobs and consistent water. VICE Canada meets with the chiefs, the political negotiators and the young residents who have spent their whole lives without accessible clean water.

Eduardo giving a talk about corruption at John Jay College in New York. Photo by David Sastre

While the British government is often accused of perpetrating all sorts of grim evils, they've generally managed to steer clear of corruption allegations. Because government corruption, as we're all taught from birth, only happens in places like Moldova and Mexico, where gangsters bribe politicians and buy themselves complete immunity. Of course, politicians aren't the only people susceptible to nefarious influences.

Last month, London's Met Police were accused of accepting bribes. A few months before that, the Independent Police Complaints Commission launched an investigation into 29 accusations of police corruption when handling child abuse claims. So corruption is clearly an issue in the UK, but what do we do about it? How do we tackle those in positions of authority with the resources to cover their tracks?

A new method pioneered by Colombian corruption investigator Eduardo Salcedo-Albarn could hold the answer.

Eduardo was paid by the Colombian government to uncover organized crime. This was no easy task in a country with a long history of ingrained corruption, sparked in part by Pablo Escobar in the mid to late 1980s. Eduardo was faced with witnesses being murdered before he could speak to them and the daunting task of unraveling the web of corruption that allowed individual paramilitary commanders to orchestrate literally thousands of assassinations.

To help unravel that web, he created computer software that uses complex AI to map connections between legitimate authorities and organized crime groups. His technique has achieved some impressive results, and he's been labelled a rising star of crime fighting. I got in touch with him to find out how his methods could be used in Britain, and how he coped with the risks involved in investigating corruption in Colombia.

VICE: What made you decide to pursue a career in fighting corruption? I'd imagine there are safer occupations in Colombia.
Eduardo Salcedo-Albarn: People usually think that corruption doesn't generate victims like assault does, but, in reality, it has terrible effects in terms of human lives. When the mayor of a town in Colombia established agreements with narco-paramilitary commanders, mass murders were executed, thousands of women were sexually enslaved, and millions were forcefully displaced. As a result of corruption, millions of humans are trafficked, displaced, murdered, and sunken into poverty. Entire animal species go extinct and natural resources are destroyed. That's why I'm convinced that, as a society, we have the moral obligation to identify and protect the victims, and to understand the domestic and transnational criminal networks that are involved.

How ingrained is corruption in Colombian society?
Unfortunately, it's highly ingrained. Since Pablo Escobar, various criminal networks have tried to infiltrate and manipulate formal institutions. The crime lords of the Cali Cartel, the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers, provided money for the campaign of President Ernesto Samper, who always denied knowing about that money, even though his campaign manager knew about it. The exact amount of money that the Cali Cartel provided is still unknown, but it was an amount between one and 10 million dollars.

Since the end of the 90s, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia sexual slavery, among other mass crimes.

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: Why Evidence of Government Corruption Was Suppressed in the Silk Road Trial

I would imagine that in a country with corruption at such a high level and single individuals responsible for thousands of murders, being an anticorruption investigator can be grim at times.
Yes. While I was working as advisor at the Presidential Anticorruption Program in Colombia we carried out several meetings with local anticorruption leaders. At that time, narco-paramilitary groups were gaining power in various regions of the country. Two local anticorruption leaders who were going to meet with us were murdered while they were heading to our meeting. During those years, narco-paramilitary structures were controlling local governments.

There have been two serious corruption scandals here in the UK recently involving the police. One involves police allegedly accepting bribes from security firms working for strip clubs and bars in London, and the other involves an investigation into whether the police covered up child abuse by MPs. Are these cases that you would likely see in Colombia, and do you think your system would be useful for shedding light on them?
The cases that you mention are the most difficult types of corruption to understand and confront, because they involve lawful agents. For obvious reasons, investigators, prosecutors, and judges don't like to tackle the participation of lawful agents like police officers, public servants, and the private sector, and that's exactly why innovative concepts, methodologies, and computational tools are urgently required. Only if those innovative approaches are applied can the most relevant nodes of those criminal networks be identified and neutralized.

Related: Watch 'Colombian Devil's Breath,' our film about scopolamine, a drug that renders a person incapable of exercising free-will.

Do you think that affluent Western countries like the UK genuinely have less corruption, or do you think it's just covered up better?
It's more sophisticated. It's less violent than the corruption in countries in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, but companies from the UK, Australia, and Canada sometimes engage in violent corruption in countries with weak institutions.

So you think the tendency for Western organizations to do their dirt overseas is underestimated?
Yes. The participation of big Western companies in corruption and transnational criminal networks is underestimated. A clear case is the role of the financial system in creating favorable conditions for massive money laundering associated with drug trafficking. For instance, HSBC directly participated in the laundering of Mexican drug trafficking money.

Eduardo and other members of the Vortex Foundation. Photo by David Sastre

What advice would you give to British law enforcement agencies when it comes to dealing with corruption?
I'd tell them to pay attention to the players operating inside lawful institutions, and to always make sure that they understand the underlying structures, no matter how complex those structures are. This is the only path to understanding the real impacts and dimensions of crime and corruption. People operating inside lawful organizations can use those organizations and institutions for achieving criminal objectives, like the cases that were recently observed in the UK. We, as a society, need a real practical commitment to dismantling criminal networks, and that commitment involves understanding and addressing the participation of agents who operate inside lawful organizations but favor criminal objectives. We hope that our tools and methodologies help to dismantle criminal networks and bring about a culture of legality.

Thank you, Eduardo.

Eduardo is currently attempting to gain funding via Kickstarter to map corruption and organized crime in more locations. You can visit his page here.

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

Cry-Baby #1: Jeanelle Callahan

Jeanelle Callahan. Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A handcuffed woman allegedly farted next to another handcuffed woman in the back of a police van.

The appropriate response: Making a joke about it.

The actual response: The non-farter allegedly attacked the farter.

Jeanelle Callahan, 48, was arrested last Thursday in Clearwater, Florida, for allegedly punching her roommate in the face. She was put into the back of a police van alongside another woman, 60-year-old Virginia Turner, who had been arrested for trespassing.

According to a police report obtained by the Smoking Gun, Callahan "became irate" when Turner farted while sitting next to her and "attempted to strike her left elbow" at Turner, before kicking her in the face. The police report states that Turner did not fight back.

In addition to the charge she was already facing for the attack on her roommate, Callahan was given an extra charge for battery.

Cry-Baby #2: Nicholas Allegretto

Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A store posted a picture online of a man whom they'd caught shoplifting.

The appropriate response: Not shoplifting if you're not comfortable with that type of exposure.

The actual response: He complained to police that his human rights were being violated.

In February, 23-year-old Nicholas Allegretto attempted to steal a magnet from Mackays, a hardware store in Cambridge, England. He was caught outside the store and made to give the magnet back. He then ran away.

After the incident, the owner of the store took a screencap of Allegretto from the security camera footage and sent it to the local newspaper to print.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, store owner Neil Mackay, said, " basically saying to him: 'We know who you are, our staff knows who you are, you're not very welcome, thank you very much indeed. We'd rather you didn't come in the store." The image was also posted on social media.

According to Mackay, Allegretto then went to the local police station to complain that his "human rights were being abused."

The Cambridge News reports that Allegretto told police he had lost his job as a roofer and his sister had been bullied at school as a result of the image's publication.

"The police decided they had enough evidence once they looked at the CCTV images to prosecute, and that's what they've done," said Mackay.

Allegretto was charged with theft. He was supposed to appear in court on Wednesday, but didn't show up. He was found guilty in his absence.

"I suppose you could say he wasn't the sharpest tool in the box," said Mackay. Which is a funny thing for him to say, because he owns a tool shop.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll right here:

Previously: Some drivers who caused a 40 minute traffic in an argument over right of way vs. a guy who attacked his girlfriend because he was jealous of a dead person.

Winner: The jealous boyfriend.

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

A screenshot from 'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,' a game set in 1984 (via MetalGearInformer.com)

For most people, especially those who didn't live it, the 1980s are probably best represented by some twisted, thorny entanglement of Scarface and Miami Vice. Like San Francisco with the free loving 60s and Nashville in the 70s with its singer-songwriter renaissance, Miami is irrevocably attached to the hedonistic and xenophobic culture that was 80s America, a flashy epicenter that conjures up images of men in suits barreling down roads in Maseratis.

The 80s were, of course, bigger than Miami; but the city's love affair with cocaine and clubs like 1235, where music made by people who just wanted to have a bit of goddamn fun blared through the night, have cemented its place as the flashy figurehead of the decade. Sure, across the sea, Margaret Thatcher was terrorizing the poor and the USSR was invading Afghanistan, resulting in the murder and displacement of countless innocents. But none of that's particularly sexy, is it? Pop culture and myth always triumph over the dull and often grim specifics of history, and Miami in the 80s is just the right combination of seediness, tragedy, intrigue, and bright lights to serve as the ethos of an era.

A screenshot from 'Grand Theft Auto: Vice City'

It's both fitting and somewhat disappointing then that video games, which have spent a good portion of their existence imitating movies and television, about the 80s often do little more than pay homage to the hedonism of that stretch of time in the same way that Michael Mann and Brian De Palma's work did. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was clearly designed to be a sandbox version of Miami Vice, just with you playing the role of a two-bit mobster instead of a detective. When it was released in 2002, the 1986-set game was praised as having one of the most vibrant and fascinating settings ever developed for a game, a sentiment that still rings true. When you weren't trying to earn enough cash to make your psychopathic mob boss happy by managing pornography studios and glam bands, you were free to roam the streets of the city, listening to Hall and Oates as you meandered in and out of night clubs and ice cream factories, perhaps even moonlighting as a taxi driver for a night (because why not?).

More nostalgia on Motherboard: These 1980s McDonald's Ads Perfectly Predicted Our Future

Vice City remains one of the best open-world games ever made, not just because the amount of freedom it offered the player at the time of the game's release was astonishing but also because, unlike most contemporary open-world games, its openness made sense thematically. It gives you a giant virtual playground, designed to let you do what you want to do when you want to do it, and that fitted with the context of the era, one that produced works of fiction obsessed with the search of happiness in a world of decadence and excess. All the same, Vice City never rises above paying tribute to its influences. It doesn't ever muse on the cyclical tragedy of Miami's drug scene or the city's racism against Haitians and Columbians. But few would have expected it to. Besides being an 80s theme park, this is Grand Theft Auto we're talking about, a series that occasionally shoots for the stars (GTA IV's plot about an immigrant selling the remnants of his soul for a stability that doesn't exist is still a master class of writing in video games) but is mostly content to roll about in the gutter and tell dick jokes.

A screenshot from 'Hotline Miami'

Dennaton's violent indie darling Hotline Miami occupies a similar space. The open-world is replaced with a series of top-down gauntlets that punish the player harshly for their mistakes, but the adoration of 80s pop culture remains apparent, with enemies wearing Don Johnson's trademark suit from Miami Vice and the protagonist's ride being a DeLorean. Like Vice City, Hotline Miami doesn't ever engage its setting in an interesting way and instead break it down into a number of stylish props; it's ultimately window dressing for a game that's primarily concerned with letting you butcher well-dressed dudes in a variety of gruesome ways.

Interestingly enough it's games set in the 80s but not in Miami that tend to grapple with the era in engaging thematic ways, often connected to warfare. The dour aesthetic of Lucas Pope's Papers, Please, which casts you as an immigration officer working at the border of a fictional country in 1982, provides insight into an aspect of the era that games just didn't tackle before: the haunting experience of refugees displaced by the likes of the Soviet-Afghan War and the Salvadoran Civil War. Papers, Please doesn't put us in their shoes, but instead as the person who decides whether they get to cross the border and begin a new life in another country or be sent back in the direction of whatever made them flee in the first place.

Related, on Noisey: Ten Outsider Hardcore Bands to Know from 1980s America

A screenshot from 'Papers, Please'

Papers, Please is a game that exists in two distinct places, acknowledging both the tense paranoia of a post-9/11 world while also reflecting on victims of war in the time of the Berlin Wall, a place far removed from 1980s America's Caligulan deluge of material excess. It's a game that embraces grey scale misery, evoking the likes of Schindler's List and Bicycle Thieves, instead of Rubik's Cubes and power ballads and in doing so allows the player to take part in a compelling, fittingly unsettling story about displacement during The Cold War.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, incomplete as it is, also forms a worthwhile take on the effects of The Cold War era, letting the player take part in both the Soviet-Afghan War and the Angolan Civil War as legendary hero Big Boss. Boss carries a Sony Walkman with him that can be used to play recoverable cassette tapes containing 1980s hits like "Take On Me" and "Gloria." These tapes acknowledge that there is a world outside of the battlefield, far away from you and your fellow soldiers, where people are snorting, fucking, and dancing their days away with wild abandon while you and your lost boys, collected from the battlefield and convinced to fight for you, engage in military operations around the world.

Yes, it's infinitely amusing to sneak into a Soviet camp and knock out each soldier while "Kids in America" blares away, but there's also tragedy embedded in that player you're carrying around. It's a reminder of the life that Boss and his fellow soldier are exiled from, both physically and psychologically, as their existence is nothing but the battlefield. It's a surprisingly poignant detail, especially since it's common knowledge that many soldiers experience difficulties reintegrating back into society after service, one that makes great use of some songs otherwise dismissed as pop garbage.

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Watch: How Pablo Escobar's Legacy of Violence Drives Today's Cartel Wars

The Phantom Pain's open, mostly empty expanses also serve as a stark contrast to the populated and vibrantly colored spaces of both Hotline Miami and Vice City. Where those games attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the time, MGS V refuses to do so, instead turning an eye to a specific series of transformative, historical events that games haven't bothered addressing before in a critical way. Admittedly, the game's handling of topics like child warfare and traumatized soldiers is half-baked at best, but The Phantom Pain's presentation of deterrence theoryanother major concern of The Cold War erais rather sublime, letting players protect their bases by building nuclear weapons at a cost to their reputation and putting a lock on in-game content.

A nearly impossible scenario in which all players dispose of their nuclear weapons unlocks a cutscene that celebrates global disarmament, but the unlikeliness of such a scenario mimics the snail-like progress nations have made in the real world. In a way that recalls the 1983 movie WarGames, The Phantom Pain's disarmament component offers a look into the paranoid me against the world logic that lies at the heart of nuclear deterrence and the cost of that logic, which is a far more effective illustration of director Hideo Kojima's point than any of the lengthy anti-deterrence monologues in either Snake Eater or Peace Walker.

A screenshot from 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture'

As games move past their need to imitate previously established mediums to a T, more of them will cover topics they haven't touched before in genuinely fascinating ways. The Chinese Room's Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, released this summer, quietly takes on nuclear war anxieties through its unsettling absence of people and touches of science fiction, and is striking for its bucolic rendering of an apocalypse. But currently, most games that take place in the 80soutside of the few exceptions abovedon't really say anything about the era that hasn't already been said in movies or television. That doesn't mean that developers necessarily lazy or unimaginative, howeverperhaps they're searching for uniquely gamey ways to express the joys and anxieties of that particular time in history that amount to more than an enjoyable if somewhat tacky memorabilia museum.

Perhaps in the future we'll have a game explicitly about the Chernobyl disaster, or one concerning the Madchester music scene, that uses interactivity in an advantageous way and focuses on topics that haven't been flogged beyond death. For now though, we have flashes of insight, even of genius in Papers, Please and Kojima's Metal Gear swan song, that hint at the promise that video games possess: as engaging pieces of entertainment that don't bow to pop culture, but instead grapple with the complexities of our past.

Follow Javy Gwaltney on Twitter.