British Columbia's Provincial AutoRoute 16, more well-known as "The Highway of Tears," is both a trucking passage and the winding graveyard of up to 42 Aboriginal women. The RCMP, the chief police force investigating the murders, believes there have been a number of serial killers operating along the highway over the past four decades. However, the Mounties put the official number of women who have been murdered along the highway at only 18, a number far lower than the estimates from Aboriginal organizations.

Running west to east through some of the most remote terrain in North America, passing by desolate First Nations reserves and logging towns, the highway has become synonymous with the endemic violence towards Indigenous women in Canada. Indigenous women are five times more likely than any other ethnicity in the country to be raped or murdered. It wasn't until after a caucasian tree planter went missing along the highway that the RCMP finally launched a full-scale investigation. The taskforce, called EPANA, has had its funding cut several times since it was founded in 2005, going from a team of 70 to just 12.

Ray Michalko, a former RCMP member who quit the force, is now looking into the disappearances and murders as a private investigator. He works directly with the families of missing or murdered Indigenous women on his own dime.

Michalko took VICE on a tour of the Highway of Tears and connected us with the families who have turned to him after sometimes decades of stalled police investigations.

Dutch and Australian police at the crash site. Image via Wikipedia

A US military forward-operating base in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Photo via Flickr user US Army

On October 3, a US military gunship launched an attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least 22 patients and staff. As you might expect, much of the international community promptly expressed outrage and multiple investigations were launched into what seemed like just the latest in a decade-long spectacle of violence unleashed on the region by the American armed forceswhether they be drones, traditional soldiers, or military contractors.

Now, after weeks of shifting explanations from American officials, the Associated Press is reporting that US special operations analysts knew exactly what the site wasand were targeting a Pakistani intelligence operative supposedly believed to be allied with the Taliban.

The AP, an outlet not known for its editorializing, described the attack in what for them counts as strong terms:

Typically, pilots flying air support missions would have maps showing protected sites such as hospitals and mosques. If commanders concluded that enemies were operating from a protected site, they would follow procedures designed to minimize civilian casualties. That would generally mean surrounding a building with troops, not blowing it to bits from the air.

What we still don't know is whether the soldiers in the field had that intel when they ordered the attack on the hospital, which analysts apparently suspected might contain a stockpile of arms. As the AP reports, Doctors Without Borders claims the plane took "five separate strafing runs over an hour" and only targeted the main facility, which contained the emergency room.

On Wednesday, even before this latest news broke, the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commissioncreated under the Geneva Conventionsaid it was ready to probe this grisly affair for war crimes, assuming US President Barack Obama and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani play ball. But the United States initially suggested it may have had troopswho were helping Afghan forces reclaim the city from the Talibanunder fire in the area. Later, General John Campbellthe top American commander in the countrysaid Afghan allies had been under attack and requested an airstrike.

The US government has not commented on the AP story so far. But on Thursday, President Obama announced he is halting the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, abandoning any pretense of ending the conflict before he returns to civilian life in 2017.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

The smartphone has completely changed the way modern relationships function. Phones facilitate far more than real-world interaction ever allowedfrom dating app geniuses who use data and game theory to hack the system to the darker side of digital love, where app addiction runs rampant and users find themselves endlessly swiping in an empty search for more.

In this episode of Love Industries, Slutever's Karley Sciortino investigates the ways that mobile apps have become an essential part of our search for the next hook-up, true love, and everything in between.

Whether it's the latest Star Wars film or the upcoming X-Files reboot, Western audiences can't seem to get enough of repackaged versions of classic pop culture. This year alone, movie theaters have shown films like Poltergeist and Vacation; there are remakes in the works onGremlins, Ghostbusters, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kidsall popular films from the 1980s and 90s.

In North Korea, the recent return of one of the most popular cartoon shows from that era hints at similar stirrings of nostalgia. In late August, on the directive of Korean leader Kim Jong-un, The Boy General aired its first new episode in almost two decadesonly now, the animation is better, the hero is all grown up, and the cartoon serves as propaganda for the state.

The Boy General tells the tale of a brave child warrior who battles marauding Japanese and Chinese invaders during the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, which ruled most of the Korean Peninsula and parts of China from the 1st century BC to the 7th century AD. The first episode, which aired in the early 80s, revolves around the young hero, who goes by the moniker "iron hammer," retrieving the sword of his slain father, so beginning his epic quest to defend the kingdom. The original series of 50 episodes aired intermittently until 1997, and was extremely popular.

"Children, adultsit's a cartoon everyone with some spare time watches," said Sharon Jang, a 23-year-old North Korean defector who fled the country in 2011. Now that she lives outside of North Korea, she's begun watching the show on YouTube, where most of the episodes can now be found.

The relaunch was so highly anticipated that many residents in the capital Pyongyang gathered in public to watch the first new episode, even in the midst of tense inter-Korean talks held to defuse recent tensions between the North and South, according to the Associated Press, which has a bureau in the North Korean capital.

Andray Abrahamian, director of research at Chosun Exchange, a nonprofit that teaches business skills to North Koreans, similarly witnessed people "transfixed" by the show on a trip to the capital last month.

"Nearly everyone was glued to the screens," Abrahamian told me, describing the scene at Munsu Water Park during an airing of one of the new episodes. "And even if they had to work, shop attendants and bar staff were trying to sneak a peek too. Some kids stopped swimming and watersliding to watch, too. It really seemed to transcend generations."

Remember that time VICE went to North Korea? Watch the VICE Guide to North Korea here.

The return of The Boy General is thanks to another young warrior of sorts: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a.k.a. Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army. In November, the Korean Central News Agency, the regime's media mouthpiece, reported that Kim visited the Scientific Educational Korea animation studio, where he announced that his people would be "glad" to see the production of another 50 episodes of the cartoon.

According to the news agency, Kim called on animators to make cartoons that would teach children about the "history, brilliant culture, and excellent traditions of the Korean nation." With its strongly nationalistic flavor, The Boy General fits the bill nicely.

Christopher Richardson, who has researched children's culture in North Korea and recently completed a doctoral thesis on the subject for the University of Sydney, said the series is ideal propaganda for the regime, since the cartoon constantly portrays the country as under threat from foreign powers, especially the United States.

"It's that constant dichotomy between the 'pure' Korean race and nation, and the toxins from outside," Richardson told me.

On MUNCHIES: The Propaganda Food of North Korea

In The Boy General, foreign invaders are sent to their maker in droves, sometimes skewered in a row, kebab-like, with swords and spears. The enemies' moral degeneracy is reinforced by their shabby dress, and is even written on their strikingly ugly facessnaggletooths and pig noses abound. The Koreans, by contrast, are generally beautiful and well dressed.

Richardson said the timing of the relaunch, several years into the young dictator's rule, recalls the flurry of new episodes released in the late 80s, when North Korea's previous leader Kim Jong-il was being groomed to take over from his father, nation founder Kim Il-sung.

After a lull in new episodes, Kim Jong-il reportedly ordered the production of five of the ten initially-planned installments to be finished in a two-month period during 1988. Kim Il-sung, grandfather of the current leader, died in 1994, leaving the leadership to Kim Jong-il.

"I think it's not a coincide that it coincided with the period of time of Kim Jong-il consolidating his influence behind the scenes in the propaganda and entertainment department, and absolutely was part of the state's drive to lay the groundwork for the first succession in North Korea," Richardson told me.

North Korea Leads the World in Human Rights, Says Report by North Korea

Richardson added that the remake is an example of the "fine balancing act" the regime is undertaking by modernizing classic nationalist narratives, as unprecedented amounts of foreign culture flood the so-called Hermit Kingdom. In recent years, North Koreans have gained previously unimaginable access to a wide array of foreign films and television shows, among other foreign products, through black markets. Popular titles are then swapped furtively among friends and neighbors using USB sticks, CDs, and DVDs.

"I think the state is paralyzed with indecision and fear, probably, and so this sort of 'old wine in new bottles' approach to cultural production is kind of the compromise position," said Richardson. "Because they know if they try to conduct a sort of final solution for foreign culture and these sort of yellow winds of capitalism, they'll lose."

But whatever the intentions of the government, for many North Koreans, the cartoon may be taken as just that: a cartoon, and one that people enjoy.

"I don't know about patriotism," said Jang. "I just watch it because it features varied, interesting characters."

Follow John Power on Twitter.

Idle No More is a protest movement dedicated to forcing the Canadian government to account for its actions in relation to First Nations. Photo via Flickr user The Indignants

Kristy Provost watched from her home near Nampa, Alberta last May as the provincial votes were tallied and the NDP swept to a historic win. At one point, as the count ticked upward and the election was not yet secure, she noticed the candidate in her riding wasjust for a momentwinning by a single vote. She leaned in and snapped a picture to fire off to her brother.

"Look," she typed out. "Your one vote could have mattered."

Provost, who is a member of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation in the Yukon, has voted every election since she was 18, but not everyone in her family does. She's questioned them on it, engaged them in conversation about why they don't vote, all the while trying to sway them to vote.

The divide in Provost's familythose who vote versus those who don'tis being seen now on a national scale as Indigenous people debate whether or not to cast a ballot in the upcoming federal election, a choice that could have major implications for a federal election that is expected to be a close one.

Provost supports voting because "when you're looking at whether or not a riding is going NDP or Conservative, that's big." Others say they won't.

"Our greatest source of power has always been and always will be in our people," wrote Pam Palmater, a Mi'kmaq woman from Eel River Bar First Nation in New Brunswick, in a post on her website Indigenous Nationhood addressing some of the pro-vote rationale swirling around the debate.

"The most exciting and transformative times in our recent history have not been tied to voting in federal elections, but were linked to our very public collective actions against Canadian processes."

Canada is actively working to undermine the collective rights of First Nations, says Russ Diabo, a Kahnawake Mohawk who wrote earlier this year about voting as "an exercise of self-termination."

It's not a question of Conservatives versus Liberals versus NDP, says Diabo, "change is going to have to come from outside the system, not within the system."

There have been no shortages of editorials this summer urging Indigenous people to rock the vote. But for many, the reasons for votingor not votinggo back centuries and extend far beyond the "Anyone but Harper" mantra.

"We're supposed to have parallel systems," Diabo told VICE. That was the point of the Two Row Wampum Treaty between the Dutch and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas) in 1613. The Two Row Wampum belt has two rows of purple beads on a background of white, one row for the ship and the Europeans it carried and the other for the canoe and the First Nations who steer it. It was meant to be a show of respect, not just a sign of peace but also an agreement to not interfere with each other's governance and way of life.

Four centuries later and Indigenous people are still reeling from the effects of continuing Canadian interference, from assimilative tactics including the residential school system to a federal government taking aim at treaties through the courts.

Diabo, in particular, resists voting now because of what he describes as the government's attempt to "change our status from being peoples to being minorities."

A rally in support of "justice for Indigenous women," one of the many issues successive federal governments have failed to act on. Photo via Flickr user Neal Jennings

For a First Nation to convert from a band under the Indian Act to a self-governing nation able to enact its own laws within its territory, the Nation must give up the possibility of having its sovereignty recognized separate from Canada.

Per Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, "the inherent right of self-government does not include a right of sovereignty in the international law sense, and will not result in sovereign independent Aboriginal nation states. On the contrary, implementation of self-government should enhance the participation of Aboriginal peoples in the Canadian federation, and ensure that Aboriginal peoples and their governments do not exist in isolation, separate and apart from the rest of Canadian society."

But Elle-Mij Tailfeathers, who agrees with Diabo that tangible change will come from outside the system (such as action taken by the Unistoten camp in BC), doesn't see voting as undermining the collective rights of a person's own nation. Tailfeathers, who lives in Vancouver and is Blackfoot from the Kanai Nation in Alberta and Smi from Norway, see it as "executing one of the tools we have in our arsenal."

"I'm not so nave as to think that if the NDP or the Liberals are in office they're going to follow through with all of their promises. I mean politics are sometimes founded on empty promises and that's what we've seen since the founding of Canada is a lot of empty promises," she told VICE. "But I do think at this particular point in time we're facing one of the most outright violent settler colonial governments we've had in a long time."

While Ernie Crey plans to vote, he says he doesn't do soor urge other First Nations to do sosimply because of the Conservative government. Crey, a member of the St:l Nation in BC, votes partly because he remembers a time when Status Indians couldn't vote and partly because he sees himself as a dual citizen, like "thousands and thousands of Canadians." Crey was 11 in 1960 when Status Indians, including his parents, were given the right to vote federally, decades after many First Nations fought and died in World War I hoping for equality when they came home.

"I feel I need to honour them," Crey says, and he doesn't think honouring them undermines sovereignty.

"It's going to take a long time for us to win recognition for Aboriginal sovereignty but I don't dwell a lot on the future," he says. "I have an eye to the future but I don't dwell on it a lot because we have so many issues as Aboriginal people to contend with everyday, whether its employment or housing or development in the community or education, health."

"We have many things to take care of and once in awhile we'll get a government in Ottawa that is prone to largely ignore our interests and, in some instances happy to be hostile towards us, and in either situation we need to rise to the challenge. We can't afford to allow ourselves to be ignored."

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.

Photo by Rebecca Smeyne. Courtesy of Counterpoint Press

When a teenage Richard Hell left Kentucky for New York Cityin 1966, he was planning to be a poet. Pretty soon, he was inventing punk rock.Playing in Television, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Hellhelped kick off the NYC CBGB scene and his tattered fashion and nihilisticlyrics inspired a visiting Malcolm McLaren to return to London and assemble the Sex Pistols.

Although punk sometimes gets a reputation foranti-intellectualism, Hell's lyrics were equal parts energetic ("love comes inspurts /

There is a lot of sexin most of your novels, and in MassivePissed Love you have an essay on the difficulties of writing about sex andanother about cunnilingus. Why is sex important to you in art?
Just because it seems to be pervasive in life. I think it'ssomething that pretty much everybody takes seriously and thinks about every day.So if you're gonna talk about what it feels like to be alive, then you are goingto be treating it.

In the essays in Massive Pissed Love, youoften doubled back on yourself and you kind of change your mind mid paragraphand it gives this feeling of listening to a really smart person articulatingtheir thoughts in real time.
I don't come in tomake a case. I come in to try to look at something and try to get a take on itand understand what's being done. So yeah, my reading of the subject will shiftaround during the course of the piece. It's not like something I consciouslyhave as a value, except in the sense that I'm talking about. I want it tohappen, I just want it to be alive. Not an argument that's canned.

It gives the effect that you can changeyour mind, or the reader can change their mind past the essay too.
Yeah, and that'ssomething I completely believe. For me, all of the opinions and assessments inthe book are provisional. They can always change. It's not about being right orwrong about something. It's about responding to it as sensitively as you can inhopes that a reader will be stimulated by it. It's not about establishing who Iam by what my opinions are. The opinion part is the least of it, it's justabout thinking about something.

I realized that my criterion was: Do I trust Pussy Riot or not? And I did.

You retired frommusic a while ago, but you came out of music retirement a little bit this yearto do a song with Pussy Riot. How was that experience?
Oh, god, it was glorious. It was one of the most ecstaticweeks in memory. It was just a total joy. I was so inspired by them and likedtheir company so much. I was really surprised when they contacted me when theysaid, "We want to meet you," and I had no idea they knew anything about me, andI didn't know what they were like, but I knew I liked everything I knew aboutthem, but I didn't know them. I had no idea what to expect. I said, "Well, whydon't you come over Wednesday night," and they all came over and we had foodand a bunch of food and whiskey, and they were just a complete pleasure. Theywere really smart, really funny, and completely down-home kind of people.

Onething that I was a little apprehensive about was if I was going to have to beminding my Ps and Qs about having the right positions on anything and notsaying anything that would be interpreted as incorrect. It was nothing remotelylike that. They were just interesting people. They're artists who have takenthis route of making their lives' work trying to find more justice for peoplewho aren't being treated fairly. But that's what it comes down to: They are terrificartists who are really great company. So it took me by surprise when they askedif I wanted to go to the studio, and they took me to the studio, and then ittook me by surprise when we got to the studio, 'cause I just figured I'd behanging and it would be fun to continue the night in the studio. Whatever theywere doing. There was a whole crew of talented people there. And the singerthey brought with them from Russia, I just adored her. Here name was Sasha. Becausenobody in Pussy Riot is really a musician, but neither was I. But theycompletely oversee the material that comes out under their name, and they were verygood at collaborating. They didn't impose themselves; they really respected andlearned from what everybody had to offer. But they were in charge of thisproduction.

But, as I said, they aren't musicians, and they had broughtwith them for this visit to New York this young singer from Russia named Sasha,and she was just a bundle of joy and it was just blissful. We stayed all nightin the studio for two nights and they asked me within 20 minutes of being inthe studio, they asked me if I would read aloud the last words of Eric Garner.I was like, "Whoooaaa," this is delicate and could really go wrong and reallycome off as being presumptuous and inappropriate to have this relativelyprivileged white guy taking on the persona of this black guy selling cigaretteson a corner who had been murdered by the police. I had to decide right on thespot. I realized that my criterion was: Do I trust Pussy Riot or not? And Idid. I trusted them that they would know what they were doing. At the sametime, it was a little dicey, 'cause I thought they don't really have this issuein Russia and they might not even know what it is making me hesitate.

Watch: Pussy Riot Goes Back to Prison:

Did you get blowback?
Not really. There is always going to be a little bit, but itwas nothing like the scale of what we were risking. But that's partly becausethe song worked. I think the song worked. You could feel that it was genuine,and I really believed it was right and good to do. I don't quite understandwhat identity politics means, but there is a limit to it, a white person hasjust as much right to be angry about that happening as a black person does. ThoughI totally respect black people's insistence on it being their issue. Still, it affectsall of us when something like that happens.

And there is adifference in sincerely trying to highlight an issue as opposed to trying totake it and turn it into your own thing, the way Kenneth Goldsmith did, who didget a lot of backlash if you followed that.
Right, I know a little bit about that. I don't really feelqualified to talk about it because I don't know it well enough. But it's likeyou're exploiting it for your own gains. As I said, I trusted Pussy Riot. Ifelt it was clear where they were coming from and it was an honest and genuineplace.

I think people knowthat Pussy Riot are sincere activists, and not just exploiting these things forsome haute couture fashion or something.
Yeah.

Well, thanks so muchfor talking with me, and I hope this book gets people reading your criticismmore.
Books like that are very hard to sell. When I told my agent Iwanted to do something like this, he advised me against this. He saidpublishers hate books like this. A collection of magazine articles. That no onebuys them and they can be really tawdry and boring. It's true, you can see itdoes seem unlikely that you gather these things written randomly over the yearsand it would turn out to be a worthwhile book, but I took pride in the things Iwrote. I really took it sincerely when I was writing it. It was all pretty muchstuff of my own volition. Sure, I was paid, but as I say, I'm allowed to writeabout what I want. It was really a pleasure to take on these assignments, andit was as interesting to me as any other kind of writing I do. I hope peoplewill give it a chance.

Lincoln Michel is the co-editor of Gigantic and the online editor of Electric Literature. His debut collection Upright Beasts was published this October by Coffee House Press. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and on Twitter.

Massive Pissed Love: Nonfiction 20012014 by Richard Hell is available in bookstores and online from Counterpoint Press.

Stephen Harper giving a victory speech on the night of the 2006 federal election. Photo via Wikipedia

2006 was a wonderful time.

It was the international year of microcredit. Cork, Ireland was named the European capital of culture. The trial of Saddam Hussein began, setting up what would later become the worst snuff film ever.

Here in Canada, the economy was growing by three percent a year, we had a comfy $15-billion budget surplus, and a young man named Stephen Harper had some pretty crazy ideas on how to govern the country.

Stevie Harper circa the January 2006 election was pretty gosh-darn tired of the governing Liberal Party and had it up to about here with the sponsorship scandal that was dragging on.

"A prime minister should not be addressing the population on this partisan issue, but rather on the concerns and challenges with which we are confronted: the health-care system, international trade, agriculture, the fiscal imbalance, safer communities, stronger families and a cleaner environment," 2006 Harper said in April of that year.

Apart from the dogwhistle of "stronger families" (read: fuck the gays), that's a pretty good list of priorities.

Cracking open a copy of the Conservatives' 2006 platform, you'd find some solid ideas: Scrap the Indian Act and give First Nations more autonomy; adopt a national plan to reduce CO2 emissions; create a dedicated transfer to the provinces to fund post-secondary education and reduce tuition fees; strengthen gun controls for at-risk weirdos and convicted criminals; and set up an aggressive transparency and accountability regime for the federal government.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that 2006 Harper's Conservative Party was full of goddang socialists.

Sure, there was some bad stuff in there, tooI can't underscore enough how much "fuck the gays" remained a subtext of the Conservative campaign until a few years laterbut you couldn't help but fall in love with the oddball.

Look at this loveable doofus.

Look at him.

Squad.

2006 Stephen Harper didn't just look weird, he said weird things, too. Like: "I think people should elect a cat person. If you elect a dog person, you elect someone who wants to be loved. If you elect a cat person, you elect someone who wants to serve."

But 2006 Stephen Harper also said enlightened things that people like me like. For example: "I'm very libertarian in the sense that I believe in small government and, as a general rule, I don't believe in imposing values upon people." (He was halfway there, anyway.)

2006 Stephen Harper expanded the Access to Information system, forced the government to publish its contracts and tenders, made it harder for lobbyists to move freely through government, and banned corporations and unions from donating to political parties.

Nowadays, Canada has moved away from the lofty bar that 2006 Stephen Harper set. The Senate is full of Conservative Party fundraisers. The Access to Information system has been intentionally bludgeoned by political operators. Government secrecy is at late-era Brezhnev levels. The government is swinging its dick around and hitting everyone in the face with it, between telling Muslim women to strip their clothes off to become a citizen to enacting an aggressive national security plan that allows cops to pave over our civil liberties with a zamboni, 2006 Stephen Harper would be appalled.

It's possible that, much like the Liberal government that 2006 Harper hated so much, a political party just shouldn't stay in power for more than five or six years. If they stay longer, a band of upstart political actors show up to sack everything, like white blood cells or a band of vandals setting fire to shit outside of Rome.

So that's why I'm endorsing 2006 Stephen Harper to clean up this crap that 2015 Stephen Harper keeps fucking up.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Screenshot via the Intercept

Watch: VICE Meets Glenn Greenwald

On Thursday, The Intercept released an extensive, eight-part report called The Drone Papers, exposing the inner workings of the Obama Administration's capture/kill drone missions between 2011 and 2013.

The report focuses on secret documents leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, who "decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the US government," according to part one of The Drone Papers.

The leaked information alleges that targeted drone strikes are often authorized by President Obama based on "unreliable intelligence," and have led to the deaths of unintended targets, some of whom have been US citizens.

"If a drone strike kills more than one person, there is no guarantee that those persons deserved their fate," the source said. "It's a phenomenal gamble."

When The Intercept reached out to the Defense Department about the documents, an official declined to comment "on the details of classified reports."

Read the series in its entirety here.

Image courtesy Daily VICE

Nick DenBoer is a visual graphics mad scientist whose most recent success, The Chickening, is a remix of The Shining in which Kubrick's canonical horror film gets turned into a poultry-themed acid trip nightmare. Anyway, given the ongoing slog of the Canadian election madness we've been reporting on here at VICE Canada, we thought it would be a great palette cleanser to have DenBoer work on some of the most memorable campaign ads (see the original Trudeau and Mulcair ads here) of the Canadian election season.

In conversation with Fucked Up singer Damian Abraham (who plays Tom Mulcair's hairy, tattooed, nipple-tweaking body double) on Daily VICE, DenBoer spoke about why he thought the ads were ripe for satire, "It's like they're spoon feeding you this bullshit... and these have been playing non-stop, getting crammed in our ears, and everyone hates them. It's like, 'Well fuck you, make something we can digest and respect instead of these, ridiculous church ads.'"

Stephen Harper

Justin Trudeau

Tom Mulcair

For more of Nick DenBoer's work, check his YouTube and Twitter.

Cannabis in Canada is still widely illegal. With a new government entering parliament in 2016, the odds of legalization, further criminalization or decriminalization of marijuana coming to fruition are still to be determined. But despite that, black market growers and grey market marijuana dispensaries are more prevalent than ever. And the sometimes dangerous, and legally dubious process of manufacturing weed oils and other concentrates is rising with growers investing tens of thousands of dollars to make sheets of potent pot wax.

With the legal fate of weed still in the balance, VICE host Damian Abraham went to BC, the Wild West of Canadian chronic, visited grows operating illegally or semi-legally, met concentrate manufacturers making large quantities of oil in spite of the law, and checked in on the exploding dispensary scene that the federal Conservative government is trying to shut down.

Here's a video of the Mayor of London crashing his huge clumsy body into the face, neck, and shoulders of a slight Japanese boy while on a trade mission to Tokyo. There's something almost soothing about a man who looks like a pale boiled egg rolled in chicken fluff just monstering a ten-year-old into some astroturf. Have you ever, really, seen someone get shoulder barged so hard that the cap they are wearing loses all anchorage in the universal laws of physics and somehow ends up around their neck? No, you haven't. Until now.

There's a lot to enjoy about the video of Boris Johnson just destroying a cheery young boy: "Come meet the prince buffoon of London!" the boy's teacher probably said to him. "Come play touch-rugby in front of photographers with this large pale man," and he would have been so full of hope, the boy, Japanese officials descending on the school a day ahead of time to do a security check, handing out oversized rugby shirts, and caps to the boys chosen to face innocently off against this colossus, the excitement building to a buzz, the boy barely sleeping the night before, tucked all up beneath a thin little blanket. I shall be so happy, tomorrow, he is thinking, to play Boris Johnson at rugby, and then six seconds into the game he is essentially assaulted by him, brutally. My favorite bit is the failed body feint: he throws his right arm to the right, which fools the nave doomed boy, and then charges left, a near-perfect feint, and thenin the cortex of Boris Johnson's mind that is marked "do crazy shit," which is especially largehe charges right again, shoulder-first into the face, neck, and shoulders of the tiny child.

I mean, first up: Is there really any need to do a body feint to beat a ten-year-old at rugby? Boris Johnson is a bear who woke up confused, shaved himself nude, and then put his head alternately in a bucket of hair and a bucket of straw. He could have six or seven Japanese ten-year-olds pulling at his legs and he'd still be able to beast them. And then you consider that this was a trade mission to celebrate Japan hosting the 2019 rugby World Cupand not, as you might rightly assume from the footage of BoJo crumpling a boy to death with his shoulder, a genuinely competitive matchand the whole pace-and-charge seems all the more baffling. Like, I would understand doing that to the boy if the boy were armed with a gun and threatening to shoot the Queen in the head unless he was given a billion pounds converted over into yen, but I don't quite see the need when he is just cheerfully trying to catch a rugby ball that you are holding as a joke.

But this is the trick with Johnson: he does all this suspending from wires and tasty tackles and public child murder to make us forget that he is a Tory, and so, by extension, essentially evil. And then if you zoom out and think about it, this whole mauling of a ten-year-old is just one big visual metaphor for the Conservatives trampling the youth of Britain.

Example: In July, Iain Duncan Smith realized child poverty figures were too high, so moved to redefine the concept of poverty based on a number of different vectors, which in a way sounds goodseparating the truly destitute from those who are just bobbing under the living wage line, as though being poor is a competition you can winbut also does slim to fuck all to attack the root cause of child poverty, which is, fundamentally, income.

Example: In the 2015 second budgetthe Conservatives, of course, doing a second, more Tory budget after being voted in completely and without the Lib Demsannounced plans to scrap the university maintenance grants from September 2016, meaning students in low- to middle-income families who were previously entitled to 3,387 a week.

Example: let's not even wade near to the quagmire that is the minimum and living wage.

On VICE Sports: How to Enjoy a Rubbish Fight

I mean, still: it is funny that Boris Johnson exploded a boy using only his shoulders and the boy died (for clarity, he didn't die: he told the press that meeting and being killed by Johnson was "enjoyable"), and the video is a cheery watch, and I don't want to be all, "Guys, you know there are people dying in the world?" about itharsh reality is the absolute boner-killer of humorbut still: this oafish bear man wants to be the leader of the Tories one day, and it's worth remembering that when he isn't dangling from ziplines or saying "wiff waff" or charging a Japanese boy's soul out of his body using force, he's sitting around thinking all of the above is OK.

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Backin August 2010, Khalik Allah, a New Yorker of Jamaican and Iranian descent,asked his father to lend him a camera so he could take some snaps of hisfriend GZA (or the Genius) of the Wu-Tang Clan. But when he was given a fully manual, analogue filmcamera, his casual interest morphed into a passion. Since then, Allah, now 30,has amassed a body of strikingly intimate photography, gleaned from prowling thestreets of New York for faces to capture.

Allah's stunning debut film, Field Niggas, isthe result of years of his immersion into the community of people who populatethe corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem. Among thispredominantly black and brown demographic are many homeless folk, alcoholics, and drug addicts whose systems are riven by the powerful synthetic weed K2.

Watch an exclusive clip from 'Field Niggas':

The film unfolds in slow motion, with sound and image deliberately out of sync to foster a hallucinatory quality. Its confrontational, compelling collage of ravaged voices and scarred, bleary-eyed faces is occasionally punctuated by the more hopeful presence of young children. Allah himself appears in the film to cajole and support his subjects. In doing so, he gives a vital platform to those widely considered the dregs of society, the people whose voices are never heard.

Field Niggas is a humane, compassionatefilm, but not without sparks of bleak humor. In this respect, it is reminiscentof Marc Singer's classic documentary Dark Days, about the communityliving underground in New York's train system. But it's also intense and harrowing, evoking a strongsense of this blighted urban pocket as an infernal prison. The titleareference to Malcolm X's 1963 Message to the Grassroots speechsuggestsmodern slavery. This connection to human bondage is intensified bythe haunting washes of chain gang music which shimmer darkly on the soundtrack.

Ispoke to Khalik Allah recently to discuss everything from the film's controversial title to the prison-industrialcomplex and his smoking habits.

VICE: Let's startwith the titleit's confrontational, like the film itself. What was your thinking behind it?
Khalik Allah: I hadthe film completed before I came up with that title, but I ran with it becauseit represented the insurgent mentality I had while making it. It sounded likesuch a rebellious title in the context of the whole industry, where people do abunch of things to get respected, like change the title of their films to getdistribution. I kind of wanted to come into the industry and get blackballedfrom the beginning, and the title Field Niggas would be a shortcut tothat. However, the opposite happened: I was accepted, and loved!

Thetitle is also an ode to my superheroes Nat Turner and Toussaint Louverture, and differentslaves that ran away. Those were always the people I looked up to as a kid.Malcolm X was the first person who brought the idea of the house negro and thefield negro to mind for me. The people that I am documenting are theunrepresented; these are the field slaves of today, and many don't realize the position they are playing inthis chess game. People don't understand how the prison complex is making so much money for the government. Thesepeople are always going to prison.

There are some officers who'll be joking with my friendspeople in the filmand a few hours later a black man can be taken to the ground by five or six officers. Khalik Allah

Unlike many documentaries, your film isn't prescriptively political in a "let's explain and solve all these problems"way. But the characters do talk about their own experiences with drugs, prison,and especially police brutality. You actually cut in the Eric Garner killing video near the end, which isshocking on its own, but even more so for how it breaks the aesthetic rules you've created for yourself.
Iwanted this to be a heartfelt, spiritual documentary rather than a politicalone. And yes, the police are everywhere in the film. It doesn't go more than 3040 seconds without you seeingthe police. Their presence represents my original concept in Field Niggas,which is to equate the characters' conditionwith slavery: In this, the police represent the overseers, not the masters.They just do what the master tells them to do. Most of them are not from areaslike Harlem, or the places they police, so to compensate for their fear, thereis tremendous aggression and intimidation of the people in the neighborhood.

Inthe film, I was trying to respect the police because that's where I am spiritually: Regardless of whatanyone looks like or does, you treat them as your brother in the world. I knowthat my perspective wasn't shared by everyone on the block. There are some officers who'll be joking with my friendspeople in the filmanda few hours later a black man can be taken to the ground by five or sixofficers. You don't knowwhat to think, and you don't knowwhat the relationship really is. But I tried to depict them in a respectable,honest way. They allowed themselves to be filmed, but they wouldn't give us any audio: That, in a way, is astatement.

Do you see your film as an act of rebellion?
Tome, as an artist, rebellion means doing what's genuine to you, regardless of whether peoplecatch on to it or not. Everything went positive with the film, but it couldhave gone negative. People could have said the film was too heavily stylized,or that I appeared in the film too much. Now, I feel like I'm being hung for the rebellious photographystyle. I'm notbeing hung by a tree with a noosemy art is being hung in galleries. In thisway, it reflects resurrection rather than crucifixion. Rather than me gettingcrucified for my rebellious photography style, I'm being resurrected, or given more life.

How does your philosophy and your religious background comeinto your work?
Igrew up in the Five-Percent nation, which practicesIslam as a way of life. We break it down as an acronym: "I Stimulate Life and Matter,"and also "I Shine Light Around Me." The idea of stimulating light and matterwas heavily in my consciousness when I was making this film. I was stimulatinglives that matter and that's whata director has to do. That's whatone of my favorite directors, Werner Herzog, used to doField Niggas wasinspired by his documentaries. I've always learned more from a director who is present in the film. He doesn't always have to be talking. Even when Spike Leewasn't acting in his filmsthroughout the 80s and 90s, he was present in all of them just through hisstyle.

In order to gain access into people's lives, and to gain permission to photograph these folks, a lot of speaking was involved. At times I was like a psychologista soundboard for people to express themselves and not be judged. Khalik Allah

You're often heard on the soundtrack, and you even shootyourself in a mirror. Can you talk about putting yourself in the film?
Puttingmyself in the film was a natural extension of what I do in my photography. I'd been photographing that neighborhood for threeyears prior to the film. In order to gain access into people's lives, and to gain permission to photographthese folks, a lot of speaking was involved. At times, I was like apsychologista soundboard for people to express themselves and not be judged.This enabled me to go so much deeper with people's lives.

The non-synchronicity between the sound and the image isreally powerful. It has a dream-like quality...
Thedecision was technical and aesthetic. I felt that the camera microphone wasn't going to capture the subtle sounds of thestreet, so I came out with a separate audio component just for that. Also, Iliked the slow-motion effect rather than real-time, and using that meant Icouldn't record the audio anyway. ThenI thought, Man, that's the perfect marriage!Non-sync would make viewers think, and give them time to actively participatein the film. In creating this stylistic break, it becomes like a novel, and youcan make your own connections. I want torespect the audience's intelligence.

I kind of wanted to come into the industry and get blackballed from the beginning, and the title Field Niggas would be a shortcut to that. Khalik Allah

Your film is intensely focused on a portion of societyblighted by troubles, but it's quitegorgeous to look at...
Thecorner of 125th and Lexington is not like Manhattan, so I knew making the filmthere would constitute a rebellion against what lots of people are doing inphotography, like shooting pretty women and landscapes. I wanted everything Idid to be antonyms of beauty, asfar as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The average photographer that's shooting beautiful women, well, sometimes youcan't differentiate if it's a great photographer or if the subject isbeautiful, you know?

It's allset at night, and almost all outdoors, apart from one subway sequence, whichmade me think of the photographer Bruce Davidson, and his incredible Subway series.Is he an influence?
Yeah,he is a great inspiration. I love his work because he went against the grainwhen he started shooting in color, and it wasn't really popular to shoot do that. I didn't want to use any synthetic or incandescentlighting, because that's whathe used in Subway to compensate for not having a flash. To compensate, I got a verywide aperture lens, so it was fast, and let a lot of light in from streetlampsand bodegas.

Watch: The Struggles of One Black Trans Man:

At one point in the film, you say that you smoke a lot ofweed during the editing process. Does it help you get to a more creative place?
Yeah,it helps me to not take things too seriously. I was in Jamaica working on newmaterial recently. The first few days I was under a lot of pressure. I wasworking with an agency for the first time after having always worked on my own.I was smoking so much weed and hash out there and it's so sunny, what I was shooting got overexposed.I didn't even balance the meter. Ijust shot completely blown out. The new film is about spirituality, and I had aman say a prayer for me. That's whenI shifted mentally, and I got more comfortable, and I said, "This is me. I'm breaking rules now, I'm in my zone and I can continue to shoot in myown style." Marijuana definitely helps with that. Also any other psychedelics,LSD, DMT, ayahuasca: Those things I recommend to all of humanity.

Even though the film is all about faces, you get such astrong sense of place. Did you set out to make a lasting document of thatarea?
BeforeI took the film to festivals, it was available for a while for free on YouTube.Someone left a comment underneath calling it "a future artifact." I started thinking about howevery personevery victim of drugsin this neighborhood is about to be eclipsedby the big wave of gentrification that's coming. You can see the plans, especially at Lenox Avenue. They are tearingdown smaller buildings, and that whole area is going to be made "safe." Soyeah, it is a future artifact.

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Field Niggas opens at Independent Filmmaker Project in Brooklyn on Friday, October 16.

Island On My Mind paints such a refreshing staging of Cuba that it makes us feel like no politics, romanticizing or simple mindlessness went into its construction. I say refreshing because most books about Cuba today seem made only to perpetuate the visual clichs of old cars and decaying architecture and while some find this romantic gaze compelling, I find this approach to be ultimately reductive and unproductive. I prefer the intelligence and clarity bound in this book.

Irina Rozovsky's pictures make a nice whole out of this island. In these small phrases of pictures an interesting normality hovers allowing us to feel how some life there could be comprehended. Irina's focus is trained on the small moments that make up the larger fabric of culture and its darker side. We are indeed, shown the bones of Cuba's organism for better or for worse.

The sea is so beautifully turned into both, pleasure and painful longing that it's not surprising to see Irina have the poet Reinaldo Arenas, who embodied those two poles of feelings for this island, open the book.

And then, at last, they saw the country and the countercountrybecause every country, like all thing in this world, has its contrary. -Reinaldo Arenas

Abelardo Morell

Irina Rozovsky is a Boston-based photographer who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She will be having a signing for her second monograph, Island in my Mind at ICP in New York City tomorrow evening. You can follow her work here. See more of her photos below.

Abelardo Morell is a renowned Boston-based photographer known for his use of camera obscura and other innovative techniques in his practice.

Photo via Flickr user Diana Robinson

For years, one of the main issues facing the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent oversight agency of the New York Police Department, was that it had virtually no evidence. Citizens would accuse cops of doing something bad, but would almost never have anything approaching prooflegally, at least, "He did this!" or, "You gotta believe me!" wasn't a significant enough reason for the Board to investigate.

So officers walked off scot-free in an overwhelming majority of the cases. Without the goods to make its case, the subpoena-wielding agency was left powerless, and gained a reputation around town for being something of a joke.

Thanks to the smartphone, that seems to be changing.

On Wednesday, the CCRB released a report that heralded videos as the main reason September 2015 saw the most substantiated claims29 percent of those investigatedmade against the NYPD in the oversight agency's 22-year history. In other words, over a quarter of civilians' complaints led to solid proof that a police officer committed misconduct according to a preponderence of the evidence.

The number of substantiated claims has risen sharply in recent years, after only 8 percent were substantiated in 2011. September was also the sixth straight month that the rate of claims being legitimated was above 20 percent; in fact, for cases that involved video in September, 51 percent lead to substantiation, as opposed to 22 percent for those withouta drastic departure from the past.

"We live in an age where video evidence is obtained through various surveillance sources and bystanders who record police-civilian encounters," CCRB Executive Director Mina Malik said in a statement. "The availability of video evidence is key in some cases and is driving the current increase in substantiations."

Of course, just as video evidence can help victims of brutality pursue justice, it can bail out cops who claim they're being smeared. As Malik put it, "This evidence has proven to be extremely useful in resolving cases for both officers and civilians alike."

Police Commissioner William Bratton claims to be on board with videos helping to keep cops and citizens accountable. As Bratton said in an interview on MSNBC Monday, "I think that's a positive, because it will in fact, hopefully, control police behavior when inappropriate, but also will control public behavior, when the public understands that their acts of stupidity, their acts of confrontation, their acts of brutality are also being caught on tape."

In one of his first addresses to the Department last year as the city's top cop, Bratton made it clear that he'd go after what he described as "the brutal, the corrupt, the racist, the incompetent" officers under his watch. Perhaps that was a nod to guys like Daniel Pantaleo, the cop behind the filmed death of Eric Garner on Staten Island in July 2014. Pantaleo had been sued multiple times in the past for allegedly infringing upon the rights of black men. But he avoided indictment under a grand jury in the Garner case despite the video evidencea reminder that smartphones are no panacea for what ails policing in America.

Still, it seems like all these questionable encounters being filmed by the public is paying dividends in New York.

After rejecting CCRB guidance at roughly the same rate as his predecessor, Ray Kelly, early in his term, Bratton has played nicer with the agency in recent months, working with the review board to discipline more offers, albeit with generally lenient punishments.

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

The apparent shift in thinking at 1 Police Plaza came full circle last month with the James Blake incident. A video that went viral showed an undercover officer, James Frascatore, pile-driving the famous former tennis player outside of his hotel before questioning. It was a sting gone terribly wrong, and Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio promptly issued apologies on the city's behalf. "This shouldn't have happened and he shouldn't have been treated that way," Bratton later told local broadcaster NY-1. (The officer was subsequently placed on desk duty.)

Bratton has also begun to outfit cops in some precincts with body cameras as part of a court-ordered pilot program. And earlier this month, the NYPD announced a new use of force policy that will require officers record every instance and interaction they have with a citizen. This change comes in addition to stop-and-frisk receipts that theoretically could discourage cops from harassing people of color.

Overall, the CCRB has seen claims significantly drop over the last two years, signaling either a citizenry that is more targeted in its beefsor a Department that is starting to get its shit together.

Critics will continue to bemoan the questionable relationship between the CCRB chair, Richard Emery, and Bratton, as well as the fact that two major vacancies on the Board limit its ability to function. But it's safe to say that there is now some kind of correlation between New Yorkers' smartphone habits and routine policing. That might be old news to Copwatch chapters spread across the five boroughs, but to the average citizen, it represents a welcome change.

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A 42-year-old woman from Cessnock, New South Wales, Australia, has been charged with repeatedly poisoning her nine-year-old daughter with injections of urine.

The case started in March when the girl, who suffers from a raregenetic disorder, was hospitalized with life-threatening renal failure.Tended court papers also show she was suffering from asevere rash.

Medical staff say the girl was at the hospital on a regular basis. She'd been sick for years and had even become a representative forchildren's health charities. At one point she even danced at a Sydney OperaHouse fundraising event.

But on March 11 doctors noticed yeast growing in anintravenous line running to the girl's jugular. Medical staff agreed this wasimpossible without tampering and the Newcastle Child Abuse Squad was called. Syringes,laxatives, and urine samples were later found in the mother's handbag, leading policeto a grim trail of evidence stretching back to 2008.

It's now alleged that the mother, whose name is being withheld, injected her daughter with urine and regularly fed herlaxativessomething which could have caused her rash. There is also evidence that shetampered with the girl's stool samples.

The case was adjourned on Wednesday and set to resume December 2, but lastnight Australian news program 7:30 revealed that the girl's motherwas an avid blogger who regularly wrote about her daughter's health. "Iwanted him to treat her," she wrote in a blog that's since beenremoved. "Do something. Anything. She was in pain and I could see she wasbecoming unwell."

The mother had also been an ambassador for several children'shealth charities.

7:30 noted that Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) is considered a possible cause for the mother's actions. MSBP describes people who deliberately hurt others forattention. The name came from an 18th century German officer, Baron von Munchausen, who was known for telling thrilling, yet unlikely stories.

One study in the US estimated 600 cases of MSBPoccurred in 1996 alone. The numbers in Australia seem much lower, with another study estimating an annual rate of between 15.2 and 24.5 cases. Numerous allegationsare proven false in both countries every year.

In a similar case last year, a 22-year-old Queensland womanreceived a two-year jail sentence after feeding her daughter chemo drugs thatshe'd bought online. The four-year-old experienced significant health effects,including bone marrow failure, while her mom gained 8,000 followers on Facebookand received around $500 in donations.

Yet in both cases friends and family stood by theperpetrator. As a friend of the alleged mother in Cessnock told 7:30, "In a lot of cases of parents thatare accused, there is another explanation and there are other sides to thestory."

This is true and it's one of the reasons the medicalcommunity has recently turned away from the term MSBP. Since 2002, it's been officiallyreferred to as Fabricated or InducedIllness by Carers. This term omits the word "syndrome," emphasizing that it's characterized by behavior and is not a syndrome of itsown.

In Cessnock, the accused mother has been released on bail, despiteconcerns that she might tamper with witnesses or try to contact her daughter. She wasgranted bail on the condition that she doesn't have any contact with the JohnHunter Hospital in Newcastle or Westmead hospital in Sydney. She faces amaximum jail sentence of ten years.

Police say her daughter was removed from her care in Marchand has since recovered.

Follow Julian on Twitter.

The author, between Kelly Bishop and Lauren Graham on the set of 'Gilmore Girls.' All photos courtesy of the author

During my first year in the drama program at a performing arts high school in suburban Toronto, I was cast as one of three girls playing Alcestis. Our teacher, the director, had chosen to have the actors who played the title role also play the part of Death.

"When I awake in the body of Alcestis," I would say as Death, "she dies," and then I'd pull back the hood of my black cloak and stand up as the self-sacrificing Queen in Euripedes's 2,500-year-old play.

In the last weeks of rehearsal, I became pale and tired and too thin. Just before the show, I woke up with burst blood vessels in my eyes, which, within hours, had drained to become deep bruises. I looked like I'd been punched.

Like many warnings, all these signs were explained away. The symptoms temporarily got better; unknowingly, I got worse. I performed in every show, but shortly after the last one I finally had blood tests done and, within days, was admitted to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. After countless tests and scans and examinations, I was diagnosed with Acute Myleogenous Leukemia mixed with something called "Natural Killer," a type of white blood cell that attacks naturally occurring cancerous cells in the body. At that time, I was told that six people in the world had had NK-cell leukemia, and that none of them had survived. My particular combination had never been seen before.

During the meeting where my treatment protocol was outlined, I was told that I would not likely leave the hospital for at least six months. I thought, OK, six months, fine. After that, I'll be fine. I convinced myself that my only problem was time.

Though I never allowed myself to fear death, that line ran through my head: "When I awake in the body of Alcestis, she dies." I was the girl, and I was death; both elements were within me.

Stars Hollow, the fictional town in 'Gilmore Girls'

I didn't find out until after I already loved Gilmore Girls that the pilot was shot in same town as my high school. One of my nurses, Gurjit, loved the show too, and she'd try to schedule her shifts so that she could watch snippets of it with me. If I had a blood transfusion or a sac of chemo to hang on my IV, she could stay a little longer. One Thursday evening, when I had a nosebleed so intense I couldn't tilt my head upwards at the risk of choking on blood, my main frustration was being unable to look up to see the television, which hung from the hospital ceiling.

The only other teenage girl on the ward with me at that time, Jessica, had just returned from a trip to Greece, which she told me had been her "wish." This was the first time I heard about Make-a-Wish, an international charity that grants children living with life-threatening illnesses the chance to do just that: make a wish. Any kind of wish implies hope, but for sick children, the hopefulness of a wish is especially powerful, since it gives them something tangible to look forward to. More importantly, a wish projects a life beyond sickness, which isn't easy when you're in the middle of it all, and often isn't even possible, depending on the diagnosis.

The appeal of Gilmore Girls was its normality: a girl my age going to school, having friends, eating food, being not-sick.

My parents kept an extremely detailed notebook in which they documented the drugs I was given, side effects cautioned and experienced, vital signs, weight, every scan I had, blood test results, and all the rest. In one of the books, I found this reference: Wednesday, August 21, 2002, 5:10 PM. Jodie came to talk to Harriet about WISHES.

Though it's not noted in the books, I remember knowing right away that I wanted to choose a wish strategicallysomething I couldn't do or obtain on my own, with money alone, and that would give me an experience as well as a trip. My first idea was to go to the Oscars, but that wasn't possible for various logistical reasons. It didn't take long until I decided: My wish was to meet the Gilmore Girls.

At first, the aspirational elements of the show were all about wit, smarts, sass, feminism, culture, and community. As my world changed, the aspiration became, more simply, normality: a girl my age going to school, having friends, eating food, being not-sick.

My wish was granted 14 months after that first meeting with Jodie. I only realized later that it must have taken so long because they weren't sure that I'd survive. I had to wait until after my treatment was finished, my permanent IV removed, and I was feeling well enough to travel. By October 2003, more than a year after I was first admitted to the hospital, I was in remission; my hair had started to grow back, and I had begun 11th grade.

My parents and I were flown out to LA (as a surprise, the airline upgraded me to first class) and the three of us were put up in a fancy hotel for a week. I had my own room, where no nurses would come to check my temperature or adjust my medications in the nightsomething I hadn't had in over a year.

On the day I was set to go to the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank, there was a stretch limo waiting for us outside the hotel, the script for the day on the back seat. The episode was called "Die Jerk," and the first line was Richard telling Lorelai that she should eat more broccoli: "Staves off the cancer," he says. This was back in 2003, remember: Richard and Emily get wireless internet installed ("Emily, I'm going to google you!" Richard says, walking around the living room holding a laptop) and at one point, Rory says: "It's Avril Lavigne's world, and we're just living in it."

The limo glided through security and pulled up in one of the big lots. My parents and I were taken inside, and I was swept away to hair and make-up, given a blazer to put over my t-shirt, and placed on set in the Yale Daily News offices. I wasn't just meeting the Gilmore Girls; I was going to be in the Gilmore Girls.

The scene they were filming that day was on the Yale Campus, with Rory and Doyle, the newspaper editor, where Rory finds out that perhaps she doesn't quite have the chops for the whole writing thing. Now that I'm a writer myself, I can attest that this is a constant, humming fear, whether or not you have an editor as hard-lined as Doyle.

"Is this some kind of hazing?" Rory asks as Doyle takes his red pen to her page. "The only parts you haven't cut are the ones you haven't read yet."

As the character of "newspaper office worker," I was instructed to look through photo slides and sign for a delivery. The director addressed me by name and made sure I was in the center of the frame. In between takes, the guy who delivered the package I had to sign for said to me, half jealous, half flirting, "You're clearly the favoriteI bet you're going places."

The best thing was that this guy didn't know that I was a wish-kid. I wasn't just normal, something I hadn't been in nearly two years; I was the most special person in the room.

Scott Patterson, the actor who played Luke, came in that day. He wasn't shooting; he showed up just to give me a tour of the outdoor set in his BMW. He took me into Doose's Market, Luke's Diner, and Lorelai and Rory's house, carefully coordinating photo opportunities all the while. "Let's pretend you work in the diner," he said, "and you can be serving me coffee!" We talked about sports and summer and other completely normal things. Again, my illnessthe thing that had defined my life for so longwas never mentioned.

Because I was clearly having the time of my life, I was invited back to the set the following day. I was given a tour of the indoor studio by one of the costume directors, who crocheted as she walked, and introduced me to everyone: Alexis Bledel and I talked about school and books; Edward Hermann and I talked of Southern Ontario, where I grew up and where he had a cottage; Kelly Bishop said I had the posture of a ballerina, and told me how she used to be a dancer; and Lauren Graham and I talked about movies and Meryl Streep. Everyone on the set made me feel not just like a part of the cast, but like a member of the family.

Meeting these people, who I had watched on TV for so long, I expected to feel star-struck. But instead, I felt totally comfortable. Though the circumstances were definitely unusual, the whole thing felt... normal? We drank coffee, ate snacks, did crossword puzzles; we just hung out together. I'd somehow survived a rare and aggressive form of cancer, and these people were international celebritiesbut there, on the set, we were all just human beings relating to each other in these basic, almost mundane ways.

The author's starring moment in the episode 'Die Jerk'

Months later, when "my" episode aired, a friend organized a viewing party at her house. We counted that I had 18.5 seconds of screen-time, which seemed practically infinite. Had Andy Warhol said that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, I wondered, or 15 seconds? Had I surpassed my time frame, or did I still have 881.5 seconds to go? My scene was over by the first commercial break, which meant we could all calm down and concentrate for the second half.

After the episode was over, there was a knock at the door. I assumed it was a parent coming to fetch one of us, but it was my wish-granter, wearing a ball gown and holding an Oscar engraved with my name: Harriet, winner of best extra.

To make a donation to your local Make-a-Wish chapter, visit their website.

Follow Harriet Alida Lye on Twitter.

A screenshot of Duggan's friends Kurtis Henville and Marcus Knox-Hooke taken from 'The Hard Stop'

On August 4, 2011, 29-year-old father-of-six Mark Duggan was shot twice and killed in Tottenham, London. Eleven specialist firearms officers had stopped the minicab he was traveling in, suspecting that he was in possession of an illegal firearm.

No gun was found on him, but a handgun was discovered hidden in a sock on grassland roughly 14 feet from his body. A peaceful demonstration outside Tottenham police station a few days after the shooting was superseded by the most destructive riots in the UK for years, which spread from London to a host of major cities. The unrest was described by Prime Minister David Cameron as "criminality, pure and simple."

Some 29 months later, on January 8, 2014, a jury at the Royal Courts of Justice came to the conclusion, by a majority of eight to two, that Duggan was lawfully killed, even though there were no prints or DNA from Duggan on the gun. In March of 2015, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) released a 499-page report into his death that cleared the police of wrongdoing. None of this is especially surprising: the number of deaths in police custody since 1990 is over 1,500, yet there has never been a conviction of a police officer for an unlawful killing. Even though the chief of the Met police has recently admitted that the force may be institutionally racist, and the force has made further nods to its own failings (as in the case of death of Cherry Groce in 1985 which sparked the Brixton riots of 1985), genuine justice appears frustratingly elusive.

Directed by George Amponsah, new documentary The Hard Stop is named after the aggressive tactical maneuver deployed by police in pursuit of Duggan. The term also suggests the cataclysmic effect that the incident had on the friends and family of the slain man. Over the course of this moving film, Amponsah closely follows the fortunes of Kurtis Henville and Marcus Knox-Hooke, two of Duggan's best friendsand fellow residents of Broadwater Farm, where Duggan grew upin the years following his death. Marcus spent time in jail after being charged with instigating the unrest, while Kurtis struggled to balance his family life with a dispiriting job search, at one point decamping to Norwich because it was the only place he could secure work.

Amponsah wisely eschews sensationalism in favor of a nuanced approach, digging into the men's personal stories and displaying great sensitivity as an unobtrusive interviewer. He underscores their testimony by judiciously interweaving archive footage (like the Broadwater Farm disturbances of 1985) and dismaying statistics about historical police brutality in the UK. As the film unfolds, it becomes increasingly, implacably haunted by the ghosts of history. I recently sat down with the film's director and its two starsDuggan's friendsfor a wide-ranging discussion.

VICE: How did the film come about?
George Amponsah (GA): I was at a birthday party in Tottenham in 2012, where I met a local community leader. We started talking about the riots, and she said it was still fresh in people's minds. I wanted to do a film about people who were at the epicenter of what happened, and she connected me with Marcus and Kurtis. I recognized something honest about them, so I followed my instincts. If you can tell something about a person by the company they keep, then I thought: "Here is a chance to find out who Mark Duggan was, find out about the humanity behind that picture that was being splashed all over the newspapers, of the scary gangster." Three years later, here we are.

Did you see it as a good opportunity to reframe the media's portrayal of Mark? That must have really hurt you.
Kurtis Henville (KH): Yeah. When he first got shot, the media reported that he was a gangster, that he was a shooter. I knew my friend. He was confident, he was quite shy, he loved ladies, and he loved his kids. That isn't a man who is just going to wake up one day and just throw his life away.

Looking back to 2011, why do you think the unrest spread so much?
Marcus Knox-Hooke (MKH): Anger at the police. The initial people that came out to fight were youth from every area. Everyone could relate with what happened to Mark, you understand me? Someone gets killed, you try to get justice, and justice don't happen. Years later, someone else gets killed and it's the same thing, going on and on. I've witnessed this from when I was a baby, in 1985, from Cynthia Jarrett, Joy Gardner... and this is in my area. Mark, he probably won't be the last. The next youth's probably gonna be one of our kids, and I promise you... anyway... I don't even know... look at it. "We're a gang and you're a gang." It's not, "You're black and we're white." The police shot a white man the other day in Enfield.

GA: Marcus has got a point, but in the Enfield case we'll have to find out from the inquest if he did have a gun and if he was a genuine threat. But we know that Mark definitely did not have a gun in his hand. So why did the officer feel the need to take the fatal shot? Why did he feel the need to shoot him twice? This is what we feel when we look at the statistics, which are disproportionate. How many of those victims are black? What is it that means black people across the world seem to find themselves disproportionately the victims of lethal force at the hands of police?

I was struck by how nuanced the film is. You're not trying to condone the worst excesses of the riots, but neither is it a finger at the powers that be.
GA: Overall it's not an anti-establishment film. In some sense the film is also directed at those who might be in danger of being involved in criminality or gangs, or become the victims of police shootings, or each other. They'll listen to people who've been there, done that, who can relate to what they've gone through. It's very easy for someone to stand outside No. 10 Downing Street and preach, but for youngsters coming from a certain backgroundwhether it's Broadwater Farm or somewhere elsethey're going to be looking to that person and saying: "You don't know where I'm coming fromwhy should I listen to you?" Also, one of the central messages of the film is: "Change yourself, do something."

WATCH: How one small protest turned into a national crisis

MKH: We need to come up with solutions for our kids to be able to walk down the streets; stop sitting around and talking about the government oppressing us. We know that the government make it hard for us. This film, and the reaction to it so far, just shows me that if you put your mind to something, and you're sincere about it, then you'll get good results. If you at look at people across the worldUsain Bolt, 50 Cent, Jay Zthey're doing stuff that they love, and that's their success. 'Nuff of these kids, they don't recognize their potential and talents because they're so drowned out by struggle. I'm in the process of setting up my own foundation, Remarkable Start, based in Tottenham.

KH: At the end of the day, sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. You've got to love yourself, have your own ambition, your own drive. You've got to have a vision. If you believe in yourself, you're going places. But if you don't believe in yourself, no one's going to believe in you.

And the film is not fatalisticMarcus meets with a policeman to discuss community relations. Do you have hope for the future?
GA: Well, police and key members of the community need to come together to have a dialogue about how to fix this problem in certain sections of the community, because there seems to be a breakdown in that relationship. The police are there to protect and serve, so it's as important for them as it is for the community to fix that relationship, or else events like 2011 will happen again.

The Hard Stop screens at the BFI London Film Festival on October 17 and 18.

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