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Photos of First-Time Voters at Myanmar's Historic Election

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"We must cautiously walk forward," were Aung San Suu Kyi's words to supporters as they gathered outside the National League for Democracy (NLD) headquarters in Yangon, the day after Myanmar's historic election vote. It was the first free election since the nominally civilian government was introduced in 2011, ending nearly 50 years of military rule. "Real victory must be for the country, not for a group or individuals," she said.

All eyes have been on whether or not NLD leader Suu Kyi can mark decades of democratic protest with a remarkable election victory against the ruling party, Union of Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Early indications suggest that the NLD has indeed won a parliamentary majority, although final official results will not be known for days.

Suu Kyi has long represented a symbol of hope for the country, commanding by force of will an extraordinary amount of power as leader of the opposition. Although she is barred from becoming president after this election (due to her children being foreign nationals), she has vowed to lead the government anyway, positioning herself "above the president."

The voting on Sunday, monitored by local and international observers, appeared to reflect a clear and peaceful process. Across polling stations in central Yangon, a diverse and multiethnic population came out to cast their ballots, patiently queuing at polling stations from 6 AM onwards. There was a sense of concealed excitement, with people showing a desire to be photographed but often hesitant in revealing their face. One voter exclaimed that he was excited and hopeful of change, but also that he should "just keep quiet, must keep quiet."

As Aung San Suu Kyi kissed her ballot paper before placing it into the box, it was clear that emotion was the driving force behind many people's votes. Over the course of the campaign, little policy has been announced by the party. Instead, it is the NLD's simple message of change that has clearly struck at the hearts of the majority.

"Everyone knows that our people need change. I need change, everyone needs change, so I voted NLD," said first-time voter Winnie Ja, 28. She claimed that her choice was one of concern for the country, but specifically for women and the younger generations in Myanmar, who she claims are often forgotten and disregarded by the current government.

READ ON VICE NEWS: How Myanmar's Landmark Election Could Influence One of Its Most Lucrative, and Shady, Industries

Excitement at the prospect of change comes hand in hand with both caution and unease. Even after the election results are officially announced, the USDP will remain in power over the coming months, which will mean a period of delicate negotiations between elected parties and the army until the end of March, 2016.

As Aung San Suu Kyi stated, it is too early to celebrate a victory yet. There is no precedent for what will happen next for Myanmar, and this election was only the start of a move towards democracy. The NLD's message of change is one that has inspired the nation as they hopefully take a defining step in their country's reform process.

See photos of some of the first-time voters below.


Meet One of the Teens Suing the Federal Government Over Global Warming

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On Monday, the World Meteorological Organization released yet more bad news for the planet: The amount of carbon in the atmosphere has surpassed the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million. It's just another sign that the Earth's climate is changing, with no end in sight, at least judging from the pessimism surrounding the upcoming Paris climate summit.

It's easy to feel hopeless, especially if you're young—you don't have any power to change the world's energy policies, yet you'll be screwed when the current crop of leaders die off and leave you with an increasingly uninhabitable planet. How are the kids supposed to fight back? The Portland-based activist organization Our Children's Trust has one answer: They should sue the government.

The group has been putting together lawsuits and petitions against multiple US governmental bodies, the Associated Press reported earlier this month; a lawsuit against the feds was filed in August and claims "that approval of fossil fuel development has violated the fundamental right of citizens to be free from government actions that harm life, liberty and property," according to the AP. A representative from Our Children's Trust told VICE their plaintiffs are all between eight and 19, making them uniquely positioned to have their lives negatively affected by actions that lead to a hotter planet.

It might seem like a quixotic battle, but with Congress gridlocked and seemingly unable or unwilling to pass legislation related to climate change, working the courts might not be a bad option, even if the Supreme Court hasn't been too friendly to environmentalist causes lately.

One of the young plaintiffs in the federal case is Victoria Barrett, a 16-year-old from White Plains, New York, who attends high school in Manhattan. VICE recently caught up with her to find out what makes her feel so strongly about this cause, and what she hopes will happen if she wins.

Check out one of our documentaries on global warming:

VICE also talked to President Obama about global warming.

VICE: What got you into this cause?
Victoria Barrett: My grandparents live . They live really close to the beach, and in developing communities like ours—and developing countries—no one is really aware of how much climate change is a factor in the beaches getting closer to the houses. They've been building walls out of sand. My grandma's property has been flooded into a little bit because of rising sea levels. Rivers overflow more.

Have you been there and seen it?
Last time I went down there was this new addition—a rock wall. And I was like, "Whoa what's this?" My mom who grew up there said the sea has gotten so much closer to the houses than it was when she was growing up.

What do you want to do when you're older?
I definitely want to do something in international relations—be in the foreign service or something like that, and have something to do with building policy. I have a feeling that when I'm older, considering the rapid rate at which climate change is affecting everyone, it's going to be a huge part of what I'm doing and what I want to do.

Where do you want to be?
I want to continue living in New York City, in Manhattan, which is an island. And as sea levels are starting to rise, and natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy are starting to happen closer to home, I'm definitely starting to see how it can affect my future, personally.

What would you say to someone like Donald Trump who wants to be president, but doesn't believe in global warming?
I would probably say to you that I understand your experience—being a person living on Earth for a while, maybe you don't see climate change as a reality, but for someone my age, climate change is a reality. It's a reality that's already having an impact on my life. If they really care about, not just the current happenings in our country, but posterity, they would do something.

"Because the fact of the matter is: Where we are now, we don't need individual change. We need policy change."

How'd you get involved with Our Children's Trust?
In my freshman year of high school, I started working with this organization called Global Kids to mandate climate education in New York City public schools K-12, and then through that, I got connected with the Alliance for Climate Education, which is an organization was partnering on the bill, and my mentors in the two organizations thought that I would be a good addition, and have a good perspective to give to the Our Children's Trust lawsuit.

So why file a lawsuit?
I've always really liked this question because it's a realization I came to quite recently: As a teenager people want to listen to me, and I have a bunch of ideas about environmentalism and climate change. I feel like maybe my generation of activists can take it from "Reusing water bottles!" "Public transportation!" and a lot of those things often labeled as treehugger-type activities, to big policy changes. Because the fact of the matter is: Where we are now, we don't need individual change. We need policy change. The US is an example in these types of things, and being a developed country, we're one of the biggest contributors to CO2 in the environment. Developing countries like Honduras are being affected by it.

Do you get tired of hearing about reusable bottles and public transportation?
It was definitely something where—when I was maybe in my freshman year with all my climate change activism—I would be like, "Oh that's really great!" And it is. I'm glad people care enough to do that. And it would have been great like ten years ago, but we're at this point where we need big change now.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: New York City Officials Just Busted a Massive Heating Oil Fraud Scheme

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Photo of oil trucks via Flickr user Ray Forster

Read: Drug Dealers and Users Just Got Swindled Out of $12 Million by the Internet's Biggest Illegal Marketplace

After two years of working informants, recording on wiretaps, and conducting old-school surveillance, New York City authorities dropped 11 indictments on nine Brooklyn and Bronx fuel oil companies Tuesday, charging them with scheming to defraud and racketeering. 44 people were arrested, and more charges are expected in what's believed to be a decades-long con, as the New York Times reports.

Low-level employees like truck-drivers and management alike are accused of shortchanging customers—citizens and official organizations like police precincts and Rikers Island—up to 10 percent of the oil they thought they were getting, costing them $18 million per year.

A source told DNAInfo on Tuesday that the companies' primary scheme was "overcharging by the millions" and that "they were practically manufacturing money" last winter, due to the extreme cold.

As if living in New York weren't humiliatingly expensive enough already.

What Happened When I Tried to Keep Up With One of Toronto's Most Aggressive Bike Couriers

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Allan Shaw. Photos by the author

"Brutal. Fucking brutal, man."

It's the third time today that a driver has taken the liberty of fully sticking his head out of his window to verbally berate me.

The reason why the driver's losing his shit is understandable: I unintentionally cut him off while very intentionally blowing through a red light in the middle of rush hour in downtown Toronto. I'm attempting to keep up with Allan Shaw, a Scottish expat who, in the lore of the local bicycle messenger's community, is one of the fastest riders.

I met Shaw that morning, just three hours before nearly getting run over by that very angry driver. He's crossed the continent from New York to Vancouver by bike, and has been a bike messenger in Mexico City, Vancouver, and now Toronto. At 26 years old, He's got the calves to show for it, along with a gnarly moustache and tattooed legs that give him the kind of ragged look that has become a bike courier stereotype.

I'm following Shaw around Toronto because I wanted to figure out whether everything I've heard about bike messengers is just an exaggeration or the real deal. Most of what I've learned comes from bragging friends, the rest of it from the film Premium Rush, a slightly cheesy flick where Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a cute but hardcore NYC bike messenger. And then there are always the rumours about crazy messengers who'll smash a driver's side mirror if they get cut off. For the record, I definitely didn't witness any of that.

Cycling in Toronto is dangerous as it gets in North America: While there are there are bike lanes—some of which are even separated—the bike lane network itself is entirely patchy. Despite a growing number of cyclists, they still don't have the critical mass to be on the forefront of a driver's mind, like in some European cities. Streetcar tracks are a built-in booby trap, and cycling in the winter is reserved for those with nerves of solid ice. Despite that, bike messengers are pushing the limits on how fast you can ride on Toronto's unfriendly streets. The danger, speed, and urgency gives the job a sense of romanticism that doesn't exist for your average UPS driver.

From the moment I met Shaw, I'm told that bike messengers don't do this for the money. (Depending on whether they're getting paid hourly or by the delivery, their rates can range from $12-$17 an hour.) Instead, they do it because they love biking in all its various permutations. One courier I met was into mountain biking. Some, like Shaw, are into long distance riding. Curiously, some others are into bike polo, a brutal sport that's basically regular polo on bikes.

Two hours into following him around Toronto, Shaw's living up to the hype. He leads me in between idling cars, through tiny gaps within crowds of pedestrians, inching close enough to moving vehicles that the messenger bag dispatch handed me for comedic effect bounces off multiple side mirrors.

It took Shaw some convincing once we get out of dispatch to ride like he usually does. He tells me that riding with others makes him nervous—not only because I might hold him up, but also because I'm not as adept as dodging cars and people as he is.

In the next hour, we don't stop at a single red light. A lot of our riding is spent simply on the wrong side of the road and Shaw weaves between and in front of cars seamlessly. It's the kind of riding I was hoping to see, but I can see why it would make him nervous to have me try to follow.

Any calculations he's making when it comes to how much space is available—where gaps will appear and how long the'll remain open—are for his bike alone. I'm struggling to get creative and make it through the tiny gaps he's found in traffic as those opportunities close and space runs out.

What catches me off guard though, is when Shaw does something I assumed you only see in the movies: Biking down the congested thoroughfare of King Street, Shaw grabs onto the side of a moving truck for about 15 seconds to take a moment of rest and get a quick boost of speed. He says it's referred to as "skitching," and it's actually quite common.

"Some people skitch by grabbing onto the wheel hubs of cars or the sides of moving trucks," he casually explains as we bike on. "I like to grab onto door handles of cars, but you have to be careful not to pull too hard, or you'll open their door. I've done that by accident once."

I'm trying to imagine the horror of looking in your rearview mirror and seeing what probably looks like a hitman about to hijack your car. Shaw tells me that sometimes he'll catch a glimpse of a driver's eyes in the mirror.

"The moment you make eye contact, you can tell if you can keep holding on, or if you're going to have to let go," Shaw explains. The worst situations can be when a driver fully freaks the fuck out and slams on the breaks or starts swerving wildly.

In places like Chicago and New York, Shaw tells me that skitching is more "accepted" and commonplace, and you can skitch for entire streets. He keeps encouraging me to give it a shot, but I'm not particularly convinced (although door handles are always calling my name when I'm biking now).

Between grabbing onto cars and flying through reds, the end result is that bike couriers are unfathomably quick. Three hours into Shaw's work day, I challenge him to race me from Parliament Street to Roncesvalles, a length that covers almost the entirety of what you can consider "downtown." A quick Google search would tell you that during rush hour, it's a 30 minute drive, and 25 minute trek on the subway.

Now that he's freed from having to slow down, I've lost sight of him within the first set of traffic lights. Without him, I'm not brave enough to rush through red lights on my own. The amount of skill it takes to fly through intersections sinks in.

After what feels like endless pumping, I finally gasp my way to Roncesvalles, a whole 22 minutes later. It took Shaw only 12 minutes, less than half the time it takes to drive the seven kilometer stretch.

Biking like this feels like real-life Need For Speed. It can come with some costs though, especially in Toronto. Shaw tells me that he's gotten two hefty traffic violation tickets in Toronto, more than he's gotten in every other city combined.

When reached for an interview, Mark Pugash, the Toronto Police Service's Director of Corporate Communications, put the cop's perspective of messenger riding quite simply.

"We regard anyone who rides a bicycle unsafely as a threat to public safety," Pugash said in an email. In regards to targeting bike messengers, Pugash went on to say, "we don't target groups. We target those who endanger public safety, whether they are drivers, pedestrians, bicycle riders, motorcycle riders, e-bike riders and so on. We have regular enforcement initiatives as well as officers who enforce the law year-round."

For Shaw, dealing with the cops is something that comes with the territory.

"I'm very passive with the cops, I don't pick fights." Shaw says. "If you wanna give me a ticket, you can give me a ticket. I don't pick fights, I'm not interested in that at all."

The greater cost though, can be your body. In Toronto, there's an average of 1271 bike accidents per year, as reported by the Toronto Star. Despite that large number, there have only been three reported fatal accidents as of June 2015. In 2009, bike messenger Darcy Sheppard died after being run over by Michael Bryant, a prominent political figure at the time. Criminal charges were laid against Bryant, but many news outlets were quick to paint Sheppard as an "angry, aggressive road warrior," despite eyewitness accounts that pinned Bryant as the main aggressor in the altercation. The charges against Bryant were eventually dropped, but the issue remains controversial and still receives media coverage even in 2015.

Despite what can be dangerous riding at times, Shaw reckons that kilometer to kilometer, bike messengers get into very few accidents when you consider their sheer daily mileage. On our five hour ride, we easily covered about 40 kilometers. Shaw's never been in a crash, but he's had a lot of eye-opening close calls. Close calls that could have even been fatal.

"I know that the next big accident is is coming. It will happen. Seeing these skilled riders that I know get into accidents that aren't their fault, you have to assume that it's part of the job," Shaw says. "You just ride the way you ride, and can't live in fear."

Follow Salmaan Farooqui on Twitter.

Here Are All The Ridiculous Reasons People Are Scared of Trudeau Legalizing Weed

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Photo via Flickr user Brett Levin

Remember when the year 2000 was nigh and the world collectively backed the shit out of all its Napster files, thinking computer systems would spontaneously combust and humanity would be sent back to the dark ages? Indeed, the fear was so crippling that the US government formed a Y2K task force and some family in Ohio bought a generator and a year's supply of canned chow mein. (Ew.)

Well, if you were to believe a handful of staunch opponents to marijuana legalization, which is imminent according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada's very own doomsday is approaching.

Once people are able to buy weed from a store instead of the backseat of some college student's car, all hell will break loose, reducing humans to heroin-injecting zombies who hang out in hookah lounges.

What follows is a collection of some of the more popular (i.e. straight up absurd) theories being trotted out by the tough-on-drugs crowd along with their respective counterpoints.

More smoking

Because of the alleged prevalence of spliffs—joints mixed with tobacco—in the Maritimes, Nova Scotia activist Chris Backer seems to think that legalization will lead to more people being addicted to cigarettes. "For a lot of Maritimers financially, we have less money here. And a lot of people stretched out that way by mixing it with tobacco," the vice-chair of Maritimers Unite for Medical Marijuana told the CBC. He said more people are likely to try marijuana once it's legal, most likely in the form of spliffs, which don't filter out "any of the garbage in tobacco."

For the record, spliffs are gross. The only people I know who enjoy them are people who already smoke cigarettes. There's absolutely no evidence that suggests anyone other than smokers are going to mix weed with tobacco. In fact, there's nothing that definitively shows a correlation between the use of one substance and the other. And while Backer is right that some people use spliffs to make their weed last longer, conserving your stash is less of a logistical concern if weed is readily available from a store.

Lastly, if we are worried that marijuana is going to lead people to use a much more harmful "drug", namely tobacco, maybe it's time to question why the latter is perfectly legal while being caught with the former one can still get you jailed.

Hookah lounges on the hook

Last week, during a Toronto city council debate in which councillors decided to shut down hookah lounges in the city, Councillor John Campbell sounded the alarm on the issue of "marijuana dens." Specifically, he suggested legalization could lead hookah lounges to transform into dens... of marijuana.

I don't really know where to start with this one. Even assuming that Campbell knows what a vapour lounge is and was making a reference to those, there's nothing to suggest that people who go out to a hookah lounge would expect to get high there, especially when they can already just go to a vapour lounge for that. I don't go to Starbucks and demand a double-double.

Campbell also asked which is more harmful, shisha or marijuana. It's a toss-up considering that the kind of shisha people smoke in licensed establishments is tobacco-free and marijuana is used as a goddamn medicine. But I guess, in Campbell's mind this whole issue has been sidestepped because hookah lounges are coming to an end. So everyone can just go back to using OG marijuana dens—aka their parents' basements.

Gateway to Hell

The Saskatoon police force, which hates weed so much that officers have said they'll arrest people for leftover roaches, has a list of weed-related concerns that have been parroted by other law enforcement agencies over the years. Inspector Dave Haye told VICE weed is a "gateway drug." Studies have shown, however, that factors like mental illness and socioeconomic status are bigger predictors of who is vulnerable to a drug addiction. And research has shown that weed can have the opposite effect of a gateway drug, helping opioid users, for example, stay off harder drugs.

Haye's ignorance didn't stop there though; he claimed marijuana on the streets is more dangerous than the reefer of the 60s. "I know what's used in grow ups; the marijuana itself could have negative health impacts." Great. But you know what tends to have quality control? Things that are regulated by the government. As for his assertion that weed is a "public safety issue," the fact is that weed is still the major cash crop for gangs in places like BC and Alberta. A gang expert told VICE legalization will "kick the legs out from underneath a lot of these groups."

Think of the children

A list of alarmist views on legalization wouldn't be complete without a nod to our former prime minister Stephen Harper. The same man who claimed weed is "infinitely worse" than cigarettes also thinks legalization will lead to more kids getting high. I'll just let this study do the talking (spoiler: he's wrong).

No one knows for sure what will happen when weed is legalized in Canada, but if Colorado is any indicator, we can expect a reduced crime rate, money saved on law enforcement and millions of dollars in tax revenue. Terrifying.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

VICE Liveblogged Tuesday's Republican Debate

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Those who didn't tune in to Tuesday night Republican presidential debate might be surprised to learn that it was actually quite different from the seven million (give or take) GOP primary debates that have come before it this year. For one, it featured just eight presidential candidates—a mercifully low number considering that previous debates this cycle have featured as many as 12 GOP tryhards. And following what they viewed as unfair treatment at the hands of the CNBC moderators during the last round, the candidates were able to extract some concessions from its network TV partner—in this case, Fox Business News. That included including no reaction shots of audience members, no visual references to the candidates going to the bathroom, and no touching (OK, we made that one up).

The result was a surprisingly substantive exchange of ideas about economic issues, foreign policy, and the size of the federal government. Sure, it was dry at points, and we didn't solve the mystery of Egypt's pyramids, but that's what we asked for, right? And just because the moderators never asked Ben Carson if he actually tried to kill anybody, doesn't mean the debate was completely lacking in crazy. We liveblogged it all below.

Albert Woodfox of the Angola Three Might Go on Trial for a Third Time

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Albert Woodfox in prison, via Amnesty USA

Read: How the Angola Three Became National Symbols of Injustice

The only member of the group known as the Angola Three still in prison, Albert Woodfox, can stand trial a third time for a 1972 murder, a federal court ruled Monday. Despite the questionable evidence against him, Woodfox has been in solitary confinement for over 40 years, and holds the record for longest time spent in what inmates sometimes call "the hole."

In June, a federal Judge ordered the 68-year-old's release from Louisiana State Penitentiary, a.k.a. Angola. The order also forbade prosecutors from trying him again. But Woodfox's attorney Angela Allen-Bell told the Associated Press at the time, "He does not allow himself to be very optimistic about things. I think that that is a coping mechanism that he has developed."

Watch inmates respond to our HBO special Fixing the System.

Originally imprisoned on allegations of armed robbery in 1971, Woodfox almost immediately became politically active, helping start a prison chapter of the Black Panthers. He and another Panther named Herman Wallace were convicted in 1974 of murdering a prison guard. Completing the Angola Three was Robert King, convicted of a different murder in 1973. Woodfox, Wallace, and King would spend the next few decades in solitary confinement because they ostensibly had what one of their wardens would later call "the Black Pantherism."

Woodfox's initial murder conviction was overturned 23 years ago, in part thanks to "systematic discrimination," initiating a multi-decade conflict between Woodfox's lawyers and the Louisiana authorities. Woodfox successfully defeated a second conviction in 2014, and Louisiana Attorney General James "Buddy" Caldwell's initial push for this third trial began in February on this year.

After Woodfox's release was ordered in June, Caldwell immediately appealed the judge's order, and a ruling was issued keeping Woodfox locked up for what was meant to be a couple of months while Caldwell's appeal was being evaluated.

This latest ruling serves as a stern rebuke of the district judge who intended to release Woodfox and prevent yet another prejudiced trial. "The district court abused its discretion by barring retrial and by granting the extraordinary remedy of an unconditional writ," the two-to-one majority wrote.

In a press release on Monday, Amnesty International opined, "It's long past time for the courts and state officials to finally provide some measure of justice and let Woodfox walk free."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

What You Need to Know About the Fourth Republican Presidential Debate

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It's been two weeks since the last Republican presidential debate, and the party hasn't come any closer to picking a frontrunner in the goat rodeo that is the 2016 primary race. Instead, it watched helplessly as the race degraded further into inane absurdity and literal theater, with one of the party's leading candidates stumbling his way through a baffling SNL gig and another insisting that he really did try to kill someone when he was a teenager. And anyone who still believed the race would take a more serious turn in the lead-up to the Iowa caucus was effectively shut down this week, when the field erupted in outrage over a red Starbucks holiday cup.

Such is the state of the Republican Party's discourse going into Tuesday night's presidential debate, hosted by Fox Business Network. It's a do-over of the last round, hosted by CNBC in Boulder last month, in which the Republican candidates bonded over their liberal media paranoia, and ganged up to overpower the debate moderators. The mutiny that followed was short-lived, and Republican candidates are back tonight without having won any of the major rule changes they had originally demanded. But they are unlikely to find a common enemy in the Fox Business loyalists moderating Tuesday's debate—which means the candidates won't have anyone to turn on but each other. We'll be liveblogging the main event, but in the meantime, here's a guide to get you up to speed:

When and where is the debate taking place?
The main debate will kick off at 9 PM Eastern in the Milwaukee Theater, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Incidentally, it's the same theater where Theodore Roosevelt campaigned immediately after being shot in the chest during the 1912 presidential race—so when Rand Paul inevitably declares out of nowhere that "It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!" that's who he's plagiarizing.

Who's debating?
Some of the dozen-plus candidates were finally voted off the island for this round, and only eight contenders—Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Rand Paul—will appear in the main event. Sadly, neither Mike Huckabee nor Chris Christie qualified, depriving viewers of two of the most reliably inflammatory zealots in the GOP primary field. They've been kicked down to the kid's table debate with Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum, who are apparently still running.


VICE Talks Film: VICE Talks Film with Gaspar Noé

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Six years after his groundbreaking, psychedelic epic Enter the Void, French-Argentinian provocateur Gaspar Noé is back with his latest film—the (very) sexually explicit Love.

The movie follows film student Murphy, played by Karl Glusman, who enters an intensely passionate relationship with the unstable Electra (Aomi Muyock) and invites their attractive neighbor into their bed.

We sat down with Noé to discuss the film's range of critical reactions, working with non-actors having real sex on screen, and his process in creating one of the year's most controversial films.

You can see Love now in stereoscopic 3D at select theaters.

VICE Vs Video Games: What Video Games Have to Say About the 1970s

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A screenshot from 'Interstate '76'

I was born in 1971, when the world was brown. Brown trousers. Brown sandals. Brown wallpaper. Brown sofa. Brown Austin Allegro. At least, that's how I remember it. Looking back now at the decade now, it seems to have been a depressing era, all miner's strikes and Vietnam War guilt. Picket lines snaking around braziers. National Health glasses and Edward Heath.

Disco and glam rock always seemed to me like a misguided attempt to titivate a botched dessert with glitter, until punk came along, stapled it to a cat, and kicked it over a wall. And just when things couldn't get any worse, Margaret Thatcher ascended to power with a sibilant hiss of contempt.

For better or worse, it's where I came from, and I have a fascination for the era in which I skidded through my formative years. It is, of course, also the decade that video games were born, but Pong (1972), Space Invaders (1978) and Asteroids (1979) actually tell us little about the 1970s. If you happen to be an alien anthropologist arriving on earth in 1980, you might come away with the conclusion that the human race was fixated with table tennis and gripped by extra-terrestrial paranoia.

However, given the unrelenting bleakness of the decade, it's a surprise how very few games have delved into it.

Activision's Interstate '76 and Vigilante 8 games of the late 90s were both set in an alternate 1970s, where the real world's energy crisis had reached a point of no return. In our universe, oil exports from the Middle East trickled away, and choked Western economies as their own oil production peaked.

In Vigilante 8 and Interstate '76, a multinational oil consortium conspires to cause the collapse of the USA. It was a gritty backdrop to a game that was essentially about driving around destroying other vehicles. A number of 70s archetypes appeared as characters, including a Las Vegas high roller, a paranoid FBI agent, an alien-obsessed hippie conspiracy freak, and a disco dancer.

A screenshot from 'Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes'

The Metal Gear franchise spans decades, and three of its installments take place in the 70s: the PSP's Portable Ops in 1970, Peace Walker in 1974, and The Phantom Pain prologue Ground Zeroes is set in 1975. Though it pays lip service to the Cold War paranoia of the time, little in Portable Ops feels distinctly of its setting. Peace Walker is set in Costa Rica, but doesn't go out of its way to reflect the country's prosperity of the period.

Ground Zeroes is more of its era, as the player once again assumes the guise of Snake in order to infiltrate an unofficial American base on Cuban soil. But it's fair to say that Metal Gear, on the whole, is set in a parallel universe that only superficially resembles our own—it's a place where it's perfectly acceptable for people to have a name like "Hot Coldman."

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's recent film, 'LARPing Saved My Life'

Yet another alternate 1970s is seen in Westwood Studios' tongue-in-cheek real-time strategy epic Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, released in 2000. Following the events of its 1950s-set (or thereabouts) predecessor, Red Alert 2 finds players either repelling a Soviet invasion of the United States or taking charge of the very same operation from the opposing side.

Rather more grounded is The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, from Polish studio The Astronauts. Released in 2014, it's a sublime paranormal mystery, set around an abandoned Wisconsin town of 1973. The lack of mobile phones and flat screen TVs are two indications that we're not in the 2000s anymore, but the game also touches on the tough economic times of the era. The town of Red Creek Valley was left deserted, following the collapse of the local mining industry.

A screenshot from 'Driver: Parallel Lines'

Driver: Parallel Lines is set in an open-world New York City of both 1978 and 2006 (its year of release). Famously, Manhattan was a dangerous place in the 70s, with tourist trap Times Square a long way from the Disney-fied playground that it is today. Most jarringly, it features the World Trade Center complex, which—obviously—was five years gone by 2006. While using the same basic street layout, for the 2006 section the game closes off the WTC with a glass wall. Interestingly, it also reflects my own brown-tinted memories of the 1970s, adopting a sepia-toned aesthetic, while the noughties are brighter colors.

One of the more interesting depictions of the 1970s can be found in one of the most obscure games you're ever going to find on eBay. Leading Company was never released outside of Japan, though appeared on the Super NES, NEC PC-9801, and the Sharp X6800 in that territory. It was a strategy sim that foreshadowed both the burgeoning VHS industry and the rise of the corporate yuppie. Players were tasked with researching VCR technology, and introducing it to Japanese consumers, without your company going bankrupt.

Related, on Motherboard: How William Shatner Spent the 1970s Rhapsodizing About Tech for AT&T

Curiously, three of the games that most feel like the 1970s I recognize aren't even set in the decade, and were released some time apart from each other.

Sony's Heavy Rain was a somber interactive drama for the PS3 (and, soon, the PS4), and though set in 2011, its direction and story feel borrowed from 1970s detective (neo)noir. The story—the hunt for the Origami Killer—seems to take inspiration from the real-life case of the Zodiac Killer, who is believed to have murdered as many as seven people in the late 60s and early 70s in California, while taunting police with a series of cryptic letters. The case remains unsolved.

A screenshot from 'Heavy Rain'

Skool Daze, which came out for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 in 1984, depicts an average British school of the sort I went to. There are blackboards rather than interactive wipe-boards, and kids armed with catapults and peashooters rather than iPhones and selfie sticks.

This year's Assassin's Creed Syndicate might be set in Victorian London, but the scenery evokes a London that I grew up in. There were enough red brick warehouses and gasometers around in my youth that it's impossible to not feel a pang of nostalgia. They're all gone now of course; the warehouses are luxury apartments, and the gasometers were knocked down to build new Waitroses.

The 1970s are no more, but playing games set in that decade depicts a time of murder, economic hardship, and international tensions between the East and West. Maybe the more things change the more they stay the same—you can change the date on the calendar, but you can't change people.

Follow Paul on Twitter.

A New Report Shows Just How Much Shit Cops Have Been Seizing

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Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

Civil asset forfeiture is the policy that allows cops to seize your money and property on the mere suspicion that you've committed a crime. They don't need a conviction to take your shit. In fact, they don't even need to press charges.

As proponents of the scheme will surely tell you, civil asset forfeiture has its merits. In the past, it's been used to pay back millions to victims by seizing assets from big-fish finance dicks like Bernie Madoff. As the Washington Post reports, cops also used civil forfeiture to seize dozens of battered pit bulls from NFL player and dog-fighting enthusiast Michael Vick's property, seeing to it that the rescued pups were then placed into fitting, loving homes. The practice helped take down bootleggers during prohibition, and has long been used against drug kingpins.

But a new report dropped Tuesday by the libertarian nonprofit Institute of Justice describes an explosion in civil asset forfeiture since the 1980s. The feds collected $4.5 billion worth of cash and property via civil asset forfeiture last year, and some $29 billion between 2001 and 2014.

Like lots of awful things in America, this problem took root in the Reagan era. In 1984, Congress created "a financial incentive for law enforcement to forfeit property," according to the report. Previously, seized cash and property were collected in the US Treasury's general fund. But the legislative change meant revenue started getting deposited into a newly created fund controlled by federal law enforcement. "As a result," the report says, "all federal forfeiture revenue can go back to the very agencies charged with enforcing the law, giving them a financial stake in forfeiture efforts."

Not surprisingly, that incentive has proved too tempting for some law enforcement agencies to pass up, and has encouraged abuse and corruption. Even when you're on the receiving end of civil forfeiture and manage to prove your innocence, getting your shit back can be a nightmare. Frequently, people get tied up in a densely tangled and expensive web of court appearances that makes the whole thing feel like a bad trip.

In one case of civil forfeiture highlighted in by the Post in June, a drug task force seized $11,000 of savings from a college student at an airport because his luggage smelled like weed. He was not charged, but cops kept the money anyway. And VICE has previously reported on egregious cases of civil forfeiture, like the one involving a man named Tan Nguyen, who had $50,000 of (what he said were) gambling winnings seized by a Humboldt County, Nevada, sheriff during a traffic stop.

Suffice it to say civil forfeiture has often been used as a battering ram in the war on drugs. And the fear is that departments have become so reliant on the money they make on civil asset forfeiture that they'll be hard-pressed to ever give it up,. That's certainly the case in Texas, where, just this year, 13 bills have been introduced to help clean up the abuse of civil forfeiture in the Lone Star state, but "massive pushback" from local law enforcement has seen to it that none of them made it out of committee alive.

But awareness of civil forfeiture is growing. Investigative reporting by the New Yorker and the Post has helped boost scrutiny of the practice. More recently, HBO's John Oliver spent 16 minutes of his show eviscerating civil forfeiture laws in a segment that's been viewed close to 7 million times on YouTube. And before stepping down as attorney general, Eric Holder called for new limits on civil forfeiture. The hope is that reforms might bring us back to the good ole days when we just had to worry about cops murdering people indiscriminately and without cause.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

'Spotlight' Celebrates the Power of Journalism to Fight Corruption

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Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, Brian d'Arcy James, Michael Keaton and John Slattery in Spotlight.Kerry Hayes/Open Road Films

The following article contains some minor spoilers for Spotlight.

At its best, old-school journalism is a high-stakes battle, revealing egregious wrongdoing and dethroning powerful villains. Released last week, the new film Spotlight is a detective story in that vein, tracking the Boston reporters who exposed the Catholic Church for protecting child-molesting priests. Though tales of abuse at the hands of the clergy had been published in the past, the Boston Globe's Spotlight investigative unit succeeded in detailing how church officials systematically protected priests they knew to be predators, bringing new attention to rampant abuse. It was a story that began in that city, and quickly became a national and and international phenomenon. New revelations about priest molestations still appear in papers across the world to this day.

The saga landed the journalists with a 2003 Pulitzer Prize, and it wouldn't be surprising if the film, directed by Thomas McCarthy and starring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams, takes home an Oscar. This is 128 minutes of great acting that imbues the work of journalism with tension and heft. It's also something of a period piece—that era of newspaper-supported investigative reporting is increasingly hard to come by in 2015.

The Globe investigation centered around Father John J. Geoghan and more than 130 of his victims. When the Globe reporters began digging in 2001, the details of the priest's abuse were detailed in court documents and spelled out in settlement deals—or what some might call hush money payments from the church. But before the investigative unit got on the case, those documents were sealed. (To this day, Massachusetts remains one of the worst states in the country for accessing public records.)

In the film, Liev Schreiber plays Marty Barron, the stoic new editor from Miami otherwise known as the "unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball." He comes to Boston, one of the most Catholic cities in the country, from a state with strong open records laws. Unlike the Boston journos, who were more or less used to running into red tape and dead ends when it came to unsealing documents, he tells the Spotlight team to go after the Church—hard.

That's exactly what they do. In that sense, Spotlight serves as a helpful introduction to how impactful investigative journalism is accomplished. It's not glamorous; in fact, the triumph of the film is making the painstaking work of investigative journalism dramatic. There are awkward conversations in coffee shops, successful attempts to bribe court clerks, lots of boiled hot dogs, and mistakes at every stage.

The Spotlight team realizes at one point that they overlooked a victim who came forward with the story several years earlier. Upon regaining his trust, along with that of several other victims, they create a database of priests who were listed as being on "sick leave"—a code, reporters discover, for when church hierarchy knew they had a predator on their hands. After hounding attorneys who represented the victims and filing a motion to get the documents unsealed, the team finally gets the goods.

Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, who rather than removing known molesters from positions where they could hurt children shuffled them from parish to parish, was forced to resign less than a year after the stories started to come out. He now has an even more powerful position as the archpriest of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Not surprisingly, other than a brief clip of journalist Sasha Pfeiffer's husband setting the table before she ducks out of dinner to have a beer with a fellow frustrated Spotlight team member, the reporters' family lives are hardly depicted at all. If this film doesn't inspire and instruct wannabe investigative reporters, perhaps it will at least educate the countless number of men who, upon hearing what I do for a living, respond, "Like Zoe Barnes from House of Cards?" I'll cheer any popular depiction of a female journalist that doesn't involve her falling in love or fucking her sources.

Baron is heard vexing about sales and the waning significance of a printed classified section, but the film doesn't concern itself with foreshadowing the coming shakeups that would severely hurt newspaper newsrooms. When the Spotlight team was busy tracking down close to 70 Boston-area predatory priests and their victims, the Globe had more than 500 employees on staff. Like most local daily papers, they weren't able to successfully navigate the problems that came with the internet and the information it provided to everyone with a modem. There were cuts—lots of them. By 2010, staff fires and buyouts lead to the emergence of "the center of the doughnut," an empty space at the paper's Morrissey Boulevard office, once occupied by 100-since terminated employees.

The layoffs didn't end there. Last month, the Globefired nearly two-dozen staffers. Seventeen others accepted buyouts. Today, the paper has a staff of about 300.

In a recent interview with On the Media, Pfeiffer offered an optimistic outlook. Despite the cuts, the Spotlight team has expanded from four to six full-time staffers. The team often collaborates with beat reporters "so they can turn around good investigative stories faster," she said.

But an expanded Spotlight team may not be enough to make up for what papers like the Globe have lost. Even the best investigative reporters take a hit when there are fewer journalists in the newsroom and in the community at large. The Catholic Church investigation is a case in point—the journalists in the film spent a lot of time involved looking back at old clippings and connecting dots that hadn't been connected before. The priest scandal would have been a far more difficult, if not an impossible, story to crack if the journalists were working from scratch. In fact, in the modern media environment, it's possible that the Globe would never have been tipped off to the abuse scandal at all. Even as online media companies accrue massive editorial staffs, hyperlocal reporting remains essential, but increasingly hard to come by.

After all, while the Globe's thorough reporting and in-depth follow-ups brought the systematic phenomenon of shady priests into the public consciousness, the paper didn't break the story. A local alt weekly, the Boston Phoenix first brought attention to the cases, and the sealed court documents, to light. Sadly, the Phoenix shut its doors in 2013.

In the wake of the cuts, it's impossible to know just how much we've lost. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, the downfall of local investigative reporting falls into the category of the "known unknowns." We know stories about local corruption and abuse of power are getting looked over—we just don't know which ones.

Follow Susan Zalkind on Twitter.

What We Learned from Last Night's Republican Presidential Debate

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Donald Trump's 'Listening Face.' Images via Fox Business Network

At this precise moment, It's nearly impossible to say what direction the Republican presidential race is heading, or where we will find ourselves when the party finally packs it in at the end of 2016. For months, Donald Trump was yuuuggge, but now, somehow, so is Ben Carson. There are constant whispers about the promise of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, while Jeb!, Rubio's former mentor and the party's once-presumed frontrunner, stutters painfully into irrelevance. Meanwhile, Ted Cruz looks more and more like Ned Flanders with each passing day, Carly Fiorina and John Kasich keep struggling to stay relevant, and Rand Paul still hasn't figured out what to do about his hair.

And the other seven guys running for the most powerful position in the world? Who fucking knows.

Needless to say, the all-American horse race seems as predictable as the Kentucky Derby five mint juleps in. So, on Tuesday night, America strapped herself in for yet another pit stop on that track—the fourth Republican presidential debate, for those still counting. This one was held in Milwaukee, with Fox Business moderators Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto calling the shots, or at least trying to. The topic was the economy, although predictably, the candidates covered far more ground than that. Here's how they performed:

Donald Trump

What he needed to do: His objectively boring 'SNL' performance notwithstanding, Trump is still the leading Republican candidate, although just barely. So, basically, his job Tuesday was to reclaim his title to the Iron Throne, whatever that may entail.

What he did: Even though he was center stage in Milwaukee, Trump was, for the most part, anything but. He wasn't included in many of the night's key policy exchanges, his platitudes seemed to be past their sell-by date, and he faced more criticism than support for his now-notorious plan to unilaterally deport 11 million people out of the country. After giving a long-winded rant about China in response to a question about the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, his opinion was erased in just a few seconds by Rand Paul, who correctly pointed out that China isn't included in TPP—and that that's sort of the point.

For most of the night, Trump was out of the spotlight, and, unfortunately for his sake, the spotlight seems to be the only thing that keeps him alive. And when Trump asked why Fiorina was allowed to keep interrupting people, the audience let him know he'd taken his Trumpness one step too far.

Trump contemplates his opponent.

Ben Carson
What he needed to do: Between this debate and the previous one, all eyes have been on the former pediatric neurosurgeon. Carson now finds himself within the margin of error of Trump, and even leading some some national polls, but questions about his autobiography have threatened to derail any message he may have had for his campaign. Tuesday was his best chance to address those concerns, and convince the American people that he really did try to attack his mother with a hammer when he was a teenager.

Read: Ben Carson's Fake Life Story Ruined My Real Childhood

What he did: I'm pretty sure Carson never actually answered a question on Tuesday night. All too often, his responses fell back on personal anecdotes, non sequiturs, and a whole host of zingers directed at Hillary Clinton. When he did discuss his policy ideas, they mostly had to do with making taxes more like Biblical tithing. Then again, this is how Carson has been at every debate, and, surprisingly enough, he continues to ascend the Republican ladder. So maybe this anomaly is what the American people want to see. And maybe the rest of you just don't get it.

Marco Rubio
What he needed to do: Like the last debate, this was Rubio's time to shine. He needed to convince the Republican Establishment that he is the real deal: a sharp, young senator who can replace Jeb! as the moderate candidate who would actually stand a chance against Hillary Clinton. Rubio needs to prove he could be the face of the Republican Party's future, and Tuesday night was the closest thing to a call-back audition.

What he did: Right before the debate, someone pressed the play button on Rubio the Candidate. Because for most of the night, he spoke solely in sound bytes, offering responses that were too scripted to even appear true. ("This election is about the future."). He came off as, and looked like, the career politician on stage: fluid, airy, and vague as fuck. Worse still, Rubio didn't have any real memorable moments, which is the only way anyone can win these things. On the bright side for Rubio, though, nobody asked him about his questionable use of the Florida Republican Party's credit card.

Liveblog: Key Moments from the Fourth Republican Presidential Debate

John Kasich
What he needed to do: Use his fourth showing on the national stage to make a name for himself, and force the American electorate to remember him as something other than the white guy that isn't Jeb Bush.

What he did: Early on in the night, the Ohio governor's performance seemed promising: he quickly attacked Trump over his immigration plan, and held his own in defense, at least for a little while. But Kasich's passionate dismissal of Trump's mass deportation designs were quickly forgotten when the former Lehman Brothers executive started getting into his positions on banking and foreign policy. By the end of the debate, it was clear that the Kasich campaign is like a Dan Brown novel: at first glance, it seems substantive and thrilling, but a close read reveals that it's really just one long formulaic stream of nothingness.

John Kasich gets a little heated over Trump's border wall.

Rand Paul
What he needed to do: According to the Washington press corps, Rand is in dire straits. His campaign is struggling to stay afloat, and he barely even met the polling threshold to be on stage Tuesday. These debates have become something of a life-vest for him, something he needs to survive.

What he did: That said, Paul seemed far from drowning on Tuesday night. He came out of the gate strong, hitting Rubio hard on defense spending — a real criticism that received a generous amount of applause from the crowd. His diminishment of Trump's rant on China and the TPP was one of the more coherent statements made all night, and he came off as well-versed in banking and economic policy, unlike some of the more popular candidates on stage. Whether that will be enough to save his campaign for another round, though, is anyone's guess.

Carly Fiorina
What she needed to do: At some point between the first and second debates, Fiorina had a moment, when voters and the media decided they might give her campaign a little more attention than conventional wisdom suggested they should. That moment has come and gone, though—Fiorina is in desperate need of another bump, and a debate is the only place she is going to get it.

Related: A Look at the Human Suit Malfunctions of the 2016 Election

What she did: Aside from saying "crony capitalism" enough times to get anyone playing debate drinking games black-out drunk, the ex-Hewlett-Packard CEO wasn't particularly impressive Tuesday night. She evaded direct questions, made a series of oddly emphasized statements about "taking the government back," and unleashing the free market on Obamacare, and repeatedly referred to herself in the third person. Fiorina's best strength thus far has been her resistance to capitulate to Trump, and without an exchange like that, it feels like she has no weapons left in her arsenal.

Ted Cruz applauds someone, presumably Ronald Reagan.

Ted Cruz
What he needed to do: With Mike Huckabee demoted to the kid's table debate, Ted Cruz was pushed into the role of talk-radio wingnut Tuesday night, a role that theoretically would allow him to reestablish himself as the original right-wing insurgent in the GOP's endless presidential primary race.

What he did: Cruz's desperate need to be the Christian Right's Tea Party darling was so transparent and needy Tuesday, it almost hurt to watch. He called repeatedly for abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, compared the "armies of regulators" in the federal government to one of a Biblical plague, and peppered most of his answers with references to crony capitalism and the Almighty. On certain issues, though, including taxes and foreign policy, Cruz tried to leap to the right, but fell down the cliff, like Wile E. Coyote. But like Wile E. Coyote, he seems to emerge from these debates mostly unscathed.

Jeb!
What he needed to do: It's hard to understate just how much Jeb needs these debates. His campaign is hemorrhaging money and staff, trying desperately to rebrand away the candidate's abundant flaws as both campaigner and politician. It's also hard to overstate just how poorly Jeb has performed at these things, and anyone who thought Jeb! could make a comeback Tuesday night was lying to you or to themselves.

What he did: Jeb's campaign team is understandably worried about the candidate, which is why, before Tuesday night, they called in a Fox News media trainer to give their man some pointers. In retrospect, that sorta seemed like a waste of time. He delivered his answers like he was talking to a New Hampshire town hall for senior citizens, awkwardly weaving in personal anecdotes and stale references from CPACs of yore. He picked fights, but they were more like halfhearted shoves. In short, Jeb just seemed like... Jeb. And unfortunately, that continues to be his biggest problem.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Colombian soldiers charged with fighting FARC (Photo via)

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

  • Trump's Migrant Plan Mocked
    Donald Trump's immigration plan—to deport 11 million people and build a giant wall—was ridiculed by Republican rivals during the Fox TV debate. John Kasich said Trump's ideas were "silly", and Jeb Bush said they would drive Hispanic votes toward Hillary Clinton. —The New York Times
  • McDonald's Shareholders Make $30 Billion
    The company has announced it will pay out $30 billion in dividends to shareholders. It follows thousands of service industry workers striking to demand a living wage of $15 an hour from McDonald's and other fast food operators. —VICE News
  • Private Jet Crashes Into Ohio Homes
    At least two people were killed when a small business jet crashed into an apartment building in Akron, Ohio. No one was inside the apartment building, but it is feared all nine passengers may be dead. —USA Today
  • 106 Bikers Indicted
    A grand jury has charged 106 bikers with organized criminal activity after a deadly shootout in Waco, Texas. Nine people died, 20 were injured and 430 weapons were recovered from the clash between rival gangs at the Twin Peaks restaurant in May. —NBC News

International News

  • Russia Has a Peace Plan
    Russia has circulated a plan to end the conflict in Syria: a new constitution put to a popular referendum with 18 months, followed by an early presidential election. The document makes no mention of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stepping down. —AP
  • Colombian Rebels Give Up Guns
    The leader of the FARC, Colombia's largest armed rebel group, has said he has ordered the organization to stop buying guns and ammunition. It marks another breakthrough in talks between the left-wing group and the Colombian government. —BBC News
  • Slovenia Erects Fence
    The Slovenian government has begun putting up a long fence close to the border with Croatia to control the flow of migrants. Since mid-October around 180,000 people have entered the country, a key route for migrants trying to get to Germany. —Reuters
  • Female MPs Thrown Out of Parliament
    Several female MPs were ordered to leave the New Zealand parliament after they declared they had been victims of sexual assault. It followed insensitive remarks the country's prime minister made about the opposition "backing" rapists. —The Guardian

(Photo by Jørund Føreland Pedersen via)

Everything Else

  • Snoop Launches Weed Line
    Hip-hop's proudest pot smoker debuted his new line of cannabis products at a suburban house party in Denver. Snoop asked guests to sample Leafs by Snoop wares "responsibly". —Rolling Stone
  • Video Shows Cop Slam Boy to the Ground
    A new video shows a Florida school resource officer slamming a 13-year-old black student to the ground before twisting his wrist. Mario Badia has been charged with child abuse. —The Huffington Post
  • There Is a Lonely Sea Drone
    The US Department of Defense's research team are about to test a submarine-hunting ocean drone in San Diego. The unmanned vessel will be able to spend months on the ocean surface at a time. —Motherboard
  • Mizzou's Civil Rights Legacy
    With their pivotal recent boycott, the University of Missouri's black football players joined a longstanding tradition of protest. Here's a look at the legacy of activism by African-American athletes. —VICE Sports

Done with reading today? That's alright—instead, watch our new film, 'VICE Talks Film with Gaspar Noé'.

Traveling as a Trans Person Is Exhausting and Dangerous

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Illustration by Hiro


As a trans person, I watched my own anxieties around travel play out on Twitter when #travellingwhiletrans started trending. It started with Shadi Petosky tweeting about her treatment by the Transportion Security Administration (TSA) while going through security procedures at Orlando airport. She entered the body scanner identifying as female, but the machine flagged "an anomaly"—her penis. What could have been resolved by politely and apologetically asking if she was trans turned into an absolute fiasco.

Shadi was forced to wait as they repeatedly referred to her penis as "an anomaly" and tried to decide if a male or female TSA agent should conduct the pat down on her groin area. She understandably didn't want a female TSA agent touching her groin, but didn't want a male TSA agent touching anywhere else. She was told if she didn't consent to a second full-body scan the police would be called. Faced with coercion, the threat of police, and being publicly and repeatedly misgendered, she eventually agreed, weeping through the whole pat-down.

Shadi's encounter was hardly a one-off. Scrolling through #travellingwhiletrans highlights many similar experiences of trans men and women being ushered into shut away rooms and told they needed to "clear" the "anomaly."

Months after Shadi's experience started this conversation, I found myself standing in line at an airport ticket desk waiting to be called forward. Shit, I thought, My voice is so low now. If I talk, I'm going to out myself as trans immediately. My internal cogs started whirring, trying to work out how I was going to make my voice more effeminate so that I didn't flag as "different."

Before I could speak, the woman at the counter handed my passport back and directed me on. I was relieved but it was a personal wake-up call. Medical transitioning changes everything—you can never truly explain how much impact it has on aspects of your life. Especially when you're like me, and have created such a lifestyle bubble you forget what the outside world can be like.

For trans people, airport confrontations are more than embarrassing, they can also be incredibly physically threatening.

Lauren Smith, the producer of the Sex, Lies, and Anarchy podcast, recounted her own experience to the Daily Dot: "I eventually dropped my pants and my panties to the ground, because they asked me to, and four women and one man who were much less than an arm's reach from me inspected my genitals. My reason for crying was not that I was exposing something private, but was because I knew the ultimate consequence of my resistance can be death. If I tried to resist and continued to do so, they could imprison or shoot me. I cried because I kept trying to not resist, but they kept telling me I was. It was very startling. I was threatened with arrest verbally several times."

Her fear of violence at the hands of these officers isn't overstated. A 2014 report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found transgender people were six times more likely to face police violence than cisgender people. The reality is for us, confrontations like this carry the looming possibility of physical assault.

But for trans individuals, the problems don't stop at the airport. The Matador Network advises trans people research the places they visit as countries that may be safe for cisgender tourists can be very different for us. Holiday spots like Belize and Oman openly suppress trans publications and writing, and have rejected reforms on laws used to discriminate against LGBT people. In Europe 24 countries still require trans citizens to be sterilized before being legally recognized.

Even if you don't feel physically threatened, other countries can still be confronting. Nevo is a Jewish non-binary trans person based in Melbourne. When he identified more firmly as being a trans man, he travelled to Israel with his movement Habonim Dror. The group does a lot of work around bringing Jewish people and Palestinians together. He struggled with the culture shock. "I think Israelis are a more abrupt, upfront people," he said. "So I felt like it was a lot more in my face. People would ask me questions to my face like, 'Are you a boy or a girl?' I could hear people talking about me a lot more. It's just a lot more obvious."

But jarring attitudes didn't rival the difficulty with speaking another language. "In Hebrew you can't address someone without using a gender," explained Nevo. "Even the word you is gendered. There's a female, male, and plural versions. There's literally no way to avoid it."

Nevo did find an unexpected upside though—by using the preferred gender for your words, you can correct people more easily than stopping the conversation and pulling them up."It was this weird phenomenon of super triggering but also empowering. I was getting triggered but was able to correct them without being confrontational."

His experiences of Judaism in Israel were more fraught. While being trans and Jewish wasn't particularly complicated for him in Melbourne, in Israel he felt like he was going into people's spaces and holy lands and withholding information. He worried that although he was a man, not telling people he was trans was deceptive and meant different things in a culture that wasn't his own.

Related: The Struggles of One Black Trans Man

Although again, there were upsides: "When I got an ultra-orthodox man to shake my hand outside the male section of the western wall—which is arguably the most holy place to the Jewish people—to me that was the most gender-affirming moment I've ever had."

Waiting for my flight in the airport, I flipped open my passport and examined the picture next to that F that identified me as female. I thought about revising this picture the next time I wanted to leave the country, but was immediately exhausted by the thought of all the paperwork I would need to do to make these processes easier. To travel through an Australian airport without a second thought would involve a name change, my birth certificate corrected, and having my whole passport reissued. These processes never end. There is always another form to fill out, always another person to come out to. I remember a comment Nevo made: "I think being trans everywhere is hard and I don't think that changes when you travel, it's just emphasized."

I think he is right.

More of Fury's work can be found here.

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The VICE Guide to Right Now: BC Man Tries to Steal Unmarked Police Vehicle, It Goes Poorly

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It's just sitting there, all inviting like. Photo via Flickr user Jason Lawrence

A man was arrested for allegedly attempting to hijack a car last night in Surrey, BC, only to find out the car was an unmarked police vehicle with two big-ass RCMP officers inside.

According to the Surrey RCMP Twitter, 25-year-old Kyle Blair tried to enter the vehicle of two of the RCMP's "biggest, burliest plainclothes officers" (Be cool, cops) because he didn't realize the vehicle was unmarked.

The tweet was attached to a meme photo that reads "File under the category: 'can't make this stuff up,'" followed by the requisite #fail.

VICE Vs Video Games: 'Fallout 4' Is Massive, Ambitious, and Really, Really Good

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Fallout 4 is the best game that Bethesda has ever created. Despite sitting on familiar foundations, the refinements made here—to its storytelling, character development, quest design, shooting mechanics, and world-building—all combine to make Fallout 4 a tighter, more precise experience than any series entry before it.

While it may fail to convince those daunted by the idea of spending hundreds of hours questing and exploring, or those put off by the fact that it's up to you to decide your own pace, Fallout 4 delivers wondrous moments of exploration and discovery with aplomb. Rarely will you find a world as rich and alive as that of the post-apocalyptic "Commonwealth," a.k.a. what's left of New England in 2077, and even rarer will you find a studio so confident with the scope of ambition that Fallout 4 delivers.

It starts boldly. After going through the familiar motions of choosing your face, your hair, your beard, and even the placement of your freckles and dimples, you're thrust into pre-apocalypse America. Fallout 4 wants to show you what things were like before everything goes south, and it does so without laboring the point. It's a brief glimpse at an idealistic impression of the American Dream—perfect beyond perfect, filled with floating robots carrying out household chores and children playing in the street, all under the imminent threat of nuclear war. After a visit from your local Vault-Tec rep, who conveniently gives your family three spaces in the local vault, you get a glimpse of the last few hours of human civilization as you sprint towards your underground haven to escape nuclear fire.

And I won't reveal anything else so detailed about the plot, because spoilers, obviously. But the tale that's told here is simultaneously a detective story, a revenge flick, a thriller, and several other things in between, and everything expands and transforms as you progress. It starts slowly, as Bethesda games often do, before pulling you along to really cool, unlikely places that get more intriguing as you discover more of them. The scope here is unprecedented, even by Bethesda's already hefty standards, and the game's capacity to subvert your expectations and consistently offer up something new is an impressive complement to its familiar formula.

Bethesda has learned how to make a world feel alive, dynamic, and reactive to your actions as a player. It handles individual factions in bold and complex ways, intertwining them into the main story unexpectedly, forcing you to think carefully about your actions and the ramifications of what you decide to do, and somehow making everything you do feel rewarding and, above all, exciting.

Fallout 4's internal mechanics are much more solid than its predecessors. Looting is so fluid now that you only need to hover over an unlocked storage space to see what's inside, while shooting feels and sounds punchier with a dual trigger system for more responsiveness. V.A.T.S., the game's slow-mo tactical targeting system, is still a legitimate option, but the real-time shooting is now so good that it was by far my preferred method.

The unique feel of every single gun—combined with the thousands of varied customization options for your weapons—makes experimenting with your arsenal a sizable distraction. Enemies all fight differently—humans and super-mutants will take cover, while feral ghouls and Mirelurks will charge headlong at you. They react to your gunfire in cool ways, too. Take out a ghoul's legs and he won't die, but fall to the ground and crawl towards you gnashing his jaws madly; fighting robots lets you tactically ping important circuitry off of their bodies—they'll even change tactics as you destroy them, running at you, and self destructing. Shoot the mini nuke in a Super Mutant Suicider's hands, and he'll go up like a mini-apocalypse before he's had a chance to get near enough to take you to Hell with him. The fact that every kill is accompanied by an satisfying "da-ding" is all the more gratifying.

When the going gets really tough, and on many occasions it will, you'll need to suit up with your power armor. This works completely differently to how it did in previous Fallout games. Instead of being a normal piece of gear, Fallout 4 treats power armor like a living entity. Rather than carry it around, you have to construct it using power frames that exist at certain points around the world. Here, you can customize and mod it like anything else you own, but it requires fusion core—a finite resource found around the wasteland—and constant maintenance and repair.

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I wasn't sold on the armor system at first—it felt like an odd setup—but over time I've come to use it more tactically. Power armor now feels like a badass option for me to even the odds, rather than just another piece of gear with higher stats. I particularly love the animation when you get into the suit, as all its pneumatic gears hiss apart to let you step inside, as well as how the on-screen HUD and arm-worn Pip-Boy display change when you're inside it.

By giving your character a fully-voiced role in this world, your presence is enriched in a way that previous Bethesda games simply couldn't manage. The game's writing, and the voice acting to deliver it, ranges from good to fantastic. Individual story beats and the characters you meet are suitably weird, whacky, and wonderful, and the game hops fluidly between the hilariously absurd to sinisterly dark in a way that feels natural rather than inconsistent.

As well as the game's cast—some good, some bad, and some brilliantly elusive shades of gray—you can also find unique companions who'll act as your partners if you want them to. You're able to develop relationships with each, which can even unlock unique quests when you've reached a certain affinity with each one. Your buddies become intrinsic to how you might decide to pursue larger stories—they'll throw information at you that seems peripheral at the time, but eventually comes back to influence your decision making.

Recruiting companions adds them to your network of settlements, which act as your personal pockets of peace throughout the wasteland. Settlement building is mostly optional, and save for the camera perspective occasionally making construction tricky, it works well to give you further ownership over your experience.

At the moment I've got six or seven settlements dotted throughout the wasteland, but I concentrate mostly on Sanctuary Hills—my pre-apocalypse hometown. I've built homes for my settlers and defenses to keep them safe from any possible raider attacks. I've grown food there, and set up water pumps to keep everyone fully nourished. Sanctuary Hills truly feels like a sanctuary because I made it that way, and it's where I pop back to whenever I need to clean the irradiated muck off my boots and have some downtime.

Unlike Fallout 3's brown wasteland, the Commonwealth is vibrant, bright, dynamic, and alive, despite its foreboding desolation. There's greater contrast between its different areas, but it all still fits together as a cohesive world. The downtown ruins of Boston—a financial district where skyscrapers groan and creak amid abandoned banks and some of the city's most iconic landmarks—feel more like what was once a major urban center than the smaller towns and outcrops, with their modest houses, Super-Duper Mart complexes, and Red Rocket filling stations. There's tons more to find, from hideouts on top of crumbling overpasses to colossal satellite relays, army bases and drive-ins, abandoned cafes, churches, airports, and stuff I haven't even reached yet but can see in the distance, begging me to go and look at up close.

And it does look fantastic, thanks to some much needed improvements to overall art direction, which helps Fallout 4 rise above any low-res textures you might bump into, or anti-aliasing issues that occur as you scrutinize the environment. This world is impeccably detailed, and there's clearly an understanding of the importance of atmosphere to convey a sense of place, with superb music both in the game's orchestral soundtrack and its various radio stations bringing the entire thing to life with a faux-1950s sheen. Dynamic weather is just a cherry on the top; seeing a perfect blue sky juxtaposed against the devastation below never grows old, while sunrises and sunsets cast an orangey hue over any scene. Heavy rainfall makes adventuring at night-time even more eerie, and occasionally you'll witness a full-blown nuclear storm, with green mist and thunder-cracked skies. It's all fantastically realized.

The only real thing that detracts from all this wonder is the game's frame rate. While playing on PlayStation 4, it dipped frequently, even with the day one patch installed. It never became unplayable, and it didn't even particularly affect my enjoyment, but that's testament to the core qualities of the game. Frame rate dips mostly happen in busy areas and during intense firefights, or when you're exploring the ruins of downtown Boston; but it also randomly affects interiors, even if they're empty, or when you first discover a new location. Sometimes these dips directly hinder combat: fighting off a handful of buzzy bloodbugs becomes a pain in the ass when you not only have to track their movements, but also keep up with the jittery frame rate.

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But frames-per-second inconsistency is the only notable technical issue I've come up against after well over 40 hours of play, which is surprising for a Bethesda game as large as this. There are some minor AI pathfinding issues with your companions, janky animations here and there, and the odd bit of clipping, but I've considered them small quirks that haven't yet damaged my enjoyment. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Fallout 4 represents the result of a studio taking seven years and two games' worth of learning and implementing every lesson into one of the richest virtual worlds we've ever seen. It is a major refinement rather than an overhaul of a genre, but this universe has lost none of the magic that was there in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, which makes it so exciting to dive back into. This is a game that displays a small handful of Bethesda's flaws—most of them technical, rather than artistic—but many of its strengths, while also showcasing a number of new strengths I never expected from its makers. It is, quite simply, an unmissable open-world experience, vibrant beyond its peers, with a sumptuous personality, an empowering sense of freedom, and an ambition few other games nowadays can hope to match.

Fallout 4 is out now for PlayStation 4 (version tested), Xbox One, and PC.

Follow Sam on Twitter.

We Need to Remember Britain's Muslim Soldiers

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The Cenotaph, Whitehall. Photo by Carcharoth via Wikimedia Commons

For many, today is a sombre one. The November 11, Armistice Day, marks the date that World War One ended, but it's also come to represent a day of remembrance for all those who've died fighting in wars—hence the name that's now more commonly used, Veterans Day.

The occasion offers space for citizens to reflect on the colossal human suffering and loss experienced in conflict—although, that can of course be done in all sorts of ways. While most might lay a wreath or simply observe the two-minute silence at 11 AM, some take it as an opportunity to be an even louder brand of dickhead than normal. The types who've developed weirdly passionate opinions about halal food over the past couple of years—or woke up today ready to share a "True patriots stand up to mega-mosques, like if you agree" text post on Facebook—take occasions like Remembrance Day to blindly scream their hatred into the vast nothing of the internet.

Independent think-tank British Future has been active in openly countering these kind of voices. Last year, for example, they sought to hush radicals trying to intimidate Muslims who observed war commemorations with statistical reports about the role that Muslims have played in wars of the past. Organizations like this believe that the misguided opinions of the British far-right are perpetuated—in part, at least—by a hazy omission on the part of many historians. It's this over-simplified, euro-centric narrative, they say, that leaves history open to exploitation by right-wing extremists and Islamists alike.

Speaking to the Labour and Conservative Party conferences in September and October, Sundar Katwala, director at British Future, explained "that , the army which fought on the Somme in 1916 looked more like the Britain of 2015 than the Britain of a century ago."

He went on: "Almost nobody is aware that 400,000 Muslims fought for Britain. The centenary of the First World War has offered a resonant opportunity to discover that untold story and to realize that, although Britain has changed fast in recent years, the roots of our multi-ethnic and multi-faith society go back a long way."

According to an ICM survey carried out last year on behalf of British Future, 78 percent of people in the UK are totally unaware of this contribution to the war by people of other faith groups and ethnicities.

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" a symbiotic relationship of extremisms in our society," said Katwala. "I don't think it's any surprise that Anjem Choudary's various fronts and the EDL grew up together in the playgrounds of Luton. The Islamist extremists and the white far-right extremists need each other, feed off each other, and help each side verify its 'them and us' narrative of grievances to its target audience."

Over half of the UK's 3 million Muslims are under 24 years old. Katwala argues that young people deserve an inclusive narrative and that a shared look at history is a necessary part of a shared society, with equal ownership over what it means to be British.

"We also need calls to action—about what being part of this society means, about the things we share in common, about the values and opportunities of that this society has to offer; about the things we seek to do together," he says. "This needs to be broader than any particular minority community: it needs to be about all of us."

Naik Shahmed Khan, who received the Victoria Cross after his service in WWI. Photo via Wikipedia

On October 27 at the Forum for New Diplomacy in London, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova highlighted the importance of preserving and teaching history, referencing the destruction of historical artifacts and heritage sites by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Since the start of the war in Syria, hundreds of thousands of refugees have experienced the same kind of horrors that have haunted World War veterans across the past century and into old age. Whether that's suffocating chemical weapons, ethnic ,and cultural cleansing campaigns, or the annihilation of homes and cities, there's a straight-forward and disturbing parallel between the suffering of the displaced people of Syria and Iraq and the people of early 20th century Europe.

Her words echoed the sentiment of a Joint Appeal she had issued a year earlier alongside UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and other international representatives. The Appeal declared that "destroying inheritance of the past robs future generations of a powerful legacy, deepens hatred and despair, and undermines all attempts to foster reconciliation... time to stop the destruction, build peace, and protect our common heritage."

Human rights lawyer and parliamentary researcher Hayyan Ayaz Bhabha tells me that Bokova's words hold equally true when it comes to limited Western narratives around the Muslim veterans of both World Wars. "To sow a positive sense of identity and belonging in Europe among Muslims today, background of such negativity, it's essential we preserve and teach the heritage and history of Muslims from around the world. The men and women of MENA, like many of the British soldiers and officers, had no stake in the European war that erupted in August 1914."

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Like Katwala, Bhabha argues that an inclusive and shared society requires an inclusive and, basically, factually-honest historical narrative. This is, in large part, the mission of the Forgotten Heroes Foundation (FHF), an independent Belgian charity for which Bhabha acts as the non-executive Director of UK Operations.

Over the last three years, FHF have gained exclusive access to the Arabic and Farsi-language World War One archives held by countries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and America. This invaluable treasure trove includes written records, personal diaries and photographs.

What FHF want the records to depict is not just statistics, but stories of real humanity, with the hope that they can be used positively to educate. Among soldiers' personal diaries are numerous accounts of European soldiers sharing natural medicines and treatments learned from their Muslim comrades, and of their experiences in sharing each other's cultures, music, food, and religious practices in the trenches—despite the harrowing conditions.

In many of the reports due to be translated, Muslim soldiers were also noted for their remarkable behavior toward the captured enemy.

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Before the Geneva Convention had been imagined, Bhabha tells me, these soldiers referred to the Qur'an and hadith while insisting that German prisoners of war be fed in a dignified manner and not forced to beg for their food. Other sources depict care for the injured enemy and are corroborated by the testimonies of surprised French, Belgian, and Canadian officers writing home.

FHF are currently crowd-funding a project to digitize and archive all 500,000 documents and images to be open to the public. Another aim of the foundation is creating a six-year interactive and immersive exhibition solely dedicated to the Muslim soldiers. If the funds are raised it will become the first of its kind in paying tribute to the citizens of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia who served on the Western Front.

The FHF project aims to establish a full and real understanding of this part of history. The secondary purpose is a deliberate recognition of true humanity, shining a light on people who found commonality in the muddy trenches of France. It's a lesson Bhabha believes will prove invaluable to our society today.

"These findings challenge religious extremists, who are often sectarian, by retelling the personal accounts from soldier's dairies of interfaith and intra-faith interactions between Sunni/Shia, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, and Hindu brothers in arms," he explains. "We want future generations who can confidently challenge and think critically about divisive narratives that suggest people of different faiths and cultures can't live peacefully or work together. Ultimately, this project is a tool to promote and improve social cohesion and build bridges of peace internationally, at a time when it is most needed."

Follow David Gilmour on Twitter.


An Oral History of 'Peep Show,' the UK Sitcom That Defined a Generation

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When the first series of Peep Show came out on DVD in 2004, it was pre-Netflix—pre-YouTube, even. It was during the period in which DVDs were a bit like a car CD selection in the 90s; you'd have a relatively limited amount and they would be on a very heavy rotation (shouts to David Gray's White Ladder for making my daily school run even more miserable).

Chances are, if you were a comedy fan in 2004, the theme music of Peep Show's first series can still be heard looping somewhere in the depths of your mind, branded onto your brain by multiple nights of falling asleep with it on (again), only to be awoken by "Pip Pop Plop" looping for eternity on the DVD menu screen.

Despite the fact the characters were a good ten to 15 years older than my friends and me, it felt like the first TV show that was properly ours. One that embraced sex, drugs, cynicism, and the perpetual hopelessness ingrained in so many British male psyches. The show gave way to a sort of secret language between us, in which conversations were constructed entirely of Peep Show dialogue.


I remember one friend being booted out of a house party for writing "Floss Is Boss" on the wall in shaving cream. Years later, I came downstairs to a flatmate seething after my friend Cath had written "Crack is really moreish" all over his prized Libertines poster.

However, after 12 years and eight series, The El Dude Brothers are about to hang up their cardigan and camo jacket. Tonight, the first episode in the ninth and final series airs on Channel 4 in the UK. A couple of weeks ago we chatted with the creators and cast about the show, which is the longest-running sitcom in Channel 4's history.

On first days on the set:

Jim Howick (Gerard Matthew): My first day on the job was pretty strange. I was lap danced upon all day. We had a lunch break, and then... back to it.

Isy Suttie (Dobby): It was the stationary cupboard scene . It was a real cupboard, so it was really hot and we were all crammed in there and there was a lot of discussion about how to shoot it and show both of our faces at the same time. I don't know why nobody ever questioned why there was a mirror in the stationary cupboard.


On favorite moments and episodes:

Jesse Armstrong (Writer/Creator): I don't watch them back, so I'm not sure. I have seen a few clip reels that people made for the wrap show...

Robert Webb (Jeremy Usbourne): That was incredibly melancholy. They made a lovely reel, a 15-minute video with a couple of scenes from all the series, from the beginning up until the end, so you're just watching yourself age 12 years in 15 minutes. As for favorites, I've said the dog eating moment so often that I want to kill myself, so... I remember the scene when they were lost on the Quantocks being really tough to shoot because it was a night shoot and everyone was really cold and tired and we were up against it and it was getting lighter and lighter. That sticks in the mind not because it was awful but because it was so good that we got it finished; I remember the euphoria that came with it. We had a few days off before we did another night shoot, blowing up Dan's barn, and that was miserable. Although now I'm just talking about the misery.

Sam Bain (Writer/Creator): There's a line I particularly like from the pilot, the first episode, where they're in the bathroom and Mark says to Jeremy: "Nothing you want is ever, ever going to happen," which I think just sort of defined their friendship.

Webb: There's a similar line that runs through my head when I check my phone, which is a Mark line: "Everybody I know doesn't want to talk to me."

Howick: My favorite episode is probably the Rainbow Rhythms one: Mark and Sophie dodge an orgy, go for a walk, Mark suddenly serenades Sophie with an unbelievably awkward rendition of "A Nightingale Sang in Berkerley Square" and they kiss. Glorious!


On comedy taboos and going too far:

Webb: The episode where I wear blackface is the first thing that comes to mind, but the whole comedy of that scene is that craziness and blithe... she's just a bit fucking stupid. She's a self-conscious taboo breaker, so she's very aware of the taboo, whereas Jez is coming at it from a more sensible angle, that is, "Let's not do this taboo." With any kind of jokes in sensitive areas, you have to ask yourself, "What is this joke doing? Whose side is this joke on? How is it going to be misinterpreted and will they have a point if they misinterpret it?" Those are the kind of things you have to ask.

David Mitchell (Mark Corrigan): I don't think there is anything you can't do a joke about, but there are some jokes that aren't on the side of the angels, and what you're doing there is saying something deeply unpleasant. But I don't think there's ever been a joke like that in Peep Show. It's not the subject matter; it's the take. I think it's slightly easier to get away with edgier stuff in a sitcom because it's characters doing it, but we're going through a bad patch in terms of people being very judgmental about jokes. I've been noticing on recent episodes of Have I Got News for You, some things that are just pretty reasonable jokes with a bit of edge to them, and you can hear the studio audience gasping. I think, five years ago, the audience would have just laughed, but now it's really, "Oh, how rude."

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Webb: Shall we blame Twitter?

Mitchell: I'm going to blame Twitter. I think the fact that there is a sport of trying to find offense and enjoying an afternoon of, "Oh, they said this terrible thing that's rude about so and so..." I think the fun people have doing that—and it is fun, even if they don't admit it—is potentially killing the joy of humor for millions. We just need to relax a little bit about jokes. We should celebrate the urge to amuse, not be so quick to assume that the person who has done a bit of an edgy joke has a lurking, horrendous prejudice agenda.

Suttie: I can honestly say I never think it's gone too far, either when I was watching it or when I was in it. I've always thought what has been done has been justified, as long as there is a clear reason for a character to be doing something. Jez's morals are really skewed but he's lovable, so he gets away with doing things that other characters wouldn't. The only time I feel that something is too much in a show is if I don't believe that the character would do it. I mean, I can think of times where it's like, "Wow!" Like the time Mark was ill and had been drugged by Jez and the toilet door is broken and he has to go to the toilet in front of everyone. But I can totally believe that would happen to Mark. Or Jeremy pissing in a church and it going through the floor and onto somebody's hat—I just thought that was really funny.

Howick: The writing confronted often the most horrendous situations with a great deal of sincerity. The comedy was so beautifully honest that you were begging for more. I'd love to hear Mark Corrigan's inner monologue as he's about to jump the shark: "I'm about to jump over a shark—an actual shark!"


On who the worst person in Peep Show is:

Howick: I've thought about this a lot. I'd definitely be happier living with Mark. I'm a Mark man. As far as the worst human being, I'm going to say Nancy. She was pretty awful.

Bain: Mark or Jeremy, I think.

Armstrong: I feel really fondly towards them and that they're not that bad, but these guys do—they think they're terrible.

Mitchell: I think Mark is worse than Jeremy.

Webb: I think they are both fundamentally bad.

Mitchell: But Jeremy is fundamentally a warm person, whereas I think Mark has a coldness at his core.

Armstrong: I think they both have the capacity to be in a nice relationship with someone if they can meet them...

Webb: So did Hitler, Jesse! Check your privilege!

Suttie: I think Johnson would certainly stab you in the back, but then he's so charming that I can imagine if I met Johnson in real life I would do anything he said, like get involved in his business and he'd nick all my money. I think Johnson, he's the most morally bankrupt. I think people might say Jez because he doesn't have a moral code, but he sort of does—it's just the same one as a 14-year-old boy.


On wrapping the show up:

Mitchell: It was sad. We had a lovely last shoot. The script was great and it's as good a series as any of them, really.

Webb: It was all very slickly produced. We ought to know by now how to play the characters, so it was probably the least awful shoot in terms of nightmare experiences.

Armstrong: Previously, when we did another series people would generally go, "Oh, you're doing another one? You're still doing that?" We may regret it, as it has been so lovely doing the series, but it felt like we had to put an end to it and have a party and say, "We've done this for ages and it's been enjoyed by people," rather than us finding it harder and harder to find the time.

Mitchell: It all went very smoothly.

Bain: Although we had a few complaints about the catering.

Mitchell: The catering wasn't the best. We've had worse catering, but we've definitely had better, so it was mid-to-low table. There once was a caterer who was fired for putting a shoelace in a location manager's pudding on purpose, as a sort of threat. He wasn't happy with the provision that had been made for his catering budget by the location manager and it ended very sadly with the ruining of an apple crumble and custard with a shoelace. I can't imagine the shoelace went in particularly clean, either. He did the catering for series one and two and then that was it.

Suttie: I was quite emotional on the last day. It feels weird for it to be the last series, but I think it's good to go out when it's still good, rather than get to 2050 and have us still pretending to be in our 20s; you have to stop at some point.

Webb: The premise was changing. It was about two young men sharing a flat, and it had become about two middle-aged men sharing a flat. Which is a different level of sadness. I think it was getting too sad.

Bain: You do worry about running out of ideas. I think at one point someone pointed out that we'd given Jeremy chlamydia twice. That's because we'd forgotten that we'd done it before, which—after 12 years—happens.


On the show's legacy:

Howick: I do hope its legacy isn't defined by the format alone. That would be a shame because it's just so funny—laugh-out-loud, slap-the-floor funny. I don't trust anyone who doesn't like it.

Suttie: I've only been part of it since series five, but fuck it, I'll claim to be part of the legacy. It's great. It might be a while until something goes to nine series on Channel 4 again, I think. It does feel like a big achievement. I feel really proud to have been in it and I hope we do go down in the history books.

Howick: I'll be wearing black for the last show. For me it's up there with the best. A modern classic. I'd happily watch it every day like a soap.

The ninth and final series of Peep Show starts at 10 PM tonight on Channel 4.

Follow Daniel Dylan Wray on Twitter.

After Getting on Psychics’ Shit List, I Went to Their Psychic Fair Anyway

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"Enter here"... to have your mind blown! Photos by the author

Of all the weird things I've written, the one where I asked psychics to connect with my non-existent dead sister provoked the strongest reactions. While I received some supportive messages, a lot of people also decided I was a horrible person, my favourite being the woman who sent me a 436-word rant about how "your heart mind is closed and your intentions are impure and your eye are blind and your ears are deaf."

I think I'm doing OK for being blind and deaf with impure intentions, but it hurts when someone says my heart mind is closed. Also, as I was researching my original story, I realized there was a lot more to the psychic world than talking to the dearly departed—there are an astounding number of methods for tapping into the past, present, and future via natural talents, cards, pendulums, and other props, for example. Since I'd only seen a narrow slice of the psychic profession, I was curious to experience more of it first-hand. Would other psychics be as janky as the four I went to last time? Are some parts of the psychic world more legit than others? What's a psychic channelling, anyway?

Conveniently enough, the annual GTA Psychic Fair, a three-day event celebrating all things metaphysical and otherworldly at the International Centre in Mississauga, was right around the corner. The centre also happened to be hosting an antique car show and Croc warehouse sale when I went on Halloween Day but I waltzed passed those to Hall 6, where I shelled out a $15 entrance fee in hopes of broadening my psychic horizons.

One psychic who "connected" with my sister for that original article said she'd warn every psychic in Toronto about me. Either she has a stunted professional network or belongs to the forgive-and-forget camp, because I gained entry and strolled amongst dozens psychics for hours without being hassled.

As I did my first round of the tables, about three-quarters of which were occupied, I was bombarded with pamphlets offering everything from psychic surgery to all-natural, non-cancer-causing deodorant. Posters were tacked to the backs of the empty booths and covered topics like alien abduction (symptoms include memory loss and sperm extraction) and the powers of crystal skulls. The few dozen people in the crowd seemed to be primarily middle-aged women, but the psychics were a fairly even split gender-wise, and I was surprised at how many accepted credit card payments. Everyone had qualifications that ranged from being born with a veil of skin over their eyes to certificates from schools across the continent. Everyone was probably violating copyright law when it came to the graphics and photos on their banners.

Important palm reading documents

Unsure where to start, I attended a talk on on how to pick a psychic. The half-hour was mostly occupied by a woman with an irritating, nasal voice asking the speaker how to tell dead relatives beaming advice into her head from her own thoughts, but I managed to glean that the best psychic for me would be someone I had a good connection with.

I decided I had a decent connection with the guy at the front offering a future, biorhythms, palm analysis, love scope, and tarot package for $10. Not only was it the cheapest thing available, but it also incorporated technology—by scanning my right hand and inputting my name and birthday into his computer, the man could cross-reference my details with a database of readings made by hundreds of psychics and spit out readings. It told me, amongst other things: I should guard against being distant in my relationships; that I'm "often lured to faraway places" (I have a pretty bad case of wanderlust, I guess); that I "can be fetishy or kinky" (sure); and that there will be failure in my future (well, shit) but a high chance of recovery (phew). Although some points seemed to align with my life, the statements and predictions seemed vague enough that could probably apply to anyone. The package was entertaining, but not exactly life-changing. Though I'd probably do it again in the future for shits and giggles.

Time for another talk—this one was on spirit guides, where I learned that dead people are literally everywhere watching us all the time, even when we're on the toilet or fucking.

Back to wandering. At one table, a steady stream of people forked over $40 for aura photos. Auras look oddly like multicolour smears drawn around someone's face in Microsoft Paint. I opted for a $15 palm reading done by "the world's oldest machine" instead and got a map of my hand and a reading ("valid for a period of approximatly 3 months") printed on continuous form paper. A disclaimer at the top warned that "the science of Palmistry is arbitrary," but I'm tentatively excited—highlights include "a big business deal is about to unfold...to your advantage $$$$$" and making "marvelous new contacts." I'll also apparently be hit by a wave of dick and/or pussy soon, because "your sexually energy is mounting and romance is about to bloom again in your life" and I can "allow sexuality to the maximum."

The reading also said I'm an "astute wheeler dealer." Not sure what that means. Same deal with the first package though—highly entertaining, but nothing that blew me away.

Enough with the machines, though—it was time for some human interaction. Most people were charging between $60 to $95 for 30-minute sessions, but I found a woman offering psychic channellings for $20. Psychic channelling, the man fielding the crowd explained, didn't look into the future—it focused on the present and what you needed to know. Sounded good.

I put my name on the waitlist, then did another round of tables and read a poster about the links between the Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy assassinations. When I came back, I took a seat across from an affable middle-aged woman and she ran over what was about to happen: She would connect to "The Council," an otherworldly group with supreme knowledge and insight, and I'd get to ask one question.

The channelling began. She sat eyes closed and silent for a few minutes, pursing her lips and exhaling sharply. When she spoke, the words came out slowly, devoid of emotion and in cryptic sentences—long story short, I have a bright future and a lot of good challenges ahead. About 15 minutes in, I was prompted to ask my question. I asked what challenge I should focus on. The Council said on making a choice about what path to follow.

The woman's eyes suddenly popped open and she began speaking in her normal, peppy voice. The Council had shown her a vision of me standing in front of a map of the world, but with North America crossed out—a sign that perhaps I should be, or want to be, somewhere else. The Council added that even though I followed a line of education didn't mean I couldn't or shouldn't try out a new path.

This was my first "oh shit" moment of the day, because I'd been thinking over what I want to do with my life and boiled it down to two options—continuing pursuing journalism in Toronto, which I've been grinding at since starting university in 2011, or, moving to Japan to teach English.

Did she mention travel and adventure because, really, who in their 20s doesn't want those things? Or is there really something to The Council? I have to admit, being told I should be grateful that I'm in a position to be making choices, and to be choosing between two good options at that, was comforting. I could understand why people do channellings—at the very least, it's a mini therapy session that leaves you with some peace and clarity of mind.

I strolled around the tables for the millionth time. A poster with three photos on it informed me that what looked like dust specks lit up by camera flash were, in fact, ghosts.

Further on, a sign offering a rune casting readings caught my eye—that, and the guy wearing a conical wooden hat and a cape sitting behind the table. I wasn't sure if it was for Halloween or his normal garb, but the scene reminded of my preteen love for RuneScape and that was enough of a good connection for me.

I sat down across from Cape Man. He shuffled what looked like a deck of oversized YuGiOh cards, then made three piles of two cards each. The runes were in the corners of each card while vividly-coloured drawings of fantasy creatures and settings sprawled across the faces—fire-breathing dragons, armour-clad men drinking in a firelit homestead, green fairies with giant tits, that sort of thing.

He did this twice, with both casting reading about the same. The first pile was my past, and it looked rough—a death in the family or financial problems, perhaps? (Nope.)

Next, my present: I'm cautious as a result of my past, but the lessons I've learned will benefit me (I hope so). My love life is pretty dead at the moment (true), but it's because I feel like there isn't anyone good enough (maybe?). I should open up to the romantic options available and take chances I'd normally brush off (cute friends, holla at me).

Finally, my future: Like both machine readings earlier, this one said my finances are set to improve, and I'll also be travelling with a friend. In a bit of a downer, I won't find a soulmate anytime soon but I'll still be happy with my romantic life.

I also got to ask the runes a question and went with Japan vs. journalism thing, although I just said I was contemplating two career paths. Cape Man laid out two rows of cards, told me to assign a path to each row and then started interpreting, which is when I got my second "oh shit" moment of the day.

Path 1, which I assigned to Japan, would be an excellent financial move, will put me in a position of power and make me an adult. Path 2, journalism, won't work out so well financially and I'll feel like a child, but I won't be a "corporate stooge." Loosely accurate on both counts, I guess. Rune casting seemed to fall between the machine readings and psychic channelling - gets you thinking a bit, but leaning more towards machines when it comes to accuracy and entertainment value.

But the weirdest part, and what broke me that day, happened as I was getting up to leave. Cape Man asked if I was "gifted." I said I didn't think so. He said that I am, in fact, an empath—someone who can pick up on and channel other people's emotions, energies and physical feelings. He could tell because empaths are like the "red-head children of the psychic world" and encouraged me to develop my gift by looking up stuff online.

Up until then, I could deal with whatever the fair had thrown at me. Fortune-telling machines, talking to angels and dead people, wish-granting rocks, getting probed by aliens? Fine. And I'd found all of the one-on-one experiences I had at least a little enjoyable and insightful, even.

But after being called impure, a trickster, and an otherwise awful human being after writing about how psychics lied to me, I've been a goddamn psychic this whole time? I've had powers I don't really believe in all along, while believers gave me shit for not opening my heart enough? Is this karma? Some sort of sick cosmic joke, a form of divine retribution? What do I do now?

It was too much. Mind overloaded, energy drained, and wallet emptied, I made a beeline for the exit.

Let Jackie Hong channel your feelings on Twitter.

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