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Canadian Veteran Wins Disability Benefits by Arguing the Navy Life Made Him Fat

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A Canadian navy ship. Photo via Flickr user/Dennis Jarvis

A 47-year-old Canadian veteran was recently granted disabilities benefits on the basis that the food he ate while in the navy had made him obese.

The veteran, who remained unnamed according to the Chronicle Herald, made his argument to Veterans Review and Appeal Board in October that the unhealthy food supplied by the Canadian Navy over his 26 years of service had made him extremely unhealthy.

During his time in the Navy, the veteran said the food caused him to gain 140 pounds and eventually suffer from high blood pressure. The board initially denied him his request, but later granted his benefits when he was able to establish a link between the food he ate while serving and his current condition.

Disability benefits vary depending on the severity of the case and the calculated need of the person with the disability. There are a total of 21 classes to be ranked in, with class 1 being the highest. Those who qualify for the highest amount of disability benefit can collect up to $2,663 if single, and up to $4,000 if married with multiple children. It's unclear how much the former veteran received.

Physician Niall Buckley, the doctor who produced a report on the man's condition for Veterans Affairs to look at, made an argument for the veteran's hypertension by drawing a link between the shift from the man's original diet—which consisted of lean meat and organic foods—to the high-sodium, high-fat food served on board navy ships.

Despite taking a position against the food served on board Canadian ships, Buckley says he doesn't think it's a Navy-specific issue.

"I don't think the food aboard the ships is any different than the food in the average kitchen in Nova Scotia," Buckley told the Chronicle Herald. "It's the same processed rubbish that most everyone is eating.

"The only thing unique about him is that he was on a different diet altogether before he went into the military."

Food may be the only outlet for a lot of sailors, however. After a series of drunken incidents on board the HMCS Whitehorse, the Navy banned booze on all ships that aren't tied to dock or celebrating approved events such Christmas parties or the Queen's birthday (presumably).

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.


A Party Clean-Up Company Told Us the Worst Things They've Seen

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All photos courtesy of Frisse Kater

Throwing a party always seems like a good idea until it's over. It's only in the early morning, once you're fully hungover and covered in unfamiliar liquids, that the regret sinks in. This usually happens after a) you realize in a drunken and/or otherwise intoxicated state, you did something regrettable, or b) you see the mess that's exploded into your house: the empty bottles and beer cans strewn about, passed-out friends littering your floor, the strange-colored vomit caked on to your shower.

This is where Tugrul Cirakoglu comes in. Cirakoglu is the owner of Frisse Kater, a cleaning company based in Amsterdam that specializes in post-party clean-up. He started the company last year, after he'd completed a masters degree in London and witnessed a number of horrifying things at dorm parties: people pissing in the sinks, people breaking things, people getting in fights and splattering blood everywhere. He realized there weren't any companies in the Netherlands offering to clean up those kinds of messes and saw a business opportunity.

On their website, Frisse Kater claims their services are used only for the "dirtiest, most extreme, and disgusting after-party clean-ups that you could ever imagine." I had to wonder what they meant by that. So I called them up to hear about what they've witnessed.

VICE: What does an average party clean-up look like?
Tugrul Cirakoglu: We're usually called after parties, where about 50 to 100 people attend. For the Netherlands, that's quite large, because houses here are quite small. Everyone has been drinking, using drugs, and everything gets messy. There's usually alcohol and food all over the floor, muddy footprints, broken glass, puking, sometimes urinating, or even people taking shits on the walls. It can get really extreme.

I'm sorry, what? People taking shits on the walls?
I think that was just one time, but yeah. For a normal person, everything would be extreme, but for us, the most extreme things are human feces.

Do you usually field calls the day after a big party, when the host realizes that someone has taken a shit on their wall?
We have some people who are really prepared and they'll call us like, two months before the party and the next day their parents come home. So we rush there and we clean everything. But in those situations, we don't clean it too well, because then the parents will be suspicious.

There was this one party where they rented a restaurant. The owner , and 50 guys came in for the party. What they were doing inside was basically this initiation event for their club. First they had dinner and drinks, and then these ten guys were taken inside the bathrooms and they were violently beaten with whips; they were punched, kicked, smacked with those rubber placemats in bars where they put shot glasses. And then that evening, the owner called us and was like, "Yo man, I really need you guys. Something happened." So when we came, we saw all the mess and what had happened and he told us everything. I was like, Whoa, this is really heavy. We never experienced anything like that before. There was blood, and it was really dirty.

Read: The VICE Guide to House Parties

That's insane. Do you charge extra for situations like that?
We charge by the hour, but if it's extreme, we say, "Hey, this wasn't the agreement." Sometimes, people will call us and when we arrive, we immediately see that there was no party—the guy's just extremely messy and dirty and needs his house cleaned.

People actually do that?
Yeah. Last month, we were called by a guy. I don't know if he went on or what, but there were trash bags left in the home for so long that everything inside had rotted, and maggots and flies started growing inside the bags. Eventually, they escaped and the whole house—literally, thousands and thousands of flies and maggots—were crawling around on the ceiling, the walls, on the furniture, in his toilet, in his kitchen... everywhere. We've never seen anything like that.

In the beginning, we didn't expect people would call us for that type of thing, so the materials we brought with us were normal cleaning materials. Now, we bring a van filled with cleaning materials for hazardous cleaning—we have masks and protective gloves and gear for these types of jobs. We also have special cleaning chemicals to kill the most extreme viruses and stuff.


Do you ever have to deal with drunk people while you're cleaning house parties?
Sometimes we see people lying on the floor or on the couch, completely passed out. In some cases—it's a bit more rare—we come to parties and there's still one or two people tripping. Most people aren't really a problem if they're just sleeping, because they don't bother you. If they wake up, they're normally just like, "Where the fuck am I?" The difficult people to deal with are the ones who are still and want to actively engage with you. There are different kinds: people who are really annoying, they can't stand still; and people who are so high on drugs that they think it's the best thing in the world and they also want you to experience it. The first kind might keep coming up and touching you or trying to hug you; the second kind keeps coming up to you like, "Hey, I have some coke, take some!"

There's another interesting group, which is people who are high but get on this "cleaning trip." They get extremely active, so once you start cleaning, they want to help—brushing everything, sweeping everything. They start scrubbing aggressively. They are really fun.

"There's no chemical substance to deal with difficult customers. You can't just spray something on them and they'll go sit down and leave." — Tugrul Cirakoglu


There are some really gross photos on your Flickr. Like, there's one photo with a bunch of used condoms on the floor. There's another one with what appears to be a shit in someone's sink.
That was cat shit actually, but it was a commercial restaurant.

What?!
Yeah, we also do commercial cleaning, and even in commercial cleaning, somehow, the craziest people always manage to find our number and call us. Personally, I never eat at restaurants. I have to be starving, because of the things we see in commercial places.

Aside from cat shit in the sink, what kinds of things have you seen in restaurants?
We see a lot of places where the owner has zero knowledge about cleaning. One time, we went inside this restaurant. We always ask the owner if we can see the closet with their cleaning supplies, because when we see what they have, we immediately know the situation. So I asked, "Where are the cleaning cloths?" You know those yellow cloths that you just use one time and you throw them away? Those were the only cloths that he had in the restaurant. I was like, "How do you know whether your staff has just cleaned the toilet with this cloth or the kitchen counters?" And he was like, "Hmmm, I don't know." So basically, you're telling me that you don't know whether this cloth here on the table has been used to clean the toilet or the kitchen or the bar or the table? What are you doing?

Warning: Don't Drink the Cleaning Products

That can't be very common though, right?
No, it happens in so many places. You know Windex? We've seen that used in so many restaurants as an all-purpose cleaner, even though it's just for cleaning windows. When we ask them, "Hey, don't you have a product to clean bacteria and sterilize your kitchen?" And they say, "Doesn't Windex clean everything?" That's very disturbing.

Which is worse: restaurant kitchens or houses after a party?
I would say both of them are dirty. I don't have any problem with someone not cleaning their own home, because that's a personal problem. But if you have a restaurant or a coffee shop, you are serving people food and drinks there, and you have to clean! You can't just wipe everything with Windex and make it appear shiny when in reality it hasn't been cleaned for years. For me, that's like committing a crime.

Your job doesn't sound very fun. Does this job totally suck?
A lot of people ask, "It must be so difficult to do this job, because these places are so filthy." But no, that's the easiest part. We use our professional cleaning supplies and everything gets clean really quickly and easily. The problem is, there's no chemical substance to deal with difficult customers. You can't just spray something on them and they'll go sit down and leave.

See more photos from real parties Frisse Kater has cleaned below.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.


A Burning Man Decompression Party Made Me Not Hate Burning Man

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A group spoon with strangers is not something I (centre person) thought I'd be into. I was wrong. Photos by Brian Bettencourt.

I've never been to Burning Man but I have several friends who consider themselves "burners."

They've tried to explain the culture and community to me on several occasions, sometimes at great length, but my takeaway is inevitably: (privileged) white people wear costumes and get high in the desert, attaching a disproportionate amount of significance to the shit they do/build there. (Sorry guys!)

So, when I pitched going to a Burning Man party in Toronto to my editor, no part of me expected to like it, let alone enjoy getting felt up by faceless strangers. But more on that later. First, I'll explain where my prejudice comes from.

Burners have 10 Principles, examples include Radical Inclusion and Decommodification, but before Saturday, I assumed these tenets amounted to pretentious bullshit that I didn't need to concern myself with. The Facebook description for the event, officially called Toronto Burning Man Decompression: Playa North, didn't do much to ease my concerns.

"A decompression party, decom or decomp is a local reunion for Burning Man participants to help ease themselves back into everyday society after the 'big event'," it said, adding there would be opportunities to "share feelings, art, performances and memories."

Really? How many memories could you realistically have from getting stoned and drunk three months ago? And isn't Burning Man itself a massive decompression from life?

Anyway, it's with this mindset that my friend Brian, a photographer, and I headed off toward Playa North. Before long, we were both declaring it the best night of our lives. Here's how we got there:

Wanting to be immersive, Brian and I decided to take one of the shuttle buses transporting people from downtown Toronto to the party, north of the city. Immediately, we noticed that our costumes were worse than everyone else's. I was wearing a tie dye onesie underneath a tutu and Brian was reusing a Spiderman suit from a past Halloween. Other people seemed to really incorporate an LED element to their costumes. (While struggling with the onesie in the bathroom later, I told one guy that he was lucky he was just wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Mildly insulted, he replied, "I worked on this all day" and flicked a switch, causing his entire outfit to light up electric blue.)

Other people put a lot more effort into their costumes than we did.

The first person we met was Floyd, a dude in his 40s who randomly attended Burning Man a few years ago, not knowing what the hell it was. He had a hard time telling us what to expect, at one point making a comparison to Field of Dreams, a 1989 Kevin Costner movie about baseball and dead dads (after reviewing my tape, I still don't understand what Floyd was getting at.)

Floyd told us Burning Man was like the baseball movie Field of Dreams.

"It's different. It's hard to describe," he said. "You just gotta experience it. Everybody wants you to have a good time." Floyd is black and I asked him if he felt like the festival was overwhelmingly white.

"I wouldn't say it was super white," he replied. "Probably like 70 percent."

Then he told us we should give him some of our vodka because he'd agreed to be interviewed. We did.

This seemed kinda dangerous.

There were people doing pyrotechnics—literally waving flames around—outside the venue, a large industrial space. Once inside, we dropped off our booze at a long table called the "gift bar," which functioned as an alcohol potluck. It was an introduction to the principle of gifting, which is what it sounds like: you give stuff to people and you get stuff. Within an hour, someone had gifted me MDMA and Brian "self-confidence" (a woman told him he was beautiful). "That never happens in the real world," he said, somewhat awestruck. On a practical level, we realized that we wouldn't have to pay for anything at this party and that basically placed it within our top 10 right off the bat.

While walking around, we were led through a maze, several dance floors, a smoke pit, "theme camps" with stuffed animals chilling in tents, a fake VIP lounge to mock the concept of VIP, and a room where people were performing bondage, among other things. It was sensory overload, like the set of a recent-era Harmony Korine movie, complete with actual "sets," ideal for taking photos.

A place to be yourself.

"That's the groping station," Lindsay Millard, the event's publicist, told us. I am naturally drawn to boobs, so I immediately walked over and asked a woman standing by the station if I could touch hers. "Why?" she asked, somewhat sourly. "Uh, I thought that's what you do here," I replied. She explained that I had to actually go inside the station to get groped. I was worried she was mad at me, but then she offered to kiss my breast; it was surprisingly intimate. Shit was getting pretty weird and Brian and I decided to go with it, so we stepped into the station, effectively a closet with glory holes poked into the walls. Anonymous hands reached in and felt up Brian and I as we faced each other. "Someone tried to jerk me off while I tried taking your photo," he remarked afterward. A similar thing had happened to me. Normally, this would have freaked both of us out, but in this context, we enjoyed it. We received the physical pleasure of being touched without having to deal with a creepy social interaction.

Getting felt up by anonymous hands was the highlight of my night.

Bondage.

Later, Brian and I circled back to the bondage room. A girl getting tied up with red rope let us take her photo. A bunch of people were doing a group spoon. I crawled into the middle and we all cuddled for a while. Then we started having one of those conversations you can only have with strangers at 4 AM when you're fucked off MDMA.

"There comes a point where most people decide they're not going to do something and every time I to that moment, I decide that's what I have to do," said a musician named Colin, who ended up being one of our favourite people. We chatted a lot about how we could never do the things we were doing at a normal bar. And how we felt "real." "You can just kind of float around the environment... You can be part of the environment," said Colin, dropping another wisdom bomb. In the moment, we all emphatically agreed with Colin although admittedly. it makes less sense now.

Throughout the evening, we encountered several attendees who had come from places as far as Edmonton and Ottawa. At first, we were puzzled as to why people would travel long distances to get to this party but once we started drinking the Kool-Aid, it wasn't that hard to understand. As long as you were being respectful of people, you could do whatever the fuck you wanted (see principle 5, radical self-expression). There was no judgment, no "social norms." Millard told me there are "rangers" who act as safety nets in case something goes wrong. "No one will tell you not to climb a giant piece of art but they'll help you if you fall off." That's probably why there were so many corporate, government-employee types around, letting their freak flags fly.

As the party wrapped up, Brian and I scanned the various rooms in search of straggling ragers, but by 6 am, people were mostly passed out, so we called an Uber. The next day I felt like a bag of garbage physically, but I couldn't stop smiling when I told people about the party. I thought I would be more embarrassed about the gushing Brian and I had done throughout the night, but I only cringed a couple times while playing back my recorder and I found myself replying to texts from my new friends with a sincere intention of seeing them again.

This doesn't mean I'm going to become a diehard burner. I'm too lazy and it seems like there's quite a lot of effort involved. But Saturday was certainly the freest I've felt of inhibition, maybe ever. If I have to rock some body paint once in a while to catch that feeling, so be it

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.


Comics: 'Charlie Hebdo' Cartoonist Riad Sattouf Discusses His Memoir ‘The Arab of the Future’

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Photo by Olivier Marty/Courtesy of Henry Holt and Metropolitan Books

Riad Sattouf is a French-Syrian cartoonist and movie director who lives in Paris. The first volume of his graphic memoir, The Arab of the Future, was published in English this fall. A best-seller in France, the book covers the peripatetic existence imposed upon the Sattouf family between 1978 and 1982 by Riad's father, Abdel-Razak, a PhD history professor and devotee of pan-Arabism, who dragged his wife and children from Paris to Tripoli to his hometown, Ter Ma'aleh, a small Syrian village north of Homs.

In Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, laws against private property meant that you couldn't put a lock on your door, so when the Sattoufs went out together one day, another family moved in to their house. In Hafez al-Assad's Syria, Riad was jeered by his cousins as a yehudi—the Arabic term for Jew—on account of his then-long blonde hair; he watched children shit on the street, piss in holes otherwise employed in the dispensing of drinking water, and murder a puppy for fun.

To those who insist that incisive proclamations and penetrating insights about now be embedded in any work whose subject matter crosses paths with Syria and Libya at any time in their histories, The Arab of the Future will be a disappointment. No universal truths about autocracy, the Middle East, or radical Islam are revealed in what is essentially a very personal story of an extremely chaotic family. The book, whose title pokes fun at Abdel-Razak's pan-Arabist obsessions, shows the hypocrisy behind one man's understanding of that failed political ideology, makes tangible the absurdity of living under propaganda-mad dictators, and it humanizes, for better or worse, certain segments of very poor Muslim populations in two specific parts of the Middle East. But that's about as far as its politics, or those of its creator, are willing to go.

When we spoke in New York in early November—before the attacks in Paris on the 13th—Sattouf was less interested in analyzing international relations than he was in discussing Donald Trump's hair, which wouldn't leave whatever news channel was on the TV above us. As I walked him back to Grand Central after the interview, we swapped pictures of our kids and talked about the costs of raising families in our respective large cities. After November 13th, he quietly ignored my repeated attempts to ask about what had happened; he only let me know that he and his family were OK.

We met in the lobby of the Iroquois Hotel. I suggested that we grab a drink and steal space in a quiet little nook up front. He looked in at the empty restaurant and said, "Why don't we go sit there, at the bar—like a couple of alcoholics."

VICE: I read that you may make up answers occasionally in interviews.
Riad Sattouf: I "make up"? What is "make up"?

Invent, lie...
Not really. I don't invent things, I don't think. Sometimes I refuse to answer, because people ask me questions, wanting to know the rest of the story in The Arab of the Future. And I don't want to tell. So I don't especially invent things, I just refuse to answer and make jokes instead.

The picture on the inside cover is of you as a little blonde child nervously holding a pistol. Is there any particular reason you chose it?
When I was young, I was obsessed with guns.

Do you know why?
No. I think, you are a boy—you have to like guns. And I liked them very much. I had a lot of plastic guns. There was always a gun with me. Like I had to protect myself from something.

There's a scene in the book in Syria in which you're playing war with your cousins, and they make you play with "the Jews" figures, which are insane. Did you keep any of those?
No, and you know, I tried to find them... I went on eBay and elsewhere, and I haven't been able to find any. And a guy wrote me, a collector of toy soldiers, and he said, "I'm really interested in your idea of those toy soldiers, and I haven't seen them anywhere—did you invent it?" And so I was thinking, I hope I didn't invent them. But in my mind, I don't think so. I think they were true.

All comics reprinted with permission from Metropolitan Books

I want to ask you more about invention, because you were, what, in the first volume? Two to four years old? So I'm reading this thinking, I don't remember hardly anything before I was maybe five.
I think I have a good memory, a visual memory. It's not sound memory—I don't remember the talking, but I remember the images well. I remember images from before what I'm telling in the book. I remember when I couldn't walk, and I was sitting in a chair, and a giant was giving me things to eat, like a giant finger. And I remember a white cat that my grandmother had; he was a very mean cat. Everybody was talking about how mean he was, and he was jumping everywhere and harassing people, and he died in 19... 80... no, he died in 1979. So I was one year old.

You use one dominant color to shade each country—yellow for Libya, blue for France, and rose for Syria. What's the particular reason that you chose each one?
When I started to remember, I realized that the different places had colors in my memory. For example, in Libya there was a lot of sand everywhere. It was very hot and yellow. In France, it was in Brittany, so it was the sea. In Syria, it was the red of the soil. Clay. If you stay in a room that is red for one hour, and then you go out, the world will seem green. You invert the dominant colors. And I wanted that to happen with the scenery. That when you changed from one country to the other, you would feel disoriented.

The way that you portray your mother in this book, she's extremely passive. You know, your father comes home in Paris one day and says, "Hey, by the way, I actually got a job in Libya and we're moving there." And she just goes along with it. Or, "Hey, let's move to a tiny village in Syria where you'll be the only woman not wearing a hijab and you'll have to eat in a separate room from the men and only get to eat our scraps." No protest. And yet you also show her as really smart, with strong opinions and a good sense of humor. But it seems like she kind of let your dad—I don't want to say walk all over her—but he just kind of led the way, and she followed.
Yeah. She was like that. At that time, she had stopped her studies and was taking care of her children. She was a housewife. And she was hoping that her husband would become somebody important. Because my father was a bright man in Libya and Syria. He was a doctor in France; very few people could say the same thing. So she was waiting for him to become somebody important, and she supported him. She was waiting, because he was always saying, "We will be rich, I will buy a Mercedes, I will have a villa—a huge villa."

He seems like he was kind of obsessed with power, the way that he sort of idolized Gaddafi and Assad.
He was in love with education and school, and he wanted the Arab world to become independent from US influence and Russian influence. He wanted to build a huge Arab nation. It was pan-Arabism, you know. But on the other side, he was not for democracy, he was not for liberty. He thought that if we let Arabs choose their leaders, they would choose a religious, stupid leader, and he wanted to... he was dreaming of staging a coup and executing everybody and becoming the chief. He was fascinated with power.

So what did he think education was going to do if he didn't actually believe in any of these people?
I don't know. This is a paradox.

Your father seems possessed of similar contradictions when it came to religion. He didn't practice his religion, and believed that education would free Arabic people from the constraints of dogma. But at the same time, having been raised as a Sunni in a small Sunni community, he hated Shias. And, of course, he wasn't that into Jews either.
Yeah, he saw himself as a liberal. So he thought that religion was keeping people in the dark, but at the same time, he thought that the devil was real and magic was real and jinn were waiting around the corner. I think that his childhood, which I tell a bit about in the first book, was full of terror. And I think—because in his village they had no electricity, no water at that time—it was a very tough life. So it was a very intense reaction to reality, like if something unusual happened, we don't know what it is—it's magic.

Has your mom read this book?
Yeah.

Did she tell you how she felt about the way that you portrayed her?
Yeah, she told me... [ laughs]

All right, fair enough. Well, let's turn to you, and the young version of you in The Arab of the Future. The story is rendered in what seems to be a purposefully childlike way—that you're not looking back on these events as an adult filtering them through age and experience as much as you are almost trying to relive them as a child.
Yeah. It was very important to show the point of view of a child on the situation. Without judgment. And to put the reader in the position of a child, and to let him judge by himself. Sometimes there are readers who tell me, "Oh my god, your father, he's so awful. He's so mean. I hate him. How can you live with him?" And then a guy after comes and says, "Your father, he's very touching. Very touching with his mistakes and everything." And I like that. I think it's better—I'm not sure exactly how to say it—to leave the story inside.

"Writers from Arabic countries—I don't want to speak generally—but a large portion of the people who are speaking about these countries, who are 'known' as 'writers' in Europe, are from rich families. They are from the upper class of the Arab world. But I lived and experienced life with children and young people from a social class that rarely has its stories told."

I know that among other things people have said about this book is that your portrayals of your father and his family are somehow comments on Arabic people more generally. Is that fair to say?
No, of course not. And that's why I chose the title The Arab of the Future. Because it's, uh, a ridiculous title, you know? There is no meaning; it's meant to reinforce the fact that I'm speaking about a point of view of one family. But I did have a lot of reactions from other people, from Algeria, from Morocco, and they said, "Oh, my family was like that." People can recognize themselves inside them. I'm sure some American people can recognize their father in the guy who likes guns.

I think that the specificity of my book is that my father was supposed to be from the upper class, because he was a teacher, but he wanted to live with his family in his village where there was a very low class. Writers from Arabic countries—I don't want to speak generally—but a large portion of the people who are speaking about these countries, who are "known" as "writers" in Europe, are from rich families. They are from the upper class of the Arab world. But I lived and experienced life with children and young people from a social class that rarely has its stories told. I think that to show the way we were living in this village, it's very important, compared to a lot of ways we see the Arab world. You know, when you see, like a girl from a monarchy buying a huge plane, putting Emirates on it... It's not only billionaires.

Or on another token, it's not just ISIS or rebel fighters.
Yeah, there are normal people.


So you worked for Charlie Hebdo, or did you just publish your cartoon there?
No, Charlie Hebdo, I used to work there, for eight years. In 2003, Cabu, one of the cartoonists who worked there [who was killed during the massacre in January], offered me a job. And he was one of my idols; he was the idol of most French cartoonists. Because when we were children, he appeared on a TV show where he helped children learn how to draw. And I'm still using the things I learned with him in my comics. So in 2003, he offered me a job at the paper, but I don't know how to draw political cartoons. But I loved Cabu, so I told him yes, but that I didn't want to make those kinds of drawings. So he said, "Do something else. You want to make a comic?" And I suggested a comic series called "The Secret Life of the Young." They're scenes I would see on the subway, or the street, and I drew them in my notebook. People having arguments, mothers speaking to their children in bad ways or telling them strange things. So I published this comic strip for eight years, but I wasn't a part of the newspaper. I sent my strip by email.

So you didn't go to editorial meetings?
No, never. Nobody ever asked me my ideas about anything. My work was separated from the news. And then after eight years of doing it, I found it quite depressing, always seeing horrible things on the street. I said I wanted to stop, and I left the newspaper—it was six months before the attack.

Has The Arab of the Future, which was a bestseller in France, changed your public profile at home?
Yeah, it's completely different.Before I published Arab of the Future, I had comics fans, like indie fans. After Arab of the Future, I had moms. Dads. Moms and people who were telling me, "I'm sorry this is the first comic I read; I don't read comics but I love it." It's very new.

Do you like that?
Yeah, I love it. I like when people from real life like my comics. For 15 years, I was drawing comics, and sometimes you would say, "Why am I doing all this? Nobody likes my comics. I'm alone at my table and nobody is here to get my picture. I'm here, and there is always a guy who comes and looks at my comic and says, 'I like superheroes,' and he goes away." So when you could reach people who are not interested in comics, but they like the story, I'm very happy.

After you had moved to France and your blonde hair turned dark, did you get made fun of again? Like when you were in Syria, and they were calling you yehudi, did you get the dirty Arab or something in France?
Of course. When I arrived in France my hair started to turn brown and curly, and I had zits, and I became ugly. And—I don't know if in English it's the same—but in French, I have a girly voice. So when I was younger, all the guys would say, "Hey you're gay," "Hey faggot."

So people were telling me I was a Jew in Syria, and in France they were telling me what a faggot I was. Gay till I was, I don't know, 16 or 18 years old. And—I've said this elsewhere, but it's very true—because I was thinking, I'm not Jewish. I'm not Jewish. But if I had been Jewish, or if I had been gay, it's incredible how life would have been for me. Each time someone said to me, "Hey gay, fuck you," if I really loved men, I would have gone crazy. So I became very sensitive to all those questions of people who are hated by a mass who don't know why. I have a lot of affection for the outsider, the excluded person.

Follow Aidan on Twitter.

The Arab of the Future is available now from Metropolitan Books.

The CDC Just Released a ‘Gun Violence’ Study That Doesn't Actually Study Guns

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This story originally appeared on The Trace.

On November 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a 14-page report on gun violence in Wilmington, Delaware, a medium-sized city of roughly 70,000 residents that also experiences one of the highest murder rates in the country. To judge by the language in its title—"Elevated Rates of Urban Firearm Violence and Opportunities for Prevention"—the study might seem to have been an overlooked watershed: Despite a 2013 executive order by President Barack Obama to resume research on gun violence, the CDC has adhered to a two-decade-old congressional restriction that effectively bans such inquiries. Now here was a document suggesting it was tiptoeing back in.

Read through the Wilmington report, though, and you get a different story—one about the strange contortions that result as the CDC seeks to fulfill its public health mission without violating Congress's orders.

While the new study analyzed Wilmington's 127 recorded shootings in 2013, it does not address how the perpetrators acquired their weapons, or if attempts to limit access to firearms might lead to a dip in crime. Instead, the Wilmington report outlines already well-established trends and risk factors: that 95 percent of city residents arrested for violent crimes are young men; that a history of violence is a strong predictor for being involved in a firearm-related crime; and that unemployment is often a risk factor for violence. The report concludes that "integrating data systems" across Delaware would allow social service providers to better understand the issue.

If the CDC wasn't going to consider the role of firearms in Wilmington's gun crimes, why do the study at all? The answer is in the research's origins, which lie in a bizarro world of not-actually-about-gun-violence gun violence studies that are an outgrowth of the congressional ban. "It's not like the study was initiated by the CDC," Dr. Linda Degutis, the former director of the center's national injury center, told The Trace. "It was a response to a request from the city."

Specifically, the Wilmington study is a product of the CDC's "Epi-Aids" program, which assists states and local governments with public health problems through the agency's Epidemic Intelligence Service division. Because the CDC is under immense political pressure to avoid doing anything that might even appear to "advocate or promote gun control" (in the words of Congress), Epi-Aid requests like Wilmington's—which revolve around firearm-related public health issues—put the agency in a difficult situation.

In a proper epidemiological study, guns themselves would be treated as a risk factor for many types of violence or injury—just as mosquitoes would be treated as a risk factor for contracting malaria, for example. As it is, the agency is confined to rehashing social or environmental factors that have already been thoroughly studied by injury researchers.

"When a health department requests an investigation of something, that's basically within the CDC's authorization, because they're not necessarily saying 'Let's do gun violence research.' They're saying 'Let's figure out what's going on here,'" said Degutis, who said she left the organization last year in part because she was frustrated with the difficulty of conducting research on gun violence.

The center's moratorium on gun violence research stems from an NRA-backed budget amendment passed in 1996. Obama ordered the agency to relaunch gun studies shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre, but his budget requests in 2014 and 2015—which would have dedicated $10 million to the issue—were refused by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The CDC still regards gun violence as so off-limits that it's not even listed under the Table of Contents section in its recently released index of research priorities. Throughout the 47-page report, the word "firearm" is only used four times: three in reference to youth violence and once in reference to suicide prevention.

Essentially, examining behaviors where guns play a role, without delving into the issue of firearm accessibility, allows the CDC to appear responsive to a pressing local public health issue without triggering alarm bells in Congress. It's a pattern that plays out at the agency with some regularity: A 2012 CDC investigation of youth suicides in two Delaware counties barely mentions guns, even though they're the most common method of committing suicide in the United States. And in June, the CDC published a paper on recent gun injury statistics—but Degutis says that effort, too, was based on existing information the organization already had access to the figures through its general injury databases.

CDC spokeswoman Courtney Lenard had this to say when asked why a study on firearms violence wouldn't explore whether gun accessibility plays a role in gun crime rates: "Prevention requires understanding the factors that influence violence—considering the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community, and societal factors," she wrote in an email. "It allows us to address the factors that put people at risk for experiencing violence as a victim or perpetrator."

David Hemenway, a gun violence researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, didn't work on the CDC's Wilmington report. But he's skeptical that it effectively addressed firearm crimes in the city. Hemenway described its lack of focus on access to guns as "crazy," adding that access is often a key data point to help predict where crimes will occur.

"You can't take your eyes off something so important as the guns," he says, "because what the guns do is make things lethal."


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NWT Cable Company Outs Names of Customers With Overdue Bills Over Facebook

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Cable's out. Photo via Flickr user Clive Darra

A cable company out of Fort Simpson, NWT, is facing heat after it posted a list of subscribers who had not paid overdue bills on its Facebook page on Monday.

Senga Service Cable Company posted the list of 25 bills on Facebook, which includes both single individuals and sometime two names bundled together, along with the amount owing for each account also listed on the page.

The post also notes that the accounts listed were to be disconnected Wednesday, with some bills on the list amounting to as little as $94, all the way up to a high of $1406.

Jennifer Simmons, a spokesperson for the company, told CBC News that "excuses" from non-paying customers is what prompted the company to out the owing accounts.

"We always got excuses from everybody," Simons said. "Promissory notes and everything, and it never arrives. So we found the most effective way is to publicly post the names."

Although the posts have been removed, screenshots obtained by CBC show some of Simmons' posts on other pages in the town. In one, she challenges the notion that what Senga Service did was unethical.

"Well then maybe it's a lesson to not live outside your means," she appears to have wrote.

"People who can't afford services shouldn't get them. Period."

Screenshot via Facebook

One of the outed people on the page was former MLA Kevin Menicoche, who said that he called the company after seeing the post featuring his name.

"I did speak with them," he told CBC News. "I said: 'I'm not embarrassed, but it would be nice if you had contacted me individually.' They thought that was one of the options available to them, but there's got to be an issue of confidentiality."

According to Simmons, however, there is no issue. After consulting lawyers, Simmons came to the conclusion that, as long as you don't publish someone's personal information, such as SIN, phone number or address, posting their name and owing amount to shame them into submission is fair game.

Let's hope credit card companies don't follow suit.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A New Report Shows Just How Unequal America Is

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Mark Zuckerberg via Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Read: You Can Buy a Human Skull for $750 at This Toronto Store

The Institute for Policy Studies is a DC-based organization that describes itself as "Washington's first progressive multi-issue think tank," one comprised of "a community of public scholars and organizers." It's just finished a depressing but not entirely surprising study, "The Forbes 400...and the Rest of Us," which is exactly what it sounds like: The Institute took a look at the earnings of the super rich folks who make up the Forbes 400 list and compared them to the rest of the country. As Donald Trump would say, the gap is tremendous. To no one's surprise, the wealthiest Americans are really really really wealthy.

To help illustrate the point, the Institute highlights some pretty startling numbers, and even matches them with some helpful charts. For instance, the richest 400 people in America "have more wealth combined than the bottom 61 percent of the US population, an estimated 70 million households, or 194 million people," or more than the combined population of Canada and Mexico. The Forbes 400 also controls more wealth than all the black people in America.

The further up the wealth pyramid you go, the more shocking the statistics get. The top 20 people on the Forbes list "own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households." These .000001 Percenters ("a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet," per the report) include Mark Zuckerburg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Phil Knight of Nike—multibillionaires who've amassed staggering fortunes while building business empires. But that group also includes nine heirs, as the study calls them, "from families of dynastic wealth," which includes two Koch brothers, four Waltons (of Walmart), and three children of the Mars candy empire.

The study briefly explores a couple ways to help close the gap, like squashing offshore tax havens and other "wealth escape routes" that help the rich hide trillions of their dollars. The authors also suggest raising the tax rate on the rich.

You can read the report in its entirety here.

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An Angry Crowd at a Toronto Liquor Store Tried to Stop a White Cop from Arresting a Young Black Man

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Screenshot via Facebook video

A video has surfaced online of an angry crowd of customers at a Toronto liquor store attempting to stop an officer from arresting a man being pinned on the ground.

In the 16-minute video, the police officer in question can be seen pinning a man on the ground as people gather around him, yelling for him to stop. At one point, the officer wipes what appears to be blood from the top of the officer's head, although it's not clear what caused the injury.

Video via YouTube/CBC

Shortly after, a man in a Toronto Blue Jay's jacket is scene grabbing at the officer, attempting to pull him away from the man on the ground. The officer, who is white, is called out in the description of the video post for attempting to "intimidate" other black people at the scene. The narrator of the video also mentions that the officer, prior to the incident, seemed unhappy and did not want to be there.

After the altercation broke out, the narrator of the video claims that the police officer was not only being aggressive to surrounding bystanders, but "was punching the gentleman and tackled him down aggressively with his knees on his neck."

The video was posted by Ajith Thala, who describes himself as someone with a "vendetta" against the police, citing incidents like the altercation in the video as a reason to distrust them.

"Toronto Police are now trying to say the kid who was harmless on the ground injured the officer," Thala wrote.

"I actually know what happened, this officer is a power tripper and he felt powerless and disrespected. That's why he did what he did."

Toronto Police's director of communications Mark Pugash told VICE that the officer was on duty at the LCBO to screen people coming in and make sure that no one caused problems for the store or customers.

Pugash said that the man, who has been identified as 25-year-old Marquel Johnson, was not known to police when he approached the store, but that he was acting erratically as he tried to enter the LCBO.

"The behaviour of the man in question caused the officer some concern. He was fidgety, he kept walking back and forth, he kept moving his hands in and out of his pockets," Pugash told VICE.

Pugash said that when the officer asked the man for ID after he entered the store and requested he take his hands from his pockets, the man allegedly struck the officer. The officer then moved to make the arrest of the man, which is when the crowd gathered.

"What you see on the video is very disturbing," Pugash said.

"The officer, I think, displayed enormous restraint and professionalism. His conduct under difficult circumstances was extremely professional and positive despite great provocation and active interference from members of the crowd. That is extremely dangerous behaviour, to interfere with a police officer when they are making an arrest."

Pugash could not comment on specifics of what the altercation with the crowd will mean for the officer or those who interfered, but noted that an investigation into the matter was ongoing. He also shot down allegations that this involved a matter of race.

"I haven't spoken to the officer, but what I can say is that allegations are very easy to make. As far as I'm aware, there was nothing substantiated ."

This incident comes amid growing sentiment around the policing in marginalized communities in North America, with movements like Black Lives Matter gaining serious momentum following police shootings like that of Laquan McDonald, Michael Brown, and Walter Scott.

Yesterday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel forced the resignation of the city's chief of police after video surfaced of the Chicago Police Department covering up evidence in the case of McDonald's murder. Many critics have also called for Emanuel's own resignation, although he has insisted that he won't.

In Toronto, there has been concern raised in the past over initiatives such as police carding, which many see as a racist and discriminatory practice. The practice, which is under review by the province's Liberal government, involves the police randomly stopping citizens, during which time they must produce some form of identification, so that police can record information about who they are and what they were doing—even if none of it was illegal or even suspicious. The practice was suspended in 2014, but was recently re-approved by the Toronto Police Services Board, with the stipulation that "receipts" of each incident can be requested by the carded individual.

Additionally, Toronto policing is being tried alongside Const. James Forcillo, a Toronto police officer who is currently on trial for both the second-degree and attempted murder of Sammy Yatim. Forcillo shot and killed Yatim on a streetcar in July 2013 after Yatim drew a knife, causing passengers to flee. Yatim did not hurt anybody on board and was several metres away from Forcillo when he was shot and killed.

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Multiple Victims Reported Dead and More Wounded in California Mass Shooting

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Photo via Flickr user Ken Lund

Multiple people were reported killed and others wounded on Wednesday in a mass shooting at a center for those with developmental disabilities in San Bernardino, California.

Local police scanner chatter suggests cops and SWAT are working to rescue dozens of people from Inland Regional Center, a sprawling complex near a golf course.

The building houses almost 700 staff-members who "provide services to more than 30,200 people with developmental disabilities and their families in San Bernardino and Riverside counties," according to Inland's Facebook page.

As the situation stretched into its second hour, reporters from local and national media outlets swarmed the area and began speaking with workers. A father was called on live TV by his son, who had apparently been trapped in the building for some time.

He choked back tears as he learned in front of the world that his son was safe.

Sergeant Vicki Cervantes of the San Bernardino Police Department told KCAL that an event was taking place about 11 AM local time in a conference room inside one of the buildings on the center's campus. At least one gunman stormed into the room and began shooting, Cervantes told the outlet.

The number of casualties remains unclear, but Cervantes confirmed multiple deaths to a local CBS affiliate. A fire department post on Twitter suggested as many as 20 might have been shot, and the New York Times reports that the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are on the scene.

The situation remains fluid, as cops with guns drawn search for suspects—reportedly three of them—and rescue innocents. The shooting comes less than a week after 57-year-old Robert Dear allegedly killed three and wounded nine more at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As of Monday, there had been 351 mass shootings in America so far this year, as the Washington Post reported, making for a rate of over one per day.

This story will continue to be updated as the situation develops.

Follow Justin Glawe on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Ted Cruz Coaching His Family Through a Campaign Ad Is Awkward as Hell

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By law, super PAC's aren't allowed to coordinate with the political campaigns that they support. The law has produced a number of absurdities in the campaign finance system, one of which is the campaign practice of quietly uploading raw footage of the candidate onto public sites like YouTube, so super PACs can legally use the material in their own ads. The hope, of course, is that no one will notice the videos. But CNN's Chris Moody did, stumbling on hours raw footage from a Ted Cruz campaign ad shoot.

Moody then did God's work, combing through take after painful take of Cruz and his family trying to get through the shoot with a tiny shred of dignity intact. In the video above, CNN has edited the footage down to the most cringeworthy, embarrassing moments, revealing "a rare peek behind the scenes of the strange world of political ad making."

Election Class of 2016: Ted Cruz Is Crazy Like a Fox

The video exposes what everyone has known for a very long time: that damn near every single moment of a presidential campaign ad—every prayer, hug, casual stroll, and solemn promise made into the camera—is a meticulously crafted nugget of inauthentic garbage. This four-and-a-half minute gem is a long look into the sad, dark heart of the average political campaign ad, exposing the humiliation presidential candidates put themselves and their poor, exasperated families through in their bids for the highest office in the land.

In the footage, Cruz is noticeably irritated, grimacing every time someone off camera coughs or clears a throat; pushing family members through countless takes to get the dinner prayer right; and pestering them to tell stories they don't deem appropriate.

In one of the most awkward scenes (really, they all belong in the Awkward Hall of Fame), Cruz can be heard off-camera, chiding his mother Eleanor to tell a story she clearly doesn't want to make public.

"That's too personal, Ted. I don't want to tell it," she says.

"Well I want to tell that and you're the best person to tell that," Ted replies.

"Well," Cruz's mother says, pausing momentarily at the sad prospect of letting her son down. "They're some very personal details that I don't want to get into."

Ted Cruz's cousins Audrey and Diego Loyola make an appearance, and clearly don't know what the hell it is they're supposed to be doing or how they can be of any help. A conversation between the two sums it up the whole process quite nicely.

"I don't know what else to say," Audrey says.

"I don't know," Diego agrees. "Just keep talking. Just keep talking."

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

Guerrillas in the Mist: Seven Days in Rebel-Held Territory in Colombia

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This story appears in the December issue of VICE magazine.

A comandante had told us someone would pick us up in front of the pool hall, but we arrived two hours late. Now we didn't know if they were still coming. We waited through the afternoon and night and, after crashing in a cheap hotel, through the next morning, too. That's when a woman wearing a black cap and a too-tight blue shirt with a small green parakeet on her shoulder pulled up on her motorcycle in front of the tienda where we'd been told to stay put. She eyed us suspiciously and left without saying a word.

We watched her—and farmers and shopkeepers and everyone else—for a signal, any signal, that they had come for us. That was the agreement we'd made with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country's oldest communist guerrilla organization. The group has been waging war against the federal government since 1964, in a conflict that has caused at least 218,000 deaths. If we showed up in this tiny village, on the outskirts of a huge swath of FARC-controlled territory called Llanos del Yarí, they had promised to take us deep into the bowels of their jungle hideout.

The day prior, we'd set out on our journey from Bogotá, the country's capital. The route is one of rolling hills haloed by mist, and snakes and howler monkeys seemingly hide in every tree and valley. The FARC, which has about 8,000 members today, has managed to control the territory for more than three decades. Farther along, the journey toward the FARC's headquarters starts to feel like a trip through Colombia's history. Ramshackle villages tell the story of the abysmal inequality between the country's center and its forgotten periphery. A two-lane highway gradually transforms into a muddy and solitary road. The farther you are from Bogotá, the poorer the infrastructure becomes. Toward the end of the journey, just before you reach FARC territory, guerrilla graffiti vandalizing government buildings begins to appear.

"Did you get here unarmed?" asked a wide-eyed young National Army soldier. He was manning a Brigada Móvil checkpoint, located on the peak of a mountain in the Andes just before the roads slope down into Caquetá. Here, many National Army checkpoints dot the periphery of FARC's territory— this, after all, is the front line of the civil war. When the soldier saw that we were just carrying tripods and cameras in our truck, he relaxed—somewhat.

"You should go back," he said. "If you keep going you'll find El Paisa, a guerrilla commander. Have you heard about him? He's a bloodthirsty man, and he's against all of the peace negotiations. Please, you really shouldn't go that way."

Eventually he let us pass, and two hours later, the night had already fallen upon us as we continued driving. Then the lights of our truck suddenly illuminated a man in the middle of the road, the muzzle of his rifle pointed directly at us.

"Turn off the lights and get out of the truck!" he screamed. The man was a young guerrilla dressed in civilian clothes. He was flanked by two more armed men.

"Where are you coming from?" one of them shouted. We had apparently passed into FARC territory at some unknown point. "Don't you know that it's forbidden to pass through here after six PM?"

We explained that we'd come from Bogotá to make a documentary, although we did not tell them that we had permission from a FARC commander to be there. We weren't sure if this FARC battalion was friendly with the commander who had given us permission to visit.

"Which way did you come from?" one of the guerrillas asked.

"Bogotá, Girardot, Neiva..." our fixer answered.

"That's it?"

"And through an Army checkpoint up there..."

Then there was silence. He was testing us. If we hadn't admitted that we had talked with the military, we would have been in trouble.

"Leave then," he said. "You can't stay here. You will get shot, bombed. Go back and remember that you can't travel through here at night."

Civilians run community meetings and participate in government, but everyone in the region knows that the guerrillas have the last word.

We turned around. After a short drive, we passed through another Army checkpoint in San Vicente del Caguán. In a tent nearby, a small light bulb illuminated the faces of 32 members of the FARC depicted on a wanted poster issued by the government. At the top of the spread was a picture of El Paisa, who has a $5 million bounty on his head. REPORT AND GET THE MONEY, the sign said. WE'LL GET THE PEACE WE ALL WANT.

We hadn't come to Llanos del Yarí just to meet Colombia's most important guerrilla fighters—we'd also come because, after two years of dialogues in Havana, Cuba, the FARC and the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos were entering the final stage of a historic peace process. On July 20, 2015, FARC leaders had announced a unilateral ceasefire. This had been tried four times since the dialogues started, and each time it failed. In April 2015, in fact, a previous ceasefire had unraveled after four months, when FARC fighters stormed an Army platoon while troops were sleeping, killing 11 soldiers. A month later, government troops retaliated and killed 26 guerrillas. Would this time be different? We wanted to find out.

We slept that night in a primitive hotel a few blocks away from the Army checkpoint. The next morning, in the daylight, we drove on along a muddy and winding road toward Llanos de Yarí and the FARC.

There we were, still waiting in front of the pool hall. The surrounding village was a shoddy little dump of a dozen huts—a vegetable stand, a school, a beer shop. A FARC commander had promised to pick us up, but still no one had come, except some farmers and the random woman with the bird on her shoulder.

Finally, after more than 24 hours of standing sentry in front of that pool hall, and just as we were about to give up, a man in civilian clothes got off a motorcycle and called to us. He had a stern grimace on his face and told us to follow him. He guided us through the Yarí plains and then led us to a few solitary houses at the base of the hills. As I scanned a crowd of some FARC militiamen gathered in front of one of the houses, I noticed a familiar face—the woman with the green parakeet. Seeing her made me realize that FARC members had been there, watching over us, the whole time.

She waved and smiled. Then, quietly, she led us to a big house in a deep valley. In front of the red wooden hacienda were at least 20 men, many wearing fatigues, some holding automatic rifles. They were members of Frente 63's Combatientes del Yarí, the eastern front of the FARC. From a pole on one side of the house flew the group's flag—two rifles crossed in front of Colombia's national colors: yellow, blue, and red. On the other side was a white flag signifying their commitment to the unilateral ceasefire.

A chubby and friendly-looking woman walked in our direction from the property's entrance and greeted us warmly. She wore a green uniform and combat boots. Everything happened so quickly. It wasn't clear at what moment we had stopped being among civilians and joined the guerrillas. We were now, without a doubt, standing in the heart of FARC territory.

The friendly guerrilla woman got on her motorbike and guided our truck through hidden roads that ran behind the pastures, through forking paths, and little by little, three hours later, she brought us deep into a desolate savanna with no fences or livestock or houses or roads. All around us were jungle corridors and mazy paths that led to the Putumayo River and up into the mountains, virginal and immense. At the end of each of these paths were more guerrillas, waiting to see what would come next: peace or more war.

The date was July 21—just one day after the FARC began its sixth unilateral ceasefire since the peace talks began in 2012. In Havana, the Castro administration and Norway had served as a mediators between the FARC and the Colombian government. As part of the negotiations, the FARC had made pledges of peace multiple times—but each time, they'd done so without actually agreeing to stop fighting. In past negotiations, during the 1980s and early 2000s, the FARC had exploited truces to strengthen their military positions. This time, the government wasn't willing to let this happen. Thus the rules were clear: While the two sides talked about peace, they continued to fight.

Because the National Army continued to attack the FARC's campsites while they negotiated, the guerrillas directed us to stay in the home of a peasant family, who were unlikely to be targets of government violence. It was there, in a wooden shack with no energy and no running water—but with a DirecTV satellite—that we spent the next few days.

I asked Laura if she thought peace was possible in Colombia. "Yes," she answered without any trace of doubt. "Because the Bible tells me so."

Following the orders of the FARC, Granny Laura, a wizened peasant woman, welcomed us to her house. She was hunched and fragile, and she walked slowly. When she spoke, her voice broke so much that it seemed as if it were going to completely disappear with her next words. She shared the home with her husband, Cruz, and their son and daughter, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren. While we spoke, the kids chased one another around the house with homemade, wooden toy rifles.

The children weren't attending school this year because, their mother explained, the nearest school didn't have any teachers. The family couldn't afford to send the kids to the next-closest school—a public boarding school run by the Catholic Church—so the kids were helping their grandmother with work on the hacienda and, in their spare time, pretending to be guerrilla fighters.

Laura was ill. She had diabetes and suffered from chronic dizziness and nausea, but she didn't have regular access to a doctor. Traveling to San Vicente de Caguán's hospital would cost her about $100, which is half her monthly earnings. Instead, Laura got her medication from a bus that drove by her home every two weeks. Sometimes she had to let the bus pass by because she didn't have enough money to pay.

Like most farmers in the region, Laura and her family lived under the FARC's rule and followed their laws. "It's better this way—whoever kills or steals, they have to ," another farmer had told me. "Of course we need to pay them a tax. Every sale, every livestock head has its price," he explained. As in the rest of the country, local juntas composed of civilians deal with everyday problems and solutions for the community—housing, public services, making demands of local officials. The taxes had made life more difficult for poor peasants, but the ones I spoke with believed the FARC's laws were as fair as the federal government's. Civilians ran the community meetings, locals told me, giving people an opportunity to participate in government— though everyone in the region knows that the guerrillas have the last word.

Chepe, a large, shy man, was in the company of 30 guerrillas when I met him for an interview. We were at a FARC camp that had been temporarily constructed out of rough-hewn tree trunks and huge green leaves, a few miles away from Granny Laura's house. Even though he spoke quietly, I could detect in his accent that he had grown up in a wealthy family in Bogotá. Chepe had been born in the jungle of Caquetá, but he was raised in Colombia's capital from a young age. He went to the Colegio Claretiano primary school and then Colegio San Viator, an upper-middle-class high school. He was called Jorge Suárez then, sharing a surname with the FARC commander Víctor Julio Suárez Rojas—his father. The elder Suárez died on September 22, 2010, after seven tons of government explosives fell on his guerrilla camp.

"The comrades wanted me to study in the city and then to come back here to help with the revolution," he told me. "When I was in ninth grade, the government started to apply pressure, and the paramilitaries were looking to make us disappear. So I studied up to ninth grade and then came back here with my dad. I spent eleven years with him.

"I wonder about my friends from back then," he said. "What would they think if they knew that I'm here? They are probably doctors, politicians, engineers. I didn't have the chance to go to university, but I studied the revolution."

His father was a famous man—or, rather, an infamous man. Also known as Mono Jojoy and Jorge Briceño, he led the FARC's Eastern Bloc, which kidnapped dozens of people in the 1990s and early 2000s. For more than a decade, kidnapping rich people for ransom was one of the FARC's key sources of income. Many people died in captivity during those years. What would have happened if any of Chepe's schoolmates ended up as secuestrados, kidnapping victims?

Chepe said he always knew that at school what he was studying was his classmates—"my enemies, the sons of the bourgeoisie." He knew that he needed to fight for the "common good. Their ideals weren't an influence on us," he said. "We were already formed as individuals."

Across from Chepe, sitting on beach chairs, the guerrilla fighters listened to their comandante. Chepe opened his laptop and started the meeting that all guerrilla units conduct at the beginning of their daily routines. They sang "The Internationale" (a classic revolutionary song that's almost as old as Karl Marx), and then Chepe read "Al Filo de la Navaja," an opinion column written in Havana by comandante Carlos Antonio Lozada. The text commented on the previous six months, a period in which the guerrillas had declared a ceasefire that was broken when a military patrol entered their territory. For Lozada, a member of the FARC delegation in Havana, it was important that the National Army reduce the intensity of its attacks in order to make the ceasefire more than just talk.

After Lozada was finished reading, the guerrillas got up to sing a song honoring Manuel Marulanda Vélez, one of the men who founded the FARC in 1964 with a group of communist peasants:

I sing to Manuel, that old dear friend.
Manuel, who one day had the courage of daring to dream.
Manuel, who bad tongues say is a bandit
And whom they used to compare to the devil.
All the love that is in his whole being will flourish.
Like Fidel, history will absolve you too, Manuel.

Afterward, eight guerrilla fighters raised their hands to comment on the column from Havana. Each expressed the exact same opinion and the exact same vision. They all blamed the Colombian oligarchy and American imperialism for the conflict. But they all emphasized how much they trusted their commanders in Havana and said they were willing to lay down their arms and pursue revolution through elections. Their accounts varied only in their eloquence. They seemed to believe in their own ideas so deeply that they nearly vibrated with epiphanic intensity.

"It's so beautiful," said Luisa Monserrat, a young guerrilla from Bogotá, as she smiled with the spiritual drunkenness of a worshipper who closes her eyes to see God. "It's so beautiful to be the owner of the truth."

All guerrilla fighters are members of both a military (the FARC) and a political party (Partido Comunista Clandestino Colombiano, or PC3). They knew that once they joined, the revolution would become their life. According to the FARC's official statutes, those who willingly join have to serve for an indefinite amount of time. In other words, they commit to being professional revolutionaries until the revolution triumphs. Desertion is a crime that is sometimes punished with execution.

Of the 218,000 people who have died in the war between the FARC and the Colombian government, nearly 80 percent of them were civilians.

To reinforce solidarity and collective identity, the guerrillas hold these meetings every day. The reading material varies, from the basic principles of Leninism, to Simón Bolívar's Cartagena Manifesto, to classic Russian and Colombian novels.

One of the women at the meeting was named Antonia Simón Nariño. She grew up in Bogotá, like Chepe, and attended the National Pedagogic University. She began reading the guerrillas' political writings about a decade ago, she told me, and she was recruited soon afterward by the Movimiento Bolivariano: a first step for any young student interested in joining the FARC. Her boyfriend was a militiaman. For three years she snuck away from her parents' house to attend training sessions held at camps in Caquetá. She told her family that she was giving catechism lessons in the Sierra Nevada. One day, her father went to her university to ask how the young instructors in the Sierra Nevada were doing, and he discovered his daughter's lies. She never found the courage to tell him that she was a guerrilla fighter, instead saying that she had joined the Communist Party, which, unlike the PC3, is a legal, non-subversive organization in Colombia. Not long after that she left for the jungle. She arranged for her boyfriend to tell her family the truth.

She finished her tearful story by singing "Todo Cambia," by Mercedes Sosa:

My love doesn't change,
No matter how far away I am.
Nor does the memory
Or the pain of my people.

The camp doesn't exactly feel like a war zone. During my time there, the guerrilla fighters passed the day by watching American TV shows and Katy Perry videos on Chepe's MacBook. Some dug trenches, others cooked cancharina, a fried pastry made with corn flour.

The FARC has fought this conflict for more than 50 years. First, it was a struggle between communist peasants and the American-backed wealthy elite in power. But in the 1980s, the FARC became involved in the drug trade to help fund the war, and the surge in narco-traffic gave rise to new paramilitary armies that fought the guerrillas for control of drug territory. Fighting intensified during the 1990s, and all sides' tactics reached newly inhumane levels: The FARC kidnapped and planted bombs that targeted civilians; paramilitaries perpetrated massacres in hundreds of villages; and National Army members murdered thousands of innocent young Colombians, claiming they were "positivos," an Army term for guerrillas killed in combat, in order to make it look like they were winning the war against the FARC.

The facts and figures are gruesome. According to the National Center for Historic Memory, nearly 80 percent of the 218,000 casualties that have resulted from the civil war were non-combatants. The UN calculates that during the past decade, 4,716 murders of innocent "false positives" were committed by the Army, while the think tank Cifras y Conceptos estimates that the guerrillas kidnapped 9,447 people. The paramilitaries were demobilized between 2004 and 2005, under the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, and though many paramilitaries regrouped to form new criminal bands that traffic drugs, their role has been diminishing.

Six miles from our camp, however, the conflict was still simmering. There, in an expansive valley, FARC units were set up to stop the advancing Army, which had just landed nearby, an action that many guerrillas considered a provocative gesture.

"At the moment I can't even imagine the process of abandoning armed struggle," Chepe said.

Chepe allowed us to walk around the camp. We saw the guerrilla troops doing exercises with their rifles still hanging over their shoulders. At noon we had lunch, then a bath in the river, where the guerrillas stripped down to their underwear, not looking beyond their own bodies. Many rested with their "bed companions," or lovers, in shacks they had built out of lumber and leaves (40 percent of the FARC are women, and many guerrillas have romantic partners).

"The jungle is our home," said Jineth, a 26-year-old woman holding a handmade notebook in which she writes Marxist reflections and poems for the FARC founders in childlike handwriting. When she was nine, Jineth saw a man murder her mother in front of a store her mother owned in the city of Villavicencio. "I was sent to a therapist," she said.

Jineth was then raised by her uncle. When she grew up she discovered that her cousin was a guerrilla fighter, and she asked him if she could join the cause. He said yes.

"Where would you go if the war were over today?" I asked her. "Our home is tied to our backs," she answered, referring to the 90-pound backpack she's carried ever since she joined the guerrillas a decade prior.

What would happen to the region if a peace treaty were signed? What would happen to the farmers, to the local militia, to the guerrillas? Jineth, Antonia, Chepe, and Luisa all agreed that they'd dedicate their lives to their political party, that their cause would never be over, that they'd have to search for the revolution by other means. Chepe and Jineth wanted to study; Antonia said she would teach. They all seemed tired of war, though they also didn't seem to really know any other way of life.

"At the moment I can't even imagine the process of abandoning armed struggle," Chepe said. "Around these areas, regular people come to tell us their problems, like a stolen cow or a fight that they had with a neighbor. We are an armed party. When we leave the arms we will continue to be a party, and we will continue our political struggle."

"And how would you prevent a new massacre of your people?" I asked. "How would you avoid the return of the drug traffickers and paramilitaries?"

"It all depends on the government," he said. "There should be some guarantees that verify that the agreement is being followed. That's why many countries will have to be involved in this."


At five o'clock in the evening on our last day in the FARC territory, we were about to go back to Laura's house when one of our fixers approached me. "You must leave now," he said. "You've been asking the wrong questions."

Someone had told the comandante that I was asking guerrillas and civilians if they were hiding kidnapped people in their homes. He gave an order that we were to leave that night. It was just a misunderstanding. One more misunderstanding in a series of five decades of misunderstandings.

My alleged offense had occurred two days before, as we were talking with Laura and her family at their dinner table. Night had fallen, and we sat next to a window through which we could see the stars. A candle illuminated our faces and projected shadows onto the wooden walls. Next to me there was a woman who looked like a regular farmer eating a delicious dinner. She told me that she was a guerrilla fighter. She had been one for years. She didn't speak much, but I took the chance to ask her the same question I'd posed to Chepe.

"Have you ever had to take care of kidnapped people? I imagine that they used to be kept in farmers' houses like this one. You've never had one here?"

"No, never," she answered me.

The conversation drifted to Laura and her kids, and I didn't broach the subject again. Laura told us about her health, about this one herb that helped her with her dizziness, about her childhood in Tolima, about her family life in Huila. We were still talking when the conversation was interrupted.

"Look, they've turned on the camera once again," said Laura's son, a day laborer just like his father, pointing to a distant light shining outside in the pitch-black sky. It looked like a satellite or a cellular tower.

All of a sudden it disappeared.

"A camera?" I asked.

"Yes, that's the Army. They are watching us," he said.

"Of course they are watching us," Laura said with her breaking voice. "The Army arrived to our house once. One of the soldiers, thinking that I couldn't see him, hid a device on top of our door. A few days later he quietly came back and took it with him."

It was a warm night. Laura rambled on from story to story. Then I asked her if she thought peace was possible in Colombia.

"Yes," she answered, without any trace of doubt.

"Why are you so sure?"

"Because the Bible tells me so. It says clearly that communism will arrive to our world even if it's just for one day."

Laura stood up in the dark and went to pick up her Bible with a lamp in her hand. Standing there, small and trembling, she pointed the light at a passage from Revelation 18–19, about the fall of Babylon.

Two months later, long after I left Laura and Chepe and the others and drove out of Llanos del Yarí in the middle of the night, the FARC would violate their own ceasefire six times. The Army attacked them another 76 times. A guerrilla fighter from the Daniel Aldana column, which operates on the Pacific coast, murdered the Afro-Colombian politician Genaro García, a peaceful man whose only transgression was opposing the FARC's rule in his impoverished community.

Today, the ceasefire negotiations continue, as does the war.

Yeah Baby: Metaphysics for Babies

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The author with his baby

Said it before, I'll say it again: your baby is wild smart. Matter of fact your baby is a genius. They used to say "nobody love a genius chile," but now they say "everybody love a genius chile" because love is genius and genius is love and genius begets genius and love begets love.

The baby knows that existence is a paradox, both coincidental and inevitable, that everything is mostly nothing and the difference between everything and nothing is functionally negligible. The baby knows that the difference between everybody and nobody is nobody. The baby knows that nobody is nobody. The baby also knows that nobody is everybody and that if nobody is everybody then everybody must be nobody, too. The baby knows that everybody is everybody and by way of, or as an extension to that, the baby knows that everything is everything. Everything is everything is the grand unified equation. E = E. That's the formula. The baby is working off these figures.

The baby, like many a great philosopher, is highly dubious of object permanence, or even objectivity for that matter. The baby is born of love consciousness, and is therefore love consciousness actualized and realized. We all are. Sometimes, or even often times, we simply don't realize it. We all are the baby and the baby is us. Nobody knows this more deeply than the baby. The baby knows love deeply because it is close to its own temporal root; any human transgression is a forgetting of the love at our root. It's hard for a baby to forget the love at its root because that love was some mere months ago, hella recent, so that's where the myth of childlike innocence finds its a priori, solidifying it as one of the more bulletproof myths of human thought.

The baby is your beacon, your book of changes, your never-ending dice game in the hall of mirrors that winds through your heart, soul, and mind.

The baby's power is mythical, mystifying, smoky, at times opaque, post-rhetorical, hyper-semiotic. The baby's genius is natural, intuitive, automatic. The baby's apparati are oblique but urgent, primal. The metaphysics of the baby are quantum, highly spiritual. The baby's geometry is sacred. The baby's poetics are light speed, unapologetically and unforgivingly beautiful, terrifyingly and reassuringly perfect. You can, may, and should put all trust in the baby.

The baby is your beacon, your book of changes, your never-ending dice game in the hall of mirrors that winds through your heart, soul, and mind. The metaphysics of the baby are labyrinthical, unfurl fractal-like, swirling flowers of human consciousness. The baby is you and you are the baby. See the world again, as if for the first time, with brand new eyes, blood of your blood, flesh of your flesh, an extension of your consciousness that will inform and expand your consciousness, teach you about you, teach you about the world. Be thankful for the gift of the baby. Do whatever the baby says. Do anything for the baby. Let the baby lead the way.

Also remember that you are the baby flesh of your familial flesh, branching from the great ancestral tree trunk. You are the baby and the baby is you, a sprig off that branch, branch off that trunk, a trunk out them roots, a big ancestral tree, a Pando forest of interlocking root systems.

The baby is the guru emanating love's light through you. The baby echoes your love back to you. Tickle the baby and the baby will laugh and then you will laugh and then the baby will laugh some more and then you will laugh some more and so on in an unending Möbius strip of laughter. The baby is a prism of joyous light. We are the rainbow. The baby has given birth to us. Trust, believe, and know these truths to be self evident, baby. You, baby! You are the baby and the baby is now. Now is yes. The truth, affirmative. Yeah, baby, yeah. Now baby, go baby, yeah! YEAH, BABY!

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

How My Ex-Girlfriend's Abortion Saved My Life

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The war on abortion is not an abstract or symbolic war. It's real. Last week's attack on a Planned Parenthood in Colorado was just one of countless violent incidents aimed at abortion providers over the years since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalized the procedure. According to statistics compiled by the National Abortion Federation, since 1977 there have been eight murders and 26 attempted murders of abortion providers and their assistants, 42 clinic bombings, 186 incidents of arson, and thousands of other incidents targeting clinics and doctors.

This is terrorism. Politically motivated violence against civilians meant to scare lots of people, and shape their actions. The list of victims of this kind of domestic terrorism is long. It includes those who work in the abortion industry. It includes women who want to access their right to an abortion. And it includes men who are involved with those women. Yes, men have a stake in this debate. I felt that acutely when I got a girlfriend I was close to leaving pregnant. Let me tell you the story.

It was a couple of decades ago. We lived in New York. I was a twentysomething writer. She, a very bright, pretty twentysomething girl. We were living together but by this point, our relationship had already begun its downward spiral. The first year together was thrilling, but six months into living together, I could see it wasn't going to work out. There was too much fighting, and while I know couples fight, the frequency and intensity of our battles was just too much for me. I think we both knew it wasn't going to work out, but like most couples who reached that realization, we didn't break up right away. We kept hoping against hope, kept trying. But before the year was over, we had both moved out of the apartment, fleeing on the same day as if it were the apartment, too, that we had to break up with.

The story really starts six months before we fled, in the middle of our argument-filled annus horribilus. She got pregnant. (We knew we weren't right for each other but we still wanted each other.) After months of drifting apart, we'd suddenly come to a major fork in the road of life. I was terrified.

I've always felt that family is critical to building kids into strong, productive adults. I would not be who I am today if not for growing up under the watchful eye of two parents who'd wanted me, planned for me, and loved me. Parents who loved each other. The relationship I was in was never going to be that. It was not going to lead to a lasting family. We needed to split up—it was inevitable. But when she got pregnant, we faced the possibility of being stuck together forever.

She told me on the couch and I remember feeling scared for my life. It was as if the words came out of her mouth and I was suddenly staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. But she just told me that she was pregnant—she didn't say anything about what would come next. I could tell she wasn't sure what came next. She knew that things were bad between us, but she didn't take the idea of getting an abortion lightly. It was a brief conversation in which much more was inferred than actually said. And we retreated into our respective corners.

For the two days after, I felt as if I was falling backward through space with no way to stop myself. I felt powerless. And I didn't feel like I could say anything without coming off like an asshole. And because our relationship was so bad, I didn't have any trust or love built up to make my opinion really matter to her. This was entirely her decision, which meant the shape of the rest of my life was in her hands. My future was out of my control—all the work, all the planning, all the decisions I had made in an attempt to build a life could be upended.

I had always said I would never be one of those guys who live apart from their kids. My father's daily presence had meant so much to my life, and I felt I had to give that same paternal stability to my kids. But now everything was up in the air. What if she wanted to keep the kid and raise it without me, screw you, goodbye? Or what if she wanted to keep the baby in an attempt to hold onto me as a boyfriend, allowing me to stay close to my child at the cost of enduring a broken relationship? Add to all that the fact that at that moment in my life, I was not ready to raise a child, not even close. We were surrounded by bad options and she alone would choose which one we would take.

The number of unintended pregnancies in America is very high. According to a report by the Brookings Institute, "nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended." The study finds that American taxpayers spend over $12 billion a year to help those with unintended pregnancies—through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Plan (CHIP), the government spends about $6 billion on women delivering those babies, and another $6 billion to take care of them when they're infants. And children of unplanned pregnancies are more likely to drop out of high school, setting themselves up for a host of other problems and challenges.

I remember the night Susan finally sat down on the other end of the couch—we weren't really touching each other much any more—and said she wanted to end the pregnancy. I exhaled like never before. I felt like a gigantic iceberg in my path had suddenly melted away. I could see a future I wanted because we were not going to have to live with the mistake of sleeping in the same bed after we knew we weren't going to make it as a couple. And no one else would have to live with that mistake, either. I felt like I got back the power to shape my life.

A few years later I met another woman, fell in love, and got married to her. Through our first years of marriage we had many productive conversations about children and our readiness for them. And then one day we talked, and together decided to pull the goalie. She was pregnant a day later. We were both thrilled. I went to all of her doctor's appointments with joy, excited to watch that boy grow inside her.

I remember watching my son wriggle around on a 3-D sonogram, and right there in the doctor's office it dawned on me just how very human an unborn baby is at that early stage. At that moment my long-held belief in abortion rights was shaken—my belief system collided with life. Now that I could see the humanness of an unborn baby how could I support the termination of a pregnancy? It was something I had to think deeply about.

Eventually I looked at my wife and her growing belly and I realized this: How could I tell her what she can or can't do with her body? How could that be right? The first time, I had known instinctively not to tell the woman what to do, and she was someone I was growing to hate. Now I was standing beside someone I loved, knowing I couldn't ever tell her—and by extension, millions of women like her—what to do with her body. I re-committed myself to my pro-choice views because I believe in, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, "a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course."

Seven in ten women who get abortions are mothers—meaning that the vast majority of abortions are performed on women who, for emotional, temporal, or financial reasons, want to maintain the family they already have. It makes sense, then, that sociologist Richard Florida found that the higher a state's abortion rate, the lower its rate of divorce. Unplanned pregnancies can be a blessing, but they can also put tremendous stress on a family.

And over the long-term, 95 percent of women who have abortions do not regret the decision to terminate their pregnancies, according to a Harvard Medical School study. If, over the long-term, women who have abortions are overwhelmingly comfortable with that decision and if they almost unanimously don't think they've made a mistake, then who am I to say those women are all wrong?

I thank God that when I fell into a bad situation, abortion was available as a safety net, allowing me to stay on the path to building the strong family I have now. People who have children when they're prepared tend to be better parents, which leads to stronger families, and their best chance at raising adults they can be proud of.

Follow Toure on Twitter.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan. Image via Flick user Renegade98

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

US News

  • San Bernardino Attack Suspects Dead
    Two suspects have been killed after a mass shooting left 14 people dead and 17 injured at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. The couple, named as Syed Rizwan Farook and his partner Tashfeen Malik, were shot dead by police officers following a car chase through the city. —NBC News
  • Texas Sues Federal Government
    Texas has filed a lawsuit against the federal government in an effort to block the resettlement of two Syrian refugee families. Texas' Attorney General Ken Paxton has argued that the government violated its own law by not consulting the state. —The Texas Tribune
  • Secret Service Crisis
    The Secret Service is an "agency in crisis", according to a bipartisan House report released today. The claim follows a string of humiliating security lapses, including an incident where two people strolled unnoticed into White House grounds. – The Washington Post
  • Pentagon Wasted Millions on Afghan Villas
    A Pentagon business advocacy agency spent almost $150 million renting private villas in Afghanistan, according to an inspector general's report released today.The report says using military accommodation could have saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. —USA Today

International News

  • Turkey Accuses Russia of Lies
    Russian accusations that Turkey is trading oil with the Islamic State have been dismissed by Turkey's prime minister as "lies" similar to the "Cold War-era Soviet propaganda machine." Ahmet Davutoglu insisted his country was trying to control its border with Syria. —AP
  • UK Joins Bombing of Syria
    British warplanes carried out airstrikes in Syria, hours after the UK's Parliament voted to authorize attacks against Islamic State targets. The first strikes hit IS-controlled oil fields in eastern Syria, according to the British defense secretary. —BBC News
  • FIFA Officials Arrested
    Two top Fifa officials have been arrested, suspected of accepting bribes of "millions of dollars" by US authorities investigating world soccer's governing body. Swiss police made pre-dawn raids at a luxury hotel in Zurich. —The Guardian
  • Pistorius Now Guilty of Murder
    The supreme court of South Africa has upgraded Oscar Pistorius' conviction for killing his former girlfriend from culpable homicide to murder, following a legal battle by prosecutors.The minimum sentence for murder is 15 years in prison. - Reuters

Caitlyn Jenner. Photo via Flickr user Alberto Frank

Everything Else

  • Downing Death Star a Bad Idea
    According to a financial engineering professor, destroying the Death Star would have had a terrible effect on the fictional universe of Star Wars. Defaulted bank loans would amount to $500 quintillion, according to numbers he made up in his own head. - TIME
  • Caitlyn Billboard Prompts Complaints
    New Zealand advertising company Cranium has apologized for a transphobic billboard. It featured Caitlyn Jenner in a Santa hat with the slogan: "I hope your sack is fuller than mine this Christmas". —The Huffington Post
  • Why I Hacked a Toy Company
    An anonymous hacker explains why he breached the servers of toymaker VTech, exposing the personal data of millions of parents and children. The aim was to expose "shitty security." —Motherboard
  • NYC Officials Rip Off Food Stamps
    A ring led by a New York State bureaucrat came up with a way of ripping off $2 million in food stamps. They used the tokens to fund a Red Bull wholesale enterprise. —Munchies

Done with reading today? Watch our new film 'The Hunt for Shale Gas on Quebec's Deer-Infested Island, Anticosti'

What We Still Don't Know About the Mass Shooting in San Bernardino

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One male and one female suspect are dead in the southern California city of San Bernardino, where 14 victims were killed and 17 more injured on Wednesday in America's deadliest mass shooting since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012.

At a press conference late Wednesday night, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan identified the shooters as 28-year-old American Syed Farook, a county public health worker, and Tashfeen Malik, a 27-year-old woman. According to family members, the two were married and had a young child that they left with Farook's mother on the morning of the attack. Both parents were killed in a dramatic shootout near their SUV following a lengthy police pursuit that left one officer injured.

Farook's coworkers at the San Bernardino County public health office, who were attending a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center, appear to have been the primary targets. According to law enforcement officials, he was employed at as an environmental specialist, and had worked for the department for five years.

San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan. All photos by author

Earlier in the day, there had been talk of a third suspect, and officials said someone had been taken into custody, but at the end of the night Burguan downplayed the possibility of an additional shooter. He said he was confident that the Redlands neighborhood where the suspects were initially found was now safe for residents, and seemed to suggest that the third person had just been picked up as a precaution.

"Other responding vehicles that saw this person fleeing from the scene stopped him and detained him," Burguan told reporters.

There has been widespread speculation that Farook was a disgruntled employee. Burguan told the press that the suspect had been at the party, but had stormed out "under some circumstances that were described as angry, or something of that nature."

But why Farook and Malik decided to open fire on a conference room full of public health workers is still very much unclear. When I first arrived on the scene Wednesday, an hour or so after the shooting, a witness named David Johnson, a life coach who had heard some of the gunshots from several blocks away, declared in an interview that the shooting proved "terrorism is real!" although at the time police had not yet found any suspects, let alone killed or identified them.

Terrorism may be real, but at press time, it was by no means clear that Wednesday's attack was an act of terrorism, or, for that matter, that it had any ideological motivation.

"I'm really being careful, because when these types of things happen—we've seen it happen time and again—a lot of information comes out in the first day or couple days, but that information changes in the days that follow," Burguan said.

In three press briefings, Burguan doled out carefully-worded quotes, taking the utmost care not to share details that weren't ironclad. When asked if the event that was attacked was a Christmas party, for instance, the police chief said he'd heard it described as anything from "a meeting to a Christmas gathering-meeting-luncheon."

According to representatives from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the suspects used two assault rifles: a DPMS and a Smith and Wesson M&P15, along with semiautomatic pistols. At least two of the guns were apparently purchased legally. Following the shootout with law enforcement, officials discovered that the suspects were also in possession of at least one device believed to be a pipe bomb.

The tragic shooting, and the ensuing manhunt turned the city and county into a confusing mess. Although San Bernardino is by no means a stranger to gun crime, the normally quiet suburb doesn't see giant shows of police force very often.

Inland Regional Center, a nonprofit social services center for people with disabilities, is a place where, for instance, the parents of someone with autism can sign them up for one-on-one assistance. The idea of planning a mass murder at a spot with such an unimpeachable mission adds an extra layer of horror to Wednesday's tragedy.

And plan it they did, according to Chief Burguan, who believes "there had to be some sort of planning that went into this," deadpanning, "I don't think they just ran home, put on these types of tactical clothes, grabbed guns, and came back on a spur of the moment."

Unmarked law enforcement vehicles raced through the streets in every direction for hours in the afternoon, and bewildered crowds of bystanders—along with members of the press—stood on sidewalks outside of police corners until well into the chilly night. As reporters waited for the final police press conference around 10 PM local time, the grassy area designated for media updates became a swamp after sprinklers suddenly turned on.

At that soggy news conference, Burguan declined to provide any details about the victims. "We are just now getting in there and starting to process the crime scene," he said. "I don't have identification on any of the victims at this point."

Image via Google Street View

According to Burguan, the possible presence of explosives slowed down officers' ability to access the scene. He explained that the site had to be rendered safe for law enforcement before anyone could be allowed near the scene of the shooting. The Inland Regional Center occupies a massive piece of property, and several blocks in every direction were marked off as the crime scene.

"At some point we will render the area a little more safe, and we will compress the crime scene down," Burguan said. Only then would he allow members of the media to get "some closer shots."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.


The Dutchman Sentenced to 103 Years in a Thai Prison for Money Laundering Speaks Out

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The Police General Hospital in Bangkok. All photos by author

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

It's a sunny day in Bangkok. The wet season has finally made way to the dry and warm Thai winter. The city is calm, awaiting the herds of tourists who will arrive in December. It's even quiet at the normally buzzing Erawan shrine, in the center of the city. This was where a bomb went off last August, killing more than 20 people. Since the attack, the shrine has become even more popular with tourists.

On the opposite side of the road, Dutchman Johan van Laarhoven, 55, enters the Police General Hospital. Two weeks ago, the Thai criminal court found him guilty of money laundering and sentenced him to 103 years in prison (he'll be serving sentences concurrently, however, so he'll spend a total of 20 years inside). Johan claims to be innocent.

In 2011, Van Laarhoven sold the Grass Company—his chain of four coffee shops in the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant. At the time of the sale, Van Laarhoven was already living in the Thai city of Pattaya with his wife Tukta and their two young children. Not long after that, the Dutch prosecutor's office (Openbaar Ministerie) launched an investigation into the Grass Company for money laundering. During years of investigation, no evidence was found that could convict Van Laarhoven or his business partners in the Netherlands.

Van Laarhoven and the Openbaar Ministerie agreed that if they ever again wanted to interrogate him about the case, he would report to the Netherlands within five days of their request. It wouldn't come to that: As Dutch regional network Omroep Brabant reports, after a request from a Dutch lawyer working for Openbaar Ministerie, the Thai authorities launched their own investigation into Van Laarhoven. Several days later he and his wife were arrested at their Pattaya home.

Fifteen months later, Van Laarhoven has been convicted for spending money in Thailand that he earned by selling cannabis in the Netherlands. It should be noted that the sale of cannabis in coffee shops is legal in the Netherlands and the Dutch "gedoogbeleid" policy ensures that authorities turn a blind eye when coffee shop owners buy stock from illegal dealers. The Thai court's verdict, however, ignores that policy, concluding that money earned with the sale of drugs has to be illegal money. Therefore, spending that money is a crime.

That's the story that got me to Bangkok's Police General Hospital, which Van Laarhoven visits weekly due to his deteriorating health. I had attended the sentencing of Johan and Tukta at the Bangkok criminal court as a reporter for a Dutch network the week before. Since I was the only journalist there, Johan's family approached and asked me if I'd like to interview him. They are desperate for media attention, because they feel abandoned by the Dutch state. They told me that Johan would be visiting the hospital on a given day and that it would probably be possible to speak with him for a while without having to first submit an interview request to the Thai authorities.

And so I find myself sitting next to Johan in a hospital waiting room—my recording device hidden underneath a notebook. I start with the question that I feel makes the most sense given the setting: "How are you doing?" But even a simple question like that seems a bit much given the circumstances and Van Laarhoven needs some time to find the words. After a while he says: "I wouldn't know. As long as I don't think about it, I'm OK. Then I think about my wife and children, about my 83-year-old mother, my entire family—my life has been ruined. And for what?"

Van Laarhoven's wife has also been convicted—she's looking at 12 years in prison. Tukta's signature is on the contracts that bought them their property in Thailand. As a Thai citizen, she had to sign because Thai law doesn't permit foreigners to purchase land. "If I had known I would be charged with money laundering, I would have never let her sign those papers," he says. "We decided to go to Thailand in 2008. My wife was pregnant and I didn't feel the need to become the richest man alive. I had plenty of money—more than I could spend. We chose to live in Thailand, because we thought it was a place where we could spend all our time with the kids. When the banks in Europe collapsed, I thought I'd be better off moving and investing my money in land. I thought that would be a smart move."

Below is the rest of our conversation.


Johan van Laarhoven and his lawyer at the Police General Hospital in Bangkok

VICE: A week ago, a Thai court sentenced you to 20 years in prison. Were you prepared for that outcome?
Johan van Laarhoven: No. I was convinced we would be going home. That's because I know I'm innocent, but also because there simply hasn't been any evidence that we did something wrong. Even the prosecution witnesses said they didn't know what law we had broken in Thailand and what it is that we supposedly did wrong in the Netherlands.

Then why do you think you were convicted?
From the start I got the feeling we were being heavily screwed with. But I don't know why. I didn't do anything wrong. If you look at my chain of coffee shops, our business model was built in such a way that it could be applied in the Netherlands and abroad. The police visited our shops when they gave tours to foreign police forces or government officials. We were heralded as a positive example. I'm still using the term "we," because despite selling I still see the company as my life's work.

You've been convicted for money laundering.
No money has been laundered. And even if everything the Dutch prosecutor suspects us of was true, my lawyer says I would be facing a year in a Dutch prison at the most. But most of what they accuse us of would have happened after I sold the company. I have nothing to do with any of that. And how could I have been laundering money if I was paying my taxes over it? If a crime has been committed in my case, then the Dutch tax authority is an accomplice. The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled that income earned from the exploitation of a coffee shop is legal, even if there is too much cannabis in stock. If you look at that jurisprudence, it's clear that this is definitely not a case of money laundering.

But that didn't stop the arrest of you and your wife in the summer of 2014.
That's when I realized the Dutch prosecutor screwed up this case big time. All of a sudden, 120 cops and every journalist in Thailand were on our front lawn. The officers were very friendly after the arrest. They even said we would probably be going home on bail in a couple of days' time. But that didn't happen and it slowly dawned on me that this might be more of a political case for Thailand, than an actual punishment for anything.

Related: Watch our documentary 'The Real Nancy Botwin'

After your conviction last week you got transferred to a different part of the prison from where you spent the last 15 months. Had you made any friends in your previous cell?
I talked to a couple of people, yes. Most of the convicts are murderers, rapists, and gang members, though. Some have tattoos all over their faces. There were some foreigners in my cell and we talked a lot, mostly about our cases. But now that I've moved, I have to start all over again. I share a cell with 40 other men. One is from England, but he's in for selling amphetamine—not really my kind of guy, I don't like hard drugs. The rest are all Thai, and a lot of them are political prisoners.

That sounds like people you wouldn't mind sharing your cell with. Better a white-collar criminal than a murderer, right?
Yes, of course. There are some former policemen in the cell too, but it's all political bullshit. Many of them are so clearly wrongly convicted. Sure, they may have been involved in some mild corruption cases but if that were an offense, everyone in Thailand would be in prison.

How did the transfer happen?
It was the morning after the verdict, so it was one big shock after another. They didn't announce it, they just came by and took me away. When I didn't get my stuff fast enough the guards' helpers threw my stuff in a bag. And there I went.

You have decided to appeal the verdict. Was that your only option?
It wasn't really a choice, because it's the only way to get an acquittal. But it's a fucked-up system, designed to let the government win. If you accept a guilty plea, you automatically get 50 percent off your sentence. That means a lot of people plea guilty even when they aren't.

The same goes for an appeal. The king pardons prisoners every year but you can only be considered for a pardon if there isn't an ongoing case. And in order to have a bigger chance of a pardon, you have to work on your ranking, which can be "medium," "good," "very good," or "excellent." If you have an excellent ranking, the time after which you can apply for a pardon is half as long. But as long as the appeal is under consideration, I'm not allowed to work on my ranking.

Would you transfer to a prison in the Netherlands if the opportunity arises?
I have no clue. I don't think so. I can't leave my wife and kids behind.

The last days in court were the only moments you could see your wife—while your hands were tied to hers with a pair of handcuffs. What were those moments like?
Very intense. You try to talk to each other but it's nothing resembling a real conversation. But it's better than nothing. I always look forward to seeing my wife, even if it's for a very short time. Last week was ridiculous: Five minutes after the sentencing we were separated. We were both in shock. I have no idea when I will be able to see her again.


Johan van Laarhoven

The appeal will be done in writing, so no more moments in court.
Yes, and the appeal can take from one to three years. If it really does take three years, that means I'll be in prison for almost four and a half years. For what? I'm innocent.

What's your daily life in prison like?
It's not really a life. I don't know how to describe it, exactly. There is no place to lie down, it's always hot, there is nowhere to sit, the food is terrible. In the cell I was in before, I was allowed to see a visitor every day but that has been cut down to once a week now. The only thing to do is wait until the day is over, and then there's the next day.

I can imagine that makes a hospital visit the highlight of your week.
That is true. At least here I can talk to someone without having bars in between us.

Your eldest son is allowed to visit you. Do his visits help keep your spirits up?
Yes, but tears build up when I think about what this does to my children. My two younger kids still don't know where their parents are. And what can we tell them—"Mummy and daddy are in jail"? If they ask why, we can't even explain it. We always thought we'd be released soon and that's why we didn't say anything to them. But time goes by and we're both still behind bars.

Your brother, Frans, said on Dutch TV last week that it would be more humane if they had given you the death penalty.
If I didn't have any wife and kids, I would've taken care of that myself. But I can't do that to them. And I still expect and hope that something or someone in The Netherlands will save us from this. That's where it all went wrong—the Dutch prosecutor gave the Thai court incomplete information. I hope some Dutch politicians will have the guts to finally put an end to this.

Soul Boys, Ravers, and Pillheads: Sweaty Photos of Classic British Club Culture

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The UK has the best club culture in the world. That might sound biased, considering I'm from the UK and grew up on speaker stacks and squat, stocky men eyeballing my fake ID and 45-year-old divorcee pillheads losing half their body water in sweat at drum-and-bass parties... But it's true. Germany might have Berlin and the States might have Miami, but the UK's got London, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, and, if you're into really gabber and/or not paying very much for alcohol, Glasgow.

Tomorrow, London's theprintspace are launching Lost in Music, an exhibition that charts the history of dance music and club culture with a collection of 500 images. They're kicking everything off with a party at Shoreditch's Village Underground, which is completely free; all you need to do to get in is register for tickets here, or just turn up after 9 PM for one-out, one-in.

The exhibition will span a number of countries—basically anywhere a culture has developed around clubbing, but theprintspace kindly sent us the photos below that show the many eras of British nightlife over the past 40 years.

A Northern Soul dancer, Wigan Casino, Wigan, 1976 © Red Saunders

Shades Disco, Manor House, London, 1978 © Jill Furmanovsky/PYMCA

Eric's, Liverpool, 1978 © Kevin Cummins

Mod girls, London, 1980 © Peter Anderson/PYMCA

Three skinheads drinking, with one showing his "Kill Mods" tattoo, 1980s © Peter Anderson/PYMCA

London, 1980s © Ted Polhemus/PYMCA

A group of breakdancers, London, 1983 © Clare Muller/PYMCA

Fordham Park free festival, London, 1983 © Martyn Goodacre

Fordham Park free festival, London, 1983 © Martyn Goodacre

New Romantics outside Alice in Wonderland, London, 1984 © Hartnett/PYMCA

Dynamite 3 MCs at Brixton Fridge, London, 1985 © Normski/PYMCA

Hacienda, Manchester, 1988 © Kevin Cummins

Ravers outside "The Trip," Astoria, London, 1988 © Marcus Graham/PYMCA

Hacienda, Manchester, 1989 © Peter J Walsh/PYMCA

A B-boy, Bournemouth, 1990 © Guy Isherwood

Goldie at Metalheadz, London, 1994 © Eddie Otchere

Pushca white ball party in a warehouse, West London, 1995 © Daniel Newman


Freedom at Bagleys, London, 1998 © Dave Swindells

Northern Soul fans at Mousetrap Club, London, 1998 © Rebecca Lewis/PYMCA

Gatecrasher's seventh birthday, 2001 © Tristan O'Neill

Cameos Nightclub, Peckham, London, 2003 © David Titlow

The BBC Asian Network tent at the London Mela, mid-2000s © Jocelyn Bain Hogg/VII


MC Tempo at Once Upon a Grime's fifth birthday, 2015 © Wot Do You Call It

The "Lost in Music" show opens on Friday the December 4 and runs until Wednesday, February 17 at theprintspace gallery, 74 Kingsland Rd, which is open from 9 AM to 7 PM, Monday to Friday.

At the Village Underground party in Shoreditch this Friday, there will be DJ sets from photographer Dean Chalkley, World Dance's Simon Kurrage, photographer Gavin Mills, the Balearic Queen Nancy Noise, acid house pioneer Danny Rampling, and Ministry of Sound's Shea Burke, along with performances throughout the night from special guest Shovell, The Drum Warrior.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Owner of Sign Company Apologizes for Transphobic Caitlyn Jenner Sign, Invites Her to Stay at His House

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Image via Facebook

Read: Rapper and Senior VICE Parenting Columnist Kool A.D. Released a New Video, 100-Track Mixtape

This week, New Zealand company Cranium Signage came under fire for their offensive use of Caitlyn Jenner's image in their annual Christmas billboard. The sign featured Caitlyn, photoshopped to be wearing a santa hat, next to the text: "I hope your sack is fuller than mine this Christmas. Merry Christmas from Cranium."

Not surprisingly, the image and text quickly drew criticism from the local community as it was shared on social media. Rebecca Jones, a mother of a nine-year-old transgender son, became aware of the sign when it was brought up at a LGBT support group she leads. She emailed the company expressing her disgust and highlighting the pain comments like this can cause trans individuals. While Cranium Signage director and owner Phillip Garratt replied and apologized for any offense, he was less gracious in an email to one of her friends who had also complained. In that exchange Phillip commented, "I think you may need to take a look at yourself and relax a bit and not take life so seriously. I was referring to a santa sack, your sick mind is the problem."

While Jones was making her feelings clear, more and more members of the wider community also began getting in contact via email and on social media. Finally sensing the weight of their fuck up, Garratt posted an apology on behalf of Cranium Signage, saying: "It was not our intention to offend any people in the community/world. I as the owner have no feelings of discrimination to the gay or transgender community and if one of my family was I would love them just the same. Cait is more then welcome to stay at my house with my family any time. I will have a wine or a beer with her quite happily and it would be an honour."

Clearly familiar with the sight of someone trying to weasel out of a media shit-pile, Jones replied: "Caitlyn might be busy, my 9 year old transgender son might be free if you want to invite him to your house and explain why you thought it was funny to ridicule a transgender person since he has been trying to raise awareness since he was 6 years old!"

Image via Facebook


Last night the board was covered up and will be taken down. But Jones suggested the company completes their apology tour by giving $1000

While the group has undoubtedly learned their lesson, and felt the weight of a throwaway joke, the incident did trigger a broader conversation. Many members of the public were slow to forgive the offense, while others called it "genius marketing" and claimed that people couldn't take a joke or were being overly sensitive.


Image via Facebook

Cranium Signage has a history of incorporating viral news events into their advertising. Earlier in the year they riffed on the Christchurch co-workers caught having an affair through an open office window a billboard reading: "Feeling exposed? Talk to us about our window frosting."

Interestingly Caitlyn wasn't the only member of her family to feature in a discussion around taste and photoshop this week. Images of her daughter, Kendall Jenner, as well as her step-daughter, Kim Kardashian, were used without permission in a controversial domestic violence campaign.

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

We Asked an Expert What Britain's Bombing of Syria Will Actually Achieve

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Image via Chris Bethell

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

On Wednesday, after a marathon 11-hour debate, MPs in the House of Commons voted in favor of joining military action in Syria. Hours after the vote, RAF warplanes were in the skies above Syria, targeting ISIS-held oilfields in the east of Syria with the aim of destroying the terror group's financial infrastructure.

Now that Britain is a part of the coalition currently bombing ISIS in Syria (including the USA, France, the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain), British planes will take part in joint air operations that target ISIS's infrastructure around strongholds such as the city of Raqqa.

A political shitstorm accompanied Wednesday's debate, amidst allegations that Cameron described Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a "terrorist sympathizer" to a private meeting of the right-wing backbench 1922 Committee, leaving him looking about as statesman-like as David Brent. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, was left bruised by the vote. His opposition to airstrikes was well known, but 66 Labour MPs rebelled against him after a pro-bombing speech from Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn which was either hugely rousing, or disingenuous bullshit, depending on your perspective. Outside the House of Commons, anti-war protesters made their feelings known by staging a die-in.

To find out whether Britain's decision to bomb ISIS in the hope of bringing peace to the region will solve everything, or is a seriously bad idea, we spoke to Ghadi Sary, a Syria expert with foreign affairs think tank Chatham House, to get his take on what British air strikes might actually mean.

VICE: Can you tell us what Britain joining the anti-ISIS coalition will achieve?
Ghadi Sary: Britain's involvement is important on a moral level, because Britain should be seen to be cooperating with its allies, whether it's France or the US. The problem is that airstrikes are not successful without a force on the ground. For example, in Iraq the US-led airstrikes have been backed by the Kurdish Peshmerga, which has been able to recapture territory. In Syria, however, the rebels are already over-stretched, and they're less capable of doing that on their own. They've not had proper training and support, and because their calls for air strikes have been ignored for the last four years, they might be reluctant to move to places like Raqqa, in the center of the country, where the airstrikes would be concentrated.

There's been a lot of talk about how many moderate rebels there are, and even if they're really moderate. Would airstrikes help them?
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was originally made up of civilians who took up arms when Assad cracked down on peaceful protestors, alongside army deserters who ran away with their weapons. But because of the lack of structure and command they've split into more than a hundred factions across Syria, and in some situations the rebels are dependent on more radical groups for logistics and support. So it's not an army of 70,000 men united in a fight against Assad; it's 70,000 men divided into many factions with competing aims.

A lot of people are concerned that air strikes would just pave the way for British ground troops in Syria. Is this "mission creep" likely?
What Cameron has promised today in Parliament is airplanes and money pretty much. But he's leaving further details of British involvement open—not specifying how far it could go. The main thing to avoid, if we don't want to escalate the Syrian quagmire, is to have a partner on the ground, and it's worth pointing out that Cameron's said he knows the 70,000 fighters aren't ideal.

Why aren't they ideal?
These are 70,000 men who've picked up weapons against Assad and aren't jihadis or foreign fighters. They do exist. But many of them are simply defending their homes. They may not be willing to go and fight somewhere else. There's a big difference between saying there's 70,000 individuals who are moderate and fighting ISIS, and saying there's an army of 70,000 men who are willing to advance. If that existed we wouldn't need airstrikes at all.

Will Britain's involvement even change anything, given that the US is already leading the airstrikes?
The airstrikes are already happening, and as this is a tag-team operation, Britain's involvement won't make a huge difference. Whatever targets the coalition had planned to attack would still have been struck—it's just the question of whether it's US or British planes in the air.

Related: Watch VICE News's 'The Battle for Syria's South'

Is there a chance that this could encourage ISIS to commit terrorist attacks in Britain?
Britain has already been in the crosshairs of ISIS since we started launching raids against them in Iraq. But because of the nature of this vote, there's a possibility that ISIS could use it as an opportunity to show they're able to hit hard when they want to. The vote itself could actually cause that, because just the act of having a debate is what ISIS hates—democracy in action.

And what about in Syria—is there a risk the airstrikes will make the situation worse?
It's hard to imagine a scenario worse than what Raqqa's going through. There is a possibility that civilians could be caught in the airstrikes. Another possibility is that what happened in Libya happens in Syria, which is that air strikes clear out one group and then another moves in. Let's not forget that there are groups like al Qaeda in Syria who are also standing by and willing to move in.

Is there an alternative to airstrikes?
One effective way of tackling ISIS would be to target their sources of revenue. Following the trail of where their money comes from and where it goes. Because often when you follow the money, you also find the networks that facilitate the transfer of jihadi fighters. We also need to revive the Vienna peace talks, and help support the Syrian opposition from a political point of view. We've got to remember that the Syrian opposition wasn't allowed to practice politics for 40 years by the Assad regime. We need to aid them to envision a democratic Syria for all.

It sounds like a really messy, complicated situation. Can we actually drive ISIS out of Syria?
It's really tough. We all want to see the suffering of the Syrian people end, and we want to see ISIS out of Syria, but at the same time we know that's not going to work just from bombing.

There's something missing in the equation, and that has been the structure that will replace ISIS, because ISIS has filled that power void. And we still have failed to agree on what is going to fill that void. Until we do that, ISIS will continue to prosper.

Follow Sirin Kale on Twitter.

Someone Stole a Circumcision Ambulance, Also Turns Out Circumcision Ambulances Exist

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Photo via @ShomrimOfficial

On Wednesday a circumcision ambulance was stolen in London in a violent carjacking, with thieves making off with an estimated £30,000 circumcision-themed emergency response supercar. Again: circumcision ambulance. An ambulance for circumcision. Circumcision ambulance.

The vehicle was a private ambulance used by a home circumcision service. The driver was too shaken up by the carjacking to speak, but a friend told the Standard: "He believes they were waiting for him. They pounced on him, they ripped off his keys off his belt, and also stole his watch, before driving off with his car."

Now I am thinking basically the same thing as you, here, mainly: yo, what is a circumcision ambulance? Who needs to irreparably alter the end of his penis so desperately that an ambulance—and this is an Audi TT, this thing can move—has to race through traffic to show up at the front door of the patient's house for an ASAP snip?

"Hello, 911? Yes, my husband is having a heart attack. Convulsing on the floor in agony, shock turning him blue. Can you send someone immediately to cut the tip of his penis skin off?"

"Hi, 911, emergency: I'm stuck in a tree and I was hoping a medical professional could come and cut the last 20% or so of my penis away."

"Emergency services please, thank you. Hi, emergency, help: the tip of my dick needs severing or I will die."

I mean the police are on the case, anyway. People are sharing this photo of the ambulance on social media because that's how justice works now. But you've almost got to feel for the thieves, don't you? I mean, yes: they pounced on an innocent medical worker and stole his livelihood and his watch and left him so shaken up he can't speak, but you can't really move a TT that says 'Emergency Response' on it, can you? Quite hard to avoid the police in London traffic when you're in an extremely cognito ambulance with an overwhelming vibe of dick-chopping about it. "Hello Sir, it's me, the police. Can you tell me where you got this Audi TT that says 'ambulance' on it, please? Can you explain to me why you have a trunk full of foreskins, and where you are taking them?"

I just like to imagine the thieves waking up this morning and going to their lock-up under an arch in Brixton. "We stole something last night, didn't we?" They were high on those party drugs we talk so much about, they don't remember. And then they pull the tarpaulin off and whoomph: there's a badged-up Audi TT, £30,000-worth of immoveable vehicle, with an icebox full of dick tips and a load of extremely sinister tiny knives in the glovebox. "Ah," they are saying. "Shit." Sometimes crime doesn't pay, is the moral of the story here. The moral of the story is: do not steal an ambulance that is primarily designed for detipping the end off a penis.

HAPPY ENDING: They just found the ambulance in a pub car park in Newham.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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