Belle Owen and a coat from IZ Fashion. Photos by Jake Kivanc

Most of us go shopping for clothes with two things on our mind: what do we want and how much money are we willing to spend? For those with a disability, however, there a lot of other variables to take into account. Will the clothing fit? Is the store even accessible? Will some impatient asshole get mad for some kind of nonsense reason?

According to Belle Owen, social media manager of a new accessible fashion line called IZ Fashion, all of these things unfortunately accompany the already stressful experience of visiting crowded shopping malls and busy department stores when you have a disability.

Owen, 30, moved to Toronto a year ago from Adelaide, Australia, out of something she describes as an "uncontrollable impulse" to travel. Previously working in public relations and journalism in the music industry, she ended up at the IZ shortly after moving to Toronto. One of the reasons Owen applied is because she relates to the brand: she was born with a disability called pseudoachondroplasia, a bone growth disorder which prevents her bones from growing past a child's length and causes her great pain when walking and carrying things.

The fashion line, by runway designer Izzy Camilleri, was created after an interaction between Camilleri and now-deceased Toronto Star reporter Barbara Turnbull when Turnbull asked to have a custom cape made for her. Owen tells me it's what made Camilleri realize that fashion needed to be created for people with disabilities. To get a better sense of what kind of stereotypes exist both in and outside the fashion industry for disabled people, and what IZ hopes to accomplish, VICE spoke to Owen herself.

VICE: So, to get an idea about you first, maybe you can tell me a little bit about your disability?
Belle Owen: OK. So, I have a post-conception genetic deformation. It's pretty rare—my parents could have, like, 100 more kids and it probably wouldn't happen. It means that I didn't start using a wheelchair until I was ten and I still do walk—I walk at home— that you don't really owe people anything.

Izzy Camilleri

What was it like shopping for clothing prior to coming across accessible fashion, maybe in comparison to a friend who was fully able-bodied?
Honestly, adaptive clothing didn't even occur to me before I found IZ. I never searched for it, I never sought it out. Even when I was mentoring, I was working with a lot of other people who have disabilities, and it was never a topic of conversation because, when you are a wheelchair user especially, you get used to making due so often. Getting into buildings, you gotta make due with where you're going to drink coffee in the morning because, if two places have a step and one doesn't, your choice is made for you. That applies across the board. You get so used to that selection that it doesn't occur to you that there is a better option.

So, I make do a lot. If there was . Some of our products have a zip, or some have no zips, or some have a complete wrap where you don't need to stand at all to put them on, so communicating those differences is hard, especially when we don't have a brick and mortar store for people to come into and go, "Oh wow, it really works." When people eventually do try the product on, they're full of praise.

You seem to work heavily with the community due to having such a small team. In terms of your models, are they mostly people with disabilities, and if so, what's that like?
Yeah, they're all people with disabilities. We wouldn't use somebody who didn't have a disability, which is also unique, because normally it's much easier to just get an able-bodied model to try swap in and out of clothing and try different poses. At the moment, all of our models spinal cord injury, which of course, does slow the the process down, but it actually works to educate people.

Like, the photographer may have never shot someone who has a disability, so you can help them learn more through the experience. It's all through experiencing and showing that yeah, we are going to use people who have disabilities, and I think that kind of education is making a difference. That mindset I think is just going to kind of naturally spread throughout the fashion world and we don't have to shout about how different we are. It speaks for itself.

If there was one thing that you really hoped people to take from the idea of accessible fashion, what would it be?
I think contributing the conversation around disability and changing minds is really important. Our "Fashion IZ Freedom" campaign is really important to me. Disability, as a community, is seen as really unsexy, while fashion is viewed as the definition of sexiness. At the same, fashion is seen as shallow or narcissistic. It is kind of about bringing those two worlds together and showing that compromise can be had and that people don't have to settle for one or the other.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Inside the North Slave Correctional Centre. Photos by Patrick Kane

The overdose of two inmates at Yellowknife's only prison last month has prompted a change in the way in the correctional centre will attempt to control contraband, according to a spokesperson from Northwest Territories' department of justice.

North Slave Correctional Centre (NSCC), which houses both inmates serving federal and provincial sentences, had two cases of overdose on November 12 via opiates that were smuggled into the prison.

The two men who overdosed were discovered by prison guards, one of whom was taken to hospital. Both inmates made full recoveries and will be facing disciplinary action.

According to NWT department of justice spokesperson Sue Glowach, the prison doesn't have a history of overdoses, nor do they see many opiates brought into the prison.

Glowach noted that it's unclear which drugs were used, as the prison doesn't have the facilities necessary for on-site drug testing, but she did mention that the opiates were ingested and not injected.

"Contraband goes into facilities all across Canada and it will always get in, despite best efforts," she told VICE. "In this particular case, as soon as found the one inmate, they did a complete search of the facility and secured the prison, which is when they found the other."

According to Glowach, the inmates were not on a methadone treatment and such a program is not something commonly offered in NWT.

Like many other provinces, methadone maintenance treatment (MMT)—the medical program used to help relieve addicts of opiate addiction by supplementing illicit substances with the opiate known as methadone—is heavily restricted in NWT prisons and often only offered to inmates who were on the treatment prior to entering prison.

The Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI) supplied statistics to VICE that showed only two of 67 deaths in federal penitentiaries in 2014-2015 were from overdose. Although it is unclear how many non-fatal overdoses there are, Stacie Ogg, spokesperson for OCI, said that the information is tracked by the Correctional Services of Canada (CSC), it's just not available publicly.

Contraband being smuggled into facilities is a growing problem for Canadian prisons: last year, a CBC News investigation found that there was a 20 percent rise in contraband being brought into prisons. Exact numbers from the CSC show 103 seizures of opiates including heroin, fentanyl, and oxycontin.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter and see more of Patrick Kane's photos here.

Photo by Ray Forster

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

London's Metropolitan Police have sacked a grand total of one officer for allegations of sexual assault since 2006, despite receiving 459 complaints from the public.

Just four allegations of sexual assault were found to be "substantiated" by the Met's internal investigations, which works out at as less than one in 100.

Here's how those number look:

Graphic by Georgia Weisz

This new data was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and runs from January 1, 2006 to August 15, 2015. It poses more questions about the way the force investigates its own abuses of power, coming weeks after VICE revealed that ten officers had been dismissed from the force after more than 22,000 claims of assault in nine years. When I got those statistics, they came with an asterisk saying "*including sexual assault," so I went back and asked more specifically for the data on sexual assault. The results were pretty stark.

Two of these cases saw formal action taken, with one officer sacked and one receiving a final written warning. Another faced "management action," while in the remaining case no action was taken. To reiterate, that's a written warning and "management action," and no action at all—for sexual assault.

A Met Police spokesperson said that a criminal prosecution was brought in one of the four substantiated cases, but failed to state what the outcome was in that instance.

Related: VICE Data Reveals Virtually No London Cops Get Fired for Allegations of Sexual Assault

More than half of the 459 allegations made—256 cases or 56 percent—were found by internal police investigators to be "unsubstantiated."

Sexual abuse has been an issue for the police for years. Three years ago, Dame Anne Owers, chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), spoke out against sexual abuse by police in England and Wales and warned: "It is essential to ensure that systems are in place to prevent, monitor, and deal swiftly with any individual who exploits that trust." This new data suggests that the warning wasn't heeded by the Met.

In 2011, Northumbria constable Stephen Mitchell was jailed for life for a number of serious sex attacks against women he met through working as a police officer. A year later, Trevor Gray, a detective sergeant with Nottinghamshire police, was jailed for eight years for raping a mother in her own home.

Dame Owers used the 2012 IPCC investigation into sexual abuse to call on: "senior leaders in the police service to be alert and determined to root out this kind of abuse of power. All cases of serious corruption cases should be referred to the IPCC. That includes all cases involving sexual exploitation by officers or police staff, which the IPCC will prioritize and investigate independently wherever possible."

The Met's record investigating its own officers for sexual assault has similarities with national figures for achieving convictions in rape and sexual assault cases in society at large.

Data published earlier this year by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) showed that the number of reported rapes that led to convictions in England and Wales fell from 17 percent to 12 percent in 2014/15.

In London, 3,742 adult rape cases were reported as well as 1,337 child cases in the financial year of 2014/15. Just 188 rape convictions were bought in the calendar year of 2014.

Harriet Wistrich is a lawyer at Birnberg Peirce who is representing eight women who are seeking compensation claims against the Met, after they became involved in long-term relationships with undercover officers who had been tasked with infiltrating activist groups they were involved in.

"These numbers are alarming, and speak to a lack of ability and willingness at the Met to hold officers to account," she said.

"It's a grotesque abuse of power. It's hard to believe that only four cases have been substantiated by the Met in nine years. Any officer found to have sexually assaulted members of the public should be prosecuted and any officer having sex with a member of public during the course of their duty should as a minimum lose their job.

"The police have had a poor record pursuing rape and sexual assault cases and historically there is a culture of sexism in the force. Given the apparent impunity police officers who are accused of sexual assault enjoy, it looks like that culture is ongoing."

Related: Watch 'Life Inside Japan's Aging Biker Gangs'

The spokesperson from the Met stated that the force take allegations of sexual assault against officers "very seriously."

"The MPS treats each occasion when an allegation of misconduct is made about a member of its staff very seriously and fully investigates in every case to determine whether a criminal offense or a breach of the standards of behavior has taken place," they said.

"Where, on examination of the available evidence, the conduct of our officers is found to have fallen below the standards expected, the MPS will take robust action, either by pursuing criminal prosecution, misconduct proceedings, or both. All MPS employees are expected to conduct themselves professionally, ethically, and with the utmost integrity at all times.

"Where, a misconduct investigation finds sufficient evidence to suggest misconduct may have occurred this is recorded as 'substantiated/case to answer.' This is not in itself a finding guilt and the officer will have an opportunity to present their own counter-evidence at misconduct proceedings before a determination is made as to whether the allegation is proven."

Of the cases that didn't fall into the categories "substantiated" or "unsubstantiated," 25 were dealt with using local resolutions—a mechanism where the complaint is resolved using an agreement between the member of the public and the police. 47 cases were withdrawn by the complainant before the case could be investigated.

A further 52 cases are still awaiting any kind of result, including two which date back to 2012.

11 investigations were discontinued by the force, due to a lack of cooperation from a complainant, according to a Met definition. The remaining 58 cases were not investigated before they could be found to be substantiated or resolved using local resolution, with reasons such as more than 12 months have passed in between the alleged assault and the complaint being made, or failure to ascertain the name or address of the complainant.

The spokesperson confirmed that all officers involved in unsubstantiated, withdrawn, or locally resolved allegations are free to return to work once the cases are concluded.

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Photo via Flickr user ERIC SALARD

Read: What We Know So Far About the Mass Shooting in San Bernardino

Not long after Wednesday's tragic mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, a woman named Valarie Kaur was boarding a Delta flight in Minnesota bound for LA to celebrate her son's first birthday. The suspected shooters in San Bernardino had just been identified as a married Muslim couple, and Kaur—a Sikh woman—could allegedly already feel the judgmental glare of those in line with her while waiting to board the plane.

Kaur took the luggage tag off her carry-on luggage where she kept her breast pump, which she planned to use during the flight. That roused the suspicion of an angry white man behind her, and he began pointing Kaur out to other passengers. Soon, an "alarmed and angered" gate agent was flagged, according to Kaur.

"I explained that I was a nursing mother, but she still didn't let me board with my bag," she wrote on her Facebook page. Kaur was then forced to show the angry agent her breast pump. "Only then was I allowed to take my seat. All the passengers in first class watched and I smiled weakly to show them I wasn't a terrorist."

Sitting on the flight afterward, Kaur was "angry, shaken, and sad." Her grief for those shot in San Bernardino, she writes, "was interrupted by a passenger seeing me as a suspect." On the plane, she thought back on "the countless subtle acts of profiling of Muslim Sikh and brown bodies in the last 14 years."

After the flight, a Delta rep reached out to Kaur via Twitter and apologized. Kaur updated her Facebook post to point out that the rest of the crew on her flight acted professionally and respectfully.

Earlier this week, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty released signed statements from Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, the two Cleveland Police officers behind the November 2014 shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

The officers read the accounts—their first public statements since the incident—as part of sworn testimony to a grand jury mulling charges against them on Monday, according to Steve Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association. They provide roughly identical narratives of how the child playing with a toy gun was shot and killed in broad daylight seconds after the officers arrived at a public park. But coming after the release of independent reports commissioned separately by the prosecutor and the family—which alternately found that the shooting was and was not reasonable—the officers' stories quickly angered activists and threaten to further erode public trust in local law enforcement.

Officer Loehmann, the shooter, and Garmback, the driver, both describe entering Cudell Park via W. 99th Street, which dead-ends at the park's swing set, where Rice had been flagged by a 9-1-1 caller. (As has been previously reported, the fact that the person brandishing a weapon was "probably a juvenile" and that the gun was "probably fake" had not been relayed by police dispatch to Loehmann and Garmback.)

"As we were even with the swing set," Loehmann writes in his two-page account, "we observed a male matching the description given by the radio seated under the Gazebo." He describes Garmback driving at roughly ten miles per hour over the snow-dusted ground and seeing "the suspect" pick up an object, stick it in his waistband and walk in the direction of a nearby rec center. As the car approached and slid, Rice turned to them, and Loehmann says he "continuously" yelled "Show me your hands!" His partner reportedly did the same. Believing the child to be "over 18 years old and about 185 pounds," Loehmann saw a "real and active" threat when Rice "lifted his shirt reached down into his waistband."

Calling it an "active shooter situation"—even though no shots had been fired—Loehmann said he followed his police training, remembering, e.g., that "hands may kill" and "the cruiser is a coffin." He said that when Rice " the gun out of his waistband" with "his elbow coming up," he essentially had no choice but to fire.

The officers' accounts—and the nature of their release by McGinty—are not playing well in the wider community, and some fear they are simply laying the ground work for a non-indictment.

"This business of soliciting and obtaining unsworn statements from these officers that are clearly riddled with problems, and then putting them out in public as if this is the final word is deeply troubling," Subodh Chandra, the Rice family attorney, said. "Fortunately, all the smart lawyering in the world doesn't clean up the fact that what Officer Loehmann is saying he observed and did couldn't possibly have happened in under two seconds, unless he's the Flash."

A memorial to Tamir Rice at the site of his death. Photos by the author

However, McGinty's spokesperson, Joe Frolik, has said that no witnesses—including Loehmann and Garmback—were permitted to give unsworn statements to the grand jury. In a brief phone conversation, he said that the prosecutor's office was "extremely limited" in what it was legally permitted to say about the proceedings, but reiterated that "whatever happened at the grand jury, wouldn't know about. All they really know is whether and when their clients would've testified."

Samaria Rice, the child's mother, we know, testified on Monday.

Frolik also said that most, if not all, of the statements made to the County Sheriff in the Tamir Rice investigation released in June would not have been under oath.

Loomis, the president of the local police union, told the New York Times that Loehmann and Garmback, after reading their statements, invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and did not answer questions. (The statements would have been read under oath.)

Chandra, the family lawyer, conceded that "of course" he didn't know what happened behind the closed doors of the grand jury, but said that "there are so many problems with these statements that a prosecutor committed to vigorously cross-examining them could rip them limb from limb. They could say, for instance, 'OK, I'd like you to please cry out three times, Show me your hands while I'm running a stopwatch. Now do it five times. Oh and by the way, why were you shouting with the windows rolled up? Are you disputing Officer Garmback's testimony that the windows were rolled up? What's the point in yelling then?"

(Garmback, in the tenth of 13 numbered points that comprise his account, wrote: "I believe the cruiser windows were up at the time of these events, but I am not sure.")

Even the gentlest cross-examiner might have been inclined to ask Loehmann exactly what he meant when he said, "Even when was reaching into his waistband, I didn't fire." As the video of the shooting clearly shows, that's precisely what Loehmann did.

"What strikes me is that they clearly wrote them together," Rachelle Smith, a Cleveland activist with the local organizing network #OrganizeCLE, said of the officers' accounts. "They didn't even bother to change the style and language used! When are two targets of an investigation given the opportunity to jointly craft their statement to law enforcement? Apparently, when they're law enforcement officers and think 'justice' is a group homework assignment."

Check out our documentary about the so-called Cleveland Strangler and policing in the city:

Cleveland Councilman Zack Reed, a prominent figure on the city's east side who has long advocated for legislation aimed at curbing violence in the city—even at the expense of his popularity among council colleagues—said he agreed with Chandra that McGinty has tainted the grand jury process.

"If this were an outside prosecutor, people would look at it and say, 'OK, at least I get the transparency part,'" Reed said in a phone interview. "But because it's McGinty—and I don't think he's a bad guy—he has done so much to muddy the waters that going forward, anything he does, even if it's done correctly, looks as if he's either leaning toward the police or against the police. He's so radioactive, it does not look like he is for the benefit of the public."

Iconoclastic Cleveland journalist Roldo Bartimole agrees. Bartimole self-published a bi-weekly Cleveland political newsletter from 1968 to 2000, but these days he chimes in only periodically on issues of regional import on a local blog.

"The officers, apparently the city, and the county prosecutor—and if that's the case, the grand jury too – expect you to believe statements by an officer who shot a couple of seconds upon arrival in a police cruiser poorly guided by another officer... They expect you not to see or believe the film that reveals exactly what happened. Quick and deadly."

Like other critics of McGinty, Roldo "Tell the truth and shame the devils" Bartimole worries that the county prosecutor—like many across America—is too cozy with his cops.

"McGinty may be making peace with the cops after indicting Michael Brelo ... Brelo was acquitted. But the police resent his even being charged."

In a follow-up email, Bartimole called the release of the officer statements "part of the PR workup for the grand jury to do nothing."

Protest signs from the year's demonstrations still litter the grounds of the park.

From the Rice family's point of view, the release of "self-serving" statements is corrupting the process. They have called for McGinty to step down—he has refused—or at least, before he makes a final recommendation to the grand jury one or way another, commit to what his position on criminal charges might be.

"He has not committed to doing that." Chandra said. "Why, we don't know. He did it in the Anthony Sowell case. He does it all the time. The concern the Rice family has is that the entire process is a charade in which the prosecutor claims transparency on one hand, but hides behind the secrecy of the grand jury on the other, to be able to blame the grand jury for his own lack of interest, diligence and vigor in pursuing the prosecution of these officers."

McGinty, for his part, has said the documents were released "in keeping with determination to be as transparent as possible.

"The investigation is continuing," he added, "and ultimately the grand jury will make its decision based on all the evidence."

Sam Allard is a staff writer at Scene Magazine in Cleveland. He previously reviewed books for the Plain Dealer and wrote about organized crime in Sarajevo. Follow him on Twitter.

That sign could soon say "and weed." Photo via Flickr user Chris Waits

Liquor stores in BC and Ontario want to start selling weed once it becomes legal in Canada.

The two unions representing BC's public and private liquor stores announced a partnership this week—the Responsible Marijuana Retail Alliance of BC—through which they're advocating to sell recreational pot at retail locations by next Christmas.

Their logic seems to be that liquor stores already sell a controlled substance that gets people fucked up, so adding weed to their mix just makes sense.

"Just as with alcohol, there are legitimate concerns about access to marijuana by youths. Our stores are an over-19, age-controlled environment and our industry has demonstrated the strongest compliance with identification checks," said Stephanie Smith, president of the BC Government and Service Employees' Union, which represents the province's 200 public liquor stores.

It would also be cost effective. Because liquor stores already have a warehousing and retail system in place "there is no need to reinvent the wheel," she said.

Last month, Warren "Smokey" Thomas, head of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which represents LCBO employees, said LCBO outlets would be ideal weed retailers because they already have "social responsibility" covered.

"They do age checks, they do refusals if somebody's intoxicated."

Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger echoed those sentiments.

"We would want any employee in one of our outlets to be well-trained, to be able to inform the public of any of the potential health risks or safety risks, and do it without consuming the products." Good luck with that last part, Greg.

Understandably, existing cannabis vendors aren't stoked about the prospect of getting undermined by liquor stores.

"I think it's bad idea because that would cut us out," said Larry, a partner at Toronto Cannabis Dispensary who didn't want to give his last name.

"I don't think it would be a bad regulatory system if it went that way," he told VICE. "They're doing it with booze and they're doing a pretty good job,as long as they keep the quality and everything. But I don't want that to happen."

Larry said he already hears concerns about quality from people who get their weed from licensed producers, which would likely supply the legal market.

He said it's hard to say why, but thinks it's partially because the people managing large, 10,000-square foot manufacturing houses aren't used to tending to so many plants.

The wisdom of selling drugs and alcohol in the same place has also been called into question.

Damian Kettlewell, spokesperson for non-medical marijuana for the BC Private Liquor Store Association, told VICE that employees are already trained not to sell alcohol to drunk people and a similar program will be rolled out for weed.

"We're going to be socially responsible," he said. "That would include not selling to intoxicated persons whether it be liquor or under the influence of marijuana."

Larry pointed that in The Netherlands, weed and booze are sold separately.

"The two definitely don't go together, at least for me," he said.

Anyone who has had the spins would likely agree.

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Nothing! Photo via Sugarquotes

Read: I Spent the Day with Albertan Conservatives Who Think We Are 'Generation Screwed'

Getting on Facebook and looking at your feed is a masochistic tic that all too many of us are plagued with; at its worst, it's a somber reminder that, at one point in our lives or another, we were a poor judge of character and befriended dumbasses. Admittedly, there are days when I scroll through the wall of my ex-best friend from middle school and cackle maniacally in response to her constant stream of memes about how nice pitbulls are, nostalgic 90s posts, and of course, profound quotes about life: "'You have permission to rest. You are not responsible for fixing everything that is broken. You do not have to try and make everyone happy. For now, take time for you. It's time to replenish.' —Unknown."

According to a new Canadian study out of University of Waterloo, my ex-best friend, and others like her, are actually rather stupid. Within the research paper, aptly named "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit," phD candidate Gordon Pennycook and four other researchers assert that there is a link between low intelligence and being impressed by seemingly profound quotes.

In the study, the researchers used a website called Sebpearce.com, which generates random statements meant to sound profound like, "This life is nothing short of an ennobling oasis of self-aware faith," or, "Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is guidance."

Nothing!!!!! Photo via Flickr user seaternity

"I came across the website, I just kind of thought about if there was any research on this; I wanted to know if people thought those statements were profound," Pennycook told VICE. "I often see quotes that are maybe not quite as egregious, but you see a lot of motivational ones... there's quotes and a picture of somebody who obviously did not say the quote—you come across that quite often."

In the study, nearly 300 participants were presented with various statements, including those of the "bullshit" variety, and asked to react to them by rating their profoundness on a scale of 1 to 5, classifying quotes as either profound, bullshit, or mundane. They were also given tests meant to measure their cognitive ability and personality.

The paper gave the following as an example of a statement participants were asked to respond to: "Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty." In reality, this sentence was constructed to evoke the feeling that motivates your dumb Facebook friends to share vapid, un-fact-checked quotes.

Those who were unable to detect the bullshit and rated the pseudo-profound as actually profound were determined to be lower in intelligence, less likely to engage in reflective thinking, and more likely to hold conspiratorial or paranormal beliefs.

In other words, these types of people are, as Nietzsche once said, "Locked in the glass cabinet of the mind's self-reflection."

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Deborah Drever. Photo via Facebook/Deborah Drever for Calgary Bow

Following Alberta's historic provincial election in May, in which the long-reigning Progressive Conservative Party was nearly decimated and the NDP was installed in a majority government, one rookie Member of the Legislative Assembly in particular received a huge amount of media attention: Deborah Drever.

Drever was elected to represent the riding of Calgary-Bow for the NDP, and at 26 she's an outlier in Canadian politics, for both her age and her gender (27 women were elected in Alberta this year out of 87 seats, a historic but still rather unimpressive number). Reports surfaced almost immediately after Drever's victory of untoward posts on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from flipping off the Canadian flag to more unambiguously offensive fare like insinuating two conservative male politicians are gay. In a matter of days, premier-designate Rachel Notley suspended Drever from the NDP caucus, and while Drever apologized, she decided to remain on the job as an independent MLA.

After several months of near-silence, in November Drever introduced a private member's bill intended to make it easier for survivors of domestic violence to break leases without penalty. While private member's bills rarely have even a chance of becoming law, Drever's proposed legislation has acquired significant support among her former party members. One MLA, Maria Fitzpatrick, gave a speech in support of the bill in which she recounted her own experiences of abuse.

The bill has now passed both its first and second readings in legislature, meaning it is likely the bill will become law. When asked late last month why she chose this topic for her first piece of legislation, Drever said her own early life was a huge part of it.

"My mom, she experienced a lot of domestic violence," Drever told VICE. "I just have memories as a child... being exposed to that, waking up in women's shelters, fleeing from a really hostile situation. It's something that's always really stuck with me throughout my life, and I thought, you know, with women's issues, it's really a continuum of factors. But right now, I think it's a good step, especially in Alberta with the growing rate of domestic violence, it's somewhere to start, tackling this issue."

As Drever mentioned, domestic violence is a huge and growing issue in the province that has arguably been hit worst by the year-long slump in oil prices. Last December saw the largest mass murder in Edmonton history, when Phu Lam shot his ex Cindy Duong, two other women, and three young boys before committing suicide. Edmonton police called it an "extreme case of domestic violence."

If it becomes law, Drever's bill will allow victims of domestic violence to attain a signed document to that effect (from a doctor, nurse, social worker, psychologist, or other support worker) and break their lease within 28 days with no financial or legal penalties.

"When I decided to do the bill around helping victims of DV," Drever said, "one of the first people I went to was my mother. She was a victim of domestic violence and growing up we stayed in various women's shelters around Calgary. I also remember staying at the children's cottage, which is a place for children to go in emergency situations. These places act as a safe haven to those fleeing domestic violence."

The bill will have a third reading soon, after which it will likely become law.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

Photo by Brock Williams/Sundance Selects

When the Taser was being developed by a NASA researcher named Jack Cover in the late 1960s and early 70s, the premise was almost utopian: a weapon that could subdue criminals without killing them, or even doing them lasting harm. Even the name—originally an acronym for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle, after the Tom Swift series of novels—speaks to the weapon's sci-fi origins.

It takes a lot of work for that sort of idea to become reality. The early Tasers used gunpowder to fire darts containing an electric charge at a target, and as a result they were classified as firearms. Once the invention was bought from Cover by a pair of entrepreneurs, however, the gunpowder was swapped for compressed air, they stopped technically being firearms, and today Taser International, Inc. brings in $164.5 million in revenue a year. The company has dominated the conducted energy device (CED) market for 15 years and supplies some 17,000 law enforcement departments around the world with its eponymous devices. (The company has also moved into manufacturing body cameras.)

At a time when police shootings dominate the news, the notion that Tasers are a safer way to subdue suspects than gunfire is a welcome one. But Nick Berardini, the filmmaker behind Killing Them Safely, a new documentary, wants people to know that while Tasers may be less lethal than guns, they're far from safe.

Berardini began work on his film five years ago, when he heard about the death of 23-year-old Stanley Harlan, who was Tasered after a traffic stop in Moberly, Missouri, near where Berardini was attending college. Harlan died in front of his parents after being zapped three times and going into cardiac arrest. (Taser's VP of Strategic Communications Steven Tuttle told VICE via email that "both the medical examiner and the courts have found that TASER did not cause the unfortunate death.") One of these Taser blasts lasted for 21 seconds, longer than most Taser tests, which tend to be closer to 16 seconds. Berardini was baffled that police didn't appear to understand how much harm their Tasers could cause.

"The officers stood around and eventually even said they believed was faking," he told me in a phone interview.

Though most Taser models can be used directly on the skin in "drive stun" mode, they are intended to be unleashed from a distance of up to 35 feet via the two barbed probes that are launched from the device. A short burst—five seconds at a time, though newer models include the option to hold the trigger and increase the duration—ideally incapacitates a person safely.

Like Tasers, pepper spray, batons, and newer less-lethal devices such as sound weapons are all controversial to one degree or another, and arguably deployed too often. Pepper spray's effect can last for 45 minutes, and in rare cases can apparently be fatal. Tear gas can be even more debilitating, and as the death of Eric Garner illustrated, even a simple chokehold can kill.

So the question is not so much whether Tasers can kill—they can. The question is whether when such deaths do occur, is it solely the fault of the officer using the weapon? Or can you lay some blame at the doorstep of the weapon's manufacturer?

Berardini thinks you can. He told me he's not a use of force expert, that he can't decide this kind of thing for law enforcement. He can, however, critique what he sees as the company downplaying the dangers of their product so that police departments would buy these expensive weapons.

Fundamentally, Berardini said Taser "changed how officers did their jobs. They basically overthrew the system of de-escalation, encouraged to embrace using force—not just to end dangerous confrontation, but any confrontation."

But Tuttle, the Taser spokesman, argues, "To take Berardini's film seriously, you have to buy into the dark conspiracy theory that the manufacturer possesses some secret knowledge of the dangers of their weapon and suppresses this like the tobacco industry did in the past"

There is no denying that the documentary takes aim at the company, but it's not exactly a hatchet job. Berardini says nice things about the company, pointing out that co-founders Rick and Tom Smith started off with decent ideas and a desire to help law enforcement and prevent the death of suspects. But he thinks the weapons were advertised as being less dangerous than they turned out to be. They didn't replace guns, but became a tool cops are all too eager to use, despite the risks. Tasers are becoming, as an Amnesty International spokesperson put it in 2013, "a weapon of first resort." The human rights group has been criticizing the use of Tasers for years, and in 2012, they said that more than 500 people had died after being hit by Tasers since the beginning of the 21st century.

When you're Tased, your muscles contract. Nerves fire. The idea is to stop you long enough for cops to restrain you, but depending on the subject's health, this shock to the system can be dangerous. Studies have been inconclusive about the effect of Taser blasts on the heart, but Taser International now warns against hitting suspects in the chest due to concerns about cardiac arrest. (Bernardini's documentary goes into this issue in detail and finds it credible.)

It should be said that Taser International has some solid numbers on its side. Some three million field uses, and two million tests of the weapon have taken place, and a 2011 study funded in part by the Department of Justice concluded, "the use of... application is a physically stressful event and that the number and duration of... exposures should be restricted to the minimum necessary to achieve lawful objectives." Ultimately, it's up to cops to follow these guidelines. As Taser CEO Rick Smith toldFortune in 2011, "We don't enter into debates about policy, we just make the equipment. Once the agency makes the decision to use force, it's in their hands."

At one point in his film, though, Berardini hangs out with officers from Warren, Michigan. That department stopped using Tasers in 2012, six years after they began, and after two incidents where people died following use. One of these was 16-year-old Robert Mitchell, whose death was ruled in part due to the Taser blast fired at him. To that end, the documentary makes a compelling—albeit anecdotal—point about how some police didn't feel adequately warned about Taser's potential dangers.

Berardini is correct that if police were truly sold that this was an entirely harmless weapon, they were misled. But it's a mistake to consider Tasers in a vacuum—police officers also have beanbags, pepper spray, batons, and more, all weapons with their own risks in this era of militarized policing.

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All photos courtesy of Ducky Doolittle

When Ducky Doolittle opens a package, she unloads the contents and asks herself: How many ways can I fuck this thing? It's a question she has to answer pretty regularly, as the main buyer for Komar, a wholesale sex toy distributor. She's trying to calculate what she calls "orgasms per dollar"—the concept that the more ways one can use a sex toy, the more value it has.

"So if it's a sex toy that's made for the G-spot but it's also a great clitoral vibrator, it has higher value, because there are a couple ways to use it," she tells me. "That's one testing ground."

Doolittle has tested countless sex toys since she joined the team at Komar a little over a year ago. She's responsible for selecting the toys the retailer will stock—everything from colorful vibrators to flavored lubricants—which means she essentially gets paid to masturbate.

Doolittle's been working in the sex industry for 26 years, starting as a clerk in a sex shop and then as a peepshow girl and burlesque performer. Later, she went into sex education and built a reputation as one of the most trusted sex educators in the country. Carol Queen, a sex-positive sex educator, called her "one of the most thought-provoking and interesting sex teachers out there," and feminist writer Susie Bright said she was "one of the most insightful and original sex educators and artists I've ever met." Doolittle went on to found the Academy of Sex Education, organize sex education workshops at places like Babeland and the Museum of Sex, and in 2006, wrote the book Sex with the Lights On: 200 Illuminating Sex Questions Answered. Basically, she's your go-to girl for anything sex-related.

"I never planned to be in business this long but, I love it and I'm good at it. Those things together just keep dropping opportunities in my lap," she says.

Working for Komar was an "unexpected" opportunity, Doolittle says, but one that she accepted happily. The company has been in the sex-related product distribution business for over 50 years. In the 1960s, under then-owner Samuel Boltansky, Komar fought obscenity laws, so books like Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Story of O could be distributed and sold in the United States. The company also worked to distribute adult magazines, and later, porn on VHS and DVD. For the past decade—in part, due to the proliferation of porn online—Komar has shifted to focus on selling and distributing sex toys.

"I'm not here to tell people what they can fuck. I'm here to help instigate their desire."
—Ducky Doolittle

Doolittle normally starts her day by opening the new boxes of sex toys that have been sent to her from manufacturers all over the world. Among the shipments she's received recently are silicone dildos in colors normally found in a crayon box; cock rings and ball straps in discreet black packaging; miniature masturbators, or "pocket pussies," some of which look like naked women without heads; and a candy dish full of brightly colored penis pencil toppers.

Ultimately, it's up to Doolittle to decide what Komar sells—which means a lot of decision making about a product's fuckability.

"You wanna have sex with that thing? I'll get it for you," she tells me. "All day, all night."

Fuckability, of course, means different things to different customers, and Doolittle has to consider the many different needs and tastes of people buying the products she selects. Some people want wellness-oriented products; others want luxe, high-grade, or chemical-free toys; others want what she calls "a mythical experience," something to make them feel dirty. To cater to all kinds of customers, she ends up choosing a variety of materials—sleek silicone vibrators with high-powered motors, alongside the cartoonish, plastic blowup dolls. "I'm not here to tell people what they can fuck," she says. "I'm here to help instigate their desire."

That's not to say she isn't selective. "I don't really have any loyalty to anything other than giving users orgasms, and that's really confusing to some manufacturers," she explains. "They just want me to pick up everything in every color. And I'm like, 'I don't care about color, I care about orgasms!'"

For example, she only buys anal toys in black because of "residual poo," as she puts it. "If people are afraid of residual poo and they're sold a black toy, they have more confidence. They use it more often," she says. "If you sell them a pink or a purple or a light flesh color, they'll be a little bit more shy about using it."

Related: How to Design Sex Toys for People with Disabilities

Doolittle's ultimate goal is to have every toy in "high rotation," meaning in regular use by the consumers in their homes (or elsewhere, for those who like to use sex toys on the go). She tells me excitedly about a product that makes your secretions taste sweet, and a new lubricant called Unicorn Spit that's made to taste like donuts—things she can envision people using regularly.

She aims to test everything she selects, but it's not always possible, mostly because it's a time-consuming process for her. "I don't think you have a fair understanding of what a toy is until you've used it at least five times," she says.

When she can't test a product herself, she focuses on measures like the aforementioned "orgasms per dollar," as well as the smell, touch, and even taste of the product. Smell, she says, can help her understand what chemicals are being used to make the product; taste helps her understand the way the product will interact with a person's mucous membranes, which are also present, of course, "in the pussy or ass."

A typical day for Doolittle will also include a trip to a sex toy warehouse in northern Baltimore: "100,000 square feet of fuckables," is how she describes it. "It's all so neatly put away that the warehouse looks inconspicuous." On a recent trip to the warehouse, Doolittle sent me a photo of herself wearing a black T-shirt from a sex toy company called CalExotics and what seem like infinite shelves of cardboard boxes filled with sex toys behind her.

Visiting the warehouse helps her to physically see what's being sent out to stores. She likes to look in each bin and cart to see what's selling well, alongside analytics on the computer, to inform her buying decisions. When the semis pull in, she takes pictures for blogs and tweets to generate hype.

Between shopping for products and testing them herself, Doolittle spends a few days a week doing store visits and staff trainings or going to trade shows around the country (the Sexual Health Expo and the Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo, to name a few). For a store visit, she'll set up an appointment with the owner of a particular store selling Komar products and consult with them about how the products have been selling: What could they be doing to make the store better? What's working? What's not working? She also likes to understand the price points in the store, the economy of the area where it's located, and the average amount a customer spends per visit, so she can better relate to the buying market she's serving.

On Motherboard: Why Are Sex Toys for Men So Terrible?

Part of what makes a sex shop run smoothly is the knowledge of the staff, which is why Doolittle also conducts staff trainings—both online and in-person—for Komar distributors. She'll go to a store, talk to the manager, find out where the staff's struggles are, and design a training to strengthen those areas.

"There is still a stigma overall working in a sex shop," she explains. "So anybody who works in a sex shop is already strong. People crack jokes, like, 'Oh, you sell vibrating doodads,' but in reality, a great worker has the potential to change somebody's relationship with their body, to change somebody's relationship with their partner, to help them find peace."

Doolittle trains staffers to interact with what she calls "the blur"—when people walk into a sex shop and they're so overwhelmed by everything they don't know what to look for or at first. She also teaches them how to help customers who are visibly lost but won't (or don't know how to) ask for help. It's essential for employees to know how to explain the differences between toys, so customers can make the right decisions for their bodies, how to care for the products they buy, and more.

"A good sex shop can be a community center, a place where you can go get information you can't get from your doctor or from your lover, and I think that's really profound shit," she says.

Sex toys, Doolittle says, were historically made for "planned obsolescence"—to be used once or twice and thrown away—so quality was never a top priority. People were so ashamed of using them in the first place they wouldn't complain when they fell apart. Today, though, sex toys are a multi-billion dollar industry, sold on Amazon and even recommended by Oprah, and quality matters in a big way. At Komar, Doolittle says she's seen "an old boys' locker room company and turn it into something modern." "You sell sex toys by the pallet," she adds, "it's just so much fun."

Some might tire of the constant parade of sex toys, but Doolittle never has. "I'm shocked every day," she says. "I think part of the thing is that I will always be a girl from Minnesota, I will always be shy." She tells me about the website of one particular sex toy company that "is so pornographic that I blush just thinking about it!" It's still titillating for her, somehow.

"The rubber butts come in and I lose my mind every time. I just get so excited by the idea and we can't keep them in stock," she says. "They're, like, rubber butts! Life is so good!"

Follow Elyssa Goodman on Twitter.

SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array. Photo courtesy of Seth Shostak/SETI Institute

In 1960, renowned astronomer Frank Drake spent 150 hours holed up in the Green Bank Observatory, using a giant radio telescope to look for aliens. The experiment, known as Project Ozma, focused on two nearby stars—Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani—which Drake had selected for observation. But at the end of the project, he had little to show for his efforts: He hadn't found any signs of intelligent life.

Though he didn't know it at the time, Drake's experiment had paved the way for the modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, in shorthand. Drake's pioneering use of radio waves would change the way scientists scanned the cosmos for signs of life, meaning his expensive and embarrassing failure had actually revolutionized the search for aliens, and would inspire SETI programs at institutions like Harvard, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

But in 1961, Drake couldn't have known any of this. So he called an informal conference of 12 men—among them, a handful of Nobel laureates and a young Carl Sagan—to come to Green Bank Observatory and decide if it were financially and scientifically justifiable to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Not only did the group decide that SETI was a worthwhile venture, but they began working on concrete research methods. One of these methods was the Drake equation, a formula meant to quantify the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that could be expected to be found in the Milky Way. Based on his formula, Drake would peg this number at 10,000; Sagan, in his unflagging optimism, estimated it was closer to a million.

On Motherboard: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life Is Like Hunting for Pizza in a Dorm

In the years after the Green Bank conference, the search for life beyond Earth remained mostly a fringe enterprise, and SETI was little more than an umbrella term for a loosely-affiliated sect of space scientists prowling the cosmos for extraterrestrial life. But in 1971, NASA became interested in SETI after developing Project Cyclops, which would use 1,000 100-meter telescopes to search for radio signals from neighboring stars.

Project Cyclops was ultimately scrapped—in part due to its astronomical price tag of $10 billion—but it jumpstarted the space agency's interest in SETI research, building on those early experiments from Drake. By 1976, NASA's Ames Research Center and JPL both had their own fledgling SETI programs. Within a decade, a number of independent SETI initiatives had sprung up up, including Sagan's Planetary Society, which funded small JPL and Harvard SETI initiatives; the "Serendip" program at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Ohio's "Big Ear" program; a number of initiatives in the Soviet Union; and of course, the SETI Institute, which was founded in 1984.

Watch: When Will Humans Live on Mars?

Still, not everyone thought scientists should spend time—and precious research money—staring into the sky to look for aliens. In 1978, US Senator William Proxmire called NASA's SETI program a waste of taxpayer money and succeeded in killing the program's budget in 1981. (He agreed to reinstate the funding in 1983, after a chat with Sagan). When NASA started building hardware for its SETI program in 1988, Congress threw a fit over who was going to pay for it, and defunded the program the following year.

In 1993, after NASA had secured $11.5 million for its newly-minted High Resolution Microwave Survey, US Senator Richard Bryan submitted a last-minute amendment to kill the program once and for all, noting that "this will hopefully be the end of Martian hunting season at the taxpayer's expense." The Senate ultimately approved Bryan's measure and by the time the dust settled, NASA's SETI program was dead.

"Bryan saw SETI as a target that he could use to show his constituents that he was trying to save them money that he considered being wasted by the government," said Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer and director of the SETI Institute. "SETI was easy for him to attack because there weren't thousands of jobs involved. It was a topic he could easily make fun of."

But while NASA's program was dead, SETI researchers were determined to continue their alien hunting. With the help of investors in Silicon Valley, the SETI Institute—which had been contracting with NASA for a number of years—raised $7.5 million to continue the targeted search that NASA had started the year prior. The renewed search was named Project Phoenix, and it logged 100 observation days at Arecibo, a radio telescope in Puerto Rico, as well as 2,600-plus hours at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.

"Project Phoenix was rising from the ashes of NASA's SETI program," Shostak told me. "Some of had been at NASA. They joined the Institute when all the SETI employees at NASA had to stop working on SETI. If they joined the Institute, then maybe they could continue on their project—and some of them did that."

Related: So, How's the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Going?

Since then, the Institute has been the preeminent source of SETI initiatives, which are funded exclusively through private donations. The organization has overseen over 100 projects since its inception, including building its own SETI-dedicated array of telescopes, known as the Allen Telescope Array. It's the only institution of its kind, but Shostak is cautious about calling it the largest—there are only five people at the Institute who actively search for intelligent life.

"Ninety-six percent of the scientists are doing investigations into life that is not-so intelligent," said Shostak. "Think bacteria under the sands of Mars, or maybe under the icy skins of Europa. Most of the effort here is actually astrobiology."

According to Shostak, the emphasis on astrobiology is a reflection of the institute's funding problems. While NASA still provides a significant number of grants for research into astrobiology, it hasn't provided funding specifically for the search for intelligent life since the 90s. Last July, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced that he would donate $100 million to boost the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but according to Shostak, it isn't likely to benefit the Institute directly.

Milner has said that a portion of the $100 million will be saved for "active SETI," which involves intentionally sending messages into the cosmos. This type of research is controversial for two reasons: First, some people are wary that the communications might give away Earth's location to a potentially hostile alien race, in effect inviting the destroyers of human civilization to our doorstep. Others object because there's no consensus on just what the messages should say—and only a select few get to decide what is communicated on Earth's behalf.

"There are people out there who think active SETI is dangerous, but I think it is a phony argument," said Shostak. Still, he added, "it's a controversial subject, so at the moment the SETI institute is not doing active SETI."

Despite the fact that the SETI Institute has yet to receive a "hello" from ET and can't actively send out interstellar messages itself, Shostak and his colleagues believe that their efforts will ultimately pay off.

"You have to look at SETI as exploration because that's what it is," Shostak said. "You could say it's a stupid waste of my money when we've got people starving in the streets, that's the nature of all research. It's all driven by curiosity. That sounds frivolous, but it's not. It's very easy to show that societies which don't have that curiosity disappear rather quickly—so the long term benefits are high. You never know what it's going to lead to."

Follow Daniel Oberhaus on Twitter.

Photos courtesy of Kathleen Marden

Last week, NASA issued a clarification that a bright light in an image tweeted by one of its astronauts was, in fact, from the International Space Station, and not from a UFO. Even though there's never been any scientific evidence that UFOs exist, it's not exactly surprising: A higher percentage of Americans believe that UFOs exist than those who believe in climate change, evolution, or that the earth is 4.5 billion years old.

One of the best-known organizations claiming to scientifically study UFO's is the "Mutual UFO Network," or MUFON. Much of their work involves consulting with "experiencers"—people who claim to have been abducted or otherwise come in contact with extraterrestrial beings. It's a little bit hard to accept that the process has any scientific validity, given that the "experiencer questionnaire" reads a bit like an oncologist diagnosing a hypochondriac by asking them if they have cancer. Even still, they are the go-to for those who believe to have had alien encounters.

MUFON's director of experiencer research is Kathleen Marden—the niece of Betty and Barney Hill, two of the most well-known alleged UFO abductees from the 1960s. I talked to Marden about her methodology, the support services she provides for "experiencers," and whether media portrayals of aliens do more harm than good.

VICE: Tell me a little about what you do with MUFON.
Kathleen Marden: I'm MUFON's director of experiencer research. What we ask experiencers to do before they file a report with MUFON is to go to our website and take the experiencer questionnaire. It's a commonalities questionnaire to determine what they have in common with experiencers who participated in the Martin Stoner Commonalities Research Project in 2012. Once they do that, their score will go to me, along with their questionnaire, and I will assign a member of the team to get in touch with them.

Then what happens?
We talk to individuals to help them determine what they want to do: Do they want a formal investigation of their case with someone from MUFON? Do they have evidence? Are they not sure what's going on? Do they want some pointers on what to look for and how to collect the evidence? Do they have unpleasant memories about what has happened to them? Are they looking for a support group? We will attempt to find a support group for them—there are so few that it's really difficult, but there are some online support groups. Or are they looking for a therapist or a hypnotist? Then we will tell them where to look for a list where they might be able to get some information about those things. Professionals who specialize in this stuff are not very prevalent so it's difficult, but we do the best we can to help experiencers define what they want.

Have you encountered people who've tried to deceive you about their alien encounters?
Absolutely. A very small percentage of experiencers who request an investigation and file a report have done so in order to attempt to pull off a deception. I have caught a couple of them in cases that I have investigated. These people tend to either have a mental illness or they tend to be on the margins of society and believe that by pulling off a deception, they're going to bring publicity to themselves and possibly money. That's not going to happen because most experiencers, if they bring publicity to themselves, it's of a negative type. They're criticized by the public and by skeptics, and nobody makes a lot of money doing this.

Watch: On the Hunt for Aliens in the Valley of the UFOs

Do you worry that somebody might not share those commonalities but still be worthy of investigation? Are there other benefits to filling out the questionnaire?
That happens. My team is non-prejudicial. There are individuals who have had recent experiences for the first time, and they won't have all of the characteristics that long-term experiencers have. So it's kind of open-ended. What it does is it can start a conversation, and the goal is to help people because these events can be traumatic and people don't know where to turn.

Because most people don't believe them?
They might have tried to speak to their families, and the families say, "Well... what were you drinking?" You know, I had a case where a medical doctor had confided in a friend hypnotized them separately and he reinstated amnesia at the end of each session so they didn't know what the other one stated. I have those tapes of their separate hypnosis sessions—I transcribed them and lined up their separate statements. What I discovered is that Betty and Barney describe where these ETs were standing, how they moved, what they did. That information was not in Betty's dreams—and it was also in conflict with some of the information in Betty's dreams—which lead me to believe this was a real event, and not just Betty reliving dreams under hypnosis and Barney knowing a little bit about her dreams and building on his own story based upon that. All of their testimony is in agreement; there is no conflict in their separate testimony.

What would you say to someone who accused them of being coached to tell this story?
Well, that's ridiculous! There was no other abduction experience before Betty and Barney's! We weren't aware of any of this. How could anyone possibly coach them? And Betty and Barney were upstanding credible members of the community. The psychological evaluations that they underwent showed that they were normal functioning people—except for Barney's distress over this experience. They were highly intelligent. They were committed to the truth. These were church-going people. They were committed to improving the conditions for their community, and for the people of their state and the nation.

Some people have suggested that those who claim to have had contact with extraterrestrials are actually experiencing vivid dreams, or sleep paralysis. How do you respond to those sorts of explanations?
All of those things are something that could occur, and that is something that we always look at. We always attempt to explain these away with prosaic explanations first. But we, as unbiased investigators, must also look for evidence. We have to look for individual testimony, eyewitness testimony, circumstantial evidence, physical evidence such as fluorescence in certain patterns on the bodies of experiencers, certain markings that we find on the bodies of experiencers—even to the point of installing surveillance cameras, motion-activated infrared in the homes of experiencers and outside those homes, and looking at the evidence.

What we find is that the outside camera might pick up a bright light outside the home. If this is a bedroom abduction, you might see the husband and wife sitting up in bed, and the next thing you know, the camera shuts down for two hours, and then you see the individuals again—but they're in bed in a different position. It's that sort of thing: the cameras always shut down.

A camera shutting down for two hours sounds more like an absence of evidence.
No. It's not an absence of evidence. It's evidence that something unusual has occurred. It's evidence of an anomaly. And when you get evidence of that anomaly over and over again, then it is significant. And what we need in all of this is not one smoking gun, one piece of evidence that is going to be irrefutable, but the preponderance of evidence, the weight of the different types of evidence that is around this constellation of evidence that we require in cases of alien abduction, for example.

Do you think that portrayals of extraterrestrials in popular media are conducive or harmful to people coming forward?
It depends on what you see. For example, MUFON's Hangar 1: The UFO Files show on the History Channel has caused many people to come forward. We've received far more reports than we did before Hangar 1 was on. But then, there are some science fiction shows that are just very, very frightening and, oh boy, it is not good for this field—and I don't think that it's good for the general population either. That kind of portrayal, in my opinion, makes people more frightened, and that's certainly something that shouldn't be happening. We should be looking at this more scientifically, more as investigators, and I am not in favor of any of the science fiction that comes out on this.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

This story originally appeared on The Trace.

As jihadist terrorists continue to set their sights on Western targets, one thing has become abundantly clear: Firearms have become their weapons of choice. The assault on the Frankfurt Airport, the attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels, the Copenhagen shooting spree, the Sydney café standoff, the Charlie Hebdo shooting, and most recently, the Paris attacks—all were carried out by assailants armed with guns.

It's a pattern that extends to the United States. As part of an ongoing research project that draws upon open-source materials and information from news reports, I have been monitoring and analyzing incidents of domestic terrorism since 9/11. To compile my list, I use the definition of terrorism set down by federal law, which states that a politically-motivated act of violence is considered terrorism if it is "intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping."

Drawing from that larger list, I count 17 jihadist terrorist attacks—acts of violence explicitly or implicitly inspired by a warped reading of Islam, or in objection to American policies toward Muslims—on the American homeland during the past 14 years. The attackers in these incidents have employed incendiary devices, cutting instruments, vehicles, improvised explosive devises, and, most frequently, firearms. (The list does not include Wednesday's massacre in San Bernardino, California, which authorities are investigating as a possible terrorism case.)

When the fatal and non-fatal incidents are sorted into their own columns, another pattern emerges: All six deadly jihadist attacks on American soil involved firearms. Overall, these attacks have killed 28 people since 9/11, and 25 of those victims were shot to death. The deployment of IEDs along the route of the Boston Marathon accounts for the remaining three fatalities—the only one of the five attacks that involved a bomb that proved deadly. Attacks involving a vehicle, a cutting instrument, or an incendiary device failed to kill anyone. Out of the eight that involved a firearm, 75 percent resulted in fatalities.

There's an explanation for that breakdown: Most weapons aren't consistently lethal. Even the bomb-making capabilities of most current terrorists aren't guaranteed to produce devices that kill numerous victims, thanks to the federal clamp down on precursor explosive chemicals and materials. As we saw in Boston—where the attackers fashioned a pressure cooker into a bomb—the lethality of explosives is now more contained, compared to the damage bombs caused prior to and including the 1994 Oklahoma City attack.

Guns are the exception. They are readily available, affordable, and can kill in scores. In four of the six deadly incidents of jihadist terrorism since 9/11, the attackers bought their firearms legally. In the other two cases, one perpetrator borrowed the firearm from a close friend and the other stole it from his mother.

Raising concerns that ISIS-inspired terrorists might attempt a Paris-style swarm attack here in the United States, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York is calling for a tightening of federal gun laws. "First and foremost, our goal has to be to avoid any terrorists—lone wolves or otherwise—from getting a weapon," he said, "rather than making sure we shoot them after they've gotten their hands on one." One measure that has received renewed attention is a bipartisan bill, sponsored by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Republican Representative Peter King of New York, which would bar someone on the terrorism watch-list from being able to purchase a firearm. Feinstein has been pitching the legislation as a "no brainer." In her view, "If you're too dangerous to board a plane, you're too dangerous to buy a gun."

It's important to note that all this focus on Islamic extremists ignores domestic terrorists driven by other motives. In fact, right-wing domestic terrorists armed with guns, particularly Christian fundamentalists and white supremacists, have committed a slight majority of the lethal terror attacks taking place in the U.S. since 9/11, claiming 29 lives—a death toll that could climb to 32 if authorities confirm that last Friday's attack inside a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, was politically-motivated.

When all lethal domestic attacks since 2002—regardless of motive—are tallied up, the numbers show that all but one involved guns. In total, firearms claimed 95 percent of the lives lost to terrorism in America over the same period. On the issue of deadly domestic terror in America, religion and skin color are not common denominators. Guns are.

Louis Klarevas, the author of the forthcoming book Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings, teaches counter-terrorism in the department of global affairs at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Follow him on Twitter.

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Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

On Thursday, one day after the horrific mass shooting that left 14 dead and 21 wounded in San Bernardino, Californiamass shooting that left 14 dead and 21 wounded in San Bernardino, California, Republican presidential candidates spoke to assembled members of the Republican Jewish Coalition. And unsurprisingly, several of them had terrorism on the brain.

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

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who Wednesday tweeted his prayers and thoughts for the victims and families affected by the senseless tragedy, was feeling much tougher this morning. "This is yet another manifestation of terrorism, radical Islamic terrorism here at home," he told the RJC audience, according to Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel. This "horrific murder underscores that we are at a time of war, whether or not the current administration realizes it," he continued.

Appearing on stage later in the day, Donald Trump told the same group that President Obama's refusal to use the term "radical Islamic terrorism" was proof "there is something going on with him that we don't know about." Through a series of retweets, Trump indicated that when events like the one that occurred inSan Bernardino happen, he sees a bump in the polls.

Mike Huckabee also got in on the action, accusing the president of moving with "lightning speed" to push for additional gun control measures in the wake of Wednesday's shooting, while ignoring the threat of "radical Islamic terrorism."

Media gathered near the scene of the shootings.(Photo by Brooke Workneh/VICE News)

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

US News

• FBI Treating San Bernardino as Possible Terrorist Act
  Federal investigators are treating the mass shooting which left 14 dead in San Bernardino as a potential act of terrorism. They are examining the two suspects' stockpile of ammunition, their recent Middle East travel and evidence one of them was in touch with other extremists. —The New York Times

• Obamacare Under Threat
  After five years of failed attempts, the Senate has passed a bill to repeal key parts of the Affordable Care Act. The symbolic bill is expected to pass at House of Representatives too, but President Obama has vowed to ultimately veto the measure. —CNN

• Chicago to Release Another Shooting Video
  Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said video showing another young man being fatally shot by a Chicago police officer will be released next week. Ronald Johnson, 25, was killed by an officer in October last year, and an attorney for his family says he was running away when he was shot. —USA Today

• All Combat Roles Open to Women
  All combat roles in the US military will now be open to women, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter has announced. This means women will be eligible to join Navy Seals, Army Special Forces and the Green Berets for the first time. —VICE News

International News

• Syrian Peace Talks to Begin in Saudi
  Saudi Arabia will host talks for various Syrian opposition groups and rebel factions next week. The aim is to come up with a unified front ahead of peace talks with Syrian government representatives, set to start in January. —AP

• Japan Launches Spy Unit
  A new Japanese Foreign Ministry group will start collecting information on militant groups such as Islamic State, prompted by last month's attacks on Paris. The intelligence gatherers will work in Japanese embassies around the world. —Reuters

• Germany Votes For Military Action
  Germany's parliament has voted in favour of providing military support to the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State militants in Syria. Reconnaissance aircraft, a naval frigate and 1,200 soldiers will be sent to the region. —BBC News

• Egyptian Restaurant Firebombed
  Sixteen people have been killed in Cairo, after molotov cocktails were thrown into a restaurant. Egypt's interior ministry said it appeared to have followed a row between workers and others at the venue, which also housed a nightclub. —Al Jazeera
  

Scott Weiland. Photo via Wikimedia

Everything Else

• Jon Stewart Lobbies For 9/11 Firefighters
  Stewart took a group of 9/11 responders to the Capitol building, tracked down Senator Rob Portman, and persuaded him to back a bill making a health program for them permanent. —The Huffington Post

• Singer Scott Weiland Found Dead
  The former Stone Temple Pilots frontman has died at the age of 48. Weiland's manager said he "passed away in his sleep while on a tour stop". —Los Angeles Times

• Mount Etna Erupts
  The volcano on the Italian island of Sicily has erupted for the first time in two years, closing the nearest airport. The tallest volcano in Europe, it has been active for an estimated 2.5 million years. —The Guardian

• People Who Share Inspirational Quotes are Dumb
  Canadian researchers say there is a link between low intelligence and being impressed by bullshit, asinine, seemingly profound quotes on Facebook. - VICE

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'Ali Boulala Was the Original Baker Boy'

On Thursday, Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, and some kind of human sponge designed to absorb all of the world's hatred, announced at an event held by Forbes that he thinks he should have raised the price of Daraprim higher. Daraprim is, of course, a $13.50 pill whose cost he raised to $750 back in September, even though it's a necessary medicine for AIDS and cancer patients.

He hasn't said how much higher, but presumably the cost he has in mind is "everything you hold dear," and then after he takes you for all you're worth, he'll do this:

Just kidding. Kind of.

He's still going around making a point about capitalism, and claiming that insurance companies absorb the cost, not the patients themselves. Here's the exact quote he gave after someone at a Q&A on Thursday asked him if he would have done anything differently earlier this year:

I probably would have raised the price higher is probably what I would have done. I think healthcare prices are inelastic. I could have raised it higher, and made more profits for our shareholders, which is my primary duty.

It's yet another unabashedly articulated version of a familiar kind of greed-is-good business logic: the goal of every CEO is to funnel as much money as humanly possible into the pockets of your shareholders, provided you don't run afoul of the law. According to Shkreli, that's what "we're all taught in MBA class."

"Try to be a CEO yourself. See how it goes," he said. The people with the right stuff to make it in his line of work—he claimed—are "people that are willing to make these hard choices, grow earnings for their shareholders, and again, try to do the right thing with those prices." Otherwise, he said, "try to maximize profits and not get kicked out of a company and let me know how that goes for you."

Last month, when he announced he wasn't lowering the price, his company's press release emphasized that while insurance companies would still take the hit, those paying out of pocket would be spared from financial ruin if they jumped through the right hoops to get a discount. He also pointed out on Thursday, "we did lower the price for hospital customers," along with releasing a smaller bottle of Daraprim. "We talked to our customers and that's what they want," he said.

But it appears that uninsured people making over $60,000 would still have to pay the full $750 a pill.

And it also looks like insurance companies's absorption of the astronomical cost of Daraprim doesn't necessarily mean insured consumers emerge unscathed. In July, when Insurance companies announced that for the year 2016, costs would need to rise by an average of 25 percent, they cited rising drug costs as a major cause.

Eye doctor and health business pundit Sreedhar Potarazu wrote back in August that, "the cost increases affect employers and insurers, who are transferring some of these costs to consumers, requiring them to pay a larger share through their monthly premiums and rising copays."

According to Potarazu this creates a situation in which patients "despite having health insurance and even government assistance to pay for it, are increasingly unable to pay for the care they need."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Promotional material from Amy Schumer's recent HBO stand-up special, riffing on imagery traditionally associated with male comedians

A couple weeks ago, I attended a screening of rare clips hosted by a comedic "authority" who recently released a book on the history of comedy. I watched, in horror, as he refrained from playing one solitary clip of a female comedian and only made reference to the mere existence of less than a handful. I can tell you the handful, because I was keeping track:

1. Minnie Pearl, who was only referenced in the context of being one of the guests on a '60s talk show George Carlin did a set on.
2. Elaine May, who was referenced in passing as part of the comedy duo Nichols and May.
3. Lily Tomlin, who he placed in a trifecta of the "most important political comedians" of the '70s, along with George Carlin and Richard Pryor, yet showed no footage of (don't worry, he showed copious footage of the two men).
4. Lucile Ball, who, along with her husband, Desi Arnaz, was tangentially referred to as the subject of a roast Albert Brooks' father did immediately pre-death.

That's it. No one else. Not even Joan Rivers, for fuck's sake! Right before the intermission, he played a compilation of rare clips of comedians before they "made it big." Surely he'll have at least one woman, finally, I thought before said compilation played. But, alas, there was not a one. Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Sandler were featured twice, however.

If you're a broad without a Netflix special to your name, the chances of you being able to monetize your stand-up is miniscule.

I later learned that the three women he had intended on including were cut for time, presumably so he could double up on the Seinfeld and Sandler clips. It was clear to me that he didn't even think about the implications of their absence. Men (and sometimes women) in his position never, it seems, think about it. Until, of course, it's brought to their attention.

Whenever anyone asks which comics I idolized as a child, I'm forced to confront the fact that my comedic idols were overwhelmingly male. As someone who considers herself a feminist (sorry, Reddit), this may come as a surprise, but it is the truth. Sure, I could lie and say I owned every Moms Mabley album when I was eight, but what would be the point? It's hard to consider female comedians when they're not in your immediate purview. I didn't even think of Joan Rivers as anything but a plastic surgery disaster until I bought Mr. Phyllis and Other Funny Stories, her first album, in high school. In the liner notes, Bill Cosby praised her by patronizing her: "the beautiful part about ," he wrote, "is that she's funny without doing all the stereotyped things that blondes do to get a laugh." Thanks, creepo.

It is—stop me if you've heard this before—hard to be a woman. It is harder yet to be a woman in the entertainment industry, specifically comedy. Which is not to imply the thankless tasks mothers, teachers, nurses, and whatnot do is less important than telling clit jokes, but still: being a female comedian is uniquely difficult.

There are, for starters, very few A-list female comedians (or, if you're still living in the Cold War, comediennes). The existence and success of Amy Schumer, Chelsea Handler, Iliza Schlesinger, Tig Notaro, and Sarah Silverman are often cited by clickbait journalists as proof that female comedy is experiencing a renaissance; that the "problem" of women in comedy no longer exists. These exceptions, however, do not prove the rule.

If you're a broad without a Netflix special to your name, the chances of you being able to monetize your stand-up, in even the piss-worst clubs of the most obscure Midwestern enclaves, is miniscule. If you're a male comedian, however, the bar for being considered at the Laff Dumpster in Left Bend, Indiana, is not particularly high. Men with vague, non-specific credits like "Comedy Central" (Read: Had a tweet featured on @Midnight once) and "MTV" (Read: Was a contestant on Next in 2008) are consistently flown out and put up with room and board without a second thought. But what do they have that women don't, other than cocks they can't shut up about?

One of the problems with most mainstream, regional comedy clubs is that racist, homophobic, and misogynistic material continues to be seen as acceptable in club environments. In light of this outright hostility towards women, it's understandable that many modern female comedians choose to go the alternative route, performing instead in rooms where they won't get patted on the ass on their way up to the stage or sexualized by tired old "road dogs" in the green room.

Even in the world of alternative comedy, however, inequality between genders exists.

To wit: a friend of mine once booked me on the last iteration of a very popular, consistently diverse stand-up show. Despite this consistent show of diversity, I was the only woman on the bill. When I casually informed him that I was indeed the only woman he had booked for such an important send-off, his face contorted into a look of horror. He had simply not thought about it. He wasn't being malicious, it wasn't intentional, it just hadn't occurred to him. This type of stuff happens all the time in the comedy world.

Often when I perform in Los Angeles, even for no pay (by and large, most stand-up is done for no pay, regardless of gender—some could say exploitation is the great equalizer), I am the only woman on the lineup, or one of two. (Let the record show there are more than two female comedians in Los Angeles.)

I've come to realize that this practice, while infuriating, is not intentional. The non-booking of women (by both male and female bookers) is rarely done maliciously. The cause, rather, is something even more insidious than maliciousness—it is unawareness.

Last month, my Facebook feed was a-titter with indignation over the Whatever Fest in Houston—people shared, in disgust, an image of the festival's lineup, which showed that, out of over 40 booked comedians, a laughable three were female. Emma Arnold, an Idaho-based comic, posted said flyer on her personal Facebook page, which in turn triggered a slew of support and vitriol. She recalls that many of the negative comments were "mostly of the women aren't funny, name-calling variety, with a few 'joking' violent comments thrown in for funsies."

Arnold is used to such online abuse. Responses to a blog entry wherein she described being sexually assaulted ("like full puss contact") by an out of town comic were horrific (e.g. "It's always the nonfunny female comedians that have these problems though" and "Maybe don't hug guys after they've slapped your ass if you don't want hands up your skirt? Duh."); she made memes of the most egregious offenders. It didn't scare her away from posting about her issues with the Whatever Fest lineup, though, which resulted in her creating a dialogue about the fest's overwhelming maleness with the fest's booker, Andrew Youngblood, who she describes as "pleasant and respectful."

Youngblood says he learned something from the exchange. He told me he "didn't anticipate" the blowback, and that the booking inequity was decidedly unintentional. "I put in offers for both males and female headliners for the fest," he claimed. "But due to scheduling, budget, and other reasons, we ended up with this lineup."

Which is all well and good, but out of 40 comics, not all were headliners—why, then, was the inequality so stark? (For what it's worth, Whatever Fest's music bill was similarly gender-lopsided, though the female-fronted band Metric was among the fest's headliners.)

"I never even realized how few women we had on the festival until it was brought to my attention," he says. "I'm glad people like Emma Arnold and Emily Galati seemed to treat the whole thing like it was worse to be accused of sexism than it was to be sexist. And that if sexism was accidental, it didn't count and shouldn't be acknowledged." His initial kneejerk reaction to the criticism, and his horror over being accused of accidental sexism, indeed seemed a bit maudlin — he acted as though he was being persecuted merely for maintaining the status quo. But the only way to make it not the status quo is to create a dialogue. In the grand scheme of things, the fact that the fracas ruined his weekend meant little. It certainly didn't ruin his reputation.

"I can't pretend to know what it's like to be a women in comedy," Youngblood told me. "I will never know. I sympathize with the struggle and can do my best to understand. I can listen, and I can learn, and hopefully I can help everyone move forward." Let's hope he's sincere. Because if so, that's one down, three billion to go.

Follow Megan on Twitter.

Hilary Benn

So there will be another war. Last night, the House of Commons decided, by 397 votes to 223, to carry out airstrikes in Syria. After the result had been announced, after the morbid spectacle as hundreds of overstuffed suits cheered the news that people would shortly be dying at their hands, the Speaker and a few MPs congratulated each other on an orderly and decorous debate, on being sensible and well-mannered as they discussed whether or not to throw dynamite at people from out of the sky. We will bomb Syria, not because it'll make anything better, but for purely symbolic and autotelic reasons: to be seen to be bombing, to kill for the sake of having killed. (Who else behaves like this?) So it's not surprising that as the eternal war continues to spin out forever, all anyone wants to talk about is how great Hilary Benn's speech was.

During the debate, Hilary Benn MP, son of the great socialist campaigner Tony Benn, delivered a 14-minute speech in which he defied Jeremy Corbyn to express his support for an air war in Syria, and seemingly everyone agrees that it was wonderful, statesmanlike stuff. He might be endorsing a thousand years of blood and slaughter, but what great rhetoric.

The reviews are pouring in, as if this were a West End musical instead of the overture to a massacre. "Truly spellbinding", the Spectator gushes. "Fizzing with eloquence", gurgles the Times. "Electric", gloops the Guardian. The Telegraph's Dan Hodges, who can reliably be called upon to provide the worst possible opinion at any given time, goes further. "He did not look like the leader of the opposition," he writes. "He looked like the prime minister."

But none of this is true. It is, however, a very convenient stance for those who see failure to drool at the prospect of an aerial bombardment as an unpardonable offence, and something that they hope to turn into fact by constant repetition.

Hilary Benn's speech was not the masterstroke of a consummate statesman; it was disingenuous nonsense. Even on the level of pure rhetoric: he imitated better speakers by occasionally varying his tone, rising from a sincere whisper to tub-thumping declamation without much regard for the actual content of what he was saying; this is now apparently what passes from great oratory. The speech was liberally garnished with dull clichés: "clear and present danger", "safe haven", "shoulder to shoulder", "play our part", "do our bit". He said "Daesh" a lot, and mispronounced it every time.

As if the self-image of the British state were worth a single innocent life.

And then there's what he actually said. Hilary Benn has form here: he voted for the 2003 war in Iraq (making him far more responsible for the rise of Isis than some of the people who will die in the airstrikes he's so passionately promoting) and the disastrous 2011 air war in Libya. Much of his speech is familiar invocation of the just war doctrine: laying out the brutality of Isis, as if the eight British jets we're sending could put an end to it; asking "what message would send?", as if the self-image of the British state were worth a single innocent life.

But along the way Benn made a few comments that were really startling, both callous and clunky. He mentioned the inevitability of civilian casualties only once. "Unlike Daesh", he said, "none of us today act with the intent to harm civilians. Rather, we act to protect civilians from Daesh, who target innocent people." Well, that's fine then. As if our sincere good wishes mean anything when we're lobbing bombs at a city from 30,000 feet.

He declared that the United Nations had been founded because, "we wanted the nations of the world working together to deal with threats to international peace and security," rather than with the goal of abolishing wars altogether – wars like the one Hilary Benn MP helped start in 2003, which led to the one he helped start last night.

He gave a strange sort of credence to David Cameron's absurd claim that there are 70,000 ground troops in the Syrian opposition ready and waiting to help Britain defeat Isis – while admitting that it's simply not true, he insisted that, "whatever the number, 70,000, 40,000, 80,000," their existence requires us to act now. Maybe there are a million, he may as well have said. Maybe there's just one.

All of this was followed by a truly cackhanded coda. Addressing his colleagues in the Labour party, Benn said:

"We are here faced by fascists. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. And it is why, as we have heard tonight, socialists and trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for justice. And my view, Mr Speaker, is that we must now confront this evil."

It's a very strange comparison to make, especially as he aligns himself with a Tory war. During the Spanish Civil War, thousands of British left-wingers did indeed join up to fight against the fascists, but Benn's new friends weren't great supporters of the effort. George Orwell writes in The Lion and the Unicorn of the "frightening spectacle of Conservative MPs wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes."

The British government choosing to attack a city halfway across the world for no good reason and to no great effect doesn't have much in common with the heroism of the thousands who travelled to Spain, volunteering their lives against fascism. But there are other analogues. During the Spanish Civil War, the first mass aerial bombardment of a population centre was carried out by German and Italian pilots over the Basque town of Guernica. The town itself had little military importance; it's possible the fascists committed their slaughter their just to see what their weapons could do. Up to 300 people died as they tried to go about their lives; the town was almost entirely destroyed. Afterwards, the massacre inspired a painting by Pablo Picasso, Guernica; a copy hangs in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations, put there to remind the delegates of the consequences of war. Clearly, as Hilary Benn's speech shows, it isn't working.

@sam_kriss

More from VICE:

The Arguments for Britain to Bomb Syria Are Completely Insane

I'm Sick of These Bullshit 'Harrowing' Prank Viral Videos

Those Bizarre 'Open Letters' to Isis Are a Cry for Help

Photo via Flickr user Peter Stevens

Tashfeen Malik, the 27-year-old Pakistani woman who authorities believe helped plan and carry out Wednesday's tragic mass shooting in San Bernardino, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a since-deleted post on Facebook before the shooting, federal law enforcement officials said Friday. Though there's still no evidence that the attacks were a result of any kind of directive from a terrorist organization—the Islamic State or otherwise—it is looking less and less like they were the product of some kind of workplace dispute, as the New York Times reports.

"At this point we believe they were more self-radicalized and inspired by the group than actually told to do the shooting," one federal law enforcement official told the paper.

Prior to the shooting, Malik and her husband, 28-year-old American Syed Farook, took care to delete information from some of their electronic devices, a move that suggests planning and would seem to hint at some kind of ideological motivation.

The couple apparently met online at a Muslim dating site, and Malik lived in Saudi Arabia before moving to the US two years ago after they were married. As a deep dive by the Washington Post suggests, the two presented as a regular family. They had a nice home, a six-month-old daughter, and job security, and Malik had to pass background checks before being admitted to the US under a visa program, according to the Times.

"He was married, he had a daughter and last year he made $77,000. He had everything to be happy," a friend who attended the same mosque as Farook, Gasser Shehata, told AFP, which also reports acquaintances say the couple were living "the American Dream" and exhibited no outward extremist views or anti-American sentiment.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.