Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greets Syrian refugees. Photo via Twitter

This past weekend, a group of Syrian refugees was pepper sprayed at a welcome event in Vancouver.

The gathering took place Friday night outside a local chapter of the Muslim Association of Canada. At about 10:30 PM, police say a man rode by on his bike and pepper sprayed a crowd of adults and children, causing them to cough and vomit and their eyes to burn. Around 15 people were treated by first responders for their symptoms.

The cops are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Responses to the attack came swiftly from a number of sources, though they all bore a similar sentiment: "this isn't Canada."

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson said it "was a disgusting display of hate—and Vancouver won't stand for it. #VanWelcomesRefugees and always will."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted, "This isn't who we are—and doesn't reflect the warm welcome Canadians have offered."

Both Immigration Minister John McCallum and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan used the classic line about how this is an "isolated incident."

"Because of the positive reaction that they're getting from everywhere they go, a horrible but isolated incident like this can be quickly forgotten and they can get on with their life," Sajjan told reporters.

I can't help but feel these statements, the same ones trotted out every time something similar happens, are disingenuous.

Being pepper sprayed by a stranger upon moving to a new country isn't an experience most people would easily "forget," nor should any of us be trying to forget about it. In doing so, we're brushing an ugly societal problem under the rug, a problem that deserves to be exposed. How can we possibly argue that xenophobia is not part of the Canadian identity when, historically and at present, there's so much proof to the contrary?

We saw it in the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks, when a Toronto woman wearing a hijab was beaten and robbed while picking up her kids from school and when a Peterborough mosque was set on fire.

There was also the niqab "debate," which looked set to decide the federal election for a depressing but not insignificant chunk of time.

Islamophobia here is in fact strong enough to warrant self-defence classes for Muslim women and an anti-Muslim incident tracker, started by the National Council of Canadian Muslims in 2013. Dozens of events were recorded last year.

Polls gauging Canadians' views on the Liberals' refugee plan, meanwhile, have been fairly split, with a recent one reporting 48 percent are in favour while 44 percent are opposed. In other words, almost half of Canadians do not want Syrian refugees to be resettled here—hardly a fringe minority. Another survey shows a majority of the population (63 percent) is concerned Syrians will become a burden on social services and the healthcare system.

And yet a quick scan of headlines relating to the pepper spray ambush ("Syrian refugees say pepper spray attack won't spoil first impressions" or "Pepper Spraying Of Syrian Refugees Won't Hurt Canada's Reputation: John McCallum"), reveals a frustrating desire to minimize this hate crime as a one-off and reassure the public, and the rest of the world, that all is warm and fuzzy here.

Even members of the Syrian community quoted in these articles appear to be appeasing Canadians.

"To be honest, Canadian people would not do this, the majority of them," said Tima Kurdi, the aunt of three-year-old Alan Kurdi who was found dead on a Turkish beach. "They are big supporters to the refugees."

You can't blame Kurdi for choosing her words carefully; the refugees who end up in Canada will rely in part on goodwill from citizens to help them adjust. Likewise, it's not fair to expect people in targeted groups to subject themselves to more hate by calling out this behaviour for what it is—a shitty reflection of a sizeable number of Canadians. But we should be able to expect some frank dialogue from our leaders.

After his city was dubbed the most racist in Canada by Maclean's magazine, Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman broke down and acknowledged, "We do have racism in Winnipeg... You can't run away from facts." The city has since hosted a national summit on the issue, with Bowman pledging his constituents have "a responsibility right now to turn this ship around and change the way we all relate." (For the record, Mayor Robertson's claim that Vancouver is an immigrant haven is debatable considering the anti-Chinese attitudes currently being perpetuated throughout the city.)

More recently, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson admitted to a group of First Nations chiefs that there are racists in his force and that weeding them out would be key to tackling the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis.

For those directly impacted, concessions like these must be validating, at the very least. For the rest of us, they're difficult to hear, but it's hard to envision how we'll move past our shortcomings without first acknowledging them.

The harsh truth allows for discussions and a potential growth in awareness amongst those with anti-immigrant viewpoints. A false narrative about how Canadians are just so darn nice, on the other hand, serves no one.

Ayy lmao. Image via Tumblr

Based on a cell phone video shot in the middle of the night by a camper on the shores of Prince Edward Island in June 2014 showing two tiny specks of light in a field of complete blackness, a UFO organization has deemed the incident as one of the best UFO sightings in the Maritimes. Today—about a year and a half later—the CBC released a 700-word article detailing the encounter and giving credit to Mufon UFO Network, a volunteer organization dedicated to studying what it calls Unidentified Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), for naming it "1 of very few confirmed cases."

Punctuated by commentary such as "it reminds me of a dreidel or a spin top—very big, very bottom-heavy too... It's not a ship, because we would see a bottom to it," the video shot by a Moncton man, John Sheppard, at Twin Shores Campground in Kensington, PEI, runs nearly eight minutes long showing the exact same scene throughout. About a quarter of the way through, Sheppard clicks on a flashlight to see if it will make a difference. "Not really," he says excitedly, clicking the flashlight off.

While it's unlikely that the case will be proven as an authentic sighting, due to the overwhelming possibility of confirmation bias from as organization with a niche focus on UFOs, that didn't stop the CBC from citing Mufon's "extensive investigation." It seems that Canada's national public broadcaster (which is heavily funded by taxpayer dollars), has apparently begun giving credence to the existence of aliens. The article did not contain any dissenting sources speaking on the sighting ("that was our plane," the military could have said, but who knows), but instead focused mainly on describing the experiences of Sheppard, who shot the video, and quoting of a MUFON "expert."

Following a subhead entitled, "Adrenaline starts to kick in," is the ensuing description:

"As the light show continued, Sheppard admits he started to feel unsettled as his adrenaline kicked in... He continued filming but huddled close to a bush so he was hidden.

'I didn't want to be seen by it. I didn't want it coming over.'"

Though the case was reported in the top 10 MUFON sightings of 2014, CBC only picked up on it "after a recent re-posting by ." The CBC then went on to explain that Stu Bundy, the assistant director of MUFON, said that "every effort was made to explain what Sheppard had captured on tape," though not much further explanation of these methods of investigation were revealed in the article.

According to the CBC, MUFON is still monitoring the area where the PEI sighting occurred and claiming that they've been unable to prove that the blinking lights seen in the sky being a regular aircraft or even a drone—their internal "drone expert" didn't think that was a plausible explanation.

We're not about to dismiss the possibility that aliens exist—I mean, fuck, they probably do—but you have to admit that this is a pretty flimsy case.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Nikki Haley at CPAC. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

President Obama will deliver his final State of the Union address Tuesday night at 9 PM EST. While no one has heard a word of it, we already know that Republicans will hate every bit of the speech, and are already preparing a rebuttal, a ritual that's usually reserved for a promising, if perhaps under-the-radar, member of the opposition party.

Over the past seven years, the GOP have used this opportunity to promote would-be rising stars including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio. This year, party officials have given the nod to 43-year-old South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who gained national attention last year during the aftermath the Emanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston, after which she called to remove the Confederate flag from her state capitol's grounds.

Presenting the GOP's official response is theoretically an honor, and if Haley puts on a stellar performance she'll be improving her chances at getting that vice presidential slot on the 2016 ticket. But if history is any guide, Haley should be less worried about killing it Tuesday night and more worried about dodging the " rebuttal curse" that's fucked with the careers of previous politicians.

One problem is that while SOTU rebuttals give big stages to politicians who haven't had much national exposure, some don't seem all that prepared for that platform. Michelle Bachmann, the Republican congresswoman who delivered the unofficial Tea Party response in 2011, was shit on by Saturday Night Live for staring off-camera during her entire rambling rebuttal. Democrat Kathleen Sebelius was criticized for her expressionless rebuttal in 2008, and Rubio's 2013 speech is mainly remembered for the bizarre water break taken by young Marco in the middle.

Beyond the performances, for whatever reason a lot of SOTU responders see their careers crash and burn in various ways not long after their speeches—an inexplicable phenomenon that could be compared to the Sports Illustrated cover curse. Bachmann retired from Congress in 2014 amid an ethics investigation into her campaign finances. Ryan was one half of the doomed GOP presidential ticket in 2012. Jindal looked like a promising young go-getter in 2009, when he delivered the SOTU response, but he didn't attract much support in this year's GOP presidential race, and has fallen away from the mainstream. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, who gave the SOTU rebuttal in 2010, was busted on corruption charges and will face prison time unless the Supreme Court intervenes.

Haley's best bet for her speech is to just be succinct, simple, deliver a single good burn on Obama, then avoid getting indicted for a crime.

Hers won't be the only response from the right to Obama's address. There's a planned Spanish-language rebuttal from Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, as well as a Tea Party Express–endorsed reply from conservative activist Wayne Allyn Root. Then there will be the even less official responses: Donald Trump will be jawing on Twitter, Texas Senator Ted Cruz might replicate his video reply from last year, and who knows? Maybe someone will pull a Joe Wilson and shout "You lie!" as the Congressman did back in a 2009 Obama address to a joint section of Congress. That sort of thing would push Haley's response from the headlines, and considering the ghosts of SOTU responses past, that might be for the best.

The Sergeant at Arms announces the president. Photo via White House/Wikimedia Commons

Tonight, President Obama will give the last State of the Union Address of his administration. That probably suits him, because State of the Union speeches are, by their nature, a grueling waste of time. But still, every January, a person in a suit who half the country invariably hates, walks into a room where half the audience also hates him, and says a bunch of political niceties, along with a few policy ideas that usually don't pan out.

There's not really much of any substance that a president can say in this situation. After all, the premise of the speech is almost always "the state of the union is strong," and in most circumstances, if everything is fine, you stop talking. Also, unlike a campaign speech, where politicians can use soaring pseudo-truths to work up a crowd, presidents give State of the Union speeches while their political enemies are glaring right at them, so they have to tone their rhetoric down to avoid prompting some kind of old man uproar that will just embarrass everybody. And that makes these speeches super boring.

But every once in a while, the Weirdness Gods smile on Capitol Hill, and something important or entertaining happens during the annual presidential address. What follows is a brief list of those rare instances.

Times When People Fell Asleep

One of the few times it's actually funny to watch people sleep is when those people are incredibly powerful, and attending an important event surrounded by other powerful people, and still manage to nod off like kids in church. It seems to happen to the people in the audience who might actually have an interesting reaction to whatever the president is saying at the time, like for instance, Senator John McCain, who fell asleep just as George W. Bush was talking about war:

...Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was in the middle of a disco nap when Obama happened to mention gay marriage in last year's State of the Union.

Ginsburg later confirmed that she nodded off because she was drunk. She also fell asleep in 2011, but hasn't confirmed that it was because she was drunk. However, the time before that, when she fell asleep in 2010, yep, she was drunk.

In 2011, there was also this lady sitting behind then-Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose identity no one can seem to figure out:

Times When Presidents Tried to Be Funny and it Didn't Go Well

Against better judgment, presidents sometimes try to employ a thing we real, non-lizard people like to call hu-mor. This is not wise.

In his first major address after puking on the Japanese prime minister in 1992, George H. W. Bush busted out a pretty weird—but arguably pretty solid—joke about it at the State of the Union, thus kicking off his speech while everyone pictured him unconscious with puke dripping from his face. (It's about a minute into the video below.)

But the worst dad joke bomb in recent SOTU history came from Obama. He was trying to say something about regulation and farmers and milk, and somehow this burbled out:

But Obama sort of redeemed himself last year when he zinged some Republicans for clapping at a weird time.

Times When Speeches Looked Really Bad in Retrospect

In 1974, Richard Nixon had been dogged by this annoying news story about a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. At the State of the Union that year, Nixon declared, "One year of Watergate is enough!" If I recall correctly, that was that: the press backed off, and we never heard about "Watergate" again.

Similarly, in 2002, George W. Bush gave the speech in which he debuted the term "Axis of Evil." It was a rousing piece of oratory about how the US was winning the War on Terror, and lots of people came away from it feeling like another invasion of Iraq was a super cool idea.

The following year, Bush further built the case for his Iraq War by saying these 16 words:

...which, if you don't want to use the word "lie," was a total falsehood based on bad intel.

Times When Other Weird Shit Happened

In 2014, this happened to Vice President Joe Biden's face:

I'm fairly certain that one of Biden's friends popped up in the front row with a pizza, and then revealed there was also Pepsi. And then Biden remembered that he couldn't have any pizza or Pepsi because he was sitting behind the president.

One of the better moments in the recent history of State of the Union addresses actually came just after the speech, during Marco Rubio's rebuttal to Obama's 2013 address. In an apparent effort to prove he wasn't a lizard in a skin suit, he picked a weird moment to drink that clear stuff humans need to stay alive.

Still, the odds are very much against anything remotely interesting happening during tonight's address, but you should watch anyway, just in case. Actual kernels of interestingness in these telecasts are like rare and beautiful butterflies—you can collect them all like I have here, but nothing beats a spontaneous sighting in their natural habitat.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The Oculus Rift. Photo via oculus.com

No hardware launch is complete without a bunch of dodgy comparisons to older gadgets, and Facebook's Oculus Rift—the first-to-drop of this year's premium virtual reality headsets—has attracted its fair share. The recently unveiled $600 RRP has, of course, sparked something of a riot, but a number of tech writers have pointed to the original iPhone's rise as evidence that a high price isn't the end of the world.

With apologies to my peers, and with the obligatory disclaimer that they probably know things I don't, I'm not sure about this. Yes, the first iPhones also went on sale for shocking sums; yes, they too were decried as luxuries for affluent geeks; and yes, it's plausible that the Rift along with its rivals, the Valve-sponsored HTC Vive and Sony's PlayStation VR (PSVR), will overcome these hurdles and achieve popular acceptance. But even in its earliest form and at that eye-watering price, the iPhone was a gadget with tremendous broad appeal, an all-purpose portable media platform from the creators of iPod and iTunes, that's easy to use and a fashion accessory to boot.

Yeah, this sort of scene didn't really become commonplace among gaming homes now, did it. Photo via Amazon

By contrast, this year's forthcoming VR headsets are specialized and unintuitive devices that require you to own a (powerful) PC or a PS4. They also make your face look like the back of a CRT monitor. Not exactly the kind of thing you'd catch Rihanna wearing at a red carpet premiere.

A more logical comparison is the Nintendo 3DS, the cherished glass-less stereoscopic 3D handheld which, I suspect, owes a significant chunk of its huge global sales total to the fact that its 3D effect is completely optional. There's also the already on-sale Samsung Gear VR, though this is strictly speaking a phone app that combines with a separately available head-mount—it doesn't offer anything near the fidelity or fluidity of a "proper" VR headset. But the comparison I'd like to make here is with another non-VR device, Microsoft's motion-sensing Kinect peripheral range, which appears to be at death's door following the Xbox One's catastrophic first year.

The Xbox One's Kinect unit. Photo via xbox.com

This isn't as weird a link as it might seem. For starters, modern-day VR to some degree picks up where Kinect left off, in terms of both execution and vision. The final versions of the Rift, Vive, and PSVR—all of which employ similar language to Kinect's marketing materials in proposing to nuke the immersion barrier between user and game world—track body movements and can be used with motion-sensitive controllers for gesture commands. Third-party developers have, in fact, been working with Kinect alongside the Oculus Rift for years. Consider AltSpaceVR, which deploys three Kinect sensors to create fully motion-tracked virtual crash-pads where Rifters hundreds of miles apart can hang out and chew the fat. You can even play Dungeons & Dragons using it.

The mingling of Kinect and latter-day VR's DNA means they share a fundamental problem of user convenience. Both types of device require a degree of seclusion and exert a mild physical toll, even if it's just turning your head. This is worth dwelling on because it goes against the grain for computing at large. Thanks to the rise of the smartphone and tablets, the popular image of a computer has shifted from that of a whirring monolith tucked away in an office to a slick, unobtrusive, endlessly accommodating machine that's at home in every scenario, from the bus to the dining table to the toilet. Isolating yourself in order to don a chunky headset or interact with a sensor feels like stepping back in time, however sophisticated the gadgets themselves may be, and the physical strain can, of course, be a turn-off when you just want to unwind.

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Related: Watch VICE's film on the digital love industry

"Natural user interface" features like motion tracking create huge problems for designers, even before they start worrying about lazy end-users who can't be arsed to clear space for a round of Dance Central. Kinect has been dogged throughout its life by latency and recognition problems, but the issue isn't always the technology—it's that human bodies aren't built to an exact spec, and everybody uses theirs a little differently. As a former Rare Ltd designer told me last summer, the most generic and basic of inputs can be a real headache to execute when the vagaries of body language are involved—one person's "raise hand to select" might be another person's "place hand above head," and coming up with a variation that makes sense to everybody is a long, arduous process.

VR game creators face comparable interfacial difficulties that may render certain kinds of game off-limits. It's hard, for example, to spin and aim a gun with the speed of the average Call of Duty player when your neck is quite literally on the line, though Epic's Matrix-y lightgun sim Bullet Train does a sterling job of selling a fantasy in which VR duelists warp from target to target, shotguns roaring in their ghostly blue hands. There's also the lingering problem of "VR sickness," which can arise for a minority of players when the simulation differs too sharply with what your inner ear thinks your body is doing. This has facilitated the rise of cockpit-based action games like Eve: Valkyrie, in which the immediate environment is stationary relative to the viewer; on-foot shooters seem to be off the menu, unless you're prepared to conduct gunfights at a pace your stomach can endure.

All this may sound quite doom and gloom, but those shared hang-ups notwithstanding, VR has a much better shot at becoming an established platform than Kinect did—a number of the industry's major players are backing it, and the tech seems finally to be a match for VR's promise following the misfires of the 80s and 90s. What the Rift, Vive, and PSVR now need are gaming genres that call on their strengths while sidestepping their weaknesses.

Kinect quite never managed to set itself apart in this fashion—its portfolio is split between solid but uninspired controller-free riffs on the Nintendo Wii's sports, music, and fitness apps, and desperate-feeling attempts to crowbar motion controls into games that are fine without. A portion of the VR scene runs the risk of heading the same way—there are, for my money, too many games on the boil that rely on the novelty value of "true" 3D depth to paper over the tedium of yet another shooter or action experience, and the fact that so many VR games can also be played on a screen suggests that developers are preparing for the worst. But a handful of titles are aiming higher.

Related, on Motherboard: Virtual Reality Could Provide Healthy Escape for Homesick Astronauts

Crytek's The Climb could be something special, for instance. A game about scaling exotic cliff-faces by looking towards handholds, then clamping down a controller button to hang on, it combines giddy photorealistic views with a gentle playing rhythm and enough in the way of tactical thinking (about choice of routes) to get your cortex humming. In other words, it's a sight for sore eyes that actually, genuinely feels like it might entertain the third or fourth time you try it, unlike many of the earlier Oculus titles.

First-person sport simulation could also be an area in which VR games lead the pack—peering through the bars of an ice hockey keeper's helmet in VR Sports Challenge creates an intimacy the likes of FIFA or Madden have never offered. And of course, there are the VR horror games, which already enjoy a fervent following. Horror games are a natural fit for VR because it can be unnervingly claustrophobic at the best of times; they also tend to be slower-paced, so the problem of physical exertion isn't as acute. Whether you can bear staying plugged in for longer than a few minutes is another question—sit still right the way through Capcom's Kitchen tech demo and you might come away swearing to never touch a headset again.

Whether the latest reincarnation of VR takes off or plunges back into irrelevance, 2016 is a fascinating year to be a games enthusiast. Between Facebook, Valve, and Sony, there's enough momentum behind this emerging sector to guarantee at least a few VR titles that are truly essential. Kinect may be an object lesson about the dangers of overhype, but its links with present-day virtual reality tech are also proof that even a failed device can make a positive impact, providing other creators and inventors take heed. With any luck, VR will not only flourish in its own right, but also help unearth the true potential of gesture-based gaming, even as Kinect continues its long, lonely march to the grave.

Follow Edwin on Twitter.

Promotional art for Making a Murderer

Netflix's new docu-series Making a Murderer, which takes a deeply skeptical look at the prosecution of rural Wisconsin man Steven Avery for the murder of Teresa Halbach in 2005, has garnered a robust audience, as well as more than a few impassioned reactions from its viewers. After all, Avery was wrongly convicted of rape in the 1980s, only to be exonerated after serving 18 years inside. Over 400,000 people have now signed a Change.org petition to urge President Obama and Governor Scott Walker to pardon Avery. (Obama, the White House clarified last week, cannot intervene, since this is a state case, and Walker does not seem high on the idea, either.)

But after it was announced late last week that Avery had secured new legal representation, Green Bay's Action 2 News has made public a copy of an appeal of his conviction that appears to have been filed by Avery himself. The error-laden appeal, which was filed on Monday and can be read in full on Scribd, argues that the state's evidence against Avery had been obtained wrongly and therefore was "FRUIT OF THE POISONOUS TREE." The appeal also argues that Avery was the victim of a series of improper jury procedures.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Ken Kratz, who prosecuted Avery in 2005, called the idea that Avery was framed "nonsense," claiming the evidence the state of Wisconsin obtained was "completely inconsistent with any kind of planting (evidence)"—the exact charge levied by Making a Murderer's filmmakers. (Kratz subsequently resigned and had his law license suspended amid a sexting scandal.)

Of course, according to law professor and exoneration expert Samuel Gross, it's completely possible that a guilty person might be victim to all sorts of procedural misconduct. In an interview with VICE published Tuesday, Gross said, "In the great majority of cases, perhaps almost all of them where law enforcement, prosecutors, or police have engaged in misconduct to try to convict somebody, they believe that that person is guilty. They may frame somebody, but the usual type of misconduct that we're aware of is framing people they believe are guilty. And very likely in most cases, they frame people who are guilty."

Follow Drew on Twitter.

Anti-apartheid activist David Motsamayi (not his real name) went 25 years without a flashback to his terrible torture in South Africa. That was until one night last year, when he was chucked into Britain's most isolated detention center for migrants. Built on the highest point of the remote Isle of Portland in Devon, the Verne, which used to be a prison, it is surrounded by cliffs and a moat.

As a school kid, Motsamayi survived police bullets in the 1976 Soweto Uprising and graduated to organizing clandestine meetings for the African National Congress (ANC). When he was captured, his testicles were electrocuted, his body was battered, and his torso badly burned.

"These are the scars of apartheid," he said as he lifted up his shirt to reveal the marks on his body. He was held incommunicado for years, at Johannesburg's notorious John Vorster Square police station. His desperate mother went to mortuaries looking for his corpse. When she was finally reunited with her son, she fainted. "She thought she was seeing a ghost," Motsamayi said. "She thought I was dead."

Decades later, he was in trouble again, allegedly facing death threats in South Africa, after investigating the suspicious deaths of his relatives who challenged government corruption. He claimed asylum in the UK and was taken to the Verne.

For the first month, he was in so much shock that he spoke to no one. "All my life I tried to forget the torture," he said. Now, he has flashbacks almost every week. Victims of torture are not meant to be detained, precisely because of the trauma it can trigger, although the Home Office frequently flouts its own rules.

No one knows when any of the Verne's 580 detainees will be released or deported. Immigration detention in Britain has no time limit, despite repeated criticisms from international organizations including the UN and the Council of Europe. For Motsamayi, "Indefinite detention is exactly the same as what apartheid South Africa was doing. Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela, all our leaders were held indefinitely."

Motsamayi is not the only one struggling to cope in the Verne. A week ago, a detainee tried to hang himself in the shower. By the time Motsamayi chanced upon him, the man's eyes were already closed. He raised the alarm and gathered enough inmates to lift the guy's bodyweight, until guards arrived and cut him down. That man survived. But last year, Motsamayi's friend, Thomas Kirungi, a 30-year-old Ugandan, died at the Verne. Detainees say he took his own life.

Figures obtained by VICE reveal that the Verne is the most isolated detention center in Britain, with at least 80 percent of detainees having no visits from family or friends. That's assuming nobody visited the same detainee twice, which seems unlikely—meaning even more would have received no visitors at all. Over Christmas, that must have sucked. Motsamayi said the guards gave them crisps and a cola to mark the occasion.

"Levels of anxiety, stress, and mental ill-health are high in detention," said Ali McGinley, director of the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detention (AVID), "and given the complex needs of immigration detainees held at the Verne, it's a real concern that there is not more support available."

Detainees in other parts of the country are not quite so isolated. Using freedom of information laws, VICE asked the Home Office how many people visited detention centers, and then compared the data with the number of detainees held at each site. The results showed there were over 63,000 social visits to nine detention centers between July 2014 and June 2015.

However, the statistics reveal an alarming anomaly. Every center had between one and three visits per detainee per month, apart from the Verne, which had just 0.2 monthly visits per detainee. Are the Verne's inmates losing a bizarre popularity contest, or is something else going on?

A look at a map shows that the Isle of Portland, where the Verne is located, is connected to mainland England by a narrow windswept causeway, whereas most other detention centers are close to international airports. "AVID is concerned that the location of the Verne disadvantages those held there," McGinley said. The local Verne Visitors Group explained, "It is virtually on an island. Often detainees ask us where they even are. It's very expensive to get to it from London and other major conurbations, where detainees' family and friends tend to be, so visiting is difficult."

"It was too far for my family in London to visit me, it was horrible," said Sam Luis, a former Verne detainee from DR Congo. A return train journey from London to Weymouth, the nearest station, costs £63 and takes six hours. Then you have to pay £25 for a cab, or hike up a steep hill. The Verne is inside a Victorian-era fort, entered via a tunnel. The phone signal is patchy at best.

Not everyone who visits a detention center is seeing family or friends. Some are volunteers from befrienders groups. AVID is an umbrella for 20 visitors groups across the country, numbering nearly 900 volunteers, from students to pensioners. The impact they have on a detainee's mindset can be the difference between life and death. "A visitor is absolutely critical in terms of helping to alleviate the mental anxiety and distress detainees are faced with," McGinley said.

Volunteers at the Verne visitor's group agreed. "People feel extremely isolated. We often find the visiting room nearly empty. Detainees' mental health is almost always badly affected by detention, but there is no professional counseling available for detainees as far as we know."

For Motsamayi, it is no accident that detainees at the Verne are massively missing out on a potential lifeline. "The Home Office puts us far away from our families to try to damage us psychologically," he claimed. And the problem does not stop there. Once detainees are at risk of self-harm, staff at the Verne have an unconventional approach to suicide watch.

When the chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, inspected the Verne in March last year, he found that, "there was no care suite and detainees requiring constant observations were held in an austere gated cell in the separation unit." The separation unit "was poor and it was used frequently. Some detainees were held there for several weeks," he said. Suicidal detainees could only venture outside into an exercise yard that Hardwick described as "stark and cage-like."

Although his inspection warned months ago that the separation unit was inappropriate for suicide watch, VICE has learned that it is still being used for this purpose. In fact, the man who tried to hang himself last week was not even taken to hospital, but instead placed in the segregation cell.

"If you self-harm, they take you to the block, the isolation unit," said Luke Simms (not his real name), a gay detainee seeking asylum from a country with extreme homophobic laws."It's meant to be for someone who is fighting. But if you are suicidal, they just chuck you in the block and they just make it worse."

Luis, who tried to end his life at the Verne, experienced the segregation unit first-hand. "The block is more depressing," he explained. "It's cold, it's horrible. There is no heating and you have thin blanket." As a way of preventing suicide, it sounds farcical. "They only check every hour and there is no camera," Luis claimed.

Related: Watch 'What Life Is Like as a Night-Shift Worker Looking After Australia's Incarcerated Aboriginals':

The Verne refused to comment directly. However, in a statement, the Home Office told VICE that: "Detention and removal are essential parts of effective immigration controls. It is vital these are carried out with dignity and respect and we take the welfare of our detainees very seriously."

"That is why the Home Secretary commissioned an independent review into the policies and operating procedures that have an impact on detainee welfare. Stephen Shaw CBE, the former Prisons and Probation Ombudsman for England and Wales, has completed the review and has recently submitted his report. His findings are being carefully considered."

"Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons has found the majority of detainees in the Verne feel safe and are very positive about their treatment by staff. A recent report by the Independent Monitoring Board also stated the immigration removal center is well run and that detainees are treated humanely and fairly."

Follow Phil on Twitter.

The Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, via email,or find the details for your local branch online.

"I want to make photographs that kill." - Charles Gatewood

For over 50 years, Charles Gatewood explored and documented the underbelly of the United States. His early work presents an artist who is deeply entrenched in the activity of the streets, whether it's Bourbon Street or Wall Street. With Leica in hand, Gatewood cleverly navigated the chaos and cacophony of the ever-present moment and delivered to the viewer a mud-strewn and elegant anthropological study of modern life.

As a young journalist, Gatewood's coverage of inner-city poverty, social protests, and pollution were widely published, as were also his portraits of musicians, activists, writers, artists, and celebrities. His documentation of body modification, fetish, and radical sex communities is unmatched. Along the way he's exhibited work all over the US and Europe and racked up awards; he is the three-time recipient of the New York State Arts Council fellowship and was also awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for Outstanding Humanistic Photojournalism.

Over the past few years Gatewood has transitioned his focus toward creating collages at his apartment in San Francisco. Some of these new works will be included in a show at San Francisco's Ladybug House that opens this Thursday (the opening reception is from 5 to 9 PM). Curated by Justin C. Rhody, the exhibition will feature vintage prints from Gatewood's classic works Sidetripping (with William S. Burroughs, 1975), Forbidden Photographs (1981), and Wall Street (1984) will be on display, as well as previously un-exhibited work.

To get you in the mood for that show, here's a sampling of Gatewood's photos:

Justin Rhody is a photographer and curator. You can follow his work here.

Image via Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" video on YouTube

One of life's minor annoyances is getting a new cell phone number, only to start receiving calls and texts from people thinking they're reaching whoever had that number before you did. Now, imagine that person were particularly popular, or perhaps famous, and people were blowing your phone up around the clock. On top of all that, imagine the person with that phone number was responsible for "Baby Got Back"—perhaps the most overtly ridiculous anthem of all time—because you have Sir Mix-a-Lot's old phone number.

This is Jonathan Nichols' truth, and he lives it every day.

Nichols was recently interviewed by the Seattle Times about what it's like to have Sir Mix-a-Lot's old phone number (no, not 1-900-MIXALOT). He received the number in 2012, as a law student at Seattle University, and quickly began to receive propositions from car dealerships, sexts, offers of free concert tickets, and everything in between.

Now a public interest attorney, according to the Times he has so far not indulged in whatever spoils are being offered to Sir Mix-a-Lot's phone. "'No false representations' is one of the rules of the bar," he told the Times.

When reached for comment, Sir Mix-a-Lot said to the Seattle Times, "Tell him any really sexy pictures—little in the middle, and if she's got much back—give them the new number."

President Barack Obama during his final State of the Union address. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The State of the Union address is a rare national moment where, once a year, the sitting president is on our screens for an entire hour or more, explaining how he sees the world and what he wants to do. For his supporters, it's basically a pep rally. For his opponents, the speech is almost therapeutic: Here's the person you spend most of your day hating, talking about everything you've told voters you hate, and here's your chance to explain why it sucks.

This division is particularly palpable during an election year, when emotions are on an endless high until November; the fact that Tuesday night was Obama's final SOTU speech only adds to the perceived drama. (The conservative hashtag this time around was, in fact, #LastSOTU).

Unsurprisingly, Barack Obama supporters defended what they saw as a victory lap. Equally predictable was the Republican response—this was their last chance to air their grievances online or on television, and an opportunity for the GOP presidential candidates to distinguish themselves from a commander-in-chief that some of them seem to see as wildly incompetent or dangerously close to a dictator.

Here are some of the most notable response to the State of the Union.

The Republican Candidates
Surprisingly enough, Donald Trump kept his mouth, or at least his Twitter account, shut for most of the speech. He criticized the Iran deal, and then eventually just sort of gave up trying: "The #SOTU speech is really boring, slow, lethargic—very hard to watch," he tweeted toward its end. If Trump ever becomes president, his states of the union are going to be really big, tremendous, incredible speeches that are also very fast.

Struggle candidate Jeb Bush had his social media team poll his Twitter followers about what Obama's biggest failure was ("weak foreign policy" appears to have won). He then did the usual opposition thing of tweeting some rebuttals to Obama's lines, at one point dinging the president for not calling ISIS "radical Islamic terrorists," a common conservative critique. That's unlikely to rescue his faltering campaign, but at least he's still trying.

Marco Rubio was in the chamber in his capacity a senator, and looked every bit as excited as anyone whose boss asks them to stay at the office past 9 PM.

Ted Cruz took another tack, skipping out on the speech to campaign in New Hampshire, then jumped right on the air to shrug off the speech as being "more of the same" and criticize Obama for being soft on terrorism. He did use the occasion on Tuesday to give a preview of what his 2018 SOTU would look like: He would repeal Obamacare, abolish the IRS, and build a border wall. Hillary Clinton would be in prison in this timeline, though that was probably a joke.

Watch our HBO episode about climate change:

The Republican Establishment

And with that, everyone went back to work trying to figure out how to be the one getting up on that podium next year.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Tony Webster

Last week, when President Barack Obama announced his new executive orders to expand federal background checks, he paused, teary-eyed, after reflecting on what had happened to the first graders of Sandy Hook Elementary School. "And, by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago every day," Obama said, to much applause.

It was a subtle reminder: Don't forget the cities. Mass killings in suburbia may grip the headlines, but the shootings that happen almost every Friday and Saturday night in the high-crime, low-income neighborhoods of our urban centers largely define gun violence in America. In Chicago alone, three times as many people were shot in the first few days of 2016 as during the same time last year.

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show which will premiere this February, we are releasing all of season three for free online. Watch all the episodes here, and don't miss the premiere of season four on Friday, February 5, at 11PM on HBO.

A 2014 study funded by the Department of Homeland Security found that law enforcement considers domestic right-wing groups as two of the top three greatest terrorist threats to America. Nestled within our own borders, these citizens—many of whom are highly trained veterans—are on a mission to protect and defend the rights of the Constitution as they see them.

After President Obama's election, the number of these organizations skyrocketed by more than 800 percent, reaching an all-time high in 2012 with over 1,300 groups. In an effort to understand this phenomenon better, VICE sent Gianna Toboni to investigate the so-called patriots who are training and taking up arms along the border.

In the second segment of this episode, Isobel Yeung traveled to the Mozambique Channel and the Gulf of Mexico to get an idea of how much we've overfished our oceans and what—if anything—the world can do to save them.

Screen grab via Youtube "Heroes" music video

One day, the frail knot of people and places that is you will dissolve forever. It doesn't matter who you are—one day your body will leap up and kill you. That seems to be a feeling pushing back against everyone's sense of immortality this week: If death got Bowie—well, maybe it really can get me, too.

With the thousands of well-crafted pages of obituary that have already been written, there seems no point in throwing another posy on the Kensington Palace flower pile. But there might be something in avoiding any attempt at being comprehensive, and instead diving into the off-center bits of Bowie most obits would leave on the cutting room floor.

So here's that:

DAVID BOWIE'S DAD LOST ALL HIS MONEY PROMOTING THE CAREER OF HIS FIRST WIFE

She was "Chèrie, the Viennesse Nightingale," real-name Hilda, a jazz singer on whose behalf the love-struck 26-year-old John Jones staged a disastrous revue in the 1930s. Jones had also owned a piano bar—the Boop-a-Doop in Charlotte Street, Soho—before he was forced to take a job as a porter, eventually finding better work for the Children's charity Barnardo's. Bowie's mother, Peggy Burns, a former cinema usherette, was also on her second marriage.

HE HAD A HALF-BROTHER WHO KILLED HIMSELF

On January 16, 1985, Terry Burns, Bowie's decade-older half-brother, left the Cane Hill psychiatric hospital in Coulsdon and lay down on the tracks, facing away from the train, awaiting the express service to London, which killed him a few minutes later. Cane Hill is on the cover of "The Man Who Sold the World," and Bowie wrote a range of songs dealing with mental illness, most obviously "All the Madmen," and more obliquely "Bewlay Brothers," which many think is designed to be a syllabic overlay of "Bowie Brothers." The tabloid press later accused Bowie of abandoning his brother (Bowie stayed away from the funeral, fearing it would become a media circus).

But the truth was very different. Ten years older, Burns had introduced the young Bowie to pretty much everything that shaped his first phase: jazz, the Beats, science fiction, R&B, Buddhism. Among the stolid townhouses of Bromley—where Bowie spent much of his childhood—Terry was a lighthouse from a world beyond suburbia, and Bowie grabbed at everything he was offering.

Years later, in a 1993 interview, he played all of this down, saying he had projected a great deal onto the elder sibling. "I think I unconsciously exaggerated his importance," he said. "I invented this hero-worship to discharge my guilt and failure, and to set myself free from my own hang-ups."

Read on Noisey: Let's Dance—David Bowie's Everlasting Influence on Pop Music

HE HAD A RUTHLESS STREAK

In 1964, Bowie left his first, unsuccessful band, The King Bees, and journeyed up the Thames to Margate, where he auditioned to be part of an R&B group called The Lower Third. The rest of the band had assumed they were recruiting an equal member, but Bowie decided to give himself top billing, issuing a press release on their behalf that read: "This is to inform you of the existence of Davie Jones and the Lower Third."

In the early 1970s, after Mick Jagger showed him some forthcoming album sleeve designs by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, Bowie went behind his back and hired Peellaert to do the cover for Diamond Dogs. The canon is full of examples of moments when the ground suddenly gave way under former friends.

Most seem to have grudgingly respected this streak. After all, anyone who's prepared to turn themselves self into a pop art mannequin is committed to success in a way we can barely imagine. Michael Lippman, who was Bowie's manager in 1975, described him as: "very charming and friendly, and at the same time he be very cold and self-centered... He wanted to rule the world."

A mural of Bowie in Brixton. Photo by Jake Lewis

HE WAS THE MAN WHO FUCKED THE WORLD

Bowie had modeled himself on a pan-galactic Pan of polyamory, and it certainly wasn't all artifice. During the 1970s, in his pioneering "open" marriage to Angie, he would regularly invite girls he saw at parties to have sex in the bathroom a few moments after learning their names. Even within their marriage, the Bowies were extravagantly open: "Angie and David used to have the most amazing orgies at Oakley Street," remembered former London socialite Vicki Hodge. "Everybody fucked everybody in the pit. Mick Jagger used to come there and be involved with sexual things. John told me that David watched while he had sex with Angie."

Susan Sarandon, Tina Turner, Lulu, Ronnie Spector: These are just a few of the (known) Bowie conquests. Nor did he restrict his womanizing to women. He was sleeping with his legendary mime teacher, Lindsay Kemp, and also Kemp's costume designer, Natasha Korniloff. When the pair realized what he was up to, Korniloff took an overdose, while Kemp cut his wrists. Both survived.

For the early 1980s, Bowie was involved in a three-year thing with Susan Sarandon, and by the late-80s was engaged to a dancer 20 years his junior, Melissa Hurley. But they split, and in October of that year, at a party in LA, he met Iman.

DESPITE HIS SEXUAL SUCCESS, HE WAS A CARD-CARRYING MIME ARTIST

It was meeting Kemp that transformed Bowie from the mop-top cheeky-chappie pop singer who made "The Laughing Gnome" into the genius monument to self-construction that he became.

Kemp was a mime artist, who instructed Bowie in this most ridiculed of crafts, plus several other cultural variations. He taught Bowie how to use his body, to pose, to dance. He introduced him to Kabuki, the Japanese onnagata tradition of male actors playing female roles.

"Kabuki is oddly fitting to Bowie," explained cultural critic Ian Buruma. " a theater of extravagant, stylized gestures. At climactic moments the actors freeze, as though in a photograph, while striking a particularly dramatic pose. Bowie never became a great actor, but he did become a great poseur, in the best sense of the word; he always moves with peculiar grace."

Kemp and Bowie put on a show together called Pierrot in Turquoise.

"His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I'd ever seen, ever," Bowie said of Kemp. "Everything I thought Bohemia probably was, he was living."

And so, too, Bowie began to turn his everyday into his fantasy, and soon enough, his fantasy became everyone else's reality.

Read on Broadly: Oh! You Pretty Things: Remembering David Bowie's Radical Approach to Beauty

HE ONCE EXORCISED HIS SWIMMING POOL

"I'd found a soulmate in this drug," Bowie told Paul Du Noyer in 2002, of cocaine. "Well, speed as well, actually. The combination."

He loved fast drugs, he said. He hated anything that slowed him down. And cocaine, from the early-70s up to the giddying climax of 1975, certainly accelerated his muse. He had Herculean tolerance for it that left his hangers-on for dust. Sessions would be delayed or canceled while the Thin White Duke waited for his man, and became increasingly akin to that character as he'd originally described it: "A very Aryan, fascist-type; a would-be romantic with absolutely no emotion at all, but who spouted a lot of neo-romance."

Key witness to the madness was Glenn Hughes, the Deep Purple bassist, who had offered Bowie space in his Los Feliz home. "David had a fear of heights and wouldn't go into an elevator," Hughes later recalled. "He never used to go above the third floor. Ever. If I got him into an elevator, it was frightening. He was paranoid and so I became paranoid. We partied in private."

Following a stint hanging out with Jimmy Page, Bowie became obsessed with the book Psychic Self Defense, supposedly written as a "safeguard for protecting yourself against paranormal malevolence," and began drawing pentagrams on every surface (later fictionalized as "Don't look at the carpet / I drew something awful on it" in "Breaking Glass").

As Hughes says, "He felt inclined to go on very bizarre tangents about Aleister Crowley or the Nazis or numerals a lot... He was completely wired. Maniacally wired. I could not keep up with him. He was on the edge all the time of paranoia, and also going on about things I had no friggin' idea of what he was talking about. He'd go into a rap on it and I wouldn't know what he was talking about."

Living out in California, not too far from the Manson/Sharon Tate house, Bowie had also become increasingly obsessed with echoes of Rosemary's Baby manifesting in his own life.

"He had this whole thing about these black girls who were trying to get him to impregnate them to make a devil baby," said Cherry Vanilla, the Warhol acolyte. "He asked me to get him a white witch to take this curse off of him, so I put him in touch with her."

The white witch was a former journalist and Wicca enthusiast called Walli Elmlark, and she performed an exorcism on the house, at the height of which, Angie Bowie later wrote, "the pool began to bubble. It bubbled vigorously—perhaps 'thrashed' is a better term—in a manner inconsistent with any explanation involving filters and the like."

"Under the God" by Tin Machine

YOU MIGHT HAVE HATED IT, BUT TIN MACHINE MADE HIM HAPPY AGAIN

Bowie's career can be read sometimes as a series of magnetic partnerships—a Richards to his Jagger for every age. Mick Ronson. Brian Eno. Tony Visconti. Robert Fripp on Scary Monsters. Nile Rodgers on Let's Dance. Then, at the end of his increasingly dire 80s pop run, Reeve Gabrels, a "virtuous" noodler and arch-session guy whom he'd met on the Glass Spiders tour.

"I look back on the Tin Machine years with great fondness," Bowie told Uncut. "They charged me up. I can't tell you how much. Reeves shook me out of my doldrums, pointed me at some kind of light—said, 'Be adventurous again.' I've been finding my voice, and a certain authority, ever since."

Even after the outright failure of Tin Machine, Gabrels became Bowie's guitar go-to guy, and his influence continued on the likes of Black Tie White Noise, Outside, Earthling, and Hours....

Few have ever thanked him, but far from the image of an auteur he always projected, Bowie needed his wing-men.

Bowie talking about how meeting Iman made the "idea of love concrete."

HIS LIFE OF CONNUBIAL BLISS WITH IMAN SOUNDS ALMOST AS SEDUCTIVE AS ANY SESSION OF PAN-SEXUAL COCAINE CREATIVITY

Bowie said he was "naming the children the first night we met." Ten years on, that child was named Alexandria Zahra Jones, and arrived in August of 2000, when Iman was already 45 and the couple were giving up on IVF.

"My attraction to her was immediate and all-encompassing," Bowie told, um, Hello Magazine, that year. "I couldn't sleep for the excitement of our first date. That she would be my wife, in my head, was a done deal. I'd never gone after anything in my life with such passion in all my life. I just knew she was the one."

"My marriage is exactly as fabulous as you all would think," Iman declared around the same time. "We've always been very close, but if it's possible we've been drawn even closer. There's a joy or a contentment that's almost palpable to both of us."

Part of the explanation for Bowie's long fallow period—between 2003's Reality and his surprise comeback in 2013—was simply that domestic bliss, watching TV on the couch with his daughter, or painting while Iman did needlepoint alongside him. Bowie will be remembered by history as a series of artistic exhibitionisms, but by the 1990s his lust for glory had already ebbed in favor of a highly domesticated love-nest.

"I don't have that sense of loneliness that I had before," he said in 2003. "Which was very, very strong."

It's a touching and slightly sobering reminder that, in the end, what survives of us is love. Even if you're David Bowie.

Follow Gavin Haynes on Twitter.

A Fnatic eSports team member in action, via fnatic.com

Competitive gaming, eSports, is big business. The revenues are rising and the viewing figures going through the roof. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Garnes Vidaregåande Skole, a Norwegian public school in Bergen, has added eSports to its curriculum. Especially considering the addition of competitive gaming to the school day at isn't without precedent. In the summer of 2015, Arlanda Gymnasiet in Märsta, Sweden, introduced an eSports course running alongside more traditional physical education pursuits, and Norway's Folk high schools have also offered courses in acing Counter-Strike.

But nevertheless, the new three-year course at Garnes, which begins in August, shows how eSports is being taken seriously as a career path in certain parts of the world. Top eSports athletes can earn six-figure salaries, with the very best/luckiest players taking home pay into the millions. And Garnes isn't a specialist institution—it's a regular public school, open to anyone in the local area.

Garnes's program, according to a report on TheMemo.com, will see students spending five hours per week perfecting their skills across titles including League of Legends and Dota 2, in place of football and the like. They will be assessed to the strictest standards, with classes split between plenty of screen time and more physically demanding activities with an emphasis on developing reactions and endurance.

Related: Watch VICE's documentary on the world of eSports

Ars Technica details what sort of gear successful applicants to the course can expect to get their hands on. The school plans to fill an eSports-dedicated space with "high-end PCs with Nvidia GeForce GTX 980Ti video cards," as well as special gaming chairs with a pizza delivery button, an oversized cup holder... Just kidding. Since nobody likes the feeling of slipping on a sweaty headset or using a sticky mouse, students will be expected to provide their own accessories. It's a small price to pay to for the privilege of slaughtering orcs in the name of education.

Read more gaming articles on VICE and follow us on Twitter.

Calle Vangstrup (left) on his first smuggling trip across the Øresund. Photo courtesy of Calle Vangstrup

When the refugee crisis washed over Scandinavia back in September 2015, some Danes started helping asylum seekers cross from Denmark into Sweden. However, as Sweden began tightening its border controls over the past few months, that activity has become illegal. Only this past weekend for example, Swedish police arrested a Danish taxi driver under the suspicion of human trafficking in the port town of Malmö. In addition, this week two men were arrested for crossing the Øresund strait with a rubber dinghy which Swedish police suspect was stolen in the Danish city of Helsingør.

But not everyone gets into the business of smuggling people for profit; Medmenneskesmuglerne (a Danish pun that loosely translates to "humane traffickers") are a group of activists who have spent the past three months helping refugees cross Øresund. I recently got in touch with one of their members, 20-year-old Calle Vangstrup, for a chat.

VICE: How did you start helping people cross over the border to Sweden?
Calle Vangstrup: I started in the fall of 2015, when the first rumors about refugees arriving in the Danish border town of Rødby began to circulate. I suggested sailing them across Øresund, because I figured either Danish or Swedish police would be keeping a very close eye on the situation. We then found some refugees at Copenhagen's Central Station and sailed them to Sweden too. I did that about three or four more times.

Do you remember how you felt sailing those people across the Øresund for the first time?
I was kind of paranoid. Not so much on the trip over, but we didn't know if the police would be waiting for us when we got home. We posted a picture on Facebook as we were sailing over, where we explained why we felt that what we were doing was OK. It got a lot of likes and shares, so we became nervous that the authorities would be waiting for us. But that didn't happen so we just kept doing our thing.

"I feel it's OK to break the law that I've broken, because I see it as an unfair and inhumane law."

How many people were you able to sail to Sweden in one go?
A maximum of 15 people at a time, including our crew and interpreter.

And how many have you personally sailed across the strait?
Somewhere between 20 and 30 people.

I heard that you ended up getting charged with human trafficking. Is that correct?
It is. A few months back, I was contacted by the Danish police, who informed me that I was being charged with human trafficking under part eight of paragraph 58 of the Danish Aliens Act. There are two paragraphs in Danish Law that concern smuggling—the second is about receiving money for it, which makes it a criminal offense. The range of penalties also varies; I can only be sentenced to a maximum of two years in jail for what I did, whereas the maximum penalty for violating the other paragraph is eight years.

Read: Protestors Block Trains Over Anti-Refugee Sweden-Denmark Border Checks

How do you feel about being charged with human trafficking?
I've followed my heart and my moral code. The justice system can sentence me if they think what I've done is wrong but I am OK with myself. I feel it's OK to break the law that I've broken, because I see it as an unfair and inhumane law.

Do you feel a sense of personal responsibility towards refugees?
Yes, I believe we all have the responsibility to help others when they are in need. I wouldn't be OK with just waving some flags at the border and abandoning the asylum seekers to the police.

Should we expect to see more boats ferrying people across the trait now that Sweden has tightened border controls?
Yeah, maybe. There are plenty of harbors on both sides of Øresund. The only problem is that most boats have been pulled out of the water now, because it's winter. However, if the weather keeps being this mild, we're eventually going to see more hobbyists in the water so it'll get really easy to hide refugee boats in the crowd.

Ven is a Swedish island in the middle of Øresund. It's only five nautical miles from Rungsted Harbor (in Denmark), so if you sail the refugees there you end up spending a very limited amount of time in Swedish waters. Refugees can take the ferry to Malmö from there.

Will you personally be smuggling more people into Sweden?
I think so, even though it's gotten harder now. Swedish border controls have scared a lot of people out of helping the refugees. The Swedish Coast Guard has also increased their presence. But it's not impossible.

Video games are always asking us questions. They're not often big ones, or particularly meaningful ones, but they're always there. Take the easiest route to your exit point, or the more dangerous but potentially rewarding one? Are you a "lone survivor" or a "waste of skin"? Do you accept the generous offer from the Pro Evo version of Panathinaikos for an underperforming Shane Long, or keep him on your books as an occasional substitute striker?

That Dragon, Cancer, out now for Razer Forge TV, OUYA, Mac, and PC, asks a devastatingly simple question, but one that games have never really asked before, at least not with quite so much feeling: "Can you find hope in the face of death?" Sadly, I'm not sure that I can. Not enough to play the debut release by Numinous Games, headed by developer Ryan Green. That Dragon, Cancer is just too upsetting for me. I can't even watch the trailer without feeling a lump in my throat. (And yes, it's easy to just write that down on a page, but trust me: every time.)

'That Dragon, Cancer,' launch trailer

It is, however, a very important game, one that further "validates" this interactive medium as an effective means of artistic catharsis. That's one way of looking at it, anyway—I'm sure that Ryan and wife Amy, who also worked on the game, would rather see it less as a purging of emotions built up in the wake of their son's death, and more a celebration of the time they did spend together. That Dragon, Cancer candidly (and highly stylistically) follows the brief life of Joel Green, diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor in 2010 and given just months to live. He hung on until March 2014, dying at just five years old.

My oldest son is five. Like many of you, I've lost family members to cancer. Hell, even superheroes aren't immune to the disease. Putting these things together in my head leads to a place I don't want to be, and that's the main reason why I won't play That Dragon, Cancer. I can't. I know it would wreck me. But I appreciate its existence a great deal. I have so much admiration for Ryan and Amy, and the small team at Numinous Games, for seeing this project through to its conclusion. It's not just emotional hurdles that they've had to overcome—there were some funding problems, and its initially exclusive platform, the OUYA, was discontinued last summer. But this is a game that needed to be finished. I'm glad it was.

Gaming isn't without countless personal stories, told through both linear narratives and player-determined paths. Depression Quest and Papo & Yo are two that come immediately to mind. The former is a text-based work made using the Twine engine that, as its title so plainly implies, sympathetically addresses the subject of depression. The latter is its designer's means of articulating his feelings on growing up around an alcoholic, abusive father, presented as a puzzle-platformer. Neither is perfect. I don't imagine That Dragon, Cancer is, either. But where it differs, for me, despite its documented diversions into disruptive metaphorical imagery, poorly realized mini-games and heavy religious sentiments (the Greens are devout Christians), is in its rawness. There's no detachment from the subject. It's right there in your face, giggling as it bumps itself, himself, at the bottom of a slide.

I can see the comments, the barbed criticisms, along the lines of this "not being a game" without searching for them. They're absolutely out there, and will only multiply. Partially that's the fault of gaming's gatekeepers for not diversifying its extremely limited array of accepted genres. Steam lists That Dragon, Cancer as an "adventure" game, but that positions it in the same category as Far Cry 3 and Tomb Raider. It is, rather, a short meditation on the loss of a loved one, lasting for a couple of hours. It doesn't feature any fiendish traps or perplexing puzzles, any savage beasts to best or pirates to punch. Its difficulty, according to critics who have played it—like Eurogamer's Martin Robinson and Kotaku's Patrick Klepek—manifests through simply continuing the game to its awful conclusion. There's barely any real "control"; as Kelpek writes: "This is a guided story; players merely determine its pacing."

Article continues after the video below

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

Not being able to save Joel is another reason why I won't play That Dragon, Cancer for myself. I love to hold onto hope during the darkest times; but when I know in advance that no amount of concentration, care, comfort, or combat will battle away the untreatable unspeakables that grew within this small boy, and that continue to throughout the game's duration, I can't find within myself the strength to even begin. When a character dies in This War of Mine, because I've not barricaded my shelter sufficiently, I feel guilty for failing to properly prepare for the night. Likewise, when my mother-in-law passes away in Papers, Please, it's because I've been too slow, too slack, at the border crossing to make enough to afford the medicine that could have saved her. But those failures are on me and I can accept them. Joel's death is set. To allow the player to turn this desperate situation around would have comprised a dishonest memory for the Greens, making a terrible situation a hundred times worse. I get why he has to die. I understand why this game only has one ending. We all have but the one ending.

In a way, I felt cheated by the climax of The Last of Us, having any chance of choice taken away from me by a bullet. Not that I was expecting it to happen any differently; that game's rather older, battle-scarred Joel's selfishness mightn't have always been obvious, but he was exclusively in it for himself ever since his daughter's death, and the greater good wasn't about to change that. But the journey to that point, that fierce hospital shootout and the heartbeat-skipping epilogue, was dramatic, exciting, fun.

Read on Motherboard: Now That We Can Edit Cancer's Genes, We Can Make Better Drugs

I don't see any of those qualities in That Dragon, Cancer. Again: It's not an adventure, it's a predetermined true story. I see suffering, traveling on a one-way ticket, no salvation. I see me in absolute floods if I so much as get five minutes into proceedings. Other writers have expressed that they did feel hope within That Dragon, Cancer's brightly colored scenes—hope that they, too, could find a way to process any tragedy that may befall them, having fully appreciated what they had before it was taken away. That they found new feelings for their own closest through this experience. I'm not saying That Dragon, Cancer allows the Greens to breathe easier, that it in some small way relives the unimaginable pain of losing a child; but its existence has to stand for something good in their lives. Or else it stands for nothing.

I've too much of my own baggage to carry any more weight, right now. And I'm sorry about that, but this isn't about me, as That Dragon, Cancer seems remarkable in many ways, and is well worthy of these words, this spotlight, without my participation. I am proud, if pride is quite the right feeling (perhaps it's more gratitude?), of gaming for continuing to present ways and means for people to let their feelings find focus and form. The Greens' work will hopefully gain enough of a profile to show those who don't regularly play video games, or haven't for years, that there's so much more to the medium than military shooters and sports simulations. If it achieves that, it'll definitely be something more than its makers ever intended: a monument to possibility.

That Dragon, Cancer is out now. More information at the game's official website. Razer is donating proceeds from sales on its platform to the Morgan Adams Foundation and Family House SF.

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In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show which will premiere this February, we are releasing all of season three for free online. Watch all the episodes here, and don't miss the premiere of season four on Friday, February 5, at 11PM on HBO.

Cocaine use in Europe has increased dramatically over the past decade, necessitating the development of new routes to meet the demand. In this episode from season three of our HBO show, Ben Anderson followed the cocaine highway from the streets of Venezuela to drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean to the ports of West Africa and, finally, to desert territories controlled by Islamic extremists. By exploring the trafficking hotspots of South America and Africa, we found out exactly who is profiting from Europe's cocaine habit.

Then, VICE looked at the boom in one of the world's newest billion-dollar industries: gestational surrogacy. The cost of surrogacy in the US can be over $100,000, leading many prospective parents to look for affordable options in other countries. Gianna Toboni headed to India, where commercial surrogacy is legal, to investigate this growing industry.

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show, which will premiere February 5 at 11 PM, we are releasing all of season three for free online along with updates to the stories. Today's installment follows up on a dispatch called "Lines in the Sand," which explored the cocaine highway running from Venezuela through Africa.

Cocaine's route from the jungles of Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru to the cash cow that is the European drug market is continuing to mutate and flourish amid the war on drugs.

Over the past decade, the narrative has been about the emergence of a new route into Europe's back door, from Colombia to West Africa and overland through the Sahara dessert up to the North African coast. In season three of VICE on HBO, Ben Anderson explored the trips narcotics take from South America through Africa and met up with smugglers as well as a DEA special agent who explained the routes and how they operate.

Since then, according to Europe's top cocaine trafficking analysts, the sands have shifted once more, leaving the world's anti-drug patrols again scrambling to keep up. Some aspects have remained fairly stable: Spain, Belgium, and Holland are still the main arrival points for cocaine from South America, and cocaine consumption remains relatively high in Europe compared to the rest of the world, especially in the heavy tooting nations of Spain and the UK.

But in terms of trafficking routes into the continent, much like the global drug scene as a whole, it's a story about diversification and proliferation.

"Cocaine traffickers are diversifying their routes and methods," Dr. Axel Klein, an international drug trade expert from the EU's Cocaine Route Programme, told me. "We are seeing a rise in shipments to the Balkan countries, for example to the Greek port of Piraeus, where smugglers are taking advantage of the disintegration of law enforcement. Also to Turkey, Montenegro, and Albania."

This has all been made possible, says Dr. Klein, because of the declining power of Colombian cartels. "European groups can just buy it in Colombia and ship it over, so we are also seeing a rise in the amount of pleasure craft being used across the Atlantic."

He also points to the increasing emergence of cocaine extraction labs in Europe. Inside these labs, which have recently been found in Spain, Portugal, and Poland, chemists extract cocaine from innocuous looking goods such as wooden pallets or bottles of alcohol that have been impregnated with the drug.

But it is in Africa where the biggest developments have occurred. Although data from this region is notoriously patchy, what evidence there is indicates that the overland route through the Sahara has largely been abandoned, according to a report on drug trafficking in West Africa called "Illicit Narcotics Transiting," seen by VICE and due to be published in the spring by one of the world's leading economic thinktanks, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Instability and violence in Libya and Mali have made the area too volatile to risk shifting large amounts of cocaine, according to the report. Moreover, the influence of corrupt states that initially facilitated the smuggling operations across Africa including Guinea Bassau, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, have now been curtailed, as has the influence of Colombian mini-cartels on the ground in Africa.

But, as the OECD report details, others have been quick to step into the breach and fill their own boots with filthy drug lucre: mainly bent politicians and gangsters in Nigeria and Ghana, who have moved to maximize their involvement in the West African transit hub. Cocaine is now increasingly moving through the major seaports and airports in Nigeria, Senegal, and Ghana for transfer to Europe.

The rise of Nigeria as a cocaine smuggling hub has been quick, and has largely come about with the help of the Nigerian diaspora in Brazil, a country that in the last two years has leapfrogged Colombia and Venezuela to become the world's most prolific disembarkation point for cocaine into Europe. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, last year 35 percent of cocaine seized in Europe disembarked from Brazil, with 11 percent coming from Colombia, and 10 from Argentina. Indigenous Nigerian criminal groups have linked up with a growing Nigerian population in Brazil, most notably in Sao Paulo, to transport drugs into Europe.

The OECD report estimates there are now 1,000 Nigerians engaged in the drug trade in Sao Paulo. They buy the drugs and send couriers by air and sea to West Africa, into the hands of one of the 50 Nigerian organized crime groups operating there, chiefly out of Senegal's capital, Dakar. It is thought these groups sent over a staggering 1,500 drug mules—four a day—on flights out of Sao Paulo in 2014.

The cocaine is then re-packaged and forwarded on to Nigerian gangs based in European cities, most notably in Holland and Spain. To ensure a smooth transit, the gangs grease the palms of between 50-100 key politicians and security figures in West Africa. Drug trafficking in the region, the OECD report says, has led to a small property and building boom and a rise in the import and purchase of top-of-the-range vehicles, including Hummers and other four-wheel drives.

According to the report, while some cocaine traffickers have been known to hand out small amounts of cash to locals, most of the money ends up in the hands of a clique of already rich and powerful figures, further exacerbating income inequality and financial exclusion for the most vulnerable in the region. Only a fifth of the money made from cocaine trafficking, estimates the report, is thought to stay in the region.

Europe is on alert from the fallout. A senior specialist in cocaine trafficking at Europol told me Nigerian gangs are a growing concern in many of Europe's major cities. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland recently asked Europol for help in tackling cocaine markets that they say have become dominated by Nigerian suppliers.

But the report says the cocaine gangs from West Africa are not content with one product. They have already diversified into producing and trafficking methamphetamine after learning how to make meth from South American cooks they brought over to Nigeria. Last year five meth laboratories were discovered and dismantled in Nigeria, and a growing number of Nigerians are being caught smuggling meth into Asian countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

"Meth production is clearly becoming a significant drug control challenge in the region, and is worthy of concern," the OECD report warned. "In the future, meth will most likely become more prominent, and with West Africa as the manufacturing hub, the potential impact on stability, governance, and development is unknown."

But routes into Europe are not all about geography. Europol has made parcel post a priority because it is well aware that Europe's teeming postal system is home to a blizzard of cocaine packages, both from professional traffickers and darknet suppliers.

You've almost got to feel sorry for the enforcement agencies: trying to sift through the European postal system for drugs is arguably far tougher than trying to stem the never-ending tide of cocaine packages being stashed among legitimate containers transported over sea, a task Europol admits is beyond them. "It's very easy to smuggle big quantities of cocaine in containers on ships," the cocaine specialist at Europol tells me, "because we only search two percent of them. Traffickers know this, so they take advantage."

And here we are. The cat and mouse game of clamping down on drug routes only for them to vanish and pop up somewhere else is completely dwarfed by the absurd difficulty of finding small bags of white powder among millions of freight containers and billions of postal packages. You can't help but think there must be another way.

On Thursday night at around 9 PM, a teenaged woman and her father grabbed some beers and headed into Osborn Playground in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. What happened next has shocked the community, stymied police, and implicated five teenagers in what initially sounded like a horrific gang rape but might have actually been even more depraved.

If nothing else, the lurid tale has shined a sustained spotlight on a corner of the city that often makes headlines for gun violence but rarely grips the public imagination.

As the New York Times reported, the original story went something like this: The 18-year-old was allegedly raped in turn by five men after they showed up brandishing a gun, chasing her father off. Employees at two nearby delis apparently refused to lend the panicked father—who may have been drunk to the point of incoherence—a phone.

Ultimately, police said it took almost 20 minutes for the man to find two cops in their squad car, which was odd because the neighborhood where the alleged attack took place was lined with both residential units and businesses. The NYPD also came under fire for waiting until Saturday night to report the crime to the public, and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has since apologized for the nearly 48-hour delay, citing a paucity of information.

As that information has emerged, the story has shifted dramatically. When two of the suspects, ages 14 and 15, were turned over to authorities by their parents, and two more, ages 15 and 17, were arrested, they said that the group sex was consensual. What's more, two of the suspects claimed that the woman was having sex with her father when they first saw her in the playground, as the Times later reported.

Detectives are currently investigating those statements. Meanwhile, the four suspects were all arraigned on Tuesday, and a fifth was apprehended at school the same day. The fact that the victim's father might have been involved, and that the two were allegedly drinking together, "does not mean she was not a victim of a pretty horrific attack," as one anonymous law enforcement official told the Times. "What appeared to have happened is that the father may have put her in that compromised position." Still, as the suspects' defense lawyers pointed out at their arraignment, the young men were not picked out of police lineups or identified via photographs, and police still have not been able to find the gun that both the victim and her father said was used during the incident.

Reports of rape were up 6.3 percent across New York City last year, though officials are estimating about 20 percent of those alleged incidents took place in previous years. (For perspective, in 2011, just 1 percent of reported rapes concerned incidents from previous years.) The 73rd police precinct, which includes Brownsville, saw 34 rapes in 2015, according to NYPD statistics.

As interest in (and horror over) the case mounts, the suspects—each of whom has been charged with first-degree rape—are maintaining their innocence. On Tuesday, a Times reporter knocked on the door of a 15-year-old suspect in the case. Standing on their doorstep, the suspect's brother and mother showed the journalist a clip they said proved the sex was consensual. It was fewer than 30 seconds long, and it's unclear how it might bolster the defendant's claims. "If you said yeah, it's lit, like, you know what I mean," an unidentified male could be heard saying in the clip. "I could tell you a freak."

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Imagine a world where all your legal weed was controlled by ex-cops. It's not that big of a stretch, in Canada anyway.

Earlier this week, former Toronto police chief turned Liberal MP Bill Blair confirmed he'll be handling the pot file for his government, raising skepticism about how someone who previously enforced prohibition and seemed to show disregard for civil liberties (G20, cough cough) would approach this task.

While the specifics of his plan are still hazy, Blair has already said the legalization rollout will be tightly controlled.

"Our intent is to legalize, regulate and restrict," he told the Globe and Mail. "There needs to be reasonable restrictions on making sure that we keep it away from kids, because I think that is very much in the public interest. We also have to ensure that the social and the health harms are properly managed and mitigated."

Blair was likely given this role in part to appease his former colleagues e.g. cops who aren't down with legalization. One of them, former Toronto police deputy chief Kim Derry, who's now—surprise—a consultant at a medical pot facility currently seeking a license from Health Canada, has already been pretty vocal about the direction he thinks Blair should move in.

"If you just open it up and allow everybody to grow this stuff and distribute it however they want, it will be an absolute mess," he told the Globe, adding Blair needs to "get rid of the goons" in the industry aka the people who, you know, fought at risk of receiving criminal records to make legalization happen.

He appears to be advocating for growing be limited to licensed producers like THC Meds—the Toronto-area company that writes his paycheques. Derry teamed up with former Toronto mayoral candidate George Smitherman to launch the business and serves as its security advisor.

He said he and Blair have been buds for 40 years, "so I'll certainly give him my opinion, whether he asks for it or not."

Blair said he's not going to be answering to anyone in particular though.

"There is a wide diversity of opinion, and it's important that those opinions be heard, but I'm not responding to any particular lobbyist or individual on this."

Because no lobbyist has ever influenced government decision-making, right?

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.