Quantcast
Channel: VICE CA
Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live

An Alabama Man's Long, Nightmarish Quest for a New Murder Trial

0
0

William "Bill" Kuenzel. Photo courtesy the author

Just after 11 PM on November 9, 1987, a gunshot rang out at Joe Bob's Crystal Palace convenience store in Sylacauga, Alabama. Linda Offord, a 39-year-old clerk working the night shift, fell to the floor with a shotgun wound to the chest, and was pronounced dead shortly thereafter. Eight people in the vicinity that night told police they recalled seeing 18-year-old local Harvey Venn around the time of the murder. A number of them also remembered seeing Venn's car outside, with another white man sitting inside it.

Venn was crashing on the couch of his co-worker, 25-year-old William "Bill" Kuenzel, and when police searched the house, Venn's clothing splattered with blood. In initial police interviews, Venn admitted that he was at the store that night with a friend—a white man named David Pope—but denied having anything to do with the crime. He told police he was home by 10:30 PM and that Kuenzel was there sleeping.

Upon further grilling, Venn changed his story. The new version: Kuenzel was with him at Joe Bob's that night, and he was the one who pulled the trigger. The police took Kuenzel in for questioning, but he emphatically denied any involvement, insisting he was at home when the murder took place.

So prosecutors offered plea bargains to the two men, as is commonplace across the American criminal justice system. The offer: enter a guilty plea and testify against the other in exchange for an eight to ten year sentence, or go to trial for capital murder charges and face the death penalty. Kuenzel was steadfast in claiming his own innocence, but Venn took the plea and agreed to testify in court.

Kuenzel, an eighth-grade dropout military brat who spent his childhood moving from base to base, could not afford a lawyer. His state-appointed attorney William J. Willingham was embarrassingly underpaid—at the time, overall compensation to capital trial attorneys for out-of-court work was capped at $1,000—and by his own admission, poorly qualified. He didn't search for additional witnesses or run forensic tests, and spent a total of about 50 hours working on the case.

At trial in September 1988, Robert Rumsey, the powerful Talladega County district attorney known for winning death penalty convictions, centered his case on Venn's testimony. Venn initially claimed the blood on his clothes was from a squirrel he'd been hunting. But Rumsey actually conceded the blood on Venn's pants was in fact Offord's, suggesting to jurors that blood had splashed onto the shotgun when Kuenzel killed the clerk, and that sometime after Kuenzel returned it to the car, it must have rubbed off onto Venn. There was no blood found in the car.

There was also a dispute about the murder weapon itself. Offord was killed with a 16-gauge shotgun, and police discovered a 16-gauge shell outside Kuenzel's home. Kuenzel claimed that in the weeks before the murder, he had borrowed a 16-gauge shotgun from his stepfather to kill a stray dog, but insisted to police that he had returned it by the time of the crime. Two witnesses testified to that effect at trial.

A newspaper clipping after the murder

Under interrogation, Venn told police he had a 12-gauge shotgun in his possession at the time of the murder, but had since returned it. The police went to the owner's house to retrieve the gun, but determined it was not the murder weapon. Venn testified to this in court, and there is no record of the police ever testing the gun.

After a one-and-a-half day trial, the jury found Kuenzel guilty and he was convicted of capital murder during a robbery in the first degree. He made a final plea before District Judge William Sullivan announced the sentence. "As I stand here before this Court to receive a sentence, of possibly the death penalty, for a crime of which I'm not guilty... I pray that when a higher court hears my case, I will be freed of this heavy burden, which was bestowed upon me by the court system. Which might take my life, but not my soul."

The jury did recommend the death penalty, however, sending Kuenzel to death row in Alabama's Holman Correctional Facility. Venn was sentenced to eight to ten years as an accomplice. Adding to the drama, Orie Goggins, a prison inmate who spoke at Kuenzel's sentencing, told the jury that after Kuenzel was convicted, Kuenzel's mother had bribed him to say that he—Goggins—was with Venn on the night of the murder, and Kuenzel and his mother eventually pleaded guilty to perjury and bribing a witness. According to their lawyers, this was an act of desperation undertaken by Kuenzel's mother when her faith in the system was completely broken, and her son joined her in pleading guilty to reduce his mother's sentence.

Now it's been 27 years since Bill Kuenzel was sentenced to die, and a group of dogged pro-bono appellate attorneys will not give up the fight to save his life. They've been working tirelessly for decades, filing appeal after appeal, and over the years have uncovered what they say is strong new evidence supporting Kuenzel, including material that calls a key corroborating witness's account into question. But Alabama's courts have been steadfast in strictly enforcing a filing deadline missed by Kuenzel's appellate attorney, denying Kuenzel access to any review of his original trial.

In a moment of increased attention on fixing America's broken criminal justice system, calls to reform capital punishment are gaining ground across the country. The Kuenzel case offers a terrifying look inside an oft-overlooked part of the problem: the byzantine rules that often delay or prevent troublesome state court convictions from being reviewed. Last November, Kuenzel's attorneys filed what they call their last "standard" post-conviction appeal in the hopes of getting Kuenzel a new trial. If this appeal is denied, barring the revelation of even more new evidence or some other unexpected event, there's a real chance Bill Kuenzel will be executed.

The stakes are about as high as they can get.

In this latest appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court, defense attorney David Kochman has turned to a diverse group of influential religious leaders in Alabama to help get the word out. The group's central message: deadline or no deadline, life is sacred from beginning to end, and Bill Kuenzel deserves justice. In a state that prides itself on its strong religious beliefs, will that be enough to finally get the Alabama Supreme Court's attention?

Having spent most of his life in a five-by-eight cell, will Bill Kuenzel get a new trial?

After the original conviction, Kuenzel continued to vehemently maintain his innocence. In October 1991, the US Supreme court rebuffed his initial round of appeals, known as "direct" appeals. As Alabama is the only state in the country that does not provide indigent death sentence inmates with attorneys for post-conviction appeals, Kuenzel was left without legal representation.

In 1993, David "Duff" Dretzin, a 65-year-old labor lawyer based in New York City, attended a conference sponsored by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization that encourages attorneys to help indigent prisoners in the South who they feel were denied "fair and just treatment." Bryan Stevenson, EJI's executive director, offered Kuenzel's case to Dretzin, who quickly decided something had gone terribly wrong.

Stevenson still recalls the moment Dretzin took on the project.

"I was trying to recruit lawyers and I'd say, 'We've got folks on death row, and they're literally dying for legal assistance, there is not right to counsel, you've got the skills to take these cases, please take the case,'" he told me in an interview. "I was giving that rap to David and he was probably the first lawyer we were trying to recruit who actually touched me and he put his hand on top of my hand and he said, 'You know, it's OK, I'm gonna do this.'"

Dretzin began the daunting task of preparing Kuenzel's petition for post-conviction appeal. He filed the appeal that October, about two and a half years from when the Alabama Supreme Court had denied his direct appeal and two years from when the US Supreme Court had denied. But after decades of unrelated litigation, the Alabama courts had determined that the statute of limitations to file these appeals ran from the earlier date—when the Alabama Supreme Court denied relief.

According to his lawyers, Kuenzel's petition was suddenly deemed months too late.

Dretzin kept on fighting the time bar, and his investigations—often paid for with his own money—revealed what he said was a significant amount of new evidence to support Kuenzel's innocence. His most glaring discovery: Venn had borrowed a 16-gauge shotgun prior to the murder, the same gauge gun used to kill Offord. But time after time, lawyers for the state insisted that Kuenzel's post-conviction petition was time-barred, and the courts agreed.

The Alabama court system's stubborn and myopic focus on deadlines was actually part of a larger national trend. After the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, capital convictions across the country accrued quickly, especially in the South. As a result, the system soon became overburdened with costly and time-consuming appeals. By the mid 90s, Congress tried to address this problem: In 1996, lawmakers passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (otherwise known as AEDPA), which attempted, in part, to restrict death row prisoners' appeals by imposing strict deadlines on their claims to federal review. But instead of streamlining the process, in certain circumstances, like Kuenzel's, the new law effectively served to deny some prisoners their fundamental rights.

In 2006, after years of tedious litigation, the story took a jarring turn for the worse when Dretzin died in a tragic car accident. Kuenzel was devastated. He had become very close to his attorney over the years, and was left scared and alone. In correspondence, he remembered how much Dretzin meant to him: "He... told me that he actually believed in me, that he believed I was innocent and that I never should have been here. This was the first time anybody had ever said that to me."

At the hospital, with Dretzin on his death bed, David Kochman, a young lawyer who had been helping on the case, decided to continue the fight. "When I decided to take on Bill's case, I don't think I knew what I was getting into," he recalled. "But I was absolutely sure of one thing: Bill had nothing to do with this murder."

William "Bill" Kuenzel and his defense attorney David Kochman in 2008. Photo by the author/Copyright Forman Films

Even though Kochman would have to convince the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the more conservative forums in America, to take another look at the case, he was undaunted. And in 2010, there was an unlikely ray of hope: By a series of twists and turns, Kuenzel's defense team became aware of a number of documents in the DA's file that were never disclosed during the original trial.

One of them, in particular, was striking: April Harris' Grand Jury Testimony.

Harris was driving by the store the night of the murder. It was dark and raining, but at trial she testified she saw Kuenzel in the store. Yet in grand jury testimony before the trial that had not been disclosed to Kuenzel's defense lawyer, she claimed she couldn't see clearly in the store. This was potentially devastating to the prosecution's original case.

Of course, the "missed" filing deadline seemed to foreclose the possibility of placing this, or any other new evidence, in front of a judge or jury. Time after time, the courts had ruled the missed filing deadline trumped any claims of innocence, no matter how strong. In 2012, the 11th Circuit concurred, declaring in its order, "We are not persuaded that we are faced with a fundamental miscarriage of justice. Petitioner therefore has not overcome the procedural bar to the review of the merits of his federal habeas petition and cannot obtain habeas relief in this case."

Kochman and his team were despondent. "How many millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted by the state of Alabama fighting to prevent Bill to get review of the fairness of his trial, when we know he didn't have a fair trial?" Kochman wondered aloud to me at the time. "It's not just."

Kuenzel was losing hope, too. Many of his family had lost contact with him over the years, including his son William Kuenzel, Jr. who was a young child at the time of the murder. Kochman, who had also started growing close to Kuenzel, went out of his way to track the younger Kuenzel down. They met over Alabama barbecue, and after telling him the bad news about the 11th circuit ruling, Kochman said, "I believe in your dad. He's a good friend of mine. I care about him." William agreed to get back in touch, according to Kochman.

Kochman and team decided to appeal the 11th Circuit's decision to the US Supreme Court. They knew it would be an uphill battle, so they asked some of the top prosecutors in the country, including Robert M. Morgenthau , Gilbert I. Garcetti, and E. Michael McCann to participate as amici, or "friends of the court," in support of Kuenzel.

"When there's newly discovered evidence, what happened in the prior trial is totally irrelevant," Morgenthau, the former Manhattan DA who still has the Central Park Five case fresh in his memory, stressed in an interview.

In spite of the new support, in May 2013 the United States Supreme Court decided not to hear the case. Kuenzel had completely lost access to one of the most important safeguards in America's justice system.

Meanwhile, a growing chorus emerged within the government, the criminal justice community, and the federal bench itself, calling for changes to the 1996 law. Ninth Circuit Federal Judge Alex Kozinski, one of the more vocal critics, suggested in the preface to last summer's Georgetown Law Journal's Annual Review of Criminal Procedure that he felt hamstrung by strict federal guidelines. "We now regularly have to stand by in impotent silence, even though it may appear to us that an innocent person has been convicted," he wrote.

But since that brutal defeat, Kuenzel, Kochman and their team have regrouped again. In September 2013, they filed an appeal back in Talladega Country Circuit Court. According to Alabama law, in order to convict, Rumsey needed at least one piece of corroboration for Venn's testimony. He used April Harris. Kochman now claimed if the original jury had heard her initial grand jury testimony, Alabama law would not legally permit the prosecution to take the case to trial.

At the same time, the Alabama Attorney General's office—whose capital litigation division is led by J. Clayton Crenshaw—was pushing hard for the state to set an execution date, which they did for early March of last year. According to Kuenzel, when he got the bad news the night before Christmas Eve 2014, he maintained his composure. "My case is still before the court," he recalled telling his prison warden. "That must be a mistake. That's not right. I'm not worried about it. God will protect me. It's not my time."

In fact, according to his attorney, Kuenzel went back to his cell and fell into a deep depression.

The execution was eventually stayed when Kochman was granted a chance to present his arguments in front of the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals in person in early April 2015, a month after the original execution date. In his opening statement before the four-judge panel, the attorney said, "This is a weak case built on accomplice testimony. The sole corroboration was denied before the grand jury. And the same prosecutor who elicited that testimony before the grand jury elicited the testimony from the same witness at trial."

Crenshaw, after reminding the courts of the time bar, rebutted . " grand jury testimony was a bit more equivocal than her trial testimony but she does say... and this is from the grand jury testimony, 'But judging from the stature of the people that were in there, I believe that it was them,' referencing Kuenzel and Venn."

Last July, Kuenzel received the news: Once again, the American legal system had ruled against him. So Kochman and his team decided to appeal—again.

Kochman has pointedly decided not to lump Kuenzel's pleas into the loud calls challenging lethal injection methods currently swirling in the national news. He also does not want to use Kuenzel's case as a call for death penalty abolition. From his perspective, the case is not about the death penalty at all, but rather "core beliefs." Kuenzel deserves a fair trial, and, his lawyer believes, if convicted again, would at least have had a full and proper review of the facts of his case.

Meanwhile, Kuenzel's backers began to try to garner as much local support as they could to amplify this message—and to convince the Alabama Supreme Court to take another look at a case they and others had declined to hear so many times before.

Last October, Kochman held a press conference to announce the coalition, which includes a diverse group of faith leaders in Alabama like Rob Schenck, the head of Faith and Action who was recently profiled in Abigail Disney's documentary The Armor of Light. Father Mark Finley of Church of the Reconciler Fairfield opened with a prayer. "We just ask Lord that we pray through all of the smoke and mirrors and allow us Lord to see the impossible be done to your honor Lord we ask this in the name of Jesus," he said.

Schenck was next to speak, admitting he had joined with "some unlikely allies with whom I as an unabashed conservative Christian don't normally keep company." But, he confessed, he was able to "find common cause on a noble purpose as is the case here. Billy Kuenzel was convicted for a crime he did not commit and condemned to death for it. Which not only puts an innocent life at risk, but it flies in the face of the biblical concept of justice."

Schenck went on to remind everyone that "Billy Kuenzel's plight is not about the death penalty. Many of us feel strongly that the death penalty is sanctioned in scripture, allowed in the Constitution, and called for in many situations."

Doug Jones, former US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama and Kuenzel's co-counsel, echoed that sentiment. "In a state in a Country that is becoming ever more partisan, partisan in its politics, partisan in its religion, partisan in its economic opportunities, there is one concept, there is one ideal, that cuts across and can bring people together, and that's justice," he said.

Kochman, a Conservative Jew, kept up the religious tack by citing the Old Testament.

"In Deuteronomy 16:20, there's a verse, 'Tzedek, Tzedek,' Justice, Justice you shall pursue," he said. "And sure enough right after that provides one example of when justice needs to be done, and that's when there's an accomplice testifying against someone else. You need to have two independent witnesses. Now, sure enough, if you look at the Alabama code, 12-21-222, there's a codification of that Biblical principle." He closed, "And the folks behind us are going to help tell the court that story. To explain to the court why they do have the power and the obligation to change this."

Kochman filed the appeal in early November, having secured support from other influential Alabama clergy to join on as amici. Of course, it's fair to wonder if a Biblically-infused moral argument will resonate with Alabama's State Supreme Court judges. But Judge John Carroll, professor of law at Samford University in Birmingham, thinks it just might work.

"There are certainly members of this court who write about the Biblical perspective on the law so it certainly may well be directed at some of these," Carroll said. "In a state that believes in the death penalty, but counts ourselves as very religious, this amicus tries to walk the right line, where its not about the death penalty—it's about justice."

Venn was released after about ten years in prison and according to divorce records, still lives in Sylacauga. When asked last fall about the case, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange was steadfast on the question of Kuenzel's guilt.

"We don't want anyone who's not guilty to be on death row," he said, "but we're pretty certain, we're certain he's not innocent."

Eric Forman is a New York-based documentary film producer currently working on VICE on HBO. He is producing a film about the Kuenzel case called DEAD TIME. Follow him on Twitter.


VICE Vs Video Games: I Tried to Infiltrate the Black Market of FIFA Ultimate Team Betting

0
0

A promotional screenshot for 'FIFA 16,' featuring one of its most valuable players, Barcelona's Lionel Messi

Players of EA Sports' famous FIFA soccer sims can loosely be divided into two categories. You have the social ones, fans of the series who are proficient at each game but don't line up at an out-of-town supermarket to buy the latest incarnation of the game every September; and then you have the Ultimate Teamers. If you identify exclusively as the former kind of FIFA fan, content to keep your squad of choice as it turns out on a standard Premier League weekend, FIFA Ultimate Team, or FUT, has probably passed you by. But to give you an idea of its popularity, the two founders of futhead.com, FIFA's foremost online community, made $1 million when they found a gap in the market and created a "canonical source for information" on all things FUT.

As its bombastic name suggests, FIFA Ultimate Team represents the very peak of the game's appeal for the straight-upstairs-for-a-four-hour-sesh-after-school crew. It works pretty simply. You start off with an average squad of players and work your way up the ten online divisions, winning coins to spend on higher-rated acquisitions as you go. All sounds fairly straightforward so far, right? But things get murkier when you consider the fact that the most desirable players in FUT float on the game's own free market, with prices set by gamers themselves.

Winning a match will get you around 400 coins, and getting promoted will get you somewhere between five and ten thousand; but elite players can sell for hundreds of thousands, or even millions. Presuming you don't want to settle for a mediocre team—and the addictive nature of FUT means you won't—you're left with two options: either clock up an ungodly amount of hours, saving up coins, or buy player packs with the in-game currency or legal tender, a route that offers only a slim chance of bagging you a great player on the cheap. It's not hard to imagine pupils turning to dollar signs at EA HQ when they figured out they could monetize a hugely popular side of their market-leading game, leading to headlines like "My Teenager Spent $4,500 on FIFA Microtransactions" from 2015, and a more recent situation in Canada where a kid ran up a bill of over $7,000.

In practice, neither of the "regular" means of building a FUT squad full of superstars are satisfactory—saving up takes too long, and packs are rarely worth the money. But history has shown that when there's demand for something that's not being supplied through official channels, the black market will soon find a way to prosper from the situation, and FUT is no different. Trading goes underground, and a Tour de France-style doping situation has developed where everyone playing at the top level seems to have a souped-up team. So, you either spend money to get ahead or get left behind.

Buying coins online from third-party sites is the most popular, but by no means only, way of enhancing your team—head to an unofficial dealer and you'll find 10,000 coins (a good few hours of gameplay) selling for something like $1. But it was when I came across a niche subculture of Twitter users acting as bookmakers, taking bets with FUT coins on real-life sporting events, that I realized how deep this black market went.

Unfortunately, as I investigated more, I found myself up against this cloak-and-dagger world. It was difficult to penetrate and its inhabitants had an inherent distrust of outsiders who might report their gamer tags to EA. However, I persevered and, channelling my inner Donal MacIntyre, slid into a coin seller's DMs.

Maybe it was always going to be hard to get a self-styled PS4 Al Capone to talk, but after initially resisting he did let his guard down enough to confirm some of my suspicions before reverting to opacity. On the one hand I admired his dedication to the hustle, but I also knew that according to many, not least EA, he was part of the problem threatening to ruin the enjoyment of FUT for the average player.

The Twitter bookies were clearly not eager to talk to me, but they inadvertently led me to polished websites offering the same service on a much larger scale, where you could gamble with FIFA coins to win more. But why would anyone bet with coins when they could bet with actual cash? Even though gambling with virtual currency is clearly a grey area legally, the implications of it left me feeling uneasy—especially in light of the fact that ensuring users of the site were over 18 had to be extremely difficult.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film on the rivalry between Glasgow's Rangers and Celtic football clubs

With the lack of honest information, It was hard to get a grasp of everything that was happening in this community, so I reached out to a FUT game Julian Assange of sorts, to help me lift the lid on these undercover happenings and explain what they meant for the game in general. My hope was that Rodrigo Lopes, an admin at fifauteam.com, would further illuminate the situation for me, but what he said didn't totally line up with the story I'd seen developing so far.

"Coin selling isn't FUT's main problem," he tells me. "EA doesn't want to admit that the real problems are coin glitches and other bugs, but most of the community believes that coin selling and coin promotion are the problem because that's what EA tells them."

"In my opinion, EA focuses on coin selling and promotion so much because it affects the sale of FIFA Points, which are used to buy packs."

On VICE Sports: Pitch Invasions: Football's Forbidden Fruit

A post on a futhead.com thread about spending money on FUT pack

After all the hours I'd lost to fan sites and forums I still had more questions than answers, but a few things seemed clear. The FUT community is slowly but surely losing patience with EA, and accusations that EA exploiting the popularity of the game while neglecting various problems within it are growing.

In some cases these trends go beyond FIFA; accumulator culture already pervades soccer and the presence, however small, of betting in FUT is a bleak side effect of this. I'm not here to moralize—I like a bet as much as the next guy—but the link between soccer and gambling is already so inexorable that it's impossible to watch a game without Ray Winstone trying to force a tasty little 4/1 shot down your throat. The fact that the most popular soccer video game in the world is now complicit in nurturing the view that sport and pissing away $20 every weekend go hand in hand is pretty grim.

There's nobody worse than the "soccer's just 22 millionaires kicking a pig's bladder around a field" crew, but FUT is a case of video games imitating life, since the team which has had the most money pumped into it is often the most likely to win. Okay, we're in the midst of one of the weirdest Premier League seasons ever, but generally speaking it's a pretty sound rule of thumb. The possibility of escapism is the main allure of many video games but by contrast FUT offers only pure, unrelenting realism—a microcosm of the capitalist slog of 21st century soccer with a couple of morally contentious issues thrown in to boot. But what else did you really expect from a game that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association lends its not-so-fair name to?

Follow Jack on Twitter.

What We Know About the 'Very Dangerous' Trio That Escaped from a Maximum-Security Jail

0
0

From left to right , the inmates who escaped from a Southern California jail: Bac Duong, Hossein Nayeri, and Jonathan Tieu. Photos via Orange County Sheriff's Department

Local and federal cops are hunting for three inmates they say used tools to cut through steel and ropes fashioned from linen to escape from the Orange County Central Men's Jail in Santa Ana, California this weekend. The inmates—described by authorities as "very dangerous"—have been identified as 43-year-old Bac Duong, 37-year-old Hossein Nayeri, and 20-year-old Jonathan Tieu, as the New York Timesreports.

The men escaped sometime after the 5 AM headcount on Friday, but weren't discovered missing until a count originally scheduled for 8 PM that night. That count got delayed when a fight between inmates broke out, and guards finally realized the men were absent around 9. The Orange County Sheriff's Office is operating under the assumption that the fight may have been staged as a diversion, and the men may be armed, as the Associated Press reports.

Each inmate is accused of horrific crimes, including one involving the genitals of a pot shop owner that almost sounds too heinous to be real.

Tieu has been charged with murder and attempted murder, and has been held since 2013 on $1 million bond. Nayeri is charged with taking part in the kidnapping and torture of a marijuana dispensary owner in 2012, which allegedly included burning him with a blowtorch and cutting off the man's penis. He then jetted to his home country of Iran, got nabbed in central Europe, and was extradited. Like Duong—who among other things is charged with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon—Nayeri was being held without bail.

The men were housed in a dormitory-style cell they shared with 65 other inmates. Sometime after the early-morning headcount on Friday, they apparently cut through half-inch steel bars hidden behind a bed in their unit, forced their way into a plumbing tunnel, and made their way to an unsecured part of the jailhouse roof. "This was clearly a well-thought-out and planned escape," Orange County Sheriff's Spokesman Lieutenant Jeff Hallock said at a Sunday press conference.

Using a makeshift "rope" cops believe was fashioned out of bed sheets and jail clothes, the inmates got around barbed wire and rappelled down a roof to the ground four stories below. It is not yet known what tools they used to cut through steel, or—as was the case in a certain high profile escape in upstate New York last year—if they had any help from within the facility. Hallock said that while catching the men was the priority, police were conducting a separate probe to determine how they got out and whether any other inmates or jail employees were involved.

It's also not known whether or not the inmates fled in their jumpsuits or were able to change clothes in the escape, which was the first in more than 20 years from the jail.

"I've been in law enforcement for 37 years, always working for sheriff's departments that manage jails," Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said at the press conference. "Escapes do occur from time to time. We try and limit that. We learn from the mistakes. I can tell you that this is a very sophisticated-looking operation. People in jail have a lot of time to sit around and think about ways to defeat our systems."

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

How New York's Homeless Lived Through This Weekend's Blizzard

0
0

A homeless man takes shelter in Central Park on January 23, 2016 in New York. Photo by Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty

For New York City's record-high number of homeless men, women, and children, the winter of 2015 was especially brutal. A constant barrage of snow slammed the city almost weekly, causing hundreds of those sleeping on the streets to seek refuge in "cardboard condos," and on subway cars, preferably away from the gaze of police officers who threatened to pass them along to overflowing shelters and hospitals. Frozen, and with numbers of homeless rising to Great Depression levels, the city's outreach budget basically doubled overnight.

The winter of 2016 was shaping out to be relatively better. Temperatures in NYC were worriedly warm for weeks on end, so much so that Christmas Day felt more like Memorial Day here. Drops to freezing temperatures were rare, and there was no snow in sight. The homeless, as it would seem, had finally caught a break.

But unfortunately, that all changed this past weekend.

From Friday night to Sunday morning, Mother Nature dumped what felt like the entirety of winter 2015's snow in one sitting; The blizzard that never arrived last year finally showed up, in full force, with a whopping 26.8 inches of white powder in total. The accumulation put New York City—and the entire East Coast, for that matter—at a standstill, as subways, buses, and roads were in total lockdown mode for hours on end.

It was the second-worst snowstorm in New York City's history, at a time when its homeless numbers are now clearing the 60,000 mark—and that's just in the shelters. And, for America's richest city, it was a true test of how a mayoral administration, already saddled with criticism over its homelessness efforts, could handle what many advocates have long deemed a crisis for its most vulnerable citizens in the most desperate times.

According to Danielle Mignelli-Pagnotta, a street outreach worker for the city's Department of Homeless Services, the outreach teams are "usually out 24/7 in each borough," but before the storm, they specifically targeted their "vulnerable client list," which has about 300 members. These are homeless individuals who perhaps pose the greatest risk to themselves, including those with mental health issues who have nowhere else to go. But luckily, she added, "most of those people, we did not see ."

The effort was the most direct usage thus far of HOME-STAT, an aggressive new program announced in December that deploys both police officers and outreach workers to "hot spots" or homeless encampments throughout Manhattan. With weatherized vehicles and extra gas, enhanced outreach began at 8 PM on Friday night, when the first snow began to fall, and continued around the clock until 8 AM Monday morning.

Each team, according to the city, saw 38 vulnerable clients per night, and as of last count, the outreach workers brought 132 individuals into traditional locations and emergency rooms by the storm's end. While Mayor Bill de Blasio advised anyone who saw someone in need to dial 311, which acts as a help hotline for the city, the number of calls increased, a city official told me.

During that time, and since then, a Code Blue has been firmly in place, meaning that no one could be turned away from a shelter, city hospital, or drop-off site. However, as of a recent edict by New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, a life-threatening storm like this requires the city and state to actively place homeless individuals in shelter—a controversial provision that has been labeled by advocates as excessive force, and criticized by city officials who argue they already had that power. By the storm's end, a city official said, seven individuals were involuntarily brought to hospitals for mental health evaluations.

For the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group and think tank, Saturday night was like any other for one of its integral services: the food van. "In its existence, the van has never missed a night," Giselle Routhier, the policy director of the Coalition, affirmed. "And we're happy to say it went out on Saturday."

"But it wasn't easy in any way," she quickly added.

The food van route, which VICE tagged along for during last year's no-show blizzard, starts at Saint Bartholomew's Church, in midtown Manhattan, and travels all over the island. The stops are pre-set, so clients know when and where the van will be. After it leaves, some then venture to shelters, while others stick to the streets.

But on the night of the blizzard, the van only made it to more popular stops. "On Saturday, it was a bit limited," Routhier explained. "At St. Bart's, we had 60 people eating, who we then told to go to shelters. But we went out at a certain time, so it's hard to say with any certainty who went to shelters, or hospitals, after they ate."

It's difficult in general to calculate just how many individuals sleep on the streets of New York on any given night, let alone during a massive blizzard. Exact figures are hard to nail down; as Mignelli-Pagnotta explained, "We have no tracking devices for each person in the city... But we're confident that not many people slept on the streets during this storm."

And Patrick Byer, 40, agreed: The number on Saturday night was low, but not zero.

Before Friday night, Byer, who has been homeless for 12 years now, said he had his fingers crossed. "I heard it might miss us," he told me, laughing. "And I was really hoping for that."

But when it did hit, Byer entered Harlem Hospital to go to the bathroom and ended up staying for the remainder of the storm.

That first night, the ER's waiting room was somewhat empty, but as the storm strengthened, with nearly three inches hitting the ground every hour, it swelled with those coming off the streets. People slept on the floor, or on small metal benches. "It was safe," Byer pointed out, "but not too comfortable."

During that time, Byer said he spoke with others who had friends waiting out the storm on the streets, or, more commonly, in subway cars and train stations. Others, he heard, were kicked out of certain locations for arguing or fighting, but these were more personal issues.

Overall, though, he said the city "did a little better" than last year with the homeless response. But still, problems persist. "There should be specific places for situations like this," Byer, who is also a member of Picture the Homeless, a grassroots organization made up of the city's most vulnerable, argued. "An emergency space with shelter and a meal, instead of a bed in an emergency room. Just somewhere people can rest their head safely at night."

Regardless, Byer said he was grateful for his stay at the hospital, whose personnel did feed its occupants, and said he preferred it any day over a city shelter, which are notoriously perilous and decrepit. That issue, along with supportive housing and employment, are things that do not disappear after the storm, Byer reminded me.

Routhier of the Coalition of the Homeless agreed, and told me she received a call this morning about a heating issue from a city shelter. The lobby at the Coalition, she added, was already filled with those who had complaints, many of which were storm-related.

"The city sees the temporary shelter and outreach work as an easy, quick solution, like that's enough," Byer argued. "They pat themselves on the back, like they did something really big."

"But what happens after the storm?" he then asked me. "We just go back to the same situation."

To help the homeless in NYC, residents are encouraged to volunteer, either as outreach workers, tutors in shelters, or homeless prevention. You could also donate to, or volunteer with, the Coalition for the Homeless's food van. Many shelters, like the Bowery Mission, take donations as well, and have volunteers feed the homeless. Clothes for those in need can be donated to New York Cares.

Follow John on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: The Mom of 'Jihadi Jack' Says He Isn't a Jihadi at All

0
0

Jack Letts via Facebook

Read: What Going to School with Jihadi John Taught Me About Radicalization

Jack Letts, a white British Muslim from Oxford, is apparently not a member of ISIS, as was reported over the weekend, but a humanitarian aid worker. This is according to his mom, who spoke to the Evening Standard about the claims. Letts was dubbed "Jihadi Jack," but his mother Sally has said her son did not leave the UK for Syria to join the Islamic State, saying she is "bemused" by reports that he did.

Letts headed to Syria after becoming enamored with the Arab Spring demonstrations in 2011. According to his mom, he has worked in hospitals and taught a bit while stationed out there. Understandably, though, as he wears a camouflage shirt and a wispy beard and has been photographed in the Middle East, the right-wing media came to the natural conclusion that he instead spends his time waging jihad.

The media had previously reported that Jack had an Iraqi wife, along with a son named Mohammed. His mom, on the other hand, insists he is just "naive" and that "he had never had a weapon in his life."

Sally told the Standard: "It is not as if he is hiding—he tells us what he has for breakfast. All this is absolutely ridiculous; it is shocking. Somehow he is supposed to be a global jihadi? It is absolutely ridiculous."

How to Trick Someone into Telling You How to Buy a Kidney in Bangladesh

0
0

All screencaps via VICE on HBO

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.

During season 3 of VICE on HBO, correspondent Vikram Gandhi looked at the harsh business of buying black market kidneys in Bangladesh. If you're a patient suffering from kidney failure in the US, one growing trend is the purchase of kidneys from abroad, where there are fewer obstacles in the way of a simple money-for-organ transaction.

But as we saw in the episode above, organs typically only flow up the world's social hierarchy. Some of the world's poorest people are willing go under the knife, in exchange for a cash windfall. But despite the fact that humans only need one kidney to live, the removal operation can permanently harm the donors—if "donor" is even the right word in cases like these.

So to get people to reveal the details of a messy process that saves lives on one hand, ruins lives on another, and involves money changing hands every step of the way, Gandhi and producer Alex Braverman had to perform some sleight of hand. With a little bit of undercover work, brokers and potential kidney providers will reveal how the black market system works, and how one can become the lucky recipient of a new kidney, if the price is right.

I asked segment producer Alex Braverman to lift the curtain a little on the investigative process, and apart from a few trade secrets, he was happy to oblige.

VICE: So why'd you have to trick people in order to get to the bottom of this?
Alex Braverman: People are not supposed to be selling their kidneys in Bangladesh. In order to prevent exactly what is happening there from happening, a law was implemented to basically make it so that family members could donate to someone else in their family who was the proper blood match. So anyone that's purchasing a kidney or selling a kidney to a stranger is breaking the law. To hear how the system works from a broker—some of them were comfortable talking about it and others weren't—we had to either let someone lie to us, or record it in a hidden way.

How'd you figure out who to talk to?
In the show, we go and talk to a young girl in her 20s, and she's someone that Dr. Zaman helped us find who was about to get a kidney from someone, and she was in Dhaka. She asks in the piece Should I tell them about the broker? and her parents are like No no no. But eventually, through her father, we got the name of a broker.

The guy in Dhaka seemed kind of like a big shot. What's his part in all this?
First there's a kind of broker that can help you make all the arrangements you need—a sort of big picture person—and that's who we met in the hotel room in Dhaka. The first guy is hustling. He wants you to follow through with the transaction, so he puts you at ease, and lets you know that you or your family member will receive a kidney, and it's gonna work out fine.

Did you have to sneak him into the hotel?
He wasn't doing anything wrong by talking to us, but he had no idea he was being filmed. We told him "When you get to the hotel, call this room from the lobby when you get there." It was just Vikram who went down to the lobby to grab him. He didn't want to talk about it in the lobby, so he just came right up.

How'd that conversation go?
He was probably in the hotel with us for 30 minutes at the most. Vikram had a bunch of questions that he wanted to ask. First he laid out his situation: that he was in from the , and he said "This is very difficult in the States, there's a list, I don't know if I can wait that long because of the deterioration of my wife's health." It seemed like the broker had heard it all before, and he never hesitated to answer those questions. That's just what he does and has done a number of times. There are places where you can do this kind of thing that are closer to the US than Bangladesh, but he didn't seem to be disturbed by that fact at all.

Where were you during this conversation?
I was in the next room over with the sound guy and the crew, listening. I wasn't shocked by what he was saying—I'd flown halfway around the world because I'd been told it worked that way, and I was discovering that it worked exactly how it had been described. There's something a little bit mundane about it, but it's a bit of a relief to know that you're going to be able to tell this story, even though obviously it's sad to see people being taken advantage of.

How was the conversation with the second kidney broker different?
That was more exciting to me than the hotel, because the guys in Dhaka seem like they're just providing a service for those that can pay for it, while the guys working with people who can't pay their loans seemed more predatory, and like a bigger part of the story.

Was it easy to get him in the room, like it was with that first guy?
He was very skeptical to meet with us—for good reason, but Vikram can be very convincing. I hesitate to call the broker sleazy, because of the language barrier, but I will say this: He was at one point desperate enough to sell one of his kidneys, and he knows what these people are going through. He showed us his scar. He was having health complications—and yet he is actively recruiting new people to go through that same process so that he can make some money. Although it's also so they can make some money, so it's not simple. Are they having second thoughts about this when they see him limping and struggling to get around and having a distended belly?

And how'd you get him on camera?
We were staying in a guest house in the north of the country and came up with a story that we felt legitimized us and invited him over to discuss it and had some hidden cameras set up. We were monitoring it from adjacent rooms. We had a place where we wanted him to sit. I don't want to give away all the trade secrets because we continue to shoot with hidden cameras when we need to but essentially there was one area in the room where we wanted him to sit because that's where our cameras would have picked him up. So we just made sure that was the only seat that was available.

And how was the conversation?
He just came over, and we had the meeting, and then ate lunch with him afterwards because we were in a guest house and asked him if he was hungry and he sat down and ate with us. Every meal in Bangladesh involves a lot of rice, lentils, bread. I think we had stewed fish a number of times, chicken. The food was really good, actually.

How'd you get him to bring in the donor?
We wanted to see what the process of negotiating a price would be. So the broker called the person willing to sell their kidney and he came over. I never actually saw him face to face cause I was in another room, but Vikram met with him again. He went through the story of why we were there, and made sure that this man understood that we wanted to purchase his kidney, and was he willing to sell it. Then the issue of price came up. I think this is in the final piece where he asked for a certain number and Vikram talked him down and they agreed upon it and shook hands. The guy was crying. He was emotional.

Was he crying because it was a life-changing amount of money?
Yeah, he was crying because of the amount of money and he was also crying because he was scared.

Did you feel bad that this guy wasn't getting his payday?
I did. At the same time, we felt equally as bad for those who we had met who had entered similar arrangements and did go through with the surgery and still were not paid. That's something that happens as well where they're promised $6,000 or $8,000 for their kidney and then in the end they get maybe one or two and the broker's like, "Sorry, that's how much you're getting."

Was shooting it as emotionally taxing as it seems like it would be?
The whole time we were there we just thought, "Wow this is one of the darkest shoots any of us have ever been on."It was a journey. We didn't know what our everyday was gonna look like. We flew out there with the information that we had and just tried to meet the right people that could make this story happen, and ultimately it did end up happening, which is exhilarating but also incredibly depressing.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Flint's Water Crisis Is Leaving Undocumented Immigrants at Risk

0
0

Members of the Michigan National Guard go door to door delivering clean water to residents of Flint, Michigan—but many undocumented immigrants are too scared of deportation to accept the help. Photo via the National Guard's Flickr page

Antonio and his longtime girlfriend Gabriela (not their real names) moved to Flint, Michigan from Mexico 16 years ago. They're both undocumented immigrants. Deportation is a daily fear, but one they say is worth the risk to raise their four daughters in America. They earn below minimum wage, socialize mostly with other immigrants, and keep to the east side of the city, as precautions against getting deported.

Now they, along with the rest of Flint's undocumented immigrants, have another precaution to take—and this one could seriously affect their health. They have to figure out a way to access clean, lead-free drinking water while remaining anonymous.

The water crisis in Flint reached a fever pitch this month, when both Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and President Barack Obama finally declared a state of emergency in the city. Flint had sourced its water from Lake Huron for years, tired of being at the mercy of Detroit's water rates, city leaders decided in 2013 to build their own way of getting water, via the KWA pipeline. To save money while the pipeline was being built, the city started using water from the Flint River in April 2014.

The move was immediately met with resistance: People showed up to city council meetings holding bottles filled with yellow water, complaining that their hair was falling out, or that their dog had died, and demanding to know what was coming out of their tap.

It turned out to be lead, as university and hospital researchers exposed in September 2015. It would be months before the state government took action on the severity of the contamination.

The past few weeks have been chaotic as officials scramble to get water and filters to Flint's nearly 100,000 residents. Hundreds of people line up daily at the fire stations that have been converted into distribution centers, where residents can take home cases of fresh water to last through the day. But amid the frenzy, most of Flint's undocumented immigrants—there are at least 1,000, based on estimates from local advocates—have avoided the distribution centers altogether, where they fear they'll be outed as undocumented.

Read: The Drinking Water Is Poisoning Children in Flint, Michigan

Antonio and Gabriela live just a couple blocks from the closest water distribution center, but they've stayed in their living room rather than collect clean water. They're scared of being asked for proof of legal residency, but they're also scared of what's happening to their family's health.

Gabriela's 11-month-old baby has a rash scaling her back. The skin looks normal, but it feels rough to the touch—the texture of eczema. Gabriela said the baby's been bathing in Flint water her entire life and has developed these skin rashes as a result.

About a year ago, the couple started suspecting the tap water was tainted, so when their daughter was born, they used bottled water to mix her formula. The rest of the family continued drinking Flint water until this past September when the lead contamination was confirmed. Now, Gabriela is worried about her baby daughter, because she drank Flint water during her entire pregnancy.

"I'm scared because we don't know if there's lead in her body, or in her brain, or if she'll get sick," she said.

Any level of lead exposure can be toxic, but the crisis in Flint is particularly dangerous for children. Babies who are exposed to lead in the womb are at a higher risk for learning disabilities and stunted growth; children may experience hearing loss, skin rashes, irritability, and developmental delays when they come in contact with any amount of lead.

Antonio and Gabriela's 11-month-old daughter sips bottled water out of a straw. Photo by the author

Another undocumented immigrant, Lucia (also not her real name), remembers the day she turned on the faucet and the water came out yellow. Since then, she's been buying bottled water for herself and her son, but it's hard to do on her salary.

Lucia, a single mother, went to a distribution center earlier this month seeking clean water, but a volunteer asked to see a driver's license. In Michigan, individuals can't get a driver's license without proof of legal residence, so Lucia doesn't have one. As of January 22, the rules have changed and IDs aren't required to get water anymore, but Lucia is still too scared to go near the distribution centers.

"I'm not here legally, and I'm scared that they'll arrest me, and then deport me," she said.

Volunteers with the American Red Cross knock on doors on Flint's east side, trying to distribute water. Photo by the author

A few good samaritans have come forward to help: Four months ago, Paul Donnelly, a deacon for the Roman Catholic Church, was sent to work at St. Mary's Church on Flint's east side, where most of the city's undocumented immigrants live. Donnelly, who is a young, Spanish-speaking American, has made it a priority to hand out water to the immigrant community over the past few weeks.

Besides the immigrants' fear, Donnelly says part of the problem is the language barrier: "They don't watch English language news at all," he told me. "Some of them in the last two weeks, one week, because they've heard about the lead from family members who live far away."

Officials at the city, county, state, and federal level are now overseeing operations to get clean water to residents; volunteers, nonprofits, and churches have also stepped in to help. Major corporations like Budweiser are donating tens of thousands of cases of water, and even local medical marijuana dispensaries are holding water drives.

Red Cross volunteers have also tried to deliver cases of water to residents on Flint's east side, where most of the undocumented immigrants live, but many of them refuse to answer the door. In the past two weeks, Antonio and Gabriela have heard rumors of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and they're even more fearful of the risk of deportation than the toxins in the water.

"We don't know what types of illnesses come from lead," said Gabriela, "but the future scares and worries us."

Follow Natalie Zarowny on Twitter.

The 'Doctor' Who Implanted Goat Balls on Men and Tried to Become Governor of Kansas

0
0

Still of John Romulus Brinkley from 'NUTS!' Photo courtesy of Big Time PR

Just over halfway through this year's crop of Sundance documentaries, some of the memorable films include a remarkably intimate, vérité portrait of sex scandal-ridden politicos (Weiner); a searching, interview-laden inquiry into whether "the internet dreams of itself" by Werner Herzog (Lo and Behold); and a doc/fiction hybrid on suicidal TV journalist Christine Chubbuck ( Kate Plays Christine). On the scale of formal inventiveness and outrageous, headline-grabbing subject matter, however, no one has quite matched Penny Lane. The director's much-buzzed-about NUTS! follows the story of radio pioneer, huckster surgeon, and failed Kansas gubernatorial candidate John Romulus Brinkley, who grafted goat testicles on impotent men, claiming it would cure them.

Did it? Of course not. But for decades, from the tail end of World War I until just before D-Day, Brinkley's increasingly popular quackery could not be contained. The surgeries, performed at a hospital he opened in the town of Milford, Kansas, and later in Texas, left scores of men maimed and dying and the nascent American Medical Association repeatedly sought to stop him. The AMA succeeded in getting both his medical and broadcast licenses taken away in Kansas, but not before he had made millions with the surgeries and other medical products of dubious merit.

Blending stark yet simple animation, talking heads, and tons of archival footage to create a humorous and haunting portrait of Brinkley, NUTS! leaves you wanting to believe the charismatic "doctor," however. Brinkley, who claimed to be a medical professional although he was never formally trained, was nothing if not persuasive.

"You'd rather live in a world where the story he's telling you is true," Lane told me in her hotel room hours before NUTS!'s premiere on Friday night. The 37-year-old Colgate University professor and director of Our Nixon, a virtuoso avant-garde found-footage documentary about the former president that aired on CNN in 2013, was anxious to present the film. "A lot of times I would tell people about it and they'd be like, 'Did it work?'" she said.

In NUTS!, one catches glimpses of Brinkley in very odd home movies and found audio pieces; he'll talk about the strange beauty of flowers or tarpons one second, and pivot to the talking about the potential for ancient "Incan" skin creams to help your eyesight. But much of the storytelling is done in an animated retelling of his epic life in six chapters that reveal him to be a man who inspired perverse loyalties—his wife went to her grave in the 1980s, over 40 years after his death, claiming the goat graft surgery worked and was still practiced—and tragic legacies (his son, to whom Brinkley delivered long, hypocritical lectures, committed suicide in the 1970s). The would-be governor was a demagogue every bit as salient as Donald Trump, whose savvy use of new media Brinkley's story forewarns, and Louisiana governor Huey Long.

After stumbling upon a biography of Brinkley's at the library, Lane wanted to make a film about him right away. "It'll be easy," Lane recalled thinking, surprised that such an outlandish and bizarre American story hadn't already been brought to the cinema and thinking she could tell his story in a straightforward fashion. Eight years in the making, the film mixes stark animated passages with more traditional talking heads and archival stills and motion-picture recordings. Lane decided to tell the story using mostly animation almost two years into the process, after discovering there wasn't enough existing archival footage of Brinkley to tell his story with the breadth she had hoped. "There was no way to bring you close to this guy just using the archival," Lane said.

A closer look at Brinkley reveals a man whose deeds might be described as the work of a sociopath, a con man who didn't care which stories he spun. Originally from North Carolina, he reinvented himself in place after place. A self-conscious self-promoter, he was a firebrand populist who threatened the establishment in an era of rising income inequality. Brinkley's personal brand was one of the first to be broadly expanded by broadcast media, as an unusually powerful radio station he built and owned in Geary County, KFKB, reached radio listeners nationwide (it later became the station where famed rock 'n' roll DJ Wolfman Jack rose to fame).

After he lost his medical license, Brinkley ran for governor of Kansas and may very well have won; the election of 1930 is widely considered stolen as the establishment Democratic political machine of the era threw out over 50,000 write-in ballots for Brinkley in a tight election.

If Brinkley's story teaches us anything, it's that men will do anything to fix their broken penises. More philosophically, NUTS! is about how hard times make people want to believe in simple explanations for complex phenomena, miracle cures, leaders who promise us that they can solve the world's problems by magic. Like the politicians who cater to our basest fears today, Brinkley was a master manipulator, an expert wearer of masks. He was good at "using the ideas of populism without actually having anything behind it," as Lane said. Maybe the most horrifying thing about Brinkley is how well he would fit into the present day.

Follow Brandon on Twitter.


How Scared Should I Be?: How Scared Should I Be of Another Recession?

0
0

Photo by the author

In the column "How Scared Should I Be?" VICE staff writer and generalized anxiety disorder sufferer Mike Pearl seeks to quantify the scariness of the world he lives in. We hope it helps you to more wisely allocate that most precious of natural resources: your fear.

I'm not a financial news junkie. In fact, I'm one of those people who tries in vain to delete the "Stocks" app every time there's a new iOS update. But I still keep the global economy in my peripheral vision, like a way-too-shitty driver swerving around in my rear-view mirror. I was one of those job seekers whose prospects were completely T-boned by the 2008 financial crisis, and I'm not looking forward to the next (metaphorical) crash.

So I couldn't help but notice that the stock market has been tanking lately. On Friday, stocks saw a bit of a reprieve after a week's worth of punishment. Driven largely by a decline in energy prices, the Standard & Poor's index suffered a grisly 6.9 percent drop at the worst moment of the recent decline. Even after things improved Friday, Francisco Blanch, researcher at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch told MSNBC this is not the end of the energy decline.

But something scarier than a stock market decline has also been going on: People are getting laid off. Initial unemployment claims—a.k.a. new faces showing up in the unemployment line—increased by 1,000 last week according to the latest report from the Labor Department. That represents the biggest spike in claims since last July. After years of consistent improvement in the employment situation, the trend is showing signs that it could reverse.

Now, in the aftermath of last year's stock market crash in China, and at a time when there's more bad news coming out of the Eurozone, that chilling word "recession" is showing up in headlines. I'll admit it: I've started getting a little scared, regardless of whether or not I should. I already know what President Franklin Roosevelt would say about how scared I should be, so instead of asking him, I asked a financial analyst.

George Pearkes researches and analyzes macroeconomics, credit, and equities for the Bespoke Investment Group. He knows a thing or two about what kind of scary shit is happening to everyone's money. His advice was very encouraging, but it merits a follow-up if there does end up being a recession in 2016. Below is the text of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:

Like economics? Check out our documentary about the fraud industry.

VICE: Let's start from the beginning. When do recessions happen?
George Pearkes: People get carried away, and do too much investment—whether it's in inventories, fixed assets, or what-have-you, or they consume too much. They realize that they've become overextended. They plowed too much into stuff that's going to pay off in the future, and they contract activity. Businesses, households, even governments in some cases, which is regrettable.

And is that happening now?
We haven't seen that. We haven't seen a drastic, economy-sized investment in a single economic sector.

Sounds like you're talking about bubbles. Does there need to be a bubble for there to be a recession?
Since World War II, there's always been some kind of over investment. Sometimes it's really significant, like the housing bubble, and then you get a really significant recession, and sometimes it's just a normal business cycle.

Could a recession happen without a bubble?
It would be unprecedented, I think it's safe to say, for the US economy to be dragged down while consumer final demand is still chugging along. It's really rare to see final demand collapse without a reason for it, without some kind of overextension somewhere—without large numbers of people being fired, without incomes dropping rapidly, without some kind of shock that takes place. It's possible, but it would be very unlikely for that to happen.

The global economy is kind of fucked. Should that scare me?
It's extremely unlikely for a recession to come from abroad. The rest of the global economy isn't looking great, but the US economy is one of the most closed in the world: If you look at trade percentage of global GDP, it's very small—it's us and a couple of African countries . We just don't have that much of a direct economic relationship with the rest of the world, which surprises people.

Let's get to the bad news, though. You've seen some scary headlines, right?Today , I think I saw my first economic statistic where I thought OK, this I need to pay more attention to, because this is not moving in a direction that I like. That statistic was initial jobless claims.

I saw that too. But the unemployment level is still pretty low on the whole, right?
The level is less important than them rising quickly off of the all-time low. Basically the way initial jobless claims work is people file less and less until you hit the sort of top of the economy, and then the economy quickly deteriorates when people start filing initial claims. We haven't gotten to the point where the data screams We are going into a recession! but it's something to take note of.

Stocks really took a nosedive too. Should I be worried about what I have stashed away in my IRA and 401K plans?
For the average person on the street looking at the stock market, never go and liquidate your 401K, or go all cash, because you'll get back in at the wrong level, and you'll sell low and buy high. You're not going to need retirement money for 30 years at the earliest—probably a lot later. There is no reason at all that you should ever even be looking at the stock market.

So with jobless claims up, along with the declines in the stock market, why shouldn't we all panic?
Typically, going into a recession, commodity prices are rising, or near local peaks; right now, we're the complete opposite. Business investment tends to roll over into a recession, and that hasn't really happened outside of the oil and gas sector. Real final demand from consumers tends to soften; that has not happened at all. You tend to see stuff in the labor flows data that shows people leaving the labor force, and that hasn't happened. Loan growth tends to decelerate from banks. That hasn't happened. Consumer confidence tends to roll over fairly in advance of a recession and that hasn't happened. You tend to see the various points on the Treasury Yield Curve get much narrower.

So let's say it's all true and there's a recession. What happens next?
There's a concept in economics called the Paradox of Thrift. Its turns out that if everyone tries to save money at the same time, everyone earns less. If everyone earns less, people try to save more money, and so on and so fourth, down the chain. When people do that—when they stop buying stuff when their credit cards, and start socking money away in a mattress, when they sell stocks and put the money in a deposit account in the bank—it absolutely makes things worse. The question is, how bad do things get? In a normal recession, this usually doesn't carried too far out of control.

But again, if it does, should we all exchange our money for Bitcoins or something?
Talking to the average person, in a cold, hard, statistical way, it's not likely that you'll get fired. It's not likely that you'll have a massive pay cut dumped on you, and it's not likely that you're going to suffer really, really grievous harm.

Unlikely maybe, but what if I get the worst of it?
You should already have money saved up—whatever you can afford. You shouldn't be trying to time what your savings rate is based on what the Wall Street Journal says in the headlines, or what HuffPo's economy section says about economic data, or what some guy pontificating in an interview in VICE has to say about the economy. You should be saving three months' expenses, or whatever you can afford. You should be contributing to a 401K, and you shouldn't be worrying about what the stock market is doing day to day.


Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of a New Recession?

1/5: IDGAF*

*Based on current economic indicators.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Brooklyn Guy Lists Igloo on Airbnb for $200, Which Almost Seems Reasonable

0
0


Images via Imgur

It's no secret that living, visiting, and even breathing in the vicinity of the New York City Metropolitan Area can make your bank account question its very right to exist. There are entire websites dedicated to shaming the numerous real estate listings of dilapidated ratholes that apparently someone along the way thought fit for human dwelling in the city's buroughs. During the massive snowstorm that hit the east coast of the US this weekend, the price gouging was no less chill—someone had the audacity to try and rent out a goddamn igloo on Airbnb.

The igloo, named "Boutique Winter Igloo for 2" was located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and was up for $200 per night. The listing was pulled down after six hours.

"Dripping with ingenuity and alt-lifestyle aura lays the Snowpocalypse of 2016's most desirable getaway," read the description. "Hand-crafted, and built using only natural elements—we're offering the experience of a lifetime in this chic dome-style bungalow for you and bae."

For interior photos, the Airbnb listing showed the floor of the igloo covered in blankets accompanied by a few of plastic-encased pillows and a single, small round window cut into the side of the snow structure.

Other amenities boasted in the igloo listing: air conditioning, shampoo, washer, and dryer. The host, Patrick, even claimed that dwelling, completely made of snow, had a bathroom, though no such room was pictured on the ad.

While the listing was a probably a joke—or, at least, we hope it was—$200 is actually a pretty good deal considering the average cost of a hotel room in Brooklyn, provided you don't mind freezing your ass off.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

West vs East Fight Over Energy East Pipeline Leaves Little Room for Adult Debate

0
0


A TransCanada Keystone pipeline. Photo via Flickr user Shannon Ramos

In the past week, many conservative politicians in Canada proved that they are not adults, but just infants cleverly disguised as adults. Consider the response to the Montreal mayor Denis Coderre's announcement that he (and 81 other municipal leaders) is not down with the construction of TransCanada's Energy East pipeline through his turf. Instead of simply saying, "Hello Denis, you actually don't have the authority as a municipal government to block the construction of the 1.1 million barrel/day pipeline as the approval process falls under the jurisdiction of a federal regulator," some of the country's most prominent right-wing figures essentially tried to blackmail him under completely imagined pretenses. In short, they've been playing rhetorical Calvinball.

Take Brad Wall, Saskatchewan Premier and rumoured Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidate, who tweeted: "I trust Montreal area mayors will politely return their share of $10B in equalization supported by west." Or Derek Fildebrandt, finance critic for Alberta's far-right Wildrose Party, who babbled: "If Quebec has such a big problem with our energy industry, it can give back the $73B in Equalization." This refrain was also reiterated by Edmonton Sun columnist Lorne Gunter and "The Rebel" himself, Ezra Levant. But the idea that "the West" pays for Quebec isn't remotely close to reality.


Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall. Photo via Facebook

Here are the boring details. Since the late 1950s, the federal government has redistributed tax dollars to poorer provinces to ensure they don't have to blow up hospitals or cut off education at Grade 3. It's typical socialist hogwash (although the money is given unconditionally like God's love, so the province can do whatever the fuck it wants with it). The idea was immortalized on paper in 1982, when Canada finally scored its very own constitution. Since then, provinces endowed with lots of oil—read: Alberta—have moaned about how smaller and poorer provinces have benefited from their wealth.

If anyone cared to actually look at how equalization transfers (which are one of three major transfers, along with the Canada Social Transfer and Canada Health Transfer) work, they'd quickly realize that money is distributed from the federal government's general revenue fund, which is collected via taxes like personal income, corporate income, and GST (so technically, Alberta's citizens as a whole would pay more into the fund then say citizens of Nova Scotia). Provinces don't "give" any money to the fund. Taxes would continue to be collected at the same rate, even if equalization payments ended (which they won't without a constitutional amendment).

At the heart of the idiocy spouted by conservatives like Wall and Fildebrandt is a regurgitation—a snotty sneeze combined with throwing up, if we're going to get technical about it—of the complex history of Western alienation. To condense Mary Janigan's excellent and very dense bookLet the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark into a single sentence: the Prairie provinces fought for decades in order to finally attain resource control in 1930, got really fucking pissed in the 70s when the federal government implemented an export tax on crude oil, and then burst into goddamn flames when Pierre Trudeau introduced the National Energy Program in 1980. Slamming Coderre for slamming the only pipeline that feasibly has a chance of being constructed in Canada in the near future arguably channels such resentment.

But the way that such dissatisfaction is manifesting is not only completely erroneous for all the boring reasons listed before, but it's drowning out thoughtful criticisms of Coderre et al that are actually grounded in reality. Think of Calgary's mayor Naheed Nenshi ("I've got a lot of respect for Mayor Coderre on this, however he's wrong") and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley (who called such opposition "short-sighted").

The argument goes that Alberta's energy sector is hurting in a very real way and the plunge in global oil prices has dragged down the Canadian dollar to a staggering low. Energy East wouldn't increase greenhouse emissions but just replace emissions generated by oil imported to Montreal from foreign jurisdictions. Without new pipeline access to transport energy products to other jurisdictions and/or fulfill domestic demands, the country's trade balance will remain in a deep deficit. In the words of Nenshi: "This country works because prosperity for one part of the country is prosperity for the entire country."

But diplomacy apparently isn't in the cards for many: the Wildrose Party—Alberta's official opposition, which still hasn't released a shadow budget or alternate climate change plan despite having months to do so—insists "it's clear the NDP government's plan for a new carbon tax to get the "social license" for pipelines is failing" and that Notley needs to "fight" for pipelines. Yet the day after Montreal's rejection of Energy East, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announced tentative support of the pipeline due to the very climate change plan denounced by the Wildrose. If it's going to happen, convincing Coderre and other municipal leaders to get on board with Energy East will likely take much more of same sort of statecraft.

Of course, such tactics may not result in the 1,600 dopamine boosts AKA retweets that Brad Wall's deeply ignorant statement received. But being a grownup in charge of an entire province isn't always fun.

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.

​Canada’s First Twitter Harassment Trial Sets a Scary Precedent for Women

0
0

Gregory Alan Elliott is seen outside Ontario court in Toronto on Friday, Jan. 22, 2016 after a judge found him not guilty of criminally harassing two women. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Colin Perkel

The internet just became an even uglier place for Canadian women.

The verdict in what's believed to be Canada's first Twitter harassment trial was announced on Friday. In a precedent-setting move, the Ontario Court of Justice decided that harassing women online is not a crime.

Judge Brent Knazan found Gregory Alan Elliott not guilty of criminally harassing Toronto feminists Steph Guthrie and Heather Reilly. To many observers, Knazan's decision illustrated that the legal system does not fully understand violence against women nor the basic ways in which Canadians function online.

For background: Guthrie told police she felt harassed after several heated interactions with Elliott in the summer of 2012. Even after she blocked him, he continued to barrage her with tweets, and made it clear he had detailed knowledge of the neighbourhood she lived in. He would also co-opt hashtags she invented, aggressively inserting himself into conversations about her organization Women in Toronto Politics. (Full disclosure: I know Guthrie through Toronto's relatively small feminist circles, I admire her work, and we are friendly when we see each other both online and in person).

Meanwhile, Reilly was "concerned" because of extensive and misogynistic tweets from Elliott, and because he tweeted about the scene at the Cadillac Lounge, a popular bar in Toronto's Parkdale neighbourhood, on a night when she was there.

Both women blocked Elliott and told him not to contact them further.

Back to the verdict: In order for Elliott to be found guilty, it had to be proven that he knew he was harassing the women, and that they were fearful as a result. It also had to be proven that their fear was reasonable.

Knazan decided that Elliott was not aware he was harassing Guthrie, and that her fear was not reasonable. He decided that Elliott did know he was harassing Reilly.

But she didn't explicitly testify that she was "fearful"—instead, she said she was "concerned." Because of that, and because he deemed her fear unreasonable anyway, the charges against Elliott were dismissed.

Knazan did, however, rule that both women were harassed, and that some of Elliott's tweets were "vulgar" and "hurtful."

Many people are now asking why, then, was Elliott found not guilty? Further, why was someone who could never understand what it is to be terrorized in this way put in charge of gauging the legitimacy of women's fear?

Elliott's trial was one of the most closely-watched in recent Canadian history. Photo via Sarah Ratchford

This verdict is troubling. A precedent has now been set that if a person is harassed online, that harassment will not be deemed criminal unless a physical element is introduced, or unless the harasser repeatedly uses violent language.

"My reaction to that ruling was 'Great, it's open season on women now,'" Ontario NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo told VICE. "You can say whatever you will about whatever woman you want, it's just freedom of expression."

It's clear that Knazan does not understand the fear of violence women carry around with them, and at what point in an interaction with a man that fear begins to manifest. He repeatedly said that there were no physical or sexual threats made. But the women did feel threatened, and that's how violence begins: with threatening and controlling behaviour. Violence comes from those who ignore other people's boundaries. The internet is a largely unregulated space where people who ignore others' boundaries can flourish.

Knazan himself said "It is reasonable that fear can arise just from the fact of someone continuing to contact someone after being asked to stop. That behaviour could reasonably signify that the person who continued the contact was capable of anything since they ignored the request."

We live much of our lives online now, and as such, a person who trails a woman on the internet after being asked not to engage with her is guilty of virtual Peeping Tomism.

But that reality seems lost on Knazan. During the trial, Crown counsel asked Reilly to explain what she meant by Elliott's Cadillac Lounge tweet being "concerning." She said she had "no idea what his future intent could be if he had chosen to escalate the harassment from online to in-person."

She testified that the implication he was physically present at the Cadillac gave her "the impression that he was stalking me though my tweets, and could potentially be at any location I was, and I felt that that could eventually lead to a threat against my personal safety. This appeared to escalate from name calling through to potential...this could be physical harm to me.'"

How could someone be any more explicit that they were fearful? But Knazan decided that if she was fearful, her fear was not reasonable.

In Guthrie's case, Knazan claims Elliott did not know Guthrie was harassed. Blocking, he says, is not necessarily a sign of feeling harassed (even though women everywhere will tell you that yes, it is). Further, Guthrie retweeted tweets about Elliott after blocking him. Knazan blames Guthrie for this, saying her continued acknowledgement of his existence would negate, in Elliott's mind, the idea that she was harassed.

Guthrie's crime, it appears, was speaking up for herself. If she felt harassed and was afraid, she apparently should have kept quiet with her finger over the "block account" function rather than speak out. As Guthrie testified, there is no perfect victim, but the courts officially fail to realize that.

In short, the courts have just sanctioned men to say whatever they want to women.

DiNovo says in her view, harassing someone online is no different than harassing them on the phone, or even knocking on their door and screaming in their face. Either way, she says, it's abusive behaviour that needs to stop, and now, the courts have only exacerbated it.

"This is obviously going to allow these men—because that's who they are—to proliferate, and to get away with more of ."

Saira Muzaffar is a founding member of Tech Girls Canada, an NGO that connects women in STEM fields with the greater tech community. Part of her work involves leading advocacy campaigns about the treatment of marginalized people in the workforce. As she says, "This is victim blaming in full view of the Canadian public."

Not only does Knazan not understand violence against women, he also admitted that he is unfamiliar with the way Twitter functions. He spent a chunk of the first hour of the verdict reciting what he had learned about the platform since the beginning of the trial. His woeful ineptitude is highlighted by how he apparently attributed a homophobic tweet from an "Eliott" parody account (note the spelling) to Elliott himself. (Which numerous media organizations, including us, quoted from the judgment.)

"That was the entirety of the evidence, so how could he feel that he was knowledgeable enough to proceed with making a judgment?" Muzaffar wonders.

"He misattributed this tweet and it's in the public record. Is he going to face repercussions for it?"

Knazan made several references to "real life" and the absence of sexual violence and physical attacks in this case, the subtext being that Twitter is not real life.

But it is real life, especially for people like Guthrie. Twitter is the place where she connects with people for work, friendship, and allyship.

The laws, as Muzaffar says, are simply too outdated to account for modern day crimes. This verdict, she's sure, will be harmful for not just women, but all marginalized people on the internet.

DiNovo says that since people live online now, it's common sense that women should be able to occupy that space without expecting to be abused every few minutes.

"That's a different kind of assault," DiNovo says, "when people are kept off of social media. They're not allowed to use a tool that men are allowed to use because of fear of assault."

"If, anytime you're on social media, that means you open yourself up to a world of abuse, is that okay? And, quite frankly, the fact that women are much more the subject of this than men, is that okay?"

I ask DiNovo how to deal with this going forward if the justice system won't take responsibility for it. She says she's still processing, but she floats the idea of introducing a new bill to address online harassment of and verbal violence toward women. She also said people could potentially be charged with hate speech for harassing others online. Either way, she says, the bar has to be set a lot higher than the threat of physical violence.

Once again, a man's "freedom of expression" trumps a woman's right to feel safe and secure.

And once again, it's been proven that Canada's justice system cannot be expected to serve women. As usual, it's going to be up to women to find a way to fix the mess.

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

One of Canada’s Most Notorious Sexual Predators Has Been Granted Day Parole

0
0


Graham James, pictured above, was convicted in 1997 for hundreds of counts of sexual abuse. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods)

A former junior hockey coach who was convicted of molesting several of his players in the 1990s is now being granted day parole from his prison in Laval, Quebec.

Graham James, the disgraced Western Hockey League (WHL) coach who was originally convicted in 1997 on hundreds of counts sexual abuse against a number of his players, was granted day parole today by a federal parole board in Quebec for a separate 2012 conviction.

James expressed some remorse at the hearing, but noted that he did not think what he was doing was wrong when he assaulted his victims.

"I clearly didn't see their unhappiness," he said.

"I think my life and the lives of many others would have been better had I not been a hockey coach."

According to the CBC, James is to complete six hours of community service a week and cannot be in the vicinity of anyone under 18, nor can he have authority over anyone under that age. The board said that it's too soon to grant full parole.

Day parole allows offenders to leave their prison or halfway house for the day to work or participate in society, but requires them to return at night to check in. In many cases, day parole eventually turns into full parole if the offender remains on good behaviour.

James has been in and out of jail since his 1997 conviction. After serving a sentence for the original charges in the 1990s that he committed as coach of the Swift Current Broncos in Saskatchewan, he was released and pardoned by a parole board in 2007.

In 2009, James was living in Mexico when former Calgary Flames forward Theo Fleury published his autobiography, which included accusations that James had abused him while serving as Fleury's junior coach. James was later taken to court and convicted in 2012 for the assaults he committed against Fleury and his cousin while they were playing in the WHL. Fleury expressed outrage on Twitter following the decision today.

The allegations against James, which were made public by then NHLer Sheldon Kennedy in 1996, shocked the Canadian hockey community and even prompted a change in the way in which the federal government grants pardons for past offenses.

READ MORE: Hockey Star to Country Singer: Music Has Helped Theo Fleury Battle His Demons

The decision follows last year's verdict in which James, being brought to trial again on new sexual assault charges from 1990, was convicted and given another two years on top of his remaining five-year sentence. In a statement to the court, the victim, who could not be named, said, "Graham James did this to me."

"He violated my trust, took away my dreams, my motivation, my spirit, my soul, my dignity."

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Self-Proclaimed Cannabis Delivery Driver Arrested for Transporting $100,000 Worth of Product

0
0


Wegadesk Gorup-Paul, pictured above, claims he was working as a delivery person for a medical marijuana producer in BC when he was stopped by police. Photo via Facebook

On January 12, a 28-year-old man named Wegadesk Gorup-Paul was pulled over for speeding nearby a ferry terminal in British Columbia. He was allegedly going 87 kilometres an hour when the speed limit shifted down to a 50-kilometre per hour zone. While it may initially have seemed like a routine traffic stop, Gorup-Paul then had his car searched by police—he says without a warrant—and cops found what they estimated to be around $100,000 worth of cannabis products including weed, hash, and shatter.

According to Gorup-Paul, however, he was working as a delivery person for a medical marijuana producer transporting products to medical dispensaries, hence the amount he was carrying in his car. Despite his explanation, Gorup-Paul has a court date on March 9 where he will face a charge of possession for the purpose of trafficking a controlled substance, which has a maximum penalty of life in prison.

"This industry has been given both the OK on the production side, and obviously the government has acknowledged that it is a healing medicine and that people need to have access to it," Gorup-Paul told VICE. "So how is it that people are supposed to get that medicine if people can't deliver it?"

Current Health Canada regulations state that for the six BC-based Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulation (MMPR)-licensed companies in existence, distribution to consumers is only allowed through the mail.

Gorup-Paul is known for his past as an internationally competing elite diver. "Numerous National and International titles provided the accomplishments necessary for me to speak publicly... my experiences as a First Nations child growing up amongst displaced people gave me much to talk about in regards to overcoming adversity and negativity," Gorup-Paul wrote on his Facebook page yesterday.

On top of Gorup-Paul's job working in the medical marijuana industry, he says he has also used cannabis to cope with alcoholism and sexual trauma he went through when he was younger. Gorup-Paul told VICE police cannot be blamed overall for what's happening to him, referencing an understanding that there is not yet a law in place to deal with his specific situation.

"Basically I'm just working with my lawyer to not go to jail and also, very importantly, to get the product back... I had a wholesale value of around $50,000 worth of stuff," he told VICE. "There are also a group of people who are MMAR-licensed growers who are out of this product, and not even them, but also the dispensary and all the people who would be getting that medicine."

Gorup-Paul had his GoFundMe page shut down due to their terms and conditions for campaigns. Yesterday, he set up a Facebook support page to help with his legal fees and can now only accept email transfers from those wanting to give donations.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

La Loche School Shooting Highlights Systemic Poverty and Racism: First Nations Leaders

0
0

Residents in La Loche console one another. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

On a morning in mid-October, a young man living in the Bridge River (Xwisten) First Nations near Lillooet, BC, entered his band office carrying a hammer and violently assaulted 10 people inside.

The perpetrator, David James, 22, died at the scene, reportedly of cardiac arrest. His attack sent ten people to the hospital, including two who were placed in critical care.

Amidst cries of horror and shock, there was another reaction: resignation.

James was extremely poor; band staffers, the same ones he beat with a hammer, had been trying to help him find a way to pay rent and find housing.

"He had complex social and health needs that our staff did not have the resources or training to adequately respond to," said Xwisten Band Chief Susan James, at the time, while Regional Chief Shane Gottfriedson remarked the same thing could happen in any band in the country.

In a way, it has.

The particulars in the La Loche, Saskatchewan shooting that took place Friday are much more sensational, of course.

A 17-year-old boy, reportedly bullied mercilessly about his appearance, shot dead brothers Dayne and Drayden Fontaine at a residence, before continuing his rampage at La Loche Community School, where he killed Adam Wood, a teacher, and teacher's aide Marie Janvier. The teen, who is a minor and can't be named, has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and seven counts of attempted murder.

It's being described as one of the worst school shootings in Canadian history, which is technically true, and explains why the story has dominated headlines across the country in recent days. But unlike similar situations that have occurred in the US, where the coverage quickly turns to conversations about gun control and extreme ideologies, the response here was markedly different. There seems to be an acknowledgment that there are larger systemic issues at play.

Those working on the ground say the underlying reason for the two outbursts, and an overarching problem with violence in Indigenous communities, is poverty. They're not surprised by what happened in La Loche. And judging by the relatively muted reaction coming from the public, Canadians aren't either.

"All of these incidents of internal violence in First Nations communities are pretty much a function of the crushing poverty that our Aboriginal communities endure on a daily basis," Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, told VICE.

"What has become abundantly clear in this case in La Loche is there are absolutely no services available, no fundamental basic services to the people there, save and except for the school itself."

Speaking to VICE News over the weekend, Kelly Patrick, former director of health for Métis Nation of Saskatchewan, said the high youth suicide rate in La Loche, coupled with a lack of mental health services and poverty, puts the shooting into "perspective."

"No one has been paying attention to this community," she said.

La Loche, a remote town of about 2,611 located 600 km north of Saskatoon, is home to the First Clearwater River Dene Nation. Members of the community are comprised of residential school survivors, many of whom experienced physical, sexual and verbal abuse at the hands of the government. Suicide rates in the general area are three times the province's average, according to the Keewatin Yatthe Regional Health Authority (43.4 deaths per 100,000 people versus 12.7 deaths per 100,000 people).

Despite Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall pointing to a provincially-sanctioned suicide prevention program, the fact remains La Loche lacks even a recreational centre to engage its young people.

"We just went through a dark, 10-year-long nightmare under the Harper regime where programs and services were harshly cut back and I think this is the consequence of it," said Chief Phillip.

Phillip said his own hometown, BC's Penticton Indian Reserve, suffered a triple homicide in 2004, in which a young man, apparently in the grips of a drug and booze-fuelled psychosis, shot three people at a party before slitting his own throat. The killer, Dustin Paul, 24 at the time, was a drug dealer who suffering from depression—his own father had been murdered in 1999.

"When you have circumstances like that that are a function of and a consequence of structural poverty, you're going to have these kinds of situations develop," Phillip said.

Usually, these "situations" quickly vanish from the public's memory, if they ever register in the first place, he added, a result of systemic racism.

"People shrug their shoulders and say, 'What would you expect, it's a First Nations community?'"

Had the La Loche shooting taken place in a white community, or one of Canada's urban centre, "governments would move heaven and earth to make investments to ensure it never happened again," he said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said his government will prioritize reconciliation with Canada's Indigenous people.

"Our hearts and prayers are also with those injured in the attack, that they may have a full and speedy recovery," he said after Friday's shooting.

But unless his government can start providing even the most basic of services to those desperately in need, he'll likely be repeating those words in the future.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: The Conspiracy Theory About Michael Jackson Composing Music for 'Sonic 3' Is Actually Probably True

0
0

For a long, long time, Sonic the Hedgehog fans have had their own conspiracy theory on par with any JFK assassination plot: Many believe that Michael Jackson secretly recorded some of the music for Sonic 3.

This isn't as crazy as it sounds—in 2005, one of the Sonic 3 composers, Brad Buxer, told a French magazine that Jackson had initially helped write some tracks, but that he wasn't sure if any of them had been used. Sega has always said that it did not work with Jackson, so it seemed like this would always be an unconfirmed rumor.

That all changed thanks to a massive Huffington Post feature published Monday that documented the history of the theory—and provided some proof:

"Six men—Brad Buxer, Bobby Brooks, Doug Grigsby III, Darryl Ross, Geoff Grace and Cirocco Jones—are listed as songwriters in Sonic 3's endgame scroll. Buxer, Grigsby and Jones tell The Huffington Post that Jackson worked with them on a soundtrack for Sonic 3—and that the music they created with Jackson ended up in the final product."

According to that story, Jackson, a huge Sega fan, visited the company's top-secret facility in Palo Alto, California, where the game was being developed. According to the executive coordinator of the team creating Sonic 3, that's when they asked Jackson if he would write music for the game.

It's unclear why Jackson's name was scrubbed from the game—some sources quoted in the story say that Sega didn't want to be involved with the pop star after he was accused of molesting children; others say that Jackson was unhappy with the sound quality and didn't want to be associated with the game.

For Sonic fans, this is big, big news, and relatively conclusive. Now they can move onto something new, like fighting about the color of Sonic the Hedgehog's arms.

The Rise and Fall of the Filipino Pool Craze

0
0

All photos by the author

Dennis Orcollo's pool career began when he was eight and his grandfather brought home a beat-up table. They lived in a coastal village on the Philippine island of Mindanao. Years before, Orcollo's father, a fisherman, was lost at sea in a storm. Soon the boy was spending entire nights on the table, and at age 16, he left home for a gold mining town called Campostela, where he hustled pool. Within days no-one would play the prodigious teen, and so he left for the capital, Manila, with a handful of dollars and nowhere to sleep. It was the mid 1990s and Orcollo had picked a good time: Pool had been a national sport since the Second World War. It was about to become lucrative too.

Today, you can find pool halls in Manila's restaurants, its schools, and even its slums, where some streets are ankle-deep in excrement and industrial slime. Each table is a refuge from horrible squalor—even in the worst neighborhoods, where locals make cash reconstituting leftover food for pennies, people shoot pool for three Filipino pesos (seven cents) a rack.

Some tables are operated by local strongmen who've salvaged them from scrap. Others, in upscale bars and casinos, are islands of shining green baize amid fogs of cigarette smoke. The dream of countless young sharks, when Orcollo arrived in town, was to work their way from the slums to the halls to the "money games," which were watched by hundreds and could earn hustlers thousands of dollars. By 2004, Orcollo was taking up to $5,000 a game from some of pool's biggest names, all over Manila.

"I started so small then I grew so much," said Orcollo, who is now known as pool's "Money Game King" and lives in Quezon City. "There's so much joy because I didn't really expect to do what I do for a career."

Pool has been popular in the Philippines since before World War II, after the country had been sold by Spain to the US in 1898. Its golden period wouldn't be until 1999, when Filipino Efren Reyes beat Taiwan's Chang Hao-Ping at the World Pool Association (WPA) Nine-Ball Championships in Cardiff, Wales. It was the sport's first televised final and Reyes, nicknamed Bata—"kid" in Tagalog—oozed laid-back charisma and came with a backstory of having worked his way up from a youth spent sleeping rough on pool tables.

Soon, pool in the Philippines got a cash infusion. Sponsors came onboard. Pool halls were renovated. Even the government pumped money into the game, backing players abroad and putting on tournaments at home. The country hosted two of the next eight WPA Nine-Ball Championships, and in 2008 the organization held its first-ever World Ten-Ball Champs in Manila, as the Nine-Ball tournament took a two-year hiatus due to the global economic crisis.

But despite a $400,000 purse, the biggest Filipino stars, including Reyes and Orcollo, didn't show. Why not?

The short answer: greed. Each player had his own manager, and each manager wanted a bigger slice of the pie. The best way to do that, they figured, was to set up independent tournaments where their own players would be the star turn.

"There was a crab mentality," said Ted Lerner, a Pennsylvania-born pool announcer and author who now lives near Manila. "These guys are starving to death and they can't even play in their own backyard."

Watch: Inside America's For-Profit Bail System

In most cases, competing in the Ten-Ball Championships would bring players more wealth and prestige. So why did so many let their managers keep them away? "Dennis's manager helped him out from the beginning when he was a nobody," Lerner said. "There's this sense of what Filipinos call utang na loob, a debt of gratitude. That gratitude culture is stronger than money."

The WPA Ten-Ball Championships were held in the Philippines in 2009 and 2011. But the country's biggest stars still stayed away. Its Nine-Ball cousin returned to Dohar, Qatar in 2010. But despite Francisco "Django" Bustamante's victory that year, Filipino stars weren't playing each other in the big games.

The money dried up. The sponsors and the government stopped financing as many games. The best players—Orcollo included—remained on the international circuit but spent less time competing at home. Kids in the slums still dreamt of stardom. But the top layer of Filipino pool had been shaved right off. Even the money games faded away. Promising young players took their talents elsewhere and are teaching pool in the US and other wealthy nations.

A lot of them want to be the next Orcollo. But the chances he took to be a global star have faded. "There are thousands of amazing players but no opportunity," said Lerner. "There's no system for them to get involved." Pool in the Philippines permeates every level of society. But its pinups have packed their bags.

What We Learned at Monday Night’s Democratic Town Hall

0
0

Bernie Sanders at the town hall forum hosted by CNN at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

After what has been literally years of mind-numbing speculation, next week the presidential primaries will begin at the Iowa caucuses. The Democratic field has already been narrowed to two, of course, and the scant number of that party's debates means that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders haven't appeared on the same stage very often—mostly, the two seem to exist in parallel universes of enthusiasm, each using their personal celebrity endorsers (Killer Mike and Lena Dunham, to name two) to hype up crowds.

But on Monday night, CNN gave the candidates one last chance to pitch themselves to the "undecided voter," a mythical breed of Iowans who still somehow haven't made up their minds after months of being pandered to. This time, however, the format was a town hall rather than a debate, where the three candidates (don't forget Martin O'Malley!) had 45 minutes each to take questions from an array of Americans who were either leaning, undecided, or just along for the ride.

The result was the purest distillation thus far of who these candidates are, and what stands between them.

First up was Sanders. If you've heard or seen the senator from Vermont bluster his way through attacks against the "rigged economy," this town hall basically doubled as his greatest hits album. Right off the bat, Sanders started rattling off stats about inequality, child poverty, and wage growth, before dissecting the stark disparities in wealth and health care profits. He was asked to define his brand of scary socialism (which is really just old-school liberalism), and his response reiterated his frequent call for "a political revolution to take on the billionaire class."

It's rhetoric pretty much every liberal Democrat can get behind—the question, now that Sanders is on the brink of winning at least one primary, is whether his policies could become reality if he became president. Moderator Chris Cuomo (whose brother, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, is backing Clinton) constantly brought up technicalities about funding and feasibility—the candidate's arguably weakest points—and Sanders was forced to defend his healthcare plan tax hikes and make a case for why Congress will somehow suddenly go from doing absolutely nothing (their current state) to passing some of the most ambitious social programs since FDR.

In his final plea, Sanders painted what was perhaps the most concise Venn diagram of himself and Clinton on the issues of climate change, Wall Street, the Iraq war, and trade policy. He also compared Clinton to Dick Cheney to illustrate that "experience" isn't always good. Sanders then ended on a somber note, saying his poor Jewish parents from Poland could never have imagined him running for president.

Then came O'Malley, who gave a fine performance but clearly represents the last dying breath of the JFK Democrats—the "ask not what your country can do for you" center-left young white progressive of the 1950s and 60s who believes in "fair market capitalism" and folksy activism. He flipped a question about LGBT discrimination laws into a starry-eyed embrace of creating a "more perfect union" with each passing generation, and then recalled his Democratic upbringing to explain his belief that America is great when its people are. Unfortunately for him, today's activist base isn't as much into genteel uplift as it is into the sort of clear-eyed, numbers-backed rage that Sanders can provide.

Watch our documentary on America's for-profit bail system

Finally, Hillary Clinton took the stage. It was clear almost immediately that the former Secretary of State is well-suited for the town hall format; the extra time gave her a chance to explain her positions and record, rather than squeezing them out into 15-second soundbites. That's something Sanders is better at—packing his anger into one-liners—but with the expansive time slot now, Clinton had a chance to shine.

Foreign policy barely made an appearance during Sanders's Q&A, while Clinton's session was dominated by the topic—Sanders has emerged as the economic candidate, while Clinton is running as the pragmatist who knows policy. And on Monday night, she truly let that side show, with fleshed-out responses that finally, for once, made the candidate look enthusiastic.

At one point, she basically gave an hour-by-hour itinerary of the Gaza troubles and Iran crisis when she was Secretary of State; she told the crowd where she went, who she met, and how fast she did it all. The point being not what she did, but that she could do it, and, furthermore, that she knows it.

For the first time in a while, Clinton genuinely came off as proud of her record, which is her strongest point. It was one of the few instances on a national stage where she mentioned her undercover work in the 1970s rooting out racist schools in the South. She mostly stayed away from discussing Wall Street or income inequality, but applauded her husband's administration, at times almost using it as a model of what her presidency would look like. (A lot of Democrats still love Bill Clinton, who stole the show at the 2012 party convention.)

If you watched last night, the choice couldn't have been clearer: Clinton is selling herself as the progressive candidate who can get things done and who has the foreign policy experience that Sanders lacks (which was the subtext of her remarks). Sanders is the anti-establishment figure who wants to shake things up, to enact real reform, to be the messiah that lefists have been waiting for their whole lives. O'Malley is, well, he's up on that stage too.

So please, can the primaries start now?

Follow John on Twitter.

Inside Day One of a New York City Police Killing Trial

0
0

NYC Police Officer Peter Liang, center, after pleading not guilty back in February. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

When police officers kill civilians, the chances of criminal prosecution are vanishingly small. No charges were brought against the Cleveland cop who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, for instance, nor the New York City officer who used a banned chokehold maneuver on Eric Garner—even though both incidents were captured on video. Among the thousands of fatal police shootings between 2005 and mid-2015, a tiny proportion—just 54—resulted in official charges, according to a Washington Post analysis.

But the people who stacked the benches of a Brooklyn courtroom Monday morning witnessed what could be an increasingly common sight in America: a criminal trial for a police officer who killed an unarmed civilian. The opening arguments in New York State Supreme Court centered on Peter Liang, an NYPD officer who shot and killed Akai Gurley, an innocent and unarmed black man, during a routine patrol of a Brooklyn housing project.

Around 11 PM on November 20, 2014, Gurley and his friend Melissa Butler were leaving her place at the Pink Houses, an East New York housing project. As was often the case, the building's elevators seemed to be broken, so they decided to take the poorly-lit stairs from the seventh floor. Simultaneously, Liang and his partner, Shaun Landau, were conducting what's known as a "vertical patrol"—itself a controversial practice where police monitor crime by sweeping the building's roof and staircases from top to bottom.

"Peter Liang, with a flashlight in one hand, burst into the stairwell, turned left, and pulled the gun's trigger and fired a shot down toward the seventh floor," Assistant District Attorney Marc Fliedner said in his opening statement."There was nothing threatening happening. His partner Landau never even pulled out his gun." (Landau has reportedly been offered immunity in exchange for his testimony.)

Liang's bullet ricocheted off a cinderblock wall and struck 28-year-old Gurley, who managed to scramble down two flights of stairs before collapsing. But three floors above, according to prosecutors, the cops argued about whether they should alert their supervisors that Liang had fired his 9 millimeter Glock sidearm.

"Neither man called in to say a word," Fliedner said, adding that Liang was "whining and moaning" that he would lose his job. At one point, Landau apparently refused to give Liang his cell phone to call a supervisor. "Neither man checked the stairwell immediately to make sure everything was okay," Fliedner told jurors.

Meanwhile, Butler frantically looked for someone to help Gurley, who was bleeding to death from a chest wound in the stairwell. That's when she found Melissa Lopez, who lived in a fourth floor apartment and ultimately called 9-1-1. "I saw her standing there, crying, asking for help, her hands all bloody," Lopez testified.

An EMS dispatcher told Lopez to give Butler a towel to stop the bleeding. She helped relay instructions from the dispatcher on the phone to Butler, who began preforming CPR. At some point, Liang—who had been on the force less than 18 months—and his partner heard the commotion and discovered Gurley and Butler. But even then, according to Lopez, neither Liang nor his partner offered any help.

Prosecutors argued that despite his training—which included CPR—and the fact that the NYPD modifies its triggers to make them harder to pull accidentally, "Peter Liang broke rule after rule after rule." The evidence, he said, supports the charges against Liang of criminally negligent homicide, second-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault, second-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of official misconduct—charges that were the result of a grand jury process.

Liang's defense attorney, Rae Koshetz, of course, offered a starkly different assessment of that night. It was a tragic accident, she said, and certainly not a crime.

Liang was working overtime in "what may be the most crime-ridden housing project in the city of New York," Koshetz said. "Suddenly, the gun accidentally discharges. is beside himself, in a state of shock. He goes back inside the lighted hallway for, at most, a couple of minutes. He's shaken. He's terrified. But totally unaware that his bullet has struck anything."

Once he discovered what happened, according to Liang's defense attorney, he sat against a wall and started crying—effectively unable to help, even once other police officers started arriving at the scene. He was so despondent, Liang had to be taken to the hospital himself, his attorney argued. (For her part, Lopez, the neighbor who called 9-1-1, testified she didn't see Liang crying.) That the accidental shot would fatally strike Gurley "was a million to one possibility," Koshetz added.

The trial, which is expected to last through at least the first week of February, will probably not be the last word on what happened that November night; Akai Gurley's family has filed a wrongful death suit against the city.

Still, given the rarity of criminal prosecutions against police officers, the case will likely reverberate through police reform circles around the country. Even if Liang's attorneys don't want the jury to think about it that way.

"The New York Police Department is not on trial here," Koshetz said. "This is not a referendum on policing in the United States."

Follow Alex Zimmerman on Twitter.

An Alien Hunter’s Guide to the 2016 US Election

0
0

Of all the fringe interest groups orbiting the landscape of American politics, there are perhaps none quite as maligned as those committed to uncovering the truth about extraterrestrial life. In recent elections, these UFO advocates have mostly laid low, ignored—if not openly mocked—by politicians seeking higher office. But as the 2016 race gets officially underway, alien hunters are starting to wonder if this election might be different.

The group got some high-profile encouragement last month from none other than Hillary Clinton. In an interview with a small New Hampshire newspaper, the Democratic presidential candidate promised that, if elected, she would share whatever information exists about the government's contact with extraterrestrials.

"I'm going to get to the bottom of it," Clinton told the Conway Daily Sun. "I think we may have been . We don't know for sure."

The comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it was enough to excite the diehard skeptics who have been fighting, unsuccessfully, for more than half a century to get the government to disclose what it knows about aliens. For this group, the remark seemed to confirm long-held suspicions that Clinton is sympathetic to their cause—suspicions rooted in her 90s-era ties to UFO activists like Laurence Rockefeller, and in her relationship to campaign chairman John Podesta, a noted skeptic who has called for greater government transparency around the alien question, and whose influence Clinton cited in her interview.

"He has made me personally pledge we are going to get the information out one way or another," Clinton told the newspaper. "Maybe we could have, like, a task force to go to Area 51."

Regardless of whether Clinton meant for any of this to be taken seriously, the interview signaled to alien hunters that the 2016 presidential election could be a significant one for their movement—marking the first time since the other Clinton was in office that the topic of extraterrestrial contact might be broached by politicians at the national level.

A 1995 photo of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton embracing billionaire philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller, a well-known UFO activist. Photo via the William J. Clinton Presidential Library

Beyond the UFO skepticism and government conspiracy theories, the election is also being watched by another group of alien hunters—namely scientists involved in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, a global research field dedicated to scanning the cosmos for signs of alien life.

Since its inception, the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been plagued bypolitics. NASA's own SETI program, developed in the mid-1970s, was a frequent target of politicians who saw its mission—"to bag little green fellows," as one Senator put it—as a joke, and a waste of taxpayer dollars, and was permanently defunded in 1993. While NASA continues to fund research into the search for extraterrestrial life, the money now mainly goes to the field of astrobiology, with research focused on looking for microbes and other non-intelligent life forms. Officially at least, the government is no longer interested in the search for thinking beings like us.

"SETI is very political, or has been in the past," said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the SETI Institute, a California-based nonprofit that conducts research on the "origin and nature of life in the universe." "Politics was extremely important when I joined the SETI Institute—it killed the NASA efforts."

In the absence of government funding, SETI research in the US has relied on private donations, which tend to be sporadic. While a $100 million infusion from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner last year has given the field a measure of legitimacy, and assured future research, the lack of federal recognition means that SETI continues to exist outside of mainstream scientific circles.

"When somebody is studying something that doesn't have any obvious practical implications, tends to think it is a waste of money," Shostak told me. "That's exactly wrong. Basic research is the kind that pays off in the long term—far more than the applied research."

There is little indication that will change under the next president. Most of the leading 2016 presidential candidates from both parties have voiced general support for NASA, and called for directing more federal resources to space exploration (the notable exception is Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, who has voted in the past to slash NASA's budget). But Shostak is skeptical that any of this would translate into support for a revamped SETI program at the space agency.

"It isn't a matter of 'let's vote for this person because they're interested in SETI,'" he said. "You're not going to find anybody like that."

Is The Truth really out there? VICE investigates in 'The Real: X-Files':

In the absence of direct support for SETI research, SETI researchers say they are looking for candidates who show broad knowledge and support of scientific endeavors. "Anyone you elect to high office should have some knowledge of science," Shostak said. "So many of don't seem to have much knowledge of science, and that's distressing because of much greater considerations than SETI."

Shostak and his colleagues have also noted that making contact with intelligent alien life will have immense political repercussions here on Earth. Given that many SETI proponents believe this is likely to happen in our lifetime, they are looking at the 2016 presidential contenders for indications of how they might handle a post-contact world.

"One would expect individual SETI proponents to be generally supportive of those parties and candidates who have voiced strong support for a solid science agenda," said Paul Shuch, executive director of the SETI League, a grassroots group that promotes private SETI research and education.

"Since SETI is a multinational cooperative endeavor," Shuch continued, "we—as individuals—would tend to oppose those factions and candidates in all countries who would be likely to exhibit nationalistic tendencies to restrict the free flow of information."

Paradigm Research's Hillary Clinton ET flag. Photo courtesy of Stephen Bassett

Of course, UFO activists who believe aliens have already made contact have more pressing concerns—namely, getting the government to end what disclosure advocate Stephen Bassett, Washington's only registered UFO lobbyist, calls the "Truth Embargo" on information about extraterrestrials.

"The extraterrestrial issue is perfectly analogous to the Cuban embargo," said Bassett, who works on behalf of the disclosure advocacy group Paradigm Research. "People knew there was an island down there, they knew there was a Cuba—they just couldn't go there. It's very much what happened with the extraterrestrial issue. Every year more and more people know that this phenomenon is not human, it's extraterrestrial, but they can't go there."

Like the Cuba embargo, Bassett said, the government's insistence on withholding information about extraterrestrial contact from the public seems increasingly anachronistic, and no longer justifiable as a national security concern. The issue, he explained, is trying to convince politicians that the problem even exists in the first place.

"This extraterrestrial advocacy movement has a problem that no other advocacy movement in history has had," Bassett said. "This movement is about something the government has claimed doesn't exist at all."

Bassett may have found an ally in Podesta. A consummate Washington insider who served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and as a special counselor to President Barack Obama, Podesta is a well-known X-Files fanatic who has publicly defended the public's right to know "what the truth is that's really out there," as he put it in a forward to the 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Last year, as he was leaving the Obama administration, Podesta ignited the UFO blogosphere by tweeting that his "biggest failure in 2014" was "once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files."

Stephen Bassett, Washington's only registered UFO lobbyist. Photo courtesy of Bassett

Podesta hasn't shied away from this position in his new role heading Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. "Notwithstanding the fact that serious scientists, military leaders, business people, and average citizens are interested in the subject of intelligent life in the universe, political leaders tend to worry about whether they will be lampooned if they broach the subject," he told me in an email. "I, on the other hand, am interested in just making the universe great again."

While Bassett seems to have gotten behind Podesta—and by extension, Hillary— not all disclosure activists agree that Clinton would be an ally in the Oval Office, with some citing her less than stellar record on government transparency as a possible red flag. But Podesta seems confident that, on this issue at least, his candidate will follow through on revealing government secrets. "She promised me she would!" he wrote in his email.

"Look, I believe that the government, in the name of transparency and openness should declassify and release information in regards to unidentified aerial phenomena," Podesta continued. "Obviously, there have been decades of speculation about what, if anything, is contained in these files. I'm confident that the American people can handle the truth."

Follow Daniel Oberhaus on Twitter.

Viewing all 38002 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images