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Newfoundland Town Issues Apology to Female Firefighter Who Was Sexually Harassed, Ostracized

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The Spaniard's Bay Fire Department, pictured above, has been at the centre of controversy due to a female firefighter being sexually harassed on the job. Photo via Facebook

The lone female firefighter in Spaniard's Bay, Newfoundland, has received an apology on behalf of the entire town for the sexual harassment she endured while on the job.

Brenda Seymour, a volunteer firefighter who also sits on the town council, recently spoke out about being the target of sexist comments and jokes, including being shown porn during a guest instructor's visit. As a result, council voted to remove Fire Chief Victor Hiscock and 19 other firefighters quit in solidarity during a council meeting.

Seymour has been accused of not being able to take a joke and using her position on council to air the brigade's dirty laundry; she's also been ostracized by women in the community.

On Tuesday—after the incident received national and international press the week before—Spaniard's Bay Mayor Tony Menchions issued a press release apologizing for how Seymour has been treated.

"As a council, we have adopted a zero tolerance policy on harassment of any kind and shall ensure that all town workers and volunteers operate in a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment," he said.

Menchions said the town, which has effectively been left without a fire department for the last week, is looking for new firefighters, presumably those who aren't sexist bullies.

"Council promises a safe and respectful environment and supports gender equity," he said.

Seymour told the CBC she accepts the apology and thinks the incident has created progress in the town of 2,600.

"I think that we've made groundbreaking headway here. I can't help but think this is a very positive thing out of a very negative one."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.


Refugees in Denmark to Show Us Their Most Valuable Possessions

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On Tuesday, a majority vote in Denmark's Parliament ratified an extensive tightening of Danish asylum laws in an attempt to make the country a less attractive destination for refugees and immigrants. Among other things, bill L87 extends the mandatory waiting period for the right to family reunification from one to three years, cuts asylum seekers' financial support by 10 percent, and shortens residency permits for future seekers of asylum in Denmark. Importantly, the bill will also allow police officers to confiscate refugees' valuables. This is in order to finance their stay in the country while they seek asylum.

That's the part of the new law that Danes have dubbed "The Jewellery Act"; it's caused most of the international outrage surrounding the controversial new law. Denmark has not received this kind of attention since the newspaper Jyllands-Posten decided to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad ten years ago. Just like back then, it's not the type of international attention that has people popping champagne corks in the offices of local tourist agencies.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen has said that "the point is to make sure everyone is held to the same standards, be they asylum seekers or Danes—those standards being that you provide for yourself, if you are able." However, p olicemen are only allowed to confiscate valuables that exceed a value of 10,000 kroner and that don't have sentimental value. This begs the question of how deep the real-life implications of this law will actually run.

To get an idea of what valuables refugees had with them upon their arrival in Denmark, VICE visited an old hospital in the port town of Helsingør that has been repurposed into an asylum center for approximately 150 refugees. This is what five of the guys who agreed to speak to us claimed to have been carrying with them when they first got there.

Abdul Khader is a 44-year-old Syrian who came to Denmark five months ago. His most important possession is the black bracelet, given to him by his 16-year-old daughter. She is currently in Turkey with her two siblings and their mother. Khader estimates that these items constitute a combined value of about 1,500 kroner .

Subhe Mohammad hails from Syria, and is 40 years old. He has been in Denmark for four months; his wife and three children still live in Syria. His most important possession is his phone, which is filled with photos of his children. Mohammad estimates that his valuables have a combined value of about 1,700 kroner .


Laith Wadea is 31 years old and comes from Iraq, where he worked as a teacher and a blacksmith. His most cherished personal possession is his silver necklace with a Virgin Mary medallion that was given to him by his mother. Aside from the necklace, he also owns an iPhone 6 and a fake watch. He estimates that his possessions are worth a grand total of about 6,000 kroner .


Nashet Blank is a 40 years old. He traveled from Syria to Denmark four months ago with his wife and three children. They sold all of their valuables to be able to travel through Europe—wedding bands included. His phone and wallet mean nothing to him. He estimates that the combined value of his personal effects can't be more than 500 kroner .

Ahmad Farman is 25 years old and from Iraq. He came to Denmark five months ago. All of his possessions are of equal importance to him, though his phone contains several photos that are especially significant to him. He estimates that it's all worth a total of 1,500 kroner .

We Asked an Expert How the Crappy Dollar Hurts Young Canadians

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Apparently this cat isn't being affected by the shitty state of the Canadian dollar. Photo via Cashcats.biz Tumblr

By now we're all well aware that the Canadian dollar, currently valued at 71 cents US, is tantamount to garbage.

Our currency hasn't been this weak since 2003, and some experts are predicting it'll drop another 10 cents by year's end. We might as well be walking around trading Pogs (or Nuka Cola bottle caps).

Factors like the high US dollar and falling oil prices—a barrel is now worth the same as a 26er of bad vodka—have contributed to the loonie's downward spiral. But what's the damage to young Canadians? I'm gonna go out on a limb and surmise that most of us don't have to worry about the $8-a-head "great cauliflower crisis" because, well, aside from the gluten-free crowd who use it to make fake rice, who the fuck eats cauliflower on the reg?

To find out how the hurting buck will impact other issues, like savings, clothes, groceries people actually eat, booze, cigarettes, and housing, we reached out to a guy who specializes in advising broke 20-somethings. Kyle Prevost, 28, is a high school business teacher based out of Birtle, a rural town in Manitoba. Though he has no financial designation, he's written books like More Money for Beer and Textbooks and runs a blog called Young and Thrifty, both of which are aimed at helping students not be total financial failures. The upshot is: stay home and DIY everything.

VICE: How is the low dollar fucking people over, especially young people who are mostly broke?
Kyle Prevost: The low dollar is going to really pinch people that like to directly travel to the US and buy stuff there—that much is obvious. What is less obvious is the slow increase in consumer goods that will affect almost everyone to some degree. For example, much of the orange juice sold in Canada comes from Florida, right? It now requires 30 percent more Canadian dollars to purchase that same quantity of orange juice as before. This can really hurt folks at the lowest income levels because it's not like you can just decide not to eat (unlike skipping that trip to Disneyland for the upper-middle class). Additionally, clothing manufactured in the US and, to a lesser degree, from all over the world, will go up. Young folks can learn some sewing skills and repair the clothes on their backs, but eventually most give in and purchase what they want.

It will also suck having to cheer for sports teams that can't afford to pay big name talent (#firstworldproblem). The last time the dollar was quite bad, the pride of Manitoba—the Winnipeg Jets—left town because they just couldn't afford to take in Canadian dollar revenue, while paying out American dollar expenses.

Finally, if you live in Vancouver (and other parts of Canada to a lesser extent), look forward to more foreign capital pouring in and continuing to buy up all of your real estate now that they can get more bang for their buck.

Is there anything we can do to minimize the impact?
The easiest way to minimize the impact is to stay home Canadian-made products should have an easier time competing in this environment.

Similarly, a Canadian farmer might be willing to wholesale you beef or chicken at a decent price (assuming you have the freezer space), but the stuff you buy at the grocery store that likely comes from the US will continue to rise. It might make sense to compare prices again if you last looked several years ago.

Should we be opening up different types of savings accounts right now? Or investing?
YES.

Many young Canadians don't start off earning a high net paycheque, so the TFSA is usually the best place to save. When it comes to explaining to folks whether to use a TFSA or an RRSP I often just see their eyes glaze over, and then they proceed to save nowhere because they are intimidated. The most important thing is to get into a savings habit. Twenty-five dollars a week is WAY better than nothing, and if you try to grow it overtime as you earn more (hopefully) then it can be an effective strategy. Compounded returns need time to grow, saving when you're young provides that.

While the terminology might be a bit new to most young people, the truth is that investing really doesn't have to be that hard. It's basically just applying grade nine math (percentages and fractions). I spend under two hours a year checking my investment portfolio.

Bottom line, the dollar shouldn't make much difference to developing simple savings and investment habits.

Are there any silver linings to having a shitty currency?
If your currency is the Canadian dollar, the silver lining is that when it sucks, it probably costs less to fuel up your car and possibly heat your house (we're almost entering semi-petro-dollar status this point). If you work in the tourism industry, this means good things for you as folks from the US and all over the world fly in and spend cash. If you live in a border town, you might have good success selling your boat or ATV if you advertise in American newspapers—it's like a year round 30 percent off sale for our southern neighbors right now. Economists and other financial gurus claim that a lower dollar should jumpstart parts of our economy such as manufacturing, but that process will likely take years to come to fruition if it happens at all. I wouldn't sit there holding my breath in the meantime.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

How Baseball Fits into a Modern Montreal

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In this 1983 photo, Montreal Expos catcher Gary Carter is mobbed by fans prior to a baseball game against the Pittsburgh Pirates in Montreal. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Bernard Brault, File)

It's getting harder and harder to ignore the rumblings. Something seems to be happening with baseball in Montreal.

Over a decade has passed since Major League Baseball left Montreal for good, brought low by a sequence of inept owners—including, at the end, Major League Baseball itself—a non-supportive media and business community and an indifferent fan base. Once rabid public support, which some say rivalled the Montreal Canadiens in popularity at one point, was terminal by the turn of the century, thanks to years of mediocrity, labour disputes, drama, dashed hopes, and a crappy, crumbling stadium. On September 28, 2004, the Expos slunk out of town for Washington, DC, never to return.

But some other team could.

For Montreal baseball boosters, the prospect of MLB returning here has never been brighter, mostly because many of the factors that contributed to the Expos' demise have been addressed and, in many cases, fixed. However, there are a number of things that need to be sorted out before one meaningful pitch is thrown in this town.


The Olympic Stadium, pictured above, was built in Montreal for the 1976 Olympic games. Photo via Flickr user Ron Reiring

Montreal Isn't Even a 'Baseball Town'

Other than for some die-hards and media types, it isn't. But as Montreal-born, Denver-based baseball writer Jonah Keri, author of a kickass book about the Expos, says, that doesn't matter. "The average Montrealer doesn't give a crap, but neither do most people in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago," he says. "The point is to have a big enough base to make it work."

He thinks a base of 20,000 season-ticket holders would stabilize the franchise enough to give it some legs, to make it viable enough to sustain in the long-term.

But a new stadium and teal wouldn't just be offering Montrealers a chance to catch a ball game on a Friday night. It would anchor a whole slate of entertainment options.

Owners are realizing that any new stadium has to come with an accompanying entertainment district. See the LA Live complex next door to Staples Center. Other cities are catching on: there's the soon-to-be-completed and awfully named The Ford Center at the Star in Dallas, the District Detroit, the Battery at the SunTrust Park in Atlanta—hell, even Edmonton is getting in on the act, with the Ice District going up next to the new Rogers Place.

There's no reason why Montreal would build a stadium in isolation, like they did in 1976. That would be idiotic. Most baseball watchers speculate that the best place for a new stadium would be the Peel Basin, a generally neglected light industrial area just west of Old Montreal and south of downtown that has the space to add spinoff buildings and facilities.

That kind of investment—estimated cost would be minimum a billion dollars to purchase a team and get a stadium built—would be just peaches to a lot of people, beginning with Montreal's mayor, Denis Coderre, whose "Montreal is back" has become an at-times unconvincing mantra of his.

(A cynic might add that the city's notorious construction industry would love to see a new baseball stadium project too, for all the wrong reasons.)

Keri says having a new park and entertainment district would—if done properly—change the whole aura around baseball in the city. By the time the Expos left, he says, going to see a game at the Big O was "an uncool thing to do. It was like, 'You're an Expos fan? That's for suckers.'"

So is Montreal a baseball town? Not yet. But there's no reason it couldn't be.

Nostalgia is Big Right Now

According to Montreal radio host (TSN 690) and baseball lover Mitch Melnick, demand for baseball has been quietly growing over the past few years as Montrealers have hit that decade-in-the-making nostalgia. And that, he says, began with the death of beloved Expos catcher Gary Carter in 2012.

Carter, Melnick says, "was as big as anybody for that era. He was the face of the franchise. He was the number one sports figure in the early 80s.

His death tapped "deep feelings and emotion that people had put aside. And people realized how much they missed baseball."

Those feelings and emotions were made manifest, at least in part, during the two exhibition series played at the Olympic Stadium in 2014 and 2015. Both two-game series drew tens of thousands of paying fans, enough to impress MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. Attendance for the two games planned for this spring—featuring the Toronto Blue Jays and the Quebec-raised Russell Martin—is expected to top 100,000.

The next step is to convince him to host a three- or four-game regular season series; something that Coderre says is a possibility at some point.

Former Expos outfielder Warren Cromartie has also been working the nostalgia angle, organizing reunions and celebrations of past seminal Expos teams via his Montreal Baseball Project. And on Tuesday night, the MLB network aired its (William Shatner-narrated!) documentary The Colorful Montreal Expos.


This Montreal Expos hat is basically a relic at this point. Photo via Flickr user eric molina

Montreal Has the Money

Getting a team here won't be cheap. It's expected to cost something like $500-million for expansion or relocation fees, and another half-bil to build a new stadium.

But the good news is, other than extremely well-heeled investors, like Stephen Bronfman, son of former Expos owner Charles Bronfman, there are also huge Canadian telecom companies around today that are looking for content for their all-sports networks. Bell's TSN and RDS have been around for a long time, but Rogers Sportsnet and Quebecor's TVA Sports are major players now as well. Bell, which lost the NHL to Rogers and TVA for the next dozen years, would probably be hungriest. Concordia University marketing profesor Bruno Delorme, who specializes in sports business, says owning the team you're carrying is logical from a business perspective.

"Sports, like news, is appointment television—you want to watch it live," he says. "Baseball games constitute content, and games cost very little to produce. Whereas you have to pay, say, a million dollars at least for a half-hour episode of Two and Half Men or whatever."

Also, MLB's revenue sharing model has dramatically altered the financial landscape, making it much easier for small to medium-market teams to pay for quality talent. "The money from national TV contracts is out of this world," he says.

He's not kidding. MLB is reaping in crazy amounts of money from national TV rights alone—a total $12.4-billion until 2021. That money is split between all 30 MLB teams. Add on local TV rights, (the Dodgers inked a deal worth $7-billion over 25 years) plus the gate and concessions, and you'll see money is flowing.

Melnick says one of the problems with the Expos was an ownership group—and not just the hated Jeffrey Loria/David Samson duo—that botched the business end of the franchise. He doesn't think that would happen today.

"There were a few too many dinosaurs back in the day," he says, "people with no vision, no balls.

"Now, there's a new generation of business types who are really plugged in and understand how much money can be made." Most of it through media rights, but also through licensing and strong merchandising sales. Baseball is doing very, very well—and the people interested in bringing it back to Montreal are convinced it will do well here too.

Can Baseball and Montreal Come to an Agreement?

Bringing baseball to Montreal isn't as easy as "writing a big fat cheque," says Keri. "You have to look at the mechanism. Will it be relocation or expansion? And if it's expansion, where will the second team be? Because you need a second team to balance things out. So who else is there besides Montreal? Sheboygan, Wisconsin? No. So it could be a while."

Nevertheless, for guys like Matthew Ross, the founder of fan site ExposNation.com, the future is looking, if not rosy, then at least better than it was ten years ago. Among his fellow die-hard fans, the mood, he says, "is very cautiously optimistic."

Montreal will still need convincing, and a lot of it. I suggested as much to Ross, adding that the low turnout at the end of the Expos' history was the result of fans simply saying "fuck it," and never looking back.

Ross agrees. "There have been so many 'Fuck it' moments," he says. "In '91, a concrete chunk of the stadium fell off. In '94, when the Expos were the best team in baseball, you had the strike. Attendance the next year dropped by 20 per cent, and that never recovered. In '96 they got rid of Moises Alou. In '97, they traded Pedro. It's really remarkable you'd ever get 20,000 people out to a game, because no one gave a shit." He pauses. "It's not like there wasn't a passion. But people just didn't want to get hurt."

Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Thieves Used a Pickup Truck to Drag an ATM From a Strip Club That Doubles as a Church

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This did not go as planned. Photo via Guelph Police Service

In a scenario that sounds like it came right out of a Trailer Park Boys episode ('cause it did), three suspects used a pick-up truck to ram through the the doors of a strip club that doubles as a church in Guelph, Ontario—The Manor—in a failed attempt to steal an ATM. When cops arrived after being called just before 7 AM today, they witnessed the truck pulling the ATM by a chain on the snow-covered ground down a street beside the club.

Sam Cohen, the general manager of The Manor, told VICE that the incompetent thieves did approximately $100,000 in damage.

"It didn't go their way, they spent all that time planning and trying to get it out, it took them 10 times longer than they probably thought it would," Cohen said. "They pull out the chain, and they're literally dragging like a sled down the street... in the end, they have to pull away so fast that they lose the ATM."

Cohen described what he saw on the club's surveillance tape, which has now been handed over to police for the investigation.

"There were men entering the club through one door, they scope out the ATM, they come through the front door, they wrap the ATM with some chain," he said. "It took them a while to get it out because they were having some difficulty." Then, he said, the ATM fell down some stairs, and they had to chain it back up. They then proceeded to attach the chain to the end of the truck through the front door, and "ripped it through the wall."

The Manor itself is a known fixture in the community. It was the previous home of Canadian beer mogul George Sleeman; the family who owns it was the subject of a 2013 feature-length, award-winning documentary, The Manor; and its Sunday church service was attended by VICE (see: the author of this article).

Though the attempted thieves chose a strange time to try to steal the ATM—in the early morning on a weekday—Cohen suspects it's because they probably assumed most people in the building were asleep at that time (the building also serves as a residence). However, he said this assumption wasn't true, referencing the fact that a cleaner became aware of the situation and that some of their tenants who live across the street saw the truck and called police.

Cops followed the truck for several blocks, at which point the ATM broke loose and the thieves were forced to make the decision to leave it behind and pull away. The truck, a dark-coloured, four-door Ford F-150, was last seen heading toward Cambridge, Ontario. There is no description of suspects available at this time.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Striking, Tender Photos of a Father-Daughter Road Trip

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Photos by Jesse Burke

"This work does seem to serve as a family album of sorts," the photographer Jesse Burke said during a recent artist's talk. But it's probably safe to say neither your—nor my—family photos look much like the exhibition he was discussing, Burke's Wild & Precious, which is now on display at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence.

In the show, there are whales and baby raccoons and dead birds. There are mountains and rivers and stone-speckled beaches and skies swirling with fluffy clouds. And, in most of the photos, there is a miniature protagonist: Burke's daughter, Clover, who was photographed between ages five and nine during road trips that crisscrossed the United States. In one frame, she appears as tiny figure digging in the dirt, surrounded by driftwood on a beach in the Pacific Northwest. In others, she is shown, up-close, wearing a butterfly net like a wedding veil, or staring at the camera while blood trickles down her face, the result of a harmless if very striking bloody nose.

The 15 images in the show come from a series of 134 photographs published by Daylight Books last November, bookended by notes from the father-and-daughter collaborators. Burke's note reads, in part, "My mind is full of moving images: You running down to the sea as the gulls laugh overhead, you collecting spindly strips of birch bark and downy striped turkey feathers, you and me quietly brushing our teeth alongside one another beneath the hum of the green fluorescent light in our motel bathroom..." At the end of the book, Clover responds: "We've held animals like birds, bunnies, salamanders, and insects... I remember seeing the dead whale and how bad it smelled."

Last week, before the opening, I walked through the show with Burke, who was recently named one of TIME's 50 Instagram photographers to follow.

VICE: How did this project come to be?
Jesse Burke: We have always been very nature-based in our life, my wife and I, prior to having any children. So we always hike, go out, and do adventures. So, when we had a kid, it was only fitting that that kid sort of adopt our lifestyle. So instead of changing our life, we just include her. And this was outside of my artwork process.

And so then one day I decided to take a road trip with my kid. Because she had vacation. And as the freelancer in our family, I have the responsibility of childcare during weeklong breaks, when my wife doesn't get to take a week off. I thought, "Let's get the hell out of town and we'll go for a ride. And we'll go take pictures for my other project."

So we were out there on the road. Slowly over the course of the first one or two days, on a five- or six-day trip, I started to just take the pictures I intended to take—pictures of landscape, essentially, in Maine—and then every once in a while, she would sort of wander into the frame. And I thought, "Oh, that's cool. I'll take those just for fun, show my wife, and I'll take the landscape pictures for my artwork." And then after like the third day I realized, "Oh, this might be something different."

Was there any inviting her into the project, on your part? Did you say, "Hey, do you want to be a part of this new project?"
Very quickly I realized that the process wasn't as much of a subject-director relationship as a collaborator-to-collaborator relationship. If I let her be herself and stop directing her so much, the project is richer in many ways, and I'm happier as a person. And she's happier as a person.

So I would sort of guide her into a space, without much guidance: park, "Let's walk this way," and just let her interact. There was an instance that was very much like the epiphany moment. We were at the beach in Canada—this picture's not in the show, actually—and she's on the beach and the beach is foggy and really beautiful and there's a lot of commercial fishing debris, because it's really remote and there's no one cleaning up. And so, after driving for a very long time, she wanted to play, run around, not stop and listen to her father. So I was like, "Stop. Look here. Do that." And she wouldn't listen. She was spinning the rope around her legs, and I was really mad. And we didn't get the pictures that I wanted.

So we left, went home, and at night, as I was flipping through the pictures on the computer, this is when the epiphany hit me that the pictures that I thought I wanted, I didn't have. But I didn't need them. Because the pictures of her doing what she wanted to do were so much better. Because they were real, they were honest, and they were a total collaboration between us. I mean, she was aware she was being photographed, and she's performing for the camera, in some ways. But on her terms, not mine.

I think one of the most arresting images is the one I'm looking at right now, which is right at eye level. We're looking her in the eye.
The bloody-nose picture.

Yeah. What do you see when you look at that photo?
When I look at that, I see calmness and understanding and a strength in the face of vulnerability. Clearly there's some sort of an injury or a wound or something happening, where there's blood involved and a young child. And she looks totally calm and confrontational, almost, instead of being afraid, instead of having a response that one would normally associate with a child blood and an injury. And I love that about her. One thing that I've always been really interested in is her ability to sort of command and control the space and feel really at ease and at home in the situation, wherever we are.

For a lot of these photos I was asking myself, "Is that animal dead or sleeping?" It seems like, most times, the animal is dead.
Dead. Always dead. This is alive.

That is a baby raccoon

Is getting your kid out into nature partly a way of having conversations about death?
Yes, definitely. It's always been important for me to have my children be aware of that, and not afraid of that. It's normal. And it happens. And it happens in our lives with humans and pets—our life, everyone's life.

But when we get out into nature, the thing that changes is that we, the Burke family—or maybe humans in general, I would argue—have a very instinctual desire to connect with animals. that is not a reciprocal relationship. They don't give a shit about us. But we love them and want to learn about them, and study them, and touch them. And, again, they want to run away from us.

Since I'm not a scientist and I don't do field studies on coyotes or anything, the only time my children or myself would get to see, touch, feel, study a coyote is if we're lucky enough to stumble upon a dead one in the woods. So part of the beauty of a moment where you come upon a dead creature is that you can then take that opportunity to really study it and look at it. And then I think that's one level of connection that's much deeper than most people would get through a book or a TV show or a zoo.

And I use this picture of the whale as a perfect example. I knew the whale was there because of the news. But then we drove there. We will do that if we hear that there's a dead whale; drive right down, so I can take pictures. And for the same reason everyone else is there: ogle it, because it's insane and incredible! I mean, this is an ocean creature and I'll have this memory of my daughter holding the whale's flipper and looking at it. And it's just such an incredibly unique experience.

You have to get past the morbidity of it and get to the core of it, which is that she gets to actually feel and see all of the creatures. And since you're out in nature a lot of time, you have more opportunity to see that creature.

Why include the sleeping photos in this series?
When we're out on the road, we stay in these kind of shitty hotels, on purpose. Partially because I love photographing in them, but also because they're cheap and easy and everywhere. And so I came out of the bathroom one night and I saw her sleeping and the light from the bed stand was right there and I just stopped and I was like, "Wow." She was like an illuminated cherub in the bed.

So I just thought, "I'm going to take a photograph of her sleeping. She just looks so beautiful." Again, like, not thinking about where it fit into the project. So I took the picture and I sat there and I just essentially watched her sleep. And it was just this beautiful thing. It was the first time in my life that I have just sort of stopped and watched my child sleep, with the light on. You can see chest moving and nothing else. It was so beautiful and simple.

So then I would photograph her every night—every single night. And then it became part of our process. The sleeping pictures acted as sort of a backbone for the project. They became super important, way after the fact, in a way that I could have never predicted. Which was the book starts and the first picture you see is a sleeping picture and then they happen sort of as chapter headings. And the last picture you see is a sleeping picture. In some ways, the arc of the entire book is a dream.

Philip Eil is a freelance journalist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Follow him on Twitter.

The RISD Museum's exhibition Wild & Precious runs through September 26, 2016. The book is available from Daylight Books. Learn more about the project—and see additional photos from the series—at wildandprecious.co.

What Life Was Like on the Ground During the Ebola Crisis

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In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show, which will premiere February 5 at 11 PM, we are releasing all of season three for free online along with updates to the stories. Today's installment follows up on a dispatch called "Evolution of a Plague," about the devastating Ebola outbreak that swept through West Africa last summer. Watch the episode below:

The first case of Ebola was documented on March 23, 2014, and in the months following, this single case grew into the worst outbreak of the disease since its official discovery in the late 1970s. Over 11,000 people died and over 28,000 were infected—mostly in Libera, Sierra Leone, Mali, Guinea, and Nigeria. Now, almost two years later, the regions of West Africa afflicted with the disease have been officially declared Ebola-free.

Last year, after the initial media panic over the outbreak had died down, VICE News correspondent Danny Gold went to West Africa to see how the evolution of the disease and its treatment was progressing, whether international authorities like the World Health Organization (WHO) had learned anything from their initial mishandling of the epidemic, and if local and global organizations were now properly prepared for subsequent outbreaks. With West Africa recently being declared Ebola-free by the WHO, we sat down with Danny to hear what it was like to be on the ground in the midst of this crisis, and if what he saw there made him believe that the world will respond more quickly and efficiently to future epidemics.

VICE: What was the most surprising thing you saw when you were in West Africa?
Danny Gold: The most surprising thing was just the confusion, and the lack of a coherent plan. No one really knew what was going on, there was a total lack of coordination. So you had situations where people would be getting sick and they just didn't know where to go or what to do. They would try to seek guidance for that, but there was no one with the capabilities to answer those basic questions. Everyone was just so completely overwhelmed. It was shocking to see such a failure of the system.

When you were on the ground in the hardest-hit areas, what was the thing that made you the angriest or the most frustrated?
Just seeing people that were trying to do the right thing by going to the treatment centers, and not being able to be treated. There was a lot of fear of this disease and a lack of knowledge amongst many of the communities and the treatment centers held this stigma—that when people went there to get help, they ended up dead. So seeing people overcome that stigma and that fear, go to these centers and then still not be able to get treated—not through any fault of the hospitals or the aid workers, but because the system was so overwhelmed, that was incredibly frustrating to witness.

What kept people going? What gave people hope that this situation could be resolved?
I think you had a lot of efforts among local communities in these countries that really took it upon themselves to organize. They realized that no one was going to come in and save the day. The US military and the international community arrived late, but when they did come, obviously they were a great help because of their vast resources. However, it really fell to the communities that we saw—the aid workers, the people who were doing the burials—who really took it upon themselves to organize and help out at great personal risk to their health. Spending time with them really gives you hope—not just for the handling of that situation, but for humanity as well.

When you were down there, were you scared of getting infected?
Not in the beginning. I'd spoken to a lot of journalists, and I think that the fear of transmission was super overblown. As long as you avoided bodily contact, as long as you avoided any transmission of fluids, you were, for the most part, OK. So the fear wasn't there in the beginning. Definitely when you're lying awake at night, you're wondering, Did I get too close? When I got back to the US, I did have that 21-day period where any rumbling in my stomach, any slight fever or slight heat that I felt in my body, made me start freaking out.

There can certainly be a tendency in the media during global events like this to give into fear-mongering. How did you and your producers try to avoid this kind of coverage?
It was difficult. On the one hand, you want people to be aware of how bad the situation is, but you don't want people to think that these countries were zombie lands. Daily life continued in most of these places because it had to. Finding the middle ground is important because people will take what what they see in the media and use it to confirm their stereotypes or fears.

So we tried to show that members of the local community were taking it upon themselves to fight this disease—that people were doing their best, even though the situation was very serious.

Less than half an hour is a very limited time to cover this entire crisis. Was there anything that you wanted to, but weren't able to include in the episode?
There was a doctor who we interviewed in Sierra Leone when they were facing a very large outbreak who had the disease himself, beat it, and then decided that he needed to give back to his community by going back to the clinic and working to help cure people. There were a few stories like that that I think were just really important to tell about people who got sick, received really great treatment from their colleagues and their neighbors, and then took it upon themselves, afterwards, to go back and to help people in the same situation.

What are the most significant updates or breakthroughs that have happened since you were in West Africa?
The most significant update is that as of January 13, 2016, the WHO has declared all of the countries affected by the outbreak to be Ebola-free. The question, though, is: What's going on with the infrastructure of these countries right now? Are they prepared for another sort of outbreak? Is the world prepared for another outbreak, whether it's Ebola or something else? I think this was a wake-up call for a lot of the world and the question remains: Will there be the proper amount of follow-through? I think that's the most important thing to pay attention to right now: how the global community will handle outbreaks like this in the future.

Overall when you were there, did you feel like the epidemic was being handled successfully? What were the major failings?
I think that there was just a lack of communication on all levels. I think that there were definitely issues with government corruption in a lot of the areas we were in, and a lack of infrastructure. I think the international community got on the case way too late. A lot of lives could have been saved if it had jumped on this earlier, especially the World Health Organization. It really, really messed up early on and tried to downplay the whole thing so as not to provoke global fears, and local governments went along with that. I think that set a horrible precedent, and potentially allowed these massive outbreaks to take place. But I think that the communities did rebound. People eventually began reacting properly, but unfortunately, it was at a point where a lot of people had already died.

What was the relationship between the international community and the people on the ground? Was that relationship functional?
No. It didn't seem functional. There were a lot of issues where you had groups of people coming in from the outside with excellent tactics on to how to fight the disease, but they didn't take into account the culture of the areas that they were in. Things like burial culture, or the culture of the way people are cared for in these countries differs from other parts of the world, and so it was hard to convince people to put aside their traditions even if it meant saving lives. It's a very complicated and delicate negotiation. And that just doesn't apply to West Africa, that applies to everywhere in the world. If you came to the US and told people, "Don't take care of your loved ones because you're only going to get sick," I think there'd be a lot of doubt and skepticism here as well. So I think that lack of sensitivity was a really glaring mistake.

Do you feel that we are better prepared for a future outbreak now?
Yes, I think we are. It's a shame that some people had to lose their lives for us to get better prepared. The question now is: How much better prepared are we? There are some experts who said that we were lucky that this outbreak was Ebola because it is a really hard disease to transmit. If the day comes when it's a disease that's airborne, or that's easy to transmit through other methods than fluids or touching, then we could be in a lot of trouble.

We had these built-in defense mechanisms 40 years ago, where you couldn't get from rural West Africa—where diseases like this can come from sometimes—to New York City within 24 hours. You can do that now because of the ease of air travel. In these more remote areas, there wasn't great transportation even 20 years ago, but now people can ride their motorbikes to a capital city from a small village in 12 to 14 hours. So these built-in defense mechanisms against these outbreaks are gone, and it's debatable whether or not the technology that we have to fight these diseases has caught up.

After to speaking to experts and people on the ground in affected areas, is there one thing that we could do differently next time around that would have the greatest impact in preventing or treating these types of diseases?
You need a high-powered fixer, like the Ebola response coordinator we spoke to, Ron Klain. You need someone like a corporate CEO who works for a company like DHL or Coca-Cola. They have these insane distribution networks and know how to solve massive problems in the most efficient ways. You have to listen to doctors and scientists, but you need these people who know how to manage and put practices in place to get things done quickly.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Follow Dory Carr-Harris on Twitter.

Kanye West Just Wants to Be a Human Being

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Image via Youtube

Earlier today, Kanye West said some mean things to Wiz Khalifa on Twitter. Some of those things were funny, some of the things were cruel, and some were downright gross and sexist. It was a big thing. It's the reason you probably clicked on this article. I'm going to get to that, I promise, but first I want to tell you about David Bowie.

In the early 1980s, David Bowie was in a weird place. He wasn't the commercial juggernaut he'd been in his Ziggy Stardust days, and he could no longer sustain himself simply on his Thin White Duke-era diet of cocaine, peppers, and hysterical public controversy. He'd gone to Germany to dry out, pushing music forward with his so-called "Berlin Trilogy," in which he successfully shed the excess and artifice of his earlier career and successfully reinvented himself as an experimentalist of the highest order.

The only problem is, once you've mastered nearly every style of rock and avant-garde, where do you go from there? Well, you look backwards, and sideways too, and maybe if you're lucky that somehow that pushes you forward. That was the idea, at least, when Bowie enlisted disco whizz kid Nile Rodgers to produce Let's Dance, melding up his poppy, synth-drenched style with the Texas blues guitar of Stevie Ray Vaughn, whose soloing over Rodgers's slick dance backdrops made the tracks feel both alien and perfectly of its time. Released in 1983, the record ended up selling over ten million copies and launched Bowie into an even higher echelon of fame. They cut the thing in less than three weeks.

It feels like Kanye West—a guy similarly known for his chameleon-like ability to inhabit any style and make it his own, a penchant for outrageous public behavior, and an omnivorous aesthetic sensibility influenced by fashion and design—is working on his own version of Let's Dance. With his 2013 album Yeezus, West successfully merged the sounds of IDM and the avant-garde electronic underground with the jagged aggression that characterized much of the rap scene of his hometown Chicago, filtering the results through his slick pop sensibilities and Rick Rubin's minimalism. The ensuing tour found him rapping while wearing diamond-encrusted masks atop a mountain—simultaneously killing the artist and drawing attention to himself in the most flagrant way possible. Following the tour, he focused mostly on fashion, releasing a grime song here, a Paul McCartney collaboration there, an errant freestyle elsewhere, to varying degrees of renown and interest.

That all changed a couple weeks ago when he released "Real Friends," a plaintive ballad featuring Ty Dolla $ign, followed up by "No More Parties in LA," a six-minute track in which Kanye and Kendrick Lamar rapped uninterrupted over a beat from Madlib, who specializes in the sort of dusty, boom-bap psychedelia that lands just left of hip-hop's center. Both tracks carried with them an undercurrent of confessional urgency, something West's recent music, while great, lacked (many of Yeezus's lyrics were scraps from decade-old unreleased Kanye songs). His last two releases, however, feel "modern and timeless," which is how Nile Rodgers once described the sound Bowie was going for with Let's Dance.

And so, West has essentially been barricaded in the studio for the past two or so weeks, evidently creating tracks out of eight hours worth of beats sent to him by Madlib. He's got Swizz Beatz in the studio too, as well as Travis $cott and The-Dream, all of whom share Kanye's knack for crafting pure pop. If, as Kanye has suggested, his new album uses those Madlib beats as their sonic backbone, the result might be something akin to Let's Dance. Not a retreat into the safety of commerciality per se, but instead an attempt at fusing styles in a way that welcomes the listener to the party instead of jarring them from the jump, which is Yeezus did.

Perhaps as a way to let off steam while under intense, self-imposed pressure (it seems as if Kanye started work on his album in earnest only a month before its February 11 release date), West has been tweeting at a pace we haven't seen from him since he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

At this point, Twitter is to hip-hop what those ringside interviews are to pro wrestlers—a chance to promote yourself, mouth off publicly, act goofy, or further a grudge you might have against somebody. After Yeezy tweeted that he'd changed the album's title from Swish to Waves for reasons we'll never know, Wiz Khalifa of all people decided to take West to task for... something? Not respecting Max B, the guy who popularized the term "wavy" in hip-hop, enough? Some sort of deep-seeded grudge Khalifa has against West because they both dated Amber Rose?

It doesn't really matter at this point, because Khalifa tweeted, "Hit this KK and become yourself," which it seems West took as a reference to his wife Kim Kardashian, which caused him to tweet, "Oh n—gas must think I'm petty cause I'm the best that ever made music... Like oh, that's Ye and I can put his wife's initials on my Twitter @wizkhalifa." He then proceeded to, true to his word, dismantle Khalifa's entire existence in an extremely petty manner, making fun of his pants and claiming Khalifa regrets having a kid with Rose because the child was a symbol that "you let a stripper trap you." It was a level of pettiness that ascended (or descended, perhaps) to the level of the intro of Cam'ron's Jay Z diss "You Gotta Love It," which accused Jay of, among other crimes against humanity, "rockin' sandals with jeans."

Shortly thereafter, West deleted the tweets, citing that "it's all about positive energy" and that he now understood that Khalifa was referring to weed and not Kim when he used the term "KK." The entire affair, which I guess caused enough of a shitstorm to warrant me writing this article about it, took up an afternoon of everyone's time, which feels like an appropriate amount of time to think about two famous people arguing on Twitter.

Kanye West is one of those rare public figures who fully understands the impact of his every move. That's not to say he's an egomaniac, or some sort of self-reflexive cultural provocateur—though there are certainly elements of both of those cultural archetypes to his persona. I just mean that he knows that people pay attention to everything he says and does, scrutinizing and analyzing it to death, trying to place it on a continuum of his behavior throughout history.

When interviewed shortly after the release of Let's Dance, Bowie told a reporter from Time, "It's hard to make people believe you don't have to be a tooth-gnashing, vampiric drug creature of the night to say something important." And it feels like West is facing that same quandary: How, after convincing the world he wasn't anything like them, can he still command the same gravitas without people treating him as if he's some creature from another planet?

It's almost like after shooting himself into space with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and threatening to burn the world down with Yeezus, he's shotgunned around the sun and is trying to crash-land back on planet earth. He's locking himself in the studio, he's rapping about his cousin stealing his laptop, he's showing his ass social media because he doesn't know about weed slang. It's all part of his public comedown, a return to normalcy from a guy who made a point of rarely being normal in the first place.

Follow Drew on Twitter.


Yeah Baby: ​Babies in Nature

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The author and his baby, enjoying nature

I know I've mentioned nature numerous times before, but it's important so I'm gonna do a whole column on it. The baby needs a strong relationship with the natural world, mane: the wind in the willows, the birds, the bees, the flowers and the trees, the roaring ocean waves ceaselessly lapping at the sandy shores, the cumulus clouds bulbous with rain scraping the earth's azure ceiling, the emerald green leaves and the ruby red flower buds, scruffy underbrush and dangly, viney overbrush, the prowling cats and growling doggies, the galloping steeds, cud-suckin' goats, the panthers and cougars, the apes, the buzzing insect kingdom, the leaping cods and salmons, the squirting whales and porpi, the jellyfish, the bubbling hot springs, the redwood forests to the gulf's clean waters, mane. This land was made for your bb.

Half the time when a baby is crying it just needs to get out in the fresh air, see some trees, feel the sun, or look at the moon if it's night. Let the baby play in waters. I already talked about how Yemaya is a crucial ocean goddess, but it bares nigh constant repetition.

We're animals from nature, too. We came out the trees, put some clothes on, invented fire, and so forth, but end of the day we're animal creatures on this sprawling community peopling the grand spaceship Earth.

You know what's fucked up? Your boy Michigan Governor Rick Snyder (R), along with Treasurer Andy Dillon, the Flint City Council, the Karegnondi Water Authority, and all the other greedhead morons in Michigan letting filthy poisoned water run through Flint faucets as we speak. That's fucked as hell, bruh. Not to mention this is a problem plaguing Allah knows how many other cities in the USA. That's what happens when you let babies grow up with no clue as to how clutch the earth's natural resources are to us. They grow up and join the city council and they vote on this or that measure, sign this or that piece of paper that saves X amount of money, Y amount of which they can pocket for they own cutty lil selves, without thinking once of how that will affect their fellow man, woman, and child.

Take the little monkey to the damn park and whatnot. One flower is worth a thousand episodes of Dora the Explorah.

I bet nobody took baby Rick Snyder to swim in a crystal clean river as a baby. That's child abuse and it has a shitty ripple effect.

Man, take the baby to the top of a tall hill or mountain and have it look down on the world a bit, get it some perspective, see how we're cradled in this bountiful hearth, born of it, nurtured by it, to serve and return to it, not control and destroy it.

We spray poison on our fruits and veggies, mane. That's fucked. We tear apart mountains and desecrate streams looking for minerals and oils to power factories and vehicles that further pollute and destroy. We're a blight on this earth. Human beings are a harmful bacteria and it ain't no fair.

At the same time, we do our thing. From far away, when you look at all the lights in these little cities and towns we made, it almost seems like we're onto something. Maybe we are. But it seems like we could be way less of a dick about it.

Regardless, our children have inherited this filthy, ass-fucked, still-kinda-beautiful place and it's important that we instill in them a love for its natural wonders and a healthy distrust and distaste for the abusive nature of our flawed technologies. I'm not saying raise your kid to blow up a parking lot full of SUVs (I'm not not saying to do that either), but take the little monkey to the damn park and whatnot. One flower is worth a thousand episodes of Dora the Explorah. Take the baby to the beach and have it feed the seagulls some free bread. That's like the animal kingdom's version of a soup kitchen.

Take the baby to a soup kitchen, matter fact. Homeless people are people too. And people are part of nature. Get your baby in tune with the groovy-ass natural world. Buy organic, steer clear of them fructose corn syrups and what have you. Stay on that apple orange banana grape strawberry type wave, feel me? None of that Cheeto Dorito Oreo garbage they trying to sell you. They don't want you to eat organic, but trust me, eating organic is key.

Nature, bruh. Nature, my G. Nature, doggie. Hug a tree, son. Tell your son to hug a tree, too. Pet a passing bunny rabbit, mane. Have the bunny eat a carrot out your daughter's hand. Purify yourself in the waters of the Minnetonka, player. Get the baby swammin'. Bask in the sun's beautiful rays, pimpin'. Set some of that baby's melanin to working and watch it grow into a strong and responsible steward of the earth, bruh bruh.

Follow Kool A.D. on Twitter.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Ammon Bundy, leader of the occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge (Screen shot via)

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

US NEWS

  • Last Oregon Occupiers Told to 'Go Home'
    Three more men have been arrested "without incident" in connection to the occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge. Leader Ammon Bundy released a statement urging the half-dozen people remaining at the refuge to"stand down". He said: "Go home and hug your families."—USA Today
  • Super PACs Offer $1.5 Million for Trump-Cruz Debate
    The super PACs supporting Ted Cruz are offering to donate $1.5 million to veterans' charities if Donald Trump agrees to face Cruz in a one-on-one debate before the Iowa caucus. Trump tweeted his response to Cruz's offer: "Can we do it in Canada?"—NBC News
  • Ferguson Agrees Police Reforms
    Ferguson city officials have reached a tentative deal with the Justice Department on police reforms. Under the agreement, all officers, supervisors and jail workers will be required to wear body cameras and microphones, and the right to film officers is preserved.—The New York Times
  • Delaware Votes on Death Penalty
    Delaware's House of Representatives is scheduled to vote Thursday on a bill to repeal the state's death penalty law. Lawyers, activists, and pastors have urged for an end to the death penalty, and Governor Jack Markell has said he will sign the bill if it passes.—Delaware Online

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

  • Sweden May Expel 80,000 People
    Sweden is making plans to expel up to 80,000 failed asylum-seekers, the country's interior minister told Swedish media. But Anders Ygeman later tweeted to say he had not taken a position on exactly how many migrants would or would not have grounds for asylum.—BBC News
  • Zika Virus Threatens to Become Pandemic
    Scientists have urged the World Health Organization to take urgent action over the Zika virus, which they claim has the potential to become an "explosive pandemic". The WHO will hold a special session today to discuss the virus, linked to shrunken brains in children.—Reuters
  • Yahoo Japan Accused of Ivory Sales
    Yahoo Japan has promised to strengthen its policies to prevent the sale of ivory online, after activists accused the company of letting the "bloody trade" thrive on its auction site. An online petition calling for a ban on ivory products gathered 1.1 million signatures.—CNN
  • Iranian President Woos French Business Leaders
    President Hassan Rouhani has told French business leaders that "Iran is ready for investments" as he seeks to revive economic trade. Talks continue today over a multibillion-dollar contract for Iran's purchase of 114 French Airbus planes.—The Guardian

Ai Weiwei (Photo by Giulia Marchi)

EVERYTHING ELSE

  • Weiwei Shuts Down Danish Exhibition
    The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has closed an exhibition in Denmark in protest at the country's plan to seize asylum seekers' valuables. Weiwei was "shocked" by Danish MPs' decision to back the plan.—Al Jazeera
  • Duke Suspends Sorority Rush
    Sorority activities at Duke University have been suspended after a new pledge student was hospitalized from heavy drinking. The university has concerns about the recruitment process, known as "rush".—ABC News
  • Kanye Trashes Wiz
    Kayne West got into a Twitter fight with Wiz Khalifa after misunderstanding "KK" as a reference to his wife. He ended up claiming Khalifa regrets having a kid with Amber Rose because it meant "you let a stripper trap you".—VICE
  • Predictive Dreaming Is Real, Says Professor
    Psychology professor Stanley Krippner says precognitive dream—dreams about events that haven't yet occurred, but later take place in reality—have some basis in science. It's all about signals from the future.—Motherboard

Done with reading for today? That's fine, you can watch this instead, the newest episode of VICE Canada Reports, "Will a Toronto Police Project Help Prevent the Next Sammy Yatim Shooting?"

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Bernie Sanders Hung Out with President Obama at the White House Wednesday

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Bernie Sanders doing his thing. Photo via Flickr user Michael Vadon

On Wednesday, with the Iowa caucuses looming, presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders was at the White House for a quick chat with Barack Obama, as CNN reports. It's the first time Sanders and the president have gone face-to-face in the Oval Office since the Vermont senator's big surge in the polls.

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said the pair probably talked about Obama's "own experience running for president," and how the current rivalry between Sanders and Clinton is "good for the Democratic Party."

The meet comes a few days after a Politico interview with Obama gave the impression that the current president was buddying up with his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama pointedly rejected any comparison between his 2008 campaign and Sanders' own long-shot bid.

But after the presidential hang, Sanders told reporters it was "productive" and shook off the idea that Obama was choosing a side.

"What the president has tried to do, what Vice President Biden has tried to do, is to be as evenhanded as they could be," he said, dismissing the idea of tension.

The 45-minute chat was over around lunchtime, with Obama hurrying to a meeting with Biden at 12:30 and Sanders scurrying off himself, perhaps to decide whether to drop an anti-Hillary attack ad before Iowans kick things off on Monday.

Follow River Donaghey on Twitter.

VICE on HBO: How Is Saudi Arabia Dealing with the Threat of Terrorism?

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

The Middle East is fracturing. Arab uprisings and military interventions across the region have caused civil wars and spawned terrorist groups. Stuck in the middle of it all is Saudi Arabia. Confronted by extremism on all sides, the desert kingdom is building massive fences at its borders with Iraq and Yemen to keep out the terrorist organizations that it may in fact have had a hand in creating.

In this episode from season three of our HBO show, that originally aired on June 12th of last year, Suroosh Alvi traveled to Saudi Arabia to see how America's staunchest Arab ally was defending itself—and how it may ultimately be fanning the flames of global militancy.

One of those militant organizations, ISIS or the Islamic State, has seen an exponential growth since it appeared on the global stage in 2014. In the second half of the episode, Gianna Toboni traveled to Europe to meet some of the young men drawn to ISIS's call, and visited with American Navy strike pilots working to roll back the Islamic State's gains.

The VICE Reader: 'Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist' Is a Gutsy Protest Novel for Right Now

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Sunil Yapa. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan/courtesy of Little, Brown and Company/Lee Bordeaux Books

Sunil Yapa's debut novel, Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, takes place during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Fifty thousand people showed up to protest the meetings. The 900 cops on duty were overwhelmed and quickly turned to tear gas and pepper spray. The novel follows seven characters over the course of one day as the nonviolent protests devolve into riots. This is a book about love and empathy, about what it means to care—or not care—about other people in the world. The fever of protest doesn't change, even if the causes do. Anyone with an interest in how our world is strung together and divided and hanging in this crazy balance will, I think, enjoy how Sunil has put it all on display.

Sunil and I survived graduate school together, so I saw an early version of this book. But that does not obligate me to love his work. Just the opposite, in fact. It's really difficult to read work by a friend because you can see right through it. But I found myself forgetting that I know the author and was totally engrossed.

Sunil and I are both world travelers with immigrant parents and homes that we rarely visit—my father is from Iraq and my mother is from Argentina, and Sunil is the son of a Sri Lankan father and a mother from Montana. Neither of us is very nested in any one place, but when our paths do cross there is always a lot to talk about. We spoke over the phone earlier this month.

VICE: This is a really good book. There are so many things that work. Each character is clearly defined and the collision of their lives feels inevitable and yet surprising until the last page. There is velocity and tension and compassion and a bit of schooling all woven in.
Sunil Yapa: Thanks!

So I can't help wondering if you know the exact percentage increase in the size of your ego since going on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
I do. Zero.

I don't believe it.
The irony, and you know this because you know me, is that I have social anxiety. So when I heard I was going to be on TV, it was both: "That's incredible," and "Oh, shit, that's absolutely terrifying." But it was fun. Seth made me feel really comfortable. And we joked about my dad coming to the US on the same plane as the Beatles for their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

True?
My pops is the original storyteller in the family. He swears it's true.

Hamida Ghafour in the Toronto Star said, "Those who came of age politically in the 1990s when anti-globalization slogans and lumberjack shirts were all the rage, need generation-defining books and Sunil Yapa's debut novel should be among them." I agree. I need reminders. I like how you brought back Mumia Abu-Jamal and the tree sit-ins.
I think because of the 24-hour news cycle we instantly forget what happens. Seattle was such a pivotal moment and people forgot about it five minutes after seeing it on TV. So part of my intention in writing this book was to unpack the sound bite: "Violent Protesters Protest with Police."

Which is still sadly relevant.
When did the American police start looking like an occupying military force? I've been watching footage from Ferguson and it's crazy, you see American police rolling into the street in tanks. I wanted to get into the cops' story, too.

You admit that it's not based all on fact. You conflated things, you added things.
The actual protest happened over five days and I think that almost everything that happens in the book up until two-thirds of the way through all happened at some point during the protest.

It was November 1999, a month before the millennium. I love that moment in history. It's the end of the American century.

When I was starting to research this, I saw a photo of a woman, long red hair, on her knees on the pavement surrounded by protesters, blood coming from her head, with her hands clasped together in prayer or in pain. And I thought, What has changed in the world that a white woman is willing to go to a protest and get beat, not to expand her own rights but to expand the rights of a kid making shoes in Bangladesh ?

Do you think the woman with red hair is a hero?
I didn't have the courage to go to the protests myself. I had been arrested already and I didn't want to go to jail again and I wasn't willing to go. So I have a lot of respect and admiration for people who were willing to go and be tear-gassed and arrested. So in that sense I think it's heroic.

But I also see a lot of Americans who think, We made the problem in the third world so we have to solve it. I think that's condescending and patriarchal in a way, especially without a full understanding of what, for example, Sri Lanka's role in the global economy might be. There is an American sense of "Let's save the world," and that's sweet. I admire that. But it's also naïve and unheroic and problematic in a lot of ways too.

What did you think about Occupy?
I went down to Zuccotti Park a couple of times and was there when everyone went out to Times Square. But there wasn't really anything to occupy. There was no visible enemy—it's not like the one percent was there mocking us­ so we could throw tomatoes at them—so people started to get into fights with the cops. And I was like, we are the 99 percent, so are they! Why are we antagonizing them? I'm not a fan nor a hater of the NYPD, but don't start a needless fight with the cops. That isn't what this is about. So I left.

On some level the cops aren't really the problem. We are all part of this huge global economic capitalistic system. Let's be aware of that.

So true. That's why I like the Biotic Baking Brigade, who protest by slapping pies in the faces of conservatives like Ann Coulter. That was one of my favorite forms of protest.
Love those guys! Love it when protest has a sense of biting humor.

"If there is a connection between the Seattle protests in '99 and Ferguson and Baltimore, I would say when people in a democracy feel powerless they take to the streets."

I went to the march for climate change in New York and like you say, it feels good sometimes to be in a gigantic crowd. But I didn't really feel like we were all there for the same reasons. If anything, maybe, when the oceans are rising and hell is breaking loose, people will look back and say "remember when those millions of people marched that day? I guess they knew it was coming."
People talk about revolution with a capital R. I'm all about a million little revolutions. That's how I see change. There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism. Marx might disagree. I was just reading about Buddhist economics.

There is no such thing as Buddhist economics.
It comes from Schumacher's book Small Is Beautiful. He has a whole chapter on Buddhist economics.

But it's not in the sutras is all I'm saying.
Ha. No, I don't think so. I think we can live with capitalism. But we need to take some of our power back from the politicians. I mean what is a protest, what are we doing?

I don't know. I really think half the time people are there for social reasons. They want to hang out with people who have similar—
That's something. That's a big deal. Not feeling alienated hanging out with people. If you just sit at home and watch the news you're going to shoot yourself. So you go out on the street. I think that's actually legitimate. Two, I think it's also maybe like, you look at Ferguson and Baltimore it's an expression of grief.

If there is a connection between the Seattle protests in '99 and Ferguson and Baltimore, I would say when people in a democracy feel powerless they take to the streets. And I would say it's a desperate measure. It's an expression of loss, a demand for justice.

The other thing they have in common is how quickly people forgot. So what's the next thing you are going to write about to remind us?
Ha. It's not my job to remind people. I write about things that I feel really moved or connected to. So I might write a book about dogs, you know?

Noa Jones writes fiction and creative nonfiction.

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is on sale in bookstores and online now.

Meet the Writers Behind a New Musical About British Left-Wing Leader Jeremy Corbyn

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Jeremy Corbyn. Photo by Oscar Webb

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Great romances have been immortalized on stage and screen throughout time: Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Romeo and Juliet, Edward and Bella, Jacob and Bella. These couples symbolize an unattainable dream, a dream that usually ends with an untimely death. Nonetheless, now comes the greatest romance of them all: the story of a fling between a young Jeremy Corbyn and Dianne Abbott, a tale brought to life on stage in Corbyn the Musical: the Motorcycle Diaries.

The musical, directed by Adam Lenson, will be opening at the Waterloo East Theatre in Westminster on April 12 and will run for two weeks. Tickets were released on Monday and have already sold out.

The plot is uncomfortably bizarre. It sees Jeremy Corbyn—now Prime Minister—facing a nuclear standoff with Russian President Vladimir Putin, set to a backdrop of a motorbike ride taken by Jeremy Corbyn and Labour MP Diane Abbott that supposedly really happened in East Germany in the 1970s. Corbyn and Abbott have never commented on the alleged fling.

There has already been some backlash from Corbynistas, who protest that Corbyn is not fair game. Unsurprisingly, the show's writers—journalists Rupert Myers and Bobby Friedman—seemed to think otherwise.

VICE: So this is your first musical. How long did it take you to come up with the idea?
Rupert Myers: After we got word of the Corbyn and Abbott motorbike saga, we came up with the plot in the space of about 20 minutes, and since then there hasn't been a lot of tinkering with that.

Is this the first time you two have worked together?
No, we both studied at Emmanuelle College, Cambridge, and had a university radio show called Rock and Roll Politics. You can literally summarize the show as "and that was an interview with Conservative MP John Redwood and now it's time for Cream, 'Sunshine Of Your Love.'" It was a very strange mix that, we will be honest enough to admit, did not change the face of British radio.
Bobby Friedman: I don't know if Rupert remembers it, but we did actually say that line.

Why is Jeremy the perfect character for a musical?
This musical is the biggest compliment to Jeremy Corbyn, because he's actually the only politician who really justifies having this, and people would want to go and see because they are fascinated by it.
Myers: Corbyn is from a small group of politicians, alongside people likes of John Galloway, John Prescott, and Boris Johnson, who have more dimensions to them then other politicians. Corbyn is the freshest one on the scene.


Did you didn't expect the backlash that came when the musical was announced?

No, I was genuinely surprised, because if you look at Bobby who has worked for the BBC, and you look at me who has written for seven years for the Guardian... I was quite shocked. People write in the comment section that I must be a Tory and when I write for the Telegraph people comment saying I must be on the left. I think it's possible to tell jokes about people without anyone thinking it's from a specific political agenda. I think people are going to see it's a fair comedy and not a tedious 90-minute treatise on our political views which no one would want to see or put on.

Friedman: I've had a few comments from people on Twitter but there are an awful lot of odd people on Twitter, so it doesn't bother me. By and large the reaction has been incredibly positive—this is the fasting-ever-selling play at our theater and our advertising budget has been literally zero.

Rupert and Bobby

Why do you think the show sold out so quickly?
Myers: I think it was the title.
Friedman: It was just an idea that sounds mad, but when you hear it you think, I do in fact want to see that show because it is inherently funny.
Myers: Politics is, at the moment, quite depressing for a lot of people and they are quite keen and maybe even desperate for the chance to laugh about it. Some situations you can laugh or you can cry. I think the Labour Party is in fact going to choose to laugh.

Many people would think the Labour Party are making a joke of themselves at the moment, without the need for political satire.
Friedman: I don't think you can ever say that any major political party is beyond satire. Some of the lines do write themselves and there is a huge about of material. But it's not just about Jeremy Corbyn and Labour. It's about other politicians as well. You can always poke fun at your leaders and it's a form of political analysis. There is always call for that.

Watch: VICE Talks Film with Mike Leigh

Myers: I don't think that a lot of Labour supporters would agree that Labour are down. Thousands of Labour supports elected Jeremy Corbyn to be the most popular leader—in terms of people who have voted for him—in the party's history. They would say that they have got their party back and that the dawn has broken.

What punches will you throw at Corbyn?
Friedman: I think we critique all aspects. There is no other politician taken as seriously by his own supporters as Jeremy Corbyn—if you were to go on Twitter now and write, "Jeremy Corbyn is an idiot," you will have tens of people coming straight back at you. It's all very serious and there is a lot to laugh at.

Is it a challenge to satirize left-wing politicians?
Myers: I think it's Nish Kumar who says, it's harder to make jokes from a right-wing perspective. What Bobby and I agreed upon is that this is not a right-wing musical. We attempt to do it from the center—that in itself is something unique because if you look at the history of political satire it tends to be written by people who are more towards one side than the other. We are trying to be balanced, so it would be interesting to see what the reaction would be.

Did you learn anything from the experience of writing a musical?
I've become increasingly fascinated with and sympathetic towards Jeremy Corbyn and I'd love to meet the guy.

Do you think Corbyn will like it?
I think Jeremy and Diane will—maybe not today, but soon—be very grateful that we immortalized potentially mythological aspects to their youth. I don't know them personally, but I'd like to think they have a sense of humor.

Follow Amelia Dimoldenberg on Twitter.

Let's Be Honest, Straight Guys: We All Like Butt Stuff

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This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

If there's anything I know about sex, it's that most people—regardless of gender—like a finger up the butt. When I learned that fact, I knew that I would spend forever being good at sex. "Just put a finger in their butt": it's the golden grail of sex tips, like every single piece of advice ever printed in both Men's Health and Cosmo, distilled into one perfect life lesson.

That, I'm sure you'll agree, is why the Kanye-Wiz Twitter beef last night was so interesting.

If you don't live on Twitter, let me break it down for you: last night Kanye West went in on Wiz Khalifa with a 26-tweet-long attack calling the rapper "corny as fuck" and accusing him of getting "trapped" by ex-girlfriend Amber Rose. It all started because Khalifa tore into Kanye for re-naming his album Waves, implying he was ripping off imprisoned rapper Max B. The tirade included such gems as "maybe I couldn't be skinny and tall but I'll settle for being the greatest artist of all time as a consolation."

The whole thing was a mess—Kanye was weirdly preoccupied with skinny jeans and letting everyone know he's an "OG" (catch up on it here if that's your sort of thing)—but the one tweet that managed to cut through all the confusion was Amber Rose's response:

With these simple words, illustrated with a single erect finger emoji, our image of Kanye had shifted from "angry dominant auteur" to submissive man, lying on his back with his feet in the air, purring as he's fingered in the butt.

So let's unpick this: what was Amber Rose trying to achieve? Well, she was trying to embarrass him—that's obvious. She was attempting to emasculate him with alleged personal details from their sex life together, and she feels that revealing this particular alleged detail is the most effective way of doing that.

In doing so, she's inadvertently highlighted a universal truth: little is more taboo and potentially embarrassing to your average straight guy than admitting he likes a finger up his butt. Which is strange, really, because, to the best of my knowledge, a lot of straight men love it.

To corroborate both the actual and anecdotal evidence I was already aware of, I googled "Do straight guys like having their butt fingered?"

These guys said:

And as this guy says, it's sex, guys! Just sex!



This comment, however, summarized why Amber's putdown was so effective:

Any sexual act to do with a guy's butt is still seen as borderline homosexual, and many straight men have a problem with that. Whether it's a tentative little finger, rimming or a full-on strap-on experience, expressing a desire for a woman to explore the back door – in many people's eyes – is as good as admitting you're way up there on the Kinsey scale.

But so many men do enjoy it, so why all the secrecy? Why has there not been a mass movement of men banding together to proclaim their love of receiving a finger in the butt in a sexual context? To get a better gauge on things I spoke to five straight men about it, all of whom wanted to remain anonymous.

VICE: Hi, can you talk about getting your butt fingered?
Straight Man One: I can talk about it, but only how butters it is and how I've never done it. And never will.

Why?
It's butters, because it's my asshole, so get the fuck away from my asshole. I think it's to do with male pride, also. I think the idea of someone penetrating you in some way doesn't vibe with a lot of straight guys. It's the ultimate horror, conceptually. It's also a hygiene thing for me.

VICE: Do you like fingers in your butt during sex?
Straight Man Two: I don't do it, but then I haven't even done anal with a girl. I just kinda like pussy more than the idea of assholes. But I've heard that dudes like it because it intensifies their orgasm, and I think with anything sexual it's so subjective and personal that it's best just to let people crack on.

Is it taboo for straight guys?
Again, the taboo element has been created from a group male psychology that essentially is still quite homophobic in my opinion. Yes, we're pretty cosmopolitan as a nation, but I've played in enough football teams to know that it's still seen with negative connotations among young men. I think it's butters that most "lads" are still like this, but then again most "lads" are dickheads.

For me, personally, I don't like the sensation of the whole butt thing. People have asked me to do pills up my ass and shit 'cause it's meant to be better, but fuck that. I'm not against the idea as an idea, I just don't feel like butt stuff gives me any pleasure

Read on Broadly: The Girls Who Use Grindr

VICE: Yo, do you like getting your butt fingered?
Straight Man Three: I'm flattered you thought of me, but I have no experience in this area, I'm sad to say. Sorry to disappoint.

Why's that?

VICE: Hiya. So, butt fingering.
Straight Man Four: Playing with the butt-hole is pretty cool, mainly because it feels nice. And who doesn't want to feel nice? There are people out there who think sliding your thumb into a nicely lubed-up asshole is for gay people, and maybe it is. Gay means happy, right? Because that's exactly what I am when someone's rumping-and-pumping or slowly tickling the inner-walls of my rectum.

VICE: Hey. Do you like having a girl's fingers in your butt?
Straight Man Five:
If you asked me that a few months ago, then no. But then it sort of accidentally happened one night; she was playing around the edges and then, y'know, oops, in it was! And yeah, it was weird but good.

So it happened for the first time in your mid-twenties. Is that because you didn't want to do it, or because it'd never occurred to you?

To be honest, probably because it feels like it shouldn't happen, like it's a bad thing. I'd do it to girls, but the other way around seems wrong. Or, at least, that's what I thought. I guess the idea made me feel really passive, like the sub. A little bitch. But now I've popped, I won't stop.

§


So there you go—the general consensus from a tiny, unscientific case study of straight dudes: once you're down, you're down. It's no big deal. Historically, oral sex was taboo, and now it's sexual bread and butter. Societal norms and attitudes around sex continually shift and stretch to include a whole host of new sex acts and kinks.

But, for now, there's still a barrier straight men have to get over before they can admit they like a finger in the butt. Which is precisely why Amber Rose's tweet was the winner of last night's beef—and from now until the inevitable "Is 2017 the Year of the Male Finger-Bang?" think-piece comes out, she'll have the power to silence a man as momentous as Kanye with the weight of a single yellow finger emoji.


What Do British Teachers Think About the Controversy Over Face Veils in Schools?

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Image via wiki

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In September 2014, a 16-year-old at a north London state school made national headlines. The student had attended Camden School for Girls for five years, but over the summer decided to start wearing the niqab—an Islamic veil that covers the whole face. The school said that she could not return for sixth form unless she removed the veil, on the grounds that staff need to be able to see students' faces to verify their identity, and that teachers need to see a student's face "in order to read the visual cues it provides."

The school's decision to ban the student was controversial. A year earlier, in September 2013, Birmingham's Metropolitan College had capitulated on a decision to ban a student who wore the veil—an equally contentious decision. Should a student be restricted from accessing education because of what they choose to wear? Or can that choice over clothing be reasonably restricted within schools?

This week, the head of Ofsted (the government Office for Standards in Education) waded into the debate. Sir Michael Wilshaw said that he would support any heads who banned the "inappropriate wearing" of a Muslim face veil (variously known as the niqab or burqa). He expressed concern that some heads were "coming under pressure" to permit the wearing of the veil by staff or pupils, and said that schools could be downgraded to an inadequate rating if the veil was hindering communication and effective teaching. The Department of Education has previously stated uniform policy is up to schools, but expressed support for Wilshaw's revised stance.

For a scrap of fabric worn by a tiny, tiny proportion of British women, the face veil has attracted a disproportionate amount of attention over the years. A general ban has been debated in parliament, with tabloid headlines sporadically screaming about its dangers. Never mind the fact that there is no data on how many women in the UK actually wear the face veil. Estimates put it in the hundreds, rather than the thousands—a number so small it is difficult to see why it merits a policy response.

"Why are we even talking about this? It is a non-issue," says Shaista Gohir, chair of the Muslim Women's Network. "You do get girls wearing face veils in colleges and sixth form but you're talking such tiny numbers. When Ofsted say any school who allows face veils will be downgraded, well how many under-16 girls do we know that have worn a veil? It's exaggerating the actual situation."

That said, she does support a ban on face veils for under-16s in schools. "It's an impediment to education," she says. "When you're communicating, it's not just what you say or hear, it's also your facial expressions giving a lot away about how you might be feeling. A teacher can look at a pupil and think they look confused or stressed or upset. There's an imbalance there when you have 29 children in the class getting the full benefits of teaching and one person isn't getting it. We need equality. And is it really an informed choice for an under-16?" Over 16, Shaista points out, it becomes odd to ban a piece of clothing, given that you can have sex and get married, and are attending school voluntarily.

Many teachers feel it is too small an issue to merit an intervention from Ofsted. "I haven't ever seen a person in a face veil, let alone a student—and most of the kids I teach are Muslim," said Camille, a teacher in Wembley, London. "What worries me is that we are talking about children, and we are talking about girls. It's frustrating to see them spoken for, to see officials arbitrarily making the statement that they can't communicate because they are in a veil. What research is that based on? It seems to me like a subjective statement."

Ahmed is a teacher in central Birmingham, who followed the controversy over the niqab at Birmingham Metropolitan College in 2013. "In a decade as a teacher in this city, I've taught maybe two or three girls wearing face veils, all of them over 16. If I'm completely honest, yes, it can be disconcerting and to an extent I can understand why teachers might not like it," he says. "But then you think—what is the alternative? You ban those girls from coming to school altogether? Remove them from a school with a mixed intake and force them further into an enclosed community? In my experience, it's so infrequent that you can afford to make an allowance to facilitate that teenager's education. The idea of downgrading schools on that basis—something that's likely to be one or two children every few years at the very, very most—seems overly punitive to me. It adds to this idea that Muslims are drowning out a British way of life when in reality, we're talking about the exception, not the rule."

Put simply, face veils are visually shocking in a culture where we are used to seeing faces. But the gleeful media response to suggestion of restrictions illustrates the way that this piece of fabric has become emblematic of a whole host of other things: a division of cultures, a clash between east and west, between feminism and religious freedom. It is difficult to think of another explanation for the disproportionate attention given to something worn by so few people.

"What bothers me about this announcement is that it comes after the news story that a kid who wrote 'I live in a terrorist house' instead of 'terraced house' was subject to an official intervention, and after David Cameron's announcement about English lessons and 'submissive Muslim women,'" says Camille. "It firmly presses an Islamaphobic message. This face veil announcement offers a solution to something that is clearly not a widespread problem. Ofsted and teachers have never had a supportive relationship. It's disingenuous to suggest that by introducing this punitive measure, Ofsted is somehow supporting struggling head teachers who don't know how to manage this issue."

By banning something currently worn by so few women, the government may have an unexpected impact. "Teenagers: what do they like doing? Rebelling, being different," says Shaista. "It probably makes them want to put the veil on."

Follow Samira Shackle on Twitter.

We Asked an Ethics Lawyer About Defence Attorneys Who Break the Rules

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NYC Ethics Lawyer Nicole Hyland

To watch Ice-T conduct a rape investigation is to know that most TV crime procedurals aren't overly concerned with realism. But for someone whose sole real-world experience with the criminal justice system has consisted of hanging out in the waiting room for jury duty, it can be hard to know for sure what shows like Law & Order or Better Call Saul get right and wrong.

New York-based ethics attorney Nicole Hyland wants to change that. As a fan of Breaking Bad, she was an early and eager viewer of Better Call Saul, the spin-off origin story for New Mexico's most ethically-challenged fictional defense lawyer. But when the first recaps and reviews came out, she found critics struggling with the basics of Saul Goodman's conduct.

"They would say things like, 'Can a lawyer do that?' Or, 'Shouldn't a lawyer do this?'" she says. "They had an understandably uninformed of whether what he did was OK or not in a particular situation."

As a corrective, she launched The Ethics of Better Call Saul, offering her own extremely-informed opinion of the lead character's behavior. The blog took off, attracting attention from Slate and the Wall Street Journal. And for good reason: The recaps are delightfully nit-picky, even obsessive in their attention to detail. We interviewed her for our latest episode of our show The Real, and we had such a great time discussing the finer points of Saul's moral failings that we decided to call her up again.

As Hyland gears up for the start of season two, we talked about public defenders, attorney-client privilege, and how 20-plus years of Law & Order reruns have skewed Americans' opinions of the justice system.

Check out our new episode of 'The Real' About New York Defense Attorney Howard Greenberg

VICE: What does your work as an ethics lawyer entail?

Nicole Hyland: Essentially, I represent lawyers and law firms and counsel them on various ethics issues that may come up in their professional lives. So, for example, if a lawyer has a situation where they have a new prospective client and they have a question as to whether they can take on that representation—or if it creates a conflict of interest for them because of some other current or former client relationship they have—they might come to an ethics lawyer.

They may have a situation that comes up where they found out that in a litigation they're handling a client or a witness who has presented false evidence or testimony and they need to know what their obligations are with respect to that false evidence. So we counsel them in the first instance and we try to help them work through what to do. And then if a lawyer or a law firm that we represent is charged with a disciplinary violation or is sued for malpractice, we would then come in and assist them.

So when you're applying this knowledge to Better Call Saul, do you ultimately think he's a good attorney? Or do you just delight in all of his failings?
It's a little of both. I sort of cringe-watch the stuff he does, but it's great fodder to talk about legal ethics because he does make so many missteps. So I enjoy that part of it.

But I also love that he can talk his way out of pretty much any situation. And that's one of the things that, for an attorney, is a great skill—to have that gift of gab and be able to extemporaneously make arguments and persuade people. I admire that, I'm a little jealous of his skill at that. And I think in many ways he's actually quite a good attorney. When he gets out of his way and he stops trying to scheme, he really has a good instinct. He's a good investigator. When he sees something or hears something that doesn't sound right to him, he doesn't ignore it. He goes after it and digs into it and figures it out.

Some of the violations you point out in your recaps were surprising to me as a layperson, like his repeated violation of the advertising rules. Is there a big difference between ethics for the general population and legal ethics?
Ethics is not really the right word to use, because ethics does imply something that's more like morality and "doing the right thing," whereas many of the principles and guidelines that we follow as lawyers don't have all that much to do with morality. They are about a decision we've made as a profession and as a society to enhance or value certain types of conduct or certain types of relationships.

So what would be a concrete instance of that distinction?

An example that I come back to is the duty of confidentiality. People would disagree with me I'm sure, but I don't think there's an inherent moral right about the duty of confidentiality. People speak about it as if there is. But if you were walking down the street and someone ran up to you and said, "I just killed a man. He's lying in the alley over there," you wouldn't feel any obligation not to disclose that to a passing police officer. You would do something and you would feel a moral obligation to make sure that person didn't get away with that crime.

But for a criminal defense lawyer, when someone comes to you who has committed a crime, even a horrible crime, you have a duty of confidentiality and that duty trumps any moral misgivings you may have about disclosing any information you learn. There are some exceptions to that, but for the most part that is your obligation. So I don't see it as a moral imperative to maintain that duty of confidentiality. I see it as a professional responsibility. It's a decision we've made as a profession and as part of our judicial system that we would rather encourage clients to be forthright with their lawyers and talk to them in order to achieve the best outcome in our justice system as an aggregate.

What do you think people misunderstand from media representations of defense attorneys?

I'm a huge fan of Law & Order, but I think it somewhat did a disservice to criminal defense lawyers because they were almost always portrayed quite negatively, as sort of the opponent to the hero who was the DA. So all of the shenanigans that the DAs would engage in to get around having the protection of a criminal defense lawyer was presented as a positive thing. You know: We're going to question these defendants and we're going to manipulate them into not wanting to have their lawyers present." That was presented as justice and truth prevailing in most instances.

Again, big Law & Order fan, but I do think that's a misconception that has created an idea in the public mind that criminal lawyers stand in the way of justice. The fact is that the justice system is so heavily weighted in favor of the prosecution and the government, and public defenders are so under-funded and so overstretched with volumes and volumes of cases, the reality is the opposite. I would like to see the public give more appreciation for what criminal defense attorneys do and the resources they have and the pressures that they have to face in trying to do what they do.

It can be hard for people to remember that when they see a lawyer defending a person who's already been tried in the court of public opinion or who seems obviously guilty. Why is it important that those people also have zealous defenders too?

This is a country that is founded on having a justice system where, in the context of the proceeding, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. And the prosecutor, the government, has that burden of proof. A defense counsel doesn't have to do anything, doesn't have to present any evidence. All they are required to do is put the prosecutor to their proof on every element. And so that's important as a broader structural liberty-based concept for our country to have those protections and to ensure that we keep the government to that proof every time. Because, yes, in individual cases there are going to be individual guilty people and some of those people will get off because the government didn't meet its burden or because they had really good criminal defense lawyer. But the idea is to maintain the integrity of the system as a whole, so that innocent people do not end up unfairly penalized.

Now it's not a fully functioning system, as we all know. I mean, for anyone who's listened to the Serial podcast or to another one I'd recommend called Breakdown, you really see a lot of the things that we've been talking about and how the system is stacked up against people, especially people who are poor. I'm not as worried about the Martin Shkrelis of the world as I am about people who really don't have the resources to defend themselves or to hire good lawyers.

Meg Charlton is an associate producer at VICE. Follow her on Twitter.

I Watched 26 Teams Create Horror Movies from Scratch in Just 48 Hours

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Scene from The Hunter of the Dark. Photo by Jason McQueen

It's 7 PM when I enter a bar in Hobart called the Grand Poobah, where the Tasploitation Challenge is set to begin. The Challenge started three years ago, and has become one of Tasmania's largest film competitions. The mood is strange; there's a nervous electricity in the air and a sense of subdued... something.

Some contestants are talking about the crash that happened nearby last night. Four teenagers in a stolen RAV4 hurtled through a red light, killing a pregnant 24-year-old. The teenage driver ran from the scene, and the woman's two-year-old son escaped mostly unscathed. The mother didn't survive. Such mindless acts of horror don't often happen in Hobart and people in the city had spent most of the day wandering around in varying states of sadness.

Now, in the evening, we're at the opening of the challenge, where 26 teams of filmmakers will write, shoot, and edit a short horror film in just 48 hours. Horror as entertainment has met actual, life-wrecking, despair-inducing horror, and it's a very strange feeling.

From the stage, festival director Briony Kidd opens the competition and each team is given a sub-genre, a prop, and a line of dialogue to incorporate into its film. Apart from that, there are no rules.

Scene 2 fromHunter of the Dark

I introduce myself to Shaun Wilson. He and his team, Dying Arts, have been allocated the Evil Twin genre. Their prop is a satin jacket and they must use a line from the Iggy Pop song "Neighborhood Threat" in their film. Wilson seems unconcerned with these constraints, which is understandable—the members of Dying Arts are all professional filmmakers, performers, or writers. Their scriptwriter, Finegan Kruckemeyer, has had 74 plays commissioned and performed around the world. Wilson jokes with his crew, heckles some friends, and generally looks relaxed. They are definitely the early favorites.

I walk on and approach a group of lightly bearded, heavily relaxed young men who—in contrast to the chummy Dying Arts crew—are not mingling with the crowd. All except one are dressed in those low-cut, deep-slung style of singlet that seem specifically designed to reveal the male nipple. The group's director of photography, Marcus Morrell, tells me the team is called the Carcinorganics, and that they've entered Tasploitation to "show what we can do." I nod. "You can't overthink it," he explains in a flat voice. I wonder how much weed these guys smoke. Privately, I don't give the Carcinorganics much chance. They've been given Haunted House as a sub-genre, a tiny clock as a prop, and a line from a David Bowie song.

The teams rush off to start scripting and I walk to the waterfront to find a beer, passing the crash site on the way. It's been cleared. The only thing that gives away what happened is the people who stand around, staring at the intersection. I check the local news on my phone. The teenage fugitive has been caught in nearby Kingston and charged with manslaughter. Even though the mother had passed away, her baby was delivered—premature, but alive.

A scene from Featherhead. Photo by Isabella Von Lichtan

The next afternoon I'm standing in the front yard of a neat blue house in Mount Nelson, watching Dying Arts work. Wilson films his two lead actors as they deliver emotionally taut performances. Kruckemeyer observes from the driveway, script in hand, making sure they don't butcher his work. I'd planned on staying longer, but there doesn't seem much point. They've just reconfirmed their status as favorites.

I leave and follow Morrell's directions to a large, neglected brick building in New Town where the Carcinorganics are filming. On set a mulleted man is clutching a buzzsaw, flanked by two buxom blondes in nurse uniforms. Morrell studies them through a track-mounted camera. His previously relaxed demeanor swapped for an intensely focused stare. He's surrounded by the rest of the Carcinorganics—still wearing their super-loose singlets—who are holding lights, operating laptops, and wafting smoke towards the actors from a foot-pedaled machine. The whole setup is impressive, and I feel ashamed for writing them off earlier.

Later that night, a candlelight vigil is held at the site of the crash. Over 200 people attend. A dozen Buddhist monks hold a silent prayer. As the Tasploitation teams begin shooting their night scenes, the baby is still in intensive care. The teams spend Sunday editing their films before rushing down to hand their final cuts to Kidd and her co-organizers by 7 PM. On Monday evening the screening and judging is held in the Hobart City Hall. About 300 people turn up, in varying degrees of horror dress-up.

Taylor Ashton and Marcus Morrell of The Carcinorganics. Photos by the author

Twenty-six films have been entered, with plenty of chase scenes, handheld camera work, and, impressively, even Claymation. Werewolves, haunted houses, possessed children, and a few garden-variety murderous psychopaths appear, plus a few too many clowns. Dig by the Decomposers is worth noting for its excellently gory special effects, as is Canine by Acute Brow Productions. The Carcinorganics also turn in one of the stronger films with Takayna—a gothic, bloody piece that draws its story from one of the many massacres of Aboriginal People in Tasmanian history. Morrell's smooth, predatory camera work is particularly impressive. They take home the Tasmaniana Award, given to the film that best interprets the idea of Tasploitation.

Predictably, the Jury Award for best film goes to Dying Arts for Things You Take, a terrific piece that was even tighter and more menacing on screen than it seemed on set. On stage, Wilson seems shocked, and he tries to deflect the applause towards his teammates. Afterwards, he tells me in a breathless mutter "We got it. We got it. I'm quite surprised." Nobody else seems to be. I slip out and head to my car. As I pull out of the car park I see the crash site, not far from the City Hall. On the ground is a small mound of candles and flowers.

The crash site

It's been a strange weekend, watching people simulate horror in a city filled with grief about the real thing. When I asked Kidd to reflect on this she was thoughtful. "I would never want to use the horror film as entertainment to comment directly on something as terrible as the accident last week," she said. "All horror is commenting on that kind of real event."

Films like these help us escape the daily horror that surrounds us, I suppose. As Kidd remarked, "Telling stories about that, whether very serious or more silly and light, is actually a way of processing and coping with those deep and fundamental facts of life."

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In Loving Memory of One of New Zealand's Oldest Strip Clubs

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Las Vegas as it looked in the 1970s. All images courtesy Tom Levesque.

Las Vegas was a strip club on Karangahape Road for 53 years. It was a garish, oddball establishment with a giant mural of a topless woman over the upper story façade. It wasn't classy, but for city residents it came to represent Auckland's bohemian subculture.

In September last year Las Vegas closed. The owners sold it off to make way for a bar, which is a sad process being repeated all along the strip. For many, the day Las Vegas closed was the day K Road's heart stopped beating.

One such individual is Tom Levesque. He and producer Eva Trebilco made a short documentary about the final days of of the beloved venue. We spoke to Tom about the film, Leaving Las Vegas, and nostalgia for a simpler, seedier era.

Las Vegas before it closed

VICE: Why did people love this place?
Tom Levesque: I think it was a few things. The music was different; there was more of a bohemian feel. Also the interior design hadn't changed for its entire life. It was those things that drew creative people who could go there, meet, and socialize with, I suppose, quite seedy people. It was always this relationship that would create a sense of innovation.

What about for you, personally?
You see the Vegas girl on the front of the building? Before you even knew what sex was as a kid, you would drive past as a four- or five-year-old and see this big naked chick. I think a lot of Aucklanders would have gone through that as well. There have obviously been complaints, but it's a protected piece now. It will stay up forever because it's been declared a part of our national heritage.

Old photo boards give a sense of the characters

How did you become involved?
We were asked by a musician who is prevalent in the rockabilly/folk Auckland scene. She asked us to document this, and we said, "Yeah, definitely." So we just went in there over two evenings, did our interviews, shot some footage, and then crafted it out. Personally, I wanted to do it because it's a historic building within Auckland, and I suppose we identify ourselves within that creative subculture as well. Also, just to have some kind of video to give back to the people who were involved over the years.

John Nicholson and friend

Tell me about the characters.
The original owner was a guy called John Nicholson. He's actually dead now but everyone says that he was a very—I wouldn't say humble—but a wholesome, kind person. He let the sound technician live in Las Vegas for some time because he had nowhere to stay, and generous acts like that were quite common, from what I've heard.

Envy, Suzy Wong, Princess Melinka, Pussy Galore

What was one of the best things you heard about the place?
You know, apparently there was a dedicated area for police officers after their shifts. I think that says something about the area's history. You know police procedure, bending the relationship between drugs, cops, and criminals.

Interior design in the bathrooms

How is the feeling now that it's gone?
It's mixed. For the musicians who played there in the past and developed friendships over the years, they're obviously really upset by it. It's really a cultural home for a lot of creatives. Then on the other side is an older generation, the sort of richer population of Auckland. They're all like good riddance. You know, that thing was awful, and represented a lot of wrongs, like selling women. I suppose their perspective is that getting rid of it cleaned the area up.

Inside the venue

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but maybe the old people are right. Strip joints exploit women. How do you balance that reality with its cultural benefits?
It's a catch-22, isn't it? Bernie Griffin, one of the guys we interviewed, said exactly that. He said he hates strip clubs but that environment really helped him with his own music. I'm not sure what the answer is either, but I'm a fan of seedy joints.

A collage of Las Vegas through a few developments

What do you think Auckland will look like in 15 to 20 years?
I think it's going to have more of what's going on with Las Vegas. I mean if you look at the city plans, even down that one strip of K Road, there are the developments for many more apartment buildings. I can just see the slow creep of gentrification coming along. I think it's a very sad thing.

Follow Julian on Twitter.

Here's What the Policing Deal Between the Feds and Ferguson Looks Like

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Protesters yell at police outside the Ferguson Police Department on Saturday, August 8, 2015, in Ferguson, Missouri. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice and officials in Ferguson, Missouri released a tentative plan to overhaul the city's notorious policing regime. The agreement, referred to as a consent decree, is the end-result of a probe that began weeks after Michael Brown's shooting death in August 2014—and suggests Ferguson officials would rather play ball with the feds than engage in a protracted court fight.

According to the Justice Department's analysis of what went wrong, which was released last March, the city in St. Louis County resembled a Kafka-esque police state. People—mostly people of color—were regularly stopped for no reason, subjected to violence, and told they were not allowed to film their interactions with officers. The motivation for this—besides old-school bigotry—seemed to be filling the city's coffers. The arrestees, who were mostly poor, would often have a hard time making court payments and get trapped paying late fee after late fee.

To fix this, Ferguson has agreed to have officers film every person they ask to search. They cannot stop people to check just to see if there's a warrant out for their arrest, nor are they supposed to arrest people because they refuse to answer questions. The department will now also consider the firing of each individual bullet to be a separate use of force that will need to be justified after the fact; warning shots by cops will be banned.

There are also new rules that seem like they should have been obvious in the first place, like not being able to shoot at moving cars. And cops will have everything from their psychological profile to driving records looked into before they are hired. A Neighborhood Police Steering Community will be implemented to facilitate a dialogue between community members and cops.

As far as the Ferguson Municipal Court is concerned, the city will provide amnesty to people who have open cases initiated since January 2014, unless there is a good reason not to. All failure to appear fees will be waived. In the future, a defendant's ability to pay will figure into how fees are designated, and when people have to pay those fees back. Community service will be offered as an alternative to paying anything at all.

You can read the full 131-page agreement here.

A consent decree is just a term that refers to a settlement between two parties—in this case the United States of America and Ferguson—without the latter admitting guilt and needing to pay a bunch of money. That being said, there are significant costs projected for Ferguson taxpayers that come with the deal, and it remains to be seen if the city council gives it final approval.

Either way, as the New York Times put it, the decree offers a "roadmap" that other cities can judge their own practices against. But it's also like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. After all, as another Times piece from last March detailed, had Michael Brown died 500 feet away from where he did, he would have been in a different municipality with its own slew of problems jarringly similar to those in Ferguson.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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