Wednesday morning, as Americans awoke to the reality that Donald Trump had truly swept the New Hampshire primary, they were met with a second, equally mind-boggling Trump story—Funny or Die surprise-released an hour-long Trump biopic starring Johnny Depp as the Donald.

The film, called The Art of the Deal: The Movie after Trump's 1987 bestselling book, stars Depp and a fantastic golden wig as the business mogul-slash-political candidate-slash-ego incarnate.

The whole thing is framed as a long-forgotten TV movie from the 80s recently unearthed at a yard sale by director Ron Howard, who makes a cameo as himself.

"The plan was to move really fast because we thought Trump would go away, at least as a presidential candidate," Funny or Die's editor-in-chief Owen Burke, who originally hatched the idea, told the New York Times. "When he bizarrely didn't go away, we had a little more time. But that meant keeping the secret for longer."

It's not easy for anyone to actually pull off a clandestine film production without news getting out around Hollywood, especially big-time talent like Depp or Adam McKay, Funny or Die co-creator and director of The Big Short, but they somehow managed to do it.

The results are glorious—there's a surplus of bad 80s TV movie tropes, a theme song by Kenny Loggins, and even an appearance by Henry Winkler. Take an hour break from work and watch the whole thing.

Bernie Sanders on the night of the New Hampshire primary. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Pretty much every presidential candidate who isn't Jeb Bush can tell a story about how their parents would never have imagined their child achieving such great things. But when Bernie Sanders evoked the memory of his parents raising him in a small, rent-controlled Brooklyn apartment while celebrating his victory in the New Hampshire primary Tuesday, it was especially easy to imagine their amazement. The 74-year-old scruffy Jewish socialist's campaign's success would have shocked them, but it also caught pretty much the entire political system by surprise.

Even for pundits who knew that support for Sanders has been growing in recent months, the New Hampshire results were striking. The Vermont senator won New Hampshire with 60 percent of the vote, far ahead of Hillary Clinton's 38 percent, a bigger margin of victory than most polls had been predicting. Until mid-January, the well-respected data journalism site FiveThirtyEight had anticipated an outright Clinton win in the state. And Clinton has absolutely crushed her opponent when it comes to getting endorsements from elected officials and other prominent figures.

Of course, for a lot of Sanders supporters, including many of the ones who filled the gym at Concord High School for the Sanders primary night party, that lack of establishment support is a big part of his appeal.

Elias Tyrrel-Walker, a 17-year-old high school senior, has been volunteering for the Sanders campaign at local colleges even though he's not yet old enough to vote himself.

"I feel like he's just something new," he said. "It seems like he's running on a platform of ideas people actually care about."

Read: How the Republican Candidates' New Hampshire Predictions Got It Wrong

The party, filled with volunteers who ranged from Tyrrel-Walker's age to Sanders's, was packed with national and international media. There was stomping, shouting, and a set, heavy on disco and funk, from DJ Mel of Austin, who also played Obama's 2013 inaugural ball.

If the primary result didn't make it clear, the Sanders operation is getting more serious than it was when it began: Early in the evening, several dozen supporters found themselves milling outside the high school in 20-degree weather because they lacked tickets that no one had told them they needed. (Finally, well after the primary had been declared for Sanders, they were finally allowed in.)

After the crowd had watched Clinton's concession speech on the big screen, Sanders took the stage and quickly made note of how many voters had come to the polls. "Yuge voter turnout," he said, prompting the crowed to echo back, "Yuge!"

"What happened here in New Hampshire in terms of an enthused electorate—this is what will happen all over this country," he went, before launching into a comprehensive stump speech about government-run health care, free college, criminal justice reforms, climate change, and the rest of his liberalism-on-steroids agenda.

For the most part, Sanders struck a pleasant tone toward Clinton, congratulating her campaign on its hard work and insisting that Democrats unite around whoever is chosen as the nominee. But he also acknowledged the increasingly aggressive intra-party contest.

"They're throwing everything against me except the kitchen sink, and I have a feeling that kitchen sink is coming soon," he said.

But many of the Sanders supporters at the event said tension with Clinton was a nonissue and that they'd obviously support her in the general election if it was necessary to keep a Republican out of the White House.

Silvia Styles, a 60-year-old volunteer who said her politics have been getting more progressive since the Bush-Cheney years, said the Sanders campaign seems to be pushing Clinton left.

"I hear Hillary say the kinds of things recently that Bernie's been saying this whole time," she said.

Brian Tourgee said he had actively considered voting for Clinton in the primary. He preferred Sanders's policy positions but worried about how he'd fare in a general election. Tourgee's 18-year-old daughter Michelle had been volunteering with the campaign, but he's had his heart broken by political campaigns before and didn't get as involved as she did, he said. But he copped to a certain amount of excitement about the election results.

"It's a good time to be a liberal," he said. "I'm not going to run away from that word."

Some Sanders fans, however, seemed shaken by the loud conflicts with the Clinton campaign in recent weeks. Will Stockinger, a recent college graduate who's enthusiastic about getting money out of politics, said it's possible he might stay home on Election Day in November.

"At first I was sure I would vote for Hillary if she got the nomination, but as the campaign goes on I am less and less sure of that," he said.

Stockinger said he sees himself as an independent because he's frustrated with the entire political system. He said the same is true of many of his friends, who span the ideological spectrum from Greens to libertarians. And Clinton seems to be very much a part of that system.

For other supporters, the key to Sanders's appeal is his economic message. Matt Firmani, who traveled from Boston to see the candidate and ended up sitting on stage behind him, said a couple of years ago he was struggling to get by at a minimum-wage job. He eventually signed up for government assistance, which helped him make it through the rough patch and get a much better job at the 3D printing company where he works now.

"I really, really, really do believe in government as a service for the people," he said.

John Mark Blowen, a 68-year-old former draft resister who had steered clear of politics for decades, echoed that sentiment.

"What he's saying is that government is the way we take care of each other," he said. "I don't know if he can win, but he's moving things in the direction of human beings looking out for one another."

The question of whether Sanders could possibly win the nomination is, of course, a highly debatable one. New Hampshire has the advantage of being next to his home state. And Democratic voters in New Hampshire—as well as in Iowa, where he lost to Clinton by a hair—are largely white liberals, the group he's been doing best with so far. In national polls, he's consistently been behind Clinton. And the next states to vote, Nevada and South Carolina, have Democratic electorates that are less liberal and much less overwhelmingly white.

But Sanders's first step toward winning in those states is to get voters across the country to take a closer look at him. And his big New Hampshire win is going to convince a lot of people to do just that.

Picture moments before Dublin Weigh in shooting. Madness. pic.twitter.com/p9GhcyJ8C4
— Colm (@cohcfc) February 6, 2016

A feud between two of Dublin's major criminal families has descended into deadly violence, with both sides taking to the city's streets to settle scores.

Last Friday, a six-strong armed gang rushed a boxing weigh-in at Dublin's Regency Hotel. Wearing Gardai-style rapid response uniforms and armed with two AK-47 rifles, the masked gunmen opened fire on the auditorium, before quickly disappearing into the city. One of their alleged targets, 34-year-old David Byrne (no relation to the David Byrne of Talking Heads fame), was dead, and two others were wounded.

Since then, police have set up checkpoints around the city, and Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald has called for calm as her government attempts to slow a cycle of violence that is quickly gathering momentum.

Initial confusion over who was responsible for the shooting was exacerbated by a statement released after the incident and published by the BBC. A man claiming to be a member of dissident group the Continuity IRA (CIRA) said the organization had carried out the attack and would be targeting more gangland figures. Some local experts were doubtful of the CIRA's involvement in what appeared to be a calculated mob hit, rather than a violent political statement.

An authenticated statement released by the CIRA late on Monday confirmed this suspicion: "The Continuity IRA wish to make it clear that we did not have any involvement in Friday's shooting at the Regency Hotel. We have absolutely no involvement in criminal feuds. We see the false claim that the CIRA were involved in this act as another attempt to tarnish the name of the organization."

Instead, it's believed that a gangland rivalry is to blame.

Attending the weigh-in was Daniel Kinahan, son of Christy Kinahan, considered to be Ireland's leading crime boss and the head of an international drug smuggling operation based in Spain's Costa Del Sol. It is thought that Daniel was the intended target of the raid and that the Hutch family—a two-generation Dublin crime dynasty and former ally of the Kinahans—were responsible.

The Hutch family became notorious in Ireland after 24-year-old Gerry Hutch was named as a suspect in two of the most lucrative robberies the country had ever seen, the £1.7 million in "owed" taxes and retired, saying he would be spending his time between Dublin and the Canary Islands.

As the younger generation of the Hutch dynasty rose to authority, they gravitated toward the drug trade, working alongside the other major Dublin crime faction, the Kinahans. Gary Hutch, nephew of Gerry Hutch and a convicted armed robber and drug dealer, had even been a housemate and friend of Daniel Kinahan's at one point—but the alliance wouldn't last.

In late 2015, Gary was shot dead in a Spanish apartment complex, reportedly because Christy Kinahan believed he had stolen over €100,000 from the gang while working for them. This was the first time a member of the Hutch family had been targeted in such a way, and it's this incident that is thought to have led to the attempted murder on Friday of Daniel Kinahan and other senior Kinahan gang members. The suspected killer is known to Garda as an associate of Gerry Hutch.

Video footage from the weigh-in attack was still doing the rounds when, on Monday evening at around 7:45 PM, 59-year-old father of five Eddie Hutch was gunned down by masked shooters in the hallway of his home on Poplar Row in Dublin's northside.

Described as a "quiet man," Eddie was Gerry Hutch's brother. Although he had a record, he had managed to keep away from most major criminal activity and made his living as a taxi driver. However, as the two feuding sides flex their muscle, extended family members and associates have seemingly become fair game. Following Friday's attack, police have moved Gary's brother, Derek Hutch, to the special protection wing at Wheatfield Prison, where he is currently serving time for manslaughter. He's already been the target of attacks within the prison.

At a two-hour long press conference yesterday, Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald and Garda Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan addressed the events, saying: "We will stand down this threat from these gangs, and the garda will have every resource that they need in order to have the kind of armed response that is necessary and the kind of saturation policing that we need to see."

Fitzgerald went on to explain that a permanent armed response unit would be created to deal with gangland activity as a direct result of the weekend's murders.

It's unlikely that Monday's murder will be the final act of violence in this feud, but the people of Dublin can do little but wait and watch. Meanwhile, the Irish intelligence services are coordinating with Spanish security authorities in an attempt to deal with the situation.

A looming election in Ireland will not afford politicians room to maneuver past difficult questions, and this current crisis brings the unresolved issue of Ireland's criminal underworld to the forefront. The management of Dublin's gangland and maintaining public safety are topics that require action, not posturing, before a civilian is caught in the crossfire.

Follow David on Twitter.

'Après-ski' is a soft-core, lowest-of-low-brow ski comedy that pulled in $2 million after its 1971 release. Screenshot via YouTube

When asked what you know about René Angélil, you'd probably say he was Celine Dion's husband, manager and father of her kids, and the architect of her rise to global superstar. And you'd be right.

When he died of throat cancer last month, the Montreal-born impresario was given a lavish funeral, and tributes poured in from across the entertainment world. Most of the tributes and obits focused on his stunningly successful career managing his wife. One weird detail that was left out, however, was his brief appearance in a film that changed both the Quebec film industry and Quebec's then-notoriously conservative, Catholic Church-dominated culture.

The movie was called Après-ski. Its US English title is Snowballin'. It's a soft-core, lowest-of-low-brow ski comedy, barely watchable today. But shortly after its 1971 release, it became massively controversial, and extremely profitable, pulling in about $2 million—that, at a time when admission was around $1.75.

There's enough in the movie to make a modern and easily outraged viewer's head explode. The question of consent, for instance, doesn't really ever come up, especially in the scene when two guys manhandle a maid (she laughs their grabby advances off). The movie can, at times, be racist, ageist, and homophobic—which is where René Angélil comes in.

In the mid-60s, Angélil and Pierre Labelle co-founded Les Baronets, a French-language boy band known for their Beatles covers. Angélil and Labelle make their cameos in Apres-ski near the end of the film, in a four-and-a-half-minute scene that comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with the plot. Sitting in a bar, Angélil is teaching Labelle, a virgin, how to pick up chicks, and arranges a rendezvous with a stranger's friend spotted across the room. Labelle rushes upstairs after getting the go-ahead, only to be greeted by... a gay dude! He fends off the gay dude's pawing and flees, terrified. Hilarious, no? (No, it's really not.)

Again, it's not a good movie, and its director Roger Cardinal admits it. Now splitting his time between his home in the South Shore community of Boucherville and Costa Rica, Cardinal says that as goofy as the movie was, it and others like it birthed the Quebec film industry.

"There wasn't even an editing room in Quebec at the time," he told VICE. "There was no industry at all."

He says the federal government was pouring money into developing a Canadian film industry, and that meant getting equipment and training personnel. Back then, Cardinal says, "It was all sexploitation."

Après-ski was following in the footsteps of a budding softcore industry that began with Denis Héroux's 1969 movie Valérie. Others in the genre include Héroux's 1970 follow-up L'initiation, Claude Fournier's Deux femmes en or (1970) and Roger Fournier's Pile ou face (1971).

The movies scandalized Quebec society at the time. The Quiet Revolution was in full swing and the Catholic Church's hold over daily life was slipping, but there were limits to how permissive the builders of a new Quebec wanted it to be.

Héroux, who died last December, famously said that, with Valérie, he wanted to "déshabiller les petites québécoises" ("undress little Quebec girls"). The expression is less creepy and more layered in French than it is in English. It was meant to be taken as keeping in the spirit of the Quiet Revolution, to shrug off the paternalistic, anti-sex atmosphere that had dominated the province for so long (while still sounding titillating, and still kind of creepy).

Le 'Après-ski' poster in all its sexually charged French Canadian ski sleaze glory

But the company that produced most of those movies, Cinepix, wasn't so high-minded, according to Alan Randolph Young, a Concordia University postgrad specializing in early Quebec softcore (and former VICE contributor). Its founder, John Dunning, considered Canada's King of the Bs, earned comparisons to Roger Corman, and helped launch the careers of David Cronenberg and Ivan Reitman. Cinepix also produced the Bill Murray classic Meatballs, one of the highest-grossing Canadian film of all time. He never denied the fact that the filmes de fesses were all about making money.

But commercially minded or not, the movies did freak out province's intellectual and moral establishment.

"They did become a point of consternation in the media over how they defined Quebec as a nation, so there was a lot of hand-wringing towards them," says Young. "But it also spoke to a generational divide, because a lot of the resistance to them came from corners like the Catholic Church, the stricter, more conservative areas."

However, the filmmakers' politics were something of a mystery. Young says one curious aspect about these movies was how, even as they pushed boundaries on free speech, they weren't always that revolutionary in spirit.

"They seem to be copping the feel of the counterculture, the hippy-ness, the sexual openness," he says, "but at the same time have these reactionary politics. By the end of these movies, there's usually some 'turning-back point'... where the protagonist realizes he shouldn't be so exploratory. There's a contradiction in it."

Nevertheless, following a complaint by a Quebec City priest, Après-ski was declared an obscene movie by the Bureau de surveillance du cinéma, and fined $500—a laughable amount, given that the movie took in about $2 million (about $12 million today) on a budget of around $250,000, according to its director Cardinal. It was so popular it was distributed to the UK and the US, where it was spliced with scenes from actual pornos to spice up the sex.

Cardinal seems to hold a special place in his heart for the movie. You can tell he's both fond of and somewhat embarrassed by it. "Après-ski is not the movie I want to be remembered by. I'm not proud of it, but I did make my name with it."

Cardinal went on to a successful career in Canadian movies, with a Genie nomination for his 1988 feature Malarek (he'd lose to David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers), and now teaches cinema. But Après-ski did go on to become a cult classic, and its soundtrack was recently reissued.

"I asked my students how many of them had heard of it," he says. Very few had. "So I told them to go home and ask their fathers or grandfathers—and nearly all of them said they'd seen it."

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Diana Ware has been waiting almost three decades to see justice for her stepdaughter Barbara, whose body was discovered in 1987 in a South Los Angeles alley buried under trash and a gas tank. Since Lonnie David Franklin, Jr., better known as the Grim Sleeper, was arrested in 2010, the elder Ware says she's taken hundreds of bus trips from West Covina to downtown LA to attend pre-trial hearings.

"It's beginning to take a little bit of a toll," Ware tells me.

Her legs and knees are beginning to give out, but Ware trudges on for Barbara—and for her own late husband, who she says died before discovering his daughter was the victim of a serial killer. "He was thinking it was just another murder in South Central," she explains.

After more than two decades of allegedly wreaking terror on the streets of South Los Angeles, Franklin—who if convicted would be the longest-active serial killer in California history—is going on trial this month. The arduous road leading up to this moment has been frustrating for cops and community members alike. Critics of the LAPD say they were lazy in their investigation, neglected to follow up on leads, and regarded the victims as insignificant because they were black women, and some were sex workers. Police paint a much different picture, describing a complicated array of factors that made finding the Grim Sleeper extremely tough, including the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, a surge in violent crime, and even other active serial killers.

In fact, Franklin was only arrested in 2010 after pioneering DNA technology—and a semi-secretive police task force—helped connect him to at least ten murders that stretched from 1985 to 2007, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. The gruesome nickname refers to the "hiatus" police initially believed Franklin took from killing in the 1990s, though it's possible he simply hasn't been connected to murders in that era.

All of Franklin's alleged victims were black women between the ages of 15 and 35. All were shot, strangled or both. Most were callously discarded in bushes, alleyways or dumpsters, in various states of undress. One victim, 22-year-old Lachrica Jefferson, was found in January 1988 with a napkin placed across her face with the word "AIDS" written on it, according to court documents.

Victims of the Grim Sleeper on the wall at activist Margaret Prescod's office in Los Angeles. Photo by David Austin

Although a 2011 grand jury indictment was expected to speed up the death penalty case, delays and bizarre courtroom antics have dragged on pre-trial proceedings for more than five years. Witnesses have retired or died, and new experts have had to be summoned to reanalyze evidence, according to Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman. Meanwhile, the victims' families have been waiting for some sort of resolution, and some have even passed away while waiting for trial.

"That means that some of these victims will have no one to speak for them or about them at penalty phase, or to see that justice was done at the end of this process," Silverman writes VICE in an email. "To me, that is a disgrace."

In addition to Ware and Jefferson, Franklin is accused of killing 18-year-old Alicia Alexander; 35-year-old Valerie McCorvey; 34-year-old Henrietta Wright; 29-year-old Debra Jackson; 26-year-old Bernita Sparks; 26-year-old Mary Lowe; 25-year-old Janecia Peters; and 15-year-old Princess Berthomieux. Franklin is also charged with the attempted murder of 30-year-old Enietra Washington, whom he allegedly picked up in his car, shot in the chest, sexually assaulted, and dumped on the street.

Upon Franklin's arrest, a police search of his property yielded a trove of naked photos, videos, and homemade porn, prompting speculation about how high the real victim count might climb. The LAPD posted a photo gallery online with portraits of nearly 200 women in the hopes of identifying and locating them. Today, at least 35 photos remain, and police are still seeking the public's help.

(Franklin pleaded not guilty to all murder charges when they were first leveled in 2010.)

Horrifying as it may be that a serial murderer would remain loose for so many years, there were a slew of issues at the time that made this case tricky, according to LAPD Detective Daryn Dupree, the current lead investigator on the case. Beginning in the late 1970s and stretching well into the 80s, crack cocaine took South LA by storm, he says, leading to a spike in drug-related crime, drive-by shootings, and murders. This was only further muddied by the activities of other serial killers in the surrounding areas.

"There were so many people dying out there," Dupree tells me. "It was hard for police to decipher the different MOs."

During this era, killings spiked in Los Angeles. Between 1970 and 1979, the homicide rate in LA city alone rose 84 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). DNA technology was limited, so police had to rely on basics like witness testimony and ballistics evidence, and although DNA obtained at many of the crime scenes was run against CODIS—the FBI's national databank—it didn't strike a match.

In fact, it wasn't until 2008 that California adopted a new (and controversial) DNA practice that ultimately provided investigators with the lynchpin they needed to nab Franklin. The state was the first to adopt a familial search program, which uses "unique computer software and rigorous protocols" to link a "family member of a convicted offender with DNA taken from a murder or rape scene," state Attorney General Edmund Brown Jr. explained in a statement after Franklin's arrest.

When Franklin's son was arrested on a felony weapons charge in 2009, a sample of his DNA was sent to the state data bank. There, the lab uncovered a link between Franklin's son and DNA evidence collected at the Grim Sleeper murder scenes, and leap-frogged to Franklin. (Franklin's son himself was never considered a suspect in the case, police say.)

Lonnie Franklin Jr., right, the alleged Grim Sleeper serial killer, at a pre-trial hearing in August 2015. (Photo by Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

On July 5, 2010, two LAPD detectives keeping tabs on Franklin saw him head into Buena Park restaurant called John's Incredible Pizza for a kid's birthday party, according to court documents. One of the detectives donned a restaurant uniform, posed as an employee, and collected napkins, glasses, a fork, and a partially-eaten slice of pizza from Franklin. DNA evidence from these items clinched the cops' case, and two days later they arrested Franklin.

Of course, for many in South LA and beyond, this apparent resolution comes way too late. Critics argue the LAPD waited far too long to warn people there was even a serial killer on the loose. Some say it was only after LA Weekly reporter Christine Pelisek broke the news to the victims' families that the news really went public.

Margaret Prescod, founder of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, argues the lives of the women killed seemed to be of "less value" to the LAPD (and much of the mainstream media) for too long.

"The women were impoverished, they were black, they were women," Presocd says. "We knew right away that if this many women had been murdered in an affluent part of Los Angeles, that that would not be the case."

Through her coalition, Prescod says she rallied a crew to distribute more than 100,000 flyers in the community, including to the "working women... on the strip." The group also organized weekly vigils outside police headquarters and started issuing press releases in a bid to force police, city officials, and the media to pay attention to the murders.

One of Prescod's first (and ongoing) disputes with the LAPD was over their classification and description of the deaths as "the prostitute killings." Although many of Franklin's victims were sex workers, some perhaps lured into his grasp by the promise of crack cocaine, the LAPD's label was derogatory and inaccurate, according to Prescod, as some of the victims were not even involved in sex work.

"This whole image of who the women were was problematic also, because it gave other women a false sense of security," Prescod tells me. "To say, 'Well if I'm not a sex worker, I don't have to worry,' you know, without knowing that there's somebody out there hunting down and killing women."

Margaret Prescod at her office in Los Angeles. Photo by David Austin

Prescod continues to host coalition meetings, is pushing to get a memorial installed to honor the victims, and remains in touch with many of the family members today. That includes Porter Alexander Jr., whose daughter Alicia was one of the youngest victims; at 18, she was found naked with a shirt knotted around her neck, hidden under a foam mattress in an alley, court documents say.

"He took the most precious thing could have ever, more or less, been given to me," Alexander says in an interview. "He took my child."

Since Franklin's arrest, there's been an HBO documentary called Tales of the Grim Sleeper and a Lifetime movie called The Grim Sleeper made about him. Media coverage of his case has been sporadic, but interest in the trial has grown so intense that there's now a press waitlist to secure a spot in the courtroom audience on Tuesday.

Families like Alexander's will be guaranteed seats. After all these years, the 75-year-old father is just hoping to have his daughter's life understood, and if the jury finds Franklin guilty, for justice to be doled out with no restraint.

"There's no rehabilitation for him. He's too far gone," Alexander says of Franklin. "He either gets life without parole, or give him death."

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

In today's age of insatiable austerity, it can sometimes be a struggle to find ways of saving money. Other than having a store-bought, pre-made sandwich for lunch and dinner and staying indoors every weekend to watch your life pass you slowly by, there isn't a great deal you can do. So thank God for wombling, a new and inventive way of saving those precious pennies.

Named after those fictional trash-collecting furry animals who spawned a famous UK kids' franchise, wombling is a new trend of money-saving in which you basically hang about in supermarket and fast food restaurant parking lots and look for discarded receipts. Due to the high number of price guarantee and loyalty schemes available these days, many receipts will often have barcodes that you can scan and save money on your next shop with.

Fifty-eight-year-old retiree Stephen Auker, from Keighley, west Yorkshire, started the trend and he reckons he makes up to £200 a year by scanning the codes off other people's detritus. And he's not just some lone money-saving maverick either: He's started a Facebook group that has over 5,000 followers.

Keen to get in on this action, we sent two of our interns out on a wombling trip of their own, to see if they too can partake in the glory of "saving money by picking up old receipts in parking lots."

TOM USHER

When braving the cold sharp sun of a Wednesday morning to go and pick up other people's discarded receipts for nothing, a few things travel through your mind. How did it get to this stage? What is my life saying? And most importantly, how can I go around picking up other people's discarded receipts for nothing without anyone actually seeing my face?

But there was no time for such self-conscious thoughts; I needed action. I began scouring the floor on the local high street, in every crack and crevice on the side of the road, nonchalantly whistling like a Looney Tunes character every time someone came near me or made anything resembling eye contact. I found two brown Tesco receipts, so instantly my insecurities were paying dividends.

I moved further away, toward a train station. According to the honorable womble code and actual plain old UK law, it is illegal to hassle customers for receipts or look inside trash cans in or outside stores. But goddammit, I was desperate. I darted into a Sainsbury's Local and eyed up a garbage full of sweet, delicious receipts, casually tossed away near the self-service checkouts as if they were nothing. Do these people not realize what a goldmine they are sitting on? I made a dart for one of the trash cans by the entrance but a piercing look from a cashier stopped me dead in my pathetic paper-chasing tracks. I backed away. I'm as keen to save pennies as the next wombler, but I'm not willing to risk my life. Or, well. Not life, but one of the deeper remaining shreds of my pride.

Dejected, I exited the store doing that weird kind of half-smile at the cashiers like I was just really happy to have visited this particular Sainsbury's Local even though I didn't actually buy anything and my behavior was close to "having a bad trip on acid" levels of paranoia. But then it struck me: the parking lots. Of course. Had I not paid attention to the great womble prophet Stephen Auker at all? I knew there was a Sainsbury's and Matalan parking lot around the back of a shopping mall nearby so I dived two-footed into its paper-filled bosom.

And what a bosom! The suckers out there not in the know about wombling obviously felt like a parking lot was the best place to dump their scrunched-up gold, and so I really went to town here. But then I saw my colleague had the same idea as me in terms of location and it suddenly became a Supermarket Sweep–esque dash around the place to pick up as many sheets as possible. I actually managed to get quite a few but—though they looked impressively lengthy. Most were from the stores Matalan and Iceland, which just seem to enjoy having long receipts with not much penny-saving action going on in them. After weighing up what I'd got online from various stores, I'd reckoned I'd saved just over 45 cents in total. But for an hour's work in this current climate, not too shabby at all!

Follow Tom on Twitter.

AMELIA DIMOLDENBERG

After watching a very tense YouTube video from wombling pioneer Stephen Auker titled, "Tesco manager approaches me when I'm wombling (E21)," I was rather apprehensive about picking up receipts in close proximity to large corporations. Especially as the first stop on my wombling adventure was a Tesco Express, a notorious death trap for womblers. As I braved the store's interior, sadly the freshly polished linoleum floor showed no signs of forgotten receipts. They were all stuffed into small black boxes underneath the self-service registers, which are impossible to reach without security seeing. A clever trick. Obviously they have had trouble with womblers before.

After a disappointing start, I decided to venture out to a larger supermarket, preferably one with a parking lot like those I had seen in Stephen's videos. On my way to the bus stop I stumbled across not one, but TWO scrunched-up Tesco Express receipts. Quickly I looked around and checked for any onlookers. I placed them in my pocket. Success.

When I finally got to a big Sainsbury's, it was pretty much the same story inside: The floors were spotless, not a receipt to be found. I began to walk out of the main doors, when out of the corner of my eye I spotted another wombler. Slowly, the supermarket morphed into an episode of Blue Planet—"We now see the two womblers meeting for the first time in their natural habitat, and fighting over a receipt to the death." I could tell the man was a wombler because he was rummaging through a line of stationed shopping carts with a '£3 off your next shop' coupon in his hand. Annoyingly that coupon was the only good piece of wombler meat in the area and my wombler nemesis had already claimed it. But then in an unforeseen twist of events, like a fool, the man dropped the coupon back onto the trolley and I was poised to take back what was rightfully mine.

From then on the game changed. I walked out into the Sainsbury's parking lot and knew I was playing with the big boys. Running through lines of cars, eyes to the ground, I looked out for my next kill—it's surprising how many pieces of tissue can have the appearance of a receipt. Top tip: Follow the wind. It will lead you to piles of unwanted receipts that have been swept behind bins and large metal fences, trapped, screaming to get out. I picked up another three receipts from behind the parking lot fence and called it a day.

My wombling adventure was over now and I was ready to bask in the glory of my success. Disappointingly, I don't know why, but there is something incredibly unsatisfying about making it rain with a handful of muddy receipts. All in all, I'd managed to save a breathtaking 32 cents. Was it worth it? Was the thrill of the chase worth it? Was clambering to grab the discarded coupons and receipts of others worth it? For 32 cents? Do you even need me to answer that question?

Follow Amelia on Twitter.

UK Apache

UK Apache, one of the two men behind jungle classic "Original Nuttah," is sitting opposite me, reflecting on his upbringing.

"I was raised by revolutionary people—my mum and grandparents were heavily involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, so I was taught to fight for justice and speak the truth," he says. "My grandfather Cassim was in the ANC and friends with Nelson Mandela, and my grandmother Zubeida was Mandela's first secretary—they're in his biography, Long Walk to Freedom."

It's a bitter January morning and Apache—real name Abdul Wahab—and I are taking refuge in his friend's restaurant, Khani Halal, on Tooting High Street. I'm here to talk to him about his journey from young "nuttah" to finding peace and purpose in Islam. But, for the moment, he's in full flow remembering his formative years as an only child—of Indian-South African (mom) and Iraqi (dad) parentage—raised by his mother in working class Tooting in the 1970s and 1980s.

As a teenager, reggae proved a defining influence.

"It was political music and had a positive message, with this talk of the world being in turmoil, sufferance, revolution, and fighting for justice. Two of my close friends were Jamaican, and we'd bunk off round each other's houses and listen to the legend Bob Marley, Papa Michigan, Brigadier Jerry, Dennis Brown, and Gregory Isaacs," he recalls.

"We'd go youth club on the Doddington Estate in Battersea where there were these sound system dances. I was imitating being a Jamaican—I'd dress like a Jamaican, walk like a Jamaican, talk like a Jamaican, but I wasn't Jamaican; I was a Jafaican," he says, laughing.

A young UK Apache with Nelson Mandela

In the 1970s and 1980s, Britain's black political struggle saw South Asian and African-Caribbean communities unite against violence on the streets, discrimination in the workplace, and a fight for rights in the face of a hostile state and its institutions. The struggle's soundtrack was reggae: outsider, anti-establishment music that spoke to disenfranchised youth, whether black, brown, or white.

Back then, Tooting was a far cry from the melting pot it is today, when a Chicken Shop and the Honest Burger on Tooting High Street stand out as exotic among the succession of South Asian restaurants. Indeed, for a "skinny little Asian kid" like UK Apache, the threat of a kicking was never far away.

"South London was rough with the National Front around," he says. "When we moved to Tooting we had things thrown at our house and neighbors called us 'Pakis.' White and black skinheads were out Paki-bashing, and sound system dances weren't welcoming to me—you could get bottled or bricked, and there was this chat: 'Who does he think he is? He thinks he's black.' I was just being who I was, and reggae was a way of talking to the people. All I ever wanted was to make music with a positive message and provide for my mum."

By 1990, Apache was making ripples in UK reggae with his debut release No Poll Tax and performing with Lord Gelly's Sound at Notting Hill Carnival. But like thousands of other inner city and suburban Londoners at the time, it wasn't long before he turned his attention to jungle.

"I instantly felt connected to jungle," he says. "It was British, and as much as I loved reggae, it was Jamaican. Jungle is where my name, UK Apache, came from. In reggae people used to call me Apache—as in Apache Indian—but jungle was UK, so I put UK in front of Apache and it fit like a jigsaw. It seemed God-sent."

UK Apache soon came across the work of a teenage Shy FX, in particular the Goodfellas-sampling "Gangsta Kid," and in 1994 they booked some time in a studio in Victoria. "Original Nuttah" was what emerged, and within months it was in the UK Top 40.

Yet, as "Original Nuttah" peaked, UK Apache walked away. Why?

"I felt people were trying to cheat me—I was confused and angry and I had no one to trust. It was too much pressure, so I stepped away," he says. "Major labels wanted an album, but it was a total mess—I'd fallen out with everyone. That was the start of my journey into Islam. Initially I was praying, studying, and performing 'Nuttah,' so I was doing the call to prayer at my masajid in Tooting. During the day I was doing 'Allahu-Akbar' and at night singing 'na-ni-ni-whoa'—I lived that life for many years."

UK Apache may have left the music business behind, but he's aware that "Original Nuttah" is as much of an anthem now as it was in 1994. Taking the vocal melody, he's reimagined it as "I Was a Nuttah," a conscious reggae take on the original, with lyrics reflecting his age and faith.

UK Apache performing a sample of "I Was a Nuttah" for VICE

"I wrote 'I Was a Nuttah' because the message of unity, peace, and Islam is bigger than me, or any of the negative 'Original Nuttah' stuff. Its message is universal. For example, it talks about respecting youth—youth clubs have closed down, the cost of studying has gone up, the government want young people to be slaves, and in debt all their lives. It's madness," he says, shaking his head.

It's an especially shaky time for young Muslims in Britain, with political rhetoric and media coverage from certain newspapers making Islam out to be a threat to British values. It's depressingly reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s, when black boys were the boogiemen. Now it's brown boys with beards and brown women in hijabs and niqabs.

"Everyone is wondering why British Muslims are joining ISIS. I believe young Muslims feel alienated and lost, with nothing to hold on to. We all have a part to play—Muslims, non-Muslims, the government, and the media who only talk about Muslims in a negative way and never show us in a positive light. Muslims have the biggest part to play—especially mosques, because many are not run in the correct way, and I've experienced it myself. There are imams who are not qualified, because they are not from Britain and they don't speak a word of English. This is a disaster."

"Imams should be from Britain so they can relate to youth. If young Muslims don't get the correct understanding of Islam from a mosque or imam, they're going on the internet, where they can get wrong information and be groomed to do acts that are not Islamic."

Over the last couple of years, UK Apache's been trying to address the void between elders and youngsters by giving talks at mosques.

"In my time there weren't many gangs, but there was trouble around drugs and fights, and I've experienced these things," he explains. "Islam guides you in a positive, peaceful manner. It depends on how serious you are, but if you look to Islam it will guide you in the right way. So I've been sharing my experiences and relationship with Islam with the youth, and I always talk about unity and bringing people together."

Apache is acutely aware that one of the most effective means of connecting people is music. However, despite recording "I Was a Nuttah," it's far from certain whether or not he'll pursue music—even if it's in a spoken word or nasheed style (without any instruments, bar very basic percussion).

"Music is haram, and I don't want to lie because of my own desire. However, if I make the decision to do it, and live properly and well in other respects, that's on my head," he says. "There always seems to be someone who wants to hear 'I Was a Nuttah,' and it's been taking on a life of its own. Sometimes these things build over the years. It has a good message, so let's see where it goes and takes me—we'll leave it in the hands of the creator."

Follow Rahul Verma on Twitter.

Carly Fiorina at her campaign event on primary night in New Hampshire. Photo by Jason Bergman

Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie, a pair of Republican candidates who never had a chance to become president, seemed finally ready to acknowledge that fact on Wednesday.

Fiorina formally dropped out after getting a measly 4 percent in the New Hampshire primary. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO ran for a senate seat in California and lost by ten points, so it's not clear why she thought she could become president. She did boost her profile if she wants to try for a lower office, so there's that, at least. The only woman in the GOP field, her most memorable moments came when she launched nasty attacks on Hillary Clinton and described an apparently nonexistent video of evil abortion doctors harvesting a live baby's brain.

Christie hasn't officially announced he's out of the race, but after a disappointing sixth-place finish in New Hampshire, a state where he's campaigned extensively, the New Jersey governor headed back to his home state instead of going to South Carolina, the site of the next primary. By Wednesday afternoon it was being widely reported that he was quitting, but the campaign has so far declined to confirm all that talk. He's going to be governor of New Jersey until 2018, when his second term ends; most of his own state seems to dislike him but he legally can't serve a third term anyway.

Even before Wednesday's news, it seemed likely that neither candidate was going to be invited to the next GOP debate on CBS. Without much in the way of support from actual voters, and without the platform of a debate stage, there wasn't much for Christie and Fiorina to do but concede—and hope against hope they'll be considered for VP.

Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore is still in the race, as far as anyone knows.

"Keeping it real" is a concept that's helped tether Kanye West to his audience for over a decade. His moves subverted the double-consciousness: He wore his black Chicagoan roots on his sleeve regardless of the white gaze, while he refused to let any monolithic concept of blackness stifle his ambition.

But it's only recently that the same strength, which helped make him a centripetal cultural force, has become truly pernicious. The lead-up to T.L.O.P. has been chaotic: G.O.O.D. Fridays only lasted two Fridays. A petty Twitter rant against Wiz Khalifa exposed West as an obsessive neurotic; he had to go out of his way to defend his anus against Amber Rose. The title of his next album changed from an onomatopoeia ( SWISH) to a game show. Yesterday, he proclaimed Bill Cosby was innocent—in all caps—possibly setting the Freedom Tower on fire.

This might be the first time Kanye West being Kanye West—that is, speaking before thinking—has dragged his album rollout. He started to regain whatever goodwill he lost with last year's "Facts" when he dropped "Real Friends" and "No More Parties in L.A.," the two 2016 G.O.O.D. Friday releases. The acclaim was near unanimous, and placed together, they have a populist appeal: "Real Friends" was a dour rehash of College Dropout's "Family Business," great for the classicists, and "No More Parties in LA" is a current-state-of-Kanye thriller. Unfortunately, those songs couldn't compete with his PR blunders. Usually, the buzz around a great West track lasts for weeks. But this time around, his lead singles have faded from memory, while his alleged penchant for anal-play is still trending and inspiring memes.

West is imploding as the zeitgeist presses forward. Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is a black cultural milestone racking up Grammy nominations. Drake is owning the transparency lane that Kanye West built with chart-topping singles. Beyoncé continues to be more subversive as her fame grows. It isn't just that West is losing his cultural cache; frankly, it's easier for fans like me to redirect the energy we usually waste defending him and use that to focus on other artists.

Watch Spike Jonze interview Kanye West back in 2007

But I simply can't quit West. This was an artist who, in 2004, taught myself and hundreds of thousands of other prepubescents and teenagers (today's creatives) that their concept of blackness was valid—that it wasn't an alternative, but stood equal within black America's multitudes. So we stood with him when he went from a pink polo-wearing outsider to becoming one of hip-hop's most famous ambassadors. Yeezus might be, at its best, a vanity project driven by his fashion industry frustrations, but there was a shared vindication in him carving out his own avant-garde space to rant. His declaration that he was running for the presidency in 2020 might've been kicked off by a barely coherent speech, but the effect was vicarious. West was dancing atop the glass ceiling that's blocked so many of us.

Unfortunately, West's past few months have been caked with misogyny, implicit homophobia, and self-aggrandizement. What was at the center of those first two albums was how they captured the un-sanitized black soul and its dimensions—pride, insecurities, flawed humanity, and potential. When he reached his commercial peak with Graduation he became living proof of the maxim "do you and they will follow." People don't get that famous based simply off artistry. West has garnered a cult of personality driven by the way his humanness is intertwined with his celebrity.

And I think that's why I just can't escape Kanye West. His art is always pushing the game forward. Before others can catch up, he's off exploring new forms of expression. Who else has been able to be this loud and this famous for this long within a white space? So I bristle when his detractors tell him to be meek, to neuter his pride because it makes them uncomfortable.

I'll definitely be following on Thursday as he finally unveils his new album at Madison Square Garden, but this time it will be with more curiosity than glee. Because the truth is, "keeping it real" and "being yourself" can't absolve Yeezus of all his sins. When West publicly discounts the rape accusations of more than 50 women who have nothing to gain, even I, a longtime fan, have to question whether there is something wrong with the picture he's painting. To love something is to ask for the best in that thing. I love Kanye West, but right now he isn't at his best.

Follow Brian on Twitter.

Ryan Kinsella, a tattoo artist working from his home in Calgary whose Instagram is pictured above, had his tattooing operation shut down last week. Screenshot via Instagram

A Calgary tattoo artist operating out of his home was shut down last week by Alberta Health Services due to unsanitary practices. In the days following, many media outlets across Canada published stories with headlines urging his clients to get tested for HIV and various forms of hepatitis.

However, the owner of the operation in question, Ryan Kinsella of Discount Tattoo, says he believes no one he tattooed was infected. "This thing is blown way out of proportion ... It was supposed to be a private thing for informed people. No one got sick, not a chance," Kinsella told VICE.

Dr. Judy MacDonald, medical officer of health with the Calgary zone of Alberta Health Services, said that she could not say if there have been any confirmed cases of diseases from Kinsella's operation due to it being confidential health information. However, she said, when tattoo artists are shut down with an order of closure like Kinsella was, it is standard for Alberta Health Services to urge clients to get tested regardless of whether or not there has been a confirmed infection.

"Whenever we have a situation like this where there's a tattoo operator who's performing services in an unsanitary manner, we do recommend that people who have been using those services be tested for bloodborne viruses like HIV, Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C," MacDonald said. "That's just our standard response, so that's what we offered to people who may have used his services... that's underway now."

Yesterday, Kinsella, who works as an ironworker in addition to tattooing as a "hobby," posted a YouTube video (which has since been taken down) that showed his operation and detailed his sterilization techniques that have been called into question by Alberta Health Services. "I have been fined for operating without a licence, not for giving people HIV, not for giving people Hep C or Hep B, or you know, ruining people's lives," Kinsella said in the video.

Kinsella was advertising his homegrown shop Discount Tattoos—which is probably not the best name if you are trying not to sound sus—on Kijiji and via flyers around Calgary.

Lexci Johnston, who has been managing tattoo studios for the last 15 years and is part of Health Educators, a body modification, industry-specific company that offers relevant training in bloodborne pathogens and infection control, was disturbed by the video Kinsella posted and plans to post her own video in response. "It's actually coming from a very ignorant place because he doesn't have the training to use his equipment properly," Johnston said.

Kinsella tattoos a client on a fabric surface bare-handed. Photo via Facebook

Johnston went on to explain that even within the video itself, Kinsella unknowingly demonstrated that he was not aware of how to properly handle equipment and sanitation, pointing out one part in which he shook a biohazard container of used needles.

In the order of closure that Kinsella was issued officially on February 2, Alberta Health Services detailed 15 violations. Of these, several brought up Kinsella's use of a stainless steel needle tube that was being reused, had rust on the outside, and contained stains on the inside—a piece of equipment he has claimed he was only using on himself to save money. Needle tubes are a piece of equipment used in machine tattooing that come in either disposable or reusable forms; however, for the latter, strict, meticulous sterilization is required for safe usage. Kinsella handed over a list of clients to Alberta Health Services, but according to MacDonald, this list contained less than five names.

While Johnston was critical of what she saw in Kinsella's video, she is generally unimpressed with the way authorities in the province respond to instances where people are tattooing in subpar conditions. "It's a double-edged sword for our industry when—it happens every few months—Alberta Health Services will issue a media statement to say that everyone who got tattooed at a certain place should get tested for HIV," Johnston said. "It reflects very badly on our industry as a whole, and we do feel the sting and backlash from the public."

Johnston is concerned that the health board is not strict enough when it comes to regulating tattooing. Though they have rules about the conditions in which people can conduct tattooing that are enforced via Alberta Health Services, there is not a licensing procedure that comes from the health board for individual tattoo artists, though some municipalities within the province provide licensing.

"The minimum standard is way too low... it's shocking when you see people operating this low below the regulations," she said.

Kinsella's tattoo operation was the first shut down in 2016 in Calgary, but last year, there weren't any tattoo operations shut down in the city. In 2014, three were closed down, and in 2013, two.

Kinsella told VICE yesterday that he will continue to tattoo himself, but will wait to tattoo others until he is cleared by Alberta Health Services. He has since deleted his YouTube video.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

The US Department of Justice. Photo via Wikimedia.

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

US News

Feds Sue Ferguson Over Police Reform
The US Justice Department is suing Ferguson, Missouri, to force the city to adopt police reforms agreed with the federal government. The city's council voted to revise the agreement, citing costs. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said residents "should not be forced to wait" for reform.—The Washington Post

Obama Wants Clinton Win, Says Former Press Secretary
Former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said President Obama wants Hillary Clinton to beat Bernie Sanders. "I don't think there is any doubt that he wants Hillary to win the nomination and believes that she would be the best candidate in the fall," he says. —CNN

Oregon Occupiers to Surrender
The last armed occupiers of the federal wildlife refuge in Oregon are preparing to surrender this morning, a group member said on a live internet feed. Occupier Sean Anderson vowed they would walk out without their guns but carrying American flags.—Los Angeles Times

Cleveland Wants $500 From Tamir Rice Family
The city of Cleveland has filed a $500 creditor's notice against the estate of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old fatally shot by police in 2014, citing reimbursement for the ambulance ride. The family attorney said it was "a new pinnacle of callousness and insensitivity."—NBC News

International News

Ceasefire Talk as 50,000 Flee Aleppo
Fighting in the Syrian city of Aleppo has displaced around 50,000 people, according to the Red Cross, and the humanitarian situation is "deteriorating rapidly." Russia has reportedly proposed that a ceasefire begin on March 1, but no agreement has been reached.—Al Jazeera

Auschwitz Guard Faces Trial
Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year former Nazi SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp, is due to go on trial in Germany over the murder of at least 170,000 people. Hanning is one of four elderly former Nazi guards due face trial in the coming months, likely the last of their kind.—Deutsche Welle

Nigerian Refugee Camp Hit By Suicide Bombings
More than 60 people have been killed in an attack by two female suicide bombers at a refugee camp in northeast Nigerian state of Borno. Police have arrested a woman who refused to detonate a bomb after traveling to the camp with the other bombers.—Reuters

Pope Sends Out 'Super Confessors'
Pope Francis has sent more than 1,000 priests on a global mission to forgive sins that normally only he may pardon. Nicknamed the "super confessors," the grave sins they have license to forgive include defiling consecrated bread and wine and violating confessional secrecy.—BBC News

Paul McCartney, emoji fan. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Anti-Bey Protest Planned
An anti-Beyonce rally is planned for next Tuesday outside the NFL's New York headquarters. The anonymous organizers described her Super Bowl performance as "race-baiting" and a "slap in the face to law enforcement."—The Huffington Post

Facebook Faces 'Colonialism' Row
Mark Zuckerberg has distanced himself from Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, who criticized India's rejection of Free Basics as "anti-colonialism." Zuckerberg called the comments "deeply upsetting."—USA Today

Paul McCartney Loves Emojis
Sir Paul has teamed up with Skype to create five-second pieces of music for new animated emojis called "Love Mojis." McCartney says he uses them to communicate with his kids: "Sometimes you just go, 'kiss, kiss, kiss, emoji.'"—Noisey

Cam Newton Gets Erotic Fan Fiction
Days after a devastating Super Bowl loss, Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton has become the subject of an erotic e-book fantasy. It's called Dabbin' with Cam: A Cam Newton Erotic Romance.—VICE

FBI Wants $38 Million For Encryption Breakers
The Bureau is making its fight against encryption, what it calls "going dark," one of its top priorities. It's asking the government for another $38 million to spend on encryption technology.—Motherboard

Done with reading today? Check out our video 'VICE Talks Film with 'Carol' Director Todd Haynes'

Photo via Flickr user Judith E. Bell

It was five days after Teresa Van Deusen's sister died when the letter from American Express arrived, offering condolences. How they knew her sister had died was a mystery—Van Deusen never called to inform them, and they hadn't made any changes on her account. But there it was, a letter expressing sympathies, and also reminding her of the $16,000 in credit card debt her sister owed.

When someone dies, their debt doesn't disappear. Their remaining assets get pooled together, and then a probate court doles out payments to cover any remaining debts: First the mortgage; then other secured debts, like car loans; and then, if there's any money left, unsecured debt, like credit cards. If, say, you're set to inherit the family house but your parents die with debt that their other assets couldn't cover, a court can force you to sell the house in order to pay off the debts. Most Americans who have debt don't die with a ton of money or assets leftover, and credit card companies clamber to get to the estate first, since when that money gets paid off to other agencies, the debt goes away.

Credit card companies have two options: pursue the debt, or chalk it up as a loss to get a tax credit. For example, Van Deusen's sister had about $5,000 outstanding on her credit card with Wells Fargo, but the bank chose not to chase it down. "They sent a letter that said, 'We're declaring this as a loss, and we're sorry for your loss,' and a 1099-C"—a form Van Deusen would need to pay taxes on the cancelled debt. But plenty of other collectors take other strategies.

"Collecting the debts of the dead—particularly the unsecured debt, like credit card debt—is a pretty good racket," said Oliver Bateman, a former debt collector who wrote for us last year about his demoralizing experience in that job.

The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act prevents collectors from making threats, calling too many times, harassing family members, or using deception in the pursuit of collecting debt. But collectors can contact family members of the deceased in order to reach the administrator of the estate. Some companies take it one step further, trying to squeeze money out of relatives or friends, even though they have no legal obligation to repay the debts of the person who's died. (The only time a creditor can legally collect from a family member is if someone has co-signed on a loan or if they are the debtor's spouse and live in a community property state.)

Michelle Dunn, a consultant for the debt collection industry who literally wrote the handbook on debt collection, says this kind of thing "happens every day."

"Some bill collectors will talk to anybody in the family and try to get them to pay a bill. They'll say it's their 'moral obligation,' which is absolutely false," Dunn said. "But people are not educated on what their rights are, and if they've just had a death in their family, they're upset. So when a bill collector tells them something like this, they might be more likely to believe it ."

Bateman told me about a colleague who used a legal research database to track down addresses of next-of-kin, sent those relatives threatening letters about an owed amount, and then persuaded people there was a "moral obligation" to pay it. "A few times, we got payment in full from the kids or other relatives of these people. It was truly breathtaking," Bateman said.

The Social Security Administration gives notice to financial institutions a few months after someone dies, but debt collectors usually find out much sooner by using databases to track recent deaths. Dunn, who was a bill collector herself before she became a consultant, told me she always read the newspaper obituaries to see if anyone she needed to call had died. "There used to be a newspaper—I'm sure it's online now—where you could pay for a subscription and see, state by state, the people who have died that day," she said.

As these online tools become easier to use, collections companies are increasingly more likely to pursue the debt of dead people, one way or another. There are plenty of horror stories: A woman in Hawaii sued Bank of America collectors, after she says they called upwards of 48 times a day just after she received her husband's life insurance check. (There's no obligation to use life insurance to pay off debts, unless the deceased person named their estate the beneficiary of their life insurance money, in which case it gets divided up with the other assets.) Another woman said she was harassed by collectors for five years about her dead sister's debt, to the point where she moved and changed her phone number multiple times. The collection agency Rumson, Bolling & Associates was sued in 2011 after harassing debtors' family members, co-workers, and neighbors, as well as threatening to "desecrate the bodies of deceased relatives" if they failed to pay off funeral bills. The company was eventually banned by the Federal Trade Commission from the debt collection business.

But the worst cases are sometimes people who think they're doing the right thing by informing a bank, loan, or credit card company that the account holder has died, and then get manipulated into paying the debt.

"Someone will call and say, 'I've been going through my uncle's mail because he's passed away and I see you've sent this letter that he owes some money, and I'm calling to tell you he's dead,'" said Dunn. "Some bill collectors will then tell them to pay that bill, and they don't know they don't need to, so people pay it."

Van Deusen, who was the administrator of her sister's estate, estimates that she spent more than 50 hours on the phone with collectors from BBVA bank, and even more with other credit card companies, which she described as "endless, persistent gaslighting." She was never asked to pay her sister's debt out of her own pocket, but she says collections agents tried to get the estate to pay off debts that weren't even real—including nearly $7,000 in fees that were issued post-mortem, and debts that had already been written off. "Death and taxes, sure," she said, "but dead people shouldn't be paying debt that the credit card companies have already written off."

Van Deusen also battled numerous calls from a third-party collection agency which claimed they had purchased her sister's American Express debt and demanded money from the estate. "I said, 'Show me a contract.' Any evidence this was her debt. In the year we were negotiating, they just never produced that."

Many collections agencies, including the one Bateman worked for, pay employees based on how much debt they collect, which can motivate collectors to squeeze every last dollar out of a family—whether it comes from the dead person's estate or otherwise. I asked Bateman if he ever felt compelled to bully a debtor, or a family member, in order to earn higher commission. "Sure, all the time," he said. "Sometimes, I'd have an argument with a particularly sassy debtor who wasn't going to pay me any money, just because it was fun to do."

"It's a recipe for someone to push the limits and break the law because they're desperate trying to get these people to pay," said Dunn. "It's setting them up to do something wrong."

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Photo by Tommy Bruce

It was after midnight on a Sunday when the fire alarm went ringing through the halls of Hyatt Regency hotel in Rosemont, Illinois. Phaedra Lewis had planned on ignoring it, figuring it had been innocently triggered by the smoke of a cigarette. Besides, it was cold outside and she was already in her pajamas, having stopped by a friend's room to hang out before going to bed.

She didn't know anything serious was happening until she was told by another hotel guest to evacuate immediately. With no time to grab a jacket, she fled to the nearest stairwell—and that's when the toxic odor hit her. "It smelled, for all the world, like the worst Pool Shock you've ever been around," she reminisces, referring to a type of pool cleaning chemical. "Like it was eye-stingingly bad, even outside the hotel."

The Rosemont police and fire departments rushed to the scene around 12:45 AM on December 7, 2014. But it wasn't just local law enforcement that stormed the hotel. There were throngs of reporters with bright cameras, hazardous materials technicians wearing space-like suits, and later, detectives from FBI Chicago's counter-terrorism and weapons of mass destruction unit.

It didn't take authorities long to confirm what many convention attendees had intuitively suspected: The intense fumes they'd smelled were the result of chlorine, the oxidizing chemical commonly used as a cleaning agent in swimming pools. The gas can be toxic when leaked into the atmosphere, causing respiratory problems and irritation of the eyes. Nineteen people were sent to the hospital as a result.

When Lewis appeared briefly in the background of a national television newscast, it triggered panic among her family. More than 600 miles away in Asheville, North Carolina, Lewis's mother was woken from her sleep in a nursing home and informed that her daughter had been involved in a terrorist attack. Lewis, who lives in a suburb near Chicago, assured her mother she was fine. Her cell phone blew up with texts from co-workers who asked if she'd been hurt. Their second question: Are you at a furry convention?

Photo by Peter Van Hiel

The incident became a national news sensation not only because authorities deemed it a deliberate, criminal act, but also because it occurred during Midwest FurFest, the second-largest furry convention in the country. The annual gathering brings together more than 4,000 people from all over the world, many of whom engage in role playing as anthropomorphic animals, sometimes while dressed in head-to-toe fur suits.

The Rosemont Police Department launched a criminal investigation into the spread of the chlorine gas, enlisting the help of federal investigators. But more than a year later, no charges have been filed and neither agency has made an arrest. Today, the source of the chlorine gas that sickened 19 people and catapulted furries into the media spotlight remains a mystery. Convention attendees still reminisce about standing in the cold together until the wee hours of the morning, and while some laugh it off as an unfortunate one-time prank, many others are still searching for answers.

An incident report filed by the Rosemont Police Department shows the case was logged into the system on December 8, 2014, assigned to a detective on December 29 of that year, and closed on July 29, 2015. But the reports reveal little about what took place after December 2014—let alone seven months later. The last page of the report sent to VICE by the Rosemont Police Department shows that the FBI had emailed the department its set of reports relating to the Midwest FurFest. The FBI did not respond to a request for the documents.

Special Agent Garrett Croon, a media coordinator for the FBI's Chicago Division, however, said that while the Rosemont Police Department may have closed its case, it's not uncommon to reopen an investigation if either department were to get a lead. "It's always ongoing because whether a year from now or three years from now, evidence is developed or tips are called in or somebody comes to the FBI and informs us, 'Hey, I know who the bad guy is,'" he told me over the phone. "Well, if it's not past the statute of limitations, the FBI reserves the right with the US Attorney's Office or the State's Attorney's Office to prosecute the case." He said they still consider it a criminal investigation.

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Detectives from the Rosemont Police Department declined to comment directly on the case, but reports they provided to VICE show that in the days following the incident, officers interviewed at least 30 hotel guests, more than 19 hotel employees, and a number of hospital workers, taxi drivers, and staff employed at local pool and hardware supply stores that sell chlorine. While officers investigated the whereabouts of several individuals, it's unclear how many were considered suspects and during what time.

"Who would've done it? Was it a furry from the inside who was looking for attention in this sort of messed up way?" asked Tommy Bruce, a Maryland-based photographer who attended Midwest FurFest in 2014 and has been documenting furry conventions all over the country for the last six years.

On Vice News: Somebody May Have Tried to Poison a Bunch of Furries With Chlorine Gas

Photos Bruce captured the night of the evacuation—all tinted red and blue from the flashing lights of nearby cop cars—depict scenes of chaos, panic, compassion, friendship, and then boredom as crowds waited in the convention center across the street for hours before they could enter the hotel again. In one image, a person dressed as what appears to be a large black and white skunk wraps white fuzzy mittens around a friend's shoulders; the friend cradles his mascot-like lion head under his arms.

In another photo, a shirtless man wearing a bear head and a leather harness strapped around his chest raises a fist to the sky, as if in protest—or joy, or maybe rage. But not every scene was quite as pleasant: One image shows a woman on a gurney being wheeled into the back of an ambulance; another shows a man gasping for breath as he clings to someone in a white fur suit for support.

Photo by Tommy Bruce

When first responders arrived at the scene that night, they used a chlorine meter to lead them to the source of the noxious odor. Donning self-contained breathing apparatuses—or large face-covering masks attached to an air tank that's worn like a backpack—the firefighters headed to the ninth floor of the Hyatt Regency, where the meter recorded a gas level of 1.4 parts per million. That's about the rate at which humans will generally start to experience mild irritation from chlorine, and can typically only tolerate it for about an hour or so, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).

Though Midwest FurFest panels, dances, and exhibits were scheduled in ballrooms and meeting halls on the first three floors of the hotel, attendees booked a majority of the 1,000-plus guest rooms throughout all ten floors, meaning furries were spread throughout the hotel that night.

By the time firefighters reached the stairwell of the west wing, the gas level had soared beyond 60 parts per million—double the rate at which people exposed to it immediately start to feel chest pain and shortness of breath—exceeding the meter's maximum reading. Humans who inhale that level of chlorine in the atmosphere risk contracting toxic pneumonitis or acute pulmonary edema, which can develop into respiratory disease, according to the NCBI.

But hotel guests complaining about having itchy, red eyes and trouble breathing had reported the odor long before emergency responders encountered it, says Lewis, who had been on staff at Midwest FurFest at the time. "But it was at night during the convention, many of them had had a few drinks, so our medical just assumed, 'Oh well, somebody spilled something on the stairs, maybe a maid did it or something,'" she said. "It was only fairly late in the evening that it really became clear, somebody had done something deliberately."

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Firefighters spotted the evidence in a stairwell landing between the ninth and tenth floors: a white powdery substance and the broken glass remains of what appeared to have once been a mason jar. The firefighters retreated from the stairwell and requested back-up assistance once they noticed a yellow and green liquid running down the walls. When the hazmat technicians arrived, they swabbed eight samples—both of the wet liquid and the dry powder—from four different stain patterns on the walls and the landing of the stairwell. The samples were then packed in absorbent pads in a steel drum, but the tests later conducted turned up inconclusive due to a faulty instrument, according to the police reports. Investigators had already confirmed the heightened levels of chlorine gas with the chlorine meter. It's unclear whether there were substances other than chlorine present.

"Outside of initial first responders and assisting in the evacuation of our attendees and staff, Midwest FurFest relinquished complete control of the onsite emergency response and the subsequent criminal investigation," the convention wrote in a statement published last November. "The furry community has been exceptionally supportive of our convention in the wake of this criminal act and our resilient staff and remarkably understanding and sympathetic attendees helped us finish the weekend on many positive notes." Matt Berger, the convention's director of programming and marketing, declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

Midwest FurFest sent out a series of tweets throughout the evacuation to keep attendees informed of the situation—but the tweets provided little clarity, stressing how little organizers knew about the nature of the emergency. In the absence of information, rumors quickly circulated, becoming magnified and multiplied through social media.

"Twitter was just like blown up for the entire night with people at the convention," recalls Bruce, explaining that furries commonly use the social network to follow stories and updates from a convention—especially if they can't attend in person. "It was interesting to be a part of that experience within the furry community where there is this sort of internet megaphone–like system throughout the whole community, throughout the whole , and there's so much ability to communicate ideas rapidly."

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Some of the early speculation included one theory that chlorine had leaked from a hotel swimming pool or a storage area—or that maybe a ceiling pipe or an air conditioner had sprung a leak, spewing nasty chemicals out into the atmosphere. But the Hyatt Regency O'Hare didn't have a swimming pool—and why would chlorine be carried through pipes, anyway? Others posited that maybe things got out of hand during a domestic dispute; or that a kid's science experiment had exploded; or that a hotel guest had decided to clean rubber work equipment with chlorine products.

After all the hotel guests—including those who had nothing to do with Midwest FurFest—got herded into the nearby Donald E. Stephens Convention Center about an hour after the evacuation began, social media served another practical purpose: locating those who had been separated during the evacuation. " were holding their cell phones up in the air in the convention center and taking panoramic pictures and then posting them to Twitter so that you could make sure your friends were OK," remembers Lewis.

But being holed up in the convention center wasn't all doom and gloom. After all, many people had been coming from parties and raves that typically last until all hours of the night on the Saturday of the weekend-long convention. Some were intoxicated or chemically altered; and some were in various states of undress, from fetish wear to pajamas to full-on fur suits.

"One guy seemed to be trying to start a revolution," said Pieter Van Hiel, a Hamilton, Ontario–based science fiction writer known for authoring a series of role-playing games set in 17th-century Japan. "He was standing there and in a very loud dramatic voice he kept starting to deliver an inspiring speech but would get like three or four words in and forget what he was saying and start again and a bunch of people told him to sit down."

Coincidentally, the convention center had been hosting another kind of furry convention earlier that day—only at that one, the animals on display were real. The cages and kennels strewn about suggested that a dog training show had taken place in the massive auditorium, and some of the dogs had been left in crates overnight, their barking and yapping audible, according to Bruce.

A photo he snapped at the scene showed that the Rosemont Police Department had also been a dog-training exhibitor during the convention—little did officers know they'd be returning to the scene again in the middle of the night. "It was sort of like, all the people dressed as animals were walking past all the accoutrements for grooming animals. That was kind of funny," said Hiel.

Photo by Peter Van Hiel

Amidst the chaos, there were also moments of tenderness: the furries in warm animal suits giving up their winter coats to those who needed them, the man who ran to McDonald's and brought back bags of McMuffin's to distribute, the neighbors who brought carafes of hot cocoa, and the nearby hotels that offered up their rooms so people wouldn't have to sleep on the floor of the convention center. All in all, the evacuation lasted nearly five hours. Firefighters had ventilated the area by opening a rooftop hatch in the stairwell and opening the doors on the first floor. Around 4:20 AM, when the chlorine meter read zero, guests were free to return to their rooms.

The convention ended that Sunday night, and thousands evacuated the building once more—this time to return to reality and bid farewell to their weekend escape. The Midwest FurFest went on again last year without a hitch, but the mystery of the chlorine has not yet evaporated.

Ken Smith, whose fursona—a term widely used to describe a furry's persona—is a leopard-fox hybrid named Malkontent, is still haunted by the gas incident, even though he didn't attend Midwest FurFest in 2014. But the San Francisco–based furry is a regular at half a dozen conventions across the country, including Further Confusion in San Jose, Furlandia in Portland, Biggest Little Fur Con in Reno, and the RainFurrest in Spokane. He often takes gigs working in the so-called headless lounge—the backstage area where people in fur suits can feel comfortable to remove their heads, unzip their suits, and cool down.

Photo by Tommy Bruce

Smith worries that violent threats against the furry community may not have been taken seriously in the past because of stigmas that make furries afraid to identify themselves, and fear within the community that authorities will not take them seriously. "That's a big problem with things like this, because furries have been so ridiculed and so misrepresented, a lot of us don't want to speak up about something affecting the furry community," he said. "If we look at the way we're handled , I think we really do count as being marginalized," he adds.

He points to a 2003 Crime Scene Investigation called "Fur and Loathing," which depicts rampant sexual deviancy and even murder at a furry convention. There was also a 2014 episode of Dr. Phil dubbed "Animal Obsessed" that he says painted furries as low-lives and freaks. (One of the talk show's guests, for example, eats dog food out of a dish and another chooses furry conventions over a college education.) But for many in the community, the biggest blow to their image dates back to 2001, when Vanity Fair ran a cover story set at Midwest FurFest. Many furries took issue with writer George Gurley's depiction of the community as sex-crazed misfits with bizarre fur fetishes.

For example, one attendee Gurley profiled has an entire hotel room filled with stuffed animals; he calls people with an erotic attachment to stuffed children's toys "plushophiles." Another section of the story describes furries as using their own language for mating: Terms like "yiff" means sex, and the word "spooge" denotes semen—one possible outcome of a so-called "fur pile," Gurley explains. "That was the first big exposure people had to furries, and of course they turned it into a bunch of lurid sex references," said Lewis. "I'm not saying there are not adult aspects of our fandom... but that is not even 20 percent of what happens at conventions."

After the Vanity Fair story was published, most furries collectively decided to shun the press, banning reporters from attending conventions. It's the reason most of the people I spoke to for this story were reluctant to grant an interview request, initially referring us to spokespeople or doing extensive background checks to ensure I had no intention of misrepresenting them. And then, of course, there was the sometimes-superficial reception to the otherwise horrifying chlorine incident itself. For example, a segment from the MSNBC news show Morning Joe went viral after anchor Mika Brzezinski erupted in a fit of giggles at the mere mention of furries while attempting to report the story. Some furries call it "fursecution," believing they make easy targets for others to persecute.

Photo by Peter Van Hiel

While that may be the case, Samuel Conway, a North Carolina–based scientist and researcher who also chairs Pittsburgh's Anthrocon, the world's largest furry convention, brushes off any suggestion that furries should be fearing for their lives. He says all the hype surrounding the chlorine incident at Midwest FurFest was just that: hype. "Was it a nasty event? Yes it was. Did people get injured? Yes they did," said Conway, a former Red Cross volunteer who's trained in emergency management services.

"But the news media kind of painted this picture, like they had the world thinking that there were probably 50 al Qaeda agents descending on the hotel with grenades or something like that," he said, admitting that others in the community have accused him of being too flippant about the incident.

"There's no worldwide anti-furry conspiracy," stresses Conway, better known online and during conventions as the lab-coat clad samurai cockroach Uncle Kage. "The mentality out there that some people have is that if they don't understand something, they immediately want to mock it. OK, if it makes them happy, swell. Whatever—knock yourselves out."

Many people have done just that: In 2007, several protesters picketed outside of Anthrocon, seemingly ironically, holding signs plastered with anti-furry statements like "Yiff in hell furfags.". That's not the only time Anthrocon has been the target of harassment or worse. In 2014, the FBI and Pittsburgh police investigated a string of social media posts that threatened the convention with violence, including the use of bullets and bombs, local news station WXPI reported.

"It turned out that the person who made these threats was, let's just say, in no position to carry them out," Conway said. "He had a nice large uniformed person show up at his door and I don't think he'll do that again." Some speculate that the person responsible for threatening Anthrocon also had something to do with the chlorine gas incident at Midwest FurFest, but authorities have not confirmed that link.

"I really hope that a lead really comes up with what happened in Chicago because it looks like somebody got away with something that was marginally successful, and the next person with a motive can learn how to be more successful. And that worries me," said Smith, who uses a wheelchair and says fire alarms can already be scary enough for people with accessibility issues.

Photo by Peter Van Hiel

Lewis says the chlorine incident at Midwest FurFest has had a lasting impact in ways that aren't always quantifiable. She says she noticed a higher police presence at the convention this year, for example, and that some people opted not to stay at the Hyatt Regency because they were concerned about the potential for another attack at the convention's main grounds. Lewis also packed a rebreather—a device that recycles oxygen in case it becomes restricted—for her girlfriend, who uses a wheelchair, just in case there was another incident and she couldn't immediately be carried down the stairs.

"I feel that the mood was grimmer this year, I really do," she said. "I think that there was a whole lot of 'us versus them' , like people were staring really hard at anybody that didn't look like they fit in with us, just to kind of keep an extra eye on it."

One unintended but welcome side effect of the chlorine disaster: It has forced Lewis to become more open about her involvement with furries—opening up a dialogue she says she wouldn't otherwise have initiated with some of her co-workers if her image hadn't been broadcast on television during Midwest FurFest.

"I hadn't brought it up just because you never know who has a weird impression of what a group is," she said, adding that she's an independent contractor, and she didn't want to put her job at risk. "It went way better than I'd been afraid it would. I think ultimately I'm saying that people are generally less of an asshole than you worry they'll be."

Follow Jennifer Swann on Twitter.

I just searched stock images for 'love' and thought these donkeys looked sweet. Forgive me. Photo via Flickr user Klearchos Kapoutsis

And a leather tourniquet closes around your throat, and your legs—bound to your shoulders with a complex system of pulleys and chains—start to stiffen and cramp, and the blood pools to your genitals and your brain, and as you shudder to one final, magnificent orgasm you croak, "I love you."

And wax drips off your nipples and cools on your thighs, and it stings and solidifies and brings up wicked goosebumps on your soft, supple flesh, and edging close to ecstasy you pant, "I love you."

And hands unseen are whipping at you through the dark, and each of your limbs is bound to a separate post of the bed, and your body isn't yours anymore—it is scratches and pink pre-blushes of bruises and the sting of a whip and the red welts of suffering, and you are gristle, euphoric gristle, and you shout to whomever it is hurting you, pleasuring you, "I love you."

And you take one delicious breath after the hands are released from around your neck and the bag taken off from over your head and you release that slick, sticky feeling that was your entire body being covered in lubricant and you look at what a mess you are, what a dirty little mess you've become, and look up at the light and say, "I love you."

And you take a sip from a glass of water because every fluid in your body has gushed out of you in a wave and you whisper, "I love you."

And you glisten and gleam and you are fresh out of the shower and pampered and powdered and swaddled in tight, fresh underwear, and suddenly every single one of your holes is filled at once—every single one, you are yanked and filled like a cushion at a cushion factory—and you yell out as much in surprise as in delight, "I love you!"

And you kneel on the floor and graciously lap it all up and gargle, "I love you."

Read on Noisey: Meeting the UK's Most Obsessive Vinyl Hoarders

Anyway: Valentine's news! It turns out saying "I love you" or talking about love or whatever in bed is actually more erotic in the long term than wearing fancy lingerie or engaging in straight-up foreplay.

That's according to a Chapman University study into the sex 'n' satisfaction habits of 39,000 married or cohabiting, consenting, heterosexual adults—all who had been with their partner for three or more years. So, like, the exact inverse of freaky. The most "slice of plain white bread with just a smidgen of warm margarine" sex-havers in the universe. Proper "just tap water is fine, thanks" orgasm-doers. The "Can we have the lights off, Lynn? And close the curtains. You know I can't rest if we don't close the curtains" of the fuck-loving world.

Anyway, out of them, turns out the more satisfied were the ones who regularly indulged in intimate behavior, with 75 percent of satisfied men and 74 percent of satisfied women in the study being the ones who regularly said "I love you" or spoke lovingly while they had sex. And probably said things immediately afterwards like, "Actually, I prefer spooning to intercourse." The kind of people who get up early to go to farmer's markets. Dream distantly of living in Downton Abbey times. Take little Tupperware containers full of seeds and nuts to work to stop them from breaking down and just enjoying a dirty, guilty lil' vending machine Snickers.

That said the phrase was also uttered by 49 percent of dissatisfied men and 44 percent of dissatisfied women, so maybe love truly is a lie.

"Almost half of satisfied and dissatisfied couples read sexual self-help books and magazine articles, but what set sexually satisfied couples apart was that they actually tried some of the ideas," said lead study author Dr. David Frederick. The study also found 83 percent of people were sexually satisfied during the first six months of their relationships, and people who sent a teasing little sext earlier in the day were more likely to be sexually satisfied later on. Also sexual variety was important for overall satisfaction, but analysts couldn't figure out exactly which various sexual flavors were conducive to long term satisfaction—"evidence on the effectiveness of specific forms of variety, such as showering together or wearing lingerie or use of sex toys, is lacking"—so guess you've got to mess around with it a bit.

So, thanks to science, if you're planning on having some electric, earth-shattering orgasms this Valentine's Day, don't come at your lover with a dildo or a variety pack of intense warming pleasure gels or restraints or frankly appalling DVD footage of someone getting done. Instead, just drop the L-bomb, right in the middle of the freshly ironed sheets, right before you bark yourself to a climax six minutes after starting. Have a good one, lovers. Have a good one.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

Vic Armstrong doubling for Harrison Ford in 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.' All images courtesy of Vic Armstrong

The film is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy's dad (Sean Connery) has been taken by the Nazis and is imprisoned in the "belly of the steel beast" (a tank). Luckily, Indy (Harrison Ford) has a horse. Riding through a desert canyon, he chases the tank down, his ancient skills more than a match for the fascist machinery. He draws up alongside the tank, leaps from his horse, executes a perfect landing, beats some Germans up, and saves the day (eventually).

"There's a lot more that goes into stunts than people generally imagine," says Vic Armstrong. "It's not just jumping off a horse."

Armstrong is a stunt co-ordinator, stunt double, and director with five decades of experience in film. He has won a Technical Achievement Academy Award, and according to the Guinness World Records, he is the most prolific stuntman of all time. He's talking me through one of his most famous stunt sequences, which he both performed as Harrison Ford's stunt double and helped conceive as the film's stunt co-ordinator.

A stunt of this complexity begins with the storyboard. In Los Angeles, a month before the shoot, the director Steven Spielberg maps out the chase with his team. Then the task is flipped over to Armstrong and action unit director Micky Moore, who have to make the sketches a reality. They pick the locations. This one is "tricky, in that you had to have the tank going along at a fairly close proximity to a cliff face," says Armstrong. Shooting in Almeria, Spain, in a part of the desert now known as Indiana Jones Canyon, Armstrong knew that the sandy soil was good for the horse, because it wouldn't have been able to gallop on rocks, but that the crumbly soil could easily give way, meaning that Armstrong couldn't ride too close to the edge of the cliff.

They brought a bulldozer in to cut an eight-to-ten-foot vertical cliff face and installed a ramp for the horse to run down, above the tank. Mechanical rigs are buried in the ground, along with pads to land on. Then Armstrong works with the horse, Huracan, who he knows well. Rehearsals take place at Fort Bravo, the local film studio synonymous with the Western. The horse's speed needs to be consistent and matched to the tank so that when Armstrong stands up to make the jump, the horse doesn't duck out sideways or slow down. "In the studios, we have the manure heap, which is the softest place to land and the biggest area to allow for mistakes. So I'd do the jump from the horse onto the manure heap and measure any discrepancies between the rehearsal and the real situation."

Armstrong has to make sure he makes his jump on the horse's up-stride. He has to ride on a rhythm: On two, he's up on the horse with his feet on some concealed pegs that will help him spring off, on three he starts kicking off, and on four, he's in the air. When he does it for the first time on camera he's a split second out, and because all his energy has been absorbed he looks like "Tom and Jerry running through the air." But then he nails it, landing on a "half-inch little pad" on the tank, wearing some padding himself. "I was so fucking pleased to land I didn't care whether it hurt or not."

Vic shooting for the 1974 film 'Dead Cert'

Born in Buckinghamshire, England, Vic Armstrong grew up riding horses. "My dad was a racehorse trainer, and all I ever wanted to do was race steeplechasers," he tells me. "I rode my first racehorse on the Gallops when I was nine. When I was 14, I started to race, but I was quite big and had to starve myself to get to 11 stone 7 , so I only ever stayed as an amateur jockey."

Richard Todd, a post-war star of stage and screen, owned some horses that Armstrong's father trained. "He used to come and watch his horses gallop on the weekend. I was eight or nine and I'd watch him with his open top Bentley and glamorous women," remembers Armstrong. "He'd tell me about the films he was in and I would watch them, then go home and pretend I was him. I'd be Rob Roy galloping up the glens, throwing myself off my pony—sad life, really, playing on my own! But I loved it."

That fantasy element is key to the stunt business, though. "It's basically playing Cowboys and Indians," Armstrong says of his profession. "You know you can't do something for real, so you do it for the movies."

This play-acting is allied to physical strength and practical ability. "Growing up with horses made me very practical because you have to do the thinking for something," says Armstrong. "And at the same time you have to adapt your thinking for the animal and be totally responsible."

Arnie presenting Vic with his lifetime achievement award at the Taurus Awards, the stunt world equivalent of the Oscars

Armstrong's journey into the film business began when he met a guy named Jimmy Lodge, who was one of the top horse stuntmen of the day. Lodge used to ride horses at the racing stables Armstrong's father ran. He was working on a film called Arabesque, with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, and he needed a horse from the stables. Then he needed someone to ride that horse. Armstrong stepped up and, for his troubles, was paid "the princely sum of £20 a day, which was over a week's wages in those days."

Pretty soon, the young would-be jockey realized that rather than simply subsidizing his horse racing, doing stunts could be a business. "There very few stunt people—certainly no young ones in those days, in 1965," he says.

Young, good with horses, and able to learn skills like sword fighting, high work (doing stuff at great heights), and falling ("You're so focused that everything becomes very slow, it seems to take forever to get down... it burns a lot of adrenaline, which is exhausting"), Armstrong worked on a string of big films and doubled for James Bond. On the first Indiana Jones film, Steven Spielberg confused him for Harrison Ford and a career-spanning relationship began, with Armstrong doubling Ford as Indy, Han Solo, and many others.

Vic and Harrison Ford in Spain, on the set of Indiana Jones

"I've told Harrison a number of times that if he wasn't such a good actor he'd be a great stuntman," Armstrong says of the man he's so regularly stood in for. "He's a carpenter, he's got a logical brain on him, and he's an absolute perfectionist—his scripts are always covered in notes at the beginning of shooting."

A picture sent from Ford to Armstrong is inscribed with the line: "If you learn to talk, I'm in deep trouble."

Today, the stunt community is much bigger than it was when Armstrong began.

"When I started there were probably 40 people doing it, and now there are 400, I should imagine," he says. It's still a "lovely business," but it's very competitive and you don't know everyone else in the way you used to. "I was very lucky that I met some of the people who formed the business. I came in at the cusp of the new wave, if you like," says Armstrong.

Vic and his wife Wendy on the set of 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'

One of those men was George Leech, part of a generation of men who used their military experience in World War II to carve out a career in the film industry, arranging and performing action sequences. Leech's daughter, Wendy, followed him into the business, and on the Superman films starring Christopher Reeve she doubled Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane. Armstrong was doubling Reeve and so, as Superman and Lois Lane, they met and went on to marry and appear in a series of films side-by-side.

CGI has changed things "incredibly for the better," says Armstrong, adding that he often likens it to morphine, in that it's an incredible drug when used in the right way for the right thing, but if you get hooked, well then it's very damaging. Films can be ruined by CGI, but it means that all sorts of safety mechanisms can be used and then just taken out in the edit. When he was doing Indiana Jones, "everything had to be in the camera frame" and thus had to be concealed, like the pegs he used to jump from the horse to the tank. Now, Armstrong can send Andrew Garfield hurtling across a street in a Spiderman film and the devices he uses to make this possible will never be seen by the audience.

The magic of the screen remains, though, and heading toward his 70th birthday, Vic Armstrong is back in the desert outside of Almeria, filming in Indiana Jones Canyon, still playing Cowboys and Indians.

If you are in the UK, Vic Armstrong will be discussing his career at the Glasgow Film Festival on February 19. Tickets are available here.

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Whatever way you look at it, initiatives to mitigate the dangers of on-street sex work are going to yield imperfect results—even when they're effective. Because for as long as sex work is criminalized, most meaningful efforts to change things for the better technically have to be made outside of the law.

So, in England, the West Yorkshire Police and Leeds City Council should be lauded for their pioneering scheme, set up in October of 2014, which allows sex workers to trade without fear of arrest on an industrial estate in Leeds's Holbeck district. The scheme has been credited with making sex workers more likely to report those who prey upon them to the police, and has reduced complaints from fed-up residents.

However, three weeks before the initiative was made permanent on January 11 this year, 21-year-old sex worker Daria Pionko was murdered within the zone, which operates between 7 PM and 7 AM and is managed by the authorities. A University of Leeds evaluation carried out before the murder stated that "the perceived decrease in police presence during operational hours is a concern and has contributed to sex workers not experiencing an increase in feeling safer." The report's author, Dr. Teela Sanders, made a number of recommendations, including calling for extra policing, better street lighting, CCTV, and number plate recognition.

A memorial to Dara Pionko

Although West Yorkshire Police is not in any way culpable for Ms. Pionko's death, the question remains whether or not policing for sex worker safety within the managed area has been neglected or mismanaged. With other local authorities considering the trailblazing scheme, it would be wise for their police forces to take note of the undoubtedly difficult lessons the managed area in Holbeck has to teach.

VICE submitted a Freedom of Information request on January 8 to the West Yorkshire Police, asking if Sanders's recommendations had been considered and inquiring about the perceived decrease in police numbers. On February 3 the request was delayed for a further 20 days to allow the police to decide whether or not it was in the public interest to release the information.

Despite the delay, there is evidence that the managed area has been skimped on. During a Leeds City Council meeting on October 14 last year—more than two months before Ms. Pionko's death on December 23—Holbeck Councillor Angela Gabriel spoke out about underfunding generally.

At the meeting, Gabriel said: "Progress has been made. But everybody decided that it was Holbeck's problem and it was going to stay in Holbeck. We have had no resources."

Gabriel declined repeated requests for an interview to discuss the issues she raised in more detail. Her reticence is reflective of the sensitivity of those involved in the managed area, which is being run under the Safer Leeds multiagency partnership and includes local sex worker charities.

In many ways the project has been an absolute success: Improved trust between sex workers and the police, due to a dedicated liaison officer, has led to an 80 percent increase in offenses and attacks being reported, with two rapists being jailed as a direct result of the scheme. The project's partners are all overwhelmingly supportive.

That said, when I spoke to a charity outreach worker—who wished to remain anonymous, saying it was not possible to comment openly because of the nature of the partnership—she said that despite "a huge amount of good will" between the partners, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of extra safety provisions was "because we're living in an age of austerity."

The industrial estate in Leeds's Holbeck district in which sex workers operate between 7 PM and 7 AM without fear of arrest.

In fact, by this March, Leeds City Council's budget will have been slashed by £180 million —a drop of more than 40 percent in five years. West Yorkshire Police are in a similar situation: Over 2016 and 2017, its budget will be reduced by more than 30 percent, with extra cuts scheduled for November.

In this situation, it's not impossible to envisage hard-pressed decision makers shrinking expenditure through the reduction of police numbers in the Holbeck zone, where the de-facto decriminalization of the area's ingrained sex industry presents the potential of freeing up the police resources previously used to curb it. Making the possibility of reduced policing more viable is the fact that many sex workers find traditional patrol methods obtrusive anyway.

"It's not good for business. I just want to do it and go home. I don't want to mess about with the police. One of the police says to me, 'You're not going to have any fun with that attitude,' and I said to myself, 'You're taking the piss—as if any of us are having fun down here anyway,'" said 24-year-old Jane (not her real name), who is a heroin addict and has been a street sex worker for two years.

Related: Watch 'The Digital Love Industry,' our documentary about how tech is shaping the way we have sex.

Jane was waiting to be picked up from the managed area when I visited for a few hours in January, shortly after it was made permanent.

"If something bad happens I'll deal with it myself. I don't need to bother with the police. It's just a waste of time. I tell you exactly what it is: Girls want to come down here, get their money, go home, get their drugs, go to sleep, and do exactly the same the next day until they sort their life out," she said.

During my visit, police cars passed intermittently and a charity support van was parked on the side of the road. Early in the evening, a police cycle patrol also passed through, though there was no sign of police officers on foot during the time I was there. One of the two officers on the bike patrol informed me that the sex workers don't like having the police around.

"Sarah"

This wasn't the case for 32-year-old Sarah (not her real name), who has worked around Holbeck for 15 years "on and off." Sarah was a heroin and crack addict, but has cleaned up and now does sex work to provide for her children.

"I've said it for years: There needed to be somewhere where the girls can go, where the guys can go, where it's all contained," she said. "It's been going on a while now and it has made things better. The police liaison officer who works with us has been fantastic. There have been more police since Daria's murder, but I think it'll go down again. But there's not much the police can do once you're in someone's car. What we really need is a row of garages with, like, parking meter things and cameras outside. You put your money in, you go in, the shutters come down, and you can do your business inside and not have to worry."

Sanders hinted at such a solution in her review, asking the authorities to "consider the place where the sexual transaction happens as the place where there is most risk for sex workers. This place is not addressed in the current Managed Area model." Initiatives that solve the problem are already running successfully in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland, but are not being considered by Safer Leeds.

Read on Broadly: Stigma Puts Sex Workers at Higher Risk of HIV

The problem is that in those countries prostitution is legal and regulated, whereas in Britain it is not. "Unfortunately we're not there yet," commented the charity outreach worker I spoke to. In the absence of legalization and legislation to govern the industry, the police department and its partners will have to think of other ways to unobtrusively protect Holbeck's sex workers that don't result in just leaving them to it.

"The managed area is regularly patrolled by officers from the local neighborhood policing team as part of a specific patrol plan," said a West Yorkshire Police spokesperson, who would not answer my question regarding reduced police presence. "The results of the independent academic evaluation, which includes the recommendations around CCTV, street lighting, and so forth are currently being reviewed by the Safer Leeds partnership in detail as it continues to look at how the managed area should continue to operate as part of the city's wider strategy around sex work."

There is no doubt that policing the managed area is a difficult and delicate undertaking, or that West Yorkshire Police has taken a brave and progressive step by agreeing to do it. Nevertheless, one has to hope that the flagship policy won't be compromised by the need to save money.

Follow Ryan on Twitter.

This is an excerpt from Tom Lean's new book for Bloomsbury Press, Electronic Dreams, exploring how 1980s Britain learned to love the home computer. Tom himself has made some small edits to the original text, to make the excerpt work as a stand-alone article.

In the early 1980s, home computing was booming around the world, as millions of people bought their very first machine from the likes of Commodore, Sinclair, Oric, Acorn, or Atari. Today it's easy to be amused at how primitive these computers seem, with their blocky graphics, tiny memories, beepy sound, and sometimes eccentric design features. Yet in their day they were an extraordinary creative medium; simple yet very powerful too, and open to experimentation by programmers who learned to push them far beyond what their designers expected, particularly when it came to creating games.

When we think of vintage computer games, we all too often think of the two-dimensional tennis of Pong, the repetitive attack waves of Space Invaders, or Pac-Man's entrapment in a haunted maze with no way out. Yet these are just the best known, and probably amongst the least impressive, of a much more diverse scene. Home computing ushered in a period of incredible gaming diversity and experimentation, probably the most creative period in video game history. It would need an entire book to adequately cover all the innovation and creativity of early 1980s games developers. The gaming scene was vast, with thousands of games of diverse genres, produced by hundreds of companies, on dozens of different platforms. However, an examination of just some of the most inventive titles and techniques of the early 1980s illustrates the great technical and creative achievements of game developers.

In Britain, many of the most innovative games of the early 1980s originated on the Sinclair-made ZX Spectrum, but were quickly ported to other platforms, too. Released in 1982, the Spectrum was a budget home computer with an emphasis on learning to program. With its "dead-flesh" rubber keys and small stylish black casing, the Spectrum appears more like an overgrown calculator than a computer to 21st century eyes, but appeared fantastically futuristic at the time. Priced at £175 for the 48k memory version (less than one eighty-seven-thousandth of the RAM of the computer I'm typing this on), it was hugely popular, meaning there were not only many people programming for it, but a large market to supply. By 1984 over 3,500 games had been released for the machine in some form or another. The quality and sophistication varied enormously, but it included a large number of critically acclaimed and innovative titles.

Curiously the Spectrum itself was not as optimized for games as some of its more expensive rivals. It needed an adaptor to plug a joystick into it, the sound capability was simply a beeper, and the odd way the machine displayed its visuals could create some strange-looking effects on screen from color clash. Other machines had more sophisticated sound and graphics, and provided built-in features to make writing games easier. A good example is the Commodore 64, which not only had an advanced sound chip but the ability to use sprites, graphical objects that made animations easier to create. "The trouble was, that guided everyone into making games that all looked incredibly similar," recalled Spectrum games programmer Jon Ritman. The Spectrum had no such hardware support, and yet its simplicity and origins as a machine to be explored made it a flexible medium to create games that did not have to obey the rules. "The Spectrum was just 'here's a bit of screen.' It's laid out in a funny way, which is a bit of a pain," explains Ritman. "But you just draw things. And you could do whatever you want. It might not be as fast, but you can do whatever you want, and I think that as a result you got more interesting ideas on it."

'The Lords of Midnight,' walkthrough

Many of the best-remembered titles of the 1980s are action games of various types, but it would be entirely misleading to suggest that this was all that was on offer. Text adventure games were a hugely popular genre at the time. In 1983 nearly 130 were released on the ZX Spectrum alone, the same year that saw the launch of a dedicated computer adventure game magazine: Micro Adventurer. At their best they were immersive works of interactive fiction, notably those actually based on books, such as The Hobbit and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the latter of which was co-created by its original author Douglas Adams. Very quickly, they evolved beyond simple text games, as programmers started illustrating them and adding other dimensions to the gameplay.

The most impressive example was probably The Lords of Midnight, written by a former teacher from Liverpool, Mike Singleton, in 1984. Drawing heavily on The Lord of the Rings, The Lords of Midnight was a quest to defeat the Witchking Doomdark, but offered far more than "YOU ARE IN A ROOM" style descriptions and typed "GO NORTH" commands. Rather, it was a mix of strategy war game and fantasy adventure, based around the remarkable "landscaping" graphical technique developed by Singleton. The first-person perspective this provided created an impression of traveling through a vast fantasy land of citadels, villages, mountains, and plains. It was a whole world for the player to explore, populated with enemies and potential allies, and like any good fantasy tale, the game even came with a map. The Lords of Midnight was far more open-ended than typical adventures: There were multiple characters to control, and it could be played as an adventure to destroy Doomdark's ice crown, or as a war game, by gathering forces to defeat him in battle. With 4,000 different locations and innovative gameplay, The Lords of Midnight was one of the earliest games that could be considered an epic. The cast of characters, atmospheric surroundings, enormous size and scope of gameplay made it a game that players could lose themselves in for many hours. Reviewers praised its world, landscapes, and coherent storyline, attributes more often associated with books or films than mere games at the time.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's film about the kids who remade Indiana Jones shot for shot

Also visually impressive, but in a rather different way, was 1983's Ant Attack. Playing as either a boy or a girl character, a novelty in the male-dominated gaming scene of the time, the game's object was simple enough: Players had to enter the lonely ruins of the city of Antescher, dodge the giant ants (or, more aggressively, blow them up with grenades), and rescue their significant other. What was striking was the world the action played out in. Ant Attack was one of the earliest home computer games with three-dimensional graphics, using a technique known as isometric 3D, where the objects in the game were drawn to look like they were solid rather than flat. The game's creator, Sandy White, was a trained sculptor. With little more than shaded blocks, White created a sprawling three-dimensional city for the player to explore. The isometric 3D technique was so novel that the game's publisher, Quicksilva, attempted to take a patent out on it, but it became a widely emulated technique on the Spectrum.

Isometric 3D was taken to another level the following year when Ultimate Play the Game released Knight Lore, an action-adventure quest of collecting the ingredients needed to stop protagonist Sabreman turning into a "werewolf." Ultimate, a trading name of Ashby Computers & Graphics, were rare among British game companies in already having experience of creating arcade machine games before the home computer boom. They became well respected for a series of superbly realized and highly successful computer games such as the platform game Jetpac and action-adventure Atic Atac. The company cultivated an air of mystery; the lead developers, brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, rarely gave interviews, which paradoxically led to even greater press interest and a loyal fan base. Convinced it had a winner, Ultimate delayed the release of Knight Lore for some months to avoid upsetting the market for its other games. Whereas Ant Attack featured an expansive but essentially static city where nothing moved save for the player and the ants, Knight Lore used isometric 3D to create a miniature interactive world. Essentially a three-dimensional platform game, Knight Lore was a maze of claustrophobic dungeons that exploited the extra dimension to good effect, with objects that could be moved around, puzzles that needed to be solved in three axes, and hazards hiding behind things. The graphics were also precisely detailed; the animated paroxysms of Sabreman as he turned into a werewolf were a joy to behold. It was an approach widely considered revolutionary; Crash magazine's reviewer declared that it "resembles nothing I've played before."

'Knight Lore,' walkthrough

Other programmers were impressed, too. "You could have heard our jaws hit the floor, basically," recalls Jon Ritman of first seeing Knight Lore. "I looked at it and thought that's what I've always wanted to do, as I saw it, make a Disney cartoon that you could play." After Knight Lore, isometric 3D became a staple of Spectrum gaming. Indeed, so many games used the format that some magazine reviewers seem to have gotten rather bored of it after a while, but it was the basis for a number of inventive and polished games. Three-dimensional games were generally more technically demanding than two-dimensional ones, and few players appreciated all that was required to make isometric 3D work on a simple machine like the Spectrum.

"It required a number things," recalls Ritman, who employed the technique to good effect in 1986's Batman. The smooth three-dimensional animation as objects moved across the screen relied on emptying a space in the graphic and then drawing into the gap that was created. "You work out the area of the screen that's changed because something's moved," Ritman explains. "You work out the order of the room, from the back of it to the front, and then you draw all the things that come in that area that you need to update, in order, all the way to the front." To avoid the Spectrum's problem with color clash, the action in most isometric games was drawn in monochrome, albeit with different colors used for different rooms to display information around the screen. "And then there was the physics, being able to move things around," Ritman adds. It seems such a simple thing today, but having items moving around in a virtual world, not just scenes being drawn, but objects that the player could interact with, was curiously novel for the time.

Read on Motherboard: How Nintendo Got the Rights for 'Tetris' from the USSR

A good game was not just about the graphics technique employed, but also about using it to make a fun experience that was large enough to entertain players for a good few hours. Batman, for example, had a 150 rooms to explore of puzzles, enemies and items, requiring another set of techniques to fit the game into the confines of the Spectrum's memory. "It required some intense storage, so the maps and things were incredibly condensed," recalls Ritman. The following year he and artist Bernie Drummond surpassed even this, with Head Over Heels, another detailed, and rather surreal, isometric game. Head Over Heels also offered some impressive gameplay innovations too: enemies that homed in on the player's character as they moved, fiendish combinations of conveyor belts and enemies, and strange Prince Charles-Dalek hybrid creatures controlled by buttons within the game environment itself. Most notably, Head Over Heels had two characters with different abilities to control, the doglike Head and Heels, who could be combined into a single symbiotic organism, allowing a number of different ways to play.

When new, Manic Miner, the madcap 1983 platform game which set a benchmark for early home computer games, had been celebrated for squeezing 20 two-dimensional screens of action into the 48k ZX Spectrum. A few years later, Head Over Heels managed 300 three-dimensional rooms in the same computer, a striking demonstration of maturing programming techniques. Isometric games such as these were probably the most impressive displays of how far games programmers could push the simple capabilities of the Spectrum. They were essentially miniature interactive universes created within incredibly tight computing constraints. No matter how primitive the computers seem today, it's impossible not to be impressed by the things that skilled programmers could make them do.

Electronic Dreams is published on February 11, 2016. More information/purchase links at the Bloomsbury website. Follow Tom Lean on Twitter.

At 8:10 AM on Friday, October 30, 2015, 12-year-old Tiahleigh Palmer was dropped off at the front of her Australian primary school by her foster carer. A few classmates saw her that morning, but when the bell rang at 8:25 AM she wasn't sitting at her desk. Something happened to Tiahleigh in that 15-minute window. Those few sightings were the last times she was seen alive.

Six days later, on Thursday, November 5, three fishermen discovered Tiahleigh's body near a bridge crossing in the Pimpama River, about a 45-minute drive from her school in Waterford West, Queensland. There wasn't, and still isn't, any known cause of death. When Tiahleigh was found her remains were so heavily deteriorated that the post-mortem indicated she could have been dead up to a week.

In early November the story dominated Australian headlines. There were repeated calls from Queensland Police for information and social media bubbled with theories and updates. But updates were few and far between. No one was arrested, and nothing new was uncovered. The story just slowly slipped from the spotlight.

It's now February, three months after Tiahleigh disappeared, and I can't let the story go. The whole thing seems so unbelievably sad and unfair, and generally odd that something like this could occur near my own home. So one weekend, on a whim, I decide to go for a drive and follow her most likely final movements, starting with the school.

As I drive west into Logan, an area just south of Brisbane, the landscape begins to change. I start passing sidewalls with murals of cows and farm animals. I see more hardware stores, trees, a Pet Motel. That's about the point when I hit the sign for Waterford West, a small residential suburb of Logan City. Off-white houses in neat yards, a few convenience stores; the streets are quiet. I start to think about the sort of people who live here.

Tiah, as her friends and family called her, had been a ward of the state since 2011. Her upbringing seems to have been a happy one but not without complications. Her mother, Cyndi Palmer, gave up her daughter as a teenage mom and Tiah was passed from carer to carer.

Julie Pemberton, one of Tiah's previous foster carers, described Tiah to the Daily Mail as "no angel, but no child is." She said Tiah often ran away and seemed proud of the fact she'd been passed up by her previous guardians after only 24 hours. "She was a gorgeous girl, she really was," said Julie. "A wild horse—you might have been able to tame her but could never have broke her. She had a lovely spirit that kid."

But this fact—that Tiah was a wild spirit who regularly ran away—is something that's seriously complicated the investigation.

Tiah's school. All photos by the author

When Tiahleigh went missing, Queensland Police waited six days before going public. This decision has received a lot of criticism, although police have since defended the choice. The Child Protection Act prevents government bodies from naming children in care, and while exceptions can be made in missing persons cases, police officers are generally reluctant to distribute photos of children online. This was the main reason police waited nearly a week before posting a report, which in retrospect wasted those first vital days.

We know that public notification can be highly useful in recovering missing children. In the US, AMBER Alerts have saved 794 children since the program began in 1996. Tragically, in Tiah's case, her body was found only three hours after the media was first notified.

In the wake of her death, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk ordered a review into the way the identities of foster children are protected. It wasn't the first time foster laws had affected criminal investigations. In 2014, three-year-old William Tyrell went missing from his foster carers' home in NSW. Due to privacy laws, his carers were not initially allowed to speak out to the public. His body has not yet been recovered.

A poster outside the school's gates

When I get to Marsden State Elementary School, I stand outside the front gates, where I'm greeted with paper posters of Tiah. "Can you help?" they ask me. It's a weekend and I'm the only one around, so I go to the bus stop and check the timetable. It's plausible Tiah could have got on a bus to her death, but apparently it's one of the few things police have ruled out.

Detective Superintendent Dave Hutchinson, who is in charge of the investigation, told me that gathering evidence about Tiah's disappearance was difficult from the start. "Many of the issues revolved around the memories of the various students," he said. "For example, information was received that Tiah was seen getting on a bus that afternoon. After considerable inquiries, it was determined this occurred on a different day."

"Information was received that Tiah was seen getting on a bus that afternoon."

Despite these problems the detective superintendent told me they've been able to deduce Tiah left of her own accord. "We know that Tiah walked out of the school willingly at about 0820 hours," he said.

The school is strangely quiet, and I walk around looking for someone to talk to, but no one will. Actually, this is a recurring issue over the next few weeks. The investigation of Tiahleigh's death is still open, which means media snooping is frowned upon. That she was a foster child with a difficult family history makes things even more difficult. I drive around Logan thinking that restricting people from talking—and therefore keeping the story out of the news—might be somewhat counterproductive. Still, over and over again I'm met with the same response: "Sorry, I'm not allowed to talk about that."

Tiah, like all kids, liked to hang out at McDonalds

I leave the school and head to the local McDonald's where Tiah was known to hang out. The police department has gathered enough information to be positive that she was planning to cut class that day—and if we're working under the assumption that she encountered a predator, there are two main plausible theories. One is that Tiah was planning to meet someone and that's why she left school. The other is that she was planning to leave school and was abducted. The shopping precinct seems a likely enough setting for either.

It's in a busy area with lots of traffic, a KFC, a 7-Eleven, a Red Rooster, an Aldi, a Subway, and a Dominos. One classmate told police she saw Tiah here on the morning of the disappearance, but CCTV footage has revealed no evidence of this. I decide to keep moving.

The drive out to the Pimpama River, where Tiah's body was found, takes about 40 minutes and I'm forced to take a toll road. I wonder if the toll cameras were checked—could they provide any evidence? In any case, the police officers had told me they could only comment generally on Tiah's movements that morning, so I don't know for sure. I'm on the highway for a while, and when I get off, I reach a desolate stretch of dusty bitumen that leads to the river. One way or another, Tiah was on this road too.

The turnoff to the river

I get out to take some photos of a road sign. As I'm walking back to my car, keys in hand, a vehicle pulls up alongside me. I'm silently freaking out, but it's a construction worker who wants directions. I can't help and he drives off, and I exhale. "Wimp" is a word to describe me, but it's also a creepy road. It's out of the way, empty, and surrounded by bushland. It's also not the closest river to the school, and it is surprisingly close to an infinitely nicer ocean. There's no reason any young girl would come here on her own volition.

Fisherman found her body near this bridge on November 5

I find the place where Tiah's body was recovered. It's just past a recycled water treatment plant on the north side of a grated bridge. Barbed wire lines the bushland and the riverbank. It's not exactly what I'd call beautiful.

I look at the stagnant water where Tiahleigh was found semi-naked. She went to school wearing a uniform, carrying a purple Mambo backpack. Then she ended up in this filthy, barely-moving water, while the backpack and the uniform disappeared. I think about where they are now, and wonder if the fisherman who found Tiahleigh received counseling.

I don't know why people fish here

Currently there are around 20 police investigators on the case, trying to work out whether Tiah's abductor was known to her. They have looked into sex offenders in the area and scoured the 12-year-old's social media accounts and internet logs. However, there is a complication: Tiah did not have a phone or personal computer. All of her online interactions are spread across computers and phones belonging to her friends, foster carers, and her school. Finding out what happened to her is complicated, for a whole series of reasons.

Whatever happened in Waterford West, it led to the tragic death of a 12-year-old girl.

A small memorial for Tiah on the road above the bridge

If you have any further information about her disappearance, please contact Queensland Police or Crime Stoppers at 1300 333 000.

Jackson Pollock's 'Mural on Indian Red Ground' in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. All photos by the author

More than once I have heard it said that Jackson Pollock, not Reagan, won the Cold War. After all, in those first two decades, when it was a matter of deciding which regime best symbolized the future, Pollock's abstract expressionism showed America to be a reactionary force capable of forging ahead. On the crucial front of the imagination, the Soviet Union could only retreat.

With these thoughts in mind, I headed to see one of Pollock's masterpieces now being shown in Tehran to find out how this exhibition came about and what subtle impact it might have.

Contrary to what some international media outlets have claimed, it is not the first time that the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has shown Pollock's Mural on Indian Red Ground, one of the great works of American contemporary art in its collection. The museum also hasn't refrained from showing its Warhols, Oldenburgs, and Lichtensteins. That particular revolution happened 15 years ago. The only requirement that the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance seems to pose is that curators find an appropriate context for showing these works. In this case, the paintings serve as counterpoints to the work of Iranian artist Farideh Lashai (1944–2013), a modernist of prodigious imaginative powers, who is the main focus of the exhibition.

When I meet the Iranian curator, Faryar Javaherian, I tell her that I am particularly impressed by Lashai, especially some of her video art, both lyrical and surreal. But, it turns out, those videos were neither as short nor as surreal as I had thought. They had simply been clipped under censorship instructions. One of them was a particularly beautiful rendition of the classical poem "Layla and Majnun." Since, in Lashai's video, Layla appeared most often unveiled and even undressed, the public version had to be reduced to about 20 seconds, and it made very little sense. Something similar happened a few years ago, when one of the panels of a Francis Bacon triptych had to be removed for supposedly depicting a homosexual scene. The triptych became a diptych.

I comment to Javaherian that in both cases completely new artworks have been created. Perhaps there is some kind of silver lining in that. She smiles but looks pained.

Contemporary art in Tehran is experiencing a boom, both artistically and commercially. Javaherian notes that, 20 years ago, Iranian art had regressed almost to the basic function of all art—that of being the heart of a heartless world—as it helped exorcise the horrors witnessed during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Coming back from the front, the young men who had some talent for drawing and painting produced tepid images of ideal landscapes and flowers. No one who has been through hell wants to relive it, Javaherian argues, something I could confirm after meeting with war veterans in Tehran. Perhaps the first contemporary art gallery of the Islamic Republic was the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, where martyrs' photographs are covered with simple decorative elements.

Today, things could not be more different. Young Iranian artists are full of blast and thunder. They gather every evening in the courtyard and cafes of the Artists' Forum in Honarmandan Park, around which a distinct art scene has been developing. The forum has become a sanctuary for artists. It is also a meeting point. With so few outlets for expressing their irreverence and creativity, young Iranians have turned contemporary art into a powerful social force.

Later that day I visit one of the best galleries in Tehran. Etemad is located at the very edge of north Tehran, where the city climbs up the snowy mountains. Everything is different in north Tehran. The air feels incredibly pure, especially if you've been exposed to the dangerous pollution levels downtown. Tiny streaks of snow water create an enchanting atmosphere. And then there is money, or rather opulence, which stands out in the fancy restaurants, sports cars, and luxurious condos all around you. At Etemad, I am entertained with tea and cookies while looking at metal rods that reveal themselves as "portraits of famous people"—including, rather scandalously, Ayatollah Khomeini himself—if seen from the right anamorphic perspective.

Upstairs, I meet Arefe Arad, one of the best young artists in Iran. She was born in 1983 in Sari, a small city on the other side of the mountains. This is her first significant exhibition.

When I meet her she is saying goodbye to a family of prospective buyers, an affluent family from north Tehran. The daughter is dressed in the mandatory headscarf, which she combines with a suit not too different from a Pollock painting. When they leave, Arad guides me through her work. She is dressed just as unconventionally: all in black, from the headscarf to the Doc Martens, heavy makeup and a long gothic cape.

Arad had worked on metal sculptures before. Now all works on display are made of velvet, satin, termeh (a type of Iranian handwoven cloth), and organdy. She makes bodies by patching different fabric pieces together. If the result evokes different kinds of human-size alien creatures and monsters, that is very much deliberate. She tells me she wants to create monsters—textile models close to mythical characters with no identity or individuality. These sculptures are flexible, viscous, patched together in deformed shapes. She says they are a reflection on the everyday life of Iranian women.

It is very late when I leave. Stopping at Tajrish Square in north Tehran, where young people converge, I see immediately what Arad means when she speaks of women as patchworks. One young woman goes up the Tajrish escalator wearing a black headscarf covering all her hair, a very proper hijab few women in north Tehran are keen on, combined with knee-high pink stiletto boots. The whole square turns to watch her walk. Such extravagance is all too obviously a reaction against the mandatory dress code. As Javaherian had put it to me, "This is how you defy the law. It is the same with parties. When these young people throw a party, it's not a party, it's an orgy."

Later, when I talk to a group of university arts students, two things become clear. First, the famous Tehran parties are a class privilege. They are something allowed only to the "bourgeois kids" in the north, who have the money and the influence to wiggle themselves out of any possible trouble with the morality police. A sure indication that this is true is the way the only cars pumping pop music out of their windows in Tehran are very expensive sports vehicles, a useful indication to the authorities of who is driving them and how to react.

I also return to my argument that the stringent legal code mandating headscarves and baggy overcoats for women are perhaps being appropriated by young women in creative and ultimately empowering ways.

The reaction mirrored the pained expression I had seen from Javaherian earlier. These are not creative cultural hybrids, but distorted chimeras. The authorities want a token of subjection and that is why every woman in Iran must carry her headscarf, wherever she is, as a public proclamation that her choices are in the end worthless. The humiliation is powerful and deliberate. At the same time, they fight back by blemishing in every way they can the almost aesthetic dreams the clerics have developed for Iran. The result is not creative but destructive, just as the parties in north Tehran are less festive celebrations than distorted affirmations of the will against a stunting force.

The next day I visit a second gallery and am again confronted with monsters and chimeras. The Aaran gallery, near Honarmandan, has just opened a solo exhibition by Mehran Saber. Both the gallery and the artist had a clash with the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance a few years ago, involving long discussions about the possible copulating intentions of some abstract shapes on a painting. Mehran left Iran, but now he is back, perhaps trusting that there is a new openness from the censors. His most recent work depicts "shapes that are stretched, distorted, and caught in suspended situations," as the exhibition catalogue puts it.

Hybrid creatures, often twisted and pressured, push and pull. These are not aesthetic ideas, but the very nature of life in Tehran. That is why, as so often in Persian history, art offers us the best window into Iranian politics and society.

If there is one person who has navigated these troubled waters with aplomb, it's Sami Azar. As director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, he made it worthy of the name for the first time since the beginning of the Islamic Republic. He then worked for Christie's as its Iranian representative. He has recently founded his own auction house in Tehran and is, according to everyone I talk to, doing extremely well.

Why has this become a city of monsters, I ask. Sami Azar is also an art theory professor as well as a businessman, so he tries to put it a bit more theoretically. "Monsters" is perhaps not the best word, but he agrees that the grotesque has become the predominant category for Iranian artists. "Many young artists create a monster-like grotesque and present it as the catastrophic result of identity crisis."

But Sami Azar is also optimistic. Tehran has a very large art community and is certainly taking advantage of scale. There are thousands of very good young artists and hundreds of galleries, some already world class. That makes the future of contemporary art here very promising, he tells me. The connection to social and political life is now stronger than ever. Artists use art to express their most serious concerns and this is turning contemporary art into a powerful social and political force, perhaps for the first time in modern Iran. What will all the monsters become when they grow up? My impression is that we will soon start to find out. A new Iran is in the making. That was already the case before Geneva and the lifting of sanctions, but the process will now be much faster.

It was getting late, so I left the arts quarter and headed north. I had a party to attend.

Follow Bruno Macaes on Twitter.