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‘Quantum Break’ Looks Like the Superhero Gaming Surprise of 2016

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Sam Lake is Finnish, through and through—his real name is Sami Järvi, and he was born in this currently ice-crusted corner of the Nordic countries. But when scanning his desk at Remedy Entertainment, the Espoo-based studio where he serves as the creative director, for clues as to what inspires him to write games that tap into American culture, one thick tome stands out. The Dictionary of American Slang. It's half hidden, but you can't miss it, peeking out from underneath presumably some pretty important documents, actively underpinning them—just as Lake's twisted take on all things pulpy about modern Americana serves as the foundation for Remedy's celebrated story-focused games.

First came 2001's gritty crime drama Max Payne and its sequel two years later. Then, in 2010, the company released the supernatural thriller Alan Wake, soon followed by its American Nightmare spinoff. And now comes Quantum Break, a new sci-fi IP for a new generation, a console exclusive for the Xbox One. It's a risky position to be in—launching a brand-new series is never easy, and doing so on a system that's far from the market leader right now, with Microsoft's machine substantially lagging behind the PlayStation 4 in sales terms, increases the chances of it failing to capture an audience sizable enough to make the endeavor worthwhile. But while he's clearly nervous about Quantum Break's release, Lake is confident that the game Remedy has made is more than worthy of player time and money.

"Doing a new thing on a new platform, pushing the technology forward, creating a new story in a new world with new core gameplay—there are a lot of 'firsts' in this game, and every one of them alone is a challenge," he tells me, as I take a break from hands-on preview time with the game. "Combine them, and it's a lot to handle. We stop at times and ask ourselves if we're crazy, and I suppose we kind of are, just a bit. But at the same time doing something new keeps you exploring, doing fresh things. It all takes time—this has taken a long time, just as Alan Wake did. But I'm happy with having been on this journey."

The development of Quantum Break goes back some years, with its first public trailer shown at the Xbox One's own reveal, in the spring of 2013. Its release, on April 5, will be supported by a live-action TV show, with episodes shown between the game's acts, which is both directly influenced by your in-game decisions and comprises plot line color for what happens in the game's next act (as decided by "Junction" sections, which give you the choice of two routes for the plot to take). The transitions from the real-life actors doing real-life stuff, albeit for pretend, and the graphics isn't quite seamless, but Quantum Break is a damn handsome game. It's not running on any off-the-shelf engine, either—Remedy has built its own, from scratch.

Sam Lake (top) and Kyle Rowley (bottom)

Quantum Break runs on the Northlight engine, which gameplay designer Kyle Rowley says is a project that's been going on behind the scenes since the Max Payne days. "We have an amazing tech team, one of the best visual effects teams in the world for games, I think," he says. "They've worked in movies, on Gravity, and some of the Harry Potter films. Those guys are really strong. And then the AI and animation systems, they're done from scratch. This is a next-generation animation system." The way that the game's protagonist, Jack Joyce—played by X-Men's Iceman actor, Shawn Ashmore—moves is incredibly fluid, while the stuttering, glitching effects of his time powers (more on those in a second) are wonderful in motion.Quantum Break looks the part, before you've so much as finished its first act.

And how you play through the game is a mix of familiar third-person combat—guns, grenades, waist-high walls—and entirely new abilities that encourage you to not duck behind cover at any opportunity, but to take on enemies in fast-paced shootouts. Jack's time-controlling powers—which he receives when an experiment goes awry, showering both him and the game's antagonist, Paul Serene (played by Game of Thrones' own Littlefinger, Aidan Gillen), in "Chronos energy"—allow him to slip behind foes without them seeing him, create a temporary time shield to deflect bullets, briefly suspend opponents in the air for a simple take-down, and much more. And it doesn't mess about in revealing these powers—Quantum Break wants you to experiment with your arsenal as soon as possible, holding little back for unlocking later in the game.

Aidan Gillen plays Paul Serene, the villain of both the game and TV show (as seen here)

"Initially, the game was slower," Kyle recalls, "but when we started adding the time powers, it became obvious that the game was a lot more fun when we sped everything up. We didn't want people to think, early on, that they were just playing a regular cover shooter. So we introduced the time powers quickly, to encourage people to use them. And the game is quite difficult if you choose to play without using the time powers—enemies are aggressive at hunting you down, and the damage they deal is high. So you have to make use of your powers just to survive."

I can vouch for that. Attempt to take on Serene's private army, part of a shady corporation called Monarch Solutions, without deploying Jack's superhero-like skills, and he'll be shot to ribbons. You need to move fast, always, as hunkering down and hoping to pop heads from afar simply won't work, most of the time. "In Alan Wake, the AI was very zombie-like," Kyle says. "But here, the enemies have full search patterns, they take on flanking behavior, all the good stuff that you might see in a quality military shooter." Again: Do not sit still. You will die.

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Related: Watch VICE in conversation with best-selling author Chris Hedges

As electric as the action becomes, though—and it does, only escalating the further you get, with enemies beginning to use time-shifting gear of their own—this wouldn't be a Remedy Game without a solid story behind the spectacular scenes. The TV side of Quantum Break shows that Remedy is taking the narrative aspect of its latest venture more seriously than anything it has done before—"The bar is really high on TV right now," Lake says. "I think that TV is living through a golden age right now, so I don't see it as an old medium." And he's certain that the world Remedy has created, with its original characters and organizations, isn't going to begin and end with this single game and complimentary series.

"The way we look at creating a new franchise, and a new concept, is that we look at it from the perspective that it doesn't just have to be a game," he says. "We put a lot of effort into building a foundation that can support more than just one game. First of all there's the potential for sequels, multiple games. But also the trans-media angle. Be that a movie or TV series, or books or whatever—I just want to create a cool set of characters, and have them engaged in conflict across great stories, in a world that's inspiring. That can work in any medium.

'Quantum Break,' The Game Awards trailer

"That being said, I don't think we'd want to repeat what happened with Max Payne, where the movie rights were sold and then we saw nothing of it until the final film. It would be nice to think that if that happened again, we'd be more of a part of the process, being able to link it further into the future of the franchise. But we'll see if something like that happens."

The Quantum Break you'll be playing in early April is, its makers hope, just the first chapter in a longer story. This is the base from which everything else will grow. (Although Quantum Break's future doesn't mean we won't also see an Alan Wake sequel at some point, judging by what Lake tries his best to not tell me: "I'm definitely not saying no to sequels, and looking at what we've done now, it'd probably be refreshing to do a sequel after this game.") For want of a better expression, I put it to Lake that this is his, and Jack's, superhero origin story.

Here's how Shawn Ashmore looks in the game

"For sure, that's definitely what this story is. We feel that all our games need a definitive ending, but more and more we look at what we're making as the 'first season.' So Quantum Break is Jack's origin story, how he becomes a superhero. There's some Spider-Man in there, in terms of the idea of science going wrong, and through that the hero gains his powers, and doors open to this new world. That's what we're seeing here. A time travel experiment goes wrong, he's blasted with Chronos energy, and he gains superpowers—and at the same time, the villain is born. So as you say, it has these familiar elements to it, but very definitely with our spin on them. I kind of feel that with Alan Wake and Max Payne, I grew to not be worried about using 'classical' story elements, because you can always produce original work from there. I don't think anyone else but us could do a Remedy game."

Related, on Motherboard: The Six Timeless Tropes of Time-Travel Movies

And here he is in the TV show

There's always been something rather cultish about Remedy. The studio's games look great, and play like they're triple-A cousins, slickly and with plenty of sizzle. But there's always something a step to the left about Remedy's productions, too, and Quantum Break feels like it's coming from a similar position to Alan Wake and the original Max Payne. Here's a game that you think you know all about, just from looking at it. It's a third-person cover shooter, big whoop. But then you dig into it. You poke around the environments and uncover what its makers call optional storytelling components—collectibles, broadcasts, Easter eggs. You begin to appreciate the incredible depth of the world that's been crafted here, and how it's quite unlike any sci-fi–themed games before it. You click with Jack's time powers and suddenly you're racing through levels, only to hit a Junction and genuinely find yourself pausing for what feels like an eternity, painfully torn between two directions.

Lake's right: Only Remedy could have made this game. An American story shaped by a Finnish writer from a desk that looks out over a landscape so commonly covered in snow. It's partially familiar, yet fundamentally different from its genre peers. And based on what I've seen so far—the entire first act, a full episode of the show, and more—it's a title to make time for.

Quantum Break is released for Xbox One and PC on April 5—find more information at the game's official website. Travel to and from Helsinki and hotel accommodation to make this feature possible were covered by Xbox.

Follow Mike on Twitter.


Your Life Will Be Better if You Give Up Your Phone

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Image by Carrrrrlos via Flickr

It feels like a cliché to even ask, but has any piece of technology since the television transformed our lives more quickly and more severely than the iPhone? On paper, Steve Jobs's "three revolutions in one" seemed like a mere refinement of several other products out there: a step-up from Blackberry, a mini-laptop, the sexy Apple version of a Nokia with WAP capability. But in practice, it's become the defining gadget of our era, one that landed harder and faster than even the internet, which took well over a decade to become more than just Quicktime porno video and the IMDb on a beige dalek in the corner of your living room.

The iPhone has changed not only the way we communicate, as Jobs stated was his intention at the original 2007 launch, but also our behavior, our way of thinking, our way of looking at the world. In less than ten years, iPhones have increasingly become the portals to our exterior: work, fun, sex, and culture. To consume any one of these things, you have to go through them. To live in the world of 2016, you have to have one. People with Blackberrys have become the new people with Netscape or those bikes you lay down on that always look like they're about to go under a bus. iPhones are the millennial Model T-Ford, the standard and the constant. The only.

But I don't have one. And it's a decision I'm glad of just about every day of my life. It started with an unfortunate encounter about two years ago (two of them, one of me, not a have-a-go hero in sight, an easy-to-shift $300 item in my hand in the midst of an economic downturn), and I'm pretty certain I know which way it's going to stay. It wasn't ideology that started it, more laziness and a fear of bureaucracy: having to go into a shop to sort it out, the indignity of refusing various upgrades and taxes and asking for just what I had before, being treated like the person who orders off the "American menu" at a Chinese restaurant. So I put it off, and the next day became the next week, and the next week became never.

I felt like I'd cheated the system. By refusing to get an iPhone, I had become exempt from everyone else's bullshit.

At first it was difficult and annoying and I suffered a few fair moments of being stood up, locked out, and sometimes quite simply forgotten about. But soon, I began to notice a shift in the way I looked at the world. I stopped waking up with somebody else's problem chipping away at my psyche. I started being able to separate day from night, life from work, important from trivial. There were no more "hey guys, we really need to get on this one-pager today." There were no requests to get anything in first thing. People started making more of an effort to accommodate me, and in return I started to live by the actual time, rather than my own time. I started looking out of bus windows, reading and watching more, and thinking about myself less.

I felt like I'd somehow cheated the system. By refusing to get an iPhone, by not being around at everyone's beck and call, I had become exempt from everyone else's bullshit. Sometimes I see people having email conversations at ungodly hours and I can't help but feel like I'm watching some strange tradition that I'll never understand, like some weird religious festival in a small town that I'm only passing through. It simply doesn't feel like my shit anymore.

Before it gets twisted, I am not a luddite, a time lord, or anyone who would consider themselves "retro." My work and understanding of culture is almost entirely rooted in the internet. Like most of my generation, I like sneakers, techno and Twitter, WorldStar fight videos, and illegal streams. I believe in the power of technology.

And for a long time I found it hard to justify this contradiction: How can you spend most of your time on a laptop, immersed in internet capitalism, yet make a stance about not having an iPhone? It seemed absurd, hypocritical, highly pretentious. Yet instinctively I knew that I just didn't want one, and that my life had vastly improved since I ceased to have one.

Then came an interview with Aphex Twin at Noyzelab, which has now been deleted. There's a section where the interviewer reveals that despite Richard D. James's vast technology collection and his fascination and knowledge about synthesizers, computers, and all sorts of hard and software, he doesn't own a phone. "They just don't make people's lives better," he said.

Look around and you'll see that people are horribly, pathetically obsessed with their phones.

It struck a chord with me. I started researching more into people who didn't own them. Kanye claims to have not had one for three years (although Google Images suggests otherwise), Werner Herzog doesn't really use one, and writer Mark Fisher described them as "individualized command centers." And perhaps even more legitimately, there's been a wealth of worrying studies and statistics detailing the impact that they can have on us. A recent survey suggests that 58 percent of Brits feel unhappy or stressed when separated from their phones, for fuck 's sake.

These phones have had a fundamental effect on our concentration levels. Look around you when a train is late, or when you're on a journey of any kind, or even in the pub, and you'll see that people are horribly, pathetically obsessed with them. Staring into them for the answers but getting no real insight, some even thinking its OK to hold entire conversations while looking at the screen. We've become reliant on them for everything, to the point where we don't learn directions, where we don't need to know how to talk to people, where we simply can't be without one. Where the very threat of losing one makes us feel a bit weird.

The old cliché of human beings as slaves to computers has never been realized. Nobody is really that in love with his or her laptop. They're just the things we do our work on, the things we watch half-entertaining sitcoms on. But iPhones are different. They're very much tools of the system, the fingers on the long arms of capitalism, reaching into our lives and tapping us on the shoulder to remind us that there's always more work to do.

Because despite his propensity for weed, tennis shoes, and Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs was essentially an arch-capitalist, one who knew that making an item for play alone was never going to set the world alight. For an invention to really dominate our culture, it would—like the combustible engine or the airplane or the television—have to become part of industry as well. Otherwise it would just be a Tamagotchi with Facebook.

iPhones are money-making machines, and they exist in a totally free market. You can spend your money on them, and you can make your money through them. Even the fun bits of a iPhones can be monetized. They are apps you can buy, they are things you can sell, and advertise, and invest in. They aren't Snake or some pixelated version of Tetris. They're an industry, one like us, totally reliant on the totemic figure of Jobs 's rectangle.

Related: Watch how Joshua Oppenheimer finds humanity in tragedy


Now, don't get me wrong. There are a lot of exciting things you can do with an iPhone, such as shooting a film like Tangerine. And in a way, I admire the utilitarian, easy-to-use ideal of them. But I wonder what will happen if we are ever plunged into the darkness without them. I worry about what is already happening to our visions of ourselves, and I wonder if the boy who became addicted to selfies is really just the start. I worry about a culture where people can't bother to watch anything longer than a Vine, and a mental health epidemic, when people are too stuck within their own selves.

It also saddens me, that for all the wonder of science, all the incredible things that technology has done for the world, all those dreams that were realized before me, and the ones I grew up thinking that may one day exist in my time, the bulk of the tech industry these days is dedicated to helping you get your work emails easier. That flying skateboard seems further away every day, but the idea of your boss using an iPhone to find out where you've been and why you're late on that report you were supposed to do seems much nearer.

Partly because it allows me to opt of a nu-capitalism that I can't get along with, partly because I just feel better, and partly because they just don't really excite me, I'm glad I still don't have an iPhone. Soon I might even cancel the contract I'm still paying for.

Follow Clive on Twitter.

‘XCOM 2’ Is Destined to Be a Strategy Gaming Classic

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All screenshots courtesy of 2K Games

I'd like to introduce you to some of my closest, most loyal companions.

First up, circumlocutory Joe—a dear friend of mine, a sergeant, who died gracefully (legs blown off, screaming) after the cover he was hiding behind was hit by grenade fire. Then there's Captain not-James-T Kirk. Stupid, gentle Captain not-James-T Kirk: a buffoon who managed to get himself captured, and whom I never bothered to save from the clutches of the enemy, even though I probably could have.

Enter corporals Sean Bell and Andi Hamilton, a thunderous duo of barely-in-shape gung-ho hurricanes: now both dead, cut down mercilessly during Operation Seething Fork, or something like that. PJ "Warhorse" O'Reilly lost the will to live when an alien Sectoid took control of his mind. When he started firing on my other squad mates, we had to put him down like a dog. Luck of the Irish.

Tamoor "The Animal" Hussain, a bearded tank of a man I had recruited from Resistance HQ, had a lot promise. Yet despite his foreboding physical appearance, Tamoor was slaughtered during his first proper tour of duty. There have been others, too. Many more. Gary, Dan, Tom, Mom. Life is fragile.

All of my friends—and mom—have something in common. They all ran out of time.

You see, with the freshly released XCOM 2, developer Firaxis has once again crafted a strategy game quite unlike any other, successfully refining practically everything that was so damn good about XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the studio's 2012 reboot of 1994's original UFO: Enemy Unknown. But Firaxis has also gone beyond expectations, over-delivering in almost every respect, adding significant strategic depth, and building new features that consistently delight, surprise, and genuinely terrify even the most experienced of XCOM players. Despite putting over 70 hours into Enemy Unknown, I still felt most comfortable nudging its sequel down to its easiest difficulty, until I had a firmer grasp of everything new that this game has hiding in its fog of war.

The game is at its most ruthless when it uses your own time against you, and in order to succeed you have to learn to be efficient. XCOM 2, which pits your human resistance force (namely XCOM) against the alien occupiers of Earth (read our interview from 2015 for more story background), communicates a feeling of brutal intelligence; it makes you feel clever and genuinely overwhelmed with relief for succeeding with each mission, but that success is never easily earned. It also never gives you the confidence to think you'll breeze through the next mission. There's nothing permanent here—make a bad decision, or even the right decision but at the wrong time, and your failure is always a turn or two away, be that the death of a squad mate, a devastating attack on your mobile command centre, or any other number of potentially game-changing threats that lay in wait throughout the game's lengthy campaign. The relief of getting home safe or successfully saving a settlement lingers briefly in the mind before you're firefighting your next emergency. Your eyes are always on a clock.

'XCOM 2,' launch trailer

Most if not all of the game's missions require you to "get it done" within a certain number of turns. For example, head into battle and you'll need to complete your objective and get to the evacuation zone before the time runs out—anyone outside of that zone when the timer hits zero gets left behind, captured by enemy forces. In some missions, you'll need to kill all enemies in the vicinity, albeit in just five or so turns, otherwise a drop ship will arrive with reinforcements, increasing the pressure on your troops who are already struggling against an enemy that greatly outnumbers them.

In the overarching strategic decisions that determine how you and your ragtag resistance buddies progress through the campaign, you'll find that the passage of time works against you there, too. Every day that goes by is another day closer to the aliens' completion of the Avatar Project, a mysterious program shrouded in secrecy but that definitely threatens to render all your resistance efforts futile. It's essentially the penultimate step before Game Over.

This could have been an incredibly annoying design decision—strategy games often give players the freedom to plan how they want to experiment with systems. But XCOM 2 constrains the boundaries and instead wants you to get things done on its terms. It works surprisingly well as a new tactical consideration, and instead of constricting your gameplay options it instead forces you to think differently and more efficiently. There's a real sense of speed to everything you do. Additional objectives suddenly become something you need to fit into the current parameters of the mission, rather than just undertake at your leisure. And when you get down to two remaining turns and still need to get four of your six-person squad to evac, it becomes fucking tense.

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Related: Watch VICE's film, 'The Real "X-Files"?'

During a particularly tough mission, I had to not only take down a VIP target—my primary objective—but also use a piece of resistance-developed technology against a high-ranking enemy officer to basically rip data from his alien brain. Doing this, I was told, would give the resistance an upper hand, but getting up close with alien forces on the battlefield poses obvious risks. As XCOM's enemies gets tougher and your soldiers rank up, it becomes a strategic decision as to who you take into the field. Take a squad full of your best troops and you're less likely to take casualties. Though should you incur any losses, they're far more damaging to the overall strength of XCOM than if you'd lost a newly recruited rookie. But in order to try guarantee success, I took the risk and sent out my finest.

Five soldiers, all experienced, and all running out of time. I had 12 turns. Just a dozen moves to find the currently unidentified VIP, kill or capture them, deal with the fallout (capturing someone means one of your squad is out of action while they're carrying a target), then move into a strong enough strategic position to put one of my men at risk of death by sending him toe-to-toe with a big-ass bad guy. And only then, once all that was done, could I move to the evac point.

Of course, I fucked it. Two of my guys got gravely wounded, so I was moving them with great care, wasting valuable turns making sure they were never out of full cover—XCOM 2's AI exploits squad vulnerabilities with ruthless precision. Getting the VIP captured went a bit wrong, too—I managed to subdue and carry them to relative safety, but when a nearby car exploded it killed them and halved my soldier's health. Two and a half men down, I was literally operating at half capacity—yet I somehow managed to mind-jack the enemy officer, keeping my eyes fixed on the clock at all times. But then came an unexpected blow: Using mind control caused this weird living computer-thing mini-boss to appear, teleporting across the map and cloning itself at will. Pants.

I finally ended up killing it, but used up my last few precious turns doing so. I left that mission with one soldier so injured that he was out of action for over a dozen in-game days. XCOM being XCOM, this caused ramifications that stifled my progress for several hours. I had to waste time rescuing captured soldiers from enemy control, and what squad I had to play with was left severely impaired by the loss of such leveled-up comrades. And every day that I was patching XCOM up, the aliens were getting closer to activating the Avatar Project. The very real stress I'd felt before losing my best on the battlefield was only growing. And time was passing, inexorably, whatever my efforts to catch up to it.

XCOM 2 is a wonderful game, absolutely one of the best strategy titles you'll play this or any other year. It's unusually smart, ruthless, and expects you to always be thinking ahead: to your next turn, to your next battle, to your next (possibly final) decision. But for me, its most cruelly unique feature is how all of its mechanics come together to create this constantly ticking bomb that makes every minute of the game feel precious and important. No matter if you've an entire day to play, or just an hour one evening after you've finished all of your shitty real-life chores, XCOM 2 gives you time, and with it you'll make a real tangible difference to the future of its depiction of mankind—for better, or worse.

XCOM 2 is out now for PC and Mac

Follow Sam White on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: El Chapo Might Go on Trial in Brooklyn

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The Mexican drug cartel boss best known as El Chapo might eventually get tried in Brooklyn federal court, the New York Times reports.

After famously escaping from a maximum-security Mexican prison last July, Joaquín Guzmán Loera got recaptured in January. This was his second breakout from a Mexican prison, and though he's currently being stashed in the same facility—albeit with a few extra security measures like motion sensors—Mexican officials are reportedly more open to his being extradited than they were last go-round. The process is already underway, although it's expected to take months or even years.

Meanwhile, US authorities argue the majority of the drugs distributed by El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel drugs end up in the United States. And while there are open indictments against the boss in a handful of American cities, including Miami and Chicago, since US Attorney General Loretta Lynch used to be the lead prosecutor in Brooklyn, the New York borough is shaping up as the most likely locale for his trial, according to the Times. (An earlier report from local broadcast network WPIX-TV suggested Brooklyn was the "likely" location should Loera get extradited.)

One interesting snag, as the Times points out, is that Mexico almost certainly won't agree to send El Chapo across the border unless the US promises not to seek the death penalty. His cartel is said to be responsible for everything from kidnapping to murder, but capital punishment is frowned upon in much of the world, even for those heinous crimes.

How an Aspiring New York Fashion Mogul Became a Serial Killer

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Salvatore Perrone. Photo courtesy Brooklyn District Attorney's office

Salvatore Perrone, the man called "Son of Sal" by neighbors and who prosecutors said targeted shopkeepers in Brooklyn, was convicted of three counts of second-degree murder on Wednesday. In 2012, the 67-year-old went on a rampage, killing Mohamed Gebeli, Isaac Kadare, and Rahmatollah Vahidipour in stores they ran in the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, and Flatbush, respectively.

In all three killings, which involved a mixture of gunshot and stab wounds, Perrone concealed the bodies with materials from their stores, like clothes and baking dishes. Robbery was not considered a motive after he left $171 in one of his victim's pockets, but there were fears during the initial manhunt that ethnicity was a contributing factor to the crimes.

Ultimately, Perrone was not convicted of a hate crime. Instead, what emerged after his capture and during trial was a portrait of a divorcée who once had ambitions as an apparel maven, suffered from financial problems, and eventually lost sight of his aspirations.

According to property records, Perrone's wife, Maria Salerno, purchased a Staten Island home for the couple in 1985. The two later later divorced, although it's unclear when. Neighbors told the Staten Island Advance that Perrone eventually started dating a woman in Brooklyn and would only come back home to sleep in the house's basement.

Also according to public records, in 2001, Perrone was charged in Pennsylvania on a litany of offenses including stalking, burglary, harassment, and public drunkenness. (He pleaded guilty only to trespassing.) Still, none of those crimes exactly suggested he was capable of three murders. In fact, Perrone, who worked as a mercantile middle-man, peddling his wares from a duffel bag, trademarked his own name in 2007 as part of an attempt to start a clothing line, suggesting he had high hopes for his future. Prosecutors said that at one point he owned a successful store.

Also during the trial, it came out from prosecutors that Perrone, who earlier in his career had hundreds of thousands of dollars in his bank account, was down to only $1.84.

Later that year, on July 6, 2012, he shot his first victim once in the neck inside the store Valentino Fashion in Bay Ridge. Then, on August 2, he shot the second once in the head before slitting his throat inside Amazing 99 Cents Deals in Bensonhurst. Finally, on November 16, 2012, he shot his third victim in the head, face, and chest inside She-She Boutique in Flatbush.

Eventually, someone recognized a photo that police distributed to the media that showed Perrone carrying a duffel bag. When cops searched Perrone's girlfriend's house in Brooklyn, they found that same duffel bag containing a .22-caliber rifle—which was tied to the murders after ballistic analysis—and a knife. Blood stains on the knife and the bag were tied to two of the three victims.

When he was arrested that November, Perrone's three-story home was in a state of disrepair. According to the Staten Island Advance, there was no furniture inside, there were 14 complaints had been lodged against the property, and there was a near-universal loathing of Perrone around the neighborhood. Although one called him "a nasty piece of work," others just said he was odd.

"He's a weird duck," a neighbor told the New York Times in November 2012. "He looked just like Edgar Allan Poe. Black coat, black vest, black shirt, black pants. Every time I saw him, he was wearing all black."

Those same neighbors called him "Son of Sal"—a nod to Daniel Berkowitz, a serial killer who claimed six victims and was known as "Son of Sam" in the 1970s. Like his forebear, Perrone earned a reputation for outbursts in court. On Monday, a judge accused him of using diversion tactics to try and delay the trial once he realized he would be found guilty—which he was two days later.

The crimes committed by Perrone are also reminiscent of those perpetrated by a man named Larme Price in 2003. The 30-year-old confessed to shooting and killing four foreign-born, Brooklyn-based store-owners, and was sentenced to life in prison.

Perrone faces a maximum of 75 years in prison when he's sentenced on March 4.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The Cop Who's Suing the Family of the Teen He Killed Is Why People Hate Cops

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A vigil for Quintonio Legrier and Bettie Jones in Chicago. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It takes roughly the same amount of nerve that inspired Donald Trump to repeat the word "pussy" at a campaign rally for a Chicago police officer who shot and killed a college student he was called to save to sue that teenager's estate for $10 million.

But that's what's happening.

"The fact that Bettie Jones, has caused and will continue to cause Officer Rialmo to suffer extreme emotional trauma," according to the claim, which was filed on Friday in Cook County Circuit Court.

Robert Rialmo's suit counters a wrongful death claim filed by LeGrier's father seeking more than $50,000, saying he was forced to go to a police station, where he was detained, while his son lay dying on the day after Christmas. The elder LeGrier's lawsuit also claims neither the officer nor anyone else was being threatened when Rialmo opened fire without warning.

Citing the danger of facing the 19-year-old African-American engineering student, whom he claims was waving a bat at him, Rialmo, who is white, says he is traumatized, suffering injuries of a "pecuniary nature." Jones, a 55-year-old neighbor, was also killed when the officer opened fire.

This suit comes in the wake of a season marked by weeks of protests that blocked retail traffic in downtown Chicago, a city still reeling from revelations of what was essentially a multi-institutional cover-up around the shooting death of another teen, Laquan McDonald. Chicago has lost a police superintendent and withstood calls for its mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to step down. Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, facing a March Democratic primary against two opponents, incredulously insists she did nothing wrong in the McDonald case.

This universal exercise in tone deafness to the racial and social differences between the lived experience of African-Americans and other marginalized groups is astonishing given the intense national conversation about these issues the past year and a half. One simple example is that, as of press time, Laquan McDonald's name doesn't show up in a search of the Cook County State's Attorney's website. That search box is as empty as the state's attorney's memory and sense of responsibility for a botched investigation and lack of transparency around that Chicago teen's death.

Lost in debates over whether black lives, in fact, matter, is the work that needs to be done is by those who regard themselves as faultless. A study released this month by the journal Psychological Science suggests as much: Much of society is wired to edit out the humanity of black children—which, make no mistake, LeGrier and McDonald were, even if they approached adulthood.

People are more likely to interpret a toy as a weapon after seeing a black face, according to the study, which showed participants images of both black and white children along with adults holding toys.

"It was the alarming rate at which young African-Americans—particularly young black males—are shot and killed by police in the US," that inspired the study, wrote University of Iowa Professor Andrew Todd, the lead author. "Although such incidents have multiple causes, one potential contributor is that young black males are stereotypically associated with violence and criminality."

Would that LeGrier were regarded as what he was: a troubled young man.

One can't help ask what Rialmo was thinking when he signed up to be a policeman, one of the more potentially injurious occupations out there. Would a log cutter be justified in suing if the sound and feel of a falling tree gave him anxiety? Does it make sense for a pilot afraid of landing a plane in the rain justify a lawsuit after being faced with an unexpected downpour? Rialmo wasn't even hurt! Meanwhile, in 2014, more than 4,000 American workers were killed on the job, including falls, electrocutions, and actually being hit by things. Law enforcement has one of the highest rates of injury, according to 2014 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nursing, meat processing, fire protection are some, but not all, jobs where American workers regularly face risks.

Rialmo, who very likely feels badly, apparently senses he is going to need a lot of money to get over the memory of the strong whiff of a swinging baseball bat fly by his head the morning he responded to that domestic disturbance call. (Never mind Rialmo is the only one alleging the teen, who suffered emotional problems, was actually wielding a bat when police arrived at the westside home.)

Meanwhile, in the original December 28 suit filed by LeGrier's father, Antonio, he says his son "never did anything that suggested that he was armed with a weapon immediately before he was shot." In a description reminiscent of the 2014 Cleveland police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Antonio Legrier said after Quintonio was shot, "the police officer who shot did not do anything to try to provide" his son medical care."

Presumably Rialmo's lawsuit represents an effort to negate the lawsuit filed by LeGrier's dad, who simply called police early that fateful morning to get his emotionally disturbed son some help. Indeed, Quintonio Legrier, a student at Northern Illinois University, had also called 911—three times—insisting his life had been threatened.

Like his dad, he wanted help.

In the black community, galling behavior that embarrass you, your family, and your community is sometimes described as reflecting a lack of "home training," and Rialmo's suit is a prime example. His nervy claim is the embodiment of an ethos practiced by law enforcement and other public institutions that regard their role in minority communities as being an occupying force rather than a protective one.

LeGrier, McDonald, Ms. Bettie Jones, and the rest are evidence of a long ago social contract written in invisible ink that charges too high a blood price we can no longer afford to pay.

Deborah Douglas is a Chicago-based writer who teaches at Northwestern University. Follow her on Twitter.

Drone Drops and Artisanal Dildos: A Look Into What is Getting Smuggled into Quebec Prisons

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Prison contraband extends far beyond the typical shivs shown above from a Hong Kong prison. Photo via Flickr user istolethetv

Tech-savvy criminals are increasingly turning to drones to sneak contraband into Quebec prisons.

Numbers released by Quebec's Ministry of Public Security show that in the last year, 16 drones were spotted hovering near the province's prisons. That's up from three incidents in 2013-2014, the year the small crafts were first noticed buzzing around penitentiaries.

It's hard to say how many of these drone-drop operations were successful, or determine what merchandise—if any—they were transporting. Only six out of the close to 20 flying objects were ever seized.

In November 2014, two men were arrested after their drug-carrying drone crashed into the prison yard at Sorel-Tracy Detention Centre, northeast of Montreal. The machine's video camera had captured images of the cunning criminals before its launch, and the footage made for some pretty incriminating evidence.

This ingeniously modern trafficking method is rather unsurprising from Quebec's prisoners. This is, after all, in a province that has witnessed spectacular helicopter jailbreaks and where inmates can apparently manage international drug rings from within the prison system.

But what is actually being confiscated within these penitentiaries isn't exactly the fun stuff you see on Narcos, instead, it is kinda sad.

Yes, there are cell phones (lots of cell phones) and drugs, along with a slew of improvised weapons all bearing the well-worn label of "artisanal": artisanal exacto knife, artisanal truncheon, and an artisanal machete, to name but a few.

Many of these confiscated articles, though, help illustrate just how difficult it can be to seek out any type of comfort behind bars. A plant, a can of Ensure and a night-light count amongst some of the most (seemingly) benign prohibited objects (but then again I guess you can make a shiv out of anything?). Prison staff also cracked down on hardcover books and removed MP3 players, CD players, and at least one Walkman.

There's also an evident yearning for intimacy: along with porn and "obscene images," guards also confiscated massage oil and an artisanal (ARTISANAL) vibrator.

VICE contacted ex-inmate Daniel*, who authors a blog detailing his experiences behind bars, to find out how this contraband smuggling—and the guards' raids—went down.

The former prisoner says that while searches were a relatively infrequent affair, they were pretty consistently stressful. "There are guards who are are cool and others who are nuts," he details, adding that inmates never know how their cell will look afterwards.

"Once we were three in a cell and they took away all of our hygienic products to make a big pile in the middle of the room," he recalls. "My legal papers were in there, and they poured a bottle of soap on them."

"There's always something you're not supposed to have, like a radio another guy lent you or stuff some dude left behind when he was freed."

And while Daniel's incarceration precedes the use of drones, he says inmates can easily sneak in prohibited goods by inserting them into body cavities, although "bringing in a phone and a charger gets a bit more complicated." And if you're not able to conceal the goods or have them flown in, your best bet is to befriend the very people in charge of contraband control.

"For sure guards bring in . They regularly got reprimanded for that."

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

Sex Shop Owners Around the World Talk About Their Valentine’s Day Best Sellers

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What's great about Valentine's Day is that it gives people in long-term relationships a guarantee for sex. What if, after being together for a couple of years, the majority of your sexual encounters start taking place just before falling asleep at night—your teeth flossed and your pajama top still on? February 14 is just around the corner, promising to make your sex life adventurous again. As long as you plan the entire evening in advance, that is.

We wanted to know how couples around the world are having organized sex this year, so we asked our international editors to visit their local sex shop and ask each owner about this week's best sellers.

CANADA


This Island is the Centre of Increasing Tensions Between China, Japan, and the US

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They gather at the gate by the dozens and wait in the dim predawn light for a convoy of trucks to rumble toward them. After daybreak, others take to the sea in kayaks to face off against wet-suited gangs of security personnel in speedboats.

Somehow this has become a normal daily routine: groups of protesters milling about along a stretch of coast on a remote Japanese island, hoping to throw a wrench into the US military's plans to "pivot" its resources in the Asia-Pacific.

Many of the demonstrators are silver-haired retirees who have made the early-morning drive from nearby towns. But a few are university students from major Japanese cities hundreds of kilometers away who are spending their year-end holidays this way.


Japanese protestors at the Camp Schwab US military gate in Okinawa (all photos by the author)

On land, they pass the time singing songs, giving speeches or holding protest signs for the occasional vehicle that passes along the quiet country road where the gate stands. On the water, the kayakers bob quietly in the waves and wait for their chance to breach a construction zone that juts hundreds of meters out from shore.

The demonstrators are determined to halt work to vastly expand Camp Schwab, a US Marine Corps base that lies halfway up the east coast of Okinawa Island in a sleepy village called Henoko. The project involves building port facilities, an ammunition storage depot, several helipads and two runways, mostly on reclaimed land.

When the trucks arrive, the protesters are usually wrestled out of the way by busloads of riot police deployed from Tokyo. But each Wednesday, the demonstrators' ranks swell by the hundreds, according to Hiroshi Inaba, who says he's the longest-serving staff member at an encampment across the street that's manned around-the-clock.

The 65-year-old explained that the construction crews and their police backup can't get any big trucks through the gate when they're confronted by such a large crowd.

"They give up," said Inaba when I spoke with him. Or at least they give up for that particular day.


Once work at the base is completed it should be one of the most powerful in Asia. An aging US Marine air station called Futenma in the island's more densely populated south is then slated to close down, and its functions will be transferred to the state-of-the-art facilities at Camp Schwab. It's all part of a larger project by the Pentagon to consolidate its assets in Okinawa and "rebalance" its military resources in the region—with an eye on an increasingly powerful and assertive China.

While I was born and raised in Canada, I've lived in Tokyo since 2014, and hopped a flight to this part of part of Japan for the first time a year ago. It's a spellbinding place where you can waste away your vacation days hopping from island to island, exploring mangrove forests and sampling awamori, the local firewater.

But people here also find themselves caught up in worsening geopolitical tensions. The idea that China and the US could ever go to war seemed ridiculous to me until last fall, when a study at Harvard University changed my mind. It looked back at what happens "when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power." The lesson from history was harsh: it almost always leads to unthinkable bloodshed.

Okinawa would be on the front lines if World War III kicks off between Washington and Beijing, which is what seems to be at the root of the fight over Camp Schwab. So I wanted to see the place for myself, and to learn more about the local anti-base movement.

Most Okinawans are against expanding the base in Henoko, saying instead that Futenma air station should be relocated to mainland Japan or somewhere even farther away. Opinion polls suggest between 70 and 80 percent of residents want the plan scrapped, posing a political headache for both Washington and Tokyo.


US military at the Futenma air station

"It destroys both nature and democracy, and infringes Okinawan people's rights," said Eiko Iguchi, a retired English teacher from the prefecture's capital, Naha, who makes the hour-long drive to protest at Camp Schwab at least once a month.

The new runways will be built partly on Oura Bay, near a coral reef that environmentalists fear will be destroyed by the project. Greenpeace says around 5,300 species can be found there and more than 250 of those are endangered, including loggerhead turtles and the Japanese dugong, a cousin of the manatee.

Okinawans have also been voicing their opposition at the ballot box, particularly since the election of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2012. He appears determined to make the new facilities at Camp Schwab a reality, and to fortify Japan's southern defences, aiming to deter Beijing as it pursues vast territorial claims at sea.

A career conservative named Takeshi Onaga became governor of Okinawa Prefecture in the fall of 2014 after he vowed to stop the Henoko project. In a snap national election held weeks later at Abe's request, local voters mostly voted against his party's candidates, who were told to support the base plan.

Onaga has since revoked permission for the land reclamation work, leading to a court battle with Tokyo. The land minister is suing him, the prefectural government is countersuing the land ministry, and the construction continues.

While Okinawa is best known as a laid-back vacation spot with white sand beaches and aquamarine seas, its charms belie a tragic history that has fuelled local opposition to the Henoko plan.

The island is the largest in the Ryukyu archipelago, which stretches 1,100 kilometres from the Japanese mainland to Taiwan, forming a natural barrier a few hundred kilometers off China's coast. Once an independent kingdom, Japan annexed it in the late-1800s.

Okinawa was later the site of one of the deadliest Second World War battles, nicknamed the "Typhoon of Steel," which claimed the lives of more than 100,000 civilians. The US occupied the archipelago until 1972, during which it built a network of military bases that today covers about a fifth of Okinawa Island, staffed by more than 25,000 military personnel.

Prefectural government officials want to shrink that footprint, arguing the decades-old Japan-US security treaty imposes a heavy burden. The island chain accounts for only 0.6 percent of Japan's land mass, they point out, but hosts three-quarters of American military bases in the country.


Art depicting an American flag at a Futenma museum

The push to reduce the US military presence dates back at least 20 years, when around 100,000 people rallied in Naha to protest the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by three US servicemen.

An agreement reached a year later outlined plans for the Pentagon to return about a fifth of the land it controls on the island, including Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. It also raised the possibility of expanding Camp Schwab in Henoko. The fight over that scheme has been raging in fits and starts ever since.

But it's still business as usual at Futenma, whose squat buildings and well-kept lawns call to mind postwar suburbia. About 3,000 people work on the nearly five square kilometers of land it occupies at the center of Ginowan City, which has grown up around the base.

Military officials here seem understandably reluctant to weigh in on the political fight being waged over Futenma, and dispute the idea that moving its operations north to Henoko is unpopular among Okinawans.

They point out that their operations include humanitarian and disaster-relief missions as well security-related ones, that the base contributes a lot of money to the local economy, and that they've voluntarily put in place policies to limit noise pollution.

"Regardless of what's in the press, regardless of the six protesters at the back gate and 12 at the front gate, what might be perceived as 'America go home' will never, ever manifest itself when you walk 100 meters outside," Col. Peter Lee, the base commander, told me.

"We've had some hiccups but we've been great neighbours, we've been great allies, we've been great partners for 70 years."

Still, a monument on a nearby university campus testifies to the persisting safety concernsfelt by many Ginowan residents. It stands at the site of a 2004 helicopter crash that injured three Marines and blackened an administrative building.

Tilt-rotor aircraft called Osprey that take off and land like helicopters but fly like planes have since been stationed at Futenma. US military officials argue that they're safe, but critics say the Osprey are prone to mishaps and have seen a string of crashes.

The central government in Tokyo plans to buy several Osprey choppers as part of a record $42-billion defence budget. Japan's growing military spending is one of many changes that are transforming its defence forces. Parliament passed unpopular legislation in September that loosened restraints imposed by war-renouncing Article 9 of the country's Constitution. And the Abe administration has been forging closer defence ties with countries that are caught up in territorial disputes with Beijing in the South China Sea.

In Okinawa Prefecture, Tokyo plans to deploy missile batteries across 200 islands, and to boost the number of Japanese troops there to around 10,000, Reuters reported in December.

"The aim is, I think, to form the capacity to seal China up within its first line of defence," said Gavan McCormack, an emeritus professor at Australian National University and co-author of Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States.

"Ultimately, if something goes wrong, the first place to suffer will be those islands," he added, "because the Chinese missile target list will have them at the top of it, as places to eliminate in the event of any clash."

Jian Ghomeshi’s Legal Team Closes Case By Arguing Complainants are Liars

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Jian Ghomeshi and his lawyer Marie Henein (left) leave court in Toronto following closing arguments in his sexual assault trial. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

Jian Ghomeshi's sexual assault trial isn't about the conduct of victims after they're abused or about how the criminal justice system treats sexual assault in general, argued Marie Henein, Ghomeshi's defence lawyer, in closing arguments Thursday; it's about dishonesty.

Henein made the remarks to Justice William Horkins as Ghomeshi's highly-publicized sexual assault trial came to closing arguments. Ghomeshi has pleaded not guilty to four charges of sexual assault and one charge of choking to overcome resistance.

On Thursday, Henein recommended her client be acquitted on all counts.

The evidence "is so riddled with inconsistencies" that it can't prove anything, let alone prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, she said.

Crown counsel Michael Callaghan began Thursday's proceedings by reviewing the case against Ghomeshi. The allegations, which are said to have taken place between 2002-2003, all constitute sexual assault because of the romantic context surrounding them, he said.

He went on to challenge some of the "myths" and "stereotypes" made about victims of sex assault, noting that delayed reporting of a crime or the fact that a victim remains in an abusive relationship should have no bearing on the judge's decision.

"The law is clear everyone reacts differently to sexual assault," Callaghan said.

He spoke to each complainant's credibility and reliability by going into the specifics of the inconsistencies and post-assault behaviour emphasized by the defence.

The first witness, who sent Ghomeshi a bikini photo months after allegedly being punched in the head by him, was trying to get an explanation from him using the "only commodity" she thought she had—her body, Callaghan argued. She had trouble remembering certain details, such as whether or not they were kissing when her hair was pulled, in part because "she tried to push this memory down and bringing back this memory was painful for her," Callaghan said.

The second witness to testify was Trailer Park Boys actress Lucy DeCoutere, whose name is not protected by a publication ban.

Callaghan said DeCoutere's attempts to hang out with Ghomeshi after he'd allegedly slapped and choked her are in line with her "people pleaser" personality. DeCoutere did not initially tell police about the emails and letters she sent Ghomeshi after the alleged attack, because, Callaghan said, "the post-assault contact was not relevant to the sexual assault that took place."

As for the third witness, Callaghan said she stayed friendly with Ghomeshi after he allegedly bit her and squeezed her neck because they worked in the same industry and that she didn't mention her consensual sexual contact with him (i.e. the handjob), because she was "embarrassed."

The Crown said the insults about Ghomeshi exchanged between DeCoutere and the third witness point to a "support network" as opposed to collusion. Having "both experienced violence at the hands of the same person," it's natural that they would bond, he said.

Callaghan maintained that all three witnesses were "unshaken" in their claims that Ghomeshi sexually assaulted them.

Danielle Robitaille, Henein's co-counsel, opened for the defence, speaking at length about the number of inconsistencies in the three women's testimonies, which she told the judge should be "cause for concern" and could suggest these assaults never took place at all. She said post-assault contact made with Ghomeshi, including DeCoutere's comment "I love you hands," speak to the possibility of consent.

Henein began her remarks by reading aloud in court the definition of "reasonable doubt."

She said the charge of choking to overcome resistance should be dismissed outright as the circumstances described in DeCoutere's account don't meet the criteria (the victim must be rendered insensible, unconscious or incapable or resistance, and the accused must be using choking to commit another crime).

Henein said the last minute disclosures made by the witnesses—the emails and correspondences sent to Ghomeshi—were only revealed when there was a concern about the evidence coming out under cross examination.

"This courtroom should not be a game of chicken," she told Horkins. "Were it not discovered independently, we weren't going to hear the truth." The complainants' explanations about wanting to "bait" Ghomeshi or trying to neutralize the situation are "not worthy of belief," she added.

She then accused the women essentially of playing the victim card to explain their contradictions.

"What the witness cannot do is lie... and then when caught out say, 'Oh gee, that's just how victims of abuse behave,'" Henein said. "There is not an expert that will testify that perjury is indicative of trauma."

She urged the judge to remain impartial in the face of such a high-profile and "emotional" case.

Horkins said he's reserving judgment. The court will resume on March 24.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

How Scared Should I Be?: How Scared Should I Be of a Contagious Disease Wiping Out Humanity?

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

Late last month, the United Nations issued a warning about global pandemics in a report so urgent, it arrived with the words "ADVANCED UNEDITED COPY" stamped on it. The document itself is 95 pages of white-knuckle terror, scolding every government on earth for complacency, and warning us that without vast improvements to worldwide public health infrastructure "the emergence of a highly pathogenic influenza virus, which could rapidly result in millions of deaths and cause major social, economic and political disruption, is not an unlikely scenario."

The UN report includes a reference to some findings from last year by the Institute for Disease Modeling, which showed that a resurgence of the 1918 Spanish flu could kill 33 million people in under nine months. Last spring, that research was briefly touted by Bill Gates, the guy who funded it, in an attempt to bring the issue of pandemics to the world's attention.

But this new report comes at a time when the virus currently scaring everyone isn't influenza, but Zika fever, an outbreak that has caused few fatalities, but has other terrifying effects including the dreaded microcephaly—babies born with abnormally small heads and undeveloped brains (something science only linked to the Zika virus last year). It may not be a deadly flu, but the rapid and seemingly unstoppable propagation of the Zika virus is drawing attention to just how ill-prepared humanity is for a novel health menace.

So is Bill Gates actually understating the risk? Could something worse than Spanish flu—deadlier and more transmissible—be biding its time on some vampire bat's fangs, one bite away from patient zero's bloodstream? What makes contagions into pandemics? And how likely is it to happen to humans?

Watch how ebola got so bad in 2014 from VICE on HBO:

"There are some worst-case scenarios: The stuff of science fiction, of movies like Outbreak," Stephen Morse, director of the infectious disease epidemiology program at Columbia University told me. These worst-case scenarios muddle the issue a bit.

Morse pointed out that when screenwriters need a pandemic to work on the silver screen, they often have to pull shenanigans in two ways: They come up with an altogether new virus—maybe from space—with previously unknown lethal properties, and then they have to "find some way to really make it highly transmissible," and that kind of transmissibility is "extremely rare."

Transmissibility is a challenge for some of the world's deadliest viruses. Outside of influenza's various forms, the Black Death, which wiped out perhaps 60 percent of the people in Europe, is "probably among the worst scenarios we can think of," according to Morse. "HIV took much longer to go around the world, and wasn't nearly as dramatic," he added. HIV and the Black Death have something in common: They generally aren't airborne.

Once it's in the human population, you can try to estimate the trajectory, but it's very hard to know what's coming. -Stephen Morse, PhD

With plague, that's not always the case. "In about 10–20 percent—it varies—of the people who get the classic bubonic plague, it'll go to the lungs, and then it can spread via the respiratory route, sort of like TB," Morse said. Plague that gets into your respiratory system is known as pneumonic plague. "That's usually what really kicks off an epidemic: One of those unlucky people happens to get the infection in their lungs." That example points to one of the scariest things about pathogens: Sometimes—as we're seeing with the surprise effects of Zika—they behave in ways we don't expect.

Surprise effects turn out to be a bigger danger than entirely new pathogens. "We organized a conference at the National Institutes of Health in 1989 to investigate that. Turns out, all the known —with the exception of influenza sometimes—are not the result of some new evolutionary event that suddenly happens, but the result of some already-existing pathogen finding its way into the human population, and essentially trying out its chances," Morse said.

But is there precedent for something like a virus entering a population and almost completely wiping it out? "There have been cases with other species where this has happened," Morse said. He pointed to the example of the Florida panther, a species brought to the very brink of extinction—there were only six left—and the cause he pointed to was a disease called feline infectious peritonitis.

The panther isn't the only species thought to be that unlucky. Ross MacPhee, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, theorizes that some kind of superinfection is largely responsible for the extinction of the wooly mammoth. MacPhee also wrote a paper on a specific rat population that was 100 percent wiped out by a form of plague.

But the point is that even with known pathogens, it's not changes in their DNA, but changes in their relationships with the species they infect that can bring about such deadly outbreaks. With humans, "anthropogenic changes" he called them, happen when populations shift internally or use land differently. These new arrangements of humans provide better "feeding grounds for the pathogenic population," and to top it off, we're nowhere near a reliable system for figuring out what changes to avoid, or knowing when we've crossed a line into vulnerability.

"Once it's in the human population, you can try to estimate the trajectory, but it's very hard to know what's coming," Morse said.

The WHO wants to create a global network of early warning systems for outbreaks. Mobilization of resources to quarantine and stop an outbreak seems technologically possible, but the global community still responds sluggishly to a crisis, something we realized in retrospect as the 2014 Ebola disaster wound down. As the recent UN report noted, early warning systems have only been established by one-third of UN countries. Which makes them pretty useless.


Final Verdict: How Scared Should I Be of an Infectious Disease Wiping Out Humanity?

4/5: Pissing Myself


Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Drake Finally Makes it, Is Given Key to Toronto

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Photo by the author

The 6ix God himself, Mr. Aubrey Drake Graham, is going to be getting Toronto's highest honour—the Key to the City—according to Mayor John Tory.

Drake—the rapper who has inarguably become the international face of Toronto—was announced as the newest recipient of the honour on Thursday via an essay posted to Tory's Twitter account.

"I was lucky recently to spend time with a man who is well known in our city and around the world," Tory wrote. "I knew his name, I knew his face and I knew his music. And we wanted the chance to get to know one another, and talk about the city we love."

"This is a man who could live anywhere, but calls Toronto home. He wants us to be proud of him. And we are. I am."

According to the mayor's director of communications, Amanda Galbraith, talks to award the key to Drake had been ongoing for some time, and the two finally met on February 3 to finalize the deal.




John Tory meets Drake (photo via City of Toronto)

The key will be given to the rapper just prior to tomorrow's NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, at centre court, at 6 PM. Galbraith could not comment on whether the timing—6PM in the 6ix—had any significance, nor could she confirm whether Drake would be performing.

This wouldn't be the first time Tory tried to show respect to a famous rapper. Last summer, the mayor created an embarrassing video of him vibing out (if you want to call it that) to Kanye West's music after he messed up and called Yeezy a "proud product" of Toronto.

The announcement comes on the heels of Drake's most recent release, "Summer Sixteen," the first single to his much anticipated Views From The 6 album. In the song, Drake references the possibility of being given the key to the city, adding that he might end up just giving it to his long-time mentor and friend Lil' Wayne.

"I might get a key to the city and give it to Wayne / Or give it to one of the young boys to carry the wave."

In case the honour inflates Drake's head to the point it matches his swole biceps we have to inform him that the last musical act to earn the key was Nickelback.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

​A Former Special Forces Soldier is Setting Up a Massive Private Military Facility in Ontario

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A Canadian Forces member training in Texas. Photo via Cpl Bruno Turcotte/DND

On the surface, Brockville is just another quaint small town in Ontario. Situated in the Thousand Islands, residents enjoy tasteful concerts and exhibits at the historic Brockville Arts Centre and tourism writeups will inevitably refer to the town of 20,000 as "charming."

But just out of town, Steve Day, a former special forces soldier, wants to show people the best way to breach buildings and take down targets using assault rifles, shotguns and semi-automatic pistols.

The retired lieutenant-colonel and former commander of Canada's secretive JTF-2 special operations unit, and his company, Reticle Ventures Canada, plan to invest $50 million to transform a 400-acre section of Tackaberry Airport into Canada's most advanced private training facility for militaries and first responders.

"This is going to be an innovation arena for leading-edge soldier systems technology,"says Day, whose specialty was combat engineering.

Brockville is the landlord and the owner of the property but the airport also falls within the jurisdiction of neighboring Elizabethtown-Kitley. Brockville will sign the lease agreement while Elizabethtown must approve the site plan.

Plans for the facility, which is partially operational and is slated for a grand opening at the beginning of April, include a 10,000 square-foot schoolhouse, a 50-meter outdoor firing range, a 25-meter indoor firing range and an aircraft hangar. Reticle also wants to construct a "simulation village"to give students as much realism as possible when learning how to deal with urban assaults and hostage situations on Canadian soil.

The military contracting industry isn't especially new to Canada. There are several aerospace contractors and other specialty manufacturers based here and London, Ontario–based General Dynamics landed a controversial $15-billion deal to supply Saudi Arabia with light armoured vehicles. However, Brockville residents, among others in Canada, are witnessing the growth a little known offshoot: a private military training business.

Tundra Strategies, based in Stayner, Ont., and Millbrook Tactical, based in Stittsville, Ont., have both worked with the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND). Millbrook has trained DND employees in the use of firearms and Tundra has taught drivers how to keep their vehicles shiny-side up in conflict zones.

"We have trained the OPP, RCMP, military and government agencies. We can't keep up with business at the moment."says Francois Paquette, president of Millbrook Tactical.

Canada's attempt at propaganda. Photo via DND.

Reticle's Brockville project, however, represents an ambitious departure for Canada's private military training industry. Paquette says, "Nothing like this exists in the Canadian private sector." Tundra, for example, runs a training facility of its own but it just has classrooms for theory based learning. For practical training they use local off-site facilities. The Tackaberry site will see straight-up live-fire exercises. As such, the facility is proving worrisome to quite a few people in the community.

"It doesn't seem to make sense to have bullets flying around at a small municipal airport," says Brant Burrow, a member of the Elizabethtown-Kitley Residents Association.

Tackaberry is a special case: training amenities will be on-site while the airport itself will stay operational as a public airport.

Which means that those looking to be trained in the art of war will have to play nice with those trying to land their Cessnas. Rob Smith, an Elizabethtown-Kitley Councillor, says, "Reticle is building earth berms between the firing point, the runway, and the airport buildings that will be tall enough to obstruct the line of sight."

Though the above mentioned features, along with strict government safety guidelines, are designed to provide protection from projectiles and noise, residents are still troubled. During Reticle's own on-site ammunition sound tests last summer, nearby residents thought they were in the middle of a war zone, says Burrow.

"There just seems to be a risk there even if the risk is low. I don't dispute that there might be a one-in-a-million chance of a stray bullet hitting a plane or a person or what have you. It may be a low risk but the consequences are dire of that one incident," he adds.

Day is hoping to attract Canadian first responders and to repatriate Canadian dollars spent on sending our men and women abroad to train. He says that he has also had ample interest from private domestic and international clients, which has raised yet more concern for residents. "Just exactly who is Reticle going to be training here? What if someone gets a hold of a gun that shouldn't have one?" asks Burrow.

Brockville has yet to sign the lease agreement with Steve Day and, according to Mayor David Henderson, the city has imposed its standard noise by-laws on the agreement. And while everything about the project seems to be moving forward, Burrow assures me that he is going to continue being vigilant. "We're in it for the long haul. We are not against these facilities by any means. We are not against Reticle. We said right from the beginning that it's a good project but it's the wrong place."

Reticle's project is likely to change the face of the Canadian private military training industry for the simple fact that nothing like this exists here. The one-stop-shop model of tactical training made famous by sprawling US compounds, like Academi's Moyock, North Carolina facility, is moving north of the border. In the very near future, innocent and idyllic Brockville could be playing host to a much more hardcore tourist.

Backstage Photos from Kanye's Massive Fashion Show

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On Thursday afternoon, Kanye West popped a "wheelie on the zeitgeist" with his Madison Square Garden event that doubled as both a fashion show for his Yeezy Season 3 collection and a listening party for his new album, The Life of Pablo. The spectacle was broadcast into movie theaters and streamed on computers across the globe—but photographer Tyler Mitchell was actually on the ground, behind the barricades with Yeezy himself, snapping up intimate photos of the man during one of the crowning moments of his already storied career.

The event was extremely special because it marked the first time West was able to fully integrate his musical and fashion visions into one single experience for his fans, breaking down the perceived boundaries of popular music and high-end clothing.

Below, check out Tyler's pictures from the night, which find West beaming with joy as he kicks it with everyone from Virgil Abloh to Young Thug and the Yeezy Season 3 models.

You can view more of Tyler's work on his website.

Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-In #104

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All photos by the author

Well Hello There,

I'm Nicholas Gazin, VICE's art editor, and this is my weekly column in which I review and discuss books, comics, zines, toys, and anything that I think merits attention for being aesthetically great or awful.

There's a documentary called Queer Japan being made by the people who run Massive that needs your money. If you like gay Japanese art and culture, then give them your fucking money.

Here are reviews of ten things. I've provided buy links from their publishers or producers, but you should always go see if your local comic store has them first.

#1. Deadpool Sixth Scale Figure
By Sideshow Collectibles

I didn't know real beauty before Sideshow Collectibles' meticulously perfect dolls entered my life in 2007. Is it possible to love an object more than you love a living creature? Is it possible to love an object more than you love yourself? These questions were answered with a thundering "YES" when I acquired Sideshow's Han Solo (in Bespin attire) doll. Standing a mere 12 inches, he managed to dwarf all my other possessions in perfection. The likeness of the doll to Harrison Ford is exact, down to the chin mole and the scar under his bottom lip. My love of the dolls carried me through the end of a deflating relationship with a human woman.

Sideshow sent me a Deadpool doll to review, which seems too good to be true. Deadpool is the Marvel Comics character from the X-Men universe who cannot die, makes jokes, and breaks the fourth wall constantly. He's a chaotic hero/villain and is insanely popular. There's a movie coming out about him soon that has some commercials that are so annoying they're actually draining my enthusiasm.

The Deadpool doll interprets the character's red and black bodysuit into a padded, militaristic new style with quilted areas, gauntlets, and shinguards. There are teeny little straps and tiny little buckles connecting them. The doll comes with two pistols, a massive machine gun with a giant silencer and scope, two katanas, and a Rambo-style knife with actual metal blades. Of course he has many, many pouches because he is a Rob Liefeld creation. The doll also has two alternative heads and multiple interchangeable hands. Not only that, his stand comes with word balloons that you can affix dialogue stickers onto. It's so beautiful, I can't stand it.

I asked Kevin Ellis, the project manager on the Deadpool figure, a few questions and these are those.

VICE: Deadpool's costume looks different depending on the artist who is drawing him. How did you decide on the costume style you went with?
Kevin Ellis: Coming into our Marvel line, we knew we wanted to take an original spin on the costumes. Taking two-dimensional costumes and turning them into actual garments is one challenge, turning them into Sixth Scale garments is a completely different challenge altogether. The Sixth Scale format gave us the opportunity to take the typical spandex costume and really give it a gritty, real-world spin. Rather than gravitate toward the fitted armor and leather alternatives usually seen in realistic translations of superhero costumes, we opted for a design that was grounded in real-world garments with a bit of a twist. In the end, we feel that we came up with a design that pushes people's perceptions of the character, but still evokes the essence of Deadpool at first glance.

Was there discussion of including his time machine?
Several unique items were discussed when first developing the figure, but they eventually made their way to the chopping block as we dialed in our initial character lineup. If it is something that people are really asking for, there is always a chance we can consider it for a future offering.

Was there anything you wanted to put in that Marvel wasn't into?
Our initial design explorations are pretty broad. When we first look into developing a figure, we consider many more options than could ever make it into the actual end product (simply due to cost). Sometimes we reach way out into left field, so our first initial design concepts have us considering multiple head sculpts, gag accessories, base elements, etc. Through the process of development, we narrowed it down to what we think best tells the story we are trying to convey with the figure. Marvel has been great to work with on this line, and very open to the liberties we've taken.

This figure seems to focus on Deadpool as a serious character who has a lot of weapons. Was there ever a consideration given to including accessories that referenced the character's humorous nature?
We did definitely deck him out with some serious firepower, but we've also touched on his more humorous side with elements like the speech bubbles ("!?!CHIMICHANGAS!?!") and more quizzical expression on his alternate portrait. The Sideshow exclusive Version also comes with Headpool, and what could be funnier than a floating zombie head in a propellor beanie?

---

Buy the Deadpool figure from Sideshow for a richer existence.

#2. The Art of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Deluxe Edition
By Tim and Steve Seeley (Dark Horse Comics)

I didn't think this book would be as good as it is.

Usually, books marketed to the nostalgic adults demographic will condescend to the reader. You know that a book about children's culture thinks you're a fool when the writer overuses the word "magic." Magic is a term people use when they're trying to con you, sell you something, or avoid telling you the truth. Great creative works aren't made by "magic," they're made by hardworking, serious, and often charmless people who are able to understand and answer society's desires with art. This book is great largely because it doesn't bullshit or pretend about what He-Man is. It talks about the creation and development that went into He-Man in a surprisingly blunt and hilarious way.

This book is a great collection of some of the concept art, comics, animation cels, packaging, posters, and other drawings and paintings that relate to the making of He-Man and the associated products. The images are big and colorful, the paintings are beautiful to me, and it would be good as merely a collection of He-Man art. But it's more than that. The book shows the development of He-Man and the cynical notes and memos used in the process of developing the property. At the beginning of the book, there are letters in which He-Man is referred to as a "generic Licensed Male Action Figure." There are psychological profiles of what boys want and what their mothers will accept.

Seeing a book like this, that respects the reader enough to be honest, is a rare thing. The He-Man toys were created primarily as a blending of Star Wars and Frazetta art, and the animated TV show was made to advertise these toys. Having been born in 1983, I was hit hard by the He-Man bug, and it was the center of my imagination from ages three to four.

I got the deluxe edition that comes boxed inside a textured box of Castle Grayskull, which I still find beautiful. A limestone green castle with a giant skull works for me. You pull down the magnetized drawbridge, and behind it is an image of He-Man holding his power sword. When you separate the contents from the two boxes, there's the book and then there's a print that portrays the MOTU characters with so much gravitas and seriousness that Thomas Morton laughed when I showed the book to him.

The Dark Horse PR guy mentioned one thing that surprised him was how much the gay press has reached out to Dark Horse about this book. Did you know that He-Man was a gay icon? It makes sense since he looks like a Tom of Finland drawing in bondage wear. Whether you're gay, bi, bicurious, or still think that you're straight, this book is incredible. If you remember loving He-Man as a child, this book will remind you instantly why you loved it and reveal how crassly you were manipulated.

Buy The Art of He-Man from Dark Horse.

#3. Uncle Scrooge: The Seven Cities of Gold
By Carl Barks (Fantagraphics)

It's hard to find a better, more perfect comic than one that Carl Barks made. Carl Barks was the once-anonymous cartoonist of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics. Until his identity was made public, he was just referred to as "the good duck artist." He had, by many accounts, a miserable life, but he was a fantastic genius who was one of the great auteurs of the medium.

This book is notable because it includes the comic that Indiana Jones ripped off the boulder scene from. Indiana Jones was heavily influenced by these comics. Every man, woman, and child owes it to their home to have a complete set of Carl Barks comics in their den or study.

#4. Lapsos
By Inés Estrada (C'est Bon Kultur)

Inés has been published on VICE for, like, six years now. She makes stickers and little stuffed animals and comics. This is her first graphic novel, and it's very impressive. It's a hardcover with partial color. It's about a couple and their interactions with magical, interdimensional beings after one of them drives over a two-headed Siamese cat. It's kinda like Jesse Moynihan's Forming. This comic is full of cute moments despite all the confusing new-age mumbo jumbo.

I like it a lot. I vouch for Inés Estrada and her work.

#5. Not Sure if Angry, Hungry or Sad
By NeverBrushMyTeeth (Tiny Splendor Press)

This is a beautiful drawing zine I got at Secret Headquarters, full of some really confident drawings of all sorts of stuff. It's printed on a risograph onto thick paper. Words aren't necessary. Just look.

Get it from Tiny Splendor, if possible.

#6. The Grand Budapest Hotel
By Matt Zoller Seitz (Abrams)

I think the Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's best movie. This book is the best book about the movie that could exist. Do you want a series of Wes Anderson discussing the movie? Do you want photos of all the sets and miniatures? Do you want to have great screenshots of scenes so you can stare at them for minutes at a time instead of the seconds you got in the movie? They're all present in this book.

Buy it from Abrams Books.

#7. Hamburger Eyes No. 16
By various photographers (Hamburger Eyes)

Oh boy, new Hamburger Eyes! I love you, Hamburger Eyes! Hamburger Eyes is the only good photo zine. Every other photo zine is just the same old shit you saw before. I often look at my own photos and think, Could I ever be in Hamburger Eyes? My photos whisper back at me, "No, you are too old and you were never as cool as these people are." Oh, well.

Get it from Hamburger Eyes.

#8. See You Next Tuesday
By Jane Mai (Koyama Press)

Some people think that feminism is when women get roles in stupid action movies and then talk about how they wanted to show the world that "women could kick butt, too." This always reads as pandering and phony to me. I hate almost every superhero movie, and it bums me out when adults try to intellectualize them and talk about them like they're not big video-game commercials. If you like these movies, go fuck yourself and stop reading this column.

The real forefront of feminism in art and comics is ladies doing comics about how gross and beautiful it is to be a lady. Aline Kominsky-Crumb was an early forerunner of this. Dori Seda did it really well and deserves wider recognition. More recently Lizz Hickey, Heather Benjamin, Lisa Hanawalt, and Jane Mai have also been really great at embracing the gross beauty of lady-ness. As a sidebar I would like to mention my sister Penelope Gazin, Molly Soda, and all the current hairy ladies who embrace makeup and their body hair.

This book collects Jane Mai's loose and sketchy diary comics in which she is constantly shitting, pissing, vomiting, sneezing, and having anxiety or joy related to these body functions. It also includes her dog, Stinky, who goes under her desk to fart. Jane and her friends are all drawn adorably. We also see Jane have public conflicts with strangers, like dudes who are spreading their legs too wide on the subway and strangers who start accusing her of being the kind of person who has a Tumblr.

It's a good comic if you love shit and piss and can't handle your feelings. So that should be everyone who reads this website.

Buy it from Koyama.

#9. Yokai Watch Vol. 1 and 2
By Noriyuki Konishi (Viz Media)

Yokai Watch is a comic about a videogame/TV show/action-figure line about a boy who finds a magic ghost butler in the woods who gives him a magic watch. The watch allows Nate to see otherwise invisible yo-kai, which are forest ghosts of Japanese mythology. In Yokai Watch, Nate sees people beleaguered by problems, which are always caused by these ghosts, whom Nate battles and then befriends. It's a lot like Pokemon, except that the main kid isn't trying to capture and imprison the magical creatures.

The concept is fun and will definitely appeal to all the hardcore weeaboos and children. It's not striking a strong chord with me, but I'm about 25 years older than the target demographic. Kids are going to dig this, though.

Buy it from somewhere.

#10. Fight Club 2 #1–5
By Chuck Palahniuk and Cameron Stewart (Dark Horse Comics)

I'd heard that Dark Horse was publishing a Fight Club comic. Dark Horse is a publisher known for getting a lot of movie licenses. They've published comics based on Star Wars, Alien, Predator, Terminator, and a lot of other sci-fi stuff. It wasn't until the press gave me copies that I found out Chuck Palahniuk was actually scripting them. I'm not totally convinced he's really writing them entirely himself, though. Writing a comic script involves some different muscles than just writing prose or even a movie script. The inside covers of each issue have little airplane-safety pictograms that mention famed comics author Matt Fraction and Chelsea Cain as "your in-flight cabin crew," which makes me suspect that it's possibly more of a collaboration, with Matt and Chelsea writing the final scripts.

Anyway, the plot of the comics is that it's ten years since the events of Fight Club took place and the main character is now calling himself Sebastian and married to Helena Bonham Carter's character and together they have a child. Sebastian is taking some sort of medication that suppresses his Tyler Durden side, but he eventually starts slipping back between his two personalities. A lot of the story is confusing, and trompe l'oeil drawings of pills and flower petals will appear over parts of the comic panels obscuring information. Chuck Palahniuk and his writing group also appear in the comic. At the end of the fifth issue, the members of Tyler Durden's army are all about to slit their veins open and spray blood on famous paintings for some reason.

I'm not sure if I like this comic series—at least not yet. I read all the Palahniuk books that were out when I was in high school, but by the fifth one the unreliable narrator and random-pieces-of-information writing style had become repetitive and shtick-y.

The drawings in the comic are competent, but seeing the story drawn instead of imagining them or seeing actual humans moving around doesn't feel quite right to me for Fight Club.

Buy Fight Club 2 from Dark Horse.

And that's it for this week. Check in next week for more reviews and things.

Send things you want reviewed to: Nick Gazin c/o VICE Media Inc., 49 South 2nd St, Brooklyn, NY 11249

And follow me on Instagram.

Love,
Nick Gazin


Everything We Think We Know About Kanye West’s Video Game, 'Only One'

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Screencap via YouTube

On February 11, rapping human man of no little reputation Kanye West revealed not only his new album, The Life of Pablo, and a Yeezy Season 3 fashion line at a special live event at New York's Madison Square Garden, but also a video game. A new video game, quite unlike anything we've played before that's been in any way related to Chi-Town's Hero, namely Kanye Quest 3030 and, my favorite, Kanye Zone.

Only One is the game's name, and the trailer, which can be seen at 2:04 in the video below, doesn't reveal a great deal about how it'll play.

But we can figure out some things out, based on what's been said, and the little we've seen of Only One.

It's about his mom.

When Donda West died in 2007, it hit her son hard. She'd nurtured his nascent talent by paying for recording time when he was in his early teens, and she ultimately backed his dropping out of college to concentrate on a music career: "Some career goals don't require college." At MSG, Kanye revealed Only One by saying, "I worked on a video game and I wanted to show y'all... the idea of my mom traveling through the gates of heaven."

So it's more specifically about his mom in the afterlife.
And ascending to heaven, which either does or doesn't exist depending on that feeling inside your chest. You know the one. It's there, or it's not. Kanye feels it, and he's super proud of Only One, announcing to the MSG crowd once the trailer had ended: "That's not easy to do, man. Y'all be acting like that shit is regular." Kanye is right: Making video games is not easy.

Not that we know just how much of his own time Kanye committed to Only One.
Obviously.

But we do know that Kanye had a hard time convincing games-making people to take his idea seriously.
He continued, as reported by Kotaku: "I go out and meet with everybody in San Fran, and they'll diss the fuck out of me. And I'll be like, 'I wanna make a game,' and they'll be like, 'FUCK YOU.' That was hard to do, bro!"

Imagine being that someone at a games studio, or maybe several people at several studios, responsible for telling Kanye West to take his game idea and stick it up his ass.
Except, he stays away from that area all together, of course. He's really not into buttholes.

We've known he's been making a game for a while, so color us completely unsurprised by this whole thing.
VICE was on top of Kanye's plans in the interactive entertainment field a year ago, when we wrote that his video game "might just be amazing." We also said, back in February 2015, that his heavenly game could well share some qualities with Ignition Tokyo's 2011 action release, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. And you have to say that the visuals of the trailer aren't so far away from that older game's awesome looks. Then again, Only One also looks a little like Robot Unicorn Attack 2. Doesn't it?

A screenshot from 'Robot Unicorn Attack 2'

Only One shares its title with a song Kanye recorded with Paul McCartney in 2014.
Said track is both a tribute to his late mother, sung from her perspective, and to his daughter, North. You can see its Spike Jonze-directed video here, if you like. The song went top ten in Indonesia, Belgium, and New Zealand.

It's absolutely not going to be anything like his wife's game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.
Not that any of us are going to rule out microtransactions—only the foolish would ever dare—but whereas Kim's millions-making freemium app is all about rising up the social strata of a select group of haves in the Hollywood Hills, ultimately becoming celebrities themselves (and ruining lives in the process), Only One appears a lot more personal. When Kanye said, at MGS, "Man, this shit was hard to do," there's no theater in his voice, no showmanship. He absolutely believes in what he's had a hand in creating here.

We have no idea what the game's coming out for.
Smartphones and tablets? PC and PlayStation? Perhaps it's a Nintendo NX exclusive? There's no point in guessing what you'll be able to play Only One on. We also have no idea when it's out—that trailer might be all that exists of the game, right now. Kanye has been making an album, after all. Fingers, pies, several, in them.

But it's going to be another endless runner, isn't it?
You know what we're talking about. Flappy Bird. Temple Run. Canabalt. Alto's Adventure. Jetpack Joyride. All visually unique, all the same basic experience: Keep on going until you can't. And if it proves that we can't ever get Donda to heaven, well, that's going to be a disappointment. It won't upset us as much as seeing Kanye tweet some dumb shit like, oh, I don't know, "BILL COSBY INNOCENT" (and all the exclamation marks). But it'll be a bummer. Unless it's not an endless runner, and actually something totally awesome, in which case: No, Yeezy, that's still a fucking stupid thing to write on the internet.

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

I Drilled a Hole in My Own Skull to Stay High Forever

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Joe and Amanda Feilding, another trepanation enthusiast, with Joe's trepanation tool. Photos courtesy of Strange Attracttor Press

"This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my head to get permanently high."

As far as opening lines to memoirs go, they don't come much more compelling than the first sentence in Joe Mellen's 1970 book, Bore Hole. It tells the story of how he dropped out of the square life in 1963 to become a beatnik—how he took acid in Spain during the psychedelic 60s, before looking for a more profound way to permanently alter his consciousness: auto-trepanation, the act of drilling a hole into your skull.

While this on its own was enough to guarantee Bore Hole cult status, Mellen—who has a fantastically readable and easy style—also managed to capture something of the spirit of the true countercultural 1960s in his writing. This would go some way to explaining why the 500 copies of the book that he originally self-published have long since become sought after artifacts from a vanished age. Bore Hole has been given a luxurious reissue by Strange Attractor, and it has been doubled in length, bringing Mellen's story up to date and making the case for trepanation in the 21st century. The book is also a persuasive attempt to answer a very fundamental question about human nature: Why do we love getting high so much?

Joe Mellen is a well-preserved 76-year-old man, and—just in case you were wondering—seems much sharper and more intelligent than the majority of people I meet on a daily basis, regardless of their age or their proclivity for LSD. I'm not particularly looking for it, but I do notice a large, finger-tip sized indentation on the top of his head after we've been speaking for about an hour. He later reveals that this is the site of an earlier, only partially successful attempt to trepan with a hand tool. The location of his successful trepanation, carried out with an electric drill in 1970, just a few weeks before he wrote his book, is actually at the top of his forehead in a "third eye" brow chakra position. It is, however, completely unnoticeable, and he has to press it with a finger for me to see where it is.

The difference between an autobiography and a memoir is that the former is the story of someone's life, whereas the latter just deals with one specific aspect of his or her history. What memoirs tend to do, in the broadest sense, is to describe a journey. And Joe's journey didn't begin with his first spliff or tab of acid, but with him throwing off the square life that his establishment parents had planned out for him. He has a clear, traditionally British accent, which isn't surprising given both his upbringing and education (he went to both Eton and Oxford). He had a glittering future in his father's firm of stockbrokers all lined up. In fact, he was just a few weeks away from his final post-graduate accountancy exams when he decided to jack it all in. (No doubt helped by the fact that he had just read Aldous Huxley for the first time and In Search of the Miraculous by PD Ouspensky.)

But as soon as he dropped out and started smoking weed, the rest of the pieces started falling quickly into place.

VICE: Were you part of the beatnik generation?
Joe Mellen: Yes, that's what it was pre-acid. But then, during the mid-60s, one began to hear about acid. In '64 I was staying in Torremolinos in Spain. There was a small clique of dope smokers there who listened to jazz. I met this guy Allan Cisco who had been turned on to mescaline by Timothy Leary in Acapulco. He told me about tripping on the beach and wrestling with an octopus in the waves. He had two trips left—and they were big trips, 850mg each. I took one and had this incredible trip. I thought it was amazing, like heaven on earth.

Joe, Amanda Feilding, and Bart Huges

Can you tell me about meeting Bart Huges, the Dutchman who introduced you to both LSD and the concept of trepanation?
I was in Ibiza in '65 and everyone on the scene was talking about acid, but only a few had taken it. I overheard two guys talking about "the future for acid." It turned out that one of them was Bart. I'd heard about this guy who had drilled a hole in his own head, and I thought, 'Well, he must be a nutcase!' It turned out he was just on his way back to Amsterdam, where he had made some acid. He and his friend started off synthesizing mescaline and then moved on to LSD... and it was really good acid.

He asked if I wanted to try some, and when I went over to his apartment he had a big brown paper bag with sugar lumps, and another containing lemons. He told me that I should dip the sugar cube in lemon juice and take them together. The trip was really wonderful.

Was it the full works? Time distortion, hallucinations...
Well, this is the beauty of it. If you don't take the sugar you'll certainly get hallucinations, and you can let it go as far as you want and then take the sugar and bring it back. The funny thing was, I thought I was hallucinating when I got back to my apartment. It looked like the pipes had sprung a leak and like my bedroom was flooded, but I thought I was tripping. Of course, when I woke up the next day, the bedroom was knee-deep in water, and it was real, so I hadn't been hallucinating at all.

The next day I went back round to see Bart, and he gave me a type-written page that was an open letter to a professor of psychiatry in Amsterdam. This scientist had asked Bart to be his assistant before he started taking acid and talking about it in public. In the open letter, he described the mechanism that he had discovered. Basically, it said acid was a vasoconstrictor; the scientist had been carrying out experiments into how acid could be used to slow down bleeding during childbirth, as well as a treatment for respiratory complaints and problems with blood circulation, but he hadn't made any connection to the idea of LSD and expanded consciousness. But this scientist wasn't a genius. He was a good chemist. Bart was a genius. He had a very good memory for everything he had ever learned.

Where does taking sugar lumps come into this?
Consciousness is a product of brain metabolism, which is the oxidation of glucose. Glucose is the only source of energy for the brain. That is the only way the brain works: by burning glucose. So as the oxidation of glucose increases, more and more cells reach that level of consciousness. So suddenly your consciousness is expanded.

In my little book, Bore Hole, there is a big idea, and the big idea is that humans have a problem. The problem is the sealing of the skull, which happens when we are fully grown . Before that, the skull is in separate plates and there is some give. Think of the brain as a pudding: It can expand and pulsate, but once the skull has completely sealed 'round it, it can no longer do that. The pulsation is suppressed and the blood passes through without pulsating. And this is why all of us want to get high. We want to get back to that youthful state of being where we have more spontaneity and more creativity and more life. This is what we miss. It's paradise lost.

The cover of 'Bore Hole'

This brings me onto trepanation. So there is a historical and a pre-historical precedent for drilling a hole in your head, isn't there?
Yes. It's the oldest operation in the world, and it has been done on every continent. They found trepanned skulls in Inca tombs in Peru: 14 skulls all in a row with trepanation holes. This was probably part of the initiation into a priest caste. I suppose the most obvious reason for doing it was to help people who suffered from head wounds. In battle, a warrior could get an axe wound to the head, which in turn could lead to splinters of bone pressing down onto the brain. So you would want to remove the piece of bone. But today trepanation is still used in Kenya. The Gusii and Kuria tribes do it with very primitive instruments. It's a very simple procedure. In surgery, it would be carried out by the nurse, not the surgeon.

I'm not a particularly squeamish person, but I did find parts of the book difficult to read. Do you understand the revulsion or discomfort the subject can cause in some people?
Yeah, of course I do. It's very understandable. When I first heard about it I thought, This is ridiculous! And the idea that someone would do it to himself or herself was absurd. But you get used to ideas eventually, don't you?

Tell me about your first attempt.
I was living back in London, and it was 1967. At that time, I was broke, and I certainly couldn't afford an electric drill, so I bought a hand trepan from a surgical instrument shop. It's a bit like a corkscrew, really, but with a ring of teeth at the bottom. It has a point in the middle, which makes an impression on the skull, and then you turn it until the teeth cut into the skull. It's slightly narrower at the bottom than it is at the top, so it pulls the circular piece of skull out once you're through with it when you pull it out. It was difficult. It was like trying to uncork a bottle of wine from the inside. The trepan was blunt, and I couldn't get any purchase on my own skull. I was tripping on acid. I thought that it was the only way I could get through doing it, but it didn't work...

I have to say, those bits in the book are hard to read... and the fact that you had two more attempts. Trepanning: It's not for everyone, is it?
Well, I think it should be for everyone. The simplest thing is this: The human being needs more blood in its brain. And this isn't a great high; it's just restoring you to that youthful level of vitality. This vitality that you lose when you hit adulthood. But it could just be done with an injection at birth. You could inject the cells round the fontanelle so it never seals. It would be very simple.

Read on Motherboard: I Tried Getting 'High' on Drugless Psychedelic Alternatives in the Suburbs

When did you try for the second time?
Maybe a year later, and I used the same method with the hand trepan. I did remove some skull, but I was unsure as to whether it had gone all the way through or not, as it had gone in at an angle. At first, I thought I'd gone through as there was kind of a "schlurping" sound as I took the trepan out and what sounded like bubbles. I think I went through a tiny bit, but I don't think it was enough.

Can you tell me about your third, successful attempt to trepan?
Yes. This was in 1970. I injected a local anesthetic into the skin, muscle, and membrane above the skull. I ended up with what looked like a pigeon's egg, quite a little lump. I cut through that with a scalpel. The local anesthetic has a lot of adrenaline in it, which is a vasoconstrictor, so minimizes the bleeding. I wasn't high this time. With the hand trepan it took a lot of muscle, but the final time I was using an electric drill with a 6mm bit and that was a lot more straightforward. Unfortunately, the drill cable broke, so I had to stop, wrap a towel around my head, and take the drill to Mr. Lea, a man who had a flat in the basement of my building. He was brilliant—he could fix anything. He didn't ask me what I was doing. So he repaired the drill and then I got back on with it. It's really obvious when you get all the way through the skull. Quite a lot of blood comes out, and the drill bit goes in by an inch. I bandaged it all up. It took two or three days for the skin to heal over the hole. I didn't need any analgesia, and there were no complications; I was very, very careful to sterilize everything. The main danger is infection. I didn't even get a headache. It took half an hour all in all, including clearing up afterwards.

I was feeling great because I'd done it, but then I noticed after about an hour I started to feel a lightness, like a weight had been lifted off me. And then it grew a bit more and a bit more and it ended up being more than I expected. I did it in the evening and went to bed at 11 PM feeling good, and I could still feel it when I woke up the next morning. And then I realized, This is it. It's done.

I've got a mate who wants to get it done—what should he do?
I wish I knew. I heard there's a guy doing it in Mexico for $2,000, and you can get it done in Ecuador and Egypt. There are doctors who will take your money. But we're talking a lot of money here. Bart always thought there should be an automat, a little booth where you go and put your penny in the slot.

Related: Watch 'Getting High on HIV Medication'

If people are going to do it themselves, what do you advise?
I don't advise people to do it themselves. I really don't. I had lessons from Bart, and I'm not going to tell other people to do it to themselves. Really, there needs to be some sort of legal and social change in this country for it to happen. I just wish that someone would do some research into drugs that get you high and their properties as vasoconstrictors.

What are the benefits of getting high?
The ego is a mechanism for directing the blood in the brain where it's needed. It constricts the arteries in some parts to increase the blood flow to other parts. But the part of the brain that dominates everything is the speech system. We depend on the speech system for survival and it dominates brain activity. It does this by monopolizing the supply of blood. The speech centers—which deal with talking, writing, reading, and listening—were the last to develop in our evolution, and they're in the cerebral cortex, far away from the heart. To ensure constant blood supply to the speech centers, the ego represses function in other parts of the brain.

People get obsessed with the word chains they use for their identity, and it may be that these word chains identify people as a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew, or whatever. So your particular word chains become very important to you, obviously. And you can resist or even attack other people who have different ideas, whereas there is actually enough room for everyone to have plenty of ideas. This is the beauty of getting high. When you get high you transcend the ego, you get above the ego. When you are high, you can see people operating on this level, and you can see where you have been operating on this level also. You are given an objective view, as opposed to a subjective view. And that is the great beauty and great value of getting high. I think everyone should get high, and I think that Vladimir Putin should drop acid.

Joe Mellen's Bore Hole is out now on Strange Attractor.

Life Inside: What It's Like to Be a Hacker in Prison

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SeaTac Federal Detention Center, where the author was incarcerated. Photo via the Bureau of Prisons

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between The Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

In 2010 Stephen Watt, a former software engineer, was sentenced to two years in federal prison and a $171.5 million restitution for writing a piece of software used by a friend to hack millions of credit and debit cards. You can read about his legal entanglements in Wired.

SeaTac Federal Detention Center, where I served my time, is not your average federal prison. The most important thing to know about it and other FDCs is that they are built for defendants in pretrial custody, or for inmates with very short (less than five-year) sentences. They get away with providing a fraction of the "amenities" and programs found at normal prisons because of the relatively brief stays of their occupants. And they must be able to house defendants of every possible custody level, from minimum to maximum. Naturally, the rules are engineered for the most dangerous, which means lots of restricted movement, no outdoors, no mess hall.

SeaTac, located near the Seattle-Tacoma Airport in Washington State, had the added inconvenience of being almost 3,000 miles away from my wife and home in New York City.

Shortly after I arrived, the windows were taped over on the outside with opaque sheets because it was deemed to be a security risk for prisoners to see the license plates of cars near the facility. The normal prison library was shut down, ostensibly out of fear that prisoners from different units would be able to communicate with one another by passing notes back and forth in the books. Not too long after that, the legal library was closed, apparently for the same reason. Because of the nature of my crime, I was initially denied any right to touch the prison computers for email or to check my commissary balance. I wasn't allowed to enroll in the only educational course of any value to me (Spanish) because it was a self-taught class using the Rosetta Stone software.

I was even barred from setting foot inside the computer room.

The author in 2011. Photo courtesy of Stephen Watt

Eventually, the shuttering of the legal library won me back access to the computers—albeit limited, filtered, and supervised. Because our legal resources were now digitized, to continue to completely deny me access would have turned into an ugly constitutional rights issue.

You may wonder what it's like for an inhabitant of the digital world to live without access to the internet. My analog life lasted about three and a half years. As a condition of pretrial release, I was mostly technology-free in the time leading up to incarceration; any personal electronic privilege was considered too dangerous a risk for society. I was prohibited from using internet-accessible devices of any sort or from instructing another person to use one on my behalf. This included not being permitted to ask my wife or mother to add a movie to my Netflix DVD queue for me.

This luddite excursion was not terrible for any denial of convenience, but rather because of my inability to acquire information. Hearing a reference to an unfamiliar name or a historical event and not being able to look it up (oh, Wikipedia!) is a curse for anybody with even a minimal sense of curiosity.

I found refuge in the ultimate old-media artifact: print. I have always been an avid reader, but I took this pastime to the next level in prison. Even before my sentencing, I envisioned a monastic time behind bars spent almost exclusively in exercise and meditation, and this became my reality when I was assigned to a facility that did not have so much as windows or an outdoor area. While on pre-trial, I made an Amazon wish list (especially of classics that I had never read for one reason or another), and also compiled a list of over 15 publications to which I would subscribe. Over my approximately 20 months inside, I averaged about eight to ten hours of reading a day, punctuated by walking in ellipses and listening to the radio. I read over 350 books and periodicals ranging from Life Extension to the New Republicand the New York Review of Books.

The New York Times, although always delivered a couple of days late because of its leisurely journey through the prison mailroom, was the cornerstone of my daily morning ritual. I read it end-to-end each morning with my coffee while most of the other prisoners were still sleeping or too groggy to watch TV, and then retreated back to my cell with the crossword puzzle.

My reading habits were tolerated by others, even though they made me a bit of a curiosity. We had a designated magazine route by which my bountiful harvest made the rounds, though "sharing any item of value between inmates" is a poorly-defined but well-known no-no in the prison system. Sometimes members of our underground magazine club would complain about the speed of circulation, and I would have to remind the dilettantes to read faster or get off the pot.

Without a doubt my most memorable read in prison was actually a re-read: The Count of Monte Cristo. It was the first book to arrive at mail call, two days after my surrender: the new unabridged Oxford University Press edition (approximately 1,100 pages). The next four or five days were an almost uninterrupted orgy of reading. The last time I had read the book, I wasn't even ten years old. My experiences since then—including my brushes with the law—allowed me to live vicariously through the character of Edmond Dantès, and to imagine my own personal enemies as the villains of the book. I'm not a remotely religious person, but I remember thinking at the time that the emotional transfiguration I experienced while reading about Dantès' revenge (perhaps not the most noble of human undertakings) approximated something a believer might feel when reading a particularly beautiful psalm.

I am not by nature a visual person at all, but I had rather intense experiences reading Shantaram (a staple of the prison reading epics) and Life of Pi. I have serious reservations about these books, although they were both ripe for the moment. In particular, reading for hours about life in a tiny raft sailing in the middle of the ocean from atop the bottom bunk in a colorless, cinder-block room primed me for the sort of quasi-hallucinatory episode rarely experienced in sobriety.

Now I am back in the digital world. At first there were boundaries. I could not use a personal computer unless it was running Windows and equipped by the government with special monitoring software (they billed me $29 a month for this "service"), and I was only permitted to use a Blackberry rather than an iPhone or Android device, which were deemed too dangerous for the likes of me. But since last February, I am back behind my old-school UNIX console, with a proper smart phone.

I realize now that the one solace I took in prison was not the freedom to read books all day, but the lack of freedom to do anything BUT read books all day. I really miss that.

The Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on the specifics of Watt's incarceration.

No One Knows How Many Homeless People Live in New York

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A homeless woman in New York last month. Photo by Timothy A. Clary via Getty

New York City's homeless youth are the invisible population everybody sees. Housing has been an issue here for as long as the city has existed, but the number of people on the streets has increased visibly over the last few years. Mayor Bill de Blasio has issued hundreds of additional beds at shelter spaces in response to the public outcry about the problem, and Crain's New York Business reports 311 calls about homelessness in the city have more than doubled from 2013 to 2015. The numbers from last year's Department of Homeless Services' (DHS) annual HOPE Count, a day in which over 3,000 volunteers scour the five boroughs for a head count of the homeless, were somewhat encouraging, with the tally coming in at 3,183, down slightly from 2014's 3,357. Unfortunately, the HOPE Count is by no means comprehensive and is prone to undercounting, particularly when it comes to homeless youth.

On Monday, DHS performed the federally mandated count for 2016. There are many challenges to accurately counting the number of homeless people in a city with over 8 million residents, chief among them being how to decide what qualifies a person as being "homeless"? According to Kimberly Forte, supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society, a group that specializes in representing low-income New Yorkers: "That is just people who are found in public areas and on the street." This doesn't include demographics that include large numbers of young people, such as couch surfers, people squatting abandoned buildings, and sex workers spending the night with a client just to have a roof over their heads. By the federal definition, they were not homeless on Monday.

The results of the tally, which won't be released until at least the summer, directly affect how much the federal government allocates to social services aimed at the homeless. Undercounting leads to underfunding, which cuts the amount of aid to vulnerable, homeless youth.

In December 2013, the Legal Aid Society, along with co-counsel Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, filed a lawsuit on behalf of 4,000 homeless youth ages 16 to 20 in order to create a right to shelter and mandate aid like mental health services. The still-ongoing lawsuit is one of the many efforts to alleviate an urgent and complex issue. Staff attorney Beth Hofmeister and Forte spoke to us about it over the phone.

VICE: Why do you think the count is insufficient?
Kimberly Forte: The reason we think that the count is insufficient is that the city is bound to count based on the federal definition of who is homeless. That is just people who are found in public areas and on the streets. So, unfortunately, the federal government program that does this does not take into consideration, for example, young people who are trading sex for shelter. Young people who find themselves spending the night in, say, 24-hour McDonald's are not counted. Young people who may be on the subway may not be considered homeless even if there is someone counting on the subway that day because he or she may not be perceived as homeless by the counter.

Now, the city has engaged in a youth count where over the next week they ask a bunch of homeless shelter providers to ask young people where they have stayed the night before. So they're trying to expand that count by reaching young people in different ways. However, the count shouldn't be only in winter. We feel that there should be more counts throughout the year in different seasons, and there should be a better way to count young people over a longer period of time.

Why do they perform the count in the winter?
Beth: The federal government wants it to be at a cold time of year because they feel like anyone who is sleeping on the street during the coldest time of the year really must not have somewhere else to go. I guess this is opposed to in the summer where they might just be sleeping on the street for fun, which, obviously, as an advocate, I don't believe is true. I don't think anyone sleeps on the street for fun. But that's the premise.

The adult count is really about identifying who the street homeless are, for the purposes of services. The youth count component is a little bit different. While they think they have taken into consideration some unique factors, we don't feel like it is actually capturing even a small number of the homeless youth population, because their homelessness can look a little bit different.

Does the city gain anything by undercounting?
Kim: Historically I do believe that was probably true, that a city benefitted from an undercount. I will acknowledge, though, that Mayor de Blasio and Steve Banks are now taking this issue very seriously with their announcement a few weeks ago to add 300 shelter beds, and it is apparent to us that they are recognizing that this is an undercount. Their desire to do more quarterly counts is an effort for them to see a larger picture of the homeless problem and the homeless youth problem. So they're coming out of that historical perspective that, sure, it was helpful because they wouldn't need many beds, but now I think they're beginning to understand and take efforts to show that is not true.

What do you think undercounting does for perception? Does a low count make people less sympathetic?
Kim: I don't know about that. Every time I go to a meeting about homelessness outside of the legal community everyone agrees that they're seeing the street population increase. If anything, they feel that the numbers aren't reflecting what they're seeing. I don't think anyone is purposely trying to undercount a population, and often their hands are tied as to how you define the youth count. The nature of the count is that it maybe isn't designed as well as it could be to capture who is actually homeless in the youth population.

Can you talk about the difficulty of finding shelter for those under 18?
Kim: Prior to our litigation, it was historically true that young people under the age of 18 were unable to enter shelters. That was really under the Bloomberg administration and in prior years of his leadership. Now, since de Blasio has taken office—but mostly because we filed our lawsuit—16-and 17-year-olds are defined as runaway and homeless by law and are now admitted to shelters.

Beth: But it is a different shelter system than the Department of Homeless Services system. DHS runs the adult and homeless family shelter system in New York City, but the Department of Youth and Community Development runs the youth shelter system, so they are the system that would take in the 16- and 17-year-olds.

Tell me a little more about the lawsuit.
Kim: We, along with our co-council, filed a lawsuit on behalf of 11 anonymous young people who were homeless and being denied access to shelter and youth specific services. Many of these young people had multiple mental health diagnoses, had been homeless over the course of a few years of their lives, and identified in the queer community. Specifically, we had two to three transgendered clients who were brave enough to give their story.

Ultimately it was a class action case, so we agreed with the city that there was a class of young people who were being denied shelter and services in this city. We currently just completed the discovery process with the City of New York, which has taken over two years.

It is baffling to us, and I say that very strongly, as to why the city has not settled our lawsuits. Especially given the fact that Mayor de Blasio has come out very publicly in recent weeks and said young people have a right to youth shelter. Both he and Mr. Banks have promised that any young person who appears either to the DYCD or to the DHS shelter system will be afforded an opportunity to be placed in youth shelter and that they will ensure young people don't have to make the critical choice of choosing to stay on the street or choosing to go to a shelter where they feel unsafe. We were hopeful that with these announcements the city would want to settle our case, but it is very surprising to us that they are continuing to litigate this action in federal court.

What about the LGBT homeless?
Kim: What we know to be true is that upwards of 40 percent of New York City youth who are homeless identify in the LGBT community. In Washington, DC, the city actually did a deliberate study on its homeless population, and it was 50 percent.

When you think about the comparison, sociological studies are about who is actually in the LGBT community, and we now know that we are seeing at least double, if not triple the number of homeless youth population who identify this way. It's in large part due to family rejection, young people not feeling safe at home, system failure of young people not feeling safe in the foster care system, having gone through the juvenile justice system in the past and not getting services that were supportive of their gender identity or sexual orientation so they didn't get the interventions they needed early enough in their lives to have them not end up in the homeless system.

There are two great providers, Street Work and the Ali Forney Center, that have made a deliberate effort to ensure their LGBT youth are very safe. Covenant House is the other youth provider and is working on its ability to ensure safety of LBGT people in its space. But certainly the DHS system is a very scary place for queer youth to go into, and they will tell you countless stories of going into these massive shelters and completely being victimized because of their gender identity and sexual orientation.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

For more on homelessness in New York City visit Coalition for the Homeless.

Follow Brian on Twitter.

VICE INTL: The Truth Behind Serbia's Notorious Witchcraft Subculture

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In Serbia, a small subculture of people living in remote villages practice what's known as Vlach magic—spiritual rituals tied to fortune telling and healing. While these rituals are an integral part in everyday life in eastern Serbia, the mainstream media has linked Vlach magic to mass killings and crime across the country.

VICE Serbia decided to travel to some of these rural areas to find out more about the history, cultural context, and everyday uses tied to Vlach magic. After tracking down local fortunetellers and taking part in some of the secret rituals, we try to discern if there's any truth behind the sensationalism.

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