Every year in a post-Valentine's Day haze, the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show rolls around. The canine competition is fierce, and as you tour the booths, you begin to realize that although Best in Show is technically a mockumentary, those characters, or caricatures, definitely seem to exist in real life, with cutthroat dog owners primping and fussing over their four-legged charges.

When not being coiffed, the exquisite pups are available for ogling at the annual "Meet the Breeds" event. This is a chance for owners to show off not only their dogs, but also their majestic, themed to breed booths. We love arts & crafts that involve Chow Chows in traditional Chinese garb, so VICE decided to send photographer Caroline Tompkins to cover the event. Caroline's photographs often deal with the beautiful ironies of daily life, and her knack for framing the eccentric really shows through in these epic pooch snapshots.

All photographs by Caroline Tompkins. You can follow her work here.

Tame Impala playing at Zenith. Photo by Nicko Guihal.

Emma Parkinson is an Australian who was wounded in last year's terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris. Today she sent us this piece on learning to love live music again. It's been lightly edited for clarity.

Reviews of Tame Impala concerts usually wax lyrical about blissed-out crowds dreamily singing along as their hands lazily drift through plumes of weed smoke. This is an accurate description. In the three times I've seen them, everybody there has been more interested in arm waving than foot stomping. The ambiance is laid back and joyful, and being part of the audience is like being part of a community. Being part of a Tame Impala audience gives you the sense that everybody is your friend.

Or that's what it's normally like—but not when I saw the band on January 31. That was the first gig I've been to since the Eagles of Death Metal massacre at the Bataclan.

I moved to Paris from Germany in early November 2015 to try and get a bit more independence. I'd been working as an au pair in Germany, and it was quite socially isolating. So I was excited to be in a position where I had complete control of my own schedule. Goodbye to the small sleepy towns I'd lived in before. I was moving to a mecca of culture. Every day would mean new places to go and new people to see. I would do things like go to concerts alone and meet new people.

On the night of Friday, November 13, that's exactly what I did. I was at the Eagles of Death Metal concert when members of ISIS opened fire on the audience. I was very lucky to get out quickly—injured in the crossfire but not seriously. I was ecstatic to be alive, and I was going back to Australia to recover. Living in Paris, I never expected that I'd deal with such a horrific thing.

In the following months, I felt anxious in crowds, especially in theaters. I even had a few anxiety attacks, but I found these were relatively easy to deal with because of the professional help I was receiving. I had the right coping strategies in place, and I was prepared for anxiety. What was much harder to deal with was the lack of trust I had developed in myself and in the people around me. Harder still was an incredible feeling of isolation. I felt like nobody understood me, or what I went through. I've had a big part of my innocence ripped from me in a such a way that my friends and peers can't understand. And I don't—I wouldn't—want them to.

Emma in Germany. Photo by Sam Gunner.

Fast forward a few months. I've come back to Paris. Eagles of Death Metal have re-scheduled their concert for February 16, and I plan to go. I'd bought tickets to see Tame Impala at Zénith some months back, so I decided to arrive early and see that concert too.

The contrast between my experiences as a Tame Impala audience member since the last time I saw them, at Paris's Rock en Seine festival, was stark. Instead of a sense of community, I felt completely alone. It frustrated me that so many people (over 6,000) could feel so joyously carefree while I felt so uneasy and afraid. I was jealous of their innocence.

The band opened with "Let It Happen," one of my favorite songs off its new album Currents. The song, like many others in the band's discography, deals with themes of isolation—"the notion growing inside / that all the others seem shallow / all this running around / bearing down on my shoulders."

It completely mirrored what I was feeling in that moment, but the urgency of the drums and synths was reflective of my anxiety, and it helped me to dance instead of running away like I wanted to.

A few songs into the set, I decided that being at the front of the audience was too much, so I headed to the balcony next to an exit. Walking with my back to the stage, past thousands of smiling faces, while Kevin Parker crooned the lines "try to be sane / try to pretend that none of it happened" was an incredibly intense emotional experience—probably the most connected I've felt to a piece of music in my life.

Then something happened. I was feeling so alone and broken, but my intense connection to the music, slowly and without my noticing, gave me back that sense of belonging that I'd missed so much. Standing there, watching the crowd sing along to lyrics like "I know that I'll be happier / and I know you will too / eventually," and dancing made me feel as if we were all a part of the same thing, even though I felt as if I wasn't occupying the same space as everybody else. It felt like these songs had been written for me, to help me deal with what I was going through. I spent nearly the whole night crying and dancing like a maniac—the people around me probably thought I was insane. It wasn't what most people would describe as a positive concert experience, but for me, it was incredibly cathartic and beautiful.

The overall tone of Tame Impala is joyous melancholy, knowing that things are really shit right now but also seeing that change is inevitable and that things will probably get better. This felt especially pertinent to me that night, but I think it's relevant for all people, no matter their past experiences.

Everybody in that room was connecting with those ideas, and through the music, we were all connecting with each other. That's the beautiful thing about music. It's an abstract expression of emotion, which means that everybody can connect to it emotionally. Music has been there for me when I needed it all through my life, and it's still there for me now. Music gives strength in the face of adversity, and fosters a sense of community in everybody—especially, I think, in those who need it the most.

So if I can urge anybody to do anything, it would be to get out there and support the bands you love, to go and find new bands to support and love, but most of all, to support and love each other.

Issues 1-4.

Print zine Little Joe is the queer cinema bible—and would no doubt revel in such a sacrilegious accolade. A sense of mischief runs through its pages, whether in the form of erotic stills from long-lost gay movies, the platforming of marginalized filmmakers, or the rebellious act of challenging cinema's heteronormative status quo.

Little Joe is the offspring of Sam Ashby, a London-based cinephile and the designer behind the memorable posters and artwork for recent film releases like Andrew Haigh's Weekend and Sean S. Baker's Tangerine.

In an effort to delve into Sam's motivations for starting Little Joe, we asked him about why it's necessary, or even just compelling, to continue to map and remap cinema's illustrious queer history. It's a potted history, and one that dips proverbially "in" and "out" of the closet—which is to say that, while some films are overtly LGBT, others have the potential to be read that way. Here, Sam shares some insight into how we can learn to read them.

VICE: When did you first have the idea for Little Joe?
Sam Ashby: I was watching Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey's Flesh with some friends one drunken summer night in 2008. I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen or heard of the film before. I'd wanted to create a magazine for some time, and here was the concept: a film publication that instilled a sense of discovery in the reader.

The unforgettable sight of "Little Joe" Dallesandro's bare ass as he lay face down in bed gave the magazine its name. It's a wink to those who get the reference and a point of discovery for those that don't. It also gives the publication a certain personality and defines its diminutive format.

What was your initial vision with the design, and how has it evolved over the years?
Little Joe started out as a fanzine, really, albeit one with academic articles! I wanted it to feel familiar, nostalgic, like an object of the past. At the time of producing issue one, I was photographing an old cathode-ray TV screen showing VHS versions of films like Cruising and American Gigolo, and I was playing around with layering found images and turning GIFs into print. Due to budget constraints, I printed the first issue in an edition of 500 copies on a Risograph machine with Ditto Press. It is mostly two color, and the print effect is wonderfully low-fi, further imbuing a VHS aura. The second issue was influenced by the 70s, in particular the book Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel.

As Little Joe became more popular and we began to print more issues, the Risograph became less cost-effective, so we made the difficult decision to start printing with a lithograph printer. This has partly led to the magazine's shift from fanzine towards the more "legitimate" journal, although I think it still sits somewhere in between.

You have quite the contributors list, including the academic Douglas Crimp, MoMA curator Stuart Comer, author Abdellah Taïa, and writer and activist Sarah Schulman. How do you go about soliciting such talented people?
When I started, I was amazed by how responsive people were to the project. I was just an eager fanboy asking nicely! The way in which the magazine has grown and gained such respect means that the whole process has become easier in a way because people understand what Little Joe is.

What do you think has been the biggest coup for you?
I think getting to work with Mike Kuchar, who is one of my all-time favorite artists and filmmakers, has been the most exciting for me. Johnny Ray Huston interviewed him for Issue 4, and for Issue 5, Kuchar designed a selection of lurid temporary tattoos that we have slipped inside each copy. I'm almost tempted to get one of them for real.

Little Joe is obviously a geeky place, but it's also a friendly place. For me, it's almost been a guidebook. How do you maintain the balance? Is it something you think about?
Absolutely. The project is about inspiring discovery, so that's why you'll rarely find articles about films that are very well known, or even, in some cases, accessible. Some of the films you will never be able to see because they are locked up in an archive somewhere. This is an interesting tension for me. In an age when people expect everything to be accessible online, I have created a magazine that is print-only and printed in a limited edition, which talks about films that are difficult to find. I want our readers to come to the magazine by chance or word of mouth. I want them to spend time with it and get involved in that process of discovering the films for themselves.

Little Joe isn't just about discussing the work of filmmakers whose work is queer on their own terms—sometimes you actively project queer readings onto movies.
There is a long and rich tradition of this, simply because we queers have always been underrepresented on film, meaning we work especially hard to read between the lines. I was amazed by how many people's formative sexual experiences were the result of watching films, and that these were almost entirely lacking in queer sexual content. Asking people their personal tales of filmic identification is so enjoyable to me that I do it for every issue under the section "Visual and Other Pleasures." We don't need queer content to identify, but rearrange "subtext" and what do you get?

Issue 5.

Good point, but do you think there's less of a need to search for this queerness on screen now because—for our generation, at least—it is more overtly present? In Issue 5, there's a piece on Boyd McDonald who conducted queer readings of "oldies" in his book Cruising the Movies. The writer William E. Jones, in looking back at McDonald's work, refers to a certain type of "cinephilia in which past generations indulged." Is that something Little Joe aims to preserve?
It's an interesting point. I think Little Joe is actively trying to preserve something that is absolutely being lost. But, that said, since the publication first launched in 2010, I've witnessed a growing interest in these subjects, and due to the explosion in online journalism, I've seen so many more people writing about queer film. Obviously we are watching films in an entirely different way than our queer elders did when they were our age—there are so many more films being made with a wider variety of subjects and representations today.

We don't need to search for queerness on screen anymore because, as you say, it's just more present, but that doesn't stop us searching for queerness that we actually identify with, and I think for me this is still something difficult to come by. Gay, lesbian, and trans folk are now ten-a-penny on TV and in film, which is obviously worth celebrating, but I still seek out the films, people, and artifacts that complicate or question, and these are frequently harder to come by. I hope Little Joe helps to point the way towards a messier, seamier, and altogether more interesting history of film from the margins.

Buy Little Joe here.

Whether it's in the morning eating toast, at work on my lunch break, or at night, when I'm unable to sleep and I spoon peanut butter from the jar like the disgusting mouth breather I am, you can guarantee I'll be hypnotized by what some 17-year-old who still lives at home and is studying for her college entrance exams has consumed that day. I spend too much time watching YouTube videos about vegan food. Like, every fucking day.

It was only a matter of time, then, before I stumbled across a dark secret. The holy grail of HCLF (High Carb Low Fat) and raw veganism: the fabled full eye color change.

The queen of this phenomenon is Fully Raw Kristina. Her video in which she explains how her eyes changed from brown to blue-green on a raw vegan diet has over 2 million views. She went to an iridologist, who explained that each part of your body and organs is reflected in your eye. It's like reflexology, where your body is mapped out on your foot, but with your eye. Using iridology, you can see if there are internal problems.

If you're immediately thinking that this strain of science sounds like bullshit, then let me share with you this video I found in a late night peanut butter wormhole, featuring elderly man Dr. Robert Morse, a revered natural doctor and iridologist, pointing at a little fleck on a picture of a woman's eye with a laser pen and talking about what it says about her uterus, suggesting she "get in there" and strengthen the vaginal wall. Yeah. This stuff gets deep.

Anyway, young pre-raw Kristina was only going to the bathroom once a week and was very constipated, eating a poor, high-fat diet. She says her iridologist told her: If her colon was all bunged up with toxins and other shit, that gunk was literally reflected in her eyes. After turning raw vegan: Boom! Gone was the clogging and the nastiness, and magically, her eyes became blue. Already this sounds a bit dodgy. Quackery alarm bells will no doubt start ringing for the cynical when she starts talking about seeing the soul through the eyes and raw food cleansing the soul, yadda yadda.

Kristina before

Kristina after. Crazy, hey!?

As odd as this is, she's not the only one talking about it. There are forums on most HCLF blogs about it and a few videos of vloggers discussing changes to their eye color with FAQs—what to expect and what not to expect. It's almost aspirational: a prize for those who commit their time and money into the extreme lifestyle. Physical, visible confirmation—besides the usual emphasis on weight loss—that what they are doing must be the good and right way to live life. There's definitely something problematic somewhere deep in there about how blue or light eyes are used to signify a clean "pure" body, while people of color question whether it can happen for them in comment sections.

ANYWAY. Let's get down to it. Is it a truckload of horse shit? A thorough Google search will tell you there is little proof that raw fruit and veg can change the color of your eyes. In fact, there's no evidence that suggests a change of eye color can ever be a good thing, but there is evidence that it can indicate something bad: Horner's syndrome and pigment dispersion syndrome, for example.

All five iridologists I asked said the idea sounded weird. Yorkshire-based iridologist John Andrews said: "Alas, it is a misconception that eyes change color with diet. It is a scientific impossibility." Yvonne Davis, an iridologist from London, was similarly skeptical but explained how the color change could potentially have happened. "Most iridologists believe the color of your eyes really can't and doesn't change that much. By the late teens to early 20s, your eyes are how they will last until you die. But until that point, they're still changing; depending on your age, it might just be this, rather than anything to do with your diet.

"Sometimes when people are older, in their 40s and 50s, if they've had a toxic lifestyle and then go total detox—we're talking for at least a year—their eyes might appear lighter. When you get older, you also might get some more pigmentation in them." I showed her the video of Fully Raw Kristina for reference. "If someone does detox or eats vegan, some colors and signs in your eyes can change—slightly. But it's very, very rare for eyes to go from brown to blue-hazel like this. I find it highly suspect."

Someone who disagrees vehemently with these eye experts, though, is Ondrej Matej, a vegan dietician and personal trainer. "Absolutely, diet can change your eye color. That's been known for a little while." He explained that his eyes had in fact changed on raw food. "They went from a very dark brown to a light brown with very slight green circle around it. You can tell eyes get lighter depending on what you eat." He started talking about iridology stuff, too. "You have little dots in your eyes, and each one is connected to organs in your body. They show the health of your organs. Healthy means clearer."

If this is legit, then should people—mostly girls, it should be said—talking about it online expect this physical change? "It's not like one day they're brown, then they're blue. It's a process that takes years," he said. Pushed harder, he admitted that not everyone would see the change. "It'll be down to genetics as well. It's a very difficult subject. It's not something that'd happen every time, and it might just be your eyes will become more open and clear."

Ondrej believes that people might be noticing this now because raw veganism or HCLF is a recent trend. Additionally, it takes a long time to see these results, so if it was real—as he insists it is—we would only really be finding out about it now. "People might not believe it now, but this could be something that might be recurring a lot more in the future." More and more people are going veggie or vegan and Rawtil4 and HCLF is attracting plenty of people for health or weight loss reasons. But the bottom line is: No one really seems to know if it's bollocks or not—although my bullshitometer is firmly swinging toward the iridologists' hot take on this one. Until a future where each one of us is gnawing on 20 bananas for breakfast and spiraled courgettes for lunch, maybe we will never know the truth.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

Despite irrefutable scientific evidence calling out the dangers of asbestos, 2 million tons of the carcinogen are exported every year to the developing world, where it's often handled with little to no regulation.

For this episode of VICE Reports, correspondent Milène Larsson traveled to the world's largest asbestos mine in the eponymous town of Asbest, Russia, to meet workers whose livelihoods revolve entirely around the dangerous mineral. Surprisingly, the risks associated with asbestos mining didn't seem to worry the inhabitants; in fact, asbestos is the city's pride, celebrated with monuments, songs, and even its own museum.

Larsson then visits Libby, Montana, another mining town almost on the other side of the globe, where the effects of asbestos exposure are undeniable: 400 townspeople have died from asbestos-related diseases, and many more are slowly choking to death. Why is the deadly industry of mining and selling asbestos still alive and well?

All images courtesy VICE News. Please note the men in these photographs are not PMC employees but others in the fight against Boko Haram.

Over 2015 and early 2016, there have been reports, ranging from staid to hyperbolic, about the Nigerian government's decision to hire private military companies (PMCs—or mercenaries to many) to bolster its armed forces' efforts to deal with Boko Haram. In spite of the ubiquitous if underexposed presence of PMCs in the world's conflict zones, where they regularly provide security and logistics for the US and British military, this recent action raised some uncomfortable questions about the future of conflict in the region and on a global scale. We spoke to Sean McFate, a former mercenary with firsthand experience of PMC operations in Liberia and Burundi, about why this deployment matters. McFate is a professor at the National Defense University and Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He is the author of Modern Mercenary : Private Armies and What They Mean for the World Order, and his first fictional title, Shadow War: A Tom Locke Novel, a thriller based on his real-life experiences in the private military industry, comes out in May.

VICE: The recent employment of mercenaries by Nigeria in its fight to subdue Boko Haram has attracted rather a lot of attention in some quarters. Given that PMCs are so prevalent in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, where they constituted up to 50 percent of all persons deployed by the US, why do you think people have gotten so excited about this?
Sean McFate: It's attracted attention for at least two key reasons. The first is that it happened, and there was really no public outrage, certainly not in the way that there would have been, say, 20 years ago. And that shows you what the US and Great Britain have done in terms of normalizing the use of PMCs. The second big factor is that Nigeria is West Africa's regional superpower. It has the most powerful military in the region, and for six years, it couldn't control Boko Haram. Then the government hired mercenaries to do it, and within weeks, those mercenaries did it. So that suggests that mercenaries are more powerful, or at least as powerful as, the most powerful military in West Africa.

Another thing that grabbed attention is that these guys had Mi-24 attack helicopters, which are like flying tanks. With extremely heavy weaponry, they were conducting offensive operations.

We don't really know a whole lot about the circumstances in which these mercenaries were hired. But it seems to me, though this is speculation, that it was possibly a slightly underhand move by Goodluck Jonathan, the outgoing president, in a re-election bid—to show military strength—and that the mercenaries were not initially meant to be taking as big a combat role as they did.

This was a more full-blooded mercenary operation than the sort that we are used to of late.
These were real, hardcore mercenaries. This was very different from the ways PMCs were used by the coalition in Iraq, say, where they did convoy protection, defense of buildings or people. This was pure offense, and they did a great job. Well... an effective job, at least.

Related: Watch 'The War Against Boko Haram'

That qualification you make there, can you expand on it? They were effective. But there's a sense that—due to the very nature of PMCs and this sort of engagement—this will be far from a long-term solution to the region's problems.
They were effective operationally, but I think there are a lot of bigger strategic questions at play within Nigeria.

The big question, of course, is how do you defeat Boko Haram? All that these PMCs did was effectively push them into neighboring countries. And now the group will push back. Is it a long-term solution? Probably not.

The second question is, what does it mean, more generally, that we have a rising industry of mercenaries around the world? This is not an industry restricted to employment by the US, the UK, or European countries operating in Iraq or Afghanistan. We are seeing their increasing use elsewhere—for example, at present in Yemen, where South American, ex-special forces mercenaries are being used. It's going global. The Nigeria case marks a bigger trend.

What do you get when you have industries invested in conflict going to the most conflict prone regions in the world? For me, this fundamentally means you are going to get a lot more war in the future.

What are the advantages for these nations in using PMCs in this way? As you already mentioned, their combat effectiveness, hardware, and training are clearly attractive in places where the national armed forces are less professional. But what else do they offer employers?
There are tons of advantages. Firstly, PMCs are generally cheaper than maintaining a standing army. Second, you don't have to deal with corrupt, politically ambitious officers. The third is that if you are a rich, small country that wants to participate in war but doesn't have the citizens who want to serve in the military, PMCs are a good option. UAE is a country like that—small and rich—and it wants to participate in the current war alongside Saudi Arabia. But its citizens aren't interested in bleeding, so the country hires the job out. There are a lot of "advantages," quote unquote. A lot of them are dubious or raise concerns, but they certainly offer short-term advantages.

In the case of Nigeria, how big of an issue do you think was posed by the toxic history of PMC use in Africa? Specifically the fact that some of those mercenaries hired to fight in Nigeria appear to have been former apartheid-era South African military? Does that legacy pose particular problems for PMCs in the region?
I think the big issue for people is that what happened in Nigeria smells an awful lot like Executive Outcomes (EO), a South Africa-based PMC which was largely formed of former South African special forces, and which carried out military campaigns in Africa in the early 90s. In the private military industry, EO represents both an apogee and nadir of the industry's potential in modern times. It was the most combat effective mercenary corporation in recent history—much more so than Blackwater, et al—but also demonstrates the power of private military companies. EO has an "alumnae" network in Africa that remains strong today. Many of the mercenaries hired by Nigeria in 2015 came from this network. And there are all sorts of concerns about the legacy of EO, and yes, I think the ghost of EO was resurrected with Nigeria's decision here. There are laws against mercenaries in South Africa, because of EO, and because the government of South Africa put out a very strong dictum, in effect saying that "these are mercenaries, and if they show up in South Africa, we will arrest them on the spot." But outside South Africa, people pretty much shrugged their shoulders at this; maybe they were thinking, Wow. We could use a group like this to go after al Shabab or ISIS or something. I am sure people had those conversations, but of course, I don't know that for a fact.

Bearing in mind South Africa's specific laws on this matter, does this appear to have been an above-board example of PMC use? Was this deployment any murkier than your average PMC deal?
There's no international law banning the use of these sorts of private soldiers. It's more that it contravenes an international norm, but that norm is winding down. This example is a little different, again, because of the PMC's use in an offensive setting, as a combat power in this case. Now, to be fair, in modern warfare, the difference between offense and defense can be rather gray and nuanced. Blackwater did a lot of offensive-type stuff. What makes this so interesting is that Nigeria hired these guys with their own private armored helicopter, and I'm not talking about a Blackwater-style helicopter with men with machine guns in the exits; these Mi-24s are Russian military standard gear, armed with missiles and so on. It's a private air force. It's the degree and the intensity of this event that's amazing. It's no longer PMCs being hired to defend convoys and so on. And of course, again, it's the fact that the Nigerian military couldn't deal with Boko Haram. What South Africa is to southern Africa, Nigeria is to West Africa. It says a lot that mercenaries are more powerful than the army there.

And that's where this fear of PMCs in the region, linked to EO's past, comes into play—mercenaries are not a threat to the UK, or to the US, but they could be a threat to other countries that are weak. Could these mercenaries stage a coup? I don't know. But if they can take care of Boko Haram, it's a pertinent question.

The PMCs of the 2000s were at pains to make it look like that era was behind us. It was all "we are good guys, we are helping the US army," or the marines, or what have you. And this deployment is interesting because it shows that the industry is actually not over the Executive Outcomes stage, at all.

So you think this could hail a return of the EO model for PMCs?
I think that as the US and others scale back the lucrative contracts that have been in place in Iraq or Afghanistan for years, the market is diversifying. You have countries like UAE, Nigeria, hiring these guys, and it's a case of supply and demand. My prediction is that we will see more of this, not necessarily PMCs taking over countries, but more of this sort of offensive action by PMCs hired to do the jobs we these days associate with state militaries.

Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

Five years and the best part of 58 million units sold since its February 2011 launch, Nintendo's 3DS is the only handheld games console you need in your chunky backpack, subversive print-tote, or remarkably roomy coat pocket in 2016. Its only "console-proper" rival, the PlayStation Vita, is as good as dead, with Sony refusing to commit first-party resources to developing new titles for its commercially flat-lining portable. Following the 154 million sales of the DS range before Nintendo's twin-screen system took on the (autostereoscopic) third dimension, the 3DS's market dominance is absolute. And the console has completely changed my relationship with video games since I got one to call my own. Not that its early reception was entirely positive.

Writing on IGN just a couple of months on from its stateside release in March 2011, Audrey Drake remarked that her 3DS had been "collecting dust for weeks," highlighting a lack of launch window third-party titles, adding: "I'm now an extremely dissatisfied customer." Sales were slow, and Nintendo laid the blame for the console's sluggish commercial performance on a lack of high-profile software. With the company losing money to the tune of billions of yen, a price cut had to come—and when it did, it was dramatic. In the UK, the 3DS's initial price of £229.99 just months after its launch. It was a gamble for Nintendo, but one that paid off—it knew that some big-hitters were on the horizon, games that could push the 3DS into profitability.

In November 2011, Super Mario 3D Land began to change the fortunes of the 3DS, ultimately selling over 10 million copies. A month later came Mario Kart 7, which has (to date) beaten that figure by over 2.5 million. Pokémon series titles in 2013 and 2014, a handful of Monster Hunters, "life simulators" Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and Tomodachi Life, and more Mario Bros. entries have all racked up sales figures in the multi-millions. The rest is history, save a few headaches. The 3DS is more than just a success; it's another Nintendo phenomenon to rank up there with the handheld that started them all, the Game Boy. Not that Nintendo's debut portable of 1989 was the first on-the-go system—that was Milton Bradley's Microvision, released in 1979. But ask anyone between the ages of, say, 25 to 40 where his or her mobile gaming experiences began, and he or she will almost certainly answer the Game Boy. (With DS being the most likely response of anyone younger.)

A range of Game Boy models—I eventually owned (and still do) the clear version of what you see here in green, front left (photo via Wikipedia)

I wasn't allowed to have a Game Boy as a kid. I'd pore over pictures of the whitish-gray machine, with its monochromatic LCD screen, recognizably NES-like face controls, and glowing red power indicator. I'd go to bed with the Argos catalog, dreaming of what it'd be like to own one, with a copy of the always-bundled Tetris and whatever else I could grab from the store in question—some Bugs Bunny platformer, Alleyway, and the first Super Mario Land. Despite my repeated requests in the run up to several Christmases and birthdays, my parents never relented.

Maybe today I can see their point of it "just being a toy," something I'd quickly grow out of—it was a plaything, a time-killer/filler, whereas the family Amiga did so much more (not that we ever used it for homework). Years later, in the late-1990s, my then-girlfriend got a summer job at Nintendo, and one day brought me home a Game Boy Pocket—the clear model—with a couple of games: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (amazing) and Disney's Mulan (I'm not sure I ever played more than five minutes of it). I quickly picked up Tetris, Tennis, Pokémon Blue, and a couple more cartridges, including the impossibly difficult Star Wars.But Zelda aside, few held my attention. I had grown out of these simple games—that, and as an 18-year-old, many more ways to fill my evenings had just opened up to me.

Handheld gaming didn't pique my interest again for 15 years and change. I'd been through a degree and a publishing job in London, worked for well over a decade in music journalism and begun writing about games as a paid gig (I know, right?) before an email from Nintendo caught my attention. Super Smash Bros. was being relaunched for the company's contemporary consoles, the Wii U and 3DS. I'd played 2001's Melee on the GameCube, liked it, and was keen to check this new version out. Small problem: It was coming out first for the 3DS, and I didn't have one. No problem, as it turned out—Nintendo would loan me a 3DS XL (the bigger-screened model) and a copy of the game. A few days later, sure enough, the mailman delivered me a little bundle of joy. I got more than stuck in—every commute was a chance to face a new challenger, and I worked hard on unlocking every character, from EarthBound's Ness to Falco from the Star Fox franchise to Mr. Game & Watch. Link and Kirby became my main guys, and while I'm certainly not proficient enough at the new Smash to take on the pros, I reached a personally satisfying level. Eventually, Nintendo needed the 3DS and game back. I was close to inconsolable (no pun intended), but another games writer came to my aid.

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Related: Watch VICE's film on the world of competitive gaming, eSports

I bought a second-hand 3DS XL from a gentleman called Dom. It had a few knocks, nicks, and scratches on it—no big deal. So if you see a slightly battered 3DS covered in VICE and Ninja Tune stickers on a train anytime soon, take a peek around it, and you'll probably find me. It's perhaps the greatest gaming investment I've made in recent years, and I absolutely include the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in that snap assessment. I adore my 3DS, and to repeat a point you might have missed earlier: It completely has changed the way I relate to video games, how they impact my life, and the amount of time I even get to spend with them.

You might think that covering games full time means that I play a lot of them. Wrong. Covering games full time means spending hour upon hour chasing stories and commissioning articles; subbing, publishing and promoting content; liaising with other in-house departments about potential new projects; handling everyday admin (people have to get paid); responding to events and announcements that demand instant coverage; and generally keeping on top of an inbox that has more pitches in it right now than an entire Major League Baseball season. So when it comes to getting hands-on with the "big" console releases of any given year, most of the time I'm in for five, six hours, tops. Fallout 4? Barely four. Metal Gear Solid V? Nine. I finished The Witcher 3 and its Hearts of Stone DLC, but that is the exception to the rule. Bloodborne? I'm still on the wrong side of Father Gascoigne.

But I've sunk a solid 12 hours, at least, into The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, and I'm still some way short of finishing 2013's fantastic 3DS RPG. It's a beautiful game, portable but so far from being a compressed take on home-console cousins. And I think that's why, for me, the 3DS has become so essential among my gaming hardware—its games are only rarely "pocket-sized editions" of others you'll have played on more-powerful systems. A Link Between Worlds is a bespoke production that is both lovingly crafted with nostalgia for the SNES's A Link to the Past and the Game Boy's Link's Awakening, and it's built to perfectly fit the specifications of the 3DS. It makes great use of the 3D, for one thing, with dungeons playing out across a number of simultaneously visible levels, and Link's wall-merging ability always looking exquisite. The same is true of Super Mario 3D Land, which uses the system's stereoscopic top screen to better telegraph routes through stages. Neither of these games would work so sweetly on any other platform.

Promotional art for 'The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds'

Which is why it's slightly saddening to see Square Enix's brand-new Final Fantasy Explorers—an engaging take on Capcom's Monster Hunter series, albeit simplified and featuring famous Final Fantasy characters—completely ignore the graphical potential of the 3DS. While every game on the handheld can conceivably be played in 2D, Explorers is only ever that way, no matter how far you push the side-mounted 3D slider. That doesn't particularly detract from what is an enjoyable romp through FF-series sights and sounds (so far, at least—my blue-haired Gary is only six or so hours into her adventuring), but Explorers isn't a game that feels unique to the 3DS. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, a ghost-busting blast through a series of haunted houses, absolutely does; likewise, the sublime Mario Golf: World Tour, a sunshine-kissed sports sim, never fails to brighten my day. The 3D is a vital gameplay ingredient of the terrific puzzler Pushmo (aka Pullblox), and it makes N64-era Zelda titles Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask look better than they ever have.

And it's accessibility to older games really makes the 3DS such an indispensable companion for me on my travels. I've armed mine with a 16GB memory card, onto which I can load any number of old-school NES and Game Boy titles, via Nintendo's digital eShop. So whereas the Game Boy was a toy, the 3DS is a window on the very history of gaming culture. I can use it to play NESsentials like Super Mario Bros. 3, the original Castlevania and Metroid, and Punch-Out!!, as well as GB winners like Kirby's Dream Land and Super Mario Land 2 (both in black and white, of course). And it's not just Nintendo's past that's preserved here—a number of releases for Sega's Game Gear are on the eShop, while Japanese developer M2's series of Sega titles "remastered" for the 3DS is regularly delivering the definitive versions of childhood favorites.

"I think all of these classic Sega titles have much to offer, in terms of evergreen gameplay appeal," M2 president Naoki Horii told me in 2015. And having played through the 3DS updates of Streets of Rage 2, Out Run, Fantasy Zone, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, each of which add new gameplay modes to familiar experiences, I can honestly say that these are the best these games have ever been.

'Chrono Trigger' is playable on the DS, which means you can play it on the 3DS, and you really should

The 3DS's backwards compatibility with DS game cards (all 2,000-plus of them) is another massive part of the handheld's appeal. In recent months, I've laughed myself sideways while simultaneously saving a high-school girl's relationship in the awesome rhythm-action game Elite Beat Agents; built a drug empire capable of impressing real-life dealers in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars; and shat my pants playing Aliens Infestation, a.k.a. the one Gearbox-made Aliens-series game you should buy, and not the stinking Colonial Marines. And then there's Chrono Trigger. Perhaps my favorite SNES RPG, narrowly edging out Secret of Mana and A Link to the Past (I was never much into Final Fantasy back then, sorry), the time-traveling, world-saving Chrono Trigger was ported to the DS in 2008, and to have access to it again, anytime I like, is just glorious. Not that I've been able to get past the sodding Golem Twins on this run. Forgot my element-absorbing armor, didn't I.

The author's somewhat battered 3DS beside his Pocket-edition Game Boy

And even when it's faced with a genre of game that it maybe shouldn't be suited for, like a frame-precise fighter, the 3DS impresses. I actually prefer the portable Super Smash Bros. to its crisper-of-visuals Wii U relative, and Super Street Fighter IV on the handheld, a 3DS launch title in Japan, holds up well against the tournament-play console versions. VICE contributor Andi Hamilton is something of a Street Fighter authority and says of the 3DS port of IV: "It's a surprisingly fully featured version of Super, and if you're a pad player, you can actually use it as a decent practice tool for combos and execution." Not that French Street Fighter pro-player Luffy swears by it—the last time I saw him with his 3DS out, during downtime at a London tournament, he was taking on his girlfriend at Smash.

In conclusion, the 3DS is, for my money—and I've spent plenty of it on it—the best handheld console ever made. I appreciate that there's a lot of love for the Vita, and that the Game Boy will always be in the hearts of gamers of a certain vintage. I respect, too, those who fought so valiantly in the battery wars of the 1990s but ultimately succumbed to plugging into the wall: The Game Gear and Atari Lynx had their fans. And, yes, Sony sold a certifiable shitload of PSPs, despite those awful UMDs. But the 3DS isn't just a portable for the present—it's a platform for gaming across the ages, and better yet, a means to play (and replay) so many beloved titles from more than three decades of gaming history while on the move. Which is why it's so perfect for me. On the train, at a station, in an airport: I'm rarely bothered by spread sheets, meeting schedules, or inbox woes. I can just get my head down and press on with playing. It's a feeling of freedom, really, that I get whenever I switch on my 3DS—and wherever the game in question takes me, I'm almost always happy to be there.

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It's a pallid November afternoon somewhere off the M40 highway. You spent last night in a Premier Inn just outside Maidstone, UK. Now, you're standing under hot lights in a clammy studio, just desperately trying to be charming. You're surrounded by 30 women from all walks of life, all corners of the United Kingdom, and not a single one of them will go on a date with you.

Thirty lights once dazzling have now faded to black. Celine Dion's "All By Myself" starts blaring out of the studio speakers, and the women, the studio audience, and the 3 million or so people watching at home wave goodbye to you, the man who couldn't find love in a room full of people looking for it. Blackout.

"That was the last thing I ever expected to happen," says Ola. He's a 30-year-old fitness coach, who made a brief appearance on this season's Take Me Out, Britain's biggest dating show. "My friends had said, 'What will you do if you get a blackout?' and I'd been like, 'Oh come on, that's not gonna happen.' That sounds big-headed, but I don't think I got a fair round to be honest."

Ola seems like a nice guy. On the show, he didn't talk that much, focusing instead on demonstrating his unworldly upper body strength (see the video above). For whatever reason, the female contestants just weren't interested. "I wasn't annoyed, I was just shocked. I took it OK, like it's not the end of the world. I just wish I'd known because then I could have planned a way to style it out."

Take Me Out has, in a relatively short time, become a TV institution: a big family-friendly dating gameshow that seems almost from another era, with it's cheesy catchphrases and 1970s gender politics. If you are simply so middle-class that you haven't watched ITV in a decade, then here's how it works. Thirty women, dressed head to toe in River Island dresses you sense still have the labels on, stand behind lit-up podiums while some preening dude tries to peacock for them. If they're into him, they leave their light on; if not they switch it off. At the end, the man picks which of the women with their lights still on he finds most palatable and turns the lights of the unappealing contestants off. Blackouts like Ola's, where none of the thirty women are up for a date, are rare. More often, they find a match and are sent to the mystical isle of "Fernando's" for a date.

It seems like a simple enough process, but it takes months of planning. Long before host Paddy McGuinness threatens to "bring on the girls," a team of overworked researchers doggedly attempt to find women who are up for appearing.

Most of the women appear on the show after sending in applications, but some have to be found through scouting. "I don't want to generalize, but they get a lot of the same girl applying: false eyelashes and acrylic nails," says Becca, a runner on the 2012 series. "So they give a quota of girls they need to fill. They'd look at past seasons and be like, 'Right—we need a tattooed Burlesque dancer,' or like, 'We need an old woman.'"

It's a similar story with the men. While the number of applications is high, the show's researchers still spend a lot of time persuading people to go on the show unsolicited. Para-athlete Tony Mills was successfully approached to go on last years Take Me Out via social media. "I think they just wanted to see a para-athlete in there and see how the girls would react to me missing a limb," he says. "Apparently, they stalked me the year before, but they saw that I was in a relationship. I think once they realized I was single, they pounced."

Para-athlete Tony Mills and Paddy. Photo via ITV

When Becca needed specific-looking women, she would spend whole days trawling through a site called Star Now, a £4.99 Spotlight. I'd spend hours on that. It was a very strange time of life."

Once the show had been cast, Becca's job was to bring the girls from the hotel down the road to the studio each day, and she helped the lucky ones pack a miniature suitcase for "Fernando's" (on her series, it was in Tenerife). She became more like an in-house counsellor, and she got disciplined a couple of times for being overly involved with the contestants. "They told me I was interfering with their emotional lives too much. This one woman who had kids used to say, 'I can't handle this'—she was much older than the others, and she'd had a couple of shows where she put herself on the line and then got turned down. I think she just thought: I'm a mom, what am I doing here?She was really upset, so whenever I saw her, I'd just whisper, 'Go home! Get out—they can't keep you here.' She did actually leave half way through the series."

While the boys come and go, the girls stay on the show until they are picked, so they can end up staying in the hotel together for up to four weeks. Unsurprisingly, things sometimes get a bit heated. "There were fights, and there were lots of tears. Girls would get amazingly stressed about getting their lights turned out. What I found amazing is that people who'd obviously been quite unlucky in love would still choose to go on. If your self-esteem is already quite low, I always thought that was a strange thing to want to do," says Becca.

Not everyone was looking for love. One male contestant, Ben, went on the show to promote veganism, and he actually consulted with PETA about his lines on the show. The charity was actually responsible for the gem, "One date with me and I'll be the only piece of meat you want."

Most of the girls I speak to have the same explanation for how they ended up on the show. What starts as a joke progresses into a load of application forms, phone calls, and screen tests. With the completion of each stage comes the, "Well I might as well see it through" attitude. Until one day you're in a cab to Maidstone.

"I just didn't think I was the right kind of person," explains Lotte, a 24-year-old editorial assistant. "I applied, sort of for a laugh, but it ended up becoming reality."

When the realization hit that she'd be joining in week three, Lotte made a game plan and stuck to it. "By the first Monday, I was like, I want to fucking go to Fernando's. I don't care what happens, I am going. You get told that you need to leave your light on for an average of five times before you get picked. If there is a guy you fancy and you leave your light on, you can hope, but you probably won't get picked. There are 30 other girls, and it's all just completely shallow. If Paddy doesn't come over to you then you're automatically less memorable. So I started to think, OK shit, I need to keep my light on a bit more; I need to up these odds. I left my light on about five times, and then voila—I got the date."

Dating in 2016 can be such a colossal head fuck, and from the contestant testimonials, it seemed like Take Me Out was no less intimidating than the real-life version of trying to find a mate. In fact, in the six years the show has been on the air, there have only been a handful of success stories. In 2014, Adele from the original 30 girls got engaged to Dave, a guy she'd met on the show two years earlier. Series five's Gemma and Gavin recently had their first child.

The Cardiff para–athlete I spoke to, Tony, is still on-and-off dating a girl he met on the series. "We're still trying to make it work, but I'll be honest, its not easy." They didn't cross paths until after his episode aired, and she started messaging him—both contestants were part of that season's contestants' Facebook group, which is apparently quite a common launchpad for a blossoming Take Me Out relationship after the show has finished. "People know what they're doing when they put everyone together in a Facebook group," Tony assured me.

In fact, finding love in Fernando's seems to be basically impossible. Lotte was given a 5 AM call time and told to wear a bikini, shorts, and trainers. "They give nothing away," she explained. "You don't know if you're going to be doing water sports, hiking, horse riding, or nothing at all. That's the worst, not knowing." It turned out she would be Bob-diving with Ben, her amateur magician and incredibly eager date.

Lotte knew so little about her date that before he arrived, she admits she thought he was of Indian heritage. "I have really bad eyesight, but I didn't want to wear my glasses on the show. I didn't see him properly till he came over to me, and by then I was so distracted by doing the whole, 'Don't you dare turn my fucking light off' thing, that I didn't really pay attention to what was going on." After the show, they keep the pair totally separate until they're on the date, so there's really no time to get properly acquainted.

He kept trying to hold her hand, "It was kind of creepy. He kept rubbing his thumb on me. I realized then that he probably wasn't the sort of guy I thought he was." Luckily for Lotte, she didn't actually have to interact with him until they were on camera. "We were chatting, and then we actually got told to shut up, which for me was ideal because I was sitting in a boat in my bikini thinking: This is great, I don't have to talk to this weirdo."

It's not hard to draw a connection between Take Me Out's lights on and off conceit and Tinder's swipe-left or swipe-right way of matching potential partners. But the show itself isn't much of a dating service. Maybe a few of the contestants are looking for love, but people are mostly searching for fame, a free holiday, or trying to promote veganism.

"The producers kind of said, 'Don't sit here waiting for the man of your dreams because at the end of the day, it's just a game show,'" Lotte says. "I met a few girls who were looking for love, but I didn't really understand why anyone would go on national TV to find a genuine relationship."

Kendrick Lamar onstage at the 58th Grammy Awards on February, 16, 2016, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images for NARAS

Kendrick Lamar swept the Grammys in rap last night and also provided the most incendiary moment of the event, stealing the show with a prison chain-gang medley of "The Blacker the Berry" and "Alright" dedicated to Trayvon Martin. But the critically exalted To Pimp a Butterfly didn't take the biggest golden gramophone of the night, losing out to Taylor Swift's 1989 for album of the year. We're now in for a week's worth of think pieces and hot takes telling us why this shouldn't have happened and unpacking what it really means—for the Grammys, for the music industry, and for American culture as a whole.

Ultimately, the Recording Academy's recognition of Lamar's album—despite the fact that it lost out to Swift's—was both a departure from its historically vanilla style of artist selection and yet another affirmation of it. Much like Crash at the 2006 Oscars, To Pimp a Butterfly's inclusion in the Grammys provided a convenient way for a notoriously conservative organization to project an image of progressiveness by celebrating a work of art that addresses race issues while also maintaining the status quo.

This isn't to say To Pimp a Butterfly and Crash are artistically on the same plateau. The former—far and away 2015's most lauded album—is an examination of the African-American experience as told by someone who's lived it. The latter, the millennium's most hated best picture winner thus far, is proselytizing disguised as a movie. Characters and plot exist only in service of its ham-fisted message: Every problem can be solved by admitting racism is bad. It's about "love and about tolerance and about truth," according to producer Cathy Schulman's acceptance speech. The movie's message is a comforting solution for the privileged who have only a cursory understanding of racism. It's naiveté for everyone else.

Crash was the worst best picture nominee in that 2006 class—literally any of the competing four ( Brokeback Mountain; Capote; Good Night, and Good Luck ; and Munich) would've been more convincing choices. To Pimp a Butterfly, on the other hand, would've won album of the year if we were judging strictly by critical acclaim; it holds a 96 on Metacritic, which is 11 points higher than Chris Stapleton's Traveller (not to mention it is Metacritic's highest rated hip-hop album ever). You can also objectively say that Lamar's sophomore album is the most ambitious of its class. It's the rare major-label record that blatantly stretches through centuries of black culture to make a radical statement. You might even say it's deserving.

But what do we talk about when we talk about "deserving" at an award ceremony? For Lamar, deserve didn't refer only to TPAB, but also to 2014, the year the Grammys trolled hip-hop. Juicy J's first Grammy performance was a throwaway guest verse for Katy Perry; some malfeasance forced Lamar to perform "m.A.A.d city" with the bland Imagine Dragons; and Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's The Heist beat good kid, m.A.A.d. city for best rap album. With a nominee class that included Yeezus, Jay Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail, and Drake's Nothing Was the Same, The Heist was the weakest possible choice. Lamar made a compelling, Compton-bred bildungsroman only to lose to a bad rap album, which chief source of acclaim came from its perceived social awareness. There's nothing revelatory about the opening lines, "When I was in the third grade / I thought that I was gay," in " Same Love." But it was a song addressing homosexuality in a traditionally homophobic genre—so the Grammy's made a show out of it.

This year's 11 nominations and five victories validate Lamar, who's undeniably evolved as an artist and is now at the top of his game. The victories also validate the Recording Academy, which remains Eurocentric (there have been only three black album of the year winners in the past 15 years). Even though the Grammys have acknowledged Lamar's work, its values remain unchanged. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below are the only two hip-hop albums to win album of the year. Neither quite centers itself on hip-hop: Miseducation is at least halfway informed by soul, and Andre 3000 was way more interested in psychedelia for The Love Below.

An album of the year win would've been huge for Lamar—and, by extension, hip-hop. But the Recording Academy still remains a conservative institution, idolizing a rigid aesthetic as its cultural cachet rests largely on its status as a legacy brand. To Pimp a Butterfly is superior to Crash, but both are linked in how they tiptoe the Academy and Recording Academy's classicism (for the Oscars, predominantly white, self-serious dramas) while allowing the organizations to exist under a progressive guise.

The difference, of course, is that Crash won best picture. To Pimp a Butterfly lost to 1989, the most vanilla of the album of the year nominees. The organizers let Lamar make his pro-black statement in his live performance. But their own statement was clear when Swift took the stage to receive her award.

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Photo via Flickr user kov-A-c

On Sunday, a New York-bound Virgin Airways flight returned to Heathrow Airport after a laser beam was shined into the cockpit. The laser reportedly affected the pilot to such a degree that he had to be met by ambulance staff but not hospitalized. So that's good. The British Airline Pilots Association was quick to comment on the incident, calling for the British government to classify lasers as "offensive weapons" in order to prevent such incidents from ever happening again.

However, if you went on eBay right now and searched for a "5mW laser," hundreds of results would appear, with prices as low as $5. If you were in the mood to attack an airplane from the ground—and, by the way, we are not saying you in any way should—these are the doozies you would use. Easy access means that this damage isn't being caused by a group of evil masterminds but by bored teenagers pointing key rings at planes for fun.

Between 2009 and June of 2015, 8,998 laser incidents across the country were reported to the UK Civil Aviation Authority, with nearly 200 incidents of laser targeting reported in the US each day in 2015.

Coincidentally, on the same day as the Virgin Airways laser attack, the International Air Transport Association released a report stating that 2015 was an "extraordinarily safe year" for air travel, with the global jet accident rate equivalent to just one major accident for every 3.1 million flights.

This begs the question: Is all this worrying about lasers for nothing? Is air travel safer than it's ever been, or will lasers soon cause us all to regularly screech out of the sky? I asked Paul E. Eden, aerospace expert and author of numerous books on military and civilian aircraft, to debunk a few flying myths.

VICE: What happens when a laser beam hits an airplane?
Paul E. Eden: With the laser light, by the time it gets to the airplane, it's spread quite widely. This isn't just a pinprick of light shining in their eye; this is a light that floods the cockpit. Because the windscreen panels are made of layers of material, the light defuses, and what you can get is a whole panel that turns the color of the laser light. You can't see though it at all—even if it's just for a couple of seconds.

Oh, so these laser beams can actually be pretty dangerous then?
Luckily, there hasn't been a case of permanent damage to a pilot's eyes yet, but to a pilot, eyes and ears are everything—you can't fly without them. Then there are the actual hazards of flying if you are blinded, even for a couple of seconds—the pilot will be lost and could hit something.

How is the threat of lasers different from other hazards pilots face?
Pilots naturally train for the unexpected; they look around the cockpit all the time. They will literally lean forward in their seat to look for potential hazards. So as soon as something unusual happens, like a laser shining at them, they naturally look towards it. And this is what you absolutely shouldn't do, because it will blind you. So a pilot's training instinctively causes them to do the one thing they shouldn't do in this instance. Pilots have to be able to recognize that threat and work in a way that's alien to them to avoid it.

If there haven't been any accidents yet, should passengers be concerned with the threat of lasers, or of consumer-level drones causing planes to crash?
Personally, I would be more concerned with choosing a safe airline to fly with rather than being concerned by the risks of a laser shining at the airplane. If you are flying in the UK or North America and most of Europe, really, you haven't got any concerns with safety. People like to say, 'Ah, maybe flying with EasyJet or Ryan Air is more of a risk because they are cheap,' but the maintenance is fabulous; all the planes are maintained so well, and the crews are trained so highly, so it's judging about where you fly and whom you are flying with.

So some countries have safer aviation systems than others?
If you look at the statistics for where the most airplane accidents happen, it's clear. Airlines in countries such as Russia, and then parts of Asia and Africa, are more prone to accidents. It really all comes down to the oversight; sometimes there aren't necessarily the government organizations ensuring that the standards are kept and that training is done to standard. Also, you sometimes don't get the same ethos within the industry; you don't get the same experience levels in other parts of the world. In the UK, a lot of the pilots come from the RAF, with brilliant knowledge and expertise. But for an airline in other countries, when something does go wrong, often people don't have that background to decide what's best to do.

So, really, we shouldn't worry about lasers?
Lasers are less of a threat to airplanes, as they are only in contact in take off and landing, and usually at that time you don't have anything in front of you. But when you start thinking about police or ambulance helicopters, which have also been targeted, that's difficult, because they are flying much lower down and are slow moving. If you think of a police helicopter over London, all those tower cranes and chimneys, a pilot wouldn't have to make much of an error before they are down in the high stuff. It is a worry—it really is.

Apart from lasers, what are the main hazards pilots are looking out for?
Typically, if there are other airplanes that have deviated from their flight path. Often that would be a light aircraft, someone who has gone out flying with their friend. Another thing that pilots are constantly aware of is birds, as they can do a lot of damage to an airplane very quickly.

From flying into the engine?
Yes. They can damage the engine but other parts of the airplane as well. It would be unlikely for birds to bring down an airliner, but they could damage it enough for it to have to return to where it had just taken off from. In very rare cases, a bird will actually make a hole in an airplane.

What's the biggest hazard to an airplane?
Sorry to be boring, but it's weather. Wind shear, for example, is probably the biggest risk. Imagine you were leaning left on someone with all your weight and suddenly they push you right; that's what windshear is: a completely unexpected push in the opposite direction to where you think you were going. But this is something airlines are getting to grips with now because there are new systems in place where pilots can be forewarned.

How do pilots prepare against these hazards?
Through very advanced simulated training. Typically a pilot will be in the mock cockpit with all the systems that would be in the real airplane, and they will have moving visuals around them. Pilots don't just use simulator tests in their training, but they have to go regularly throughout their career to practice emergency procedures. The tests will run a program of emergencies but also insert things they weren't expecting, like failing an engine. The pilots are always being tested to extremes they will probably never encounter.

What about bombs—should people actually worry about them?
Well, bombs are quite different because they come from people causing damage with intent. Airplanes are built to standards where they are far stronger than they need to be to fly safely. But you can't make an airplane bomb-proof. Ultimately, it comes down to stopping those bombs getting on the plane in the first place.

So, overall, is flying becoming more or less dangerous?
I don't think flying has been dangerous since the 1940s. Of course, there are always risks involved, but I think those risks reduce all the time. Every new airliner is safer than the one that came before. Also, the industry is very inward-looking at any mishaps it has had, always questioning why it was that something went wrong and trying to find a way to fix it. For example, if a car crash happens on the M1 because a driver has pulled into a lane without signaling, and then if all car drivers , things naturally become a lot safer.

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When a handwritten list was discovered in the bedroom of one of three Bethnal Green schoolgirls who fled to join Islamic State in Syria last February, items included a $70 epilator, a $17 bra, and a pair of new underwear. The scribbles told us something. "It's stuff a teenage girl would pack when she's going away with a girlfriend to Ibiza for the weekend," says comedian Shazia Mirza. "Yet you're going to join a sixth century, barbaric terrorist organization. It's an absolute fantasy."

When the fantasy became global news, Shazia was on a sofa in New York with a friend watching pictures of these young girls flash up on CNN. What she saw "horrified" her: "I really felt like I had something to say about this." Within months, she'd written all the material for her show, The Kardashians Made Me Do It—a comedy gig about ISIS and jihadi brides, about censorship and fear. It is now touring the UK.

Shazia was born in Birmingham, England, but now she "doesn't live there any more because she's doing well" (according to her own website). She made her name on the comedy circuit in 2001, when, after 9/11, she'd open her shows with the line: "My name's Shazia Mirza—at least that's what it says on my pilot's license." Six years later, she presented a BBC Three documentary that was similarly brazen. Its title? F*** Off, I'm a Hairy Woman. We caught up with her to ask about the merits of confronting ISIS with satire.

Shazia Mirza. Photo via Wikimedia

VICE: Why did you decide to make a comedy show about young women joining the Islamic State?
Shazia Mirza: I find it very difficult these days to have an opinion that I care about... But I was horrified by the story of these girls. I really felt like I had something to say about it. I felt like I could relate to them in some way. I think this is the first time in the 12 years I've been doing stand-up that I've actually written a show that I really want to do.

I don't believe that people go and join ISIS because they're angry about a war in Afghanistan when they weren't even born to witness it. I used to teach in Tower Hamlets, around the corner from where the girls used to go to school, and they never talked about religion, but they always talked about boys.

When David Cameron says they're radicalized, my friends and I don't even understand what that word means. They're not radicalized—they've been sexualized by these men.

You've been very outspoken about these things in the past. Do you get a lot of grief?
I feel that I was forced to say things in the past. When I first started, I was the only Asian woman in comedy, and I felt so much pressure immediately to represent all Asians, speak for the community, explain why wars are happening—to explain things that a) I know nothing about and b) I wasn't a developed enough comedian to deliver.

A lot of the early reviews for The Kardashians Made Me Do It used words like "brave." You've referred to ISIS as the "One Direction of Islam." Are you nervous about putting yourself out there with this material?
All the early reviews of my show were written by white men, all of them, and a lot of them don't understand what I'm talking about. And you can't blame them for that, because why would they know? As I say in the show, they say that they want to hear the things I'm talking about, but in actual fact, I feel like they don't want to hear it from me. They want to hear it from Stewart Lee and Mark Thomas—straight, white men they can relate to.

Speaking of straight white men, David Cameron's "language fund" to teach Muslim women English seems to have made your show even more relevant.
The Muslim women I know speak better English than the English people I know who have been born and brought up in this country. I kind of understand David Cameron: He's a white, upper class male. It's a very particular life that he's lived. Where during his life has he met a lot of Asian or Muslim women and known them? Probably never.

But to call me "brave," I find quite patronizing. I'm not brave—I'm just like every other comedian. I'm not doing stand-up in Syria. I mean, that would be brave. I'm doing stand-up in a democracy where you can say what you like.

You are, but you still have to deal with complaints because of what you say.
So does Frankie Boyle...

Last year, you spoke about "liberation" on Radio 4 and said: "I know Muslim women who are head-to-toe covered in black, who are very liberated in their thoughts and actions, but one might look at them and think they're imprisoned." You got quite a few complaints after that—were you surprised?
Yes. I have a whole section in my show about that. I said exactly what I thought: I think the burka is very liberating because you don't get judged for your sexuality. A lot of women equate liberation with covering themselves up but still having a free mind.

I don't know any women who have been forced to wear it. I know a lot of women who wear it, and their husbands don't like it. My father never liked my mother wearing it—and my dad is a pretty culturally strict, Pakistani man. I know very few women who wear the burka. I have a friend who wears a niqab, and that's her choice.

You called your show The Kardashians Made Me Do It. What do they have to do with jihadi brides?
I didn't want to call it that. I wanted to call it The Road to al-Baghdadi, but the Tricycle Theater putting the show on wouldn't let me because it was really worried that ISIS was going to turn up.

Are you scared of that too?
Everybody's scared. You'll never know the truth as long as there's fear, which is exactly what ISIS wants. I think the theater worried somebody would turn up and kill people for putting the show on. Which is not out of the realms of possibility... They thought it would end up on Twitter, and, of course, ISIS is always on Twitter.

So why did you go for the Kardashians name instead?
When the three girls from Bethnal Green went to join ISIS, their sister said, according to the Home Affairs Select Committee, "I can't understand why she's gone—she used to watch the Kardashians, you know?" That's what she told the government! I couldn't believe it! But I could understand. She was trying to say—look, she was normal. She watches the Kardashians like everyone else.

Shazia Mirza is touring the UK in The Kardashians Made Me Do It, including a stint at the Soho Theatre, London, March 1-5.

Photo by Raf Troncho

Chests puffed, faces crimson, two roosters glared at each other from glass pens. The arena was packed with men in pressed shirts, gobbling fried chicken and throwing their hands overhead. "Four hundred! Five hundred!" they yelled in Spanish, placing bets on the roosters. Outside, shops were empty and business was slow, but here in San Juan's cockfighting club, workers were in high demand.

Puerto Rico's economy has tanked. The territory is $72 billion in debt, unemployment has reached 12.2 percent, and the poverty rate is 45 percent—triple the poverty rate in the United States. But as businesses shutter, the cockfighting industry stays strong, employing countless workers around the island.

Cockfighting, which is legal in Puerto Rico and considered the island's "national sport," generates about $100 million annually on the island from bets, entrance tickets, food, and other expenses, according to a National Parks Service report. There are about 200,000 fighting birds each year, and each requires breeding, feeding, medical care, and training. More than 1.2 million people worked in the industry in 2003, the latest year for which numbers are available. Industry insiders I spoke with estimated that the number of workers had remained consistent, but they noted that many cockfighting businesses had gone underground, avoiding government regulations and taxes.

Photo by Raf Troncho

In San Juan, at the Cockfighting Club of Puerto Rico, members assured me the sport was hotter than ever. One recent Saturday afternoon, the club held 40 back-to-back matches, filing the stadium.

"This is our culture—people won't give it up," Efrain Rodriguez, president of the Cockfighting Club of Puerto Rico, told me in Spanish in the club's downstairs bar one recent Saturday afternoon. "When I was born, my parents put a rooster in my hands."

Rodriguez, who owns "700 or 800 roosters," explained that the industry continues thriving, despite the poor economy, because wealthy men pay for membership to the cockfighting clubs and for the roosters to be raised and trained. The San Juan club has 46 members—mostly lawyers, doctors, and businessmen—who get front-row seats to the fights three times a week, entrance into a special VIP room, and other perks. Each member has hundreds of roosters.

Photo by Meredith Hoffman

The cockfighting workers I spoke to agreed they've lucked out by entering the field, since each one has a special role.

Caring for the roosters, both before and after the fight, is the most involved task. An entire room in the Cockfighting Club of Puerto Rico is dedicated to nursing the victors after battle.

On Vice Sports: Cockfighting in America

"I've worked some other jobs, but this is more stable," said Carlos Perez, who has worked on and off at the club for decades. As we spoke, he held a rooster beneath a faucet and sprayed it with hydrogen peroxide. "My friends are getting kicked out of work, but here there's always something to do—you can train the fighters, you can care for them."

Beside Perez, a new employee gave a battered bird the full treatment—peeling open its bloodshot eyes to squirt them with antibiotic drops, then petting its belly and prying open its beak to push in banana mush.

"I used to be a house painter, but I love these birds," the employee, Edwin Ramos, told me. He said this work also paid about 20 percent more than his previous job.

Watch: Sabong Is the Philippines's Billion Dollar Cockfighting Industry

Even the waitresses told me they'd remained loyal to the club, since the customers—"men with money and tourists"—pay bigger tips here than at typical bars or restaurants.

"We always earn more here, and only have to work three days a week," Yesenia Hill, a 41-year-old waitress with dark bangs and tight jeans, told me. "I've been here since I was 18."

Rodriguez and other members of the San Juan club say their attendance has not faltered despite the island's economic crisis. But Puerto Rico's official Cockfighting Commission has voiced concerns that government-regulated clubs are actually seeing a downturn in business. The commission receives taxes and fees from 87 government-regulated clubs, but the president told the Associated Press in 2012 that more fights were going underground to evade extra costs. The commission did not return multiple calls requesting comment on the current situation.

Photo by Meredith Hoffman

Underground fights may concern the government, but for folks in the industry, all that matters is that the cockfights continue. Some residents grew worried after Congress passed a farm bill in 2014 that made cockfight attendance punishable with a $10,000 fine, but Puerto Rico has not enforced the legislation as the sport is legal on the island.

In the rural village Nagaubo, lined with vacant homes and abandoned farms, one plot of land bustles with 300 cocks and their steadfast caretakers.

Photo by Meredith Hoffman

"You have to train them like boxers," Wito Velazquez, the farm owner, told me while cutting a rooster's feathers in his lap. Velazquez, who started training roosters at age 13, said he was already teaching his six-year-old daughter the practice.

"People always have money for fights—it's a culture," he said.

Beside him, Wilfredo Burgo, a middle-aged man in an oversized black T-shirt, also snipped feathers. "It's like taking care of a baby," he told me, glancing up. "You take care of it from the egg. But you get used to it when they die."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Andy Smith

In light of the recent spate of sextortion cases that have been occurring in which men are convinced by catfish accounts to get on Skype, perform sexual acts, and extorted for money, we spoke to a legal expert to figure out what the nuances are inhibiting the scammers involved from being brought to justice. In a recent article on VICE, a male victim, Taylor Cooper, thought it pointless to report what had happened to him because he feared law enforcement would be useless considering that he suspected the person extorting him was in a different country. However, he was willing to go on the record with his full name to help support other potential victims and warn others who could potentially become victims.

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Baylee Wylie was found dead in December. Photo via Facebook.

A Moncton man charged with first-degree murder in the death of Baylee Wylie, 18, has been deemed to fit to stand trial.

Devin Morningstar, 18, recently underwent a 30-day psychiatric evaluation following his arrest in Wylie's murder. He will appear in court March 7 to set a date for the trial.

Morningstar is accused of having two accomplices—Tyler Dominique Noel, 18, arrested charged with first-degree murder and Marissa Shephard, 20, who remains at large.

Police won't say how Wylie died but characterize his murder as "extremely violent." His body was found in a burning triplex early on December 17.

Shephard, described as being five-foot-five with brown hair, has been charged with first-degree murder under a Canada-wide arrest warrant, but her whereabouts remain unknown. RCMP recently released a YouTube video featuring photographs in which her appearance varies dramatically.

"We know she is capable of changing her looks and could be just about anywhere," Inspector Jamie George says in the video.

The video has garnered more than 400,000 views.

Stephen Nagle, the father of Shepard's son, told the CBC he fears something bad has happened to her. If she was truly on the run, he claims she would've reached out to her family by now.

"She would have reached out to the people she knows she can trust. She hasn't reached out to me, so I fear for the worst. Her father, everyone, fears the worst," he said, adding she is on methadone and requires medical attention.

Shephard's father David has previously said he fears his daughter is dead.

Noel is also facing a host of new weapons-related charges relating to a break-and-enter of a cottage in Elgin, New Brunswick.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Taken nearby a church at Queens, Prince Edward Island (Photo via Flickr user Arnaud Abadie)

The Maritimes are desperate to attract new immigrants: understandable, given recent hand-wringing over the region's alleged death spiral and imminent economic ruin. Growth is such a priority for these amazing, shrinking provinces that former New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna recently suggested all new immigrants to Canada be forced—yes, forced—to start off in the Maritimes. "Critics will question why we should bring people to areas of high unemployment," writes McKenna, who himself moved years ago from New Brunswick to Toronto. "But that is precisely where immigrants are needed. We need their entrepreneurship, their worldliness, their drive, their consumption, and even their desperation."

Photo via Flickr user GotCredit

It might seem odd in an era defined by stagnant wages and rising income inequality for the long arm of the law to be cuffing Americans who default on their federal student loans. But according to reports out of Texas, that's exactly what's happening.

Paul Aker, 48, tells the New York Daily News and a local Fox broadcast affiliate that a coterie of heavily armed US Marshals showed up at his door in Houston last Thursday. His alleged crime? Failing to pay Uncle Sam back for a $1,500 student loan he took out to attend Prairie View A&M in 1987, he claims.

"I say, 'What is this all about?'" he told the Daily News. "They say, 'Shut up, you know what this is all about.' I don't have a clue."

Marshals apparently later suggested in court their automatic weapons were a safety precaution, and that they had concerns Aker might be armed—which he denies. A local congressman, Democrat Gene Green, told Fox 26 Aker's episode is just the beginning of a broad push by the feds to shop out loans to private debt collectors, who then request help from judges—and the US Marshals.

The outlet cited a source in the Houston US Marshals office indicating as many as 1,500 more warrants could be coming soon. That's pretty terrifying given that most previous reporting—including from our resident personal finance sage Allie Conti—suggested actually getting arrested over your loans is virtually unheard of. (More likely, experts tend to agree, is seeing your wages garnished.)

Aker, meanwhile, says he was ordered to pay $5,700, as well as almost $1,300 more for the cost of his detainment. Failure to do so, he claims, could result in another arrest.

The RCMP and an officer are being sued after after a cop's gun was stolen (Photo via Wikimedia)

A Winnipeg teen who was shot last year with a gun stolen from an RCMP cruiser is suing the national police force, the Attorney General of Canada, and the officer in question for an undisclosed amount.

Sixteen-year-old Calli Vanderaa was shot in the parking lot of the convenience store last October, where she had stopped with a few friends. The single bullet that hit her left her with a punctured lung, along with damage to her ribs and internal organs.

The semi-automatic handgun used in the shooting was allegedly stolen from the cruiser of Sergeant Chris McCuen earlier that evening after it was left sitting in open sight on one of the backseats of the car.

Although the police said Vanderaa was not the target of the shooting, 22-year-old Matthew Wilfrid McKay and 25-year-old Matthew Andrew Miles are charged with a number of crimes, including an attempted murder charge for the shooting of McKay.

Vanderaa's lawyer launched the lawsuit last week, which seeks compensation for both "physical and psychological" damages sustained by Vanderaa.

"This is a little girl, who had a bullet tear through her lung, her spleen, her colon, ."

Making note of more-typical examples of police brutality such as the shootings and assaults that have dominated the media, Charney said that this case is an example of one of the main issues that is overlooked when it comes to "bad policing"—the financial cost.

"When we think of bad policing, we think of harm caused to people, or where people are beat up and they die, but there's a financial cost to all of this as well. Bad policing is expensive, it increases the cost of what the public pays for policing, and the people ultimately bear that cost".

The RCMP responded to VICE's request for an interview by saying that the matter was still under investigation and that the police force could not comment on the matter.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Very fuzzy screenshot (it's a leak) via YouTube.

Canadians who were up early Monday might have been lucky enough to tune into Canada AM, CTV's morning show, and catch one of the most embarrassing rap battles to ever grace live television.

This thing was so bad that CTV had to apologize for it multiple times and refused to post the footage online, but thankfully someone else did.

The segment in question was promoting Blackout6, an upcoming Toronto rap battle being hosted by a group called King of the Dot.

"It started in the streets?" unassuming CTV host Marci Ien asked Organik, MC founder of King of the Dot, referring to the battles.

"In the streets, yes," said Organik, describing a rap battle as "two people competitively attacking each other with poetry."

Ien then introduced rappers HFK and Charron and greenlit their performance, saying, "go at it guys." Those words will likely haunt her for the rest of her career.

What followed was offensive on multiple levels, but primarily because it was so terrible.

The guys, who are godawful lyricists, made gay jokes, trans jokes, fat jokes and slut jokes. None of them were funny jokes. On a show most likely being only being watched by suburban parents and their kids (it was Family Day in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan ), they quipped about jerking off, blowjobs and "virgins in Oshawa." They also dropped references to "true dough," Dion Phaneuf and Michael Cera, giving this shit-pile of a performance a distinctly Canadian flair.

CTV didn't post the battle online, but someone leaked a shitty copy onto YouTube so we can all relive the pain (again and again, seriously I watched this like six times in a row).

HFK opened the battle, referring to himself as "Hugh Hefner going up against Bruce Jenner."

(Really setting the tone by channeling a man who is literally about to die at any minute.)

"Please save all your comments; before I grab your girlfriend and turn her O-N, like the Canadian province. I spent my Valentine's Day with a girl who's incredibly awesome; But you spent yours alone in your room, looking at pictures of Beverly Thomson."

Viewer's Note: Beverly Thomson is a host of Canada AM and yes, this dude just implied that his friend jerks off to photographs of her. Ien already seemed pretty uncomfortable at this point and appeared to be looking at someone off camera—though for reasons unknown the show carried on without cutting to commercial break.

Charron continued the searing hot exchange by teasing HFK for being fat and looking forward to Ribfest. Very timely. He added:

"I'm from the nation's capital; You gotta girl in T-dot with woof ; But I had her move from Toronto to Ottawa; Dion Phaneuf."

Then there was some back and forth that implied people in Oshawa, Ontario have a lot of sex; in fairness, there might not be all that much else to do there.

"Chances of you being a gangster are about as low as finding a virgin in Oshawa," said HFK; Charron responded, "It is hard to find virgins in Oshawa, especially cause your girlfriend lives there."

In an incredibly ironic diss, Charron said, "It's funny you say I look like Michael Cera—but your rhymes are super bad." (At no point did anyone else mention Michael Cera.)

Incredibly, the four-minute battle continued uninterrupted. Personally, I think this soundbite from HFK summed it up nicely:

"And since I got the spotlight and I'm on TV, there's something I want to say: Just cause Charron gave me head, it doesn't mean that he's gay. But hey, Happy Valentine's Day."

When it was done, a somewhat stunned Ien thanked her guests and said sorry to viewers.

"Cause we're a morning show and this isn't the streets, we gotta apologize for some the language right there," she said.

The men were reportedly then escorted out of the studio by security before they could hurt anyone else with bad poetry.

Canada AM followed up with a Facebook apology that said "the lyrics were unexpected and not reflective of our beliefs."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Find Benjamin on his website, blog, and at Traditional Comics.

Frozen breast milk. Photo via Flickr user Bart Everson

Nicole, a Portland, Oregon–based account director for a health company, flies frequently enough for work that she has the security procedure down to a science. She's also the mother of a baby boy, and because she's often away for a few days at a time, she travels with a breast pump and keeps the milk in dedicated storage bags, tucked in a cooler that she typically checks through to her final destination.

But before a recent cross-country flight back home, the configuration of Newark Liberty International Airport delivered her straight to the security level after dropping off her rental car. So she kept her cooler full of pumped breast milk in her carry-on bag and lugged it through security.

She went through her usual routine, asking if she needed to take out her breast pump (she did not) and declaring all of her liquids to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent. She expresses about 26 ounces a day and was carrying two-and-a-half days' worth of breast milk. When the agents held the bag for a manual security check and scan, it set off additional alarms.

"And that's when they called the bomb squad," she said.

When the TSA introduced its "3-1-1 rule" in 2006, limiting the amount of liquids allowed on board, medications and breast milk were exempt. But per its guidelines, the TSA may use "random and unpredictable security measures" at officers' discretion, which can lead to mishandling of breast milk, breast pumps, and other items with traveling mothers.

The process of searching Nicole took nearly 45 minutes, involving a full pat-down inspection by a TSA agent, and two bomb specialists who manually inspected and photographed each of her items. The hold-up in security caused her to miss her flight.

"These guys are trained on how to handle someone with a walker or someone with a CPAP machine," said Nicole. "It's upsetting that they don't seem to think it's important to be trained adequately to deal with women's breast milk and breast pumps."

In another case, Sapna McCarthy, a Bay Area–based human resources consultant returning home from a two-day business trip, told me her breast milk passed through airport security at Los Angeles International Airport—but her freezer packs were confiscated for being partially thawed.

"The more questions I asked, they just said it was policy and refused to discuss it with me or get a manager," McCarthy said. Instead, she was told to collect ice from a coffee shop in the terminal to keep her breast milk cool, which she had to replenish repeatedly as her hour-long flight was delayed by several hours.

A TSA spokesman told me the agency "provides regular training and updates to personnel regarding screening of liquids and gels, including breast milk" in order to "avoid discrepancies in screening experience."

But it's these very discrepancies that often frustrate mothers traveling with breastfeeding supplies. In McCarthy's case, the TSA's website clearly says that if gel packs and other accessories are "partly frozen or slushy," they are subject to additional screening, not immediate confiscation.

In 2012, passenger Amy Strand was held up at security because she had ice packs for her breast milk, but her milk bottles were empty. An agent informed her that she could not travel with the ice packs unless it was accompanied by breast milk and directed her to a public restroom to pump into the bottles before she was allowed through. (The TSA later issued an apology.) Recently, at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, passenger Katie Champ claims she was harassed by airport employees who had her lift her shirt during a pat-down procedure and told her she shouldn't have brought breast milk to security if she didn't want to undergo additional screening.

On another recent flight out of Portland, Nicole—the woman whose breast milk set off the bomb squad—was stopped in security to have her breast pump examined, which involved a TSA agent fully disassembling the pump. She was eventually cleared, but when she boarded her cross-country flight, she discovered that the pump was totally inoperable.

Several other women have shared with me their stories of random manual inspections of breast milk and formula, including gloved hands, swabs, and litmus paper—unsettling to any parent who spends hours sterilizing bottles and pump parts to avoid contamination.

While it's not always made clear, according to the TSA's rules, technically only the passenger can open and close bottles; should you prefer not to have the milk examined, you can request alternate screenings such as an enhanced pat-down and bag inspections (to some, a puzzling solution to the potential threats posed by liquids).

Most policies regarding breast milk, formula, and the screening options available to passengers are detailed on the TSA's website, in part thanks to Stacey Armato, a Hermosa Beach–based attorney who sued the federal agency after being "harassed and abused by TSA agents" in 2010.

At the time, Armato was traveling weekly for work between Phoenix and Los Angeles, and she explained she was "getting a lot of infections because would travel and not pump all day." Her doctor warned her she could lose her milk supply altogether if she didn't start pumping, so Armato started bringing a breast pump on her trips. Uncomfortable with the idea of running her breast milk through the X-ray machine, she came armed with a printout of the TSA's official policy, which stated she could request an alternate screening for the milk.

She made it through security without problems the first few flights, until one trip she was stopped in the security line. According to the complaint later filed against the TSA, she was held up for 40 minutes and subjected to repeated inspections "for not simply 'pumping and dumping' her breast milk." Finally, "the TSA permitted her to pass through security with the 'alternate screening' process for her breast milk."

But when she got on a flight the following week, Armato encountered the same agents at the checkpoint, who stopped her and held her in a glassed-off area for about 40 minutes.

"They were telling me to be quiet if I knew what was good for me—that my milk was going to get thrown out," she told me. After about half an hour, she burst into tears, which led agents to summon the Phoenix police. "The police officer said they were called because I was out of control—that I was crying too much."

The amount each woman can get in one pumping session varies drastically, some collecting only enough for the next feeding—so Armato didn't want to just "pump and dump," as the TSA agents had originally suggested. "People don't know how much effort it takes to get that milk, and I was a day-to-day pumper," she explained. "The milk was for my son to drink the next day."

Armato filed a formal lawsuit against the federal agency in 2011, and four years later, the TSA settled the case to the tune of $75,000, along with an agreement to retrain its officers on proper breast milk-screening procedures and to clarify the language on its website.

"I felt like that was a bigger victory," Armato said. "If it went to court, we couldn't be guaranteed that they would retrain their employees; we expect them to follow the rule in every other arena, so why not this one?"

But even the most clearly spelled-out rules aren't always followed or are interpreted differently among agents.

"I think there's still a training issue," Nicole said. "Frankly, I believe they don't think it's important to be trained—nationwide—on how to deal with women's breast milk and breast pumps adequately, and I find that really upsetting."

Follow Sarika Chawla on Twitter.