Toronto's financial district (photo by the author)

I am woman in her mid-40s, in a same-sex relationship, suffering the same problem as many couples out there: the sex part has died. Absolutely everything else is wonderful. I work on Bay Street in Toronto—I am extremely well-known figure in what I would describe as a very professional career path. I decided last year to start looking into escort services, and I've grown to love my time as a female client.

It didn't start off great, however. It took about six months of researching the market before I settled on my first booking. For example, there are many SPs (service providers) who are tailored towards men or heterosexual couples, but it's hard to find those that specifically state women, and who fit my preferences. I consider myself a very fussy person. I think everybody is to some degree, but I'm a very picky person. I prefer a mature woman who has been around, who knows how to behave, who is confident and can carry themselves. Essentially, I'm not only looking for an intelligent woman, but a classy, sophisticated woman who isn't going to stick out beside me.

For the first SP I saw, I booked a hotel room and waited two hours past our appointment time before she arrived. It turned out that she was unruly and inconsiderate—she barged in with a knapsack on her shoulder, and the entire experience was over within 30 minutes. After she left, I realized she had taken an expensive bottle of wine that I had bought for the occasion, along with the takeout I had ordered. She asked for both—she didn't steal them from me—but it struck me as extremely tacky.

Growing up, I didn't have an opinion on sex work and I really didn't care. I don't mean that in a derogatory manner, it just wasn't important to me. It's not until I met Lisbeth—the SP who gave me my first real experience, almost two months after the aforementioned encounter—that I realized just how amazing and compassionate these women can be. Everything about her impressed me: the way she spoke, the way she carried herself, her punctuality. It was all incredibly graceful. Suffice to say, after that, I was hooked.

For me, the whole experience goes far past just sex. The meeting, the talking, the intelligent conversation, the way someone carries themselves—that's all foreplay. To see somebody who's well put together and very confident, like I am, that's my high. I don't think many of the SPs have met a woman like myself, and because of that, I try to treat them in an amazing way. Like a princess. To me, it's very, very important to treat sex workers with respect and with dignity. I have given some of them gifts and surprises that they never imagined receiving. In a way, I know it's selfish: the whole process of wooing them over—even when I've already paid for the time—it gives me an adrenaline rush.

Despite how much I love being a client, the question I find myself asking sometimes is how long I can keep this up for. I've never done this in my career or personal life, so it's somewhat new to me, but yes, I am a cheat. I am not in denial. Some people would say, 'You're meeting an SP so it's not cheating.' I disagree—I am cheating. Obviously, that kind of preempts my personal needs, so I have to sort of look away and turn a blind eye. My partner doesn't know, my colleagues don't know. No one knows about this life but me and my SPs.

Outside of that, what concerns me is that these women have become my friends, which in a way, is much more difficult than the escort part of it. These women are totally awesome and I would love to stay friends with them. I mean, I've never just ended a friendship abruptly. With that said, for them, I'm not sure if it would really matter at the end of the day. I understand that aspect is part of the job, but it would be hurtful for me.

I think that, in a way, ironically, I have become protective of these women. It's like I'm their saviour. I want to make sure they're OK, because I have the utmost respect for these women. I would not be able to do this job, so I give such huge kudos to sex workers. Not only do they put themselves out there—physically and mentally—but this job in general is so taxing. These women have become a part of my life, and I care for them deeply.

*Name has been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

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The website Patrick Fox set up about his ex. Screenshot.

If it wasn't against the law, Patrick Fox says he would kill his ex-wife.

Fox (formerly called Richard Riess), a Burnaby, BC, resident, has been running a website dedicated to smearing his ex Desiree Capuano since 2014. It includes intimate photographs of her with friends and family, her personal information, and emails exchanges in which he admits to their son he'd have "no qalms" (sic) shooting her if doing so wouldn't result in a lifetime prison sentence.

Capuano, 35, who is American and lives in Tuscon, Arizona, told VICE she has a court order, issued by an Arizona judge December 2015, prohibiting Fox from harassing her but because he lives in Canada he's immune to it. She said the RCMP arrested him for criminal harassment in July 2015 but the Crown dropped the charges because there was no evidence he was a threat to her.

"Freedom of speech should not cover this and the fact that he's in another country should not give him amnesty to do whatever he wants," she said. "Unless he was in front of me with a gun, the Crown wouldn't consider him to be a threat to me."

Fox did not respond to request for comment from VICE but admitted to the CBC he's behind the site.

He told the CBC he won't take down the site until Capuano is "destitute and homeless."

The pair, who met in Arizona, broke up in 2001, about a year and a half after their son was born. After years of custody battles and back-and-forth—the boy spent a 10-year stretch with Fox during which time Capuano said he cut off all contact with her—Capuano ended up with the child in 2011. Fox was deported back to Canada for a third time in 2013 (his ex said he'd been living in the US illegally).

Their relationship has always been tumultuous, Capuano told VICE, but has become increasingly hostile in the last few years.

Fox's incredibly amateur website (seriously, it looks like it was made using clipart), features photographs of Capuano with headings like "My bedroom: This is where I get nasty, naked and fuck my brains out...what little I have left, anyway, after all the weed" and "My bathroom.. where I shit and shower." Many of the photos, which Capuano said were taken from Facebook and from their son, are innocuous household shots with no people in them; others feature Capuano kissing her boyfriend, or are of her younger son.

Intimate details about Capuano, including her medical marijuana ID card and police reports are also posted on the site.

Capuano said her ex's obsession with her is "scary."

In an email exchange obtained by VICE, Fox explains to Capuano that he wants to drive her to kill herself.

"My intention was to do everything in my power and capabilities to make your life as miserable as possible, and, if possible, to the point that you ultimately commit suicide. That would be my ultimate desire," he wrote.

In the same thread, Fox refers to an exchange with their son, in which the teen ask his dad if he would shoot Capuano.

"I told him that murder is illegal and immoral and can result in spending the rest of one's life in prison. And that the rest of my life in prison is not a risk I'm willing to take. But otherwise, no, I would have no qalms about it; that that is how much I despise you for the things you've done," he wrote, adding "There is nothing illegal or threatening about wanting to harm someone—as long as you don't act on it." In yet another email, on which he copied their son, Fox said he would consider hiring someone to have sex with Capuano just to obtain pornographic photos of her.

Capuano told VICE her ex has claimed he's crossed the Canada-US border illegally.

"The whole reason I'm doing this is because there are no laws preventing what he's doing," she said.

Toronto lawyer Gil Zvulony told VICE online smearing is fairly common and crosses both sides of the border. If Capuano wants to have the court order enforced in Canada, he said she'd have to hire a lawyer or contact local authorities—but they would have to assess what crimes are being committed.

"When you're looking at criminal harassment, you have to look at the whole picture the whole context of how it was said," he said. "To express hate for someone is not a crime."

There's also a possibility that Fox is breaching copyright laws by using her photos or committing defamation so there could be a civil case, however Capuano says she can't afford an attorney.

Cheaper options could include contacting the server hosting the website to have it taken down or even asking Google them to remove the site from turning up during searches of her name, said Zvulony.

"She could also create her own website that would rank her higher than his."

Capuano told VICE she's speaking out because she thinks online harassment laws need to catch up.

"Just because he's not here in person it doesn't mean it's not abuse."

Fox told CBC he "doesn't look good," but thinks his side of the story "mitigates some of the nastiness."

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These tabs have way more uses than getting off your face at a festival. Photo via Wikimedia.

A medical historian in Canada recently stated that everyone's favourite hallucinogen, LSD, might make its way back to the medical scene—namely for use in palliative and geriatric care.

Erika Dyck, a medical historian who works as a professor at the University of Saskatchewan, looked into LSD trials in 1950s and 60s for her paper recently published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal to figure out why there was initial interest in the drug. "To see where some of that renewed interest is, some of the questions are rather similar, and some have moved in different directions," Dyck told VICE.

One of those different directions is the use of the drug in palliative (medical care for those with serious illnesses) or geriatric (medical care for the elderly) settings. Though Aldous Huxley, a well-known British intellectual and psychedelic pioneer, took LSD on his deathbed, the use of the drug for those nearing the end of their lives is a relatively new idea in the medical field.

" studies—ayahuasca, peyote—we know that there have been elements of spirituality that confront death, deal with death and mortality."

In 2014, a trial conducted with 12 cancer patients showed the efficacy of LSD relieving anxiety in those with life-threatening diseases. In that study, results showed both a decrease in anxiety (77.8 percent of participants) and an increase in quality of life (66.7 percent) for those who took the drug.

Dyck says that rather than LSD being a solution to an ailment, the drug could be used to help people manage what they might be going through mentally.

However, she says, acid's reputation as a festival drug long associated with hippie and party culture could be detrimental to it being able to be used in a legitimate medical setting.

"It may be interesting that the same generation that engaged in recreational use of LSD are now perhaps the patients demanding it in a more medical context," Dyck told VICE. "One of the biggest challenges to any so-called psychedelic renaissance will be encountering that reputation that it has culturally as a drug of abuse."

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Photo via Congressional Pictorial Directory / Wikimedia Commons

Last month, a New York Post editorial writer named Paul Sperry wrote a brief biography of 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders titled "Don't be fooled by Bernie Sanders—he's a diehard communist." Sanders, as Sperry and virtually every other political writer have noted, may be Hillary Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination in the 2016, but he wears his socialist allegiance on his sleeve, decrying the plight of the poor, and bashing "the richest one percent," five times before breakfast.

Sperry takes issue with the "mainstreaming" of Sanders as a standard-bearer for the Democratic Party. He attempts to prevent this by drawing the reader's attention to the Vermont Senator's past involvement with scary, scary radical Reds like, for instance, the Young People's Socialist League, the youth branch of America's Socialist party at the time that Sanders was involved.

But while Sanders may have been a young socialist, the groups he used to associate with haven't been too eager to claim him as one of their own. In particular, the current leaders of the Young People's Socialist League told VICE that they don't care much for the Democratic presidential candidate's brand of "socialism."

Today, YPSL mostly focuses on issues pertaining directly to students—specifically, students of Moorpark University, which is the only school that's had an active branch of YPSL since 2011, when the Socialist Party USA voted to let YPSL become a separate entity. According to the group's current chair, Jen McClellan, once YPSL was on its own, its members were free to think smaller.

"We noticed that we didn't have a cafeteria on campus. We just had vending machines, and we were like, 'What's up with that?'" McClellan told VICE in an interview. Under the current leadership, she explained, YPSL's main campaign has been arranging for a food co-op at Moorpark.

But the group's new, hyper-local focus apparently doesn't preclude them from weighing in on the national pursuits of their most famous former member.

"I couldn't in good conscience say I helped the Bernie Sanders campaign," said YPSL's vice chair Justin Simons, who also works as a political organizer for the Socialist Party USA. Simons acknowledged that Sanders was "instrumental" to the YPSL's success in the 1960s and 70s, but said he believes the Vermont Senator's current political positions are fundamentally flawed. Sanders's campaign, Simons explained, "doesn't get at the root of the problem"—the problem being what he called a "cycle of corruption and political adversity for people of all walks of life." In other words, capitalism.

To be sure, Sanders has occasionally departed slightly from the standard socialist message. Though he's constantly condemning Big Banks, Sanders has also praised tech companies like Google and Twitter for creating jobs. But true socialism, Simons explained, means the eventual overthrow of even these relatively friendly-looking capitalist institutions. "We're going to establish a system of ownership where workers are in control of the means of production," he said. "That's the socialist idea."

But Simons critique went beyond economic justice. "Bernie Sanders's position on Israel could use some review," he told me, unprompted, before going on to express his own personal concern with Sanders's preference for a two-state solution. "We call for an end to all aid to Israel," he explained.

He also questioned the wisdom of enlisting Arab nations to fight the Islamic State, something Sanders has called for in his foreign policy platform. "One of the reasons the situation is so bad in the first place is because of Western imperialism," he said. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Simons added, "have a vested interest in destabilizing places like Iraq and taking down the Assad regime in Syria."

More than anything, though, the YPSL simply can't get on board with the Democratic Party. Sanders may have voted against the 2008 bank bailout, Simons said, but the Democratic Party made it happen, leaving him and his socialist student comrades disgusted with the Establishment Left.

In addition to his affiliation with the Socialist Party USA and YPSL, Simons once worked as an organizer for the 2008 Obama campaign and said the experience made him disillusioned of the Establishment Left. The break was solidified, he explained, when Democrats in Congress helped push through the 2008 bank bailout "No one received justice that day." he said.

When I asked about Sanders's friendship and close association with wealthy real estate developer Tony Pomerlau, Simons didn't seem surprised.

"It's not uncommon to have wealthy, powerful friends involved with what you're doing, and sometimes those interests do come ahead of the interests of the public," he said knowingly. "That's an important thing to keep in mind when you're dealing with any large political organization." Which sounds a lot like something Bernie Sanders might say.

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A likeness of Shell CEO Ben van Beurden by P. Mitchell Hand. Photos courtesy Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider

Ben van Beurden oversees a hugely profitable energy company that some critics allege has been at least loosely implicated in human rights and environmental abuses ranging from execution to the destruction of precious natural resources. But the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell has never been charged with a crime and remains a free man.

P. Mitchell Hand, who recently painted a portrait of Beurden from the confines of a state prison in Arizona, is not.

Hand is serving 33 years for burglary and selling stolen goods, among other offenses. He's just one of 29 prisoners who contributed to CAPTURED, an art project unveiled this week by New Yorkers Jeff Greenspan and Andrew Tider. The duo asked inmates who have committed serious offenses ranging from theft to murder to draw portraits of the executives and CEOs of some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful companies. The corporations are often accused—whether by human rights groups or civilians—of using high-powered lawyers to avoid accountability to the public for arguably criminal conduct. (A study last year found white-collar crime prosecutions in America at a 20-year low.)

CAPTURED is the end-result of a one-and-half year undertaking that included extensive research and communication with the families of the men and women behind bars. The research and art is displayed on a site that also lists grievances against the companies, as well as the artists' crimes. It's a self-funded project that pays the prisoners for their talent—albeit with a cut for the services inmates use to receive cash inside—which is a rarity behind prison walls.

This isn't the first time Greenspan and Tider's antics have made headlines. They're the same duo behind the Edward Snowden statue that briefly appeared in Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park last year before being taken by the NYPD. The friends are also former ad-men who think the key distinction between these recent political endeavors, and their old gig is the use of pathos to inspire people to act on pressing issues, rather than to buy products.

"For us, it's ideas about surveillance, ideas about privacy, ideas about justice," Greenspan tells VICE. "Those are things we wanted to hopefully get people more excited about."

We called Greenspan and Tider up for a chat about the project, what they expect it to achieve, and where they're steering donations.

VICE: So how did this project get started?
Jeff Greenspan: We were doing a lot of research about companies that were destroying the environment, and we started looking at what their actions were and we thought to ourselves, "Wow, these guys are really criminals." These corporations and the people who run them were engaged in illegal activities, or they have highly illegal activities as business practices.

We started having this thought of how can we get people emotionally interested in this issue. There's a lot of talk about climate change and the activities these companies engage in, but it kind of gets relegated to news. It doesn't break through emotionally. We're also very aware of people in jail for petty crimes. By the way, the people who're in for minor offenses or relatively minor offenses, while the people who run these corporations commit far greater damage to the world than these people do, yet they make profit off it. So then we thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting if we had people in prison—people who're behind bars—literally looking at someone who's committed exponentially more damage and have to draw them.

A pencil sketch of Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, by Ryan Gragg (#1651297)

How did you get in touch with the prisoner artists in the first place?
Jeff Greenspan: We spent a good three months finding out how not to get in touch with prisoners in prisons. We ultimately went on eBay and started looking for people who were selling prison art. And we found some users who were selling multiple pieces of prison art that was of good quality and mostly portraiture. So we saw the web sites that were also selling—and these were generally relatives and friends of people in prison who had a lot of talent. A lot of these prisoners would sell a portrait of Madonna or Elvis or a political figure for $20 or $30. We were able to look at the quality of their work and got in touch with them.

We did something very similar with Facebook. We found a couple of Facebook pages that were devoted to prison art, and we found people with talent. But once we found those, the project kind of went viral. Andrew and I started getting letters in the mail from people in prison to all over the country, saying, "I served time with this prisoner in Arizona State. Now, I'm in this prison, and he told me you were looking for people who could draw really well. If you reach out to my sister, she can send you examples of my work."

Because most of these prisoners can't send packages or artwork to someone who is not on their authorized list, they would use their relatives or their sisters or their parents as a conduit to get us to see the quality of their work.

Is humanizing the inmates part of the project, too?
Andrew Tider: It was something that happened along the way for us was because we were corresponding with these inmates—there was a lot of letter writing. That was the only way a lot of prisoners could tell their story. These are people who have been in really tough situations and have grown up in very disadvantaged communities. That doesn't excuse what they've done, and they're very quick to point out, "Yes, I did this thing." But it also brings a lot of questions about what are we doing with our criminal justice system. Are we actually doing something positive? Are we reforming people?

Did you become personally close to any of these artists?
Jeff Greenspan: I'm friendly with many of their wives, sisters, daughters, cousins, brothers, and sons because it was their families who were sending us the artwork and following up with us about the project. I've talked to the moms of a couple of these inmates, and a few of the inmates I've spoken directly with on the phone.

Some of these people are murderers, and in fairness, we haven't spoken to the victims' families from these crimes—or the victims themselves in some situations. So we only know the inmates' side of the story. That said, some of them are very touching stories. One of them killed his best friend when he was very young, maybe 16 or 17 or 18—and it was allegedly an accident. The inmate wrote something to the effect of—I don't have the words in front of me—"It doesn't matter how long they keep me in for, and it doesn't matter if they even let me out. I killed my best friend, so I'm already in the worst jail for the rest of my life."

There were other people imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter or multiple attempts of robbery, where they're serving 17, 20, 30 years. And we're not suggesting that they should be free, and we're not suggesting there shouldn't be some kind of penance or rehabilitation at all. But you have to ask yourself why we lock up so many people, and such a high percentage of people of color and people of limited wealth, while people of massive wealth and generally of one color get to pretty much run the country. And when we say run the country, it's because they have enough political and financial clout to change rules, and when they break the rules they can't change, they pay a settlement to walk away.

I'd imagine the families are excited, too. Since the prisoners are invisible to most eyes, this may be the only way they get their names out there.
Jeff Greenspan: The inmates are all excited, obviously, because with each set of crimes we've listed, we've also listed contacts for the artists. So each of these artists hopes someone will reach out to them. I have to tell you, and I don't remember which one it was, but one of them said we're the only ones who ever write them. A lot of these inmates, their families have abandoned them or they have no families or they're out of sight, out of mind for a lot for people. They're emotional because they would love for people to contact them. I know they would all hope for other people to ask them to draw portraits because it's a way for them to make money.

That in turn makes their relatives very happy because their loved ones behind bars have very few people on the outside to talk to them. One of the inmates told us this was one the first time he's ever made an honest dollar. And how good he felt and how wonderful he felt that his talent and his work from inside the prison system was going to be seen by a real audience.

A painting of Charles and David Koch, CEO and VP of Koch Industries, by Joseph Acker (#15967538)

Were you forced to exclude artwork for this project?
Andrew Tider: We were pretty clear about what we were looking for for these portraits because we had a specific artistic vision for the project. But some of the inmates would editorialize in their own way. Maybe they drew a straight portrait, but there would be dollar signs on the CEO's tie or devil horns or something like that. I think that this is proof that when they read about what these people have done, they connected with it emotionally in such a way that they weren't expressing what we wanted to express but really felt their own way. At the same time, the goal of these was not to really editorialize. The project itself editorializes.

I noticed you're donating all proceeds to the Bernie Sanders campaign, which I guess isn't shocking, but what's the story there?
Andrew Tider: The reason is the pillars of the Bernie Sanders campaign: prison reform and making the people on Wall Street, and other corporations beyond Wall Street, accountable for their actions. The third pillar is to remove this type of corporate control over our government and the election process. We feel if he got elected, he would move the country toward a place where a project like this would be less necessary.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Check out the Captured project here.

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Boxing instructor Khadijah Safari

"The last thing people think I've got in my bag is a load of boxing gloves," says Khadijah Safari. The 5'4" hijabi Muay Thai boxing instructor is struggling under the weight of the huge sports bag she's hauling to a class she teaches in Milton Keynes, outside the British capital. "When I lived in London, I'd get taxis all the time and drivers would say, 'Where are you off to? What do you teach?' I'd tell them, and they'd double-take, thinking perhaps I'd just covered my head because it was raining or something, but it was obviously my hijab... Once, I went to Holland & Barrett to buy training supplements for one of my students. The guy behind the counter loudly and slowly asked, 'Can. I. Help. You?' like he assumed I couldn't speak English. Though I suppose that's better than the time a man yelled, 'Go back to your fucking country!' and threw his sandwich at me.

Tales of this kind of racism aren't uncommon. What might be is Safari's response to it. Four years ago, she set up boxing classes in London that catered predominantly to Muslim women. She recently moved to Milton Keynes and has become even more ambitious—hoping to establish a national women-only kickboxing tournament that will allow Muslim and non-Muslim women to compete together. Her plan is to empower them, physically and emotionally, and give them confidence that they could kick the shit out of people on the streets in the real world—if they really had to.

You have to be strong—before I came here, I lived in Worcestershire and people would shout 'Muslim!' at me in the street.

The ethnic make-up of the streets that Safari's students inhabit has shifted significantly in recent years. In 2001, 13.2 percent of Milton Keynes residents were from an ethnic group other than "white British." By 2011—the most recent figures available—this had risen to 26.1. Only 4.8 percent of people in Milton Keynes identify as Muslim, but in a climate where ethnic difference can be seen as a threat to the political rhetoric of "British values," a feeling of unease prevails. In 2013, a petrol bomb was flung onto the roof of the local Zainabia Islamic Center. It was a relatively isolated incident, but it's recent enough to make it plain why local Muslim women feel a need to be defended.

"One of my students asked me to go the shop with her to get milk because she was wearing a niqab and was scared," says Safari. "People threaten them, pull veils from their heads. Imagine how many women are experiencing that, every time they go out?"

Self-defense classes aimed at Muslim women have existed for years across the United Kingdom. It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that many women are protecting themselves against a climate where their safety is being increasingly and aggressively compromised. Last September, a shocking figure showed that Islamaphobic attacks had risen 70 percent in London in the last year. The media reported stories of women being spat on and name-called, while the #afterseptember11 hashtag retold stories across Europe and the UK of how life had changed for women after 9/11.

Safari, left, and one of her students



Safari's sessions are grueling. Headscarves hang on hooks at the back of the room, hair is tied back, and the sparring is rapid, sweaty, and punishing. When men are in the building, newspaper is stuck on the windows to respect "purdah"—the religious practice of screening women from men or strangers. Safari shouts at the panting women, who are blocking, punching, and memorizing sequences. At one point, she expertly raises her legs above her head and holds a firm static kick position for 30 seconds—a display of control that receives applause from the room.

When I visit on a Thursday, one of the attendees is 26-year-old Fatima. Her family is from London, via Sierra Leone, and she found Safari through Facebook. "It's a good skill for anyone to have, but particularly Muslim women because we are more overtly Muslim," she says.

Safari, who is a black belt in Muay Thai, now wants to take it to the next level by creating the first halal martial arts organization—Safari Martial Arts Association—to cater specifically to the needs of Muslims. Men and women train separately, so the idea is to have a space where women can remove their headscarves and be respectful of their religion and their sport at the same time.

Afshah, 33, is fixing her hijab with magnetic pins that the women are sharing around after the session as they remove black and red boxing gloves. She's from Islamabad but has been in the UK for eight years. "I have three kids at home, and I want something for myself," she says. "My husband wants me to get a black belt. You have to be strong—before I came here, I lived in Worcestershire and people would shout 'Muslim!' at me in the street. I felt so insecure. I didn't want to go out. This class has given me a little bit more confidence. If there was a competition, I would love to go to there."

Sisters need to be able to play football and go for a jog where they're not judged by the way they are dressed.

The current British female kickboxing champion is in fact a Muslim. Ruqsana Begum is the only Muslim woman who is a national champion in her sport. She also runs her own classes based in London and is in the middle of launching a "sports hijab range for sisters" later this year, called Sports Hijab by Ruqsana. Her point is simple, but one that keeps needing to be made—that Muslim women are capable of powerful, physically demanding athletic excellence, without being held back by stereotypes. "Sisters need to be able to play football and go for a jog where they're not judged by the way they are dressed," she says.

Safari plans to hold a competition to celebrate Milton Keynes's 50th birthday next year, which she hopes will lead to more interest and funding for a national competition. "It's very achievable," she says. "I don't see any reason why it couldn't be. It'd also be an opportunity to give positions like judges and referees, which are usually held by men, to women. In doing this, we're showing a totally different side of ourselves."

For more information on Safari Kickboxing, visit its website.

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Passing through a metal detector, Kenneth Towler made his way into the lobby of the Center for Community Health on Los Angeles' Skid Row. Towler, 47, is no stranger to the clinic's chaotic waiting room, so he quietly took his place against the back wall as various patients filtered through the clinic. The smell of urine and smoke clung to some visitors, many of whom, like Towler, are homeless.

These visits to the clinic had become routine, but now, the 47-year-old was noticeably worried. His mind rewinded to two weeks earlier when he claims the few possessions he had were stolen, including medication for his bipolar disorder and a new prepaid cell phone. "And as soon as I turned my back they just took everything," he said. "It was the phone they were really after."

The incident meant he would have to request a refill on his medication before its scheduled date, which can be nearly impossible for patients like Towler, who has a history of drug abuse. So now he was here, anxiously waiting to be called in to see the doctor.

Towler's situation is common in Los Angeles, which has about 44,359 homeless individuals at any given time, according to 2015 figures from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. For those who are mentally ill—a group that accounts for nearly one-third of the county's homeless population—receiving and keeping prescription medication can be a daily struggle.

Stealing and selling are both problems: Many prescription drugs have high street value, and homeless populations are vulnerable to theft. And because so many homeless individuals also have a history of drug abuse—about 50 percent of homeless people with mental health conditions have co-occurring substance abuse problems, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration—it can be difficult to find a clinic that will refill stolen prescriptions.

"Before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I was already using drugs. I did cocaine in high school and then harder drugs as I grew up," Towler said. "It wasn't until I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder that I realized that I was using the drugs to deal with everything."

The CCH clinic, run by the private non-profit health agency JWCH Institute Inc., tries to fill the gaps in access to mental health care for the city's homeless. Past and even ongoing drug abuse doesn't prevent clients from receiving mental and health care services at the clinic, a sign of recognition that, especially for homeless people living on Skid Row, getting necessary medication can be challenging, in part because of substance abuse problems.

"This isn't about getting to the bottom of things or catching them in a lie," said Jordan Allan, a clinical medical social worker at CCH. "The doctor goes by what they see and what the client relays to them."

Theft, Allan said, only makes the problem worse. "One of my clients had a container of medication. He's in a wheelchair, and he can't fend for himself, so people would steal his medication," she recalled. "I ended up putting a sticker on it saying 'Laxative: Will give you diarrhea' because otherwise people would steal it."

Allan noted that anti-depressants, some of which are used to treat schizophrenia, are often sold on the street. "I know painkillers go for like $4 a piece, so do some of the larger dosages of the anti-anxiety medication," she said. She added that the clinic's pharmacy no longer fills prescriptions for painkillers because of the high abuse rate.

Allan refers people who need an emergency refill to Exodus, a mental health urgent care clinic about three miles east of Skid Row, sending them with a note describing the patient's mental condition, and, with the patient's consent, information on their progress in the clinic's program. "They'll give them enough medication for the end of the month because I always write in the email their next refill will be ready," she said.

But not all of the physicians at CHS take this approach. In many cases, clinicians will deny a refill if they suspect the client could be selling or abusing their medication. Without receiving the medication, those patients are left to cope with their illness on their own or pay out of pocket at another clinic.

That was the case for Towler who, after waiting for more than an hour, returned to the lobby defeated. Like many others before him, he had been denied a refill on his meds. "He told me no because I was just going to sell it," he said, dejected. "Now I really don't know what I'm going to do the rest of this month."

Follow Celeste Alvarez on Twitter.

Among other things, Gretchen's family must keep its distance from schools. Photo via Flickr user Kelly Hunter

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

In 2001, about six months before Gretchen met her husband, David, he was charged with sexual assault. After a night of drinking, police found him and a friend drunk and half-dressed on the side of the road; she was passed out, and he fled when the cops arrived. Gretchen* says that David initially thought he would be getting a DUI. In fact, he was ultimately charged with "sexual penetration by foreign object/victim unconscious"—the "foreign object" being his hand*.

David did three years in a California prison, three more on parole, and he will spend the rest of his life on the sex-offender registry. Fourteen years after the incident, almost every aspect of the couple's life together has been shaped by that night, from where they can live to whether they should start a family.

Gretchen is particularly worried about the passage of a new law that will make it difficult for registered sex offenders to travel internationally. The law is aimed at those with underage victims; David's was not, but many on the registry report being stonewalled when they travel, regardless of the age of their victims.

Below, Gretchen discusses her marriage, her neighbors, and what the future might bring.

A couple months into our relationship, he told me what had happened. I was 18 at the time. He was 22. I was very young and obviously in a little bit of shock. I thought, There's no way you can go to jail for this. I mean, you guys were two stupid young kids. You're not a monster. You're not the crazy man in the park, the lurker. And I just thought that it would go away.

It never went away.

He didn't go to prison for about a year and a half after we met, when he finally just gave up and pleaded guilty because he said he didn't want to put everyone through the agony of what was going on—mostly myself and his mother. The entire time he was gone, I was finishing my college degree. I would go up to see him on the weekends here and there, but he wanted me to focus on school and told me he was going to be fine.

He still says to this day that prison was the easiest part. He says that now it's even harder because he doesn't know what to expect. It's the constant worry. We're so fearful every time we drive up to our house: Are the neighbors going to be picketing out front? Every time the doorbell rings, my heart drops. You live in this constant state of fear.

We've never made friends with any of our neighbors. We really just try and keep to ourselves. But cops still do home compliance checks where they come knock on our door to make sure he lives there. So we're fearful of that—that somebody might see the police show up at our door every single year and start to get suspicious about what is going on in our house.

To be harassed every time you come home, it's a little uneasy.

For the first three years he was home, his picture wasn't even on the website. You would actually have to go into the police department to find out anything about him. And then they said they had made a mistake. Then, all of a sudden, his name and photograph is on there. Then they said he can't live within 2,000 feet from a school. We had just bought a home and lived about 2,020 feet away from a school. Thank God we didn't have to move.

Every time we turned around, it was something new.

We really wanted to be parents. But the more the laws kept changing, and the more we saw how people on the registry were treated—which at this point, he has truly not had to experience, but he's just terrified of what could be—we just thought it's not the responsible thing to do, to bring a child in the midst of this. To have to explain to them, "Your dad can't pick you up from school, and you can't have friends over."

We went and bought a large map and placed it in my office and just said, You know what? We have four young nieces that all live within about ten miles of us. Our very close friends with kids, they are always spending time at our home. We're going to be the best aunt and uncle we can be, and we're just going to go travel the world. We started traveling everywhere we could. We've gone to the Caribbean, we've gone to Europe. We have a trip planned right now to Greece in August.

This new law finally put us both over the edge. When we first found out about them sending notifications to other countries, we figured out a way around it. We live near the Tijuana border, and I said, Let's try and fly out of there and see what happens. But of course, when we fly back to the US, he's essentially harassed at customs. There's nothing they can do, because he's not breaking the law, but they want to know how he got there and how he's been to all these places. There have been times where they've looked through all his stuff, torn everything apart, asked if he has computers, asked where he's been, asked who he's been with. To be harassed every time you come home, it's a little uneasy.

Now with what's coming, we kind of just feel like our backs are against the wall. Do we pick everything up and leave? We just don't know if that's the right thing to do. We have very close ties to our family here. I'm a business owner. We're financially pretty successful here. We just thought: Either we'll stay in California and just stick this out and hope maybe one day the laws will change. Or we'll leave the country altogether and be done with it.It's just a never-ending punishment.

*Gretchen says David and the young woman got intimate consensually, and police misread the situation when the woman opened the car door to throw up, then fell out and passed out. According to prosecutors, the young woman was passed out all along, and David perpetrated "a sexual attack on a totally vulnerable person."

Names have been changed.

The Palestinian village Wadi Fukin in the foreground. The Israeli settlement Beitar Illit in the background

British photographer James Morris's book, Time and Remains of Palestine, published by Kehrer Verlag and out this March, offers an unsettling look at the often almost invisible monuments of the Nakba: the rubble, ghost towns, and paved-over Palestinian settlements erased in the 1948 Palestine War.

Yet, in spite of the book's highly charged political subject, it is a beautiful, eerie, and markedly unobtrusive document of Palestine's past and the West Bank's precarious present. I had a chat with James about the work.

VICE: Firstly, how do you think of yourself, in terms of photography?
James Morris: Definitions are always difficult because they feel restrictive and are usually applied by other people. However, I suppose I am a photographer intrigued in all sorts of ways by the evidence of human interaction with, and presence in, the landscape—man's impact and the layers of history evident there. I follow threads linking place and people, past and present.

How does Time and Remains of Palestine fit into your photographic approach and past work?
It could be seen as a tangent because it deals particularly with conflict, which I haven't done so directly before. However, it feels like a logical extension of my practice. The Israel-Palestine conflict has been present for all of my life and shows no sign of diminishing, so is a constant in my mental landscape. This is what drew me to look at the actual landscape. What I found—starting on the first day, in fact—was something I hadn't considered or expected: the absence of architecture, a demolished landscape, and a veiled history. So by following this particular line of enquiry, as with all projects, there is both continuity and variation.

Central Market, Old City, Hebron

How do you describe this project? I always think it's interesting to ask, especially in a case like this where you're at times documenting an absence more than "a thing."
I think of the project as exploring a part of both what happened to Palestine in 1948 and where it finds itself now, through looking at this very particular "man-altered landscape." It follows a historical trajectory that links past and present, starting, in part one, by probing the now historic Palestinian presence in much of Israel, documenting the sites of some of the 400 or so villages and numerous towns that were depopulated and in most cases razed as a consequence of the 1948 war and later conflicts.

Part two reflects on the concept of a would-be future Palestine that resulted from the Oslo Peace Accords but has failed to materialize in any meaningful form. It documents the fabric of occupation and conflict in the labyrinthine West Bank, a land zoned into multiple and convoluted "areas," divided by walls and fences, checkpoints and road blocks, and reduced by settlements. Rather than addressing the conflict as a whole, it considers the diminishing of Palestine.

The book is split into two distinct parts. The first deals with Nakba, the "disaster" that is a huge part of the Palestinian identity and history. How did this part of the project start?
Part one originated from a walk in a pine forest at the very start of my first visit to Israel, when I stumbled on the unexplained remains of some seemingly ancient structures. A plaque erected in 2004 by the Jewish National Fund declared the place an "oasis," "a recreation area, a place of water, of hope, of peace, of vision." Later that day, I found a film online depicting a recent visit to the same location by Israeli Palestinians. Elderly men recalled that, as children, those remains had been their village. They had been made internal refugees by the 1948 war, during what they called their Nakba—their village flattened, their right of return refused, a planned forest of imported pines veiling their former world.

What was strikingly evident was the huge gulf between these two perceptions of one place. Though I knew of the concept of Nakba, finding myself in such a place and then coming to understand this history was a powerful introduction to its reality—though the term specifically relates to the defeat and substantial depopulation of Palestine in 1948, the notion of "disaster" or "catastrophe" is one that strongly echoes still.

Anata village

In terms of research, I presume lots was required, as these locations are hardly signposted. What was the process there?
As you say, the sites of destroyed villages are very rarely signposted, and many are entirely flattened or built over. Even international guidebooks aimed at foreign tourists, who might well find this history of interest, almost completely ignore it. After my first visit I started research, mainly looking at the work of the so-called New Israeli Historians who emerged in the 1980s and began to question the more comfortable and accepted histories that were being taught.

The most significant text was Benny Morris's 600-page The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, which exhaustively trawls Israeli military and state archives from the 1948 war. But also the work of Meron Benvenisti, Walid Khalidi, and numerous other sources. When back in Israel, I searched out the village sites using old maps and the internet; some were easy to find, but many had virtually disappeared. It was always an unsettling experience to come across the remains of a village, possibly a pile of stones amid a forest or a solitary minaret in the middle a modern Israeli suburb, knowing already something of its charged history and its continuing significance to the diaspora. Before I started to photograph a place, I would sit and read more of its history from the books I carried with me. The notes I made evolved into the extended captions that work as a brief history of the site of each photograph in the book.

Qisarya, district of Haifa

In part one, made up of these photos of the remains of settlements, some are in ruins, but to me the strangest examples are the parking lots or playgrounds, where the original settlement hasn't just been removed but emphatically built over. Which were the sites you found strangest to photograph?
Too many to say, really. The whole experience was intense, unsettling, and often deeply strange. There was a nervousness at not knowing how people would react to what I was doing, which in the end was largely unfounded because so few people seemed to register what it was I was looking at. Also, the weight of the knowledge that I was accumulating, an understanding of what had happened there and where the population had ended up. And then of course also knowing so much of the history of the European Jews who came to Israel hoping to find solace from their unimaginable horrors. Together, this made for a very charged atmosphere.

Kafr Bir'im is unsettling because so much of the village is still extant—you can walk through the lanes and look into collapsed and overgrown houses. In Imwas, there are picnic tables among the abandoned graves in the old cemetery, which at first sight does seem unbelievable. Ein Houd is now an artists' colony of pretty stone houses in one of the few un-demolished Palestinian villages. The atmosphere is outwardly bohemian, but one senses an odor of guilt.

Read on VICE News: In Photos—One Year in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

One notable thing in the book is the stillness and general absence of people. I assume that's intentional? Clearly, in part one, it adds to the feeling of desolation, but in part two, it continues to feel starkly empty.
As you observe, part one is concerned with an absence, and this is the atmosphere I wanted to project. But as a whole, the work is more concerned with historical developments than individuals. I wanted the landscape to reveal the stories, which I think it proved capable of. So apart from a few examples, the occasional figures who appear are not particularly recognizable as individuals—they are perhaps symbolic figures.

The lack of people in the book makes the observer feel invisible, too. During the project, how much did you interact with residents, Israelis, Palestinians, or authorities?
Actually not a lot—not in depth. I felt it was important to maintain some distance from those people affected by the politics on a daily basis to try to achieve some objectivity. I wanted it to be a very particular exploration of what I found, or was drawn to look for, and to avoid the effect of being embedded in either culture. So beyond everyday encounters with people in the street, it was quite a solitary experience. I was only once told to not photograph something, an old Palestinian building in Israel, but even then not with any real conviction.

Abu Zurayq, district of Haifa

How does looking at the current state of Palestinian life in part two contrast with, or inform, part one?
In portraying the West Bank, I am looking at the place that should be a future Palestine, according to the Oslo Accords, but which has failed to materialize in any meaningful form; it remains a virtual state under Israeli dominance. Each part could work as a piece in its own right; they are separated both in time and location. The intent is that they work like book ends of the period of time since the foundation of Israel, encapsulating something of the story of Palestine. Comprehending the history evident in part one helps understand how the landscape of the contemporary West Bank has evolved. It is perhaps like two small pieces in a complex puzzle, joined in the need to see more of the picture.

There are photos—of Beitar Illit, for example—where there's a sense of encroachment by new Israeli settlements on existing Palestinian ones. Is there a feeling of history repeating itself in these places?
I think that rather than repeating itself, it is perhaps a continuation in an evolved form. When I arrived in Israel for the first time, I was handed a "Touring Map of Israel" at the airport information desk. This officially-sanctioned image of Israel encompasses, without mentioning its name, the whole West Bank to the River Jordan, but makes no reference to Palestinian territories, using instead the terms Judea and Samaria. It doesn't mark the separation barrier or the 1949 green line, and it gives only slight mention to the five major Palestinian cities beyond Jerusalem, and none to the smaller towns. By comparison, even tiny Israeli settlements are recorded. It was explained as: "This is all Israel, you can go anywhere." I don't think it would be controversial to assume that many in Israel are attracted to this concept of a Greater Israel and would probably not be saddened if there were many fewer Palestinians in it. Settlement expansion can certainly give the impression of an ongoing encroachment into the viability of a Palestinian state, but whether there is a clearly defined goal I don't know.

The subject of the book itself seems to point to a political direction on your behalf, but do you see it as a political book?
I don't see the book as any kind of activist text, though the subject is of course political. Yes, the work is concerned almost entirely with the Palestinian story and does not attempt some notional sense of "balance" by exploring a parallel Israeli history. And that could be construed as political—but it's not a label that feels appropriate. It's interesting to note that the historian Benny Morris, whose work I most relied on, has more recently said that, in 1948, Israel did not go far enough and should have expelled many more Palestinians. So to reflect on this history does not need to imply a particular bias. Its intent is to express what has taken place, to encourage the viewer to look and think. In recognizing it is only pieces in a complex picture, it doesn't have the certainty of a political book. More importantly, I think, are the words of Raja Shehadeh in the book's introduction: "Without people acknowledging, truly seeing, the Nakba, there can be no peace in this region."

It is necessary, especially in conflict, that both history and the present are endlessly re-explored. My hope is that those who pick up this book will be more than capable of forming their own opinions.

See more of James's work at his website.

Even as we wait for the Crown's decision, it's clear that the Jian Ghomeshi (pictured above) trial is revealing how Canada's judicial system deals with sexual assault. Photo via Flickr user Canadian Film Centre

We were filing out of the second overflow room in Toronto's Old City Hall courthouse where we'd been listening to a live stream of the Jian Ghomeshi trial. It was the final day of the proceedings, and Crown prosecutor Michael Callaghan had just delivered his feeble rebuttal to Ghomeshi's formidable defence lawyer, Marie Henein.

"In order to prove you were strangled, you must die," a woman with a neatly fastened gray ponytail and round glasses said loudly as she got up to leave the room. Others around her nodded their heads in agreement.

Ghomeshi pleaded not guilty to four counts of sexual assault and one of overcoming resistance by choking. Henein had just spent a week and a half tearing down the three complainants' credibility, repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that the women were in contact with Ghomeshi after they said he abused them, and asserting that they had lied to the court because they neglected to mention their continued relations in initial statements. The Crown said, in summary, that memory slips with time, and that Henein was reinforcing stereotypes about the ideal victim.

The verdict will not be announced until March 24. But given the way the trial played out, it has been proven, once again, that our legal system does not serve women. Survivors across the country are left asking, "Great. What now?"

So I spoke with Canadian feminists in law, politics, and activism, and they outlined some of the ways the system could better handle sexual assault trials.

Altering the System We Have

"The criminal system needs to revise itself to reflect the reality that sexual violence is really unlike other criminal acts that are codified in the criminal code," says feminist lawyer Pam Cross.

She has a few suggestions for changes to the system which, she says, would be fairly straightforward to implement.

The way the law is set up now, "victims" aka witnesses don't have the right to legal representation. The exception to that is when, during a sexual assault trial, the defence presents third party documents (i.e. therapist's records). The women who spoke out against Ghomeshi all had legal counsel, and if more survivors did, they could be advised on what the process will look like, how long it will take, what kinds of personal details will be exposed, and the kinds of questions they should be prepared to answer.

If they do decide to report, they'll be ready for it. Or, they can make an informed decision not to report if that course of action suits them better.

Lenore Lukasik-Foss agrees with this proposed modification. She is the chair of the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, and she says usually, those who report being sexually assaulted and who decide to take their case to court cannot afford lawyers.

"All feel validated and in which they feel that the person who has caused them harm understands the impact of what they have done." She says restorative justice would also give the abuser a chance to apologize and to learn and change so they don't do it again.

What if Ghomeshi Gets Off?

Cross points out that survivors can still take the allegations through civil court even if their criminal trial doesn't work out. Cases in civil court are tried not on reasonable doubt, but on a balance of probabilities, meaning the judge hears both sides and decides which is most believable.

It's a cheap conclusion, but in the meantime, there's nothing to do but wait for the verdict.

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

Harper Lee. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. Courtesy of Harper Collins

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has died in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, AL.com reports. She was 89 years old.

Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, released in 1960, had long been her only published novel. But the story of Jean Louise "Scout" Finch's childhood in Maycomb, Alabama, and her father Atticus's heroic court battle against racial injustice stands as a hallmark in American literature. Her opus won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, and it remains one of the most widely taught and referenced books in the US today.

Lee has lived a fiercely private life since, almost never granting interviews or meeting with reporters—she even turned down an interview offer from Oprah. She recently made headlines when Go Set a Watchman, billed as a sequel but is more accurately an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, hit bookstores last July, raising many questions across the literary world. In the novel, Finch, the highly moral figure in Mockingbird, is instead written as a racist. Combined with the surprising timing of the book—after the death of her sister, Alice, who had been the diligent protector of her work and legacy—many wondered if the decision to publish Watchman was made without Lee's approval.

Writer Morgan (left) in the elevator with Shia Lebeouf. Photo courtesy of Oxford Union

It's a Friday morning in Oxford. Shia LeBeouf is here, and not many people care. Yesterday, I lost out on securing a spot on the Oxford Law Society's puppy playdate, which booked up online in under four minutes. Someone was trying to sell his or her spot for £100 . Today, the Transformers actor-turned-conceptual artist is standing inside an elevator for 24 hours, asking people to come and join him, while the whole thing is live streamed on YouTube. He is also due to give a talk at the Oxford Union debating society tonight.

Apparently, people love puppies more than they love performance art, so when I turn up to LeBeouf's elevator at the EC English language school, there is a meager line outside. It may have something to do with the fact that it is 9 AM on a cold February day, but Oxford students have lined up for hours here for less—namely to be in the same debating chamber asMade in Chelsea stars. People here seem pretty bemused at their own interest in the event, and nobody coming out of the elevator looks any more enlightened. The most pressing question here really is why? Why here, in this abrasively orange building, on a market square in a quaint university town? Apparently, because Oxford asked. And apparently, because no other building would have them.

We didn't wait long to get to the elevator doors. After pressing the "up" button a few times, a group filed out and we filed in. I shook LeBeouf's hand, then the hands of his collaborators Nastja Rönkkö and Luke Turners. The door closed. Forgetting that our voices were being live streamed, we talked about the elves in The Lord of The Rings—the subject of the dissertation my nerdy best friend I brought with me is writing; we talked about how Shia had liked the floors in the college he stayed in, because they "have a lot of history"; and we talked about how much he likes partying at Mexican quinceañeras. I brought up Transformers once, tentatively. He changed the subject.

The author outside LaBeouf's elevator

After a couple of minutes, two chemistry students came in, and momentarily, we forgot that we were in a confined space with a celebrity and just chatted between ourselves about mundane student things. Eventually, when conversation ran dry, and we were aware that we were Shia-hogging, we left. On my way out, someone asked me what he smelled like. But like any short conversation with another human being, my only real impression of him is that he is a nice guy. Listening to the live stream, he just told someone he liked his corduroys, and at another point, he made everyone get out of the elevator so an old woman could actually use it. He held the elevator door for people. He wanted to know the names of students' dogs.

LeBeouf has been the simultaneous subject and arbiter of the media frenzy about his spiraling descent for the past couple of years—ever since charges of plagiarism over his short film HowardCantour.com. Critics who are unaware, or more likely unwilling to acknowledge that this narrative has been created by LeBeouf himself, have dismissed his artistic performances as the self-indulgent narcissism of a celebrity desperate for acknowledgement from intellectual circles. Recently, we watched him watch every single one of his movies in reverse chronological order in #allmymovies, snidely joking about his falling asleep in Transformers. We made and shared GIFs out of his motivational Just Do It video. We read articles about him allegedly being raped in the process of #Iamsorry, but apparently, no one went to the exhibition itself. We laughed about his lurid spandex outfit when he ran laps around a gallery in Amsterdam to mark a 12-hour art conference in #metamarathon. We were bemused by the pretension of the silent interview in a hotel room he did with Dazed magazine. We were bemused, period.

Shia LaBeouf makes everyone get out of the elevator so an old woman can use it.

It is easy to call LeBeouf's behavior erratic and attribute his performances to the same crazed celebrity mentality that saw him fighting outside strip clubs or checking into rehab. But it is so much harder to seriously engage with him. This is, obviously, less hard to do when you are in a confined space with the man himself, as he looks into your eyes and says that #allmymovies was just a struggle to "come to terms with myself." Alongside sincere moments like that, there was the inevitable bullshit that you would expect from someone who has had to be in the same room as Megan Fox a lot. Like when he told the chemistry student we were in the elevator with that he believed in science like he believed in magic. That was one of those times.

This piece, called #elevate, is an effective, if trite, exploration of the painful performance of small-talk, of the yearning for genuine human interaction, of bringing celebrity down to earth. Of course, it's a derivative rip off of Marina Ambromovic's The Artist is Present—like how his apology tweets for plagiarism were all blatantly plagiarized, and just like how Damien Hirst's work is a rip off of every artist ever. This is just where art is at right now—and the enduring popularity of self-referential narcissists like Kanye West, James Franco, Joaquin Phoenix, and Bret Easton Ellis is a testament to that. Whether or not I am able to confirm a wry irony in his smile, or an element of performance in his earnestness, standing in an elevator with Shia LaBeouf was worthy of my time. Listening to him is worth yours.

The cover of right-wing magazine 'wSieci.' The text reads "The Islamic Rape of Europe."

This week, the popular right-wing Polish magazine wSieci ran a cover that has offended a lot of people. Reason being: It features an image of a woman being grabbed at by numerous hairy arms, and the words: "The Islamic Rape of Europe."

The photograph—which, minus the hands, looks a lot like a stock image for "woman who's just remembered she left the iron on"—is a comment on the sexual attacks on German women in Cologne that took place on New Year's Eve. There were 58 counts of sexual assault that night, and even though only three arrested suspects were recent refugees, the subsequent message from Europe's right-wing media was clear: Refugees are a threat to the safety of women in the EU.

Since the migrant crisis began, Poland has stuck to a very strict line on immigration. Most recently, at the EU summit currently taking place in Brussels, Poland—along with the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary—has called for Europe's borders to be sealed off in order to block the main route used by refugees.

Considering the uproar over the cover so far seems to have come mostly from outside of Poland, and because I don't speak Polish and therefore cannot gauge the reaction on Twitter, I decided to give our friend and VICE Poland editor Maciek Piasecki a call to see what his fellow countrymen think of the cover.

VICE: What was your initial reaction to the cover?
Maciek Piasecki: I'm becoming increasingly desensitized to this kind of cover because the right-wing media does this kind of thing all the time. It portrays people it doesn't like with a gun to their face.

Is the majority of Polish media right wing?
Yeah, I think so. Some of the more eccentric left-wing magazines have been closing down in recent years. There has been an increase in magazines like wSieci—they call themselves "rebellious magazines." They came about during the time of the centralist-neoliberal government in Poland and were openly against the government, but right now, they are really pro-government because the government is now conservative.

Friends of the ruling party, for example, own the Polish Journal, so it's a bit like the Hungarian situation, where friends of the party in power also own the media. But these magazines still call themselves "rebellious," even though they're basically party media.

Do you think the message on the cover is something that resonates with more of the Polish population than not?
There aren't many Syrian refugees here in Poland—people get their information from these kinds of magazines or really biased social media pages. The topic of Islamic refugees attacking European women has been the source of this discourse for the past few months, especially after Cologne. The cover story is definitely playing on this sentiment. Also, it's not exclusively about attacks on women; it's also about what the EU is covering up, pretending it's uncovering some conspiracy theories.

What do you think about the cover aesthetically?
I think we should have more art classes in Poland.

Does Poland have an issue with the EU in general? Or just immigration?
The ruling party is not eurosceptic; it has never openly opposed the EU. The lives of many Poles have improved through being in the EU. But the immigration quota is something that is definitely a concern of Poland. I don't think many people want to stop in Poland anyway, and it's the Poles who want to leave Poland. Everyone is trying to run away. Poles are really happy to emigrate, but they clearly don't see that people would like to come here too.

Do you think the cover will have much of an impact in Poland?
I don't think so; I think it's just part of the rhetoric. On the whole, it is quite dangerous, as I think Polish people are coming to think that it's normal to publish such things, which is worrying.

Has there been much of a backlash against it? Are people offended?
People are offended, but only those aware of the racial issues, not the majority of the public. I don't think the editor of the magazine would say the publication was racist; it's just under the skin. The old EU countries are definitely more politically correct. In Poland, you don't get people with different shades of skin—everyone is pretty ethnically uniform. There aren't many in Poland who could be hurt by the image because they don't see these perpetrators as part of their community—that's the issue.

Follow Amelia Dimoldenberg on Twitter.

Donald Trump's campaign headquarters is perched near State and Meeting Street over looking the Congaree River in Columbia, South Carolina

Last week, the United States of America nervously watched the 2016 election season's second popularity contest take place in New Hampshire. Both parties had wins by outsider candidates. Bernie Sanders came away with the Democratic victory, retaining 20 percent more of the vote than his competitor Hillary Clinton, while Donald Trump landed the win for the Republicans defeating second runner-up John Kasich—also by a 20 percent margin. The Republican primary in South Carolina and the Democratic Party Caucus in Nevada will take place this Saturday. The Republican Party Nevada Caucus will be on February 23 and the Democratic South Carolina primary on Feb 27.

I spoke with some potential voters in SC about what issues mattered most to them and why they would be voting on February 20th.

All photographs by Pete Voelker.

There is something about a man in a suit with a swagger that is timeless and cool. Frank Sinatra knew it. James Bond knows it. Apparently, filmmakers Daniel Cloud Campos and Spencer Susser know it, too. Fresh off their premiere of "Shiny" at the Sundance Film Festival last month, they've released the film—which features one hell of a suit—online for the whole world to see. The twist to this particular suit story, however, is that there isn't a body inside it.

The film is the classic story about an "everyman" protecting a damsel in distress. Luckily, the way they did it they were able to keep the "cool," the suit, and the swagger all while not having to worry about actors, sets, and locations. To do this, Campos and Susser smartly used stop-motion animation to tell their story by bringing entire outfits to vivid life. With a mounted camera high above a wooden floor, the directing duo hammered out a remarkably choreographed scenario where a few pieces of clothing perfectly characterize robbers, a confident woman, a dashing man, and a gaggle of passersby. The sensation of reality is enhanced by a fantastic sound design, where a simple sigh, cough, scream, footstep, or punch calls to mind that invisible mouth, foot, or fist. The most stunning thing about a small department store's worth of clothing coming to life isn't the telling of a mugging gone wrong but rather the staggeringly real sense of movement and action.

Dedicated readers will know this isn't the first Spencer Susser short featured on VICE. Way back in the seventh "I'm Short, Not Stupid," I covered his amazing short film "I Love Sarah Jane," about a girl named Sarah and a whole mess of zombies. Part of the change in tone and style might be due, in part, to his co-director Daniel Cloud Campos, who is an acclaimed dancer and choreographer as well as a music video and film director.

All in all, "Shiny" is a joy to watch and behold. If clothes could move on their own, this is the first thing I'd want to watch them do after they came off people (although I'd still give the people a watch first).

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

New York city. Some call it "the big apple." To others it is "the city that simply doesnt ever sleep." Others still know it as "the city of angels." Me? I just call it home. I mean, I am not from here nor do i live here. But for the short time that i was in this city full of a milion stories, the only story that matered was my own: I witnessed the god of comedy Jery Seinfeld perform live for the first time ever

Just to clarify that last sentance, this was not Jery seinfelds first time performing. How else do you think he earned his own hit NBC sitcom (Seinfeld) that literaly DOMINATED television sets across this great nation throughout the 1990s and left a mark that still courses thru the landscape of popular culture more powerfully than the mighty Missisippi?

But even if you had never heard of Jery before tonite (because u were born in a coma? seriosly WTF, hypothetical person i invented in my mind), watching the show it was clear that one was witnessing a master at work. The theater was his domain, and for anyone asking, yes, jery is still the master

The crowd outside the Beacon was rowdy is fuck. Honestly I havent seen middle aged white people get this turnt up over anything since Beyonces super bowl performance. Then as soon as we were all seated who BERSTS out on stage but none other than Jerys fellow comedy icon Steve Martin (Bringing Down the House). He made some jokes but i dont really remember any of them. Listen, my plan was to type down everything on my iPhone 6S but i was siting next to some journalist's and they had notepads and thats when i sudenly realize that when you are writing about the theatar its simply proper etiquete to not have your phone all lit up and distracting smh.

But anyway just picture steve martin kind of making some wry jokes or whatever and then pulling out his banjo and didling out a couple of melodys and what not when suddenly JERY creep up behind him, no fanfare nothing, just two legends in the game sharing a stage as equals

From that point onward, Jery kept it lit with an hour-plus comedy performance that give the audience a window into what Seinfeld would be like today. Any number of his bits could have been truncated and tossed in to the intro of a brand new epsode of seinfeld—if it was still on TV—and it would be just like old times (paging NBC).

Now if youre like me and you have spent the last three years watching every single late-nite TV appearance Jery has ever done in the event that he makes a face or says something that u can photoshop into a freeze frame of a Drake music video or a GOP debate or whatever the case may be, then some of the jokes n stories he told may not be new for you. Regardless the performance was a tsunami of latter-day Jery greatest hits and deep cuts coming at you from every single direction

He eased into his set by talking about "going out" in general, about how everyone wants to go out, and then once theyre out, they "gotta go." It was pure seinfeld, jerry demonstrating an impresive economy of words to nimbly sum up the human experience of socialization before boiling it down to the very poignant observation that none of us really want to be anywhere and that wherever we are, we arent realy satisfied. Daniel Tosh if youre reading this, take note, comedy is about more than just "janking off" onstage. Its about identifying the universal moments that make us human

From here on Jery triple-axel jumped into a barage of dispatches on american culture, from Swanson dinners to texting to motion detectors in toilets

Some times i have to fill out a form or whatever and I actually have to think for a moment about what my birthday is before writing it down. But Jery can cram thousands and thousands of words of an elegantly crafted and fine-tuned comedy set into his mind and regurgitate it with the precision of the lead balerina in Swan Lake, his voice warbling into the emphatic high tones that are one of the keys to his all-consuming charisma

It felt like just ten minutes but Jery had been going for an hour when he thanked the crowd. After getting a standing ovaish, he asked the crowd if anyone had any questions. My heart rate acelerated. Beads of sweat formed on my temple. This was my moment. I would finaly get to find out what he thinks seinfeld would be like if it was still on TV today with brand new epsodes every week, just like back in the day

Sitting in the backyard of his home in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood on Saturday afternoon, August 22, 2009, Antonio Johnson had plenty to look forward to. A young father with another baby on the way, he was supposed to start a new job that Monday, according to his mother, Myrna Williams-Cammon.

Suddenly, a former childhood friend of the 21-year-old came into his backyard and pulled out a gun, his mother tells VICE. Loud pops shattered the air, and bullets tore through Johnson and his pregnant girlfriend, who was sitting next to him. She and the baby survived, but Johnson was killed.

More than six years after his death, Johnson's killer remains free because the only person who provided a name to Miami-Dade Police homicide investigators is also dead, his mother alleges. (A department spokesman declined comment on the still-open investigation). She also claims the killer and the dead witness knew her son very well, but that she does not want to disclose their identities for fear of reprisal.

"The person police believe killed my son practically grew up in my house," Williams-Cammon says. "Apparently, he thought my son was talking to the police about him."

Today, Williams-Cammon is on a mission to end the "no-snitching" culture in Florida's inner-city neighborhoods, especially in her home county of Miami-Dade, where there have been two dozen gun-related incidents involving juveniles in the past 13 months, according to local police reports. On Tuesday, Williams-Cammon and 29 other mothers of murder victims traveled to Tallahassee, the State Capitol, to show support for a bill aimed at protecting the personal identities of witnesses in homicide investigations.

"It may be too late for my son," Williams-Cammon says, "but this bill could help other parents find justice for their murdered children."

The only problem is that the legislative solution Williams-Cammon and her coalition seek threatens to infringe on a suspect's right to face their accuser, civil liberties advocates warn. The debate points to the larger, perennial frustration investigators and prosecutors face across America when trying to convince people who have knowledge about violent crimes to come forward.

"I understand what they are trying to do, but doesn't make sense," says Barbara Petersen, president of the Florida First Amendment Foundation. "It is contrary to everything our criminal justice system stands for."

Ed Narain, a Democratic state representative from Tampa, insists his legislation will not prevent defendants and their attorneys from gaining access to witness information during the discovery phase of a case. Instead, he argues the law would only prohibit the media and general public from finding out the names and other personal data about witnesses.

"It's good policy," Narain tells me. "We have to do something to restore people's faith in the criminal justice process."

Narain adds that killings in his home city motivated him to propose the bill, singling out the shooting death of 14-year-old Edward Harris III in May of last year. The teen had survived a prior drive-by, and his father believed Harris was killed for cooperating with police, according to a local CBS news report.

"The victims are not gang bangers," Narain says. "These are good kids who were doing the right thing."

Since filing the bill last fall, Narain has gained support from the Tampa Police Department, which has not been able to make arrests in half of the 62 murder cases initiated in 2014 and 2015, according to department spokeswoman Andrea Davis.

"This is a very real problem," Davis writes VICE in an email. "We have violent crimes where there were dozens of witnesses, but they don't provide the information needed to arrest someone. Many times that is due to fear of some type of retaliation."

Check out our documentary about gun culture in Florida.

Since January, when Narain introduced his bill at the beginning of the Florida state legislative session, the Miami caravan of victims' mothers has traveled to the State Capitol several times to urge legislators to pass the witness protection law, Williams-Cammon says. She believes the bill will make a huge difference in Miami-Dade's inner city neighborhoods, where many gun victims are 18 and under and a high number of homicide cases go unsolved.

February has been a particularly violent month for some children and teenagers in Florida's most populous county.

On the second day of the month, two elementary schools in the city of Opa-Locka were put on lockdown while cops searched the area for shooters who opened fire on a car at a Burger King drive-thru. One victim, 17-year-old Donesha S. Gantt, used her cell phone to live stream dramatic video on Facebook of what she thought were her final moments.

"I know they shot me, but it's good," a sobbing Gantt says in the footage. "God, forgive me for all my sins." Gantt and another woman in the car who was also shot survived the attack. Ten days later, three other public schools were put on lockdown while officers canvassed the area for gunmen who shot up a house in Miami Gardens. In the past week, three teenagers got shot in a 24-hour span; two survived, while 16-year-old La-Nard Wilcher was killed.

Between January of last year and this month, 25 people between the ages 7 and 19 were shot in Miami-Dade, based on a search of daily press releases put out by the Miami Police and county police departments. Fourteen of them died.

In a statement before the Florida Senate criminal justice committee earlier this week, Miami-Dade Public Schools Superintendent Alberto Carvahlohe suggested the numbers are even higher. "Over the past 12 months alone, 60 school age children have been shot in Miami," Carvahlo said. "Over 20 have lost their lives."

In addition, 90 out of 126 homicide cases that occurred between January 1 and January 31, 2013, in the county's Northside District—which includes parts of inner city neighborhoods such as Brownsville and Liberty City—remain unsolved, according to Miami-Dade spokesman Detective Daniel Ferrin. The district also has a homicide clearance rate of 28.6 percent during the same period, which is significantly lower than the national murder clearance rate of 64.5 percent, according to 2014 FBI crime statistics, the most recent available. In a recent press statement, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said "only five of 100 shooting/homicide incidents in the Liberty City area result in an arrest."

The overwhelming support shown by the Miami area parents helped the legislation move quickly through several Florida House and Senate committees, as well as garner bipartisan support in the Republican controlled legislature, according to Narain.

However, the Senate criminal justice committee voted to temporarily postpone, making a recommendation in favor or against Narain's witness protection law. Narain expects the committee will reconsider voting on his bill next week. "I don't see anything standing in its way," Narain says. "But maybe I am naive."

But even if the bill gets approved by the full legislature and Governor Rick Scott, the law would likely be challenged in court, according to Petersen of the Florida First Amendment Foundation.

"There's a lot of room for prosecutorial misconduct involving uncredible witnesses," she says. "Plus, you cannot be accused anonymously of murder."

Follow Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.

Cape Bretoners sure do seem thirsty to have Americans invade their pristine island. Screenshot via Cape Breton if Donald Trump Wins

If you've been on Facebook this week, you've likely noticed one of your low-to-middlebrow political friends posting this website: Cape Breton If Donald Trump Wins. It's exactly what it sounds like. The site tells Americans, should Donald Trump win the US presidency, to immigrate to Cape Breton, the picturesque Nova Scotia island.

"Don't wait until Donald Trump is elected president to find somewhere else to live!" the website says. "Start now, that way, on election day, you just hop on a bus to start your new life in Cape Breton, where women can get abortions, Muslim people can roam freely, and the only 'walls' are holding up the roofs of our extremely affordable houses."

The site has gone viral as our American media pals have gone along for the ride—with one even calling Cape Breton a "gun-free, pro-choice, ultra-diverse haven." Its maker says he's received over 1,500 inquiries, many from Americans who really, really want to move.

And why wouldn't they? Cape Breton is fucking beautiful and the people there are so nice, you wonder if they are anthropomorphic models of the feeling you get after a warm hug.

There's a couple catches, though. "Ultra-diverse?" If you mean some Cape Bretoners are Catholic and some are Protestant and not everyone plays a fiddle, then yes, that counts as diversity. And that abortion line? It's not true.

Women can't get elective abortions in Cape Breton. At least, not according to Cathie Penny of Cape Breton Sexual Health Centre, the island's go-to sexual health educator. "You can get referrals and you can get follow-up . So it's safe to say it's history."

If Americans still fear they'll have to seek refuge in Nova Scotia if Trump wins, Trace has a simple solution.

"Uh... don't elect Trump?" she suggests. "Don't find yourself in that position."

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On this episode of VICE Talks Film, we meet Roger Deakins—the legendary cinematographer behind No Country for Old Men, Fargo, and The Shawshank Redemption—who just received his 13th Oscar nomination for Sicario, a dark thriller that takes place inside the world of Mexican drug cartels.

Fellow 2016 Oscar nominee Matthew Heineman—director of the acclaimed documentary Cartel Land—sits down with Deakins to discuss the overlapping themes of their respective films.

Sandra Wesley, pictured above, is the executive director of the Montreal sex workers' rights group Stella (screenshot via VICE Du Jour)

Are suburban teenage girls at risk?

You might think so, given recent headlines coming out of Montreal these days.

In the past month, a spate of disappearances involving five teenage runaways, all from a single group home in the Montreal suburb of Laval, has been causing deep worry lines to appear on the foreheads of Quebec parents, journalists, and politicians. To make matters even more salacious, just about every story on the issue has stated or insinuated that the girls had been lured into prostitution by street gangs.

The disappearances had all the necessary elements for a media frenzy: Troubled white suburban teenage girls! Prostitution! Street gangs!

The good news is, the five girls eventually were found or returned on their own. But the response to the disappearances reached such a fever pitch that, last Tuesday, Philippe Couillard's provincial Liberal government announced that it was setting up a $3-million, five-year program specifically to fight teen prostitution, mostly by improving coordination and communication between the cops, social workers, and other officials. Public Security Minister Martin Coiteux said he hoped the new program would lead to more arrests.

It's a move that Sandra Wesley, the executive director of Montreal sex workers' rights group Stella, describes as hypocritical.

She says the disappearances of the girls and the government's response are a distraction, hiding the fact that provincial funding of programs aimed explicitly at combating sexual exploitation of youth are drying up, and will run out at the end of March.

Wesley says Stella, which provides workshops, strategies, and training to help sex workers either avoid violent situations or develop the skills necessary to get out of them, is going to lose almost 20 percent of its annual $600,000 budget because the Couillard government—already under serious fire for the dramatic belt-tightening it's imposed on the province since coming to power in 2014—is cancelling the $110,000 Stella used to run its safety and security program.

"It sends the message that the government, when they decided to make these cuts, did not think violence against sex workers or violence in the lives of sex workers was something that was worthy of continuing to finance," she says.

It's as if the government gives up on women once they join the sex industry. All the money and effort is being spent on preventing them from entering it, with little left over to help women once they are actually in—whether they are there voluntarily or not.

Stella already lost one outreach worker due to budget cuts last year. The one taking effect as of April 1 will cost them another, reducing their team from seven to five. They'll also be losing the services of a sexologist, who helped sex workers referred by Stella deal with issues they encounter over the course of their careers.

Wesley says she draws a line of short-sighted government action on matters related to sex going back to 2001, when the then-PQ government cut high school sex education. That played a crucial part in perpetuating widespread sexual illiteracy in a generation of Quebec teens who have now reached adulthood.

According to Manon Massé, a member of Quebec's National Assembly with the left-wing Québec solidaire party, the cuts being implemented now affect a bunch of community groups serving her east-end Montreal riding. That includes Stella, but also L'Anonyme and the Bunker, two organizations working with street kids on a host of issues ranging from sexual consent to exploitation.

What seems to bug Massé a lot is just how minor the savings are. She says those groups and the several others that rely on provincial funding to fight sexual exploitation can get by on a total government investment of about $1.5 million a year.

"That's peanuts," she says. The $3 million in new funding promised by the government on Tuesday, she says, "is better spent on community groups."

Both Massé and Wesley say the government's new plan misses the point of sexual exploitation entirely.

"They're handling it as a crisis," Wesley says. "But I believe that, for us and the other organizations that we work in partnership with, prevention and intervention are the services that are needed. Police repression will not in any way help."

Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter.