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An Alliance Between Toronto Police and Harm Reduction Centres Has Drug Users Scared and Angry

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All photos by the author

A controversial program that disguises plainclothes police officers as harm reduction workers has some outreach workers and portions of the homeless and drug-using population of Toronto up in arms.

The Street Outreach project—a pilot program by the Toronto Police Service (TPS) launched last fall that partners with two of the city's major harm reduction organizations—has much of the marginalized community saying that the program needs to be completely shut down by its planned end date of March 31.

The program has caused significant backlash from other outreach groups in the city. The concern is that at-risk communities are now afraid of being threatened or arrested by police officers embedded within The Works—a needle exchange run through Toronto Public Health—and John Howard Society (JHS), a privately-funded outreach group. The Toronto Police denies that the program has ever been used to assist in arrests.

"Our problem isn't as much with the police—they had access and money and thought, This is good. The Works and JHS are the two agencies that let the police in and mixed law enforcement with harm reduction, and those two places are the ones that really dropped the ball," Matt Johnson, a spokesperson for the Toronto Harm Reduction Alliance (THRA), told VICE.

Johnson explained that, for marginalized communities, police presence is intimidating enough, but notes that there's an added factor: The information typically shared with harm reduction workers—both medical history and intimate details of client's lives—is not something most drug users feel comfortable talking to the police about. Often, they're afraid it may be used against them, their friends, or their dealers.

According to Johnson, the blowback from at-risk communities—against not only The Works and JHS, but organizations such as Parkdale Community Health Centre—has been tremendous.

"When we conduct outreach, we learn people's Hep C status, their HIV status, what kind of drugs they've been using, and sometimes where they're getting their drugs from. This is all stuff that people would be very careful about if they knew they were talking to a police officer. We first heard just whispers about suspicious interactions with police near these , harm reduction teams—our peer teams—started getting people saying, 'I'm not talking to you, you work with the police.'"

According to the Toronto police, the program—built on the back of a $99,000 portion of a provincial grant called "Proceeds of Crime"—is in no way targeting drug users for arrest or looking to obtain any criminal information from them. Rather, police say they're trying to supplement enforcement policies with community policing—the sooner at-risk, possibly violent individuals can get access to social services, the less likely is that police have to deal with criminal behaviour later.

Superintended Scott Baptist, unit commander of 13 Division—which works in conjunction with John Howard Society—says that the Street Outreach project is part of a "turning point" for the police. Baptist says that the TPS has begun to deal with issues of substance abuse and mental health as social problems, not crimes.

"We have a court system that is simply ineffective in instances like this," he told VICE, noting that many cases dealing with at-risk populations are not as cut-and-dry as the criminal code makes them out to be.

"Enforcement is not the cure. It's a social issue that needs a social cure."


In January, THRA and the Toronto Drug Users Union (TDUU) called an emergency meeting with Toronto communities to discuss complaints regarding police not identifying themselves while with harm reduction workers. There were also concerns that arrests around the time the program began—two of which allegedly happened at The Works—were a direct result of the Street Outreach project.

The aftermath of the meeting was that, officially, the police have stopped going out with outreach workers from The Works on street operations, although the program has continued without change at the John Howard Society. In the case of The Works, if 12 or 13 Division police encounter anybody in the community who wants access to further services, the officers on duty would send a referral to The Works and allow an employee take it from there, rather than ride along with harm reduction workers directly.

Baptist told VICE that officers on outreach always operate in plainclothes, but says that they are required to carry ID around their neck and verbally identify themselves as law enforcement. Despite this, Johnson alleges that not all police are identifying themselves.

"The people that it's supposedly helping? They know it's destroying their life, because they're not comfortable going to these places anymore and getting the services they need. They're afraid that, if the cops on the program see them, even if they aren't busting them then, the police still know their faces," said Dawn, a member of one of the harm reduction centre in the city (whose name has been changed to protect employment). According to Dawn, the issue of police possibly gaining intelligence from those seeking help goes far past the individual who they collect it from.

"If the police were to see them while not on outreach and on regular duty, they're afraid of getting busted, they're afraid of outing their friends, they're afraid of outing their dealers if they get caught talking with those cops. It's destroyed 30 years of trust building within the agencies."

To Johnson, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether the police are collecting information or not—the streets believe it enough to deter some people from going to get help.

"What's out on the street is that this has resulted in arrests. Perception in street communities is the same as fact, so the police can deny it as much as they want, but that won't change the truth: that some people are not coming to get help anymore."

Follow Jake Kivanç on Twitter.


Serial Killer Robert Pickton Released a Book From Prison Proclaiming His Innocence and It’s Totally Legal

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Robert Pickton, above, is believed to have murdered nearly 50 women. Screenshot via Global

Robert Pickton, the worst serial killer in Canadian history, has released a paperback book proclaiming his innocence from behind bars.

In Pickton: In His Own Words, the former Coquitlam, BC pig farmer claims he's "the fall guy" in a justice system that wrongfully convicted him for the murders of six women. The book, selling for $25.73 on Amazon, was published in the US by a retired California construction worker named Michael Chilldres, whose name appears on the cover. According to CTV BC, Chilldres was given a copy of the manuscript from a former cellmate of Pickton's—a child sex offender who hopes to use the profits to pay for his own legal fees.

Judging by what appears in the online preview, the book, which is riddled with bible passages, run-on sentences, and grammatical errors, is unreadable. It is, however, perfectly legal.

There is no federal law preventing prisoners from profiting by recounting their crimes, although that legislation does exist in Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia.

BC Minister of Public Safety Mike Morris said his office is "investigating every means available to ensure that the families involved are protected from further harm and that Robert Pickton will not profit in any way from this book."

Toronto criminal lawyer Ari Goldkind says it's "unfortunate" no laws exist in BC and criticized the government there for not following suit with what other provinces are doing.

"We're talking a very populated province with all sorts of killers and rapists who might want to profit off their story," he told VICE. "If the minister doesn't like it, go to a photocopy machine, photocopy Ontario's legislation, and put this before the legislature in BC."

Pickton, 66, was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in 2007 and is currently serving a life sentence in Agassiz, BC. After his arrest in 2002, he told an undercover cop posing as a cellmate that he was responsible for the deaths of 49 women.

His book makes several assertions, including that the Hells Angels are behind some of the murders for which he was blamed and that the case against him was a "conspiracy theory linked to a bazaar insolent" (sic), CTV reports. He also says he's a "green horn" who has "little experience about women over sexual intercourse as sex is sin without marriage."

As distasteful as his remarks may be, Goldkind said Pickton is protected by free speech rights. He said Pickton likely leaked his writings to his cellmate to avoid having Corrections Canada "peekaboo" at his work. But even if they'd caught him, Goldkind said they have no jurisdiction to interfere with publication of the memoir.

At one point, the federal government tabled legislation similar to that of Ontario's, but it never passed into law. Goldkind said it was based on the Son of Sam laws, first enacted in New York in 1977 following reports that serial killer David Berkowitz, nicknamed the Son of Sam, was being offered lucrative book deals. (Berkowitz did release a book called Son of Hope, but apparently didn't make money off it.)

In November, infamous Ontario rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo released a fictional e-book called A MAD World Order on Amazon, but it was quickly pulled offline due to public outrage.

As of noon Monday, Pickton's book had amassed 91 customer reviews on Amazon, with a total of 1.3 stars. Most people were expressing horror that Amazon would sell something penned by a serial killer, but there were five five-star reviews, including one that said "This is a rare opportunity to get into the mind of a serial killer. Hitler made a book and that's not illegal. Just read the damn book, you all know you want to!!!"

Speaking to the CBC, Sandra Gagnon, who believes her sister was killed by Pickton on his farm, said she finds the book deeply offensive.

"It really disgusts me knowing that the worst serial killer in history has the nerve to write that book and reopen wounds."

Chilldres told CTV he empathizes with the victims' families but that he was just helping out a friend by publishing the book.

"Don't shoot the messenger," he said, noting he used Wikipedia to fact check Pickton's story.

Goldkind said the public should be more concerned about the kind of people who would willingly purchase a serial killer's book than about the fact that Pickton has written it in the first place.

"They know they're not getting literature, they know they're not getting great works, they know it's full of typos and grammatical errors, and it's a self-serving document," he said, pointing out that a full confession would be a much more compelling and potentially useful read than a book purporting to tell Pickton's side of the story.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

What We Know About the Michigan Uber Driver Charged with Going on a Random Shooting Spree

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Matt Mellen feared for his life as he rode an Uber to a friend's house on Saturday.

The driver swerved through oncoming traffic lanes in Kalamazoo, Michigan, at 80 miles per hour and ignored at least one stop sign, according to a Facebook post Mellen's fiancée Mackenzie Waite wrote around 5:30 PM. But as she called 9-1-1 and complained to the company, the driver, Jason B. Dalton, was gearing up to do far worse than drive recklessly, according to police.

Dalton, 45, was charged with six counts of murder on Monday after prosecutors say he went on a shooting spree in three different locations, wounding two more people. The victims include 53-year-old Richard Smith and his teenaged son Tyler, who were killed at about 10 PM at a car dealership, as well as four women—Mary Lou Nye, 62; Mary Jo Nye, 60; Dorothy Brown, 74; and Barbara Hawthorn, 68—who were sitting in their cars outside a Cracker Barrel when Dalton allegedly opened fire there about 15 minutes later.

A 14-year-old girl in the car with the women was critically wounded.

Dalton's initial act of violence is said to have come some four hours earlier, when he allegedly opened fire outside a rental townhouse and wounded an unidentified woman. Neighbors found her laying in a parking lot, the house festooned with bullet holes. Dalton—who according to the New York Times worked for Progressive Insurance until mid-2011—was eventually taken into custody without incident when cops spotted his car at a downtown bar around 12:45 AM.

The tragedy came during a weekend that saw at least five other mass shootings in the United States. But what's especially troubling about the Kalamazoo deaths is that there doesn't seem to be any motive or even a whiff of logic connecting the shootings, a degree of randomness that left the western Michigan city desperate for answers.

"How do you go and tell the families of these victims that they weren't targeted for any reason than they were there to be a target?" Kalamazoo County prosecutor Jeffrey Getting asked in a Sunday news conference.

Meanwhile, Mellen may not have even been the last person to ride in Dalton's car that night. A Twitter user who goes by Black Mamba tweeted a screenshot suggesting Dalton gave him a ride around 8 PM, apparently in the midst of the carnage. Another woman named Megan Knight told the New York Daily News that a co-worker requested Dalton's Uber shortly after 11 PM but canceled it at the last minute. Carmen Morren told the Times that she, too, canceled: Dalton was set to pick them up at a local pub at 11 PM when she and her husband decided to ride with a different Uber driver just minutes before his arrival.

A man named Derek, who gave only his first name, wasn't as lucky, telling a local NBC affiliate that he ordered the Dalton's Uber as a safety measure after hearing about the spree. Derek said Walton pulled up and that he and his family climbed aboard.

"I kind of jokingly said to the driver, 'You're not the shooter, are you?'" Derek recalled. "He gave me some sort of a 'no' response... shook his head... "I said, 'Are you sure?' And he said, 'No, I'm not, I'm just tired.' And we proceeded to have a pretty normal conversation after that."

Less than 20 minutes later, police caught up with the suspect.

Dalton has no criminal record, with an Uber spokesperson indicating he passed a company background check. But neighbors suggested that even if they never suspected he was capable of such wanton brutality, Walton wasn't exactly a low-key presence.

"He periodically shot his gun out the back door," neighbor Sally Pardo told the Times. "He would shoot randomly into the air."

Dalton has been married since 1995 and has two children who are aged 15 and ten. In addition to the six murder charges, he was slapped with eight gun charges and two counts of assault with intent to commit murder. He faces up to life in prison.

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

Fentanyl Is Now Killing More Ontarians Than Any Other Opiate

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Prescription fentanyl patches seized in a drug raid in Ontario. Photo via Ottawa Police Service

Fentanyl, the powerful opioid responsible for causing a rise in overdose deaths in Alberta and BC, is now responsible for most opiate-related overdoses in Ontario, according to data from the Officer of the Coroner General.

In statistics obtained by The Globe and Mail, the government agency recorded one out of every four opiate deaths in 2014 as being caused by fentanyl—a rate that trails just behind the one in three ratio of fentanyl-related overdose deaths that currently exists in BC.

Ontario's high opioid overdose rate is no secret: according to official statistics, almost 5,000 people died from opioid overdoses between 2000 and 2013. Last year, a collective of doctors and medical experts called the Municipal Drug Strategy Coordinator's Network of Ontario (MDSCNO) filed an official plea to the provincial government to take the opioid crisis more seriously—advocating for expanded access to safe injection sites and the life-saving, overdose-reversing drug naloxone.

According to Michael Parkinson, a member of the Waterloo Region Crime Prevention Council (WRCPC) and spokesperson for MDSCNO, the rise in fentanyl deaths is another example of how serious the opioid crisis is, but makes note that the new data—going back three years—is not as current as it should be.

"We simply don't know what those deaths attributed to fentanyl mean. Whether those are people using pharmaceuticals or bootleg fentanyl," Parkinson told VICE, noting that bootleg fentanyl—typically sold in pill or powder form—is more widely found on the west coast, while most cases of the drug appearing in Ontario have been from stolen or illegally sold prescription patches.

"What we have seen so far in 2016 in Ontario is a surge in opioid overdoses and alerts from Waterloo region, from Kingston, and from Toronto. From those overdoses, heroin is suspected, but the concern is that it very well turn out to be bootleg fentanyl. The coroner data is three years old by the time it arrives, and no real time monitoring occurs in Ontario, so how would we know if opioid overdoses started to surge?"

Earlier this year, WRCPC launched the Overdose Monitoring Alert Response System (OMARS) —a dedicated third-party program for tracking opioid overdoses in the Waterloo region. Parkinson hopes that OMARS will be able to tell more about what's exactly happening in the province, but says that a more comprehensive strategy from the government is needed to cover all municipalities.

When asked for an interview by VICE, the Ontario Ministry of Health declined but said that they take "the issue of opioid drug misuse very seriously." In response, the Ministry pointed to its Narcotics Monitoring System (NMS)—a program that tracks the dispensing of opioid drugs for anomalies pointing to abuse or resale—and government-funded substance abuse treatment programs as examples of what the province is doing to respond to the crisis.

Dr. Philip Berger, medical director of the Inner City Health program at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, told VICE there needs to be more done on the issue of tracking prescriptions, specifically pointing to physicians that are either carelessly or maliciously prescribing painkillers as one of the reasons he believes overdose rates are continuing to rise.

Berger says that, in his recent experience, it's not uncommon for his patients to show up with fentanyl in their urine, but believes the issue is a systemic combination of patients lacking access to both substance abuse services and the overprescribing of medication. While data on the Canadian side doesn't exist, correlation between the prescription of opioids in the US and the number of overdose deaths has been well documented.

Fentanyl first started making ripples in Canada when it began to replace OxyContin—the pharmaceutical opiate that was taken off the shelves in Canada in 2012 due to its high potential for abuse—as the go-to street drug. Due to fentanyl being 50 times more powerful than heroin, many users—especially in Alberta and BC—overdosed on the drug. Last year alone, the drug killed hundreds in the two provinces, prompting health agencies to start issuing take-home naloxone kits and convene about strategies on how to fight the spread of the substance.


Follow Jake Kivanç on Twitter.

Being a Teenager is Hard Enough Without Having to Learn English as a Second Language

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The author circa middle school

Shortly after my family relocated from Taipei, Taiwan, to Modesto, California, an older boy groped me on the middle school bus. I ignored him until I felt his sticky fingers touching my legs, bare in denim shorts. I tried to blink the reality away, but his hands were still there, creeping further up. I squeezed my knees together, and with my arms, I pushed down my backpack on my thighs as hard as I could, creating a physical shield between him and me. Internally, I was searching for the words I could use to stop him—stop touching me, get off—but all I had in my English repertoire were things like, "The restaurant is on the left side of this street. I like to bike and swim. How about you?"

By the time we reached campus, I was exhausted from maintaining the tense posture. I didn't report what happened to the teachers, both because I lacked the language to describe the incident and because I was so terrified that I never dared to look at the boy's face.

I can't prove I was singled out as an easy target due to my poor English, but statistics show it's not uncommon among immigrants in school. A 2007 survey from schools in Massachusetts showed that 49 percent of middle school English-learning students were verbally bullied. Twenty-eight percent were physically bullied, compared to 21 percent of native English-speaking students. Based on a 2012 report from the National Education Association, one-fourth of all Asian American students are English learners, and 54 percent of the overall Asian American population are harassed in school—a rate much higher than other ethnic groups. "Racial tensions, resentment of immigrants and language barriers, the stereotype of API students as unassertive overachievers, and the spike in attacks against students perceived as Muslim" were listed as the likely causes.

By 2050, estimates suggest more than one third of America's schoolchildren under the age of 17 will be either immigrants or second-generation Americans. But research conducted by Harvard University shows that "many schools are ill-equipped to meet their needs"—including giving them the language skills to speak for themselves.

Before I moved to America, I wasn't one to hold my tongue. My mom likes to tell the story of how, as a toddler, I stopped a much taller girl from chasing my older brother—I was bold, mouthy even. At home, I had to be told to be quiet; at school, although I was a star student, I was sometimes chastised for talking during class or even talking back to the teachers.

Before we got our green cards, I watched Disney Channel shows in our fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Taipei, imagining what my new life in the United States would be like. Then in 2000, when I was 12 years old, my family moved to California. I often think back about that initial adjustment period and how it shaped me as an individual. Puberty is tough enough without having to adapt to a completely different language, culture, or environment. I realized what I truly missed the most during those first few years actually wasn't my family, and it wasn't my friends—it was the ability to use my voice.

I was a top-of-class student in my motherland, but in English-speaking California, my comprehension of the foreign language was at a level at least five years below my age. I'd taken some English classes back home, but no matter how many textbook English phrases I memorized and recited, none of them provided the proper tools to help me navigate the life of a middle schooler on the West Coast.

Since the classes for ESL (English-as-a-second-language) students were taught in English, which we were still struggling to understand, my school basically dumbed down the entire curriculum. I remember constantly fuming, Just because I'm stupid in English doesn't mean that I'm stupid in everything else! In math class, I strained my ears to understand what the teacher was saying, only reaching clarity when she wrote down numbers and signs on the blackboard. I both hated and relished those moments, when I registered that I understood the mathematical concepts perfectly well, yet could not comprehend the words coming out of her mouth.

Puberty is tough enough without having to adapt to a completely different language, culture, or environment.

The diluted coursework for ESL students can have disastrous academic repercussions. In 2013, 20,000 students sued the state of California after they were held back in school for low proficiency due to language barriers. Similarly, Haley Jordan, a former eighth-grade science teacher at a school in Phoenix, Arizona, told me her school often assumed that English learners wouldn't excel in other subjects, even though her "immigrant students were the ones most interested in science. They responded really well to visuals and hands-on activities, but all the district looks at was standardized test scores."

Other schools have handled immigrant students more gracefully: Abbey Davis, a fourth-grade social studies teacher in Marin County, California, told me her school encouraged her to attend a two-day workshop solely dedicated to educating English learners. "It was paid for by the school district since this is a privileged area with plenty of funding," she told me. "We talked about ways teachers could make the English learner students feel comfortable and safe within the community."

Making English-learning students feel safe and comfortable isn't just important for their academic performance but for their social survival. When each conversation means yet another potential failure, kids go to great lengths to avoid human interaction. Once, shortly after I moved to California, I was playing paddleball in gym class when a girl on the opposing team accused me of cheating and called me a chink. Even with my limited English, I recognized it as a racial slur. I struggled to retaliate by calling the girl a bitch—one of the few insults I knew—but the girl only laughed at my poor pronunciation of the word and mocked me even more. For the rest of that quarter, I took refuge from others in the school library whenever possible.

Things do seem to be improving, and most American schools now take a hard stance on harassment and bullying. Jen Pinkham Gutierrez, a sixth-grade teacher in Lodi, California, told me her students have made an effort to welcome immigrant students. "They want to help and teach the new students," she said. "They ask, 'How do you say this where you come from?' and we talk about everyone's different culture."

During my first few years in America, none of my ESL teachers asked about my background—how smart and confident I'd been back in Taiwan, and how much I struggled to bring that confidence to classrooms where I could barely grasp the language. I felt powerless without my voice. I couldn't prove my worth, stand up for myself, or make friends. It was well into high school when I could adequately express my thoughts and emotions in English, when I stopped dreading being called on in class. And if that moment can come sooner for the thousands of other immigrants who will enroll in American schools this year, we'll all be better off.

Follow Chin Lu on Twitter.

This Salt Lake City Day Care Has Become a Magnet for Conspiracy Theories

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All photos by the author

Visit Salt Lake City in February, in inversion season, and you'll hardly see further than 50 yards. The rocky mountain ranges, the dozens of craft breweries, the looming Salt Laky City Temple are all shrouded in gravy-thick smog. But even through the haze, if you wound up at the intersection of 1300 South and 300 East, it's impossible not to see the Fun Time Kidz Day Care, a DayGlo-green building with purple doors and yellow trim around windows blocked with pictures that look like they've been torn out of old coloring books. There's a deserted playground out back which, if it existed in a Silent Hill game, would definitely be a place where a zombie child would lurch out at you.

Depending on who you ask, Fun Time is either a normal day care (albeit a slightly creepy one) or a cover-up for something insidious. Possibly a CIA black site, a drug front, or an organ harvesting operation. For the people who suspect something sinister, it's become the subject of an enduring mystery: What's going on in this building, and why has nobody seen kids come in or come out?

The Fun Time Kidz Day Care conspiracy began on January 25, 2015 when user discogodfather6922 posted a photo to Reddit. He wrote that he'd lived nearby for five years, but he'd never having seen any "kidz" having a "fun time" inside. (The original thread, now completely redacted, is preserved on Imgur.)

Soon, other Salt Lake City locals weighed in. One user had admitted to seeing children inside, despite the cardboard in the windows. Another user claimed to be a letter carrier who had been inside the day care and said it was fully functioning. "The only strange thing is," the user added, "no matter what time of day I showed up with their mail, it always seemed to be nap time." Another user claimed to know someone who broke into the facility out of curiosity and found one room with a "chair facing a TV displaying a live video of another room in the building."

Later, users claiming to live in the neighborhood chimed in to say the place was just a normal day care, swept up in paranoia from digital sleuths. But their defenses aroused suspicion from other users. "I'm just going to point out that every person in this thread saying this place is legit registered their accounts in the last 15 or so hours," posted a user called Gthing.

The conspiracy theories reached a fever pitch so quickly that after only a few days, Reddit admins deleted the original thread from r/saltlakecity. At that point, there were already hundreds of posts and users had begun harassing the business and posting personal information about the owner, which the admins said amounted to doxxing. Banning all discussion of the day care, the admins argued, was necessary to stop future "witch hunts" and to " by an ignorant person who doesn't know what's going on," Dolan said. That said, he conceded the place was "creepy as hell."

And perhaps that's it—our hunger for the strange, bizarre, and fantastical can outweigh the more boring truth. The conspiracy against Fun Time took a peculiar building and turned it into a larger-than-life legend, much like shadows on a wall appear large and scary, and take on an entirely different shape than the objects they come from. "They have these steel spring playground animals," Dolan said, "and on a winter night, or any night really, when it's desolate, those things take on a creepy vibe."

Follow Eric Peterson on Twitter.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Ted Cruz (Photo by Gage Skidmore via)

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

US News

  • Cruz Fires Aide Over Fake Rubio Video
    Ted Cruz asked his campaign spokesman to resign after the staffer promoted a fake video of Marco Rubio. Rick Tyler, the former spokesman, had tweeted out a video subtitled to show Rubio saying the Bible had "not many answers in it." Rubio actually said, "All the answers are in there." —The Guardian
  • US Sells Weapons to Almost Half the World
    America's weapons exports now make up a full third of the world's arms trade, up from 29 percent between 2006 and 2010, according to an international monitoring group. The US sells weapons to at least 96 countries, just under half the total number of UN member states. —VICE News
  • Cybersecurity Chief Quits Before Hack Hearing
    Donna Seymour, the cybersecurity chief for the government's Office of Personnel Management, has retired just two days before she was supposed to testify before Congress on last year's data breach. Records for more than 21 million people were hacked. —The Washington Post
  • Pentagon Has a Plan to Close Gitmo
    The Pentagon is planning to send a detailed plan to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay to Congress on Tuesday next week. The plan is thought to include an outline of costs for upgrading US facilities where inmates could be transferred. —Reuters

International News

  • Ceasefire in Syria Set for Saturday
    The US and Russia have announced that a partial cessation of hostilities in Syria will begin at midnight on Saturday, February 27. Skepticism remains since a previous truce did not come to pass, and opposition groups still have to confirm their participation by Friday. —BBC News
  • Peru Oil Spill Pollutes Amazon
    At least 3,000 barrels of crude oil have been spilled in an Amazonian region of Peru, polluting two rivers indigenous communities rely on for water. Petroperu has promised a full clean-up and is also providing food and water to the Achuar community. —The Guardian
  • Fiji Cyclone Death Tolls Rises to 29
    The number of people killed in Cyclone Winston, which hit Fiji on the weekend, has risen to 29, with about 8,500 people still sheltering in evacuation centers. Aid workers are now warning of possible outbreaks of Zika and dengue viruses. —Reuters
  • Sea Levels Rising at Fastest Rate in 28 Centuries
    Sea levels are rising several times faster than they have in the past 2,800 years, according to international scientists. By 2100 the world's oceans could rise by up 131 cm, according to findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. —Al Jazeera

(Photo by Asterio Tecson via)

Everything Else

  • Serial Killer Memoir Pulled From Amazon
    A memoir reportedly written by Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton has been withdrawn hours after appearing for sale online. Self-publishing company Outskirts Press asked Amazon to remove Pickton: In His Own Words. —The Toronto Star
  • Bill Gates Thinks We Need a Miracle
    The Microsoft founder said even lots of "crazy-seeming ideas" are not enough to solve climate change. Gates thinks we need "an energy miracle" to get carbon dioxide emissions to zero. —USA Today
  • Nation of Islam Promises to Protect Beyonce
    Louis Farrakhan has pledged to protect Beyonce if the country's police won't do it. The Nation of Islam leader said the singer "started talking all that black stuff... and white folks were like, 'We don't know how to deal with that.'" —VICE
  • Ted Cruz Gets Zodiac Killer T-Shirt Treatment
    Activist Tim Faust—who raised $30,000 for abortions in Texas—is selling "Ted Cruz Was the Zodiac Killer" T-shirts. "Ted Cruz is a terrifying monster. You know who else was a monster? The Zodiac Killer," said Faust. —Broadly

Done with reading for today? That's OK—instead, watch Roger Deakins and Matthew Heineman discuss depicting the drug war in their Oscar-nominated films, Sicario and Cartel Land.

We Asked an Expert What the 'Ceasefire' Between the US and Russia in Syria Really Means

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A US aircraft on the flightline at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, in November. Photo via the US Air Force Flickr

On Monday, news outlets including the Associated Press reported that Russian and US officials had agreed on a ceasefire in Syria, slated to go into effect on Saturday. This is being framed as a big deal, with Russian President Vladimir Putin saying in a statement that "We are finally seeing a real chance to bring an end to the long-standing bloodshed and violence." Casual observers, though, might be confused by the headlines: The US and Russia certainly aren't friendly, but they weren't shooting at each other in Syria, so why do they have to sign this kind of document?

In reality, "ceasefire" is a bit of a misnomer here. The agreement doesn't mean that outside powers will stop bombing ISIS or other groups designated by the UN as terrorist organizations. There are a lot of details that need to be hammered out, as well—this is just the beginning of a long potential process that could eventually lead to the Syrian government and some rebel groups reaching some sort of peace agreement.

To find out more, VICE reached out to Omar Lamrani, a Middle-East analyst for the Texas-based conflict forecasting organization Stratfor, and asked how this is all going to shake out. Unsurprisingly, Lamrani was less than optimistic about this being the end of all fighting in Syria. What follows is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Let's clarify one thing first: Is the Islamic State involved in this ceasefire?
Omar Lamrani:
The Islamic State is not within the parameters of the ceasefire. The US, and Russia, and rebels, and the loyalist forces will continue to be able to attack the Islamic State.

Is this a good deal from the perspective of someone who would like to see less fighting in Syria?
It's a way to tamp down the fighting, and I think that's the best that can be hoped for as some of the rebel groups get sidelined and the focus becomes more on the extremist groups. This is initially looking positive—meaning we're finally going to have some traction on the ground—but there are still very significant hurdles that have to be overcome for us to actually talk about a meaningful ceasefire.

What are the hurdles?
The ceasefire itself is already limited because obviously the Islamic State is excluded and so is Jabhat al-Nusra. And if Jabhat al-Nusra is excluded, then it's going to be very very difficult to have a ceasefire implemented on the ground because al-Nusra is very widespread amongst the rebellion. So given the fact that with the agreements that we already have so far, the US and Russia are already saying that allies of Russia can strike Jabhat al-Nusra, that means that an actual, meaningful ceasefire across the country is very unlikely to happen in the way that some people might imagine.

What still has to happen before there's an actual reduction in fighting?
Essentially, the next steps are for Russia to go to the loyalist camp—meaning the Assad government, Iran, and other supporters of the Assad regime. We have the Russian defense minister, who is actually in Tehran right now and very likely talking to them about this proposal and some other issues. And then from the US side they'll take it to allies in the region, the GCC, Turkey, and then obviously in the southwest, to the opposition itself.

So the US and Russia have to sort of sell this ceasefire to their Syrian allies?
That is the hope. Russia goes to Iran and says, "Listen, we agreed to this deal with the United States. We think it's a good deal. We think we should take it." And the United States is doing the same with the opposition. Whether that actually happens on Friday has not been determined. I wouldn't say it's clear-cut that the loyalists or the opposition will accept the conditions, because remember: The ceasefire was supposed to happen last week and it didn't.

And just to recap—why is the US now pushing for a ceasefire instead of trying to topple Assad?
The United States perspective is, Things are going really badly on the ground. Let's get the ceasefire. Let's get this conversation moving towards a political transition. And the sooner as we do that, the sooner we can focus on ending this conflict. That's the US perspective, and not necessarily a perspective that's shared by others.

And what might be keeping the rebels from getting on board?
The rebels will be extremely concerned about the fact that Russian aircraft will continue to be able to bomb. That has consistently been one of the prerequisites to any ceasefire—that the Russians stop the airstrikes. Because they look at and say, "Well, the Russians can always go up there, bomb a target, claim it's al-Nusra when in fact it isn't al-Nusra." Potentially, rebels in very close proximity to al-Nusra also get damaged by the strikes. So the US perspective might not be the same perspective as the opposition.

Meanwhile, is this deal like Christmas for Assad and Russia? Are they getting everything they wanted?
They have been pushing for other rebel groups like Jaysh al Islam and Ahrar al-Sham to be considered as terrorist factions. That doesn't seem to have happened here. The biggest issue is that they have the military advantage on the ground, and by agreeing to a ceasefire they essentially give the rebels breathing room.

Are the Kurds involved in this?
The Kurdish viewpoint has always been that they should be included in all these negotiations. So far at Geneva II they've largely been excluded with the promises that later on they will be brought into the conversation, but that hasn't really happened thus far. In terms of Turkey, they just want to be given assurances that Turkey will cease strikes against them. This conversation thus far—with the details that have come out—have not really pointed to anything like that being included. Turkey, as we speak, is currently shelling the YPG.

Should we be hopeful about this deal leading to eventual peace?
To be perfectly frank, the devil is in the details. There are two things that are really going to show us whether this is going to stick. The first thing is: How much buy-in there is into this deal by the opposition and the loyalists on the ground? And the second thing is: What kinds of methods are there by which both sides can integrate their definition of which groups are terrorists or not, and how do they think that will work out on the actual battlefield?

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.


NSFW: This Vine of a Guy's Dick Falling Out to 'Work' Should Be the Official Video for 'Work'

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Don't know if you saw, but the "Work" double-video came out yesterday. It's great: Rihanna, an angel we don't deserve, winding around in a clammy dancehall while a track-suited Drake flouts every dress code convention in living history and does that "frowning and waving his hand like he just smelled the work microwave" dance move he does. Then another one, where Drake just sits on a sofa and admires the art going on in front of him, and Rihanna just walks backwards a bit and sings.

Great, great stuff. There are no two humans alive I would rather watch have sex with each other than these two people. Well done to the two directors, Director X and Tim Erem. You really did well. You really gave it a go.

That said, I'm happy to announce that the "Work" double-video released yesterday is now null and void, and this Vine of a man popping his dick and bollocks out the front of his suit is now the official video to Rihanna's comeback single:

Play it on a loop 70, maybe 80 times. Wallow in it. Really get up inside the crevices of this Vine. There are raw human emotions on display, here. It is a six-second, three-act play. There is humility and redemption. There is joy and there is pain. This Vine of a man popping his dick and bollocks out the front of his suit has everything.

We've all been embarrassed in our lifetimes, haven't we? I'll start: the time I was most embarrassed was at school, on a break-time. Knowledge you will need to be aware of: I was an extremely fat boy and looked sort of like one of those 40-year-old mums you see on couponing shows. Our school let the sixth formers out at breaks and lunchtime to go to the nearby shops, or smoke on a low wall next to the main road out by our school. So consider: an entire wall cluttered with cool kids, smoking away, and me, waddling to the zebra crossing looking, for all the world, like I had two rough sons called Jaysen and a special room in my house for all the discounted toilet paper I had accumulated.

On MUNCHIES: I Got Spat On and Chased By Art Students As a Deliveroo Rider

So I get about halfway across this zebra crossing, and I see there is a lorry coming, at quite some pace, from the opposite direction. Something inside my brain snapped at this point: my left striding leg went forward, to get to the other side of the road before the lorry killed me; my rear right leg turned to go backwards, toward the safety of the smoking cool kids. Panic in my eyes. Nervous sweating. A moment of sheer madness. Something went wrong and I malfunctioned. I did the splits.

Consider the lorry driver, who stopped in very good time, and what he saw: he saw an extremely fat, scared-looking boy do the splits in the middle of the road in front of him for absolutely no reason at all.

The man was laughing so much he couldn't drive. There was a traffic tailback behind him for many minutes afterwards. Every single cool kid at the school saw me try to ease myself back up to my feet using only my arms, exerting myself so hard my trousers slipped down and exposed my butt crack.

So we've all been embarrassed. But have we been as embarrassed as the man who accidentally popped his dick and bollocks out of the front of his suit? I don't know:

The thing is: "Work" is a banger. It is very hard, especially after a couple of drinks, not to get a little carried away with "Work". You think: 'Yes, I think I am capable of twerking.' You go: maybe it's time I dropped it to the flo'. "Work" gives you a kind of gilded confidence that only the biggest pop songs can imbue: it makes you feel bulletproof, it makes you feel free. It makes you think that maybe you should do a medically-inadvisable dance move while not wearing pants. It makes you do something that pops your trousers apart so hard it sounds like someone quickly opening a crisp packet.

Because my major concern when I first saw that Vine of a dude popping his dick and balls out of the front of his suit was: did this dude just bust through his pants and his trousers with one crotch-pop? How much power can this man's groin generate? Fucking hell. But then I watched again, again, another time, once more: unless they are obliterated to atoms at the exact second the man drops it to "Work", there are no underwears present in this moment. It is just suit material being strained to the point of destruction.

Which, I guess, is the bittersweet core at the centre of this embarrassment pudding. The man approaches the booty pop with a very pure innocence – that this sweet, brief second of his life will not ruin it irreparably, that this moment will not define him as a man, will not be a highpoint of his life's embarrassment, a single splayed hand in front of his torso and a look to camera – and leaves it changed. Over the course of six seconds, we see one man's life as he knows it end, and another one begin in its place. At the exact moment his dick and balls flop out, he is reborn.

Before:

After:


And then there is the reaction. Embarrassment is a curious feeling – it makes us flush, makes us sear, for some reason it is the most lasting emotion. Sadness and despair we can move past; happiness we can cling onto for as long as we can. But embarrassment cuts deep. Embarrassment we can recall some 10, 20 years later, and feel it just as strongly as we did the day we first held it. No other feeling endures or amplifies quite like it. It is the bolognese sauce of emotions. It tastes better the second time you heat it up.

Kudos, then, to the man with his dick and balls out, in the two to three seconds after his dick and balls pop out. This is when the shock happens: the initial "my dick and balls have popped out" amazement. As he reverses out of the squat, he isn't thinking, 'How in the fuck am I meant to get home without everyone seeing my dicky and ballsack?', but instead instinctively goes to cover his newly-ruined crotch, mouth a silent scream. It's a very pure moment – like a baby being born and screaming for the first time, or a pig being shot.

And, finally, he looks down back at his crotch, for confirmation: yes, he just did his trousers so hard his dick and balls are hanging out. Yes, that was captured on camera. No: no blood. Yes: this night has just gone irreparably sour.

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We have to learn from other people: the mistakes they make, the adversities they overcome, the triumphs they achieve. When someone pops their dick and balls out the front of their suit while dancing to "Work", we need to ask ourselves what we can learn from this, how we can use this to grow.

Lesson one: do not attempt to drop it low unless you have an ironclad crotch seam in place. Lesson two: underwear isn't that bad, you know. Lesson three: visible embarrassment is an instinct that saves us from the abyss. Moments like this – when your dick and balls spill out your trousers on Vine – can define a person. But when we process that shock we start to become someone else: stronger, hardened, bulletproof in a way that can't be synthesised.

We've all, one way or another, popped our dick and bollocks out of our trousers. We've all overcome it. You can be stronger now, "Work" suit trouser dick and bollock man. We all can.

@joelgolby

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Beautiful Photos of English Countryside Threatened by Fracking

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Fracking: a process of giving mother earth a particularly lucrative sort of enema. You pump the ground with water and chemicals in order to fracture it, allowing shale gas to escape. On the plus side, you get your hands on another sweet, sweet fossil fuel. On the downside, fracking has been associated with environmental and health problems and the potential contamination of drinking water.

The picturesque town of Balcombe in West Sussex, England, has been a focus of fracking activity in the UK. In summer 2013, fracking company Cuadrilla was allowed to drill near there, despite protests from angry locals, eco-warriors, and Vivienne Westwood.

Photographer Leonidas Toumpanos took a series of beautiful shots of the Sussex countryside, as well as portraits of locals who live off the land and are worried about their livelihoods. The project was done on film, some of which was then buried underground.

We Meet The Parents Medicating Their Kids with Weed on the First Episode of 'WEEDIQUETTE' on VICELAND

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On February 29, VICE will launch our new TV channel, VICELAND—a 24-hour cable channel featuring hundreds of hours of new programming. It's been a lot of work, but we're very proud to share what we have been making. Today, we're bringing you the first episode of WEEDIQUETTE, a classic VICE show that's making the leap to TV.

In our season premiere, our host Krishna travels to Oregon and California to meet families who—as a last resort—have turned to hyper-potent weed oil to treat their children's life-threatening cancers with seemingly positive results.

Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the US, and so far, most cutting-edge therapies can be complicated, expensive, and highly invasive. There's a wild notion gaining traction among medical marijuana advocates that the chemicals in weed have undiscovered cancer-fighting properties. But with little hard evidence, families whose children have terminal varieties of the disease are taking matters into their own hands and getting their kids super stoned, to save their lives.

There are many players in the weed revolution, each one with a story, and we'll be giving them all a chance to tell their tale when VICELAND goes live on February 29.

Give our first episode of WEEDIQUETTE a watch above and stay tuned for new episodes airing on VICELAND Tuesdays at 11 PM. Visit our website to find out about all the ways that you can watch our new VICELAND shows.

An Australian High School Is Letting All Genders Wear Dresses and Christians Are Upset

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Newtown High School of the Performing Arts is behind St George's Hall. Image via Flickr

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Newtown High School of the Performing Arts in Sydney, Australia, has updated its policy on uniforms to make life easier to trans, gender queer, and non-binary pupils, following a push from the school's students.

From now on, students will be free to use whichever uniform or bathroom matches their gender identity. They could already do both of those things before the policy was officially changed, but now they're saved the trouble of seeking formal permission from administration, which Newtown student Jo Dwyer called a "long and difficult process" in an interview with the Age.

Speaking to VICE, the New South Wales Department of Education explained that the uniform itself hasn't changed, it's simply been made genderless. "Students can wear any part of the available uniform options," a spokesperson told us. Similarly, Newton's bathroom policy hasn't formally changed from that already in place across NSW, it's just more explicit. "Usually, students should not be required to use the toilets and change rooms used by persons of the sex they were assigned at birth if they identify as a different gender," the spokesperson said. Newtown's just taken the grey area out of the state's policy, by making it clear students are completely free to use the bathroom of their choice.

The move makes sense coming from Newtown, given it's one of the most progressive schools in the country. You might remember when its students were sent to meet then Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and completely shredded him in a Q and A session—"Not saying that I don't trust you, just wondering why a man is the Minister for Women?"

It's not the first school to change its uniform policy to accommodate trans and non-binary students—some British schools began doing so last year—but it's the first in Australia, and as such has become the target for ire from Christian lobbyists. "People are wondering if this is where rainbow ideology and rainbow politics is taking us," Australian Christian Lobby spokesperson Wendy Francis told VICE. "These gender theory ideas go way beyond anti-bullying to almost proselytizing."

Earlier this year, the lobby came out in opposition to the Safe School program, which aims to aide young LGTBIQ students and educate their peers. Francis even claimed the program promotes "queer sex and cross-dressing."

Not that the NSW Department of Education is particularly bothered by these sorts of opinions. When VICE asked the Department to comment, a spokesperson said that as a matter of course they "don't respond to third parties" and stressed "we do not comment on that organization."

It's also quite unlikely that Newtown will be the only school bringing in genderless uniforms. Last year, the Victorian Youth Parliament created a bill to present to the Victorian government demanding school uniforms be made gender neutral across the state. The Safe School program, which 495 institutions currently participate in, advocates for the same policy. Although given Newtown's change came from pupils pushing for something they cared about, it might not take legislation to implement; just students who give a shit.

Follow Isabelle on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Inside the Surreal, Sleepy World of a Ben Carson Rally as His Campaign Falls Apart

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It's early on Friday evening and I'm in the middle of a crowd listening to a man talking chaos and salvation, terrorism and God. He sounds very tired; everyone listening to him looks very tired.

I am in Florence, South Carolina, to see Ben Carson. We are in the Florence Civic Center, a concrete box, cavernous and bright, neutral carpets, a place built specifically to host events of vague importance, minor league hockey and WWE matches and, right now, a presidential campaign as funeral procession. Hundreds of people are here to celebrate this doomed campaign, still here, physically, making promises, "beholden to no one," he says, but also sort of gone.

I don't know why Ben Carson is still in these rooms, trying to be president. I don't think anyone does, even Carson himself; maybe he knows least of all. Even before he took in a pathetic 7 percent of the vote in Saturday's South Carolina primary, he was drifting: unimpressive results in Iowa and New Hampshire, a campaign staff that literally quit on him, a moment where he seemed to go catatonic backstage before a debate. But he has vowed to stay in the race until the end. After the South Carolina primary, he said that "the political class" only has control if America gives it control. "That's the message I'm going to be taking across the nation." So then, I guess, this is to be a traveling public service announcement of one man's hallucinated interpretation of America, the earth, the history of the universe.

He is a man who will never be king, but until then, he and all these people will stand together dreaming about castles.

Read: A Day with South Carolina's 21st Century Racists

Friday's event was originally scheduled for Wholly Smokin' Downtown, an "upscale barbecue restaurant," but was moved to the Florence Civic Center the day before due to the large expected attendance. And it's true, there are lots of people here, rows and rows of seats filled, people standing in the aisles if they have to, teenagers with shiny sneakers and impeccably gelled hair sitting on a ledge in the back, filming on their iPads and drinking Mountain Dew.

But it feels obligatory, muted. Security guards checking their phones, making sure no one comes in the back entrance. An old woman in pink is in a scooter looking at her watch. Old men with their belongings piled at their feet. Women pushing strollers around the room to keep babies quiet. Photographers with heavy sweaters and beards mumbling to each other and packing tripods up early. Guys with official-seeming blue blazers and lapel pins covering their mouths with their entire stretched palm to hide big yawns that make them look like lions about to nap.

A sleepy young Carson fan. Photos by Andy McMillan

"People say conservatives aren't compassionate," Carson says at one point. "But I think they're way more compassionate than people who are going to pat you on the head, say 'There, there,' give you things and make you dependent forever and ever."

And later, "We've been free for hundreds of years. And we've had guns for hundreds of years. I think there's a correlation there."

This is a man who believes that the pyramids in Egypt were built by Joseph from the Old Testament to store grain, that women getting abortions is comparable to slavery, that the Jews could have prevented the Holocaust if they had access to guns. Lots of the time, Ben Carson sounds like Sarah Palin on opiates.

Yet everything at here is lifeless. There isn't even the sense that the event is on the brink of something ridiculous or electrifying, something to gawk at. It feels like we are sitting through a timeshare seminar to get a free vacation, or passing time while a substitute teacher narrates a PowerPoint on Mesopotamia. See this as an indictment of society, of the current political candidates, as the internet has ruined everything, but it's undeniable: Ben Carson, for all his real-or-The-Onion? tangents and absurd, retweetable suggestions for fixing America, is deeply boring.

Carson in mid-speech, leaning on the lectern for support.

Before he quit the race, Jeb Bush was your divorced dad clipping a cellphone on his belt, drinking Diet Snapple alone at the airport, buying VIP passes for him and a date to a Red Hot Chili Peppers show, getting stood up and eating shrimp cocktail alone and listening to "Californication." Trump is the guy at the carnival positive he can guess your weight, and when he guesses wrong he tells you impossible, you're lying, how much change you got in your pockets? Cruz has turned a presidential campaign into something almost militaristic. But Carson is just... just... out there.

But Carson is just... just... out there, tumbling around the universe. He is fascinating for his delusions; if he has an identity it is that he seems permanently confused. Not an existential crisis but, like, how'd all these cameras get here? If he said them more loudly, his theories on society, the economy, and religion would be outrageous. For 19 years he was the Director of Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. He once separated conjoined twins.

He spends his days now comparing homosexuality to bestiality and being in NAMBLA.

He is a man singing a sometimes-inaudible lullaby about fiscal gaps, the "pied piper coming along talking about free college." About electromagnetic pulsation, dirty bombs, something something we need to something our electrical grid. He says phrases and words out loud, things like "couple that with" and "via," that seem like they have only existed in press releases from pharmaceutical companies.

The crowd seems like it showed up more for the symbolic acknowledgement of their own up-from-nothing narratives, their rigid Christian values, than it did Ben Carson, Protector of the Republic and the Sanctity of Human Life. The applause is weak and quick.

But, anyway, we're here: There are cameras on platforms and silent bodyguard-ish men with earpieces and good posture guarding Carson, the man whose face is on the book his fans are holding, and now he's right in front of them, and we are all swirling in this little whirlpool of low-level celebrity and instagramable moments.

He closes his speech with something about the military, our troops, and then "God is my center. I'd much rather lose than tell a lie, thank you very much." This was the way most of it went, call and response buzzwords about guns and Muslims when he senses the crowd is flat-lining and that he needs to resuscitate it. There are lots of medical analogies too: performing surgery, removing the infection. America is poisoned; Carson is a real-life doctor. Get it?

Ben Carson works the crowd

As Carson steps off stage and wades into the converging mass, I see a mom with lots of makeup dragging her kids by the hand through kneecaps and interlocked chairs, camera already set to selfie mode, trying to make space for her friend, calling out to her across the room, the mom desperate for someone to join her.

Waiting in front of a railing to the side, young kids in fleece vests, guys in V-neck sweaters, kids with their shirts tucked in, guys with shirts you get for renewing a magazine subscription. Teenagers in gingham shirts tucked into jeans, faded visors, holding their girlfriends' waists with a firmness somewhere between "hey remember me????" and "Maybe later.... ;)"

A woman with wavy red hair says, "Do you wanna go shake his hand?" to a blonde woman in a leopard-print shirt and jeans with bedazzled back pockets. The blonde woman says back, "Nah, but I'll take your picture if you wanna go?" They both linger in the back row for a few seconds, maybe considering how long is appropriate to pretend-consider the handshake and the picture. They take a few steps, still undecided, then walk toward the door and leave for good.

Carson works his way to an exit behind the stage, posing and signing, inching a little bit closer each time. A short man climbs onto a chair to take a picture over everyone. Carson decides it's time to go, the crowd groans briefly in disappointment. It disappears not long after that.

Follow John Saward on Twitter.

After Several Years of Struggle, I’m Ready to Admit That ‘Dark Souls’ Has Defeated Me

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I'm standing beside a bonfire in the Undead Parish area of Dark Souls. An endless, infuriating tapping echoes around the ancient brickwork—somewhere beneath me, a blacksmith is pounding hammer against anvil, over and over. There's something rather more deadly down there, too—a Titanite Demon. I've tried to kill it countless times, and cannot. I only know its name because I consulted one of the game's wikis, and even then I was lost for half an hour. I truly do not know where I am going in FromSoftware's devilish action-RPG, or where I've been. Or why I'm bothering, really.

I have no idea what my level is supposed to be right now, compared to my gaming progress. I don't completely understand my stats, or what anything means when it comes to attributes on armor, weapons, or shields. I'm basically hoping that the bigger these numbers are, the better I'm doing, the stronger my equipment. I've become trapped within the warped mind of Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki, almost against my will. I chose to come here, of course I did. Nobody made me play this game. But Dark Souls is a title that people in my position, games journalists, are supposed to "get." It's Edge's greatest game of all time, according to the magazine's top 100 list published in late 2015. It's one of the 21 games of VICE's lifetime you "really should have played." The critical praise of my peers runs through my head, likewise words of encouragement: "Praise the Sun," and so forth. But, I just can't. I can't do this.

This screenshot, and the next, captured by the author

Being a writer, there are certain things that I'm predisposed to: self-deprecation, mental self-flagellation, and a wandering mind that takes me to fantastical places. So in theory I should love Dark Souls—and I am keen to stress that I don't dislike this game. I've come to terms with its unforgiving difficulty, its complete lack of regard for gaming convention, and I've turned a mostly blind eye to its performance woes having been playing it on an Xbox 360.

Those words spin around my head, etching themselves in to my brain between the blacksmith's strikes, like the red-orange scratches scattered around the floors of this gaming world. "Praise the Sun," they so often tell me—except the more the sentiment is repeated, the less it means to me. When Keza MacDonald reviewed this game for IGN, she awarded it a 9.0 and wrote: "this is one of the most thrilling, most fascinating, and most completely absorbing experiences in gaming." I respect her opinions, and want to see the game that she's been privy to—such is her affection for the game that she's co-authored a book on it, coming out later this year. Twitch Streamer Zisteau's "The Essence of Dark Souls" is full of great humor, albeit derived from 2014's Dark Souls II. So I know that there's fun here, somewhere within the endless cycle of death I'm caught in. Many others have attained the higher level of appreciation needed in order to access this game's pleasures. I remind myself that this is what I want, too.

Yet the more I play, the more I conclude that this game isn't about having a good time. Anything but. Possibly naively, I hoped that I would have fun once I got used to the tactics and controls. That I might feel that exhilaration of relief that comes from defeating a boss that's been fought repeatedly to no previous avail. But in truth I feel mentally exhausted by it, utterly drained of interest, and I'm now questioning any kind of ability I possess as a gamer because I'm utterly unable to access what Keza and numerous other games journalists, fans, and admirers are experiencing with this game and its series. I am not absorbed in anything other than desperation at my inability.

Article continues after the video below

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In a way, it's a bit like the adventuring lure that American novelist Jack London inspired in his 1903 short story, The Call of the Wild. Inspired, readers went out into the Alaskan wild, to see if they could stand up to its harshness and, in some way, better themselves. Gamers hear about the wonderful, rewarding challenge of Dark Souls and rise to meet it themselves. And that is what the game does for many, many of its players.

I'm no Jack London. I'm alienated by reports of fascination with this game, because they don't match my experiences. I look back to my comfort zone, and how I normally approach games. I look for lore in role-playing, but in Dark Souls, that only reveals itself through exploration, through progress. As I can't connect to this world, I never feel a part of it, and as a result it feels like this isn't my adventure at all, and it never was. The story behind this questing is fractured, and tough to piece together. However many hours I spend staring at my avatar, ambling around the Undead Parish and beyond, doing whatever they can to avoid another death, I come no closer to engaging with the lore that's buried beneath these stone floors, these grimy paths, these broken bodies. NPCs are impassive, useless; the glowing messages from other players read more like trolling than useful tactical advice. All I know for sure is that I definitely shouldn't "go hollow."

So I pause. I stop progressing, and just drink in the gruesome splendor of this place I've found myself in. So much work has gone into the art and atmosphere of Dark Souls. Its world is a delight for the senses—that infernal blacksmith aside. I climb to a high point and just enjoy the view for a while. Here, without any need to swing a sword or open my life-preserving Estus Flask, I do feel at one with this game, I get it, and think there's something here for me. Something more than repeatedly dying at the hands of a bastard demon firing lightning at my fragile form.

But it's not enough. I have to stop. I've been toying with this piece for weeks, after slamming against the game for what feels like forever, because I need to make it clear that I'm not being negative about Dark Souls. It continues to draw plaudits and possibly always will, and will receive a second sequel, Dark Souls III, in March. I know the kind of comments that come easy to an article like this one: "git gud," "you suck," "give up," or anything else to that effect. Perhaps I've come at this game entirely wrongly, robbing myself of an easier path to its secrets, to whatever qualifies it as a classic to thousands of players. Then again, I wonder if I'd have found it penetrable whichever way I went at it. So many hours lost, so many "You Died" screens on from when I created my character, all I am is depressed.

Leaving Dark Souls isn't easy for me. On three separate occasions I have tried, and failed, to discover that eureka moment. And admitting defeat isn't something I enjoy doing, especially when its core to my work. But others can keep this game for themselves. Its Alaska is theirs. I've come to terms with my failures, and I know they don't make me "less" of a gamer. Merely someone whose adventuring in Blighttown, the Depths, Royal Wood, and Firelink Shrine is at an end—before, even, it really got started.

Dark Souls III will be released in Japan on March 24, and worldwide on April 12. You can expect to see more coverage of it and the Souls series in the coming weeks.

Follow Sean on Twitter.

The Welcome Rise of Female Characters Who Have the Freedom to Be Gloriously Messed Up

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Jon Hamm and January Jones in Mad Men

Warning: contains spoilers for season two of Fargo, season one of Mr. Robot, and the movie Gone Girl.

In the history of TV and film, there is a short list of stereotypes to which female characters conform. Even in modern, critically acclaimed productions, women often end up playing supporting roles: either as a wife holding the family together while the flawed, nuanced, and over-written male lead sucks up all the juicy stories, or as a love interest adding sex appeal and sensitivity as we once again witness the eternal struggle of being young, white, and male in this world.

In the last few years we've seen that start to change. Shows like Orange Is the New Black and Broad City have women acting mean, failing, and pooping. Women who have issues, but issues that don't mean they show up at their ex's house in the rain, sobbing uncontrollably while holding out a photo of what their baby would look like, snottily singing Adele. These new TV women are messy and chaotic, and they only seem manic and pixie-like when they're really, really high.

The thirst for these kinds of character is growing with each TV season, and comedy actresses, in particular, have broken down the door to allow darker and more morally ambiguous characters in drama. In particular, a new type of female character has emerged, made up of glamour, instability, and eyeshadow. These are women who are unmerciful in their actions and unbalanced in their temperament, but always look like they just stepped out of the salon.

Kirsten Dunst as Peggy Blomquist in 'Fargo'

The TV embodiment of these coiffured Ophelias is Peggy Blomquist, Kirsten Dunst's magazine-hoarding beauty queen from season two of Fargo. Peggy feels like a glimpse of what Amber Atkins, the Midwestern pageant obsessive Dunst played in 1999's Drop Dead Gorgeous, would be if we revisited her in her early 30s. Peggy is cold-blooded and merciless, but never has a hair out of place. After killing a man with her Chevrolet Corvair, she calmly drove home and dished up Hamburger Helper ready meals for dinner, while ducking questions from her husband over whether or not they should have a kid.

A few weeks later she was too engrossed in a black-and-white romance on TV to notice that the man bound and gagged next to her had escaped. That same man later pleaded with the Sheriff to rescue him from Peggy because she'd calmly and coldly slid her knife into him while preparing lunch.

None of Peggy's transgressions affect her demeanor. Her sociopathic tendencies aren't just glib characterization. Fargo is less about these rare violent outbursts, and more about the importance she places on winning over others. As Dunst herself says, "She can't let anything stop her from her search for a better life."

Peggy was cheek-bitingly frustrating to watch as she inched herself and her bumbling but devoted husband closer and closer to danger, through her complete refusal to admit that she'd fucked up. She was one of the most engaging and exhilarating female characters on TV in the last 12 months.

Amy Elliot Dunne in 'Gone Girl'

If Peggy had a cinematic sister, it would be Rosamund Pike's Amy Elliot Dunne in Gone Girl, the 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn's bestselling thriller. Amy is cold and callous, a woman who exacts the cruelest revenge on her cheating husband—by faking her own death. Then she sits in grotty motel rooms, stuffing her increasingly pale and puffy face with chips, as he's implicated in her murder by the press. Her revenge is perfectly planned, and watching her binging on the rolling newsfeed day after day is intrusive and disturbing. She's living only to see him suffer, but there's a twisted intimacy to it as you grow to know a character who's invisible.

When she decides to go back to her husband the first thing she does is get fit and elegant again. She's a woman who knows what she wants and how to get it. So as she staggers back to her own house, covered in the blood of an ex-boyfriend whose throat she managed to slit in the process, she falls into her husband's arms, once again in complete control.

Some might say these women promote a helpful version of various different kinds of mental illness, somehow managing to stay undeniably glamorous while losing their minds. That they're "bad role models," a concern that never seems to apply to men. No one seems to be bothered about that when Don Draper is somehow a deathly alcoholic who smells amazing, never farts, and is irresistible to women. It's all right when Elliot Alderson from Mr. Robot manages to hack the world's most difficult security encryptions while extremely high and suffering from so many forms of psychoses he regularly has conversations with hallucinations. Why should women be the only ones who can't be unhinged and fabulous?

In more light-hearted fare, these kinds of characters have become well-established. Lena Dunham's narcissistic Hannah in Girls or Krysten Ritter's self-centered party girl in the underrated sitcom Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 are able to play lead roles despite being resolutely unlikeable. The more of these manic manipulative characters there are, the more we get used to seeing complex women in lead roles. It may sound counterintuitive, but perhaps progress is seeing women on TV fuck up and get away with it.

Follow Elizabeth on Twitter.


What We Mean By Yesterday: Friends Are Mean to Each Other in Today's Comic by Benjamin Marra

High School Girl Arrested After Eight Stabbed at Toronto-Area School

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Photo via Facebook

A high school student has been arrested after she allegedly stabbed eight people this morning at a high school near Toronto.

According to police, a call was received around 8:32 AM reporting that a female student had stabbed eight people at Dunbarton High School in Pickering. Within six minutes, police had arrived at the school and placed the alleged attacker into custody.

Six students and two faculty members were injured in the attacks, with four of the victims being brought to hospital, one of whom is facing serious but not life-threatening injuries. Police say that most of the injuries are minor.

Durham Regional Police spokesperson Dave Selby told VICE that the incident reported to police happened as follows: the student, brandishing a single knife, began to attack other students in the hallways of the school. Two staff members then interjected into the situation and were also injured. The cause for the attack is currently unknown.

"At this point, the scene is stable but we are still investigating before coming to any conclusions," Selby told VICE.

According to Charles Senior, spokesperson for the Durham District School Board, the school is currently in lockdown and could not confirm when it would be lifted.

Police will not be releasing the name of the student due to the fact that she is a minor.

Follow Jake Kivanç on Twitter.




What This Leaked Training Manual Tells Us About the UK's Counter-Terrorism Strategy

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A case study of someone who apparently looks like they might be in Al Qaeda

Since last year, various public sector bodies in the UK (schools, prisons, hospitals) have held a duty to have "due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism," under the government's "Prevent" counter-terrorism strategy. What this "due regard" actually means in practice has continued to baffle many, including those who are now encouraged to act as intelligence gatherers for the British state.

The University and College Union, for instance, which represents the lecturers in higher and further education expected to implement the Prevent duty, have called it a "draconian crackdown on the right to debate controversial issues" and that it "risks stifling our right to question and challenge ideas with which we disagree."

This month advocacy organization CAGE leaked the Prevent training manual and videos to try and get some clarity on the situation.

In a script for a workshop called "Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent" (WRAP), it is made explicit that the training public sector workers will receive is far from ambitious. If someone had 0/10 knowledge of what Prevent was at the beginning of the session, they're only going to get to 2/10 in the session. Then they'll be sent off to interact with students, patients, and other members of the public in their new capacity as part-time spies. Completing Prevent training will probably leave you with more questions than you had going in and with a general air of suspicion—which is presumably the point.

The training even has a hard time telling you what extremism actually is. You're told to imagine an iceberg, that the visible tip is the violent public terror attacks that we have all come to fear, while the submerged portion is all of the things that lead up to it which the recipients of Prevent training should be looking out for. It is freely admitted that "while some of this is criminal activity, the further down we travel, that might not be the case..."

Because having a different opinion can't be deemed criminal, Prevent gives another justification for monitoring the murky bit at the bottom of the iceberg. The government's WRAP handbook suggests these should be treated as "safeguarding" issues, which is the category public bodies that look after children and vulnerable adults call their duty to look out for abuse and neglect. Having bad thoughts is being treated the same as abuse.

The handbook notes that this could be seen as a convenient leap, but trainers are pressed to suggest that this concern simply comes from a narrow conception of what terrorism is. From there they are meant to bring people's minds back to tragic events like 9/11 and 7/7, or an example local to where the training is taking place—such as the murder of Lee Rigby if the sessions happening in Woolwich—in order to refocus them on the task of weeding out "a threat to our communities."

Prevent training largely consists of video case studies where intervention from workers such as teachers, mental health staff, and police have managed to steer someone away from an extremist position.

Trainees are walked through a three-part process of identification, which asks them to pick out emotional, verbal, and physical signs from the videos watched.

The table above outlines just how impossible it is to differentiate the Prevent image of a potential terrorist from someone who is just a bit miffed, or reinventing their image.

If you don't want to be suspected of being a terrorist under Prevent guidance, you should probably avoid doing the following things: crying, being angry or depressed, using the internet, getting tattoos, asking inappropriate questions, or making any new friends.

"Neil"

If you can avoid doing those things here's another tip: don't be Muslim. The training does absolutely nothing to address or change the inaccurate perception that terrorists are mainly Muslim. In fact it absolutely feeds into that stereotype. One case study even cartoonishly depicts prisoners from Iraq promoting the benefits of jihad in the aftermath of 9/11 to "Neil," who has severe mental health problems.

The videos that make up the training suggest mentorship and pastoral conversations with teachers are part of how potential terrorists were turned from the brink. But the WRAP handbook essentially backtracks on this and admits that that part of the videos is misleading, instead saying that referrals "will have most likely have been a Channel Panel or Prevent Professional Concerns meeting." In other words, it would be nice if a friendly chat with your teacher would allay any concerns about your terrorist thoughts, but in fact we'll have to set up a panel with some police officers.

Related: Watch Filmmakers Roger Deakins and Matthew Heineman on Depicting the Drug War in Their Oscar Nominated Films

The results of the training are plain to see. Ill-informed and ill-equipped public sector workers are being pressured into bypassing standard safeguarding in the case of Muslims, and instead raising their concerns to the government through Prevent. For those not racialized as Muslim, depression, crying, and withdrawal might prompt support and mental health care. In the case of Muslims this stuff could land you in an intimidating meeting where you are asked uncomfortable questions about your internet habits and tattoos.

Samayya Afzal, from Bradford University Students Not Suspects, told me:

"The idea that practitioners can walk away from these scant training sessions instilled with any sense of "expertise" in counter-terrorism is almost laughable, were the consequences not so serious—as we have seen so vividly just these past few months.

"This lays bare the fact that Prevent is not guided by evidence or any real intelligence: Prevent is driven by paranoia, and it inspires fear in return. It is built on conjecture, yet demands unquestioning obedience in return."

UCU, CAGE, 383 professors, campaigners and politicians, as well as the UK's terror watchdog have raised concern about Prevent. This is no surprise when it seeks to label Muslim students, patients, and clients of the public sector as potential terrorists based on bad psychological profiling not even fit for a spy drama.

Follow Wail Qasim on Twitter.

Meet the 'Coaster Geeks' Who Travel the World Trying Out Roller Coasters

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A theme park: not just somewhere you pay to gain access to, before spending the majority of your time standing in a line. These tourist attractions—these paved, fenced-in arenas of looping, colorful steel—are also churches, places of worship to hordes of so-called "coaster geeks."

Roller coaster aficionados tour the world in search of new rides, spending thousands on trips and merchandise, and swearing allegiance—kind of like football fans—to their favorites. They obsess over the nuts and bolts of the roller coasters they ride; for a true coaster geek, it's not enough to just stand in line and spend two to three minutes upside down—they have to forensically understand each coil and curve.

Serena Cherry, a 27-year-old from the UK who has the Saw ride from England's Thorpe Park tattooed on her arm, says a true coaster fan should know who has built a ride from over a hundred paces.

"Those built by B&M have very thick, chunky looking tracks—a cross-section of their track typically looks like a W shape—whereas Swiss manufacturer Intamin often use quad rails, so their rails are cube-shaped," she explains. "Years ago, you'd have to peer over a fence to know who was building what, but now coaster geek sites will have already done that for you."

In some cases, it seems, enthusiasts will go to extreme lengths to get their hands on exclusive information. Merlin Entertainment—the company that owns basically every theme park in the UK—reported that their social media had been hacked by fans looking to get news of Thorpe Park's rumored (and now confirmed) collaboration with Derren Brown.

Serena's Saw ride tattoo

For Serena, a guitarist in the post-hardcore band Svalbard, committing her love for her favorite theme park to song was enough. "I composed a song called 'Thorpe Park (On a Week Day)'—it's a bit of a parody," she says. "On a weekday at Thorpe Park there are no queues. It's like winning life—a completely blissful day where there are no obstacles to your enjoyment, your relationship to the roller coasters."

Like many coaster geeks she can chart her adoration of adrenaline right down to the first coaster she fell in love with. "When I first saw Nemesis in 1994, when it just opened, it was like nothing on earth—the structure, ambition, and scale of it was like something from another planet," she says. "It was inverted, pulling off in all directions, yet mixed with all these alien themes. It looked mythological. I watched my dad ride it and begged him for every detail. I then had to wait four years until I was exactly 1.4 meters tall to ride on it."

A POV ride-through of Nemesis. POV ride-throughs are pretty popular in the coaster geek community.

Remembering her first Nemesis experience, Serena compares it almost to an early romantic encounter: "I was nervous, I was excited, and then it was over all too quickly. That day I went on it twice and queued for two-and-a-half hours each time."

Most of us have been to theme parks—perhaps on a school trip where you all had to wear matching backpacks the wrong way round, or a deathly silent first date over a burrito in the park's Mexican Cantina—and have enjoyed the day out. But for coaster geeks, there's a lot more to it than that.

"They are art installations that you can experience," says Serena. "It's not about just stepping on the train—the moment begins when you see the structure, how otherworldly it is. You study each fragment of the theming; it's like enveloping yourself in a story."

Jordan outside Thorpe Park

Jordan Middleton, 25, from Essex, has ridden 772 roller coasters at over 100 theme parks, burning as much as £1,000 on trips to her favorite rides in Japan, America, and Europe. She insists she doesn't dress like a typical coaster geek, but says you can spot one a mile off.

"They look like they're going hiking," she says. "Trousers with loads of pockets so you don't have to check a bag in and out. Sensible shoes... I'm actually mocked a lot because I'm a bit more fashion-conscious and don't wear hiking boots. Detachable hoods, boots with zips so you can get them on and off easily for rides. People bring flip-flops so they can wear them off after they've been on a water ride."

Jordan—whose obsession with rides began as a teenager playing RollerCoaster Tycoon, a game where you can build your own theme parks—describes how online coaster geek forums are full of oneupmanship.

"My fiancé thinks he's a coaster geek, but he really isn't. He has some knowledge, but it's not at geek level yet. Other geeks would judge him," she says. "It's not just about knowing the rides; it's about knowing manufacturers, plans, build spends. Everything. There are geeks who know how many bolts are in any Disneyland ride. Others have spreadsheets charting their top ten rides and what dates that order changed. It's very, very serious."

Online arguments rage about favorite restraints—the bars that hold you in your seat – and what body type is best for roller coasters: tall, short, thin, or fat. The obsessiveness isn't just consigned to the tracks, says Jordan: "There are specific bits inside theme parks that only coaster geeks would know about. Inside the ride Colossus at Thorpe Park, the developers, Intamin, when building the ride, accidentally created a seat-shaped alcove in the structure which is now known among geeks as the 'Intamin Throne.' A lot of coaster enthusiasts pose for pictures on it and many propose or get engaged there."

Jordan didn't get engaged on the Intamin Throne—that honor was reserved for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, Tokyo. Not that that's her favorite ride. "There's a roller coaster in Pennsylvania called Skyrush. Imagine you're riding a roller coaster that's like a bucking bronco, constantly trying to throw you off, but with a comfortable restraint that holds you on. It's really smooth and fast," she says, describing her holy grail of coaster. "Also, Six Flags Magic Mountain—that's roller coaster mecca. You pull up and all you can see is roller coasters as far as the eye can see."

Phill in Thorpe Park

Phill Pritchard, 30, works in a pharmaceutical company, but—perhaps unsurprisingly—pharmaceuticals are not his primary passion. His primary passion is theme parks. And one theme park in particular.

"There wasn't enough about Thorpe Park on the internet already, so I created Memories of Thorpe Park. It now has around 30,000 to 50,000 photos from around Thorpe Park," he says. "I just reached out to people who blogged and asked if I could share usage. I have everything from old logos, pics of disused rides, even the old 'Thorpe Park Rangers'—the site mascots."

Phill points to a pivotal time in the theme park's history as a game changer for his website. "The fire in 2000 was a very worrying time," he says. "It's still sad to think about it now. The two rides that were lost were important to me growing up—the Phantom Fantasia, a slow moving ghost train, was my favorite ride as a child. That was a big shock to me, especially the way it went. Nothing officially has ever been announced, but it's supposed to have been a cigarette fire."

Phill, who does still visit other parks besides Thorpe Park, says his fixation with roller coasters comes from the otherworldly set up. "There's nothing like a theme park. It's like walking into a film set," he says. "Nowhere on the planet can you go from being in outer space to a pirate ship to a horror theme without thinking it's ridiculous. I love to suspend my disbelief like that."

A POV ride-through of Thorpe Park's Saw ride

There's a community aspect to coaster geek culture, and of course the basic appeal of these rides is obvious: they kind of make you feel like you're flying. I get that. I get why people become interested in roller coasters and how a passing interest can snowball into a full-blown passion. But surely these coaster geeks get bored of riding the same two-minute experience again and again?

Serena, who has now ridden the Saw ride nearly a thousand times, says it never gets dull—and, in her explanation of why, sums up why many coaster geeks become so enthralled with lining up for hours for that brief rush of adrenaline.

"For me, a truly brilliant roller coaster tells a story. As a coaster, Saw is beautifully paced. It has an indoor section, plenty of interactive points as you go past on the carriage, and you notice different elements every time. From the moment you see it, to queuing up, to riding it, a story should unravel. I like it best in the pouring rain. Did you know that, when the track is wet, it makes the wheels slippier and a tiny bit faster? Saw in the rain, in the dark, that's my absolute favorite."

Follow Andy on Twitter.

Follow Jake on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: The Kid Behind the 'Damn, Daniel' Meme Got Swatted Last Night

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Things have taken a nasty turn for Josh Holz, the kid who filmed the "Damn, Daniel" video clips of his friend sporting some dope Vans that recently went viral on Twitter.

Around 1 AM on Tuesday, a prankster made a bogus 9-1-1 call to Riverside, California, police suggesting someone inside Holz's house was going postal with an AK-47 and had wounded their own mother, according to a local ABC affiliate.

The Riverside Police's SWAT team surrounded the Holz family's home within minutes of the call, only to find the family safe inside.

"Ever since their video has gone out there, received a number of what they call strange phone calls and emails, and a lot of strange things happening so tonight was just another incident for their family," said Lieutenant Kevin Townsend, one of the officers who arrived at the alleged crime scene.

The "Damn, Daniel" meme has brought Holz and Daniel Lara—the star of the video—a ton of recent attention lately, swatting incidents notwithstanding. Someone is apparently selling a pair of white "Damn, Daniel" Vans for $300,000 on eBay, and there's even a "Damn, Daniel" remix making the rounds.

Police have yet to find the jackal responsible for the 9-1-1 call.

Thumbnail image via Flickr user WEBN-TV

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