No matter how many hours of your life you've spent on yoga and mindfulness, sometimes the only thing that'll make a rough situation better is an honest curse—bellowed out, straight from the heart to God's ears. When you stub your pinky toe, when genitals collide with zippers, or when you're in traffic and other people seem to be, too: swearing and cursing is the answer. If it's at all possible, you'll want to blame others for your misfortune, but a fist in the face of the enemy is never the answer. A well put violent insult can hurt much worse.

Cursing is engrained in us all and it's what unites us as human beings. But the way we curse can wildly differ from one country to the next. We asked our European VICE offices about their rich traditions when it comes to cursing, swearing, and insulting each other to the bone.

ITALY

One of the most fascinating things about Italian swearing is that the vocabulary is so rich, you could almost have a meaningful conversation with someone by only using curse words. Italian bad words are generally used in place of interjections or entire exclamatory sentences, covering a wide range of emotions: "cazzo" or "minchia" (dick), "merda" (shit), "figa" (cunt) can express anything from disappointment, to surprise, to extreme satisfaction. If you aim to offend, however, the vast majority of curses target family members: "figlio di puttana" (son of a bitch) or "mortacci tua" (which curses the enemy's dead loved ones).

Cursing God, the Virgin Mary, or the Lord is also a shared Italian experience, mainly by matching these names with any imaginable offensive word, name, or kind of animal. Contrary to other forms of Italian swearing, these blasphemous swears are generally complex, articulate, and wordy—the longer, the better.

The best curse in the Italian language, however, hails from central Italy and reads: "Li mortacci tua, de tuo nonno, de tua madre e dei 3/4 daa palazzina tua," which translates into "Fuck your dead relatives, and your grandfather's, and your mother's, and those of the three-quarters of your apartment block."

—Alice Rossi

All illustrations by Timo ter Braak

SERBIA

If Serbia is rich in something, it's swears. The renowned Serbian linguist Vuk Karadzic, who singlehandedly reformed the Serbian language and wrote the first dictionary and the first New Testament in this language, was also the first to recognize our swearing heritage by cataloguing all folky Serbian curse words.

The people closest to our hearts bear the brunt of our cursing: our family, and particularly our mothers. "Jebem ti mater" or "I fuck your mother" is the mother of all swears, with all others deriving from it. Generally, many of our curses revolve around vaginas: "Pizda ti materina," for example, which translates to "I fuck your mother's rotten pussy." Variations on this theme include "I'll fuck your bloody child in a pussy," and "Let a dog fuck your mother's pussy." If you'd want to insult someone's manhood, you could take a homophobic turn with "You'll be disgusted with pussies and enjoy only dicks." Just calling someone a "stinky boob" is also an option.

If you want to do it right, though, you'll curse someone's entire bloodline: you could go with "I'll fuck everyone dead in your family, and your offspring and ancestors," a slightly classier "I'll fuck your blood, seed, and tribe," or "I will fuck the first row at your funeral."

More polite but also successful curses are "I shit in your mouth" or "I shit on your back." The greatest mind-bending curse in our language, though, would be: "I fuck your dick in a pussy." Generations of experts have tried and failed to understand how this could be done.

—Magda Janjic

FRANCE

French swearwords these days are pretty lame compared to the ones we started using in the Middle Ages. From that time and up until about the 18th century, everyone from peasants to aristocrats would shout out words like "Gourgandine" (prostitute), or "Sacrebleu," which is hard to translate—it's old timey and more or less the French equivalent of " zounds." These were more exciting times, when French people would yell things like "Jean-foutre" at each other, which means "vile," but in a very untranslatable way.

French people today are less creative with their cursing: they just use homophobic slurs like "PD," "fiotte," "tarlouze," or more basic things like "connard" (douchebag), "pute" (whore), or "salope" (bitch). Luckily, French people do still use some expressions that are a bit more eloquent, like "Va te faire mettre"—which would translate into something like " go do yourself" and is generally used when you need someone to fuck off.

—Julie Le Baron

ROMANIA

Swearing culture in Romania is built on three pillars: oral sex, mothers, and Christ. The most common curse word in Romania is "muie" which roughly translates to "suck my penis." We also use "my dick" to emphasize stuff in normal conversations, like the Polish use "kurva" or "whore."

The most creative mother curse in Romanian is "Să mă fut în mă-ta," which translates to "I want to fuck myself in your mother." In light of this, it should come as a surprise to no one that according to Romanian PornHub statistics, "mom" has been one of the most commonly searched phrases on the site for years.

The most controversial Polish swears revolve around religion. Although 81 percent of Romanians consider themselves Christian-Orthodox, most people here use "futu-ți Cristoșii și Dumnezeii mă-tii" which translates to "I will fuck your mother's Gods and Christs." That's not a typo, by the way, that's a plural form of Christ.

—Mihai Popescu

THE NETHERLANDS

In contrast to most eastern and southern European countries, insulting one's mother isn't that big of a deal for the Dutch. We choose a more direct approach, by whishing an array of deadly diseases on the object of the curse. Over the years, curses and swears involving "klere" (cholera), "pest" (the plague), "tyfus," "tering" (tuberculosis), and "pokke" (smallpox) have all been popular.

More recently "kanker" (cancer) has become the swear word of choice in Dutch, although it also remains the most controversial, as cancer is more of a problem in today's world than, say, the plague is. It's a versatile curse, as it can be used when you realize you locked yourself out and your phone is still inside ("kanker!"), but it can also be combined with other words. A guy you don't like is a "kankerlul" (cancer dick) and his female counterpart is a "kankerhoer" (cancer whore).

These diseases can also be used to a superlative degree or even in a positive way. If it's extremely busy at the gym, you'd say it's "teringdruk" (tuberculosis busy), and if you've had a great time with someone you could tell him or her it was "kankergezellig" (cancer fun).

—Twan Stoffels

AUSTRIA

In Austria, when something truly pisses us off, we yell "hure!," which translates to whore and is used in a similar way as "fuck."

An important category in Austrian swearing is the use of body parts. Sometimes we call people "beidl"—which means scrotum, but is often used as synonymous to dick—and, like many great nations in the world, we call people asses or assholes.

Many Austrians would call someone they don't like a "schwuchtel" or "mongo"—slurs for gay and handicapped people, respectively. But these swears can be used for things as well, as Austrians feel things can be gay or handicapped, too. Obviously, Austrians are the worst, and need to be told to fuck off. Or, as Austrians would say: "Geh scheißen!" (Go take a shit!)

—Markus Lust

DENMARK

All serious Danish curses involve getting eaten by scary things. Things like "satanedme" (Satan eat me) and "kraftedme" (cancer eat me). Say some guy bumps into you, causing you to drop your book of H.C. Andersen fairytales. To this you'd respond: "This is way too Satan eat me!"

Then there's a whole array of sad Danish excuses for curse words: translations of actual English curses, as featured in movie subtitles. These include gems like "skidespræller" (shit wriggler), "kors i røven" (a cross up the ass), and "røvbanan" (ass banana), and are apparently the closest the Danish language gets to simple yet effective words like "fuck," "shit," and "douchebag."

This is real, and we need help. World, if you're listening: send us your far superior curse words. There are innocent Danish children in legitimate danger of thinking the actual Danish translation of Bruce Willis's iconic Die Hard line "Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!" is "Thanks and goodbye, brother shit!" Please send help.

—Alfred Maddox

GREECE

Greece and swearing just belong together. One of our most common words is "malakas," which means "wanker" but is mostly used instead of "friend," "bro," or "dude." A less friendly expression would be "shit on your grave," which should not be used lightly, because Greeks can break out in fist fights over it.

Another common curse is "better spend it on doctors," which you'd use if you want to buy something in a shop but it's too expensive. You'd turn to the shop owner, and basically tell him that when another customer buys your object of desire from him, he should spend the money on some doctors to cure him from his madness. "Na se pane tesseris" is another expression that can't be translated exactly, but it refers to the moment you're laying in a coffin, while four people carry you to your grave. So basically it means "die."

And, lastly, a phrase that experienced great popularity in the 1980s and 1990s in Greece is "may your VCR burn." If you don't understand the gravity of this curse, you have no idea how cool and expensive VCRs were back in those days.

—Pavlos Toubekis

GERMANY

Unlike most people would expect due to the harsh sound of our language, our swearing traditions are relatively boring and tame. Classic German swear words or compositions often sound like an awkward kid who tries to say something bad, but doesn't really know how to do it. Like "Dumme Kuh" (stupid cow), for example, or "Pissnelke" (a word for both a dandelion and a prudish, boring girl), or "Flachzange" (which refers to a flat plier and to an idiot).

Compared to other countries, Germany is more focused on fecal matter and butts than on sexual acts. The first German word anyone outside of Germany learns is "Scheiße" (shit), while "Arschloch" (asshole) is also rather popular.

That said—our best swear words have naturally found their way into our language through German rap music. Rappers have introduced Germany to the concept of fucking each other's mothers, with words like "Hurensohn" (son of a whore) and "Ich ficke deine Mutter" (I fuck your mother). They've also taken the German tradition of cutesy not-really-swears to a whole new ironical level by inventing insults like "Du Lauch!" (you leek). Yes, the vegetable.

—Barbara Dabrowska

SPAIN

Spain has been a deeply religious country since the day Jesus was born. That's why our swears all revolve around spitting in the eye of God, Jesus, his mother Mary and their entire entourage. This great Spanish swearing tradition is slowly fading into political correctness, but you still can hear old guys on the street yell things like: "Me cago en la puta madre de Jesús, en su padre, y en toda su jodida corte celestial" (I shit in Jesus's whoring mother, in his father, and their whole fucking celestial court). I remember my grandfather being so angry with someone one day that he said "me cago en su corazón" (I shit in his heart), the memory of which gives me the chills to this day.

So basically if you really want to insult someone in Spanish, you need to shit on, in, or near some kind of saint.

—Juanjo VIllalba

Ultimate Jerk Center owner, K, in the kitchen

Ultimate Jerk Center closed up shop for a couple of weeks recently, which got a lot of people very worried. Luckily, the Brixton institution was just undergoing a refurb, but bearing in mind the rapid pace of gentrification in the area—and along Coldharbour Lane, where Ultimate Jerk is located—you can see why locals feared the worst.

"People were coming in really happy we were still here, because so many other places have closed," says the owner, K.

Open 24 hours a day, Ultimate Jerk Center is trying to engage in the Brixton of 2016. K knows more and more people are coming to the area to party—or at least to get shitfaced at the bars—and that people tend to enjoy inhaling lots of food after inhaling lots of alcohol. A depressing number of local businesses have closed as rents are hiked up, but K's doing all he can to keep the place busy while also giving back to the community.

"For me, if I can give people a job and help them out of some situation they're in, that's the thing that makes me happy," he says. "This is about creating something to show the people that don't have nothing to look up to that they can do something."

I spent the day hanging out in the shop and photographing the people who passed through.

Ammon Bundy speaking in Arizona in 2014. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Read: A Brief History of Americans Revolting Against Their Government

Ammon Bundy and at least 15 others charged in the Oregon wildlife refuge standoff pleaded not guilty to federal conspiracy charges on Wednesday, as the Associated Press reports.

Twenty-five people in total are in hot water over the 41-day armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which began January 2 and ended earlier this month. Bundy and his alleged cohorts face up to six years in prison, and that number could grow if federal prosecutors follow through with plans to tack on more charges as they continue to examine evidence.

Judge Anna Brown reportedly kept a firm hand over both sides during the two-hour hearing, ordering Ammon Bundy back in his seat when he tried to stand and speak at one point. She also reprimanded federal prosecutors for moving slowly; the defendants have a right to a speedy trial, she said, not one in 2017.

Still, the occupiers found moments to further the anti-government message that inspired the standoff in the first place.

"I have no rights at all," Jason Patrick, one of the defendants, told Judge Brown when she asked if he understood his rights. "You're the federal government, you're going to do whatever you want."

Brown let that one slide.

A trial date is set for April 29, according to the judge, though the AP notes that court documents list an April 19 date.

Wildin David Guillen-Acosta. Photo courtesy of Alerta Migratoria NC

It was 6:30 AM when Wildin David Guillen-Acosta stepped outside his house in Durham, North Carolina, headed to school. The 19-year-old had just begun his second semester of senior year at Riverside High School, where teachers considered him an exemplary student and peers called him a leader. But that morning, Acosta never even made it down the street—two immigration agents waited in the driveway and commanded he get in their vehicle.

"The agents picked my son up in the driveway and asked him questions, and they didn't identify themselves until they got him in the car," Acosta's mother Dilsia Acosta told me in Spanish, recalling the incident on January 28. "He just wanted to go to school. He loved it there. He wanted to keep studying, to go to the university and become an engineer."

Acosta, a Honduran native who fled gang violence for the US at age 16, is among dozens of Central American youths around the nation who have recently been targeted for deportation on their way to class, to work, or to the store.

The arrests are part of the Department of Homeland Security's large-scale crackdown on Central American migrants, in reaction to a record number of women and children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador crossing the border. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials conducted highly publicized raids on families in early January, and on Tuesday, Thomas Homan, the executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations for ICE, announced that the agency had created dozens of teams to continue apprehending and deporting Central Americans.

"Consistent with our laws and values, recent border crossers, including those apprehended as unaccompanied children, who are unable to establish they are eligible for relief and have exhausted appeals have been, and will continue to be, ICE removal priorities," Homan testified at a Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday.

But as ICE boasts about its strict enforcement tactics, it declines to acknowledge the jarring impact these raids have on US soil: Many students have simply stopped going to school.

Attendance dropped by one-third in several classes at Riverside High School the day after Acosta's arrest, according to Bryan Proffitt, the president of the Durham Educators Association. Since then, he told me attendance both at Riverside and neighboring schools has remained "inconsistent."

"Not only have they lost a student who is perceived by his peers to be a leader and who is really active in the school community, but also there's a ripple effect at their school and at schools around the county," Proffitt said. "There's truth to the argument that even kids who aren't victimized by these raids are pretty traumatized."

It's not just in Acosta's school district: In the Washington, DC area, school attendance has also dropped in fear of raids and school principals are grappling with how to protect their immigrant populations. Community groups in Maryland's Montgomery County and Prince George's County gathered in January, distraught over the raids.

"Kids have been afraid to come to school and parents have called saying, 'Is it safe for my kid to go to school?'" said Amy Fischer, the policy director for the non-profit RAICES (the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services), who attended the meeting. "School officials don't feel comfortable saying it's going to be OK. They have a lot of questions, like, 'Where will ICE pick someone up, and what is off-limits for ICE?'"

US immigration policy prevents the agency from arresting individuals in "sensitive locations," including schools and churches, but Fischer said "there are still a lot of questions about what ICE's actual boundaries are."

ICE agents' behavior when arresting the youths has also caused concern. In North Carolina, ICE has arrested at least seven other unaccompanied minors—youths who entered the country alone—since January for deportation, using rough and deceptive tactics, according to local activist Viridiana Martinez.

"If you hear each story of the way these kids were picked up, it's totally unnecessary, the tactics ICE used," said Martinez, who helped start the group Alerta Migratoria North Carolina, a forum for migrants rattled by the raids. "We started a hotline, so we got calls from eight or nine families of unaccompanied minors who had been targeted."

Martinez said ICE officials arrested El Salvadorian teen Jeffrey Sorto on his way to school while he waited at a bus stop in the morning. She also said an agent punched Guatemalan youth Bilmer Araeli Pujoy Juarez while handcuffing him.

"Bilmer was in the car with his dad, and they'd just left the driveway when they were intercepted by an ICE van. The agents were unidentified with no clothing showing they were ICE," Martinez said. "They got him out and handcuffed him and grabbed his neck and held it tight, and then a female agent punched him on the lip."

ICE agents also entered the home of Alexander Josue Soriano Cortez without a warrant and handcuffed everyone in his family, Martinez said.

A protest against ICE deportation raids in Minneapolis. Photo via Flickr user Fibonacci Blue

All of the individuals apprehended in North Carolina are now being held in Stewart Detention Center in Georgia where they await their deportation, according to Martinez. But Riverside High School and the local community have formed a petition to stop their removal and to return them to their homes.

"We circulated a petition directed at the Department of Homeland Security that these students are not threats and should be released," Proffitt said. "We got our local school board to pass a resolution denouncing the detention and asking they not be deported and that these activities cease in the community."

ICE spokesman Bryan Cox did not immediately provide responses to the cases of Sorto, Juarez, or Cortez, nor would he provide details about Acosta's case. But he claimed that ICE has never "arrested anyone at a bus stop." Cox said Acosta was a top priority for enforcement since he had arrived in the country since 2014.

"Wildin David Guillen-Acosta, a 19-year-old Honduran national, was taken into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody January 28 in the parking lot of his residence. Mr. Guillen-Acosta falls within an ICE priority category due to a final order of removal issued by an immigration judge in March 2015," Cox said in an emailed statement.

"ICE focuses its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security," he continued. "This includes individuals, whether alone or with family members, who have been apprehended while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States, recent border crossers, and individuals who have received a final order of removal on or after January 1, 2014."

But immigration experts say ICE is ignoring a critical fact: These are refugees, not migrants here for a free ride. The youths and families have fled three of the most violent countries in the world, and many have been targets of gang violence but lack access to legal counsel to win their asylum cases.

"We know the asylum system here in the United States is extremely complicated, so despite the fact that the government says these people have exhausted their legal options, the vast majority of these folks don't have access to resources to have a fair day in court," Fischer said. "We're essentially deporting people back to their deaths."

While in detention, teachers have mailed homework to Acosta so he can keep up with his studies. If he's deported, his mother fears he simply won't survive back in Honduras.

"He came here because he was threatened by the gangs. They said they'd kill him and hurt his family if he didn't join," she said. "Imagine how sad I feel. He's a piece of my heart. He's my son."

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user lifesizepotato

VICE is tracking mass shootings in America in 2016, and comparing the numbers with their European counterparts. Read our rationale for the project and the metrics we're using here.

In the broader scheme of American's gun problems, domestic violence might not seem like the most urgent piece of the puzzle. After all, the United States bore witness to hundreds of public mass shootings last year, including high-profile terrorist attacks in Charleston and San Bernardino. But a new report from two gun control groups serves as a reminder that domestic violence actually accounts for a huge share of gun deaths in America. These incidents are also some of the easiest to predict and prevent, with abusers leaving a trail of 911 calls and other hints that trouble might be coming. And while policymakers have crafted laws in hopes of keep guns out of the hands of abusers, the report suggests they're riddled with loopholes and bedeviled by poor enforcement.

The authors—the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy and Prosecutors Against Gun Violence—offer a prescription for how to plug up those gaps. The report serves as a solid goal post for states with lax laws and those struggling to enforce decent ones. But even the folks behind the recommendations concede they won't tackle domestic gun violence alone, which speaks to the ongoing and existential challenge posed by the patchwork of weak gun laws in America.

After all, domestic gun violence is "a multi-pronged problem," according to Hollye Dexter, an activist with Women Against Gun Violence. "We've got to come at it from a lot of different directions."

Domestic gun violence often involves a man killing his current or former partner or family, and almost never makes the news like random public shootings. But these tragedies take a toll: Of 2,707 female homicide victims in 2013, nearly half were related to or involved with the killer. Going by recent FBI data, over half of such "partner-related" murders would have been shootings. According to the gun control advocacy group Every Town for Gun Safety, domestic incidents also made up a disproportionate number—57 percent—of mass shootings under the FBI definition (at least four people shot dead in one incident) between 2009 and 2015. Eighty-one percent of the victims in those shootings were women and children.

Rather than inevitable bloodlust, this violence seems linked to guns, the presence of which increases the chance that a partner will be killed in a domestic violence event by about 500 percent. Domestic gun violence also wounds many more, and it keeps more still in a perpetual state of fear as firearms are used for terror and control even when not fired.

Thankfully, it's rare for domestic gun violence to explode in a vacuum. In up to 70 percent of cases, it follows a series of threats or less deadly violence, all of which offer points of contact with authorities before things get deadly. In one study, at least half of all women killed by their partners had been in touch with the criminal justice system at least once over the previous year. Recognizing this, Congress has enacted laws that allow states to prevent firearms purchases and even seize guns under certain domestic violence protection orders. When officials do remove guns from those deemed dangerous enough to merit a protection order, risk of intimate partner homicides dropped in at least one study by 19 percent.

Unfortunately, many states choose not to make removing guns from violent abusers mandatory, or fail to identify the guns, serve the order, or execute successful retrievals. Federal law also limits the right to remove guns to those with protective orders issued by (ex)spouses, people the abuser lived with, or those they share children with, and does not apply to temporary protection orders issued after abuse is identified but before a full hearing can be carried out for the protection of a victim.

The report suggests states adopt gun removals in permanent and temporary protective orders, and where gun removals are optional, at least get key legal stakeholders to pledge to use them. The authors also lay out a comprehensive outline for how to best identify, remove, and (if need be) return abusers' guns. "To do removal and retrieval properly, you need to develop a comprehensive system," says Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Education Fund to Stop Gun Violence and a co-founder of the CRBFP. "You can say, 'We have removal in the state,' but unless you work with the stakeholders to develop processes... these things won't happen by themselves."

But even if states followed the recommendations of the report to a tee, they wouldn't be able to remove guns from all dangerous abusers. That's because there are a host of parallel loopholes in the definition of just who qualifies for domestic violence protections. The report only addresses in passing that domestic violence protective orders typically don't extend to non-cohabiting dating partners or stalkers, who are more likely to commit domestic violence than, say, a spouse. (There are other types of protective orders for these individuals, but they often don't carry tough restrictions.). The report also skits the issue of people who have trouble navigating the court system to successfully secure an official form of protection despite facing a clear risk of violent abuse.

Perhaps most importantly, weak background check data and exemptions for private or gun show sales make it exceedingly easy for someone prohibited from owning a gun under a protective order (or any other restriction like a felony or violent misdemeanor) to get one anyway. This at least partially explains why states with stronger background checks see 46 percent fewer women shot to death in domestic violence incidents than more lax states on average.

Horwitz sees creating a strong universal background check standard as key to bolstering gun removal and reducing domestic violence risks, a policy he believes many Americans support. Lindsay Nichols, an attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, adds that Congress is considering legislation to extend gun restrictions to stalkers, dating partners, and other loophole classes, which could go a long way in strengthening the benefits of domestic violence firearm removals. She also points to a recent California law that allows wider categories of people to get courts to restrict gun access to those who pose a plausible threat, which could help nip potential disasters in the bud.

There's almost always going to be a way for abusive people to do harm in America. But as the report's authors argue, effective policy can put up barriers that block the worst of that violence without unduly violating the constitutional right to bare arms. Frustratingly, no single volley of gun policies exists in a void, making the success of any one law or set of best practices in part contingent on the airtight implementation of different sets of ideas. But detailed proposals like these show that despite the tricky politics and enforcement hurdles, America is capable of giving victims of domestic violence access to better legal protection—and a chance to escape the peril of their partner's gun.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

In 2013, Canadian border agents intercepted a suspicious package coming from Japan that was addressed to a residence in Newfoundland. That package contained a life-like sex doll. But it wasn't a typical sex doll—it resembled a small child.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

A new parliamentary report recommends that few restrictions, not even the need to have a terminal illness, be placed on Canadians' ability to access doctor-assisted suicide.

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, pictured above, has halted in-person public talks in the city about transit. Screenshot via YouTube

Calgary's mayor Naheed Nenshi has decided that transit is such a touchy subject that face-to-face talks are too dangerous for the city to hold. Instead, he suggests that future debates on transit take place in the never-ugly digital realm.

This study is laughable, government. Photo via Flickr user Ciaran McGuiggan

I didn't leave my mom's house until I literally moved to the other side of the country—at age 25.

During the time I lived with her, I also ate all of her food and occasionally asked her to go to the movies with me with so that she would pay for both us.

For years, she put up with my crap because she knew paying rent in Vancouver on a lowly reporter's salary meant not being able to eat (read: drink and party). Amongst my friends, at the least who'd been raised in Vancouver, I was no anomaly—most people lived at home while in school and continued to do so after graduation, saddled with student debt and arts degrees that led to barista gigs.

So I was a little thrown off today when I read reports that young Canadians, according to our federal government, are baller as fuck.

A CBC story published "SECRET" data from the Finance Department that says Canadians aged 28-34 are the richest they've ever been, with an average (not median: see more on that later) net worth of $93,000, about 35 percent more than other generations. Based on wealth surveys conducted by the government from 1977 to 2012, it seems Canadians in this age bracket are faring much better than their counterparts in the US, UK and Australia.

"The 2008 recession did not seem to affect much the wealth holdings and earning potential of today's generation of young middle-income Canadians," the report says, while the CBC notes "the findings raise questions about the Liberal government's focus on helping young Canadians through difficult times."

But before we go cancelling Justin Trudeau's $1.5 billion youth employment strategy, let's consider for a moment that this research might be complete and utter garbage. (Is that why they kept it secret?)

"It's bullshit," said Vancouver freelancer Jessica Barrett, who researches and reports on precarious employment and income disparity amongst young people.

Barrett pointed out the government's numbers are based on average net worths but there's no context given as to the young people included in the survey—we don't know if they came from wealthy families or not, though the conclusions certainly seem to indicate they did.

UBC professor Paul Kershaw, an expert in generational trends, says the story is much more "complicated" than what the government report suggests.

"Canada doesn't have good data to compare student loans now versus the 1970s or 80s. That's a problem, because tuition back then was half what it is today (after inflation). And fewer young adults back in the day incurred any student debt, because only half as many went to postsecondary," he said in a statement.

The CBC's own case study, Torontonian Alyssa Furtado, 31, who founded RateHub.ca, now owns a house in downtown Toronto and has retirement savings, admitted she graduated without student debt thanks to her parents.

"Canadians who are able to get into the housing market, who are able to put savings away, by and large are those that were able to have their education paid for by their parents... and that's certainly not everybody," said Barrett.

The government report notes that student loans are basically a non-issue in terms of impacting the overall net worths young Canadians, but perhaps that's only true if you're not paying it back on your own.

The Canadian Federation of Students estimates the average student debt load upon university graduation is around $27,000. Coupled with a national unemployment rate of around 13 percent—about double the average of the general population, it's pretty hard to see how folks in their late 20s are doing better than ever.

As a result, many young people are forced to take temporary or contract jobs, in which they don't receive benefits or pensions. A 2015 study by TD Bank found that 30 percent of youth employment (aged 15-24) was made up by temp jobs.

"I work for myself and that's risky but I make enough money," said Barrett, 33, who has a mix of freelance contracts and shares the main floor of a Vancouver house with a roommate.

"But if anything were to go off in the balance, if I were to get sick or have a kid, I do not know what I would do. Everything would fall apart."

Toronto-based labour lawyer Andrew Langille said the government findings simply highlight the income disparity between the rich and the poor.

"The entire study appears to be skewed by the incomes of the top 10 percent but especially the incomes of the top 1 percent," he told VICE.

A report by BMO Economics put the median income of millennials (aged 25-34) in Canada at only $34,700 in 2011.

And, to state the obvious (which the government report does not), the party for young Canadians doesn't stop with crushing debt and joblessness/low wages.

Anyone who lives in an urban centre is additionally fucked over by an inflated real estate market.

Haing S. Ngor and Sophia Ngor at the Oscars in 1985. Photo by Mark Elias, courtesy of Arthur Dong

Twenty years ago today, Khmer Rouge survivor and Academy Award-winning actor Haing S. Ngor, was gunned down just yards from his Los Angeles home. Ngor had been made famous for his role in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, for which he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Officially, three teenaged members of the Oriental Lazy Boyz gang were convicted of Ngor's murder, but many in Cambodia believe his assassination was ordered by Pol Pot, who led the Khmer Rouge.

The controversy around his death—and the remarkable achievements of his life—are charted in The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, a film made last year by filmmaker Arthur Dong. Dong, recently appointed Distinguished Professor of Film at Loyola Marymount University and himself Oscar-nominated, has spent four decades of movie-making on issues of race, gender, and violence. To make The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, he dug through the Ngor family's personal records and archives of the Pol Pot era, blending the footage with interviews and original animation to paint a life-size picture of a reluctant star who used his fame to campaign for justice in his homeland.

Ngor suffered four years of torture and starvation in labor camps before escaping Cambodia in 1979, but his wife—along with almost two million people—died under the Khmer Rouge regime. His murder 12 years later was seen by some as payback by Pol Pot, still alive and controlling large parts of the country, for starring in The Killing Fields and speaking out against the regime. To many in the Cambodian-American community, this explanation made more sense than the official conclusion that Ngor's murder was a gang-related robbery (Ngor's Rolex had been stolen, but his Mercedes and $2,900 in cash were left in plain sight at the scene of the crime). Then, in 2009, during a UN-led Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Kang Kek Leu (or "Comrade Duch") testified that Pol Pot had indeed ordered Dr. Ngor's assassination, adding to the conspiracy theories.

As a filmmaker, Dong was intrigued by Duch's claims but he had always planned to turn his lens on Ngor's life story rather than focus on his death. The film looked first to the activist's autobiography and went in search of the emotional truth at the heart of his remarkable life.

VICE: As a filmmaker, what brought you to the story of Haing S. Ngor almost a decade after his death?
Arthur Dong: His was such a dramatic journey, such an emotional human story. You know, if you read his book, you see that it is really a love story—for the love of his wife who he lost during the war. So that's how I constructed the film, as a love story. Throughout my body of my work, I have always looked at culture and social justice issues, but it's always told through the lens of human experience and how these larger issues are framed through a person's life. And Dr. Ngor's life was so exhilarating.

How important was it to contextualize period in Cambodian history that Dr. Ngor survived?
I quickly learned that the history of that era is so intricate and there were so many international forces at work in Cambodia at this time. told me how little as an American I know, especially about America's involvement during this period. But as a filmmaker, the emotional story is my job; as an audience member, I am only ever engaged when the story is emotional. When a film starts to get didactic, that's a different type of film and not the kind I am interested in. So I knew from the start that this was a film about Dr. Ngor's life journey and that audiences wouldn't be interested if it was bogged down. I also understood that the hardships that he lived through, the atrocities that he witnessed, and his accomplishments in life wouldn't have the impact if the audience didn't understand what had gone on. So I had to find a really intricate balance between his story and what the audience needed to know about the history at a minimum to really appreciate what he went through.

The film was widely acclaimed in the US, but you recently went to Cambodia and showed the film in four different cities. How did audiences there respond there?
You know, when I first landed in Phnom Penh I had a debriefing by the US Embassy and they warned me that Cambodian audiences hardly ever stayed for the credits, never mind for the Q&A. They tried to prepare me. But at all our screenings, people stayed behind and talked about the movie. We were pleasantly surprised—it was a big success.

In Dr. Ngor's hometown of Samrong Yong in Takeo province, a tiny little village, we screened it in the yard of a primary school he financed and it was like a big carnival—kids were running around, old people in wheelchairs came, vendors selling toys and candy and food I'd never seen before. I've been to a lot of screenings in my life but that one was the most amazing audiences I have ever experienced.

How did they react to an American telling this story?
One of the questions that would always come up in Cambodia was, "What am I?" Meaning, am I Cambodian? And of course, I'm not. But they were surprised because they felt the movie has an authentic Cambodian sensibility. At one one of the screenings, the young Khmer filmmaker Kulikar Sotho, who directed the movie The Last Reel, told me she worries when foreigners try and tell the story of her country—she called me a foreigner, too. But she also told me this movie felt was very true to her, very authentic. I was very proud of that.

Would you say Dr. Ngor's story resonates with young Cambodians who didn't live through the Khmer Rouge era?
Well, I'm not an expert on Cambodian culture and history, which is why I relied on a panel of advisors to help me produce this film, but as far as I am aware there were few heroes during this period that people looked up to. That's why Dr. Ngor's story is so important because he survived this not as a victim, but as someone who asked, "What can we do about this?" It is not uncommon for people who experienced this kind of trauma to want to forget about the past, to not want to talk about it, and that has happened in Cambodia to a certain extent and it is a very common response. But Dr. Ngor didn't want that. He fought for these crimes to not be forgotten and he wanted those who were responsible to be brought to justice.

In many ways, Dr. Ngor gave a voice to younger people in Cambodia by saying it's OK to tell this story, we don't need to be quiet about this, they can try and hide the extent of what happened but they won't hide it forever. He needed the truth to come out and he worked hard to bring the truth to light, by speaking out and working with the UN, for example. And of course, he wrote it all down in his very popular book, and this film is very much an extension of his project.

Do you think there is something fundamental about his story to the immigrant experience in the US?
For immigrants and refugees, there is no one path. I come from an immigrant family myself, and some families like my own stayed steeped in the culture they were from, some want to forget and assimilate and say this is America, this is our new home, and some are a mix. With Dr. Ngor, he couldn't forget his experiences and at the beginning, he didn't want to participate in The Killing Fields. He was a social worker in Chinatown in the US trying to help immigrant communities and he just wanted to get his practice going, but he was chosen by the filmmaking world to be a voice and he was finally persuaded by those around him to be the voice to tell their story—little did he know how powerful that voice would become.

Both Dr. Ngor's niece and nephew were involved in the movie and his estate granted you full access to its archives. Was it difficult to convince the family to revisit his death after gaining closure of sorts through the murder trial?
Since his death in 1996, Dr. Ngor's family have have been approached by many filmmakers but they have turned them all down. But the executive director of the Haing Ngor Foundation is the actor Jack Orm and when I became interested I contacted him and asked him what it would take to get access to his story. He said, "Are you serious? We've always wanted you to do it but we thought you were too busy." So they were waiting for the right filmmaker to come along, someone who they felt they could trust and when we started, they didn't ask me for any editorial input and really let me do the movie how I wanted. And of course, his nephew Wayne Ngor did voiceover and his niece Sophia Ngor Demetri has come to a lot of the screenings and Q&As. Thankfully, they liked the movie.

The gang members sentenced for his murder are still in prison. But after working on this movie in light of the sensational comments made by "Comrade Duch" that Pol Pot was being behind the killing, do you think justice has been served?
There were three trials. Each one of the defendants had a trial and there were convictions, they went through their appeals and were denied and they have now exhausted the appeal process. That's the American justice system. But for me, the jury's still out. I acknowledge the convictions, but you also have to acknowledge that no one forced Duch to say what he did, no one even asked him. He was just describing the tactics Pol Pot used to get rid of his enemies and he just included this comment about Haing Ngor. You know, talk to some people and they'll say Duch is crazy; others will argue that he was inside the regime and knew exactly what went on. For me as a storyteller, it was certainly a key, dramatic moment and for those who raise questions about Dr. Ngor's murder, it gives a reason for the conspiracies to continue.

Before Dr. Ngor's death, his family feared his life might be in danger. During the making of your own movie, did any of his family members feel threatened due to their involvement?
You know, things are still happening in Long Beach . What was going on there? It was reported as being this wonderful, lavish funeral and she was one of the senior KR figures. So it's not surprising that there is still conspiracy.

Ngor was an early advocate for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and towards the end of the film, you show footage of the only two regime leaders convicted by the tribunal for crimes against humanity. Do you see this as closure of a sort or is the process just beginning?
It's part closure, part chronology. It's certainly an outcome that Ngor would have wanted, but it's not the end, and the final scene of the movie shows Dr. Ngor expressing that sentiment. For some viewers, I felt it would be important to know that even though its symbolic, some of the leaders were convicted. But it's not everybody—a lot of people got away with murder. And the footage is real, it's what happened. There's been progress yes, on some levels, but there's also a lot of work still to be done.

There's still an awful lot of issues, a lot of poverty. People have said to me, "So you've been to Cambodia. Wasn't it fun, wasn't it beautiful?" And I say, "It depends on where you've been." If all you do is hang out downtown in Siem Reap and go see Angkor Wat, then sure, it's fun. It's like saying America is great after walking down Madison Avenue. But I didn't want the film to end on a pessimistic note, and I don't think it does.

You mean with the shot of Dr. Ngor's wedding?
Yeah. Visually, the film ends with a photograph of Dr. Ngor's wedding party and the sticky notes on top that specify if a person is still alive or how a person died but the sticky notes slowly disappear, leaving them all in a better place at this wedding party. I wanted an emotional lift, everybody is still alive and whatever religion you are, they are in a good place. The music that closes the film is a beautiful love song by the Cambodian-American singer Bochen, who does a lot of rap songs but has this one beautiful that she re-recorded with Khmer lyrics. I wanted to end with a woman's voice, symbolically representing the love between Dr. Ngor and his wife. It's an emotional song and closes on a note of hope.

Follow Simon Henderson on Twitter.

Correction: A previous version said today was the 10th anniversary of Haing S. Ngor's murder. It is actually the 20th anniversary. We are bad at math.

Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz during the Republican presidential debate in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Michael Ciaglo-Pool/Getty Images)

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

US News

Rubio Lays into Trump
Senator Marco Rubio unleashed a scathing attack on Donald Trump at last night's Republican debate—insulting the mogul's business ethics, hiring practices, and finances. Trump claimed the role reversal from the usually robotic Rubio was a bid for better television ratings. The debate is the last before the March 1 Super Tuesday primaries. —New York Times

US Military Tests Ballistic Missiles
The US military test fired its second intercontinental ballistic missile in a week. The unarmed Minuteman III missile blasted off from an Air Force base in California to "prove the operational missiles that we have are reliable," said Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. —Reuters

Four Dead in Kansas Shooting
Four people have been killed and 14 others injured after a gunman opened fire on the streets of Harvey County, Kansas, then attacked a manufacturing plant where he reportedly worked. The suspect was shot dead by police at the plant. Five of the victims are in critical condition. —VICE News

Surgeons Perform First Uterus Transplant
Surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic have performed the first uterus transplant in the United States, in the hope of giving women without wombs a better change at pregnancy. A 26-year-woman underwent a nine-hour surgery to receive a donor's uterus. —CBS News

International News

Corruption-hit FIFA Unveils Reforms
FIFA has voted to limit its president's tenure to three terms in office, in a raft of reforms as the world football governing body scrambles to recover from a corruption crisis. Sepp Blatter's replacement will be announced at the congress in Zurich later today. —BBC

Polls Open in Iran
Iranians are voting today in elections for parliament and for the Assembly of Experts—the body that appoints the supreme leader. Moderates backing President Hassan Rouhani have formed a coalition of candidates called the List of Hope. —AP

Shia Mosque Bombed in Baghdad
At least 12 people have been killed in a double suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in the the Iraqi capital. The first suicide bomber blew himself up among worshippers as they left the mosque; the second targeted police forces who had arrived to treat the wounded. —Al Jazeera

Icelandic Whalers Hang Up Harpoons
Iceland's Hvalur—one of the world's last whaling companies—has announced it will stop trading, blaming Japan for putting up "endless obstacles" to its markets. Greenpeace called it "incredible news and a significant blow to the slaughter of whales." —VICE News

Photo via Flickr user Marco Paköeningrat

Everything Else

Facebook Staff Defaces Black Lives Matter Slogan
Mark Zuckerberg has scolded Facebook staff after employees crossed out "Black Lives Matter" and wrote "All Lives Matter" on a company wall. The defacing happened several times and was "deeply hurtful," said Zuckerberg in an internal post. —Gizmodo

Brooklyn Barbershop Was 'Stash House'
The L & L Barbershop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has been implicated in a major coke and heroin operation. An indictment involving 22 people alleges dealers often convened at L & L. —VICE

Bagel Finds 1,000 Women on Tinder
EverythingBagel—a 24-year-old guy who pretends to be a bagel on Tinder—has matched with over 1,000 women. "I feel like I probably have a better chance as the bagel," said the guy, who is still single.—Motherboard

Fired Yelp Employee Reacts to Backlash
Talia Jane—the woman who was fired from Yelp after writing an open letter to company CEO complaining she could not afford to eat properly—said she has no regrets. "Any voice is still better than silence," said Jane. —Broadly



Done with reading today? Watch our video 'Director Robert Eggers Discusses His Puritan Horror Film, 'The Witch''

L & L Barbershop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Photo by the author

The L & L Barbershop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was open for business as usual on Thursday. Patrons sat and awaited the Dominican-American barbers' razors in a scene surely replicated in dozens of similar spots across New York City.

But L & L is the only Brooklyn barbershop that just got implicated in a major coke and heroin operation.

Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson and New York Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton announced charges against 22 people for dealing drugs in Williamsburg Thursday. The larger of two indictments names 18 defendants facing 157 counts for selling heroin and cocaine in the vicinity of South 5th and Keap Street. (L & L is on South 4th near the intersection with Keap.) Most of the defendants, who range in age from 17 to 30, were arraigned on Wednesday.

The robust indictment alleges dealers often convened at L & L, storing drugs in the shop's office, along with a number of other safe houses. Fifteen transactions took place within 1,000 feet of either an elementary school or day care, prosecutors say.

Schoolchildren were walking by the shop when 28-year-old John Reyes was awaiting his haircut Thursday. While he admits drug-related activity is a problem in the neighborhood, he's skeptical the barbershop's owner or any of the individual barbers are directly involved. Instead, he floated the possibility that someone unaffiliated with the shop might have stored drugs in the store, and he suggested the police arrested someone who was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

"What are you going to say? There are 15 people who are working here, and they found the drugs in the back?" Reyes told me, speaking hypothetically. "How is he in possession of the drug if it's all the way back here?"

The charges include criminal sale of a controlled substance, criminal possession of a controlled substance, and conspiracy in the second and fourth degree. Cops leaned on physical, electronic, and video surveillance to build their case.

The smaller indictment—which names four defendants on 38 counts—includes lesser charges of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance and criminal possession of a controlled substance. The perps allegedly sold crack cocaine, heroin, and marijuana to undercover cops.

Investigators first began looking into this case when a man named Andrew Sanchez was shot outside of 417 Lorimer Avenue in what cops quickly determined was likely a drug-related incident. And this latest bust comes five months after police hit 25 people with heroin-related charges connected to a family-run ring that allegedly brought in $1.5 million a year.

"Drug dealers peddle poison that kills our neighbors, degrades our communities, and frequently leads to violence," DA Thompson said Thursday. "I have no tolerance for these activities, and we will continue to aggressively prosecute these important cases."

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

All photos by the author

Greetings Fellow Comic Lovers,

My name is Nick Gazin, and this is my comic review column. If you don't like it, tough. These are my reviews, and you have to do what I say and agree with everything I write, even the typos.

Alvin Buenaventura died. He was a great guy who published great comics and championed the medium. He battled tirelessly in the war against mediocrity. The first time I met him in 2009, he introduced me to Lisa Hanawalt, whom I had never heard of before. Then he asked me to draw in his sketchbook, which had sketches by Crumb, Burns, Swarte, Speigelman, and other luminaries. He was a true enthusiast for comics. Dan Clowes wrote a great piece about him for Boing Boing.

Here's the portrait I did of Alvin seven years ago in his book.

Here are reviews of five things. I provide links for where to buy these things, but please try to seek them out at your local comic store first.

#1. Jem and the Holograms: Twilight in Paris doll
By Hasbro and Integrity Toys

I begged for people to send me cool free Jem stuff in my coverage of the Jem party, and it worked. Some people have complained that I'm reviewing too many dolls and not enough comics in my comics-review column. To those people: I am very tempted to just turn this into a sneakers, knives, and cat-food review column, so be happy that I'm just chatting about dolls now.

In recent years Hasbro has expanded from just making toys for children and moved into the high-end adult collectibles market as well. It has produced a new series of Jem dolls that go for about $140 a doll and present modern renditions of the characters from the 1980s cartoon show (which was released in conjunction with a line of toys). This particular doll comes in a really well-made display box that resembles the Eiffel Tower. Inside the giant cardboard tower casket is a Jem, lifeless and perfect. On the right half of her cardboard cage is an interchangeable head and dress so that you can transform Jem into her mundane Jerrica Benton persona.

This particular doll looks an awful lot like Taylor Swift. The box makes it easy to want to just leave the doll in and display it as it is, although if I get real sad I might display the Eiffel Tower box in its fully completed form.

Thank you for the doll. Please send more Jem dolls. Thank you.

Buy Jem.

#2. The Divine
By Asaf Hanuka, Tomer Hanuka, and Boaz Lavie, published by First Second

Tomer Hanuka is a giant star of illustration, and I've been watching lesser artists build careers imitating him for about a decade. When I first met Tomer half my life ago, he was selling comics he'd made with his brother, Asaf, called Bi-Polar. They've joined again creatively to make this new book, The Divine, with Boaz Lavie writing the thing.

The Divine is about a poor expectant father with training in explosives. In an effort to improve his quality of life, he takes a mysterious job blowing up a mountain in a rural Southeast Asian country, which puts him in contact with a macho psycho, jaded, telekinetic child soldiers, and a dragon. The story is basically Avatar, but instead of the magical natives being sexy, blue, cat people, they're magical Asian kids. The kids are more appealing than the Avatar aliens were, and the comic is infinitely more beautiful to look at than the plastic-toy, video-game CGI of Avatar. What really makes The Divine valuable, though, is the rejoining of the Hanuka brothers making beautiful comic-book moments. The things that they draw are things that can't be written about or explained. You can only experience it by seeing it, and it's worth looking at.

Buy The Divine.

#3. BB-8
By Sphero

You probably know what this thing is from all the mainstream news about it, but if you don't, it's a remote-control robot toy based on a character from the recent Star Wars movie. Controlling it via an app, you can steer the BB-8 like a remote-control car, or press a few buttons that will make it appear to nod in agreement. You can even record a holographic message video like in the Star Wars films. It's clearly a very cool toy. I tended to accidentally knock its head off when it would ram into walls, but it goes back on with magnetic power.

When I asked the inventor of this robot, Adam Wilson, about his life and what led to this, it became clear that I was talking to the living embodiment of the American dream. I asked him if his parents were proud, and he mentioned he only had one parent. I asked him about what Star Wars toys he'd had as a child, and he mentioned his family not being able to afford toys but that he played with his uncle's Star Wars collection. Despite his troubled teens, he'd gotten good grades in high school and got a scholarship to MIT, where he studied robotics. Now he is the king of making cool robots.

Buy BB-8.

#4. Adult Contemporary
By Bendik Kaltenborn (Drawn & Quarterly)

Bendik Kaltenborn is a Norwegian cartoonist known by some as the artist behind Todd Terje's album covers. The comics he makes feel like they're made up one panel at a time with no thought to the future or the past. They read like jam comics made by multiple people riffing on what the previous person drew. This book collects Kalterborn's work over the past five years including illustrations, sloppy sketchbook comics, more finished work, and a comic strip he did called BUM, complete with the annoyed Facebook comments by people who hated it.

The art is very nice, and the stories are weird and dreamy. It's definitely a quality book, but I find the comics frustrating, like dissatisfying dreams. The drawings are often very funny and fun, though.

Buy Adult Contemporary.

#5. Judge Dredd Classics: The Dark Judges
Written and drawn by various people (IDW)

Judge Dredd is a fascistic and scary cop in a dystopian future that you wouldn't want to live in. It's supposedly heavily inspired by Star Wars, but it feels more like if Blade Runner was much, much worse. The Dredd stories that are most popular are the ones that incorporate the discorporated Judge Death. A large reason for this is because the flawless comics genius Brian Bolland drew them. This book includes all of Bolland's great run in color and then a few other stories drawn by artists that are not Bolland, so I didn't read them.

Buy The Dark Judges.

That's this week's column. Tune in next week, and follow me on Instagram.

Marco Rubio and Donald Trump at the GOP debate in Houston. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Gary Coronado, Pool)

For months now, the primetime debate stage has been a bounty for Donald Trump. It's where the Republican presidential candidate has been able to translate his abusive Twitter persona into IRL bullying, systematically dispensing of his 2016 opponents—and also the media, the moderators, and several US trading partners—with a well-timed eye roll or a particularly cutting insult. Trump has never been a great debater in terms of substance, but on television—and increasingly off of it—the GOP primary race is just another badly acted reality contest, a format the real estate mogul knows well.

So, Trump took the stage in Houston Thursday with a swagger, the unlikely favorite to win the Republican nomination after winning three states' nominating contests in a row. In the wake of his victories, Trump's opponents, wary of going the way of Jeb Bush, had mostly continued to ignore him, preferring instead to claw at one another for second place. There was no reason to think that another debate—the last match up before Super Tuesday—would be anything but a win.

But Trump didn't get another win. For the first time this election cycle, his rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio laid into him, taking advantage of what may have been their last chance to stop the apparently unstoppable frontrunner. It was the debate the Republican Establishment had been waiting for: a shrill indictment not just of Trump's policies, but also his ego and persona, equal parts hilarious and horrifying. And it offered a window into the party's strange struggle to rebel from the inside out.

In his strongest debate performance so far, Rubio took the lead in the anti-Trump effort, attacking his opponent with a ferocity that was definitely not present in previous debates. The young Florida senator, who has flagged in previous debates, appeared to have done his homework this time, hurling page after page of opposition research at Trump. At every opportunity, Rubio would run through a laundry list of Trump's corporate misdeeds, including the fraud case against Trump University, the use of undocumented workers to build Trump Tower, requests for foreign workers at Trump properties in Florida, and those four bankruptcies.

He also attacked Trump for being rich—a first in this GOP campaign. "If he hadn't inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now?" Rubio asked. "Selling watches in Manhattan." The logic may have been hard to follow, but the point was pretty clear.

Rubio found his most effective line of attack, though, in an exchange over Obamacare, when he pressed Trump for his plans to reform the health care system. "You don't have a plan!" Rubio jeered, when Trump repeated his call to allow insurance sales over state lines. "Now he's repeating himself!" It was the same criticism Chris Christie had used to level Rubio in New Hampshire weeks earlier—and it worked on Trump.

"I'm not repeating myself," Trump protested. "I'm not repeating myself!" Hardly anyone heard him over the applause.

Cruz similarly tried out a couple of jabs, taking a break from smearing Rubio to demand that Trump clarify his views on the Supreme Court vacancy, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and religious liberty, and pointing out (again) that Trump once donated to Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. But Cruz mostly just looked like Rubio's less cool older brother, playing third wheel as the Florida senator smirked his way through three hours worth of attack lines.

Trump, meanwhile, seemed ill-prepared for the onslaught. Hounded by rivals on both sides of his podium, as well as by the moderators, Trump's only reaction was to insult his attackers. "I mean, first of all, this guy is a choke artist, and this guy is a liar," he said finally, frustrated, gesturing at Rubio and then Cruz. The only person who seemed to notice, though, was Ben Carson, who requested that someone please attack him too.

As chaotic as the whole ungodly experience was, it was the first time this election cycle that someone managed to embarrass Trump, a heartening sign that he is perhaps vulnerable, and that the Republican race could go another way. But as excited as GOP elites might be to see Rubio land a hit Thursday, Trump's fans are unlikely to be swayed by a night where Trump looked like a blustering bully who can't describe his own policies—that's the candidate they fell in love with, after all.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

From the Swedish Police preliminary investigations of the Martin Trenneborg case.

This article was originally published on VICE Sweden

Kidnappings might not be that common in Sweden, but when they do happen, they are pretty fucked up. So much so that Stockholm syndrome, a peculiar phenomenon in which hostages develop positive feelings toward their captors, was named after a hostage situation that took place in Stockholm in the 1970s.

The latest kidnapping to take place in Sweden was made public in September 2015. On the evening of the 18th, 37-year-old Martin Trenneborg entered a police station in central Stockholm alongside a woman in her early thirties. After briefly speaking to the receptionist, the pair sat down in the waiting hall. Two hours later, the woman was called into an interrogation room. The man stayed in his seat. Then four police officers came out and arrested him, marking the climax of a disturbing news story that the tabloids dubbed "The Sex Bunker Doctor" and "Swedish Fritzl". The chain of events includes a sound-proof bunker, poisoned strawberries and a sex contract. But more on all that latter.

On the 23rd of February this year, a Swedish court sentenced Trenneborg to 10 years in jail for kidnapping. Ever since the story broke, several criminology experts have stated that this case is one of the most disturbing in Swedish criminal history. In recognition of this alarming milestone, we assembled a brief history of Swedish kidnappings.

The Gevalia Daughter

The first case of kidnapping in modern Sweden took place in 1963 – at least as far as we know. Ann-Marie Engwall, the 7-year-old daughter of Jacob Engwall, Managing Director of Gevalia (Europe's largest coffee roasting company at the time) was abducted on her way to school. The kidnappers, a man and and woman who remained anonymous, claimed they were going to drive her to a school trip she had just missed.

To pass the time while waiting for the ransom money (a sum of about €1,500, which they apparently needed to fund their own private detective agency), the perpetrators took Ann-Marie to a petting zoo and to a café. As soon as the ransom was collected, the kidnappers put Ann-Marie in a taxi to be sent to her parents. Not wanting to go by herself, and unable to grasp the concept of abduction, she tearfully asked the kidnappers to join her.

Mr. and Mrs. Engwall contacted the police right after their daughter arrived. The kidnappers turned themselves in that same day. They would do well later in life, however. Once they served their sentences, they got married, and had successful careers within governmental organisations.

The Ulrika Bidegårdransom photo, taken by the kidnapper. Photo: Swedish Police

The Girl in the Box

The kidnapping of Swedish Olympic equestrian Ulrika Bidegård took place in 1993. Swedish carpenter Lars Nilsson, who had worked on renovating the Bidegård family home, attacked her outside her parents' house in Belgium. He tied her up, gagged her and sedated her with paint thinner. On the way up the stairs to his apartment in Brussels, he dropped Bidegård on her face, busting her lip. Once inside, she was forced to wear a blindfold and noise-cancelling headphones, and was tied sitting up inside a homemade, wooden portable loo. During the four days she was held captive, she was given little food and water.

Belgian police managed to locate Nilsson after he used Bidegård's credit card to make cash withdrawals. They raided his apartment two days later, arrested him and liberated Bidegård from her wooden prison.

A ransom letter arrived at the Bidegård estate the day after Nilsson's arrest, enclosed with a photograph of Ulrika inside the box, demanding $500,000. During the investigation, people close to Nilsson described him as kind and sound, without criminal inclinations.

The Westerberg Case

In 2002, a guy posing as a flower deliveryman kidnapped Erik Westerberg, son of a successful business executive, from his home in Stockholm. Westerberg had been featured at the top of a list of wealthy youths which had been published in an evening paper that same year. Westerberg was also put in a box, and then transported to a cottage on an island outside of Stockholm where he was chained to a bed.

The kidnappers demanded that about €1,000,000 in cash was attached to a wire under a bridge outside of Paris, France. Westerberg's father delivered the money personally. Soon thereafter, the kidnappers released Erik and gave him a pack of cigarettes and some matches. The Swedish Task Force found him after he had smoked roughly three cigarettes. Once his identity had been confirmed, Swedish police notified their colleagues in France, and shortly afterwards French police arrested the two accomplices who had received the ransom.

Another Person, Another Box

The box is a recurring theme in Swedish kidnappings. On the morning of 3rd February, 2005, Fabian Bengtsson was found in a park in Gothenburg, having just been released by his abductors after 17 days in captivity. "Start walking, you are free, don't look back" was the last thing the kidnappers told him before they let him go.

Bengtsson, heir to SIBA, one of the leading Nordic chains for consumer electronics, was attacked with teargas in his garage, crammed into an empty TV box and brought to some kind of hovel. Once there, he was transferred to another soundproof wooden box with a mattress inside. The kidnappers had targeted him in an attempt to extort about €5,000,000 from the Bengtsson family.

Over time, however, the kidnappers grew to like the abductee. When they weren't threatening him with a homemade gun or shoving balls of tape into his mouth, they cooked him omelettes and washed his clothes; drank whiskey and played cards with him. After a little more than two weeks, overtaken by sympathy, they released Bengtsson. They were caught by the police thanks to the many mental notes Bengtsson took while in captivity, such as at what hours he heard the sound of the ice-cream truck turn the corner onto their street, and how long it took the kidnappers to get food from McDonald's.

Bad Students

Alexander Åhman, another son of another wealthy businessman, disappeared from his student flat in Uppsala a few days after Christmas in 2011. His abductees were his housemate, a psychology student, her presumed boyfriend who was a medicine student, and one more of their friends. After the flatmate had treated Åhman to a pie containing sedatives (the pie was bitter apparently, but he ate it anyway to be polite) the kidnappers taped him up, put him in the back of a van and drove 570 kilometres to an abandoned school building in the city of Umeå.

Åhman spent his week in captivity in a dark, unheated basement, with very little food – beer being his only source of nutrition by the end – and only a thin mattress to sleep on. It was very cold, so Åhman tied diapers he found in the room to his feet to retain some warmth.

Four days after the kidnapping, two of the kidnappers were in the vicinity of Stockholm. The pair had taken Åhman's mobile phone in order to text his family, posing as him. With the app "Find My iPhone", the family traced the phone, noting that it moved north on the highway. The police caught the kidnappers with the help of the app, and Åhman was rescued two days later.

The image above is the copy of a sex contract found in a folder called "Master Plan" on Trenneborg's computer. It made headlines due to its sadistic nature.

The Sex Bunker Doctor

Some time in 2010, Dr. Martin Trenneborg allegedly began building a faux machine shed next to his country home, in Knislinge in southern Sweden. Inside the shed he constructed a 60 square metre, soundproof concrete bunker with double security doors equipped with electronic locks.

Five years later, in September 2015, Dr. Trenneborg goes on a date with a woman, in her apartment in Stockholm – 550 kilometers from Knislinge. He stays for two hours, during which they chat and have sex, and then he suggests that they meet again in two days. She accepts. He goes back to Knislinge that same evening to prepare.

On their second date they drink champagne and he feeds her Rohypnol-laced strawberries. Once she is intoxicated beyond comprehension, he hands her a diaper which she puts on herself. He then fetches a wheelchair from his car, rolls her out and puts her in the passenger seat. He injects her with sedating drugs on the hour, throughout the seven-hour drive. The woman's only memory after eating the strawberries is waking up in the car and noticing a heartrate monitor clipped to her finger.

She wakes up in Dr. Trenneborg's bunker. He allegedly says that she's going to stay for a few years, cooking for him, hanging out and having unprotected sex two or three times a day. He takes samples of her blood and vaginal swabs so he can test her for STDs, and gives her birth control pills. He also says he's considering abducting another woman to keep her company – possibly her mother.

Five days after the abduction, Trenneborg leaves for Stockholm to pick up a few things from the woman's apartment and to attend a U2 concert. When he comes home the next day, he offers to drive her back to Stockholm to get some of her stuff. At this point, the police have left a note on the woman's apartment door, stating that she is missed by her family and that her locks have been changed by the police.

During the trip to Stockholm, worried that police are on to him he coaches her to pretend that they are a couple. He says he doesn't want to go to jail. The fact that she is being compliant and has not attempted to escape makes him hope she will not report him. The pair arrive to the police station in central Stockholm, and it's not until she is separated from the man that she tells the police officers what has happened to her.

On the 23rd of February, Martin Trenneborg was sentenced to ten years in prison for kidnapping. He also has to pay the woman a penalty of €19,000 in damages. Trenneborg admitted to kidnapping her but denied and was acquitted of a rape charge.

More from VICE:

We Asked Ex-Career Criminals How They Would Have Pulled Off Britain's Biggest Cash Heist

What Happens When Somebody Actually Goes Missing In the UK?

The Many Crimes of Serial Killer 'The Sick Ripper'

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

"Hey slut!" he yelled at me, laughing with his friend. "What? You know you're a slut!"

I stopped and turned to face the two corrections officers who were pointing at me. I smiled and waved before proceeding to walk into the dining hall.

I put up with this type of behavior from the Michigan Department of Corrections staff constantly. It's something I expected from other prisoners, but the harassment from the officers is actually much more severe.

In the past, I might have reacted in anger, but that's exactly what they're looking for. Outbursts will only destroy my chance of getting parole.

Back when I was locked in a double-bunk cell in level-four security at Chippewa Correctional Facility, a young gang member moved in with me. When he entered the room, he informed me that the officers had said to him, "Your bunkie's a freak! He's down for whatever!" They had laughed at him in front of the other inmates.

So he told me, "I'm not locking with no fag. You have to tell them to move ya, or I'm going to beat your ass."

When the doors opened, I told an officer what my cellmate had said, leaving out the fact that he threatened to beat me up. Doing so would have been considered "snitching." (Being tagged as an informant means you might get your face slashed open with a razor so that you're marked for life and people will know you can't be trusted.)

The officer gave me a direct order to return to my cell.

I figured it would be better to disobey, so I refused to lock down, was written a misconduct ticket*, and taken to the hole. I spent the next eight days there, waiting for an administrative hearing. Since I failed to convey to the officers that I was being threatened, the order was determined to be valid and reasonable. I was found guilty and sentenced to an additional ten days in the hole.

This is common for gay people in prison. After being bullied out of our cells, we—not the bully—receive misconduct tickets and punitive sanctions. The message is that if somebody is bigger, stronger, or part of a gang, they can kick their cellmate out and face no repercussions.

When we have problems with staff, we are instructed to use the grievance process. I have filed numerous grievances about staff who have called me "fag" and other derogatory names, but the result is always the same: The administration states that the staff member adamantly denies my accusations. The officers' lies are automatically accepted as the truth because, as one resident unit manager rhetorically asked me when interviewing me about a grievance, "Since you are the one in state blue clothing, why should I believe you?"

Another officer once told me, "Writing a grievance on me ain't gonna do shit. I've been an officer since before you started taking cock in your ass."

So I know I can't win against them. But that's OK. One day I will be free and able to pursue my dreams. Meanwhile, the staff members will still be consumed with this hateful place, working jobs that they don't like. This is their world, not mine.

I'm just passing through.

*According to the Michigan Department of Corrections, "Prisoner Yost was found guilty of prisoner-on-prisoner sexual misconduct and disobeying a direct order."

Corbett Yost is a 30-year-old inmate at the Oaks Correctional Facility in Manistee, Michigan, where he is serving a 15-year maximum sentence for an unarmed robbery he committed in 2012.

Shia Labeouf—a man quite regularly accused of pretension—with a bag on his head, for art. Photo by Siebbi via

I've always had an aversion to pretension. I think most of us do. No one wants to be viewed as pretentious, and a quick Twitter search shows that the word is used roughly once a minute to call people out for everything from enjoying soy lattes to owning a fancy lamp. Calling someone or something "pretentious," it seems, has become the easiest way to police somebody else's taste.

Enter Dan Fox and his book, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters, which blends pop culture with high art, philosophy with rap lyrics, and Stanislavski's system with George Clooney. It not only gets to the heart of where pretentiousness comes from and why we all hate it so much, but it also suggests that it's a crucially important cog in the great wheel of progression.

I had a chat with him about all that.

VICE: Let's start with an easy one. What is pretentiousness?
Dan Fox: The Oxford dictionary definition is "attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc. than is actually possessed." But in popular usage, it can be taken to mean "affected," or "arty," "snobbish," "conceited," "exaggerated," "ostentatious"—none of which necessarily mean the same thing. You'll find it applied to a surprisingly disparate range of things. No one can really quite agree on what it means.

But you're in pretentiousness's corner?
The moment you start unpicking why people use the term as an insult, you realize that it says more about the accuser than the accused. It's a false note of objective judgment that affirms the accuser's supposed "authenticity" or "ordinariness" against someone else's fakery. People use it as a way of shutting down things they don't understand, or which differ from their idea of what art, culture, or other people "should" be. Pretension is often a sign of a curious mind. And what, really, is wrong with taking an interest in ideas or things around you? Is it pretentious to show enthusiasm, to have an enquiring attitude? You'll never lead an interesting life if you spend your time policing yourself or other people out of curiosity for the world.

You argue in your book that it's taken a social role. Can you explain that a bit?
It's used as a way to police class status—to stop people getting ideas above their station, from doing something not usually associated with their class background. Pretension is often assumed to be someone's deliberate attempt to pull a fast one, to consciously be a poseur, a con-artist, a faker, and yet in so many instances, what one person regards as pretentious is another person's genuine enthusiasm or way of expressing themselves. It's often much more innocent than is assumed.

So why is it so common for us to dislike people we think of as pretentious?
We have a profound distrust, yet fascination, with people not being who they say they are. You can find this way back in classical mythology, and stories about shape-shifting gods or changelings. You can see it in the ways we both love and hate actors and theater. Also, in the West, since the Enlightenment, we've grown to believe in the primacy of authenticity as a value to aspire to, as something that's deeply connected to our understanding of ourselves as democratic individuals. To be pretentious is seen to shun that somehow.

Right. But I get pissed off about some pretentious people—I admit it. I'm not perfect. I see them as dilettantes and fakes. What's that about?
It's about the authority we give to professionals or to people with educational qualifications. In the arts, dabbling, being an amateur, can often be more productive than following the rules and orthodoxies that are drummed into the professional. The dilettante often does not know the "correct" way to do something, and so can sometimes be better placed to happen upon an innovative way of doing something that the professional, in their fixed way of thinking, wouldn't. That said, you probably wouldn't want to be an open heart surgery patient being operated on by a dilettante.

A dilettante is also someone self-taught, an autodidact, which is interesting to think about in a field such as pop music, for instance: The entire history of pop music is one that's been shaped and innovated by amateurs, by people teaching themselves music in their bedrooms or in pub backrooms—not in music conservatoires.

I'm feeling I'm going to have to adjust the way I look at things. Let's keep with the pop music theme. Kanye West. He's probably a genius, but then he also does seem a bit affected.
I'm not sure it's a case of premeditated behavior, as if Kanye is sat in the studio thinking, "Today, I'm going to make a pretentious song." On the contrary: He's making the music he wants to make. The issue is that pretension is in the eye of the beholder. In pop music, there's often an association of a certain sound or way of performing that's taken to be "authentic"—for example, the pained white man singer-songwriter, emoting the truth of his heartbreak in a croaky voice over an acoustic guitar. But that itself is as much an act, as much a pretense, as Kanye making a concept album that might seem overblown, but is doing something musically far more interesting.

I've been listening to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly recently. Is a white, middle-class English guy into a rap album about systematic American racism pretentious? Am I overthinking this?
Well, what do you think would be sincere for you to listen to? Mumford & Sons? God help you if that's the case.

I can confirm that it's not.
I can't see why listening to an album about another person's experience of the world that's different to your own is insincere. For instance, a whole generation of black American techno producers in 1980s Detroit were influenced by Kraftwerk, four white guys from Dusseldorf with classical music training, making music about technology in postwar Europe. So too was Afrika Bambaataa in early 1980s New York, who sampled Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" for his track "Planet Rock." Would you describe their interest in Kraftwerk as "insincere"?

Related: Watch The first episode of 'Gaycation,' a show on VICE's new American TV network VICELAND. In this episode, hosts Ellen Page and Ian Daniel explore LGBTQ culture in Japan.

No, because these guys have been given the legitimacy of making good art. But I get what you've been saying.
One thought experiment I enjoy doing is taking a massively popular, best-selling album or film and trying to describe it without naming the artist or title, and see if it sounds pretentious.

Hit me.
For instance: a concept album about an imaginary Edwardian military band, featuring songs written in a number of styles ranging from psychedelic rock, through Indian classical music, to European avant-garde composition, and vaudeville. Its cover features Karl Marx, Carl Jung, Marlene Dietrich, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

I think I know this one.
That's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, an album that sounds remarkably pretentious when you remove the band name, when you take away the associations we have with that name—of global popularity, of a celebrated British export, of a high point in 1960s pop culture.

Context is everything, then.
Pretentiousness is a driving force in art, because it entails risk—the risk of over-stretching your ability, of perhaps falling flat on your face. But if you played it safe all the time, you'd never get anywhere interesting.

Would you rather be perceived to be pretentious, while actually being authentic, or be perceived to be authentic, while actually being pretentious?
My interest in things such as "arty" black and white films with subtitles, weird music, strange books, modern art, and so on has always felt genuine to me. I liked them because they showed me other ways of seeing the world, possible paths to leading an interesting life outside the small town I grew up in. It was never an affectation, yet in some people's eyes it would probably be seen to be pretentious. But those are my interests. It's what I enjoy doing. I'm perfectly happy to be perceived to be pretentious if that's the case. After nearly 20 years working in the contemporary art field, I'm not expecting to receive from the National Authenticity Board a certificate of merit for not being a pretentious wanker anytime soon.

Follow David on Twitter.

A missing person poster in Ireland. Photo by William Murphy via

Last year, 137,146 people were reported missing in the UK. While we might see many of their faces posted to Facebook or in the back pages of local newspapers, it can be all too easy to look straight through them.

The plight of missing people remains something most of us know very little about—an issue that throws up many more questions than answers. How do so many people simply disappear? What does attempting to track someone down actually entail? And, most importantly, how many missing people are found?

Although nearly 140,000 people were reported missing last year, the real number is thought to be considerably higher. This is because many incidents go unreported. According to the charity Missing People, an estimated 250,000 go missing every year. While the majority of these cases are quickly resolved, the charity says, an estimated 2,500 people remain untraced for over a year after they first disappear.

The circumstances that lead to people vanishing are manifold, but research conducted by Missing People found that up to 80 percent of missing persons cases involve someone believed to suffer from mental health problems. Of course, it's rare that these cases gain any kind of national attention—broadly speaking, it tends to be attractive white women who make the headlines.

Anthony Stammers, 30, is one of thousands of Britons currently classified as missing. He left his home in Mile End Road, Colchester, England, on May 27, 2012, and he has not been seen since. "He went missing the day before his grandfather's funeral. It massively took us by surprise," explains his mother Julie Stammers. "He was very close to his granddad. He was holding hands with him when he passed away. I think maybe it was a catalyst."

Having moved back home after finishing university, Stammers had been living with his family for five years. "He'd been suffering from depression for two or three years," says Julie. "He'd been looking for a job and had written off for 120 jobs over the couple of years."

Although Stammers distanced himself from friends in the months before he left, he remained close to family throughout. "Anthony is a very family-orientated person," says Julie. "But maybe he's gone because he felt a burden—because he didn't have a job. He hates to be beholden to anyone."

Every day is plagued with uncertainty for Anthony's family. "It's just soul destroying, because you have all these questions in your head—questions that can't be answered," says Julie. "I do go through some very dark moments. Some nights I don't sleep at all. Mornings are my worst. I get up and have a good old cry, and I lock myself in the bathroom with the taps running so no one can hear."

The anxiety, understandably, has had a knock-on effect on how Julie and her husband now live their lives. "We won't go away for long periods of time for holidays, and I won't change my hairstyle much in case he doesn't recognize me walking along the road," she explains. "It might sound silly to other people, but we kept getting our car repaired every single week because we didn't want to replace it in case he didn't recognize it in the driveway or at a set of lights. In the end, we had to replace it."

The police spend 14 percent of their time searching for missing people. Joe Apps, the manager of the National Crime Agency's Missing Persons Bureau, told the BBC in 2012 that the bureau—using data from 3,000 previous cases—can make informed assumptions about a missing person's whereabouts, taking into account their age and gender.

"In terms of 15-to 16-year-olds, 30 percent came back to where they'd started from without any police intervention. Just under 30 percent went to friends' houses, and 14 percent were found walking the street," he told the BBC. "In terms of distance traveled, 80 percent of them were found within 25 miles. So it just tells you that 'missing' is a very local issue. They are most likely to be found very close by."

Although the police have carried out numerous searches for Anthony Stammers, nothing has been found.

"Essex and Colchester police have been so good," says Julie. "We've had no bad news, so we have to be positive. None of his personal belongings have been found. His passport's still here. But it's not impossible to get anywhere in the world. He could have gotten on a boat. There are ways of getting around things. He could use a different name and get a different national insurance number or do cash in hand. We all love him to bits and are waiting for the day he comes home."

When months turn into years, the family and friends of missing people are left living in limbo, experiencing what is termed as "ambiguous loss." Karen Robinson, the head of Partnerships at Missing People, has dealt with dozens of missing person cases. In turn, she has witnessed the destruction and trauma it wreaks for those left behind.

"There's been research into the particular trauma faced by families missing someone. They are unable to grieve," explains Robinson. "As human beings, we emotionally need closure on things, and grief doesn't start until we know for certain that somebody has died. In the absence of a body being found, it's really common for families to remain in that painful limbo."

To put that into perspective: According to a 2011 study by Missing People, between 0.6 percent and 1 percent of all missing person cases reported to the police end in the missing person being found dead.

"In some cases, this is because they have been out of touch for a long time and have died of natural causes before contact was re-established," reads the report. "In other cases, this is because the missing person has become a victim of homicide, or has committed suicide, and may have been reported missing after their death, but before their body was discovered. Research suggests that the risk of being found dead is higher for adults than for young people, and the risk increases with age."

People don't want to hear that their loved one has died, of course—but equally, the fact that, in 99 percent of cases, people are left with no clear answer either way gives an indication of just how many people are left in the dark. And as if the emotional trauma wasn't bad enough, those left behind can also be thrust into a financial mess; if your relative goes missing, you're legally prohibited from stopping their direct debits. Their car insurance, mortgage, phone contract, or gym membership payments will continue to seep out of their account every month.

As well as working in partnership with police forces to track people down, Missing People also provides vital support to those affected. "The charity is here 24 hours a day to support anyone who is missing, thinking about running away, or the loved ones left behind," Robinson explains. "We're the neutral bridge between the person and the police."

The charity contacts a total of 20,000 missing people by text message each year. "It generates lots of contact back from those missing people, who then use us as a confidential space to explore their options," she says. "We won't tell you what to do. We pass messages like, 'I want to let you know that I'm thinking of you. I'm just not ready to see you yet.' We also do three-way calls."

The most affecting cases Robinson mentions are those where people have become so isolated that they don't even realize someone is missing them. "Some people don't realize they are missing because they might have drifted out of contact with their loved ones," she says. "So actually learning that they've been reported missing and somebody is concerned for them might actually be a prompt for them to reconnect."

Nevertheless, it remains immensely difficult for missing people to get back in touch with family and friends. "The longer you're away, the harder it becomes to say to the people that you love, 'This is where I've been and why,'" Robinson explains. "If you didn't go home tonight, how would you explain tomorrow where you were and what you did, and how would you explain after two nights and after a week?"

Interestingly, research has shown that those who go missing make a series of short-term rash decisions. "They might decide, 'I can't take this any more, I'm leaving,' with no intention of staying away for a long period of time, rather than making a calculated plan to leave," says Robinson.

Many adults who remain missing for over a year will never return. While it's not unknown for people to come home—even after ten or 20 years—statistically speaking, the longer a person is missing, the less likely it is that he or she will be found or that he or she will reconnect with family or friends.

The acute anxiety and uncertainty experienced by the people left behind doesn't bear thinking about. At what stage do you choose to stop going over and over the days and weeks before they disappeared? And is it possible to ever fully give up hope until a body is found? Britain might be the most spied on country in the world—one CCTV camera per every 11 people, to be exact—but there are still many who manage to slip away.

Follow Maya on Twitter.

Cedric Larry Ford seemed to have a good thing going.

With a steady job at a lawn care manufacturing plant and photos of himself fawning over two children on his Facebook feed, the 38-year-old was a relatively successful guy in the central Kansas community of Hesston, where the plant was the main game in town.

But according to the New York Times, Ford was served an abuse protection order on Thursday afternoon. Ninety minutes later, he was randomly firing a gun out of his car window.

Locals were in mourning Friday after Ford's shooting rampage left three dead and 14 injured before he was killed by police.

Harvey County Sheriff T. Walton told the press in a briefing late Thursday that the violence started a little before 5 PM local time. That's when police first got a report of a man being shot in his shoulder in the nearby town of Newton, by someone in another vehicle. A few minutes later, police got another report that a motorist was shot in the leg as he was driving a pickup truck. The shooter then stole the vehicle and drove less than five miles north to Hesston.

Ford arrived at the factory as 200–300 employees worked their shift. After shooting and critically injuring a victim in the parking lot, he entered the facility and opened fire near the paint department. Some employees thought there was a fire before realizing the popping noises they heard came from an assault rifle.

"I just heard the gunshots and I just took off running," 25-year-old Jesus Fierro told the Times. "I heard people saying someone was shooting, and then I got shot in the leg and everyone started helping me."

An employee who was present said the gunman "started spraying everyone," sending workers rushing to exits amid the chaos. Walton said Ford went on firing "until he was out of ammo," according to NBC News, "I don't know how much he had... He was just shooting indiscriminately."

Tim Kasper, a laser operator at the plant, said that he was talking to a co-worker, his friend, before the chaos happened. Ten minutes later, the friend was dead from a bullet wound to the head.

"Things can change fast," Kasper told the Wichita Eagle. "It was just a normal day before that."

Ford was killed at 5:23 PM, according to the Hesston Record. Police found an assault-style rifle and a handgun on the man, who was quickly identified by co-workers.

The factory holds a special significance for Hesston, with the company employing about 1,000 people—about a quarter of the town's total population. The Times notes that it's common for spouses and fathers and sons to be co-workers at the factory.

According to theEagle,Ford had a troubled past that included a misdemeanor conviction in a "2008 fighting or brawling case," multiple traffic violations, and the alleged assault of a woman described as his "live-in girlfriend," who penned the written petition for protection on February 5.

The mass shooting comes just a few days after an Uber driver went on a spree that left six dead and two injured in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Both cities played host to what has become an all-too-routine sight in modern America.

As Sheriff Walton put it, "We always say it won't happen here. Well, here it is. It happened here."

Follow Brian Josephs on Twitter.

Helensburgh (Photo author's own). Homepage thumbnail by Bodger Brooks

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you've ever seen 1973 classic The Wicker Man (and I don't mean the terrible Nick Cage remake), you'll be familiar with the idea of isolated Scottish communities and their weird ways. In the west coast town of Helensburgh—which, while 25 miles from Glasgow, is not exactly remote—inhabitants worship submarines. That seems to be the only logical explanation for why they've recently been knocking down a church wall so that they can stick an actual submarine inside. And who wouldn't worship a shiny underwater prophet that brings jobs, security, and economic well-being to all those who cross its path?

In fact, they're just building Scotland's first museum dedicated to the history of underwater warfare, with a World War II "midget submarine" as the star attraction, and they need to get it inside somehow. It hasn't arrived yet, so there's currently just an old church with a hole in its wall.

But submarine warfare isn't just of historical interest in these parts. Modern submarines are based a few miles to the north of Helensburgh in the deep sea lochs that cut across Scotland's west coast. Much to the annoyance of hippies, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the fairly significant proportion of the country who find the notion of mutually assured destruction in some way objectionable, the subs based there are stacked full of nuclear weapons. This is the home of Trident, Britain's nuclear deterrent.

The subs patrolling the depths are arguably relics of the Cold War. Saying that, each one does possess the firepower to send humanity back considerably further (some time around the Stone Age would be a good estimate). The system involves two subs covertly prowling the depths of the ocean, primed to retaliate in the event of a nuclear strike on the UK or its allies, while the other two are dockside undergoing maintenance. This neat arrangement is pending a £167 billion replacement in a few years. But that's up for debate: For the first time in about 30 years, the leader of the Labour Party is against their existence. The question is, would the area be able to survive without them?

This quiet area of coastline is the number one target for any superpower, rogue state, or terrorist cabal intent on wiping out the UK's military capacity. Not that there was much sign of impending nuclear apocalypse along Helensburgh's wind battered seafront on a rainy Sunday. Nor was there much sign of anything, in fact, with most of the town's residents preferring to shelter inside the quaint Italian delis and cozy, military-themed pubs that line the seafront.

Each day, hundreds make the commute from here and towns across the region to Faslane and its sister site of Coulport. The base is reputed to be the largest single-site employer in Scotland, with its current level of 6,900 workers set to exceed 8,000 by 2022. A few decades ago, figures like that were the norm for workplaces, but in a country that has lost virtually all of its major industry, it makes the naval base unique. Even Amazon, with its hundreds of warehouse jobs just across the water in Greenock, barely registers against it. What's more, the jobs serving Britain's submarine fleet are highly skilled, unionized, well paid, and secure.

There's a confidence about Helensburgh that marks it out from the depressed, post-industrial malaise that envelopes much of central Scotland. Its affluence is visible; not many of Scotland's seaside towns of 15,000 or so can boast a Waitrose and a private school. Given the area has done this well out of weapons of mass destruction, it follows that local politicians effectively worship at death's altar. Its MSP, Jackie Baillie, is the only Scottish Labour MSP that defied the party's anti-Trident position in a Holyrood vote last year.

"I argued strongly in support of the base and the thousands of jobs it provides for local people, as I have always done, and I will not be changing my position," she told a local paper at the time. "I will put my constituents ahead of my party, and reality ahead of rhetoric."

But given both the reality and rhetoric of Scottish Labour's prospects, the forthcoming Scottish elections do not, to put it mildly, look great. Baillie is facing an uphill struggle to save the seat she's held since 1999. Her likely successor is the SNP's Gail Robertson, an opponent of Trident and a member of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Does she want to see the base packed up tomorrow and its 7,000 workers lining up at their nearest employment office?

"To suggest the removal of Trident would have negative consequences for the local economy would be to say that all of the employment at the base is directly related to Trident, which is far from being the case," Robertson told VICE. "In fact, the cost of renewing Trident comes at the expense of spending on conventional defense and conventional manufacturing jobs. Investment in more conventional defense based at Faslane would be far more beneficial to the local economy."

And it's not lost on the SNP that this apparently Trident-reliant area was one of only four to vote "Yes" in the 2014 independence referendum.

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The issue of exactly how many workers rely on the UK's nuclear weapons program is hotly contested, with supporters estimating anything up to 11,000 jobs. However, in response to a Freedom of Information request in 2012, the MOD quoted 520 jobs as being directly reliant on the Trident program. For its part, the SNP has been insistent that the removal of nukes, or even independence, would not entail the mass job losses envisioned by Trident's proponents. Local representatives are keen to sweet talk the "base vote," with new MP Brendan O'Hara writing recently that the navy is "very much at the heart" of the local community.

The Trade Union Center and Sottish Trades Union Congress are against renewal, but local trade unionists think differently. Jim Moohan is a senior organizer with the GMB, which represent workers on the base. "It's been there for over 50 years, and thousands upon thousands of jobs are at the site. Taking away the main source of income in the area would leave the place desolate," he said. "The contractors have no intension of diversification to other types of job."

The question may be fairly moot. Despite a large demonstration against Trident in London on Saturday, a combination of a Conservative majority and dissenting Labour MPs will almost certainly ensure that the program is renewed when it comes up over the next couple of years. In Helensburgh and surrounding towns, a community will continue to flourish thanks to the weapons that could destroy us all.

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