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Fort McMurray Wildfire: What You Need to Know

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There's not much left of what was once a thriving oil city. All photos via Dan Olson for VICE News

The wildfire that has left many parts of Alberta's oil capital of Fort McMurray in ashes remains out of control and is now four times the size it was a week ago. At an estimated 161,000 hectares (about 1600 square kilometres), the fire is now threatening to cross over the Saskatchewan border. Some 80,000 people have been displaced, and fire crews are working around the clock to stop the spread of the fire. Despite exhaustive efforts, officials are worried that, short of a drastic change in weather, the fire will continue to grow unhindered.

Here's what you need to know.

Damage
Although exact numbers aren't yet clear, the most recent estimates of structural damage in Fort McMurray suggest that around 1,600 buildings had been destroyed by the fire. Pictures show that entire neighbourhoods have been razed, although the downtown, including the city's hospital, has mostly been spared. Insurance costs alone are estimated to be about $9-billion. The city, as of now, is completely uninhabitable—there is no power, drinking water, or services. It is essentially a ghost town.

Premier Rachel Notley, who held an emotional press conference over the weekend where she committed to fighting the fire and restoring stability to displaced residents, will be visiting the city Monday with a crew of journalists and a handful of government officials to assess the damage from the ground level.

Control
Since it began on May 2, the fire has been largely uncontrollable. Firefighters have had a tough time fighting the flames with water and retardant bombs—the typical two-punch solution used for putting out wildfires. According to a report by VICE News this weekend, Russia has offered to send water bombers to Canada to assist in controlling the fire, although Canadian officials say they're still reviewing the idea.

Due to the size and scope of the fire (with temperatures getting so high that many air vehicles cannot safely pass over it), officials are waiting on a change in weather to either provide a break in dry air big enough for the flames to be extinguished, or for a straight-up miracle in the form of a rainstorm. Neither have come yet, but there's hope the weather is beginning to settle slightly with the cooler temperatures seen over the weekend.

Displacement
Aside from the 80,000 in the city and surrounding areas who were forced to evacuate, there are thousands more who were caught on nearby highways or on vacation when the evacuation orders began. Now, officials have a two-pronged approach to the situation: resettle those who got out, and try to convince those who haven't to leave as soon as possible.

Inspector Gibson Glavin of the Alberta RCMP told VICE that over the last few days the RCMP have found numerous cases of people still within the evacuation zone—either because they couldn't leave or didn't want to. Glavin said that authorities have offered help to all those who willingly left, and has made note of those who stayed in case of future emergency.

Businesses
Aside from the charitable donations that have poured in from across Canada, there have been a number of businesses making adjustments to their pricing and practices thanks to the fire. Last week, residents began to report that those outside the evacuation zone had begun listing their homes on AirBnB for $0 to anyone who could prove they were a resident of the now fire-damaged area. In terms of less-than-essential-services, an Edmonton strip club also offered free lap dances to escapees, though they do plan to hold a "strip-a-thon' to raise money for relief and rebuilding efforts.

But not everyone is getting good press: after a post accusing Air Canada of price-gouging flights from Fort McMurray to the Maritimes blew up online, dozens of residents expressed their anger with the airline for taking advantage of a tragic situation. The airline originally defended its pricing as "competitive,"but later apologized and agreed to refund those who escaped the fire by air.

Crude oil production has also dropped dramatically due to the fire shutting down a number of high-profit operations near the evacuation zone. Economists are now predicting much lower economic growth for the province, which was already hard hit following a prolonged oil slump.

The Human Cost
Although no deaths have been linked directly to the fire, a head-on collision between a vehicle and a truck on one of the escape routes last week resulted in the death of two people. According to the RCMP, the evacuation routes are now clear and are not experiencing the level of traffic buildup that was seen shortly after the fire. No injuries have been reported either.

There's has also been a concerted effort by Albertans to rescue the abandoned and lost pets from Fort McMurray. Social media groups dedicated to the rescue of furry creatures forgotten in the evacuation zone have spawned hundreds of thank you posts from owners who got their pets back, despite calls from authorities to leave their pets behind if it meant risking their lives.

Glavin told VICE that reports of arson that popped up on social media over the weekend were not true to his knowledge, but that the RCMP has encountered a handful of people looting in the area. Glavin said that only one arrest was made. Regardless, the RCMP is keeping a tight presence in the area to prevent similar incidents from happening.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter


People Told Us About What It's Like Dealing with Colourism

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Zoe Saldana's casting in the Nina Simone biopic, Nina, has set off a number of conversations about race and colourism. Still via Nina.

"You don't have to be so stuck up about it. We can still be friends," a black man once told me after I rejected him at a bar.

Prior to calling me stuck up, the only thing he knew about me was my background—not even my name. He had approached me with the all too familiar line, "What's your background?" And after I told him where my parents are from, he asked if I had a boyfriend. I said, "Yes, I'm alright thanks," and he dropped the good old "stuck up" light skin stereotype that I often hear.

At least once a week, someone asks me what my background is. Usually it comes upon meeting someone new, before any significant introduction regarding who I am.

Being half Jamaican and half Filipino, I understand that people will be curious about how I look the way I do. But I don't understand how people can assume who I am and how I act based on the shade of my skin.

All the time, people of colour are subject to stereotypes based on the lightness or darkness of skin tone. Dark black skin equates rudeness is one stereotype, light skin black girls think they are better than everyone is another, dark Asians are dirty, and the icky list goes on.

Colourism (aka shadeism) is discrimination based on a person's skin tone. A prejudice that is similar but yet separated from racism, colourism strikes an invisible divide between people of the same race or ethnicities.

In many cultures, light skin is hailed as superior in several aspects of life. In China an old saying actually states, "one whiteness can cover three kinds of ugliness." Additionally, most Asian beauty products have skin-lightening qualities. Societies award light skinned people with beauty and wealth-related power due to their proximity to whiteness. In India for example, most successful movie stars and social figures are light skinned.This not only creates perceived hierarchies between people of similar backgrounds; it revives histories of colonialism, slavery, and hatred.

Recently, there was controversy after actress Zoe Saldana was cast to star in the Nina Simone biopic, Nina. Simone, an artist whose life was defined by her talent and activism against anti-black racism, was a dark-skinned woman with distinct black features. However, Saldana, while she is a black Latino, has features that fall much more in line with society's white canvas beauty standards. And if you didn't think this decision was already ill-advised, Saldana wears makeup to darken her complexion (which some critics have straight up called blackface) and a prosthetic nose in the film. By choosing an actress who reinforces white beauty and superiority to play an obviously black woman, critics say that the casting directors completely erase Simone's efforts for black equality.

To further understand the impact of these prejudices and cultural norms, I asked a bunch of people how colourism has affected their lives.

All photo via author unless indicated otherwise.

Jodianne, 28
Background: Jamaican

One day in fifth grade, I was walking home from school and . People who are pure Kuwaiti are darker skinned, but again, if you are paler, they assume you are mixed with something "beautiful." I'm not the darkest Asian, but I'm not the lightest. In the summer, I tan really easily and in the winter I'm pale. So I'm just in a constant back and forth. Coming from these two backgrounds, it's complicated and it can be really frustrating.

Angelyn, 21
Background: Chinese and Jamaican

One time I met this dude on a bus. He was a friend of a friend I went to elementary school with. Years later he called me, and he was like, "Who's this?" I said, "You called me." And then he said, "To tell you the truth I just had your number saved as Light Skin." I just hung up the phone. I mean, this guy only just saw me as light skinned. And it's not even the most terrible thing. I find that light skinned women feel like they should shut up about everything that happens to them because it's worse on the other end. But it still is kind of shitty when people see you and think you're slutty or someone goes after your looks and nothing else deeper. So what's better, being objectified or being unwanted? Neither of them are really that great.

Photo via Jake Kivanc

Dominic, 20
Background: Jamaican

From my experience, people are way faster to think that they understand the type of person you are. There's been so many times that I'll say the type of music I listen to and people will be surprised. They'll be like, what, you don't listen to Waka Flocka? You listen to rock bands? One time I was at a party and I saw this girl who I followed on Instagram. I never spoke to her before but I went over to her and we started talking. Somehow we ended up talking about what we found attractive and she said she thought light skin guys are most attractive. She was basically saying, I'm not her type.

Matt, 28
Background: Jamaican and Portuguese

When I was younger I was told by adults, "Thank god you're light skin" or "It's a good thing you're half white." Unfortunately, this lead me to believe that being half white or having lighter skin made me better than those who didn't. It was a lot harder for me to learn to love myself and accept my black heritage. As I started to date I noticed how I was fetishized and exoticized by most white men and denied by most black men. My experience dating white men always left me feeling more like a prize that they won at a fair. My experience dating men of colour was far more tolerable. However, there are those that believe because I am light skin I cannot claim my blackness because I'm half white.

Follow Ebony-Renee Baker on Twitter.

* Interviews have been condensed for length and clarity.

​A Look Behind Halifax’s Recent Murders Reveals City’s Ugly Racist History

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Hundreds of people attended an anti-violence protest in Halifax last month. Photo via THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

Between April 17 and April 23, three young men were shot and killed in Halifax and the surrounding areas. Tyler Richards, who I knew, was shot in the city's west end, Naricho Clayton was shot on the northern edge of Halifax's downtown, and Daverico Downey was killed outside a home in North Preston, a historically black suburb. There have been seven murders in Halifax in 2016, a city of less than 400,000 people that has a disportionately high violent crime rate. Winnipeg, a city roughly twice the size of Halifax, has had 10 murders this year.

Recent violence in Halifax has disproportionately affected the city's black community. However, to blame this violence on problems which are internal to that community fundamentally ignores the deep structural inequality built into Halifax's economy, its politics and even its geography. If you aren't from Halifax it is hard to understand just how segregated along lines of class and race this city is. Understanding that segregation and the limits it places on those born into the wrong neighbourhoods is necessary for understanding how violence shapes the lives of many of the people who live here.

Halifax is a city facing an affordable housing crisis. It's a city just a few years removed from a bloody feud between two families, the Melvins and the Marriotts: two drug dealing, biker gang-connected families from the poor, mostly white suburb of Spryfield. It's a city where some bosses won't hire employees who have to take public transit to work. It is also a city in the midst of huge condo boom and a city where despite widespread opposition, the federal, provincial and municipal governments have committed a combined $400 million to help build a privately owned convention centre than no one wants.

Read More: The Bizarre, Violent Story of Halifax's Real-Life Trailer Park Boys

The construction of towers downtown and the expansion of subdivisions in the wealthier suburbs have led some to claim that recent violence is an anomaly that is overshadowing the positive impact of urban renewal. But that rhetoric ignores the obvious question: who does urban renewal serve?

To look at a moment when a young black man was gunned down in North Preston and not connect it to the uneven distribution of wealth in this city is astounding. North Preston was an area settled by black loyalists in the 1700s and 1800s and is largely cut off from the rest of the city due to its distance from the peninsula and a lack of proper public transit access. Importantly, many of the descendents of those initial loyalists have never been given proper legal title to land that has been in their families for centuries. The result is legal instability and the inability to sell land (or even transfer it to family members) at a time that downtown and suburban property owners are making huge profits buying, developing, and selling property. We have overwhelming evidence from the United States that the inter-generational wealth gap between white and black is tied directly to home ownership and government policy.

Former basketball star Tyler Richards was killed in April. Photo via The Canadian Press

Blindly praising urban renewal requires one to ignore a number of facts: While a wealthy developer received hundreds of millions of dollars to build a hotel and convention centre from all three levels of government Nova Scotia's ruling Liberal Party have cut funding from a 33 year old African Nova Scotian run community organization that helps people Preston and Cherrybrook find jobs. In recent budgets we've seen no new funding for public housing, no new money from the province to improve public transit to Halifax's working class and poor suburbs, and no additional support to create jobs in predominantly black or poor neighbourhoods. The province refused to provide help to Harbour City Homes, a north end Halifax co-op which provides co-op housing for low income residents. And in a huge battle waged by community groups for access to a closed-down public school—largely organized by black and Indigenous community members—the developers won.

Halifax at dawn. Photo via Flickr user InAweofGod'sCreation

Halifax's segregation and uneven development cannot be divorced from the structural racism woven into the fabric of the city and the province. This is the city where our newspaper of record published this monstrosity just a few weeks ago, stoking the flames of racist and xenophobic hate. This is a province where the education system continues to fail black students. A province where an interracial couple had a cross burned on their lawn and where African Nova Scotians face an unemployment rate of 14.5 percent and are less likely to have a university or college education when compared to the population as a whole.

Halifax is a city where former world class boxer Kirk Johnson had to file a human rights complaint against the Halifax Police Department after being pulled over 28 times for the crime of being a black man with a nice car and where international students still find themselves subject to racist taunts and overcrowded and illegal housing. This is a province where African Nova Scotian and Mi'kmaq communities are far more likely to suffer the impact of toxic industrial and government pollution. This is a city where overwhelmingly white dog owners organized themselves to fight for the right for their dogs to literally shit all over the land where Africville once stood. And most obviously, this is a city where three black men were gunned down in one week. In short, this is a city that is plagued by white supremacy.

Read More: Africville, Canada's Secret Racist History

I knew Tyler Richards. I didn't know him well, but I knew him in the way that you know people in a small city like Halifax. I've been sickened in the last few week with comments I've heard and read insinuating that, because the most recent shooting deaths in Halifax involved people allegedly involved in the sale of illicit drugs, they brought it upon themselves. I heard it when Jefflin Beals, who I played basketball with when we were kids, was murdered during Toronto's Nuit Blanche in 2011. I heard it two years ago when Dan Pellerin, who was a teammate on my high school soccer team was stabbed to death in North End Dartmouth. Every time I hear it I know that it's bullshit. We make choices, but those choices are constrained by the structures we live under. The choices I've made that make me safe—to go to university (twice), to live in downtown Halifax, to work for political organizations that pay me a living wage—are choices that were available to me. Those choices aren't available to everyone.

The politics, economics and geography of this city put hard constraints on the choices people get to make and to pretend otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand what violence is and the way that it intersects with class and race.

I am sick of hearing about a murder and wondering if it will be someone I know. But more than that I am sick of hearing about another murder in Halifax at all. This city, a city that I love, is destroying people and we need to do something to stop it. Until we recognize that this violence is bigger than the individual choices of its victims and perpetrators, we will continue to fail to understand it, let alone stop it.

Follow Chris Parsons on Twitter.

The Time I Had Lunch with Mariah Carey

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Photos by the author

With Prince, Bowie, Whitney, and MJ all gone, the earth's natural supply of mega-famous, mega-beloved, mega-insane pop divas is almost completely depleted. We're pretty much down to just Madonna, Elton, and Mariah.

The deaths of so many huge public figures in such a short span of time has put me in a constant state of celebrity death–related anxiety. Whenever I encounter a famous person in the wild, I've become completely incapable of being cool about it. On my phone right now are creepshots of Toni Collette buying salad, John C. Reilly at a roller disco, and Bobby Brown watching a circus. Not because I was massively excited about seeing any of these people; I'm just worried that if I were the last person to see them alive, and I failed to document it, I would have failed you, the reader.

So I figure now, while it's still fresh in my memory, would be the time to document the couple of hours I spent last summer in the presence of Mariah Carey. This isn't to say I have any reason to believe Mariah Carey is going to die soon. But 2016 has been a real shit so far.

For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, I was invited to attend a luncheon in honor of Mariah receiving a star on the Walk of Fame. (This apparently didn't happen until 2015 because it took eight years for her to set a date for the ceremony.) According to the PR person who organized it—again, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me—I was the only member of the press invited.

The luncheon (I'm not totally sure what a luncheon is, or how it's different to lunch, but the PR person kept using the word in her emails, so I'm using it here) was held in an extremely plush restaurant in Hollywood filled with expensive-looking people who made me feel extremely underdressed, dirty, and unmoisturized. There was enough perfume in the air that VICE should expect a worker's comp claim from me for black lung any day now.

I'd gotten there shortly before Mariah was scheduled to arrive, so I sat and listened to the DJ. He was playing nothing but Mariah songs. This is going to be awkward for Mariah when she arrives, I thought.

Mariah was, we were told, running late. So the assembled guests, and I, like thousands (if not millions) of people before us, stared toward the door she should have already entered through and patiently waited for her to arrive.

I, of course, knew Mariah would be late. That she might be on time had never even crossed my mind. Mariah is, I assume, late for everything. And not late in the way that you and I might be late for things. "Late" in a way that would be called "canceling" if you or I were to try it.

This is because Mariah Carey is not a human. She is beyond human. The behavior of people at her level does not fall under the umbrella of what we would consider to be human behavior.

This is a woman who named albums Me. I Am Mariah... The Elusive Chanteuse and The Emancipation of Mimi; who uses her StairMaster in high heels; who responded to a question about Jennifer Lopez by pretending not to know who she was; who had a panic attack on television because her "bad side" was facing the camera; who reportedly asked for 80 security guards and 20 white kittens as part of a rider; who had her fish "changed" so they'd be on the same sleep cycle as her.

These are things that no other human would do unless they were making fun of Mariah Carey.

She is a feral child raised by yes-men in a McMansion, existing in a world devoid of grown-ups to enforce rules. A billion dollar reboot of Lord of the Flies. And as I waited for her to arrive, I was very excited at the prospect of witnessing some of her insane behavior firsthand.

By the time Mariah eventually showed up, she was about two hours late. I was coming back from the bathroom when she made her entrance, so I walked through the main doors of the restaurant at the same time as her.

For a few seconds, I was able to see what it's like to enter a room as Mariah Carey. It is, in a word, overwhelming. Cameras flashed, the word "MARIAAAH!!!" came from all directions, people applauded, a bouquet of roses suddenly materialized in her arms, people shoved cellphones in her face and accosted her for selfies, someone else shoved a microphone in her face, champagne corks popped. It all made me extremely anxious, and it wasn't even aimed at me.

Once the commotion had died down, Mariah sat at a table in the center of the room with a crowd assembled around her.

Seeing her in the flesh was weird. She is an image that has been forced into our minds for decades. Seeing someone at her level of fame in the flesh is akin to seeing Lisa Simpson or the Nike swoosh walking down the street. My brain couldn't process it.

Shortly after sitting down, Mariah got up and made a beeline for the DJ booth. I assumed she was going to ask him to play some music by someone other than herself. This was because I was judging Mariah by my own mortal standards. I am a person who gets cramps from cringing so hard every time I have to listen to a recording of my own voice to transcribe an interview. Mariah is a person who listened to a recording of herself performing live while giving birth.

As she walked back to her table, a song of hers called "Why You Mad" started playing. Presumably having been requested by Mariah.

At one point during the song, the volume dipped. Mariah yelled "What happened? Louder!"

When the song finished, Mariah shouted out "One more time?" Even though the sentence ended with a question mark, there was no doubt that it was a demand. The DJ didn't seem to pick up on this and failed to immediately restart the song.

Mariah then shouted, "ONE! MORE! TIME!"

A few seconds later, "Why You Mad" started playing again.

As the song played, a couple of members of Mariah's entourage stood up from their lunch(eon) and started dancing by the table. Eyes closed, arms raised. Enraptured. One member of her entourage shouted, "I LOVE THIS SONG!" Mariah nodded approvingly.

About ten minutes after it finished, while "Fantasy" played, Mariah once again got up from the table and approached the DJ booth. Once again, the DJ dropped "Why You Mad."

By this point, pretty much everyone had left. I guess because Mariah had been late enough that people had to go make sure their pets and plants and children were still alive. It was pretty much just me, a couple of miscellaneous PR people, Mariah, her entourage, and the DJ (who was still only playing Mariah).

I kept an eye on Mariah, anxiously waiting for her to do something weird. It never came.

She sipped on a drink. Ate some chicken. Talked to her children and her friends. She was normal. It was weird to see her indulge in such regular behavior. It never occurred to me that Mariah might actually eat at a luncheon thrown in her honor. It never occurred to me that Mariah might eat in public at all. It was a jarring sight.

With no one to talk to, I had nothing to do but stare at Mariah. Since all the other tables in the restaurant were open, I tried out a few different angles. She continued to behave like a normal person. The multiple requests for that one song of hers was the only weird thing I saw.

I'm sure that, to Mariah, I didn't exist. A guy staring at her from the edge of her field of vision is nothing new. Like a zoo animal, she is used to the people looking at her from all directions.

I, however, felt creepy. She was trying to eat. I was staring at her, waiting for her to live up to my expectations. After an hour or so of staring, I decided to leave Mariah and her people in peace.

As I made my way out, I passed through a crowd of Mariah fans, wearing Mariah shirts and holding Mariah signs, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of her through the restaurant's windows.

While I was writing this, I found out that Mariah had never heard "Why You Mad" before it was played for her at her luncheon.

Which I guess is why she wanted to hear it so many times.

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: ​Toronto’s Only Cat Cafe Has Cats Removed By Humane Society Amid Abuse Allegations

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Cat cafes are a hit with humans, but how do the cats feel? Photo via Flickr

Toronto's only cat cafe, the TOT Cat Cafe, is down a few felines after the city's humane society removed some of the cats amid allegations from an anonymous employee who claimed that cats were mistreated by the business.

The Toronto Humane Society (THS), which had given the cafe five of its seven cats on a charitable basis, took the cats out of the cafe last week over a concern that the facility was "not aligning" with the values of THS as a non-profit organization.

According to THS executive director Barbara Steinhoff, the humane society was specifically bothered by the cafe charging a fee to see the cats in a separate room—something that Steinhoff told VICE was not true to the humane society's intention when placing the cats there.

This news comes after a post by an alleged former employee—originally found on a Bunz Trading Zone pet page before being taken down and re-shared anonymously—that accused the TOT Cat Cafe of mistreating and abusing its cats.

"Over the past few months it has become apparent to me that the cafe's owners do not care about cats. They constantly forget to feed them, or give them water, or properly monitor their health," the post reads.

"I have had enough. I can't keep doing this. It has taken a huge toll on my health. SO yesterday, I reported them to The Toronto Humane Society and all of the cats were removed."

THS declined to comment on the post and said that the main reason they removed the cats was due to the surcharge to access them. Kenneth Chai, owner of the cafe, told VICE that the post was "just a rumour" and that the cafe is aware of the employee who posted it. Chai said that the cafe has not mistreated its animals in any way.

"The cats are great, there is nothing we can do about the rumour that has been started," he told VICE.

Chai says that the cats are well fed and that, when stressed, there are areas where they can go to relax and be away from people. Chai said that the THS had a working disagreement about money, but that the "goal has always been charity" when it came to the cafe.

Chai added that the cafe will be receiving new cats shortly from other rescue shelters in the area, and that the cafe will remain open despite the allegations.

Until then, there's always other places to trip out on shrooms at.

Follow Jake Kivanç on Twitter.

Why Men Kill Their Mothers

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Norma Bates from 'Psycho,' via Paramount Pictures

On August 20, 1989, entertainment executive Jose Menendez was shot point-blank in the back of the skull while relaxing on the sofa in his Beverly Hills mansion. His wife, Kitty, had fallen asleep next to him and was awakened by the shots. In a futile attempt at self-preservation, she bolted for the hallway, but was hit in the leg by one of the bullets. She slipped in her own blood and fell, continuing to crawl away until she was shot in the chest, then ten times in her head, before her killers bludgeoned and shattered her skull. Later, it would be revealed that Jose and Kitty Menendez had been brutally murdered by their own sons: 21-year-old Lyle and 18-year-old Erik Menendez.

Incidents of parricide—the killing of one's own parents—continue to fascinate psychologists, criminologists, and the public alike. To kill one's own parents is such an abrupt departure from the seemingly universally idea that we should celebrate our parents, especially on the heels of a holiday like Mother's Day, when people take stock of their parental bonds. According to the FBI, though, in 26 percent of all homicide cases in which the perpetrator is known, the victim is slain by a member of their family. And a Department of Justice report from 2011 shows that murders committed by a victim's own children are on the rise—up from 9.7 percent of all family homicides in 1980 to 13 percent in 2008, making parricide the fastest growing type of familial homicide.

Lyle and Erik confessed to the murder of their parents right away, so their trial was never a matter of did they do it? but instead, why? The defense claimed that they'd been driven to kill after being subjected to years of cruel emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of their father, and that their alcoholic mother sometimes took part in the abuse, too. The prosecution denied the abuse ever occurred and suggested that the brothers killed their parents to access the enormous wealth their father had accrued. Their trial soon became a public spectacle, followed like a real-life soap opera.

The vast majority of Lyle and Erik's friends and family believed the abuse allegations aimed at Jose, but the defense team had one major problem: Kitty may have been a less than perfect mother, but the evidence didn't seem to suggest she had done anything that would have made her sons want to kill her, especially in such a cruel way. Even more perplexing, according to people who knew the family, Erik and Lyle were both close with their mother.

Dr. William Vicary, a forensic psychiatrist who treated both brothers after they were arrested for the murders, told me that during his first few encounters with Erik, "all he wanted to do was tell me how wonderful his parents were—how terrific, brilliant, and successful his father was, and how loving and kind and warm his mother was." One of the police officers who worked the case also told me that during their investigation, they found phone records indicating conversations between Lyle and Kitty that would last three, sometimes four hours long. If everyone around Erik and Lyle observed an idyllic relationship between the brothers and their mother, then what could have prompted them to kill her?

There are two primary theories behind why sons murder their mothers. Sigmund Freud, who spent a great deal of his research ruminating on the relationships between parents and children, claimed that a son who murders his mother is defending against incestuous impulses. (By contrast, sons who murder their fathers may be eliminating competition for the "possession of his mother.") Other experts—like Dr. Kathleen Heide, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida who has written four books on parricide—believe sons are more often reclaiming control. In her book Understanding Parricide, Heide suggests that "men who commit matricide often reported feeling that their mothers were either ambivalent toward them or excessively domineering. These men were frequently described as considering the act of killing their mothers as a way to maintain their masculinity or as protection against extreme emotions triggered by their mothers' behavior."

Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, one of the first doctors to take an in-depth look at parricide, blended the two theories. In his 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, he wrote that "many matricides committed with excessive force occur in the bedroom, and are precipitated by trivial reasons. These crimes represent the son's unconscious hatred for his mother, superimposed on sexual desire for her." Wertham's theory draws ominous parallels to cases like Michael Miller, who was convicted of sexually assaulting his mother, Marguerite, after he had bludgeoned her to death, or Kevin Davis, an 18-year-old in Texas who admitted to choking, stabbing, and hammering his mother to death before having sex with her corpse.

Related: Inside the West Texas Sanctuary for Kids Who Killed Their Parents

About two-thirds of matricides are committed by adult sons (rather than juveniles) and in many of the matricide cases I researched, the crimes were sexually motivated in some way. In some cases, the mother was apathetic about sexual abuse that the son had been the victim of, or had been the direct sexual abuser herself; in others, she had interfered in a romantic relationship, or the murderer had problems associated with sexual deviance. Murders of fathers—which are twice as common as matricides—were more often the result of a heated argument, a "snapping," or a passion-fueled scenario that led to murder inadvertently. In cases where both parents were murdered, as with the Menendez murders, the motivations were not always as clear. Catalysts ranged from claims of abuse, jealousy, arbitrary quarrels, control, greed, and blatant narcissism.

During Erik Menendez's testimony during the trial, he cried, winced, and sobbed describing the moments he watched his mother moaning from the multiple shotgun blasts that he and his brother had inflicted on her. Later, a jury would convict Erik and Lyle for the first-degree murder of their parents and sentence them to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Few of us will understand the dichotomy of loving a parent while simultaneously wanting to murder them. But maybe unanswered questions are to be expected.

Follow Alexis Linkletter on Twitter.

One of America's Shadiest Landlords Is Facing Possible Prison Time

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CEO of Croman Realty Steven Croman and his wife Harriet in New York City. The landlord faces a litany of criminal charges to which he pleaded not guilty Monday. (Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for DuJour)

"My only way to describe him is that he's evil," Cynthia Chaffee says, sitting in her East Village apartment. "It's demonic what he's doing."

In a video posted to CromanTenants.org—tagline: "You are not alone. Don't be afraid. You are not helpless. You have rights!"—Chaffee describes life under a landlord named Steven Croman. Ceiling leaks that destroyed her paintings. Pneumonia caused by long-term heat outages. Entire floors, flooded. And last but not least, vengefulness.

On one occasion, Chaffee recalls, Croman barged into a tenants' association meeting, furious after the Village Voice listed him as one of the city's ten worst landlords in 1998. The man had seen three whole pages dedicated to him, and was none too pleased.

"He came in like a terror, an absolute terror," Chaffee says in the clip. "Like the Gestapo."

Chaffee and another tenant formed the "Stop Croman Coalition" in 2007, which documented alleged abuses by the notorious landlord—who, by then, owned properties across the island of Manhattan. They even hung posters around town, giving prospective tenants the heads-up. (At the time, a spokesperson for Croman said the tenants had a "personal agenda.")

But on Monday morning in downtown Manhattan, the tenants' testimony took on new power. After turning himself in to authorities, Croman, 49, was charged with 20 felonies, including grand larceny, criminal tax fraud, falsifying business documents, and a scheme to scrape off extra bucks on rental incomes to secure bank loans worth millions. (His mortgage broker, Barry Swartz, was also charged with 15 felonies.)

Now Croman, who pleaded not guilty to the charges, faces 25 years in prison, making him the most prominent landlord to face major criminal charges in America's largest city in some time.

The scheme, prosecutors say, was a simple one: Croman would buy buildings with rent-controlled apartments, push the tenants out using deceitful tactics, and then reap the rewards of one of the hottest real estate markets on the planet. According to a lawsuit filed by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, whose office investigated Croman and his management firm 9300 Realty for nearly two years—and is also suing him for restitution—the man often left behind units in disrepair, sometimes refusing court orders to fix them.

"Now, with today's filings, we're putting an end to this conspiracy and business plan built on fraud and harassment," Schneiderman said at a press conference.

According to the lawsuit, some of Croman's actions carried Wolf of Wall Street levels of dick-ish behavior, with property managers allegedly referring to tenants as "targets," as the New York Times reports, some earning $10,000 bonuses for successfully forcing people out. Tenants have horror stories about racking up tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees warding off dubious charges in housing court. (Chaffee says she was sued 11 times.)

Meanwhile, Croman could apparently be heard yelling "Buyouts! Buyouts!" as he ran around his office, and a former cop who prosecutors say served as the landlord's henchman is charged with intimidating tenants, sometimes even following them out of state. The ex-cop also allegedly called buyouts a "team sport" in a text message to a property manager.

"I know that!!" the manager responded, according to the suit. "Who's our next target? We have to start lining them up!!!"

In a statement to reporters, Croman's defense lawyer, Benjamin Brafman—who also represents the vilified "Pharma Bro," Martin Shkreli—said, "The charges in this case are defensible, and Mr. Croman intends to address all issues in a responsible fashion. The criminal charges have nothing whatsoever to do with allegations relating to tenant harassment."

By the time Croman was booked on Monday, he was no stranger to the residents of the city, repeatedly making its official 'Worst Landlords' list—a public database launched by Mayor Bill de Blasio, when he was still the city's public advocate, in 2010. As a mayor who focused on issues of affordability, de Blasio went on to launch a joint task force with AG Schneiderman to seek out bad apples in real estate. (More recently, though, de Blasio and Schneiderman's office have seen their relationship strained by an ongoing investigation into an alleged city land use scandal.)

Croman could be their biggest score yet.

But according to Joel Kotkin, an erstwhile New Yorker and expert on wealth and housing in America, what Croman is accused of doing is really no surprise. In fact, Kotkin believes, the real estate market—both in metropolises like NYC and those abroad—tacitly endorses this sort of behavior.

The convergence of increasingly limited housing stock, lax regulations, and a seemingly infinite number of buyers—both American and foreign—conjures up a "perfect storm," according to Kotkin, where people like Croman prosper. "The temptation is enormous," the expert tells me.

The quasi-incentivized hustle creates a market that is "tilted towards the high-end," Kotkin continues, which is "not good for the middle class, and certainly not for the working class." It transforms what were once affordable neighborhoods into new capital ventures, exclusively available to an upper echelon of society. It sends gentrification into hyper-speed.

And of course, it's not just New York City (talk to anyone about San Francisco lately?), and perhaps not even just America. "Nationally?" Kotkin gawks, when I say the word. "We're seeing this in Singapore, in London, in Sydney, where there's just this mad rush into these urban real estate projects, because you have all of this money floating around."

So it's highly unlikely that prosecuting the (so far just alleged) actions of one of New York City's shadiest landlords will slow down this market-rate merry-go-round, since Croman is almost certainly just one of many. But for those who live "under the Croman Real Estate / 9300 Realty regime," as the tenants describe their conditions, maybe this is a start.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Meet the Woman Fighting to Normalize Toplessness

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Chelsea Covington chatting with the police in Washington, DC. Photo via Breasts Are Healthy

On Wednesday, the ew Hampshire House of Representatives is scheduled to debate a bill that would allow towns in the state to "regulate attire" in public areas as a way of criminalizing female toplessness. The legislation was proposed after another New Hampshire bill, which would have banned exposed female breasts outright, was shot down in March.

While it's legal for women to be topless in many parts of the United States (you can find a full map here), people aren't exactly comfortable with it yet. Chelsea Covington is fighting to change that. Covington, 27, started going bare-chested about three years ago. (She prefers the term "bare-chested" over topless, because "topless you are lacking something.") Now, Covington gardens, bicycles, picnics, walks, and sunbathes sans shirt, wherever legal and whenever comfortable. She also keeps a blog, Breasts Are Healthy, where she documents the everyday outings of her nipples. I spoke to Covington about how the police and laypeople react to her bare chest, and what she hopes to achieve by choosing not to wear a shirt.

Warning: Photos of bare breasts below.

VICE: How much time per week do you spend bare-chested?
Chelsea Covington: Weather is definitely a factor. In the wintertime, there is definitely less activity. But really, I will take any opportunity I can. Cooler temperatures don't bother me so much, but I also am not going to do it just to do it either. I do it because it is how I am comfortable and how I like to be, so if it's snowing outside and you wouldn't be without a shirt on, I wouldn't be without one either.

How cold is too cold?
Probably below 50. I'm pretty warm-blooded so I can handle some temperatures.

When you travel, where have you gone out bare-chested?
Washington DC; it's been legal there since '86. New York, since '92. I've been to both places a lot. Pennsylvania—Philly and Pittsburgh, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont. Pretty much most of the Northeastern United States.

And the first thing you do is get some kind of legal clarification, right?
I do some research first about what the laws actually say, if there is any case law, and then I either call or go to the police department and ask to speak with someone. They often say, "Hold on, let me find the Title IX coordinator," because everyone is so afraid. It's been fascinating noticing the difference in different police departments because it's never the same. Because some people will read and then consult with the legal department and be like, "OK, there's nothing saying female bare-chestedness is illegal, so go for it!" And then there are others that take months and months to get back. Of course, there are more pressing issues. However, it's still a question that needs to be answered.

I try to , because street-level cops aren't ones who make decisions. They're there to enforce the law as they have been instructed, and often are not in position to make decisions, so that's unfair pressure to put on them.

Chelsea Covington in Washington, DC. Photo via Breasts Are Healthy

You've compared it to open-carry demonstrations. What do you think that says about our notion of breasts and how we perceive them?
Well, that's a heavy subject. I believe that to get some people to understand you have to approach it from an angle to which they relate to. There was an officer in DC who said, "I understand this is legal, but it's unreasonable." And I was like, "But it's legal." We had a conversation, a very long conversation. It wasn't antagonistic or anything like that. He was just trying to wrap his mind around it. And he said he wished he was in Montana where he could have his guns strapped out or whatever. I said, "Exactly. All these people are going to the supermarket or the diner or wherever to normalize arms. That's what they're doing. They're normalizing it by doing things they would normally do, except armed. And that is getting people used to the sight and then they won't be offended anymore." My main goal is to normalize the sight. Just like men: We don't talk about a man being without a shirt, because it's been normalized.

What reactions do you get from passersby?
Overwhelmingly neutral. People walking by might just look, or they might not even look.

Really? Do they avoid eye contact?
I try not to challenge people. I want people to have whatever reaction they're going to have without feeling like I'm judging them. I want them to do their own internal work. I don't want them to think I am looking at them and going, "Yeah? And?" I'm not. That's not who I am, and that's not my goal. They're going to feel how they're going to feel, but I would like to be seen as a human being and have my own rights protected. So I don't engage people unless they talk to me and that has happened so many times.

People come up and talk to me. How many times can you say you've walked in DC or New York and a stranger has talked to you? Probably never. People come up and talk to me all of the time. It's with questions and encouragement or "I don't understand. Can you explain this to me?" And I have had some of the most beautiful conversations and interactions with people I have ever had in my entire life, and that's wonderful and heartening to me, that people are going, "OK, I wasn't sure how I felt about this, but now I understand that you are not scary and not trying to ruin by day and I'm not trying to ruin yours," and it doesn't matter that I don't have a shirt on, because that's the goal.

"I don't have slogans painted on my body. I don't yell. To normalize bare-chestedness, you have to do normal things." — Chelsea Covington

What's the most difficult interaction you've had?
There was one time where I was in Prospect Park in Brooklyn and my fiancé and I were sitting and having a picnic. It was a quiet day, and this man walked by on a path and he was dropping the f-bomb left and right and saying, "This is a fucking family park!" It was pretty ridiculous. He was talking about me, but he wasn't talking to me, and calling me fucking garbage and a whore and a harlot.

That's an old-school one, harlot.
Points for originality there. But it was interesting because he wouldn't even look at me, wouldn't confront me. I was looking to see if he was coming toward me to have a conversation, and he literally walked by, ranting. It was strange. Then there was this family that walked by with a stroller and they took more notice of him , and I realized that he was doing work for me, because who really was out of place in a family park? The guy dropping the f-bomb and ranting and raving or the bare-chested woman sitting there eating grapes?

Chelsea Covington in Washington, DC. Photo via Breasts Are Healthy

Is that partly why you started blogging about this?
It was at the request of family and friends, because I had been gathering stories and sharing them with people. There were people who knew what I was doing and said, "You have to write this down. You're accumulating this unique brand of knowledge." There were some other women out there, my friends included, who wanted, but didn't know how, to go about doing this, being bare-chested, being in-public, and not understanding how to go through this and deal with people in general. So that's why.

I never meant for it to be a spectacle. I don't have slogans painted on my body. I don't yell. I don't carry signs. There are times for that, but to normalize bare-chestedness, you have to do normal things.

I noticed a comment on your YouTube channel from a guy "thanking" you for a free peep. Do you ever feel unsafe doing this?
No, and I will tell you why: I and every woman you have ever met has been physically or verbally sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, probably multiple times. It happens in school—I remember walking up the stairs and having my ass grabbed and then turning around and not being able to figure out who did it. Even though other people saw it, nobody said who it was and no one copped to it. I have never once been touched inappropriately being bare-chested, and it's interesting. I think it's because it has this humanizing effect. That's what I gather from the way people interact with me. It's me taking ownership of my own body and that is really powerful.

How do you feel about being looked at by someone like the commenter?
It's OK to look. But it's not OK to demean me to only that, or any other woman. We look at you, too! I look at a who actually come talk to me want to talk to me, too. It's not all about getting the free peep show, as my YouTube guy said. I greatly appreciate that. We need the support of men. We need the support of everyone.

I understand you are making a political point and engaging with society, but what about being bare-chested is physically comfortable to you?
I'm a really warm-blooded person, so I get really hot, hot to the point where I wish I could take my skin off. Guys can walk around without a shirt on when they get hot, and I have wanted, since I was a very young child, to be able do the same. I get very hot, especially in bras. They're very tight to the skin. You end up feeling gross.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.


The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Hillary Clinton
in Phoenix, Arizona in March 2016. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.


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

US News

US Troops Prefer Trump Over Clinton
A survey of US military personnel revealed that active military personnel would prefer Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton as president. Just over 54 percent of the troops surveyed by the Military Times said they would vote for Trump, while only 25 percent said they would vote for Clinton. However, more than one in five soldier said they'd rather not vote in November if they have to choose between just those two candidates. —Military Times

Flint Mayor Accused of Taking Water Crisis Money
Former Flint City Administrator Natasha Henderson has alleged that she was fired after reporting that Mayor Karen Weaver told staff to direct water crisis donations to a personal account. Henderson filed a federal lawsuit detailing the allegations and said she "feared going to jail" after receiving Weaver's instructions. —Michigan Live

Ferguson Gets First Black Police Chief
Delrish Moss was sworn in as the first black police chief in the city of Ferguson, Missouri. Moss said he wanted to bring "nobility" back to police work. He replaces Tom Jackson, who resigned last year after a Justice Department report cited racial bias in Ferguson's criminal justice system. —ABC News

Panama Papers Reveal the Americans Tied to Fraud
A newly released database showing the files of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca has identified offshore companies connected to at least 36 Americans accused of fraud or other serious financial misconduct. Mossack Fonseca has previously said it turns away clients involved in conduct raising "red flags." —The Washington Post

International News

Man Knives Train Passengers in Germany
A man attacked passengers with a knife at a train station outside Munich early on Tuesday, killing one person and leaving three others injured. Witnesses told police that the man shouted "Allah Akbar" ("God is great") during the attack. Police officers have arrested the attacker. —Deutsche Welle

Duterte Wins Philippines Presidency
Rodrigo Duterte has won the Philippine presidential elections, after early results gave him an unassailable lead and his opponents officially withdrew. Known as "the punisher," Duterte said: "I will be a dictator, but only against forces of evil—criminality, drugs, and corruption in government." —CNN

Ceasefire in Aleppo Extended
A truce in place since last Thursday in the Syrian city of Aleppo has been extended until midnight on Wednesday. The agreement is only partial, since it does not include the Nusra Front or Islamic State groups. US Secretary of State John Kerry said he wanted a permanent truce rather than piecemeal ceasefires. —BBC News

Brazilian Senate Presses On with Impeachment
The Brazilian Senate has vowed to vote on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, rejecting the decision of the acting speaker of Brazil's lower house, who tried to annul the impeachment process. The constitutional standoff could end up in the Supreme Court. —Reuters


New Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Facebook Denies Pushing Liberal Agenda
Facebook has responded to allegations the social network censored conservative news stories, saying it "found no evidence" to support the claims. Former curators have alleged they were told to "manipulate" what was trending. —The Guardian

London Mayor Hits Out at Trump
The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has slammed Donald Trump for saying Khan could be an "exception" to a ban on Muslims entering the US. Khan said: "This isn't just about me. It's about... everyone who comes from a background similar to mine." —The Huffington Post

Bison Becomes National Mammal
President Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act into law making it the official national mammal of the United States. The law is entirely symbolic, so it won't provide any new backing for conservation efforts.—ABC News

Minnesota Introduces Prince Act
Lawmakers in the state have introduced a bill called the Personal Rights in Names Can Endure Act, or PRINCE Act. It aims to protect an individual's image and likeness after death. —Noisey

Done with reading today? Watch our video 'VICE Talks 'Chasing Asylum' with Filmmaker Eva Orner'

VICE Long Reads: How Jellyfish, Nanobots, and Naked Mole Rats Could Make Humans Immortal

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All photos by Chris Bethell except when noted

Dr. Chris Faulkes is standing in his laboratory, tenderly caressing what looks like a penis. It's not his penis, nor mine, and it's definitely not that of the only other man in the room, VICE photographer Chris Bethell. But at four inches long with shrivelled skin that's veiny and loose, it looks very penis-y. Then, with a sudden squeak, it squirms in his hand as if trying to break free, revealing an enormous set of Bugs Bunny teeth protruding from the tip.

"This," says Faulkes, "is a naked mole rat, though she does look like a penis with teeth, doesn't she? Or a saber-tooth sausage. But don't let her looks fool you—the naked mole rat is the superhero of the animal kingdom."

I'm with Faulkes in his lab at Queen Mary, University of London. Faulkes is an affable guy with a ponytail, telltale tattoos half-hidden under his T-shirt sleeve and a couple of silver goth rings on his fingers. A spaghetti-mess of tubes weave about the room, like a giant gerbil maze, through which 12 separated colonies of 200 naked mole rats scurry, scratch, and squeak. What he just said is not hyperbole. In fact, the naked mole rat shares more than just its looks with a penis: Where you might say the penis is nature's key to creating life, this ugly phallus of a creature could be mankind's key to eternal life.

"Their extreme and bizarre lifestyle never ceases to amaze and baffle biologists, making them one of the most intriguing animals to study," says Faulkes, who has devoted the past 30 years of his life to trying to understand how the naked mole rat has evolved into one of the most well-adapted, finely-tuned creatures on Earth. "All aspects of their biology seem to inform us about other animals, including humans, particularly when it comes to healthy aging and cancer resistance."

Similarly sized rodents usually live for about five years. The naked mole rat lives for 30. Even into their late 20s, they hardly seem to age, remaining fit and healthy with robust heartbeats, strong bones, sharp minds, and high fertility. They don't seem to feel pain and, unlike other mammals, they almost never get cancer.

In other words, if humans lived as long, relative to body size, as naked mole rats, we would last for 500 years in a 25-year-old's body. "It's not a ridiculous exaggeration to suggest we can one day manipulate our own biochemical and metabolic pathways with drugs or gene therapies to emulate those that keep the naked mole rat alive and healthy for so long," says Faulkes, stroking his animal. "In fact, the naked mole rat provides us the perfect model for human aging research across the board, from the way it resists cancer to the way its social systems prolong its life."

Over the centuries a long line of optimists, alchemists, hawkers and pop stars have hunted various methods of postponing death, from drinking elixirs of youth to sleeping in hyperbaric chambers. The one thing those people have in common is that all of them are dead. Still, the anti-aging industry is bigger than ever. In 2013, its global market generated more than $216 billion. By 2018 it will hit $311 billion, thanks mostly to huge investment from Silicon Valley billionaires and Russian oligarchs who've realized the only way they could possibly spend all their money is by living forever. Even Google wants in on the action, with Calico, its $1.5 billion life-extension research center whose brief is to reverse-engineer the biology that makes us old or, as Time magazine put it, to "cure death." It's a snowballing market that some are branding "the internet of healthcare." But on whom are these savvy entrepreneurs placing their bets? After all, the race for immortality has a wide field.

In an office not far from Google's headquarters in Mountain View, with a beard to his belt buckle and a ponytail to match, British biomedical gerontologist Aubrey De Grey is enjoying the growing clamor about conquering aging, or "senescence," as he calls it. His charity, the SENS Research Foundation, has enjoyed a bumper few years thanks to a £415,000-a-year ($600,000) investment from Paypal cofounder and immortality motormouth Peter Thiel ("Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead"). Though he says the foundation's $5.75 million annual budget can still "struggle" to support its growing workload.

According to the Cambridge-educated scientist, the fundamental knowledge needed to develop effective anti-aging therapies already exists. He argues that the seven biochemical processes that cause the damage which accumulates during old age have been discovered, and if we can counter them we can, in theory, halt the ageing process. Indeed, he not only sees aging as a medical condition that can be cured, but believes that the "first person to live to 1,000 is alive today." If that sounds like the ramblings of a crackpot weird-beard, hear him out; Dr. De Grey's run the numbers.

"If you look at the maths it is very straightforward," he says. "All we are saying here is that it's quite likely that within the next 20 or 30 years, we will develop medicines that can rejuvenate people faster than time is passing. It's not perfect yet, but soon we'll take someone aged 60 and fix them up well enough that they won't be 60 again, biologically, for another 30 years. In that period, therapies will improve such that we'll be able to rejuvenate them again so they won't be 60 for a third time until they are chronologically 150, and so on. If we can stay one step ahead of the problem, people won't die of aging anymore."

"Like immortality?" I ask. Dr. De Grey sighs: "That word is the bane of my life. People who use that word are essentially making fun of what we do, as if to maintain an emotional distance from it so as not to get their hopes up. I don't work on 'curing death,' I work on keeping people healthy. And, yes, I understand that success in my work could translate into an important side effect of people living longer. But to 'cure death' implies the elimination of all causes, including, say, dying in car accidents. And I don't think there's much we could do to survive an asteroid apocalypse."

So instead, De Grey focuses on the things we can avoid dying from, like hypertension, cancer, Alzeimer's and other age-related illnesses. His goal is not immortality, but "radical life extension." He says traditional medicines won't wind back the hands of our body clocks—we need to manipulate our makeup on a cellular level, like using bacterial enzymes to flush out molecular "garbage" that accumulates in the body, or tinkering with our genetic coding to prevent the growth of cancers, or any other disease.

Chris Faulkes with a naked mole rat

Chris Faulkes knows of one magic bullet to kill cancer. And, back at Queens, he is making his point by pulling at the skin of a naked mole rat in his hand. "It's the naked mole rat's elasticky skin that's made it cancer-proof," he says. "The theory—first discovered by a lab in America—is that, as an adaptation to living underground in tight tunnels, they've developed a really loose skin so they don't get stuck or snagged. That elasticity is a result of it producing this gloopy sugar , high-molecular-weight hyaluronan (HMW-HA)."

While humans already have a version of hyaluronan in our bodies that helps heal wounds by encouraging cell division (and, ironically, assist tumor growth), that of the naked mole rat does the opposite. "The hyaluronan in naked mole rats is about six times larger than ours," says Faulkes. "It interacts with a metabolic pathway, which helps prevent cells from coming together to make tumors."

But that's not all: It is believed it may also act to help keep their blood vessels elastic, which, in turn, relieves high blood pressure (hypertension)—a condition that affects one in three people and is known in medical circles as "the silent killer" because most patients don't even know they have it. "I see no reason why we can't use this to inform human anti-cancer and aging therapies by manipulating our own hyaluronan system," says Faulkes.

Then there are the naked mole rat's cells themselves, which seem to make proteins – the molecular machines that make bodies work—more accurately than ours, preventing age-related illnesses like Alzheimer's. And the way they handle glucose doesn't change with age either, reducing their susceptibility to things like diabetes. "Most of the age-related declines you see in the physiology in mammals do not occur in naked mole rats," adds Faulkes. "We've only just begun on the naked mole rat story, and already a whole universe is opening up that could have a major downstream effect on human health. It's very exciting."

Of course, the naked mole rat isn't the only animal scientists are probing to pick the lock of long life. "With a heart rate of 1,000 beats a minute, the tiny hummingbird should be riddled with rogue free radicals , allowing for more cell divisions than most animals are capable of. And we mustn't forget the 2mm-long C. elegans roundworm. Within these 2mm-long nematodes are genetic mechanisms that can be picked apart like cogs and springs in an attempt to better understand the causes of aging and ultimately death."

The Immortal Jellyfish Screenshot via

But there is one animal on Earth that may hold the master key to immortality: the Turritopsis dohrnii, or Immortal Jellyfish. Most jellyfish, when they reach the end of life, die and melt into the sea. Not the Turritopsis dohrnii. Instead, the 4mm sea creature sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor, where its body folds in on itself—assuming the jellyfish equivalent of the fetal position—and regenerates back into a baby jellyfish, or polyp, in a rare biological process called transdifferentiation, in which its old cells essentially transform into young cells.

There is just one scientist who has been culturing Turritopsis polyps in his lab consistently. He works alone, without major financing or a staff, in a poky office in Shirahama, a sleepy beach town near Kyoto. Yet professor Shin Kubota has managed to rejuvenate one of his charges 14 times, before a typhoon washed it away. "The Turritopsis dohrnii is a miracle of nature," he says over the phone. "My ultimate purpose is to understand exactly how they regenerate so we can apply its mechanisms to human beings. You see, very surprisingly, the Turritopsis's genome is very similar to humans'—much more so than worms. I believe we will have the technology to begin applying this immortal genome to humans very soon."

How soon? "In 20 years," he says, a little mischievously. "That is my guess."

If PKubota really believes his own claim, then he's got a race on his hands; he's not the only scientist with a "20-year" prophesy. The acclaimed futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil believes that by the 2030s we'll have microscopic machines traveling through our bodies, repairing damaged cells and organs, effectively wiping out diseases and making us biologically immortal anyway. "The full realization of nanobots will basically eliminate biological disease and aging," he told the world a few years back.

It's a blossoming industry. And, in a state-of-the-art lab at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, at Bristol University, Dr. Sabine Hauert is on its coalface. She designs swarms of nanobots—each a thousand times smaller than the width of a hair—that can be injected into the bloodstream with a payload of drugs to infiltrate the pores of cancer cells, like millions of tiny Trojan Horses, and destroy them from within. "We can engineer nanoparticles to basically do what we want them to do," she tells me. "We can change their size, shape, charge, or material and load them with molecules or drugs that they can release in a controlled fashion."

While she says the technology can be used to combat a whole gamut of different illnesses, Dr. Hauert has trained her crosshairs on cancer. What's the most effective nano-weapon against malignant tumors? Gold. Millions of swarming golden nanobots that can be dispatched into the bloodstream, where they will seep into the tumor through little holes in its rapidly-growing vessels and lie in wait. "Then," she says, "if you heat them with an infrared laser they vibrate violently, degrading the tumour's cells. We can then send in another swarm of nanoparticles decorated with a molecule that's loaded with a chemotherapy drug, giving a 40-fold increase in the amount of drugs we can deliver. This is very exciting technology that is already having a huge impact on the way we treat cancer, and will do on other diseases in the future."

The next logical step, as Kurzweil claims, is that we will soon have nanobots permanently circulating in our veins, cleaning and maintaining our bodies indefinitely. They may even replace our organs when they fail. Clinical trials of such technology is already beginning on mice.

The naked mole rat colony in Chris Faulkes's lab

The oldest mouse ever to live was called Yoda. He lived to the age of four. The oldest ever dog, Bluey, was 29. The oldest flamingo was 83. The oldest human was 122. The oldest clam was 507. The point is, evolution has rewarded species who've worked out ways to not get eaten by bigger species—be it learning to fly, developing big brains or forming protective shells. Naked mole rats went underground and learned to work together.

"A mouse is never going to worry about cancer as much as it will about cats," says Faulkes. "Naked mole rats have no such concerns because they built vast networks of tunnels, developed hierarchies and took up different social roles to streamline productivity. They bought themselves time to evolve into biological marvels."

At the top of every colony is a queen. Second in rank are her chosen harem of catamites with whom she mates for life. Beneath them are the soldiers and defenders of the realm, the biggest animals around, and at the bottom are the workers who dig tunnels with their teeth or search for tubers, their main food source. They have a toilet chamber, a sleeping chamber, a nursing chamber and a chamber for disposing of the dead. They rarely go above ground and almost never mix with other colonies. "It's a whole mosaic of different characteristics that have come about through adapting to living in this very extreme ecological niche," says Faulkes. "All of the weird and wonderful things that contribute to their healthy aging have come about through that. Even their extreme xenophobia helps prevent them being wiped out by infectious diseases."

Still, the naked mole rat is not perfect. Dr. Faulkes learned this the hard way one morning in March last year, when he turned the light on in his lab to a grisly scene. "Blood was smeared about the perspex walls of a tunnel in colony N," he says, "and the mangled corpse of one of my mole rats lay lifeless inside." There was one explanation: A queen had been murdered. "There had been a coup," he recalls. "Her daughter had decided she wanted to run the colony so she savaged her mother to death to take over. You see, naked mole rats may be immune to death by aging, but they can still be killed, just like you and me."

That's the one issue that true immortalists have with the concept of radical life extension: we can still get hit by a bus or murdered. But what if the entire contents of your brain—your memories, beliefs, hopes, and dreams—could be scanned and uploaded onto a mainframe, so when You 1.0 finally does fall down a lift shaft or is killed by a friend, You 2.0 could be fed into a humanoid avatar and rolled out of an immortality factory to pick up where you left off?

Dr. Randall Koene insists You 2.0 would still be you. "What if I were to add an artificial neuron next to every real neuron in your brain and connect it with the same connections that your normal neurons have so that it operates in exactly the same way?" he says. "Then, once I've put all these neurons in place, I remove the connections to all the old neurons, one by one, would you disappear?"

Dr. Koene is a neuroscientist, a neuroengineer and Science Director of the 2045 Initiative, the brainchild of Russian billionaire Dmitri Itskov, whose aim is to "create technologies enabling the transfer of individual's personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality".

It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done? "The mind is a product of the brain that is routed in physics," says Koene. "It's a material thing subject to cause and effect, and that's the kind of thing we describe in mathematical models. If we can describe something in math then it means it is computative, so of course it's possible to upload a mind such that it's running on a different computing substrate. That said, being just a brain in a box would be a very sad thing indeed. That's why we need immortal bodies to support it."

So he and Itskov have launched a four-phase assault on death, known as the Avatar Project. Avatar A (2015-2020) will be a robot that we control with our brains; Avatar B (2020-2025) will be the transplantation of a brain into a synthetic body; Avatar C (2030-2035) will involve uploading the contents of a person's brain into a synthetic one; and Avatar D (2045) will be a hologram that will replace bodies completely.

"The real reason for this is self-directed evolution," Koene says. "If we can modify not just the mind but also the body, then that adaptability is the most powerful thing there is. It was Darwin who said it wasn't the strongest or smartest species that survives, but the most adaptable, and this technology will include allowing us to change our capabilities of memory, travel, how fast processes information, or even add new senses to experience a spectrum way beyond what we do now."

Despite his lofty ambitions, even Koene thinks we'll never truly escape the cold hand of death. "Really, what we're talking about is putting the extent of your life in your hands as a choice," he adds. "Don't leave it up to a disease, leave it up to yourself."

Aubrey De Grey (Photo: SHARE Conference, via)

But would, ultimately, that choice be up to us? Or would it be up to someone else? That's what Dr. John Troyer, director of Bath University's Centre for Death and Society, wants to know. "Overcrowding is the obvious long-term issue," he says. "But the near-term question is about access. Will this technology be universally accessible, or will it be exclusionary?"

He makes an intriguing point. Already there is a wide healthcare disparity between rich and poor; recent figures from the London Health Observatory found the gap in life expectancy between those in London's affluent and deprived areas is now nearly 25 years. "We already have discrepancies in access to all kinds of biomedical care in the UK," he says. "We're heading into a situation where the upper classes might say, 'Well, maybe the lower classes should just be able to die a natural death while we live on.' I mean, in some ways that's already happened—it's just not said that way."

There are political, ethical and social questions, too. "How will we fund this?" he asks. "How long should women continue to have babies? How long will we go to university for? Will prisoners be offered the technology or denied it? And what if the state tries to use it as a punitive tool – to forcibly regenerate criminals against their will for however long the sentence is? Well, we already have that too."

Dr. Troyer sees another standout theme in man's quest for radical life-extension. "There is a certain masculine blindness to some of these issues, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it is being driven largely by white men with money who've worked in tech," he says. "Of course, I don't ever want to essentialize gender, but there is a bit of a divide in what could be described as male ego driving a lot of this, as if society would be robbed of the male genius. In my experience, I get a lot of women saying, 'Why would I want to do this?' It's a noticeable trend, that's all I should say."

Of course, that's not something a naked mole rat would ever worry about. In their feminist ecosystem, there's no place for male ego; it is the queen alone who decides what's good for the colony. And she has a bulletproof way of preventing overpopulation, too: by literally bullying her subjects into infertility, so she has exclusive breeding rights. "She uses a system of very subtle cues, like shoving and trampling, to prevent them from developing sexually," says Faulkes. "In humans, stress can lead to infertility, and it's likely that the same mechanisms are interfered with in mole rats."

As a result, she gets the best food and does the least work. Whenever another tries to usurp her she fights them to the death, and usually wins. And if she wants sex, she gets it. "The queen always initiates mating," chuckles Faulkes. "Woe betide anyone who tries it on with her uninvited." It may be a dictatorship, but it's one that works. "It works because every mole rat is programmed to do their bit, no matter how small, for the good of the colony, which in turn helps them individually," says Faulkes. "That's ultimately why they've developed their anti-aging genes."

Trouble is, that doesn't really work for humans: In North Korea, the average life expectancy is 69 years, according to the World Health Organisation, compared to 81 in the neighboring south. "Short of all moving to the sewers and waiting 20 million years to evolve," smiles Faulkes, "our best bet's to replicate their mechanisms through biology. That we think we can do."

So who's your money on to win the race for immortality? Obviously, each scientist I spoke to reckons their field is the one to watch. But in truth, it probably will be a combination of them all. As De Grey says: "I don't think there will be a single winner in that sense. I think it'll be a case of the divide and conquer approach. Lots of people are going to have to develop lots of different components and put them together before we can truly defeat aging."

We've moved downstairs to Faulkes's office. Aside from the reams of paperwork and science books, it is a cornucopia of biological curios: a pickled bat in a perspex box, monkey skulls, horse skulls, the scull of a saber-tooth tiger, a dead crow, a stuffed fish and a plastic bag of preserved rats from the 1920s hanging on the door. It is a veritable museum of death, which seems a little ironic given what he does in life. "I suppose it all reminds me that death is everywhere," he says. "Right now we can't escape it—not yet—so why ignore it?"

But if we do work out how to streamline our biology to defeat aging, would he want to live forever? He thinks for a moment, then says: "I dunno. It might be interesting. But to be honest, I'm more interested in next month when I'm going to Download Festival to see Black Sabbath with the wife and kids. That's real life, and I plan to live it while I can."

Follow Matt Blake on Twitter.

Diving Deep into the NSFW Side of LinkedIn

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An example of the kind of inspirational quotes people are now posting on LinkedIn

Megalomania, emotional blackmail, prostitution, drug dealing, and creepy men named Bob. Depending on your perspective, these are either the ingredients for the first two seasons of Twin Peaks, or a few basic features of your LinkedIn feed.

Visit the world's biggest social network for professionals, and you'll notice something's changed. No longer is the site characterized by very earnest CV updates and people endorsing jokey skills like "weight gain" and "vole herding" on their friends' profiles. Now, there's much more to it than that: direct messages inviting you to join "Fat Joe–approved" pyramid schemes; photos of people doing "good deeds"; middle-aged bank managers arguing about breasts; a steady stream of inspirational quotes, in which Salvador Dalí, Steve Jobs, and Muhammad Ali impart pieces of wisdom that have absolutely nothing to do with finding a job

Individuals are trying to make their profiles go viral in the hope that potential employers will see they're really good at reposting memes and then offer them a spot at their actuarial firm or funeral parlor. In fact, admits LinkedIn's senior communications manager Crystal Braswell, it's the evolution of the network feed into something more akin to Facebook and Twitter that has put a "heavy impetus" on members trying to generate viral posts.

READ ON VICE LONG READS: The Things the World's Billionaires Are Funding to Help Humanity Become Immortal

Although she is unable to provide any statistical data to back this up, Braswell says there's a direct link between users posting viral content and career growth. "We have heard from members that after posting viral posts, they have gotten new jobs or opportunities," she says. "It's all about opening up your thought process to your peers."

However, it turns out that many of your peers do not appreciate you opening up your thought process. Some LinkedIn users have been voicing their annoyance with the Facebookification of the site using the #RIPLinkedIn hashtag on Twitter, lamenting the posting of "inappropriate pictures," the many, many spam messages they receive, and the "political propaganda" they see popping up in their feeds.

Still, Braswell says LinkedIn's 250 million users are now "more engaged then they've ever been." So what exactly do they all find so engaging?

INSPIRING PHILOSOPHY

Picture the scenario: You're at a music festival, you've dropped a pill, you've lost your friends because it's dark and your eyes are doing that weird flickering thing, and you've decided to just plant on top of a grassy bank and dance around for a bit by yourself. You are less aware of your body than usual, so do not realize that both of your arms are above your head and that your lower jaw is parallel with the tip of your nose.

A few years later, you've heard that a LinkedIn profile will definitely result in a six figure wage, so you go ahead and sign up. Everything looks good at first. Colin Okoye from school has endorsed your timekeeping skills; Jenny Atkins from college has reached out to tell you there's temp work at the entirely faceless logistics company she works for, if you're looking?

And then you refresh your feed. Fear—the kind that strikes right in the lower intestine when you wake up after the Christmas party and remember that you called your boss a "Tory cunt" as a joke no less than 15 times—consumes your entire central nervous system. A PR guru named Hans has shared a video of you dancing at that music festival with his peers and tagged it with an inspirational message: "It only takes one person to create a crowd."

"I might see a post like that, and maybe I'm in the middle of a crazy day, so it's a welcome reset," says Braswell. "It can be inspiring to read for some businessmen and women."

I'm generally not very inspired by videos of people dancing, so I scroll through my own LinkedIn feed to see if I can find something genuinely inspiring that might provide a welcome reset in the relentless succession of disappointment that is my life.

Someone has liked a story about a toddler—well, a stock photo of a toddler—giving her mom the sweeter of two apples. The post is designed to "improve your judgement skills as a working professional." Obviously. Another post about two giant dogs ready to tear shreds of shit out of each other is a cautionary tale about your moral conscience... in the office! Finally, I am greeted by an image of the 11th president of India, APJ Abdul Kalam. A quote attributed to him reads: "Success definition: when our 'signature' changes to 'autograph.'" He is grinning at me, mocking me with his smile.

None of this inspires me. In fact, if anything, it makes me feel worse. I'm 27, and my signature isn't considered an autograph to anyone on earth.

WEIRD EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL

Business, eh? The old rat race. Survival of the fittest. Doing a job. It can be pretty taxing, right? Sometimes so taxing that our mind's eye becomes completely blinded by the red hot poker of spreadsheets and expense forms, and we lose sight of the struggles of our fellow man.

So what better way to remedy this—and beef up that profile engagement—than by sharing some Humans of New York-esque posts with our LinkedIn contacts? An HR manager at Asda who recently posted a selfie with an elderly man she'd spent two hours having coffee with knows this full well. The caption stated that her conversation with the man was "the perfect reminder that amongst the hustle and bustle of everyday life and work, time really is the greatest gift to give someone." Her post racked up nearly 200,000 likes and was praised by some in the comments as "the best thing I've seen all year".

LinkedIn's Crystal Braswell approves of the post, saying: "I don't think that it is random, as while it might not resonate with someone like you, another person may see lots of relevance or be inspired to take some time out of their busy day."

Let's explore the facts: At worst, most people would get fired if they took two hours out of their day to have coffee with a stranger. At best, they'd have to endure a very tedious disciplinary meeting. But who am I to disagree with a post that has touched quadruple the population of the Faroe Islands? There are more and more of these "good deed" posts appearing, presumably now that people have cottoned on to the fact that Being a Nice Person = V Good Chance of Becoming Employed.

THE PICK-UP ARTISTS

British lawyer Charlotte Proudman, dubbed a "feminazi" by the Daily Mail, recently made the headlines after receiving a message from a senior partner at a law firm, in which he called her profile picture "stunning." She subsequently outed him as a sexist and claimed that rich white businessmen now use LinkedIn to pick up women.

I ask a female friend for some more evidence of this. She presents Bob, one of her many regular commenters. Bob, who she's never actually met, tells her he would move "heaven and earth" to meet with her. Another guy adds a winking smiley to the beginning of the sentence: "Have you ever covered peer-to-peer lending?"

I'm unsure of whether that bizarre pickup routine has worked on literally anyone in the past, but it definitely didn't work on my friend.

Separately, I see a female designer has posted a grinning photo where she's clutching a dog with a big floppy tongue. The dress she's in is very cleavage-y. I'm not sure why she's shared this on LinkedIn, but the commenters don't seem to mind.

CATFISHING

The process of scraping—which involves a company using the details of a LinkedIn member to create a fake profile to then sell on dodgy financial deals—is rife on LinkedIn. The company has previously admitted that the process "undermines the integrity and effectiveness of LinkedIn's professional network by polluting it with thousands of fake profiles."

That means you could be accepting requests from clones of your friends, or be victim to someone using your image to completely fuck people over.

SEX AND DRUGS

Type in the word "escorts," and you're greeted with more than 10,000 results. While I'm sure not all of these results represent sex workers, a few clicks in, and I'm on the profile of Nottingham-based escort agency Midlands Maidens, which proudly cites "Microsoft Office" as one of its skills. LinkedIn is on the internet, so finding something to do with sex within its wide collection of accounts is no huge surprise— it is a little odd, considering the site specifically forbids "profiles or content that promotes escort services or prostitution."

Another search takes me to a page proudly offering a regular supply of cocaine. While it's probably a hoax, it's no secret drug transactions are taking place on LinkedIn, with weed growers operating in places where cannabis is legal advertising their wares to the entire world—much of which is still pretty backward when it comes to drug laws. So will I soon be able to recommend people on my connections list based on their marijuana growing capabilities?

Braswell counters: "I think we are succeeding on clamping down on content that violates rules. I do. I see the team making good strides. Ultimately, we provide tools so you can filter out the content in your feed that you don't want to see. You can block users. Moving forward, we will provide more clarity and education to users that these tools exist. The feed will become more customizable."

It's a fair point. After all, I don't have to see any of this. I have choices. I decide to click "hide this content" and "unfollow" on all the regular pests who clog up my feed, before hitting the refresh button. I still don't have a job, but at least I never have to read another Katharine Hepburn quote in my life.

Follow Thomas Hobbs on Twitter.

Jian Ghomeshi Won’t Face Second Sexual Assault Trial

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Jian Ghomeshi will not face a sex assault trial in June. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

Former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi will not stand trial for sexual assault in June, but will instead sign a peace bond in relation to the complaint, according to a source.

Ghomeshi, 48, was facing one count of sexual assault relating to a 2008 incident involving a former CBC colleague. A five-day trial was slated for next month. But according to reports, the charge will be withdrawn in court Wednesday.

Ghomeshi is expected to speak in court and sign a peace bond—a court order that will require him to abide by certain good behaviour conditions for a year or face criminal charges. It is not an admission of guilt.

Following his February trial, Ghomeshi was acquitted of four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcome resistance by choking brought forward by three other complainants.

More than 20 women have come forward alleging Ghomeshi was abusive to them, though few pressed criminal charges.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

The Government Cover-Up Behind Romania's Filthy Hospitals

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Protesters at Univeristy Square in Bucharest fighting for their right to not get sick in the hospital. Photo by Alex Mihaileanu

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

Last Friday, about a thousand protesters gathered in Bucharest's University Square. "Silence kills," "You diluted our health," and "Your incompetence is our death," read signs held up by some of them. They had taken to the streets to express their anger at Romanian authorities, who had authorized the use of faulty disinfection products in hospitals. These products turned out to be heavily diluted—about ten times more than was claimed on their labels. That malpractice put thousands of patients in these hospitals at risk of getting infections.

This all came to light in an investigation by the newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor, published in late April. The paper uncovered that the disinfectants used by medical personnel in over 2000 operating rooms throughout the country—to clean their hands and their medical instruments, among other things—were never inspected by governmental health authorities. The quality of the products was only guaranteed by their manufacturer—a company called Hexi Pharma.

But when the newspaper had the products tested at a private laboratory, it became clear that disinfectants had been diluted—to increase Hexi Pharma's profits. As a consequence of this dilution, the number of hospital-acquired infections in Romania has gone up in the last few years.

The scandal broke out six months after a fire killed 64 people in nightclub Colectiv in downtown Bucharest. 27 people died at the scene from the fire or from smoke inhalation, while another 33 died in the following weeks in hospitals—succumbing to their injuries and bacterial infections.

Photo by Alex Mihaileanu

The Gazeta Sporturilor also found that Dan Alexandru Condrea is not only the main shareholder of Hexi Pharma, but also controlled Unilab—one of the laboratories where Hexi Pharma had its products tested. Hexi Pahrma also had many government contracts signed with hospitals around Romania. On top of that, it recently came out that the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) knew about the problem and had informed authorities several times in the last few years.

"All these legal beneficiaries received constant notifications about the irregularities in Romania's public healthcare system. Over the past five years, the SRI has sent about a hundred messages, including ones on matters related to hospital-acquired infections," according to SRI spokesperson, Ovidiu Marincea.

The fact that Romanian hospitals do not report cases of hospital-acquired infection out of fear of being legally sanctioned—even for the unavoidable ones—is a well-known issue in Romania. That fact explains why official European reports note that Romania has a rate of only 0.2 percent for such infections, while in other European countries that rate is between three and five percent.

"We know that's impossible—we can't have the cleanest hospitals in Europe," said former health minister Patriciu Achimaș Cadariu at a press conference on the subject. He was probably right there: European research says Romanian patients have the hardest time of all European patients getting rid of bacteria they have contracted in hospitals.

Romanian medical authorities responded to the scandal by promising to look into how efficient Hexi Pharma's disinfectants were. Last week, the government came back with reports announcing that out of the 3526 tests it had carried out at a national level, only five percent of the Hexi Pharma product samples did not match the contents or proportions on the label. That same research also claimed that other manufacturers than Hexi Pharma were selling disinfectants were even less efficient than advertised. This government report further angered Romanians, who were skeptical about the authenticity outcome, to say the least.

On top of all that, Romanian investigative platform RISE Project showed in a publication last week that Hexi Pharma owner Aurelian Condrea used an offshore account in Cyprus for his own profit. Condrea would buy one liter of disinfectant for €7.90 to his own company, Hexi Pharma.

Meanwhile, Romanian prosecutors began a criminal investigation into how Hexi Pharma gained a monopoly on the market by signing thousands of contracts with public hospitals in Romania. The Hexi Pharma factory has halted production and has assured it will cooperate fully with the investigation.

Protesters covered the stairs of the Romanian health ministry with fake blood, ten times diluted. Photo by Sidonia Bogdan

When the health ministry claimed only five percent of Hexi Pharma's samples had been diluted, several media demanded that the names of hospitals where bad samples had been found were made public. The Ministry refused to do so, claiming they weren't allowed to in light of the ongoing criminal investigation. VICE Romania then encouraged its readers last Thursday to bombard the Romanian government with e-mails asking to disclose the names of the hospitals that presented a public risk of infection.

Prosecutors told VICE Romania that "there was no written correspondence between the prosecutors' office and the health ministry." That would mean that the health ministry had lied when it claimed it couldn't name those hospitals because of the criminal investigation.

Then on Friday, after 400 people had flooded the inboxes of Romanian medical authorities, the health ministry published the list of the 50 hospitals that had used faulty disinfectants. Among them were nine hospitals located in Bucharest, including four emergency medical units. This lie—and probably also the fact that he had missed a governmental crisis meeting—led to Health Minister Patriciu Achimaș Cadariu resigning yesterday.

Current Romanian PM Dacian Ciolos has temporarily taken over the position of health minister and has been working on a tactical reform plan, together with several hospital directors and specialists from the ministry. That plan should be put in effect in June. Ciolos has also promised in a press statement that all disinfectants and hospitals will be thoroughly inspected in the near future. Whether that reform will ever actually be put into effect is questionable: Romania has local and general elections coming up, and some politicians seem to care about more about those than about the health of the Romanian people.

How HIV-Positive Immigrants Get Stranded Abroad Without Meds

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Photo via Flickr user Felix Castor

Since he was diagnosed with HIV in 1994, José (not his real name) hadn't missed a day of his antiretroviral medication. That changed when he applied for his green card. José, a Mexican citizen, had been living undocumented in California for years until he married a US citizen and became eligible for permanent residency. Since he was not in the United States legally, he had to return to Mexico to have the required medical exams before he could return to the United States with legal status. He anticipated a two-week stay for the medical exams; he packed a month of medication just to be sure.

Within a few days of arriving in Mexico, though, doctors informed José that because of his HIV status, he would need more stringent medical tests. He would need to stay in Mexico until they got the results, which would take three months. He frantically traveled to different states and cities, but couldn't find a supply of his specific antiretroviral medication. So José went two months without it.

"It was a nightmare and such a stressful thing because you don't know what the outcome is. You don't know if you're going to be allowed to come back," said José, who also lost his job and medical insurance because of the unexpected wait. "We . Their family is in the US," said Bolour of these clients. "We have a regulation that doesn't make sense."

Mixes of antiretroviral medicines that are very specific to each patient are often not available in Mexico, according to Tom Davies, a professor emeritus at the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University. If it's available, a month's supply in Mexico can cost thousands of dollars; shipping it in from the United States can also be difficult.

Last year, Antonio—an HIV-positive undocumented immigrant who applied for a green card after marrying his partner—found himself stuck at the US consulate in Ciudad Juárez for more than a month. (He asked to be referred to by first name only, because his family does not know he is HIV-positive.) Antonio could only take a month's supply of his antiretroviral medication with him, because that is all his insurance would give him in advance. His husband attempted to ship him more medication, but the package was turned away at the border because Mexico requires a permit to ship prescription medication.

In a last ditch effort, the couple and their immigration attorney contacted Luis V. Gutiérrez, a Congressman from Illinois and a prominent advocate for immigration reform. Gutiérrez helped Antonio secure humanitarian parole, which allowed him to return to the US briefly for medical purposes.

"Government policies are generally one-size-fits-all and sometimes people get put in difficult or potentially deadly circumstances," Gutiérrez told VICE in a statement. "Sometimes people need help getting the bureaucracy to come to the logical and humanitarian outcome."

Morris said his organization, Immigration Equality, is pushing for a change in the procedure—specifically, advocating to test HIV-positive, undocumented green card applicants in the US. The results could then be sent directly to US consulates ahead of the applicant's green card interview.

Morris noted that by stranding people without access to their medication puts them at even greater health risks. "They are putting these people at greater risk by sending them to countries where TB is an issue and asking them to stay there for three months," he said.

Antonio's partner, Darren, emphasized that they were only able to get Antonio his medication because they had a committed immigration attorney, the help of a congressman, and the financial resources to stay afloat during the costly ordeal.

"I just hope we can prevent it from happening to someone else," he said.

Follow Serena Solomon on Twitter.

Inside the Room Where Boston's Drug Addicts Can Be High Without Overdosing

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Dr. Jessie Gaeta, chief medical officer with the Boston Health Care for the Homeless, at SPOT before it opened last month. Photo via BHCHP

This piece was published in partnership with the Influence.

On a corner of Albany Street, along a strip known in Boston as Methadone Mile, an easy-to-miss sign appears in a window. It simply says: "SPOT."

This unassuming piece of paper denotes a new program, revolutionary by US standards, called the Supportive Place for Observation and Treatment. Run by Boston Healthcare for the Homeless (BHCHP), SPOT is an indication that the political tide is turning when it comes to dealing with drugs like heroin and the people who use them.

Physically, SPOT is very simple: It's just a small room encircled by reclining chairs. It's purpose is equally simple—if, in some circles, controversial. SPOT is a place where people currently under the influence of drugs can go for medical supervision to reduce their risks. The facility is staffed by nurses; people who arrive have their vital signs monitored and will receive immediate treatment if necessary.

Dr. Jessie Gaeta, chief medical officer at BHCHP, explains that anyone can walk into SPOT. People sign in at the door, but giving a name is optional. Once settled into a chair, their oxygen levels will be monitored, and a finger probe will be used to track their pulse. Their blood pressure will also be taken every five minutes, using an automated blood pressure cuff. Staff frequently reassess participants' levels of consciousness on a formal scale, says Dr. Gaeta, so they can identify any changes that suggest deepening central nervous system depression.

"An advantage to monitoring a person's vital signs if they are sedated is that we can often know that someone is deteriorating before respiratory or cardiac arrest occur, and we can respond earlier," Dr. Gaeta explains. The responses to such a situation could include CPR and the use of Naloxone, the anti-opioid overdose drug. Emergency services would also be called immediately.

"Just because people are active in their addiction doesn't mean that they deserve to be thrown to the outcasts of society." —Marisol, a recovering addict

Participants decide when they are ready to leave the space, although staff would wish to ascertain first that they are able to safely walk out.

SPOT "is a long time coming," Dr. Gaeta says. Granted, the program doesn't go as far as the supervised injection facilities (SIFs) that Vancouver and other cities around the world have successfully employed for decades. But it's radical in the context of a national fixation on abstinence, America having yet to implement any legal SIFs despite some encouraging recent campaigns.

SPOT has even garnered the support of Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who himself is abstinent and in recovery—and is a noted opponent of marijuana legalization.

Dr. Gaeta cites a 2013 study that analyzed mortality rates among BHCHP's patients and found that drug overdose was the leading cause of death for this population. "This data mobilized us to take on addiction as a core part of our program's identity and to figure out how to integrate addiction services into our primary care model," she says.

The SPOT space is an extension of work BHCHP is already doing. Dr. Gaeta says they were looking for better ways to manage overdoses, as they see about two to five per week in their main building. "It's really hard to manage an overdose in the middle of a waiting room, or in a bathroom, or in a dental clinic," she notes. SPOT allows them to not only respond more effectively when overdoses happen, but also aids relationship-building with clients, she says. "We want people to feel safe coming in intoxicated," she explains. Once established, these relationships, it's hoped, will increase the likelihood of clients wishing to access addiction treatment and other health services.

And though SPOT just opened on April 26, the staff is already seeing results. The space hosted about ten people per day in its first week, and it's anticipated that will increase as word spreads. "We're noticing a shift in the way people are talking to us," Dr. Gaeta says of the early response to SPOT. A person may have come in on day one and said they were just tired and looking for somewhere to lie down, she explains. Later in the week, they might be telling staff the exact cocktail of medications they've consumed.

This information is crucial—and not just because it indicates SPOT staff are effectively building trust.

"Overdoses are becoming more complicated due to the mixing of drugs," Gaeta says. "We're seeing a lot of people mixing heroin with benzodiazepines and clonidine ." Nationwide, the majority of opioid-related fatalities involve combinations of different drugs; knowledge of their presence increases the staff's chances of better understanding how different drugs interact and responding effectively to any problem.

When designing the program, Dr. Gaeta believed it was crucial that the people who would be using the space had their voices heard. Her organization surveyed people using the local needle exchange and asked them what barriers to utilizing SPOT might be—out of that consultation, for example, came the practice that anyone can use the space, without being required to provide his or her name or ID. BHCHP's Consumer Advisory Board, made up of formerly homeless people, also had input in determining that the space was needed and that people would use it. Members of that board have also served as peer support in SPOT itself—they are often people in long-term recovery themselves, who can facilitate the relationship-building work.

Speaking with someone who uses SPOT proved a difficult task at this early stage. The participants are mostly homeless and transient, and without being required to provide a name, there is no record of who has used the room. The space is closed to visitors, and by nature of the room's use, many of the people entering or exiting are either not in the mood to talk with a journalist, or unable to do so consensually. But the fact that their numbers are already growing is a pretty good indication of its immediate value.

Check out our documentary about America's for-profit rehab industry.


Reception from Boston's large recovery community, where some might feel challenged by SPOT's non-abstinence focus, has also been mostly positive. "The reality is people are going to continue to use," says Marisol, a local woman in long-term recovery. "We cannot force them into treatment, and we cannot arrest them out of addiction. Just because people are active in their addiction doesn't mean that they deserve to be thrown to the outcasts of society." She adds that she wishes a place like SPOT had existed when she was still using. "If I was still active and I was injecting by myself in the bathroom, the chances of me overdosing and nobody finding me would be much higher."

The space is not without its detractors, however. Dave Mitchell, another Boston resident in recovery, has mixed feelings about SPOT. "One side says it's a great idea, and maybe there won't be so many fatal overdoses. But on the other hand, I feel like any funding going toward this project could be used in a more beneficial, recovery-based solution... like treatment beds or sober houses." He also worries that the space is "enabling active addicts."

But the evidence from programs that go further still than SPOT is hard to argue with. In the eight countries that allow supervised injection facilities, the results have been clear. These sites have reduced the number of drug-related deaths, increased numbers of people seeking both drug treatment and medical care for other conditions, and decreased numbers of discarded syringes in public areas. Such unequivocal evidence of positive outcomes has to outweigh any instinctive concerns about "enabling."

So why doesn't Boston go further? Dr. Gaeta notes that providing a space for people to safely inject their drugs would violate both state and federal laws. A recent op-ed in the Boston Globe addressed the "daunting" legal hurdles that would have to be navigated if Massachusetts hoped to follow in Vancouver's footsteps, but ultimately argued SPOT doesn't go far enough and that a supervised injection facility is badly needed.

Few US politicians have caught up. In an interview with Rolling Stone, US "Drug Czar" Michael Botticelli indicated that SIFs are being researched and have not been ruled out as a possibility: "Taking a close look at these programs becomes very important for us—not only in terms of reducing overdose and infectious disease, but also how these programs might or might not an entryway into treatment."

SPOT is not the only harm reduction method the city of Boston is utilizing. The needle exchange AHOPE—which is located next door to SPOT—provided more than 150,000 clean needles last year, reducing people's risks of HIV and hepatitis C transmissions. And the Boston Public Health Commission has made needle disposal kiosks available for a range of organizations and service providers.

The most recent kiosk was installed at the Dimock Center, a community health provider. It's an outdoor model available to anyone in the community; you don't even have to come inside to access it. Dimock staff hope this low barrier to use will promote further treatment when the person is ready. "The needle kiosk provides a safe, secure, and nonjudgmental method for reducing risks," says Rachel Maloney, nurse medical manager for HIV Services at Dimock.

Time will tell how much of an impact SPOT can have, or how soon it may be superseded by an SIF. But for now, it's doing its best to provide a desperately needed service. Dr. Gaeta doesn't see SPOT as new or innovative, because managing overdoses is something that many providers do already—people aren't kicked out of the building due to intoxication. But explicitly naming a safe space where people can go when they're under the influence is new, and could potentially be a model for the rest of the country to follow.

"People are worried about making it easy to use and that it will promote use. But there is no evidence for that," Dr. Gaeta notes. On the other hand, "There is no recovery in death."

This article was originally published by the Influence, a news site that covers the full spectrum of human relationships with drugs. Follow the Influence on Facebook or Twitter.

Britni de la Cretaz is a freelance writer, feminist momma, and recovered alcoholic living in Boston. Follow her on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: I’m a Republican Lawmaker in the Deep South and These Are the Gun Laws I Can Support

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This post originally appeared on the Trace.

It is known as the "Charleston loophole." Three months before Dylann Roof opened fire in a Charleston, South Carolina, church, killing nine black parishioners, he was arrested for drug possession. The offense should have ultimately prevented him from purchasing the Glock handgun he used in the massacre. But a clerical error meant the FBI examiner conducting Roof's background check was unable to get more information about the arrest within the 72 hours allotted under the law. So the purchase was automatically approved, in a "default proceed" sale.

In the aftermath of the mass killing, South Carolina lawmakers introduced legislation that would extend the time that federal investigators have to review background checks for gun buyers. But in April, the head of the state's Senate Judiciary Committee, Larry Martin, squashed the bill, and two other gun reform measures, by refusing to hold hearings on them.


South Carolina State Senator Larry Martin. Illustration by Alex Fine for The Trace

The move could be viewed as another case of a conservative lawmaker in a conservative state acting according to the standard ideological script—killing anything that appears to threaten the Second Amendment. And Martin says he did oppose those bills on ideological grounds. But he also says that he declined to hold hearings for practical reasons: He didn't want to give a platform to ultra right-wing gun groups who would use a doomed bill to rally their members to flood his phone line and crash his inbox. Martin believes the current three-day background check window is sufficient, and that the poor records reporting that allowed Roof to get his gun can be remedied without legislation.

Martin's broader record shows a Southern conservative politician more willing than most to challenge the gun lobby. He has sponsored, and ushered through, legislation that seeks to keep guns away from potentially dangerous people, like domestic abusers and the severely mentally ill. He now says he will also work to defeat a bill, approved by an overwhelming majority by the state's House of Representatives on Monday, that would allow state residents to carry concealed weapons in public without a license.

Here is Martin discussing his votes on gun reform, the backlash from some of the bills he has supported, and what he thinks is really driving the so-called permitless carry movement, as told to Mike Spies.

In a Southern state like South Carolina, there are ways to determine whether gun control legislation is good or bad. The essential thing to keep in mind is that "bad" is anything that contradicts the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment provides a very clear grant of authority under our Constitution for law-abiding citizens to have firearms in their homes, cars, or on their person, if they so choose.

But I'm not one of those types who believe that any common sense approach to solving a problem is always trumped by the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment sets a high bar for taking someone's gun rights away, but if you've demonstrated you're a threat, some action needs to be taken.

I'm not one of those types who believe that any common sense approach to solving a problem is always trumped by the Second Amendment.

There were bills at the start of the session about creating a gun registry, extending waiting periods, and banning assault weapons. I wouldn't hold a hearing on them because it would have been taken by some very extreme gun rights groups—not the NRA, but the fringe groups—they would have used the mere fact that we held a hearing as a fundraising tool. And I have no interest in raising money for those fringe groups. I've seen the emails they've sent out on me where they were soliciting contributions so that they could shut down that gun-grabbing senator from Pickens, which is where I'm from.

I had no intention of allowing them the pleasure of convincing folks that I was holding a hearing on something that I knew would never pass. The legislation was so off the wall in terms of what's practical anymore. You might get three votes in the Senate, maybe four. We just can't take up every bill that's introduced. And the chair needs to make a decision sometimes on what's the best use of staff time.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on an issue that can't pass and shouldn't pass. All of what was in those bills, every aspect, was, I think, in a gross violation of the Second Amendment, and not in the spirit of what people believe is reasonable.

Let's talk about good legislation. It keeps guns away from criminals and, at the same time, does not step on the toes of law-abiding citizens. There is a natural tension between what law-abiding citizens can do and criminals can't do.

Twenty years ago, we enacted a concealed weapons permit law, and of course we've expanded that over the years in terms of the locations in which law-abiding citizens can carry a weapon, but we still have restrictions on it.

We still have gun-free zones, for example, despite the constant suggestion that they are a bad idea. I don't think it's sensible to do away with the notion that there are places we don't want people carrying guns. Even in the 1800s, if you walked into most municipalities, it was understood you didn't take your gun into the local tavern or a local business.

Where guns are allowed is a discussion we're going to continue to have. I'm not opposed to having administrators and educators, who have been properly trained, carry weapons in a school environment, for example.

I don't think it's sensible to do away with the notion that there are places we don't want people carrying guns.

We passed a law several years ago to prevent the mentally ill from purchasing weapons. Some viewed it as a form of gun control. But I don't think you should be able to walk out of a mental hospital, and then buy a firearm.

I also recently sponsored domestic violence legislation that created quite a furor. I don't believe people who threaten to kill their family members or spouses should have access to weapons. I was accused of being a gun grabber. What I was up against, as an architect of the bill, was a state that led the country in domestic violence deaths. Other states had passed similar legislation to take guns from domestic abusers. If someone is considered to be a threat after a court hearing, the judge ought to have the discretion to have that person surrender their weapons.

I don't think it's very difficult to be a Republican in my situation, though I've gotten some opposition. There's a Facebook page called "Fire Larry Martin." So yes, I've been attacked, but I think the Justice Antonin Scalia made clear that the Second Amendment does not guarantee the right to carry whatever, whenever, wherever. This whole argument has never been made before. If it was an inherent constitutional right, it would have come up before 2010.

If you look at how constitutional carry has evolved over the last six to eight years, and I'll just be blunt about it, I think the election of President Barack Obama contributed to the frenzy. These constitutional carry organizations have rallied behind the battle cry that he's coming for your guns. A lot of folks take the position that, "Hey, that's OK, but I'm going to be wearing one when he does."

Frankly, it's a political statement. That's what it is. And I think history will prove me right.


Follow the Trace on Twitter.



Fort McMurray Evacuees Have Seen and Done Some Weird Shit

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Fort Mac has a few wild evac stories. All photos via Facebook

It's been a tough week for just over 80,000 residents of Canada's oil capital Fort McMurray. A still-burning wildfire now nicknamed "the beast" has destroyed over 2,000 homes and buildings, damaged the city's power grid and rendered the water supply undrinkable. That's left tens of thousands scattered throughout the province in makeshift shelters, still living out of hastily-packed bags.

And while the disaster is still far from over—some predict the fire could last for months—the initial panic is slowly beginning to subside, and Fort Mac denizens are starting to share their war stories from the past several days in local internet forums. The result is equal parts harrowing and absurd.

"I've seen families with babies walking down the highway because they ran out of gas," Fort McMurray native Matthew Whiteford told VICE. "Or if they had a quad in the back, they would leave the car and continue on that for awhile. Then the quad would run out of gas. People were driving bumper to bumper for 14 hours."

Whiteford has his own unconventional escape story. He says he skateboarded about four kilometres through Fort Mac on the night of the evacuation last Tuesday, before hitching a ride to safety with a stranger.

"It was clear skies behind me, but the view in front of me was a nightmare," Whiteford said of his foot-powered trip south on Highway 63, hours before police reopened the only road out of town.

"I had a backpack with a couple shirts and socks and a pair of jeans," he said. What he didn't have, obviously, was a car. "It was an emotional moment. Fort Mac is my hometown—it was like watching my world burn."

In a Facebook group devoted to the oil town's "controversial humour" residents remember the other strange ways their neighbours left town. Teenagers Karlee and Gwen Dion amused bystanders by riding horses down the highway. "Taking the horse is smart," said one poster Nikki Rae. "You don't need gas and you can get through any traffic."

Others recounted cars and trucks going off-road, even knocking through fences to escape gridlock traffic as the flames moved in on the city. "Guy rammed through the wood fence at Golden Eagle campground with a cube van," wrote Scott Connell. "Looked like something off the movies. Wood splinters flying past me. Got to say it was funny as hell."

"I'm glad he did," chimed in Rob Boyd, "that's how we got out of there, so thanks."

What a time to be alive!

Then there were the two Fort McMurray women who went into labour just as police shut down the highway to Edmonton. New mom Susan Harty told CTV she thought for sure she'd have to deliver on the side of the road mid-evacuation. Though the district's mayor tweeted the babies were born in oil worker camps north of Fort Mac, both were actually delivered hours later after being airlifted to Edmonton. Since then, more residents shared photos of their own refugee newborns, while others listed fire baby name suggestions. (Blaze, Ash and Ember seem popular, along with Darby Allen, after the district fire chief).

As the evacuation enters a second week, Fort McMurrayites' war stories have taken another twist. With only moments to pack, and many days left to suffer the consequences, the community is buzzing with jokes about less-than-logical disaster packing.

"Nothing for me to wear but got me bear head."

A thread nearly 1,400 posts long swaps tales of the strange and useless things people decided to take with them. There are endless photos of sewing machines, mounted bear heads, samurai swords, cake icing, cheese slices, wind chimes and chain saws. Many reached for booze, often at the expense of family photos, laptops, passports, underwear and socks. My favourite is a snap of a lost dildo in the street, with the comment: "Someone must have been in a rush evacuating Gregoire last night."

All this is to say the Fort Mac crew have been through a lot lately. They've been shaken up and forced to see and do weird shit. Which I guess is why some are now getting their battle scars inked permanently. There are at least a dozen Fort Mac Strong tattoos now out there, and it's safe to say there's a wild story behind each one.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

No One Knows How Stoned Is Too Stoned to Drive

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Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Let's get something out of the way first: It's bad to drive while you're stoned. You probably already know this, being a young-ish person in a world with an ample supply of both cars and weed. The paranoia, the tendency to focus too much or not enough, the slight inaudible sort of buzzing that settles around you—all of that can add up to produce a horrible accident. Common sense and studies both tell us driving while high is stupid.

Common sense and other studies also tell us, however, that stoned drivers are much, much less dangerous than drunk drivers. And there's the rub: As weed use becomes decriminalized and legalized across the country, what sort of laws should we put in place to prevent marijuana-related DUIs? Several states, including Washington, Colorado, and Ohio, have adopted regulations that mirror the ones in place for booze, meaning if you have a certain amount of THC in your bloodstream you cannot legally operate a vehicle. Unfortunately, those laws are basically nonsense, according to a new survey released by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

The authors of the report examined records of thousands of drivers who had tested positive for THC after being pulled over. Most had alcohol in their systems along with THC (a big no-no for drivers), but among those who were solely on weed, the levels of coherence varied widely. Some who came in under the legal limit were obviously unfit to be behind the wheel, while others who were stoned out of their gourds on paper appeared to be unaffected.

The fact that weed affects different people in vastly different ways isn't surprising to anyone over 15. Some smokers are all like, "Hey let's go play basketball and talk to my parents," while others are more, "Actually hold up I want to sit very quietly over here on this bench for several hours." The disregard by lawmakers for this universal pot truth is frustrating, but not terribly surprising.

A local news channel in Seattle even dramatized this phenomenon pretty effectively a couple years ago in the wake of the 2012 legalization of recreational pot. It conducted an experiment in which three people—one who only toked occasionally, one who was a weekend pothead, and one "heavy daily user"—sucked down a third of a gram each and got behind the wheel of a car to take a supervised driving test, then smoked some more and repeated the process. Two of them flunked after nine-tenths of a gram, as you'd expect (one of them nearly hit the cameraman), but the heavy user, a 27-year-old girl named "Addy," who was three times above the legal limit for THC when she showed up to smoke some weed on TV, was "excited about being high and behind the wheel" and actually wasn't a bad driver. It wasn't until she had smoked 1.4 grams that she started having problems, backing up into a cone. (Addy became a minor internet celebrity as the "delightful driving test stoner.")

It does make sense for politicians in states set to legalize weed to worry about an uptick in stoned drivers—the AAA Foundation also found that more drivers involved in fatal crashes in Washington had THC in their blood after the state made recreational pot legal. But figuring out how high is too high to get behind the wheel is hard, not least because regular field sobriety tests don't really work on stoners—"A 21-year-old on his first bender and a hardened alcoholic will both wobble on one foot. But the same is not necessarily true of a driver who just smoked his first joint and the stoner who is high five days a week," is how a 2014 New York Times story put it.

The AAA Foundation believes that officers should use specialized tests to determine if drivers are impaired, not simply rely on how much THC is in someone's blood (traces of marijuana can linger in the bloodstream for days or weeks after smoking, making some states' outright bans on any THC in drivers' systems obviously absurd). The foundation also recommended that the existing state laws concerning THC concentrations be scrapped as they don't rely on science—but other people have been beating that drum for a while, with little effect. Meanwhile, a bill that would set THC blood level limits for drivers is advancing in Maine, and Michigan's legislature is also looking into the issue. It seems unlikely that another study telling us what we already know is going to stop lawmakers from making these choices—more likely, this is going to be a fight that pot advocates will have to wage after they finally achieve countrywide legalization.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Leslie's Diary Comics: 'Exes,' Today's Comic by Leslie Stein

A Baseless Kneejerk Reaction to the Three Newly Announced Pokémon

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Image via The Pokémon Company

Pokémon remains the greatest thing that could have possibly happened to 11-year-old me. It started, as so many important stories of youth and young boyhood do, with competitive collectible trading cards. One day they just appeared overnight: boys with backpacks would huddle around in schoolyard groups, skimming through their own decks, swapping, skimming again, holding their prized shinies aloft in special little protective baggies, the prized trades, swapping again, constantly, huge decks, two or three hundred cards, this thing I'd never heard of. Someone palmed a Ponyta card off to me and that day I made a vow. "I'm going to swap this," I said, solemnly, holding Ponyta up to the sky, "as many times as I can in one day!" I then immediately swapped it with Paul Schultz for a Diglett. Paul Schultz knew what he was doing. Fuck you Paul Schultz. A Diglett is fucking worthless. A Diglett is less than worthless. I still have that Diglett, somewhere, in a special Pokémon card case I saved up my birthday money to buy. Because Diglett is fucking worthless.

The point is Pokémon is extremely important and responsible for both treasured childhood memories and longstanding near-baseless grudges. That's why today's announcement of the three starter Pokémon for the upcoming 3DS release of Pokémon Sun and Moon is so important and so iconic. In 17 years, whatever dystopia or utopia we've carved the year 2033 to be—flying cars and hover poverty, laser crime and astronaut pills, whatever world we will have molded for ourselves—there will be thousands of men and women, just simple idiot children now, who will have a grudge with their own personal Paul Schultz over Rowlet, Litten, or Popplio. There will be thousands of grown adults who still treasure a tiny, foil-enhanced trading card of these Pokémon, resigned to an attic somewhere back where their mom lives.

Shit though, look at Rowlet:

Rowlet is that kid at your school who loved his mom like, way too much. Your mom made you invite Rowlet to your eighth birthday even though you really didn't want to, even though you knew this would hit your cred. Your mom has no idea of how cut-throat it is out in these playground streets. She has no idea about the tiny, faltering little hierarchy at play here. Unless you are actively strong and prone to violence, or really good at football, there's no way you will naturally rise to the top of the pile. You have to carve your own little niche out in the middle; you got to work for every drop of credibility. And then your mom makes you write out birthday party invitations for everyone in your class, and that includes Rowlet.

Rowlet turns up to your party with his hair neatly parted (by his mom) and wearing a waistcoat and bowtie (picked by his mom) and won't leave your side, won't leave you alone (because his mom told him that you are best friends now) and Rowlet wets himself and Rowlet has a really low level egg allergy that means your mom isn't allowed to serve anyone else birthday cake and Rowlet runs slower than everyone else and Rowlet sucks at hide and seek and you all try and escape Rowlet, you all try and sprint off and weave your way through the labyrinthine back garden you are playing in, all go off and form your own birthday party, a Rowlet-free zone, and then when you come back after 40 minutes everyone is like "where's Rowlet?" and "Yo, where'd Rowlet go?" and your mom makes everyone split up and look for him and obviously you find Rowlet, sitting cross-legged in your treehouse and sobbing, those big sobs where you can–'t re–here–lly ta–alk pro–perl–ee–hee, and your mom asks Rowlet what's wrong and Rowlet takes a big slobbery breath and goes, "nobody LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKES ME," and then everyone has to fucking stop what they are doing and go like, "oh, Rowlet" and "we do like you, Rowlet" and like Rowlet, mate: it's my fucking birthday, here, it's not about you, you little fucker, Jesus grow a spine, fuck me.

So that's Rowlet.

To truly measure the coolness of the other two Pokémon announced today we have to invent a new metric which I am calling 'Are They Pikachu, Though?' Here's how it works: if the new Pokémon are Pikachu, then they are cool with me, because Pikachu is the best unevolved Pokémon there is*, **. Obviously it is impossible for either of the two Pokémon announced today to actually be Pikachu—that ship has sailed—and so they will be marked for coolness on a Pikachu scale: five Pikachus is cool, zero Pikachus is uncool. Five Pikachus can only be achieved by Pikachu. I did not say this was a fair system.

*Don't chat shit at me about Mew, Mewtwo, or any Pokémon invented after the original 151, because I do not want to hear about them.
** The best evolved Pokémon there is is Blastoise.

POPPLIO

Popplio, now this is a Pokémon I like. This guy is like... how to explain this? I cannot look at this picture of Popplio without hearing a honking noise. Like a clown horn. Popplio is a fun guy, I can tell that straight away. This dude is here to entertain. He's essentially a seal with a clown's ruffle. This dude is circus. His big flapper says, "Eyy, buddy: high five!" He can definitely juggle. He can definitely balance things on his nose. If I had to guess his starting move I would go with 'aggressive juggle.' His finisher is probably 'cough up some fish bones so hard you think he's going to choke.' Another consideration: Popplio's name is also exceptionally fun to say in an Italian accent while doing a big molto bene hand gesture. Try it. Close your eyes and imagine you're in any Robert de Niro film from the 90s. Someone walks into you and spills your drink. You're a made guy, this won't do. You just scored a whole bunch of cocaine and you intend to both sell and take it. You can't take this disrespect. And you turn to the guy and go, "Hey. HEY. Popplio, motherfucker! Can't you see?" And then guy hurries to palm down your lapels and says something desperate and breathless like, "I'm sorry, Roddy, I didn't know it was you!" On this basis alone: Popplio is a cool Pokémon, and I approve of Nintendo inventing him.

PIKACHU SCALE: Popplio is four Pikachus out of five.

LITTEN

Litten is a lit kitten, i.e. a fire-type Pokémon that is also a cat, but could also be a frankly disastrous attempt by Nintendo to dip an innocent toe in the youth slang market. Because the kids say that, these days, on their Tumblrs, in line for their Supreme drops: "Oh," the kids say, "it's lit." And this kitten is lit. It's literally lit. It can control and conjure fire and use it to injure other animals. That is the living embodiment of lit. Both ways. That's double-lit.

I fear what the future of this might be. A large Snorlax rip-off called '$WAG.' A water-type Pokémon called 'woke bae.' Clefairy learns a new song and it's "Why You Always Lying?" In the innocent and pure world of Pokémon, I fear the encroachment of fleeting youth slang and dank, dank, tropically dank memes. The surest way to ruin something is to splice it into the modern ether. Keep Pokémon in its own world, away from our awfulness. Keep Pokémon in its own world, away from our horrid memes.

That said—and even though Pokémon traditionally has a bad time with cats, I mean Meowth sucked, Mew sucked, Mewtwo sucked, Persian sucks—I do get the vibe that Litten will evolve into something very cool indeed. A kind of Charizard/tiger mash-up creature. Fire cannons coming out of its shoulders. Eighty feet high. Really cool finishing move where it explodes. Litten is definitely the coolest Pokémon out of the latest crop. I am definitely starting with this Pokémon.

PIKACHU SCALE: Litten is also four Pikachus out of five, despite being slightly cooler than Popplio. I'm sorry. This Pikachu scale was flawed from the outset.

Follow Joel Golby on Twitter.

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