Gord Downie performing in Detroit in 2012. Photo via THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Gene Schilling

Gord Downie, the voice of a generation of Canadian rock n' roll, has announced he has terminal brain cancer.

The Tragically Hip made a statement on their website early Tuesday morning, saying Downie. 52, received the diagnosis last December.

Despite the dire prognosis, the band says they are hitting the road for one final tour.

"This feels like the right thing to do now, for Gord, and for all of us," the Hip said in a statement. "We're going to dig deep, and try to make this our best tour yet."

The band's latest and 13th album, likely their last, Man Machine Poem, comes out in June. The first tune released off the album, "Tired as Fuck," is pretty good and, in retrospect, pretty sad.

The Hip have long-occupied the space of the definitive Only in Canada Band, being a guaranteed part of the soundtrack of bush parties and hockey arenas since their 1989 debut, Up to Here. Downie's evocative, if often inscrutable, lyrics, have drawn inspiration from Canadian stories in the way few popular acts have in this country, mythologizing dead hockey players like Bill Barilko, for example.

The Kingston, Ontario band formed in 1983 and has had eight albums hit number one in Canada. They were inarguably the most successful act to come out of 1990s alternative scene in Canada, although the Hip never quite managed to garner much of an international fan base. (This, of course, was a large addition to Canada's ever-growing mix of insecurity and pride in its place in the world.)

A staple of CanCon rock radio, it was the stage where the band really made their mark. Downie's sweaty, improvised dance moves and ad libbed poetry are pretty legend up here.

Downie has also produced three solo albums (listen to "Chancellor"), an album with The Sadies and wrote the one book of poetry that you're most likely to find on the bookshelves of Canadians under 50. He appeared in the 2008 film, One Week, as a pot-smoking, recovering cancer patient.

A news conference on Downie's condition will be held at a Toronto hospital later today. The singer is married with four kids.

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Background Trump photo by Gage Skidmore, via

Everyone in Britain has an opinion on Donald Trump, and it's pretty much the same one. I realized this a few months ago, when a damp and depressing Tuesday inspired me to switch on The Wright Stuff, a British morning talk show hosted by former gossip columnist Matthew Wright.

For once, the panel wasn't discussing whether it's wrong for people to chastise a mother for sending her son to school with a store-bought lunch, or if good singers should be banned from ruining karaoke for others, but rather whether or not Trump should be stopped from entering the country for his controversial comments on women and Muslims. The consensus was: "Yes, he probably should." For the first time in history, tabloids, Twitter feeds, and the country at-large found itself nodding along to Matthew Wright's words in unison.

But surely in a country where the majority are more pissed off about Mary Berry's recipes being removed from BBC Good Food than millions having to eat from food banks, all opinions can't swing that way. There's got to be someone out there with a positive word to say about Trump.

I searched the streets and the internet for those people, and I found three. Without chastising, butting in, or any other Trump tricks from my side, I asked these three British fans of his to explain why they like him.

DAVID

David didn't want to provide a photo, so here's one of Donald Trump pointing. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr

VICE: What is it you like about Donald Trump?
David: He calls it as he sees it. Almost all politicians say what they think their electorate want to hear, not what is right. Politicians—Margaret Thatcher aside—trade on the marginal voters and trim their arguments. They are also very afraid of single-issue groups that mobilize campaigns to discredit them. The result of this approach is that difficult issues are avoided and open debate becomes impossible. For example, discussion of two extremely critical issues in Britain was avoided, despite needing to be addressed. This is the future of the NHS and immigration. Donald Trump has not avoided any difficult issues and says what he thinks when asked a question. This is in marked contrast to Hillary Clinton, who never gives an honest answer to anyone and changes her answers to suit the audience. For this, Trump is vilified by the media who look for anything to create controversy.

The media made his opinions on women controversial?
Trump has made some unfortunate remarks about women, but Hillary was complicit for almost forty years in attacking women who went public and Bill Clinton sexually harassed them. You judge who women should support. Trump has an agenda to balance the budget and cut expenditure and to put US priorities first and stop interfering overseas when there is no sound reason to do this. It may not be to the Europeans' liking, since we will have to start looking after ourselves and pay for it. Hillary wants to continue deficit spending and engaging in foreign adventures. We—with Hillary in full flow—have ruined Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine for no clearly apparent reason. Time for someone to take a different approach.

Would you welcome him to the UK? And would you go to a rally of his?
Yes, he should come to the UK and speak his mind, and I would go and listen. Much of what he says can be applied to the UK. Trump also supports a free trade agreement with the UK, unlike Obama, who is trying to influence the UK to take a decision against our interests as a favor to the vile Cameron.

What's one reason why people should rethink their opinions of Trump?
You may be surprised to hear this, but the majority of the people I know agree with most of what he says. Nigel Farage may not be the toast of metro London, but outside he is very popular, and four million people voted for him. He is not as outspoken as Trump, but his popular appeal is the same. Farage and Trump are demonized by the left wing, who generally want to avoid the issues of having to earn what they want to spend, and believe that ordinary people should get out of the way to allow fashionable "progressive" views to take over. These people will never see Trump in a favorable light.

ED

What's to like about Donald?
Ed: I'm a businessman, so I always respect successful businessmen, as I know that means they're driven, high-energy individuals. Also, I'm opposed to increasing censorship on what can or can't be said, and Trump bucks the trend by calling out truths many people don't want to hear, and fake outrage about.

Would you welcome him to the UK? Would you go to a rally of his?
I'd welcome him to the UK and would attend a rally. I'd even go further and like to be involved. Trump has made other Western leaders look extremely weak.

Would you vote for Trump if you could?
I'd vote for him, absolutely, because I'm concerned about the West becoming crippled by political correctness, that it will be exploited by those that wish us harm. I owe it to future generations not to allow Islamization to go any further; it's a culture at odds with Western values and needs repelling. Only Trump has the strength of character to do that in the Western Hemisphere.

KARL

What is it you like about Donald Trump, and why would you like to see him become president?
Karl: Look, I'm not saying I'd want him as a dinner guest, but he's a human, not a political animal, and I'm an Anti-Establishmentarian, sick to my teeth of crooks like Blair and Bush, Cameron and Obama. They lie. I think Trump will just tell it as it is and not be swayed by the CIA, IMF, or UN policy, or all the other dark influences politicians without genuine conviction hide behind.

Why should people rethink their opinions on Trump?
One, the truth will probably be spurted out on numerous occasions because he talks from the heart before the backroom spin doctors turn the truth into lies. Two, he'll out the truth about Saudi Arabia. He's not as stupid as his hairdo implies. He knows Saudi has been sheltered for forty-five years since Nixon and King Saud made their Petro dollar pact. Trump knows the people hate what's going on with Saudi-backed terrorism causing misery worldwide. Obama treats the people like fools. Trump is a working businessman; he is the only potential world leader who will break that protection of state-sponsored terrorism and bring a little bit of peace to the world.

Three, I've actually been in the hotel business and know a lot about Trump – he makes big noises, then slowly backs down to what he really wants and expects. Like asking for a billion dollars for Aston Villa, knowing it's only worth £75 . So he says, "I want every Muslim vetted before they set foot in America." With all respect, that's what happens anyway. I think he means properly vetted, as it's very easy to buy anything in every Muslim country in the world: Uou want a passport saying you're nineteen? Here it is. You want paperwork to say you're a dentist? Here it is. I think he'll deter a few radical Islamists by tightening up embassy staff and diplomatic immunity scams but not stop more than about fifty Muslims entering the US, but I think he'll tighten up immigration of the unskilled and the trafficked from Central America.

Would you vote for him and why?
I'd vote for him for sure. He is "Small government" with a capital S. He is as sick as we normal lower-middle classes are of the thieves in local and national government on huge salaries, huge pensions, and always on the sick. His tax plan is simple and adds up! It has passed scrutiny by major accountants, and it will benefit the poor, bring more people out of poverty, encourage more employment on higher earnings so lower hours, and be so much easier to administer. I don't see a backlash there, and the simplification of company tax will bring back onshore a lot of companies and stop a lot more going offshore.

Follow Oobah Butler on Twitter.

Haidar has been waiting for six months in a 270-square-foot cabin he shares with three other people. He's one of the lucky ones—some people share the same sized space with 11 others, while other cabins are only 130 square feet. They're all living at Tempelhof in Berlin. The former airport was originally built in 1927 and dramatically expanded by the Nazis in the 1930s. It's infamous for its iconic architectural design, enormous size, and its role as a lifeline for the people of West Berlin during the Berlin Airlift. Today it houses 1,300 refugees waiting for more permanent housing and integration into society. The people living here are theoretically only meant to stay for six weeks, but due to a lack of available accommodation, many people I spoke to when I visited had been there for over six months.

Inside, the air is thick and warm, and there are security guards at every exit. They're watching me closely as I shuffle through the corridors of cabins—past cleaners collecting laundry and children playing. The refugees here have a roof over their head, three meals a day, and reasonably adequate facilities, but uncertainty about the future and a lack of personal space are a constant source of insecurity and discomfort among the people living there. I wanted to offer a look into the living quarters of refugees at Tempelhof, so I documented their rooms—or "boxes" as they're bleakly referred to—and talked to the residents about their living situation.

Issa, 25, from Baghdad, Iraq

I've been at Tempelhof since November 2015. I live here with two of my friends from Baghdad. We're really lucky because we're only three people living here—other rooms have more people. So I can't really complain, although I still call it a box. The main difference between living here and back home is that in Baghdad I felt safe and comfortable at home, but I didn't feel safe as soon as I stepped out of my house. Here it's exactly the opposite: When I'm in my living space, I don't feel comfortable, but when I go outside, I feel more secure.

Sayed, 37, from Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

I've been here for just over four months. I have no idea what will happen next, or how long I'll be living here. Living here isn't good—especially for my mental state. This morning we had a big problem with some of the security guys. We're having issues with integrating too—there has been no news about an integration course we were supposed to have. I'm living with two other families in my cubicle, twelve people in total. I have to like them. I have no choice.

Hamza, 28, and Akram, 16, from Qunaitra, Syria

We've been living in Tempelhof for six and a half months, but this doesn't feel like living. Our brothers are fighting in Syria, and we are fighting here. The hardest thing is the living space and how we're treated socially. We're treated as refugees, not as human beings. The good thing is that we are now immune to shitty living. All eight of us in our room met on the way to Germany. We can't bring our own food or milk into the building. We thought that a country like Germany would provide us with better spaces for living, which is why we took the risk in coming here.

Abdulrahman, 19, from Damascus, Syria

I've been in Tempelhof for five and a half months. I live with my sister and my uncle, and there is also another guy from Damascus living with us. I think the living conditions here are bad—it's not healthy to be living in such confined spaces with so many people. But we have a good group of friends here—mostly people from Syria and Palestine—and we also have some friends who live outside of the camp, so sometimes we hang out at their places. The difference between the houses my friends live in and here is huge. Their places are cleaner, they have their own electricity, they have a fridge to store food and drinks, and they have gas to cook. I think it's quite unfair how it's decided who's moving into a house and who has to wait—there have been people who moved here after us, and they've left before us. They say families should leave first, but I think we are also a family: I'm with my sister and my uncle. My soul is not happy, but I try to keep smiling.

Ahmed, 31, from Al-Hasakah, Syria

I've been here for about six months with my twelve-year-old cousin. I did a Masters in agricultural economics in Syria when I left. We lived in a land of militias, where there was no state whatsoever. My cousin has been exposed to a lot of violence and we were worried about how traumatized he would get. As a child, it's easier for him to cope with the limited living space, but he misses his parents and the emotional link to the place where he lived a lot. I didn't know the people that I'm currently living with before, even though we come from the same town. I will start my course at the Technological University in Berlin soon, and I'm worried about where I should study when it starts. I'm going to need my space and privacy. I'm not sure I know how I will cope.

Nadia, 37, from Logar Province, Afghanistan

I've been living here for four months now with my husband and four children. It's very hard to be here—the hardest thing about it is probably the constant noise. My daughter has a mental illness, and when there is a lot of noise, she gets worse. My children aren't able to study here when they get out of school, but they are learning German, and I'm really happy for them. My son never wants to go out and play. I have to force him. He finds it hard to engage with the other children and make friends here. My dream is for my children to study here and achieve their goals.

Omar, 20, from Damascus, Syria

I've been here at Tempelhof since October 2015. I live with seven other people I met here, and we get along really well. I'm a single man, so it's OK, I can live here. But if I were married or had a family, I would tell them not to come here because the living situation isn't good. We are just men in our box, and it's a bit like military service. The food is pretty bad, but most of us were in the army, so we're used to this—although the toilets were cleaner in the army. At six in the morning, they turn the lights on, and at ten at night, the lights go off again. And If you're late for a meal, you don't get to eat.

Mohamad, 18, from Mayadin, Syria, Khaled, 19, from Mosul, Iraq, and Sherko, 25, from Kirkuk, Iraq

We met each other at Tempelhof—it's six of us living together in this room. We all get along very well, but there's not much privacy. It does feel like one big family, though, which is nice. We are trying hard to integrate with guys and girls outside of the camp, and we're very thankful for their hospitality. We do sometimes feel a sense of reluctance toward us, which I think mostly comes from fear. Around Christmas, we'd visit Alexanderplatz quite often, and one time a friend and I were talking in loud voices and two girls in front of us at some point turned around, looked at us, hid their bags away, and walked off at a faster pace.

Haidar, 24, from Kirkuk, Iraq

I've been in Tempelhof for six months now, and I'm living with three other people. I come from an upper-middle class family in Iraq, and when I heard about opportunities in Germany, this is not what I expected. The living situation here is nothing compared to the way I was living in Iraq. I would like to go back home, but every day the problems in Iraq are getting worse. For now, I have to just bear this situation. I think in two years I might still be living here at Tempelhof. It's hard to find a place for a German to live in Berlin, let alone for us.

Michaela, 19, and Kutzung, 19, from Eritrea

We're friends from Eritrea who traveled here together, and we've been here for six months now. We are Christians, but there are mostly Muslims in this camp. We haven't had any problems on that front, though. We just hope to find some work here in Germany soon—we would be happy doing anything.

Most photographers are not invited to take out their cameras at strip clubs, or to document casual hangs with the Bloods. But Ivar Wigan—perhaps due to his soft-spoken, Scottish charm—always seems to be invited to the party.

Wigan's photography series, The Gods, is a celebration of the culture and community around hip-hop in the American South. Shooting primarily in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami, Wigan's images are provocative and cinematic, showcasing street culture from a perspective that's intimate and admiring.

All photos by Ivar Wigan

Wigan was born in Scotland and raised in London. His voracious approach to documentation reminds me of a famous quote by Susan Sontag, from her book On Photography: "The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.''

The Gods shares common themes with Wigan's previous work, which includes explorations of tribal Africa, the Jamaican dancehall scene, and images from his extensive travels around the American South. Wigan's series will be exhibited at Little Big Man Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, from this Saturday, May 21 through June 21.

VICE: Why is so much of The Gods shot inside strip clubs?
Ivan Wigan: The subjects of the series all pivot around the world of gangster rap, and strip clubs are the main meeting place within that culture—they're like the church, basically. A lot of the action unfolds in strip clubs. That's where everyone goes to hang out, where the rappers play their new records, where all the hottest DJs in hip-hop have residencies. And for some of the women in those communities, their greatest aspiration is to be able to dance in one of those clubs. For example, in Atlanta, if you're a Magic City dancer, people look up to you, they show you respect, because those girls are making more money than everyone else in their environment. They're often only 21 or 22, but some are making $5,000 a night easily. They have flash cars, all that. So a lot of the young girls are literally waiting to hit 19 so they can get a dancer's license. And the guys want to date the star dancers, and to be seen with them.

That's refreshing to hear, given that even within the most sex-positive communities in cities like New York, there's still a lingering stigma about women taking their clothes off to make money—even if the women say that they enjoy their work.
Yeah, being a dancer is not regarded as even remotely negative in Atlanta, which of course is a very different attitude to other places in the world. I grew up in England, where a strip club is considered a really dirty place—somewhere old men go alone to get some kind of sterilized erotic experience. But in Atlanta, it's not remotely like this: Everyone goes to strip clubs—couples go, I met a pastor in there, you see groups of girls, people go to watch basketball or football games, they go for dinner—all the clubs serve food. But by the end of the night, it's heated and everyone starts dancing, and it turns into a bit of a club. So it's not just a place where men sit around a stage in a long coat looking sinister. It's really an upbeat, mixed environment where people go to interact. The dancers are beautiful young women who have positive aspirations. It's something that's quite unique to the South. Atlanta is at the center of it, but you have clubs like that in New Orleans, Jacksonville, Memphis, and a bit of it in Miami. There's more than 65 strip clubs in the metropolitan area of Atlanta.

The subjects of your work are represented as heroic—almost divine. Is this intentional?
That's very much the case. I'm trying to raise street-corner characters to iconographic status. Another person could shoot all this same subject matter very differently—in negative or condescending light, or in a way that was highly politicized. But I'm trying to lift people up. My purpose is to make beautiful pictures that the subjects of the photos love.

Is this where the name The Gods comes from?
Actually, "Gods" is a slang term for veterans of the street—guys who have survived the prison system, veteran hustlers. So the younger boys will often call the older guys the Gods.

What drew you to this particular American community, rather than, say, shooting communities in your native Scotland?
I think a lot of artists place themselves into lifestyles or situations that are unconventional or exotic to them, in order to clean away the conventions they are born into, and to see the world or their subject in a fresh light.

It's not often that people are allowed to take out their cameras inside strip clubs, or while shadowing gangs. How did you get such intimate access?
I had to live in Atlanta for a long time. When I arrived, I didn't know anybody. I went there because I knew about the club scene, and when I landed I just said to my cab driver, "Take me to a cheapest motel," and from then on I learned the city, made friends, and embedded myself. I was there for more than a year, but I didn't take any photos for the first nine weeks—I didn't even take my camera out of the bag, I was just driving through the city and trying to understand it physically, the communities and the neighborhoods, and getting out and talking to people.

When I eventually found the clubs that I wanted to work in, I would go there every single night until I knew all the dancers and the security and the management. It's all about relationships. So I was part of the scene at the time. I'd always have my iPad and would show them my photos—the work breaks down the barrier, and they can see what I'm about.

For more on the culture of strip clubs in Atlanta, check out our video: 'Atlanta: Strip City':

Would you say you work is portraiture? Documentary? Both?
You know, I never really thought of it in those terms. There's definitely some portraiture in there. But then, when I met the Bloods... well, it's not like you get many chances to hang out with the Bloods, so you can't try to control that situation—you just shoot what you can. So from that point of view, it's a documentary project. But I'm not trying to document everything, warts and all. It's more like, "Here's my view of this world. Here's a slice of life that I've chosen to represent."

I was very much looking for moments of light in the storm. Because it's a dramatic world. Really, it's more akin to wedding photography—I'm trying to enter this world and be very much part of the party, to live within it, get to know everyone there, and to give back something that the subjects love and want to keep. I give the people I shoot prints whenever I can. There's a couple of shots in the series—the bigger group shots—where I didn't get to give a photo to every single person, but for the most part everyone loved and was given their photographs.

Do you feel like white audiences are more receptive to a white photographer representing black culture?
I would say no. In Britain we don't categorize artists by their ethnicity, so I find this question a bit odd as it's intrinsically divisive. The subject of race is a tricky one for me because Britain is very different in this regard, and much more integrated. There's been many events and parties where I've shot side by side with NYC-based photographer Wayne Lawrence, who was born in the Caribbean. We are friends and frequently share feedback on each other's work. He is probably the highest-profile photographer of African descent working in America. Wayne is a far more successful photographer with countless accolades and awards, so I'm very much still in the shadow of many artists who have come before me. On his Instagram he just describes himself as "a human." That's how I see myself, too. I don't think the question of the reception of our pictures by the public is in any way related to our complexion.

What does it mean to be a white person creating imagery of a group of people who don't usually get control of the way they are represented?
With social media playing an increasing role, I think everyone has a stronger degree of control over their images.

How do you navigate the lines between admiration and fetishization? Documentation and exploitation? How much of a concern is this for you and your work?
Fetishization implies some sort of erotic content that I don't really see in this series at all. I don't feel photography to be an exploitative process if the intention is to produce a positive result of lasting beauty. What better gift can you give a person than to portray and display their image, caught looking their finest, in the prime of life?

People often compare your work to Nan Goldin, although her work feels much darker than yours.
I like Nan's work very much. I met her in Paris the year I started doing this, and I bought a print from her at the time, which I live with, above my bed. She's always been an inspiration to me, but she shoots from a very dark place—she has concentrated on a lot of very dark and turbulent subject matter, and while my pictures might have an edge, I don't see darkness in them. I see them as positive, more of a celebration. So that's really the difference. For example, one of Nan's most famous images is of the hand of a final-stages AIDS victim, holding the hand of his boyfriend. It's a very powerful image, and I respect it very much, but I would never take that photo, because that's just not my purpose as an artist. My purpose is to find things to celebrate.

Follow Karley Sciortino on Twitter.

Ivar Wigan's The Gods is showing through June 19 at Little Big Man Gallery in Los Angeles. Check out more photos below.

A screenshot from 'Fallout 4: Far Harbor'

For the past ten years, Bethesda games have sculpted how I think about games. At age 14, I picked up my first Xbox 360 and a copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I still have that same disc today, in its case, the receipt tucked behind the 100-page manual.

After putting thousands of hours of playtime into Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim, as well as every expansion released to support those main games, Bethesda has even influenced what I want from other titles—in terms of gameplay features, design ideas, and that inimitable sense of freedom that few other open-world productions master so well.

When Fallout 4 was announced midway through 2015, just six months before it came out, I, unsurprisingly, lost my shit. Not only was a new Bethesda game on its way, guaranteeing a massive world to get invested in, but I only had a short while to wait for it. This so-brief period between announcement and availability was as good as unprecedented in our modern period of games publicity—but it's something I think will influence other developers' future projects and their own release plans, given how well it worked.

And when it came out, I really liked Fallout 4. I went as far as saying, on this site no less, that it was an unmissable open-world experience. Its world is truly magical to explore, and for me, it features the best storytelling of any of Bethesda's games so far, even if its ideas, of fractured families and fizzing revolution, are familiar. This is a studio that places its strengths in building a universe rather than fleshing out character development and creating narrative complexity, but nonetheless it felt like a marked improvement on what preceded it. Most notably, though, it played like a proper sequel, something I had never felt with other Bethesda releases. Whereas Oblivion and Skyrim were two very different beasts, Fallout 4 sits comfortably, thematically, and aesthetically, beside 2008's Fallout 3.

But the charm faded. It took a while, 60 hours of play and change, but having put more than 300 hours into Skyrim, I was expecting Fallout 4's amazing early game impressions to develop into a compelling whole, to last for a near-infinite future. And yet, that compulsion disappeared. The urge to explore everywhere, to see everything, just vanished. Which was pretty disappointing, to say the least.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's new documentary, 'Locked Off'

But now we have the third and final DLC pack for Fallout 4, and it's a massive one, too. Unlike the previous two, Automatron and Wasteland Workshop, Far Harbor (which came out on May 19) presents a brand new landmass, a murky, fog-shrouded island, ripe for exploration. It's one of the most atmospheric expansions that Bethesda has ever realized, and a marked improvement upon Skyrim's fairly drab Dragonborn DLC and its island of Solstheim. If I had to make a comparison, I'd say Far Harbor plays and feels most like Fallout 3's Point Lookout, which opened up a huge new area neighboring the Capital Wasteland.

Far Harbor does more of what Fallout 4 did so well in its opening hours. It introduces you to complex factions, each with their own unique agendas, and asks you to decide how you want to interact with and within each one. The island is home to three distinct groups: the denizens of the titular harbor, and the militia-like Fishermen; a group of runaway synths holed up in a haven called Acadia; and the radiation-obsessed Church of the Children of Atom cult, who have set up shop in an abandoned submarine base they've named the Nucleus and staunchly protect the radioactive fog that smears the island.

As ever, your actions have at least interesting and often major consequences, and it should be appreciated that this is an expansion that focuses more on talking than constant shooting. There are some really intriguing quests, as well as some unexpected twists and turns along the way.

And yet, Far Harbor represents something more than simply some quality DLC for a game that's already really good, but not quite up to the standards that I'd perhaps set for it. Far Harbor is the reassurance that I needed, to be able to say to myself: OK, I'm done with Bethesda games for now. I still had to play it, of course, because after ten years of subliminal conditioning, these things are almost completely ingrained within me. But I haven't been excited about it. At first, I was convinced that, just by playing more Fallout 4, I'd fall back in love with it—that the thrill of discovering something new, something fresh inside this world of death and pain, would take over me again, and it'd be like the old days where I could sit for hours at a time and just live in that world. But it never came.

My own buzz for Far Harbor doesn't compare, for example, to the bubbling anticipation that I have for The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine. That's a game that's pushing barriers with both its world building and the stories it tells, and I'm convinced that I'll see every little thing in the almost-upon-us DLC, sucking every tiny morsel of detail out of its world. With Far Harbor, and Fallout 4 in general, I'm shooting guns, upgrading my tools, finding new characters to talk to, and learning more about this fascinating world. It's all good—frequently great—but it used to be that Bethesda games were so much more. That greatness was a constant, but I don't think it's ever been that way through this Fallout 4 campaign.

Whatever's next for Bethesda director Todd Howard and his team—presumably a new Elder Scrolls—I hope its rekindles the absolute wonder that, for so many years, more than simply kept me interested. These games influenced my entire outlook on what a video game could be, and now it's time for the studio to once again revolutionize instead of repeating tiring formulas.

Fallout 4: Far Harbor is available now. Find more information at the game's official website.

Follow Sam White on Twitter.

All photos by the author

A little after 8 AM Tuesday, four coach busses of refugees left the makeshift camp at Idomeni, near the border of Greece and the Republic of Macedonia. Two other buses followed about half an hour later. By 10 AM, a total of 609 refugees were on their way to organized refugee camps outside Thessaloniki—Greece's second largest city. The evacuation marks the beginning of the end for Idomeni, an uncontrolled refugee camp rivaling the "Jungle" in Calais in size and dourness. About 8,500 people were trapped in Idomeni, destitute and living in abysmal conditions.

Starting at dawn on Tuesday, a large-scale police evacuation involved approximately 1,400 police officers from all over Greece. The Greek police have set up a security cordon of three miles around the camp, and at 6 AM, police removed journalists from both Greek and international media from the area. One team from the Greek public television channel ERT and two photographers from the state news agency were allowed to enter the camp—but they had to keep a distance of over 600 feet from the evacuation.

The fact that access during the evacuation has been so difficult for national and international media has sparked a lot of criticism from journalists, who have accused the Greek government of imposing a media blackout. Journalists working for German newspaper Bild, Liana Spyropoulou and Paul Ronzheimer, hid in the camp, but Ronzheimer was removed by the police around 11 AM. All volunteers from NGOs working in the camp had been removed as early as Monday night, while police helicopters hovered overhead and the area resembled a military zone.

Aerial footage of the evacuation released by the Greek police

Refugees and journalists on the Macedonian side of the border told VICE that the evacuation began with the tents near the reinforced border fence. According to reports, there was no resistance from refugees, who were separated according to their ethnicity and boarded buses in groups of 50. Many of them had already packed their things and waited patiently for the police—mainly Syrian and Iraqi families with young children. Young immigrants traveling alone from Afghanistan, Morocco, Algeria, and Central Africa were recently involved in clashes with the police at Idomeni, which didn't happen Tuesday—some of them may have left the camp early to try to cross the border to Macedonia.

The operation will continue in the next few hours, moving from the camp to the railway tracks of the train line between Thessaloniki and Belgrade, which was occupied by tents and shacks.

Giorgos Kyritsis—spokesman for the government's coordination panel on migration—said on Monday that the evacuation might take up to ten days, until all 8,425 refugees have been moved from Idomeni to official shelters. Kyritsis assured that "this is not a police sweep where everyone will be evacuated in a day, but a much more smooth migration process."

The first refugees who have been removed from Idomeni will be accommodated in centers in Sindos—a suburb of Thessaloniki. Late last week, the Greek government announced that 6,500 places had been created in nine new centers, spanning seven buildings and two large tents. Asked about the exclusion of journalists from Idomeni, Kyritsis said on the Greek TV channel Mega that "there are restrictions in such operations anywhere in the world." He added that the first phase of the operation "should not be under the eye of too many cameras" and that over the next period, things will be more easy and open.

The Greek-Macedonian border has been closed since mid-March, when the so-called Balkan route was effectively sealed for migrants. In 2015, almost 1 million people have gone through Idomeni to the Balkans and Central Europe, until the Macedonian government decided to build a double metal fence for 25 miles along the border, preventing any more people from crossing.

That fence trapped an enormous number of migrants in Greece, stuck in the rain and mud. Volunteer doctors and NGOs recorded gastroenteritis, outbreaks of skin diseases, and children being born in squalid and unhealthy circumstances—a humanitarian drama outside of any notion of international law. Conflicts among refugees over a position in line for soup or phone chargers were a daily ordeal.

The effort to persuade refugees to leave Idomeni has been going on for a week and a half—approximately 3,000 people are estimated to have moved to the organized camps so far. As of Tuesday, a total of 54,124 refugees were estimated to be present on the Greek islands and mainland.

For-profit bail is a fact of life across America. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

Every day, hundreds of people pass through the large, glass-paneled doors of the Bronx Hall of Justice in New York City. In an area with high levels of crime and poverty, the outer-borough court is a staple of criminal justice in urban America, with seemingly endless stacks of cases, many of them concerning "quality of life offenses" like turnstile jumping and smoking weed. For an awful lot of people, these are revolving doors of recidivism, as defendants find themselves making return trip after return trip, often in between bids behind bars.

The Honorable George A. Grasso, supervising judge for arraignments in New York, watches that door spin every day. But in his mind, this dystopian spectacle doesn't have to continue—in fact, he has a pretty good idea about how to change it: by reforming the bail system.

It is in cities' criminal courts where bail gets assessed, and assigned, often landing poor, innocent people behind bars—sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, months or even years—when they're unable to fork up as little as $20. The result can be traumatizing and destructive, as in the case of Bronx native Kalief Browder, who committed suicide not long after spending three years in NYC's hellish Rikers Island jail (his family couldn't pay bail when he was accused of stealing a backpack). In response to outrage at the damage money bail can inflict on (often innocent) people, the New York City Council last year created a fund to help people facing bails under $2,000. Earlier this month, officials announced ATMs were being installed at local courthouses to make the process of shelling out bail money slightly less of a nightmare.

But what about changing the system more fundamentally? Some American locales like Washington, DC, have abandoned money bail entirely, though that idea hasn't gained a ton of traction nationwide. When it comes to the question of money bail in New York, a task force was convened in the summer of 2014 to explore alternatives. Alongside court experts, public defenders, and fellow magistrates, Judge Grasso was one of the task-force chairs, and in his chambers on the ninth floor of the Bronx Hall of Justice, he broke down how bail is changing in America's largest city.

VICE: The main issue with bail seems to be that people just can't afford it—in New York, something like twenty-eight percent of people can't pay it within a week of arraignment. So they just rot in jail, which can have toxic effects—for them, for the public, and for taxpayers. What's your thinking for how to fix that?
Honorable George A. Grasso: I think the nub of what you're getting at is having options that are available to the court that are consistent with people's ability to pay, right? So, one option we have is that we can release people on recognizance (ROR), and actually that is used very broadly in New York City. Now, as a supplement to that, we have implemented what we call a "supervised release" program, which became effective on March 1.

OK, so how does supervised release work?
The thing is, there's no money associated with it. So the ability to pay is off the table.

What supervised release does, instead, is create a very good option, I think, for judges to consider in cases where RoR is not appropriate—for those with any misdemeanor, except domestic violence, and nonviolent felonies. We were approved roughly for twenty-three hundred spots citywide, and by mid-May, we had done an excess of over five hundred citywide, with well over one hundred in the Bronx. I've utilized that myself rather extensively. In fact, I'm doing one today in the arraignment part of the Bronx courthouse.

What determines whether you qualify for bail on one hand, or supervised release on the other?
The underlying common denominator of bail in New York State is whether or not someone is likely to appear in court on the next date, or "flight risk." Traditionally, if we find someone who is not likely, the option had been money bail. Now, supervised release creates an option where we think RoR wouldn't be appropriate, due to extensive bench warrant history, lack of community ties, and things of that nature. So we work with service providers—in the Bronx, we have the Bronx Community Solutions, whose offices are conveniently located right on the same floor of our arraignment parts. We have BCS providers in our courtroom every shift, going through cases at the beginning of the shift, looking at court dockets, seeing which people fit should be interviewed for supervised release.

Who's doing the picking and choosing here? You, as the judge?
Defense counsel is essentially the gatekeeper of the program, so if a BCS provider thinks someone is eligible, they have to speak with the defense counsel and get permission before they interview that individual defendant. A defense attorney might be looking at a higher flight risk, and then they'd be inclined to, say, "Sure, interview my client." I had a case that was a nonviolent felony, a first contact, and the prosecutor was recommending RoR. So we didn't do a supervised release.

But assuming the defense gives permission, and also assuming that the BCS provider finds the defendant to be eligible, based upon the interview, there's a risk assessment that's supplied by the social service providers as a screening tool. Then the provider makes a recommendation to the court as to whether or not someone is eligible or not eligible.

And if all that occurs, then a judge can go with supervised release in lieu of money bail.

In doing their assessment, what do the social service people look for?
The first prong is a risk-based assessment, which looks at things like bench warrant history, and the nature of the charge. The person is then given a risk level. So at the lower end of the risk level, the individual could have as little as one meeting and one telephone call a month with the BCS worker. At the higher end, you could have them every week, as well as other conditions they may attach to it. However, since "dangerousness" is not a specific factor for consideration in a judge's bail determination, this risk assessment is not shared with the court.

Now, on the parallel track—and I think this is very important—is the mandatory needs assessment, which the individual must submit to. Is their insurance reviewed? Do they have the right level of healthcare? If not, they can be advised how to get Medicaid, or how to get insurance. Are there any underlying substance abuse issues? Are there any underlying mental health issues? Housing issues? Employment issues? All of that is discussed as part of the assessment.

But if you're not making someone shell out a bunch of cash, the way bail normally would work, how do you ensure they'll return for their next court appearance?
It's a serious program, with serious consequences. So an individual who is going to participate has to tell the court affirmatively that he or she wants to be considered for it. That individual then signs a contract in the court with a series of provisions and obligations, all designed to ensure that, while we're not requiring money bail, we have something that is a tangible mechanism for an individual to understand his or her obligations to come to court.

In addition to that, they agree to completely cooperate with all contacts—phone calls, meetings—and stay out of trouble, like not getting rearrested while the contract is in effect. Of course, they also agree to make every court appearance. If they break the contract, the violation is brought to the attention of the court by the service provider, which they're required to do. And we can go back to that case, and set cash bail. If they can't make the cash bail, they stay in jail for the duration of the case.

What we're really doing with this is taking on that ability to pay issue, and putting the ball in the court of the defendant. The ability to pay is off the table. What's on the table is whether the defendant is going to step up to his or her end of the bargain. If they do that, then they will be out—they will not be going to Rikers Island, and they will be out as defendants as long as the case is in play. That's it.

What have you seen so far? Is it working?
I'm hearing the appearance rate in the Bronx is very, very high. And what really has the potential over time to change the whole dynamic of how we work to address people's needs in criminal court in a non-punitive way is that mandatory-needs assessment.

We have a lot of people who just churn through the system repeatedly: people who have underlying substance abuse issues, whether it's drugs or alcohol; people who have varying degrees of mental illness that have been unaddressed; or people who are homeless, and in and out of shelters. I've been hearing compelling stories about people who were in very, very difficult circumstances, and just upon sitting down in the mandatory-needs assessment, opened up in ways that they hadn't previously done, voluntarily submitting to services that not only could potentially keep someone from coming to court, but, even more importantly, put someone in the position that can address long-term services and needs that have gone unaddressed, and almost guarantee that person to continue churning through the criminal justice system. And it could be life-changing, in some cases.

And then it also gives the courts, the DAs, and the defenders excellent opportunities for non-jail dispositions. So your "sentence" is to continue to accept services that may be crucial and potentially life-changing.

Check out our documentary about for-profit bail in the United States.

In that mandatory-needs assessment, should someone be, say, in and out of the shelter system, what goes through the mind of the service provider? Are they thinking, "This person cannot possibly afford a money bail option?"
If somebody is in and out of shelters, that's raising a red flag, like, "What can we do to help this individual, in the here and now, with stable housing?" And with stable housing, we can do a couple of things with that. One, it makes it much more likely that the person is going to live up to the contract in hand. And, even more significantly, if we can do that on the front end of these cases, or initial contacts at arraignments, we can make it a lot less likely that the person is going to get rearrested and churning through the system, without sending them to Rikers Island.

How do you see this progressing in the future? Do you think that, over time, it'll be more and more accepted as an alternative to bail in America?
Well, I can tell you, to the extent that I'm hearing from people who are critical, it's like, "How come we can't use more of this? Why don't we have more options?" And that's generally the feedback from the defense as well. We're about three months in, but I think we're going to see very high rates of appearance, and right there, that's crucial. Over time, I think that this has the potential to have a significant positive impact on recidivism.

The reality is, unfortunately, that we're dealing with populations of people who have many challenges in terms of housing, medical issues, and substance abuse. But at least it's a start, by using the authority of the court in a way that is not punitive, per se, but is more focused on combining an ability to enhance someone's likelihood of appearance with potential connection to services that could be crucial to them, and helping them avoid constant contacts with the criminal justice system.

When you first started working on this issue, what drove your interest? Not every judge is particularly worried about the losing end of the bail system.
Prior to being a judge, I was a member of the police department. I started as a twenty-two-year-old police officer in 1979, became a lawyer in the department, and, at one point, did police disciplinary work. I was general counsel for the department, and first deputy commissioner for eight years before I became a judge. So the opportunity to be in the court, and be involved in programs that can, in certain ways, recast the reality and the perception of what the court can do in a positive way is something I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to be involved in.

I think a core thing that all of us in the criminal justice system—whether it's law enforcement, defense, prosecutors, judges—can agree on is the respect for the rule of law. And a whole variety of good, positive options, available at the earliest stages of the process, works to enhance justice for an individual, and, at the same time, if done right, enhance public safety. These are the things that we need to work toward, and I think a program like this gets us to rethink this as a system in a positive way.

How do you see bail changing in the years ahead?
Clearly, there's a lot of attention being paid to mass incarceration, and the collateral damage done from policies left over from a time of very high crime in this city, and state. And now, especially in the city of New York, we are in a time of almost historic public safety, in many respects, yet we still have levels of incarceration that we would like to work on.

So the twin challenge for the system is to use this opportunity we have now, with the public safety, to maybe rethink the dynamics of the process in a positive way. And like I said, with the supervised release, we're squeezing out the ability to pay, but the quid pro quo is that it's not dependent on the size of his or her bank account, but their commitment to the rule of law, and the process. I believe that what we're doing now citywide in the courts could be foundational, if it works the way it can work. And I believe it can work in rethinking the need for money bail.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Canadian Press photo

The Calgary man who stabbed to death five college students at a house party is not criminally responsible for the crimes because he was mentally ill, the Crown prosecutor in the case said Tuesday.

Matthew de Grood, 24, has admitted he killed Lawrence Hong, 27, Joshua Hunter, 23, Jordan Segura, 22, Kaitlin Perras, 23, and Zackariah Rathwell, 21, but according to an agreed statement of facts and testimony from psychiatrists who spoke to him after the stabbings, he believed the world was ending and that he was killing werewolves and vampires.

De Grood pleaded not guilty to first degree murder. His defence lawyer Allan Fay argued de Grood is not criminally responsible for the crimes because he was having a mental breakdown at the time they were committed. During closing remarks Tuesday, Crown attorney Neil Wiberg agreed with that conclusion.

"I agree the accused was suffering a psychosis," he said, but noted that de Grood carried out the crimes like a "killing machine."

The court heard from two psychiatrists and a psychologist who all testified de Grood was psychotic when he carried out the stabbings at a house party in April 2014.

The judge has reserved making a decision until Wednesday. If found not criminally responsible, de Grood could be sentenced to time in a psychiatric institution. Vince Li, the man who was found not criminally responsible for beheading a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus in 2009, spent seven years in a mental health institution and later a group home before being approved in February to eventually live alone.

Wilberg has said he's waiting for the judge's decision before revealing whether or not he will seek a "high risk" designation for de Grood.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Barack Obama on a recent visit to Vietnam. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Like the cute but overlooked friend waiting in the wings in every boilerplate romantic comedy, Barack Obama, it turns out, is the president America has always been in love with—it just needed time to figure out. That, or in the midst of a particularly ugly campaign season, people are waking up to the fact that whatever the current president's faults may be, the next one could be a lot worse.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Monday, Obama's approval ratings are now the highest they've been since his second inauguration. Unsurprisingly, the numbers fall along partisan lines, with 88 percent of Democrats and just 8 percent of Republicans approving of the job Obama is doing. But the president scored above 50 percent among self-described independents, which confirms a polling trend that's been consistent for months: Most Americans actually like Obama.

Right now, being liked is a pretty rare thing for US politicians. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, for instance, are widely hated, even though millions of people cast primary ballots for each of them. Congress is even more despised: Only 11 percent of likely voters think it's doing a good job, according to a recent poll from Rasmussen. In the 2016 primary, Republicans hated their own party so much that they backed a reality TV star over a dozen Establishment candidates, while a sizable number of Democrats are so unhappy with the political status quo that they've thrown their support behind Bernie Sanders, a candidate the media largely dismissed as hopeless. And poll after poll has shown that Americans of all political persuasions think the country is on the wrong track.

In this environment, it doesn't seem to make sense that a sitting president should be popular. Yet Obama remains liked, if not loved. The Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement, is still disparaged by most Americans, but that doesn't seem to be affecting his personal popularity. For years, the left has complained about the president's habit of governing as a cautious technocrat, yet Sanders supporters, who claim to be agitated and agitating for change, overwhelmingly favor him, according to that NBC/WSJ poll.

Gallup polls show that Obama is especially popular among young people, minorities, and college grads, but even a third of "liberal/moderate Republicans" (whatever that means) also approve of the job he's doing. In the NBC/WSJ poll, 39 percent of respondents said they would consider voting for a third Obama term if the Constitution allowed such a thing, compared to 34 percent who said the same thing about Bill Clinton in 2000. And Obama blows George W. Bush out of the water, of course—his predecessor's approval rating at this time in 2008 was in the 30 percent range.

When Obama's legacy is considered, there will be a lot of repetition of the criticisms that have dogged him for the past seven years. Many liberals don't think he did enough on key areas like immigration, climate change, or gun control; conservatives think he did too much. Journalists have complained about the administrations lack of transparency; civil libertarians have cause to be upset over his handling of the NSA and his drone wars; others have bemoaned the expansion of executive power under his administration, a continuation of a decades-long trend. Economic indicators have improved over the past few years, but Americans still feel anxious about their financial stability, possibly because of the rampant inequality that's everywhere they look.

But approval ratings are not based on voters breaking presidents down into component parts—they're about feelings, auras, vibes. And while Obama came into office on a wave of hope and change, he's become a symbol of rather dull day-to-day competence in his second term, popular simply for his ability to keep the country on a more or less even keel. There have been no new ground wars, no sudden dips into recession, no impeachment trials or FBI investigations threatening to consume his legacy. Maybe that's a low bar, but after the disaster of the George W. Bush years, merely avoiding a catastrophe does seem like an achievement.

More to the point, with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the horizon, a president who doesn't preside over the country's collapse seems like a pretty nice thing to have. Top military officials are already dreading a Trump presidency, Clinton seems more likely than Obama to push the US into foreign entanglements, and whoever is sitting in the Oval Office will inevitably have to deal with a divided and deadlocked Congress that will make it difficult or impossible to do routine things like fill court vacancies. As we get further into the 21st century, it seems pretty likely that Americans are going to look back on the Obama Era as a time of great plenty because things were pretty OK.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Everyone deserves to get kinky in a dorm at least once in their lives. All photos by author

For most people who had to jump through the mental gymnastics clusterfuck of sneaking people into their parent's house during their teenage years, dorm sex can seem like a big step up. Gone are the days of trying to finesse a hook-up across town—now you can simply take an elevator to a different floor or walk down the hall and start hitting it up with your crush.

But it's not all fun and games—fucking while living in a building full of hundreds of horny students can be tough. Thin walls, rumours, shitty roommates and the ability of a nasty STI to wipe out an entire floor all make quick dorm hook-ups a bit of a minefield. Now that the university school year is officially over, we asked some students across Canada about the best and worst of their sex life from inside school residences this past year.

This could be Alaska in 300 years. Photo via Flickr user sergejf

Leave it to Canadian researchers to be the most pragmatic about the world's ability to fuck up on climate change. Researchers at the University of Victoria have published a comprehensive model of what will happen if (or when) we burn every drop of oil on the planet. With somewhere between 6.4 and 9.5 degrees of warming by 2300—safe levels being under two degrees—it's the bleakest long-term prediction the world has seen so far.

The author's daughters. Photograph courtesy of the author

It'll be fine, this can't be any harder than "Dark Souls," I thought to myself, glibly, as I prepared to deliver my own daughter in the bathroom of our house. It was a half-assed attempt at diffusing the situation in my own mind. We were supposed to jump in the car and get to the hospital for the baby to be delivered there—y'know, by professionals, who had done it at least once before. But things had moved too quickly.

I stared in wide-eyed terror as a living, breathing human appeared in front of me, where there previously wasn't one. A new person had just come into existence, and now I had to catch her. I remember saying, "She's here! She's here!" in a wobbly voice, to the emergency operator. My phone was wedged between my cheek and my shoulder, as if I was making a salad or folding laundry while waiting on hold to customer services. I swung my head to the left to fling the phone away, and held my new daughter in my arms, who was incredibly shouty about being alive. Delivering a goddamn baby. What a night. I stared at the same bathroom tile for 30 minutes afterward, brain completely in shock. I have a faint memory of the paramedic offering a "congratulations" before taking the baby off me to get her checked out. About four minutes later, I replied, "Uh huh."

It wasn't until we got her to hospital that they spotted something wasn't right. They rushed her off to the intensive care unit for further inspection, where her oxygen levels dropped suddenly. I paced around the hospital room, trying to take full breaths and process the information. My heart was missing beats; it felt like a boa constrictor had wrapped itself around my body, and it was taking all I had to stop it from squeezing me tighter. We were taken out of the room when things got worse. They asked us if we had a name for her, and if we wanted to take a picture before we left. I took a picture of her with my phone, as the unspoken hung thick and heavy in the air.

We sat in an adjacent room, holding onto each other like we were trying desperately not to fall off something. As they wheeled her past us in the transport incubator, covered up by a towel, a woman said to me, "We don't know what's going to happen now." At least, that's how I remember it, but to this day I can't honestly say whether she actually said that, or whether I imagined it.

I went home to try to sleep for the first time in 50 hours. I got a message from my wife telling me they'd found a problem with her heart. I punched the kitchen cabinets and looked out the window. It was raining harder than it had that entire year.

I lay on my back in the dark in a hotel in Southampton, 72 hours awake now. I lay there wondering whether my daughter would be alive in the morning.

I'm sitting here now, typing this, looking at mom and baby hanging out on the sofa, baby sucking her thumb and looking at me, all big-eyed and cooing. She came home this week, three months old. She's incredible, and to watch her develop the same way my first daughter did fills me up to the brim with joy and love. People tell you that you're over babies by the time the second one comes around, but, if anything, she's more precious to me than the first. Somehow we got through all this mentally in one piece. I attribute my success to the support of family and friends, our beautiful NHS, and gin. I also played some video games during this period.

This is where I'm supposed to extol the magical healing properties of video games: "How Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Got Me Over My Aversion to Toblerone"; "How Bishi Bashi Special Made Me Think Death Wasn't a Thing." But everything that's happened has put my relationship with video games in a weird position.

Instead of counting my breaths and working out what shade of mauve my aura is, I had "jab, jab, pile-driver; jab, jab, pile-driver."

I don't think I should stop playing video games, but I feel like, as consumers, as writers, we take them too seriously. In our frantic attempts to legitimize the hobby to everyone else, we push it too far. There are countless pieces on how video games make more money than every other industry ever, and how if you laid all the $20 bills used to purchase Call of Duty end to end, they'd stretch to Saturn and back. Any game with even a whiff of artistic integrity gets held up as a poster boy for video games as art. We freak out over 2D platformers making rudimentary attempts at portraying a theme beyond "shoot this lad's mouth off." Why are we so desperate to prove ourselves to "non-gamers"?

Most of these trends are largely harmless, but I worry about writing that positions games as a panacea for mental and emotional issues. When writing about games as an ally against the forces of mental illness, we need to be more careful. An example of this done well is a 2013 piece by Dan Douglas called "Playing The Pain Away" for Midnight Resistance, which won a Games Media Award in 2013. You can see that Dan is very careful not to position video games as the entire solution to his recovery, and highlights where they can be counter-effective. He does indicate where and how they are useful, however, and I have a story of my own to contribute.

Zangief in 'Street Fighter V'

A few weeks following my daughter's birth, I was at home, and I decided to retreat to the garden in an attempt to feel better. It was a beautiful day, so I made a cup of tea and sat in the sun. After a few moments, as I gave myself time to sit and think, I suddenly and rapidly began to feel awful, as if I was falling at speed, despite being sat very still, and I thought I might black out entirely. Luckily, you could argue, I'd had a couple of anxiety experiences like this in the past, so I could identify what was happening.

I made my way back inside, fired up Street Fighter V, and felt better very quickly after jumping into training mode and playing around with some combos. The feeling soon passed, and I felt in control again. The meditative and distractive quality of training drills gave me enough time to steady my mind. Instead of counting my breaths and working out what shade of mauve my aura is, I had "jab, jab, piledriver; jab, jab, piledriver." I could control Zangief's hulking, muscly avatar and make him do what I wanted, and that illusion of control tricks the mind, albeit temporarily.

Then again, podcasts also helped me: We spent a couple of weeks in Ronald McDonald House, a charity providing free accommodation, situated near hospitals, to parents with ill babies and children. During that time, I discovered and plowed through dozens of episodes of Bill Burr's podcast. Bill is a stand-up comedian, and in his podcast, he sits at home and talks to himself for an hour in an entertaining fashion. It was incredibly useful to me at the time, as it was an inner monologue that replaced my own in those moments where I had time to think.

I think we waste too much time and energy on trying to convince people we're doing the right thing with our time by playing hundreds of hours of video games. We need to just relax and enjoy them for what they are—entertainment, art, fun. Sometimes they're thrill rides, which is when they're entertainment. Sometimes the mechanics of video games are used as a vessel to explore themes, politics, emotions, which is when they're more like art. Sometimes they're both. But they're not medicine. At best, they're like using ibuprofen to treat a head injury. It's great that video games offer escapism, but there's a difference between escaping and getting lost.

The author has chosen to donate his fee for this article to Ronald McDonald House Charities. More information on the organization can be found on their website.

Follow Gareth Dutton on Twitter.

A soldier takes cover on May 23 during the battle for Fallujah. (AP Photo/Rwa Faisal)

Fallujah, the city known to Americans as the site of the costliest battle of the Iraq War back in 2004, is once again a battleground. On Monday, the Iraqi army launched a major assault on the city, which has been occupied by the Islamic State since 2013, and as of Tuesday afternoon, the city center was still being shelled. This comes after months of siege, during which the tens of thousands of civilians in Fallujah have suffered from severe food shortages.

To find out what's at stake in this symbolically significant battle, less than 50 miles from Baghdad, VICE spoke to Omar Lamrani, senior military analyst at the Austin-based military intelligence firm Stratfor. He told us that Iraq, whose military has in the past been roundly humiliated by ISIS, really needs to win—and win the right way—if it wants to hold onto any semblance of political stability.

VICE: What does the battlefield look like in Fallujah?
Omar Lamrani: There are approximately twenty thousand Iraqi forces overall. That includes the Iraqi government as well as the Hashd al Shaabi, also known as the PMU—the Shiite militias. Fallujah was pretty much surrounded before the operation began, but they've tightened the siege, and now they're trying to get into the urban areas. They have to go into some deep urban fighting. The Islamic State is heavily dug into the city. They know the terrain. They're determined to fight, and there's really nowhere else for them to go.

What's at stake for the Islamic State?
They're trying to take advantage of the political instability in Baghdad, and try to cement divisions within the Iraqi Security Forces, and the Iraqi population. So their dream is to see this big civil war within the Shiite camp, within the Iraqi government, and that's why they're trying to keep this thing going.

Related: We were there as the Iraqi army took back Ramadi late last year

What's at stake for Iraq?
The reason why they really need take Fallujah in the first place is, Fallujah has been a staging ground for all the recent attacks in Baghdad and Sadr City. the way they clear Fallujah is quite important. When they took Ramadi, it was a military victory for the Iraqi Army, but they really destroyed Ramadi in the process.

What could go wrong?
goes into Fallujah, and they wreck the place, suffer extensive casualties themselves, cause tremendous numbers of civilian casualties, and then really wreck any path forward for reconciliation. Because that means even if they take the ground, the insurgency's going to simmer, and keep going on.

Keep in mind: Baghdad is in a budget crunch. They don't have the money to go about rebuilding these cities that they've destroyed. So that just adds to the complications of the operation.

How has the Iraqi army been doing this year, militarily speaking?
They have been doing better over the last six months. Ever since they retook Ramadi , they've gone westward. They've taken Terbil.

You mentioned Sunni militias as well. What's their role?
There's this competition between the Iraqi government and the militias. So the militias tend to play up their role in the conflict. They retake areas, its reputation, and make sure people understand that it is itself on the front line in these areas, even if they do receive support from the Americans and the militias.

How's the Islamic State going to respond?
The Islamic State has no hesitancy about booby trapping mosques, hospitals, or pretty much any place, using human shields. They are going to maximize any damage caused to civilians caused by the government. They're going to play up the propaganda in this sense. They're going to talk about how a few Islamic State soldiers have taken on hundreds of Iraqi soldiers, so even in defeat, they can portray it almost like an Alamo of sorts—a last stand—the sort of narrative that they can shape into propaganda.

If the Iraqi government wins, what's next?
Once the Iraqis feel that they've cleared the flank, which is Anbar —which poses a threat to Baghdad—then you will see a shift further to the north of the country, and the focus would be in Mosul then.

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Look at Anna Haifisch's art and comics on her website and Twitter.

Dylann Roof's April 26, 2015 booking photo from the Columbia Police Department

READ: What Racist Skinheads in Prison Think About Dylann Roof

The US Justice Department just got on board with South Carolina prosecutors' decision to seek the death penalty for confessed mass shooter Dylann Roof, according to a statement released by Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch on Tuesday.

Roof was indicted for 33 federal crimes for a killing spree at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in June 2015 that resulted in the death of nine parishioners. He was officially charged with a hate crime a month following the shooting and nine counts of murder in the state of South Carolina.

"Following the department's rigorous review process to thoroughly consider all relevant factual and legal issues, I have determined that the Justice Department will seek the death penalty," Lynch said. "The nature of the alleged crime and the resulting harm compelled this decision."

The shooting was deemed both a hate crime and an "obstruction of persons in the free exercise of religious beliefs," but before Tuesday the Justice Department had not decided whether to send Roof to death row, consequently postponing Roof's trial several times.

The now 22-year-old's explanation for the shooting was that he wanted to cause a "race war," according to law enforcement officials who spoke to the media last year.

Alleged Toronto street gang the "Dixon City Bloods" were raided in 2013's Project Traveller, making headlines across the country for charges involving crack and gun operations in Southern Ontario. But the group occupies a unique space in the city's consciousness.

Several alleged members appeared in a notorious photo with deceased former Toronto mayor Rob Ford in the companion piece to his crack tape. Two of the men in that photo were later shot—one fatally. Their turf, Dixon, is much smaller than its reputation, just six condo towers at the intersection of Dixon Road and Kipling Avenue near Toronto's Pearson airport. After an influx of Somali refugees in the early 1990s, it was dubbed 'Little Mogadishu'; the neighbourhood remains predominantly Somali.

But what has been classed as a cultural and geographic criminal organization may not exist at all. VICE goes inside this insular community where we hear that residents had never heard of the Bloods (AKA the Goonies) until media reports and a police press conference about the widely reported 2013 raids. They can't deny that there are young people involved in gun violence but say the numbers are exaggerated and far from what could be called organized crime. VICE talks to the street-level players, alleged founders, those who have been imprisoned as Bloods, and the media who reported on the police's narrative to see if the Dixon City Bloods are a serious criminal organization, a creation by cops to justify raids in Rob Ford's former stronghold, or something in-between.

Recent photo of me (Photo by UCFFool, via)

This article originally appeared in VICE UK.

If, like me, you're a man who has an inordinate amount of sex, to the point where it becomes a mechanical endeavour, the climax serving only as a momentary distraction from the robotic horror of coitus, then you're in luck. Us heavy-intercourse men are getting bigger dicks, and it's all got something to do with beetles.

In a study published by journal Evolution and conducted by scientists at the University of Exeter, it was found that the male burying beetle will lengthen the size of its penis through above-average mating over the course of a few generations. The female burying beetle, on the other hand, grows claws in its reproductive organs.

Predictably, the female beetles come off worse out of this whole thing: it only requires a couple of sessions to fertilise all their eggs. The males, however, can fuck any and all beetles they want, and their dicks subsequently get bigger. All the ladies get is too many kids and a load of pincers in their vaginas. Typical. Looks like the patriarchy is alive and well in the beetle world.

The rate of evolution in these beetle dicks is quite remarkable, though. As Dr Paul Hopwood from the University of Exeter pointed out: "It's fascinating how genital evolution can happen so fast – in ten generations – showing how rapidly evolutionary changes can occur."

Nobody's suggested the same thing could happen to humans – YET. But hey, if it works for beetles, why shouldn't it work for us?

More on VICE:

The Biological Origins of Arms Races

Ice Bugs Are Rare and Imaginary but They'll Make You Tear Your Skin Off

The Brutality Report - Knowledge of the Bug Pit

Photo via Flickr user Dave Hosford

A former New York City cop was arrested Tuesday over what prosecutors describe as a swanky prostitution ring catering to some of America's wealthiest men. Michael Rizzi, who served on the NYPD from 1991 to 2000, is accused of running dozens of sites that delivered escorts to the doors of johns for the cost of up to $2,000 an hour, according to a federal criminal complaint.

Lending the allegations an additional air of intrigue is the fact that Rizzi happens to be married to Jill Juliano, the niece of a reputed Gambino crime family captain.

According to the complaint, Michael "Bruce" Rizzi ran the shady business beginning in June 2012. Records show he's the owner of 58 active domain names related to escort services, like pureplaymates.com and lusciouscompanions.com.

Those sites include forms for women to apply for work as an escort, and one such applicant apparently balked when Rizzi asked her to meet in person for an interview.

"I'm sorry darling, google 'escorts in nyc' im number one for a reason. I get the most business, my girls make the most money, my clients are the wealthiest people in the world," he replied, according to the complaint. "Been doing this 10 years never a problem."

Patrons of the escort service were apparently quite wealthy. One man hired an escort for a trip to Jamaica where they would stay on a private resort. Other clients were quoted prices of $600 an hour, or $8,400 for a 14-hour appointment. Another john who interviewed with Myles Mahady, the investigating NYPD detective, claimed he and two friends hired three of Rizzi's employees for $25,000, which covered both sex and cocaine provided by the escorts.

This isn't Rizzi's first arrest: In July 2009, the former cop was charged with enterprise corruption for his role as "super agent" at the center of a sports betting ring. He had 400 clients, according to the feds, and was convicted in 2011, ultimately paying a fine.

Meanwhile, Rizzi's wife's uncle Joseph "Sonny" Juliano allegedly raked in millions running a numbers racket and taking illegal sports bets, although he claimed to only make $106 in annual income. Juliano was arrested in 2003, at the age of 65, for running illegal gambling rooms in Brooklyn, Staten Island, Queens, Westchester County, and Long Island, and prosecutors said at the time that he often used old men with canes to collect on bets. Later that year, he was sentenced to a minimum of a year and a half in prison after an agreement with the state caused him to plead guilty to one count of attempted enterprise corruption.

Juliano never admitted to being part of the mafia. But Jill Juliano's father Richard, himself reportedly a Gambino soldier, also pleaded guilty in 2003 to illegal gambling charges.

"The mob has of course tried to adapt to the times and online 'escort' services are among some of the very lucrative vices that such organizations like to get a cut of or fully operate themselves," mafia historian Christian Cipollini told VICE.

Rizzi was set to be freed Tuesday on a $500,000 bond posted by his wife and backed by her house, according to a spokesperson from the US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn. Special conditions included no contact with customers, escorts, employees, or potential witnesses. But the New York Times reports the suspect was re-arrested prior to his release on state gun charges.

Rizzi was to be arraigned in federal court on Wednesday afternoon.

"My client has never denied running an escort service, which is a companion service," Rizzi's attorney, Javier Solano, told me. "I don't think people understand the concept of this. They are one hundred percent legal and legitimate. Whether or not the person asking for the person to come over expects something other than companionship is not my client's problem."

Solano added that Rizzo never did anything shady, like put his business under another person's name. But the case may invite fresh scrutiny of any lingering ties between (former) cops and organized crime in America's largest city.

"This isn't the first NYPD officer to marry into the Gambino crime family," said Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD detective sergeant who joined the force the same year as Rizzi. "The job is falling apart at the seams."

This post has been updated to include additional information.

*Correction 5/25: An earlier version of this article misstated the nature of the relationship between Jill Juliano and Joseph "Sonny" Juliano. Juliano is her uncle, not her older brother.

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An anti-Trump protest in Chicago earlier this year. Photo via Wikimedia.

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

US News

Anti-Trump Protest Turns Violent in New Mexico
Protesters and police clashed on Tuesday night outside a Donald Trump rally at the Albuquerque Convention Center. Police used pepper spray and smoke grenades after some protestors threw burning "Make America Great Again" T-shirts towards the cops. Albuquerque police said several officers were injured after being hit by rocks. —CBS News

Millennials More Likely to Live With Parents Than Partner
Living with parents has become the most common living arrangement for millennials, according to a Pew Research study. For the first time in more than 130 years, adults aged 18 to 34 are more likely to live with their parents than with a partner. There has been a dramatic drop in the number choosing to get married before 35. —NPR News

GOP Considers Major Overhaul of Primaries
Republican leaders are reportedly discussing big changes in the way the party selects its presidential nominee. One idea is to close GOP primary contests to independent voters. Officials are also considering changing the calendar to prevent early states Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina being so important. —The New York Times

Feds Seek Death Penalty Against Dylann Roof
The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty for Dylann Roof, the 22-year-old accused of shooting and killing nine people at a predominantly black church in Charleston last year. "The nature of the alleged crime and the resulting harm compelled this decision," said Attorney General Loretta Lynch. —ABC News

International News

Afghan Taliban Appoint New Leader
The Afghan Taliban has announced Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada as its new leader following the death of Mullah Mansour by a US drone strike. A religious scholar and former head of the Taliban courts, Haibatullah Akhundzada has been responsible for issuing most of the Taliban's fatwas. —BBC News

Cuba to Legalize Some Private Businesses
The Cuban government has announced it is to legalize small and medium-sized private businesses. Although President Raul Castro has not outlined the details, Cuban business owners said they were hopeful the reform would allow firms to import and export to other countries without state control. —AP

Kurds Launch Offensive on IS-Held Raqqa
An alliance of Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters has launched a military offensive to push the Islamic State out of the northern city of Raqqa. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), said it has gathered thousands of fighters in the countryside north of Raqqa. —Al Jazeera

Greece Agrees New Debt Deal with Eurozone
Greece has reached a deal with Eurozone finance ministers to access $11.5 billion in new funds. Eurozone ministers have also agreed to offer Greece debt relief in 2018 if it becomes necessary. Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister and president of the Eurogroup collective of finance ministers, called it a "major breakthrough." —Reuters

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Everything Else

Cosby Will Go to Trial in Sex Assault Case
Bill Cosby will be tried on charges of sexual assault after a judge rejected his plea to have the case dismissed. Cosby is accused of drugging and molesting a former Temple University employee Andrea Constand in 2004. —Sky News

North Carolina Schools Want to Ban Skinny Jeans
Students are objecting to a New Hanover County school system proposal to ban skinny jeans and leggings. "Excessively tight fitting pants" would be banned unless they're covered by a top or dress. —NBC News

Former NYPD Cop Charged with Running Prostitution Ring
Former New York City cop Michael Rizzi has been arrested over what prosecutors describe as a prostitution ring. He is accused of running dozens of sites that delivered escorts to the doors of johns for upwards of $2,000 an hour. —VICE

Prince's First Manager Talks About Early 'Brilliance' of Singer
Owen Husney, Prince's first manager, has explained what it was like to work with the headstrong 17-year-old prodigy and recording Prince's debut album. "There was a focus, there was a brilliance of intelligence," said Husney. —Noisey

Done with reading today? Watch our new film 'Inside the UK's Illegal Rave Scene'

The first time I tried Ativan, I was 15. I had to spend the night in the emergency room, and I was given one "to take the edge off." It turned out that I had leukemia, and I would spend over 200 nights in the hospital that year. I asked for an Ativan almost every single one of them.

In the 14 years since then, I've gone through dozens of prescriptions for sleep aids, from Ambien to Zopiclone. I've tried over-the-counter pills like Benadryl, Gravol, and Unisom. I've never felt guilty about it. I consider sleeping pills a solution to a problem, rather than a problem in themselves. But there was an incident a few weeks ago that gave me pause: Manic in the throes of a weeklong, profound insomnia, the over-the-counter pills and $120 worth of natural sleep aids weren't working. I called my doctor and begged for an emergency prescription of Ativan, convinced I would have a heart attack if I didn't take the goddamn pill and get some sleep.

I got the prescription, took the Ativan, and slept. I still had three half-milligram pills left. But for the first time, I felt like an addict. And for the first time, I considered that I might want to stop.

Sleep learning, or "hypnopedia," is an attempt to trick the mind into absorbing information during sleep. The first commercial application was in 1927, when Alois Benjamin Saliger marketed the Psycho-Phone, an audio device that promised to tap into "the vast powers of your unconscious mind during sleep" by playing specific phrases on repeat. "It has been proven," Saliger told the New Yorker in 1933, "that natural sleep is identical with hypnotic sleep and that during natural sleep the unconscious mind is most receptive to suggestions."

Saliger sold recordings to inspire prosperity, inspiration, normal weight, even life extension. The script for mating went as follows: "I desire an ideal mate. I radiate love. I have a fascinating and attractive personality. My conversation is interesting. My company is delightful." The recording would go on through the night.

Related: How Humans Can Evolve to Need Less Sleep

Fifteen years after the launch of the Psycho-Phone, in the summer of 1942, psychologist Lawrence LeShan conducted an experiment on sleep learning. LeShan brought a group of young boys who bit their nails to a country home, and while they were sleeping, played a recording of his own voice repeating: "My fingernails taste terribly bitter. My fingernails taste terribly bitter." When the record player broke, he supposedly went into their rooms and whispered the message himself.

After 54 nights listening to the mantra, LeShan eported that 40 percent of the boys stopped biting their nails. Since then, the scientific community hasn't given much consideration as to whether or not sleep learning works, but research suggests sleep plays an imperative role in cementing learned information, and audio played at night can marginally enhance language learning.

Illustrations by Mai Ly Degnan

I wanted to see if sleep learning could teach me how to sleep. I bought a fresh notebook and made a voice recording, inspired by the Psycho-Phone, of myself repeating: "I will sleep so deeply tonight; I will have a restful night and wake up feeling awake and alert." I would play if for myself every night for two weeks, in the hopes I could convince my unconscious mind to make it through the night without sleeping pills.

Here are my notes from the first week of the experiment:

Monday
I wanted to start today, but I didn't sleep last night and was scared I'd get trapped in another insomnia cycle. Took my last 1.5 milligrams of Ativan. I'll start tomorrow.

Tuesday
Was tired all day from taking sleeping pills and not sleeping enough. I set my recording to start an hour after I went to bed and fell asleep immediately, around 10 PM. I woke up at 1 AM to the low sound of my own voice, thinking, Fuck my mantra.

Wednesday
Went to yoga tonight, which sometimes helps me sleep more soundly, but woke up at 4 AM. When I woke up, I put the mantra on pause for another hour, to ensure that I didn't hear it while awake—it's meant to be "sleep learning," after all, not "wakeful learning." But I didn't sleep much after that, and woke up from a disconcerting dream five minutes before my alarm.

Thursday
I had my first sleepover with the man I'm seeing. Too embarrassed to listen to my recording, obviously. Didn't sleep much but didn't feel tired the next day.

Friday
Fell asleep so fast that "it's like it was your sport," my bedmate told me. (He was intrigued by and supportive of my sleep recording. Good sign!)

On the weekend, I told some friends about my project. I haven't told many people about my sleep problem. I'd been trying to avoid the fact that it was a problem, but also, it's a problem that seems so banal. My friends were kind and supportive, saying that it seemed like I was using sleeping pills for the right reasons—that is, to sleep—rather than to "numb feelings" or "avoid problems." They were intrigued by my sleep learning experiment, if dubious. We all agreed it seemed a lot like hypnosis.

"I will sleep so deeply tonight; I will have a restful night and wake up feeling awake and alert."

During the second week of my experiment, I continued playing my recording in lieu of using pills, but slept fitfully. There were three nights that I heard the audio begin to play before I fell asleep and became anxious about the fact that I'd been lying awake for an hour. But generally, I did feel less anxious if I couldn't sleep—a huge change for me. I couldn't tell if this was because of the sleep learning or because, in thinking and talking about my insomnia more than I usually do, I was normalizing it.

Chronic insomnia is defined by the American Sleep Association as at least three restless nights per week over a period of at least one month. By this measure, I'm surprised not everyone is an insomniac. Since I started talking to people about my trouble sleeping, it seems almost everyone suffers from similar problems. Indeed, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine acknowledges that 30 percent of adults have some symptoms of insomnia.

A recent study conducted by the American College of Physicians suggests patients try cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) before medication. They couldn't say outright that cognitive behavioral therapy outperforms medications for chronic insomnia, but the group does say that therapy is less risky.

I mentioned this to my friend Sarahjane, who is studying psychotherapy in Toronto. "CBT is about conscious reconditioning to change your habits," she told me. "But sleep and insomnia are inevitably coming from an unconscious place, and I think to address those issues, you need a therapy practice that goes much deeper."

Deeper, as in back to the start of the problem. I've never before had the thought that my insomnia could be linked to emotions about my teenage cancer, but this experiment has made me wonder. Primary insomnia is defined by sleep problems unrelated to another health condition. But secondary insomnia can be spurred by anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as moving, job loss, and separation.

Since finishing the experiment, I've fallen back into my normal pattern of sleep and sleeplessness. I've taken OTC medications about every other night. I still think my insomnia amounts to more than an addiction to sleeping pills, and while I can't say the sleep-learning experiment had any direct effect on my insomnia, investing this much thought into my sleep patterns and history has changed things for me in a way I hadn't anticipated.

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