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Girl Writer: LA's Museum of Broken Relationships Is a Reminder of All Your Horrible Exes

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All photos courtesy of the Museum of Broken Relationships

At first glance, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles seems more like a collection of household items than artifacts of heartbreak. In fact, if the space itself were any less posh, it would look like a yard sale. There's a Betty Boop plush doll opposite a dinosaur piñata; on one wall, a plain blue blouse is on display. But when you look closer, you notice that beside each object is a story about where it came from.

The museum, originally formed by artists Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić in Zagreb, Croatia, is now opening a second location in Los Angeles. Vištica and Grubišić were themselves a couple once, and the museum was designed as a way to "overcome emotional collapse" of breaking up. The Los Angeles iteration sticks to this same theme. The museum's director Alexis Hyde and her staff sorted through more than 250 donated artifacts, each with their own sad tale, to create the museum as it can now be seen in its new Hollywood location.

"It might not look like it, but everything here is one of a kind," Hyde told me. "It's not priceless, but it's irreplaceable."

Once I began reading the stories for each object, it was hard not to think about the objects I've kept from my own broken relationships. Turns out, I don't have many. My most recent ex bought me a kit to make whip-its, which I never even used, and then asked for it back after we broke up. The closest thing I have to an object from a previous relationship, aside from a few pairs of underwear accidentally left behind in my apartment, is a photo from the time the guy I was dating peed my name on a sidewalk. It's not tangible, sure, but I still have that image saved on my phone, and I'll probably never delete it.

Related: We Asked Our Exes What It Was Like to Date Us

That's what's so fascinating about this place: It not only proves how universal heartbreak is, but more importantly, how universal it is to not want to let go. We invest so much of ourselves in relationships that when they're over, we need a souvenir—a reminder that it wasn't all for nothing. It feels unnatural to get to know someone so deeply, and let him or her get to know us deeply, then completely cut him or her out of our lives. These dispensable objects are a stand-in for our memories, and even the most painful ones can be difficult to surrender.

But the whole point of the Museum of Broken Relationships is that surrendering can be therapeutic.

"I've had people bring objects in person, and as they handed it to me have cried or been hesitant," Hyde told me. "I always ask, 'Are you sure?' And I see the relief that washes over them. They're happy to have let go of it, but it was a fight."

"Everything here is one of a kind. It's not priceless, but it's irreplaceable." — Alexis Hyde

Take the antique coffee grinder on display. "I sent him snail mail and a vinyl of Ella Fitzgerald's 'Dream a Little Dream of Me,' and he sent me an antique coffee grinder," reads the description. Then, according to the text, they ended up going to Iceland together before saying their final goodbyes at the airport (cue a Decembrists song as the credits roll). Other objects were tinged with neglect, deception, and betrayal. The blue blouse on display was worn by the woman who submitted it on the day her husband told her he was leaving her. In another part of the museum, there was a comic from a woman who explained: "I spent an entire summer making this birthday present, and he left it in my car."

It's hard not to put yourself into each of the stories, even if your own exes weren't nearly as romantic and/or terrible as the ones represented by the objects. A story that evoked anger in me might make another person feel hopeful, depending on how you see yourself in the story and how it makes you feel about your past relationships. "It's almost like a good abstract painting," Hyde told

On Motherboard: I Paid This Company $30 to Break Up with My Girlfriend

After snaking through the museum and reading the stories of real people being discarded and clinging to the objects that were left behind, I was on the verge of a panic attack. I mean this literally: My heart started racing, and I struggled to keep myself from breaking down and crying right in the middle of the museum. I kept asking myself, How do I avoid being one of these stories? Can I avoid it? At the same time, every object on display was a reminder that all relationships are doomed to fail.

I left the Museum of Broken Relationships feeling like I'd just left a therapy session. That's what's so important about a museum like this: The objects inside are both universal and deeply personal. And, hopefully, if I ever return, I'll see these objects and their stories in a whole new way, because I'll have a new perspective on my own love life.

The Museum of Broken Relationships opens to the public on Saturday, June 4. For more information, visit its website. If you'd like to donate an object from a failed relationship, you can do so here.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.


Son of Canadian Real Estate Tycoon Accused of Torturing and Killing His Girlfriend in West Hollywood

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Iana Kasian was found murdered in her West Hollywood apartment last week. Photo via Facebook.

The Toronto-born son of a rich real estate developer has pleaded not guilty to murder, torture, and a host of other charges relating to the horrific death of his girlfriend in West Hollywood.

Blake Leibel, 35, entered the not guilty plea in a Los Angeles courtroom Tuesday, after being arrested for allegedly killing his girlfriend Iana Kasian. Police reportedly found him barricaded inside the couple's apartment where Kasian's body was also located.

She had sustained blunt force trauma to the head, according to police. In a statement, prosecutors said she'd been mutilated and all of her blood was drained.

Kasian, 30, is reportedly the mother to Leibel's baby, who was born just a few weeks ago.

Speaking to the National Post, a friend of Kasian's said Kasian moved out of her home with Leibel after he was recently charged with sexual assault, but she visited him last Tuesday. He was released after posting $100,000 bail. Her body was found Thursday after her mother reported her missing.

Leibel is a graphic novelist and director whose works include a book called Syndrome about the mind of a serial killer and a screenplay about a killing spree. His dad, former Olympic sailor Lorne Leibel, is known as the "Ferrari Man" due to his penchant for sports cars. His mother reportedly left most of her large estate to him before she died in 2011. According to the Washington Post, he was receiving an $18,000 monthly allowance from his parents.

In addition to premeditated murder and torture, Leibel is facing charges of mayhem (mutilation), and aggravated mayhem. A conviction could mean the death penalty.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Keith Schwartz has ordered Leibel to undergo a psychological evaluation.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Is Vancouver the Tax Haven Capital of Canada?

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A city of glass and offshore accounts. Photo via Flickr user Jake Warren

It's been nearly two months since the Panama Papers first made headlines, and still there's so much more to learn from the millions of documents exposing clients of the notorious Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. (Now released into a searchable online database; you're welcome, tax nerds.)

Already we've got the sense there are hundreds of thousands of super-rich people setting up offshore bank accounts and shell companies for various purposes, many of them shady. And on top of all the world leaders, mobsters, C-list celebrities, and sports officials named in the docs, there are also over 1,300 Canadian mailing addresses linked to offshore firms that are just starting to get noticed.

Vancouver correspondent for the South China Morning Post Ian Young took a closer look at those Canadian-owned tax havens last week, and found a pretty glaring concentration of them in Metro Vancouver's wealthiest neighbourhoods and suburbs. It turns out Vancouver and Richmond addresses are over eight times more likely to appear in the papers than the Canadian per-capita average, while West Vancouver addresses are in there 19.2 times more than the norm. See the whole investigation with graphs and charts here.

While Greater Toronto technically has a handful more addresses linked to offshore accounts than Metro Vancouver (382 to 375, respectively), if you control for the huge population gap between the cities, Young found the West Coast is way ahead. "I think Vancouver is definitely the tax haven capital of Canada," Young told VICE. "On a per-capita basis, there's a fairly huge disparity."

Young is quick to note the Panama Papers leak does not give a full picture of all Canadian-made tax havens, nor does it necessarily suggest wrongdoing. "What you can see is the difference in scale between Vancouver and the rest of Canada, between Vancouver and, say, Toronto, which is the financial capital, which you would think would have a very huge number of tax haven companies, or a higher proportion, but it doesn't."

Young also has some theories about why and how this all happened. He's been following "millionaire migration" to Vancouver for a long time, and he says the tax havens are another indication that Vancouver has an unusually high concentration of international millionaires.

"I think you can make some conclusions," Young told VICE. "The situation is this: Vancouver has taken by far and away the great majority of the world's wealthy immigrants that have arrived in Canada."

For nearly 30 years, Canada had an investor visa program that essentially granted citizenship to anyone with the means to lend the government $800,000. That visa program was shut down in 2014, but a similar one run out of Quebec continues to let in more millionaires destined for Vancouver, according to Young's research.

"So many millionaires have moved here, and have been moving money around the world to come to Vancouver, and one of the strategies that people use when they're doing that is tax havens." Young says Vancouver is the end destination for about two thirds of Canada's millionaire migrants, while Toronto takes the other third.

Wealth migration, predominantly from mainland China, has also been blamed for heating up Vancouver's out-of-control real estate market. To get a sense of the size of the issue, University of British Columbia researcher Andy Yan somewhat controversially looked at Anglicized and non-Anglicized Chinese names registered on property documents. This week Vancouver's mayor Gregor Robertson called out pundits who take studies like these and assume "anybody with a Chinese name who is buying a home in Vancouver must not be from Canada."

Young agrees that looking at names doesn't prove anything about individuals. "What it doesn't do is tell you whether or not those are citizens or not citizens. It doesn't tell you whether they're permanent residents or not permanent residents," he said. "All it tells you, basically, too a greater or lesser degree, is whether or not they're ethnically Chinese."

With some caution, Young still thinks this information can add a new dimension to the ways millionaires are shaping the city. "You certainly don't want to come to some conclusion about whether or not ethnically Chinese people have some racial predisposition to misbehaviour, that is simply not true," he said. "What there is, is a millionaire disposition."

When compared to Census data of the general population, the offshore firm data Young looked at again showed a much higher concentration of Chinese names, particularly in West Vancouver. Again, it doesn't mean the whole group are recent immigrants or from China.

According to Young, that means the international superwealthy can choose to play by different rules on both citizenship and taxes—and both are happening more in Vancouver than anywhere else in Canada.

Follow Sarah on Twitter.


The VICE Guide to Right Now: For the Love of God Someone Help This Man Get the Snakes Out of His Attic

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Mark Hyatt owns a home in Greenwood, South Carolina. Unfortunately, that home has snakes in the attic. At least two snakes, but Mark thinks maybe there's another one up there.

Mark really wants someone to get rid of them for him, because no sane person would want to deal with a couple of attic snakes themselves. Mark is at a loss.

In hopes of remedying the whole snake situation, Mark shot a video and sent it over to WSPA 7 News, who posted it on their site along with a write-up that verges on haiku.

The video is mostly just Mark marveling at the snakes, inching toward the snakes spilling down from his attic, and then shuffling back to keep a safe distance. For the love of God, can someone out there help this man?

Read: Wow, This Is a Big Gator

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Former Employees Say Trump University Was a 'Fraudulent Scheme'

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Donald Trump and Trump University President Michael Sexton announcing the creation of Trump U in March 2005. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Ever since Trump University was accused of being a mechanism for defrauding people who wanted to learn Donald Trump's business secrets, the real estate mogul and presumptive GOP nominee has stood by his for-profit real estate seminar business. But he faces a contentious, potentially publicly damaging legal battle, as shown by the more than 400 pages of Trump U "playbooks" and testimony from former employees that was made public as part of one of the lawsuits against the company, the New York Times reports.

Trump U, launched in 2005 at the height of the housing bubble, claimed to be able to transform its students into real estate titans with a few weekend lectures. But at least three former employees described it as a predatory scheme that relied on savvy salesmen encouraging vulnerable people to take on credit card debt to pay for expensive lessons that weren't worth the price.

"In my experience, the primary goal of Trump University was not to educate students regarding real estate investing," testified Ronald Schnackenberg, who worked as a sales manager at Trump U for several months from 2006 to 2007. "The primary focus seemed to be making money, as quickly and easily as possible."

"Trump University was a fraudulent scheme," he added, according to court documents.

The Trump University handbook encouraged its sales team to dig personal information out of prospective students for leverage, and to "let them know you've found an answer to their problems." It also emphasized that they should encourage these people to take on credit card debt to pay for the courses.

Trump's lawyers called the testimony from employees "discredited," according to the Times, and Trump's camp continues to claim that most students at Trump U were satisfied (some of the unsealed court docs included positive statements from former students).

Trump has also gone on the offensive against the federal judge, Gonzalo Curiel, saying, "He is Hispanic, and he is very hostile to me" in a Fox News interview.

Read: There's Another Donald Trump Scandal That No One Is Talking About

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck speaks to the press after two people were killed in a shooting at UCLA on Wednesday morning. (Photo by Mintaha Neslihan Eroglu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

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

US News

UCLA Shooting Victim Identified
The victim of an apparent murder-suicide on the UCLA campus on Wednesday has been identified as William Klug, an engineering professor. Police said two men were found dead. A gun and a note possibly left by the gunman were also recovered. They believe Klug may have been the shooter's teacher. —ABC News

Republican Hispanic Media Chief Quits
Ruth Guerra, the Republican National Committee's head of Hispanic media relations, will resign this month. Guerra allegedly told several colleagues she is uncomfortable working for nominee Donald Trump and selling his message to Hispanic voters. She is set to go and work for a Republican-aligned super PAC. —The New York Times

Somali Commander Accused of War Crimes Found Working at US Airport
A former Somali military commander accused of war crimes during the country's civil war has been found working at a US airport. Yusuf Abdi Ali is employed as a security guard at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC. Ali has been placed on administrative leave by the airport after details of his past came to light. —CNN

No Federal Charges for Cops in Jamar Clark Shooting
Civil rights leaders have criticized the decision by federal prosecutors not to bring charges against two Minneapolis police officers involved in the shooting death of 24-year-old black man Jamar Clark. "Our government leaders have clearly let us down," said the president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. —VICE News

International News

World Powers Call for Air Drops in Syria
The US, UK, and France have urged the UN to begin air drops of aid to besieged areas in Syria. They accused the Syrian government of failing to respect a June 1 deadline for aid distribution. A Red Cross convoy reached the besieged area of Darayya on Wednesday, but it was only allowed to deliver a small amount of medicine. —BBC News

At Least 16 Killed in Somali Hotel Attack
At least 16 people have been killed and 55 wounded in a car bomb and sustained gun attack on the Hotel Ambassador in Mogadishu, Somali, authorities said. Security forces say the hotel is now secure after clearing the building of militants from the Islamist group al Shabaab. —Reuters

Saudi Arabia Invests $3.5 Billion in Uber
Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has invested $3.5 billion in Uber to help the ride-hailing company expand across the Middle East. It is Uber's biggest influx of cash from a single investor. Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick described it as a "vote of confidence." —CNN Money

Indian Court Convicts 24 Over Massacre
A court in India has convicted 24 people of involvement in a notorious massacre that took place during the 2002 anti-Muslim riots, finding 11 people guilty of murder. The mob attacked a residential complex in Ahmedabad, hacking and burning 69 Muslims to death. The judge acquitted another 36 people for lack of evidence. —The Guardian


Wiz Khalifa. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Wiz Khalifa Sues Label and Former Manager
The rapper has filed a lawsuit against his former manager and label in an effort to terminate a deal signed in 2005. It accuses Rostrum Records and Benjy Grinberg of profiting from "every aspect" of Khalifa's life, and seeks more than $1 million in damages.—Pittsburg Post-Gazette

Airbnb Bans Racist North Carolina Host
Airbnb has banned a host in North Carolina after he used racist language to tell a black woman who booked a room she was not welcome. "This is the south darling. Find another place to rest," he wrote to her in a message. —USA Today

Marijuana Edibles Made Legal in Oregon
Marijuana-infused edibles go on sale legally in Oregon for the first time today, part of the state's rollout of legalized recreational weed. Customers aged 21 or over can purchase the edibles, so long as they contain under 15 milligrams of THC. —The Oregonian

Illegal Commercial Drones Receive No FAA Fines
The Federal Aviation Administration has never fined a drone user for flying for money, despite warning that flying drones for commercial purposes without permission is illegal, according to documents obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. —Motherboard

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'Locked Off: A Documentary About the UK's Illegal Rave Scene.'

We Watched That New Porn Reality Show ‘Sex Factor’ So You Don’t Have To

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(Screenshots via Sex Factor)

This article originally appeared in VICE UK.

Filming a double penetration scene isn't easy. Have you ever thought about the logistics? "Hero D Protagonist" hasn't. He's squatted against the sofa at completely the wrong angle and he's fumbling himself inside "Minx", who lowers herself onto him with the pained dignity of someone entering a hot bath. The Colonel stands to attention beside the two as the scene unfolds; penis noncompliant, he's mashing away at it with teeth gritted. Both sets of eyes flit nervously at the cameraman and hovering offscreen guides. Minx has long since retreated to her mind palace. xHamster has produced an original porn reality show called The Sex Factor because God has abandoned us.

The format is pretty simple and follows the same well-worn paths as non-porn reality shows: the contestants come pre-prepared with their soundbites and characters (only, instead of "I'm not here to make friends" it's, "I wanna be the Miss Congeniality of porn" or, "I love fucking on sailboats") and they all live in a big house together in an effort to make them fuck (only, the inter-cast fucking isn't obscured by a blanket and night vision; I mean, they actually make extremely high quality POV scenes in their off hours).

Then, just when you get comfortable in the format, it skews off and gets more porny: they have competitions like "blow-offs", where the losers are voted out of the house; they have a lineup of pneumatic porn actors saying "I want my panties to be wet at the end of this competition"; there are a lot of leather sofas with sweat stains on them. It's a show about people who are extremely bad at sex, but it's also a character study in the type of person who is totally convinced that they're America's great undiscovered penis.

Here's what you can glean from the first two episodes:

David Caspian cries after doing a bad wank

All Reality Shows Need at Least One Extremely Creepy Contestant

... although The Sex Factor has generously gifted us two. It's Day One, and David "Caspian" Caspian – he goes by Caspian for those lusty CS Lewis vibes – has misread the mood of the house in a major way. As his fellow housemates decamp to the diary room to say how creeped out he makes them feel, he makes the classic mistake of stripping entirely naked and lying on the floor, masturbating and giggling to himself. Even in the porn house, this is regarded as a faux pas. It's hard to know what sort of vetting process didn't catch Caspian before he could begin his own personal wank odyssey.

The Colonel ("I'm here to be a leader... in porn!") is the worst type of person on television: the serial reality show contestant. He was on a series of Beauty and the Geek and now he's on The Sex Factor because he can only get a rod on if he's doing it to win a television show. He spends an entire blowjob looking down in open astonishment. He doesn't bother to do a porn face – no leering, no gasping, no encouragements – and, actually, he doesn't seem to be enjoying it at all. He joins in the double penetration scene – they've put The Colonel on vag duty here, although he mostly just looks at it – and spends an agonising 30 seconds just trying to make it inside. You know in Eastenders when they ask you if you've been affected by any of the events in the show? The Colonel trying desperately to thumb himself inside a lady should be followed by some sort of helpline number and a crying break.

Veronica Vain fakes an orgasm for a room full of people

Reality Television Makes People Forget How to Speak

Do you have a main thing? Asa Akira's main thing is that girls don't shit or fart. We know this because she tells us: "That's my main thing: girls don't shit, girls don't fart." Tori Black informs us that: "The Colonel is known to keep a hard dick," like he's a leathery gold rush gunslinger rather than your cousin who works at CEX. In a short piece to camera, The Colonel says that women should "just follow orders... like a meat puppet!" with the unhinged grin of a man who definitely owns multiple meat puppets.

It is a magic all of its own. I doubt people even need coaching any more. Sit them in front of a camera and they'll start talking completely unprompted about how improving their rimming skills is the first step in their quest to be a more complete person. Judge Kieran Lee describes himself as "The man with the million dollar cock. Cocky, arrogant, but overall a nice guy."

Is it porn that has made him this way? Or reality television? Either way, he's broken.

The judging panel with host Asa Akira

Simon Cowell Has a Lot to Answer for

And lo, Cowell spoke thusly: "There must always be one judge who is a proper bastard," and it was so. Kieran Lee is the sole male judge, and he has confused the deadpan tell-it-like-it-is judging technique of real TV with just straight up being a dickhead. He's also from Derby, which lends the whole process a weird "cornered in Yates' smoking area" vibe. The other three judges – Lexi Belle, Tori Black and Remy LaCroix – all sit next to him looking slightly like hostages, smiling brightly so he doesn't turn his critical cock on them instead. And he's taking this seriously: every time a decision goes against him he looks like he's on the verge of throwing a wobbler. The man is every bad Tinder opener all at once, compressed into the same tight shirt.

The girls

Men Are Bad at Sex

During the blow-off challenge the girls have to attempt to bring the boys to climax within three minutes. The first two boys manage it without breaking a sweat. They saunter off, celebrating with their mates, still half-flaccid weapons slapping against their thighs. Yeah, bro! High five! The girls only manage to nail the last one after one of the judges scuttles over to lend an extra mouth. The boys have a mini-competition to have a dildo moulded like their member, and all they have to do is get an erection the fastest. The show ends up having to cut between takes because there's only so much desperate dick-pummelling you can take before you start to feel sorry for them.

The girls all seem very normal and are fitter than the men by an order of magnitude. They aren't professionals either, but crucially they don't seem like they've learned everything they know about sex from the older boys at school. When the boys are all asked to climb on the stage at once and pole dance together, the scene is like a set of monkey bars at playtime. The Colonel starts doing press-ups. It sort of sums up the whole concept of aspirational male porn stars.

The boys. This is like the start of some weird sex prom.

Porn Is Not Glamorous

How glamorous did you think porn was? No, you're wrong; it's much worse. Add a thin film of grease over everything, subtract any actual enjoyment. Have a nice warm bath after you've watched The Sex Factor and maybe read the Bible. Be extremely glad that the porn you watch is done by glowing professionals with pearly teeth and wangs like great leathery sea-beasts. Visually speaking, beautiful people fucking is like the righteous coupling of ancient gods. As The Sex Factor frequently reminds us, normal people fucking is more like two furious hogs fighting for a dropped chipolata.

A Porn Reality Show Isn't Actually That Strange

Here's the thing that was surprising: The Sex Factor isn't really shocking at all. Quite a lot of reality TV tiptoes along the porn line at the best of times anyway – once you've seen the thrusting, grunting outline of a waxed Geordie under a thin blanket, can you really say you'd be shocked if the blanket fell off? Michelle and Stu banged under a table in Big Brother 5, and Anthony and Makosi upped the ante by having some low-key pool sex in Big Brother 6. If Big Brother's Little Brother had offered a CSI video enhance of the vile deed, you know you wouldn't have turned it off.

You almost forget the porn is happening once you get caught up in the characters and the challenges, just like every other reality show. God help me, I've been starting to think it may have stumbled on a winning formula. It has its claws in me. I'm rioting if The Colonel doesn't win.

You can watch new episodes of The Sex Factor – we're promised it gets "completely XXXX" in the latest instalment – at www.sexfactor.com

@janhopis

More stuff about porn:

What I Learned from Giving Up Porn for a Month

What Did Porn Do to Millennials?

The Woman Who Looks Like Ted Cruz Is Going to Do Porn

How Bangladesh's LGBT Community Is Dealing with Threats and Machete Attacks

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Rainbow Rally 2015 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo courtesy of 'Roopbaan'

"People in Dhaka are now saying that Xulhaz made us gay," says the frightened voice across the line. "Xulhaz and Tonoy did not make anyone gay. We are gay because that's the way we were born. There's nothing anti-Bangladeshi or unnatural about being different, but the prejudice is steep."

This is the first time that Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy's friend, who I will not name for his own safety, has lost anyone close to him. It's 2 AM in Dhaka, but he has been unable to sleep properly since Tonoy, an activist, was murdered, alongside former US embassy employee Xulhaz Mannan, by half a dozen machete-wielding extremists in Bangladesh on April 25. The Bangladeshi government claims that the extremists were homegrown, while al Qaeda and ISIS, along with religious extremist groups in Bangladesh, take credit for the dozens of public executions around the country. Extremists have issued warnings that the killings will continue, and that those who report on LGBT issues will be hunted down. Many members of the LGBT community remain in hiding as a result of these attacks, and the prejudice displayed by many of the country's ordinary citizens.

Mannan and Tonoy were both involved in Roopbaan, Bangladesh's only LGBT magazine. Over the last year, Roopbaan became very visible in Bangladesh, starting a nationwide youth leadership program, an online platform, a film festival, and an HIV awareness and testing program called Pink Slip.

"My bosses laugh at the fact that Xulhaz and Tonoy were unmarried. They say the two 'deserved' their fate because they were homosexual. My bosses don't even know that I am gay, and neither does my family," the friend confides. "Imagine having to hide grief like this? Now I have nothing. No life. No future."

Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy and Xulhaz Mannan from the 2015 Rainbow Rally in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The faces of other attendees have been blurred to protect their identities. Photo courtesy of 'Roopbaan'

Since the murders, two terror cells were uncovered, and an alleged killer was arrested. However, for those of us who knew Mannan and Tonoy, memories of traveling freely around Dhaka, eating biryani, playing card games, attending gallery exhibits and classical music concerts, or sitting under the bamboo groves in the botanical garden have become soiled. After the murders, gay friends felt there is little solidarity with their cause within the country. Sometimes, causes like free speech and LGBT rights are derided as being part of a Western hegemony, but this is just muddying the rhetorical waters: Foreign powers do not need to manipulate people into wanting to be able to walk down the street without harassment and speak without being killed.

The double homicide marked the first time in the three-year-long wave of radical Islamist murders that the gay community has been targeted. For those of us who knew the two men, the aftermath has been a reminder of the hierarchies placed on which lives are deemed worthy of mourning in Bangladesh. Vigils were held in Paris, London, and New York after the murders, but none were held in Bangladesh.

When the machete attacks on Bangladeshi intellectuals began three years ago, Bangladeshi authorities were initially silent.

The government only spoke up after the death of blogger Niloy Neel at his home in the fall of 2015. And even then, Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh's prime minister, called the writing of bloggers "filthy words." "You can't attack someone else's religion," warned Hasina. "You'll have to stop doing this. It won't be tolerated if someone else's religious sentiment is hurt."

In this climate, it isn't surprising that the attacks have continued. Just days before the murders of my friends, a university professor with a love of classical music was killed. In quick succession following these murders, a Buddhist monk, a Hindu tailor, and a homeopathic doctor were also hacked to death. After a law student in Bangladesh was murdered this May, the government wondered whether the death could be justified based on the online writings of the student.

These deaths showcase how expendable life remains in the country. Terrorists falsely claiming Islam as their guide cannot be further justified by Bangladesh's government.

"We are being attacked on all sides. Locals are allowing it. Those who condemn the murders are being silenced." —A friend of Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy

Amid this targeting of minorities, Bangladesh's government seems either incapable or unwilling to effectively condemn the murders. Blaming homegrown extremism at the hands of its opposition parties, the government has also vilified the legacies of the murder victims instead.

After Mannan was murdered, US Secretary of State John Kerry shared his security concerns about growing extremism with Sheikh Hasina over the phone. Soon after, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Nisha Desai Biswal traveled to Bangladesh to discuss security issues, meeting with Bangladesh's Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal. Afterward, Khan was reported as saying, "Our society does not allow any movement that promotes unnatural sex. Writing in favor of it is tantamount to criminal offense as per our law."

This, then, has been the government's response to a murder epidemic: to blame the victim, and legitimize the slurs hurled at marginalized communities.

"The government wants to hold onto its religious base by wrongfully suggesting that we are not Muslim," says one of Roopbaan's co-founders, who, like Tonoy's friend, also wishes to remain anonymous. "This pacifies the extremists and legitimizes the killings.

"Tonoy refused to talk about the threats, although he received dozens of threats," says Tonoy's friend. "Now we are being killed, and talking about how scared we are or writing about it is criminal? We are being attacked on all sides. Locals are allowing it. Those who condemn the murders are being silenced."

On VICE News: 'Sex, Slavery, and Drugs in Bangladesh':

These fears are palpable in a country where freedom of speech is increasingly under assault. Recently, Bangladesh's government tightened the noose by announcing that it has proposed plans to create a "Cyber Threat Detection and Response Network." The $19 million scheme, if approved, would promote around-the-clock online surveillance of citizens, effectively allowing the government to block and remove any online content it deems unfit for national viewership.

This allocation of resources is misguided, given Bangladesh's more pressing problems—66 percent of the country's girls are married before they reach the age of 18, and poverty is rampant. Sustainable measures to tackle these issues have not been scaled up adequately to create widespread impact: Consider that half of Bangladesh's roughly 163 million are female. This means more than 40 million women are married before they reach 18. Poor feeding practices, alongside teenage pregnancies, arise in intergenerational stunting in a staggering 41 percent of the overall population, across all social demographics. These problems arise even though the government depends heavily on foreign aid and nonprofits to provide basic services such as vaccines, education, and health interventions, and received $2.6 billion in 2013 alone.

Despite this, the plans to monitor content on social media and international sites, under the guise of tackling "cyber crimes," continues, raising concerns. Some believe it to be a ploy by the supposedly liberal Awami League government to curb freedom of speech. Late last year, the government blocked social media sites for 22 days, and in the fall of 2013, YouTube was blocked for several months.

Individuals have been targeted as well. In December 2015, the administrator of a popular satirical Facebook page, "Moja Losss" ("Lost Fun") was arrested for allegedly mocking the government. The arrest came in the form of a raid carried out by Bangladesh's super paramilitary force, AK-47s in hand. Mahfuz Anam, the prominent editor of Bangladesh's largest English daily the Daily Star, was slapped with 79 sedition and defamation charges amounting to an alleged $17 billion, as of February.

Little has been made of social media's instrumental role in aiding growing fanaticism in Bangladesh. Ten days before the murders of Mannan and Tonoy, a Facebook group called "Voice of Bangladesh" promised violence if the LGBT community took part in the annual April New Year's parade.

Citing the Facebook group, police ordered Mannan to stop the community from participating in the national parade. The next day, on April 14, four gay activists were arrested when they did not comply and marched in the rally. Mannan stayed in the police precinct until his friends were released from custody.

"Why should I be scared?" Mannan wrote to me last year. "I'm human, and I cannot hide who I am."

The question as to why Facebook would even allow such a group to exist remains unanswered. Those within the LGBT community in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, repeatedly reported this group to Facebook, but it remains active. (Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, another social media group called "Salauddiner Ghora" ("Salauddiner's Horse"), which is affiliated with extremist groups, released a YouTube video of the gruesome aftermath of Mannan's murder. The video shows Mannan's lifeless body being dragged by curious onlookers outside his home prior to police arrival. Mannan's mother—a severe Alzheimer's patient who was forced to witness the murders—is then seen covering the protruding gray matter, pushing it back into Mannan's head.

This graphic video remains online, even though human rights groups lodged complaints to YouTube. Salauddiner Ghora lauds the public executions on Facebook and Twitter. They have even published faces of the next targets, while suggesting anyone involved in the future killings of "non-believers" will go to heaven for "doing the work of God."

"These pages are in Bengali. Is that the reason why these social media sites haven't responded?" asks Roopbaan's co-founder.

Earlier this week, the original Salauddiner Ghora Facebook group was finally taken down. But, as of Wednesday, a new one has been started.

Following the April arrests, Mannan called for a top-level security meeting with all the leaders and allies of the LGBT community. They began to check in with one another daily. They curtailed going to events at night.

Mannan delivered a last youth leadership lecture on Roopbaan just a week before his murder, in tandem with a photography art exhibit in Dhaka. Unaware that he was being followed around, he took an open rickshaw to his house.

"Just the fact that we were being watched for weeks is chilling," says Roopbaan's co-founder, who was with Mannan at the time. "Despite our fear after the arrests, we spoke normally and had a good time. It was the last time I saw him alive."

"Tonoy's last production was a theatrical representation of Siraj ud-Daulah, the last king of Bengal before the British invaded the country and began colonizing it," says his friend. "He performed it on Saturday. Then Sunday was Tonoy's birthday. He treated his friends for dinner, but he refused to cut a cake because he cut two cakes last year. If we had known it was his last night, we would have stayed with him longer. He was murdered the next day. Now we are scared to visit his grave or reach out to his family."

Despite the murders, the extremism, and the victim-blaming, many in Bangladesh's LGBT community remain committed to furthering the dialogue.

In the last two years, Bangladesh's first lesbian comic book Project Dhee was launched, alongside theatrical performances and art exhibits, poetry anthologies, and a documentary film about the Rainbow Rally, a diversity-promoting New Year's Day celebration started by Mannan. Bangladesh even recognizes "hijras"—a term used in the region to refer to trans people—under the law.

"Why should I be scared?" Mannan wrote to me last year. "I cannot live in fear. I'm human, and I cannot hide who I am."

But the persecution has unquestionably made life harder for many, and resulted in severe chaos.

"There is a lot of misinformation going around. Many who are panicked are claiming affiliations with us so as to receive asylum in countries like Germany. They have never worked directly with anyone in the LGBT community in Dhaka, and it is regrettable that they are taking advantage of this situation," says one of Roopbaan's two surviving co-founders.

"When will the government do something to help us? After we have all been killed?" asks Roopbaan's other surviving co-founder. "We deserve to be protected, not exiled and silenced, alongside remaining voiceless forever."

Raad Rahman is a communications, advocacy, and partnerships specialist who has consulted extensively with UNICEF in Bangladesh. Follow her on Twitter.


Photos from the Real Life Version of 'The Beach'

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This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Last year, photographer Rebecca Rütten spent three months in a secluded hostel on a tropical island, where a group of backpackers found their utopia. She documented the daily excesses of these scantily clad free spirits, predominantly from the Western parts of the globe and privileged enough to be able to escape normal life for months at a time. Rütten tried to keep her objective distance as a photographer, but obviously she didn't want to miss the party either. The only way to get close to her subjects was to become part of this group of hedonists, who try to find the meaning of life by playing drinking games and fucking a lot.

She turned those months into a book called Never-Never Land, which starts out with idyllic shots of an untouched rainforest and a pig splashing in the sea. A next shot is one of two people sticking their butts in the camera, freshly tattooed with the question "¿POR QUÉ NO?" ("WHY NOT?"). Rütten is vague about the hostel's exact location, because she wants to protect it from a flood of visitors.

I spoke to Rütten about how the series came about.

VICE: So you ended up with a bunch of kids in this secluded paradise, cut off from the real world, getting fucked up in a possibly toxic group dynamic. Were you ever worried about what it would be like before you went to the hostel?
Rebecca Rütten: I wasn't, actually. My first time at this particular hostel was in January 2014. Everyone was dressed up, the music was good and loud, the people were exciting, and everything seemed so intense. There was a real sense of community. For Never-Never Land, I went back to see if this lifestyle really is as carefree as it looks. But I should have questioned the excesses I noticed even when I was there for that short period the first time.

When reading your diary entries, it's clear that you're losing more of your objective distance every day.
The fact that it was a photo project was always in the back of my mind, but it was difficult to maintain my distance. The internet was only working intermittently, so I had very little contact with my friends and family. Many of the guests had been there for a longer time, and the rules were immediately established with newcomers. It was important to belong. Everyone participated in the drinking games, and of course, casual sex was encouraged too. That all added to that sort of cabin fever the group had.

How did you capture everything when you weren't ever sober yourself?
I always had my little camera in my bag. Capturing everything was hard because I also wanted to be part of it and enjoy it. I stopped enjoying it when I started seeing how repetitive it all was. And I saw more and more people who just weren't doing well and seemed to be trying to numb their feelings. Which is not very different from what's happening in your average club on a Saturday night—people sometimes just want to lose their minds.

Rütten

The hostel seems to be deep in the rainforest, what's that like?
It's tropical—there are crazy numbers of scorpions, parrots, and monkeys. I stepped on a boa constrictor once. The scenery was incredible, but it was also definitely dangerous. People in a fucked-up state would start annoying the animals. And it was so isolated and in such a part of the world that you can't just drive over to a hospital if something happens to you. Most of the guests would just take lots of pain killers and hope that whatever was wrong with them would go away.

Can you tell me a little about the handwritten diary entries we can see in the book?
I asked some interesting characters I met there some questions about their lives and asked them to write their responses in my diary. It's amazing how naively some of them considered their time there. They wrote things like, "This was the best experience of my life," and then in the pictures, you see people throwing up and shoving their scrotum in someone's face.

A guest entry from Rütten's diary. It reads: "For it to be important it must have worth, for it to have worth we must gain something. What do we gain from travelling? Understanding. Knowledge. Removal of external influences that cloud our personal truths. REALIZATION."

How do feel about backpacking after this experience?
I ask myself why it's primarily white, middle-class kids trying to build these escapist utopias in developing countries, while not involving the local population. Why do they choose to go to these politically weak countries—just because the weather's great? Or is it because they feel no one is going to bother them?

Backpacking used to be my religion—I thought it was the only true way of life. But I'm more critical of it now. When I travel, I'm looking for exchanges with people and things that I don't understand yet—I want to get out of my bubble. The hostel is a bubble.

You can see Rebecca's other work on her website or on Instagram.

Ball’s to the Wall: Newfoundland Premier Could Be Exiled Over Payout Scandal

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This man has gotten by on his looks. Photo via Facebook

Barring Alberta having to deal with Fort McMurray burning down, there is probably no government in Canada having a worse month than Dwight Ball and the Newfoundland and Labrador Liberals. At least Rachel Notley can do her job.

The NFLD Liberals have had their hands full trying to put out the funeral pyre they set for themselves in April's budget. But now, Premier Ball also finds himself at the centre of a massive political scandal involving the exorbitant severance paid to the ex-CEO of Nalcor, the province's crown energy company. It's enough to make you feel bad for the guy—or it would be, if he wasn't going so far out of the way to dig to his own grave.

It gets a little confusing. So let's backtrack.

Muskrat Love

Ed Martin was the CEO of Nalcor Energy, appointed to the position in the glory days of Danny Williams, Not First of His Name, Attempted Prime Minister Stephen Harper Slayer. Nalcor is in charge of Muskrat Falls, a hydroelectric megaproject on Labrador's Churchill River, that has been the obsessive focus of every provincial administration going back to 2010 (two parties and/or five premiers, depending how you keep track).

By all accounts, Muskrat Falls is a clusterfuck. Behind schedule, over budget, potentially devastating to the environment and local Indigenous communities, haunted by a sketchy approval process, its ultimate purpose, function, and value in question, it was a big gamble even when the province was flush with cash. Now that we're broke, it feels more like an albatross.

There are so many problems with the project that the Italian prime minister raised his concerns about it to Justin Trudeau at the recent G7 meeting in Tokyo. Oh, yes: Muskrat Falls is also underwritten by a federal loan guarantee to the tune of $6.4 billion, so all you mainlanders are on the hook too if this project goes tits up. Thanks, Stephen Harper!

Anyway, as CEO, the buck has stopped with Martin for all this, and there are few people left in the province who are convinced he was doing a good job—including the new Liberal government. One of the few popular things Finance Minister Cathy Bennett did on Budget Day 2016 was slam Nalcor's executive for mucking everything up. The b'ys apparently got the message, because Martin was gone as CEO less than a week afterwards and the Nalcor board, feeling that they had lost the confidence of government, resigned en masse in an act of crony capitalist hari-kari.

At the time, it was reported that Martin had resigned voluntarily for family reasons. This is also what Premier Dwight Ball told the House of Assembly on April 21. Good riddance to bad rubbish. The shakeup at Nalcor was complete and everyone on the Iron Island lived happily ever after.

Except not really. As it turns out, Martin did more than just resign. After stepping down, he was "terminated without cause" by the board, which triggered a (very, very) lucrative severance package—$1.4 million over two years, plus his public sector pension, plus an additional lump sum of $4.7 million. For those of you keeping score at home, that's a hell of a lot more money than the government is saving by closing all those libraries.

A Good Guillotine Is Hard to Find

As you can imagine, all hell broke loose. The provincial state is bleeding to death and the bureaucrat responsible for mismanaging one of the biggest infrastructure projects in the province's history was just handed a golden parachute on the public dime by his buddies on the Nalcor board.

People are understandably, ah, agitated.

In such manner as he is wont to do, Dwight Ball bungled the situation from the start. The media reported on May 4 that Martin would be receiving the $1.4 million severance, and according to the premier, that news story was the first he heard of it. Which is fucking weird, yes? Especially when the man appointed on April 22 to be the new chair of Nalcor (John Green) is the lawyer who drafted Martin's severance agreement. But hey! Maybe it just never came up. Maybe it's not the premier's job to keep tabs on what happens at the top levels of the government's biggest crown corp as it handles the largest single project in the province right now. Seems like a lot of work.

Things got progressively weirder as the story unraveled. Ball was very emphatic at first that because the severance was part of Martin's contract (finalized in 2009), it was out of his hands. To his credit, he did eventually acknowledge that maybe some of this was a little sketchy (now that you mention it, public servants firing each other in the pursuit of cash money does seem weird!) and had the the Department of Justice look into it. They too agreed that, yes, this is weird, and it probably warrants an independent investigation. So Ball diligently dispatched the Auditor General. This was on May 29.

The next day, in perhaps the greatest troll ever undertaken by a civil servant in Newfoundland history, Ed Martin issued a press release stating that not only did the premier know about his post-resignation severance package, but that it was Dwight Ball's idea. He did this while the premier was in question period, so that he wouldn't be able to respond to the situation until after the media feeding frenzy. It was also the six-month anniversary of the Liberals' election victory. The tricky motherfucker may have Littlefingered the public for a cool six million, but credit to Martin where credit is due.

Needless to say, Ball transformed into the Mad Premier. Losing his shit at a scrum on May 31, he denied Martin's version of events and dared him to release the details of the severance agreement. Which Martin immediately did, and the "severance agreement," dated April 20, states that "the board of directors of Nalcor has been advised by the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador that in all circumstances it has agreed that is entitled to his severance." Meanwhile, Leo Abbass, one of the board members involved, also came forward to corroborate Martin's story.

Then, finally, came the real bombshells: on June 1, Ken Marshall, the ex-chair of Nalcor, claimed that not only did Ball (and Natural Resources Minister Siobhan Coady) know about the severance agreement in April, but that he had a paper trail to prove it. Later that day—while Ball was in Toronto—the Premier's Office released emails from Marshall confirming that both Coady and Ball had received an email on April 20 confirming that Martin was being terminated and that he would get his severance package. Wherever he was at that moment, we can only assume Ball's pants immediately burst into dragonfire.

Ball Breaker

This is all very byzantine and a little bonkers, so let's reel it in. There are two separate but closely related issues here.

The first is trust. Dwight Ball is fundamentally untrustworthy. He has shown such a repeated recklessness for the truth in his brief time in office that you have to wonder if it's pathological. He (unnecessarily) campaigned on a platform of no job cuts and no HST hike and then immediately delivered both. He raised a religious (and homophobic) flag at Confederation Building and justified it by saying there was no flag policy in place when documents later showed that this was false. Now we have a pretty strong indication that he has been lying about what he knew about Ed Martin's severance, and when he knew it. He got an email about it on April 20 and spent the previous days in meetings with the CEO. It is profoundly unlikely the first Ball heard of this was May 5. Ball may not have been involved to the extent Martin claims, but it is also basically impossible to trust anything the premier says about it at this point.

Why did he lie about this? There is no reason. In fact, had he been telling the truth, it would have arguably been worse: it would reveal that he actually has no idea what is happening around him, even in one of the province's biggest portfolios.

This leads us to the second issue: incompetence. No one expects politicians to keep their campaign promises, or even be particularly truthful while in office. But these aren't even good lies. They are absurd, pointless, and easily disproved.

This is a weak and desperate government helmed by a mad premier. Ball can't even oust a widely reviled, overpaid mismanager appointed by a previous administration without it blowing up in his face. What is the guy going to do when he has an actual problem? Do you feel good about the guy at the wheel of Newfoundland's ship of state?

It's only been six months, but the pattern is established. The premier has no idea what he's doing, and you couldn't trust him even if he did. Dwight Ball should do the honourable thing and exile himself to the Night's Watch.

There is always the chance that whoever replaces him could be worse. But he can't stay. Someone. Anyone. Please. As a local bard so eloquently put it, we gotta get Ball sacked.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.

We Asked Young Farmers How They Feel About the Rest of the World Stealing Their Look

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The cast of 'Peaky Blinders.' Photo: BBC

Modern fashion is weird. We don't have the generational identifiers previous decades had: We're not hippies, mods, punks, or breakdancers like people were in the olden times. Instead, we're all of those things, mixed up and amalgamated: a pair of flares here, some Stan Smiths there.

Take, for example, an item like the humble flat cap. It's classically seen as the go-to headwear for working-class caricatures like Del Boy, Andy Capp, and Guy Ritchie, or worn more practically by farmers, clay-pigeon shooters, and other countryside folk. But since the arrival of BBC drama Peaky Blinders, the flat cap has started to rub shoulders with wearers of snapbacks, bucket hats, and Carhartt beanies as the must-have item to cover up your terrible haircut.

That's according to Holly Clark, a men's accessories buyer at John Lewis, who said: "This year, we have seen the flat cap booming in popularity, undoubtedly thanks to the return of BBC2 's Peaky Blinders. Sales have continued to rocket as the series progresses, peaking at 83 percent compared to last year, the week that the third episode aired."

But what about the people who have always worn flat caps, those country dwellers who've always had their bonce covered in tweed, rain or shine, but mostly rain? What do they think of all these trendy city bastards stealing their look and frolicking in beer gardens and taking their trendy city drugs in their traditional hat of choice? We asked a few to find out.

Miles, 28


Photo courtesy of Miles.

VICE: What do you think about the sudden rise in popularity of flat caps? Are you furious?
Miles: They've been a very traditional thing to wear in the countryside for years when you're doing country pursuits. I always wear mine for shooting and when I'm out and about taking the dog for a walk, for instance. They are comfy and are surprisingly warm—plus they keep the rain off. Nowadays you see them being worn a lot more in rural areas, even on nights out.

But how do you feel about your style being appropriated like that?
I've grown up with it, to be honest, and it's always been the thing to wear in the countryside—it's the accepted form of cap. That with a Barbour, your favorite pair of matching tweed plus fours, and your chateau boots. I wouldn't wear one out and about in Manchester or London, though.

Why not?
I think one may get a few funny looks and perhaps punched in a city for being seen to go shooting. However, in Lancashire and Yorkshire, it's accepted.

Fair play, but the caps you wear are all the rage now because of Peaky Blinders, the show on TV. Do you watch it?
Yeah, I've seen it. They wear it with a different style, if you get me.

What do you think of people who wear it in that different style?
I'm not sure, really. I think of gangsters and stuff.

What's your favorite cap you own?
I have a Schoffel tweed cap I like in a Blenheim tweed, and another tweed Barbour one.

Oli, 32


Photo courtesy of Oli

VICE: What do you think about everyone wearing flat caps all of a sudden?
Oli: It's not the worst hat trend, I suppose. More practical than Pharrell's hat and smarter than the baseball cap. And you're more likely to be trusted by the elderly and the gentry with one on.

How do you feel about your style being stolen by all these trendy city people?
It depends what they match it with, I suppose. I wouldn't really call it my style, though—more headwear handed down from father to son. So it's actually quite nice that Shoreditch wankers are looking to be more like my dad.

Are you a fan of Peaky Blinders?
Yes, I do watch Peaky Blinders. I think it's marvelous. It's a nice look—very of the time, I suppose: smart, grubby chic. Although I wouldn't go all out on an outfit like that myself.

So why do you wear flat caps? You mentioned it being a hereditary thing?
As a kid, I wore flat caps because my old man did. I must have looked a little like a Victorian chimney sweep at times. But my dad was a country-dwelling type of bloke and shot things and sat in pubs with farmers. So I wanted to be like him and his mates.

Do you think they look cool in general?
Hmm. Generally, no.

Why?
I find they make good cover when it's cold. Or to hide Sunday bed hair down at the pub. My mate says I look like a fat old record collector when I wear mine, though. I think it's definitely a hat of the trip-hop generation as well. I bet people who work at Ninja Tune have a flat cap or two.

Izzy, 28


Photo courtesy of Izzy

VICE: What do you think about the sudden rise in flat cap popularity?
Izzy: I think my granddad would be pissed off—he used to have one for every day of the week. In this picture, I'm wearing his Sunday best. I grew up on a farm, and I'm pleased about it—it's a good look for a boy and a girl. I like hats—all hats apart from cowboy ones. They're shit.

Do you watch Peaky Blinders?
Nope. I don't have time for TV.

What do you think about people wearing flat caps because of a TV program?
I once dyed the front of my hair blond like Ginger Spice after seeing her on TV, so who am I to judge?

How do you feel about them being trendy now? Like fashion people in London wearing them.
I didn't realize, to be fair. But now I think about it, it's making me angry.

Why?
Do they wear cords, too? And fucking waist coats?

Yep, I'm afraid so.
Yeah, I'm not a fan. They would be shit-scared meeting some rum old Norfolk boy down a pitch black footpath at night wearing a flat cap.

Chris, 33


Photo courtesy of Chris.

VICE: Flat caps have apparently become really popular recently. How do you feel about that?
It's surprising. I doubt it's because of the practicality of them—I assume a celeb somewhere started it, or a hipster. But hey, they are comfortable and practical—that's why I wear mine.

It's actually because of the show Peaky Blinders. Do you know it?
I know it. Not got around to watching it yet, though.

How do you feel about people appropriating your farmer style like this?
If someone wears something because they like it or they feel drawn to it, great. If they are wearing it because other people are doing it and they want to be "edgy," then they need to evaluate their life choices.

What about you? Why do you wear them?
I began wearing one because I was spending an increasing amount of time around the shooting community. There is a certain dress code among the community; you're expected to perpetuate a certain image, for the sake of tradition. That's all good in my book. I'm pretty traditional at heart. I've never really been a fan of anything on my head, really, but when I started wearing my flat cap, it fitted.

Fair enough. What do you think about them now just being part of a trend? Does that bother you at all?
I'm very dismissive of fashion and trends in general. Trends will come and go—some fast, some slow. Maybe the flat cap is just a fleeting trend. Either way, I know I'll be wearing mine for the rest of my life.

I Spent the Night in a Hentai Porn Theatre at Canada’s Biggest Anime Convention

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All photos by Luis Mora

I stumbled in through the right side of the door after flashing my ID to show I'm over 18 and immediately tripped over an overstuffed messenger bag. I wedged myself in between the wall and a garbage can—one of the only spots left to stand in the mid-sized conference room with aged, patterned red carpeting and two massive glass chandeliers. As I held my hands on my shoulders in an attempt to squeeze myself into the crowd, a guy from across the room boisterously yelled, "Get that pussy wet!" right as I noticed the first flesh-coloured pixelation in the centre of the screen. His demand provoked a roar of excited screaming from the crowd of about 100.

The hentai screening room at Anime North, Canada's biggest anime convention by attendance, is the stuff of anime nerd fables. Well, for some fandoms at least. I wasn't even sure it was real until I saw it for myself. For years, anime fans I met at raves would regale me with tales of how they stayed in the hotel-conference-room-turned-anime-porn-theatre overnight at the convention when they couldn't afford a proper hotel room, while others said it was the perfect place to come down after a night of raving at Anime North's legendary dance parties.

This year, at 11 PM when the Paris Room in the International Plaza Hotel nearby Toronto Pearson Airport switched its programming from all-ages anime to anime porn, the curator had chosen one of the OG hentais to screen: Cream Lemon. The series premiered in 1984 as one of the first video hentais ever and is known for its bizarre storylines.The episodes are standalone, and the content ranges from sci-fi to incestuous romance to coming-of-age tales.

Travis, who was curating the hentai screening this year, and is a comic artist and serious anime fan, told me, "They always have late-night hentai, and in previous years I found it was like censored or just not really good or interesting. A lot of people were disappointed with what was being aired; they want it more raunchy." So this year, Travis decided to take on the responsibility of choosing what hentai would be shown.

As I watched one of the first episodes of the night, in which a group of rebels overtakes a desert town and fucks women in it, Ben, the volunteer helping to watch over the room yells, "Hand check!" as he walks down the centre row of chairs and flips a switch to turn on the the lights in the room. Each person in the crowd promptly raises both their hands as giggles erupt throughout.

I was pretty confused about how serious the hand checks were, a confusion which only increased as Ben called for them roughly every 20 minutes, so I had to ask a vet of the hentai room what the fuck the intermittent monitoring actually meant. I ran into a dude I knew from my raving days at the con (surprise, surprise), Darcy Epikuro, who was headlining the indoor dance party at the con that evening. After his DJ set, he had come to the screening room—as he has for years to decompress from partying—with his girlfriend Kitty, who sat on his lap while they watched hentai together.

Stopping every so often to make lewd comments about the current episode of Cream Lemon that was screening ("Don't Do It Mako! Mako Sexy Symphony Part I"), he explained to me that though the hand checks are generally a joke, over his many years at Anime North, he's seen some incidents of note: "There's just various dudes jerking off and getting caught... People have seriously tried to jerk off in this room. It is half joke, half real—but the one time someone doesn't raise their hands, you've got to be worried."

As the night went on, around 2 AM, I felt like my brain had hit some previously unknown capacity to deal with the obscureness of hentai with all its sparkle-covered genitals, the seemingly identical perfectly round breasts of every female character, and the level of screaming from the audience who sounded like jocks at a sports bar during playoffs. By this point, my friend who had vowed to stay with me all night had abandoned the room to go sleep in my car because of the permeating stench of feet. The audience, unsurprisingly, was heavily male, and as one of the few females who were there for more than one episode, I felt like I was peeking into a boys' clubhouse where anything goes. (I still can't get the now-familiar chanting of "Fuck her!" out of my head that punctuated everything from a simple kiss to full-on penetration.)

I found Tom, who was in the hentai room for much of the night with a massive crew, standing up dabbing in the front row during a particularly raunchy scene when two female characters started sucking each other's nipples and, as one of the more visibly and audibly excited members of the audience, I had to ask him why he was there.

"As shitty as it sounds, I mostly come to the hentai room ironically. The hentai room is a big joke where you just clap at an orgasm." A eight-year veteran of the con, Tom had once again found himself in the room while looking for a party. "Usually it's very obviously not serious, but then you'll always see an old dude by himself—but then again, that could be me eventually if I'm here like 20 years from now and don't have any friends anymore."

There were a few guys who were alone and sat silently throughout the entire night seemingly glued to their chairs, but the majority of the audience was of the same school of thought as Tom and appeared to be in the room to have fun and scream shit like "Tag team her!" and (during a particular unfortunately themed episode) "Fuck the Nazi out of her!"

"I try to tell people not to yell out too much because it distracts from what you're actually supposed to be watching, and then the joke becomes about what was said instead of what you're seeing," Travis told me. "You can't do anything once it gets to a certain point, controlling the crowd."

As the usual new wave of people flowed into the room as a new episode started early on in the night, I met a young couple, Michael and Erica, who were standing behind me because of the lack of seats. "This is my first time watching hentai, and boy is it a good time!" Erica told me in-between outbursts of screaming from the crowd. "Look at the shining light of the vagina!" Though her boyfriend Michael said he'd watched hentai before, he explained that many people who are into anime (like himself) aren't necessarily into anime of the pornographic variety. "In it's a lot less sexual for most here, and a lot more just 'What the fuck's going to happen next.'"

As it neared 3 AM, the only thing keeping me sane was clutching my Neon Genesis Evangelion-themed body pillow as the night got insurmountably weirder. A sci-fi episode of Cream Lemon came on, aptly named "Star Trap," and I thought my long wait for the first tentacle porn of the night was over. But then, just as the monster had two youthful female characters in his lair and had contained them in an egg, he magically caused one of the females in question to shift gender and grow a penis instead so they could have hetero sex. Typical.


Adam, a man I spoke to who has been to this particular screening room at Anime North "many times" and has been coming to Anime North for five years told me he's a fan of hentai because, "One, they go a lot more raunchier, they push a lot of boundaries... It's also anime, so you've got that great sense of humour too."

Around 4 AM, right after I had developed a headache from lack of sleep and being out in the sun for most of the day at the con, I was subjected to Nazi porn for the second time in my life. (The first was in a friend's dead uncle's basement in Edmonton when we found the motherload of French Canadian porn he'd left behind, but I digress.) Around this time, there was a group of bros cosplaying as Marines from One Piece in the back of the screening room doing trust falls.

After the Nazi porn, I had definitely hit my personal saturation point, and as the crowd had thinned out a bit since it was late, I put three of the metal-and-scratchy-red-fabric chairs together and tried to sleep. But sleep would not take me. I suddenly realized how strange the music in Cream Lemon was, like some sort of deranged carnivalesque symphony. Giving up on rest, I resumed to people-watching and noticed nearly half of the 15 or so people left in the room had fallen asleep. Bastards. One dude who'd been making out with a woman next to him earlier in front of me, though he was sitting straight up, had his Pikachu fitted-topped head crooked back on his seat and was passed the fuck out.

By 5 AM, Travis announced that after about 17 episodes, the rest of the Cream Lemon files he had were corrupted, so this was the end of the night. I was finally free and stumbled out of the room after my six hours of hentai, squinting my eyes as I walked through the fully lit hotel lobby and saw people sleeping on various couches and chairs. As I left the hotel and walked toward the parking lot across the street, I heard the menacing sound of birds chirping—the effective toll of death for the night. On what was one of the strangest walks of shame in my life, I saw cosplayers passed out on sidewalks, pieces of costumes littering the ground, and people who seemed to be waiting in front of the main building for Sunday's convention activities to start.

Though the hentai room was a bit depraved and taught me a bit too much about how men behave when they're primarily in the company of other men, after watching so much of Cream Lemon, I can't help but agree with how the curator of the room described how he feels about hentai: "I think it's art—that's why I like animation and comics and anime is to see the art, and then also sexy art... I like it as a sci-fi or fantasy story, not as something to masturbate to.

"But if people are into that, whatever—you can masturbate to anything."

Follow Allison Elkin on Twitter.

Dirt in Vancouver is Literally Earning More Money Than All of the City’s Workers Combined

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This yard is probably one of Vancouver's highest earners. Photo via Flickr user SKXE.

There are few surprises left when it comes to Vancouver's absurdly unaffordable real estate market.

However, by crunching some numbers, one researcher has revealed yet another sad reality for locals to digest: in Vancouver, homes, and more precisely, the earth on which they stand, earn more money in a year than the city's entire working population makes through their jobs.

In a blog post titled "Work vs Twiddling Thumbs," data analyst Jens von Bergmann looked at census data showing that, after tax, Vancouverites earn a cumulative $17.8 billion in income. He then shifted his gaze to land value increases of single family homes in Vancouver from 2015-2016 and found "the typical household made $262,000 last year by twiddling thumbs."

When von Bergmann did the math for the city's 78,740 single family homes, he discovered the total land value increase was $24 billion—$6 billion more than the city's workers took home.

To be clear, this means that dirt in Vancouver is earning billions more per year than gainfully employed human beings.

Von Bergmann also compared hourly rates for how much a Vancouverite with a job would earn versus how much a house would earn; based on a 40 hour work week, he said the average person would take home $26 an hour while a home would collect $126 an hour.

Though, given this is a place where it takes 109 percent of a person's disposable income to buy a home, these numbers might not be all that shocking.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Financial Experts Told Us Just How Bad a Deal Trump University Was for Students

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Photo via Flickr user Mike Poresky

Were Donald Trump just a real estate developer turned reality TV star with a habit of getting himself embroiled in lawsuits, news that his get-rich-quick seminar business was being sued in multiple courts for allegedly being a thinly veiled scam wouldn't have been major national news. But now that Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president, every detail of what could have been a relatively routine legal fight over Trump University is now under scrutiny.

Former Trump students have already been featured in campaign ads accusing the candidate of defrauding ordinary people, and when a judge's order earlier this week led to hundreds of pages of court documents being released—including damning testimony from Trump U employees—Hillary Clinton and other Trump foes jumped on the chance to portray the would-be president as a sleazy con man.

Maybe more important than the employee testimony is the Trump University 2010 "playbook," which reveals the high-pressure sales tactics the University's employees used to lure students, and a preview of the kind of financial advice offered newbie investors. The guide tells salesmen that students should be encouraged to use credit cards to pay for the courses themselves—the most expensive of which cost $35,000—and also told things like, "If a seller will take $10,000 down on a fixer-upper that you expect to make $20,000 on, why not use credit cards?" and "Check with a tax attorney to see how you might borrow from your own retirement account to finance real estate investments."

Is using credit cards and retirement money to buy property really a sound investment strategy? How badly does this sort of sales pitch mislead customers? To help figure this out, VICE spoke to several finance experts, who said, first of all, that the basic premise of Trump U—that real estate can make people rich—isn't off-base.

"If properly analyzed, real estate investing is one of the most common ways normal people can build long-term wealth," Sam Dogen, a 13-year finance veteran, real estate enthusiast, and popular blogger, told VICE. "The reason is because real estate rides the wave of inflation, and real estate is a part of the inflation component along with food and energy prices. Inflation is one of the most powerful economic forces that almost always goes up and to the right."

"A lot of people have built successful careers in real estate by starting small and collecting a property here or there," added Douglas Abbey, who teaches residential real estate investment at Stanford's business school. "You do not have to be rich to invest in real estate. Inherently it is not a bad idea, and it is not inherently risky unless you over-leverage, unless you borrow too much."

The problem is, it seems as if Trump U salespeople were encouraging people to undertake just that sort of risky borrowing—any investment you go into credit card debt to make is going to have to pay off massively to be worth it.

"The average credit card interest rate is roughly fifteen percent, which is more than the average annual return of the illustrious Warren Buffet," explained Dogan. "Further, even if you put down a healthy twenty percent, you are still leveraged five to one. A ten percent decline in the value of the property means a fifty percent decline in your cash downpayment."

The Trump U manual also suggested that people who hem and haw too much be belittled for pussyfooting. It also said that people in bad financial situations should be told that the course offered a quick fix to their woes. "Urgency is proportional to pain," the playbook reads. "Problems are like health. The more a problem hurts now, the more the need for a solution now. And the more it hurts, the more they'll be prepared to pay for a speedy solution. It's got to hurt enough!"

But Abbey, the Stanford professor, said that way of looking at real estate investment is wrong-headed. "Anybody buying real estate should not be looking for a quick buck," he told VICE. "It's just not a business that's well suited to that."

Dogan said a similarly successful strategy for getting rich quick would be to "go to Vegas and bet it all on black."

Perhaps worst of all is the way Trump U salespeople were advised to get students to think of credit card debt as as OPM––other people's money. Nick Clements, a former credit card executive at Barclays, called that "horribly misleading."

"Debt can be used––and has been used by Donald Trump––to make you rich," he told VICE. "But that is a very different type of debt, and it is just wrong to create equivalencies."

He gave the example of someone who borrows $100 to buy a building at a 2 percent interest rate. If you collect $5 in rent, you are making a $3 profit. You're borrowing money to make it, in other words. So long as prices keep going up and the markets don't take a turn, you're golden.

"But in this case, people would be borrowing at high credit card rates to purchase a Trump University education with a low value," Clements said. "That is a 'bad deal,' to use the Donald's language."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Black and White Portraits From Anime North

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I don't know anything about anime; it was never popular in Colombia where I grew up. But I do love seeing people fanning out about about stuff they love, and I love it more when I am ignorant about what they love. For the past two years, much of my photography has been about a series of images—take, for instance, the portraits I took at a Canadian sex convention for VICE. Anime North, the largest anime con in Canada, was the perfect place for this concept to come to fruition as no single portrait could possibly define the entire weekend there.

Each person I met at Anime North was not just nice but extremely nice. Every single person I asked for a portrait said yes, and that never happens. Everyone was comfortable and proud of how they looked—there is nothing like asking someone for a portrait and they don't even ask "How do I look?" or "Can I fix myself first?"

READ MORE: I Spent the Night in a Hentai Porn Theatre at Canada's Biggest Anime Convention

The approach for me is always to show what type of people attend an event, and that's the reason I shoot in black and white. Colour can distract the viewer from really looking at the subject. From showing that even superheroes take breaks for a nap and fast food to shooting the more provocatively dressed cosplayers being mobbed by smartphone cameras, the images sans-colour come out more formal, classic, easy to look at.

Follow Luis Mora on Instagram.


How Self-Employment Can Impact Your Mental Health

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Image: Dan Evans

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

The highs and lows of your mental health may not define you, but they can certainly shape your life. Work, in particular, insistent and inflexible, is deeply bound up with how close to the edge you happen to be at any particular time.

I can trace my own life back in this way. I left home and started work at 17, having already had treatment for mental health issues. There's definitely a link between this, my 15 years of uncontrolled "self-medication," and the fact that, until I was 26, none of my means of income can be put in black-and-white on a résumé. After that, I worked full-time in a bar for a few years. It wasn't until I was 30 that I began attempting a career in journalism.

Since then, with drinks and drugs demoted from daily to "recreational," I've steadily upped my dose of SSRIs as I've tried to keep the balance between sanity and earning a living. I managed nearly four years in an office but found it hard—I virtually stopped sleeping, meaning days at my desk felt as though I was on acid—so I decided to go freelance.

In this, I join many others who've decided that the relative flexibility and privacy of self-employment is the best option for managing mental health. And often, it is. The stress of deadlines and hustling new work, for me, pales in comparison to dealing with Other Human Beings when I'm anxious or depressed.

The trouble is, drumming up new work—be it pitching features or picking up fares for Uber—requires a degree of self-belief and togetherness. Drop below a certain threshold, and it all falls apart. I've been there—feeling too shit to pitch anything, too mental to write. Like most people I know, I have no savings, so I have to keep working to pay rent. I spent four months staying with a friend at the beginning of this year as I tried to get myself back on working track.

As of 2016, the UK has record numbers of self-employed workers. An estimated 4.6 million—around 15 percent of the workforce—now work for themselves. Two-thirds of new jobs in the UK created in recent years belong to the self-employed.

But is this a brave new world of enthusiastic entrepreneurs, setting up mini empires from their kitchen tables? Not entirely. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has described the new self-employed as "odd jobbers, desperate to avoid unemployment." An in-depth report by Co-operatives UK called them the "self-employed precariat."

According to the TUC, "Self-employment appears to be a key factor in the UK economy's shift towards low-paid work." Around half (49 percent) of the UK's self-employed are in low pay, compared to around a fifth of employees (22 percent).

Given that there's a growing crisis around mental health care, and knowing that poverty has a direct impact on wellness, it's inevitable that these upward lines on the graph—self-employment, mental illness—will intersect.

Charlie, 41, says that, for her, work and mental health were "bound up in one another."

"I graduated from my PhD and found there were virtually no academic jobs in my field," she said. "I was left struggling on zero hours contracts. The effect on my finances was calamitous, and the stress of working so hard, with so little employment stability and so little income, led to anxiety and depression. This downward spiral continued over a period of three years, until I had a complete breakdown and attempted suicide."

By this time, Charlie's local authority had taken out a court order and sent bailiffs to her home to recover goods equivalent to her council tax arrears. "I began planning my own death again," Charlie says. Finally, she saw a sympathetic doctor and was referred to a crisis team. Through them, an advocacy worker from Mind helped her apply for benefits. She now receives ESA and PIP and is registered disabled.

Kate, 28, is a self-employed dog walker living in Essex, England. Her depression and anxiety has recently escalated.

"I just managed to keep working with my regular clients," Kate says. "But I had to drop out of a part-time course, and I haven't managed to generate new business or do any promotion. I think my reputation has suffered as I've been scatty with getting back to people. I feel like I have so many plates to spin and have to keep on spinning them, or everything is going to crash around me."

Kate is currently waiting for support from her local NHS counseling service.

Andy, 27, had set up his own business—a shop—when his mental health took a turn for the worse. "I had three months of not being able to do anything," he says. "I couldn't think or focus or do anything other than feel like my life was a pointless waste of time. I had to borrow money to pay bills and struggled continually to pay it back. I even resorted to payday lenders, which has left a long-term stain on my credit rating."

Other people I spoke to had similar stories. A therapist from the southwest was forced to live with her ex-husband again as her depression meant she was unable to work enough to cover costs. A painter and decorator from London said he has to just "push through," although "talking with clients can help."

People's outcomes vary. Andy got involved in amateur boxing and says it "helped my physical condition and that helped my mental state". Charlie says, "My mental health, although fragile, is better now than it's been in the last five years, but I have no career."

Mental health charity Mind says it's aware of the problem. "We know that money and mental health are linked," said Emma Mamo, the head of Workplace Wellbeing at Mind. "If you've just set up your own business, money is likely to be an issue while you're getting established. And if you're a freelancer, it can be difficult to get stability."

Mamo suggests basic self-care as a first step: make a conscious effort to schedule in relaxation time, take breaks, stop for lunch, get outside, try not to work stupidly long hours, work through tasks one at a time rather than flitting between things in panic. Get in touch with your doctor if you're not coping.

In London, Carmen D'Cruz, 30, has created a workshop on getting organized when you have depression or anxiety. Key, she says, is remembering you don't have to do everything: "Strip back those layers of fake obligations and unnecessary goals." Also, ask for support: "Friends, family—get them to help."

But the problem also needs to be tackled on the work side of the equation. Does it need to be this precarious, this poorly paid? According to Co-operatives UK, there's an urgent need for cooperatives, trade unions, and mutual organizations to "form cohesive institutions to unite the self-employed precariat."

Where the US, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain have growing unionization movements for the self-employed, in the UK, support is patchy. Unite, which covers industries including building, agriculture, and the service industry, told VICE it doesn't, as yet, have many self-employed members. GMB is likewise not focused on the self-employed, although it represents workers in similar positions, such as Addison Lee, Uber drivers, and people on zero-hour contracts.

Industry-specific unions may be more helpful. Tim Dawson, president of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), said: "My anecdotal experience is that a considerable proportion of freelancers suffer some kind of mental or psychological issues... All NUJ branches have a welfare officer who should be in a position to provide discreet advice and help. They can also provide access to the NUJ's charity, NUJ Extra, which helps scores of journalists with financial issues every year."

The number of freelancers is growing; there's been a permanent change in the way we work. It's time to create some new structures of support if we're going to pay our rent, meet deadlines, and avoid, if possible, completely losing our minds.

If you're self-employed and struggling with your mental health, you can get support from organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness or the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute.

Follow Frankie Mullin on Twitter.

A Lawsuit Could Expose a Culture of Sexual Violence at an Elite Prep School

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Part two in the dramatic legal battle surrounding an elite American prep school and its allegedly "warped culture of sexual misconduct" has begun.

The criminal case against Owen Labrie, the former student at St. Paul's prep in New Hampshire who was convicted of misdemeanor statutory rape last year—along with a felony for using a computer to lure a child—is still tied up in an already bizarre appeals process.

But the victim's family is now suing the school itself.

Late Wednesday afternoon, family attorneys filed their complaint, which they say shows how Labrie's crime took place as a direct result of the school "fostering, permitting, and condoning a tradition of ritualized statutory rape."

The complaint describes a school storage shed dubbed the "Mars Hotel" that was littered with old condoms, alleges the school's refusal to acknowledge a systemic problem even after the rector's own wife was solicited for a "Senior Salute"—the moniker for a campus hookup ritual—and cites a report that administrators ignored a prior warning about Labrie's aggressive sexual advances.

Attorneys also claim school administrators failed to report the rape after the victim first described the incident to a faculty member, and did nothing to protect her after she returned to the school and was openly mocked.

The school has already been rocked by the sensational material unearthed in last summer's criminal trial, including explicit emails sent between senior male students apparently tallying sexual conquests. They were also shown to share strategies for seducing younger students, or "prepubescent bum," which included Labrie's professed method: "Feign intimacy... then stab them in the back."

But Steven Kelly, an attorney for the victim's family, says the details released so far have just been the "tip of the iceberg," and that new information about the school's refusal to address student misconduct will be exposed as part of an extensive discovery process.

"This is devastating damage to this family financially and emotionally," Kelly tells VICE.

The complaint also details how the victim's name was released by some media outlets, and says she was threatened by online commenters. "i know my ivy frat bros are putting a target on her, she is gonna get used and abused," one apparently wrote.

The girl's home address was also released online.

While a specific cash figure is not specified in this complaint, Kelly points to the Erin Andrews case, in which the sports reporter was awarded $55 million in damages from the owner of the hotel where she was videotaped while undressing.

"We fully expect this verdict would be on the high side of the verdicts around the country," Kelly says.

In a statement released Wednesday, the school said the lawsuit is "without merit."

"We categorically reject any allegations that St. Paul's School has an unhealthy culture," the statement reads. "The safety of our students has been and will continue to be the highest priority for our school."

According to the Wall Street Journal, after the trial verdict, in an email to the school community, St. Paul's Rector Michael Hirschfeld wrote that officials first heard about the Salute in spring of 2013. The rector elaborated about his knowledge of students using the word "slay" and "slayer" in a speech to students: "While these words made me uneasy, I did nothing as the head of the School to address their use nor, to my knowledge, did anyone else," he said, according to Vanity Fair.

The rector's remarks have since been removed from the school website.

According to the complaint, Hirschfeld had additional knowledge about the practice of scoring sexual encounters at the school since he oversaw the work of a student who conducted an independent report on school norms called, "The Real Student Handbook: The Little Red Book." (A request for comment from Hirschfeld was met by a reference from the school to its initial statement.)

The civil suit is the latest development in a more than two-year saga that began when the State of New Hampshire pressed charges on behalf of the then 15-year-old victim in 2014. Prosecutors were quick to hone in on the Salute, a practice where upperclassmen reach out to younger students for an intimate encounter—ranging anywhere from hand-holding to sex. Hookups between students were tallied on a campus wall.

In Labrie's case, he invited the victim to the roof of a campus building to take part in a Salute via email. The new civil suit alleges he sent out nearly identical emails to several other students. (In his criminal trial, Labrie was found to have had sex with the girl, who was too young to consent, in a mechanical room.)

Labrie was sentenced to a year in county jail and at least 15 years on the sex offender registry last October. He was then released on bail pending a decision on his appeal—that is, until I ran into him on a train going from Boston to Cambridge on the afternoon of February 29. He told me he was visiting his girlfriend, and my impromptu interview—and tweets about it—sparked an investigation in which prosecutors revealed he broke the terms of his curfew on numerous occasions. Labrie's bail was revoked for about two months, at which point the judge, on suggestion from the state Supreme Court, decided he had learned his lesson.

Now Labrie is back out on bail, albeit this time with an ankle bracelet.

The "Mars Hotel," as described by the plaintiffs. Photo courtesy Steven Kelly

Meanwhile, Labrie's attorney, Jaye Rancourt, had continued filing appeals. In one effort to reinstate his bail, she released a letter from a professor who had been mentoring him on a master thesis on the french philosopher Simone Weil, in an attempt to get into a PhD program at Oxford.

In the letter, the unnamed professor compared Labrie to Joan of Arc.

"It's so amazing to me how much God loves you—because God doesn't usually bother to wizen up ordinary kids who get involved in teen-age sex play," the professor wrote. "But, obviously, God intends something more from you than a 'staged normal life.' God intends that you (like Joan of Arc and Simone Weil) take on a higher task."

In another motion, Rancourt broached an allegation Labrie's previous attorney, J. Carney made during a sidebar at trial: That one of the witnesses against the accused, his former roommate Andrew Thomson, had also been accused of having sex with an underaged girl, and that the school handled that matter internally.

Thomson is the son of Lucy Hodder, who was once legal counsel for New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan, and Carney implied Labrie was being charged criminally while more connected students at the school were given a pass. Rancourt alleged this information was barred from the court, but Judge Larry Smuckler later claimed that the issue was not barred, and that Carney simply did not pursue the angle at trial.

Smuckler recently dismissed Rancourt from the case, however, agreeing with the prosecution's argument that she cannot effectively argue Labrie's defense team was ineffective since she herself was part of that team.

Meanwhile, what the school did or did not know about Thomson and Labrie's other friends at St. Paul, who formed a not-so-secret group called the "Slaymakers," according to the civil suit, is sure to be scrutinized at a new level in months ahead.

Kelly, the family attorney, says witnesses could also include the sons of the school's trustees.

Follow Susan Zalkind on Twitter.

What We Know So Far About the UCLA Shooter and His Kill List

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The man who shot and killed a UCLA professor Wednesday before taking his own life has been identified by police as Mainak Sarkar, a former doctoral student at the school who was recently living in Minnesota, where he's believed to have killed a woman prior to the campus incident.

On Thursday, police revealed Sarkar kept a "kill list" that included the names of the slain professor, the woman in his home state, and at least one other UCLA prof who was unharmed, as the LA Times reports.

Sarkar had once thanked William Klug, the 39-year-old associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering he shot multiple times Wednesday, for being his "mentor" in his 2013 dissertation. But in recent months Sarkar had gone on a social media tirade about the professor, accusing him of stealing his coding work.

"William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor," the killer wrote. "He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy. He made me really sick. Your enemy is my enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust."

A UCLA source told the paper these accusations were "absolutely untrue" and "psychotic."

Sarkar, 38, was a resident of Minnesota, where the deceased woman's body was found in a small town, apparently dead from a gunshot wound, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said Thursday. The last name on the list was that of a second UCLA professor who also taught Sarkar. The professor has been contacted and "is fine," according to the chief, though cops believe Sarkar intended to kill her Wednesday, too.

The Minnesota woman's connection to the killer remains unclear. But police suspect Sarkar drove from Minnesota to California in a gray Nissan Sentra after her death, armed with two semiautomatic handguns and multiple magazines in a backpack. Investigators are still searching for the vehicle, and advise anyone who believes to have spotted it to call in the tip.

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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The scene outside UCLA after Wednesday's shooting. Photo by Mike Pearl.

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

US News

UCLA Gunman's Estranged Wife Found Dead
Mainak Sarkar, the man suspected of killing his UCLA professor is the suspect in another homicide. A woman, believed to be Sarkar's estranged wife, was found dead of a gunshot wound at her home Minnesota. She had been on "kill list" discovered in Sarkar's home and is believed to have been shot before the UCLA shooting.—The Washington Post

Trump Supporters Attacked Outside California Rally
Donald Trump supporters were assaulted by anti-Trump protesters on Thursday night after the candidate's campaign rally in San Jose. Some Trump supporters were punched and spat at. One woman was cornered and pelted with eggs. Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta said violence "has no place in this election."—NBC News

Five Soldiers Dead After Truck Overturns in Floods
Five soldiers have been found dead and another four are still missing after an army truck overturned in a creek in Fort Hood, Texas during major flooding. Another three troops from the 1st Cavalry Division were recovered and are in stable condition. Aircraft, dog teams and rescue boats are continuing the search in Owl Creek.—ABC News

CIA Blamed Detainee Death on Federal Bureau of Prisons
Newly released CIA documents show that the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) sent a team to a CIA black site in Afghanistan to train guards in "short chaining", also referred to as short shackling. After a detainee died in 2002 – the only documented death associated with the CIA program – the agency blamed the BOP training.—VICE News

International News

24 Killed as Police Clash with Squatters in India
At least 24 people have been killed and 40 others injured when police tried to evict a religious sect illegally occupying a park in the Indian town of Mathura. Two officers were shot and killed. State police admitted several squatters died in police firing, but at least 11 were killed in a fire that broke out in the squatters' huts.—BBC News

Abandoned Japanese Boy Found Alive and Unharmed
A seven-year-old Japanese boy abandoned in a forest by his parents for being naughty has been found alive, almost a week after his disappearance. Yamato Tanooka survived by sleeping in a military base building and drinking from a water faucet. Tanooka's father said he apologized "for causing such an awful memory."—The Guardian

Middle East Peace Talks Begin
French-led talks aimed at reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process will begin in Paris later today. Although Israel and the Palestinians will not participate, officials from the Middle East Quartet, the UN and the Arab League will try to create an agenda for a full peace conference in the autumn.—Reuters

Venezuela Delays Recall Referendum
A meeting by Venezuela's election authorities to decide whether to hold a referendum to remove President Nicolas Maduro was cancelled after protesters clashed with police in Caracas. The National Electoral Board said a decision was postponed "indefinitely," and called on the Venezuelan people "to remain calm."—Al Jazeera


Muhammad Ali in 1966. Photo via Wikimedia.

Everything Else

Muhammad Ali Hospitalized
The 74-year-old boxing legend has been hospitalized due to a respiratory issue, but is said by family to be in "fair condition." Ali suffers from Parkinson's disease and been in hospital three times in the past two years.—ESPN

Prince Died of Fentanyl Overdose, Autopsy Confirms
The superstar died of an accidental, self-administered overdose of opioid painkiller Fentanyl, the Anoka County medical examiner said in a death report. Prince collapsed in an elevator in his home on April 21.—VICE News

Feds Used Prisoners for Tattoo Recognition Tests
Documents show that the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) teamed up with the FBI to use 15,000 prisoner photos for an experiment in tattoo recognition algorithms. Prisoners had not consented to the profiling experiment.—Motherboard

Floods in France Force Evacuation of the Louvre
The French weather service has predicted ongoing flooding misery, after the River Seine burst its banks and forced the closure of the Louvre. The museum will remain closed today as staff move precious works of art from the basement.—VICE News

Done with reading today? Watch our new video 'A Completely Objective List of the Ten Best Comic Books of All Time'

Life Inside: The Bogus Murder Confession That Changed How I Investigate Family Violence

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

"The victim is requesting to drop the charges," my investigator Jeff said. "What should we do?"

"Put it in the reject pile," I said. It was January in Vernon, a small town on the Texas plains near the Oklahoma border, and Jeff and I were going through stacks of pending cases, trying to figure out which ones to prioritize.

I had been elected district attorney of the sprawling, sparsely-populated 46th judicial district in north-central Texas in November 2006. As the top prosecuting attorney in the area, I was in charge of prosecuting all felony crimes, from oil theft to capital murder. When I took office, the district attorney position had been vacant for most of the previous year, and cases had piled up.

Many of the rejected cases involved family violence and contained affidavits of non-prosecution signed by the victim. We had an unspoken rule for dealing with these cases: "If they don't care, why should we?" Unless there was a third-party witness, we rejected domestic violence cases whenever the victim told us to. It was easy—no one ever complained.

But on July 4, 2009, something happened that forever altered my approach to family violence. Five-year-old Kati Earnest was killed in Vernon, beaten to death inside an apartment that her mother, Kristina Earnest, shared with a boyfriend, Tommy Castro, on the edge of town. Earnest and Castro brought Kati's limp body into Wilbarger General Hospital sometime before midnight, claiming the child had drowned in the bathtub.

The bruises on Kati's body told a different story. It was obvious that she had suffered a terrible beating, and the police and local child protective services were called. The autopsy results came in two days later: Kati had died from blunt force trauma to the abdomen, and her death was a homicide.

That same day Jeff came into the office with a broad smile on his face and a DVD in his hands. "I've got the confession right here," he said. "She admitted everything."

He popped in the disc and played the confession Kristina Earnest had given to police. But it was bizarre and didn't seem genuine. Her affect was flat, she had no emotion—we would learn much later that she had taken Clonazepam, a powerful anti-anxiety drug, prior to her statement. The things Earnest claimed to have done to Kati didn't match up with the medical examiner's report on what caused the child's death.

I had an uneasy feeling. "She's lying," I said.

"I bring you a confession in a capital murder case, and you tell me you don't believe it?" Jeff asked, clearly annoyed.

I could understand his frustration. This case had sent shockwaves through our small community, where child homicides are exceedingly rare. If we had just accepted her confession, no matter how far-fetched, we would have had an open-and-shut case. But Earnest's confession just didn't add up for me.

"Let's look at Tommy Castro," I said.

Castro had numerous prior arrests, for charges like assault, harassment, sexual assault, and burglary; Kristina Earnest had none. Castro's ex-wife, Melissa, who lived in the Dallas area, called him "evil" and described years of horrific abuse she had endured at his hands. He was also on felony probation for an aggravated assault case in Amarillo, Texas. The victim in that crime was Shyla Frausto, his ex-girlfriend.

The more we looked into Castro's past, the more abused women we found: He had been accused of beating, abusing, and sexually assaulting women since the early 1990s. Yet despite his prior convictions involving family violence, the criminal justice system had repeatedly failed to hold Castro accountable, often dismissing charges "at the victim's request," even when the evidence was strong.

Castro's previous cases had been treated by police and prosecutors the same way I had treated family violence cases for two years: with disregard. It shamed me to think Kati might still be alive if Castro had been dealt with appropriately in the past.

We tried Castro for Kati's murder in May 2011. One of the most important witnesses was Dr. Judith Beechler, a counseling professor and domestic violence advocate who educated the jury about the power of violence, intimidation, and control in a relationship. Neighbors from the apartment complex also testified about how domineering Castro was with Kristina Earnest, describing how he always led her around by the arm, while she constantly stared at the ground; he even told her, they said, when it was okay to greet other people.

Women flew in from as far away as Indiana and Australia to testify about Castro's abuse, and after an eight-day trial, the jury decided to sentence him to life in prison. As we unraveled the case, I realized family violence is something I can no longer turn away from—that if the judicial system doesn't intercede on behalf of victims, there's usually no one else who can.

It isn't just the threat of physical violence that makes a victim compliant to the demands of an abuser. It's also the steady drip, drip, drip psychological effect that leaves victims feeling helpless, hopeless, and utterly dependent upon the very person who abuses them. And despite all of the awfulness, it's common for victims to continue to love the people who abuse them.

One of the biggest advancements in the battle against family violence is police-worn body cameras, which can capture images of the victim just after they've been assaulted. Juries can not only see the physical marks, but the raw fear as well—and that brings the violence home in a way that the typed words in a police report never can.

J. Staley Heatly is a prosecutor in Vernon, Texas. He currently serves as chairman of the board of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association. In 2013, he founded Texoma Alliance to Stop Abuse, a non-profit program that provides court-ordered counseling to abusers. *Kristina Earnest eventually pleaded guilty to injury to a child by omission, a crime for which she was originally sentenced to 50 years in prison before being re-sentenced to 18 years.

*This story has been updated to include information about Earnest's eventual plea and sentencing for failing to protect her child, details that were regrettably omitted from the original.

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