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We Asked an Optometrist Why Molly Makes Your Eyeballs Shake

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Lovely (Photo via)

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It all usually starts at around 1AM. You've reached that point, a few dabs or bombs in, when it's suddenly a great idea to text your ex-housemate. It's time to tell them how much you love them, how much you miss them, and that you wish they were right here with you, stroking people's faces at the rave/house party/unnecessarily long dinner party.

But when you look at your phone to send the text, the apps are hopping across your screen like mad. You remember what your eyes were like, back when they worked a couple of hours ago, and none of this was part of the deal. Opening and closing them doesn't stop it either, FYI. Instead you may struggle to fixate on bright lights, or your eyes may feel like they're jerking sideways. Welcome to the ecstasy eye wiggles – or, as sometimes diagnosed online, nystagmus.

That's not to be confused with acquired nystagmus, which is usually caused by a head injury. This is that involuntary, quick-flickering-eyes feeling, well-known to the kinds of people who ask the /r/drugs subreddit if this is totally fine or if they're dying. It's nothing new, though. A forum post from as far back as 1999 sees a user describe a pill that gave them "gave me the most intense eye wiggles I have ever experienced. Sometimes I couldn't see and I thought i was going to fall over," they continue, "but I could feel my eyes flickering back and forth so fast that I could see two or three of everything."

I figured it would be worth asking someone who understands how eyes work and just how much involuntary nystagmus can affect the body. So I got in touch with an expert – Dr Matt Dunn, an optometrist and lecturer in visual perception at the University of Cardiff – to chat about eye wiggles, how our body creates them and what their long-term effects could be.

VICE: Hi Dr Dunn, can you tell me why our eyes wiggle when we take MDMA?
Dr Matt Dunn: There are reports of nystagmus occurring with MDMA but no direct studies have been done looking at it specifically. Having said that, there are reports of other drugs – things like cocaine, for example – causing something called opsoclonus, which isn't quite nystagmus but it's very similar. I've found some videos on YouTube and it looks to me more like what you would call opsoclonus. In this case, it's not technically nystagmus but these things are very similar: they're involuntary wobbles of the eyes.

We know why opsoclonus happens. There's a population of neurons in the brain stem called omnipause neurons, which exist to allow us to make quick eye movements. So when you move your eyes, you make rapid movements called saccades. In order to do that, you use neurons in the brain stem that are normally active, and which stop the eyes from oscillating back and forth.

Normally, those neurons allow you to make a focused rapid eye movement to a new target. But when omnipause neurons are turned off, you we get these rapid back-to-back oscillations – the saccades. So that's what it looks like is going on.

What are the wobbles doing that make it so hard to focus on something like a smartphone screen when you're really high?
Well, if your eyes are moving uncontrollably, then you will find that it's difficult to focus on what you're trying to see. We often forget how focused our vision is. You've got about two degrees of visual space, at the very centre of your eyes, in an area packed with cones called the fovea. If you hold your hand out at arm's length and look at your thumbnail, it's about that size; a dense area of photo receptors. So that's all you've got to do your reading and your focused visual tasks.

Zooming out, everything in your peripheral vision isn't quite as detailed as that. Although we have the illusion that everything looks clear all the time in fact we're only really seeing clarity in the middle. So when your eyes uncontrollably start moving around in different directions, then you become aware of the fact you're unable to look at something that you want to see because your vision is only clear in that central area. And if you are then unable to focus your central vision on the object you're looking at – like something on your phone screen – it'll be really hard to see.

Does MDMA affect the muscles attached to your eyes and make them wiggle?
It's speculation. No specific studies have looked at it. An educated guess would stipulate that what's happening here is within the brain itself. So the muscles would just be an effector in that long neurological chain. If there was a feedback loop in the brain, then it's causing that motor signal to be passed out to the muscles. All you're seeing there are the muscles doing the job they're told to do. It's just not the appropriate response.

If your eyes wiggle, does that mean you've taken a good pill? People speculate about that a bit when talking about this.
That's hard to know, really. Is that something desirable? Probably not. There are people who are affected by nystagmus constantly. Many people develop this after birth. It's a very debilitating condition. Other people will get nystagmus later in life in response to an injury or multiple sclerosis, things like that. And then they have uncontrollable eye movements for the rest of their life. Now they're not quite the same as what it would appear as we're seeing here. They're still uncontrollable eye movements and they're not very desirable at all. I can't imagine it being construed as a good thing!

Can the wobbles physically damage our eyes?
I cannot see any specific reason why it would. In people who have nystagmus, we find that over long periods of time, they can sometimes develop an astigmatism – or distorted images – in the eye. This amounts years and years of constantly having the wiggles every waking moment of your life. I should imagine it's unlikely to cause permanent damage to the eye from short durations like this, from recreational drug use.

Could eye wiggles last for ever?
In some people, that is the case. Although, I'm not aware of any reports where it'd been induced by MDMA. It's usually in response to a serious brain injury of multiple sclerosis. It's not out of the question.

But once they've started, is there a way to stop eyes from wiggling like this?
Presumably, if it's something affecting the fundamental level of the brain stem related to consciousness, I would imagine probably not. It does sound to me as though if that's happening, that's someone overdoing it somewhat!

One thing worth mentioning is there are some people who can do this voluntarily. They have this ability; on command they can make their eyes wobble at anytime when they're asked to. Is that a very desirable thing? I can't imagine it would be.

Thanks, Matthew.

@its_me_salma

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Nick Gazin's Frozen Food Reviews: I Will Review Frozen Food No More Forever

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It's incredible how much noise one man can make while eating frozen food. I started consuming these microwavable meals the moment I realized my ex-girlfriend would probably never love me again and, realistically, no one else ever would either. Having run out of hope or an interest in my own well-being, I resorted to buying food that involved only pushing a button on the microwave to cook it. There were some days where even that felt like an insurmountable task.

Photos by Julian Master

I started reviewing the frozen food I bought as a way of making fun of my painfully lonely, sad bachelor lifestyle. It seemed to work. Everyone else thought my pain was funny, too.

There were other, deeper reasons that drove me to write these reviews, besides depression and a desire to entertain strangers: I wanted to know what lay beneath the colorful, alluring, warped cardboard packages with pretty pictures of four-color food. I wanted to dredge up the truth from behind the freezer door.

The response to the reviews was immediate and universally positive. Distant relatives and old acquaintances were suddenly congratulating me, voicing their approval of my reviews. Styrofoam boxes full of dry ice and food items started arriving with regularity.

My freezer couldn't handle the volume of boxes, so I bought a second freezer to help contain my frosty bounty. I got book offers, talk show appearances, and DMs from disgustingly forward fans. I'd used my sadness to springboard me into celebrity.

Where do I go from here? I thought. The answer saddened me. I can go nowhere from here, so this will be my final frozen food column for VICE.

To celebrate my retirement from the frozen food world, the kind and beautiful people from Amy's Kitchen—makers of the best frozen cuisine the world has ever known—came to the VICE office in Brooklyn to throw me a party. I wore a suit that I found in the Salvation Army dumpster in order to show up "as my best self."

I arrived in the rear conference room to find all my work friends already orbiting a colossal spread of vegan and vegetarian food that the seraphims at Amy's had bestowed upon us. It was like Christmas, the prom, and the Berenstain Bears book Too Much Birthday all wrapped into one. It was almost too much to take. I ran to the bathroom and had a tearful 15-minute meltdown.

When I returned, the Amy's people presented me with a large cardboard burrito woman covered in tattoos. I drew on it to make it look more like Molly Soda, my feminine ideal.

I wonder if Molly Soda will see this as a fitting tribute or not. Oh well.

I sat between the two Amy's PR angels and munched down three lunches-worth of Amy's food. I did my best to engage them, but I think I broke my charisma bone at some point. I asked one of them what kind of music she enjoyed, and she just hemmed and hawwed and couldn't answer. I need to work on my conversational skills.

Sandwiched between two women who provided me with frozen burritos and my own cardboard burrito girl, I could feel time slow to a crawl. I looked around the room at the admiring and envious stares and glares of my co-workers and I realized I had fulfilled all my boyish hopes and dreams.

Marilyn Manson's album Antichrist Superstar ends with the repeated phrase, "When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed." I know now what those words mean.

I have gone as far as one man can go in the world of frozen foods. I have eaten frozen pizzas and lasagnas and Chinese; I have tasted frozen breakfasts and fish sticks and macaroni and cheese. I sampled every ice cream that $40 could buy. I have reached the summit; there is nowhere to go from here. I am done.

I thought that what I needed was to find love in other people. The truth is, before someone else can love you, you have to learn to love being by yourself and eating high-sodium food in your apartment. It's like the Wizard of Oz—all I needed was to be alone with the food I'd had all along.

The hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of an old ska song I listened to in college about how "old food critics never die; they just fade away."

Like that old food critic in the ska ballad, I now close my frozen food column and fade away, an old food critic who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.

Please contact me if you would like to buy my Molly Soda burrito waifu.

Follow Nick Gazin on Instagram.

Comics: 'Twerkerella,' Today's Comic by Ida Eva Neverdahl

Brendon Chung Says Disney’s ‘Talespin’ Inspired His New Heist Game

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All images courtesy of Blendo Games.

About six months back, The Witness developer Jonathan Blow said he wanted to "make games for people who read Gravity's Rainbow?" On the other hand, there's independent developer Brendon Chung, whose Quadrilateral Cowboy launches on July 25. Chung draws inspiration from a less "canonical" work: Disney's TaleSpin.

"When I was really, really young, I was into this cartoon called TaleSpin. It starred characters from The Jungle Book, but now they were in a 1920s, vaguely alt-future, sci-fi thing where they're air pirates. There's floating air carriers. It had this basis of really janky 1920s/1940s seaplanes, but just adding that twist made it this beautiful, weird, interesting thing. I couldn't get enough of it, and it was a major inspiration for a lot of what I do."

The fact that he was influenced by one of the keystones of the 90s "Disney Afternoon" block of cartoons shouldn't make you think that Chung's style of game development is immature. Chung is one of the most innovative and exciting game developers in the industry.

The games press has a bad habit of giving one figure in a game studio too much credit for how an entire game turns out, but with very little exception, Brendon Chung is Blendo Games. The programmer, artist, and designer of six independent games (including Thirty Flights of Loving, Atom Zombie Smasher, and Gravity Bone). And now, Chung is days away from the release of his latest game, the cyberpunk hacking adventure, Quadrilateral Cowboy.

With his total control over the direction of his game, he's able to tackle cyberpunk and game design with a degree of freedom to indulge in wherever his whims take him that is rarely seen in the games industry. Take, for instance, his unique vision of "cyberpunk," which eschews the familiar chrome and neon in favor of something else. "I think that what I was trying to do was to play with the cyberpunk that I think is not played with as often. I'm much more interested in really janky technology. And things you make in your garage. Things you use your home soldering kit on... slamming garbage together to make it work as opposed to sleek touch interfaces and high tech stuff. I was trying to make things as low tech as possible."

Quadrilateral Cowboy follows a tech startup company that has fallen on hard times and turned to hacking to pay the bills. The twist with this all-girl crew of Hiro Protagonists is that this 1980s world is less William Gibson and more a pastiche of steampunk, cyberpunk, and 1950s culture. Your secret hideout is littered with good, old-fashioned books; you listen to music on a "portable" turntable; your hacking deck looks like it should be running Windows 3.5. Most important, you play the game through a system of basic coding that is familiar to anybody who grew up in the DOS years of computing.


At the end of Thirty Flights of Loving, Chung greeted players not with traditional end credits but with a meditation on Bernoulli's principle of fluid dynamics in regards to flight. Digression is a common literary technique favored by authors like David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, but outside of the last two entries in the Saints Row franchise (a series Chung name-dropped as keeping a surrealist streak alive in games), it's not something we see much of in either the AAA or indie-gaming space. It's that dadaist streak of alt-history, frenetic editing, and flights of fancy that are at the core of how Chung operates as a storyteller and game designer.

"I used to work in the AAA space, at Pandemic Studios here in LA, and I was working on Full Spectrum Warrior , and someone says, 'wouldn't it be crazy if you swung the camera around so quickly that you saw the camera crew and wouldn't that be hilarious,' but that would never be done in a million years."

But now that he's his own boss, wild ideas like that don't need to die on the vine. "I'm trying to make the best that I can out of it cause who knows how long this will last. It can just disappear, so I'm trying to put everything that I've always wanted to do into what I do now."

That suggested ending for Full Sprectrum Warrior is, perhaps coincidentally, almost identical to how Ingmar Bergman's Persona ends. While I'm cautious about drawing direct lines between games and film too often, Chung has more in common with that philosophical, existentialist Swedish filmmaker than you might imagine at first glance.

If you're accustomed to the "language" of contemporary AAA gaming, Chung confounds it at every turn. Thirty Flights of Loving turned the first-person game narrative on its head with no expository dialogue, telling its story entirely through its actions and environments, and employing enough jump cuts to make Godard have a fit. Whereas most sci-fi games treat hacking as a mini game and secondary experience, Quadrilateral Cowboys makes it the core mechanic and requires players to learn actual (if basic) coding.

Yet, somehow, Chung's games almost never feature that all too common gaming feeling of being pulled out of the experience because you've hit some arbitrary limitation. He never relies on that old familiar excuse, "it's just a game." You're never asked to ignore some strange inconsistency just because. "I try to make my stuff as frictionless as possible. There are some things that kind of irk me. Like when a game pauses and makes you read a text box to understand what it means or when it makes you sit through a cinematic and watch a movie play."

Chung doesn't begrudge other developers, necessarily—he just holds himself to a very high standard. "Those things can be done well, but there are so many ways to screw it up that I try to make my stuff effectively the opposite way... trying my best to find what the media does and should do to be the best version of it. For me, it has to look cohesive. It has to look intentional. There has to be a reason." And that's what Chung has managed to do with his games so far.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is out July 25th. Although Chung has been "crunching" at the game for a while now, he's been "dying" to dive into Pokémon Go like the rest of us, a game he believes is responsible for new and amazing forms of social interactions. For a man who made a game about melancholy hacking in virtual reality, he seems very hopeful for the future of AR and VR to create new ways not just for us to enjoy games but to socialize as a gaming community.

Here's hoping that Chung can lend his unique touch to that emerging language of games as well.


Follow Don Saas on Twitter.

Do Young People Care About Gentrification?

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Millennials: we have to live, work and buy coffee somewhere. Photo via the author

Like most young people, I'm perpetually broke. Thanks to a crushing mountain of debt, I moved to a cheaper neighbourhood. In the short time I've been here the area has become "hipper" and the condo developers have taken notice.

It's now at a point where beautiful and expensive micro-lofts are built in the shittiest parts of town. My weird little corner of the city is not-so-subtly gentrifying, and I can't help but feel partially responsible for its transformation.

I figure not everyone feels this way. It seems much of my generation would rather patronize swanky restaurants in gentrified neighbourhoods without thinking about the people we are displacing in the process. So I asked some other millennials living and working in fast-changing neighbourhoods to see if young people actually care.

'Nobody wants to identify as a gentrifier.' Photo via Facebook

Joel, Vancouver

VICE: What's it like to be a business owner in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside?
Joel: I've worked in social housing in the Downtown Eastside for 11 years prior to opening Black Medicine Tattoo. I love this area even though it's not without its problems. There is a huge struggle related to poverty and mental health. There is a community of small business owners that is absolutely incredible. However we're currently in the middle of a tidal wave of development.

Has anything changed about the neighbourhood since you opened for business?
The most recent set of condos finished construction and they started building several more including two within spitting distance from the shop. Less people smoke crack on our street at night. High end restaurants, Starbucks, bars for the party crowd have all been recent arrivals. It's still rough, but things are changing.

Vancouver's 'tidal wave of development.' Photo via the author

Do you personally identify as a gentrifier?
Nobody want's to identify as a gentrifier. Nobody is the bad guy in their own head. I believe we cater to a younger artistic crowd as a shop. Young artistic types are the tip of the spear when it comes to gentrification. We move where we can afford to live and slowly increase its desirability until we and the historic residents of the area can no longer afford to live there. However young people have mobility in their living situation whereas the poorer residents of an area may not. We can uproot and move to another city or area if we have to. That isn't the case for many people in the Downtown Eastside.

What's the weirdest thing you've seen on the street?
I'm not going to try to impress with some fucked up tale at the heart of which is the suffering of a human being stuck in a shitty situation. It's not entertainment. However there are some weirdly beautiful things like finding parts of my girlfriend's art project built into a shelter on the side of the street. You see a lot of the raw humanity in the Downtown Eastside that people in other parts of the city manage to hide.

What is your experience with the people being displaced by gentrification in Vancouver?
Working for the Portland Hotel Society founded by Liz Evans and Mark Townsend was eye opening. Those people fought to make a home for the residents of the Downtown Eastside by transforming many of the buildings from being dirty and dangerous to safe and stable. They helped empower more people to take up that fight as well. Monied interests will find the potential to make more money wherever it exists. Right now there is potential in the Downtown Eastside. Vancouver's housing market has become insane and the increased pressure from that is being felt very deeply. What I wonder is if there is more we can create in our cities and societies to protect those who are vulnerable to gentrification.

Montreal's Little Italy: 'not totally gentrified.' Photo via Flickr user Axel Drainville

Kate, Montreal

VICE: What neighbourhood do you live in? What's it like?
Kate: Right now, I live in Little Italy. It's a really vibrant neighbourhood. I would describe it as at an in-between stage: there are really cool African grocers, some grittier areas, old, storied Italian spots, but also a bunch of new brunch spots and coffee shops opening up. It's not totally gentrified, but it's become hipper. So many cute little shops, restaurants and art galleries. Little Italy has the Jean Talon market, which is one of the gems of the city.

What do you know about gentrification in Montreal? Do you care about it?
Mile End. It's arguably the hippest neighbourhood in Montreal: it was home to Arcade Fire, Grimes, etc. It's where I lived when I moved to Montreal. I almost definitely couldn't afford to live there now, though. It used to be a cool artist community—now it's mostly yuppies. I care about it in selfish ways—I want to live where my friends are living and I don't want to eventually get pushed out because of higher rental prices—but I also care about it from a social perspective. I see a lot of people on rental Facebook groups looking for cheapish housing for entire families and be nearly totally out of luck. There's also been a downswing in community housing and on a societal level, that bothers me.

El Kartel in Vancouver's Chinatown. Photo via the author

Pablo, Vancouver

VICE: How do you feel about your role in Vancouver's Chinatown? Do you ever think you might be a gentrifier?
Pablo: I feel running El Kartel in Chinatown is only a positive thing, I don't identify myself/business as a gentrifier. The building we are in, a 1903 Heritage Building belongs to the Chinese Benevolent Society and is probably one of the nicest in Chinatown, in order for us to to come in as tenants we had to be interviewed many times and be accepted by the society. The most important thing for them was to have a business that could contribute to the revitalization of Chinatown by bringing more people to the area. They loved the idea that we always have been involved with the community and throwing cultural events.

Providing a space for local artists seems paramount to El Kartel's mission, why is that important to you?
Putting on art shows means so much to me. We've been doing them since 2003. I grew up loving art and music and ever since I had a space to showcase artist I haven't stopped. I treat the store like my house. We always have nice art on the walls and some special music playing. Supporting new talent and bringing people together makes me very happy. About every five to six weeks we change the art and we love to celebrate. Our openings are very special, we invite local DJ's, musicians, dancers and all sorts of performers and the vibes are always amazing.

Have you ever felt judged by customers for opening a business in a historically low-income community?
Not really. A few people have come into the shop with intentions to do so but they just end up dancing, looking at the artwork on the walls, and leaving with a smile on their face. When I think about it, it would be better to have more business like mine than empty spots covered in bad graffiti and full of drug dealers and crackheads outside. The community has actually been very welcoming, we have become mutual friends and customers.

Blame 'desire for the coolest, trendiest shit.' Photo via the author

Sean, Toronto

VICE: What neighbourhood do you live in? What's it like?
Sean: I live in Parkdale, which is the south west corner of downtown, specifically King St W & Dufferin. It's an area that has seen a lot of changes over the last 10-15 years. It used to be a rougher neighbourhood from what I understand. I first moved to the area in 2010 and a lot my neighbours told me that the area used to be a really poor/underdeveloped area of the city but never really explained why.

What do you know about gentrification in Toronto?
If you ask anyone that lives downtown, more than likely they can agree that Regent Park is a good example. Regent Park was well known for being a poor/low income area around the Queen/Dundas area just east of Jarvis that had housing projects. The entire area ended up getting demolished and there were plans for condos to be made within the next two years or something. I ended up moving from Toronto for a couple years and then moved back in 2014 and just recently saw the newly finished condos of the old Regent Park area and it doesn't look a single thing like the old Regent Park.

Do you think young people are driving change?
Young people may have a part in the gentrification process because of consumerism and desire for the coolest, trendiest shit. Liberty Village is a good example because of its long history of being a commercial/industrial manufacturing area in downtown Toronto, housing massive brick lofts and businesses that varied from building ammunition and bombs during both the wars to the Toronto Carpet Factory.

All of those businesses and manufacturing facilities ended up getting shut down for whatever economic reason but these beautiful spaces remained and eventually were snagged by artists and creatives. There has been a major change now though, where developers have taken over and built a shit ton of condos and jacked the price of rent up so that unless you're a rich kid, or a successful couple renting a one bedroom, it's a bit out of reach for most people.

Ah, Mount Pleasant.

Tom and Vicky, Vancouver

VICE: What makes you spend $5 on a cup of coffee instead of going to place like Tim Hortons?
Vicky: It's a taste thing. A coffee culture thing. After learning to be a barista, I've come to see things differently. Coffee is just way better at a smaller place than what you get at Tim Hortons. Vancouver is just so full of good coffee shops that you don't have to go out of your way.

Tom: There's no reason not to head to a smaller better coffee shop.

With making the choice to patronize a small coffee shop do you identify as gentrifiers?
Vicky: It crosses my mind. I work in the arts and feel like it's a huge part of the problem. But a lot of the time artists go to certain areas because of low income. That's where a lot of interesting people come together to share in interesting creative practises and more people follow suit. The retailers ride on that and push people out making it unaffordable for people like us. And it's not just here.

Tom: It's definitely happening everywhere.

Do you think you can do anything to avoid gentrification?
Vicky: It's part of a capitalist system. It's unavoidable but I do think there needs to be more regulation on when big companies come into an area that they need to be held accountable for investing in the community. There needs to be more community involvement. There needs to be more support for people who grew up in the area, or are from the area.

Tom: It's normally white privileged demographics that push these people out and these are usually people who are there out of necessity. It's got to be weird to have businesses coming in and ruining everything for some some sense of identity.

Vicky: I don't know if it's avoidable. As much as we like to critique it I don't know what we can do to stop it.

Follow Zac on Twitter.

What One Tiny Island Can Teach Northern Ireland About Marriage Equality

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This weekend opens a new chapter open for same-gender couples on the Isle of Man. They're now able to marry, thanks to some surprisingly progressive new legislation made legal on Friday the 22nd of July that not only brings through marriage equality for the island but also extends civil partnerships to straight couples. Chief Minister Allen Bell, head of the Manx government and who is gay, called it an "historic moment". For LGBT rights activists on the the Isle of Man it has been a long campaign – the island only decriminalised being gay in 1992.

On a clear day, a thin mist rises out of the sea at the western horizon looking out from the Isle of Man. It is, of course, Ireland, where a popular referendum last year brought in marriage equality. Follow that same coastline to the north and it's possible on those days to also see Northern Ireland, the last corner of this archipelago where same-sex marriage is not law.

Northern Ireland is like the Isle of Man in that it's traditionally very conservative, but that is changing. An Ipsos/MORI survey released in June reflected an increasingly secularised and liberal Northern Irish population. The data concluded that 70 percent of adults in Northern Ireland supported same-sex marriage, a figure that's grown in the past year. So, if such a high proportion of people approve of marriage equality in Northern Ireland how come it isn't law? Well, that's where it gets complicated.

Decades of sectarian violence have left a warped political structure. Party politics does not casually fall along the normal right- and left-wing spectrum but is strung up tightly between British unionism and Irish nationalism. In a society still experiencing the psychological and emotional hurt of war, parties are voted for on the basis of their constitutional position not their economic or social policies. Post-conflict paranoia of the "other side" is the electoral currency, maintained and capitalised on by parties who were founded in the fire of the Troubles.

It means that the shadow of the past falls upon everything. The monopoly on power in Northern Ireland's executive is shared between Irish nationalist Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). In this kind of setting any progressive political ambition and social policy, like same-gender marriage, is subservient to the constitutional juggernauts that inevitably direct the majority of people's vote.

Of the two ruling parties, Sinn Féin are the vocal supporters of LGBT equality, a radical force in Irish politics with controversial historical roots in the republican armed struggle. They work for nationalist working class interests while championing Irish cultural expression. But in late 2014, Sinn Féin's party president Gerry Adams was overheard describing the equality line as "the Trojan horse of the entire republican strategy".

In other words, as MP Colum Eastwood put it, "Adams revealed that Sinn Féin is not interested in promoting an equality agenda because it is the right thing to do but rather because it can 'break' their opponents." He received widespread criticism from other nationalists at the time and the party reiterated its commitment to equality, but ultimately it seems as though social policy plays second fiddle.

In a society still experiencing the psychological and emotional hurt of war, parties are voted for on the basis of their constitutional position not their economic or social policies

Generally speaking, the most heavy political opposition to marriage equality comes from the DUP, a pro-British ultra-conservative party founded by Protestant preacher Ian Paisley at the height of Northern Ireland's divisive conflict. Most recently the party was criticised when, in November 2015, the provincial assembly at Stormont voted in majority for same-sex marriage for first time and the DUP blocked the motion using an "emergency break" called a petition of concern. It's a device originally designed to prevent decision-making that would disadvantage one of the two polarised political camps, but in this case the DUP used it to undermine a democratic choice because it worked against their religious philosophy.

But the DUP's actual electorate seem split on the issue. The same Ipsos/MORI survey from last month also examined attitudes across voting preference, finding that 50 percent of those polled that vote DUP are in favour of marriage equality and 44 percent are against it.

While we could assume that a large portion of DUP voters do sympathise with the party's opposition to marriage equality, these statistics show that an astounding half of the its voting base do not. Some of the faithful are falling away. Brexit, which unionism's main party supported, has kickstarted new conversations about Irish unity. The attraction of a cosmopolitan and European Ireland that voted for marriage equality is tempting even to moderate and LGBT unionists. Secularism played an enormous role in eroding the grip of the Catholic Church.

Ironically, the DUP were opposed to a united Ireland on the premise that the Roman Catholic Church had too much influence over the Irish State. "Home rule is Rome rule" was the slogan railed by its leader Paisley. These days, though, it would seem that unionism's main political party, as it now runs from the increasing secularism of the Irish State, finds more common ground with the traditionalists from the Catholic Church. We're left with a convoluted web of interests that hold tolerance and equality hostage.

On top of secularism's perceived threat, younger generations are injecting new political dynamics and empathies into society, with their liberal convictions and cynicism of the fear-driven narratives of the past. Whether the dinosaurs can evolve fast enough remains to be seen, but it's about time they made a start.

@itsdavidgilmour

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The LGBT Campaigners Using Tactical Voting to Push Out Homophobia in Northern Ireland

Looking Back on the Unsolved Case of Northern Ireland's Springhill Massacre

What I Learned from LGBT People's Stories of Coming Out in Ireland

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Jill Freedman is an incredibly accomplished artist and image maker. Her career has spanned five decades and during that time she has made a name for herself through award-winning street photography in New York. She began working spontaneously in the 1960s when she shot her first two rolls of film on a borrowed camera, and has been creating iconic images ever since.

I was mostly familiar with her amazing black and white photographs of cops, firefighters, and 70s NYC, so I was very surprised to receive an email from her with the subject line "Miami Strippers 2002". However, after getting the chance to chat with her a couple times and visit her apartment and archive, I realized she applies the same spirit of adventure to every assignment.

Below is the artists statement she published with these photographs.

In search of the indecently possible, and the romance that's in it, I checked out what the strippers weren't wearing. For who would know better about taking it off than a stripper? But alas, stiptease is no more; no more tease of the balloon or bubble or veil. They come out already stripped of illusion, leaving nothing to the imagination. Where is the magic? Nowadays strippers look like everyone else running around in their underwear, except their heels are higher and their bodies build. And they get paid for the working out. Jill Freedman, December 2002 — Miami Beach, Florida.

She spoke to VICE about her her process when shooting this project.

VICE: You're a prolific street photographer, how do you embed yourself without being intrusive?
Jill Freedman: Sometimes I'm invisible, sometimes I'm not. I don't question magic.

What's the story behind your access and motivation to photograph these strippers?
I saw a woman in ridiculous stripper shoes standing in a doorway. It made me want to shoot strippers.

How do you choose the subject matter you're going to focus on?
It chooses me.

I find you're known a lot for your work shot in NYC, do you prefer photographing place outside of the city, like you did here?
I love traveling and making pictures. People are the same everywhere, most of them are nuts. It's fun catching crazy moments.

In speaking with you now, several times, I've learned a great deal about your life and adventures, but I'd love to hear more about what you'd like to be photographing now versus when you started?
I started photographing people and I still want to photograph people. For me, the thing is catching moments and sharing them.

This is unpublished material and you you've mentioned to me in previous conversations that most of your work has remained unpublished, which is surprising. I find artists today need immediate approval or to get exposure for their work instantly, but you photograph out of necessity, have you always been this way?
Yeah, necessity like a spider has to spin a web, that kind of necessity. I'm happy when I'm taking pictures, it's fun to lose yourself out in the street.

You can follow Jill Freedman's work here.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Saskatchewan River Oil Spill Is About to Cut off Another Town’s Main Water Supply

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Water, water, everywhere... Prince Albert photo via Wikimedia Commons

An oil spill into a Saskatchewan river is a causing another town to shut off its water intake this weekend, and residents are being asked to dramatically cut back their water use.

A Husky Energy pipeline dumped an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 litres of crude into North Saskatchewan River on Thursday, and so far efforts to contain the spill aren't going well. What started in Maidstone a few kilometres from the Alberta border is now expected to travel over 300 kilometres downstream by tonight.

The company attempted to put booms around the spill, but downstream towns have released emergency notices saying those containment efforts were "breached." That's a problem for many nearby communities that draw their drinking water from the river. One official told VICE it could be up to two months before Prince Albert or North Battleford can confidently draw water from the river again.

North Battleford, a town of about 14,000 people, shut down its river water intake on Friday. The town's reservoirs can store about three days' worth of water supply, after which they'll have to dip into groundwater, the city's director of operations told the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.

Now the spill is headed for Prince Albert, where officials are asking its 35,000 residents to "remain calm" and "do their part to limit personal water usage." The city is expected to shut off its river intake later today.

The town released a statement saying it had enough storage capacity for 48 hours of potable water, and could extend that to a week by using a "secondary retention pond." The release calls on individuals to limit flushing and shower use, and to stop watering lawns and washing vehicles "until further notice." The municipality has shut down its irrigation systems, a water crane, and a water park as a precaution.

Prince Albert communications manager Alanna Adamko told VICE they're prepping for a long cleanup. "We've been hearing that oil has been not only affecting water but also the lining of the river banks as it's coming down," Adamko said. "We're planning for up to a two-month cleanup before we would be fully confident to use the North Saskatchewan River."

Adamko said the town would be announcing long-term alternatives at an afternoon press conference.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.


A Look at Alasdair McLellan's New Book About Palace Skateboards

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Palace Skateboards team member Blondey McCoy, from 'The Palace' (All photos by Alasdair McLellan)

Skaters have been a fixture of London's Southbank for decades. But that didn't stop developers trying to move in on the brutalist undercroft beneath Queen Elizabeth Hall a couple of years ago with the intention to "refurbish" the area that's become the UK's most important unofficial skatepark—by which they meant replacing it with sandwich shops and bars where you can spend £6.50 on a pint.

Luckily, the battle to save the space—led by pressure group Long Live Southbank—was successful, and it's still much the same as it's always been.

Over the past seven years, photographer Alasdair McLellan has been documenting the scene on Southbank, focusing specifically on the Palace Skateboards team Palace Wayward Boys Choir. Collated in a new ICA exhibition, "The Palace," the photographs are a series of intimate portraits that show the camaraderie, focus, and dedication of the team. There's also a video installation from Palace founder Lev Tanju on display, filmed on VHS and looking like those videos from the 90s of Rodney Mullen doing weird flatland tricks in school yards.

"Alasdair has been a photographer that we have been following closely for some time," explains Matt Williams, curator of the exhibition. "This is a real insight into a younger generation of independent skaters, who have taken on a response to the environment around them. Palace have built their own brand and authorship over the past few years and really stand apart from the more generic elements of popular culture. The aesthetic of Palace is omnipresent both in graphics and visuals—and we've recently had a strong focus on DIY culture at the ICA. The idea that something special can evolve very much from a hand to mouth existence; that crossover between contemporary culture and more niche culture past and present, you see it in Lev's video work and designs. We felt that there was a nice parallel between what Palace are doing and DIY culture in other forms; they very much started off as a DIY thing and they still create for themselves first and foremost."

Working with them for seven years, McLellan got to know the Palace team well and documented both their professional team and amateurs, capturing a sense of camaraderie among them all that comes through best in his personal black and white shots.

"Alasdair has been working with them since 2009," says Matt. "You see someone like Blondey McCoy back then—he was just a kid, and now he's a key member of the team and an artist himself. He built up these personal relationships over a period of time and, I think, was very keen to represent that bond that you get with people who spend night and day together; the passion of skating; people trying to challenge the parameters that modern life puts upon all of us on an everyday basis.

"Also, the Southbank was in a precarious position for quite some time. But the campaign was strong; there was a petition that carried over a million signatures. Actually, in terms of a key part of underground London culture—global underground culture, in fact—I guess you'd think about the Southbank in relation to something like the 100 Club or CBGB. It carries the same kind of cultural weight and importance. For so long skaters have existed as a subculture, but they've also ended up manifested in popular culture."

Blondey McCoy and Lucien Clarke

Collating the photos into a recently published photo book (also entitled The Palace), McLellan was particularly attracted to the very British aspects of the Palace team, as he explains in the book's introduction:

"When I think about skateboarding pictures I always used to think about America, and then I met Lev and PWBC and they all looked really good, and it was very British, and they all dressed more like they were going to a football match than skating in Waterloo. The fact that they were aged 15 to 30, and it looked like they could be in Fagin's gang; it was like something out of a Dickens novel. I liked that the names they all had sounded like they're out of Brighton Rock, too; Nugget, Blondey, Edson, Snowy. Most brands don't have a history like theirs, born out of hanging out on the Southbank. The exhibition at the ICA and The Palace book are a very honest and charming document of what this is all about."

Follow Harry on Twitter.

See more photos from The Palace below:


The Forgotten Victims of the First Atomic Bomb Blast

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A outdoor museum at the White Sands Base, housing the varieties of missiles and rockets tested in the White Sands Missle Range located south of the Trinity blast.

July 16, 1945: At 5:30 in the morning in the mountains of south central New Mexico, something shook Barbara Kent out of her top bunk bed. The 12-year-old girl crashed down on the floor of the Ruidoso, New Mexico cabin where she was attending summer camp.

"It was the biggest jolt you could imagine," says Kent, recalling to VICE the moment—71 years ago this past Saturday—that the first atomic bomb was detonated in the nearby white sands desert. "We were all sitting there on the floor wondering what happening."

Kent was one of 12 girls that had arrived days before to attend summer camp organized by their dance teacher Karma Deane. " thought the water heater had exploded so we rushed outside. It was just after 5:30 and it should have been dark—but it was like the sun had been turned on," says Kent, describing the light, brighter than a dozen suns, produced by the first successful test of a nuclear weapon.

Later that afternoon, the campers were inside the cabin when they noticed a delicate white powder falling outside the windows. "It was snowing in July," Kent remembers from her home in California. There was excitement and confusion as the girls ran outside to play in the unexplainable weather. "We were catching it on our tongues like snowflakes. Scooping the ash and putting it all over our faces."

71 years later, Kent—now 84 years old—has suffered multiple bouts of cancer and is the sole remaining survivor of the camp (10 of the 12 of died before they turned 40). "This is no coincidence," she says. Like many other Trinity Downwinders, Kent blames her health problems on the government, which did nothing to warn residents of the danger of the radiation exposure caused by Trinity. "It was so wrong of the government not to evacuate everyone when they knew this was going to happen. They never told us so we played in the thing that killed us."


The hundreds of luminarias/farolitos that light the evening sky in Tulurosa New Mexico. Each luminaria represents a member of the community that has passed away.

For many years, the cries for help of New Mexico Downwinders have gone unheard, while the impacts of the radiation on these communities are still largely unknown due to a lack of data or studies on the fallout.

According to a study on radiation releases since 1943 by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment (LAHDRA), "Too much remains undetermined about the exposures from the Trinity test to put the event in perspective as a source of public radiation expose or to defensibly address the extent to which people were harmed." While conducting the study, the CDC and LAHDRA were given unprecedented access to previously classified and internal documents at Los Alamos National Labs.

"We were unknowing, unwilling, and uncompensated participants in the world's largest lab test," says Tina Cordova, founder of the Tularosa Downwinders, a consortium which has been fighting for both recognition and compensation for the dowinders in the Tularosa basin of New Mexico. This year, the Downwinders began collecting health surveys (400 so far) on rates of cancer and other other diseases that plague Tularosa Basin communities. "The effects to us are clear," she says, pointing out that everyone in her community has lost someone to diseases linked to radiation exposure.

According to health physicist Joseph Shonka, the impacts described by Cordova are likely in areas near the blast. "Trinity created more fallout than at other nuclear tests," says Shonka, who headed up the aforementioned CDC LADHA study. "At the Nevada site the closest people were 150 miles away. Here you have people 15 miles away. There is no question the exposures were higher than in Nevada and Utah."

"The people who lived in downwind of the Trinity blast were exposed to clouds of radiation that blew from the explosion," New Mexico Senator Tom Udall states in an email; Udall is a longtime supporter of the New Mexico Downwinders. "Radioactive debris fell from the sky, killing cattle and poisoning food and water, and generations of residents have suffered from cancer and other illnesses."

"From the beginning, the government has refused to take responsibility," he continues. "We can't undo the years of suffering, but we should make sure the victims receive similar recognition and compensation that other residents have received," Udall's referring to the compensation given to those effected by the Nevada Test site through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) and denied to New Mexico Downwinders.

This past Saturday in Tularosa, community members fanned out behind the dugout of the local high-school base ball field to take part in the 7th annual Vigil commemorating the anniversary of the Trinity test. "This year, we have 700 Luminarias," says Tina, motioning towards the small paper lanterns that dot the outfield—each light representing a Tularosa resident that has been lost to cancer.

"We have all been affected," says Henry Herrera, sitting with his wife Gloria along the first base line, their chairs pointed toward center field and the direction of the blast he himself witnessed at age 11. "I remember I was helping my dad pore water in the radiator, holding the funnel. Just as we got done with it there was was a hell of a blast and the cloud went up." The radioactive plume rose over 38,000 feet in just minutes.

Henry Herrera describes seeing the nuclear blast as a young man

Herrera's father thought it was an explosion from the nearby white sands missile range; he himself recalls being mesmerized by the massive mushroom cloud. "I watched it outside for hours. It rose up and up to the east. The bottom half kept on going but the top half pushed back and landed right here." When he saw the dust from the cloud approach the house, he ran inside to tell his mom. "I very well remember because my mom was so angry. She had just hung up our clothes on the line—you can imagine what they looked like."

"People around here were dying right and left," says Herrera, who has since lost countless friends and family to cancer, himself a survivor. "Nobody knew what was going on, they just died."

The fallout around Trinity was, according to Shonka, potentially far worse then even Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "The cap is the nuclear bomb, and the stem is all the dirt that was swept up into it," he explains, describing the iconic mushroom shape produced by a ground blast like the one at Trinity. "The bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were detonated at 1900 and 1650 feet. Their stems never touched their caps, so there was never much fallout.

When you have a ground level blast like Trinity a large amount of dirt is sucked into the cloud and mixed with radioactive material. The temperatures are so hot that everything melts. As the cloud cools off, different things condense out at different temperatures. As they solidify again, they fall out."

When asked about the incidences of cancer and other deceases related to radioactive expose, Shonka said, "If you ask me if there is high likelihood that there are health related issues from Trinity, I can say yes. As for why the Nevada Test downwinders have been given compensation and New Mexico hasn't—that's a question with a political answer."

"If we were compensated, then the government would be admitting guilt" Gloria Herrera claims. "The would be admitting the fact that they bombed us first." Her husband elaborates, "We are small. We are poor. We have no political power."

Rows of luminarias representing a loved one who had died of cancer or other deceases thought to be linked to radiation exposure from the Trinity test.

For years, the voices of Trinity Downwinders were absent from political dialogue, newspaper coverage, or even public awareness. Archival research done by VICE at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico, found numerous clipping from local papers, stretching back to the 50s, reflecting on the legacy of the Trinity Test. Yet until recently, there was no mention of the first victims of the Atomic Age.

This has begun to change.

In 2015—some 70 years after the Trinity test— the National Cancer Institute began the first-ever official health study to quantitatively estimate the number of cancer cases in New Mexico (past and future) that may be related to the nuclear test. That same year, Senator Udall took the senate floor and made an impassioned speech in support of the amendments to add New Mexico Downwinders to the government's Radiation Exposure Compensation Program (RECA).

Support has grown: Both US Senators and all 3 US house members from New Mexico are co-sponsors to the RECA amendments. But the measure has failed to advance in Congress for several years.

"Many people here have little faith in the federal government," says Tina, noting the trepidation of NM Downwinders towards both the federally funded health study and the will of congress to included their claims. "Many think we are just looking for compensation," says Cordova, "Which we deserve. "But even more than anything we want the government to acknowledge what they did. We were the first sacrifice of the atomic age. That needs to recognized and corrected."

Follow Samuel Gilbert on Twitter.

The Beauty and Splendor of Being a Slut

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The author, his husband, and his boyfriend. Photo by the author

It was when I read an opinion piece by a British writer Dylan Jones that I learned I was a slut—an actual, world-class slut.

In his piece, Dylan describes being called a slut when, after the topic of one's sexual headcount came up as party banter, he estimated that he'd slept with 400 guys. Which, to me, is low. What was worse were the comments on an article which aggregated Dylan's essay, attributing his number to low standards and self-esteem, even supposed "mental health issues," as if one's worth lowers with each dick or ass you take. Sex-positive commenters emerged as well, praising his honesty while dismissing the puritans. But I can only imagine what those closed-minded moralists would say to me.

Sleeping with 400 men means sleeping with 40 each year for ten years. My husband Alex and I probably fucked 40 guys over the course of our five week honeymoon in Europe.

I had my first three-way when I was 14, with two neighborhood boys. I've been having sex regularly since I was 16. I have been having sex for 32 years—32 times 40 makes 1280. And that's a low estimate. The real number of men I've slept with, as far as I can figure, is somewhere between that and 3500.

I've had a lot of sex, and for that, I feel lucky.

What matters is the quality of the time we share together, whatever the duration of that time may be. I remind myself daily to remember that each man I make love to is a human being, and that I can love them for precious few minutes.

Sex isn't just about getting off. It's about connection and intimacy. Even in the most anonymous of hookups, there's something magical to be found; blowing a stranger in a bathroom can be as intimate and mind-blowing as any sex. Sex is transcendental and beautiful, even if that stranger pushes you away, zips up, and leaves. Even if you never see your partner again. Sometimes, especially if you never see them again.

I spent teenage weekends at my best friend's apartment on Central Park West. We would spend our Saturdays watching the Robin Byrd Show while I sucked him off. Eventually, I'd head out alone to Central Park. I was probably 16. I didn't have a community. I didn't know what it meant to be gay. And while I was a horny teenager, I wasn't just going to the park to fuck. I was looking for a place to belong, and people who were like me.

In the late 90s, I left New York for Los Angeles, and found myself alone in a new city. I had just read John Rechy's Numbers, a veritable cruising bible, and soon found myself stalking the shadows of Griffith Park, devouring whatever and whomever I found. I know now that what I searched for, beyond sex, was friendship, and a way to be intimate with another, even if just for a precious few seconds. I spent hours kissing, fucking, holding others' hands while they masturbated, whispering things into strange ears, sharing moments lost but for my memories.

There is real beauty to be found in holding someone while deep inside them, feeling their heartbeat and hearing their shallow breaths. Sometimes it's enough to share that feeling and nothing else. Occasionally, within moments of loneliness, self-hatred, and desperation, we find each other, and for a few minutes can anchor one another in a dark and isolating world.

I feel no shame for any of it. I have fucked amazing people, people I now care for and love. These are people who would do anything for me and I would do anything for them in return.

"That guy," I once overheard one man say about another, "has fucked so many people, his sex can't have meaning anymore. He's an addict." But sex has retained meaning to me. With some guys, it still feels magical, like something truly important is happening.

I have fucked amazing people, people I now care for and love. These are people who would do anything for me and I would do anything for them in return.

I refuse to shame anyone for their choices, even if they aren't choices I would make. For 12 years of my life, I was a daily heroin user. I have been an escort. I have slept with men for a line of coke. I've held men I loved while they died in my arms. I've stolen from people who meant the world to me. I have been selfish, unkind and petty. I have lied, I have cheated, and I've found redemption—a way to really like who I am, to forgive myself, and to seek out those I hurt and make amends.

We are broken beings living in a harsh world. Why shouldn't we be good to one another? Why shouldn't we fuck, support, cherish, and love one another? I want as many people to love and be loved in turn as possible in this world. I sincerely want my husband to fall in love and fuck as much as he can in this lifetime, and I want the same for our boyfriend, too. I want it for every guy I make love to, now and in the future...

What matters is the quality of the time we share together, whatever the duration of that time may be. I remind myself daily to remember that each man I make love to is a human being, and that I can love them for precious few minutes. I can hold them and protect them. That is the worth of who we are, and the value we can offer.

Follow Jeff Leavell on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: Reflecting on the RNC's Blindness to Police Brutality

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Cleveland cops. All photos by Peter Larson

Watching the Republican National Convention go down in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio this week, I couldn't help but fear that the latest round of police killings in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Florida would get swallowed up in a sea of blue blindness.

Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful for cops in this country and the sacrifices they make—including putting their own lives in harm's way. I have family and friends who work in law enforcement and I respect them. The deranged cop killers Micah Johnson and Gavin Long in Dallas and Baton Rouge should be called out for their madness.

But amid America's undying adulation towards police officers—public servants who choose to receive salaries with public tax dollars—the most significant issues seem to be getting lost in the noise. There is no doubt many cops behave with honor and good intentions. But we can't let the conversation stop there, as RNC speakers and attendees have, going so far as to cheer wildly when one of the cops involved in Freddie Gray's death got acquitted in Baltimore this week.

We have to be brutally honest during this harsh but familiar period in American history: There are too many police officers who perform their jobs with no honor and use the privilege of wearing the badge to inflict savagery on the public. The senseless shooting of a prone black man helping his autistic patient in North Miami earlier this week is just the latest bit of damning evidence for this.

As a black man, I've been profiled by cops on numerous occasions. Too many times to count. I've been followed and stopped while taking evening strolls in Cleveland and other cities. I have been pulled over by cops for so-called broken taillights and for my license plate stickers not being visible—the kind of petty crap that can send a black man home in a bodybag or to the county jail.

WATCH: The Cleveland Strangler

I've also seen police power from the other side of the interaction. A few years ago on Cleveland's West Side, I spent time with a controversial police sergeant while gathering background for a story on male prostitution. As he listened to his radio and assisted on regular calls, we chatted about trivialities such as the hip areas of town (what clubs had the most attractive women waiting in line), what mom and pop restaurant served the best fried Perch, and of course, the Cleveland Browns. But whenever he pulled over a motorist or drove down a sketchy street, I could feel his power—the power to upend lives.

The sergeant asked people to get out their cars. He stopped a group walking down the street and frisked them. During another stop, he bizarrely questioned a man, who was dressed as a woman, about why he performed sex acts for money.

"This is a reporter for the newspaper. Tell him why you suck dick," the police officer said.

After I identified myself, I politely told the man, who had mentioned to the officer he was from Youngstown, my hometown, that he did not have to disclose anything to me. I ended up changing the subject so we could continue the patrol for the evening. I felt embarrassed for him, but I got the sense that he had been treated that way before.

But to be fair, the officer also did perfectly decent things like give an extremely inebriated man a ride home and help a lost couple with directions to the highway.

While spending time with that sergeant, I didn't sense his detainment of people was so much about race—maybe because I'm a black guy and he was cognizant of it. But it was definitely about power, the power to control the situation because he had a gun and a badge.

I also think that police use their power out of fear. A 2015 dashcam video released from the Austin Police Department this week showed, Breaion King, an African American woman being dragged and slammed from her car for allegedly speeding. The officer, Bryan Ricther, said the woman was resisting arrest.

Later in the video, as the woman was being driven to a police station, the arresting officer's partner, Patrick Spraldin, said that he believed that black people had violent tendencies. His response was to a question King asked about why so many people were afraid of black people.

The problem with Spraldin's views, as with a lot of officers, is that many are afraid of people they don't identify with. Many patrol from their cars instead of walking the beat. They know the dilapidated home where dope boys push drugs, but they don't know Miss Anderson who lives right next to the bando and cooks up a mean peach cobbler. I doubt many of the officers, particularly those who are white, who I have encountered over the years, have ever of had dinner over someone's house who was not in the same socioeconomic or racial class as they were. And if they did, I highly doubt it was on the minority's turf.

Earlier this month, days after the tragedy in Dallas, a clearly exhausted Police Chief Donald Brown said he believed just one or two percent of America's police are bad apples. Brown and his deputy chief, Malik Aziz, should be commended for their leadership, composure, and compassion. Their department has made real strides on use-of-force complaints in recent years. They also said bad police officers need to be removed from law enforcement.

But the man's percentages are way off. We all know African Americans and Latinos are more likely to have encounters with law enforcement—and in many instances, deserved or not, they are unpleasant experiences that contribute to the distrust many minorities have for cops. I also disagree with Brown's pleas on CNN for the public to commend and praise cops for the sacrifices they make every day, and to not publicly criticize them when they break the law or act negligently.

During the segment, Brown said:

"The 98 percent, 99 percent of cops come to work and do this job for 40 grand... and risk their lives not knowing whether they're going to come home... get this criticism. That's just not right and it's not sustainable. I'm just making a plea to this country to stand up as a silent majority and show you're support for these people to keep them encouraged... to protect you."

Police behavior, especially when force is used, should be examined frequently and thoroughly. It is a life and death issue in many poor and urban communities.

For many African-Americans and Latinos in this country, a police stop more often than not means they will be given an impromptu traffic ticket that oftentimes could be the difference between paying the rent or driving under suspension, a broken taillight that leads to an unnecessary vehicle search or detainment, or the ultimate price—being tased, put in a chokehold that leaves you gasping for your last breath, or having a gun drawn on you and being shot.

This was not the message being sent by speaker after speaker at the Republican convention last week—they said don't question the cops, and if you do talk about them, make sure it's unconditional praise.

But I'm not blinded by the blue. All I see is red.

Donaldson is a freelance journalist and documentary film producer. He is a former reporter at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio, and The Detroit Free Press.


How Foreign Investors Are Using Drug Cartel Tactics in the Canadian Real Estate Market

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Beautiful, expensive Vancouver. Photo via Flickr user JamesZ_Flickr

Canada's freakshow real estate market has been drawing a lot of international attention as of late. A few weeks back I talked to an infamous Wall Street short seller who is betting against one Canadian mortgage lender, and claims our housing bubble may be ready to burst.

When I asked why he thinks we're in for a bumpy ride, Marc Cohodes pointed to Chinese capital outflow restrictions, which limit citizens from moving more than $50,000 out of the country per year. He said investors from China are breaking those rules in order to move massive amounts of money into Vancouver real estate, and the Chinese government could choose to crack down on this at any moment.

It turns out Vancouver-based anti-fraud lawyer Christine Duhaime has been keeping a close eye on Chinese millionaires who are maneuvering around those rules when migrating to Canada. Working for clients like the Bank of China, she's successfully gone after at least one person who defaulted on $10 million in Chinese bank loans, and who also spent $8 million on Lower Mainland property. Last month she tweeted the case was "of global significance for China."

Of course the extent to which international millionaires, particularly from China, impact Vancouver's housing market is still up for debate. Preliminary data from the BC provincial government pegs foreign investment at just five percent across Metro Vancouver, though many observers have called out those self-reported numbers as pretty much useless.

But for the Chinese millionaires who do choose to work around capital outflow restrictions, Duhaime says one of the most common and widespread methods is "smurfing." She says it's a tactic also used by Colombian drug lords, and court documents show at least one Canadian bank has helped a woman buy a home this way. VICE reached out to Duhaime to learn more about how this all works, and what Chinese authorities are doing about it.

VICE: Can you break down the basics of smurfing for us?
Christine Duhaime: The analogy I use is from the drug trafficking world when they're dealing with bulky amounts of cash. What smurfing does is take these large amounts of money, and breaks it up to reduce the volume of it in order to avoid being detected. A large transaction would require threshold reporting of cash, whereas many little transactions fall below the reporting requirement for anti-money laundering. In the case of drug lords, instead of taking a gym bag full of money to the bank, what they'll do is employ many people to go to all sorts of different banks with smaller amounts of bills and change it over so it's useable to the gang.

How is this tactic used to move money out of China?
In China, each person is limited to moving up to $50,000 out of the country each year. People move money all the time, sometimes legitimately, in order to get around these currency controls. The way I have seen it being used is that a person will hire or use many, many smurfs who will each fill out a bank form to wire $50,000 each on behalf of another person. In these bank forms, they claim to be the owner of the funds, when in reality they are not. One employment law case found a person from China had a large sum of money that was moved to Vancouver this way. A whole number of people each went to a bank, each made deposits so she could buy her house. When you have transaction after transaction of exactly $50,000, that is suspicious.

Vancouver, still expensive. Photo via Flickr user Stewart Butterfield

Is this a widespread thing? How would you know?
It has to be widespread for this reason: you can't send money out of China with your government identity past the $50,000 point. I have boxes of evidence in my office of wires that Chinese foreign nationals have sent over several years to Canada, all in different names of people and all for the same person. In the situations I have seen, it was employees of the Chinese foreign national that were used to smurf money out of China to Vancouver to buy luxury homes. There are other ways to move more money out with permission from the Chinese government, if there's a legitimate reason like you're involved in litigation or owe alimony payments. But almost nobody ever goes for that permission because they don't want the government to know how much they have, or they do not want to disclose how they came to acquire such a large amount of money.

Is there an above-board way to do this?
I can't imagine any. And the reason is because each of those people fill out a form in which they say they're the owner of the $50,000, so they're lying on a bank form. To ask multiple people to do that for you is not an easy thing, it's not a natural way to move money around.

Do you think the Chinese government is going to crack down on this kind of thing?
The Chinese are very concerned about it, they definitely don't like it. They are already cracking down on it. And not only that, they are tracing where the funds went that were smurfed out to identify instances where there may be financial crime involved. One of the things that is surprising about people who smurf is that it can be detected going years back. They've approached some countries around the world about who they want back. They've managed to succeed in some cases, to bring people home to prosecute.

Follow Sarah Berman on Twitter.

The Vice Interview: MØ on First Loves, Darkest Fears, and Seeing Ghosts

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This is the VICE Interview. Each week we ask a different famous and/or interesting person the same set of questions in a bid to peek deep into their psyche.

When she was growing up in Denmark, Karen Marie Ørsted was obsessed with Spice Girls. Now, in her twenties, she's essentially a punk Sporty Spice with the best cover of "Say You'll Be There" you've ever heard.

At 18, she formed Mor, a trashy band, and toured Europe and New York, playing at squats. She loved 80s hardcore and got heavily into left politics, spending her free time campaigning and attending rallies. Realizing she had to go solo and switch to electropop, she began project MØ (pronounced halfway between "muhh" and a cow noise). Her debut No Mythologies To Follow came out in 2014 and captured the confusion of being a young adult along with massive bass and pulsing synths, via pop choruses of Spice Girls-level catchiness. Now she's co-writing Major Lazer songs and has just released a song with them and Justin Bieber.

Just before her Diplo-produced second album drops, we met her in Rough Trade and shared a weird avocado toast thing and talked about being scared by everything.

How many people have been in love with you?
Maybe six or eight. Some of those were when I was young and when you're 16 you know it's not forever. It's a little easier for me to attract people now—I think back to when you're younger and fall for people in bands, even though you barely know them. I've been with my boyfriend for two and a half years and he's a musician himself and super down to earth. Ever since I was 19 I've been in a relationship, to be honest. I always go from one to another, for some weird reason, and I always find someone where I connect on a personal level.

Why did you break up with your first boyfriend or girlfriend?
He broke up with me. I was so heartbroken for so long because it was the first. As a teen it's the first time you feel everything so when when that happened I thought I was gonna die. I was so fucking ruined. I heard the reason was that I didn't want to do anything sexual. I was only 14 and wasn't ready. I was scared. Afterwards I was so scared of falling in love for real.

What would your parents prefer you to have chosen as a career?
They've always been supportive and just wanted me to do something that makes me feel uplifted in life. The only thing was my dad—he wanted me to go to college and get a basic education after high school. My parents are both teachers and my dad is a psychologist now. And actually, I wanted to go in the end because all my friends were doing it. I was scared that I'd miss out on getting drunk with my friends. I'm happy that I did it.

How many books have you actually read and finished in the past year? Don't lie.
I'm a pretty slow reader so maybe only two books. But I really want to read more, because it also inspires me a lot. When I wrote my first album I was reading Joseph Campbell, he's this philosopher who writes about mythology. That inspired the title, No Mythologies to Follow. I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries. We live in a very stressful time, with like screens all over the place, and I think reading a book can make you really relaxed. It's almost like a yoga class, because it makes you get into something that's organic and natural, it's not about scrolling or clicking, it's different. So I want to do it more, and I find it really pleasant. Right now I'm reading Kim Gordon's Girl in a Band. I loved her and Sonic Youth as a teen so it's like candy.

When in your life have you been truly overcome with fear?
All my life, like I'm a child. I was super scared of the dark. I have a crazy imagination and it's a visual one that can be scary from time to time. I still have a nightlight now. If I've had really long working days for many days in a row, I'll get more anxious, and that's when sometimes, when I'm about to fall asleep, my mind goes, "Oh, what the fuck?" and ghosts start to come up the side of the bed. When it gets really bad, I turn on the light. I hope I'll get over it some day. It's not bad, but this is definitely the thing that scares me the most, because in real life, if I'm in situations that are a little bit scary, then I don't get scared. I toughen up. Definitely the most scary times are in my head.

Photo via Wiki

What would be your last meal?
I don't know if I'd be able to eat if I knew it was my last. I don't even have a favorite food but I'll say sushi. I like the classic little maki rolls with salmon and avocado.

If you were a wrestler, what song would you come into the ring to?
It would be like a sensitive, but very dark, rough song. Maybe Wildfire with SBTRKT and Little Dragon, because that has the emotion and fragileness but it's still crazy. Inside my tornado brain, that's how I see myself; a vulnerable person, but at the same time...

What film or TV show makes you cry?
The older I get the more I cry when I watch stuff. It's always on the plane, because you're like fragile and the air con is drying you out. I cry a lot during documentaries, especially when it's about nature and real people. Show me an animal program about predators on the savannah with all this poetry, like, "Oh, a predator is always out there. Those poor leopard kids are never going to get anything to eat!"

If you had to give up sex or kissing, which would it be?
Oh, sex for sure. The love and intimacy that a kiss represents, I could not live without that. I would rather walk through my life and have the tension and not get sex but have the love, than walk through life and get the sex but not have that tender moment, because the sex stuff, that's the explosion, but I would rather have the flames.

Where did you go on your first friend vacation and what did you do?
I miss that so much! The first one was just with my best friend who I still talk to every day and another friend. That was just before we really started to drink, but we started drinking there, with some guys. The two other girls hooked up with the guys, and I got so angry because one of the girls hooked up with the guy that I was kind of in love with, so I got so angry that I started crying and went in the tent to sleep angry and drunk.

What memory from school stands out to you stronger than any other?
Being in a group of girls and just having very special times that would only be within these walls of childhood. You don't know you would split up and everything would be different, and the whole world would change. That thing you have in school was really special and magic. Being so close and being like the family that you chose yourself. The thing with my job is that where I used to be with my girlfriends all the fucking time, now I see them only a couple of times a month. It's one thing to have a great family, and even though you love that safeness and you have a good time with them, when you're with friends that are your own age, you're in a whole different mindset. You reflect upon yourself in a much deeper way. You mirror yourself in all these people and it's so important.

What is the nicest thing you own?
I have my lucky cats, I have my bum bags. I don't have crazy eccentric thing, really. No matter how much I make on certain things right now, this is my life savings, like I'm gonna live off this my whole life. It's important to be rational about it. I have that from my mom and I'm happy I do.

Do you think that drugs can make you happy?
I don't believe in drugs because I have such a fantasy mind that I think if I took anything psychedelic, I'd be shit fucking scared. But, I get drunk like everybody else. I don't think they can make you happy, but I think they can make you let go and make you realize the other side of things. And even though people say, "Yeah, we did drugs, it's not real," well it is kind of real if you remember it the next day, and for the thoughts you have and the conversations you have, and even the feeling of letting go, because it does make you feel differently. Of course, I have smoked weed, but not for a while, because it didn't really do much for me. I think when I get drunk, that's when I get high.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.


VICE Talks Film: How ‘Childhood of a Leader’ Shows Us the Making of a Fascist

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For the latest episode ofVICE Talks Film, we sit down with filmmaker Brady Corbet to talk about his dark, chilling, and incredibly ambitious directorial debut,Childhood of a Leader. The film—which earned him awards for best director and best debut feature at the 2015 Venice Film Festival—is set in the shadow of WWI and chronicles the childhood of a nine-year-old boy through a set of increasingly intense tantrums, painting an ominous portrait of the formation of a fascist.

Corbet discusses the film's thunderous score composed by Scott Walker, how being a child actor impacted his directorial approach, and how winning at the Venice Film Festival transformed his life.


Paris Lees: Everything I've Learned About Sex

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Sex! Fucking! Cumming! Isn't it marvelous? I bet you'd like to be doing it right now, wouldn't you, rubbing your genitals into a sloppy, sticky frenzy, like an eager, rutting animal? I thought I knew everything about sex, but one thing about growing up is realizing just how little you do know. You know? Like, when did straight guys become so blasé about analingus? And how do you choose a good safe word? And does anyone, really, like being fingered?

I wanted to look at aspects of sexuality that I'd never heard of before for my new BBC Three series The Paris Lees Sex Show. That's right. The BBC has given me my own show. About sex. I wanted it to be much smuttier and more superficial, but the Beeb insisted we give it an educational spin, you know, for the youth. Public broadcasting, right? But it's still quite slutty, by BBC standards—see how my lady lumps jiggle about in this clip like two big wobbly jelly-filled balloons?


Anyway, VICE wanted to know if I'd actually learned anything from my special investigations and it turns out I did, actually, which, combined with a good decade of being—well, let's face it, a bit of a slut—means I've gathered a fair bit of wisdom when it comes to sex. So, without further ado...

1. CHILL

Relax. Take a deep breath, hun. Honestly, if life has taught me anything it's that you can sit on a traffic cone, if you would only chill the fuck out for a minute. #ThisGirlCan

2. GET A SEX DRAWER

I don't care who you are, get a sex drawer. Even if you're hooked on traditional penis-in-vagina sex, cum is gonna fly loose every once in a while, right? Not to mention all those lovely pussy juices. So you're gonna need somewhere to store tissues, condoms, and a hand towel. Handcuffs. Dildo. Machete. All your sex stuff.

3. VALUE INTIMACY

I've had several truly intimate and special relationships in my life—my manicurist, my hair stylist, the lady who does my eyebrows. But it's only really in the past few years that I've grown the fuck up and realized how great true intimacy can be. Sure, promiscuity can be incredibly fun—and anyone who used to drink in Yates in Nottingham back in 2009 knows I mean that with all my heart—but I doubt it's nourishing in the long run. I kind of think of casual sex as junk food now. And love-making as home cooking. Don't get me wrong—sometimes you just really, really fancy a big fat greasy saveloy from the Turkish chip shop down the road, but it's never going to compete with a meal that's been slowly prepared with herbs and love and shit. Who'd have thought it, eh? Me, a romantic...

4. NOTHING REALLY MATTERS

So here's the other thing that my awakening to intimacy has taught me—when you love someone, pretty much anything goes. I'll always have my own preferences and, believe it or not, boundaries, but when you're loved up, you'd kind of do anything for them. And I don't mean that in a weird, degrading, co-dependent way, but in a loving, open, and beautiful way. Like when you find yourself doing something you've never really been turned on by before purely because you know that the person you adore finds it hot, but—and here's the crucial bit—now you enjoy it too.

5. NEVER SAY NEVER

I'm "sex positive" but there are things I can't help but have a visceral dislike of—say, for example, people hurting themselves. And I suspect that scat—playing with shit—will always be a step too far for me. But many things that I once thought beyond the pale, or ridiculous, don't seem so bad to me any more. And from personal experience, I know I'm not alone in that. I've met many guys in their 30s and late 20s who are turned on by trans women—whether post- or pre-op—who, at 20, would never have believed that they would 'go there.' But like so many areas in life, your sexual perspective changes all the time, often quite dramatically. And that's OK. I guess that what I'm trying to say is that I've recently discovered I'm into Furries.

6. FUCK ME WHILE I CRY

Can we all just agree that it's super hot to be fucked while you're emotional?

7. PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES NEED TO CUM TOO

I'm fairly self-absorbed, so it's not something I've thought about a lot before, but since I started filming my show, I've learned that there isn't a lot of porn out there for people who are blind or visually impaired and, well, that sucks. There is a book of braille porn, but you need two hands to read it... so yeah. Blind people need better erotica that appeals to all their senses.

8. FANTASIES ARE FINE

Everyone has a naughty fantasy that they would never in a million years want to enact in real life and that's fine. And I reckon everyone needs to access that fantasy once in a while. Even if you're really turned on by the person you're with, even if you love them desperately and couldn't be more attracted to them, sometimes you will still have to think about Your Thing to get off. I don't want to know what yours is and you sure as hell don't need to know what mine is, although if you really want to know it involves a see through mac and a girl I used to go to school with on a wet and windy night with six rugged, woman-starved firemen and a dog biscuit but that's all I'm saying, OK.

9. THREE'S A CROWD

You always say you're going to have a threesome when you first hook up with someone. You probably won't. I'm not saying threesomes can't be good or that happy couples can't pull them—and a third party—off with huge success, but it's fraught with danger. I reckon you should get the threesome stuff out your system during your slut years, but it's 2016, so do whatever the fuck you like, I suppose.

10. GET TESTED

Lord knows how, but I've never actually had the clap. IKR? Despite doing it unprotected down an alleyway behind Marks & Spencer's, twice, with a drug dealer who looked like the one with contact lenses from So Solid Crew. But I'm an idiot. Just use a condom. We don't want you getting some awful sexually transmitted disease, like gonorrhea, or a baby. Speaking of which...

11. SEX EDUCATION NEEDS TO GROW UP

Most sex education does next to nothing to prepare you for the realities and responsibilities of Game of Bones. Oh, what's that you say? You put a penis in a vagina and a woman can become pregnant? Who fucking knew?! There was me thinking the only way to find yourself with child was to fall asleep under a hawthorn tree on the solstice. Yes, kids need to learn about reproduction, but they also need to know about consent if we are ever going to end sexual violence, promote respect for people's personal boundaries, and save a lot of trauma and suffering. When I was at school, we watched a film telling us that one day we'd have to wash our armpits more often, grow hair down below, and that masturbation could be quite nice—all of which I'd have worked out by myself by the time I was 14, thank you very much. No one ever told us it was OK to be gay, or bi, or even not to want sex at all. And they fucking should have done.

12. EMBRACE THE AROMA

Armpits are hot. Don't spoil them with cheap deodorant. Just keep them clean. It's important. I watched a video about that once. Maybe it's just a personal preference of mine, but I suspect the Joy Of Sex was right—we are supposed to like the way other human beings smell. Apart from Boris Johnson. I reckon he smells like spam and failure.

13. STOP BEING SELF-CONSCIOUS

Stop worrying. Your sex partner is with you because they're attracted to you. Or really horny and can't do any better. Either way, just fucking own it—and enjoy yourself!

14. LATEX WORKS

Latex is hot. This was my dress at the beginning of March:

This was my dress at the end of March:

Sorry, Kim West Latex.

15. HEAD IS A SKILL

Blowies. I'm gonna leave the last word with Samantha from Sex and the City: "Teeth placement and jaw stress and suction and gag reflex. And all the while bobbing up and down, moaning and trying to breath through our noses. Easy? Honey, they don't call it a 'job' for nothing."

§

And that's it, really. I will probably just keep making the same mistakes over and over again for the next 50 miserable years or so, but I hope that at least some of the knowledge I've picked up can help you. Happy fucking!

Follow Paris Lees on Twitter.

Watch The Paris Lees Sex Show here.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Doctor Filmed Maggots Crawling Out of a Patient's Wounds at a Romanian Hospital

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This isn't a picture of the Romanian hospital mentioned in this article, but praying is probably what you'd want to be doing if you were a patient there. Photo by David Amsler via Flickr

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Last week, a particularly gruesome video was leaked to Romanian media, showing several maggots in an open wound close to a patient's ear. The man had suffered severe burns and was hospitalized in a burn unit in Bucharest, Romania.

The video was leaked by Camelia Roiu—an anesthesiologist at Spitalul de Arși, where the patient was admitted—who told newspaper Gazeta Sporturlor: "What's the point in hiding what's really going on? What's worse—to let the public know about the horrible conditions we work in or to live with not having done anything to change them?" She also claims that there were flies flying around the intensive care unit, where she shot the video. The patient died one day after the video was released.

"The maggots were not the cause of the patient's death, and, of course, we removed them from the wound," the hospital's spokesperson Dr. Adrian Stănculea told Romanian television station Antena 3. "The footage is real—I can't deny that. The patient had four or five larvae in the burn wounds on the side of his face. The wound was covered with dead tissue, which can't be washed easily—if you aren't careful, you could end up with an ear in your hand. Those areas were washed very delicately."

But Camelia Roiu claims there have been other cases of larvae infecting patients' wounds in the same unit. She has encouraged her colleagues to speak out, but the response has been mixed. "Some of my colleagues think I should shut up, but others are professionals. I appreciate that," said Roiu, according to hotnews.ro. "Those who don't want to admit what's going on should remember that, as doctors, it is our duty to care for people."

In an interview with TV station Digi 24, the recently appointed Romanian health minister Vlad Voiculescu did not hesitate to accuse the hospital's management of negligence: "This is unacceptable... surely someone could have taken some time out of their lunch break to put up a mosquito net," he said. He also said he hopes the doctor who filmed the incident cleaned the wound after putting her camera down.

The Romanian medical world has suffered a bunch of scandals recently. Less than a month ago, the same burn unit came under scrutiny when a patient died after she accidentally received a transfusion of the wrong blood type. In May 2016, an investigation showed that disinfectants used in most major hospitals' across Romania were being diluted to the point where they lost their effect. And in November 2015, 64 young people lost their lives in a fire in Bucharest's Colectiv club. An investigation by newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor revealed that the cause of some of those deaths were not the actual burns, but hospital infections.

The Spitalul de Arși intensive care unit was closed down after the larvae video was leaked. The Ministry of Health sent out a press release describing the measures the hospital will take to prevent this from happening again—like installing hand-sanitizing stations at the entrance and exit of every ward, and hiring an outside firm to clean and disinfect the air conditioning. Phew.

Read: Trump Is Still Talking About the Cruz JFK Conspiracy Theory

The VICE Morning Bulletin

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Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz attends a campaign rally in Florida on July 23, 2016. Image via Getty

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

US News

Two Killed at Florida Nightclub Shooting
At least two people have been killed and at least 16 injured in a shooting at a nightclub in Fort Myers, Florida, officials say. Gunshots were fired in the parking lot of Club Blu shortly after midnight. One person of interest was detained nearby, and police are now looking for other persons who may be involved.—ABC News

Wasserman Schultz Resigns Over Wikileaks Scandal
Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been forced to resign after emails released by Wikileaks showed the DNC trying to thwart Bernie Sanders's campaign. Sanders said the emails "reiterate that reason why she should not be chair." Wasserman Schultz will become "honorary chair" of Hillary Clinton's campaign.—VICE News

Michelle Obama to Address DNC Tonight
The first lady has been handed the primetime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention this evening in a bid to validate Hillary Clinton among those who remain skeptical. Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, will address the DNC later this week to endorse Clinton.—The Washington Post

California Wildfire Triples in Size
A wildfire raging in the Angeles National Forest north of Los Angeles tripled in size over the weekend, spreading across more than 33,000 acres. By early Monday, firefighters had only contained 10 percent of the so-called Sand wildfire, and about 1,500 families in the area are under orders to evacuate.—NBC News

International News

Car Bomb Kills 14 People North of Baghdad
A suicide car bomber has killed at least 14 people, including women and children, at the entrance to the town of Khalis, northeast of Baghdad. Police said most of the victims died inside their vehicles. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but ISIS has recently stepped up its attacks in the area.—Reuters

Syrian Suicide Bomber Injures 12 in Germany
A 27-year-old Syrian man has blown himself up and injured 12 other people with a backpack bomb in the German town of Ansbach. The failed asylum seeker detonated the device outside a bar Sunday evening after being refused entry to a music festival nearby. Three of the wounded are in serious condition.—AP

Australia Plans to Imprison Terror Convicts Indefinitely
Australia will detain people convicted of terrorism-related charges after their sentences finish, if they are thought to pose an ongoing danger, said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. He said the measure was prompted by an increase in attacks around the world. "We cannot afford for a moment to be complacent," he asserted.—The Sydney Morning Herald

Turkey Issues Detention Warrants for Journalists
Turkey's authorities have issued detention warrants for 42 journalists, part of an ongoing crackdown after the failed military coup. Prominent political commentator Nazli Ilicak is said to be on the list. Thousands of soldiers, judges, civil servants, and teachers have already been detained or placed under investigation since July 15.—BBC News

Everything Else

Lil Wayne Walks Off Stage at Cannabis Concert
The rapper dropped his mic and walked off stage after only ten minutes at the Medical Cannabis Concentrates Cup event in San Bernardino, despite being booked for one hour. Organizer High Times says it is "awaiting an explanation."—Billboard

Nintendo Shares Fall Despite 'Pokémon Go' Success
Shares in Nintendo have tumbled almost 18 percent on Monday after the company revealed Pokémon Go would have only a limited impact on profits. Shares are still up 60 percent since the game's July 6 launch.—Reuters

Edible-Pot Company Sued for Fraud
An investor in marijuana-chocolate maker Altai is accusing the company of securities fraud. The lawsuit claims the CEO lied about his own contributions and spent $750,000 "as if it were his own personal piggy bank."—BuzzFeed News

Sinn Féin Leader Says Northern Ireland Could Leave UK
Gerry Adams, president of the Sinn Féin Party, says the UK's withdrawal from the EU could lead to Northern Ireland leaving the UK. Adams called the decision to hold the Brexit referendum a "stupid decision taken in London."—VICE News

Texan Jailed for Bitcoin Ponzi Scheme
Trendon Shavers, a 33-year-old Texan, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for running a fraudulent Ponzi-style scheme called Bitcoin Savings & Trust. He has also been ordered to repay $1.23 million to 48 investors.—Motherboard

Fugitive Mexican Drug Lord Pleads for Peace
The legendary Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero has denied he played any role in the 1985 murder of a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent. "I believe that I deserve to be left in peace," said the 63-year-old fugitive.—VICE News


We Read One-Star Reviews of 'Run Lola Run' to Franka Potente

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Image by Frances Smith for VICE

When Run Lola Run was released in the US in 1999, it was already the largest-grossing movie in German history. The film's success makes sense, since its fast pace, unique vision, and heart-pumping soundtrack make for the kind of movie that people had to tell others about—or see again.

At the time, audiences had never experienced anything like director Tom Tykwer's thrilling tale of Lola—portrayed with brilliant urgency by Franka Potente—trying to come up with $100,000 in 20 minutes to save her boyfriend's life. Throughout the film, Lola's 20-minute run across Berlin is told three different times in three different ways, and in each retelling, there's one tiny change that dramatically affects her outcome.

Over the past 15 years, the film's achieved cult status, and its average rating on Amazon of four-and-a-half stars reflects that, with 73 percent of users awarding it the maximum rating of five stars. At the time of this writing, only 3 percent of the 666 (!) Amazon reviews give the film one star, a fair number from Amazon users pissed that the subtitles didn't work on their streaming rental; the rest are, in my opinion, contrarians doomed to live on the wrong side of culture.

We pulled some of their most vicious, froth-mouthed critiques of the film—and then we read them to her to see what she thought.

Estela Kehoe's one-star review from October 26, 2013 is titled "Don't waste your money": "I had heard of this movie, and wanted to see it. The movie was terrible. I love Franka Potente, but this movie is not good. It had a good concept but it just dragged on and on. You watch one scene over and over and over. I donated this movie to Goodwill."
Franka Potente: She's not right or wrong. The film plays the same scene a few times with different results, so it can feel like it's dragging if you're not paying attention. If you're a hunched over a bowl of chips or if you go to the bathroom at the wrong moment, you might feel like you're seeing the same movie again and again. I can see that.

That's how people view a lot of TV and movies nowadays—we do other things while we watch. Maybe this movie is more difficult to watch now than it was nearly 20 years ago.
Well, people certainly aren't as patient—I notice it in myself! I just watched one of my favorite movies the other day, Belle de Jour,and it seems so slow now—things take forever to develop. Today, you have to make yourself sit down and breathe. We've lost the ability to immerse ourselves in things. When Run Lola Run came out, the thing about it was it was a very fast-paced film. Today, all movies are fast-paced, and the editing's so quick that I feel like I'm being robbed of an experience. Everything is accelerated now.

What's your response to Estela about this sentence in particular: "The movie was terrible"?
That's totally fine. Honestly, I can't force you to love it. I like a good, strong statement. I walk out of movies all the time saying "That was terrible!" or "That sucked!" I'd rather you felt strongly one way or the other than not at all.

This is from Paulo Leite in August, 2007. This one-star review is titled "SPOILER - a stupid film, unimaginative, badly written... with barely one good idea." "Basically, this is just a 'one-idea-film' that would have made a GREAT short feature. Instead, they stretched it into a feature film. And it is all offensively idiotic."
I love that!

Do you find the film offensively idiotic?
No, but I love that it invoked such a strong position. Out of all things for the film is, unimaginative certainly isn't one of them. A lot of things in the film were actually new at the time, so I'd certainly disagree with that part. I would be very curious to hear which movies Paulo thinks are imaginative. Which other movies did he review?

I can't find any more movies he reviewed, but he reviewed a book called Global Leaders and Islamic Finance and gave it five stars.
He sounds smart, at least.

"Greg" wrote a one-star review titled "Three words: empty, repetitive and boring": "I know all opinions are subjective but I do not undertsand what you could find interesting in this movie. The love story is stereotyped. The boyfriend is an idiot (which makes the girl an even more idiot), the soundtrack is exhausting and the plot is non existing. In this type of movie there is MUCH better which has been done. Please....."
Well, the boyfriend is an idiot—I totally agree with that. But in Lola's defense, she's young—in her early 20s. that his being an idiot makes her stupid for running all around for him and trying to solve his problems, but...yeah, that's what young chicks do.

"The love story is stereotyped"—what could that possibly mean?
She's dating a guy who holds people at gunpoint in a small supermarket in Berlin, so I don't know about that one.

This one from "A Customer" is quick and to the point: "It made me dizzy. I feel asleep."
It makes me dizzy too! There's a lot of fast editing, and running, so if you have a condition, maybe you'd fall asleep. Maybe it was exhausting to watch all the running. I don't know how could you fall asleep a movie like that, though.

I mean, it's 90 minutes of you running to an energetic soundtrack.
I once dated a guy when I was in Japan, and when I visited his family, we rented Meet the Parents because I said, "Oh my God, it's my favorite film! Let's watch this!" During the scene where Ben Stiller ends up on the rooftop and his cigarette burns everything, my boyfriend and his mom both got up and said, "We're tired—we're going to bed." It was too much for them—the action stressed them out—and they apologized and went to bed right when the action was getting going. There are certain people who get tired in the face of action. Maybe "A Customer" is one of them.

From zzcatfelix's review "Run Lola, Run Lola, run Lola and again run Lola," August 2002: "I did not get it. She is just running and running and again running. No philosophical idea. No point. The movie is telling us the same story in three different versions. Why? Boring..."
You can look at the movie in different ways—you can see the action in itself, which is that the person keeps running, or you can see the philosophical or universal message behind it. But I'm not gonna bore anyone with this again. Actually, this person totally got it—running, running, running: That's all the movie is.

The word "run" is in the movie's title twice.
In German, the movie is called Lola Rennt. When I was told that I was doing a movie called Lola Rennt, I was like, "What?" I didn't get it, or the title. I started reading the script, and I still couldn't fathom that it was about a person named Lola running. Before my agent explained it to me, I couldn't even make any sense out of it.

One last review: "This is one movie where the title makes as much sense as the content. I gave it one star, although Franka deserves five stars for fitness."
I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day! I was so unfit, but I am glad it didn't look that way.

How did you manage to smoke two packs a day and run that much?
I was young and stupid—you know how it is. It's so crazy to look back. I was 22! Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I would drink and smoke and get up and shoot a movie. The movie was so much fun to work on, though, and the director was a lot of fun. Even if you showed up tired, everyone was hanging in there and having a good time. There's no way you were tired. It was really one of the greater working experiences.

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The Aftermath of Sunday's Suicide Bombing in the German Town of Ansbach

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Flowers at the scene of the crime

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

The apartment of 21-year-old Antonia Kourtides in Ansbach is located just a few feet from the spot where a suicide bomber injured 15 people on Sunday night, when he detonated explosives in his backpack just outside a music festival. Antonia was reading in her study that night, when she was startled by a loud bang. "There were no screams coming from that direction, though, so I assumed it was just local teenagers playing with fireworks. But when I saw the bustle of firemen and policemen outside my window, I realized that it had to be something more serious," she says. "Of course, one of the first things that pop in your head these days in such cases is terrorism."

The glass of this display cabinet was broken during the attack on Sunday night.

The explosion took place at about 10 PM, very close to the entrance of Ansbach Open 2016, which this past weekend attracted more than 2,000 visitors from across Germany. Today, a video was discovered on the suicide bomber's phone that shows the 27-year-old Syrian pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and promising to take revenge on Germany "for standing in the way of Islam."

German interior minister Thomas de Maizière said at a press conference in Berlin that the attacker was supposed to return to Bulgaria—where he had first gotten refugee status—but that this deportation was stalled when he showed papers proving he had mental-health issues.

Apart from the area surrounding the crime scene, the mood in the town of 40,000 people feels relatively normal. The cobblestone streets of the old part of the town are just a bit busier than usual. Broadcast vehicles are parked everywhere, police officers are securing pieces of evidence and calmly asking journalists to keep away from restricted areas, and onlookers have gathered near the barricades. From the cafes on the nearby Martin Luther Square, locals sit and watch the bustle.

The streets surrounding the crime scene are open to the public again. Remains from the night of the attack are still on some tables.

"This morning, I went shopping. On my return, as I tried to enter my building, I was stopped by police," says Antonia. Yet traffic seemed to resume soon after that—even the cafe where Antonia and I met this past afternoon is full.

People around us are drinking coffee and laughing, just a few feet from the scene of last night's crime. The terrorist attack is the subject of most conversations I can overhear, but it's dealt with an attitude so relaxed, it's almost creepy.

"If I didn't know what happened yesterday, I wouldn't be able to guess just from the behavior of the people around me," says Antonia, as she sips her coffee. "Personally, I'm fine. I'm not panicking. I just hope the events of the last few days don't further the hatred some Germans have for refugees."

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