The shoes of the victims, removed as is custom before entering the prayer area of the mosque, are still on otherwise empty shelves. Shoes of worshippers who fled the scene as a gunman opened fire are strewn all over the floor.
Two days after a deadly attack that left six people dead, the Centre Culturel Islamique de Quebec opened its doors to media to show "all Canadians what happened."
"We want to show these images to stop the contribution to the hate, to stop the contribution to the Islamophobia," said Mohamed Labidi, former president of the mosque.
In a silent video posted online Tuesday night, mosque leaders took viewers on a tour of the empty building, where graphic evidence of the massacre still gives it the appearance of a fresh crime scene.
The walls and carpets of what was once a place of sanctuary are stained with blood. Bullets pierced the walls.
"The gunman came in by this entry, this is the entrance of the mosque, started shooting two people on the outside at the entrance and then he came in," Ahmed El Refai, who lost his best friend Azzedine Soufiane in the shooting, told reporters on Wednesday morning, taking them through the scene. "He started shooting, if you look, that's the bathroom, he started shooting people here and then he entered that opening and started killing people."
In his first two weeks in office, President Donald Trump has governed like a cable news junkie who's surrounded himself with ideologues, issuing sometimes vague and sloppily worded executive orders, beefing with the media, and pushing forward policies that stirred up dissent and unease within the federal government. His executive order banning (at least temporarily) all refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US is being challenged in court, and the lasting results of several of his other actions remains to be seen—so the most important, enduring move of his presidency can probably be said to have happened on Tuesday night, when he announced he was nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
The nomination itself was steeped in the sort of ratings-maximizing showbiz moves Trump favors—he announced he would do the announcing at 8 PM EST (primetime, of course), then said he was bringing two finalists to Washington, DC, in advance of the nomination. This was building suspense where there really didn't need to be any—everyone already knew this pick was hugely important, since it would break a 4–4 tie between Democratic- and Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices. Before the election, many conservatives said that they would vote for Trump solely to keep the country's highest court out of liberal hands; whatever happens in the next four years, they got their wish on Tuesday.
Even most liberals agree that Gorsuch is qualified for a spot on the highest court. But his qualifications, and even to an extent his personal beliefs, are almost beside the point. In recent years, the Supreme Court has become not so much politicized as weaponized in the culture wars over issues like gay marriage, guns, and abortion, and both the right and the left see him not so much as an individual but as part of a five-justice arsenal poised to make America as a whole more like its red states.
Putting Trump aside, for once, Gorsuch is the sort of judge that any Republican president would have nominated—Ivy League background, a set of beliefs that closely mirror those of Antonin Scalia (the justice he would be replacing), and a tendency to side with Christians who say the government is trampling on their rights. He ruled in favor of an employer who said Obamacare's mandate to provide health insurance that included contraception to their employees in the famous Hobby Lobby case, and dissented from a Tenth Circuit decision against the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic organization that similarly said Obamacare's contraception requirements violated their beliefs. He's anti-euthanasia, generally in favor of strong protections for those accused of crimes, not particularly anti-death penalty—all positions that Scalia held as well. Even better, from conservatives' point of view, he's only 49, meaning he likely has a long Supreme Court career in front of him.
Also like Scalia (and other conservative judges), Gorsuch is fond of interpreting the Constitution as literally as possible, a position that often puts him at odds with progressives. (The Founding Fathers failed to make any mention of abortion or LGBTQ rights, issues that weren't at the front of their minds.) This reverence for the Constitution is a noble and high-minded principal, but the Constitution is often not so much a rulebook as a battlefield. Both sides of any controversial issue can find textual justification for their positions, and there is enough ambiguity in certain constitutional phrases ("cruel and unusual punishment," "a well regulated militia") to fuel centuries of arguments.
In a 2005 essay referenced recently by the Guardian, Gorsuch sneered at liberals' attempts to use the courts to advance "their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education." But of course conservatives use the courts in similar ways. It was a right-leaning lawyer's lawsuit that led the Supreme Court to discover in the Constitution the right to own a handgun, and a deep-red county's suit that resulted in a key part of the Voting Rights Act being overturned. (Scalia was on the side of the majority both times.) Conservatives have challenged several provisions of the Affordable Care Act in court, fought Barack Obama's executive orders that granted protection from deportation to some undocumented immigrants, and sued to protect the ability of businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
The idea that judges are supposed to be impartial callers of "balls and strikes," to quote Chief Justice John Roberts, is often invoked but difficult to put into practice when every major piece of legislation or executive order comes before the court. (Roberts himself cast a deciding vote in upholding Obamacare, a betrayal in the eyes of many conservatives.) Trump's executive actions on immigration are being challenged by liberal states and cities; if a "First Amendment Defense Act" protecting businesses that discriminate against LGBTQ people became law it would face similar blowback. Everyone says they don't want Supreme Court justices legislating from the bench, but everyone is also equally prepared to sue in order to overturn what they see as bad laws.
Given the immense power justices have, and their lifetime appointments, is it any wonder that their appointments are growing increasingly contentious? Senate Republicans famously flat-out blocked Obama's pick to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland, even though that unprecedented move left the court short a seat for nearly a year. Now some Senate Democrats are ready to filibuster Gorsuch's confirmation. That would likely just end up slightly delaying the inevitable, since the GOP controls the Senate and can change the filibuster rules to get Gorscuh through, but many progressives want their party to get a little bit more spiteful and obstructionist. To quote sex-columnist-turned-lefty-firebrand Dan Savage, "You have to play the dirty fucking game being played, not the goo-goo game you'd rather play."
Looking past Gorsuch, Trump may have one or even two more Supreme Court nominations to make in the next four years if the oldest justices retire or die. And it's not likely that these Supreme Court battles are going to get less contentious—the stakes are too high.
If the Democrats retake the Senate in the 2018 midterms and a Supreme Court seat is left open, what are the chances that they let Trump fill it? Republicans and Democrats will argue against any procedural move that holds up a favorable nomination, but that won't stop such moves from being made. The Supreme Court's word is legally binding. Everything else is just an argument.
The anarchist squatters who took over a £15 million mansion in London's bourgeois Belgravia neighbourhood and opened it up to rough sleepers were forcibly evicted this morning. After a court order was issued on Tuesday, bailiffs battered down barricades and pushed homeless resisters to the floor. I headed down to watch the resistance from the inside.
The occupiers – Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians (ANAL) – had expected their defeat. And they weren't wrong to presume: Nick, a cheery squatter, said the court hearing over their eviction lasted all of three minutes.
Andrey Goncharenko – the mansion's billionaire Russian owner – has kept a low profile during the battle over a property he has never lived in, and his representatives made short work of the ANAL crew's appeal. Mr Goncharenko owns four lavish London properties, including a £120 million Regent's Park pile dubbed "Britain's most expensive home". He plans to add a swimming pool to the newly-evicted property in Eaton Square.
After hearing the news of the court order the squatters held true to their egalitarian credentials and organised a council yesterday evening in the mansion, taking a vote on whether or not the 30 or so squatters in the building wanted to resist the eviction. Almost every hand shot up, and talk turned to tactics.
Inside the squat
First-time resisters were advised to play dead once the invasion took place, while one veteran advised "spreading Marmite and piss all over the floor when they get inside – it's a chemical weapon. It really stinks... they'd have to get pressure cleaners in to clean up." Calling for focus, another experienced squatter reminded the group: "Mayhem generates support. For half an hour after the eviction starts, there'll be so much media attention. We have to record the bailiffs vandalising a Grade Two listed building."
People then moved out to scavenge for pallets and call in back-up to defend the luxury property.
Talk soon turned to when the bailiffs would make their move. An early false alarm came at around 8PM, when word spread there was someone sniffing around on top of the building, dubbed the "ANAL Embassy". We climbed through a skylight onto the sixth-storey roof, looking over London's smog-filled skies to the distant one-eyed glare of the BT Tower.
In fact, the hi-vis interloper was a security guard stationed in the neighbouring building. Initially coy, he got drawn into a debate with a couple of squatters. "Ten percent of squatters are OK, sure," he said. "But the other 90 percent are disgusting. The places I've seen… they're full of junkies."
"We all have ways of coping," shot back a squatter called Kate. "And those are people at the absolute bottom of society, coping the only way they can."
Back downstairs, people started securing all the entrances and exits, screwing shut doors and hammering planks of wood across windows. Some needed extra reinforcement, having been smashed by a gang of Nazi-saluting fascists on Saturday as an activist ran a poetry workshop and children coloured in banners.
Other squatters started preparing a communal meal, under the guidance of a squatting veteran called Tammy. "The posher the house, the more media attention we get," she explained as she whipped up a vat of Quorn lasagne. "We're neighbours with the Queen here. And this is just a group of homeless people who'd otherwise be stuck outside in this foul weather."
"Me, I'm like a cockroach," she added later. "Wherever I am, I always survive."
As I was cutting up a carrot, a squatter called Josh wandered over.
"I hate those," he said.
"Yeah, I know what you mean – it's so difficult cutting up veg on a plate with a lip."
"No, I mean the knife. I was stabbed in the back with one just like that. It nearly killed me – my heart stopped twice." Josh went on to explain that he was five days clean from an addiction struggle, and heading back up north to visit his family and child for the first time in 15 months.
The barricading continued until the small hours. People drank, chatted and played music, or slept sprawled across the stairs and huddled in corners. Tension and exhaustion grew, with multiple false alarms as different officials scouted out the building and squatters raced to pack up their possessions.
Bailiffs outside the squat
At 8AM this morning, the bailiffs arrived. Backed by a slew of police officers and a pointless fire engine, around 15 representatives of private evictions company The Sheriff's Office swarmed around the mansion and battered on the reinforced doors with rams. The anarchists laughed as their handiwork withstood the strong arm of the law, driving the bailiffs to weaker doors downstairs.
They were met with blasts from fire extinguishers and chants of "we shall not be moved", but muscle prevailed and the heavies surged into the building. While arguing fiercely with a bailiff, Josh was grabbed from behind and slammed to the floor by one of his shaven-headed colleagues. One squatter with cerebral palsy, who could only walk with the aid of crutches, was unceremoniously carted out on piggy-back by a friend. Another sat on the floor to meditate, prompting a bailiff to snap: "You'll be doing some pretty non-peaceful meditating if you don't move now."
Under threat of arrest, the crowd was driven out peacefully. Some ANAL activists headed off to scout out a new squat elsewhere in the city, while their comrades milled around winding up the slab-faced security contractors in the doorway, asking about their steroid habits and pretending there were arsonists and knew about secret passages hidden throughout the empty building. Eventually, they were let in one by one to recover their possessions: a mobile phone, a docile dog, a pair of crutches.
Tammy confronted the bailiff who manhandled Josh. "It's fucking disgusting, kicking homeless people onto the street," she yelled. "You're one pay-cheque away from homelessness yourself."
*Names have been changed to protect the identities of squatters.
President Trump's recent immigration ban against seven Muslim-majority countries has created a complex and challenging environment for some of the international community's most vulnerable people. Nationwide protests, horror stories of families separated from one another at American airports, and five-year-old children being detained for hours by authorities have become the face of this crisis. But the Muslim ban has also had a less-visible impact on an equally vulnerable group of people: Citizens of the affected nations that are currently seeking urgent medical care in the United States are now worried about their ability to access life-saving treatment.
Al Ameen is a 33-year-old Iraqi refugee who suffers from the genetic disorder hemophilia A, which prevents blood from clotting properly. He has been living in Jordan and awaiting care in the US for two years, according to a Reuters report. Doctors have told Ameen that only a few medical centers in the world are equipped to handle his condition. With the instituted ban, he is panicked that he will no longer be able to get the treatment he needs. "I'm going to die here by myself," he said.
"The world is falling apart," said Peter Dinklage who was onstage to present the 2017 Sundance Film Festival's last award. "We are treating others not how we would treat ourselves. We are at a breaking point. And it's a brilliant and hilarious ride." He raised a hand to the suddenly confused crowd. "Just a second," he said. "Don't worry. I'm talking about our Grand Jury Prize Winner." After thanking the cast and crew, writer-director Macon Blair, whose film I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore took that final and most-coveted prize, said, "My mom and dad had a small part in this movie and last week went to DC to protest the incoming administration, and, on the same day, there was the rally here, and those things were very hopeful to me in the face of all this craven, regressive, cruel bullshit that's going on."
"Of course, I'm so grateful for the award," he added, over email. "But, to be honest, I did feel a little frivolous, promoting a goofy little comedy movie while the new administration began going berserk on people's lives. But, on the other hand, it was extremely inspiring and hopeful to be around so many people who are just as angry and freaked out as I am, but are far more intelligent and worldly and armed with plans to resist. The best part was listening to what they had to say."
It was a fitting way to end a festival that, in many ways, appeared uneasy with itself all week. The mood veered between hope and doubt (and, occasionally, fear) regarding the power of protest and art's ability to effect political change.
The very first question posed to founder Robert Redford at the festival's opening press conference asked him to account for what political involvement Sundance would have moving forward. "Presidents come and go," responded Redford, who might, as the famous face of the festival, be legally bound to neutrality. "The pendulum swings back-and-forth. Always has, always will. We don't occupy ourselves with politics. We stay focused on stories being told by artists. If politics comes up in the stories the filmmakers are telling, then so be it. But we don't play advocacy. We do not take a position." A later question addressed the news that Trump intended to cut funding to the NEA, a major sponsor of the festival. Executive director Keri Putnam replied, "This isn't just an issue for filmmakers, it's a human issue. This is about free expression, and it's about what role the arts play. From what I understand, the total amount of the cuts equates to .016 percent of the federal budget, so it feels hard to believe that's a real budget-cut measure. It feels more like a statement about the arts."
"I think that there is only one way to address political issues, that is in how you live your life."—Timothée Chalamet
It took no time at all for journalists and audience members to demand answers from artists, writers, and filmmakers as to what they thought art's obligations were post-inauguration. Nearly every response I heard fit into two distinct categories: Those who felt that art should retain ultimate freedom and not be tied to politics and those who saw no way for art to avoid politics in some form. Writer-director David Lowery, whose wholly original film, A Ghost Story, drew the most excitement and argument of the festival, fell into the latter camp, saying, "Every film is political. I think it is important to think about things that matter to you, and what you want to say, especially in light of current events. That doesn't mean I'll make films that are didactic." Sharing the stage with Lowery was director Sydney Freeland (Diedra and Laney Rob a Train) who wasn't willing to go quite so far. "I try not to make it soapbox," she said, "because story is paramount."
Still from 'I Don't Feel at Home in this World Anymore.' Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
Festival director John Cooper cried during his introduction at the premiere of Call Me by Your Name, a coming-of-age film that focuses on a passionate summer romance between two young men played by Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. Through tears, John Cooper referenced the power message of acceptance at the film's center. "When we watched this film, it was a big deal for us," he said. "It's just so beautiful." Director Luca Guadagnino stepped in, saying, "I hope the countryside of Italy will help you forget the inauguration."
"Any context in which this film could progress political causes is good," Chalamet said later, when I had the chance to speak to him offstage. He looked over to Guadaningo, who added, "I think that there is only one way to address political issues, that is in how you live your life. And if there is a lesson to be taken from these dark years ahead of us, it is to confront fiercely the narcissism and denial that those evil forces are endorsing right now."
In contrast, André Aciman, who wrote the 2007 novel on which the film is based, expressed to me his reservations regarding art's role in the political sphere. "Some of the greatest movies that we love, that have given us the greatest pleasure were made during the harshest times in history," Aciman said, over the phone. "If you think of World War II and all the great movies that were produced then, they have no connection to the world at war. Art in general sometimes shrugs its shoulders at current events. My philosophy has always been that art has no business with the hard facts of life."
"The problem is that there is very little humanity in politics. And I think our job is, 'How do I reveal more about the human experience?'"—Mark Palansky
This hesitation was shared, at least in part, by Peter Dinklage, star of Rememory, who told me, "With my art, with movies, once there's a little bit of a political wink in there, I put up a wall. I don't want to be pressured to put politics in art. It's a slippery slope. I'm not a huge Brecht fan. Kill me." His director, Mark Palansky, nodded and added, "The problem is that there is very little humanity in politics, and I think our job—although I don't consciously think about this stuff when we're making a film—is, 'How do I reveal more about the human experience?'"
The political themes continued all the way through the end of the festival, dominating all that was said at the awards ceremony on the closing night awards, which began with a standing ovation for filmmakers from Muslim-majority countries. This continued with grand jury prize-winning Last Men in Aleppo director Feras Fayyad, who said, gravely, "We are Syrian. We are not ashamed. We do our best to fight for the freedom of speech, for humanity, for justice. I trust in the US. It can change. It can fight like we fight. We need freedom and justice and justice and justice." Before presenting the US documentary grand jury prize to Dina, Larry Wilmore referenced solidarity with "all my Muslim brothers and sisters. Even though I grew up Catholic, today, I am a Muslim." Once the applause quieted, the comedian added, "Tomorrow I have to go to the airport, so I'll be Catholic again."
It's important to ask what, if anything, art can do for us right now. I'm invested in the answer as a belief in art's power has been one that's guided me for decades, and if I have to give it up, then fine, I'll give it up, but I want to do it on my own terms and not because of the actions of Donald Trump.
"Independent perspectives in film and documentary matter," Keri Putnam said in the festival's closing remarks. "They bring humanity and dimension to our understanding of the world at a time when binary and divisive rhetoric and actions are too often prevailing. The founding values of Sundance Institute—upholding free expression, amplifying diverse voices, and affirming the power of artistic creativity to propel us forward—feel more important now than ever. I hope we're all going to take the energy you feel here at the festival and bring it out of Park City to advocate for the culture we want to see."
Judging by the applause coming after these words, she wasn't alone.
Three days before opening his Montreal restaurant Candide, chef Jonathan Winter Russell headed to Italy on an assignment to which he couldn't say no.
He was asked to feed refugees, people recovering from drug addiction, former sex workers, and whoever else needed a warm meal with food waste from Milan's 2015 universal exposition, whose theme was "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life."
Winter Russell and fellow countryman Jeremy Charles were invited to rep Canada and cook at Refettorio Ambrosiano, an abandoned theatre from the 1930s converted into a soup kitchen conceived by Osteria Francescana chef Massimo Bottura and Don Giuliano, the parish priest of Greco, one of Milan's poorest neighbourhoods.
Luckily, Canada's National Film Board (NFB) caught wind of the soup kitchen and tagged along to film the characters inside and outside of the kitchen for a documentary called Theater of Life, written and directed by Peter Svatek.
We caught up with Winter Russell at Candide as he whipped up a winter broccoli dish and talked about the takeaway lessons from working on such an ambitious project.
On Wednesday morning, Trump sat down for a White House event to honor the beginning of Black History Month. His remarks quickly shifted from "the tremendous history of African Americans throughout our country" to a rant about the media and that false report about how he supposedly removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.
From there, the whole thing careened into a rambling thank you to FOX News for its positive coverage of him, a promise to create "safer communities" with increased police presence, and some gloating about his actually-pretty-dismal black-voter numbers.
Trump also described 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass as "someone who has done an amazing job" and is "being recognized by more and more people," even though Douglass died in 1895.
The whole thing was a rambling mess of a statement from a president who was endorsed by the KKK's newspaper during his campaign. Sitting next to Apprentice contestant Omarosa Manigault and HUD secretary pick, Ben Carson, he told those attending the event that he doesn't watch CNN because it's "fake news," before calling the media "the opposition party."
The White House has more events planned through February to honor Black History Month. You can watch a clip of Trump's Wednesday statements below.
Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz are getting back up on the debate stage this year to argue about the future of Obama's Affordable Care Act, Politico reports.
CNN announced Wednesday that it has secured a primetime spot for the event, which will air next Tuesday night. CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate, and audience members will also be encouraged to ask questions, town hall-style.
The 2016 presidential contenders never got a chance to face off during the election, but seem to have a lot of things to argue about in terms of their parties' opposing views on healthcare. Texas senator Ted Cruz will likely be asked about the plan congressional Republicans want to replace Obama's act with, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders will probably argue that the repeal could affect millions of people on Medicaid and Medicare, as he did with a giant poster of Trump's tweet on the Senate floor recently.
Entertainment factor aside, the debate could provide some useful information and talking points for people who are still thoroughly confused about Obamacare before Congress votes on it. According to a recent Kaiser Family Poll, 75 percent of Americans either want Congress to leave Obamacare as is, or repeal it only when there is a suitable replacement. As of now, the repeal is expected to leave 20 million people without healthcare.
Picture the scene: a small rural town in Scotland announces it is going to provide everyone in the community with a basic income, regardless of their circumstances. There would be no more futile job searches or punitive sanctions for the unemployed. People would be free to quit their pointless, underpaid jobs whenever they liked and still have something to fall back on. Wages would rise, and a healthier and happier society would result. Maybe income taxes would go up, and more well-off residents wouldn't feel much direct benefit, but everyone would have a guaranteed level of income and the independence that comes with that, no matter what.
That's the fundamental principle of Universal Basic Income, an idea which has been simmering away in the background over the last couple of years as liberal democracy crashes and burns across the globe and inequality spirals. It's touted as an alluringly simple solution to the complex problems caused by crap jobs, the accelerating automation of work and an inefficient welfare system, creating an enormous buzz wherever it surfaces.
Utopian? Perhaps. But that hasn't stopped the concept from being taken seriously. Now, two Labour-led Scottish local authorities are giving real consideration to the idea. One, Fife Council, is progressing plans for a pilot scheme. Having already achieved support from political parties in the region – even the local Conservatives are in favour – a strategy is being worked on for how it could be implemented. Glasgow is currently making similar plans, at a slightly earlier stage of development.
It follows the launch of UBI trials in the Netherlands, Finland and Italy over the last 12 months, although each of those has focused on samples of unemployed people, rather than an entire population. The trial in Fife looks set to take a more radical approach, providing a guaranteed income to every citizen in a town.
On Saturday, around 150 people packed into a sports hall in the village of Kelty in central Fife, around 40 minutes drive north of Edinburgh, to discuss how this bold idea could become a reality. Once a thriving mining community, the major employer is now a sprawling Amazon "fulfilment centre", and parts of Kelty measure as among the most deprived in Scotland. Exactly the sort of place, in other words, where a basic income pilot could yield real results.
Although the details are yet to be worked out, the project is gathering momentum.
"At the moment, we want to find a town in Fife – let's say of between 2,000 and 5,000 people – and we would want to run the pilot for a minimum of two years. The rest of it is up for grabs, in terms of the amount and so on," explained Paul Vaughan, the council official spearheading the scheme. He joked that towns in the area are already competing for the best claim to it. That probably won't be the university town of St Andrews, a coastal enclave of American undergrads with the most expensive street in Scotland – but it could be somewhere like Kelty.
As local football side Kelty Hearts fought to a victory in the snow outside, academics, council officials, politicians and activists sat in the neighbouring sports hall discussing the finer details – and pitfalls – of a UBI pilot. As well as its location, there are plenty of other issues to be ironed out. How would it interact with existing benefits and tax bands? What impact would it have on local employers? How can it be funded? Crucially, how much money are we talking?
Too low, and it would do little to solve poverty. Rather than incentivising employers to raise wages it could actually encourage them to pay less. But set at a higher level, it would give workers greater independence and put pressure on employers to make jobs more attractive.
There is an expectation that the pilot scheme will be centrally funded by government, although providing a town with a population of even a few thousand with a fixed amount over two years would come in at tens of millions, as well as the costs of administering and evaluating the trial.
Parts of the media are deeply hostile to the idea of anyone receiving "something for nothing", especially if they're poor. While the whole point of UBI is that it's universal, and so removes the stigma associated with benefits, a pilot would be isolated to one area. Its inhabitants could find themselves living in goldfish bowl over the two years, as tabloid journalists trawl their social media accounts for signs of egregious spending habits and the more impressionable residents land themselves reality TV deals. The poverty porn of Benefits Street could pale in comparison to the notion of a whole town sponging on YOUR cash, Great Britain!
At a local level the proposal has managed to win support from across the political spectrum. A Conservative councillor told Saturday's gathering that UBI represents an "elegant solution to a dog's breakfast of benefits", while the co-convenor of the Scottish Greens reckoned it could be used to give everyone the right to a decent life, and to "value them as human beings".
Earlier in the day, Willie Sullivan, chair of campaign group Citizens Basic Income Network Scotland, said: "Local government gets this reputation that it's risk averse, a bit bureaucratic, not open to new ideas and certainly not at the radical edge of social transformation. But Fife are leading the UK and bits of the world on some of these issues."
If things stay that way, the area could find itself at the centre of a huge amount of both hype and scrutiny in the years ahead. While the exact structure of Fife's basic income initiative is still to be figured out, the world will no doubt be watching when it does arrive.
On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia's death nearly a year ago. As a federal judge for the Tenth Circuit, Gorsuch has built up a staunchly conservative record: His 2010 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision supported giving employers the right to not provide contraceptives to their employees in the name of "religious freedom"; in 2015, he joined an opinion to deny an incarcerated trans woman in Oklahoma the rights to gender-affirming hormone therapy and feminine clothing.
Should the Senate confirm him, as it most likely will, he'll likely have a say on cases that will affect LGBTQ Americans for decades to come, some of which will come in the very near future. Today a number of legal battles are currently playing out in state and federal courts with potential to reach the Supreme Court. These cover issues from LGBTQ employment discrimination to "religious freedom" (often meaning the freedom to discriminate) to public accommodations for transgender people. Queer and trans people at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities will bear their brunt. Precedents will be set, and Gorsuch may be the deciding vote in what those precedents are.
"Our community has made a lot of progress in the court system, which has encouraged even more [LGBTQ] people to pursue their rights through that court system," said Sarah Warbelow, Legal Director of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation's leading LGBTQ lobbying groups. According to Warbelow and other legal experts, cases in pursuit of those rights with Supreme Court potential can be divided into three general categories. The first seek to determine whether anti-LGBTQ discrimination is a form of sex discrimination. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sex-based employment discrimination is illegal nationwide, but discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is not. (A 2014 executive order protects employees of the federal government and its contractors from that sort of discrimination; on Tuesday, Trump announced he wouldn't rescind that order.)
Inclusive anti-discrimination laws do exist at the state level, but only in about two-fifths of states, leaving LGBTQ residents in many jurisdictions to discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, and other areas. Since federal law supercedes state law, many attorneys hope to prove that Title VII's prohibition against sex discrimination also covers homophobic and transphobic discrimination. And there are handful of viable cases that could bring that argument before the Court. On the sexual orientation front, there are Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College and Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, both of which involve lesbian-identified women who allege that their former employers harassed them, denied them promotions, and even terminated their employment on account of their sexual orientation. Hively is farther along than Evans—attorneys from Lambda Legal argued the case in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals last November—but "if either of those [cases] made it to the Supreme Court, they could set a precedent that sex discrimination covers sexual orientation," said James Essecks, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's LGBT and HIV Project.
As for gender identity, Blatt v. Cabela's Retail Inc. argues that Pennsylvania woman Kate Lynn Blatt was discriminated against and fired by her employer because she is trans, and that her treatment violated both Title VII and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Perhaps the most high-profile court case involving anti-trans discrimination is G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, which the Supreme Court will review sometime this year (possibly before Gorsuch would have a chance to hear arguments). It involves Gavin Grimm, a trans high school senior from Virginia. After he publicly disclosed his identity, Grimm's school board adopted a policy prohibiting him from using communal boys' restrooms on campus. Grimm's ACLU legal team allege that's tantamount to sex discrimination under Title IX, the law that ensures equal opportunity in federally funded education regardless of sex. Also of note is Carcaño v. McCrory, a pending Title IX challenge to North Carolina's anti-trans bathroom bill, the notorious HB2.
Another group of LGBTQ-related cases Gorsuch could preside over question the legality of discrimination against queer and trans people in the name of "religious freedom," among other ethically deplorable but somewhat constitutionally sound defenses. (See the recently resurfaced First Amendment Defense Act, which Trump has promised to sign should it reach his desk.) Can a florist refuse to do business with a gay couple because she believes that homosexuality is a sin? Can a medical provider deny a transgender person transition-related coverage for similar reasons? These are the kind of questions that lie at the heart of cases like Ingersoll v. Arlene's Flowers, Craig and Mullins v. Masterpiece Cake Shop, and Franciscan Alliance v. Burwell. Given Gorsuch's record on Hobby Lobby, which involved similar principles of religious liberty, it's not hard to imagine where he might fall in these cases.
The third group of LGBTQ-related cases threaten to "roll back past victories," according to Pooja Gehi, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, a legal advocacy group. One such victory? Same-sex marriage, which is being challenged in Texas with Pidgeon, et al., v. Mayor Sylvestor Turner and City of Houston, and in Arkansas by way of Smith v. Pavan, et al. Neither case stands a chance of overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that effectively legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, but that's not their intended goal. Instead, they're intended to chip away at smaller elements of the ruling—say, the right to spousal benefits or to name non-biological parents on a newborn's birth certificate. Queer and trans people won't lose the right to marry per se, but their unions won't be as inclusive as those of different-sex couples if marriage equality opponents are successful.
With the nomination of Gorsuch, Trump has pushed his envisioned Supreme Court further to the right, and away from the best interests of all but the most privileged classes of queer and trans Americans. Should he have the opportunity to nominate additional justices in the future, the bench will only become more conservative. Still, legal experts have not lost hope yet.
"For decades, the federal government was openly hostile to [advocates for LGBTQ civil rights], so we pursued a strategy of state-based incremental progress. This is very familiar to many of us who have been in the movement for decades," said Janson Wu, the executive director of the New England-based GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders. "We need to fuel change at every level of government. We need to be working to make change on all fronts including elections, lawsuits, direct action, and public persuasion. No one can do everything, but everyone must do something. If we all do something together, then we will be able to create lasting change."
Humans may have descended from apes, but now a few apes are taking a page from the human playbook by turning to a Tinder-like app to choose their mates, the Guardianreports.
Researchers from Leiden University in the Netherlands launched a study at Apenheul primate park giving female orangutans a tablet with pictures of potential mates to see if looks alone can influence their sexual preferences. By having the ape select a mate before meeting him, researchers hoped it could increase the chance the two hit it off in person, rather than flying a guy out from a different zoo in Singapore just to get rejected.
"This is completely digital, of course," Thomas Bionda, a behavioral scientists at the zoo, told NOS. "Usually, smell plays an important role too. But with the orangutans, it will be what you see is what you get."
Apparently all the lady orangutans have to do is just pick someone attractive and then the mate arrives at their door without any fuss or dating, giving an entirely new meaning to the phrase "monkey see, monkey do." The whole thing sounds way more like monkey Grindr than monkey Tinder, but whatever.
Leiden University has also been doing this research on endangered bonobos, and found that members of the species are actually reacting to the body language they see in the photos. They react most positively when they see another bonobo removing lice from the hair of a partner or engaging in sexual activity. No word yet on how they feel about users posing with elephants, though.
The study was going well until one orangutan, nicknamed Demolition Woman, smashed the specialty steel-reinforced tablet the apes were using to flip through potential mates, but honestly, who can blame her, really?
Within minutes of giving birth in 1969 at the Crown Street Women's Hospital in Sydney, Christine Cole's newborn daughter was taken away from her by staff.
"I was pushed back onto the bed by three nurses. The pillow was placed back on my chest and the midwife at the end of the bed said, 'This has got nothing to do with you,'" recalls Cole, now a prominent human-rights activist and scholar.
In the days leading up to the birth, Cole—then aged 16—had been dosed with barbiturate drugs and other sedatives and then induced into labor. Afterwards, she was given milk-drying hormones and carted off to a facility miles from the hospital to prevent any contact with her newborn.
"I had not signed any adoption consent," she says, "this was presuming that my baby was going to be taken for adoption, irrespective of what I wanted."
The removal of Cole's daughter was part of a record boom in the adoption industry in Australia at the time, which saw an up to an estimated 150,000 babies adopted between 1950 and 1985.
"He woke up something inside of us that we didn't even know was there," filmmaker Tanikia Carpenter said while narrating in her debut documentary, Farewell Obama. In this case, she was referring to an awakening of hope in young people specifically. But the same can presumably be said for much of America.
The 30-minute documentary debuted at the Harper Theater in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, where the Obamas have a home, on Barack Obama's last day in office, January 19. Though Obama's supporters may be mourning the Trump presidency, the film does not utter a word about the nation's new commander-in-chief. Instead, it taps into familiar themes that have marked Obama's campaigns and eight-year presidential run: race and hope.
It does so through the lens of acquaintances and confidants of Obama who invited Carpenter into their homes and businesses to candidly share their memories of the man before that first presidential campaign. Carpenter also uses her visit to the White House as a North Park University student and the 2008 election celebration in Chicago's Grant Park to tie the film back to herself and the city. The film's soundtrack includes soulful tracks like Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours," mirroring the Motown-esque songs the Obamas often play before or after their speeches.
Along with grainy cellphone footage and photographs of herself at the White House and in Grant Park, Carpenter weaves together interviews with Bishop Ed Peecher, the pastor of a Chicago church; Zariff, Obama's barber; and Stephen and Patricia Blessman, who worked on Obama's 2008 campaign. The interviewees share anecdotes ranging from charming to heartbreaking yet hopeful. One tells viewers about the death of her young child and receiving a thoughtful letter from Obama stating that he "was praying for her." Others share collected Christmas cards from the Obama family and detail tales of tirelessly working on the campaign to the point where some slept in the office before election day.
After Jesse Jackson's failed bids for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and '88, there was some skepticism in the black community that Obama could actually win, which interviewees admit. But as one of the subject put it, "Just to know the Obamas is [to] hope." It's not quite clearly articulated why they inspired that hope in this documentary, but it's clearly a current that runs wide and deep—and not just among the people Carpenter talked to.
Farewell Obama is part of a wave of nostalgia for the former president that started even before he left office. Last summer saw the release of South Side with You, a biopic depicting Barack's first date with Michelle, and last month Netflix gave us Barry, another biopic, this one based on Barack's attempt to find himself while in college in New York. None of these films try to examine the complicated legacy of his presidency—they are about Barack Obama the person. Who was he before he became president? And how did he become such a towering figure in recent American politics?
Barry explores his ambivalence with race. As a biracial young man with a short, curly afro, Obama navigates both an affluent, mostly white academic world as a student and the struggles of black and brown inner city New Yorkers, getting himself in uncomfortable situations as he tries to seamlessly code-switch between both.
Southside with You, on the other hand, presents viewers with Barack's powers of persuasion, shown through community organizing and his budding relationship with a then-reluctant Michelle Robinson. Both films offer the kind of intimacy you usually only get with fiction—the Obamas represented are familiar, but how close are they to the real thing? Farewell Obama is more distant and doesn't pretend to be uncovering any deeper truths. It's a snapshot of a campaign, as well as a time before everyone knew that Donald Trump would be working to undo his legacy.
"The goal was to get people who worked with Obama before he became president, because they had these stories we never heard," Carpenter said. "We wanted these hidden stories to come out at this time, because we have lived to see history take place."
As most of the country reflects on the eight years of Obama's presidency, each of these films offers a different perspective—a look at what he meant to the people who knew him best, and the people who didn't know him at all but wished they did. To Carpenter, Obama's presidency "meant hope that if you put your mind to something and God calls you to do something, you're going to achieve it no matter what may come against you."
(Top photo of Milo Yiannopoulos: Official Leweb Photos, via)
I hate to say it, but Steve Bannon was right.
Trump's right-hand man – the former head of the far-right Breitbart News, and the man who reportedly masterminded Trump's travel ban – was actually right. Speaking to the New York Times last week, Bannon was criticised for telling the media to "keep its mouth shut" – a demand that caused a fair amount of outrage. However, it was the second part of his sentence that was actually more interesting: "They [the media] still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States."
Since Trump's election, media outlets across the western world have been in a frenzy trying to figure out what the hell went wrong. Russians. Fake news. Russian fake news. But as the post-mortem rolls on, members of what's now considered the "alt-right" (in reality, loosely banded groups of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, internet shit-posters and suburban fathers) have consolidated. They threw accusations of "fake news" back at CNN until the term became meaningless. So when mainstream media pundits had to abandon the phrase, they ran to the second fail-safe of modern journalism: the fact check.
For the modern pundit, fact checks are a virtual safe space and a comforting reassurance – so much so that whole news organisations are built on the premise that liberal ideas are default by their very nature, and "facts" alone can reinforce that. In the run up to both the EU referendum and the 2016 US election, pundits – both professional and those dumping their views on your timeline – placed their faith in data: extrapolated polling data, weighted surveys, obscure IFS reports. In their minds, reams of obscure data sets would drown out the voices of populist neo-fascism.
Although this clearly didn't work, it's done little to quell the fetish of combative fact checking. Almost every news website continues to publish fact checks of Trump's obvious lies – from inauguration crowd sizes to the potential effectiveness of the travel ban when it comes to terrorist attacks on US soil. In all cases, this has done little to no damage to Trump, the monsters of his administration or the base that cheers them on.
Part of this failure lies in the mainstream media's search for new tools to take on Trump. Where, just a few years ago, it relied on data journalism, infographics and fiddling with Twitter's API to convince the public to fund it, 2017 has presented a new – and more daunting – challenge for the MSM: getting the public to trust it in the first place.
For anyone who spent much of 2016 online, all of this was inevitable. For years, the authority of raw data has been a contentious battle sprawling through social media accounts, reddit threads and Facebook chats. Spend five minutes searching "Islam" on Twitter and you're bound to find at least one Pepe avatar account posting "proof" that 80 percent of Muslims want to implement Sharia law in the west, according to data commissioned by a British tabloid newspaper – data that is plainly ridiculous and untrue.
It's not just religion, either; last week, a veteran investigative reporter was accused of reporting "fake news" about homicides in Chicago, despite the fact that: a) he didn't actually report anything, and b) he just tweeted some raw data. Contesting facts online has become so messed up that even the Auschwitz memorial – the actual Holocaust museum, for anyone who needs context on this – had to reassert its authority on Holocaust history when challenged on Twitter.
In all these cases, presenting factual evidence does little, if anything, to promote nuance, or to shut down those manipulating data for their own ideological ends, while accusing others of doing the same.
And this is where I think Bannon was onto something. Under Bannon, Breitbart was less of a media organisation than a crusading movement – one that very explicitly, according to Bannon himself, aimed to fight for the Judeo-Christian values lost in Western decadence. For Bannon, use of "facts" and data wasn't about proving people wrong, but rather giving legitimacy to Breitbart's overall cause. It's why characters like Breitbart's technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos prove to be so effective in talking about data compared to academic speakers: it's less about how accurate the facts are, and more about how the data fits into Breitbart's narrow view of the world.
Liberal mainstream media can learn from this, as Breitbart, Infowars and other renegade alt-right sites continue transform themselves into government mouthpieces. To be effective at a time when everyone is being pummelled with "facts" day in, day out, providing rigid ideological narratives that are easy to understand is essential. Furthermore, human interest stories that explain the narrative are needed to disseminate the messages the facts present. What's reported must still be factually correct, of course – we can't hop on the bandwagon of simply making things up – but it has to be delivered in the same kind of packages that appealed to all those previously undecideds ahead of the EU vote and the US election.
Though all this could be achieved in plenty of new and innovative ways, one thing is for certain: fact checkers are terrible at telling stories, and in this dark new age can cause more problems than they solve.
While we still know very little about Alexandre Bissonnette, the university student accused of killing six people at a Quebec City mosque Sunday night, a picture of him has begun to emerge, and it's a picture that everyone on the internet is familiar with.
Bissonnette, 27, enrolled in social sciences at Laval university, was a vocal Trump supporter, according to acquaintances and classmates, who trolled a Facebook group for refugees and seemed to hold anti-women views; he reportedly employed the term "feminazi."
Éric Debroise described him to Journal de Québec, as an "ultra nationalist white supremacist," while Jean-Michel Allard Prus, who did his undergrad with Bissonnette told VICE the suspected terrorist was an aggressive troll online.
"He just wanted to say anything and start a fire," Allard Prus said. "He didn't have his arms open to immigrants you could say. He was against all gun control. He could have been a perfect Republican."
Bissonnette was reportedly inspired by French nationalist Marine Le Pen, who visited Quebec City last summer. Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front party, courted controversy over her 2010 remarks that compared Muslims praying on the street to a Nazi occupation—remarks that landed her in court for inciting racial hatred. A report in the Globe and Mail says Le Pen's visit prompted Bissonnette to express "extreme online activism."
As we wait for details about Bissonnette's motives to emerge, experts who study right-wing extremism say it was only a matter of time before an event like the shooting took place.
"I can't say it was completely unexpected," said Barbara Perry, a criminology professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology who authored a study on white supremacists in Canada published last year.
"I expected there would be murders, at the very least serious injuries and assaults given the uptick we've seen across North America and in Europe."
Perry's report defines right wing extremists as people who are fixated on a white power-based nationalism; they tend to be xenophobic and threatened by non-whites, immigrants, Jews, homosexuals, and feminists, and they perceive the government as being a pawn of these groups.
Accused mass murderer Alexandre Bissonnette is escorted to a van after appearing in court Monday. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jacques Boissinot
She tracked the movement across Canada, speaking with former extremists, members of communities impacted, law enforcement officials, and people combatting this type of ideology. She identified more than 100 groups in Canada, including Soldiers of Odin, the KKK, Blood and Honour, Combat 18, and the Hammerskins. Some of the groups consist of nothing more than "one guy with a laptop in the basement" said Perry, while more prominent skinhead groups in Quebec have 20 to 40 members.
Perry said the internet is where "those who are perpetuating the rhetoric or going in search of the rhetoric… live." But, while it sounds like Bissonnette expressed some right wing views, she said it's very difficult to predict when online rhetoric will turn into real world violence.
"The whole idea that we can predict is a myth that we need to get over," she said.
According to Perry's report, 9/11 made the public fear terrorism in a way they previously hadn't. But the attack drew attention away from the more common white domestic terrorists, like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and instead put the focus on brown-skinned Muslim men.
In studying 30 years worth of violent incidents in Canada, however, Perry found around 120 events coming from white supremacists and related groups versus seven acts of violence coming from what the study refers to as Islamic extremism.
"It really puts it into perspective," she said.
Simon Fraser University PhD student Ryan Scrivens co-authored the report with Perry.
He told VICE that when racially-motivated violence did break out, law enforcement officials tended to write it off as isolated incidents.
"They didn't communicate, they just thought 'We have a couple skinheads in our city or town.' It was a broader problem," he said.
He pointed out Justin Borque, the man who killed three RCMP officers in Moncton in 2014, wasn't labelled as a terrorist but rather as a lone wolf with mental health issues.
Both Scrivens and Perry said populist rhetoric by politicians and, in the case of Donald Trump, an actual Muslim ban, are fuelling the tensions.
"Our worst fear is realized of what the impact of this rhetoric would be and it's not coincidence it happened on the same weekend that [Trump] invoked that executive order. It was a message that clearly said there are people who don't belong in this country."
In Canada, Conservative candidate Kellie Leitch was called out on Twitter after she expressed her condolences over the mosque shooting. Leitch has advocating for screening immigrants for "Canadian values," which many view as dog-whistle politics.
Perry said Leitch would be "foolish" not to reconsider her tactics. J.M. Berger, a fellow at The Hague International Centre for Counter-Terrorism said it's difficult to determine how rhetoric translates into violence. However, he explained that the US has seen a wave of hate crimes and harassment following Trump's election and there's good reason to think that trend will continue, similar to what happened in the UK following Brexit.
"There's no doubt that President Trump's campaign has profoundly emboldened white nationalists in the United States and abroad, in terms of organizing and promoting their message," he said.
According to Berger's studies, white nationalists are outperforming ISIS on Twitter and other websites. He said the two groups have some things in common—they divide the world into two categories of identity, with an "in group" and an "out group."
He said ISIS has "one of the most violent prescriptions for dealing with the out-group," whereas neo-Nazis, while historically very violent, have been less able to mobilize their followers to carry out mass murders.
In addition to bringing the people who commit crimes to justice, Perry said it's important to attempt to intervene when people express right-wing extremist views online.
She pointed to an initiative in the UK where social workers monitor chatter about white power on Facebook and Twitter and try to directly engage people in a dialogue. She also talked about how Google ads have been used to redirect someone searching for white power groups to sites with "alternative narratives."
"I think we really need to pay more attention to that than the punitive responses, which can be counterproductive," she said.
At Monday night's SAG Awards, Nicole Kidman was asked what was the hardest part about her turn in LION. She thought for a moment and then replied, "Playing a real person. I'm playing Sue Brierley… trying to find her essence, and honour it, and have it be properly depicted on screen." This was a concern as well for Sue's son Saroo, who's incredible life story was the basis for the film. "There were times where it felt like it was running away from us. There were times where it felt the script was a bit far-fetched and diluted a bit," Saroo admits to me from his home in Tasmania. "But we worked with the film creators, and they were so open."
The result is a film that's enjoyed broad critical praise, a wide release in the US, and has already grossed more than $33 million at the box office—a feat many would've told you was impossible for an Australian film. No one really saw LION's success coming, even Kidman only really felt it once the film was shot, edited, and show to early audiences. "I knew we were onto a good thing when my sister and my husband saw the film and they both came out weeping. And wanting to, like, just hug me," she said Monday night. "I thought, that's an amazing reaction to a film."
Nicole Kidman, David Wenham, and Sunny Pawar as Sue, John, and Saroo Brierley. All images supplied
Saroo's reaction to the film has been positive too—particularly Dev Patel's Oscar-nominated take on him—but admits the whole thing has been a bit surreal, tracing back to that first brunch with Patel at a quiet cafe in Hobart. You might think that, given all the twists Saroo's life has taken, he'd be the kind of person who's not easily rattled. Then again, is there a right way to act when you find yourself sitting across a table from Dev Patel? "I didn't know what I was in for. I was sort of starstruck, surprised—I was meeting Dev Patel!" Saroo says. "I've never met a celebrity in my life... let alone having breakfast [with them]."
But things went well, and the two bonded telling stories of growing up in Indian families—Patel in Harrow in London's north-west, Saroo in Hobart after being adopted by Sue and John Brierley from an Indian orphanage when he was just five years old. "It almost felt like we were brothers," Saroo says of his brunch with Patel. "We just bounced off each other and talked about things we liked. He definitely has sincerity in his voice and is so open about things." One thing Patel was open about was how much he wanted the role: "He went out to the director and writer [Australians Garth Davis and Luke Davies]... knocked on their door, asking about this film where a child gets lost in India, insisting he wanted to be a part of it," Saroo explains. "Like, you know, 'I'm the right person and I'll do whatever it takes to be part of it.'"
The real John and Sue Brierley with a young Saroo
Reduced to a headline, Saroo's story—the one that inspired Patel to fight to play the role, and commit to the hours of Australian accent training that came with it—usually boils down to this: Indian Orphan, Adopted By Australian Couple, Finds His Birth Family Using Google Earth. And as amazing as that sounds, it's a retelling that misses some of the most incredible parts of this story. Like Saroo's near perfect photographic memory, which allowed him to remember minute details about the small Indian town he grew up in, decades after he got lost, separated from his older brother on a train.
It also gives the sense it was some sort of fluke that Saroo was able to track his birth mother down, 25 years later. Speaking with him, you get the sense that there are few other people on Earth who could've pulled this off. Although Saroo had a relatively happy life growing up in Tasmania there was a desire within him to understand what happened to him as a child. This yearning kept him going through nearly five years of late nights craned over a computer. It was a painstaking, meticulous process, scouring Google Earth for familiar landmarks. He didn't even know what the name of his hometown was. "I was too scared to tell anyone because it felt like mucking around: it was like finding a needle in a haystack," he says. "I knew that, but all of a sudden I forgot about that and was so intrigued about being methodical, doing things in it's simplest form to be strategic about it."
Sunny Pawar as a young Saroo Brierley in "LION"
In his mathematical way, Saroo broke his problem down into simple questions: How fast do the trains go in India? How long had he been asleep? Working backwards he drew a 1,600 kilometre radius around Kolkata—where he'd woken up on a train more than two decades before, a five-year-old alone in one of India's most populous cities, with no idea of where his family was. Slowly, Saroo ruled out one tiny town after another. "I was searching for so long and then all of a sudden, early morning around 2–3 AM, I stumbled upon something," Saroo explains. "I had come to this train station that I haven't seen for 25 years. It was a moment of shock, this tremendous feeling, where it was just perfectly the way I remembered it."
Saroo was from Ganesh Talai neighbourhood of Khandwa, an ancient city in central India, more than 1,500 kilometres west of Kolkata. As he clicked around his hometown, the landmarks of his childhood were all there. "It was in the roads and the stations, and how it seemed untouched for such a long time—all of the sudden, there it is," he remembers. A few months later, Saroo set off to visit, the idea of finding his family a faint flicker in his mind. "When I got to my hometown, all I wanted to do was take my shoes and socks off and walk the streets that I used to 25 years ago. But I threw my bag outside the hotel, walked out and my legs automatically took me straight to the door I was born," Saroo says. "There was no one in the house, it was all black and dark and the house was almost broken."
A young Saroo, growing up in Tasmania
Saroo was despondent, but soon a woman appeared and asked him "in a very English voice" if she could help him. He pulled an A4 photo of himself as a child out as his bag and explained to her this was him as a child. "These people don't live here anymore," she replied. Suddenly, another man appeared and Saroo repeated his question. "He told me to stay there for a second and he came back about five minutes later and said, 'Come now, with me. I'm going to take you to your mother.'" Around the corner he introduced Saroo to a woman, instantly he knew. "She stepped forward, I stepped forward; we both just had our eyes glued towards each other—it was such a pivotal moment where time itself stood still. Collectively, being neutrons and protons and electrons, our minds came together like a nuclear fission," he says.
Today, Saroo visits his birth mother as often as he can—he still doesn't speak Hindi, and she doesn't speak English, but they have a translator who just lives around the corner. In the midst of all the Oscar buzz around LION, she is set to travel over the US for the awards ceremony. It's another surreal turn, but that just seems to wash over Saroo. He's more interested in talking about his work with ISSA, the Indian Society of Sponsorship and Adoption. When I press him, he admits he might want to write a prequel to LION, about his life growing up in Tasmania after being adopted by an Indian orphanage by the Brierleys. "Hopefully that would get turned into a movie too," he laughs. "I think there should be more true stories out there."
On hearing that Suspiria was due for a Luca Guadagnino-directedreboot this year—the same year of its 40th anniversary—more than anything, I wondered: Haven't I already seen this? Nicholas Winding Refn's technicolor stab at the L.A. fashion industry The Neon Demon came out just last year. It owes, if not a total debt, then at the very least the use of its themes and its lighting gels, to Dario Argento's 1977 ballet-Giallo horror.
"Refn's concern," wrote The Village Voice, "is the emotion of a moment, much like Suspiria, where the director has a naïve ballerina wander into a roomful of razor wire just because it looks cool." Both have soundtracks that sound like hell, assuming that hell sounds both electronic and proggy; and both deal in young, female blood. Both put girls at the mercy of women who are aging; and both have their ingénues put at grave risk by ambition. Both super-stylize their dubious substance. I could go on. "Refn," Argento has said, "[is] definitely inspired by my films. He admits it."
The word "homage" is always tricky, given that it's occasionally used to mean "copied from," "ripped-off," or "stolen." The Neon Demon is none of these, which is why I'm harping on it here. The film transmogrifies some of the media-hyped fears of the 70s (i.e. the occult) into the fears of the modern age (i.e. vanity and the fashion industry's vagaries). There remains, therefore, a reason for moral hysteria; fear itself is rebooted. This is maybe how one actually remakes an iconic style or idea without actually screwing the pooch—by reimagining.
Famously, Argento first designed his film as a vehicle starring 12-year-old girls, before being told that nobody wanted to see children murdered: there are fully-grown women in The Neon Demon who are hungry for underage blood, and there are murder victims in Suspiria who, thanks to his mostly unmodified script, speak like children. These are differing takes on the same kind of upset. Puberty and sexual awakening, both, feel like girlie concerns in cinema, and feed into the girliest horror. Neon Demon and Suspiria are films that are never quite clear as to whether they're trying to scare women, or whether they're scared of them.
Suspiria's plot is nasty, brutish, and mercifully short to outline. A young American girl named Suzy joins a ballet academy in Germany, where a student has been recently murdered. We see the murder in graphic detail. Later, Suzy begins to suspect that the school is run by witches; clearing the way for several other violent killings, and a dénouement in which she's attacked by a classmate's reanimated corpse. All of the girls are pale and thin and snotty, with terrific center-partings in that very typically 70s style, and all of the blood looks like gouache, which makes the death freakier because it looks deeply surreal. Suspiria is shot primarily in lurid, watermelon reddish-pinks and cool blues, as well as the sickly, sulky green of imitation jade. The set design helps convey the surrealism; the doorknobs are placed higher than usual, more aligned with the girls' heads, forcing them to reach upwards.
When Susan, the school's newcomer, ends up falling ill—the doctor vaguely diagnoses her with a mysterious illness related to her blood—it can't help but call to mind Carrie—the supernatural ruling a woman's basic biology. Like Suspiria, Carrie received a new reboot; both star the scowling, worldly seeming Chloe Grace Moretz, whose presence often signals a smart-mouthed tough with an attitude. In Carrie, the reboot, you know that she's going to avenge herself. Helmed by a female director, Kimberly Peirce, it makes the feminist subtext of the original into a heavier text.
Stephen King, when asked about his opinion on remaking Carrie, reacted the same way the rest of us had, and the same way we will when Suspiria 2.0 hits. "The real question is," he said, baffled, "why, when the original was so good?"
The most interesting thing about the remake of Carrie is what it doesn't show, which is an alternate ending where Sue Snell is seen giving birth to its heroine, fully-grown and bloodied. "I suggested," Peirce explained in an AFI Directing Workshop for women, "we could have a full-grown Carrie, or Carrie's hand, being birthed—you know, something along those lines.' They liked the idea, but they were concerned. They wouldn't, or couldn't, at first articulate what it was. Finally, one of them ventured, "So... you really want to show a vagina?" Some things, it seems, are too frightening for horror whatever the era. What the movie ends up being is a failure that, beat-for-beat, apes the storyline of the first film, but lacks its pale underdog's energy.
"Horror as a genre," Hazel Cills wrote at The Dissolve, "so often thrives in moving forward, in figuring out what makes people tick and jump in the present, in creating new characters or establishing smart takes on centuries-old ones. So remakes, especially ones that reach back only a couple of decades, seem antithetic to the genre's relentless progression... the greatest threat to horror originals is the temptation to update the special effects and cinematography to slicker contemporary norms." The bright unreality of Suspiria's gore is its saving grace; blood pools on parquet floors and looks dreamy rather than queasy. It would not do for the death to feel too true in something whose subject is "witches at ballet school." It would not do for the style to be vanquished for realism. Knowing that Tilda Swinton is involved in the new Suspiria barely lessens the blow. Dakota Johnson's presence is further bad news, since in Suspiria, there should be no shades of gray whatsoever—only lurid, watermelon reddish-pinks and cool blues, and the sickly, sulky green of imitation jade.
"I know nothing about this project except what I read in the papers," Argento fumed in a recent interview. "I repeat: I have never, ever been asked about it…Honestly, I do think it would be better if it wasn't remade …the film has a specific mood. Either you do it exactly the same way — in which case, it's not a remake, it's a copy, which is pointless — or, you change things and make another movie. In that case, why call it ' Suspiria'?"
Why, indeed—why not change things and make a new movie, and call it The Neon Demon? Refn's film, his overt debt, at least earned admiration from its master-source. A good enough riff on a classic will add to the conversation; a terrible remake is only like drowning it out. Suspiria, Variety dryly notes in a standalone paragraph in its announcement about the new film, "is a Latin word for 'sighs.'" The title has never felt more apt.
Slim Jxmmi flops down face-first on a hotel room sofa. Swae Lee, looking a little bewildered, gently swings around a glass bottle of water, eyes half-closed. Rae Sremmurd, the masterminds behind "Black Beatles", the soundtrack of 2016's Mannequin Challenge meme monolith, are behaving as if they've just woken up in a strange flat at 2PM after a fairly hefty bender.
They flew into London from Paris the night before, and are feeling a little worse for wear. "Minor hangover," Jxmmi says. What does a bad one look like then? "Throwing up everywhere – 'somebody help me, I'm dying'. Throwing up on girls, too." For a second, it looks like the pair might be flagging, until I ask about the previous night's Paris show. "It was awesome," Jxmmi exclaims. "Fucking awesome! I saw the Eiffel Tower light up!" And just like that they're back to their normal selves.
The platinum-selling brothers from Tupelo, Mississippi have cause to celebrate after the year they've had. But even without an explicit reason to let loose, they would probably jump on an express train to hedonistic nirvana. Their constant Spring Break-eqsue partying is what makes them who they are, what lends them a limitless, unending buoyancy that seems to grant them the energy to pump out hit after hit. It's all part of the "Sremmlife" ethos.
"My mother doesn't know that I'm here. She doesn't know that I do this. If she learned I am here, she won't open the door to me when I come home."
Farad, his face splattered with oil, smiles as he tells me this. His mother knows he's an engineer. She knows he works for Iraq's Northern Oil Company, based out his hometown of Kirkuk. What she doesn't know is that he's risking his life every day by fighting oil well fires set ablaze by Islamic State fighters as they fled Qayyarah, 60km south of Mosul.
Crew members covered in oil. All photos by the author
Today, he and his crew are working a well that's no longer burning but continues to spray oil and toxic gas from the damaged wellhead. I've just watched him and his men take turns carrying out the day's ritual: affix respirators to their face, climb down a ladder into an oil-slicked pit, strain against stiff valves on the exposed wellhead, be overwhelmed by the gases, retreat and repeat.
A single spark from the tools on metal could reignite the whole well, so firemen constantly soak the wellhead with their hoses. One of the firefighters, apparently a gambler, lets a lit cigarette dangle from his lips as he stands on the edge of the pit. The air rings with alarms as the personal exposure alerts do their best to alert disinterested ears. The air is full of toxic hydrogen sulphide gas, like always, but no one cares.
"In that moment I don't care about the toxic fumes," says Farad. "I think about controlling the well. I have one aim, one goal. It's like killing a monster," he says, grinning. "A monster with three heads."
The approach
It's not hard to find Qayyarah, in northern Iraq's Ninevah province. The black smoke pluming from oil fires completely consumes the landscape; a landscape that is otherwise just tan-coloured, undulating plains in all directions. Even with your closed eyes you could follow the smell of sulphur right into town. And as you get closer the black funnels become a ceiling, blanketing Qayyarah's homes and businesses like night.
Up close the fires are like nothing else I've ever seen: seas of burning oil hundreds of square metres around the wellhead, flames curling and rolling into the air like entire city blocks, hundreds of metres up.
Keeping the earth mover free of flames while they excavate the oily sand
When I ask one firefighter why he thinks IS set the wells alight, his answer is a laconic "terrorists just destroy things." From what I've heard and seen so far in the country, it was probably mostly to do with creating cover from airstrikes for their eventual retreat. It could also have been a final "fuck you" to residents of the town who welcomed the return of Baghdad's security forces after two years.
Qayyarah itself, like many towns recaptured from IS over the last few months, gives vivid reality to the term "war-torn." Buildings have been flattened or ripped open, others pocked by bullet holes and rocket bursts. Heavily armed Shia militiamen and Iraqi police man checkpoints or patrol the streets. There's an eeriness to the light, a kind of perpetual dusk as the sun, a white ball behind the clouds above, struggles to reach the streets below. The ever-present smoke has left a layer of black grime over everything, including the local residents. Many, particularly the young and the elderly, are suffering under the effects of the smoke. Some have died. A nurse at the clinic tells me they get at least 10 new cases of respiratory illnesses a day, and sometimes up to 20. By the time we arrive this has been going on for 10 weeks.
Farad instructing his team
"The priority is stopping the fires," says general manager of the Qayyarah oil field, Muhammed Akash. Trying to work out how many of the 51 wells in the area are burning is like trying to peg down figures for anything in Iraq, a Sisyphean labour. Muhammad tells me it's not clear from the air how many wells have been set alight because of the thick smoke, and the police engineers are only clearing the roads of mines left by IS when they need to move to the next one. He suspects there were about 20 wells burning, and can say in the 10 weeks they've been here they've put out four and are working on the fifth. It can take anywhere from a fortnight to a month to bring a single well under control, so he has no idea when all the fires will be extinguished.
"It depends on the scale of the fires, where the explosion hit," he explains. "It could be a year."
How they put out the fires depends on the circumstances. Muhammed explains that sometimes they use explosives to starve the fire of oxygen, sometimes chemicals are injected directly into the pipe to smother the flames. At one well, where the burning oil has ringed the wellhead, lead engineer Ali Aksen explains the course of action.
Hell
"The digger clears out the area here," he says, gesturing at a blackened machine at the edge of a flaming lake. It lifts a load of burning oil and sand as firefighters hose down the arm, dumps it where it can be extinguished, and goes back for more.
"With water we will cool it down until we reach the source of the oil. Then we inject a mixture of water and salt into the pipeline. The brine material stops the gas from coming up," Ali explains. We're standing only a few metres away from the flames and already I can feel the exposed skin on my hands and face starting to burn. The digger's cab is even closer, but its operator, Abdul, is nonchalant about the whole thing, even though I've noticed the digger slip on an oily incline a couple of times in just a few minutes.
"Yes, of course it's dangerous but when I'm with these guys I don't feel it," he smiles. "If I was afraid I couldn't work here." It's the same kind of no-fear attitude I've seen a lot of in this country, but with none of the bravado I'm used to hearing when speaking to soldiers. Everyone working here, firefighters, engineers, machinery operators, has a kind of muted-dedication to the work, with none of the pomp of the army. There's also a camaraderie that's in stark contrast to the simmering mistrust between the various militias, security forces and ethnicities we've encountered throughout the area.
Farad helps a guy overcome by fumes
"I consider all of them as myself, and I consider us as one team," says Farad. He's a kurd from Kirkuk, where ethnic tensions may simmer over after the IS threat is repulsed, but here he leads Arabs and Turkmen, Sunnis and Shias. "We are the same."
Moments later he's called to the edge of the pit. A few men raise their arms in triumph: they've got the well under control. There's some back-patting, hand-shaking and posting for pictures. Tomorrow they'll start from scratch again.
