Dennis Oland, charged with second-degree murder in the death of his father, arrives at his preliminary hearing at the Law Courts in Saint John, N.B. on Wednesday, November 26, 2014. Photo courtesy The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan

Rumors ran thick and fast in Saint John, New Brunswick on July 6, 2011, when Richard Oland, president of the Far End Corp and a sixth generation member of the Oland beer dynasty, was beaten to death on the floor of his office in the heart of the historic uptown. The cause of death: dozens of slashes and blunt-force wounds. The killer had wielded a heavy object with enough force to break apart the bones in his face, leaving fragments lodged in the wounds. Gashes on his hands indicated he fought for his life. The blood soaked through three layers of flooring, permeating the ceiling of the office below.

Murders are rare in Saint John, a port city of 70,000, a melange of massive oil refineries and wild ocean views, dead malls, and 19th-century brickwork draped with film-noir fog. For 230 years, Canada's oldest incorporated city has kept it old school, in the sense of both strong family and community loyalties, and in that it's still an old boy's club. At some point, almost all Saint Johners have been hired and fired by a small coterie of millionaires and billionaires. Irving and Oland-owned companies pump the gas, brew the beer, and sign the checks: that's enough to shut up most of their critics. Generally, it's only when things get so bad that a dispute ends up in court that the juiciest scandals of such wealthy elites enter into public record.

The Oland case ripped the lid off the private life of Richard Oland. While well known in Saint John, he wasn't well liked. After losing a bitter battle to his brother for the helm of Moosehead, Canada's oldest independent brewery, he rapidly racked up his own professional successes—but according to his wife, he was verbally and emotionally abusive, and "never the same with his children" afterward. Richard's great joys seemed to be arguing with people, winning sailing competitions, making a lot of money, and carrying on an eight-year affair (which was increasingly difficult to hide). His shrewdness extended to his wife, whom he required to provide receipts for any expenditures from her $2,000/month allowance. By his death at age 69, he was worth a cool $37 million . Hundreds of mourners, including the premier, mayor, and lieutenant-governor, filed out of his funeral to the strains of the Sinatra classic "My Way." The lyrics ("The record shows I took the blows / And did it my way") were spookily fitting.

From the moment cop cars arrived at the murder scene on Canterbury Street, Saint John crackled and sparked with rumors. Cabbies, co-workers, and coffee-shop regulars all had their pet theories and suspicions. Among them: Richard was beaten to death with a drywall hammer (which, strangely, turned out to be probably true). The killer was his jilted lover or the jilted lover's husband or a pissed-off investor or the Russian mafia.

The top guess, however: Dennis Oland, Richard's only son.

Dennis Oland, accompanied by his mother Constance Oland, arrives for the start of his trial in Saint John, N.B. on Wednesday, September 16, 2015. Photo courtesy The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan

At face value, this was a slam-dunk theory. Richard's son admitted being the last person to see his father alive, at the office, where he said they were talking about a genealogy project. Dennis was also hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, according to testimony from a forensic accountant, spending around $14,000 as the co-executor of his father's will and trustee of an additional fund. Good financial news, at least, in a time of tragedy—but also, some said, a fiscal motive for murder.

The Saint John Police Department—which has since been dragged into allegations of corruption and other major fuck-ups in the Oland investigation, first realized something strange was happening with Dennis during a videotaped witness statement to Constable Stephen Davidson.

What started as routine questioning quickly turned into a laundry list of his late father's ugly traits. In the video, Dennis describes his father as "a really difficult" person "lacking in certain social skills." Unsolicited, he outlines Richard's infidelities, and how he alienated his friends and family with his constant disses and arguments. When asked if he knew anything that could help police, he airily theorized that "some crackhead looking for $20" was probably the killer (never mind said crackhead forgot the Rolex, laptop, and BMW keys sitting on Richard's desk). But while some people called Richard a "ruthless bastard," Dennis said, he didn't want his father dead.

The chattiness dried up when Dennis was asked where he was during the murder. While he admitted coming to his dad's office, he couldn't recall the route he drove or what he did afterward. Left alone in the room, Dennis appears confused on the video, tracing an imaginary map on a piece of paper, mumbling to himself. After 2.5 hours, police informed Dennis he was a suspect, and they'd be executing search warrants.

Inside the Far End Corp. building, where Richard Oland was killed. Photo by Julia Wright

But then, very strangely, the case seemed to go cold. The searches of Dennis's home, Volkswagen, and a boat co-owned by his wife turned up nothing. No other suspect was advanced: still, nothing happened. For two years. Dennis continued to work occasionally at the office where his dad was killed. Reporters, meanwhile, were going nuts: lawyers for the local paper and CBC started contesting the sealing of several search warrants, as police threw shade at the forensic lab for taking forever processing the scene. The media were forced to dance around a court-ordered publication ban on naming Dennis as a suspect for almost two years. While the ban was eventually overturned, the radio and print silence had only intensified the rumors.

Public feeling was equal parts shock and "no shit, Sherlock" when, two years after the crime, Dennis Oland was charged with second-degree murder. He was released after a few days in jail on $50,000 bail posted by his uncle, Derek Oland, who issued a public statement defending Dennis's innocence and pledging the family's full support during upcoming legal proceedings.

As with his highly public self-presentation leading up to the trial, it appeared as though Dennis Oland was trying to send everyone a message via social media November 9, 2013. Just a few days before he was charged, he changed his publicly-visible profile pic to a still of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. In the 1993 flick, Ford plays a man wrongfully convicted of murder, trying to find the real killer while being hunted by police. It was either a truly ballsy bit of vaguebooking, or a strange attempt at black humor. Whatever the intended message, few people, if any, remarked on the reference. In any case, it was eclipsed by the re-emergence of another strange photo of Dennis, re-used by various media outlets, in which he appeared to be smiling as he exited his father's funeral.

Four years after the murder, those proceedings drag on. The trial, which started September 16, 2015 and is scheduled to run into December, is poised to be one of the longest criminal trials in New Brunswick history. It's drawn a remarkably vivid, dysfunctional portrait of the Olands. But it's an even more powerful illustration of just how much appearances matter in small towns, where gossip is a tie that binds, and burns. Peeping over the hedges to see what your neighbors are up to is a favorite recreational activity.

Dennis Oland's estate, Sevenacres, has been in the family for generations. On one of the toniest roads in Rothesay, a Saint John suburb with an average household net worth of $2.29 million , Sevenacres is screened from the road by a double-barrier of log fencing and box hedges, further buffered by spacious paddocks, a barn, and stables. While private, the situation is extremely cozy in other ways: it's just a five-minute walk from the mansion where Richard once lived—and closer still to neighbor and Oland family lawyer Bill Teed. The court-ordered conditions for Dennis's release include that he maintain this residence, surrender his passport, and advise police of any travel outside New Brunswick. In other words, he's basically trapped in this genteel seclusion.

Saint John, New Brunswick. Photo via Flickr user Thomas Duff

So, on a certain level, it's kind of easy to see why Dennis has, in recent years, turned into quite the man-about-town—a shift from his quieter, pre-2011 lifestyle, according to some who knew him. While Dennis is seen daily above the fold of the local paper, as well as entering and exiting court in a swarm of media, he's almost as frequently sighted at bars, restaurants, auctions, and concerts. In a city the size of Saint John, this is not a huge circuit. In fact, it appears from the outside a hellishly claustrophobic, Panopticon-like situation, enough to drive anyone mad. But it seems to have had an opposite effect on Dennis.

On November 26, the same day his preliminary hearing ended, Dennis Oland and a group of friends attended a Bob Seger show at Saint John's biggest hockey arena, Harbour Station. While Bob and the Silver Bullet Band revisited classics like "Against the Wind," he and his buds conspicuously rocked out—to some eyes, an odd way to cap off 37 days of court proceedings determining he'd be tried for murder. As Dennis and friends stood up in their seats, working on their night moves, saucy fellow Seger fans surreptitiously snapped pics of the local celebrity in their midst, stealth-texting photos with captions like "OMG look who it is!"

In a bizarre small-town twist, when Oland pleaded not guilty on September 8, 2015, he attracted a bigger crowd to Harbour Station than Bob Seger. Five thousand people were summonsed for possible jury duty: one of the biggest jury pools in provincial history, and larger than the pool for either Paul Bernardo or Robert Pickton, necessitating the makeshift venue. Even the typically yawn-worthy process of jury selection felt like the casting for a reality TV show. Offered a choice to be tried either by a judge alone, or by judge and jury, he choose the route of public spectacle. And so, the concession stands were open and prospective jurors chowed down on nachos as Oland sat in the middle of it all, watching the masses filter in. He entered his not-guilty plea into a microphone, on the arena stage, in front of thousands.

Several months ago, I was out with a fellow journalist at Port City Royal, around the corner from the former crime scene. We'd both covered the Oland case. So it felt a bit weird when we walked in and instantly spotted Dennis and Lisa. When Dennis left to bring the car around, we watched a mint-condition, dark-green 1967 Volvo Amazon roll down steep Grannan Lane. In a town of 12-year-old Toyota Corollas and brand new Ford F-150s, a ride like that stands out: I'd often spotted it parked on Charlotte Street. I'd even tweeted a picture of it, once: "My ride's here." I'd had no idea, then, who it belonged to.

As Lisa got in beside Dennis, she looked back. For a second, I saw the scene from her perspective: us staring out at her, framed by the glowing rectangle of the window. She looked pained and annoyed: we were caught red-handed, watching. Indeed, it was impossible not to watch the car's silhouette, like a getaway vehicle in a Turner Classic Movie, as it disappeared into the darkness.

"If one does not think that the privacy of my clients has not been invaded, let me suggest to you that it's not only been invaded, it has been run over by a truck," defense lawyer Bill Teed told a closed-door hearing in August 2012.

"What this family has had to put up with and deal with as a result of this murder, as a result of the investigation, as a result of the media attention, their privacy rights and...the innocent rights that we try to protect for them, has been just about drowned." The trial, for the Oland family, has no doubt been a humiliating, painful airing of dirty laundry, literally: the court has seen pictures of Dennis's Hugo Boss jacket, stained with trace amounts of blood matching Richard's DNA profile.

All this stuff about privacy and appearances hearkens weirdly back to something Dennis said, early in his video statement to police. Describing the ill-fated genealogy project he and Richard were working on, he unconsciously may have revealed an irony in how he sees himself—and how he thinks Saint Johners see him.

"We have our family You could see all these fabrications were built up about people being, y'know, more than they actually were."

His public appearance of carefree innocence aside, Oland may well see this four-year nightmare quietly resolved. The expertise of his top-flight Toronto lawyers, the bungled police investigation, the two-year delay in laying charges, the fact that no murder weapon was ever found, and innumerable other factors all cast enough reasonable doubt for a jury to, very soon, potentially find Dennis Oland innocent.

But whether he'll ever walk freely again in Saint John again is another question.

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On today's Daily VICE, we discuss hipsters with a consumer behavior expert, visit the observatory on Hawaii's sacred volcano, explore Seattle's feminist music scene, and talk global warming with President Obama's chief scientific advisor in an interview conducted in June 2015.

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Former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver during better times. Photo via Flickr user Zack Seward

In Manhattan federal court on Monday, a Lower East Side politician named Sheldon Silver was found guilty of all seven counts against him. Just like that, one of the longtime pillars of what is probably America's most corrupt state was done.

After spending nearly 40 years in government, the former New York State Assembly Speaker was arrested earlier this year on charges of honest services fraud, extortion, and money laundering. The federal complaint from US Attorney Preet Bharara's office essentially accused the guy of repeatedly using his position for personal profit (he was also a private attorney). That scheme included a Columbia University doctor who referred clients to a law firm in exchange for state grants for research. It also centered on luxury developers who—through a secret retainer—indirectly did Silver the same favor; in the developers' case, the payoffs were lucrative tax breaks from the state.

It was your classic "pay to play" corruption: a politician using power to line his own pockets and lying about it routinely—a guy pretty much everyone thought they knew was corrupt. And through the five weeks of trial, the US attorney's office brought a ton of evidence against Silver to prove that point. Silver's defense team, on the other hand, simply argued that what their client did was just "politics as usual."

Now the the 71-year-old faces the possibility of decades in federal prison for his crimes, joining the increasingly crowded club of Empire State politicians to get caught on the wrong side of the law. The only question is how big of an impact Silver's fall will have on the way things get done in New York.

"Today, Sheldon Silver got justice," Bharara said in a statement issued soon after the verdict was announced. "And at long last, so did the people of New York."

Silver's downfall is a major victory for the prosecutor, who has made it his mission to DirtDevil the shit out of the Empire State. It was his office that picked up the pieces of the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption last year, after the subpoena-wielding body was shut down by its own creator, Governor Andrew Cuomo. (It is now pretty common knowledge that the reason for the shutdown had something to do with the Commission getting too close to Cuomo's own office in its probes.)

After the Commission was shut down, Bharara sprang into action, leveling two massive indictments: one against Silver, and another against his Senate Republican counterpart, Dean Skelos, who's still on trial himself. It felt like almost overnight, the US Attorney had single-handedly eliminated two of the "three men in a room"—a made-for-Frank-Underwood phrase that captures how, in Albany, Cuomo, Silver, and Skelos used to agree on budget deals in back rooms.

Even as Skelos's trial rages on, literally just around the block from where Silver met his demise on Monday, what Bharara has done is essentially convict the entire governing process in New York. With this verdict in mind, any deal that Silver touched in the past now firmly reeks of favors, subtle bribery, and straight-up corruption. The rest of Albany will most likely try to shun his legacy—it already seems like Silver's name has been swiped off his district's website—when, in reality, it was the broader political culture that took a big hit on Monday.

Of course, given this state's track record, it's hard to expect a massive turnaround after one conviction, splashy though it may be.

"Rats don't fall for the same trap twice," Janos Marton, a former Moreland Commission Special Counsel, told me over email after hearing the verdict. "Silver's successors in power may find different paths to the same corruption, and it's on all of us to stay vigilant."

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United Nation Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon welcomes Barack Obama at the COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference. Photo via Thierry Orban/Getty Images

On Monday leaders from nearly 150 nations gathered in Paris for COP21, or the Conference of Parties, an annual gathering that seeks to find global solutions to help get a handle on arguably the Biggest Bugaboo of our time, climate change. The conference is set to last just under two weeks, until December 11, and upon its conclusion the 195 countries and 40,000 delegates who made the trek to the French capital hope to have agreed upon something monumental. They have but one real goal: They seek a "legally binding and universal agreement" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, "with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C," according to COP21's website.

If the world isn't able to keep the temps from rising above the agreed upon 2 degrees Celsius the consequences could be disastrous. Many scientists project that warming above that target in the future would fundamentally alter our world, and would bring about long droughts, rising oceans, mass migration, and extinctions. It would render many cities on the Persian Gulf uninhabitable.

"Never have the stakes been so high," French President Francoise Hollande said in his speech to the gathered delegates on the first day of COP21. President Obama echoed those sentiments, and along the way quelled Chinese fears that such measures can't be taken without stalling the economy, pointing to economic growth in the United States over the last two years despite no growth in emissions. Chinese President Xi Jinping said that any agreement reached at the conference must account for the differences among the attending nations, saying countries should be allowed to seek their own solutions to cap emissions based on their own interest. China and America, the two largest producers of greenhouse gas, met on Monday at COP21 and vowed to continue to take strong action on climate change, a move which was met with praise in the form of a Tweet from former Vice President Al Gore.

British Prime Minister David Cameron asked the other world leaders amassed in Paris "what would we tell our grandchildren" if, in fact, they fail to agree on a robust climate deal? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country would remain committed to the goals of COP21, and believes new technology will help the world reach them. Perhaps, of the many speeches given on COP21's first day, the one with the highest stakes came from Perry G Christie, prime minister of the Bahamas, who said failure to reach a binding agreement could spell the end of his country in total. As a result, he'd like to see a more aggressive plan, one that would not see the earth's temperature rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In other climate news out of Paris, Bill Gates is heading up a 20 billion dollar investment, along with 28 other backers, in clean energy. The group, called Mission Innovation, would be a public-private venture, marrying billionaire investors to governments because "the pace of innovation and the scale of transformation and dissemination remain significantly short of what is needed," as they put it in their launch statement. The money will be spent on technologies designed specifically to reduce greenhouse gas.

Reaching an agreement won't be easy, as past negotiations at COP have proven, and sticking to it may prove even harder. The proof there lies in the Kyoto Protocol. Reached at COP3 in 1997, it was designed to lower greenhouse emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. But that protocol is a nonbinding one, which ultimately meant it didn't have the teeth to hold countries responsible when they couldn't keep to the goal. Beyond that, several large nations—Canada, India—were exempt from the agreement reached at Kyoto. The binding agreement of COP21 has been something conference organizers have been working toward for 20 years, and one that requires everyone to be on board. It's an important 12 days. Our future may depend on it.

Follow Brian McManus on Twitter.

To get more information about how you can make a global shift to100% clean energy happen, click HERE.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Leefon.

Amid the ongoing tensions surrounding the indictment of a Chicago police officer in the 2014 murder of 17-year-old Chicago high school student Laquan McDonald, a student at University of Illinois at Chicago has been arrested for allegedly making online threats to "rid the world of white devils." According to reports, the student, Jabari Dean, posted extremely specific messages online about bursting on to the nearby campus and executing 16 white people—one for each police bullet fired at McDonald on October 20, 2014.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the following unambiguous threat was included in a comment posted on WorldStarHipHop.com, below a movie clip about Black Panthers preparing to kill police, and it was initialed "JRD":

The comment was apparently discovered online over Thanksgiving weekend by a New York resident who forwarded the information along to the FBI. On Sunday night, the University of Chicago had received word of the threat, and announced that the campus would be closed Monday. The FBI apparently tracked Dean down through his ISP and made the arrest on Monday morning.

Limited information has been released about Dean. The 21-year-old was arrested "without incident," according to a press release by the Department of Justice. According to his Linkedin profile, Dean studies electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, and attended to Hirsch Metropolitan High School on Chicago's South Side.

Federal prosecutors say that Dean, who appeared in court on Monday, is not considered a threat, because he lacked the resources—presumably weapons—to make good on his threats. He will be allowed to return to his mother's house, where he lives, on Tuesday.

The arrest comes in the wake of protests over McDonald's murder. Last Wednesday, a Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder in the case. Footage was released showing the police officer emptying a clip into McDonald, who is seen jaywalking, then being shot in what is apparently continuous gunfire that persisted long after he is seen lying on the ground, limp. McDonald had allegedly attacked a police car while on PCP.

With the help of the Fraternal Order of Police, Van Dyke was able to post bail Monday, and was expected to leave jail later this evening.

Dean now faces federal charges of making a "threat in interstate commerce," a charge that usually accompanies terrorism cases. However, the court filing in the case says Dean's alleged crime carries a five-year maximum penalty, so it's by no means clear that federal prosecutors plan to pursue terrorism charges in this instance.

Earlier in November, after two faculty firings at the University of Missouri, a student posted a similar threat on Yik Yak, saying "I'm going to stand my ground tomorrow and shoot every black person I see." A suspect, Hunter Park, was arrested and charged with making a terrorist threat.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

A member of the Tunisian security forces stands guard as journalists gather at the visitors entrance of the National Bardo Museum in Tunis on March 19, 2015, in the aftermath of an attack on foreign tourists. Photo by AFP/Fethi Belaid

Last week, the Carthage Film Festival was thrown into turmoil when a suicide bomber killed 12 members of the Tunisian Presidential Guard. The bombing took place in the downtown district housing the cinemas where Africa's oldest film festival was taking place. The next day ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, as they had done in the past month when bombing a Russian passenger jet in Egypt, and attacks in Beirut and Paris.

The suicide bomber struck while I was on the flight to Tunis to attend the festival. "We have been attacked," were the first words I heard as I landed at the airport. The words were spoken in a grave voice by the communications director of the festival, who had come to meet me at the airport. Her second words were, "You're going to stay, right?" I nodded. Her phone was ringing off the hook with guests canceling visits, and others asking if they could leave Tunis. She said we had to take separate cars to the hotel.

The drive from the airport to the hotel was an eerie affair. Hardly anyone was out, and the only vehicles on the streets were parked police cars that acted as blockades stopping us from getting to the hotel. A curfew had been set for 9 PM, and we had already missed it. The driver snaked through the streets looking for a path to the hotel. Every couple of blocks, he would get out of the car to chat a few words in Arabic before returning to the car and driving on until he reached a barricade, where the police would let us past. At one barrier, there were no police, only another vehicle, and both drivers seemed to stare each other down until we moved on. A few minutes later, the driver's mother called, demanding he return home. It felt as though I was in some desolate town in a Western, not heading to Africa's oldest film festival.

Can a film festival take place at the time of curfew? Behind the scenes, the organizers had already made their decision. The show would go on.

At the hotel door, the fact that the security guard was the size of a Bond henchman, offered no comfort. Nor the three young men carrying guns, with "police" emblazoned across their jackets.

The tension evaporated when I saw the magnificent beard that drops like a bat from the chin of Tarzan Nasser, or it could've been his co-director, his identical twin brother Arab. He was sitting with the great Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, the star of their film Dégradé.

I couldn't help but chuckle over the fact that we were living out the plot of Dégradé, which tells the story of several women in a hair salon who are almost oblivious to the mini-war that is going on outside. In the hotel lobby, however, the director was just staring forward with an expression that seemed to say, "I can't get away from this shit."

The lobby bar was bustling because no one had anywhere else to go. The conversation between the badge-wearing collection of filmmakers, actors, producers, staff, and journalists was mostly about cinema, sprinkled with the odd comment about the bomb. We learned that a month-long state of emergency had been called by the government. No one in the lobby was certain if the festival would still carry on.

Can a film festival still happen when there's a curfew in place? Behind the scenes, the organizers had already made their decision. The show would go on. Sami Tlili, the artistic director in charge of selecting feature films, was busy rewriting the schedule for movies that he had been poring over for months.

"A lady said to me that any other film festival would have stopped," Tlili told me. "But we didn't want to be defeated by terror. We spent the whole night rewriting the schedule so that we could screen the films in the hours when there is no curfew, trying to make sure we showed every film that was in the selection at least once."

One of those films was Much Loved, a film about Moroccan sex workers that was banned in its homeland after its world premiere in Cannes. The lead actress Loubna Abidar was recently beaten up by extremists in Casablanca, then said she was ignored by the police when she went to report the crime. She claimed the police said that it was just desserts for her performance. Fearing for her safety, she moved to France.

Yet Tlili argued that the film wasn't programmed as a political statement, even if the choosing of the film had come to been seen as such. "The polemic that occurred around the film and in Cannes didn't come into our decision of playing the film. We chose it because of the cinematic merits. Of course we know other Arab countries refuse to show the film, but they have their own criteria and we respect their decision."

The desire not to be defeated was apparent when two days after the bomb, Much Loved played to a full house. The street was packed with attendees and fans, several straining to take photos to post on social media, celebrating free speech and open discussion. This was the event of the festival, the best rebuke to the terrorists, an appreciation of a film that shows sex workers operating in an Islamic country that doesn't try to hide their existence. It's hard to imagine that there has been a more meaningful and exhilarating screening of a film anywhere else this year. The crowd breathed pathos.

VICE Talks Film: Talking to Director Joshua Oppenheimer About 'The Look of Silence':

The decision to be the first country in the Arab world to play Much Loved is in keeping with Tunisia's position as arguably the most liberal Arab country today. After all, it was in Tunisia that the Arab Spring began in December 2010, after the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi sparked a series of demonstration that toppled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Inspired, Tunisia's neighbors followed suit, although many have since headed into the arms of warlords.

Despite—or perhaps because of—its position as the only Arab Spring country that has made the transition from dictatorship to constitutional democracy, Tunisia has already faced two major terrorist attacks this year. In March, three ISIS-affiliated gunmen shot visitors at the Bardo National Museum, killing 22. In June, a gunman killed 38 tourists on a beach in Sousse. Yet even here the Tunisian people showed their desire for democracy, when a dozen locals and workers at the hotel, formed a human barricade, challenging the gunman to shoot them first. The gunman turned away, saying, "I haven't come for you. Go away."

Parliamentary elections last year resulted in an Islamic country voluntarily relinquishing power to their secular opponents. The new constitution incorporates the Islamic heritage and secular liberal freedoms. Notably, the constitution even guarantees equal rights for women, a fact noted by Michael Moore in his new film Where to Invade Next, in which he contrasts Tunisia's progressive gender politics, especially its high number of female parliamentarians, with the paltry situation in the United States.

The decision to continue with the festival was a fitting way for the Carthage Film Festival to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The festival screened a broad spectrum of films from around the world, with a focus on Argentina and Italy this year, as well as showcasing the best in regional cinema.

On the night of the bombing Alayan was disappointed that the 9 PM screening of his film was cancelled. "Maybe it's because I live in occupied Palestine," he said. "I was even ready to go to my screening that night."

Yasmine Mustafa, the editor of The Council , a documentary about students running for elections at the UNRWA school in Jordan, was walking to her screening when the bomb hit. She had to be asked repeatedly to return to the hotel before she eventually decided to return. She called the cinematographer who was already at the cinema. "I was told that the screening carried on," she explained. "So I would like to have been there, but they cancelled all the Q&As that were to take place after the screenings."

It's fair to say that in the nights after the bomb, some cabin fever set in at the hotel. The same faces, the same dinner, no movies to invigorate us. Yet the conversation remained lighthearted. Keeping the tone joyful was Muayad Alayan, the Jerusalem-based director of Love Theft and Other Entanglements, about a petty Palestinian thief who steals a car with an Israeli soldier in the trunk.

On the night of the bombing, Alayan was disappointed that the 9 PM screening of his film was cancelled. "I didn't even think that it was in question whether the festival would carry on," he said. "Maybe it's because I live in occupied Palestine. I was even ready to go to my screening that night."

Also, with a smile constantly on her face and a glittering sweater, is Hind Shoufani, director of Trip Along Exodus, who made a film about Palestinian politics through the years, told through the eyes and writing of her father Dr. Elias Shoufani, a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Because of the time constraints, the film festival cancelled post-screening Q&As, but like many at the festival, she held a Q&A in the cinema lobby instead.

I spoke with British producer Georgina Paget, who came to the festival with her film Queens of Syria, about female Syrian refugees who performed their own version of The Trojan Women while in Jordan.

"I'm here with a documentary film that shows the human spirit triumphing over adversity and that highlights the power of art and creativity to unite and heal," Paget said. "But this year the festival itself has been testament to that. It's been truly amazing to see the way that the organizers, film makers and audiences have made sure that it's been art, and not violence, that's triumphed in Tunis."

Follow Kaleem on Twitter.

Photo by Chris Bethell

The UK housing crisis spares only a lucky few, but a bunch of students at University College London (UCL) have just scored a victory that might give those struggling with crappy housing situations reason to be cheerful.

Student digs are traditionally dives, but earlier this year, Hawkridge House in Kentish Town, London, was basically turned into a loud building site with very little notification. There was often construction noise, even in exam times, and students were told not to open their curtains because there would be builders about, peering in. There were also sightings of rats and mice.

Pissed off students decided to do something about this, and in April held a rent strike—meaning they got organized and simply refused to cough up their rent. This led to threats from the university that they would be thrown out of their classes. VICE can now reveal that they have been awarded £300,000 in compensation. 238 students were each given £1,197 —equivalent to nine weeks' rent that they had demanded.

The university complaints panel unanimously declared UCL had "seriously failed" in its treatment of its students, saying management showed a "lack of empathy" in dealing with students' grievances whilst acknowledging conditions at Hawkridge House were "unacceptable."

This comes off the back of last month's announcement that students in other UCL accommodation had also won some compensation, too. Strikers at Campbell House were awarded over £100,000 in compensation for living in conditions described as "unbearable."

VICE has been given a first look at the campaign's announcement. The triumphant tone will presumably leave UCL's management a bit nervous. It says:

"UCL Cut the Rent—a directly-democratic, student-led campaign—believes this announcement further vindicates their established position that direct action and disruptive protests are extremely effective methods for holding unelected and powerful bodies to account. With compensation for striking students now in excess of £400,000, UCL-CTR believes that rent strikes will become an increasingly important tactic amongst the wider student movement."

I spoke to Angus O'Brien, the current UCL Union Halls and Accommodation representative, who told me that the victory feels, "really good, to be honest. It's been an incredibly long fight that started over seven months ago."

But there are no plans to let up now that the students have been compensated. "The relationship between students UCL in accommodation has completely changed. They're now a little bit running scared of the campaign and hoping that we don't do it again. But this is exactly what we want to do on a wider scale across the university and get affordable rent for all students."

UCL currently makes almost £16 million in profit from renting out accommodation. "That could fund a 45 percent rent cut for everyone," said Angus, adding that the campaign's demand is for a 40 percent cut to allow for maintenance work. "We think Hawkridge House and Campbell House will provide great examples for how we can take back control over our accommodation and access to education. If that leads to a rent strike it leads to a rent strike. But the students have the power to win this battle."

The longer-term goal is to abolish rent entirely, he said. "We'll get there one day."

Angus put the cost of rent into a wider context of universities trying to milk their students for every penny they can to make up for funding cuts: "Fighting against the rent increases can be the front line of the free education movement. If universities can't exploit students in other ways, they're going to have to go to the government and say, "we need free education—this isn't working."

According to the campaign's statement, the action continues this week:

"As the next stage of the campaign, UCL-CTR will be holding a rally at the university on Friday at 13:00 to demand an immediate 40 percent rent cut and the establishment of affordable rent prices for all those living in UCL student accommodation."

Angus reckoned the rent strike could provide inspiration for other people paying sky high rent to live somewhere awful: "Universities can provide a testing ground for housing actions. It's all the same landlord, students live in the same place, there's a social element to it. It would be much harder to do it across a city than in a university, which is why it's so important to do it in university. Once there's that example of housing action and collective action, that can be applied to a larger scale because people can see it's going to work."

I asked Angus what the students were going to do with the money. "I have no idea," he told me. "Hopefully booze and stuff but probably just more on rent."

Follow Simon on Twitter.

Nintendo's Wii U hasn't had the easiest of rides in 2015. Great games have emerged—Super Mario Maker and Splatoon from Nintendo itself, plus indie productions like the definitive version of Year Walk and Affordable Space Adventures—but there have been notable absences. The desperately wanted new Zelda game has been pushed to next year with barely a meaningful update since E3 2014, and Star Fox Zero, while a little shaky in previews, has also slipped to 2016. Which puts extra pressure on Xenoblade Chronicles X, the spiritual sequel to 2010's highly acclaimed Xenoblade Chronicles for the Wii, to be the big-budget game for Wii U owners to gather around this holiday season, and to shift a few more consoles at the same time.

Monolith Soft's newest massive-scale RPG kicks off with the not-so-distant-future destruction of Earth. That's inside the first few seconds: this world of ours, vaporized. And it's not even our fault. Bummer. Some humans escape into the stars, though, and we ultimately crash land on the planet of Mira and set about making it home. The ship that's carried all that's left of the human race to this wild and wonderful world, the White Whale, becomes the city of New Los Angeles (yes, really), which serves as your base for the entire game. How this surprisingly well-established urban sprawl is portrayed sets the tone for everything that's to come, with a strange approximation of American culture skewed through a very Japanese sci-fi lens.

Your personalized player character is rescued from an escape pod by a military captain called Elma, who very quickly imposes herself as the main protagonist of the story (which is, basically: Establish humanity in its new home while also protecting it from an alien menace that I'm pretty sure could be sorted with a healthy smack by a hardback book). It's through her orders and directions that you first see Mira in its imposing size and at times breath-taking beauty – this is exemplary world building, environments dazzling in their variety and inventiveness. Everything is completely bizarre while retaining an unlikely coherency—you believe that these locations do all fit together within an ecosystem, and that the native creatures, the "indigens," have evolved to suit their surroundings over too many years to count.

As realistically otherworldly as Mira is, though, the manner in which characters interact is rather less true to life as we know it, but fascinating all the same. In one post-combat scene I saw, two of the game's selectable squad members decide that they "should go shopping later"—this is the first thing that comes to mind once they're covered in giant insect gunk, looking like they've been through the Battle of Klendathu. Then again, those slacks might not be salvageable, even on a hot wash. In New LA, there's a shop that's called Army Pizza, seemingly dedicated to all those Americans who love carbohydrates and shooting guns. But like games before it, such as Binary Domain and Deadly Premonition, these odd, stilted NPC interactions and what they mean for the overall tone are actually rather endearing.

Your character is largely powerless to what plays out around him or her, remaining mostly silent. Elma makes the decisions, and this gives XCX a fly-on-the-wall perspective, as you're experiencing the plot through your team's actions. There's a core plot to see through, naturally, but Mira is so amazingly large that side-quests and the simple pleasure to be had in exploring can easily derail the main narrative. This isn't a problem—the game is open to play at any pace, and distractions can be investigated entirely guilt-free, with the story waiting for you whenever you're ready; that next almighty boss fight isn't going anywhere. Many open-world games claim to offer freedom, but XCX really does convey the impression that the player can do whatever they want.

As you venture across the five continents of Mira, the almost overwhelming scale of this game becomes apparent. Collectibles pepper the map, which is significantly bigger than The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 combined, and gargantuan monsters wander around, owning the land they inhabit. These are the masters of this universe; you are a visitor at best, and a nuisance to be squashed if you don't step carefully. Cross the path of a larger beast, and you'd be wise to steer clear of a scuffle. Gigantic indigens are everywhere, and it can be frustrating to accidentally engage one only to see your party (of three or more) killed in a single hit, but that's what Monolith was going for. This world is one that you have to respect in order to overcome it, and those who don't will be crushed underfoot.

'Xenoblade Chronicles X', Battle Trailer

It's not alone in being slightly tarnished by them, but Xenoblade Chronicles X is plagued by fetch quests. They're the crux of both certain main missions and optional extras. At one point, I was tasked with finding three squashes in the middle of a desert continent—and this was somehow going to help me get a license piloting a Skell, one of the gigantic mechs you may have seen on the game's artwork (and that you see crash inside the first hour of the story). I spent four hours looking for those fucking things. There are also affinity missions, focusing on character relations, and these are dominated by fetch quests. It's backwards design, really, which a company like Monolith should be stepping away from after so many years in the business.

But when you do get yourself a Skell, it's a huge turning point for XCX. Not only does your means of traversing the world suddenly become a lot faster, but Mira becomes even bigger. Once the Skell is flight-ready, vertical exploration is possible, and you can visit places you could never reach while on foot. The Skells also change up combat—you're free to customize what skills you take into battle by buying them, making any previous character progression almost completely moot. By the end of the game what skills you're using on your Skell matter much more than what class you are.

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Watch VICE's film on the Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

Before then, combat is served in the same vein as an MMO, using cooldown-based action combined with a party-encompassing combo system, and it all works pretty well once you're used to not needing to actively trigger every single attack. Instead, you simply move to a new technique, and the game takes over. The classes you can choose from to build your party are all pretty standard—some focus on buffs, others are tanks, and certain allies are really just there to provide support. Your individual character progression looks a little bit different. You're able to level up each skill you use in battle and move up to a more advanced class, upgrading abilities and gear as you go along. Generally, there's enough going on in combat situations to keep you on your toes.

XCX is built upon a multitude of connected mechanics, from registering to a faction to maintaining arms manufacturers who you can fund by giving them your stock of the game's mineable currency, Miranium. These are almost completely unexplained in the game, though. I had to read the manual more than a few times just to get my head around everything—and when was the last time any of us had to read the manual?

New on Motherboard: A 'Minecraft' Player Is Recreating Studio Ghibli's Beautiful Worlds

While these obtuse systems are interlinked, the game's reliance upon them—and their somewhat muddled presentation, especially if you're coming cold to this series—leaves XCX at risk of crumbling under its own weight. Character progression doesn't work as it does in other (J)RPGs, and it can take a while for a really satisfying gameplay loop to emerge, one of risk set against reward, exploration against discovery. That will click, if you're willing to exercise a little patience, but I won't be surprised to read stories of players giving up on this game after a handful of confused hours. Personally, the simple fact that XCX is unlike anything else out there, regardless of genre, makes it a worthwhile time sink—the visuals are consistently impressive, and Hiroyuki Sawano's eclectic (to say the least) soundtrack is practically a character of its own. Persist with XCX and uniquely camp and pulpy vibes settle in, something I don't think exists in any other game released this year. Or last, or the one before that, and so on.

Console JRPGs have been stagnating for a while, so a firm shakeup like the one XCX delivers is more than welcome. It commands a huge time investment from the player, but unravelling the complexity of its world and ecology is almost endlessly entertaining. Its shortcomings can't be ignored, but the sheer scope of XCX, paired with its singular personality, qualifies this as a release that Wii U owners should take a chance on. After all, what other enormous open worlds does the console have on its side right now? And even if Zelda was out, you're never going to see Link zip around in one of these.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is released on December 4 in the UK and North America, a day later in Australia, and is exclusive to the Wii U. Japanese readers will already be familiar with the game—it came out there back in April.

Follow Sayem Twitter.

Trailer for Something Better to Come

Ten-year-old Yula lives in Europe's largest trash dump, called Svalka, just 13 miles from the Kremlin in Putin's Russia. It's the only home she's known: Heaps of garbage, where Yula and her mother, Tanya, are forced to work for an illegally-operated recycling business. They're paid in denatured alcohol (a substance similar to rubbing alcohol). The residents drink and bathe in melted snow. They eat rotten food scraps and sleep on trash in makeshift huts. Their only connection to the outside world is through the garbage of others and the glimmering views of Moscow that can be seen from the dump.

Fourteen years of Yula's life there are chronicled in a documentary, Something Better to Come, by Oscar-nominated director Hanna Polak. The film—which one reviewer called "Boyhood from a trashcan"—follows Yula from age ten to 24, through family struggles, rampant alcoholism, and a teenage pregnancy. Polak's use of cinema verité creates an intimacy and immediacy between subject and viewer. As viewers, we don't just see life in the dump—we feel it, touch it, and experience it, as much as you can from the other side of a screen. With subtlety and patience, Polak gently reveals the horror and destitution of Yula's life and the lives of those around her. But most importantly, Polak teaches us that shared grief and despair can create the truest form of kinship and community.

The film makes its debut on HBO Europe on Sunday, as well as select screenings in the United States this week. I spoke to Polak about the creation of the film, the decision to follow Yula, and the astonishing changes she saw over their 14 years together.

VICE: You must have met hundreds of homeless people while making this film. What drew you to Yula?
Hannah Polak: She was outstanding in many different ways. You could immediately see that the camera liked her, that she is beautiful, that she has something really interesting in her face, in her eyes, something very strong, something very stubborn. I liked her immediately. I thought Yula and her mother Tanya were amazing because they really supported each other and were really close with each other, which does not often happen in these kind of difficult families. Often times, the parents are drinking, the children are alone, and they actually run away from those kind of abusive houses.

What was Yula's childhood like?
In Yula's case, she actually really did have strong relationship with both of her parents. She really loved her father, even though her father was very abusive. When she was a young child, he would send Yula to buy him vodka without giving her money. She would have to go around the small province where they were living and collect garbage and sell it. She would just have to go and find vodka otherwise she couldn't come back. So, you know, I think it's something on this emotional level—that they both have this capacity to be kind .

They accepted me very quickly, both Yula and Tanya, and they were very easygoing and they would tell me things. And I wanted to listen and I wanted to be there, but Yula whose fate was completely extraordinary.

Watch: Can Anyone Shut Down Greece's Volcano of Burning Garbage?

How did you relationship with Yula change over the course of 14 years? Were there any pivotal moments in your relationship?
She realized very quickly that she could trust me , because they knew that she felt safe when I was there. They said, "OK, you can film but just be there because we don't know if she is going to run away." So this is how I was able to observe the moment.

Yula was 15 years old when she got pregnant. She didn't really have any shelter, and I took her from the garbage dump to give birth. That was the moment she completely opened to me—she was completely frightened and searching for some kind of support in me and I felt that this was a moment when I finally understood many things about their life. This girl... It's not a film, it's a life.

Almost the entire film takes place in one of the largest garbage dumps in Europe, Svalka, which seems like a lawless dystopia. Who is in charge of Svalka and what are the politics of the place?
Svalka was opened in 1964 and is considered a military area because of the hazardous materials dumped there. There is a rumor that even radioactive waste from previous years is still buried in this ground. It's a huge mountain of trash, 14-stories high, stretching two miles long and one mile wide, surrounded by a fence. There are official staff workers, some of whom came up with an idea to open different kinds of businesses at the garbage dump, including recycling centers, but these businesses were not sanctioned and operated illegally. So, poor people come from all over to work at these illegal recycling centers where they collect recyclable materials and are paid with a small amount of money or vodka, which is not really vodka, but some kind of spirit. Many people are poisoned and die from this alcohol and the people in charge buy this alcohol for 30 cents and sell it for a dollar. It's become kind of a mafia situation, in which the people from the recycling centers beat someone who goes and works for another recycling center, and the people who are on the lowest level of this hierarchy suffer the most because they are paid pennies. They can be threatened, they can be killed. No one cares for their life and existence. So you can see that it's a huge business and there is an illegal market system in place.

It sounds almost like a micro-country with its own self-contained market system.
I think that was the most shocking thing for me—I found a country in the country. Normal country laws do not apply here, because there is this fence which is dividing this garbage dump from have no rights to call the police if something happens, so then in turn, they've created a situation in which there are all these illegal things going inside and there are no investigations.

There was this one case of a woman who nearly raped; she was stabbed with a knife many times. It happened sometime after I met her and I saw that she only had one eye. I asked her, "Marina, what happened?" and she said, "I was attacked with a knife in this rape attempt." She said in the beginning she could still see, but after a month, she wasn't able to see anymore. I asked her, "Why didn't you go to the hospital? Why didn't you call me?" And she said, "Do you think I could go to the hospital? Do you know that they would start an investigation here, a criminal investigation, and I would never be able to return here?" I couldn't believe it. She had no rights.

Had you seen things like that happening—the police investigating after someone sought help or medical attention?
Yes, this is something I observed so many times. The police would come from outside to burn the houses inside, beat the people, put them in prison, for not having documents.

Related: A Volcano of Garbage in the Arctic Has Been Burning For Eight Weeks

The film is very subtle with its social commentary. We only really hear about what's going on in Russia and the world outside of the dump via the broken-down radios and what the people in Svalka see on television. Why did you choose to mediate social commentary this way?
First of all, I didn't want to create a cliché about Russia. I love this country, and I don't want to be amongst the people who just blindly criticize everything, politicize everything. I am not an outsider who is trying to find a bleak subject and talk about the country; I want to tell the stories of these people. I'm sure that many Russian people have no idea about what is happening, because no one talks about these people.

There is also the fact that this is a universal story—it's not only in Russia, but everywhere in the world that we have homeless people. I included the radio parts to create a sense of time passing and history passing. Putin came to power in 2000, and I used his career to draw a small moment in the Russian history. There is some kind of context to this place.

How do you think this film can help the people living in Svalka?
I hope that it will evoke discussion. I hope the viewers will be inspired by Yula. I don't even see the film about the garbage dump—I see this as an inspiring story, that we all are able to change our life, to be kinder and nicer; show more love and appreciation and kindness.

Follow Catherine Lee on Twitter.

Photos by the author

It was cloudy and chilly outside the Mitchell Courthouse in Baltimore on Monday morning at the opening of the trial for William G. Porter, one of the six police officers charged for the April death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. The other five implicated officers will have their own trials over the next several months; the prosecution reportedly sees Porter as a "material witness" who could be useful against the others. Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby charged the six officers in May after weeks of protests and riots that upended the city.

The trials begin at a fraught time for the city, as Baltimore has seen a dramatic spike in homicides this year, with 311 murders so far in 2015—100 more than the city saw in all of 2014. Meanwhile, police killings of people of color continue to generate outrage across the country, leaving Baltimore activists to wonder exactly how much they've accomplished since Gray's death and the tumult that followed.

The "Baltimore Uprising"—as local activists call it—began just over a year ago, on November 25, 2014. That's when protesters gathered downtown to protest Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, not getting indicted. Local activists recognize that the death of Freddie Gray carries as much significance for the national Black Lives Matter movement as other high-profile killings, and on Saturday, they held their own rally in solidarity with activists in Minneapolis and Chicago.

Looking Back at the Chaos That Followed Freddie Gray's Death

"The people from West Baltimore's poorest communities are still reeling from how the Freddie Gray incident was handled by the powers that be," says Perry Hopkins, an organizer with Communities United, a local grassroots organization. "The majority want justice, but openly say if officers only get a slap on the wrist, this city had better be prepared to experience another thwack on the hand. They mean it."

When I asked Hopkins if he thinks that means the community will begin protesting again if the officers are not convicted, he said, "Yes they'll protest...and in many different fashions."

A few handfuls of activists convened with signs and banners at the courthouse Monday, where metal barricades blocked off the areas protesters typically use to congregate. Some grew angry at what they felt were attempts by city officials to thwart their First Amendment rights. Still, those within the courtroom could hear protesters' chants from the street.

Sharon Black, a leader with the Baltimore People's Power Assembly, told me that it feels like there's a great deal of confusion right now, even among some of the most committed activists in town. "We've been phone-banking, and our sense is that people are a little bit confused about what's actually going on," she said. This makes sense given the complicated legal process, and the fact that the presiding judge imposed a strict gag order last month on the lawyers involved in the case.

"People are sort of saturated with news, and there's a bit of wearing down in terms of energy," Black said. "The bigger response from the public may only come after the trials have concluded."

Legal experts have expressed doubt that the officers will be convicted, and city officials are preparing for the likelihood that residents could revolt if they feel justice isn't served. Police Commissioner Kevin Davis says his department has spent nearly $2 million on new police riot equipment—including vans, protective gear, shields, and helmets—since the unrest over Gray's death this spring. Davis replaced the former Baltimore police commissioner, Anthony Batts, and the police department underwent a significant reorganization over the summer.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told the Baltimore Sun that city officials are having "constant conversations and planning sessions" to prepare for, and prevent, potential riots. "Community members certainly don't want the city to erupt in violence again," she said. More than 250 businesses were damaged after the April protests, almost 150 vehicles were burned, and roughly 60 buildings were set on fire.

"People in Baltimore still want to see justice for Freddie Gray, that has not changed one bit since April," said Andre Powell, a protestor who stood outside the courthouse Monday morning. "Yes the mood was much more heightened directly after the incidents but people are closely watching what's going on."

Porter, the first officer on trial, has been charged with manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. Officer Porter reportedly asked Gray if he needed a medic while traveling in the police van, but thought he might be lying to avoid going to jail when Gray said yes. The officer is a 26-year-old Baltimore native who's been on unpaid leave from the Baltimore Police Department since posting his $350,000 bail earlier this year.

A spokesperson for the Baltimore police union on Monday told VICE they were unavailable to comment on the trial. In general, however, the union has expressed outrage at the indictment of the six officers, and has called on State Attorney Marilyn Mosby to recuse herself from the case. The president of the union, Gene Ryan, called the city's $6.4 million settlement deal for the family of Gray, approved in September, "obscene."

On Monday, the court proceedings were focused on selecting a panel of impartial jurors for the case. Porter's attorneys have argued that finding a truly fair jury will be impossible in Baltimore, and that the trial must be held elsewhere.

There is new evidence to suggest that Marylanders outside of Baltimore hold rather different views on the Gray protests than those who live within the city. A recent poll found that Baltimore voters are more likely to say that racism and the lack of jobs are the biggest reasons for the unrest after Gray died. Voters across the state, on the other hand, are more prone to saying it was due to residents' "lack of personal responsibility." The same poll found that 63 percent of Baltimore voters supported Mosby's handling of the case, compared to 38 percent of voters statewide.

The presiding judge, Judge Barry G. Williams, a black man who previously prosecuted police misconduct for the federal Justice Department, said he would reconsider moving the trial out of town only after the court makes a serious effort to find a fair crop of jurors within the city. Williams made clear that he thinks it's important for people to be tried by "their peers." And trying the officers within the city, many have noted, should help lend the court proceedings greater legitimacy. "One way to ensure that a community accepts a jury's verdict is for the jury to reflect the entire community's diversity," University of Maryland law professor Douglas Colbert told the Sun.

Residents and civil rights leaders will closely monitor the proceedings, and the local NAACP chapter plans to have a court watcher in attendance for the full duration of the trial. A great deal is riding on the outcome of these trials, and for better or for worse, everybody in Baltimore knows it.

Follow Rachel M. Cohen on Twitter.

All photos and drawings from the archive of Stefan Ruiz, photographer and illustrato unknown

Stefan Ruiz first discovered photography in the early 1990s. He was working as an art teacher at San Quentin State Prison, California, and started taking pictures of the inmates who came to his classes. Crime had always fascinated him. The son of a Mexican lawyer, he grew up with dinner table stories of trials and arrests. But it was the characters behind it all that really grabbed him; his work as a portrait photographer has taken him around the world, shooting everyone from patients in Cuban psychiatric hospitals to Mexican "Cholombiano" street kids, and big names like Bill Clinton and James Brown.

But for his latest project, he's put his own lens down to bring to light a haul of lost photographs from Mexico City's scattered police archives. It started in 2010, when he came across a box of dusty mugshots in a flea market in Las Lagunillas. The owner, he discovered, had a whole load of police images taken throughout the 1950s to 1970s—from stills of armed robbery and artists' impressions of stolen possessions to portraits of the most notorious criminals of the age. Brown and frayed, the photographs were an alternative insight into life and crime in mid-century Mexico. So, Stefan set about making them into a book.

The book's mugshots are mainly of thieves, who were idolized by the country's poor. It also features mugshots of famous murderers such as student-turned-serial-killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hérnandez, brothel-owners and mass-murderers Delfina and María González, as well as scrapbooks of political radicals who were labeled as terrorists like 1960s teacher and civic leader Genaro Vazquez.

While the 20th century guerrillas and highway bandits may have been largely replaced by drug cartels and organized gangs, the entrenched and violent criminal culture that Mexico is so often associated with by outsiders is still very much present—figures show that over 7,400 intentional homicides took place nationwide between January and May, while some analysts have estimated that 80,000 organized crime-related killings have taken place in Mexico between 2006 and 2015.

We caught up with Stefan to discuss the motivation behind his book and what he thinks these images tell us about Mexico today.

VICE: Tell us how you found all these pictures.
Stefan: I go to flea markets a lot and I often buy photographs. I used to teach in a prison and I've always been a bit obsessed with crime photos. I like mugshots because I take portraits and in mugshots the portraits are pretty good—by the time the picture is taken, the person is obviously screwed. But the thing that I found interesting about these photographs was that they weren't just mugshots, they were so random. There were so many of them, too. I asked the guy at the stall if he had any more. The next time we met, he showed up with two black plastic bags full of them.

Why did you decide to publish these photographs now?
I showed the photos to a friend who works in publishing. You know, there's always crime in Mexico so it seemed relevant. Also, I wanted the photos to get out there because I thought they were good enough to share and bring up different ideas. We found this professor, Benjamin Smith, who teaches Latin American History so together we looked at different photos, trying to find connections with the photographs I had. I had already found some; I knew that one of the guys who is labeled as a terrorist in the country was teaching at the University of Mexico and was an expert in Mexico's leftist movement. And then we found some of the other people, like the American guy Joel Kaplan who escaped from prison in Mexico with a helicopter, and all of that was great because it just added a whole other level to the project. Also, the photographs talk of how crime in Mexico has changed over the years so we thought it was important to publish.

What do you think these photographs say about contemporary Mexico?
I guess what I wanted to do was to tie into the idea that everything is different but the same; things have changed but they haven't really. I mean, now in Mexico you have Narcoterrorism, which is different from the leftist terrorism of the 60s and what's going on with ISIS, but the problem is still incredibly real. Probably the difference with Mexico today is that at the time some of the crimes were maybe a bit more innocent. In the 1950s the most popular form of crime in Mexico was robbery, which is why most of the mugshots I have are of thieves. But right now with all these beheadings and bodies hanging off the bridges it's really gone to a whole other level.

Last year 43 student teachers went missing and nothing happened. The government keeps saying everything's fine and things are getting better but the druglords like Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán seem to be more powerful than the government sometimes.

Your family are Mexican migrants, and you go back there pretty regularly. Are we getting a true picture about what it's really like in Mexico from the mainstream media?
There has definitely been a clampdown on the media; it's pretty common knowledge that the government right now has been a little less friendly toward any critical media and the PRI has always been close to some of the established media. But then also the cartels have been much harsher, they've been killing journalists in Mexico like crazy.


What's it like as a photographer there?
When I was shooting the Cholombiano series in Monterrey, it was pretty hectic. There was a lot of violence in the neighborhood and it was very sketchy. Nobody goes there unless they're part of the military. There were a few times when I could feel the energy going bad, which is when you just pack your equipment up as quickly and calmly as possible, put it in the car and go.

I remember shooting there and people coming up to me saying, "Do you realize how crazy it is here?" I mean, you have police driving around in pickups with masks on, they're not showing their faces. I've been pulled over by the police a few times over the years, trying to get bribes. Especially if you rent a car, the police will know and pull you over and hold you up for a while and fish for money. I have Mexican friends who if they get pulled over by the cops and asked for their driving license, they keep the windows up and show it through the glass. Because if you hand it to them, they'll say, "If you want it back you'll need to come to the police station and pay a big fine. Or you can pay me $20 and we'll just settle the ticket here."


So what do you want your work to achieve?
I'm trying to do things that are at least a little bit informed and respectful. I try to deal with Mexico in a slightly nuanced way and I like the idea of commenting a little bit on the political situation without taking it overboard.

Follow Giulia Mutti on Twitter.


Mexican Crime Photographs from the archive of Stefan Ruiz is out now, published by GOST Books.

Photo via U2Soul

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

"Another fun e-petition." It's all I can say now. It's the year 2016 and I have been sideways-promoted to being VICE's Head of e-Petitions. We have a new site dedicated to news stories recounting the existence of unsuccessful e-petitions, and I am the head of it. It's called SiGNED. Our most successful story is an e-petition to rename Prince Charles "the Prince of Shit." It got 96,000 signatures and a push campaign on Facebook but Prince Charles still refuses to change his name. "I will not change my name," Prince Charles is saying, in a hastily arranged press conference with Sky News, "to 'The Prince of Shit.' These petitions mean nothing." But he is wrong. In 2016, e-petitions are all that matter. It is everything we have, the only news available to us. It caps off a trend that started two years ago when the government launched that website, and culminated with Britain locked in a sort of emotional void where the only way we can now communicate opinions is via e-petitions. This is all Kanye West's fault.

Trace your finger back through the timeline back until now: There is an e-petition to change the train station "Canterbury West" to "Kanye West." This is because of the word west—if you look closely, you will notice it is both a key component part of Kanye West's name (Kanye West) as well as the location of the Canterbury West (West) station. This is a humorous joke. The petition was actually first created in March, but nobody noticed it, and then about 900 people did and signed it, and that's when it became a news story. Hold on, I just need to check against my "writing up an e-petition as a news story" flowchart:

Oh, right, OK. "Sadly, Kanye (wealth be upon him) has been not always been afforded the respect he deserves," said Mark Kilner, age unknown, when describing the petition, which is about changing the train station name "Canterbury West" to "Kanye West," and which also yes has attracted some 900 signatures so far. "We cannot undo past wrongs such as retroactively giving Taylor Swift's Grammy Award to Beyoncé any more than we can save Jesus from crucifixion (although technically God kind of took care of that), but we can show our appreciation in other ways, and what better start than renaming Canterbury West Station to Kanye West Station?" Also nearly 1,000 people have signed it.

On NOISEY: We Ranked The BBC 'Sound of 2016' From Worst To Best

This is not the first time Kanye West has inspired an e-petition: You will recall, in March, that kid you went to school with who was really into Kasabian because "Serge is a lad" and it is "proper rock music" started a petition to ban Kanye from playing Glastonbury because, for the first time ever, he had bought a ticket. "Kanye West is an insult to music fans all over the world," Neil Lonsdale said, before clicking 'Like' on a "Jeremy Clarkson = LEGEND" Facebook page and playing exactly one chord on an acoustic guitar. "We spend hundreds of pounds to attend glasto, and by doing so, expect a certain level of entertainment. Kanye has been very outspoken on his views on music... he should listen to his own advice and pass his headline slot on to someone deserving!" 136,000 signatures.

I want to be upfront and tell you that I am extremely pro-Kanye. Not because of his music or his personality or anything like that. Kanye is an enormously powerful man who still, on the downlow, manages to rock a goatee, and he should be respected for that. Like, seriously: Did you ever really notice Kanye had a goatee? He could be directly standing in front of you, and you'd barely even notice it. Kanye West, every day of his life, shaves his neck and 80 percent of his chin in the exact same way your dad did after the marriage wobble in 1998, the same way Wayne Lineker shaves his face before his gooch. Kanye West is married to a woman so attractive she has essentially transcended humanhood and become instead a work of art, and he is doing this with a beard that is positively Spakian. We need to respect him for that and that alone. Everything else is just extra.

On VICE Sports: Luca Zidane and the Curse of a Genius Father

But Britain does not know how to deal with Kanye West, because he is bombastic and self-proud and so arrogant it is art, and only ever really wears big T-shirts and a surprised-but-also-sad expression, and that jams against every uptight principle Middle England holds dear. Kanye West would find it impossible to be British. Imagine Kanye West eating a Yorkshire pudding: You can't. Kanye West refusing to pay 30p at a motorway services to take a shit because "your nan's house is only 50 minutes away, Kim." Kanye West grimly trying to enjoy an overcast day on a beach in Cleethorpes. Being British is an endurance sport, sometimes, and Kanye West is not fit enough for it. He is American in a massive, cartoonish way, and so we can only react to him with extreme polarity, emotions as e-petitions.

I think it says a lot that, e-petition-wise, there are more of us inclined to tear Kanye West down for being good at what he does than elevate him to the name of a train station for being iconic. That neither end goal of the two Kanye West-flavored campaigns were ever likely to happen—why would Glastonbury listen to headline booking slot suggestions from someone who calls it 'Glasto' and has been literally once? Why would Canterbury West change its station name to make it actively less helpful to travelers?—but they are both revealing insights into how the base British mind tries and ultimately fails to comprehend the diamond-complexity of Kanye West and all his facets. Is Kanye West good? Name a train station after him. Is Kanye West bad? Politely stop him from singing at a singing show that you are in no way obliged to attend. Fundamentally, we do not know how to deal with Kanye West. The only way Britain can edge close to understanding his complex goatee'd genius is through the medium of e-petitions. We are simple cell-structures bobbing in a complex sea; we are dogs trying to use a TV remote. We are cavemen throwing rocks at a magnificent sun; we are Britons trying to comprehend Kanye.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

Image via flickr user jglsongs

There's been a lot in the UK media lately about chemsex. VICE'ss documentary on the subject follows the publication of the British Medical Journal's report on the subject. After years spent hiding away in endless sex parties and chillouts, chemsex is now out in the public consciousness for everyone to observe in all its graphic detail. And it makes a lot of people—gay and straight—very uncomfortable.

Featuring graphic scenes of real sex parties in which guys inject mephedrone, smoke crystal meth, and engage in bareback sex, CHEMSEX makes for challenging viewing. Just when you were ready to tell your mum you met a lovely new guy (on Grindr, though maybe you'll tell her you met in a bar) along comes the chemsex crisis to ruin your picture-perfect wedding.

It has been leading gay magazine Attitude's cover story. Articles have appeared in the Independent and the Guardian. Even the Daily Mail and the Sun ran editorials. Where once it existed in the subculture of gay excess, chemsex is now experiencing the glare of mainstream media attention. But the problems around sex and drug addiction have been the concern of sexual health clinics up and down the country for nearly a decade. It's something the NHS has been dealing with, being the first point of contact when people slip into comas after overdosing on GHB, or worse, when they die. The only organization that doesn't want to address it is the government.

There's even unease from within the gay community. At the Stonewall Awards last month, I was talking with one concerned gay man who told me how he felt it was inappropriate that the media was drawing so much attention to the subject. "It's not exactly the image we want to convey to the world, is it," he said. "The girls in my office would be shocked to hear about that kind of stuff."

Yes, it's true. We don't want to burst their bubble and let the girls in the office think that gay men exist outside of RuPaul's Drag Race finger snaps and witty Sex and the City repartee. Wider society is more accepting of gay men than ever before... but it only really fully accepts us as long as we're shopping and not fucking. Because sex is what technically defines us as gay men. It's not our penchant for pop music, our interest in fashion, and the arts that sets us apart; that's all just window dressing in the appropriation of culture that gay men have stitched together to give us common semiotics. The defining characteristic that differentiates gay men from the straight world is that we have sex with other men.

I know it looks like I'm spelling out the obvious here, but it's got to the stage where it's kind of necessary to do. Chemsex is a very real issue happening all over the UK. It's tearing sections of our community apart slowly, and it's spreading ominously, and won't get better until policy makers acknowledge that sex is an intrinsic part of gay identity.

Here's a fact: Gay sex is immeasurably pleasurable. That's why gay men are at it, a lot. I know this from personal experience. Bad blowjobs aside, I can tell you that the vast majority of gay men who engage in sex enjoy it. While it might not be the most earth-shattering experience every time, the desire is strong enough and the pay-off good enough to have us seek it out again. In this regard, gay men are no different to straight men. Men are men. And men enjoy sex, whether it lasts for an unsatisfying sixty seconds or orgasmic six hours. It's just that for gay men, access to sex is much easier and more accessible than your average heterosexual encounter. Negotiating this sexual minefield is tricky at the best of times for most people. Factor into this that young gay men's sexual identity is virtually invisible in wider society for the most part of their lives and it creates an emotional void in which all manner of problems present themselves.

Of course, these are generalizations and I fully acknowledge that not every gay man is a rabid sex addict. Many gay men are happy in faithful and monogamous relationships. But, comparatively, a considerable number of gay guys do not adhere to those traditional relationship structures. And as much as recent legislation makes LGBT people equal in the eyes of the law, the fact remains that gay men still make up a small proportion of the mainstream. In a YouGov survey of 1,632 adults, just 5.5 percent identified as gay. Purely from a statistical point of view, gay men, and gay sex, will always exist as something that remains on the edge of what society deems "normal." Gay sex and relationships will always be "other." It's a subject that MPs avoid, parents switch the channel away from when it appears on TV, and schools avoid addressing in the open and factual manner that young gay people so desperately need it to be presented.

The school system is where we need to start educating young people about sex and relationships in modern Britain, because it rarely comes from parents. And talking about sex and relationships of other sexualities will not turn swathes of heterosexual young people gay. But it will promote understanding, acceptance, and respect of LGBT people, and also go a long way to tackling bullying. However, ignoring LGBT relationships in schools only serves to further isolate an already vulnerable section of the community.

Researchers at Birmingham City University and Sheffield Hallam University have discovered secondary schools in Britain claiming to incorporate sexual diversity into their sex and relationship education (SRE) are in fact upholding heteronormativity.

"If openly want to discuss homosexuality, I don't think the classroom is the best place to do it. It's something that we say if you have concerns about, we have the drop-in clinic with the school nurse," said one teacher, who has been teaching SRE for over eight years.

Keeley Abbott, lecturer in Social Psychology at Birmingham City University and research lead, said this highlights a lack of understanding amongst teachers around what constitutes real inclusivity within the context of sex and relationship education. "Lesbian, gay, and bisexual students could be being left vulnerable here with a lack of any sex education provision that is relevant for them," she said.

Dr. Sonja Ellis, lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University, added, "Teachers also need to be aware of the various ways of imposing heteronormalizing practices through their use of terminology, and should be using words such as 'partner' instead of 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend.'"

It's this invisibility of gay sex and intimacy in society and the shame that comes with it that feeds into many of the issues around chemsex today. Growing up as a gay man in a world that is dominated by a privileged, white male ideology, in which religious dogma is ever-present, and where men are discouraged from outwardly embracing any emotional and compassionate complexity is perhaps the most depressingly constrictive box to find escape from. It's no wonder so many gay men suffer disproportionately high mental health issues, never mind the myriad issues faced by those from non-white cultures.

It's little surprise that when gay men find ecstatic, joyful, pleasurable release during intimate physical contact with each other it becomes something that is sought out again and again. When recognition of any emotional intimacy has been starved of you during your formative years, buried beneath layers of social pressure to conform, gay sex becomes that briefest of moments when those constraints evaporate. Throw drugs into that mix and you can have a recipe for disaster.

In the summer of 2014, I met with the National AIDS Trust to ask for their support on an initiative I devised to raise the issue that ignoring LGBT-inclusive SRE in schools was not only destructive to the future mental health of hundreds of thousands of young people, it was also irresponsible not to educate them about protecting their sexual health.

Related: Watch the trailer for CHEMSEX, released in theaters in the UK on Friday, December 4.

Good SRE for young people regardless of sexual orientation makes them aware of the pressures that are all too present in an increasingly connected world. In a society dominated by social media, where the perfect selfie sits alongside pressures of body image, and easy access to porn all means the lines between sexual fantasy and reality blur. MPs are so unbelievably out of touch with the problems facing young people today, from issues of consent to revenge porn.

Most parents haven't a clue about the kind of pressures their kids face. Good quality SRE should be taught within a framework of Personal, Social, Health, and Economic (PSHE) lessons. A Parliamentary Committee that took evidence from a huge range of professionals, teachers, and experts in the field came back with an overwhelmingly pro-PSHE report in February 2015. It identified that SRE in schools was inadequate and the government should look to implement a statutory system in all English schools. It took Education and Equalities Minister Nicky Morgan five months to respond, sidestepping every recommendation the Committee made.

Ironically, it was Neil Carmichael, Conservative MP for Stroud, who had the most damning words for Morgan. As Chair of the House of Commons Education Committee, he said, "The response made by the Government is disappointing. Ministers entirely sidestep the call made by MPs in the closing months of the last Parliament to give statutory status to PSHE. They also reject or brush over nearly every other recommendation made by the previous Education Committee in their key report published five months ago."

It's not enough to give gay adults the right to marry, when we aren't educating young gay people about the importance of constructive relationships and the value of intimacy. It's not enough to be preaching to gay men about regular sexual health check-ups and to be aware of the facts around HIV, when we aren't even giving all young people basic information about safer sex.

Education is the key to breaking the perpetuating cycle of chemsex, which is only getting worse. It's time to let young gay people know that their sexuality doesn't need to tear them apart.

Cliff Joannou is Deputy Editor at Attitude magazine.Follow him on Twitter.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week—a series exploring the people, issues, and stories in and around the world of chemsex—click here.

Photo of the University of Otago via Wikicommons

Read: Male Brains and Female Brains Look Pretty Much the Same, According to Science

Last month, students across several subjects at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand, were asked to re-sit their end-of-year exams. It was reported that there had been issues with completed exams being stolen, but while rumors bubbled on campus the incident passed with minimal wider news coverage.

That was until this morning, when a 23-year-old woman appeared in in Auckland District Court and the bat-shit crazy truth came out.

On November 7 the woman took an exam but aroused suspicion when she repeatedly asked to go to the toilet. When staff checked the bathroom they found handwritten notes, decided she'd cheated, flagged her exam, and took it away. So later, the woman—whose name has been withheld—hid in a cleaning cupboard in the university building until everyone went home for the night.

After everyone went home for the night, she emerged from her hiding place in dark clothes, a hoodie, rubber gloves, and a balaclava. Carrying an axe, she proceeded to live out every university student's late-night Red Bull–fueled exam fantasies.

Intent on finding her paper, the woman used the axe, along with a steel bracket, to smash through wood and glass. During the spree, she stole 98 completed exam scripts across a range of subjects including dentistry, politics, English, and sports medicine. One was hers, and we assume she took the other 97 because she'd already gone to the effort of axing her way in.

Not surprisingly, smashing up a public building triggered several silent alarms—one of which was set off when she tried to lift an office door off it's hinges with a hand truck. The police spent eight hours investigating the scene, and initially reported having no leads beyond being able to conclusively say the burglar appeared to have knowledge of the building.

The university is understood to have later provided electronic data, including emails and web search history, to help the police in their investigations. The woman was arrested a few days later, and the exam papers and the clothes she was wearing during the break-in were later found dumped in Otago Harbour. The university reported that despite being recovered, the scripts were in an "unusable state."

The woman will be sentenced on February 10. In the meantime, a university spokeswoman has said they are reviewing their security systems.

Follow Wendy on Twitter.

The framed photo of Stephanie that Michele keeps on her mantle. Photos by Jane Gerster

Michele Pineault remembers the phone call she received in the summer of 2014. It was a Victim Services worker telling her the Coroners Service of British Columbia needed to talk to her, that they would be calling.

Michele remembers sitting at home for hours, days, then weeks, waiting for the phone to ring. All that time, she was going crazy wondering what it was they needed to tell her. Her first thought? They had made a mistake. That the DNA of her daughter, Stephanie Lane, had perhaps not been found at a crime scene—the devastating end to a six-year search.

Finally, Michele got fed up and made the call herself.

"You cannot do this to a mother," she remembers telling the person at the other end of the line. She thought the investigation into her daughter's disappearance had come to an end—a painfully unsatisfactory end, but an end nonetheless. But now this? "You're torturing me all over again... I don't know what the hell's going on."

Michele remembers the call from the Coroners Service that came shortly after.

It was a man—she doesn't recall his name—who told her that they had remnants of Stephanie in their possession. They'd found pieces of Stephanie's bones on infamous serial killer Robert Pickton's farm.

That fall, Michele received two of Stephanie's vertebrae and an inadequate explanation: the RCMP and then the BC Coroners Service had kept the pieces of bone in a storage facility from 2002 to 2014. Why had it taken more than a decade for them to be delivered to Michele? There was no answer, just a statement that the delay could not be explained.

At first, Michele wasn't sure what to do with her daughter's remains and she couldn't think clearly enough to process what she'd been told about why it had taken so long for her to receive them.

It was not until January 2015—18 years after Stephanie's disappearance, and nearly half a year after Stephanie's remains were delivered—that Michele felt she had to speak out.

Michele and Stephanie

Stephanie Lane was born in the spring of 1976 and disappeared in the winter of 1997. Her mother Michele Pineault, who was just 17 when she gave birth to Stephanie, remembers that day and the days that followed. "We grew up together," Michele recalls.

Stephanie was a mercurial child, but a solid achiever through grade school: She won solos in the church choir and starring roles in school performances, and she was a straight-A student. Years later, when Stephanie's younger brother attended his sister's alma mater, a teacher told Michele: "You know, in your lifetime you're lucky to one gifted child... I had that in Stephanie."

But in high school, something changed; a switch was flipped. To rouse Stephanie from bed in the morning, Michele often had to dump water on her.

"She was so, so smart," Michele recounts, but, "she missed the most classes in the school's history."

Stephanie switched schools twice, but her apathy endured.

At 18, she asked her mother if she could go on a weekend trip to Kamloops with a friend—a friend Michele knew was stripping to save money for school. Michele didn't want her to go, but ultimately agreed: "If I said no, she'd go anyway."

Before that weekend was out, Stephanie called home to say she had started stripping. Michele was shocked, but also resolved to maintain the open relationship she'd always enjoyed with her daughter. And she did: As Stephanie began dancing in Vancouver under the stage name "Coco," Michele would make sure her daughter ate.

"Coco," they'd announce over the speakers, "your mom's here with your dinner."

In high school, Stephanie had been an occasional pot smoker. Now, she drank. She started doing heroin. And at 19, she got pregnant.

Stephanie was 20 when her son was born, her boy addicted to heroin. She had planned to put the baby up for adoption, but Michele—who held him and named him—asked for custody. She worried that the boy's adoptive parents might give up on him, and that she might lose track of him in the system, never to find him again.

A framed photo Michele has of Stephanie with her son before she disappeared

"You have these illusions of white picket fences, and that he's going to get adopted by a rich family," Michele cajoled her daughter. "That may not happen. So, please, please, please let me have him and I'll take care of him."

The boy entered foster care, but after less than two months, he came home to Michele on a temporary basis. Whenever Stephanie came by for a visit, she would lean in, swinging her long hair in front of his face, telling her little boy he was "mummy's baby, mummy's baby, mummy's baby." He would raise his little hands to grab the dark strands of his mother's hair.

Michele would simply watch. "It was just the joy of my life," she says.

When Stephanie's son was five months old, Michele gained full custody. There was no more talk of adoption now. Michele believed her daughter would eventually come home for good to raise the boy herself.

But months later, in January 1997—with Michele just days into a new, tough-love style of parenting—Stephanie disappeared, never to return.

"The guilt that I feel..." says Michele, almost two decades afterward.

Read more: She Was 16 When She Went Missing, But the RCMP Didn't Tell Anyone for Three Years

It wasn't until six years later, following a major break in 2002 during the police probe into the disappearance of 50 women—including Stephanie—from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside district that Michele received the news that broke her heart. Victim Services came to tell Michele that her daughter's DNA had been found on Robert Pickton's farm.

On February 5, the RCMP searched Pickton's farm looking for illegal firearms. Pickton was arrested and released in the morning—but while searching his farm, officers discovered one of the missing women's inhalers.

In the days following, as police combed the farm, stories began to appear in the press: the discovery of DNA on the farm and allegations that police ignored the case for so long because many of the women were sex workers or used drugs.

Pickton was arrested on February 22 in connection with the disappearances. Police escalated their search of his farm in the months to come.

After the arrest came the phone calls. Michele grew to hate reporters. She got one phone call, then another, always asking the same question: Did the police call you about your daughter?

She realized the reporters were following a process of elimination, "phoning everybody to find out who they actually found on the farm."

After the visit from Victim Services, Michele changed her phone number and stopped reading the newspapers.

"I just totally shut myself off," she says, "and I relied quite heavily on the bottle to get through."

Related: Watch our documentary, 'Searchers: Highway of Tears'

Robert Pickton's trial began on January 22, 2007, almost five years after his arrest. He would face only six murder charges, though he stood accused of 20 more—the trial judge having separated the six from the 20, reasoning that to try that many cases simultaneously would be unmanageable for the jury.

Pickton did not face trial in Stephanie's case.

During the trial, the Crown called 98 witnesses; the defense 31. The process lasted nine months. Michele only managed to sit in court for one week; it was simply too hard.

On December 9, the jury found Pickton guilty on six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Faith Papin, and Marnie Frey. The judge sentenced him to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 25 years. The 20 outstanding murder charges were stayed. Pickton had already received the harshest sentence possible—at the time—under Canadian law.

Read more: 27 Years of Silence: The Family of Missing Alberta Aboriginal Woman Is Still Searching for Answers

Shortly after Pickton's final appeal was denied in the summer of 2010, the government of British Columbia announced The Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. It was tasked with probing the police investigations into the disappearances of the women in the Downtown Eastside, and with investigating the charges stayed against Pickton for assaulting a sex trade worker years before his final arrest.

The Commission uncovered many problems, including: barriers for families reporting loved ones missing, gaps in investigations and families kept uninformed throughout, systemic bias, and multijurisdictional investigation issues.

But despite these nods to the victims and their families, the Commission's focus was squarely on the police: their investigations and changes that they should make when conducting investigations.This focus was evident long before the final report was delivered. Indigenous groups withdrew from the process and the independent lawyer appointed to represent indigenous interests following the withdrawals later quit, saying that while a disproportionate number of missing murdered women were aboriginal, she regretted that she "could not find a way to bring the voices of the missing and murdered aboriginal women before the commissioner."

In 2012, as the Commission delivered its final report, the BC Civil Liberties Association, West Coast LEAF, and Pivot Legal Society published a report of their own. Blueprint for an Inquiry concluded: "If nothing else, this Inquiry demonstrates what should not be done in conducting a public inquiry involving marginalized communities."

For Michele, who attended the inquiry even though she didn't want to, the low point of the experience was the revelation that the commissioner, Wally Oppal, spent one of his weekends during the inquiry filming a role in a movie about a serial killer.

"That's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," she says,"I think I came out of there more traumatized than I was going in."

Her words are a potent reminder about all that could—but must not—go wrong as the new Canadian government begins discussions about the much-anticipated national inquiry into the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women.

The Butterflies in Spirit drum next to Stephanie's photo

Fay Blaney is the co-chairwoman of the Women's Memorial March Committee. She is Xwemalhkwu from the Campbell River, but works in the Downtown Eastside.

It's partly the failure of the BC inquiry that has her worried. Little was gained from that inquiry, she says. BC's Auditor General is now investigating the status of the implementation of the inquiry's recommendations.

For a national inquiry to be done right, she says, it needs to start with the women and it needs broad terms of reference fleshed out in consultation with indigenous women and organizations of all shapes and sizes across the country.

"We really do need to address root causes," Blaney says. "The ones that will know what the root causes are, are the Indigenous women."

She'd like the inquiry to be explicit in its terms of reference: this is about violence against women, specifically Indigenous women. Colonialism and racism are issues, she agrees, but problems have often been framed as such at the expense of talking about gendered violence.

Blaney is now waiting to see whether—and with whom—the government consults ahead of the inquiry. That, she says, will be the first indication of its eventual success or failure.

The government is currently consulting with Canadians about the pending inquiry and the Department of Indigenous Affairs says, "We hope to make an announcement about the process for the design of the inquiry shortly."

Regardless of the "design," the government needs to follow through on the inquiry's recommendations, says Kendra Milne, director of law reform with West Coast LEAF, which co-authored Blueprint for an Inquiry.

"It's crucial that the federal government commit at the outset to act on any recommendations that come out of the inquiry," Milne says. "What will not be useful is another lengthy and expensive process that develops recommendations that are then just ignored."

Michele was happy to receive this gift because it was black (which Stephanie also was) and had sunflowers (Stephanie's flower).

On January 28, 2015, wearing a T-shirt with her daughter's smiling face and the words "Am I Next?" written above it, Michele spoke to members of the media assembled in Vancouver. Through tears, she recounted more than 15 long, bitter years.

She said she'd been told in 2003 that Stephanie's DNA "was found on the Pickton farm, it was found in a significant spot, and if there had been more it would have been enough to charge him with, so I accepted that."

But now, having received Stephanie's remains, she says: "Two pieces of her vertebrae was certainly enough to charge him... There is evidence to prove that he murdered my daughter and I want Robert Pickton charged with my daughter's murder."

In a January statement, the B.C. Coroners Service said the remains weren't new evidence. There have been no new charges.

"The sole issue is the unfortunate delay in returning the remains," the statement reads. "The Coroners Service regrets it cannot explain this delay as none of the current senior management team were in their positions at the time, and those who were involved are no longer employed by the Coroners Service."

Even if Pickton isn't charged again, Michele wants to know why it took more than a decade before she received Stephanie's remains.

"They call it an oversight," she says of her correspondence with the department in the months since, all in the hope of more robust answers. "I call it a fuck up."

Michele outside her new home in Surrey, BC, with a photo of Stephanie

Michele moved into a new home in Surrey, BC a few months ago.

On a mantel near her door, she has placed her photo of Stephanie and her drum from Butterflies in Spirit—a dance troupe that raises awareness about missing and murdered indigenous women. She has placed a photo of mother and daughter together, taken when Stephanie was a toddler, and next to a photo of Stephanie with her own toddler son. In the photos, everyone looks content.

In the cabinets behind the dining room table, Michele has placed a black angel with a bouquet of sunflowers. It was a gift from a friend to honor Stephanie—half black, half Indigenous and gone too soon—and to acknowledge the last perfume she wore: Sunflowers by Elizabeth Arden for Women.

It's been more than a year since Stephanie's vertebrae were returned to Michele. They wait in their clear tubes in their clear plastic bags in a purple box decorated with butterflies.

Michele's grandson, Stephanie's only child, has a plan to say goodbye. They'll go to the Vancouver park where there's a memorial bench with Stephanie's name on it. It's where they've gone every year on Stephanie's birthday. Sitting on the bench, they'll release little lanterns into the sky.

Not yet. Michele is hesitant: There have been so many mistakes; who's to say there hasn't been another? What if the vertebrae she received aren't actually Stephanie's?

"There is absolutely no doubt about the identification," said a spokeswoman for the BC Coroners Service via email, adding that this has been explained to Stephanie's family.

But Michele's continuing her fight to have the remains reexamined and the details of how and where and when mistakes were made released.

"There are too many errors," she says, "and I took them at face value. I trusted everything they told me as truth and now it wasn't."

So Michele and her grandson wait for a sign that may never come.

Follow Jane Gerster on Twitter.

Illustration of Lord Norman Fowler by Dan Evans

This World AIDS Day, VICE is exploring the state of HIV around the globe. Watch our special report, "Countdown to Zero," tonight on HBO at 9 PM, and to get involved visit red.org and shop (RED).

In 1987, an HIV diagnosis was catastrophic. Until March of that year, no drugs proven to prolong the lives of HIV-positive people had been approved for use, and thousands worldwide had already died after contracting the virus.

In the UK, the loudest media coverage of the HIV/AIDS epidemic came from tabloids spreading scare stories as fact, which is why a lot of people actually believed you could catch HIV via a toilet seat or by sharing a cigarette. This, of course, was dangerous in its own right: with so much misinformation out there, it was difficult for people to access the information they really needed.

Lord Norman Fowler, then Conservative health secretary, saw to it that this changed. In 1987, Fowler and chief medical officer Sir Donald Acheson persuaded Margaret Thatcher's government to send a leaflet titled "AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance" to every household in the UK. The booklet laid out—too graphically, by the standards of some in Thatcher's cabinet—exactly how you get HIV and how to protect yourself against it.

They supported the campaign with a TV ad that looks a bit like a spoof horror trailer if you watch it now: a pair of hands engraving "AIDS" into a gravestone while John Hurt does a scary voiceover. But there's no doubt it was effective: it terrified people into talking about and practicing safe sex, and other countries—including America, whose government hadn't conducted any national campaign by that point—started to follow the UK's lead.

Nearly 30 years later, Lord Fowler still does his bit in the fight against HIV/AIDS. In 2011, he chaired a six-month investigation into how the UK has dealt with preventing and treating the virus, and in 2014 released the book AIDS: Don't Die of Prejudice after traveling to nine countries around the world and finding HIV/AIDS sufferers treated with ignorance, prejudice, and intolerance.

During the filming of VICE UK's new documentary, CHEMSEX, we sat down for a chat with Lord Fowler. Below is that interview edited for length and clarity.

The "AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance" advertisement released in 1987

VICE: To start, can you give us a rundown of what you did and the challenges you faced in raising awareness about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s?
Lord Norman Fowler: The first thing you've got to remember about the 1980s—and the late-1980s particularly—is that although there was a very big increase in the number of people with HIV, there were no drugs and no way of actually tackling the issue. HIV was a death sentence, and therefore you had hospital wards full of young men, mainly, who were dying. The only thing you could really do was try to prevent new people from becoming infected.

Public education was obviously a big thing—communicating that this was how you got HIV, that you could avoid it by taking pretty sensible precautions. As far as drugs were concerned, again, if you contracted HIV from shared needles, the obvious thing to do was provide clean needles. And that's exactly what we did, but it wasn't without controversy, because many people said, "OK, you give them clean needles, surely that's just encouraging drug taking and crime." In 2011 we did a select committee report on this. I asked the chief constable, "Has there been any increase in crime because of the needles?" Not one of them said there had.

And what about the sexual side of things? What were the key challenges in getting across the sexual health messages?
What we in the health department thought we had to do was get a direct message to the public. Again, not everyone approved of that message. I don't think Margaret Thatcher was that keen on the message. But my view was that if we got over a direct and punchy message, then people would take notice. The leaflets we sent to every household in the country were entirely explicit about how you got HIV, and again there were some complaints about it, but these policies had the impact of bringing down HIV and sexual disease rates. The tragedy is that the lesson hasn't been learned: that you do need good prevention if you're going to tackle not just HIV, but sexual disease generally.

Yeah, last year we saw a record high of men who have sex with men (MSM) being diagnosed as HIV positive in the UK.
I think the oomph has gone out of the campaign. People are complacent. There's the view that "we've now got the drugs—it would be a pity if you got HIV, but, you know, no big deal." That's an attitude that should be challenged. We don't put anything like enough emphasis on prevention in this country. The figures we got out of the government were that they were spending £800 million if you don't take prevention seriously.

What's happening now with chemsex is that all the issues you dealt with separately—the drugs, the needle issue, and the sexual health issues—are all interrelated. How do you think that changes potential preventative strategies?
The short answer is that you've got advertising agencies who look at this, who study it, and then make proposals. My campaign of slightly shocking people and saying, you know, "If you don't do this then you're going to die," clearly that isn't the campaign you'd run now. There's no neat answer to your question, except to say that you've got to measure the position as it is today and make the appeal that is relevant today, particularly to young people.

What would you say to those who argue that sex education is redundant in an age where people are exposed to sex so early through technology—where, for gay men on apps like Grindr, it takes something like four to six conversations to be introduced to chems, and six to eight conversations to be introduced to injecting?
It's not just sex education, but also relationship education, and you need to start that at a relatively early age. My belief is: if you give people knowledge, then most of them will make the right choices. If you don't give them knowledge, you're going to find that a lot of them might make the right choices, but that a lot of them will not. We called the original campaign "Don't Die of Ignorance" because people were ignorant of how terrible the consequences of their actions could be. The effects aren't as terrible , and that is one of the challenges, but I've not yet met anyone with HIV who thinks it's just a matter of no consequence. It is a matter of consequence: it has all manner of impacts on your life, and that needs to be communicated.

In the 1980s it was "don't die of ignorance," and the subtitle of your latest book is "Don't Die of Prejudice." Do you think that, even in the UK, we've still got a long way to go until the LGBT community feels...
Secure? Yes, I think we do. Fortunately we don't have to go as far as some countries I've been to, like Uganda or Russia, where gay people are persecuted and prosecuted. So obviously the position here is better than that, and we've made some rather important improvements and reforms—equal marriage being one of them—but if you ask me, "Do you think that homophobia has disappeared in this country?" The answer is, "No, of course it hasn't."

What do you think of the argument that there's a sort of self-destructive streak within the gay community? Obviously drugs have been combined with sex for years, both by gay and straight people, but the way drugs are taken now in the chemsex scene seems like a step beyond all that.
I think these things go a bit in waves. When we started, injecting heroin was a big issue, and then it's sort of evened out. This isn't a question that's possible to answer in a few words, but I think that, in a sense, people are not as concerned about HIV as they were. The idea that you can deal with all this with one pill is, to a certain extent, true—but there are big, big disadvantages to that , which we don't spell out. And because we don't spell them out, people might think, 'Perhaps we can experiment a bit more, going down this particular drugs street.' It's more complicated than that, but this is what we should be looking at, because without putting in any effort, you're not going to win.

I suppose the difference is that, in the 80s, the campaign was for blanket awareness, whereas with chemsex it's a problem that affects a very specific community. How do we turn this into a public awareness issue? Is it a public awareness issue?
It's a very good question. There are a lot of local, slightly disjointed campaigns, which I think would be made a lot stronger if they were done against a background of a general knowledge of what was taking place and what the dangers and the difficulties were. But then you're quite right: you should actually have your local campaigns—your specific campaigns—on the back of that.

Related: Watch our trailer for CHEMSEX, released in UK theaters on Friday, December 4.

You dedicate a significant portion of AIDS: Don't Die of Prejudice to current trends in the gay community, including chemsex. During your research, what did you find most interesting or concerning?
What I find most concerning is the level of prejudice and discrimination toward gay people, against lesbians, against transsexuals, against people who take drugs, and so on. That's by far the most important thing that I write about in the book. And the tragedy is that, in many ways, the prejudice is getting worse, not better. You know, obvious places like Russia, Uganda, Nigeria, Ukraine—a whole range of countries where the position now is actually worse than it was ten years ago.

It's a big human rights issue, but it's also a public health issue. If your aim is to get people coming forward to be tested—and remember, half the people with HIV in the world don't know they have HIV, or are certainly not diagnosed—an enormous barrier to getting tested is the prejudice and discrimination, because you're not going to go forward and get yourself tested if you think there's a prospect that you're going to get prosecuted or ostracized.

But then you have London, which is so much more tolerant than any of those places you listed, where there's more intravenous drug use in the gay community than ever before. Why are there more and more people falling into what the British Medical Journal have called a "public health priority"?
I mean, this is a minority of the gay community. I think this is half the trouble with this debate—that people talk about gay people taking drugs, and then you get this impression that all gay people take drugs and are all into chemsex, which is rubbish.

It is a minority, absolutely, but perhaps not an insignificant minority. And there are these studies—you know, the Lambeth School of Hygiene, the London School of Tropical Medicine—that suggest that the increased sexualized drug-use is having a direct impact on HIV in collections and diagnoses.
I'm not dismissing it, but I think it's worth putting it into context, because if you're not careful you can stigmatize everyone who's gay—which is ridiculous. But I'm certainly not dismissing what's happening. What's happening should be a matter of concern for anyone who is running any policy in this area. You must just try to keep up to date and try to find the right messages for today.

How does it make you feel personally that, in many cases, there's a more flippant attitude toward HIV, especially among young people? I mean, in making this film we've seen it—lots of people who don't care, and actually a community of people who are actively on the hunt to contract HIV, because once they get it they can just take the pills and don't have to worry about getting it any more.
I think that is disastrous. It's disastrous in the sense that it is, again, an aspect of ignorance, because if you contract HIV it isn't consequence free. Even when you've got your anti-retroviral drugs it's not consequence free. And everyone who has got HIV says exactly the same to me: you have all kinds of issues that will come up—mental issues, social issues, all kinds of issues come as a result. To be flippant about it, and to take no care, is just absolute folly. So, somehow, one has got to fight against that.

And that comes back to public education.
Yes. The question is: what are we going to do to challenge that casual attitude? We've got to give it a lot of thought and put a lot of effort into challenging that attitude, because it's in the public interest that we do so; it's in the interest of, particularly, young people that we do so. There's not one solution that you pick; there are a range of policies that you have to follow. But somehow you've got to get HIV and AIDS back onto the agenda, and you've got to get public education back onto the agenda as well.

Thank you very much.

If you or anyone you know is seeking advice about HIV/AIDS, visit the website of the Terrence Higgins Trust.

Chemsex support is available in most sexual health clinics. 56 Dean Street offers one-to-one chemsex support; visit chemsexsupport.com. Antidote (London Friend) offers drug and alcohol support for the LGBT community. Call 0207 833 1674.

CHEMSEX is released in the UK on Friday, December 4. To see a full list of theaters showing the film, click here.

CHEMSEX will be released on DVD and On-Demand in the UK on January 11.

To read the rest of the articles from our Chemsex Week—a series exploring the people, issues, and stories in and around the world of chemsex—click here.

Photo by Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photos

This World AIDS Day, VICE is exploring the state of HIV around the globe. Watch our special report, "Countdown to Zero," tonight on HBO at 9 PM, and to get involved visit red.org and shop (RED).

Today is World AIDS Day. Started in 1988, World AIDS Day has been bringing people together in the fight against HIV while raising awareness and education. According to the World Health Organization, over one million people died from HIV-related causes last year, bringing the total to more than 34 million lives globally so far. The WHO estimates that 36.9 million people across the world were living with HIV at the end of 2014. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected region, with approximately 25.8 million people living with HIV in 2014. The region accounts for a disproportionate 70 percent of the estimated two million new cases each year worldwide.

I was diagnosed HIV-positive in 2011. Today I'm 25. I find that a lot of people my age are pretty detached from the realities of HIV, so I thought I'd share my personal experience and point of view of being a young and positive American in 2015. Here's my A-to-Z list of what it's like being HIV-positive.

AIDS Jokes

When I first found out that I was positive, in March of 2011, I was inundated for weeks with pamphlets, articles, and YouTube videos that were all very sterile and sad. Without levity, without smiles, it was hard not to feel drained. Then I went on Twitter and read some AIDS jokes and actually managed to laugh.

For so long after my diagnosis—weeks, months—my brain was stuck on my status. I couldn't think about anything else. AIDS jokes allowed me to stay in that headspace but experience something besides dread. I was able to think about my status, my body, my life, in a way that didn't make me feel awful. I don't have AIDS; I may never have AIDS. But AIDS jokes, for as terrible and dark as they are, allowed me to find humor in what I assumed was my fate. AIDS jokes are cruel and wrong and, in truth, shouldn't even be a thing. But they made me feel like a person during the saddest point in my life.

Boning

Being positive doesn't mean that I'm celibate—I have a healthy sex life. I'm young, gay, and I live in New York. I'm surrounded by gay men who are either positive or are on preventative medication (A. K. A. PrEP). Because I'm upfront about my status, there's always a precedent of safety, honesty, and forwardness before any clothes come off.

Cure

Every day it seems there's another article being published along the lines of " A Cure for AIDS: Scientists Say It's 'on the Horizon,'" or "Oregon Researcher: On Doorstep of HIV Cure?" To me, all of these articles are little more than clickbait. Articles and news stories proclaiming that a cure is on the way have been coming out for decades now. If I actually got excited every time one of these types of pieces came out I would be sorely disappointed all the time. That said, I do have hope that one day a cure will happen; just not any time soon. When/if a cure does come about, my guess is that it'll be in the form of a shot, or a series of shots. I like to imagine that when it becomes available I'll be in my mid 40s, that I'll have the day of the last injection marked on my calendar with a big smiley face. When/if I am finally cured, I'll cry. I'll eat cake and drink champagne and start planning a trip to Taiwan, a place that I'm barred from entering because I'm positive. Still, I'm not holding my breath.

I remember when I first came out as gay, my mom made me promise not to catch HIV. When I had to come out to her as positive, she just hugged me.

Dating

In the past year everything has changed in my dating life, thanks to PrEP, a new daily medication that negative people can take to prevent HIV transmission. Before PrEP, I would never think of giving out my number, meeting someone at a party, or going on a date from Tinder. I was 100 percent in on sero-sorting—only dating someone with the same HIV status as me. However, with PrEP, there are so many negative guys who are open to dating someone positive that my dating life is exploding. My sea has five times as many fish in it all of a sudden.

Education

Holy fuck, you do not realize how uneducated people are about HIV until you become positive and have to learn everything yourself. It's as if society stopped paying attention in 1991. From what I can tell, most of the general population is completely oblivious to the modern realities of HIV. People are still ignorant and scared; they have no idea how far we've come. Fortunately, there's the internet.

Family

I remember when I first came out as gay, my mom made me promise not to catch HIV. When I had to come out to her as positive, she just hugged me. The only family members I've told about my status are my parents, and they've been nothing short of completely supporting and wonderful. I love you, Mom and Dad.

Going on a Trip

There are some countries in the world that I can't travel to because I'm HIV-positive. Their legal guidelines say that I should be barred from entering. But it's not like I was dying to go to Singapore anyway.

Health Care

Before learning my status, I was 100 percent trusting of doctors, nurses, and health-care professionals in general. It wasn't until I had a doctor that made me feel like a complete failure of a person that I realized a stethoscope is essentially the same as a priest's collar—something that's meant to inspire trust, but is not a guarantee. Now, I have a gay doctor who's married to a man who's HIV-positive. It's amazing how impactful it can be to go to the doctor and hear your status spoken and see a smile on the speaker's face, to have nurses touch you without flinching, to be in a space where you know you'll never be judged or treated like a specimen. Having the right health care is extremely important. (If you need help, GLMA is a great resource.)

Insurance

I had no idea how big of a deal insurance is until I found out that I was positive. Insurance companies are essentially Satan incarnate, but they're also the only reason that I can afford to take a medication that costs around $3,000 a month. So at least Satan is on my side.

Jail

Here's a theoretical situation: Let's say I meet someone; we click, and I tell them that I'm HIV-positive. They understand, they're cool with it, and we get it on. They develop feelings for me; I'm not into them and cut it off. But what if they're vengeful? They can go to the police, tell them that I never disclosed, that I had unprotected sex with them, and that I endangered their life. Without any physical evidence, I can be arrested, sent to trial, and it's their word against mine. Let's further imagine I'm faced with a judge who doesn't know anything about HIV, who is biased against me based on stigma and stereotypes. Meanwhile, I'm publicly defamed, my family, friends, and employer all become aware of my status, and I risk losing everything. This is part of why Charlie Sheen had to go on the Today show and make his status public: He was being blackmailed by people threatening to use HIV criminalization laws against him. These laws say that if you have sex with someone and don't tell them that you're positive, they can press charges against you in a court of law and you can go to jail. Although HIV criminalization laws are meant to "protect" the public, these laws can be harmful because they de-incentivize HIV-negative people from getting tested and HIV-positive people from disclosing their status.

And on the topic of jail, HIV remains a serious issue. Inmates in federal and state prisons are disproportionately affected by HIV, along with other health problems, and there were over 20,000 inmates with HIV/AIDS across America—a little over one in a hundred inmates are affected.

VICE on HBO: Watch the trailer to 'Countdown to Zero':

Kids

I can still have kids being HIV-positive. It may cost a bit more, but it's still definitely doable. Women living with HIV can greatly reduce the risk of passing HIV to their babies by taking a combination of medicines (called antiretroviral therapy or ART), and individuals or couples seeking to adopt cannot be legally discriminated against for having HIV.

Labs

I get my blood drawn every six months. The phlebotomists at the lab are really nice and tape vampire cartoons to the wall so I don't have to watch the blood being drawn. It can be a bit of a hassle, but it's nice knowing that my health is being monitored so well.

Medication

I have a gay magazine from 1983 framed in my bedroom. On the back cover is an ad for a multi-vitamin called "Vita-men." The tagline for the ad? "Fight Back!" AIDS was close to its peak in 1983, and the only defense anyone could come up with was a vitamin sold through the mail.

Every morning I take a giant mauve pill called Triumeq, a powerful medicine consisting of three different HIV-fighting drugs. With this one pill, I'm essentially being kept alive indefinitely. The medicine prevents the virus from multiplying and helps my body kill off almost every copy of the virus in my blood, which keeps me healthy (see: section U/V below). My expected lifespan is close to that of a negative person while I'm on this medication.

If I were religious, I would build a shrine to Triumeq. In my view, it's an incredible feat of human engineering, on par with the moon landing and the internet. Nonetheless, I remain worried about how this crazy powerful drug is affecting my body, how it'll affect me as I age. Will I have caved-in cheeks and a huge stomach from lipodystrophy, a side effect that has been associated with some HIV medicines? Will my kidneys shut down? Will I need a new liver in 20 years? I figure Elon Musk will have some way of 3D-printing new body parts in the future, and I'll be good to go. That's my only hope, seeing that I'm barred from ever receiving an organ transplant because of my status. Still, whatever happens, I'm lucky to be able to take medication in the first place, as these life-saving treatments in other parts of the world, such as Africa or Asia, are drastically less accessible. So I really can't complain.

Photo by the author

I never know if they're going to silently judge me, pity me, fear me, or just flat-out reject me. If I tell someone my status, it's because I'm fairly confident that they're a reasonable, educated person whom I can trust.

Nonprofits

Amazing people doing hard work just because they feel like making the world a better place for people like me. It's really touching. There are so many HIV/AIDS non-profits out there filled with really well-intentioned people— GMHC, Callen Lorde Community Health Center, and Lambda Legal, to name just a few. When I first found out my status, I was approached by a local nonprofit that helped me set up doctor visits, offered me free counseling, and helped me educate myself about HIV. That same group was also the lead sponsor of sex education, free condoms, and open testing in my city. Any time there's an AIDS walk or a fundraising initiative, I give. These people are saints.

PEP and PrEP (post-exposure prophylaxis and pre-exposure prophylaxis)

PEP

Not many people know this, but there is essentially a Plan B for HIV. If you have unprotected sex and you suspect that you may have been exposed, you can go to the emergency room and be given a series of medications that will essentially prevent you from getting HIV. It's not a sure bet by any means, but it can change the game. Had I known about PEP when I was younger, there's a good chance I could be negative right now.

PrEP

For those who don't know, PrEP (A. K. A. Truvada) is a daily medication that a negative person can take to prevent becoming HIV-positive. When taken correctly, it essentially acts as an immunization. If you "hook up" and/or have sex without condoms, you should talk to your doctor about getting on PrEP right away.

On VICE: 'Stopping HIV? The Truvada Revolution':

Quick Testing

Getting tested for HIV can take as little as 20 minutes. There's no reason you can't find the time to get tested. GMLA is a great resource for this, too.

Rejecting Shame

I'm combining R and S here. HIV inflicts the most damage before you're even infected. The most pain you feel being HIV-positive comes from when you first find out your diagnosis, being slammed to the ground with all of the shame and stigma society has surrounding the virus. I only was able to feel healthy and sane when I finally realized that most of the struggle was coming from worrying about other people's opinions about me and how I'll function in a world of HIV-negative people.

Telling People

That said, I keep being HIV-positive private. Not because I'm ashamed—it's just that it's easier and safer. I never know a person's attitudes, political beliefs, or education levels surrounding HIV. I never know if they're going to silently judge me, pity me, fear me, or just flat-out reject me. If I tell someone my status, it's because I'm fairly confident that they're a reasonable, educated person whom I can trust. The few times I've told someone, I'm usually the first positive person they've ever met. Most times I'm greeted with respect, but a few times I've inspired tears and long questioning sessions. Which is chill—I'm glad to be able to expand someone's view. But I'm also not trying to be a Lifetime original movie.

Undetectable Viral Load

Here I'm combining again, this time U and V. The term viral load refers to the number of copies of the HIV virus in your blood. The higher the number, the more copies of the virus in your system, the worse it is for your health, and the more likely you are to pass it on. With medication, your body can kill off copies of the virus to the point where it's not even detectable by modern testing techniques. When you're undetectable, your body doesn't have to fight so hard against HIV, leaving it free to take care of other things, like a cold or the flu. Also, when you're undetectable, it's very difficult to pass on the virus.

Who Gave It to Me, and Am I Mad at Them?

Fortunately, I know when and how I was infected. I had sex without a condom. It was with someone I had been hooking up with on and off for around two years. I felt really comfortable with him, and when it came time to go for the condom we just sort of bypassed that step. At the time, he had no idea that he was positive. That's how it usually goes. The majority of HIV transmissions occur via people who don't know their status.

And no, I am not mad at him at all. I can't hold anger at someone for failing what was ultimately my responsibility. No one was responsible for protecting me from HIV but me. I chose to have unprotected sex; it wasn't forced upon me. I can't harbor any negative feelings toward him. That would just perpetuate this false predator/victim mentality around HIV, this idea that it's always the positive person at fault.

Explaining Myself

Only about one in five straight people say they used a condom the last time they had sex. Plan B is sold over the counter. Besides test tube babies, every single person on Earth was created via unprotected sex. I had unprotected sex; just like most sexually active people have at some point. But because I was infected with HIV some would have you believe that I'm dirty, evil, insidious, stupid, and deserve to die. These are the same people who think because I'm HIV-positive, I should be segregated from the rest of humanity, shunned, and pitied. I'm really over being demonized and stigmatized. I hate having to explain myself, to justify wanting to be treated as a person instead of as case study or a monster.

Zero

The number of new infections coming from a recent trial of PrEP users. Seriously; if you have sex, get educated about PrEP and PEP.

The late End Times preacher Harold Camping. Photo: copyright 2012 Universal Life Church Ministry via Wikipedia

We should all count ourselves lucky. This century alone we've already survived at least 20 raptures, with our latest narrow escape coming just over a month ago. On October 7, the world was supposed to have been consumed by flames, the majority of the global population burnt to cinders, what with God being notoriously picky when it comes to dishing out his golden tickets.

This cheery PSA was delivered by Chris McCann, leader of the Philadelphia-based religious group eBible Fellowship, who told the Guardian: "According to what the Bible is presenting, it does appear that the seventh of October will be the day that God has spoken of: in which the world will pass away."

Sure enough, the seventh rolled around and there were no all-engulfing flames. No ghostly horsemen plucking bad souls from their commutes and dropping them into Hell. Just a reminder that pregnant women should avoid alcohol and the announcement of this year's Bake Off winner.

To most, these failed doomsday predictions are just Twitter fodder—thousands of people making the same joke, then forgetting all about it, and just getting on with their lives. But for those who genuinely thought they'd said their last goodbye to their closest loved ones, before finding they've once again been denied entry to the pearly gates, it surely can't be such an easy thing to forget. So what actually happens to these believers? How can they continue to believe in the aftermath of a very publicly failed prophecy?

The rapture, like any good party, requires a lot of preparation. First, there must be the handing out of the invitations. In 2011, for instance, End Times preacher Harold Camping used his radio station, Family Radio, to spread the word of the impending doomsday on May 21 that year—a date he then revised to October 21 when the hellfire failed to materialize.

Then, depending on your preacher, there might be a practice run. David Berg, founder of the religious movement Children of God (later rebranded The Family International after a series of controversies and allegations of child abuse within the sect), took a more hands-on approaching to getting his followers prepped for the various apocalyptic events he had predicted.

Flor Edwards as a child, when she was part of the Children of God movement

Flor Edwards grew up as part of the CoG in the 1980s and 90s, so I emailed her not long after McCann's failed prediction to ask her more about life before and after a failed prophecy. She told me that, in preparation for the end of days, men from the camp where she lived would storm her dorm unexpectedly as she slept.

"The Rapture would be preceded by the Great Tribulation, or 'The Last Days.' The men coming in were part of the Antichrist's army, I think," she said, explaining that the people running into her room with guns and batons were mimicking this supposed military force.

I suggested that it must have been terrifying to face the prospect of an early death from such a young age. "Of course it was terrifying," she said. "We thought we'd be saved, but the threshold to get there would be death, and perhaps we would have to meet our fate as martyrs. By the time came, I was a young preteen living in America. I was no longer scared of death."

Inevitably, there are a number of obstacles that a group might face in the wake of a failed prophecy: First comes rationalizing the big apocalypse-shaped elephant in the room. What one must remember, though, is that God is never wrong—a doomsday misjudgment is solely down to a human error, not a godly one. (Deuteronomy 18:21-22: "You may say in your heart, 'How will we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?' When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.")

So what may sound like a dodge to you and I is an honest mistake on the shoulders of a prophet. The prophet will return to the Bible to find more clues of when the doomsday will actually occur, although many—including Matthew the Apostle, who kicks of the New Testament—say it is a mistake to try to determine one. (Matthew 24:36-44: "But about that day and hour no one knowns, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.")

Once that's been cleared up, out comes the damage control. Admitting outright failure threatens a group's ability to continue, so many prophets will just move the rapture date along a bit, making sure to keep it vague. According to Flor, after 1993 passed without a single doomsday, Children of God founder David Berg began distributing newsletters to followers entitled, somewhat ambiguously, "It Could Happen This Year."

Was this was the start of the group's unravelling? I asked Flor. "This was definitely the 'unravelling of the group,'" she said. "There was almost a sense of humiliation that the predictions 'the prophet' was making were not coming to pass. That was the hardest pill to swallow for most of his followers."

When this kind of thing happens, some, like Flor and her family, will leave. After 1993, Berg had insisted they move back to America from Thailand, where they were living at the time, to continue evangelizing. But they felt jaded, and in 1996 Flor. "You have to understand that Father David didn't dump these ideas on followers from the beginning," she told me. "It started as a very innocent, hippie love-shack kind of movement. Young people looking to make the world a better place and create change."

But for those who decide to leave, there are always more who stay. Believers don't lose faith easily. Like Abraham, many followers believe they're being tested by God, so every failure is an opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty. So they carry on: they campaign, proselytize and pray harder than before. There will always be a new rapture date, because if there is nothing to look forward to then the group will fall apart. This glimmer of hope, no matter how vague, allows prophets to continue their work without eliciting too much pressure.

Look at Camping: He somehow predicted six failed doomsdays without being hailed a fraud, and even after his death Family Radio lives on.

Chris McCann himself is a follower of Camping's teachings. His eBible Fellowship—which he has pointed out is an online organization, not an actual church (though it does hold monthly meetings)—has also managed to retain large numbers of its followers after its October 7 mis-prediction.

The eBible Fellowship declined to speak to me for this article, emailing me the following response when I asked them what they do when the world fails to end: "I'm afraid we would be too boring for your story. We simply return to the word of God, the Bible, and keep studying it. That's it."

Viktor Vasnetsov's 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.' Image via Wikipedia

However, their site, oct7thlastday.com, states: "E Bible Fellowship tends to view a 'passed date' for its end as some sort of victory and celebrates it as though it means it will never end. And yet, the truth is that the world is in its death throes... It's just a matter of when that remains in question."

At the time of writing, predicting the world's end has a perfect failure rate of 100 percent. But as Lorenzo DiTommaso, a Professor of Religion at Concordia University, tells me, it isn't as simple as followers of these End Times preachers just seeing the light. "Like any deeply held worldview, a person's theological worldview is an expression of one's core views," he said. "Persons usually don't choose or change belief systems like they're buying fruit at the market."

Religion and a person's relationship to it is complex and resilient, and so doomsdays will continue to be set and believed. And while it's easy to dismiss those who believe so fervently, even in the face of such strong social antagonism, there aren't many of us who can put our hands up and say that we haven't once done something vaguely similar. Everyone has believed something absurd; I once spent $27 on a batch of Kony 2012 posters in the belief that it would somehow impact the ethical decisions of Ugandan guerrilla armies. Embarrassing in the aftermath, yes, but I survived.

And despite the predictions of these doomsday prophets, it looks like their followers will, too.

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Photo via Flickr user JohnPickenPhoto

After weeks of anticipation and subsequent outrage over the release of the video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by a Chicago cop, the city's police superintendent was fired early Tuesday, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Garry McCarthy, who was previously the top cop in Newark, New Jersey and an operations chief in New York City, has overseen Chicago police since well before McDonald's death at the hands of Officer Jason van Dyke last fall. Van Dyke, who's been charged with first-degree murder for the incident, was freed on $1.5 million bail Monday. Apparently, between that case and the tragic video of a local nine-year-old being brutally murdered, allegedly by a gang that had beef with his father, Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided a head needed to roll.

"Now is a time for fresh eyes and new leadership," Emanuel said at a morning news conference, where he acknowledged the public's trust in his police force "has been shaken and eroded."

Critics are pointing out that Emanuel and Cook County Prosecutor Anita Alvarez did everything they could to delay the release of the McDonald shooting video, as the mayor faced a re-election campaign shortly not long after the incident in October 2014. It's fair to ask why McCarthy is the only one paying any kind of price. But if nothing else, in a city where police accountability is virtually nonexistent, that Van Dyke has been charged and the police leader is gone suggest that the city government is not totally blind to the problems activists have been shouting about for years.