A Jewdas political action in London. All photos courtesy of the author.

Growing up with the knowledge that you have a homeland, a country that was fought for in your name, to be a place of safety should you ever face persecution for your culture and your faith, is a comforting thought. This is what that the state of Israel promises the eight million Jews living in diaspora communities around the world.

The Israeli Government is mounting the pressure for us to make the move there, with Prime Minister Netanyahu calling on Jews to relocate to the state: "I would like to tell all European Jews, and all Jews wherever they are: 'Israel is the home of every Jew... Israel is waiting for you with open arms," he said last year.

The problem is, for many young Jews right now, the modern state of Israel feels far from a home. A recent poll found that 47 percent of the UK's Jewish population believe that the Israeli government is "constantly creating obstacles to avoid engaging in the peace process". Three quarters said that the expansion of settlements on the West Bank is a "major obstacle to peace." Just under a third even said they wouldn't demand that Palestinians must recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

Annie Cohen is a London-based student and member of Jewdas, a new non-Zionist Jewish organisation based in London, which uses the strapline "radical voices for the alternative diaspora". The group's aim ­– according to its website – is to harness the "great radicalism of Jewish tradition, a tradition of dreamers, subversives, cosmopolitans and counter-culturalists" by "putting loyalty to ideas of international justice over tribalism and parochialism". The group is populated mostly by under-30s, and meets regularly, hosting cultural events and organising political campaigns such as refugee fundraiser "Beigels not Borders".

Organised communities in the diaspora seem unwilling to reflect this change in attitudes. The list of active, major Jewish youth movements in the UK are Zionist in their entirety, offering "unparalleled opportunities to meet other young Jewish people and to have fun whilst exploring personal connections to both Judaism and Israel."

Attempting to avoid these political fractures by by sticking to synagogue is no more fruitful. Festivals such as Yom Ha'atzmaut (Independence Day), the celebration of Israel's creation, are now inescapable dates in the religious calendar. The Prayer for the State of Israel read in services week on week. Israel has been weaved into the very fabric of modern orthodox Jewish practice.

So in the summer of 2015, Annie went to a week-long summit in Morocco, along with representatives from 10 other countries, to launch an alternative, international Jewish organisation. "The outcome of these meetings feels really important, we're just getting started, but we're growing, and will start campaigning together soon," she says. "It was an emotional experience to be sat for six days with people who care so much about ending the occupation. It felt so empowering, transforming our own communities, with people who had travelled across the world to be together."

Organisations like Jewdas have been growing in number and popularity worldwide. In America, the organisation representing Jewish students, Hillel, split over Israel. Campus branches calling for "inclusivity and open discourse" have felt no option but to form their own organisation. Australia, South Africa, and Canada have new local groups too.

"What grew from trying to create spaces for Jews who shared anti-Zionist politics turned into something bigger, into somewhere you can be Jewish and not feel excluded for your views, where in fact they're the norm," says Annie. "We can support each other, especially those of us in countries where organisations are already vocal in their support for the Palestinian struggle, we can help members in other countries who are trying to get stuff off the ground."

When Moriel was 19, he lived in a Palestinian village inside Israel for a few months. For the first time, he saw Palestinians as people, which went against everything he'd been taught as a child. "There are a lot of concepts to grapple with in this conflict, and I didn't know any Palestinians personally. I suppose growing up I learned to view this whole group of people as a political concept, so it was easy to paint this nation as a threat."

But the community is changing, a new Jewish identity is being formed, one that's distinct from a Zionist politics. It comes at a time when dissenting voices, and places of comfort, have never been more in demand.

@mikesegalov

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Sarah Reed (Photo courtesy of Lee Jasper)

Three weeks ago, Sarah Reed died at HMP Holloway. It has taken until this week for her death to come to light, a fact made even more worrying when we consider that she was a black woman with a history of mental health problems who had previously experienced a violent assault at the hands of Metropolitan Police constable James Kiddie – a case that led to a conviction and his dismissal from the Met.

Lee Jasper, an anti-racism activist and former Senior Policy Advisor to the Mayor of London, is acting as the family's liaison until they are ready to talk to the press. According to a post on his blog, Sarah's family received a call from the prison on January 11th informing them that she had been found dead in her cell at 8AM. They say that the explanation they were given was that she had strangled herself lying in her own bed.

They were called to the prison to identify her body, but say that on arriving they were prevented from seeing her and have described being treated in a "hostile and aggressive manner". They were offered no comfort for their shocking loss.

The reported details are sparse so far, but already one gets the uncomfortable feeling of having heard this before. Stephanie Lightfoot-Bennett is a campaigner with the United Friends and Family Campaign. She told me about her similar experience on the death of her brother, Leon Patterson, in police custody. "My twin was beaten during arrest and he died in a police station cell. When the family arrived to identify his body, they split us up and would only allow us to see him through a glass window, all the while telling us that he had inflicted his injuries on himself. That was 22 years ago and yet it seems this is still happening, despite our calls for accountability and justice."

The Reed family have highlighted that Sarah had been in custody at the Maudsley Hospital after being sectioned and detained under the Mental Health Act 1983. Her history of severe mental ill-health went back to 2003, when her newborn baby became unwell and suddenly died. In October 2014, Sarah was arrested while in hospital, after, Sarah says, she had defended herself against a sexual assault. She was later remanded in custody before trial at London's women's prison, Holloway. Despite the recognised concerns about her health and mental stability, she was held in prison.

A protester holds a "Black Lives Matter" banner at a solidarity demonstration for Mike Brown in London, 2015 (Photo by Jake Lewis)

The issue of deaths in police custody has become fairly well-known; people being left handcuffed and unresponsive for minutes at a time, or dangerously drunk people left to sleep it off in a cell rather than being taken to hospital – that kind of thing is news. But the same is not true about deaths that occur within the prison system. Raising public awareness about the need for state accountability is hard enough, but the difficulty is magnified when it occurs in a part of society that is often forgotten about and hardly ever seen by the majority. Last year 256 people died in English and Welsh prisons. This year already, 27 deaths have occurred, with six of those yet to be categorised. Since 1990, an estimated 3,807 people have died in prison. These figures include suicides, which speaks to the concerns about mental health care in prisons raised since the death of Sarah Reed.

According to the Prison Reform Trust, 30 percent of women and 10 percent of men had previously been admitted to psychiatric care before they entered prison. The Centre for Mental Health also note that women in custody are five times more likely to have mental health problems than other women. Prisons are not hospitals, and those who would be sectioned under the Mental Health Act should be transferred to NHS care at a secure hospital. But the Centre for Mental Health found in 2011 that generally, there are severe delays in this process of transfer.

Since Lee Jasper made public for the first time information about Sarah Reed's death at his blog on Tuesday, many have expressed their outrage and dismay at the case on social media. Jasper and others have been using the #SayHerName hashtag employed by the US BlackLivesMatter movement, particularly in relation to the case of Sandra Bland, to draw links between the two deaths. In 2015 Bland was found dead in a Texas county jail cell where the state claims she killed herself. Protests around the United States questioned both the motives for and circumstances of her death.

Watch: Inside America's For-Profit Bail System

Similarly Sarah Reed's family have questioned why she was arrested at the Muadsley Hospital, linking the 2014 conviction and dismissal of PC James Kiddie – for beating and punching Sarah in the head after being called to arrest her at a Uniqlo on Regent Street – with her arrest the following year while in mental health care. Lee Jasper says, after speaking with her family: "The fact that Sarah had previously challenged racist and violent Metropolitan Police Officer who was later sacked leads the family to suspect that she was targeted for arrest under any pretence, as an act of retribution."

Jasper also suggests that the circumstances surrounding Sarah's death and the claim that she had strangled herself as "an almost physical impossibility" and this question has resonated with many of those calling for clarity around this case.

It is troubling enough that someone can experience a serious instance of state brutality once in their life. The possibility this could have happened twice to Sarah Reed is shocking. In the last few years we have found that state violence is all too often inflicted on black people, who also suffer disproportionately from poor mental health and care. Yet when these instances of brutality take place in the closed environment of a prison, they get even less attention than their counterparts in the outside world. Prison regulations mean that news often gets out slowly and is heavily controlled by those running the institutions.

When being a prisoner all too often means being poor, being black and being vulnerable due to metal health problems, we cannot afford to ignore deaths like Sarah Reed's.

@WailQ

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This article originally appeared on VICE Alps

Anyone who frequents flea markets knows them. The unassuming boxes filled with old albums, postcards and photographs, hidden between junk-covered stands and old furniture. Even if you're not looking for anything, you still flip through pictures of strangers' holidays, family gatherings and random snapshots; sometimes you even make it through someone's whole life. You often take a second to wonder why these pictures were taken, who these people were and why in the world they wanted pictures of them like that at all.

Siegfried Sander goes to flea markets to uncover these long-forgotten stories. What others see as unwanted inheritance or rubbish he buys up, using the pictures for his research. Sander specifically looks for photo series that differ from typical flea market photography – moments that weren't meant for the public eye, or that took place behind the facade of bourgeois decency. He also keeps an eye out for long-forgotten professional photographers, whom he would like to memorialise on his website.

One focus of his collection is portraits of women, and nude photography that shows the motifs around the ways women were portrayed from the 1920s to 70s. The collection also focuses on photography where people are captured in extraordinary and absurd moments: postcards advertising attractions featuring little people, portraits with polar bears, Christmas trees without families, and people inexplicably dressed in matching outfits. I spoke to him about the collection.

VICE: How long have you been collecting and how did it start?
Siegfried Sander: I'm an art dealer and gallerist in Hamburg, so I already move in flea-market and antique-shop circles for my career. Thirty years ago, my wife and I started buying furniture and design pieces and it all started when we bought a cabinet for our office that happened to be filled with the previous owner's photo albums.

They were a childfree couple. The 20 to 30 photo albums exclusively showed the owner's dog and his wife. But, the man actually cut his wife out of every single photograph; her face was never in the pictures. For example, when she takes their dog for a walk, you only see the leash and an arm. Over the years and decades he documented his dog's life, and never once included his wife on film. I thought that was so interesting, psychologically. If you spend a lot of time with old photos, you find the craziest things, again and again.

Do you know anything about the original owners or the circumstances surrounding their photos?
Sometimes I can find out information from the stamps on the backside. All of the pictures in the "Women" collection were taken by professional photographers, who used lighting on the women. You don't know of them (yet) from breakthrough exhibitions or books and some will never be known unfortunately. But there are downright legends among them: Julian Mandel, for example, was a photographer in Paris in the 20s and 30s. He made thousands of postcards but there's no information about him in books or online. There are rumors that he could have been a famous photographer working under a pseudonym, not wanting to ruin his reputation with this kind of "trashiness" – meaning female nudes. Millions of his pictures exist, but nobody knows anything else about him.

Which probably has to do with the subject matter itself and the silence that surrounds it ...
Exactly. There's also the legend of Monsieur X. They say there was a wealthy man in Paris who had a car and, with a friend, bought women from the red light district for a lot of money, made a nice life with them and liked to photograph them in hotels and in nature. When he was old, he went to a publisher and entrusted him with thousands of photographs on the condition that they wouldn't be published until after his death, noting that the negatives had been destroyed. The other condition was that his identity was never to be revealed, otherwise his family would drop dead. You can believe it or not ... but there are a lot of these kinds of legends. And sometimes I know nothing about the pictures – the ones from East Germany for example.

In the East German pictures you see underwear that's photographed as though for a catalogue, with various backdrops, that must have been taken in a studio. But then you can clearly see the photos were taken in private apartments. Alongside the poses for the catalogue, you always find shots where the photographer was clearly more interested in the model than the clothing.
You can really smell the 60s and 70s here. They look a bit like F.C. Grundlach. You see semi-abstract compositions set up in the room made of cardboard. But Grundlach had sturdy walls. Here you just see cardboard hung up with string unfortunately.

The historic and sociological context must play an important role when talking about the origins of the East German pictures.
Definitely. I have contact with someone who used to work at the post office in East Germany for example. Aside from his job, he also set up a network of semi-professional nude models. His hobby was photographing weddings, especially when there were guests from the West. He would develop the pictures overnight and sell them to the people from the West the next day; he made a lot of money doing it. Then he would take the money and enlist women to model nude through secret classified ads in newspapers and by postcard.

They were normal women, doctors, salesgirls – all kinds. Of course the women didn't want people to know that they were being photographed for money. Some of them made a lot of money; some made more nude modeling than at their normal job. Then the postman would sell or trade the nudes within his circle of friends – they didn't have any exotic magazine market.

That's why it would be interesting to know who these pictures were meant for.
I'm less interested in the historic dimensions. I'm much more interested in the craziness. For example, I have pictures from a lawyer who photographed his Christmas tree each year, but never with his family. Over many years, the tree is always decorated, but solitary. It kind of recalls Harvey Keitel in the movie Smoke. He takes a picture of his street corner every day. These series sometimes have something meditative to the people who made them, even if they just seem crazy on the surface.

The collection really shows a breadth of visual language and topics and varies between the questionable and the banal, humorous and serious moments. What holds them all together?
Some things seem really foreign to you, while others seem very familiar. They're all things that draw you in and you don't necessarily know why. For me as a viewer even, it's still always a self-awareness trip. For me it's about a personal discourse. Why does someone photograph something exactly this way? This question mark in my head is the starting point for all the pictures.

By publishing the series I've collected, I would like to show, aside from my personal discourse, that life is much more colourful than we could imagine – without morals and judgements.

Some of the series in your collection, for example "Wet Laundry," "Man Photographs Woman," "Outdoor," and "Flowerpower," depict quite ordinary moments that then look absurd as series. You have to ask yourself here why the people in our analog past wanted to capture these moments. And why very many of the same motifs show up in different families.
I was brought up to believe that taking pictures was something special. You needed a camera to take pictures. And, like many technical creations of that time, the camera was usually kept by the man of the house and usually he was the only one to use it. He was able to show all the things he owned with the camera. That's why there are so many pictures of cars, bikes, girlfriends and dogs.

And then there are these motifs that get repeated. For instance, the wife in her Sunday best next to a magnolia bouquet. Maybe this was in a movie or it was a template in a magazine, because you see this a lot. There are certain proto-motifs in photography that take on a life of their own – but everyone thinks they're being original and doing it for the first time.

You also discovered the photo series "Geliebte Margret", now up on many blogs, at a flea market, right?
I have contacts to flea market people in different cities who set pictures, magazines and movies aside for me. In this way I got a suitcase with photographs that I sold to Galerie Zander. I was very happy that the pictures became famous through them.

"Margret – the Chronicle of an Affair" shows the meticulous logging of an affair in 1970 between a married employee, Margret, and her just-as-married boss in West Germany. He photographed her for months when they would meet up, and kept the pictures in a kind of diary where he also noted – in administrative German – the specifics of their meetings, including comments on her mood swings, dandruff and pubic hair. He obsessively pointed his lens at his beloved. After a few months, the affair ended and with it the diary.
After it was published, a lot of people told me they know of other people leading similar double lives. I'm interested in these kinds of stories. You look from above at photographs that show a little sequence of someone's life, like in the movie Down to Earth, with an unknown beginning and end. With the Margret story, the gallery still could have made sure neither of them have any family left.

So you'll continue to look out for these kinds of stories at flea markets?
I wouldn't have anything against discovering the next Helmut Newton while rummaging at the flea market. But there are so many other photographers and series where I don't want them to slip into oblivion. So it makes me happy when people visit my website and even want to know more about the individual pictures.

All images courtesy of Siegfried Sander.Josephine is a picture editor and runs photo blog Edit for the Masses.

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Most long-running television shows, at some point, will fall back on that trusty trope known as the "clip show"—an episode that consists primarily of excerpts from previous episodes (Friends, for example, had six spread over its ten seasons). Joel and Ethan Coen have been making feature films about America and its oddball inhabitants for 32 years now, and their latest offering, Hail, Caesar!, feels like their own idiosyncratic riff on that format. It's an enjoyably meandering compendium of tics, references, and themes (particularly religion, fate, and the movies) culled from their impressive canon and marshaled into a surprisingly coherent, curiously haunting whole.

Hail, Caesar!'s setting is Hollywood circa 1951, and our main man is Eddie Mannix (a gruffly likable Josh Brolin), head of physical production at Capitol Pictures. He's also a "fixer," tasked with making problems disappear. Coen aficionados will recognize (the fictional) Capitol as the same studio that employed Barton Fink (John Turturro) as a screenwriter in the 1991 film of the same name, set roughly a decade earlier. The tortured Fink was the consummate outsider: a lefty, intellectual, East Coast playwright whose mind disintegrated under pressure from the demands of the mainstream machine. Mannix, unlike Fink, is an inside man, and (no need to ask) a smooth operator—having him as our central character makes for a more comfortable viewing experience than Barton Fink.

However, Mannix also carries a weight on his shoulders: We first meet him in a confessional booth, where he bends the ear of his long-suffering Catholic priest about his failure to give up smoking, and his guilt at keeping the fact from his wife. In another amusing early scene, we see him focus-grouping with bickering religious leaders of different faiths about the best way to represent God onscreen—Mannix is, you see, supervising production on Hail, Caesar!, which is also the name of the main film-within-the-film, a big-budget yet chintzy-looking Biblical epic starring starring nice-but-dim matinee idol Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, in pleasingly self-effacing mode).

The plot, such as it is, kicks into gear when Whitlock is poisoned on set by an extra (a marvelously furtive cameo from Seinfeld alum Wayne Knight), then spirited away to a coastal hideout. Any fears we might have for Whitlock's safety are dispelled when we discover the identity of his captors: "The Future," a garrulous, genteel, kinda funny-lookin' group of Communist screenwriters clad in 50 shades of beige. As new film Trumbo highlights, the Hollywood anti-Communist blacklist, first established in 1947, was a very serious deal indeed, so the Coens' imagining of these earnest, banished men collecting by the sea is both surreal and oddly touching. Their ramshackle kidnap plan, meanwhile, is every bit as whimsical as the one woven through The Big Lebowski.

The rest of the movie consists of a loosely interlocked series of vignettes peppered with eccentric characters. The constant is Mannix, whose predicament—that of a decent guy struggling to keep numerous plates spinning in the face of larger, unpredictable forces—recalls that which troubled Larry Gopnik, the protagonist of A Serious Man, a bleak comedy that transposed the Old Testament narrative of Job to the Minnesota suburbs of the 1960s.

Instead of Larry's apocalyptic bad luck, however, Mannix must contend with some very human problems. He's under pressure to accept a job that would make his life easier but rob him of the challenges on which he thrives. He must deal with posh British director Laurence Laurentz (a hilariously flighty Ralph Fiennes), who is desperately unhappy with the casting of the new romantic lead in his film, pretty boy Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a stuntman palpably uncomfortable with speaking roles. There's DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), an ingenue who sparkles in front of the cameras as a synchronized-swimming mermaid (wearing a "fish ass," as she bluntly puts it), but has a bewilderingly complicated personal life. And Mannix is also pestered by twin-sister journalists (Tilda Swinton, times two: haughty and haughtier) who threaten to undermine him in their own devious ways. Equally notable, by the way, is Michael Gambon as the embodiment of another classic Coen device: the unseen, omniscient (one might say godly) narrator. The Irish actor's stentorian purr is simultaneously authoritative, amused, and vaguely lascivious: a fitting tone-setter.

Smartly edited by "Roderick Jaynes" (who doesn't exist: It's the Coens!), Hail, Caesar! moves at an easy but never draggy pace, and soars in sequences that invite viewers to lose themselves in the magic of the movies, only for the curtain to be pulled back, revealing the artifice. This trick is best exemplified in a wonderful soundstage sequence depicting the filming of a scene from fictional musical Swingin' Dinghy, starring hunky Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) as a tap-dancing sailor. While Gurney hoofs and hollers (rather tunefully) through a happily homoerotic seafaring shindig entitled "No Dames!", the Coens chop up the scene, cutting between how it would be viewed by a paying audience (i.e., as envisioned by its director, swaggeringly played by Christopher Lambert), and how they themselves see it: a mess of complicated set-ups by the camera crew. While doing so, the Coens also cleverly point us toward some sinister, plot-sensitive background details. In moments like these, the Coens' directorial prowess is dizzying, at once cerebral, emotional, and narratively propulsive.

Hail, Caesar!'s tone is generally light, but, as in so much of the Coens' work, darkness loiters at the fringes. It uses the patina of flagrant, joyous artifice—and a cavalcade of well-judged star cameos—to mask a critique of shady dealing in the film industry, and cinema's enormous potential to operate simultaneously as an ideological weapon and a tool of suppression. On the shortcomings of the Hollywood "Dream Factory," it's not as vicious as, say, Robert Altman's The Player, or as luridly sour as David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. It is, however, a brilliant companion piece to Barton Fink, leaving the viewer with plenty to ponder once the laughs have subsided.

Follow Ashley on Twitter.

Hail, Caesar! opens in UK theatres on Friday the 26th of February

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In this episode of VICE Talks Film, we sit down with director Todd Haynes – the guy responsible for films like Far From Heaven, I'm Not There, and Velvet Goldmine – to discuss his latest movie, Carol. Then, we chat about what it was like shooting his first romantic film, the difficulties of making movies about women, the vast influence of David Bowie, and the nuances of falling in love.

A photo of Assange taken around the time he was at Melbourne. Image via

This article originally appeared on VICE US

Thursday the United Nations concluded that Julian Assange is being detained illegally. This must come as a relief for Assange, who had tweeted a promise to turn himself over to the British police if the UN didn't rule in his favor.

So what now? Well, it will probably mean nothing. If Assange requests his passport back, as he promised he would, the UK government will likely ignore the request and he'll remain holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Or maybe he'll try to leave, in which case all bets are off.

Someone who is watching this whole saga with particular curiosity is Jerry Koliha, one of Assange's former teachers. Back in 2003, Assange enrolled himself into mathematics at Melbourne University. It was there that he did a semester in linear analysis under the tuition of Koliha.

We gave Koliha a call to see if he had a message for his former student.

VICE: Tell me about the first time you met Julian Assange.
Koliha: Well it was a third year mathematics subject. It's been six years since I retired, so that would've been 2006. He looked very distinctive sitting in the first row, because he was a mature age student. He asked very advanced questions. From the essays he handed in it was clear to me that—had he put his mind to it—that he could have been a very good mathematician. But he was quite erratic in attendance. You could see very clearly that he wouldn't be bound by the timetables, he'd just follow his own mind.

Did he come across as arrogant?
No, it wasn't arrogance. He was clever, he was asking very intelligent questions. Obviously, he was aware of his own intelligence, which may have come across badly to others. But I wouldn't say he was arrogant.

What kind of marks was he getting?
Very good grades, but I can't even tell you if he completed the subject. I had the feeling that he was a bit preoccupied with other things that interested him at the time.

Have you followed the WikiLeaks story?
I did follow what happened and my personal opinion is that our society needs to be more open. What he did, I appreciate. I endorse openness. Unfortunately the US has a lot to own up to, and to own up to democracy in general.

Do you think Julian has contributed to the world?
Definitely.

Julian's been accused of sexual assault in Sweden. What's your take on that?
I have no idea what transpired. How could I have an opinion on something that transpired in Sweden?

Well, I'm asking because you knew him personally.
If you're a lecturer in a class of 20-plus people, he's just one student sitting there. I didn't develop any closer relationship with him. With other students I did, but as I said, he was very preoccupied with other interests.

Do you wish you had gotten to know him better?
That would've been difficult. That comes from the student, not the lecturer.

At dinner parties do you ever bring out this story—that you taught Julian Assange?
Yes, I have to admit that I mention the name now and then . I wouldn't be human if I didn't. People usually ask what he's like, but I have to repeat what I just said to you. I really didn't know him that well. He was very intelligent, he has a very good mind, but that's all.

If you could be flown to the Ecuadorian Embassy right now, what would you say to Julian?
I'd say, "I'm sorry that you were forced to take this action and sit for three years in isolation. I would say, "I appreciate what you did with WikiLeaks."

What do you think you've learned from this experience, personally?
Well I think society—not just Australia, not just America, but all of society—should be far more open. It would solve a lot of problems. Openness is the key that could improve our society, and WikiLeaks has been a tremendous contribution to that. I sincerely hope everything will be OK for him.

How do you hope this will end?
I sincerely hope the US will amend its view on it, and the case that is pending will be abandoned, as it should be in the case of Snowden.

Follow Julian Morgans on Twitter.

The electric chair, nicknamed "Old Sparky," during a rare press tour of Florida State Prison at Starke in August 1989. (AP Photo/Mark Foley)

This article originally appeared on VICE US

In Florida, there's no shortage of things that can kill you. It's the lightning-strike and shark-bite capital, as the Orlando Sentinel helpfully dubbed it. Also, alligators. But leaving natural phenomena aside, Florida is also one of the most execution-friendly destinations in America.

The Sunshine State has 389 death row inmates—more than any other besides California, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Alarmingly, Florida also leads the nation with 26 death row exonerations. "If you add it all together, Florida's the worst of the worst," when it comes to capital punishment, says Mark Elliott, director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Meanwhile, American support for the death penalty is near a 40-year low, according to a Pew Research poll conducted last spring. The fact that DNA evidence can exonerate people who were long ago falsely convicted has inspired many to doubt the efficacy of the criminal justice system, and laws around the country are changing to mirror that shift in public opinion. In January, the Supreme Court—which still leans in favor of the death penalty in the abstract—deemed Florida's execution sentencing protocol unconstitutional.

But rather than take the death penalty off the books, politicians in Florida are currently arguing over new justifications they might use for killing convicts. Which begs the question of why, in a swing state that's often considered a barometer for the the rest of the country, officials are so dead-set on preserving capital punishment.

Bob Dekle, a law professor at the University of Florida, says the death penalty has been a part of the state's culture as long as he can remember. First it was hangings, and then, in 1923, it was the electric chair. Dekle's granddaddy was a sheriff in Union County in northern Florida back around the time of World War I, when the state's executions were still carried out at the local level. The old man threw the switch on an inmate himself once, a duty Dekle says grandpa didn't particularly enjoy. But that was local custom—at least until 1941, when local sheriffs were replaced by black-hooded executioners.

Things carried on that way until 1972, when Supreme Court justices, in a 5–4 decision, said that the death penalty was cruel and unusual—and often had a racial bias. Florida was the first state to pass a new law in hopes of resuming executions later that year, but a national moratorium remained in place until the Supreme Court's 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision. State officials were anxious to resume capital punishment, reflecting a sense of vigilante justice that permeates the Deep South, as well as some uniquely Floridian sensibilities.

"There's always been a sense in Florida that if you feel you have been victimized, you have an obligation to protect your honor by avenging what has taken place," Robert Snyder, a professor of American Studies at the University of South Florida, once told the Tampa Bay Times. "A sort of bestial spirit resides deep within the heart of people in Florida."

That bestial spirit produced a penal code that has been notoriously lax when it comes to executions. In most states, juries have to unanimously agree on aggravating factors to recommend a defendant be put to death. Florida is one of just two states where a simple majority is sufficient, and it's one of just three where judges can go rogue and take the execution route even if a jury doesn't call for it.

Suffice it to say Florida's death row tends to be pretty packed.

On May 25, 1979, a 30-year-old named John Spenkelink was the first person sent to Old Sparky once it got fired up again. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Spenkelink, who was convicted for murdering his roommate, was given two shots of whiskey before taking his seat in the chair. Dozens of men—and two women—were sent to die there in the coming decades. In fact, the frequency with which people were executed became a point of civic pride; in 1986, Tampa Mayor Bob Martinez ran for governor with the campaign promise that Florida's electric bill would go up if he were elected.

By the late 1990s, however, a number of malfunctions raised questions about whether or not the electric chair constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In March 1997, the state tried to electrocute Pedro Medina, but his head basically caught on fire as witnesses gasped for air. An official turned off the chair while Medina, who was mentally ill and possibly innocent, was still breathing.

Still, politicians grasped at straws, trying to justify the death penalty. State Senator Ginny Brown-Waite, who witnessed a particularly gruesome electrocution in 1999, said that the prisoner's nosebleed formed the sign of a cross on his shirt, which she suggested might be a sign from God that the execution was divinely mandated.

In 2000, Florida at least began granting prisoners the choice between Old Sparky and lethal injection; only one man has requested the chair since.

On January 7, Florida carried out the first execution in America this year. But on Tuesday, the State Supreme Court postponed the next one as lawmakers try to appease justices in Washington. The conversation will likely not address the racial issues brought up in the 1970s Supreme Court cases, although the degree to which the death penalty is imposed along those lines remains startling. (A January report authored by a professor at University of North Carolina found that no white person has ever been sentenced to death for killing a black person in Florida.)

For his part, Dekle—who has personally witnessed three executions in Florida—says other states passed stricter death penalty laws when capital punishment was reinstated decades ago specifically to discourage the Supreme Court from striking them down again. 43 Florida death row inmates have filed direct appeals and might see their sentences reduced to life in prison as a result of the January ruling.

"It's a mess that could have been avoided if the Supreme Court had 40 years ago said, 'Wait a minute, this ain't right," Dekle says of the troubled Florida law. "Eventually, they're gonna hammer out a new mechanism for imposing the death penalty, and quite likely people on death row are gonna get new sentencing hearings. And maybe 40 years from now, the Supreme Court will decide that's unconstitutional too."

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(Photo: Dulcie Lee via)

Most people have told a lie to get laid, but not many of us have done so backed by the state. Since a 2011 Guardian investigation uncovered the stories of a group of British women allegedly manipulated into intimate relationships with undercover cops, we've started to learn just how far the Metropolitan police's now-defunct Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was willing to go for information on "groups involved in politically motivated crime" – largely anti-racists, environmentalists and animal rights activists.

In 2008 the Met had binned the covert SDS, created in 1968 and responsible for spying on murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence's family in the 1990s and burrowing into protest groups using close relationships with female activists. Then, in November 2015, a Met assistant commissioner formally apologised for the sexual relationships – though prosecutors in 2014 had decided not to charge four officers known to have dated women under false pretences.

Now a public inquiry is accounting for what exactly made the SDS shady enough to shut down entirely. Eight of the women who found themselves in relationships with men who'd lied to them from the moment they met have come forward, mostly anonymously or under pseudonyms, to share their stories. Enter Kefi Chadwick, a writer who's adapted the women's experiences into Any Means Necessary, a play that opened at Nottingham Playhouse on Friday. We spoke to her about fictionalising undercover cop Mark Kennedy's impact on the women he dated in Nottingham and telling a story still shrouded in half-truths and cover-ups.

Never trust the acoustic-guitar-at-a-party guy; Kate Sissons and Samuel Oatley, rehearsing the play. (Photo: Robert Day)

VICE: This is one of those stories that feels destined for adaptation. How did you get the women to speak to you about something so personal?
Kefi Chadwick: I contacted them through their barrister, and three of the eight women met with me, before two of them ended up being involved in the play over a good couple of years. It was very important to me that they, at the very least, were happy for me to do it and ideally were prepared to be involved. It took a long time to reach them because obviously they're anonymous – they don't want anyone to know who they are. From doing interviews and spending time with them, we've become good friends.

How did you begin to tell the story, when it feels as though there's so much we don't know about it? The Met still won't release the names of any other officers involved, for their safety, for example.
I didn't want to do it without the women's cooperation. One of the reasons why the women were interesting in talking to me was that I wanted to do a fictional version of the events that took specifically place in Nottingham. I wanted to tell a 30-year story, so in the end I chose to have a framing device: a hearing in 2011, where you have the women's stories being told and the Met trying to destroy them. Then you have a central story, set in Nottingham from 2004 to 2008. The job of a playwright is to imagine, so I had so much real material that building on that to create this vivid world for the play was much easier. I had all this reality to base it on.

How did it feel, to use material this raw? Didn't you feel as though you were prying, or getting too close to the women?
I mean, to use people's lives ... what I've tried to do is shift and fictionalise everything. It's interesting, because the women were worried about being exposed by the writing, but once they'd read the first draft they went, 'Ah, yes. I see now that this isn't identically my story, but it is my emotional truth.' I think that's what people engage with, and what makes the play powerful.

Nick Karimi and Sissons, rehearsing. (Photo: Robert Day)

There were so many strands to this scandal. The latent sexism, for starters, of straight women activists being targeted and exploited by their intimate relationships with undercover policemen.
Absolutely. There was a lot I wanted to get in, and I feel as though it's all pretty much there. But it's about not having to give everything the same amount of airtime. There are the references to the Lawrence family, and the other women; the different campaigns, and the involvement protest movements in Scotland.

What about tone? This could easily have turned into something really over-wrought, bashing the audience over the head with one perspective. How did you try to balance that out?
It was really important to me to make a good piece of theatre. I think a lot of political drama is very valid but can be very worthy. If you're already on the side of its point of view, people won't go and see a show. I didn't want to write something that was really didactic or that hit you over the head. I wanted to write a piece with characters you connected with and went on a journey with – all the things that a really strong drama does, but with this emotional, political context at its core. You have to think: do I want to preach to the converted, or do I want people to come and see it, who might not be very politically engaged but will go away thinking, 'this is wrong, and I want to do something about it'? That's what I wanted to make.

But what sort of place for this pseudo-activism is there in theatre?
I've written the play so it can be adapted, should there be developments later on in the Pitchford inquiry. Of course, when I first started researching this three years ago or so, it wasn't so much known then. But more information just keeps coming and coming, and I think that's just going to continue, as more officers are exposed, as more relationships are discovered and as there's more corruption with police desperately trying to hide what they did. I think that's going to be really interesting.

Any Means Necessary runs at Nottingham Playhouse until Saturday 20 February.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

Wherever there are rules, those rules will be broken. That's why not following the cleaning rota you set up with your housemates often leads to screaming matches, or a casual case of entrenched bitterness. When we decided to move in together a few years ago, we purposefully chose the path of least resistance. It spares us the bad vibes, but still has some drawbacks. After a while, it suddenly becomes hard to say who is responsible for the mountain of dishes towering above the sink, or when a pot turns into a science experiment and mysteriously disappears onto the balcony for a few days (or weeks).

The most exciting things in our flat usually take place in the kitchen, while cooking, eating, cleaning (or, more accurately, not cleaning). Since most of our conversations, unsurprisingly for long-time photography students, revolved around the subject of photography, it was only a matter of time before we started to explore the microcosmos in our kitchen, with cameras in hand.

Since then, we've consistently documented the fuzz and slime that blooms when we forget to chuck things out. To be clear, even though so much food is thrown away each year in Germany where we live, we didn't let our soup go mouldy for the sake of it. All these photos were taken of lost treasures found deep within our fridge. Somehow, photography became the perfect form of therapy for some of the visual trauma we caused ourselves over the years.

You can find Nikita's work here, and Max's here.

More from VICE to make you queasy:

The Horrifying Food of Reddit's Bro-Cooking Community

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(Photo: Flickr user Kakei.R)

This article originally appeared on VICE US

Assholes are like opinions: Everyone has them—but no one has more opinions on assholes than Jonathan Allen.

For the Canadian academic, anuses are a gateway into understanding culture, language, social anxieties, humor, politics, and possibly the meaning of life. Given that butts are gender neutral and represent a host of positive and negative connotations, they make for a fascinating topic of study. Allan spent two and a half years researching and philosophizing about the anus, and he eventually wrote Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus. Set for release in early March this year, the book inspects the ass in literary theory and cultural criticism.

Starting with Sigmund Freud's 1908 work "Character and Anal Eroticism," Allan shows how describing someone as having an "anal personality" may signal our need to take the anus, with all "its pleasures and its discomforts," and "repress" it. From there, the author surveys everything from films like Brokeback Mountain, the virginity complex, anal pleasure and violence, and even how butts relate to colonialism in Canada.

We reached the professor and Canada research chair in queer theory at Brandon University by phone for an interview. We probed him about butt stuff like twerking and how the anus relates to socio-economic disparity and gender.

Dr. Jonathan Allan says Kent Monkman's "Cree Master 1" painting flips the traditional colonial narrative. Photo courtesy of the University of Regina Press

VICE: What do you mean by the "democratization of the anus"?
Dr. Jonathan Allan: One of the things that most interests me is how we define gender based on difference. And of course, gender is this weird thing that gets conflated with sex all the time. When you fill out a government form, it asks for your gender—male or female. Well, male or female is about your biological sex, not your gender, which is how you live your day-to-day life. Everything is about difference. The one thing that unites us is the butt. We all have one, have access to it, and we sit on it for most of the day. That's what's so interesting to me.

You also relate the anus to what you call "the frontier myth and colonialism."
When I started presenting this work at conferences, someone asked me about colonialism. They referred me to novel Song of the Loon, which is about a settler's erotic adventures with indigenous bodies. So much of the language of colonialism—we say "the land was raped" and so on—what would it mean to invert that narrative?

This might sound simple, but butts are dirty. They are considered uncouth to talk about in certain company.
That's true. I can't imagine most of us sit around during holiday dinner talking about our butts. But, at the same time, pay attention to it on TV. You will hear constant references in the media. I was watching one of those medical emergency shows on TLC, and sure enough some guy shows up at the hospital with something stuck up his butt, and he can't get it out. On Big Bang Theory, there's a great moment about the "anal autograph" and the "colon calling card." In the movie Sisters, there's a scene where a dancing ballerina toy gets stuck in some guy's ass. For ten minutes, there's an ongoing joke about this toy playing music in this guy's ass. We do this thing where we talk about our rectums, but we talk around them. We hint at it because it's dirty. It's purpose is defecation, but there's a remarkable universality to it.

Photo courtesy of the University of Regina Press

Can we talk about twerking?
It's a shameful and yet desirable thing. It defies rules of gravity and it's right in our face. It's not the first time we've seen the ass in popular culture. We had Ricky Martin's "Shake Your Bon Bon," "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," "Fat-Bottomed Girls," Sisqo's "Thong Song," and others. But twerking took it to a whole new level.

In your book, you say women are the biggest readers of gay romance novels.
There's very little serious writing about romance novels, unfortunately. To actually sit down and read these things not as a joke or judge them as something bad housewives read, I wanted to find out what's going on there. They're everywhere though. I think are the fastest growing sub-genre in romance reading. They are mostly written by women for women. They speak to anxieties around the male body and the kinds of pleasure men have and have access to.

For your research, do you have a room covered in photos of anuses with interconnecting strings linking them together? I'm thinking A Beautiful Mind–type scenario.
There are all these connections that are constantly made. One thing that is interesting to me is how the ass is invoked in political discourse. The metaphors we use—"backroom deals," for instance. Or Donald Trump's "getting schlonged" thing. It's about about the refusal of the phallus, right? And then he uses that to describe Hillary Clinton. Or Doug Ford: After the provincial election in Ontario, he said how the Progressive Conservative party needs an "enema."

Photo courtesy of the University of Regina Press

Let's talk about eroticism.
For a part of the body that's so taboo, we put a lot of energy into it. Whether it's getting a perfect ass, downsizing if we have a fat ass, or gaining an ass. I saw in a men's magazine—maybe GQ or Men's Health, one of those magazines—2015 was the year of the man's ass. In the first pages of my book, I point out how declared 2014 to be the year of the ass in general. We're obsessed. We want to sculpt it; we wear yoga pants.

Dr. Jonathan Allan. Photo courtesy of the University of Regina Press

Could you unpack the issue of violence and the anus?
In the book, I talk about Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge. That scene is quite graphic. There is a certain violence and a lot of power at play. I think that power is always transferable and always in flux. The anus is always there. We've all experienced pain in our asses. We've all experienced anal pleasure. We've all had particular bowel movements that were pleasurable. When we frame it in those terms, it becomes something different. I don't think we'll ever get rid of the shame of assholes, but we're clearly interested in them.

Is there something to be said about social class and the butt?
The butt is the proletariat of the body. If it is about wealth, the Kardashians seem to be doing fine. There are class arguments to be made around it though. I quote the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who says, "The day shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Quarterback Cam Newton celebrates during the NFC Championship, where his Carolina Panthers beat the Arizona Cardinals. The Panthers are the heavy favorites over the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl. (Photo via Getty Images/Streeter Lecka)

This article originally appeared on VICE US

A week before the Super Bowl, Eddie was sitting in a TV room in the federal prison where we're both inmates* watching SportsCenter with Monday's USA Today sports page in his hand. Eddie may be a prisoner, but he's also a bookie, and he was doing what bookies everywhere were doing in the lead-up to the biggest betting event of the year: worrying about the betting line.

"Carolina's still giving Denver three points," Eddie said. "I need that to go up at least a point and a half or I might get crushed. Everyone's taking the Panthers."

Just like on the street, sports betting is big business in prisons, and it follows the same format—Eddie had given the inmates who wanted to bet on the game the most recent Vegas line, and everyone was taking the Carolina Panthers both inside bars and out. (A week after our conversation, so much money had been bet against the Denver Broncos the line had moved to favor the Panthers by five and a half points.)

There aren't statistics on the subject, of course, since inmates are technically prohibited from gambling, but some bookies in my facility claim to make upward of $30,000 a year. Eddie claims he's made about $7,000 since last April, when he decided to start a betting pool, also known as a "ticket," at the beginning of the baseball season. Since then, he's expanded to bigger betting events, such as the Super Bowl.

"I was tired of giving the bookies all of my money," Eddie explains. "So I said, 'fuck it,' and started my own ticket."

The name of Eddie's ticket is "Bet & Sweat," and the inmate said he has runners, or people who collect bets (and later debts), in all every block on the prison's nine-block compound. Each runner makes 10 percent of each losing bet that they bring in, and Eddies gives his betting clients a free $2 play every night to entice more action.

Some prisons might use cans of tuna or mackerel for money, but you're just as often to find stamps being exchanged. In this prison, the powers that decide such thing determined that each 49-cent stamp used on the black market is worth 40 cents in the prison; a $1 stamp is worth 80 cents. To keep the underground economy afloat, inmates purchase stamps at full price from the commissary, so a "book" of ten stamps is worth about $4. During Super Bowl weekend, a bookie could easily make several grand. The Panthers are considered such a sure thing that Eddie decided to require gamblers to bet on three other games this weekend, mostly basketball, in order to play his ticket.

One of his runners is called Man-Man, a convicted drug dealer serving 16 years and a diehard Panthers fan. He said that he's yet to bring in a single ticket that has someone betting on Denver.

"I've had about 30 dudes in last five days bet the Panthers on their tickets," Man-Man said. "I told Eddie not to mix the Super Bowl games with basketball, but he didn't listen. Now he's got at least eight dudes who laid a book on four bets, and they all hit three games. They're just waiting on the Panthers to hit, too, and Eddie's out 80 books"—or $320.

In the days leading up to the Super Bowl, there was plenty of talk about the game and who was betting what on it. An inmate named Little C was seriously thinking about dropping 25 books, or $100, on the Broncos. The guys who run Pay-to-Play, a competing ticket, were talking about giving the Broncos four points instead of three, and paying the winners 3-to-1 means you bet $100 to win $300, an enticement to get people to bet on the underdog.

"Yo, my gut be tellin' me to do it, you know?" said Little C. "But if Peyton shows up and the Broncos do what they do, man, it might be all bad for the black man... And how I'm gonna look goin' for a white man in this Super Bowl?"

Old Man Denis is a lifer in his late 70s who's been running a betting pool called Win Big in every penitentiary he's been held in since 1995. He's got fond memories of the last time the Panthers were in the Super Bowl, in 2004.

"Best Super Bowl game is the history of the NFL," he said. "They went a quarter and a half without scoring a single point, then in the last five or six minutes of the game they put up nearly 30 points between them. I thought I was in big trouble."

"The Panthers saved my ass," the inmate remembered. "The game went way over , I would have lost nearly $10,000. As it turned out, I pulled in a little over $1,000 that night."

This year, Eddie has his own plan for how to recoup his losses if the Panthers cover the spread and he ends up having to "If the line doesn't change, or everyone sticks with the Panthers, I'll just lay some of my bets off on the other tickets," Eddie said. "I refuse to get massacred... I'll leave that up to Peyton."

*Note: The author of the piece asked that his name and location not be revealed because he's writing about activities banned by prison authorities and is worried about the repercussions he could face as a result. The last names of the inmates quoted in this article have also been redacted.

(Photo: Fairfax Media, via Getty)

This article originally appeared on VICE US

In 1999, a couple of days after Shawn Williams met the woman he'd eventually marry, she went in the hospital for knee surgery. Two months later, after the cast was taken off her leg, doctors informed her that she had multiple sclerosis. By 2005, his wife was forced to leave work—something as mild as turning her head would lead to uncontrollable vomiting. For a while she could still get around with a cane or crutches, but by 2009, she was bedridden.

Williams installed a downstairs bathroom to their two-story home and converted the living room into his wife's hospital quarters. Williams made the transition into a full-time caregiver. Last summer his wife fell out of her hoyer lift (a device used to move immobile people in and out of bed), and he was forced to check into a full-time nursing facility.

A couple of years ago Williams started the r/caregivers subreddit. It's a place where he and fellow caregivers can talk about the stresses, questions, and sadnesses that come with supporting an incapacitated loved one. The community is small but dedicated, and it provides an empathy that the rest of the world can't muster.

"It was slow going at first, and it's still slow going," Williams told me. "I follow the MS subreddit and told them about it, which brought in a circle of people. It's nice to just throw stuff out there, even if people didn't have any advice for me and were just lending a shoulder."

R/caregivers is one of many communities on the internet focused on fostering empathy between people who look after loved ones. While a lot of the conversation on these sites is focused on granular, mechanical advice—like, for instance, "do medical alert bracelets work?"—these are also spaces to be sad.

"I can't stress enough how important it is to have support whether online or in real-life," said a caregiver who prefers to remain anonymous, who regularly posts on the Facebook group Dementia Caregivers Support and reads r/caregivers. "People in real life don't really want to know what's going on. They don't want to hear anything other than, 'Life is great! My loved one is so sweet and I love being able to care for them! What a blessing!' The minute you voice the truth, people get uncomfortable."

"In the group I'm in on Facebook," the caregiver added, "I can talk about how my loved one just hit and screamed at me, and people will talk me off the ledge. I can ask about how to remove the smell of pee from a carpet. I can ask a question about Medicare or etiquette when hiring a live-in. Other people who actually understand what I'm going through are a godsend."

Williams told me that his wife doesn't know about the caregiving subreddit, which allows him to be as honest as he needs to be. "Venting is important," he said. "There's so much frustration, you want to be mad at the disease, but you can't help but take it out on the person. If you can it's good to bide your time until you're in front of a keyboard so you can do your screaming there."

"Caregiver here. I've cared for my mother for about seven years. No family. No friends. No job. (Not for lack of trying) I've run out of ways to stay positive I believe," user pookie74 wrote in an r/caregiving post titled "Depression." "The stress is overwhelming and my health is deteriorating. I realize how hopeless this sounds (and actually may be) but, as a sole care provider, having stopped my own life years ago, what can I do?"

Around 43 million Americans care for an aging loved one, said Andy Cohen, head of the caregiving support site caring.com, adding that the grief that comes with that task tends to stay private.

"One of the things that came up in our research is that while people are looking for objective information, they're also looking for emotional support," Cohen said. "If you're planning a wedding or having a baby you obviously want to talk to your friends about it, but if your parents are dying you're not inclined to do the same thing because it's very sad. We set up our forums to use aliases so people can be open with their feelings in a supportive group. One of our customers called it her 'sacred garden.'"

Some of that honesty can be brutal. Cohen says that some people come to his forums and talk about hating their parents—something they would likely only say anonymously.

In a few years, Williams hopes to buy a house with the necessary equipment that would allow him to bring his wife home and return to caring for her full-time. It won't be the final hurdle, but they've learned to roll with the punches and stay optimistic.

"Not to be cliche, but she's my soulmate," Williams told me. " gets me on a level that nobody else does. She's someone I can trust. She understands all my crazy ideas, my dreams, my sense of humor."

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Check out Luke on his website and on Twitter.

The first time I traveled to Vegas for the so called "Oscars of Porn" was back in 2008 when a couple of friends of mine were nominated for AVN Awards for an Exorcist porn parody called The XXXorcist and I went along for the ride. A year later I had just been laid off of my last real job and I decided to go back this time as actual credentialed media—from then on, porn was my beat.

Eight years after my first AVN Awards I returned to Vegas and my friend Joanna Angel, who lost her nomination for The XXXorcist back then, was hosting the whole show. Joanna and an ex-girlfriend of mine were both inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame, so AVN feels as much as a family reunion as it does an assignment.

The AVN experience is a lot more than just an award show. It's four days of total madness that includes the Adult Entertainment Expo, the actual awards show and more parties than you could imagine with non-stop weirdness going on in the rooms, casinos, and bars of the Hard Rock Hotel.

If you imagine the entire porn industry stuck in a hotel together, then pour booze and cocaine on that, throw a bunch of rich vegas douchebag money on top of everything, you get exactly what you would expect: a four-day orgy of sex followed by emotional breakdowns and 75 percent of the industry sick in bed for the next week.

See you all next year.

All photographs by Nate "Igor" Smith. You can follow more of his work here, and grab his new zine of other goodies here.

Remember the English Defence League? How they charmed their way into our hearts by touring the country pissed-up, screaming Islamophobic chants and rampaging through town centres complaining about "Muslamic ray guns"?

Well now it's back, and it's all grown up. Sort of.

(Photo: Lee Harper)

Pegida UK is an attempt by ex-English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson to form another anti-Islamic street army, only this time with less booze-fuelled thuggery and angry shouting. When he quit the EDL, he claimed that they had become "part of the problem". Sick of being leader of a group of politicised football hooligans, Tommy wants a little respectability.

Birmingham played host to what was touted as Pegida UK's "first" UK outing on Saturday, as similar demonstrations were simultaneously held in cities across Europe. In fact, there had been previous failed attempts by the post-EDL counter jihad movement to take up the Pegida mantle, but they didn't really go anywhere. The group takes its name from the German founding cell, Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes – "patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West" – which has had tens of thousands walk in its demonstrations against Islam in Germany.

(Photo: Lee Harper)

"Save us", read badges worn by attendees as they gathered in a car park of Birmingham International airport on Saturday. As rain lashed down, that sentiment summed up the vibe. The turnout was low – reported at about 200 – and the no chanting, no alcohol rule made the event quite dull. A heavy police presence kept an anti-fascist demonstration well away, and there was no repeat of a previous Robinson-organised outing in Birmingham in 2014, when EDL members rampaged, throwing smoke bombs, cobble stones coins and coins at riot-cops.

Having gathered, the group set off for a silent march. Pegida joint-leader and failed UKIP candidate Paul Weston later described the quiet as "spooky" but really it felt more like an awkward school trip to a cemetery.

Catch a glimpse of "Trump is right" on the far right (Photo: Lee Harper)

Perhaps the buzz-kill rules had put off some of Tommy's old allies – although there were certainly some ex-EDLers in the crowd, often refusing to talk to the press. The question was, if those guys weren't welcome, who was taking their place? And if they weren't here for a piss-up, what were they here for?

"I'm here to honour the memory of the 60 million Christians who died defending Christ from a narcissistic usurper whose first wife was Khadija", George Nevison from Wales, told me, referring to the prophet Muhammad. "I'm here to honour their memory so I won't be with the goats on the day of judgement."

(Photo: Lee Harper)

It would probably be unfair to suggest that George was representative of the crowd, and that most people there followed a fundamentalist interpretation of an old religious text. That's not a courtesy Pegida are willing to extend to Muslims, though. At the rally after the short silent march, Weston said Islam is "the same side of the same coin" as Nazism. Pegida insist that they're not racist, but they take their own alarmist reading of Islam, then assume all Muslims ascribe to it and can't interpret their religion how they see fit. It's a bit like saying all Christians enjoy smashing babies against rocks and are cool with slavery because the Bible says so.

Which is not to say political Islam isn't a thing, but the nuance of Pegida's approach is probably best summed up by the fact that some protesters had "Trump is Right" placards.

(Photo: Lee Harper)

British-Pakistani man Muhammed Suleman Khan also addressed the crowd about the threats to Muslims who renounce Islam. He told the story of Nissar Hussain who "was physically attacked while his eight-year-old son was in his house because he turned away from Islam. A smashed knee, a smashed hand – they were aiming for his head." It seemed fairly worthwhile until he said racist "rivers of blood" poster-boy Enoch Powell was right, and that Muslims who don't like the UK should leave. He summed up what he saw as the Muslim community's attitude: "Join us, you have a hug, leave us, you're dead."

Muhammed Suleman Khan: 'Enoch Powell was right' (Photo: Lee Harper)

The sincerity of Muhammed's conviction about the treatment of apostates wasn't in question. But I couldn't help but think that Pegida follows a similar logic in reverse, with only people who repudiate Islam entirely credited with any thoughts of their own, and everyone else assumed to be unthinking members of some enormous, sinister cult.

For instance, Pegida co-leader Anne Marie Waters said that under Islam women are treated "like dirt" and railed against politicians, but didn't find time to mention, for instance, the Birmingham Muslim women from the Labour Party calling out the "systematic misogyny" of Muslim men in the party – something that was in the news the day before the demo. Pegida rails against oppression in Islamic communities but doesn't seem to notice when Muslims themselves challenge it.

Tommy Robinson, addressing the soggy crowd. (Photo: Lee Harper)

Then there was the more obvious stupidity. "David Cameron has pretty much decided that strangers from far-away lands are more important than we are," said Waters. When migrants have been told they'll need to earn £35,000 just to live here and people still shiver in the Calais jungle, you have to wonder what planet Waters is sourcing her news from.

The reported poor turnout aside, a few of the respectable, middle class types milled about that Pegida will need to lure if it is to be a success.

John, an immigrant himself. (Photo: Lee Harper)

John, wearing a bowler hat and with his dog in tow, seemed to personify this. He said he was a third-generation Irish immigrant himself, but said new immigrants should do more to assimilate: "We left our shillelagh behind, you see... I don't think it's conducive to maintaining our cultures and traditions and think we might well have been mistaken in encouraging to remain separate and apart with our laws of multiculturalism. We cannot maintain this continual open borders nonsense."

(Photo: Lee Harper)

As the rain poured and Rule Britannia played over a PA, a university lecturer wearing a Barbour jacket and a tweed flat-cap said, "I think it's fantastic. I hope I'll be able to come next time and bring friends. I think it'll grow and we'll see a real, good, peaceful grassroots movement to demonstrate that we must, for the sake of the country, resist Islamisation."

Was that optimism well founded? At the end of the demo, Robinson told the crowd that there would be another demo in April, and then every month thereafter, in the same location. The boring repetition of touring the country's car-parks with no obvious political strategy apart from pissed-up, angry shouting was one of the things that led to the slow death of the EDL. Pegida UK seems set to do the same thing, only without the lure of a boozy day out and always in the same Birmingham business-parky area far away from where anyone can hear their anguished moaning. It's hard to see it being that appealing, but you can't underestimate the victimhood complex at play here.

(Photo: Lee Harper)

Follow Simon and Lee on Twitter.

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Farewell, Tommy Robinson, Brave English Lionheart

I first meet Pamela Anderson on a Tuesday. She's posing on the deck of a mid-century house in Beachwood Canyon, in the low hills of Hollywood, as afternoon fades gently into evening. It's hard to say what's more striking, when I first walk into the house: Pamela Anderson, or the light on the deck, golden as only LA light can be at the end of a clear afternoon. Beneath the sky, a band of grey smog hangs on the horizon – under that, the creeping 101, the spindly marquees of hotels.

Pamela is wearing black lingerie and a trench coat, and her hair is groomed into a neat bob. All day, she's been a fantasy out of Hitchcock or Fellini: She's posed in tears with a pistol, in silk pajamas, taking drags from ultra-thin Capris while clasping an oversized cordless phone in a convincing semblance of panic. When the camera is doing its work, the small army of assistants, stylists, hair people, and hangers-on all fall silent. All I can hear is the beep-click of the shutter and Lana Del Rey on the stereo, for mood.

Watch the new Pamela Anderson sci-fi short "Connected" on Motherboard.

It's not right to say she is unrecognisable in the photos being taken; she is Pamela Anderson. But she looks small for someone so much larger than life, and somehow modest, miles away from the beach-bronzed rock 'n' roll goddess I was expecting. It's a strange effect. The Pamela Anderson that comes up when I google her name, all smudged eyeliner and wild chemical blonde, feels like another woman. It feels like an invention. In my time with Pamela – beginning here and ending ten hours later, dazed, in an Uber winding back down the hills – I will learn that the line between invention and reality is porous.

Pamela Anderson filming a scene for Connected, a new sci-fi short premiering on Motherboard. Photo byTucker Tripp

As I'm waiting to speak with her, night falls. An assistant pulls the photographer aside. I'm going to get wine," she whispers, "what should I get?" Rosé, chardonnay, champagne; the consultation spreads to Pamela. "Goldschläger?" she jokes. That's how she met her first husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee – she sent him a shot of Goldschläger from across a Las Vegas bar. He licked her face and they were married not long afterward, a modern-day fairytale, on the beach in Cancun, the bride in a white bikini. Their union was catnip to paparazzi, and the Anderson-Lees were rarely out of tabloids throughout the mid-1990s, inadvertently creating the celebrity sex tape genre before bearing two children and divorcing. Much of what I know about Pamela Anderson before meeting her is coloured by the vivid imagery of this era, which I absorbed at an impressionable age. The assistant goes for rosé.

The segue from shot to matrimony sounds improbable, but that's the way Pamela tells stories: as impressionistic collages of names, moments, and places, sometimes daisy-chained into breathless sequences. Each is like a little flower arrangement. David LaChapelle, Las Vegas, bathrobes, glitter on her skin, "visiting Elton in his room." That's how she lives, too. She doesn't have a manager, or an agent; she never really has – "they just give up on me," she says. Instead, she meets people, follows her instincts, gets into pickles, unpickles herself, picks up, moves on. She claims to be both unmanageable and suggestible, demonstrating a combination of freewheeling courage and guilelessness that has led her to who she is today: a newly-single sex symbol pushing 50 with a rolodex full of artist friends and two adult sons, entering what she calls "Chapter Two" of her career.

The way Pamela tells it, Chapter One was one long mistake. Discovered at 19 on the Jumbotron of a BC Lions football game in Vancouver, Canada, she'd never even been on an airplane until she flew to Los Angeles for her first Playboy shoot. The magazine had pursued her intermittently after the Jumbotron fluke led to a Labatt's beer ad and then a photo campaign for the Vancouver gym where she worked. When Playboy called her at home, she was in the middle of a fight with her fiancé. He was throwing silverware. The phone rang. Pamela, this is Playboy – would you consider doing a cover for us? "I was ducking, avoiding forks, knives," she recounts to me, wrapped in a white terry bathrobe after the photo shoot finally ends, holding a long-stemmed champagne glass. "I was on the floor of the kitchen going, 'Yes! Yes! When can I go?'" The magazine proposed a test shoot just as Pamela's fiancé entered a new paroxysm of jealousy, graduating from lobbing cutlery to trays. "That's how I came to LA. I just left. The next day."

She crossed the Canadian border in a bus, then flew from Seattle to LA after spending a night – her first – in a hotel. The Playboy shoot was touch and go. She was so nervous she vomited when a female wardrobe assistant touched her breast. They only shot one roll of film, but it was enough. In a striped Oxford blazer and tie – and not much else – she graced the October 1989 cover of the magazine, her first of 14 covers, more than any other single model.

She credits the magazine for her career and her cultural education. "I always say I went to university at Playboy. I met activists and gentlemen, we talked about art and politics, films and music. I met musicians and actors. That's where I got my information." Not that she came in empty-headed. Growing up in British Columbia, she read a lot. Hugh Hefner teased her because she was the only Playboy model who could recognise his mansion's art collection – none of the other girls could tell the Dalis from the Basquiats.

Photo by Luke Gilford

In 1991, Pamela was cast as Home Improvement's original "Tool Time" girl, and then, in 1992, without an audition, as the Malibu lifeguard CJ Parker in Baywatch. The show was high camp, like most of her major acting gigs: as Vallery Irons in the action-comedy sitcom V.I.P., as the titular character in the universally panned Barb Wire. In leaner years, she did what she could to pay the bills, including working as a magician's assistant in Las Vegas and making cameo appearances on international franchises of Big Brother and Dancing with the Stars. But it's Baywatch, where she first sported a high-cut red swimsuit, that made her an icon. Pam explains her career after that first Playboy cover more succinctly: "I was going to come home, and then Baywatch happened, and then everything else kind of just happened, and I got married, and rock stars, and kids."

Her kids are 18 and 19 now, both in college, both "really well-adjusted, great boys." Her red Baywatch swimsuit is for sale on eBay, along with the 3.24 carat diamond engagement ring given to her by her third – and fourth – husband, professional poker player Rick Solomon, from whom she has only recently divorced. The proceeds will go to the rainforest preservation charity Cool Earth, an organisation championed by her friend Vivienne Westwood. "We all hang onto these things and the world is falling apart," she explains, but "I'm saving half the rainforest in Papua New Guinea by selling that engagement ring. He doesn't care, trust me."

Photo by Luke Gilford

Pamela has been an environmentalist and animal lover since childhood. At 12, she convinced her father to stop hunting after discovering a headless deer carcass in the house, bleeding into a bucket. She never ate meat again. Sixteen years later, she was on a never-ending Baywatch promotional tour, visiting one country after another, and tired of answering the same questions – who are you dating, who are you wearing – she wrote a letter to PETA. It was written on mauve stationary, return-addressed "Mrs. Happy."

Dear PETA,

I'm in a TV show called "Baywatch" and the press is obsessed with my personal life. I'd really like to divert some of the attention to things more important than my boobs or my boyfriends. Can we join forces? I've been an animal lover and a PETA member since I was a kid, sending in rolled up quarters, and I've always wanted to get more involved. Please use me.

Love,

Pamela Anderson

"I said," she recalls now, "do something with me. I want to share this attention with something more meaningful. Give me anything."

Dan Mathews, now PETA's senior vice president of media campaigns, opened the letter; he took her gambit, beginning a decades-long relationship with Pamela, PETA's most successful poster child and advocate. Mathews, the architect of PETA's highly visible "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" campaigns, considers Pamela and PETA a match made in heaven. She remains the organisation's most committed spokesperson, promoting each campaign the way other celebrities might promote a film: doing talk shows, doing junkets, traveling internationally. She's got a really punk rock attitude about ," Mathews explains to me over the phone. "She doesn't care what people think. And because she's so sexy, so friendly and engaging in a positive way, that no matter how challenging the message might be, the messenger is so dynamic that you can't ignore it. I think that's the magic combo."

Everywhere Pamela goes, Mathews identifies local animal rights issues: exotic circus animals in Monaco, chinchilla furs in Paris, laboratory chimps in Florida. Her activism ("my activism," she says, a lot, as though it were a disease) has only intensified in recent years. In 2014, she started her own charity, the Pamela Anderson Foundation, which cites as its goals the protection of "human, animal, and environmental rights," and in 2015 she joined the board of Sea Shepherd, an anti-whaling organisation known for its aggressive direct-action tactics. She calls Julian Assange a friend ("I think he's one of the leaders of the free world") and in December, visited the Kremlin with a delegation from International Fund for Animal Welfare.

A still from 'Connected.' Image courtesy of Luke Gilford

Not that all of Pamela's second chapter is wrapped up in politics. Tonight, for instance, after we finish our interview, we're supposed to go to a fashion party. It's not far, in Hollywood – the designer Stella McCartney, an old friend, is showing her fall 2016 collection at Amoeba Records. Everyone is going to be there, I'm told – even Dan from PETA. Pamela disappears into the bedroom and emerges wearing a tailored black-and-white dress, her hair swirled into an updo. She looks impossibly chic and I suddenly feel underdressed. A little more champagne and a black Suburban takes us down the hill, straight to the business end of a red carpet gauntlet. Pamela hoofs it across, photographers howling her name, a storm of shutters; women holding iPads point me down the quieter path, behind the flashes. We rejoin at the entrance, where I immediately lose her in the crowd. I find out later that she left. When we meet again, back at the house, she's apologetic: The lighting was too harsh. Too many people. This is what it's like to be around someone famous.

Pamela became a celebrity in a different age. Although hounded by paparazzi during her rocky and very public marriages to Tommy Lee and briefly, Kid Rock, she retained some measure of inaccessibility. Her heirs to the throne of tabloid notoriety have no such luxury, nor do they desire it. The celebs created by Instagram and YouTube became famous to be seen; what's the point of privacy? Now that every would-be Kardashian can send out a constant, direct-to-consumer stream of staged intimacy and selfies, access – the longtime currency of fame – has been upended. Pamela, whose image was ubiquitous before ubiquity could be juiced with retweets, is left in the strange position of having to renegotiate the nature of her own public image.

'We could have saved the entire rainforest in the entire world,' she tells me, 'with that stupid sex tape.'

"I never really paid attention to those tabloid stories," she says dismissively. All of her old signifiers are gone: The Playboy Mansion, her first destination in Los Angeles, her incubator and university, is currently on the market for $200 million. Hef is 89. The magazine itself is changing format; Pamela was the cover star of its last nude issue. Although Baywatch is trudging inexorably towards a movie reboot, Pamela – as of now, anyway – is not slated for so much as a cameo. And her sex tape with Tommy Lee, the great scandal of her public life, is hardly shocking anymore. For the record, she tells me – she insists – the couple didn't sell their video to anyone. Dirty money. "We could have saved the entire rainforest in the entire world," she tells me, "with that stupid sex tape."

The Pamela of the present is not the Pamela of the past, but she knows how to exploit the fame that the swimsuit brought her. She is nothing if not self-aware. "I don't know how I turn boobs into trees and whales and oceans, but I do," she says. "Whatever attention I've gotten, I've used it to get in the door of a lot of places." In campaigns for PETA, she models lettuce-leaf bikinis; she owns a shoe company, Pammies, that sells a vegan version of the shearling Ugg boots she made famous on Baywatch. She plays her present against her past like she's casting it against type; every charitable, intelligent, or daring thing she does is newsworthy precisely because it breaks with her public image as a bimbo party girl. A few days after I met her, she was in Paris, speaking to the National Assembly of France about the practice of force-feeding geese to make foie gras. French politicians were less than generous about the credibility of Alerte à Malibu 's star lifeguard, but her presence made headlines internationally. How long she'll be able to play this line remains to be seen. Eventually, even the past eludes us.

A still from 'Connected.' Image courtesy of Luke Gilford

Pamela did a short film recently, Connected, directed by her friend and collaborator Luke Gilford. (VICE's tech channel Motherboard is debuting it.) She plays Jackie, a lonely spin instructor who lives in Venice Beach and is obsessed with the usual Southern Californian alchemies of youth and beauty: She juices, she applies creams, she meditates. The film surprises in many ways, not least with Pamela's performance, which is subdued, vulnerable, even raw.

In one scene, she faces herself in the mirror, pulling and pushing at her body, showing her age; in another, she weeps on the floor next to her stationary bike. No makeup, no skimpy outfits. Just a quiet voice, stripped of much of its SoCal affectation. Pamela has never presented as being less than perfect in a film – she's never been asked to – and the role was difficult precisely because of its familiarity. As a single mother of two facing the realities of ageing in Hollywood, it hit close to home.

She felt self-conscious on set, but listening to music helped her get into the zone. Particularly "End of Innocence," by Enigma; Pamela gave birth to her first son, Brandon, to "Age of Innocence." It's still a favourite of hers, she says, because it reminds her of a time in her life when she was happy. "I was at the height of everything," she says:

"I'd just gotten here, I was working, I had Baywatch, and then I met Tommy, and we got married, and we had babies. You never feel like that dream is going to end. I never felt like I would ever be divorced. I never thought everything would fall apart. I never thought I'd be a single mom. I never thought I'd be in other relationships. I just felt so good at that time, when I was listening to that music. To hear it again and realise what's happened in the last 20 years, how all that was taken away. It happens to so many women."

When I speak to Gilford – full disclosure: I call him a friend – about this, he goes quiet. She was going through a divorce during the shooting of the film, and they are close enough for him to know the details. He even encouraged her to use that pain in the film's more emotional scenes. His fascination with Pamela mirrors mine; Connected is an attempt to scratch at the surface of a sex symbol's mythology to get at the human being beneath. Her age works in his favour, in that regard. Although she's still stunning, she's no longer being cast in the sexpot roles that have bankrolled her career, and that very real questioning – what next? – reveals Pamela's vulnerability, her soulfulness, attributes that may serve her during Chapter Two, whatever that may be.

She invented herself in the first place. She was a flat-chested brunette from Canada who evolved into a blonde bombshell American icon.
—Luke Gilford

"What is the trajectory, or the evolution," Gilford asks me, "of someone who's really made her mark on the world with her body, something that inevitably depreciates with age?"

Perhaps it begins with truth. In 2014, when Pamela launched her foundation, she spoke for the first time publicly about a history of sexual abuse in her childhood and adolescence. Around the same time, she cut off all her hair. They were not equivalent acts, but they were related.

"I felt people didn't really understand there's a human being behind , a person," she tells me. "You really can't judge anybody. Everyone's gone through hard times." Naming her suffering and chopping away at her image, she revealed a willingness to be public in a new way. She has always been visible, but she wanted to be seen. Gilford agrees. "She invented herself in the first place. She was a flat-chested brunette from Canada who evolved into a blond bombshell American icon. She invented that. And now, at almost 50, she's ready to be reinvented. To show more truth."

I leave Pamela Anderson late, not far from where I first saw her. She's curled on a low couch, stilettos kicked off on the rug. I'm tired, I look tired, my makeup has smudged, but she's still Pamela Anderson. I shake her small hand, wish her well, and I mean it.

Follow Claire on Twitter.

Team Simple Tools (all photography courtesy of the author, pictured third from the left)

It's the evening of Friday, January 29th, and I've found myself entirely out of my comfort zone. I'm meant to be playing video games, not making them. And yet, here I am: at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, England, taking part in the Global Game Jam. If you offered a penny for my thoughts right now, I'd give you just the one: we don't have a hope in hell.

"We", because I'm not alone here. Former games journalist turned Auroch Digital producer Peter Willington is beside me, likewise Pocket Gamer writer Danny Russell. This is all Peter's fault. He's been trying to encourage journalist friends to take part in the GGJ, the largest international event of its kind, taking place in real-life locations across the entire world. "It'll be great," he enthused in the Facebook post that piqued my attention. "It'll be really interesting to try a game jam without any of the usual skills." Those "usual skills" being, in this case, the skills required to make video games.

Sometimes Peter says "interesting", when what he really means is "disastrous".

A quick game jam 101, for those new to the concept. This is an event – it need not be big, but it certainly can be, in the case of GJJ and the previously-covered-on-VICE Ludum Dare – where teams come together to prototype a project and then, hopefully, produce a finished, or at least working, game within a short period of time. Some of these games can go on to make it big. Acid Nerve's Titan Souls was created during a jam, before being polished up and given a proper release through publisher Devolver Digital in 2015. Participating in game jams inspired Markus "Notch" Persson to get creative with his designs, and then Minecraft happened. These gatherings can lead to amazing things.

Danny and I became part of "Simple Tools". Peter aside, it's a team with few practical skills beyond whatever artist Tom Waterhouse, who probably didn't know what he was getting roped into, and Tim Skew, our programmer, could bring. Tim didn't realise that by agreeing to let me stay on his sofa, he was also agreeing to help me make a game, something few of us had done before.

To reiterate an earlier point with curt precision: we're fucked.

I'd been buoyed by fake confidence, but sitting around the half of a conference table we managed to snag in the moments after the theme, "ritual", was announced to the assembled throng, I'm starting to have some doubts about my ability to produce anything in just 48 hours. For reference, this article took me something like 52 hours to put together, and didn't require a companion tablet app.

Our coder is stuck at work still, an hour away, and we're facing one massive problem: how do you even start making a game? What if our coder can't make whatever idea we settle on work? Hell, what if our idea sucks?

We drink too many cans of Coke. We eat too many biscuits. Brain food. That sugar's used to write down a few ideas, which we immediately discard as being too obvious. But the panicked feeling in my gut is subsiding a little. We do have a few things in our favour.

Firstly, Tom is an immensely talented artist. Secondly, Peter's knowledge from "the other side" helps us determine what's possible within two days. We settle on a card game with digital elements. This should let us iterate fast and check our design before we get our coder to do anything. After all, we only get one chance to do this right.

After flirting with the school social system and escaping from a zoo, we decide that our "ritual" of choice is going to be about being the best student in school.

Sharing our workspace for the weekend is Team Discovery Channel, and it quickly becomes apparent that not only do they possess a lot more technical skills than us, but they also seem to be making a game about fucking a bird. The atmosphere between the two teams goes from frosty to we're-best-friends-let's-tell-each-other-everything-about-our-lives over the course of the Friday evening alone.

Saturday is the hardest day's work I've ever done in my life. Saturday is like the first hour back in the office after a long holiday, only for 12 hours straight. By mid-afternoon I've forgotten what fresh air feels like, and I'm tired of looking at cards.

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Life-saving donuts are passed from group to group, and one member of Team Discovery Channel creates a tea-making roster with himself in every slot, drowning us in the stuff. I don't actually like tea, but I'm too caught up in British social angst to ever decline a mug of the stuff.

Tim and Tom are set up at either ends of a table separate from us less-technically-minded sorts, so they're not disturbed by us playtesting and going over, and over, and over the card designs. We start to refer to their table as the talent table. I look over to see how they're doing, and realise how futile my own efforts are in comparison to theirs.

Tom is putting in an Olympian effort. He sits sketching at a tablet, designing and drawing from 10am to 10pm with barely a break, creating every piece of art for the entire game. Tim meanwhile gets in at 12 but remains in a chair, wearing a three-piece suit, and codes for the next 10 hours straight.

Beside us, Team Discovery Channel is experiencing a crisis. One of their programmers, who we'll call "A", has announced he needs to go and do something elsewhere. He's vague on the details and, taking all of his stuff, murmurs that he might be back in a couple of hours, perhaps tomorrow. This creates a unique problem for our sister team, our friends, because "A" is the only member of their crew who actually knows how his code works.

Disaster. An urgent email is sent his way, and ignored. Joe Williamson, the artist for Team Discovery Channel, is about to get a promotion. In just a few short hours he has to become his team's sole programmer, and he has just one evening to get the game ready. That game, since you're obviously curious, has a name by this point. Randy Birds. No, really.

The mood is lighter than you might imagine, but when the place closes up at 10pm we're excited just to go outside. But in a bid to get our game "feature complete", which is the term for everything working even if it doesn't look pretty, Tim works well into the night, eventually crawling into bed after 4am.

Everyone at the Bristol jam has been working above and beyond, and when 10am rolls around the next morning, you can clearly see who's been going at it right through the night. This includes the entirety of Team Discovery Channel. They describe what sounds like the worst night of their lives, but they find themselves, on this new Sunday morning, somehow back on track to successfully submit their game before the absolute final deadline of 5pm.

Sunday is pretty quiet for the designers. I spend most my time writing fiddling with the balance on events and stuffing puns into flavour text. We settle on a name: Gravity Academy. It's named after our primary mechanic, an anti-gravity card that is a complete Fuck You to everyone playing it, generally accompanied by a bunch of people whooping like idiots whenever it appears.

On Motherboard: Global Game Jam Is a Decathlon for Game Developers

"A" saunters in shortly after 10, greeting his team as if he hadn't left them to flounder entirely. Half an hour later he announces he's going to see what the other teams are up to, and vanishes again. It feels a bit like he's broken the trust of the room, but Team Discovery Channel aren't too bothered, saying that he was redundant at this point. They're gracious enough, though, to put his name into their game's credits.

I take a stroll around the venue myself, to see what other teams have been up to. I spy "A", working away in a corner, trying to finish his own game. I hope that his idea was a worthwhile one. By the time I get back, we realise that the deadline for submission is looming, and we're going to have to leave voice acting out of our final game. Or, in other words: the recordings I have on my work Dictaphone, made by Danny in a shower cubical, will have to remain on hold for the Gravity Academy Game of the Year edition.

The problem is, despite our best efforts and no massive problems with the development, tying all of the art and sound together with code takes time. Tim has been hammering away for most of the last 35 hours, but he's not superhuman.

Meanwhile, Randy Birds is coming together nicely. There's a jungle of controller wires snaking out of two laptops – the controllers require USB ports to function, and the laptop running the game doesn't have enough to support the four players. But there's a complete game here now: you have to tap out a three-digit code, corresponding the the pad buttons, before your rivals; and the better you do, the more the female bird will shower you with love hearts. It is, essentially, competitive mating.

Somehow we manage to upload the details required of us at 4:59pm, seconds before an organiser hustles us off to give a five-minute presentation that decides the fate of our game. And despite the jam's 17-minute opening movie promising that this wasn't about competition, it's definitely a competition. I look around, and I see judges: it's definitely a competition.

Our card game takes 25 minutes to play, and we have five minutes to present it. Despite the best efforts of Peter and Danny, we struggle to get the core concept across. Perhaps that comes though in this piece, too? Never mind – I told you at the start that this probably wouldn't work out perfectly.

After us comes "A". His game is game billed as "A commentary on religion and our relationship with spirituality". Presumably he spent Saturday night communing with his chosen deity and Sunday's split from the group was divine intervention, and he's on a mission from G... No, wait. His game features a rapidly moving baby with an erection, and you're trying to move some scissors to circumcise the poor kid. Miss too many times and the baby's eyes cross and he turns a sickly shade of green. The word "Infanticide" is written across the top of the screen.

Now I'm not the most sensitive guy in the world, but even so, this is the first game I've seen by an indie developer that's ever made me uncomfortable. In a jam featuring games about horny birds, a plasticine wedding and ballet – with no dancing, but a bizarre and beautiful art style – a one-note joke about circumcision that might lead to you stabbing a baby to death left me just a tiny bit cold.

In the end, Gravity Academy doesn't place in the top three. Randy Birds, though? It only goes and bloody wins.

That was the best we could have hoped for, really. Everyone that played Gravity Academy loved it and we're going to work more on it, but perhaps the most memorable aspect of my participation in the GGJ was seeing the guys on the table next to us work so tirelessly, and being rewarded for their efforts. So why not give Randy Birds a go? It's not like it's actually going to make you stuff a turkey.

@_jaketucker

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Tragedy in Taiwan
AN EARTHQUAKE LEFT 23 PEOPLE DEAD AND ABOUT 120 MISSING
Buildings in southwest Taiwan collapsed and others were left tilting dangerously

Scenes from a quake in Pakistan, in 2005 (Photo: Gregory Takats via)

(via)

A 6.4-magnitude earthquake hit the Taiwanese city of Tainan in the early hours of Saturday morning, killing at least 23 people and leaving more than 120 trapped in the rubble of a collapsed commercial-residential building.

According to the BBC, tin cans and white polystyrene reinforced the concrete of the building, exposed since the structure's collapse and indicative of serious – and potentially illegal – breaches of construction standards. Tainan officials have said that it's too soon to know for certain whether poor construction contributed to the building's collapse.

The quake hit at the start of this year's Chinese new year, when many families were gathered at home to celebrate. About 100 people were believed to still be trapped in the rubble on Sunday evening, according to the Guardian, while rescuers had managed to pull out more than 240 survivors from beneath the wreckage.

Long-Range Rockets
NORTH KOREA SAY THEY LAUNCHED A SATELLITE INTO ORBIT
The UN Security Council is pissed, and to hold an emergency summit as a result

Not the North Korean rocket launch, obviously (Photo via)

(via)

On Sunday North Korea made good on last week's promise to launch a long-range rocket, sparking both condemnation from the international community and an emergency UN Security Council meeting.

North Korea's government has said that the rocket is carrying an Earth observation satellite while critics believe the launch counts was a long-range missile test, in violation of UN resolutions.

Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary, deemed the launch "deplorable" and US National Security Advisor Susan E. Rice called the long-range missile test a "reckless action" that would have "serious consequences". Russia's Foreign Ministry also released a statement critical of the launch.

North Korea last launched a long-range satellite in December 2012, and last month tested a nuclear device for the fourth time – again, largely condemned by the global diplomacy community. North Korean state media reportedly termed the launch a "breakthrough in boosting our national defence capability".

Unmasking an ISIS "Beatle"
ONE OF FOUR ISIS EXECUTION CELL MEMBERS REPORTEDLY IDENTIFIED
Londoner Alexanda Kotey was linked to Mohammed Emwazi's beheading group

(via)

Alexanda Kotey was revealed to reportedly be the second known member of ISIS' notorious execution group, in a BuzzFeed News investigation on Sunday.

Kotey, a 32-year from west London, is believed to be one of four ISIS guards responsible for beheading more than 25 hostages. The first was Mohammed Emwazi, dubbed "Jihadi John" by the press and allegedly killed by in airstrikes last year.

Kotey reportedly travelled to Gaza on an aid convoy in 2009, and whether he has returned to the UK since has not been confirmed.

The four ISIS "Beatles" allegedly earned their nickname from past hostages thanks to their English accents. They are believed to have beheaded 18 members of the Syrian army as well as seven American, British and Japanese hostages.

Bridge Blast
A DOUBLE-DECKER BUS EXPLODED ON LAMBETH BRIDGE
The bus was blown to pieces – for a Jackie Chan film

Karmik Grant-Byas, who's on trial for allegedly promoting prostitution and engaging in sex trafficking. Manhattan District Attorney/Studio/Manhattan DA's Office

Most lawyers would be mortified if they were ever publicly compared to Saul Goodman, the sleazy attorney from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul who has no qualms supporting a meth operation or cavorting with killers.

Howard Greenberg isn't most lawyers.

Standing outside a Manhattan Supreme Courtroom Friday morning a few minutes after making his closing argument in a sex trafficking case, Greenberg invites comparison to the dysfunctional attorney even as he oozes confidence in his own abilities.

"I'm a poor excuse for a lawyer, and don't you forget it!" he jokes.

Greenberg is well known in New York criminal justice circles for enthusiastically taking on clients who have done terrible things to people, and this case is no exception. He readily admits his client, Karmik Grant-Byas – who is charged with promoting prostitution and four counts of sex trafficking – is a "scumbag" and has done "despicable" things to women.

In his closing argument, Greenberg even encouraged the jury to find his client guilty of the prostitution charge. "Had they charged him with assault, I would ask you to also find him guilty of that," he claimed. Still, Grant-Byas is no sex trafficker, he argued: "I trust Manhattan jurors to know the difference between sex trafficking and prostitution."

Greenberg's closing statement, which he mostly read from handwritten notes scrawled on loose pieces of paper, drew countless objections from prosecutors – which were all sustained – and numerous interjections and scornful looks from Judge Bonnie Wittner. "John Adams was branded a pimp when he defended British soldiers who fired into a crowd at the Boston Tea Party," Greenberg noted near the beginning of his argument, immediately drawing an objection from the prosecution.

"It's very interesting English history," Wittner interjected, visibly angry. "But it's not relevant to this summation."

Greenberg, whose unkempt mad scientist hairstyle is unmistakable, spent about 20 minutes of his hour-and-a-half closing on a series of sarcastic one-liners. "The supposed victims of sex trafficking always shed a tear for the defendant, yeah right.... The supposed victims of sex trafficking always look healthy as a horse, yeah right.... The supposed victims of sex trafficking can always refuse a job with a John, yeah right."

"Did any of that laundry list paint the picture of somebody who's in sexual slavery?" Greenberg asked jurors. "The hoes committed voluntary sex acts committed by the spirit of free will."

The felony sex trafficking charges, prosecutors countered, are supported by a raft of text messages, phone calls, and physical evidence that show Grant-Byas often used threats and violence to coerce four women into turning tricks. "Getting in trouble with the defendant meant a beating," Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Dolle told the jury. "You heard his reaction when broke the rules: 'Bitch, I'm going to fuck you up when I see you.'"

Dolle clicked through a clinical slideshow of monstrous behaviour. Photos of forearm burns and a busted lip. Phone recordings of him screaming at the women for not bringing in enough money. (In one recording played for the jury, Grant-Byas said: "Nah, I'm good, I had Tims on. I stomped that bitch ribs.")

But the case is complicated by the fact that Jennifer Encarnacion, one of the women prosecutors claim was the subject of intense physical violence that included being punched in the face and burned with a flatiron, testified as a witness for the defence. Her testimony was widely circulated in New York's tabloids, which quoted her saying that working for Grant-Byas afforded her money and freedom, and that her clients included New York law enforcement officials and a Chicago judge. (Media outlets typically don't name victims of sex crimes, but in a brief interview with VICE immediately after Friday's closing arguments, Encarnacion gave permission to use her name and disputed the prosecution's characterisation of her victimhood.)

"I am not a victim. This is what I choose to do," Encarnacion, 22, tells me while standing near an elevator bank in the courthouse by her mother's side. "My mom knows what I do and she's totally OK with it."

As for the evidence of being burned and beaten, she insists, "It's a regular relationship. Everybody goes through stuff. He's not charged with assault – he's charged with sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is forcing people. There was no victims saying that he forced them."

Still, in her closing, Dolle tried to discredit Encarnacion's testimony, telling the jury, "People cannot consent to being abused," and that Grant-Byas ran a prostitution ring "through violence, threats, intimidation, and control." The prosecutor also pointed out that Encarnacion is subsidising her pimp's legal bill. (For his part, Greenberg acknowledges that three of the alleged victims are financially backing Grant-Byas's defense.)

Check out our documentary about Howard Greenberg, the 'Real' Better Call Saul.

But Encarnacion bristles at the claim that she was somehow not in control of her own body and says that if Grant-Byas is acquitted, she won't hesitate to work for him again. "She was not there – she doesn't know what I went through," she says, referring to the prosecutor. "I stand by him regardless of what these people say, and I always will."

In the final moments of Greenberg's closing, he emphasised his client's guilt on the prostitution charge and called the trial a "monumental waste of resources," a claim that drew an immediate objection.

"Not only have I managed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is not guilty of sex trafficking," Greenberg said, "I have also along the way managed to prove that every day is a bad hair day for me."

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