The character Beard, from 'Hotline Miami 2', who also happens to be Åkerblad, basically

"I wanna just explore art. That is my mission in life."

Niklas Åkerblad, aka El Huervo, has been creating all his life. He went to school for it, sure, but it's not like a formal education necessarily mattered. "I mostly did what was expected of me at art college," the Gothenburg-based artist and musician tells me, over email. "I enjoyed playing video games and drawing weird characters instead. Then I studied computer game art in college, but I did mostly the same there. Drank lots of beer."

It was in 2010 that Åkerblad's life was taken in a new direction, one that'd ultimately lead to his work being seen by millions across the world. Hotline Miami, by Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin (under the banner of Dennaton Games), was a couple of years shy of completion, but the core concept was blossoming. "I met Jonatan at No More Sweden, a sort of game jam thing, in 2010," Niklas says. "We didn't really hang out at the thing much, but on the way back home on the train he showed how to eat instant noodles raw, and that was kind of the deal breaker for me. I like classy moves like that."

Soon enough, Niklas was hanging out with the pair. "They started doing (entirely out-of-its-mind indie game-cum-music video nightmare) Keyboard Drumset Fucking Werewolf. Dennis thought I was like some kinda Zen person back then. Which I'm not, but it was flattering." The Dennaton pair took such a shine to Niklas that it's not just his art – and music, as El Huervo – that's in the original Hotline Miami and its 2015 sequel, Wrong Number. The character of Beard, that's him, plastered all over the art for the second game.

Cover art detail from 'Hotline Miami'

"They basically had their mind set on everything after fiddling around with a prototype, so there wasn't much I could do except hang around sometimes and cook nutrient-rich food – I can't survive on tofu and fish sticks. Obviously that must've done something, because after hearing my song "Daisuke" they decided to put me in the game. And it was real honourable like, because Beard is the coolest character, I think. He's the only ray of 'hope' for (the original game's protagonist) Jacket."

But Dennis and Jonatan didn't immediately ask Niklas to provide what would become some seriously iconic imagery for their game. "They wanted a cover in a VHS kinda style, and initially looked for artists online," he recalls. "But I thought I should do it, so they ultimately left it in my hands. It was cool because all the characters just existed from a top-down perspective in super low-res sprites, so aside from verbal things like 'sleazy Russians' and 'pig mask', I could do whatever with it. That's how the 'B' on Jacket's, uh, jacket came to be. I just figured he had some random American football jacket with a team's logo. Like the Boston Bruins. Which, I found out, was a hockey team. Goes to show how much I know about sports."

Niklas also took inspiration from older video games, from an era when stylised graphics were the norm, with realistic character design a good few console generations away from being realised.

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"The cover was supposed to fill in the blanks that come from the obvious abstraction of 8bit-ish graphics. Just like back in the old days. Strider on the Mega Drive has a real Aryan-looking dude on the cover. Like he's Lawrence of Arabia. It's super cheesy, and he's waving his sword in an awful pose. But in the game he looks like some manga dude, onion-shaped brown hair blowing in the wind, and drawing his sword faster than any Kurosawa samurai could ever dream of. I find that kinda stuff interesting. It creates a dissonance in the player.

"So, I actually tried to do the characters the total opposite of how I saw them in the game. And be as generic as I could with the posing, like they did back in the 1980s (which is when the game's set). Also, I figured nobody would try to copy the style in their own fan art if I did it this way. Obviously, it would suck if everybody tried to copy the cover, and not follow their own visions. Nobody wants to copy the cheesy white guy on the Strider cover. You wanna draw manga-hero Strider, being bad ass."

Two of Niklas' sketches for the new 'Hotline Miami' cover art, plus one image that served as inspiration, from Marvel's 'Transformers' comic series of the 1980s

As El Huervo, Niklas is an essential part of the sound of Hotline Miami, with three tracks on the game's soundtrack, beside contributions from artists including Sun Araw, Jasper Byrne and Scattle. "Dennis said 'it all came together' when they put "Daisuke" in the game. And with the track "Turf", I was just being inspired by what the guys were doing, and wanted to honour it. They thought the song would be perfect for the last boss battle. (Spoiler link.) It was just one of those moments when the various elements all click together."

Wrong Number received a triple-vinyl soundtrack release as part of its special edition, via iam8bit, with Niklas providing the artwork. "I tried to incorporate the feel of the music in the second game's triple-sleeve 12". I could have just gone all "Daisuke" and "Rust" over it, but that would have been too murky; plus I always felt the more disco stuff is what most players identify with. Now we have a Kickstarter though, for a triple-sleeve 12" soundtrack for the first game, and for that the colours and motifs have gone more spiritual, as well as subtler."

As Niklas says, there's currently a Kickstarter running for a triple-vinyl release of the Hotline Miami soundtrack. With well over three weeks to go, it's already smashed its target of £40,000, which is evidence enough of the massive attraction of owning these sounds on a physical format. Of course, it helps that the release will come with bonus tracks and all-new sleeve art, depicting Jacket in a state of mid-obliteration.

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The 'Hotline Miami' collector's edition vinyl, currently on Kickstarter

"I wanted the new art to be more low key and spiritual. The idea was to kill Jacket, and I wanted to place him in sort of a calm limbo. To me that is what "Daisuke" is: the calm limbo."

Niklas isn't simply an artist for hire whenever a new Hotline project comes up – he's worked on sleeves for his own material, and considers the cover and art book of his Vandereer album (as seen, and heard, on Bandcamp) to be "a fucking monument for me". Doing Hotline Miami didn't hurt getting commissions from other games-makers, too.

"I gotta say, I think Hotline has been invaluable for whatever attention I've gained. At least for that push that helps when trying to get your mental masturbations attention. I've actually done other games, like else Heart.Break() and Kometen. Those have helped me reach out. But, of course, if your face is on the top page of Steam for a week, that also tends to help." Mission successful, you might say.

Stream the Hotline Miami soundtrack below (minus the new bonus tracks)

Check out the Hotline Miami vinyl Kickstarter here, if you like. Head to the Dennaton website for everything else Hotline-shaped.

@MikeDiver

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Me looking at baby posts. Photo via Flickr user futurestreet

This article originally appeared on VICE Australia

I was lying in bed scrolling through my Instagram feed last week when I noticed not one, but two birth announcements.

The first was a classic baby bump, posted alongside a caption that said "part of me wants to stay pregnant forever!" The other was of a (very cute) baby boy I've never met, yet, due to his mother's incessant updates, I'm aware he's currently having potty training issues and is going through a weird biting phase—his mom, a former classmate of mine whose Insta bio reads "wifey and proud mommy," says he likes clamping down on her thigh the most.

The baby was wearing a little shirt that said, "I am going to be a big brother September 2016," and splayed across his lap was a series of sonograms.

Instinctively, I rolled my eyes.

Honestly, how could you want to be pregnant forever? You get sick, gain weight, your hormones are out of control, and drinking is VERY frowned upon. And then after the baby is born (through an excruciating process), you just literally never sleep properly, and have to worry about another human being for like... ever.

The darker side of parenting—though documented—seems to be lost amongst a sea of threads about the best types of strollers, teething strategies, and "MommyMemes."

(Is it really necessary to take a photo of your bump every other week? We get it—you are still knocked up!) While I am happy for people who are stoked about having kids, I also wonder if, once it happens, something switches in their brain where all of a sudden moments that are objectively boring as hell—look, a tiny human just splattered a bunch of mushy fruit everywhere—become truly life-affirming entertainment. And I don't know if I want to be the kind of person that looks at a tiny human with mushy fruit on their face and it's the highlight of my day, reinforced online by 100 likes (and loves and wows, now) from obliging/enabling friends.

At first I thought maybe the Facebook algorithm was fucking with me, but it seems for a lot of people my age, this is real life.

I'm 28, single, and obsessed with my job, so I admit having babies is low on my list of priorities. I still have to Google how to brown ground beef every time I cook pasta sauce and only just started making my bed. I have a crew of similarly career-minded girlfriends who are also single, and when we're together, I never feel the need to defend my life choices. We've agreed to kill each other if any of us ever updates our public profiles to include the words "wifey" or "mommy."

But a growing number of people from back home are getting married, moving to the suburbs, and not using birth control—on purpose. And while I know they know I'm happy, I definitely feel like the odd one when I go back there, guaranteed to field at least a few questions about why I don't have a boyfriend, and occasionally, how I feel about having a family. These questions bring on a sort of hidden anxiety that my day-to-day life never forces me to confront.

Just last week, I had dinner with a former colleague, who turned the conversation to who does and doesn't have children. She lamented the fact that a couple we know in their 40s wasn't able to get pregnant—"that's so sad"—even though that couple seems to be one of the happiest I know. Then, of course, she asked if I ever planned on having kids. "When you hit 35, your fertility goes down like this," she said, using her forearm to make a downward slant. I answered honestly, saying that I didn't know.

I'm not particularly maternal. I've never even had to babysit, so I speak to kids like they're adults because I don't know what else to do.

Growing up, my mom, who had an arranged marriage with my dad, would tell me, "Don't have kids unless you really feel like you're missing out." I know she loves me—we are super close. But she missed out on a lot of good shit. Travelling, getting ahead in her career faster (she is still a boss, but it took a lot longer), having a real romance. Also, I don't think raising my brother and I was a particularly good time. He was constantly in trouble and I was attention-starved and oscillated between throwing tantrums and, as I got older, not really giving a shit about anything other than getting fucked up with my friends. My dad was checked out for much of that time period, so he wasn't much help, save for the fact that he would inadvertently fund my booze and pot.

So yeah, I guess when I see couples on Facebook happily eating placenta or whatever, I'm pretty skeptical. I wonder if they ever have sex anymore, or about how exhausted they are, or if they're jealous of their single friends who can still spend an entire day in bed when they're hungover without having to tend to a wailing infant. I don't really envy them, but sometimes I do wonder what it'd be like to have a greater purpose in life—something that might motivate me to not be immobilized, binge watching Netflix every Sunday.

Then my delivery pizza arrives and I'm like, "nah."

When one my my best friends came to me for advice as she debated having an abortion, I told her, "Nobody ever says they regret having kids but some people probably do." Maybe not in a big-picture sense, but there must be moments where they wonder how much easier/happier/richer their lives could have been if they weren't spending them chasing a couple little shits around the house.

If only people were a bit more honest, like Snapchatted their screaming kids with the words "I WISH MURDER WAS LEGAL" once in a while, perhaps we'd all make decisions more based in reality.

Then again, I haven't had sex since December, so maybe this will never be an issue for me.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Sutton's Smut Bandits
SOMEONE SHOT PORN WHILE DRIVING AROUND "IN BROAD DAYLIGHT"
A local councillor isn't happy, and is trying to track down the filmmakers

(Photo: Des Blenkinsopp via)

(via)

A Sutton Lib Dem councillor is trying to hunt down the makers of a porn video shot in various locations around her constituency, after the people in the area started identifying local landmarks from the film.

The film's plot revolves around a female cab driver who picks up various male passengers around Sutton during the day, before they have sex in her cab.

"It is absolutely disgraceful that this is happening in public, not to mention right on my doorstep," said Councillor Trish Fivey, speaking to local press last week. "It's very worrying that it is going on under our noses, in broad daylight, where anyone could walk by and be subject to this indecency."

So far, the Met police haven't been involved in the search for the porn directors.

Smell a Rat
REPORTS OF A GIANT LONDON RAT WERE BASICALLY BULLSHIT
The rat found dead in east London looked so big due to forced perspective

(via)

Newswire SWNS' report of a giant "four-foot rat" found in Hackney, as covered by the Evening Standard, the Telegraph and others, may not be accurate.

The story was based on a photo, circulated on Friday, of a man holding up a huge-looking rat with a litter picker.

Really, the image was so dramatic because of something called forced perspective, an optical illusion in photography and film that makes objects appear bigger or smaller than they are in relation to each other. It's the same idea that inspires tourists to take those photos where they're pushing over the Leaning Tower of Pisa or holding the Eiffel tower between their fingers.

Hackney council posted their own version of a forced perspective photo, adding: "It's probably not that big. Our pest control team are checking it out though."

PC Gone to Court
A CHRISTIAN WHO WAS FIRED FOR BEING PREJUDICED IS GOING TO SUE
The UK magistrate hit back after his views on same-sex couples led to his dismissal

(Photo: Joe Gratz via)

(via)

A Christian magistrate who used to make decisions on adoption cases in the UK has said he plans to sue his employer after he was fired for ruling against same-sex couples being fit adoptive parents.

Richard Page was fired following comments he made in a March 2015 BBC interview. At the time he said he felt "it would be better if it was a man and woman who were the adopted parents". He'd been previously given retraining for saying heterosexual couples were "better for a child", during an adoption trial.

He's now reportedly going to sue Michael Gove directly. "I believe that there is not sufficient evidence to convince me that placing a child in the care of a same-sex couple can be as holistically beneficial to a child as placing them with a mum and dad as God and nature intended," Page said.

Alps Avalanche
SIX PEOPLE DIED AFTER AN AVALANCHE HIT THE ITALIAN ALPS
The victims included five Italians and one Austrian national

(via)

Snow overwhelmed people mounting Monte Nevoso in Italy on Saturday, after an avalanche hit high on the Alps and left six people dead.

Out of a group of 15 skiers on the mountain, one was reportedly injured and the others largely unharmed, though early reports had referenced several people missing or injured.

An Italian teenager was among the six dead, as was an Austrian woman.

The avalanche risk predicted for the weekend in the Italian Alps overall had been at three on a scale of one to five, and marked as two – or moderate – on the same scale, for Saturday in that particular area.

SS soldiers reading a pamphlet that does not actually contain Hitler's poetry. That cover was done in Photoshop. (Photo: Bundesarchiv via)

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Süleyman the Magnificent had two major things in common: a tendency to rule with an iron fist, and a burning need to channel their emotions into poetry. And as it turns out, they weren't the only totalitarian rulers with a poetic side.

Dutch writer and journalist Paul Damen gathered as many poems by authoritarian leaders as he could find, and assembled them into the book Bloemen van het Kwaad ("Flowers of Evil"), which was published by Koppernik earlier this month.

I spoke to Paul to find out why dictators tend to write poetry, how the book came about and whether or not the poetry within it is actually any good.

Poetry by Adolf Hitler from Bloemen van het Kwaad. With all images in this article, the poem on the left is the original poem from the book, and on the left is our own rough English translation for your convenience.

VICE: Hi Paul. What do you love about dictators' poetry so much that inspired you to spend eight years studying it?
Paul Damen: Well, I don't, really. It's just a hobby that got out of hand. I knew Hitler and Mussolini had written poems, and that Nero had written a lot, so I thought: 'What about the rest of them?'

How did you manage to find all these poems?
It was difficult at first, because when I started the internet wasn't as extensive as it is now. I remember going to the university library in Naples to go through the 36 enormous volumes of Mussolini's Opera Omnia. It all became a lot easier when the works started appearing on the internet.

The whole project was a gamble, because I had no idea how many poet-dictators I would find. If you find five of them after a long search, you still have nothing – you have to have at least 20 to turn it into a book, I think.

Poetry by Hirohito from Bloemen van het Kwaad.

How did you translate the poems?
I know about seven different languages, so I could handle most of the poems. Some chapters were difficult, such as the poetry in Arabic, but based on context I managed to get relatively far.

Hirohito's poems are a good example. By looking at certain key words I could figure out the context. If you read "mountain", "snow", "green tree" and "panoramic views", it's not difficult to tell what the poem is about. After that you check character after character – because my Japanese is not great – for a possible translation, based on that context. The translation that I ended up with, I had checked by two or three people who actually do understand Japanese.

Wouldn't it have been easier to just hire a bunch of translators?
No, I wanted to do everything myself. And translators can screw it up, too: a lot of poetry translations, such as the ones I found of Mao's poetry, made no sense whatsoever. So I preferred to translate everything myself, and then have it checked afterwards.

Poetry by Osama Bin Laden from Bloemen van het Kwaad

Isn't it weird that these ruthless dictators have such a well developed sensitive side?
Well, in most Arab countries it's perfectly normal that dictators or rulers write poetry. It's part of their culture, as it is in China and Japan. A true warrior should know how to fight and write poetry – at least, that's the idea. That may seem weird from our Western perspective, but we're the exceptions – not the rest of the world.

Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung were all tremendous assholes, but they're no strangers to poetry. The same is true for Osama Bin Laden. He was simply expected to write poetry, and it was part of his education: rhetoric and poetry.

Poetry by Elizabeth I from Bloemen van het Kwaad

Why would they take time out of their busy days just to write poetry?
Their motives vary. A number of them wanted to prove that they had other qualities besides being a dictator. Hitler always said about himself that he was a writer. Someone like Elizabeth I wrote to express her feelings. Süleyman I did that too.

But there are some who wrote purely for propaganda purposes, like Mao, Fidel Castro and Nicolae Ceaușescu. Or António Salazar, from Portugal. He wrote shitty hymns to the Virgin Mary, God and the Portuguese flag, to propagate nationalist and Catholic values.

Right.
Mussolini is also an interesting case. He wrote poetry when he was younger, and as a dictator he used his talent to spread propaganda. So, for example, he established a day to honour bread and wrote a poem about it, like: "Honour the bread, hooray for the bread, everybody's happy with bread," and that was printed on posters and distributed all over the country.

Poetry by Süleyman I from Bloemen van het Kwaad

Is any of the poetry actually good?
I like Süleyman's poems. You can see that Mussolini is a writer at heart, and, strangely enough, Karadžić, the Butcher of Bosnia, is pretty good. His themes are terrible – it's all about blood and people coming from the mountains to retaliate – but it's well crafted.

Actually, when you read the poems, you should detach yourself from the idea that they're all bloody madmen. They're not your typical romantic poets; they don't wake up in the morning and suddenly decide to write about the beauty of life. Almost all of them have a hidden agenda or ulterior motives with their poetry.

Are there any dictators missing in your collection?
I would've liked to include dictators like Enver Hoxha, Franco, Pinochet or Jaruzelski, but they've not written poems, unfortunately. And there are some poets I didn't include. If you look at my personal bullet points of what exactly makes a dictator, you could see the prophet Muhammed as one. He had his own caliphate, where his power was unlimited. And half the Qur'an is full of poetry. But I won't translate it – I love my life and don't want to deal with what could happen if I do.

Poetry by Mussolini from Bloemen van het Kwaad

It's remarkable how many dictators are poets – could you turn it around and say that many poets could have been dictators?
I don't know about that. A poet needs to be somewhat romantic and have an enormous power over language. A poet wants to move with language, shock with language – or at least exert some influence with language. Dictators and poets have that in common: wanting to have an influence and leave a mark on their audience.

Thanks, Paul.

Below are two more poems from Bloemen van het Kwaad, thefirst by Mao Zedong and the second by Fidel Castro.

Fiona Wood in her office at Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth. Photo by the author.

The medical profession has long regarded severe burns as a mostly irreversible injury. Many burn victims don't survive, and those who do are often left with horrific, life long scarring. But in the early 1990s, one woman came up with an experimental technique that could save the lives of many burns victims and reduce their scarring. Fiona Wood called her invention spray-on-skin, and although she and her product are lauded in the medical world, they're both not without controversy.

Today, Fiona Wood is the only person I know who, by sheer force of character, can compel exhausted medical students like myself to put down our phones and listen. I'm ushered into her office at Fiona Stanley Hospital in Perth, where she greets me with a wry English joke. Born in a Yorkshire mining village in 1958, the power of education was instilled in her from a young age. Learning was something her parents (a coal miner and a teacher) valued highly, and in high school she was encouraged to question everything "not as a criticism, but as an opportunity to nudge things forward." She originally wanted to be an Olympic runner but after that didn't work out, she was drawn to medicine.

Fiona first came into contact with burns patients at the Queen Victoria Hospital in West Sussex, where she was a junior surgeon in training. "I was looking at the scarring and the devastation in people's lives and thinking: 'Could I actually change that? Could I change that person's life trajectory?'"

What I'm going to do is learn as much as I can right here, right now, so I can change as much as I can going forward.

The catalyst for her pioneering invention was a case that almost made her give up. In 1992, she was confronted with a high school teacher who had been burned in an explosion. "A 29-year-old with 90 percent burns," she says, her voice becoming much quieter. "I thought I'd done a good job and then he got polyneuropathy (nerve deterioration) and became critically ill. He was paralysed and had to spend nine months in rehabilitation. I thought: 'I'm not cut out for this. I can't do it.'"

A few days later, she had a change of heart and decided to use the experience as an opportunity to learn. At that time, the treatment options for burns victims included using swaths of unburned skin grafts from the patient (which is a fast and reliable technique but it also requires a lot of skin and causes scarring) or to artificially grow skin – either from a donor or from a patient's own cells. The latter option took two weeks and could leave the patient at risk of infection as their exposed tissue cultivated bacteria.

This is why in 1993, Fiona and her colleague, Marie Stoner, began to work on an idea that would eventually become spray-on-skin. Instead of growing the skin tissue in a culture flask, they decided to grow the skin directly on the patient, cutting the healing time down from weeks to days. But after failed efforts to line gloves with skin or to attach cells under an adhesive dressing, one exasperated researcher said to the other, "Jeez you know, we should just spray this stuff on." It was a throwaway suggestion but, in that moment, they knew it was the way forward.

Fiona and her six children. Photo courtesy of Fiona Wood.

They called their product ReCell, and it worked by taking a small amount of healthy skin from a patient, dissolving the structures holding the cells together with an enzyme and spraying the resultant solution over the affected area. It soon became a standard part of Fiona's practice, but it wasn't until a terrorist attack in 2002 that anyone outside the medical community really took notice.

On October 12th, the Islamic extremist group Jemaah Islamiyah detonated two bombs in the Bali tourist area of Kuta, resulting in 202 deaths and countless injuries. Twenty-eight of the most gravely injured victims, some with burns covering 90 percent of their bodies, were airlifted to Royal Perth Hospital for urgent treatment. As head of the hospital's burns unit, it was Fiona's job to coordinate four operating theatres, 19 surgeons and 140 medical staff; as well as use her own skills to help save the lives of 25 people. When I ask her about that day, her reply catches me off guard. "I sense that you ask me the question because you think that incident might have been different from normal. Yes, the hospital was full; yes, there was a level of intensity and there were burn patients who needed treatment, but there was also an element of 'That's what we do' and 'Business as usual.'"

At that time, spray-on-skin hadn't been exposed to the full gamut of clinical trials, and as some critics would later point out, it was still in an "experimental" stage. Despite this, Fiona decided to use ReCell on the most severely burned. "You have to be pragmatic," she says. "There's no mileage in being churlish and saying 'I'm not doing this because it's on the back of a devastating event.' What I'm going to do is learn as much as I can right here, right now, so I can change as much as I can going forward."

Perth Hospital was the only one that used the treatment and Fiona was later lauded for the reduced incidence of scarring that came with it. Three people died under her watch, which was tragic but also impressive, considering the scale of attack. Yet, post-Bali, there was some discussion from Fiona's peers about the lack of clinical trials confirming ReCell's efficacy. Concord Hospital burns unit medical director Peter Maitz later told The Age, "Patients who come from a terrorist attack like Bali should not be subjected to an experimental procedure."

Watch our documentary, 'Dying for Treatment':

Ask her about this and Fiona is quick to describe the body of evidence that existed in 2002 for her "logical" and "very low-risk" technology. These included tests on animal models, work using the skin graft donor site as a control wound and a comparison of treatments in randomised scald injuries – all of which demonstrated positive effects. But this wasn't the only source of controversy.

In the same year as the bombings, Fiona and Marie decided to commercialise their research, forming Clinical Cell Culture . What originally started out as a "splendid idea" soon got them into hot water over perceived profiteering from horrific injuries. While Avita Medical runs as a not-for-profit organisation in Western Australia, the cost of ReCell does vary worldwide. When I ask Fiona about the ethics of making money from technology that could, if free, help thousands more, she acknowledges that it's a dilemma but argues it's difficult to make a difference without money.

Engaging in positivity and dismissing negativity appears to be her central philosophy. It takes her a long while to think of the worst part of her job. "The thing that irritates me is when people criticise without offering solutions to the problem," she says eventually. Not letting the "bastards get you down", as apparently her dad would say, is also advice she would give her younger self. "I think I may have lost a bit of energy worrying about what people said. As you get more mature, criticism has less of an impact. You kind of learn to shrug it off."

Do I think I live in an environment where we have the capacity for genius? Yes. Do I think it's realised often enough? No.

Interestingly, it's this attitude that's influenced her current work. She explains that her work revolves around harnessing positivity to aid recovery, she explains. With this premise in mind she's begun researching the ways the brain responds to injury, in order to compliment or borrow certain mechanisms. Her research title even has a snappy title: "Can we think ourselves whole?"

Despite her zealous faith in science and evidence, her belief in positive thinking comes up more than once. It might go some distance to explain her energy (she has six children and still manages to plays sport), as well as her ability to solve problems. I ask her if she considers herself a genius:


"No. Do I think I live in an environment, where we have the capacity for genius? Yes. Do I think it's realised often enough? No. I think that partly has to do with faith. To drive innovation and to change lives, we need to believe we live in an environment with a capacity for genius."

Ukiyo, one of the cats found mutilated in Croydon (Photo: Facebook)

Another night in south London, another beloved family pet butchered.

Boudicca Rising, co-founder of South Norwood Animal Rescue & Liberation (SNARL), gets into the car with her partner, Tony Jenkins, and puts another address into the SatNav. The couple don't know the owner of the recently deceased cat, but they know the horror that awaits when they arrive.

"Typically the cats are being found either beheaded or with the tail removed, or a combination of both. Occasionally, there are eviscerations, paws removed and, in some cases, cats cut in half," says Boudicca. "The attacks are happening somewhere else, as the blood is usually drained from the animal before it is then left on the owner's doorstep. Displaying the bodies outside the owner's address, we think, is a big part of the thrill for them."

Worryingly, the killer now appears to be attacking more regularly. "In the last two weeks alone we've had another 12 cases come in," says Boudicca. "Most are recent kills, but also historic cases where people have seen the coverage and revealed this happened to their cats too."

The story of the "Croydon Cat Killer" – or, more accurately, the "London Cat Killer", as identical cases continue to crop up in other boroughs – has now been splashed across TV and the tabloids for months. Reports of mutilated cats being found in their owners' gardens and driveways began to appear in October of last year, but police are no closer to catching the perpetrator.

Officers were initially slow to react to the murders – the early crimes usually being logged only as "criminal damage" – but the focus shifted when SNARL managed to get an audience with police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe at an open forum event in Croydon. Under the weight of a petition with some 40,000 signatures, the police started taking the attacks seriously. PETA have also offered a £5,000 reward for information via Twitter, which has been retweeted by the likes of Dermot O'Leary, Caroline Flack and Martin Clunes. SNARL are desperate for cat owners to keep their pets indoors overnight, even if they aren't in the immediate vicinity of the crimes.

As a cat owner who lives in the area, I've heard rumours that the deaths could be the work of a gang-style initiation or, rather more outlandishly, a budding terror cell. Boudicca, who's been collecting the bodies of the murdered cats for professional forensic examination, insists it is the work of one person. "Based upon the dozen or so post-mortems we have carried out, the forensics suggest it is one individual," she explains. "In terms of the way they are cutting them, the vet is suggesting the perpetrator is getting better at it."

Speculation is mounting that the attacker is a cab driver – or someone who travels for their job – as bodies with identical wounds have appeared in Edgware and Tottenham Hale, but clues are very limited. In a bid to prevent copycat killings, Boudicca won't reveal the killer's typical trademarks, other than the basic outline of the mutilations. "If the killer doesn't live in this area, we assume they have done in the past. They know this area well," she says.

Another grim facet of the case, says Boudicca, is that the killer appears to enjoy watching the victim find their own murdered animal. "We knew they liked to leave the cats at the owner's doorstep – although they have got it wrong in many cases, which would suggest they have time enough to watch the cats leave a specific address."

In another case, the killer may even have returned to move the body a second time. "We received a call from a lady in Thornton Heath who had found a tail and a leg of a cat," says Boudicca. "We asked her to take photos and to cover the scene to stop it being tampered with or children finding it. She did this, placing a green recycling tub over the body parts, and bin bags around it. When we arrived the parts were gone. They had definitely been there as the lady had a photo. There is no way an animal had taken them and put the bin and bags back exactly in the same place."

Alongside sensational tabloid stories and the rising body count, SNARL – essentially just Boudicca, Tony and a handful of other part-time volunteers – are doing the hard yards in trying to catch the Croydon Cat Killer alongside working their own 9 to 5 jobs and caring for the animals in their rescue centre.

READ ON BROADLY: Why Animals Have Sex With Corpses

Late-night call-outs and the endless horror of mutilated animals and distraught owners are just some of what they've faced in their quest to find the killer. The other problem has been getting people to listen in the first place. The murders were first highlighted when a Facebook report from another south London animal charity – the Riverside Animal Centre in Beddington – warned that animals were being dismembered. SNARL then warned their own local area, before beginning their own research. Tony says, "We shared it on Facebook and then we had people contacting us from all over the place. We then found out about the first murder in Addiscombe – a cat was eviscerated and left on a door step."

The RSPCA had been contacted several times about different attacks, but either blamed foxes – "The cuts are far too clinical and the forensics show it's the work of a bladed weapon," says Boudicca – or said they were unable to carry out their own investigations without an actual suspect being named.

The search changed pace when Amber, an eight-year-old tortoiseshell cat, was found, beheaded, by his owner Wayne Bryant in Shirley. Amber's body was then taken to a vet, who confirmed it was the work of a knife, possibly a machete. A GoFundMe then quickly raised £5,000 to pay for more of the bodies to autopsied to prove the killings were linked. But even that wasn't easy. "The police initially said even if we had tests done privately at our own expense the police couldn't accept the results as part of an investigation," says Tony. "The reasoning was that, if a case went to court, an independent report wouldn't hold up as evidence."

WATCH: 'Lil Bub & Friendz', our award-winning documentary about the internet's favourite cat.

But now, under the weight of further attacks, police have agreed to accept results from a mutually agreeable forensic analyst. The RSPCA has also finally agreed to start their own post-mortems. The big fear for them and residents is that the killer could soon switch to humans, with animal torture being a graduating step for many serial killers.

Former FBI profiler and author of Dangerous Personalities, Joe Navarro, says, "Animal torture is usually associated with psychopathy – a person lacking remorse or a conscience – and in this case this is very likely. This killer derives pleasure from both the act of killing and the pain and suffering he causes others upon their discovery of his mayhem. As to whether he will kill humans, that cannot be determined from these mutilations alone, but we can be sure this individual's severely flawed character has all the hallmarks of psychopathy."

With more reported cases every night, Boudicca and Tony are now left answering daily calls from stricken owners. The only way to end the horror, they say, is to help police catch the killer.

"People are very reluctant to ring 999 when they see something strange, specifically when it's involving a cat, not a human being," says Boudicca. "But the police want your calls and they are keen to catch this person. If you see anyone behaving strangely, enticing a cat with food or carrying a cat towards a car without a carrier, please do call the police."

To donate, find more information or to offer to become a volunteer for SNARL visit their Facebook page.

@andyjoneswrites

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David Cameron (Photo via DFID)

So there's clearly something going on between David Cameron and his mother. Last month, the octogenarian Mary Cameron drew some attention when she signed a petition against cuts to child services imposed by her own son's government. (Cameron's aunt, meanwhile, actually took part in a protest against the same cuts.) Mary Cameron had a good reason to oppose austerity – she works at an Oxfordshire children's centre. Soon to be past tense: her efforts were unsuccessful, and the centre is now closing; the Prime Minister's policies have essentially put his own mother out of a job. She is, as she told the Mirror, "very sad".

Strange behaviour for the leader of a party so committed to family values to go about upsetting his own mother. But you can imagine the young Cameron, during his long unwitting rehearsal for the Bullingdon Club, practicing his preteen tyranny in front of a long-suffering Mary: smashing porcelain plates, screaming at all hours, demanding to breastfeed well into double-digit age and biting when she lets him. Cameron has always radiated the sense that he was born to rule, and people who think like that tend to have unpleasant childhoods.

It's not Oedipal, exactly, it's revenge; the Prime Minister reducing his mother to the status of just another voiceless pleb, signing petitions against the government that do exactly nothing, losing her job for no good reason. The Oedipus complex is, for the most part, a bourgeois phenomenon: it's structured around the basic family unit, daddy-mummy-me, a triad mostly found in respectable but unspectacular urban homes, polite to the neighbours but distant, aware of the past but detached.

The Camerons are a very different type of family. They're directly descended from King William IV. The Prime Minister's own grandfather was a baronet. Really posh people don't really have families, they have lineages: the immediate libidinal attachments aren't with their distantly immediate relatives but the oil paintings in the drawing room, fleshily familiar faces that lived hundreds of years ago. Women disappear in these lineages; they silently, patiently reproduce the line, while every new scion experiences its subject-formation through its relation to men. If there is an aristocratic Oedipus, it's reversed: the child wants to possess the father, and overthrow the mother. And this is how you get Tory policies, which do tend to disproportionately affect women.

I think this is a persuasive theory, and it might be true. But much of the gleeful coverage of the closure of Chieveley and Area Children's Centre has ignored the fact that there was a third Cameron objecting to the cuts in Oxfordshire: the Prime Minister himself.

Letters leaked last November show an increasingly irate David Cameron remonstrating with Oxfordshire council against the "significant cuts to frontline services – from elderly day centres, to libraries, to museums", in addition to the "unwelcome and counter-productive proposals to close children's centres across the county", despite the fact that there's only been a "slight fall in government grants". In fact, as Tory councillor Ian Hudspeth responds, funding had been cut by 37 percent.

This is all deeply weird. Cameron spends much of his time almost gloating at the depth and severity of the cuts he's imposing in search of a chimerical fiscal balance. He must know that these cuts are a disaster for the arts and culture and that they disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, because on any given Saturday there are 20,000 people marching through central London to tell him so. But here he is, aghast that Oxfordshire isn't "following the best practice of Conservative councils from across the country and making back-office savings while protecting the frontline".

But in a way it makes sense. This is disavowal, the mind's ability to simultaneously hold two contradictory positions, the infant's response to the lack of a maternal phallus: "I know very well... but at the same time..." Cameron knows that his policies have been disastrous for vast swathes of the country, but it doesn't matter, it's happening to other people, and for the milk-fed Tory narcissist, other people aren't entirely real. He can maintain the fantasy that all his cuts are just forcing local councils to streamline their bureaucracies, until the same thing starts happening to his constituency, to his mum, and it becomes real. And once you start looking, you can see this same neurosis unfolding all across the government.

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Last year, for instance, the Department of Work and Pensions attempted to resolve this contradiction by inventing people to benefit from its benefits sanctions. In a leaflet, stock photos were used to illustrate fictional stories from claimants who never existed, explaining (essentially) that they were pathetic worms who needed to be punished, and that having their only source of income withdrawn really helped them get back on their feet. And they're still at it: last week, Iain Duncan Smith claimed that "75 percent of those who have been sanctioned all say it suddenly helped them focus and get on". This is, as far as anyone can tell (the Labour party is trying to refer the claim to the UK Statistics Authority), absolutely untrue. But did he believe it?

These people aren't wilfully lying, exactly, but neither are they just innocently incorrect. Between ideological imperatives and the mad buzzing nest of confused longings that constitutes the human mind, there's a disconnect: the government has lost touch with reality. It's almost more comforting to believe that the Tory front bench are motivated by a desire to see their own parents suffering – we might be ruled by sadists, but at least their sadism is minimally efficient. The truth is far more disturbing. They're evil, they're idiots; they know exactly what they're doing, they know nothing at all; they're responsible statesmen, they're terrified infants, clawing for the nearest nipple.

@sam_kriss

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Anyone who's seen a documentary on how bread or computers or cars are made knows that there's something oddly compelling about assembly lines. We're so used to seeing the finished products out in the world, but we rarely watch them come together from component parts—the steady, repetitive process that turns raw materials into the basic items that make up our world.

Filmmaker Nikias Chryssos made a short documentary that's like that, but for Fleshlights.

Titled The Double Feeling, this short takes you behind the scenes of a Las Vegas Fleshlight factory, where you can watch as the hot plastic is molded and the sex toys are shaped into categories the plant manager describes as "lady," "mouth," "butt," and "nondescript." You can also watch a man make a dildo have sex with a Fleshlight, in case you were wondering about how that worked. The whole thing is below:

I caught up with director Nikias Chryssos to ask him a few questions about his peculiar little film and to see if he's ever had any hands-on experience with his subject.

VICE: Have you ever used a Fleshlight?
Nikias Chryssos: After the shoot, the company gave us a Fleshlight as a present. We had it tested in Berlin by a French porn actor named Kevin Long, but unfortunately, the footage was lost in mysterious circumstances.

I'll take that as a no then. So what spurred you to make a film about a Fleshlight manufacturer?
There is a children's program on German TV called The Show with the Mousewhere kids learn how factories work and how things like chocolate or pasta are produced. I thought it would be interesting to do something like that for adults and look behind the scenes of such a special product.

Making a film about a sex toy seems strange enough, but what was the strangest thing you discovered while making it?
The strangest thing is how an object like this one can be stripped down from its connotations of shame and strangeness through daily interactions and proximity, something I noticed in the different relationships the workers and developers had with the Fleshlight.

Clearly you are a professional, but what was it like to watch the head of the company simulate sex in front of you with a dildo and a Fleshlight?
It was really nice. He was so open and hospitable with us. That particular moment was exhilarating, intimate, and joyful, close to what Werner Herzog describes as the "ecstatic truth." I imagined hearing David Attenborough's voice in my head and felt very alive.

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as a film curator. He's the senior curator for Vimeo's On Demand platform. He has also programmed at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Take one chunky teenage troublemaker and an old bushman and send them off into the soggy New Zealand bush on the run from child welfare. That's the story of Taika Waititi's new film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which stars Sam Neill, Rachel House, Oscar Kightley, and Rhys Darby. Julian Dennison plays a 13-year-old wannabe gangster who loves hip-hop so much he names his dog Tupac. Sam Neill is his reluctant foster uncle who has just as much emotional growing up to do as his young charge.

The film is based on Wild Pork and Watercress—a novel by late Kiwi legendary bushman, hunter, and author Barry Crump. It's a project that's been around since way before Waititi's 2010 hit Boy. Last year, he chucked out the dark, depressing version of the script he wrote a decade ago and smashed out a family comedy loaded with references to Sleeping Dogs, Crash Palace, Thelma and Louise, Lord of the Rings, and everything Wes Anderson.

VICE called up Waititi, who is currently in Los Angeles working on Marvel's massive Thor franchise, to chat about his ten-year process to get Hunt for the Wilderpeople made.

Julian Dennison and Sam Neill in 'Hunt for the Wilderpeople'

VICE: You've been working on this project since 2005. Why did you stick with it so long?
Taika Waititi: When I first wrote this, it wasn't my project. I was writing it for other producers. I was making Eagle vs Shark, and I'd writtenBoy, which got financed. I was getting more and more swamped with my own projects. After What We Do in the Shadows, I had a little break. I decided I wanted to do something really fast. A friend of mine reminded me of this project. I had a look at the script, and it was terrible, so I rewrote it all.

Was it always crammed with references to New Zealand films and commercials?
When I was writing, I realized the film had a chance to celebrate New Zealand's heritage of great adventurous filmmaking. Those guys who went before us who didn't go to film school. They didn't know what the equipment was called. They just made it up as they went. There's something really cool about that. Like throwing out a lot of the rules and trying to make the best, most enjoyable, most uplifting, and adventurous film possible and not be bogged down in the trends.

What is it about Hunt for the Wilderpeople that ignores trends, in your mind?
It takes a lot of Australasian cinema from the 70s and 80s. There are a lot of zoom shots, dissolves, cross fades, the character types. Even to have a manhunt is such an old school Kiwi thing. All those things we used to love so much when we were young. It's a little love letter to that style.

There's a reference in the film to the famous Kiwi Flake ad. How does that do overseas?
The ads with the beautiful woman in them were also in the UK. I think Americans still get it. When I used to see those Flake ads as a kid, I used to think they weren't for kids. They were naughty ads. It's like an adults-only chocolate commercial. There's allure and something that's so romantic.

Were there any references you had to take out?
We had a Tupac song at the end of the film in our edit that we knew we would never be able to get because a lot of the music back then is in dispute because of the samples. But I just thought it would be cool.

Tell me about working with Sam Neill. What does he do before a take?
He doesn't do anything. He's the most casual guy. He's so funny. I think a lot of the time you think of actors, especially really established ones, there'll be this arduous big thing when they need five minutes between each take to ground themselves and connect to the ether. I was very surprised by him. He just knows how to turn it on and off. He's probably the most relaxed person on set.

Was Julian Dennison the only kid you wanted to cast?
Yes. I worked with him on a commercial a couple of years earlier. I wasn't thinking about this film then, but when I made the commercial, I thought that I was going to have to find a film role for this kid because he's so unique. Not only in his talent but his energy, his presence, the way the camera just falls in love with him.

Taika Waititi on location. Image supplied

How tough was it shooting in the bush?
Very tough. We had five weeks to shoot this film, and we were probably outside for four and a half of them. It was the New Zealand winter. We were cold. It was usually raining. It was treacherous damp muddy conditions. It was great because there was a feeling of camaraderie—these people with one mission who worked their asses off to get the film made.

What about the car chase scene?
We've got no right having a car chase that epic in this film given the time we had. It was a celebration of how determined our people are. When people over here in the States find out how much time we had, and that we didn't have ten times the money that it would take to do that stuff we did in the film, they're so amazed.

You've made a couple of very funny films where the kids have shitty family situations. Is the way people raise kids in New Zealand an issue that concerns you?
I'm concerned with a lot of the poverty that our children grow up in, especially in the Far North and the area where I grew up . I definitely feel passionate about that, but I never like saying that is the message of my film. I feel I can subvert the idea that there are some things that need to be worked on within the social welfare system and how we all raise our kids.

Some people told me they thought Boy was a sad view of the Maori community. I wholeheartedly disagree with them. I think it's a celebration of how a people can thrive and survive and make the best of what has been forced upon them. I never see those things as a subliminal message of my film. For me, it's more realistic and more human to have humorous and uplifting things happen against a slightly darker backdrop.

What flag are you voting for in the change the flag referendum?
I'm not voting for any flag. I hate the whole thing. I have my own flag designs I'm trying to peddle on Facebook, but nobody's interested. Everyone should shut up about the flag. We should fix the problems in our country, and when we've fixed racism and poverty, we can celebrate by designing a new flag.

You're getting a lot of tweets about not fucking up Thor. How are you handling the pressure?
I love those tweets. I feed off that stuff. I have to hold myself back and stop myself from engaging too much. I'm a sucker for trolling people on Twitter. I'm one of the few people who realize that Twitter is Twitter, and that Twitter is not real life. Nothing on Twitter is real.

Have you not ever met someone on Twitter and formed a meaningful relationship?
God knows I've tried. Also, whenever people want to talk about Thor, it's so ridiculous because it's so early. We haven't even started. They're upset over something that hasn't happened.

You did get a good tweet from Guillermo del Toro. He called you "a great NZ director. Ingenious, funny, and a nimble storyteller triumphs again."
That's real life. He's real life. But the people who hate me aren't real life. Once you turn 40, you don't care about anything other than your family and people being good to one another.

Follow Frances on Twitter.

For more of Brian Blomerth's work, visit his website, Twitter, and Tumblr.

VICE fans,

Over the past few years we've been making loads (literally thousands) of videos and documentaries about all the important, weird, or funny shit you want to watch.

Now, we're really happy to say we'll be following in the footsteps of our North American cousins in launching our very own TV channel, VICELAND, in the UK later this year.

VICELAND will be on 24-hours a day, seven days a week, and will feature extensions of already much-loved VICE bits, like the Action Bronson-fronted food adventure 'Fuck, That's Delicious' and 'Fashion Week International', alongside brand new shows like Ellen Page's 'Gaycation', 'Black Market' with Michael K. Williams and 'Weediquette'.

We'll also be showing domestically-produced programmes too, featuring some familiar faces from Britain and Ireland to make you feel at home. As VICE boss Shane Smith said: "This is the biggest move yet in our long love affair with our British and Irish audience. VICELAND is going to give them a whole new way to experience VICE content – on their own televisions, around the clock."

With VICELAND in the capable hands of creative director Spike Jonze, we hope you'll join us on the airwaves soon.

In the meantime, check us out on Twitter and Facebook – and for all the latest sign up to our mailer below.

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PREVIOUSLY: What Do Serving Prisoners Think About the 'Brexit'?

Last week the Council of Europe published a report that saw UK prisons ranked the most heavily populated in the EU. The figures show that there were 95,248 people incarcerated in the UK in 2014; this figure has since increased, and will likely continue to rise.

I'm a teacher in prison. Recently, having managed to get the mandatory entry level literacy exercises out of the way (this session: how to structure a formal and informal letter), I asked a selection of prisoners in my class why they felt they were part of the biggest prison population in the EU and what, if anything, could be done about this.

(Names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy)

DAVE

Dave, 33, was sentenced to eight weeks (of which he'll serve four) for non-payment of fines. I ask Dave if he thinks his offence warranted a custodial sentence and he laughs; he describes it as "absolute bollocks" but says he'd be happy enough to do it again if he has to – although he does go on to complain about having to put up with four different cell mates and a chicken salad baguette that contained only one piece of lettuce and a single cucumber slice.

Bravado aside, it's clear that Dave doesn't want to come back to prison if he can help it. He misses his children and his girlfriend, and has felt very uncomfortable around "the dirty smack heads". He tells me that it's obvious there's a problem with drugs being freely available in prison, and has heard of people deliberately picking up small sentences so they can make money inside from dealing. The penalties for being caught bringing drugs into prison are pretty steep, and a more concerted effort is being made to halt the flow of drugs from outside, but it's clear that it's still an issue for concern and a big barrier to even beginning to help rehabilitate people and make inroads into reducing the number of people in jail.

PAUL

Paul, 36, has been inside a couple of times over the last two decades, first for 12 months, but this time for 14 weeks. He's got a well-paid job outside as a plasterer and is in the fortunate position of knowing that he can drop back into work more or less the day after leaving prison. This is interesting, as many of the students I teach complain they end up committing another crime and returning to jail because of a lack of work available to them once they leave. Paul has a degree of sympathy for this, but is quick to add that ultimately it's down to an individual to sort themselves out, and says relying on the prison system to help them is a waste of time.

At this point, Paul starts talking about "benefits culture" and draws a link to how prison life serves as an extension of the welfare state: free food and free board in return for passive compliance. Is he saying that people are seeing regular stays at prison as a natural part of their lives? "Some fuckers are, yeah, for sure," he replies. No one in the room disagrees, out loud at least.

Given his profession, I ask Paul whether or not more focus on practical trade courses would work to reduce reoffending, and by extension the overall prison population. He agrees in principle but says that even when the appetite to learn is there, sentences are often far too short to properly master a trade, even at a basic level – which again leaves the onus on prisoners to make their own way upon release, often with the inevitable consequences.

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SIMON

Simon, 24, has been in and out of prison since he was 16. He tells me that he tried adding up the total amount of months he's been inside and it came to just under six years. What's interesting about this is that Simon has only ever received relatively small sentences (the longest being eight months); the long time actually spent in jail derives from constant breaking of tag and license conditions and also crimes committed while in prison (punching a prison guard in the face being the most notable).

Simon has previously spoken about the transition from Youth Offenders prison to the adult HMP experience. I ask him how he first felt being around older men, often with long and serious criminal records, and he insists that this wasn't a problem. He does, however, say that being placed in a prison 200 miles away from his family was difficult to deal with. They weren't able to visit him, for what he now recognises as legitimate financial reasons, and it led to a breakdown in communication that resulted in him being homeless, fast-tracking his drug use and return to prison. Simon has reconciled with his family now, but says that this was a huge factor in him developing the pattern of returning to prison so frequently.

ALFRED

Alfred, 26, is serving six years for a third strike on selling cocaine, MDMA and ecstasy. He's got decent A-levels and was two-thirds of his way through a university degree when he received his first strike. The group has already discussed how many crimes don't really warrant prison sentences, how individuals need to take stronger ownership of their life choices and how rehabilitation somehow needs to be worked into prison culture. Alfred agrees in principle with all of this, but ultimately he sees the problem as being something entirely different. Smaller, state-owned prisons are being closed and the trend towards private prisons seems to be on the rise, something that Alfred views as pointing towards an ever-expanding prison population.

It's a pretty sinister and dystopian thought, but equally hard to disagree with Alfred when he says, "Private prisons only exist to make profit – why would they ever turn away a new or returning customer? For them, the bigger the prison population, the better."

§

The men in my class don't have any specific answers on what could be done to reduce the prison population, but their own experiences of prison life certainly do point towards what's going wrong. It's possible to look at, say, Scandinavian countries with excellent records of rehabilitation and lower rates of reoffending, but policy that is successful and practical for one kind of country, with a very different economy, isn't necessarily suitable for the UK. What's clear however is that a bad situation is only going to get worse if we carry on down the route of privatisation; I've already taught classes that contain a father and son, how long before whole families take up semi-permanent residence in super-sized McPrisons?

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Donald Trump in Hickory, North Carolina, on Monday. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

It's safe to say Donald Trump means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some people think he should be the next president of the United States, some think he's a fascist who supports white supremacist policies, and a few people think that he should be the next US president because he supports white supremacy. Everyone from taxi drivers to professional pundits has an opinion on Donald Trump, and so do America's prison inmates—even if they can't vote, for the most part, they are as excited and/or scared as the rest of the country.

"Donald Trump is a paradoxical individual," says Tut, a 52-year-old African-American from New York doing life in federal prison for a "three strikes" violation. "He is an extremely successful businessman, but everything in life isn't about money. People are not real estate, and every economy doesn't deal with currency. There is a human economy that supersedes the monetary and materialistic ideals of powerful people. He needs to understand the fact that the presidency isn't a pissing contest."

Many prisoners see Barack Obama's movements toward criminal justice reform as encouraging for obvious reasons, and the prospect of Trump, who can come off as a cartoonish authoritarian, doesn't seem like a step forward.

"The guy scares the hell out of me," Alex, a white guy doing ten years at medium-security prison in Tennessee for growing marijuana, tells VICE. "I believe he's Hitler reincarnated. He is a war- and fear-monger. Just like Hitler, he tells the people what he knows they want to hear and makes promises he can't keep and has no way of backing it up. He wants to build a wall to keep out the Mexicans, and he wants to kick out and alienate all the Muslims. I can't believe people entertain this con artist."

Scammer, con man, huckster—those are a few of the terms that come to inmates' minds when they talk about Trump. But a lot of prisoners don't really have a problem with the candidate's unabashed acquisitive nature. Like many Americans, they see his skill at making money as a potential asset for a president.

Dinger, a 40-year-old black man from Pittsburgh doing 20 years at federal prison in Kentucky for drug offenses, counts himself a fan. "I don't know too much about him, but he had his own casino. I think anyone that had his own casino would be a great president if he's elected," he says, adding hopefully, "I hope he changes these laws, so that I can get the hell outta here sooner."

To a swath of America's condemned population, Trump offers a breath of fresh air—even if the country should never have reached such a dire state.

"Something is very wrong with that picture," Chris, a 36-year-old white man from Ohio doing 52 months for Oxycontin distribution, tells me. "Looking at his background, he is a savvy businessman who has made a fortune. But considering his past, he has no political background. Unfortunately, he is the best person for us to elect. And that's sad! American people really need to look at this and understand how bad this country has become."

Most Hispanics in the country can't stand Trump, and Beans—a 45-year-old Sureño gang member from Mexico by way of Florida doing an eight-year sentence for illegal reentry—is no exception.

"I hate Trump," he tells VICE. "I came to this country when I was four years old. I did everything right till I got in trouble in 1992 for guns. I made a mistake and did four years in prison because of it and got deported to Mexico. I came back because I didn't have family in Mexico. I was working hard. Every day work, work, work, till I got stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and charged with reentry. Trump, whatever he's thinking, I don't think it's fair. Everyone has the right to live a good life regardless of past mistakes."

And Willie, a 30-year-old Native American from Alaska doing seven years for drugs, thinks that if Trump is serious about his immigration polices, he needs to deport himself. "If he was real about kicking out immigrants, he should leave too. Because Native Americans are the only true natives of this country," he says.

Multiple prisoners I spoke to believe Trump's campaign staff are behind the burst of violence—and that the mayhem is calculated to boost his standing.

"I think Trump is behind the violence and the people running his campaign are badass," Dave, a 44-year-old white guy from Kentucky doing 17 years for a bomb-related crime, tells me. "I don't think he'll be president, but he's doing exactly what he was supposed to do. As far as helping us though, he damn sure isn't going to do a thing to help us."

It's safe to say plenty of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans inside the prison-industrial complex view Trump as a racist who only wants to make America great for white people. But it's a fact that Trump's campaign has put the spotlight on race—an issue that is even more charged inside prison than outside it.

"Trump creates racial divisions within the Democratic and Republican parties unseen since the civil rights era," argues Sly, an African-American federal prisoner from Buffalo who's doing life for drug and gun crimes. "He pushes racial divisions between the American people."

Those divisions have exploded into violence in places like Chicago over the weekend. But some prisoners, including people of color, can't resist the charm of a hyper-masculine blowhard.

"As a black man in America, to finally witness a candidate like Trump pursue the White House with brutal honesty and be successful ranks right next to witnessing the first black man become the president of the United States," says Tea Mack, a 42-year-old Chicago native doing a sentence of 420 months for a conspiracy to commit kidnapping charge.

Federal prison inmates can't vote, and most state and local inmates can't either. Even many former convicts—especially in states like Florida—are barred from the democratic process. But that doesn't mean America's least visible citizens don't understand what's going on right now.

"Obama has tried to make America a better place for all," says Alex, the Tennessee inmate. "He has tried to right some of the wrongs committed by our government. I like the direction he has pointed this country. And now we have Hillary and Trump. Now, I'm not opposed to a woman running the country, but she has to have some balls, not pockets looking to be filled. It is disheartening to think that these are the best two people in America who can run the country."

A lovely plant for your garden. Photo via Flickr user Brett Levin

After mailing out dime bags to Canadian members of Parliament earlier this year, British Columbia weed activist and former New Democratic Party candidate Dana Larsen is expanding his pot giveaway to tokers from coast to coast.

Today, Larsen pledged to send free weed seeds to anyone wanting to plant a cannabis "victory garden" this spring. He says it's an effort to put pressure on the feds to keep their election promise and end pot prohibition.

"It is civil disobedience against the unjust pot prohibition laws that has gotten us to the verge of legalization," Larsen wrote in an announcement. "Let us finally bring our plants out of the closet and into the fresh air where they belong."

Larsen invites would-be weed growers to visit a new website and fill out a quick form. From there, he'll personally mail ten or 100 seeds to anyone who pledges to grow "openly and freely, preferably on your own property."

Larsen and some weed seeds. Photo via Facebook

Recreational weed use is still illegal across the country, but Larsen isn't too worried about cops coming after him. In the past, he's mailed Premier Christy Clark a half ounce of Purple Kush and delivered all 184 sitting Liberal MPs a gram of ganja along with his book, an illustrated history of cannabis in Canada. At the time, Toronto law enforcement said an investigation into the pro-pot stunts would be a waste of time.

"It's important to demonstrate this is a plant, it grows easily in any terrain, and Canada has a long history of growing cannabis," Vancouver pot campaigner Jodie Emery told VICE.

"I hope nobody gets arrested for openly growing cannabis," she added, "but if somebody does get in trouble, it'll provide the opportunity to challenge the law and demonstrate why it's unjust."

In February, a landmark court decision ruled that medical marijuana patients are allowed to grow their own weed, despite laws passed by the former Conservative government that required patients buy from federal growers. By breaking the law, Emery and Larsen hope to see that right extended to recreational users at home.

Eddie Mannix (Photo: Central Press via)

If you know anything about the real-life Eddie Mannix – the thuggish general manager at MGM during the studio's golden age – then you probably know that making a comedy about him seems ill-advised.

Yet, that's precisely the task that Joel and Ethan Coen have taken on in their newest feature, Hail, Caesar! Set in 1951, the film follows Josh Brolin as a likeable "studio fixer" who shares Mannix's name, and whose story is very loosely based on Mannix's life. Brolin's job is to protect movie stars from the vagaries of public scandal; to that end, he dashes around Hollywood sound-stages chasing kidnappers and fending off gossip columnists.

The Coens offer Mannix's day-to-day activities in the spirit of ironically light-hearted farce – one that obscures a dismal and unglamorous reality. For the real-life Eddie Mannix, who reigned at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1924 to 1962, covering up rape, abortion and potentially even murder were all a part of the job. While studio co-founder and mogul Louis B Mayer extolled the virtues of wholesome family entertainment, Mannix served as the muscle. He and the MGM publicity department were determined to maintain the studio's rosy public image at any cost.

Karina Longworth's You Must Remember This podcast dedicates a whole episode to the man, discussing the worst of the rumours surrounding his career. In an article for Vanity Fair, David Stein alleges that he helped to quash rape charges against an MGM executive in the 1930s, even after the victim, Patricia Douglas, went directly to the district attorney with her case. Then there's the story that provides the plot for 2006 film Hollywoodland – the mysterious suicide of TV's original Superman, George Reeves. Reeves had been having an affair with Mannix's wife Toni before suffering a few nearly-fatal car accidents. He died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in 1959.

Hail, Caesar! nods to Mannix's careful handling of Loretta Young's unexpected pregnancy, arranging for her to adopt her own child and thus shielding her from the taboo of unwed motherhood. His list of "fixes" are almost dazzlingly reprehensible – from manipulating Judy Garland's worsening drug addiction and talking stars into terminating pregnancies, to pinning crimes on innocent parties. He even personally helped to recover the badly burned remains of mega-star Carole Lombard from a plane crash in 1942. One shudders to imagine his average working day.

Of course, the enormity of Mannix's job description took a great deal of complicity, and MGM helped to furnish that. Hollywood studios once wielded nearly feudal levels of power: backlots were essentially self-sufficient, from the Warner Brothers' colossal ranch to the palatial surroundings of the 20th Century Fox lot.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's was the biggest of them all; its backlot in Culver City spread over 176 acres, holding 200 permanent buildings that included a dentist and a barbershop. More transitory facades included an array of sets – jungles, ancient temples, New York streets and European villages. The lot had its own railway station to ship in lumber for set-building, and the commissary fed some 2,700 people per day.

These were practically self-contained moviemaking cities, with an according rule of law. As such, there were studio doctors and a homegrown police force, specially trained to recognise all contract players on the lot. If a crime or a scandalous medical condition popped up, these people were the first on the scene, well before the LAPD were informed.

Some of the better-known scandals "taken care of" by studio police are well covered in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon. The apparent suicide of Jean Harlow's husband Paul Bern, the cold case murder of silent-era director William Desmond Taylor and the stabbing death of Lana Turner's abusive boyfriend Johnny Stompanato all have something in common: in each case, studio officials were at the scene of the crime for hours before police were called.

It's not surprising that someone like Eddie Mannix is relatively obscure now. MGM was home to Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and Jean Harlow, earning it the old boast "more stars than there are in heaven". No one wants to imagine that the purveyors of The Wizard of Oz and Singin' in the Rain could have carried out and covered up a murder with the same ease as a mafia don.

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Mannix's embodiment of Hollywood gangsterdom had less explicit echoes throughout the first half-century of American film. The rise of the movie industry and organised crime in America had their own parallels. Both were enterprises helmed largely by Jewish and Italian immigrants, flourishing at the turn of the century. Both hinged on the outsider's dream of success in America. It seems fitting that a mutual fascination existed between them – Frank Sinatra emulating Bugsy Siegel, or Siegel's own starry-eyed wish for Cary Grant to play him in a movie.

Similarities abound everywhere. Take vicious LA gangster Mickey Cohen and head of Columbia Studios Harry Cohn, the so-called "meanest man in Hollywood". In fact, they had a remarkably similar background. Both were Russian Jews, poor immigrants from New York and self-made men who came to California early to seek their fortunes. One chose to trade in celluloid, the other in violence.

Maybe unsurprisingly, their worlds were not totally divorced from one another. The legend goes that Cohn, a notorious bully, enlisted the gangster when he learned the combustible news of a romance between Sammy Davis, Jr and his contracted blonde bombshell Kim Novak. In 1957, public knowledge of a planned interracial marriage might have ruined both careers. Supposedly, Cohen threatened to bar Davis from his nightclub circuit, which would have effectively ended his career. Other stories suggest the threats were more sinister. What is clear is that Davis was married to black singer Loray White within a year – likely at the behest of Columbia Studio's underworld associates.

Cohn's persona probably contributed to the cigar-chomping, egotistical stereotype of the studio head. But unlike Eddie Mannix, he also seemed to have his moments of magnanimity. He gave relative creative freedom to luminaries like Frank Capra and Orson Welles, and was fiercely loyal to studio employees – even paying hospital bills for some.

The moguls were largely men of little formal education but great imagination; hustlers with immigrant chutzpah. Their ugly tangles with politicians, police and mobsters are a crucial part of Hollywood history. In their efforts to make motion pictures an enduring art form, they might be admirable – but their methods left a lot to be desired.

@christinalefou

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Old Hollywood's Elite Were the Last to Use LSD for Therapy

The Coen Brothers' 'Hail, Caesar!' Is a Hilarious and Surprisingly Dark Take on Old Hollywood

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Rushdie was tired, and I was ecstatic. Photo via the author

I was at the airport, waiting for my father to return from an Umrah trip to Saudi Arabia and feeling anxious from three too many shots in my iced coffee when my mother pointed to the gates and mumbled, "Hey look, it's that writer you like—the one your dad hates." I looked over and saw a tired man in a suit: Sir Salman Rushdie. He was standing in a weary, tired daze from his 14-hour flight, and I immediately bounded over and added to his confusion with questions, admiration, and a request for a selfie.

In the Qur'an, there is no explicit mention of a worldly punishment for blasphemy, as there is for offenses such as apostasy. And although Rushdie is addressing deeply conflicting questions we have about our faith, I believe he excuses himself from insult because he is operating within art. Furthermore, I believe addressing questions of faith is important, especially as a lot of Muslims, such as those fleeing Syria for the West, are experiencing a sense of spiritual disarray on a regular basis. Documenting feelings is not blasphemous, and especially not when what constitutes as "blasphemy" is open to interpretation.

Related: Watch our interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard

As a Muslim raised in the West, it's a natural tendency to question your faith. The novel affirms that a loss of faith leads to a soul in crisis, precisely when the environment you're introduced to is not built on the belief systems you were raised to be immersed in.

But what bothers me most about this fatwa revival is the obnoxious arrogance of such a decision or "opinion," as if the face of Islam and Iranian culture hasn't been tarnished enough. Its shameful to think that an appointed leader from a culture that gave us writers like Attar and Sadegh Hedayat, and filmmakers such as Kiarostami, Panahi, and Makhmalbaf ignorantly refuses to nurture the nation's artistic potential. Instead, Iran is choosing to fuel bigotry.

In high school, I remember lying to my cousins about liking Salman Rushdie. I was afraid they'd label me an atheist or a munafiq, but the truth is they were the real hypocrites. Pretty much no one in my family had read The Satanic Verses. Neither had any of my family in America, Germany, Pakistan, or Afghanistan—the latter didn't even have access to books, yet they all blindly agreed that this man deserved death.

This hypocrisy might be what really annoys me, or maybe it's that people often aren't equipped with the tools or intellectual opportunities to think for themselves, or enough freedom to judge work on its own merit. The Satanic Verses is to Muslim intellectuals what Infinite Jest is to hipsters. It's on everyone's shelves, and they all have strong opinions on the author, but most haven't read past the first 30 pages.

Follow Mahmood on Twitter.

All photos by Jake Lewis

At a small pub called The Horseshoe tucked away in a corner Farringdon, central London, Deta Hedman, the current number one female darts player in the world, is practising. She's wearing relaxed jeans and a pink and black darts shirt, drinking a pink cider to match. It's only a small session, relatively, as she has to be up at four in the morning to travel to the Isle of Man for a tournament. "I do as many as I can. I think last year I only had a couple of weekends off. But this year so far I've had two weekends off because Billingsgate got cancelled. Because I don't go out each night to play leagues, I have to keep playing tournaments, because that's how I practise. And while you're winning it becomes a habit. And I love those habits."

Deta was born in November 1959 in Jamaica, before moving to Witham, Essex, with her family. Her voice contains traces of a patois cadence she once had. She still lives in Witham. "I've been here 43 years. When I came my brothers used to play darts in the pub. One of them had a darts board at his home. When I go down to his house after school, do my chores, we used to have a practise and it was 301, double in double out, and they used to whitewash me and I would never get off that board until I won a game. And that's how it all started really."

Since then, Deta has won over 100 tournaments and risen to the top spot in women's darts, while holding down a job at the Royal Mail, doing late shifts and working until the early hours of the morning. It's a work ethic that has been present throughout her career, and it makes her uncomfortable with the title of 'professional'.

"I'm a semi-pro, to put a finer word on it. To me, when somebody says you're a professional, that's what you do for a living. But I'm a semi-pro, because I've always worked. Once I left school I found a bedsit. From that I just worked, paid my bills, and darts is just a hobby that I thoroughly enjoy. Whenever I get prize money, I think OK, that's a bill that's going to be paid."

In 1997, financial difficulties and redundancy caused Deta to drop darts altogether. The hiatus lasted seven years.

"What you've got to realise is, up until I came back, I've never had a sponsor. If I didn't win, I'd have nothing. So if I did win anything, that just goes back into the kitty. Even though I have a couple of sponsors now, which helps, if I didn't do so well then I wouldn't be able to do as many tournaments as I do, because the prize money for the ladies' tournaments is absolute pants. It really is. And it costs us exactly the same as the men to travel, especially in Europe. The pairs, the singles - we pay exactly the same. That's why the World Championship, I get so angry with it, because the men's prize money is £100,000 and the ladies' is £12,000. And it's only three years ago that it went up to 12. Before that it was 10, and before that it was six, and before that it was four."

Deta is The Dark Destroyer, a nickname she lifted from boxer Nigel Benn. "I destroy people on the board normally, so that's where it came from." Deta's throw has a beautiful glide to it, much like the rest of her movement. Though tall, she swans when she walks, and her throw has a strange time-stopping effect, as if she's pushing it directly into the board through telekinesis. There is something decidedly easygoing and stress-free about her actions, even down to her speech. Everything is said with the calming placidity of experience and quiet determination.

Like all pub sports, racial diversity in darts isn't great, to say the least. It's something Deta has had to deal with in the past and, unfortunately, on occasion, still does. "We were in Europe once and someone said in a clear voice, 'I didn't know they trained monkeys to throw darts.' It doesn't really bother me as such. If they were to say it in my face, then I would tackle them. I would go back in their face. I will fight my battles. If it continues then obviously I'll do something about it." In contrast, she's been made to feel different in her long-term home of Witham.

"Pubs aren't the black person's culture. But where I live in Witham, there are pubs everywhere. You probably don't remember, but in the olden days everybody used to go to the pub on a Sunday and play darts, dominos, card games - all the little cheese and pickle and biscuits - that's where it came from, we all loved doing that at lunchtime. And where we lived in Essex, it was such a friendly place, it really, really was. Everybody knew everybody."

The nurturing disposition has rubbed off on Deta, as she contemplates a life after darts. "There is going to be a time where I will have to stop playing. I would like to put something back into the game, such as being an official. I was actually speaking to the youth selector recently, so I might go into that."

Deta Hedman's supreme love for darts is evident. It seems that her maintenance of a 'normal' life and remaining semi-professional has allowed her to care for the game and the people in it in a different way, and let her retain a sense of great humility, even as world number one.

"I still walk around Witham and people say, 'There's that darts lady!' And I say, 'Who?'"

@joe_bish / @Jake_Photo

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Cyberdog in Camden Market

Sarah Mitchell, 38, was an original cybergoth back in the mid to late 90s. "Cybergoth, for me, started via lots of different influences at the same time, as these things often do. I loved a comic called Tank Girl with a girl who wore socks on her arms and a Japanese fashion magazine called Fruits which was just pages of alternative Tokyo fashion. As a result of that, I was wearing big boots and little skirts or shorts." At the time she was living on the Isle of Wight, so Sarah absorbed the subculture through disparate sources. "Once I was old enough I'd go to this nightclub called Boilerroom, basically the only alternative night. I got into industrial and incorporated a heavier look with the bright colours I already wore. There were only a few people who dressed like me. But when I went to festivals on the mainland, there were plenty of people dressed like me. It was then I realised cybergoth was happening all across the country."

Without the internet, you had to DIY. "There were no YouTube cybergoths doing tutorials or online shops or anything, so you just got a mate who thought they knew how to do dreads with beeswax and a bit of backcombing. There was one hippy shop near me that sold hair dye and a few bits so I'd go there and once a year I'd go to Brighton with all my money saved up and go to Cyberdog and all the alt shops there," Sarah recalls.

Sarah Mitchell and her husband

The scene was strongest in London, and in Manchester and Liverpool, where the UK metal scene has always thrived. Jilly's in Manchester was a particular favourite. "For a lot of people, like me, we'd just be heavy on booze – WKD, crap like that. Everyone's tables would be chock-a-block with glasses. There was definitely a drug scene, though, which caused a divide," explains Sarah. "The cybergoths who were hardcore into industrial rave were thrashing around holding glowsticks, and a portion of cybergoths would do MDMA or coke. It was definitely an environment where you could chase that high if you wanted." Despite looking distinctly alien, their alignment with mainstream rave culture was clear.

Cybergoth began its decline in the late noughties. Jilly's shut down, as did much of Manchester's thriving clubbing scene, and organised raves became an anomaly. In the past ten years, half of the UK's nightclubs have closed due to a mix of increased policing, struggle for licenses and planning tensions.

Mike Schorler, spokesperson for Wave Gotik Treffen, the biggest goth festival in Europe, told VICE: "There used to be many more cybergoths, judging from obvious outfits, about four or five years ago. In recent years their number keeps decreasing." Their online presence is declining, too: the cybergoth subreddit has barely any updates and 'cybergoth confessions' Tumblr stopped posting two years ago. It's rare to see a flash of neon cyberlox or space goggles on the streets anymore – even in Camden. Could it be that an end to rave signalled an end to the subculture?

It's more likely that it's just operating in a different space. People in cybergoth Facebook groups were reluctant to talk to me for this piece, and many of those who did wanted to do so anonymously. It's little surprise, given the way that cybergoth has been ruthlessly maligned. Eloise Adora, a 24-year-old alternative model and beauty therapist from London, says that the bad press has been collectively felt. "There have been so many times where we've been asked questions and then later on been portrayed negatively and in a pisstaking way. It happened a lot in Slimelight, where journalists pretended they were going to write positive things and instead did the opposite. The clubs – that one in particular – won't allow media to question people and will throw them out. A lot of us stay at home more than clubbing now anyway, partly because some things said were hurtful and untrue." Only last year, a cybergoth student was allegedly turned away from a local Wetherspoons, mocked by drinkers for being "transgender" and a "freak show" as she left.

Eloise Adora, photo Yuliya Colley Photography

The original cybergoths, meanwhile, have grown up. Sarah is now a mum to a small child who can't go clubbing anymore – "even if I could afford the time or money" – and can't keep up with expensive alternative brands. Cyberdog, forever in sync with the movement it spawned, now has a kid's range, and its social media accounts are littered with professional mother-and-child photoshoots. It started the hashtag #cybermums in the run up to Mother's Day, encouraging parents to share cute photos of themselves with kids.

But there are still younger cybergoths coming up to take the baton. Laura Aurora, 29, moved to London four years ago to seek out a cybergoth scene. "I worked for Cyberdog and met a load of people through that, going to clubs and festivals. I found a community of like-minded people and for the first time I felt like I fitted in somewhere. This gave me the opportunity to really play with my look and made it into what it is today." She wasn't disappointed with what she found in the capital. "There's Slimelight every Saturday and Club Antichrist every other month or so. Industrial music in general is very healthy and there are new bands and genres springing up all the time, so you get a good mix of age ranges. Industrial music doesn't have a limited shelf life like most commercial stuff tends to."

Naturally the look hasn't stayed chained to the one forged in the fires of Cyberdog and the 90s. Eloise has seen a vast turnover in trends around the scene since she was a teenager. "All the people I know have adapted to cyberpunk or cyberpop styles of clothing. I would even consider my style a mix of Japanese alt fashion and cyberpop as well as traditional cybergoth."

All photos by author

A new recommendation from Toronto's top medical professional is calling for the opening of safe injection sites at multiple locations in the city.

Dr. David McKeown, Toronto's medical officer of health, told reporters Monday he believes supervised injection sites should be opened at three locations in the city's most at-risk areas—Queen Street West, Downtown, and Queen Street East.

A safe injection site provides intravenous drug users with clean injection equipment and medical supervision while they get high.

" needs to have to be able to seek other services."

Berger notes the success of facilities like Vancouver's Insite—North America's first and, until recently, only safe injection site—in reducing overdose deaths and infectious disease rates, which he says proves the service is both effective and necessary in cities with high drug-using populations.

He also told VICE that while Insite has been very effective in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, the service doesn't exist in the rest of the metro Vancouver area, which leaves "huge portions of the population" neglected. Berger says that wouldn't be an issue with McKeown's plan.

"This is a plan that was exhaustingly researched and talked about for the last decade. It was an inevitability," Berger said.

McKeown's report notes that, in 2013, 206 people died from drug overdoses in Toronto, up 41 percent from 2004. The overdoses align with the huge spike in province-wide deaths from opioids; more than 5,000 people died between 2000 and 2013 alone.

McKeown is set to present the idea to Toronto Public Health on March 21, after which the federal government can choose to green-light the plan or not. According to Berger, it's likely the plan will go through given the government's recent approval of a second safe injection site in Vancouver.

Among local politicians, the idea of safe injection has support. Councillor Joe Cressy, who has been leading the charge on harm reduction initiatives in Toronto, told reporters Monday the implementation of safe injection services is a "top public health priority."

"These programs will save lives. They will provide comprehensive health services to those who need it. These programs will also make our communities safer. They will move drug use and needles from streets, our parks, our backyards, and our coffee shops, and into a supportive and safe environment," Cressy said.

But not all agree. Brash conservative Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti told VICE News he will fight the safe injection sites "tooth and nail" and thinks the service should only be done in "hospital settings," rather than in clinics open to the public.

"I don't disagree with the fact that we need to learn how to do things better, but you cannot mix heroin and residential communities in any way," he said. "You've got to figure out a process that gets professional services for addictions... but in hospitals, not in local communities. It becomes a disaster," Mammoliti said.

Mayor John Tory told reporters Monday that he is "carefully reviewing" McKeown's proposal, but added the implementation of the plan needs to be sensitive to the public.

"My priority is the safety of the public and that means working to prevent drug-related deaths and keeping needles and drug paraphernalia out of schoolyards and other public places across Toronto. This is a difficult issue, and it is important that we listen to the experts, review the facts, and hear the views of local communities during the public consultation process," Tory said.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Comedian Fawzia Mirza as Ayesha Trump at Donald Trump's canceled rally Friday in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Bradley Murray/Moll Jean Nye/Beela Productions/Charger Ent

"It's really a beautiful story, actually. Donald Trump build the Taj Atlantic City for my mother, Miriam Ali."

A Muslim woman named Ayesha Trump is explaining to the camera how, just as the original Taj Mahal was built as a sign of a man's outsized love for a woman, Trump's famous hotel-casino in New Jersey (which he doesn't own any part of now) is an undying testament to a passionate romance. It's a fascinating story. It's also completely untrue.

Ayesha Trump, the subject of a new mockumentary that came out Monday, is illegitimate in more ways than one—she claims to be Donald Trump's out-of-wedlock child, and she's also a character played by Fawzia Mirza, a Chicago-based actress and writer. Ayesha is obviously a vehicle for the usual Trump jokes, but her creator also intends her to be an explanation for some of the GOP frontrunner's most outrageous and hateful statements.

Ayesha Trump: The Muslim Trump

"I just started thinking, What could make him have so much hatred for us?" Mirza tells VICE. "And I decided that so much hate could only come from love he wasn't able to openly express."

Just as many prominent homophobes were later revealed to be closeted gay men, Mirza decided that Trump's Islamophobia might have stemmed from a love affair he had to hide as a married man.

"She was a flight attendant who was serving Mr. Trump chicken biryani and samosas in first class" before they "joined the mile-high club," Ayesha explains in the mockumentary. "They stayed friends after this—with benefits—not health benefits, sexual benefits, because obviously my father doesn't really care about people having health care."

According to the mockumentary, the fictional romance continued in secret until Ayesha's mother died in a mysterious plane crash while en route to China—where Donald Trump had offered her work in one of his signature fashion collection warehouses.

After filming wrapped, Mirza took her Ayesha Trump act to the Trump rally in Chicago on Friday, a raucous affair that was ultimately canceled before it began due to sweeping protests and violent confrontations. She went with a group of friends, including a former US Army infantryman whom she said was prepared to "airlift" her out of the rally with his arms if things got heated. But they were surprised to find Trump supporters were welcoming; some even offered them Subway sandwiches and beer.

For the most part, the Trump supporters the group encountered "were amazingly friendly but so full of hate," Nabeela Rasheed, the executive producer of the mockumentary, explains. One man had told her that he had 4,000* rounds of ammo in preparation for an armed conflict he anticipated between Muslims and Americans. But it wasn't intended as a threat—Rasheed says the bullet collector just assumed that she had "seen the light" and come out in favor of Trump, and therefore would be sympathetic to his point of view.

Some Trump supporters did turn on Mirza when they realized her act wasn't exactly kind to the candidate, according to Rasheed. That's when the shouting broke out.

"As people got louder and louder, Ayesha would just get quieter and quieter," Rasheed recalls. That's part of why Rasheed thinks the character serves as such a fitting archetype for many American Muslims: "She's absolutely an allegory because she has this quiet innocence."

Ayesha's soft-spoken responses helped diffuse the charged exchanges, and, according to Rasheed, mirrored the "gentle manner" of the Muslim-American community.

"They don't go out of their way to show up at rallies. They don't go out of their way to show up at the gay pride parade, for example... or even Black Lives Matters issues," she says. "I'm overgeneralizing a bit, but we have to stand up be counted."

A still of Fawzia Mirza as Ayesha Trump. Courtesy of Moll Jean Nye/Beela Productions/Charger Ent

That theory is backed up by Meira Neggaz, executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a Michigan-based nonpartisan think tank that studies the role of Muslims in America. Only about half of young Muslims, for instance, were registered to vote in 2009, the lowest rate among any faith group. Although a climate of Islamophobia might add to those numbers, by and large, Neggez argues, a lack of civic activity has kept Muslims from being heard politically.

"Muslims don't vote in droves and unfortunately politicians know that," she explains in an interview. "Yes, the Muslim population is a small percentage of this country's population; however, even then, the community is not taking full advantage of its accountability mechanism, which is to vote and to be politically engaged."

She adds that many Muslims are largely the sort of "model minorities" who are "working in jobs that help other people and contributing to the economy of the United States." But they lack the sort of political power that would make demagogues wary of attacking them in the course of a campaign.

"If boycotted his hotels. The Latinos, because of their numbers and because of their organization—they're very organized and have lots of institutions that bolster the community."

Mirza decided to hit back at Trump's vilification of Muslims through comedy in part for this same reason—Muslim-Americans haven't been able to level much of that sort of response to Trump.

She says she wants to create a scenario where he couldn't use her criticism to bolster his own appeal as he's done with so many who have tried to take swipes at him in the past.

"This just seemed like one thing he can never do that with," Mirza says. "He's never going to embrace his illegitimate Muslim daughter... and that's why Ayesha Trump is the perfect way to critique Trump and to shed a light on how what he says impacts people."

The actress doesn't expect Trump to ever actually acknowledge Ayesha, but she's imagined what it would be like for them to meet.

"She'd probably tell him that it's OK, and he doesn't have to be full of so much hate," Mirza says. "And then he'd cry, and then she'd cry, and then she'd offer him some chicken biryani."

*An earlier version of this article misstated the rounds of ammunition the Trump supporter has stockpiled—it's 4,000, not 40,000.

Follow Beenish Ahmed on Twitter.