Guo Jingming, director of China’s popular “Tiny Times” film franchise, tweeted a bold message of support to his 31 million followers: “Corrupt officials ought to be cursed — support the host who tells the truth!”
Earlier this month, Google allowed anybody to purchase Glass—as long as they did it on one specific day. Well, the shopping page is live again, and anybody with $1,500 can plop down for a pair. Again. Of course, since Glass started to trickle into the wild what-seems-like-forever-ago, the AR product has [...]
How did Alibaba capture 80% of Chinese e-commerce? This question was originally answered on Quora by Ashton Lee.
Google’s founders have lost a combined $5.2 billion since the World Billionaires List was published in early March.
New faces John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, and Max von Sydow join the original cast for J.J. Abrams’ film.
Video Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise is like the Joker’s Christmas special in that early Batman: The Animated Series episode. They are the films that “nobody wants to see, but everyone will watch.” This Paramount (a division of Viacom, Inc.) franchise is one that pretty much everyone claims to hate, that everyone claims represents the nadir of [...]
It’s a sad reflection of the quality of economic debate, or perhaps the economic knowledge of our rulers, that Margaret Hodge is once again calling for a boycott of Amazon over how little it pays in corporation tax in the UK. This woman is, after all, the chair of the [...]
The Anonymous Instagram User Who Calls Out Rappers with Fake Watches
Chinese billionaire Gao Dekang has stepped down as CEO of Bosideng International, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of down jackets. The move, effective today, will facilitate a “precise division of labor” between labor and management, Bosideng said in a statement yesterday. Bosideng has been facing pressure from easing economic growth [...]
It’s time to think more creatively about higher education finance. Why? Because the world of postsecondary education is changing, but the basic approach to financing college students’ education hasn’t changed with it. Financial aid programs aren’t working as intended, and proposed solutions rarely amount to anything more than tinkering.
Beth Hart and Keb Mo also perform at the tribute to Black Sabbath frontman and Village CEO Jeff Greenberg.
At a glance, it seems remarkable that Idina Menzel’s version of “Let It Go” would chart at all on the Billboard Hot 100, let alone make it to the top ten. It would make far more sense for the Demi Lovato version of this tune—the one originally slated for the single—to occupy that space.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
If you attended school or smoked crack in the last 30 years, you probably graduated from D.A.R.E., the drug-prevention program that teaches kids to “just say no.” According to D.A.R.E.’s website, 75 percent of US school districts and more than 43 countries teach their curriculum. This would be great news if the program actually helped prevent addiction.
Since police officers first taught D.A.R.E. over 30 years ago, the American Psychological Association, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Government Accountability Office have critiqued the organization’s tactics. The program lost federal funding in 1998, but since 2009, D.A.R.E. has used the acclaimed keepin' it REAL curriculum, a Penn State-developed drug-education program targeting middle schoolers. Keepin’ it REAL has been tested on 7,000 students and—unlike D.A.R.E.'s old-school lesson plan—has been included on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices. Students who completed keepin’ it REAL are less likely to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes and weed.
This is nice to read, but do we really want D.A.R.E. implementing any more drug-education curriculums? Studies prove D.A.R.E. has failed in the past, and behind those studies are students who were promised a good drug education but instead found themselves addicted to drugs only a few years later. To learn more about the story behind the data, I sat down with several drug addicts from across America to talk about how D.A.R.E. failed them.
VICE: What about D.A.R.E. sticks out?
Shorty: We all sat on the floor while people demonstrated people smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. It scared me a little. I was afraid that maybe the first time I tried anything I would die. They told us how addictive crack, cocaine, and heroin are—the statistics, the numbers, the probability of becoming addicted after the first hit or dose. You know what that made me wanna do? Smoke crack, snort cocaine, and do a dose of heroin to see if I could beat the statistics. I did it all.
What would have gotten through to you—if anything could?
I don't think anything would have gotten through to me. I had an uncle who died of a drug overdose around the time I learned about D.A.R.E.—even that didn't stop me from wanting to try [drugs]. I needed to take the risk and experience it myself.
Did anything about D.A.R.E. help you?
Cliff: D.A.R.E. had a volunteer speaker from a correctional facility speak about his addiction. I felt like I had a connection with him because we grew up in the same environment. I felt having a police officer teach this program was a good idea, because they have experience in the field of drug abuse and they see it every day.
Did your drug education fail you?
I think my school had several resources that could have helped with substance-abuse issues. I never [sought] out any help, because I did not care at the time.
What eventually got through to you?
I became sober once I got arrested for a theft charge. I was admitted to treatment several times and eventually started going to N.A. meetings.
What do you remember about D.A.R.E.?
Travis: I remember them really pushing us to believe that only losers used drugs. The programs were a scared-straight approach [that] appeals to people who aren't addicts. The biggest thing that sticks out is the emphasis on just say no. We practiced saying, “No.” I was on board with saying no to drugs. I think there was a really big emphasis on abstinence. They never showed us the realities of drugs and alcohol. We all saw a black lung and looked at a liver with cirrhosis, but the effects on your personal life were skipped over almost entirely.
How did you fall into drugs?
I was always curious, but between my religious upbringing and the support of my straight-edge friends, I was able to stave it off until I was an adult and out of my hometown. I would fool around with [cough medicine] and prescription medication, but I didn't make it a habit until I smoked weed with my brother-in-law for the first time. I had nothing else holding me back—I was unemployed at the time, and he asked me if I wanted to try it with him. I didn't hesitate. Every time with every [substance] was different. Sometimes it was to fit in. Sometimes I chased it. The first time I used pills, I immediately felt like things were OK.
What could have stopped you from trying drugs?
Nobody could stop me. I did what I wanted. I ditched friends who objected to my use and made new friends who I could get drugs from or who could help me find them. I had countless interventions and dangerous experiences. I picked up a dealer once who was covered in blood and took him to the dollar store to get a new t-shirt. I drove drunk and high even though I always said I wouldn't.
Did you think you would ever try drugs?
Madison: Looking back, I was certain I would never use at the time, because I was scared of getting in trouble and never thought I would be exposed to drugs of any kind. I felt the same way about alcohol. I was incredibly naive about the ease of access and prominent existence of drugs in middle and high schools.
Do you think your education didn’t teach you about addiction?
The mention of the disease of addiction was nonexistent. The fact that addiction is deadly to the body, mind, and spirit was overlooked. I was shown pictures of strung out teens who skipped school and stole from their mom's purse or sister's piggybank. I knew that would never be me—I was a high-functioning active drug addict and alcoholic. It took me a long time to admit I had a problem simply because I had a bachelor's in accounting from UD, a high-paying job, a nice house, and plenty of opportunity.
Did D.A.R.E. answer your questions about drugs and alcohol?
Shaundra: No. Not at all. It's lead by authority, which kind of gives you a scare tactic. I think it'd be more effective to incorporate real, live recovering addicts, such as myself, to tell their stories, if you really want to teach kids the truth about that lifestyle.
Were you curious about drugs growing up?
No. I was never really curious about drugs growing up. I think what happened is I had [told] my dad that I'm bisexual and he kind of disowned me and kicked me out when I was 16—I had previously been bullied about this at school. A few days or weeks later, my best friend asked if I wanted to try marijuana. She had never done it before either, but we wanted to see what all the fuss was about. In hindsight, I think my first time was very much [due] to peer pressure.
You took D.A.R.E., correct?
Dustin: I did in elementary school. The issue was I didn't encounter drugs until later and all the D.A.R.E. stuff I learned had washed away.
Why did you use drugs?
Lack of structure in my childhood and the genetic disposition. Both my father and mother are addicts, and my brother uses meth IV. Culturally, I grew up in an environment where drug use didn't have a negative connotation. I never developed proper coping mechanisms to deal with the stress. Drugs are an easy replacement coping mechanism.
What do you think about discussing addiction in drug education?
Addiction and substance abuse is typically a symptom of another issue. Everyone uses for different reasons. Being able to link consequences directly to use, and to take away the glorification aspect, is something that has to happen. Unfortunately, most children can't understand the path from decision to consequence at an early age.
Do you remember anything about D.A.R.E.?
Leandra: D.A.R.E. was the program with the dog back then—McGruff or something like that. They were teaching us about drugs and peer pressure, things of that nature. We earned a red and gold ribbon that said, “Say no to drugs.” We learned the street names and effects of drugs.
What would you have changed about drug education to suit you better?
One of the main things I think the program didn't do was make it real to me. I was young, yes, but I didn't know anyone who was or had ever been an addict, so it was like it just couldn't happen to me. I didn't learn that it could be anyone at anytime. For those who are not or do not personally know someone who is an addict, I tell them to not be so quick to judge, because they don't know why that person is like that. No one wakes up one morning and decides to be an addict. It is a long, dark road full of pain and heartache, compounded by a string of bad decisions which leads to more suffering.
Landing our clients speaking gigs at industry conferences and the like is often a key deliverable for many PR firms. Some events are more prestigious than others. For example, these last couple of days we’re swimming in the breathless doings at TechCrunch Disrupt, taking place in the Big Apple. Yahoo! [...]
OnePlus and Cyanogen are working to patch the OpenSSL vulnerabilities
Because, as moms everywhere truly believe, LOL = lots of love.
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The train derailed in downtown Lynchburg, Va. No injuries have been reported.
Orphan Black took the world by storm last year, and it wasn’t long before the niche series turned into a cultural fascination on the levels of The Walking Dead, and in less than a week, the long awaited return of the world’s newest sci-fi obsession comes to television screens all over North America in the most spectacular of ways.
Your classmates: “Oh, I started at Citibank just out of kindergarten!”
More comic on your deepest anxieties at Cat And Girl and Toothpaste For Dinner!
Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger relive the action hero glory days and Tommy Lee Jones defends the portrayal of Native Americans in “The Homesman.”
"Chaikhana with the Portrait of Lenin" by Alexander Volkov, one of the banned pieces of Soviet art now housed in the State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan
Making our way out of Uzbekistan’s Xorazm Province, we began our three-hour drive to the city of Nukus, capital of the country’s autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan. Up until the late-1990s, the land we were driving through was still cotton fields; today, it’s just an expanse of salty grey emptiness.
Once a thriving agricultural center, Karakalpakstan is now one of the sickest places on Earth. Respiratory illness, typhoid, tuberculosis and esophageal cancers are rife, and the region has the highest infant mortality rate in the former USSR.
These problems started with the destruction of the Aral Sea, which dates back to the US Civil War. After finding his supply of American cotton under threat, the Russian tsar decided to use the sea’s tributaries to irrigate Central Asia and create his very own reserve of cotton plantations. With a staggering 1.8 million liters of water needed for every cotton bale, the liquid began to run out, and by 2007 the Aral had shrunk to one-tenth its original size.
An abandoned construction site and derelict Soviet block in Nukus
The dehydration of the landscape has led to vast toxic dust-storms that ravage around 1.5 million square miles of land. Spreading nitrates and carcinogens, these storms used to hit once every five years, but now come ten times a year.
North of Nukus, beyond rusted ships stranded in the manmade desert, Vozrozhdeniya, or “Rebirth Island,” contains the ruins of a Soviet bio-weapons facility that you might recognize from a mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops, in which you have to kill a bunch of Russian doctors in hazmat suits. Sensors on the island's testing range measured the effects of smallpox, brucellosis, and the bubonic plague on monkeys, sheep, and donkeys (all tied a mile apart), until it was quickly vacated following the collapse of the USSR. Now joined to the mainland thanks to the Aral Sea’s falling water levels, the island is an eerie wasteland of smashed test tubes and petri dishes, its radioactive scraps fought over by smugglers.
Getting out of our car in Nukus we were greeted by a smack of hot, dry air, machine gun-wielding guards sweating outside the Council of Ministers building and a child with a goiter the size of a pomegranate circling us on his bicycle.
A man passed out at the Markaziy bazaar, Nukus
Sprinkled around the thinly-spread city center, nondescript Soviet-era blocks were smattered with broken windows and attempts at Timurid motifs. Groups of unemployed men hunkered together, loitering on street corners, and there was a wedding taking place near the distinctly un-amusing amusement park.
In the bustling Markaziy bazaar, babushkas in socks and sandals peddled the cheapest brands of loose cigarettes from buckled wooden trays; men wearing skull caps lay passed out in the shade of tin shacks, drained bottles of vodka at their sides; and the young women flashed glimpses of gold teeth—normally a sign of wealth, but here a byproduct of endemic malnutrition; in Karakalpakstan it's either gold teeth or bare gums.
Savitsky's art museum in Nukus (Photo via)
Yet, it’s in this environment that a remarkable collection of art has survived, precisely because of its inhospitable location. Ukrainian-born art collector Igor Savitsky collected thousands of avant-garde artworks banned in the Soviet Union under Stalin and founded the State Art Museum of the Republic of Karakalpakstan in the mid-60s. The museum houses works from a forgotten generation of artists—their styles far removed from the “Socialist realism” permitted by the Communist regime of the time—who mostly met an unsavory end.
"In the Cart" by Alexander Volkov
Featuring geometric scenes of everyday Central Asian life, Alexander Volkov’s colorful oil paintings saw him labeled a bourgeois reactionary after Stalin issued a campaign against free-thinking artists. Fired from his posts, he lost everything, and over the course of the next three years all of his works were removed from the leading Russian museums. Moscow ordered that Volkov be isolated from anyone who had anything to do with the art world, and if anyone requested to meet the artist the authorities would tell them that he was far too ill to receive visitors. In many ways, however, Volkov was one of the lucky ones—at least he avoided the gulags.
"On His Knees" by Lev Galperin
A fusion of Dadaism and Cubism, a piece called “On His Knees” is one of the only surviving works by Lev Galperin, a painter and sculptor from Odessa. His paintings were regarded as counter-revolutionary and he was arrested on Christmas Day of 1934 and sentenced to five years of hard labor. During his trial, Galperin dared to voice his feelings about the Soviet regime and the state of art in the union. His death certificate reads, “Cause of death: execution by shooting.”
A series of sketches by Nadezhda Borovaya show what conditions were like in the gulags. When her husband was executed by the authorities in 1938, Borovaya was sent to the Temnikov Camp, where she spent the next seven years secretly recording and smuggling out scenes of daily life. Savitsky managed to procure funding to purchase these drawings for his museum by persuading party officials that they were depictions of Nazi concentration camps, not the Soviet forced labor facilities.
Islam Karimov on a billboard in Nukus
On the upper floor, an entire section of the museum is dedicated to a visit from Uzbek despot Islam Karimov. Even in the desert of forbidden art, the authorities were watching—Karimov scowling down from billboards in the abandoned construction sites outside the museum. In fact, his influence was everywhere; walking around this remotest of backwaters it took us three hours to find the city’s sole internet hub, but we passed plenty of elegant clay tennis courts along the way. The president’s daughters clearly liked tennis.
That evening, the only thing open along the main drag—besides the shashlyk grill being manned by two slurring middle-aged men—was a bar. Settling on a rickety bench, we sat in front of a fridge containing one lonely bottle of UzCarlsberg.
Making their way along the uneven pavement outside, a pair of khaki-clad police paused by the crumbling lattice fence. The atmosphere in the bar immediately changed—the conversation became stilted and the barmaid’s smile turned into a wary grimace as she clicked the radio off. Having stumbled upon the only two tourists in town, the soldiers blocked the pitch-dark track to the back alley toilet, indicating that we should pay them to use this hole in the ground.
Making their excuses, all of the bar’s other patrons soon vanished, clearly experienced when it came to escaping this kind of fleecing. “Go! Close!” the flustered barmaid pleaded with us, wringing her hands. It wasn’t even 10:00 PM.
Briefly mulling over the disappearing act we’d just seen, we figured that it was probably a good idea to take the barmaid’s advice, so backed away and left Nukus and its avant-garde art museum behind.
This story is excerpted from Stephen Bland's forthcoming book Does It Yurt?
The 26-year-old singer took to Twitter to discuss her personal life at length, sparking mixed reactions from fans.
Neil Hall / Reuters
She told Glamour: “I’ve never used it as a gimmick. I’ve always said I’ve dated guys and I’ve dated girls… If I’m in love, I’m in love. I’m not going to hide it.”
Don Arnold / WireImage
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Prepare to be obsessed.
Francois Durand / Getty Images
The song is about a kid growing up without a dad and wondering where he is. Stromae's dad, who was absent most of his childhood, died in the Rwandan genocide.
The equity market activity in Q1 2014 appears soft despite being much better than the level observed in Q1 2013 in terms of number of deals completed. The fluctuating activity level was the reason that Thomson Reuters estimated a 21% decline in equity underwriting fees for the industry as a whole in Q1 2014 compared to Q4 2013, although a 27% jump was expected year-on-year.
“You go up that road, there’s a left right there, you go like this, and you go there, and after as you go there, you go up there again…”
“I live, like, you know mani maji? You go up that road, there's a left right there, you go like this, and you go there, and after as you go there, you go up there again, go so, then you go over there, there's a house, and then after you pass the house, then you go like this, and go up, and then you turn around this corner, there's another house, then you go over, then there's a red mango tree, then you go around, there's a road, go around, turn by the yard, then you go like this and go straight out, then you go up, there's another house, and then after you are finished, then you go over, then you go up, there's a mango tree, and then go up a little more, and go up the front, that's my house.”
