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Vintage t-shirt, Silken Favours scarf, Philippa Green earrings

The Super Bowl trophies look really nice; it's a shame about all the sex trafficking that comes with the NFL championship game. Photo via Flickr user LearningLark

The Super Bowl is a long, exceptionally polished television advertisement for the corporate state we live under that's watched by over 100 million people. It ostensibly exists because of a football game, but the annual event has grown over the years into a kind of modern variety show that features singing and dancing during the halftime show, comedy sketches during the commercials, and gruesome blood sport during the actual game. America!

That’s the way most people experience the Super Bowl—as something that, like the Academy Awards and war, happens on TV. But the big game is also a kind of traveling circus, only instead of clowns and acrobats, the people arriving in New Jersey and New York are tourists, security experts, the 1-percenter oligarchs who can afford the ridiculous prices for luxury suites at MetLife Stadium, and actual sex slavers. The big game provides an awesome—in the old sense of “inspiring awe”—spectacle, but for anyone who has to deal with its mundane on-the-ground aspects, it’s a nightmare of greed, lies, and broken promises.

It's Very Cold in New Jersey

Snowy football games look dramatic on TV, but a sudden storm could force the NFL to change Super Bowl Sunday to a Monday. Photo via Flickr user Karyn Christner

The most obvious problem with the 2014 Super Bowl is that it's a football game being played outdoors in New Jersey in early February. Fortunately, though it will be very, very cold, it probably won’t snow—but an unexpected storm could force Super Bowl Sunday to be on Saturday, or Monday, or some other day of the week, which would presumably be a disaster for advertisers, ticketholders, and anyone else financially tied to the game. That’s why in past years the NFL has decided to hold the event in a southern town like New Orleans or Miami, or in a city that has a domed stadium. That’s not to say the NFL is unprepared—a league official told Newsday, a local paper, that “crews at the stadium will be ready to move snow in the parking lots, seating areas, and on the field and on our vitally important roadways… We will be prepared to move snow quickly,” but contingency plans wouldn’t be necessary if the game was being held in a warm-weather city that people actually want to visit in the winter.

People Are Suing Over Unpaid Bills and Ticket Prices
Another hassle that could have easily been avoided is a lawsuit filed against MetLife Stadium’s operators by Taylor Turf, the company that installed the field’s playing surface last summer. The artificial grass was put in in only 11 days, a process that normally takes twice as long, according to Taylor Turf’s owner, and the company is still owed $292,000 for the rush job. While that gets worked out, the NFL has it’s own legal problem—a New Jersey lawyer has sued the NFL, alleging that only 1 percent of 77,500 Super Bowl tickets are sold to the public at face value, which is in violation of state laws that say 5 percent of tickets for any event be sold at face value.

Fans Will Be Monitored by Police at All Times
The execs who run the league aren’t worried about the weather small-fry lawsuits, of course. They’re much more worried about a terrorist attack. As a result, the already extremely security-conscious NYC metropolitan area has gotten even more paranoid than usual, installing 200 additional temporary security cameras around Times Square. Fans roaming the streets of Manhattan, miles away from where the game is to be held, will constantly be under surveillance—according to the Associated Press, “Hazmat and bomb squads will be on standby. Others officers will patrol with bomb-sniffing dogs. Still more will watch from rooftops and from police helicopters.”

And They Won't Be Able to Tailgate

This parking lot will become a tiny police state when the Super Bowl comes to town. Photo via Flickr user Gabriel Argudo Jr

The security presence will be even more overwhelming at MetLife on the big day. Hundreds of New Jersey state troopers will be on hand, along with 3,000 private security guards hired by the NFL. Fans aren’t going to be allowed to walk to the game or get dropped off outside the stadium grounds, and neither will they be allowed to travel to MetLife via taxi, limo, or any car without a parking pass. More crucially, they won’t even be allowed to tailgate—a traditional pregame pastime beloved by generations of fans. If Seahawks or Broncos supporters want to celebrate their team’s ascension to the top of the NFL by drinking and grilling meat and tossing a ball around, they’ll have to do it in their vehicles.

“You will be allowed to have food in your car and have drink in your car,” the CEO of the Super Bowl organizing committee told the media. “And provided you’re in the boundaries of a single parking space, you’ll be able to eat or drink right next to your car. However, you’re not going to be able to take out a lounge chair, you’re not going to be able to take out a grill, and you’re not going to be able to take up more than one parking space. And it’ll all be watched very carefully.”

That’s a pretty crappy set of rules to deal with if you’re a fan who’s paid over $1,000 for a ticket, plus a minimum of $150 for a parking pass, plus whatever it cost to get all the way to New Jersey. And the reason there’s not enough space to tailgate, by the way, is that there’s a 300-foot security perimeter around the stadium, which shrinks the number of parking spots from the usual 28,500 to less than 13,000.

The NFL Lies About How Much Money It Brings to Local Businesses
The payoff for all these headaches and all these security measures is the $500 or $600 million that New York and New Jersey will get in extra consuming spending from all those tourists who come to town. Ha! That was a little bit of Super Bowl economics humor—though the NFL likes to throw big numbers like that around, experts who have studied the impact of the Super Bowl on local businesses say that the event actually brings in, at best, only about $50 or $60 million in increased economic activity. Visitors coming to town for the football spend more at NFL-sponsored shops and events rather than local establishments, so the money doesn’t get funneled into the area’s economy. What's worse, the shitstorm of activity might dissuade those who would normally visit New York—Broadway producers have complained to Variety that the Super Bowl Boulevard street fair in Midtown Manhattan will cause visitors to avoid the theaters in the area and hurt box office revenues.

And the League Has Treated New Jersey Like Crap

As far as the NFL is concerned, East Rutherford is basically just a road that leads to a stadium. Photo via Flickr user Doug Kerr

The event also creates lots of hassles for those who should be reaping the benefits of the big game. Bars, restaurants, and towns that want to throw Super Bowl–themed parties can’t use the words Super Bowl to promote their events, since the NFL owns the trademark on that phrase and has a history of making sure that no one else is cashing in on it. Scores of local governmental agencies have been enlisted to help with all the nitty-gritty organizing that a Super Bowl entails, but some who have been involved in the process feel disrespected by the NFL.

“New Jersey isn’t getting the respect it should,” James Cassella, the mayor of East Rutherford, home of MetLife Stadium, told NJ Spotlight, a local news website. Cassella complained that the league didn’t provide promised promotional banners advertising the game to the area; more broadly, he says NFL officials are a pain to deal with:

“According to Cassella, the NFL takes a dour attitude toward sharing any of the public cost burden to stage what the league calls the biggest single-day event in the world: ‘We don’t give you any money,’ he mimicked. ‘You should be honored the games are here.’”

The mayor has reason to be pissed—his town is technically hosting the Super Bowl, meaning it has to deal with some of the infrastructure-straining difficulties of a major event, but it isn’t built to get a comparable payday. As the below charming local-news video shows, East Rutherford business owners feel like the NFL hasn’t promoted the town at all. “The game gonna be right here, but the parties are going to be in New York City,” said one resident.

Lavish Super Bowl Parties Are the Stuff of Nightmares
Those New York City parties are where you find people who are actually going to profit off the game. The beneficiaries of the presence of boozed-up out-of-towners with too much money in their pockets are, for the most part, providers of sleazy luxury. Though there are some reasonably priced local Super Bowl parties, there’s also decadent, decline-of-Rome style bashes—like the one sponsored by Shape and Men’s Fitness, which will be emceed by Jeffrey Ross, feature Mary J. Blige, and cost $1,500 to get into, and the supermodel-studded Leather & Laces party, tickets for which will set you back at least $950. Those who wish to flaunt their wealth in even more disgustingly extravagant ways can always avail themselves of the Chatwal Hotel’s “World’s Most Expensive Tailgate,” where guests can drink 64-year-old Scotch and watch the game on a television that is—seriously—coated in gold and diamonds while presumably trading anecdotes about Swiss bank accounts and how to wash the blood of Third World orphans off of ostrich-leather seats in one’s private plane.

The Super Bowl Is also the Super Bowl of Human Trafficking
The more down-to-earth Super Bowl tourists will, of course, be going to strip clubs, which have been preparing for a deluge of visitors—one fine establishment has just invested in the world’s tallest stripper pole. TMZ was all over this beat, of course:

“We spoke to several Big Apple strip joints... and they all said the same thing—you can't have enough women in the clubs that weekend, 'cause with all the ballers coming to town, it's going to be INSANE.

In fact, a rep for Scores—Howard Stern's favorite joint—tells us they're not just bringing in talent from across the country... they're flying in a bunch of chicks from Russia who've BEGGED for the chance to shake their asses for the richest pervs in America.”

Hell yeah bro, hot Russian strippers! The downside to watching the chicks who’ve been flown in to shake their asses is being aware that with the Super Bowl comes a wave of human trafficking. A recent Washington Post article said that officials are “warning the public to watch for people who are forced into labor and individual pimps exerting control over young women and men who are oftentimes underage,” and quoted a anti-trafficking advocate named Danielle Douglas as saying that some tourists “are coming to the Super Bowl not even to watch football—they are coming to the Super Bowl to have sex with women, and/or men or children.”

The upside of all of this is that if you aren’t one of those awful sex slave–buying pieces of human filth, and if you have managed to buy a ticket to the game at a semi-reasonable price, and if you aren’t involved with a local government agency or business that is annoyed by the NFL’s Super Bowl policies, and if the game isn’t postponed due to a sudden snowstorm, you’ll have a terrific football game to look forward to. Hopefully, not too many of the players end up with long-term brain damage.

@HCheadle

Lady Cadet Wardah Noor prepares to lead a mock attack during field exercises.

Lady Cadet Wardah Noor, a slim 24-year-old Pakistani with deep-set eyes and an erect bearing, has pinned all her hopes on becoming a soldier.

“I found my civilian life to be slow moving and unsatisfying,” she told me one evening in September after a full day of class and training exercises at the prestigious Pakistan Military Academy (PMA). Raised in a middle-class home, Wardah had already earned a college degree in computer science but found little opportunity in her small village in Pakistan’s Punjab province, where horse-driven carts were still the primary mode of transportation. She craved discipline and structure. She wanted, she realized, to join the army.

LC Wardah was one of 32 women, ages 23 to 27, who comprised the PMA’s 2013 lady cadet class. The Academy is located in the town of Kakul, just a few miles from the Abbottabad compound where Osama bin Laden was killed by a team of Navy SEALs in 2011. It’s Pakistan’s answer to West Point; it’s just as hard to gain entry, and those who do, go on to lead young soldiers into battle.

Gaining admission to the academy is highly competitive. Once enrolled, male cadets spend two years of rigorous physical training and the study of war craft. Female cadets at the PMA, however, receive only six months’ training and then are assigned duties that don’t involve direct combat, serving as members of the medical and engineering corps, or analyzing tactics and logistics, or even training future officers.

“I want to be a part of protecting my country from the terrorists, and protect our borders,” LC Wardah explained. “We have both external threats as well as internal threats.”

Pakistan’s military is the country’s most stable and powerful institution. It has waged four wars against India, staged three successful military coups, guided the country back to civilian rule, and, since 9/11, received $17.2 billion in US military aid. However, despite having the seventh-largest military in the world as measured by the number of active-duty personnel, inhospitable parts of the country like the mountainous Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (formerly known as the Northwest Frontier province) remain under Taliban control—and remnants of al Qaeda still lurk near the permeable Afghan border.

The cadets line up on the rifle range for weapons-handling instruction.

Due to the country’s geopolitical significance, Pakistan is an essential first line of defense in the global war on terror. And, remarkably, it has become a venue of progressive change and inspiration for females serving in the armed forces around the globe. In Pakistan, a country where women are afforded little in the way of education and career opportunities, the army has slowly integrated so-called lady cadets into its ranks following General Pervez Musharraf’s inauguration in 2006.

Like in many countries throughout the Middle East, women in Pakistan don’t have it so easy. According to a 2011 survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, gender experts ranked Pakistan as the third-worst place in the world for women, just behind Afghanistan and Congo. Honor killings are still rampant, the report states, and 90 percent of Pakistani women face domestic violence at home. The Pakistani NGO Shirkat Gha reported earlier this year that half of Pakistani women are married before the age of 18, and in its 2012 report on Pakistan, UNICEF claimed that there’s “considerable inequality when it comes to employment for women and men.”

In 2012, the attempted murder of Malala Yousafzai, a teenager who is an advocate for girl’s education, trained a bloodstained magnifying glass on the generation of Pakistani girls and women who are fighting for change. Even now for most women in Pakistan, a career in such a traditionally male-dominated field like soldiering is still a remote prospect. It’s also a tough slog, regardless of gender.

From the moment the lady cadets wake at 4 AM until they go to sleep at midnight, or later, their day is a cavalcade of challenges. Physical training starts at 6:30 AM, followed by breakfast, then classroom lessons on defense, attack positions, and public speaking, then back again for drill and saluting practice.

“This schedule is intentional to train them to cope in stressful environments,” Platoon Commander Captain Arooj Arif, the no-nonsense leader of the lady cadets, told me. When I first met her, she was eight months’ pregnant but still commanding her charges.

The training of every class of cadets culminates in four days of field exercises at a location far from the academy that I am unable to name for security reasons. I traveled with LC Wardah and the rest of her cadet class—a disciplined, ambitious group of young Pakistani women from nearly every part of the country—to their field exercises, where their resolve to become warriors would face its toughest test.

Lady Cadet Kiran writes down defensive plans and attack positions during class at the Pakistan Military Academy.

During the exercises, the cadets practiced combat maneuvers in the blazing postmonsoon heat and slept four to a tent on folding cots. I asked Major Chengaiz Zafar, who is in his first year training lady cadets, why the army trains women in these conditions, even if they’ll never see combat. “Because they need to know how things work in the field when they are dealing with operations that directly affect what is happening to soldiers in conflict regions in the country,” he explained, adding, “They will be a part of the effort to help fight terrorism in the country.” Major Chengaiz graduated from PMA, too, near the top of his class.

LC Wardah was given the role of section commander for the exercises. During a morning briefing at base camp on the fourth and last day, she laid out the plans for the mock attack she and her fellow cadets would wage. They needed to divide into the three squads and move through tilled farmland and cornfields until they arrived at the faux enemy lines. From there they would perform a three-pronged pincer move on their mock adversary.

By 10 AM, the heat was already searing on the plains and the air was thick with humidity. After LC Wardah’s briefing, the cadets returned to their positions—trenches dug at various locations throughout the fields. They would wait there all day until it was time to strike out. With little cover from the burning sun, the idea of becoming a soldier in an army that will for the foreseeable future be pinned between the Taliban and al Qaeda didn’t seem like an enjoyable prospect to me.

“These battle exercises help us understand what it’s like to face the real thing. I wish we could go and fight,” said LC Kiran Javed Khan, a 27-year-old who had trouble meeting the weight requirement for cadets when she first joined the academy. She needed to lose two kilograms. “I ended up losing four,” she told me.

“Hurry up, get yourselves ready and into formation!” LC Wardah yelled. The cadets prepared for combat in their trenches. A heavy rain began to fall on the once-scorching landscape, delaying their attack, but just before dusk, orders came from Major Chengaiz that it was time to strike. The lady cadets, hair pulled tight into low buns underneath olive berets, began trekking through the wet fields, each holding a German-made G3 rifle.

For most of these women, military service is the only opportunity they have to leave their villages and start an independent life.

Twenty-three-year-old LC Meimouna Mahruck remembered sitting in a room with 150 other applicants from her village in Swabi, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, wondering if she would make the cut. With pride she told me, “I am the first woman from my entire village to have joined the army.”

To gain acceptance to the PMA, women applicants must go through a series of written exams, physical tests, and a final interview before being selected for one of the few highly sought- after seats. They have to compete for the 40 available spaces, compared with the approximately 2,100 spaces allotted for men.

“In time military commanders will increase the number of female cadets. They have since the program started and the standards, especially the physical training, gets tougher each year,” Captain Arif, who graduated the academy in 2010, told me. “At first they didn’t know how much the women could do and what they were capable of. Next year they are planning to introduce horse riding and swimming as part of the cadets’ physical training.”

The cadets charged through the mud and fired on their faux enemy. Afterward, the cadets returned to camp and waited for dinner. It had been a long day spent in searing heat and torrential rains. In the cool evening air, the cadets shivered.

It was their last day and the promise of a warm shower back at the Academy and the relative comfort of a routine of drills, marches, and course work on the manicured grounds of the PMA lifted the lady cadets’ spirits.

Lady Cadet Zarnigar, after hitting her target during the weapons- handling exercises

Many people I spoke with held the surprising assumption that someday women will fight alongside men on the front lines in Pakistan, a proposition that is still contentious in many other countries around the world. Only a handful of nations are without restrictions on allowing female soldiers into combat. And nations like the US have faced serious issues with sexual assault in mixed-gender platoons.

Perhaps some of the bullishness about mixed-gendered combat I heard was feigned propaganda and bluster—not the actual mood on the ground. Some male cadets did express that the six-month period of training—in contrast to the two years men spend at the academy—is insufficient for combat, which might be a fair assessment. But that quarrel could also be a cover for belief that women can’t, in any circumstance, be ready for battle no matter how much training they receive. While no one I spoke with wanted to be on the record as having said that, this was a common sentiment I overheard among some of the gentlemen officers. And even if women were trained for two years and green-lit for battle, there would still be hurdles to overcome, like chipping away at the edifice of gender norms about the role of women in wartime.

After returning to the PMA grounds near Abbottabad, the cadets resumed their normal battery of training. They marched into a large field where they were separated into four groups and taught how to handle and fire weapons, finishing in the early evening hours and hurried back to their quarters as dark storm clouds came over the mountains.

LC Mehnaz Younas, a 23-year-old from Kashmir province, washed up, tied a long white scarf around her head, and unrolled a prayer rug to begin her recitations. Clouds billowed across the Himalayan ranges. When she was finished, she quickly joined the others as they headed into the canteen for dinner.

Inside the spacious hall, the women occupied only three tables while male cadets filled the rest of the mess—their booming voices filling the room. In stark contrast, the women sat quietly and ate the small portions of food they served themselves. They were exhausted and finished their meal, barely saying a word. In bed by midnight, they would wake up at 4 AM to start the day all over again.

Being allowed into the boys club—if they are truly allowed—won’t be easy for these women. Cultural mores against the comingling of sexes prohibit them from socializing with their male colleagues and forming allies who could help them get promoted.

In a country where the most that is expected of a woman is to marry and have children, these lady cadets were quickly marching toward a life of independence propelled by an inner motivation that is beginning to take hold of an entire generation of Pakistani women.

“I push myself toward things,” LC Wardah told me on my last day at the academy. “If I want something, I will do my best to achieve that goal, whatever it is.”

Watch LC Wardah and her comrades in action in a new documentary, coming soon.

Michael C Ruppert on Syria, Obama, and global economic collapse: “The United States Empire is crumbling as we speak. The world doesn’t have a Plan B for what happens when the United States fails. But the United States NEEDS to fail. The US dollar NEEDS to fail. Not until you have killed the last fish, cut down the last tree, and poisoned the last river will you discover that you cannot eat money.”

Most people were first exposed to Michael C. Ruppert through the 2009 documentary, Collapse, directed by Chris Smith. Collapse was one of the scariest documentaries about our world and the fragile the state of our planet. It was also one of VICE's favorite films from the past ten years.

Michael was forced to leave the LAPD after claiming that the CIA was complicit in selling drugs across America, and he quickly became one of the most original and strident voices to talk about climate change, government corruption, and peak oil through his website, “From the Wilderness.”

Following the release of Collapse, Michael’s personal life underwent something of a collapse itself and he paid off all his debts, left behind all his friends, and moved with his dog Rags to Colorado, planning to commit suicide.

VICE caught up with Michael in the middle of the epic beauty of the Rocky Mountains at the end of last year. We found a man undergoing a spiritual rebirth—still passionate about the world and with a whole new set of apocalyptic issues to talk about.

Apocalypse, Man is an intimate portrait of a man convinced of the imminent collapse of the world, but with answers to how the human spirit can survive the impending apocalypse.

Apocalypse, Man is a feature-length documentary to be released over the next few weeks. 

Soundtrack by Sunn O))), Flaming Lips, Interpol, Michael C. Ruppert, and more.

Directed by Andy Capper.

Mohmed Fahmy at his desk at CNN. Photo via Instagram.

If there’s anything that usually galvanizes journalists, it’s the mistreatment of one of their own. But more than a month after an Al Jazeera journalist was arrested in Egypt for “broadcasting false news,” most Canadians are probably still unaware of Mohamed Fahmy's case.

Fahmy was the acting Cairo bureau chief when he was arrested Dec. 29 along with Australian correspondent Peter Greste and producer Bader Mohammed. Egyptian by birth, Fahmy was raised in Montreal, has previously worked for the New York Times and CNN and is, by any definition, a respected mainstream journalist, not some ink-stained pamphleteer looking for trouble.

So far, neither Prime Minister Stephen Harper nor Foreign Minister John Baird have said a word about the Canadian citizen currently being held in deplorable conditions abroad. Even journalists have largely ignored the case, with only a handful of reports written about Fahmy in the first weeks of his imprisonment.

Prosecutors have yet to formally lay charges against the three journalists and on Jan. 22 their detention was extended by 15 days, which Fahmy's family says has left them feeling helpless.

“We have contacted the Canadian government and pressured them to take action, hired one of the best lawyers in town, reached out to the media, reached out to the human rights groups, contacted friends working with the Egyptian authorities, etc,” Mohamed's brother Sherif wrote in an email to me on Monday. “After all this we are back to square one again.”

The accusations against Fahmy and his colleagues are as bizarre as they are unbelievable. According to Egyptian authorities, they were collaborating with terrorists, spreading lies aimed at undermining the military regime and using illegal broadcasting equipment—an alleged offense you'd expect to be a simple matter of licensing and not worthy of prison.

In Fahmy’s case, he has also been accused of passing false information about Egypt to CNN, his former employer, for reasons only apparent to the prosecutors.

"He's shocked from the insane accusation that he's been facing,” Sherif said.

Tora prison is a rough place even by Egyptian standards. First constructed more than a century ago, successive regimes have used the massive complex south of Cairo to detain and torture their opponents. Overcrowding, beatings, and electric shocks have been the norm at Tora for many years. Over the last decade, even the United States got in on the game, sending terrorist suspects to Egyptian authorities who could interrogate them more creatively.

For most of Fahmy’s time there, he has been in solitary confinement, kept in the dark for days at a time in a dank, cold cell overrun with cockroaches. He has also been denied all medical attention for a broken shoulder that has left him unable to lift one of his arms. (Al Jazeera just published a letter from Greste further detailing the horrendous conditions.)

"It's pretty shocking,” according to Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, himself a former guest of the Egyptian penal system. Last year, he and doctor Tarek Loubani were en route to Gaza to volunteer at a hospital when they were swept up in a mass arrest in Cairo. They spent 50 days in the same prison without charges until pressure from Canadian authorities finally freed the pair.

“You would think that journalists themselves would be getting this story out and convincing their editors that this is worth covering,” Greyson said over video chat on Sunday.

I asked Greyson if he thinks the government would have been as motivated to work toward his and Loubani’s freedom if his name hadn’t been so waspy, or if, say, he had been a man named Mohamed.

“I was always talked about as the Canadian John Greyson, the Canadian filmmaker, the Canadian professor,” he said.

His companion, meanwhile, was frequently described as Palestinian-Canadian, in a way that seemed to cast the news coverage in a different light, says Greyson. In the same way, Fahmy's dual citizenship may have hurt the "Canadian-Egyptian" in terms of how much effort editors and Canadian government officials are putting into springing him from jail.

"The hyphen is allowed to shadow his case," said Greyson. "He’s a respected Canadian journalist. He’s working for a very mainstream news organization, Al Jazeera. Big surprise it’s not liked by the current Egyptian regime because it’s actually been reporting on what’s happening on the ground.”

Fahmy’s association with Al Jazeera is certainly part of the problem. On the one hand, “the generals running Egypt consider the channel overly sympathetic to the Brotherhood” and on the other, the network tends to fall on the “wrong side” politically in the western world—which is ostensibly leading to a muted wave of media coverage.

Consular officials say they are in contact with Egyptian authorities on Fahmy's behalf, and Canada's ambassador David Drake has even met with Fahmy's parents, who flew to Cairo from Montreal in order to work for his freedom. But rather perversely, the ambassador has told the family that he needs his own bosses in Ottawa to feel public pressure before he can press more aggressively for Fahmy's freedom.

Unfortunately in cases of Canadians imprisoned abroad, it often comes down to how much publicity they get back home. In Greyson and Loubani's case, a nationwide campaign that included prominent media personalities convinced even John Baird to personally intervene, but for every such instance there may be others where Canadians remain behind bars because they lack a high enough profile to force ministers to act.

Dan McTeague, a former Liberal MP, worked as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and frequently intervened on behalf of Canadians detained internationally. He has said the highest levels of government rarely get involved unless there is enough public outcry.

"What often happens is that only when the minister or... the Prime Minister is involved do we get the kind of results we fully expect," McTeague told CBC Radio's The Current back in October, following the success of the #FreeTarekAndJohn campaign.

That leaves Mohamed Fahmy in a dangerous place. If prosecutors do produce charges against him and his Al Jazeera colleagues, it could be years before the creaky Egyptian legal system hears their case. And the longer he remains in limbo, the worse his conditions are likely to get. Jan. 25 was the three-year anniversary of the Egyptian revolution that led to the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak, a momentous event that was to herald a new era in Egypt. But on that same day, Fahmy's brother says guards confiscated food, clothing and his blanket as punishment for something he is unaware of.

"This case is prolonging for a reason none of us is aware of, but what we do know is that the more time this case takes the more dangerous it gets," his brother said in his email.

Former CIA agent Robert Baer once said that when the agency wanted someone tortured as part of the War on Terrorism, they'd send that poor bastard to Syria. But "if you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt."


@id4ro

Raw footage from the aftermath of the pipeline explosion.

The massive explosion of a TransCanada natural gas pipeline Saturday night south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, has left some 4000 homes and possibly hundreds of livestock operations without heat over a weekend where temperatures dropped to -32 by Monday morning, with a windchill of -45.

The explosion, which reportedly sent balls of fire streaming “200 to 300 meters high,” took place around 1am on Saturday near the community of Otterburne, and burned until the early afternoon, forcing the evacuation of nearby residents and cutting off the flow of natural gas needed by Manitoba Hydro customers in ten rural communities south of Winnipeg. The blast, which is the sixth such gas pipeline explosion in Manitoba since 1994, and the fourth on a TransCanada pipeline in the province since 1995, also impacted the thousands more Xcel Energy customers in North Dakota, Minnesota, and western Wisconsin.

While the explosion only hit one of two pipelines supplying the area, the CBC reported that “TransCanada had to shut off the gas supply to the second pipeline as a safety precaution in order to effect repairs to the damaged pipeline.” The RCMP do not believe the explosion is any way suspicious, and TransCanada are working to identify the cause of the fire.

Despite the bitter cold and highway closures from blowing snow across Manitoba, the people in the affected communities are pulling together to keep warm while Hydro and TransCanada scramble to restore service.

“This town’s pretty resilient,” said Bryan Trottier, an electrical contractor from Niverville, MB. Trottier said he and his crew have been busy since early Saturday morning, wiring electric heaters into otherwise heatless homes, either to keep residents warm or to keep pipes from freezing and bursting. According to Trottier, the challenge lies in “giving people enough heat to keep their house barely warm enough to live in. My own house has been dropping about a degree a day […] With all this extra load we have to watch the main hydro line.”

Official emergency shelters and warming stations have been set up by local municipalities in the towns of Niverville, New Bothwell, Grunthal, Ritchot, and Ste. Agathe.Trottier also said that neighbouring communities have been quick to open their homes.

“There’s tons of people offering up houses and apartments,” Trottier told me. “I had a person in a neighbouring community phone me and say they had two empty apartments and we were welcome to use them.”

The area affected by the explosion is a hotbed for livestock production in the province. Local farmers are also feeling the cold as hundreds of hog, chicken, and dairy barns have had their heat supply cut off, according to the Western Producer . TransCanada executive VP and president of natural gas pipelines Karl Johannson said that compensation would be provided to farmers for loss of livestock. Compensation could also be provided for damage to property from the blast, as well as cost of space heaters and hotel stays over the course of the outage.

Schools throughout the affected rural municipalities were closed Monday due to a lack of heat. An official statement from Manitoba Hydro Monday morning read that “TransCanada Corporation is advising Manitoba Hydro that work to bypass the damaged section of their pipeline is progressing” but that “the work has been challenging and further complicated by extreme freezing temperatures and high winds.”

Johannson told a press conference in Ile des Chenes, Manitoba, Monday afternoon that TransCanada “simply don’t know” the cause of Saturday’s explosion. While testing is still ongoing, he told reporters that “instances like this aren’t common” and that the age of the pipeline, despite being 50 years old, was not believed to be an issue in the explosion. According to Johannson, the pipeline had last been internally inspected in 2009, and had been “in very good condition” at that time. He also did not believe that the cold weather was a factor, though he conceded the Arctic temperatures posed their own problems to restoration of service.

“We build our pipelines so that they are up and available this time of year,” Johannson told reporters. “So this concerns us greatly.”

TransCanada Corp are behind the push to build the Keystone XL pipeline, a proposed, 1,897 km pipeline that would move oil sands crude from Alberta to refineries in Nebraska. The proposal has the OK of the Canadian government, but is opposed by environmentalists, and is currently being stalled by pissed off farmers in Nebraska, despite the hyper-inflated cash incentives TransCanada is offering. The Obama administration is expected to make a decision on whether to OK the pipeline in the coming months.

TransCanada Corp is Manitoba’s primary natural gas supplier. The company maintains five natural gas pipelines that come into Manitoba from the west, and three that move southeast into the United States, as well as one of two oil pipelines crossing the southern part of the province. Enbridge—whose aging Line 9 pipeline in eastern Canada has thousands of “crack-like features,” according to the company’s own reports—operates the other one.

While some houses are already going back online, Johannson estimated that most natural gas service would be restored over Monday night and into Tuesday afternoon, At that time, Manitoba Hydro workers will have to go door-to-door to relight pilot lights that they extinguished Saturday morning. Yesterday it was revealed that natural gas in Otterburne had been restored, with over 15,000 Manitoban homes set to regain power in the next 48 hours. Lee Spencer, the acting executive director of the Manitoba Emergency Measures Organization stressed community in this time of chaos, cold, and confusion. "We're entering into the 48-hour window and there is still a day or two maybe to go in this crisis," he said. "We ask neighbours to look in on their neighbours. We all think of the person that we know who may be elderly and we've always considered to be self sufficient and independent. Make sure they have warmth, they have food and they understand how they can get support."


@badguybirnie

Photo via.

This Sunday’s Super Bowl will feature teams from the two US states where marijuana is legal for recreational use. It’s the WEED BOWL, and the heady coincidence shines a spotlight on our country’s evolving attitude towards legalization, a fact that is not lost on marijuana advocates.

At the AFC championship game in Denver two Sundays ago, the Marijuana Policy Project placed a billboard reminding fans and players that there is now a safer legal alternative to alcohol, the intoxicant classically associated with football. While cannabis might not seem like a logical complement to football’s aggression and athletic intensity, the NFL is beginning to see a connection between the two. 

Recently, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell officially stated that the league is open to the idea of medical marijuana to treat football players. Cautious not to give an outright endorsement, Goodell said, "We will follow medicine and if they determine this could be a proper usage in any context, we will consider that."

Right now, the National Hockey League is the only organized sport in the US that doesn't test for cannabis because they don't consider it to be a performance-enhancing drug. This is in sharp contrast to the NFL, which has banned a number of players for marijuana use, including Seattle Seahawks cornerback Brandon Browner. Suspended indefinitely for repeat marijuana violations, Browner will not be allowed to play in the Super Bowl game that he helped his team reach. It won't help him at all that his team's head coach, Pete Carroll, just made a statement expressing openness to medical marijuana for football players. 

"I would say that we have to explore and find ways to make our game a better game and take care of our players in whatever way possible. Regardless of what other stigmas might be involved, we have to do this, because the world of medicine is doing this."

The NFL's acquiescence to the American public's stance on marijuana isn't too surprising when you see how many current and former NFL players are experiencing head trauma-related medical issues, and how many of those are suing the NFL over it. In a current case in which 4800 players are suing the NFL, a judge just rejected a settlement of $765 million, saying the amount "may not be enough to cover injured players." 

Browner is yet another example of the many people who are jilted out of justice on the pathway to sensible weed laws. As his employers gradually warm up to medical cannabis, Browner's career with the Seahawks remains fucked as a result of his cannabis use. It's kind of like how President Obama decided to speak out about the injustice of marijuana prosecutions in the US, which unfairly target minorities, while not a single medical or recreational legalization bill in the country has addressed prior offenders, some of whom are serving time for weed-related crimes in states where weed is legal.

Collage by Alex Cook

I didn’t watch the Grammys on Sunday because WWE’s Royal Rumble was airing at the same time. The Royal Rumble matters because the winner of the 30-man contest gets to challenge for the WWE championship at WrestleMania, which could mean that he’ll spend at least the rest of the year as the face of the wrestling industry. Because Vince McMahon is a notorious muscle mark who fetishizes comic-book superhero bodies, the Royal Rumble was won by Dave Batista, a 45-year old bodybuilder/actor/douchebag who wears skinny jeans and used to have an absurd strip of hair from his lip to his chin. The fans shat all over Dave and booed him out of the building, while scathing reviews from internet marks drowned out the WWE hype machine.

The fans’ choice to win the Royal Rumble, Daniel Bryan, wasn’t even in the match. Daniel does not have Dave’s chiseled, oiled body or skinny jeans. He’s small by WWE standards—a vegan with an unkempt beard and sloppy hair. But he’s an incredible athlete and, if you’re willing to consider wrestling an art form, easily the most compelling artist on the current WWE roster. But Vince believes that the champion should have the kind of body that draws stares when he walks through an airport, regardless of what the fans actually want, so Daniel Bryan jobs out in a four-star match at the start of the show and Dave Batista wins in the main event.

Daniel is favored by the hardcore, old-school wrestling fans with refined tastes, the ones who subject matches to sophisticated critiques filled with insider jargon. These “smarks” (shorthand for their own self-ID as “smart marks”) can cite a long history of WWE favoring oiled muscleheads over superior artist-athletes. These are the fans who continually support WWE by purchasing pay-per-view events and action figures. Ironically, this means that WWE doesn’t actually have to make them happy, because there’s no threat of them going away. WWE casts a broader net when plotting its biggest matches of the year, appealing to casual viewers with mainstream stars like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, even if Dwayne has put on so much extra muscle that he can’t work a ten-minute match without getting winded or injured.

Kendrick Lamar is hip-hop’s Daniel Bryan, the greatest artist of 2013 and uncrowned champion for the hardcores. Macklemore, on the other hand, is the safe and corny industry choice. So of course Macklemore won, because the Grammys aren’t for people who take the culture seriously. Macklemore’s apologetic text to Kendrick could read like John Cena’s support of Daniel Bryan. John, the WWE’s longtime superhero who gets booed by the smarks, needs Daniel to validate him with the smarks.

Because WWE’s Royal Rumble was more real to me than the Grammys, I missed the awards and only learned of the Grammys-Macklemore controversy the next day, as my feeds became flooded with blog posts analyzing Macklemore’s various privileges: He is, as has been observed thousands of times by now, a white man criticizing hip-hop at large and a straight man co-opting LGBT issues, claiming universal power to speak to/for everyone. 

I wouldn’t hit Macklemore with the “It’s not your issue, shut your mouth” critique, and I wouldn’t necessarily ask him to turn the song into a reflection on his privileges. As perhaps a better move than claims of silent neutrality or piling on disclaimers about how he recognizes that he’s white and straight, Macklemore could have offered his social intervention without presenting himself as hip-hop’s lone courageous voice against homophobia. If “Same Love,” even with its multiple problems that others have pointed out, had dedicated a few seconds to shouting out numerous queer hip-hop artists of color who resist the multiple oppressions from which Macklemore benefits, the song would have meant something different. Instead of positioning his song as the one reason for a gay hip-hop kid to not think that hip-hop hates him, Macklemore could direct that kid to the artists who had already made the kinds of spaces in hip-hop that Macklemore dreams could someday be possible. And it would have corrected the false picture that “Same Love” paints of this issue as one pitting homophobic black hip-hop against benevolent white LGBT communities. If Macklemore’s glaring weak spot here is that he speaks as an outsider, he could have deflected this criticism through alliance—actually making himself an ally—with insider voices.

To say it in wrestling terms, the question is who “goes over.” Going over can simply refer to winning the match, but there’s also a broader meaning: to put the other wrestler over means that you help him/her become significant to the fans. Because wrestling is a collaborative performance, you can only look as good as your fellow performer wants you to look. The best wrestlers to work with are those who are willing and able to put their opponents over, that is, to make their clotheslines and bodyslams look believable and devastating. It’s a special talent, and the wrestlers who are particularly great at putting people over are wrestling’s unsung starmakers. On the other side, some wrestlers have developed reputations for putting themselves over at the expense of others. Consider Shawn Michaels’ 2005 performance with Hulk Hogan; having been booked to lose to Hogan, a disgruntled Michaels ridiculously oversold Hogan’s offense, making a joke of the match. 

When he could have chosen to elevate queer hip-hop and not seek the role of hip-hop’s salvific hetero white-boy conscience, Macklemore only put himself over. He’s hip-hop’s Dave Batista, who strolled in as number 28 in the 30-man Royal Rumble and got to flex and pose in triumph, while the smart marks were chanting Daniel Bryan’s name. Dave Batista couldn’t understand the utter disdain of the smarks, perhaps because it never occurred to him that the rightful star of the show had been excluded from the Royal Rumble, and that it was only through this exclusion that he could become the apparent main-event star for WrestleMania. “Same Love” isn’t so different from WWE anyway­—both reveal that you can become a champion even when you’re just pretending to fight.

Michael Muhammad Knight (@MM_Knight) is the author of nine books, including Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing. His 10th book, Why I am a Salafi, is forthcoming.

The view over North Mitrovica

Photos by Chloe Forsyth

Last Wednesday night, an elected official was gunned down outside his home in Kosovska Mitrovica, a city and municipality in northern Kosovo. The killing, which everyone is desperately trying to avoid calling an assassination, is the latest in a series of pretty undesirable things to have happened within the country's political landscape.

Kosovo is a place that has long been wracked by internal problems. It may have achieved independence in 2008 but it's yet to achieve legitimate political stability and organized crime is rife, making it a hub for human trafficking and heroin distribution. Its neighbor Serbia still refuses to recognize its sovereignty and tensions between those who still identify as Serbs and Kosovo's Albanian population have left it ethnically divided.

This is especially evident in the town of Mitrovica, which is divided in two by the Rivar Ibar. To the south resides an Albanian majority, while a Serbian majority calls the area north of the river home. In 2010, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared Mitrovica to be under the rule of Kosovo’s capital Pristina, a city with a predominantly Albanian population. This, of course, was no problem on the south bank, where the muezzin's call to prayer issues four times a day from Albanian mosques. However, north of the river it's a different story. It's the kind of place where, despite an ICJ ruling, cash machines still only dispense Serbian-issued dinars.

In fact, for the last 14 years, the authorities that control the four Serb-dominated municipalities in northern Kosovo have refused to acknowledge the Pristina-based government, content to sit back in a kind of limbo and leave their fate in the hands of the powers in Belgrade. So it's no surprise that the international commentariat got pretty worked up when, in April 2013, those powers signed an agreement effectively allowing the residents of those four municipalities to take part in the regional Kosovan elections, held last year on the 3rd of November.

The elections did not run smoothly. Nearly four months before they took place, they were ruled to be in violation of Serbian law by the North's interim assembly, although this ruling was rejected by both Belgrade and Pristina. As polling day drew closer, candidates were threatened, assaulted and killed by militant members of an election boycott movement. These Serbian nationalists share the interim assembly’s view that the elections are in violation of international law, but take it one step further and equate participation with outright treachery.

Of course, not everyone in the boycott brigade is going around killing people—more moderate elements have busied themselves tearing down the campaign posters of pro-integration candidates and erecting enormous billboards declaring: "Taking part in the separatist elections is the ruin of the state of Serbia!"

A "boycott" sign in Kosovska Mitrovica

By the afternoon of election day, videos had appeared on YouTube of Serb nationalists trashing ballot boxes in North Mitrovica, and turnout in the northern municipalities peaked at just 22 percent. However, the elections were seen as a success by integrationists either side of the Ibar, if only for the fact that they took place at all. In the months that followed, a calm fell over North Mitrovica. Tensions remained, but gone were the political shootings and nighttime bombings that had demolished entire apartments in the build-up to the voting.

That was until the 7th of January (Serbian Orthodox Christianity’s Christmas Day), when what is believed to have been a hand grenade was detonated in North Mitrovica's downtown area. Several shops and cars were damaged in the blast, but no one was injured. Four days later, mayor-elect of North Mitrovica, Krstimir Pantic, took to a podium to publicly refuse to take his oath of office. In front of a gang of journalists, assembled to witness what was supposed to be a historic moment—the first tangible sign that Kosovo's Serb-majority municipalities were ready to start cooperating with the rest of the country—Pantic was struck by the realization that, by taking the oath, he would be acknowledging Kosovo's legitimacy as a republic. This, he claimed, would be a violation of Serbia's constitution.

Last Wednesday night, ethnic Serb Dimitrije Janicijevic, the North Mitrovica pro-integration mayoral candidate who was shot outside his home died in hospital with ten pistol rounds lodged in his torso. That Saturday, fellow pro-integrationist candidate Adrijana Hodzic agreed to meet me near the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) Mitrovica headquarters. Janicijevic’s funeral had taken place the day before and overshadowed every aspect of our conversation.

Hodzic told me that Janicijevic’s murder, which she described as "sad and somehow confusing," had come as a shock to Mitrovica’s Serbian community and left her fearing for the safety of herself and her family. I asked her if she saw a link between the bombing on Orthodox Christmas Day, Pantic’s refusal to take office and Wednesday night’s fatal shooting—perhaps one or all of these things had something to do with anti-integration Serbian nationalists.

However, she was reluctant to posit any clear link and declined to speculate on a possible motive. She would say that, whatever the intentions of Janicijevic’s assailants, there was no way their actions wouldn't have come to be seen as politically motivated. It will increase fear in an electorate that already has to contend with nationalist thugs loitering outside polling centers and candidates campaigning under the threat of car bombs and assault.

A poster of Adem Jashari in South Mitrovica. Jashari is a national hero to Albanian Kosovars, and was killed along with his family by a Serbian hit squad that included helicopters and artillery support.

Later in our conversation, Hodzic's assessment of the boycott movement made it tempting to join the dots between the events of recent weeks. She said that the anti-integration camp is split in two; there are those who merely fear a change to the status quo, and those who actively stand to profit from tensions being maintained. A divided Kosovo is a near absolute impediment to the rule of law in the northern municipalities. It makes sense, then, that it is those Kosovars operating outside the law who benefit most from its continued division.

An ex-pat consultant named Samuel, who is based in Pristina, told me last year that the lawlessness in the north is the reason that, for many years, the majority of heroin sold in Western Europe was controlled by Albanian gangs. The irony, he said, is that despite all the nationalist rhetoric used to maintain this gangster’s paradise, Serb, Albanian and Russian organized criminals all share a vested interest in a northern Kosovo going on without any kind of definitive rule—their anti-integration propaganda isn't necessarily pro-Serb, it's just promoting political turbulence, allowing them to continue operating without a functional government to intervene. The general consensus is that the Serb and Albanian mafias must have come to some kind of an arrangement, and there's a joke that the country’s most amicable discourse takes place between its mafias.

On the terrace of a café facing Pristina’s Grand Hotel, Ardi Shita—the Secretary General of the American Chamber of Commerce in Kosovo—gave me his analysis of the situation. Like the others, he feels organized crime is the greatest impediment to integration, saying that North Mitrovica’s residents had "for the last 15 years been unconsciously in the service of organized crime," but that progress is finally being made. Nowhere is this better evidenced than in the Mitrovica North Administrative Office (MNAO), which is headed up by Adrijana Hodzic. Founded in May 2012 to provide North Mitrovica with the basic public services that neither the Belgrade nor Pristina governments were capable of furnishing, the MNAO deliberately remains silent on political issues.

The MNAO is hugely popular, yet Hodzic, her staff and their clients have been subject to intimidation from the start. One of Hodzic’s deputies was shot twice in front of his colleagues. That this manifestly non-partisan institution is victim to such violent opposition illustrates the fear that motivates North Mitrovica’s anti-integration thugs. It is the fear of effective administration and rule of law, the absence of which allows organized crime to flourish.

Graffiti in South Mitrovica

According to Hodzic, the citizens of North Mitrovica have been betrayed by the international community. Last November they risked their safety to take part in elections that promised to bring stability to the town for the first time since the war. But, in light of the past two weeks’ events, it would seem this promised calm has failed to materialize.

Hodzic says the two organizations tasked with ensuring security and justice in the town—KFOR (the Nato-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo) and EULEX (the European Union’s Rule of Law mission)—have failed to hold up their ends of the bargain. With inadequate law and order provisions in the north, killings and violence (political or otherwise) are rarely prosecuted. "The danger is," Hodzic told me, "that if we don’t have results after this execution [of the elected official]—if we don’t catch the murderer—each incident that passes without punishment only encourages the next." Her choice of words was deliberate: "Every attack is a sort of execution; it’s like a classic Sicilian hit."

According to Samuel, one of the greatest issues with EULEX is its recruitment policy. In his opinion, the organization is predominantly staffed by impossible-to-fire eurocrats too incompetent to be tolerated in Brussels. The result is a mission filled with bitter, lazy, middle-aged men stuck in a country they despise (in some cases for as long as a decade) because there’s nowhere left in Europe willing to offer them the $130,000 a month they’re rumored to draw for their services. According to reports, they’re often to be found in the capital’s Irish bar, moaning about the locals and missing their wives. Whatever their exact salaries, Adrijana Hodzic said, "International security forces are too well paid not to investigate, name and punish the culprits."

There have, however, been some improvements to security provisions in Mitrovica in recent months. Last year, the Kosovo police force was responsible for the south side of the town—a handful of Italian carabinieri (national military police) kept watch over the town’s bridges and the north was left largely to its own devices.

When election violence bordered on riotous in North Mitrovica on November 3rd, EULEX asked KFOR to step in and secure the situation. Now, an armored personnel carrier (APC) and up to two dozen Portuguese soldiers carrying automatic weapons guard the Ibar River Bridge at all times. Portuguese KFOR jeeps and another APC regularly patrol both sides of the town.

Any increase in security has to be a positive for this fragile city, especially framed against the tensions that arose around Belgrade's agreement to include the four northern municipalities in Kosovo's legal system, but the heavy presence on the bridge seems like tokenism. The days of clashes between ethnic Serbs from the north and the South’s Albanians are largely done with; the tension that this show of force is clearly a response to has consisted almost entirely of internal violence in the Serb half of the city.

KFOR troops on top of their APC

The futility of the bridge guards’ task is evident in their demeanor. They spend their days bored and cold, smoking, taking photos of each other and popping into a nearby Italian restaurant for coffee. One night they were so bored they invited the photographer accompanying me and myself onto the roof of their APC. It seemed like the most fun they’d had in days. Even their commanding officer couldn’t muster the energy to get mad about two drunk 20-somethings larking around on top of his military hardware.

So what’s going to happen next? Pantic’s refusal to step into the mayor’s office will force the electorate—one that’s already grown sick of elections in the three months they’ve had them—back into the voting booth.

The next question is: Who will be brave enough to stand after the last fortnight’s violence (which may not have even ended yet)? Adrijana Hodzic won’t be running but remains dedicated to progress in the troubled town. "My motivation to be involved in this dangerous process is my kids," she said.

Ardi Shita spent part of the last two years working on both sides of the Ibar as a lecturer at Mitrovica’s International Business College, and his guess was that Oliver Ivanovic would take the mayor’s office next month. Ivanovic is a controversial figure, having had his start in politics in 1999 by giving karate lessons to the "bridge watchers," the Serbs who used to stand guard over the Ibar River Bridge. Shita’s feeling was that, while Ivanovic may not be the ideal candidate, anything has to be better than Pantic, whose universally criticized showboating displayed a kind of political immaturity Mitrovica cannot afford.

However, Ivanovic was detained by EULEX this morning, which could potentially hamper his mayoral hopes somewhat. The security agency is refraining from comment, but Albanian-language press in Kosovo is speculating that he might be being questioned over suspected involvement in the unsolved murders of 11 Albanians following the 1999 war. If their suspicions are proved correct and Ivanovic is charged, it will of course cast further uncertainty over this troubled municipality’s future.

And there have also been signs of tension south of the Ibar. A rare debate over religion has kicked off in Kosovo in recent weeks, with prominent Muslims and Christians both firing rhetorical shots over the parapet. Against this backdrop, a bust of Albanian saint Mother Teresa was toppled in South Mitrovica a couple of weeks ago.

This is a dangerous juncture for Mitrovica and something has to be done. As Shita bluntly put it: "Until someone comes up with a solution, people will die."

Follow Jack on Twitter: @jackoozell

Dating in Los Angeles makes me miserable. To be fair, dating anywhere is miserable, but, there's something about living in Los Angeles that makes all of it so much more dreadful. The city is so spread out that rush hour dictates our lives more than our desire for sex does. I'll admit that I’ve uttered the words, “he lives on the West Side! It'll never work out," on more than one occassion.  We have to drive everywhere, and it takes an eternity to get where you're going, so why go anywhere?

That's why online dating is perfect for the citizens of LA. You don't have to sit in traffic for two hours to try to find love. Dating apps like OkCupid and Tinder have made it possible for me to meet other singles while in bed eating pizza. No worrying about having to drive drunk or wasting money on an expensive cab. You can flirt and squirt in your pajamas. That's the most LA thing ever.

Nothing is perfect though, and believe it or not—online dating is not perfect. For every decent message I get from a seemingly well-adjusted person, there are 20 creepy, perverted, and sometimes just plain weird, messages from “people” with handles like "ButtSex69." It has gotten to a point where I am numb to reading messages that say, “will you kick me in the balls?” or  “I would love to cum on your tits." Will it all one day be worth it when I find “the one”? God, I hope so. 

Alison Stevenson is a writer/comedian who had the distinct pleasure of growing up in LA's San Fernando Valley. See her and other VICE west coast contributors at ENTITLEMENT; Wednesday, Februrary 5th, with headliner Greg Proops at Los Globos on Sunset Blvd. in Silver Lake.

@JustAboutGlad

Eleazer Acevedo and her children in their home inside the Jordan Downs housing project

It’s not necessarily the patchy linoleum flooring, the egg-white cinder block walls, or the bars against all the windows that gave Eleazer Acevedo’s unit at Jordan Downs in Watts, Los Angeles, its penitential quality—it’s more the sparsely furnished rooms, noticeably bare save a few scant furnishings that look as though they’ve been plucked from a dozen different roadsides and yard sales.

“Sit, sit,” Acevedo insisted, pointing towards two foldaway picnic chairs and a narrow stool in her living room—any more than three visitors and those holding the short straws have to sit on the floor. Acevedo perched on the edge of the stool and leaned forward. With her hands cupped between her knees as though in wide-eyed prayer, she began her story.

Acevedo, 29, and her four children—ages 13, 11, five, and three—lived in Downtown LA for 12 years. After losing her job selling clothes, she was forced to relocate three months ago to a much cheaper unit at Jordan Downs—or what was purported to be a cheaper unit. The $600 that she currently pays was supposed to be $400, and three months in, she’s still trying get her rent reduced to something manageable for an unemployed single mother of four.

Acevedo does get food stamps, but in order to pay for rent, electricity, extra food for her children, clothes, gas for her car, and a spreadsheet's worth of daily expenses, she turns to her friends for financial support—all her family live in Mexico. There’s no spare cash for furnishings. She’s exhausted with worry; the dark shadows haunting her face betray countless sleepless nights. But Acevedo’s concerns extend beyond the immediate. An even greater worry to her is that she has been forced to relocate somewhere that potentially poses a major health risk to her and her children. “When I came here, they never said anything about the development project or the contamination," she said. "They kept their mouths closed… and I’m worried for my kids because lead is very dangerous.”

The Jordan Downs urban redevelopment project has been decades in the imagination, years in the works, and months under the glow of a green light—a major landmark for a community long bedeviled by crime, poverty, and unemployment. Last August, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved plans to raze the current 700 units and replace them with approximately 1,800 mixed-income apartments along with chain stores and new streetscapes in order create “a vibrant urban village and model for public housing developments throughout the country,” according to the city's five-year plan for South Los Angeles. This urban village was going to cost around $1 billion. Current government subsidized tenants have been promised one-for-one rehousing, as long as they remain in good standing with the Housing Authority. The full scope of the project hinges on a $30 million Choice Neighborhood Initiative Grant—a sought-after federal grant likely to be awarded in May.

At the center of Jordan Downs is a 21-acre L-shaped industrial site called the “Factory.” Now vacant, adorned mostly with rubble and weeds, the Factory abuts the residential complex; the two are separated by an eight-foot-high brick wall with holes large enough for a child to crawl through. This is the source of everyone's fears.

A 2011 Human Health Risk Assessment (HHRA) concluded that the site contains elevated levels of lead, arsenic, trichloroethylene (TCE), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), stating that the “results indicate that lead does pose an unacceptable hazard to children in a residential scenario.” All the contaminants listed pose major health risks, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, including cancer and autoimmune and neurological diseases. A Housing Authority interoffice memo from 2009 said, “Jordan Downs revitalization efforts will include development of other parcels including the parcel on which the 700 units are currently located. It is quite possible that these properties might also suffer from environmental contamination and therefore might require remediation.”

As a result of the HHRA’s findings, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) commissioned a Remedial Action Plan. While HACLA agreed to excavate and move 33,600 cubic yards of soil from the Factory—at a cost of around $8 million—the residential land remains unmentioned. Even after a recent ExxonMobil pipeline groundwater investigation in which the Department of Toxic Substance Control (DTSC) sent a letter to the Housing Authority that concluded that “groundwater sampling conducted as part of the M-145/M-8 Pipeline investigation and remediation by EXXON-Mobil Corporation has indicated that groundwater adjacent to the site has been impacted by petroleum hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds,” the DTSC has recommended further evaluation only on the northeastern edge of the Factory—not beyond the wall. The DTSC has yet to sign off on the Remedial Action Plan.

Lenny Siegel, executive director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight (CPEO), a nonprofit, said he has advocated for months that testing be extended beyond the Factory’s boundary. He believes that from the limited data produced thus far, further testing for TCE vapor intrusion (a carcinogen) should be conducted in residential areas at least beyond the north and south boundary of the wall.

“It’s strange to me that you would have indications of TCE with so little sampling… and you don’t have a reading that high and contamination stop at the property line [of the Factory],” Siegel told me. “A property boundary does not define the catchment area of groundwater contamination.”

David Pettit, a senior attorney of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental advocacy group, thinks along similar lines. In fall of last year, the Housing Authority circulated a leaflet among the residents designed to allay fears of contamination-related health risks. The flyer says outright, “There is currently no risk to residents.” The leaflet also states that “collections of soil vapor revealed that Volatile Organic Compounds [an umbrella term under which TCE falls] do not pose a risk for future residents.” Pettit believes that contrary to what the leaflet states, thorough testing on the residential properties needs to be conducted before such assertions can be made.

“The concern, in essence, is that there’s nothing [that’s] been done to investigate soil conditions or soil vapor conditions in the [residential] site,” said Pettit. “The reason I have concerns is, given the neighborhood where this is, I would think you’d want to know whether the people living on the existing units are at risk. And that analysis just hasn’t been done. The thing is, if they build this [development] and people are getting sick because of pollutants that the Housing Authority knows about now, there’s tremendous liability for them down the road.”

Decades of heavy industrialization in and around Jordan Downs means that there are reasons beyond the environmental report’s findings to think that residents are at high risk of contamination, according Pettit. A disused smelting plant from the 1960s sits vacant not far from the housing project. In 2004, 1,250 tons of soil were excavated from the David Starr Jordan High School football field after elevated levels of lead and PCBs were discovered—a result of an explosion at the nearby S&W Atlas Iron and Metal Company recycling facility two years prior. Another lead cleanup operation is currently being conducted at the high school.

Pettit believes that the Remedial Plan falls short of safeguarding residents from lead exposure. “Lead is a neurotoxin that affects brain development. What you see are communities affected by lead that have lower IQs than surrounding communities," he said. "Once a kid takes it in, the effects are irreversible. Let’s not forget, this is a multi-family project. There’s going to be lots of kids around, and I do know that there is no safe level for lead. I felt the cleanup plan that the DTSC came up with was not health-protective enough.”

In an email, the DTSC stated that using the environmental evaluations conducted following USEPA’s methodology, the highest concentrations of contaminants found in soils onsite would not pose a risk to offsite residents or the school from wind-blown dust. “However, DTSC cannot comment on the impacts of past operations at the site or the surrounding neighborhood, as DTSC did not oversee these processes. It should be noted that testing for contaminants in the surrounding communities will not answer the question as to the source of the contaminants itself. For example, lead-based paint and leaded gasoline were routinely used until the 1970s. Lead-based paint is still part of many of the older buildings. Therefore, finding lead in the surrounding properties would not automatically mean that the site was the source.”

According to Doug Guthrie, the Housing Authority’s president and CEO, officials knew when they acquired the site that a cleanup process would be necessary, and the Housing Authority and developers have complied with all demands made by the DTSC. “We’ve always been very open with all the testing that we’ve done there," he said. "We entered into a voluntary agreement with the DTSC. We’ve been very cooperative and open when it comes to ensuring that we’re doing the right thing by the residents. At this point in time, we will do whatever the DTSC tells us to do to clean the site."

Undeterred, community activists have promised to keep pushing for testing beyond the wall’s boundaries. Thelmy Perez, the Housing Collective coordinator at Los Angeles Community Action Network, has worked for months bringing together a collective of residents, advocates, and activists, all of whom she says are concerned for the immediate health of people living at Jordan Downs.

“Where you have a Housing Authority that isn’t being accountable to the residents and is not being transparent about the threat of toxins in the area, it obviously generates a lot of fear in the community,” said Perez. “There are 700 families who live at Jordan Downs and their health is a priority—or it should be a priority.”

@1danross

Photo via Facebook.

Like those underemployed twenty-somethings the internet loves to ridicule, former cabinet minister Chuck Strahl has to hustle a few side jobs to get the bills paid. “I’m not independently wealthy,” he told the National Post earlier this month, when questioned about his work as both an energy lobbyist and a government spy watchdog.

Until Friday, Chuck’s main gig was chairing the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC)—a part-time job that allowed him access to vast piles of intel collected by CSIS. Chuck’s mandate was to ensure spies followed the rule of law and that Canadians’ rights and privacy were upheld. PM Stephen Harper appointed him to the position in 2012, after serving as a Conservative MP in Chilliwack from 1993 to 2011.

Since Chuck isn’t a trustafarian or anything, he also registered with the BC government as a lobbyist for the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline on December 6, 2013. Elected officials usually have to wait five years to do that kind of work federally, but British Columbia’s government has no rules against it. He’d already worked as a “consultant” for Enbridge since 2011, which the federal ethics commissioner had given a green light.

The huge conflict of interest here should be pretty obvious: Chuck was privy to intelligence programs that, for example, monitored people and organizations who publicly oppose the Northern Gateway pipeline—particularly leading up to the controversial project’s environment and safety review hearings. While there’s no evidence that he shared secrets with Enbridge, or that his lobbying intentions somehow influenced SIRC’s oversight, Chuck gave in to the media uproar and called it quits late last week.

“I retired from politics three years ago and do not wish to be in the centre of the political fray,” reads Strahl’s letter of resignation. “Nor do I want to be a distraction from the important work SIRC does everyday in ensuring the security of Canadians. It is therefore with regret that I have concluded it is best for all concerned that I step down as Chair of SIRC.”

As it turns out, half the colleagues Chuck left behind at SIRC also have ties to energy companies: Denis Losier works for Enbridge and Yves Fortier was on the board of TransCanada. (“Independent” appears to be a loosely-interpreted term at SIRC.) The ministry of public safety used to have its own inspector general watching the watchers, but that office of investigators was eliminated to save money in 2012.

According to Canadian cybersurveillance expert Ron Deibert, the last thing we should be doing in this metadata-soaked era is eliminating spying oversight mechanisms. During a lecture at the University of British Columbia last week, Deibert explained how the historically recent emergence of social media, cloud computing and mobile web surfing have taken countless scraps of information out of our brains and put them into the hands of unaccountable third parties. As a global society, we’re still figuring out the ethics, limits and “digital hygiene” practices that best serve this new reality.

Deibert readily acknowledges the legitimate security challenges governments face in this globalized, over-digitized environment. In his view, it’s not surprising or unsettling that Canadian and American spy agencies work together during international conferences like the G20. However, the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy and the Dark Side of the Internet thinks the spy industry has suffered a disturbing “inertia” over the past decade—sucking up hundreds of millions of records on law-abiding citizens along the way.

Spy agencies—and particularly “signals intelligence agencies” like the NSA or Canada’s own CSEC, of which little is known—have taken a cavalier attitude toward the privacy laws that protect law-abiding citizens. They’re mining third-party servers, routers and apps for data before accountability mechanisms have a chance to catch up. Last week a US oversight panel made a big leap by ruling the NSA’s sweeping metadata collection program is unlawful, and also not that helpful.

Deibert says Canada has some strong laws around privacy, but that CSEC is not accountable to those laws. “The area we’re talking about, signals intelligence, has very little oversight, and doesn’t fall under federal or provincial privacy commissioners’ jurisdiction,” he says.

CSEC has a different oversight body from SIRC, which reports to the ministry of national defence. At the very least CSEC commissioner Jean-Pierre Plouffe is a retired federal judge—not ruling party faithful like Chuck. (Strahl and Plouffe are “apples and oranges” according to Deibert). Still, oversight for Canada’s most secretive spy agency suffers “architectural” inadequacies.

Plouffe and a staff of 11 investigators oversee 2,100 CSEC employees. “They have pretty full range to go in and ask questions, review files, and interview members,” Deibert explains. However, “accountability is within the tent; CSEC is not answerable to parliament or an outside agency.” In other words, it’s not independently reviewed, which may explain why so little is known about the scope of CSEC activities.

This is something Deibert wishes Canadians were angrier about. While neighbours to the south are making noise and getting response, Canada’s conversation has barely started. “People are hopefully waking up to that,” he says, “right now it’s a real gap.” 

@sarahberms

On Sunday, we arrived at Bastille Square in Paris under heavy rain, ready for a protest that had been billed as a “Day of Anger” by the dozens of far-right groups responsible for organizing it. The demonstration had a nebulous array of gripes: They hated abortions, the gays, the Jews, and so on. Most of all, though, they hated the French president, François Hollande and his Socialist Party. Hollande actually become more popular since news broke of his affair with actress Julie Gayet, but his approval rating is still a dismal 31 percent, and that seems unlikely to change no matter how much sex he has.

That isn't to say that the far right is more popular than he is—Bastille Square was far from full. The organizers claimed there were over 150,000 protesters at the event, but the police said there were only about 17,000, which sounds closer to the truth.

Before a fist had been shaken in anger, about ten members of the militant, frequently nude feminist group FEMEN showed up to protest against the protest. By the time we arrived they had already been bundled into police vans, the crowd chucking shouts of "whores" at them as they were whisked off to the station. Their clothes had been left behind on the street, and we wondered what would happen to them.

Then the march began.

The lack of unity quickly became evident. The Catholics were leading the way, wearing blue, green, and red—the colors of the notoriously right-wing royalist town of Versailles—and protesting against gay marriage and abortion. They waved royalist flags to represent a longing for the good old days of the Ancien Régime and the aristocracy.

Unsurprisingly, supporters of the racist, anti-immigrant National Front were there as well. Weirdly for a political demonstration, most of the protesters claimed to be “apolitical,” and it was clear they were conscious that the world thinks of them as pretty abhorrent racists. We saw some guys using their keys to scratch the word hatred off a vandalized poster. Popular subjects of signs included National Front leader Marine Le Pen, the “controversial” comedian Dieudonné—you know, the dude who introduced the quenelle, a fascist salute, to NBA star Tony Parker—and Manuel Valls, the current Minister of the Interior.

The most agitated protesters were at the rear of the procession. We saw people from the Union Defence Group, a far-right student group, all dressed in black, with a big poster calling for a coup. Nearby, pro-Dieudonné militants were waving flags in honor of their hero and were still protesting for “freedom of speech.” They took the opportunity to use that freedom by taking selfies of themselves doing the quenelle on their phones and poking fun at the Holocaust (or “Shoah”) by singing “Shoah-nanas”—which in French sounds like chaud ananas, or "hot pineapple." And nanas is French slang for "chicks," as well. You know what they say, antisemites love puns about fruit! Just for good measure, they were also chanting, “JDL [Jewish Defence League], you motherfuckers!”

An uneasy and weird alliance seemed to be forming between the traditional racists of the French far right and some Arabic and black folks who'd attended to support Dieudonné. We also saw supporters of the Paris Saint Germain football team—clad in club shirts, scarves, and caps—waving smoke grenades and yelling “Thank You, Anelka!” in reference to this.

The crowd walked to Vauban Square, near the Invalides. When they got there, we noticed the first signs of unity—people listened to anti-government speeches and laughed together at the punchlines.

We left the square at around 6 PM, as the protest was mostly breaking up. We were wet and depressed but clearly not as angry as those who began fighting with riot police about half an hour after our departure. According to reports, 250 people were arrested and 19 cops were injured.

Illustration by Penelope Gazin

It’s the space between things that’s truly important. That’s what committed self-actualizers will tell you; so will graphic designers insisting on negative space, and stylists who are all like, “Less, less, less, less…” pulling off bracelets and pants. It’s never the thing itself, but the stuff—the lack of stuff—around the thing. Falling asleep, I often find a convincing, semiconscious simulacrum of cozy peace by imagining a nonscientific, crayon-drawn version of a light field, and then focusing tighter and tighter on the black empty places in between the things. That is what’s important, right there.

By now, as mid- or late winter or whatever it is approaches, still months until fireworks holidays, and until some liquid-jasmine physical atmosphere makes us more able to be with our bodies, and with each other (hugs through piles of down aren’t the same), the allotment of collective ritual opportunity has mostly been spent. Ritual is always limited for us, a casualty of everything else that happened, for the young and secular and very much online who occupy so much of our time creating new versions of good and fulfilling lives. Ritual, like real, physical, people-and-concrete communities, can’t be counted among the experiential, cultural things that have been (equitably or not) replaced by some aspect of technology. A human need that is, I think, as in us as it ever was, the practice of welcoming, organizing, confirming ritual has been forced to wait it out under a ten-foot wave until we decide how far we can (or, will) go with our inboxes and social-media posts as extensions and expressions of not just ourselves, but also the solemn end—the waaay end of our feelings. That undefined space around and between the “things” is more important, yeah, but those things, the markers and parameters that define both types of spaces, are there for a reason.

Yesterday I sat in front of my laptop, my body a tense C-curve and my paper cup of coffee a Starbucks serif, clicking through a photo gallery of this church I thought I might go to on Sunday. It’s the same denomination that I was raised in, and what I wanted from it is basic nostalgic comfort, and probably some approximation of a set of values that I keep in a glass-door trophy case in the hallway of my memory palace. I miss it.

I’m into this stuff, into real-time, on-purpose meaning-making, but this kind of attempt at creating ritual by sort of re-creating it based on previous experiences more often happens online. Most of the rituals that we’ve come up with to replace what has been collectively lost somewhere else already feel supernormalized: posting baby pics on Facebook is, I guess, what’s “done” now, with “It’s done” and “It’s not done” always being the ordering philosophy for any sort of social interaction, whether in person or online. But then your baby is on Facebook the same way fleeting YouTube stuff and 10 percent–off coupons are on Facebook, and that’s when this new, aggregated version of normal still feels temporary and shifting. It’s an appropriate, if still anxious, middle ground of convenience and celebration, of making and remaking meaning together.

Birth, death, marriage, divorce, coming of age, accomplishments, and failures all require real acknowledgement and recognition. We need a way to ritualize and symbolize that makes use of both our humanity and the reality of how lives play out. Birthdays are the easiest, with the routine of abbreviated Facebook messages for the public confirmation and validation, and multi-’moji texts, for the private loving-up. It’s easy, because the tone of the thing itself isn’t usually in conflict with the way it’s celebrated online. Still: I just sent my friend a season of a TV show via iTunes for her birthday, which is in most ways better than giving her a box of what will too quickly turn to shit, but clicking toward and downloading a prezzie on your birthday must be a step in the vertiginous march toward the void.

For a while—real years, by now—I’ve been rereading Moby Dick every winter. It’s not my favorite book, and it’s not a cute read to skate over in an afternoon; I read it every year, and will keep reading it every year, as a dull protest against having nothing else to do to mark time. Otherwise, my entire adult life feels too much like a mostly uninterrupted, mostly unmarked length of heavy rope, unfurling through a routine of work and hanging out and moving between the two, and I guess also waking up and falling asleep. It’s all being recorded, meticulously if abstractly, online, and I’m sure interruptions and markers will eventually emerge from all of the space around them, even if they’re not so obvious to me now, and even if I feel like I need them to reveal themselves sooner.

More of Kate’s Li’l Thinks can be found at Twitter.com/KateCarraway.