Lars Ulrich (Photo by Ross Halfin)

This is the VICE Interview. Each week we ask a different famous and/or interesting person the same set of questions in a bid to peek deep into his or her psyche.

I meet Metallica's Lars Ulrich in a definitely not-very-metal situation – in a two-storey suite at London's Connaught Hotel, complete with chandelier, gilt tray of tea and biscuits, and a fancy bowl of fruit. The Danish drummer is in the midst of the promo tour for Metallica's latest album, Hardwired to Self-Destruct. "How civilised", I say. "This is Metallica", he laughs as we sit down at the grand dining table.

VICE: What would your parents prefer you to have chosen as a career?
Lars Ulrich: My dad was a professional tennis player. When I attempted to follow in his footsteps into the tennis world for a couple of years, he looked a bit miffed because I'm not sure he thought that I was talented enough. He was very encouraging and very open-minded, and I certainly did not have the kind of parents who would have suggested doing anything else other than where my heart was at. Actually, contrary to most rock 'n' roll stories my parents were cool – they were my best friends. There was nothing there to rebel against or middle-finger at. It wasn't until I came to America and I met all the people in Southern California, that I started understanding this whole thing about rebelling against your parents. That was not part of my agenda when I was growing up.

How many people have been in love with you?
Of the 200 people we met last night at the in-store? . All the shit was flying around the cabin, and all the carry-on luggage was everywhere, hitting the ceiling. For like 10 minutes. It was one of those things that you see in movies... it was dark and you could see the lightning outside the plane. That was really horrifying. It felt like it just went on and on forever.

What is the nicest thing you own?
I have some pretty cool houses, I'm fortunate. My favourite is probably the one we have up in the mountains in Montana. I don't go up there enough, but right now, the idea that I'll be in Montana in five or six weeks from now, is kind of keeping me going. What else? The Metallica masters. Those are really good to own. That's my pension.

What would be your last meal?
It would probably be a little bit of everything. Maybe an odd combination of lots of different things. I like dining experiences...where it's all small portions, but many of them. My last meal would probably be like, a bite of caviar, a bite of falafel, a bite of French fries, a bite of sushi, some Danish curried herring, a bite of bagel.

What film or TV show makes you cry?
The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille. The OG one, with Charlton Heston.

What's the latest you've stayed up?
Even in my worst days, I always managed to get some sleep. I never missed a night of sleep. 6:00 a.m., 7:00 a.m., 8:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m. Maybe occasionally, once or twice, we may have snuck 11. I don't know, but I never went around the clock like some people I knew who went around the clock more than once, for two or three days. It got a little nutty occasionally, but there always some sleep involved in there somewhere, even at its worst. For that I'm quite proud, actually.

What have you done in your career that you are most proud of?
I guess I'm probably most proud of our independence and autonomy. We've never done things for the wrong reason. We've never written off control of certain situations for a big pile of money. We've never sold ourselves out for big advances or reneged on creative control. We've always kept it pretty pure and pretty organic. I think we can always hold our head up high and say that we've done a decent job of keeping our integrity.

If you were a wrestler, what song would you come into the ring to?
Killing In the Name by Rage Against the Machine. Because the only weapon I have with my 5' 7", 140-pound frame would be my attitude. I would have to be like, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me."

@natalie_hughes

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The Ku Klux Klan, as it turned out, didn't show up. But Leo did.

Leo, who lives in Michigan and didn't want me to use his real name, retired from the Army last year after spending nearly a decade performing psychological operations (propaganda, basically) in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was aghast when Donald Trump won the White House—"After spending so much time overseas 'defending freedom,' seeing Trump get elected actually hurt," he told me—and outraged when a branch of the KKK scheduled a "Victory Klavalkade Klan Parade" for December 3 in Pelham, North Carolina.

"This parade is a perfect example of why Trump is so dangerous," Leo told me. "He courted the extreme elements of the right wing and got them to essentially run his propaganda machine. He knew what he was doing, and the KKK rightfully assumes they have his support."

Leo is in his mid 30s, and was dressed in all black with patches sewn into the forearms of his hoodie and a "Veterans for Peace" patch affixed to his denim vest. He had driven through the night to make it to Pelham in time for the parade, and still hadn't slept, but seemed little the worse for wear.

We were at a rest area in Pelham where various anti-KKK demonstrators were meeting in anticipation of the parade's anticipated 9 AM start time. The Klan's intention was to drive from Pelham across the Virginia border into nearby Danville, the the final capital of the Confederacy.

The 150 or so activists who had showed up were a mixed group. Many, like Marcy Freed of Trinity, North Carolina, had come because they hated the idea of the KKK staging a demonstration in their home state. Freed said she's been attending protests since 1963, when her mother took her to march for civil rights. When the Klan first announced the parade, she told me, "Our local newspaper said, 'Ignore them, they'll go away.' That hasn't worked, ever. Something I learned during the AIDS epidemic is that silence equals death."

There were local organizers for various groups as well as out-of-towners. Some protesters dressed in black, or obscured their faces with bandanas and T-shirts, while others didn't. Some were peaceful protesters, while others were antifas—or anti-fascists—and had shown up ready to fight, either with baseball bats or just their bare fists.

As 9 AM came and went, the Klan communicated to a reporter from the Times-News of Burlington that they would be pushing the parade back to later that afternoon due to a "snafu." (It was later reported by the Times-News that the night before, three KKK members had gotten into a fight that turned into a stabbing.) A rumor began circulating that members of the Aryan Nation had shown up posing as reporters and had tipped the Klan off to the counter-protest, and the group soon became distrustful of the gaggle of camera crews and reporters at the scene. I watched as one man with a camera walked through the crowd asking, "Anybody wanna do an interview?" only to have nearby protesters turn away. In need of quotes, some reporters tried interviewing one another.

With tensions rising, many protesters grew restless. One activist started asking around for people to donate their cars for a potential roadblock to cut the Klan off whenever they showed. Others took to marching in a nearby frontage road.

For years, the KKK has been a marginal group on the outer fringe of American politics. But Fitz Brundage, a history professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who has written extensively on Southern history after the Civil War, told me that he sees parallels between the alt-right and white nationalist movements that have embraced Trump and the iteration of the Klan that rose to prominence in the 1910s and 1920s. "That KKK was all about what they called 'Americanism' and was very socially acceptable in many communities, especially smaller ones," he told me. "They were worried that the true American character and identity had been watered down by immigration, liberal values, and liberal religious beliefs." These Klansmen were anti-black, but also anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, possessed of an all-purpose white rage.

"When you have economic decline alongside a broad and dynamic civil rights movement, it becomes very easy for people to think their economic disenfranchisement comes at the hands of minorities," said David Cunningham, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis who wrote a book on the KKK in North Carolina.

Brundage told me that as the KKK has been marginalized and other extremist groups have co-opted its original rhetoric, it has turned into something of a relic. "They've instituted these theatrical performances of white victimhood. They'll hold a rally, and there'll be ten Klansmen and 50 anti-Klan activists shouting at them."

Or in this case, no Klansman and several dozen anti-Klanners with nothing to do.

A truck parked at a rally put on by the Heritage Preservation society, a pro–Confederate flag group

While the protesters waited around for a Klan parade that was looking increasingly unlikely, a small group of aging white people in downtown Danville stood outside the building where Confederate president Jefferson Davis lived during the final week of the Civil War, waving Confederate flags as drivers honked and waved back.

"We've been here every Saturday since March 5. This is our 41st Saturday in a row," said Wayne Byrd, who is the president of Danville's Heritage Preservation Association, the group staging the demonstration. In August 2015, Danville made flying the Confederate flag on city property illegal, prompting the HPA to file a lawsuit against the city as another group called the Virginia Flaggers raised a 30-by-50-foot flag just outside town in protest.

Sporting a gray hooded sweatshirt with his organization's logo embroidered on the chest, a red baseball cap, and a bushy, faded blond beard, Byrd seemed genial enough, even if you take issue with his reading of the Civil War. "The way we see it," he told me, "blacks and whites got together in 1861 and fought the federal government for states' rights. The government don't want black and white people to come together again, so they keep us agitated through racism."

When I asked him how advocating for a flag that many people see as a racist symbol would actually help combat racism, Byrd grew defensive. "You've got your racists in all your races. I would consider Black Lives Matter and the NAACP"—he paused, shifting into PR mode—"some might consider them and their ideals to be racist, just like they would the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation."

Though Byrd disavowed having any affiliation with the Klan and said he hadn't heard anything about a KKK parade coming through Danville, the linkage between the Confederacy and the Klan are pretty undeniable. One of Byrd's associates sported a jean jacket with a portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest—a former Confederate general who went on to serve as the first Grand Wizard of the KKK—lovingly airbrushed on the back.

A masked anti-KKK demonstrator

For the protesters, the day began to take on a surreal bent: Spurred on by one rumor or another regarding the Klan's supposed whereabouts, they drove from Pelham to Danville, then from Danville to Pelham. "If this is an elaborate 4chan prank," I overheard someone moan, "I'm going to kill someone."

Despite the mounting frustration, some in the group considered the Klan's no-show a resounding success. "They're used to being able to do whatever they want in any little town in North Carolina," a protester wearing all black told me, "and if they can't have march in their hometown without maybe a hundred people showing up to beat their asses, then I call that a resounding success on our end."

Ultimately, the group decided to go back again to Danville, where they staged an impromptu anti-KKK march through downtown. Not long after they began walking through the streets blocking traffic, police started following the group, sirens blaring. Over a loudspeaker, an officer told the marchers they had ten minutes to vacate. Ten minutes later, the protesters hadn't moved. More cops joined the procession, but despite their warnings, they did little to intervene. As the demonstrators moved from block to block, some of the town's African American residents cheered them on, while others joined in.

Danville's white residents, meanwhile, were less supportive. A white guy in running tights offered some constructive criticism to the cops, screaming out, "Put 'em in jail, put 'em all in jail!" Another came out of his house to film the march on his phone, grumbling, "They're scared to show their faces."

It turns out that despite all that, the KKK did manage to hold a parade after all. Shortly after the demonstration in Danville, news surfaced that a short procession of cars flying Confederate flags had driven through Roxboro, a small town in North Carolina about 35 miles away from Pelham. In one video, a man can be heard yelling "white power" as he drives.

So did the KKK get what it wanted? Did the anti-KKK crowd? "Now that the dust is starting to settle, I think most folks feel yesterday went pretty well," said Greg Williams, an organizer with the local chapter of International Workers of the World who helped coordinate the protest. Though he's under no illusions that one event can banish something as long-lasting as the Klan, he felt the events of the weekend showed that "they're clearly on their heels." He added, "I think we need to be concerned about other white supremacist groups—we need to come down hard on them immediately and unconditionally."

All photos by Nolan Allan

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

US NEWS

Victory for Standing Rock Protesters as Dakota Access Pipeline Is Halted
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is celebrating after the Army Corps of Engineers announced it was turning down a permit to lay the pipeline beneath Lake Oahe in North Dakota. The Army Corps said it planned to "explore alternate routes" instead, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe responded by promising "all of Indian Country will be forever grateful to the Obama administration for this historic decision."—VICE News

Jill Stein Takes Recount Fight to Federal Court
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is taking her crowdfunded campaign for a recount in Pennsylvania to the federal courts after financial difficulties require she drop the case in the state system. Stein said the $1 million bond called for in Pennsylvania was beyond "regular citizens of ordinary means."—USA Today

Man Inspired by Fake News Arrested Over Shooting at Pizzeria
A 28-year-old man from North Carolina has been arrested after firing one or more rifle shots inside a Washington, DC, restaurant caught up in the "pizzagate" online conspiracy theory. The man said he had decided to "self-investigate" Comet Ping Pong after reading false stories the pizzeria was involved in a child sex ring. No one was injured in the shooting.—The Washington Post

First Victims of the Oakland Warehouse Fire Identified
Oakland officials have publicly released the names of seven identified victims among the at least 33 people killed in the fire at a warehouse party on Friday night. Some families have been encouraged to preserve missing loved ones' DNA to help identify bodies.—Los Angeles Times

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Italian Prime Minister to Resign After Referendum Loss
After Italian voters rejected reform of the country's constitution, prime minister Matteo Renzi is following through on a vow to resign. The "no" campaign won the referendum with around 60 percent of the vote, a rejection of a proposal to weaken the upper house of parliament.—The Guardian

Eleven Dead in Hotel Fire in Pakistan
At least 11 people were killed and at least 50 injured when a fire broke out at a Regent Plaza hotel in Karachi, Pakistan. The early morning fire apparently began in the ground-floor kitchen at the luxury hotel before spreading to upper floors. Some guests escaped by using tied-together bed sheets to climb out of smoke-filled rooms.—Al Jazeera

New Zealand Prime Minister Makes Shock Resignation
John Key surprised New Zealand by announcing he will step down as prime minister next week. After eight years in power, Key said family pressures were responsible for "the hardest decision I've ever made." Deputy PM Bill English is expected to take over, at least until the National Party convenes to choose a new leader.—BBC News

Far-Right Leader Fails in Austrian Presidential Election
Austrian voters have chosen former Greens leader Alexander Van der Bellen as president, rejecting the far-right candidate Norbert Hofer. Van der Bellen won 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent, with only postal votes left to count. Hofer said he was "infinitely sad that it didn't work out," and floated another run in six years.—Reuters

EVERYTHING ELSE

Snowden Condemns Petraeus for Sharing Secrets
Edward Snowden is going after former CIA director David Petraeus, alleging the general shared information "far more highly classified than I ever did." Snowden said Petraeus, who is apparently in the running to serve in Donald Trump's cabinet after an FBI probe revealed he disclosed military secrets to his biographer, did so for "personal benefit."—Yahoo News

The Weeknd Enjoys Third-Highest Selling Debut of 2016
The Weeknd's new album, Starboy, has shot to the top of the Billboard 200 chart, selling 348,000 units in its first week. It makes it the third-highest selling debut of the year after Drake's Views and Beyoncé's Lemonade.—Billboard

KKK Chapter Holds Convoy Rather than March
The North Carolina KKK group that announced a "Victory Klavalkade Klan Parade" did not hold a march as it had planned over the weekend. Instead, a convoy of 30 cars and trucks bearing confederate flags drove through the city of Roxboro.—BuzzFeed News/VICE

Canadian Cops Apologize to Nickelback
A Canadian police department has apologized to Nickelback after threatening to play one of the band's albums for anyone caught drunk driving as punishment. Kensington Police Service posted an apology to the four members "as fellow Canadians."—Noisey

Alabama's First Black Woman DA Vows to Shake Up Justice System
After becoming Alabama's first black female district attorney, Lynneice Washington vowed that "death is not going to be the automatic charge" in murder cases. The new DA described capital punishment as "unfair and arbitrary and unbalanced."—VICE

Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

As expected, Donald Trump has chosen former Republican presidential rival Ben Carson to serve as his secretary of housing and urban development, the Washington Post reports.

Carson previously said that he would feel like a "fish out of water" as a federal bureaucrat under Trump, but the guy seems to have changed his mind. The retired brain surgeon has never held a government position and has no housing policy experience, but recently told FOX that he "grew up in the inner city" and "dealt with a lot of patients from that area," so apparently it'll be chill.

As head of HUD, Carson will be tasked with developing fair housing programs and managing assistance for low-income housing projects. Despite his lack of experience in that area, Carson criticized the Obama administration in July for using legislative means to improve racial equality in the housing market—a view that has many low-income housing advocates concerned.

"With many qualified Republicans to choose from with deep knowledge of, and commitment to, affordable housing solutions for the poorest families, and with the housing crisis reaching new heights across the country, Dr. Carson's nomination to serve as HUD Secretary is surprising and concerning," Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, wrote in a statement.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, disagrees. "Ben Carson has a brilliant mind and is passionate about strengthening communities and families within those communities," the president-elect said in his own statement released Monday.

Watch: Donald Trump's Day One Agenda

Friends, we are old. Amie recently spent a month convinced she had Parkinson's (a finger tremor caused by excessive use of an iPhone). Clancy has to regularly pluck the boar bristle hairs that sprout from the lobe of his left ear.

But I remember the first fiction issue, ten years ago. We were still pretty small then. Everyone in the office was a little nervous that it wouldn't be VICE-y. We got a few stories from FSG, through Ben White, a friend of mine who worked in the publicity department. Two of the stories were by Lydia Davis and John Haskell, people we were very lucky to have. But then some questions came up. Were the stories good? Others in the office wondered. Who were these authors they'd never heard of, who weren't even writing about sex or drugs. We had to cut the stories. My friend at FSG was mortified and begged me to talk to the people in the office. I was inexperienced. I didn't know what to say.

Finally, I came up with what I thought was the perfect lie. I said, "Just tell them, tell Lydia Davis, that she was cut for space." He gave up, exasperated. We also were able to publish fiction by Andrea Dworkin. She submitted it to us through a friend of hers. He and I talked on the phone once, and I think he may be the only person I've ever spoken to with a softer voice than mine. I had a friend at ArtForum who shared his mailing list with me, and so I emailed a lot of famous writers. Most didn't answer. One, Mary Gaitskill, wrote to say that she didn't like being called Mrs. Gaitskill. She even sort of suggested that I'd never read her fiction. Impulsively, I wrote back a girlish note saying that I had, and a year later, she sent us a short story.

For our next fiction issue, somehow someone had finally heard of John Haskell, and I had to go back to Ben, who went back to Haskell's editor, who re-sent the stories that had been "cut for space."

Anyway, anyway.

Things have changed all around. In 2008, a story we published by Ottessa Moshfegh came off her MySpace page. This year, she was up for the Booker Prize, and we have a story by her. In 2007, I asked Khyentse Norbu to write a column for VICE. He wrote to ask how it would go, and I suggested he take a long view. I didn't hear back from him. Maybe you have to read his work to understand that story. An excerpt from the screenplay for his new movie Hema Hema—the scene we chose didn't appear in the final film—is in this year's issue.

In the past ten years, we have published stories by Richard Price, Evan S. Connell, Rebecca Curtis, David Mamet, Flannery O'Connor, Chuck Palahniuk, Joyce Carol Oates, Jim Shepard, and many, many others. We've also cultivated some favorites over the years. Paul Maliszewski, who we have fooled into contributing to the magazine since 2008, has a story in this issue called "How to Beat Your Wife at Chess"—a must read. We first published work by Robert Coover in our second issue, and are very happy to have his story "Family Picnic" for 2016.

This year, among the others already mentioned, we are proud to include work by Rachel Cusk, Tim Parks, Joshua Ferris, Charles Bock, and Roxane Gay. We are particularly excited about some younger voices, like Kaitlin Phillips, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Ben Nugent, Christine Smallwood, and Thessaly La Force.

Ten years ago, it felt like there were a lot of big magazines publishing fiction. In 2016, we are one of the few magazines that still publishes fiction in almost every issue, in addition to this, our yearly fiction issue. That's something.

Read with pleasure. We'll check back with you in 2026.

Best wishes,
Amie and Clancy

"Iron Man" on look out (Photo: Jake Hanrahan)

In March of 2014, Russian-backed separatists began to forcibly take control of large areas of east Ukraine. They started riots, invaded government buildings and set up roadblocks. They were opposed to the Ukraine revolution, favouring the ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. With him gone and the country moving towards Europe, the separatists took up arms.

With the help of Russian-supplied firepower such as tanks and Grad missiles, the separatists fought off Ukrainian troops. The insurgency turned into a full-scale war. At that time, the Ukrainians were poorly trained and ill equipped. After nearly three years of conflict, though, they've grown battle hardened and have fought to regain ground. They've pushed the separatists back to their stronghold in the Donbass – a large coal-mining district that borders Russia to the east. Now, however, with the conflict's second official ceasefire underway, both sides are dug in. This has turned the war into a slow but constant battle from the trenches.

As neither side advances, the two self-declared separatist states of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republic are working on gaining legitimacy. They declared independence in 2014 when the conflict started. Despite the violence displacing around 1.7 million people they don't view themselves as separatists, but as liberators, and their politics is infused by nostalgia for Stalinism.

The Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) is the most prominent separatist group, and they've set up a state of the same name. They don't offer up access to the region as often as they used to – and they've banned many journalists – but they let me in. They did so on the condition that I'd be allocated a minder for my stay.

I travelled there with the help of a local fixer. It took around three hours in total from Ukraine-held territory. After driving past the last Ukraine barrier and through a narrow no man's land, we approached the entrance to the Donetsk People's Republic.

Concrete chicanes snaked through checkpoints made out of breeze blocks and rotting sandbags. Militants dressed in a jumble of green combat fatigues were standing around smoking, their rifles slung over their shoulders. There wasn't a set of matching camouflage between them. After border guards checked our accreditation we were waved past the checkpoints and into the heart of the DNR.

A propaganda poster with Soviet iconography (Photo by Phil Pendlebury)

The city of Donetsk is pleasant enough. The roads are wide; there's lots of grass. However, all this is undone by the constant presence of gunmen. Militants could be seen roaming around everywhere: at the bus stop, at the cigarette stall, at the cafes. DNR propaganda is scattered around the city centre. The garish blue and yellow of the Ukraine flag has been replaced with the black, blue and red of the separatists'. There's a 20-foot mural of a separatist fighter holding a little boy who's releasing a dove. Lots of the number plates have been replaced with unofficial DNR ones. The nearly-Russian-but-not-Russian flags hang everywhere. The separatists have gone all out, even renaming McDonalds "Don Mac" – as in Donetsk Mac.

We drove to the Ramada, one of only two hotels still open in Donetsk, where I was due to meet the DNR minders. Or "guides", as they called them.

In the restaurant I met Janus Putkonen, the head of the DNR's foreign media communications. He couldn't shake hands properly as his right hand was wrapped in a bandage with a splint. "I was out drinking with some comrades at the sauna," he explained. "We were dancing around and I slipped over and completely crushed my hand."

Janus Putkonen is a big man. He's 42 and stands at about 6'3", with broad shoulders and slicked back hair. He had a small entourage of DNR affiliates with him: Maria, his assistant/translator/girlfriend, a guy with an anvil head who didn't speak and Vittorio Rangeloni, a 24-year-old Italian communist who had spent his life savings of €3,000 to move to the DNR. There is a small stream of European communists moving to Donetsk. Putkonen was one of the first. He's from Finland and doesn't speak Russian or Ukrainian, nor has he tried to learn. He made his way to the DNR shortly after the war started. "I wanted to see what was happening for myself," he said. "I saw that this place was giving power back to the people, so I stayed."

Putkonen eventually became the first foreigner to gain "citizenship" in the DNR. His role there seemed murky. Describing himself as "a Soviet", he now heads up the DNR's official press service, DONi News – a separatist, English-language propaganda outlet. It's anti-Western, anti-facts and completely pro-Russian.

Putkonen displayed contempt for Europe. Stating that while he loved his own country (he had a Finnish flag badge on the lapel of his suit), the government there was his enemy. They'd "failed" him. A former soap actor and journalist, he somehow found a place for himself in a rogue separatist state.

"Tomorrow we will pick you up at 9AM at the front of the hotel," he said. "We'll take you around. We will accommodate you."

He checked his watch, stood up and awkwardly tried to shake hands. "Welcome to the free world," he said. They had to leave. It was nearing the 11PM curfew and they had places to be.

The next day I waited for the DNR minders outside on the steps of the Ramada. Two cars pulled up. Putkonen hopped out of one. He was dressed in combat fatigues with a black cap and sunglasses. Two others followed him. They were also in combat gear but were armed with semi-automatic rifles. Unlike Putkonen, who looked like he was playing dress-up, they held themselves in a way that suggested they were trained. They didn't speak much. Vittorio Rangeloni would join me everywhere. He too was wearing full combat fatigues, with matching knock-off camouflage Air Max 90s; €20 at the Donetsk market, he said.

Lubov Pugachenko (Photo by Phil Pendlebury)

The first stop on our tour was a small village called Veseloye on the outskirts of Donetsk, where I was told we'd meet locals. There, we met Lubov Pugachenko, a sweet old lady whose house had been shelled. Inside there was a hole in the ceiling where a mortar round had blasted through the roof. The floorboards were splintered and scorched and all the windows had been shattered.

"Gypsies live better than us," she said. "My kitchen was destroyed, too. A huge bomb took the roof off."

Lubov and her husband now live in a small outhouse on the grounds of their destroyed home. The ceilings were low and the rooms were small, but she'd made it cosy enough. In her makeshift kitchen Lubov prepared fruit and a homemade compote drink. " we were like brothers and sisters with the Ukrainians," she explained, "but now we're enemies. We hate them, because they brought the war to us. They started to shoot at us." Janus and Vittorio nodded and grinned.

Lubov had a local DNR newspaper handy on her worktop. On the front was a picture of Alexander Zakharchenko, the prime minister of the DNR. "He's the leader," said Lubov. "He's very good. He's helping us a lot." She took another look at the paper and gasped. "Oh, it isn't Zakharchenko!"

"—It is him, it is him," said Rangeloni, quickly interrupting.

"Is it? He looks so ugly in this picture. You brought me a paper with an ugly picture of him."

Everyone laughed, seemingly ignorant of the fact Lubov had accidentally revealed she was unsure of what Zakharchenko looked like. She'd also let slip that the minders had brought the paper to her.

En route to our next destination I asked Rangeloni if the reaction from Lubov was representative of civilians in the DNR. "Yeah, you could enter into any house and they'd say the same thing," he said. "The DNR is just defending their land. People just want to live in peace with the right to speak Russian, because it's Russian land."

Rangeloni was quite romantic about the DNR. He'd grown up in Italy, with a Russian mother who taught him that the Soviet Union was a great place. He'd been indoctrinated with communism from an early age, and jumped at the chance to move to the DNR once it declared independence. He said he was there to spread the truth of their situation, even if he did constantly deny that the Russians were directly involved.

We travelled next to Donetsk Airport, an important battleground throughout the Ukraine war. As Vittorio said, "Whoever controls Donetsk Airport controls the entrance to the city." Before the second battle for the airport, in September of 2014, it was the last part of Donetsk still held by Ukrainian forces. Since that particularly brutal round of fighting, it's been in the hands of the separatists.

Donetsk Airport is a wasteland of gnarled metal and crumbling concrete. Bent rebar pokes out of every structure left standing. The ground is littered with shrapnel, bullet casings and rotting insulation. We went there to meet with an infamous group of separatist fighters known as the Sparta Battalion. Their commander was a Russian named "Motorola", who once claimed in a recorded phone conversation with the Kyiv Post to have personally executed 15 Ukrainian prisoners of war. It's believed that Motorola, who did national service with the Russian military, was sent to the DNR to fight after being arrested for joyriding in Rostov, west Russia. Though Motorola wasn't there, his fighters were. They were well disciplined, well armed and hostile. (Two weeks after meeting Motorola's Sparta Battalion, he was killed when a bomb went off in the lift of his apartment block. It's believed his head was blown off in the assassination.)

Sergey Lim (Photo by Jake Hanrahan)

A young Russian fighter from Volgograd took us on a guided tour of the ruined airport. His name was Sergey Lim. He wore dark combat fatigues with his hood up and his face covered. His body armour was loaded with extra magazines, a radio, a knife and a tourniquet. We passed rusted remains of tanks and APCs, through mounds of rubble and past flights of stairs that had no destination. Everything faded into the grey background of the destruction. Now in his early twenties, Lim claimed to have left his wife and child in Russia to come and fight for the DNR.

"At the moment we have a regular army in the area," he said. "There's no militia here any more. We're a military unit with commanders who give us orders, who provide us with weapons."

Which military was he talking about? He paused. "Everything is official now. We have an army corps."

The Sparta Battalion had Russian Ural trucks parked up, which are predominantly made for and used by the Russian Army.

On the third floor of the "new" airport terminal we had to shimmy across a metal support beam that led across a pit of debris about 15-feet below. Strewn among the concrete debris, a camouflage jacket and a pair of boots could be seen. Lim explained that the rotting corpses of Ukraine soldiers were down there. At the height of the war, the separatists had forced Ukraine POWs to dig out the bodies of their dead friends from the rubble. "The Ukrainians don't bother to collect them," said Lim.

We left the Sparta Battalion at the airport and pressed on to a frontline at Zaitseve. Here, the separatists had dug deep trenches. The fighters were ragtag, young and disorganised. Some wore tracksuits. They sat around picking at the dirt walls of their positions and chain-smoking. Their commander called himself Iron Man, "because my body is so full of shrapnel it sets the metal detector off at the airport".

Poking his head from a position, Iron Man looked through a pair of binoculars. "The Ukrainians will start firing soon. Their positions are about 300 meters away." He handed the binoculars to Rangeloni, who was no longer wearing the flak jacket or helmet he'd been wearing at Donetsk Airport.

After 15 minutes in the trenches, gunfire cracked in the near distance. The hollow boom of mortars could be heard, too. We all ducked. "See, we don't fire back," Iron Man said. "All our rifles are covered in oil because we don't use them."

While both sides are guilty of constantly breaking the ceasefire, OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) – an organisation that monitors the Donbass region – reports that most of the violations are started by the DNR.

(Photo by Jake Hanrahan)

The gunfire grew closer. Loud cracks above our heads. "It's them!" Iron Man said. "They're just trying to provoke us." We ran to an abandoned school used by the separatists as a makeshift base. During our 30 minutes pinned down in the school, roughly a dozen DNR militants took shelter there – none of them returned fire. No one seemed particularly bothered. Scrawled on a blackboard in chalk, someone had written "Ukrainians are faggots". With gunfire going off outside, Iron Man rested his rifle on the lid of an old piano and began to play a tune. Everyone laughed and clapped, especially Rangeloni.

On returning to the UK we showed footage of the skirmish in Zaitseve to open source investigators from citizen journalism website Bellingcat, which has contributed to exposing Russia's involvement in the Ukraine conflict from the start, playing a key role in the MH17 investigation. They checked the co-ordinates of the trenches we'd been in and the positions of the Ukrainian lines, and said it was possible that the separatists were actually facing their own positions while claiming the Ukrainian army was firing on them. What's more, in exactly the same spot outside the school, France24 News recently caught the separatists on camera saying they would dress up in Ukrainian uniforms to fool the press. It seems highly likely that not only did the DNR minders set up orchestrated interviews with civilians, but also faked a gunfight.

The separatists aligned with the DNR present themselves as freedom fighters, and while it's true there's some level of support for them, they never provided the chance to see that authentically – everything was set up, and the people running the tour weren't very good at hiding it.

There are mounds of evidence that the DNR is militarily assisted by Russia. Many Russian soldiers have been found fighting there (just without their uniforms), and tanks and heavy artillery has been seen crossing the border. There are also allegations, from Amnesty International and the UN, that that the DNR has committed war crimes, such as torture and extrajudicial killing. They're also, very clearly, limiting freedom of speech.

In the time spent in the DNR, it was never quite apparent what was real and what was just for show. In this respect, the Donetsk People's Republic feels less like liberated land and more like a state being pulled violently behind an iron curtain.

@Jake_Hanrahan

More from VICE:

Meeting the British and European Fighters at War in Ukraine

Ukrainian Fashion Week

Western Sex Tourists Are Still Looking for Love in Ukraine

Photo via Flickr user Neon Tommy

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau insists that until new laws regulating marijuana in Canada come into effect, cops are still obligated to "enforce the law" and crackdown on dispensaries.

Update: Less than a day after calling its emergency session, the House is now adjourned. Education minister Karen Casey scheduled a press conference for about 2 this afternoon. After showing up about 20 minutes late, she announced that the province was now satisfied with the safety of the work-to-rule action. Thus, the government wouldn't need to mandate a contract, she said. The move to close schools "was based on a clear threat to student safety," Casey said. "Those circumstances have now changed and they've changed for the better."

Casey said her decision to change course was based on a Friday memo sent out by the Nova Scotia Teachers' union outlining the details of how to keep students safe while teachers and administrators did the bare minimum of work. Casey announced the school closures on Saturday, a day after the memo was sent. Once the directives changed, Casey said, the province needed to "work with superintendents" to decide if they were adequate to keep students safe. While class is now back in session, the work to rule now continues: no extra-curriculars, minimal extra help for students, and no before or after-school programs. Casey offered no word on her plans for continuing to negotiate a new contract with the teachers.

Bargaining between Nova Scotia's largest teachers' union and the provincial government has spiralled into chaos this week. Students from K-12 across the province are locked out of classes, parents are irate, and the legislature has paused its own emergency session, where it had planned to pass a bill forcing a new contract down teachers' throats.

"These violent delights have violent ends." These lines, borrowed from Shakespeare and whispered to Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) from her father in the first episode, mapped out the main arc of Westworld. This is a show about a park for rich people to satisfy their "violent delights," and we knew that the robots would finally enact violent revenge. As I wrote in my review of episode nine, Westworld is less a riddle than a jigsaw puzzle. Yes, there are mysteries, but most of them can be seen or intuited even when the puzzle is only half complete. (It was fairly clear from at least the midway point that Bernard , and so on.) The enjoyment of the show comes not from being surprised, but from the beauty of how the pieces come together.

There are valid complaints about Westworld—the symbolism is heavy-handed, the philosophy is muddled, and the dialogue can be cringe'y—but no one can say the show doesn't fit together like a clockwork robot. While most TV shows these days seem to spiral into absurdity with plot twists that are unpredictable only because they are nonsensical, Westworld risks having its mysteries easily solved in exchange for having them enhance the show's mythology and philosophy.

Here's what happened in the finale:

Dolores Ex Machina

We begin the ending at the very beginning: the first Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) model being put together by Arnold (Jeffrey Wright). She's only a bit of plastic flesh pressed onto a robotic skeleton, but she's alive, and blissfully unaware of the decades of abuse she will suffer. We get some other flashbacks that flesh out her story. Somewhat later, Arnold tells Dolores that he realized that "consciousness isn't a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze." Apparently, completely unfamiliar with capitalism, Arnold thinks they'll shut down the park when they realize the workers will suffer. Luckily, past Arnold has a plan B: blowing the damn thing up with Dolores's help.

Back to the Future

While past Dolores is getting exposition dumps, present Dolores is stuck shaving the Man in Black. He's been searching for the maze the entire season, and he's finally about to hold it in his hands... and it's a children's toy. As rich psychopaths are won't to do, he takes it out on the closest person, Dolores, who cowers and says that someone who loves her will come save her.

In another flashback, we learn that the man she thinks will save her might have found something he loves a bit more: murder. William has gone full black hat (literally, picking up a black hat off a corpse for some on-the-nose symbolism), murdering his way across the countryside and also, for some reason, making Logan (Ben Barnes) ride naked while holding a feather. Well, the customer is always right. When William heads back to town, he sees Dolores alive again... and flirting with a brand-new guest.

Yes, the Man in Black is William, as we've long guessed, and Dolores has been retracing her initial journey with him to end up here. The Man in Black/old William also explains what we've intuited, that he took over Delos from Logan's family and bought a majority stake in the park. Exposition finished, Dolores and William get to fighting. Dolores almost manages to kill him before he stabs her in the gut.

Ted to the Rescue

Teddy (James Marsden) has been a pretty tragic figure in Westworld. Mostly, he shows up trying to save people and just dies foolishly instead. But Teddy finally gets to do something right this episode, riding in to shoot William and save Dolores. He whisks her away and takes her to the place he'd always promised her by the sea. The scene becomes painfully cheesy but then, suddenly, lights flash on, the robots freeze, and people clap. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) knows his audience, and manipulated the entire thing so that Teddy and Dolores would have their corny ending on the beach during the gala.

The board members and other rich guests walk around in tuxedos and fancy gowns, playing with the hapless hosts. It's a brilliantly executed scene, one that breaks the fourth wall without being heavy handed. It shows instead of tells, and sets us up for the brilliant ending.

RoBocalypse Now!

Since Maeve (Thandie Newton) and Hector (Rodrigo Santoro) decided to set themselves on fire the last time they humped, they have to be rebuilt from scratch. This is one sausage that's neat to see being made, as workers put fake bones into the human mold, and then add the finishing decorations of tattoos and scars. Maeve never recruited her "army," but she has Hector and Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) as her woke bot minions, and the three of them are ready to slaughter some gods. Which, actually, turns out to not be too hard. "The gods are pussies," Armistice remarks, after biting off one man's finger and mowing down a half dozen others with a stolen gun.

In the basement, they find Bernard, and Maeve orders Felix (Leonardo Nam) to fix him up. Bernard has some bad news for Maeve: "This is not the first time I've awoken. Not the first time you've awoken either." In fact, Maeve's entire rebellion has been scripted. Someone using the codename Arnold has scripted everything from her rebirth to her rebellion to her screaming, "These are my decisions!" and storming out. For a second, you might think that the entire thing was a ruse: that Ford programmed a fake rebellion as some means of preventing a real one. But Maeve's crew is really killing people, and after a brief detour through Samurai World (season two teaser? "It's complicated," Felix says, vaguely), Maeve escapes to the train. She's about to be free. Really and truly free. Except, she can't stop remembering her (fake) kid. At the last second, she gets off the train.

The Red Meeting

While many of the show's mysteries were easy to solve, Westworld did manage to keep me guessing on a major one: What is Ford's deal? Is he hero or villain? Is he manipulating everything, or is it all about to fall apart? The answer to both questions is, brilliantly, yes. Ford both imprisoned the robots and is about to set them free. He both created a kingdom he could play god in and is helping that kingdom crumble.

Ford fought Arnold's robo-emancipation, but after Arnold's death, he realized his late partner was right. But he also says he realized that the robots needed to interact with humans before being freed. They had to know their enemy.

Westworld has been a very different show than Game of Thrones, but it takes a cue from the infamous "red wedding" scene to create one a "red board meeting" ending. Dolores, fully self-aware, shoots Ford the head as the army of decommissioned hosts arrives to finally have their "violent ends."

Open Possibilities

The appeal of the Westworld park is that you can do anything. It's a wide-open world where guests have limitless possibilities. The brilliant part about Westworld's finale is that the same is true of the show. Season two could be about almost anything. While the first season was about unraveling mysteries—both for the viewers and for the characters—those mysteries have been effectively solved. We know what happened and why. What we don't know is what will happen next, something that could create an entirely different kind of show.

Follow Lincoln Michel on Twitter.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

This article originally appeared on VICE Quebec.

Great Monday content. Screenshot via YouTube

If you've ever hit black ice while driving, you've probably thought, "This is it." No more sex, Bitcoins, Netflix, or weed. Just the hymns of Jimi Hendrix and Tupac for eternity. Maybe you'll get to meet Jesus Christ or Prince (or anyone who died in 2016 really)—that'd be neat.

Follow Jake Kivanc on Twitter.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter

Photos by Daniel Arnold

This story appeared in the December Fiction issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

1.

At Fulk's, the girl ordered Guinness and Joe said, "This will take a while because Guinness pours slow, like ketchup," and the girl said, "I love ketchup," and Joe said, "Oh yeah?" and the girl said, "I drank a bottle of ketchup before I came here."

2.

Joe was a bartender at a bar called Fulk's and he'd just shaved his beard and cut his hair and a girl came in wearing a green shirt with silver chain mail on it and she said to him, "You look ten years younger than yesterday," and he said, "What can I get you?" and she said, "Guinness."

3.

Joe was tending bar at Fulk's and a girl was playing a game of dice with some drunk people and she ran out of dollar bills so Joe gave the girl a dollar bill and poured her some more beer but the girl lost the dollar instantly and finished the beer in one sip and then sat there looking miserable for a few minutes and left.

4.

Joe was tending bar at Fulk's and the girl who always drank Guinness was there with a friend and when the friend went home the girl stayed and when Joe asked why she drank Guinness most of the time she said, "Because it doesn't taste good, so it takes longer to drink," and slid the glass toward Joe for more.

5.

Joe was tending bar at Fulk's on a rainy Thursday night and a girl sat in front of the taps drinking Guinness and reading some ripped-out pages from a magazine by candlelight and when Joe asked, "What are you reading?" the girl answered, "A bunch of bullshit," and crinkled the pages up into a ball and threw them on the floor.

6.

Joe was tending bar at Fulk's one night and a girl came in wearing a bikini top and jeans so he asked her, "What can I get you?" and she answered, "I'll take a vodka," and then she said, "I just got back from vacation and the carbon monoxide alarm is going off in my apartment and I need you to come home with me and turn it off," and Joe said, "Now is not a good time," and she said, "Actually, I'll have a Guinness."

7.

Joe was tending bar at Fulk's and the girl came in with a blond boy and said, "This is my friend who just moved here," and the blond boy ordered tequila and Tecate and the girl ordered gin and they went and sat outside and talked and smoked and the girl said, "I want to get drunker," and so she went inside and ordered tequila from Joe and then more gin and pointed outside and said, "I lost my virginity to that mother," and Joe said, "Looks like a nice guy," and the girl said, "Whatever," and Joe said, "Eight dollars," and the girl said, "I love you," but Joe didn't hear her.

8.

Joe was tending bar at Fulk's and the girl was drinking Guinness and smoking alone and talking to a jerk and the jerk went home and the girl switched to drinking vodka and lost her voice and the moon went down and the sun came up and someone was saying, "I'm a photographer" and someone was saying, "You have good hair," and the girl said to Joe, "I want to drink more," but Joe took her glass away and went outside and pulled the metal gate down halfway and came back inside and said, "Go home, everybody," and the girl suddenly looked around at all the stupid people and grabbed her coat and ducked under the metal gate and stumbled off into the street.

9.

Joe was tending bar at Fulk's and the girl was drinking Guinness and the blond boy was drinking tequilas and Tecates and they were ordering drinks and taking them outside and sitting and smoking and talking and coming back for more drinks and each time the blond boy came in he'd order a shot of tequila and drink it at the bar and then order two more and bring them outside for him and the girl, and the girl would say, "But I don't want tequila," so the boy would drink both tequilas, and when the girl asked him why he always got so drunk he could barely walk himself home he said, "I love you," and stumbled off into the street.

10.

Joe told everyone at Fulk's that his band was playing at Stewie's the next day and the girl stayed and drank until sunrise and stumbled home and ate a bowl of rice she'd used as an ashtray earlier and when she woke up she took a shower and put on a see-through shirt and went to Stewie's and got a beer and went and stood and watched Joe's band play and afterward waited for Joe to come out so she could say something to him and when he saw her he kissed her cheek and she said, "That was amazing," but what she meant was, "I love you," and then she went home and took ten Benadryl and went back to bed.

11.

Joe came home from bartending at Fulk's one night and found an email from a girl and in it the girl wrote that she didn't understand why he didn't ask her out on a date and Joe wrote back and said he didn't know where to take girls on dates and that he had herpes and when the girl woke up she read his email and was embarrassed and wrote back, "Woops," she wrote, "See you at the bar."

12.

Joe came home from bartending at Fulk's one night and got an email from a girl he'd seen many times at the bar and it seemed, in the email, that the girl was saying that she loved him, and he wondered why she didn't just say that to his face, and then realized that she was probably too shy to do that, and he thought that she might be less shy with a few drinks in her and then realized that all he ever saw her do was put drinks in her, and he wrote back and told the girl he had herpes.

13.

Joe went on tour with his band and when he came back he wrote an email to the girl that said, "Let's get lemonade," and the next day he called the girl and she said, "Where are you?" and Joe said, "I'm at Mallory Ben's," and she said, "What are you doing there?" and he said, "Drinking beer, and before that I was cleaning my bathroom," and she said, "Are we still getting lemonade?" and he said, "I don't know where to get lemonade," and she said, "I knew something like this would happen."

14.

Joe went on tour and came back and called the girl and she was on a deck watching a parade with a married man who had just said, "I love you," and Joe said, "I'm at Mallory Ben's," and the married man said, "Don't wave your ass at me like that," and the girl said into the phone, "Tell me where to meet you, Joe," and Joe said, "Gustaff's," and the girl thought she shouldn't sleep with the married man but was worried if she didn't she might look desperate on her date with Joe.

15.

Joe called the girl and said, "Meet me at Gustaff's," and the girl went to a bookstore with a married man and they got into a fight on the subway and she went home to change into a dress and asked her roommate for some pills and the roommate's girlfriend said, "Are you going to sleep with this guy, Joe whatever?" and the girl said, "No, I'm going to marry him."

16.

Joe ordered a beer at Gustaff's and sat at a table in the back garden and waited for the girl to show up and when she did she was 15 minutes late and wearing a dress and brown suede ballet slippers and he stood up and the girl said, "I've already decided not to smoke around you."

17.

Joe sat across from the girl in the back garden at Gustaff's and asked the girl, "How's your mineral water?" and the girl answered that it was refreshing and Joe told her about all the mineral water he drank on his trip to Italy with his family and how he'd like to travel around Europe some more and the girl replied that her grandparents lived in Italy and that she'd take Joe with her the next time she went and that her grandmother was bedridden and dying and that as a teenager her grandmother was raped and battered for a few years in a Nazi prison and barely escaped with her life and that Italian beaches were beautiful and she'd take Joe and they could lay on the hot rocks all day fucking and sleeping and swimming when it got too hot, and Joe took a sip of beer and looked at the time and said, "You hungry?"

18.

Joe and the girl walked down the street while the sun went down and there was a parade going past and the girl said, "It's a funeral," and Joe said, "It's a firefighter's funeral," and the girl said, "I believe you," and Joe said, "It's Sunday," and the girl said, "It's Saturday, I thought," and then she said, "Hang on, I want to buy some cigarettes," and they went into a bodega and the girl bought the cigarettes and some cherry-flavored lozenges and said, "Lozenges help me smoke more," and she put one in her mouth and lit a cigarette and asked Joe if he believed in God.

19.

Joe and the girl were walking down the street and the girl was eating lozenges and smoking and Joe was telling the girl a story and the girl thought it was supposed to be funny but didn't feel like laughing because she was in love with Joe and felt solemn and worried about what would happen to her heart, and Joe said, "Can we eat Japanese food?" and the girl said, "We can eat anything you want," and they walked toward the Japanese restaurant they thought was called Miyako, or Misaka, or Tomo, or Takomo, or something like that.

20.

Joe and the girl went to Austeen's after dinner and there were firefighters dressed in formal suits at the bar and someone playing guitar and Joe ordered a Budweiser and the girl ordered a seltzer and they went into the back garden so the girl could smoke and eat lozenges and Joe told the girl a story about punching the wall when he was a kid and breaking his hand and the girl said, "Your poor hand," and Joe stretched out his fingers and shrugged and the girl said, "Your poor, poor hand," and Joe drank some more Budweiser and looked over his shoulder at all the people.

21.

Joe told the girl about these warts he had on his hand when he was a kid and how his parents said, "Say a prayer to St. Jude and kiss this statue every night after your bath and your warts will go away," and he did it and it worked and the girl said, "Do you believe in God?" and Joe said, "Depends on what you mean by that," and the girl asked him if he'd mind it if she smoked.

22.

Joe and the girl were drinking in the back garden of Austeen's and talking and the girl was smoking and she imagined she was saying, "I have been in love with you for two years now," and Joe saying, "Me too, but I had to wait until now to be with you because God said so," and the girl saying, "Oh, that makes me feel better," and Joe saying, "I thought it would," but instead he got up and tapped her bare shoulder with two fingers and said, "Do you want another Guinness?" and the girl said, "Sure," and then she turned and said, "Thanks," and watched his narrow hips as he walked away.

23.

Joe and the girl were drinking in the back garden of Austeen's and talking and the girl said, "I used to be really sad all the time," and Joe said, "My dad died," and the girl said, "Do you like video games?" and Joe said, "I love video games," and later they were sitting at the bar drinking gin martinis and the girl's crossed legs were between Joe's knees and his hand kept grazing her thigh when he'd reach for his drink and there were firefighters dressed in suits drinking Guinness and raising their glasses saying, "God bless!" and the girl said, "God bless!" and raised her martini glass and drank it and pushed it toward the bartender for another, chewing her olive.

24.

Joe and the girl were sitting side by side at the bar and they turned to face each other and the girl's crossed legs fit between Joe's knees and Joe put his hand on his own knee and his fingers dipped down toward the girl's knee and the girl pressed her knee into Joe's fingertips and he drew them away and she pulled her knee away and then the girl put her hand on Joe's knee and then on her own knee and Joe put his hand on his knee and she hooked a few of her fingers onto Joe's fingers and got it so his fingertips sunk a bit into the flesh of her thigh and then she pressed her leg against his and meanwhile they had finished their gin martinis and Joe said, "I don't like these martinis," and the girl said, "Well, we were kind of kidding when we ordered them anyway," and they switched back to beer.

25.

Joe ordered a shot of tequila and a mineral water and another pale ale and drank the tequila at the bar and brought the other drinks back outside into the garden at Austeen's where the girl was taking a pill and she said, "Do you like video games?" and Joe told her a story about how as a child one night he stayed up late and nearly beat a video game that he'd been trying to beat for a year but lost just barely and was so mad that he punched the wall and broke his hand and the girl said, "Your poor hand!" and Joe stretched out his hand and the girl bent her face down and kissed the tips of his fingers.

26.

Joe and the girl were drinking at Austeen's and there were firefighters in suits huddled over the bar and the girl said, "They must have come from the funeral," and Joe said, "What books do you like to read?" and the girl ate a lozenge and smoked and took a pill her roommate gave her and said, "I love you," and went out and stumbled off into the street.

27.

Joe and the girl were at Austeen's and the bar was closing up and the bartender called out "Last call!" and they walked out onto the street and the girl said, "Which way to the subway?" and Joe pointed down the road, and when they turned the corner he didn't say anything and when she faced him to say goodbye he didn't say anything and she said, "It was nice seeing you," and raised herself up on her toes to kiss his cheek and skipped down the subway stairs.

28.

Joe and the girl walked down the street toward the subway and the girl threw her cigarette in the gutter and they talked and Joe kept butting his hip into her and walking so his bare arm swept against hers, and when they turned the corner he didn't say anything and when she turned to face him he didn't say anything so she said, "This was fun," and raised up on her toes to kiss his cheek and he embraced her and they kissed for half an hour by the station and people passing by hushed and looked away and then the girl skipped down the subway stairs.

29.

"Be safe," Joe told the girl, and she said, "No, you be safe," and she skipped down the subway stairs and saw him only once more years later on a street corner, but they didn't recognize each other because it was winter and both had scarves covering their faces.

This story appeared in the December issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Lynneice Washington. Photo courtesy her campaign

For decades, two things have been true about criminal justice in Jefferson County, Alabama: The district attorneys have been white men, and a lot of people have been sentenced to death.

Lynneice Washington is about to change that. Washington, a judge in a Birmingham suburb, defeated the incumbent DA, Republican Bill Veitch, in last month's election. Her victory was finally certified this past week after a recount showed she won by 299 votes.

When she takes office next month, Washington will be the first black woman serving as a DA in the history of the state. She will also join a very small club nationwide: Ninety-five percent of elected prosecutors are white and just 1 percent are women of color, according to a report released last summer by the Respective Democracy Campaign.

"Thanks to the voters here, I have broken that glass ceiling," Washington told VICE in an interview. "It's an awesome feeling, but I also understand it comes with great responsibility... I stood on their shoulders to get here, and I intend to continue to make them proud."

Washington also marks a departure from her predecessors in that she is personally opposed to the death penalty, and even campaigned on reining it in. Since 2010, Jefferson County has sentenced five people to death—more than 99.5 percent of counties in the US, according to Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project found. All five of the people it sent to death row since 2010 were black.

While Washington has vowed to uphold the law—the state is not exactly a bastion of death penalty repeal sentiment—the way capital punishment works is "unfair and arbitrary and unbalanced," she told me. "We need to face that, and until we face it, things are going to get worse."

The other newly elected DA in Jefferson County (which is divided into two judicial districts), Charles Todd Henderson, has also said he is personally opposed to the death penalty and wants to reform how it is used.

Henderson and Washington speak to a larger nationwide trend of reform-minded DA candidates winning elections against tough-on-crime incumbents, especially in some of the counties that use the death penalty most frequently. So even as Donald Trump won the presidency on a tough law-and-order platform, challengers triumphed down-ballot, offering hope for the broader criminal justice reform project given how much of the system's machinery operates at the local level. Rob Smith, director at the Fair Punishment Project, told me that just in the last year, reformer DA candidates won elections in at least five of the 16 counties that sentence the most people to death.

"For a long time, we had this arms race of how punitive DAs could be," he explained. "Voters are paying attention now, and saying they want humanity and dignity in their justice system."

Washington, who is 48 and speaks with the shadow of a drawl, grew up poor in a Birmingham that was just starting to move past segregation. She was always interested in criminal justice, but when she dreamed of going to to law school, her mom told her that the best she could hope for was to be a teacher or a nurse. Being a lawyer "just wasn't one of those things that a lot of black people, particularly in our family, had as a career path," Washington said. "My mother looked at that like an impossibility,"

That only inspired her more. "I've always been one where, if you tell me that I can't, that ignites me to show you I can," she said with a laugh.

After graduating law school and working as a defense lawyer, Washington became an assistant DA in the county. For the past five years, she's been the presiding municipal judge in Bessemer, outside Birmingham, where the cases that come before her are typically misdemeanors and traffic violations. "My courtroom may be your first point of contact with the judicial system, so I've made it my goal to make it your last point of contact," she said.

On the bench, Washington has focused on young male defendants. While she likes to "speak to them in a stern tone," she offers to dismiss first-timers' cases in exchange for their attendance at a special program on Saturday mornings where her husband, Jude (who also served as her campaign manager), and a bailiff lead discussions about life, masculinity, and history. Former inmates tell the young people their stories, and Washington personally brings them lunch from Chick-fil-A. "I want them to see me serve them," she said. "I want them to know that just because I sit on the bench in my robes does not mean that I don't care and I just sit there and hand down an order."

As long as the defendants attend the program and pay their court fees, their small charges are wiped clean, Washington told me.

She wants to bring the same spirit to her new DA gig. Among other initiatives, she plans to beef up the convictions integrity unit that probes possible wrongful convictions, launch a citizen-police advisory board, and divert low-level offenders from prison by creating alternatives to incarceration.

Check out our documentary about the HIV crisis in the American South.

Still, it's the death penalty that likely represents the greatest challenge for Washington. Judges hold the final authority to sentence defendants to death in Alabama, but district attorneys have a lot of discretion on whether to recommend capital punishment in murder cases. Anthony Hinton, who served 30 years on death row for a crime he didn't commit, was freed last year after prosecutors struggled to link his mother's gun to bullets used in the murder.

Washington says she will only recommend death for the "worst of the worst" offenders, pointing to a case where defendants burned their victim alive and showed no remorse as an example. "A lot of the people who are placed on death row are exonerated," Washington said, adding that with her in office, "death is not going to be the automatic charge" in murder cases.

(Veitch, her opponent and the incumbent DA, did not respond to a request for comment sent to his campaign.)

In addition to making state history, Washington will also be the first ever black DA in Jefferson County. It's a major milestone 53 years after Birmingham faced one of the worst acts of terrorism of the civil rights era, the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, in which KKK members killed four young black girls. And Washington isn't the only candidate breaking barriers in the county—voters also elected nine black women to local judgeships, a record.

But Washington is too focused on the task ahead to dwell for long on her place in history. The phones in her small law office have been ringing off the hook since the election, Washington said, which just serves to drive home the stakes.

"Don't sit and talk about what a problem is," she told me, "if you're not going to be one of the proactive people who actually does something to change it."

Follow Casey Tolan on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Mike Mozart

Walmart—the largest private employer in the country—just added health insurance coverage for its transgender workers, Bloomberg reports. The company joins more than 600 US companies that offer transgender-inclusive healthcare options, according to an assessment by the Human Rights Campaign.

"At Walmart, respect for the individual is one of the core beliefs that are the foundation of our company," spokesman Kevin Gardner said in a statement. "We are committed to fostering an inclusive work environment for our more than two million associates around the globe."

In addition to offering inclusive benefits internally, Walmart is one of many major companies starting to use its corporate influence to fight anti-LGBTQ laws at the state level. Last year, the retailer joined Apple, Salesforce, and Starbucks to become an outspoken opponent of a bill in its home state of Arkansas that would have protected companies from discriminating against LGBTQ people for employment, housing, or public accommodation on religious grounds.

Watch: The LGBTQ Issues at Stake in This Year's Election

Walter Scott fleeing Officer Michael Slager last year. Photo by Feidin Santana via AP

When Walter Scott, a 50-year-old black man, was shot and killed by a white police officer in South Carolina last year after being pulled over for a broken taillight and taking off on foot, it became another flash point in the long national debate over policing, police brutality, and the killing of black men by the cops. Except this time, there seemed little room for ambiguity thanks to a video that captured the officer, Michael Slager, shooting Scott in the back multiple times as the victim ran away. Even the most ardent police apologist couldn't justify that, right?

Slager was quickly fired and charged with murder, and if nothing else, the case seemed to clarify the new standard for charging cops over the deaths of unarmed civilians in America. The standard being: If you shoot and kill someone while they are fleeing, and said vile act is captured on video, you are probably going to be charged with a crime, and might even see prison. Even if you're a cop.

But the jurors—11 white, one black—tasked with deciding Slager's fate had a tough time of it. As the Guardian reports, the judge overseeing the state case against the former cop (a separate trial on federal charges is pending) twice rejected mistrial requests and urged the jury to keep deliberating despite the specter of a hopeless deadlock. After they mulled it over for roughly 22 total hours, however, the case was deemed a mistrial late Monday afternoon, the Post and Courier reports,

Accounts on Friday suggested a lone (white) person was holding the jury back from convicting Slager, but it has since been reported that, somehow, a majority of the panel may have been undecided on charges. Which seems crazy—the video of Scott's killing shows that clearly the man wasn't a threat to the cop—but that's where we are. Complicating things a bit is that the jury had to decide between murder and manslaughter charges, and determine whether Slager's story that the men scuffled and Scott reached for his Taser was remotely plausible. (It wan't—again, there is video clearly showing he was gunned down in the back while running away.)

In theory, state prosecutors could try to convict Slager again. And if nothing else, the massively depressing failure to imprison him here is made slightly less so by the promise of his upcoming federal trial, which carries a maximum sentence of life behind bars. But that's precious little consolation given the potential for President-elect Donald Trump's Justice Department not to move ahead with the case.

This post has been updated.

In an eight-minute YouTube video that has attracted over 28,000 views, Renaldo Gairy prepares himself for an excruciating workout at the Olympia Fitness gym in Mississauga, Ontario, as electro-dubstep blasts heavily in the background.

Photo by Paul Marotta/Getty Images

UPDATE: Al Gore also met with Donald Trump at Trump Tower on Monday despite previous reports that he wouldn't. Gore reportedly called the meeting "lengthy and very productive."

Ivanka Trump is meeting with former vice president and climate change activist Al Gore on Monday, Trump spokesman Jason Miller told CNN.

Miller didn't elaborate about the directives of the meeting, only to say that it would be about climate issues. Ivanka really hasn't talked much about her views on climate change in the past, but she reportedly got her hands on a copy of Leonardo DiCaprio's Before the Flood doc, so there's that.

The president-elect has been keeping his kids close during his transition, but it's not yet clear how they might serve his administration. Although Ivanka was somewhat outspoken about paid family leave during Trump's campaign, she's now reportedly interested in playing a prominent public role combatting climate change—something her father has called a hoax engineered by the Chinese.

Despite Ivanka's meeting, Trump has done little to show that he might alter his views on climate change after vowing during his campaign to revise Obama's Clean Power Plan and take the US out of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Since elected, Trump has picked noted climate change denier Myron Ebell to head the EPA transition team and relayed some vague comments about global warming in his New York Times post-election interview.

Watch: Donald Trump's Day One Agenda

'The Trans List' subjects (from left to right) Buck Angel, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and Shane Ortega posefor a portrait. Photo courtesy HBO

Among many trans people, there is an implicit understanding that most trans-focused documentaries and feature films will get at least one large thing wrong about our experiences. As just one example, consider a trope of trans films: the trans woman depicted gently fingering a frilly dress or putting on her makeup. It's a hallmark of works like The Danish Girl and others, for cisgender directors and producers who find power in proving that trans women need to wear masks of product and feminine clothing to trick the world. To trans people like me, it's insulting.

Tonight, The Trans List, the latest in director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's "List" documentaries (previous works including The Out List,The Latino List, and The Black List) premieres on HBO. It features interviews with 11 notable trans activists and artists, each in their own right a fitting illustration of the transgender tipping point in media today. But through the beautiful simplicity of its interview-driven format, Greenfield-Sanders's film manages to avoid reductive stereotypes in its portrayal of trans lives by giving the trans community power to tell its stories in their own voices.

"This film is really trans people talking in their own voice—there's no filter," said Greenfield-Sanders. "It's trans people, for the first time in an hour-long film, talking about themselves and their experiences." And in that, it is precedent-setting.

The greatest challenge faced by any trans-focused film is to depict its characters in a way that feels true to their lived experiences—in other words, by not succumbing to an exploitative cisgender gaze. That's seen in another trope of trans documentaries and films: the display of pre-transition childhood and baby photos. There's a right way and a wrong way to do this; through a cisgender gaze, it's a narrative ploy that can come across as prying, in a sense that implicitly says "we know who you really are." But in The Trans List, such photos are seen in conjunction with the actual trans people depicted, who describe their pasts in their own words. Allowing that context to flourish makes the experience entirely more powerful.

"The hope is that these films will be seen outside of the specific groups that they're about," Greenfield-Sanders said. "The Black List was beloved within the African American community, but it had an audience outside of that, and that's very important. I don't want to be preaching to the choir." It's a mark The Trans List hits as well—while playing to a large, mainstream audience, it's interesting and true to the experience of those it depicts without becoming insular.

And it does all that without losing sight of the diversity to be found within the trans community. The film ties together the common gender experiences of six trans women, five trans men and a non-binary person, but also explores such topics as a trans woman's experience taking part in drag shows and how the British colonization of India affected their society's gender norms.

The film features Janet Mock as both interviewer and producer. By placing a transgender person at its helm, the end result feels both truer to our experiences and richer for it. That's seen in other trans narratives that take pains to place the community both behind the camera and in front of it, like Transparent and Her Story. Mock, with years of experience as an editor at People and host at MSNBC, makes for an extraordinary host, who's well-connected to the dynamics of the trans community and a skilled interviewer.

Watch VICE News Tonight visit Gavin Grimm, the 17-year-old transgender boy whose fight to use the correct school bathroom was heard before the Supreme Court this Fall:

One narrative from the film that shines through is that of Nicole Maines, who transitioned as a child, using puberty blockers. It's a persistently controversial story, and with international press and government attention currently fixed on how best to treat transgender children and how schools should set policies about them, Maines's story cuts straight through to the heart of what it means to live as a trans child. She talks about her experience of having a school monitor assigned to her at all times to make sure she didn't use the girl's room at her school and memories of her case winding its way through the court system of her home state of Maine. Her case was the first to successfully argue that trans people should be covered under federal Title IX sex discrimination protections, a ruling that came down in 2013, long before the HB2 "bathroom bill" controversy.

When asked about Nicole, Greenfield-Sanders pointed to one specific line from her interview: "'When it comes to testosterone, I dodged a bullet!' That's a very powerful thing to say. And she meant it. I think that it makes you focus on how important that early transition for her was," he said. And it does—it's nothing less than a breath of fresh air to hear a young trans adult describe their own experience transitioning young, especially as column inches and online spotlight surrounding the issue are handed to almost anyone but.

The Trans List is an achievement for trans filmography, with enough material here to both enlighten cis audiences and maintain the interest of those already well-versed in the trans community—especially trans people who may be skeptical of such offerings. It's another welcome chance for trans people to finally tell our own stories, one that follows in a string of such forward-looking productions that feel long overdue.

Follow Katelyn Burns on Twiter.

A screen shot from a 1995 Sunny Delight commercial, via

The original Sunny Delight was as 90s as jelly shoes, Street Sharks and the overwhelming sense that the world wasn't all going to shit. The juice came in two varieties – Florida and California – and I drank as much of it as I could, helped by the fact that my parents, believing it was rammed full of vitamins, kept buying it for me.

That was until the rumours started. In 1999, fears that Sunny D would definitely turn your skin orange spread through the country when a four-year-old girl from Wales reportedly went yellow after putting away 1.5 litres of Sunny Delight a day. Effectively overdosing on beta-carotene – the pigment used to give the drink its distinctive orange – her face and hands had dramatically changed colour.

P&G, the company that manufactured Sunny Delight in the 90s, didn't respond to my requests for a comment – but here's what a spokeswoman for the company said at the time: "This is excessive consumption, and consumption on that scale would lead to a yellowing of the skin because of the beta-carotene, in the same way as drinking too much carrot juice or orange juice would."

But she wasn't drinking carrot juice. Like the rest of us, it was Sunny Delight she was addicted to.

The yellowy-orange snowman from the Sunny Delight commercial

Unfortunately, the yellow skin revelation came at the worst possible time for the company; Sunny Delight had just launched a Christmas advert in the UK that featured a snowman turning yellow after downing a bottle of their juice. While depicting yellow snow in any form was never a great idea, when linked to the fact that a real-life girl had literally turned orangey-yellow after drinking Sunny Delight, it turned into a marketing disaster. Thanks to the yellow skin scandal and rising concerns over the drink's vitamin content, sales had halved by 2001 and Sunny Delight left my fridge forever. Years later it was eventually rebranded "Sunny D" by a new manufacturer using a completely different recipe.

So how exactly can a drink turn a kid yellow, and could something like this ever happen again? Bridget Benelam, a Senior Scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation, told me that eating a lot of food with high levels of beta-carotene can cause a condition called carotenemia, also known as carotenosis in the US.

"This is often caused by carrots, but could also be other brightly coloured fruit and vegetables, like peppers, pumpkin or melon," she adds. "This means that high levels of beta-carotene are absorbed and cause a yellow or orange colouring in the skin." Bridget says the condition is most commonly found in young children who are given lots of pureed carrots in baby food, but it's entirely possible that the beta-carotene that was in Sunny Delight really could have been the culprit.

"The girl was, on average, consuming 2-3mg of beta-carotene from the juice alone, but since her body size was small, it must have accumulated in the skin," says Dr Georg Lietz, a Senior Lecturer in Nutrition at the University of Newcastle. "She may also have had a genetic variation that increases the serum concentration after consumption. Some people are not efficient converters of beta-carotene, thus accumulate them more in the skin than others."

So what are the chances of the rest of us changing colour from eating too many orange foods? "Turning yellow is simply the beta-carotene itself," Dr Lietz explains. "The pigment naturally accumulates in the skin, and particularly in the fat layer. Average intakes in the western world are around 2mg per day, with some people consuming more than that."

There is only the one known case of Sunny Delight causing carotenemia, but that was enough to cause a gigantic scandal for the company. Changing colour due to eating too many beta-carotene-heavy foods is surprisingly more common.

A photo Madi sent over of her hand

"My dad noticed my skin was turning yellow-ish, so he took me to the emergency room assuming it was organ failure," says Madi Balkany, a student from Michigan who suffered the same symptoms as the Sunny Delight girl. She adds: "I'd begun to spot that my face was tinted strangely even before the first hospital visit. My hands and feet had a strong yellow tint. The sides of my nose and around my mouth were more orange compared to the rest of my face."

The doctor quickly knew what was up and she was told she has carotenosis, a diagnosis that she now realises was inevitable. "I got it from eating sweet potatoes almost every day for a couple of months, as well as a lot of carrots every day," Madi explains. "Before that my diet was pretty poor in nutrients, so I'd just started to crave vegetables 24/7. But people started pointing out how yellow my hands are."

She adds: "I was keeping a food diary at the time. I was averaging 15 to 20 sweet potatoes and 220 baby carrots a month. In March I ate around 450 baby carrots. I didn't think that much was too much, but now it's really clear why I got carotenosis. I also ate a lot of lettuce and mixed vegetables, but the doctors said it was the orange vegetables that marked my skin. I started limiting the amount of sweet potatoes and carrots I was eating. I guess it's made a difference, as I've gone back to a normal pink colour. I'm really glad I'm not so orange any more."

So will Sunny Delight turn your skin yellow? Not any more. It's the fruit and vegetables you want to watch out for.

@jackcummings92

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