Jackie Kilby, an archives technician at the National Archives, was parsing old letters to the US State Department when a name caught her eye: Caleb Brewster, a key member of George Washington's Culper Spy Ring, recently made famous by the AMC show Turn. The Long Island sailor-turned-revolutionary's 1792 letter to President Washington recounted how, on 7 December 1782, five years into his service, he'd led a battle against three British ships near Fairfield, Connecticut. During the encounter, Brewster took a musket ball to the chest, an injury noted in Washington's own journal. Three months later, the partially recovered Brewster led another attack on a British vessel, aggravating his wound. He was incapacitated—"confined two years & a half under distressing [surgical] operations & a most forlorn hope of cure," as he put it in his letter. The injury, sustained in the service of the very foundation of America, had left him with a long-term disability.

The rest of Brewster's story would be frustratingly familiar to veterans born two centuries later.

The Continental Congress had guaranteed disabled soldiers disability benefits in 1776. But when Brewster went to New York (states were supposed to pay claims), it wouldn't pay up. Neither would Connecticut, where he'd also lived and served. In 1789, the newly established US Congress took the responsibility for paying claims, so Brewster petitioned them—and in 1790 they explicitly granted him back pay on his claims and half pay for life. But the Treasury refused to settle his account, so Brewster beseeched President Washington personally to help him receive the benefits promised to him. It took the president's intervention in 1792, nine years after Brewster suffered his injuries, for the US to settle up.

"What he described, it really made me realize that not much has changed," says Kilby, who published her research on Brewster's case on the National Archives' blog last month. Kilby saw resonances between Brewster's case and challenges her father, a Vietnam Army vet exposed to Agent Orange, and brother, a Marine Corps Reserve lifer who did two tours in Iraq, have faced trying to claim benefits America promised them.

America has a long history of publicly venerating its veterans, but an arguably longer history of failing them. As the veterans affairs legal historian James Ridgway tells me, "people are much more familiar with the rhetoric around the way we wish we treated veterans rather than the decisions that we actually make." That's a problem, as failing to recognize historic failures prevents us from fully contextualizing our modern systems and actually realizing our pro-veteran rhetoric.

If Brewster really did get his payout, he was one of the lucky Revolutionary veterans. There were around 250,000 soldiers who fought in that war by some estimates, but only about 3,000 drew a pension in the early years of the republic. Kilby believes this was because the country was flat broke at the time—by the time it was able to fund disability claims, many in dire need had sold their papers to speculators for pennies. However, studies, including one from Ridgway himself, indicate that many benefits were promised to soldiers mainly to recruit soldiers and keep them from deserting, and were only paid out grudgingly by politicians and a public with no particular allegiance to vets.

In the decades and centuries since, the country's attitudes toward veterans shifted from war to war. According to Ridgway and others, these shifts depended on how politically powerful vets were: After the Civil War, when vets made up 5 percent of the population and were well represented in politics, veterans spending made up about a fifth of the national budget. But after World War I, when vets made up a smaller and less visible slice of America, their benefits took a hit. By 1932, veterans were so unhappy about their service bonuses, issued in 1924 but unredeemable for two decades, that they descended en masse on Washington, which succeeded in scuppering Herbert Hoover's reelection bid but didn't achieve much for the vets.

Ridgeway argues that most people's conceptions of veterans benefits stem from the comprehensive system developed after World War II, under which vets were given pensions and disability payments, money for education, and other goodies—but historically, these were the exception, not the norm. (Even the most famous post–World War II benefit, the GI Bill, was not an unqualified success, as black veterans were prevented from realizing many of its perks.)

The current scandal over long wait times and failures at the Department of Veterans Affairs, especially in its hospital system, has angered many Americans, and Donald Trump's promises to take care of veterans helped him rise to prominence during the 2016 Republican primary. But from a historical perspective, these problems are unfortunately not unprecedented.

"I hate to say this, but I think the current benefits veterans receive are the best it has ever been," says Kilby. "It is seriously lacking and can be incredibly painful and difficult, but it is easier than it has been in the past [to receive care and benefits]. Can it be and should it be improved? Yes. But was it worse 50, 100, 150 years ago? Definitely."

Trump's aggressive positioning of himself as a savior for ignored vets in light of these scandals was unusual in its shamelessness—one veterans group even publicly said it would refuse money from his campaign. But that sort of grandstanding, which can reduce vets to political props, is a long bipartisan tradition.

"Capitalizing on these scandals for political gain because people may be unfamiliar with the veterans population or what's going on writ large seems really insincere," says Amy Schafter, a vets affairs researcher at the Center for a New American Security, who argues that VA officials mostly do their best with limited resources and have made inroads on scandal issues.

An honest attempt to get the benefits to veterans that they deserve would start with the recognition that the recent scandals are just the latest chapter in a long, tortured history, with failures and shortsightedness often stacking on top of each other. Dan Nagin, an expert in vets' issues at Harvard, points out that one of the VA's current struggles is that it's evaluating benefits claims based on a (legally enshrined) WWI-era conception of disability that has trouble processing modern understandings of mental health issues or other complex medical problems.

The experts I spoke to didn't blame VA bureaucrats for the current crop of problems, but instead pointed to institutional failures, like chronic underfunding and understaffing, that require a major overhaul to address.

"As long as we remain ignorant of the origins of the processes that we have today," says Ridgway, "we will fall into the easy trap of demonizing and blaming people who do their best to make it work… That lazy mental shortcut harms not only public servants who are doing their best, but also veterans who would benefit from a 21st-century system."

Despite Trump's promises, he has done very little for veterans so far in his young administration. While legislators have introduced dozens of veterans-related bills in Congress, they have not prioritized vets' issues thus far either. Some of those bills are well intentioned, says Schafter, but will be ineffectual, and some of them may just be empty shows of support for veterans offering little in the way of substance. And the shrinking proportion of vets within the population means that, while they're still a key voting block that's constantly praised by politicians, if history is any guide they'll have less and less political power in coming years.

Brewster, a Revolutionary War solider dicked out of his promised benefits by a well-intentioned but ill-provisioned system, could probably empathize with all this. Just like Brewster, modern veterans find themselves pushed to fight far harder than they ought to for those things supposedly guaranteed to them. But given what has been reported about Trump's reading habits, they probably shouldn't emulate Brewster and write passionately argued letters. Maybe a tweet with a chart?

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

(Top photo is not actually of a violent extremist; just of a man in a balaclava against a tartan background)

"Fascist scum," spluttered Nigel Farage, without irony, after some pro-independence Scottish nationalists tussled him out of a press conference in an Edinburgh pub back in 2013.

It created a media frenzy at the time, but the real history of the extremist struggle for Scottish independence goes far beyond a bar-side slanging match between the former UKIP leader and a handful of Alex Salmond fanboys.

In the 1970s and 80s, the fight for an independent Scotland was marred by militant pro-independence terror attacks – splinter groups dubbed "Tartan Terrorists" were behind bomb blasts that rocked Edinburgh Castle, letter bombs dispatched to top politicians and the Royal Family, and an anthrax dump at the Tory party conference.

But not long after the Farage spat, around the time of the 2014 independence referendum, a new kind of extremism began to rear its head in Scotland. And this time it came from the far right. The Scottish Defence League, Britain First and the National Front all crawled in to campaign on the fringes of the unionist campaign. In the aftermath of the No vote, far-right revellers were filmed making Nazi salutes and singing Rule Britannia as they brawled with police and lit flares in the streets of Glasgow.

(Top photo: Andrew Milligan / PA)

They didn't make much impact. Militant unionism is a much younger child than militant separatism: revolution is easier to rally around than the preservation of the norm. As Liam Turbett wrote for VICE when analysing the dismal efforts of the far right to make gains in Scotland, "for [Scots] craving a cultural identity, a feeling of supremacy, a uniform or a street fight, there's already a host of 'legitimate' organisations to get involved with".

But that could be about to change. With talk of a potential second Scottish referendum following Brexit, another opportunity for legitimate sectarian debate could force those on the further fringes of the right into more aggressive action this time around.

Kris McGurk, 25, is the chairman of the Regimental Blues, a British nationalist group included in a recent report commissioned to review the policing of far right protests in Scotland. The Regimental Blues (RB) – which ex-soldier McGurk says was founded in 2013 to push Protestant unionist values on the fraught streets of Glasgow – appear to share at least one member with the Scottish Defence League, an offshoot of the far-right English Defence League (EDL).

A Regimental Blues promotional video

In a now-deleted post on its website announcing "Regimental Blues Votes GB", the organisation listed targets including Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon, "all Yes campaigners" and "businesses backing the Yes campaign". Kris says that threatened violence didn't happen, and that RB focused on signing up loyalists so they could vote No. There also was no mention of real thuggery from either side of the campaign in the papers. "We sent our followers to back the mainstream," said Kris. "To do leaflet drops, man the phone-lines, to focus on community issues and not politics."

Similarly, he claims that though RB values might chime with Britain First and the Scottish Defence League, "we keep well away from them in the street. We'd have to give up a lot of our Christian values, and we wouldn't like to be classed as far-right extremists. Some of the things [these groups] say on paper [about] controlling immigration, a lot of people would agree with, including myself, but on the street they don't agree with that – they're very aggressive and hard… [so] RBs always maintain we have nothing to do with them."

Kris hints, however, that a second referendum could provoke a different type of action. "The west of Scotland is a hotbed for sectarianism now," he said. "The SNP has blown the community apart. I wouldn't be falling under Better Together again. Politicians should be looking at Northern Ireland, at the consequences of allowing tensions on the street level just to keep boiling and boiling."

§

In the 1970s and 80s, the extremists came from the left. In 1966, Marxist revolutionary Matt Lygate founded the Workers Party of Scotland to lead the struggle for a Scottish socialist republic. Alongside translating the works of Chairman Mao into Gaelic, Lygate and his cohorts spent their days planning violent bank robberies to fund the operation. In 1971, the party's bookshop was raided, and in 1972 Lygate and his comrades were all convicted of bank robbery in what are believed to be some of the longest sentences in Scottish legal history. Lygate got 24 years: "Eight years for robbery and 16 for his politics," a lawyer ruefully observed afterwards.

Violence continued: in 1971 an unclaimed bomb blast rocked Edinburgh, and the early 1970s saw continued explosions at oil pipelines and radio masts, claimed by leftist splinter groups.
In 1981 a militant group known as the Dark Harvest Commando collected soil contaminated by British Army anthrax tests and dumped it at the doors of the Tory party conference. This was two decades before attacks using the same lethal bacterium killed five American citizens and provoked one of the largest FBI investigations in history.

The Scottish National Liberation Army (SNLA) – sometimes dubbed the "Tartan Terrorists", and founded by former soldier Adam Busby – was perhaps the most prominent of the leftist splinter groups. In the 1980s, the group began using marzipan, which looks and smells like the plastic explosive gelignite, to create hoax parcel bombs, targeting British businesses or "settler companies", as they called them. In 1983 there were 27 Tartan Terrorist attacks. Other campaigns included a genuine letter-bombing campaign that targeted Margaret Thatcher and Princes Diana, and a foiled acid attack on Cherie Blair in 2002.

Part of a letter sent to the Press Association from the Scottish National Liberation Army in 1983 (Photo: PA)

All these – and many more attacks – are chronicled here by David Leslie, a former News of the World true crime correspondent, who wrote a book on the SNLA. Hundreds of years in jail sentences have been handed down to ultranationalist terrorists, though Leslie claims that only one light injury occurred – a result of when a secretary handled a letter bomb.

With those harsh sentences in mind, even members of the Scottish centre-left suspect a level of foul play. A number of ultranationalist luminaries have been accused of false-flag collusion with the British government, alleged to have infiltrated the SNP as part of a government campaign to delegitimise the Scottish campaign for independence. SNP Member of the Scottish Parliament Christine Grahame, for example, has claimed still-classified documents will expose a "dirty tricks campaign… waged against the party by British unionists".

Widely accused of being an agent provocateur is Major Frederick Alexander Colquhoun Boothby, who founded the paramilitary Tartan Army – the group that claimed responsibility for the bulk of the 1970s bombings. Boothby moved back to Edinburgh in the late 60s from Surrey, where he'd been "under suspicion of beguiling teenagers into Satanic rituals". Boothby, alongside SNLA founder Adam Busby, was accused of being a Special Branch agent who infiltrated the nationalist movement to make it appear extremist and absurd. Similar claims have been repeated by infighting ultranationalists.

Adam Busby is now wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis. He spent the referendum period emailing dozens of bomb threats to Pittsburgh University, for reasons which remain unclear. The SNLA surge led by Busby in the 1980s was provoked by the controversial failure of the 1979 devolution referendum due to low turnout.

§

The No campaign's win in 2014 didn't trigger any wave of bombings, and far-right activity remained a sideshow.

In fact, the only visible ultranationalists on the scene were Siol nan Gàidheal (SnG), or Progeny of the Gaels, whose slogan is "White Settlers Go Home". Back in 1994, an enforcer for the organisation allegedly bragged about breaking the jaws of English expats to Scotland before "help[ing] them with their bags to the station".

This time around, SnG's participation in the referendum campaign was limited to a few banner drops and graffiti tags. Key man Bruce Ogilvie – who refused an interview with VICE – cut a faintly tragic figure, clad in shabby tartan as he heckled career politicians. It hardly seemed as terrifying as the pro-union press tried to suggest.

Another SnG spokesperson told VICE: "We don't trust any journalist, as half the stuff that has been published seems to have just been made up, and the rest is merely half-truths." This goes some way towards explaining the failure of truly radical nationalists to make much headway in Scotland, either during the referendum or throughout the 20th century.

"If there's another election referendum it would be time for a hard campaign."

The very fact the SNLA were not visibly "taken seriously" by the British government or the media stopped them from achieving serious publicity or impact, a recent academic paper suggests. By "publicly ignoring" the radicals and relying on local law enforcement to fire-fight their campaigns, "the British government minimised the performative power and thus the influence of the movement". Treated like a joke, they became one.

But in 2017, the Regimental Blues present an arguably more potent threat. By aiming lower than the ultranationalists, they are more likely to achieve success. Unlike the faintly ridiculous Major Boothby and his comrades, Kris is a smooth-talking everyman. "People who meet me think, 'He's a nice guy, he's got a good head on his shoulders,'" said the ex-serviceman and father of four. "But when I say I'm in RBs, all of a sudden I'm a knuckle-dragging good-for-nothing. That's the opinion we're trying to change."

With nationalist views increasingly becoming more mainstream, the RBs do not need media attention to win people over to their cause. Instead, Kris described a rapidly-spreading grassroots political movement, feeding off resentment of the political establishment rather than being withered by media scorn. "If there's another election referendum it would be time for a hard campaign," Kris warned. "No more just parading."

@hashtagbroom

(Photo by Michael Lionstar)

Yaa Gyasi published Homegoing a few months before the US voted in Donald Trump, and her reflections on culture in the time of Trump are perfectly apt for her best-selling novel: "I think one of the best things that art can do is to shine a light on dark places, and to hold something up and say: 'This hasn't gone unnoticed. We see this, and we're going to say something about it.' And so hopefully people will continue to call up and call out these moments that are damaging, devastating, or dark, and not let it slide."

Gyasi does something unusually seen in conversations of late: She thinks carefully about every sentence. Her rare calm makes her a refreshing voice to turn to during these nerve-wrecking times; equally, Homegoing is a must-read for any person who might describe themselves as "woke," giving a crystal-clear and heartbreaking portrait of the legacy of slavery in America. While it provides the escapism that an excellent novel is bound to give, it also speaks to how crucial it is to look at history for answers and guidance, because, Gyasi comments, "so much of what we are looking at is not new."

Read the rest on Broadly.

Everybody knows about Bill Clinton and his saxophone, and how Barack Obama can croon a mean Al Green, and how George Washington cannot tell a lie, and how Donald J. Trump can do so many tremendous amazing things you just can't help but be tremendously amazed. Everyone agrees.

Thomas Jefferson could do pretty much everything from design houses to write music, while Teddy Roosevelt was a speed reader, and could plow through three or four books in a day.

Even with all we know about our presidents, there's still quite a lot out there not commonly known. For example...

Abraham Lincoln Had Hulk Strength

While it's widely remembered that he preserved the Union and ended slavery, it's all but forgotten now that young Abe, all 6'4" and 214 pounds of him, was said to have superhuman physical strength.

Some claim he picked up a 44-gallon barrel of whiskey and drank from the bunghole. Others say he could down a tree as fast as any three normal men. In arranged wrestling matches, he was known to pick up town bullies and toss them around like they were empty beer cans. He also apparently could dead-lift up to 1,300 pounds and walk around with loads weighing half that.

John Quincy Adams: Sommelier Par Excellence

When you think of John Quincy Adams and his dad John, you tend to assume they were abstemious Massachusetts Puritans who never took a dram save for medicinal purposes, if even then. That notion couldn't be further from the truth: the elder Adams drank beer for breakfast beginning at age 15 (as was not uncommon in his day) and often more beer, or hard cider, later in the day, throughout his long life.

As for his son, the White House has likely never been home to a more consistent, gentlemanly and sophisticated drinker, aside perhaps from his dad's lifelong frenemy Thomas Jefferson. John Quincy Adams drank often (if never to excess) and drank well and did so expertly.

Like Jefferson, John Quincy was a wine snob, but while Jefferson sipped French and Italian vintages, Adams had a special passion for Madeira, a fortified Portuguese wine. And he really, really knew his Madeiras: At one dinner party he astounded all present by blindly identifying 11 of 14 sample pours passed around the table. "Doubtless he could not have hung up such a score had he not kept in practice," wrote one biographer.

The day John Quincy Adams followed his dad into politics was the day America lost its first great sommelier.

John Tyler Fucked a Ton

Like, a lot a lot.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson: The Judge Dredd of Tennessee

After an abortive foray into politics came to an end in 1798, Andrew Jackson returned to Tennessee, where he was given a judgeship in what was then a rough frontier state. Among the toughest customers was Russell Bean, a "bear of a man" often described as the first white child born in the state. Bean acted as if the whole state belonged to him by virtue of that fact, and chose to obey whichever laws he saw fit. Not many of them did, especially when he was full of corn liquor, which was often.

In 1802, Bean came home from a two-year flatboat trip to New Orleans, only to find his wife nursing an infant. Though completely unschooled, Bean knew a little something about math and how babies worked, so he concluded that the child wasn't his, whereupon he took out his Bowie knife and sliced off the child's ears, so he "could know this one wasn't one of his."

While women and children had few rights in those days, this outrage would not stand. Bean was arrested, tried and sent to jail, but quickly managed to escape back into the mountains, where he subsisted as an outlaw. Evidently he thought he'd allow for a few weeks to pass and the whole thing would blow over, but he didn't count on Judge Andrew Jackson.

Old Hickory had him rearrested and brought before his court. Bean responded by cussing them all out and just flat walking away, again. Jackson ordered the sheriff to bring Bean back to face the fury of the court. The sheriff, terrified of the untamable Bean, at least pretended to go about his work for a time, before returning to Jackson sans prisoner. Alright then, Jackson said, take a posse with you this time. The meek sheriff shuffled out the door again, returning shortly thereafter claiming that no posse could be summoned: the whole town was that scared of Russell Bean.

By this point Jackson had heard enough. Wussy cops. A whole town shaking in its boots. Did he have to do everything around here?

"Mr. Sheriff,' Jackson hissed, "since you cannot obey my orders, summon me; yes sir, summon me."

The flabbergasted sheriff duly summoned the judge, who adjourned court for a ten-minute recess, tossed his robes in a corner, strapped on his pistols and went to work. He found Bean in the town square, guzzling whiskey, berating the cowed townsfolk, and waving around a pistol.

With a pistol in each hand, Jackson parted the throng and walked directly toward the ruffian, murder in his eyes, and shouted: "Surrender, you infernal villain, this very instant, or by God Almighty I'll blow you through as wide as a gate!"

Bean took measure of that cold glare and those two pistols, and after a few moments' consideration, dropped his pistol, tossed his knife on the ground, and headed off to court.

As Bean later explained: "When he came up, I looked him in the eye, and I saw shoot, and there wasn't shoot in nary other eye in the crowd; and so I says to myself, says I, hoss, it's about time to sing small, and so I did."

The epilogue is bizarre: Bean paid a fine and was branded on the palm. Being Bean, he immediately gnawed off the branded chunk of flesh and spit on the floor. He was later pardoned by the governor. The baby he mutilated died from its injuries, and his wife divorced him. But then, years later, proving true love knows no bounds, Bean and his ex-wife reconciled, with none other than Andrew Jackson serving as matchmaker.

James Garfield Could Do Something You Can't

James Garfield could read and write, which was far less common in his time than it is in ours, but not that big a deal. Narrowing down a bit, he also knew Latin—again, not that unusual for a well-educated man of his age, if rarer today. Boring in further still, he also knew Greek. (And German: he was the first presidential candidate to campaign in two languages.)

Now let's really throw in a twist: Garfield was ambidextrous, though possibly left-hand dominant.

Now let's put all of that in a blender and come up with this most amazing of odd presidential oddities: James Garfield could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, at the same freaking time.

Amazing, right? Yes.

And totally useless? Probably.

But we will never know whether or not that party trick could have propelled America to further greatness as he succumbed to an assassin's bullet 199 days into his administration.

William Henry Harrison photo via Wikimedia Commons

There Was Once An Actual Swamp in Washington, and It Might Have Killed Two Presidents

With all this talk about swamp-draining going on, it bears remembering that Washington was once the site of one of the vilest mires on American soil, and it just might have played a role in hastening the demise of two presidents and almost a third.

William Henry Harrison died about a month into office, and for over a century the official story was that he tempted fate by delivering an overlong inaugural address in bad weather while deliberately underdressed to demonstrate his manly vitality despite his advanced age. According to that fable, Harrison caught cold, which progressed to pneumonia, which took Old Tippecanoe out before the first new moon of his reign.

Modern science has a different take. Medical historians believe now that Harrison succumbed not to a chill brought on by orating in nasty weather, but drinking water tainted by human feces.

For a couple of decades in the middle of the 19th Century, DC authorities (absent a modern sewer system) simply allowed (and even hauled) the city's "night soils" to a fetid heap a few blocks uphill from the White House, and we all know where shit flows, right? Downhill, straight to the executive residence's water supply.

In 2014, the NYT pointed out that the DC shit-swamp would have bred both salmonella and typhoid fever, both of which play absolute havoc on the human digestive system. ("Congestion of the liver" was listed as the secondary cause of Harrison's death.)

Two of the next three presidents to follow Harrison—James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor—both were stricken with serious stomach bugs during their presidencies. Polk survived, but chose not to run for a second term. Taylor died, under circumstances mysterious enough to have made some wonder if he was poisoned by pro-slavery forces, so much so that his body was exhumed for forensic testing in 1991. Nope: no poison. The shit swamp may have claimed another victim.

In 1850, the District of Columbia introduced a modern sewage system (complete with pipes!) and no president would die in office of natural causes until Warren G. Harding in 1923, and he did so far from Washington, while on a tour of the west.

But if you ever wondered where the Trump organization nicked the DC swamp metaphor, look no further than the graves of William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, possible victims of the real DC shit-mire.

Follow John Nova Lomax on Twitter.

(Top photo: Screen shot, via)

Listen, I think we can all agree that football is coming to an end. This is, as most things are, Messi and Ronaldo's fault: in past times, once-in-a-generation footballers have come more or less once-in-a-generation, and by extension one at a time: we went from Maradona to Ronaldo to Zidane with gaps in between, and now, by freak occurrence, we have Messi and Ronaldo at the same time.

There are meant to be five year spaces between these players, at least: having them both at the same time breaks the rules, one cancelling the other out, making the Ballon d'Or an annual tug-of-war yawnfest about who was the most truly exceptional in this calendar year. Think: when Messi and Ronaldo retire – and we've probably got about two to three more seasons left of them, realistically, because players like Messi and Ronaldo don't stick around to distress in public; even a megabucks tour of China or Qatar is going to be an embarrassment to their legacy; they can only go out on top, and so they can only go out soon – who is going to win the Ballon d'Or in their place?

Gareth Bale, the most complexly balding man on earth? Neymar, a straightforwardly glossy Brazilian step-over merchant? Kevin de Bruyne, the visibly ill kid from your school who never had to do PE because of his asthma? Come on. Be real. With them gone, football is over. It's going to be at least 20 years until we have another truly great footballer come along, maybe more.

So we all agree now that football is over. But, thankfully, last night, it briefly peaked:

This is Sutton United reserve goalkeeper/goalkeeping coach/all round handyman Wayne Shaw, and here he is eating a pasty. This is because Sutton United had used all of their substitutes in the game against Arsenal last night – a fifth round FA Cup tie I am bound by law to describe as "magical" – and there was absolutely no way Wayne Shaw was ever going to make it onto the pitch. The statistics you need to know about Wayne Shaw, widely cited, are that he is 46 years old and weighs 23 stone. He is not unfamiliar with the concept of eating pasties. And so, last night, in glorious super HD, he ate a pasty like he was trying to hurt it with his mouth.

This, without context, is the greatest thing to ever happen in football.

But it's also the worst. As it transpires, Sutton's sudden beam of media focus meant they were able to leverage the game to make more money for themselves: a new shirt sponsorship was arranged with Sun Bet, Arsenal donated learning facilities to the club in exchange for the gesture of half of the gate receipts, ticket prices were temporarily raised, a new generation of Sutton fans were made aware of the club for the first time and, hopefully, will sustain it now long into the future.

But we're not talking about philanthropy, we're talking about a pasty, and a tweet from the Sun Bet account made two hours before kick off either suggests Nostradamus-like pasty-based soothsaying powers from the social media manager responsible, or, worse, a horrible, dirty little pasty stunt. And before we enjoy (or do not enjoy) Wayne Shaw eating a pasty, we need to decide if the action of eating it was politicised – i.e. a horrible, hollow PR stunt arranged by The Sun – or neutral and pure, a genuine, cherishable moment of non-league cup football. Two writers with diametrically opposed viewpoints (good, bad) will argue this in a segment I like to call, "Wayne Shaw Eating a Pasty: Good or Bad?"

WAYNE SHAW EATING A PASTY: GOOD OR BAD?

JOEL GOLBY, GOOD: Wayne Shaw eating a pasty is good. Wayne Shaw eating a pasty is perhaps the universe's final pure example of banter. Banter, as we banter historians know, peaked in 2015, after a long 2014 of university rugby clubs being banned for being bastards, with The Rise and Subsequent Fall of Daniel "Dapper" Laughs. Banter, since that time, has become a sort of sullied concept, a dirty word, and 2016 and 2017 has seen a severe shortage of it as a result. Dabbling in banter, in big big 2017, is akin to talking about Knebworth or how great acid used to be in the 70s: redundant, embarrassing dad behaviour. When was the last time you did banter? Exactly. In 2014 it was all you could do. You got your knob tattooed in Zante, remember? You lived for the bants. And now it seems so far away.

Wayne Shaw is bringing it back, though, eating 50 percent of a pasty in two huge, precise bites. If you've never been a fat lad eating a pasty – and I have, multiple times in my life – then you do not appreciate what Shaw is doing here. When he eats the pasty, he does not let a single crumb of it go to waste. Pastry is a flaky casing, right? It crumbs easily. You eat a pasty out of a warm paper bag; that bag is going to be filled with crumbs afterwards – pasty shavings. Not Wayne Shaw's bag. This is a man who has eaten a pasty so many times he is now essentially an expert at it. Wayne Shaw could go pro at pasty-eating. And that is banter.

JOEL GOLBY, BAD: Wayne Shaw eating a pasty is bad. Eating a pasty is bad because it's the Sun. Listen: you cannot begrudge a small, non-league team from taking every opportunity to make money from their once-in-a-generation cup tie. You cannot fault them for accepting a reported five-figure sum from Sun Bet to be their shirt sponsors for the game. Sometimes you have to put politics to one side and accept the grubby, grubby, grubby, grubby, evil blood money that comes your way. Sometimes you have to do it! If it was any other betting company: we would not be having this chat. But it's the Sun, so we are.

And so Sun Bet tweeted 8/1 odds on Wayne Shaw eating a pie, and then he ate the pie. This is not a coincidence, hinting strongly at a Wayne Shaw–Sun axis of evil that led to a pasty being consumed on BBC One last night in slow motion. This is corruption to the very deepest core of the game, and, worse, corruption under the guise of banter and imagined by the Sun. There's a Daniel Merriweather song, if you remember him, which is applicable to Wayne Shaw eating a pie: "You took something perfect—" Daniel Merriweather sings, and in this analogy that perfect thing is 'eating a pie for banter' —"and painted it red." Wayne Shaw painted a pie red. With his mouth. Because of the Sun, the worst bastards there are.

JOEL GOLBY, GOOD: It is also banter, I suppose, because Wayne Shaw is a sort of human meme. When the FA Cup draw was announced, photos of Shaw – along with the caption "this is Sutton's reserve goalkeeper" – made the rounds, because look at him: he's sort of like one of those scenes in a movie where six children smuggle themselves into the cinema in one gigantic trench coat, but the children are all the size of association football goalkeepers, and they are all stuck inside the same Joma kit. There are no photographs of Wayne Shaw not wearing a Joma kit, which makes me think that maybe he does everything in it. Wayne Shaw, gardening in full kit and football gloves. Wayne Shaw divebombs into a swimming pool wearing Sutton away 2014. Wayne Shaw, showering in shinpads. Does Wayne Shaw wear a full Joma kit to make love? I am not going to speculate. Football is a glossy game – too glossy, arguably, too detached from the fans who sustain it; a computer-generated mega corporation interlocked with another mega corporation and played through the eyes of 22 men and their management teams – and moments like Wayne Shaw eating a pasty, or literally being in the bar at half time, briefly keep it grounded before the whole game flies off into the shining chrome neutrality of space. Wayne Shaw eating a pasty is great because it could have happened at any game in the last 120 years, but it happened at Sutton, against Arsenal, as a team of millionaires made quite-hard-work-but-not-really of beating them 2–0.

JOEL GOLBY, BAD: Augh, but then Wayne Shaw went on Good Morning Britain today and posed for this selfie with Piers Morgan, and it just really would help me enjoy the pure moment of Wayne Shaw eating a pasty more if he didn't so consistently align himself with the very worst people in the world!

JOEL GOLBY, GOOD: The fact that Wayne Shaw has released two statements about the pasty today – two statements – one confirming it was a pasty not a pie, and one explaining he didn't eat it in direct alignment with The Sun, makes this good again. Shaw told the Independent: "A few of the lads said to me earlier on: 'What is going on with the 8-1 about eating a pie?' I said: 'I don't know, I've eaten nothing all day (*4), so I might give it a go later on.' As I say what is that, Sun Bets had us at 8-1 to eat a pie. I thought I would give them a bit of banter and let's do it. All the subs were on and we were 2-0 down." He ate the pasty for banter. He did not gobble the pasty into his body for financial gain. The pasty is good again.

JOEL GOLBY, BAD: Augh, but then the actual manager of Sutton United gave a quote to the press saying eating the pasty was bad, reflecting poorly on the club and everything. "I would assume so," Paul Doswell said, last night, when asked whether he thought it was a PR stunt. "I think Wayne has become this global superstar on the back of being 23 stone. He's made that a chance to make some more media coverage off the back of it. The reality is I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me. I don't think it shows us in the best light." Wayne Shaw's media career starts now, and I am here for it from this moment right until he wins Celebrity Big Brother 2017, and not a moment later.

JOEL GOLBY, UNDECIDED: I think basically what we've come to here is an impasse, and I would like to propose a theory: Wayne Shaw eating a pasty is both bad and good at the same time, in exactly equal measurements. This, by extension, makes Wayne Shaw eating a pasty a philosophical question: how can an action be at once in two entirely opposite states? Wayne Shaw's pasty is both hot and cold. Good and evil. Heaven and hell. Wayne Shaw's pasty is a piping-hot paradox. It is Shrödringer's pasty. It is 2017, and we want our heroes and villains to be demarcated clearly between black and white, with no grey area in between. We have no space for nuance any more. Wayne Shaw eating a pasty, though, somehow falls into no man's land, becoming both. There is no right answer. The last 2,000 words were entirely in vain.

@joelgolby

Life is built on duality. For every sweet, there's a sour. For every yin, a yang. And for every Stormzy, there's an Ed Sheeran. One makes rap; one makes songs using the guitar. Both, though, are wildly successful.

On the road to the release of their two new albums (Ed Sheeran, "÷"; Stormzy, "Gang Signs & Prayer"), the pair caught up for an episode of our infamous Back and Forth series, where they spoke about everything in and amongst themselves – including sliding into DMs, falling asleep during sex, the first time someone threw their underwear at them, and more.

Click to watch the video on Noisey.

On January 24, President Donald Trump issued an executive order intended to speed up construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which the Sioux Indians consider the "black snake," a fulfillment of an apocalyptic prophecy. For months, the pipeline had been blocked by high-profile protest camps established by the Standing Rock Sioux and filled with activists who traveled from all over the world. Under Barack Obama, the Army Corps of Engineers had in December denied an easement needed to complete the pipeline's last unfinished bit, which came near the Standing Rock reservation—a proximity that the tribe said would infringe on their sovereignty and potentially pollute their water. Many "water protectors" saw this as a victory and left. But Trump's government rapidly reversed that decision: The easement was approved on February 7 and construction has already begun, despite the tribe's last-minute effort to block the DAPL in court.

The largest protest camp, Oceti Oyate ("the people's camp") is on land managed by the Army Corps, which has ordered the remaining 300 or so activists (down from a December peak of over 10,000) to leave by February 22. Any remaining campers may be charged with a misdemeanor that carries up to $5,000 in fines or six months in prison, according to an Army Corps spokesperson.

Some occupants plan to relocate to other camps, but many appear ready to defy the local authorities, the federal government, and even the Standing Rock Sioux themselves, whose leaders have been asking activists to leave for months.

"We've raised the vibration of this land so high, I think people would stay even if the pipeline is stopped," says Dennis Romaro, 25, a Chumash from California. "Everybody here is somehow disconnected from... modern society, money and currency... and we start to see a sense of unity throughout this dynamic. I have to stay here forever."

Currently there are five camps, which activists refer to as "prayer camps." There's still a Native presence in these places, but most of the remaining activists are young and white. Rosebud and Sacred Stone, both long-established, have roughly 300 people. The Cheyenne River camp has about 20 people, mostly veterans and Cheyenne River Sioux. The newest camp, Rise of the Seventh Generation, has about 40.

The unseasonably warm temperatures have turned Oceti into a shallow, slushy lake. Many structures are being relocated to higher camps (one set of compost toilets has gone to the Rise camp), but the kitchen will stay, says Brandi-Lee Maxi, a 34-year-old. "We'll still be here, feeding whoever's left in the resistance camp, the liberation camp. This is basically the front lines, and it is treaty territory. As a Lakota woman, I'd like to remain."

A structure in the camps flooded by recent snowmelt and rain.

The lowland is dotted with skeletal teepees, half-built plywood sheds, and massive piles of abandoned tents, blankets, and clothes. The camps are about 70 percent cleared. The hum of circling helicopters competes with the rumble of bulldozers that shovel trash into piles and piles into dumpsters.

An activist from California, Senai (who refuses to give his last name), shouts at the Lakota men operating the bulldozers: "You're just doing this for money! You're selling out your land for money!"

"This is my home! Go back to yours!" one of them responds.

The bulldozers are funded by the Standing Rock tribe to clear the camp before spring floods wash trash into the river. But some activists think these fears have been overblown, and the National Weather Service says the flooding will likely be minor.

Activists have nicknamed Standing Rock chairman Dave Archambault II "DAPL Dave," and are angry that tribal leadership invited the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to help clear the camps. BIA agents have arrested camp leaders both in the camps and at the reservation casino, leaving many activists camera-shy and worried that federal agents are building cases around their social media footprints. On February 17, the BIA set up checkpoints outside of the camps, ensuring that no tents or building materials make it into Oceti or Sacred Stone.

Tribal representatives did not return requests for comment about clearing the camps, but the Standing Rock Sioux Facebook page has repeatedly mentioned concerns about flooding, escalating police tactics, and general safety and liability. Casino spokespeople have told the Bismark Tribune they are losing revenue due to the camps. And in a statement released February 1, Archambault said, "The fight is no longer here, but in the halls and courts of the federal government." He's been urging banks to defund the pipeline and promoting a Native-led March on Washington on March 10. In a recent interview, he told the Guardian that a continued activists presence may lead to further oppression of his people.

Sacred Stone, which contains a permanent dining hall and school, is on reservation land owned by LaDonna Allard and her family. On February 16, BIA agents delivered papers naming Allard a potential "co-trespasser" on her own land, giving both Allard and the activists ten days to either "show cause" that they are not trespassing or evacuate camp. The papers state that because the tribe has a 67 percent stake in the land, it must consent to all "occupancy." Via email, Nedra Darling, a BIA spokesperson, wrote that "without a lease or the consent of all landowners" anyone living on the land is trespassing.

But Allard believes that she has the required consent and that a tribal resolution passed in June authorizing the creation of Sacred Stone still stands.

For now, both Oceti and Sacred Stone remain, even though over the weekend the tribe's bulldozers were joined by Army Corps bulldozers, sent in to demolish Oceti—and despite a particularly brutal clash with police a couple of weeks ago.

A sculpture at Sacred Stone called 'Not Afraid to Look the White Man in the Face.'

The first night of February, following a vision in a sweat lodge, a handful of activists set up seven teepees on top of a hill legally owned by Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind DAPL. (This move was not endorsed by the tribe; police later referred to them as "rogue" campers.) The next morning, a larger group of activists went up to bring breakfast and finish the work.

Ryan Flesh, from Washington State, was in Oceti digging a tent out of the snow when other activists ran past shouting, "They're breaking through the barricade!" Flesh estimates that more than 100 campers rushed up the hill to the Backwater Bridge on Highway 1806, the site of the most severe clashes with law enforcement in November.

"The police pushed us back and formed a line and... the National Guard steps in front of them with their riot shields, at which point we thought something more was gonna happen," Flesh says. "But what they were doing was just being sure... they could bulldoze a path to the western high ground camp, then drive the big trucks up there so that they could arrest everyone."

On the hill, 76 activists were surrounded by officers as they set up the final two teepees. When they finished, they linked arms and circled a fire, singing as officers tugged arms and hair and the backs of jackets. Eventually, officers kicked out the backs of their knees, forcing activists to the ground.

The activists say they were made to kneel in the snow, where many of them kept singing. Some were punched or hit with batons or had their faces held to the ground. They were loaded into vans and school buses, then transported to the Morton County jail, where they were caged and told to strip to their base layer. Their hands were zip-tied behind their backs and they boarded the buses again, with no heat and the windows open, for a ride that would deliver them to various prisons.

Ethan Petersen, 23, says he saw a woman urinate on herself after repeatedly asking to use the restroom. About a dozen activists were on the bus nearly six hours, all the way to Fargo, according to Donald "Duck" Longsoldier.

"They had some guys in zip ties real tight. The guy next to me, his hands were all purple, but I got out of mine early. But I didn't want to let them know I had them off," Longsoldier says. Other activists independently recount the same story of "the guy with blue hands," who cried and begged officers to loosen his ties.

Longsoldier moved to sit beside the man, taking the position next to the open window, and held his hands in his own. "I was just holding them, because I knew if I rubbed them, it'd hurt," he says. Then another activist moved to the other side of the man, sandwiching him in body heat, and took his hands so that Longsoldier could rub his back and chest. "He was freezing," Longsoldier says. "We kept telling the cops, and they didn't care." (The high was eight degrees that day.)

When they reached Fargo, Longsoldier was moved from the group holding cell to the solitary drunk tank. He says this happened because he told a corrections officer that he'd like to file a complaint about the transport procedure. He was kept in the tank for a few hours and forced to blow into a breathalyzer before rejoining the general population.

The activists who have been around for months say that, as tough as this treatment was, it was tame compared to earlier actions that involved water cannons, mace, and flash-bang grenades.

According to Rob Keller, public information officer for the Morton County Sheriff's department, they haven't received any official complaints.

"Until there's a report, which will be followed up, these are only accusations," Keller says. "When you are arrested, there are certain things that have to happen to process the person through the system, to ensure the safety of everyone."

Three times (twice under Obama and once under Trump), the American Civil Liberties Union has requested that the Department of Justice investigate suspected civil rights violations and send federal observers to Standing Rock.

Oceti at sunset.

The week following the arrests of the 76 activists on the hill, camp crews worked constantly to provide food, clean bathrooms, and dispose of human waste. But there were others who seem unsure how to spend their time.

People chain-smoked in enclosed kitchen tents (and wondered out loud why they can't shake the "camp cough") and streamed weeks-old Democracy Now! interviews. They discussed direct action for blocking pipeline construction—strategies that, with their dwindling numbers, seemed implausible. They debated various legal strategies, such as filing tort claims and, more dubiously, claiming that as a sovereign person under common law, a court without a jury does not have jurisdiction over them.

At Sacred Stone, about 70 veterans representing two veterans group, both originating from a highly publicized December campaign to bring vets to support the Natives, were building arctic shelters and a new kitchen on high ground. After the eviction notice, they stopped construction to plot their next move.

"If we're asked to leave, we're going to facilitate a safe exit for our members and any other veterans and community members," says Mark Sanderson, founder of one of the groups, VeteransRespond. "It's not good for veterans' well being to get involved in any sort of confrontation with law enforcement." (VeteransRespond's Facebook page now discourages more vets from coming.)

An eviction will leave some vets, such as Sharon Bates, at loose ends. Bates, 56, helps in the school and kitchen and had been planning to stay at Sacred Stone indefinitely. "I don't have a life anymore. I don't have anybody to go back to. I've even let my address go," she says.

Rosebud, just across the river from Oceti, lies on Army Corps land and reservation land. The Cheyenne River Camp is also on leased reservation land. So far, neither have received an evacuation date. Rise of the Seventh Generation is on 70 acres of privately owned reservation land, and its organizers plan to screen campers, to keep out both infiltrators and "antagonizers." According to its caretaker, Brandon Green, unlike at Sacred Stone, the tribe is not a majority owner.

"It takes disaster to learn a lesson, but in the process, we unify."
–Dennis Romaro

The situation is uncertain for the camps, but no matter what happens, Jean Paul Roy, 54, a tribal councilman with the Flandreau Santee Sioux, thinks there are victories in Standing Rock "that will probably never be out in the mainstream."

By this, he doesn't necessarily mean the defeat of the DAPL, which seems unlikely. But, he says, the movement, which was started by youth, has empowered young people growing up in a tradition that privileges elders: "It's given them purpose and the will to fight for the next generation to come."

Romaro echoes these sentiments. "If DAPL didn't start this whole pipeline thing, there wouldn't be any of this," he said. "It takes disaster to learn a lesson, but in the process, we unify."

To many—particularly those not on the ground at Standing Rock, those who don't call their friends "sister" and "brother" or mention "Creator" in casual conversation, those who haven't sipped the herbalists' fire cider to ward off a cold, or eaten fry bread in a tent kitchen, or posed questions to the sacred fire only to have it leap in a seeming response—this may seem like a hollow and high-priced victory. But to some people in camp, it's everything.

Cheree Franco is a writer and photographer, mostly working in Arkansas, Mississippi, New York, and Pakistan.

Even by chef standards, it was a pretty aggressive game.

Sure, everyone was there for a good cause and there was a lot of respect for opposing team members, but they were playing to win.

Chefs—the good ones, especially—are highly competitive people. For a lot of Canadian cooks and front-of-house staff, hockey is a great way to hit the off switch and channel any aggression that can arise from a high-stress job. Put a bunch of them and their city's pride on a clean sheet of ice and you'll get a hockey game for the ages.

That was the logic behind the Drake Barn Burner Hockey Game: Toronto Vs. Montreal Chefs, which, as its name suggests, pitted the finest chefs of the two cities against each other on the ice at the Essroc Arena in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

"It's a really fucking cool concept," says Nick Chen-Yin, chef-owner of Smoke Signals Bar-B-Q in Toronto. "There's always been a rivalry between Toronto and Montreal within hockey, like, the Leafs versus the Canadiens."

Read the entire article on Munchies.

This is the final essay in a six-part series. Read the previous entries here.

The sign on the Buchenwald gate, "Jedem das Seine," faces the inside of the camp. This was so the inmates could look up and be reminded of the slave camp's guiding philosophy: Everyone gets what he deserves. The Nazi equivalent of "You Can't Always Get What You Want," the Stones song that mysteriously closed Trump rallies last year. Something I only mention because between yesterday morning and today Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

Which I can handle, really. I just need to lie face-down on the floor for 26 hours or so and I'll be fine. The parallels between Adolf and Donald have been marched out everywhere. It's not just that both men boast alarming hair and exude gamy charisma. In the beginning, except for a handful of racist maniacs and World War I vets, everybody in Germany thought Hitler was an assclown, too.

That said, you haven't lived until you've visited Munich during its annual beer festival, Oktoberfest. I'd had the peculiar thrill of getting lost during this shitshow at dusk, while a bunch of drunk-off-their-ass Hermann Göring lookalikes in tight leather short-shorts and feathered dunce caps blocked the street to break into a spontaneous can-can. It makes weird sense that Hitler got his start where beer-shitting your lederhosen is a badge of honor. In one bad moment I found myself cornered in an alley and thought, This is how it ends. Mauled to death by a bunch of gone-to-fat Sound of Music goons in soiled hotpants, so close I can smell their Lowenbrau gusts. Were they really hissing Juden, or was I imagining it?

But back to Buchenwald! Our guide, Greta, a lovely young millennial who keeps flinging wisps of hair out of her eyes, very Kate Winslet, explains that Buchenwald was not an extermination camp. Inmates were worked to death, used as slave labor. Horrific enough, but now that I'm writing this up I can't help but think Donald Trump supposedly didn't pay his workers, either! But never mind.

The macro horrors of the camps are well known. Back to back, they can be numbing. But the specifics of state torment are haunting. Greta leads us to the pathology lab of the crematorium, in which a doctor's measuring stick has been mounted along the wall in the corner. "When the camp was primarily Soviet POWS, Hitler had a directive that the Commissars—that's what he called them—were all to be shot in the back of the neck. So," says our guide, as we gather around the tall measuring stick, "look closer."

Our guide leads us out of the room, to a tiny booth behind the wall where the SS slid their guns through a slot and shot the inmates in the backs of their necks. Which, horrifically fascinating as it is, is not even the most fascinating detail.

The macro horrors of the camps are well known. Back to back, they can be numbing. But the specifics of state torment are haunting.

Listen: "The Kommandant knew that shooting a man point blank, when he's looking straight at you, could do some psychological damage to the shooter. So they invented the Measuring Room. Prisoners were told they were being measured for camp uniforms."

The murderous misdirect, of course, was a death camp staple. Like SS telling new arrivals at Auschwitz they were headed for the showers, going so far as playing valet and telling victims to remember the number of the hook they hung their clothes on so they could find their things later. Then leading them to the "showers," locking the door, and gassing all of them with Zyklon B.

"By the way," Greta adds, "none of the guards were compelled to join the murder squad. The higher-ups knew that if they were ordered to kill, the men might resist. Might resent. But if they volunteered, they were motivated. They wanted to be "a man among men." There was, you might say, a subtle psychology involved. What today we might call their 'management style.'"

The commandant of Buchenwald was Karl-Otto Koch, who is more famous for his wife, Ilse, AKA the Bitch of Buchenwald. Ilse, Greta tells us, liked to ride her horse through the camp wearing tight sweaters and little else, taunting the starving inmates. "Sometimes," our guide continues, "she would crook her finger and bring one back to her bed. Afterward she would have him shot."

Ilse was also obsessed with tattoos. It's been said that when she spotted a tattooed prisoner, she would have him skinned, then keep the skin. In evidence at Nuremberg were items the Kommandant's wife allegedly made with human skin. Among them were lampshades, a detail familiar to people who know little else of the Holocaust.

No doubt it's Bad Tourist Behavior, but after listening to Greta I'm moved to ask why she, a clearly capable, charismatic young woman, chose to work at a death camp. Visibly uncomfortable at my question, the guide takes a moment and plays with a strand of her hair. "When I was little, my grandfather told me a story about a farmer in town. The farmer, my grandfather told me, was a very kind man. He'd also been a Nazi. One day my grandfather asked him, 'You seem so nice, why would you follow Adolf Hitler?' 'Because,' the old farmer told him, 'who else would give me 20 slaves?' I think this is something people don't understand about the Nazis. For regular people, there could be enormous benefits."

I wait a beat, half-expecting her to add "and that farmer was my grandfather's father, my great-great grandfather. This is penance." And drop the mic.

Instead, she simply shrugs and replies, with simmering conviction, "I believe people should know."

Before I can ask a follow-up, Greta steps away, finds the rest of the group, and asks if they all know where the cafeteria is.

I cannot eat at the Buchenwald cafeteria. I can, however, walk slowly by, after going to the men's room, and make a point of staring at the diners disapprovingly and flagrantly taking pictures. Look at me, I'm thinking . I'm too noble to eat here, but not too noble to walk by taking pictures and judging you amoral carnivores. (In hindsight, it was a total douche move.) I stomp out of the cafeteria, fast, to show I am so sensitive it bothers me to see people eating where so many suffered.

And then, BAM. Like a fucking idiot, I walk at full-speed into a plate glass sliding door. I cut my forehead and have to trot back in, past the diners, to the death camp men's room—much nicer than the crude facilities at Auschwitz (that's Germany vs Poland, right there)—where I grab a fist-full of wet paper towels and try to staunch the blood streaming over my unibrow. The realization that, even here, at the Axis Mundi of My People's Agony, I have managed to make an ass out of myself is not a great feeling.

Ten steps from rope to inferno. From our point of view, this is sadistic. From the Nazis, it was efficient.

By the time I get to Dachau on day 11, I feel like going to death camps is my job. I get on the bus in the morning and go to work. Surprisingly, this does not make me jaded. It makes me more attentive to the particulars of horror. A kind of accumulated moral and sensory horror at once exhausts and turbo-charges awareness. Which leads me to the Dachau crematorium. And forgive the abrupt transition here, but the niceties of narrative crumble in the face of details. Specifics. The little thing that makes the big thing real. Like, say, the hooks in the crematorium at Dachau.

Yes. There are hooks in the ceiling of the crematorium at Dachau. When I see them I realize two things: that the SS hung victims in front of the ovens so they could see what was coming, and that it was someone's job to stand on a ladder, drill holes over his head, and screw in the hooks.

The noose, tied to the hook, slipped around the victim's neck as he or she faced the flaming maw. Extending from the ovens is a sliding tray, like a tongue, with long handles on the end for the sonderkommando to slide the newly dead into the fire. A sign on the wall says "Each of the four furnaces could cremate two to three corpses at once. The ovens were connected to the chimney by an underground canal."

Ten steps from rope to inferno. From our point of view, this is sadistic. From the Nazis, it was efficient.

Toward the end, there was not enough coal to fire the ovens, and bodies were left outside the building, piled up in mounds, or dumped into holes.

The sight and stench, according to Dachau's American liberators, induced vomiting, trauma, and rage. Call it the dead's revenge upon the living. The US later forced local townspeople and Nazi party members to come to Dachau and help dispose of corpses. Naturally, they were all shocked. They had no idea.

***

Flying home to imminent Trumpland, all the parallels are there. (Unlike Trump, Hitler actually brought jobs to the fatherland. War will do that, and death camps don't build themselves. Of course, there was also slave labor involved—but never mind.)

It occurs to me that if we go to war with Australia and NATO and Mexico and god knows who else, we'll need plenty of armaments, not to mention our own camps. For "illegal aliens," Muslims, and—who knows—maybe even the Jews.

It's not like this is a great leap. Or even original. As I mentioned earlier, it's well known that a lot of Hitler enablers were under the impression the Fuhrer was a clown with creepy hair they could easily control. The lesson being: never underestimate a creepy clown.

As I write this, CNN is running a story whose banner reads: Hate on display: Rise in crime against Jewish centers, synagogues... There's video of a masked man smashing the window of a Chicago temple and jumping back in his car, conveniently parked out front. Think Kristallnacht, with security cameras.

This bit of business is followed by footage of the founder's statue at Rice University in Houston, vandalized with a swastika drawn below the word 'Trump.' In January, dozens of bomb threats were reported to Jewish community centers throughout the country. The phrase "new normal" is being marched out.

The truth is that Trump makes me miss Dachau. Horrific as that was, it's over. Trump is just beginning, and that's a real terror.

It's hard to find a Jew without one relative or another who died in the camps. My own grandfather was killed in a pogrom in Vilnius, Lithuania when my father was two.On my mother's side, great aunts and uncles who expired in concentration camps were rarely discussed, as if mere mention of their names would summon the demons who killed them.

But facism, and anti-semitism, have been in the building for years. In fact, they never left. The demons only needed to be re-summoned. Nazi-loving Charles Lindbergh promoted "America First" during World War II, when even Roosevelt turned boats full of Jews away. Meat-faced patriots like Bannon and Trump have simply picked up the banner.

Illustration by Koren Shadmi

(Collage: Marta Parszeniew. Stefano Brizzi picture: Met Police; phone picture: Asimzb, via; acid photo via wiki)

When the smell of rotting human flesh became too much for the residents of Block E to take, the caretaker on The Peabody Estate first tried to mask it with bubblegum-scented air spray. When that didn't work, somebody eventually decided to call the police.

That was on Thursday the 7th of April last year. Almost a week earlier, on the night of Friday the 1st, a man who would later be identified in court only as "CD" found himself lost on the estate while looking for a chemsex party he'd been invited to by someone named "Domination London" on "gay fetish app" Recon. The Peabody Estate, which originally opened in 1876, lies a few minutes south of the Thames, between London Bridge and the Tate Modern. Its desirable location means a one-bed studio apartment there will set you back £1,300 a month in rent, but its various blocks can be difficult to navigate for the uninitiated.

Eventually, CD found the right door and rang the buzzer. There was no answer, so he rang it again. And again.

Eventually a man's voice answered. It said: "Hello, sorry, we are having kind of a situation here."

CD didn't know what the voice meant by "a situation", so he asked what was going on. The voice explained that somebody was feeling ill, but said not to worry because they were taking care of it. CD asked if there was anything he could do to help, and the voice said no, everything was under control, but the party was cancelled. The voice, CD would later testify, "sounded concerned, a little bit upset. He did not sound too worried." As he walked away, CD thought to himself that perhaps somebody was throwing up on the carpet.

The voice on the other end of the intercom belonged to a 49-year-old Italian named Stefano Brizzi. He later told police why he hadn't let CD in; he'd invited a few men to join his party, he explained, "but they didn't arrive, and when one did arrive I was right in the middle of strangling Gordon".

PC Gordon Semple had been the first guest to arrive at Brizzi's flat that night. A 59-year-old Scot, originally from Inverness, he was now living in Dartford, Kent and had been working for the Metropolitan Police for 30 years. He had been with his partner, Gary Meeks, for 25 years, but their relationship was open. So it wasn't that unusual that, earlier that Friday, while still on duty, Semple had contacted Brizzi on Grindr. Brizzi's Grindr nickname was Dom SE1, and his profile said he was "free now for hot dirty sleazy session". After Brizzi invited him round, Semple travelled via Blackfriars and arrived at the flat a few hours before CD would makes his unsuccessful attempt to join them.

Both Brizzi and Semple spent the intervening hours sending out messages via Grindr and Recon inviting people to join them for a chemsex party. With the exception of CD, they ended up being left alone. Brizzi maintained in court that Semple's death by strangulation was an accident, a bondage game gone too far. However, this is not what he had told police when they first arrived at his flat in response to his neighbour's call about "the smell of death". When they asked what had happened, he told them calmly: "I killed him last week. I met him on Grindr and I killed him. Satan told me to."

(Photo: Stefano Brizzi)

Stefano Brizzi was born on the 26th of June, 1966 in the small Italian town of San Marcello de Pistoiese in Tuscany. He was the youngest of three children born to a civil servant father and a mother who worked in child health care. His family were devout Catholics, and his uncle became a priest.

Around the age of 15, Brizzi realised he was gay. He found the realisation impossible to reconcile with his family's strict Catholic beliefs. A childhood friend told the Italian newspaper Il Terreno: "Thirty years ago, it was not easy to live freely without being judged [for] homosexuality. I remember Stefano [was] a very sensitive boy, who could not find peace within himself. He is tormented."

Another friend, Mauro Vaiani, said: "Like all homosexuals in my generation, he has faced a bumpy ride to gain acceptance."

When he was old enough, Brizzi moved to university in the nearest big Italian city, Florence. He stayed on afterwards, working as a computer programmer throughout his twenties and thirties. In 2008, while in his early forties, Brizzi was diagnosed with HIV and hepatitis C.

He referred to the diagnosis as "a death sentence", but treatment kept him healthy, and in 2012 he was offered the chance to move to London to become a senior web developer for investment bank Morgan Stanley, on a £70,000-a-year salary. His uncle would later tell Italy's La Nazione newspaper: "Stefano has spent a life studying. He took his degree in Florence and started to work here as a programmer, but complained because they paid little, had no prospects of employment and [he] dreamed of going abroad. As soon as you have it done he went [to] London. He was very happy about this opportunity."

Brizzi lasted less than three years at Morgan Stanley. After moving to London he tried drugs like GHB, ketamine and crystal meth for the first time, and his eventual addiction to meth became so bad he was asked to leave his job in February of 2015. The following year he joined Crystal Meth Anonymous and saw a psychologist. Later, he told the police that none of these interventions helped him. They had found a copy of the Satanic Bible on his computer and a notebook of handwritten notes addressed to the devil. "The problem with that is the psychologist says crystal meth caused psychosis," Brizzi explained. "I was raised Catholic, being gay was evil. And the devil… so I've been into Satan."

(Photo: Stefano Brizzi)

It wasn't until four days after Semple's death, on Tuesday the 5th of April, that Brizzi made the very short walk – 240 steps – from the Peabody Estate to the Leyland Specialist Decorators' Merchants on Southwark Street. The journey takes about three minutes, or a little longer if you're weighed down with the sort of equipment Brizzi bought for himself: a three-in-one saw set, metal sheets and plastic buckets, as well as bottles of acid and cleaning products.

CCTV captured Brizzi placing one of the buckets over his own head, apparently to make sure it would be big enough to hold a human skull. After this footage was shown in court, prosecuting QC Crispin Aylett asked Brizzi if he had been inspired by the Breaking Bad episode where Walt and Jessie attempt to dissolve a body in hydrofluoric acid. "Do you accept that you were living out an episode of Breaking Bad?" asked Aylett.

"I accept I considered without any rationality at all," replied Brizzi. "If I had thought about it – if I was some kind of criminal mind – I would have done things in a much more organised way. I think I was inspired by the idea. I took whatever was there, thinking maybe I can dissolve him."
That is not, however, the only way that Brizzi attempted to get rid of PC Semple's body. The court heard that he had "grated his victim's flesh from his bones before eating some with chopsticks". PC Semple's DNA was found inside the oven, on chopsticks, on a chopping board and inside a cooking pot, while there was also a bite mark left on one of his ribs.

One of PC Semple's feet washed up on the south side of the Thames, where it was found by a member of the public.

When the police arrived at Brizzi's flat that Thursday they were met by the overpowering smell of cleaning chemicals mixed with rotting flesh. They found Brizzi in his pants, surrounded by bin liners containing chunks of flesh, a pelvis bone, a hand and part of a spine. His bathtub was full of a blue-green liquid with globules of fat floating in it. This turned out to be caustic soda and spirit of salt containing hydrofluoric acid, although he had failed to dissolve the body as he had been unable to heat the chemicals to the required 300 degrees.

After telling officers that Satan had told him to kill Semple, he elaborated: "I spoke to Satan and he was telling me to kill, kill, kill, and I agreed at the first opportunity."

As Aylett later recounted in court: "That led the officer to ask him if he had any problems with his mental health. The defendant said he used a lot of crystal meth, but there was nothing apart from that."

Left: Stefano Brizzi. Right: Gordon Semple (Photos: Metropolitan Police PA Wire/PA Images)

The case went to trial last October. Brizzi denied murdering PC Semple, claiming that his death had been an accident during a sex game, but pleading guilty to the crime of obstructing a coroner by attempting to destroy a body. A few weeks later, on the 13th of November, Brizzi was convicted of both crimes.

He was sentenced to a life term, but on Sunday the 5th of February this year he died in his cell at HMP Belmarsh. While some newspapers reported the death as a suicide, the Prison Service themselves would only issue a statement to confirm the bare minimum of facts: "HMP Belmarsh prisoner Stefano Brizzi (dob 26/06/66) died in custody on Sunday 5 February. As with all deaths in custody there will be an independent investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman."

That investigation will probably take around 22 weeks, but its findings won't be made public until after the inquest, which will be carried out by HM Coroner for Inner South London. Typically, inquests of deaths in police custody and prisons can take a year to report their findings.

Shortly after Brizzi's conviction, serial killer Stephen Port was also sentenced to life for murdering a series of men he'd met on Grindr. The proximity of the two cases led some tabloids to start publishing scare stories about the app and others like it. However, Monty Moncrieff, chief executive of London Friend – a health and well-being charity for London's LGBT community - told The Guardian: "What role the apps have been playing to facilitate that is that it's just been the medium through which he's met them and the intention's been there. He hasn't done it as a result of the apps, the apps haven't made him do that."

Speaking specifically about the effect of crystal meth in the Brizzi case, London Friend said in a statement: "A case like this is a rare and extreme example, but the impact of crystal meth on the mental health of our service users is not. We strongly advise anyone who experiences any difficulties through using it, or other drugs or alcohol, to seek support as early as possible."

They offer support for anyone who wants help stopping or controlling their use of drugs for chemsex, and while they point out "PC Semple's death could not have been prevented in this case", they do also offer advice on staying safe while using dating apps.

@KevinEGPerry

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This is part two of a six-part series. Read the other installments here.

It's the first full day of the tour and our orders are to be up at six. Leave luggage in front of the door. Make it down to the meaty buffet breakfast at 7. Be on the bus by 8. It is, fittingly, a regimented schedule.

As is my wont, I sit in the back of the bus. Putting a lot of seats between me and the group. It's a habit I've had since grade school, but bad form on a bus tour. It's not long before I'm spotted and invited up to the front.

"Look at Gerald all by himself on the back of the bus. Well what do you know, you've won the lottery and now you get to sit up front behind our wonderful driver, Josef!" All eyes turn.

I make the walk of shame up the aisle and take the uncomfortably visible seat behind the driver. I didn't mention this—why would I—but I have a thing about people staring at the back of my head. I like people where I can see them. Having people behind me, staring at me, makes me so uncomfortable I sweat.

No way around it, I have to sit for seven hours, with 19 people behind me aiming their eyes at my occiput. The set-up induces the same crawl-out-of-my-skin-and-slide-down-a-cheese-grater sensation as kicking dope. Not as intense, but the same family of squirm.

Adding to this unease is the feeling I imagine a lot of people get while moving through erstwhile Nazi turf. Peer into a café, step onto an elevator, and you can't help but wonder if every hairy-nostrilled old timer giving you stink-eye has a secret history. Case in point, the sausage-bobbling geezer at an adjoining table this morning at breakfast. I wondered if the old bastard was unaware he was scowling at me. No way to tell if his Pirogi-chafed piles are killing him or if, in happier times, he was bayonetting babies just up the road. And feels nostalgic.

The problem, when Nazis are involved, is that paranoia doesn't register as paranoia. It's just there. Like gravity.

As my grandfather used to say, "If you ever forget you're a Jew, a Gentile will remind you. Especially a Third Reich gentile."

I'm hoping this paranoia abates as I spend more time in the Hebe-Killing Countries. But in fact, it just gets worse. The problem, when Nazis are involved, is that paranoia doesn't register as paranoia. It's just there. Like gravity.

We're headed toward Warsaw's "Wedding Cake" palace of culture and science. Our tour guide, Margaret, is a silver-haired wire thin Brit who has that kind of competent, Helen Mirren beauty that holds up even when you're Helen Mirren's age. The professional embodiment of "carry on." Her job, I soon learn, is a hybrid of professor, shepherd, and tummler.

On the way to the palace she tells us about the mythical Mermaid of Warsaw, who once upon a time fell in love with a local fisherman and devoted herself to protecting the city. She tells us to keep our eyes peeled for mermaid doorknobs, a small nod to the heroine from local residents. She's telling us this fable, I think, as a way to ease us into the trip—going straight to the heavy shit would be too jarring. We need to hear a nice story before diving into hell.

Impressively, Margaret doesn't work off of notes, and when we finally get to the famous Wedding Cake she manages to make the architectural oddity weirdly interesting. "In the Stalin era, the building was known as the Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Science," she tells us. "After Stalin, they took his name off the front, and out of the lobby. But you don't live through Stalin without a sense of humor, and today Warsaw locals who don't refer to it as the Wedding Cake prefer Stalin's Syringe, or Elephant in Lacy Panties." Having had some experience with syringes, I get the Stalin thing. The Elephant in Lacy Panties, I suspect, may involve vodka. That said, the building is a jarring combination of phallic and fussy. But I don't get to a lot of weddings.

Stepping off the bus, I realize there is no self-esteem booster like pulling up to some prosperous corner, getting out with a Globus strap around your neck and taking marching orders from a stern tour guide. Speaking of orders, the strap is to hold our Whisper, a headset that enables tourists to hear what the guide is saying without having to hang around her like little lambs with a mama sheep. (The feeling is not unlike that of being in rehab and taking a van to baseball games, where other fans regard you like you're vaguely mentally challenged when you get off the short bus in public.)

After the Wedding Cake we stop in a charming square, where I buy a little Jew. A tiny wooden rabbi, with a coin in his hand. The shelves are full of them. I ask the storekeeper, a grinning fellow with a trim beard, no moustache, and a pearl button country western shirt, "What's the significance of the mini Jews?" He's more than happy to explain. "They're cute, Ja? They're lucky Jews. The Zydki. Put them by the door, so money won't go out of the house."

I chew on that, and he amplifies. "In Poland, we have saying: 'A Jew in the room—a coin in the pocket."

Well OK then! I take six. On the one hand, it is a racial stereotype. The rabbi's holding a coin! On the other, it's a happy stereotype. Cute as a Leprechaun (or a lawn jockey), as opposed, say, to a vicious Semite slitting the throat of Christian babies for blood matzo. The Poles traditionally are no great fans of the sons of Moses.

It's the little things!

I've got my bag of rabbis when we get off the bus and saunter over to what's left of our second destination: the Warsaw ghetto.

The Warsaw ghetto, for those who don't know, is where Nazis stuffed Jews—not just those from Warsaw, but from nearby towns as well. At its height there were half a million people crammed into a 1.3-mile area. That works out to 7.2 people per room. Counting closets as rooms. So basically, the Jews were walled into a vertical coffin. The crack Third Reich nutritionists decided that if residents consumed less than 800 calories a day, they'd all be dead in under a year. They had a lot of scientists on that. The plan was slow motion genocide. ("One famous survivor," Margaret tells us, "was Roman Polanski. Who of course went on to make The Pianist.")

More than three million Jews lived in Poland before the start of World War II. Today, there are around 20,000. But there could be millions of Zydki. So why not drop a couple hundred zloty to buy a half dozen Lucky Charm rabbi? One zloty is worth a quarter. The bill even looks shabby. It's the Burt Young of international currency. What else are you gonna do with it but buy tiny Jews?

In a tragic example of the law of unintended consequences, our guide informs us the failure of the Nazi plan to starve out 500,000 Warsaw Jews spurred the High Command to grease the wheels for another solution: The Final One. Wherein they built camps, and packed the future dead onto boxcars. By strange coincidence, even before the fascist wave broke in America, the prison industry was booming in Eastern Europe. Hiring workers to add chimneys and crematoriums could be a real jobmaker! I can already hear Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press: Say what you will about Hitler, he was big on infrastructure!

Illustration by Koren Shadmi

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany

Nurses often have starring roles in romance novels or porn, but in real life their work is usually undervalued and underpaid. Honestly, there's probably no amount of money in the world that would compensate their daily efforts – we would all die horribly without them, while they have to endure the grossest and saddest parts of what makes us human. On top of that, there's an enormous nurse shortage in the UK, which will likely get worse after Brexit, as some hospitals rely on people from the EEA to make up 2 percent of nursing staff. Nurses are under a lot of pressure, and that pressure takes away time spent with patients.

"I'm happy when people understand that I'm doing more than just wiping strangers' arses," says 22-year-old nurse Jana from Lower Saxony in Germany. She has been working as a trained nurse in a German hospital for six months now, and says that in those six months she has never felt that she was given enough time for her patients, because every extra minute spent on one patient could have been spent on the 20 others waiting for her care.

Jana was kind enough to answer every question I ever wanted to ask someone who works with humans in their most dire moments.

VICE: Long toenails, faeces, puss – what do you find most disgusting about your patients?
Jana: There are two things I really struggle with – washing penises and cleaning under fingernails. I might be a nurse, but I'm also a human being. When you wash a penis, you have to really pull back the foreskin first. That's not always easy. Sometimes patients haven't washed for weeks and a lot of gunk collects down there. The smell can make me feel sick.
I feel similar about cleaning under people's finger nails – the stuff under there can be anything. A colleague of mine once threw up in a rubbish bin, but that never happened to me.

Do your male patients ever have an erection while you're washing them?
Sure, that happens. It's like a reflex; people can't help it. It's not that bad – and at least it makes a penis easier to wash. Recently I came into a room with a tray of food while a patient was playing with himself. He didn't stop after I came in – he wasn't in a great state mentally, at that point. Some people are really reduced to their primordial instincts in the state they're in. And I often get disgusting jokes, which can be pretty disturbing. Or I'll have patients who are able to wash themselves but say, "You're better at it." That makes me feel pretty uncomfortable.

Read: 10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask a Gynaecologist

How often do you do things at work that a doctor should have done?
That happens every day – taking blood, administering intravenous catheters, starting an IV. Basically, many doctors just pass down work, and it really annoys me when they forget that it's actually their job. There's often a strong hierarchy in hospitals. Some doctors really enjoy letting you feel that they're the doctor and you're the nurse. One head doctor once even called me maeuschen ("little mouse"). I don't let those kind of things slide – I asked him if he was being serious. He wouldn't have thought anything of it otherwise. That's how it is, and some nurses accept it.

If you have to go to hospital, do you go to the one you work at?
Absolutely not. I know how things work there and I know how time constraints can make it difficult to keep up the standard of care for staff. And I'm not comfortable being operated on by people I know. I know how some doctors and nurses talk about patients while they're unconscious.

So what do they say about patients who are out of it? Do they mock patients' penis sizes, for example?
Sure, that can happen. Not just around the operating table – behind closed doors, too. But honestly, I think you need to have a sense of humour about it to be able to deal with the job. I mean, for example, it's awful seeing people with dementia. But it can also be really funny when someone tells you they're worried they'll miss the bus every three minutes. Sometimes you just have to laugh about it. But you always absolutely have to treat people with respect. A person with dementia might not know what's going on any more, but they still have the right to be treated like a human being.

Read: 10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask an Ugly Person

Have you ever stolen medication?
No, that would be wrong and also nearly impossible, I think. The storage room is always busy and the more serious stuff is locked away. Only one nurse has the key to that storage, and whenever you take out things like opioids or morphine it has to be documented.

Do you ever not wash your hands before or after patients?
We have a standard for hygiene at the hospital. That standard is very high, and it isn't always met, to be honest. But as long as you're not unsterile, that isn't that bad. That standard is basically just a theory, and you can't always live up to it in practice due to time constraints. It becomes critical if, for example, you wouldn't have enough time to clean wounds properly. I just make sure I take enough time for everyone – even though I might not always have it.

Have you had many patients fall in love with you?
I think "love" is too big a word, but I've been offered a few phone numbers. They might have tried a few others first, though, or just done it out of boredom. I've never had anything going on with a patient, but so far I've never really fancied anyone either.

Read: 10 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask an Albino

And do men outside the hospital ever ask you to play a sexy nurse at home when they find out your occupation?
I've never met a man who responded in that way. Sure, people have asked me to "play doctor" with them, or said it hurts between their legs – could I maybe check if everything is OK? But come on, I don't have time for guys like that.

Have you seen many people die?
I was there for the death of about six people. The worst time was the first time I saw a woman die – when I came into the room I realised right away that she was struggling to breathe. When patients die, their lungs often fill up with water and they start making this awful gurgling sound. She had almost suffocated when I came in. Morphine made her relax and breathe easier, but it was too late. I'll never forget that sound. People die every week in hospital – I'll often come in in the mornings to the news that a patient has died or was sent to a hospice. I wouldn't say that I got used to death, but I think that I've learnt do deal with it.

Jana sent us a picture of herself that ran with the original German version of the interview. After some personal backlash, she asked us to make her unrecognisable in her picture.

Milo Yiannopoulos has been disinvited from giving a talk at a high-profile conservative gathering, had his book deal cancelled, and could now be fired from his job at Breitbart News, after comments he made that seemed to suggest he condoned pedophilia surfaced online.

Calling consent an "arbitrary and oppressive idea," Breitbart senior editor Yiannopoulos appears to make light of child abuse in one video, saying: "We get hung up on this child abuse stuff, to the point where we're heavily policing even relationships between consenting adults." He went on to say that relationships "between younger boys and older men...can be hugely positive experiences."

The self-styled "most fabulous supervillain on the internet" has strongly denied the allegations, claiming that the videos were edited to misrepresent his comments. "I would like to restate my utter disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors," Yiannopoulos said in a Facebook post. "I am horrified by pedophilia."

Continue reading on VICE News

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

US News

Trump Almost Ready to Sign Revised Executive Order
A revised edition of the Trump administration's deeply polarizing and constitutionally troublesome executive order restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries is said to be nearing completion. The new order is expected to make clear that green card holders are not impacted by any travel ban, and the question of religious discrimination should be less glaring as well, according to anonymous sources.—CNN

Feds Investigate Latest Jewish Center Bomb Threats
The FBI and the Justice Department are investigating bomb threats made at ten Jewish community centers Monday in the latest outburst of anti-Semitism since the election. More than 100 headstones were found damaged or pushed over at a Jewish cemetery in Missouri, among other incidents.—NBC News

Milo Book Deal Scrapped
Simon & Schuster has canceled a book by Breitbart editor and alt-right champion Milo Yiannopoulos. It follows the circulation of video in which Yiannopoulos defended sexual relationships between men and "younger boys." The American Conservative Union has canceled a Yiannopoulos appearance for the same reason. In a Facebook post, Yiannopoulos vowed: "This will not defeat me."—The Guardian

NAACP Announces New Leader
Roslyn Brock has stepped down from her position as chairwoman of the NAACP, the country's largest civil rights group, having led it since 2010. Former vice chairman Leon Russell has been named as the organization's new leader after being elected by the board of directors.—USA Today

International News

Pakistan Court Bombing Kills at Least Six
A suicide bomb attack in the grounds of a court in Tangi, in northwest Pakistan, has left at least six people dead and another 15 wounded, according to police and hospital officials. Three attackers began to detonate their suicide vests at the gates of the court complex just as they were shot by police. The militant group Jamaat-ur-Ahrar has claimed responsibility.—Al Jazeera

Five Killed in Australian Plane Crash
Four Americans and an Australian pilot were killed when a small passenger plane crashed into the roof of a shopping mall in Melbourne early Tuesday morning. Police said the plane experienced engine failure shortly after leaving Essendon Airport, just outside the city. There were no reports of residual casualties.—BBC News

Russian Ambassador to UN Dies Suddenly
Russian president Vladimir Putin says he was "grieved" to learn of the death Vitaly Churkin, Moscow's longtime ambassador to the United Nations. The Russian foreign ministry has given no details of the 64-year-old's sudden death in New York City Monday, but an anonymous US official said he died of a heart attack.—Reuters

Marine Le Pen Investigated Over Fake Jobs
The headquarters of Marine Le Pen's National Front Party was searched by French police, who were investigating claims by the European Union's anti-fraud office that Le Pen invented jobs to access EU funds. She denies the claim. The party said the raids were designed to "disturb the smooth running of the presidential campaign" in which the right-wing insurgent is expected to perform well.—The Guardian

Everything Else

Uber Asks Eric Holder to Investigate Harassment
Uber has enlisted former US attorney general Eric Holder to lead the investigation into alleged sexual harassment at the company. CEO Travis Kalanick said it would be conducted in "short order" and will also include board member Arianna Huffington.—The Washington Post

Solange to Headline the Roots' Festival
Solange, Pharrell Williams, and Lil Wayne will headline this year's Roots Picnic at Festival Pier in Philadelphia in June. The tenth annual show on June 3 will also see performances by 21 Savage and Kimbra.—Rolling Stone

NASA to Make Exoplanet Announcement
US space agency NASA is expected to make a major announcement on Wednesday about a "discovery beyond our solar system." A livestreamed press conference will see scientists share findings on exoplanets, the planets orbiting stars other than our sun.—CNET

Lady Gaga's Pro-LGBTQ Lyrics Cut by BBC
Lady Gaga fans have reacted angrily to the BBC cutting lyrics referring to LGBTQ empowerment from a performance of "Born This Way." The broadcaster said the lyrics "were cut for time only" on the BBC show Let It Shine.—Noisey

Gucci Partners with Diversity Nonprofit
Gucci has become the first luxury fashion brand to partner with an Italian nonprofit that offers diversity strategies for companies. Company president Marco Bizzari said he was "proud" to join Parks—Liberi e Uguali, the group named after civil rights icon Rosa Parks.—i-D

This is part five of a six part series. Read the other installments here.

Needing a break from my comrades I latch on to another tour group at Auschwitz and hear the guide explain that a thousand people squeezed into a room for 200. I recall the late Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski, in his short story "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," talking about the nightmare within a nightmare of being in a lower bunk, under an inmate with typhus. You know, because of the dripping. He also talked about the stench.

But today there is no stench. The site is immaculate. And I realize that without the stench, without mud, this isn't hell. This is the Museum of Hell.

Somehow I've left the barracks and wandered downfield to the railroad siding where a lone period boxcar sits on the track. "The selection!" I hear myself cry. I'm standing on the spot where notorious Auschwitz physicist Dr. Mengele—or whomever was god that day—made his selections while an orchestra of inmate musicians played waltzes nearby.

Survivors recall that Mengele sniffed at the flower in his lapel as he decided the fate of new arrivals. Thumb to the right, the gas and chimney. To the left, hard labor. Fast unspeakably horrible death or slow unspeakably horrible death.
It doesn't matter how iconic the scene is, that it's been rendered in a thousand movies, described in books and documentaries into numbing cliché. As I said earlier, when you're actually standing there, on that ground, all preconceived notions you had about the place are erased. I hear myself, stealing a line from DeNiro in The Deer Hunter, saying aloud: "This is this." I keep my eyes on the ground my entire time at the camp, like a crack addict looking for crumbs. I don't know what I'm looking for. It's just… this earth, this dirt. Where the dead once marched. I bend down, pick up rocks, fill my pockets.

As I stagger off I'm struck by a strange sensation that the eyes of the murdered are staring up from beneath me, neither judging nor complaining. I crash past a clan of red-faced white people sitting on the ground, as if besotted by emotion, and head to the long courtyard between the infamous Blocks Ten and 11.

This is the Wall of Death, before which condemned prisoners—and by prisoners I mean men, women, babies in their mothers' arms—were paraded naked from the adjacent "dressing room" and shot in the neck.

From the outside these two long buildings, facing each other across a well-maintained walkway and courtyard, might be smallish Greenwich Village brownstones. As you approach the far end of the courtyard, however, a sign urges quiet and noise fades. This is the Wall of Death, before which condemned prisoners—and by prisoners I mean men, women, babies in their mothers' arms—were paraded naked from the adjacent "dressing room" and shot in the neck. Bouquets have been placed on the ground. Pebbles in the cracks. A guide explains that when business was brisk the SS used air pistols to spare the tender ears of the professionals inside the buildings.

Block Ten was Experimentation and Sterilization. This is where, among other things, Dr. Mengele busied himself sewing twins together, injecting dwarf children with gangrene, sterilizing legions of inmates by having them sit on irradiated benches. The usual.

Block 11 was the Torture Building. Over the door a small sign is still visible: BLOK SMIERCI. "Death Block." A rare case of non-euphemistic Nazi-speak. Block 11 was a nest of torture chambers within the open-air torture of the camp itself. Visitors walk down a narrow corridor, peering into each specially designed hellhole. The Suffocation Cell: custom made so occupants slowly use up the oxygen. Some guards would light candles and put them inside for the prisoners. The candles were not to illuminate but to suck up oxygen, speed asphyxiation. For inmates caught trying to escape there were the starvation cells, where victims were basically left to die—slowly—with no food or water.

Walk down the hall to the next door. Peer into the Standing Room, a three-square-foot box in which prisoners could do nothing but stand. "I had an apartment like that in college!" yucks Timmy the Memphis jokester.

And then I spot it, the most startling thing I've ever seen: the hair.

A woman in a hijab and her partner move quickly away from Timmy, as do what look to be a family of Norwegians, blonde blue-eyed types right out of Hitler's master race catalogue. I follow them out of the hallway and into a stairwell, where a throng of stunned-looking visitors make their way up the stairs.

No more cells. Now we're facing actual displays of actual items recovered when the Allies liberated the place. Call it an eloquent frenzy of objects: a mountain of suitcases, countless tangled eyeglasses, discarded artificial limbs piled behind the glass. (Among their other issues, it seems the Nazis had serious hoarding problems.) And then I spot it, the most startling thing I've ever seen: the hair. A swollen, unspeakable, unimaginable mass of human hair. Two tons, according to the plaque. Shorn from the newly dead by the sonderkommandos, Jews whose job it was, for extra food or cigarettes, to drag the freshly gassed corpses from the chamber and wrench the gold teeth from their mouths and shave their heads. Said hair, tainted with Zyklon B, was sent off to be turned into carpets, cloth, or delicate fibers for detonating bombs. The ashes, gathered in heaps, served to fertilize the Commandant's garden, the Germans being early recyclers.

I suddenly realize that I have not swallowed, barely breathed, since coming face to face with this room-filling human hairball.

Stumbling blindly outside—I don't know if my vision's blurred from grief or disbelief—I gulp for air and follow an Aussie I know from my group. For some reason, I keep repeating in my head, This is sanctified ground… This is sanctified ground…

Except maybe for the cafeteria, which I have somehow found myself in front of. Is Auschwitz Vegan? Hitler was famously vegetarian—not counting the Bulgarian fecal matter his personal physician, Dr. Morell, would supposedly mix in with his injections of morphine and methedrine. But that's not really eating…

Watching the mysteriously (to me) peckish visitors pour into the outdoor snack bar, I find myself just standing there, in the little road out front, staring with some grim amalgam of shock, revulsion, and genuine disbelief. Sensing my dismay, an old school gentlemen in a Homburg hat and suit, no small touch in 80-plus weather, steps beside me and stares at the death campers shoving pizza and chicken legs into their faces.

We stare together for what feels like a long time, or might have been seconds. Without looking at me he begins to speak, in an accent that may be Dutch, or Finnish, or even Icelandic. "You know, people assume the visitors' center—the souvenir shop, café, toilets—was built after the place was re-opened for tourism. The truth is, that building was put up in the early 40s. The spot where they're eating is where prisoners were tattooed and disinfected, where their heads were shaved. Their first traumatic entry into hell. Now commemorated by tourists munching pizza."

My new friend ambles off before introducing himself, merely stopping as he goes to add, "Look it up."

For minutes afterward, I can't take my eyes off the cafeteria. People, there's no way around it, are really chowing down. What is it about genocide that gives these folks such a hearty appetite? At what point will some savvy marketer take a page from showbiz joints like the Carnegie Deli, or Canters in LA, and offer sandwiches named for stars? Canters has the Jerry Lewis and Jack Benny. Why can't Auschwitz claim Eli Wiesel? Primo Levi Pastrami-on-Rye?

Who knows if that's more disrespectful than what's already on the menu—or the fact that there even is a menu?

Don't ask me. I have no appetite whatsoever, and head back to the bus.

Illustrations by Koren Shadmi

On Monday, Montreal city council unanimously approved a motion to recognize the Quebec metropolis as a sanctuary city—a move that would allow those without identification or documentation to use city services—but critics are calling the move an act of political opportunism.

Following in the footsteps of a number of Ontario cities, such as Toronto, Hamilton, and London, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre says the city's move to become a sanctuary city was largely a symbolic response to dialogue around a growing international immigration crisis, much of which relates to President Donald Trump's crackdown south of the border.

According to the Montreal Gazette , Coderre, previously an immigration minister under former prime minister Paul Martin's government, said that the motion will help to ensure those without documentation are seen as "victims" and not as criminals. He also noted that the city will push to—unlike Ontario's cities—allow those without identification to access provincial health and education services.  

"We are sending a message that refugees and those without papers are victims and so we have to help them," Coderre said. "We will ask Quebec to follow our lead, as we did with the (Vietnamese) boat people and Syrians. Some have been here for six to seven years. We need to fix their situations."

Toronto reaffirmed its stance as a sanctuary city shortly after protests against President Trump's immigration ban rocked the city for multiple days.

During an interview with VICE Tuesday morning Jaggi Singh, a prominent migrant-rights activist and spokesperson for the direct-to-action organization Solidarity Across Borders, called the vote a farce—citing similar votes in Toronto, London, and Hamilton, Ontario as being examples of how the phrase has become an empty promise in age where it's "easy to be progressive."

"It's not too difficult to distinguish yourself from Donald Trump in a city like Toronto or Montreal," Singh told VICE. "These are cities that are already diverse— not voting in favour of becoming a sanctuary city would actually be a political negative."

Singh, who has an extensive history of working with undocumented individuals, said that the problem with the concept of sanctuary cities is lack of restraint on police—noting how law enforcement who interact with someone who doesn't have documentation can still arrest and possibly attempt to deport that person if they want to.

"Cities need to have a direct responsibility here to make sure that police are not going to cooperate with the [Canadian Border Services Agency] (CBSA) if somebody gets stopped on the metro, or gets caught jay-walking," Singh told VICE, adding that he says this happens daily to people across the country.

"It's not just disingenuous, it's insulting."

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Lead image by Flickr user abdallah.