A huge crack in the ground—caused by iron ore mining—working its way towards Kiruna, Sweden. Photos by Klaus Thymann

The problem with aggressively mining a single specific site for over a century is that it tends to damage to the local landscape a bit. In Kiruna, for example—a Swedish town that’s been exploiting its iron ore resources since the 1800s—a huge crack caused by extensive digging is now moving towards the suburbs and threatening to swallow up thousands of homes.

This has obviously caused a few problems, the main one being that no one wants to buy a house that's about to disappear, leaving residents with no other option than to take a buyout offered by the government and move away.

A year ago, the photographer Klaus Thymann decided to spend the next decade documenting Kiruna's changing environment and the locals who decide to stay. I met up with him to talk about his project.

VICE: Can you tell me a little about Kiruna?
Klaus Thymann: Kiruna is a mining town in the very north of Sweden. I think it’s the world’s biggest iron ore mine—there were definitely mines there since before the town was founded in 1900. Because of the excessive mining, there's a massive crack moving at 15 meters [16 yards] a year toward the city. It doesn’t look man-made, it’s so irregular and torn up. It's scary. It means that the city is going to have to move elsewhere if it doesn't want to be swallowed by the earth.

That sucks.
Yeah. Looking at it from an engineering point of view, it’s pretty crazy that moving an entire city to a different location is even viable. People’s lives there are in a weird limbo. Most of these guys know that they’ll eventually have to move, but not exactly when. Also, they won’t be able to sell their houses because nobody’s going to want to buy. All they'll be given is a fixed fee by the government.

So there are plans to actually relocate some of the city's buildings?
Yeah. They're going to pack up a lot of the historic buildings, like the wooden church, and then resurrect them somewhere else. It's quite fascinating, really; it’s such a big, brutal project, and at the same time it’s also quite considerate—taking the old church down, putting it back up again. It says a lot about the complications of modern society—how we extract minerals from the earth, how we use the earth, and how we try to build our societies. I think it’s highly sophisticated.

Do you think that's a cultural thing? I'm not sure you'd get that same level of care in other countries.
Maybe. Sweden is quite a mature society, so I do think it probably has something to do with that. But this is also a modern project—20 years ago, things might have been different. We may have reached a point where our history and values actually influence our decisions.

How do you feel about that? Is it a good thing that these buildings are going to be moved?
Yes and no. This [destruction] is all still happening for the extraction of iron ore, but it's this complexity that fascinates me. By documenting it and by bringing people’s attention to the issue, I don’t pretend to have the answers, but if I can raise questions then I think I may have created an interesting picture.

From all the people you've met so far in Kiruna, are there any particular stories that have stood out?
Well, I met quite a few people who have to move pretty soon—in a year and a half or so. I can sympathize with that kind of uncertainty. When you know you aren't going to be in a place for that long, you stop caring about things like the chipped wallpaper. It must be an odd feeling—I don’t envy that.

A lot of them are going to move to the new town, but they're still dealing with all sorts of secondary issues—like, if they manage to sell, will the price of their old house match that of a new one? Then there are things as simple as the climate; the town lies within the Arctic Circle, which isn't ideal for construction.

When did you start working on this Kiruna project?
About a year ago. I’ve been up there twice so far. The plan is to keep going back frequently over about ten years or so. Some of the areas have already been shut off and are inaccessible, and some of the buildings are being taken down. Another aspect of the project is that each image is paired up with GPS coordinates. Because of that, I can start creating repetitive images—that way the viewer can see the changes over time. I don’t have a view as to when it’s going to finish, though.

Looking at your work, it's clear you have an interest in mapping. Why is that?
Back in the late 1990s in Denmark, I worked on a project called Virus. We were dealing with subject matters that were very peripheral, a little counter-culture. We were the first to do a series on ECHELON, for example, which was actually the prequel to PRISM; it’s a big surveillance system that taps information [transmitted through telecommunications systems]. I went on to work on Hybrids, where I documented hybrid cultures all around the world—things like underground gardening in Tokyo. And now I'm also working on Project Pressure, which is mapping out glaciers across the globe. That’s a collaborative effort.

What I’m looking for in projects are things that are mainly unexploited and can give people a different view of the world. You see a picture, and then hopefully you start looking at structures in a different way.

Follow Elektra on Twitter: @elektrakotsoni

The Trinity site, New Mexico (photo via)

In 1945, the world's first nuclear weapon was detonated at the Trinity site in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. The massive blast pulled the white desert sand up into an atomic fireball, the heat transforming the granules into green glass that fell back to the desert floor.

Days before and a few hundreds miles north, the world’s first ever nuclear weapons scientists mused over whether or not the atmosphere above the test site would be incinerated by the atomic reaction, ushering in a new age of apocalyptic fear that would define the next couple of generations.

A replica of the Fat Man bomb dropped over Nagasaki at the Trinity site (photo via)

Growing up in New Mexico, this history surrounds you. We had family trips to the Trinity site and school visits to the Bradbury Museum In Los Alamos, where we were thrust in front of full-sized replicas of the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before being subjected to goofy museum movies about the wonders of atomic energy.

My childhood home was situated almost directly between the two primary nuclear research and development sites in the country, Sandia and Los Alamos national labs. My university sat just a few miles from the single largest nuclear weapons cache in the world. 

"In New Mexico, we live in a radioactive web," said Jennifer Richter, former University of New Mexico professor.

A former Los Alamos scientist, who requested anonymity, told me, "The US nuclear complex is either unacknowledged or considered antiquated Cold War stuff. But look at the world today—Iran and North Korea, the global investment into nuclear energy and the meltdown in Japan. It's coming full circle, with New Mexico at the center."

And that's not just patriotic hyperbole; in his book The Nuclear Borderlands, author Joseph Masco describes New Mexico as "the only state in the US supporting the entire cradle-to-grave nuclear economy." This includes uranium mining, nuclear weapons design and testing, the largest single arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the only permanent depository for US military industrial nuclear waste in the country.

An aerial view of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (photo via)

Los Alamos, the birthplace of the nuclear weapons program, is located on an isolated mesa at the base of a dormant volcano in northern New Mexico. In pre-history, these mountains provided the raw material for early weapons; Native Americans throughout the southwest would travel hundreds of miles to acquire obsidian—which, despite sounding like a Stan Lee comic book villain, is actually cooled volcanic rock—from the crater for their arrowheads and spear points.

In 1943, another techno-pilgrimage took place, this time by thousands of brilliant minds coming together to unlock the power of the atom. The "Manhattan Project" was a success, and its outgrowth—the Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL)—remains America's premier nuclear weapons research facility, pulling in nearly $2 billion in federal funds annually. 

But in Los Alamos—the city that owes everything to the atom—the most iconic, and improbable, figure in recent history is anti-nuclear activist Ed Grothus. A former weapons maker turned nuclear abolitionist, Grothus was the owner of the atomic salvage yard known as the "Black Hole," and chaplain of the "High Church of High Technology," where the self-appointed cardinal would deliver bomb "un-worship" sermons. 

Grothus began as a weapons machinist for LANL, building "better bombs" during the golden atomic age. But in 1969, he quit his job to pursue his business and activist interests full time, spending the rest of his years—until his death in 2009—pissing off the nuclear establishment. One time he allegedly taped "United Nations" to the side of his car and drove around the labs looking for weapons of mass destruction. In another stunt, he sent a can of corn labelled "ORGANIC PLUTONIUM" to then president Bill Clinton. In turn, he received a visit from the Secret Service. 

"That's Ed—everything he did was a criticism of the nuclear insanity of this state," said long-time friend Bob Holmes.

Ed Grothus standing outside the Black Hole, 2004 (‪photo courtesy of the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM)

In the 1950s, a good decade before he started his anti-nuclear activism, Ed opened the Black Hole, a kind of bric-a-brac shop that contained all the techno-scientific relics he'd collected during his time in the labs. Filled with Geiger counters, decommissioned bomb parts, archaic computers and centrifuges, the place was both a playground for budding rogue scientists and a rare look inside the still highly secretive government labs.  

In 1976, Ed and his wife bought an old grocery store and put down the atomic thrift store's roots. The new Black Hole soon became a base for Ed's campaign for nuclear disarmament, the objective being to recycle all the scientific equipment for use in peaceful endeavours. 

From then until its closure in 2012, Ed's creation was a shrine to his belief that "one bomb is too many."

The fireball from the Trinity test, captured 25 milliseconds after detonation (photo via)

The nuclear madness of the Cold War began in earnest in 1943. The Trinity bomb drop was the first of 1,149 nuclear detonations by the US government, 942 of which took place within the continental US. The massive radiation released into the atmosphere during the period of nuclear proliferation has left its atomic signature on every human being, colonizing our biosphere.

Today, the dangers of nuclear fallout, atomic warfare, and radiation are all well known. But the legacy of the bomb remains complicated. 

As Souta Takashi, a Japanese American who visited the Trinity site in 2006, said: "For me, this is a solemn place. It represents death, destruction, the beginning of troubling times. But what I saw was Americans coming here, barbecuing, celebrating, laughing. It was disturbing."

US veteran Michael Guzman disagrees: "This bomb ended a war, saving hundreds of thousands of American lives," he said. "The deterrent power of our bombs means no more world wars. That is something worth celebrating."

The site is open to the public two days a year and attracts a wide range of visitors—from protesters and military veterans through to amateur scientists and alien enthusiasts.

To some, the detonation of the first bomb was a disaster—opening a door that can never be closed again. To others, it was a godsend—the strongest deterrent power ever invented, the argument being that the horrors of its use make another Nagasaki or Hiroshima almost inconceivable. But while they might have been proved right—in that a nuclear Holocaust has so far been averted—we still live with the consequences of the bomb's production.

"Trinity Test Site, August, 1945", graphite and radioactive charcoal on paper by Nina Elder, 2012 (image courtesy of the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM)

In 1999, hundreds of people from Carlsbad, New Mexico, gathered in town to cheer on the first truck delivering barrels of deadly nuclear waste to the nearby Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) site. WIPP is the America's only deep geological depository for nuclear waste, designed to house thousands of tons of the deadly material produced by the US nuclear-industrial complex.

The town of Carlsbad pushed for the development of the original WIPP site and is now lobbying the federal government to expand the project to take more than a hundred thousand tons of the worst nuclear waste in the country.

But, shockingly, not everyone is in favor of living above highly radioactive discharge. "It's dumbfounding, really," said Albuquerque resident Maria Cisneros. "The idea that you would bring this kind of poison to your doorstep makes no sense."

Former Carlsbad resident Matt French disagrees: "It's simple," he said. "WIPP means money and jobs."

The material impounded at the WIPP site has a half-life of 10,000 years, bad news for any future generations who decide to go digging in the southern New Mexico desert.

To deal with this eventuality, the US Department of Energy has, since 1983, worked with linguists, anthropologists, futurists, art historians, and science-fiction writers to come up with a warning system—permanent markers for future generations, including a sign featuring a man without any hair pulling Macaulay Culkin's Home Alone face.

Unsurprisingly, the process of imagining a world 10,000 years from now has proved troublesome. Any notion of national, linguistic, technological, or cultural continuity from present day is unlikely. Meaning the waste products of our nuclear technologies force us to think about our actions today in relationship to a world that cannot possibly be conceived.

As Jennifer Richter told me, "That eternal legacy is thought-provoking, in a way that we are not trained to provoke our thoughts."

I suppose it's only fitting that New Mexico, where the atomic age began, is also the primary resting place of its excess. And at the WIPP site, New Mexico’s atomic legacy will outlive us all.

Voltage says there's only way to take part in the McConaissance. Screencap via. 

On Friday, news broke that Canada’s federal court came to a decision regarding a demand from Voltage Pictures, a production studio responsible The Hurt Locker and Dallas Buyers Club along with a smattering of unknown movies, that wanted Canada’s most downloader-friendly ISP, TekSavvy, to release the identities of subscribers that Voltage alleged had illegally downloaded their films. As I wrote in December 2012, this case has all the hallmarks of copyright trolling; a legal practice that has clogged up courtrooms in the United States with mass amounts of lawsuits that tend to go nowhere.

To launch this noble legal crusade, Voltage teamed up with an organization called Canipre, which exists simply to punish Canadian downloaders who are getting away with virtual larceny. Canipre proudly claims that when copyright-infringement hooligans are “asked” to stop downloading, 95% of them do. This unverifiable statistic alludes to the funny logic and threatening tactics that studios like Voltage have adopted. Canipre is the same organization that VICE’s West Coast Editor, Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, pointed out was also guilty of copyright infringement.

Hilariously apt hypocrisy aside, Voltage Pictures fought to get contact information for about 2,000 TekSavvy users so it could send them threatening letters, in order to cash in off of their fear. While these letters are designed to indicate some kind of forthcoming legal threat, in reality, if the downloader doesn’t pay up there’s very little chance that an actual lawsuit will follow (based on American precedents). As these cases have spread across the United States, there are online resources like Fight Copyright Trolls, which have been created for people caught up in this shakedown system. The Pietz Law Firm, an LA Based intellectual property practice, has a whole page on their site for “Slaying the Copyright Troll.”

In it they write: “the troll is really after… a few thousand easy dollars. Litigation is very difficult and expensive. What the troll really wants are any easy settlements that can be obtained without having to do the work of actually serving a lawsuit and then litigating it in court… It is no surprise or coincidence that many copyright trolls price their monetary settlement demands at around the same price that it costs to hire a defense lawyer. Most lawyers will charge you a few thousand dollars to represent you in a case like this.”

They offer a solution called the “ostrich defense,” named after the flightless weirdo bird’s tendency to bury its head in the sand and cut off the outside world—which would be completely inadvisable and wildly irresponsible if you were charged with a real crime where someone got hurt, or physical property was damaged. But apparently in the world of copyright trolling, you can basically just pretend like nothing ever happened: “Pretend there is not a problem, and hope that the lawsuit simply goes away. As I noted above, there is actually a good chance that the case will eventually go away. So this approach can actually be effective. Many trolls never bother to serve people with the lawsuit (which is required if you want to actually bring a case to trial) after they get their list of names from the ISP’s. For the copyright troll, time is better spent simply trying to collect from their list of names than actually litigating.” 

Of course, this approach would not guarantee that you will be absolved from all legal threats nor does this article constitute legal advice. Plus, I would imagine that many people who happen to receive these letters do in fact panic, pay the troll toll, and throw their computer out of a window to prevent it from ever happening again. The United States has also dealt cases where porn studios have tried trolling people in the same way; imagine getting a letter from a mysterious organization telling you they know about your porn habit and they were going to come after you in court? Mortifying.

Canipre, well aware of the ominous properties of red text. Screencap via.

One such porn trolling case, which was filed by a classy group called Sunlust Pictures, was thrown out of a Tampa courtroom for “attempted fraud on the Court” after no actual Sunlust Pictures employees attended the proceeding. Apparently Sunlust sent a man to represent them who was not an attorney, nor was he an employee of said porn studio that has produced such hits as Trinity St. Clair’s Sexual Odyssey and True Lesbians. ArsTechnica referred to the case and its massive failure as “surreal.”

Clearly the Canadian courts have been watching this headache-inducing copyright trolling cancer spread through the American courts, so while Voltage Pictures did score the names of the TekSavvy users it was after, the conditions under which it is allowed to contact said users have been heavily regulated by the courts to make sure this kind of nonsense doesn’t override our legal system.

As Michael Geist wrote for the Toronto Star: “The safeguards include court oversight of the ‘demand letter’ that will be sent to subscribers, with a case management judge assigned to review and approve its contents before being sent to any subscriber. Moreover, the letter must include a message in bold type that ‘no Court has yet made a determination that such subscriber has infringed or is liable in any way for payment of damages.’” Voltage Pictures is also on the hook to pay TekSavvy for their “costs” in digging up this subscriber info and providing it to the movie studio.

So, if you did happen to download a copy of the Dallas Buyers Club or The Hurt Locker over TekSavvy’s internet-tubes, you may be in for a surprise in your mailbox sometime soon. While there’s no guarantee you will be absolved from an actual lawsuit if you ignore the thing, shred it, light it on fire, or put it in the recycling box like the eco-friendly Canadian you are, it doesn’t sound like our courts have given Voltage very many teeth to bite you with. Hopefully this will deflect future trolling cases from polluting Canada’s courts in the future; and remember: if you enjoyed watching Matthew McConaughey flip new-age AIDS medication in the fictional world of Dallas Buyers Club, maybe you should just go ahead and buy the BluRay.
 

@patrickmcguire

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“I’m a farmer.”

These were the words used by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán when he was asked what he did for a living before news cameras on June 10, 1993, following his arrest and extradition to Mexico after years on the run. In a way, no truer words have been spoken in the history of the country’s bizarre and bloody drug war.

Guzmán was indeed a kind of “farmer.” The poppy and marijuana crops under his control were the basis of a multi-billion-dollar transnational trafficking empire that would eventually make him one of the richest and most wanted men in the world.

He was sentenced to 20 years in a maximum-security prison, but in 2001 he managed to escape, cartoonishly, in a laundry cart. Guzmán expanded his reach by trafficking marijuana, heroin, and cocaine into the United States, Europe, and Australia. He is said to exert control over most of western Mexico, parts of Guatemala, and trafficking ports in East Africa. While his nickname means “Shorty,” there’s nothing diminutive about El Chapo’s stature in the illicit drug world. Forbes has regularly named him in its lists of richest and “most powerful” people.

Guzmán’s prosperous stint as a fugitive came to an end again on Saturday morning following an epic 13-year manhunt across the country, leaving a trail of blood and tragedy as his Sinaloa cartel ruthlessly fought off Mexico's security forces on one front and combated rival cartels over control of the country’s lucrative drug trade on another.

Shortly before 7 AM, Mexican authorities captured Guzmán in this condominium building overlooking the water in the Pacific resort city of Mazatlán, in Sinaloa. No shots were fired in the raid, which was assisted by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the US Marshals Service, and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Condo #401 looks plain, almost shabby, in photos taken after the raid that led to Guzmán’s capture.

Mexican authorities addressed the media on February 22.

Guzmán was flown to Mexico City. In the afternoon, after Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam delivered a brief statement on the tarmac of the international airport, uniformed soldiers wearing face masks led the drug lord from a navy hangar to a federal police helicopter.

Guzmán wore dark jeans, a pale long-sleeved shirt, and a formidable mustache. The kingpin was briefly seen hunched over and wearing handcuffs. He didn’t take questions and wasn’t heard speaking before the helicopter swiftly carried him away to the Altiplano federal prison. (The Justice Department announced on Sunday that it will seek Guzmán’s extradition to the US.)

Mexican authorities also took no questions; the dais and flag that were used for their statements were packed up within seconds of the helicopter’s departure.

Mexicans were left to absorb the fall of a mythic figure in the country's recent history. Many wondered what would come next. Despite recent drug liberalization initiatives within the United States—the leading drug-consuming nation in the world—Mexico’s drug war has shown no signs of abating.

Guzmán’s role in the US-Mexico drug trade is a mystery, and colored by allegations that he or his operatives maintain contact with US and Mexican authorities—even as protected informants.

Jesús Vicente Zambada, a major Sinaloa cartel operative who was extradited to Chicago to face trafficking charges, has claimed in court that US agents in Mexico gave him and other cartel members immunity in exchange for information about rival cartels, particularly the bloodthirsty Zetas. US prosecutors insist that he had no such deal with federal agents. (Zambada is still awaiting trial.)

While associates and relatives of Guzmán have been arrested or killed in shootouts in recent years, including his 22-year-old son Edgar in 2008, others in his inner circle have been known to move about on either side of the border.

In the summer of 2011, Guzmán’s wife, Emma Coronel, gave birth to twin girls at a hospital in Los Angeles County. Guzmán married the former beauty queen in a extravagant party in 2007 when she was only 18. Federal agents monitored Coronel, a US citizen, while she was in California. Because there were no charges against her, she freely returned to Mexico with her children.

Guzmán was born in 1957 in a village called La Tuna, located in the Sinaloa municipality of Badiraguato—one of the poorest counties in all of Mexico. His father was a gomero, or poppy farmer, but Guzmán grew up mostly poor and neglected, and eager to prove himself.

Badiraguato is considered the gateway to the so-called Golden Triangle, the rough and remote poppy- and cannabis-growing region of the Sierra Madre mountain range that runs down western Mexico, dominating Sinaloa and neighboring Durango and Chihuahua. Some of the biggest names in Mexico’s narcotics industry were also born in Badiraguato, including Rafael Caro Quintero, an old-school drug lord who was released from prison on a technicality last August after 28 years behind bars.

According to the book The Last Narco by Malcolm Beith, Guzmán got started in the drug industry as a lieutenant to Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, considered the godfather of Mexico’s cocaine shipping trade, in what was then known as the Guadalajara cartel. After Félix Gallardo’s capture in 1989, Guzmán and his group within the Sinaloa cartel effectively took over and began expanding, killing, or disappearing anyone who stood in their way. By 1993, when Guzmán survived an assassination attempt in Guadalajara that left an archbishop dead, El Chapo’s legend already loomed large in Mexico.

Pressure began mounting on the government to score a victory against the drug traffickers, which led to Guzmán’s capture in the summer of 1993 by Guatemalan authorities and his extradition to Mexico. Guzmán reportedly carried on a lavish lifestyle within the maximum-security prison Puente Grande. He was so well pampered during his stint in the pit, according to a 2009 Wall Street Journal profile of Guzmán, his set-up sounds like it might have been swankier than the beachside condo in Mazatlán. He had a television and a cellphone to direct his drug empire, selected meals from a menu, smuggled plenty of contraband, and received visits from cartel members and prostitutes. He kept a supply of Viagra on hand.

Guzmán’s escape coincided with the transition to a multiparty democracy after the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was interrupted by the election of President Vicente Fox, a member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN). Fox took office in December 2000 as the first non-PRI president in Mexico’s post-Revolutionary history. Guzmán escaped from Puente Grande a month later.

The country’s bitterly contested 2006 presidential election resulted in a second presidential term for PAN under Felipe Calderón. Immediately after taking office, Calderón launched a military campaign against drug cartels in his home state of Michoacán. The new President even made an appearance in public wearing military fatigues.

Troops rolled into cities and towns within cartel territories, sparking warfare in major cities like Monterrey, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Morelia, Acapulco, and Culiacán, Sinaloa’s capital.

The six years of Calderón’s sole presidential term proved to be the bloodiest period in Mexico’s history since its revolution, more than a century before. At least 60,000 people were killed in drug violence during that time, and some 26,000 people went missing. Only a small fraction of these cases will ever be solved. Most of these atrocities occurred due to a government-approved, prohibitionist drug war in which Guzmán was arguably the most symbolic figure.

Sightings of Guzmán abounded for the next several years. He was said to be in Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, and even the US. Narcocorridos about his exploits could be heard in nightclubs, on YouTube, and over the airwaves in northern Mexico (until authorities banned their broadcast). When Guzmán dined out, he would pay the tabs of the other diners. It seemed for a while that El Chapo was everywhere except prison.

In 2009, a Catholic archbishop in the state of Durango said that Guzmán was living just up the road from a town called Guanacevi. “Everyone knows it, except the authorities,” the priest said.

The Sinaloa cartel made strategic decisions to combat its rivals the Gulf cartel, the Zetas, and the Beltran Leyva gang across Mexico. Violence erupted in Guerrero, Veracruz, and Michoacán, with Mexico’s security forces killing and capturing various capos.

Ciudad Juarez saw the worst of the warfare by far. An estimated 11,000 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez between 2007 and 2012. Over the same span, more than 7,000 civilian complaints of military abuses were registered with the country’s National Human Rights Commission.

In the course of the conflict, the US played an unprecedented role in Mexican law enforcement, making it seem almost as though the US agents operating in Mexico were practically in control of the push to find and capture Guzmán and others. Calderón left office in December 2012 and turned over power to Enrique Peña Nieto, returning the PRI to the presidency and introducing uncertainty about the direction of the fight against cartels.

With Guzmán’s capture, there’s no telling what will happen next. History has shown that the capture of top capos in Mexico often precipitates a violent struggle among splintering forces to fill the power vacuum. The leadership of the Sinaloa cartel is said to have shifted to Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, Jesús Vicente's father, who is believed to be Guzmán’s second-in-command. But reports have also noted that Dámaso López, a young, flashy capo known as “El Mini Lic,” could position himself strongly within the top ranks of the Sinaloa cartel in Guzmán’s absence.

At the same time, rival cartels could detect an opening in Guzmán’s arrest and seek to regain ground that they have lost to the Sinaloa cartel in recent years. This would be a very dark turn of events.

Follow Daniel on Twitter @longdrivesouth

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Photos by Kristina Podobed

On January 19, Ukraine's Orthodox Christians celebrated the ancient holiday of Epiphany the same way they always do: by going down to the Black Sea for a mass winter swim. People from all over the country flock to its icy waters in the name of God, who, they believe, revealed himself as Jesus on that day tons of years ago.

Odessa is an historically recreational city. Locals are known as Ukraine’s biggest hedonists, which might be the reason why they are also considered the least politically active folk in the country. This year, while the streets of Kiev were being consumed by rioting protesters, the "Walruses of Odessa" spent Epiphany trying to set a mass swimming record at Langeron beach.

The Walruses are a local club, formed by people who believe that controlled exposure to the cold strengthens the body. Officially, 750 people joined them to dive into the Black Sea that day—unofficially, the number was put at 2,000. The event was supported by the Young Regions Party, a junior subdivision of the Party of Regions, which was headed up by recently ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.

These pictures show a few of the last moments of peace before our country faced the true nature of its criminal government.

This guy did not manage the cold as well as the other walruses and fainted.

See more of Kristina's work here

Red River ice jam, in 2009. Screencap via.

As the coldest winter in Manitoba’s recent history grinds interminably onward, Manitoba Hydro, the province’s publicly owned energy provider, has been raking in all kinds of bucks. According to the public utility’s recent quarterly report, the past nine months of Hydro’s net income was $72 million, thanks to a combination of high domestic use and third-quarter energy exports to the tune of $338 million. During the same nine-month period in 2012-13, Hydro had a net loss of $38 million.

On the coldest goddamn day of the year, when media around the world mocked Winnipeg for being “colder than Mars,” the Winnipeg Free Press reported that Manitobans set a provincial record for electrical demand, burning through a whopping 4,632 megawatts (MW) as temperatures plummeted past -50C in some parts of the province. While Manitoba Hydro’s total provincial generating capacity sits at 5,675 MW, Hydro is not hesitating to use these numbers to its advantage as it tries to win approval for its current wet dream projects in the hinterland of northern Manitoba: the Keeyask and Conawapa dams.

The public utility released a series of pamphlets last week detailing the province’s expected energy needs over the next 20 years, predicting a “shortfall of dependable energy by 2023,” and hyping hydroelectric power as a better alternative to competing sources like natural gas. Economic, environmental, and social benefits were also extolled.

At the same time, Manitoba Hydro is undergoing hearings with the Clean Environment Commission and the Public Utilities Board in an attempt to convince Manitobans that these two massive developments along the Nelson River—which combined would generate over 2,000 MW of “clean, renewable” power—are a no-brainer. But critics and concerned First Nations believe these developments could cause more economic, environmental, and social hardships in the north than they would benefit.

“I absolutely do not believe they are necessary,” Peter Kulchyski, a professor at the University of Manitoba and a regulatory intervener on behalf of the Concerned Fox Lake Grassroots Citizens against proposed Hydro developments, told VICE. Kulchyski believes that the proposed dams intended use is purely for export purposes. The market itself for that energy is precarious at best, with hydraulic fracturing opening up increasing stores of cheap natural gas in North Dakota and other would-be client states. “The result of fracking is that [southern buyers] don’t need the power.”

Kulchyski isn’t the only public voice questioning the need for these developments. In December, Larry Kusch and Bruce Owens of the Free Press wrote about current trends in US energy consumption towards natural gas, and came to the conclusion that if these trends continue, there will be no need for Conawapa. However, they do acknowledge that Keeyask is as good as a done deal, and could to be up and running by 2021.

As for environmental impacts, Manitoba Hydro and the provincial government have always sold the public on hydroelectricity as a “green” alternative to natural gas or coal generated power. And in the face of widespread fracking and oil sands development, the argument is an easy one to make. You don’t have to blast the substrata with a deadly chemical cocktail or turn huge sections of forest into a hellish moonscape to get power from a hydro dam. But hydroelectric development is far from environmentally neutral.

Members of the Fox Lake First Nation, one of four First Nations who would become partners with Hydro in the Keeyask development, have already seen irreparable changes to their traditional territory.

“Generations before us witnessed the unspoiled beauty of Fox Lake,” Avery Wilkie, a youth delegate from Fox Lake First Nation, told the Clean Environment Commission on December 10, 2013. “But we haven't. We have only seen the after effects each dam leaves behind.”

Some of the effects of previous Hydro developments on waterways in northern Manitoba include polluted drinking water; loss of fish and wildlife habitat; along with unnaturally fluctuating water levels that lead to increased rates of erosion of banks which makes travel on the Nelson, and other rivers, unsafe. The proposed dams would not only impact the Nelson River, but would also flood nearby trap lines used for generations, and impact volatile woodland caribou habitat and endangered sturgeon spawning areas, among other key species.

“If you count the roads and the increased traffic on the roads, the quarries, the construction campsites themselves, the transmission lines, the transformer stations, the garbage dumps and waste disposal, it’s ridiculous,” Kulchyski told VICE. “The traffic alone will scare wildlife away.”

“If Keeyask has to be built,” Wilkie told the CEC, “build it so damage to our land and water is not so adversely affected to our people.”

Hydro, of course, promises to mitigate any environmental disturbance as a result of development. But so do developers in the oil sands.

Economic and environmental impacts may be relatively straightforward and quantifiable, but the social impacts on northern communities are much more difficult to assess. It is well documented that while resource development generally brings piles of cash in to communities that desperately need it, that cash infusion is often followed by a rash of social problems.

Despite the abundant risks, many northern residents remain cautiously optimistic about partnership with Hydro on the Keeyask and Conawapa projects. But if the experience of the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and their recent partnership with Hydro on the Wuskwatim dam is any indication fo what to expect, First Nations and other northern residents should be wary. After cost over-runs more than doubled Wuskwatim’s price tag to $1.7 billion, Nisichawayasihk finds itself burdened with over $36 million in debt. It could be decades before the community realizes any tangible economic benefits. By comparison, costs are estimated at $6.2 billion for Keeyask and over $10 billion for Conawapa, without including the costs of building the Bipole 3 transmission line to transport the electricity to southern markets.

Besides, Kulchyski predicts that any jobs First Nations might see from upcoming Hydro projects would be short-term, unskilled, and would only serve to further “exacerbate existing inequalities.” 

“The jobs that are created are at the very bottom of a racially stratified workforce,” he says, echoing a concern of many who spoke before the CEC. The youth delegates from Fox Lake in particular stressed the need for meaningful training and opportunity for advancement, not just jobs. “The experience from the Nisichawayasihk is that many Aboriginal workers don’t last very long on the job, because they’re treated like dirt. Because they are on the bottom of the hierarchy, and everybody knows that they got the job because [their] First Nation fought for them to get it.”

“This is the end of the traditional culture,” Kulchyski continued, citing the testimonials of trappers from the Concerned Fox Lake Grassroots Citizens group. Even though neither Keeyask nor Conawapa have passed all their regulatory hurdles, Hydro is already building access roads and clearing brush for work camps. “They’ve already pulled the trigger... It’s the end of the trapping way of life for the community. That means it’s basically the end of the culture.”

Industrial projects on the scale of Hydro’s developments in northern Manitoba since the 1970s are difficult, if not impossible, for southern residents to wrap their heads around, as are the often tragic implications for First Nations communities that result. When southern residents are also the beneficiaries of such mega-projects, it’s even harder to argue against them. Manitobans—myself included—enjoy the lowest electricity rates in North Am erica. The uncomfortable reality is that we continue to do so at the expense of Indigenous communities in the northern hinterlands whose constitutionally protected, traditional way of life is on its last legs.

@badguybirnie

Mossless in America is a column featuring interviews with documentary photographers. The series is produced in partnership with Mossless magazine, an experimental photography publication run by Romke Hoogwaerts and Grace Leigh. Romke started Mossless in 2009, as a blog in which he interviewed a different photographer every two days; since 2012 the magazine has produced two print issues, each dealing with a different type of photography. Mossless was featured prominently in the landmark 2012 exhibition Millennium Magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is supported by Printed Matter, Inc. Its third issue, a major photographic volume on American documentary photography from the last ten years, titled The United States (2003-2013), will be published this spring.

Springtime starts with a bang in Afghanistan, as it marks the start of the fighting season between the Taliban and Afghan security forces. For the first time in 12 years, the Afghan National Army (ANA) has to operate without their American allies following the US troops' withdrawal. Golareh Kiazand, from VICE News, travels to Kandahar to see how the ANA, the police, and ordinary Afghans deal with this turning point in a very long war. 

Most of you have never heard of him. He never threatened to jump out of an office window when a client wouldn’t buy his ad, like George Lois, or famously suggested the headline "From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor" for a Panasonic campaign, like Jerry Della Femina.

He is the Midwestern son of a preacher. As an adman he was shy; not a braggart. He vomited before client presentations—not from liquor like that hack Don Draper, but from fear. Fear that this new client wouldn’t have the balls to buy his ballsy ads. But for him, advertising was always about one thing only: the work. Nothing else mattered.

You won’t find much information about Tom McElligott online. He didn’t give very many interviews. He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. And his Minneapolis start-up agency, Fallon McElligott Rice, made their mark in the pre-world wide web years of 1981 - '88. This was smack in the middle of the mega-merger phenomenon of big Madison Avenue agencies swallowing other big Madison Avenue agencies—a development that forever destroyed a lot of the creativity and spirit of the advertising industry.

I was attending advertising concept courses at the School of Visual Arts in the mid-1980s, so I had access to the One Show Awards annuals. The One Show was (and probably still is) the highest quality American advertising awards show. At the time, the annuals were essentially yearbooks for Fallon McElligott Rice. They were that good.

I plastered the felt-covered cubicle walls at my first ad agency copywriting job with those McElligott ads (see some of them below), carefully, selfishly X-ACTO-ed out of the annuals. Another thing on my wall was this quote by McElligott:

“I’d much rather overestimate the intelligence of the consumer than underestimate it.”

Don’t be fooled by his aw-shucks friendly face. McElligott was always the smartest man in the presentation room, and an unrelenting bear when it came to selling his work. Some of that tenacity comes through in this 1986 interview in Inc. magazine (where the vomiting stories I heard at SVA are confirmed). The reporter kept trying—and failing—to poke holes in McElligott’s philosophy.

McElligott left his own agency in 1988, apparently unhappy with its creative direction. (Today, the agency he started with account guy Pat Fallon is owned by Publicis, and doesn’t even have his name on the door.) He worked briefly for Chiat\Day, and then in 1991, the same year he was elected into the Advertising Hall of Fame, he launched another Minneapolis start-up—McElligott Wright Morrison White. It quickly failed, thanks largely to the disintegration of the super-competitive creative spirit of the 1980s ad industry, the spirit which he thrived on. He retired from advertising in 1993, before the age of 50.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview he did for an ad student, after retiring:

“Don’t be distracted by anything. The work is what counts. There are a lot of things that can get in your way, that take up your time and your emotional and intellectual energy; none of them account for anything. They mean nothing. The only thing, in the final analysis, at this stage of the game, that really counts, is the work. The work is everything. The years that I spent in advertising I saw an awful lot of people who had the potential to be good lose a lot of their ability to distraction, to politics, to fear, and to who has the bigger office. You’ll get the bigger office; you’ll make the money. Anything you want will happen, but sometimes it’s hard for people to see that when they’re in the middle of it. It looks like it’s incredibly complicated. Well, it’s not complicated at all. In fact, it’s so uncomplicated it’s amazing. All it is about is the work. Finally, if you do the work people will notice and you will get what you want. That’s it. It’s as simple as that.”

This is applicable to much more than creating ads, obviously.

Now let’s start your master class in advertising copywriting.

The most famous, and probably most successful, campaign McElligott created was the “Perception/Reality” business-to-business print ads for Rolling Stone.

The ads were placed in trade publications like AdAge to change the media’s perception that the Rolling Stone reader was a stinky counterculture bra-burning hippie with no money. McElligott even created a scratch and sniff execution (use your imagination about what the two smells were).

As far as my opinionated ass is concerned, this is the best business-to-business ad campaign in history. The side-by-side perception/reality idea has been redone ad nauseam, less effectively, over the last 35 years. If you’re wondering how successful the campaign actually was, ask founder Jann Wenner how much his ad revenue jumped.

This Hush Puppies campaign was a client’s wet dream—product name in every headline, product shots in every layout—yet the ads were still hilarious, and featured the cutest brand mascot ever. Has there been a better shoe campaign since? Nike in the 1990s, by Wieden & Kennedy. That’s about it.

Two brilliant Public Service Ads for two very different clients. Left: a Stevie Wonder testimonial—funny, memorable, and damn effective. Copy reads: "Driving after drinking, or riding with a driver who’s been drinking, is a big mistake. Anybody can see that.” Right: a simple undeniable truth for the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

McElligott got himself a whiskey account in the mid-80s; a whiskey account with no money to spend on production. Not a problem if you have a great fucking concept with legs, a big idea. The campaign makes you want to run to the nearest bar for that first drink. And it did it with stock photos. Brilliant.

One of McElligott’s early clients was the Episcopal Church. Better ads for a church have never been written. Period.

PETA used their full name in ads in the 1980s. And they ran ads that weren’t the sexist garbage they do today. It’s often not effective to use shock value visuals in PSAs, but with the right writing, it can work. No matter your view on animal experimentation, I dare you to tell me these ads aren’t effective.

If you’re wondering about TV commercials, McElligott did them, too, and did them well. But not many of them are online. An exception is this Penn tennis balls commercial.

It takes the tired product demonstration bromide and hysterically turns it on its head (please excuse the laugh track). This ad would of course never pass muster today. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all”—perfect tagline.

Flash-forward to the 2014 advertising industry. The great copywriter is dead and buried. He was already wheezing when McElligott left the industry. He dropped dead about ten years ago. Now everybody is a “creative” (even those who “create” the new awful native advertising garbage), and creatives create “content.” It’s a happy little NO HATERZ kumbaya business, where things faintly resembling ads are assembled by groups brainstorming, not by two-person teams of copywriters and art directors—the only way to make great advertising.

The above collection is just a smattering of McElligott’s great ads. Dave Dye has collected every Fallon McElligott Rice print ad that can be found online. If you work in a creative field—especially if you’re a Social Media Dipshit—go look at the ads, here. Now.

@copyranter

Sean Devlin, with the the 300 cans of donated food from the SHD community. Photos via Vanessa Lorraine-Phillips.

On February 12, at 7:40 AM, a group of six young activists representing Shit Harper Did (SHD) erected a wall of 300 cans of food in Toronto's financial district, literally blockading the entrance to the Conservative Cabinet Ministers regional office. Sean Devlin, a SHD representative, claims the Conservative government's new budget completely ignores this country’s nasty case of growing economic inequality: “Right now inequality in Canada is actually accelerating faster than it is in the United States, and it’s predominantly impacting younger people a lot harder than those over 35. The unemployment rate for folks under 25 is almost double what the national average is. That's a big part of why we decided to do this today.”

The demonstration, which has quietly flown under the media radar, was also inspired by an unfortunately crass PR snafu from the Federal Minister of Industry, James Moore, who obnoxiously asked a reporter: “Is it my job to feed my neighbours child? I don’t think so.” Despite J-Mo’s subsequent half-assed apology, Shit Harper Did felt that if politicians don’t have the time or money to ensure their children are fed because they’re too busy pissing it all away on ad campaigns about how great our economy is—then they might as well pile a truckload of non-perishable items in front of the Toronto Conservative Cabinet office to make a point.

While the idea of watching ministerial security guards try to figure out what to do with stacks of canned chick peas is, at the very least, amusing, the point the activists were trying to make is serious: 4 million Canadians now struggle with sufficient access to healthy food, an ugly truth made evident by a 23 percent rise since 2008 in the portion of Canadians reliant on food banks. To add insult to injury this comes at a time when Conservative tax cuts have allowed the largest corporations to hoard over have a trillion dollars in tax payer subsided profits.

"Canada's top 100 CEOs earned an average of 171 times what the average Canadian worker hopes to make. A third of all food bank users in Toronto are 18 or under. 20 percent of those using food banks have graduated from high school or university. The Conservatives promised to create jobs, but food banks are witnessing the devastating impacts of rising income inequality," said Vanessa Lorraine Phillips, one of the protestors.

Security guard scolding the decidedly unconcerned SHD team.

The protestors also argue that the Tories are actually planning to make matters worse by introducing a tax gift for well off families that would only create more inequality.

SHD volunteers from across Toronto donated the nutritious obstruction of mostly vegetarian protein. Unfortunately for them, however, the much-needed food was confiscated. The Minister’s office then proceeded to throw a hissy fit, refusing to confirm if the food would be delivered to the food bank or thrown in the trash (it was later confirmed that after two days, the cans were finally donated to the food bank).

The food blockade was just one example of a nation-wide movement that the SHD crew is cultivating. According to Sean Devlin, the tools will soon be in place to provide people across the country with access to the same system these activists used to make the action happen. “The Shit Harper Did portal is going to provide people across Canada with the ability to log in and start an event in their community which is going to be about gathering food to do something like what we did today. It will allow people to connect with other locals who want to be a part of the SHD movement. They can have a point person and a drop off site, and hopefully that will encourage them to donate food to their local MP and make them responsible for getting it to a food bank. It also shows people that as Canadians, we care.”

Bugs on a stick via

When I was in kindergarten I had one enemy. His name was Travis, and he was disgusting. Every day at recess, Travis would poke around in our schoolyard's leaves, branches, and garden debris until he found his prey, a patch of wriggly, squirming earthworms he would swallow with intense pleasure. Like clockwork, as soon as we all returned to our classroom, he’d become queasy and barf all over the floor. Travis was repulsive to us, but when I think of him now, I realize that he was ahead of the curve. Eighty percent of the world regularly consumes insects. 

Just last year, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization issued a comprehensive report on the benefits of incorporating insects into the Western diet, recommending that we all up our intake of the more than 1,900 edible species of critters on the planet, because our population is skyrocketing. The bad news: Our food resources are rapidly in decline. By 2050, the 7.2 billion human bodies on earth are expected to increase to 9.6 billion. And besides, every year, we all unwittingly ingest about one to two pounds of bugs that cling to the produce we eat, from the wheat that makes up our pasta to the grapes that become our raisins and the canned tomatoes that are destined for marinara sauce. Crunchy.

Enter a growing number of small entrepreneurs who are cooking and baking snacks made out of roasted, ground insects. One of those people on the forefront of this rogue cuisine is Megan Miller, founder of Bitty Foods, a baking company that uses “sustainably raised” crickets. You didn’t hallucinate that sentence. Megan’s actually building a forthcoming line of cookies, muffins, and other treats using cricket flour, which Miller describes as “nutty” and “neutral-tasting.” Bitty has only just begun production in San Francisco, but will be available nationwide within the next year. I spoke with Megan to hear her perspective on why she thinks Western society should get over the “ew factor” and embrace consuming bugs of all kinds.

Megan making cricket-flour muffins. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Snyder

VICE: How do you turn crickets into a baking form? Seems complicated.
Megan Miller: I turn them into a fine powder that can be used like any other gluten-free flour, and then I bake things with that “flour.” For now, common things that I’m making are items like cookies and muffins, but I’m also working on a pizza-crust recipe, pasta, and savory foods as well. 

Why did you start this company?
I got the idea about a year ago when I was traveling in Southeast Asia and Central America, where insects are a common part of the diet. I started thinking that there really wasn’t any reason why they shouldn’t be in the Western diet. I think it’s mainly because bugs have a branding problem, because they’re actually really tasty, but they look disgusting. And if we could figure out how to change the form factor and package them into delicious products that are beautiful and accessible for people to eat, then they could actually become a popular food here too.

Do you believe we can save the world by eating insects?
Eighty percent of the world’s cultures already eat bugs—if anything, the US and Europe are the only holdouts. By 2050, there’s going to be an extra few billion people on the planet, and economists are concerned that we’re not going to be able to keep up with meat production and supply everyone with adequate protein. There are problems with vegetable protein sources as well, because their production is equally as intensive in terms of land and water usage. Insects breed very quickly, can grow in small spaces with limited water resources, and they have a very high feed-to-meat conversion rate—like ten times higher than beef—so they’re extremely efficient and ecologically friendly.

Cricket flour. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Snyder

In terms of nutritional value, how does one of your products compare to a steak or a chicken leg?
Insects are nutritionally comparable to meat and contain the full range of amino acids that meat does. At their dry rate, crickets are about 68-percent protein, and the rest is comprised of fat and fiber, so it’s a really healthy blend of nutrients. There’s also a lot of iron and potassium and other major nutrients in them. What’s interesting is that I first went down the road of trying to extract the insect protein—my boyfriend is a biochemist, and we worked on a protein isolate, but I actually think that the whole insect is lovely. There’s no need to throw out any part of the insect. Humans can digest chitin, the compound in the insect’s exoskeleton that is very fibrous, which means that there’s been a long history of humans eating insects, because our digestive systems are evolved to digest the whole insect.

When was the first time you willingly ate an insect?
I was in Oaxaca, Mexico, about ten years ago, drinking a michelada, that cocktail that’s sort of like a Bloody Mary, but it’s made with beer instead of vodka. It had this amazing, spicy powder rim around the glass, and I asked, “What is this? This is the most amazing stuff.” My friend was like, “Oh, that’s maggots.”

Oh, my god. But as you said, your products use milled roasted cricket flour. Why crickets? 
In my travels in Southeast Asia and Mexico, I’ve eaten grasshoppers, locusts, lots of types of larvae, and scorpions, but I actually think that crickets are the most culturally appealing for Westerners because they already have positive cultural associations. When we think of crickets, we think of nice chirping on warm summer nights. Some cultures even believe they’re good luck. Another common insect used among entomophagists—which is the term for people who eat insects—is mealworms. I’ve milled them into flour, and they work beautifully as well. I think that mealworms will catch on at some point, but they’re a little bit more problematic, because I think some people associate them with other larvae that we wouldn’t want to eat. 

All of this was made with cricket flour. Photo: Jonathan Snyder

How would you describe the taste of crickets?
Crickets are neutral in taste, but they’re kind of nutty. When you start to get into the culinary applications of insects, there is a lot of more interesting flavors that can be explored. Chef René Redzepi at Noma, which has been one of the top restaurants in the world for a number of years, serves a lot of insects. They work with certain species of ants that have a sort of arugula or citrusy flavor to them. For my baking purposes, I’m trying to create a neutral, earthy, high-protein ingredient that can be used in a broad range of products. Crickets are the only bug for now. 

Do you think that you could convert vegetarians?
Vegetarians seem to be interested. It depends why people are vegetarians, but I’ve talked to a number of people who are vegetarians for sustainability reasons, and they’re like, “Yeah, you know what? I’ll try it.” 

Why do you think the Western world has an associated aversion to eating insects?
I think it’s the fact that eating insects has been associated with human strife for a long time throughout history. When you think of eating insects, you think of eating them during a famine or those stories from the Bible of people surviving on locusts and honey. Insects are primarily eaten by people who are very poor in a lot of developing countries, and there’s often a sort of cultural aversion towards things that are associated with a low socio-economic status. I’m trying to turn crickets—cricket flour specifically—into foods that will be beautiful, aspirational, and trendy, because I think that one of the important factors in getting these foods widely adopted is to get them into the hands of higher socio-economic classes so they will become desirable. 

Cool. Thanks so much, Megan.

@Lochina186

Fear is the worst, and I’ve got loads of it. I’ve got an inordinate fear of yoga—actually, I have a fear of being terrible at yoga. I can’t touch my toes, and I fart when I try. Plus I think about all of the pretty girls who go to yoga, which makes the whole thing even more problematic for me, because I’m afraid of talking to pretty girls. They're either terribly mean or terribly dumb. I can't even get started on my fear of talking to people whose names I have forgotten, because it's everyone's. Everyday fears like these run rampant through my brain, alongside making rent, eating properly, and trying to remember if I locked the door when I left the apartment. It gets worse when my inner voice starts fretting over things of note, like succeeding at my job, love, and life. 

Tom Moody has these same problems. Part of Tom is filled with major self-doubt, part of him is super-confident, and both parts won’t stop fighting each other. He suffers from delusions of grandeur and inadequacy. I guess that’s what happens when your mom sleeps with the ice cream man and your dad refuses to be patient with you (probably because his wife is sleeping with the ice cream man). Thirty-two years later, when Tom intends to make his debut musical performance at an open mic, all of these fears of inadequacy come rushing back. Of course, Tom is working with corny pop songs instead of a downward-dog yoga position but he’s still dealing with what pretty girls might think of him. 

The short film is animated beautifully with awkward characters by Ainslie Henderson. You can see and feel the struggle, which is voiced with humor and sincerity by the very underrated Mackenzie Crook. There are aspects of the character we all know too well. “A person finding his voice” is something that’s been done 1,000,000,000 times, but it remains a timeless story. And although this one shows its symbolism all too obviously and things pan out all too conveniently, there’s so much heart and genuine anguish in this animation, that it’s hard to fault. Facing your fears is an important lesson to learn and action to take. I’m sure if I finally went to yoga, I’d feel better—not just because that’s the point of yoga, but because I would have gotten off my ass and looked at some girls.

Ainslie Henderson completed I Am Tom Moody for his graduation film at the University of Edinburgh. It was recently nominated for a BAFTA award for Best British Short Animation. It won the 2013 Slamdance Grand Jury Prize for Animated Short as well as many other awards and nods from international festivals. If you like it, you should check out his making-of video, which is basically a companion piece to I Am Tom Moody. It showcases Ainslie experiencing all of the torment and insecurities of his main character, while painstakingly animating his main character. 

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall, mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and screens for the Tribeca Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super-fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

@PRISMindex

Photos by the author, Alexandre Hervaud, and Saber Jendoubi

On Saturday afternoon, my hometown was set on fire as a small group of ultra-left activists turned a demonstration against the construction of a massive new airport into a full-on riot. Nantes, in the northwest of France, has been the focal point of protests against the construction of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes (NDDL) airport for the past six years, and the project has been in the development stages since the 1970s. The idea of the airport has tended to die with each financial crash or change of the country's political leadership, only to return later like a ghost whose magic power is making people really, really angry.

This weekend, the airport's opponents had gathered en masse once again: a hodge-podge of activists from across the spectrum of the left. There were 50,000 to 60,000 of them according to organizers, but more like 20,000 according to less sympathetic media outlets.

The event began peacefully. People waved banners and chanted chants, farmers rode tractors, and several prominent left-wing and Green Party politicians were in attendance. A Nantes local named Tristan told me, "The airport is a big waste of money, but it also goes beyond that. It’s almost symbolic now. These big projects do not make any sense from an ecological and economical point of view, especially in times of crisis." The airport is due to cost €556 million ($764 million)—although critics reckon that the figure could end up escalating wildly, to something more like €2 billion ($2.75 billion).

These people had come dressed as potatoes. I don't really get why.

At first I thought these guys were conspiracy theorists railing against the Illuminati lizard men hell-bent on building airports for the New World Order. Turns out they're making a point about the endangered species that might get harmed if the airport gets built.

Soon after the family-friendly procession and its obligatory samba band started marching through the streets of Nantes, a few dozen protesters decided to break off from the main group to embark on something a bit more violent. They started by trashing the local office of Vinci—the company that's building the airport. The trigger for the rioting seemed to be that a couple of hours before the protest, the local authorities had decided to change the march route, forbidding protesters access to the centre of town.

"We weren’t happy about that at all," Tristan told me. "Cops were posted at every corner, at every entrance to the center of town. They were like bouncers. We were allowed to protest outside the center of town, where we weren’t as visible and wouldn’t ‘bother’ the inhabitants."

Another protester, who wished to remain anonymous, told me it was a chaotic scene. "It got quite schizophrenic at some point," he said. "You had people going about in the center of town doing their Saturday shopping, as rubber bullets were being fired at protesters."

Before long, the cops dispatched a water cannon and dug into their supply of stun grenades. Meanwhile, the rioters did what rioters the world over do: erect barricades and chuck cobblestones.

The anarchists smashed quite a lot of things, including this travel agency.

Weirdly, they also set fire to the local public transportation offices. I wondered how they'd be getting home later that night.

They also attacked this police station.

"The rioters started taking out hammers from their bags to get the cobblestones out [to throw], so something had been planned," journalist Saber Jendoubi told me. "Between 30 and 50 were actually breaking things; it was a very active and organized minority."

Four arrests were made and reports said that six policemen were injured during the clashes. According to IndyMedia, a young protester hit by a stun grenade lost an eye.

In a press release, the organizers were eager to hype the large turnout and the fact that people had turned up from all over France. While the public may not agree with the tactic of smashing up travel agencies and fighting police, they appear to be on the side of the airport haters; a recent poll showed that 56 percent of French people are opposed to its construction and only 24 percent support it. Those in favor argue that the existing airport in Nantes is obsolete. But Tristan said, "Why build an airport when we are running out of petrol? We’re trying to copy the transportation model of the United States, but it makes no sense, because we’re not half a continent."

Since 2006, protesters have been occupying the planned construction site, dubbing it the ZAD (Zone à Défendre, or "Protected Zone"). I visited the "ZADists" in December 2012, weeks after violent protests had taken place. The occupants seemed to be an eclectic bunch, including old-school eco-warriors, local farmers and young people keen to experience a squatter's lifestyle in the woods.

Given that building work is scheduled to begin at the ZAD soon, you can't help but think that Saturday's violence will be making a return to Nantes in the near future.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter: @becksunyer

Photo via Flickr user Andrew Mason

On Valentine’s Day, two police officers in Euharlee, Georgia, showed up at the home of 17-year-old Christopher Roupe to serve a probation violation warrant on his father. According to a lawyer representing Roupe’s family, immediately after the teenager opened the door, an unnamed female officer shot him fatally in the chest. The officer, who's now on paid administrative leave, told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who is now handling the investigation, that Roupe pointed a gun at her. But it's not at all clear that's what happened. Neighbor Richard Yates, who was interviewed by local-news station WSBTV, thought that Roupe was actually holding a BB gun and “playing a game” with another kid. (Yates also said he saw the female officer crying after the incident.) Tia Howard, another neighbor, told WSBTV that “they said” the boy had a Wii controller when he was shot.

When I called him to ask about the incident, Euharlee Police Chief Terry J. Harget told me he had no comment or official statement except what had been given to TV stations last week. Harget added that he hoped the truth would come out and that the event was a tragedy, which it certainly is.

It’s not an isolated tragedy, though. Police mistake various harmless items—Wii remotes, combs, wallets, pagers—all the time. Frequently, you’ll hear that a suspect was “reaching for his waistband,” a common excuse/cliche in police shootings that often makes the officers more justified in letting one fly than they were. And it’s not just confrontations with suspected criminals that end in gunfire—sometimes the police simply spot a teenager with a toy firearm, or a man holding a hose nozzle, or a homeless man with a stick, and open fire.

Naturally, cops get nervous when people hold objects that could be weapons, but in some situations, like Roupe’s, there’s no threat posed to the cops whatsoever. What’s more, if Roupe had been holding a gun, shooting him still wouldn’t have been justified. This is America, and the police don’t have a monopoly on guns. Occasionally, someone is going to answer a door holding a gun, maybe because he was in the middle of cleaning it, maybe because he just likes holding guns. (Hey, this is America.) That shouldn’t lead to a summary execution. As usual, the fix here is for cops to take a damn minute before resorting to lethal force, and for departments to train their officers to avoid reaching for their waistbands until they're certain that the kid opening the door is really a bad guy and not just a fan of fake weapons.

Here are our bad cops of the week:

-A Bastrop County, Texas, sheriff’s deputy fatally shot a 47-year-old woman named Yvette Smith on February 16, and police have backed away from their initial report that she was armed. Deputy Daniel Willis responded to a disturbance call from a house at about 12:30 AM early that morning—the report was that two men were fighting about a gun. When Willis showed up, one man was outside, and the other man was inside with some other people, and that’s where things get murky. The police first claimed Smith displayed a firearm and refused to obey a deputy’s commands, so Willis shot her. (She died at a hospital some time later.) A second report from the sheriff’s office said that they couldn’t confirm either the presence of a gun, or Smith’s noncompliance, so, uh, that’s bad. Willis has been put on administrative leave.

-On Thursday, US District Judge William Martini dismissed the lawsuit filed against the NYPD by Muslim groups over the NYPD’s campaign of spying on their communities in New Jersey after 9/11. The existence of this spying—which has, as far as anyone knows, never led to a single arrest or foiled terrorist plot—was revealed in a series of Pulitzer-winning Associated Press articles in 2011 and 2012. Judge Martini said the plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the NYPD; in essence, he ruled that the “adverse effects” felt by these communities was a result of the AP stories on the spying, not the actual spying. If you don’t know you’re being watched, your constitutional rights aren’t being violated, right? A similar lawsuit from a group of Manhattan Muslims is still making its way through the courts.

-The DEA in Georgia has made it easy for residents to snitch on potential abusers of prescription drugs—now it’s only a text away. Warning signs citizens are supposed to look out for include pharmacists who are driving fancy cars, customers who come in too often, and doctor’s prescription pads with overly neat handwriting. Text your tip to the hotline, and the DEA will follow up. (This program has also been instituted in Philadelphia.) Though prescription drug abuse can be fatal, and seems to be on the rise, this kind of snitching system will mostly just snag a few sad addicts, small-time crooks, and chronic pain sufferers who can’t get enough medication without addressing the demand or supply of the drugs. Though that sort of thing is usually enough for the DEA to say well done.

-Speaking of the DEA, former agency head Peter Bensinger recently told Yahoo News on February 19 that pot legalization is dangerous. Bensinger, who headed the agency from 1976 to 1981, fears that children will be adversely affected, that people will drive under the influence, and that marijuana, with its dangerous health effects, will see an increase in use. Bensinger also apparently believes that Colorado and Washington state’s new anti-prohibition laws are “against federal law and the Constitution and our international treaties.” Blah blah blah. Nothing is surprising about a man who made his living on misery now fighting against the changing times—but the amazing thing is how out of date Bensinger already sounds. He’s losing, and he seems to know it.

-Charges related to a June 2012 encounter with police could have brought Marcus Jeter of Bloomfield, New Jersey, five years in prison for eluding the police, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer. But newly revealed dashcam footage has exonerated Jeter and led to charges of conspiracy, official misconduct, and assault by two Bloomfield cops. That dashcam tape initially didn’t surface until Jeter’s lawyer filed a request for records—and an internal investigation apparently failed to turn it up, which may be even more troubling than the incident itself, which involved the cops pulling Jeter over and beating him up even though he was complying with their orders. The linked story is worth reading, but essentially the police beat up an innocent man, lied about it, and weren't caught in their lie thanks to some conveniently missing evidence.

-It’s been a long, cold winter, but a New Jersey poodle is spending the season somewhere a bit warmer thanks to our Good Cop of the Week. Earlier this month, Bridgeton police officer Ronald Broomall was driving on patrol when he saw a small poodle nearly dead from cold and exposure. He grabbed the pup, put him on the dashboard of his cruiser to warm him up, then rushed him to a nearby animal hospital. Broomall saved the dog, now named Chance, and he is up for adoption.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter: @lucystag

Photo courtesy of the US State Deptarment. This story is from VICE News, our new news website. See more and sign up now at vicenews.com.

When Edward Snowden's leaks revealed what the NSA had been up to in Mexico, Mexicans were understandably pissed. The National Security Agency had spied on Mexican presidents Enrique Peña Nieto and Felipe Calderón, on Caledrón’s cabinet, and on multiple governmental agencies as part of an operation dubbed Flatliquid. An August 2009 NSA operation in Mexico, perhaps somewhat insensitively code-named Whitetamale, included a wide-scale hack of Mexico’s Public Security Secretariat, the body that polices the trafficking of drugs and people. And Mexican phone calls and texts were collected as part of operation Eveningeasel.

The operations netted the NSA info not only on drug cartels, but also on diplomatic talking points that, according to Der Spiegel, “allowed US politicians to conduct successful talks on political issues and to plan international investments." Operations Whitetamale, Flatliquid, and Eveningeasel—it's unclear how many NSA guys high-fived each other after coming up with the names—were conducted from the NSA office in San Antonio. But other Snowden documents showed that the NSA captured and analyzed internet traffic from a US diplomatic post in Mexico City, and that the US embassy hosted agents from the joint NSA/CIA Special Collection Service, a black-budget program dedicated to bugging foreign embassies and government installations.

But it took a separate, recently declassified memo to confirm that the NSA maintained a secret office inside the US Embassy in Mexico City.

That office is a so-called fusion center. The existence of fusion centers in the United States is no secret; they were established in the wake of the glaring 9/11 intelligence failures to promote information sharing between US intelligence agencies, the military, and state and local governments. The centers were primarily a creation of the George W. Bush administration; at least 72 had been established by 2009.

The secret fusion center in Mexico City, however, was only confirmed by a 2010 Department of Defense memorandum requested by George Washington University’s National Security Archive project under the Freedom of Information Act. The document also revealed a network of joint US/Mexican intelligence centers open to staff from both countries—but Mexican personnel weren't allowed access to the one in the embassy. Support was given to the fusion center by the Department of Defense’s office for Counternarcotics and Global Threats, and was largely channeled through US Northern Command (NORTHCOM), which is charged with protecting US interests in North America.

Despite the existence of the memorandum, the NSA is backing away from any admission that the Mexico center exists and is refusing requests for further information. According to Unredacted, the National Security Archive’s blog, the NSA has given a Glomar response to further FOIA requests—in other words, they're saying that they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of more documents. (This, despite the fact that Unredacted has already published the the memo.) NORTHCOM has also refused additional FOIA requests, stating that the material is classified.

Why is everyone refusing to discuss something whose existence has already been established? Because the center is broadly concerned with “high value targets" (HVTs), or what the DoD calls “a target the enemy commander requires for the successful completion of the mission." HVTs are typically understood to be terrorist leaders. But the fusion center at the US Embassy in Mexico appears to have a somewhat broader definition.

“Reading the document, we know that the Mexico fusion center is focused on high value targeting, but it’s not clear at first glance who or what those targets are,” Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Mexico project, told VICE News. “In Mexico, one might logically assume that high value targets are the leaders of criminal organizations—drug traffickers, human smugglers, etc."

But as Evans points out, we now know—thanks to Snowden—that the National Security Agency applied the HVT label to Peña Nieto along with other world leaders who were the targets of US snooping. "Given that this is a top secret, US-only facility," Evans said, "my guess is that the Mexico fusion center probably takes an ‘all of the above’ approach, targeting both criminal organizations and Mexico’s political leadership.”

The US Embassy in Mexico City. Photo via

The memo revealing the existence of the center was written by William Wechsler, who at the time was the head of Counternarcotics and Global Threats at the DOD. It's addressed to then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Mike Vickers, and calls for multiple interagency centers throughout Mexico, to be kept separate from the US-exclusive fusion center in the embassy.

The United States and Mexico have worked closely to police narcotrafficking since the 2006 inauguration of Calderon, who reached out to George W. Bush for aid against the cartels during Bush's second term. Among the targets of a $1.9 billion American aid package, according to the Washington Post, were the cartels' brutal death squads. In order to help the government, the US began employing Predator drones in Mexican airspace for reconnaissance by mid-2009.

“It’s important to remember that it was only a few years ago that Mexico and the United States were touting the establishment of the joint-intelligence fusion centers, in which both countries worked side-by-side against the drug cartels and other shared threats," Evans said. "But we now know that the US has been pursuing a two-track policy: One, a network of joint-intelligence centers staffed by personnel from both countries. The other, a secret facility to which the Mexicans were not invited.”

After the initial disclosures, Mexican legislators demanded the country’s Attorney General investigate the secret facility and any espionage being conducted by the United States.

So Mexico is mad, but was it worth it? A two-year bipartisan investigation into domestic fusion centers by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released in 2012, found that the centers’ intelligence reports were largely worthless, that they violated civil liberties and privacy, and that the data gathered often had little to do with terrorism. The subcommittee report also found that between $289 million and $1.4 billion of taxpayer money had been spent on the centers, including line items like $75,000 spent on 55 flat-screen TVs for the San Diego Fusion Center to conduct “open-source monitoring.”

That, no joke, is essentially how they refer to “watching the news.”

The National Security Archive is fighting to overcome the NSA's Glomar response and NORTHCOM’s denials in order to uncover more information about the NSA's secret office in the US Embassy. Meanwhile, earlier this month, US Ambassador to Mexico Tony Wayne witnessed the signing of a new data-sharing agreement between the US and Mexico.

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Photos by Scot Sothern

It’s 1973 and I’m somewhere in North Florida or maybe South Georgia, behind the wheel and stuck in the moment. A dirt road ambles along throwing up dust and settling in places no one would want to settle. I pass tumbledown bars and markets with screen doors that slam in the wind. I drive by a little white church and two rows of shacks facing each other across the road. People old and young planted upright in the weeds watch me roll by like I’m pulling a funeral procession on a rope. Kids standing in the sun with no shoes and wavering smiles.

Between cypress trees, under Spanish moss, I expect to see a Civil War graveyard. I pass a woman on a chair in the dirt; her limbs twisted, her face distorted; a protruding tongue like a pound of severed flesh. I park and get the camera and spool in a roll of Kodachrome. She is at the outside edge of a low-slung house, old and unstable but clean with fresh paint. She watches me get out of the car and becomes overstimulated and kinetic and I worry she might fling herself from the chair. I talk to her slow and low like a good person. “Hey, how’s it going?” She ratchets her neck and her head ricochets off invisible walls. A flurry of backlit motes whirl away like a magnetic storm. An older woman comes out. She tells me the girl is her granddaughter and she would appreciate it if I don’t get her all excited. I ask does the girl understand us?

“Her name is Martha and she understands me,” the woman says. “That’s all she needs. What did you stop for? What’s your business here?” She goes to her granddaughter and puts a calming hand on the back of the girl’s neck.

“My name’s Scot. I’m a photographer. Can I take her picture?”

“So people can laugh at her?”

“No, no. Not at all. I don’t think so. I hope not.”

“God is watching you, son.”

“Yeah, well that’s a first.”

When I was in high school—despite being a child running wild—my mother made me go to church. I hated the services but I sucked it up every week and put on a tie, combed my hair, and sat brooding in the back pew. I had to draw the line at Sunday school, so I worked a deal that let me get a Sunday school room of my own where I took care of a mentally disabled teenager, Jimmy. At first I mostly ignored Jimmy and just hung out, smoking and looking out the window. Once I got a couple of girls to skip Sunday school and hang out with me, but close proximity to nubile babes gave Jimmy a boner that looked like it was going to blow out his barn door and the babes went back to bible study.

I liked Jimmy and over the course of four years I taught him the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandants and the words to “Jesus Loves Me.” One Christmas I gave him a picture book of Jesus and his crew walking on water and chillin’ with the lepers.

Grandma gives me the all-clear to photograph Martha and I pose them together and make an exposure. Martha sticks out her tongue and Grandma tells me they had to pull out Martha’s teeth so she wouldn’t bite it off. She tells me Martha’s mother, her daughter, took off a long time ago following some cocksure rooster with a hundred-dollar bill. I tell her that’s a drag and ask how long has she lived here?

“All my live-long days, 67 years,” she says.

“Wow, I guess you’ve seen a lot of stuff change.”

She looks around, up and down the road. She tells me no, she doesn’t see nothing much has changed at all.

I take a couple more pictures and tell Grandma thanks and I shake her hand. I get in the car and 50 yards later I come upon a rickety one-car-at-a-time wooden bridge. I pull onto the bridge but stop when I see a giant turtle sitting between the rails, looking at me like I’ve just spoiled its afternoon nap. It’s big as a bean-bag chair and I honk and it doesn’t move. I pull closer until it’s nearly touching the front bumper and I honk some more. It doesn’t move. I put the car in park and I get out and tell the turtle come on, fuckhead, move out of the way. I’m a couple of yards away, calling the turtle names, when it hisses and jumps and snaps at me with the speed of a snake. I yell fuck, shit, piss, and run back to the car. I back all the way to Grandma’s house where I turn around and go looking for a highway. In the rearview mirror I see the dust as it settles around Martha.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.