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The Death of a Romanian Kangaroo

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Photo courtesy of iStock

It sounds like the start of a heartstring-tugging kids’ film: On January 14, in the western Romanian city of Arad, the cops received a series of calls reporting that children were chasing a kangaroo down by the railroad tracks. At first they assumed it was a joke, but later they were called by the railroad police, who said, essentially, no, it was a real animal, and yes, they had it in custody. When the cops arrived to pick the kangaroo up, it had already died, of stress or suffocation, in the trunk of a railroad policeman’s car, which is where this story ceases to be anything resembling a movie for kids.

Nobody has assumed responsibility for the death of the kangaroo. The local police told me that the situation is the responsibility of the railroad police in Arad, because it was their trunk in which the kangaroo had died. But the railroad police in Arad told me that it was the job of the railroad officers at the Aradul Nou station, since they were the ones who had caught the animal. The Aradul Nou station cops said I should talk to the local police. After I told them that I already called the local police, they simply said, “Then we can’t help you. Have a nice day.”

But never mind whose jurisdiction the kangaroo expired in. The real question is, how the heck did it show up in Arad in the first place? Livia Cimpoeru, a spokeswoman for Vier Pfoten, an animal rights organization that had complained to the local police about the kangaroo, said that the bouncy marsupials had become a recent hot item for exotic-animal dealers and collectors.

”More and more kangaroos show up in Romania, like we’re turning into Australia,” she explained. “Last year, I personally followed a driver who was transporting a kangaroo. Another kangaroo was seen at the border with Hungary. Two other kangaroos were attacked and eaten by stray dogs.”

This past year has seen many cases of animal trafficking in Romania—in one memorable incident, an entire illegal zoo that included four lions and two bears was found in the backyard of a mafia boss. It’s illegal for ordinary people to sell kangaroos, or any other wild beasts, but the laws surrounding trafficking animals are vague—the penalty is likely to be, at most, a year in prison and a 400-euro [$550] fine for animal cruelty. At those prices, who can afford not to hawk a few kangas for spare cash?

The issue, Livia told me, is that the Romanian authorities don’t seem to care about the illegal animal trade. “Romania is a transit country for an extraordinary animal-trafficking ring that goes through Hungary,” she said. “The border police aren’t doing their jobs, and the local police are just shrugging their shoulders. They know that they’d have to confiscate the animal, but they don’t know what to do with it—they’d have to call the mayor’s office, the local zoo, and veterinarians. So they just say, ‘Screw it; we have more important things to do.’”


'Porn Studies' Is a Serious Academic Journal for Serious Academics

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Screencap via YouTube uploader sameesha1000

Porn Studies, "The first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic," launched on Friday, and it's currently free. For a limited time, non-academics like you and me can peruse it, and try to wrap our quivering brains around some hot, throbbing knowledge before a paywall gets draped over all the best parts.

The time was evidently right for the study of porn to take another step toward recognition as an academic field, with not just a journal, but also a workshop called "The Pedagogy of Pornography" at The Society For Film and Media Studies' 2014 Conference in Seattle. Such conferences don't exactly attract media attention, and so there was no public titillation when the giants of porn studies got together for an all-star show. I contacted them to find out how it went.

But first, check out all the action at the journal's website. You can get unfettered access, not just to thumbnails, but to full-length essays with titles like "Humanities and social scientific research methods in porn studies," "Positionality and pornography," "Authenticity and its role within feminist pornography," and my personal fave, "Deep tags: toward a quantitative analysis of online pornography." And if you prefer your quantitative analysis completely raw-dog, here's a link to a spreadsheet of the entire dataset from the study. Kinda freaky, but, ya know, some people are into that shit.

The journal itself is published by Taylor & Francis, a 200-year-old British publishing company that lends gravitas to any such title, and it is perhaps this fact that attracted anti-porn activists to take notice and get their hackles up. After all, despite the journal being a compendium of MLA-formatted essays with proper parenthetical citations, and despite it being intended for consumption more or less exclusively by the tweedy, there's international controversy afoot.

That shouldn't really surprise me I guess, because after all, the journal discusses videos of naked people fucking.

Gail Dines, screencapped from Youtube user PublicChristianity

You see, there's a debate about the ethics of pornography that goes beyond famous battles such as The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Mom vs. 17-Year-Old Son, and when a publication like The Independent in the UK writes about it, that's their angle. Publications looking for someone to at least sound eloquent and rational tend to look no further than Gail Dines, who also pens editorials for The Independent. Their article gives her a platform to say things like "These editors come from a pro-porn background," implying that a more objective journal would take a very explicitly "anti-porn" approach. 

Dines began as a feminist, and I suppose remains one to this day, but in the 1970s and 80s there was a schism over how to regard sex in a world informed by feminism. During this era, called The Sex Wars, many feminist friendships and professional associations ended. Dines formed a makeshift coalition with the religious right, and to this day, she writes books and gives interviews about how harmful porn is. Let it not be said that Dines' writing never includes hard numbers and facts. In a New York Times op-ed from 2012, she wrote the following:

"The most extensive peer-reviewed study in the past decade found that a majority of scenes from 50 top-rented porn movies contained physical and verbal abuse of female performers. Physical aggression—including spanking, open-hand slapping, and gagging—occurred in 88 percent of scenes, with expressions of verbal aggression—usually a man calling a woman derogatory names—in 48 percent."

No one who brings numbers to a debate can be wrong, right? I think we can all agree that indeed, the lion's share of cisgendered, hetero porn lacks situations where sensitive men focus on pleasing women. Porn is often a garish form of nightmare theater that repeatedly plays out the phallocentric fantasies of society's lowest common denominator. To put it another way, in porn:

"[...]young women with crisp fake tans, long platinum blonde hair extensions, silicon breasts, and acrylic nails are fucking cocks that are artificially erect. They vocalize a performative sense of pleasure with moans and squeals as their male counterparts lead them through a formulaic equation of sexual positions that ‘opens’ the penetrative action up to the camera for the viewer's pleasure—not their own. This assemblage of ‘fast food’ pornographic sex continues until the female performer is instructed to ‘fake’ an orgasm and receive a load of hot cum on her face."

Any idea where I got that pull quote? From a paper in Porn Studies, the very publication Dines staunchly opposes.

Dine's censorship rhetoric, as in her editorial, "Stop Porn Culture," allows for a publication called "Porn Studies," only if what's being studied is how to abolish it. However, with porn being consumed by approximately everyone, and there being, according to some estimates, as much as one entire internet of porn in existence, advocating for abolition doesn't seem as helpful as the apparent mission intuited by the editors, contributors, and readers of Porn Studies: to include pornography as a facet of what academics call cultural studies.

John Stadler, literature professor at Duke University, and one of the figures at the forefront of porn studies, explained this to me more fully in an email. "Porn is a part of culture, and whether one likes it or not, it has and will continue to be a part of our culture throughout our lifetimes. It behooves us as a society to critically engage it without a predetermined agenda."

Because of the whole, "without a predetermined agenda," notion, he actually seemed hesitant to weigh in about anti-porn advocacy, since this kind of advocacy is just not part of his job description. When academia is working right (and admittedly it isn't always), people who have something interesting to say about an issue rise to prominence, and people who just have an axe to grind for one reason or another are relegated to TV talk shows and New York Times editorials.

For more on this aspect, I also got in touch with Dr. Constance Penley, one of the leaders in the field of porn studies, to get her take on the reaction to this new field. Penley is a professor of film and media studies at UC Berkley, and one of the first people who ever studied cultural phenomena like fan fiction in an academic setting. 

Constance Penley, screencapped from the Huffington Post 

She told me that the publication of Porn Studies is just the tip of the iceberg for the field. "2013 was the trifecta for porn studies," she said. In addition to the journal, there were other events she considered milestones like "the release of The Feminist Porn Book, and the first annual Feminist Porn Conference." So while Gail Dines is being targeted by men's rights advocates as the man-hater who wants to ruin everyone's fun, she clearly does not have the market cornered on feminism in pornography. 

Penley told me anti-porn advocates are hardly a blip on the intellectual radar of those in the field, saying "There isn't a pro v. anti-porn argument among scholars, but a protest of porn scholarship by anti-porn activists, some of whom try to pass for scholars, who don't like the scholarly literature's conclusions," she says.

In other words, Porn Studies will be "pro-porn" when an author has a positive takeaway, "anti-porn" when they don't, and probably more often than not, ambivalent about porn as a whole. This means rather than a rehash of a debate from the old Sex Wars days, the debate can take place in print, every quarter, and it will be peer-reviewed. 

Penley says the problem with advocates like Dines is they help perpetuate a somewhat stifling culture within academia. "Nearly 70 percent of the professorate is contingent, adjunct labor without the protection of academic freedom to do teaching and research on whatever the professor deems worthy and necessary. Adjunct faculty can't risk doing anything new, edgy or nontraditional, anything that would raise controversy. This is a problem not just for porn studies, of course, but for all of humanities and social science scholarship."

It's hard for non-tenured faculty, whose jobs are not secure, to study anything controversial, because they might be fired when the media picks it up and makes it into something tabloid-worthy. Academia increasingly can't stand up to the power of bad PR. Donors are extremely susceptible to PR, and It's easier for a university to just ditch the faculty members causing controversy than to hire a decent branding firm in order to defend their scholarship, even when the scholarship is important and shouldn't have to be defended.

So what will the scholarship consist of? According to Stadler, it will consist at least in part, of finding hidden complexity. "Porn is often treated as though it were not complex," he says. "The body has always been a site that has had to struggle to prove its relation to knowledge. That misunderstanding is one that deserves correction."

The body's "relation to knowledge?" If you can parse material written in academic-ese, there's about to be some heavy shit written about porn. Personally, I just hope I can keep up.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Theater of Justice

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Illustration by Molly Crabapple

Last week, I sketched an evidentiary hearing for a woman named Cecily McMillan.

Two years ago, I'd seen Cecily convulse in handcuffs as the police shut down an Occupy Wall Street protest. Cecily was an organizer. A plain-clothes cop had grabbed her breast from behind, hard enough to leave a bruise shaped like his handprint. Instinctively, she elbowed him. Most women would do the same if a man grabbed from behind.

The cops beat Cecily till they broke her ribs. As she had a seizure on the pavement, the crowd screamed for the police to call 911. The police just watched.

Two years later, Cecily is charged with assaulting an officer. She faces seven years in prison.

In that fake-wood courtroom in lower Manhattan, the judge told Cecily's lawyer that the fact that her arresting officer had beaten up other people was not relevant to her case. His records would be sealed. Afterwards, addressing her supporters, Cecily tried to hide the tremor in her voice.

Courtrooms are a violent theater. The violence happens off-scene: in Rikers Island where a homeless man recently baked to death; in the shackles and beatings and the years far from everything you love. But the courtroom itself is the performative space, the stage where the best story triumphs, and where all parties, except (usually) the defendant, are just playing parts.

In the past three years, I've sketched many courtrooms. I sat in Fort Meade drawing the back of Chelsea Manning's cropped blonde hair. In Guantanamo Bay, I drew Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through layers of bulletproof glass. I've been to hacker trials and misdemeanor court and the sentencings of friends—though at my lone disorderly conduct hearing, I got an ACD (which is short for adjournment in contemplation of dismissal) so fast I couldn't even reach for my sketchpad.

The trials I've drawn have mostly been politically motivated. The defendants, however victimized, were heroes too of their stories. They read statements they agonized over, knowing that it might be a long time before they could speak again. The courts tried to stamp out all that was special, to make them fit into what activist Mariame Kaba of Project NIA calls the “widget factory” that is the criminal justice system. Their supporters tried to tear through the ritual, to remind them they were important and loved.

At Chelsea Manning's trial, her supporters wore shirts reading “Truth.” Chelsea was not allowed to turn around to see.

But the average defendant isn't a famous whistleblower. He's a person of color charged with a drug crime. Most trials resemble not grand dramas but factory farms. The raw material is a person. The product is a prisoner. Trials are deliberately dull. They move glacially, on state time rather than human time. If you hire your own lawyers—a necessity to have a chance of winning—you'll blow through your life savings. As the cop cliché goes, “You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.”

Yet, America loves her trials. Courtrooms are secular churches. Bow your head, hush your voice. With enough Law and Order episodes, the criminal justice system gets mixed up with justice. Square-jawed prosecutors will punish the wicked. The innocent will be redeemed.

Real trials like acquitted baby killer Casey Anthony's are layered over fictional ones. They're outlets for collective sadism. Look at the murderess. Are we not pure?

The pop culture courtroom is familiar to all Americans. It is both grand and comforting, a pillar of our democracy. So we ignore the reality that we imprison more of our population than any country in the world, in horrific conditions, half of them for drugs, disproportionately the poor and brown.

If “getting your day in court” means justice, why should you complain if you're locked in a box when that day is done?

No one who's spent time in courts believes trials are about truth.

A former prosecutor I spoke to told me he'd been trained to conduct a trial like a performance. It was all about keeping the audience engaged. He would point at the defendant, stabbing the air with his finger, to show the jury that they too should point at him with a guilty verdict. The prosecutor told me that there was no feeling worse than hearing “not guilty.” It was 12 average Americans saying he sucked at his job.

Defense attorneys I spoke with agreed. It's all about the story—something that public defenders, who get paid nil and don't have the power of the state behind them, are usually too overburdened to craft.

At sentencing, performance and pragmatism coalesce into poison. At the sentencing hearing, the prosecutor will always paint the defendant as a threat to all good citizens snug in their beds. To keep them safe, the defendant must get as many years as possible. But weeks before trial began, that same prosecutor will usually have offered the defendant a plea deal that was a fraction of that sentence.

Because the entire system would implode if everyone demanded a trial, prosecutors push plea bargains like restaurants hawking early bird specials. But instead of money, they're haggling over life. If you're too poor for a lawyer or have already spent months in jail because you can't make bail, plea bargains can be irresistible. They account for 95 percent of felony convictions.

Marissa Alexander, a PhD and mom who fired a warning shot at the ceiling to stop her husband from beating her, was offered three years as a plea deal for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. She refused, knowing herself innocent. The judge sentenced her to 20 years. Now, she's appealing. If she loses, the prosecutor wants to lock her up for 60.

This is a “trial tax” you pay if you annoy the courts by insisting you are innocent.

At trial, you better fit a casting agent's idea of “Not Guilty.” Cecily McMillan is small, white, and lovely in her blowout and blazer. White America seldom imagines that little white girls, like Cecily and me, will punch cops. We wear the costume of innocence. It’s not surefire, but it helps.

The poor, the brown, the trans—to juries, they're guilty unless proven otherwise. Innocence is the absence of guilt. It is near impossible to prove a negative.

If you're too poor to afford bail, you arrive in court in chains. If you have no family to bring you a suit, you wear your prison jumpsuit. During her murder trial, Angela Davis's team fought for her to get bail. They wanted her to go into the courtroom each day in her own clothes, looking like a woman who was and would be free.

When I write about courts, there's pressure to add of course.Of course some defendants are guilty. Of course there are rapists and murderers. Of course judges and prosecutors see themselves as good people doing a tough job, trying to get through the day. Yet, this of course excuses too much. It excuses a system drenched with racism, corruption, and violence. It excuses a contest where he with the most cash wins. Where instead of truth, justice or mercy, lawyers must craft fables—tales rigged in favor of those who already have the most.

As I sat at Cecily's trial, my friends were in Philly, attending hacker Andrew “weev” Auernheimer's appeal. Auernheimer himself was in solitary, locked with his thoughts in a six-foot-by-11-foot box.

Last March, I attended Auernheimer's sentencing. Hacker Jaime Cochran had taken the train 20 hours from Chicago to support him. She was thrown out of the courtroom for touching her phone. Jaime stood on the other side of the door. Every time it opened, she screamed “Dongs!”

Afterwards, some criticized Jaime for not respecting the court. But from where I sat, it felt like the most human thing anyone could have done.

The court was locking up Jaime's friend. She couldn't stop that. At least she could show that she wasn't buying their show. Jaime told me later that she refused to be a “docile spectator” in her friend's life.

After one trial, the lawyers move on to another. Judges hear the next case. But for most defendants, courtrooms are preludes to cages.After the theater of justice, reality is theirs alone.

Follow Molly on Twitter.

 

The RCMP Is Spending Nearly $100 Million to Spy on the Mohawks’ Black Market Tobacco Trade

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Photo of the police presence at the Mohawk blockade at Tyendinaga, near Belleville. Via Nicky Young. 
The same Conservative government that dismissed a federal inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women as too costly, has allocated $91.7 million over five years in its budget for a high-tech surveillance operation along the Quebec-Ontario border with the US in order to find and shut down Mohawk-run underground tobacco operations. The funds were set aside specifically for a “Geospatial Intelligence and Automatic Dispatch Centre,” which will rely on a number of different and costly surveillance technologies.

“Law enforcement partners need to have a clear understanding of the border environment in order to identify potential threats. This is most effectively and efficiently accomplished through the use of technology, including sensors, radar, cameras and underwater acoustics,” an RCMP media relations officer told VICE.

The RCMP’s costly new policing and surveillance initiative will continue to target the Mohawk border community of Akwesasne, from which black market tobacco is moved up and along routes to Kahnawake near Montreal and Tyendinaga near Belleville, and where a Mohawk blockade was held recently calling for an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. It was at this protest that the OPP deployed camera drones, technically referred to as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), as just part of a package of expensive technology and weaponry used to monitor and disperse the Tyendinaga blockade.

The OPP have defended their use of drones--that run the government around $30,000 apiece—explaining that UAVs are an inexpensive way to conduct necessary investigations. The legal status of UAVs remains murky, but it seems their use is not permitted over populated areas. You can’t fly drones over people, according to Transport Canada. At the protest itself, the cadre of police and their seemingly endless supply of manpower, vehicles, and equipment greatly outnumbered the handful of Mohawk protesters and journalists on site. With this new use of drone cameras and the allocation of a large chunk of funding for further RCMP surveillance and crackdowns on contraband tobacco, Harper has shown that his government financially prioritizes policing Indigenous communities, instead of getting them justice.

The government war on contraband tobacco has been in motion for some time now. Between 2007 and 2011, the RCMP seized nearly four million cartons of First Nations contraband cigarettes, with a retail value of about $80 million. In 2013, the Conservative government introduced a series of laws, packaged in the omnibus bill C-10, imposing mandatory minimums for people who get caught smuggling tobacco (with cigarettes, 50 or more cartons). According to police, cigarettes are not only smuggled across the border (since the territory at Akwesasne spans beyond the border on both sides) but the cigarettes are then sold at a cheaper price to largely non-Indigenous clients looking to circumvent costly federal and provincial taxes.

“This initiative will significantly enhance law enforcement coverage of the border environment that is being exploited by organized crime to facilitate cross-border criminal activities, including the smuggling and trafficking of contraband and humans,” the RCMP told VICE. “We will be implementing measures that will support and expand current intelligence-led efforts by enhancing current border technology, focused on the goal of disrupting organized crime groups, that are operating along the border between the Quebec/Maine border and Oakville, Ontario,” said the same media relations officer.

Prior to 2007 when the trade began to go underground, Mohawk properties like the Rainbow Tobacco Company did business nation-to-nation across provincial and national borderlines. But since then, the RCMP crackdown has nearly bankrupted Rainbow, which had its cigarettes seized illegally by a number of provincial governments. While circumventing taxes imposed at borders remains in something of a legal grey area, there is a case for the “sovereignty through cigarette” argument that Rainbow and others have made for independent nation-to-nation trade. Regardless, the interference of the provincial government in a federal matter in illegally seizing cigarettes led to a court battle Rainbow Tobacco has not recovered from, financially. In addition to this, it came out later in court documents that the RCMP pressured the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) into revoking Rainbow’s federal tobacco license in 2012.

But tobacco is central to many Indigenous communities, both culturally and economically.

It’s a huge economic force within the Mohawk community, which has depended on the tobacco trade for jobs. Tobacco is both political and lucrative; the Mohawk community found that like Big Tobacco, they too were reaping financial reward. This has historically allowed the Mohawk community to not only remain relatively independent in terms of institutionalized support from the government, but also politicized enough to take a stand against the government where they see injustice—in calling for a federal inquiry, or at Oka, for example. Shawn Brant, a Mohawk activist from Tyendinaga who trades tobacco for a living, believes the increases in policing and surveillance are a direct attack on Indigenous communities.  

“I think this [initiative] isn't about targeting the tobacco trade, I believe [this] is about targeting an aspect of our community that actively speaks out against government's colonial and apartheid policies and that's the tragic reality,” Brant said of economic loss to the Mohawk community.

According the “History of Rainbow Tobacco” found on the company’s website, “the cigarette industry is currently a major employer of Kahnawakeron within the reserve proper and is one of the major reasons the unemployment rate within the community has steadily decreased in the past 5-10 years.” It goes to on to say that “in 2009-2010, the Kahnawake Tobacco Association (KTA) estimated that approximately 1700-2000 community members were employed in the tobacco industry.” Those numbers aren’t insignificant.

While costly, the federal budget estimates that these recent changes and the RCMP’s new border policing and surveillance initiative will bring in some $685 million in revenue in 2014-15 for the government. What is not included in this calculus, apparently, is the cost of dismantling the economic base of the Mohawk and other Indigenous communities. Such an oversight, particularly when taken with a refusal by this government to invest in the safety of those same communities and their missing and murdered women, makes it plain to Brant and others what Stephen Harper’s priorities are.

“I believe the agenda of government to expend resources to target tobacco, on one hand claiming to be a law and order government, a tough on crime government, a government that is committed to safety and the protection of victims within society, is [an] irony that people can observe when they're faced with the same government refusing to take any justice initiatives on the issue of murdered and missing women and girls. And I think that's the hardest pill to swallow, [...] the assertion that they are a government that is tough on crime, yet failing to provide justice to First Nations women and girls. [Instead they] impose mandatory minimum criminal sentences, jail sentences, on those people who use tobacco as a means to support their family and develop economies within impoverished First Nations communities,” Brant said. 
 

@muna_mire

Comics: Blobby Boys - Part 5

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Keep your eyes peeled for new installments of Blobby Boys every Wednesday from here until the end of time. Or until Alex gets sick of working with us.

Sex, Snow, and Cocaine: My Life As a Ski Resort 'Chalet Bitch'

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Belle de Neige (“Beautiful Snow”, if you didn’t take French) is a blog about what people who work at ski resorts get up to when they’re not fixing snow blades, or delivering après-ski drinks to Jemima Khan and whoever else goes on ski holidays. The writer just condensed a bunch of her blog posts into a book, so we asked her to condense her book back into a blog post. This is that.

I’ve been blogging about all the unpalatable shit people get up to on ski seasons for five years. And I’d say I’ve covered all the major bases: sex, ill-advised drug consumption, orgies, avalanches, immoral workplace behavior, rich delinquents, Russian prostitutes—everything you'd expect when you mix young people with high altitudes. So wrapping that all up into one snappy article should be easy, right? All I need to do is reel off a few anecdotes involving undignified sexual encounters as a result of British teens exporting British drinking culture, and I’m set.

But the problem is that I don’t want to start out like that, because perpetuating bullshit myths is boring. And because not everyone behind the scenes of Europe’s ski resorts are Harrovian drop-outs or braying packs of Hollister homeboys. In fact, many “seasonaires”—the word for people who work ski seaons up in the mountains—aren’t like that at all. Many of those I know are laborers or lost their jobs in the recession.

Ski resorts are often sanctuaries for misfits, mid-life crisis sufferers, and the odd dodgy guy with a big scar down his neck who, you suspect, probably can’t go home rather than won’t go home. Every one of them, just like me, is either running from something or towards something else. They move to the mountains because they’d rather live an existence that revolves around adrenaline and fresh morning powder than PS3 marathons and the kind of anonymous powders you buy off 30-year-old losers in parking lots.

Of course, it’s true that there are also plenty of gap-year vagrants who make ski seasons feel like a succession of back-to-back freshman orientation weeks—overexcited, rudderless 19-year-olds rolling out of school and rocking up in the Alps without a clue what they’re going to be doing for the next six months. Unable to clearly differentiate an ass from an elbow—let alone do an effective job of catering for holidaymakers—they spend the majority of their time doing stuff like drinking each other’s piss or jumping off roofs into snow drifts after 30 shots of Jägermeister.

Occasionally, events involving this sort of seasonaire start to take on a sinister edge. One girl I worked with got herself into a very nasty fix after she was filmed blowing a trio of guys (all in costumes) after the Christmas party. I know this because the video was broadcast by one of the perpetrators on a TV in a bar later that week. Of course, it was consensual and she only had herself to blame, but I couldn’t help feeling that it looked a bit like borderline gang rape. And who exactly, I wondered, was supposed to be looking out for her?

Stories like this fit the grand tradition of seasonaire life. For instance, there was another girl a few years before our Christmas party, Belladonna, whom staff had nicknamed “Harriet the Chariot.” She was a talented swimmer who’d once been groomed for Olympic duty, but had managed to escape her pushy mother and went off to work a season in a bar. By the end of her time there, she had slept with a total of 200 people, which—if I’ve got my math right—means she must have been having sex with roughly two different guys a day.

My own foray into the alpine abyss was triggered by a particularly hostile breakup, involving an engagement ring, a defaulted mortgage, and a gracious sprinkling of bankruptcy. I’d also only just got over the untimely death of my mother, who dropped dead suddenly from a heart attack when I was 21, and then my best friend bit it from a drug overdose.

It’s fair to say that I didn’t exactly touch down for my first season in the most self-possessed state of mind.

Conveniently enough, though, it turned out that a ski resort is the ideal location to get over all these issues—mostly by getting fucked in every sense of the word. For a while, I went on a one-woman rampage, spending most of my days either up to my armpits in soap-suds and other people’s pubic hair, having sex with stoned, broke teenagers on Tabasco-soaked mattresses, or careening down a mountain, fucked up on tranquilizers I’d pinched from one of my chalet guest’s bathroom cabinets.

This quickly descended into an amoral frenzy of bad behavior, which featured me cleaning toilets with my chalet guests’ toothbrushes, putting poop in their food as revenge for their rudeness, sinking vodka shots for breakfast, or doing a bunch of coke and driving seven-hour airport transfers.

In fact, more alarming episodes probably happened to me and those around me in that one season than throughout the rest of my life. I got buried up to my tits in snow after a roof slide, got pissed on by a paralytic French ski instructor, and nailed his friend off-piste in full view of a busy chair lift.

I gave numerous blow jobs in toilets and, on one occasion, woke up caked in my own vomit, naked in bed with a man I barely knew, and found a large piece of pink chewing gum stuck between my ass cheeks. Then there was the time I had a threesome in a $15,000-a-week chalet, reamed over an ottoman in nothing but ski boots and a beanie.

I should probably tell you about our guests. For a start, there was the vodka-saturated Ukrainian who let himself into the wrong chalet at four in the morning and got into bed with my guests’ eight-year-old son. This did not go down well—there was a lot of gnashing of teeth and screaming about pedophiles. Then there was the bachelor party—a bunch of guys who turned up with one of their “daughters” in tow, before offering their host, a wide-eyed 18-year-old girl from Devon, a line out of their huge bag of blow.

And, of course, there were the Latvian guests who turned up to my friend’s chalet with a couple of six-foot-tall, leather-clad prostitutes, looking like something out of a mid-90s pay-per-view. They had soon littered the entire building with condoms, leaving blood stains and cocaine all over the leather sofas and fucking in the sauna in full view of my friend. But he wasn’t complaining, particularly after they started having breakfast topless, or when he was gruffly offered one of the girls as an end-of-week tip.

So take from that what you will. But if you’re looking for chronic thrush and the opportunity to rub your genitals against an assortment of unwashed people in weird locations (bubble lifts, parked cars in busy town centers, store cupboards, bar toilets, overpopulated bunk rooms), or hoping to break various appendages in the pursuit of enjoying yourself, a ski season is 100-percent the best way to do so.

I have, of course, somewhat trounced my own point here. Instead of all this crassness, I could have talked about how ski seasons saved me from certain depression. That processing all my woes against a backdrop of soaring, inhospitable terrain taught me a lot about the minuteness of my problems and the corresponding insignificance of humanity as whole. Or that it introduced me to some of the most honest, motivated, and talented people I've ever met.

But people don’t want to hear about that. So I guess it’s just much easier to accept the hackneyed, clichéd image of snowboarding and skiing as a club exclusively for twats—the preserve of bearded rich kids who say “gnarly” and "far out" a lot, and have trust funds and yacht club memberships.

Snow sports are adored by those who do, and dismissed by those who don’t. Because the problem with skiing and snowboarding is that it’s hard. You can’t pay to be good at it; you have to earn it. Which actually makes it a great leveler. Believe me—I’ve watched plenty of petulant, knock-kneed super-wives fail at the parallel turn to know it to be true. Thousands of bucks in private ski tuition and a shiny Moncler ski jacket do not a skier make.

So, as an ode to the experience, I wrote a book about it all. And some of the sex, drugs, and vomit stuff made it in there, too. But much to my disgust, it seems that at this point the publishing industry would much rather scope around for the next slab of saccharine chick-lit to sell to virgins than consider what I have to offer. They don’t want vomit and VD—they want P.S. I Love You set in a snowstorm.

But my book has a bit about skiing on ketamine, for fuck’s sake. What else should adolescent girls be reading about?

You can read more of Belle’s tales of "catastrophe, sex, and squalor from the alpine underbelly" here.

Milf Teeth: For Once, We Shouldn't Laugh at Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin

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Within minutes of its hitting the internet, the jokes started coming. Had Chris finally found out that Gwyneth wasn’t actually British? Had she finally listened to a Coldplay album? Who would get custody of Beyoncé and Jay-Z? Then, when it became apparent that Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin had announced their marriage break-up as a feature on her lifestyle website Goop, describing the process as a "conscious uncoupling," the real trolling began. 

Of course it did. This is an actress who also used Goop to advertise for a private tutor who would work weekends to teach her kids ancient Greek, Japanese, philosophy, tennis, sailing, and chess—lessons they were being heinously deprived of at their private school. The children were five and seven years old at the time. The husband is the frontman of a band who sells millions of emotionally tweaking records and who was personally described as a "wanker" on live radio. By Bono. Imagine being described as a wanker by Bono. I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say it would be like your dog standing up on its hind legs in your kitchen one day and suddenly laughing at you for being a dog.

So not only does "conscious uncoupling" sound pretty funny, especially if you’re more familiar with the unconscious kind, when you go out and get so drunk that you can’t even remember getting dumped, but Gwyneth had added a 2,000-word essay from two of her gurus on the spiritual aspects of a healthy break-up. People don’t usually try to rebrand the entire concept of divorce while announcing that they’re having one, but then Gwyneth is, as my friend Bim put it, a total gangster. The thing about everything these gurus say about conscious uncoupling, though, is that it is true.

OK, so this Goop essay contains some unanticipated real talk about insects and their exoskeletons versus the endoskeletons of us vertebrates (and how there was a time, millions of years ago, when a dragonfly’s wing measured three feet across, leading to a Russian theory about the creation of insects being a failed attempt by nature to evolve a higher form of consciousness). But more important than the arthropodology is the sense that these are two very famous people who had two very human children and are trying very hard to find a way to still be a family, to let the crack down the middle of them feel like more of a seam.

The idea of failed marriage, as theirs will now be described, is so old and rotten that I think I prefer these brave new words of "conscious uncoupling." What’s a failure about more than ten years and two new human beings, raised in love? We've got to get over this idea that only "forever" counts. People used to die at 47, and now that's when they remarry. The life cycle has changed, as Gwyneth's cheery newsletter points out.

People don’t fail—machines fail. Marriage is not a machine; there is no success, there is no failure. Was Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s marriage a failure? She preferred women, and they didn’t have children, or sexual intercourse. One day she wrote him a note, filled her pockets with stones, and threw herself in the river. Yet the letters they wrote each other, over the years, are among the tenderest things I’ve read. “You have given me the greatest possible happiness. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been,” she said to him, and that’s just in her suicide note.

Life is like a big bag of raw meat, by the end dripping with piss and blood, ill-defined pauses, and a cinema reel of moments lost and moments gained. I can see why people are laughing at Goop. Positive thinking is a truly helpful tool in so much of life, but sometimes, just sometimes, you want the perfect blond movie star to stand back and say, This is the pits. My feelings are smashed across the floor like a broken bottle of cooking oil. The future is gray. My brain aches. I’m through.

And yet, personally speaking, conscious uncoupling sounds a hell of a lot better than what I’ve managed in my own life. Falling out with the person with whom you created children is a heartbreak that I can’t even describe. You can’t drink it away or find someone else so that it doesn’t matter anymore. It will always matter. It’s a feeling you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, although you don’t even have to, because the person you loved has already slipped into that role. Your very own angry ghost.

So if those cheery blond quinoa-munching celebrities Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin can consciously uncouple, and teach the rest of us how to do it, then please go ahead. I for one will listen. The angry silences can burn a hole in your heart otherwise.

Follow Sophie Heawood on Twitter.

The Awkward, Colourful World of Maya Fuhr

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Maya Fuhr is one of those photographers who is constantly documenting her weird, wonderful life. If she's not shooting editorials fo Topshop or documenting her friends and their art, she's just snap, snap, snapping anything that catches her fancy and isolating some of the more vivid and strange moments of her existence. We recently raided her archive of new work and pulled some of those out to share with you. So yeah, here you go. Enjoy!


This Death Row Inmate Is Dying to Donate His Organs

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In 2001 Christian Longo killed his wife and his three young children and fled to Mexico. Once he was brought back to the US, he was convicted of those murders and placed on Oregon’s Death Row, where he has resided since 2003. He was once on the FBI's top-ten most wanted list, and James Franco is even going to play him in an upcoming movie.

Christian, now 40 and still in jail, is turning a new leaf. In an effort to give back to his community, he has decided to donate his organs upon his inevitable execution. The only problem is, due to the lack of an efficient prisoner donation protocol, he pretty much can't. Chris is even willing to forgo all appeals of his death sentence if he can donate his organs upon his execution. Still, he's been denied.

Through his Gifts of Anatomical Value from Everyone (G.A.V.E) organization, Chris is looking to change that. The mission of G.A.V.E is to remove the medical and ethical issues involved with prisoner organ and tissue donation and gain approval for some of the 2 million incarcerated individuals to donate. If successful, the organization will substantially reduce the number of people on waiting lists for organ and tissue donation (which is more than 121,000, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network).

I recently conducted an email interview with Longo about how he came to found G.A.V.E, the work his organization is doing, and the impact prisoner donation could have if certain ethical and political barriers were removed.

Image via FBI

VICE: What piqued your interest in prisoner organ donation?
Christian Longo: After watching a friend increasingly suffer from a degenerative disorder called scleroderma, it became apparent she would eventually need a kidney transplant. After being told by my prison system that consideration may only be given for donations to immediate family, I put together a proposal for my unique circumstances as a death row inmate. I offered to end my remaining appeals and face execution if my healthy body parts were able to be donated to those in need. My request was denied.

How surprising was it to find out you couldn’t donate?
It was a Spockian "that's illogical" moment followed by a fear that someone I cared about might not be able to find a suitable donor... which pissed me off.

When and why was the ban of prisoner donations instituted?
It's not a ban per se, but there's enough red tape that it might as well be. Due to inadequate testing, infections such as HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C were being transplanted with the organs. Prisoners along with gay men, hemophiliacs, and intravenous-drug users were all listed in the CDC's donor exclusion recommendations.

What's changed since?
In 1994, the risk of contracting HIV was much greater in prison than it was for the general US population. I think the problem lies in testing methods. In the early 90s testing procedures were unable to detect the virus accurately. Now we have RNA testing, which can detect the virus within days of infection.

Who allows prisoners to sign up to donate organs? Any prisoner donations yet?
Utah became the first state to legislate the right of prisoners to be donors last year, and they now give inmates the opportunity to register as donors upon entry to prison. To date, about 1,000 of the 7,000 prisoners in Utah's correctional system have signed up. Texas and Maricopa County, Arizona, also allow prisoners to register as donors.

Thus far, I'm not aware of any registered inmates who have donated. The problem has been that even in states that technically allow donation, they only allow donations after death. Prison security issues slow this process down prohibitively, to a point of death for the organs... and any hopeful recipient. Until prison policies are adjusted accordingly, living donation opportunities, like kidneys and bone marrow, have to be considered.

What about societal aversion to donations from prisoners? And is that present on the recipient level?
Unofficial polls reflect that over 70 percent of respondents feel that prisoners should be able to donate. I encourage anyone to swing by any local dialysis clinic to ask if they would accept an inmate's organ, even one on death row.

What are the ethical and medical risks, if any, for these types of procedures?
Certainly, the care that can be taken to screen a confined prisoner is much greater than that of, say, an accident victim whose organs must be procured quickly. Ethically, so long as a prisoner is given the same counseling as non-prison donors, ensuring appropriate consent—the biggest gripe of ethicists—any ethical issues are easily resolved.

Is informed consent a real concern regarding prisoner donation?
The medical community and prison systems are still sore from the 70s, when it became apparent that prisoners were being used for medical experimentation. Even though prisoners were "volunteering," there was a paid incentive. That's why it's important that organ and tissue donation be offered without perks. No parole considerations. No pay. Not even special visitation.

How many lives could be saved using the organs of executed prisoners?
First off, organs and tissue from the nearly 2 million non–death row inmates would make the greatest dent by far, but the numbers of lives that could be saved by the executed are not insubstantial or insignificant. There are currently about 3,100 prisoners on death row in the US. There are about 45 executions per year, with roughly 1,400 executions since lethal injection was first used. Recent surveys have shown that roughly 80 percent of death row inmates would donate after their execution if given the option.

With a planned execution, you can maximize the amount of viable transplants and have recipients at the ready for every part—one heart, one pancreas, two kidneys, two lungs, two liver lobes, and up to 50 other transplantable parts. This could save or, at the very least, severely improve the lives of hundreds of people every year.

What about those who can't separate your past from your current mission?
I agree with the "gifts of a bad man bring no good with them" rationale unless that man can give in a way that does nothing to benefit him. A horrible past does not preclude positive acts, like a fight to donate healthy parts. However, I agree that I'm not the best person to tackle this issue. I was torn for years about how loud to shout. I'm a distraction. My presence adds unnecessary questions to the debate, like this one.

Worse, it stirs up the pain of those I've hurt. I would like nothing more than to quietly donate, even if it means facing my sentence to do so.

Meet the 'Water Witch' Who Is Helping California Farmers Deal with Drought

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Sharron, the water witch in the field. Photo courtesy of Sharron Hope

I live in a city and I’ve never seen a water well. It sounds exotic, or even fictional. I just turn on my faucet, water comes out, and I don’t have to consider its source.

Here in the eastern United States, we’re doing OK when it comes to precipitation, but our West Coast neighbors are seriously suffering from a terrible drought. California—often referred to as our nation’s “breadbasket” because it grows nearly half of all domestically produced fruits, vegetables, and nuts—is deep into its second year of reduced rainfall, the likes of which the state hasn’t seen since the 70s. That much food on the line means a lot of profits are in danger. With this year’s drastically reduced crop yields, food prices across the country are rapidly increasing. In the next few months, the prices of artichokes, celery, broccoli, and cauliflower could rise by 10 percent

The devastating drought in California. Photo by Flickr user Ingrid Taylar

These high stakes are making California farmers both desperate and creative, because they’re looking for ways to find water underground since it refuses to fall from the sky. A couple of weeks ago, an article about “water witches” caught my eye. The piece described so-called witches in California using the age-old technique of the divining rod—usually just a tree branch—to tap into energy fields below the surface of the land to locate groundwater and pinpoint where to drill wells. This common practice, also known as dowsing, has been around since at least the 15th century and has been also used to unearth precious metals, gravesites, and oil reserves. In spite of its popularity, witching has long been stigmatized. In 1518, Martin Luther thought the notion of walking around with a wooden stick in the woods was completely freaky, and decried it as occultism. Seventeenth-century France even put strict limitations on water witches. But while scientific bodies such as the US Geological Survey claim that witching is about as successful at finding water as pure guesswork, it continues, after many, many centuries, to remain popular: Winemaker Robert Mondavi, a practicing water witch himself, has popularized the practice in California’s vineyards, and even John Franzia—the Two-Buck Chuck guy—advocates dowsing. 

I wanted to hear about witching firsthand, so I called Sharron Hope, the president of Gold Country Dowsers, the Oroville, CA–based chapter of the American Society of Dowsers. Hope, who has been dowsing in California since the 70s, said that in recent years her business has more than quadrupled. Just don’t call her a witch. 

VICE: When you go out dowsing for water, how exactly does that work?
Sharron Hope: I head to the property, I find a tree branch, and I hold it out in front of me. Then, I turn around in a circle, and when the branch senses energy, it’ll start dipping down towards the earth, but just minutely—you have to really concentrate on what you’re doing; you have to forget about everything else, just relax and turn slowly, and when you feel that dip, you walk in that direction. When you get over the site where there is the most water, that stick is gonna point down to the earth. 

You say “when the stick senses energy.” What kind of energy are we talking about here?
Water, of course, is flowing underground, and it’s flowing past rocks, and rocks actually store energy. So as it goes through those rocks, the water strips off some of that energy—some of those electrons—from the rocks. And that energy goes shooting straight up. That’s what the tree branch, up on the surface, is responding to. I started doing water wells in 1979. And I’ve noticed over the years that there are heavily-traveled deer trails over water veins. And a lot of times, when I go out to dowse, the spot that I find to drill the well is where two deer trails cross. So wild animals, too, can pick up on that energy that comes up from the water. 

The process sounds kind of supernatural. Is that where the name “water witch” comes from?
Actually, the name comes from the fact that a lot of dowsers, historically, used a branch from the witch hazel tree to find water. But the overall term is dowser—you know, we don’t like to be called water witches, actually. It provokes snide comments. It’s really just an old-fashioned term that people used 100 years ago.

An old-school dowser. Photo via Wiki Commons

It sounds like dowsing has a long history.
As far as we can figure out, the practice goes back at least 10,000 years. There are actually petroglyphs of men holding a tree branch and looking for water. And of course, before we had machinery and drilling rigs, we had to hand-dig wells, so you better believe they had some kind of methods to find the water. And basically, most of 'em just used a tree branch.

OK, so back to the branch. Once you find your spot, what do you do?
I’ll mark that spot, and then I’ll get my L-rods out. They’re made of solid brass, and they have a copper handle. So I’m holding on to the handles, and I’m standing a little bit away from the site that the branch found. And I move towards that site, and I get right over it, and then those two L-rods will cross. 

So they’re sort of drawing together of their own accord?
Yes, they go together of their own accord. They cross and make an “X.” And if I back up again and walk around that site, maybe about 8 to 10 feet away from it, as I get to a water vein, those rods are gonna separate and make a line. That indicates the edge of the water vein. So that’s the process that I use. In fact, I was out dowsing a well in Berry Creek today for a family who bought ten acres out there, and they want to have a well for a little family garden. And last Thursday, I was out at a vineyard—it was almost 200 acres, and I dowsed several well sites for them. 

Do vineyards make up a lot of your clientele?
Oh, I have a variety of clients. A lot of homeowners around here have property with acreage, and for a lot of them, their wells have either gone dry because of the drought, or the water table has gotten so low that they’re not getting enough out of their wells to run their households. We have rice farmers around here, and I’ve dowsed wells for them. We have a lot of agriculture around here. I’ve done organic orchards, citrus farms, olive orchards—there’s a lot that I’ve done in the past 35 years. 

Has your business increased in the past couple of years because of the terrible drought?
Oh, definitely, definitely. For most of my career, I’d been dowsing about one well a month. Now I’m doing anywhere from one to four a week. 

Do you get calls from people who had never heard of dowsing before?
Yes, the well-drillers are actually referring people to me. Because the well-driller, you know, he just drills a hole. He says, “Where do you want me to drill your well?” And at $15–50 a foot for drilling, you don’t really want to have to guess at where he should start drilling—you want to know. 

Thanks, Sharron.

An Interview with Fred Phelps' Son, Nathan

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Nathan Phelps (photo via)

Westboro Baptist Church founder and world-famous bastard Fred Phelps died last week — and it doesn't look like he'll be missed even by a large part of his large family (he had 13 children and 54 grandchildren), who still make up a large part of what remains of the WBC.

So far, more than 20 members of the Phelps family have left the church due to his behavior and WBC's practices. One of them is Nathan Phelps, who left the Kansas family house at 18, accusing his father of, among other things, child abuse. Having completely denounced the WBC dogma, Nathan now lives in Canada, calls himself an atheist, and is an avid supporter of LGBT rights. He has also spent the past few years giving speeches and interviews about his experience as a member of WBC.

Back in 2012, I had the honor of having Nate stay as a guest in my house for a few days. Once I heard about his father's death, and with the Facebook announcement Nate made about it in mind, I got in touch with him again.

VICE: Hey Nate, how do you feel about your dad dying?
Nathan Phelps:
I haven't seen my father in over 35 years. I spoke to him once, briefly, in 1995. Ten years after I left home, I went through a deliberate mourning process for the loss of my family. Between that and the passage of time, I believed I would have no feelings when he passed. I was surprised that there were feelings when I learned of his condition and then his death. I've now had a few days to consider those feelings, and I think the sadness is over what might have been.

When you revealed that your father was dying a few days ago, you said family members that left the church were being blocked from seeing him. If you had been able to, would you have wanted to see him one last time in person?
In a perfect world, I would have jumped at that chance. I left that place 37 years ago as a fearful young man. The absence of interaction, an opportunity to process that, only means I still have that fear to contend with. If there were the least bit of evidence that our relationship had changed in his eyes, I would be there in a heartbeat. Other than that, my greatest concern was for my family members who had expressed a desire to see him and were being denied that opportunity.

So far, that famous Facebook update of yours from a few days ago has 2,000 comments. I read quite a few of them, and there seemed to be a divide between those who wanted to leave comments celebrating his death and those that felt this would be disrespectful to you as his son — even likening it to picketing a funeral. Given that you were one of his biggest critics while he was alive, what are your thoughts on this?
They [the WBC] have done great harm to many people. I cannot expect all of them to be prepared to forgive and forget just because he stopped breathing. Having said that, I don't condone fighting hate with hate. I am fond of something the British philosopher Bertrand Russell said near the end of his life: "The moral thing I should like to say is, love is wise and hatred is foolish." These are not interesting words on a sign, but a way of approaching life and other humans morally.  

You sometimes tweet at your sister Shirley. Does she or any of the other family members who are still in the church ever respond or communicate with you?
Rarely, but I've heard from most of them at one time or another. The interesting thing about those encounters is that we discover quite early on that we have no basis for debate because I roundly reject the foundation for their entire worldview, the divine inerrancy of the Bible.

You had revealed that your father was excommunicated a few months ago by the church he founded. Do you know if this was an indication of any significant changes at the WBC? What do you think will become of it now?
This is tough to answer with any certainty. I've heard he was kicked out because his personality had changed, and he was treating the family and other church members cruelly. You will allow me to pause for a moment of bitter laughter at that one. That rationale should have seen him excommunicated 60 years ago. But I digress. The other thing I heard is that he was at odds with a newly formed board of eight elders regarding the direction of the church and this led to his excommunication.

Having said that, it's not clear if it was a complete excommunication or a forced removal from his position as pastor. Some things I've heard from family members suggest that they turned their back on him in the end. Other comments lead me to believe that he was still, in their eyes, in good standing with God.

What effect do you think his death will have on the family? Do you foresee it changing any of their relationships with you?
I won't hold my breath. I do believe that the new dynamics will be very, very difficult to sustain. There is evidence that an outsider, Steve Drain, holds significant power. That same power in my father's hands encompassed so much more than Steve could ever match. If they keep bleeding young members from their flock, I have to believe they will reach a tipping point that will fracture what's left. Stay tuned.

What Really Happened During Mexico City's Airport Shootout?

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Screen shot of Deputy Chief Luis Cardenas Palomino from his original press conference

At 8:33 in the morning on Monday, June 25, 2012, the sound of gunfire erupted in Terminal 2 of the Mexico City International Airport. The shots were coming from the direction of the food court. Witnesses recalled seeing two separate groups of gunmen, both clad in the dark navy uniforms of the Mexican federal police. Travelers and airport personnel dived for cover underneath the neat rows of small round tables.

Altogether, three policemen died at the scene, all of them clean, according to The Federal Public Safety Department, whose uniforms all of the shooters in question were wearing. The two men dressed as police but designated as villains fled the airport on foot.

The shootout at the Mexico City International Airport remains one of the most singularly bizarre, alarming and, above all, unexplained events of the drug war.

Among the dead was the bodyguard to the chief of federal police at the airport, the shift supervisor for land transportation at the terminal, and a patrolmen on duty that morning. The Federal Police was unsure whether the men responsible for their deaths were police, ex-police, or impostors. They were later identified as two patrolmen, dirty cops, the chief said, caught red-handed in a drug deal involving an anonymous network of cocaine traffickers based in Lima, Peru.

Apart from the body count, almost nothing about the official version stands up. The deputy chief of the Federal Public Safety Department, Luis Cardenas Palomino, attributed the shootout to a satchel of drugs hidden in an airport men's room. When one of the dirty cops brought it out, that was the signal to move in for the arrest. So then why did 44 minutes elapse on the time-stamped video from the time that a blurry figure is photographed entering a restroom and a nondescript figure is photographed from behind to the top of the stairs where he will be detained? Why is the satchel of drugs not clearly pictured in any of the still images presented as evidence? Where did it go when the suspects ran away, their arms unencumbered?

It was a drug deal with no evidence of drugs, a special operations team of three officers, all of whom ended up dead, a special operation every moment of which somehow eluded the 430 security cameras filming every inch of the airport at the time, and without the knowledge of the airport security personnel that monitored them.

Last week, members of the team of video surveillance monitors at Mexico City International Airport leaked never-before-seen footage from the shootout of June 25, 2012, to the Mexican news weekly Reporte Indigo. The new footage exposes Deputy Chief Palomino and The Federal Public Safety Department for selectively choosing video and still images to substantiate the story of the special operation of good cops busting bad cops that they wanted to transmit to the public.

The new footage shows that Deputy Chief Palomino hid from the public the fact that a second shootout occurred in the airport only about a minute after the two patrolmen had already fled. Reporte Indigo cited anonymous sources close to the investigation who believed the patrolman was most likely killed during the second shootout, when the suspects were out of the building. 

The footage from 2012 shows the two shooters escaping through the food court at 8:33 a.m. In his presentation to the media, Deputy Chief Palomino stops the tape there, at the point time-stamped 8:34:30. The last movements are of terror-stricken patrons of the food court beginning to pick themselves up off the floor. By choosing to stop the footage there, it gives the appearance that the violence was over.


A still from the security footage used by Deputy Chief Palomino.

The new footage, however, continues rolling past that point where the deputy chief had stopped the tape. A mere six seconds later, bullets fly in the food court once again.

What did The Federal Public Safety Department have to gain by hiding the fact of a second shootout? Certainly, the notion that one group of police was secretly planning to arrest the other could not have survived otherwise. A closer look at the new footage also reveals that more federal police were involved in the shootouts, and the operation appears larger and more premeditated than previously thought.

The new footage introduces previously unknown characters into leading roles in the shootouts. Two unidentified federal police officers appear in one new scene. They are shown leaning against a railing in a busy passageway between the food court and the gates for international flights. It is only a few minutes before the first shootout will begin. A civilian wearing a ski mask approaches and greets them, shaking hands. He then crosses to the other side of the busy passageway and greets others at the edge of the frame before disappearing off camera.

The officers display a nonchalance that amounts to a kind of premeditation. Moments before the shooting commences, one of the policemen moves away from the railing and walks over to within a few yards of where the first shots are fired. As panic sets in, and the travelers and employees of the airport are seen running for their lives, the second officer moves without haste to a large screen in the middle of the frame, which he steps behind and which blocks the camera's view of him. His partner returns showing no sign of panic, and both men can be seen speaking on their cell phones as they observe the unfolding action. Neither of them so much as unholsters his firearm.  

A similar figure appears immediately after the second shootout in the food court. He is another federal policeman, emerging briefly from a hiding place behind a giant decorative potted plant in the middle of the seating area. Like the others hiding behind the screen, this man seems to be aware of where the security cameras are. He too is seen speaking deliberately into a cell phone, emerging from hiding only  momentarily to assess the scene. When a detachment of federal police arrive on camera, they patrol away from the direction that the shots were fired, rather than toward it.

A week after their escape, the two patrolmen accused of gunning down three of their fellow police reached out to the Mexican news magazine Proceso to tell their version of the story. Daniel Cruz and Zeferino Morales admitted guilt in the deaths, but denied they were involved in drug-trafficking.

“And we know that we are going to pay for that, but we cannot acknowledge the other charges because we never got involved in drug trafficking,” Cruz said. “It is very clear who protected drug-trafficking and who provided the protections. They (the deceased policemen) always used to say that they got along well with Chief Palomino and that they had it all on a silver platter.”

So, what are we to make of all this? A quick rundown of the recent criminal history at the airport is enough to suggest that the shootout most likely arose from a dispute between rival cliques of corrupt police over the spoils of drug-trafficking. As recently as 2008, then-chief of the federal police, Edgar Millan, was shot to death in his home in Mexico City. One of the suspects was a former anti-narcotics police officer at the airport, and he had in his possession a notebook with detailed information about drug-trafficking there.

Less than a year before the shootout, a pilot with Aeromexico was caught at Madrid's airport with 92 pounds of cocaine in his personal luggage. Eight months prior to that, three flight attendants with Aeromexico were caught with over 300 pounds of cocaine between them. A company providing private security at checkpoints in the Mexico City airport were also arrested in connection with that case.

The Mexico City Airport is known as a transshipment hub for South American cocaine headed to Europe, as well as a recipient of bulk cash deliveries from the United States.

Officers Cruz and Morales remain fugitives. They said they would turn themselves in when there is a  change in the presidential administration. That change happened in December, but neither man has been heard from. The reward for their capture is around a half million dollars. The third man, their shift supervisor, whom they said had nothing to do with the airport shootout, was captured and charged on July 15, 2012. In August, 348 federal police officers at the Mexico City International Airport were replaced and reassigned to other states.

The replacements were police officers who passed a double scrutiny, and an exhaustive vetting process, according to a statement that Chief Palomino made at the time. But only time will tell when the next scandal—or shootout—occurs.

Peru's DVD Pirates Have Exquisite Taste

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In Pasaje 18 of Lima's Polvos Azules shopping mall, you'll find racks of DVD burners humming away while fluorescent lights cast their glare across the glitter of thousands of bootleg movies in telltale cellophane wrappers. It looks like a scene right out of cyberpunk. But for many Peruvians, whose access to alternatives like Netflix is hampered by some of the slowest internet speeds on the globe, bootleg DVDs remain a primary source for accessing current movie releases.

Motherboard's Mariano Carranza recently paid a visit to Lima to check out how the DVD bootleggers operate, and they said Johnny Law has cooled down on the piracy crackdown in recent years. It hasn't always been that way; As a shop owner named El Chino told us, "I had problems with the law about 11 years ago. They'd stop by and confiscate my films. But they don't do that anymore, mainly because this has grown too much." In 2006, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) estimated that some 98 percent of music distributed in Peru between 2004 and 2005 was pirated.

Crude Journalism

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A fire at the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond, California, force 15,000 people to seek medical attentiion. Photo courtesy of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Richmond is tucked into California's western tricep, a former wine town with a population just over 100,000. Under the administration of Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, the town is the largest city in the United States with a Green Party mayor. It’s also an oil town—in 1901, Standard Oil set up an operation and tank farm, choosing the location for its easy access to the San Francisco Bay. Soon after, a western terminus of the Santa Fe Railroad was built in Richmond to handle the outflux of crude. Over the course of the 20th century, Standard Oil became the Standard Oil Company of California (SOCAL), and later, Chevron.

Throughout the 90s, the Richmond refinery was fined thousands of dollars for unsafe conditions, explosions, major fires, and chemical leaks, as the plant oozed chlorine and sulfur trioxide into Richmond’s atmosphere. In August of 2012, the Richmond refinery exploded after Chevron ignored the warning of corroding pipes from the local safety board. The disaster was linked to aging pipes, which were simply clamped instead of replaced altogether. 15,000 residents in the surrounding area were forced to seek medical treatment, and Chevron’s CEO, John Watson, got a $7.5 million dollar raise.

Now that some time has passed, Chevron has decided to modernize the refinery, and has simultaneously sponsored the creation of the Richmond Standard, an online newspaper that is decidedly positive about anything the company does. The paper, whose name is a sly reference to the company that Chevron grew out of, covers minimally reported local stories on crime, public meetings, and sports. It also features a section called "Chevron Speaks," which works as a place for the company to put forth its ideology. According to SF Gate, "the idea of the nation's second-largest oil company funding a local news site harkens back to an era of journalism when business magnates often owned newspapers to promote their personal, financial, or political agendas. Now that mainstream newspapers are struggling to survive, online news sites are testing ways to fund their operations."

The founding of the Standard coincides with a modernization initiative at the Richmond plant, which would allow the facility to process fuel with higher percentages of sulfur, the key to the corrosion that resulted in the 2012 plant explosion. “They’re planning on doubling the sulfur content of the crude,” Andres Soto, the Richmond Community Organizer at Communities For a Better Environment, told me. 

According to Andres, Chevron wants to go from 1.5% sulfur content to 3%. Outside of the fear of another explosion, there is a serious environmental problem with the modernization and the refinery in general. “They’re publically claiming there will be no net increase in emissions,” he says. “Our suspicion is they plan on releasing more greenhouse and particulate emissions, here in the local arena, in exchange for cap and trade.”

For those of you unfamiliar with cap and trade, it’s essentially when you let one of your refineries pollute above the federal limit in exchange for another refinery polluting below the federal limit. The differentials from “caps” are traded so that in the end everyone is supposed to be meeting requirements, on average. “It’s the single largest refinery on the West Coast of the United States. As a facility, it’s the single largest emitter of green house gases in California,” Andres says. He believes the refinery will cause serious pollution to the Bay Area, and that the company will start using the port of Richmond to export tar sands to China that aren’t legal for fuel in the United States because of the sulfur content.

As you may have heard in relation to the Keystone Pipeline proposals, tar sands are semi-solid petroleum and sand mixtures that are being harvested in Alberta, Canada. The process of extracting the petroleum wastes a lot of water, and a Yale article reported last year that a company extracting petroleum used 370 million cubic meters of fresh water in 2011. Chevron could export the sands to China for their needs and save Americans time and resources, but Andres points out the emissions from shipping and the emissions China will create will circle back to America with the winds.

Chevron is attempting to convince the public that the refinery is a good idea in the pages of the Richmond Standard, typically using the promise of more jobs and money. Andres says the company is buying every billboard in town. The billboards often depict people of color, likely in an effort to convince minorities that they can trust a multinational oil conglomerate.

Richmond is about a quarter Latino and a third African American, so there is a big population for Chevron to market to with these advertisements. Andres believes that regardless of race, the low economic standing of many Richmond residents risks the town being subject to anything that creates jobs. He also believes that Richmond is becoming more progressive, and that people will hopefully spend more time educating themselves on the issues.

Not only is the company buying up all the billboards, but in 2010 the company spent $1.2 million in city council elections, and Andres claims they spent an additional $2 million in California state legislature. In November, there will be five out of seven council seats opening in Richmond, including the mayor’s seat, and that appears to be why they’re plastering the town with billboards.

A company like Chevron is more than willing to spend all the money it can to ensure the operation of its biggest refinery in California. Whether it means starting a newspaper or sponsoring elections, they seem capable of doing anything necessary for their project. Chevron did not return my calls, but I’m sure they’d have plenty of jargon about jobs and economic growth for me. There may be a lot of jobs in oil, but there aren’t any jobs at all when the town you live in is on fire.

 

Follow Thor Benson on Twitter.

Italy's Newest Tabloid Is Devoted Entirely to the Pope

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Ever since Pope Francis became the leader of the Catholic Church last year, the mainstream press has gone nuts. Since his ascension to the top of the Vatican, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (his pre-pope name) has been called a “revolutionary,” a “rock star,” and a “superhero.” He was also proclaimed to be a living saint for performing a miracle only a few hours after his investiture in March 2013—when he managed to make Rome’s public transportation work properly (for a couple of hours, at least).

That was just the beginning. After suffering through the reign of notoriously non-media-friendly Pope Benedict (although his red Prada shoes made regular headlines), Italian journalists couldn’t believe their luck when they realized there was finally a pope who regularly rode the bus and carried his own bag and who wasn’t immune to the flu.

So Pope Francis had already been on plenty of magazine and tabloid covers before March 5, when the first issue of Il Mio Papa ["My Pope"], a weekly magazine devoted to his holiness, hit newstands. Il Mio Papa's editor is Aldo Vitali, who is also behind Italy’s bestselling TV listings and celebrity news magazine, TV Sorrisi e Canzoni ["TV Smiles and Songs"], and the official press release, announced that Il Mio Papa would have “a positive and popular point of view, with colorful layouts and highly emotional pictures.” The publisher, Mondadori (which is owned by the family of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi) has high hopes for the publication, as it has an announced circulation of 3 million and a PR campaign that includes banners in St. Peter’s square in Vatican City.

(It may or may not have been inspired by a photoshopped parody of Tiger Beat that featured Pope Francis that was on the website of left-wing magazine Mother Jones over a year ago.)

It's sort of odd to launch a new weekly magazine at a time when the print media is supposedly dying, but Vitali seems to believe that the pope's appeal can overcome publishing trends. In a letter to his readers, the editor wrote: “The Pope never stops—every day he surprises us with his firm decisions and his unpredictable gestures... If you are reading these lines it means that we have something in common: an admiration and deep appreciation for Pope Francis.” Il Mio Papa, he continued, will aim not so much to “celebrate” the world's top Catholic, but to “help him spread his message.”

I leafed through the first issue (it's 68 pages long and costs 50 cents) to get a sense of what that looks like, and found that the tone of the articles was generally, “The pope always hugs the children passed to him by their parents," and, “Often mothers ask for a kiss for their child and the pope is always surrounded by children who are happy to be next to him,” or, “Pope Francis is constantly showing his enthusiasm for his devotees, and St. Peter's Square is everyone’s home.”

The best part is the photos that resemble the candid celebrity shots commonly found in tabloids, except instead of D-listers groping C-listers in taxis, you get Pope Francis “walking among the happy crowd” in St. Peter’s square. You also have pope-related news items, like the one below (at left) about how there's going to be a TV show inspired by the pope's life in Argentina between 1976 and 1981, “when he opposed Jorge Rafael Videla’s regime, helping the underprivileged.”

After the “political” section (bo-ring!), ll Mio Papa advises readers on how to enjoy the Angelus prayer in St. Peter's Square (“you can see the pope better from the first quarter of the square, on the right”) and offers glimpses into the pope's personal life; he's “declined to live in the Papal apartments” and “prefers to live in a hotel room.” That one comes with a map of the papal apartments that looks like a children's book illustration:

Readers can also treat themselves to a pull-out centerfold of the pontiff that could decorate “your room or your place of work” so that “the pope's smile and prayers will always be with you.”

Toward the end you'll find a photo story about the pope’s first year in Vatican, in which you can spot the selfie he took with some kids in August 2013, captioned “A technological pope.” A few pages later you can find a guide to signing up for Twitter in order to “receive Francis’ messages on your phone (it’s easy and free)”.

Page 55 is by far my favorite. Headlined “Francesco Helps Us,” it maps out the components of the Pope’s “five-finger prayer” (for an English explanation of the five-finger prayer, click here).

Via Tumblr

The magazine's ads make it clear that Il Mio Papa's target demo is older people who are having troulbe pooping. “'Kilocal Woman' helps you fight weight gain” reads one. “Wake up your bowel and fight constipation” is another tagline, and not far away is “Re-charge your bowel with good bacteria.” There are also ads for hearing aids, beauty creams, and products that make “your legs look like they did when you were 20.”

What does the actual pope think about Il Mio Papa? Well, judging from this interview with newspaper Corriere della Sera, he's not very happy—he told the interviewer that he doesn’t want to be portrayed as a superhero or a rock star, because he's still a man that “laughs, cries, sleeps calmly, and has friends like everyone else. A normal person.”

Good luck with that, dude.

Follow Leonardo Bianchi on Twitter.


Mining Conflicts in Guatemala Are Erupting in Violence

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An anti-mining banner at the roadblock reads: “Defend our Mother Earth from the rats.”

In 2000, engineers from Radius Gold, a Vancouver-based mining company, discovered a belt of gold deep inside the Tambor mountains in southern Guatemala. The Guatemalan government promptly issued the company an exploratory license, and for more than a decade, Radius studied the region as a possible base of operations. The proposed mine lies just a few miles from the village of San José del Golfo and from San Pedro Ayampuc, a small city. Few locals, most of whom are of indigenous Mayan descent, were consulted before Radius moved in. Few of them knew anything was happening at all. They certainly didn’t know they were living atop what would become a literal gold mine.

It wasn’t until early 2012 that townspeople began to grasp the scope of what was happening just down the road. They watched as truck after truck, loaded with heavy equipment, rumbled down the winding jungle roads that were normally used as routes for colectivo buses and small pickups carrying crates of chickens. In February 2012, Radius obtained final permission from the government to build its mine, which it hoped would pump out as many as 52,000 tons of gold a year. Fearful of what might happen if a big foreign developer started digging into their soil, the community decided to intervene. They formed a human roadblock, manned in rotating shifts by people sitting on plastic chairs. They held banners, and cooked on-site meals for protesters in a makeshift kitchen under a lush canopy of vegetation. The mine has yet to extract a single ounce of gold, and March 2 of this year marks the second anniversary of this roadblock, known as La Puya, which translates to the Point—as in the tip of a spear.

A shooting victim shows a wound from the April 2013 attack near the Escobal silver mine.

The human roadblock was the culmination of decades of frustration with the destructive and lucrative mining industry in Guatemala. The industry has benefited the national coffers since the country opened up to foreign mineral extraction in the mid 1990s. But that wealth rarely trickles down to those living in close proximity to the mines, who are the most affected by the damage to the local ecosystem. In San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc, where most residents earn a living as sweet-corn farmers or chicken ranchers, the fear was that the arrival of large-scale industrial mining would suck up and contaminate the local water supply, drying up natural springs, depleting the water table, and polluting it with arsenic.

I visited La Puya in July 2013, after hearing about the many attacks the roadblockers had withstood over the course of the previous year. Five months after La Puya was formed, Radius Gold sold its exploratory license to Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA), a mining company based in Reno, Nevada. The human roadblock drastically increased the risk of the investment, but the structure of the sale was such that Radius wouldn’t be paid in full until the mine started producing. This incentivized both companies to get rid of the activists and start digging up gold. In December 2012, the mining companies hired police and private security who arrived en masse at the roadblock and delivered an ultimatum to the protesters: Clear the road, or be removed by force. Steadfast and resolute, the protesters didn’t budge—even when the security detail fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. Instead, the roadblockers lay flat on the dirt road, holding flowers up to the riot-gear-festooned police.

Members of La Puya meet with Guatemala’s president, center, and interior minister, right.

That official attempt to move the roadblock was somewhat chaotic but still respectful of the rule of law, oversimplified as a case of the state wielding its power as a cudgel against protesters illegally blocking a road. But months earlier, Yolanda “Yoli” Oquelí Veliz, one of the leaders of La Puya, had gotten a far more acrimonious visit.

On the night of June 13, 2012, as she was driving home from the roadblock, two masked gunmen followed Yoli on motorbikes and shot at her multiple times. “I still have the bullet in my back,” Yoli told me when I interviewed her at La Puya’s camp on a calm, sunny day in July. She craned her neck and pointed at a raised mound of flesh near her kidney.

Although many are undocumented, attacks like the one Yoli survived are all too common. Anti-mining encampments pepper the Guatemalan countryside, and attacks by private security organizations have been reported all over the country. One such case occurred in April 2013, at southeast Guatemala’s Escobal silver mine, which is owned by the Canadian-founded company Tahoe Resources. Tahoe’s head of security gave orders to open fire on protesters who had been blockading the road near the mine, according to an investigation by Guatemalan newspaper Siglo 21 a month later. Six people were badly injured, and the head of security was recorded on tape giving the order to shoot, allegedly saying, “Kill those sons of bitches.”

Guatemala’s president, Otto Pérez Molina, right, and interior minister, Mauricio López Bonilla

Following the attacks, people from nearby villages began setting vehicles on fire. Riots broke out. Guatemala’s president, Otto Pérez Molina, imposed a “state of siege” for 30 days, a legal move that gave the military the right to impose martial law on the areas around the mine. The community’s blockade was dissolved, and Tahoe has been extracting silver on a commercial scale since January 2014, having begun operations in September last year. According to the company’s press materials, Escobal is now poised to become the largest silver mine in the world.

Guatemala sits atop a wealth of natural resources—nickel, gold, silver, and titanium—that lie beneath the country’s rich volcanic soil. In 1960, the Canadian-owned and -operated International Nickel Company (INCO) became the first transnational mining company to arrive in Guatemala. That year also marked the beginning of a 36-year civil war between the government and a slew of leftist guerrilla groups fighting over land distribution, indigenous rights, and economic equality. The conflict ended in 1996, after sweeping neoliberal economic changes were enacted and many regions of the country previously controlled by rebels were opened up to the mineral-extraction industry.

Since then, the government has granted more than 400 licenses to multinational corporations, and the terms for these companies are exceptionally favorable. The government rarely receives more than 5 percent of a company’s earnings, and under the leadership of President Pérez Molina, corporations pay the government only 1 percent of the value of the minerals they extract. They also get to use local water at no cost. Mineral exploitation is a technical term for the process of mining, and in a very literal sense, communities like those near La Puya are being exploited for their gold, their water, and their wealth, with mining often leaving behind a thoroughly pillaged landscape that is utterly bereft and toxic.

A farm overlooking the Escobal silver mine

On June 12, 2013, I was invited, along with ten representatives of La Puya, to the National Palace in Guatemala to speak with the country’s president and its interior minister. The goal was to strike an agreement between activists and the government. The demonstrators at La Puya are the only community-based activists to have been invited to the National Palace for such a meeting. Unbeknownst to them, however, the president had also invited KCA in an attempt to open up dialogue between the two opposing sides. Yoli was furious and refused to speak with KCA executives. Which made perfect sense, considering her explicitly stated objective was the cancellation of all mining licenses within their territories.

“This decision can only be made by the government of Guatemala and therefore cannot be discussed with KCA,” she told Pérez Molina. He thought about this for a minute before asking members of KCA to leave the room, after which the president, the interior minister, and the representatives of La Puya spoke. One of the main issues discussed was an environmental-impact study previously executed by KCA. The study found the environmental and ecological risks posed to areas surrounding the mines to be of relatively low impact—a conclusion that has since been discredited by several reputable geologists. La Puya successfully argued its case, and the meeting concluded with Pérez Molina’s promising that a second, fully independent study of the effects of mining on the area would be commissioned by the government. In the meantime, KCA was ordered to suspend its operations.

At the moment it felt like a small victory. But as of press time, the promised environmental-impact study has yet to be commissioned, and the scale of attacks against villagers near the mine has increased.

The day shift at La Puya’s encampment

I returned to Guatemala in early December 2013 and visited San José de Nacahuil, a tiny village about 15 miles from La Puya. On September 7, 2013, 11 people were killed and 28 more were injured there when masked gunmen with automatic weapons stormed the village’s main street and opened fire on businesses. Authorities and local newspapers reported that the shootings were gang-related, but the community disputed this charge.

I drove up to San José de Nacahuil on a single-lane road and talked to local residents. They showed me the cafeteria where ten of the victims from the September 7 attacks had died. Bullet holes riddled the wall. Later, an elderly woman led me to a spot where gunmen had allegedly chased a man and shot him before dragging his body back to the café and dumping him with the others.

According to many residents whom I interviewed, police invaded the small community hours before the massacre, to intimidate and harangue them. After the police had left, the gunmen arrived, tracing the same route as the officers and targeting the same businesses the police had visited.

The community of La Puya in peaceful resistance

Villagers believed that there had been an escalation of the mining corporations’ intimidation tactics, which now bore all the hallmarks of police collusion and a militia-style subjugation of locals fighting against the degradation of their environment. Their strategy was now one of preemption; police and thugs had shifted their attention from disbanding already-established roadblocks to disrupting nearby communities that might rally to the cause.

It seems that the resistance to mining efforts in this area of rural Guatemala—and the associated violence—won’t be stopping anytime soon. La Puya might be celebrating its second anniversary, but some protesters are facing criminal charges and trials as their attackers go largely unpunished.

Yoli, the woman who was shot in the back near La Puya, went to court in February 2014, along with six of her fellow protesters from the roadblock. They were charged with kidnapping, coercion, and intimidation, allegations that their supporters claim are false. As of press time, a verdict has not been reached, but to the mining companies it’s something of a victory: It has kept Yoli in a courthouse, far away from the roadblocks.

Stoners Now Have Their Own Cryptocurrency: PotCoin

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Stoners Now Have Their Own Cryptocurrency: PotCoin

Creating Sand Castles with a Single Grain of Sand

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Creating Sand Castles with a Single Grain of Sand

Epicly Later'd - Season 1: Ed Templeton - Part 6

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In the final part of Ed's episode, he discusses the many highs and lows that Toy Machine has faced since he began the company. And when a leg injury sidelines Ed from skating, he and Deanna confront the possibility that he may not be able to stay on the path he's carved out for himself.

Syrian Children Are Drawing to Heal the Trauma from War

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In an upscale district of Downtown Beirut, two pre-teen boys rapped in Arabic during an exhibit showcasing the artwork of Syrian refugee children. Ramzi, a 12-year-old originally from Daraa, Syria, beatboxed as his friend Ayham, who is also from Daraa, spit rhymes. Guests watched quietly, impressed, as the two boys recalled life before the uprising-turned-civil war wreaked havoc on their country.

This was part of an exhibit, called “Light Against Darkness,” the result of a three month art workshop that focused on helping children overcome the trauma of war through creative expression. Forty-three children produced about 166 works of drawings and clay sculptures, many of which depicted colorful renditions of schools, kids playing together, and families bonding.

Others, however, were not so cheery. Suha Wanous, a young girl originally from Latakia but who arrived to Lebanon from Damascus, the Syrian capital, drew a daughter holding her mother’s hand while a gun is pressed to her head point-blank. In the background of the picture, it’s raining and a helicopter is opening fire on a home while two small children lay on the grass bleeding, presumably dead. The organizers of the exhibit explained how Suha used to pass an army checkpoint daily before going to school back in Syria. She used to greet the soldiers Assalamu Alaykum (meaning “peace be upon you” in Arabic.)

Art therapy sessions first started as a response to sketches like Suha’s, said Ali Elshiekh Haidar, a representative of Najda Now, the Syrian NGO that organized the workshop in conjunction with the Norwegian Embassy in Beirut. “We want everybody to see that children can overcome the war… If they don’t have the voice, they have the color for everyone to see what they have seen,” he said.

For some children, expressing that voice on paper was no easy task. That’s where the Nadja Now center in Shatila comes in. The Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut’s southern suburbs is increasingly becoming home to Syrians fleeing the war. Sitting together in the center, Ali showed me dozens of sketches that were painted over in solid black out of angst. “At first, they were very stressed. They had a lot of shock from Syria, and they had the idea they could never see anything colorful again,” he said.

Since the sessions began, however, the children’s spirits seem to have been lifted. Children no longer blacken over their work, and most draw colorful images, including of Syria’s green and rugged landscapes. “It has helped us forget what we saw in Syria,” remarked one young girl of the workshop.

Occasionally, Ali admits, children do recreate scenes from the war, especially if they hear bad news from Syria. But as Yasser Moalla, Najda Now’s psychotherapist explained, “the purpose isn’t to forget the trauma of war, but to overcome it.” Many illustrations depicting combat, death, or destruction can still be seen hanging on the walls of the center in Shatila.

Even as Najda Now’s workshop has helped refugee children deal with the trauma of war, aid workers say more needs to be done for Syria’s children. As a joint press conference held by executives from some of the world’s largest aid agencies—Mercy Corps, UNHCR, UNICEF, Save the Children, and World Vision International—clearly declared on March 15, the third anniversary of the Syrian uprising, an entire generation of children are “at risk of being lost forever” due to the conflict.

Syria, they reiterated, is in tatters. Conservative estimates say at least 10,000 children have died from the war, and for those who manage to find refuge in neighboring countries, living conditions are bleak. Lebanon, a country of 4.4 million, has received almost 1 million refugees from the conflict. Of those, 435,000 are school-aged children—more than the total number of Lebanese children currently enrolled in public schooling—and nearly 300,000, about 70 percent, remain out of the classroom.

Aid agencies, meanwhile, are struggling to keep pace with the depths of the conflict. Budget shortfalls are a problem; UNICEF’s 2014 plans, for instance, are only 8 percent funded. Even in the rare case that financial issues aren’t present, other obstacles hinder educational programs and psychosocial support. In Lebanon, for example, Syrian children are failing entrance exams for public schools due to substantial differences between the two countries’ curriculums, especially in terms of language requirements. “We try to have a lot of them stay in school by having an English program,” said Ali. “It’s a difficult situation.”

Andrea Koppel, Vice President of Global Engagement and Policy at Mercy Corps, stressed at the March 15 press conference, “If we are going to respond to the needs of children here in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Iraq, in Turkey, let alone inside Syria, we need to have the means to do it.” Mercy Corps fundraised in three weeks for Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines what it has in three years for the Syrian war.

One American newspaper editor put it perfectly while we were drinking a beer in Beirut, “We don’t run many Syrian refugee stories anymore. It’s become stale. People are now more and more de-sensitized to the war.” Even as, he correctly noted, the conflict is getting much worse. The number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon is projected to top 1.5 million by the end of 2014, almost 35 percent of the country’s pre-war population.

For people like Ali who are directly involved in field humanitarian work, the question isn’t about funding, it’s about basic human rights. “We don’t ask for charity," he said. “We ask for their right to education, their right to live, and their right to a childhood. A lot of the international community has forgotten this." 

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