The photographer Guillermo Cervera always looks to portray a hidden side of world conflicts that news outlets won't immediately think to cover. For instance, when he was in Afghanistan a few years back, he took photos of the swimming pools and gyms in war-torn Kabul.

These days, Guillermo is in Ukraine, so he just sent us these heartwarming images of young Ukrainian boys and girls having a pretty good time at the local aquapark.

Splashing around at Donetsk's Aquasphere—the largest indoor water park in the world and one of the best examples of ousted president Viktor Yanukovych's absurd economic decision-making—young Ukrainians try to have as much fun as they can.

Click through to see more of Guillermo's photographs.

Canada's telecom giants don't seem particularly invested in protecting your privacy. Photo via the author.
When news broke earlier this year that CSEC had been tracking Canadians through free airport WiFi, the mainstream media largely missed the point. Not only had Canada’s NSA been using airport hotspots to gather personal information about Canadians, they had also been gathering data from other corporate sources to create behavioural patterns designed to track the comings and goings of whoever it is their targets are. That’s a bit more invasive than simply snooping on folks looking at cat videos, who are waiting for their connecting flight to Orlando.

If you go through the original presentation about CSEC’s so-called airport spying program, which was leaked by Eddie Snowden, you can see that CSEC uses the example of a kidnapper who’s on the lam, and whose position can be pinpointed by CSEC tracking programs. Not only is this somewhat of an overreach for CSEC (because isn’t finding kidnappers a police responsibility?) but it also indicates that there are corporate partners throughout North America helping CSEC gather information on Canadians. Listed in that presentation are Bell Sympatico, Boingo, and Neustar—a company that was the subject of a VICE Canada report earlier this year.

Within that same free airport WiFi presentation was an allusion to a ‘Canadian Special Source,’ that had provided data to CSEC, which was widely speculated to be a “large telecommunications provider in Canada.” This created a firestorm (within the small circles in this country that actually research and follow online surveillance, that is) of speculation as to which company that ‘Special Source’ is, and it provoked further research into the amount of data that Canadian telecom providers turn over to the government.

Christopher Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow at U of T’s Citizen Lab, along with a group of other researchers, sent formal letters to Bell, Rogers, Telus, and every other telecom provider in Canada asking them to quantify the amount of requests that they received from law enforcement agencies for customer data in 2012 and 2013, how their protocol and processes for these requests work, how long they keep subscriber data, and so on. Unsurprisingly, they were almost unanimously stonewalled by the telecom companies in this country, stating: “The companies that have responded to the letters as of March 5, 2014 have generally declined to provide specific responses to the questions posed of them.”

While these letters may not have sounded a widespread, public alarm, news broke late last night that Canadian government agencies issued 1.2 million requests for customer data in 2011 alone. This data came from the federal privacy commissioner, who received anonymous figures from nine different telecom companies in Canada. As the Toronto Star reported: “It’s not clear from the report what information was sought by agencies, how much data was released, or what judicial oversight—if any—was involved.”

One source we can turn to, for some clarity, is the Google Transparency Report—an annual rundown of the amount of requests coming from law enforcement agencies to the company whose motto is to avoid evil at all costs. In 2011, Canadian authorities issued 91 requests for user data. This number dropped slightly in 2012, to 88 requests. And in 2013, that number spiked up to 101 requests. On average, Google reports that they respond to about 25 percent of these requests with actual data, but in the first half of 2011, 48 percent of these requests were granted, and in the second half of 2010, Google responded to 55 percent of requests.

With such comparatively low numbers of user data requests to Google (that are apparently rising, nonetheless), it’s more than concerning to see more than a million annual requests to telecom companies across the country from federal government agencies—for entirely vague reasons. Canada’s telecom companies are clearly in an awkward legal position, as a representative from Bell told the Star that, “Any request for information about lawful access activities should be made to the law enforcement agencies involved.” Oh, thanks for clearing that up, Bell. I can’t wait to pay my next phone bill!

These corporate non-answers are reminiscent of last year’s awakening that companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint are not only complicit in NSA spying, but that they receive cash to cooperate. When the news of the NSA’s highly invasive PRISM program broke out of Ed Snowden’s treasure trove last year, Yahoo, Facebook, and others denied knowing about the program. Some of these same companies are now lobbying for the right to be more transparent about the amount of law enforcement requests they receive per year, which according to Ed Black, the president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, “will allow companies to show what they have been doing is more limited than some have assumed and, that when appropriate, they have challenged and pushed back.” But, given that some of these same companies were paid by the NSA to be “PRISM compliant,” it’s hard to believe their intentions are true.

VICE reached out to the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) and asked if they ever requested information from either Canadian telecom companies or Google. Their response was typically curt, refusing to add any further comment and directing us to a 2011-2013 Public Report from the agency that provides no insight into whether CSIS requests information from telecom companies in Canada or abroad. The report does say that CSIS is aware of a “wide range of targeting against the private sector in Canada,” by hostile actors, whose targets include “high-technology industries… the telecommunications sector.”

We also contacted Ronald Deibert this morning, founder of the Citizen Lab, and a Canadian cybersecurity expert. Regarding the latest news about telecom disclosures, he told me: “This latest information confirms what many of us have for long suspected: that Canadian telcos operate in a culture within which the digital exhaust we entrust to them on a daily basis is routinely shared with agencies of the Canadian state. Canadian telcos have apparently forgotten that judicial protections are essential to a liberal democracy, except when it comes to protecting their own asses from liability.”

Despite this rampant, warrantless sharing of data between telecom companies and government agencies, Canadians don’t seem to be overly concerned about this sliding standard of personal privacy occurring under all of our noses. We have seen recent attempts by the Conservative government to normalize online surveillance with the scapegoat of cyberbullying, in a bill that would also protect internet providers from being sued for complying with warrantless surveillance. The bill, C-13, has not been voted on. But evidently, the Canadian political climate is being pushed towards a reality where surveillance is normalized; so it is now a question of whether or not this train can be reversed.

With a federal election around the corner, hopefully privacy can be pushed as a major issue of debate that Mulcair, Trudeau, and whoever the Conservatives trot out, can trip over each other to discuss. That said, without a more public outcry over the vague but substantial cooperation between telecom companies and government agencies, this may just continue to proceed—largely unchecked.

With additional reporting by Ben Makuch.
 

@patrickmcguire

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

One of our Middle East writers, Karl Sharro, got an exclusive interview with God. He talked to Him about His beginnings, the situation in the Middle East, and what He thought about the movie Noah.

VICE: Good day. What’s the best way to address you?
God: Just call me God.

It’s an honor. It’s been a while since you have granted a personal audience to a human. May we ask you why is it always someone from the Middle East?
It’s a gesture of nostalgia on my part. Monotheism took root there, and it’s obvious why I would like that. I also thought it would be amusing to allude to those encounters from the past.  

Why now? What has changed? It has been a while since your last interview.
I have a whole universe to run, obviously, and there are areas of priority. But it’s also part of the pleasure I get from these projects like Earth—I can put together the ingredients and then let them develop on their own. But I thought now is a time for another appearance, something lighter in tone. I am quite intrigued by the internet and social media; I see potential there.

Let’s go back to the beginning. How did it all start? Why did you do it? What was the motivation?
If I gave you the answer it would be cheating. You are meant to discover the answers for yourself. But that in itself is a partial response to your question. There are clear philosophical indications of what I call the conditions of existence.

Is this about what philosophers call free will?
If I were to put in terms of the limitations of human language, then the answer is yes. And there’s no denying that this is mainly how I have historically communicated with human beings.

Has that caused problems in your experience?
Some people are too literal; that is the biggest issue. I wouldn’t call it a problem; it’s part of the process and the conditions of communication. There are uncertainties, but it would be very boring from my point of view, otherwise.

Back to the Middle East. What do you think about what’s happening there now? There is a lot of conflict, and a lot of it is connected to religion. What are your thoughts on that?
I have always had that issue with people who think they are doing things for me, or in my name. If I wanted the world to work like that I would have said so. But in giving you the freedom, you are obviously free to make that mistake. This is what makes the process interesting.

So you would be reluctant to intervene personally and put an end to this conflict?
People in the Middle East are arrogant. They tend to think of me as a local guy and that I should therefore care about them more than others. And that breeds a sense of abdication of responsibility, which manifests itself in their language. Phrases like inshallah [God willing] epitomize this. This is intellectually lazy. You have to take responsibility for your own existence.

It’s remarkable how some of those answers sound like I have written them myself.
I speak to you in a language you understand. It’s something I have always done.

Any ideas for new books? Again it has been a while since your last one.
I have questions about the format. Things have moved on over the centuries, particularly the last one. You might get the occasional powerful best seller, but a few months later nobody’s talking about it anymore. Look at that man Gladwell; he’s done very well for himself through this process. But it’s ephemeral. If I come back it will have to be in a unique way; there's a lot of expectations.

What about podcasts, blogs, Youtube channels?
I wouldn’t say no immediately, but it would have to be special. Again, because of your successes, people have increased expectations.

What did you think of Noah? I assume you have viewed it, being all-seeing and all of that.
It’s an amusing take. I have watched over the centuries as people have interpreted this story in different ways, so it’s an over-familiar narrative for me. I would have liked to see more existential considerations.

You can tell me: Did that really happen? Were you that upset with humanity?
You’re projecting human traits onto a divine being; that is a classic mistake. It’s a common attitude, but it makes watching you add to your own speculation about my true nature amusing. The story may or may not have happened. The real question is what you can learn from it; let’s put it that way.

What do you think of atheism?
I used to like atheists. There used to be grand atheists who took the intellectual independence that I gave them very seriously and pushed it to its limits; I admired that. It was big and daring. But today I see pettiness and small-mindedness, shrill denunciations and lack of intellectual ambition. It bores me.

Thanks, again, God. This was very enjoyable. Is there anything you would like me to take back with me?
Take those two tablets with you and preach their message. I’m joking of course. It’s a self-referential thing.

Karl Sharro is an architect, writer, satirist, and commentator on the Middle East. He has written for a number of international publications and writes a blog, Karl reMarks, about Middle Eastern politics and culture, with occasional forays into satire.

VICE Profiles is a weekly window into our eccentric and idiosyncratic world that covers everything from offensive college students to exotic animal ownership to gun licenses for the blind to child bullfighters. VICE Profiles airs Mondays on VICE.com. Keep an eye out for the series premiere, coming May 5.

Illustration by Nick Gazin

After originating in the Mediterranean in the 1800s, the round pie we call pizza became a global sensation post-World War II. Just about every nation in the world has their version of this versatile dish. The genius of pizza is that it's infinitely adaptable. Everyone has their preferences and unique predilections. Cultures put their own spin on pizza, but it's all equal... or is it?

A restaurant in Canada created the world's most expensive pizza just this month. For $450, you can get a white truffle pie with lobster thermidor, black Alaskan cod, smoked salmon, tiger prawns, and Russian Osetra caviar. It probably tastes like licking the crotch of a track suit after a marathon, but the Dr. Frankensteins who invented this monstrosity are able to call their dish "pizza" because their stupid ingredients are on a round disc made of dough. I refuse to stand for that.

It's time that we as a society put our foot down and set some guidelines for what is and isn't pizza. We've assembled an A-Z list of the most important aspects of pizza culture and SPOILER ALERT: none of them include fucking caviar.

AFTER SCHOOL

This is the witching hour when it comes to pizza. While pizza definitely has its moments at dinner and during the wee hours of the morning when you're plastered, it really shines due to its ubiquitous presence at after-school extracurricular activities. Whether it's post-soccer game or during a study session for final exams, pizza absolutely dominates this time slot. We haven't seen numbers like this since Cheers in its heyday. In fact, if it weren't for pizza at practice, math-letes all across the nation would starve to death.

Honorable Mentions: Anchovies, all-you-can-eat lunch buffet, artichokes, anal leakage

BIGFOOT

Whoever says Bigfoot isn’t real doesn’t remember Pizza Hut’s contribution to the world of cryptozoology. In the 90s, Pizza Hut introduced “The Bigfoot.” This gargantuan pizza was one foot wide and two feet long. Initially popular, it was quickly discontinued. Although there are some who say the beast is still out there…

The giant, square pizza was something of a mini-trend in the 90s. Domino's had the Dominator, which didn't last long. Even Little Caesar's had one called "Big! Big!" This was also discontinued, and not just because of the stunning lack of creativity in the pizza's name.

Honorable Mentions: BBQ chicken, Book-It, breadsticks

Photo via Flickr User Peter

COLD PIZZA

Like revenge, pizza is a dish best served cold. Eating your pizza cold not only tastes great, but is fast and easy. Sure the crust isn't as snappy and the pepperoni now has the consistancy of an unused condom, but the congealed cheese is the secret weapon of the leftover slice. The magic of cold pizza cheese is not something I even want to understand. Telling me why it's good is like telling me how babies are made. WHO CARES, DUDE? I just wish there was a stork that delivered cold pizza to my house.

Honorable Mentions: CiCi's Pizza, crust-first, coupons, CPK

DAD WEEKEND

Your parents sit you down and tell you that they still love each other. It isn't your fault, but they're going to start spending time apart. You know what that means? Twice a month you're going to get to order whatever toppings you want! Thank God your dad can't cook for shit. True love is a lie, and you're reaping all the benefits. Hey, maybe if your family spent more time eating a nice home-cooked meal around the table instead of inhaling pizza in front of the TV you wouldn't be in this position in the first place. Ah, it's a vicious cycle. A delicious, vicious cycle.

Honorable Mentions: Deep dish, dessert pizza, delivery, DiGiorno

EAT PIZZA ANYTIME (YOU CAN)

Like a vaguely Jewish lightning bolt from the sky, Bagel Bites struck fast and hard on the cultural landscape in the 1980s and 1990s. From its oppressively catchy jingle to its ability to be bought in bulk and served to snotty children (or snotty drunks), everything about the frozen pizza bagel was carefully crafted to immediately carve out a hole in my heart. Pop them in the oven for a few minutes and you have a bunch of tiny pizzas that can fit in the palm of your hand. In the morning, in the evening, and even at supper time. When pizza's on a bagel, you truly can eat pizza any time.

Honorable Mentions: Ellen DeGeneres Oscars pizza stunt, Edgar (the delivery guy from the Ellen pizza stunt)

FROZEN PIZZA

Picture yourself alone, adrift in a godless universe on a dark Wednesday night in America's Middle West. You just got off an eight-hour shift at the liquor store. You come home to an empty, cold apartment filled with drained energy drink cans and fast-food wrappers. You open the freezer. There, under the fluorescent light, you see it: Your dinner. The consistency of it is not unlike the box it sits in. The taste? If not for the hot sauce you poured on it after 20 minutes in the oven at 375 degrees, flavorless. It's not delivery. It's depression.

Honorable Mentions: Flatizza, folding your slice

GLUTEN-FREE

Bread is filled with gluten. Pizza is filled with fucking bread. So no, poindexter, you can't have gluten-free pizza. Or, at least, you shouldn't be able to. The proliferation of Celiac disease, however, has made money-hungry eateries of all shapes and sizes eager to cater to gluten-free geeks. Which is why, in spite of it all, you can now get gluten-free pizza.  By virtue of the fact that the 17-year-old preparing it could give less than a fuck about your "condition," though, the restaurant warns that "Customers with gluten sensitivities should exercise judgment in consuming this pizza."

Honorable Mentions: Gout, Gangnam Style pizza

HERMAN CAIN

The Godfather himself. This guy sold pizzas and thought that would be enough to make him president. Looking back, I’m actually surprised America didn’t go for that. However, in an apparent nod to the Italians that pioneered pizza before him, his sexual aggression with female employees got the best of him and tanked his campaign. And to think, we could have had our first "pizza president." Perhaps history will right itself in the next election cycle and we can all finally vote for "The Noid."

Honorable Mentions: Hungry Howie's

Photo via Flickr User Rolando Tanglao

ITALIANS 

I’d like to start this off by thanking the Italians for inventing this fantastic dish. You were the first to put a bunch of cheese and random shit on a round disc made of dough. Pretty clever. We'll take it from here though. Your crust isn't stuffed. Your pies are neither "hot" nor "ready" when I order them. Why is your sauce sweet? Where's all the cheese? I see zero cartoon mascots in your country. Do you even have an electronic system that allows me to track my pizza as it's being made? Oh, you don't? SMDH, Italy. Here in America, we're always "Makin' It Great."

Honorable Mentions: Internet pizza memes

JUST GET SOME FUCKING BREADSTICKS, OK?

Pizza's overly eager little brother. Whereas the calzone is like pizza's obnoxious, arrogant cousin from the big city (a meal unto itself, basically a pizza folded into itself), breadsticks are a trifling, yet delicious compliment to any meal. If you want to really lose your mind, usually there is a type of "insane" or "loco" or "crazy" bread that is just a bunch of breadsticks covered in melted cheese.

Wondering if anyone else wants breadsticks? Guess what? They do. Everyone secretly loves breadsticks. There are no Tumblr pages or novelty t-shirts dedicated to breadsticks, but that's because they're the Batman of comfort food. They're our silent guardian, our watchful protector, lurking in the shadows—the Carb Knight.

Honorable Mentions: Jonas Brothers hit song, "Pizza Girl"

KALE

Kale is a "superfood." Pizza is a "super" food, to be sure, but its health benefits are nonexistent. That's why, when you combine the two, not only do you negate the healthfulness of the kale, you ruin the taste of the pizza. What the fuck is wrong with you? Don't you know there are kids in Africa right now dying for access to superfoods?

Honorable Mentions: K! Pizzacone,

LIQUID DEATH (AKA "GREASE")

A 2-ply napkin, applied to the surface of a grease-laden slice of pizza, is but an impotent attempt to protect the eater from the colon-crushing, waist-expanding nightmare that is said pizza. Emphasis, of course, on impotent. You can blot all you want, baby girl, but it ain't gonna do a goddamned thing, other than needlessly destroy a dozen napkins. If you're worried about the caloric content of your meal, here's a suggestion: eat something that isn't pizza. Or just throw up afterwards. The grease'll coat your throat.

Honorable Mentions: Lactose intolerance, Lunchables pizza

Photo via Flickr User yoppy

MAKE IT YOURSELF (OR NOT)

There are many things you can make at home, and I am sure they're great: Hamburgers, pasta, sandwiches, etc. It’s not that hard to make this shit on your own. Pizza, however, you can never do. I know you think you can, but unless you have a wood-fired oven and the ability to get that dough into a perfect circle your DIY pizza is a sham. I learned a long time ago to give up on making my own pie. Every time it came out of the oven it looked like pizza's "Before" picture in a plastic surgery ad. The slices end up being rectangular, the bread is too thick, and the cheese is never right. The above photo is ostensibly of a "pizza," but throwing lunch meat on a round cracker does not a pizza make. 

Honorable Mentions: Mozzarella sticks, marinara, Macauly Culkin's pizza-themed Velvet Underground cover band

Photo via Flickr User Michael Gray

NEW YORK STYLE

The age old debate: New York vs. Chicago. Chicago style is great. Really. It's delicious and filling. It's a truly special treat. It's also not as good as New York style. I mean, seriously. Look at this shit.

Why does this even need to be said? God bless you, Chicago. Your "pizza" is fantastic, but it's not pizza. Consolation prize for not being Los Angeles and putting avocado on your pies though. Thanks for that.

Honorable Mentions: Napoli, Noid

OBAMACARE

"Papa" John Schnatter announced that implementing Obamacare at his Papa John's franchises would cause as much as a 14-cent increase in price and lead to employees' hours being cut. Heaven forbid a CEO who churns out one of the unhealthiest foods on the planet dole out a little extra cash to take care of his own. So next time you want a pizza, think about where your money is really going. (Your gut.) In fact, if the typical American family abstained from buying pizza and saved that money instead, then a lot more people in this country could afford health insurance.

Honorable Mentions: Oregano, obesity 

PINEAPPLE (PROS & CONS):

PRO: Warm, juicy, flavorful, a bit sweet and a bit sour, pineapple is a topping that ought to go without saying for true pizza aficionados at this point. Pineapple also supposedly makes your cum taste better. I don’t know if that’s true or not but there’s no way pineapple is making your cum taste worse. If it makes you feel better, let’s also just say that it’s locally grown and organic. There you go. Now just put it on your pizza and enjoy yourself. 

CON: This is pizza, not fruit salad. Next thing, you're going to tell me I should put grapes and cantelope on pizza. This is the slipperiest slope there is. When it comes to pizza, I am a strict constructionist.

Honorable Mentions: Pizza saver, "Pizza por Pesos"

QUICK DELIVERY TIME

Unless you're a mom or a nerd, pizza is not a pre-planned affair. Therefore, the quickness of delivery time is almost more imperative to your enjoyment of pizza than if the damn thing is even edible. We all know at least one person who's eaten an uncooked frozen pizza because they needed it now.

In fact, the hierarchy of pizza qualities, in order from most to least important, is as follows:

1. Actively not made of poison

2. How fast it gets to your mouth

3. Quality of ingredients

4. Does the money you spend on this pizza go to scumbag anti-abortion groups?

5. GMOs or whatever

6. Did it fall on the floor cheese-side down?

7. Did it fall on the floor cheese-side UP? (this is totally fine and actually improves the pizza, because you are eating a miracle.)

Honorable Mentions: Queen Latifah did voiceover for a Pizza Hut commercial

RANCH

In March of this year, a pizza place in Dallas, Texas, charged patrons $1,000 for a side of ranch in order to discourage the use of the creamy dressing on their neapolitan-style pie. Jay Jerrier, owner of Cane Rosso, claimed that he was merely joking when he slapped the insane figure on a bottle of ranch hanging from the wall of his establishment. This "joke" quickly turned into a 900 comment-long Reddit flame war. Opinions ranged from: "He's in the high quality end of the service industry, you're not paying for food, you're paying for his expertise. He has every right to point out that ranch should not be requested or used in his own establishment" all the way to clever pop culture references like "No soup for you!" Remember? Like in that sitcom your dad used to watch.

The truth is, ranch is delicious. Pizza crust is usually dry, dull, and flavorless. Why not dunk that shit in some creamy salad dressing? What are you, some kinda commie?

Honorable Mentions: Rock-afire Explosion

STUFFED CRUST

Let's all drop down on bending knee and kiss the ring of Pizza Hut founder John R. Pizzahut, who, in his infinite wisdom saw fit to go in through the out door and put stick it where it doesn't belong. "It," of course, is "cheese" and "where it doesn't belong" is inside crust. What now seems like an obvious move was highly controversial at launch. Who had ever dreamed of eating pizza backwards? Now, it's accepted practice. Not one to rest on their past success, Pizza Hut has stepped up their game again and created the Three Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza, which It took a true visionary to buck convention and begin the golden age of pizza we currently enjoy. Thank you, John R. Pizzahut. Your legacy will live on forever. Jackpot!!!!!!!

Honorable Mentions: Square pizza, salad pizza

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

I’m not saying the Ninja Turtles made pizza what it is, but the early 90s were a great time for pizza all around and the Turtles benefit from that association. Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Rapahel showed the ideal dream life we aspired to but could never have: they hung with their bros all day, they used weapons, and they ate pizza all the time without any of the bodily consequences of being human. They could never get flabby stomachs, and their big, weird green muscles seemingly were never affected either. They also had a great loft-style sewer apartment that any slum-chic trustfunder would kill for. The Turtles were grotesque abominations of nature, just like we all are, but they had each other and they had pizza. 

Honorable Mentions: Tummy (where the pizza goes)

UNDERGROUND PIZZA JOINTS (SUCK)

I know you think that pizza place in the basement of some guy's house in a dark alley 20 miles outside of town has to be the greatest pizza in the world, but chances are it's crap. Unlike “secret” burrito and taco spots, secret pizza spots don't really exist. If it's good pizza, people know about it. Hate to burst your bubble, but just stuff some Sbarro in your mouth and deal with the crushing reality that is delicious corporate pizza.

Honorable Mentions: "U Bake" pizza

VARIATIONS

Call me xenophobic if you must, but I hate when "worlds collide." Fusion, be it jazz or Japanese, maddens me. Which is why I'm confused and angered by any variation on the pizza's classic cheese, crust and toppings formula. While burgers are great, and pizza is fantastic, the two should stay on their own ends of the culinary Mason-Dixon Line.

A Korean chain called Mr. Pizza down the street from me called sells seafood-covered pizzas with crusts made out of "sweet potato mousse"; said pizzas are served with orange marmalade dipping sauce and cost $30. This is not pizza. This is the subject of a listical describing how "weird" Asian culture is.

Honorable Mentions: Vegan pizza

WEIRD TOPPINGS

There's a whole litany of ingredients that can go on a pizza, and at this point we've become bored with the same old cheese, pepperoni and mushroom variations we've had for years. Anchovies are the standard weird topping, although some people swear by them. Jalapenos have made it into the rotation as of late. My friend Dave loves to order jalapenos on his pizza. I try to avoid eating pizza with Dave. Isn't that a shame? A friendship torn asunder due to pizza? Pizza is supposed to bring us all together! While we all have our predilections, I would suggest sticking to the mainstays in larger groups. It's just gonna go down easier that way. But when you're alone, or with a trusted friend? Get weird, bro. Let that freak flag fly. Anchovies, jalapenos and all.

Honorable Mentions: Wings (buffalo), white pizza

X-TRA LARGE

At Costco, you can purchase an 18'' pie for $9.99. That's an amazing price, and an exciting proposition. Yet no one you see purchasing one looks excited. It's almost as if their lives are hell.

Honorable Mentions: X-Files episode with pizza in it. Remember that one?

YOU BETTER TIP THE DELIVERY GUY

Only pornography has recognized that pizza delivery is a profession worth blowing. Women love men in uniform which is one reason the Pizza Delivery Guy was the top porn character of the 80s and 90s. Society as a whole, though, has been slow to recognize the importance of the job. Pizza delivery is a profession that deserves respect regardless of the position’s pay, like a soldier or mail carrier, and a new uniform would go a long way toward that end. I would suggest something sleek, black, and militaristic, with a hat that has room for the restaurant’s logo on the front. Maybe an armband? How about leather boots? I think we're onto something.

Honorable Mentions: Yelp reviews, Yolo pizza

ZITS

What grease goes in, it must come out, no matter how delicious it may have been going down. Zits are a nice taste of irony, too, since they make your face look like exactly what you just ate. Although they’re ugly and annoying, zits provide a helpful service: they protect us from ourselves. Without zits and fat, there would really be no reason to not eat pizza for every meal. 

Honorable Mentions: 'Za (don't call it that)

Follow Dave, Alison, Allen, Grant, Josh, and Megan on Twitter.

All photos courtesy the author, who explored the world of North Korean defectors on this past week's episode of VICE on HBO

I flew to Seoul to mingle with North Korea’s “most beautiful defectors” on the set of a hit reality TV show. With its Looney Tunes sound effects and bright lights, the Korean sensation Now on My Way to Meet You, like everything else associated with the Hermit Kingdom, feels part cartoon, part horror show. The mod set shines more like a 70s quiz program than a talk show—plus they have feats of strength and physical challenges.

The defectors, all women, sat in three rows of white tulip chairs and were interviewed about dating, love, partying, and torture. The show is supposed to give North Koreans a platform to tell their stories to their neighbors in the South, in hopes of being seen as normal by them, but the execution can be taxing to watch. When some of the show’s stars actually got to talking, their tales were horrendous: starvation, solitary confinement, hard labor, and firing squads.

Midway through the day’s taping, the show’s host shouted, “Aicha beeah oh” and waved me onto the set. After some small talk, he demanded I choose the prettiest girl in the lot. I looked at the rows of women who’d just poured their hearts out and refused. The host continued to prod me to choose my favorite North Korean defector, until he finally sent me off stage for being a buzzkill.

The stories of those escaping North Korea are somewhat like those of Holocaust survivors in that they are a combination of serendipity and brutality. No one just boards a bus across the border, slips a customs agent a wad of cash, or hides in a trunk. Defectors starve, get beaten, are sold, raped, and impregnated. And that’s once they get to China.

The North Koreans who actually make it to the promised land find themselves in South Korean public housing, towers clustered by the half dozen, living within one-bedroom cookie-cutter apartments, surrounded by fellow defectors. The towers have large numerals painted on the sides of them, visible from the highways and busy roads that they line, as if they are just part of some spreadsheet in a government registry. Every defector’s apartment is a photocopy of the one next to it, so you can get a read on where someone is in their internal life according to the state of their domestic affairs.

The first defector I visited got catapulted into the international blogosphere after being coined the Man Who Wants to Go Back to North Korea. As we set up our cameras in the living room, Son Jung-hun smoked a cigarette in his windowless bedroom. The apartment was barren—the bank had repossessed the refrigerator and dishwasher after he undersigned a defaulted loan for another defector trying to broker an escape for her relative. While the floor was littered with cigarette butts and loose papers, the walls were lined with his teenage son’s academic awards, toys, and schoolbooks. Within those bookshelves was a rare Korean copy of the new age gospel of positive psycho-bullshittery, The Secret.

We sat on the floor as he lamented the discontents of capitalism, a familiar song. He also spoke of credit and interest rates with mystery and disdain. He explained that because of his accent and short stature (due to malnourishment), employers can tell he’s North Korean and won’t hire him. South Korean women ignore him because he is broke. He said he is only living in Seoul for his son, who just made honor roll. When we went downstairs from his humble flat, Jung-hun showed us his luxury sedan, which he continued to pay for despite living beyond his means.

His mantra remains, “I want to go back to North Korea.” His words are more like the poetic refrain of Melville’s Bartleby than the makings of real political activism. While double defecting is rare, when it happens, the North Korean regime has a field day with propaganda. Who knows what happens to them after the media circus dies? Jung-hun told me that’s of no concern to him, and explained that he is dying of liver cirrhosis. Jung-hun's martyrdom, then, is all about telling South Koreans how fucked-up they are.

Nearly 70 years since there was a unified Korea, the North and South have polarized. While parts of Seoul could be set pieces in a techno-utopia, the North remains medieval. They don’t have YouTube or Nike Airs—even the evolution of kimchi and barbequed meat has been frozen in time. We all live in bubbles, but the North Korean bubble is built on equal parts material and mental isolation. One of the defectors explained that a smuggler of South Korean and Western DVDs was publicly executed in front of her elementary school. Career ambition and business savvy are foreign concerns.

While some of our Seoul contacts believe that their country is uniquely judgmental and callous, it’s hard to say whether South Korea is more close-minded than any other society with an influx of immigrants. The difficulties of North Korean assimilation—new arrivals suffer from six times the employment rate of the regular population—can clearly be attributed to the cultural gap in terms of education, work ethic, and financial goals. The defector’s transitions could not be more extreme.

South Korea is not just a highly competitive culture; it’s also one of the hardest-working places on earth. And when you look at the statistics on alcohol consumption and sex trade per capita (both estimated within the top five in the world), South Koreans are also among the best at blowing off steam. The men of Seoul like to do shots, sing karaoke, and fuck hookers. Their Karaoke bars, noribans, don’t look that different from the places littering Midtown and the East Village in Manhattan, except, in Seoul, that’s where johns troll for hookers. It is within these establishments, tucked into the corners of the city, that female defectors often find their jobs.

I interviewed a prostitute named Yoon in her furniture-less flat, outside the city limits, who was paranoid about her pimp noticing our cameras or suspecting that she’d been turning tricks without consulting him. In the evening, after we left, she would descend upon these noribans and hourly hotels until first light.

I sat again on unforgiving hardwood, massaging the pins and needles out of my calves, while she smoked menthol after menthol. She explained how, after several failed attempts and multiple years of torture, she was finally stolen across the icy Tumen River, with skin peeling off the frozen soles of her feet, and then immediately sold to a Chinese farmer.

Farmers in southern China are among the loneliest bachelors on Earth. Yoon described how her husband and his father repeatedly raped her, even while she was pregnant with one of their children. She left her baby crying in his crib in a farmhouse when she hitched a ride with a Christian group to Vietnam (the second step in a circuitous route to seek asylum in Bangkok, followed by entry to Seoul). The Korean government hooked her up with the apartment and some job training. Soon she landed a job at a shoe factory.

“They tormented me,” day in and out, Yoon said. She heard hateful whispers and gossip from her co-workers, and soon the treatment from everyone around became unbearable. The terrible work conditions forced her to quit and led her back down the crimson alleyways of the noribans. When I asked her about whether she had marriage prospects or dreams of the future, she said, “Honestly, the moment we cross over the border, I think people like us have already given up on life and love. As I’m getting older, I think about being alone. How much longer could I do this? It’s really nothing more than just living. To be honest, there are no dreams left….Frankly, things are more confusing here in South Korea. People here don’t let you dream.”

North Korea is a manipulative cult. Pastor Won at the Durihana Church, who focuses his efforts on defectors, spoke about the ease with which North Koreans adapt to Christianity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost easily replace the Holy Trinity of Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un, and Kim Il-sung. The of capitalism, or Christianity, for that matter, is a nursery rhyme compared to the brainwashing in North Korea. Now, two generations deep into a divided Korea, those 25,000 or so who’ve slipped out of the shadow of the Kim family have what is best described as a North Korean–flavored post-traumatic stress disorder. While the South Korean government has done a great deal to assimilate their Northern kin through public housing and job training, many defectors continue to live in torture camps of their own minds.

Once you start to understand these defectors—who seem too scared to even admit where they came from, let alone tell their stories—a sleazy talk show feels like an earnest attempt to culturally elevate North Koreans into a country that will soon see little benefit in unification. And when you realize that even when handed their freedom, the next generation of North Koreans may spend decades recovering from the trauma of the Kim regime, even The Secret starts to seem like a reasonable opiate.

It's raining and very gloomy in New York, and we at the VICE offices in Brooklyn are totally bummed about it. So to improve your day, here's a visual journey through a tanning salon to fill your eyeballs with fake sunshine. It's a proven fact that exposure to UV rays gives you vitamin D and releases endorphins, and we estimate that at least 11.5 percent of these healthful benefits can be translated through a computer screen and into your body via your retinas. If you'd really like the full experience of going to a tanning salon, you can get it right at your desk by plugging your headphones in, turning on some top 40, and cozying up in that sad office sweater that lives on the back of your swivel chair to mimic the warmth of the sun, all while you look at these photos that William Mebane took in a tanning place, called Salon Bronze, in Easton, Pennsylvania, last week. 

William Mebane is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose first book will be launched at Steven Kasher Gallery this Thursday night, May 1. Published by Daylight Books in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Empire is a collection of photographs made in collaboration with Martin Hyers on a series of road trips between 2004 and 2007.

Surfware creator and artist Cory Arcangel in his studio.

Cory Arcangel makes a lot of work that seems at first like a goofy joke. But then—once you think about it for too long—it starts to look like a complicated comment on themes like obsolescence and the art game.

At 33, Arcangel was one of the youngest artists to ever be afforded an entire floor in the Whitney Museum. Formerly a guitar major at Oberlin, Arcangel went on to form a "programming ensemble" for artist-hackers, and is probably best known for the series of modified video games that formed the centerpiece of the 2011 solo show at the Whitney. He’s also made supercuts of cats on pianos mashed up so they’re playing Shoenberg, worked out how to order pizzas from Domino's with a single line of code, and hung “paintings” in galleries that were made with a single click on Photoshop.

Now, Arcangel is gearing up to launch a clothing line, Arcangel Surfware, at a one-day pop-up in a New York Holiday Inn conference room, where new art of his will also be on display in the city for the first time since the Whitney show.

The only promotion has been a tweet from Cory’s account linking to a bland press release on a comically dated website, explaining that the products “consist of everything one needs to ‘chill’ in bed all day and surf the internet in comfort.” The rainbow-colored logo features a yin-yang, an emoticon, a picture of a laptop, and the brand name in Comic Sans.

It all looks more like a prank than a genuine product launch. But when I went to the artist’s Gowanus studio, an assistant was sketching up the layout for the show on a computer, and Arcangel appeared to be totally earnest about the merch line and its weird, mid-90s aesthetic. Piled on a table were samples of everything that will be on sale (except bed linens, which are still being made). There were white track suits, gadget covers printed with work from Arcangel's Photoshop Gradient series, zines full of source code, and vinyl albums of original Moog compositions written in the style of classic house breakdowns.

VICE: I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening.
Cory Arcangel: I think a lot of people thought it was a joke. It’s not a joke. It’s so off the wall that a lot of people didn’t really register that it’s a real thing, which is totally fine. I think they thought I was just playing a prank on everybody. But everything in the press release is true.

I sketched it, and then it went through their press department, and they mashed it all up. It’s a real press release. I would never describe myself as a groundbreaking artist. But when they sent it back to me I was like, Well, all right, this is the language of press releases. Let’s just flow with it—it’s kind of funny.

I thought you’d intentionally given it that strange, corporate tone.
It happened totally naturally, but I was 100 percent down with it. It was part of the whole idea of the project—if you’re going to work with these systems you can’t push against it. It’s more fun to just flow along with it.

How many of the clothes are you having made?
Everything that I’ve made will be in the pop-up shop. I don’t know how I’m going to display them yet. As artwork? I haven’t wrapped my head around it yet. I haven’t gotten that far.

But is it going to be super limited edition, or more like when a band makes a ton of merch T-shirts?
Band. I think there might be one or two limited-edition items.

It seems like the whole thing is one big art project. Even the website and the promotional interviews—it’s almost like a performance.
Yeah, maybe. We’ve been working on it for years. It took a long time to figure out the right tone, how to conceptualize it all, and what I wanted to do. But yeah, it’s a complete idea.

There’s obviously an early 90s theme running through everything, including your email interviews that are printed in Comic Sans.
Yeah, Comic Sans is the font on the logo. It’s a shout-out to the web of the 90s. That’s the inspiration.

Will the art in the show be stuff that’s never been seen before?
I haven’t had a show here in three years, ever since my Whitney show. It’s technically my follow-up to the Whitney, so it’s exciting that this is more DIY.

Is your foray into fashion about deflating this idea of importance that might be attached to you as an artist?
It’s hard for me to explain—it just seems like there’s energy here. I guess a lot of it is just intuitive. I feel like Oh, of course I need to be doing shows in Holiday Inns right now.

Doing shows in institutions are really great because you can really get away with showing some pretty intense stuff, because the institution will force itself on the work and give the work a kind of weightiness, which you can really play with. Maybe this is just a way for me to play with the other end of the spectrum—show in a space that doesn’t have any institutional weight or something. I don’t know. I have no idea.

A polar bear wearing an Arcangel Surfware hat

It’s at this blurry edge of what constitutes art.
I came to art backwards in a weird way. The idea of being an artist was a practical decision to me. I was someone who just liked to do interesting projects, and then I just called myself an "artist" because it was the path of least resistance. But I don’t necessarily have any internal hierarchy over distribution channels. You can do something cool—it doesn’t have to end up in a gallery. Although, obviously, I like doing the gallery stuff because it has its own dynamics.

The profiles of you that I’ve read all explain how you studied guitar at college and got into electronic music and coding, but the bit I don’t understand is how you went from doing these hacker-type projects to these big museum shows.
I’m not sure if I understand that either. You’re asking the wrong person.

Did you have a career plan?
No, definitely not. People just kept asking, and I kept saying yes. That's the easiest way to explain it. I just follow the intuition of what interesting things are, and that’s all I’ve ever done really, and this is hopefully the same kind of vibe. I was like, I want to start my own… I don’t even know what to call it. Clothing line? Merch line? I would read all these interviews with hip-hop artists, and I never understood what they were talking about—starting clothing lines and stuff. Now I know, and it’s much more complicated than I ever imagined.

In what way?
Different languages, factories, deadlines, shipping, licensing, all these things. Art is actually pretty Mom and Pop. I make something in my studio, and I ship it to a museum. This has all these moving parts; it’s pretty fascinating. Mad props to all those people who have their own clothing companies. It took me years to get this together.

Did the promo web page confuse people?
I don’t know. I haven’t really talked to anybody—you know how you put things out and it just disappears into a void? In a way, it’s something I’m kind of comfortable with because that’s what art is. Art is something you put out and seven years later someone will say, "Oh, that was really cool." I’m kind of used to working on an existential time scale for projects.

The more I thought about the project, the more it seemed to be about these ugly outdated aesthetics, like the yin-yang logo.
When I was a kid, surfing was popular in the suburbs of America. When you were 12 and you’d go to JC Penney, you would buy Ocean Pacific clothes. I had all these stickers on my guitar that were yin-yang from these surfwear companies and I had no connection to them at all, and that’s what was in my mind.

I wanted the yin-yang, because it’s about the spiritual side of surfing—I know it’s ridiculous—and the computer and the smiley. I just knew I wanted those three items. In terms of how it looks, it’s just how I like things to look. I can’t explain it any more than that. This is the height of my design sense. This is the best I can do.

Sorry for saying it was ugly.
No, I’m totally happy.

Inside Arcangel's studio

I guess any explanation for what’s behind an artwork fall short of the experience of just engaging with the it.
What I thought I was making when I made art ten years ago, it turns out, wasn't even close to what it was doing. Does that make sense? I was not even remotely close to having any understanding of what I was doing at the time.

At a talk at the Met, you quoted Duchamp as saying that one part of being an artist is making the art, and the other part is engineering its entry into the world. That seems relevant to this project.
Right. I haven’t figured out how to talk about it yet, actually. That second part is in progress right now. I haven’t figured out what it is yet, so I’m kind of flying on the seat of my pants.

Duchamp has this work that’s kind of a rotary—it spins, and when it spins it makes an optical illusion. It was very famous, and he wanted to sell it as an invention, so he debuted it in a kind of art trade show for inventions and he was positive it was going to be this convention hit. It was this complete failure. We could just hear tumbleweeds when we open the pop-up shop.

If it was a failure, it would also be kind of great too—as an art work.
Let’s not even talk that way. I’m really trying for it to somehow happen because I want to keep working with clothing. I’m doing everything I can to do it like if I were Lil Wayne. When he does a company, he’s going to try and make it a real company. I’m going to try and make it a real company. I want to also kind of appropriate the business end of this structure as well, to the best I can. So we’re going to try for a success.

Is it going to be distributed to other shops?
It’ll be available at the pop-up shop, and that day also the website goes live, and you’ll be able to buy all of it on the web, and also I’m going to see if some shops will take it, but it’s not going to be like global in any way. Maybe a few tiny little art shops will carry it. Whoever will take it, I will gladly give it to them. But probably, mainly people will get it on the web.

Do you have any big aspirations you haven’t fulfilled yet? Maybe things outside of art?
I just want to keep trying new things, I guess. I know that sounds boring. The thing is, there’s always so much cool stuff happening. The way that things change so quickly now, it’s always throwing up these opportunities. I want to do webisodes. There’s always this new amazing stuff that you could do.

But in terms of concrete stuff, I’ll probably be doing more composition in the future, and more sculpture. That’s probably the most concrete answer I can give you. The work will shift a little bit, I suppose. Like I think those zines kind of represent the end of my computer time—once I get them all together, it's like, OK that was my computer work, now they’re printed on paper, and if my hard drive blows up it doesn’t matter, and now I am done. Time for something else. That’s my vague ideas of what’s happening. It could change though. And more pop-up stores.

So you’re going to keep doing this?
Oh yeah definitely. This is just the first line. I want to keep making zines, keep making records, and hopefully come out with another batch of stuff. We’ve just got to get this one out first.

Arcangel Surfware will debut Mat 17 online at a one-day pop-up at the New York Holiday Inn Soho and online. Learn more here.

Eastleigh neighborhood in Nairobi

Meet Ifran. She is a Somali refugee living in the Eastleigh neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya. She sells tea out of a cart to survive and usually makes about 150 Kenyan shillings per day (Less than $2). Last November, her life changed when police started bullying her into bribes, accusing her of being a terrorist, and threatening her with deportation. “The biggest issue we face is police harassment.” She told me over the phone “they ask if I’m illegal. I showed them my registration card and they took it from me and refused to give it back even after I give them money I made from selling tea.”

Ifran—along with the rest of the refugees in this story—asked me not to mention her last name because she feared retaliation. She is like over 400,000 other refugees in Kenya who are facing involuntary repatriation.

Inside Eastleigh especially, Police officers, who are part of Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit, indiscriminately detain Somali teenagers and young men—accusing them of being Al-Shabaab a terrorism group responsible for an the Westgate attack, threatening them with deportation.

The tension for Somali refugees started on September 21, 2013. Unidentified gunmen attacked the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. The mass shooting lasted four days, left 67 people dead and over a hundred more wounded. Just two weeks later, Kenyan politicians used the incident to express outrage—but more importantly, to further their political agendas to shut down the refugee camps and kick Somalis out of the country.

On November 10, 2013, the UNHCR, the Kenyan government and the Somali government signed a refugee repatriation agreement. The agreement outlined the responsibilities and stressed that repatriation must be voluntary. The UNHCR quickly commented on the situation to say that it only supported the idea if the refugees left voluntarily, otherwise it would be a straight violation of the Geneva Convention.

Kenya’s responsibility included “providing security escorts for convoys to the Somali border, and continuing to provide protection and assistance for refugees until they leave” and the UNHCR included being “the guarantor of the voluntary, safe, and dignified nature of the process” The agreement, however, does not mention the fate of refugees who are not registered — “numbered at half a million by Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto, who might not enjoy the protections, including against forced return.” This silence is a big one — especially when (mentioned during UNHCR’s November conference) Kenyan officials stopped giving out new registration cards and Kenyan police are accused of asking Somali refugees for their registration cards and then throwing them away or destroying them on a regular basis.

Fatima is a single mother of 9 children who came to Kenya in 2000. She also makes her living selling tea and told me, “because I am Somali I am discriminated against for jobs. They tell me ‘here is not Somalia. You should go back to Somalia.’ [Someone from] Nairobi City Council broke my teacart and detained me. Kenyan police ask for the little money I make from selling tea. They say I must pay something or they will take me to the police station and detain me [but then] my kids will not have anyone to take care of them. So I give them the money but now I have no money to give [my children] food.”

Inside the Dadaab refugee camp, the situation is not much better. Aid and food rations have been cut and supplies continue to dwindle. Aid organizations have to tighten their budgets as the nearby Syrian refugee camps grow. Doctors Without Borders warned that cutting aid plus lack of information could result in non-voluntary repatriation.

A Somali mother speaks during a refugee repatriation conference in Eastleigh

During a refugee repatriation conference in Eastleigh organized by UNHCR and other Kenyan NGOs in November, a Somali mother said “young boys are being arrested here [in Eastleigh] everyday and accused of being Al-Shabaab. All there people who are arrested everyday by the police, especially from Begani, even though they are innocent. Police are asking for sometimes 500,000, 1 million or 2 million Kenya shillings. Everyday our young boys do not go to school, they [stay] in the house because of the fear [of] being arrested and convicted.” Her account accompanied a roaring applause and nods of agreement from the other Somali women and men in the audience. The Q&A host responded, “thank you and please let’s keep the topic focused on questions about returning.” Apparently, the connection between the two was initially lost.

Sahara has lived in Kenya since 1994 and is the sole provider for her four children. She told me that one night the ATPU officers come to her house and attacked her family, “I was at the gate [to my home] when they came up behind us and started to beat us. A relative, [who was] a teenage boy who had come to visit me, he is 18 years [old]. They used force and violently took him away. We have not seen him since and they took money I had in my home, by force.”

The United States, along with the UK and Russia, trains the same police unit that is indiscriminately harassing and detaining Somalis. One Kenyan counterterrorism official used Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan military occupation as an example of Kenya’s anti-terrorism approach. He told Open Society Justice Initiative, “In this work you can’t go by the book.” He compared the extralegal approach to that of other countries explaining, “This is why there is Guantanamo Bay and why the British are detaining people in Afghanistan.”

Kenya receives funding from multiple western governments including the United Kingdom and the United States. The U.S., specifically, began funding Kenya’s Anti-terrorism police unit in 2003 with $10 million dollars. They’ve been funding them ever since; in 2013 alone the United States gave them $7.75 million dollars— none of which went to police salaries, but to training and equipment.

Mohammed is a 24 year old Somali Kenyan living in Eastleigh, says these tactics fuel the recruitment of Al-Shabaab. While the overwhelming majority of the people who are harassed have no ties to them, “there are two ways Al-Shabaab convinces the youth to join them, first they say they will assist refugees and give them money. And so they target very poor youth. Second, police harassment. They tell [the] youth if you are with us police will not harass you and this is how you get back at them.”

After an Al-Shabaab blast in Nairobi on March 31, 2014 that killed six people, the harassment and mass profiling escalated to unprecedented levels. Under the name Operation Usalama Watch, “Kenyan security forces have been storming homes in the capital, rounding up thousands of Somali refugees and Somali Kenyans,” according to Al Jazeera. Thousands of refugees, allegedly the ones that cannot afford to pay bribes, are being detained in Kasarani, which some refer to as a concentration camp. Some refugees without registration cards have been deported. Rape and beatings have been reported in detainment centers and one death has been confirmed.

In February, Amnesty International published a report called “No Place Like Home,” which argued that the climate of fear police officers were creating in refugee neighborhoods like Eastleigh was being used as a tool to deport Somali refugees under the guise of “voluntary repatriation.” Somali refugees cited poor living conditions, restrictions on their movement, inability to pay bribes and fear of rape and beatings from police officers as the reasons why people decided to return to Somalia. During past periods of incisive police harassment toward Somali refugees in Kenya (November 2012-January 2013), the numbers of Somali refugees who asked for permits that allow them to return to Somalia spiked to 3,200, while the monthly average is usually 150. Kenya’s Interior Minister accused Amnesty International of trying to slow down the repatriation process.

Ahmed, a 25-year-old refugee, told Amnesty International, “Here, in Kenya, it’s like a prison. At night we can’t leave the house, in the day we might be arrested. It is currently not safe in Somalia, we hear of killings and murders, but the situation here is very desperate...so instead of being here, let me go back. There is no freedom here.”

Many refugees cite police harassment as a reason some have returned to Somalia in recent months: Abdisalam, who came from Somalia 7 years ago told me, “they told us ‘voluntary repatriation’ [and] ‘people are not going to be forced’ but again, it is going to be forced repatriation because the police here are coming with violence and trying to harass people at the night time. So many people have already gone back to Somalia! I’ve seen another guy here who had a kiosk, he owned a shop here and even he sold it back. He said ‘I cannot stay here I was stopped three times, when I went to [jail] they told me…I had to pay 50,000 [Kenyan shillings].’”

Returning to a war-torn country is not particularly popular with the refugees..Ahmed, who practices christianity, fears he will not be protected if he goes back, “I will be in even more danger than everyone else. They will kill me.”

Sahara, who left for Kenya when she was 16 years old after witnessing Al-Shabaab kill both her mother and father told me, “I do not want to go back. I cannot because [of] the memories there.”

Refugee trauma is similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. Imagine a terrible experience, usually involving death and sexual assault, that forces you out of your home and into another country. Your life is forcibly uprooted. The trauma causes two types of pain: psychological—flashbacks, anxiety, nightmares, depression—and physical—headaches, nausea, loss of appetite. Returning triggers these feelings, but so does staying.

Follow Raven Rakia on Twitter.

Mayoral candidate and Kanye West fan, Sarah Thomson. Photo via Facebook.
Sarah Thomson is making a lot of people uncomfortable. She’s running for mayor right now, and while she remains a fringe candidate—polling at around four percent—she’s been in the public spotlight with a number of bizarre campaign strategies that seem designed to grab attention more than anything else.

As the Liberal candidate on the mayoral slate, Thomson is a political amateur without much experience—apart from her failed mayoral bid in 2010. Thomson made a name for herself in the last election when, in part due to an odd slate of candidates, she finished as one of the top five candidates, quitting early to throw her support behind George Smitherman. Aside from this attempt, she says her business experience (she’s the publisher and CEO of Women’s Post) has also prepared her for a go at municipal politics.

Thomson has never held city office or been substantively involved in a campaign apart from her own. Despite this, Thomson believes her business acumen will translate to effective mayoral leadership because, in her words, business owners “understand what it means to be fiscally responsible.” She believes that the city’s councillors simply “haven’t had a strong leader who can unite them in a solid strategy.”

There’s probably more to it than that.  

Funnily enough, this is definitely Thomson’s most effective and least controversial campaign strategy to date (this is the same woman who showed up to City Hall on a horse-drawn carriage to announce her 2014 candidacy). Trying to sell us on your fiscal smarts is definitely a better plan than, as the Torontoist put it, “keep[ing] it real all the way to the mayor’s chair.” And while I didn’t intend for this article to veer into listicle territory, I think it’s probably the best way to  catalogue Thomson’s increasingly bizarre campaign, which has been defined by a series of disparate and confusingly off maneuvers.

To start:

Her Dreadlocks Are a Bit Much



Photo via Facebook.
The first weird thing about Sarah Thomson is that between her 2010 bid for mayor when she looked like this and now, you may have noticed a drastic change in her appearance. Yup, she has a head full of dreadlocks that she’s really proud of. I could go into the practicalities of why that's a terrible idea, but I think that’s clear. What’s worse, dreadlocks, or just ‘locs’, are sacred to some people of colour’s culture. Rastafarianism is a spiritual practice after all. It’s important to note that Black people that I know still can’t go to work with their hair in that style, so when it’s appropriated by people who have no real cultural link to the practice, it’s sort of offensive. That, and like I said, the fact that white hair naturally does not want to dread up makes it a lose-lose situation. Aesthetically and politically, it’s a no-go. Why, Sarah?

Her Campaign Logo Is Ridiculous

Photo via Facebook.
Despite it being a lose-lose situation, the second weird thing about Sarah Thomson is that she incorporated a silhouette of her dreadlocked head into her campaign logo. The dreadlocks are central to her image. Not a good look though, Sarah. Did no one tell you that? You should probably fire your staff because you hired a bunch of yes-men who have absolutely no idea what a good haircut or logo looks like.

She Had Her Child Interview Her On Camera

The third weird thing about Sarah Thomson offers some semblance of an explanation as to why Thomson is wearing her hair in dreadlocks. In her own words, it’s about “keeping it real,” as evidenced by an inexplicable video interview conducted by her grade-school aged son (the video now appears to have been expunged from the internet). In the uncomfortable video clip, Thomson alternately answers substantive questions about why she’s running, and staged jokey questions from her kid. On whether she prefers dogs or cats for example, she offers: “If a cat were big enough it would eat you.” Very insightful, Sarah. Thanks. 

She Thought It Was a Good Idea to Record a Parody Video of ‘Timber’

Finally, Thomson’s campaign recently released a ‘Timber’ parody video of her performing a cover version of Pitbull’s song with someone her press release calls “White Kanye.” The song is about improving transit, of course. This is in keeping with poetry published on her Tumblr to coincide with the video’s release:

Stop and go. Stop and go

I want a city with transit below

I want a city with underground trains,

Light rail or subway, they’re almost the same.

I want a city that is filled with a passion

to dream of a future not cramped by inaction.

I tried to bite my tongue on this one, but Thomson continues to cultivate an image that belies some sort of cultural authenticity when nothing could be further from the truth. You can’t “keep it real” by affecting Blackness—via your hair, or through odd, parodic hip-hop videos. There’s nothing “real” about when white people wear their hair in the traditional, sometimes sacred, ways of some people of colour (see: her dreadlocks).

Thomson’s cultural performance may be bolstered by the desire to achieve something close to what Rob Ford has: a certain cache with racialized voters. There is definitely an effect achieved when, for whatever reason, the cultural signifiers of Blackness are attached to your political person when you’re not Black yourself. The most famous instance of this was when Toni Morrison made the rhetorical argument for Bill Clinton as the country’s first Black president. Clinton was poor, raised by a single mother, ate McDonald’s, and loved jazz. Some Black people identified with that.

Arguably, Rob Ford has somehow achieved a similar effect with a subset of Black voters in the city. I didn’t believe this was true myself, until the concierge in my building—a Black male voter—explained it to me. When this effect of perceived proximity to Blackness or Black culture is coupled with policies that Black voters like him may favour or perceive as favourable to them—e.g. keeping taxes low—it can make for a pretty powerful political attraction. For my concierge, it was enough to overlook the growing allegations of criminal activity surrounding the Ford family and Robbie’s administration. Not me, though.

Anyway, maybe Sarah Thomson is attempting to gain cache with voters of colour by wearing dreadlocks and doing rap videos with a so-called White Kanye; but to keep it all the way real, as a Black woman, I’m not buying her bizarre cultural routine. And I imagine most everyone else is just weirded out.


@muna_mire

I moved out to Los Angeles from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, ten years ago, but it wasn’t until I attended game five of the Clippers-Warriors NBA playoffs that I felt any sort of pride for the City of Los Angeles. I’m a die-hard Philadelphia sports fan but adopted the Clippers as my second team during the Chris Kaman years and always enjoyed rooting for the red-headed stepchild of Staples Center. Over the past few years they added Blake Griffin, Chris Paul, and coach Doc Rivers, assembling an exciting championship-caliber team. It seemed like they were building a bandwagon that had plenty of room for new and old fans alike.

I went to the game for a variety of reasons: to support the players on the Clippers, to cheer on the $100 bet I had on them to win the Western Conference, and to witness one of the more poignant games in recent sports. I understood the people who called for a protest, and being a white guy, I would never know the true sting of owner Donald Sterling’s words, but it just felt like the guys on the Clippers could use more people in their corner. One of the more disappointing aspects of Donald Sterling’s comments was that the sports world had become a divisive element in race relations, when historically it has been such a foundation for growth.

Growing up in mostly white neighborhoods, I didn’t have a ton of friends that were black. The vast majority of black and Latino friends I did have were teammates first. It’s one thing to be taught about racial equality in the classroom, and it’s another to feel racial equality out on the field. That’s the great thing about sports: By creating a shared enemy, you quickly look past any differences and see the commonalities that make up humanity. I may be an Irish kid from the north side of town, and you may be a Puerto Rican from the south side of town, but we can both agree that the teenagers from the neighboring town need to be destroyed next Friday night.

A common enemy seemed to be the theme Tuesday night. Asian women, black guys, white chicks, and even Ron Artest came to Staples Center to send a pretty clear message: Fuck you, Donald Sterling. Did Sterling make some money from the game Tuesday night? Sure, but he’s a billionaire who makes money continuously, and the receipts from Tuesday night’s game are a drop in the bucket. But he felt it where it counted: his pride. The pathetic truth is that even at the advanced age of 81, Sterling still wanted to be popular. He was concerned about what people thought of him and desperately wanted to be cool. Can you imagine being 81 and getting upset about a 20-year-old’s Instagram?

Selflessness is the first thing you learn in sports—and ironically a glaring character flaw in Sterling. It was always about him. How much money does he make? How young is his girlfriend? How cool are his reading glasses? Except, Tuesday night at Staples Center, you looked around and realized it wasn’t about him. It was about us.

Observing the diverse crowd, I felt a strange sense of pride knowing that I was part of this merry band of misfits that came together to collectively tell this guy to kiss our ass. I felt pride in knowing that when shit really hits the fan and that common enemy rears his ugly, jowly head, we can rally as a community, as a team, and send a message about what we value. Because whether you’re a migrant worker looking for a new life in a new world or a Midwest meathead looking for a new life on the Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Los Angles is a place you can call home.

Follow Sean Green on Twitter.

We know that Steinbeck was a great lover of the stage. He mentioned attending several musicals in Journal of a Novel, his account of writing East of Eden. He had great respect for the magic of the theater, as the actors bring the characters to life. He adored playwrights like Arthur Miller, who gave characters life and drive. Although Of Mice and Men was the only play Steinbeck ever wrote himself, it stands as a pillar, a foundation, in the history of American theater. The story is as solid as oak, and at its very center is Steinbeck’s love for humanity; it's a story of a deep connection between two people.

Of Mice and Men, the novella, was written as an experimental hybrid form of play and prose. I genuinely believe that Steinbeck originally intended for the novel to be performable, given the highly dependent dialogue and its limited number of locations. It even follows all of Aristotle’s dicta of unity: place, time, and action. By 1937 those intentions came to the stage as Steinbeck adapted the novella into a play for the Broadway production, directed by George Kaufman, and I would argue that it is stronger than the novella—a more compressed and lean narrative of character and inevitable tragedy.

The story builds up to a “dream”—George and Lenny’s dream of the "Place.” “Not many guys travel around together,” the audience hears over and over again. It’s unusual to see two guys as close as Lenny and George, almost unnatural. If certain scenes evade the dream, those scenes antagonize the dream: the toughness of the ranch, the isolation of the migrant-worker lifestyle, the disregard for living things, like Candy’s dog, or the ostracism of the minority (Crooks because he’s black; Candy’s wife because she’s a woman; Candy because he’s old and crippled; Lenny because he’s slow).

As soon as any of the other characters hear about their dream, the "Place,” they jump on board with George and Lenny, because everyone shares the dream. We can identify with the characters because they stifle it within themselves, as many of us do with our dreams. Steinbeck draws a conflict of man versus the system in the friendship between Lenny and George; they’re almost two sides to one person. Lenny is the exposed heart, and George is the protective parent with his own kind of deep love. Throughout the play, George then dreams just as big as Lenny; he wants everything that Lenny does—to be free, to tend to the rabbits and the soft things in life—but he has suppressed it because he needs to protect himself, and Lenny, in such a harsh climate.

These characters got away from Steinbeck a little bit—especially in the play version—because the relationship between George and Lenny is closer than any other. Even Tom Joad and his mother aren’t tied by life and death as Lenny and George are. Steinbeck often wrote about groups, but with George and Lenny he wrote about the intimate love between two, and although Steinbeck has many indelible characters who shine throughout his works, he never touched on the deep and tragic tones that he used when Lenny and George were brought to life.

Of Mice and Men sits in a trio of books about ranch life—In Dubious Battle and Grapes of Wrath are the other two—but this story isn’t about ranch life, only using the ranch as a backdrop. It’s about the characters, focusing on the action created through tension and drama. The characters use their conflicts and desire—essentially their wounds—as torque. What makes this so beautiful is that there is hardly a villain. Even Curly is just trying to keep his wife under control: He obviously cares about her, he wears a glove full of Vaseline to keep his hand soft for her, and she just wants to “talk to somebody.” Everyone is essentially working toward the same goal, but their own socials dividers keep them from uniting.

The book, the play, and the films all contain these ideas. The book doesn’t have the experiential quality that the play has, and the movies have the pressure of becoming cinematic, of opening up the tight world of the bunkhouse to include the rest of the ranch. The tightest, most dramatic, most impactful incarnation of this material is in play form.

After doing it on Broadway night after night, I can attest to its power: Even if you know what’s coming, you want to believe that maybe this time things will work out, maybe it will end tragically, maybe the boys will get to the "Place” after all, and then the tears fall when they don’t. Boy, is it powerful. 

Sukhumi, Abkhazia, 2013. Only a few people have access to the military parade and get the chance to see the event up close.

In the fall of 2013, I traveled to the Republic of Abkhazia to experience first-hand the festivities surrounding the 20th anniversary of their victory against the Georgian army—the event that gave birth to the country in its current form. Abkhazia is a ghost nation; it is not recogniZed by the international community and it still officially belongs to the country of Georgia. To get there, I had to travel through Georgia and three different border crossings. Needless to say, the two places are not on the best terms.

Almost completely cut off from the outside world, Abkhazia is still suffering from a war that’s very much alive in people's minds. Located in the backyard of the Sochi Olympics to the Northwest, the Caucasus republic is wedged between southern Russia, Georgia, and the Black Sea. Its economy is sluggish but that doesn't defeat the people's spirits.

I stayed in Abkhazia for two weeks and what I enjoyed the most was the constant mix of modernity and traditions: ancient religious devotions and flat screen computers, young girls jumping around carelessly during a memorial for soldiers who died for independence—that kind of thing.

Dranda, Abkhazia, 2013. Maya is posing with the Abkhazian flag. Maya and her family are Syrian refugees. Nine people live in a renovated three bedroom flat provided by the Abkhazian state. They all love Abkhazia and want to build their lives there.

A few weeks after its self-proclaimed independence at the end of the Soviet rule, on August 14, 1992 Abkhazia was invaded by Georgian tanks. A year later, on September 30, 1993, Tbilisi’s troops were defeated by the Abkhazian armed forces with the help of volunteers from North Caucasus. Several thousand were killed and nearly the entire Georgian-speaking population fled the republic.

But that military victory over Georgia was only the beginning of a long ordeal. Despite formally declaring its independence in 1999, Abkhazia has been under an economic embargo by the international community for nearly 15 years. It was only after the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, that a weak light was seen at the end of the tunnel for Abkhazians, when the republic's legitimacy was recognised by Russia. Almost everybody won; Abkhazians got their houses gradually rebuilt (most were destroyed during the Patriotic War of 1992 and 1993), and Russia moved one step further into Georgia proper. Today, the security of the self-proclaimed republic is manned by the Abkhazian military and a Russian military base.

Sukhumi, Abkhazia, 2013. A large military parade involving several hundred soldiers, dozens of tanks and helicopters, was held on Independence Day on September 30th.

Abkhazia is gradually emerging from its autarky, but it still has a long way to go. Other than the diplomatic support of Vladimir Putin, the only places they have secured recognition from are Venezuela, Nicaragua, and the Pacific islands of Vanuatu and Nauru. Cargos from Turkey are detained by the Georgian navy, and only one able to keep the country afloat is their Russian big brother.

I discovered Caucasus in 2012, while reporting on the Chechen minority in the Pankisi valley, in northeastern Georgia. I did a little reseach but back then, the only feedback I got about Abkhazia was negative. People would tell me it would be impossible and dangerous to go there. But everyone I spoke to was Georgian, so I decided to see for myself.

My goal was to show the state of Abkhazia today, beyond clichés. It's been 20 years since the war of independence and five years since the Russian-Georgian war.

I had the amazing opportunity to attend the independence commemoration festivities of September 2013. Not wanting to stick to the official program however, I relied heavily on my local contacts and explored the country from within. I visited their businesses, art galleries, monasteries, schools, and ministries.

Sukhum, Abkhazia, 2013. During the festivities, Abkhaz young girls are waiting to go on stage in their traditional clothes.

I was struck by how easily people gave me access to their institutions – including the Ministry of the Interior. It was obvious that this was a country in expectation, eagerly looking for a nod of approval by the outside world, and was therefore trying to show itself in the best light.

As for what the future holds, the normalisation of relations between Georgia and Abkhazia seems to still be a challenge. As my photographs show, the memory of the 1992 to 93 war is still alive in the minds of Abkhazians and Georgians. In fact, Abkhazians consider any reunification with Georgia as a potential threat to their national identity.

Yet, the future of their relations with Russia is even more difficult to predict. Abkhazia is becoming more and more dependent on Putin, both in terms of security but also financially: Its currency is based on the Russian ruble (RUB) and its economy depends on Russian subsidies by 70 percent. Abkhazia wants to preserve its independence at any price, but I'm not that sure it can afford it.

Guillaume Poli is a French photojournalist. He worked for Paris Match, Le Parisien,Téléramaet L’Humanité. His full report on Abkhazia is available on Epic Stories here and here.

CLICK THROUGH FOR MORE OF GUILLAUME POLΙ'S PHOTOGRAPHS

Sukhumi, Abkhazia, 2013. The pupils from Pushkin secondary school are about to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Independence and Victory over Georgia. As I had nothing special planned, I went to this school in the city center, as the children were preparing a concert. At the entrance, I presented my certification and was allowed to enter. Once inside, I renewed the operation and started taking pictures. An angry-looking man asked me what I was doing. When I showed him my certification, he didn’t pay attention to it and asked me to follow him. After several phone calls (perhaps to the ministry), he finally allowed me to photograph the school celebrations.

New Athos, Abkhazia, 2013. Father David (on the left) is trying to instill a monastic life in this small Orthodox community, which fears of becoming a mere touristic monastery. We are in the room where Father David and his disciples eat after the late afternoon mass. A liturgical reading closed the meal that I shared with them in a calm and caring atmosphere. The faithful do not live in the monastery; Father David has built a community of faithful disciples who come every day.

New Athos, Abkhazia, 2013. This Orthodox monastery was built by Russian monks in the 19th century on the supposed site where martyr Saint Andrew lived. Each year, the monastery attracts nearly a million tourists and pilgrims who pass through Sochi to visit Abkhazia.

Sukhumi, Abkhazia, 2013. On Friday nights, young Soukhoumiens come to dance in this Soviet-style café adjacent to the Black Sea. It offers a large dance floor open to the beach.

Sukhumi, Abkhazia, 2013. During the 20th anniversary of the military victory over Georgia, a dense crowd is watching the parade of the Abkhaz army. Here, children grow faster than elsewhere: They have not known the 1992 war but live in an area of ​​tension and conflict.

Sukhumi, Abkhazia, 2013. During the week of September 30th, many festivities, concerts and dances in traditional costumes are held.

Sukhumi, Abkhazia, 2013. These veterans of the 1992 to 93 war are received by President Ankvab in the Chamber of Deputies.

Sukhum, Abkhazia, 2013. In junior high Pushkin, I attended the rehearsals before the September 30 commemoration.

A BOPE officer in Rio de Janeiro, standing next to the battalion's logo (All black and white photos courtesy of the BOPE press office)

A group of men dressed head to toe in black scoff down their daily serving of rice and beans, talking over each other like they’re at a family gathering. Rio de Janeiro’s Special Operations Battalion (BOPE) spend every lunch like this, the hour or so providing a brief respite from the dangers of their job.

The caveiras (or skulls in Portuguese, a nickname based on the battalion’s sinister logo) are the elite police force called into Rio’s favelas when conflicts become too heavy for the regular cops to handle. “We’re the last resort,” says one of the commanders.

Last month, state security officials proved him right, announcing that they were deploying BOPE to "pacify" the Alemão and Vila Cruzeiro favelas ahead of this summer’s World Cup—a result of four on-duty community police being killed since February alone. The campaign to clamp down on slum crime started in 2008 and had only witnessed eight police homicides in the five years before this recent spate of murders, so it’s clear that tensions are rising as police step up efforts before the first kick-off whistle is blown.

The problem, however, is that BOPE—trained to deal with the extremes of Brazil’s drug gangs—have been accused of extra-judicial killings, kidnappings and torture by human rights groups. Obviously, this reputation isn’t going to go down well in the favelas they’ve been ordered to patrol; it’s unlikely you’d put a lot of trust in a group of men accused of shooting first and asking questions later. In fact, some worry that the elite police’s deployment is only going to cause more tension and, subsequently, more violence.

Lieutenant Colonel João Jacques Busnello

Of course, there are those who champion the caveiras; after all, they are ostensibly there to make the city a better place. This is what Lieutenant Colonel João Jacques Busnello is keen to impress as we talk over lunch, a sign hanging over his head that reads: “Proud to be Brazilian."

Busnello served on the ground with BOPE for 11 years, participating in hundreds of operations and taking three bullets in the process. He’s taken out kidnappers to save hostages and helped a woman in labor reach the hospital in time, but is now retired from street service and coordinates operations from the elite police force’s HQ.

Growing up the son of a doorman and a lunch lady, he says he always wanted to become a BOPE soldier. “I like serving—I always liked serving,” he tells me. “I helped old ladies, children. I always enjoyed volunteering [before joining BOPE], so that helped me a lot with this work, because being a policeman is rewarding. Today, I am very happy. I’m a happy man because I’m a policeman.”

When I ask him to recount some of his experiences in detail, he tells me that, while they’re unforgettable, they’re “kind of heavy," before switching to a story about a BOPE officer who became the unofficial HQ chef. “Our team would go everywhere and come back wanting to eat, but the food was horrible,” he begins. “The BOPE HQ has no restaurants around—it’s like a desert here. So we all took a Navy cooking class, but the food the guy cooked was still awful.”

One day, the rest of the battalion made the guy try his own food. He didn’t stick around much longer after that. “The guy ended up running away from the police,” says the Lieutenant. “He became a deserter because he was scared.”

Captain André Penha Brasil

When I ask about his time in BOPE, Captain André Penha Brasil is just as cagey as Busnello. “It’s too intimate,” he explains.

Instead, I press him on the accusations levelled at BOPE concerning all the human rights violations allegedly committed in the field. He says that Brazilians—and especially cariocas, people born in Rio—have no respect for authority, and that the heavy assault weapons he and his colleagues use are an “equalizer” to the guns in the favela.

I tell him that doesn’t justify officers allegedly using their weapons against people instead of following a legitimate legal route and bringing them in for questioning. “If the opponent is willing to violate rights and is using [guns], you must have a a way of stopping that,” he says. “If I had an efficient way to stop someone without killing them, I would obviously use that instead. Unfortunately, lethal arms continue to be more efficient that non-lethal arms.”

He then ponders whether the news of a cop’s death in the favelas would receive as much coverage as the death of a civilian, before concluding that it would not. And he has a point; at the end of February, two policemen were ambushed and killed by two armed men, both suspected to belong to a local drug gang. One of the officers, 33-year-old Wagner Vieira da Cruz, had just graduated from the academy and hadn’t even received his first salary. Admittedly, the coverage of the murders was scarce, but I can't help but wonder whether news coverage of these deaths is something he should be concerning himself with—if, instead, he should focus more on keeping the peace than keeping murder tallies.

The BOPE headquarters in Rio de Janeiro

Captain Brasil tells me that he wasn’t made for a nine-to-five desk job; he wanted something different. Compared to Busnello, the captain comes from a pretty well-to-do background, spending his childhood in Spain, Malaysia, the Netherlands and India thanks to his father’s job as a diplomat. His family has a long history of military service, but he decided to join the police instead because you see “more action” in Rio than you would in the Brazilian army.

“Everyone is afraid of losing their life,” says Brasil. “In my position of risk, I find ways to deal with that—you develop coping mechanisms. Plus, fear is important—and necessary; I don’t want to be on the street with anyone who’s fearless.”

The last last officer I speak to, Major Sandro Aguiar, has served for 15 years and joined the force for his love of dogs. He’s worked as a police dog trainer and a field officer with dogs for ten years, and says the battalion extends as much loyalty to the canine unit as it does to those holding the guns.

Boss the Labrador (on the right) after a drugs haul

“Before the pacification of [the favela] Jacarézinho, we’d done a series of operations in that community, and we always had a satellite radio,” he says. “We were monitoring the criminals’ activities and we heard them threaten this dog, Boss, a Labrador. From that moment on, we had to change the formation to protect him.”

Many officers take old dogs home when they retire. Aguiar hasn’t done this yet for lack of space, but he brings his son to visit the dogs in the canine HQ—a different location from the BOPE HQ—whenever he can.

The impression I get during my day with these officers is that the most important characteristic to possess as a Brazilian policeman is a desire to serve the nation—the word “service” is repeated constantly by everyone I speak to. Some might argue that the accusations levelled at BOPE don’t exactly count as serving the community, but it’s important to remember—when getting uppity about the police using weapons—that they’re constantly coming up against deadly force in the situations they're assigned to.

BOPE officers during training

According to a blog focusing on Rio’s police force, 136 of the city’s cops were shot in 2012, 71 of them fatally. A report published by Folha, a newspaper based in Sao Paulo, states that at least 229 police officers were killed throughout the whole country in 2012—meaning one officer was killed every 32 hours—and says that the number may well be higher.

Of course, the general population have had it a lot harder than police; throughout the country, there were, on average, 128 reported homicides every day in 2012. There are no definitive statistics concerning how many of those deaths were at the hands of police, but Amnesty International claims that cops are responsible for around 2,000 deaths every year. It’s impossible to say conclusively whether all of these deaths are justified, but, if I’m going to speculate, the overwhelming likelihood is that they’re not.

Rio is in a difficult place at the moment, having been thrown into chaos by the upcoming World Cup. Authorities have been evicting people from their homes in an effort to present Rio in a better light, and hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets to protest against spiralling construction costs—which they argue could have been spent on much worthier stuff than a few soccer stadiums—and government corruption. So the elite police moving in to occupy your neighbourhood at the tail end of all that is clearly going to cause some trouble.

When I ask Busnello why life in Rio has come to this, he gives me an answer that surprises me at first—one that sympathizes with the people he’s been charged with policing. “The problem with our society is that it presents social virtues with very large discrepancies—it’s unbalanced,” he says. “The police, as society’s crisis manager, are in the middle of this. And when you put an unknown agent in the middle, it’s going to be problematic.”

Follow Nicole on Twitter

Photo via the Globe and Mail.
Last night, the Globe and Mail sent the internet into a frenzy with a heavily watermarked screenshot of Rob Ford holding a pipe. It seems as if Robbie was kicking it in his sister’s basement with someone resembling Sandro “bedbugs in a vial in case you fuck with me” Lisi, and an unnamed drug dealer, who was presumably the one clandestinely filming him.

This dealer has been trying to sell the tape to various media outlets (VICE has not been contacted), which we know because Gawker also got a sliver of the #CrackTape2 action, after they explained in a cranky blog post how they weren’t able to capitalize on the tape before the Globe spent $10,000 on a screenshot of Toronto’s mayor holding a pipe.

Robyn Doolittle and Greg McArthur broke the story for the Globe, which obviously could not have gone over well in the Toronto Star’s newsroom, who recently saw Robyn jump ship. In response, the Star ran a story last night about J Biebz punking Rob Ford while he was allegedly high on coke at a mega-nightclub called Muzik by the Toronto waterfront. The Star also ran with a screenshot of Gawker, in print, on their front page this morning, instead of giving the hat-tip to the Globe. 

Oh, and in case you missed it, the Toronto Sun posted an audio recording of Rob Ford saying nasty things about Toronto mayoral candidate Karen Stintz—namely that he wants to “jam” her, which is either code for sweaty sex, or some kind of fetish maneuver using a strawberry breakfast spread. Either way, Stintz has responded by saying Rob Ford’s comments were “gross” and that he is a ”bigot.”

So, in the scope of an hour or two, we saw evidence of a new crack video, read news that Justin Bieber shamed Rob Ford in a nightclub, and heard brand new audio of Robbie saying some greezy shit. Now the mayor has stepped down, and claims that he is on his way to rehab. Rob was pictured with a suitcase on the way out of his home this morning, and took off in a car that had an envelope marked with the Passport Canada Ottawa address on it, as spotted by CityNews.

Photo via CityNews.
This could mean one of two things: Rob Ford is off to rehab in a foreign country, or Rob Ford is running off somewhere without an extradition treaty to Canada. Either way, I can’t imagine that this is the last we’ll see of Rob Ford. This is a man who has been fired from his job once already, weathered the storm of #CrackTape1 somewhat sturdily, and embarrassed himself on national television after Jimmy Kimmel wiped his sweaty brow and made him play late night parlour games.

Evidently, the spin machine is in full effect. Rob Ford is an addict. Rob Ford needs help. Rob Ford is going to rehab. And Rob Ford will be back to prove to Ford Nation that he is the best damn mayor that ever did allegedly smoke crack twice on camera, and get sued for allegedly orchestrating a violent beatdown of his sister’s ex-boyfriend in prison.

This narrative is not acceptable for many Torontonians who are calling for the mayor’s resignation, but as we have learned time and time again, Rob Ford is not one to back down from a major scandal. And judging by Rob Ford’s latest tweet, his office is currently looking to fill a junior position that pays $30k a year—so get those resumes ready, friends!

Unfortunately Toronto’s councilors, journalists, and various other naysayers who dislike FordTopia can continue to berate the mayor and call for his resignation—just as we have done all along—but unless this guy gets charged and forcibly removed from office, I’m not convinced that he will leave of his own volition. Even after this latest crack clusterfuck, Rob can easily go to rehab, take a break, come back, tell everyone everything is fine, and wait for this next crack wave to blow over.

If you think that’s an unrealistic view of a man who is quite clearly out of control, then you probably haven’t been following this story for very long. The golden rule of Rob Ford is that things will always get crazier, and there’s nothing more ridiculous than maintaining your job after you get caught smoking some kind of crack-like drug on camera—twice.

@patrickmcguire