All photos via Darryl Couch.
The island of Newfoundland is well known for many things: the brightly coloured row houses of St. John’s, the majestic icebergs and frolicking whales that tease our shores each Spring, and those amazingly saturated tourism ads that make every corner of this province look like a perfectly lit ethereal scene. All things I affectionately refer to as “Newfie Porn”—but don’t think I’m giving the rest of you a pass to call us Newfies. That’s our word.

Anyhoodle, Newfie Porn is what brings the tourists out in droves, during the two or three months a year the weather’s half decent, to photograph all this rocky island has to offer. And we love every minute of it!  In fact, Newfie Porn is such a thing that ever since the release of this Newfoundland & Labrador Tourism ad entitled Clothesline, I regularly catch people photographing my laundry. Try doing that anywhere else in the world and you’ll likely get arrested for being a pervert. Here in Newfoundland, we offer to hold the camera so you can be in the photo. Not only will Newfoundlanders happily let you gawk at our drawers, but we’ll likely invite you in for a drop of tea afterwards, too. Now that’s sexy. That’s Newfie Porn.

So what is Newfoundland’s latest eye candy attraction? Well, it’s a 26 metre long beached and bloated whale carcass on the rocky shore of Trout River, a tiny community on the island’s West Coast. Now, there are likely a hundred reasons we should all be sad about this, seeing as this day in age one cannot even enjoy eating a hamburger without having to repent and then figure out where it came from, how it was raised, and if the greasy meat will fatally stuff our arteries. That and the fact these whales are numbered and very precious.  But today, I’d like to focus on the positive. The positive being that some experts are predicting this giant whale might soon explode, spewing literal tonnes of oily blubber and foul gunk across a multi-kilometre radius. I know, I know! That’d make a terrible mess and the town may well be doused and left to clean up the mess with no real idea how one should go about cleaning up such a mess. But on the other hand, it is what it is, and it’s going to be friggin’ awesome! 

How often does something like this happen? Well, it turns out this kind of thing isn’t totally unheard of, but is fairly rare. And in sticking with the Newfie Porn theme, I’m going to liken this event to finding the G-Spot. It can happen, it has happened, and yet it may never happen again. But if and when it does, it’s absolutely mind blowing and well worth the wait!

See this vintage news reel from 1970 where a town in Oregon attempts to beat the bloated beast to the punch by stuffing it with TNT. The result is pure comedic gold, I tell ya! Gold!

The reason for the possible explosion, you ask? A massive build-up of methane and other gases due to decomposition combined with the ongoing weakening of muscular and epidermal tissue.

So if you’re at all into cultural porn of any kind, be it ‘Newfie’ or otherwise, science and/or watching things explode, join me in Trout River, Newfoundland.

I’ll be the one on the beach in the lawn chair with the haz-mat suit and a half case of India Beer, camera cocked. The sooner, the better b’ys! She’s liable to blow at any time.

Here is Hannah Georgas's new video for “Enemies,” a song about “that guy” who always seems to get caught with a slime trail of dirty texts and IMs between him and some hussy. The song is great, a propulsive indie-pop earworm capped by Georgas's snaky vocals, but it’s the video, directed by John Patton Ford, that really got us excited. 

A lone dog trainer, played by character actor John Ennis (whom you might recognize from Mr. Show or Zodiac), and his dog, played by a greyhound named Nimbus, spend their days alone in a one-story shithole and their nights on the track, begging to beat the odds and win across the board. Despite the abject cruelty of the dog-racing industry—where dogs are often overworked, fed 4-D food from dead or diseased animals, at risk for breaking their legs and necks running on tracks ridden with potholes, prone to massive coronaries from the stress of overexertion, forced to live in crates 22 hours a day, and, at the end of it all, unceremoniously killed when they’re too broken-down to run—the video really does capture a crumbling, melancholy vision of soon-to-be-dead American individualism! And no animal rights activists can take that away from us, dammit!

"Enemies" is the fourth video from Georgas's self-titled sophomore record, which was released a few years back through Beetle Bomb Music. You should buy it right here. Also, if you’re British, German, or Canadian, Georgas will be playing in your country this summer. Tour schedule is below.

May 8–10: The Great Escape Festival, Brighton, UK
May 12: Ger Berghain Kantine Panorama Bar, Berlin
May 15: Shackwell Arms, London
June 14: CBC Music Fest (with Spoon and Tegan and Sara), Vancouver

Four months ago, Teru Kuwayama was appointed Photo Community Manager at Facebook—not a job you'd normally associate with a war photographer.

Kuwayama has not only risked his life to document what goes on in war zones, he's a senior TED fellow and a firm believer in using social media for journalistic purposes. In 2004 he co-founded Lightstalkers, the online forum for reporters, photographers, and filmmakers, and in 2010, he launched Basetrack, a project that documented the deployment of a Marine battalion and used Facebook to share photos and stories with the soldiers' families.

I caught up with Kuwayama to talk about all that and Instagram in space.

VICE: I guess I should start by congratulating you on your new job.
Teru Kuwayama: Thanks! I made it through 20 years as a photographer without actually having a job, so I'm still not quite sure if being honestly employed is something to be congratulated on. But it's definitely an adventure. I'm not a domesticated animal, so this is a totally new experience for me. It was definitely an experiment on both sides.

What's it like working at Facebook?
It's a fast-moving company and things change rapidly. I'm really a point of contact, somebody that can speak to the photography community and explain to them what the company is trying to do, and vice versa. I sometimes feel a little bit like what the US military once called a “terp,” or an interpreter—translating between Americans and Afghans.

A lot of photographers don't trust Facebook. Most of the agitation seems to be focused on loss of image rights, downloadable images, and the automatic deletion of metadata as soon as it's uploaded to the site. What would you say to them?
There’s sometimes an assumption that the platforms are out to get you, but that's just not the case. Sometimes people [who work at platforms] aren’t aware of the concerns, or the complexity of dealing with those concerns is bigger than people realize. When you have a platform that's being used by over a billion people—having it be 100 percent satisfactory for everyone is a tall order.

“A lot of photographers” is basically referring to professional photographers, who make up a really small percentage of the people uploading photos to Facebook. We tend to think of ourselves as the most important class of photographers, but in the hundreds of millions of photos getting uploaded each day, we’re statistically insignificant. But a lot of these questions are actually being worked on, particularly the metadata stuff.

What exciting developments do you see in the future?
I think still photography and motion photography may find some interesting convergence in these new short video formats. There’s technology like Oculus Rift that literally opens a new dimension of sensory perception. I also think it's interesting how much social media isn’t immediately visible. A lot of communication occurs in groups or messaging apps, so you no longer see quite a lot of the things that once might have lived on people's Facebook walls.

That means people are getting more conscious of their privacy.
Yeah, but it's also increasingly possible to contact people or groups more specifically—[which becomes] more desirable as the online population expands. This is one of the fundamental distinctions between traditional media and social media. It's about the individual's personal connections and accessing those social graphs. With the proliferation of these private messaging apps you’re seeing the potential for that to become more granular and targeted.

I'm curious to see if some new form of journalism will evolve out of that. Like a shift from sending one message to millions of people to sending very specific messages directly to individuals. Who knows? That's the fascinating thing about where I am now, I'm literally seeing so much of this being engineered or prototyped before my eyes.

What are some of your favourite Instagram accounts?
One of the most amazing ones is NASA—there’s literally Instagram in outer space! Another great account I follow is TSA—it's pictures of the stuff that's been confiscated at US airports. Also Asim Rafiqui's, which is a family album of portraits of relatives of detainees at Bagram. It's far from the stereotype of the web as a collection of kittens and cappuccinos, it’s a really powerful example of what a social media platform can be used for.

What effect do you think Facebook and the platform it's providing is having on journalism?
What even is journalism? We're associating "capital J" journalism with a very formal concept and construct deriving from the newspaper age—almost as an aesthetic. What happens on social media platforms is the most fundamental form of journalism you can imagine: It's people sharing their thoughts and experiences.

One of the interesting opportunities of social media is it's allowing individuals to tell their stories and do their own communicating without having to go through the filter of someone who's deemed a professional, and that's a disruptive idea that's discomforting for a lot of professional journalists and organizations.

But there will always be a need for the professional journalist.
There's unquestionably a need for those core concepts of ethics—honesty, accuracy, and transparency. But I think we'd be fooling ourselves if we said that newspapers and journalism schools, simply by virtue of existing, were enforcing those concepts across the world. What’s equally important is that every individual starts to think in the way that we associate with professional journalists. Analyzing the information they see, asking themselves, "Is it true?" and, "What can I compare this to and what other perspectives are out there?"

Not very long ago news organizations might have looked at blogs as interesting sources of opinion, raw pieces of information that could be contextualized and taken as leads in a way. Now I think that people often look at news organizations in that way. They can see very clearly that different news organizations have different points of view even though they might call themselves fair, balanced, or neutral.

Does this have anything to do with why you started Basetrack?
Basetrack was a few years ago, but what hasn’t changed is this: America is engaged in the longest war in its history, and you find that, overwhelmingly, the American people don't know anything about Afghanistan and can't identify or articulate what we're trying to achieve there.

Myself and the Basetrack team were really interested in seeing if there was an alternative to the way we traditionally worked. We effectively launched the experiment of being our own publishers. We were all used to working for mainstream news channels that went out to millions of people, and here we all were, targeting a few thousand family members surrounding this Marine battalion.

But it was one of the most intense experiences we ever had in terms of engagement and having people reaching out to us constantly. I remember a time when we showed up at a little outpost in southern Afghanistan and found a box of cookies that had been shipped to us from a Marine’s mother. That didn’t happen when I worked with news magazines.

When did you start shooting with iPhones?
The Basetrack project was the first time I used iPhones as cameras and that's because it's so functional. It's small, that touch screen interface makes it surprisingly dust-proof, and it takes good pictures. There’s this spectrum of apps that comes with the device and the fact that everybody can do post-production is amazing. Everybody has a dark room in their pocket and a publishing platform built into the device—that's all remarkable. It's also accelerated the learning curve so much that people can ramp up on a much faster cycle.I think this is the first really functional digital camera. For the first time it’s really “point and shoot.”

Do you have any modifications to yours?
The phone I'm talking to you on is the one I used while embedded in Afghanistan and has a protective case that was designed by Balazs and Peter Gardi during the Basetrack project. It’s called Strikecase.

What were the hardest things about shooting with a phone in these conditions?
I honestly haven't hit too many barriers with it. My perspective probably isn't typical in that before I was using a mobile phone as a camera, I used mostly Polaroids, Holgas, and a panoramic camera called the Widelux. These are all archaic, totally manual cameras that had so many technical limitations—so in comparison, a mobile phone is one of the most sophisticated cameras I’ve ever used.

Which of the iPhone images you took in Afghanistan stands out the most for you?
This turkey image. During an operation to clear this town that had been occupied by insurgents, a Marine unit was using this compound as a sniper position and to hold these detainees that had been picked up in the area. I think this is the image that sticks out to me as it was shot at the height of the counterinsurgency push in Afghanistan, which was described at the time as "hearts and minds approach" to convince the local population to support the local government. This is a cycle that happened constantly—people being detained, having bags put over their heads and having their houses occupied by foreign forces. There were a lot of hearts broken and a lot of minds were lost.

In episode five of Last Chance High, Crystal is picked up for shoplifting after disappearing for almost a week—and has left her mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, Cortez prepares to head downstate to visit his father, who is serving a life sentence in prison for murder.

On Chicago's West Side, there is a school for the city's most at-risk youth—the Moses Montefiore Academy. Most of the students at Montefiore have been kicked out of other schools for aggressive behavior, and many have been diagnosed with emotional disorders. 

Last Chance High takes viewers inside Montefiore's classrooms, and into the homes of students who are one mistake away from being locked up or committed to a mental hospital.

Photos by Conor Lamb

In case you missed it, neo-Nazis were supposed to take New York City, and much of America, by storm on March 15. It was all part of a scheme hatched on the white-supremacist chat rooms of Stormfront. They called for a national “white man's March.” Unsurprisingly, the planned nationwide protest ended up being a complete dud. I know, because I spent the day scouring Manhattan looking for fascists. 

They were no shows at Grand Army Plaza near Central Park, where they had planned to congregate. Nor were they on hand in Queens, where they had advertised a barbecue party that day in front of the outlet strip mall on Jamaica Avenue, which is heavily trafficked by African Americans and West Indians. The only other white person around on Jamaica Avenue that afternoon, besides myself, was a dude handing out yoga-studio flyers. Instead of hitting the streets, many of this country’s racist white folks rang in “white man's March” by lazily posting photos of themselves holding white-pride banners on the internet. 

But that's not to say I didn’t find racists on March 15; they just weren’t white. In Queens, I came upon a group of about a dozen individuals lined up in a row, wearing purple robes with faux-gold edging in front of the Jamaica Center shopping complex. 

If you live in a major American city, you may have encountered a variation of the scene I witnessed: men who look like they've wandered off the set of an all–African American production of Jesus Christ Superstar, soapboxing on the street corner to puzzled passersby. While the first rule of advertising is to keep it short, with these guys the message travels a long, windy route through the Book of Deuteronomy and other texts before arriving at the takeaway: Black people are the real Jews, and white people are possessed by Satan. 

When I asked the strange group of men who was in charge, I was directed toward a robed gentleman who said, “People call us the Black Israelites. But that's not right. We are the Israelites.”

Their garments read “Israelites United in Christ” in a font that looked as if it had been borrowed from a poster for Disney's Aladdin. There on the street, one fellow read from a Bible, overseen keenly by a preacher who would interrupt him periodically and interpret the text. The gist of the message from what I could gather was, "Down with the white man's science.” 

The rest of the group stood behind the duo, hard and expressionless. Pedestrians passed by, clutching shopping bags, heading straight for the nearby subway entrance, sidestepping the strange scene as if avoiding someone with the flu. Others stood dumbfounded, trying to make head or tail of the rants. One bystander tried to argue with the flock and received a torrent of phlegmy scripture that left him cursing and walking off, shaking his head. There was no arguing with these men, who were incensed with the word of God. 

The Israelites United in Christ are part of a religious movement that goes back to the post-Reconstruction days in the Southern United States. In 1895 William Saunders Crowdy, a former slave and a Civil War veteran, was chopping wood near Guthrie, Oklahoma, when, he claimed, God spoke to him in a voice that was like “the rushing of birds.” 

God told Crowdy that he was a Hebrew and that it was his duty to restore the Kingdom of Israel. Crowdy, his hair turned white by God's whispers, set about spreading the Gospel. In 1896, he set up the Church of God and Saints in Christ in Lawrence, Kansas, along with various “tabernacles” that spread across the South, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic. Crowdy's church still stands in Washington, DC, where he and his followers relocated.

Today, there are hundreds of “Israelite” congregations across the United States and the Caribbean, counting thousands of members. On its website, Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks hate groups in the United States, notes that plenty of them, and this includes the Saints in Christ, “are neither explicitly racist nor anti-Semitic and do not advocate violence.” 

Nonetheless, SPLC has expressed concern over the extremist wing of the religion that has grown up since Crowdy's days. Along with Nation of Islam, whose leader, Louis Farrakhan, has made disparaging remarks against Jews, the SPLC classifies this wing of the Black Israelite religion as a hate group. 

“They say that God is coming back to enslave and murder all white people,” SPLC's Mark Potok told me, describing the faith as the “precise analogue” of Christian Identity, whose white adherents believe the Jews are decedents of Satan. Mark also points out that Neo-Nazi leader Tom Metzger has labeled them the “black counterparts” to his white-supremacist movement. These days, the white-supremacist movement as a whole appears neutered and weak. However, lone wolves can still ignite acts of violence. We were reminded of this on April 14, when former Klansman Frazier Glenn Cross went on a shooting spree outside a Jewish community center in Alabama and killed three people. Members of the Israelites have their own share of blood on their hands. The late Miami-based Black Israelite leader Yahweh Ben Yahweh (or God, son of God) was convicted in 1990 on federal racketeering charges related to his ordering the murder of some 14 people. 

“He was a truly bloody, frightening guy,” Potok remembered. “His thing was, 'Kill me white people and bring me back their ears.'” 

With Yahweh's passing, in 2007, Israelite extremists were left without a prominent prophet, but that doesn't mean they've vanished. As recent as 2009 a former follower of the Nation of Yahweh religion was was tied to the slaying of hip-hop journalist Sam Ferguson. 

Meanwhile, on street corners across America, there are still hundreds of small black-supremacist churches left around, each claiming to be the one true path to salvation, hoisting up their own mini-Yahwehs.

“They're into confronting people on the streets,” Potok said. “I'm not suggesting they're going to go out and blow up federal buildings and shoot cops… I mean, we'll see.” 

The religion inhabits a kind of paradox. They are much maligned by the African American Christian establishment, though they take literally the symbolic identification of the traditional black church with the plight of the enslaved Israelites in the Bible. They have adopted traditional Jewish religious practices, yet resent people of Jewish heritage as pretenders. In their eyes, a secret masonic order is repressing them, distorting the true nature of reality. Hence, African Americans don't know they are the genuine Israelites, though all one has to do is read the Bible and look at the pyramid on the dollar bill to understand the truth.

On the sunny afternoon of April 18, I paid a visit to the Israelites United in Christ in Allerton, a neighborhood on Bronx's east side. Their neighborhood was lined with cheap four-story apartment complexes and the weather-bruised marquees of auto-body shops and corner stores that halfheartedly begged for attention. A sign at the entryway of their church warned that visitors would be frisked for weapons. However, my guide, who identified himself as Deacon Asaph, didn't bother to pat me down. 

The Israelites had done their best to convert the subterranean room, with its exposed pipe and electrical wiring, into a place of worship. They had placed an elevated altar under the basement windows and hung a portrait of a pissed-off, red-eyed Jesus on the wall. He glowered at me as Asaph and I chatted.

“There was a lot of Israelite groups when I came into the understanding,” Asaph recounted while donning a purple robe over his T-shirt and jeans. 

Asaph discovered the Israelites in the 80s, while he was working at a shoe store near Times Square. On his lunch breaks, he would watch them preach. “I would see the men on the street just like you. I said, 'These guys are nuts. They're cursing people out. They're arguing with people.' I didn't understand it, so I ignored it for a while. But I realized, these guys are saying things in the scriptures that most churches are not. When I started to speak to them and do research on my own, I said, 'These guys are telling the truth!'”

By “truth,” Asaph means that the Israelites have found a way to use the Bible to justify their beliefs. “Opinions are like assholes,” he explained. “Everybody has one, and shit comes out.” By contrast, the Bible is the word of the Lord. Why? Because it says so. 

Asaph picked up a warn-out copy of the Good Book. “Here's why we don't deal with white man's science,” he said, flipping through its many highlighted passages until he found what he was looking for: Timothy 2:16. Asaph read aloud that God instructed Timothy to “'avoid profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called.'” With that, he shut the book, satisfied, adding, “We're talking about a group of people who make a pill and then tell you there's 15 other things that could come about from that pill that could kill you.” 

This was a pattern that lasted the rest of the afternoon. I would ask a question and the Israelites would reach for their Bibles, read to me, and offer their own extrapolations on the text. 

As Asaph and I spoke, I noticed someone else looking on. His outfit was basically the same as Asaph's, only he wore medieval leather bands strapped to his wrists. I asked to be introduced. This was the leader and founder of Israelites United in Christ, Elder Nathaniel Judah Ben Israel. Slightly taller than Asaph and I, Nathaniel's towering presence was topped with the wry smile of a con man or one content in the sanctity of the Lord. 

Twenty-eight years ago, a 20-year-old Nathaniel was standing on the street corner when a young man put a flyer in his hand. “It said, 'Jesus was black, and Christmas is not to be observed,” he recounted to me. “I said, 'Wait a minute, I was raised celebrating Christmas. I was raised thinking Jesus was white.” 

Nathaniel demanded proof of what the piece of paper said, and conveniently, the young man had a Bible on hand, which he opened to Revelations 1:15: “And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.” 

“It was like newfound life” said Nathaniel. “I'd been lied to all these years.” 

This revelation, the elder said, led him to start his own church, which—unlike the other churches claiming to be Israelite—follows the “exact” word of God. 

To support the church's activities, Nathaniel and most of his flock “work in either law enforcement or security.” I asked if he felt there was a contradiction in opposing a Satanic world order in one's free time and working for that order while on the clock. 

“Not at all,” he insisted. 

“Many of our forefathers in the Bible were in law enforcement,” chimed Asaph, who then read a bit about being “content with your wages” from Luke 3:14 at Nathaniel's direction. 

We were all sitting in a circle at this point, and I suddenly realized I was getting my own personal Bible lesson from the founder of a black-supremacist church and his trusted assistant. This went on for over an hour, during which time I learned a lot.

For one thing, Beyoncé is a whore. Black women are taught to look up to her and other false female idols as part of a plot to destroy the true Israelite family. That's why Israelites United in Christ have a special ministry geared toward women that teaches them homemaking tips and provides cooking recipes. Men and women each have roles to play in life that are dictated by God. A woman's place is in the kitchen or in the bedroom, making babies. 

This brand of sexism didn't strike me as all that special. Fucked-up, yes, and kind of silly, since it was directed at Beyoncé. Yet lots of faiths—Christian, Hindu, Islamic—have backward beliefs. But then we began to venture into the nitty-gritty racist territory. Up until that point, I'd felt kind of sympathetic. I could get behind Nathaniel and Asaph's belief in a black Jesus, in inverting a book that had been used by whites to justify the barbarous enslavement of their ancestors through labeling them inferior heathens. Frankly, I couldn't give a shit if Jesus were green. Some scholars even doubt a historical Jesus existed, but if a black Jesus works for the Asaph, why should I knock it?

When it came to the matter of the masonic conspiracy against the church, their reasoning didn't make sense to me, but I heard them out. According to Nathaniel, through no fault of my own, mind you, I am possessed by Satan. Above me there is a group of secretive white people who are in touch with the Dark Lord and control the world economy. 

As crazy as that sounds, a small group of people, most of whom are white, do own a tremendous portion of the world's wealth. On planet Earth today, just 85 people have more money than 3.5 billion of their poorer counterparts combined. The Israelites' reasons for why they are downtrodden may be nuts, but that doesn't mean they actually aren't downtrodden. According to census data, nearly 30 percent of the population in the Bronx lives below the poverty line. In Newburgh, New York, where Israelites United also have a strong presence, the poverty rate is nearly as high. Both regions are in a war for the dubious distinction of being the poorest in the country, and both are composed primarily of African Americans.

As SPLC's Mark Potok put it, "Black racism in America is largely, if not entirely, a response to white racism.” 

“But at some point,” he added, “this chain of hate has got to stop.”

Some may look at the poverty that people experience in the Bronx and Newburgh and think it's time to break down racial barriers. Israelites United, however, want to keep de facto segregation in place. Only they want black people on top.

As they closed the lesson, I was instructed that we are living in the last days. There will be peace on Earth when the black Jesus returns and the true Israelites take all the white people captive under Christ's command.

“Don't worry, we're not going to sodomize you,” Nathaniel assured me with that grin of his. 

I wondered whether there is a way for a white person, such as myself, who might be under Satan's command but who wants to do right by God, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

“You should support this truth,” Nathaniel told me. “You should get us on as many venues as you can. You and your counterparts—find a way to get this truth out, [and] you are going to be in the Kingdom.”

There you have it, white people who read VICE, spread the word of the Israelites or a black Jesus might shank you where the sun don't shine.

Follow Peter Rugh on Twitter.

On December 5, 2013, in an attack that went largely underreported by the world's media, al Qaeda gunmen, clad in government military uniforms, casually slaughtered 52 innocent civilians in Sanaa, Yemen's capital. The al Oradi hospital sits within the same compound as the Yemeni ministry of defense, where al Qaeda alleged that drone strikes were directed.

Instead of targeting the ministry, however, the attackers killed the security guards manning the side gate of the hospital, then spent hours calmly stalking its corridors, shooting doctors, nurses, and even patients lying in their beds. In grim pictures captured by surveillance cameras, one gunman is seen approaching a group of terrified hospital staff.

At first they don't flinch, and almost seem to be awaiting instructions, until the attacker reveals a hand grenade, pulls out the pin, and tosses it at them as if he were throwing a ball to a puppy.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) usually avoids targeting civilians and even provides some form of governance in the small areas they control in Yemen. This goes some way to explaining why it enjoys some level of support in this war-torn country. But when this footage was aired on national TV, even AQAP supporters were horrified, and it was compelled to make an apology.

In a video statement, its military leader, Qasim al Raymi, acknowledged "our mistake and guilt," claiming that the nine attackers had been ordered not to enter the hospital. He continued: "We offer our apology and condolences to the victims' families. We accept full responsibility for what happened in the hospital and will pay blood money for the victims' families." Al Raymi added: "We are continuing our jihad."

A dead whale on the California coast in 2007. Photo via Flickr user Images by John 'K'

OK, so let's say you have a dead whale on your hands. Depending on where you live, this is not as uncommon a problem as it might seem. Residents of Newfoundland, Canada, for example, are currently dealing with a pair of rotting blue whale corpses. These noble giants of the sea were likely killed by some ice, and now they sit rather ignobly on rocky beaches, rotting and slowly filling up with methane gas, which bloats the bodies and could cause them to explode.

Living beached whales are a challenge to deal with in their own right. Occasionally, they can be kept wet and breathing long enough to be guided back to sea, but often they die of natural causes or have to be euthanized to spare them unnecessary suffering. When that happens, you’re left with the same issue faced by local officials in Newfoundland, where the government has told the towns of Trout River and Rocky Harbor that it’s their responsibility to deal with the whales—how do you handle 60 tons of decomposing meat?

Here are some options:

Let the corpses stay: They might be good for tourism!
Everyone loves a giant dead aquatic mammal. From the Wire:

People have been flocking to the town in the past week to get a look at the carcass, according to Jenny Parsons, a restaurant owner in town.

[…]

At least one Trout River resident wants to take advantage of the large influx of gawkers. She told the Guardian, ‘Right now we have a stream of traffic coming to see this whale, and we would like that to develop further into maybe “What can we do with this whale for future tourism?”’

The difficulty here is that people like looking at whale corpses, but they really, really don’t like smelling them—the same folks snapping #DeadWhaleSelfies will presumably not hang around to sample the local delicacies when the air smells like bloated, rotting blubber.

OK, but can anything be done to profit from the whales’ deaths? Can people sell bits of blubber as souvenirs?
No, absolutely not. Blue whales are endangered, which means you can’t saw off the whales’ flippers—as one bold Trout River resident did—without breaking the law. And getting close to the corpses means you risk getting all kinds of whale-borne diseases, not to mention the chance of falling into a whale if you stand on its decomposing skin.

What about getting rid of all the nasty blubber and turning the whales’ skeletons over to a museum?
Some communities in Newfoundland have been doing this—the plan is to “develop a network of whale skeleton pavilions” according to a 2010 CBC News story about how the Canadian town of King’s Point built one such structure. That article says it took nearly a decade of volunteer labor and $700,000 ($640,000 American) to strip the meat from the bones, though the end result was “definitely worth the effort.”

But when asked about the prospects of doing that to the dead whales in Trout River and Rocky Harbour, Maurice Budgell, the guy in charge of the King’s Point Heritage Society, didn’t seem excited about undertaking the task again:

"'With all of the problems that we had with the one that we have here now, it would be a monstrous job to take on something else like that,' said Budgell.

'The biggest problem for us were just [the] volunteers not in the fishing business — it was the smell of the whale, the smell of the blubber.'

Budgell said some of the equipment used to get the flesh off the bones still smell like rotting whale blubber, ten years after the task was completed."

Truck the bodies away to a landfill then!
Provided you have a big enough truck and a crane that can lift the whale carcass, this is a good way to at least get the whale away from your town. You have to be careful about transporting these big guys, though, as they can explode at any time, as Taiwan residents found out in 2004.

By the way, if you want to see a video of how a whale explodes due to methane-gas buildup, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND you watch this video of a biologist cutting a corpse open (for science!) and nearly getting blasted by a slurry of blood and organs. Pay particular attention to the nervous guy getting the hell out of the way at the 0:05 mark:

Why not graffiti the corpses?
OK, you could do this—as one New Jersey resident did to a small dead whale that recently washed up in Atlantic City—but it still doesn’t solve your problem.

What about just blowing the whole thing up?
This novel solution was notoriously hit upon by an engineer in Oregon named Paul Thornton, who was tasked with dealing with a whale corpse in 1970. This decision resulted in chunks of whale blubber—some as big as coffee tables—raining down on suddenly terrified bystanders. Eventually, thanks to one of the most charming websites of all time, the story of the Exploding Whale and Thornton’s terrible, terrible decision spread far and wide. The local news story on the incident has been seen by millions, and should be in some kind of hall of fame:

OK, shit, so… bury the bodies?

This may be the best thing to do with a whale corpse: New York City buried a 60-foot finback whale that washed up in 2012, and Uruguay disposed of a 52-foot sperm whale that way earlier this year. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do, however—you’ll need a lot of cranes and trucks to get the job done. And as a 2009 whale burial in Florence, Oregon, shows, putting one of these guys in the ground can involve cutting them into pieces, which is EXTREMELY GROSS JESUS CHRIST:

Anyway, if you see a dead whale on the beach, tell an adult immediately. If you want to know what’s going on with the whales in Newfoundland, check out HasTheWhaleExplodedYet.com.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Screencap via ABC News

Leo Sharp is an 89-year-old drug mule. He pleaded guilty last fall to trucking 200 pounds of cocaine across the country for the Sinaloa Cartel. Now, he's awaiting sentencing next week on May 7, his 90th birthday. He told a news crew in no uncertain terms that if given jail time, "I'm just gonna end it all. Period." If that's too ambiguous for you, he clarified: "I'm gonna get a goddamned gun and shoot myself in the mouth or the ear, one or the other." So if he means it, that's happening this coming Wednesday.

Sharp has a lot going for him PR-wise. He's a Bronze Star recipient who saw action in the Italian theater of WWII. "I served with the 88th Infantry Division, also known as the Blue Devils," he wrote in a friend's obituary a year ago. This means he was part of the fighting force that drove the Germans into Rome in 1944 at heavy cost. In addition to running drugs, Sharp has probably put bullets in a lot of people.

After the war, he made himself into an even more unimpeachable example of the Norman Rockwell/Greatest Generation set. After settling in Michigan City, Indiana, he got into the flower business. He narrowed his focus to the daylily, and achieved international recognition for his special variety of hemerocallis hybrida, known in gardening circles as "Siloam Leo Sharp." 

In his 80s, the flower business wasn't paying the bills, however, and for one reason or another, Sharp found himself trafficking cocaine for the Sinaloas. That's not like getting mixed up with some hoods. The Sinaloa Cartel is the Comcast of the drug world, and they used Sharp to move 670 kilos in total. If you were an avid coke user in Chicago from 2009 to 2011, there's a good chance Leo Sharp was your courier. Hell, if it was carted eight more hours and turned into crack after crossing the Canadian border, maybe Rob Ford even smoked it.

But in 2011, Sharp got busted with 200 pounds of cocaine by the Michigan state police. Some coverage emphasized that he had dementia, but it doesn't look like he thought for a second he was trucking around a bunch of Gold Bond. He confirmed in press interviews that he'd known that was cocaine back there. He'd gotten involved "because an old man is not gonna be bothered by cops, driving through Arizona," he told ABC News. 

Late last year, he seemed comfortable with what he'd done. In that same ABC interview he equated cocaine with lilies. "All God's plants that cheer people up are created for a purpose. To take depressed people's minds, and make them feel like they can feel good," he said. 

Image via Flickr user Christina Groth-Biswas

When I spoke with Sharp's lawyer, Darryl Goldberg, it was obviously time to downplay Sharp's indifference to the law. Goldberg politely declined to let me interview Sharp ahead of sentencing, saying, "I'm getting a lot of requests, and here's how I'm going to play it: Hopefully he'll be on house arrest by next week. In the meantime, for an interview I'd have to be there, and I can't."

His courtroom statement had been an effort to make Sharp appear a little more contrite. "Mr. Sharp made a monumental mistake at a moment of perceived financial weakness, and was exploited and threatened, but his conduct in this case was truly an aberration from a law-abiding life."

The prosecution looks to be gunning for a five-year sentence, which, granted, is merciful for a drug offense of this scale, but would be a life sentence for Sharp. Goldberg, however, is pushing for house arrest. Legally speaking, that looks unlikely. Sharp's confession indicated jail time is inevitable, but maybe some kind of time served arrangement would make house arrest a possibility.

Screencap via ABC News

It may be a little gauche to point this out, but just because this particular old man is a colorful, outspoken flower enthusiast, the justice system isn't supposed to hold him to a different legal standard than, say, a 25-year-old black man in Compton who probably had his reasons too. But clemency for offenses like these, even for less telegenic offenders, is becoming a catchy idea.

Now, after decades of pursuing harsh penalties and bringing about its own plague of prison overcrowding, the Department of Justice is looking to free thousands of cocaine offenders under orders straight from President Obama. This is happening at a time when, as we've pointed out in the past, the system seems to be moving toward locking up fewer drug offenders to begin with.

A favorable outcome for Sharp could be an example of a positive sea change. Then again, the high-profile case of an old man being sent to die in a concrete box might spark an even more substantive shift toward reform. Maybe Leo Sharp is just the mascot the war on "the War on Drugs" needs right now.

But Sharp probably isn't thinking about the national implications. "Hopefully at the sentencing, if he gets jail time, they won't cart him off right then and there," Goldberg told me. He didn't point out the 500-pound gorilla in the room, though: If they don't remand Sharp right there in court, he'll probably be a no-show on the day he's scheduled to get locked up.

And maybe that's for the best.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Praise be to Satan. All photos by the author, who has a shitty camera phone

In January the Satanic Temple announced plans to erect a monument glorifying the Dark Lord on the front lawn of the Oklahoma Statehouse. An Indiegogo campaign was launched with what seemed like a somewhat lofty goal of $20,000, but by the time donations ended almost $30,000 had been raised. Now an artist trained in classical sculpture is toiling away in New York, crafting a Baphomet figure sitting beneath a pentagram and flanked by two children gazing upward in loyalty. When it is finished, it will be cast in bronze and, the Satanists hope, eventually displayed in Oklahoma.

The statue is a direct response to the state's installation of a Ten Commandments monument outside the Capitol in 2012. State Representative Mike Ritze paid for the controversial statue with his own money, and therefore it was considered a donation and OK to place on government property. Following that line of reasoning, the Satanic Temple submitted a formal application for their monument.

As Trait Thompson of the Oklahoma Capitol Preservation Commission told CNN last December, “Individuals and groups are free to apply to place a monument or statue or artwork.” The applications are then approved or rejected by the Commission. Unfortunately, the state has placed a halt on issuing permits for any other monuments until a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against Ritze’s Commandments monument is settled.

Nonetheless, the Satanists are building this thing, and I was offered an early peek at the work in progress by Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves. Greaves told me he has received numerous threats from people who want to attack the sculpture, but that he “wouldn’t expect these outraged and nearly insensible reactionaries to actually know how to assault a bronze monument without severely hurting themselves in the process.” Still, he’s not taking any chances. The Temple is building a mold of the sculpture so they can pop these things out like evil, terribly expensive action figures whenever they need a new one.

“Depending on our insurance policy,” Greaves said, “we may be able to cast two from the destruction of one, expediting our arrival to the next battleground.”

The Temple estimates that the monument will be finished in a few months. Once it’s done, they plan to put it in front of the Oklahoma Statehouse regardless of the the Capitol Preservation Commission’s ongoing battle against the ACLU. They feel this should be allowed because their application was submitted before all the hullabaloo over Ritze’s monument.

“After all,” Greaves told me, “the Ten Commandments still stand at the State Capitol. We are fully willing to place our monument at the Capitol, even while the ACLU suit is fought, with the understanding that a judgment against the Ten Commandments will have ramifications for our monument as well, likely resulting in the removal of both.”

The Baphomet, which will stand seven feet tall and be a testament to the glory of the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, would be placed directly beside the sculpture glorifying the laws given to Moses by the Christian God. The idea of a Satanic monument sitting on government property in Oklahoma—which is like the Bible Belt's Bible Belt—seems a bit far-fetched, but Greaves says that "there has been quite a bit of discussion among legal scholars who recognize how difficult it would actually be for Oklahoma to turn us down… Constitutional law is quite clear on this issue: The state can’t discriminate against viewpoints. If they’ve opened the door for one, they’ve opened it for all.”

Ryan Kiesel from the Oklahoma ACLU seems to agree. He told the Libertarian Republic, “If, at the end of the day, the Ten Commandments monument is allowed to remain on the Capitol grounds with its overtly Christian message, then the Satanic Temple’s proposal can’t be rejected because it is of a different religious viewpoint.”

When the monument is finished, the Baphomet will rest on the block beneath the pentagram. His lap will serve as a seat for children.

One popular argument being used against the Temple’s monument is that it doesn’t have “any historical significance for the State of Oklahoma,” as State Representative Paul Wesselhoft told a local news station in January. “The only reason why the Ten Commandments qualified,” he continued, “is because at the Capitol, what we do is we make laws. We are lawmakers. Well, one of the earliest laws we have are the Ten Commandments.” This, it is important to remember, was said by a current democratically elected member of Congress.

Greaves told me that “the idea that the Ten Commandments are foundational to US or Oklahoman law is absurd and obscene… I would argue that the message behind our monument speaks more directly to the formation of US Constitutional values than the Ten Commandments possibly could. It especially does so when it stands directly beside the Ten Commandments, as it affirms no one religion enjoys legal preference.”

Regardless of what happens at the statehouse, the Temple is charging ahead with the monument. And if it doesn’t end up in Oklahoma City and the Ten Commandments are forced to be removed, the Satanists will try to find a home for the Baphomet in another deserving state. Texas, for instance, has had a monument of the Ten Commandments sitting on its capitol grounds for 40 years. As Greaves put it, “There are no shortage of public locations across the US where religious monuments await a contrasting voice.”

If you would like to support the Temple’s monument, go to their website and buy some nice Satan swag. All proceeds will go toward the Baphomet.

Follow Jonathan Smith on Twitter.

Sometimes doing things the old way is better. Sometimes not so much. Image via Flickr.

Recent news coming out of the FDA sounds like it just might give women who have vaginas (not all women have vaginas) cause to rejoice. Switzerland-based healthcare company Roche has developed the cobas HPV test, just approved by the FDA, as an alternative to the Pap test for women 25 and over. It samples a woman’s DNA to determine whether she carries abnormal cells or high-risk HPV, which is the cause of most cases of cervical cancer.

Frankly, I would have jumped at the chance to never again have my vagina pried open by a cold, ominous, salad-tongs-resembling plastic tool, only to have cells scraped from my cervix after more invasive poking around with another frigid tool.

But, I spoke with Dr. Nancy Durand, a gynecologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, and she said if I thought I was off the hook in that regard, I’m sorely mistaken.

“The test is done exactly the same way as a Pap test,” Durand tells me on the phone. “Some women heard of it and thought they didn’t need a pelvic exam. We still use the speculum, and we still take the sample the exact same way. The lab does a different test, but not the provider.”

While it may seem like nothing has changed, Durand says the Roche method is actually a better test for a primary screening, as the FDA recommends. Sunnybrook has used the test for the past year.

“It’s more accurate at picking up the women who are at risk for either high-grade abnormal cells or cervical cancer. We miss fewer cases versus when the traditional Pap test was used first.”

If the test is positive, and it appears there are risky cells, a Pap test will be run, as well. But that doesn’t mean you have to take a second visit to your healthcare provider. It just means the lab has to run a second test, as they already have the sample. Durand stresses that a woman can test negative and still have HPV, just a lower-risk version. But it can still cause genital warts, and there is no way to know you have it as it doesn’t show up on the test. The test only identifies type 16 and 18 HPV, which are the riskiest ones that cause cervical cancer, as well as some other high risk strains. Low-risk ones are not detected.

Durand explains that the prevalence of HPV is much greater among women under 30, and as such, there is a higher chance women in that age group will have higher-risk strains of HPV. Because we’re young, though, she says we can fight those strains with greater ease, and that symptoms generally clear after two years.

The critique, she says, is that the test will detect a lot of high-risk viruses that most often will not result in that woman having cancer. The risk goes up the older you get—so much so, in fact, that in the Netherlands, they don’t do any screening at all until women are 30 and older.

Meanwhile, in Canada, healthcare providers can’t officially recommend the Roche test because it’s not yet funded. Durand says that’s presenting a dilemma for providers, as the Roche test is more effective than the Pap, but providers have to follow provincial guidelines.

“We can’t recommend that you have a test, across the board, for all the people in Canada, that they have to pay for.”

She says that’s an exclusionary practice, as the $90 to $100 retail price of the test would be out of reach for too many Canadians. If it becomes funded, the test will still have a cost associated, but patients will pay the wholesale price.

The upside to that is that the Roche method is more accurate, and misses fewer cases. Durand says instead of needing a test every three years, a patient may only need one every five.

Roche is billing itself as a company that “does now what patients need next.” But a number of women’s health organizations are saying it’s too soon for the Pap test to be replaced, and that Roche’s method hasn’t been studied thoroughly enough, despite the FDA approval. Groups against the speedy implementation of Roche’s method include the American Medical Women’s Association and Our Bodies Ourselves, amongst others. They say this is a “radical” shift, and that it could lead to confusion, higher costs, and overtreatment in younger women. (Younger women will often carry HPV, but run little risk of developing cancer).

Roche’s method of using DNA to detect the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes the majority of cervical cancer cases, has actually been available for years, and the testing is usually done to confirm the results of a Pap test, anyway. The difference is that Roche now wants it to be a standalone option.

"It replaces a safe and effective well-established screening tool and regimen that has prevented cervical cancer successfully in the US with a new tool and regimen not proven to work in a large US population," state the groups who oppose the test in a letter to FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg, according to The Associated Press. The letter is signed by 17 patient advocacy groups; including Consumers Union, the Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund and the National Alliance for Hispanic Health.

Alas, it looks like more research is needed before this sits well with everyone. It also looks like there will be no reduction in the time women are required spend naked from the waist down, cold, feet in stirrups, having our vaginas unlovingly poked and prodded with various torture devices. But at least that time might be more productive going forward, as time goes on and the test becomes funded.

@sarratch

President of Rwanda Paul Kagame (Photo courtesy of Russell Watkins/Department for International Development)

On April 7, 30,000 Rwandans filled Amahoro Stadium in Kigali, the nation’s capital, to mark the 20th anniversary of the genocide that left an estimated 800,000 people dead. The centrepiece of the day was the world’s most upsetting school play, a re-enactment of what happened in those terrible months complete with a field of dead victims and an educational prologue, in which eight Russian soldiers played the parts of the Belgian colonists who exacerbated divisions between the Hutu majority who turned on the minority Tutsi population and their moderate Hutu fellows. These Russian soldiers, called on to be actors for the day, then swapped their pith helmets for blue UN berets and drove away over the dead bodies, fleeing before the cavalry arrived in the form of troops from the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

During the re-enactment, screams and cries filled the stadium and distressed audience members had to be carried out and placed on mattresses in a specially designated room in the basement of the stadium. The finale, in which RPF troops, played by present-day Rwandan soldiers, carried the dead victims from the stadium, brought cheers from the crowd. The underlying message, though, was rather less joyful. The Tutsi-led RPF are still in power and Rwanda’s current president, Paul Kagame, was their commander in 1994. “We saved you, so don’t forget it,” he was reminding his audience. The Rwandan state has consistently discouraged talk about ethnicity but that does not change the fact that a Tutsi-led organization is ruling a Hutu-dominated country.

There have been more chilling reminders of this power than a stadium re-enactment, though. When Kagame’s former head of intelligence, Patrick Karegeya, dared to question the wisdom of his master, he was thrown in jail. In 2007, he fled to South Africa, from where he accused his former government of carrying out a series of political killings and labeled Kagame a “dictator.” On New Year’s Day this year, he was found dead in a hotel in Johannesburg. Kagame’s response was not pleasant. “Rwanda did not kill this person… But I add that, I actually wish Rwanda did it. I really wish,” he said. Kagame followed this up with some more unnerving public pronouncements. “You can’t betray Rwanda and not get punished for it,” he declared, in a speech delivered in Kinyarwanda. He then added—in slow, deliberate English, accompanied by a thousand-yard stare—“it’s a matter of time.”

Karegeya’s case is a single example of the authoritarianism Kagame has become known for. It is because of this and the country’s economic success that Rwanda is often referred to as a “new Singapore.” The Rwandan premiere is somewhat similar to Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s tyrannical but ruthlessly efficient former prime minister. Like a number of Israeli leaders, Kagame has used the memory of genocide to justify stamping out any dissenting voices. Don’t like the government? You may as well be saying the genocide was a good thing. An opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post even compared Kagame and Binyamin Netanyahu. Favorably.

M23 soldiers in the Congo in 2012. Controversially, they were supported by Rwanda before their defeat. (Photo by Tim Freccia)

Rival politicians in Rwanda, most notably Victoire Ingabire, and a slew of journalists have been imprisoned under genocide ideology laws that are meant to stop anyone from downplaying the slaughter in 1994. In reality, these are used to neutralize anyone who disagrees with Kagame. Essentially, he didn’t put together an army in exile and then liberate his country from one of history’s most terrible atrocities in order to listen to women and liberals tell him he wasn’t being very nice. The same applies to his feelings about foreign donors, who have cut aid to Rwanda because of its support of rebel groups in the Congo, most notably M23, who were defeated last year but are sure to re-emerge in a new form soon.

This isn’t just the story of a dictator intent on enriching his inner circle and no one else, though. Rwanda’s GDP has grown steadily since 1995, child mortality rates are much lower and the country tops the global league tables for the percentage of female parliamentarians. Those who’ve met Kagame talk of a fiercely intelligent man obsessed with Rwanda’s development and when you consider the seriousness of the 1994 genocide (not to mention previous mass killings), the restraint shown by the RPF—at least on Rwandan soil—has been relatively admirable. He's had some concrete domestic policy successes too, the "One Cow" per poor family program, which is exactly what it sounds like, has helped to reduce poverty and also democratized cattle ownership, while also removing the connection between Tutsi and cattle. Milk is now the country's top export.

Tony Blair with his good friend Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda

In part, it’s these success stories and the West’s love of a good old-fashioned Hollywood redemption yarn that led to a whole raft of feel-good stories about Rwanda around the 20th anniversary. Leading from the front was everyone’s favorite ex-world leader for hire, Tony Blair, with an article entitled “20 years after the genocide, Rwanda is a beacon of hope.” Presumably the fact that Blair was formerly a well-remunerated advisor of Kagame's had no bearing on the praise heaped upon his government.

The New York Times ran a photo story called “Portraits of Reconciliation,” which was made up of a series of pictures of a Hutu with a Tutsi they’d hurt in some way during the genocide. The subtitle was “20 years after the genocide in Rwanda, reconciliation still happens one encounter at a time,” and it was, as the website Africa is a Country pointed out, a “profoundly banal” piece of journalism that “reduces violence to a set of meaningless outbursts.” It also reinforced that old preoccupation the Western media has with “tribal” violence, as every single shot placed Hutu in direct opposition to Tutsi.

Elsewhere, the Daily Telegraph went with, “Twenty Years on, Rwanda is a land of hope not hatred,” and the Times ran a hymn to the merits of Western intervention, which served as a reminder of why this tiny country in the middle of Africa garners so much conflicted attention in North America and Europe: guilt. Western leaders knew in advance that extremism was on the rise and that, in the words of Kagame, “there were camps for militias to carry out the killings.” It was following French training and with French weapons that much of the killing was done but having failed so disastrously to intervene in Somalia (think Black Hawk Down and the Battle of Mogadishu), world powers stayed away and the UN stayed impotent. Thus, the genocide became a great “failure” of the West which, in turn, has paved the way for Rwanda’s “rehabilitation” to be viewed as a great triumph, built on the aid of foreign powers and the wisdom of men like Tony Blair and Bill Gates.

Don’t believe me? Just check Blair’s website.

Amahoro Stadium in Kigali. Used as a "UN Protected Site" during the Rwandan genocide to host 12,000 Tutsi refugees, on the 7th of April this year it was the site of a macabre re-enactment of the tragedy (Photo via)

While it has been easy for everyone (the UN, Belgium, the US) except the French to apologise for their part in the 1994 genocide, it has been far less easy to acknowledge the part played by imperialism and the guilt that comes from that, which cannot be alleviated simply by trumpeting the fast broadband connections in Kigali, or the fact that there are no slums in the capital (which is actually because the government won't allow slums in its gleaming capital, not because Rwanda is no longer very poor; it is still very poor). Kagame knows this and there is a genuine sense of “Why should we give a fuck about the people who didn’t give a fuck about us?” to some of his work that is admirable, as is his line on the “selective” justice of the International Criminal Court.

In his address at Amahoro Stadium, Kagame said, of France’s part in the genocide, that “no country is powerful enough, even when they think that they are, to change the facts. After all, les faits sont têtus [facts are stubborn].” In many ways, he is right to take the French and Belgians to task over their colonialism and their part in the genocide, but while that may be the case, his motives are of course also the motives of a politician and, as Africa Confidential said of the commemoration, “For a heartfelt commemoration of a terrible tragedy, it was an event that was conspicuously marked by geopolitics.”

Kagame has been president since 2000, won an election in 2003 and then again in 2010 and was considered the de-facto leader from 1994. Rwanda’s constitution allows for two seven-year terms but already there are suggestions that the president will stay for a third term. Kagame went to the same school as his old pal, Uganda premiere Yoweri Museveni, who he is now being compared to, a former golden boy turned difficult proposition. The Rwandan has got to a point many leaders get to, where they feel like no-one else could really do it as well as them and that, because of that, they should just stay in power indefinitely.

Democracy is something that Kagame pays lip service to but it’s not something he’s interested in. Kigali is now a gleaming PR exercise, free of slums and beggars but how did it come to be like that? Robert Mugabe, after all, cleared Harare’s slums because he couldn’t stand to look at them from his window any more. Tony Blair talks of a Biblical-style transformation in a country that once seemed destroyed. We should know it’s just not that simple.

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Sharlene Simon

The incident: A woman fatally ran over a 17-year-old boy.

The appropriate response: A lifetime of regret.

The actual response: She is suing the dead boy and his family. 

On the night of October 28th 2012, 17-year-old Brandon Majewski was out for a bike ride with two friends in Alcona, Canada.

Around 1:30am, the three friends were struck from behind by an SUV being driven by a woman named Sharlene Simon. Brandon was killed instantly, while his friend Richard McLean sustained several broken bones. The third friend, Jake Roberts, received only minor injuries. According to the police report, Sharlene was driving 10kmh over the speed limit. 

To add to the family's grief, 6 months after Brandon died, his brother Devon also died, after overdosing on pills and alcohol. 

Earlier this week, Sharlene, the driver of the SUV, filed a suit against the dead boy for the emotional trauma she's received as a result of the accident. Also named in the suit are the two other kids she ran over, as well as Brandon's family. 

She is claiming $1.35 million in damages due to her "psychological suffering," including "depressions, anxiety, irritability and post-traumatic stress."

"They did not apply their brakes properly," her claim reads. "They were incompetent bicyclists."

Brandon's parents are, understandably, in shock. "She killed my child and now she wants to profit from it?" Brendan's mother, Venetta MyInczyk, told the Toronto Sun. "She says she's in pain? Tell her to look inside my head and she will see pain, she will see panic, she will see nightmares."

"I feel like someone kicked me in the stomach. I'm over the edge." Derek Majewski, Brandon's father, added. 

Cry-Baby #2: An unnamed concerned parent

The incident: Some kids gave away free copies of a book their school had banned.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: Someone called the police. 

Earlier this month, a group of outraged parents successfully convinced Idaho's Meridian School District to ban the book True Diary Of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. The school did this despite a petition by students to save the book receiving 350 signatures. 

The book tells the story of a Native American boy who is transferred to a mostly white high school, where he faces bullying. According to the Idaho Statesman, parents objected to the fact that the book contains a reference to masturbation ('If God hadn't wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn't have given us thumbs") and its use of "foul language." Some parents also felt it was "anti-Christian."

To protest against the banning, students and local supporters started a fundraiser to buy copies of the book to be given to the 350 teens who'd signed the petition attempting to save it. 315 of these copies were handed out during a Wolrd Book Night Event last week.

This didn't go down too well with one concerned parent. Police turned up to the free book event after receiving a call from someone concerned about kids being given the banned book.

Once the officers realized nobody was doing anything wrong, they left. Which is unusual for this column, this would usually be the part where a student is tazed or beaten to death. 

According to KBOI2, the book's publisher heard about the event and has sent an additional 350 copies of the book to a bookstore in the town, to be given free to any student who wants one. 

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here (though I have a feeling I know who'll win this week):

Previously: A person who called a SWAT team because they lost at Call of Duty vs. a guy who fined someone $525 over a soda refill

Winner: The soda fine guy!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter

Oklahoma death row inmates Clayton Lockett, left, and Charles Warner. Photo via Oklahoma Department of Corrections 

A constitutional crisis over Oklahoma’s secret lethal injection methods reached its grisly denouement Tuesday night, with the botched execution of convicted murderer Clayton Lockett. An untested drug cocktail that was supposed to swiftly kill the prisoner instead left him writhing and groaning on the gurney, forcing state officials to halt the execution and postpone a second, scheduled for later than night. Lockett eventually died, apparently of a massive heart attack, a full 43 minutes after the first injection.

For weeks, Tuesday’s double execution had been a disaster in the making, thanks to an unusual, and unseemly, standoff between Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Mary Fallin, and the state’s supreme court. Faced with a nationwide shortage of lethal injection materials, Oklahoma officials were forced to scramble for an alternative cocktail to use in the executions of Lockett and another death row inmate, Charles Warner, settling on an experimental trio of lethal drugs that had never before been tried in a lethal injection. Defense lawyers sued to stay the executions, challenging a state law that shields information about execution drugs and policies. Last week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed to stay the executions until the issue could be litigated. But Fallin, in brazen disregard for judicial independence, decided that the court’s decision was invalid and used political pressure to hasten the executions.

The chaotic constitutional wrangling drew national attention, marking the apotheosis of a national debate over whether death row inmates have a right to know basic details about the drugs that will be used to kill them, and whether states should be allowed to keep that information secret, precluding any oversight from medical officials, the courts, or the public. When Lockett’s execution began at 6 PM on Tuesday, no one save the officials overseeing the lethal injection knew anything about where the drugs came from, how they had been altered, or whether they would even work.

By now, you know the horrific outcome. At 6:23 PM, a medical technician began administering what was supposed to be a trio of injections to Lockett, starting with the sedative midazolam, a short-acting benzo often used in medical procedures. Ten minutes later, the doctor declared that Lockett was unconscious. The next two drugs, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride, which paralyze and stop the heart, were administered in sequence.

That’s when things started to go awry. According to witnesses, Lockett’s body began to twitch, and he was heard mumbling words. Here’s an account from KFOR reporter Courtney Francisco, who was in the viewing room to witness the execution:

6:28 PM – Inmate shivering, sheet shaking. Breathing deep.

6:29 PM – Inmate blinking and gritting his teeth. Adjusts his head.

6:30 PM – Prison officials check to see if inmate is unconscious.  Doctor says, “He’s not unconscious.” Inmate says, “I’m not.”  Female prison official says, “Mr. Lockett is not unconscious.”

6:32 PM – Inmate’s breathing is normal, mouth open, eyes shut. For a second time, prison officials check to see if inmate is unconscious.

6:33 PM – Doctor says, “He is unconscious.” Prison official says, “Mr. Lockett is unconscious.”

At this point, the two other drugs were injected into Lockett:

6:34 PM – Inmate’s mouth twitches. No sign of breathing.

6:35 PM – Mouth movement.

6:36 PM – Inmate’s head moves from side to side, then lifts his head off the bed.

6:37 PM – Inmate lifts his head and feet slightly off the bed. Inmate tries to say something, mumbles while moving body.

6:38 pm – More movement by the inmate. At this point the inmate is breathing heavily and appears to be struggling.

6:39 PM – Inmate tries to talk. Says, “Man” and appears to be trying to get up. Doctor checks on inmate. Female prison official says, “We are going to lower the blinds temporarily." Prison phone rings. Director of Prisons Robert Patton answers the phone and leaves the room—taking three state officials with him.

A little after 6:40, Patton, the director of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections, came into the viewing room to announce that a stay had been issued for Lockett’s execution. About 25 minutes later, at 7:06 pm, Lockett died of cardiac arrest, according to a statement from Oklahoma DOC spokesperson Jerry Massie. “We believe that a vein was blown and the drugs weren’t working the way as they were designed to,” Massie wrote. “The director ordered a halt to the execution.”

Details about what happened in the chamber, and why things went so terribly wrong, exactly went wrong, are still hazy. On Wednesday, Fallin called for an investigation of the state’s lethal injection protocols, to be conducted by Oklahoma’s public safety commissioner, and ordered a stay of execution for Warner, the second inmate. (She also emphasized that the state was legally correct in proceeding with Lockett’s execution.) On Thursday morning, state officials confirmed that Lockett’s body has been sent to Dallas for an independent autopsy. "I believe in the legal process. And I believe that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for those who commit heinous crimes against their fellow men and women,” Fallin said. “However, I also believe the state needs to be certain that its protocols and procedures for executions work.”

At this point, the central question in Lockett’s death surrounds the secret, untested formula that Oklahoma used in his execution and, more broadly, the hidden provenance of lethal injection drugs in states nationwide. In recent years, the political stigma associated with the death penalty has led drug companies and doctors to distance themselves from the practice, forcing state officers to improvise when it comes to administering lethal injections.

Until 2010, the protocol for lethal injections was standard, relying on the anesthetic sodium thiopental as the key ingredient. But US companies stopped selling the drug, in part because being in the capital-punishment industry is bad for business. The last US supplier, Hospira, stopped making it in early 2011. Later that year, the European Union imposed an export ban on sodium thiopental, as part of an official push for a “universal abolition” of the death penalty.

As inventories dwindle, state officials have been forced to come up with alternative death drugs, either by mixing their own injections or by farming that task out to compounding pharmacies, which make custom drugs and fall outside of the scope of most FDA regulations. And because most medical professionals won’t have anything to do with sanctioned killings, the task of coming up with new lethal formulas falls on government bureaucrats.

“The medical community has been particularly eager to oppose using medical means to help figure out how to do these executions efficiently and effectively,” said Douglas Berman, an expert on sentencing law at the Ohio State University. “So corrections departments and state officials are trying to come up with these alternatives without any medical expertise. “

The entire process is steeped in secrecy, as states scramble to come up with viable alternative cocktails without revealing the source of the drugs. An Associated Press survey of the 32 states that practice capital punishment found that the vast majority have passed laws shielding information about lethal injection drugs and their suppliers. In some states, corrections officers have gone even further, taking road trips to swap briefcases of sodium thiopental in the middle of the desert, and showing up at out-of-state pharmacies with wads of cash to avoid a paper trail.

The furtiveness is partly to protect drug suppliers, but also to prevent defense lawyers and activists from using the information as anti-death-penalty ammo, said Berman. “There’s the feeling that if states are transparent about this, people will take the information to try to block executions,” Berman said. “But it also breeds an extraordinary amount of distrust that the government is cutting corners.”

Obviously there is no way to test a killer drug cocktail, so death row inmates effectively become the lab rats for states’ lethal injection improv. The results have been disturbing. In January, death row inmate Michael Wilson cried out, “I feel like my whole body is burning!” as he was injected with another untested concoction, this one containing pentobarbital, a sodium thiopental substitute that is poorly regulated and, if contaminated, can cause extreme pain. A few days later, in Ohio, condemned inmate Dennis McGuire “gasped and convulsed” for a full 15 minutes after receiving a lethal injection. In Lockett’s execution, the trio of drugs used in the lethal injection had only been used once before, in Florida, but Florida used five times the amount of the sedative midazolam than Oklahoma did on Tuesday night. The origins and the efficacy of the drug cocktail were unknown—Oklahoma prison officials would only say that they got the ingredients from licensed pharmacies.

No one—not even the staunchest death penalty supporters—wants it to go this way. “There have been so many incidents of states not getting this right,” Berman said. Tuesday night’s execution, he added, “was just the most tangible example.” But with so much secrecy surrounding lethal injection experiments, it’s impossible to know just where states are going wrong. Meanwhile, corrections officers continue to wing it, unwilling to concede that they don’t know what they’re doing.

“Everybody agrees, if you're going to have the death penalty, you need to be careful,” Berman said. “But the less transparency there is, the more likely it is that this is going to get done wrong.”

For last week's episode of Band for Life, click here.

Photos by Norma Costello and Pierre Benoit Roux

Femen, the notorious, often topless radical feminist troupe, loves putting on a show, and the baptism of their new Paris squat on Sunday provided a great opportunity. The girls invited friends and the media to their satanic-themed party on Sunday to flaunt the new international Femen HQ—their move there prompted by the fact their previous squat-cum-HQ was burned down last July. Leader Inna Shevchenko claims the fire was the result of arson, while police maintain that it was an accident.

Regardless, they have a new place now, so I went down to their opening party to check it out.

It’s fairly common to spot some cops at a Paris squat party to deal with noise complaints. But it’s not often you see a line of riot police outside, unless everything has really gone to shit.

But in this case, the police weren’t there to shut the festivities down or frisk guests for drugs, they were there protecting the squat. For whatever reason, the girls’ plans to hold an anti-religious, queer-embracing, patriarchy-bashing party hadn’t gone down particularly well with France’s growing neo-fascist movement, and some nationalist thugs had turned up to intimidate the guests.

Et les propos ne sont pas légers :"A trop jouer avec les flammes de l'enfer, leur local pourrait prendre feu…" #Femen http://t.co/yl25i4FDGr

— Alexandre GABRIAC (@Gabriac) April 18, 2014

France's "favorite fascist" Alexadre Gabriac, a rising star in the right-wing Front National party, had promised to come along, sending a very poorly veiled threat Femen's way in the above tweet, which translates to: "If they play with the flames of Hell too much, their house could set on fire."

Of course, nobody was setting fire to anything—all the wannabe Nazis were just ambling around awkwardly until Shevchenko went outside to invite them all in to "dance in the fire" with the feminists. Surprisingly, none of them wanted to do that, and before long they had all shuffled off without causing too much of a fuss.

The far right aren't the only ones unhappy about Femen's presence in Paris.

Their new squat is in Clichy, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, and the posters for the squat party, which they put up throughout the area, feature a woman with three breasts whipping the bare asses of a bishop, a rabbi, and an imam. As you can imagine, this is not the best way to ingratiate yourself into a deeply religious district.

The squat was way fancier than any of the crusty places I've visited in Barcelona, or any of the free party communes I've ended up at in Riga. The walls were all painted a uniform off-white, there was a large upstairs patio, a dance floor, and a printing room/shop. The above picture was taken in the designated interview room.

There were a lot of tits painted on the walls.

Standing pride of place in the interview room was Shevchenko's chainsaw, charred from the fire at their last squat and one of the few possessions she managed to bring from Kiev to Paris. The tool was what Shevchenko used to saw down a cross outside a Ukrainian church in support of Pussy Riot, and it's now become an emblem of Femen International; it was the destruction of the cross that forced her to seek political asylum in France.

As I was taking photos, Jacob—an 83-year-old who hates "misogyny of all forms," pictured above—grabbed the chainsaw and started screaming about the evils of the patriarchy.

The party was full of cameramen from various media outlets, along with around 20 girls from all over the world who were there to take part in Femen's week-long boot camp for activists.

Shevchenko hopes that the training will help to spread Femen's message of topless protest worldwide, as well as allowing her to prepare new recruits "morally and physically" for the group's "naked war."

I got chatting to one of the recruits, Roberta from California, who seemed a little lost, or maybe just not entirely aware of what she was getting herself into.

"It's like, I don't really want to do the Islamic protest in the States," she said. "I don't agree with that. And I'm not sure I want to do the topless thing, either."

Mind you, she got topless for this photo later on, so I suppose she might work out after all.

Then the DJ got topless.

And then this guy, a soldier, took his shirt off too.

This situation was a little confusing; he looked like the kind of dude who'd be far more at home pounding alcopops and chanting "chug" at strangers, but somehow he managed to turn this place into his own personal playground, picking up Shevchenko and twirling her around his head while everyone applauded.

The event felt more like a housewarming and a fundraiser than a radical activist party; the Femen shop was selling ornate head dresses for €30 ($41) and people were mostly sitting around drinking and smoking weed. But I suppose they just want a bit of peace while they're at home, especially considering the fact their last squat was burned to the ground.

Whether or not they'll be secure in their new HQ remains to be seen, given that they've already managed to piss off the local community—and they've made their location very clear by painting "FEMEN HQ" on the side of the building. But Shevchenko doesn't seem too worried: Before I left she told me that she gets death threats daily, but said she wouldn't be doing her job properly if people liked her.

Let’s face it: looking at contemporary art can be a frustrating and unrewarding experience (unless you count painfully trying to decipher overly-intellectual art-speak as “good times”). Visit any art fair and, more often than not you’ll be bombarded with one of three scenarios: someone making the most painfully obvious cultural criticism that’s been done to death (e.g. we worship celebrity/entertainment/technology too much), someone taking someone else’s slightly original idea and running it into the ground with their own terrible version, or someone’s made something so bafflingly weird and inaccessible that you feel that they think you’re an idiot because you don’t “get it." Slap some crazy price tag on top of that and you can understand why some people find art so alienating.

But then there are guys like Jake and Dinos Chapman, who for the last two decades, have made the sort of visceral art that makes everyone who sees it go, “holy shit”—and not always in a good way.

All photos via the Chapman Brothers.
As part of the 1980’s movement of Young British Artists (alongside artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin), the Chapman Brothers have spent the last two decades selectively exploring the darker side of existence and gleefully pushing people’s buttons along the way. From their nightmarish sculptures of child-like creatures with penises for noses and buttholes for mouths, to their vast miniature hellscapes of mass carnage, Nazis, debauchery and suffering, to their Shitrospective work where they’ve taken their most famous pieces and remade them into smaller crappy cardboard versions—it’s clear that the British duo haven’t a single fuck to give when it comes to criticism.

But just as their work is intentionally provocative and confrontational, it’s also challenging: throwing life’s horrors in your face, making question your own limits and what exactly makes something “art” (yes, this last one sounds lame, but trust me, they do it well). “A work of art is kind of expected to form some sort of social relation between the object and the viewer, that the viewer is supposed to get something out of the object… we're trying to avoid the idea that that’s possible. Which is impossible… and that leads towards the levels of hilarity and extremities in the work,” explains Jake. While the subject matter they often broach—morality, religion, sex, death, art history and consumer culture—may have been touched upon by other artists countless times before, the way they approach it is with a specific unredeeming all-out assault on your senses that you can’t help but be consumed by it.

But while shock-schlock symbolism of Nazis, taxidermy orgies, and crucified Ronald McDonalds may seem heavy handed and huge bummer, the key element that distinguishes Jake and Dinos’ work from the doom and gloom is how hilarious it all actually is. By doing things like juxtaposing KKK outfits with rainbow socks and Birkenstocks, The Chapmans continuously diffuse moments of horror with humour. “We think that through the act of laughing, that it’s the most appropriate approximation of the notion of death as a survivable event which obviously death isn’t, but humour is.”

And the reaction the viewer has—whether it’s horror or hilarity—is as much part of their work as the sculptures, paintings and drawings themselves. “In a sense when people come into the space, the distinction between the work and person gets blurred, because they become part of the work,” explains Jake, “I don’t think we would see some people’s reaction to the work as separate thing from the work itself, it’s all sort of messed up in the same huge aggregate of shit and crap.”

Jake & Dinos Chapman’s show Come and See is at Montreal’s DHC/ART until August 31^st, 2014.