Michael with Ron Jeremy.

If you were a teenager in the 90s, your porn came from three trusty sources: magazines shamefully bought from newsstands and hidden inside a newspaper on your way home, those soft porn B-movies on late-night TV—when utter, unavoidable desperation hit—the lingerie section of the Victoria's Secret catalog, and back page boob-job ads in your mom's magazines. Besides being ball-clenchingly embarrassing to look back on, it was a comparatively innocent time: the Brideshead Revisited of pornography to today's internet-enhanced Cannibal Holocaust. 

That shift to online didn't only make us pick up on fetishes that older generations went to their graves unaware of and normalize hardcore smut that would have Mother Teresa spinning furiously in her grave, but also made porn instantly more accessible, driving up viewers' demand. YouPorn is now estimated to account for 2 percent of all web traffic, which probably doesn't shock you too much, but is an insane statistic considering that's one website and the internet is a pretty big place, all things considered.

The shift had a bigger effect on some than others, like Michael Leahy for example, a man who developed a crippling porn addiction and managed to ruin his entire life with just an internet connection and his right hand. Clearly this is just about the most extreme case you could ever come across—it's not like five minutes a day is going to make everyone in your life despise you (unless you have inexcusably boring friends)—so I called Michael up to see how he got from where he was to the author, speaker, and expert on pornography addiction he's become.   

Michael and his family in the 80s.

VICE: So, Michael, how did your crippling porn addiction start?
Michael Leahy: My story really begins at the age of 11, when I first encountered adult material. It was hard back then, in the late 60s, to get hold of it. It was about finding a stash of magazines at your friend’s dad’s place or in the woods, or whatever, so my exposure was pretty limited. I was a recreational user of porn for a long time, even at college when video came along. Later on, higher quality porn and digital distribution on CD-ROMs increased my usage, but it wasn’t until the internet arrived that the real problems began.

What was it about internet porn that changed things?
This was the early 90s and it was like the Wild West days of internet porn. We could literally watch the number of sites that were available grow right in front of our eyes, to the point where, pretty soon, we couldn’t see the edges of it. That was the beginning of the end for me. The internet changed everything. Within a fairly short period of time, I found myself watching up to eight hours of pornography a day, every day.

How? Were you unemployed or just doing it at night?
No, I was doing it at work. I was working for a big corporation and we had something that was very rare back then: a high speed internet connection.

Didn’t you get caught?
This was long before companies realized what people were using internet connections for, so there was nothing to stop you accessing any sites you wanted and there was nobody checking up on us.

Michael in the early 90s.

What effect did it have on your work?
It wasn’t unusual for me to be on a business trip and stay up until 3 or 4AM watching porn, knowing full well that I had an 8AM meeting the next morning where I was making a presentation to sell multi-million dollar software to corporate directors. I'd literally nap for a couple of hours, wake up, tired, put my suit on, and go to the clients. I’d maybe schedule a trip for three or four days and only see half a dozen clients, then spend the rest of the time watching pornography. As you can imagine, I began to find it pretty hard to hold down a job.

Yeah, I bet. How did porn change your sexual behaviour in real life?
One of the fetishes I picked up online was voyeurism, so I would often schedule business trips around that. I'd be able to expense hotels at $185 per night, but I would choose to stay in $60 motels in a seedier part of town because I knew that the rooms were crammed together, buildings looked over each other and there was little privacy. I’d spend hours and hours looking into other windows, masturbating and waiting for someone to walk by their window undressing.

What was the peak of your addiction?
The addiction escalated into an affair with a woman who I met online. The relationship was exclusively about sex; she was nothing more than porn with skin on. It was like a 24/7 high as opposed to the occasional high that I was getting from watching porn. When you’re having an affair and you’re hiding the relationship from your wife and kids, there’s an adrenaline rush and a buzz that you get from doing it. That was the peak. When my wife found out about the affair, I admitted to my pornography addiction and my compulsive behavior. I’d say I was going to stop every day and I made myself believe it, but I continued going back to porn.

Was there anything loving about your affair? You describe her as porn with skin on, as if she were an object. 
What made her pornographic to me was that she was exactly like the woman I'd been searching for every time I browsed the internet. She was the epitome of it. It wasn’t until my wife had divorced me that I realized my affair partner was also an addict, of a kind. I discovered at the bottom of my depression that she was seeing about five or six other guys who were married with kids. I got exactly what I was asking for: that perfect porn woman who doesn’t want any ties or a long-term relationship. Of course, I was so attached to her by then that I wanted commitment, but it was the last thing on her mind.

Michael at one of his lectures.

So by this point you’d lost your wife and become estranged from your kids; what made you turn it around?
It was when I was lying on the floor of my apartment in Atlanta having suicidal thoughts. I was thinking seriously about walking over to the Wal-Mart not too far from where I lived, buying a gun, sticking it in my mouth and pulling the trigger. It was when I started thinking about writing a suicide note to my boys—that, thank God, is when I woke up. I decided that it wasn’t the legacy I was going to leave to my kids: the father who killed himself because of an addiction to porn.

And you’re better now?
I might be “recovered,” but I still see counselors and go to group therapy. I’m sure I’ll be in counseling for the rest of my life. It’s kind of cathartic to be able to talk about it and revisit some of it, but some of it is still painful. I have a really hard time talking about my boys and the price they paid. I’m reconciled with them again, but my wife started seeing someone else and eventually remarried, which closed the door on that. We’re friends, but it’s sad to think of what might have been. You know, the sitting-on-the-porch conversations about the kids as you grow old together.

You now tour the US speaking to college students about your experience; isn’t that painful?
It’s painful, but it’s important for people to hear about because these are some of the consequences you don’t think about when you’re a college student. You think you’re going to meet the person of your dreams and won’t need porn anymore because you’ll have this wonderful wife who you can have sex with whenever you want, but it just doesn’t work like that.

So you're saying porn is damaging?
Well, sex is a permanent fixture in our consciousness and our relationships. To abuse that part of who we are is just asking for trouble. That’s why even porn on a recreational level will damage you, probably in ways subtler than it did to me, but it will do damage. You’ll feel a level of sadness when you catch yourself thinking about your old girlfriend, or Miss November, or a porn star, or whatever, when you’re having sex with your lover. You’ll know that connection wasn’t there, that intimacy wasn’t there, and she'll sense that too.

So what’s the answer? Ban porn?
In my speaking tours and books, I make it clear I’m against censorship, that I’m not interested in morality discussions and that I’m not here to tell anyone how to live their life. What I’m interested in is the facts, how pornography affects our brain chemistry, our physiology, our relationships. I very much bought into that whole porn culture. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, I didn’t believe I was hurting anyone and yet eventually that lie would end up costing me a 15-year marriage, my two boys, and my career.

Thanks, Michael. I'm glad things are working out for you.

Follow Alexander on Twitter: @alexwalters

The "Saving South Sudan" Issue of VICE is unlike anything done before in the 21-year history of the magazine. It tells a single story over the course of 130 pages, following the writer Robert Young Pelton, the photographer and filmmaker Tim Freccia, and a former South Sudanese refugee named Machot as they travel to Machot's homeland, one of the most war-ravaged countries on Earth. For Machot, the trip was an attempt to help South Sudan out of the seemingly never-ending cycle of war, corruption, and power-hungry strongmen that has ruled the country for generations. For Pelton and Freccia, it was the chance to explore and document the conflict that is rapidly turning the three-year-old country into the world's newest failed state—and to find out what, if anything, could stop South Sudan's slide into hell. 

Understandably, they ran into some problems on their journey. To begin with, they almost couldn't find a pilot foolhardy enough to fly them into the middle of an ongoing war between the government in Juba and the rebels led by Riek Machar, the country's former vice president. Then they had to haggle and negotiate their way into an interview with Machar before following his fearsome but undisciplined White Army to a battle in the town of Malakal that turned into wholesale slaughter. 

Partly a history of colonialism and misguided Western interference in Africa, partly a profile of Machar as he plots and coordinates his rebellion in the bush, partly a look into one of the most dangerous, dysfunctional countries in the world, "Saving South Sudan" is a terrific, sobering work, and no one but Pelton and Freccia could have produced it. Pelton, the author of the bestselling, one-of-a-kind travel guide The World's Most Dangerous Places (now in its fifth edition), has profiled "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, been kidnapped by right wing death squads in Colombia, and lived with an elusive retired Special Forces colonel training Karin rebels deep inside the jungles of Burma. Freccia—who like many journalists, was inspired by Pelton's work—has made it his life's work to document conflicts and crisis in Africa and elsewhere. His photos provide a stark, sometimes horrific look into the realities of life in South Sudan, and his video footage is currently a documentary now playing on the site.

Pick up a free copy of "Saving South Sudan" anywhere VICE is distributed, or read it online now. Download the free iPad app for even more pictures, extended video footage, and special extras. 

Lelo is the Georgian version of rugby, only with fewer rules, no time limits, and an indiscriminate number of players. It's been played in the region for centuries, and it's still big in southwestern Georgia, where the village of Shukhuti holds a match every Easter Sunday in remembrance of the dead.

Two creeks, set about 150 yards apart, mark the goal lines for each team, which are made up of local residents, though anyone is free to join in. Between the creeks is a playing field full of houses, yards, and a road. The object of the game is simple: whichever team meakes it back to its creek with the 35-pound ball wins. It's a game that's meant to test players' passion, strength, faith, and devotion, and it gets pretty violent as the gangs of burly men stampede through the village—fences, saplings, and the occasional bone often end up broken in the melee.

Winning a game of lelo doesn’t just mean beating your opponent, it’s also a tribute to those who are no longer with the winning team, and the ball is placed on the grave of a deaceased villager after the match.

Azerbaijani tanks in Karabakh (Photo via)

Since crisis broke out in Kiev, commentators have stayed busy discussing Ukraine’s possible ripple effects on several “frozen conflicts” in areas around Russia. South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova—all of which have been involved in conflicts at some point throughout the past couple of decades—have had their fair share of attention, so why is nobody talking about Nagorno-Karabakh (besides the fact that it’s difficult to say)?

Today marks 20 years since war ended in Nagorno-Karabakh (NK), an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that claims independence but, internationally, isn't recognized as independent. From 1988 to 1994, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over the terrain in a war that killed up to 30,000 people. A Russian-brokered ceasefire was signed in 1994, but soldiers remain armed along the “line of contact” and people keep dying; dozens are killed each year, and hundreds of thousands are still displaced. Svante E. Cornell, director of the US-based Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, calls it “The mother of all unresolved conflicts.”

Recently, tension has escalated. In April, Azerbaijan began large-scale military drills near its border with Armenia. There's also the threat that Russia’s annexation of Crimea—hailed in Armenia, which supports an independent NK, and castigated in Azerbaijan, which does not—might tip the balance and, in doing so, kick off a regional war that would draw in big players like Russia, Turkey, Israel, and Iran. “In general, I would be worried about what this means for the South Caucasus,” said Katherine Leach, British Ambassador to Armenia.

Either way, Russia, which helpfully supplies cash and weapons to both sides of the dispute, looks set to gain from the situation, if only by capitalizing on regional insecurity. Late last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, in which he declared: “Russia will never leave this region. On the contrary, we will make our place here even stronger.”

The disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh

In January, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its “Worldwide Threat Assessment," which noted that “Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories will remain a potential flashpoint” and that “prospects for peaceful resolution" were dim. This followed the International Crisis Group’s September assessment, which described an accelerating “arms race” in Azerbaijan and a ramping up of “strident rhetoric” in both countries, with the use of “terms like ‘Blitzkrieg,’ ‘preemptive strike,’ and ‘total war,’”

On May 7, James Warlick, co-chair of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) regional negotiating team, gave a much-anticipated speech on “The Keys to a Settlement” in NK. But the speech—which made elusive calls for “bold steps,” “core principles,” “expression[s] of will,” and “participation of the people”—didn't really bring anything new to the diplomatic table. Just a few weeks earlier, Warlick had taken to Twitter to muse: “What a wonderful Easter! My prayer is for a lasting settlement on #Nagorno-Karabakh.”

But will bloodshed in Ukraine inspire more than just tweets for divine intervention?

Today, Nagorno-Karabakh is a wreck. Ceasefire violations are common, as are muscle-flexing military drills. Soldiers are regularly shot and killed, fueling speculation that the “frozen conflict” is about to “boil.” Civilians die, too, sometimes by stepping on one of the many, many old landmines that remain scattered around the region. A kind of legal no man’s land, NK is a hot-spot for drug smuggling, petty crime, and human trafficking. As you've probably guessed, living conditions suck—hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis are still displaced, with many living in squalid conditions.

And then Ukraine happened. At first, the illegal referendum in Crimea inspired a new push for a resolution in NK; in November, the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia met for the first time in three years—talks that US Secretary of State John Kerry promised “to be engaged in.” But, by January, optimism had faded. The beginning of the year saw a rise in ceasefire breaches, reports of civilian casualties, deaths at the “line of contact,” and the arrest, in Azerbaijan, of an alleged Armenian infiltrator.

When residents of Crimea voted to separate from Ukraine and join Russia, the UN passed a resolution condemning the move. Azerbaijan backed it, but Armenia did not. In the so-called Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, authorities reportedly hosted a public celebration in honor of the now-purportedly-free Crimeans.

The flag of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic

It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. Things have been deteriorating for some time, but recent years have seen a huge hike in regional military spending. Azerbaijan, in particular, has been acquiring military assets at a staggering rate, and some fear that the newly-endowed Baku might now feel inspired to test out its arsenals, two decades after its conflict with Armenia.

This is where Russia comes in. It’s no secret that Moscow is playing both sides, officially backing Armenia and stationing troops at its base in the country's Gyumri district. In 2012, the Kremlin sent troops from Russia and four other post-Soviet republics to Armenia for the largest military drill to ever take place there. Still, Moscow sells masses of weapons, equipment, and artillery systems to Azerbaijan.

“With Putin back in the Kremlin, I think the main instinct is to preserve the status quo,” says Thomas de Waal, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment and author of Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War. “[Russians] don’t want to do war, which would oblige them to bring in the army on the side of Armenia, but I don’t see any evidence that they want peace either… At the moment, Russia is not in the mood for that kind of creativity. It chooses to lock things down and [maintain] its leverage.”

Each side is vying for Putin’s backing, and it's working—especially in Armenia. Near the end of the NK war, Turkey closed their border to Armenia, leaving the country isolated, and in swooped Russia to help. So it’s no surprise that, last year, Armenia (just like Ukraine) announced that it would join Russia’s new customs union rather than pursue an EU association agreement.

Should it break out, war in Nagorno-Karabakh could expand quickly. Turkey backs Azerbaijan, as does Israel—and the latter has sold tons of weapons and a fleet of drones to Baku, reportedly as a means of keeping neighboring Iran (which supports Armenia) in check. A US diplomatic cable from 2009, released by WikiLeaks, quotes Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev describing his relationship with Israel “as being like an iceberg, nine-tenths of it is below the surface.” Tangled threads of regional alliance come together in NK.

One possibility is that regional diplomatic channels will fall apart. Ongoing OSCE negotiations are being carried out by the so-called “Minsk Group,” chaired by the US, France, and Russia. But some doubt that the group can survive, reliant as it is on US-Russia cooperation. If it did crumble, that would be cause for great concern, says Ambassador Leach, since there is no other “viable alternative” negotiating format.

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev (center), Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliev (left) and their Armenian counterpart Serge Sarkisian (right) speak during their meeting in Krasnaya Polyana near Sochi, Russia on the 23rd of January, 2012. They discussed the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

Of course, the switch could always be flicked from inside NK. Azerbaijan and Armenia both have sizeable armies, and the so-called Nagorno-Karabakh Republic has its own defense force. Since the Crimea annexation, Republic authorities have been especially keen to make their voice heard and not just let Armenia do the talking. Early this month, the Republic’s representative to the US, Robert Avetisyan, told me, “It is our deep understanding that the NK Republic should be regarded as the principle party of negotiations with Azerbaijan.”

Some believe that the only conceivable solution is an official, internationally-sanctioned referendum on sovereignty in NK. But exactly who would vote in that referendum remains disputed; would the Azerbaijanis who were booted out of the territory get to cast their votes?

Paradoxically, as a result of the situation in Crimea, Azerbaijan must be cautious. Crisis in Ukraine has highlighted Europe’s energy reliance on Russia and accelerated the hunt for non-Russian alternatives. Azerbaijan might be just what the doctor ordered. “The Caspian region, of which Azerbaijan is the linchpin, is the only major alternative to Russia for energy,” George Friedman, head of the policy-risk consultancy Stratfor, recently argued. Already, Europe is working to expand gas pipelines from Azerbaijan through the continent. In December, Baku signed a $45 billion natural gas contract with a BP-led group, making Britain the largest foreign investor in the country.

This budding oil and gas relationship might explain why some European states have looked the other way in the face of recent human rights abuses in Baku—some of them related to NK. Recently, a journalist and a prominent human rights activist were arrested on allegations that they are Armenian spies. “In Azerbaijan, one of the results of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is a mania about Armenian spies,” explains Rachel Denber, a regional expert at Human Rights Watch. There have been incidents when the government “has mobilized Azerbaijani nationalism against any remnant of empathy towards Armenians.”

Of course, it's most likely that neither side wants war. But as we learned in 2008, when Georgia and Russia battled it out over the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, unpredictable things can happen when simmering ethnic tension, revanchist land claims, Russian interest, and lots of guns collide.

For now, Ambassador Leach hopes that “in the context of Ukraine and this question of the Soviet Union’s former internal borders… more people will make themselves familiar with the situation” in the oft-forgotten Nagorno-Karabakh.

@katieengelhart

Click here for last week's episode.

Sorin Lupaşcu (Photo by Mihai Sibianu, Studio Martin)

Westerners tend to imagine cities under communist control as being bleak gray concrete expanses where the only form of entertainment revolved around watching your toenails grow through the holes in your socks. In some cases, that actually isn't too far from the truth, but in communist Romania there were plenty of pursuits to remind young people that they were young, like embroidery or woodwork, or—if you lived in the right place—dance parties complete with DJs and disco balls.

Sorin Lupaşcu was one of those DJs. The 57-year-old now coaches aikido, but from 1974 to 1996 he organized and provided the soundtrack to countless Romanian parties, which means he manned turntables before, during, and after the 1989 revolution.

"Before the 1980s, the only parties that would last till the morning were the private ones," he told me. "Marian, the local police officer—a young fellow who ogled all the girls desperately—used to say, 'Comrade Lupaşcu, what can we do to make sure there won't be any trouble tonight?' I'd say, 'Well, Marian, how about you come by and dance a little? I'll give you some civilian clothes and you can tell the girls you're my buddy.'”

A small part of Sorin's music collection

The first night Sorin organized, in 1974, was at a school in his hometown of Iaşi. He pushed the tables and chairs to the sides of the room and borrowed a cassette player and some bootleg tapes of bands like Deep Purple, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd. Except for Floyd ("nobody danced to them," Sorin said), everyone loved the music.

Following the success of what was essentially a glorified school disco, Sorin decided to continued holding events—to do that, he had to get his own cassette player. The best source of income was working the local tram lines, which the young promoter did for three months, until he had enough money to buy a tape player from some Romanians on their way home from Libya. "It was big and heavy, with two speakers—not just one, like most people had during those times," he said. "If you kicked it, it would hurt your foot. Having it was the crowning achievement of my life.”

The next thing he needed were some tapes of his own, which in the mid 70s were pretty hard to come by. The only music playing on the radio was local folk, easy listening, and regional communist songs—not exactly the type of tunes he wanted to play at his parties. In fact he could only find "good music" on Radio Luxembourg and Radio Veronica, two pirate radio stations based in Western Europe. Later on, like most young Romanians, he got into Radio Free Europe, an anti-communist broadcaster that, in its early days, received funding from the CIA.

By the late 70s, music made specifically to dance to—like Giorgio Moroder's productions for Donna Summer—was being played on the radio, which led to the building of the first local nightclubs in Romania and a radical overhaul of how dance nights operated. Until then, there were no rooms built especially for dancing, which meant Sorin had previously had to bring his own equipment to whatever venue he was booked to play.

Before the parties—which, at this point, were still mostly being held at local high schools—he and a friend would lug his speakers, record player, and records around on the bus. Afterwards, he'd carry all that gear home alone: two speakers, two magnetic tape recorders, and a backpack filled with tapes, records, cables, a microphone, and a mixer. "If you saw me on the street, you would have thought I was crazy,” he laughed.

Sometimes, Sorin would accidentally leave something behind—a cable, a microphone, his "Birdie Song" tape. "They would come to me and say, 'Do you have the "Birdie Song"? No? Then you don't have shit!' That's what it was like—it was harsh," Sorin chuckled. "If you needed lights on stage you had to know somebody at the railroad company who could lend you a signal light and a railway stop, or have a friend working at some theater where the technicians could loan you some colored foil. Color lights were rare."

In 1979, disco exploded. ABBA, Boney. M, and Bad Boys Blue were all huge, and German synthpop duo Modern Talking were "laying down the law," according to Sorin. By then, the DJ already had hundreds of tapes and over 300 mixes; he'd buy cheap blank cassettes in Bucharest and record songs off the radio. Every tape was named "Disco Set List" and they were all numbered.

Later on, when he "figured out that magnetic tape was the future," Sorin would buy recordings from people who'd traveled outside of Romania and copied foreign music on to tape. He still has the receipts for the packages. "I did some calculations and figured out I was spending enough money to buy three Dacia cars every year," he said. "Some of the first magnetic recordings I bought were Kraftwerk's Autobahn and 'Das Model.'"

Sorin at Disco CH in 1979

Sorin, who by then was an electromechanical engineering student, now had enough music to play a week of consecutive nights without any repeats—all he needed now was a room to do it in. Iaşi's chemistry college allowed Sorin to set up his equipment in their P1 and P2 dorms, a space he dubbed Disco CH.

There was only one key to the disco, and Sorin hung on to it. He painted the walls, rewired the place, bought a cabinet to keep all of his records safe, and invested in some speakers put together for him by an electrical engineering major. They were badly made, but Sorin and his team put them up on the walls anyway and used them until they burned out. Then they made some more. Later, he built a disco ball a yard wide, sticking each mirrored panel on by hand.

After everything was set up, Sorin asked the local police whether the disco could keep its electricity on all night, even though power was shut off throughout the rest of the city from 10 PM to 6 AM. "We'd say, 'Chief, we've got girls here—what if one of them gets sick?'" Sorin recalled. His ploy worked: The disco—which ran every night from Thursday to Sunday—was allowed to stay open from 9 PM to midnight. Admission cost 3 leu (about $1), which went to the college's student union and paid for repairs and new dorms.

The 1981 freshmen ball at Disco CH

Disco CH didn't even have a coat rack, let alone a bar, and smoking indoors was forbidden, so the entire focus was on the music and lighting. "I always thought that being a DJ meant loving both music and conversation," Sorin told me. "I never faded from one song to another without telling everybody the name of the band and the song. When you go to a disco, you go to a show. If the DJ gives you the music you want and he also makes a few jokes, then he did his job."

If it was raining outside, Sorin would take that into account and play something melancholy; if it was warm, he'd play something chilled out; if the audience looked excitable, he'd make them "jump around"; and if nobody felt like dancing, he'd play games with them: "'Everyone to the left, everyone to the right'—that kind of thing."

Sorin's disco would regularly attract around 400 students. “I made them all love Romanian music," he smiled. "I would get them dancing and jumping with "Life Is Life", then I would hit them with some Andri Popa [a Romanian folk ballad artist] and all 400 would sing along. And if I played the romantic song "Fata din Vis," the girls from the neighboring dorms would faint.”

A DJ during that era in Romania's history had roughly the same social standing a professional athlete does today. People would point at Sorin in the street and lose their shit every time he released a new mixtape. He also enjoyed some personal privileges in the student halls: His clothes would be washed for free and technicians would come to help him out as soon as he called them, which is a rarity even today. In exchange, he'd invite whoever assited him and their friends to his next disco night. He used the same bartering technique to get his hands on some Russian and Polish cassette players. “They weren't quality goods, but they got the job done,” he said.

Sorin's team was made up of five people. Two walked around the room to make sure nobody was smoking or getting into fights, another sold the tickets, a karate or judo expert guarded the entrance, and the DJ's right-hand man handled the lights and anything else that needed doing—he once sat in the same contorted position for four hours to keep a cable twisted a certain way so the disco didn't lose power.

The 1986 freshmen ball at Disco CH

In 1982, the Youth Tourism Bureau, which represented the Communist Youth Tourism Committee, started organizing DJ courses. Sorin enrolled, "but didn't learn a thing, because I was already in the know.” The exam was part theoretical, which you had to take in front of a committee. But instead of putting pen to paper, Sorin talked the theory out with the adjudicators and they passed him there and then.

The practical part of the exam was a one-hour disco set at a club in the Costineşti student seaside resort. After the show, the committee's chairman apparently told Sorin, "You're the man!” before giving him an A. That qualification meant he started earning a decent wage as a DJ in a time when "DJs weren't the type of people who could make a living off their salaries." And if he did it off the books, Sorin could earn almost 1,000 Leu (around $300) a show—usually at a wedding or a birthday party or a high-school prom, where the cops were often forced to turn a blind eye, since it was their sons turning 18 or their sisters getting married.

The same year that Sorin got his DJ qualifications, Communist Party officials decided that Romanian music needed to be promoted, meaning for a disco to function DJ's were legally obliged to play local music and have their set lists vetted by the County Cultural Commission's Council. ”I always tried to explain that I didn't know what music I'd be mixing beforehand, because I had to get a feel for the room," Sorin sighed, 30 years later. "But they didn't care.”

Ultimately, however, the new rules didn't affect Iaşi's biggest name too much, as nobody ever came to check up on him.

Sorin at the Holiday Radio club in Costinești

In 1983, Sorin ended up working at the Ring in Costineşti—the largest open-air disco in Eastern Europe at the time. Entry was cheap and, at its peak, the place would pack in up to 3,000 people. Sorin said Yamaha sound system was "mega professional," brought in from Germany and tuned by German technicians.

Sorin never allowed anyone into his booth, though people would try to clamber up almost every night. And if anyone did make it in, he'd call for Marius—the local lifeguard and Ring's in-house security—to escort them away.

Sorin in 1985

It was this policy that eventually led to Sorin being banished from communist Romania's DJ booths. In 1986—when he was starting every set with Modern Talking's "You're My Heart, You're My Soul"—someone named Nicu Ceauşescu jumped behind his decks and tried to give him some mixing advice. Like everyone else who'd ever invaded his personal DJ area, Nicu was told to piss off. Unfortunately, Nicu turned out to be the son of then-Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.

The following day, the 29-year-old Sorin was out of work. "I suffered a lot," he said. "Being a DJ was my lifestyle—my reason to breathe."

After the fall of communism in 1989, Sorin went back to DJing for another six years. Now he'll only play sets on request, and he winds up at all sorts of events—some, like a conference on laparoscopic surgery, have been stranger than others. Even at that conference, he told me, he managed to rouse the audience up into a party train. He also promotes Romanian music on TV and the radio, and wants to help artists who are struggling to break into the mainstream, but said he doesn't like modern clubs. "DJs nowadays are like machines," he groaned. "They don't say a word, and they just play the same style of music over and over again. Besides that, everybody's smoking."

For now, Sorin is perfectly happy coaching his aikido team. And when he takes the kids out for exercise on Saturday mornings, all the local residents line up in front of their windows to watch him at work—just like they did while he was behind the decks at Disco CH.

Photo via Alice Chernoff.
That Instagram-ready manicure you just got isn’t as cute as you think. Exposure to chemicals used in creating those pastel-cupcake fingertips can contribute to miscarriages, birth abnormalities, and even cancer.

But it gets worse. You can barely walk a few blocks in Toronto without running into one of those nail salons with neon signs in the window, yet the city has largely ignored any potential regulation of the chemicals used behind those storefronts. They’re a decade behind where California is in safeguarding this industry, a fact that was discussed at an event hosted in late April by the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health (NNEWH) in Toronto. And as California has been a pioneer in the U.S. for regulating nail salon chemicals, NNEWH wants to make Toronto the Canadian equivalent.

“The biggest concern is with what they call the ‘toxic trio’—so it’s the three main chemicals that are found in a lot of the products: toluene, formaldehyde and phthalates,” said Anne Rochon Ford, the leader of the NNEWH project and executive director of the Canadian Women’s Health Network. “[California is] like years, years ahead of us in terms of making change and making the salons healthier and working with the product industry to get some of the toxins out of the products that are used most.”

Those chemicals may sound pretty foreign, so let me break it down for you. Toluene is an ingredient in the glue that is used for acrylics and can also be in nail polish and polish thinner—it’s linked to miscarriages and birth abnormalities. Formaldehyde you may recall as being the chemical used to embalm corpses, but it’s also contained in disinfectants, nail polishes, and glues. It’s linked to breathing problems like asthma—and as a carcinogen, it can cause cancer. The final type of chemical in the toxic trio, which is present in nail polish, sealant, top coat and base coat are phthalates—these can cause problems in the brain including poor memory and ability to concentrate. Those are just the long-term effects of course. Collectively, the toxic trio can cause skin rashes, itchy, watery or burning eyes, can irritate the nose and throat and can cause light-headedness and nausea. NNEWH made a pamphlet with all this info on it in English, Vietnamese, and Chinese; the top three languages of nail salon workers in Toronto.

By this point you’re probably thinking about those masks you see salon workers wear. They must protect them, right? Well, guess what? They don’t. The ones you’ve probably seen on the person working away at grinding down your acrylics are made of thin cotton. The type of mask that could actually protect from the toxic trio chemicals is called an N95 mask, it’s more expensive and the look of it is a bit Silence of the Lambs-esque. I doubt that manicurists will be rocking those anytime soon for fear of scaring off customers.



The N95 mask. Photo via.
I went to several salons in downtown Toronto to see what their employees had to say about the conditions they work in. At each business, I was immediately greeted with warm welcomes, smiles and (of course) the pungent smell of polish, glue, and acetone. Then they figured out that I was there to ask questions. Being polite and taking alternative approaches had little effect—I got used to being stared at by entire salon staffs with looks of confusion and terror on their faces. One woman who greeted me and asked what services I would like flawlessly in English at Grace Nails on Carlton Street suddenly pretended she didn’t understand what I was saying when I tried to set up an interview. “If it is questions you are asking, then I don’t answer,” she said as she returned to scrubbing a customer’s foot for a pedicure.

I guess you can’t blame them—it is their livelihood after all. As Ford told me, salons are sometimes even like a second home to employees. After trying three places, I finally found one on Church Street that was (kind of) willing to talk to me. A worker at Tweetie Nails & Spa ran me through how acrylics are done and showed me some of the products they use for this type of manicure, including a tiny vial of KDS nail glue. I later looked up the safety sheet for this glue and found a formaldehyde-containing chemical compound on its ingredient list.

While there are no laws protecting workers and customers of nail salons in Toronto yet, there are some people out there trying to create alternatives to products containing chemicals that are more suited for dead humans than live ones. Tanya Picanco of Indie Nails is one such individual.

“People don’t realize what goes on your skin goes in your body,” Picanco said. She currently sells a line of safe-as-they-can-get nail polishes via Etsy, where she has made about 1,300 sales. Her products used to be “three-free,” meaning they didn’t contain the dreaded toxic trio used in everyday salons. Today, she uses a “five-free” base that additionally leaves out formaldehyde resin and camphor. The polishes she makes by hand in her Scarborough garage-turned-studio are whimsical and brightly coloured, containing glitter, confetti and even glow-in-the-dark stars. Picanco is currently paying part of her mortgage with the cash she makes on nail polish, but still manages to sell her wares at a relatively low price $5-15 per bottle.



Photo via Alice Chernoff.
Unfortunately, a big part of the equation of regulating nail salon chemicals has to do with cost. The toxic trio-containing products are cheap and many salons are budget-based.

Elizabeth Glassen, a 22-year-old cosmetician, has been getting acrylics done every three weeks for the last two years. “If they change the way it is now, it’s probably going to be more expensive,” Glassen said. “I’m always going to get my nails done; I don’t want it to break the bank.” Glassen’s viewpoint is a common one for customers of this industry. Some people just aren’t willing (or can’t afford to) pay more for a healthier alternative.

It’s not like those healthier options are readily available in Toronto anyway. Lush & Lavish in Little Portugal was the first natural-focused salon in the city when it opened in 2009. Linh Diep’s business offers no shellac, acrylic or gel manicures, only regular ones using a line of three-free polishes from SpaRitual. In fact, even when new customers want to have old nail treatments such as acrylics taken off, Lush & Lavish refuses—the acetone content of the remover required for such is much too strong for them to allow in their salon. The remover they use for taking off regular polish has the lowest possible percentage of acetone and therefore requires more effort and time on behalf of the manicurist.

“It was very important for me to not expose my employees to chemicals like that,” Diep said. She mentioned how sometimes customers don’t like that the manicures take longer than at your everyday neon-sign nail salon, an average of 45 minutes compared to 30. The prices at Lush & Lavish for a regular manicure are also slightly higher than average at $30. The more natural alternatives don’t come cheap, at least not right now. The only way price will drop is if the demand goes up, but customers will have to start asking more for three-free products before that can happen.

But Ford warned that term organic “doesn’t even apply to the nail salon industry.” No matter what, there are going to be chemicals involved. The only part of this industry we can change is regulation around what chemicals can be used and the safety precautions workers must take when using them. Until Toronto steps up, workers and customers alike will continue to be left to fend for themselves in the chemical-cloud-filled rooms of salons across the city.


@allison_elkin

Last March we traveled to Uruguay to take a look at how the first nation to legalize and regulate the entire marijuana trade is constructing its laws. Along the way we met and interviewed José Mujica, the country’s president and the galvanizing force behind the unprecedented legalization effort. We also smoked weed alongside him. He was pretty chill. The documentary that came from the trip, titled The Cannabis Republic of Uruguay, can be viewed here, and a long-form written profile of Pepe, as everyone in the country calls him, can be read here. Because of space constraints, we were forced to edit down our interview with him for the documentary, as well as the mag article, but we thought it was wide-ranging and intriguing enough to publish in its entirety, so that's what we're doing now. 

Today, May 12, Pepe is visiting the US and will have an Oval Office meeting with President Obama and other meetings with Secretary of State John Kerry. Pepe was a gun-toting guerrilla fighter in his youth and spent 14 years in prison trying to enact a Che Guevara–inspired revolution in Uruguay. He’s an avid anti-consumerist and remarkably pragmatic for a socialist South American leader—he’s even sanctioned the beginning of open-pit mining in the country. We think he’s one of the most fascinating world leaders of the past few decades, and some drug -policy advocates believe that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize thanks to the impact his marijuana experiment could have on the drug war.

Photo from Mike Mellia’s portrait series Our Side of the Story: South Sudan

The April issue of VICE includes just one article in its 130 pages. The magazine's sole story, Saving South Sudan, by Robert Young Pelton, is a gonzo-style dive into the strife of the world’s newest nation, one that has faced perpetual war “with some sporadic days off” since 1955. In April, we received an invitation to a gallery exhibition by New York–based photographer Mike Mellia, whose project, Our Side of The Story: South Sudan, is a series of portraits of South Sudanese refugees turned artists. Subjects included supermodels who've walked for the likes of Louis Vuitton and appeared in Kanye West videos, an actor starring in an upcoming Reese Witherspoon movie, and a poet studying at Columbia University. Almost everyone in the series still has family in South Sudan, or a neighboring refugee camp, and many of the subjects' families don't know the extent of their current artistic lives.

We got in touch with several of the subjects of Our Side of The Story in hopes of giving them a platform to talk about their almost unbelievable voyages from Sudan to America, from refugee camps to runway shows and top-tier universities. VICE will be sharing one of their stories every day this week, starting with Mari "DJ Stiletto" Malek.

Mari Malek was born in Wau, South Sudan, into a family of roughly 20 children. Her father was a minister of finance in the government, and her mother was a nurse. As the war got worse, her mother turned the house into an open-door sanctuary for displaced people whose homes had been razed in the fighting. When the violence became more concentrated in the area, her mother swiftly and stealthily brought Mari and two sisters to a refugee camp in Egypt in hopes of getting them out of the continent.

She eventually emigrated to Newark, New Jersey, living in a low-income housing complex filled with drugs, violence, prostitutes, and other problems that made the transition feel "even scarier than our home in Sudan." After locating family in San Diego, Malek went to school in California and had a child at age 20. She eventually was asked to model and, on a whim, moved to New York to pursue fashion. She has since modeled for Lanvin, Vogue, and appeared in the videos for Kanye West’s “Power” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” and now she DJs at Manhattan mega-club Lavo under the name "DJ Stiletto." She spoke with us about working in a world as far removed from her childhood as humanly possible, why the impetus of the current civil war comes down to male egos, and how her nonprofit organization, Stand for Education, is working on boosting learning opportunities in South Sudan, which she believes is the only way to end the war. 

VICE: Where in South Sudan were you born? 
Mari Malek: I was born in Wau, South Sudan, during the Second Civil War. I come from an educated and working family. My family was also very large. I have about 20 sisters and brothers. Five of us belonged to my mom and dad, and the rest were my half sisters and brothers. My dad had four wives, and my mom was his third wife, the one who took care of all his children. 

At that time my mother was a nurse, and my father was working in the government as the minister of finance and was always traveling back and forth from South Sudan to the north. The south was becoming too dangerous for us to live in, so we moved to Khartoum (the capital of Sudan when it was still one country).

Since I grew up in a well-off family, I was going to school, had plenty of food, and was a happy child because I had my father, my mother, my family, and a home. Things got worse, and my family lost everything. I remember when I was like five years old a bunch of northern Arab soldiers raided our home and took everything from us and took our father away. A few weeks later my father returned home hurt and jobless. I was confused and did not know what was going on at the time (our parents did not express to us exactly what was going on). Little did I know, that was the last time that our family would be together.

My mother took care of us, as well as a bunch of displaced people who kept on coming to our home, escaping from the south because villages were being burned and people were being murdered. Our home became like a hospital filled with hurt and sick men, women, and children.

Four years later, my mother had made plans for us to escape Sudan. My father never wanted us to leave, so she took us secretly. She took my two sisters and me by surprise from our father, and off to Egypt we went to live as refugees waiting to be sponsored into the USA. My mother wanted to make sure we were protected and had a chance at living our lives in better circumstances. 

What is something about life in refugee camps that the average American wouldn’t know?
Living in Egypt, my mother had to start her life all over. We had to start our lives all over. Mom got a few jobs as a maid so that she could support us. She was working all the time. I had to take care of my younger sisters and become a mother to them at the age of 9, because my mother was busy making sure we could attend school, eat, and have a decent life.

Every morning when I woke up and got my sisters ready for school, I was praying for protection. When we walked the streets of Egypt, the Egyptians made fun of us, threw things at us, and spit on us. We took a 45-minute train to school, and from school and every single day we were mistreated and discriminated against. We had to fight!  We were all kids mostly under 12, fighting for our rights every day.

Can you describe a moment from your childhood in South Sudan that you hold dear? 
In Wau (the village I was born in), we had a lot of mango trees. I remember when my siblings and I would go pick mangoes from our backyard. We challenged one another about who could climb the mango trees the highest and pick out the best-tasting mangoes. After we picked the mangoes we washed them and cut them and sat under the shaded tree and had a mango picnic. I so miss that! Every time I think of that moment, it's like I just time-traveled. I am taken right back to that exact moment. I can hear the breeze, feel the shade, and taste the mangoes. I miss my home!

When did you move to America?
In 1997, we were finally sponsored by the Catholic Charities to come to the USA. Our sponsor lived in New Jersey. He was an Asian man. He picked us up from the Catholic Charities office and dropped us off to what was then our new home.

Our apartment was in Newark, New Jersey. It was a scary place, especially at that time. It seemed even scarier than our home in Sudan. The building we were put in was filled with drugs, violence, gunshots, prostitutes, and rats. We were very lonely and terrified. We spoke no English and knew no one. It was freezing-cold—the coldest we had ever experienced. We were kids, and at this time I was about 14 or 15 years old, and we had an innocent outlook on things. We really didn’t pay attention to all the bad things around us. We were just happy to have our mom and one another.

My mother, on the other hand, did not like our new living circumstances, and she obviously knew better than we did. As usual, she was already planning on moving forward to a different environment for our own safety. With a little help from an amazing person we met, we were able to locate some of our relatives in San Diego, California, and moved to connect with them. Our new life began there. We connected with our long-lost relatives, went to school, and started settling in the United States of America.

How did you end up modeling and DJing in New York? 
After leaving Sudan we basically lived the rest of our lives poor. I got my first job when I was 16 years old, to help my mother out. After all, she was a single mother, and none of the education and work she had completed in the past mattered here in America.

We found ourselves constantly having to start over all the time. It was challenging. I grew up fast. I worked, finished high school, went to college, met someone I fell in love with, and got pregnant at the age of 20. I gave birth to my beautiful angel, Malayka Malek. I ended up being a single mom, like my mother. I struggled between going to school, having a job, and being a single mom all at the same time. Although I was blessed with my baby girl, I felt empty and like a robot.

I finally decided to take a risk and follow my heart. I told mom that I was going to go check out NYC for some modeling opportunities and see where it could lead me. Every single day of my life since I came to America, I was getting approached to model, but I had no idea what that was, so I was a bit scared.

Now I am involved in the entertainment business. I started off as a model here in NYC, which led me into discovering that I can DJ, and now I play live under the name “DJ Stiletto," often at clubs like Lavo, in Manhattan. I am the first nationally and internationally known South Sudanese DJ, and I am looking to expand that into music production. I work with clients in the fashion and music industry, such Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, Rolls-Royce, Kenneth Cole, Indochine, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Lacoste L!VE, and a Lanvin Paris ad campaign shot by the legendary photographer Steven Meisel. I am now becoming more established as a DJ, so I do not have to work a day job like I used to. 

Can you tell me anything you’ve heard or witnessed in South Sudan that illustrates how people are being hurt and need help? 
Well, since we became independent on July 9, 2011, Sudan is no longer just Sudan. The country is now divided into two different parts, Sudan and ROSS (which is the Republic Of South Sudan). The American media have been focusing a lot on the broad statistics, which I personally feel takes away the connection of this being a humanity issue and not just a South Sudanese issue. I want people to start really looking at us as a part of them. As one! As our country is not just a country somewhere out there, but an actual part of this planet.

What do you think is the source or root of all this violence in South Sudan? 
There are several sources for the violence happening in my country, but I think a major cause of all this violence in the region is a lack of education. Most of the country is illiterate. Only about 20 percent of the people are able to read and write, and only 1 percent of those who can read are women. Mind you, 64 percent of the country consist of women, who are not even allowed to speak or have any sort of a voice. Does that make any sense to you?

Like Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” How can we make any major political decisions when most of the people in the country cannot read or write? This is exactly why my nonprofit, Stand for Education, focuses on providing access to education. I want to shed light on this issue and bring opportunities to the children and women of South Sudan so that they can learn. I want to teach the younger generation that it doesn’t matter what tribe you are from.

The other root of the problem is “men with egos.” Our country is the youngest country in the world. Our leaders are inexperienced and running it. I feel like they are running it with their testosterone and egos. The current crisis in South Sudan has been exposed to the media and to the blind as a “tribal war,” when really it is a power struggle between two men who want power for themselves. These men are supposed to be our leaders and our protectors.

What upcoming projects are you working on?
Currently I am working on my nonprofit, Stand for Education, where we focus on providing access to education in South Sudan and empowering women/girls to discover their power and use it in the highest form possible. We need to protect children, nourish them, teach them, and give them structure so that they can have a bright future. A child in South Sudan has few choices as far as learning. These choices are under trees, in an overcrowded class with a teacher who has a sixth-grade-level education, or they have to go out of the country (and that is if their family can afford it, which is less likely to happen).

South Sudan currently has one of the lowest globally ranked levels of gender equality in the world. Women and girls are supposed to just get married, have children, and take care of a man. Most girls in South Sudan are used as a source of income. They are being sold. A girl can be used and married off at the age of 12 to an old rich man so that the family can get a dowry (which comes in a form of cattle or cash). They barely have a chance to attend school or live their childhood. If a girl gets a chance to go to school, she will most likely drop out due to early marriage and early pregnancy. That is why I am dedicating each and every chance I get to helping these children and women. 

Are you optimistic about the future of Sudan? What will it take to end the violence? 
I am very optimistic about the future of South Sudan. I believe in us. I believe we can rise above this. Sometimes it takes for things to fall apart so things can come back together. At some point we are all going to have to step back and look beyond our egos to fix this never-ending violence and negativity. 

Please visit Mari’s charity, Stand for Education, at www.stand4education.org. The organization aims to give less fortunate people access to educational opportunities and strives to help young women in particular. 

Find out more about Mike Mellia’s South Sudan–focused portrait series, Our Side of the Story, on his website.

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter.

Anti-circumcision activists outside the "mobile education unit." All photos by Erica Euse

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the philosophy of Anthony Losquadro, an anti-circumcision activist. Losquadro is the executive director of Intaction, an organization that has been informing the public about the harmful mental and physical effects of circumcising baby boys since 2010. On Saturday, Intaction unveiled their mobile education unit, a large truck plastered with photos of men sullenly holding their baby photos with the text “I did not consent.” Inside the truck are massive screens that play videos castigating the practice of cutting baby wieners.

When I visited the truck on Saturday afternoon, it was strategically parked across from the New York Medical Center on First Avenue in Manhattan, a hospital where thousands of baby foreskins have been and will be chopped off. Intaction plans to take to the streets in their new mobile unit, traveling the Tri-State Area and stopping at college campuses and other hospitals. All this talk of baby boners is not for nothing—according to the Center for Disease Control, the rate for circumcision has dropped 10 percent over the past 30 years, and part of that decline is likely thanks to the outspoken efforts of new grassroots organizations like Intaction. 

Losquadro and his crew hope to continue to decrease the practice of circumcision through more education and awareness. To understand the importance of the foreskin, why they see circumcision as genital mutilation, and how the tradition of circumcision has been perpetuated, I sat down with Losquadro outside Intaction's mobile education unit for a little chat. 

VICE: Why is Intaction out here?
Anthony Losquadro: American society discounts the anatomical function of the foreskin. It is a natural body part that all mammals have, and it contains 20,000 specialized nerve endings, which serve an important function, and it’s very painful and stressful to remove it. It is primarily done in America and the Middle East. Europe, South America, and Asia—they don’t practice this. There it is the exception rather than the rule. Here in America, it is the rule rather than the exception, but that trend is changing.

How prominent is circumcision in New York?
Right now, according to New York State health statistics, only 42 percent of boys in New York are being circumcised. To some extent, doctors are pushing it, and the registered nurses on the maternity ward floors. A lot of it is out of ignorance, practice, and custom.

What is Inaction’s main goal with this campaign?
Our main goal is education and awareness. My experience is that once people stop and think about it, they realize how ludicrous it is to circumcise a baby. Today, with the internet, it is very easy to get information. Whereas in the past, they had to rely a doctor’s guidance. Now they can research it on their own and fall back on common sense. If he is healthy and it is a normal body part, why are they removing it?

Doctors sometimes cite medical reasons for why babies should be circumcised. Are those valid?
There are really no medical reasons to amputate a healthy body part. They have claimed that it can prevent HIV, but it is not a reliable means for prevention. A lot of studies that have been cited have been called out by doctor’s groups in Europe. They say that the studies are biased because they are done by researchers who have spent their life being vocal proponents of circumcision.  

How has circumcision continued for so long?
Throughout the ages they keep coming up with new excuses for circumcision. It originally started in America during the Victorian age, the age of sexual repression, as a way to keep boys from masturbating. If you cut off the foreskin, they will have less pleasurable sensation in the penis. Then that theory wore thin, so they came up with new ones. They said it’s for better hygiene. Then they came up with HPV and HIV. Now they are trying to claim that it prevents prostate cancer. The United States has one of the highest rates of HIV infection for a Westernized society; we also have the highest circumcision rate. So where is the benefit?

People have been very supportive of ending female genital mutilation abroad. How is this different?
I have traveled to a lot of international conferences focused on all forms of genital mutilation. Other countries tell us, “How can you come here and tell us female genital mutilation is wrong when you do male genital mutilation in your country? You are hypocrites.” We have no standing when we are trying to tell African nations not to circumcise women, when we are doing it to our sons.

Are the men in the group mostly circumcised or not?
It is a mixed group. The majority of the men have been circumcised, and they are unhappy about it. This is something that has been put into the closet. Where can you discuss that you are unhappy that you have been circumcised? There is no venue. That is why organizations like Intaction are providing that venue. We aren’t going to make jokes about it. It is an uncomfortable subject to talk about, so people like to make jokes, but it is a serious issue. It’s a form of men’s rights.

What about foreskin restoration? What is that about?
It is a type of skin expansion process that surgeons use, meaning that if you place the skin under tension for a long enough period of time, the skin cells will grow to relieve that tension. There are various methods that they use to put tension on the skin of the penis to pull it forward and attempt to restore the foreskin. It isn’t a perfect situation. It is also kind of a long process because skin doesn’t grow that fast; it takes years. A few men have done it, and a lot of men are attempting to do it, but our primary mission is trying to keep babies boys from [being circumcised]. Right now there are probably half a dozen circumcisions going on in this building and the hospitals in the area. It happens every day, and most of it is ignorance. 

Follow Erica Euse on Twitter.

Late last year, South Sudan's president, Salva Kiir, accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of attempting a coup d'état amid accusations of rampant corruption within the government. Infighting immediately broke out within the presidential guard, sparking what has now become a brutal tribal and civil war that has pitted Machar’s ethnic Nuer loyalists against the majority Dinka, who have sided with Kiir. Machar narrowly escaped assassination, fleeing to the deep bush as Kiir’s troops razed his home and killed his bodyguards. And now the world’s newest sovereign nation is in imminent danger of becoming a failed state.

In February, journalists and filmmakers Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia set out on a grueling mission to locate Machar in his secret hideout in Akobo and get his side of the story. Accompanying was Machot Lat Thiep, a former child soldier and Lost Boy who had advised on South Sudan’s constitution and now works as a manager of a Cosco in Seattle. Machot acted as a guide of sorts, arranging Pelton and Freccia’s rendezvous with Machar through a series of endless satellite-phone calls to old contacts and rebel platoons, who would eventually guide the group to the deposed vice president.

After spending a couple days with Machar, he granted Pelton and Freccia unprecedented access to the front lines of a battle in Malakal, where for the first time in history the pair documented the heretofore mythical White Army as they looted, murdered, and pillaged their way to some twisted interpretation of “victory.”

Saving South Sudan is a multi-platform exploration of the horrors of the country’s newest civil war. We devoted an entire issue of the magazine to Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia's sprawling 35,000-plus word epic exploration of the crisis in South Sudan. It's a companion piece of sorts; watch the documentary and read the issue or vice versa. But you won't get a full scope of the situation without doing both.

If there's one thing Montrealers love as much as hockey and gravy-covered cheese-fries, it's protesting. From the FLQ crisis in the 60s to the student marches of 2012 the people of Quebec have a long history of social uprising and civic dissent. But amongst all the free-tuition pot-clanging and hockey playoff rioting, one particular annual protest has the Montreal Police (also known as the SPVM) on high alert.

Montreal's Anti-Police Brutality March was started in 1997 and has since spread to Switzerland, Germany, England, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Nigeria, the US and Mexico where every March people  take to the streets to protest police brutality and oppression. In Montreal this usually means a few windows broken, vandalised news vans, and a lot of unhappy law enforcement in riot gear. Ever since Quebec's controversial P6 bylaw was enacted in 2012, the cops—armed with new unrestricted powers, controversial tactics, and larger budgets—have been selectively cracking down on protests, this one in particular. We decided to visit this year's event to find out what exactly goes down. 

@lindsrempel

Late last year, South Sudan's president, Salva Kiir, accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of attempting a coup d'état amid accusations of rampant corruption within the government. Infighting immediately broke out within the presidential guard, sparking what has now become a brutal tribal and civil war that has pitted Machar’s ethnic Nuer loyalists against the majority Dinka, who have sided with Kiir. Machar narrowly escaped assassination, fleeing to the deep bush as Kiir’s troops razed his home and killed his bodyguards. And now the world’s newest sovereign nation is in imminent danger of becoming a failed state.

In February, journalists and filmmakers Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia set out on a grueling mission to locate Machar in his secret hideout in Akobo and get his side of the story. Accompanying was Machot Lat Thiep, a former child soldier and Lost Boy who had advised on South Sudan’s constitution and now works as a manager of a Costco in Seattle. Machot acted as a guide of sorts, arranging Pelton and Freccia’s rendezvous with Machar through a series of endless satellite-phone calls to old contacts and rebel platoons, who would eventually guide the group to the deposed vice president.

After spending a couple days with Machar, he granted Pelton and Freccia unprecedented access to the front lines of a battle in Malakal, where for the first time in history the pair documented the heretofore mythical White Army as they looted, murdered, and pillaged their way to some twisted interpretation of “victory.”

Saving South Sudan is a multi-platform exploration of the horrors of the country’s newest civil war. We devoted an entire issue of the magazine to Robert Young Pelton and Tim Freccia's sprawling 35,000-plus word epic exploration of the crisis in South Sudan. It's a companion piece of sorts; watch the documentary and read the issue or vice versa. But you won't get a full scope of the situation without doing both. 

Since the collapse of the English Defense League (EDL), a British group that intended to counter the rising tide of Islamic influence in the United Kingdom, a number of far-right organizations have been vying for the honor of leading the country's racists into a battle that no one else thinks they need to fight. One such group is Britain First, whose members like to see themselves as the elite of the national far-right—a kind of Navy SEALS complement to the EDL's regular army.

Their meme-heavy Facebook group makes it clear that Britain First's members believe they are Christian soldiers on a crusade. They don't bother with mass street protests, preferring instead to target their actions against people they consider to be enemies of their country. So far, this has been limited to hassling the more extreme fringes of British Islam. They set up a "Christian Patrol" in response to Anjem Choudary's "Muslim Patrols," which have been walking around East London bugging drinkers, gay people, prostitutes, and anyone else who has the temerity to act like Britain isn't a country ruled by Sharia law. (We made a film about all of this; it's called London's Holy Turf War.)

This weekend, however, Britain First retrained its focus, as it made the bold decision to harass ordinary Muslims in Yorkshire, a county in Northern England, as well as Scotland.

With their flat caps, All Saints haircuts, and matching windbreakers, Britain First members look a bit like those people who try to sell you discount stand-up comedy tickets on the street. But they're not; they're just an innocent far-right gang who want to be free to roam the city in uniform.

According to Britain First's Facebook page, Saturday "saw the launch of Britain First's Yorkshire brigade with a day of action in heavily Muslim Bradford." In the group's own words, “Our newly formed units descended on around 10 giant mega mosques, madrassas and Islamic centres across the town to distribute British Army bibles and anti-grooming leaflets.”

There's already a Muslim-led anti-grooming initiative based in Bradford, but apparently this didn't convince Britain First leader Paul Golding to go hassle the BBC or some Catholics instead. 

No doubt this guy was charmed to have his attempt at piety interrupted by a roving racist who'd come along to tell him that he's worshiping the wrong god.

But there was more. “Our brave activists also invaded the campaign HQ of Bradford Labour Party and spent a considerable amount of time giving the local councillors a dressing down for their inability to fight Muslim grooming gangs in their community."

If Britain First don't stand up to the wrath of local Labour Party officials and their weekend lackeys, who will?

Also given a serious "dressing-down" was this guy: a worker at a Subway that serves halal meat. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it's not the guy who works the Sunday shift who's in charge of sourcing those delicious meatballs.

“Finally,” Britain First is proud to declare, "after the Mayor of Bradford declined a meeting request, the assembled patriots visited his home address only to find he was too cowardly to come out and face us.”

Well, why wouldn’t the city’s serving Asian mayor want to spend his day off chilling with a bunch of Islamophobes who put stuff like this on their Facebook page all the time?

Maybe they wanted to have a constructive dialogue about the radicalization of some members of the Muslim community, or maybe they wanted to bash him over the head with a mace. It's impossible to say.

So, all in all, it was a busy day for the uniformed activists, who ended their report from the front line with the menacing promise that "this is the first of many such operations that are due to be launched across Yorkshire against Islam."

"The Yorkshire brigade is finally here and has 'blooded' itself in the most heavily Muslim town in Yorkshire,” they said.

On the one hand, Britain First's bizarrely over-the-top rhetoric is kind of funny. On the other hand, their Facebook page—and the hundreds of comments, like the one above, that are getting tons of "Likes"—are a bit worrisome.

Whether Britain First keeps its promise to make Yorkshire a Christian heartland remains to be seen, but it seems that the group is determined to spend the summer bothering Muslims. So that's something for everyone to look forward to.

Follow Si Cunningham on Twitter.