Photo via Flickr user Charles Hope

In April, the Department of Justice concluded that the Albuquerque, New Mexico, police department is pretty lousy at not beating up and/or killing people. The APD got some unwelcome nationwide attention when they killed James Boyd, a mentally ill man the cops confronted because he was camping illegally, but 25 other people have been fatally shot by the town's cops since 2010. After the Boyd killing, APD Chief Gorden Eden said officers were justified in their actions, but he has since backpedaled, undoubtedly in response to public outcry and repeated protests—just one of the many times in the past few years the police have looked to be at odds with the city they're supposedly protecting and serving.

The big problem is a complete lack of accountability. District Attorney Kari Brandenburg hasn’t brought charges against any cop in the past 13 years—that includes the two officers who in 2011 fatally shot Christopher Torres in the back in his own yard. (The police claimed Torres, who was mentally ill, had a gun, but he turned out to have been holding a broom.) Torres’s family sued the city and won a $6 million payout after a judge concluded that the officers were “not credible” in their report of the incident, but the two cops have escaped any sort of criminal prosecution.

The most recent public expression of dissatisfaction with the APD came in the form of a rally on Saturday, June 21, where protesters held a mock trial for Eden. As if to underscore their antagonistic relationship with the demonstrators, the department sent an undercover officer—dressed in a tie-dyed shirt, no less!—to film the protest.

“We are peaceful, we were lawful, there was no issue with the people who were marching today, so why were they surveilling us? That doesn’t make sense,” one of the protest’s organizers told the local news. For its part, the APD simply said that the officers were there to “protect” the demonstrators, but refused to answer follow-up questions posed by the local media. I’m not an Albuquerque resident, but here’s a suggestion for the APD: Maybe you could try doing what your own city and the US Department of Justice have suggested and change your policies, or at least try to explain yourselves and start a dialogue? Hopefully nobody else will get shot for very little reason before you learn to control your trigger fingers.

On to the rest of this week’s bad cops:

–Last weekend, the Washington Post highlighted some West Virginia law enforcement officers—both local and federal—who haven't gotten the memo that the cool thing to do is relax about marijuana these days. These cops still think of marijuana as a “gateway drug” that will lead to ruin and desolation. Plus, many officers think that making a lot of easy arrests for weed possession will make it easier for their departments to get money. Marijuana was still illegal as of press time, though no one knows why.

–Also at the Washington Post, Radley Balko highlighted some cases in which people were beaten or even killed by cops who didn’t recognize that they were suffering from diabetic shock or had fallen into a coma. Too many times, cops think that people who are unconscious or acting erratically are fucked up on drugs or booze and wind up Tasering or beating them—often, this is because they aren’t trained to look out for mental illness or epilepsy or any other such condition.

–On June 19, VICE News’ Natasha Lennard reported on the release of a video that shows an El Paso, Texas, police officer fatally shooting a handcuffed man in March 2013. The dead man, 37-year-old Daniel Saenz, had assaulted an off-duty cop and staff at a medical clinic. Saenz had been Tasered five times throughout the day as he reportedly continued to act erratic and violent—then, as seen on the video, Flores fired a single shot. Wrote Lennard:

The bullet went through Saenz’s left shoulder and into his chest, piercing his heart. The authorities called it an accident. They said that the guard knocked Flores as he pointed his drawn weapon, causing it to fire. They said that Saenz could have moved his cuffs to the front of his body and, with his strength, use them as a weapon. They said a taser would not suffice to subdue him.

But the video speaks for itself. The bodybuilder was executed.

–As Motherboard’s Max Charney has written, many police departments are making clandestine use of “Stingrays”—devices that capture cellphone data en masse—but more alarming than the devices themselves is the secrecy surrounding them. On Thursday, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU, emails from 2009 were released that shed further light on the level of deception involved in the use of these devices. The five emails, sent between Florida police departments, refer to deliberate requests by federal authorities to hide the source of information gleaned from Stingrays, saying information should be credited to “confidential informants” instead. It seems kind of bad that cops would lie to judges?

–The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reportedly raided a woman’s home early in the morning of on June 10 in Homestead, Florida, and she still doesn’t know why. A little after 6 AM, around a dozen agents smashed the door in, threw flashbang grenades, and ransacked Kari Edwards’s house, breaking many things in the process, including the a glass shower door. Edwards, who used to work for DHS, told Police State USA that the raid was supposedly over “electronics” but agents didn’t seem focused on that, nor did they show her a warrant until two hours into the raid. Edwards’s security camera recorded the agents busting in the front door, and more unsettlingly, also recorded one of them finding a camera inside, then turning it to face the wall.

–Trying to out-do the many, many cops who merely shoot dogs, two Baltimore police officers are accused of cutting a dog’s throat after it was already subdued. On June 14, Thomas Schmidt and Jeffrey Bolger responded to a call about a loose dog that had reportedly bitten a woman, leaving a superficial wound on her hand. Schmidt supposedly held the dog down while Bolger killed the dog with a knife. A witness heard Bolger say "I'm going to [expletive] gut this thing," and now he faces multiple charges for animal cruelty and malfeasance in office.

–But #NotAllCops are bad! On Thursday, after a man reported nine ducklings trapped in a storm drain, a Bartlett, Tennessee, officer Todd Halford came to the rescue. As the mother duck stood by making distressed-duck sounds, Halford climbed into the drain and lifted out the ducklings one at a time. All the ducks are safe and happy and everything is fine.

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

Up until a week ago, the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq was one of the most hotly contested areas in the country, teeming with Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmens, all of whom had strong claims to the land. Now that the Iraqi army has fled and ISIS has been repelled, the Kurds are fully in control, and hope to integrate the city into the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG).

Despite a large Kurdish presence in Kirkuk, this still might not be so easy. The Arab and Turkmen populations have long resisted Kurdish rule, and the large amount of oil nearby—which all of these groups want a fair share of—will only complicate matters further.

The Kurds, however, insist that control over the city is more a matter of dignity. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing throughout Saddam Hussein's rule, many Kurds in the area were forced off the land during an Arabization process, which sought to change the demographics of the city. Poor Arabs were offered land, houses, and money to move to the city and take over formerly Kurdish lands.

During the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Kurdish forces and American soldiers took the city from the Baathist party. But the Kurdish forces mostly withdrew, and the city was not annexed to the KRG.

Since then Kirkuk has been under a sort of coalition rule, though it is still considered a disputed territory. Kurds have sought to implement Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution, which would allow the people of Kirkuk to vote on whether or not the city should join the KRG or remain part of Iraq. But this vote has been delayed numerous times.

As recently as 2012, the Iraqi army and the Kurdish fighters, know as Peshmerga, engaged in a standoff that at times seemed like it could break out into conflict. For now though, the Kurds are firmly in control—though south of the city, sporadic attacks continue.

VICE News spoke with Falah Mustafa Bakir, the head of foreign relations for the KRG, who said that the Kurds have no intention of giving up their control of Kirkuk.

Photo by Rhiannon Adam

Millie Anthony is 38. Middle of the night. Lying there in the still bedroom, looking toward the window. A man called Jeff lies beside her. “We’re watching the trees again,” she says. Nine seconds pass before he says, “Yes.”

And there they lie for 53 minutes more until they fall asleep. It’s 3:47.

Millie’s up first and is in the kitchen sitting at the table. Six minutes later Jeff appears. Takes a cup from a cupboard. Goes to the stove and pours himself coffee from the pot. Sits at the table. They look at each other. He sips. “Need some wood,” he says. Finishes his coffee. Gets up. Millie says, “Maybe we should go into town later.” “OK,” he says, and goes outside. Theirs is a remote house with land. Middle of nowhere. Without breaking stride he picks up the ax. Is moving toward trees. The song “Bernadette” by the Four Tops playing in his head: “People are searching for…” Before he reaches the “spot” he decides he’ll resist looking at it. He won’t look at the patch of ground, that patch of ground—and doesn’t. Walks right on by it. “The kind of love that we possess…” He hacks down a few branches. Then chops them into logs. Picks them up and walks back toward the house. Drops the ax. Goes back inside.

It’s a small nothing town. Little more than a main drag with a few streets off it. There are four coffee places—used to be six—and they’ve chosen the least popular. Worst coffee, fewest people. Millie and Jeff share a red leatherette booth. And there they are. He sort of smiles at her. She looks at his face. His eyes. His ear. Her cup. And says, “I think we should move it.” Twenty-seven seconds pass. He’s not smiling now. “Maybe,” he says. Sipping. Coffee. Millie and Jeff. “Might need a new shovel—that one’s on its last legs,” he says.

They’re walking down a side street toward the hardware store. Approaching it. “Keep walking,” he says. “Let’s not do that.” They don’t buy a new shovel. They go to their car. And drive home.

It’s evening, and they’re both standing outside the kitchen as the sun dips and the gloaming seeps in. Jeff looks like he’s about to speak. And does. “OK, let’s think about this. If we do do this—and I’m not sayin’ we shouldn’t—we have to be very precise. Very... mindful. Seventeen million percent. Plan it. And do it. And just do it right. He’s been in there four years.” She’s quick, Millie, sharp. “Not ‘he’—‘it.’ ‘It’ has been in there four years. ‘It.’” “OK, ‘it,’” he says.

He sips his beer. “When? Tomorrow?” Looking at each other. Millie says, “Tonight.” Jeff thinking. “Inkling Woods,” she says. “Forty-minute drive. Deep in there nobody goes.”

“We’ve been there,” he says. She’s staring at the patch. Millie staring at the spot. At the end of the garden. “Yeah, but we’re not ‘people,’” she says.

He’s checked the oil. Topped up the water. Filled it with gas. And he’s driving. Alone. It’s gone nine. Pulls off the highway. Toward the woods. Just him. No other cars. Eases off the road. Onto grass. Slowing. Now hits the brakes hard. The back wheels slide. Carve into the grass. Exposing mud. He’ll be parking here again. Here exactly. Sits. This is just a maneuver, he thinks, a transportation. No big deal. Steeling himself. To dig. Eventually he gets out. Goes to the trunk. Takes out a flashlight. Picks up binoculars, hangs them around his neck. Picks up a small camera. Slips it into his pocket. Picks up a book, Birds of North America: A Guide to Field Identification. Takes the old shovel in his other hand. Closes the trunk. Has a good look around. Removes the camera. Photographs forward. East. South. And west. Re-pockets it. Enters the woods. It’s gray in there. There’s a sliver of moon in the sky. Smells good. Now and then a few birds flap above in the trees. Wood pigeons, probably. Flapping. Jeff passes 36 pine trees. Fourteen common oaks. Eight scarlet oaks. Twenty-four yews. All of these numbers and types he scribbles down in a notebook. By flashlight. He will need to find this place again. He stops. “OK,” he says. And he begins to dig the grave.

Millie’s in the bedroom. She’s showered. Wet hair. Naked. Standing in front of the mirror. Staring at her face. Her body. Her self. She runs her thumb softly across the faint, silvery five-inch scar that tracks from her collar bone toward her chest. Frank’s scar. From beating number four. The last one. She can hear the sound of Jeff’s car returning. Staring at herself in the mirror. Watching her face. Millie. Millie says, “Ha.” Forces herself to smile at herself. Walks to the bed. Pulls on her jeans. A sweatshirt. Boots.

Jeff in the kitchen. Standing. And Millie comes in. Looking at each other. “You OK?” he says. She nods. “You?” “I’m fine.” Millie says, “Are you hungry?” “I’ll eat later,” he says; “let’s dig him up—‘it’ up.” He smiles at her. She smiles back. “Could be grisly,” he says—“four years.”

At the patch. At the spot. The shovel easing into the earth. And out. And in. Jeff digging. Millie watching. A different sound. Jeff stops. Staring down. Millie comes closer. Jeff digs more. Gently, carefully. Like an archaeologist. See a dirty-white shower-curtain ring. Using the shovel like a broom. Lightly sweeping. Scraping. Now the grimy plastic shower-curtain shroud. Frank’s body inside. Nothing of him visible. Just a shape. Frank the Mummy. Jeff takes a break. Is breathing heavily. And into his head comes Levi Stubbs singing. That last imploring cry: “Bernadette!” He looks at Millie. With such love. Resumes digging.

Together they manage to ease the shape out of the ground. Prize it out. Both panting. They’ve been here before, but it’s easier now. What weighed 200 pounds has become less than 80.

The smell—faint but there. Hanging. Hovering. A note of a smell. Fungal yet sweet. Almondy. Icing sugar-ish. No, not that. It is what it is—the smell of dead husband.

Jeff says, “Can you get some old newspapers and line the trunk?” Millie goes into the house. Jeff looks at the body. “Gonna lift you up now, pal.” He said that before. Four years ago. Gets the thing onto his shoulder. Like a dead mouse, he thinks, a big dead mouse. Takes it to the car. Millie finishing lining the trunk. Jeff drops the body into it. Onto the newspapers. It lands with a small sound. A dull sigh. They look at each other. He slams the trunk shut. Millie gets into the passenger seat. Clips the seat belt. Sits. Jeff gets in. Starts the engine.

On the road. Driving. Millie says, “Let’s go someplace. Get a beer.” “You serious?” he says. “Get a beer, listen to some music, have some fun.” He’s looking at her. Driving. Looking at Millie’s face. He laughs. “No, let’s not do that. Let’s do that sometime else.” She shrugs.

So they come to the woods. Park in the same place. Jeff gets the dead thing onto his shoulder, and they go in. It’s darker. Smoky clouds block the moon. But Millie has the flashlight, and tree by tree they find the newly dug hole. Flop the body into it. Shovel earth onto it. Cover it with leaves, twigs, moss. And it’s done.

They walk back to the car. “It’s not that way—it’s this,” he says. “Are you sure?” she says. “Yes,” he says. And he’s right. They reach the car. Get in. “He’s farther away now,” Jeff says. Millie fixing her seat belt. Saying nothing. “When we get back we burn the newspapers and fill in the hole.” She nods. Jeff starts the car. Says, “And that’s that.” They head home. It’s 1:57 AM.

Millie Anthony lies in bed. The room is still. Her eyes are open. Jeff, beside her, is asleep. Not snoring exactly, just breathing deeply. In and out. In and out. She can see the tree outside the window. Swaying tinily. Sometimes brushing across the glass pane. In and out. In and out.

I am a skull with a gold tooth. A skeleton with a loose wristwatch. I am in mud. The plastic around my head has all but rotted, and bits of papery flesh cling yet to my thin bones. Around me float my credit cards and a greening wallet, ginger centipedes, fat woodlice, assorted maggotry. Forests are silent. I grow weaker. I perish second by second. I crumble. Disintegrate. Weaker. Only rarely now am I steam on glass. Shape in snow. Man in supermarket. Scream in the wind. And never trees.

Several years will pass before he is dug up again and moved yet farther away. But today, right now, Millie and Jeff are in a bar. Drinking beer and listening to music.

Louis Mellis co-wrote the screenplays for the 2000 film Sexy Beast and the 2009 film 44 Inch Chest.

Polish nationalists and attendees of Music Day clash in Tottenham on Saturday, June 21

On Saturday, June 21, a group of about 20 Polish far-right nationalists attacked the audience at a family event called Music Day, held in Tottenham's Markfield Park. It was billed as “an all-day celebration of music in tandem with celebrations across the world” and seemed to have gone off peacefully enough, as you'd expect from a family music festival. But as it was drawing to a close, a group of skinheads rushed the stage, assaulted several members of the crowd and event team, and left one man in hospital with stab wounds. The crowd managed to push the skinheads back into a small corner of the park before four riot vans turned up to shut down the melee and arrest several people for breaching the peace.

The footage above shows festivalgoers and the far right exchanging missiles, including flares. Another video shows a man getting arrested wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Wielka Polska,” meaning “Great Poland.” The attackers were from a group of far-right Polish immigrants known as Zjednoczeni Emigranci Londyn (Emigrants United London). The police confirmed that a 22-year-old Polish man was charged with racially aggravated common assault, religiously aggravated common assault, and common assault, and added that a 22-year-old man was arrested for racially aggravated common assault after a man's kippah was pushed from his head.

I spoke to Rob, one of the organizers of the event, about what happened.

VICE: Hi Rob, can you tell me a bit about what went down on Saturday?
Rob: You know, this was clearly marked as an inclusive family event and it turned into fucking Armageddon. We have held this event for several years and never had any problems before. It had been a great day in the sun and everyone was having a good time.

Did you know about the group beforehand?
Well, while we were setting up two people from the local council came and warned us that “the BNP” [the British Nationalist Party, a far-right group] were having a rally [in the area] today. So the council knew this was a possibility but I have no idea why it was presented to us as “the BNP” when these were clearly Polish nationalists. The council told us that they were aware of the situation and that there would be a police presence in the park all day. We sent out a text to alert people but we thought everything would be fine. But—at the moment when these guys came—there were no police around and that’s when it kicked off.

The police move in to make arrests.

How aware of Zjednoczeni Emigranci Londyn were you before the event?
We know they've been in the park and in the community for a while. We have seen their stickers and racist graffiti popping up over the last few months and there have been some standoffs between us and them, a few words here and there, but nothing violent. They have been waving nationalist flags and displaying aggressive behavior, but nothing like this. This is the first physical confrontation; we did this event last year in the same place and it went off without a hiccup.

How did the fight start?
We were just coming to the last DJ set and the group came, I’d say there was about 50 of them, but only ten to 20 were the ones instigating the trouble. I was stood there with a friend immediately as they came and we stood against them. Before anything, one guy stole a beer from our bar, cracked it open, and walked away. We tried to stop him from doing that and the beer was taken from his hand by one of us, asking him to pay for it. Then another guy got on the stage for some reason. He was obviously inebriated, the way he was moving. By this point, more of them had started to congregate at the back of the stage. We instructed them to get off, but not a hand was laid on them. He asked us to move out of the way so he could get down and we let him do that, walking past a line of us peacefully to get back to his crew.

So how did that escalate?
There was then a standoff as they drew up to us, there were more of us and we were standing face to face. There was a conversation between the two groups in Polish—one of our guys was confronting the group in Polish as to why they were here making trouble and asking them to leave. The guy who stole the beer then started shouting in Polish, “Are we going to fucking do this, guys?”

Immediately after this, the skinhead who had been arguing with our friend in Polish punched him in the face. He fell to the ground and crumpled into the wheel of one of the vans. Once that happened, they charged at us. One of our group was stabbed once and he fell to the ground. Punches, bottles, and flares were thrown and the fascists retreated into the rose garden.

The arrested nationalists are led away by police.

Sounds pretty horrible.
There were babies there, you know? There were broken bottles being thrown, and there were children in prams. Could you imagine what would have happened if a baby had got hit in the face with a bottle?

Is the guy who got stabbed OK?
The stab was shallow and didn’t get to the kidney, it was superficial and he is going to be OK. Several people were injured, though—two of our guys were left with large open wounds on their foreheads. We were lucky we had two paramedics in attendance.

Where were the police when this was happening?
We were let down by the police. They knew [the far-right nationalists] were going to be there and when we needed them the most, they weren’t there. There couldn’t have been more warning, so we feel disappointed there weren't active police stationed for the duration of the day. They had been seen in the park all day; I had been told there had been an arrest made prior to the [main attack].

Polish far right stickers in Markfield Park.

In a statement, the North London Antifascists referred to Zjednoczeni Emigranci as a “a relatively small but hardcore group.” Made up of ultra-nationalist Polish immigrants, it has about 350 members on Facebook. Their Facebook page seems to have been pulled down for now, but when it was up was littered with ultra-nationalist iconography, racism, and links to videos and stories about Polish football hooliganism.

The group are known to the local community, and according to several locals they have been a presence in Markfield Park for some time. A local skater said that he'd seen a rally take place in the park three months ago and that a group of about “200 of them were assembling and displaying nationalist flags, lighting flares, and talking through megaphones.”

A local business owner and retired police officer who wished to remain anonymous said his business had been broken into three times by the same group over the past couple of years. “It’s been a while, a good few years. They had nearly 500 people in the park yesterday,” he said. “They’ve been congregating here, slowly building, over the last three and a half years now. This group has been causing a lot of issues here by drinking, damaging property, and robbing people.

“We have been working with the council and the authorities but they are getting worse and worse and now we have a fascist Polish party here trying to rule the country. All of them are youths and full of energy and this is really worrying for us.

“We need help and protection from the authorities," he continued. “We have our children that use this park and these guys are out of control. I have seen one of them getting arrested about six times in this park but he still comes back like nothing has happened to him, every single time.”

Unite Against Fascism have organized a rally outside Tottenham Town Hall on Monday at 6 PM under the slogan, “Nazis Out of Haringey.” Meanwhile the North London Antifascists have warned that, “We will not stop until every piece of ZE graffiti and stickers are removed or covered up, and their events so opposed by antifascists that they are forced to abandon them… if they dare to try to intimidate the communities of North London again we will be there to oppose and stop them.”

Follow Oz Katerji on Twitter.

Over the last week, there's been some pretty intense media coverage of China's Dog Meat Festival, which has become something of a tradition over the last two decades. As the name suggests—and much to the dismay of all the people who see dogs as friends rather than food—tens of thousands of dogs are slaughtered and eaten each year at the event, which takes place in the city of Yulin, Guangxi province.

I was in Yulin on Saturday, when locals once again raised glasses loaded with lychee wine to the heavens and tucked into bowls full of freshly roasted, fried and boiled dog.

Pet-lovers across China and the rest of the world have been quick to lament Yulin's apparently boundless appetite for puppy flesh, and several Chinese celebrities have made online pleas to bring the festival to a halt. However, locals are reluctant to give up their annual gathering. When I spoke to one female vendor in the downtown Dong Kou meat market, she told me she’d lost count of the number of dogs she’d sold in the last week but guessed it was well over a hundred a day—business has rarely been better.

Shandai, from animal protection group the Guangdong Shoushan Volunteer Center, reckoned that previous estimations of 10,000 dogs being sacrificed for the festival are too low, claiming the figure is more like 40,000. (Plus 10,000 cats, in case you're not really a "dog person")

Walking around the city, the presence of animal rights protesters seemed to have resulted in an unapologetic backlash. Locals filling their baskets with freshly chopped paws and tails were defensive over their dog-eating customs, one woman in the market declaring indignantly, “I’m not forcing them to eat dog, so they can't force me to stop.”

“Even more people are eating dog this year," complained Pian Shan Kong, an animal activist from Guizhou who has been observing the festival for three years. "As outsiders come to protest, locals are spurred on to resist.” Kong is currently holding four rescued pups in his Yulin hotel room—the guy who sold him them reportedly got angry when he realized they weren't destined for the dinner plate, and threatened to slice all four open on the spot if Kong couldn't match his inflated asking price. 

Dog lover Yang Xiaoyun took it one step further and purchased a total of 300 caged dogs, which she spent 11 hours ferrying back to her hometown in Tianjin. Despite her good intentions, the 90,000 RMB ($15,000) she spent buying them will no doubt continue to feed dog sellers across the region.

China’s dog meat industry is a largely unregulated trade, with activists claiming that the animals are usually stolen pets or strays, posing a health risk to anyone chowing down. Dog dealers however, insist that the dogs are "tu gou," a type of dog that are mostly bred on farms for their meat, and that the moral objections are therefore no different from when other cute animals, like lambs, are eaten.

An attempted demonstration by animal rights activists took place on Saturday outside the Yulin city government building, culminating in a few banners being snatched and quickly torn to shreds. This was followed by an angry exchange of abuse between locals and protesters, before security guards were called on to disperse the crowd.

While the rest of China continues to debate the morality of putting dog meat on their plates, it’s clear that for Yulin residents no puppy dog eyes are going to stop them having their banquet.

As one local proudly pointed out, “If you’re not talking about the World Cup, you’re talking about our festival – that can only be good for our reputation as having the best dog meat in China. In the future, Yulin will become even more famous!”

Follow Isobel Yeung on Twitter

The announcement that Starbucks would offer all of its 135,000 employees $10,000 worth of free education at Arizona State University has crowded out a lot of really depressing news about the state of public education. Whether it’s California’s Supreme Court ruling that teacher tenure is unconstitutional or the Common Core marching on in spite of Diane Ravitch’s relentless exposés, people were looking for some good news to counter the incessant chorus of voices insisting that American education is in a crisis.

Under the program, the full details of which can be found on Starbucks’ site, freshman and sophomores will receive $1,267 outright towards their tuition each semester, while juniors and seniors will receive $2,420, and the company pledges to reimburse the balance for any employee who completes at least 21 credits. They don’t have to stick with the company after graduation but presumably, as Natasha Lennard observed, they can’t quit while they’re still in school.

Like fellow Seattle-based company Costco, Starbucks is known for paying a pretty decent wage to its workers, providing genuine, accessible benefits and—unlike that other Seattle-based company that killed all the bookstores and now has a phone—not generally treating them like fungible units it can’t wait to replace with servile robots. So this has been greeted as a good thing in some quarters, a direct pipeline for the quintessential strivers of the underclass straight into the American Dream.

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, can’t really be mapped onto the liberal-conservative American political spectrum too easily. His closest political approximation might be Mike Bloomberg. Schultz grew up in public housing, his company sells fair-trade beans, and he doesn’t want people bringing their guns in while they get a Frappuccino. Although left-of-center as far as billionaires go, he’s also a strong supporter of Israel’s conservative government and also one of those very rich people who’s convinced that the national debt is America’s most grievous problem, once piously refusing to donate any of his vast fortune to either political party until a comprehensive debt deal emerged from Congress. (Remember Schultz’s campaign, circa Christmas 2012, ordering baristas to write "Come Together" on coffee cups, until that pesky debt thing went away? It sounded anodyne, but the specter of a billionaire compelling his minions to cheer for austerity was peculiar). 

That burst of activism rankled New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who noted that Fix the Debt was really a propaganda tool for corporate titans worried about the prospect of a fairer tax code, masquerading as a neutral proposal no one could possibly be offended by. Schultz’s main anxiety at the peak of the debt hysteria seemed to be that both political parties were equally to blame for not coming up with solutions for the deficit, and their dysfunctional stalling would lead to higher interest rates, inflation, and widespread unemployment. As someone who positions himself as a benevolent father figure of sorts to his army of young employees, Schultz saw reason to tut-tut about Washington’s incompetence, and presented himself as having the moral stature to do so. The economic horror that was 2009 was still fresh in the minds of people whose unemployment ran out—many of them, college-educated professionals who, as the cliché has it, were sucking it up and pulling shots just to make ends meet.

However genuine Schultz’s personal sentiment was, Fix the Debt was funded by corporate cash—lots of it—and existed basically as a vehicle to do two things: to advocate for cutting Medicare and Social Security, and to stir up fears that a debt catastrophe was imminent if we didn’t. By muddying the debate and pumping up a we-must-kill-these-programs-in-order-to-save-them approach, Krugman argued, Fix the Debt hoped to ram highly unpopular entitlement cuts through Congress. Fortunately, it was a maladroit political operator and has dropped off the scene.

But Starbucks’ new education proposal is of a piece with Fix the Debt. More to the point, as it becomes clear that those awful debt proposals are dead in the water, education has become the new cause celebre among meddlesome billionaires. Common Core is largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the lawsuit overturning tenure in California was a pet project of Students Matter, which is bankrolled by Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur named David Welch (who, in fairness, is affluent but not quite a billionaire). It’s almost as if these ultra-rich people are all friends and convene annually to chat about where and when to intervene in public policy debates, to make sure the outcomes suit them.

Rather than advocating for the expansion of Pell Grants or better regulation of predatory student loans—fairly common-sense proposals with strong popular support—Schultz’s priority is to make sure that anything that gets done jives with the prerogatives of the .01 percent. Through conspicuous displays of enlightened corporate civics, CEOs make sure that all fixes to America’s problems go straight through them, bypassing any unreconstructed liberal dinosaurs in the government who might propose, say, higher corporate taxes to fund higher education, or restrictive rules on just how much Sallie Mae can gouge recent graduates. It’s textbook neoliberalism, softened a bit to make it more palatable by wrapping it in largesse, and technically, Starbucks isn’t actually shelling out a dime; Arizona State is offering discounts. Considering that online courses are riddled with commercial ads and retention rates are very low, the entire enterprise sounds more like co-branding or synergy than anything else.

Americans seem to accept that elite private schools are more or less non-meritocratic institutions designed to perpetuate the existing power structure by charging exorbitant tuition. Four years at Sarah Lawrence will run you a quarter-million dollars, which happens to be 12 years’ worth of 40-hour weeks at $10 an hour, before taxes. But how grim is it that higher education at a state school is slipping away from the people for whom it was specifically designed? What Starbucks is tacitly admitting is that America’s class divide is so vast, it has become increasingly impossible for most people to get ahead in life without extra help from one of our overlords—even if they already got a coveted slot at one of the kinder, gentler Fortune 500 companies. Against the backdrop of giant retailers like Amazon and Wal-Mart, which actively steal their employees’ wages, Starbucks does seem far-sighted, but Schultz is just as opposed to unions as Jeff Bezos or the Waltons. So it’s not about empowering people to take charge of their lives. Schultz and people in his income stratum alone get to make the decisions about how life’s gonna be. That’s why they’re CEOs. 

There’s another structural issue as well. This proposal comes largely in the form of reimbursements, which are better suited to the middle class. The racial disparities in the reconstruction of post-Katrina New Orleans are a case in point. White middle-class residents who could pay out-of-pocket to rebuild their houses and wait for FEMA to make good on its promise recovered much more quickly than their poorer, largely African-American neighbors who couldn’t shell out the cash up front. Starbucks is potentially driving a wedge between its relatively better-off employees and the rest—or, at least, the ones whose lives make it possible to work and study at the same time, and those who can’t. As the Affordable Care Act was a boon for health insurance companies who got a gift in the form of millions of new customers, so too is this proposal an implicit bonus for student loan companies, the likeliest place aspiring students will turn to cover the difference between what Starbucks is offering and the full tuition. And if there’s one true crisis in American education, it’s the trillion dollars student loans people owe.

Hopefully, tens of thousands of Starbucks employees will take advantage of ASU’s online programs, study what interests them, and go on to derive meaning and pleasure out of the work that they do. But it doesn’t change the fact that the average American’s ability to chart his or her own destiny in life has gone down at the same rate as billionaires’ power to control everything has gone up. It’s just that some of them are nice sometimes.

Follow Peter Lawrence Kane on Twitter.

Illustration by Geffen Refaeli

When I called movie stores asking if they had the 2000 film Sexy Beast I was initially embarrassed because to me it sounded like a porno. I had never heard of the film but the second video store manager I spoke with sighed and said, “Oh, that’s a good one,” and then in a tone of newfound respect agreed to hold it behind the counter until I could come by to get it in the evening. Still I felt doubtful. I knew that it was about gangsters. I didn’t care about gangsters. Yet from the moment it began, with the character Gal, played by Ray Winstone, lying in front of his pool in a yellow man-bikini, I was hooked. A former safe-cracker who has retired to an idyll in Spain, Gal is blonde, middle-aged, bloated, and hot. He seems happy.  You get the feeling something strange and (most likely) bad is about to happen to him. It does: A boulder falls from the mountainside right into his pool. No doubt, one suspects, an omen of what is to come. Before long, you understand that the blissful existence he has found in Spain, with his beautiful former porn-star wife Deedee and friends (a fellow criminal-retiree Aitch and his wife Jackie) is about to be disrupted by the arrival of Don, a psychopath played by Ben Kingsley, who wants to wrap Gal into a bank heist. The style of the film is dream-like, sometimes nightmarish, with a nonlinear narrative structure and, at times, a Shakespearean tone. Don’s irritation with the happiness of the others—his clearly meaning to disturb it, and his obsession with Jackie, the wife of Aitch—is chemically explosive, and in response to him each of the characters seems to become electrified.

Louis Mellis, who along with David Scinto wrote the screenplay for Sexy Beast, was born in Edinburgh. He moved to London when he was 16 and worked as a rat-catcher, zoo-keeper, gardener, door-to-door salesman, barman, and chef, and then went to drama school and became an actor. He stopped acting in 1991 and has been writing ever since. He is now writing the film The Pleasure (set in England and France in 1792) and a pilot for an HBO series called SSSucker (in which a ripped off inventor seeks revenge). Soon he will be directing his own film, Respectable. Louis's story "We're Watching the Trees" was published in our June fiction issue.

VICE: What is the origin of Sexy Beast? What inspired you to write it?
Louis Mellis: A passing thought. A whim becomes an idea. A "what if?" Is there a film in it? A story worth telling? If such a notion stands up to scrutiny after being examined from various angles and it is decided that it could make a film—I like to think that the film it will become is already out there floating in the ether, waiting to be written. And it's the screenwriter's task to find it and hone it and get it down on paper as a set of clearly discernible plans.

Sexy Beast was the middle film of a trilogy planned by myself and my then writing partner David Scinto, sandwiched between Gangster No. 1 (which we originally wrote as a stageplay) and 44 Inch Chest. We wrote the screenplay for Gangster No. 1 and had Jonathan Glazer on board to direct but the situation became untenable and all three of us walked. Rare I guess on a first film, which I've still not seen. So we had to come up with something quick or that would have been that. David and I locked ourselves away for three weeks and wrote Sexy Beast. The initial idea was how possible is it for someone to "split the program." To escape from the past and create an idyll in Spain. What are the human logistics?

So you began writing for the stage? How did that lead to the screenplay? Did someone encourage you to make it into a film?
We were approached to make the stageplay Gangster No. 1 into a film and wrote several drafts, which for legal reasons could not be used.

May I ask what happened that made you all three walk?
Simplest thing to say RE the three of us walking away from Gangster No. 1 is "artistic differences." Because it was our first film we were expected to put up with all manner of ridiculousness RE casting, tone, themes, etc. These stuck in our throats and so we left them to it (and walked into the London snow).

I can’t imagine how much pressure you must have felt to write it in three weeks. That’s amazing. Would you describe what those three weeks were like and how you felt at the end of the time period?
I remember the three-week period during which Sexy Beast was born as intense, manic, fun. We had no idea what the film would be—it started with a guy basking in the Spanish heat and from there we improvised most of the rest. Fortuitously it flowed and as is always the best way, it "wrote itself." Incidentally both films wrapped on the same day, so we were in effect in competition with our own work. 

Often writers get credit when in reality they've merely been the conduit. i.e., the classic question: "How did you get the idea?" is impossible. An idea comes from nowhere. The "work" bit is getting it down.

Did you set out to write characters that were gangsters? Or did what you want to write about end up requiring gangsters?
I think the attraction of working in the gangster genre is that the characters and situations can easily become more Shakespearean than in, say, a rom-com.

Now that you mention Shakespeare, I see that very much in both Sexy Beast and 44 Inch Chest. What are your favorite Shakespeare plays? Did specific ones influence these films?
I have no particular favorites amongst Shakespeare's plays—maybe there's a bit of Iago in Don Logan?

Do you know any gangsters? 
Can't say I fraternize with gangsters (or would want to). Interestingly amongst the criminal fraternity of thieves, pick-pockets, con-men etc., gangsters have always been looked down on as the lowest of the low: unskilled, no-class, gaining only through violence, and lacking expertise.

Whose idea was it to have Don pee on the rug in the bathroom? This crystallizes something about his character for me. And maybe part of the reason this interests me is that a woman would never do that. It just wouldn’t occur to her. 
Don Logan in SB peeing on the rug came out in an improvisation between myself and David Scinto (as did most of that film). It's petty, mean-spirited, child-like, cat-like (spraying). Territorial. Would a woman do the same? Don't see why not if she was Don-like in demeanor.

What was it like to write with a partner? What would you say to other writers who were wondering if this is the way to go? (I have noticed that with screenplays people often partner, but this would never happen with a short story or novella, and so this fascinates me—how it works.)
Yes, it's strange how two people can concoct a screenplay but hardly ever happens with a novel. Must be because film is a collaborative venture. By necessity working with a partner already involves compromise. (We had a hard and fast rule: If we both didn't agree on something, it was out. No discussion or case-pleading. It was gone and we'd find another solution.

Do you believe in God? 
Sometimes... but mainly I believe in good!

Any advice for aspiring screenwriters?
Regarding creating film scripts, the thing I adhere to is something Chekov (I think) said (and I paraphrase): "A guy walks into a casino, places 20 grand on black, loses, goes home and shoots himself. This is what we generally see.

But, a guy walks into a casino, places 20 grand on black, wins, goes home and shoots himself... that's drama!

Richard Cole (left) with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Photo courtesy of Cole

I'm standing outside a Tesco gas station in London's posh Notting Hill, waiting to meet Led Zeppelin and the Who’s legendary road manager, Richard Cole. He shows up right at 6PM with the sharp punctuality only a road manager could have. We go to the local hardware store and, with a buoyant intensity that never breaks, he declares to the clerk, "It appears my scissors have run out of power." He slams the tape-wrapped scissors on the counter. Even though Cole doesn’t have the receipt and can only vaguely remember that he bought them in November, the clerk doesn’t hesitate to give him a new pair.

It all happens so fast that at first I thought he was actually stealing them. He shouts for me to hurry up as his crimson suede loafers peel back out onto the road. Richard Cole never stops moving.

Cole grew up in post-war London and—like many other children of his time—he becomes enamored with the rock 'n' roll music that had slowly seeped over the Atlantic in the late 50s.

In 1961 at age 15, he left school to begin working as a scaffolder in North London and immersing himself in the local mod scene. "We were the first and the best. We were the true mods, my mates and I," Cole says at dinner, once I finally get him to sit still.

In late 1963, on the cusp of the British Invasion, Richard became fascinated with the local music scene at the famed Marquee nightclub and the nearby nightlife at a bar called The Ship. It’s there that he had perhaps his first important revelation: "There was no pussy in the scaffolding business."

One night, while watching local group Herbie Goings and the Nighttimers breaking down their gear after a gig, he asked if they were looking for a manager.

"I badgered them to death,” Cole tells me. “And lied through my teeth about my knowledge of the business. Most importantly, I had my license—driving the band and gear was the most important task of the day." Richard got the job, and his teeth remained sunk in the jugular of rock 'n' roll for the next 40 years.

Having proven himself with the Nighttimers and on the search for the next gig, he was offered the road manager job for two bands: Mersey Beat and the Who. In perhaps Cole’s best lapse in punctuality of all time, he asked for the Mersey Beat gig a few days late—the job has already been taken. So he accepted the gig with the Who. It was 1965 and Richard Cole wasn’t even 20.

Cole in October, 1965, driving the Who around London

Cole fondly recalls his early days with the Who as they'd storm up and down the UK, playing five shows a week. "They were like nothing else on this earth. There still isn't anything like them and there never will be. The music, their style, the presence—they had it all. All lovely boys, but being with Keith and John was a laugh a minute," he recalls with distant eyes and a wild smile. This was the golden age—before the hard drugs became prevalent. "It was all Purple Hearts [Dexamyl] and alcohol then."

Cole remained with the band for a year, noting their 1966 performance at the NME Pop Festival with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Yardbirds was a landmark gig to witness. In fact, Cole only lost the job when he lost his license for speeding to one of the Who’s many gigs.

Inspired by a trip to America with the New Vaudeville Band in 1967, Richard moved to New York City and was managing Vanilla Fudge by 1968—a year he declares to be maybe the best time of his life. It was in America where he met some of his favorite people of all time—the wild groupies of NYC.

"They were these crazy chicks—crazy in the best way possible,” Cole tells me. “Fantastic girls! They would take care of the boys in every way imaginable. Most importantly, they would take them around the city to the top clubs, and do their laundry—most of the boring work I'd have to do, so they'd save me time and I would get to hang out."

Shortly after managing the Jeff Beck Group, Richard began managing Beck's old band, the Yardbirds, for their last tour—now featuring a little known session player named Jimmy Page. Not long after the Yardbirds’ final show on a flatbed truck in 1968, Richard Cole once again found himself in the right place at the right time—Page's new band, Led Zeppelin, was forming and were in need of a road manager.

Although he had only officially been in the music business for fewer than five years, it didn’t take long for Cole to realize that he was witnessing one of the greatest rock bands in the history of the world take shape. "About four shows into that first tour of 1968-1969, I realized Led Zeppelin was an exceptional band—simply brilliant musicians."

Cranking out one classic record after the next, the only thing that grew faster than the riotous crowds was the hedonistic excess that would come to define both the band and Richard Cole. It has been said that much of the mayhem and madness surrounding the band in those days could be directly attributed to Richard Cole—a claim he nonchalantly dismisses as he slices into a meatball with his fork. "I like to say that I never got into trouble. Rather, I would find myself in trouble. It was all so spontaneous then. Most importantly, it was all so much fun."

Led Zeppelin were bona fide rock gods by 1973, as they began one of their most successful (and controversial) tours of their career—a tour that later went on to partly inspire Cameron Crowe's movie Almost Famous.

After Zeppelin's performance at New York's Madison Square Garden, the night's box office receipts—totaling roughly $203,000—famously went missing from their hotel’s safe deposit box. Richard Cole was the last man to hold the money and the only one in the entourage with the key.

Suspicion was quickly cast over Cole, though the band and their management stood firmly behind him. But Led Zeppelin's word was no good to the FBI, who swiftly arrived at the hotel, pounding on his door to question him. "I greeted them with a bottle of Dom Perignon and offered them a glass, but of course they declined," Cole recalls with a chuckle. "They had me take a lie detector test, which of course I passed. And that was that. Actually, they were really nice guys, given the circumstances. We ended up suing the hotel and got a lot more money back. Funny how that works."

Growing tired of hotels on tour, Cole decided it would be a great idea to rent a "dude ranch" for Zeppelin’s week off—but they would never get to stay that long. The ranch owner, he recalls, was looking at them with disgust the moment they arrived. "He had his old lady on the porch next to him and a fucking bible in his lap, so I knew we weren't going to get on that well."

After a few days of non-stop partying and an endless stream of women, an argument finally boiled over between Led Zeppelin and the ranch owner. It reached a near-deadly climax when the rancher pulled a shotgun and trained it on Cole. "We were done with the dude ranch."

The band and their roadies piled into their cars to make their escape. Running out of precious time and not wanting to stick around to be fitted for handcuffs or a toe tag, Cole floored his car straight through the rickety ranch gates and the band successfully escaped down a dirt road straight for the airport as the sheriff sped to the scene. 

As Zeppelin continued to rage on throughout the 70s, so did their festering drug and alcohol habits—and Cole found himself in the iron grip of opiates. One of his first wake-up calls, he tells me, came on September 6, 1978.

That night, Keith Moon was invited as a guest of Paul and Linda McCartney to a preview of the film, The Buddy Holly Story. Richard Cole also attended, and later they went out for dinner. Cole stresses that, at this point, Moon was trying to dry up and had been sober the entire evening. "It was actually quite a normal night, a real nice evening. Keith seemed fine—no drink or anything. In fact, it was I who left early to get my gear and fix.”

The next morning, Cole received news that Keith Moon had taken an accidental overdose of pills and died in the same flat Mama Cass had passed away in, four years prior. "Shock isn't even the right word,” he tells me. “There are no words still. My poor, sweet friend was gone forever."

The writing was on the wall for Cole, but it just wasn't legible enough for him to read. During what turned out to be Zeppelin's final European tour in 1980, Richard was officially fired from the job he had held for the longest time in his life. In his first attempt to turn his life around, he headed down to Italy for detox, but it didn’t exactly go as planned. The Red Brigades, an Italian left-wing terror group, bombed a railway station and Richard Cole was unbelievably mistaken as a member of the group and arrested.

"I'd been in Italy for only a little bit but I had already gotten quite a nice tan and had a big beard—I fit the description." He spent the next six months in an Italian jail, though—as any working-class Londoner would do—he made the best of it. "The food was actually wonderful. I could even get roast lamb and baked potatoes by special order because I had money."

While in jail, Cole received news that his longtime friend John Bonham had drank himself to death. "It was all the more painful because I was stuck in jail… There was nothing I could do. I just had to sit there and take it the best I could. It was odd, because I remember thinking if it was going to be any of them dying, it would have been Page. He was quite thin and sickly-looking at that point, and he was also battling nasty demons himself." To further fuel his misery behind bars, Cole learned that his home had flooded, resulting in the loss of many valuables—including his entire record collection, which he estimates to be roughly 2,500 records. "I don't even own any records now, nor anything to play them on. What's the fucking point?"

After his release, Richard Cole returned to England where he continued his nasty drug and alcohol problem. Down and out and in need of money, he amazingly returned to scaffolding—20 years after he left that world for rock n' roll. But the straight job didn’t turn him straight. “I was still drinking and doping at that point. You could say I was high up on the beams and only getting higher."

I remark on what an ironic arc that is for a life, but Cole dismisses the idea. "I suppose it would have been, if I had died up there—but I wasn't dead yet. I certainly wasn't done with life."

In late 1985, Cole recalls taking his final drink in a pub. "I was not even halfway done with a pint when I heard this voice say, ‘Alright, Richard, that's enough, isn't it?’” He placed the glass on the table and hasn’t had a drink since.

The present-day Richard Cole. Photo by the author

The rock ‘n’ roll life came knocking again in 1986 when Black Sabbath found themselves in need of a manager. "They asked me if I was looking for a gig and if I could still throw a mean left hook. I said yes to both and was off again." He notes that Tony Iommi was the only original member of Black Sabbath at this point, and they were not doing as well as they had been. "What a fucking band they are. Just fucking monstrous. Geezer, Tony, and Bill were just an absolute powerhouse, but I really have to give credit to Ozzy for their success. He was an absolute natural. Sabbath wasn't making much money at that point. Ozzy was making a ton of money, but when you put them all together they make a fucking fortune!" Tours with Ozzy Osbourne, Eric Clapton, and Lita Ford carried him into the 1990s, where he settled down to live in Los Angeles.

Possibly to make amends to the ghosts of his past, Richard also becomes a licensed drug and alcohol counselor. Richard still sporadically returns to tour managing, working for acts like Fu Manchu, the Gypsy Kings, and even Crazytown. He’s almost surprised when I tell him I think that Crazytown is easily the worst band in the history of music. "Work is work," he shrugs.

The mention of John Entwistle, the Who’s bassist and Cole’s childhood friend, sends a pained look on Cole’s face before I can ask if he was surprised to hear of Entwistle’s cocaine-induced heart attack in 2002. "You're always surprised," he tells me. His eyes water briefly and he looks up to the ceiling. "He was a lovely guy, the Old Ox. I knew him since I was 18. We all lived at our mum's in those days. We'd go and pick each other up and have a riotous good time. You don't just make friends like that. I miss them all terribly."

Nearing 70 and with three stents in his chest and 50 years of memories, Cole doesn't have much room to care about current music. "These bands today, they’re all people who have gone to university—posh boys who only seem to be into it for the money and not the fun. Back then, we were in it for the fun. There was no fucking money! For fuck's sake, Bonzo was a bricklayer when Zeppelin started! He was even apprehensive about leaving that job to go out with Zeppelin. What does that tell you abut the musicians of today? Those boys knew fuck-all about the business—they just worked their asses off until they had a hit record."

Though living a relatively quiet life, he still does manage to see his old friends—he had been out with Robert Plant the week before, and last spoke to Jimmy Page a few months ago as he put the finishing touches on the Led Zeppelin re-issues. He even excitedly tells me he is off to hang out with Steven Tyler the following day. We exchange stories about seeing the Rolling Stones on this most recent tour as well. The restaurant at this point has come to a full hum with evening diners filing in to the point that we are almost shouting in each other’s faces. He has another appointment  and we prepare to say our goodbyes. Cole asks me if there is anything more that I would like to know. I don’t want this conversation to end—with his grey, slicked back hair, neatly trimmed beard, and khaki shorts, he reminds me of my own father. I lie and tell him I think that’s enough.

With that same affable energy and wide smile on his face, he shakes my hand. "Alright John, lovely to meet. Please keep in touch." He is ten feet away by the time he finishes the sentence—those crimson suede loafers are already peeling up the road.

Though we look back on rap-rock as a weird footnote in music culture, by the late ‘90s it was a full-blown phenomenon. At the center of it was Fred Durst, a pretty-boy skater dude from Gastonia, North Carolina who fronted Limp Bizkit and openly courted the sort of pop culture infamy usually reserved for serial killers and reality TV stars.

If you were one of the lucky people to visit our VICE Island: House of Vans NXNE concert, you witnessed a rowdy mini-festival show that featured Le1f, Omar Souleyman, Future Islands, and Pusha T. The rest of the island was full of revelers who turned the Toronto Islands into their NXNE oasis for the day. Retroactively treat your FOMO by viewing some of the best moments from the day in our gallery. Enjoy!

Copyright Skategypsy

A couple of weeks ago, our friends at Noisey wrote about a guy who was photographed pissing into his own mouth at a Trash Talk show in Melbourne. It might have seemed pretty gross and weird to you at the time but it turns out it wasn’t an isolated incident. In fact, it's just one example of a worldwide phenomenon among skaters – a phenomenon that even has its own name: "bubbling".

At least that's what this friendly skater called Troy West – aka Skategypsy – told us recently. According to Skategypsy, "bubbling" originated in his native Australia but was popularised in Europe through his own skating tours.

Here's the rest of that conversation about gargling piss.

VICE: How did bubbling first start? Just how big is it in Australia?

Troy West: It's huge in Australia! It's part of our everyday life. My dad actually taught me how to do it when I was a kid.

And so you brought it to Europe?

I was on tour in Austria and this other skater, Frido, asked me if I would drink my own piss for €100. So I explained that it's common practise in Oz and did it right there and then, and then again later by some lake in Italy. It took Frido a few days to master the art, though – he had a weak flow.

Fast forward to 3:45 if you'd want to see a skater drink his own pee

Is there a deeper meaning behind it?

It's a pretty big statement! Try it and find the meaning yourself.

Why do you think it’s so big in the skating community?

Skaters like to provoke reactions from laymen, I guess.

Do people still tend to be shocked by this kind of stunt?

Fucking oath. I'm in a pub in Bolivia right now and just had to explain to this legendary skater Al Partanen what "bubbling" is. He was polite about it, thinks it's fucked for sure, but I have no doubt he will try it by the end of the trip.

Copyright Skategypsy

Does it make your skating better?

Of course.

Do you expermient with other bodily functions as well?

I personally don't. But an Austrian friend of mine once ate his own shit while taking a bath. The same guy also pissed on a security guard's sandwich at a Bad Brains concert. 

Thanks for the lowdown, Troy.
Bubble on!

Mohamed Fahmy on his way to a court appearance in early June. Screeencap via YouTube.
International condemnation was quick and furious this week as Egypt handed down stiff sentences against three Al Jazeera journalists who had been detained in the country since December on vague terrorism charges.

Canadian-Egyptian Mohamed Fahmy, who was Cairo bureau chief for the satellite network at the time of his arrest, and Australian correspondent Peter Greste each received seven years in prison for allegedly aiding the banned Muslim Brotherhood through dishonest reporting. Egyptian producer Baher Mohamed got an even longer sentence of 10 years.

US Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the “chilling, draconian sentences.” UK Prime Minister David Cameron said he was “completely appalled” by the verdict. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who had personally called Egypt’s new president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi days earlier, was "shocked, dismayed and bewildered."

And in Canada: barely a whisper.

There was only a meek press release from the office of Lynne Yelich, the junior minister for foreign affairs, in which she said she was “disappointed” and “concerned” with the judicial process. The statement does not even identify Fahmy as a Canadian citizen, calling instead for the protection of “the rights of all individuals,” as though the government is as interested in the aspirations of the average Cairo mechanic or street vendor as it is in the welfare of its citizen.

Asked why the government’s response had been so timid, both during and after the trial, a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs sent VICE a familiar response, variations of which had met every query about Fahmy’s case throughout the last six months.

“Canada has been granted full access to Mr. Fahmy to provide consular assistance,” read the statement. “Minister Yelich has personally contacted Egypt’s Minister of Foreign Affairs to relay Canada’s disappointment regarding the judicial process which led to the verdict.”

To date, the Canadian government has never explicitly called for Fahmy’s release. This despite a shambolic trial that dragged on for months and saw everything from pop songs to videos of sheep farming offered as supposed evidence the three men were working to destabilize the country. It was such a disaster, the judge frequently took to wearing sunglasses in court, perhaps in an effort to hide his own embarrassment.

Throughout Fahmy’s detention in Egypt, Canadian officials have cited the journalist’s dual nationality as reason they couldn’t more vocally call for his release, even though Fahmy grew up in Montreal and only travelled on his Canadian passport. Asked specifically how Fahmy’s dual nationality had impeded the government’s efforts over the last six months, Foreign Affairs cited privacy concerns and suggested, absurdly, that, “any questions regarding his citizenship should be discussed with him directly.”

Too bad he won’t be able to chit-chat about his citizenship anytime soon, especially when the one that matters—his Canadian citizenship—has all but been ignored.

Given Canada’s forceful campaign to free John Greyson and Tarek Loubani, two Canadians detained in Egypt last August, the official reaction to Fahmy has been just shy of indifference.

Tom Henheffer, executive director of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, has no doubts about why that is.

"It's time to say we are against two-tier citizenship, where if you have an immigrant background you don't get the same protection from the government," he said.

CJFE has been working with Al Jazeera to support the Fahmy family for months, but the organization has tried to remain apolitical throughout for fear of complicating the case. Now Henheffer says it’s time to go “all out” and push the Conservative government to take action and “lead a coalition of countries” demanding the release of the journalists. CJFE is urging Canadians to use a tool on its website to send letters directly to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office in order to keep up the pressure on a reluctant government to intervene.

Ever since Harper heralded the 2013 military coup in Egypt as a “return to stability” it’s been clear what Ottawa’s priorities are: As long as Egypt’s generals put an end to the political turmoil that followed the 2011 revolution and clamp down on the Muslim Brotherhood, all would be forgiven.

But Henheffer said that cozy relationship with with Egypt’s generals isn’t worth much if Canada can’t even secure the release of its own citizens from that country’s prisons.

Fahmy’s family, too, is hoping Ottawa will finally push for the Canadian’s release.

Speaking over the phone from Cairo, his brother Sherif told VICE the family was devastated by the verdict.

"It was a heartbreaking scene. Totally unexpected, unjustified,” he said. “We were all very optimistic. No one expected this at all."

Sherif says he holds Harper personally responsible for Mohamed's plight, tweeting angrily after the verdict that the prime minister was leaving his brother to rot in jail. Worst of all, the jailed journalist believes Canada was fighting for his release all along, an impression the family has apparently been unwilling to contradict, likely out of fear it would crush his morale even further.

"He is convinced Canada is actually doing its best to seek his release. He doesn't know what's happening on the outside.”

"The family is preparing to appeal the case, but even though Egypt’s new leader has said he won’t “interfere” with the court, a presidential pardon from Sisi is still the most likely route to freedom. Sherif said that can only happen if there is enough international pressure on the new president to intervene."

“The Egyptians realize that by this verdict they are going to get pressured from the Netherlands, England, Canada, Australia and the US. They have to somehow find a way to reverse this verdict and let them go,” he said. “But I can't believe the Canadians aren't pressuring the Egyptian side at all."

So far the Canadian response hasn’t been encouraging. On Monday, as other world leaders denounced the verdict against the Al Jazeera journalists as attacks on free speech and democracy, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird was conspicuously silent. Harper, too, maintained his long record of ignoring Fahmy’s case, although he did find the time to wish his wife a happy birthday on Twitter.

@iD4RO

Image of the now Thonnakona site, near Vaughn. Photo via Melanie Vincent.
A challenge by the Huron-Wendat First Nation in Quebec City may be about to force two multi-million dollar projects in southern Ontario back to the drawing board.

“We never extinguished our rights in Ontario,” said Huron-Wendat Grand Chief Karl Sioui in an interview with VICE. “If you step on our site, our land, there's a price to pay for that.”

The Huron-Wendat, whose reserve is in Wendake, Quebec, just outside of Quebec City, have signalled their intention to file court injunctions against both Enbridge's $690 million gas pipeline expansion in the Greater Toronto Area, and the Ontario government's multi-billion dollar expansion of Highway 407 East, from Pickering to Clarington, including two north-south routes connecting the 407 to the 401.

At issue is whether the Huron-Wendat were properly consulted under their constitutional rights and under the principle of free, prior and informed consent as outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, of which Canada is a signatory. That means that Enbridge, the Ontario Energy Board (which organized the review of the Enbridge gas expansion), and the Ministry of Transport of Ontario were all required to engage in meaningful consultations with the Huron-Wendat Nation.

For some it may seem bizarre that a First Nation based in Quebec would need to be consulted over infrastructure projects in Ontario, but a quick history lesson clears that up:

For thousands of years, the Huron-Wendat originally populated the northern shores of the Great Lakes Region, and used the St-Lawrence as their “grand boulevard” for hunting, fishing, and travel. As Grand Chief Sioui explained, it was only through disease brought by Europeans that the Huron Nation was dispersed from that land, and ended up settling further north, near Quebec City in 1651. They never ceded the rights to the land where they lived in Ontario, said the Grand Chief.

Their historical presence in southern Ontario isn't in dispute, and archeological findings of the last decade put ancestral Huron-Wendat sites right along the routes of the Highway 407 and Enbridge’s pipeline expansion. The largest is what is known as the Mantle Site, uncovered in 2002, and which has been likened to the New York City of the Huron-Wendat Nation. Located in Stouffville, ON, just north of the 407, it was a central trading hub, was about 4.2 hectares large, about the size of Manhattan, and inhabited by some 2,000 people. Other archaeological sites have been found in the areas around it, including throughout Toronto and other parts of the GTA.

“Both Enbridge and the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario have discovered ancestral aboriginal sites that they now have to move,” said the lawyer representing the Huron-Wendat, Suzanne Leclaire, in an interview. “But they have not consulted with the First Nation, which is a constitutional duty that most project proponents, either mining or infrastructure, [should abide by]: You must consult if you know you're on aboriginal traditional land, which is the case here.”

There are some 400 recognized Huron-Wendat archaeological sites found throughout southern Ontario.

The Ministry of Transport of Ontario has said that they consulted with the Huron-Wendat, starting in 2008. In an email to VICE, a representative wrote that they have been regularly providing updates to the Huron-Wendat Nation about the development of the Highway 407 East expansion and its archaeological impacts. This was done, they said, through both letters and face-to-face meetings, adding: “The Huron-Wendat Nation has participated in ceremonies on site and MTO has provided it with copies of the Environmental Assessment document and archaeological reports.”

The email also states that they follow the guidelines laid out in the Ontario government's Engaging Aboriginal Communities in Archaeology.

While that's a start, said Leclaire, she counters that it's not enough. Beyond archaeological information, she said, the MTO is required to provide all environmental and economic information, and then engage in full consultations with the Huron-Wendat before any decision on the project is taken. “So far, the MTO has refused to provide any information on the economics of the project nor any opportunities to provide input on the routing of the highway. Moreover, MTO refuses to negotiate an Impact Benefit Agreement, as constitutionally required,” said Leclaire.

Enbridge did not reply to a request for their response to these concerns. And the Ontario Energy Board only responded that they have not yet received a notice of appeal on the Enbridge decision.

No lawsuits or appeals have been filed, said Leclaire, but they will come, especially if work begins on either of the two projects without further consultation with the Huron-Wendat. That seems unlikely for the next phase of Highway 407 East, since it's still in the pre-construction phase and only slated to start in 2015 (phase one of the extension is already in construction, and should be completed by late 2015). But the Enbridge gas pipeline expansion is planned to begin by late 2014

What exactly is at stake if these two projects are put on hold? Enbridge has said that its expansion is necessary in order to keep up with household natural gas demands in Toronto, predicting a possible shortage for the GTA as early as the winter of 2015-2016, with some possible 270,000 customers affected. Ontario Liberals and local mayors have touted the Highway 407 extension as relieving massive gridlock in the GTA, creating business opportunities, and according to a recent study, reducing commuting times by 26 minutes per day.

The Huron-Wendat are not putting a price tag on their negotiations with either Enbridge or the Ontario government, and Grand Chief Sioui said that they are not against development. But he is adamant that governments and developers need to respect the duty to consult when they build on unceded land. It's an issue that isn't new, but is still contentious, and has been playing out across Canada: From Enbridge's other pipelines—the Northern Gateway in northern BC and the Line 9 reversal in Quebec and Ontario—to the northern Ontario so-called “Ring of Fire” mining development, to natural gas exploration in Elsipogtog, New Brunswick, and many more. Much of what we know as Canada has never been ceded to the Canadian or provincial governments. As major infrastructure projects increase in number and size, and questions of their economic, environmental and cultural impacts grow, so to has the stead-fastness of Indigenous peoples to ensure consultation and that their rights over their territory are preserved.

It's become such a major issue for any infrastructure project, that Leclaire says she's shocked that neither Enbridge or the MTO would have thought of the consequences of not initiating a comprehensive consultation process. “Most mining developers in northern Ontario are well familiar with the duty to consult procedures but somehow, project developers appear to forget the duty to consult process also applies in southern Ontario,” she said in a release detailing the Huron-Wendat Nation's concerns.

It's an oversight that shows just how far Canadian governments and corporations still need to go to reconcile their vision of economic and resource development with the country's ongoing legacy of colonialism. According to Sioui, the time of head nodding and empty promises are over.

“They need to leave that [colonial] era. We don't just want a little plaque, don't just want a hand on the back, saying 'Alright, thanks Konrad.' No, no, no, that's not enough,” said Grand Chief Sioui.


@timmcsorley

Al Quds University’s sports field, overlooked by a wall separating Israeli and Palestinian territories

Last week, soccer's ruling elite took time out of their busy schedule of corruption to reject Palestinian calls to ban or suspend the Israeli Football Association from FIFA—for now. The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) had complained that Israel consistently undermines Palestinian soccer development. They want their neighbors kicked out of the federation, but instead a new committee is going to be set up, giving Israel until the end of the year to make it easier for Palestinians to play the beautiful game.

The general secretary of the Palestinian Players’ Federation, Mona Dabdoob, was one of those who presented FIFA chiefs with a dossier of restrictions and attacks from Israel on Palestinian sport as they met in Brazil. A few weeks earlier, I had visited her at the PFA HQ, recently built by FIFA in Al Ram, a dusty satellite town of Jerusalem, cut off and almost surrounded by the wall separating it from Israel. She flicked through the dossier and showed me photos of what little is left of the national soccer stadium that was bombarded in Gaza in 2012. It had already been rebuilt once after having been destroyed in 2006. The Olympic headquarters were also destroyed.

As if having stadiums and infrastructure routinely blown up wasn't bad enough, Palestinian soccer players also have to put up with being checked when traveling, and are often blocked from passing through the territories. “To play a team half an hour’s drive away for a league match within the West Bank, teams are stopped at one or two checkpoints. And they can keep them there for hours. Or just turn them back,” Mona told me.

The road on which Jawhar and Adam were attacked

Occasionally things can be much worse. On January 31, two Abu Dis FC players, Jawhar Nasser Jawhar, 19, and Adam Abd al-Raouf Halabiya, 17, had walked a teammate home after training when Israeli snipers shot them both repeatedly and set a dog on them. I skyped them from their hospital beds in Jordan, where Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein, FIFA Vice President, was paying for their extensive treatment. The pair showed me their injuries. “There was no alarm, no identification or warning,” said Jawhhar.

Adam was shot first in the leg. As Jawhar tried to drag him to safety, he was shot repeatedly in the hand and leg—11 times total. Adam was shot once in the knee and two times in the other leg. The soldiers were hidden in the trees by the side of the road. As the boys lay screaming, a dog was set on them.

Jawhar showed me the bite marks on his right wrist—the hand that hadn’t been shot. “I asked them to remove the dog, but they said they were not allowed to. When it was biting down to the bone in my hand, I poked the dog in the eye with my other hand and only then it let go.

"They covered our eyes and tied our hands," he continued. "They pulled us along the ground without a stretcher for 100 yards to the base by our shoulders. It felt very, very, painful. We were shouting from pain.”

As the screams echoed around the village and news of the attack spread, Jawhar’s family arrived, but they were told they would be shot if they came any closer.

Adam and Jawhar were then taken to an Israeli border police station. “In the camp, they tore my football shirt off, and put fingers in my gunshot wounds,” said Jawhar. “They were saying, ‘Jawhar, are you throwing stones at us? Are you making Molotov cocktails or a bomb?’ My eyes were covered, and they hit me in the mouth and over the head.”

“They hit my head with a gun and they broke the leg with a gunshot in,” Adam said. “My head had seven stitches from being hit by a gun. They forced my leg backwards until it snapped. I don’t know who did this; the soldiers covered their faces. They were joking and laughing.”

After three hours the ordeal came to an end and a Jeep took them to the hospital. They insisted they had no idea why they were attacked. The Israeli police maintain that Jawhar and Adam were moments away from attacking the nearby police base with an explosive device, but they haven’t been convicted of that.

Given the horrific nature of their injuries, they will never play soccer again. “Football was very important for me,” said Adam. “The only hobby Palestinians have left is football.”

Abu Gharqoud

I met Iyad Abu Gharqoud, the smiley star of the Palestinian national team, at a stony patch next to the Israeli separation wall that slices through Abu Dis, severing it from Jerusalem. “I’ve seen Jawhar and Adam play,” said Iyad. “I know they’d both be promising team members right now." On the wasteland where we met, a donkey was grazing, chewing up the few blades of grass near a rusty goalpost. “This is Al Quds University’s sports field,” Iyad smiled. “The separation wall was built straight through the middle of it. After protests, vigils and court appeals, an Israeli judge agreed to move the wall to the edge of the field, as long as it’s not used as a turfed pitch because it’s next to the wall!” he said.

As we talked further, Iyad made it clear how routine disruption is for soccer players in Palestine. “I don’t go out after playing in case the Israelis catch me at a flying checkpoint, cuff me, and take me back to Gaza. Traveling to matches, we always set off early, as they can keep us for hours at checkpoints, or not let us through at all. They make us strip to our pants often,” he added.

Israel denies there is a conscious policy to disrupt Palestinian soccer. In São Paolo, Sports Minister Limor Livnat said Israel would allow Palestinian athletes to "exit and enter for the purpose of sports, excluding occasions in which there are attempts to make use of sports in order to injure or threaten the security of our citizens."

As the World Cup continues in Brazil, the IDF continue its operation against Hamas and its search for three missing Israeli teenagers. The death toll has reached five deaths in the 12 days since the crackdown began. As tensions escalate, it seems unlikely that Israel will ease up on spoiling soccer for Palestinians, whether in the form of security measures that can clobber innocent people, or an active policy of collective punishment. If it doesn't, the pressure will continue to mount on FIFA to become the first international body to boycott Israel.

Follow Ben Gelblum on Twitter.

A Rainbow Family elder plays a tambourine at a Rainbow Gathering in Pennsylvania. Photo by Cavale Doom via Flickr

Heber City, Utah, is usually a quiet town. Nestled in a tranquil valley of the Wasatch Mountain Range, somewhere in between Salt Lake City and Provo, the little bedroom community has some of the lowest unemployment and crime rates in the state. More than 60 percent of the city is Mormon. So it came as a particular surprise when city officials learned that they would be playing host to this year’s gathering of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a loosely organized troupe of nudists, hippies, and itinerants that meets every summer for a month-long love-in.

Started in the late 1960s as an outgrowth of the anti-war and hippy movements, the Rainbow Family of Living Light describes itself as "the largest best coordinated nonpolitical nondenominational nonorganization of like-minded individuals on the planet.” The flagship Rainbow Family Gatherings, which have occurred every July since 1972 in a different US national forest, are like longer, more authentically weird versions of Burning Man, bringing together upwards of 10,000 “Rainbows” from a cross section of fringe culture: bikers, Jesus freaks, computer programmers, naked yogis, and gutter punks looking to escape “Babylon,” the Rainbow shorthand for the various evils of modern life. The gatherings are free and open to anyone. No one is in charge, and nobody can tell anyone else what to do.

“If you asked 20,000 Rainbows why they go to the gathering, you would probably get 20,000 different answers,” said Rob Savoye, a “Rainbow” who has attended gatherings since 1980 and runs the unofficial Rainbow website WelcomeHome.org. “I know rednecks, Orthodox religious people who go to the gatherings, so it’s really hard to put a label on it.

“People are tolerant, accepting of different stuff,” Savoye added.  “A lot of us have had rough family lives, and the Rainbow has sort of filled that void for us.”

Leilani Garcia was arrested Monday for allegedly stabbing a man at the Rainbow Gathering camp. Photo courtesy of the Heber City Police Department

But as officials in Utah learned this week, recent gatherings have also had a more sinister side, attracting a seedier crowd that uses all the anachronistic peace-loving as cover for drug abuse, theft, and violent crime. On Monday, Heber City police arrested a woman known by the Rainbows as “Hitler,” who is accused of stabbing a man at the gathering’s encampment. Authorities are also investigating the death of a 39-year-old New Hampshire woman who was found lying outside at the camp last week. Over the weekend, law enforcement agents said they were called in to respond to a drug overdose at the camp, and to reports that a group of “Rainbows” crashed a wedding on their way to the gathering. “They just went into the reception and started taking the food," Wasatch County Manager Mike Davis told the Salt Lake Tribune. "They weren’t trying to blend in." 

“Of the problems that we’ve seen at the Rainbow Gathering, nudity is the least of our worries,” said Dave Whittekiend, the US Forest Service supervisor for the Uinta-Wasatch Cache National Forest, where this year’s gathering is being held. The big concerns, he added, are “drugs and violence.”

In preparation for the official start of the Gathering next week, local authorities have told residents to avoid the campsite and start locking their doors. “While many members of the Rainbow Family are upstanding citizens, a small segment of their population have reportedly caused significant and detrimental impacts on nearby communities,” the county said in a public letter, warning of possible panhandling, trespassing, public urination, and nudity. Representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints have also taken steps to avoid the Gathering, including relocating two nearby girls camps, and continue to closely monitor the situation,” said LDS spokesperson Eric Hawkins.

Although arrests and police run-ins have always been a hallmark of the Gathering, in the past these issues were dominated by an ongoing conflict with the government. For more than three decades, state and federal officials tried to shut down the Rainbow Gatherings, or at least force the “Rainbows” to sign a group-use permit with the National Forest Service, driven by what Savoye said was “permit envy” of the Bureau of Land Management, which exacts hefty fees from Burning Man.

“The Forest Service wanted that money,” said Savoye. But because the Rainbow Family has no leadership, there was no one for the feds to deal with. “The government always thought that there was a leader of the group hiding somewhere,” he said. “So they spent a bunch of years throwing people in jail, trying to find someone to sign the permit.”

Tensions reached a boiling point at the 2008 Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming, when Forest Service law enforcement officers fired pepper balls at Rainbow Family members during a clash at the encampment. A report published by the Wyoming ACLU after the incident found that it was part of pattern of “harassment and overzealous enforcement” in the Forest Service’s relationship with the Rainbows. Since then, the two parties have reached an uneasy détente, although the Forest Service continues to deploy a National Incident Management Team of about 40 federal law enforcement agents to the annual gathering, at a taxpayer cost of about $500,000.

“The Rainbow Gathering prides itself on being unorganized, so we’re not going to invest an extraordinary amount of time trying to enforce the permit issue,” said Whittekiend. “We treat it as a special event, similar to a fire.”  

The years of government confrontation have diminished turnout at the Rainbow Gatherings, said Michael Niman, a journalism professor at Buffalo State College and author of People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia. As a result, he said, the event has become less mainstream, attracting more hardcore elements of the hippy fringe. “As police harassment increased, the fact that Rainbows kept showing up at the Gatherings made it like an act of civil disobedience,” Niman said. “People usually avoid conflict, so one of the things that has happened is that you’ve seen a shift in the mix at the Rainbow Gathering, toward folks people perceive as scary.”

Although Niman insisted that reports of violence at the Rainbow Gatherings have been overblown, he conceded that as attendance has fallen off, the events have started to attract other drifters and vagrants who may not have come for the crystal worship and talking circles. “There’s been a crystal-meth problem, a crack problem, a homeless problem,” he said. “You’ll start seeing kids from nearby cities—they have no place else to go, so they’ll show up at the Rainbow Gatherings.”

While these new arrivals are obviously a nuisance for local law enforcement, they are perhaps more troubling to the Rainbow Family, a movement that members say is ill-equipped to deal with knife-wielding lunatics and wedding marauders. “The crowd has changed,” said Savoye, with a touch of sadness. “For many years, the Gatherings were against the use of drugs, except maybe a little pot. Partly, that was to preserve a sense of community. Now, we’re dealing with kids who come to gatherings and use drugs and incite violence. And the Rainbow Family is not really set up to deal with that kind of behavior.

“A lot of these kids end up hanging out more in town and causing trouble with the locals. It’s an embarrassment,” he added. “Its a little bit of a drag that we've sort of become a refugee camp.”