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As a member of the queer art and music collective MEN, JD Samson continued the work she started with Le Tigre, infusing punk dance music with observations on gender issues. Samson recently decided to call it quits with MEN, but that obviously won't stop her work as a queer musician and activist. At a recent performance during Indianapolis's Winter Pride Show, she and her band wore shirts reading "Shut It Down," "I Can't Breathe," and "Hands Up Don't Shoot."

The protests were still very much on Samson's mind when we recently met for coffee in Brooklyn—but so were other matters, like her recent collaboration with Pussy Riot's Masha Alyokhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova and Atlas Chair, the indie label Samson runs with her friend Inge Colsen. (The label's roster features the duo Baby Alpaca and the gay electro-punk trio bottoms.) Samson also dropped some news that hadn't been widely known: She recently got engaged to Ariel Sims, via a surprisingly traditional proposal.

VICE: What happened with MEN?
JD Samson: MEN doesn't exist anymore. I haven't really wanted to talk about it in the press, because I don't want it to be like a press moment or something, but the reality is that that project kind of started in 2007 as a collective with five people, of which only two of us were in it at the end.

You and Michael O'Neill?

In terms of income these days then, is DJing your main gig?

How did you and Johanna Fateman end up also working on new music with Pussy Riot?

Besides making music with Pussy Riot, you've also been participating in the protests in New York. What's the difference between the Black Lives Matter protests and Occupy Wall Street?

Is it true you recently got engaged in the middle of all this?
I did. It was very traditional; it was in our house. I had made her this drawing in the beginning of our relationship that was kind of this conceptual drawing of me hugging her —it's kind of like concentric circles, it's a weird drawing—and I had a ring made that looked like it. Once it was made, I asked her.

Did you get down on one knee?
Yeah, I did, and I was wearing a tux! She walked in, and I was wearing a tux, and there was like roses and stuff. She was like, "What are you doing?" and it was kind of like, "Is this happening?"

You've also been working on your label with Inge Colsen, Atlas Chair, for a couple years now, right?
Yeah, I forgot about that as one of my jobs! You know Inge started this label with the idea of having bands use us for PR and label management, and kind of release an introductory EP, as a way to incubate artists that didn't yet have an image or a fan base. The first thing we put out was Baby Alpaca—[Chris Kittrell] did an EP that came out last year—then we did the Aikiu, which is a friend of mine from France, and Sony France has that record but they didn't want to release it in the States, so they licensed it to us to just do an EP. And then we did a Baby Alpaca remix record, and now we're doing bottoms. This bottoms record has been super awesome to be a part of. I think they're really a face of a new generation of punk dance music that's political.

Philosophically, they're very similar to Le Tigre.

On the subject of Le Tigre. I feel like we are in an era of "never say never" when it comes to reunions. Obviously Kathleen Hanna's got her own thing going now with the Julie Ruin, but does a reunion ever cross your mind?

Follow John Norris on Twitter.

Because being chewed up and rejected by America twice apparently wasn't enough of a hint, Mitt Romney is thinking about running for president again. Or at least he's not not thinking about running for president. After denying for months that he would do it, the perennial candidate finally let it slip to donors in New York Friday that he's seriously considering a third White House campaign, and that he wouldn't mind if they told the Wall Street Journal.

This is a weird move for lots of reasons, the most obvious being that Romney is terrible at running for president. After his last campaign, Romney swore he wouldn't put us through it again. When the New York Times asked last January if he'd changed his mind, he emphatically replied: "Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no." Then his advisors started saying he might run, but that he definitely wouldn't if Jeb Bush got in the race. But Jeb wants to run, and now it seems Romney just can't let go.

Did this guy forget that we're not interested? Or maybe, like the guy at the party who accuses the host of buying her homemade cookies at the "local 7/11 bakery," he just doesn't get that no one likes him. Remember, this is same man who tied his family's dog to the roof of the car for a road trip. Not out of malice, but because he thought it made sense. Mitt Romney doesn't get a lot of things.

So why's he running? According to Romney's former national campaign finance chairman Spencer Zwick, it's because the former Massachusetts governor is "too much of a patriot." Zwick told the Washington Post Friday that Romney wouldn't "sit on the sidelines and concede the presidency to Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren when he knows that he can fix the country."

To be fair, Republican voters have been toying with their old flame Romney. Recent 2016 polls have shown the former nominee leading his potential 2016 rivals, although some of that probably has to do with the fact that voters know his name. But Romney faces a much tougher field than he did during the last Republican goat rodeo. And historically, the odds are against him: Losing presidential nominees rarely never run another campaign, and when they do they almost always lose.

In reality, Friday's 2016 hint seems to have been a more about locking up his enormous donor base, a power move that could turn Romney into a Republican kingmaker if—or when—he decides not to run. If another candidate wants those rich dudes to sign a check, they'll have to go through Romney first.

It's an elaborate move aimed at avoiding the inevitable irrelevance that befalls all ex-presidential candidates. Romney himself put it best: "I have looked, by the way, at what happens to anybody in this country who loses as the nominee of their party," he says in Mitt, a documentary about his presidential campaign. They become a loser for life, all right? That's it. It's over."

On Wednesday morning, extremists attacked the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people and leaving many more seriously injured. According to witnesses, the gunmen shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and "The Prophet is now avenged!" as they were leaving the scene.

We asked our European offices how their nation's far-right and conservative parties had reacted to the massacre in Paris.

FRANCE

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Marine Le Pen. Photo via Flickr

An estimated 100,000 people gathered spontaneously across France yesterday to pay tribute to the journalists and policemen who were murdered. These tragic events, which unfolded on what is being called the "the French press's darkest day," have sparked off many emotional reactions from Charlie Hebdo's contributors, readers, and mourners, as well as French politicians.

The political bureau of the far-right group Bloc Identitaire responded by publishing an article on their website that said that "no one could pretend they were fighting jihadism without questioning massive immigration and Islamization." When we asked for a comment, they refused to speak to us. The same goes for Égalité et Réconciliation, the far-right group led by the strongly anti-Semite polemicist Alain Soral.

As of now, the Front National—France's biggest far-right party—have been pretty quiet about yesterday's events, keeping to the relatively politically correct position that they've been using since Marine Le Pen replaced her hard-line father as head of the party.

In her speech yesterday, she described the events as "an awful attack." In a three-minute video she published in the evening, she said: "These attacks are the work of a murderous ideology that currently kills thousands of people around the world... It's my responsibility to say that this attack must release our word against Islamic fundamentalism. The absolute refusal of Islamic fundamentalism must be loudly proclaimed by whoever holds life and freedom among their most precious values."

She also strategically put an emphasis on the fact that "no one wanted a confusion to be made between our Muslim compatriots and those who think they can kill in the name of Islam. But this obvious denial of any amalgamation should not be an excuse for inertia." During an appearance on France public television, she stated that she " wanted to offer a referendum on reinstating the death penalty," adding that she personally thinks that "such a possibility should exist," which provoked many outraged reactions from French Twitter users decrying a tacky attempt to score political capital from yesterday's events. Shortly after, she expressed anger on Facebook when she learned that her party had been excluded from the Republican march that will be held in Paris next Sunday, stating that the other parties "have managed to transform a national unity moment into a symbol of division and pious sectarianism."

GERMANY

[body_image width='800' height='533' path='images/content-images/2015/01/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/08/' filename='how-europes-conservatives-reacted-to-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre-body-image-1420734399.jpg' id='16564']This weekend's PEGIDA march in Berlin. Photo by VICE Germany

Germany has been strongly divided over the subject of Islam in recent years. A study published today claims that 57 percent of the population take a "skeptical" attitude towards Islam, either viewing it as "dangerous" or "very dangerous." Growing anti-Muslim sentiment has given birth to the PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Western World), who attracted a whopping 18,000 protesters to a march against Islam in Dresden last Monday. Luckily, the rest of Germany seems to be incredibly shamed by this xenophobic movement and takes to the streets in counter protests, showing solidarity with Muslims. Dresden aside, all other German cities saw counter-protesters outnumber PEGIDA, rendering their claim: "We are the people" ridiculous.

Unsurprisingly though, PEGIDA is already starting to use the Hebdo attacks as a means to swell its support, as are others. Erika Steinbach, the German soulmate of Marine Le Pen, just took to Twitter with a winky face and a bad joke (I think?) about the Catholic Church being the only institution anyone could criticize. And obviously the NPD—Germany's far-right party—and other right-wing extremists had to jump on the bandwagon too, co-opting the "Je suis Charlie" Facebook banner and condemning the attacks while claiming they've seen it coming. In the video, their chairman Frank Franz says that "what happened in France is exactly what the NPD has been warning about for years... Islamization and foreign infiltration have to be stopped."

What might be the most cynical aspect of the far-right reaction to the Hebdoattack so far is that normally they're all so quick to slur the media as a bunch of corrupt lefty propagandists. Now, they're using an attack on what they call the "Lügenpresse" [a Third Reich term that translates as "lying press"] to justify their racist agenda.

UNITED KINGDOM

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The main political story of the last year or so in Britain has been the ascent of UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party). Their main schtick is their hatred of the EU, mainly because the UK's membership in it allows immigrants to come to the UK to seek work and housing. They also possess a full house of reactionary opinions; their members generally don't like gay marriage, women who have jobs, or human rights, and they think climate change is a big ol' hoax.

While not being overtly racist, they seem to constantly need to kick out their own members for making racist remarks, such as the councillor who recently said she had a "problem" with "negroes" because there was "something about their faces." Yet they never seem to wonder why these people are attracted to the party in the first place.

And so, when two or three Islamo-fascists carried out their murderous attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices yesterday, it was only a matter of time before Nigel Farage, the party's cig-mad, ale-mad, hey-I'm-just-an-ordinary-bloke leader, was going to say something inflammatory.

Sure enough, he made an appearance on last night's Channel 4 News, putting the attack down to, "having a fifth column living within these countries... holding our passports, who hate us." And perhaps, when it comes to these extremists, that's true enough. Obviously, these guys hate the West. Less convincing is Nige's theory as to where that hatred stems from: "It does make one question the whole really gross attempt at encouraged division within society that we have had in the past few decades in the name of multiculturalism."

That's right: All those non-white, non-Christians who have been trying to live here while maintaining links to their culture, and any Brits who have been cool with that should all be having a long, hard think about what they've done. Look what's happened—all those multi-faith prayer rooms in airports and Eid celebrations on Manchester's "Curry Mile" are somehow culpable. With each rubber-stamped planning application for a new mosque, the attack on Charlie Hebdo became more and more inevitable.

With the exception of those on the extreme-right fringe, everyone else was quick to condemn Farage's statement. However, to his many fans, this will probably further solidify his image as the only public figure brave enough to "tell it like it is."

ITALY

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Matteo Salvini in Milan, photo by Marco Valli. The T-shirt says "stop the invasion"

Almost as soon as news of the Hebdo shooting had broken, the Italian right-wing began hurling abuse at the entire Islamic world. The politician seeking to take maximum advantage of the situation is Matteo Salvini—a member of European Parliament, secretary of the xenophobic Lega Nord party, and one of Marine Le Pen's primary Front National allies. Within just 24 hours of the attack, Salvini was being broadcast across Italian TV and flooding his social networks with statements such as: "We are housing our own enemies." If it needed any underlining, he declared that he thought Europe should: "Block the illegal immigrant invasion, NOW!"

Salvini's "we are housing our enemies" claim was endorsed by right-wing newspapers: Libero, for instance, put the screenshot of the policeman's execution on its front page beneath the headline, "This is Islam." Meanwhile, another politician appearing on every TV channel and news show was the Egyptian-born journalist Magdi Cristiano Allam—a former Muslim converted to fundamentalist Catholicism. He declared, "We have to hit the very heart of terrorism's supply chain: mosques, websites, Islamic schools."

The massacre was also exploited by openly fascist movements. Roberto Fiore, the leader of Forza Nuova, said that "the Paris massacre is an act of war against Europe. It is mandatory to respond adequately." In order to do so, Fiore suggested "shutting down Saudi Arabia and Qatar's embassies in Europe" because these countries are "major financial supporters of ISIS." Fiore also wanted to conduct a census of all the Muslims living in Europe, before finally expressing his wish for the creation of PEGIDA-like movements across the continent, declaring that "the days of indulgent chatting are over."

While widespread violence against Muslims seems unlikely, this cumulative level of seems likely to end up producing a sort of collective "cultural" punishment for Muslims in Italy—and that's obviously the last thing that a minority which is already quite marginalized in the country needs.

GREECE

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Antonis Samaras. Photo via Flickr

The blood at the Charlie Hebdo offices was still fresh when a new wave of xenophobic rhetoric was emerging in Greece. With the national elections just three weeks away, some of the politicians there saw the massacre as a great opportunity for political gain.

Antonis Samaras, Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing New Democracy party, stated in a public speech: "You see what is happening in Europe: Everything is changing dramatically... In France, the Socialist [Prime Minister] Hollande has sent his army onto the streets... there was a massacre in Paris today and in Greece, some people [his opponents, the left-wing SYRIZA] are inviting illegal immigrants and handing out citizenships."

Former Minister of Health and New Democracy MP, Adonis Georgiadis, tweeted: "Some didn't even want the fence on Evros," referring to a fence that runs across the Greek-Turkish border to prevent undocumented migrants from entering Europe. A few minutes later, he tweeted again: "The attack on Paris could mean the end of the innocence of Europe about Islam. SYRIZA want to open the borders." Many users condemned his comments, saying that it's a shame to use such a tragic event for political purposes.

It's not the first time that Islamophobia or xenophoba has prevailed in the country. Greece is the gateway to Europe for millions of immigrants. It is facing an economic meltdown and is unstable politically. It seems obvious that certain conservative political forces will try to exploit public anger and fear for political gain. Within just a few years of existence, the fascist Golden Dawn—in prison for the time being—managed to increase its share of the vote to 7 percent.

On the 25th of January, Greeks will be called upon to take part in one of the most important elections in the modern history of the country. With the polls currently giving a lead to SYRIZA, conservative powers are using everything—even such a tragic event—to win themselves more votes.

AUSTRIA

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Yesterday evening, around 300 people gathered in front of the French embassy to offer their condolences to the victims' families, a few thousand feet from the VICE Alps office. The crowd weren't fearful about the prospect of domestic attacks by Islamists. They were more concerned with the welfare of Austrian Muslims. We saw a woman wearing a hijab being guided across the street by young men, as if to protect her from possible assailants. The tension was palpable.

Even though the "Je suis Charlie" crowd were united in their cause, their couldn't have been less of a consensus on what had caused the massacre and what should be done about it. Besides journalists and others showing their solidarity, there was also a block of members of the Identitarian movement on the scene. One the one hand, they were participating in the silent show of respect towards the victims. On the other, they were taking part in their own protest against "the Islamification of the contintent."

"We condemn this cowardly attack that cost 12 lives," Alexander Markovics, chairman of Austria's Identitarian Movement, told us. "This is not only an assault on freedom of speech—it's an attack on all Europeans that defend themselves against the Islamification of their homeland. For decades, we decided to ignore the threats of mass immigration, especially when it happened under the pretext of asylum seekers. This is the final consequence of our Europe-wide politics of ignorance." According to him, the time for "humanity" and "more of the same everybody's-welcome culture" is up: "Jihadists are attacking our freedom with Kalashnikovs—this calls for a defesce of what's ours. It calls for self-preservation." However, he wasn't any more specific when it came to actual political action—just as the War on Terror was all about rhetoric, so are the current slogans of IM.

Meanwhile, the leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, tried to tiptoe around the issue and simply shared an article about the massacre on his Facebook page (notably from Austria's largest left-wing newspaper), along with the message "Wake up!"—as if to please all parties involved. Sadly, this also tells us something about the state of political discourse in Austria: As long as you are only remotely Islam-critical and latently xenophobic, you're on the safe side of public debate. Just as the far-right's support throughout Europe continues to grow, their ideology seems to arrive at the political center.

In another posting, Strache went on to say, "The PEGIDA movement gains more and more followers all over Europe. People are asking for a clear division line between Europe and radical Islam." Of course, this division line already exists. But so does the vague feeling among the frustrated, saddened people that something still has to be done and some statement needs to be made against the invasion of our freedom from unknown groups with unknown goals and even less well understood ideologies.

Virtually no party or political movement throughout Europe asks for tolerance of radical Islam or Islamic terror. However, this fact is beyond the point. It just needs one Heinz-Christian Strache and a couple of disillusioned Identitarians to call for a division line that already exists, to make everybody believe that it doesn't.

DENMARK

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Pia Kjærsgaard and a painting of herself.Picture courtesy of the Danish Peoples Party press section

The Charlie Hebdo attack really snatched at the heartstrings of Denmark, a country where the immigration debate rages and the right-wing Danish People's Party recently topped the polls. It's less than ten years since newspaper Jyllands Posten published the Mohammed drawings—a series of 12 satirical cartoons that were supposedly intended to contribute to the debate surrounding the criticism of Islam and media self-censorship but led to violent protests throughout the Middle East.

The events of Wednesday brought about great sorrow from bystanders and media folks alike, and, unsurprisingly, re-ignited the debate on whether or not it's appropriate to publish such cartoons. On whether it is a matter of freedom of speech or just provocation for the sake of provocation.

Pia Kjærsgaard, founder and former leader of the Danish People's Party, told TV2 that given the tragedy in France she believed the cartoons should be reprinted in order to "show who we are" and that "we wouldn't be threatened." Newspaper BT's editor-in-chief Olav Skaaning Andersen strongly disagreed and insisted that there was "no journalistic grounds" on which to do so.

The right wing have been quick to link the incidents to religious fanatics and claim it as an attack on free speech. Kristian Thuelsen Dahl, current leader of the Danish People's Party, was unavailable for a quote but his Facebook status left no doubt as to his opinions:

There's barely any doubt that the attack on the magazine happened in order to suppress freedom of speech and is based in religion. It shows, that we're up against terror-types, that will stop at nothing in their war against freedom and the freedom of speech

[...]

But for the rest of us, the fear is that this will, again, compromise freedom of speech and that the assailants will be successful in their endeavor. This must never happen! We must rethink our method of defense to secure our right to freedom!

His sentiment in rethinking "our method of defense" was echoed by Pia Kjærsgaard in an interview with tabloid Ekstra Bladet. When she asked what to do if current laws couldn't prevent such atrocities, she responded: "It's quite possible that we have to start using other methods. Maybe we need to resort to necessity. It isn't reasonable that Danes in Denmark need to be under police protection. We're the ones locked up, as if we're in a prison."

This need to "resort to necessity" and to "rethink our method of defense" is disconcertingly vague and hard to fathom in any setting other than vigilantism, a path that is not known for its ability to foster social integration. The immigration debate here in Denmark has been given credit for raising the Danish People's Party to new levels of popularity and imaginably the Charlie Hebdo tragedy may act as a scapegoat that will only further their agenda.

SPAIN

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Poster of Democracia Nacional

Spain's extreme-right parties don't possess any real power (for now), but of course they feel justified by the Charlie Hebdo massacre. "Multicultural societies are multi-troubled societies," declared Robert Hernando from Plataforma per Catalunya, a Catalan extreme-right party. "This is something that everybody can see except the guys who are in charge." Hernando was speaking last night at a solidarity demo in Barcelona that was also attended by leftist parties. "I am ashamed to be in this demonstration with people who are accomplices of this shameful colonization we are suffering in Europe. I am not used to being surrounded by such hypocrisy and opportunism."

Manuel Candela, President of Democracia Nacional, also declared: "What happened yesterday in France only strengthens our thesis. Multicultural societies have failed. A society can't live with its enemies. It is just a matter of time that this conflict between Europe and Islam will tear our continent in a bloody war. And there is only one solution: Muslims should return home. EUROPE FOR EUROPEANS!"

But in Spain these far-right groups resemble crazy preachers in the desert. The main political parties—even the moderate right-wing People's Party, who are in government and have been investing millions into strengthening Spain's borders to Africa—haven't publicly sought to use the massacre to their advantage.

Spain has a long and sad tradition of terrorist attacks: 191 died in the Islamic attack in March 2004 in Madrid, and more locally we had ETA to contend with for many years. The response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre has been the same as always—condemn and unify.

POLAND

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The drawings of Charlie Hebdo showed us the exact world we live in, but with an added punchline. No one is enough of a saint and no one is safe, either. Twelve people are dead because of the way they used to express themselves. It's a tragedy and we mourn those deaths.

But in Poland, for some right-wing parties like Ruch Narodowy, the attack was just another reason to blame everything on Western Europe because they "tolerate the growth of Salafi movements, allowing Wahhabi sect mosques to be built throughout the continent." Another conservative party, Kongres Nowej Prawicy, has its own problems to deal with; two days ago their leader was accused of having two illegitimate children, so they didn't have much to add to the discussion.

Life goes on in Poland, and no political parties have really concerned themselves with the attack.

SWEDEN

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When Sweden's general election took place in September 2014, the far-right Sweden Democrats became the country's third most popular party, taking 13 percent of the votes. The party is often mistaken for an anti-immigration party, focusing only on one political question. However, journalists such as Niklas Orrenius at the newspaper Dagens Nyheter maintain that Sweden Democrats is nationalist and its that concerns with immigration are based on a nationalist ideology.

At a press conference in December 2014, Richard Jomshof—an MP and the editor of the Sweden Democrats' in-house magazine said, "We [SD] look at Islam and Islamism as a threat. There is something very problematic with Islam."

Christmas and New Year's in Sweden saw a series of arson attacks on mosques in Eskilstuna, Eslöv, and Uppsala. The motives are not yet confirmed, but they don't appear to have been coordinated. They should nevertheless be viewed extremely seriously. As "Je Suis Charlie" is becoming the saying on everybody's lips, it's also a reminder of how society is splitting apart. Sweden Democrats' growing popularity walks hand in hand with a growing normalization of Islamophobia, which could divide the country in devastating ways.

ROMANIA

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The French Embassy in Bucharest this morning. Photo byAlex Mihăileanu

Last night and this morning, small groups of Romanians went to the French embassy and left a few candles in the snow, in front of the building, to commemorate the people who were killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

One of the first political reactions to the attacks was a moderate status posted by president Klaus Iohannis, which culminated with the idea that "religious and ethnic tolerance, as well as free speech, are the basis of modern civilization, which is built on democratic principles." After that there were several reactions from the local Muslim community who went on TV to distance themselves from the terrorist attacks. Thankfully, Muslims are pretty well integrated in Romania and there haven't been any conflicts with them for over a century. A lot of them run businesses here and the person who now runs the country's Medical Emergency Services and once led the Ministry of Health is a Palestinian.

Far-right movements in Romania are very obscure. Most of them steer clear of Muslims, and are more preoccupied with the Roma and the LGBT communities. But there were some members of the right-wing media who had racist reactions towards the attack. Lucian Mîndruță, a libertarian journalist, posted: "Allowing cultures which demolish churches and kill Christians to build mosques on our soil and impose their laws here is a suicidal idea." His ideas are also shared by Dan Tapalagă, another right-wing journalist who thinks that "they have no right to force us to think otherwise with death threats, from under a veil or a turban, or while reciting verses from the Qu'ran."

Surprisingly, there were more xenophobic reactions from Christian politicians against French secularism, which they see as the cause of the attack, than against the Muslim community. Adrian Papahagi, a Romanian politician, whose movement is a part of the European Popular Party, said that, "Making fun of sacred things is popular in secularist [anti-Christian] France," as a sort of excuse for what happened at Charlie Hebdo. He was seconded by another conservative Christian politician, Iulian Capsali, who commented on his Facebook page that "in France, Christians are persecuted by the secularist state, not by Muslims." These reactions were backed up by a large number of people who say the journalists at Hebdo provoked the French Muslim community.

SERBIA

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/01/08/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/08/' filename='how-europes-conservatives-reacted-to-the-charlie-hebdo-massacre-body-image-1420734211.jpg' id='16563']Last night's vigil outside the French Embassy in Belgrade. Photo by VICE Serbia

A group of Belgraders gathered outside the French embassy at the center of the city last night to lay flowers and light candles honoring the victims of the attack. Another vigil is planned for tonight—this one called by the Independent Union of Journalists.

After a decade of war in the Balkans, Serbian society has changed radically. The once far-right extremists pledging to ethnically cleanse neighboring Bosnia of Muslims find themselves in power these days as moderate pro-Europeans, preaching tolerance and Western democracy. Those who remained loyal to nationalism are largely ignored, only paid a small amount of attention when the government of conservative centrist Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic needs a scapegoat to mask unpopular decisions.

Those who did mention the massacre in Paris on social media or their websites mostly blamed the West and the "unjust and merciless" 1999 NATO bombing campaign on Serbia, launched to end Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

THE NETHERLANDS

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Geert Wilders and cat. Photo via Nufoto.nl

Today in the Netherlands, everyone thinks back to the local war between free speech and Islamic fundamentalism that took place ten years ago. In 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a Muslim extremist, an event that gave rise to a decade-long discussion about radical Islam.

In the intervening years, politician Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), has set the tone for the debate about Islam in the country. By packaging his message in witty soundbites and memorable quotes, he has managed to insert his message of Islamophobic and anti-EU sentiments into the mainstream political debate. Because of his fiercely populist politics and tactics, his more traditional opponents find it difficult to handle or react to him.

Wilders adheres to strict media blackouts, waiting for the shit to hit the fan before he shows up for a few minutes to tell anyone with a microphone how right he turned out to be. He started his media blitz about the attacks in Paris yesterday with the tweet: "When will Rutte and other Western government leaders finally understand: This is war."

While Wilder is declaring an all-out war, his opponents are pleading for moderation and peace. Some local Muslim organisations such as the Dialogue Between Muslims and Governments (CMO) and the Cooperation Moroccan Dutchmen (SMN) have rushed to condemn the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices. Spokesperson Farid Arzakan branded the attacks "terrible" and called on everyone to choose their words carefully when responding to the event. "We shouldn't be using terms like 'war'; that seems very inappropriate."

After the murder on Van Gogh, a "shouting demonstration" organized by Amsterdam's mayor took place in the city to show the country's anger. Yesterday, on the same Dam Square, people quietly chanted "Je suis Charlie" and emphasized that they were there to commemorate, not demonstrate, and most certainly were not anti-Muslim.

Previously – Europe's Leading Satirists Respond to the Charlie Hebdo Massacre

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Photos by Paul Dunca, Diana Bobina, Andronis, Maria Drăghici, Ana Maria Preduț, and Virginia Lupu

Based on the news cycle, you'd think LGBT people all lived in a sparkly version of hell. It's true that in many ways, being queer can suck, but besides dealing with a whole lot of crap, LGBT people are living beautiful, diverse lives in a variety of cities across the world. Our new photo column "Being Gay Is Beautiful in..." explores this idea, showcasing photos of a different city's LGBT community every week to display how being queer is fucking awesome.

This week, we go to Bucharest, Romania. Although Romania remains a deeply homophobic country, its LGBT community has continued to host pride parades, an LGBT History Month, and QUEER NIGHT, an annual alternative party created exclusively for LGBT people. For this week's column, VICE Romania collected photos of LGBT Romanians celebrating at QUEER NIGHT and partying at underground events.

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Here's a drawing of Kurt Westergaard

Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard is well aware of how it feels to be the target of extremist anger. In 2006, he drew a cartoon for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, illustrating Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. It wasn't taken lightly and incited protests worldwide. Since then, he's been living with constant death threats. He's been attacked in his home by Islamic extremists and is still under constant police protection. As if that's not enough, the far right have adopted the drawing of Muhammad and continue to use it as a symbol of why they believe Islam is horrible and violent.

In light of the tragic attack on the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, we called him and convinced him to give his two cents on the week's incidents in Paris.

VICE: What's your take on the tragic events that took place at the offices of Charlie Hebdo?
Kurt Westergaard: Just like everyone else, I think it's awful. Really, really awful. And it has sent a huge shockwave through society, all across Europe.

Do you feel that recently there's been an escalation in attacks on freedom of speech?
Every time something like this happens, it's an escalation. And, of course, it has some terrible consequences, as it brings out self-censorship in everyone.

What about your own drawings? Has this changed the way you think about them?
No. I don't think it has. What's important now is that we don't move backwards. That we don't submit to this grotesque situation and begin to think it's so dangerous to either write or draw about Islam. Any time something like this happens, it's a huge shock, but luckily I don't think either the people or the press will stand for it. The worst part is that it has a very negative influence on integration everywhere.

Speaking of integration, the right wing have sort of adopted your drawing of Muhammad to use in their own context. How do you feel about that?
The drawings are mine. It's very odd that the right wing has been using them this way. It's obviously illegal and I can press charges, but right now it's just something I have to live with.

Right. Finally, has the attack in France changed anything for you personally?
I'm incredibly angry over being threatened in the way I have been since I made my drawings. That anger has helped me to overcome the fear of an attack. Mentally, it's been a way to cope for me.

Previously – Europe's Leading Satirists Respond to the Charlie Hebdo Massacre

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A man lights a candle at a vigil for the victims of the "Charlie Hebdo" attack in Berlin. Photo by Flickr user Thierry Chervel

Welcome back to the Fear Digest, our weekly countdown of the things terrifying America. Read last week's column here.

10. Controversial Images
It was one of those weeks when the world seemed a little more dangerous and a little less familiar. On Wednesday, three gunman stormed into the offices of the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, killing a dozen people there before fleeing and later taking hostages at a printing plant while an apparently allied terrorist seized a grocery store. The violence seemed like an assault on satire itself, or even free speech generally, and media outlets across the globe struggled with how exactly to cover the event. Should they republish the cartoons of Muhammed that made Charlie Hebdo a target for Muslim extremists—a gesture that would display solidarity with the victims and might show that the press couldn't be bowed by threats—or was it not worth the risk? Did some of the cruder drawings cross the line into being simply racist caricatures? Whatever their reasoning, a lot of publications deliberately didn't show the controversial cartoons, with some even blurring photos of Charlie Hebdo covers that featured Muhammed (without context, this sort of made it look like they had giant dicks on them):

[tweet text="How the terrorists win: @Telegraph is now blurring the cover Mohammed cartoon of #CharlieHebdo in its reporting pic.twitter.com/DffGzIrQZI" byline="— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg)" user_id="Yair_Rosenberg" tweet_id="552814280471367680" tweet_visual_time="January 7, 2015"]

Where this gets kind of muddled is that the Associated Press went a step further, with a spokesman telling BuzzFeed News, "It's been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images." Wait, some people said, what about Andres Serrano's famous Piss Christ artwork? Why is that available in the AP image library? Our bad, said the AP, who promptly pulled it down. That's a stupid and dangerous precedent, wrote the Stranger's Dan Savage. "Who determines what images (or stories?) are deliberatively provocative as opposed to unintentionally provocative or just plain old provocative or not provocative at all? Who gets to play the censor?" he said in a Thursday blog post. "Anyone with a gun or grievance—which means anyone at all."

Last week's rank: Unranked

9. The Islamic State
Another side effect of the attack, which al Qaeda's Yemeni branch claimed responsibility for, was that that terrorist outfit may have enhanced its reputation among jihadists around the world, a victory in the "the public relations war" it's been fighting against the Islamic State (IS), reported Fox News. (Though the gunman who took hostages in the Paris supermarket claimed allegiance to IS.) That means that for once IS didn't seem like the Big Bad facing the West.
Last week's rank: 6

8. Lionfish
Just when IS looks a bit less threatening, we have to worry about a new danger—lionfish. The ugly creatures have been spreading invasively throughout the Atlantic Ocean after appearing off the coast of Miami in 1985, and now the government is so concerned about them killing other fish and coral reefs that it's advising people to kill and eat as many of them as possible. It might seem like a small threat, but the species' spread is pretty terrifying, as you can see from this map:

Last week's rank: Unranked

7. Republicans
Speaking of the government, the GOP now controls a pretty big chunk of it, and liberals are worried about what that means. "The last time Republicans had political momentum, after the 2010 elections, they plunged the United States into a year of crisis governance, including a threat to default on the debt if they didn't get concessions on spending cuts," wrote Slate's Jamelle Bouie. Of course, maybe this new batch of conservative congressmen will be less obstructionist and more open to compromise in the name of getting things done than their predecessors, but on the other hand hahahahaha.
Last week's rank: Unranked

6. Vacations
It's enough to make you want to get away from it all—but not many Americans can do so. According to a recent survey, more than 40 percent of them didn't take a single vacation day in 2014. Why not? "Fear is a major factor holding American workers back," reported Quartz. "A study by the US Travel Association found that four out of ten Americans were shying away from vacation days because of fear of more work upon their return or of being replaced while away."
Last week's rank: Unranked

5. Sledding
Our dystopian nightmare of overwork at least keeps us away from certain dangerous recreations like sliding down an icy hill really fast. Several people have won massive settlements in lawsuits against local governments after suffering sledding injuries, so now a bunch of municipalities have simply banned the activity to protect themselves from liability. Good job, everyone.
Last week's rank: Unranked

4. The Weather
In case you haven't noticed, a massive wave of freezing cold has basically consumed the entire country. Ten people have already died this winter in and around Chicago alone, and the homeless are especially at risk as temperatures drop. Shelters and government officials across the country are dealing with the cold as best they can, while the Weather Channel is coping as usual, i.e. it's running ominous snow-related graphics constantly.
Last week's rank: 3

3. People Who Hate the Cops
The weather hasn't done much to chill the conflict between the police and the activists who hate them, as a recent protest in Portland, Oregon, showed. Activists chanting slogans, like "hands up, don't shoot" and "I can't breathe," disrupted a town hall meeting held by Senator Ron Wyden that fairly quickly descended into disorder, with a 100-year-old Navy veteran who was being honored calling for the interlopers to show some "respect." Meanwhile, in Missouri, protesters interrupted the opening session of the state legislature before being removed by the police.
Last week's rank: 1a

2. Cops
The cops, on the other hand, continued to demonstrate why some people really, really hate them: An Idaho officer killed a women accidentally while trying to shoot her dog, an NYPD cop was caught on video "joyriding" on the roof of a police cruiser, and authorities released a clip of Cleveland police forcing Tamir Rice's sister to the ground moments after shooting the 12-year-old. On the plus side, cops aren't handing out ominous "Welcome to Fear City" leaflets like they were in New York back in the 70s.
Last week's rank: 1b

1. Terrorism
But everyday fears about being killed by the cops or freezing to death were mostly pushed aside this week in favor of a renewed focus on terrorism. The FBI and the State Department issued vague warnings in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, while neocons used the tragedy as an opportunity to bash Obama and demand that no one get in the way of the NSA and the rest of the national security state—New York Congressman Peter King even implied in a radio interview that the NYPD's controversial surveillance operations on the Muslim community were justified. We're only 11 days into 2015, but it looks like it's going to be a long and terror-filled year.
Last week's rank: Unranked

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

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James Bidgood's photos are highly saturated fantasies where half-naked boys lean sensually beneath glittery skies. It's as if David LaChapelle shot twink porn, but where LaChapelle's work looks hyperkinetic and hard, Bidgood's photos seem hypnagogic and gauzy—ecstasy to LaChapelle's coke.

People often cite Bidgood's work as a precursor to LaChapelle's and other artists like French duo Pierre et Gille, but despite his reputation amongst artists, Bidgood has mostly existed outside of popular recognition for the past 40 years. His most famous work, 1971's erotic arthouse artifact Pink Narcissus, was originally credited to "Anonymous," and fans often mistake the film for the product of more well known queer film pioneers like Andy Warhol or Kenneth Anger. His work was really fucking gay long before marriage equality was hip, and the price he paid was to be forgotten for a long time.

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Before Bidgood, gay erotic photos tended to fall into two camps: soft-core physique pictorials (for bros who liked to look at other bros wearing briefs), or low-rent, hardcore pornos. Instead of producing photos with production values as shoddy as your average dick pic, Bidgood crafted entire worlds for his models to inhabit. Using cheap paper materials and sequins he birthed glittery dreamscapes in his tiny Manhattan apartment.

His work is painstaking in the truest sense of the word. An uncompromising artistic vision motivates him, and he obsessively worries about his own inadequacy. Pink Narcissus took seven years to finish, but you can't keep a good gay down. Now in his 80s, Bidgood has launched an IndieGoGo campaign to buy a new camera and start publicly producing art once again. With only a few days left, he still has a lot of money to raise, so if you cared enough to read this far, you should probably go donate.

Right before Christmas, I sat down with Bidgood in the same small apartment where he created so many of his photos, to discuss fame, shame, and what he plans next.

VICE: It seems like you're finally getting a tiny taste of the recognition you deserve. How does that feel?
James Bidgood: Right now, I'm suffering Susan Boyle syndrome—which is I've been this piece of shit on the fourth floor and nobody cared for a long time—and now suddenly I go on Facebook and read these things. It's like I could walk on water.

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And it's very hard to live like this and to look at my life and how poor I am. It's not easy. It cuts me, and I read on there who I am and what I am, and they talk about the people that borrowed from me and they're all living high off the hog, and it doesn't make sense to me. How I can be all that?

You realize you're a huge influence though, right?
You have to understand: I can't understand it. I did some nice things, but a lot of people do a lot nicer things.

I did do something different, and I will say that. When you're looking at photographs, if one of mine is there you know it's mine. You know a Diane Arbus when you see a Diane Arbus, and that I'm in that league makes me happy, because you know if it's a Bidgood and that's a flattering thing—it means I discovered a way to do something that set me apart.

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You have a reputation for being uncompromising when it comes to your work. Why?
The reason I try so hard is because I think I'm so bad. If you don't think you're very good, or that you don't know shit from Shinola about art, then you figure, "I've got to try much harder and do better. I can't just blow a fart through some tissue and call it art!" I'm not good enough to do that, so I have to make sure everything is just as good as I can possibly get it, and that means I hardly ever get it done—I took seven years to make a movie.

And nobody likes that, you know? I've worked for photographers, and they wanted to go home and fuck their wives at five o'clock and I was still going. It was always just a job to everybody, and nothing's ever just a job to me. And that's a curse, because—well, you can imagine. Everyone hates you. Oh yeah, they can't stand you. It's like a goody two-shoes or something, but that's not what it's about. Even if it's a fucking catalog shot, couldn't it just be a little nicer so somebody might enjoy it more? Or so it might sell the product more? I don't know. I don't even know that anybody sees that stuff when they look at a package insert. I have no idea. And I don't care. It has to do with what I think of myself when I go home at night.

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What are you going to create with the new camera from your IndieGoGo campaign?
A new series about real love affairs of gay people. They're fairy tales drawn from real life, starting with two men who are very much in love. In my version of their story, a king is on safari in his jungle country, and he comes upon this one part that's sparkling and glowing. In the crotch of a tree is the reason for all of this dazzle and it's this creature whom he falls in love with.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

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Photo by Wikimedia Commons user David Shankbone

You probably know Alex Karpovsky as Ray Ploshansky, the sardonic Greenpoint coffee shop manager in Lena Dunham's infamous HBO show, Girls. However, for the past decade, he's also played a supporting role in America's micro-budget independent film scene. He's written and directed several of his own films and acted in movies like Beeswax by Andrew Bujalski ("the Godfather of Mumblecore") and Mike Birbiglia's Sleepwalk with Me (a cult favorite).

Karpovsky often plays a meta-version of himself in his own features. In the buddy comedy Red Flag, he's on a modest movie tour, repping an older film of his called Woodpecker to under-packed art house theaters and stoned kids on college campuses. There's a nice moment in the film where he's introduced before one of his director's talks as one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2006 and the voice behind several Russian gangsters in Grand Theft Auto IV. Both true, but his IRL bio also boasts a starring role in a new feature called Tired Moonlight, which was directed by Britni West and is premiering at Rotterdam Film Festival.

I gave Karpovsky a call to chat about his new film, acting and directing at the same time, and Lena Dunham's intelligence.

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VICE: How did you get involved with Tired Moonlight?
Alex Karpovsky: Britni and her boyfriend Stephen Gurewitz are old friends of mine. I met them both on a movie called Incredibly Small four or five years ago, and since then we've worked on a bunch of projects together. Stephen made a feature length film called Marvin, Seth, and Stanley that Britni worked on as well. So they are just old friends of mine.

Britni is from Montana and she made a movie out there kind of about her upbringing and her childhood, incorporating all of these colorful and eccentric characters that she knows. So we made this really beautiful and lyrical tone poem, a journey through the backwoods of Montana, shot in 16mm two summer ago now.

I read that you're not just acting in this, but also working as an associate producer. Is that sort of doubling common in the context of these small indie films?
To say the very least, these low budget independent movies are incredibly collaborative endeavors. You need to rely on so many dependencies and favors just to make the whole project congeal. So if I can help in anyway, I try to do it. So in this movie, I tried to put on my very small and ill-fitting producer's cap in hopes that it might help a few things.

And is this the same context in which you've made a lot of your films?
There's a lot of backscratching involved. I do something on yours, you do something on my movie. And it can be anything. Last year, I helped me friend record sound. I boom-operated on his movie and in return I got him to act in one of my projects. So it's really whatever anybody can do.

In a lot of your movies, you play a version of yourself. But Rubberneck is very different. You're playing a lovesick suburban scientist. I was curious, did you write it with yourself in mind?
I wrote it with my friend Garth Donovan in hopes of finding someone a little bit older and with a little bit different energy than me. We did find someone after a long process that we were really excited about, but unfortunately three days into our shoot, he had a family emergency and had to drop out. We didn't have any one else lined up as a number two and we had to keep the train moving. So we re-shot the first three days with myself and that's how I ended up playing that role. It was absolutely not written for me.

I think I read that with John Cassavetes's Love Streams, he only ended up being in it because someone dropped out last minute.
Was he? That's really interesting. Do you know who was initially supposed to be in it?

It was Jon Voigt. Cassavetes is someone who is interesting to think about as maybe being a bit of a model for what you're doing. You're acting in bigger and bigger things and still trying to do your own smaller projects. But a lot of things have changed in independent film since Cassavetes's day.
The similarity remains that people want to make small, personal, intimate projects with a group of their friends. I think that has remained the same, but in terms of the practicality and the execution, a lot of things have changed, and I think a lot of things have changed for the better. With the advent of really good and cheap video cameras, the aesthetic boundaries between what someone does on their own in the basement and what we are presented from a studio have increasingly disintegrated. And for a lot of people, especially if they are watching it on their laptops, they can't even tell the difference. There are no longer these binary camps between us and them and between personal stories and other stories.

And another reverberation is it's a lot cheaper to tell these personal stories without any corporate or studio backing. You can now do it on these sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo and these crowd sourcing platforms. With these new DSLR cameras and these new web sites, it's much easier to tell these stories. I think that's fundamentally different from when Cassavetes was making his movies.

Cassavetes sometimes talked about his model being that he would go out and do something commercial and make some money in Hollywood and then go and use that money to fund his own stories with his friends. But in terms of that model, I am so lucky because I can go out and get some money from the show that I do and use that money to fund my own projects and the projects of my friends. But unlike Cassavetes, who felt he was selling out doing that kind of thing, I don't feel that way at all. I'm working on something that I'm really proud of and think is really interesting and engaging and I hope to get to do for a long time. So I feel like in many ways, I'm even luckier than Cassavetes even though I'm not nearly as talented—if that makes sense.

Absolutely. Also, in your case, with Girls, you weren't auditioning for some role with a big paycheck. You were in the same small indie world of acting in a friend's film when you were first in Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture, right?
Yeah, exactly. And in fact, I've only [gotten] one or two things in my life through auditions. The other 99 percent have all been through friends, acquaintances, and stuff like that.

What are you working on right now?
The Cohen brothers are making a new movie—I don't think it'll be out for another year—but I'm acting in that. And I'm also directing and producing a web series about internet dating in Los Angeles called Side Swiped that is really fun and weird and dark. And just acting in independent movies here and there. I'm writing another movie I hope to make in the fall. We'll see what happens.

On the topic of that web series, have you gotten into that show High Maintenance?
Yes that's a good reference for it. We're working in the same mold of a small video project, eight-to-ten minutes long, that explore some of the weird characters in our lives. High Maintenance is a huge influence for sure.

And are you a character in it?
No, I'm just directing and producing it.

Is that a relief sometimes to not have to do everything?
I just think it's fun to direct. It's just very pleasurable. And if I don't act, yes it's even more fun. But I also think I just do a better job when I'm not also trying to act. I can just focus on the images and the performances of the other people. I'm not as distracted. Some people can multi-task a lot better. Lena is an incredible multitasker in that sense. She can be totally present in a scene and be loose, flexible, and have great improvisational ability. But there's another core processor in her mind that is simultaneously making all these notes of all these adjustments that need to happen to the image and to performances and whatever else. And I can't do that as well. I'm not as smart as she is.

Follow Whitney on Twitter.

Last year the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) made an average of nearly 600 illicit drug seizures a week. The Australian Crime Commission hasn't yet released the final tally but numbers have been rising since 2009, with the 2012-2013 period setting an all-time record of 86,918 seizures nationwide. This could either mean improved techniques by border security or more likely, a growing local market. And with demand comes suppliers, any way they can.

Drugs come into Australia in all sorts of ingenious ways. And although the ACBPS is an utterly dry government bureaucracy, they're not above occasionally hat-tipping a good attempt with a pun-laden media release. In fact there seems to be a direct correlation between the ingenuity of the smuggler and the cringe-worthiness of the subsequent media release. So with 2014 showing creativity on both sides of the law, we tallied some favourite examples.

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Kicking off last year was a January 1 case the ACBPS dubbed a Not-So-Happy New-Year. A 25-year-old man was caught with 29 kilograms of methamphetamine hidden inside gelatin vitamin capsules. And if you're wondering what it takes to hide 27 kilos, that's 48,500 capsules inside 735 bottles. Unfortunately border guards at New South Wales' Air Cargo facility pulled apart this two-box consignment and after conducting tests, confirmed the white powdery substance had negligible nutritional benefit.

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A few months later a 33-year-old man from Quakers Hill, New South Wales, was arrested for importing liquid cocaine inside a 2.6 litre box of wine. Considering Australia was the destination, the man presumably thought a goon sack would blend right in. But when the package arrived from Brazil it was intercepted at Sydney's International Mail Facility where customs officials noticed it had been tampered with. And the title on their media release? Coke and Wine Mix Proves a Headache for Drug Smuggler.

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In another liquid cocaine story, a 22-year-old woman from the UK attempted to bring in 1.5 litres inside a lava lamp. She arrived in Sydney on a cruise ship from New Caledonia, where at White Bay Cruise Terminal sniffer dogs signaled something was up. Border guards found the lamp, which was filled with bright yellow liquid and featured a painting of a Hawaiian girl sitting beside the sea. In court the woman faced up to 25 years imprisonment or a fine of up to $850,000. She is still yet to be sentenced.

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Later in July a 41-year-old man was busted with 5 kilograms of heroin concealed inside individually wrapped chocolates. Even the ACBPS's New South Wales Regional Commander, Tim Fitzgerald, acknowledged the attempt had been "carefully thought out and planned". However when he arrived at Sydney airport from Singapore, he was pulled aside by customs officials and searched. The multiple bags of chocolates raised their suspicions and when x-rayed the chocolates were found to be irregularly hollow. The ACBPS didn't miss a beat, putting out a press release dubbed Sweet Detection – Heroin Found Inside Chocolates. The man now faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.

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In September the ACBPS penned a media release titled Fishy Import Hooks Two Men which detailed - you guessed it – a case of two men importing narcotics inside boxes of fish. The sizeable bust of 88 kilograms of heroin and 21 kilograms of meth, concealed amongst frozen fish fillets as brown and white ice-packs, was estimated to have a street value at around $75 million. The ploy came apart when the ACBPS observed the shipment stopped in Kuala Lumpur, and the contents switched before being sent on. Two men, both Vietnamese-Canadian dual-nationals, attempted to collect the consignment and were arrested on the spot. The investigation also uncovered a makeshift heavy-duty press, which police believe was used to compress the bricks of heroin. The whole operation was hailed a triumph in multi-agency cooperation and a failure in criminals knowing what colour ice is.

While there were drug battles won in 2014 the overriding lesson seemed to be that narcotics aren't going away. As Australia's newly-minted Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Scott Morrison, admitted in a speech earlier this year, "Despite rising rates of seizure at the border ... the drug trade is increasing as supply grows to meet ever increasing demand."

All images via the Australian Federal Police

Follow Max on Twitter: @RannMax

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Photo by Matt Ham, Off the Boat

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

Surfing in Scotland isn't easy. Nature sees to that. The waves are only decent during winter, and even then you can only surf during a small window of daylight. Have a crack at northern Scotland's best spots and you'll be forced to endure freezing water, snow, and blasting winds, while also having to dodge the blocks of ice that tend to creep up on you out of nearby river mouths.

The small town of Thurso boasts the best right-hand breaking wave in Europe, and despite its climatic disposition has managed to spawn a group of hardened surfers. The sport has transformed a town—once famous only for agriculture and a nuclear power plant—to a place where those braving the cold are rewarded with uncrowded waves.

Mark Boyd is a regular fixture in the freezing line-ups along the coastline. I asked him how the area's taken transformation.

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VICE: How and when did surfing get going in Scotland?
Mark Boyd: Surfing first started in Scotland on the east coast in the mid to late 1960s, with small groups of surfers forming around the Fraserburgh, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh regions. Andy Bennetts from Edinburgh, and his friends Stuart Crichton and Ian Wishart, thought they were the only surfers in the country when, in September of 1968, they set off for Aberdeen on the train to try out Bennetts's new board, which he'd purchased on a holiday to Cornwall.

When they arrived at Aberdeen, however, and asked a friendly man at the beach pavilion if they could leave the board with him for safekeeping, they were surprised to discover that he already looked after a board for another surfer—local lad George Law, who'd been surfing there since 1967.

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A sign on the beach in Thurso. Photo by Matt Ham, Off the Boat

Can you tell me about the area of Thurso? What's it made up of industry-wise?
I grew up in the countryside near a small fishing village. Fishing and farming are the main industries in the area. I now live in Thurso, a town of around 10,000 people, where Dounreay Nuclear Power Plant employs much of the population. In the far north of Scotland, a large percentage of men work offshore in the oil industry in the North Sea and West of Shetland.

How far north are the waves?
On the mainland the most famous stretch of surfing coast is found on the north coast. But you can travel up to 60°N in Scotland and still find waves in the Shetland Islands.

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Photo by Alexander Tatko Northlink

And how cold is the water?
Winter is from December until February, I guess, but the surf season is from late September to early April. Average sea temperatures can get down to about 6°C, but we're often surfing near river mouths with ice and snowmelt, so the average temperatures in these bays can be a great deal colder. Throw in below freezing air temperatures and some wind and it gets pretty chilly.

Sometimes the sea will appear to be steaming—the fog gets so thick just where the water starts that you can't even see the surf from the car park. When the rivers freeze over, the subsequent blocks of ice breaking off and floating into the lineup can become a real hazard.

How much light do you get?
In the dead of winter it's been getting light about 9 AM, and dark about 3:30 PM. But if we're lucky enough to get some waves in summer, it's pretty cool because you can almost surf all night.

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What was the standard lifestyle for a teenager growing up in the area?
Those who weren't into football were hanging about in bus shelters, freezing and drinking Buckfast. The northeast of Scotland actually has a pretty bad reputation for drugs and, in particular, a high level of heroin addiction. It's a pretty strange contrast considering how beautiful and picturesque some of these places are. But, to be honest, through my youth I never really encountered drugs at all—I suppose I was too busy surfing. Surfing in Scotland most definitely repels anti-social behavior.

How accessible is it for kids to get into?
The best surf, unfortunately, is in the winter—so that means freezing temperatures, snow, and gales. So progress for a learning surfer is slow, particularly with short daylight hours, meaning surfing after school is not an option during peak swell season. And the waves are big and cold. It doesn't scream invitation.

Then you need a really good wetsuit, a hood, boots, gloves for the cold, and a board. It's pretty expensive, especially when wetsuits need replacing regularly to keep you warm, or if you're growing as a kid. It's really difficult to learn and needs a lot of persistence. It took me ages! And my wetsuits were always old and terrible, and I was always freezing. I never even knew it, though, until I got a new one.

Then, once you've worked out how to do it, if you're too young to have a car you're pretty limited to the spots you can surf. But once you get past all that, surfing offers you a lifestyle, sport, opportunity and a reason to travel and a network of friends across Scotland.

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How'd you get to the beach when you were younger?
I used to walk most of the time—it was pretty cold and tiring as it was all uphill on the way back with all my gear. I lived close to the beach, but the spot we surfed was actually at the far end of that beach from my house, so it was a bit of effort. When it was really cold my granny would often pick me up and drop me off in the car. When surf was big I'd ask her to sit in the car to make sure I was OK while I surfed because I was scared and alone.

Any times the cold became life-threatening?
I'm not sure about life-threatening, but I've had my fingers get so cold walking back to my car, with wetsuit gloves on, that I thought they'd never come back to life, and when they did it was so painful. You just need to know when you start getting cold to get out of the water, or that's when you start making mistakes.

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Photo by Dave Schlossbach

Is there much localism?
Like anywhere in the world where you go surfing, you have to give respect to get any, and there's not many places with world class waves these days that you won't find a degree of localism. Most quality surf spots in Scotland have a regular crew of locals who surf there day in, day out, so if you're a visitor you have to abide by the usual surfing etiquette guidelines you find anywhere else in the world and not just expect to get straight in among it at the peak.

Most Scottish surfers are pretty welcoming people, but that doesn't mean anyone will take too kindly to our welcoming nature being abused. If you take Thurso-East as an example you'll probably see the same few faces on most of the best waves, and if there ever was a purpose of localism, in my opinion, it is to ensure that waves aren't wasted. When locals see you're being respectful, waiting your turn, not hassling and not missing waves and wasting them, you could find yourself getting some of the best waves of your life in among a great group of people. Act any way in the contrary and the boys aren't shy to "get ye telt!"

Follow Marcus Thompson on Twitter.

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Photo by Matt Ham, Off the Boat

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Photo by Reagan Ritchie

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Photo by Matt Ham, Off the Boat

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Photo by Matt Ham, Off the Boat

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From left: Shelby, Kinky Kace, the Bunny, Ari, Big LA, Alyssa, Mike Busey, Ratchet Regi, and Sexy Sushi. Photos by Stacy Kranitz

There's a place in central Florida where all your dreams come true. The weirder ones, anyway, the ones about your most decadent sexual fantasies, the ones where you're wandering through a party that never ends, or launching eggs into a 500-pound man's asshole, or fucking a girl while simultaneously taking a shit and showering. You can dance with snakes, ride ponies, and shoot Class 3 machine guns with the self-proclaimed "most ratchet stripper" in Orlando.

The place I'm talking about is called is the Sausage Castle. You can find it in Osceola County, a hick region about an hour away from Walt Disney World; the Castle is a compound built in front of a swampy, feces-infested body of water called Alligator Lake. It's run by 34-year-old Mike Busey, who might be described as a Juggalo version of Willy Wonka (he also happens to be Garey Busey's nephew). Mike, his degenerate cohorts, and a handful of babes who go by "the Busey Beauties" live at the Castle and throw sex-crazed parties for Florida lowlifes and D-listers like Bam Margera and GWAR. It's like a combination of the Island of Misfit Toys and the Pleasure Island from Disney's Pinocchio.

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The Sausage Castle family tree. Illustration by Amanda Lanzone

"If you're not 500 pounds, a midget, or molested by your dad, we don't have a need for you," Mike said.

During all-nighters, it's normal for a girl to fuck another girl with a beer bottle. At one notorious party, Mike piloted a drone as the device yanked an American flag out of a queen's ass and brandished the soiled banner all across his property.

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Chaz takes the Bunny for a pony ride

Over the last five years, these party tricks have gained Mike notoriety throughout Central Florida; last year the Orlando Sentinel named him the area's 51st most famous person. Over the summer, he became a full-blown internet phenom when Da Mafia 6ix's video of Ratchet Regi, one of his Beauties, giving a 500-pound man a "lapband dance" at the Gathering of the Juggalos went viral.

I initially met Mike at the Gathering. His freak show intrigued me, mainly because it managed to shock thousands of Juggalos, a group known for relishing dysfunctional shit. Mike operated an outdoor strip club at the festival, where the Busey Beauties gave disabled men in wheelchairs lap dances and sat in a smelly whirlpool. When it came time for their big performance, Mike invited the audience on stage to watch Regi squirt chocolate out of her vagina and then blow a veteran.

"We're like a subgenre of the Juggalos," Regi said of her performance. Mike agreed: "I relate to the Juggalo community so much just because I'm a broke piece of shit that lived in a trailer."

For whatever reason, Mike also related to me. After the Gathering, he invited me to stay with him and his gang of weirdos at the Sausage Castle for a weekend. He promised me I would ride an airboat through Alligator Lake, interview him on record for more than five hours, and get my ass eaten.

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Mike, Ari, and Kinky Kace take a dip in the hot tub in their living room

Mike's life hasn't always revolved around running a low-budget Playboy mansion in the Florida swamps. During his teenage years, he dedicated his life to God. He prayed daily and attended a Christian college where he played basketball—he was skinny back then. But the inner politics and hypocrisy of the school turned him off. He rebelled and eventually dropped out.

"From that point forward," Mike said, "let's just say me and the church had a little bit of a vacation."

Like Moses in exile in Midian, Mike entered a depression after he left the church. What was his purpose in life? Apparently, he was born to party. He ended up living with some bros he knew from pulling pranks on people at Downtown Disney. Mike's roommates threw wild parties, and after people noticed the absurd amount of males at the events their place started getting referred to as "the Sausage Castle."

Mike felt like his bros were his brothers, but what makes you popular with your bros rarely makes you popular with your landlord. The house's owner evicted them, devastating Mike. Then he moved into another party house—bringing the Sausage Castle nickname with him—until his new landlord evicted him too.

"[The second Sausage Castle] ended, and I was like, fuck. Then it dawned on me: You know what? We're gonna start naming these motherfuckers as we go—Sausage Castle one, two, three, four, five, six, seven," Mike said. "The Sausage Castle is wherever I and all my stupid shit go."

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Sexy Sushi, Ari, and Ratchet Regi regularly breathe fire

Since then, Mike has lived in five more Sausage Castles. He moved into the current, and longest-lasting, Sausage Castle during the recent recession. When he found the house, it was a glorified two-story shack in front of Alligator Lake. According to Mike, it was owned by a good-ole-boy contractor and his wife who lost their fortune in the economic downturn. The house went into foreclosure, and a Jewish landlord Mike calls "Israel" bought the Castle. To this day, Mike rents from him.

To fund the Sausage Castle, Mike rents out rooms to veterans and the Busey Beauties, live-streams events in his house, buses Walt Disney World interns onto the property for "intern parties," charges cover fees at house events, and hosts "Rockstar Weekends," where a person pays a few thousand dollars to live in the Sausage Castle and act out his or her sexual fantasies.

"The fascination with me is I'm this fat broke guy with a small dick and I'm surrounded by rock stars and hot chicks," Mike told me. "I give the average Joe hope he can grow up to be fat with an ugly haircut and bad teeth and fuck beautiful women."

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Ari strips on the living room's granite stage

In the past five years, he says, he's spent more than $50,000 transforming the decaying house into the Sausage Castle with weird shit like a granite strip-club stage in the living room that boasts a "Wheel of Debauchery" to inspire salacious activities. Instead of buying standard velvet strip-club chairs, he has surrounded the stage with church pews plastered with porn photos. He's also filled massive fish tanks with rubber dicks that he calls "Dildo Atlantis."

Ande Spade, Inmate Art, and Frog the Artist's murals of American icons like E.T. and Michael Jackson cover the walls, and Fleshlights have been built into wall murals of naked women. (As an advocate for gay rights, Mike also installed a butthole Fleshlight into a mural of a naked man, but someone stole that toy.)

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Ratchet Regi plays with her snake in the kitchen, which is covered in photos and panties

"We try to keep it like Disney World. We like to hide dust and construction," Mike said. "We treat this like a set."

If Mike brought his kitchen to Art Basel Miami Beach, he could probably sell the room as an installation piece for $100,000. He removed his microwave and replaced it with a box covered in cheetah-print fabric, where he used to keep a snake. From the ceiling, he hangs panties that girls have given to him. And on the fridge, he keeps photos from parties and of his friends and low-culture celebrities he knows, like Weeman, Bret Michaels, and Michael Jordan's son. Not to mention he's got the condom he bust his virginity nut in hanging on the wall of his office.

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Ratchet Regi, Robbie, Alyssa, and Big LA dance at an impromptu pool party

But it's not the decor that makes the Sausage Castle special. It's the people. They come to live with Mike for all kinds of reasons, but it usually boils down to the fact that they're outcasts exiled from their families and hometowns.

Ratchet Regi grew up in Kansas and spends her nights maintaining her status as the "most ratchet stripper in Orlando." An Afghanistan War veteran named Nick lives upstairs with a pack of dogs and smokes weed to keep himself from shooting people. Another veteran named Robbie lives in an outhouse in the back and had to have a doctor install a metal plate into his head after he nearly died in a motocross accident. Among all these rugrats, Naked Ashley walks around the Sausage Castle in the nude all day for no apparent reason. And although Gay Aaron revealed little to me about his personal life, he regularly visits the Sausage Castle to detox from drugs, so I presume he's going through his own shit, just like all the other tenants and regulars.

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Kinky Kace in the bedroom Mike calls "the treehouse"

Although the first Sausage Castle served as a bro pad, today's incarnation revolves around the needs of women, gay men, and veterans. Kinky Kace moved to the Castle after she came out as a lesbian in "super racist" Citrus County, Florida. Moving into the Sausage Castle, she told me, allowed her to find self-confidence.

"Every time we have a party, Mike's like, 'Kace—get yourself some pussy! Look at that ratchet bitch right there! She'll suck on your clit for hours,'" she said. "For me, being in a place—a home—where everybody accepts me for what I do or what I want, that gives me moral support."

To repay the Sausage Castle for providing her with a sanctuary, Kace renovated the girls' bathroom, painting it purple and pink, storing vintage Playboys on shelves above the sink, and installing a chandelier. Across from the toilet, she hung a sign that says, "Family, Friends, Forever." She said, "People look at that sign and think, Maybe [the Sausage Castle is] more than I thought."

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Mike relaxing with his pugs in his bed

But of all the peculiar characters of the Sausage Castle, Mike might be the freakiest.

"My whole childhood was super fuckin' weird," he recalled. "I remember being four or five years old and burning part of my family's trailer. I blamed it on my sister. So my dad put me in the bathtub and rolled up newspaper and burned it and started taunting me with it like, 'You wanna get burnt, motherfucker? You like that? You like that?' Then he told me to pack all my shit up because he was giving me away. He dropped me off at a fuckin' children's home, drove around, came back, and took me to McDonald's."

Mike spent most of his youth in foster care in South Carolina and also lived in California, Louisiana, and Florida. When he was 13, another foster kid told him the man he thought was his dad wasn't actually his biological father. To this day, Mike has no clue who his real father is.

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Mike and his alternative family watch 'American Horror Story' together

Without traditional familial ties, Mike created his own with his loved ones and friends who live and hang around the Sausage Castle. Even though they are crazies, covered in poo and period blood, the Sausage Castle residents take care of one another better than many people look after their biological children, siblings, and grandparents.

"I always felt this sense of insecurity, like things weren't stable," Mike said. "I've known different ways of life and different lifestyles growing up, but the Sausage Castle has been the most continuous, steady thing. It's going on, like, 15 years now. I've never had anything in my life last this long, not even a Christmas tradition or a relationship—nothing. It's one of the few places where I find some kind of sick, twisted contentment and inner joy and peace amid the ridiculousness of what I call my life."

Follow Mike Busey and Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier speaks at the 2014 ICP-Bard MFA Symposium. © International Center of Photography. Photo by Emma Freeman

Does art have the power to generate social and political change? It's a question that's been discussed endlessly over the centuries, but it seems especially timely in the past few months, with the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the wave of activism-infused art that's followed the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. So it seems fortuitous that a panel at the School of the International Center of Photography last month discussed that very topic.

Part of the all-day symposium What's Love Got to Do with It: Affect, Interactivity, and the Haptic organized by the ICP-Bard MFA candidates in conjunction with MA candidates from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the panel Affect, Image, and Political Agency investigated photography, video, and performance art's ability to document and transform evocative personal experiences into provocative political statements.

Moderated by art historian, writer, and art critic David Deitcher, the Affect, Image and Political Agency panel featured multidisciplinary artist Patty Chang, who according to Deitcher test "the limits of endurance and, sometimes, polite taste," and photographer, video artist, and performer LaToya Ruby Frazier. The two were chose for the panel due to their dual interests in artistic creation and activism—Chang often explores parental relationships, Asian identity, and global cultural concerns in her work while Frazier delves into the underrepresented realities of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

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Deitcher opened the panel with a question posed by equally political artist Lorna Simpson who asked, "How do we move from pain to power?" Inspired by Simpson's question, the panel examined Chang and Frazier as two artists who exemplify the power derived from unwaveringly documenting painful moments of grief, illness, intergenerational contact and the troubled legacies of capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism. Despite the differences in their subject matter, both Chang and Frazier employ their own lived experiences as a means of social, cultural, and political critique. Describing her approach to her work and, consequently, Chang's as well, Frazier explained, "It might seem personal, but it's not about me at all."

Introducing their own art individually, Chang began with an unexpected account of the wandering womb, a puzzling condition in which the uterus was thought to move freely throughout the body as theorized by, unsurprisingly, a bunch of men (including Hippocrates). Juxtaposing personal and political histories of the past and present, Chang's presentation acted as almost a performance itself with her fascinating and, at times, baffling links between seemingly disparate topics, stories, and artworks. Through her presentation, Chang wove together her own experiences from her physical and emotional symptoms during pregnancy to her travels in Uzbekistan and China, which she visited months after the height of the violent unrest between the Han Chinese majority and Uighur minority. She also included Swedish explorer Sven Hedin's The Wandering Lake, a 1937 book detailing his discovery of a mysteriously moving lake in China that is now completely dried from irrigation.

[body_image width='1278' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/01/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/09/' filename='can-art-be-a-form-of-political-activism-body-image-1420821504.jpg' id='16977'] Still from Untitled (For Abramovic Love Cocteau) via Patty Chang's Vimeo

Layering these diverse topics as "a means of creating consciousness," Chang's art frequently mines the complex intersection between bodies and landscapes as political commentary. For example, Chang introduced a video featuring ephemeral headscarves spelling out the character for "wolf" on the back of a truck in China. In an interview, a Uighur woman details the significance of the wolf as a part of the foundational mythology of the Uighur minority. As the wolf headscarves unravel over each bump in the road, Chang connects the Uighur minority's displaced identity in Western China with the similar instability of the landscape.

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Still from Patty Chang's Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part 1 via Creative Capital

The most striking instance of Chang's merging of the body and landscape in her presentation was the video Invocation for a Wandering Lake in which Chang approaches and gently bathes a beached sperm whale. White from decomposition, the whale recalls Moby Dick as well as Sven Hedin's Ahab-like colonial search for the Wandering Lake. Depicting humans' unique relationship, as Chang expressed, "both in the world and of it," Chang mournfully and caringly caresses the whale. Evoking both love and loss, the video references the detrimental effects and traumatic legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental change.

Likewise, Frazier's artwork similarly portrays the body's relationship with the landscape as a political act, reflecting the manmade problems and the silent victims of capitalism and industry in her hometown of Braddock. Located nine miles outside of Pittsburgh, Braddock is home to Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill, which has operated since 1872. An economically depressed industrial town, the city is full, Frazier said, of unaddressed problems originating from the toxicity of the steel mills, which have contaminated the soil, air, and water. While largely an African-American community, the majority of the mainstream discussion of Braddock focuses on the history of the steel mills or, more recently, their current white mayor John Fetterman and the cultural projects generated by outside artists.

Frazier on her work in the 2012 Whitney Biennial

Perhaps the most obvious and jarring comparison between the media's idealistic representation of Braddock and Frazier's art is Levi's recent advertising campaign, which portrays Braddock as a frontier-like utopia. Titled (apparently unironically) Ready to Work, the campaign reflects a romanticized vision of an emerging post-industrial Rust Belt city including, most inexplicably, horses. Screening the advertisement, Frazier described the ad as "a liberal fantasy" and "an illusion of positive change." Frazier explained the importance of her sitting "between the working class and the creative class"; she frequently challenges these false narratives through representing her own and her family's experiences. The artist even staged a performance, filmed by Art21, in order to directly confront Levi's by scraping and tearing her denim-covered body on the pavement outside of a Levi's pop-up photo workshop in New York.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/09/' filename='can-art-be-a-form-of-political-activism-body-image-1420822298.jpg' id='16983'] 2014 ICP-Bard MFA Symposium. © International Center of Photography. Photo by Emma Freeman

Working against the "historical erasure" of her community and its concerns through her art, Frazier documents three generations of black women from Braddock—her grandmother, her mother and herself. By capturing frank, beautiful, honest and, sometimes tragic moments through her camera, Frazier presents a family that has seen the rise and fall of the steel industry in Braddock from its boom in the 1920s to white flight in the 1960s to the war on drugs and the devastating effects of Reaganomics in the 1980s. The frequent lack of men in her photographs and videos also signifies the absence of men in their lives who have served in the military or worked in the steel mills.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/09/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/09/' filename='can-art-be-a-form-of-political-activism-body-image-1420822261.jpg' id='16981'] 2014 ICP-Bard MFA Symposium. © International Center of Photography. Photo by Emma Freeman

Evoking Eric Garner's last words "I can't breathe" in her discussion, Frazier not only reveals the emotional and psychological bonds between her grandmother, mother and herself, but she also depicts the realities of the chronic and terminal illnesses suffered by many Braddock residents caused by the mills. From difficult black-and-white photographs of her mother's surgical scars after an operation to remove breast cancer to her own self-portraits after lupus attacks, Frazier's photographs reflect the physical toll of living in Braddock. By presenting private moments of illness, Frazier uses her artworks as a public protest against the recent closure of the UPMC Braddock Hospital, which was, according to Frazier, "like a community center because we all have terminal illnesses." Illustrating the treatment of the community by the healthcare system, Frazier's work represents the duel deterioration of the city and the residents' bodies.

Chang and Frazier emerged through the panel as two significant artists who utilize their own personal artistic practices as tools for larger political and social goals. Placing the artists' works and the panel in conversation with the Millions March, which was held on the same day, an audience member asked Frazier specifically whether she feels optimistic about the protests against the deaths of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, and countless other people of color killed by police violence. Responding that these events confirm why she creates art with an urgent cultural meaning, Frazier replied, "I'm hopeful but serious. This is my life. It's not even art, it's my life."

Emily Colucci is a New York–based writer and the co-founder of Filthy Dreams, a blog that analyzes culture through a queer lens. Follow her on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

On the morning of Sunday's unity march in Paris, flowers lined the walls outside the original offices of Charlie Hebdo. Cartoons had been drawn in tribute. "Paris will always be Paris," one read. There were fists holding pens. One old man was covered, head to toe, in handmade signs with the "Je Suis Charlie" slogan on them.

I was with a VICE News film crew and Luc Hermann, the executive producer at documentary company Premieres Lignes, talked to us about the day of the massacre. The offices of Premieres Lignes were four meters from Charlie Hebdo's. Hermann's colleagues had been the first on the scene. There was a lot of smoke and a lot of blood, they said. They tended to the wounded and looked for survivors. In the aftermath of the shootings, those who'd been on the scene first were able to give a couple of interviews. Now, they could—they were too traumatized.

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Hermann said that when Charlie Hebdo moved into their office building, his team was excited. They knew, obviously, that the old Charlie Hebdo offices had been firebombed. But when police cars appeared outside the offices for protection, they joined the satirical magazine's staff in laughing about it. It was their way of coping with the fear, but it was also their way of living. Hermann hoped that his company and Charlie Hebdo would work on some projects together.

When Cherif Kouachi and his older brother Said were identified as the gunmen, Hermann realized that, by terrible coincidence, he knew them. In 2005, he had investigated the Buttes-Chaumont cell, of which Cherif was a member. The cell sent young Frenchmen to al Qaeda–affiliated training camps, but Hermann recalled Cherif as less a dedicated fighter and more a lost boy who still liked to smoke and drink. A product of the sprawling, poverty-stricken 19th arrondissement, Cherif had, Hermann thought, probably been let down by French society.

I had arrived in Paris on Friday, two days before the march and two days after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo. In the countryside to the north of the capital, the landscape looked medieval. Church spires humbly poked their way up into dark gray skies. Houses sat enveloped by a bottom layer of lighter gray. On the internet, shock and horror had morphed into a dizzying debate on free speech encompassing everything from the perceived racism of Charlie Hebdo to the West's hypocrisy to the suggestion that Islam itself is to blame for those who use its name in vain.

On the streets, there was some fear and much emotion. The Metro was quieter than usual but the sirens never stopped. A 30-year-old woman with a newborn baby told me she was worried that demonstrations of unity would be bombed. Employees at a pharmacy said they were concerned their local Metro station would be targeted. Friends at a local magazine admitted they'd left work early the past two days. French Muslims feared reprisals from far-right wing groups and, as this map of anti-Muslim attacks from around France shows , their fears were not unfounded. Alongside this fear, though, there was kindness—an outpouring of fraternity among shattered but emboldened people.

From Charlie Hebdo's offices, we made our way toward Place de la République, the starting point for the march. The square has, in the last few days, been the location for an ongoing vigil in honor of the dead and the statue that sits in the middle of it is covered in messages of support, flags, drawings, and cartoons while all around it groups sit in circles lighting candles in front of them.

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The march had brought up to 2 million people out onto the streets. The French Interior Ministry said it was impossible to count, there were so many. In some side roads, the crowds couldn't move at all. People sat in trees and on top of public toilets. They hung from balconies and stood in the windows of restaurants. On the rooftops, police snipers dropped in and out of view. There were, it was reported, more than 2,000 police officers and 1,350 soldiers on duty, but their presence was never keenly felt. No one was getting kettled, though at times the sheer volume of the crowd meant that it was impossible to move.

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We were, in this heaving mass of people, far from the front line of political leaders posing for their own purposes—making a show of their love of freedom when for the most part their actions had never demonstrated such a love. David Cameron took the opportunity to ratchet up the "clash of civilizations" narrative by speaking of a "fanatical death cult" and echoing the head of Mi5's demands for increased surveillance powers by talking of "keeping our security strong." Other freedom-lovers present to bang their own drums included Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and a delegation from the country widely thought to fund an array of extremist groups, Saudi Arabia.

For once, though, the hypocrisy of the leaders didn't seem to matter. The people of Paris were doing something real together. Not on the internet but on the streets. They brought signs celebrating all different kinds of creativity; they sang anthems ranging from "La Marseillaise" to a song that called for unity between Jews and Muslims. "Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies," one sign read. "Long live peace, long live liberty," said another. "Dying of laughter," said a third.

On one wall, a far-right party had put up a couple of posters. "That's not our France," pleaded the crowd gathered around it. Freedom in its Western conception can be a hard idea to defend when its ideological trumpeting comes against the real world backdrop of the recent CIA torture report, or racism in police forces, or the innocent civilians who die around the world as a result of the actions of Western governments, or any number of dreadful things that are often too hard to bear.

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But the people marching in Paris on Sunday were not marching in defense of the real-world hypocrisies and betrayals present in noble ideas. They were marching for liberty, equality, and fraternity, and they meant those things in their truest sense. They brought their own emotion and their own conception of injustice and they shared it with those around them. One marcher even carried a sign that said: "I am marching but I am conscious of the confusion and the hypocrisy of the situation."

At the center of Place de la République, the monument was covered in people and flags and messages. At its heart, a group of Palestinians had been joined by a group of Israelis. Two men from the group—one Palestinian, one Israeli—hugged and kissed each other. They looked out to the people gathered around them, shouted "Shalom, salaam, against prejudice." The crowd picked it up, and soon people of all ages and all racial backgrounds were singing together, resisting the temptation to give into fear, resisting the desires of those in politics and the media who would have us turn on one another.

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

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Yes and No supporters face off in St. George's Square on the day before the vote. The following day, No supporters reclaimed the square. Photo by James Turner

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

When Glasgow's city center was overrun by rampaging unionists the day after Scotland voted against independence from the UK, the stand of two young Yes-supporting women who were surrounded by a hostile mob went viral. It's only now, several months later, that their full story has become clear—including how they were picked out for arrest while violence broke out around them.

Depending on your opinion, Scotland was either an exciting or nervous place to be in the days leading up to its independence vote, with referendum hype and dread touching every part of the country. An expectant media had spent days beaming out photos of hopeful Yes campaigners, with the thousands of young people camped out in Glasgow's George Square providing some of the most iconic images of the campaign.

DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHO THIS GIRL IS SHE GOT GUTS #45 #INDYREF pic.twitter.com/qfqujwizDt
— Rab McEwan (@McEwanRab) September 20, 2014

Less than 24 hours after the polls had closed, the world was still watching as clashes broke out in the same location, as a group of emboldened No supporters descended on the square, determined to take it back. Spurred on by Facebook fascists Britain First, hundreds of loyalists—the kind of folk usually seen tagging alongside Orange Order parades—began gathering from early evening. Flares were set off, police horses called in and—for a couple of hours at least—hyperbolic online reports were depicting the city as a war-torn, riot-ravaged hellhole. Twitter went into a predictable meltdown, and a lot of people got very pissed off at BBC News for posting a "joke about bananas" on its Facebook page when there was a mini-riot taking place in Glasgow.

It was amid the scenes unfolding around the square that images soon materialized of a last stand from two young women. Sisters Sophie and Sarah Johnson, aged 16 and 20, weren't looking to be the center of attention when they headed to the square, as they had also done in the days ahead of the vote. But, they told me, they would soon find themselves in the "complete polar opposite" situation: as Yes supporters in the middle of an increasingly volatile crowd of tanked-up loyalists.

Grainy mobile photos show them standing their ground with a saltire, as a handful of outnumbered cops watch on. When 16-year-old Sophie's flag was wrenched from her grasp by a hostile, mostly male mob, laden with union flags, Vine footage captured by an onlooker would come to define perceptions of what had gone down in the square that night. In the febrile atmosphere of September 19, with passions running high, this imagery—of a young women standing up to a group of bullies—had an emotive pull. For many still reeling Yes supporters, it seemed to sum up everything they'd just been through.

"We didn't want to be pushed away. They [No supporters] were shouting at us to get out of the square and spitting on us," Sarah told me, explaining why they stuck around in the square for so long. "We had just as much right to be there and we weren't going to be cleared off just by them telling us to."

However, they soon would be moved on when both were arrested by the police, accused of obstructing crowd control efforts. While Sarah and Sophie insisted they were simply using their right to peacefully demonstrate, the police soon grew tired. "We were led away, smiling, while the unionists cheered," Sophie said. "We were taken off to Cathcart police station. They couldn't take us to a nearby one as that's where No supporters were being sent. It was quite a long drive so we kept ourselves entertained by singing Flower of Scotland."

Being stuck in the cells overnight, they had little idea of the extent of their newfound online notoriety, although there was one early clue. "While we were getting our fingerprints done, one of the police officers told me that some of his friends had seen the video of the flag being taken out of my hand," said Sophie.

They were released on bail and are still waiting for further news, but they could be in further trouble. "The report has finally gone through to the Fiscal [the public prosecutor], so we're waiting for a decision, which could be a fine or a court date," Sophie told me. If it came to it, a fine would likely be hundreds of pounds. They could theoretically be jailed for a breach of the peace conviction but with their lack of previous the chances are slim.

Just over a week ago, a pro-independence Facebook page finally managed to identify the pair who had remained anonymous until now, having put several appeals out. When it emerged that they were both facing potential charges following their arrest on September 19, a petition was soon started, which came "completely out of the blue" for them. Almost 10,000 signatures have since been gathered, demanding that they each receive an apology from Police Scotland for their arrest, and that all charges are dropped.

Only four other people were arrested on the day. Since then, follow-up inquiries have led to the arrest of around15 more people, all of them believed to be No supporters. Both are now hoping that the case is not taken further. "Obviously we don't want a record for doing something—peacefully protesting—which we had the right to do. I don't think we should have been arrested for it, especially as the police saw people throwing things at us, yet we were the ones taken in," said Sophie. As for the flag which was snatched from Sophie's grasp, her sister managed to seize it back, after leaping on top of it. "I think the fact that I managed to grab it back shows that Scotland is not ready to give up yet," said Sarah.

Follow Liam on Twitter.