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Flowers laid for the victims of child abuse. Photo by Susan G. Crocombe

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, survivors of child abuse were invited into Parliament. Around 300 people from all over the country crammed into the House of Commons' biggest meeting room, standing and sitting on the floor, thanks to an invitation by MP John Mann.

The last three years have seen ever grimmer child-abuse scandals surface, with few areas of British public life immune. It seems that after decades, the country is finally taking these accusations seriously and the victims themselves are finally being listened to in the corridors of power.

Called the White Flower campaign, it draws inspiration from a popular campaign that saw thousands take to the street with white flowers to protest high-level pedophile rings in Belgium. The day started with campaigners laying white wreaths and flowers next to the Houses of Parliament to commemorate children who had been murdered, disappeared, or abused.

In the meeting, emotions were running understandably high. Its purpose was to call for a statutory inquiry into organized child abuse that is "fit for purpose." Campaigners want the government's inquiry into child abuse to tackle organized and institutional child abuse from 1945 until today and to be a statutory inquiry—with power to stop any more evidence disappearing or being shredded.

Seven months after the inquiry was announced, progress has been slow, as both chairs—Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and Fiona Woolf—were forced to resign after accusations that they were too cosy with establishment figures.

VICE chatted to two of the campaign's key organizers about why they're speaking out and what they hope to achieve.

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Phil Frampton, pictured above as a child, is the coordinator of the White Flower campaign.

VICE: What is the White Flower campaign?
Phil Frampton: In Belgium, thousands took to the streets—the whole country protested the organized child abuse scandal there. We want to take the issue to the streets here. We will make sure survivors' voices are heard in the public inquiry. We have held a white flower vigil here today outside Parliament, and we will be holding them around the country, wherever children were abused. We want people to come forward and for their voices to be heard.

What do you want from the public inquiry?
We want it to tackle all abuse and go further back than 1970. It's not transparent. The choice of chair and panel member must be absolutely transparent. And we want people who come and testify to get proper support and protection. And dedicated, trained police who will be on hand to investigate the claims that are made. People need to believe in this inquiry so as many survivors as possible can come forward. Many of us here have been campaigning on this issue for decades.

How did you get involved in campaigning?
I was born into care and was in care until I was 18. I'm what they call a publicity seeker. We've been called treasure hunters, only in it for the money, and now David Cameron is calling us conspiracy theorists.

That's why we're here, united against abusers. We are survivors, whistle-blowers, MPs, child protection professionals. We're publicity seekers. It's time we were heard. Eleven million survivors united will not be defeated. Eleven million survivors can end the misery of child abuse.

Are you optimistic you will succeed?
The public inquiry has stalled before it's even begun. But we believe that Theresa May has the power to resume it. My childhood and working with child abuse survivors has taught me to be realistic. But right now, I don't believe this can all be swept under the carpet any more. I am definitely optimistic.

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Nigel O'Mara, pictured above, is a child-abuse campaigner who has faced threats and violence during his search for justice.

VICE: Can you talk a bit about why you're here?
Nigel O'Mara: I am a survivor of abuse in care homes, and I set up UK's first-ever helpline for male survivors—the Survivors' Helpline. I set it up in 1986 and started bringing things into the public domain. And I paid dearly for it.

How?
I was beaten half to death three times. During the North Wales child-abuse scandal I supported survivors. I was warned that my life would not be worth living if I continued. I was attacked in my own home. My partner escaped and managed to tell the police. They never came. I told them what had happened and they said, "Well, what do you expect?"

And they did nothing about it?
I knew not to expect much from the police. I reported being sexually abused to the police aged 12, and they told me that it doesn't happen to boys. Me and my other friends reported it to the police but nothing was done. Back then it was impossible to convict pedophiles. Things are a lot better now. But there is still a long way to go.

And what do you want to see coming out of this campaign?
I'd like to see an open and transparent inquiry that enables all survivors to take part, whether they are aged ten or 100. That's why we're called survivors. Because we are still alive. Many of my friends were not here today. Some like Jason Swift were murdered.

Others we lost to suicide or drugs. The effects of being abused in childhood are catastrophic. For me, it meant I rebel led against people in charge of me and went through the care system, and was spat out and became homeless. I survived destitution by prostitution. And I survived that through drugs. The cycle of self-harm did untold damage. And 40 years on, the abuse still affects me. I speak and write six European languages but I never got any qualifications.

We want a review of services, so everybody who needs support can afford it. We want justice for people who were kids then and for kids now to know that there are people who will stand up for them.

Follow Ben on Twitter.

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Dr. Taj Hargey in his Open Mosque, Cape Town

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

Dr. Taj Hargey says he became radicalized after 9/11.

"I went to mosque in Oxford that week, after the largest political event of the age concerning Muslims, and did anyone mention it? No. Not at all," he says. "I mean, it wasn't entirely clear to what extent this concerned Islam just then, but where was the basic human compassion? I thought, Something's wrong here.'"

Hargey is now a full-blown radical, and he's waging his own private jihad, turning Muslim teaching away from the stodgy conservatism of most clerics.

Not only is he a radical, Hargey's also a hardcore fundamentalist, in that he rejects the Hadith—the book of the so-called "sayings of the Prophet" (compiled 200 years after the Prophet died) and the text used to form the outline of Sharia law. Unsurprisingly, Hargey also rejects Sharia itself.

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The Open Mosque, Cape Town

Fundamentally, he points out, Islam is about the Qur'an, and it is from the Qur'an that he will preach, ignoring all the other footnotes beloved of modern clerics. All of that stuff, he says, has no pertinence to the Qur'an: It's a book that rejects violence, doesn't mention the burqa, embraces a role for women, and doesn't explicitly ban images of Muhammad or encourage Muslims to murder satirical cartoonists.

To this end, Hargey took part of his salary as an Oxford don and started his own mosque in South Africa late last year. The place of worship, he says—unlike most around the world—is both gay-friendly and woman-friendly. Which is exactly why he's not getting on so well within the local community of sects, imams, and governing councils.

His "Open Mosque" in Cape Town has been firebombed three times since it commenced operations in September. "They also tried to drive a 4x4 through the doors... but for me, right now, the project is about holding on," he tells me. "I've always said that if we can make it to our first anniversary, then we will have made it. And they know it! That's why they're piling on the pressure."

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Outside, on the walls of this former warehouse buried in the backstreets of the resolutely unfashionable end of Wynberg, he's painted the five founding principles of his baby: Qu'ran-centric, gender equality, non-sectarian, inter-cultural, and independent.

While his day-to-day work is in the UK, he's returned here for a few weeks to check in. "Because this thing, at the moment, it needs the founder: it needs direction, it needs leadership," he says.

Inside the building, there are still builders' scaffolds and men with overalls cobbling bits of it together. Without sponsors, building work stops and starts depending on when Oxford has paid him. Yet Hargey believes he has a franchise that could stretch all around the world.

"It's interesting that you mention that word. I'd say yes—there's definitely a set of principles here that can be easily grasped," he says. "Already, we've had email requests from as far away as Brazil—they want to know when we can establish an Open Mosque there."

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Builders at work in the Open Mosque

By unhappy coincidence, I meet Hargey the Friday after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Unlike his own experiences of 9/11, today's congregation—seven women and 13 men—get both barrels of commentary. He preaches for the better part of an hour, blasting off broadsides from the MacBook he's tucked into his lectern, as thick with Qur'anic citations as his academic background suggests.

"Where does it say in the Qur'an that blasphemers must be killed? Nowhere. That is only in the Hadith," he thunders.

He's splenetic. The Prophet, he points out again and again, showed clemency to a host of people who insulted him or ridiculed him. He seems to be making a special point here, playing to the gallery slightly. In the front row, a Muslim reporter from the local papers has been dispatched to note down the sayings of this mad mullah of liberal tolerance.

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Yet, as one devotee who'd shuffled from mosque-to-mosque around the Cape for the past few years tells me, elsewhere, most other Imams won't be making a similar pitch this Friday afternoon. "They're very conservative in what they teach," he sighs. "They want to have the power, so they give you lots of laws."

The sophistic use of the sacred texts annoyed him enough that he kept changing. "For me, it was that they always preach from the Hadith. I started to get suspicious of that. You never heard them talking from the Qur'an."

"They use the Hadith," says Hargey, "because it gives them power: 'Don't do this. Do that. God will get you.'"

In the global context, Cape Muslims are pretty moderate folk. Yet inside their mosques, there is the same climate of fear around stepping out of line. "Mainly," Hargey points out, "because you won't have anyone to bury you. They won't let you into the cemetery."

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South Africa's governing body for Muslims—the MDC—has declared the Open Mosque as illegal, and written to all the local papers defaming Hargey and condemning his place of worship. He's been threatened with hanging and castration by anonymous letter-writers. The opening week came with a Friday protest where outraged believers tried to block the entrance, followed by further death threats to the good doctor when they failed.

"They have a vested interest in maintaining their own power block, because they control the money," says Hargey. "There is R100 million [$7.6 million] every year in certifying food as halal. But no one knows where that money goes. There is zero transparency around it. They're all elected from within. There's no democracy there either."

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Three months after opening, something like a congregation is starting to emerge out of the town's disaffected Muslims. Fear is still capping numbers, but they've already got three weddings booked in. Unlike his adversaries, Hargey is OK with non-Muslim men marrying Muslim women. And crucially, unlike the mosque 500 meters down the road, he wants women to be involved. "There should be a place here for my sisters, my mother, my daughter, my wife," he tells me.

They pray here, right alongside the men. Rather than taking the Hadith's limp injunctions that women will have "better rewards in the home" than at prayer, he sticks with what Muhammad himself did in Medina. "This place is much more like the prophet's own mosque than any other you'll see. Why? Because it has only one entrance. For both men and women."

Not only does it nix gender, his congregation seems to cut across class, too. One elegant middle-aged woman looks like she might have the keys to a Beemer in her black beaded clutch purse. Others pull off in their pick-up trucks. There is a black African guy who's clearly not from around here. A white guy.

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More revolutionary but less visible, the Open Mosque is also perfectly happy to have The Gays in its congregation. Though that still isn't quite the same as adoring them.

"Look, the Qur'an says quite clearly that homosexuality is a sin, but it does not say that you should punish people," Hargey stresses. "It is for God to make that judgment. Not for me. My job as a Muslim is to live a good life. To be nice to people. To pick up litter. To help those who need help. Why must I go around condemning when God is taking care of that?" He wouldn't marry a gay Muslim, but "if they want a civil partnership, that is OK. It's just that marriage to me is defined by the Qur'an as a man and a woman."

Five hundred years after the Diet of Worms, no one has so far managed to do a back-to-basics prune-job on Islam, yet the idea is so bullseye-right for our times. He will have to face the full might of the cultural enforcers, but Hargey's starting to scent the appetite for change that's out there, too.

Right now, he lacks the funds or people to establish more Open Mosques around the world, but in his five founding principles he's got an easily reproducible franchise model for rolling his ideas around the globe with the full warp-speed of 21st century culture. There's a brand here, and if he can just keep it together, and take on the medieval majority, Hargey could change the world in much more meaningful ways than his hardline counterparts have ever managed.

"Ten years from now, if God keeps me going, I think it could definitely be all over the world, yes," he says. "But for now, the goal is just to make it through to September and the first anniversary. When September comes, we're gonna have a huge party, I tell you."

Follow Gavin on Twitter.

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This post originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Say what you want about the kind of people who get barbed wire tattooed on their biceps or tribal tramp stamps—deep down you know you envy them for their commitment. They have the guts to brand themselves with something silly for life, while people like me can barely commit to a three-month gym membership.

Which is why I couldn't miss the History of Symbols: The Tattoo in Romania exhibition taking place at Suțu Palace in Bucharest. The show features some of the oldest tats in the country, on the very pieces of dead skin on which they were etched. And yes, some of these still have hair on them, which is both disgusting and fascinating.

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The tattoos are part of the private collection of Nicolae Minovici (1868–1941), a forensic doctor who served as as head of Romania's anthropometric service. Minovici wrote an essay on Romanian tattoos in a time when ink graced the bodies of those representing the bottom of the social scale, like drunken sailors or prostitutes. (He was also pretty much responsible for the introduction of concepts like the morgue and an ambulance service in Romania, but that's another story.)

Most of the tattoos Minovici gathered belong to illiterate male delinquents. Half were Romanian, half were foreigners. Most of them made the safe choice of getting their girlfriend's names inked on their chests and arms, but the collection also features some pretty obscene designs. In his essay, Minovici talks about the 11 cases of penis tattoos he encountered in Paris and three cases of what he calls "sick" tattoos in Romania. In one of those, "the naked body of the man's mistress contrasts the dead body of his son." Romania's most famous penis tattoo belonged to the dick of a highwayman called Terente and said "I fuck well and I'm heavy on the beak."

There were professional tattoo artists in Bucharest back then, but they were mostly Greek, which means the whole thing was an imported trend. Most drew their own tattoos using a pretty awful method that involved burning oil and mixing the leftover ashes with urine.

To find out a little more about Minovici and tattoo culture in Romania, I spoke with professor Octavian Buda, a psychiatrist at the Institute for Forensic Medicine and the author of many articles and books on tattoos. He told me that this collection is special, because during those times, tattoos were a rarity. I still found it odd that there were no rebellious noblemen tattoos among the collection, but he explained that "it was difficult to gain access to those people, because they had a higher social status, so they were buried accordingly," meaning they couldn't be used as study material at the morgue.

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Minovici would take photos of the tattoos in his collection and show them to his students of forensic medicine. Photography itself was a rarity in that age, but it was used a lot in forensics.

Professor Buda thinks that Minovici's interest in tattoos could be considered "artistic only as a form of expression. By which I mean he wanted to express the mindset of the criminal, and the psychological universe that made him act this way. Minovici was considered a gutsy pioneer who dealt with the dark side of society, a theme that fascinated both the local and the international press at the time."

So yeah, do check out A History of Symbols if you happen to be in Bucharest some time until the end of March, when it closes.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Ketamine, a.k.a. Special K, the hallucinogenic raver staple appreciated for its tranquilizing, dissociative high, has made a bit of a splash in the media recently, due in part to its promising potential as an antidepressant.

The World Health Organization lists ketamine among its tally of "essential medicines" thanks to the drug's broad use as an analgesic (painkiller). This allows doctors to prescribe the substance "off-label" for mental disorders like clinical depression. The results are extremely promising.

Allegedly showing results in hours rather than weeks, ketamine affects the levels of the neurotransmitter glutamate, whereas traditional antidepressants like Prozac instead focus on serotonin receptors. Administering ketamine by IV has been shown to rapidly increase levels of these synaptic proteins, with significant effects observed after a mere two hours.

Brent Miles, 41, a songwriter and journalist from Phoenix, Arizona, regularly got ketamine IV treatments at a clinic in North Scottsdale in 2013. I sat down with him to hear his firsthand experience of what this treatment is like, and this is what he told me:

In 2013, I heard a story on NPR about these studies with using ketamine to treat depression. They said there were only a few places in the country allowed to do this and one was in Arizona. I lived in Arizona and I'd tried fucking everything, so I was like, you know, I'll try this.

I was diagnosed bipolar when I was 21, so 20 years ago. I tried every medication under the sun. Some of them work, but they have really bad side effects. Some don't work at all. I'm not an expert in pharmaceuticals, but it just seems like the strategy is just to throw different medicines at the wall and see what sticks.

I've been on Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Paxil, Geodon, Zyprexa, Effexor, just about all of them. In my 20s, doctors would treat my anxiety with Valium, Xanax, and other addictive benzodiazepines. I was failing all of my classes in college because I couldn't concentrate, so my doctor diagnosed me with ADD as well and prescribed Ritalin for it.

Of course, Ritalin is an amphetamine and therefore highly addictive. Some doctors would recklessly prescribe me copious amounts of benzos and amphetamines. They were highly effective for treating my disorders—but almost too good. Medications like those make you feel really fucking good. So I would start taking more and more, because you build up a tolerance. The downside was after years of taking these highly addictive medications, I began taking them just to be numb and high. Then you realize you're a full-blown drug addict, which obviously just adds more complications and setbacks to trying to treat a mental illness.

And I know this is a widespread problem, because I've known other people who went through the exact same experience. The treatment becomes a curse.

So I saw the ketamine thing and said, Well, I'll try it. As far as the trials were going and the success rate, it looked promising, and the science behind it made sense too. I wanted to try it because I'd been trying everything for years to control being bipolar.

This wasn't a research-based trial or anything like that. Because ketamine is legal to use as an anesthetic, this clinic didn't have to select me. I just scheduled an appointment. I paid for this out of pocket. I believe I paid $1,500 for six treatments, and they let me pay in four installments.

First you go in and they talk to you, just to make sure you're not insane or something. There are 300 questions to answer on a computer, like about your mood, where you're at with your condition, and if ketamine treatment would even work for you.

They have a psychiatrist on site who consults with you too. They don't just let anybody in there. They seemed to be weeding people out who were probably going just to get their hands on ketamine.

It's about a two-hour process. You can't drive afterwards, obviously. They have a nurse go through what's going to happen to you. Like, "If you start feeling something, say something, because some people can't handle it." The nurse takes your blood pressure, your pulse, monitors all that. Then they prep you for the IV, put the needle in, and tape it so they can hook it up to the IV machine.

They have big plasma TVs with Netflix so you can watch movies. They want you awake the whole time. The nurse guy was like, "You can't fall asleep. You can listen to music, you can watch TV, but don't listen to Slayer, because that wouldn't be good for the experience." It was funny how he put it. It wouldn't feel the same with death metal. They want you just relaxed. I never got sleepy, just calm. Once in a while, the nurse's assistant will talk to you, just to make sure you're cognizant.

I was excited just because I was hoping this would be the one that worked—because of all the studies they did, and the proof that backed it up. I was excited to think that this might be the answer.

But I was a little scared, too, just because I'd never done ketamine or anything. You start to think this is kind of crazy. If I ever have surgery with anesthesia, all I can think about is, What if I don't wake up? Because sometimes people don't. It knocks them out. But see, that's the problem—I think about this shit.

On your first treatment, they start with a really low dose to see how you're going to react. If you're OK with that dose, they'll go higher on your next treatment. If you're OK with that, they increase it. I did five over a six-month period in 2013.

IV ketamine is actually a way lower dose than if you bought ketamine off the street. That's really strong. When they're doing the IV, it's a lower dose because they don't want you going psycho. I've actually never taken ketamine bought on the street, so I don't know what it's like, but it seems like people tend to lose their shit on it.

With the IV treatment, you start disassociating with everything, like you're observing, not participating in anything. It's really weird. I don't know how to explain it. As far as the mind goes, you start going through these weird levels, kind of like Inception or The Matrix, where you don't know what's real.

You start thinking about all kinds of stuff. Whatever races through your mind—and usually when you're depressed it's negative shit—when you're on ketamine it's just like, Well, nothing I can do about that. You feel like, I'm not in control, and that's fine; you're going to die someday and that's just life. You kind of learn to just accept it, I guess.

So it slowly comes on and then it gets kind of intense, at least for me, because of the thoughts and stuff, a lot of stuff was just flashing by, like random memories, but I can't do anything about it.

I tried to watch Pulp Fiction, but they wouldn't let me. But the TV had a screensaver—nature scenes and animals in the wild, with really soothing music—so during all of my treatments, I just watched that the whole time. It was weird because seeing nature got me thinking, Well, my problems aren't important. There's all this stuff going on, and my problems aren't the end of the world. You get bombarded with life, with existence. What's weird is you're not doing it actively—you're not trying to work on stuff—it's just happening.

That was my first experience with a dissociative drug. However, I did a lot of LSD in high school, and I've done ecstasy a couple times and powdered MDMA. While it feels great, the day after I can just feel all the serotonin in my brain got sucked out. The next day, I'm just depressed and a day after that, I'm back to normal. So that kind of sucks.

But I never felt any withdrawals or addiction to the ketamine. In therapeutic doses, there were no problems with withdrawals or addiction. After five treatments, it wasn't like I felt the need to go out on the street to illegally obtain some K, unlike what happened with my other psychiatric medicines.

You've got to get successive treatments, though. With some people it takes two; with some people it takes ten. But it helps. After my first treatment, I felt good for a week. Not the kind of bipolar "good" where I'd be manic. I just felt pleasant, and not crazy or compulsive. I felt normal for the first time in a long time.

But this was the first treatment, a low dose, and it kind of wears off. It's not like you crash or anything. During the next treatment, they boost up the level that you're given, so it would start working successively, staggering. After that, I started feeling better.

The thing is, treatments are really fucking expensive. And in my case, I would probably have needed more treatments to get to a place where I could work on things healthily. I wish I could afford a few more treatments, because I felt like I was getting there. It helped, but it's not like it wore off, like I'm not back to where I was before that. I am a little better.

You'd think they'd have some therapy to go along with the ketamine. The way I experienced it, sometimes it felt like you could go either way, like you could have a bad trip.

But it did help. Once it got to a point where I could afford it, I started going to a psychiatrist and a therapist once a week. So that combined, I'm definitely in a way better place than I was.

It's actually kind of hard to tell because I was actually doing things right this time. I don't know if it's like that with a lot of bipolar people, but when you start feeling good, you stop taking your medication because, Oh, I'm feeling fine. But it's because you're taking the medication.

I didn't tell my psychiatrist about the ketamine. I just have a feeling they won't know enough about it. I was kind of afraid to mention that in case they disapprove. It's a weird thing. It's so new a lot of psychiatrists just don't know anything about it.

I would definitely recommend it. If somebody could afford it, I would definitely say try it. I'd love to go back.

As told to Troy Farah.

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Indonesian security forces have a corruption problem. Photo via Flickr user Yulian Hendriyana

Early Wednesday morning, several mainstream Indonesian newspapers and a WhatsApp chat group of local reporters received a message containing pictures apparently depicting Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) head Abraham Samad smooching and cuddling with someone who looks like Elvira Devinamira, the winner of Miss Indonesia 2014. The photos, sent from someone claiming to be Devinamira but of unknown actual origins, have exploded in the local press and social media.

The photos gained traction not just because they are tawdry—Devinamira is 21 and Samad is 48, married, and a prominent national figure—but because many suspect they are part of a longstanding feud between Indonesia's anti-corruption watchdogs and the police.

One day before the photos emerged, Samad announced a major corruption case against Police Commissioner General Budi Gunawan. The general was President Joko Widodo's sole candidate—of five options presented to him by the law enforcement corruption watchdog National Police Commission—to replace Indonesia's outgoing National Police Chief, and despite the whiff of scandal, parliament approved Gunawan for the post on Thursday.

Samad's case against the general follows a six-month investigation into irregularities in Gunawan's bank accounts, which was flagged as early as 2010. The officer's personal wealth inexplicably grew from $364,000 to $1.79 million between 2008 and 2013 and he has faced corruption allegations before. Yet the police and hostile politicians took the timing of the announcement—the day before the general's nomination was to be voted on by lawmakers—as a pointed jab.

Samad has gone on record claiming the photos are retaliation for his case against Gunawan, and he has some cause—beyond the proximity of the photos' release—to pin them on the police.

Since its foundation in 2002, the KPK has gained a reputation for honesty, integrity, and decisive action. In notoriously corrupt Indonesia, that's meant taking on chief justices, ministers, and well-connected tycoons. In the past, the KPK has gutted the cabinet of then president and commission originator Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. They prosecuted a member of his extended family too. Just last year, in addition to spreading anti-corruption messages via pedicabs and a gaming app, the agency took on murky deals between the nation's leading energy businessmen and its flagship air carrier.

Such high-level prosecutions seem to have some political elites desperate to legally defang the KPK. Alongside these legislative challenges, lawmakers have tried to challenge the character of individual investigators before, including Samad, who has been chief since 2012.

Its pit bull approach has also often led the KPK to lash out at the supposedly untouchable police. Meanwhile, the cops implicated a former chief for arranging a drive-by shooting against a man whose wife he was supposedly in love with, tried to plaster KPK agents with their own bribery charges, and threatened to raid the agency's offices and arrest investigators. When the magazine Tempo published a story on some earlier corruption charges against Gunawan, the police appear to have bought up every print copy. (The magazine's offices were then mysteriously firebombed.)

As of now, Samad's accusations have not caused Gunawan any problems with his potential promotion. With parliament giving him the nod, it's up to President Joko Widodo—a.k.a. Jokowi—to decide whether or not to actually swear him in on Friday.

That's a pain for Jokowi, who came into power as a populist, anti-corruption crusader from outside the traditional political elite. His support of the KPK in its legislative battles and willingness to have his cabinet vetted by the agency seemed to cement this reputation. Yet his nomination of Gunawan, whom Samad claims he's warned Jokowi about, has ruffled the feathers of watchdogs.

Some suspect Jokowi was forced to push for Gunawan by the head of his party, former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, on whose security detail Gunawan served from 2001 to 2004. That's plausible given that Jokowi is facing opposition from almost every sector of Indonesia's political world.

Others speculate that, rather than shaming Jokowi for his nomination, the KPK might have been giving him a good excuse to dump Gunawan and reaffirm his commitment to anti-graft goals. But in practice they've just put him in a precarious situation, offering Jokowi's political opponents ammunition, and chipping away at his populist aura by boxing the president into a corner.

As Jokowi figures out how to handle this Gunawan debacle, Samad is struggling to defend his character, rabidly denying the intimate photos' authenticity.

"This is gossip that was deliberately spread to destroy me and criminalize me," he texted MetroTVNews.

Putri Kusuma Wardani, head of the Miss Indonesia Foundation, and Minister of Sports and former IT expert Roy Suryo, both believe the photos were edited. A KPK investigation has (unsurprisingly) confirmed these allegations of malicious character assassination via Photoshop.

Yet the photos aren't so easily brushed aside. Screenshots from Devinamira's Instagram account from five weeks ago appear to corroborate that the two have met. And independent analysis of the photos by leading Indonesian editor Agan Harahap, famous for transposing Western stars into Indonesian contexts, claims that the photos are either authentic or flawlessly edited, as they show no clear signs of manipulation at the pixel level. But Harahap also insinuated that even if real, the individuals pictured could just be lookalikes.

Even if he can prove that the photos were fake, Samad will still face questioning by the parliament, which is suspicious of the timing of his case against Gunawan. Ironically, with Samad on the rocks personally and the KPK in the rough politically, the only person walking out of this situation relatively unscathed is Gunawan. Whether or not he was the one who sent the photos, that's a disconcerting reality that has to make the beleaguered Samad crazy.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy Butler County Sheriff's Office

Six months ago, Christopher Lee Cornell was just a seasonally employed momma's boy who didn't even have a driver's license. Looking for direction, the 20-year-old started growing a beard and praying five times a day at an Ohio mosque. When he was arrested Wednesday, his long, flowing beard couldn't be contained in his mugshot, and the FBI is suggesting he hoped to align himself with a terrorist organization an ocean away.

According to federal court documents, Cornell began referring to himself as Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah last summer. FBI Special Agent T. A. Staderman, who was deposed for the complaint against Cornell, alleges that he used Twitter to voice support for the Islamic State and promote violent jihad. In the fall, a confidential source flipped on Cornell and gave information to the Feds to strike a deal in an unrelated case.

"I believe that we should just wage jihad on our own orders and plan attacks and everything," Cornell allegedly told the source this past August. "We already got a thumbs up from the Brothers over there and Anwar al Awlaki before his martyrdom and many others."

The source also told Staderman that he met up with Cornell last October. The two discussed their plan further, and Cornell said he wanted to conduct an attack by December. He also allegedly showed jihadist videos and bomb-making instructions to the informant.

The second time they met, Cornell got more specific and revealed that he wanted to attack the Capitol building in Washington, DC. Members of Congress were described as enemies. The pair went over some research and discussed places that would sell them rifles, according to the Feds.

Agents knew Cornell was going to purchase guns, so they asked the owner of the Point Blank Gun Store and Range for help about a week in advance. Then, ten minutes before Cornell arrived at the store, the FBI called up the store owner again to give him a heads up. The owner made Cornell go through a background check before selling him two semiautomatic rifles and 600 rounds of ammo.

As soon as he bought the guns, the agents tackled Cornell and brought him into custody. The official charges are attempting to kill a US government officer and possession of a firearm in furtherance of an attempted crime of violence. He'll appear in federal court on Friday and is currently in Ohio's Butler County jail.

John Cornell, the suspect's father, gave an interview with local Cincinnati TV station WLWT that painted him as a lost kid who was looking for direction and belonging. He's also accused the FBI of setting his son up. "He's a mommy's boy," Cornell said. "He hangs around with his mom. His best friend's his kitty cat. He was really vulnerable."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

[body_image width='1024' height='683' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='a-brief-history-of-getting-your-dick-chopped-off-303-body-image-1421327299.jpg' id='18300']That's one method of doing it, yeah. Photo via Flickr user Jiuck

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Over the weekend in China, father-of-five Fan Lung had his dick chopped off twice in one night by his furious wife. First, after his wife discovered an explicit email Fan had sent to his lover from her phone, he was de-penised with a pair of scissors while he slept. While he was lying in the hospital recovering from having his dick sewn back on, his wife crept into his room, chopped his peen off again, and threw it out the window. It's all a bit Oscar Wilde: to have your penis chopped off once might be regarded as misfortune, but to lose it twice looks like carelessness.

First off, if Seth Rogen hasn't optioned the rights to this story already so he can turn it into a 90-minute chuckle-times rom-com, he's missed a trick (in act three, Seth's protagonist discovers the true meaning of love after watching his bloodied prosthetic dick being eaten by a dog following a 15-minute chase scene through downtown LA. James Franco is the voice of the dog. The working title is Dick Slice).

Second—and this is quite bad—police haven't yet managed to find the penis in question, and the general consensus is it got eaten by a stray animal.

"It doesn't matter that he's lost his fertility," his lover, Zhang Hung, told Central European News. "He has five children already."

What an extremely chill reaction to your boyfriend getting his dick chopped off twice.

[body_image width='1024' height='680' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='a-brief-history-of-getting-your-dick-chopped-off-303-body-image-1421327349.jpg' id='18301']Siri, search "people looking sad + sausage." Photo via Flickr user Bruno.T71

Maybe Zhang Hung's apathy just comes from already being saturated with stories of guys waylaying their penises. And that's understandable: Ever since John Wayne Bobbitt was uncocked in 1993 by his wife Lorena, high-profile de-peenings have been going on around the world.

In a way, Bobbitt is the poster boy for having your dick chopped off by your wife. His case, and the grimly high-profile trial that followed it, was worldwide news in the early 90s, leading to a short-lived porn career for him ( John Wayne Bobbitt's Frankenpenis is an actual video that exists), a greater awareness of the issue of domestic violence and the term "bobbittize" to enter medical parlance.

For a while there, it was kind of feared that Lorena Bobbitt's whole chop-off-a-penis-with-a-kitchen-knife-then-throw-it-out-of-the-window-of-a-moving-car schtick might become a widespread thing: As of 1995, there were 100 documented cases of bobbitization, with many attributed as copycat crimes. But chopping off a dick isn't new—although the running theme is pretty much always revenge.

In ancient China and Heian-period Japan, de-donging, along with castration, was one of the main criminal punishments handed out to men. Documented cases of people taking the law into their own hands go back as far as the 1800s (a man in Luiba, China, had his dick chopped off with a shaving knife by his daughter-in-law after he tried to have sex with her), but really started to get going in the 1970s.

Between 1973 and 1980, there were 100 cases of Thai women chopping their husbands' penises off (mainly for their adultery, but often following prolonged domestic abuse)—so many that doctors started to specialize in penis reattachment. With penis reattachment becoming vaguely widespread, cock loppers were forced to become more creative when it came to the throwing-a-penis-out-of-a-window junk disposal bit: In 2011, Catherine Becker made headlines after severing her husband's genitalia and dropping it down the garbage disposal. There's no walking that off.

More recently, there have been various cases of penis loss—in 2013, a Floridian escort used her teeth to attempt to chop a john's penis off, but instead just demolished his balls; in 2012, Peruvian Julia Munoz Huaman chopped off her sleeping boyfriend's penis and flushed it down the toilet. And closer to home, last year a bewildered Middlesborough man was found wandering along the A66 at 4:30 AM in a distressed state looking for his penis. And now Fan Lung, with his double-dip dick attack.

Anyway, here's some easy-to-follow advice if you're looking to not get your penis cut off: Don't commit adultery or domestic abuse, and if you absolutely must have an affair, don't message your girlfriend from your wife's phone.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

Barack Obama has long promised action on climate change. During this year's State of the Union address, set for next Tuesday, he'll finally have some measured progress to report. Throughout most of his presidency, Obama has neglected the climate. Instead, he's focused his efforts on health-care reform and escaping budgetary wrangles with Congress. Obama didn't even mention climate change once during the 2012 presidential debates, instead choosing to push an "all-of-the-above" energy strategy that's led to a massive resurgence of the American oil and gas industry.

Now, in the heart of his second term, things have changed—slightly. By focusing on executive actions in lieu of support from a hostile Congress, Obama has nudged America's future fossil fuel throttle down a notch or two. In the short-term, though, progress remains slow. America's carbon emissions increased overall in 2014, and though they're now on a slightly less apocalypse-inducing trajectory than they were a year ago, the current policy mix still isn't quite adequate to keep global warming to safe levels. There's a big difference between making public pledges to reduce carbon emissions and actually reducing them.

Obama doesn't want his legacy to be another president who had access to overwhelming evidence on climate change but didn't act. And act he has. If you factor in the anticipated impact of new policies out to 2025, the White House calculates we'll avoid a total of 3 billion tons of additional carbon dioxide emissions. That's only little more than six months worth of our emissions at current rates, but it's something.

Though his domestic policy achievements on climate change will help, history may view Obama's greatest achievement on climate change on the international stage. Appearing with the Chinese president in Beijing in November, he sent a clear signal to the world that if we want to fix this problem, the two countries are going to have to bridge our differences and work together.

By all accounts, 2015 is a make-or-break year for the climate. If Obama is able to help broker the first truly global agreement in Paris this December—one that's consistent with calls by scientists for truly rapid emissions reductions—it will be one of the greatest achievements by any US president in history. His administration has already helped steer international negotiations away from a legally binding treaty toward a "politically binding" accord, because there's little chance Congress would approve the former. This year, expect Secretary of State John Kerry, who's called climate change "the greatest challenge of our generation," to focus on his efforts to craft an ambitious deal.

But no matter what happens in Paris, Obama's not waiting. On Wednesday, the White House announced a new plan to regulate methane emissions from the oil and gas industry for the first time, aiming for a 40-45 percent reduction from 2012 levels by 2025. Methane, the principal component of natural gas, is a greenhouse gas that is 87 times as powerful as carbon dioxide on a 20 year timescale—about as much time as scientists say we have left before "dangerous" climate change is locked in, assuming current emissions trajectories.

However, there's a major loophole: the proposed rule applies only to future oil and gas infrastructure. If you're of the mind that natural gas will form an important near-term transition "bridge fuel" while renewable energy sources ramp up—consistent with Obama's "all of the above" plan—then this action probably means something to you. But if you factor in methane leaks, it's not at all obvious that burning natural gas is an advantage over coal. The new White House rules would aim, in part, at helping the industry plug those leaks. And only 29 percent of America's methane emissions come from the oil and gas industry. Agriculture is an even bigger source, at 34 percent, mostly from the beef and dairy industry.

This action on methane is about as much as can be expected via executive action alone, and it's nowhere near the scale of change that's needed. It's the last major action Obama is expected to take domestically, combined with much improved vehicle fuel efficiency and regulations on power plants. Obama's also recently announced he's planning to veto any legislation that would force approval of the languishing Keystone XL pipeline, which would be a long-sought moral victory for environmental campaigners.

But we're far past the time for moral victories. The latest administration move on methane comes amid fresh evidence that a majority of fossil fuels must stay in the ground to reach global goals on global warming. And Obama's accomplishments over the last 12 months are nowhere near enough to put America on a responsible climate path. But it's a start.

Climate change is such a pressing problem that it will require a bold rethink of the entire economy for real progress to be made. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. With solar grid parity essentially already here and a majority of the Republican electorate in favor of climate action, those systemic changes could come about more quickly than most people realize.

The major risk with Obama's executive action strategy for tackling climate change is that any new rules must be in place before he leaves office. That doesn't give the White House much time. No matter which party the next president belongs to, Obama will have to trust them to pass economy-wide climate legislation in order for his pledges to be fulfilled. Until then, his climate legacy will be mostly talk.

Follow Eric on Twitter

Greg Barker's new documentary We Are the Giant takes an in-depth look at an exceedingly complex global phenomenon—the Arab Spring. By focusing on three unique stories born out of three disparate but interconnected struggles, Barker draws out the common threads that bind the ongoing revolutions together. We recently sat down with Barker to discuss the film.

[body_image width='1024' height='633' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='edmonton-cabbies-staged-an-anti-uber-protest-271-body-image-1421358113.jpg' id='18558']Cab in Edmonton, Alberta. Photo via Flickr user Kurt Bauschardt

On Wednesday, more than 150 cabbies from every Edmonton, Alberta taxi company took to the streets to protest Uber's UberX rideshare service entering the city's transport market.

In a show of solidarity that took place over the lunch hour, taxis slowed traffic as they made a procession—an appropriate formation for their dying business model—from Edmonton's south side, finally encircling City Hall.

Edmonton is the fourth major market for Uber in Canada—it's already operating in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. But with Toronto already wary of the company's UberX program, and Vancouver successfully squashing the company's start in BC, Uber's stay in Edmonton is far from guaranteed. Especially if the cabbies have anything to say about it.

Philip Strong, the president of the Edmonton Taxi Service Group, told VICE that while his organization didn't help organize the protest, it did support the end goal.

"We have to be aggressive in getting rid of Uber," said Strong. "They will deceive and cheat everything, and they don't obey the law."

The pissed-off cabbies have a long list of gripes with Uber that include not having proper insurance or licensing, ignoring inspection regulations, and, of course, the competition that they would bring.

So far the city of Edmonton has sided with the taxi drivers, calling Uber drivers "bandit taxis," routinely ticketing them, and actively attempting to catch them through various sting operations. Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson told the Edmonton Journal on Wednesday, "The city has been quite clear on our position on what is a legitimate cab and what isn't.

"The consequences have been made quite clear to anybody operating outside the current rules."

Balraj Manhas, the president of the United Cabbies Association in Edmonton, was a lead organizer of the protest and was in the lead car of the processions. At City Hall, Manhas hand-delivered their list of demands. Among the demands, the taxi drivers humbly request that the City of Edmonton issue a court injunction against Uber.

Manhas is incensed that Uber hasn't yet been shut down, and warned that if Edmonton doesn't take action, shit might hit the fan.

"We were very peaceful. We caused no disruption in the traffic, but if it goes on drivers will be getting mad," Manhas told VICE. "We will have some pressure to block the roads or go into rush hour traffic.

"It can be a mess in this city. We don't want that."

Of course Uber is far from perfect. Some customers have issues with the surge pricing system that can send the cost of a simple fare through the roof during an extremely busy time like New Years. There's a litany of other reasons the company's reputation is currently struggling; heck, even their drivers aren't so into them.

When reached for a comment, the Canadian communications lead for Uber, Xavier Van Chau, stated that, "Uber is all about keeping Edmonton moving, making it safer and more reliable than ever before for Edmontonians to connect with their city. Change is never easy, and we look forward to working together to ensure that the public is best served."

It's important to note how dreadful Edmonton taxi service is: during peak hours, people typically have to wait an hour or even more to get a taxi, and hailing one on the street is nearly impossible. According to some business owners whose customers rely on taxis, Uber is providing something that current licensed drivers just aren't: rides.

Steve Steffler, the manager of Bohemia, a music and arts venue just off Edmonton's popular Jasper Ave, has seen the problems with cabs firsthand. His main issue is the long wait for his patrons as taxis ignore his venue in order to cherry pick clients from hotels or other event venues for an easy fare.

"I've seen people wait up to three hours," said Steffler. "Our bar is very central in the arts district and you'd think it would be easy to hail a cab but they barely drive by at all, and if you call in advance to book one, you may be waiting two or more hours, or indefinitely."

Follow Mack on Twitter or visit his website.

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Pro-sex-work demonstrators in Montreal in 2013. Photo by Joel Balsam

Despite the Harper government's best efforts to convince them otherwise, Canadians still don't want the state butting into their consensual sexual transactions.

That's the results of a new Forum Research poll provided to VICE, which shows more than half of Canadians oppose the federal government's new sex work laws, while roughly the same number support legalizing the sex trade.

It also shows that five percent of the country is willing to admit they have solicited a sex worker.

The Conservatives' new laws came into effect on December 6, just shy of a year after the Supreme Court took a hatchet to Canada's old prostitution regulations, which the justices ruled were directly endangering sex workers' lives.

The new laws criminalize the purchase of sex, running a sexual business, advertising sexual services, and soliciting too near a school or playground. The bill, supposedly, allows sex workers to work as independent contractors, hire certain staff and to advertise their own services.

The Forum poll shows that only 27 percent of Canadians support that law, while 52 percent oppose it outright. Opposition to the bill is essentially uniform across age group, gender, and region.

Even among Conservative supporters asked by the polling firm, only 37 percent support the bill, while more than four in ten oppose it.

When asked if they support legalizing sex work outright, 54 percent of the country is onboard, with a third disagreeing. The poll shows that men are, perhaps unsurprisingly, more likely to support legalization: two thirds endorse the idea. Roughly half of every province supports letting sex workers go about their business without being arrested.

The findings of the poll are virtually identical to what Forum found when they asked the same questions last summer. The only difference is that, despite an aggressive campaign from the government to sell its tough-on-sex agenda to voters, fewer Canadians support the new laws.

"Sex work is said to be the oldest profession, and the majority want its professionals to be allowed to practice in peace," says Forum Research President, Dr. Lorne Bozinoff.

The poll also asked one of the most uncomfortable questions a stranger could ever ask you over the phone: "Have you, yourself, ever engaged the services of a prostitute?"

The results aren't terribly surprising. 85 percent of the respondents said no. A tenth of them refused to answer.

But 87 brave Canadians—five percent of those polled—said yes, they'd visited a woman or man of the night. Nearly 10 percent of the men asked, and two percent of the women, admitted to that fact.

Bozinoff says it's pretty reasonable to assume that the one in ten who refused to answer had probably solicited a sex worker at some point in their lives.

A few of the politicians who voted for the new laws might even be among those who admitted to exchanging money for a good time. Sex workers have warned members of the governing Conservative caucus that, if they're insisting on pushing forward these laws, their secrets might be unveiled. While sex workers have largely backed off that threat—the consensus within the sex work community is that outing johns could put sex workers' lives in danger—the allegation hangs heavy over Ottawa.

They'll now be in trouble (of their own making) if they want to visit a house of ill repute. They could face fines or even jail time.

Meanwhile, sex workers themselves still face the long arm of the law if they step outside the very narrow confines of what the law says is acceptable behaviour for those in the industry. Anyone running an escort agency or brothel, or acting as a manager to workers, could face more than a decade in prison.

VICE asked Jean McDonald, Executive Director of Toronto's sex work action project Maggie's, what's changed since the laws came into force in early December.

She says everybody is in a bit of a holding pattern as police agencies and provincial governments figure out what to do. Vancouver police, for example, have signalled that they're more interested in protecting sex workers than trying to jail them or their clients. In Ontario, Premier Kathleen Wynne is having her government review whether the laws should be enforced at all.

"We don't know right now where the police are going to go with the enforcement," McDonald says of the Toronto police.

But while McDonald says police haven't stepped up criminalization of sex workers, they haven't exactly reduced it, either. She says sex workers who deal with her group still regularly face tickets from city police—for things like loitering and public nuisance—and police are still making their presence known around Toronto's strolls, making business hard.

McDonald says business generally "seems to be slow." She says it's too early to tell whether that's because of the new laws or not.

The government's lion on the matter has been Manitoba social crusader and MP Joy Smith. The white-haired, soft-spoken, bespectacled grandmother helped write the bill, and brought along the bevy of anti-sex work activists who stumped for the bill while it was being studied by the House of Commons.

Reviled by sex workers as much as she's adored by social conservatives, Smith's opus is now part of the Criminal Code. She doesn't consider sex work to be work at all. As she once told me, "I don't use the word 'prostitution,' I use 'human trafficking.'"

With this success under her belt, Smith announced this week that she won't be seeking re-election.

"After taking time to consider my next step in the fight against modern day slavery," said Smith in her announcement, "I have decided that I can do more outside of Parliament than in it. Following the next election, I will continue to support the survivors of human trafficking by devoting my time to the Joy Smith Foundation."

That Foundation "raises awareness of human trafficking as well as provides support to victims of human trafficking in Provinces across Canada," according to its website.

That sort of foundation is likely a prime target for a slice of the $20 million in funding that will be doled out by the government in the next few years. The money is supposed to help workers exit the sex trade, fund programs that mitigate exploitation of women, girls, and marginalized groups, and to complement the new laws, according to the government.

Smith's organization might be getting that funding right now, but her organization doesn't publish full financial reports.

Canadians, generally, support that $20 million, according to the Forum poll. More than half support the cash, while about a third oppose the funding. More than 40 percent, however, feel the amount is inadequate.

Follow Justin on Twitter.

[body_image width='1000' height='1000' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='village-people-jeannette-montgomery-barron-300-body-image-1421326633.jpg' id='18294']

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. All featured images © Jeannette Montgomery Barron, courtesy of Collezione Maramotti and Silvana Editoriale

Photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron moved from Atlanta to New York in 1979. After graduating from the International Center of Photography and armed with her Hasselblad 2¼, she set about capturing New York's art scene, fascinated with the energy of the individuals—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Bianca Jagger, Willem Dafoe—who came to define the period.

"I wasn't really going to tons of parties, though," she says. "My goal was just to get the picture. I really wanted to record these people, it was like a game to me."

While Barron says that "everyone was photographing the same people in the same area downtown," her work—which, in its stark monochromes, has echoes of her contemporary, Peter Hujar—has stood the test of time as an important document of the 80s New York, where musicians, painters, writers, fashion designers, filmmakers, publishers, actors, models, and photographers worked and played together, made their own rules, and shaped our creative culture as we know it today.

Of course, living and working as an artist in the city is a different story altogether now. "You always romanticize the past but I do think it was a different environment," says Barron. "New York was a place you could live and work as an artist. That's all changed. It's really hard now unless you're super successful, which is why lots of people end up in LA."

Barron's method was always to never take up too much of her subject's time. She was unimposing, relaxed, and the results—whether they were shots for Cosmopolitan or Comme des Garçons—were a striking lesson in the use of subject and shadow. My Years in the 1980s New York Art Scene is the latest collection of Barron's work. Her previous book, Scene, showcased her most famous portrait shots, but this new book goes behind the scenes with contact sheets, etchings, and mementos from the time. We spoke to her about the story behind some of her most famous photographs.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT AND ANDY WARHOL
( Image above) "The gallerist Bruno Bischofberger called me up and said, 'Go photograph Andy and Jean-Michel because I'm doing a show of their paintings.' Jean-Michel was really stoned. I mean, he had smoked these huge spliffs. Andy was in awe of him. At the end of the portraits I asked them both to sign model release forms. Jean-Michel was being legalistic, adding something extra to his, and Andy said, 'Oh, Jean-Michel, that's such a good idea, I'm gonna do that, too.' This wasn't in the original Factory on Union Square—I did go to that one, too, and it was like a mish-mash of junk Andy had gone out and bought and didn't know what to do with. The Factory on 33rd Street was very streamlined and professional. You wouldn't go there and see someone lying on the floor—this was business."

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CINDY SHERMAN
"I last saw her at a party two months ago and she's so shy I can't believe she ever let me photograph her. She probably regrets it. Recently, I was going through my old answering machine messages from back then and came across one from the morning I was going to photograph her. Just hours before I was supposed to go, she left a message saying, 'Hi it's Cindy, actually, today's not a good day so maybe come another day and if you don't get this message just come.' I got that message, but continued like I didn't hear it."

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BIANCA JAGGER
"There was no way to not get a good picture of her. She was complete angle, a beautiful woman. This photograph was an assignment for German Cosmopolitan and, after that, I became friends with her. We would have lunches, go shopping, eat macrobiotic food, and keep people waiting. She was three hours late for our shoot that day—typical for her in those days—and, when Neil Young's 'Old Man' came on the radio, she started to cry."

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WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
"It was his birthday. He was 71 and a friend of mine, Howard Brookner, had made a documentary on Burroughs, so he arranged it. It wasn't in the Bunker—it was someplace else. I went in and saw these shotguns lying on the table and it kind of creeped me out, I have to say. I was like, I'm going to take this picture and get out of here. Little did I know the guns were filled with paint for his famous shotgun paintings."

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ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
"Robert died not long after this photograph was taken. Photographing another photographer, especially one you admire, is really intimidating. I was thinking, What am I gonna do? I know I'm going to mess this up. I'll forget to do something, or forget the film—which I'd done before. Some people used Polaroid backs, but I never did. He put me at ease immediately (we had friends in common) and was very inquisitive of my work. At the end of the shoot he offered me a glass of chocolate milk and a joint. He loved chocolate milk. The 80s were a really sad time—it was frightening, no one knew what was going on. When I first heard about AIDS, it was the 'gay cancer'—that's what it was called. You'd see these guys on the street and know they were goners. It was really, really sad. I lost a lot of friends."

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WILLEM DEFOE
"Willem is a good friend of mine. I've photographed him a lot, but this was a movie still for a film my brother and Kathryn Bigelow directed called The Loveless. It's a biker film and was very low-budget for the time. It was Willem's first starring role and then, of course, he went on to do Platoon and became a star. Willem is a great guy. He's not tough—it's all in his face."

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JULIAN SCHNABEL
"He was so sweet to me. We met at Barney's, which, at the time, was a small store. I was always at his studio and, this time, I think I was there bringing him prints that he signed for me—it was something I used to get people to do then. He wrote, 'To Jeannette, your fan, Julian,' and I don't think he would do that these days. Julian is a really smart guy. It's amazing how he's figured out all these permutations of his career. He's a great stylist."

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DENNIS HOPPER AND MATT DILLON
"This was another assignment for Comme des Garçons. It was 1991 when they asked if I'd photograph them. No one wanted to fly at the time so I said, 'Yeah, if you'll fly me on Swissair,' which was the neutral airline. They did, and it was great. Photographing two movie stars in expensive T-shirts isn't a bad day's work. Matt Dillon is sweet. Dennis Hopper liked to stir things up a bit and provoke you. He had fun doing that."

Follow Russell Dean Stone on Twitter.

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

When networks deign to grant you access to content you pay for on devices like your phone, computer, or anything other than your approved set-top box, they call it " TV Everywhere." TV Everywhere is strictly a corporate term, born in network boardrooms and PR meetings. It's not a term consumers use, because we don't demand that networks bless us with "TV Everywhere." Instead we just grumble endlessly when they won't let us watch a thing using any of a million modern conveniences instead of a stupid, anachronistic box.

Still, the term "TV Everywhere" is great for 2015, because it describes the state of things really beautifully. It's like the truck carrying all the TV got jackknifed on the highway and all the TV spilled out.

So, what's going to happen with TV in 2015? Cover your eyes, kids. There's TV everywhere.

Despite their piece of jargon not catching on, telecom companies should be feeling pretty good about 2015. Comcast and Time Warner are hoping to get their merger approved in the coming year, leaving America with one giant cable organization competing with the satellite companies. DirecTV, meanwhile, is merging with AT&T, leaving us with fewer and fewer companies providing us with precious content. It's enough to make you cut the cord and move over to streaming services, services like the new "Sling" (not to be mistaken for a Slingbox), from DirecTV's main competitor, Dish.

Speaking of streaming, Showtime and HBO are both jumping on the standalone streaming bandwagon in 2015. If you pay for those, plus Sling, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon, you could be paying $70 a month for TV. "Cutting the cord" was a way to stick it to the man in 2013 and 2014, but now that cord cutting involves signing up for an ever-increasing number of differently priced streaming services, it might look more attractive to just move back to paying for the package deal cable provided—that's music to the ears of the telecoms.

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In addition to more 8K and OLED TVs at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Samsung rolled out even more affordable 4K TVs. If you don't know what a 4K TV is, you're not alone. (Basically it makes the pretty pictures you look at sharper, clearer, and presumably prettier.) This is shaping up to be the year you find out, though, with Tim Moynihan of Wired writing, "This is not just hype. It is not 3-D. This is the future, and in the coming years, 4K will be as ubiquitous and essential as HD video is now." You might not be watching the Super Bowl on a 4K TV this year, but with millions of sets expected to be sold in 2015, you could be watching the kickoff of next season's first game in ultra crystal clarity.

"Great! Sign me up," you might be saying. Not so fast. There's a 4K format war afoot, and it's likely to make your 4K TV finicky about streaming services you'll want it to be friends with. "Make the wrong decision and you may not get the content you want," writes Moynihan. Meanwhile, Samsung is making deals designed to make sure that if you want to watch TV in these ultra-high resolutions, you have to go through them.

You know how today you've ignored 11 popups on your computer and phone asking you to update your operating system? Good news: That's going to start happening with your TV soon, thanks to one of the combatants in the format war called Tizen.

Samsung recently asked software developers to start working on smart TV applications for a TV it's just announced, using the Tizen open-source operating system. Smart TVs already have graphical user interfaces, but this is expected to be a serious move toward turning your TV into a customizable content-consumption device, like your phone.

Annoying, right? Most people just want to be able to sit there and watch TV, not use the thing to noodle around on the internet or play Angry Birds.

But unlike Samsung's insistence that a curved screen is something we all want, a move toward universal adoption of customizable, wifi-enabled smart TVs makes sense in a way. There might be a future on the way where your TV works right out of the box: You just connect it to Wi-Fi, and all your streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and HBO Go are ready to go on your TV. No set-top box needed.

But what about the actual content beamed onto the giant, curved home entertainment rectangles on our walls?

For the discerning viewer in 2015, there's going to be more of recent Golden Globe winner Transparent on Amazon, more Game of Thrones on HBO, more Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards on Netflix, and a final season of Mad Men on AMC. Once it was the place where all of America's TV hopes and dreams lied, but in 2015 AMC's best prestige offering is just an expansion of the Breaking Bad–verse.

But we're not discerning viewers. We're content vacuums. We used to be snobby about how Nielsen ratings supposedly didn't measure the real viewing habits of America, but ever since they started crunching numbers from social media, they got a clearer picture of what we're really watching, and it's not good. Now they know we mainly just watch The Bachelor, Pretty Little Liars, American Horror Story: Freak Show, Teen Wolf, TheBachelorette, The Voice, andDancing with the Stars. We also enjoy Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Scandal, though, so a tiny bit of what we watch wins awards. Well done, everyone.

It looks like the theory floated recently by TV Guide's Michael Schneider is correct: America doesn't want TV to deal with social issues. Maybe that's why new shows for 2015 don't look very challenging—they include a remake of The Odd Couple from the producer of Mad About You. Galavant, a show about singing fairytale characters, looks inventive, but it's getting ratings that are just OK. Framework, a design competition show hosted by Common, looks like a great one to binge-watch while you're sick in bed, but it's only on Spike TV for now.

One bright spot: Empire is getting both good reviews and good ratings.

This is the stuff we want, and it's also what we deserve in the coming year. But there's programming we theoretically need, called "news," and that aspect of TV is looking pretty dreary.

After its series finale on December 14, the fictional newsroom of HBO's The Newsroom is gone. With it goes most of America's diet of pompous pronouncements about journalistic ethics—outside of Gamergate, naturally.

It doesn't seem like TV news could possibly become more of a swamp in 2015, but if I were you, I still wouldn't go there to find clarity. Millennials don't get local news from TV, so in all likelihood, the local news is going to continue to air mostly hysterical stories about local crime followed by segments about how to stretch your grocery-buying dollar, and how to spruce up your bathroom for autumn.

CNN's declining ratings over 2014 resulted in penny-wise-and-dollar-dumb decision-making. The network's endless coverage of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane, and its panicky Ebola stories (although, looking back, too much blame for that may have landed on CNN's shoulders) made it look increasingly like a relic and not the reliable news source it once seemed to be. Sadly, given the poor ratings of their thought-provoking documentary shows, they probably won't make more of them.

Still, if you like good TV news it's out there. 60 Minutes and Al Jazeera America aren't going anywhere, and did I mention a show called VICE?

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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'The Jerome Project (Asphalt and Chalk) V,' 2014.Images courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In the aftermath of the Ferguson grand jury's acquittal of officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting Michael Brown, the artist Titus Kaphar drew on black asphalt paper the images of a group of unarmed black men who had all suffered premature deaths by white men. Using white chalk, Kaphar sketched Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, and Michael Brown, overlaying their faces on top of each other to confuse the viewer. The disorienting result aims to signify the growing list of young, black men whose lives have been unfairly taken by authorities in America, and how communities across the country are still mourning these victims.

Opening tonight, January 15, at Jack Shainman Gallery's two locations in Chelsea, Manhattan, Kaphar will present two separate bodies of work that focus on the duality of black experience in America from both a modern and historical perspective. The first show, Chalk on Asphalt, includes the overlain victims, as well as an extension of the artist's earlier work, The Jerome Project, which consisted of confessional-styled paintings that featured black males all named after St. Jerome. Kaphar's men, who are covered in tar and gold leaves, have served time for committing un-saintly offenses.

In Drawing the Blinds, the second show, the works represent the artist's ability to re-imagine blackness by revising the dominant histories we learned in grade school but now take for granted. In one untitled work, a black woman sits on her knees in a blue dress, swiping the floor as a cutout of a baby sits on her back. The post-racialist would want us to place a black child on the woman's back, but upon consideration, the baby must in fact be white, given the work's pre-revolutionary framing. With this realization, we are confronted with the shows' multilayered ideas, as well as the racial tensions and misunderstandings that still shape our country far more than we would like to believe. Kaphar's work brings forgotten figures to the center of the canvas and demonstrates how their stories continue to inform the country's narrative, and matter now more than ever.

I had the opportunity to catch up with Kaphar to speak with him about his timely solo show and expand upon the art's powerful conceptual goals.

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Jerome (Set)

VICE: You came to make the work in The Jerome Project because you were searching for your father's criminal record. How did that search lead to you creating that body of work?
Titus Kaphar: My father and I had been out of contact for a long time. So I went online and I was randomly searching for other things, and then it came into my head: "I wonder what this dude is up to?" I looked up his name, we don't share a surname, and found 99 men with the same one. I was shocked about how many of them had similar criminal records, how many of them were black, and that got me thinking about what was going on with the system.

Focusing on the real-life Jeromes that make up the project, how did their lives influence the paintings beyond the internet search?
Once I found the mug shots, I felt like it was necessary for me to get in contact with these folks. I didn't necessarily want to get in contact with my father, but that happened serendipitously. So, he was the first one I reconnected with [in person]. I filmed the conversation with my father and I saw a different person in him than I had ever seen before.

Do you attribute that to prison?
Definitely not. It was the result of things that had happened in his life after prison. After going through the footage, I realized that I learned a lot about the criminal justice system, poverty in America, and these structural problems—like the deindustrialization of cities in the Midwest (which affected the community I grew up in)—and how those issues evolved into criminal justice issues. So after talking to my father, I wrote letters to several different Jeromes. Some were in prison, and some were not; some replied, and some did not.

You use tar and gold leaf in the paintings. What do these materials symbolize?
When I first started the project, I was thinking about the name Jerome itself. I spoke with my father about how he ended up with the name and he told me that because it related to the bible. And so as I was looking into St. Jerome and I started looking into irony of these men living in this un-saintly situation, but being named after a saint. So I decided to make small devotional paintings for men who would never receive that kind of attention. Beauty is often a bad word in contemporary art right now, but I definitely wanted the paintings to be beautiful. I wanted people to look at these black men on the wall and say they are beautiful. Then to realize these are men who are incarcerated—that moment of confusion where you are trying to manage the reality of beauty and incarceration is part of the project's goal.

The tar happened because I was trying to figure out a way to deal with how being incarcerated impacted these men's lives. So I decided to start to submerge the paintings in tar in proportion to the amount of time they had served in prison. But the more research I did I realized that the amount of time that one spends in prison is only the beginning of their relationship to the system. And so the amount of tar I could apply just wasn't enough. Then, I decided to lean on the tar itself as a symbolic gesture of the impact of the criminal justice system. So works are fully covered and some are slightly covered. The tar also functions as a means to protect the identity of some of these individuals.

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'Jerome XXIX,' (2014)

What would you want people at risk to get out of The Jerome Project?
I think this is a question of expanding the project. I am working with high school students at this community organization called Art Space in New Heaven who is building an exhibition about the criminal justice system. I did a test run of the program at De Anza College in San Jose with 30 students—I had dancers, photographers, painters, sculptors, art historians, and historians all working together in the museum space there.

What we ended up doing was having this really beautiful experience where the folks who didn't consider themselves artists became the research mind of the project. They would bring their information to the group and say, "Did you know they are building prisons based on third- and fourth-grade test scores?" and that would inspire the artists' work. For the dancers in the group, we built a simulated cell and they choreographed a piece in that space, navigating the outline of the bed and desk while thinking about the idea of being confined. I am also in talks to set up a program at Rikers Island to go in and work with some of the guys there. So there is a way to address this issue through the arts.

Switching over to the revisionist paintings, what strikes me about the revisionist work is that there are these histories overlapping on one another—a combination of word-of-mouth family tales, and these social studies text books that tell you that black people ain't shit and white people rule the world. In your paintings, the duality embedded in those histories is always at play. Did you start painting with this intention?
Duality is a perfect word for it because in most of the work there's this simultaneous idea of absence and presence. Something is gone and something is present. And so I think about the history itself much in the same way. It may not be written in all of the textbooks, but it is still there. I also feel very strongly that most of the history that we have been taught is at best incomplete, and at worse fiction. The more I read history, I realize that all depictions are, to some degree, fiction. We lose something in the interpretation. And as I realized that painters throughout history have embraced this idea of fiction, I have felt complete freedom to address these paintings in a way that made sense for me.

Prior to photography we have these paintings that function as placeholders in our minds for specific historical events. The signing of the Declaration of the Independence is a really great example because the Trumbull painting generally pops in your head when you think of that event. Well that is a complete fiction. That's not how it happened. Those individuals were never in the same room together signing any document like that. But yet that is the placeholder in our mind. So for me these paintings are a way of altering the placeholders and allowed me to maybe put in some facts that were maybe left out.

So if you view this painting hanging on the wall through a dominant narrative, the cutout would certainly represented a white baby on the black woman's back. And what makes that even more powerful for me is that the black woman is dressed in a nice blue dress, which represents a form of empowerment for the time in which the painting is staged. Or am I reading that wrong?
I think there's two things, one it is significant that you realized that. You see into the history and understand that the individual on the back most likely was white. I didn't tell you that. That's your understanding that you bring to the painting. But a lot of people are going to look at that painting and not come to that conclusion. [body_image width='1000' height='1003' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='titus-kaphar-on-his-new-solo-show-and-unarmed-black-men-in-america-111-body-image-1421354440.jpg' id='18511']

'Space to Forget,' (2014)

In your paintings Another Night for Remembrance: Study in Time and 1968/2014 you use this white paint over protest scenes. What was your thought process behind that particular technique?
It was very specific with the Time project. I was really nervous about that. Not nervous because I didn't think I could do it. I was nervous because I felt like, to a certain degree, I was participating in the very thing that might lead to the erasure of this issue. Once we see something on television, or in print, we are given a kind of permission to forget. And so I wanted to make something that reflects this erasure that happens.

We are talking about Ferguson right now and Eric Garner right now. Are we going to still be talking about it five years from now? Because these issues are likely going to be still happening—I hope not, but historically speaking it's probably still going to be happening. So for me, the white washing was about a kind of erasure.

Will the piece be in the show?
The piece will be in the show but the piece is not for sale.

What strikes me about you is that you draw from a very personal side to create your work. Why do you make work that is much more personal that a lot of artists would claim to do?
I tried to avoid it for a really long time to be honest with you. I stopped for a while because I got tired of having these deeply personal conversations with people I didn't know.

Like me.
Yes, but I got to a point where I realized that these conversations, as I create work, have the affect of informing people who may not know. And for the folks that do know, the work says I get you, I understand where you are coming from, and I am coming from the same place. It's not always easy or comfortable and I don't always like it and sometimes I pull away from it a little bit because sometimes it is painful. [body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/01/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/15/' filename='titus-kaphar-on-his-new-solo-show-and-unarmed-black-men-in-america-111-body-image-1421354735.jpg' id='18513']

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'Yet Another Fight for Remembrance,' 2014

Titus Kaphar's solo exhibitions Drawing the Blinds and Asphalt and Chalk will open Thursday, January 15, and be on display through February 21 at Jack Shainman Gallery at 513 West 20th Street and 524 West 24th Street.

A portion of Titus Kaphar's The Jerome Project is currently on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem (144 West 125th Street) through March 8.

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Photo by Chloë Ellingson.

If you're freezing your ass off in Toronto tonight, come out for a photo show featuring work by Canada-based photographers as diverse as the city itself. Our good pal and VICE contributor Liam Maloney and Lisa Kannako will be hosting the first Toronto iteration of the Open Show starting at 7 PM at the Belljar Cafe, 2072 Dundas Street West. Work will range from Thomas Dagg's nostalgic glimpse into Star Wars to Chris Katsarov Luna's look at the industrial sector in Ontario, and Quebec-raised Laurence Butet-Roch's personal take on sovereignty through her examination of the Scottish bid for independence. Chloë Ellingson will show her ongoing work following native language in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, while Nathaniel Brunt's pieces document the India-Pakistan dispute over the Kashmir region.

So if you're interested in learning what the next generation of Canadian photographers are working on, swing on by. If you've got work that you'd like to submit for the next Open Show, check out their website, or just bug Liam at the event tonight (don't tell him we sent you).

Here's the Facebook event, if you're into that sort of thing, and here is some of the work they'll be showing and talking about.

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Photo via Flickr user 0ystercatcher

A man on a nearly 10,000 mile trek along Australia's coast escaped a poisonous snakebite this week when a lunging king brown snake's fangs were blocked by his full-body Star Wars Stormtrooper armor. In a video post made near Yalboroo, Queensland, on day 277 of his travels and uploaded to the Facebook page for his journey (dubbed "Storming Australia"), 47-year-old ex-soldier Scott Loxley describes his encounter with the vicious three-foot snake as follows:

I'm walking up the hill and I see a snake on the side of the road... He's kind of coiled up and I thought he was another dead snake and I just continued to walk past him.
Ha, turns out he wasn't dead. A big, old king brown ... and he's, um, lunged at me and bit me. But the good news is the armor—he bit me in the shin and the armor actually protected me and stopped the bite. I could feel the teeth on the plastic scraping.
But the armor actually stopped something. So all those people who rag on the old Stormtroopers, you know, The armor doesn't do this, it doesn't do that, it stopped a snake bite and probably saved my life today.

Loxley was referring to a common criticism of Stormtroopers in Star Wars, who despite their heavy armor appear to be vulnerable to everything from blasters to fuzzy little Ewoks. (Some apologists for the film try to explain away these shortcomings in highly esoteric terms.)

Loxley is lucky his armor was more effective than its cinematic counterpart. King browns, or mulgas, are among Australia's most venomous snakes, known for their savage bites and the unparalleled volume of venom they can inject. The cause of the most snakebite deaths in Australia, their toxins can cause blood coagulation and poison the brain and kidneys unless treated swiftly.

And that's not the only poisonous Loxley might have encountered. The king brown is only the 13th deadliest animal living on Loxley's route, according to the Australian Museum's danger rankings.

But Aussies are tough. Though 3,000 snake bites are reported in the country a year, only a handful of people die from them. Loxley, who eats tons of bush meat, regularly consumes poisonous snakes. He even considered chasing his king brown antagonist down, but decided it was too aggressive. It wasn't the first snake to bite him, although it was the first he let get away without killing or devouring it in response.

It's worth pointing out that Loxley's armor servers a greater purpose than snake protection on the road. He's using it as a stunt to draw attention to his walk, which began in September 2013 as a charitable endeavor to raise money for the 2016 opening of Melbourne's pending Monash Children's Hospital. Loxley has burned through over 20 pairs of shoes and started using truck tires to retread his latest pairs. To date, he's raised over $33,000 from 599 donors and hopes to have $82,000 by the time he finishes the trip this summer.

The Stormtrooper gimmick isn't unique to Loxley. He's part of a larger organization known as the 501st Legion, which is comprised of people who dress up as Star Wars baddies to promote fandom of the series. Their members, active in dozens of countries from America to Australia (where they have four chapters), also regularly raise money and appear pro bono at charity events for organizations like the American Cancer Society, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and the Red Cross. Established in 1997, the society has become so popular that Lucas Films has tacitly given them a stamp of approval by including them in the Star Wars canon.

Still, Loxley's coastal trek is extreme compared to most of 501st charity events, which usually involve members coming out to perform scenes as a group. It's unusually long for a charity walk as well. Although fairly common as a fundraising gimmick, most are just a few hundred miles long.

The only direct parallel to Loxley's trip may be Jacob French's 3,000 "Trooper Trek" across the Australian Outback in 2012, which raised $100,000 for the Starlight Children's Foundation.

Loxley claims he's not really a big Star Wars nerd, but the 501st requires that its members have a high-quality outfit. There's a shocking variety of getups, but a decent suit runs about a grand. His membership meant he had greater fang protection than a casual fan who might have been wearing a cheap Halloween costume alternative.

Still, according to Brian Troyan, a.k.a. TK-8968, a 501st public relations officer, the costumes aren't meant to be protective and more often than not have the opposite effect on members.

"The low visibility and limited mobility afforded to a member in costume probably causes more accidents and injuries than it avoids," Troyan told me via email. "Even without any dramatic accidents, Stormtrooper armor often leaves the wearer bruised at the joints from pieces that pinch into the arms and legs. But members of the 501st take these 'armor bites' with pride. [Still] it's all very impractical."

TK-8968 and the 501st team are only aware of one other instance in which Stormtrooper armor has done more good than harm: An underwater explorer and filmmaker named Scott Cassell (not a member of the 501st) apparently uses a homemade fiberglass suit modeled after Stormtrooper armor to defend himself against squid attacks.

True to TK-8968's warnings, Loxley's suit has proven more of a burden than a protection for the bulk of his trip, especially in the heat of the Australian summer. The suit locks in heat so terribly that he lost about 45 pounds within the first half-year of the trek.

"The heat and humidity have made every day almost unbearable to the point where I wake up and go, 'I can't put it on today,'" Loxley told news.com.au. "But if I don't, I won't finish. So every day I put on the armor and off I go."

The heat is melting and cracking the suit, forcing him to hold it together with tape. As it continues to buckle under the stress of the journey, it will presumably be less useful in warding off future snake attacks.

How Loxley holds up as his armor disintegrates remains to be seen—the dude is probably a walking hunk of leather by now. On the bright side, turning yourself into jerky and talking about near-death in cosplay has an upside: Donations have spiked since Loxley's brush with death.

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