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Illustration by author

"In Egypt, no one would buy a drama where the cop was a hero," Ganzeer told me. "The story people buy is one where an unjust cop does evil things to the protagonist."

Ganzeer is the pseudonym of a 32-year-old Egyptian artist who became famous during the revolution. He's also a friend with whom I like to drink. Earlier this month, few days after his first US solo show opened at New York's Leila Heller Gallery, we sat in the cement cave in the back of Interferance Archive that serves as his studio and talked.

He conceived of the concept for his show, titled All American, only a few months after his May 2014 move from Cairo to New York. NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo had just choked Eric Garner to death. Anti-police protests were blossoming across America. Murder by cop became an inescapable subject, and one he wanted to confront on its home turf.

Ganzeer made over 70 pieces for All American . Inside the gallery, silkscreens hang floor to ceiling, forming a maze. On opening night, crowds of gallery-goers banged into these walls, dislodging the prints. The prints themselves were ice cream–bright, screened in double, triple, quadruple layers at Bushwick Print Lab. Beneath New York–style graffiti, Marilyn Monroe smiled next to Micky Mouse, Mister Potato Head, Aunt Jemima, and SpongeBob SquarePants. A ball-gagged Captain America hung alongside a drawing of a backpack overprinted with the Fourth Amendment. In one piece, Pantaleo glowered in yellow and blue, choking Garner inside a parody of an ad for the NYPD.

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Photos courtesy of Ganzeer

Ganzeer told me the visual chaos is a nod to supermarket aisles. For him, those colorful displays embody America: fractal cheer concealing the truth. As I walked the maze, bits of that truth came into focus. In letterpress, Ganzeer had created his own money. Each bill showed a crime committed by America. A beheaded Native American. Slaves, shackled, about to board a ship. The currency was convincing enough that he had to mark it with, "This note is not intended to serve as legal tender, though its value exceeds five dollars."

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Ganzeer complains he has no style. He's wrong. His background as a designer shows through in everything he makes. He draws type with graceful geometry, whether it's swirling, scrawled, tagged, or stenciled. His compositionscrackle and flash.But to me, that's not what makes a piece his. I can tell a Ganzeer by its lines. His ink is tense with amphetamine precision. Mockery, exhaustion and rage, battling it out on a micron tip.

Though Ganzeer been making art professionally since 2007, he became famous during the Egyptian Revolution, when he covered the Cairo's walls with skulls, tanks, and masked army officers. He was briefly arrested in May 2011. During the Mohammed Morsi presidency, he painted a nude woman in a hijab who was praying for her husband's tongue in her pussy. Some viewers called for his arrest again.

Ganzeer was no more popular with Abdel Fattah Sisi's military dictatorship. After he started the collaborative social media art series #SisiWarCrimes, TV presenter Osama Kamal claimed on air that Ganzeer had been recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood, which the regime had designated as a banned terrorist organization. Calling Ganzeer an Islamist might seem ludicrous, especially considering that snarky naked lady painting, but media slander like that is often a prelude to jail. The artist left for the US.

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In America, where the fetish for foreign dissidents runs deep, Ganzeer could have dined out for years on his revolutionary cred, making do-gooders feel brave by proxy just for buying his paintings. But it was a role he rejected as Orientalism; he was sick of how the Western press reduced him to nothing but an avatar for the Egyptian Revolution and ignored his critique of their own countries.

"When you see injustice somewhere you want to call bullshit on it," he told me. "There's just so much injustice in the United States."

Ganzeer's studio was bisected by a massive collaborative painting by him, Tunisian street calligrapher el-Seed, and the German graffiti artist Case. Originally exhibited in Frankfurt, it showed an African child soldier holding the outline of a gun. Ganzeer told me that it had originally been filled in with euros—a swipe at the German banks funding foreign wars. This offended some viewers, and by the end of the show, all the euros had been torn off. No one wants to confront their own sins.

Ganzeer's friends back in Egypt were proud of him, both for showing in New York, and for "taking his dick out," for having the audacity to call out America from the inside.

To this day, the US government provides generous military aid to Egypt's dictatorship, which has has sentenced thousands of dissidents to death, jailed three Al-Jazeera journalists, and gunned down protesters in the street. Yet no matter how many dictatorships they fund, US politicians always pay lip service to "freedom," and many Americans still see their country as a basically benevolent superpower.

"It's questionable that Americans will be able to look at the American flag the way the rest of the world does," Ganzeer said.

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Because he's done illegal murals, many critics have called Ganzeer a street artist, a label he rejects. He prefers a phrase coined for him by Bidoun magazine: "contingency artist" —one who uses whatever means are necessary.

Ganzeer calls his artistic genre "concept pop," which takes the pretty vapidity of pop art and puts some substance behind it,and executes conceptual art so beautifully that people are forced to care about the concepts. He doesn't think much of art done as therapeutic self-expression—for him, that's something to keep in your drawer, not display in a gallery.

"There's a good quote by some old Greek guy who said, 'True glory exists in doing what deserves to be written, and in writing what deserves to be read.'" Ganzeer said. "Just think about that question before you put your stuff out there."

Ganzeer told me that after every show, he never wants to do another one. They burn him out too much, he gets bored too easily, and is too hungry to try new things. Then he showed me his next project: a graphic novel about a young girl who is kidnapped by a pedophile during the Egyptian Revoltion.

Like Scheherazade, she protects herself by telling stories. On one panel, the girl sits with her imaginary friend, who is crocodile-headed like the Egyptian god Sobek, with a penis and dangling breasts. Ganzeer had done a page of studies of different-sized Sobek dicks, trying to find one discreet enough for American comics distributors.

Ganzeer is a longtime comics fan, and his bookshelf is dominated by a battered set of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan, a series about Spider Jerusalem, a Hunter S. Thompson–esque figure who believes that "Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world." Transmetropolitan is a bit of an international token among weird kids. You see references to it inked on the forearm of a Kurdish futurist here, shouted out by a Greek journalist there.

When Ganzeer was still a student, he emailed Ellis to ask him if he should try to make his name doing superhero comics. "Fuck no," Ellis responded. "Do your own thing." So he did.

Art, like journalism, is a compromised field full of people who posture rebelliously while furiously currying favor behind the scenes. But, like journalism, art can still be dangerous. If you doubt this, come see Ganzeer's All American. It is both a powerful affirmation of the importance of art, and a sort of recipe: Keep dodging, keep punching, keep moving. Then, maybe, you can avoid being consumed.

Follow Molly Crabapple on Twitter, and find more information on Ganzeer's New York show here.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Remember the video for Die Antwoord's " Baby's on Fire" in which a BMW twists and turns around a dancing Yolandi? That twisting and turning is called "spinning," and it's a motorsport that has taken South Africa's townships by storm.

Over weekends in the Soweto area of Johannesburg, crowds flock to makeshift pitches in vacant lots to watch dapper young men raise massive clouds of smoke, quickly run down the tread on their wheels, and hang out the sides of their BMW 325is.

Watch the video above, made in collaboration with Sure Motionsense, and you'll see how dangerous it looks. These guys cling on by the crook of their arms, feet skidding along the dust, faces shining through the clouds of smoke, while the car they're attached to screams itself hoarse, until it breaks stance and the man re-enters through the window to the cheers of those watching from behind piles of old tires.

Soweto was the only place this kind of motorsport could have started. It's the most famous township in South Africa, home to 850,000 people divided into around 30 residential areas. The uprisings and resulting massacre of 1976 here are scorched into living South African memory. It has a life and mentality all of its own, a fuck-you-we-do-what-we-like attitude born of a necessity that can only come from oppression.

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In the 80s, a thriving gangster culture gave rise to spinning at funerals, where it became ritual to steal a car and spin it around in honor of the fallen. Then, during the early 90s, when the country looked almost certainly doomed to racial civil war, some twentysomething Sowetans got together and practiced outside the criminal world. They didn't know what they were doing exactly (stunts, drag racing, whatever), but it all centered on the BMW 325i—the so-called box shape, or gusheshe—and being the best. It grew from there, and these days it's on the brink of being a certified official motorsport, having already advanced to a profitable industry and network of promoters, spinners, and crowds.

Jeff James was one of the guys who started it all, back in the 90s. He's 42 now, with a wife and kids, and is considered one of the founding fathers, but he still spins every weekend. He claims to be the first guy from whose car somebody clambered:

"[The first jumper is] a very close friend of mine," he says. "We tried some funny tricks, hey, like drag racing and stunts. And that's how it developed, the whole thing. People have different perspectives in terms of spinning. People say it's very dangerous—but almost every sport is dangerous. What I would say to them is, if you're watching it, it looks dangerous. But in the car, it's different. You just have to be 100 percent sober-minded."

Much of what makes spinning so popular is its celebrity aspect. Some of the spinners are more famous for their banter and presence than their driving skills. Jeff isn't one of those ("I just spin my car, man; that's it."). But when you're fucking up a car every other weekend, the expenses rack up. You need to be the celeb who can name his price when the promoters and organizers come calling. Jeff has won that right—he maintains his car by demanding food and accommodation for the events he spins at.

Since it's not yet a recognized sport, all of the spinners—even the celebs—also have day jobs. Generally it's related to cars in some way. Jeff runs a taxi service. Mageshe Ndaba, the man they call the King of Spin, is also in the taxi industry. Unlike Jeff, he plays up the celeb aspect—plays up the cash. He sounds slightly offended when I ask him where he ranks within the spinning community.

"I wouldn't have the name 'King of Spin' if I wasn't one of the top competitors," he says. "They chose it. They gave it to me, back in 2003, because they loved what I was doing. Look, if people choose to call me that, it's fine; if they decide not to, it's also fine."

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Mageshe was also there right at the beginning, an 18-year-old in matric. He wasn't from Soweto, and he used to drive his BMW from neighboring Springs at night to take part.

"We had no controlled areas back then. We had to do it in the streets," he recalls. "I had my close calls with the cops. Sometimes I talked my way out of it. Sometimes they even asked me to demonstrate."

What's funny is, since the popularity boom, the same cops who used to chase these kids are now massive fans. "For sure! No doubt about it—they say now, 'Hey, look bra, we love what you're doing, hey.' I think if I applied for advanced driving to train the cops, I'd get that job, like, yesterday, my bra.

"All people know me as [the] Father of Spinning, so their parents come to me and say, 'Look at these Mageshis!' So I try to encourage them to be safe."

And these kids will have an easier time of it, especially in terms of safety, should government acquiesce and make a sport out of this phenomenon. It has all the classic calling cards of an everyman's sport, just like football: the lack of discrimination, the primal excitement, the come-all and one-for-all vibe. Subsidy and regulation is what is sorely needed for spinning to shed the stigma of gangster culture and non-regulation. But it's so damn expensive.

"Bra—you don't wanna know. You don't wanna know. There's nothing as expensive as spinning, hey," says Mageshe when I quiz him about it.

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Pule Earm is a documentary filmmaker, spinning promoter, commentator, and political busybody. He only spins in private, to be able to articulate the feeling to other people, to "categorically explain the feeling of performance better than a spinner can." He's made it his mission since 2009 to punt this township pastime into the big time on the national circuit. Pule is the confluence point between politics and the spinner on the ground.

"I realized early that the guys don't have a voice," he says. "So my entry level was being a spokesperson on behalf of the industry, through my storytelling capacities."

He's founded Soweto Drift, a spinning school and promotions agency that's at the forefront of the drive for regulation.

"The whole concept of Soweto Drift came from a film. It was inspired by the likes of Tokyo Drift, The Fast and the Furious," he tells me. "We wanted to make it into a South African concept. The film has been played on a couple of film festivals and is now even on Mzansi [a local film channel].

"I met with Fikile Mbalula [South African Minister of Sport] last month to talk about spinning. I've met him on a number of occasions as a comrade, so I know him, you know. Basically, it was out of this world. He just came and greeted us and we had a conversation with the director-general of motorsport. The idea of them taking this so seriously inspired me to push harder."

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His pushing has led to a partial breakdown of social and class divisions, to the point where even white folk from upper-class Johannesburg—along with a host of political celebs—make the trip to inner Soweto regularly. Which is maybe the only thing stranger than the sight of a bunch of guys clambering over screeching cars mid-doughnut.

"It is definitely a recent thing," he says. "The guys in the industry, they started inviting their white friends. We do the spinning in Soweto. The attendance isn't as high as the events in the East Rand, or Mayhem in Pretoria. It's because of the nature of the venues we use. In Soweto, it's hardcore township. The neighboring residents in Pretoria are white, so you get more white people there, as opposed to Soweto. I will take that credit alone and say Soweto Drift has made that possible, and inspired other promoters to broaden their horizons in terms of their target markets. That makes it easier for other people to have whites at their events. Now that spinning is in that environment, the motorsport fanatics will go anywhere.

"It makes me excited. Because the way we want to position car spinning is to make it a national sport. So we can't be ignorant, or envious, when white people are at the events. That's what we want. Unfortunately, we live in a world where some of us believe that if a white man endorses something, it's successful. Personally, I don't believe that, but I have no problem with white communities coming to the spinning. I see that as positive, and it simply means that if the audience can easily adapt to sharing, without putting up barriers, so can the motorsport in terms of administrative processes and maybe get some non-white people on the boards of motorsport directors.

"You get all types of backgrounds. You get guys from the poor communities, the middle class, the high class. It's not like boxing, where, you know, you only get the elite. Or cricket. It's like soccer, basically," says Pule. "It crosses all the lines in terms of race, politics, class—it doesn't discriminate."

In a country as divided as South Africa, that takes some doing.

Follow Karl on Twitter.

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The Islamic State is no stranger to attacking civilians. Recently, though, they've been targeting not only gay people and journalists but also subversive magicians.

Earlier this month, reports emerged of a street performer who was beheaded in a public square in the city of Raqqa, Syria, the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State.

The illusionist, who went by the moniker "Sorcerer," was known for entertaining locals with innocuous magic tricks like making coins and cell phones disappear. According to UK tabloid The Daily Mirror, he was charged with "creating illusions and falsehood" deemed offensive to Islam and was sentenced to death by beheading. An activist who recently fled Raqqa and was familiar with Sorcerer told the Mirror that the magician was a popular performer who simply entertained locals: "He was just called 'Sorcerer' by people and children loved him. He was doing nothing anti-Islamic but he paid for it with his life."

ISIS has been cracking down on all forms of magic. The video below was released in July by the organization's media arm and shows a man from Aleppo moments before he is beheaded for sorcery. Another propaganda video shows militants scouring a so-called "sorcerer's nest" for books about magic and declaring that the appropriate penalty is to be struck by a sword.

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Clearly, ISIS does not take the threat of supernatural forces lightly. We wanted to understand why seemingly harmless street magicians are being lumped in with supposed satanic, spell-casting sorcerers.

VICE spoke to Adam Silverstein, professor of Abrahamic religions at Bar Ilan University and author of Islamic History: A Very Short Introduction. He is also a magician and member of the Magic Circle, a UK-based organization dedicated to "promoting and advancing the art of magic."

According to Silverstein, the root of this problem is largely semantic. "The Arabic word for 'magic' is Sihr—pronounced with a guttural 'H'—and in the Qur'an it means 'magic' in the sense of 'black magic,' but in modern Arabic the same word is used for 'entertaining magic,'" Silverstein explained. "That can lead to unfortunate confusions that can, very occasionally, have serious consequences for magicians in the Muslim world.

"Chapter 2, verse 102 [of the Qur'an] specifically states that it is 'the Satans' who teach magic," he said. "Seeing as how Sihr is associated with 'the Satans,' it would not surprise me at all if some in the Muslim world associate Sihr—even of the entertainment sort—with threatening forces."

Mamdouh Marzouki agrees. He's a well-known magician from Saudi Arabia who goes by the stage name "Mumdo," and he says his craft is frequently misunderstood.

"Black magic is a sin in the Qur'an," Marzouki said. "It is considered evil and the work of the Devil and therefore it is forbidden. But to this day there is a great confusion between black magic and what I do.

"What I do, with all due respect to magicians, it's not real magic," he added. "It's just trickery and misdirection but a lot of people in this part of the world believe that what I do is real and I do my best to tell them that it's not by educating them. Sometimes I go even further and break the Magician's Code and reveal some tricks just to prove that what I do is illusion."

During his studies, Silverstein performed magic to small groups in Jordan, Egypt, the West Bank, and Arab villages in Israel. He said "the reception was generally positive but audience members would often react with fear rather than enjoyment," a fear that Silverstein chalks up to crowds "interpreting what they see through their own cultural perspective, which was often coloured by belief in demons and the like."

"I recall one performance in which a group of slightly older men observed a standard trick and responded by abruptly leaving while muttering under their breath about the powers of the Jinn."

Jinn are supernatural beings or demons often associated with black magic. It's also the root of the English word genie.

Anecdotal evidence aside, belief in supernatural forces is widespread in the Muslim world, according to a Pew Research report surveying over 38,000 muslims in 39 countries. In the Middle East specifically, well over half of the population is reported to believe in Jinn and sorcery is almost universally considered "not permissible" within Islam.

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Mumdo performing magic on stage. Photo courtesy of Mumdo

Mumdo's stage act is heavily influenced by glitzy American-style magic shows; he makes female stagehands disappear and helicopters appear out of thin air.

"Siegfried and Roy, David Copperfield, Jeff McBride all are magicians that have influenced me and I still look up to them," Marzouki said. Yet he says that he still gets criticized and accused of "witchcraft" because many Muslims do not make the distinction between satanic black magic and the extravagant but benign trickery that he performs for a living.

And it's not only non-state actors like ISIS that seem unable or unwilling to make the distinction between black magic and entertainment. Saudi Arabia, a country with no criminal code where judges interpret holy texts to deliver rulings, also beheads alleged sorcerers in public. The country's religious police force has set up an anti-witchcraft squad that gets dispatched to investigate cases of black magic and sorcery. Even the Harry Potter books are forbidden in the Kingdom, according to The Jerusalem Post.

In 2008, popular Lebanese psychic hotline show host Ali Hussain Sibat was arrested following an "undercover sting operation." He was charged with "manipulating spirits, predicting the future, concocting potions and conjuring spells," the New York Times reported.

Sibat was sentenced to death by beheading for being a sorcerer, though the Saudi Supreme Court eventually reversed the sentence after an international outcry.

Not surprisingly, Mumdo, a Saudi native, has also had problems with the authorities. "My performance permit was once rejected and I had to cancel a few shows before because of the confusion between what I do—illusion—and real magic," the illusionist said, adding that it is not uncommon for him to turn down performances if he feels that he will "get bullied by the religious police." Nor is this uncommon for other magicians in the Middle East. "Some of my fellow magicians have also cancelled and stopped their shows because of religious concerns."

Still, magic may be a complex and controversial issue in the Muslim world, but why the death penalty?

Capital punishment for magic, or Sihr, is actually firmly planted in Islamic history and law. Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim is a professor of Islamic Law at McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies. When asked about the Raqqa magician who was beheaded, he told VICE that "ISIS must have been at least partly influenced in its decision to implement this punishment by normative, pre-modern [before the 19th century] juristic discourse."

"The majoritarian position among pre-modern Muslim jurists is that Muslims who exercise magic should be put to death," Ibrahim said. According to him, this reasoning is the basis of the beheading in the ISIS propaganda video above, and it is "the dominant position in normative discourse in the four Sunni schools of law."

But he emphasizes that "the frequent persecution of magicians is indeed a recent phenomenon. When you read 16th- through 19th-century Ottoman court records, for instance, you realize there was no inquisition of magicians, no witch hunts, as was the case in Christian Europe, despite the jurists' harsh punishments."

Both Silverstein and Marzouki say that the general attitude toward "entertainment magic" is definitely warming, and both cite hugely popular TV talent show Arabs Got Talent as crucial to the growing acceptance of entertainment magicians.

"The public is much more aware of what I do and it's a little safer now," said Marzouki.

Still, he says he is hardly surprised by the execution of the street magician in Raqqa. "I expect anything from Islamic State. These are radicals who kill innocent women and children, so I am not surprised. I feel sorry for the street magician and my heart goes out to his family. This is tragic and shouldn't have happened. Street performers are entertainers and this guy was trying to bring smiles and joy to the people in a very difficult time."

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Photo via Pixabay

Under the broad anti-terror legislation tabled Friday, Canada's spy agency, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), will be given broad new powers to investigate and "disrupt" terrorist plots. Canada's police services will be able to go after online terrorist propaganda.

When the bill was tabled on Friday afternoon, the Prime Minister vowed to prevent attacks like the ones that hit Ottawa and Quebec in October.

The powers included in Bill C-51 come with little new oversight or transparency. The core of the provisions will allow CSIS to disrupt attacks the organization believes may occur in Canada or abroad.

The government calls them "disruption warrants," and they will let Canada's spies do just about anything. According to the legislation those warrants authorize the spies to "enter any place or open or obtain access to any thing," to copy or obtain any document, "to install, maintain or remove any thing," and, most importantly, "to do any other thing that is reasonably necessary to take those measures."

To use the new measures, once passed by Parliament, the spies will need to apply to a judge to authorize operations to stop a terrorist attack. The legislation doesn't offer many caveats on that power, instead enabling the spies to take whatever measures they feel are necessary, in Canada or abroad. So long as a judge agrees, it's all fair game—even if it's illegal.

The word install appears to be an indication that CSIS should have powers to install malware and keyloggers, which the government has already moved toward legalizing.

On top of that, the bill offers no new oversight for CSIS. Currently, it is policed by the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), which has been lambasted for being woefully inadequate and staffed by political appointees.

The opposition NDP have already raised concerns about these new powers and the corresponding lack of oversight.

"This is obviously a serious addition to the powers that CSIS would have, and it requires some serious questions," said NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar.

The proposed "disruption warrants" are good for up to 120 days, and can be renewed twice. The legislation is explicit that authorities can ignore the laws of Canada and any foreign state while operating under such a warrant.

Also included in the bill are new powers for the government to put Canadians on the no-fly list and keep them there, and to share information about possible security risks with airline carriers and other departments.

The proposed law allows people placed on the no-fly list to appeal the decision. But the bill also gives the minister new powers to ensure that it's harder for people to get off the list—including, as C-51 lays out, the power to introduce evidence "even if it is inadmissible in a court of law." That could include evidence obtained illegally.

What may prove the most controversial part of the bill is the provision allowing police to order what the government deems terrorist propaganda taken off the internet, and allowing the authors of websites calling for terrorist attacks to be arrested and hit with significant jail time.

Police will be able to issue takedown notices, subject to the approval of a judge, to force website hosts based in Canada to destroy comments, blogs, or webpages that are found to promote or glorify terrorist organizations or attacks. People who have posted such material will be allowed to appear in court and defend their postings, although they will open themselves up to self-incrimination if they do so. If they don't appear in court, the judge can decide to order the information to be deleted anyway.

Promoting terrorist attacks on a website could also net you up to five years in prison. The bill says that if someone intentionally advocates or promotes terrorism, "knowing or reckless as to whether it would result in terrorism," it is a crime.

The legislation also allows both Public Works and Citizenship and Immigration Canada to share information proactively, without being asked, to national security agencies, if they believe there is a terror threat.

Immigration handles Canadians' passport information, while Public Works maintains the Controlled Goods Program. The utility of information they might share was laid out in briefing documents provided to reporters: "During a routine inspection, officials discovered that 10,000 large-caliber NATO ammunition rounds were unaccounted for. What's more, a foreign delegation recently visited the facility. Following this visit concerns were raised about potential links to a terrorist organization."

In that hypothetical scenario, the document says, Public Works could contact public safety agencies independently.

Concerns will obviously be raised that, without any legal protections or oversight, letting bureaucrats share individuals' personal information on a whim infringes on privacy. This government has already made it possible for tax agents to share Canadians' personal information if they believe a crime has been committed. These measures essentially encourage bureaucrats to surveil Canadians, even if it's well outside their mandate.

The legislation also seeks to lower the threshold allowing police to investigate and arrest suspected terrorist planners and hold them without charge while they investigate the possible threat.

Police will only need to prove to a judge that an attack "may be carried out," as opposed to establishing that the attack will be carried out, as is currently necessary.

Under the same changes, police can detain individuals for up to seven days without charge. They will also be able to apply for a 'terrorism peace bond' which will allow them to surveil, track, and limit the travel of individuals for up to five years. Police will be able to forbid that person from having a passport, and can even limit their travel to a specific geographic area.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the new legislation in Ontario, alongside Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney and Justice Minister Peter MacKay.

He brushed aside criticisms that the bill adds no new oversight while vastly expanding CSIS' powers. He even went so far as to chastise opposition parties for suggesting that security and civil liberties are mutually exclusive.

"[Canadians'] freedom and their security, more often than not, go hand in hand," Harper told a crowd of supporters, continuing that "it was a jihadi terrorist that took away our freedoms," not police officers.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

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This weekend marks the third annual LA Art Book Fair, put on by the rad folks at New York's Printed Matter. For three days, the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA will host tons of artists, curators, collectors, and will feature publishers selling zines, books, prints, posters, t shirts: the whole she-bang.

Among those hawking their artsy wares is Girlfriends—essentially an all-female art collective curated by talented New York-based Dafy Hagai—who has brought together a gang of young, self-published female artists, all of whom are from culturally diverse backgrounds: Japan, Israel, UK, US and Canada.

VICE Canada readers should be familiar with some of the names at the table—Maya Fuhr, Claire Milbrath from The Editorial, and Rebecca Storm—and the fantastic Monika Mogi, Dana Boulos (members of Petra Collins' Ardorous collective) and Valerie Phillips will also be showing.

So yeah, if you're lucky enough to be in Los Angeles this weekend and want to support some of the awesome talent coming from this country and elsewhere, drop on by and say hello to Girlfriends for us.

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Photo courtesy of Hood By Air

Across the Atlantic, the European menswear shows for fall/winter 2015 have just wrapped up. Beyond the usual parade of outlandishly expensive designer clothes and showman hijinks, there were a few curious trend developments. The fashion industry is fascinating right now, because it sits at a precipice. The impact of the internet, an oversaturated global market, and a weak economy have left many brands and designers disoriented. Many time-honored labels can't figure out how to play the game, since all the rules seem to have changed.

Last year Prada saw a 40 percent drop in profits. In contrast, Saint Laurent, a brand that only a few years ago was near the bottom of the relevancy pecking order, has become one of the fastest growing luxury labels in the world. New designers and names pop up incessantly, while others get flushed down the fashion toilet and quickly fade from memory.

With all of this clothing chaos, it makes sense that a lot of the big designers played it pretty conservative this season. The biggest outward statement on the runways were the wide and relaxed pants that will hopefully prod some fellas into finally tossing out their crotch-ripped skinny jeans. Other than that, on the surface, the whole affair was pretty staid. Most designers followed more commercial imperatives, as opposed to the whacked-out conceptual stuff that actually makes fashion fun.

A New Dandy Look

Unfortunately, this world is still filled with men who are so self-conscious of their own rigid masculinity they are filled with resentment and panic when they just see a guy actively challenge gender norms. So it was interesting to see that Gucci, one of the largest luxury brands in the world, would recast their brand with outrageously effeminate bohemian looks that might derogatorily be described as "sissy." This Gucci remodel comes by way of newly instated creative director and Gucci veteran Alessandro Michele. The iconic Italian brand's change in direction echoes a similar move made by Spanish leather house Loewe lead by fashion wunderkind J.W. Anderson. Both Anderson and Michele have discarded notions of conventional masculinity and are unapologetic for their non-heteronormative fashion. For Fall 2015 Gucci showcased silk ruffled blouses on long-haired waifish boys, while Loewe's lookbook suggested a gay couple on vacation. Make of it what you will, but the fact that two of the largest luxury conglomerates (Kering owns Gucci, LVMH owns Loewe) are giving so much visibility to a previously underrepresented type of consumer is a sure sign of society's progressive attitudes. For fall/winter 2015, the mantle of the "sissy" has become fashion's boldest statement.

East Meets West

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Photo courtesy of Dries van Noten

In the new Netflix series Marco Polo, actor Lorenzo Richelmy plays the celebrated explorer who serves in the court of Kublai Khan. Dressed in quasi-traditional East Asian garb, Richelmy's wardrobe presents an interesting fashion proposition, one that hasn't been lost to menswear designers in London and Paris.

While Western clothing has reshaped the fashions and dress of Asia for over 150 years, the reverse has happened only on rare and isolated occasions. In recent seasons, menswear designer Craig Green has made a name for himself by appropriating traditional Japanese garments and interpreting them in a wholly modern language. His shows have become some of the most talked about on the fashion calendar. French designer and former creative director of Lacoste Christophe Lemaire has long since referenced dress from East Asia putting its styles in a contemporary and urban context. Belgian legend Dries van Noten has, for over 20 years, looked to ethnic dress from around the world for his collections. These designers, among others, converged this season and collectively made significant push for adapting and appropriating East Asian dress for menswear inspiration.

Perhaps now as we enter a more global oriented world, and as the fashion market broadens and expands its audience considerably, menswear looks to foreign and ethnic dress for innovations when Western tropes have been exhausted. Wrapped and draped jackets, soft fluid pants—it's a subtle and elegant means of dressing that is both functional and comfortable. And it's these traits that help any aesthetic shift become a permanent one.

Boys from the Hood

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Photo courtesy of A.P.C.

In menswear you have the dandy, the jock, the rebel, the nerd, the military man—fashion archetypes that are constantly referenced and reiterated by designers each season. Hood By Air's Shayne Oliver is one of the few designers who have managed to author a fashion archetype completely of his own design. His is an urban identity derived from a culture made up of primarily, but not limited to, America's black and Latin racial minorities. Oliver has codified their style and swagger, bringing its themes and aesthetics to high fashion. It has been a noticeable influence on Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci, whose menswear collections share many common themes with Oliver's. So this season, as Hood By Air made its claim on the international scene with a presentation at Pitti Uomo, the men's fashion fair in Florence, Oliver's "hood" boy emerged as legitimate fashion template, inspiring scores of upstart designers from Milan to London who now pursue the same elevated streetwear niche. One noticeable addition to the fashion calendar is Marcelo Burlon County Milan, the new label by Tisci's own friend and collaborator. His presentation was reminiscent of Oliver's staging and design motifs and was one of the most hyped shows of the season.

This burgeoning archetype, however, had its oddest interpretation at A.P.C., maker of high quality classic staples, where its notoriously derisive creative director Jean Touitou chose the phrase "The Last Niggas in Paris," repeated throughout the presentation, as the collection's key theme. The lookbook sports a Caucasian model in Timberland boots designed in collaboration with A.P.C., that Touitou said was inspired by the "ghetto." The irony and inappropriateness of this appeared to be lost on Touitou who, according to the Style.com write up by Luke Leitch, justified his language and cultural harvesting by his friendship with Kanye West. Timberland subsequently and understandably nullified their partnership with A.P.C. and Toitou has since apologized.

In less than two weeks, all eyes will turn to New York City for the Big Apple's own Fashion Week presentations. Whether we'll see appearances from the hood boy, the fabulously flamboyant or more East Asian-inspired looks or something different altogether remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

Follow Jeremy on Twitter.

Turns out Mitt Romney isn't running for president after all. After nearly a month of very publicly threatening to mount another White House bid, the twice-failed Republican candidate told supporters in a conference call on Friday that he has decided to let someone else give it a try this time.

"After putting considerable thought into making another run for president, I've decided it is best to give other leaders in the Party the opportunity to become our next nominee," he said, according to a transcription of his remarks published by radio host Hugh Hewitt. "I believe one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee. In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case."

Clearly, this was the right choice, although it is curious that he thought he had the choice in the first place. As we pointed out when he first teased a 2016 run, Romney is terrible at running for president—that's why he lost twice, rather badly. For a while, it seemed like everyone taking Romney's third campaign seriously was suffering some sort of collective amnesia about the 2012 campaign, because Romney was really, really bad at being a candidate. His attempts to relate to the average American were so painful, it almost made you like him.

More damningly, Romney left America with the lasting impression that he was an out-of-touch rich dude with no conception of what life is like for Normals—this was the candidate who, despite endless attacks on his wealth, continued to say things like "I like being able to fire people," and "corporations are people"—not to mention that whole 47 percent thing. In short, he was the living, coiffed embodiment of the income gap.

Other Republicans realized this. Romney's flirtation with a third run was disparaged by a number of party leaders and influential conservatives, including the hallowed Wall Street Journal editorial page. "If Mitt Romney is the answer, what is the question?" the paper asked in an editorial earlier this month, going on to remind readers of just how badly Romney screwed up his last campaign. On Thursday, Iowa strategist David Kochel, who worked on both of Romney's campaigns, announced that he was jumping to Jeb Bush's team.

True to caricature, Romney himself seems to have been the last person to realize that no one wanted him run. Even as he bowed out Friday, he insisted that he probably could been an effective candidate. "I am convinced that with the help of the people on this call, we could win the nomination," he told supporters. "I also believe with the message of making the world safer, providing opportunity to every American regardless of the neighborhood they live in, and working to break the grip of poverty, I would have the best chance of beating the eventual Democrat nominee, but that is before the other contenders have had the opportunity to take their message to the voters."

Maybe Romney was right—maybe sometime between the 2012 presidential race and building a mansion in La Jolla, he came up with the magic formula to save the world. We'll never know. But his departure was welcomed by other Republican presidential hopefuls, particularly Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, his main rivals for support from the GOP establishment. According to the New York Times, Romney and Christie are scheduled to have dinner Friday night, a sign that he might be ready to throw his support behind the New Jersey governor. In the meantime, Bush, who had reportedly been needling Mitt to get out of the race, had much nicer things to say this morning.

"Mitt is a patriot and I join many in hoping his days of serving our nation and our party are not over," he wrote in a Facebook post on Friday."I look forward to working with him to ensure all Americans have a chance to rise up.

Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.

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Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

It is early evening on a Saturday in the middle of July. I am sitting in the highest tier in Yankee Stadium. Fifty thousand people are staring down at Joel Osteen, America's Most Impeccable Windsor Knot.

The sky is flawless, blue like an IT'S A BOY ribbon. Like, if there were a God, who had a passing inclination to conceive of something inexplicably perfect and present it for the heathens as proof of His might, it would look like this, probably. Of course, the woman two seats over from me—bubbles of fat on her elbows and ankles, sweat shining from every concave surface on her body—is eating her remaining nacho cheese directly from the container, with two curled fingers, and He would have to claim responsibility for that, too, so we'll just say that it was nice out.

Joel Osteen is equal parts Tony Robbins, palm reader, and late-night radio DJ. Osteen is Senior Pastor at the Lakewood megachurch in Houston, the largest Protestant church in the United States. He lives in a spectacularly generic $10.5 million mansion in one of Texas's wealthiest suburbs. He is an advocate of prosperity theology, a nontraditional, frequently criticized interpretation of the Bible in which God wishes for us to prosper financially and donating to the church will help fulfill that wish.

If you are sleepless or lonely, you can find him on cable, almost whenever, beaming into your brain at maximum voltage, rescuing you from yourself.

His sermons include almost no religious parables. They are instead fueled by vaguely empowering solutions to human strife, inflated with the heft of God: Greatest Hits. He recites passages like, "We are masterpieces, fearfully and wonderfully made," and says, "You are fully loaded and totally equipped to fulfill your dreams." He wants you standing in front of the mirror beating your chest, calling her back, never giving up. He is selling limitless positivity with no strings attached, mirages for the hopeless in the form of fortune-cookie bromides. He is a man with perfect posture, perfect abs, big white teeth, a family that seems impenetrably happy. On stage his children bounce all over like cartoon animals. His son's Twitter feed is an ongoing G-rated celebration of moms, feeling awesome, and One Direction. His wife talks like she is permanently on an infomercial for LOVE. Not loving anything in particular, just LOVE as a concept, love as unbridled happiness. Osteen is saying this without actually saying this: "We have won, we are proof, we are the manifestation of the wisdom I have shared with you. God has steered us and now here we are, standing in Yankee Stadium, wearing khaki pants and gaudy watches. One day, if you work hard enough, maybe you can wear khaki pants too."

Humans mumble; humans piece together sentences as they're going. Osteen doesn't. There is no apprehension or doubt.

Osteen is a maestro of American consumerism. His ministry—from the pastors on stage at the Compaq Center to women in call centers in Ohio—has achieved near-total homogeneity, from ideology to tone of voice. They speak in a way that is both calm and uplifting at the same time. Every word of conversation seems scripted, practiced. They are selling you this worldview in a way that is so patient and unflappable it is as if it's a recording. They are nice to us. They listen. They are telling us we're big and brave. We are masterpieces.

I first spoke to Andrea Davis, one of Osteen's PR representatives, over the phone, early on a Tuesday evening in May. There is a discipline in everything she says, a restraint and a sweetness that is so unflappably consistent it seems synthetic. From call centers in Ohio to Houston, his subordinates are disseminating not just His word but also a melodic niceness that washes over you like an ocean current. For every question you might stumble through, every request or concern, they respond with a pause of the perfect length, like it were calculated by scientists, not too short like they are aggressively trying to convert you, and not too long like they are disinterested. Just long enough for them to take a seemingly real, honest consideration of what you are saying before trying to assuage you.

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Humans mumble; humans piece together sentences as they're going. Osteen doesn't. There is no apprehension or doubt. In interviews, there is no opening for interruption. There is just a continuous flow of words and bromides and affectations and smiles. Thoughts unspooling like an audio cassette. He is a delivery vehicle for GOD, almost. It sounds ridiculous to say, but if you were GOD, and you were running GOD CORP., this is what you'd want your salesmen to do. He is the VP of Faith and Healing, Earth Bureau. His happiness and composure are relentless. You don't have time to consider the plausibility of what he is preaching; there is just an assault of powerful rhetoric you can feel settling onto your arm hairs and the back of your neck.

If a sermon seems vague or preposterous, it is simply punctuated with quotes from the Gospels, inflated by the heft of His word. His audience wants someone rubbing their back and Liking their Facebook photos, inspirational Tumblrs to re-blog, someone telling them she's going to text you back, she probably just has no service. There is an explanation for your plight, your sadness, and it is His complex architecture.

On November 28, 2014, Osteen tweeted, "You were created to make somebody else's life better. Somebody needs what you have—your smile, love & encouragement." Joel Osteen detonates his words in your subconscious like a Beyonce GIF. He straight DGAF, baby: You are the one; you are in her wet dreams. In Joel Osteen's world, God is an exclamation point, a dubstep bass drop. God is steroids, God is your hype man, He is Cialis, He is the boombox you are holding outside her window.

In our hearts, we don't want enlightenment, we want tall tales. We want the myth. The myth is easy.

At his church in Houston and in the bleachers in the Bronx, on couches in desolate suburbs, these people are consuming a worldview, an optimism, an artificial hope funneling directly into the side of their necks like a USB port. Osteen is saying that you can have bad credit, bad blood pressure, bad skin, bad pants, bad morals, bad ethics, but here it is, salvation, in the form of a shiny man whose face is permanently fixed to a smile setting on his CONVERT-meter that could smash mountains to cracker crumbs. This is what he does, his persona, his accessories, his beautiful white children and beautiful white wife. He makes a horizon of humans believe deep in their souls (because they are the sort of people who believe definitively that souls exist) that he is the answer. I don't know if God is real, but Joel Osteen is; I can see him with my own eyes. This is the response emanating from every person standing in the audience. He is evidence.

People have never seemed so obedient; celebrating little axioms like Osteen is in a rap battle with Negativity and Being a Loser. People shouting back "Tell 'em, Joel!" and nodding slowly, eyes closed. People want to participate in rituals, to belong, to know the punch line and the commercial jingle. Singing choruses and saying Amen and mmhmm, clapping and stomping, lost but now found, sitting beside other people who were lost but are now found, in Yankee Stadium, America's official palace of sanctimony and empty virtues.

America is a nation that loves violence but also loves to mourn. We are a country that dares to be provocative and sinful but that cherishes chastity. We are a nation of bullshitters and liars, deceivers and magicians. Reality is something that horrifies us, something we can gawk at. In our hearts, we don't want enlightenment, we want tall tales. We want the myth. The myth is easy. The myth is puffing its chest and fixing its tie and congratulating us just for getting here, sitting wide-eyed before a slick-haired man.

You recognize the American proletariat's obsession with the fantasy of something stupendous materializing from the ether—scratch-offs and Powerball, microwave dinners and five-minute abs. We are a people desperate to escape our plight as quickly as possible. Religion is the greatest marketing scheme ever devised because it sells the impossible by touting its impossibility. YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT. We want solace for no money down, no investment. We live to stand in awe of something. Osteen has said before, "People respond when you tell them there is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind." He commits to unverifiable principles with such fervency it is almost admirable. It works. He is telling us that the us we used to be does not have to be the us we are tomorrow. That our lives are perpetually in a state of reevaluation. That we can be illusionists, duping ourselves so that we can be a different self. That we can amputate our flaws, watch them come dislodged in the rearview mirror, and cruise to prosperity with the top down and a blond woman licking her lips in the passenger seat.

In 1996, five British academics said, "If you want my future, forget my past." They were the Spice Girls.

There are moments of transparent, theatrical pause: a deep sigh, a squint, like he is waiting for GOD Himself to transmit His word, and then GOD does, and Osteen has received it.

Everything about Osteen's existence, all of his machine, is designed to appeal as intensely to as broad a population as possible. Each sermon is punctuated with a triumphant, melodramatic God Is Great musical number and a melody you'd hear in a movie about an endangered animal being freed from a zoo, or a dyslexic kid winning a spelling bee. His band members and his pastors, they're all vaguely ethnic, someone who could look like anyone, like you, like someone with the answers, like the Next Big Thing. His performances are shamelessly bombastic in a way that is so undeniably American: A well-dressed male selling make-believe to the desperate, to people half on their phones, half paying attention, looking for something easy.

Six days ago Osteen tweeted, "Don't sit around guilty, condemned. Have the boldness to believe that you can be blessed in spite of your mistakes." He is selling hope as a McDonald's commercial, if McDonald's sold DELUXE GOD MEALS. Sit there. Watch him. There are moments of transparent, theatrical pause: a deep sigh, a squint, like he is waiting for GOD Himself to transmit His word, and then GOD does, and Osteen has received it. He is so bewildered, he can't believe it, its clarity and potency, and now he's about to share it with you, folks, for the low-low price of $ETERNALDEVOTION.99.

In the row in front of me, a woman is looking down at her phone. She is composing a text message to someone named Henry. The message says, "Joel received a $50 donation from me, God has already given it back." She is holding all her belongings tightly against her body. They are piled against her chest, her food and her purse and two plastic bags. She is looking at Osteen, and she is looking at her phone, trying to communicate her arrival to someone, to a witness. The sun is setting. Down there on the grass is a man telling her it's going to be all right. Televangelism is about the sale of something, but it is also about the desperation of the buyer; it is about the glowing men on stage but also the people sitting out there in the dark.

Antonio Hernandez, a.k.a. Yung Gutted, is a young dude from Brooklyn whose first EP of dark lo-fi beats, Internet Graveyard Vol. 1, landed him on bills with Ratking and earned him and his crew, Nocturnal Sons Posse, gushing praise from Pigeons and Planes and Dazed. Internet Graveyard Vol. 1 made some nice nods to the legendary early Three Six Mafia tapes, but Antonio has fully refined his sound on the forthcoming Towers 2 EP, released by London-based label Earnest Endeavors.

This track, "Inhuman Pt. 2," features vocals by Antonio's brother, Carlos, who's made waves recently as the frontman of Ava Luna. It's dark and introspective R&B, just as well-suited to sex as it is to chain-smoking at your dining room table and wondering how things got so messed up.

Listen to more Yung Gutted via Earnest Endeavors.

Around 200 protesters gathered outside the Denver Police Department's district two station Wednesday night, some pounding on the windows of the building while the now-familiar chant of "No Justice, no peace!" rang out from the crowd. A video projector was hooked up to a car battery, beaming the image of 17-year-old Jessie Hernandez onto the wall of the station.

Hernandez was shot to death on Monday by two Denver police officers, one of whom suffered a broken leg either when the car Hernandez was operating drove into him or as he moved to get out of the way. There are conflicting accounts of what exactly happened that night, but also more than enough anger to inspire a handful of protests in Hernandez's name.

According to the Denver Police Department's initial account, Officers Gabriel Jordan and Daniel Greene were investigating the report of a suspicious vehicle—it was allegedly stolen—in the city's Park Hill neighborhood. As the officers approached the car on foot, the driver accelerated toward them, at which point shots were fired.

But does it ever make sense for cops to shoot moving cars, even when their own lives are in danger?

An anonymous witness who claims to have been in vehicle with Hernandez told local 9News that police opened fire before Jordan's leg was broken. The Denver Police Department declined to comment to VICE on the ongoing investigation, directing us to a press release on their Twitter account, which says, "Although we are still determining the facts of the incident, the Denver Police Department is committed to transparency and once the investigation is complete all information obtained during the investigation will be made available to the public."

This is at least the fourth case of Denver Police opening fire on a moving vehicle in the past year, two of which resulted in deaths. The most well known is the July killing of 20-year-old Ryan Ronquillo, who was shot as he tried to escape in an allegedly stolen car after cops found him at the funeral of a deceased friend. Nicholas Mitchell, the city's second independent monitor for cops, had been conducting an investigation into the trend even before the Hernandez shooting.

According to Robert J. Kane, professor and director of the criminology and justice studies program at Drexel University, cops opening fire on a moving vehicle is "not an uncommon problem," but policies differ among departments around the country as to whether a moving vehicle constitutes a lethal threat to officers.

In Kane's opinion, though, opening fire at a moving vehicle only makes the situation worse.

"If you shoot a car and hit the person, then the car becomes a moving missile," he told VICE. "The driver has no control over where the car is going to go. So if it crashes into a building or a bus stop and kills seven kids, was it really worth shooting at it? Even though the person may pose a threat, would you rather shoot at it now and risk hurting other people, or would you rather survey it, follow it, and try to stop that car in a controlled way?"

If initial witness accounts about Hernandez's death are accurate, it stands to reason that the officer's broken leg was the result of the driver being shot and an unmanned vehicle blindly rolling into him, or at least forcing him to awkwardly dodge it.

The policy of the Denver Police is to not open fire on a moving vehicle unless "the vehicle or suspect poses an immediate threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person and the officer has no reasonable alternative course of action to prevent death or serious physical injury."

But the LAPD— not exactly known for its kid-gloves treatment of civilians—takes a kinder, gentler approach. Its policy states, "Firearms shall not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless a person in the vehicle is immediately threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle. For the purposes of this Section, the moving vehicle itself shall not presumptively constitute a threat that justifies an officer's use of deadly force. An officer threatened by an oncoming vehicle shall move out of its path instead of discharging a firearm at it or any of its occupants."

According to Craig Hartley, executive director of the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, it doesn't make sense to have a universal standard. "We leave it to organizational policies to make determinations about that," he said in an interview. "Sometimes that can be driven by a number of factors, like population densities and other issues."

Kane added that in addition to the issue of a police officer feeling that their own or someone else's life might be threatened, opening fire on a moving vehicle can be legally justified under the "fleeing felon" rule.

"If a known or suspected felon was trying to evade police custody, you can shoot him," Kane told VICE. "And that goes back to British Common Law, before the US was even an established nation. Over time, regulations around deadly force have been narrowed in response to Supreme Court decisions, and wrongful death civil lawsuits that police have lost. As far as I know, there are no laws and have been no Supreme Court cases that have said you can't shoot at moving vehicles."

Of course, a conviction of the officers in death of Hernandez would set a strong precedent, at least for Denver cops. The case has been moved to the office of District Attorney Mitch Morrissey, inspiring protesters and family members of Hernandez to arrive early Tuesday morning at the his office, demanding justice for the slain teen.

Despite city payouts of over $13 million over the last decade in civil lawsuits against the Denver police and sheriff's departments, Fox 31 reports that the last time a Denver district attorney prosecuted an officer for firing a weapon in the line of duty was 1992, and a jury found that officer not guilty. (This is not unique to Rocky Mountain State: The New York Daily News reported in December that over the past 15 years, there were 179 NYPD-involved deaths but just three indictments of officers, with none spending actual time in jail.)

The tragedy of Hernandez's death has struck the community hard in part because of her young age, but also because she was Latina and queer. Early in Wednesday's rally at the Denver Police Station, Theo Wilson of Art from Ashes, a youth program that worked with Hernandez, read a poem that the deceased teen had written during her time with the group.

"I am kind and respectful, others see me as a disrespectful teenager," she wrote, "and that's what gets me in trouble, but really I am a kid who wants a good education... I don't want trouble... I want peace."

Wilson added a few words of his own:

"We are running out of patience, and we running out of time. Hopefully there will be the type of systemic change that comes from their end. If that does not happen, we are going to take matters into our own hands."

Follow Josiah M. Hesse on Twitter.

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Photo by Simon Van Vliet

Three years after being arrested by Montreal police service (SPVM) at the March 15, 2012 anti-police brutality demonstration, more than 80 people charged under the controversial bylaw P-6 learned this week that they're no longer going to trial. The prosecutor for Montreal confirmed that the charges were removed just days before the trial was finally set to start.

Gonzalo Nunez, a public relations officer with the City of Montreal, told VICE that "after reviewing the evidence, the prosecutor decided not to proceed with the case." According to Nunez, the city's prosecutor concluded it would not be possible to "discharge the burden of proof" in time for the trial that was set to begin on January 29, 2015.

Municipal bylaw P-6 was amended in May 2012, amid the massive social movement resulting from the so-called Maple Spring student strike, and rendered illegal any protest route that hasn't been approved by police. It also prohibited people from wearing masks in demonstrations, anticipating changes to the Criminal Code passed at the federal level to ban masked protest. The bylaw also established a $500 fine for anyone present or taking part at any such illegal gathering—a 500 percent increase from the prior fine.

Over the past three years, Montreal police have arrested and fined more than 3,500 protesters under P-6. Between March 5 and May 1, 2013 alone, the SPVM ticketed over 1,200 people and collectively charged them with to $800,000 in fines.

On March 15, 2013, a VICE journalist was arrested as she was covering the annual COBP protest against police brutality. (Full disclosure: I was arrested, detained and fined on May 1, 2013 and "held for investigation" on May 1, 2014.)

A decade ago, the UN Human Rights Committe was already voicing criticism against the SPVM's indiscriminate mass arrests technique, known as "kettling." Blind to criticism, Montreal police refined their urban riot control methods in partnership with the Canadian Forces after the killing of unarmed teen Fredy Villanueva sparked riots in Montreal's north end in 2008.

Since the 2012 student strike, mass arrests have become business as usual. Over the years, the SPVM has become expert at crowd control, as police chief Marc Parent boasted in a 2013 interview. "Police forces from around the world come now to learn about our techniques for crowd control," Parent told the Globe and Mail.

It might be simple enough for riot police to arrest people by the hundreds just to fine them, but it's a real problem for the municipal court to process all these cases with due diligence.

"They're trying stuff out," activist Julien Villeneuve told VICE. "They don't know how to deal with this," said the philosophy teacher, also known as Anarchopanda, who became a mascot of the 2012 student protests and who was since arrested five times under P-6: on March 22, April 5, and May 1, 2013, and on March 15 and May 1, 2014.

It seems that a lot of the mass-arrest cases simply don't hold up in court, and about 20 percent of them have now been dropped. Last year, the city decided to drop the charges against about 650 defendants, mass arrested under P-6 in April and May of 2012. In October, a municipal court judge forced the city to drop its case against another group of 27 protesters arrested on April 21, 2012.

In a 38-page ruling, justice Gilles R. Pelletier concluded that the city failed to respect the defendants' constitutional right to be tried within reasonable delay and pointed out several gaps in the prosecution, which he deemed were just short of a "denial of justice." The judge also called the botched judicial process a "massive haemorrhage of resources and funds."

A few days prior to the ruling, activists Julien Villeneuve and Jaggi Singh—who have both filed constitutional challenges to the bylaw—obtained documents which revealed that the city of Montreal contracted a private lawyer to defend the regulation's constitutionality, which raised some eyebrows given the context of austerity in the province.

Villeneuve also instigated several class-action lawsuits against the city, where over 1,500 protesters claim $21-million in damage for having their rights violated and being mistreated by police during mass-arrests.

He feels this is a "the now or never moment" for people to become aware that this situation makes no sense, either politically or economically.

City councillor and chair of the City of Montreal's Committee for Public Safety Anie Samson declined VICE' request to comment to case. In a text message, her press secretary stated that the "decision stems from the municipal court and from independent prosecutors."

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All images courtesy of Michal Pudelka.

I studied abroad in Prague during college. After the excitement of smoking indoors and underage binge-drinking in the Czech capital wore off, I started to get antsy. A friend told me about a photographer named Michal Pudelka who was based in the neighboring country Slovakia, and said the young artist was looking for some help on his now-defunct zine, Anonym. At that point, anything sounded better than continuing to ruin my liver, so I jumped at the opportunity and did a little bit of editing for the arts and culture mag. While the interviews and stories were great, what made Anonym stand out were Pudelka's photos.

his aesthetic felt like jumping into a funhouse designed by Guy Bourdin that was located in some bleak, Eastern Bloc–era carnival. Though his photos have plenty of color and humor, there's a gloomy undercurrent with themes of body mutilation, decay, and nightmare-ish surrealism.

A few years have passed, and unsurprisingly Pudelka has been shooting covers for sleek fashion mags like AnOther, signed a contract with powerful agent Katy Barker, and was picked to shoot the spring ad campaign for the iconic Valentino. Though he is now based in London and has an assistant and crew working with him, Pudelka's creative compass and mesmerizing aesthetic have remained consistent. I reached out to the 24-year-old to alk about the rapid growth of his career.

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'Anonym' Issue 12 editorial

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'Anonym' Issue 13 editorial

VICE: I've known you for a few years now, though I never learned much about your background. How did you get interested in photography—what kind of culture was around in your hometown of Bratislava, Slovakia?
Michal Pudelka: It's not very easy for a gay guy to grow up in a post-communistic country where access to information is suddenly open but the minds of the people are still closed. I was judged for being different for as long as I can remember, so I closed myself into my own world of creativity and inspiration. One of my biggest inspirations is still communistic architecture and art—the color combinations, the materials, the textures. I was always working on drawings and paintings, wanting to be a fashion designer for many years. Then, when I finally got to Parsons in Paris, I fell in love with taking photographs during my foundation year. I started with self-portraits and it just made sense to mix it with fashion, since I always had a passion for art of dressing.

How did your career jump from making Anonym to all these high-profile fashion campaigns?
My big break was definitely meeting my agent, Katy Barker. She [helped] photographers like Terry Richardson and Craig McDean. So from the minute we signed a contract, I knew I'd work in high fashion. She is a gladiator and when she wants something, she just goes for it no matter what. Actually, the first sentence she ever said to me was that I would be perfect for Valentino, and here we are.

How would you escribe your photos to someone who's never seen them before? What are the biggest themes that connect your work?
I would describe them as a surreal mash-up of my personal feelings and coincidences of everyday life that interest me. I love to play with color and color combinations.

Your photos are funny and wry, but sometimes I feel like there's a darkness underneath. Do you consciously try to find humor in the dark settings?
I love to look for humor in unusual situations. I think that's how life works—to expect the unexpected. Many people get confused that my work is very happy because of all the color, but that's just a camouflage. I use my work mostly to filtrate the negative out of me so I can move on. The fact that sometimes it's presented in pink dress is the irony of it, obviously. I was always very interested in mutilations and different states of mind. It is still something that fascinates me. Also, my mom is a doctor. Growing up, I spent lot of time in hospitals. Many people don't like hospitals, but I actually feel at home there.

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'Transhumanism' editorial

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Can you tell me about your interest in body doubles and repetition, in both colors and in people? One of my favorite things about your work is that it reminds me of looking in a funhouse mirro where you see a million versions of a body but they're all slightly off.
My interest in doubles and repetition started with a fascination with the behavior of social groups. I noticed that in different groups people tend to look vey much alike, wear the same clothes, use the same words. To me, it is slightly like losing our own identity just for being part of some group.

What about your focus on women—is there a reason you typical shoot women over men?
I think that, in general, women are more beautiful creatures than men. Also, shooting female models gives bigger space for realizing my visions without coming across as gay—which usually happens when you are being more creative with male models.

When do you come up with your best photo ideas—during long walks, in the shower, while dreaming?
It really depends, sometimes I'm in the mood to create, so I sit down and draw ideas. Sometimes, something pops into my head while watching Desperate Housewives or The Simpsons. Many times, I also dream that I'm shooting a shoot that I didn't do in real life. So when I get up, I write it all down.

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Editorial for 'AnOther'

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'Anonym' 12 editorial

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Just after midnight on Tuesday, police in Hanoi detained a truck smuggling three tons of live cats into Vietnam. The driver, a 30-year-old man named Hoang Van Hieu, admitted that the ill-begotten cats were bound for restaurants in the country, where cat meat is, in fact, a delicacy, especially in the provinces of Thai Binh and Nam Dinh, not far from Hanoi.

"After receiving a tip, we searched the truck and discovered the cats inside," Sky News quoted Dong Da district deputy chief of police Cao Van Loc as saying. "The owner, also the driver, said he bought the cats at the [Chinese] border area of Quang Ninh province. All of the cats were from China."

With an average adult weight of about ten pounds for a healthy domestic feline, three tons means we're talking hundreds of cats. The animals, crammed on top of one another in bamboo cages, were just the latest haul in a small cat-trafficking market that sources from nearby China, Laos, and Thailand to satiate Vietnam's appetite for kitty flesh.

Of course, Vietnam isn't the only nation to enjoy the occasional cat. Feral cats, strays, and captured pets have been consumed with some regularity in the Canton (Guangdong) region of China, South Korea, and parts of rural Taiwan. Some animal-protection publications suggest the Asian cat market consumes up to 4 million kittens a year. Whatever the number, a fixation on unconventional meats in Asia looms in the American imagination—though there's evidence eating cats and dogs is relatively common in other places, notably Switzerland.

The reality is that in most regions of the world, the market for cat meat is undergoing a mix of popular backlash and official clampdowns. Concerns about disease transmission from unregulated meat, cruelty (many cats are electrocuted, hung, beaten, or even cooked alive), and general sentiment toward kittens have led to outright (if poorly enforced) bans on the market in Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Taiwan. In 2010, animal rights groups in China proposed (but failed to push through) a ban on eating cat that would have fined consumers more than $700 (with a maximum 15-day jail sentence) and producers $1,500 to $75,000. Despite the failure of the bill, massive ad campaigns have emerged, playing on popular emotions and morality to advocate some kind of overhaul in the government's policy toward cat consumption.

Despite official government condemnation of unsanitary kitten meat and the promotion of the use of cats to control urban rats, shop owners in Vietnam continue to sell cat for up to $50 to $70 apiece—a rate that suggests high demand. Due to a lack of cat breeders who sell their charges for food and the extreme caution of pet owners in Vietnam, this demand appears to be encouraging smuggling from neighboring countries like China. And this most recent three-ton shipment far surpasses the 90-cat haul that came over the border from Thailand, which made regional headlines in 2013—a sign of the market's growth.

"A lot of people eat cat meat," Van Duang, a Hanoi restaurant owner, told AFP in 2014. "It's a novelty. They want to try it."

Maybe the novelty of cat meat will wear off, or popular sentiment will change as more locals keep cats as pets. But for now, the government's efforts to rein in trafficking have fallen pretty flat.

Hoang Van Hieu's three-ton haul earned him a $350 fine for carrying undocumented and illicit goods. But doing the math suggests this was only a fraction of what the merchandise would have netted him—potentially thousands of dollars. He may have lost one shipment, but a few hundred bucks versus the potential final payoff for any successful shipment is no real deterrent. It would be both easy and logical for him and others to continue trafficking despite the high-profile bust.

Ironically, the losers in this sting may not have been the cat smugglers or consumers, but the cats in Hoang Van Hieu's truck. Vietnamese law maintains that any smuggled products must be destroyed. There's some doubt as to whether or not the state will find a loophole for the cats given the sheer number of cats, but according to Sky News, Chief Cao Van Loc has indicated the cats will likely be killed as per protocol.

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

Cry-Baby #1: Jerquan Dickson

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Screencaps via Fox 43

The incident: Some kids threw snowballs at a guy's car.

The appropriate response: Yelling something at them as you drive away.

The actual response: He shot one of them several times.

This past weekend, 22-year-old Jerquan Dickson (pictured above) was driving in York, Pennsylvania.

As he passed a group of teenage boys, one of them allegedly threw a snowball at his car.

According to police, Jerquan got out of his car, chased the teens into an alleyway, and opened fire. He fired six shots before fleeing. Several of these shots hit 15-year-old Johnel Barton in the arms and legs.

Jerquan was found by police at his home. He admitted to shooting at the boy, but claims he had been attempting to fire "warning shots" into the snow. He was charged with aggravated assault and recklessly endangering another person.

The kid who got shot was taken to hospital, where he was treated for non-life-threatening injuries, Fox 43 reports.

Cry-Baby #2: Hershey's

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Photos via Flickr user Bodo and Google Maps

The incident: A British imports company sold imported British chocolate.

The appropriate response: Buying and eating it.

The actual response: Hershey's took legal action against them to stop them from selling a variety of superior-tasting British goods.

Last August, the Hershey Company took legal action against a New Jersey–based imports company called Let's Buy British. In the suit, Hershey's claimed that Let's Buy British was violating US trademark laws by importing various British chocolates.

The main issue for the company was the sale of Dairy Milk products, which Hershey's has been making their own version of since licensing the rights to the name from Cadbury in the late 80s.

The British candy contains more fat and milk than a typical Hershey's bar, but less sugar, and the US product is also only 11 percent cocoa, meaning it falls short of the 20 percent cocoa minimum required to qualify as chocolate in the UK.

The UK version of the chocolate is generally considered to taste better than the Hershey's-made US version.

Hershey's also took issue with the company importing Toffee Crisps and Yorkie Bars, as they said their packaging and names, respectively, were too similar to US products.

As a result of the legal action, Let's Buy British agreed to stop importing British-made Cadbury's products, Toffee Crisps, and Yorkies, as well as several other British candies that have US counterparts (like Kit Kats and Rolos).

Talking to the Independent, Hershey's spokesman Jeff Beckman said they intend to continue taking legal action against people they view as violating their copyright. "It's important for Hershey to protect its trademark rights and to prevent consumers from being confused or misled when they see a product name or product package that is confusingly similar to a Hershey name or trade dress," he said.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here, if you could:

Previously: Some people freaked out because they were asked to pay for a birthday party, and some cops gave a guy a ticket for eating while driving.

Winner: The birthday party invoice people!!!

Follow Jamie "Lee Curtis" Taete on Twitter.