A loyalist protester, whose sign reads, "Our only crime is loyalty!!!" at Friday's republican march in Belfast.

Northern Ireland's loyalists are pissed off. On Friday night they injured more than 50 cops, who – after adopting slightly softer tactics earlier this year when policing the flag protests and the Belfast Twelfth – were out in force to monitor a republican parade.

The parade was taking place for a couple of reasons. Firstly, to mark the introduction of new internment laws in Northern Ireland in 1971 – when the British government decided to round up hundreds of people they suspected of being IRA terrorists and hold them in prisons indefinitely without trial. The parade's second aim was to protest against the ongoing treatment of republicans by the security services.

However, with Royal Avenue – where the march was supposed to pass through – blocked by loyalists before the event even started, republicans were bizarrely redirected through an interface with the loyalist Shankhill Road. Missiles were briefly exchanged, but the republican demo was eventually guided through, leaving the loyalists to vent their rage on the gathered police forces.

The republican march passing through Belfast.

But what was it that brought the men whose "only crime is loyalty" – and occasionally lobbing masonry at police lines – out onto the streets once again?

For Belfast's loyalists, Friday's anger was Pavlovian: republicans were marching, so it must be an IRA march. In their eyes, this march was something that by its very existence was insulting murdered Protestants and had to be stopped. Worse still, the march was given no restrictions by the Parades Commission, who – just a month ago – had prevented the loyalist Orange Order from marching home through nationalist Ardoyne, leading to a week of rioting.

Considering this to be a show of pro-republican favouritism on the police's part, staunch loyalists – who are ready to jump on any opportunity to show that they're the biggest victims in the six counties – got a little riled up. This comes in the context of Alex Salmond trying his best to break up the union and Sinn Fein showing increasing electoral confidence on both sides of the border, making the community that prides itself on being "more British than the British" feel increasingly abandoned by the mainland.

Loyalist protesters being held back by riot police.

Marginalised working-class Protestants, who make up the grassroots of loyalist culture and the core element of the street­ fighters, feel they are looked down upon by mainstream unionists and constantly undermined by concessions to Irish nationalists. Their incoherent rage is mocked by republicans, middle-class Protestants and hand­wringers appealing for an abstract social peace. All of these things fuelled the anger that manifested itself on Friday. When Ulster Unionist leader Mike Nesbitt turned up to mediate, he was spotted talking to police, attacked with a half brick by the very people he purports to represent and forced to leave.

Another factor likely to have aggravated the loyalists was the presence of members from "dissident" groups like the 32 County Sovereignty Movement (32CSM), Republican Sinn Fein and the Republican Network for Unity (RNU). Those three groups are the largest in Northern Ireland to oppose the peace process and support a continued war against British forces. March organiser Dee Fennelly told me the night before the march that, while dissidents would be in attendance, it wasn't intended as a dissident march.

Police using a water cannon on the loyalist protesters.

Dee is a republican and a member of a group called the Anti­ Internment League, who claim that the police are using “internment by remand” – arresting republican activists on charges that will never stick and taking them off the streets for two years while they await trial. It’s a highly emotive topic for republicans; internment was used throughout the 20th century on both sides of the border to imprison men without trial. It was always counter­productive and the IRA harnessed public animosity towards the tactic to the extent that it became their most effective recruitment tool.

The republican march.

One recent case highlighted by the march is that of Brendan McConville and John Paul Wootton, both serving life sentences for the Continuity IRA murder of a policeman. They are now appealing the charges in a case that has seen police use covert surveillance against witnesses and the pair's defence counsel claim that Northern Irish police (PSNI) are attempting to sabotage their appeal.

Gerry Conlon – who, as a member of the Guildford Four, spent 15 years in prison for an IRA crime he didn't commit – has spoken in support of the pair, saying, “It was appalling that two men could be sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a policeman on so little evidence.”

A sign held up by a loyalist protester.

Unfortunately, Friday's riots have drowned out the chance for any proper discussion around justice in the new Northern Ireland. Both sides claim to be the real victims of prejudicial policing, with a member of the 32CSM stating that their march descended into violence after the PSNI blocked "the rally for extended periods of time, giving the loyalist protesters opportunity to launch attacks on the marchers".

But after police injuries stole the headlines, it's unlikely that anyone's going to pay much attention to a debate about the state of policing in Northern Ireland 12 years after the rebranding of the RUC to the PSNI, or ask whether the pace of change has been quick enough.

For the dissidents, nothing short of a united Ireland is acceptable, and their fight is likely to continue. The loyalists, on the other hand, may struggle to find a seat at the table when US diplomat Richard Haass chairs talks this autumn to look at how far things have come since the Good Friday Agreement, and if they get one they may not like what they hear.

Will all that in mind, progress remains slow in Ulster, and we'll undoubtedly be back on the streets of Belfast next August to witness another summer of intense recreational rioting.

Image courtesy of ESO/L. Calçada

The Earth is doomed, and the only question is how long humanity has left. Fortunately, we have options: in the past few years there’s been a flurry of potentially habitable planets discovered. In June, German astronomers found three planets relatively near to us that orbit around a star at a distance that suggests they could have liquid water—and therefore life. To learn more about our future on other planets, we talked to Daniel Berleant, a scientist who earlier this year published The Human Race to the Future, a book about the final fate of humanity.

When I was young, we hadn’t detected any planets outside the solar system that could be habitable, and the thinking was there probably weren’t very many. That’s part of this kind of human-centric viewpoint that we’ve had for a long time. We used to think that the sun revolved around the Earth and then we discovered that we revolved around the sun—then they thought that the Earth was probably the only habitable planet around, and we’re discovering that’s not the case. 

It’s good for us to think about settling humanity on other planets because if something goes wrong—terribly wrong—on Earth, we’ve hedged our bets. If the sun exploded or something, if there were human colonies on distant planets, we would survive. The more extraterrestrial bodies we’re inhabiting, the better. 

Having said that, of course it’s going to be a lot easier to colonize, like, the moon or Mars. Traveling outside the solar system gets to be a little trickier. The planets they’ve just discovered are 22 light years away, which doesn’t sound like a big number, but really, it’s very far away [about 129 trillion miles]. We don’t know how to build ships yet that would go fast enough to get people there in a reasonable time. One of the positive things about really fast travel—as in travel near the speed of light—is that time on the spaceships would go slower. So although it might take 22 or many more years of Earth-time to get there, subjectively on the spaceship, it could take less. 

The problem is, it will be really hard to transport lots and lots of people. We could maybe transport a few people to start a colony but if we wanted to reduce the population problem on Earth by moving millions of people to another planet, that’s really tough. Another problem is even if we could send people to the existing planets it would take so long that it would be of less interest to people here on Earth, since you wouldn’t be able to think about it happening in the next month or two. You’d have to say, “Well, maybe my great-great-grandchildren will hear the news that they got there.”

More from the Hot Box Issue:

Itty-Bitty Kitty, Giant Spirit

I Left My Lungs in Aamjiwnaang

It’s Good to Be the King

Slate and Stone jacket, Benson shirt, Richard Chai pants

Photos By Richard Kern, Stylist: Annette Lamothe-Ramos

Photo Assistant: Max Dworkin; Hair and Makeup: Tayler Treadwell; Set Design: Scott Penkava; Digital Imaging: Taco

Models: Nola at APM, Li Bing, Peter Cairns, Cole McDonagh, and Bobby Warden at Root

Watch the trailer for the video we filmed, based on this fashion shoot:

Click through to the next page for more images from this fashion shoot.

Hollow Dancer necklace

American Apparel bodysuit and socks, Hollow Dancer belt

Siki Im pants, Blake Hyland choker and bracelet

Chromat skirt, Pedro García shoes, Hollow Dancer bracelet

Lelo robe

Religion jacket, Priestess NYC hoodie, Damir Doma pants, Dr. Martens boots; Mandarin & General dress, Ruthie Davis heels, Blake Hyland bracelet; Damir Doma jacket, Rochambeau pants and boots, Umit Benan mask

American Apparel bikini bottoms

Agent Provocateur robe, Blake Hyland necklace; Lelo robe; American Apparel crop top and bikini bottoms, Hopeless Lingerie harness; Lelo shorts; Hopeless Lingerie bodysuit

More fashion from VICE:

House Arrest

Beware the Lizzies

Garbage Girls

Joey Chestnut and Matt Stonie battle it out for the World Gyro Eating Championship in Houston, Texas, on May 19. Joey won by eating 22 1/4 gyros in ten minutes, while Matt finished second, with 20. Photo via Niko Niko's

@joeyjaws @Hooters im sitting at campbell right now. Competition would be nice.

— Matt Stonie (@MattStonie) July 29, 2013

A couple weeks ago, Matt Stonie, one of the best competitive eaters in the world, delivered a Twitter jab at the best competitive eater in the world—the Saturn-Devouring-His-Children of foodies, the seven-time winner of the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, Joey Chestnut. Matt was mocking Joey for for not joining him on National Chicken Wing Day to do some friendly, nonsanctioned competitive noshing. Athletes belonging to more popular, more mainstream sports are normally too media conscious and sensitive to the brands that sponsor them, but competitive eaters are still free to be themselves in public. In Matt “Megatoad” Stonie’s case, that means he can good-naturedly banter at his rival and remind eating fans (there are eating fans out there) that there’s other competitors.

Joey did not respond to the tweet—he had just taken his second Hooters World Wing Eating Championship by inhaling a gargantuan pile of 179 hot sauce- and margarine-slathered bird limbs in ten minutes, and if he’d still been hungry, he’d probably be looking to tuck into pretty much any other form of nutrition. Or it could have had something to do with his famously publicity-adverse nature. For a guy who dominates competitions that most people regard as sideshows, Joey doesn’t seem to seek out publicity and rarely brags. Some in the sport say he's difficult when it comes to the press (maybe that's why he didn't want to speak with me for this article). The 29-year-old’s quiet dedication to his craft—the taxing training schedule, the rigors of contest after contest—is almost monklike. Even when he won his seventh straight hot-dog title, he seemed subdued, like one for whom the act of competition is more important the victory itself.

Contrast that with Matt, a 21-year-old kid from California with a baby face and an air of impish calm common to surfers who live pretty much entirely on sun-soaked beaches. He came to competitive eating casually, in the way of a young man discovering an unlooked-for superpower. “There was a local place that had a five-pound burrito and I thought it would be cool to be the first person in town to finish the burrito,” he said. “That was just for fun. Then a few years ago I was up in the Boston area and there was a lobster roll eating contest just like five minutes away from my house with a thousand-dollar prize. I won, and beat a bunch of pro guys and I was like, ‘I can do this.’”

The International Federation of Competitive Eating, the organizing body of the sport, currently ranks Matt number four in the world, but he’s slowly but surely climbing the ladder, spurred on by a series of shocking and unexpected victories over Joey. Matt doesn’t share the champ’s reticence—“I smoked him,” he said of Chestnut after he won the deep-fried asparagus title in Stockton, California, in April by wolfing down 9.5 pounds of fat-saturated vegetables in ten minutes.

This was more than just another notch in Matt’s masticatory belt—the loss was a deeply felt, personal setback for Joey, who only ate eight pounds of fried greens. Joey started his career on the “asparagus circuit,” and won his first eating title there in 2005. Richard Shea, President of Major League Eating, compared Stonie’s triumph to Roger Federer trumping Rafael Nadal on a clay court. “Joey doesn’t take that lightly,” he said.

Mat represents the first legitimate challenge to Joey’s all-food-groups-encompassing supremacy since the six-time Nathan’s champion Takeru Kobayashi angrily split with Major League Eating in 2010 over contract differences regarding endorsement revenue. At its apex, Chestnut versus Kobayashi transcended the boundaries of athletic competition and became an international rivalry—when Joey took back the belt from his Japanese rival on July 4, 2007, he spoke about bringing the title “home.”

There’s no nationalism in the Stonie/Chestnut face off, and it hasn’t exactly captured the public’s imagination the same way Kobayashi/Chestnut did. But if you care about competitive eating—if you are impressed instead of grossed out by grown men eating, say 47 dozen oysters in eight minutes—the emergence of a legitimate rival for Chestnut is as exciting as Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich jostling for position in the Tour de France, or Bird and Magic facing off on the hardwood, or David and Goliath meeting on the battlefield.  

At the Nathan’s contest on July 4, Matt raced out to an early lead, but his youth and inexperience betrayed him. He succumbed to that day’s brutal humidity (the hotter it is, the more hot dog buns tend to swell in eaters’ bellies), wilting as Joey finished strong—the champ devoured 69 franks, setting a world record, and Matt was a distant second at 51.

The two great gladiators of gluttony butted heads again on July 11, in Corinth, Mississippi, at the second annual World Slugburger Eating Championship, a part of the 26th Annual Slugburger Festival. (A Slugburger is a combo beef/soybean meal patty that was invented during the Depression—the “slug” in the name is derived from archaic slang for a nickel.)

The Corinth clash is a relatively minor event, so Joey’s presence there was a bit odd. As Richard Shea remarked, “After [Chestnut] lost to Stonie, he started popping up at contests. I think he felt like, ‘Oh boy. I’m being challenged.’” The Slugburger was the first world record that Matt set, and it appears that the champ hoped to avenge the searing pain over the loss of his prized asparagus crown by dealing an equally wounding rebuke to his ephebic adversary in entrées.

Once again, though, it was Matt who proved the hungrier man, edging out Joey 31-30 in the ten-minute contest that might as well have been a two-man match. “One burger—that’s all it takes,” Matt said afterward, clearly feeling inflated by his victory.

Unlike Joey, who is already talking about quitting the sport, Matt is clearly looking forward to someday unseating his competitor at the top of the eating food chain. “Most of the contests, I’m right up there with Joey,” he said. “It’s great that people are looking at me as the future of the sport. But I’m only going to be the future if I keep pushing.”

They’ll battle again on August 18 at the Day-Lee Foods World Gyoza Eating Championship. Joey holds the world record at 266 in ten minutes, but Matt is hoping to snatch that title from the elder statesman’s jaws. If he does, you can be sure he’ll be tweeting about it.

More food-related oddities:

This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

My Greatst Performances in Binge Eating

Eating an Entire Cow

Photo via Flickr

O Canada, the land of free health care and legalized same-sex marriages. Sometimes, from up here on our porch of “progressiveness,” it can be fun to look down on our American neighbours and shake our heads at the dysfunctional political debates that dominate CNN. A friend of mine once told me that the best thing about being Canadian is “getting to live like an American without actually having to be, you know, an American.” In political terms, this means we get to live in a democratic nation, but our government isn't partially elected by a large population of white Southerners who tend to disagree with things like science.

It's a fairly condescending notion, but there's an element of truth to it. Stephen Harper has done his best, often crossing his own backbenchers, to keep social issues like abortion and marriage equality out of the public debate. But that doesn't mean social conservatism in its most heinous manifestation—bigotry—doesn't exist in the Great White North, it's just not popular enough to win a federal election.

Enter REAL Women, an NGO with a political orientation that could accurately be described as slightly-right-of-bonkers. Last Wednesday, the group issued a press release attempting to shame Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird for speaking out against homophobic laws in Uganda and Russia. As I wrote about a few months ago, the Canadian government gave over half a million dollars to a homophobic relief group in Uganda, so it takes a pretty extreme perspective to make a pseudo-closeted Conservative cabinet minister look like a hero of LGBT causes, but that's what REAL Women have somehow managed (even if our country might actually be run by a gay mafia).

The other sticking points for REAL Women were the $200 000 Baird gave to “special interest groups” in Uganda, which Landoldt considered “highly offensive” to taxpayers, along with Baird's open criticism of Russia's anti-LGBT laws, which he has referred to as “mean-spirited and hateful.” The laws in Russia, which have outlawed information on LGBT issues from being given to minors and have banned Pride parades, have attracted a great deal of media scrutiny lately, given the consequences they might have on athletes and tourists at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.

I really wish I could direct you to the press release itself, because it reads a bit like one of those fake advertorials that run in The Onion. Example: “It is a fact, that homosexual activists in Canada are intolerant of any resistance to their demands, and, as such have become a tyrannical minority” (sic, obviously). Unfortunately, I can't link you to the press release because REAL Women's website has been down since Friday. I can, however, link you to a August 2 cache of the site, which largely consists of republished op-eds from our country's most obnoxious pundits (at least one of whom has publicly opposed REAL Women).

According to REAL Women, it is “insulting” for leaders of Western countries to their own cultural values on other nations who don't share those values. In other words, they think it's a little of rude of John Baird to ask the Ugandan government not to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. “According to the culture and the religion of, you know, Uganda, it's not a human rights issue.” REAL Women national vice-president Gwendolyn Landoldt told CBC News “It may be unwise by Western standards, but who are we to interfere in a sovereign country?”

Cultural relativism is a pretty silly sentiment to extend into the sphere of human rights, but the part about interfering in a sovereign country is more than a little hypocritical coming from this particular group. Judging by REAL Women's website, their entire purpose is to encourage the state to impose socially conservative values on the entire population. Officially, REAL Women “speaks for women who support the values of traditional marriage... We see the fragmentation of the family as one of the major causes of disorder in society today.”

In other words, they don't like it when gay folks get married. Claiming that marriage equality is somehow a “threat” to “traditional marriage” or “families” is a standard technique used by homophobes to support homophobic policy without actually admitting to any homophobic sentiment. The trick is to turn the actual issue around and behave like a victim. Hence, REAL Women has accused “homosexual activists” of being “intolerant” and “tyrannical” as if it were every gay man's sole intention to destroy nuclear families with effete hand gestures and colourful shirts.

The Foreign Affairs office has handled this conflict rather well, although it helps that very few media outlets have taken REAL Women seriously. Baird asserted that most Canadians don't think homosexuality should be criminalized (duh) while his aides held a meeting with representatives from REAL Women. Apparently, they had a civil conversation and agreed to disagree.

John Baird has the support of the Prime Minister. The Conservatives were elected with the help of centrist voters who are more concerned with the economy than advancing regressive social causes. REAL Women won't affect any policy at the moment, and most pundits (including right wing ones) have balked at the extremity of their opinions, but it would be a mistake to think that Canada is somehow “above” these issues. REAL Women have 50 000 members who stand behind the group's disinterest in protecting homosexual lives in Uganda; a great deal more Canadians would oppose marriage equality if the issue were brought back to Parliament.

Earlier this year, Harper faced criticism from backbenchers who wanted to bring abortion back to the public debate. Small-c conservatives are divided about about the current administration's policies on LGBT rights abroad. All this means that if Stephen Harper loses control over the Tories—whether by retiring, losing an election, or failing to maintain a party revolt—these issues will likely return to parliament. Remember, it wasn't too long ago that an admitted creationist lead the official opposition.

Image via Nikki Loehr

Barrett Brown has been sitting in prison, without trial, for almost a year. In case you haven’t followed his case, the 31-year-old journalist is facing a century of prison time for sharing a link that contained—within an archive of 5 million emails—credit-card information stolen from a hack of a security company called Stratfor (Jeremy Hammond, the actual hacker, is going to prison for ten years), threatening the family of an FBI officer who raided his mother’s home, and trying to hide his laptops from the Feds.

The flood of NSA leaks from Edward Snowden has placed extra attention on Barrett, who focused on investigating a partnership that many people are incredibly uncomfortable with—the connections between private security, surveillance, intelligence firms, and the US government.

Barrett’s website, ProjectPM, used a small team of researchers to pore over leaked emails, news articles, and public corporate information to figure out what this industry does exactly, and how they serve the White House. It’s partly because of Barrett that we know about things like persona management, a technology used by the US government and its contractors to disseminate information online using fake personas, also known as sock puppets.

He also helped the world learn about TrapWire, a surveillance program that’s built into security cameras all over the world and “more accurate than facial recognition technology.” When it was made public in the pre-Snowden era, most media outlets played it off as not being a big deal. We still don’t know exactly how powerful TrapWire is, but, because of the Strafor hack and Barrett’s research, at least we know it exists.

Anyone interested in getting involved with ProjectPM is invited with this call to action: “If you care that the surveillance state is expanding in capabilities and intent without being effectively opposed by the population of the West, you can assist in making this an actionable resource for journalists, activists, and other interested parties,” which sums up the quest for information that is, in and of itself, on trial in Barrett’s case. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in the Guardian regarding the prosecution of Barrett Brown, “here we have the US government targeting someone they clearly loathe because of the work he is doing against their actions.”

Barrett is set to appear in court next month, but his defense attorneys are asking for an extension to sort through the prosecutors’ evidence. The defense insists they’re in the midst of having a forensics expert process the data. The US government’s evidence is stored on a 2 Terabyte hard drive and two DVDs, and the prosecutors are essentially arguing that a.) All of that does not account for much information, despite the forensic processing that is still ongoing, and b.) the defense has had enough time to get their shit together. But, beyond that, they’re trying to silence the media coverage surrounding Barrett Brown’s case.

Within the government’s “Opposition to Continuance,” written to oppose an extension of Barrett’s trial is a lengthy section about his supposed media strategy. In this section, the government prosecutors have claimed Barrett’s defense team is defying the judge’s warning to not “try the case in the media.” It also states “the government has reason to believe that Brown’s attorney coordinates and/or approves the use of media.”

After that is a list of occasions where Barrett communicated with members of the media, myself included. For what it’s worth, I did not arrange that interview through Barrett’s attorneys, nor did his current attorneys represent him at the time of our conversation. The government is asking for a complete ban on media statements from Barrett and his representatives. It appears to be a desperate strategy to silence criticism and dissent in a case that already deeply threatens the nature of journalism and freedom of information.

Also alluded to in the government’s outline of journalists who have covered Barrett Brown are Glenn Greenwald and the late Michael Hastings, who was a friend of Barrett’s. As Hastings himself said: “Barrett Brown is a journalist, plain and simple. He’s also a colleague and friend, and one of the brilliant, if highly unconventional, American writers of his generation. I offer my support to Barrett and his family, and respectfully ask for his immediate release from custody.”

While the judge waits to decide whether or not Barrett’s trial date should be extended, and if a media gag order should be allowed (his defense rightfully points out this request comes without citing any particularly offensive or justice-obstructing statement Barrett has made thus far), we have decided to publish an original article from Barrett Brown himself, which you can read right over here. It compares the Watergate era to the Wikileaks era, and does not deal with the specifics of Barrett’s trial.

Barrett Brown is an imprisoned author who deserves to be published while he navigates the harsh obstacles of today’s American justice system. The precedent that a guilty verdict—and a 100-year prison sentence—would set is troubling. But, as Barrett told me in March, he’s not “terribly worried” about the punishment he’s facing. While it’s hard to fully believe him, it’s certainly reassuring for someone like me who is in fact quite worried about what prison time, in this case, could mean for the future of investigative reporting, internet security, and journalism at large.

If Barrett goes to prison for digging into the pitch-black world of online surveillance, it will make figuring out what America’s massive intelligence firms are doing with their powerful, secret surveillance tools even more difficult and dangerous than it already is. With Edward Snowden stuck in Russia and Bradley Manning facing well over a century of hard time, the world simply can’t afford to lose Barrett as well.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patrickmcguire

Previously:

Why Is Barrett Brown Facing 100 Years in Prison?

We Spoke to Barrett Brown From Prison

I’ve spent the last year or so in a federal lock-up awaiting trial on charges that have been duly analyzed elsewhere. Long story short: I’m facing decades in prison. This is inconvenient in some respects, but there are perks. Had I not been imprisoned, I probably never would have gotten around to reading the book that’s been a beloved staple of the US Corrections System since it was first published in 1975: Born Again, by Nixon aide Chuck Colson, who famously found Jesus before his brief incarceration on Watergate-related offenses. Christianity is popular among inmates—almost as popular as crime—and Born Again has plenty of both. As for me, I’ve always fancied myself an aficionado of flailing, nonsensical political prose, which is why I once read a whole book by William Bennett. Colson’s volume didn’t just scratch my itch; it taught me a great deal about American civic life in the 60s and 70s, to boot. I’d like to pass on some of what I learned, even if most of it is terribly inaccurate.

The introduction to Born Again, added after the wild success of its first few printings, is largely given over to explaining that Colson didn’t mean to make the great deal of money off of it that he was making at the time. “I had received lucrative offers to write political memoirs, but I felt compelled to tell people the simple story of what God had done in my life . . . I had no idea there even was a Christian publishing industry.” But, oops, it turns out there is, and so Colson accidentally made a whole lot of money anyway.

“Watergate has raised so many questions,” Colson notes, but we are only confronted with one: “Can humanism ever be the answer for our society?” This, seriously, is the most central question that occurs to Colson in the context of Watergate, with the Nixon Administration somehow representing humanism. And of course, the answer is “no,” as Colson makes clear. “There is an almost sanctified notion that man can do anything if he puts his will to it.” If the humanists could only see how badly Colson fucked up his chance to become a respected power broker of a dying republic, they might have the decency to stop almost sanctifying such delirious notions.  “I no longer believe I am master of my destiny. I need God; I need friends with whom I can honestly share my failures and feelings of inadequacy.” Such inadequacy is very much on display in that this is the best Colson can come up with even after a year of sitting around in prison trying to figure out how to set up humanism to take the fall for a bunch of shit that he and his conservative friends did.

After a few more feints at exposition, the introduction runs its course, which is probably for the best. The first chapter is entitled “Something Wrong,” perhaps in reference to the grammar, usage, and punctuation mistakes that interlace the book, all of which we must presumably blame on humanism. The narrative begins at a post-election “Victory Party,” which of course is capitalized because you always capitalize parties. Colson relates how empty this 1972 “Victory Party” felt compared to the more emotionally fulfilling 1968 “Victory Party” wherein everyone had felt more, uh, Victorious. Worse, someone invited the world’s worst party guest. “Then we were cornered by Senator Bob Dole, the Republican national chairman. Angrily he jabbed his finger at me. ‘The President didn’t even mention the committee in his speech!’” The unease went deeper than just the soul-crushing presence of Dole. The real problem was, of course, humanism, and the false sense of pride it confers among its devotees. “In fact, pride was at the heart of the Nixon Presidency in its reach for historical greatness.” In which case, the Ford Administration must have been more to Colson’s taste. But hark! We’re transitioning into a flashback! “And pride had been at the heart of my own life, too, as far back as I could remember.” Seamless.

“It was a sunny day in early June 1949 for graduation ceremonies at Brown and Nichols, a small private school in Cambridge,” Colson relates, really bringing the scene to life for us. And having attended his precious Cambridge private high school, and then having received a scholarship from Harvard, what do you suppose Colson does? You will never guess. He begins to whine. You see, there exists an informal class of people known as the Boston Brahmins who hold no special rights or ancestral privileges but who nonetheless apparently run Boston, Harvard, and probably the whole world, and Colson was never invited to play their WASPy reindeer games, such as, I suppose, croquet. “We were neither the new ethnics—Italians, Irish Catholics just seizing political power in the wards of Boston—nor old stock. ‘Swamp Yankees,’ we were called. Acceptance was what we were denied – and what we most fervently sought.” Isn’t that a sad fucking story? Martin Luther Honkey over here had a real rough childhood, it seems, having presumably been forced to use the Swamp Yankee water fountains instead of those marked “Brahmin Only” and otherwise having a rough time of it while all the blue-blooded dagoes divided the city up among themselves, leaving nothing for Generic White People, Cursed Among Men. As much of a nightmare as postwar Massachusetts must have been, Colson X is subjected to an indignity well beyond the imaginary ones described thus far when the Brahmin overlords send one of their number down from the pyramid of skulls atop which they reign and offer our much put-upon Untouchable that full scholarship to Harvard. And the dean, damn him, actually has the nerve to “pause a moment for me to express my elation” instead of begging him to forgive the Brahmin Reich its crimes against his people and accept their humble gift. Mumia Colson triumphantly turns down the fork-tongued representative of the “Eastern intellectualism” that Colson associates with Harvard. Then he opts to attend Brown, which I suppose is not representative of any such thing.

This degenerate nonsense continues for several more chapters until we are finally introduced to a sympathetic character, Richard Nixon, whom the American people had decided would make a fine president. If only they’d known what Colson himself would soon begin to suspect—that the presidency itself had lately become so corrupted that even Nixon would find his democratic instincts compromised by mere possession of the office. “The era of the ‘Imperial’ Presidency came to full flower with John F. Kennedy, who trusted only family and longtime Camelot worshippers around him,” Colson explains, somewhat bizarrely. We get a better sense of what Colson, in his innocence, does and does not consider aspects of such imperial presidencies in the course of an anecdote that is intended, in a strange combination, as both amusing slice-of-White-House-life vignette as well as cautionary tale on the dangers of creeping dictatorship. You see, one evening, Nixon decides that he’d like to go over to the Kennedy Center and listen to music. Alas, the staff that handles Nixon’s little outings has already gone home, so it falls to Colson and a couple of secretaries and poor George Schultz to figure out if it’s even open, and if a certain composer that Nixon likes is conducting, and if not then what else might be going down—and all of this is a huge comic ordeal involving telephone calls and inductive reasoning because that’s how these things were done back before the internet. Finally, Colson figures out that the Marine Band is playing tonight, and of course this sounds great to Nixon the ofay. So now our hapless hero Colson has to arrange the logistics entailed in getting Nixon over there and making sure that the Marine Band plays “Hail to the Chief” when the president comes out on the balcony. It’s a hell of a story, right up there with Lonesome Dove, but it also has an important lesson to impart. Nixon, you see, never seems to notice how much trouble this last-minute whim of his is causing everyone. To wit: “Over the years a system of total and unquestioning loyalty to the Presidents had grown up,” he explains at this point, and not a chapter ago when Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia and got it.

What Colson lacks in perspective he makes up for in his willingness to jot down hilarious and telling Nixonisms. “The leaks, the leaks; that’s what we’ve got to stop at any cost. Do you hear me, Henry?” the president mutters to Kissinger, who of course turned out to be a prolific leaker himself, at least when it came to press fodder that could make him look good at the president’s expense. We are also reminded that Nixon was ahead of his time. Back then, his malevolent and obsessive quest to stem “the leaks, the leaks” at “any cost” was viewed as a sort of psychic illness; today, both the sentiment and the extralegal pursuit of leakers that followed is considered downright presidential. “We might as well turn it all over to the Soviets and get it over with,” mutters this pioneer among presidents, anticipating the drama queen logic that today’s national security state now evokes against Wikileaks and certain other parties. “These leaks”—most notably the ongoing publication of the Pentagon Papers—“are slowly and systematically destroying us.” This latest crisis was, of course, the work of dastardly Pentagon analyst Daniel Ellsberg, “who by his own admission once experimented with LSD,” Colson reminds us with exquisite nastiness. “The press hailed him as a courageous champion of the ‘public’s right to know,’”  a term which Colson presents in scare quotes to indicate that this is a silly and alien concept that does not accord with American life—except, presumably, when it comes to Ellsberg’s medical records, which the administration helpfully dumped. “I want the truth about him known,” Nixon tells Colson, who is then tasked with “exposing” Ellsberg. Then Colson’s fellow humanists G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to get those medical records. “Our fortress mentality plunged us across the moral divide,” past secret bombings and into the realm of actual burglary. “Other excesses came, as the shadowy form of the demon which would take down the Thirty-Seventh President of the United States was now taking shape like a genie drifting out of a bottle,” says Colson, who must have stolen some acid from Ellsberg, too.

Soon Nixon is re-elected. Kissinger splits his time between leaking to the New York Times and trying to figure out who else is leaking to the New York Times. The war comes to an end, but not before putting further strain on Nixon and Kissinger’s winning dynamic. “In its ‘Last Hurrah,’” Colson observes, “Vietnam managed to poison the relationship between these two unusually gifted men, a relationship which had led to some of the most spectacular American foreign policy achievements in decades.” I hope the Vietnamese feel bad about this.

Later Colson is sent to Russia to finesse the party brass on some minor policy issue or another. At a press conference there, an impertinent U.S. reporter asks him about the budding Watergate scandal. By contrast, “There had not been a single word about the scandal in the Soviet press and the Soviet officials who were aware of it were perplexed; wiretapping and bugging is a way of life in their country,” he noted. Of course, this was way back in the halcyon days when the US could be contrasted with totalitarian regimes on matters of surveillance. What an age of innocence it was, the Watergate era. Anyway, it was too depressing to read on after this point. Also I understand that Colson is dead now, which is probably for the best.

Barrett Brown is an American author and journalist awaiting trial on charges related to his research on US government intelligence contractors. For more information on his case, visit freebarrettbrown.org.

More on Freedom of Information:

How the US Government Contains Those Who Would Free Information

Julian Assange Talks to VICE about Bradley Manning and Political Payback

The Torture of Bradley Manning

Photo via Wikicommons

You know that conspiracy theory they threw out in Zeitgeist and on CNN about the US absorbing Canada and Mexico into a North American Union without borders? While it may seem like an unlikely prospect to most, the last couple of weeks have proven how real 21^st century manifest destiny might actually be.

First of all, south of the border at an NSA conference supposedly held to quell the privacy shit-storm unleashed by Edward Snowden’s leaked documents, Senator Diane Feinstein lumped Canada and Mexico with the US into one big blue continent called the “homeland.” Then, through an access to information request, the Canadian Press uncovered an internal document from the RCMP that says the US doesn’t want to be subject to Canadian law when their officers operate in Canada.

Wait, you didn’t know US officers working for organizations like the CIA and DEA were allowed to usurp Westphalian sovereignty and just come to Canada with guns and arrest people? Even if you did know, both governments have been really hush-hush about the Beyond the Border agreement that is said to make us more safe.

Since these two “staunch allies, vital economic partners, and steadfast friends” signed the declaration in 2011, the two countries have been taking “baby steps” towards implementing a new superior security team—cue the Orwellian doublespeak—which is seriously called the Next Generation policing project.

The first step was when they beefed up the NEXUS and Fast and Secure Trade (FAST) that allow frequent travelers who subject themselves to full screening to get through border security quicker.

Then they amended Canada’s Criminal Code to allow for the Shiprider program to let US coast guards go through Canadian waters and arrest people as long as an RCMP officer is on board.

The third step was creating Integrated Border Enforcement Teams (IBET) also known as Border Enforcement Security Teams (BEST) where teams of officers from both countries work together on each other’s land to catch security threats. With that step, they also allowed US customs officers to work in Canada to pre-clear shipments going south.

And now the step that is worrying a lot of people is when these IBET/BEST teams move inland. It was supposed to have started last year, but the reason it hasn’t happened yet is because the US wants to be given diplomatic immunity like they have in Afghanistan.

The problem isn’t with Americans and their terrible human rights record, questionable policing/detainment tactics, history of torture and refusal to sign on to the International Criminal Court…wait no, never mind, that is the problem. How can Canada trust a country that since 9/11 has infringed on the privacy and human rights of so many of their own citizens as well as foreigners in the name of the fight against terrorism?
 

The US hasn’t even trusted us to try our own homegrown terror suspects. I’m talking about Maher Arar who in 2002 was extradited to Syria and tortured for a year despite having lived in Canada for 15 years prior to being detained. There’s also Omar Khadr who at 15 years old was a Canadian citizen held in Guantanamo Bay for ten years before finally being tried and repatriated to his home country of Canada in 2012.

If Team America World Police is allowed free reign in Canada, how will officers who break Canadian law be treated if they aren’t subject to our laws? Will they just scurry on home without punishment if they do something like shoot a civilian without reasonable cause?

In this April 2012 list of recommendations, Canada does well to emphasize that it will stick to it’s own laws regarding the privacy of its citizens within this partnership. They have also underscored the fact that Canadian information will be held within our borders. But, when it comes down to the nitty gritty, we already know from the NSA scandal that our information goes through American servers. If we do catch US security forces doing something wrong do we actually have the marbles to say anything? I highly doubt it.

Canada’s interest in this whole thing is to encourage the US to keep doing business with us instead of buying their imports from elsewhere, but economically it has always been clear that we need them more than they need us. If a controversial situation arises such as an infringement on our privacy based on US laws not our own, the country that makes the final call is most probably not going to be the country with a population ten times smaller with a fraction of the defense force.

If you’re pissed off about this, hesitate a second before you blame the Conservative government. Talks about a North American Union date back to the Liberal government when Paul Martin took part in the Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting in 2005 to the anger of thousands of protesters in Montebello, Quebec. Similarly, Christy Clark’s Liberal government in British Columbia has commended Harper and Obama for signing the Beyond the Border agreement showing that this isn’t a partisan thing between Canada’s two oldest political parties.

This agreement comes at a time when it’s been really hard to trust our own security and disciplinary forces. With laws like the protestor mask ban and when a guy like officer James Forcillo has yet to be charged for putting nine bullets into 18-year old Sammy Yatim, including six when he was already on the ground, our draconian and questionable legal systems do start looking depressingly similar.

Creep Joel on Twitter @JoelBalsam

More on North American Union Security:

If You Liked ‘1984,’ You’ll Love 2013!

Meet the Native Activist Who the Canadian Government Was Spying On

What Can Canada Do About Homegrown Radicals?

When photographer Giles Clarke saw the “gang cages” that members of San Salvador’s warring street criminals were imprisoned in—sometimes for months at a time—it was as if he encountered something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The photographs he took of more than 30 men stuffed into cages that are 12 feet wide and 15 feet tall are insane and express the underlying theme of VICE’s latest edition, which we’ve titled the Hot Box Issue.

In keeping with the spirit of Giles’s discovery of absurd detention, artist and writer Molly Crabapple traveled to Guantanamo Bay to check out the US Naval Detention Center that has become a worldwide blot on America’s credibility as a moral power for her story named after a T-shirt she found at the base’s gift store: “It Don’t GITMO Better Than This.”  

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Noah Friedman-Rudovsky traveled to Mennonite colonies in Bolivia to report on the continuing and frightening rape epidemics happening in their insular community. They found that even though the perpetrators of the so-called ghost rapes have been apprehended, the rapes continue.

We also traveled to Colombia in search of rare strains of marijuana with the self-proclaimed King of Cannabis, Dutch seed magnate Arjan Roskam, offering a more traditional take on the meaning of hot box.

As you can imagine, there’s much more in out latest effort to sink your teeth into too. Terry Richardson photographs mega superstar cat Lil Bub who then got her fortune told. Richard Kern shot a dark and titillating fashion editorial inspired by David Cronenberg's Videodrome.

As the month rolls along, expect more goodies from the print issue to appear on VICE.com—including an excerpt from  Adam Leith Gollner's new book The New Book of Immortality, new fiction by Barry Gifford, and a report on the courageous women of Egypt battling rape and sexual assault during the country's recent revolutions. 

If you want an IRL copy of this magazine to hold and snuggle with we'd suggest heading to one of these fine locations pronto. Actually, don't bother. They probably are already gone.

Find all the published and future articles for the Hot Box Issue here.

Cory Booker laughing it up at TechCrunch Disrupt, a tech-industry conference, in 2012. (Photo by Max Morse/Getty Images) and via TechCrunch's Flickr account

Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is one of the hippest, most tech-savvy politicians in the country. He’s known nationwide for using Twitter to connect to constituents and others, and for saving old ladies trapped in burning buildings and dogs trapped in crates; during Hurricane Sandy, he even let some of his neighbors stay in his house. At first glance, he’s the quintessential charismatic politician come to save a city beleaguered by crime and poverty. But high-profile acts of heroism notwithstanding, America’s favorite mayor (and, it’s more or less assumed at this point, a candidate for president in the not-too-distant future) spends a lot of time chilling with Silicon Valley execs and hedge-fund bros, and, more importantly, freely uses those connections to enrich himself.

As the New York Times recently revealed, despite the fact that he is currently running for (and about to win) a seat in the US Senate, Booker has up to $5 million of equity in a YouTube-esque start-up company called Waywire that was conceived on his behalf a couple years ago by Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter guru. Booker personally lobbied tech-industry billionaires like Google’s Eric Schmidt (and other rich people he knows, like Oprah) to provide $1.75 million in seed money, and he's used appearances around the country made in the name of attracting investment to his troubled city (including a speech at South by Southwest  in Austin, Texas) to plug the start-up. That won't help Newark much but it will likely help Booker's personal bank account.

“This is something that would be flat-out prohibited if Booker were a member of Congress, and for good reason,“ said Craig Holman, a lobbyist at Public Citizen, a government watchdog group. “It raises serious questions and conflicts of interest. Even if Booker may have a sincere love and passion for social media and high-tech businesses, those who are investing are very often going to have something at stake before him if he were a senator.” Even if the company is struggling, as the Times reported in a follow-up story, the potential for corruption remains very real.

Booker is no stranger to profiting from his national stature. He’s been getting hefty fees on the speaking circuit for years now (most of it has been donated to charity, though he pocketed over $200,000 after taxes—or about as much as 2016 presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton makes per gig). He also failed to disclose “confidential” payments from his former law firm, which has done millions of dollars of business with the city of Newark, as the New York Post uncovered Sunday. And though in 2002 he railed against incumbent Newark mayor Sharpe James (as the anticorruption savior of the city) for not releasing his tax returns, he has yet to do so himself with the Democratic primary less than a day away.

His campaign spokesman told me that if elected, Booker would step down from Waywire’s board, put his shares in a trust, and block the company from lobbying his new office. But ethics experts say most of those moves are mandated by law anyway, and he would still remain unofficially closely tied to the tech industry—surely his friendship with people like Mark Zuckerberg, who donated $100 million to Newark’s school system in 2010, will have some impact on his voting behavior.

This goes deeper than another big-city politician from the Northeast being ethically shady. Booker’s “investment” in a tech company speaks to a broader trend in US politics toward embracing private technological innovation as the solution to all of our problems. As George Packer recently wrote in the New Yorker, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are increasingly applying their financial muscle in the political realm. Booker’s arrival in the Senate will coincide with tech companies ramping up their influence peddling in Washington DC. Zuckerberg recently founded Fwd.us, a lobbying group that represents the industry’s interests in immigration reform, and last week Twitter hired its first lobbyist and formed a PAC. Booker will be representing New Jersey when he gets to Washington, but he’ll also be sympathetic to the interests of some very wealthy (and increasingly well-organized) Californian entrepreneurs.

And while tech billionaires keep coming up with awesome new ways to share content with friends on the internet, we haven’t seen much from this crowd in terms of plausible strategies to reduce income inequality or address other structural economic problems. Their attitude that they can succeed in finding game-changing solutions where others have failed strikes some Democrats as the worst kind of arrogance.

“How about we focus on helping poor people climb out of fucking poverty instead of some tech startup that focuses on video curation?” opined one veteran Democratic Senate aide, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly. “I mean, Jesus Christ. Politicians' job is to ‘get’ tech to the extent that it's useful. Beyond that, it looks masturbatory.”

Booker’s actions also point towards a worrying trend in Democratic politics of embracing America’s captains of industry as partners in governance. As I wrote in Salon last month, Booker represents a new strain in liberalism that trumpets all the good the money of big banks and oligarchs can do, rather than the power of government working for the people. To his credit, he has convinced many of his rich buds to donate money to the city he runs. The problem is, this only works as a political philosophy as long as Booker and these celebs continue to hang out at ski resorts and the Aspen Ideas Festival. There’s no sense that government should provide for the least fortunate because of an underlying social contract—instead, the idea is to hope that America’s rich and powerful keep getting a nice buzz from using their money for good.

The danger is that these relationships with billionaires who have visions of techno-utopias dancing in their heads isn't that far away from government being a plaything of the very wealthy. In other words, the oldest kind of old-school corruption.

Unless something crazy happens, Booker will win the Democratic primary Tuesday and likely cruise to a victory in the general election (Republicans rarely win statewide races in New Jersey). He’s also poised to seek higher office at some later date, and when he does, he’ll have some very big money backing him up, making him a force to be reckoned with.

“I'm not envious of people's success in Silicon Valley,” Representative Rush Holt, the progressive congressman running against Booker who helped defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last year, told me. “There are some businessmen and women who are supporting my campaign. No one's given me a company.”

Matt Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer whose reporting about politics has appeared in Slate,Salon, the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and New York. You can follow him on Twitter: @matthewt_ny

More political coverage from Matt:

Good Riddance to Anthony Weiner

Ray Kelly’s Path to Becoming America’s Big Brother

Big Money’s Obama

NEWS

I Left My Lungs in Aamjiwnaang

Breathing the Most Polluted Air in Canada

By Patrick McGuire

One of the many unintentionally ironic signs in the Chemical Valley.

The first thing you notice about Sarnia, Ontario, is the smell: a potent mix of gasoline, melting asphalt, and the occasional trace of rotten egg. Shortly after my arrival I already felt unpleasantly high and dizzy, like I wasn’t getting enough air. Maybe this had something to do with the bouquet of smokestacks in the southern part of town that, all day every day, belch fumes and orange flares like something out of a Blade Runner-esque dystopia.

Sarnia is home to more than 60 refineries and chemical plants that produce gasoline, synthetic rubbers, and other materials that the world’s industries require to create the commercial products we know and love. The city’s most prominent and profitable attraction is an area about the size of 100 city blocks known as the Chemical Valley, where 40 percent of Canada’s chemical industry can be found packed together like a noxious megalopolis. According to a 2011 report by the World Health Organization, Sarnia’s air is the most polluted air in Canada. There are more toxic air pollutants billowing out of smokestacks here than in all of the provinces of New Brunswick or Manitoba.

Nestled inside this giant ring of chemical production, surrounded on all sides by industrial plants, sits a First Nations reservation called Aamjiwnaang where about 850 Chippewa have lived for over 300 years. Aamjiwnaang was originally a Chippewa hunting ground, but the area was turned into a First Nations reserve in 1827, after the British government snatched up an enormous amount of Native land. Today, it’s one of the most singularly poisonous locations in North America, yet neither the local nor the national government has announced any plan to launch a health study to properly investigate the side effects that are hurting the local residents, who inhale the Chemical Valley’s emissions every time they step outside. 

In 2002, the Aamjiwnaang Environmental Committee was founded. This activist group formed in response to a plan by Suncor to build what would have been Canada’s largest ethanol plant right next to the reservation. Suncor is one of Canada’s energy giants that specializes in crude-oil processing—in April of this year, they caught some heat after spilling a chemical used to blend biofuel into a British Columbian inlet. They informed the nearby First Nations people, who live on the inlet, days later. As for their ethanol plant in Aamjiwnaang, Suncor eventually halted construction on the project in response to the Environmental Committee’s protests, and instead built a desulphurization plant next to the reserve’s burial ground. 

It wasn’t until the Evironmental Committee came together that people realized how bad things had gotten. I spoke to Wilson Plain, one of the committee’s founders, about Aamjiwnaang’s communal realization that the Chemical Valley was hurting their population. “As a community we were not really aware of what was being released from the plants,” Wilson told me. “When we started having regular meetings of the Environmental Committee, people started recalling how many incidents we had.”

The committee also began commissioning studies, like the one published in 2005 that analyzed birth rates on the reservation. A healthy community should have roughly a 1:1 birth ratio of females to males, but the study found that the Chemical Valley’s ratio had reached nearly 2:1—a statistical anomaly that had never been recorded in any human population, though it has been documented in animal populations that live in extremely polluted areas. 

A protester rallying against more industry coming to the Chemical Valley.

Another study conducted between 2004 and 2005 by the environmental activist organization Ecojustice found that 39 percent of the women in Aamjiwnaang had suffered through at least one stillbirth or miscarriage. Since then, however, there have been no inquiries by federal or local authorities to discern exactly what is causing these abnormalities, let alone any attempt to reverse them. Defenders of the petrochemical industry have brushed off these findings as irrelevant, and similarly shrug at the “anecdotal evidence” offered by Aamjiwnaang residents about the foul smells or the strange ailments that are pervasive in the community. 

Here’s an example of anecdotal evidence: In January, the Shell refinery had a “spill,” meaning they accidentally leaked toxic chemicals into the air. The leaked substance included hydrogen sulfide, a highly toxic, potentially lethal substance that was used as a chemical weapon by the British in World War I. The gas floated over to Aamjiwnaang’s daycare center, where the staff and students noticed the air began to smell strongly of rotten eggs. Almost instantly, kids got sick and many were sent to the hospital with headaches, nausea, and skin irritation. For hours, doctors wrongly diagnosed the children as having ordinary flus and colds—if Shell had owned up to the leak that exposed them to hydrogen sulfide, they would almost certainly have gotten better faster.

Christine Rogers has three young girls; one of them was attending Aamjiwnaang’s daycare at the time of the leak, while the other two were riding in a school bus directly through the affected area. “As a parent, you do everything you can to make sure that your children are safe, and when something like that happens, you feel like you’ve lost control,” she told me. “It makes me want to break down and cry when I think about that. What if it had been a bigger spill? You think you’re prepared but really you’re not. It feels helpless.”

Christine went on to explain how she handled the effects of the leak with her eldest: “I told her she needed to tell me about any of the little symptoms that she was experiencing so we could get her to the doctor to see if she’s OK. She had crusted eyes at that point and her eyes were bloodshot for three days, so I had to make sure she didn’t have any infections.”

Parenting in chemical-ridden Aamjiwnaang comes with uniqu-e challenges. While we spoke about her daughters, Christine told me they used to think the Chemical Valley’s massive smokestacks were “cloud makers.” When it came time to tell her children the truth, she came up with a rhyme: “The more clouds in the sky, the more people die.”

Since the incident in January, Shell is believed to have been responsible for two other leaks of hydrogen sulfide—one of them sent three workers to hospital and was still being investigated as of press time. Spills are a regular part of life in Aamjiwnaang. In 2008, the roof of a large tank belonging to Imperial Oil that contained benzene, a well-known carcinogen, collapsed. The entire city of Sarnia was told to stay inside with all of their doors and windows shut. 

Often, the responsibility for detecting leaks falls to community members like Ada Lockridge, an Aamjiwnaang Environmental Committee member and outspoken activist who owns an air-testing kit called a Bucket Brigade. This low-tech device consists of a plastic bucket lined with a replaceable plastic bag attached to a vacuum nozzle that protrudes out of the top of the bucket. When Ada suspects the air around her is being polluted by a leak—if it smells like gas or chemicals and tar more than usual—she sucks some of that air down through the vacuum nozzle and into the plastic bag, then sends the bag to a lab in California that for a $500 processing fee will analyze the data and send her a report within two weeks. She used this bucket to detect a hydrogen sulfide leak in April after getting a whiff of a rotten-egg odor she rated as a “ten out of ten” on her personal scale.

Ada describes discovering that leak like this: “My daughter showed up at my house to bring me coffee and a bagel and said, ‘Oh, Mom, it’s terrible out there. It smells like rotten eggs.’ So I got on the phone with the Spills Action Centre [operated by the Ontario government] and told them something was leaking… A lot of times, we’re the ones that notify the companies that they’re leaking. I went outside in my housecoat [with my Bucket Brigade] and told my youngest daughter to plug her nose and run to the school bus.”

This is just part of the heavy price Sarnians have long paid for living in a perpetual boomtown. Oil was first discovered just south of Sarnia in the mid-1800s, and since the city was ideally located—on the banks of the St. Clair River, close to Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago—the petrochemical industry set up shop here. Companies bought land from the people of Aamjiwnaang in the 1940s and 50s, back when the environmental impact of chemical industries was unknown, and in 1942 the first facility in what would become the Chemical Valley opened: a plant owned by Polymer Corporation that manufactured synthetic rubber for the war effort. During the 60s and 70s, the town prospered as the local industry exploded with growth, and the Chemical Valley became such a source of national pride that for several years the smokestack-packed skyline was featured on the back of the Canadian $10 bill. 

Vanessa Gray, a protester from Aamjiwnaang, demonstrating outside an oil-industry conference.

In the decades since we’ve learned much more about the effects these industries have on the environment, and residents find no sense of pride in being surrounded by polluters. Sandy Kinart, who lives in north Sarnia, on the other side of town from Aamjiwnaang, is a lifelong resident of the city. Her husband worked for Welland Chemical as a millwright, assembling and installing machinery for years before dying of mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos exposure. In response she helped found the activist organization Victims of the Chemical Valley. Like many residents who grew up in the “golden age” of Sarnia in the 60s and 70s, she’s only lately come to realize that living near all that industry can be a curse rather than a blessing. 

“As a child, driving through Chemical Valley was part of Sunday evening,” she said. “The lights were all on, and boy, that just looked like a fairyland to us. Back in the day, those oil and chemical drums were kept pristine-looking, the gardens around the refineries and plants were beautiful, it was lovely to see. We were proud that we lived in the Chemical Valley… We don’t see that anymore. Now the flowers are dead, the trees are all dying, the drums are all grungy down there; it looks derelict. The industry doesn’t have to keep up the pretense anymore.”

I reached out to several of the petrochemical companies with plants in the Chemical Valley and, after a lot of back and forth, wound up at the desk of Dean Edwardson, general manager of the Sarnia-Lambton Environmental Association, an oil-industry-operated nonprofit. He refused to comment on specific incidents (and acted surprised when I told him about Shell’s two hydrogen-sulfide leaks). But when I pressed him on the January Shell leak that affected the daycare, he admitted that there had been a mistake somewhere along the line. “We had a communication problem,” he said. “Clearly it was unacceptable, and I think if you asked Shell, they would tell you it was unacceptable. Impacting the community is not acceptable, and they regret that incident.”

When I asked Dean how these companies handle the atmosphere of distrust that now permeates Aamjiwnaang and Sarnia due to the leaks, he replied, “I don’t think anyone’s asking anybody to trust the industry. Trust has to be earned and I think our companies are trying to earn that trust.” He also gave me an analogy that awkwardly acknowledged just how bad the situation was: “You can be a great guy, but you go murder somebody, all of a sudden, you’re a murderer.” 

Dean also pointed out that Sarnia’s air quality wasn’t helped by what he called “transboundary migration of contaminants from our friends to the south.” In other words, roughly half of Sarnia’s pollution has floated into the city from American smokestacks. Detroit lies just a few dozen miles to the south and is similarly scarred by Canadian pollution—on the banks of the Detroit River, in a poor area of town, sits a three-story-high pile of petroleum coke that stretches the length of a city block. The pile’s owner, Koch Carbon (part of the infamous megacorporation Koch Industries, run by the Koch brothers), doesn’t seem to care to do anything about it either. As a headline in the New York Times this May put it, “A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit.” 

Chemical Valley seen from a small plane.

Just across the river from the coke pile lives Jim Brophy, a scientist and health expert who has studied pollution and human health in Sarnia and Aamjiwnaang for decades. (Jim and his wife Margaret helped discover the Aamjiwnaang birth-ratio anomaly.) I visited Jim to learn more about the problem of “cumulative effects,” which works like this: one petrochemical plant is legally allowed to produce a certain amount of Pollutant A, and another plant down the road is allowed to produce a different amount of Pollutant B—but no one knows what happens when A and B meet and combine in the air above a populated area like Aamjiwnaang. The Chemical Valley’s atmosphere is full of an unsettlingly unregulated, dangerous cocktail of poisons.

“The levels of toxic exposure we have in Ontario is not safe by any stretch of the imagination,” Jim said. “The most at-risk communities are First Nations on the fence lines, the blue-collar workers in those plants, the poor working class who live in south Sarnia… It’s not the CEOs.”

The mayor of Sarnia, Mike Bradley, seems sympathetic to the concerns of some environmentalists, though he also has a politician’s habit of hedging everything he says. “You’re never going to win by advocating for the oil industry in the realm of public opinion,” he said. “The reality is you cannot function in your daily life without the plastic, chemical, and petrochemical sector.” 

The mayor did express some support for conducting a study on the people most affected by the Chemical Valley’s emissions; however, he said that there isn’t enough government funding in place to support the research needed for the study. For at least the time being, the long-term effects of living under the chemical haze of Sarnia will continue to be unknown. 

Jim thinks that the blame for this can be laid at the feet of politically influential oil companies. “In countries where petrochemical industry has substantial power, there’s a real deficit of democracy,” he said. “We live in a situation now in Canada where the oil industry has tremendous power. Some would say they literally have a lock on the federal government. So when you’re in a community like Sarnia, where they have tremendous clout, and there’s fear of plant closures and downsizing and so forth, the Department of the Environment doesn’t act as a counterweight to that industry. It falls then to the Ada Lockridges of the world to stand up to this… Where the hell is the federal government? Where the hell is the provincial government? What are we doing here? Have all the protections and the democratic rights of our society collapsed?”

Right now the task of pushing back against pollution falls to smaller organizations like Sandy Kinart’s Victims of the Chemical Valley, and they can only do so much. In 2003, the group helped erect a monument to those who died from working in the refineries and factories in beautiful waterfront Centennial Park. It was nice while it lasted, but this spring, much of the park was closed after an excessive amount of asbestos was found in the soil. When I visited, I couldn’t get in and there was no official signage explaining why the park was shuttered. 

Wandering around the exterior of the park, I found two sticky notes that had been left on the chain-link fence that blocked the entrance. On them, an anonymous Sarnian had distilled the situation quite simply in cursive handwriting: “This is a memorial for those who died and suffered because of the Chemical Valley. It’s behind a fence because the government found out that this park is also polluted by toxic chemicals.”

More from the Hot Box Issue:

It’s Good to Be the King

The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia

It Don’t Gitmo Better Than This

All Photos By: David Degner, Just off Tahrir Square, Mohammed Mahmoud Street is where Yasmine El Baramawy was beaten and raped.

I t was almost 11 PM on Friday, November 23, 2012, when from the window of her apartment in downtown Cairo, not far from Tahrir Square, Ghada heard a crowd screaming, “She has a bomb strapped to her stomach!” Ghada (who wishes to be known only by her first name) immediately thought of her children who were outside among those who had gathered. She ran to the balcony to search for them, but her terror shifted into action when she saw a naked woman pinned against the hood of a car, with a circle of men around her. Ghada grabbed her husband and some clothes for the stranger, and they sprinted downstairs to rescue her. They pushed through the crowd and into the circle, pulling the girl to safety.

Earlier that afternoon, Yasmine El Baramawy and her friend Soha (a pseudonym chosen to protect her identity) had made their way to Tahrir Square after hearing about the clashes between anti-Morsi activists and government-backed security forces. Protests against the post-Arab Spring constitution had started in Tahrir Square two days before. Yasmine and Soha hadn’t planned to explicitly join in; they just wanted to watch from a few feet away as protesters cheered against President Morsi. 

In the fall of 2012, five months after becoming Egypt’s first-ever democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi signed a “constitutional” decree that gave him unlimited authority: he simultaneously appointed himself the chief of police, the chief of the military, and the head of Congress, giving himself the power to appoint or dismiss anyone within the government at only his discretion. He was, in the plainest terms, mad with power when many felt he had run on a platform that styled himself as the antithesis of Hosni Mubarak. Backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi was supposed to improve Egypt’s economic well-being and restore political control to the people. Egyptians were angry. Yasmine and Soha were angry.

At approximately 6 PM, the two women arrived at the edge of the square, the intersection at Al Kasr Al Aini Street at 6 PM, right as the sun was setting. They had yet to reach the demonstrations in the distance, and the square was relatively calm where they stood; Yasmine’s instincts immediately filled her with an urge to flee. She had witnessed mobs of protesters before, but something was off this time. Five minutes hadn’t passed before the girls decided to leave. When they turned to go, they saw a group of men running. The girls froze. 

Yasmine, 30, stands in Tahrir Square in June, just before former President Morsi was ousted by the military.

Too late, the young women realized: the crowd of young Egyptian men were running toward them. They stopped within inches of the women’s faces, so close that Yasmine and Soha could smell the kebab on their breath. The men began ripping off Sana and Yasmine’s clothes, leaving them exposed. 

Just then the square was tear-gassed, and the attackers scattered. Yasmine fell to the ground. Soha ran for help, returning with Sherif, a friend she had spotted among the protesters. Before they could pull Yasmine to her feet and leave, the tear gas evaporated and the mob returned. Sherif was strangled and tossed aside. Then, the thugs split up: half of them encircled Yasmine; the other half closed around Soha. That was the last time they saw each other that night.

Yasmine’s circle started to move away from the square, toward Mohammed Mahmoud Street, a dark street lined with pro-revolutionary graffiti. Yasmine felt fingers and knives penetrate her vagina, machetes slice her skin, but also heard shouts of “We’re going to help her!” She couldn’t differentiate between the voices of those trying to rescue her and her assailants. Even if her own brother had reached down his hand and told her to take his palm, she wouldn’t have been able to identify him.

Dragging her through the dirt, garbage, and sharp, broken sidewalks of Mohammed Mahmoud Street, they pulled and pawed at every part of her body—her limbs, her hair, her breasts. But Yasmine fought back, remaining close to the ground, crawling through sewage runoff as the circle of men pushed her further away from the square.

She was barely able to breathe, but when the attackers tugged at her pants, she kicked them. When one of her attackers tongued her, she bit down as hard as she could until she felt his blood gush. When they pinned her against the wall of an apartment building, she wailed for the doorman to let her in; instead, he stared blankly, not even turning his head. She noticed a crowd above her, sitting on building ledges and pointing. Could they hear her scream? Could they tell what was going on? Why did no one pull her to safety? she wondered as they dragged her through a mosque and finally into an alley.

The first time the circle parted was when a car pulled up, running over Yasmine’s hair. They attempted to pull Yasmine inside the car, but she resisted. Virtually paralyzed on the hood of the 1970s white Skoda, she could still hear her rapists screaming false accusations against her: “She’s got a bomb strapped to her! She’s going to blow us up!”

On November 30, protestors and activists gather around a sexual-assault watchtower

"M

en want an untouched, good Egyptian girl,” my mother explained to me when I was barely a teenager. Of course, she waited till my father was out of earshot. My mother was that “good Egyptian girl,” a virgin bride wed to a man who swore to provide for her, protect their family, and preserve tradition. She wanted the same for me, and when we moved to the US, she feared that I would lose those Egyptian values. “If a man doesn’t see the blood from your hymen on your wedding night, it’s aar (shame) on you and a fadiha (public embarrassment) for the family.”

My mother’s logic is not a religious thing for Egyptian Muslims; my family is Coptic Christian. It’s cultural conditioning, available in movies and temsiliat (TV series) that tell plenty of stories about the good Egyptian girl: She is an excellent cook; if you come to visit, she will welcome you with a heaping pot of meat and vegetables. She is obedient; if her brother is thirsty, she will fetch him some water. She is innocent; she desires marriage but not sex.

When it’s time for her to get married, her family will usher in a variety of suitors to meet her. During that time, her only role will be to appear desirable, but above all demure, serving the suitor with tea. Her smile will be wide, her laughter hushed. When a suitor decides to ask her father for her hand in marriage, she will answer shyly, “Ilit shoofoo ya, Baba,” or “Whatever you see, Dad.” She will only leave her parents’ home on leilat al-dokhla, or the night of consummation—her wedding night. 

An Egyptian bride’s wedding-night blood represents more than just the loss of her virginity; it represents that she’s preserved herself and—more importantly—her family has preserved her and thus the family’s honor according to the tenets of traditional Egyptian values. A good Egyptian girl would never protest against this.

Shereen El Feki, who studies and writes about sex in the Arab world, recently told Reason magazine about an eager young woman who researched sex because she so badly wanted to please her husband on their wedding night. “When she initiated some activity, her husband hauled out of bed and made her swear on a Qur’an that she has never had relations before marriage.” 

While Egyptian women are conditioned to obey, men are conditioned to dominate and take whatever they want. Plenty of examples of how this works can be found in popular “romantic” movies. “No means yes” scenes are far too common in films from early Egyptian cinema, like Al Sharisa, as well as contemporary releases like Captain Hima and Omar we Selma. It usually goes like this: The man tries to kiss the woman, and she turns her head. He pulls her closer to him. She tries to run away. He finally grabs her and holds her tight until she gives in, seeming to enjoy the back and forth. While the US and other Western cultures might classify this scene as sexual harassment, Egyptian culture calls it “love.”

The acceptance and promotion of sexual harassment as normal, or even a deserved and acceptable punishment, makes Egypt one of the most potentially dangerous places for women in the world. Nearly 100 percent of women in Egypt have endured verbal or physical sexual harassment, according to a recent UN report. This attitude has spread like a virus through the political protests in Tahrir Square, a historic landmark that has become colloquially known all around Egypt as “the place where women who want to get raped go.” 

Two months after Yasmine's attack, Mohamed El-Khateeb, along with other OpAntiSH volunteers, returned to fight rapists around Tahrir Square.

Yasmine didn’t return home after Ghada and her husband pulled her to safety. Instead she began staying with a friend who had already heard about what had happened through other friends. But Yasmine was stunned into silence. She couldn’t even cry until she heard Soha’s voice the next day. 

During the week she stayed silent about her attack, she began to wonder: Is this what it meant to be a modern Egyptian woman? She thought that the stray dogs starved and kicked and shot in the streets of Egypt are treated better than the Egyptian women who stood up to their government and demanded change in Tahrir Square. At that point, Yasmine told me, she doesn’t even want to be associated with her country. She wanted to quit the fight, leave the country, maybe start a new story someplace else, toss the burden of shame. She wanted to denounce her citizenship. 

Soha’s story traces the same timeline, pattern, and events as Yasmine’s: Men enclosed a circle around her, ripped her clothes, beat her, dragged her through the streets, while penetrating her with their fingers and knives. She escaped after she begged one of her attackers for mercy, pleading to him that she was a mother who wanted nothing more than to see her children again. To this day, she remains anonymous and hasn’t filed any charges. She views it this way: the police couldn’t save her, the law doesn’t protect her, and society blames her for her own attack; she must remain quiet. 

“Reporting harassment in the police is problematic, and although, we have laws against sexual harassment, they’re not enforced,” said Dina Samir, a former spokesperson for HarassMap, a NGO founded in December 2010 that has taken off since the Arab Spring. “According to one of the laws, you have to have someone who witnessed the situation. Sometimes that’s impossible, if someone grabs you or touches [you] and just runs, how can you find them? You can be in an empty street where nobody saw [the harassment].” One of HarassMap’s main tactics to thwart this type of behavior is an online reporting system for victims that includes a user-generated map of where these incidences occur. All of this is to help end the stereotype that unwanted advances are actually wanted, or even deserved, and to quash the taboo of talking about all forms of sexual harassment. 

Soha’s point of view is completely understandable: Why would she choose to relive those memories when the overwhelming odds are she’ll lose the fight? 

In Egypt, sexual harassment cases are given little to no attention. In 2009, only 88 cases of rape were reported to the Egyptian police; even if those cases get prosecuted, the courts are magnificently inefficient. Bribery and corruption are the heartbeat of the Egyptian courts. Pumping cash to officials isn’t only common, it’s the only way of conducting any real business. Police officers won’t listen or talk to anyone—victims or lawyers—without a few Egyptian pounds in their hands. A lawyer defending a harasser unrelated to the Tahrir Square rapes, who spoke to me on the basis of anonymity, said, “The [victim] asked for 30,000 EGP in order to drop the case. I laughed in her face then went and paid the two witnesses 1,000 EGP each to change their testimony. I’ll win the case and my guy will walk. That’s Egypt.”

After I met with Yasmine, I retold her story to some of my family members in Egypt, and one responded, “Her story isn’t believable. Why wouldn’t she file a police report to at the very least prove to her husband she was attacked when he discovers she isn’t a virgin?” Even Ghada’s husband, who witnessed Yasmine’s brutal attack and rescued her out of the hands of her rapists, questioned the authenticity of Yasmine’s story. When Ghada was helping Yasmine get into a galabeya, a traditional long cloak, he stood in disgust, shouting, “What did you do to these men? Where do you know them from?” 

Yasmine’s original plan was to stay silent, but a week after her attack, she heard about six assaults identical to hers that took place in Tahrir Square on the night she was accosted: all occurred between 6 PM and 11 PM; a circle of 20- to 30-year-old men surrounded the victims, ripped their clothes off, beat them, and penetrated their vaginas with knives. According to Yasmine, around the same time, the prominent Salafi preacher and television personality Abdullah Badr—a jailed Islamist famously arrested in May 2013 after libelously accusing an actress of “adultery”—broadcasted on his television show that at least 30 girls so far had been sexually assaulted in Tahrir. He said they were “whores” who purposefully went to Tahrir to get gang-raped. 

Yasmine, on the other hand, told me she believes that the Muslim Brotherhood has been orchestrating these attacks, paying off thugs to assault anti-Morsi protesters and discourage further change in Egypt. Of course, verifying such a claim can be difficult. Egypt runs on bribes as much as it does on conspiracy theories, and it’s not uncommon to hear lines like “No, it’s really the activists,” “Those guys look like the Black Bloc,” or “Mubarak paid thugs to do this, so he could get his own revenge on the revolution” if talk turns to the protest rapes. “Witnesses” can be conjured up at a moment’s notice, telling whoever is asking questions anything he or she wants to hear if the price is right. Earlier this year, when a VICE production crew was shooting a documentary in Egypt, they interviewed a group of men who claimed they had been paid off by the Muslim Brotherhood to carry out the gang rapes. Afterward they demanded 500 EGP, about $70. (The crew paid but discarded the interview.) If Yasmine is correct, it seems the plan is to transform female activists into victims, to force them to swallow their hope while spitting back shame into their faces. If this is the case, it would also ensure that their male activist counterparts and family members are wounded with guilt, because they, like Soha’s friend, Sherif, were unable to protect their fellow activists—a political failing as well as a strike against the ideal of the dominant Egyptian male. Fathers, brothers, and entire families would be burdened with the embarrassment of a fadiha, and their fear of public shame would keep the victims silent, their cause muted. Even if any of the victims were allowed to tell their stories, the quick spin of “she wanted to get raped, so she went to Tahrir Square” would most likely be  the accepted cultural narrative. 

It almost sounds too elaborate and fantastical a plan—a typical Egyptian conspiracy. But, according to Yasmine, this is exactly what has happened to her. When she first wanted to tell her story, colleagues—activist friends, political figures, and even journalists—refused to listen. “We can’t prove any of this,” they told her. “We will ruin the reputation of Tahrir Square and the reputation of the revolution.”

Instead of hiding, Yasmine felt obligated to warn women who planned to protest in Tahrir. “If I had known, I would’ve been more cautious, I would’ve worn multiple layers so I wouldn’t be exposed so quickly, I would’ve gone with more male friends.” One week later, on December 30, she posted an (at the time) anonymous, detailed recollection on Facebook of her attack. Her post acted as a tipping point that inspired the formation of Operation Anti-Sexual Assault, or OpAntiSH, the volunteer-based group, modeled on the NGOs HarassMap and Tahrir Bodyguard. Like those organizations, OpAntiSH is comprised of ordinary citizens who’ve volunteered to take matters into their own hands because they believe the type of gang assaults to which Yasmine and Soha fell victim are being ignored by the government and local law enforcement. Given the risk, it’s a surprise that women make up half the group. 

Mohamed believes the mob assaults are premeditated because assailants singled him out whenever he tried to intervene.

OpAntiSH responded to Tahrir Square’s organized gang-rape crisis with a plan that kicked off on January 25, 2013, the two-year anniversary of the Arab Spring, when thousands were expected to protest President Morsi’s increasingly far-reaching power grab. During the rally, an OpAntiSH control group stayed at an activist’s apartment located atop of a building on the tip of the square that served as a safe house. Yasmine was among them. The volunteers split into two groups: “the attack group,” volunteers who would physically intervene if needed and attempt to break up and distract the circles of thugs; the other half served as the “safety group” who would sneak in to extract the victim. The 19 cases of simultaneous gang rape that took place that night far exceeded their expectations and planning. 

The volunteers arrived at Tahrir around 6 PM to three simultaneous cases of gang assaults in-progress. Overwhelmed and distraught, the volunteers split up. One of them, Mohamed El-Khateeb—a soft-spoken, even-toned 24-year-old—anchored himself atop a ventilator to get a better view of the situation below and noticed a foreign woman encircled by a large group of men. He felt he had to do something to keep her from drifting further into the crowd. Against all the training he received—to never intervene alone—he jumped from his perch and crashed into the center of the mob. He knew that the woman being attacked wouldn’t be able to differentiate him from those pursuing her, but he was determined to help anyway, pushing men aside and pulling her clear of the mob.

Mohamed jumped back on his makeshift watchtower to locate his colleagues. He quickly realized he was alone, so he phoned the control group, who advised him to run to one of the buildings near Talat Haarb Street. He didn’t need an address. As soon as he got to the street, he quickly spotted the mob. The OpAntiSH volunteers were trying to pull another victim inside the building. Mohamed squeezed his way through to the horde, which per the usual pattern was screaming things like “I’m trying to help her,” or “This is my sister.” Again, he could only see the victim’s head and feared for what might be happening to her body. The mob immediately realized Mohamed wasn’t one of them and began to attack him, grabbing his thighs, punching him with the butt of a knife, and even biting his chest—all of which has only convinced Mohamed further that the assaults were premeditated. 

At that moment, someone in the square set off a homemade flare. Everyone dropped to the ground, while Mohamed and the rest of the volunteers grabbed the victim, shut the iron gate to the building, and took refuge inside. The mob, however, was relentless. They tugged at the iron gate, trying to break it, screaming, “We want the girls inside! We want the girls inside!” It took 30 minutes of exhausting struggle before the mob gave up and left.

Mohamed fought to save one more victim that night, a woman who was eventually taken by ambulance to Kasr Al Aini Hospital around midnight. As she was bleeding to death, having been repeatedly vaginally penetrated with a knife, the government-run hospital turned her away. Egyptian law requires the hospital to file a forensic report after a crime, and the volunteers were told a forensic scientist wouldn’t be available until 6 PM the following day. Heliopolis Hospital, a privately run facility, admitted her only after the OpAntiSH volunteers begged the staff to care for the dying victim.

Mohamed viewed the January 25 operation as equal parts success and failure. OpAntiSH volunteers were able to save some women from the mob assaults, and intervene in 15 out of the total 19 cases that were reported that night, even though it’s likely that dozens of similar incidents went unreported. These operations were the impetus for Yasmine to go public with her story. Volunteer groups couldn’t take on this fight alone. Within a few days, on February 1, 2013, she and another victim, journalist Hania Moheeb, recounted their nealy identical stories on Al Nahar, an Egyptian TV channel. 

After Yasmine’s TV appearance, countless lawyers offered to represent her, but the police claim to have no leads on the case—despite her having acquired the plate numbers from the 70s Skoda that ran over her hair, evidence left on the clothes she was wearing that night, and YouTube videos of similar attacks shot by eye-witnesses. (According to a private investigator she hired following the incident, the car belonged to a member of Morsi’s majority political party.)

Tahrir Square on January 28, 2011

Still, Yasmine continues her fight. On June 30, the one-year anniversary of Morsi’s election when activists and citizens marched to demand the removal and impeachment of the now ex-president, facing the potential of sexual assault again, she stood between the 33 million protesters who made 93-degree heat feel like 140, walked for hours, and chanted “Erhal!”—“Leave!”—to Morsi, who was ousted by the military on July 3. Yasmin refused to carry a weapon but surrounded herself with six male friends for safety. In the end she was unharmed, but HarassMap and OpAntiSH reported 46 different cases of sexual assault in Tahrir Square on June 30 alone. Even as Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood fell from power, the number of mob sexual assaults rose to 169 cases by July 5, with as many as 80 throughout the night of July 4.

If the Muslim Brotherhood indeed is coordinating these attacks, the fight may not be over. As of this writing, blood continues to stain Egypt’s streets as the Brotherhood faces off with the Egyptian military in an attempt to regain their former power. As one of the most organized groups in Egypt, the Brotherhood, especially if they join forces with the Salafi Islamists, may still be capable of once again gaining control of the government when a fair and free election eventually takes place. 

As the Egyptians walk the precarious path to stability, it’s apparent that the women of Egypt must step forward and join the fight. “The solution isn’t less women in Tahrir Square,” Mohamed told me. “This is planned, so they [the organizers] have a set number of men coming with the intention to single out the girls and rape them. If ten men came and only found one girl, it would be easy for them to attack her. If 20 girls showed up, [the rapists] would be outnumbered, and we could easily break up any attack.” 

Even after this second revolution, the role of Egypt’s women may not be changing fast enough to bring them justice.

@notsovanilla

More news from Egypt:

Watch: Egypt After Morsi

Read: Michael Wahid Hanna on the New Wave of Violence in Egypt

The Egyptian Army Massacred 72 Egyptians this Weekend

It seems the entire internet is extremely pessimistic about the new round of John Kerry-brokered peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians. But seeing as most people online don't have a decent grasp on the Israel-Palestine situation, I decided to find out what the real world thinks about the issue. And since I live in Palestine, it was pretty easy to find people who will be directly affected by the outcome (or lack thereof) of the negotiations.

So what do the Palestinians think about the talks?

"It's bullshit," said Jaber Abu Rahmeh, a friend of mine from Bil'in, the village featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary 5 Broken Cameras. Residents of Bil'in have been demonstrating for more than eight years against settlement construction on their land, as the village has lost more than 1500 dunams (370 acres) to settlement expansion. Jaber's cousin Bassem Abu Rahmeh was killed by Israeli soldiers during a demonstration in 2009.

Jaber says the talks are a distraction to buy time for the Israelis to steal more land. He also believes the Israelis can't be trusted to hold up their end of the bargain—an understandable position given Israel's routine and ongoing violations of the Geneva Conventions.

"For us, it's a waste of time and for them they are saving time to plan everything," he said. "It's an occupation, and they don't respect any agreement. They didn't respect Geneva, they don't respect anything."

I also spoke to Mohammad Khatib, the coordinator of Bil'in's Popular Struggle Committee, the group that organizes the demonstrations. He wasn't much more optimistic than Jaber.

"You must understand that the Palestinian people get frustrated and lose the hope of the peace process because it took a long, long time and it's now continued for 20 years without any practical result," he said. "Even the results that it's achieved have made the situation much, much more complicated than before… All the actions that the Israelis are taking, they are not showing that the Israelis are willing to have a real peace."

The 20 years that Mohammad mentioned mark the time since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the agreement reached between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in 1993. The second round of Oslo Accords, signed in 1995, divided the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C. Israel maintains control over Area C, a whopping 60 percent of the West Bank, which is why it's able to decide what happens to Bil'in's farmland.

It's also why Israelis are able to continue building settlements with the protection of the Israeli military, which has full jurisdiction over everything in Area C. In fact, Israel published bids on Sunday to build over 1,000 new settlement housing units while the peace talks are taking place, and the Israeli cabinet just approved a swanky new benefits package for a bunch of settlements.

I put the question to Lior Amihai, an Israeli who knows a lot about settlements. Lior works for Peace Now, a group dedicated to finding a way to a two-state solution. He's the deputy director of their Settlement Watch project, which does pretty much exactly what you would think it does.

Over the course of the conversation, most of which dealt with the awesome maps Peace Now makes of the 120-plus settlements in the West Bank, I got the sense that Lior is a pretty optimistic dude, and generally believes a fair solution will eventually come around one way or the other.

"Negotiations will fail and then they will blame each other; this is most likely what will happen. And then most likely the Palestinians will be the ones to be blamed," Lior told me. "We should already set the standards of what we're accepting and what we're not accepting. And this sort of regime that's inside the West Bank I think should be understood as something that's not acceptable."

But Lior's a leftist. Driving around to random outpost settlements in order to map them and then tell anyone who will listen how fucked up they are is a pretty extreme thing to do by the average Israeli's standards. So I found some average Israelis hanging out on the beach in Tel Aviv and had a couple of pleasant chats about the future of the region.

"I wouldn't expect a lot from this peace process," said Daniel Meyer as he sunbathed in Speedos. It sounds like you're not very optimistic, Daniel?

"I used to be, but every time I'm expecting something, even after the elections, nothing really changes. And I become apathetic to the situation… there's nothing really I can do."

I wandered down the beach a bit and introduced myself to Nadav Abramovitch, interrupting his game of paddleball, which might as well be Israel's national sport.

"It's an endless cycle. I really don't see any possible way—we don't want them here, they don't want us here," Nadav said.

So what's the solution?

"Eventually, like, it's gonna happen again and again until someone will, you know, they eventually will collapse."

Collapse? You mean one side's gonna wipe the other side out?

"Umm…"

Like war?

"Yeah, something like that."

OK, that cheered me up. Thank you, Nadav. I was beginning to get discouraged.

After talking to Nadav, I found Alona Bar-Yona, who explained to me why Israel can't give any of the land it's stolen back to the Palestinians.

"It's like if my family, they have a big land of grass around their house and all the time there are people in this grass and they throw stones at my parents' house, and my parents will say 'We want to let you build here,' but some of those people that live on their grass, alone, they say to my parents 'Those people will not change their opinion and they will continue to throw stones at your children.' So what should my mother do? What should she do, you understand?" I took this as a rhetorical question and rather than responding let Alona continue. "I cannot let you build a house on my land as long as you want to kill me. And they want to. Some of them. Not every one."

The problem with Alona's metaphor is that when she says "my land" she actually means "their land." The reason settlements are settlements rather than just being towns is because they're built on land that Israel is supposedly temporarily occupying as an emergency measure. But since the emergency has been going on since 1967, the year of the Six-Day War, Israel has had a lot of time to make its "temporary" measures permanent in the form of settlements (unequivocally illegal under international law) and the building of a gigantic wall that also encroaches on land belonging to the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, as I discovered, the US Congress' opinion on the settlements is apparently pretty close to Alona's. At a press conference in Jerusalem, 37 Democratic members of Congress met the press and waxed philosophical about the peace process. The ranking member of the delegation, Steny Hoyer, is the House Minority Whip, making him the second-most-powerful Democrat in Congress, a kind of Tonto to Nancy Pelosi's Lone Ranger.

Hoyer is completely unable to understand that the Palestinians still consider Jerusalem their capital, and want the Eastern half of it as a condition for any possible peace deal. Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, and the international community still considers it occupied territory rather than an uncontested part of the Israeli state. Hoyer courted controversy a couple of years ago when he said settlements in East Jerusalem aren't really settlements, a sentiment he doubled down on during the recent press conference.

"'Settlement' may have a different meaning in your mind than it does necessarily in mine," Hoyer said when asked if the congressional delegation would visit any settlements. "The expansion of Jerusalem, as a city that has natural growth to it, is one thing, from my perspective."

Henry Waxman (L). 

Things got even worse when Henry Waxman, a senior Californian congressman who looks a bit like a naked mole rat that somebody dressed up in a suit, jumped in to say that settlements are "not the central issue" in the peace talks.

I caught up with Waxman after the press conference to, well, press the issue. Waxman, visibly annoyed with my line of questioning, stuck to his proverbial guns.

"I don't think it's a central issue in the talks," he repeated. "I have to work out, uh, the other issues. And what a Palestinian state would look like."

Although I was unclear on why it's Waxman himself instead of, say, the Palestinians who has to work out what a Palestinian state would look like, I asked him what the central issues are.

"Oh. Boundaries. Security. Um, the recognition of the rights of the Jewish people to have their country recognized as a Jewish country," he said, apparently missing the fact that the issues of boundaries and security are impossible to solve without doing something about the settlements.

I don't think Hoyer and Waxman's opinions would be too shocking to Mahmoud Zwahre, a (Palestinian, of course) member of the Popular Struggle Committee from the village of al-Maasara.

"Mainly, let's say that we are against the negotiations, not because we are against the negotiations as a principle, but because of the atmosphere the US creates… you know the American position has never been neutral," Mahmoud told me. "I'm not optimistic to be in 1993 with 100,000 settlers and in 2013 we have more than half a million settlers."

Of all the people I talked to, I didn't find a single one who was optimistic about the negotiations. The congressmen are a possible exception, but I think their views are less "genuine optimism" and more "political posturing."

The response that stuck out the most to me was from an Israeli girl on the beach who didn't give me her name. While rolling a cigarette, she summed up perfectly the general attitude toward the peace talks.

"It's boring," she said without really looking at me. I asked her why she thinks that.

"I'm sorry, I'm very busy right now," she said, and went back to rolling her cigarette.

Follow Andy on Twitter: @HanDetenido

More from Israel and Palestine:

Forty-Thousand Bedouin Are Being Kicked Off Their Land by Israel

Dodging Sound Bombs and Water Cannons at Israel's Catastrophe Day

Jerusalem Day Made Me Lose My Faith in Humanity

There are various ways to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim festival that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The most common procedure for celebration involves gathering your family early in the morning to perform the Eid prayer, before breaking your Ramadan fast by eating tables full of food. However, the annual procedure down the Curry Mile (or half-mile, if you're being pedantic) in Rusholme, Greater Manchester is a little different to what you'll find elsewhere.

Muslims flock to the area from miles around to celebrate Eid here. I arrived in Rusholme at around 7.30PM on Friday and already the atmosphere was electric; all of the mile's curry houses, shisha bars and milkshake cafes were packed. Street vendors and performers peppered the pavements and men either roared around on quad bikes or crawled by in super cars, many blaring the kind of dubstep that sounds like the guttural groans of several thousand dying fax machines.

The wild party atmosphere sometimes spills over into violence and this year there had been rumours that the English Defence League would show up to protest against the event. Whether they were put off by the huge police presence or not, they didn't make an appearance.

However, BJ Chela – who launched a one-man protest against the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners at the end of June by salsa dancing around Blackburn – was there doing his thing, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with a black mask over his head. Unfortunately, a group of women – presumably mistaking his show of solidarity for an off-brand Disney street performance – turned his solemn demonstration into a Thursday night photo-opp, complete with smiles, Rubicon and peace signs.

Male sartorial choices seemed to veer between Sean Paul circa the video for "Like Glue", and Apprentice contestants basing their entire personas on Pitbull's winning shiny suit and shades at night combo. Walking around with my camera, I felt like a party photographer without a club website to upload all the photos to. Groups of men constantly asked me to take their photo, either with their friends, in their car or flaunting their gold. Everyone seemed to be having a blast.

Follow Chris on Twitter: @CBethell_photo

More days of celebration from around the world:

Jerusalem Day Made Me Lose My Faith in Humanity

The People of Hastings Still Do May Day the Traditional Way

Making Friends at Stonehenge at the End of the World

Photo by Nicky Young for VICE Canada from the first Sammy Yatim protest.

It's been just over two weeks since a Toronto Police officer named James Forcillo shot 18-year old Sammy Yatim on an empty streetcar nine times, before his body was tazed by another, unknown, sargeant. While the city awaits the results of the SIU's investigation into Sammy's killing, a second protest (read our report on the first demonstration here) is ongoing in downtown Toronto.

It's been a while since the city of Toronto has had such a collectively outraged reaction to a local tragedy—and while there have been some troubling responses to Sammy's death—the overwhelming feeling at these protests is one of anger, as many people are hoping the Police and the SIU will handle this case justly.

Our very own Angela Hennessy is there, live blogging. Check out her reports below.

Image by Courtney Nicholas

What’s in an adaptation? What’s in a remake? How does the transference of material from life into art differ from the transference of material from one piece of art into another? And what about the approach? Meaning, when we take from life, do we do it as a documentary (nonfiction), a feature film (fiction), or as reality television (depressing)? And when we do a remake, what are we remaking? The story, the characters, the structure, the way it was shot, the way it was written?

The story of Psycho began with Ed Gein, a real dude who lived in Wisconsin in the 50s. Gein was a sick bastard who liked going to the cemetery and digging up recently interred bodies of women whom he thought looked like his mother. (Gein must have been doing a ton of digging, especially considering he was all by himself! I had to dig a grave once in a recent adaptation of As I Lay Dying, and that shit ain’t easy.) He made furniture out of their body parts—lamps out of their skin, bedposts out of their skulls. He seemed to be into collecting the parts as much as he was into the actual killing. You can see a list of flesh bits that were found in his house on Wikipedia. It was stuff like vaginas in shoeboxes and heads in bags.

This true story of Ed Gein was then turned into Psycho, a novel by Robert Bloch. And that novel inspired Hitchcock’s film, which led to a series of schlocky sequels. (One of those sequels was Psycho III, which was directed by Anthony Perkins, the actor who played Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho. I guess Anthony’s career got sucked into that storied motel, after all.) Gein’s penchant for masks of human skin must have also inspired Leatherface of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the late 70s. Then in the late 90s, Gus Van Sant made a shot-for-shot remake of the Hitchcock original—something he was skewered for. And now there is the series called The Bates Motel, which is a Twin Peaks-type take on Mother Bates and her child, before Ed killed her and stuffed her body. All of these incarnations make you wonder, what is still vital about this thing called Psycho and what is it that keeps us returning to the story of Ed Gein?

Another work that was inspired by Gein that Wiki isn’t aware of is Cormac McCarthy’s third book, Child of God, which is about a loner named Lester Ballard who progresses from peeping tom, to necrophiliac, to murderer. It’s fascinating to see how Bloch used the Gein source to make a thriller and McCarthy used it for a dark character study. I was fortunate enough to adapt this novel into a movie, which will premiere at the Venice Film Festival at the end of this month. I said to McCarthy that I would probably be asked why I chose such a subject for a film, so I asked him why he chose such a subject for a book. He said, “I don’t know James, probably some stupid reason.” Then when I asked him about the deeper theme of extreme loneliness, and the inability of the character to fit into civilized society, he said, with a John Ford level of dissembling (Ford was famous for not talking about his work, see Peter Bogdanovich’s film on him): “Yup, there are people like that in our world.” Yes, indeed.

In 1993, the great Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, one of the YBAs, exhibited his piece, 24 Hour Psycho, in which he slowed down Hitchcock’s film to about two and a half frames per-second in order to make it last 24 hours. There is a ton to be said about this piece. To me, it is about going “psycho” on the film form. We are made to watch something that is part of our collective consciousness. Who isn’t aware of Psycho? Even if you haven’t seen it, you know the music, the shower scene, etc… But Gordon’s work subverts that familiarity in such an unusual way that he forces you to start thinking about different aspects of the film. It becomes an object. You look at the shots like film stills. You lose the story and start to become aware of the actors behind characters. Almost 20 years later, the great Don Delilo featured Gordon’s piece in his book, Point Omega. Incidentally, I put the two of them together so that Delillo could have permission to write about the work. Then Douglas went on to acquire the rights to adapt that book into a film, in which he wants me to star. He’s been talking about it for a while. Let’s do it Douglas!

Douglas’s piece was first presented in Scotland and had very few viewers, now it’s owned by MoMA and I’m sure a bunch of other important institutions. Twenty years later, it stands out as one of the most important works of the 90s. Later on, my favorite director, Gus Van Sant, released his own version of Psycho in 1998. Gus said the idea was to do a remake the film based on the direction, rather than just the script or the story. This was a move out of the contemporary art playbook, but relatively unheard of in mainstream film. And that was one of the big things against Gus. His Psycho had the expectations of major Hollywood film. What would probably have been celebrated in the art world (look at Douglas’s piece) was rejected by film critics and filmgoers. Gus had just come off of his largest commercial and critical success to date, Good Will Hunting. He was allowed to do almost any film he wanted. For a long time he had been talking about a remake of Psycho, and no one took him seriously. After the Affleck-Damon rocket to the stars, he was given the green light. You can’t blame him for wanting to make it on a sizable budget, and for wanting to get paid after years of smaller movies, but I think the movie would have had better karma (it is a great idea) if it had been made for less.

Fifteen years later, I like Gus’s version. I know that my attraction is probably due to my love all of his work, but I really enjoy gleaning his style from behind Hitchcock’s template—the colors, the design, the lighting, the framing. Even if all of that is based on Hitchcock, it is now Van Sant in a Borges/”Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” kind of way. Yes, there is something strange about the actors standing in almost the same positions as those of the original. It forces the viewer to be aware of the connection to the original film, and if a viewer hasn’t seen the original, then the presentation probably looks strange because it is consciously following an old style of blocking and shooting that might feel slow to a contemporary audience. The aware audience will chafe at the explicit connections, and the unaware audience will not appreciate the care put into mimicking a master. Not to mention, all the actors are great. The film was made back when Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, and Joaquin Phoenix were in a trio of films together. The only problem is that their performances were undercut by the close proximity of the original. It’s like watching a great rendition of a scene from Raging Bull in an acting class—you ain’t never going to get DeNiro out of your head, no matter how good the performance. Something more needs to be changed. But I still like Gus’s film. I see it and I think, What balls!

I also made my own version of Psycho, an installation at the Pace Gallery in London. And yes, we reshot the shower sequence. But I played Marion. Long story, but I think it worked.

Bates Motel is cool. I haven’t watched much, but it’s well done and engaging. Here the idea is to go back to Norman’s youth and show us how he got to where he did in Hitchcock’s film—although it is set in present day. I’m not sure how that works, but I’m bet they’ve given some explanation in the press. The point is to go back to the past and expand, expand, expand. They’re not trying to quickly tie up lose ends, as I think they did in Psycho IV. One privileges the exploration of a character’s youth, it gives us new insight into character we already know. I think the fascinating thing is that while watching Bates Motel we are made to sympathize with a man we know will be a demented murderer of innocent women. Crazy.

More film stuff from James Franco on VICE:

All Over the Place in New York

Keep Standing by Me

New Orleans Dionysus

Eric Holder, who announced a helpful policy on Monday. Photo via

After over 1,600 days in office, one rhetorical but unreal end to the war on drugs, and scores of state-law-violating, promise-breaking medical marijuana raids, the Obama administration did something useful yesterday. In a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, Attorney General Eric Holder said he would direct the Justice Department to no longer seek mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent, low-level drug offenders. There’s a lot more that needs to happen to address the systemic inequalities perpetuated by the drug war—and a ton of work needs to be done at the state and local levels—but this is a hell of a step in the right direction.

Mandatory minimums are laws that require judges to hand out brutally long sentences to defendants convicted of a variety of crimes. They originated in the 50s as part of aggressive anti-marijuana legislation, and while those laws were repealed in the 70s, the idea of mandatory minimums came back with a hysterical vengeance during the Reagan years. Juries are generally not informed of mandatory minimums when they are deciding court cases, and judges have no way to lessen sentences either; it’s a method of punishment both draconian and robotic. The most bizarre, tragic stories about mandatory minimums feature judges who want to send a drug offender away for some lesser sentence, but are unable to do so.

Holder’s plan isn’t perfect. For one thing it’s not being retroactive, so hundreds of thousands of people in prison for small-time drug busts will be there for years. (Though Holder also mentioned looking into a “compassionate release” program for dying or elderly prisoners.) For another, it’s based on the discretion of the Justice Department—the next attorney general could reverse this policy, and Holder himself could always change his mind and renew the government’s commitment to putting low-level crack dealers in cages. But in the same speech he said he supported a piece of bipartisan legislation that would cement similar changes into law: senator Rand Paul’s Justice Safety Valve Act, which would allow judges to ignore mandatory minimums in federal cases. That’s how bad these laws are, and how bad drug policy is in this country: giving judges, who aren’t usually noted for their leniency, the ability to knock some years off a clearly unjust sentence counts as a massive improvement.

Along with a judge ruling against New York City’s stop and frisk policy (more on that below), talk of reforming some asset forfeiture laws (you should read Sarah Stillman’s excellent New Yorker piece on the topic), and the attention journalist Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop has received, it’s enough to make you feel optimistic that the prison-industrial complex has finally peaked and will soon enter a decline. Which isn’t to say that there’s not a lot of horrible, undeserved suffering going on in prisons—sometimes directly thanks to Holder—or no more sweeping reforms that need to happen. But after 40 years of lunacy, it’s a strange and wonderful thing when there’s any good news about the drug war.

On to the rest of this week’s blotter:

- On August 12 , a federal judge ruled that the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy violated the constitutional rights of scores of thousands of New Yorkers (duh, said a chorus of activists) and ordered a federal monitor to oversee an overhaul to the system. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s policies are having a bad time lately. Earlier in the week, it was reported that as part of a 2010 lawsuit over the long-controversial, racially-slanted policy, the NYPD would finally delete hundreds of thousands of names and addresses its officers had collected during these stops.

- The DEA has used tips provided by the NSA and other intelligence agencies to go after drug traffickers, then “recreated” an investigative trail to make it look like they came by the information through normal channels, according to a report by Reuters that came out last week. The government has been obsessing over drugs a lot longer than it’s been obsessed with terrorism, so this news shouldn’t be a complete surprise. But it's deeply disturbing that the origins of drug investigations resulting from top-secret spying have been kept secret from even judges, defense lawyers, and prosecutors who were involved in the cases. Senior DEA officials told Reuters this type of lying was a “bedrock concept” of how things worked.

- Lieutenant Jonathan Josey, a Philadelphia cop who was caught on video punching a woman at the city's 2012 Puerto Rican Day Parade, is back on the force as of this week, despite the fact that he was charged with assault and fired by the police commissioner. An arbitrator reviewed the video frame by frame and decided that Jonathan was merely swatting a beer out of the woman’s hand when she slipped and fell. Now, not only is he back on active duty, he’ll be awarded back pay for the eleven months he spent without his badge and gun.

- On August 9, the Seattle Police Department—known for a pattern of excessive force, according to the Department of Justice, a.k.a. they sometimes shoot people for no reason—settled a civil suit filed by the family of Brian Scott Torgerson, a mentally disabled man who was abused by cops in May 2010, for $1.75 million. The suit claimed that during the course of his arrest Brian was beaten, deprived of oxygen, and wrapped in a mesh “spit hood” after he had vomited and was bleeding heavily. Even more tragically the brutality resulted after Brian’s parents called the cops to his apartment, hoping he’d get the help he needed.

- The TSA, which is mostly known for hassling travelers at airports, has been branching out in the past few years. Its agents have been spotted at such exotic locations as a Paul Ryan campaign rally and various sporting events. They’re now a fairly routine sight at Amtrak stations as well, as the The New York Times noted last week. TSA officers apparently need to walk around and make themselves visible in order to frighten wrongdoers and make the innocent feel safe, even though there are a whole bunch of other law enforcement agencies, like Amtrak police and local cops, that could presumably do the job as well.

- A few weeks ago, the Concord, New Hampshire, police chief got into a bit of hot water when it was revealed that not only did he want $250,000 from the Department of Homeland Security to buy a tank-like armored vehicle, he claimed he needed one because, “Groups such as the Sovereign Citizens, Free Staters, and Occupy New Hampshire are active and present daily challenges.” After the predictable, and understandable, outrage this provoked, he backpedaled like a pro.

- The father of Ibragim Todashev, the Chechen immigrant who was a friend of deceased Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and who was fatally shot by FBI agents while they were interrogating him about the bombing, plans to file a lawsuit against the FBI. The feds have been evasive about why the younger Todashev was killed, and conflicting media accounts suggest he charged at agents while holding an object, or possibly while unarmed. In any case, a man’s son is dead and he’s trying to figure out why.

- On Thursday, a Salt Lake City, Utah, district attorney named Sim Gill took the rare step of ruling that a police shooting of a 21-year-old woman was “unjustified.” After months of investigation, Sim decided that when sheriff’s deputies were not legally justified when they fired six shots at Danielle Willard, who was unarmed, in a November 2012 incident. He’ll conduct a second investigation to ascertain whether the deputies should be prosecuted. (That shooting led to the disbanding of the drug squad responsible, and an internal investigation found numerous examples of officer misconduct.)

- The winner of our Good Cop of the Week award is Sarasota, Florida, officer Derek Conley, who, along with some forthright civilians, caught and then released some very confused sea turtle hatchlings who had begun to crawl up a beach in the direction of a hotel resort instead of toward the water where they belonged.

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

Previously: End the War on Baby Deer