If you saw Jaimie Warren's Horrorfest 2015 in the January issue of VICE magazine, and wished Harry Potter technology existed in the real world so the pictures could spring to life, your wish just came true. Here are animated GIFs Jaimie made for us based on B horror movies. Enjoy and share with your coolest friends.

See Jaimie Warren's previous contributions to VICE here.

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Collages by Marta Parszeniew

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

For the thousands of you who I'm certain have been following the passage of the Consumer Rights Bill, last Monday was a big day. After quite some tussle, the government approved crucial amendments tabled by the House of Lords, and the bill—which updates our consumer rights in response to commerce moving online—will become law by July, a monstrous 17 months after it was introduced into the Commons.

It's been, one peer said in the Lords, a "cliff-hanger." The bill covers a wide range of rights in a multitude of trades, but it got caught up on a single point—whether to regulate the secondary ticketing market, which allows fans to sell on tickets for events they can't attend. Of course, for many years now it's been suspected that secondary ticket platforms are being used for touting and fraud on an industrial scale. If you're a music or sports fan, you'll be well aware of this. You may have even bought a counterfeit ticket on open, seller-to-buyer secondary marketplaces like Viagogo, Seatwave, or Stubhub, or watched in horror as tickets for high-demand events sell out on the primary market in moments, then end up on the secondary sites for sometimes five times their face value moments later.

How does that happen and is this something the government needs to interfere with? Those have been the two key questions as secondary ticketing has been fiercely debated in the Commons and Lords. Former banker Sajid Javid, Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, maintained right up to the last moment that while selling counterfeit tickets is already a crime, touting was "classic entrepreneurism" that needed no regulation in law. However, he met an impressive adversary from his own party—Conservative peer Lord Moynihan—who persuaded him otherwise.

"One of the major reasons why you can't get tickets for high-demand events as a member of the public is because there's specialized software available to touts which sweeps up the supply within a nanosecond of them going on sale," Lord Moynihan told me after the government—making quite some U-turn—agreed to back the amendment he'd tabled. "I want to see a transparent, effective, legal secondary market—I'm in favor of that. But I respectfully disagree with [Sajid Javid's] view. The tout market works as a highly sophisticated sweep of tickets. It is not a free market."

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Mike Weatherly MP, co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Secondary Ticketing, summarized the new legislation—called "a veritable alphabet soup of amendments" by MP Jo Swinson—in a statement. It will, he said:

1. Provide greater transparency for fans, with the following details required to be provided by resellers—seat number or standing information, if any restrictions apply (student price or under 18), face value.

2. Compel the Secretary of State [Sajid Javid] to review measures relating to secondary ticketing in 12 months and report to parliament.

3. Put a duty on ticket resellers to report criminal activity.

Each of those points is interesting, saying much about what politicians think of the secondary market. But let's deal with the third one first—a last-minute addition to Lord Moynihan's amendment that surprised even MPs who were close to the behind-the-scenes negotiations.

"What criminal activity are they talking about?" asked Oliver Wheeler from Viagogo. "I have no idea. Really, I have no idea. What I do know is that if we're ever—and it's very rare, but it does happen from time to time—approached by the police or any other body or authority expressing concern about X, Y, or Z in any category of our business, we respond and we help them with it."

The duty to report criminal activity was possibly included based on two things: a National Fraud Authority figure that suggested fraud in the market amounted to a staggering $2.2 billion in 2012, and findings from a 2013 Metropolitan Police report on ticket crime. It said: "The lack of legislation outlawing the unauthorized resale of tickets and the absence of regulation of the primary and secondary ticket market encourages unscrupulous practices, a lack of transparency, and fraud." And also, "Ticket crime has links to other serious and organized crime," and, "Ticket fraud is significantly underreported."

The big four secondary platforms—Get Me In!, Seatwave, Stubhub, and Viagogo—all offer guarantees to consumers that counterfeit tickets will either be replaced or refunded, but for Reg Walker from Iridium Security, an expert on secondary ticketing and a government source, the duty to report criminal activity is the most telling factor of the new legislation. "It's a damning indictment of the industry that you have to force them to report crime," he says. "I think I'm right in saying that the only other time that has ever been done in law was when the banks, in their worst days of excess, refused to report money laundering. So, congratulations second ticketing, you're now up there with banking."

It's hoped that including the precise details of tickets listed on the secondary market (point one of Mike Weatherley's above summation of the new legislation) will reduce fraud, stamp out the curse of speculative sales (non-specific tickets sold on secondary platforms before they're available from event organisers) and also make it easier to identify sellers who are sweeping tickets on the primary market to resell. Once identified, they can be blacklisted and/or fined (to the tune of $7,000, the legislation dictates) and event organizers can nullify their tickets—all good news for fans, but dig deeper into the legislation and annoying complications arise.

In 2012, MP for Walthamstow Stella Creasy tried to buy a ticket for the Stone Roses reunion shows at Heaton Park, Manchester—an event that fans, she said in the Commons, "had only dreamed of for many years." When she went to make a purchase, she noticed tickets on the secondary market were being "advertised at more than $1,500 only minutes after they had sold out. Their original face value was $80." Those shows were non-seated events, creating an immediate failing of the regulations when they come into effect. If they seek to combat fraud and touting by ensuring block, row and seat details of a ticket are listed on secondary sites, what if the event is general admission, as many music events are? Surely they'll be harder to track and could still be subject to speculative sales?

"For general admission tickets, this amendment may not be able to solve the problem in terms of the information given," says Sharon Hodgson MP, co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Secondary Ticketing with Weatherley. "But due to the new obligations on the secondary ticketing operators to report any suspicion of criminal activity, it does strengthen the oversight of the entire market."

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If, over time, it does seem like the legislation is skewered towards all-seated sporting and cultural events, it's not hard to understand why. Hodgson and Weatherley's "put fans first" campaign only truly took flight after older MPs and peers began to understand the secondary market on their own terms—when tickets for the Rugby World Cup this summer and Benedict Cumberbatch playing Hamlet at the Barbican in the autumn ended up on secondary platforms for over $1,500 months in advance. Also, noticeably, it was Lord Moynihan—a former Olympic rower and ex-chairman of the British Olympic Association—who tabled the amendment in the Lords and negotiated for it to be reinstated in a new form after the Commons threw out his original draft in January.

The legislation, called "light-touch regulation" in the Lords, is weaker now, but from Hodgson and Weatherley's point of view it's still a good start that can be built upon in the statutory review (point two of Mike Weatherley's above summation), which is more of a concern to Weatherley than whether the new regulations favour all-seated events. "There has to be a determination to get this review correct and for it to not be just window dressing," he says. "And there has to be action on the recommendations—whatever they may be. At the moment that is not legislatively required, but I would like to see all parties commit to taking action if so advised."

Another thing: under the Computer Misuse Act, it's illegal to use botnets—defined on Wikipedia as "a collection of internet-connected programs communicating with other similar programs in order to perform tasks"—to harvest tickets on the primary market, but it's not an offense to resell tickets purchased legitimately (unless they're for the football). If an event organizer or venue approaches a secondary site to cancel tickets being sold for a performance, it's because the action of reselling breaks the terms and conditions of the original sale, rather than the law. To confuse matters more, some ticket-sweeping technology is now more advanced than bots and not yet criminalized, creating ambiguity in the definition of a tout. Could fans who chance their arm by buying four tickets for a gig that they guess will sell out, before flogging two of them at profit to offset their costs—a practice that Sajid Javid would greatly admire—end up becoming identified, blacklisted, and fined as if they're professional sellers?

The new legislation does address this issue by including a clause on whether the terms of primary sellers are fair, and Weatherley says, "All providers of live events I have spoken to have stated categorically that they will allow genuine fans to resell at face value—or nearing face value—and I am satisfied that this isn't an empty promise." But you can understand why eBay-owned Stubhub told the Guardian recently, "We need greater legal clarity on this point."

Secondary platforms don't like promoters meddling in their affairs because, Oliver Wheeler from Viagogo claims, canceling tickets is unpopular with consumers: "What we've seen around the world—when they started doing that in the US a few years back, for example—is that fans hate it," he said. "It creates a backlash against event organizers—assuming they're interfering for non-fraudulent reasons—and they very quickly stop doing it."

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The biggest of the secondary platforms is Viagogo, a company that was exposed by Channel 4's Dispatches in 2012 to be selling allocations of tickets they'd received direct from promoters while advertising itself as a fan-to-fan network, manipulating market price, colluding with "power sellers" (touts in all but name), and mass-buying tickets on the primary market, which they then sold on (a practice they've since given up, Wheeler says). Perhaps they were unlucky that Dispatches specifically concentrated on their business, while also revealing suspect activity at Seatwave (now part of a giant, global conglomerate that includes promoters Live Nation, primary agency Ticketmaster, and another secondary business, Get Me In!), but they've done little to ingratiate themselves since. After Dispatches aired, Viagogo changed its company name in the UK (where it was founded), liquidated, and moved its operation to Switzerland, raising concerns about whether this new legislation even applies to them (yes it does, says Reg Walker).

Wheeler, echoing statements that the other secondary platforms made in response to the legislation, says, "If these amendments are designed to give more information to people, which we support, and to cut down on fraud, then I don't see a problem," but he won't provide an exact breakdown of the sources of tickets of the four million tickets currently being sold globally on Viagogo ("that's commercially confidential"), mentioning that they come from a variety of sources—fans, hospitality. and travel companies, sponsors, venues, promoters, musicians, and professional sellers.

A report prepared for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 2009 suggested that 20 to 40 percent of tickets for "high-end" music events (they used Kings of Leon as an example) were being resold, with that number jumping to 60 to 70 percent for "very high-end" (Madonna or the aborted Michael Jackson concerts) concerts. What percentage of those amounts are sourced by professional sellers remains unclear, but Dispatches found a YouTube of the then-CEO of Seatwave, Joe Cohen, telling a conference in 2010 that a staggering 68 percent of tickets on the site at that time were from "brokers." He later went on the record saying 35 percent, but Paul Latham—COO of Live Nation in the UK—in a piece he wrote for Music Week in 2012 claimed it's actually 70 percent.

The secondary sites claim that fraud and the influence of shady characters with multiple personalities and credit cards using technology to harvest supply is greatly overstated. And although secondary platforms profit hugely from having swept tickets listed on their sites, they can't understand why the government are going after them and not the promoters and primary sellers. "The concept that somebody is using industrial machinery to harvest [an] industrial [amount of] tickets is frowned upon, and it's very much a problem for the rights owners to solve," says Wheeler. "The only people that know who are buying from the seller are the people selling them in the first place."

Much is still unknown, as Stella Creasy, a key ally in the fight for reform, admits: "No one's saying this legislation is a magic bullet, but we are saying that transparency is crucial, not just in dealing with botnets and software, but because it will help identify what is going on. We just don't know at the moment and that's a major issue."

"This legislation isn't worded as I would have it in any way, shape or form, but the fact that there is a commitment that, within 12 months, we'll have a completed review is a big step forward," says Mike Weatherley, who has beaten cancer over the last two years and is standing down as an MP at the election. "I've been campaigning on this for four years and had doors slammed in my face at every turn. We've now got an acceptance that there is a problem, we've got points in legislation opposing touting and we have the review. Really, it's huge."

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Box art detail from 'Ecco the Dolphin'

I don't remember how I ended up getting a copy of Ecco the Dolphin. I preferred to play stuff that involved lots of punching and kicking, and a game about a lost cetacean searching for his family would have come as a an affront to my then bloodthirsty childhood brain.

However, it became one of my favorite Sega games, representing a welcome change from the instant button-bashing gratification of fucking up punks and bikers in Streets Of Rage 2. The central character is a dolphin, obviously, called Ecco, again, who is estranged from his pod after a mysterious tornado sucks them out of the ocean. It transpires that they've been abducted by a group of aliens known as the Vortex, who come to Earth to harvest its natural resources, including sucking up a smorgasbord of sea life. Ecco's quest takes him to Atlantis, before he travels back in time through a complex combination of wormholes to confront the Vortex at its hive, the Machine.

Ecco was a hit for the Genesis in the early 1990s, and the beginning of a successful series that ran until the Dreamcast didn't. I hadn't thought about it much between then and now—until last year, when I was reading up on John C Lilly.

Lilly was once a renowned and respected scientist, with a particular interest in marine biology and interspecies communication. In the early 1960s he was given funding by NASA to research whether it was possible to teach dolphins to speak. NASA's logic was that if we could learn to communicate with dolphins, we would have a better understanding of how to converse with extraterrestrials if they were to ever pop down for a visit.

Lilly flooded a house in the Caribbean so that dolphins could live as closely as possible with him and his team, among them Margaret Howe Lovatt, who apparently had sex with one of the animals. The experiment fizzled out as, unsurprisingly, nobody was able to get any of them to talk—although check out YouTube for one of his subjects attempting a pretty close "Hello Margaret." Useful, if all aliens were named Margaret. Lilly lost funding for the project, moved away from traditional science and threw himself further and further into 1960s pseudo-mysticism and chemical experimentation.

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John C Lilly, via

Around 1971 Lilly was looking for a cure for his chronic migraines, and a friend suggested that ketamine could help get rid of them. Back then ketamine wasn't a widely used drug, probably only used recreationally by a small group of dedicated trippers, quite unlike its status today as a popular party drug. When he was under the influence of a small dose of K, Lilly said that he felt the migraine being pushed out of his body and, miraculously, he never had one again. Encouraged by this, he developed a longstanding affection for the substance he dubbed "Vitamin K," and started taking it regularly, gradually injecting it in higher doses.

Just shooting up ketamine on its own wasn't enough for Lilly, though, and soon he was IV-ing it inside a sensory deprivation tank with the help of his friend, Dr Craig Enright. They thought that by using the tank external stimulation would be significantly reduced, giving a psychedelic or, in this case, a dissociative experience at a higher level of intensity. Neither appreciated that what they were doing was incredibly fucking dangerous—tranquilizing drugs and floating on water aren't to be mixed under most circumstances, and sure enough Lilly's wife, Antonietta, had to resuscitate him on one occasion where he nearly drowned. These experiments would form the foundation for Paddy Chayefsky's 1978 novel Altered States, later adapted into a movie by director Ken Russell.

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'Altered States,' trailer

During his sessions, Lilly came to believe that he was being contacted by an organic extraterrestrial entity called the Earth Coincidence Control Office—ECCO. This alien group was benevolent, omniscient, and in control of all earthly matters. Except for when they weren't quite so friendly, as at one point Lilly thought they'd made off with his penis:

That evening I took 150 milligrams of ketamine, and suddenly the Earth Coincidence Control Office removed my penis and handed it to me. I screamed in terror. My wife Toni came running in from the bedroom, and she said, "It's still attached." So I shouted at the ceiling, "Who's in charge up there? A bunch of crazy kids?"

The similarities between Sega's Ecco the Dolphin and Lilly's ketamine fantasies are undeniable. It's almost like the game's story is an amalgamation of his interest in dolphins and the wacky philosophy he spouted when returning to reality from his phenomenal K-hole trips.

Alongside ECCO, Lilly encountered another alien life force, which he called the Solid State Intelligence. Unlike the entities from ECCO, the SSI were spawned by a mechanical solar system, and their main aim was to ravage the earth and destroy mankind. It's not unlike the much-documented cinematic battles between us fleshy creatures and advanced AI turned malevolent, and it's no stretch to compare the SSI with Ecco's Vortex enemies, those evil, dolphin-kidnapping interstellar villains.

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Perhaps I'm starting to sound a little like Danny Dyer's character Moff in Human Traffic (see above), but I think this has a lot more substance then other possible video game drug references—like the "hallucinogenic" mushrooms in Super Mario Bros, or all the pills Pac-Man munched through as he made his way around those haunted mazes. But such claims always come across as stoned speculation, inane banter between mates after the third joint had been smoked out, with no game designer backing up them up.

And Ed Annunziata, the creator of Ecco the Dolphin, had said very little about Lilly, making my comparisons between the game and the drug philosophy I'd read about seem like just another coincidence. Until a little internet digging revealed a single tweet, subsequently posted on a Facebook fan page. It's brief, but tantalizing: "No, I never took LSD, but I did read a lot from John C. Lilly."

And there you have it, from the creator himself: Ecco did take inspiration from Lilly, and proof that horse tranquilizer-induced fantasies can indeed form the basis for great games. And if that's not a challenge to the young, upcoming developers of right now, I don't know what is.

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In 1992, Nigerian electronics trader Kenneth Nnebue was having trouble selling a large stock of blank VHS tapes, so he instead used them to record his film, Living in Bondage. Shot in about two weeks, the movie went on to sell 750,000 copies and set the country's film industry in motion. Today, Nollywood, as it's called, is the second-largest producer of movies in the world. Here's how it compares with its Indian and American counterparts.

Nollywood photo by Sunday Alamba/AP, Bollywood photo by STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images, Hollywood photo by Murray Close

See our story about Uganda's leading action filmmaker, The Best of the Best Movies!

For a doofy guy decked out in a wool cardigan and sleeveless vest, Tenzin Phuntsok was a surprisingly smooth operator.

I spoke with the young politician on a recent trip to Dharamsala, India, the political and spiritual epicenter of the Tibetan diaspora, sometimes known as Little Lhasa, after the Tibetan capital. I was hoping he could help me understand the growing threat of discord in the Tibetan exile community. As the general secretary of the National Democratic Party of Tibet, Phuntsok believes in Tibetan independence rather than autonomy under China, setting him apart from the mainstream. But as I grilled him one morning over a cup of thick, milky tea, asking about every political faction and religious minority I could think of, he brushed off any notion of strife with a smile. For all their differences, he said, most Tibetans are devoted to unity—he's even willing to accept autonomy as a step toward independence.

But he lost his composure briefly when I brought up Dorje Shugden, a vengeful spirit with a small but persistent following. As I asked about the politically active Tibetan Buddhists who venerate the spirit, Phuntsok launched into a diatribe: "Following Dorje Shugden is not a religion," he said. "It is like following a dog."

The next time you're in a Tibetan temple or at a Free Tibet rally anywhere in the world, find a monk or official and mention Dorje Shugden yourself. You'll probably get a similar reaction. I did every time I brought the spirit up over the next few months in India and America.

In the past two decades, this group, disconnected from the mainstream by an obscure theological disagreement, has been a vocal critic of the Dalai Lama, becoming the bogeyman of the Tibetan movement and its supporters worldwide.

In 2008 and 2014, members of the Western Shugden Society and the International Shugden Community, an organization of Westerners and Tibetans who follow the spirit, scored headlines by crashing events in America featuring the Dalai Lama. Picketers chanted, "Dalai Lama, stop lying!" and accused the world's favorite monk of running an oppressive theocracy. Their bids at attention have gotten downright kooky, like when they recruited Brazilian chanteuse Deborah Blando to sing "Dalai Lama Lament," whose lines include: "Your precious guru, your holy lama, / Gave Dorje Shugden, protector of the Dharma, / But through your lies, you see him as a Mara, / Cause his students mental pain and trauma."

It isn't all awkward songs, however. In 1997, Indian police implicated Shugden followers in the murder of three members of the Dalai Lama's inner circle. Pro-Shugden attackers, they say, burst into the monastery of anti-Shugden monk and Dalai Lama confidant Lobsang Gyatso and stabbed him and his two students, Lobsang Ngawang and Ngawang Latto, 15 to 20 times each.

Kelsang Gyatso, the monk behind the modern Shugden movement, denies any connection between his followers and the murder. But the incident led Robert Thurman—Columbia University professor, longtime Dalai Lama associate, and Uma Thurman's father—to label the group the Tibetan Buddhist Taliban. Many Tibetans feel a deep paranoia about the sect, suspecting, with limited evidence, that it may be planning an assassination or collaborating with the Chinese.

"If you look at [people's] faces," Phuntsok told me in an exasperated tone, "we don't know whether they are following Dorje Shugden or not. There may be people inside the Tibetan government and other organizations following him secretly. We just don't know."

Such speculation lies thick on the ground in Dharamsala, the stronghold of the Tibetan movement. It spreads and takes root easily—in part because, for all the talk about Dorje Shugden, you'd be hard-pressed to find a group of his followers there to dispute it.

Geshe Lhakdor, a prominent Gelug monk and associate of the Dalai Lama, in Dharamsala, India. Photo by the author

It can be hard to get a straight answer about what Shugden followers believe or how this whole fucking mess got started in the first place, especially in mainstream Tibetan strongholds, where the sect is scarce. The only thing that really sets them apart from other Tibetan Buddhists is their veneration of Shugden. While many Tibetan Buddhists believe in celestial beings that can help or hinder religious practice, not everyone agrees which are good or bad.

Devotees maintain that Shugden arose to protect the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism. The Gelugpa is one of five schools separated by differences in the interpretation of technical terms or modes of monastic organization so minute that outsiders often can't spot them. As Tibet was once theocratic, with each school like a political party controlling chunks of territory, monks often squabbled over these details. Shugden supposedly helped the Gelugpa avoid contamination by other schools' practices and defended their position as the most powerful.

Despite being the official head of the Gelugpa (and ruler of the Gelugpa and other citizens in a wide swath of Tibet), in the 1930s the previous Dalai Lama campaigned for unity among the schools, promoting the mixing of theologies to create a more integrated Tibetan Buddhist identity. So the sectarian Shugdenites got suppressed. And while the Gelugpa remained the most populous school, a few monks bristled at their leader's lack of theological purity and their own lack of political favor.

The current Dalai Lama has continued to strive for unity ever since a diverse group of Tibetans were cast into exile in the 60s. But this has put him at odds with a resurgent call for purity by a small group of former Gelupga monks who say their protector, Shugden, will rain vengeance on those who mix with other traditions.

Gelugpa monk Kelsang Gyatso split from the mainstream in 1991, forming the pro-Shugden New Kadampa Tradition. Though he claimed it would be tolerant of other schools and open to non-Tibetans, he refused to mix with other sects. Things turned ugly in 1996, when the Dalai Lama publicly declared that he opposed veneration of Dorje Shugden. The triple homicide happened a year later—a fitting act for a spirit of retribution.

"It's completely normal for any religious leader to say, 'I think your understanding of this religious practice is wrong,'" said Robert Barnett, a Columbia University scholar of Tibetan politics. "But then Tibetans in the exile community around him began to impose a ban on all members of the Shugden community, whether they were followers of the Dalai Lama or not."

The Dalai Lama's office acknowledges that some Tibetans do discriminate against Shugden followers—frequently by denying known devotees access to shops or refusing to do business with them—but it condemns this and denies its role in encouraging such actions. Barnett thinks they're not taking enough responsibility for how people interpret the Dalai Lama's words.

Gyatso himself only took umbrage with all of this until 1998, when he pulled the NKT out of the fray. But other Shugden groups popped up, often with NKT ties, to lead a bitter campaign against the Dalai Lama as a suppressor of human rights, impure monk, and all-around bad dude.

Prominent scholars like Barnett say that the entire sect (Thurman calls it a cult), including the many Westerners who've joined up, is a training camp for bitter anti–Dalai Lama activists. "It's not unusual that a new... quasi-Buddhist cult emerges and a lot of Westerners join it," Barnett told me. "But what is really worrying is that [Shugden followers] also take on the idea that they should become activists to take on the Dalai Lama."

Figuring out how many Shugdenites are politicized is difficult, since we don't know how many exist. Some say most of the adherents are Westerners, while others insist that most are in Tibet. Estimates range from a few thousand to more than a million acolytes across the globe.

As I tried to track down Shugden communities in Dharamsala, all my house visits and cold calls and interviews came up with bupkis. This didn't speak much to their prominence in the exile community. Still, I thought I could get a feel for whether Barnett was right about the Shugden groups radicalizing Westerners into anti–Dalai Lama foot soldiers by visiting one of the NKT's hundreds of international centers. One of these, the Kadampa Meditation Center, is in New York City. In a nondescript building a block from the 1 train in Chelsea, Manhattan's Shugdenite center hosts a monthly "Melodious Drum" puja, or devotional offering, that is open to the public. I decided to gatecrash the ceremony.

The center's front room looks like the gift shop of a swank museum, packed to the gills with Gyatso's books and cut-rate Buddhist knickknacks. After getting the stink eye from a receptionist when I admitted it was my first time there, I was led into what would pass for a bland community center if not for the glass case of giant gilded Buddhas lining one wall and a smiling portrait of Gyatso. To the side is a giant mural of Shugden himself.

To sell a wrathful protector to a Western audience, I thought, the NKT might try to downplay Shugden's ferocity. Apparently not. In the mural, he rides a dragon, engulfed in flames, his three eyes glaring and his teeth bared, brandishing a curved sword over his head.

In front of the icons sat about a hundred folding chairs and cushions, only a third of which were occupied. Those gathered were mostly upper middle class and overwhelmingly white. Some of them wore artfully homespun clothes. Others had clearly just arrived from the office, ready for a three-and-a-half-hour evening chant to the fierce guardian of an arcane lineage. The offerings made to Shugden weren't simple foods, but Theo chocolate and blue corn chips, probably bought at Dean & DeLuca. I'm fairly certain the ceremonial tea was apple juice.

Most of these attendees had found the center by happenstance, without full knowledge of the disputes surrounding it, or even of other Tibetan Buddhist traditions—a referral from a yoga teacher here, a random Google search there.

That makes sense. Since the late 2000s, the NKT has billed itself as "Modern Buddhism." They claim to be global, rather than Tibetan, Buddhists, open to all peoples and levels of devotion, and their advertising sidesteps their old beef with the Dalai Lama. They say they're simply devotees of the teachings of Je Tsongkhapa. As Tsongkhapa happens to be the first Gelugpa master, that's a sneaky way of claiming purity without getting into all the theological bile with newbies. More important, their promo materials rarely mention Shugden, if at all.

Yet the "Melodious Drum" prayer was a 98-page chant to the spirit, requesting his aid with honorifics like "his wrathful smile" and "trumpets of thighbones" and "offerings of flesh and alcohol."

The chant was mellow. Speakers piped in new age flute music with serene male and female vocals to lead it, and the effort to fit esoteric prose into a set meter was almost comic. But I still wondered why no one seemed to question spending an entire evening begging for forgiveness—and material wealth—from a wrathful spirit obsessed with his followers' doctrinal purity.

Maybe the critics are right and the NKT is a cult luring people in with easy messages, only to turn them into anti–Dalai Lama protesters. It's suspicious that the centers almost exclusively focus on and sell books by Gyatso and stress the spiritual good of donating to the NKT. (Some wonder whether unsuspecting hippies may be subsidizing the anti–Dalai Lama movement.) Groups like New Kadampa Survivors—whose leader the NKT claims is mentally unstable—insist on the cult classification.

But that's the paranoid interpretation. The NKT is purist, so it's natural for followers to teach Gyatso alone. They're also among the most approachable Buddhists. A three-and-a-half-hour chant can be a mind-and-body-numbing ordeal, but the NKT lets people jiggle, shift, and come and go. The prayer was mostly in English, making it theoretically comprehensible to all. And beyond requesting the aid of a protector spirit—not so unusual for people born in a Judeo-Christian milieu—most of what the NKT teaches is basic Buddhism: suffering, nirvana, and all that jazz.

Fervent devotion to anything, from Dorje Shugden to Jesus Christ, can look creepy as hell from the outside. Some devotees may dive into vitriolic activism. But most schmoes at NKT centers around the world don't go down that road. It's just a meditation tradition they fell into and found helpful. And Shugden and his demonic murals are an innocuous part of that.

I do understand Phuntsok's concerns, which are widespread among his people. The future of Tibet, and especially Tibetans in exile, depends on maintaining social cohesion and global goodwill. When Shugden followers, Tibetan and Western alike, attack the Tibetan Buddhist mainstream, no matter how just their criticisms are, they hammer at the Dalai Lama's saintly image and chip away at Tibetan unity. Shugdenites' promotion of purity—and indeed their very existence—is seen as a threat to the all-inclusive universalism that's played a big role in bringing the exiles together since the 1960s.

Still, I wonder whether the fear of Shugdenism in Dharamsala might be a scapegoat for general anxieties about Tibetan unity and the crawling independence movement. Even if Phuntsok is right and following this spirit is like worshiping a "dog," Shugden's bark is probably worse than his bite.

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Mossack Fonseca headquarters in Panama. Photo by the author

In mid February, the authorities in Geneva, Switzerland raided the offices of British multinational HSBC after a public prosecutor opened a criminal investigation into allegations that the bank, one of the world's largest, had helped its clients launder money by hiding it in offshore accounts. Not long afterwards, German police raided the offices of Commerzbank, suspecting that it, too, was involved in money laundering.

Evidence gathered during the second raid implicated a third company, the Panamanian-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, in the criminal money laundering. As it happens, I wrote about Mossack Fonseca for VICE last December, in a story titled "The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators." And the evidence found during the raid on Commerzbank suggests that despite my story—and the small sliver of sunlight it shined on Mossack Fonseca's dealings—the firm is still up to its old tricks.

Investigators believe that Mossack Fonseca helped set up offshore front companies linked directly to the accounts. It's not yet clear from published reports whose money HSBC, Commerzbank, and Mossack Fonseca allegedly helped hide offshore, but the list reportedly includes several Israeli billionaires.

As I reported after an extensive investigation that included trips to Panama and Las Vegas—where Mossack Fonseca uses a closely-linked firm, MF Corporate Services, to help its clients set up bogus shell companies—the Panamanian law firm has a long list of shady prior clients.

They include Rami Makhlouf, the richest and most powerful businessman in Syria who is believed to be the "bagman"for President Bashar al Assad. That kinda speaks for itself.

Other clients of Mossack Fonseca's include associates of Muammar Gaddafi and Robert Mugabe, as well as an Israeli billionaire who has plundered one of Africa's poorest countries, and a business oligarch named Lázaro Báez. According to US court records and reports by a federal prosecutor in Argentina, Báez allegedly laundered tens of millions of dollars through a network of shell firms, some which Mossack Fonseca had helped register in Las Vegas.

Incidentally, the main employee of MF Corporate Services is Patricia Amunategui, a native Chilean who previously worked as a casino cocktail waitress and, based on her Facebook page, enjoys yoga, spiritualism, and hiking, and admires the Dalai Lama, the Tea Party, and former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Another person who has helped set up Las Vegas shell companies for Mossack Fonseca is Leticia Montoya. She's based in Panama and has previously registered or served as a nominee director for at least six anonymous companies that were involved in major international corruption scandals. Here is her passport photo.

Also, I mentioned HSBC above. Its CEO, Stewart Gulliver, was recently revealed by the Guardian to have controlled an offshore bank account in Panama. He has claimed that he only opened it because he didn't want his colleagues to know about the enormous, swollen bonus he received from HSBC. It is not yet clear if Mossack Fonseca set up his account.

According to the Guardian, Gulliver was the "beneficial owner of an account in the name of Worcester Equities Inc, an anonymous company registered in Panama, containing a balance in 2007 of $7.6m. It was through this entity that Gulliver 's HSBC bonuses were paid until 2003. He also held a second account in the name of Worcester Foundation, which had been closed before 2007." (See this article at Naked Capitalism, which very generously cited my earlier VICE story.)

What's more, a US Senate committee report has described HSBC as a major conduit for "drug kingpins and rogue nations," and in 2013 the bank signed a $1.92 billion settlement with the US Justice Department after admitting to helping launder millions of dollars through shell firms for Colombian and Mexican cartels.

(Credit where credit is due: The best, most groundbreaking work on money laundering and the offshore system has been done by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.)

The German and Swiss investigations are ongoing.

When I asked Mossack Fonseca for comment on these fresh investigations, the firm denied everything generally without denying anything specifically—though they essentially denied that Báez had ever been a client. The firm also bragged that it had never been criminally charged with wrongdoing, which seems like a pretty low bar, but that was its defense. And while it remains true, to the best of my knowledge, that the firm has not yet been charged with criminal conduct, that may soon change depending on the investigations in Switzerland and Germany.

A spokeswoman for Mossack Fonseca, Ana María Garzón—who is employed by Burson-Marsteller Panamá—said it would be "inaccurate and ludicrous" to suggest that Mossack Fonseca is currently being investigated for criminal wrongdoing. She also said everything I have ever written about Mossack Fonseca is false, though she failed to say what specifically was not true. She also said that "all remarks made by publications such as Vice Magazine and others who have replicated the false accusations and fabrications are baseless and respond to vested interests."

I'd like to take her at her word in these denials, but I would also note that according to the Guardian, her employer, Burson-Marsteller, is PR firm that has worked for dictators and murderers in Nigeria, Argentina, Romania, and Indonesia, as well as Union Carbide after Bhopal.

But that's just from a cursory search on the Internet, so who knows? Of course, when I asked Garzon about these allegations against her own PR shop, she had no comment. If she replies, I will be sure to update this story.

Ken Silverstein is an investigative reporter who writes for VICE and other publications, including the New York Observer, where his new column, Washington Babylon, will soon debut. He was formerly a senior investigative reporter for Racket.

[body_image width='1024' height='702' path='images/content-images/2015/03/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/16/' filename='someone-did-a-shit-so-bad-a-british-airways-flight-had-to-turn-around-and-land-475-body-image-1426511390.jpg' id='36474']No suggestion that this particular airplane is currently weighed down with shit. It's just a photo of an airplane. Photo via Aero Icarus.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A British Airways flight was forced to turn around and land over the weekend because somebody did a shit so bad the plane was essentially rendered useless. Imagine living your life in the knowledge that you once turded so appallingly that a 747-400 had to turn around and land. Your liquid shit bought a £360-million ($533-million) airplane juddering out of the sky. Imagine looking your loved ones in the face after that. Imagine hugging your mom. You couldn't. Your asshole is essentially a terrorist.

Anyway, the BA flight from Heathrow to Dubai on Saturday had to turn around and flop back down again at Heathrow just 30 minutes into the seven-hour flight because somebody did a toilet crime.

Hertsmere Tory councillor Abhishek Sachdev—who has clearly not heard the "he who smelt it, dealt it" directive—happened to be on the flight, and, as well as tweeting his response ("Insane! Our BA flight to Dubai returned back to Heathrow because of a smelly poo in the toilet! 15hrs until next flight... #britishairways") also spoke to the Daily Mail about the ordeal. Again: imagine making a smell so bad a Tory councillor talks to a national paper about it.

"The pilot made an announcement requesting senior cabin crew, and we knew something was a bit odd," he said. "About 10 minutes later he said, 'You may have noticed there's a quite pungent smell coming from one of the toilets.'

"He said it was liquid fecal excrement. Those are the words he used."

Two things:

i. The informed knowledge of the liquid state of the turd in question sort of suggests the pilot actually went and looked at the mess himself, and, in which case, did he hold his special pilot's hat over his nose?

ii. This question always comes up when someone does a shit so appalling that it might as well not be human. We've all seen a bad shit. We've all been to a pub. We've all traveled on a bus at least once in our lives. Everybody in Britain, at some point, has had to piss at a train station. We've all lifted a toilet seat and, like Pandora's Box, stared into the abyss-like doom of someone else's medically inadvisable droppings. But the question is this: how, and more specifically why, is it possible to shit up and around the rim of a toilet and, side-question, how does one shit up a wall?

Ask me to shit up a wall and I would not know where to start. If I was trying, I do not think I could shit along a vertical pane. But there are people out there who seem to manage it on the regular. Do they go to the doctor immediately after? When you "deposit" something so forcefully that it ricochets right back out again, do you go straight to A&E and say, like, "Hello, doctor, something is very wrong with me," or do you, like, try and walk it off? Also, why does this always happen in public toilets?

Anyway, the flight was rescheduled for the next day, and British Airways made a statement saying, "We're very sorry for the discomfort to our customers," before providing everyone on the flight—including the rogue shitter, presumably, whoever they may be—with overnight hotel accommodation.

Safe travels, rogue shitter. Peace be with your lower intestine.

Follow Joel on Twitter.

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The idea of the certified genius—which usually means someone who is in the 98th percentile on IQ tests—evokes stereotypes of business tycoons and unconquerable chess players riding the trajectory of their inevitable success. They are the World's Smartest People and we've been conditioned to expect great things from them.

But data collected from high IQ societies—such as Mensa and Triple Nine —shows something quite different: People with exceptionally high IQs come from and fall into all walks of life, and are just as likely to be found managing a restaurant as they are theorizing about the early universe.

While IQ alone is no longer considered a comprehensive measure of intelligence, it still remains the most useful way of measuring non-verbal reasoning ability and other cognitive processes. To demystify the stereotypes surrounding the highly intelligent, I spoke to dozens of high-IQ individuals about their lives, brains, and the relationship between intelligence and success.

"Geniuses are everywhere," says Varun, a 35-year-old Mensa member who worked as a grocer for years after earning a chemistry degree. When first joining Mensa at age 19, he imagined being part of a society of quantum physicists. But he "soon discovered that a lab assistant was just as likely to have a higher IQ than the tenured professor," he said.

Varun believes a variety of factors, such as being able to afford education, mingling with the right crowd, where you grew up, and self-perception, play as much of a role in how your life unfolds as your reasoning and computational abilities. Why? Because most of us don't get to compete on a level playing field. "Society is not a meritocracy, despite what the movies show about the underdog genius who overcomes this and that. It's bullshit," he said.

One female member of the even more exclusive Triple Nine Society said that the stereotype likely comes from a young perception of classroom intelligence, and from people like Bill Gates or Stephen Hawking, who reach positions of such notoriety that the details of their intelligence becomes public knowledge. On the other hand, the majority who don't flourish and work menial jobs remain unknown.

"You won't find waiters on top IQ lists because no one would be interested to read it," she says. "People want to characterize why these people are so successful, and so they latch on to things like IQ."

Very few of the people I interviewed worked in fields traditionally related to having a high IQ. The vast majority enjoyed everyday jobs—administration, transportation, hospitality, etc.—well below social and public radars.

"If people who think they're smart just wanted to do what everyone considered a smart job, I think it would be kind of silly."

Like Varun, most imagined upon joining that they'd be an outlier among the world's leading academics, but were surprised to find out everyone felt the same way.

"Occupation and intelligence are only superficially related," says Marie Hough, a Mensa member whose IQ ranks within the top 0.1 percent. She worked as a flight attendant for years before settling down to do a PhD in occupational health. "You don't need a high IQ to succeed in life, just like you won't necessarily be successful if you have a high IQ."

Many say they actually hide their membership in a high-IQ society—from non-members and on their resume—to avoid prejudices. "It's only an advantage in the right circumstances," Marie says, adding that it can quickly become a pejorative.

"To succeed in a way that is applauded by society—like winning a Nobel Prize—takes relentless hard work, obedience, and dedication to a single, almost irrational topic," says Mensa member Sebastian Maharaji. "My experience is that most people that want to succeed in that way usually have some sort of chip on their shoulder, and have developed a lot of habits that feed achievement. But people who know they're smart from the day they're born don't really have that, and as a result develop a lot of character habits that are distractive and not necessarily complementary."

Martin, a 43-year-old warehouse worker and longtime Mensa member said, "I don't tell anyone because I don't want to be called out or isolate myself. I've always kept it a secret from coworkers; it's just a personal thing for me."

Many confessed that they were exceptional at games like crosswords or chess, and areas of knowledge like mathematics, regardless of if they were putting it to occupational use. Many also added that "occupational use" is a subjective term.

"I use it for remembering names and orders and allocation numbers, so I don't have to keep looking at the sheets all day to know what goes where," says Martin, who has a nearly photographic memory. "But I don't make a scene out of it; everyone just thinks I have a good memory and work hard."

Henry, a Mensa member in his 50s, discovered his exceptionally high IQ after doing a test while serving a long prison sentence for assisted murder charges, which according to him, "goes to show IQ is certainly no indicator of wisdom."

He believes that a high IQ can actually give way to conformity issues. "You see the way that society is spun," he says, going on to say this can instill a disinterest in contending in the rat race. So while being able to learn things quickly might seem to open a lot of doors, it can also paradoxically cause one want to keep them closed.

Many also admitted suffering from some variant of ADHD or social anxiety, but not in the way characterized by fictional TV geniuses.

Philip, a 40-year-old Mensa member whose IQ ranks in the top 0.5 percent, worked as an interstate train driver for years after earning a PhD in economics. "It paid more than most financial entry jobs, and I didn't have to interact with anybody," he says.

A political science major and Mensa member who worked as a cab driver says they were drawn to the job due to a fascination with existing "in the peripheries, and interacting with people from all walks of life in that way."

Asked whether or not in an ideal world they'd rather be doing something else that directly correlated to their unique skills, or ever wondered about wasted potential, most brushed off the idea.

"You can be smart at what you do and apply the way you are to whatever you're doing in a way that is satisfying. I wanted money the easiest and quickest way possible. Societal values are not a factor in that if one is really being honest," says Philip, the former train driver.

Warehouse man Martin agrees. "Work is work. I don't think it matters what you do. I do this. I get a paycheck. I spend time with my family. If people who think they're smart just wanted to do what everyone considered a smart job, I think it would be kind of silly."

But Philip and Martin don't speak for all of the high-IQ community. Many I spoke with maintained executive or academic type jobs, and added that their IQ score has directly led to jobs and university placements, and is the talking point of job interviews.

"At the end of the day employers see that and in the back of peoples' minds, there is a curiosity that 'this person is smart in a way that 98 percent of people are not,'" says one Mensa member and intellectual property lawyer. He believes success with a high IQ is a fine line between being hardheaded and exhibiting one's skills in a socially agreeable way.

Unfortunately, he says, having the developmental environment in life to learn to recognize where and what that line is, is likely the gray area that determines societal success.

For the majority of those I spoke to however, the biggest use of their high IQs has been about leveraging personal satisfaction, like with any other skill.

"One of the best parts of working a cab was the discussions I'd get into with the odd professor or whoever who'd want to talk about wasted potential," says the aforementioned taxi driver. "The conclusion was usually, 'No thanks.'"

Some names have been changed or removed entirely, as requested by the interviewees.

Follow Steven on Twitter.

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An archeologist starting the main excavation of Broadgate ticket hall. All photos courtesy of Crossrail, unless otherwise stated.

Three hundred and fifty years ago, London was in the process of being ravaged by the Great Plague. Between 1665 and 1666, around 100,000 people—a quarter of the city's population—died.

Plague pits were dug across the city as the disease spread, into which victims were tossed in an attempt to halt the epidemic. There are still burial sites under what is now a Sainsbury's in Whitechapel, Golden Square in Soho, Green Park, Pitfield Street in Hoxton, and numerous other locations.

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A map marking out where a number of London's plague pits are located. Image via.

We've known these pits were there, but, until recently, none have been excavated. Then the digging for the Crossrail project uncovered a huge burial site near the original Bedlam hospital, where the new east entrance for Liverpool Street station will be. The burial site was in use from 1569 until 1738 and contains more than 3,000 skeletons, a large proportion of which are thought to be plague victims. In total, 20,000 Londoners were buried in this small plot of land in the 16th and 17th century.

A team of archeologists began excavating last week, which has caused a bit of tension among those concerned with this kind of thing. There are some who believe the dead should be left in peace and that, because they're exhuming so many remains, a great wave of spiritual chaos is about to hit London, as if it weren't a weird enough place to live already.

As an intrigued disbeliever, I decided to go down to the excavated plague pit with two people who fear this coming tide of psychic bad shit. The first is a ghost hunter: Barri Ghai, founder of The Ghostfinder Paranormal Society—a group that investigates hauntings and supernatural phenomena.

The second is professional clairvoyant Lidia Frederico, who specializes in spiritual protection services.

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Lidia and Barri near the entrance to the Liverpool Crossrail site. Photo by Jake Lewis.

"The disturbance of so many bodies is likely to trigger some form of paranormal activity," Barri tells me as we make our way to the entrance of the site, next to Liverpool Street station. "I've seen many cases where people experience spiritual energy as a result of building work."

From outside, the Bedlam burial ground looks like any other building site. The sides and roof are covered so there's no way of seeing what lurks within. The day we meet it's sunny, it's lunch time, and the area is busy with office workers darting out for their meals. As far as I can see, no one seems to be behaving strangely as a result of some acute spiritual disturbance. However, Lidia can already sense something and pulls her jacket close around her.

"There's not a peaceful energy here," she says, shivering.

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Inside, the site feels like a film set. The ground is packed with skeletons. Real skeletons. Not joke shop Halloween props or foam skeletons built for a movie shoot. Real ones. It's hard to get your head around seeing skulls and ribcages poking out of the earth in the middle of London's Square Mile. A team of archaeologists are working quietly, uncovering the remains as we watch from a viewing platform. Outside, London buzzes by. It's pretty surreal.

Lidia starts crying.

"I can see shadows everywhere," she says. "They're in pure pain and confusion. This is sacred ground. Wherever people are buried, energies start to establish. They're aware they're being disturbed now. I can hardly breathe."

I look back at the bones in the ground and try to image them as tormented souls; Liverpool Street as a 17th century plague pit. If the £650,000 [$963,000] studio flats and luxury chocolatiers of Shoreditch in 2015 are mildly horrifying, the scene in 1665 would have been straight from hell: whole families barricaded into houses to die, limbs rotting and covered in seeping sores; "dead carts" piled with bodies winding their way through panic-stricken streets to places like this. In his book, A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe described seeing a body-collector perving on the corpse of a young girl, another man laughing as he swung two dead children by the legs.

"The terror was so great at last that the courage of the people appointed to carry away the dead began to fail them," he wrote. "Nay, several of them died, although they had the distemper before and were recovered, and some of them dropped down when they have been carrying the bodies even at the pit side, and just ready to throw them in."

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Lidia is looking grim. She approaches one of the security guards and asks to speak to whoever's in charge. She wants to warn the archeologists that they're in personal danger and should stop the excavation immediately. At the least, she wants them to cleanse the souls off their shoes with salt water before they go home.

"They're tapping into something very serious," she warns, but the security guard just nods in a confused sort of way.

Barri is less visibly disturbed, but he's worried too and says he feels as though he's walked into a "blanket of energy, like a fog." He agrees that the Crossrail project is unleashing something dangerous into London's ether. Both he and Lidia are aghast that millions of commuters will soon be exposed to this mass awakening.

"Given that the area being excavated has 3,000 unmarked graves, it's highly likely that the spiritual energy will be felt by lots of people," Barri says. "Once the ticket hall has been built above this and thousands of people are walking through here every day, people will pick up on the residual energy that's been embedded in the ground."

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The Bedlam burial ground was in use for more than 200 years, and it's not only plague victims who were buried here; during that time, London had civil wars, the Restoration, and the Great Fire. The site is also thought to be the final resting place of some important historical figures, including Robert Lockyer, executed by firing squad in 1649 for his role in England's first democratic political movement, the Levellers.

Last year, when preliminary excavation began, Crossrail's archeology team began compiling a register of people buried at Bedlam. Of the 20,000 people whose remains ended up wedged into this plot, around 5,000 names have been added to the list.

Lidia may now be in contact with one of them. "He's a little boy called Peter," she says, her eyes filling with tears again. "He's saying, 'Mommy's not here.'"

When I tell Lidia that 400 skeletons have already been removed, she spreads her hands and rolls her eyes in weary exasperation: "Well, of course. They've separated him from his mother."

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Archaeologists digging at the Bedlam site.

Skeletons removed from the Bedlam site are being taken to the Museum of London Archaeology for testing by osteologists. DNA tests on bones from other Crossrail sites have already yielded insights into the lives and deaths of long-dead Londoners and, in particular, into specific strains of the plague virus. Once this work has been carried out, the skeletons will be reburied on an island off England's southern coast. The ground on this island will be consecrated, a nod to mainstream magical thinking.

Still, maybe these bones do deserve a "proper" burial. Catharine Arnold, author of Necropolis, a book about how London deals with its dead, says that one of the remarkable things about the plague was how quickly all visible memory of it was erased.

"The number of deaths was catastrophic," she says. "In modern London, this could only be caused by something like a terrorist atrocity or a nuclear bomb. It was such a grisly time that, by the end of 1665, when the plague had died down, authorities were keen to plug the plague pits as soon as they could. Then, a few months later, you get the Great Fire of London—conspiracy theorists believe it was started deliberately to prevent another outbreak—and that destroyed so much of the city.

"But although we have a monument for people who died in the Great Fire, there isn't one for the people who died in the plague. It was such a calamity, it was almost as though people wanted to forget it ever happened."

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Barri, Lidia and I walk outside, back into the warm afternoon. I glance around, but, as yet, no City boys with demon eyes are scaling buildings, no ectoplasm drifts from the construction workers eating their lunch on a wall.

A busy tube station will soon be built here; one in which you'll not only have to contend with lost tourists and angsty commuters, but also, perhaps, the undead. I imagine battling to the Oyster machine past ghostly hordes of plague victims.

But maybe we'll be OK. Lidia says she now feels obliged to return and perform a spiritual clearance, laying the souls to rest. She's very matter of fact about her burdensome gift.

"That's me off to Ikea for some candles," she says.

Follow Frankie on Twitter.

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Quebec separatist graffiti. Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski

If there's an exploitable fear in Quebec right now, it's the looming threat of terrorism.

Both of the young men behind last year's domestic terror attacks―the hit-and-run in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu and the Parliament Hill shooting―were born and raised in la belle province.

Quebec's linguistic and cultural ties with France also meant that the Charlie Hebdo massacre resonated much more loudly here than in the rest of Canada. Factor in a group of young students leaving the province to allegedly fight for ISIS (and a prime minister capitalizing on every single morsel of fear), and you have an electorate eager to embrace a brand-new anti-terror omnibus bill.

Last month, an Angus-Reid poll showed that nearly nine out of ten Quebecers were on board with Bill C-51.

So it's not surprising that Stephen Harper's Tories are gaining ground in Quebec, which means they could potentially catch up with the NDP and ride the terror train all the way to another majority government.

However, some pundits caution that his plan could backfire in the province, similar to the way ousted PQ leader Pauline Marois' foray into identity politics proved popular in the short term but ended up being a key factor in the demise of her party in last year's crazy elections.

But if Harper's political gamble works and he is able to capitalize on Quebecers' support for Bill C-51, Quebec might actually be in favour of legislation that would disproportionately target its citizens.

At least, that's what the Parti Québecois is saying. Last week, the sovereigntist party issued a press release decrying the bill's wide reach.

"Bill C-51 is a slippery slope in regards to the respect of Quebecois' rights and freedom," wrote MNA Alexandre Cloutier. "It challenges citizens' right to dissent and reaches way beyond its mandate, which is to fight against terrorist threat."

Cloutier added that if the bill were adopted, Quebecers could be flagged by CSIS or 16 other federal agencies simply because they're protesting against climate change or fighting for justice for aboriginal people, students, or workers.

Quebec is also home to the country's biggest student movement in recent history, a place where citizens take to the streets by the thousands to express discontent about anything from pension reform to budget cuts at Radio-Canada to blocking an oil terminal project by screaming bloody beluga murder.

Quebecers have a reputation for being outspoken and irreverent, and its media is definitely unforgiving when it comes to attacking politicians or public figures deemed incompetent. Public pressure recently led to the resignation of blunder-prone Education Minister Yves Bolduc, after he condoned the strip-search of a young female high-school student.

And, of course, there is the ever-present sovereignty movement. Cloutier believes that the province's separatist tendencies could give the federal government yet another reason to focus on Quebecers with Bill C-51, which clearly targets activities that undermine the country's sovereignty or territorial integrity. Needless to say, a movement that aims to secede an entire province from the rest of the country would fall under the scope of an activity that "undermines the sovereignty" or "territorial integrity" of Canada.

"The way it is currently written, the law broadens the notion [of an activity that undermines the security of Canada] to anything that undermines the sovereignty, security or territorial integrity of Canada," Cloutier wrote in the press release.

He interprets this as including any activity the government deems to be "interference with the capability of the Government of Canada in relation to [...] the economic or financial stability of Canada," "changing or unduly influencing a government in Canada," and "interference with critical infrastructure."

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney has disputed these points and accused the PQ ministers of not reading the bill.

But prominent law professor Craig Forcese, who recently testified before the House Public Safety Committee on Bill C-51, says that the legislation would not move sovereignists into the definition of "terrorist activity," the PQ's take is not unfounded.

"(It) is true that the new information sharing regime allowing permissive information sharing within government (and potentially beyond) could reach [the] sovereignist movement, to the extent that [separatists] might engage in protests or advocacy that is not fully lawful," he told VICE in an email.

"Unlawful advocacy and protest would include wildcat strikes or street protests that do not comply fully with all regulatory, criminal, municipal, provincial or federal law," Forcese writes.

For human rights lawyer Julius Grey, this indiscriminate condemnation of dissent is exactly the issue.

"Disobedience is part of the way in which laws are changed in democracies, in socially just countries," he outlines. "When laws become an embarrassment, people start disobeying them.

"That's how laws get changed," he says, citing the civil rights movement and abortion as examples.

In terms of the specific impact on Quebec and the separatist movement, Grey says it could be an example of unintended consequence.

"I don't know if it would disproportionately affect Quebec, but it affects any place where there are protest movements," he says.

"Today, the law is clearly aimed at the Islamic movement, its target is not separatism," Grey added. "But you don't know how the law will be used in the future and it could certainly be used for that sort of thing."

So while it may be too early to tell whether or not Quebec could be singled out by anti-terror legislation, it is definitely strange to see Canada's "distinct society" seemingly at ease with or unaware of the far-reaching consequences that this bill could have on any of the numerous causes that Quebecers tend to take up when they get pissed off.

With files from Nick Rose.

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

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Covers of the now-defunct Fast Forward Weekly. Photo via Facebook

On Thursday, Feb. 19, the new issue of Fast Forward Weekly had just arrived at our office and, as I had done every other Thursday during my four years as music and film editor, I was flipping through its pages, beating myself up over tiny typos, panicking about who was writing next week's stories, and procrastinating my own assignments. Every time a new issue came out, there were about 15 minutes where you'd either feel proud of your accomplishments or deeply ashamed of your mistakes before you had to worry about the next one.

That afternoon, we gathered around our small meeting table for what we thought was a standard staff meeting, where publisher/editor Drew Anderson had laid out some beers and snacks. He nervously made small talk while we waited for an ad rep to finish her smoke. Once everyone was in their seats, he looked up, and in a grave tone said, "Greatwest Newspapers has decided to shut us down. Our last issue will be printed in two weeks." Not understanding how to process the information, I laughed. I've since spent my first week of unemployment drinking cheap beer and binge-watching Empire.

Greatwest Newspapers is headquartered in St. Albert, a 60,000-person "city" located near Edmonton. They own a few dozen publications, including such notable magazines as Edmonton Senior and Calgary Senior, along with a ton of rural community newspapers. It's not uncommon for these papers to feature two-page centre spreads highlighting all the babies that were born in town that week. None of the other publications feature articles about safe crackpipe repositories, art gallery swindlers, or their respective local hardcore scenes. As Calgary's only alternative weekly with a focus on arts and culture as well as news, Fast Forward Weekly was the bratty little brother of the company, but even it was aging.

Formed in 1995 and shut down just shy of its 20th anniversary, the paper was of that fabled, ancient era where advertising and editorial were mutually exclusive departments. To this day, ad people weren't allowed to make suggestions or have any say in what editorial was doing. It was a noble idea, to be sure, but also a relic from the past. Advertisements go on covers of magazines now, and their pages are peppered with ads that look like stories and stories that were written by advertisers. People who say "J-school" love to soapbox about these trends, launching into self-righteous tirades about once-meaningful standards, but you can't maintain those morals and have a profitable business in 2015. We live in the age of the brand: everyone's their own personal brand, thirsty marketers serve as "brand ambassadors"—hell, there's a new magazine in Calgary that's literally called Branded. Put simply, it should come as no surprise that our print newspaper—named after a VCR function, no less—was working on an outdated model.

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The Fast Forward Weekly office. Photo by Josiah Hughes

The news of Fast Forward's demise was met with an overwhelming chorus of sadness as people seemingly came out of nowhere to express how much they'd miss us and how much of a hole would be left in the city. There was a smarmy swarm of immensely kind vultures from local media outlets, piling papers to establish slow-motion tracking shots for their evening broadcasts about the end of an era. Ironically, our last issue was packed with ads, and the paper ballooned to approximately four times its scrawny recent size.

Already, the loss of Fast Forward is rippling through the arts community. As Brenda Lieberman, festival director for the Calgary Underground Film Festival and senior features programmer at the Calgary International Film Festival, explains, Fast Forward was a crucial ally in programming films. "It actually added credibility to our films and our organization," she says of the paper's relationship to CUFF. "When we were trying to secure Canadian and international films in a non-industry focused city—it's not like we have buyers coming, we don't have journalists flying here—Fast Forward was one of our primary defences or tools or examples of where we could look to get coverage for these films on any sort of level."

Kevin Stebner, a musician, show promoter, artist, and record label proprietor, is easily one of the hardest-working artists in Alberta, though he hasn't achieved the national fame he deserves just yet. For him, Fast Forward was a source of encouragement. "Fast Forward actually went and searched out the activity of arts culture in Calgary and engaged with it," he says. "Certainly no other publication did that to the extent that Fast Forward had. Certainly no media from the east would. Every mention, or article, or even place to write about something exciting locally, only sought to raise visibility for local artists—and every minor step towards larger visibility was one minor step towards less struggle for local artists. Working as an artist or musician, running a label—these are Sisyphean, difficult callings. Without support, it's even harder."

I too took Fast Forward for granted. Though I was generally proud of our work, I often thought we weren't edgy enough, or we weren't pushing enough buttons. I once co-wrote a cover story called "Canadian music is boring" with my colleague Mark Teo, and of the many criticisms we faced, the one that stung hardest came from a friend: "I just read your story, and all I can say is that it was the most obvious argument I could think of. I've always thought that about Canadian music." Though our left-leaning cynicism was obvious to some, I now realize we were often the only ones saying it. That we tried or cared at all was what made us such a vital force in Calgary.

Originally from Toronto, Teo lived in Calgary for a year, serving as the music and film editor right before me. With an outsider's perspective, he too saw Fast Forward's criticism as a necessity. "I liked Calgary, but there was certainly a bit of culture shock coming from Toronto. The entire arts community—or really, the entire downtown community Fast Forward served—was preoccupied with proving that it wasn't a redneck hick town," he says. "It was almost comparable to how Toronto's hellbent on proving that it's Canada's answer to New York. Both, of course, are untrue.

"Due to the tightness of its communities, it was incredibly timid—its arts media, for example, felt it very difficult to properly criticize the arts scene," he adds. "Thing is: Criticism is completely necessary for any scene's self-awareness. I don't necessarily believe that Fast Forward was the always critical voice it could've—or should've—been. But at the same time, I think its arts coverage provided something essential to a town that had a completely under-reported arts scene."

As much as the city's aggressively passionate arts community aspires to make, do and be something substantial, there's no denying that the city is built to cater to an affluent class of oil-industry employees. They're the ones who keep businesses alive, from cookie-cutter bars serving $8 domestic beers through our many entrepreneurial coke dealers. They're also the reason that we're likely getting a new hockey arena instead of, say, solving the housing crisis.

Like it or not, the city is built for and run by rich people. It's no wonder we couldn't find advertisers to finance a bunch of environmentalist articles or guides to the city's small but worthwhile noise scene. In fact, every time I'd make fun of one of our many Linkin Park concerts, we'd lose advertisers.

Calgary is a place that desperately wants to be world-class, even though a solid selection of its citizens think that means Cirque du Soleil, appies 'n' bevvies at a chain gastropub, or floor seats to Neil Diamond. These people are the ones with money, not the many struggling, oft-ignored artists we catered to and covered.

"Like all alt-weeklies, Fast Forward's mandate wasn't to cover whatever was playing at the Saddledome, but to cover local, beneath-the-surface phenomena, and there's nothing to replace it," Teo says. "To me, its role was curatorial: It was there to tell Calgarians about their actually worthwhile local culture. But it also informed the rest of the world that Calgary had its own, distinct culture, and that, yes, there were things worthwhile happening in the city."

Now, Calgary lacks a nagging, cynical and occasionally snarky voice to push it into becoming the so-called "world class" city it wants to be. "As of right now, there is definitely no alternative voice in the city, certainly not one focused on arts," Stebner adds.

That's the tragedy here: If any city needed an alt-weekly, it was this one.

Follow Josiah Hughes on Twitter.

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Fila top, shorts and headband by Shop Dutty; Top from Beyond Retro, American Apparel shorts, glasses stylist's own; Leotard from Rokit; Leotard from Rokit, glasses stylist's own; Top stylist's own, American Apparel shorts and headband, Bumbag from Beyond Retro

PHOTOGRAPHY: NADIA LEE COHEN
FILM: BEN COHEN
STYLING: CHARLOTTE JAMES

Make-up: John Maclean and Sara Exall
Models: Alex, Kris, Tess, Lily, Millicent, Kate, Shirley, Susanne, Charlottem and Andy

Special thanks to The Refinery

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Leotard from Rokit, glasses stylist's own

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Top stylist's own, vintage glasses, American Apparel headband

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Adidas top, vintage glasses

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Johanne Dindler jacket, Weekend Offender T-shirt, American Apparel headband

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Adidas jacket, vintage glasses; Adidas tracksuit; Paper Dress Vintage jumper, American Apparel shorts and sweatbands; Paper Dress Vintage jumpsuit, jacket from Beyond Retro; Johanne Dindler jacket, Weekend Offender T-shirt, American Apparel headband

[body_image width='1500' height='1001' path='images/content-images/2015/03/13/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/13/' filename='yoga-fashion-shoot-379-body-image-1426266780.jpg' id='35984']

T-shirt from Beyond Retro, vintage glasses

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Paper Dress Vintage jumper, American Apparel sweatbands

Watch a video from the shoot below:

[vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/121940088' width='640' height='360']

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A protest against blacklisting in 2013. Photo by Simon Childs.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

You'd hope that construction work would be one area of life where tabloid stories about "health 'n' safety going mad" were actually true, in order to stop people getting in the way of machines designed to smash concrete, or falling off some 20th floor scaffolding. In fact, for years, the opposite has been the case, as people raising health and safety concerns have been systematically nixed from getting a job in construction.

From at least the 1980s, construction companies kept a secret "blacklist" of some 3,200 workers that they wanted to ensure never found work. These included various types of people who somehow got in the way of the companies making a fat profit—workers who complained about dangerous practices on sites, trade union organizers who tried to get a better wage, and even environmental protesters who weren't employed in the industry but got in the way of construction. Lives were ruined as tradespeople found that they were mysteriously denied work all the time, despite being qualified. Some people were even pushed to suicide as they couldn't provide for their families.

In 2009, an article written by journalist Phil Chamberlain in the Guardian ended up being put on the desk of an investigator at the Information Commissioner Office. That kick started a chain of events which exposed the truth of blacklisting that many had already suspected for years. Following a raid on the organization set up by the companies to manage the secret blacklist—the Consulting Association—the Blacklist Support Group was formed to represent blacklisted workers. The secretary of the group Dave Smith, a trade unionist who was blacklisted himself, has teamed up with Phil Chamberlain to write a book exposing the practice. Blacklisted: The Secret War Between Big Business and Union Activists tells the story of multinationals and the state colluding to undermine trade unionism and thousands of workers fighting for their dignity—a fight which continues to this day. I caught up with the pair at the book's launch last week.

VICE: Dave, you've written this book as somebody who has been a victim of blacklisting. Tell me about your experience.
Dave Smith: My blacklist file is 36 pages long and runs from 1992 until 2006. The first entry records a protest about several week's unpaid wages on a Balfour Beatty site. The rest of my file is about safety concerns I have raised including asbestos and overflowing toilets. I could never get a job for any of the large companies but managed to find work with small subcontractors or via employment agencies for a while. But it reached a point where even the agencies wouldn't offer me a job. This is recorded in my blacklist file. I went from driving a large four by four to a £300 [$445] fiesta van and during the height of the building boom I was virtually unemployable. I had to leave the industry to pay the mortgage.

"Blacklisting people who complain about safety causes deaths on building sites. It's as simple as that."

How big was the human cost throughout the industry?
Some people we interviewed for the book have been out of work for 20 years. When you first tell someone that, they go "out of work for 20 years? Building work? That can't be right," but then when you actually see their file, they're out of work and as soon as they get a job, the company find out, and they're sacked. They get another job as soon as they're fired and they're sacked again. We've been talking not just to the workers but their wives and their partners. Kids aren't getting new trainers, kids aren't going on school trips. People have lost their houses over this. Quite a few people, their relationships have broken up. This isn't just about numbers, it's about the fact they've taken food off our tables and that's why we've taken it so personally.

One of the main reasons workers were added to the blacklist was for raising health and safety concerns. What kind of impact does this have on building sites?
Well everybody knew there was a blacklist. It wasn't a secret, although the employers always denied it whenever the politicians asked them. Management used to say, "If you carry on like that we'll make sure you never work again in the building industry" and it wasn't an idle threat—it was true. The impact on health and safety is, if somebody moans about a bit of scaffolding or the toilets overflowing and gets sacked for it, then next time when the toilets are overflowing or there's asbestos, people just keep their head down and don't say anything, which is one of the reasons why constructions got such a terrible health and safety record. Blacklisting people who complain about safety causes deaths on building sites. It's as simple as that.

The promotional video for 'Blacklisted.'

The blacklist was mainly a list of construction workers, but not entirely. What other kind of people were on the list, and why?
Phil Chamberlain: It started off as a construction blacklist and—I think it's the nature of the surveillance—once you start compiling it takes in more and more people. People who the companies are concerned about suddenly get drawn in. If we look at the road protests [anti-road building activism] that grew up around the 1990s, they affected construction companies. The environmental protesters who took part in roads protests aren't union members but they're people the companies want to keep tabs on. That coincides with the kind of people which the state are interested in keeping tabs on as well. That's when you start to see that kind of cross over. We've got academics and journalists on the list as well. People who start to cause worry to the companies started to be added in.

So you're talking about a cross over between the construction companies and the state. Was the list compiled with the active collusion of the police?
It appears there were links between construction companies and the police. The question is about how systematized that contact was. In some cases it would have been personal contacts developed up over a number of years or inherited. We've spoken to industrial relations officers from the companies who have freely acknowledged meeting Special Branch people and we know the industrial desk at Special Branch was tasked with looking at trade unions and maintaining contact with corporations. We know those links existed and have done for a number of years. In some cases it would have been done on a fairly informal basis and in other cases perhaps more systemically done.

The files are quite clear in that some of the files contain information that could only have come from the police. That not just us saying that, the Information Commissioner's Office looked at the files and came to the same conclusion independently to ourselves.

It's quite clear this is much wider than construction and much wider than the UK but that's because it's the nature of the economic system which can't deal with that kind of dissent, which is ultimately about preserving some profit margin at the expense of democratic, legitimate forms of protest.

In the book you draw a lot of parallels between the blacklisting scandal and the the phone hacking scandal. Why is that?
I think it's fascinating in the sense that when Rob Evans and I wrote the article for the Guardian in March 2009 and in the summer Nick Davies writes that superb piece showing the breadth of phone hacking. The numbers are relatively similar.

But phone hacking victims are getting some sense of justice, whereas blacklisting victims are having to fight to be listened to.
The differences is who they are. The celebrities have got a lot more access to mechanisms to make their voice heard. They can employ better lawyers, they can apply pressure in a number of different ways.

The willingness to address the issue of phone hacking is in stark contrast and I think it's because they've treated it as a corruption issue, but with blacklisting this was the normal mode of operation. That says something fundamental about the way we handle industrial relations in this country, the way we handle dissent in this country, which is far more frightening and needs to be resisted.

The book ends by putting blacklisting in its global and historical context. How widespread is the practice, and similar tactics?
One of the guys who ran the Economic League [predecessor in many ways to The Consulting Association] said to Parliament: "it's gone on since the pyramids," as if it's part of your hazard of working. I think there's a danger of accepting it because then we don't get to challenge it and say that fundamentally this is wrong.

It's quite clear in this country it's operating in the NHS. There was a story published two weeks ago about keeping files on people involved in airline disputes with British Airways. We've looked at cases that have taken place in Canada where migrant workers from Mexico have been monitored and refused visas to go and work in Canada. There was a case in France in 2013 where Ikea used access to police files to monitor people in their stores. We've got evidence of a company based in Ireland which recruits migrant workers keeping files on workers in Europe who might be causing problems.

It's quite clear this is much wider than construction and much wider than the UK but that's because it's the nature of the economic system which can't deal with that kind of dissent, which is ultimately about preserving some profit margin at the expense of democratic, legitimate forms of protest. Most of these people are simply just raising health and safety issues. There was a case in Indonesia where people were upset about conditions at an Adidas company and they reached for the blacklist. It's a tool for managing, but it doesn't mean it's right.

Blacklisted: The Secret War Between Big Business and Union Activists is available from New Internationalist Books

Follow James on Twitter.

Today, there are more people in the world who play the online multiplayer battle game League of Legends than there are people who live in France. We wanted to see how humanity got to this point, so VICE host Matt Shea flew to South Korea, a country where competitive gaming—also known as eSports—can either make you rich and famous or land you in rehab.

In Part One, we touch down in Seoul, where the city's gaming cafés, stadiums, and arenas are buzzing with anticipation for the biggest eSports match ever held in Korea. At the League of Legends world semifinals, Matt falls in love with famous cosplay team the Spiral Cats, but he's crestfallen when they ditch him for an American eSports superstar.

Follow Rhys, Matt, and Grant on Twitter.

I'd like to live in New Zealand. The weather is nice, the economy is stable, and I'm pretty sure Evangeline Lilly from LOST still lives there. It's a beautiful place, and it only makes sense that Auckland-based band Surf City makes upbeat, invigorating rock music. I discovered Surf City's debut EP a couple years ago and it remains one of my favorite garage rock debuts—the songs are like Deerhunter plus Dick Dale with some Nuggets-era psychedelic goodness on top. Since that EP, Surf City has released three full-length albums on Fire Records. They have refined their sound in the past few years, but they still never deviate too far from classic jangly pop. Check it out.