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Tensions at York University Picket Line Are Getting Worse Every Day

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A barricade at York University. Photo via Flickr user OFL Communications

Striking graduate students at the University of Toronto have successfully drawn attention to their cause, with other local unions joining in the picketing and noted alum Naomi Klein refusing to cross the picket line if it's still in place when she's scheduled to talk at the school on April 7. Meanwhile, the ongoing strike at York University—which began just a few days later, on March 3—hasn't garnered nearly as much attention.

This is surprising, because if anything, the picket lines at York are more emotionally and physically fraught: a few weeks ago, two picketers were injured in a hit-and-run. And Tuesday, an altercation between picketers and people attempting to drive past the picket involved the destruction of a barricade and one man claiming he was going to "come back and shoot [the picketers] up."

Laura Pin, a third-year PhD candidate at York who was present at the Sentinel Road picket line, explained the situation.

"We have one lane of traffic stopped each direction, and we have about three people talking to drivers, explaining why we're here, telling them about how long the wait will be, and handing out pamphlets with some info," she said. In response to the university's senate executive choosing to resume classes this week, the union had decided to picket more aggressively, by stopping cars for slightly longer. After being stopped for what Pin says was likely around five minutes, people began getting out of their cars to confront picketers. Pin says she was standing further into the line of cars and saw a couple step out of their van first. Video of the incident seems to show a lone man get out of his blue car first, but only the picket line and first few cars are visible.

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Some picketers in the video attempt to talk to the angry motorists, but most hang back.

"Our policy is to disengage as much as possible, right?" said Pin. "To say, 'Okay, we'll let you through immediately.'"

Video shows Pin shouting at her fellow picketers to "clear the road" as the man from the blue car walks past picketers and starts moving parts of the physical blockade. After about a minute, he gets in his car, drives past the picket, then gets back out and walks toward picketers. A woman with bright red hair, who says her child has a fever, continues yelling at the picketers until her partner has driven past the picket and she walks off to meet him.

No university security are visible in the video, which runs nearly four minutes in length. Janice Walls, a media relations staff member with York University, responded by email: "York Security is working with the Toronto Police Service daily to increase safety at the picket locations. The management of York Security is speaking with picket captains about safety at the picket lines and how they might all work with Toronto Police. Security at York uses a number of methods to monitor safety including safety officials and vehicles, as well as CCTV coverage at the lines. We are also adding additional York Security resources to help monitor safety at the picket lines."

This appears to be the kind of situation the union, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 3903, warned of when the school's senate executive decided to resume classes. Union chair Faiz Ahmed said in a statement, "Opening classes before reaching a settlement will create chaos and confusion among students, who should not be pressured to cross picket lines."

One of the reasons for this "chaos and confusion" is that undergraduate students at York are explicitly not required to cross picket lines for academic purposes, and many professors will not do so out of solidarity. For classes to "resume" means students who do wish to go back have to first figure out which of their classes will start again, and then navigate their way past picket lines.

Yet even before the senate's executive complicated the strike by declaring classes would resume this week, tempers had flared during confrontations between strikers and the public.

"This is not the first time something like this has happened," wrote masters student Nancy Ghuman in a Facebook message. "We've had multiple people hit or 'bumped' by cars, one person was actually carried on top of a car. The general public seems to be getting impatient, as are the people on the picket lines."

Ghuman brought up a point often forgotten in the rhetoric that surrounds labour disputes and strikes: the stress can be immense for all involved.

"We also want to go back to class, we also want to go back to work and get the education we have all paid for," she said. "People may think that being on strike is easy, that you get a break from school, but you don't. The stress level is very high, emotionally, physically, and mentally. There are many graduate students who are waiting to finish this semester and move on to the next steps in their lives, but they cannot do so. We want to get a fair deal with the university and return back to class as soon as possible.... I can say for myself and a lot of others on the picket line, we're tired, we want to resolve this ASAP."

The original version of this article incorrectly stated that the woman in the video said her child had had a seizure.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.


Toronto Police Chief Bragged About Monitoring Protesters and Anonymous Is Pissed

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[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/iMIQiO6KZkY' width='500' height='281']

In 2013, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair stood in front of a room of police chiefs in Philadelphia to discuss his force's "gold standard" when it came to monitoring social media.

The purpose of Blair's keynote was to, apparently, sell his cops' ability to efficiently crack down on a protest—using information provided to them via social media surveillance.

In his speech, Blair bragged about the Toronto Police Service's (TPS) ability to monitor an Israel/Palestine demonstration in 2012, which happened on the same day as Toronto's Grey Cup celebration.

Apparently, this collision of public hootenanny presented a particular policing challenge.

Blair described his force's process for monitoring political activists that day, while standing at a podium in what appears to be a nondescript conference room. He explained that they were monitoring social media "within the command centre" by employing a technique called "geofencing" that lets them "determine the location" of conversations happening on Twitter along with who's having those conversations in the first place.

He continued to say: "We were very fortunate because there was... an individual in that demonstration who was the primary organizer... He was using social media very effectively to organize that demonstration. He was sending out tweets. He was giving his location. He had not turned off geofencing capability of his own device. So we were able to monitor his location... He'd in fact become our very best intelligence officer on the scene."

Despite Blair giving this speech close to two years ago, the footage has been viewed less than 150 times on YouTube. It was originally filmed by independent journalist Kenneth Lipp, and has resurfaced thanks to a new video from the hacktivist collective Anonymous that was published earlier today.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/ZxUn80p7VgU' width='500' height='281']

VICE contacted the Toronto Police Service for comment on this video, and we were told by their Director of Corporate Communications Mark Pugash: "Toronto Police Service pays attention to a wide range of public domain information including radio, television, newspapers, websites and social media. We do that on a daily basis."

When asked if they are required to abide by any particular legal framework when monitoring social media for information on protests, Pugash wrote in an email: "Reading newspapers, listening to the radio, watching television, surfing the net, looking at Twitter and Facebook and using search engines do not require a legal framework."

And as for whether or not this type of monitoring is a violation of privacy, Pugash wrote: "Reading newspapers, listening to the radio, watching television, surfing the net, looking at Twitter and Facebook and using search engines cannot be seen as violating anyone's privacy."

We also reached out to the Anonymous team that republished Blair's comments earlier today, and asked how they hope their video will inform Canadians about the way our police monitor protests.

In an encrypted chat room, an Anon member wrote: "Canadians at protests should consider becoming a lot more tech savvy. Turn off your geolocation info; it's not hard to do. Learn to use Red Phone (Android) or Signal (for iPhone). Text Secure and Signal give you options for encrypted text messaging.

"Always keep your options open for old-fashioned person to person communication. There are also increasing options for catching when police are using surveillance tech. Those most comfortable with programming and tech can help out a ton in these areas."

As for whether or not this type of monitoring is okay in the eyes of the law, VICE spoke with Iain MacKinnon, a lawyer who specializes in privacy rights, who told us that the legal test comes down to whether or not users have a reasonable expectation to privacy. According to MacKinnon, this is a murky expectation at best in the case of tweets that are geotagged.

In an email, MacKinnon wrote: "People can turn off their GPS data so that it is not easily available through monitoring software. So it is difficult to argue that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you choose not to turn off that function of your phone. And if the purpose in gathering the information is to monitor crowds for potential criminal activity, that would also undermine an expectation of privacy."

But even if Blair's spying strategy is legally defensible, it doesn't mean it's the type of police tactic that rings true ethically.

VICE contacted Christopher Parsons, a cybersurveillance researcher at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, to discuss this line between legality and ethics.

"The legality of monitoring public communications isn't entirely black and white... but it doesn't strike me that what [Bill Blair described] was necessarily illegal," said Parsons in an emailed statement. "That authorities are monitoring public communications, where authorities are not considered to be a 'member of the audience,' really gets to the heart of many contemporary privacy debates: under what conditions is something private or not?"

Parsons said the legal situation is similar to the context of a barroom.

"Bars are public places," he said. "People talk loudly and are overheard by strangers at neighbouring tables. But we have a privacy-based expectation that when we speak to our friends or colleagues the people three tables down aren't just overhearing (they might have to if I'm being loud!) but recording the communication for purposes I wouldn't approve of."

VICE also reached out to the Ontario Privacy Commissioner's office, but they declined to comment on this story.

Indeed, the issue of police monitoring social media comes down to whether or not open source information, i.e. publicly sourced data that can be found simply through Google or Twitter or Facebook searches, is fair game for law enforcement. Open source information is certainly a valuable tool for journalism, for example, which often leads to important stories being broken.

And perhaps, the public's safety has been legitimately defended from time to time using data taken from open networks. Otherwise the CIA might not have founded a whole division called the Open Source Center; which provides an intelligence service to government employees that exists largely to scrape data from foreign social media profiles.

There is already dwindling support in Canada for new anti-terror legislation that will increase law enforcement and government spying powers. And after this week's news that CSIS helped the government monitor Northern Gateway pipeline protesters, this type of police tactic is unlikely to be accepted as a sound public safety measure.

Especially considering that this past weekend, demonstrations against the proposed anti-terror laws were launched across the country, which could have been monitored using these same tactics. So really, news of Blair's love affair with open source intelligence could not have come at a better time.

After noting this political climate, VICE asked Anonymous about how Canadians should interpret the Toronto Police's strategy of scanning social media for information on protests. We were told: "Canadians should be alarmed, as we think they are, that police are not only doing the kind of things on display in our video but also think they need even more room to snoop on activists, petty criminals, and just everyday people.

"We're all way behind when it comes to being spied on by police and Canadian intelligence agencies. It doesn't have to stay that way."

Follow Patrick McGuire on Twitter.



The Tsarnaev Trial Is Blowing up Boston All Over Again

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On April 15, 2013, the Tsarnaev brothers' ugly bombs ripped open the heart of my city. And now, after our historically brutal winter, the trial of the surviving younger brother is tearing at us again. Instead of enacting justice in the theater we call a courtroom, this trial seems to merely be dusting off old trauma, unnecessarily reopening a wound that had only just begun to close.

Is every trial really necessary? Is this one?

You know what happened: Two half-Chechen immigrants, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, placed backpacks filled with gunpowder, pressure cookers, and ball bearings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three, maiming or injuring 264, and scarring the region. The brothers set off the bombs two hours after the lead runners had come in, which meant that they hit the largest possible number of ordinary people cheering for families and friends. They jerry-rigged these bombs to leave infections and pain for years in those who survived. In the pictures that we've seen far too many times, and now again in the surveillance videos, you can see Dzhokhar, the brother now on trial, place his backpack coldly next to a family with three small children, one of whom died and another of whom lost a leg and barely survived. Three days later, all of us in the metropolitan region woke up in lockdown, asked to stay in our houses as police searched for Dzhokhar after he escaped an early morning firefight and hid nearby.

What you might not know is that targeting the Boston Marathon was, for us, as pointedly symbolic a strike at local civic life as the 9/11 attacks were assaults on world trade in New York City and US military power in Washington, DC. The Tsarnaevs had lived here since 2002—Dzhokhar became a citizen on, of all days, September 11, 2012—so they knew that the Marathon is Boston's national holiday, our rite of spring. This oddball state holiday, nominally called Patriots' Day, on paper commemorates the battles of Concord and Lexington (and surely someone goes to those reenactments, although I don't know who). But in real life, it's a day off for the Marathon, a day we gather as a community, an ummah of our own. It's our celebration of having emerged from the long, dark tunnel of winter, a civic heartbeat in which everyday people rise above their everyday lives. I can't think of anyone I know who hasn't gone to see it—or run in it—once, twice, or many times.

You find a spot somewhere along the 26.2 miles and scream yourself hoarse for an hour or more, cheering not so much for the superhuman frontrunners as for the stark-raving amateurs, for everybody's mother or cousin or buddy who by sheer force of will endure the impossible. Maybe you hand out cups of water. Maybe you ring bells or wave encouraging signs or hold up a picture of some friend who's running it. Maybe you squeeze into the jammed and narrow city streets as one of the 30,000 fans leaving Boston's house of worship, Fenway Park, when the Red Sox game lets out in the afternoon, putting you shoulder to shoulder with tens of thousands of Marathon fans and runners. Even if you're not out there at the Marathon, it occupies some corner of your mind while driving or walking or shopping or working. You get texts from family or friends there, or pings from the Globe or Herald telling you which Kenyan won this year and how close the nearest American was. With the Marathon we celebrate being together and alive.

Or at least we did until the Tsarnaevs' bombs rebranded it as a day of death.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/AoTnGa-Dckw' width='500' height='281']

Afterwards we came together under the banner of "Boston Strong"—yes, often with posters including a Red Sox logo, symbol of our local religion—precisely because we felt so vulnerable and weak. We gathered in Fenway Park for the next game, where we roared approval when our beloved slugger David Ortiz, Big Papi, declared that the bombers would never win because "this is our fucking city." Together we cried.

Even if you're not out there at the Marathon, it occupies some corner of your mind while driving or walking or shopping or working.

With Dzhokhar on trial, all that is coming back. And why?

"Do I really need to hear again from the man who held his son in his arms while he died?" one Harvard communications director asked me. "I know what he did. I just want it over."

A social worker picking up her kids after school told me she's trying to just glance at the headlines each night, that she can't afford to get sucked back in; she just wants Dzhokhar punished in whatever way he most dreads.

I haven't seen anyone post articles about the trial on Facebook or tweet them out, which tells you how little we want to chew all this over yet again. We've already thought about how this war-zone refugee from a disastrously chaotic and stricken family found a home in the People's Republic of Cambridge, where he was embraced by the high school's culture of diversity and respect, books and sports—and how he rejected those ideals, blowing up his city for an absurd cause on which he could displace his disastrous family's misery. In a media-saturated world where we can look up every detail online, why drag it out again?

In a democracy, a trial is supposed to do many things. It's a meeting of adversaries in battle, a theater of war in which jousting is channeled via words instead of weapons. It's an attempt to ferret out a plausible truth from competing interpretations of the facts. It's a display of the rule of law, in which the state must reveal its evidence to ordinary citizens who get to decide whether punishment is justified. It's a performance in which public and private passions are dramatized and, in theory, resolved—a catharsis to purify and purge emotions harmful to the body politic. More recently, trials are supposed to offer "closure," that new-age therapy goal, for those harmed by the crime. Some trials metastasize beyond these important goals and become circus rather than drama, with media personages circling like the ringmaster of the Hunger Games, voyeuristically offering up twisted personalities and individual misery for viewers' consumption. Which one is this?

And part of what makes Boston strong is that most of us agree that Dzhokhar should not be killed in our name.

Of course, I can't speak for the immediate victims: Their lives were shattered and will never be put back the way they were before. I can't speak for the cops and nurses and firefighters and doctors and all the others who helped scrape tattered bodies back to life. Nothing I write, nothing that the rest of Boston thinks or feels, can compare with that. Perhaps for them this trial does enact justice and finality, putting what happened in some meaningful order, ending in sentencing.

But this trial—any trial—is not only for them. Terrorism, perhaps even more than any other crime, has secondary victims: not just the innocents maimed and killed, but the lacerated community all around. And it's traumatic to hear again about victims gripping their own organs so as not to bleed to death, or seeing jagged bones sticking up out of their own shredded bodies. Watching the surveillance videos that track him callously buying milk and going to the gym is creepy, but did anyone think that a young man dissociated enough to place a bomb right beside three small children would be shocked and sobbing over his deeds an hour later? Do we have to be reminded that, three days later, the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked a man who escaped when they stopped at a pair of Memorial Drive gas stations that used to be unremarkable reference points on the Charles River? We know.

This trial isn't about determining the facts. The jury, those citizen witnesses, are not being asked to judge not whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did it—his lawyer admitted that in the first 15 minutes, and is scarcely questioning any witnesses--but whether he was a foolish young man misled by his thug older brother who had dipped in and out of crime, or he himself did it coldly and with enough malice that he deserves to be put to death.

And part of what makes Boston strong is that most of us agree that Dzhokhar should not be killed in our name. Massachusetts has no death penalty because we're against it. Bostonians oppose the death penalty even for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 57 to 33 percent. It took forever to select a jury from the 1,373 people that the New York Times reports were in the initial pool, in part because who could possibly be impartial after media saturation made visible his guilt—and in part because it was hard to find a Boston-area jury willing to execute anyone, even an unforgiven (and perhaps unforgivable) Marathon bomber.

This trial, in other words, teeters on the verge of being an unnecessary and gruesome circus. According to CNN, the Justice Department refused a plea deal in which Tsarnaev would acknowledge guilt to escape the death penalty. But why? That would have upheld the rule of law. That would have been the civilized antidote to the Tsarnaevs' explosion of mayhem and pointless rage.

That would have kept Boston strong—instead of letting the Tsarnaevs' crimes wound us yet again.

E.J. Graff is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Follow her on Twitter.

In Defense of the UK's Four Masturbating Judges

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The Royal Courts of Justice, where some judges work

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Judges: aging white guys in horsehair wigs brushing the crumbs of a long lunch off their robes. Bourgeois overseers sitting in large, decaying leather chairs, project managing the criminal justice system and deciding whether or not to renew a B1 liquor license.

Nothing about the stereotype screams sex appeal. Nothing about the stereotype screams, "These people are worth defending." In fact, it screams, "Out of touch." It suggests that these men (and they are usually men) are more interested in dozing their way to an easy paycheck than paying attention to what's happening in the courtroom in front of them.

This week, three judges were sacked—and a fourth resigned—after they were found to have watched porn on their work computers. The Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice called this conduct "wholly unacceptable" and pronounced the watching of porn an "inexcusable misuse" of official IT accounts, thereby upholding the sanctity of all official IT accounts. The porn was not illegal and it wasn't revealed whether it had been watched during cases the judges were sitting on.

I'm not going to pretend that the image of a masturbating judge is an uplifting one. No one wants to picture a middle-aged man struggling with his tackle while, in front of him, grainy images flicker on his mid-level Toshiba. But what harm have these men really done? What they did, they did in the privacy of their own offices. It's not as if they fired up PornHub in the middle of the open plan while stricken assistants ran for cover.

Of course, responses to the viewing habits of the judges have been overwhelmingly negative. They've been sacked and they've been condemned. "These representatives of our notoriously stuck-in-the-past judiciary had probably just discovered the internet," ran a Guardian comment piece, which goes on to take this assumption and link it to the failure of judges to "process diversity" and "overcome their own bigotry." These men may have been bad at their jobs and they may be out-of-touch with society, but watching porn does not prove this.

The Liberal Democrat John Hemming was one of a number of politicians trying to score points when he said that he was concerned about a "lack of transparency" in the judiciary. The Mail pointedly brought up that "one of the four judges jailed a teacher for downloading child pornography and another sentenced a Peeping Tom for using a mobile phone to film women in swimming pool changing rooms." None of the fired judges watched child pornography. None of them filmed women at swimming pools.

This rush to condemn is presented as concern for the public. Judges play an important role in society, so it's important that they are not cut off from this society and it's important that they are dedicated and hardworking. This is the concern that is presented to us, but in fact the desire to publicly shame these men is based on an unthinking acceptance of the ongoing corporatization of our society and the zealous championing of a new kind of puritanism.

Our society's fear of sex means that there is no thought that watching porn might be a release, something other than a grubby and outrageous betrayal of the good citizens of this country. I know a highly respected academic who, from time to time, picks up boys on Grindr and has them come to his office. He still does his work, he just allows for some fun as well. This way of working, though, is now seen as a dirty, scandalous, and unprofessional fuck-you to a corporate world in which we're all expected to be good little worker bees, churning out our data as efficiently as possible in our work pods, never doing anything that isn't in the company interest. As units of productivity, the idea that we might not want to completely subsume our desires is dangerously human, which also makes it dangerously unmanageable.

Of course, it would obviously be terrible if a judge gave bad counsel because he'd been cranking one out in his back room rather than studying the particulars of his latest case—but again, there is no proof, or even suggestion, that this is what happened.

I spoke to a vastly experienced judge who told me that our adversarial legal system means that judges—particularly part-time ones like the ones who have been fired—often have far too much time on their hands. Mornings, afternoons, and even days are freed up by the difficulty of bringing together all the relevant parties for a case, and by the fact that judges are contracted to serve a certain number of days (if the case they are working on finishes quickly they are still obliged to serve those days). Judges used to listen to the radio. Then a Ministry of Justice edict went out saying that they weren't allowed to do that. Books and newspapers are too obviously not work, but computers contain an array of easily hidden distractions, from the socially acceptable (Facebook) to the morally outrageous (porn).

But while it's easy to flick from tab to tab in order to hide what you're really watching, it is the advent of computers that has made the enforcement of puritanism truly possible. Now, what we do at work can be surgically monitored. Our browsing histories and hard drives can be ransacked. The judges were naïve to think that they weren't under surveillance. They were naïve to think that they would be allowed to get away with doing anything other than soullessly plodding through their day. These men are not the most hapless of all the figures drowned in the rising tide of corporatization, but they have been drowned by it nonetheless.

To me, this drowning contains more sadness than outrage. One of the judges, Warren Grant, said he had been "suffering from severe and undiagnosed depression." The anesthetizing distraction of porn was part of this story. Not the story of a deviant betraying the noble cause of public service, but of a man in trouble.

Andrew Maw, the Recorder who resigned before he could be fired, was 65. He spent his life serving the law, but now he's just a man, a grubby little man who watched porn on a publicly monitored computer. These men aren't folk heroes, but the people rushing to condemn them are the proponents of a corporate puritanism that would take our humanity and crush it with shame and condemnation.

Follow Oscar on Twitter.

Everything We Know About the Art in 'Empire'

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Everything We Know About the Art in 'Empire'

VICE Vs Video Games: How Sonic the Hedgehog Helped Me Beat Cancer

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Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

One big problem remained. A doctor stood to the left of my hospital bed, blinking. Behind him was a drip stand, also blinking, its pulsating red light fastidiously metering out the vile chemotherapy that heroically dribbled through a needle and into my vein.

A painfully aloof cancer was ravaging my left leg: osteogenic sarcoma. This was a rare and sophisticated network of malignancy with a big appetite and a tight schedule. The doctor noisily blinked once more. The odds of saving my left leg were as thin as the bone that once grew there.

The best-case scenario was the installation of an "extended prosthetic knee"—which, to the ears of my 12-year-old self, sounded pretty mint. Then there was option B. This choice was called "amputation." I'd seen enough pirate films to know that it required me to bite on a stick and do all I could to not scream. But thanks to the colorful array of medical drugs I was on, with names that jostled like dinosaurs, I couldn't even eat soup without vomiting, let alone keep a twig between my teeth. That option seemed flawed.

Finally, option C: the deluxe package. This was just straight-up death, possibly via a peppering of pulmonary tumours. Option C was even more of a metaphysical mouthful than what'd come before. So my pre-pubescent brain filed this eventuality in a compartment labelled: "that sounds weird."

To the right of the hospital bed stood my immediate family: my stunned parents, and my numb siblings. Stoically, they also blinked. Then we all stared hopefully towards the frozen TV that clung to the wall.

I sighed. Then I gave my big problem my undivided attention. I couldn't get Sonic the Hedgehog to defeat Doctor Ivo Robotnik at the end of level five. Star Light Zone was simply too hard. I craved to liberate the animals of South Island from their mechanized incarceration. It's all I had left. Picking back up my black Sega controller, I un-paused Sonic from his midair leap and vanished from the oncology ward once more.

Unlike the rest of my life, things were flourishing with Sonic. Yes, my hair kept falling out of my head and into my lunch, which was not cool. And I couldn't walk, constantly dreading the repulsive gauntlet of school life on crutches. I hadn't spoken to a girl in years and puberty was hiding furtively somewhere else in this hospital. But once Sonic was rolling, I was free. This hedgehog's gallant bounds made life palatable the moment the pad hit my palms.

I loved Sonic and his perpetual energy. This gaming obsession warmed my sepia hospital room like a sunrise.

My classmates from a strangely distant high school in Macclesfield had philanthropically donated a Mega Drive (what they called Genesis system in the UK). It was a gift to commemorate my contracting of cancer and to aid me in the art of distraction from bone saws, spinal epidurals, the cavalcade of vomit bowls, endless needles and the lingering bruises from failed cannula sites.

The plan worked. I loved my Mega Drive. I loved Sonic and his perpetual energy. This gaming obsession warmed my sepia hospital room like a sunrise. Regardless of what exotic brew of chemotherapy they dosed me with, or whether I lay in my home bed or a medical bed, the only true constant in my life was that hyperactive hedgehog's defiant smile and spinning red sneakers. As I boisterously hammered the controller, all thumbs and mutters, the chemo needle wiggled painfully in my forearm. Like a spur in a horse's flank, each noxious twinge hurled me further into a pixelated world of escape.

Days whispered into weeks. Weeks exhaled into months. The more needles that went into my arms, the more I curled up. Morphine entered my spine, but I simply became one with my blue hero. Hickman lines were inserted into the top of my heart to radically accelerate the chemo hitting my blood. In defense, I imagined myself a ball, bristling with 500 sharpened quills.

It was the nurses that first complained about my mania with speed—an obsession further fueled by the availability of a wheelchair. I sped round corners, terrorizing porters and playing chicken with lane-hogging beds. I just couldn't stomach the inertia that made me visible.

I began to recreate the slopes, loop-the-loops and jumps of South Island. Using nothing more than hospital ramps, a wheelchair and my own belligerent momentum I liberated myself. Thundering down the sterile corridors, my wheels red hot with hope, I craved the blurring colors of flight.

The gray pain of NHS reality urged me deeper into this Technicolor warren. Mechanized wasps stung me with medical lasers. Armored bugs fussed towards me in motorized cyclic loops before scurrying off. I scratched away my opiated, itchy dawn dreams by pressing restart.

The ching! of shiny rings sponsored an assumption that if I could just gather enough of them then I could win another life. Or at least salvage half a leg.

My doctor's slippery behavior started to mirror Robotnik's own evasive presence at the end of each level. I'd stumble upon him, quietly laying in wait for me, before unleashing increasingly toxic concoctions into my circulation.

An acrid metallic taste took over my mouth. The methotrexate they plied me with popped me further out of my body as this journey descended ever deeper into a mechanical, bionic hell. I was compelled to push on further towards Scrap Brain Zone and the final reckoning. The quest for the six Chaos Emeralds had become a mortal wager.

Often I had to pause. This pinball world became drenched in nausea. My throat burned with acid as old industrial pipes flared with fire on screen. Lifts patiently ferried me up and down the levels. I bounced across the TV sets of static that raged into the white noise of infinity. My azure avatar chased the sparkle of fleeting power-up invincibility that seemed my only hope to survive.

I drank golden hoops at supersonic speed. The ching! of shiny rings sponsored an assumption that if I could just gather enough of them then I could win another life. Or at least salvage half a leg.

Dr. Eggman's trail of golden halos teased me on. Podiums appeared, podiums dissolved. I leapt boldly over chasms that would seize an entire life. Hopping between lava beds and feinting past thrusting, syringe-like spikes I charged towards an industrial atrium that hissed with septic funk. Once there I calmly awaited the boffin and his final reckoning. My foot tapped nervously.

Eventually the doctor emerged, bustling manically around the room with all manner of instruments and cronies. I balled up, bounced and thrust every spike in his direction. His attacks stung. My body flashed. A 16-bit soundtrack blared mindlessly into the future. Then, eventually, silence. A lot of blinking resumed, both on the screen and off. Nerves shattered, Sonic's smog of pixels began to disperse. His lurid colors faded. The hum of a hospital resumed.

A fox flicked off the television set. Then stared me down benevolently, cast open the curtains before prattling on brightly about my stitches. Stitches? I'd had my operation? The fears of amputation tore through my mind. I struggled up in bed, looking blearily towards my toes in panic.

My mind flashed through a dozen shades of relief. I clearly had two feet.

The needles, drains, pipes, quills, and cannulas retracted, and I realized I'd conquered South Island. The Chaos Emeralds were mine.

One left leg wallowed in bandages like a fuzzy white zeppelin far up in the sky. This frozen white of cloth was completely numb. I couldn't feel a thing, but it certainly wasn't any shorter than the right leg. In fact, it looked much longer, but perhaps that was the morphine being sneaky again. Either way, regardless of the shared occupancy of titanium knees and fleshy junctures it was still very much attached to me, as I was attached to it.

Then all the needles, drains, pipes, quills and cannulas retracted and I realized I'd conquered South Island. The Chaos Emeralds were mine. The mechanical terror of Dr. Robotnik was vanquished and I didn't have to chew on any sticks in the process.

Perhaps the next game was tracking down my abstracted puberty lost in this hospital over the last 18 months. Where did that fox just scamper off to? Was it a nurse? Or was it Miles Prower, a.k.a. Tails, come to fetch me for the follow-up adventure.

According to the consultants, one in six cancer sufferers face their tumours for a second time later in their life. But I barely gave a fuck, as I was all set for Sonic 2.

This Gorgeous New Film Was Inspired by a Early Internet Legend About 'Fargo'

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Rinko Kikuchi in 'Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter' (2014), by David and Nathan Zellner

There are true stories, and there are the stories that we wish were true. The new film Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, by Austin's prolific filmmaking brothers David and Nathan Zellner, is such a story. Kumiko, played by the superb Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi, is an introverted young woman in Tokyo on the edge of 30, losing contact with reality as she grows obsessed with a VHS cassette of the film Fargo. This is no ordinary VHS tape, but one discovered by the beam of a flashlight, buried within a gloomy coastal cave, which I imagine to be located a stone's throw from the iconic Toei Company logo and not much further from the haunted well of Hideo Nakata's Ringu.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter plays out in the foggy border country between real life and cinema life. While studying the mythical cassette, Kumiko becomes certain that she has calculated the exact location of the film's ransom money, last seen buried in the snow along the side of a lonesome Minnesota highway by a bloodied Steve Buscemi. Kumiko's life in Tokyo grows increasingly isolated and dysfunctional as the promise of the buried treasure becomes more real, throwing into motion a desperate and epic journey away from the color and commotion of Tokyo to the bleak Minnesota winter and along the highway to Fargo.

If Kumiko's story sounds a bit familiar, that's because it is rooted in an urban legend that flourished and developed on internet messageboards back in the early aughts. The original post, which described a Japanese woman searching for the money from the beloved Coen Brothers film had its basis in the real-life tragedy of Takako Konishi , an office worker from Tokyo who had travelled to America and committed suicide in 2001. In reality, Takako's misadventure had nothing to do with the film Fargo; she had journeyed to North Dakota to die because she had previously visited there with a former lover who had rejected her. Nevertheless, the spark created by the bizarre misunderstanding that she'd perished in a cinematic treasure hunt caught fire and spread across the web, burning its way into Nathan and David Zellner's imaginations. They've been working on Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter in one form or another ever since.

In the meantime, the Zellner brothers made other films—lots of them. Together they've written, directed, and appeared in two other features and at least a dozen short films, which range from good to mind-blowing. However, Kumiko is, hands down, their most ambitious and visually arresting film, and it comes as no surprise that over a decade of careful consideration went into it. I spoke over the phone to the Zellners after their recent premiere at MoMA in New York.

[vimeo src='//player.vimeo.com/video/118846656' width='500' height='281']

Trailer to 'Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter' (2014), by David and Nathan Zellner

VICE: It took a long time for you to take Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter from an idea to a film. When did you get started, and how long did it take?


David Zellner: Kumiko is based on an urban legend that circulated online, starting in 2001. What we initially saw was a very minimal post without much information, which said that a Japanese woman had gone missing from Tokyo and traveled to Minnesota in search of the mythical fortune from the movie Fargo. It piqued our interest because there was so little information for something so sensational. It created a sense of mystery and intrigue, and we wanted some closure with it. The other thing about it was this idea of a kind of antiquated treasure hunt, something out of the age of exploration. Remember that this is before social media really took off, before Facebook and Twitter. If the legend had been debunked immediately, we probably wouldn't have been interested in the story in terms of making a film. There were some true elements, but all the things about the treasure hunt and the obsession with the movie Fargo leading her to Minnesota were completely made up, collectively, as part of the urban legend. We became obsessed with the story while it spread and started filling in the gaps out of our own curiosity and began working on the script from there.

At what point did you realize that this legend was material for a film?


David Zellner: When we started on the script, we didn't have any idea about the practical elements of making it happen. We just started writing and took the little bit of information from the internet and built a world around it. We had also been to Japan before as tourists, and we're big fans of Japanese cinema. From that standpoint, we had enough of a foundation to work on a story. It took years to get the project off the ground for a lot of reasons. Financing and scheduling and shooting on a tiny budget in two different parts of the world, in two different languages, with entirely different crew bases, and that sort of thing. There were a lot of false starts with it, but we kept persevering.

Nathan Zellner: Weather was a big thing as well. We wanted the movie to be grounded in reality and have authenticity to it, so we made sure that we would be able to shoot in Japan and then in the dead of winter in Minnesota. You can't fabricate snow very well on a budget.

"When you become an adult, the world is mapped out with satellite imagery."

There's a documentary called Room 237 about people who are obsessed with Stanley Kubrick's The Shining , some of whom have mapped out the fictitious Overlook Hotel, not unlike the way Kumiko maps the treasure from Fargo in the real world. Do you think stories and films can be a kind of trap for some people?
David Zellner: It's a kind of formula or logic that only makes sense to Kumiko [herself]. We wanted our story to work on different levels, especially the idea of truth versus fiction. When you become an adult, the world has less mystery. There are no unexplored lands, and the world is mapped out with satellite imagery. We liked the idea of taking a quest element and putting it in a contemporary setting and making a modern-day folktale.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter could also be described as a very strange road movie. Alexander Payne is one of the executive producers of the film, and I feel like Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter would make an interesting double feature with his film Nebraska. They both concern characters on a quest for treasure in the middle of America, who experience difficulties communicating with the people they meet along the way.


Nathan Zellner: Communication is another layer that we were interested in. We saw Kumiko as an introvert and wanted to show how that would create problems for her. The people that she meets are trying to be helpful, but they're being helpful on their own terms because they can't really connect. We didn't want anyone that she meets on her quest to be an obstacle or to be something she would have to push through. It's more about how her internal struggle creates roadblocks that she stumbles over along the way.

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Rinko Kikuchi in 'Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter' (2014), by David and Nathan Zellner

What was working with Rinko Kikuchi like?


David Zellner: Working with Rinko was great. The kind of films we like are dramas with elements of comedy and vice versa. Rinko dialed into that right away and understood the tone we were going for and really got the character. Kumiko is by herself for most of movie and we weren't going to do voiceovers or anything like that, so it was crucial that all the information you get from Kumiko comes through her expressions and body language. Rinko acted with her whole body and embraced the character in a fearless way. She did so many subtle and understated things that telegraph information about Kumiko.

Nathan Zellner: We talked about Buster Keaton quite a bit when we were working on the silent qualities of her character.

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Rinko Kikuchi and Nathan Zellner

You seem to specialize in female characters who are deeply conflicted and not verbally expressive. Not just Rinko Kikuchi as Kumiko, but also Sydney Aguirre in Kid-Thing, which is one of the most intense performances by a child actor in recent memory. Kid-Thing is remarkable for the way you were able to get a very young actress to project a very heavy personal dilemma without saying much.


David Zellman: With both films, a lot of it is having discussions before shooting and finding ways to relate to those characters on a human level. Once that's in place, everything goes very smoothly. There's not much dissection of the characters once we get going. There's so few good, complex female lead roles out there, so it's fun.

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David Zellner in 'Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter' (2014), by David and Nathan Zellner

Do you anticipate the Coen brothers will see Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter at some point?


David Zellman: Hopefully. Who knows? We were simply trying to be true to the urban legend. We have a huge amount of respect for their work. We wanted to use Fargo as a kind of conduit for Kumiko's journey and not have it be some kind of riff or winky homage kind of thing. When we were putting the film together, we wanted to make it very clear that what we were making was its own piece.

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter opened yesterday in New York and will be shown tomorrow, March 20, at BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn, after which there will be a Q&A with Nathan Zellner. The film continues through March 26 at BAM, opening at select theaters nationwide on March 27.

Follow Matthew on Twitter.

The MUNCHIES Guide to Sweden: Umeå

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The MUNCHIES Guide to Sweden: Umeå

BC First Nations Lawsuit to Halt Industrial Development Seen as National ‘Game-Changer’

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Fracking operation in progress. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

A groundbreaking legal battle launched earlier this month by a First Nation in BC has the potential to not only stop all industrial development in its tracks in the northeastern corner of the province, but could create a chain reaction of similar lawsuits across the country.

The Blueberry River First Nations, located near Fort St. John, BC, made history earlier this month when they filed suit against the provincial government looking for an interim injunction that would prevent a single additional oil and gas well, seismic line, or hydro project to pop up on their traditional territory until the issue of their treaty rights can be addressed.

The suit, filed on March 4 in BC Supreme Court, sues the province for allegedly breaching Treaty 8 by allowing "the consistent and increasingly accelerated degradation of the Nations' territory," resulting in the loss of members' ability to exercise their inherent aboriginal harvesting rights on the land.

It's the first lawsuit in the province—and one of a rare few ongoing in Canada—to challenge a breach of treaty on the basis of cumulative impacts, or the total adverse environmental effects resulting from decades of industrial activity in the area, rather than legally attacking development on a project-by-project basis.

As such, the suit now puts into question all future development in the Peace region, including the recently greenlit Site C dam project on the Peace River and ongoing plans to ramp up LNG production.

But according to legal experts, the case also holds the potential to significantly alter the trajectory of dozens, if not hundreds, of battles between First Nations and the Crown over the issue of treaty rights.

"It could quite literally be a game changer," said Larry Innes, an attorney with aboriginal rights firm Olthuis-Kleer-Townshend, who works closely with First Nations in similar situations in northern BC, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories.

"If [Blueberry is] successful, particularly at the injunction stage, it has the potential for immediate relief and a bit of a domino effect."

With the court's decision, not only does the Crown risk the chance of having its operations severely constrained through a judge's order, according to Innes, First Nations across Canada will have the legal precedent necessary to file similar actions.

"It would embolden First Nations under similar circumstances and force the Crown and industry to take the matter very seriously," he said. "That might mean taking the decision out of the Crown's hands, where the court would give them direction. It could be very dramatic."

Death by a thousand cuts
According to Blueberry River Chief Marvin Vahey, the First Nation's traditional lands have been "ravaged" since 1900, when their ancestors signed Treaty 8 and legally bound the Crown to the promise that First Nations would be able to hunt, trap, fish, and harvest traditional medicines from their lands forever.

"Blueberry's ancestors would not recognize our territory today," Vahey wrote in a statement accompanying the claim. "It is covered by oil and gas wells, roads, pipelines, mines, clearcuts, hydro and seismic lines, private land holdings, and waste disposal sites, among other things.

"The pace and scale of development have accelerated in the last 25 years, and are now at unprecedented levels."

Maps released by the First Nation along with the statement of claim show a territory almost entirely consumed by various industrial projects over the past several decades, with 90.8 percent of land disturbed by industrial projects, and a vast portion of the southern territory in line to be flooded by Site C.

Those projects, Vahey argues, have meant death by a thousand cuts to the First Nations' way of life.

"There are vast dark zones throughout our territory where we are no longer able to practice our treaty rights," the chief said. "It is the cumulative impact of thousands of provincially authorized activities, from water withdrawals, to major industrial projects such as the Site C dam, which have destroyed our way of life and threaten our continued existence as a people."

At the same time, Vahey said, the First Nations have not benefitted economically, with Blueberry receiving less than 0.1 percent of provincial oil and gas royalties, despite the region's status as the leading petroleum hotspot in the province.

BC's Aboriginal Relations Minister John Rustad gave a written statement on the suit, which he called "unfortunate."

"Our government is committed to consulting with Blueberry River First Nations and all Treaty 8 First Nations on decisions that may affect hunting, fishing and trapping treaty rights within their respective traditional territories," Rustad said, adding that the government has established a cumulative effects program to address the impacts of resource development.

"I understand Blueberry River First Nations' concerns regarding natural resource development within their traditional territory and we remain committed to reaching a respectful, long-term government-to-government relationship," he wrote. "Our negotiators have been meeting with Blueberry River First Nations to reach an agreement that ensures they are able have both economic opportunities and a role in environmental stewardship within their traditional territory."

The government has until April 3 to file its response in court.

The problem with cumulative impacts
When it comes to grappling with the gravity of cumulative impacts on the environment, Innes said the missing piece is not a matter of missing science.

"It's not like we don't know better," he said. "Cumulative effects have been part of environmental assessment policy and practice for 20 years or more."

Instead, Innes argues that the regulatory system is essentially incapable of meaningfully addressing development on more than a case-by-case basis.

"The way cumulative effects are dealt with is cursory, at best," he said. "Review panels tend to trip over them on the way out the door, or regulators basically say it's too hard, where they'll provide direction on say a single well, but say it's not their mandate to set policy for cumulative effects."

It's a matter of passing the buck, Innes said, whereby no regulator is properly equipped to enforce thresholds on development, allowing governments to continue approving projects, undeterred.

"It's a damning indictment of those who design and implement regulatory systems that set these guys up to fail, where they are given mandates that they can't fulfill," he said of the Blueberry suit. "It's cases like this that forces the government to take their blinders off and stare, I hope, in horror at what they've created."

Similar fight occurring across the border
Blueberry River is not the only First Nation attempting to force a new precedent in aboriginal case law in Canada when it comes to cumulative effects.

In 2008, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation of northeastern Alberta filed a massive suit against the federal and provincial governments, citing some 17,000 treaty violations based on a tally of the number of oil and gas projects on their traditional territory located in the tar sands region.

Beaver Lake member Crystal Lameman, whose uncle and former chief Al Lameman launched the band's suit, said legal action has become the only legitimate recourse for First Nations who are denied meaningful participation in regulatory hearings and whose concerns are not accommodated by the Crown through consultation.

"The government and industry is making every attempt to put up roadblocks," she said.

Though the Crown has attempted to have the Beaver Lake case thrown out of court on numerous technicalities, other court rulings have affirmed its validity and secured the First Nation a trial, though no date has yet been set.

Lameman said the decisions affirm the growing sense among aboriginal governments across Canada—backed by numerous recent, precedent-setting court rulings—that the law is on their side when it comes to holding the crown to honour the treaties and its fiduciary duty to First Nations.

"Beaver Lake, Blueberry—we are examples that represent a growing understanding that through aboriginal title and treaty rights, the native rights framework is the best strategy we have to stop unmitigated industrial expansion and the resulting cumulative impacts at the source," she said.

"Indigenous people are still asserting our rights to free, prior, and informed consent; we're still asserting our sovereignty over our lands, even if the hand that claims to feed us is still refusing to feed us."

Meagan Wohlberg is an award-winning journalist based out of Fort Smith, NWT and editor of the Northern Journal. Follow her on Twitter.

Photographing LA's Nightlife of Crime and Trauma

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Scott Lane's life looks a lot like the movie Nightcrawler. He's a freelance overnight news cameraman, meaning that every night, he films car crashes, fires, deaths, and shootings in Los Angeles.

Under the moniker Loudlabs News, he sells his often grisly footage to news stations, running the whole operation out of his car, which is filled with radio scanners, camera equipment, a portable wifi hotspot, and a couple of laptops he uses to edit and upload video. His jobs starts in the evening, when traffic slows down and the freeways open up, and it ends a couple of hours before sunrise, just in time for the morning news broadcast. He's been in this line of work for the last 15 years, and although he doesn't see himself as a documentarian, he has recorded the dark side of LA as much as anyone else.

The scenes he photographs—a teenager wheeled away on a stretcher, a man electrocuted by a telephone wire, the aftermath of a drunk driving accident—can be gruesome. "My reality is people's most harshest realities," Lane often says.

Los Angeles-based photographer theonepointeight spent a week with Lane, documenting the crime he trails every night. These are some of those scenes.

See more of theonepoingeight's photography on his website and Instagram. See more of Scott Lane's work on his website and YouTube channel.

VICE Premiere: VICE Exclusive: Listen to 'Petra II' by Electronic Artist Saffron

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Richard MacFarlane's Vancouver-based label 1080p is releasing new and interesting electronic music at a considerable clip, and they show no signs of slowing down. It's a little mind-boggling, given the sheer volume of garbage-tier electronic music that currently exists on the internet. Somehow, 1080p manages to consistently unearth dozens of obscure and undervalued artists from the annals of the internet—musicians working within the genre to produce tunes that are both danceable and interesting.

This time around, we have have Saffron's Petra II. It's a smooth run of tracks with some bizarrely wonderful samples and synth sounds, at times veering into chaos but always returning back to the beat. Give it a listen.

Dissecting Decades-Old Testimony in a Satanic Child Abuse Case

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This story was co-published with The Marshall Project.

Any courtroom lawyer will tell you that young children are among the most difficult witnesses to put on the stand. Their stories can shift over time, they easily contradict themselves during cross-examination, and though they can swear to tell "the whole truth and nothing but the truth," it is not always clear they understand what that means.

Nowhere is this problem trickier than in a case of sexual abuse where the child is the only victim and witness, a dynamic that took full form during the so-called 'satanic abuse' cases in the 1980s and 1990s. These cases may have faded in the collective memory, but from California to Texas to New York, communities were roiled by sensational tales of animal sacrifices, murders of babies, and violent orgies that children were sworn to keep secret by powerful cabals of daycare workers. Many believed the cases were linked, while doubters saw such bizarre claims as products of a Salem-like hysteria.

The accusations all started with children. As a generation of journalists and lawyers discovered that the victims had been subjected to faulty interviewing techniques and flawed medical exams, most of these cases were debunked, even when the children did not formally recant their accusations.

But the case of four women from San Antonio, who were convicted of molesting two young girls in the late 1990s, has endured, stretched out over more than two decades of trials and a years-long effort to free them. (I first began reporting on the case for The Texas Observer.

On April 22, the case will enter its final act as the two alleged victims take the stand. Now in their late 20s, one still maintains the abuse took place, and the other says the two were coerced to make a false accusation. After each is cross-examined, a judge will decide the likely truth—essentially who is more credible—and make a recommendation to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The state's highest criminal court will then decide whether the women should be declared innocent and entitled to compensation from the state, or, in an unlikely but plausible scenario, sent back to prison.

The girls accused the four women of holding them down, inserting various objects into them, and threatening them with a gun.

The women whose fates depend on the hearing have been branded the "San Antonio Four" by their supporters. They fall into an increasingly visible category of prisoners who have been freed due to evidence of a wrongful conviction but have not been formally declared "innocent" by courts. They were arrested in 1994 for sexually molesting the two girls, who were seven- and nine-years-old at the time. Elizabeth Ramirez, the girls' aunt, was considered the ringleader. In 1997, Ramirez was sentenced to 37.5 years while her three friends, Anna Vasquez, Cassie Rivera, and Kristie Mayhugh, got 15 years each in a separate 1998 trial. The girls had stayed with "Aunt Liz" for a week because their father had been busy with work. Mayhugh was Ramirez's roommate, and the other two were friends who often spent time at the apartment.

The girls accused the four women of holding them down, inserting various objects into them, and threatening them with a gun. Or a knife—their stories changed multiple times, though they always had overtones of witchcraft, leading one doctor who examined them to wonder if the crimes were "satanic." The women had come out as lesbian to their families—Anna and Cassie were dating at the time—and the idea that their sexual orientation explained their purported crimes came up multiple times throughout the investigation and trials.

In 2006, a reclusive teacher and one-time dog sledder from the Yukon Territory named Darrell Otto began exchanging letters with Ramirez. She persuaded him of her innocence, and he convinced several journalists and activists to investigate the case. They in turn convinced a lawyer, Mike Ware, to file new appeals for the women. Doctors reviewed the original medical exams of the victims and found that the original doctor, Nancy Kellogg, erred in testifying that the girls had definitely been sexually assaulted; at most, Kellogg later admitted, the results were inconclusive.

In my reporting, I discovered a messy family saga. Ramirez's family believed the two victims had been coached by their father, Javier Limon. He was an ex-boyfriend of Ramirez's sister who the family said had made romantic advances toward the much younger Ramirez. When Ramirez rebuffed him, her family claimed, Limon retaliated by coaching his daughters to accuse her of molestation, and the girls ended up accusing Ramirez's three friends as well.

Implausible as this scenario may seem, questionable allegations of child abuse often permeate bitter divorces and custody battles. Websites offering advice to men going through divorce often include sections on how to deal with being accused of abuse.

At a burger joint one evening in 2013, Limon strongly denied this account. He told me he never propositioned Elizabeth Ramirez and that his two young daughters came to him unsolicited to accuse their aunt and her friends. He said he'd done what any father would do: gone to the authorities.

Limon had reason to be defensive. The year before, in August 2012, one of his daughters, named in the public record as Stephanie Limon (now Stephanie Martinez), announced that Javier had coached her to accuse the women and that she was never molested. Twenty-five years old and a mother herself, Stephanie read to a camera from a sheet of notebook paper in the backseat of a car, saying her father forced her as a 7-year-old to accuse her beloved aunt. "I was threatened," she recalled, "and I was told that if I did tell the truth that I would end up in prison, taken away, and even get my ass beat." (A film about the case is also in the works.)

With that recantation and the disputed medical evidence, Mike Ware, the lawyer, convinced a judge and the Bexar County District Attorney that the women were entitled to a new look at the case, and in the meantime could be freed. The women emerged from a jail in downtown San Antonio in November 2013 to teary hugs with family. Cassie had never held her new granddaughter, and Liz had not seen her teenage son since he was five years old.

Though celebrated by gay and lesbian activists as martyrs for a prejudiced era, their situation was still precarious. They took menial jobs and began a long wait for resolution, knowing that if they were declared officially 'innocent,' they would be entitled to hefty checks from the state for their wrongful imprisonment. If their innocence was placed back in doubt, they could return to prison. Because she got out of prison ahead of the others on parole, Anna remained on the sex offender registry. She could not be in the presence of children and faced limited work prospects. She has since been removed from the registry.

As their lawyers continued negotiating with prosecutors, a strange dichotomy emerged; Stephanie, the younger of the two victims, maintained that she'd never been molested. Her older sister—who is still officially a victim of sexual assault and therefore goes by the initials V.L. in public records, and who will not agree to interviews—never recanted. She still says it all happened. Stephanie's recantation is compromised by the fact that she has fallen out with her father, Javier; he says she is recanting to get back at him. Her sister's accusations are compromised by the fact that she and Javier are still close.

On April 22, Stephanie and V.L. are expected to take the stand and hash it all out with lawyers for the four women and prosecutors. The judge will then make a recommendation to the state's Court of Criminal Appeals about whether the women are entitled to a ruling of "actual innocence" and millions* of dollars in compensation.

If the victim has recanted, the change of heart can easily be undermined by prosecutors.

But the hearing will have larger ramifications. Since the satanic abuse scandals died down, there has been a lingering intellectual battle between lawyers, journalists, and activists who have mostly succeeded in getting these cases overturned, and a small community of opponents who say the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of defendants that actual cases of child sexual assault are being papered over. In his 2014 book, The Witch-Hunt Narrative, Ross E. Cheit, a professor of political science at Brown University, argued, "We have, over the last 20 years, discounted the word of children who might testify about sexual abuse" and have become "more worried about overreacting to child sexual abuse than we are about underreacting to it."

Cheit reserves particular vitriol for Debbie Nathan, a journalist whose reporting for the Village Voice and book, Satan's Silence, challenged the satanic cases. Nathan now helps challenge convictions of child sexual abuse with the National Center for Reason & Justice, and it was she who learned of the San Antonio women from Darrell Otto and convinced lawyers with the Innocence Project of Texas to take on their case.

Although Cheit's book did not make a big splash, his line of argument is reflected in the fact that some of those convicted in the satanic abuse cases have not been exonerated. Among them are Jesse Friedman, who pleaded guilty to molesting children with his father at a computer class in Long Island in 1988. (His best-known supporter, the documentary filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, serves on the advisory board of The Marshall Project. He is also the director and co-producer of the HBO documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.) After Jarecki's 2003 film Capturing the Friedmans cast doubt on the allegations, prosecutors revisited the case file and reaffirmed his guilt in a disputed 2013 report.

And then there are Fran and Dan Keller, who ran a daycare in Austin, a short drive from San Antonio. The couple spent 22 years in prison after they were accused, in the words of the Austin American-Statesman, of "dismembering babies, torturing pets, desecrating corpses, videotaping orgies, and serving blood laced Kool-Aid in satanic rituals." Like the San Antonio women, the Kellers were recently freed while the case was reopened, but they have not been declared innocent. The Kellers are represented by Keith Hampton, who also is aiding Mike Ware in the effort to exonerate the San Antonio women.

Hampton and Ware, like all defense attorneys trying to exonerate defendants in these cases, are confronting the vagaries of child testimony. If the victim, now an adult, has not recanted, he or she may be relying on false memories, or the abuse may have really occurred, even if some of the most horrific stories are fictional.

If the victim has recanted, the change of heart can easily be undermined by prosecutors. In the fall of 2012, a young woman took the stand in San Antonio in efforts to exonerate her father. As a child, she had testified that he abused her, but now said it had never happened. As in the San Antonio Four case, she claimed to have been pressured by another family member with adverse motives. After her testimony, prosecutor Mary Beth Welsh told reporters, "The question turns on this witness and whether she was being truthful then or is being truthful now." A San Antonio judge found her credible, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declined to overturn the man's sentence, arguing the recantation was not enough to prove his innocence.

The testimony of Stephanie Limon and V.L. will present a microcosm of these issues of child testimony and memory, which haunt us a generation after the satanic abuse cases. There are two witnesses, alike in their unshakeable conviction, and one of them is wrong.

This story was reported by Maurice Chammah for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. You can sign-up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

*Texas pays the most of any state to the wrongfully convicted. In 2009, the state passed a law allowing $80,000 to be paid for each year of imprisonment. The San Antonio women would be collectively entitled to roughly $4.7 million.

There's Not Much Actual Cocaine in British Cocaine

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Illustration by Tom Scotcher

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

London is the cocaine capital of Europe. According to a report from 2014, the city has a higher concentration of coke in its water system than anywhere else on the continent; we're literally pissing away three times more of the stuff than Milan. British police have even stopped testing bank notes for traces of the drug because within weeks of entering circulation you can guarantee they'll have been shoved up a nose and scraped along a CD case.

Cocaine is everywhere—except, it seems, in the one place you expect it to be: cocaine.

"The streets are awash with white powder, they are not awash with drugs," says Lawrence Gibbons, Senior Operations Manager for Drugs at the National Crime Agency (NCA). "We analyze everything seized from an ounce upwards—the weight street dealers typically buy at—and we are regularly seizing huge quantities of substances which have zero traces of cocaine. An ounce at the moment is never more than 22 to 25 percent purity, and after that it is cut again before it hits the street. Dealers and customers genuinely don't know what they're buying, and that is the danger."

Plenty of casual users truly believe their guy gets the best stuff, especially those who employ nifty marketing techniques, like offering £50 or £90 bags [$70 or $130] to choose from. But, say experts, the UK cocaine market has long since collapsed to the point where no street level dealer can truly know what they are selling you. So convincing is the mimicry and so effective the cutting, one forensic expert who assesses seizures across the UK claims he has only seen "one or two single grams" of cocaine in the last two years that have tested at higher than 70 percent purity, expensively bought or otherwise.

The collapse in cocaine purity is credited to importers' enterprise with products normally found beside a dentist's chair. Around 2007, they discovered cocaine could be heavily cut with cheaply bought benzocaine—a dental anesthetic that mimics coke's numbing effect—in place of glucose, the previous cutting agent of choice. Benzocaine can be bought as an identical looking powder for around $17 per kilo from China, and can then be cut into cocaine at a ratio as high as 10:1 or more. This week, two men from South Wales were jailed for conspiracy to sell cocaine; they had aroused suspicion after buying 12 blenders from Asda to mix together four blocks of blow with 12.8 pounds of benzocaine.

Gibbons says, "If you go back to pre-2007, cocaine purity was reasonably high, but it was always cut with inert substances like glucose. However, there was only so far you could cut cocaine with glucose before the numbing effect—the 'Kojak test' you see detectives do on-screen—would dissipate. Dealers started using benzocaine or phenacetin, as they look like cocaine and have the same numbing effect, so they were able to cut harder to spread their product."

You might argue that the NCA—a national law enforcement agency—would say anything to stem the tide of drug use. But even independent testers claim that the nation's party drug of choice is teetering at near anemic levels.

Allen Morgan, an independent forensics expert who assesses drugs hauls for big trials, says: "Cocaine is as low as 1 percent and 3 percent in many seizures I have seen. Purity drops as the drug passes along the supply chain. Even at import standard you are looking at something which is 50 to 60 percent pure. I've seen seizures of whole kilos that have been bashed to near zero."

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A few lines of coke. Photo by Justin Caffier, via "I Got Cocaine Blown Up My Ass So You Don't Have to."

So popular are the cutting agents that last year's Queens' Speech promised to give police greater powers to seize, destroy, and prosecute those trading in them—many of whom hide under the guise of legitimate companies selling painkillers for university research, fish farms, and tattoo parlors.

The prosecutions made by Operation Kitley, a task force launched seven years ago specifically to tackle the trade in these substances, demonstrate the ratio of cutting agents to actual drugs. In 2011, for instance, dealer Jamie Dale, 32, was sentenced to 18 years after supplying 32 tons of cutting agents UK-wide. When he first fled from police, in his pants, carrying $30,000 worth of cash, officers found almost zero actual cocaine at his home. Tellingly, John Wright of the Serious Organized Crime Agency said after the trial, "If you have snorted cocaine since 2008, it is certain you will have snorted some of Dale's product."

In January of 2011, 24-year-old Craig McKoy was arrested in Luton following the discovery of 645 grams of cocaine and 53 pounds of Benzocaine in a cutting factory. In May of 2010, Mark Dear, 42, was found in possession of 704.81 grams of cocaine and 52 pounds of benzocaine in Cambridge. In June last year, Cornwall police sentenced a gang of 20 men to more than 100 years for dealing in over $1.5 million worth of cocaine. As part of the bust, dealer Jason Carter was caught with 4.4 pounds of benzocaine-laced coke with a tested purity of only 17 percent.

Just because benzocaine is found in anesthetic doesn't make it safe, says the NCA's Lawrence Gibbons. "Scientists have tested cocaine since the 1880s, and so we know many of its effects. However, this version of benzocaine is far removed from the small, standardized doses you get in dentistry—this is stuff made in bulk in bath tubs or factories in China. We have no idea what damage it does when taken in huge doses, snorted as powder or mixed with alcohol."

[body_image width='692' height='462' path='images/content-images/2015/03/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/17/' filename='london-theres-no-cocaine-in-your-cocaine-940-body-image-1426595300.jpg' id='36898']

Photo by Giorgi Nieberidze

Clearly, this hasn't put anyone off. Dean (not his real name), a 29-year-old dealer, delivers $103 gram wraps to parties and flats across west London, telling me his clients don't mind snorting the stepped-on stuff.

"There's so many weekenders and day festivals—everyone goes to Ibiza or Glasto at least once in their life now—and they want drugs as part of that experience," he says. "They ask, 'Is this decent stuff?' but even if you let them try a bit first most of them haven't got a clue if it's any good. They take it anyway. They've decided they want drugs and will buy it however it comes."

The cocaine market is now split into two defined tiers—those happy to pay $45 to $60 for "bashed up" street cocaine, and those who will pay a premium—anything from $100 to $220 a gram—to acquire a better quality wrap. Higher premium cocaine—upwards of 40 percent purity—is often called "flake" because of its shimmering snow-like appearance, but it too can also be copied, according to Gibbons.

"Phenacetin—a known carcinogenic—has the same shimmering appearance as purest cocaine," he says. "You could put a bag of each in front of a user, and without testing it's near impossible to tell the difference."

Some dealers buy forensic kits to test the quality of drugs they purchase. However, without those, even many established sellers won't really know what they're buying, says drugs expert Morgan. "If you're really mixing in high society and can demand import standard, it is available at a price," he explains. "But dealers often think they are selling import-standard gear as they bought it in sealed, stamped blocks as if a cartel has packed it. However, gangs have been known to rip off other dealers by hiring presses from Speedy Hire, bashing up cocaine with cutting agents, then re-pressing it so it looks like it has come straight off a boat."

Such was the state of the UK's cocaine market that punters were steadily leaving it behind—other drugs, like MDMA and mephedrone, grew in popularity (ephedrine, a former legal high, has grown 300 percent in popularity since it was banned in 2010)—and the cocaine market temporally rallied in 2012, says Morgan. "Two years ago, people were sick of buying a gram of cocaine that was inevitably underweight, and when they took it didn't actually do anything for them. They would get 800 mg [.8 grams] of a substance that was 1 percent cocaine. They switched to mephedrone or amphetamine instead."

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Photo by Chris Bethell

This statement is borne out by the UK Focal Point On Drugs Report, which details drug purity. In December of 2008 an ounce (28 grams)—the size that a dealer would buy at before selling himself —as found to be 21 percent pure. This momentarily rallied to 46 percent by June of 2012, only to collapse again to 28 percent by March of this year.

So if cocaine isn't worth the paper it's wrapped in, why are people still doing it? Adam, 28, a futures analyst at a bank, admits taking $100 grams of cocaine every other weekend with mates, but only half believes their insistence he's doing "decent stuff."

He says: "I love the ritual of doing cocaine—the edginess of waiting for the dealer to arrive, bundling into a club toilet to do a line with a mate. For that tiny moment you have a couple of grams with your mates we feel like rock stars. My weekday life is boring—I don't want my weekends to be like that. Also, as idiotic as it sounds, girls are all over you if they think they can score a line from you."

Dean, "a higher end dealer" (his own words), says his customers rely on cocaine because they have lost the ability to talk to each other without it. "I deal at parties, and I sit there and can't believe how dull people are," he says. "They're so wired into technology that they just sit looking at their phone all night. It's only when they've had a dab or a few lines that they seem to be able to talk face to face. It's like a placebo."

Worryingly, the fact that bashed cocaine is cheaper actually makes it more attractive, says forensics expert Morgan. "Traditionally people preferred cocaine as it had a smoother comedown and, unlike amphetamine, was made from a plant, so people viewed it as safer. Now it's so cheap—because of bashing—more people can afford to try it."

It's just unlikely they'll ever know what they're trying.

Follow Andy on Twitter.

Comics: Envoy - 'Market at City One'

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Look at Lane Milburn's website and get his book from Fantagraphics.

SpaceX: No One Laughs Anymore When We Talk About Colonizing Mars

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SpaceX: No One Laughs Anymore When We Talk About Colonizing Mars

Meet the Former Drug-Dealing Gangster Turning Kids Away from Extremism

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Tanayah Sam (Photo by Jermaine Pinnock)

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

For a minute or two after getting into Tanayah Sam's car, I wonder if I'm mistaken about the former leading member of Birmingham's notorious Burger Bar Boys gang. An imam is angrily denouncing Charlie Hebdo's pictures of the Prophet Mohammed over the stereo, and the noise overwhelms our initial introduction. On the way to our meeting, the day's newspaper headlines had imposed themselves upon me: Jihadi John had been identified as 27-year-old Londoner Mohammed Emwazi.

In the current climate, significant points in Tanayah's past could be read as a checklist on the road toward dangerous radicalization: a gun-toting, drug-dealing outlaw jumps bail while awaiting trial for armed robbery, devotes himself to Islam and ends up in Yemen, well known as the home of a number of jihadist training grounds. When he was finally caught in Birmingham four years later and given a nine-year sentence, Tanayah was labeled an "Islamic gang leader" and moved around 11 different prisons.

Back in Tanayah's car I listen carefully to the imam's sermon. The impassioned voice goes up a notch. The real ire has been saved for the murderers who slaughtered Charlie Hebdo's staff. Like Tanayah's story, it would be a mistake to allow initial impressions to obscure the truth.

The truth is that Tanayah is far from a danger to the public, and is in fact shaping up to be an important player in the struggle to prevent those in Britain who are disenfranchised enough from straying into a life of crime or Islamic extremism. This isn't a personal opinion. The 34-year-old has been accepted to study for his Master of Criminology at Cambridge, despite never having attended university before.

The key to his rehabilitation and ongoing contribution to British society? Tanayah says he couldn't have done it without Allah.

We drive to an inner-city Birmingham school for pupils with behavioral difficulties, which is surrounded by tower blocks where groups of youths stand around aimlessly outside scruffy shopping rows. Tanayah is here to help organize a trip to a nearby prison for a group of at-risk children so selected inmates can give them an impression of what's in store if they choose to carry on as they have been—just one part of the decidedly secular work Tanayah does within the prison system. The harried but upbeat teacher he's working with informs me that anti-extremism officers are planning to give a talk at the school.

As the teacher walks us off the premises we pass a teenage boy in the center of a group of unruly kids.

Pointing to him, Tanayah says to the teacher: "I want that one there to come."

There's some amiable passing conversation; the teenager says that a relative of his is in prison and asks if Tanayah knows him. He mentions a name: nothing. He mentions a street name: there seems to be a glimmer of recognition in Tanayah's eyes.

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A young Tanayah

That criminal behavior can be passed down through families is familiar to most, but Tanayah's knowledge of the process is as intimate as it comes. Until he was 14, Tanayah was raised by his mom in a steady and loving home. He was doing well in school and loved soccer. Then his reggae-artist father, who'd been an intermittent presence during Tanayah's childhood and was involved in the Yardie culture, came back onto the scene. One night while he was staying at his dad's, things changed forever.

"He called me into his bedroom and he had a revolver gun in his hand. He's like, 'Come here, son.' I've gone to him, and he's said, 'Go on, hold this.' He helped me point the gun out the window and I fired one shot. Then it was a pat on the back and I could go back to my bedroom," Tanayah explains.

"When I look back, it was like a rite of passage in his world. In some African cultures, kids at that age get circumcised, or they might go out into the wilderness and kill a wild beast. He made me fire a gun."

After his initiation Tanayah was granted access to his father's pseudo-celebrity world of good times and bad behavior. The 14-year-old decided he didn't need an education. What was the point of learning when it was obvious you could take everything you wanted by force? In the space of a year Tanayah went from being near the top of his class to being expelled for stabbing a school-mate in the chest with a screwdriver.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/h6_yUr4i1OQ' width='640' height='480']

Footage from the Love Express sound system in Birmingham in 1986, the scene Tanayah's dad was involved in

The Jamaican music scene, once a cultural aside to day-to-day life, took more and more precedence. Tanayah's social group narrowed until it included only the offspring of broken homes and badman fathers, all of which—at that time—centered around dancehall club nights in Birmingham.

Things fell apart: his mom chucked him out because of his increasingly wayward behavior, and schooling stopped altogether. He moved in with his dad for a while before his mom, in desperation, sent him to Jamaica to spend time with his grandma. Tanayah was back within six weeks and had decided to change course.

"When I got back to my mom's I was this humble kid. She can see a change in my attitude and I know not to go home with too much badness," Tanayah tells me. "But in front of my dad and my uncles I'm smoking weed. There's older women sharing my bed. I remember, at one point, being at my dad's and there were some Yardies there and there were four guns just laying on the table. By the time I was 15 I was gone—just deep in that world."

By now, Tanayah had started to make inroads of his own into the netherworld of criminal life. Swapping reggae for drum and bass he and his friends also had new role models to look up to: the original Burger Bar Crew, who, in 1996, were wresting control of the drug market from the Yardies one murder at a time. Sixteen-year-old Tanayah and his friends were still fledging gangsters, but they were starting to get noticed at club nights, and they were enjoying the notoriety.

"When you're name's bigged up on the mic and everyone's listening, it's like you become that celeb. I think a lot of us suffered from feeling invisible. Our mums were holding down jobs and doing the best they possibly could. But a mum can't be a dad," Tanayah says. "And the father element in life, you don't have it—and when you do, you just see a celebrity father, so to speak. You want that. Without that you're not there, you're not noticed."

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Tanayah as a young man

From 16 to 19 Tanayah's life went something like this: selling weed turned into moving heroin and crack, carrying a knife turned into walking with a gun, rivalries turned into murderous feuds, friendships turned into faustian pacts, prison stints turned into stretches (at one point he even did time with his dad).

By 1999 the Badder Bar crew that Tanayah had become a major player in were widely feared, inheriting the Burger Bar's position (though, to the outside world, they would still be known by that name, as it became a kind of shorthand to refer to a number of gangs in the area). Instead of battling with Jamaican-born Yardies they fought, often to the death, with other nearby black British gangs. It was the beginning of one of the bloodiest periods of modern Birmingham's history.

§

It's Friday, so the roads around the mosque are crowded with parked cars. After finding a parking space Tanayah hurries into the mosque, which has been converted from an old church, to pray. Inside, the building is bare except for a large red carpet and patterned stained glass windows. The simple layout is designed to invite uninterrupted contemplation.

The imam's voice is melodic and soothing, and the collective rustling of shell-suit tops and puffer jackets sound like autumn leaves as the worshippers bend to pray. Compared to the frenetic end-of-week streets outside it is a relaxing and serene atmosphere—one that is central to Tanayah's life. It's a long way from the jungle MCs shout outs and breakbeats, heard in an all together different type of temple, that were so coveted in his youth.

After prayers have finished I ask Tanayah about the armed robbery. We're driving to the halal butchers to pick up the two sheep that have been slaughtered in celebration of his baby boy's birth, as per Islamic tradition. The botched attempt to rob an off-license in 2000 is a shameful and embarrassing subject for him. The shopkeeper wrestled with him and the gun went off twice, thankfully without injuring anyone.

"I just look like a dick. I just wanted some money for some weed—it wasn't even like it was going to be profitable. I was living on adrenaline and I had this concept that I could do whatever I wanted," he admits. "I didn't think about the after-effects it could have had on that man's life. I wanted to say sorry, but they told me after the trial that it was better to leave it alone. I feel guilty about the bad things I've done. Now I have to put in more positive than I have negative."

The robbery was a turning point. Tanayah had flirted with the idea of Islam some months earlier, but after two weeks of trying to stay straight a rival gang member had pulled a gun on him and he dived back in. This time was different: after being arrested and charged for the robbery, and questioned about numerous other serious offenses, he looked at his life and realized that it was an unmitigated disaster. Whatever happened—whether he was on the streets or behind bars—there was no escape from the ever-deepening cycles of crime and incarceration.

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(Photo by Jermaine Pinnock)

Alone in his cell, Tanayah got down on his knees and began to pray: "I said to Allah, 'If you can get me out, I promise I'm not going back to the street, I'm going to change.'"

Tanayah was bailed out and he kept his word, though it was a slow and delicate process. First he cut off contact with his boys, a risky decision that contained the real possibility of internecine bloodshed. On top of this, his enemies would kill him if given the opportunity, so he was still carrying a gun in the fault-line neighborhood where he lived.

At the same time, Tanayah was also carrying the Bible and the Quran, sitting on the steps of Birmingham's central library, "reading both and just trying to figure it out." The Bible had been given to him by a friend of his dad's named Doc, who died. The inscription reads: "To Tanayah from Doc. Walk good."

A chance encounter with a taxi driver led Tanayah to his first visit to a mosque, and over the next few months he began his long journey from rude boy to religious man. The armed robbery trial was drawing closer and closer, and after being told by his barrister that he was facing 15 years, Tanayah "jumped on a plane to Yemen" in spring of 2001.

"I was relieved when I did get locked up. The running took its toll."

Tanayah says: "Yemen at the time was where a lot of Muslims were going to learn the religion. It wasn't as it is today. There was a connection there for me, brothers were there to meet me from different countries, from different races, and this became something that just cemented that there was no way I was going back into the criminal lifestyle. I started to learn a bit of Arabic and the cultural aspects of Islam."

After four months Tanayah returned to England as a wanted man. Despite being on the run, and suffering two gang-related attempts on his life, Tanayah says he stayed on the straight and narrow through cash-in-hand and agency work, and a strict adherence to Islam. After four years the police caught up with him and, in 2005, he was sentenced to nine years in prison for armed robbery.

"I was relieved when I did get locked up. The running took its toll," he tells me.

§

We pull up next to a mosque and Islamic bookshop in a rundown area, with two dead sheep in the trunk. A few men dressed in Muslim robes are hanging around outside. Tanayah starts putting the cut up meat into plastic bags and handing it out to people as a gift, in accordance with tradition.

Nine or ten people are now gathered around the car. A guy pulls up in a VW Polo and asks Tanayah what he's selling. Learning the meat is free he happily takes a bag and drives off.

David (not his real name) is one of those at the car. Wearing Kickers boots, a white thobe and a Yasser Arafat scarf draped over a head that, in previous years, likely sported dreadlocks, David—with his thick Jamaican accent—is a striking figure.

The 40-year-old tells me he used to be "on the road," but left the criminal life after converting to Islam.

"I went back a couple of times when I needed the money. But every time I did I felt a little bit worse, until I stopped altogether," he says.

David slips his arm through mine, points to the sky and gives me his patois-inflected take on Islam's explanation of the mysteries of existence. It's a gentle enough theory and is pleasant to listen to.

Then he switches subject: "We're not those funny Muslims who say they can't be free here. Nobody goes hungry, you can have a place to live. That's what it's about."

David spreads his arms and legs wide like a star and says: "Look, I'm free to practice my religion right here."

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/03/19/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/19/' filename='tanayah-sam-former-burger-bar-boy-islamic-gang-830-body-image-1426781498.jpg' id='37911']

(Photo by Jermaine Pinnock)

In prison, Tanayah's practice of Islam brought advantages and disadvantages. Once imprisoned gang members realized he had renounced the life and was not only a practicing Muslim but also versed in the Arabic root of the religion, he was left alone. His incarceration was violence free, except for one incident, when a young gang member attacked him in an attempt to prove himself. The disadvantage was that the authorities mistook him as an Islamic gang leader, which led to him being shuttled around 11 different prisons.

"I got labeled as the leader of a Muslim gang, which was ironic, 'cos I was actually trying to diffuse guys away from extremist ideologies and gangs. Some of it was because Muslims are taught to pray together," he says. "On one wing I was on there was 18 Muslims out of a population of 60. The prison officers weren't really knowledgeable about Islam or gang culture, so naturally it worried them. Unfortunately it can fuel the anti-authority attitude that leads many to adopt Islam in the first place, when in fact true Islam is not hostile to authority."

In 2013, Muslim prisoners in England and Wales had doubled from 7 percent of prisoners in 2002 to 14 percent, with the numbers continuing to grow. Muslims make up just 4.7 percent of the population in England and Wales. It is a controversial topic and one the Ministry of Justice apparently does not want discussed. Repeated requests to speak to its Muslim Prison Advisor about issues surrounding the religion's rehabilitative qualities have been denied.

While, for Tanayah, becoming a Muslim meant he was given the structure to stop committing crime and lead a productive life, it doesn't mean he's been prevented from identifying the problems that crop up when Islam is practiced behind bars. Since his release in 2010 Tanayah has worked within nine prisons, teaching convicts about engaging in civil society, working with gang members to develop the skills needed to exit the lifestyle, and guiding the authorities to better understand the prison population. He's had a front row seat from which he can properly evaluate things.

Tanayah says there is a lack of diversity among Muslim prison chaplains, and that recent converts in prison need religious guidance from people they identify with. A middle-aged imam of Pakistani origin from Bradford is perhaps not the best person to communicate the core tenets of Islam to a young black man from London. If a convert does not relate to the recognized religious authority within a prison, Tanayah says, there is the potential that he will turn to someone he does relate to—usually a fellow prisoner—and that can have dangerous implications.

This is just one of the avenues Tanayah hopes to explore and expand on at Cambridge, most of them secular topics he understands through hard-learned insight. That is if he can raise the £18,000 ($26,500) needed to take the Masters Degree.

"Islam is not for everyone, and I don't push my religion on anyone. If you ask I will inform, but that's as far as it goes. I genuinely just want to help people break the cycle of crime, so if I can't go to Cambridge I'll be happy continuing with my work," he says.

"But I'm praying that I can go."

Follow Ryan on Twitter.



Progressive Economists Released an Alternative Budget Calling for Hipster Farms, Cheap Tuition, and a Tiny Military

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Somewhere in the space-time continuum, there is an alternative universe. In it, there is bizarro Canada. The residents of that nation have cheap tuition, mandated equal pay for men and women, a massive childcare plan, rapid public transit in every city, and start-up family farms dotting the countryside. The people dress in bowler hats and ascots, and they are governed by what is known in our timeline as the Alternative Federal Budget.

And while this policy document, the brainchild of left-wing wonks at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), may seem absurd and unattainable in our bleak and austere reality, in their world of progressive think-tankery, anything is possible.

Here's the scheme: boost spending next year by more than $50 billion dollars, and cancel or implement enough taxes to bring in about $35 billion. Then, cross your fingers and hope that all your investment and job creation plans pan out and the gap between those two numbers shrinks to about $9 billion, by the 2017 fiscal year.

That means we're looking at about a $5-billion deficit in three years, if you want to follow the CCPA down their yellow brick road. On the other hand: we'll have a lot more wind turbines.

The CCPA releases these blueprints every year around the same time, as a window into how bizarro Canada functions, but this year is a bit different. Between cratering oil prices, slower-than-expected growth projections, and increasingly lean federal departments—and the fact that we won't even see a federal budget until April—things are a bit weird in 2015.

So there might be a little more interest in this left-leaning exercise in hypotheticals this time around.

The CCPA doesn't appear to have a lot of faith that Stephen Harper will change course and adopt its socialist schemes wholesale, but the document does go over well in some circles within the NDP and Liberals.

Indeed, Thomas Mulcair's party shares quite a few ideas with CCPA. Creating a universal child care program, for one. ($6 billion over three years, in the alternative budget.) They've also voiced support in the past for yanking development subsidies from Alberta's tar sands. (CCPA thinks that will save the government about $1 billion by 2018.)

The report also advocates huge expansions in federal infrastructure projects and public transit (to the tune of about $13 billion over three years), which has been a favourite talking point of the Trudeau Liberals.

But it's unlikely that any party would latch on to all the hugely expensive spending proposals set out in the document. There's $4 billion in new international assistance, $14 billion to undo federal department budget cuts, well over $25 billion to expand medicare and create a national pharmacare program, and much more.

On the other side, if the think tank were to suddenly be installed as government in some sort of centre-left coup d'etat, it would move to raise taxes on just about everything. The CCPA would eliminate income splitting, not just for families with children—which is the most recent controversial proposal from the Conservatives—but also for the elderly, for whom income splitting has proved immensely popular. They would also slap an inheritance tax on estates over $5 million, crackdown on tax havens, limit tax-free savings accounts, raise corporate taxes, and create a new tax bracket over $250,000. Oh, and there'd be a massive carbon tax that hopes to pull in $28 billion within three years. (They would return about half of this cash to, ostensibly, non-polluting citizens.)

The CCPA says their plan will do a lot to level the income gap between men and women, reduce income inequality, reduce CO2 emissions, and increase employment.

VICE asked Mike Moffatt, economics professor at the Ivey Business School and part-time member of Justin Trudeau's economic council, what he thought of the plan.

"It's certainly entertaining," he says.

He says the thing is a mixed bag: some good ideas some bad. But, generally, it's "unrealistic."

The whole report really relies on overly-optimistic job numbers based on the assumption that a rapidly-aging Canada could, overnight, get back to its overheated job numbers of 2007 despite massive new taxes. Even then, it still projects a budget deficit.

"I don't know who's going to be doing the hiring, given the billions of dollars of taxes they're putting on business," he says.

He highlights the fatal flaw that always crops up in pie-in-the-sky projects from progressive projections like this one.

"They're going to tax the snot out of every manufacturer in southern Ontario to the extent that they're going to Ohio, then they're going to offer them $450 million to come back," he says, referring to the "value-added" grant that the CCPA is proposing for industries like the auto sector. "It makes no sense."

But even if the Alternative Federal Budget wouldn't actually work in our dimension, the program still has some suggestions that are infrequently talked about on the national level. To that end, this is an exercise is forcing everyone to think outside the box.

For one, it proposes reducing tuition to 1992 levels (which was about $3,000, or half of what it is today). It also suggests massive amounts of funding in water conservation and improving wastewater mitigation. On gender equality, it proposes requiring gender-income parity for federal employers. For the rural hipsters and lumbersexuals who want to live off the land, there's $300 million in aid for young and new farmers.

The Alternative Federal Budget isn't all just taxes and spending, though—they also want to cut spending in some places. Namely, the military: they also propose cutting military spending by $1.5 billion by 2018.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Why Did the Booze Police Beat Up a University of Virginia Honors Student?

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The University of Virginia campus. Photo via Flickr user Philip Larson

University of Virginia student Martese Johnson was trying to get into an Irish pub when an officer with the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control grabbed him. Witnesses were stunned when, with an assist from another ABC cop, the officer wrestled the popular honors student to the ground and continued to manhandle him as one onlooker yelled, "Yo! His head is bleeding!"

A snapshot of Johnson, bloodied and subdued, has made the social media rounds, sparked a 1,000-person rally on the UVA campus last night and birthed the hashtag #JusticeForMartese. Johnson, who according to his lawyer needed ten stitches in his head, is charged with obstruction of justice without force and public swearing or intoxication. He was released on $1,500 bail Wednesday morning.

The scuffle has led to renewed criticism of Virginia's Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC), who effectively serve as the fun police. As in more than a dozen other states, Virginia's ABC regulates alcohol sales and helps enforce booze-related laws. According to news reports and UVA students, the local ABC has a tense relationship with the hard-partying students it's supposed to protect, and its officers have a history of going over the top in trying to police alcohol use.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/0faIzE0TSJA' width='560' height='315']

In Virginia, residents can only buy liquor from stores run by the ABC, which falls under the auspices of the Secretariat of Public Safety and Homeland Security. They also arrest kids with fakes, and rumors swirl around campus on Friday nights about what bars they'll be monitoring or if they're going to come raid a particular dorm in search of contraband.

Suffice it to say this incident isn't the first time they've looked really, really bad. Last year, a woman named Elizabeth Daly was confronted by seven plainclothes ABC officers after buying cookie dough, ice cream, and a pack of bottled water from a Kroger that's next to the ABC store. The officers, who had mistaken the water for beer, banged on the 20-year-old's car and terrified her. Then they arrested her and made her spend a night in jail. That fuck-up ended up costing the agency $212,500 in settlement money.

False arrests like that one have understandably left a bad taste in students' mouths. One UVA junior, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that she suspected some people were using the latest incident with Johnson as an excuse to shit-talk everybody's least favorite law enforcement apparatus.

"I think in general a lot of people have gotten behind Martese, but personally I haven't really an opinion yet because there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence yet," she told me. "No one really seems to have the exact story."

It seems like local officials are taking the situation extremely seriously. Governor Terry McAuliffe is calling for an investigation by the Virginia State Police, and while the Alcohol Beverage Control did not return requests for comment from either their national or local Virginia offices, the agency did issue a statement saying the officers involved would be restricted to administrative duty until it's finished.

For her part, University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan has issued a very strongly worded letter condemning the attack.

"This was wrong and should not have occurred," she wrote. "In the many years of our medical, professional and leadership roles at the University, we view the nature of this assault as highly unusual and appalling based on the information we have received."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Republicans Have Their Fear Candidate for 2016

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"Jeb couldn't be here today and you better be glad, 'cause it would have been $10,000 a plate. Cruz couldn't be here 'cause he's building a fence. ... Any Democrats here? You better be glad Scott Walker's not here, 'cause he would beat you up."

The jokes are decent, as far as jokes about people running for president go. A little dad-ish, a little amateur, but not bad—they get at the essence of three Republican candidates, short and punchy, and not mean, per se, but also not not mean. If I was Senator Ted Cruz, and I heard myself described as being off somewhere building a fence, I'd probably shake my jowls and shrug.

The best part about those jokes isn't the jokes themselves, though; it's that they came from another prospective GOP candidate. Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator from South Carolina who, despite his state's redder-than-raw-meat politics, clobbered Tea Party challengers in 2014, is considering a run for president in the next cycle, and that means making jokes at events like the St. Patrick's Day breakfast roast in Nashua, New Hampshire.

To give you a sense of how unlikely Graham's dominance in South Carolina was in 2014, here's a paragraph from Molly Ball's profile of the senator for The Atlanticlast spring:

On paper, Graham is the right wing's juiciest target. An unapologetic champion of bipartisanship and compromise, he has worked with Democrats on initiatives such as immigration reform and climate legislation. Conservative blogs and talk radio have nicknamed him "Flimsy Lindsey" and "Grahamnesty." ... He has been censured by nine separate South Carolina county GOP organizations and heckled at his state party convention. For years, a local activist has driven around with a Graham effigy stuffed headfirst into a toilet, leading a brigade of self-styled "RINO hunters." In 2012, the president of the Club for Growth said Graham would be the fiscally conservative group's top target this year.

But Graham didn't just win last year: he annihilated his far-right opponents, taking 56 percent of the primary vote. After that, the general election was pretty much a foregone conclusion. And while any bid for the White House would be a serious long shot—another joke Graham made at Tuesday's roast was about how Senator John McCain, his BFF and closest neocon ally in the Senate, is his "best and, quite frankly, only supporter"—he might have an outside chance of being the most entertaining candidate of 2016.

Right now, the field of potential Republican candidates mostly falls along one of two possible lines. There's the establishment conservatives like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie, and there's the far-right candidates, like Cruz, Walker, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul. Given Christie's spectacular implosion, Graham could be the candidate injecting, at least from an outside perspective, a little fun into the race: unlike the ultra-conservatives, he's unlikely to try and defund the Department of Education, and unlike Bush, he has a discernible personality. He's been one of the few Republicans bold enough to offer unmitigated resistance to the Tea Party, and he usually does so by aggressively belittling them. He and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid reportedly end phone calls by exchanging F-bombs. He's never sent an email. And he has almost no chance of winning any 2016 election, at least as things stand right now, so unlike the rest of the field, he's free to say and do as he pleases.

There is one complicating factor, though, and it's a big one. Like his best bud McCain, this dude is a big-time hawk. Like, a "with us or against us," wipe-our-enemies-off-the-face-of-the-planet, America is in a "religious war against radical Islam" kind of hawk, one who thinks the Middle East is once again ripe for some good-old-fashioned American interventionism. One of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration's foreign policy, Graham has been against negotiating with Iran from the beginning, telling talk radio host Hugh Hewitt last month that nuclear Ayatollahs would be "the greatest threat the world will know in my lifetime." And you get the sense that he really, truly believes this.

In fact, these convictions are the reasons why Graham got it in his head to run for president in the first place. As Stephen F. Hayes wrote for The Weekly Standard, Graham is so certain that Obama has brought America to the brink of nuclear winter, he thinks he may be the only one who can fix shit around here.

The positions put Graham pretty far outside public opinion, and will likely freak the hell out of any left-of-center American, as well as many Republicans who aren't convinced the US should jump back in to another overseas war in the desert. It could also be the sticking point for those on the far right who would otherwise be appalled by Graham's more centrist views on domestic issues. If the South Carolina Senator does become a real player in the Republican primary, we can look forward to seeing the GOP have a dark night of the soul as it decides which issues truly drive the party.

After last year's State of the Union, Graham told reporters, "The world is literally about to blow up," and strongly implied that it was Obama's fault. It's one thing to call an opposition president weak—as a Republican Senator who actually does think the world is about to blow up, it's almost your duty—but it's another to level that charge against members of your own party. Graham's belief that he's the only guy that knows how to work the fire extinguisher is bound to cause a panic among his 2016 primary opponents, pushing the entire GOP field to the right on foreign policy, and turning the Republican campaign into a race for who can fearmonger hardest. So as entertaining as the rest of us might find Graham and his Southern dad jokes, you can rest assured that his fellow candidates won't be laughing.

Follow Kevin on Twitter

The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion

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The CIA Just Declassified the Document That Supposedly Justified the Iraq Invasion
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