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Radu Mazăre partying in Brazil. Photo by Ștefan Ciocan/Mediafax Foto

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania.

Located right by the Black Sea, Constanța is Romania's main port and its number-one tourist destination, and for the past 19 years it's had the pleasure of being run by mayor and legendary party animal Radu Mazăre. If you keep up with local Romanian politics you'll know that Radu was recently arrested for—among other things—allegedly accepting a $10 million bribe for a contract that cost taxpayers $28 million more than it should have.

But we're not here to talk about politics and corruption; we're here to talk about a flamboyant man who spends his days doing extreme sports, and inadvertently wearing Nazi uniforms to fashion shows, and his nights partying. A man who, whenever it gets too cold, jets out to his mansion in Brazil, because it's totally fine to just rule Constanța over the phone for a couple of months a year, right?

Presumably inspired by Rio's carnival, Radu has started holding his own version in Romania during the summer, providing a convenient excuse to dress up and party even more than he already was. In fact, turns out he loves dressing up so much that he sometimes even does it at political events. Here are his ten most ridiculous costumes.

Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE PHARAOH
During one of his infamous carnivals, Radu dressed up as a kind of Rameses knockoff, complete with the apathetic wax-statue stare of someone who's really nailed that whole "phoned-in governance" thing.

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Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE KNIGHT
Here he is dressed like Stephen the Great, a famous Romanian historical leader, dwarf, religious nut, and pimp. Tyrion Lannister if Tyrion Lannister were obsessed with building churches.

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Photo by Andreea Alexandru/Mediafax Foto

THE EDWARDIAN PARTY KING
Here you'd probably assume Radu is at another carnival event. He's not. He's just at a tourism fair, inexplicably dressed like a fairytale king.

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Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE SEXY SULTAN
Here he is dressed like sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, doing his best to troll anyone who's ever used the hashtag #culturalappropriation.

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Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE FLASHY HUNTER
I don't know what's going on here. Is he supposed to be a Zulu king? Did he just have a crown and some feathers left over in his dress-up box? Either way, it looks like he's having a much better time ruling his city than de Blasio (or maybe not?).

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Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE FRENCH ARISTOCRAT
Here he is holding a cane, dressed like Louis XIV, because fuck responsibility.

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Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE COURT JESTER
Presented without comment.

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Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE PICADOR
Yeah he's been accused of some pretty serious corruption charges, but hear me out: can you name any other local politicians who've decided it's OK to take a night off, rent a bullfighter outfit, and prance around onstage at a fashion show? Didn't think so.

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Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE REVOLUTIONARY
In 2011 Radu was under investigation for corruption, which naturally led to him showing up at press conferences to discuss his accusations dressed like Che Guevara. That's how much of a fuck he gives.

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Photo by Cristi Cimpoes/Mediafax Foto

THE BOASTER
Still not a carnival. Nor a building site. Just a regular political event, showing his team that he has so much money it requires a big old shovel to move it about.

Long live Mayor Mazăre.

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A German player getting quite into the game at the British and World Marbles Championship.

Some sporting rivalries are carved in stone. AFC Wimbledon and MK Dons in soccer, the Yankees and the Red Sox in Baseball, the Cleveland Browns and the Pittsburgh Steelers in football, England and Germany in the world of competitive marbles.

This year's British and World Marbles Championship was a case in point, with Germany's Mermel Club Erzgebirge—which had won three of the previous five tournaments—pitching up at The Greyhound pub in Tinsley Green, West Sussex to face English teams with names like The Handcross 49ers, the Yorkshire Meds, and the Black Dog Boozers.

It's not a sport that gets a lot of media coverage, marbles—presumably because most events seem to take place in bar parking lots, or because not many banks want to sponsor teams of middle-aged men who drink Old Speckled Hen while competing. So to get a handle on what a marbles championship consists of I headed to The Greyhound on Good Friday to watch the competition and meet some of the teams.

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The ale was already flowing when I arrived, and it was pretty easy to distinguish the teams who'd signed up for a good time (one team's members were all dressed as Waldo, of Where's Waldo? fame) and those out to win.

The Tinsley Green tournament apparently dates back to 1588, when two local men who were into the same milk maiden decided that the best way to her heart was via a marbles competition. However, operating in its current form at The Greyhound since 1932, the British and World Marbles Championship now consists of two teams containing six players, each vying to knock as many "target marbles" out of a six-foot-wide sandy ring as possible using a larger marble, or "tolley." Whoever knocks the most out wins.

In total, 16 teams tried their luck, but the ruthless efficiency of Erzgebirge proved too much: the English were swept aside with multiple flicks of the thumb. The Germans cruised to victory and yet another title.

After Erzgebirge had been crowned victors I had a chat with some of the competitors.

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Barry Ray
"I won the championship four times in the late-1970s and early-80s—that was with the Handcross Rebels. But we disbanded; we got too old, some passed away, some have moved on. I started practicing in the winter of 1951. I've been playing ever since. This is the 63rd time I've been here.

"My grandfather was a big player down here. He was a real character—he was known as Jim 'Atomic Thumb' Longhurst. His forte was to shoot marbles from three feet away—in, say, a pub—against a beer glass, either a pint jug or a dimpled one, and he would smash it."

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The PIMPS (The Plough Inn Marbles Society)
"We played the reigning champions, the Germans, in the first round, and they were excellent. We've never played before, but we had fun. We still managed to score. Our pub, The Plough Inn in Ifield, has been represented for the last five or six years, but the lads who normally play are away on a skiing trip, so we're stand-ins. Time for an early bath."

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The Rolling Drunks
"We've been here the last seven or eight years. We've never got past the first round apart from this year. It's monumental. We've never found out what makes a good marbles player."

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John Roberts of the Turners Hill Tolleymen (front row, second from left)
"I founded the team back in 1981, I think it was. I've been coming here from when I was a kid. I've always followed it and thought it would be good to get a team together some day. We've been getting worse ever since.

"We built two marbles rings like the one here out the back of our local pub, The Red Lion. We did make the semi-final four years running, but we're in the process of rebuilding—it's a work in progress.

"It's a social game, isn't it? You can see there's a lot of beer involved. The spirit is to turn up and play. There are only a few games or sports where the taking part is the main thing."

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Phil Schaifer of the Mermel Club Erzgebirge, Germany (third from left)
"We have come all the way from East Germany to play in this tournament. We trained three or four times before we arrived."

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Junior Garth
"I've played marbles in France, Belgium, Holland... it's a dedication. It helps if you like a tipple. I've been in the game more than 40 years. I would like to see more youngsters involved."

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Ian Gardner
"I've been playing marbles for 40 years. It takes a lot of practice, like every other sport, but now I'm getting old I don't practice so much—it's hard getting up and down now; my legs ache. I've won the team event 16 times. That's not too bad, is it?"

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Two members of the winning team, Mermel Club Erzebirge
"Wir sprechen kein Englisch!" ("We don't speak English!")

See more photos from the event below:

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The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach. Photo via Flickr user DVIDSHUB

It's time to admit it: America sucks at war. The last time we decisively defeated our enemies was 1945. Korea was a draw, Vietnam a defeat, the first Gulf War only a qualified success—Saddam Hussein stayed in power considerably longer than George H.W. Bush—Afghanistan and Iraq epic disasters for American foreign policy. The United States has more firepower at its fingertips than any empire in history but seems unable to translate all that might into anything that could be called victory.

Considering the United States spends over $500 billion a year on war, almost as much as the rest of the world put together, we don't seem to be getting much bang for our military buck. If any other government program cost as much as the Pentagon with as little to show for it, Americans across the political spectrum would be up in arms. Instead, they mouth "Thank you for your service" and shrug at the size of the military budget.

This is not to say we don't win battles. In Afghanistan after right after 9/11 I watched the US crush the Taliban in record time as a news cameraman. When I arrived in the country, the Taliban controlled all the cities and most of the countryside; the Northern Alliance, outnumbered and outgunned, ruled mere slivers of land. All us journos figured the war would be a long hard slog, at least four to six months, even with American help.

And then, we began to hear the pounding of B-52 strikes. A handful of Special Forces soldiers had secretly infiltrated across the Uzbek border. Dressed like mujahideen, riding Arabian stallions towards Taliban front lines, these trained spotters called in precise air strikes on enemies tanks and trenches. Northern Alliance commanders would point out the targets, the spotters would aim their lasers, the B-52s would aim, and, like magic, the Taliban's ancient Russian tanks would be transformed into heaps of blazing metal. Taliban soldiers soon abandoned their trenches and melted away. Barely a month after bombing began, the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul. Victory came so much faster than any of us expected.

Or did it? Fourteen years later, the American war in Afghanistan looks like a disaster. The country's government and people despise us, the Taliban once again control much of the country, and more heroin is exported than ever before. Afghanistan has become America's longest war, that early "victory" a mirage.

Iraq is no better. Back in 2003, the neocons crowed their invasion would transform the Middle East. They assured a dubious public that new Iraq would be democratic, pro-American, perhaps even pro-Israeli. The war and occupation would pay for itself, funded by expanding oil revenues. Democracy would spread throughout the Middle East, and our problems in that region would be over.

Charles Tripp, an Iraq expert at SOAS, University of London says the neocons accomplished "exactly the reverse of what some of them thought they would achieve. The largest winner out of all of this has been Iran. America no longer shapes the politics. Iran is on the ground directing Iraqi forces." No streets in Iraq have been named after George W. Bush. Iraqis are not grateful we liberated them from a brutal dictator. Instead, over 200,000 Iraqis have been killed, 1.4 million have lost their homes. Christians and other minority groups have emigrated or been slaughtered. The country, once reasonably well integrated has been transformed into sectarian ghettos. Had he a crystal ball back in 2003, even Dick Cheney might not have advocated invading.

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M1A2 Abrams tanks maneuver as part of exercises in Germany in 2014. Photo via US Army

America's losing streak began almost exactly 50 years ago. On March 8, 1965 , the first US combat troops waded ashore in Da Nang. Confident and proud, greeted by Vietnamese girls who garlanded them with flowers, they (and the rest of the world) assumed we would easily defeat our poorly armed rag-tag guerrilla enemies. Twenty years earlier, these young Marines' fathers had simultaneously crushed the mighty German Wehrmacht and the Imperial Japanese Navy. Now the world's largest, most modern military was facing off against rice farmers armed with AK-47s. It should have been a cakewalk.

Ten years later, after the deaths of over 50,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, the North marched into Saigon, our allies hanging on to the skids of helicopters, desperate to escape. Though the US has had some easy wins since then—remember Grenada?—when it comes to major conflicts our well trained, well armed, and well fed military has had a pathetic record since World War Two. What are we doing wrong?

Soldiers may well resent that question. Vietnam vets can argue vociferously that they didn't lose. In firefight after firefight, Americans crushed the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. Even the Tet Offensive, which turned the American public decisively against the war, was actually a battlefield victory of American arms. The Vietcong were slaughtered in the tens of thousands, their ranks so depleted they played little part in the rest of the war, replaced on the battlefield by the North Vietnamese Army.

But as Andrew Bacevich a history professor, US Army Colonel, Vietnam vet, and longtime critic of American interventionism explains, "It takes more than killing lots of the enemy to achieve success in wartime." The Viet Cong may have lost the battle, but Tet is when they won the war. Americans at home watching the Viet Cong capture the US Embassy in the center of Saigon stopped believing the optimistic statements coming out of the Pentagon. Over 18,000 American soldiers were killed in 1968, and Americans realized the war was not winnable, at least not at a price they were willing to pay. Without civilian support, a drawdown of American troops was inevitable, as was the fall of the South Vietnamese government.

In a democracy with a free media, a long, pointless war in a faraway land is a tough sell—as it should be.

Let's imagine a counterfactual. Let's say the Vietnam War had not been televised, and America had not turned against Johnson's Indochina adventure. If the public encouraged the Pentagon to send more troops in order to capitalize on our battlefield victories, perhaps America could have eventually worn down the North Vietnamese Army and kept the Saigon regime in power. This, in a nutshell, is the argument made by grumpy right-wingers. The soldiers won the war but the candy-ass civilians at home lost it. "Marines win battles, politicians lose wars," leathernecks will tell you.

Yes, but what if a war isn't worth winning? That sort of victory in Vietnam would have likely cost thousands of American lives and untold amounts of defense spending. But when Saigon fell in 1975, it made absolutely no difference to ordinary US citizens. We did not run out of rice, communism did not spread out of Indochina. On any genuine strategic level, holding on to South Vietnam did not really matter to US interests. By the same token, in ten years will anyone in Kansas care which armed band rules Helmand or Diyala?

In a democracy with a free media, a long, pointless war in a faraway land is a tough sell—as it should be. The control of some territory halfway around the world does not strike the average American as being vital to the security or prosperity of the United States.

The American foreign policy establishment rarely admits it, but the US is by far the safest country on the planet. Unlike China or Russia or Israel or Iran or Congo or Ukraine we have no enemies on our doorstep: Canada's to the north, Mexico's to the south, oceans are to our east and west. England survived Hitler because it is an island. Russia crushed Hitler because it is a continent. America is both. Foreign policy wonks pretend distant lands are crucial to US security but, thankfully, the American people aren't generally convinced.

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A soldier fires during target practice at Fort Riley, Kansas. Photo via US Army

So why do we go to war at all? In the 2000s, many among the antiwar left believed America invaded Iraq because of oil. This is a rather naïve view: Today China benefits more from Iraqi oil production than does the United States, and had Bush's agenda been to get Iraq's oil, he needn't have invaded. Every Iraqi I have asked agrees that if Hussein had been offered a deal in which he leased his oil fields to American oil companies in return for remaining in power, he would have jumped on it.

"In 2002, the US was the third-largest client of Iraqi oil exports," Tripp, the Iraq expert, says. "Saddam would have been very happy to normalize relations and increase oil production."

If it wasn't oil and it wasn't WMD, then why did we go to war in Iraq? You can talk about Bush needing a war to win the 2004 election or Cheney's desire to pump up Halliburton profits if you want, but mostly, the invasion came about because a significant strand of the American foreign policy establishment wanted to shock and awe the rest of the world with the might of the American military.

Back in 2002, the right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg called this sort of thinking the Ladeen Doctrine, after the neocon Michael Ledeen, who Goldberg quoted as saying, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." To the proponents of war, Iraq itself was incidental, a means to an end, more symbol than a real place. No wonder they didn't sweat the details.

A "Mission Accomplished" banner is a moment you can sell on television. The tedious work of building a bureaucracy is not.

Vietnam was the first televised war; since then our conflicts have become made for TV. American policymakers' careers rise and fall on the strength of their spin, so naturally the reality on the ground matters less than how it is seen back home. That's how you get situations where US administrators in Iraq are unfamiliar with the region and don't speak Arabic; that's how you wind up with the corrupt, incompetent Hamid Karzai as the American-picked leader of Afghanistan. A "Mission Accomplished" banner is a moment you can sell on television. The tedious work of building a bureaucracy is not.

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American and Afghan soldiers on a mission in Afghanistan in 2007. Photo via US Army

I first went to war when I was 14. I lived in Saigon at the time with my father, a television news reporter covering the Vietnam War. One day, he took me out into the Mekong Delta to see the fighting. Along with his cameraman and sound man, we clambered onto a jeep and headed out of the city. If war is a heady mix of tedium, testosterone, and terror, that day was mostly tedium. We hung out with some ARVN soldiers for a while, then drove around searching for battle. To my father's disappointment we found no "bang bang" worth filming that day but we did see something I will never forget. It was almost like a hallucination: in the middle of the jungle, connected to crumbling tarmac and then dirt roads, a pristine highway cloverleaf interchange that would have looked more at home on I-10 in Texas than in a third-world country.

Presumably some American corporation had gotten a contract to build roads for the US military. They knew how to build cloverleaf junctions to first-world health and safety standards so that is what they did, out there in the middle of nowhere. It was unnecessary and inappropriate but it fit in with their skill set and they got paid. A few days after we visited those ARVN outposts, they were overrun by the NVA. I wonder what the North Vietnamese thought of our immaculate highway interchange. I wonder if Vietnamese kids today use it as a skateboard ramp.

That interchange didn't help win the war, obviously, but it created some jobs and threw some paychecks at some contractors, which at times seems like the only real reason to send out our troops. Just about every Congressional district is home to a military base or an arms manufacturing facility or some other place where our defense dollars go, making military budget cuts extremely unpopular. Lots of Americans (including me) made a good living in one way or another from the war on terror. Average Iraqis and Afghans, not so much. If they were the ones getting paid, things might be different today. As Tripp says, "if people could see direct benefits, the Americans might have been able to create a larger constituency for the occupation, but money was spent on American contractors and scarcely any on Iraqis."

War is good for less and less these days. Developed nations obtain resources through trade rather than conquest, and as our economic interests become increasingly intertwined, a war between the great powers would be unthinkable, disastrous even for the winner.

None of America's wars of the past half-century really involved crucial national interests.

Were the United States to face a genuine threat to its national security, were Mexico try to reconquer Arizona or Canada invade North Dakota, I am confident America would find the wherewithal to defeat its enemies. But those scenarios are complete fantasies. None of America's wars of the past half-century really involved crucial national interests.

Bacevich cuts to the heart of the problem: "The biggest mistakes have been those made by the civilian policymakers who have committed the military to unnecessary and unwinnable wars." It is precisely because the wars were unnecessary that they are unwinnable.

If victory in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan had really been vital to American security or prosperity, the electorate would have been willing to risk their children's lives and perhaps even pay more taxes. If Iraq had been more than just a symbol to George W. Bush, he and his administration would have thought about the costs and consequences of the invasion. War focused on impressing the electorate at home is doomed to failure. The fundamental reason America can't win wars is because we don't really have to. Maybe we should stop fighting them.

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Virginia Falls in the Northwest Territories. Photo via Flickr user Mike Beauregard

The government of the Northwest Territories celebrated one year of full control over its natural resources last week by releasing its own rules for hydraulic fracturing in the territory, but critics wonder if the new regulations are actually a step up from existing requirements.

The territorial government proposed a number of "enhanced" regulations promising increased reporting, disclosure and baseline information for companies applying to perform the controversial shale oil and gas drilling method more commonly known as "fracking" in the territory.

"This is the first significant step that the government of the NWT has taken to put a distinctly Northern stamp on the regulatory system that we now govern," said Industry, Tourism and Investment Minister David Ramsay, who also serves as head of the new NWT energy regulator, to media during a press conference on April 1.

Fracking in the NWT is currently overseen by the National Energy Board (NEB), whose new filing requirements for fracking were launched in the fall of 2013. The new NWT regulations keep those requirements, giving them the force of regulations, but are intended to boost stringency in four Northern priority areas that include water and air quality, and enhanced disclosure and reporting.

But while the regulations do put in place new measures for air and water monitoring, many are puzzled by the claims of increased requirements around disclosure, whereby companies are expected to make public the toxic ingredients contained in their fracking fluids and chemical additives.

Like the existing NEB requirements, the proposed NWT regulations do not require mandatory disclosure, leaving it up to companies to decide whether or not they will divulge the chemical makeup of the substances used to drill, fracture the shale bed and extract oil or gas to the surface.

In fact, the need for explicit consent from companies is written into the territory's oil and gas legislation, which prevents the regulator from forcing operators to publicly disclose information due to proprietary rights.

Where the new regulations are an improvement is in that they explicitly ask a company to disclose, rather than ask if they are willing to do so, according to director of petroleum resources for the NWT government, Menzie McEachern.

"This may seem trivial, but it is a different approach," he said. "Also, if an operator does not publicly disclose this information, then they must state publicly why they will not. The NEB guidelines did not have this last provision."

While they can't force companies to make information public, McEachern said unwillingness to voluntary disclose will be taken into consideration by the regulator when granting authorizations to companies.

Disclosure must be mandatory: critics
Still, many wonder why the government didn't make disclosure mandatory with its new rules when other jurisdictions are already moving in that direction.

"What I find astounding is that two or three weeks ago, the Obama administration made full disclosure mandatory on public and tribal lands in the States, so this is where the whole discussion is going," said Lois Little, co-chair of the NWT chapter of the Council of Canadians and a member of Fracking Action North, a coalition of nonprofits demanding a full environmental assessment of fracking in the NWT before another project is given regulatory approval.

"Why in the world would we be so regressive in terms of maintaining the status quo, when research is daily giving people cause for concern, and a lot of that has to do with the chemicals used and privacy industry holds?" she asked.

Companies looking to conduct fracking in the Sahtu promised the NEB in 2013 that, despite the lack of a mandatory requirement, all fracking chemicals would be disclosed to the public before and after fracking a well. That promise aligns with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers' own guidelines for companies.

ConocoPhillips, the sole company to carry out horizontal fracturing in the NWT to date, made good on its word while drilling two exploratory wells near Norman Wells last year, providing a list of all possible chemicals to be used in their fracture program and their concentrations beforehand, as well as a list of those actually used following each frac.

The company did admit, however, that its frac stimulation provider Schlumberger does not provide details on the exact mixture of each of their products—considered trade secrets—and that wastewater returning to the surface can have undergone chemical reactions with naturally occurring underground substances, rendering the composition of the flowback fluid unpredictable.

Flowback fluid is irremediable and must be disposed of in underground storage wells on-site or transported by truck to licensed sumps. Though changes to flowback fluid typically involve increased salinization due to underground minerals, there have been cases of increased radioactivity.

"If we want to be really responsible, why not require full public disclosure, in terms of the type and volume of chemicals, but also the type recovered?" Little said.

Disclosure methods still conceal trade secrets
Concerns with trade secrets go far beyond the issue of voluntary or mandatory disclosure, however, as others are quick to point out. Recent reviews of the internationally recognized best practice for industry disclosure of frac fluids—the website FracFocus—shows that companies are still able to claim proprietary rights when posting their list of chemicals.

A new report, published in March by the US Environmental Protection Agency, found that at least one ingredient was listed as a trade secret in over 70 percent of FracFocus entries, and that companies designated 11 percent of all ingredient records as confidential business information.

It's why people like Jessica Ernst, a former oil patch consultant from Alberta who is suing Encana over allegedly contaminating her drinking water through fracking, argues that when it comes to disclosure, regulations need to have sharper teeth.

Ernst thinks there needs to be zero tolerance for trade secrets when it comes to ingredients posted on sites like FracFocus or the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for each substance that are handed to regulators, and that the exact information on mixtures, concentrations and Chemical Abstract Numbers needs to be made public well before fracking occurs—not a month after, as currently permitted by regulators in the NWT.

"We need specifics, for drilling additives, for cementing additives, and for perforation chemicals," Ernst said. "Never mind what's being injected underground, but for what will be driving on the highways. If there's an accident, emergency people won't know what to do."

There is precedence for Ernst's concerns. In 2008, an emergency room nurse in Colorado, Cathy Behr, nearly died after being exposed to a "mystery frac chemical" a patient was doused in. She lost her sense of smell and spent 30 hours in intensive care after her organs began shutting down.

Although the company provided MSDS sheets to Behr's doctors at the time of the incident, it refused to provide them with more specific information once she fell ill, according to news reports, meaning her doctor had to guess what to do to keep her alive.

"If they're only required after, then it's too late," Ernst said. "The only way to do this is that companies must disclose, it must be listed publicly and at least a month before drilling starts."

Fracking contested in the North
Beyond the issue of disclosure, many in the NWT say the government is getting ahead of itself in allowing the unconventional horizontal drilling practice into the territory.

"The decision hasn't been made in any public way that Northerners want to get into the fracking game," Little said. "It's a bit presumptuous of these folks, especially when outlining the so-called 'Northern values' and that kind of devolution talk."

It's not just Fracking Action North that has expressed concern. The Dene Nation, which represents every Dene First Nation in the territory, passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on fracking in 2011. The Gwich'in Tribal Council recently followed suit, and the Sahtu Secretariat Inc.—the aboriginal government whose land is the area being eyed by fracking companies—last year called for a comprehensive regional review of fracking before further projects are approved, supported by NWT MP Dennis Bevington.

Similar demands are being made in the Yukon, where a government-appointed committee recently completed a lengthy public consultation on whether or not fracking should be allowed in the territory. The resulting report reflected a lack of consensus among the committee, though the primary recommendation was for more research to be done on the potential impacts to the land, air and water.

Other Canadian jurisdictions have banned the practice altogether, like Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, along with numerous American states and countries such as Scotland, Wales, and France, among others.

The draft NWT regulations are now open to the public for comment. A 90-day review and engagement period, which will include stops in 11 communities across the NWT, begins this week.

Aboriginal governments, existing oil and gas regulators, companies, and industry lobbyists will also be included in the consultation. Input from the engagement sessions will be made available online on a regular basis and the results of the review shared, and final changes to the regulations are scheduled to be completed by June or July, with final regulations brought into effect by August 2015.

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

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The desolate and barren wasteland of post-apocalyptic Washington, DC is the second most harrowing locale in Fallout 3. The first? Tranquility Lane.

Against the death, destruction, and irradiated monstrosities that roam the unforgiving wilderness, Tranquility Lane marks an entirely different, yet no less terrifying, warped reality. It's a dream sequence, but behind its prim and proper facade lurks the deceit, lies, and evilness of the abhorrent Betty character.

For me, it's the most chilling dream sequence of any video game, which is why I decided to have it analyzed. I had Christine, a holistic therapist and dream analysis specialist, believe that the Tranquility Lane segment was, in fact, a recurring dream of my own. I described the minutiae of the dream, before asking her professional opinion as to its possible meaning.

Apparently, my failings at high school French are somehow linked with Bethesda's multi-award-winning sandbox RPG of 2008.

The dream begins with me standing in a cul-de-sac lined with lovely, old-fashioned houses. It's like a scene from Pleasantville or The Stepford Wives, complete with white picket fences, shiny red fire hydrants, and meticulously groomed gardens. I'm searching for my father but instead happen upon a troublesome girl named Betty.

Very quickly it's clear she's up to no good, but everyone else around the square is welcoming and friendly. I get the impression Betty has an issue with this—a thought cemented by her asking me to "play a game" and make local kid Timmy cry. I find it difficult to refuse and oblige her request.

She doesn't stop there, however, and goes on to issue a series of malicious orders that I'm able to entertain or reject at will. These include breaking up the marriage of a local couple, and murdering a resident by virtue of setting deadly traps around her home. There's part of me that knows I could oblige Betty's evil desires, yet I am also aware that I can refuse. And as if it wasn't strange enough already to have someone so seemingly innocent dictate plans for murder, her voice switches between that of a young American girl and an old German scientist.

Instead of carrying out her dirty work, I can enter the only abandoned house on the street. Here, I'm able to locate a computer console whereby pushing some buttons welcomes a troop of Asian soldiers into the cul-de-sac who slaughter and chase away the good people, leaving only Betty, who is now furious with me.

This is where the dream ends.

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The Tranquility Lane dream sequence from 'Fallout 3'

VICE: So, that's the dream.
Christine: Right. OK. When you're in the cul-de-sac, would you say it's the present day?

No, I'd say it's in the past. It feels like I've come from another world, one that on the face of things might not be as nice as this one.
What sort of clothes are the people there wearing?

Smart clothes. The men wear checked shirts and pressed trousers, while the women wear floating, floral dresses and have big hair.
So you could say the 1950s, or 1960s?

Perhaps.
I think there could be a number of reasons behind this particular dream. I obviously don't know your personality, I don't know your background—so we can explore a few options. First of all: the cul-de-sac. A cul-de-sac is somewhere you can escape from, just the very shape of a cul-de-sac denotes this. The fact that you're surrounded by residential housing, and the fact that it's reasonably affluent, would suggest that it's not somewhere you're scared to be—it's somewhere that you'd be quite comfortable in. The fact that you have this female here could mean that there is a female energy around you, whether that be a mother, grandmother...

(Both of my grandmothers are long passed away, and I have a good relationship with my mother—I sense that Christine feels she's losing me.)

...Or a neighbor, a teacher even, that you had some sort of bad feeling towards. Perhaps you're a bit scared of them, or you don't or didn't particularly like that person. Maybe you didn't have a connection that you feel you should've had. Is there anybody that you can pinpoint that could be that person?

Hmm, I wouldn't say anyone in my immediate family.
No, not in your immediate family. Because you're looking for your father, that would suggest that this isn't a family situation. So we're now looking at teachers, maybe a boss at work, or somebody that you felt was maybe asking you to do things that you weren't comfortable with. Is there anybody like that you can think of?

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Actually, I did have some pretty awful teachers, who were particularly difficult to get on with.
It could be something around that. You certainly can carry that forward. I know people in their 50s who still suffer stress, sweats and palpitations over maths exams, honestly. And it took us a long, long time to actually discover what the problem was.

Your dream could be something around the relationship with a female energy that you weren't comfortable with. The setting outlines something that you're able to remove yourself from but the thing is you keep returning to it. Whatever the situation with that is then that's not closed.

That's one option to consider: Maybe you have to reconcile those feeling that have rubbed you up the wrong way.

Option two: Because you don't recognize the people around you, could suggest that it's a past life flashback. Probably in that life, the fact that you're looking for your dad means that your dad would've been in that life with you, which is likely the clue behind why you keep looking for him. The female would have been there as well. What you need to be doing the next time you have the dream is not look at the people as they are, but look at their eyes. Try to concentrate on their eyes. The eyes are the person you're taking with you. For example, I could be in a past life with you, but in the dream you appear as my mother. Your eyes will be your eyes, though, and that's how I know it's you.

Have you looked at the female closely enough that if you took away the rest of her face, you'd still recognize her eyes?

She's so nasty and evil. I think I'm scared to look into her eyes...
You need to look into her eyes. That's the clue. If it's a past life situation with that person, it might not even be a female, it's the eyes that matter. If you recognize those eyes, more than likely, you'll have a past life relation with that person. Have a look next time. You may not recognize them, but I think you will recognize that person. Even have a look at the other people significant in this little story, you might recognize them too, and you might be able to make a connection in this life.

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So the teacher in real life, do you remember anything in particular about her—any redeemable features?

Mrs. Fullerton? She was a nightmare. Old school. A bitch, basically. But I was pretty shit at French generally, so that probably didn't help our relationship.
French you say! That explains the German accent. When you started high school, do you recall if you were asked which language you would prefer to study?

Yes, we had the choice of French or German.
As did my daughter when she started a couple of years back—both of those and Italian. You've said learning French didn't come naturally to you—you clearly would've preferred to study German. Or perhaps you resent the fact you opted for French when you might've enjoyed German better. The profession—a scientist—is one that requires much knowledge. Teaching is similar. This idea of French versus German can be explored deeper still and could be representative of your own life, how you may have made the wrong choices or wished for different outcomes at certain stages in your life.

Speaking of choices, what do you make of Betty asking me to commit murder? Although I don't kill the neighbor (I know Mabel Henderson can be murdered in Fallout 3 at the expense of karma, but given this was the first time Christine had met me, I didn't want to end the session with the police waiting in the car park), there's the suggestion that I could trip her cooker's pilot light, or leave a roller skate at the top of her stairs for her to slip over.
Murder in dreams normally suggests putting an end to something unfavorable. It could be an addiction or, as is most likely in this case, an old relationship. Also, killing someone or something in a dream can also signify repressed anger—either at yourself or someone or something else.

Oh, I almost forgot, there's always a dog in the dream. I suspect at times that he may in fact be my father.
What kind of dog?

Erm, a black German Shepherd with white patches around its nose and middle?
Hmm. Dogs tend to represent things you might expect: loyalty, companionship, protection. These could be traits similar to your father, but giving that you're searching, unsuccessfully at this point, for him this interpretation is likely incorrect. Black dogs tend to represent duplicity in people, that they may have an as yet undiscovered agenda or that their true intentions can or will be uncovered. I'm not saying you don't trust your dad—perhaps you don't, I couldn't say—but these are general symbolizations.

(Given the fact that the Lone Wanderer's father abandons him at a young age, this might not be too far off the mark.)

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What about the Asian soldiers' intervention?
This likely represents good over bad. If you're a decent living fellow and you don't like injustice, if that sort of thing upsets you, then your injustice hat might kick in. I would think that if you've going with the first scenario about the female energy and how you were treated by females that were in authority then that'd definitely make sense.

Does the fact that they're Asian have any significance? (They're actually Chinese.)
The Korean War, maybe? If it looks like 1950s America, that'd be right. War equals one side versus the other, the perception of good against bad within each side. Your angst against this teacher figure manifests in the young girl. It could be considered obscure, yes, but most dreams are. Unless you deal with that situation this is going to keep coming back because it obviously had an emotional impact on you. You might not realize how emotionally hurt you were—if you were traumatized in any way, then your subconscious sinks it to the back. You can pull it forward with hypnotherapy.

Sacrébleu. Who'd have guessed my fourth-year French class would've had such a profound effect on my later life. Mrs. Fullerton did remind me a little of a Super Mutant, but I'm fairly certain that's just a coincidence.

Am I willing to see a hypnotherapist on the pretense that a video game dream sequence is actually one of my own? Watch this space.

Follow Joe Donnelly on Twitter.

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Some poop. Photo via Flickr user Horrortaxi

Over the past month, a series of protests have broken out across university campuses in South Africa over the continuing realities of racial inequality and white privilege in the post-apartheid world. Originating at the University of Cape Town, where students started vandalizing a statue of colonialist extraordinaire (and the man who granted the campus its land in 1918) Cecil Rhodes as an offensive symbol of oppression, the protests have expanded to the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Howard College and Rhodes University and now include tactics like building occupations. But while some worry that this movement could signal the outbreak of acrimonious racial confrontations in the nation, most news outlets have been fixated on one tactic used by the protestors: throwing human feces at the statue of Rhodes during their first major agitation in March.

"The issue of poo is very metaphoric for us," Al-Jazeera recently quoted student protest leader Chumani Maxwele as saying. "We're using metaphor for us to explain our collective black pain. We show our collective disgust."

Given the way these protests are being reported even a month after they began (it's rare to find a headline that doesn't highlight the shit slinging, and harder still to find an article that doesn't reference it anywhere), you'd think poop-based protests were an exceptionally rare occurrence. Yet there were at least two other major examples of diarrheic dissidence in March 2015 alone:

In America, Marine General John Kelly reportedly told a Senate committee that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had started to use mixtures of bodily fluids, including slurries of ass ham, to barrage guards. Meanwhile in the Latehar district of India's Jharkhand state, Adivasi (tribal native) protestors organized a mass public shit-in , squatting over copies of the central government's new land bill, which they feel impinges on the already marginalized community.

Both of these cases seem to accord with philosophic musings on anal activism ( because people have mused on this), which describe using turds as tools of protest as an extreme act of desperation. An unparalleled act of defilement, almost universally taboo, it's seen as an extreme measure. That's how Abhay Xaxa , leader of the Jharkhand Adivasi dump demonstration, sees it too—he says they settled on their new tact after a rally of 30,000 Adivasis in the neighboring state of Chhattisgarh failed to gain any attention, leaving them at wits end for new methods.

"Poop protest is not a new form of agitation," India Resists quoted Xaxa as saying. "In fact throughout history, whenever oppressed masses have dropped their shit as arsenal, rulers have been shaken because it often marks the beginning of a social uprising."

Watch what happens to your poop after you flush it in our documentary 'You Don't Know Shit.'

Yet this lofty analysis may give us humans a little too much credit. People seem to resort to using water logs as a weapon in personal disputes regularly and almost thoughtlessly.

In the New York area alone Gothamist has recorded at least four trivial disputes within the last decade that rapidly escalated into fecal fracases: In 2006, a Manhattan resident chased down a 13-year-old who'd failed to scoop her Chihuahua's colon cannonball and smeared it in her hair and all over her catholic schoolgirl uniform to teach her a lesson. In 2010 , a Staten Island man got a misdemeanor charge for criminal mischief and graffiti (apparently that's how we legally classify smearing poop on stuff) for chucking some crap at his neighbor's door after a neighborly feud. (A similar thing played out between a Bowery sculptor and the art gallery next door the following year.) And in 2013 , a Hoboken woman, angry over a parking ticket, scooped some shitlets off the street and threw them into the face of the official who'd just written the citation.

This apparent human readiness to resort to rectal warfare may explain the numerous instances of both logical, justified and illogical, poo-related protests we've seen over the last few years alone:

In 2011, at least one protestor seemed to think it was a good idea to squat on a cop car at the Occupy Wall Street protests (despite all the flak and heat protestors were taking for poor sanitation at their campsites and the plethora of other avenues of effective dissent open to them.)

In 2012, members of the Continuity Irish Republic Army imprisoned in the high-security Maghaberry facility outside Belfast launched a "dirty protest" against new full-body search protocols, smearing their cells with stink streaks in a meaningful callback to the strategies of IRA prisoners held in abysmal conditions in North Ireland's Maze prison in the early 1980s.

In 2013, protestors in Cape Town, South Africa perhaps planted ideas in the heads of the current student protestors by launching a mass (bowel) movement, pinching and pitching loafs onto the provincial legislature building, the international airport, the bus transporting the regional premier, and throughout a series of low-income settlements to protest poor sanitary conditions and economic disparities. The same year, a similar tactic spread to Zimbabwe, where a man spared a free speech charge by using a campaign poster from dictator-President Robert Mugabe's political party to wipe his wide load. Even Texans may have joined in, as highly contested reports emerged that summer that 18 jars of waste were confiscated from pro-choice protestors demonstrating outside of the state senate as it debated stringent new abortion restrictions.

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A truck full of shit, not related to the one in Paris. Photo via Flickr user Ed Mitchell

But 2014 takes the cake as a real doozy of a duce-demonstration year. That January, a French horse breeder, accused of using his animals' crab apples in previous protests, drove an entire truck of horse shit up to the National Assembly in Paris and dumped it there in a big F-U to a new tax on equestrian activities. In March, to the northwest in Breast, France, a man (who'd previously pissed all over post office computers) stuffed his own stuffing into the cash slots of 17 ATMs, apparently to protest The System. A few months later, in August, an Egyptian dissident (who'd fled the country in 2011 after some nude protest photos landed her in trouble with the authorities only to wind up in Sweden involved with the radical feminist group Femen) made headlines for menstruating on an Islamic State flag while another woman in a black hijab flipped off the camera and let loose her intestines over the ISIS symbol. Two months later , in a more localized instance of outrage, a little person in the UK city of Hull decided to vent his frustrations against the lack of facilities for him in public housing by dropping trou in a municipal building's reception room. And finally in November , Cards Against Humanity decided to take a stand on Black Friday's rampant consumerism by selling literal bullshit in a box, explicitly labeled as such. They sold out of their 30,000-box stock within half a day.

(Honorable 2014 mention goes to a group of Hong Kongers who, that August, decided to share their frustrations with mainland Chinese tourists allowing their children to relieve themselves in public by dressing up, parading down to the Harbor City tourist trap, and taking fake dumps before massive audiences of locals and visitors alike, drawing tons of media attention.)

Yet going back farther than this, it gets a bit difficult to find instances of poop protesting. Two cases emerged in 2008, but for the most part such demonstrations only crop up occasionally—the IRA prison protests being among the most notorious. This may mean that we've just not been catching a wide world of low-level lower-intestinal activism in the mass media until fairly recently. Or it may mean that we're actually seeing an explosion in excremental action in the modern day. Either way, the Cape Town protests and their initial sewage salvo are certainly not unprecedented events, especially in recent history. And it seems fairly likely that we'll see a bit more merde in headlines on social movements in the coming months and years.

Follow Mark on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Voters who enjoy probing interviews and believe that an election campaign should revolve around politicians rigorously defending their ideas might have been disappointed by Spotlight – David Cameron , which aired last night on ITV in England. In it, Tom Bradby, ITV News's political editor, spent time with Cameron in a number of domestic settings and talked to a few people close to him in order to show him in a more personal light.

There was no snorting, grimacing Paxman here. What there was, though, was a chance to see how Cameron himself wants to be thought of. This was the kind of interview in which the pact is: I give you a little more private access than usual and, in return, you give me the chance to show the electorate who I really am.

What kind of character would emerge? Would the prime minister try to thrill us as the maverick ideologue on a mission or would he opt to play the calm and competent leader? Would he win us over with his easy charm, or reassure us by being as stern a father to his children as he is an adversary of Putin? Would any of it be more than just a vote-grabbing act? Over half an hour, five themes of Cameron emerged. Here's what those themes were.

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CAMERON THE DECISION MAKER

If there's anything articles about the daily routines of high-powered CEOs have taught us, it's that the early bird catches the worm by efficiently answering the 247 administrative emails it needs to attend to before dawn. And so we met Cameron at 5:45 AM, already working away at a desk in his kitchen. It's from now until 7:45 AM that this presidential character can enjoy some "peace and quiet." After that, it's all cabinet meetings and Cobra.

He told us he had ten decisions to make that morning. He'd make them, and some of them would end up being the wrong ones. The line was repeated later in the program.

The message is clear: This is a man who can get up early. Also, this is a man who can make decisions. He can make decisions while other people are still boiling the kettle. Would Ed handle this kind of schedule, or would he be forever pressing the snooze button on his alarm? Could he even choose what to have for breakfast without panicking and spending the entire household budget on smoked salmon?

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DAVE THE FAMILY MAN

The three Cameron children gathered around the kitchen table for a morning chat in the way families do. Cameron is warm and personable, as demonstrated by his ability to eat an austere bowl of porridge with his children without thrashing them and carting them off to boarding school. Young Arthur Cameron was going to dress up as Robin Hood at school, and while a wholehearted embracing of this role would place him in direct conflict with his father, reporter Bradby left Oedipus out of it.

Instead, the voice-over asked how the PM moved from "matters of state to the school run," from "school lunches to Libya." The answer, of course, was: really, really smoothly, because Cameron is a decision-maker and that stretches into every area of his life.

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The intersection of normal life and politics got awkward at times, though. Later in the show, while walking in the countryside, Cameron talked about his disabled son Ivan, who died just before his seventh birthday. Cameron's pain must be tremendous but here, the loss of his son is used to illustrate his hard-won wisdom and a sense of perspective. It's hard not to be cynical when the game requires the personal to be so completely laid bare to enhance the political. With Dave ostensibly at his most "real" it was in fact hard to tell to what extent he was being genuine.

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DAVE THE NORMAL GUY

Because he's a family man, he's a normal guy—even if, as he admits, "I went to a very posh school... I had a very privileged background."

There's no way of hiding this, so just admitting it is the sensible thing to do and quickly shift the focus from his privilege to the hard work and support of his parents. Most of the electorate may not be able to identify with going to a boarding school founded by a king in the middle ages, but they can identify with kids, marriage, and having parents you feel obliged to describe as "hard-working."

For most people this means something like your dad rushing out before you wake up to commute to a dreary 9-to-5 to keep food on the table. In Cameron's case, his dad was working hard to run a network of offshore investment funds in legal tax havens to preserve a $4 million family fortune. But hard work is hard work, whatever form it takes.

DAVE THE CHILLED BRO

A fixation with "Chillaxed Dave" ran through the program. Conservative Party co-chairman Lord Feldman, George Osborne, and William Hague all talked about how their leader was always the "calmest man in the room." Feldman pointed to his tennis-playing skills (Clegg is a "technically better" player but "makes more mistakes"), while Hague said that "the fact that he can relax is a great strength." And I guess it is comforting to know that the PM isn't going to fly of the handle in the Iranian embassy because someone took the last Ferrero Rocher.

An offshoot of the chill-bro image is Cameron's desire to be seen as cool. Just after he came to power, the Economist put an illustration of the prime minister with a Union Jack mohawk on its cover alongside the headline "Radical Britain: The West's most daring government." The paper distanced itself from the cover a couple of years later, but ITV's cameras caught it, still framed on Cameron's wall, like a post-Iraq Blair humming "Things Can Only Get Better" to himself, over and over again to keep the sounds of errant surgical strikes gone wrong out of his head.

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THE BLANK SLATE

In the end, the decision-making, presidential-style normal guy was stripped away and something more unsettling emerged: the blank slate. In a Q&A after the show aired, Bradby told me that Cameron "sometimes seems a little baffled by people seeing 'deep' motivations in him. It is true to say what you see is what you get."

A man who has no "deep motivations" sounds like a cypher. It's as if Bret Easton Ellis decided to give one of his characters an Etonian accent. In the program, Cameron is described as having "no strong beliefs about anything." Philip Collins, the Times columnist, acted as the program's one vaguely critical voice, suggesting that Cameron's suppleness is ultimately a weakness because no one really knows who he is.

That lack of conviction combined with a sort of Machiavellian political malleability comes across. He says that today's students and young people will be fine if they "make the right choices," which is an awesomely languid way to describe the insecurities he's talking about. Can he really believe it when he says that?

Being a shape-shifter adrift on a post-ideological sea is fine if you're some kind of Twitter satirist or Newsnight philosopher, but our politicians are meant to offer us a committed vision of what our society could be like. They're all struggling to do that right now. Last night David Cameron got the chance to tell his own story, but the yarn he spun was one underpinned by banality, entitlement, and a lack of urgency.

Follow Oscar on Twitter.

Read more VICE Election '15 coverage

With the very symbolic stroke of a pen, New Orleans coroner Jeffrey Rouse did his part last week to mitigate ten years of suspicion, mistrust, and guilt left behind after Hurricane Katrina.

In officially reclassifying the death of Henry Glover, a 31-year-old father of four, as a homicide, Rouse corrected one of the more grotesque instances of injustice to arise from an era that was marked by wholesale disregard of civil rights and common sense.

Glover was shot in a shopping center parking lot by a New Orleans police officer on September 2, 2005, four days after the hurricane decimated the Gulf Coast. His body was then driven to an isolated area where both he and the car were set ablaze with emergency flares—by a different New Orleans police officer.

That was the end of Glover's physical suffering, but only the beginning of what would be ten years of administrative violence against his humanity and psychological torture for his family.

Incredibly, the New Orleans Coroner's Office initially classified Glover's death as "accidental." This was long before Rouse took over the office. When the case was reopened in 2009, and again in 2010—both times before Rouse's tenure—Glover's cause of death was reclassified as "undetermined."

That's how it remained until last Wednesday, when the recently elected coroner told us what everyone has known for ten years: Glover's shot up and torched body was neither accidental nor undetermined.

Somebody killed him.

In a place with the nicknames the Big Easy and the City That Care Forgot, you can expect a certain insouciant and laconic approach to everything in New Orleans—justice included—but waiting ten years for Glover to be identified as the victim of a homicide has been absurd even by our corrupted standards.

And it's more than just a symbolic act. Astonishingly, because the case was never classified as a homicide, the New Orleans Police Department never fully investigated Henry Glover's death. That's just a matter of protocol.

When miles of levee surrounding New Orleans collapsed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, America got its first glimpse of what dystopia really looked like.

The news of reclassification signals perhaps one small step toward the karmic cleansing this city has so badly needed since everything went wrong in the summer of 2005.

Perhaps.

When miles of levee surrounding New Orleans collapsed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, America got its first glimpse of what dystopia really looked like. There was no law, there was no order. It was the survival of the fittest—and the most heavily armed.

The disheveled masses wandering the streets of the city in search of food and water predated images we would soon associate with a TV show called The Walking Dead. Chaos and confusion were the new normal; moral boundaries were as murky as the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain, which flooded 80 percent of the city.

But even with these caveats—the necessarily breeched protocols and improvised practices of all agencies and institutions—justice never seemed more blind than in the case of Henry Glover.

Walking through a strip-mall parking lot in the Algiers section of New Orleans—the largest swath of unflooded land in the city —Glover was felled with a single gunshot wound to the chest, fired by NOPD cop David Warren, who claimed self-defense.

It's a scenario that has become disturbingly familiar in the ensuing decade: Unarmed black man. Armed white cop. Unreliable eyewitness accounts.

But this was just the first action in a series of events that would spiral out of control into complete insanity. Glover's friend and brother lifted his limp body from the street and flagged down a passing motorist, William Tanner.

They loaded his body into Tanner's Chevy Malibu. Unsure whether any hospitals were operational, Tanner drove the group to Paul B. Habans Elementary School, where he knew the NOPD had set up a temporary station, and where he thought they could get help.

Bad move.

The cops stationed at Habans were in lockdown and panic mode. When the Malibu pulled up, Glover's friend, his brother, and Tanner were all handcuffed, roughed up, and detained. Officer Gregory McRae took off in Tanner's Malibu, which was later discovered abandoned on the back side of a remote levee. It had been torched with police flares. Glover's charred cadaver was still in the back seat.

Thus was set in motion the Escher paradigm that became Glover's official status as a dead man—one step forward, two steps back. Over time, he became not just a victim of a deranged era, but a potent symbol of that era.

Henry Glover became a flashpoint for broken law enforcement in the wake of the storm. He even became a plot point in HBO's Treme television series—a way of explaining how everything went wrong through the story of one for whom nothing went right.

Those witnessing from a distance marveled at just how dysfunctional this city turned out to be.

It's no secret that the New Orleans Police Department was corrupt long before Katrina dealt her wrath. The shootings and lootings perpetrated by police officers in the storm's immediate aftermath were among the first headlines to be dispatched from the broken city. The wholesale theft of a fleet of Cadillacs from a downtown auto dealer by NOPD rank and file gave us a comic rendering of the term commandeered.

Those witnessing from a distance marveled at just how dysfunctional this city turned out to be. And it was that institutionalized—and officially sanctioned—dysfunction that allowed Glover's case to remain in limbo for nearly a decade.

A key player in in all this was the original coroner on the case, Frank Minyard, a glib, amiable, and aged politician better known for his trumpet playing at campaign events than any actual keen interest in law enforcement.

Minyard, who held the elected position for more than four decades, was a power broker by default and longevity. The coroner's office was his personal fiefdom, affording him an astonishing amount of independence and clout. Throughout his time in office, he was never abashed about his support for the police and his inclination to side with the shield whenever a case was too close to call.

Not many rational folks would be inclined to label Glover's case "too close to call," but injecting rationality in official proceedings in New Orleans has a been a difficult birthing process in the new New Orleans.

And only because of the media and the relentless pursuit of justice by Glover's family members did his case not go simply into that good night. Upon Minyard's long-overdue relinquishment of the Coroner's position in 2014, fresh eyes and open minds were finally able to prevail.

Jeffery Rouse issued a simple—if somewhat bureaucratic—announcement last week:

"It became very clear to me that the appropriate classification is homicide. That is simply from a medical standpoint, and simply means a death was caused by the intentional actions of another person. It is not a legal finding of manslaughter or justifiable or murder or anything of that nature."

It does, however, appear to open the door for the NOPD to finally investigate the death of Henry Glover. That would be interesting to witness, though it may all be too little too late or simply moot. (NOPD Public Affairs Officer Gary Flot told VICE this week that the superintendent has not released a statement or orders on the case since the coroner's finding.)

Into the void of justice left by the NOPD all these years, the Feds finally stepped into the breach several years ago in an attempt to even the scales—with less than impressive results.

Officer Warren was convicted in a 2010 trial for his role in Glover's death, but eventually acquitted in a second trial before resigning from the force last year, ducking federal civil rights charges along the way.

Lieutenant Dwayne Scheuermann, who followed Tanner's car when McRae took off with Glover in the backseat, was acquitted in 2010. Another officer on scene at the shopping center and the elementary school, Lieutenant Robert Italiano, was brought to trial for allegedly assisting in the coverup, and also acquitted.

Several other officers were disciplined for their roles in the conspiracy of silence and coverup, and a deputy superintendent was forced to retire. That leaves Gregory McRae as the only man serving time for the killing of Henry Glover—and he's got an appeal tentatively scheduled for June.

Tried once in 2010 and retried again last year, he received identical sentences of 17 years in prison for incinerating Henry Glover's body on the back side of a remote levee. Whether or not Glover was even dead before he was set on fire is still, as the former coroner was so fond of saying, undetermined.

This all serves as a small, symbolic victory for those who give a damn about the city, its reputation and its livability.

It's a disgraceful chapter in New Orleans history, and still far from over. Glover's family has long called for the state of Louisiana to go after Warren, Glover's killer, and are holding a press conference Wednesday asking District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro to press murder charges. Given the coroner's new ruling, he apparently has no choice but to investigate, even if Warren's lawyer says the double-jeopardy rule looms as a potential obstacle.

This all serves as a small, symbolic victory for those who give a damn about the city, its reputation and its livability.

Yes, it puts our ugliest history back in full public view, placing us once again before the court of public opinion. But what is one small step for the cause of justice in this city is also a giant leap for the cause of Henry Glover.

It's an old trope: Without justice for everyone, there is no justice for anyone. And only by the felling of the obstructions and obfuscations of old can we erase once and for all that ugly excuse for the crimes that still haunt us.

Chris Rose is a New Orleans-based freelance writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of the New York Times bestseller 1 Dead in Attic.

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Photo courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

On Wednesday, a a federal grand jury found 21-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev guilty for carrying out the bombing of the Boston Marathon in April 2013.

The first phase of the trial, which began in March, has arguably mostly served to re-traumatize the city of Boston, even as the story of how two half-Chechen brothers perpetrated the bloodiest act of terrorism on US soil since 9/11 has captivated the country to the point that it's slated to be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster.

The 12 jurors met for seven hours Tuesday without reaching a verdict. They submitted questions to the judge—which were answered Wednesday—before reaching a unanimous conclusion. Tsarnaev was found guilty on all 30 counts, 17 of which carry the possibility of the death penalty.

Of course, a guilty verdict was expected from the very first day of the trial. In opening arguments, defense attorney Judy Clarke stunned the media and the courtroom by announcing: "It was him." From that point on, she tried to prove that Dzhokhar's older brother, Tamerlan—who died in a shootout with police—was a radicalized Svengali character and Dzhokhar merely his unwitting pawn. Meanwhile, government lawyers set out to prove that Tsarnaev had accessed jihadist material on his computer and was untroubled by the slaughter, even stopping by Whole Foods to purchase milk right after helping kill three people and injure 260 more.

Prosecutors forced 18 jurors, including six alternates, to focus on the carnage of the bombing. Some of them cried as they were reminded of victims like Martin Richards, an eight-year-old who died in the blast. People like Rebekah Gregory, who lost her leg in the attack, testified as well.

Meanwhile, the defense rested after calling only four witnesses to the stand.

The sentencing phase is where defense attorney Judy Clarke could turn heads. In the past, she's represented the Unabomber, Jared Lee Laughner, and one of the men behind 9/11. Amazingly, she's never had one of her clients get executed, even if they wanted to be martyred. (For his part, Dzhokhar has come across as less than concerned with what will happen to him throughout the course of the trial.)

The sentencing or penalty phase of the trial is slated to begin April 13. One of the main questions is whether Tsarnaev will testify on his own behalf. It's a tricky decision for his legal team, because if he comes off as unlikeable or crass, he's probably doomed. On the other hand, if he expresses remorse he might be spared. It's hard to say what kind of witness he would make, as he's never given an interview, and there aren't even cameras allowed in the courtroom.

"The US Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that," Tsarnaev scrawled inside a boat just before being captured in Watertown, Massachusetts. "As a [illegible] I can't stand to see such evil go unpunished. We Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last week I got a phone call from a squatter's collective called ANAL, or the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians, saying they had been evicted from the Institute of Directors, the building they squatted near Buckingham Palace that they showed me round at the end of March.

They invited me to view the new squat they had taken early in the morning of April 2, so I went to visit. I wasn't expecting much as I arrived opposite Trafalgar Square. Then, one of the squatters called "R" (annoyingly they all only gave me an initial) pointed at the banners covering the Admiralty Arch, right in front of Buckingham Palace.

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R told me that they had been evicted from the Institute of Directors with relative ease. But like a teenager drinking WKD on a park bench, these guys had a taste for Pall Mall and it wasn't long before they were back.

Looking up at the anticapitalist banners, I was surprised that these guys had managed to bag this high profile building, right on Trafalgar Square, at the peak of the Easter holiday. As we went inside through a back door, there were about ten highly visible security guards hanging around the corners of the building.

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Inside there was an office where people were laying on posh leather sofas, drinking wine, and listening to punk. M, a woman I recognized from the Institute of Directors, greeted me with a hug. J smiled at me and offered me a nespresso coffee while lying on a sofa, smoking a rollie, surrounded by old copies of Hamlet and political documents. He told me he expected an eviction the same day.

The building was grade one listed and is pretty famous, but I had no idea of the scale of the space inside. J explained the building was once part of the Cabinet Office. He took out something that looked like a crumpled eviction notice with doodles on out of his pocket, "Basically they're selling it off to make a five-star hotel," he said.

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Looking around, there was the debris of the government offices that had been there before: ties hung up, bottles of booze that looked like they would cost about a month's rent, photographs of David Cameron, and a signature book that looked very private-members-club. I felt like I had just broken into the rumpus room at an Oxbridge college, except it was located next to the Queen's home. It was probably the most baller squat ever.

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J and S, another woman I hadn't met before, offered to give me tour the place. They wanted to take me to the roof. After walking down four different corridors we came to one of the main stairwells. We went through empty room after beautiful high ceilinged room empty room. J warned me to not to leave them, as there was a risk of getting lost, which is pretty rare for a squat.

I asked the guys if they were worried about being arrested at all but they didn't seem phased at all. "Oh no. I don't care. Under this government, under all this blood money, there's really no point. I have no future. There's no jobs left anyway," said J.

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We reached the roof and five squatters politely helped me up a ladder to get to the top. The 360 degree view was pretty mind blowing. I guess the hotel will be able to charge a premium if they open up a roof bar.

On the roof the squatters started singing and yelling anti-capitalist slogans and some of the tourists below seemed to look up. I decided it was time to head back down.

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After walking down the street, I looked up at the arch and watched J and the others lean of the window and stand on the edge of the roof. People started gasping and taking photographs and I saw another girl, O, who I recognized from the Institute of Directors building cycling past. I asked her what she thought about all the commotion. "I think it's really good we have anarchist action in the run up to the general election and having it in front of Buckingham Palace is really symbolic," she said. "You could have ten empty buildings to each homeless person. I really think they should bring back residential squatting rights. This group are homeless too. They are fighting for homelessness awareness and actually have the guts to do these things."

I left the Mall and a few hours later got a call from O telling me they had been evicted. I got back to the scene at nightfall to find a large group of them on the corner of the Arch outside.

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The group gradually moved towards their other squat in Soho, laden with bags of stuff and trolleys full of banner paint. The contrast between the designer handbags, couples drinking wine, and American families going to the M&M store was pretty stark.

It's clear that this group of homeless political activists are taking their actions seriously. They're organized, articulate, and so far no one has been arrested. Each occupation has been "one step closer to power," but it still seems kind of unlikely they'll be squatting Buckingham Palace just yet.

Follow Nadira on Twitter.

Previously:

A Group of London Squatters Called ANAL Have Moved in Next to the Queen

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Scenes from a sad orgy. Photos by Stephen Keefe

Millennials are going through a bit of an identity crisis right now. We aren't quite as addicted to the internet as middle-schoolers being raised on iPads, but we're not completely free of the sometimes soul-sucking grasp of social media either. We're equipped with the same idealism and emphasis on self-exploration as our hippie parents, but we don't really have the economy to all turn our dreamworlds into a reality.

Most people in this predicament drown out the dissonance with designer drugs and binge drinking. I tried a slightly different route, but I didn't have that much company from people my age. My brief introduction into the kink and alternative party scene in Montreal has mostly seen me encounter baby boomers and Gen Xers. Maybe it's the natural progression of things, or maybe our generation is more comfortable taking risks chemically than doing so on our own two feet. Whatever it is, there's a distinct lack of us out there, and it can be somewhat isolating.

When two of my Tinder matches and I went to a swinger's club on Valentine's Day, we were the youngest people there by a few decades and felt somewhat out of our element. So my two matches, Rose and Daphnee, decided to throw their own private sex party with younger people and asked me to co-host. To be honest, I was a bit orgied-out, but I've always been curious about what it's like on the organizational side of an orgy. And, really, what's the harm? So I agreed.

We started a Facebook thread to bounce ideas off each other and came up with a skeleton for our party. We decided we would have 25 single guests who we all agreed were open-minded, fun, and reasonably attractive. We decided on a two-to-one girl-to-guy ratio since more girls seems to put everyone at ease. The first floor would be candle-lit with a dress code of underwear and lingerie, with snacks, drinks, and a live DJ. The downstairs would have three beds, with new sheets and enough condoms for everyone. We'd have guests come around 10 PM and whatever happened, happened—as long as it was done with consent and respect.

After we'd laid out our ground rules, we hunched over our glowing rectangles and began the invites. Our collective recruitment effort was going well, and within a few days we had about 20 people reply yes, as well as a handful of maybes.

Rose ordered a value pack of 100 condoms off Amazon and got one of her friends to agree to DJ, while Daphnee picked up some cheap booze from the States. On the day of the party, all that was left to do was go to Costco and pick up the sheets and snacks.

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Always practice safer sex.

After Costco (which is fucking insane on Saturday by the way), things started to crumble. We were in the back of a cab, squished in between bags of fruit and cookies, when Rose threw down her phone on the leather seat.

"DJ's not coming," she said.

Apparently he was afraid of losing his last shred of innocence and bailed. Several more guests ducked out while we were on the way to Daphnee's house, by which time Rose was visibly pissed off. She organized the cookie tray in silent irritation as I set up the bar and Daphnee set up the beds downstairs.

It was 10 PM and the scene was set. The food and drinks were out, the blinds were drawn, and the candles and fireplace were giving the room a soft orange glow. It smelled like candles, and the sound of bass-heavy Drake tunes drifted around the room. Rose and Daphnee paced around in their lingerie, adjusting things here and there.

I took my shirt off, since stripping down to boxers seemed a bit aggressive just then. We sat on the couch with our glasses of whatever and waited. It was tense. We spun the ice around in our glasses and didn't say much. It was obvious our minds were on the night ahead, except for Rose, who looked like she was still fuming from the cancelling guests. The light from the fireplace was dancing off the girls' rosy cheeks and mascara, and I noticed we were all posing more erotically than usual. I realized I was flexing, and stopped.

The buzzer rang and we all looked at each other. A tall guy with long blonde hair strode in confidently, looked at us for a moment and turned to the bar. This was Noah, Rose's match. Apparently he was a cool DJ with a big dick. He said hi to Rose, introduced himself to Daphnee, and turned his back to me. He finally turned around after pouring his drink and I began to introduce myself,

"Hey, I'm—"

"Shirts off, eh?" he said, mildly amused with himself, before taking off his own. He had these grey eyes and peach fuzz facial hair above his lip. It seemed like he resented me being there, but it was a pretty intimidating atmosphere, so I didn't hold it against him. After standing there together self-consciously for a moment, he walked past me and sat on the couch beside Rose.

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Please drink responsibly, even when participating in a disappointing group sex event.

I sat down on a chair across from Daphnee. I thanked god my whisky buzz was starting to kick in. We all sat there glancing around the room, making small talk and praying for more people to come. I peeled off from the raging awkwardness and nibbled on some strawberries in the corner of the room. Why was it so dark? You don't need romantic lighting to talk about how the iPhone 4 was actually better than the iPhone 5. I reminded myself that this whole creepily seductive setup would make a lot more sense when the room was filled with people in their underwear.

The buzzer rang again and we all launched out of our seats before Daphnee motioned for us to sit down. It was 11 PM.

"Oh, yay, it's Martin," she said, looking down at her phone.

Martin was friends with of all of us. He was one of those "good vibes" guys that everyone knew and liked. We'd worked on some projects together and I knew he was a good dude. He walked in and laughed, which is what we should have all been doing, come to think of it.

He sat down with a drink, skipped asking why no one was here and shot me a friendly grin.

"How ya doin', man? I haven't seen you in ages."

We caught up like two guys at a high school reunion as Noah started nibbling on Rose's neck, red-faced and drunk as she tried to hold a conversation with Daphnee. He'd stop once in a while to say something like: "From a producer's point of view, it's just not worth it to do small gigs."

I started to think I didn't like this guy anymore. He had a weird predatory energy like he was there to conquer, and Martin and I were irrelevant obstacles in whatever rampage he had planned. He'd draped his long, pasty body on the couch and was whispering in Rose's ear.

I could have blended into the background if there were more people, but I couldn't hide as a host with two guests. Everyone was looking at me like, "Well, you're the pervert that started this whole thing, let's see whatcha got." Still, it was only midnight and a lot of people show up late to parties, so I had faith things would turn around.

At around midnight Rose and Noah slipped downstairs, leaving Daphnee, Martin and me by the couch.

"You know what, I think I'm putting my shirt back on," said Martin, "I think it's weird."

"Yeah, shirts on, totally, yeah, good idea—definitely weird," I said as we scrambled our arms through our sleeves.

It was 12:30 now, and we couldn't really blame the empty room on how early it was anymore. I looked at my phone for the first time and saw about four new messages from guests who had decided it wasn't for them or who suddenly couldn't make it.

"Any luck?" said Daphnee, looking over my shoulder.

"No, you?" She just shook her head.

Noah and Rose came back and sat down out of breath. Noah draped his sweaty body on the couch and took a big gulp of his drink.

"K where the fuck is everyone!?" Rose shouted out loud what everyone was thinking. We all looked at each other but just put our heads down, like parents who didn't know how to explain that the goldfish had died.

"Everyone's a pussy," mumbled Noah in between sips of his drink. I looked at him with growing hatred. He lay there with a sweaty arm around Rose, crooning out these entitled one-liners like he was some kind of sex god. His conical, moist nipples stuck out obnoxiously into the firelight like two hairy pink traffic cones. Fuck this guy. I hated him and I hated his nipples. I didn't want to be in the same room as them.

I took my drink and went downstairs. I lay on one of the twin mattresses on the floor and took a time out. It was 1:30 AM and I could hear Rose delivering a heated rant about how nobody showed up even though they confirmed with her, how people's word meant nothing anymore, and how she'd lost faith in women. I put my hands over my face and drowned out the noise until she sounded like a teakettle.

Daphnee came downstairs and gave me a look like she was glad to see an old friend. Things lightened up a little like we had our own secret spot down there away from the tragedy of the night, and I took her picture by the bed.

Just then the stairs thumped loudly and we turned to see Noah holding Rose, looking at the bed. Noah started taking off his pants and I got the fuck out of there.

I sat with Martin and tried to hold a conversation while the sound of violent sex drifted up the stairs. We held a scattered banter but we couldn't ignore how loud it was and eventually fell silent, catching each other's eye once in a while and raising our eyebrows as we crunched on icecubes.

Drake's droning, pitchy tone was starting to piss me off. It was 2 AM and everything in the room was a sharp reminder of the slow, embarrassing onset of failure. The untouched vegetable wheel, the unwrapped sausage, and the unopened bottles of booze all glared at me like artefacts of our collective rejection. I couldn't play it off like we had thrown together a casual night and were "cool" with whatever. Oh no. We had enough shit for 30 people, and none of them had shown up to have sex with us except for a good friend and a predatorial DJ.

Everyone came back up and we sat there for a while in a drunken haze, waiting it out and soaking in the collective failure. Nobody really wanted to be there anymore, but you got the sense that it was too much to bear alone. We sat there huddled in a circle like we were on a life raft out at sea, trying survive this thing together.

Noah decided he needed to "get up early" or something, and I was happy for him. We watched him go, and went back to our weird underwear sex cave. It was 3 AM and the subway wasn't running anymore, so I realized that I was stuck there.

Daphnee ran her hand up my leg and looked at me playfully but with a subtext of sadness.

"You haven't participated yet..."

I looked at Rose and the three of us went downstairs. They started taking off their clothes and making out. I was just happy to be downstairs but I guess I could have sex, too. We ended up having a reluctant threesome on the big bed and passing out in different parts of the room.

I fell asleep on the twin bed on the floor, and woke up to Daphnee curling up beside me,

"Noah keeps trying to have sex with me," she said, nuzzling into the pillow and nodding off. I set my alarm for eight to go to work in the morning and we fell asleep breathing whisky onto each other.

I scrambled up as my alarm went off a few hours later and went outside into the piercing sunlight. I shuffled to the subway with a pounding headache and tried to make sense of what just happened. Realistically it couldn't have gone much worse. I think the problem was with how we framed the whole thing, and how we misunderstood the attitude of our generation. Millennials might love numbing themselves with amphetamines and alcohol, but they still want sex to be a fun, special thing that grows throughout the night, not rammed down their throat with Costco cookies and Drake music. Maybe this is what we got for treating sex like a circus.

Follow Stephen Keefe on Twitter.

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Dillon Hillier, left, who spent time fighting with the Peshmerga before returning to Canada this year. Photo via Facebook

While Canadian jihadis appear in Islamic State propaganda, get arrested and charged with domestic terrorism, or groom their online personas, a group of Canadian veterans are trying to join the fight against ISIS.

The 1st North American Expeditionary Force (NAEF)—a volunteer group comprised of ex-professional soldiers from NATO militaries and led by a Canadian—said it received approval from the Kurdish Regional Government to set up a commando and sniper school for Peshmerga recruits in Kurdistan, an autonomous region of northern Iraq.

One of the founding members of the group who only identified himself as Kevin and said he was a 15-year Canadian veteran with operational experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, said there will be a Peshmerga Reconnaissance Commando Instructors program and from there, top candidates will be plucked to take a sniper school put on by the group. All recruits will be given a First Aid training program, essential for any soldier serving in an active battlefield.

"Reconnaissance skills are a key foundation towards developing proficient sniper/counter sniper teams," said the NAEF member, who also has experience in Kurdistan as a private security contractor before the war against the Islamic State began. "With The 1st NAEF operating as Canadian not-for-profit, and a Kurdish registered NGO, all coordination takes place through KRG ministerial offices including Peshmerga."

The Peshmerga, translated to "those who do not fear death," have been a key player in the fight against the Islamic State. The Kurds have sustained heavy losses since brutal city-to-city fighting across northern Iraq began with IS, but as of late, a cocktail of NATO bombing campaigns and ground successes put IS on the run for the the first time since June.

Canadian Special Forces are on the ground in northern Iraq training the Peshmerga too, some training in sniper tactics, while Canadian fighters pound IS with smart munitions—a mission Stephen Harper recently extended along with beginning to bomb targets within territorial Syria where ISIS is mostly headquartered.

The NAEF—which claims former security contractors and capable army veterans as members—says it isn't a mercenary entity. Instead, the group has registered as a not-for-profit company in Canada and is registered as a non-governmental organization by the KRG.

As the group will be involved with training Peshmerga soldiers in active duty on the front lines with IS instruction missions in Kurdistan come with lethal risks. One Canadian special forces soldier was killed last month in a friendly fire incident near the front line.

"Measures and safeguards have been implemented to minimize overall risk exposure of 1st NAEF members while deployed," said the ex-soldier. "Our DDC members delivering aid services are under no increased risk over that of other legitimate aid organizations functioning in Iraqi Kurdistan. To the contrary, the combination of specialist backgrounds forming The 1st NAEF allows us the capability to assess and adapt to shifting threat profiles, serving to further reduce the risks to our operations."

In the past, the department of Foreign Affairs in Canada cautioned against such volunteers in Iraq and Syria, suggesting those interested in deploying in that conflict zone "join the Canadian Armed Forces" instead.

The group says it plans to deploy in May, but is first seeking donations to finance 25 members to be on duty for 12 months.

"We have not achieved our funding goal and cannot deploy until those goals have been reached. Naturally, the stronger funding commitments we receive the more members we can deploy in support of operations," he said.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

Upsilon Acrux makes experimental rock that never feels cold, because they manage to present all of their technical chops with the same passion as some kids just learning bar chords. They're like that one math teacher you had in middle school who made solving for X tantamount to life and death and had feelings towards pi that would make the class feel a bit uncomfortable. With that kind of fervor, it wasn't hard for you to embrace numbers. And it's not hard for us to embrace Upsilon Acrux's heady, progressive noodling.

The California-based group has a new record coming out April 14 on New Atlantic Records called Sun Square Dialect. The track above, "Remnants of the Habitable Epoch," begins with some twinkly melodies and quickly evolves into a maelstrom of layered rhythms and mathy goodness. It's the perfect introduction to their new album, which is full of songs that have the spirit of hardcore and post-rock with the complexity of classical compositions.

Preorder the new album via New Atlantis Records here.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was a contender—a rarity in my life, let me tell you. I've never really been the best at anything. I won a gift certificate in high school for being pretty good in my graphics class, but other than that it's always a case of almost but not quite, of coming in third, of being just behind the other guy(s). "Just" being subjective, of course—there's a reason I never represented my school's "A" team at any sport.

But for one night in March 2015, I saw glory before me. I even touched it. Once per year, the Viking-like Jack Clothier of British independent label Alcopop! Records—the same Viking-like Jack Clothier who tried (sadly unsuccessfully) to buy the domain name for UKIP's website back in January—arranges an NBA Jam tournament in London, inviting a scraggly bunch of music industry types and idiots like me to compete for a small but perfectly formed trophy.

I briefly held the award for 2015. It was hard-edged in my hands, but light and forgiving—your standard piece of tat picked up from a small-town shop of no clear purpose, the kind that also stocks fishing tackle and a range of cleaning products you'd never let near your flooring. All the same, it would have looked awesome up on my bookshelf, an eternal reminder that, just once, I didn't suck at something. I handed it back to Jack. I would never hold it again.

NBA Jam lit up arcades when it was released in 1993. Midway's stripped-back-to-basics basketball "sim" had precedent for its two-on-two court competition—that formula was pioneered by another Midway title, Arch Rivals (I can just about remember playing it on the NES), which had come out four years earlier—but this presentation of high-speed, slam-dunking sports action was unlike anything else. Reality was largely out, replaced by instant accessibility uncommon in today's sports games, the controls comprised of just three buttons and a stick, and an appealing degree of outright chaos.

Matches would regularly swing back and forth, each team pulling clear before three-point shots started to steer awry for no (obvious) goddam reason, opening up space for a comeback. It was rare to thrash anyone, be that the CPU or your friend who had all the money on him (so you went easy, at least for a few matches). An absolute beginner, with the right team and a load of luck, could beat someone who'd played the game every day for an entire summer vacation. It was the most effortless "pick up and play" title of its time—and it soon enough made a billion dollars, a report in 1994 confirming NBA Jam as the most successful arcade game of all time.

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'NBA Jam' arcade gameplay

The impressive turnout at Alcopop!'s 2015 Jam tournament, held at Peckham's Four Quarters gaming bar, makes it clear how fondly people of a certain age bracket—I guess, let's say mid-20s to mid-30s, to be kind—remember the commentator cry of "he's on fire" once the player's player (because you only controlled one of the two on each team, the other handled by AI or a co-op partner) had scored three consecutive hoops, earning himself turbo capability. This turbo power is something that certain coins-pumping players never really understood—which you, as someone who did get it, could exploit.

Mapped to one of the three buttons on the arcade cab, alongside pass and shoot, turbo wasn't just there to provide a shot of speed when sprinting to the other end of the court. Using it in sync with the shoot button would, when close enough to the opponent's hoop, result in one of the game's signature, spectacular jams. It also allowed you to shove the opposition over, when defending—like I said, reality wasn't an issue for Midway, and any match of NBA Jam would be marked by a multitude of "illegal" moves—and was essential for winning the game-starting tip-off.

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It was the game's Acclaim-published home ports that really opened it up to the widest audience, and it's through these versions that most of us playing for that petite prize really got our slams going. 1994 saw NBA Jam released for Sega and Nintendo systems, including the monochromatic Game Boy, as well as PC. March 4 was dubbed "Jam Day" for the occasion, and the new console conversions, including the "Tournament Edition" update, added bonus content to the already perfected gameplay—Easter eggs aplenty, including secret characters to dunk with; massive heads; and refreshed player rosters covering the NBA's twin conferences. I played in Alcopop!'s 2014 tournament, losing in the second round to the eventual winner, who we'll call Dan, because that's his name. I wasn't prepared to go out at such an embarrassingly early stage this time around, so prior to heading to Peckham, I got to practicing.

My Mega Drive's still working, but having no functional official three-button controller means that, when I dust the 16-bit machine off for some court time ahead of competition play, I have to use something called an asciiPad MD-6. I don't remember buying it, and its SNES-style button layout doesn't make turbo-assisted tactics as natural as they are when the appropriate B button is dead center in a trio. I soon enough remap the buttons, putting turbo on the shoulder, but it's still not right. I lose a couple of games, playing as my tournament-allocated Orlando Magic, and feel shitty about my prospects. But then: salvation. Combing through the chaos of my old video game clutter, I find a proper Sega six-button pad. Its Z is hanging loose, so it'll never be Street Fighter II-ready again, but for NBA Jam? Perfect. I win two matches, then three, and more. I'm bubbling with optimism by the time I'm called for my first match.

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In 1993, Shaquille O'Neal was Orlando Magic's star player, an award-winning rookie turned global celebrity whose cash-generating appeal stretched way beyond professional sports. He also rapped, and acted, after a fashion. He'd go on to make appearances in a host of home video games, too, from the appalling fighter Shaq Fu to Ready to Rumble Boxing: Round 2 (beside, bizarrely, Michael Jackson), and a slew of more lifelike basketball titles from the likes of EA and Sega. But when NBA Jam made the move from the arcades to consoles, Shaq fell from its playable cast (Michael Jordan, who controlled his own image rights rather than leaving them in the hands of the NBA, was also absent). You'd think this would spoil a Magic-user's chances of progressing through any knockout contest. Think again, though, as his teammate Scott Skiles carried over to the Mega Drive/Genesis conversion, and while he's a tiddler next to Jam's super-athletes, he's a three-point machine. I select him as My Guy, and set about winning.

"This is like watching Stoke City against Stoke City," comments one observer, as my first round match—against a very like-minded player (who even brings his own controller to the event)—becomes a duel of the diminutive dynamos, a battle between edge-of-the-D three-point buckets. I edge the feast of long balls 59-57, my opponent going through to round two as the highest-scoring loser. Match two, and Skiles is in his element, repeatedly nailing his shots—courtesy of me releasing the shoot button at the very peak of his not quite "from downtown" leaps. I win by something like 14 points—a thrashing in Jam terms. The quarterfinal is tighter, but it's against someone I've already beaten in a warm-up, and I do so again. Poor Nick Anderson, my AI-controlled teammate, barely gets a look in as Skiles powers to the three-point line, time after time, switching to a simple two-point layup when the defense is proving proficient. And then... then comes the semi, and my year-ago nemesis himself.

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'NBA Jam' Mega Drive gameplay—Orlando Magic vs Chicago Bulls

Long story short: I lose. Despite being up by five points at halftime, I lose. Although I'm perfectly placed to make the final for most of the match, I lose. The trophy's gone. My campaign is over. Dan goes on to win the tournament for a consecutive year. I later see a photo of him being held aloft, beer in one hand, plasticky statue of victory in the other. The absolute bastard.

But I've not hurried to return my Mega Drive to the loft—it's still out, plugged into my TV, a copy of NBA Jam T.E. next to it. I might fire it up again at any moment, because Jam's a game that really has stood up to the test of time remarkably well. A simple formula, nailed the first time, it's one of the all-time greatest sports-based video games, up there with (for my money) the inimitable Sensible Soccer and Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe as a 16-bit-era affair that hasn't lost an ounce of its sparkle in the time between then and now. Sure, my Mega Drive is sitting beside a PS4 and Wii U right now, rather than on top of a Mega CD, but when the right game's slotted into it, it's as relevant a console as any contemporary equivalent.

There have been countless NBA Jam reboots and remixes over the last 20-and-more years, an "On Fire" edition of the 2010 installment representing the latest, but really: the game remains the same, so I'll be sticking to the original for as long as it takes to become a champion. Same time next year, ladies and gents?

Boston vs Cleveland and title Mega Drive screens via

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