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[body_image width='640' height='462' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='granting-omar-khadr-bail-is-not-good-enough-body-image-1429914697.jpg' id='49646']

Omar Khadr being interrogated. Photo via Flickr user Human Rights Film Festival

After 13 years in prison, Omar Khadr was granted bail on Friday by a judge in Edmonton, Alberta. Khadr's case has been the subject of international criticism: he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was just 15, and is currently serving an eight-year sentence (despite having been detained for over a decade before that) for killing an American combat medic with a grenade. Khadr confessed to the crime while he was being held in Guantanamo, where he spent eight years and alleges that he, like many prisoners there, was tortured.

Khadr himself described the abuses to which he has been subjected in a 2014 op-ed for the Ottawa Citizen:

"From the very beginning, to this day, I have never been accorded the protection I deserve as a child soldier. And I have been through so many other human rights violations. I was held for years without being charged. I have been tortured and ill-treated. I have suffered through harsh prison conditions. And I went through an unfair trial process that sometimes felt like it would never end."

What's happened to Khadr (and might continue to happen, since the federal government is appealing his bail) is a travesty several times over.

For starters, Khadr's supposed confession seems clearly to have been coerced from him. In 2010, journalist Glenn Greenwald detailed the capture: "Khadr, then 15 years old, was taken to Bagram near death, after being shot twice in the back, blinded by shrapnel, and buried in rubble from a bomb blast. He was interrogated within hours, while sedated and handcuffed to a stretcher. He was threatened with gang rape and death if he didn't cooperate with interrogators." And this was only the beginning of his 11-year stay at Guantanamo.

It goes against every standard democratic, Western legal doctrine to use a confession to a crime made under duress of this nature.

But it's clear, based on the rhetoric around Khadr's case, that there is disagreement on the definition and use of torture. One thing that isn't up for debate, though, is that child soldiers are not supposed to be held criminally responsible for things they do as child soldiers.

Khadr was 15 when the alleged grenade-throwing took place, 15 when he was interrogated at death's door. Because he was under 18, he should have been afforded the same sympathy extended to the Lord's Resistance Army child soldiers, whose plight helped spur the "KONY2012" social justice campaign to capture LRA leader Joseph Kony.

"Ultimately this... is about the accountability of the Canadian government to all Canadians," the law firm Phillips Gill wrote about its lawsuit alleging the Canadian government knew about Khadr's treatment in Guantanamo. "This is about fundamental rights—rights that the Canadian government has guaranteed in our constitution to apply to every Canadian citizen—and how those rights appear to have been ignored in Omar's case."

It's widely understood that children forced to fight in other people's wars are not war criminals or monsters. That the Canadian government refuses to accept this fact about Khadr is appalling, and it means that while Khadr being granted bail today is a good thing, the horrific injustices he's suffered are a long way from over.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/04/24/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/24/' filename='a-rikers-corrections-officer-was-fired-after-missing-work-because-her-husband-shot-her-in-the-face-body-image-1429905995.jpg' id='49615']

Photo via Flickr user Colin Mutchler

These days there's rarely a shortage of news coming out of Rikers Island: savage fights, spikes in gang violence, an inmate jailed without trial for three years. New York's island detention complex wedged in between Queens and the Bronx has acquired a Guantanamo-like reputation that has led city officials, under pressure from the federal government, to reform this place from the bottom up (or at least try). But on Friday, a lawsuit was filed against the people who run Rikers over mistreatment alleged suffered by a guard, not an inmate.

On December 21, 2013, Janine Howard, a 40-year-old Rikers corrections officer, was reportedly shot in the face by her husband, Brian Martin, another corrections officer, after a domestic dispute in their home on Long Island. Howard suffered permanent nerve damage and critical injuries that necessitated the complete reconstruction of her jaw and her eye socket, the placement of plates in and around her mouth. Martin, who has a history of violence, was immediately arrested, and pled not guilty to charges of attempted murder last January.

But, at a Downtown Manhattan law firm on Friday, the story was what happened afterward.

Sitting with a few reporters, myself included, Corrections Officer Benevolent Association President Norman Seabrook, Mercedes Maldonado, Howard's lawyer, and Howard passed around copies of a petition that was filed against the Department of Corrections and Corrections Commissioner Joseph Ponte on Tuesday, alleging that the agency in charge of Rikers unlawfully terminated Howard once she returned to her job this past December, without any reason given whatsoever.

According to the petition, Howard, like any new Rikers recruit, was placed on a two-year probation upon hire in 2011. The horrific incident with her husband occurred just at the tail end of that period. Then, of course, she was out for months because she had to have her face basically reconstructed and wasn't able to return to work after, due to a pending criminal trial against her husband. At the hospital, Howard said, she was visited by the former corrections commissioner who allegedly told her not to worry about finishing probation; she even received a letter from the Department just two months after the incident saying she was successfully tenured. But on December 2, 2014, she was visited by DOC officials anyway.

"A supervisor from my facility and an officer who accompanied him came to my home," she said. "My father answered the door. He requested my shield ID and my rules and regulations handbook. I was confused; I had no idea what was going on. I didn't know why, and he wouldn't say why."

She contacted a union delegate the next day, who told her they had spoken with the personnel department and the decision was final. She had been officially terminated just a year after being shot in the face by her husband. He's currently serving a 30-day suspension and is incarcerated—but is still technically employed at Rikers according to Howard and Seabrook.

(The NYC Department of Corrections has been reached for comment on how this happened, but we have yet to hear back. The DOC has also yet to respond to Howard's petition.)

Howard and her husband both worked at the Otis Barnum Correctional Center. The facility was the epicenter of Rikers abuse, and now, as a result, the new home of an enhanced supervision unit for the worst inmates. Seabrook, the COBA President, told me that the violent nature of Rikers was a major factor at play here—the implication being that life on Rikers was so insane, it may have driven Martin to nearly kill his wife; a situation that, if true, is truly something to behold.

"A lot of these men, they want to be, if you will, a part of the culture of hip-hop and 'Look at me, I'm this person,'" he told me. "A shield and a uniform doesn't make you a man. I want corrections officers to be treated with the same respect that they want to be treated with. And that's a part of reform."

Seabrook, a close ally of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has pledged to make that reform a top priority of his administration, said he would demand justice from the mayor and argued that the motive to terminate Howard was to avoid any external scrutiny of internal conflict on Rikers. "It's not a matter of hiding what happened," he explained. "But just a matter of maybe [the problems will] just go away."

Howard has a five-year-old daughter, and has just recently served Martin with divorce papers. (They had been married for a year when he shot her.) When I asked her how she's been doing since her termination, she said she regularly takes medication for insomnia due to the injuries, and goes counseling about once a week. She also said she has a constant fear that someone she worked with at Rikers, who might still be friends with Martin, is right behind her.

"I feel victimized," she said. "I feel like my safety and security can just be taken from me at anytime. Even though you do what you're supposed to do."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

We're now deep into the third season of our show VICE on HBO. Among other stories, we've taken a look at climate change in Antarctica, American militias taking law into their own hands, and traced the cocaine highway that leads from the streets of Venezuela to the sinuses of European teenagers. We just aired a new episode where host Vikram Gandhi went to Haiti to track the trail of money that was sent to Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. With almost $10 billion in global relief, why is it that so many Haitians are still living in subpar conditions? We sat down with Gandhi to debrief his time in Haiti—check it out above.

Watch VICE Fridays on HBO at 11 PM, 10 PM central or on HBO's new online streaming service, HBO Now.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Unlike most young men his age, when Alan Belmore was 19 he was running for the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 general election—aiming to be the youngest MP in the history of modern government.

At the same age, working-class Yorkshire-born Joe Cooke became president of the now notorious Oxford University Conservative Association, a Bullingdon-style group that regularly churns out future Tory leaders and has made headlines over the years for its Nazi dress-up parties.

Back in 2010, we followed the lives of these young, likable, politically engaged men in the build up to the election. But the experience wasn't particularly satisfying for either of them. Alan failed to win his seat, and Joe became disenfranchised with party politics. For the first time in British history, a coalition government was formed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, with the Lib Dems accused of selling out the very young people Alan sought to represent.

Now, with the 2015 general election imminent, we decided to catch up with Joe and Alan as they met for the first time to reminisce on their respective fates, and that of the Coalition.

Find all of VICE's Election '15 coverage here.

Michelle Manhart loves America so much that she joined the Air Force when she was only 16 years old. However, she had dreamed of posing in Playboy—and considered it "the best magazine for models"—since she was a young girl. Those two passions collided in 2007, when she was booted from the service for posing both in her uniform and nude for the magazine.

The sometimes-actress had the opportunity to serve her country again last week, when she snatched a flag away from a group of protestors. A video of the incident has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube and made headlines across the country. But practically no one is talking about the much stranger—and darker—events that preceded and followed the flag-snatching, including the manhunt for a black student accused of bringing a gun onto campus.

The flag-stomping has received so much attention that Valdosta State canceled classes and shut down the campus today in anticipation of a "Flags Over VSU" protest. Valdosta Police Chief Brian Childress told local media the rally was expected to draw between 2,000 and 3,000 people coming out "to support the American flag." That estimate might even have been lower than the actual turnout: According to Facebook, 4,000 people pledged to descend upon the small town in southern Georgia.

But the controversy over a flag is actually something much more sinister, highlighting racial tensions that exist in the small, south Georgia town. For instance,the group hosting the pro-flag rally is called "It's not racist it's facts," and posts on Facebook under the vanity URL "itsawhitething." People on social media are fearful that there will be racially motivated violence in the area

The story began last week, when a sociology major named Eric "E.J." Sheppard, a self-described member of the New Black Panther Party, organized a protest against racism that involved stomping on an American flag. When the protests continued over the next several days and the school's administration refused to step in, veteran Manhart decided to take matters into her own hands.

"Anytime it's been torn or ripped, it needs to be properly disposed of," she told a female student after ripping a flag away from her last Friday. "We're gonna take care of that. This belongs, actually, to the entire United States." Manhart later got into a sort of tug-of-war with police and was detained but not charged, although she was banned from campus.

Things escalated on Tuesday when police said they found a backpack on campus that contained a gun and documentation they say shows Sheppard purchased it as a local pawn shop. Sheppard is now the subject of a manhunt, and according to a university press release, the police are considering him "armed and dangerous."

"Please make the right decision and turn yourself in, either to the authorities or to me, and we will handle this together," Sheppard's father pleaded, via the Valdosta Daily Times." We love you and are here for you, as you requested."

A spokesperson from the Valdosta Police Department did not return requests for comment about whether or not there were any incidents at the protest Friday afternoon, but there haven't been any reports of arrests yet. Employees of the university could similarly not be reached today. In a video that circulated online, though, students seemed to gather peacefully and sing "The Star Spangled Banner" in honor of the flag.

[tweet text="Students sing "the Star Spangled Banner" at @valdostastate#Valdosta#VSU#ValdostaStatehttp://t.co/twkarraQWU" byline="— Valdosta Daily Times (@TheVDT)" user_id="TheVDT" tweet_id="590254714777784320" tweet_visual_time="April 20, 2015"]

Manhart, meanwhile, has become a conservative media hero for her attempt to save the flag. "We drape that flag over many coffins over the men and women that unfortunately don't get to come home the way they left; over our firefighters, our police officers, a lot of our civil servants," she told the Air Force Times. "If you're walking on that flag, then you're also walking on their caskets and you're walking on everything they stood for and you have no respect for the freedom that they have fought to make sure that you can have."

But the more important questions about how Sheppard went from a very promising young student to a wanted man go unasked. The details will probably emerge slowly, and out of the media spotlight, long after the adulation of Manhart fades away.

"E.J. is not as chaotic or dangerous as they think he is," a student named Lewis Cureton told the student newspaper at Valdosta. "He is simply angry because he's read a lot of history."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

This photo was taken the last time the author saw his wife alive.

Dir: Joanna Angel
Rating: 9
BurningAngel.com

It dawned on me yesterday just how easily I could be framed for killing my wife and how no one could save me from my own stupidity because I don't have the kind of money required to retain a good lawyer. For the record, I'm madly in love with my wife and have never once thought of offing her. By the same token, I have a very dark and offputting sense of humor (which most VICE readers seem to miss each month), and a lot of what I say can be taken the wrong way. For instance, last week, my wife's high school girlfriend texted me asking for photos from her birthday party. I told her that all the photos were in my wife's phone and my wife was away at sea.

"At sea???" she wrote. I replied, "She's swimming with the fishes." The very moment I hit send I panicked and worried that the girlfriend would not see the humor in my words. I quickly texted her "HA!" to diffuse any worry. She did not respond, although I could see that she had read the text. I followed with another text saying, "She's away on a Carnival bachelorette cruise to Mexico." She still did not respond. Fuck.

That's when it hit me that at the birthday party someone at our table had joked about killing her husband, and everyone laughed and toyed with the idea. Everyone but me. I was preoccupied imagining what everyone looked like having sex. Even the old people. I now see how my silence could have been misinterpreted to mean that I wanted to kill my wife. Fuck.

Of course the next thing that came to mind was the minor tiff, via text, that I'd had with my wife before she boarded the cruise ship. I sent her a screen grab of a collection of nudes I keep of her when I travel, and she responded by saying, "Those aren't my panties in the lower left. That's not me!" She was correct. Granted, the photos were sent to me by a photographer friend and not another woman, but I already knew how that would sound to a jury. Fuck.

The evidence was mounting against me, and by this point I was totally freaking out. So I did the only thing a fool having these thoughts could possibly do to incriminate himself further: I googled "How often do people fall off cruise ships?" You know, just so the cops could find that in my computer's history. Would you believe more than 20 people a year fall off cruise ships? And nearly half of them since 2000 occurred on Carnival Cruises? Fuck!

At that point I hadn't heard from my wife in two days due to lack of signal at sea, and I was just about ready to call the police on myself when my wife texted me from a café in Cancún with free Wi-Fi. She asked how our three- and five-year-old sons were doing. I hadn't even considered them in this whole sordid mess. What would come of them with no mother and a father in prison? I texted her back: "I love you. I hope the ship is safe. I DON'T WANT YOU DEAD. I NEVER WANTED YOU DEAD!" Was that too much? She didn't respond.

I wanted to blame a dropped signal, but what if the cartel got her and raped and beheaded her? FUCK!

How would that last text look to a jury? As I'm typing this I still haven't heard back from her. I'm thinking it's probably a bad idea to submit this to the editor since it may come off as somewhat suspicious.

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Martin Sojka

Al Qaeda is building wells in Yemen, ISIS is trying to capture dams in Iraq, and Hezbollah doled out cans of H2O in Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel. Until the Middle East's colossal water crisis is alleviated, militant and extremist groups may continue to exploit the shortage to gain power, loyalty, and state-like legitimacy.

Lack of water empowers extremists. Nearly 1.6 billion people confront economic water scarcity, and the Middle East's arid climate—along with an increase in droughts attributed to climate change—put the region in particular danger. In Congressional testimony given in March, Paige Alexander, USAID's Assistant Administrator of the Bureau for the Middle East, said that if the region continues on its current trajectory, it "will likely face 'absolute' water scarcity by 2030."

Sana'a, Yemen, may become the world's first capital to drain its water supply.

Access to clean drinking water is only part of the problem. Without water, farmers can't produce crops, which leads to food insecurity. Water scarcity also limits people's ability to carry out basic sanitary habits, thus speeding the spread of illness and disease.

These conditions make communities vulnerable—especially to extremist groups. By either providing water access or holding it hostage, militants like Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP), the Sunni extremist group's arm in Yemen, and ISIS take advantage of the shortage to buy the population's gratitude or exert control.

Yemen is a prime example of the ways in which water scarcity enables extremists. One of the Middle East's poorest countries, Yemen's water scarcity is correlated to its conflict, said Marcus King, Director of the Master of Arts in International Affairs at George Washington University's Elliot School of International Affairs, in an interview with VICE.

READ: A Severe Lack of Clean Water Is Killing Indigenous Children in Colombia

Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi's government recently cut the country's National Water Resources Authority budget by 70 percent. Hadi fled the country in February after ongoing conflict with the Houthis, a group of Shia rebels who had, among other grievances, voiced complaints about the unequal distribution of water.

The situation is dire. Farmers have stopped collecting and storing rainwater, instead opting for groundwater irrigation, which is extracting water 12 times faster than it can be replenished. Other factors, like population growth, government mismanagement of resources, and the population's addiction to Qat—a leafy stimulant whose trees use half of the country's water meant for agricultural purposes—all exacerbate the shortage. Sana'a may become the world's first capital to drain its water supply, with estimates claiming the city could run dry within the next ten years.

[body_image width='1024' height='684' path='images/content-images/2015/04/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/22/' filename='is-water-scarcity-radicalizing-the-middle-east-235-body-image-1429704612.jpg' id='48502']Sana'a. Photo via Flickr user Rod Waddington

As the Houthi insurgency fights against forces still loyal to the exiled president—and Saudi air strikes continue in support of Hadi—AQAP is building wells and other water infrastructure in Yemen's rural villages to win support.

This strategy is purposeful. In 2013, the Associated Press discovered a document in which AQAP suggested manipulating residents by "taking care of their daily needs like water. Providing these necessities will have a great effect on people, and will make them sympathize with us and feel that their fate is tied to ours."

King, whose research includes overlaying areas of water scarcity with outbreaks of Islamic extremism, says, "In terms of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen, [water] will only play into the hands of extremist groups."

READ: World Faces Severe Water Shortage If Changes Are Not Made, UN Warns

ISIS is also using water to their advantage. But David Michel, Senior Associate and Director of the Environmental Security program at the Stimson Center, says that the group isn't trying to win over the population like other insurgencies, including AQAP.

Last year, ISIS succeeded in taking the two Iraqi dams, the Mosul and Fallujah, but was soon repelled by Kurdish forces. "So they seem to be using—or in the case of the Mosul dam, trying to position themselves to use—the control water like a medieval siege tactic," Michel told VICE. Later, the group attempted to seize the second largest dam in Iraq, the Haditha dam, which provides control of the Euphrates River.

"If you can't breathe, then water's not your issue." —Edward Saltzberg

"[ISIS] had the potential to destroy the dam and cause widespread destruction," explained Emma Ashford, a visiting fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute. "It's very hard to prevent groups from seizing control of resources, and once they control them, they decide what happens to them."

Yet Michel says that water has yet to provide ISIS any real state-like legitimacy. "I don't know of any evidence that suggests that ISIS is a more competent municipal service provider than the Syrian or Iraqi states that they have replaced," he says.

Ashford says it's important to improve the provision of resources in water scarce countries that aren't already actively engaged in war. For countries like Yemen and Syria, where conflict has escalated, "There's really too much going on to deal with [water insecurity]."

Not everyone is as pessimistic about the water situation in the Middle East. While acknowledging challenges, UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson wrote in the January 2015 issue of Nature, "We must not lose sight of the opportunities that water offers as a source of cooperation. Tensions over water resources have historically led to more collaboration than conflict." He cited the 1960 Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan and the 1964 Basin Commission on the Lake Chad Basin as proof of "hydro-diplomacy."

RELATED: America's Water Crisis, our documentary on water scarcity at home.

In the short-term, solutions for water relief, such as desalination, can be complicated to implement or expensive. In 2007, Yemen's water minister even suggested relocating people from Sana'a to the Red Sea Coast due to the lack of water. But nearly any solution will be challenging to implement during a war.

"If you can't breathe, then water's not your issue," Edward Saltzberg, Managing Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum, told VICE. "You just can't execute a long-term plan if you're facing immediate threats of conflict."

Before addressing the future, King stresses the importance of examining the underlying causes of counterinsurgency operations and addressing water supplies as part of extremist strategies, "so the Al Qaedas of the world don't become the legitimate providers of basic human needs."

Follow Alyssa Martino on Twitter.

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Sassafras Lowrey's new novel, Lost Boi, reimagines Peter Pan for the genderqueer generation, with a coming-of-age story that is as tender as it is kinky, and as sweet as it is subversive.

In this retelling of J. M. Barrie's classic, the lost bois are trans kids who've banded together after being abandoned by their parents or failed by social services. Pan is their leader, their savior, and the "dom" to their "subs." Hook is an old-school top, the kind who talks about ritual and etiquette and doesn't allow any of his "pirates" to go into "battle" without having their leathers perfectly shined. The Mermaids are tough-as-nails femmes who live on a boat named the Lagoon. And the Croc? That's heroin, the deadly addiction that's always snapping at Hook's heels.

READ: Queen Sabrina, Flawless Mother

Like many characters in the book, Lowrey is trans. Ze prefers gender-neutral pronouns, but isn't fussed by any particular language so much as the intent behind that language. I've known Lowrey since we worked together on an art show in 2014, and was intrigued when I heard about Lost Boi. It seemed to fit into a growing body of literature that was literally remapping America through the experiences of trans / genderqueer punks, exploring our society from a marginal position that until recently, rarely had access to the machines of publishing (like Sybil Lamb's I've Got a Time Bomb or Lowrey's first novel, Roving Pack, which won Lowrey the Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award in 2013). These books follow in a long tradition of newly empowered communities' renaming and reclaiming mainstream places and cultural touchstones, and represent an important part in the growing transgender civil rights movement.

I sat down with Lowrey for bubble tea on St. Mark's Place, a hallowed street in the history of punk, to ask why Ze chose Peter Pan and what it takes to reclaim a classic.

VICE: Why Peter Pan?
Sassafras Lowrey: Why not Peter Pan? It's amazing. It's a classic story that has so many themes that come up within pop culture and especially within queer culture. The big thing that stood out to me was how dark it was. I grew up with a VHS tape of a stage performance of Peter Pan, and I saw the awful, racist Disney version. But I had no idea how dark J. M. Barrie's Peter was, so incredibly seductive and unlikeable and cruel in this way that felt very appropriate for dynamics that exist in our world.

Your Peter, the eternal child, is much more grown-up than most versions I've read or seen. What was it like to write him?
The image of Peter was one of the things I felt most clear about before I started writing. There is this caricature that exists in queer culture of "the person who hasn't grown up." They're hanging out with 19-year-olds and everyone thinks that's cool and they're super hot and super popular, and they go to every punk show and live in every squat. And they're still doing it somehow at 45. I wanted to complicate that.

I love J. M. Barrie's version, even just on the level of the language of his sentences. But there's a lot of fucked up stuff in there. How did you decide what to keep and what to lose?
I used his original text as a guiding outline, and then thought about what was important for the story I wanted to tell, which was trying to rectify some really fucked shit that [Peter] does. One of the Easter eggs in Lost Boi is that it aligns chapter for chapter with J. M. Barrie's work: Every chapter corresponds to one of his. The biggest change was that I got rid of the "Indians." The Urban Primitives were my reference point to what would have been J. M. Barrie's Indian characters.

I was also really interested in separating gender and care-taking. So Wendi is this very important femme, caretaking presence. It's an intentional relationship dynamic role that she's taking on, but it's not inherent to her femininity. Her counterpoints are the Mermaids, who are hyper-feminine and super-femme, and not caretakers. Or they're caretakers of each other in their own house and community, but they're not caretaking the bois, and they're definitely not caretaking Pan. I didn't want to write a book that [said] "This is who all femmes are," any more than I wanted to write a book that [said] "This is who boys or butches or trans guys" are. I wanted there to be difference there.

You obviously put a lot of thought into how you want to communicate with your community in writing. Why is that important to you?
I'm trying to write queer books for queer readers. I don't have an MFA. I'm never going to get an MFA. You don't need an MFA to write books. The big thing is figuring out what you want to write and who your niche audience is. I knew I was not going to write the next Harry Potter. I'm not trying to write the next Harry Potter.

My biggest hope is to write stories that give queer folks a chance to see our lives and our relationships and our bodies in print, without a glossary and without definition, and without having to explain or justify ourselves. The biggest reward of doing this work is getting letters from readers that they see themselves or their world in these characters.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

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All photos by Gesi Schilling

Shaneeka Harrell storms out of the shadows with her head lowered and hidden in a white hoodie. Performing as Muhammad Ali in her one-woman show, From the Corner of Cassius Clay, Harrell whips around her jump rope and skips over it at a steadily increasing pace. Framed by two screens playing footage of Ali, she sits on a stool, stretches, and does a sort of painful-looking ballet move or two. She talks about how pretty she is and how we, the audience, can't keep up with her. She shadowboxes and insults us as though we are her opponent: "I'm gonna hit you so hard, God gonna look at you and say, 'That ain't mine!'"

When Harrell removes her hoodie on stage, her body exudes power. From the Corner of Cassius Clay, which debuted earlier this month at the Goldman Warehouse as part of the O, Miami Poetry Festival, ends with a spoken word poem about Clay by Miami poet Denise Frohman: "Every day is 15 rounds with an opponent you cannot see."

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Harrell is a native of Carol City, a suburban, crime-ridden area of Miami-Dade county. She danced and played basketball in Miami, before moving to New York to dance with Urban Bush Woman and pursue an apprenticeship under Bill T. Jones, a leading choreographer and director of post-modern dance. After returning to Miami, Harrell was inspired by the documentary Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami to create her one-woman show with director Teo Castellanos.

Harrell's performance as Cassius Clay centers on the period Clay spent training on Miami Beach. I spoke with Harrell about her intense physical preparation for the show, Clay's work as an activist and poet, and the inspiration she draws from Tupac.

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VICE: Why did you choose to write a play about Muhammad Ali?
Shaneeka Harrell: All I knew about Muhammad Ali was that I saw him on T-shirts on 125th Street in Harlem, next to Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I didn't know why. I didn't know crap about Muhammad Ali's life and I was born here [in Miami].

I like to work when I have a question. The answer brings on more questions. The stories that people have about Ali being here... I have a story of my pops meeting [Ali] at an IHOP. Everybody older than 60, if they lived in Miami proper, they have something to say about [Ali's time here]. I unlocked a door, and I didn't know what was behind it. It was like I opened a time capsule.

"Ali wanted to usher in humanity. Ali fought, and not just in the ring." —Shaneeka Harrell

I didn't know the richness of Miami black history. We were boycotting and doing sit-ins at restaurants before they were doing that in Alabama. I didn't know how rich and progressive our town was. It was called Colored Town. There was something very important for me to say about [Ali] being in Miami before he blew up. It's like everyone wants to know what happened the night before Martin Luther King got shot. I wanted to talk about this young man living in this vibrant city. I would love to take this [show] to a youth center in our town. These kids need to know about what you can do it Miami.

RELATED: Watch our documentary on bare-knuckle boxing.

Did you train in boxing to prepare for the show?
I actually did, bro. It was the hardest thing I've done in my entire life. I could've come at it from a theater or dancing way, researched the character and blah blah blah. But I wanted to know how it felt. There's something about the training, the rhythm and repetition, that was really interesting. Everyone's heard the story that Muhammad Ali came over here to Liberty City to train. He ran 6 miles each day on the 395 Causeway and ran forwards one way and backwards the other. I wanted to run to know what that felt like. I wanted to jump rope.

When I got to the gym, that's when shit got real. Because there's a style and a form, just like there's a form to dancing. There's something beautiful about boxing. There are all these different things to do with your body, and it's amazing to see how Muhammad Ali did none of it. So I had to do orthodox boxing training, and then unlearn that.

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Is the text of the show, aside from the poem at the end, directly taken from Ali's own words?
I tried to keep it as close to Ali's words as possible. He's a poet. I wanted his words. I feel like there's a correlation between his fight and my fight. This is a 20 year old man who's saying, "Don't look at me as a fighter, but as an artist."

In your show, you compare Ali with Tupac. Why?
They're both [poets and] artists at the forefront [of their fields]. If you're in the forefront of anything, you can use that for good or not good. Ali wanted to usher in humanity. Ali fought, and not just in the ring. If you have a position, use it. Speak the truth, even when it shakes.

While the current run of "From the Corner of Cassius Clay" is complete, Harrell plans to perform the show again in the future. Find out more about her work on her website and follow Jonathan Peltz on Twitter.

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Getty Images

The moon landing. The fall of the Berlin Wall. Once in every American generation comes a moment that changes the world forever. For millennials, that moment came last night, when Bruce Jenner—an Olympic gold medalist, symbol of American masculinity, and national father figure by way of his daughters' reality show—came out as trans on a primetime interview with Diane Sawyer.

"Yes," Jenner said, "for all intents and purposes I am a woman."

Jenner's revelation wasn't a huge surprise. Over the past year, tabloids and gossip bloggers have speculated about the Olympic gold medalist's gender because of his changing appearance. At first the rumors were largely dismissed as tacky transphobic jokes about plastic surgery. (In Touch's photoshopped cover of Jenner wearing lipstick stands out.) Then, in February, Buzzfeed News reported that Jenner would come out in a televised interview and star in a new E! "docuseries" (TV speak for a "reality show with social meaning") about transitioning.

When Sawyer asked about accusations that Jenner had decided to do the interview for publicity, he laughed. "Are you telling me I'm going through a complete gender change for a show?" he said. "What I'm doing is for the good, and we're gonna change the world."

Rocking a pony tail and blue shirt, Jenner described growing up knowing "my brain is much more female than it is male" and how the predicament affected his three marriages.

"It's been really tough," he said through tears, at the start of the interview. "My brain is much more female than it is male. It's hard for people to understand that but that's what my soul is."

When Sawyer showed Jenner a photo of him winning the Olympics, the former "World's Greatest Athlete" said, "I see a confused person at that time, running away from who I was."

The interview explained the complexities of trans lives, a foreign topic for many Americans. Jenner discussed preferred gender pronouns and how he will continue to date women and has never been attracted to men. "Sexuality is separate," he said. He also described himself as a Republican.

Watching the interview, I felt the same thing I did when I watched Obama win the 2008 presidential election: this was major social change. But last night's moment was cultural, not political, so it felt more everlasting.

Jenner also touched upon the negative aspects of keeping a secret for so long. "I'm still a lonely big boy. I don't socialize a lot," he said. "When you deal with this issue, you don't fit in. I like to play golf, but 99% of the time I golf by myself."

Jenner also laughed throughout the interview, flipping his long hair and making witty jokes. When Sawyer asked what he wants, he said, "To have my nail polish long enough before it chips off." At another point he spoke at length about how Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have been some of his biggest supporters.

"Girl, you gotta look really good!" Kardashian reportedly said. "You're representing the family."

And the Jenner interview does affect the Kardashians' reputation. Since the dawn of reality TV, critics have hated on the Kardashians and other reality stars for having little social importance. Critics claimed the Kardashians weren't, excluding Jenner's earlier athletic career, "talented." But it will be hard to argue, in the wake of Jenner's interview, that reality TV never changed the world in a positive way. The Kardashians now stand at the center of our era's TV, fashion, music, and social movements.

Bruce Jenner has changed the fucking world.

This isn't to say all is well in Kardashian Land; they are real people, after all. Real people who just found a giant secret has been kept from them, which now alters the shape of their lives. Jenner even made a few digs at the Kardashians in the interview. When Sawyer asked him while going through his closet if he saw his transitioned self as a Kardashian, he replied, "No, no. She's definitely a Jenner."

"I had the story," he said at another point in the interview. "We've done 425 episodes over eight years now, and the entire run I thought, Oh my god. This whole thing, the one true story in the family was the one I was hiding. The one thing that could really make a difference in people's lives was in my soul, and I couldn't tell that story."

Jenner has, most importantly, brought new awareness to trans lives. On national television, Diane Sawyer taught Americans, from the coast to the midwest, about the importance of preferred gender pronouns.

Unlike Britney, unlike Lindsay, unlike nearly every fucking celebrity who has opened up about their personal lives on a primetime special, Jenner has changed America in a monumental way. And let's not pretend America's biggest export isn't culture: Bruce Jenner has changed the fucking world. And he has changed it for the better.

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter.

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Check out Esther Pearl Watson's website and get her books from Fantagraphics.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. Today: Engineering teams in Sanaa removed weapons and unexploded bombs from streets, China rescued 64 babies from human trafficking gangs across the country, Kenya is looking to create more secure money transferring firms, and Romania arrested more than 100 suspected organized crime members.

Essential Japanese streetwear brand A Bathing Ape had a soiree on Thursday night to celebrate its New York City store's 10th anniversary. The event was held at the Up & Down, that club in the Meat Packing District where we once saw Nick Jonas take his top off at the behest of an intense drag queen. It goes without saying that the party was filled with some of fashion and hip-hop's biggest heavy hitters. In the mix was everyone from hot Houston MC Travis Scott, who spent part of the night rapping and wilding out on top of the DJ booth, to fashion maven and Kanye West's right hand man, Virgil Abloh, who DJed a crowd-pleasing, trap-happy mix.

While we were there, we caught up with Pusha T, who is one half of the legendary coke rap duo Clipse and an outstanding solo artist in his own right. Pusha is also one of the main dudes who helped make Bape hot in the United States by rocking it in his videos and rapping about it in his songs. So it only made sense that he—alongside guys like Travis Scott, Big Sean, Virgil Abloh, Wiz Khalifa, and the Flatbush Zombies—has been chosen to reinterpret some of Bape's iconic pieces in a collaborative collection for their 10th anniversary in New York City.

Pusha has been setting style trends ever since he wore that Virginia Squires Julius Erving jersey in the "Grindin'" video. So, in an effort to one day reach his level of transcendent freshness, we asked him how he developed his personal style.

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Pusha T. All photos courtesy of A Bathing Ape

VICE: You're a lot of guys' style icon. How'd you develop your look?
Pusha T: I like to call my personal style "international dope boy fresh." I would say that I am really open to all types of brands and fashion.

What do you think has been the impact of your personal style on the culture?
I feel like any and everything that you wear, you have to make it your self. There are some people like Pharrell who have a style that you look at and you're like, Man, only he could pull that off. Then, you have guys like Kanye West who are risk takers and will wear something and you'll be like, He's crazy. I feel like by the time it gets to me, I have molded it and shaped it for the guys on the block. So you can wear Saint Laurent and those Philip Lim sweats that you might have thought were too small, but I've showed you how to put it together. I give them the validation. I am the stamp of approval.

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A Bathing Ape X Pusha T Hoodie

When did you first get hip to Bape?
I started getting boxes of Bape in 2002 at my house from Nigo [founder of Bape]. He reached out to us through Jacob the Jeweler. He was a fan of Star Trak and the record "Grindin'." He wanted some kids from Virginia to wear his stuff, kids who had an unorthodox sound. And that's how it started.

What were your first thoughts of the brand?
Once I knew the history and found out who this guy was, I thought it was fresh and I just loved how it was everything. It was a Bape hat, hoodie, T-shirt, jeans, and shoes. It was a uniform. There wasn't anyone doing it like that. I tell people all the time, we weren't first with Bape, but we made the frenzy.

What did you want to include in your collaboration?
I wanted to take it back to where I was. I was a kid from Virginia in the streets and hearing about this Japanese man who likes my music. He likes dope boy music. I titled my collaboration "Fresh Out the Pot." So, that ties back to it.

After, chatting with Pusha T, we linked up with the Flatbush Zombies, our old friends who helped usher psychedelic drugs into hip-hop. And the genre hasn't been the same since.

Even when these guys were starting out, they had an eclectic style that borrowed from skate and hippie culture as much as it did from hip-hop. And since they've toured the globe, it's only gotten more multifaceted. We chatted with the wild boys from Brooklyn about their new collaboration with Bape and their fashion sense.

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Has your style changed since you guys became big rap stars?
Meech: I was dressing the same, dirty jeans, fire sneakers, A Bathing Ape, our own brand, and Ralph Lauren.

Juice: Yeah, we pretty much dress the same, the same brands...

Meech: We just buy more expensive pieces. We have always been ourselves. I think at our schools we all dressed like, not outcasts, but we dressed differently.

Erick Arc Elliott: We definitely wore stuff that if other people wore it, they would probably get made fun of. They just weren't comfortable until everyone else did it.

Meech: They wouldn't wear old Jordans, but now they're cool. They wear their jeans tight now because rappers wear tight jeans.

So you feel you pioneered that style in your neighborhood?
Meech: We don't feel it, we know we were [pioneers].

You rock a lot of tie-dye. Where did that come from?
Meech: For one, when you do psychedelic drugs, the tie-dye pattern looks beautiful. We also always vibed with the aesthetic of the Grateful Dead. So, we figured that's the best way to pay homage by introducing the tie-dye lifestyle into hip-hop. No one really did tie-dye in hip-hop like that.

Erick Arc Elliott: I would say wrestling too, like Macho Man Randy Savage. We like vibrant colors. Pastels, a lot of things.

When did you guys get hip to Bape?
Erick Arc Elliott: I had one shirt, I wore it so much I can't wear it anymore. I was maybe like 16 years old and it actually reminded me of an old wrestling shirt. When you play Royal Rumble, or some shit. It had this half-circle on it.

Meech: When I was in junior high school, this dude had mad Bape. He had too much Bape on his hands and it wasn't even his size. I copped Bape from him before I came to the store. My first shit was the Incredible Hulk Bapes.

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A Bathing Ape X Flatbush Zombies Sweatshirt

What did you want to include in your collaboration?
Juice: We just wanted to incorporate New York.

Meech: It's not us, it's about New York. It's the 10th anniversary. We are from New York City. Out of the 10 [collaborators], we are actual residents.

Anything else you want to say to your VICE fans about your personal style?
Juice: We are nasty, you can't fuck with us...

Meech: I just want to tell people to be themselves. Stop trying to copy other people's style. Find your own.

A Bathing Ape (Bape) started in 1993 by Japanese designer Nigo, whose real name is Tomoaki Nagao. The unusual name references the sarcastic saying "a bathing ape in luke warm water" and the brand's logo is an allusion to the 1960s film, The Planet of the Apes. Over the years, it has become one of the most iconic labels in streetwear, regularly nailing standout collaborations and getting nods from legendary rappers like Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Nas. You can learn more about the collaborative collection for Bape's 10th anniversary in NYC here.

Handsome Eric is one of the best new artists I've come across on the vast labyrinthine world of Bandcamp, and he's only 18. Handsome Eric is the project of Stephen O'Dowd, a kid from Dublin who records in his college dorm room. His pop songs are atmospheric and interesting, topped with O'Dowd's deep, melancholic drawl.

He's become a micro-celebrity in a tiny pocket of 4chan's /mu/ where people share Bandcamp links, but still has less than 200 likes on his Facebook page. His lyrics alternate between genuine feels and tongue-in-cheek wordplay, and his album titles are off-hand phrases like, "Nah, I'm Good," and "Oh, Cool." We're streaming his new EP exclusively until the release. Give it a listen.

Listen to more Handsome Eric on his Bandcamp.