Donald Trump wants to make America great again! But perhaps first, he should properly secure his website. Photo via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Telecomix is a hacktivist group of loosely connected individuals, primarily known for bringing clean lines of communication to war-torn areas where information is suppressed. In their own parlance, the group's guiding principle is "datalove," meaning they want to spread information far and wide while actively preventing it from being needlessly repressed.

To give you a couple of examples, during the 2012 conflict in Gaza, Telecomix provided dial-up internet lines to help people get their stories out to the rest of the world during an internet blackout. They also figured out how to provide a mass message to the people of Syria after detecting that their internet was being surveilled by the Assad government.

Their most recent action, however, targeted Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in a bizarre operation meant to commemorate the career of outgoing The Daily Show host Jon Stewart. Yesterday, Trump's website was defaced with a personal message to Stewart that began with a thank-you: "[We] would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the many happy years of quality journalism and entertainment you and your team have undertaken at Comedy Central..."

The group followed up this defacement in a press release published on Pastebin, which aimed to clarify Telecomix's modus operandi among other things: "Simply, we attempt to ensure safe, uncensored channels remain available so people can inform themselves and each other anonymously."

The branch of Telecomix that took responsibility for the Trump defacement was Telecomix Canada, who rarely make headlines for their actions, which predominantly focus around securing safe communication for dissidents and activists without drawing much attention to themselves.

VICE reached out to Telecomix Canada earlier today for a quick chat about their targeting of Trump. VICE also contacted a producer at The Daily Show, along with the Trump Campaign, for comment, but has not heard back. The story will be updated accordingly if those parties respond.

VICE: I hadn't seen any high-profile Telecomix Canada activity until this incident. Are you a new sect of the Telecomix group?
Telecomix Canada hacktivist: Oh no, we've been around for years and years... We're not hidden, we don't make a point of hiding, we just don't do stuff that's illegal, or outright illegal, as a rule. And in this case, it's kind of a merry prank. I don't think everybody should have a big fit about it.

Telecomix Canada is kind of a loose-knit thing. We get together every so often and take on an op: i.e. a hacktivist operation. We don't take on very many.

What sparked the idea of defacing Donald Trump's website?
Oh, we hadn't had an adventure in a long time [Laughs].

Honestly, if you want to get into the deep subtleties of it, there's an awful lot about what's happened in the last five or ten years in terms of what goes on online that is driven by a lot of the philosophy Jon Stewart brought to the news business... An awful lot of what's going on now with people being very frank and funny online is driven by a lot of his first work. He was quite exciting, and people forget how crazy that is or was five or six years ago... He deserves a proper thank-you!

And why the platform of Donald Trump's website? Just because Trump's getting so much attention right now?
We're not a hacking crew; that's not our thing at all. We did take some umbridge to Trump's comment that somehow you can have cheap and safe and good all in the same $3 website. And it's dangerous. This is where things go wrong in Canada... the federal government systems are virtually porous.

So it wasn't meant to be a higher thing; it really was meant to bring a smile, nothing more, nothing less, as described. But we did kind of want to highlight the entirety of this cybersecurity dilemma by dumping it on Donald Trump's corporate website, if that makes sense.

Ultimately the damage done to the website appears to be pretty minor.
This is where we become Telecomix and stick within our roles. There were several access points into the Trump.com system... We put the thank-you note in a place that was deliberately... easy to find so they could fix it fast. So we weren't really showing everyone the way in, you know. Because then the problem arises that someone more aggressive exploits the vulnerability.

Telecomix's letter on Donald Trump's website.

Right, so you didn't want to open the door to more significant damage?
It's kind of like knowing the way into the Trump site and not saying where it is... We knew they would deal with it within a timely manner. We knew that we didn't want to create a circus over there.

This idea that IT—i.e. $3 websites—is something that you try to economize on... is really not a good plan. If in fact the government is determined to pursue surveillance... they're going to have to step up their game.

We'll continue to do our thing, we're positive, we're fairly confident that the reaction is going to be people undertaking better encryption, and we're back to where we started in about two to three years. Everybody will be running HTTPS everywhere.

But, in the meantime, it creates this problem of cyberattacks. And if that's what's driving an awful lot of targeted attacks, and the dump of data. We're quite clear: we don't support destructive action like on anybody. We didn't see this as a destructive thing. There's probably some debate in the community depending on who you speak to.

The Trump campaign is, of course, not particularly driving any surveillance operations though.
Oh god no, but Trump's people lost a pile of credit card data in their hotels, which hurts somebody who's got a secondary mortgage on their house because they had a weekend at Trump's hotel chain and got their information stolen...

If you were building a car, it would require that it meet some basic standards and it be safe. We don't treat technology that way. Many large organizations—not all—treat it as a cost centre and one that they don't see worth an investment. But we honestly think—and this is a belief among our group—is that actually there's value in organizations that pursue safe environments for their people... But at the moment, certainly this is an example of a really broad problem in the industry, and in government as well.

Tony Clement is an example, we believe Tony Clement has the worst advice on the planet [Laughs].

And what are you referring to specifically?
As I say, they're pretty porous. There was a NAFTA hack this year... they left it open for a week, and they'd been notified on Twitter a week earlier about it, and they didn't pursue it at all. I mean it's really like that, and so when they start waving around cybercrime and stuff like that...

Here's the question. It's a really serious question. Although it's not really what we were hoping to raise with the Trump hack, on a really serious level, the government is discussing what they claim is cybercrime. We see it, we honestly see it, more as a question of industrial negligence. That's how we really view the exercise. Open data systems are the future, but if you want them to work, you must actually do them in a way that is secure so that the data you need to protect is secure.

Really, the issue is that it's halting an awful lot of that work because of the paranoia about cybersecurity, which is then phrased in a legal framework rather than a technical one.

So you're basically saying there's more emphasis on prosecuting cybercrime rather than on protecting systems?
No, I meant what I said in the first place! It's a question of how you see the panopticon. They see a breach and a hack on their systems as a cybercrime. We see it, although we don't participate in that kind of work, we see it as engineering negligence in the same way that somebody who built a bridge that fell down would be treated...

I don't even need to elaborate on it. That's actually it. That's actually how we see it. They call it cybercrime; we literally believe that it's negligent engineering. And there's more than enough talented people to help them do it properly.

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The scene of the second shooting, on Dufferin Street. Photo by Lindsay Gray

Police have yet to lay out exactly what led to the shooting deaths of two people in Toronto early Tuesday morning, but say the violence started a nightclub hosting Drake's OVO Fest afterparty. A man and a woman were killed and three other people were wounded and one victim has already been released from hospital.

Mid-afternoon, Toronto homicide Inspector Peter Moreira updated reporters about what police know so far about the violent events in and around the Muzik nightclub on the grounds of Exhibition Place. He said they are now looking for two men in their mid-twenties, calling them "persons of interest." One man is under suspicion for the initial gunfire that led to one death on the nightclub's patio, while the other is sought in connection with the subsequent shooting north of the Dufferin Gate, which killed a young woman. Police didn't come out and exactly say it, but they painted a picture of the woman being an innocent bystander.

Though police are still piecing together how events unfolded, Morreira gave a brief account of the shootings. Officers posted around the Exhibition Place grounds first heard gunshots coming from inside the club at about 3:20 AM. As they responded to the scene, they "encountered a crush of people exiting the nightclub," which was packed with hundreds of people. Police said there were numerous people congregating around the club, and as many as 4,000 in the general area.

After entering the club's patio, officers discovered a man who was eventually declared dead on the scene, despite their efforts to revive him. Police found another wounded man just outside the fence of the patio on Saskatchewan Street, as well as an injured woman in the same general area.

At the second crime scene, located just outside VICE's office on Dufferin Street, about 400 metres from Muzik, three men were "involved" in a shooting, according to Morreira, including the second person of interest. It was here that a woman in her early twenties was gunned down. A police officer rushed to perform CPR on the injured woman, leaving a bicycle on the ground nearby. The victim later died on her way to hospital. Moreira told reporters that "it would appear that she didn't have a role to play in any of the events that led up to the shooting."

A fifth victim was picked up a little less than two kilometres north, at the corner of College and Dufferin streets, after he flagged down an ambulance. Police are seeking anyone who may have helped him escape the scene of the shooting, saying that it is unlikely he could have walked that far north on his own.

The crime scene was closed off well in Tuesday still. Photo by Josh Visser

Earlier, Toronto Police Deputy Chief Peter Sloly said that two of the wounded victims were seriously injured, while one was less serious. Moreira said that one victim has already been released from hospital.

Sloly said that police don't know how the weapon or weapons got into the club. "General procedure" would see private security agents pat down partygoers, he said. There is also no information yet released about whether Drake was present at the time of the shooting, though several Twitter users reported that he was at the club earlier.

Drake has not offered public comment yet today.

The entire area, including the VICE offices and several neighbouring streets, were cordoned off by police throughout the day as the homicide squad continue their investigation. Moreira said that they have only talked to a small fraction of partygoers who may have witnessed the violence, and are asking anyone with information to report to a website police have set up. Photos or video taken at any point during the night would be particularly helpful, he said.

This is the second consecutive year that gunfire has broken out after the OVO Fest afterparty at Muzik nightclub. Drake was also the host of last year's event, when two people were injured in a shooting in the early morning of August 5.

Tuesday's shooting comes in the midst of a spike in gun violence in Toronto, with 143 shootings reported to police in the first seven months of the year, 40 more than at the same point in 2014.

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Edward Heath in 1987. Photo via Wikipedia user Allan Warren

On Monday, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), a British police watchdog, announced that it was opening an investigation into whether the police force in the English county of Wiltshire covered up allegations of pedophilia made against former British Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath in the 1990s.

The IPCC also said it was going to investigate whether Wiltshire police dropped a criminal prosecution in the 90s after the defendant in the case—who according to the BBC was a female brothel keeper—threatened to expose the former Conservative PM as a pedophile.

This alleged coverup in the 90s was apparently reported to Wiltshire police by a retired police officer late last year. (Wiltshire police were then obliged by law to report the complaint to the IPCC.) The officer who made the allegations is believed to have complained in the 1990s about the incident but his concerns were apparently ignored.

On Motherboard: To Treat a Potential Predator

Heath, who was Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974 and died in 2005 at the age of 89, is the most famous British politician to be accused of pedophilia, but he's by no means the first—over the past year, the UK has been consumed by pedophilia scandals, as a parade of public figures, including BBC host Jimmy Saville and multiple former members of parliament (MPs), have been accused of sexually abusing children.

After the IPCC statement was released on Monday, Wiltshire police said that they were reopening their own inquiry into allegations of sexual abuse by Heath. Then, just hours after the statements from the IPCC and Wiltshire police, the Daily Mirror published the testimony of a man who claims he was raped by Heath when he was a 12-year-old boy, over 50 years ago.

The alleged victim said that he was picked up by the then Conservative MP in 1961 after he ran away from home and that he was taken to a Mayfair flat where he was raped by Heath. The man claims that he reported the attack to social workers two months later but was "fobbed off."

On Tuesday, police forces in Kent and Jersey announced they were also opening investigations into allegations of child abuse by Heath.

"The victim has named Sir Edward Heath in connection with the allegation. Detectives are making initial enquiries," Kent Police told the BBC. Jersey police said the allegations related to abuse "within institutions or by people of public prominence."

The Sir Edward Heath Charitable Foundation, which runs a museum at the PM's former home, Arundells, said they welcomed the investigation. "We wholeheartedly believe [it] will clear Sir Edward's name and we will cooperate fully with the police in their enquiries," a spokesman told the BBC.

Allegations against Heath have been in the public domain since at least 2012, when Labour MP Tom Watson brought claims of a VIP pedophile in Westminster in the 1970s and 1980s to the attention of the House of Commons.

Watson passed on information regarding allegations against Heath and other politicians, including Sir Cyril Smith, to the police in October 2012. The police confirmed at the time that they were investigating the claims against Heath.

British police launched Operation Fairbank in 2012 to look into the allegations of a VIP pedophile ring operating in Westminster; they launched Operation Midland in 2014 in response to allegations that three boys who had been sexually abused were murdered in London in the 1970s and 1980s to protect the identities of senior politicians.

Soon after the Watson allegations in 2012, the British Crown Prosecution Service admitted that Smith, a Liberal MP who died in 2010, was a pedophile and should have been charged with the sexual abuse of boys during his lifetime. In 2014 it came out that 144 separate complaints had been made against Smith while he was alive but public authorities—including local government, the police, and the British intelligence services—had blocked attempts to prosecute him.

Isaipriya, the much-loved presenter and actress, reading the news on Tamil Tiger TV. Her death would shock the world.

This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

To the Tamils of northeast Sri Lanka and to much of their global diaspora, Isaipriya was a star: a presenter and actress who came to symbolize the Tamil resistance.

She was beautiful, and she read the news on Tiger television and performed in romantic Tamil musicals, singing the praises of Tamil Tiger war heroes and the Black Tiger suicide bombers who raced their explosive-packed speedboats into the vulnerable sides of Sri Lankan Navy ships.

Isaipriya was respected and admired, not just by the people of the Vanni—the small region in north Sri Lanka where the secessionist forces of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had created a de facto state—but also by Tamils around the world, driven from their homeland by decades of discrimination, which occasionally exploded into outright pogroms among the Sinhalese majority in Sri Lanka.

"She was a lovely woman," said Benjamin Dix, who for four years was a UN staffer in Kilinochchi, the administrative capital of the Tiger state. Dix knew Isaipriya, and he understood the moral ambiguity of her message. "She was incredibly gentle and respectful," he said, "but at the same time, she stood for and symbolized the movement of the Tigers, which was hard and brutal and completely focused on their objective of gaining Tamil Eelam and an independent state within Sri Lanka."

In October 2008, the UN ordered Dix and the other few remaining international staffers out of the region after the Sri Lankan government, led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, declared it could no longer guarantee their safety.

In reality, Rajapaksa wasn't concerned one bit about the safety of the UN staffers. He was about to launch the final offensive against the Tigers, and he didn't want any international observers.

A Sri Lankan government soldier ties Isaipriya's hands behind her back. Later that day, she would be sexually abused and executed. The photos in this article were taken by survivors as evidence—and by perpetrators as war trophies. They were supplied to the author by a variety of anonymous sources.

With the UN expelled and international journalists banned, the Sri Lankan government hoped and believed that what would happen over the next 138 days, as they made a push into Tiger-held territory, would remain a secret—a war without witnesses. But there were witnesses, survivors and perpetrators alike, and they had cameras and cell phones.

This war would be filmed in terrible detail—and for the past few years, with the help of exiled Sri Lankan journalists, diaspora Tamils, and survivors of the war, my colleagues at the UK's Channel 4 News and I have been compiling, analyzing, and authenticating this evidence. What began as a series of reports has evolved through two TV documentaries into a full-length feature documentary, No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka.

On May 19, 2009, the day after the official end of the war, the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defense posted on its website its regular war report, recording the deaths of senior Tamil Tiger officers. Isaipriya was listed as a casualty of war. The spelling had changed—and she'd been given the military rank of lieutenant colonel—but the message was clear: Isaipriya had died in action. A fighter.

The problem is that—like so much claimed by the Sri Lankan government, then and since—it was a lie.

I received proof of that lie four years later, in the form of a grainy video showing the capture of Isaipriya by Sri Lankan government soldiers. In the 48-second-long tape, Isaipriya is still alive. She is uninjured, but partially naked, distressed, disorientated, and being half-dragged, half-helped, from the shallow waters of a lagoon. Since then more photographs have emerged showing her and a 19-year-old woman named Ushalini Gunalingam, who had been captured with her. They are in custody, their arms tied behind their backs.

And then there is a final terrible video, shot by a Sri Lankan soldier on his cell phone as a grotesque war trophy. Isaipriya and Gunalingam have been stripped naked—apparently raped—and then executed. They lie in a pool of blood. "I would like to fuck it again," says an off-camera Sinhalese voice.

Vans and tractors driven for miles to the promised safety of the government's no-fire zones lie burnt or abandoned.

Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948, but colonial strategies of divide and rule had left a cancerous legacy. When the British left, power fell to the island's Sinhalese majority. The minority Tamils confronted institutional discrimination with nonviolent resistance, and the state responded by ramping up the attacks on them. Employment discrimination increased, restrictions were imposed on their access to further education, and new laws made Sinhala—which few Tamils spoke—the official language. Violent anti-Tamil attacks followed, the worst of which, in May 1958, cost more than 200 Tamil lives. A series of armed Tamil nationalist groups emerged.

On July 23, 1983, an ambush by a small guerrilla group known as the LTTE resulted in the death of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers. Pro-government supporters exploited the event to trigger the worst anti-Tamil riots in the country's history, a period now known as Black July. As many as 3,000 Tamil civilians were massacred in just one week, and tens of thousands fled to the traditional Tamil heartlands in the northeast.

Many young Tamils joined the insurrection, dedicating their lives to the fight for an independent Tamil state, Tamil Eelam. Control of that insurrection was swiftly seized by the LTTE, which, under its enigmatic young commander, Velupillai Prabhakaran, ruthlessly eliminated or subsumed its many rivals for Tamil loyalty. The war had begun.

For more on Sri Lanka, watch VICE News' doc 'Sri Lanka: Caught in the Crossfire':

The Tigers were brutal but effective. Over the next quarter-century, Prabhakaran built an army prepared to use conscripted child soldiers and suicide bombers against civilian targets, as well as traditional methods of guerrilla warfare. His movement, full of contradictions, confronted caste restrictions and encouraged women to fight as equals, yet allowed no political freedom, eliminated rivals, and demanded absolute loyalty—down to the cyanide capsules worn by each fighter to be swallowed in the event of capture. By 2008, the LTTE had constructed a functioning state in the north of the country, with its own banks, police, civil service, and armed forces. It even had its own TV station—with Isaipriya as its star. But things were about to change.

In 2008 Rajapaksa prepared to launch a brutal final offensive against the Tigers. On January 2, 2009, the Tamil capital, Kilinochchi, fell when the Tigers effectively abandoned the town and withdrew to the northeast.

By the middle of January 2009, with the Tigers in hopeless retreat, the Rajapaksa government declared the first of a series of what they called no-fire zones, into which they encouraged as many as 400,000 Tamil civilians to gather "for their own safety." But instead of protecting these no-fire zones, government forces relentlessly shelled them, all the while insisting, implausibly, they had a policy of "zero civilian casualties."

In a makeshift hospital on the grounds of an abandoned school, relatives care for their loved ones while the government denies them antibiotics and painkillers.

Innocent Tamil civilians died by the thousands, in what some regard as nothing less than a genocide. Episodes from that massacre were preserved like scenes from a nightmare in short video sequences, uploaded at necessarily low resolution on satellite phones during brief breaks in the shelling.

In one of the videos, two young girls, held back in their bunker in case another shell falls, scream in fear and anguish while in front of them the dead and terribly injured lie prostrate. Then one of the girls recognizes one of the damaged bodies in front of her. "Mama!" she screams.

Another family lies huddled in a shallow bunker. Shells are falling nearby. "Don't take the video," one woman, clasping her child protectively, screams at the cameraman. "Please get in the bunker. What are you going to do with the video? They are killing everyone." The cameraman keeps filming.

In the makeshift hospitals at the time, a series of medical points set up in abandoned primary schools, the suffering was truly awful. Critical shortages of antibiotics and anesthetics caused untold pain and countless unnecessary deaths.

Vany Viji, a young Tamil woman from London who had been visiting the region and became trapped by the fighting, was one of those who volunteered to help in the last hospital. Still traumatized by her memories of those days, she recalls helping to restrain a seven-year-old boy while, without general anesthetic, a doctor sawed off his left arm and leg, shattered irretrievably by a shell. "I was holding his mouth so he didn't scream."

A UN report concluded that the government deliberately and illegally denied humanitarian supplies like anesthetics. At the same time, government forces targeted and shelled these hospitals, killing hundreds.

But the Tigers were also complicit in the suffering. Reports spoke of Tigers opening fire on Tamil civilians who tried to escape the killing fields and test their luck with the government forces. The violent conscription of teenagers and children to work as laborers and fighters—publicly abandoned during the peace process—recommenced. Five years later, there is still no accurate figure for the dead.

The injured, the dying, and the dead spill out of the limited space in makeshift hospitals.

By May 17, 2009, the final no-fire zone had been overrun. It was smaller than Central Park in New York, but crammed with tens of thousands of civilians. Triumphant Sri Lankan soldiers, battle-weary and brutalized but fired up by the chauvinistic rhetoric of their commanders and political leaders, went on a grotesque rape and murder spree.

We know this because these soldiers—in an unconscious illustration of the culture of impunity in which they operated—recorded these terrible crimes on their mobile phones and camcorders. And over the past four years, more and more of this footage has emerged.

The first clip, uncovered by a group called Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS, a network of exiled Sri Lankan journalists from all communities), came to us at Channel 4 News. It showed bound, naked, and blindfolded prisoners being pushed to the ground and then executed, in cold blood, by shots to the head.

We then obtained footage showing the aftermath of another execution, in which one of the dead was identified as Balachandran Prabhakaran, the 12-year old son of the Tiger leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

The boy is lying on the ground surrounded by five executed men, believed to be his bodyguards. But it is the pattern of bullet wounds on the boy that is most disturbing. He has been shot five times. The first entry wound, on the left of his chest, is surrounded by speckling or "propellant tattooing"—evidence that this gun was just a couple of feet away from his chest when the bullet was fired. The other wounds—entering at a shallower angle—suggest they were fired after he had fallen back as a result of the first, probably fatal, shot.

Balachandran Prabhakaran, the 12-year-old son of the Tamil Tiger leader, held captive in a Sri Lankan government bunker. A few hours later he would be shot and killed.

The government denied that their forces had executed this child—just as they denied having killed Isaipriya.

But then, via JDS, we obtained two more photographs.

These show Balachandran alive, in a government bunker, apparently in the custody of a uniformed Sri Lankan army officer. He is eating a snack, and looks up anxiously, like a lost child in a supermarket. Metadata encoded in the stills suggest these pictures were taken just two hours before the ones showing him dead. It seems this boy was held in custody, and even offered a snack, before he was taken and executed.

Six years after these terrible events, not a single person has been charged, and neither Rajapaksa nor his brother, the defense secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa (a US citizen), has faced any consequences. One UN report concluded that as many as 40,000 Tamils may have died, mostly as a result of government shelling. A subsequent UN report suggested the true figure could even reach 70,000.

This January, the growing corruption and nepotism of the Rajapaksa government finally proved too much for many Sinhalese people to bear, and with the help of tactical voting by the Tamils, the Sri Lankan people removed them from power. But while the new government has made promises to mount a domestic inquiry into the crimes, they have also promoted or reinstated military officers accused of direct or command responsibility for those crimes.

For the traumatized Tamils, such a domestic process would be the final insult—nothing less than victor's justice over a beaten people. Meanwhile, a report ordered by the UN Human Rights Council has been delayed until September, and some fear that the call for an international judicial reckoning is weakening. Although the evidence is now here for all the world to see, the search for justice is far from over.

Callum Macrae is the director of the film No Fire Zone. Reporting for this article was generously funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Screenshot from security footage, via the Voice of OC

In May, a marijuana dispensary in Santa Ana, California called Sky High Holistic was raided by the police, who claimed it did not have a valid permit.

It started off like a standard raid—the police banged on the door, ordered customers onto the floor, and proceeded to sniff around.

Then police started to dismantle the security cameras—which was caught on tape by one of the cameras they missed. The footage goes on to show the officers chumming around, playing darts, and snacking on edibles, before making some unsavory remarks about the dispensary manager, Marla James, who is an amputee. In one exchange, an officer asks, "Did you punch that one-legged guerita?" and another replies, "I was about to kick her in her fucking nub."

You can see an edited "highlight reel" of that security footage here, courtesy of the Voice of OC.

In mid-June, the dispensary filed a federal lawsuit against the police department for their misconduct, claiming they used excessive forced and caused over $100,000 worth of damage. The Santa Ana Police Department also agreed to conduct an internal investigation.

But now the police officers featured in the video are complaining that the footage shouldn't be part of that investigation, since it was "taken without their knowledge" and is edited to make them look bad. (Matthew Pappas, the lawyer for Sky High Holistic, says he gave the Santa Ana police both an edited, condensed version and a raw, unedited version of the video clips.) According to the Orange County Register, the police officers filed a lawsuit to "prevent Santa Ana Police Department internal affairs investigators from using the video," arguing that the officers "had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded."

Of course, it's not impossible that the edited version of the video was an inaccurate representation of what happened in May. Maybe the officers were just snacking on a non-marijuana treat they brought with them! Maybe "kick her in the nub" is a police code phrase! But the Police Department also has the raw, full-length footage to determine what really happened, and arguing that the video violates their "privacy" is about as ridiculous as the cops' behavior in the first place.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

Photo by Flickr user Heath Alseike

Psychedelic connoisseurs are usually well versed in "set and setting," or the the idea that both your state of mind, beliefs, and expectations (set) as well as your social and physical environment (setting) determine whether your trip is heavenly or takes you straight to hell. The concept has been a bedrock of psychedelic practice since acid guru Timothy Leary first promoted it in the 60s and 70s.

But research now shows that these non-drug influences are even more powerful than previously suspected—and can affect everything from how aggressive you get when drunk to your risk of addiction, your experience of pain and even whether or not you overdose. Expectations and environments can either harsh your mellow or heighten your high—and they change the way your brain processes information as they do so.

On Motherboard: How to Make Weed 'Dabs' at Home With a Hair Straightener

According to Ted Kaptchuk, a leading researcher on placebo effects and professor of medicine at Harvard, "It depends on what you're targeting, but in issues like mood and in recreational drug use, the evidence suggests that [expectations] are pretty important."

For one, beliefs about whether or not you are actually receiving a drug can directly affect both your experience of it and the way your brain reacts. A recent study on smoking showed just how profound these effects can be.

Giving smokers cigarettes that contained nicotine—but telling them that they were nicotine-free—dramatically reduced their brains' physical responses to the drug. This almost certainly made the smoking less satisfying, because it lowered activity in brain regions that contain the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is linked to desire and pleasure.

What's more, the false belief that the cigarettes lacked nicotine actually changed the way the smokers made decisions about risk in an investment game, altering how much they valued their wins. Not only did their beliefs affect how they felt while smoking, they also altered subsequent behavior related to reward and motivation.

"It's a neat finding," says Tor Wager, director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at the University of Colorado, who was not involved with the research.

Watch: Stopping HIV? The Truvada Revolution

The study's authors argue that the data has major implications for the understanding of addiction: basically, that beliefs about drugs can affect dopamine in much the same way that drugs themselves can, making the psychology of the condition critical. They write that the reduction in the "high," which comes from a false belief about getting a drug, indicates that "although it might account for physical dependence, DA [dopamine] abnormality alone is not sufficient to account for the whole collection of addictive symptoms."

Whether a culture sees drunkenness as shameful or as a badge of masculinity affects what anthropologists call "drunken comportment."

Beliefs are also widely known to affect drinking, with cultural ideas about what people do while drunk influencing how they behave while sloshed. "There's clearly some individual differences in how people behave when drunk and it's clearly also considerably structured by cultural expectations," says Robin Room, professor of alcohol policy research at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

For example, studies show beliefs about alcohol causing aggression can influence whether or not people become violent when drunk. Other types of beliefs about the specific effects of drinking on sensations like relaxation and stimulation also change how drunk you feel. Whether a culture sees drunkenness as shameful or as a badge of masculinity also affects what anthropologists call "drunken comportment."

"It varies a great deal by situation within a particular culture and who is doing the drinking," Room notes, mentioning gender as one factor. Biology, culture, environment, and psychology all play a role.

Stimulant highs are also changed by expectations. For example, when people with cocaine addictions (who weren't seeking treatment) were given IV methylphenidate (Ritalin) and told they would be getting a stimulant, their overall brain metabolism was 50 percent higher, their heart rates were faster and they reported a 50 percent increase in feelings of "liking" the drug and being "high," compared to those who believed they would be getting a placebo but were actually given the same dose of the drug.

And sometimes, the influence of expectations even goes beyond conscious awareness. "There's a lot of modification of the effects of medications and drugs by anticipation, either conscious or non-conscious," Professor Kaptchuk says.

In a study Kaptchuk and his colleagues just published, 49 people learned to associate pictures of specific faces with either high or low levels of heat-related pain applied to their forearms. Once this connection was learned, seeing the faces previously associated with greater pain made moderate pain worse— and seeing the faces associated with less pain provided relief.

That finding alone wasn't surprising; after all, prior studies had shown that cues previously associated with distress enhance pain, while those linked with pleasurable experience enhance pleasure. But what was intriguing in the new study was that even when participants couldn't really see the faces—they were masked so that the images could not be recognized consciously—the moderate pain was greater for the "high pain" faces compared to the low ones.

Unconsciously, the participants' brains had become conditioned to predict whether a particular face meant more or less pain. And so, even they couldn't consciously identify them, their brains responded to the faces, magnifying the pain they way they'd been trained to do.

Rats given drugs like heroin in the same cage repeatedly are more likely to die from getting a high dose if it is later given in a different environment.

This kind of unconscious conditioning doesn't just affect pain—it also alters many types of drug responses. For instance, research on both rats and humans suggests that tolerance for drugs like heroin and prescription painkillers relies to some extent on environmental cues. Rats given drugs like heroin in the same cage repeatedly are more likely to die from getting a high dose if it is later given in a different environment. In humans, this effect may account for some otherwise mysterious overdose deaths that occur when people take their usual dose in a new place— and could suggest new avenues for research on overdose prevention.

"It's a form of conditioning," Wager says. "Some parts of it you are aware of, some not." So tolerance to a drug, where you need more to get the same high, isn't just pharmacological, but also psychological. In part, your brain relies on unconscious cues related to where, how, and with whom you typically take the drug in order for tolerance to work.

Bizarrely, this means that expectations can either enhance or diminish drug highs. In the case of cocaine users given Ritalin, expecting the drug heightened their pleasure. But the expectation of taking a drug in the place where you usually do so can also make you tolerant and reduce the effects. Indeed, the effect is sometimes so large that when do you take the drug in a new situation, it can kill you.

"Some placebo effects mirror the drug experience, but another whole class are designed to prepare for what's coming, so they oppose the response," Wager says. And no one really knows what determines which type of effect will predominate.

The question of who becomes addicted to alcohol or other drugs is also heavily influenced by set and setting. A series of experiments from the 1970s, in which rats that were housed with other rats and given lots of toys and a stimulating environment ("Rat Park"), found that they took far less morphine when given the chance, compared to rats caged alone. Having a better social and physical environment made the rodents more resistant to addiction—and the same thing seems to be true for humans.

In fact, even when the researchers forced the Rat Park rats to become physically dependent and taught them that drinking water that contained morphine could relieve withdrawal, they took eight times less drug than the caged rats, whose lives were the equivalent of being in solitary confinement.

A study published in June found similar effects with cocaine. Mice that received extra stimulation—like being trained to find rewards of Honey Nut Cheerios—were less susceptible to developing a strong preference for a chamber where they later were exposed to cocaine. And other studies have shown that varying the conditions of an experiment—like whether animals get to socialize, their living conditions, or the way they are raised—affects whether rats prefer cocaine or sweets, which accounts for why headlines in the 80s suggested that crack was the most addictive substance and why headlines in the 2010s demonize sugar as being at least as bad.

It's safe to say that drugs themselves are only part of the story—and if we want better ways of addressing drug problems, we need to look beyond the brain. Getting addicted is much more than simply exposing your brain to a drug; it involves making repeated choices in a complex environment and unconsciously learning to associate the drug with relief. Recovery, likewise, involves complex learning—and is much easier in an environment that offers meaningful options and warm relationships. To conquer addiction and reduce drug-related harm, a basic understanding of set and setting is essential.

All photos by Jocko Weyland

If you lived in New York City in 2009, you remember the stories about the "dumpster pools" set up in an undisclosed lot somewhere in Gowanus, Brooklyn. They were the stuff of legend. New York in the summer is basically a crematory made out of asphalt and trash, so when rumors of an oasis amid the warehouses in south Brooklyn began to circulate, things escalated quickly. The now-defunct DIY magazine ReadyMade broke the dumpster pool story but withheld the location in a nice attempt at keeping the small space under wraps. After ricocheting around the Brooklyn blogosphere for a couple of weeks, however, the story landed in the Times, which led to a national frenzy about the pools. Stories about the dumpsters appeared everywhere from ABC News to NPR to the Daily News , and at one point even Oprah called the organizers—personally—to ask about having them on her show. The secret was out, and all of New York was trying to figure out how to get an invite to one of the pools' private parties.

Weyland was kind enough to answer some questions via email ahead of Wednesday's opening reception for the book at Dashwood's shop in Soho.

VICE: What was the lot being used for before you found it?
Jocko Weyland: An all-purpose conglomeration, with lots of what most people would consider junk lying around, as well as forklifts, backhoes, cranes, old cars, boats, jet-skis, bikes, ladders... you name it. A moving company called Rabbit Movers had an office and parked their trucks there, and movie stylist RVs were stored there between jobs. There was a woodshop, a guy named Lee had a music studio, and this fellow Johnny lived above Danny's office. And there were three boats moored in the canal that housed various nonconformists. All kinds of things were going on there, though it wasn't readily apparent what they all were, exactly. Prior to that, way before I met Danny, up through 1990, well, the end pages of the book are police evidence photos from when it was allegedly a haven of purported illegal activities.

What do you think it was about that space that you found so special? It seems like a lot of it was Danny's personality, but you visited often by yourself just to spend time alone there, correct?
Danny's personality was such a key factor. He really was the "king of the lot" and his sensibility and character infused everything, from the smallest detail to the overall "vision," if you could call it that. It was all a reflection of him and his life. What really made it special was that he was sort of a benevolent dictator who made a space, not only a physical but psychic one, for all kinds of wingnuts and misfits who he gave refuge to and allowed to unabashedly fly their freak flags high. Which was especially great, since on the face of it you wouldn't have guessed that. He was gruff, a tough old New Yorker, but there was a mischievous prankster behind the facade, who had a soft spot for oddballs and rejects. An anti-authoritarian streak ran deep in him and by extension the whole lot.

And yes, I went there a lot by myself, and I'm very thankful for that. Danny got there at 4:30 AM or so and was gone by 2 PM. His son, Danny Jr., would get there later in the morning but also leave fairly early. It was a real gift that I had access, and keys, and could be there at any time. It was extraordinary in many ways, but the main facets of that were all the space, all the cool shit lying around, and the feeling of freedom, not buttoned-down or prissy. As I say in the book, in was a true temporary semi-autonomous zone.

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Is there anything about the lot itself that you feel helped to inspire the creation of the pools or the events that were thrown there?
Not as far as the pools, because we, Macro Sea, had the idea for the pools before we found the lot. We just needed to find a place to do put them and make our "lo-fi country club." But that wasn't easy. It had to be the right place, though neither David Belt, Macro Sea's founder, nor Alix Feinkind, who also worked for Macro Sea, or I could have said precisely what that entailed. Then, by pure chance, when I found Danny, his lot turned out to be the perfect location and had just the right ambience. So as that first summer went on, with the pools and the parties, the film screenings and music events, I think everyone who came to the pools was really inspired by the lot. Well, almost everyone. Most people who could dig swimming in a dumpster pool by the Gowanus were inclined to dig everything else about the lot.

When the story about the pools exploded were you worried they would get shut down? Why do you think the city—aside from the one noise complaint and the letter from the department of Health after the pools were finished—was so accommodating?
Yes, we were. There was a bit too much exposure. That was good for Macro Sea, certainly, and the attention led to many future projects. But what we thought would stay "underground" quickly got out of hand, particularly from a "management" perspective. And therein lay a paradox, because David and I (and the Dannys) loved the pools and what we had created around them, but we didn't like the hassle of dealing with all the looky-loos and problems that arose because of their popularity. Kind of a double-edged sword.

The city didn't know about or care about us, but with all the media coverage, especially the article in the New York Times, well, sooner or later someone high up was going to say, "What's going on over there? Who are these people? And do they have permits? Is it code compliant?" Etc. Etc. That's what happened. But by that time, actually, on the day David got that letter, it happened to be the same day he decided to empty the pools. We'd had loads of fun, but it was also a lot to handle. So the city's threat at that point didn't really mean much. Though, ironically, it led to David meeting with the Department of Health, saying, basically, "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission." And later, to the Department of Transportation and Bloomburg's Summer Streets Program people asking Macro Sea to make custom pools, which we did. Those street legal, code compliant, fully mobile dumpster pools were manufactured at Cooper Tank in Bushwick in the winter of 2010 and then were used on Park Avenue that August for the Summer Streets program. And now, five years later, those three pools have been very graciously donated by David to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, where I happen to be the curator.

What did Oprah say when she called about the dumpsters?
Well, that's all second-hand, reported to me by David. I did not speak directly to Oprah. I was skating at Bay Ridge that day and David called and told me, and we were just laughing. It was absurd. As I heard from him, her people called at the office and told him Oprah wanted to talk, but he would have to be on hold for 15 minutes, and would have to address her a certain way—all these rules and regulations. Well, he said, tell Oprah thank you very much for the interest, but I'm busy, could she call back? I guess they got kind of huffy about it, like, how could he be so impertinent? Anyway a minute later his cell phone rings, he answers, and it's "Hi, David. It's Oprah." They figured out his cell number somehow, like CIA-level capabilities. They had a nice chat and she said how much she loved the pools and floated the idea of us going on her show. Which, thankfully, David declined. That would have been preposterous.

Another funny thing is the same day, and I remember David calling me at 10:00 at night to tell me, is that Waste Management, the biggest waste disposal company in the country, put a link to the Times article on their website. That was real validation for us—much more than getting a call from Oprah.

Did you consider inviting Oprah to take a swim in the dumpsters?
In retrospect, maybe we should have. That might have been great. On the other hand—another hassle.

Do you have plans to do anything else with the space?
Macro Sea did a lot there—the pools, Glassphemy!, and I put on two Elk Gallery shows. But by the summer of 2011, Danny had gotten sick and Macro Sea had moved on. It was all very amicable. Danny recovered and I got to see him on the lot in the summer of 2012, and he knew that I wanted to do this book. He would always sort of shake his head, like why was I so interested in his lot, and him? But I also think he liked that someone got it, someone appreciated it. Then he died in early 2013, and that was obviously the end of an era—for the lot, and for us. A deep personal loss, too, and really the reason for this book: a heartfelt eulogy and celebration of an exceptional man and the environment he devised. Danny Tinneny Jr. now has control of the lot and I'm sure has plans for it. Though it's on a Superfund site, that will eventually get taken care of, and it's extremely valuable real estate.

You've traveled the world taking photos of interesting and exciting people and places; did you ever find it difficult to focus on one stationary subject—an old lot—for such a long period of time?
I've never thought about it this way until you asked, but in a sense, the lot was a microcosm, an interesting and exciting place, that I went back to again and again and it was always exotic and intriguing. It might be stationary, between Carroll Street and Union and the canal and Bond Street, but every time it was akin to traveling to a far-flung, stimulatingly alien yet familiar foreign land. So there was no risk of it ever getting boring or mundane.

More photos from Danny's Lotare below. To buy a copy of the book click here, and if you're in New York Wednesday night stop by Dashwood at 33 Bond Street from 6:00 to 8:00 PM and get a copy signed by Weyland.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

Link as he appeared in the 2014 E3 trailer for the Wii U's 'The Legend of Zelda'

It's been nearly 30 years since the original The Legend of Zelda game came into existence. Since then, Nintendo has released no less than 19 further Zelda titles, not counting spin-offs. Across all of these games there have been two main constants: Link has always been a man or a boy, and Zelda has always been a girl.

Next year will hopefully see us playing the newest game in the Zelda series, an entry for the Wii U that was originally showcased at E3 in 2014, which will mark the role-playing franchise's 30th anniversary with its 20th game. When it was first shown to us, in a non-gameplay trailer, there were mutterings that it's possible that this Link, for the very first time, could be a girl. People analyzed the video looking for clues, highlighting elements of interest. But Nintendo quickly put pay to rumors that Link might have changed gender for their next big adventure: this Link was, just like the Link before him, very much a male.

'The Legend of Zelda', E3 2014 trailer

At E3 this year Nintendo revealed The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes for its 3DS console, in which you can control one of three Links in a co-op adventure with AIs or friends to solve puzzles, dress up, and generally mess about. The dress up part is especially interesting, as it was shown during the trailer that Link is able to wear Princess Zelda's clothes. Was this it? In a game where there are three versions of Link, would Tri Force Heroes mark the moment when a female Link finally becomes playable? It doesn't matter if it's not a main entry, or if it's not canonical. Well, that's also a no from Nintendo.

The response to the Tri Force speculation was rather lily-livered in its nature to say the least; essentially it was "a call to heroes has been put out, and only men are heroes," and to say that's bollocks is a tremendous understatement. History has seen many influential female warriors: Women like Joan of Arc and Grace O'Malley defied the standards of their time, women who set out to prove themselves in areas considered to be the domain of men.

Link as he appears in 'The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks'

Japan, Nintendo's home, has two excellent examples of its own in Nakano Takeko and Tomoe Gozen. While not an official member of the Aizu army during the Boshin War, Takeko commanded a unit comprised totally of women, where she led by example charging into battle with a naginata. Tomoe Gozen fought in Japan's Genpei war and predates Takeko by nearly 700 years. Gozen fought alongside male samurai and was highly skilled with both the bow and the sword (hello, Link). Gozen lived to see the war through to its end while the unfortunate Takeko was killed by a rifle bullet during a charge.

In the fictional world we see characters like Fa Mulan (who went to war in place of her father), Éowyn and Arwen from The Lord of the Rings, Marvel's Black Widow and Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones. There's plenty of scope and inspiration for women to be heroes and warriors.

Article continues after the video below

Watch VICE's film, The Mystical Universe of 'Magic: The Gathering'

So, what's the deal with Link? You might think he's an established Nintendo character, and altering him would be like radically redesigning Mario. Except, Link has never been a constant at all. We've seen him sport brown, pink and blonde hair. We've seen him shrunk down to miniscule size to tackle two worlds in one. We've seen him turn into a wolf, a rabbit, become a merman and a sentient painting. But most of all we've hardly ever seen the same Link each time.

Over the course of 30 years, Link's origins have been told and re-told over and over again, and that's because—unlike Link's Nintendo stablemates—he isn't exactly established. The lore of the Zelda titles is a generational story where the great evil is sealed away and the hero is reborn in each generation to fight it when it returns; your standard hero fare, really. With the hero reborn each time, in a place where the children can be both male and female, why is it always a male that gets chosen? There's just no need for it to be that way every time.

'The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess' turned Link into a wolf—but he can't be a girl? (Image via the Zelda wikia)

We're in a time where developers and industry veterans are wising up and realizing that there's a whole bunch of gamers out there who want to see better representation of their demographic. It certainly wouldn't hurt Nintendo to at least try—it's not like the backlash to a female Link would be any worse than the shit they got after the Metroid Prime: Federation Force reveal. Nintendo has frequently played around with its characters throughout its history, placing them in different scenarios and game types. The company even gave Zelda a badass alter ego in Sheik, proving that they're not against making women competent warriors in their games. Link has always been semi-androgynous too, with his features becoming more and more feminine over the years. Going for broke just once couldn't hurt.

Recently, a Tumblr user made a mock-up of what the revealed cast of Final Fantasy XV—an upcoming RPG derided somewhat for its boyband road-trip aesthetic – would look like with their genders swapped. The work was warmly received. Not only was the quality of the images high, but they made the characters look so much more interesting. The game's current crew of black-clothed, dour-looking men wouldn't be missed if this swap were actually to happen. (It won't, but imagine having the option.)

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Here's Link, stood to the right, as he's seen in 'The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker'

This is the 21st century and the times of terrible game advertising like Ocarina of Time's "Get the girl, or play like one" are fast leaving us. Many games shown at E3 2015 gave us strong and tough women in leading roles in big-budget titles. Dishonored 2 features female playable character; Guerilla's next big thing, Horizon: Zero Dawn, has a female protagonist; Mirror's Edge is making a comeback with Catalyst; and Nintendo... Well, I would say they have Samus, but she hasn't had a game of her own for a long time now.

It's time Link became a female protagonist in Nintendo's roster of characters. Maybe not permanently, but possibly in an alternate timeline – which shouldn't be difficult given Link is reborn every generation anyway. He needs to "do a Thor" – that's a name given to the one Mjölnir has chosen fit to wield it, and currently it rests in the hands of a woman, a decision that is proving incredibly successful for comic publishers Marvel. Link can be Nintendo's Thor, a hero chosen each generation, male or female. Canonically, the legend that Nintendo has created actually gives them the flexibility to have Link be a woman, and when the gender split of people who identify as males or females and who play games is about 50/50, there's just no reason for them to not make the most of their own fiction. Because right now, their hero of time is only a Link to the past.

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What a shithead. Photos via the author

I thought I loved high school. Looking back, it had been—at best—an infatuation. The place I thought I adored was filled with easily impressionable and easily impressed teenagers. These kids helped build a reputation for me and at the time, I revelled in this personal branding of infamy. Today, I'd do anything to escape my teenage rep. Generally, if you pissed your pants in gym class or solely ate ketchup packets for lunch, graduation would be your reprieve from that embarrassing part of your life. People have better things to do and will eventually move on with their lives. But in Canada's smallest province (that's PEI, if you are interested) your high school peers build a persona for you that can follow you to the day that you're dick up in the dirt.

I was a teenage shithead. This persona erupted at a point where the list of new things to do in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island ran dry—which, if you've ever been here, happened pretty quickly. Every Friday night was spent listening to the same Motion City Soundtrack album driving listlessly in my friend's mom's minivan. And as much as I fucking loved that album, it wasn't enough to save me from myself.

Illustration von Ole Tillmann

This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine

On June 17, 2015, a day before the start of Ramadan, Prime Minister Kalzeubet Pahimi Deubet of the predominantly Muslim Chad announced that burkas, turbans, and other religious face coverings would be banned nationwide.

The motion was uniquely harsh, outlawing full-face veils everywhere (not just in state institutions), threatening dissidents with summary arrest, and sending cops to burn headscarves in the markets. Despite this severity, local Muslims raised seemingly little outcry.

The government issued the injunction to protect national security after bombings on June 15. The culprits, allegedly Boko Haram militants punishing Chad for fighting with a coalition against the Islamist group in neighboring Nigeria, supposedly used veils to hide explosives. In never-again overkill, Chad promptly bombed Nigerian Boko bases, launched a dragnet seeking local collaborators, and passed the ban.

According to Elisha Renne, an African veiling expert at the University of Michigan, other nations (like Nigeria) have had even more trouble with veil-smuggled bombs. But they haven't issued bans, perhaps because they fear sparking zealous backlashes over a rare threat. (Although in the weeks following Chad's ban, there have been renewed and serious discussions of a similar move in parts of Nigeria.)

Yet Chad avoided any such backlash. Lori Leonard, a Cornell sociologist with extensive experience in Chad, suggests this is partly because few locals ever wore full veils. More important, citizens are amenable to backing most actions the government takes to stem Boko terror.

Therein lies the irony of Boko sadism: Militants want to drive people toward conservatism. But they're so horrific that they can push a Muslim-majority nation to impose harsh anti-veil laws, and persuade citizens to swallow them, in the dim hope that this can help wipe out these twisted fuckers.

Update: Towards the end of July, the Muslim-majority nation of Niger (just west of Chad) issued its own ban on full-face veils out of fear that they could be used to facilitate bombings. Although the nation has suffered a number of Boko Haram-led assaults, the government seems to be issuing this ban as a preventative measure rather than a reaction to any recent veil-smuggled bombing. It is, as of yet, unclear whether reactions to the ban will be as tempered in Niger as in Chad.

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Photo via Flickr user Martin Cathrae

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Before I personally volunteered at a crisis and emotional support helpline, I had very little understanding of what actually went on at such a center. I figured that the job had something to do with spending hours listening to people who were down on their luck and needed a little company or a bit of emotional support—and in many ways it was. But what struck me the most, besides the amount of callers who were oblivious to the fact that they were pedophiles, was how many "regular people" called in. I'm not sure what kind of person I expected to be using the hotline exactly—perhaps I was just naive—but so many of the people that I've talked to could have easily been a friend of mine or a member of my family.

The association I work for has dozens of centers across France. The one I am assigned to is housed in a small Parisian council flat made up of a kitchen, a bathroom and a sitting room that was decked out with a bunch of phones. A few of the center's 20 volunteers—or "listeners"—have been working there for more ten years. At a guess, the average age among listeners is about 30 years old and there are just as many men as there are women.

The first time I applied to work in that center I was rejected. In reality, it's quite complicated to get hired—the job requires a lot more than spare time and willingness. The employers are also quite selective so as not to end up spending a load of time training people who simply seek to satisfy their curiosity or quickly ease their conscience and then just bail six months later. Successful candidates seem to come from quite a broad array of backgrounds: Some are psychology students working with loneliness, depression, and madness, while others simply think it's their calling to save people from whatever situation they have landed in. I've also wondered whether or not I was just a voyeur but, in the end, I assured myself that I was there for the right reasons.

I was interviewed three times by three different people before getting admitted. They asked me why I was applying, what my availability was like, and if I'd ever been depressed—those working for the association seem to possess a hawk's eye for spotting people's weaknesses. After passing the initial interviews, I had to take part in three listening sessions that lasted for four hours each. Before being allowed to take calls myself, I had to observe other listeners and develop my own "listening style." Everyone I work with has their own way of listening.

My first solo call was with a young Tunisian woman whose father had thrown her out of the house for telling people that her brother had raped her—something that was supposed to be kept a family secret. The conversation lasted for about 50 minutes and was intense from the beginning.

We can't adopt any sort of moralizing attitude or antagonize the caller, no matter the severity of their actions.

The association's rules strictly stipulate that the listener can never end the call, so I struggled to steer the conversation away from going round and round in circles. When that does happen, you are advised to try and convince the caller to hang up by saying things like: "If you agree, then I suggest that we leave it here for now." People often try to prolong things by negotiating for a few more minutes or asking for a particular volunteer, even though we are all completely anonymous.

My second call was also strange—it was from a man who couldn't stomach the fact that his daughter was growing up. I later figured out that this was because she didn't want him to abuse her anymore. Those sorts of moments are quite difficult because we're supposed to listen to everyone. We're permitted to ask such people whether or not they know that what they are doing is punishable by law, but nothing else. We can't adopt any sort of moralizing attitude or antagonize the caller, no matter the severity of their actions.

Every three weeks, we have a meeting—supervised by professional psychologists—where we'd discuss any complicated listenings we'd had in that period. We analyze each conversation and try to define a process to deal with similar chats. Those meetings really help relieve some of the pressure and feelings that you took home with you at night.

Occasionally, you get people who express disappointment or just go completely nuts over the phone. I remember one woman in particular: One night, we spoke for an hour about how her children never visited her anymore. The conversation began dragging on so I tried to suggest that we should wrap things up. Then all of a sudden, she turned and began screaming obscenities: "If that's how you are going to be, I'll take off my panties and put my pussy on your face," she said. She also spent a few minutes trying to convince me that she'd somehow gotten pregnant purely by listening to my voice. In the end, she apologized. Which I guess is something.

Related: Watch our documentary on 'Gay Conversion Therapy'

I think the caller that threw me off the most was this 17-year-old boy from Sarcelles. It was easy to tell that our discussion was the first time he'd used the hotline, because instead of remaining anonymous, he told me every last detail about himself. He explained to me that he was extremely lonely—his two friends had left to study elsewhere and he was seeing his cousins less and less. He was mostly interested in finding out where he could meet new friends. On paper, it was a very classic call, but to imagine a 17-year-old sitting alone in some suburb, so desperate for companionship that he had to call a helpline, made me so sad. It really struck home that these problems affect so many people—literally anyone could find themselves at the other end.

I am also genuinely shocked by the amount of parents calling to talk about how their children don't take care of them and the number of young girls who've been rendered infertile by cancer and are too scared to tell their pregnant friends.

Once, a woman called to tell me that she was standing in front of her apartment but couldn't bring herself to go inside because she was sick of her husband. Her entire life was built around that relationship so she hadn't dared to leave to him. Another time, I spoke with an an old lady who told me that nobody wanted to visit her. She was slowly going blind but had seen her daughter stealing from her. She was afraid of confronting her about it because she thought she might never come back.

Surprisingly enough, I have never found myself overwhelmed by the sort of emotion that accompanies confessions like this. Sure, it's hard to hear these things but it's important to keep in mind how much this sort of call means to the person on the line. Sometimes, myself and the caller even end up laughing together. I have, in many cases, felt close to people and grateful that I was afforded a glimpse of their everyday life.

After each call, we have to write down the time the conversation began and when it ended, precisely what sort of conversation it was, and then sum the whole thing up in a few lines. These notes aren't for anything other than catharsis for the listener. The center is full of files detailing each and every one of the calls and I must admit that I've thought about reading them more than once. In the end, I never do and that's probably for the best.

Some cocaine, not at Route 36, because it's impossible to take photos inside. Photo by Zxc via

Traveling through South America, I'd heard whispers, rumors, and outright recommendations for the so-called Route 36. According to some—and by "some," I mean the types who enjoy putting high purity cocaine into their noses—it's about as essential as Machu Picchu on any backpacker's itinerary.

Route 36 is an illegal pop-up lounge bar located in La Paz, Bolivia where cocaine is served by the gram on a silver platter, along with the cocktail of your choice. It also seems to be somewhere literally everyone knows about, which leads you to suspect that, for it to remain open, there may be an element of corruption at play.

Of course, while everyone knows of it, not everybody knows where it actually is. After provoking blank faces from three cabbies, we eventually found our man. "Can you take us to Route 36 please?" we asked, in Spanish. He quoted us 15 bolivianos (just over a buck) and took us on our way, the only hiccup on our journey was the roadblock we had to circumvent.

La Paz's main plaza had been protected by riot police for the past week or two as striking miners from another city demanded investment. The day before our taxi ride, at the end of July, those demands were delivered by way of dynamite set off in the middle of the road. This is the sort of climate in which La Paz has resided for the past few years; tourists indulging in artisanal local drug services, while protests rage every couple of months, from from soldiers demanding better working conditions to the disabled campaigning for better welfare support.

As we avoided the roadblock, driving into the outskirts of La Paz, the cabbie explained to me that the majority of Bolivia's cocaine is produced around the eastern cities of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. It's the many farms here that give Bolivia its number three global ranking when it comes to coca production, with its 23,000 hectares of plantations behind Bolivia's 48,000 and Peru's 49,800.

Arriving at the bar, we were almost manhandled through a four-foot opening in what looked like a garage door by the three young Bolivian men who were rather inconspicuously standing guard outside. After paying our 25 bls [$3.62] entrance fee (which we exchanged for ripped pieces of paper indicating no.12056 and no.12057, respectively) we sauntered in and were beckoned over to the busiest table by a charming Norwegian man.

He'd just been asking around on the street for coke and had been bundled into a cab that ferried him here for the night.

"Dos caiprainas, por favor," my friend, Josephine, asked of the weary hostess who approached us as we sat down.

"And a gram of cocaine, right?" she interjected before the last syllable had escaped Josephine's teeth.

We paid the 50 bls [$7.26] for the cocktails, in addition to the 150 bls [$21.77] for the gram of coke. It was delivered to us instantly.

This isn't the kind of bar that turns a blind eye to dealers in the bathroom; this is a bar that actively facilitates and promotes the use of cocaine. Route 36 changes location as soon as there's complaints from the locals. According to a few of the guys sat around the table, it had been here for several weeks.

There were around 20 people in the bar. We were sat with eight English gap year kids, two Belgian professionals, and the Norwegian. Half a dozen Irish businessmen were sat on the opposite side of the bar, definitely the most wound up and coke-y of everyone in there, in addition to two bar-women, the hostess, the DJ (who kept playing fucking terrible dubstep), and two security guards constantly pacing around.

Bolivian President Evo Morales holding a coca leaf. Screen shot via.

The coca leaf, of which cocaine derives, made news recently amid the Pope's visit to La Paz. In the Andes, the leaf is considered a sacred commodity, and President Evo Morales is a staunch defender of its medicinal and nutritional qualities. And he makes a very valid point; its cultural importance for Andean people, who have chewed the leaf for thousands of years, is primarily to relieve altitude sickness, not facilitate four-hour house party conversations with your boss about how to improve workflow.

It is for this reason that he ended the practice of previous governments, which destroyed coca leaf fields as part of the American war on drugs, kicking out the US Drug Enforcement Agency, which was offering farmers £960 [$1,500] for each field of coca destroyed. He had referred to this as cultural imperialism, arguing that increased demand for cocaine in the United States shouldn't rob indigenous peoples of ancient traditions.

Since legalizing coca cultivation after he was elected in 2006, Morales has repeatedly insisted that coca is not cocaine, calling on the UN to remove it from its list of prohibited drugs. However, Bolivia's cocaine exports have risen steadily since he took office, with production rising from 290 to 420 tons between 2013 and 2014, and it is perhaps inadvertently due to his liberal policies that Route 36 exists.

Watch our documentary 'Cooking Cocaine in Lima'

I had to excuse myself from pleasantries and introductions to rack up on the cut-out surfaces that the bar had provided. I made two slugs from the wrap we'd been given and hoovered it up. It was pretty good. It could have been more floury, but it went down a treat. No flinch, no cringe. Unsurprisingly, I became chattier than usual as we all exchanged life stories and travel tips.

The two English guys next to me, Hamish and Josh, explained how they had been forced to withdraw the equivalent of $900 (in exchange for 10 grams—they'd only wanted two) by some Colombian gangsters when they had tried to score in Medellin. This place was a far cry from their experience that day.

The bar had a deal going, so Josephine and I pooled our cash with our two new friends to get four grams for the price of three. Suddenly a charismatic—but a little wet behind the ears—Swedish guy pitched up next to us and started passing lines around for everyone. I had to show him how to snort the coke. He was the kind of man who would get busted in a second anywhere besides the security of that box, and his entrance summed up the ease with which one can locate the place.

READ ON MOTHERBOARD: The Effects of Cocaine on Blood Flow in the Brain

By 5 AM I was pretty wired, chain smoking cigarettes and talking very much at people rather than with them. At around half 6, a woman in her fifties asked us if we wanted any weed, trying to avoid the gaze of the bar-staff. We bought five grams of an almost un-smokeable black clump masquerading as marijuana, which subsequently gave me a headache for 80 bls [$11.61] and headed back to our Airbnb in a cab with seven of our new very high, very chatty friends.

We had a fun night, and I learnt a few things: that Brits have a pretty insatiable appetite for cocaine tourism; and that, if that's what you're in South America for, it's better to head to Route 36 than buying it on the street and risking having a knife held to your throat.

Follow Mattha on Twitter.

Tom Hayes arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London, Thursday, July 30, 2015. AP Photo/Frank Augstein

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

They called him Tommy Chocolate. Because, when the big swinging dicks of the trading world were at the pub each lunchtime, downing their lager, cussing out their rivals, deciding which office girls they'd like to do from behind and which they'd let be done frontwards, Tommy Chocolate would also be stood there too: drinking his traditional mug of hot chocolate, cutting a quieter, altogether more awkward figure.

This despite the fact that, in his own right, Tommy Chocolate—real name Tom Hayes—was actually one of the biggest swinging dicks of all.

So much so that when the star trader left his job at UBS and signed to Citigroup, his new employers handed Hayes £2.2 million [$3.4 million] as a golden hello. Even in the world of high-powered trading, this was a stoinking sum. But Hayes had made £20 million [$31 million] for UBS in 2007. By the middle of 2008, he was already up £30 million [$47 million]. His success exceeded the market's norms by so much that he became the subject of gossip. What exactly, people wanted to know, was his secret?

A year after joining Citi, the answer to that question became obvious. Hayes was sacked from his job in Tokyo for manipulating the Japanese version of inter-bank lending rate—"Libor"—and so began the process that led Tommy Chocolate to his trial at Southwark Crown Court, star of the only major UK banker trial of the post-crash era. Yesterday, that trial finally with a guilty verdict. Tommy C is now a prisoner of Her Majesty, looking towards a 14-year sentence.

Of course, Libor rigging didn't cause the Crash. It simply coincided with it. But as the only proper banker prosecution on the CPS's books, the events playing out at Southwark since the end of May have become symbolic of that same seedy, fuck-you-all era of banking, where some insiders rolled-over the outsiders by whatever means necessary.

Watch on VICE News: Ukraine's Failed Ceasefire

Libor matters because it sets the rate for a range of financial products as crucial as they are terminologically obscure: swaptions, interest syndicated loans, collateralized debt obligations.

In its simplest form, Libor represents the rate at which banks are prepared to lend money to each other. High Libor = there isn't much spare cash in the market. Low = take all you want. That then influences the rate at which they will lend to the public—it establishes a base-line for what's happening with interest rates outside of the Bank of England or US Federal Reserve's own rates.

The value of the market for Libor has been estimated at $450 trillion—that's pretty-much-everything-sized, which is why manipulating it has implications everywhere. The city of Baltimore, for instance, tried to sue Barclays for their role in Libor fixing, after the interest rates on their loans were kept artificially high by the fix, costing them millions.

The extraordinary thing about Libor is not that it was rigged, but that there was ever a time when it wasn't rigged. Libor was a gentlemen's agreement enacted in an environment where everyone was a scuzzy street pimp pounding their a knuckle-duster.

The British Banking Association was in charge of setting this global rate, which is why, in a charmingly ramshackle British way that Richard Curtis might have been proud of, all this bogglingly complex trillion-dollar financial architecture was kept safe by a system about as effective as paper locks.

The entire rate was effectively a matter of the personal opinion of eight people. The British Banking Association would take submissions from 16 global banks about the rate at which they would be prepared to loan money to other banks. They knocked off the four highest and lowest answers, then aggregated the remaining eight. Bam: Libor.

It didn't take Gordon Gecko to figure out that if you influence the eight people who get to chip in on that rate, you control a $450 trillion market. Which is where Hayes, an unrelenting, obsessive maximizer, re-enters the picture.

In endless phone calls replayed to the jury, Hayes could be heard grunting down the line to traders at other banks in his estuary wide boy accent about how he's looking for a "low three-month," or a "high six-month." In endless instant messages shown on video screens in the court, Hayes butters up his trader contacts, then idly slips to them the notion of the "low three-month."

In one email, a trader called Darrell Read, who was leaving to move to New Zealand, gushes in chummy valediction about how much Hayes has helped him out—what a rip-roaring roller coaster ride they have taken together.

Related: Watch 'The Bros of Fracking'

In a world already run on bullying and daft luxury perks, Hayes's methods slotted right in, even if his overall side-payments spending was surprisingly modest. He dropped a grand on lunch for one bunch of submitters. He asked a colleague to sort out another group with a money-sloshing night at a strip club to soften them up. Then there are the so-called "wash trades"—where Hayes was alleged to have paid people for their services by trading with them at a distinct disadvantage to himself. He told one broker: "If you get that up I will fucking reward you."

In the face of this quantity of tightly documented evidence, Hayes's strategy was simple and brazen: "So what?" "It's a free country." "Why would someone who thought they were committing a crime leave such a huge paper trail?"

He thought he was innocent because this was an innocent and widely accepted pursuit. He even wrote his Libor upping ambitions on his Facebook wall, his lawyers pointed out: "Tom needs a high three-month." Plain as that. In a letter to his HR managers, Hayes challenged them to point to anything in the Citigroup guidelines he'd overstepped.

Unfortunately for him, the law is very clear on why ignorance of the law is no excuse. But then, the law was also peculiarly vague when it comes to what Hayes actually did. Libor was so loosely defined that there doesn't seem to be one, direct, clear contravention. A specific crime of rate-rigging has since been brought in, but no such thing existed at the time. Which was why he ended up charged with something as vague as "conspiracy to defraud."

In fact, his legal team presented a surprisingly robust case, for someone who seemed so bang-to-rights. The stack of evidence against him included an 82-hour-long taped police interview from 2012, in which he sang like the Placido Domingo of canaries.

To counter this obvious defensive issue, he retracted all the admissions of guilt therein, arguing that he was desperate to get charged in the UK, not the US. Had he been extradited, Tommy C would have faced a 30-year sentence, rather than the book-throwing 14 he got over here—the very upper reaches of British justice's ability to throw the book at a financial criminal. Say what you like about no-holds laissez faire American capitalism, but fuck with their financial system and they go at you with sticks.

The trial was a vast encyclopedia of tedium that extended from May until yesterday: days of people testifying about the floor plan in Citigroup's Tokyo HQ.

A month in, the star finally made his way into the witness box. And when he did, he wasn't alone. By his side at all times, sat a woman in a suit, her long dark hair tied-off neatly. Occasionally, she would lean in and ask the judge whether Tommy could have a little time out, or whether an ambiguous question could be re-worded. But she wasn't a lawyer.

Hayes's other nickname in his early trading days was "Rainman," and it turned out that the pop diagnosis of some bully-boy banker down the pub can also be right from time to time. During the early days of the case, Hayes was been diagnosed as spectrum autistic: He had mild Asperger's. Her role was to make sure he understood the questions—to tell the barristers when they changed the subject too rapidly, or to advise against the making of jokes, most of which Hayes admitted he "doesn't really get."

Hayes admitted his diagnosis could explain why he'd kept the same superhero duvet from age eight to age 24. Or his general "obsessionality." "I wanted to do my job as perfectly as I could," he said, about teenage McWork jobs. "It doesn't matter if I was cleaning a deep fat fryer or picking chicken off the bone, those jobs were left to me because I'd do them the best possible."

On July 10, as his spirited, often combative self-defense peaked, he broke down in tears on the stand. "I wanted to tell them... I haven't done anything wrong," he wept, before going full Jerry Maguire: "At the time I didn't think about any of it, whether it was right or wrong. People go to work every day... on the train or on a bike... or however they get there... and they do a job. They don't sit and think, 'Is doing my job honest or dishonest?' They do their job."

He emphasized every word of "do their job," and it actually sounded stirring, until you thought about it for half a second. Then, you started to wonder whether this non-insight had been swirling around his head for weeks. Whether he'd lain awake, the big thing he had to say forming and dissolving and re-forming before his eyes, until one three am the wording finally perfected itself. They. Do. Their. Jobs. Nuremberg, eat your heart out.

But don't underestimate the role of that sort of psychological self-justification. Hayes was just bullish and obsessive enough to have take such a blinkered view up a gear. He'd been a true believer in the culture. Then the culture had whipped the rug out from underneath him. No wonder he was feeling so sore.

In fact, at times it felt like Hayes had gone for a full, exhaustive trial rather than just pleading guilty in order to spread some muck around. Again and again, he painted himself as the fall guy. "UBS had thrown me under the bus," he said, when his barrister asked him again why he'd originally decided to plead guilty. "I was up against two $50 billion organizations [UBS and Citi], the DOJ [US Department of Justice], the FSA [Britain's then financial regulator], you name the acronym. I was the guy everyone was going to blame."

Amongst many others who'd stood idly by in the culture he foregrounded, he named his own boss at Citigroup, Mike Pieri, who is also alleged to have also gone around asking for high three and six month Libors. In a text to the Wall Street Journal just before the trial kicked off, Hayes put it plainly: "This goes much higher up than me."

"The practice was tried and tested," he told the court. "It was so endemic within the bank [UBS], I just thought ... this can't be a big issue because everybody knows about it ... [it was] such an open secret."

The court has spoken. Hayes is guilty. As representative of Banking Evil (2006 - 2010 variety), you can certainly feel pumped up and angry at him. Maybe you can also still feel sorry for him. And in small personal ways, I certainly did. Regardless of what had happened on the stand, he always cut an awkward figure—sad, a bit anxious, misplaced, not much of a master of the financial universe, or even the sort of guy who could take a lead in rigging the world's most important interest rate. You wanted to reach over to him and go: "It's OK mate. You'll be alright. Really. Even if you're not."

Is there something wrong with the fact that the only guy to have been brought to trial under the Libor scandal so far is an autistic Tommy Chocolate with his own superhero duvet? Is this—ladies and gentlemen of the popular opinion jury—the sum total of all evil in the financial services sector? Or is this something we're being bought-off with? Should we be expected to choose between the statements: "He is guilty" and "He is being thrown under the bus"?

We have had our pound of flesh. Great. But if we're satisfied by that, then we're missing the ton of rotting carcass that is the financial system just behind it.

Follow Gaivn Haynes on Twitter.

The couple at their wedding (via Instagram)

Read: Photos of Triumphant, Pissed-Up Irish People Celebrating the Gay Marriage Vote

A militarily-trained gay couple in New York have left some homophobic chode "covered in his own blood" after he attempted to attack them while they were out shopping.

Larry Lennox-Choate III and Daniel Lennox-Choate, who married in 2013, were shopping in the city when an unknown assailant became incensed by their sexuality and began yelling anti-gay slurs at them, before attacking Daniel and leaving him with a bruised lip.

However, both Larry and Daniel attended West Point military academy, which was founded by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In a Facebook post, Larry said they "tossed" the assailant "in the street like the coward he is".

The story, posted below, has since been picked up by many media outlets. They say that the NYPD's hate crime division is on the case, though as of today no arrests have been made, with the investigation still ongoing.

William Shatner and a terrifying airplane monster. Via Twilight Zone's 'Terror at 20,000 Feet.'

As a chunk of barnacle-covered debris provides the latest twist in the mystery of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, few could argue that it hasn't been a profoundly doom-laden 17 months in air travel.

In hindsight, that moment in March last year when MH370's green radar-blip vanished over the Andaman Sea marked the start of aviation's annus horribilis. Six months later, in an event that might have smacked of farce had it not been so sad, another Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down by a surface-to-air-missile over eastern Ukraine. Fast forward another six months, and a clinically depressed first officer ploughed his Germanwings plane into an Alpine mountainside. Three disasters with different causes, but each sharing a common outcome: zero survivors.

And right now, as I sit in The Flying Horse in Gatwick's South Terminal, a blister-pack of diazepam lying next to a half-finished pint (my third) on the table in front of me, this trio of tragedies is bubbling away in my mind. Once again—and I have to do this a lot, being primarily a travel writer by trade—I'm in a departures lounge, preparing to board.

For me, the question has never been why some people are scared of flying, but rather how anyone in their right mind manages not to be. In just under an hour, my fellow passengers and I will step into an aluminium tube, strap ourselves into our seats and rocket up to 36,000 feet. For the next few hours, our fragile bags of flesh will be barreling through the upper-troposphere at 550 miles per hour. Outside it will be minus 60 degrees centigrade. The jet-stream will be caressing the wobbling wingtips at a brisk 100mph. And there will be people asleep. Asleep. Meanwhile, I'll be sat rigid, clammy palms gripping the arm-rests in anticipation of the first ripple of in-flight turbulence. And I'll be thinking: 'What is wrong with you people? We're all about to die!'

For aviophobics like me, take-off plunges you into a world of pessimistic hypotheticals. Of bird strike, lightning bolts. Of "Catastrophic Electronic Failure." Every mechanical noise presages imminent cataclysm. The sudden screech of hydraulics? That's the landing gear falling off. A sudden bank? Almost certainly the start of a graveyard spiral that will only end when the plane's nose crumples crepe-paper-like into some foreign field. That urgent zip of engine noise? Probably an evasive maneuver—any second another plane will shear through the fuselage. And there'll be just enough time to think, I knew this would happen before a shard of ruptured aluminium decapitates your row.

"It's estimated that around 9 million people in the UK and 500 million people worldwide have a fear of flying," says Elaine Iljon Foreman, a clinical psychologist whose "Freedom to Fly" program has helped over 300 people tackle their aviation anxieties in the last two decades. "People often say it's a fear that creeps up on them as they get older. Perhaps that's because the youthful illusion that death is something that only happens to old people starts to fade. Sometimes it starts after a particularly scary experience."

I can trace my own fears back to 2007 and two flights that were memorable, in different ways. On both, by coincidence, I was traveling with a friend who works for Airbus. His job is to buy wings, a very important component of an airplane, from some clever manufacturers in China.

Flight one: a night-flight somewhere over the same French Alps that recently engulfed Germanwings flight 9525 in a ball of flame, and a storm grabbed hold of our Ryanair A320 and shook it for one seemingly interminable half-hour. The archetypal turbulence nightmare.

As the plane strained against the buffeting, prompting a mixture of whimpering and self-denying hilarity from the passengers, my friend spun round in his seat and, seeing me near-hysterical, endeavored to explain the mechanics and the back-up systems—the meticulously engineered unlikelihood that it could all go wrong. Those violent judders urging me to puke my heart out of my mouth, he explained, were merely the plane's many computers compensating for the fickle whirligig of gale-force winds.

Such technical counsel is supposed to help the fearful. Yet, as he blithered happily away about the dozens of advanced processors parrying each gust with unerring efficiency, all my brain offered were images of gray dialogue boxes spouting error messages.

Then, a few months later, we were on a flight back from Morocco when a dazzling white flash lit up the starboard windows.

"Um, we think that was a bolt of lightning," an uncharacteristically tremulous pilot's voice announced over the PA system ten minutes later. "Very common... [pause] ... Everything seems to be fine." And there, sitting next to me, was the wing-seller, preparing to accept Christ, just as pallid as I was.

READ: Pilots Explain Why We Shouldn't Worry About Turbulence

To mitigate such primal fears, the aeronautics industry's main recourse is to talk about the odds—the serendipitous death tombola. You're more likely to be stabbed in the face by a random kitchen utensil than you are to be thrown into a mountain in a jumbo-jet. You're certainly more likely to die on the roads—2,000 times more likely, according to a cursory internet search. Thing is, peril feels more easily dodged when your feet are stuck to the ground. If your car is about to smash into a jack-knifing 18-wheeler on the highway, you could hurriedly fling open the door and commando-roll onto the grass median, like in a film.

The idea of the plane crash is so uniquely terrifying because all human agency (however illusory) is eradicated. Psychologists like Iljon Foreman will tell you that it's all about control. "It's often the fear of something terrible happening to the plane, and knowing there's nothing you can do about it," she explains. "Think of all the things like structural failure, pilot error, air traffic control issues, extreme weather—all of the potential catastrophes that can befall a plane." (And I am thinking about those Elaine; I really am.) "They're all to do with a loss of external control."

It's this abject helplessness, amid a disorienting facade of movie-watching, mini Merlot-sipping gentility that sets us aquiver. It's the thought of those passengers on the horrifying headline-makers of recent months—the vanished, the shot down, the intentionally crashed—knowing there was nothing they could do to halt the plunge. Up in the air, Death doesn't need to outwit you. You're a sitting duck.

Meanwhile, somewhere in a bland cubicle, a cold-hearted risk analyst with a little model plane on his desk has calculated that the one-in-a-million "hull loss" (the industry's dispassionate terminology for what most of us know as "a fucking awful plane crash") is an acceptable threat to the balance sheet. His answer to George Carlin's oft-quoted wisecrack "If black boxes survive air crashes, why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?" would simply be that it would cost too much money. Surely, if our safety were their paramount concern, as they're so keen on telling us during pre-flight safety briefings as they explain the various pointless things we should do before our compromised plane splats into the ground, they'd invest in parachutes and ejector seats for all.

All this, of course, is to say nothing of the preamble, for you've already forfeited control from the second you check-in. From the moment we pass through the opaque screens of the security gate we are no more precious than animated cargo—everyone a suspected terrorist with nitro-glycerin in their water bottles and detonators in their boot-heels.

Want more travel stuff? Watch our documentary 'Big Cats of the Gulf', about the people who keep banned wild animals as pets:

I'm inclined to believe Morrissey when he says that he was groped by an airport security guard in San Francisco. A burly customs official in Helsinki International once cupped my testicles while staring me straight in the eye for a full five seconds. Under ordinary circumstances, it was the sort of violation that might have incited a head-butt, or at least some high-pitched protest. Instead, on the conveyor of humiliation that is the airport security process, I stood and meekly accepted the tea-bagging, then simply shuffled off. Such dehumanizing treatment helps to ensure that most of us are in thrall to a sort of passive fatalism even before we've entered the departures lounge, where the overwhelming sense of powerlessness is reinforced by the cosmic joke of airport prices.

For the airlines, of course, this is just dandy. It makes financial sense for them to turn flying into a trauma. Long-haul operators have weaponized discomfort by turning the surcharge into an art-form, offering everything from speedy boarding to extra leg-room, all at a price. How else could you convince the prodigiously well-off to part with the $45-a-minute it costs to fly from Abu Dhabi to London in Etihad's "Residence Class," complete with double bed, butler service, and 27-inch TV?

For the rest of us, somewhat comforted by the knowledge that "Residence Class" is located in the aircraft's nose, offering the prospect that the bed's double mattress might cushion the impact for us plebes, flying is a war of attrition: us vs. the slow march of time.

We all have our coping strategies. I don't watch whole films. I watch snippets of every single film on the menu. Sometimes, I get up to go to the toilet when I don't need to, just to kill another two minutes —two minutes out of ten purgatorial hours.

"Have you considered going on a course?" my GP enquired recently, as I implored him to print off a prescription for my latest batch of benzodiazepines. Ignoring my disinterest, he ran through the options: hypnotherapy, aversion therapy, CBT...

"I'll certainly look into it," I replied, while giving him a look that said: "Please give me the fucking pills."

Because, for now, my best technique by far—think of it as my travel writer's top tip of the week—is three pints of beer and 20 milligrams of valium. By employing this simple narcotic combo, I can just about survive the ride.

Follow Henry on Twitter.

All photos by Charles Caesar

In 2009, Soulja Boy tweeted this fact: "I'm a fan of Anime ^_^." A year later, he dropped the track "Anime," referring to the Japanese cartoons so beloved by American geeks, with lyrics like: "anime, drop pants; anime, wrist and chains; anime, and everything; anime." It's a bit jarring, the casual throwing-together of bling and nerd culture: "Pikachu diamonds, anime floskas."

Anime blogs and forums heralded the rapper's otaku-coming-out as the end of American anime fandom, usually thought of as the domain of white geeks. At the same time, diehard Soulja Boy fans were wondering when swag and anime fell into bed with one another. The critics were overcome by cognitive dissonance.

Soulja Boy, for his part, didn't acknowledge crossing any invisible boundaries. "Bitch, I look like Goku," he said, referring to the popular anime Dragonball Z's protagonist, a fair-skinned, spiky-haired fighter.

Actually, Soulja Boy doesn't look much like Goku. In fact, the only black character in Dragonball Z was a puffy-lipped slave named Mr. Popo (later recolored blue for American television). But at the height of Dragonball Z's popularity, black fans breathed life into "black Goku," using Photoshop to darken the anime character's skin and proliferating his likeness throughout the internet.

Soulja Boy isn't the only famous rap artist who acknowledges that this Japanese cartoon—and hundreds of others—blew up in the 90s black community. In his book The Tao of Wu, RZA of The Wu-Tang Clan dedicates a whole page to Goku's resonance with black Americans, noting that "Son Goku is part of an ancient race called the Saiyans, who come from a distant planet and were known as the fiercest warriors in the galaxy. So Son Goku has superpowers but doesn't realize it—a head injury destroyed his memory, robbed his knowledge of self." He added, "I even use the name Goku as a tag when I write. And when my hair is in an Afro? Word up: I'm Super Saiyan."

RZA sees a portrait of the American slave trade in Saiyan's lost history, left behind on another planet. It's fair to say that the parallel was not intended by Akira Toriyama, the show's creator. In contrast to anime's popularity among black Americans, there are fewer than a dozen depictions of black people in anime who are not thugs, criminals, or slaves. One reason could be that less than 2 percent of Japan is made up of foreigners—it's one of the most homogeneous countries in the world—so people of African descent aren't exactly commonplace. Japan also doesn't have a strong track record on racial acceptance: Miss Universe Japan 2015, a half-black ("hafu") model, faced extreme backlash from fellow Japanese because of her ethnicity.

Still, Japan's cultural exports—especially anime—have become extremely popular in America (the export of anime racked up a $2.7 billion worth in 2009 and $4.8 billion at its height in 2003). So it's no wonder that over 26,500 people showed up at Otakon, Baltimore's anime convention, late last month. Decked out in costumes of their favorite anime character, these American otaku came to celebrate this facet of Japanese culture with cosplay. Between panels on "What the @#$% Japan?!" (18+) and raucous anime porn screenings (also 18+), we caught up with some of the black attendees to talk about what anime fandom can teach us about race in America.

Chanel P., 22

VICE: How did you get into anime?
I was maybe eight or nine years old. You know when Poke'mon or Sailor Moon got big? I didn't know that was anime. I was just like, oh, cartoons! Once I got a little older and had friends in school talking about how that was anime, I looked into it more.

Were there any anime characters you identified with in particular?
I definitely identified with Sailor Jupiter [from Sailor Moon]. I was the tallest kid in my elementary school class. People would pick fun at me. She was shy, and so was I.

What do you think about the fact that there aren't many black anime characters? Was that a barrier to engagement?
It was at first. When I first started coming to anime conventions, I was a bit afraid, actually, to cosplay any characters. I thought, They aren't black, I can't do that . I thought you had to actually look like the character in order to dress like her. But, I mean, I saw people of my skin tone dressing like the character they wanted and thought, I can do that too . I thought, I guess it doesn't matter that there aren't black characters. But I think we do need more black characters.

What's it been like to cosplay?
The first time I cosplayed Sailor Moon was at Otakon last year. That was the first time I ever cosplayed. I got some pictures taken that were posted on the internet. I was excited, like, Hey I'm on the internet, yay! And then I read the comments. A lot of them weren't good, at all. I got, "The cosplay is good, but she shouldn't be black," and "Oh, her skin is too dark," and "Oh, her hair shouldn't be blonde." It was a lot of nasty stuff people should have kept to themselves.

How did you feel when you saw that?
I got a little angry. But then I brushed it off because these are people who are just racist and they'll be that way regardless.

Are you interested greater Japanese culture, too?
I went to Japan when I was in high school, actually. I did an ambassador's program my senior year. I got a lot of dirty looks there, walking around as a black student. A lot of shop owners didn't want to talk to me. They followed me around in the store.

Why do you think that happened?
I guess they probably know the American stereotype that black people steal. That's the problem with stuff in America—stereotypes follow you everywhere.

How did it feel for you to love Japanese culture but be treated that way?
It upset me. It really did. I was so excited to go there, and I'd read a lot of stuff about how the Japanese are really polite. The fact that I was treated like that ruined my experience. After the fourth day, I really wanted to go home. And we were there for a week.

But you still love anime.
I'm not going to let what the people who create it do spoil the fact that I enjoy it. They're still really good stories.

In terms of anime fan culture at conventions like Otakon, do you feel like people are accepting?
Yeah, for the most part. I do get a lot of younger black girls messaging me. One young girl really wanted to cosplay Sailor Moon herself but was scared of wearing blonde hair because of how people feel about her skin being really dark. I said, "Just do it. You wanna do the character so bad, so you're being afraid of what people say shouldn't change that." She did it, and she sent me pictures. She was really adorable.

Cerise Canzius, 36

VICE: How did you get into anime?
I've kind of always watched anime, but I didn't actually know the word anime until, like, eight or nine years ago. None of my other friends are into any of that.

So you watched it a lot yourself.
Yeah, I'd just do my own thing and I didn't have anyone to talk to about it in Chesapeake, Virginia. The majority of my friends are black, just because of the neighborhood I live in, and I went to an all-black college in Atlanta.When I got older, I met another anime fan at a car dealership. He overheard me talking about making Kagome from Inuyasha's outfit for Halloween. He told me about conventions, cosplay. We came to our first convention about four years ago. That's when I got into cosplay.

What has your experience cosplaying been like?
The first year I cosplayed, I taught myself to sew. I made these costumes. I get a lot of compliments here [at Otakon], so I posted pictures of me cosplaying on Facebook. My aunt saw them and was like, "Should people see this?" A lot of our mutual Facebook friends go to our church. I unfriended everyone from my church to make my family feel better about me cosplaying. We've been going to that church our entire lives.

Has anyone else in your church community done something that's provoked a similar response?
Nope.

Just cosplay?
Yep. I was a character from Gurren Lagen. I was wearing short shorts and a bikini. I was so proud. I got so many compliments that day. My cousin is a model and she poses in bikinis all the time. It's like, that's OK, because being a model and wearing skimpy clothes is acceptable. But wearing skimpy clothes as a cosplayer in my community is taboo.

A lot of anime characters read as white. Has anyone discriminated against you while you're cosplaying?
I actually have never been called out for cosplaying someone who's not my color. I know a lot of people have been.

Tiffron Ronald Canzius, 25

VICE: So, how did you meet your wife, [Cerise]?
I heard her talking about Inuyasha. That's one of my favorites, too. Also, Gurren Lagen. That was one of her first cosplays.

Did you share a connection over being African-American and liking anime?
Yes. You don't see a lot of black nerds. Or at least, you didn't used to. Now you do. I don't know if it was taboo or what. So when you saw another one, it was a big deal. Kindred spirits.

Why do you think that is?
I think it's just that, in black culture, [you're told] that it doesn't mesh well with anime—it's just completely different. But when you get into anime, you learn it's not different.

Why would it seem different?
It's something you're not exposed to. It's nothing against it. Growing up, I watched Fresh Prince and Martin. Our parents are like, what is [anime]? They don't know. Then, you find out that there are really popular rap tracks that sample beats from anime shows. I know Puff Daddy samples something from Record of Lodoss War, a 1986 anime. I was like, Whoa, why are these famous black people nerds and no one told me?

And Samuel Jackson is the voice actor for the protagonist in [the anime] Afro Samurai.
And he's a huge nerd! If I could meet anyone, I'd meet him. He always has comic books on him. Not a lot of people know that.

Why do you think you weren't exposed to it?
For lack of a better term, as a community, we had other stuff going on. As a minority, you're always trying to come up. That's the focus. Growing up, my mom was like, get good grades so you can get to a better status. Her focus was always academic. When she saw me with cartoons and whatnot, she was like, what are you doing with that?

Are there any characters you identified with as a black person growing up in America?
Afro Samurai. That plays into what I said earlier. As a minority, my mom always said you have three strikes against you: You're a man so they won't go easy on you. You're foreign (I was born in South America). And you're black. So you have to work extra hard cause you have those things going against you. As a community, you're trying to do better because stuff isn't in your favor. Afro Samurai is about how [Samuel Jackson's character] has the number-two headband and he wants to defeat the man with the number-one headband, so he can be the best. That metaphor goes so deep.

Were there any other characters you identified with?
Piccolo [the green alien from Dragonball Z] is black. He is. In the main group of the Dragonball Z fighters, there wasn't a black one, but there was a green one. He was token. You can see him being a black man instead of a green man and you wouldn't think twice about it. He has to work extra hard just to keep up with Goku. Goku is just naturally good.

He has privilege!
Piccolo has to do so much extra just to keep up with him.

Curtis White, 32

VICE: I'd love to hear about how you got into anime.
It all started with Dragonball Z . It opened my eyes to different types of animation outside of Looney Toons, outside of Garfield & Friends. It was eye-opening.

What did you like about Dragonball Z? Who was your favorite character?
Piccolo. In my opinion, Piccolo was the one who didn't get enough respect. He was always doing the dirty work. He would always halfway finish off the villain and then Goku or Vegeta would finish it off because Piccolo wasn't a main character. He was tough, though.

Someone told me Piccolo was black.
I believe that. He was tough. Now he's the king of Hell. It all works out. You put the most badass character in the most badass place.

VICE travels to Japan to meet Naoto Matsumura, the last man standing in the ghost town of Tomioka.

Is it a conflict in your identity, being black and liking anime?
Not at all. I grew up watching cartoons. Anime was just the next step. It's something I've always enjoyed. I don't think it's a conflict of interest with who I am because this is who I am. I'm 32 years old and at an anime convention. I've been doing this for six years. In terms of anime, there aren't really black characters. There isn't a black Vegeta [from Dragonball]. There isn't a black Goku. When we saw Piccolo, it was like, Hey, it's a person of color . We can identify with him. The only other one was Mr. Popo and he had blackface. It was almost insulting. With Piccolo, we could identify with him.

Even though he's an alien?
We were brought to this country, so I can identify with him.

Jelani Walton, 26

VICE: Is this your first anime convention?
I've been to six cons in seven months.

You're on a bender!
I know, right? After you get into it, you can't stop! I'm already planning the next two.

Does it matter that almost all anime characters read as white?
It's very hard to find dark-skinned characters in anime. When you do, it gets you excited and makes you want to connect with those characters. Then you start looking for more—that made me branch out. I found a website that had all animes with black or dark-skinned characters in it. It made me want to watch more anime to see what they're like.

Some people say they don't think about the race of anime characters since it's not live-action.
Well, once I got into it and start noticing that there aren't many dark-skinned characters, I just want to see what the representation of dark-skinned characters was like. Some of it is stereotypical. All types of yo yo yo's, saggy pants. There are other characters who are intelligent. I just wanted to know what Japan thought of us.

Were you disappointed?
No. A good representation of dark-skinned characters is really good. It makes me want to connect with their culture. I'm planning on going soon.

That's great!
[In anime], I just see a chance to escape. I get tired. I pay a lot of attention to the media. It's nice to be something different. You get to observe a different culture.

What makes anime an escape?
I like how together Japanese culture seems to be. One of the terms in anime is ganbatte. It means, "Do your best." They want to make sure that everyone does their best, works together, and works hard. I like that. I like the cohesiveness. I want to be a part of that.

Aaron Taylor, 24

VICE: When did you get into Japanese culture?
The first anime I started watching back in the day was Dragonball Z on Cartoon Network. But if you had to ask, my technical soul has been Japanese my whole life. My mom will tell you, since I was one, I slept with swords. I made my own swords.

How did you get into making swords?
I started making swords when I was 12. My dad showed me how to do that. Hand-crafted. I've made about four blades now. I have tempered steel, a dual-blade sword, I have a serrated edge which is tempered steel, a lot of iron.

To you, are there parallels between samurai culture and African-American culture?
There's a lot of honor in both. Samurai culture and African-American culture. You put your family before everything. With Bushido [martial art], you don't go out and kill for random reasons. You use your sword to protect. You don't do random, vicious, violent crimes for yourself in African-American culture. If you do, you have to do it for your family.

Have you ever had to defend your family's honor?
It was a while back. This one other kid beat up on my second nephew. It was in elementary school. I came to his house and I fought him in front of his whole family outside his door. It was because of how he treated my nephew. In Bushido, it's about an honor code. I honor my family above everything else. If you test that honor, you're challenging me to a dual, so to speak. We're respectable people.

Yeah.
There's a lot of antagonism against black people. At the end of the day, all you have is your family. It's a stronger bond than most cultures. You keep your family close to yourself. You don't badmouth family.

Karim Smith

VICE: Is it important for you to see someone of your skin color in something you watch?
In anime, not so much, since it's from Japan. There aren't a lot of black people there like there are here. It would hit me if we weren't included more in a cartoon here. I don't have the same expectations.

Are there any anime where you feel like black people are misrepresented?
There was one. It's an old anime. A prison anime. I can't remember the name. It focused on black stereotypes: gangster, criminal, not educated. It was set in New York in 1980. There were stereotypes of every race—Americans were automatically stupid and goofy compared to Japanese. They were doing it as a joke, but it came off as offensive to me. I couldn't watch one episode.

Was it worse than what was on American media at the same time?
No. In America, it's more harmful because it's closer to home. In Japan, they just don't know.

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