Photo by Jake Lewis

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Nightclubs are shutting down everywhere but the problem seems most acute in East London. On the first day of the year, Plastic People announced it was shutting down. This week it emerged that the George & Dragon would be closing, the third gay pub to be lost in Shoreditch in less than a year. But the most troublesome development came when Hackney Council announced a proposed licensing clampdown, with any new bars or clubs expected to close at 11 PM in the week or midnight at weekends. If there is a war on the UK's nightlife, this week Hackney council made its first tactical retreat—postponing its consultation because of what it calls a "minor error."

When Hackney started their licensing review, bar and club owners in the area quickly launched the We Love Hackney campaign to raise awareness about the plans and encourage people to share their views with the council. In just a few weeks, more than 4,000 people signed up and 2,000 emailed the council through the campaign website. Many more responded directly. Hundreds of people made their views known on Twitter under the hashtag #NotConsideredAppropriate—a reference to the council's view on nightclubs in an early draft of its proposed policy.

This week, the council suddenly pulled its consultation. With just three days to go, councillors noticed a "minor error" in the draft policy. They were keen to state this was definitely not a result of the huge backlash against the proposals. However, they conceded, it would allow for "further engagement" to take place before another consultation next year.

A day later, events took another unexpected turn. When pressed for details about its "minor error," the council admitted that more than 25 percent of the opening times in its proposed policy were incorrect. In fact, the council wanted an even more harsh regime than previously thought—with many venues only deemed acceptable if they closed at 11 PM rather than midnight. To be clear, this was not a minor error. Getting the times of your proposed licenses wrong could definitely be described as a Massive Fucking Error. The consultation had become a shambles. Was this a U-turn? A mistake? A stalling tactic? No one knew if it was a cock-up or conspiracy. It was starting to look a lot like both.

The We Love Hackney campaign had organized a rally for supporters on Wednesday night at Shoreditch street food venue Dinerama. I went down to try and find out what this all means. Many of the people behind Hackney's bars and clubs were there, as well as hundreds of residents who had turned out to show their support. News that the council had, for the time being, cancelled its plans seemed to have everyone in a good mood. The sun was out, there was a free bar. Towards the end, Hackney MP Diane Abbott turned up and posed for photos.

Despite the buoyant atmosphere, no one was ready to assume the battle had been won. Kerry Maisey set up Ridley Road Market Bar in 2011. She explained how the council had helped her secure planning permission and licensing. "I wouldn't be able to do that under the proposed licensing policy," she said, raising concerns that a clampdown would send Hackney's nightlife into a downward spiral. "It's important to manage development but Hackney's blanket approach favors incumbents, creating monopoly and reducing the incentives to do better."

Maisey's point neatly skewered one of the arguments made by supporters of greater licensing restrictions: That opposition is being driven by existing venue operators with the most to lose. Limiting the number of venues benefits anyone who already runs a bar or club, reducing the amount of competition and placing a premium on the value of their license.

WATCH: VICE's search for the dark heart of the UK Gabber Scene:

While thousands of ordinary people wrote oppose Hackney's plans, the council doesn't seem to want to know. Local councillors have a clear idea of what their constituents look like, and they don't look like clubbers. Dan Beaumont is the man behind Dalston Superstore and Dance Tunnel: "You will find that a lot of people who complain about bars, look and sound like councillors," he said. "What we have to try and do is widen the perspective so that we end up with a settlement that works for most of the people who live in Hackney."

Hackney Council now plans to hold another consultation next year. Perhaps there will be a different policy. Or, perhaps the same battle will have to take place again. Jonathan Downey is a restaurateur and bar owner who helped organize the We Love Hackney campaign. He told me he hopes a proper discussion will take place. But he's not confident. "I don't think the people involved in formulating that policy and then operating it are the right people," he said. "They either change, or they've got to be replaced. It's just another mess from the council's licensing division."

Over on Noisey: We Created Guess Wu—The World's First Rap Board Game

This problem isn't isolated within Hackney. Local authorities across the UK seem to think that nightlife can be easily separated from the rest of our cultural landscape. They're wrong. You can't pick and choose the aspects of culture that you like, shutting down bars and clubs but keeping the coffee art and the pop-up opera. Perhaps local councillors don't recognize the role that nightlife has played in the evolution of our cities. Maybe they just don't care.

They should. Shortly after I arrived at the We Love Hackney event, I spoke to Alan Miller, chair of the Night Time Industries Association. "If everyone in Hackney truly said, 'We don't want any of this,' we'd have to think again," he told me. "But millions of people every week go out voting with their feet. Local councillors in Hackney and across the country get less votes than we've had in the We Love Hackney campaign. People should take note of that."

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Prison photo via Flickr user Christian Senger

Read: How Do You Readjust to Society After Decades in Prison?

The Connecticut Supreme Court deemed the state's death penalty law unconstitutional on Thursday, blocking the execution of all 11 people on deck and ending a debate that has troubled legislators for years.

As the Hartford Courant reports, when Connecticut lawmakers abolished the death penalty in 2012, the law they drew up only banned "prospective" executions—meaning people convicted of capital crimes after the law was passed couldn't be executed, but anyone sentenced to death before April 25, 2012 would still face lethal injection. The problem with that, as the state's Division of Criminal Justice argued before the General Assembly that year, is that the law "creates two classes of people."

"One will be subject to execution and the other will not, not because of the nature of the crime or the existence or absence of any aggravating or mitigating factor, but because of the date on which the crime was committed," the DoCJ's testimony reads.

Now, thanks to the Supreme Court's 4-3 decision, that's no longer an issue, and Connecticut has become the eighth state to fully do-away with state-sanctioned killing since 2007. But not everyone is psyched about the high court's decision—and some are convinced it won't stand.

In her dissent, Justice Carmen E. Espinosa argued that the Connecticut Supreme Court's decision to outlaw the death penalty because it "no longer comports with evolving standards of decency" may leave room for legislators to reenact capital punishment in the state.

"As the majority recognizes, there is nothing that requires that the standards of decency evolve only in one direction," she wrote. If lawmakers felt a majority of Connecticut citizens supported capital punishment—as 62 percent of them still did according to a Quinnipiac poll conducted around the time the 2012 law passed—they might be able to write up a new law that permits the death penalty.

For now, though, Connecticut sits alongside 18 other states that don't offer the death penalty under any circumstances. The last one to abolish the practice was Nebraska, which put an end to capital punishment in May.

Photo via Flickr user nespirit

This story was co-published with the Marshall Project.

In 1980, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacated Jerry Hartfield's murder conviction and ordered a new trial. But the trial never happened. Twenty-six years later, Hartfield crafted a handwritten petition arguing, essentially, he was serving time for a crime he was no longer convicted of. The person who helped him craft the petition? His cellmate, a jailhouse lawyer. It took almost ten years, but it worked: Hartfield's new trial started this week.

"Jailhouse lawyer" is an informal term for a prisoner who helps other inmates with legal filings. And in most places, the help is just that: informal. Though the term is occasionally used synonymously with "hack" ("a lawyer who throws out any and all arguments, even blatantly wrong ones," according to Urban Dictionary), jailhouse lawyers have been at the heart of several key legal victories: the right to an attorney, the right to be protected from abuse by other prisoners and by guards, and the right to free exercise of religion. In his book Jailhouse Lawyers, Mumia Abu-Jamal, perhaps America's most well-known jailhouse lawyer, described the practice as "law written with stubs of pencils...law learned in a stew of bitterness, under the constant threat of violence, in places where millions of people live, but millions of others wish to ignore or forget."

The Training

Occasionally jailhouse lawyers are actual lawyers: people who went to law school before they were convicted of a crime. Most often, however, they are self-taught, spending long hours in the prison law library. With no access to the internet, they read outdated law books and case law on CD-ROMs. "The reality of being a jailhouse lawyer is it takes intensive legal study, just the same way it does for lawyers on the outside," says Rachel Meeropol, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-author of the Jailhouse Lawyer's Handbook. "It's an incredibly difficult endeavor."

A handful of states provide more formal means for inmates to provide competent legal help to other inmates. One of the most well-established of these programs is in Louisiana, where 115 "offender counsel substitutes" serve 19,000 of their fellow inmates. They receive 40 hours of training each year and must prove their chops on a standardized adult education exam to earn the coveted job. Michigan and Florida have similar programs.

What Everyone Gets Wrong

"There's this story about prisoners constantly using lawsuits to complain about frivolous things," says Meeropol. The image of the prisoner with too much time on his hands, filing one lawsuit after another, gained currency in the 1990s, and remains potent today. "Rikers Island inmates cost city big $$ with 'frivolous' lawsuits," blared the New York Post (citing anonymous sources) in 2013. A San Diego paper ran a similar story that same year.

The Prison Litigation Reform Act—passed in 1996 in response to this perception about inmate lawsuits (a case involving an inmate who sued over receiving the wrong type of peanut butter was referenced often during its consideration)—includes a "three strikes" provision. Poor inmates who have had three lawsuits dismissed lose the right to have their filing fees waived for any future lawsuits. Because filing fees can run into the hundreds of dollars, requiring inmates to pay the fee often makes it impossible for them to file lawsuits in the future.

The Insider's Perspective

Shon Hopwood became a jailhouse lawyer during his 11-year federal sentence for bank robbery. One of Hopwood's earliest filings for a fellow inmate, John Fellers, was ultimately won before the US Supreme Court. (After his release from prison in October 2008, Hopwood went to law school and will begin a faculty position at Georgetown Law School in late August.) Because prisons typically have rules preventing inmates from paying one another, jailhouse lawyers are "paid" in creative ways. When Hopwood was working on a petition for a fellow inmate who was Italian, "every Friday, I would take my plastic bowl and meet him at the housing unit, and he would bring me back a bowl of pasta and homemade pasta sauce he and the other Italian gentlemen had made" using generic marinara sauce from the commissary supplemented with fresh vegetables smuggled out of the kitchen. "To this day, it's the best spaghetti I've ever had." Another inmate paid for his petition—which ultimately helped shave ten years off of his sentence—by buying Hopwood a typewriter ribbon and a card for using the copy machine. "For $12 of commissary, he got 10 years off his sentence," Hopwood says.

Retaliation

Jailhouse lawyering can be a high-stakes proposition. Stories abound of retaliation, both big and small, by prison administrators against those who make trouble for them in the legal system. The New York Civil Liberties Union identified at least 100 instances of inmates being sent to solitary confinement for providing "unauthorized legal assistance." In a federal lawsuit, a prisoner named Avon Twitty accused the Bureau of Prisons of moving him to a "Communication Management Unit," designed to limit prisoners' access to other prisoners or the outside world, as a result of his jailhouse lawyering (he was paroled in 2011, and his role in the case was dismissed). Says Hopwood, "Once you start suing prison staff, things get real real quick."

This article was originally published by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

"Did you just say 'occupation'? Oh, no, buddy, you're outta here." Photo via Flickr user Laurel L. Russwurm

If there's one thing the ostensibly progressive federal NDP just won't put up with from its candidates, it's the slightest criticism of Israel.

At least, that's what the past few days of electioneering has indicated. On Sunday, Morgan Wheeldon—candidate for Kings-Hants in Nova Scotia—was forced to resign after the Conservatives published old comments he made on Facebook: "One could argue that Israel's intention was always to ethnically cleanse the region—there are direct quotations proving this to be the case," he wrote. "Guess we just sweep that under the rug." A day later, Jerry Natanine—who was vying for the riding of Nunavut—told CBC he was cut from the contest due to his historic support for Palestine.

Such moves are a "major step back" and force many in the Palestinian-Canadian community to re-evaluate their support of the NDP, says Hammam Farah, member of Students Against Israeli Apartheid at York University: "I do want Harper out of office, but it puts me in a very difficult and disappointing and disconcerting position. I feel awful that if I want Harper out of office I may have to vote for a party that isn't really interested in my history and human rights of Palestinians."

The NDP have a lengthy history of supporting Israel: while J.S. Woodsworth (founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the NDP's precursor) opposed its formation, subsequent leaders including M.J. Coldwell and Tommy Douglas backed it. Thomas Mulcair has historically taken a much firmer stance on the issue: in 2010, he led the crusade to punish deputy leader Libby Davies for expressing support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. She's not running for re-election this year.

"To say that you're personally in favour of boycott, divestment and sanctions for the only democracy in the Middle East is, as far as I'm concerned, grossly unacceptable," Mulcair said at the time. That followed on the heels of a 2008 statement saying, "I am an ardent supporter of Israel in all situations and in all circumstances."

In 2014, Paul Manly—son of former NDP MP James Manly—was disqualified as candidate in Nanaimo-Ladysmith; he asserted it because his views on the issue and for petitioning the Conservatives and NDP in 2012 to work harder for the release of his father, who was confined by Israeli officials for participating in efforts to breach a blockade in the Gaza. Manly is now running for the Green Party in the same riding.

Since becoming NDP leader, Mulcair has "all but silenced the pro-Palestinian hysterics within his party," according to the Globe & Mail's Konrad Yakabuski, who tied the efforts to a push for more mainstream appeal.

Farah—whose group is now working on pressuring the York board of governors to divest from companies that are selling weapons to countries like Israel—concluded: "The NDP needs to get in line with this. It's contradictory and very disappointing the NDP would come out supporting some form of social justice, but then when it comes to Palestine it gets scared. Canadians can see the NDP gets scared. Completely removing candidates from running in the election is a cowardly move.

The Conservatives have also publicly identified NDP candidates Scott Andrews (Vancouver Quadra), Hans Marotte (Saint-Jean) and Matthew Rowlinson (London West) as critics of Israel. Many of the entries on "Meet the NDP"—a Conservative-funded website featuring quotes from candidates—relate to Palestine, suggesting the party may be attempting to demonize candidates with the wedge issue. The sole response from NDP party brass on the issue was from Brad Lavigne, senior campaign advisor, who told the Toronto Star that "Mr. Wheeldon's comments are not in line with that policy and he is no longer our candidate."

Two Facebook pages have since been created to petition for Wheeldon's reinstatement as candidate for Kings-Hants, with the larger garnering more than 300 "likes" so far.

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Image via Google Street View

The Tampa Bay Times reports that a Tampa, Florida, Days Inn is facing a lawsuit alleging the hotel discriminated against its employees as well as subjected them to some seriously gross and suspect stuff. One plaintiff named Charlena Williams alleged in an OSHA complaint that she was, "forced to clean a hotel room where a body was found" and that "the hotel did not use proper health and safety measures to clean blood, vomit and other fluids from the room before booking new guests to stay there."

Perhaps most horrifyingly, Williams claims that, "Instead of replacing the mattress where the body was found, she was instructed just to flip it over."

Later, the company was forced to pay OSHA fines in part because of citations that were, the Tampa Bay Times says, "related to having employees handle 'contaminated' linens and towels, and failing to make hepatitis B vaccines available to employees who were exposed to the body."

On the whole, the lawsuit doesn't paint the owner of the Days Inn franchise, Jamil Kassim, as anyone's idea of the world's greatest boss. The Tampa Bay Times says that his former employees have also accused him of "(using) racial slurs to describe them." The paper also says the suit states that, "managers at the hotel told the employees they were going to be fired based on their race. They were all fired during the summer of last year."

Five In-Depth Stories About the Horrors of the Hotel Industry

1. Sex, Drugs, and Luxury: The Life of a Bellboy at a Five-Star Hotel
2. Undocumented Workers Reportedly Constructing Trump's New DC Hotel
3. Teens Are Now Shitting in Hotel Pools for Fun
4. Exploring Vietnam's Lunchtime Sex Motels
5. This Hotel in Belgium Is Shaped Like a Giant Anus

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This article appears in the August Issue of VICE Magazine.

It's a "pastime" in the truest sense of the word in that only a species with so much time to pass could have devised and named it. It's a sport/game/leisure activity so simple that I always feel vaguely self-conscious actually explaining it out loud: "Well, you, um, try to knock down pins with a ball." And as a subject, it is probably undeserving of hard contemplative thought or, more germane to what you're looking at right now, an exploration of its universe via words and photographs.

But a few summers ago, I started bowling regularly and began to notice that when I'd step into an alley, whether it was the sort that exists as a vestige of another era or a lackluster attempt to keep up with this one, I'd start to feel vaguely sick. I don't mean that I'd become physically ill, but that I'd turn into some kind of existential Humpty Dumpty—precariously perched and vulnerable by definition. As soon as I'd catch a whiff of that disinfectant they spray into the shoes or hear the cartoonish sound of a proper strike being rolled, I'd kind of freak out.

My hypothesis was that these airplane-hanger-size buildings felt purgatorial. That there was something about the game and the spaces it's played in that somehow highlighted or even exaggerated life's possible meaninglessness and just how goddamn bored we really are. All I knew was that never in my life had I been simultaneously so drawn and repulsed by something. It was like being unquenchably hungry with a nagging stomachache.

So, this summer, photographer Eli Durst and I spent some time bowling and thinking about bowling in the state of Connecticut. He took pictures; I wrote words. We both spoke to a lot of bowlers. The hope was to gain a bit of a better understanding of how something so weightless could feel so weighty—how something so utterly benign could have such sharp teeth.

—GIDEON JACOBS

All photos courtesy of Michael Cirelli

Owning a mom and pop skateboard shop in 2015 is absolute murder. Last month my partner and I celebrated our 12th year in business at NJ Skateshop. In those dozen years we have gone from having upward of 30 demos a year to having just one in the past 18 months. We watched as lines hundreds of people long waiting for $150 Nike SB Dunks evaporated thanks to the brand selling their shoes direct to market on their own website. The small shops have seen the paltry profit of $10 per skateboard deck drop below the national minimum wage mark, while huge mall chains and online skateboard vendors are able to strong-arm a much lower cost and undercut the little guys. Just a half decade ago we were part of an exclusive group of Vans core skate retailers called the Hardcore 100 (full disclosure, I work for Vans). After enduring a grueling recession and the above stated bullshit, many of my friends and peers across the country have been forced to close up shop, and the Hardcore 100 is now the Dirty Dozen.

One of the saddest fatalities in this struggle was Enfield, Connecticut's Skate Lair, which closed in 2011 after 12 hard fought years in business. Skate Lair was owned and operated by the very loud, very colorful Connecticut skate OG, Erik Munday. Within skate retail Munday is the stuff of legend. When I met him ten years ago he told me he carried five board brands, none of which were the popular brands at the time and that he'd verbally abuse anyone who asked for anything else; that he made kids box in the shop for sport; that he had guns everywhere in the store; that he snapped a Zumiez manager's phone who was trying to secretly compare prices in his store and then beat him up... the stories went on and on.

At first, I thought he was full of shit. But when I started asking around, everyone I spoke to who had visited Skate Lair swore every word out of Munday's mouth was true. And while his tactics might seem kind of... intense, in some ways it was refreshing. Skateboarding is so sanitized and vanilla and focused on "training" these days that people often forget skaters have never been a bunch of jocks who followed rules; skating has historically been a lifestyle rooted in anarchy and lawlessness. Now more than ever skating could use a guy like Erik Munday.

But Munday has moved on and found a new job, a job that pays far more in one year than 12 years in skate retail combined. For the past 24 months Munday has been traveling around the globe as a hired mercenary. His assignment is to make sure materials being imported into war zones make it to their destinations without being hijacked.

While he has seen his fair share of combat, Munday is able to compartmentalize his experiences and discuss them with relative ease. I caught up with Erik in Brooklyn last week to hear his unflinching recollection of going from gripping boards to getting shot at by Somali pirates.

VICE: You used to own Skate Lair skate shop. Tell me how you ran that place.
Erik Munday: It was a giant shit-show. Skate Lair isn't and wasn't just a skate shop; it's a gang that runs almost 20 years deep, and because of the way I did it everyone said it wasn't going to work. I didn't carry any of the popular brands. I carried my friends' brands: Natural Koncepts, Shut, Zoo York, 5Boro, Traffic... the underground brands. Why would I push the bullshit when I can carry the real shit?

I remember you telling me that when kids would ask for any other brands you would yell at them until they cried.
I'd keep one Girl deck and if they asked for it I'd say, "If you buy that deck then we got to box in the bowl and you have to go at least two minutes with me." And I'd keep boxing gloves in the back.

I heard about those boxing matches in the shop and that you had guns lying on the counter at all times. How did you not get into any trouble?
Oh, we did. We got investigated by the cops. I just didn't give a fuck. I did demos for the outlaw biker gang because their clubhouse was in town. I'm not a biker. I look more like a cop than I do a biker but I can relate to them in the way people look at skaters as dirtbags. Bottom line: I gave a fuck about the kids in my area and those dudes respected that. When they'd get locked up I was the motherfucker taking care of their kids. But cops on the outside were looking at us like, "What the fuck are you doing?" We might have had questionable tactics but we were down for our kids.

Let's talk about your current day job and how you got into it: How do you go from being a skate shop owner to a paid mercenary?
Private military contractor is my actual title. But as the skate industry started fucking over small shops I had to close my doors in 2011. I started bouncing at a bar at first because I can fight and figured rather than just doing it to do it I might as well get paid for it. One of the kids I bounced with was a Marine and we'd go shooting and I'd shoot better than him. I'd fuck with him, like, "You're the one protecting our country?" Another time we were at a police range and I smoked everybody. I'd do shooting competitions and I'd whip ass. Turns out he knew my cousin who is military and he owned a private company and that's how that transpired. It came down to me being able to put rounds in a target and being in good shape and able to fight. That's all you need. It's not like it's the most brainiac job.

What does a mercenary get paid? I have no clue.
It depends on what you're doing and on the contracts, but I get paid more than a doctor, man. Obviously the more exposure and the hairier shit you get into and the more they can depend on you to do anything they need the more you'll get paid, but trust me, you're gonna earn every motherfucking last penny.

What does the job entail, exactly?
I wasn't infantry. I was armored escort. I was on the gun. On my first deployment I did merchant-marining. We went around Africa to bring the shit into the ports: rubber, metals, and machinery. But as you go into that part of the world it gets hairy, and the company I worked for, they got jumped by pirates. So my first deployment there was a bunch of us on this huge freighter. It's a huge area to cover, so when the pirates swarm the boat you're kind of fucked. They know what they're doing too and they have nothing to lose—they don't give a fuck.

Our boat was going 10 knots and they set up a trap and waited for us to come into it and swarmed us. We had loudspeakers and tried to keep them at bay, let them know that we're not one of those boats they're just going to jump on, but they felt us out and then they jumped us. It was crazy. Suddenly I was like, Holy shit. Here we go. I'm in this shit! I've been shot at before but this was different. This was surreal. You're out at sea in such a big open area and when a shot is fired it's like seeing a flashlight. We're up like eight stories from the water so I remember seeing the lights then hearing the pinging of the bullets hitting the ship and hearing the crack of the air pressure dissipating above me over and over. I'd never been in that type of engagement. We were trained for it, but all I could think was, Six months ago I was gripping boards in a skate shop. I've been in fights but I never went up against Somalis.

How do you react, being in that situation for the first time?
If you come at me I'm putting you down. They came at us that time harder than they normally do. They wanted to get on that boat. In that movie Captain Phillips they show one guy climb up the back and take over, but those guys were clearly amateurs. If they get on the boat they don't stay there. What they do is kill a couple dudes and then take the prisoners on their boat and go onto shore and ransom their asses.

I may be wrong, but your job isn't so much to protect the materials on the boat as it is to protect the cash each boat carries, correct?
The official policy of most governments is that they don't do ransoming because it just encourages more taking of hostages, but that's a bunch of bullshit. On most boats there's a certain amount of cash so the pirates know they're going to get paid if they can get onboard and grab someone. On the deployment before my first trip they got on the boat and grabbed one of our guys, took his ass to shore, and then made the ransom call. Once they get to shore you're fucked. You're either paying or he's dead. And you better pay quick; there's no time for debate. But basically my job is to keep them off the boat. I'm on a mounted M240; it's a large weapon that shoots 700 rounds. It sprays a whole lot of lead. It's like spraying a hose.

Do you lose sleep over the fact that you've killed people for your job?
No. It's not that I'm proud of it. I don't go around bragging about it. I usually downplay it, but you're asking me point blank... the fact is I signed up for it and on the other side they did too.

Do you think we're making any impact over there?
Everyone has an opinion over here in the US but they've never been there. They should talk to the guys who actually go over there. The military and private military are putting their asses on the line. I have nothing but respect for those guys, but in the grand picture, the "fighting terrorism" thing, it's a bunch of bullshit. We're creating terrorism. It's all about making money. When we go over there, dropping bombs, there's going to be so much collateral damage. I've seen people with their intestines hanging out—and innocent people do get taken out. You have a family. What would you do if someone kills one of your sons? Even if it wasn't a personal thing, it becomes personal.

You told me you pissed in Saddam Hussein's pool.
Yup, that shit was personal because my family was there before. I was like, "I'm going to piss in this guy's pool." People were looking at me with my dick in my hand and I didn't care if I got chewed out or not, fuck that guy even though he's not there anymore. It was principle.

I've seen photos of soldiers skating his palaces. Did you skate at all over there?
I don't know how they got away with that. If I did that my outfit would kick the shit out of me. I'm a skater for life, but I do this for money. I can't fall and hurt my ankle while on deployment, so for two and a half years I didn't even touch a board.

How long do you think you can keep doing this?
I knew at 14 I was never going to be a 9 to 5 guy. I did work in a factory 60 hours a week and I hated it. That's why I bounced—I'd rather get paid to punch someone in the face than kiss a boss's ass. But I could do this as long as I have to. It's like I have a split personality. I'm here talking to you but when I'm there to do a serious job I'm dead serious about doing it. But it's interesting; through this and through skateboarding I met a guy named Johnny Hickey who made a movie, Oxymorons, about his years running the pills trade in Boston. It won a bunch of awards. In October he starts filming his new movie called House Rules, with Tome Sizemore, Bill Burr, and Eric Roberts, and Johnny doesn't want to see me get my head blown off so he cast me in the movie as a skateboard guy who whips ass. So I'm going to run with that. Maybe I can do that instead of ducking bullets for a living. I'm also going to be working with my good homeboy Josh Zickert helping run Natural Koncept skateboards; so I'm still out there connected to the skate world.

If and when you completely stop being a mercenary can you leave it over there? Or are there already things, mentally, you're not able to shake?
Nah, man. My eyes are cameras. There's shit I wish I'd never seen and I'll never forget that. If I live another three lifetimes I'll still remember that shit. I mean, when people are trying to kill you, you remember that. But I have the ability to not let it affect me.

Follow Erik Munday on Instagram.

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

Jeremy Corbyn at a rally (Photo by David Henry Thomas)

Jeremy Corbyn is topping the polls to become the next leader of Britain's left-wing opposition Labour Party. Everyone in Britain is in a spin about it, because a man slightly to the left of Fidel Castro might now have a chance to lead the country. How did this even happen? What's going to happen next? How can you Americans best understand a man who might be lining up with the French to oppose your next big foreign war? Let me explain...

Who is Jeremy Corbyn?
He's a 66-year-old bearded, teetotal vegetarian socialist. He's the kind of guy who's so committed to equality that he allegedly divorced his second wife because she wanted to send one of their kids to a selective school. In short, he makes Bernie Sanders look like, well, Donald Trump.

Related: The Real Reason Donald Trump Will Never Be President

So he isn't, as I've heard, the Donald Trump Of British Politics?
Yes and no. Yes, in that he is benefitting from a global mood of "fuck politics." A decision by voters since the Crisis that anything has to be better than the deckchair-rearranging, airbrushed, copy-pasted zombies who have dominated the politics trade since the 1990s. Corbyn's an obvious outsider, and he's a guy who always speaks his own mind. He doesn't have a PR bone in his body. And that's why his insurgency is winning.

A Jeremy Corbyn rally (Photo by David Henry Thomas)

And no?
No, in the sense that he has a brain that sits inside his head and gives him ideas and thoughts. Trump is an appallingly dumb man who has made an absurd amount of money, kicking the shins of a lot of people in the process. Corbyn suffers from the opposite problem. He claimed less in expenses than virtually any other British politician. His hobbies are working on his allotment and jam-making. And he is a sort of armchair intellectual who sees everything in terms of the impractical socialist idealism that Britain thought it had spent the past 35 years abolishing.

WATCH: Our new video 'Inside Poland's Independent Paramilitary Groups'

How much support does he have?
Oh, it's gone beyond mere support. It's mania. We're into Corbyn-mania. He has sold out venues on his recent tour to double their capacity. In a four-person race, he has 53 percent of all the votes by the latest poll. Thirty-two percent more than the second-place candidate.

Where is his support coming from?
A secret army of reborn hard left/New Left types who have been big on social media for five years but no one in the political mainstream has paid any attention to in 30. Corbyn's voters are either young enough not to realize that these ideas have already been tried, or old enough to remember when they last actually worked. A great many of them have joined the Labour Party specifically in order to vote for him. In order to make the voting process more inclusive, the party established a low-fee "Supporters" membership. This has fired up the race, while also backfiring spectacularly. It made it a matter of a few clicks for hard-left types who don't even like the Labour Party to get their man elected to lead it. Then there are the "Tories for Corbyn."

You mean Conservatives?
Uh-huh. A month ago, a couple of newspaper articles floated the idea that Corbyn would be utterly spanked by David Cameron at the next election in 2020. That meant that it was up to good Tories to sign up as Labour supporters, and spend their £3 in order to give Corbyn the best shot at winning the Labour race. That way, Conservative government could be assured after 2020. The technical term for this is "entryism."

So far, Labour has rooted out about a thousand of these false flags. But realistically, they're facing an impossible task. One Tory MP even signed up just to show what a joke the system was.

Jeremy Corbyn (right) with his Labour left-wing friend John McDonnell (Photo by Jack Pasco)

What are his actual policies?
Corbyn has been so successful in part because he has been prepared to dream so big. While the other three candidates in the race all tinker around with the tiny little wedges on their pie charts, Corbyn's been seizing control of the bigger picture: What sort of a society do you want to live in?

Turns out a lot more people than expected want to live in a society that includes re-nationalizing the railways and the energy companies, bringing back a range of social grants, and spending our way out of debt by effectively printing money—what he calls "the people's quantitative easing."

Foreign policy-wise, he's a classic British leftie: anti-American, pro-Palestine, anti-nukes. Whoever is US president would basically have to call time on any hint of the so-called "special relationship."

Jeremy Corbyn (Photo by Matt Francey)

I guess a lot of people are quite pissed off or scared by his rise and rise?
The idea of including Saint Jeremy on the leadership ballot (he only got on there with help from about 20 MPs who didn't support his candidacy but wanted to "broaden the debate") was all very well and good when Corbyn was a 100-1 long-shot. But now that he's odds-on to become leader pretty much every big Labour figure of the past 20 years has come out to warn voters not to choose him. This includes Tony Blair, who this week in the Guardian warned that Labour faced "annihilation" if he won. "It doesn't matter whether you're on the left, right or centre of the party, whether you used to support me or hate me," he wrote. "The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff's edge to the jagged rocks below." Thanks to this sort of toys-out-the-pram complaining, Corbyn may not have a party with which to in 2020 as the party descends into a massive civil war.

A Corbyn T-shirt (Photo by David Henry Thomas)

What's going to happen if he wins?
A big victory celebration, possibly in Trafalgar Square. Then the trouble starts. Most of his MPs are against him, and a few of them have already announced they intend to launch an internal campaign to depose him from day one. As a serial rebel himself, he will struggle to keep them together for votes, but the real challenge will be interim elections—European ones in 2018, and local council ones next year. Lose both of those badly, and Corbyn could be gone before he gets to face a general election.

Alternatively, Cameron could end up accidentally taking Britain out of Europe in his 2017 EU referendum, leading to his own resignation. An unpopular Tory replacement plus some sort of EU exit-based economic crisis could—just maybe—usher Corbyn straight through the doors of Ten Downing Street in a snap election.

What a day that would be.
Yup. Part of everyone just wants to see the White House photo call where President Trump makes awkward small-talk with Prime Minister Corbyn over a glass of apple juice.

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Photographers walk near the remains of containers after the explosion at a warehouse in Tianjin on Thursday, August 13. Photo by AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

At 11:30 PM Wednesday night, a series of massive fireballs exploded out of a warehouse in the industrial part of Tianjin, China, a port city of 15.2 about 70 miles south of Beijing. The first blast created enough force to register as a 2.3-magnitude earthquake, and was immediately followed by a second blast with a 2.9-magnitude force that created a massive mushroom cloud. Smaller blasts soon followed.

As of Thursday evening, it was widely reported that at least 50 people were killed (including 12 of the 1,000 firefighters who were on the scene) and over were 700 injured in the blasts, with at least 10 percent of the wounded in critical condition.

Those numbers are likely to increase as search and rescue efforts continue.

Already, this places the Tianjin explosion among the worst manmade disasters in recent Chinese history. (An explosion in a metal dust-filled room at an auto parts factory near Shanghai last August had a higher initial body count, with 75 dead, but at least it was contained to that factory.) Chinese officials have vowed to monitor and investigate the incident, but the government also seems to be limiting the media's ability to report on the explosions. What information has trickled out, generally through Chinese state media outlets, has been piecemeal, leaving citizens and observers to wonder exactly what toxins were released in the fire, how dangerous they could be, and whether this massive incident will lead to any reforms in China's much-criticized industrial safety and regulatory policies.

"China has detailed regulations on many areas, including the environment and very likely the handling of [hazardous materials]," explains Professor Andrew Wedeman, an expert on Chinese economic growth and corruption at Georgia State University's China Research Center. "The problem is that enforcement is lax or nonexistent... Industrial accidents, including explosions and fires, are not uncommon despite workplace safety regulations... In some areas the rules may need rewriting and improvement. But what is need[ed] much more is systematic following and enforcement of the rules."

The warehouse belonged to Ruihai International Logistics Co., which as of last year employed 70 workers and 20 contractors, netted about $4.69 million in revenues, and handled 70 percent of all hazmat in Tianjin's port, with the capacity to hold and move up to a million metric tons a year.

According to the BBC, "The warehouse was designed to store chemicals including sodium cyanide, butanone and toluene diisocyanate, as well as compressed natural gas and other flammable substances."

The Communist Party–run People's Daily newspaper reports that at least one Ruihai official has been detained for questioning. This, combined with revelations that a 2013 inspection by the Tianjin Maritime Safety Administration found five out of 4,325 containers in storage at the time were in violation of safety regulations may lead some to speculate that corruption or mismanagement were to blame for the accident. Yet no known reports on company safety drills and investigations clearly indicate mistakes to date.

Steven Charles Hunt, president of the dangerous goods consultancy ShipMate, which runs the HazMat training program HazmatU®, suggests that the variety of chemicals reportedly potentially stored in Ruihai's warehouse would have left plenty of room for disastrous errors if regulations were treated as informally at the port as Professor Wedeman suggests they might have been.

As Hunt explained to VICE in an email, "Flammable solids and corrosives should not be stored together, or in close proximity. When in freight containers, sodium cyanide should be stored at least two container spaces away form incompatible materials such as formic acid. If flammable solids (powdered metals, for example) react with other incompatible substances like oxidizers or strong acids, explosive chemical combinations can be formed."

According to a Chinese official spoken to by the Wall Street Journal, "readings taken near the blast site for some chemical pollutants were above regulatory thresholds but were falling."

Without specific details (like the heat of the fire, which items may have combusted first, and all the materials involved) experts like Hunt can't say anything for sure. But he does believe that some of the chemicals that could have been in the warehouse could give locals good reason to be worried.

"Sodium cyanide [for instance] is fatal if swallowed, in contact with skin, or if inhaled," writes Hunt. "It is also corrosive to metals and very toxic to aquatic life and may have long lasting environmental effects. It is a water-soluble compound and has a characteristic smell of bitter almonds... [and] large amounts of hydrogen cyanide [an extremely toxic gas that can travel far by wind] may be produced when [it] is spilled into water."

And that's just the danger of the release of one isolated chemical agent into the skies, rains, and waters of Tianjin. If explosives detonated in the warehouse and damaged multiple containers, Hunt warns that it could have created a "toxic soup" of hazardous interactions and products.

"The level of contamination in the surrounding waterways has yet to be determined," admits Hunt, "so we won't know the full effects to the aquatic environment for a while. We can only hope that the prevailing winds will carry the toxic fumes and gases away from the densely populated areas.

"If not, there may be more casualties to come," he adds.

Professor Wedeman, for his part, thinks that the state has good reason to transparently investigate the Tianjin explosion, initiate reforms, and punish anyone found culpable for the incident. With a nod toward prominent state anti-corruption drives, Wederman notes that the government is already attempting to clamp down on corner-cutting. And a massive environmental catastrophe like this, which will have widespread effects, will only accelerate that push.

"I would hazard that in the coming months we will see a number of people charged with negligence, some of whom may even face criminal punishment," Wedeman told VICE. "Problems like air and water pollution, contaminated food, counterfeit drugs, and (of course) deadly accidents like that in Tianjin affect not only workers, farmers, and other civilians. They also threaten the health and safety of officials, party members, and their families and loved ones. It doesn't matter if you are powerful or powerless when the air is choking and poisonous."

Of course, until we know what actually was in the warehouse, we can't be sure whether the health and environmental situation in Tianjin is as dire as Hunt fears it may be. And until we learn whether this event was a random occurrence or a result of incompetence or corruption, we can't say whether Tianjin will become a calling card for the regulatory reform and anti-corruption movements in China. So far, we don't even know how much of a setback the damage of the explosions will be to the port. But given the scale of the disaster, it's hard to imagine that it was an accident for which no one is to blame, and even harder to believe the idea that the powers that be will let the incident pass without some kind of tangible response.

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Want to read more about MH370?

We Asked an Expert How the Debris Found on Reunion Island Might Help Locate MH370

The Search For Glory and Also MH370

How it May Have Felt to be on Flight MH370

Since MH370's disappearance last March, the bulk of theories around the plane's fate have centered on it nosediving into the Indian Ocean and breaking apart on impact. But the discovery of a section of wing (the flaperon) on the French island of Reunion off Maritus on July 29 has raised alternative possibilities. Now, Malaysia's government news agency has suggested the plane may have landed on—not crashed into—the ocean.

The idea was put forward by Malaysian satellite expert Zaaim Reha Abdul Rahman, who worked with one of the teams who tried to locate the plane in the days following the disappearance. He said he formed the theory from satellite data.

Speaking to the Bernama news agency Zaaim explained that the wing section was only slightly damaged, leading him to believe it hadn't been violently torn from the aircraft's main body. "If MH370 had crashed with a really hard impact, we would have seen small pieces of debris floating on the sea immediately after that," he said.

Comparing the piece found on Reunion with debris gathered after Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed in the French Alps in March this year, he said none of those pieces exceeded one foot in length due to the force of the impact. "If MH370 had crashed with a really hard impact, we would have seen small pieces of debris floating on the sea immediately after that. Furthermore, the flaperon that was recovered [from Reunion Island] wouldn't have been in one piece... we would have only seen bits and pieces of it," he added.

With this in mind, he has suggested that the plane glided downwards after running out of fuel, landing softly on the southern Indian Ocean and slowly sank. His suggestion that it's possible for a plane of that size to float for a while before sinking was proved by US Airways Flight 1549 that landed on the Hudson River in 2009, and remained above water for long enough for all 155 passengers and crew aboard to be evacuated.

If MH370 did land in this way, it's possible that some of the 239 people onboard may have still been alive when the plane landed more than seven hours off course. After the impact, Zaaim says he believes the plane "floated for a while" before submerging into the deep sea "in one piece."

US National Transportation Safety Board investigator Greg Feith has also stated that since the recovered part wasn't crushed, it was "either a low-energy crash or low-energy intentional ditching." The theory would also explain the lack of debris found, despite an exhaustive search effort. To date, the flaperon is the only piece of debris that has been linked to the flight. While there have been a handful of other reported sightings of plane parts in the Maldives, none have been confirmed as being part of MH370.

France will continue its air and sea search of the area surrounding where the wing washed up until the beginning of next week. The island's top authority has said in a statement that the search has so far turned up "no significant elements."

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City Hall in Bastrop, Texas, southeast of Austin, a few miles from where pregnant 29-year-old Samantha Dean was found dead. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

America has been fixated lately on the tragic deaths of black men and women at the hands of cops and in police custody, triggering what might be unprecedented scrutiny of police departments around the country. It is through that lens that the February killing of Samantha Dean got blanket coverage by local news stations in central Texas. But if investigators are right, her lethal mistake was not a minor traffic infraction or driving with a missing license plate—it was being pregnant with a cop's daughter.

If the Texas Rangers are correct, Dean was murdered in cold blood because she was carrying the daughter of a man—an Austin police officer—who did not want to father that child. VonTrey Clark, the cop who allegedly conspired to murder her, is now reportedly on the lam in Indonesia, and was only fired from the police department after he left the states during an Internal Affairs investigation.

In early February, a local sheriff's deputy found Dean's body in the parking lot behind a vacant shopping center outside the small town of Bastrop, about 25 miles southeast of Austin. No one had called the police; the deputy discovered her by chance during a routine patrol. She was covered in black plastic, according to police records released last month, and was found lying next to her black Dodge Charger, which had a door left open. Investigators speculated the crime scene was staged and that the execution-style murder—Dean was killed with three bullets to the head, at least one at close range—probably had taken place somewhere else.

The child Dean was seven months pregnant with, whom Dean had already named Madeline and whom her family had affectionately referred to as Maddie, did not survive.

A search warrant for Clark's police station locker was released to the public on Wednesday. The warrant includes a Texas Ranger's affidavit laying out the facts of the case, and indicates that a man arrested in connection with the murder probe told officers in June that Clark had paid a mutual friend $5,000 to kill Dean and make it look like a drug deal gone wrong. Clark did not want to pay child support for the baby since he was "married" (the affidavit only refers to a girlfriend), the man said. He also told investigators that Clark drove Dean to the place where she would be killed.

Shortly after finding Dean's body in February, investigators learned she was the victim services coordinator at the nearby Kyle Police Department, another small town near Austin. Her family told local news about Dean's battle with sarcoma cancer during college, which prevented her from becoming a police officer because the cancer attacked her elbow and left her with a disability. She did the "next best thing," her mother said—after studying criminal justice in New York, she returned to Texas and worked in a civilian capacity for the Kyle Police Department. She helped crime victims there and volunteered to do the same at the Austin Police Department.

The day after Dean was killed, detectives interviewed Clark, at the time still an officer with the Austin Police Department, who told them that he and Dean had had an on-again off-again "sexual relationship" for years and that he believed he was the father of her child. Through text message exchanges and Dean's diary entries, detectives learned that Clark had insisted Dean have an abortion because if she birthed the child, his life "would be ruined" and he would "lose his family."

Watch: Investigating an Unsolved KKK Murder in the Deep South

One week before her body was found in the otherwise empty parking lot, Dean wrote in her diary that she feared Clark was going to murder her during a recent sexual encounter. He had handcuffed and blindfolded her, she wrote, and had insisted on staying in uniform and keeping his gun on, according to the Ranger's affidavit.

Dean had also told coworkers that if anything happened to her, Clark was responsible, according to coworkers contacted by police. To the Texas Ranger who requested search warrants for Clark's home, car and for a DNA sample, the journal entries and texts pointed to a "possible motive."

Clark was put on paid leave days after Dean was killed. Through phone records, the many agencies involved in the investigation—which now included not only local and state departments but the FBI—learned that Clark had been communicating with three other people using burner phones in the hours leading up to the murder. The following month, Internal Affairs opened its own investigation and discovered that Watson, a convicted felon, was Clark's old roommate. Clark called Watson "baby brother" in text messages and after the murder deposited money into Watson's father's bank account without telling Internal Affairs, which led to an indefinite suspension from the police department.

Kevin Watson. Photo courtesy Harris County Jail

Watson and his girlfriend, Kyla Fisk, both live in Houston, about three hours east of Austin. Also implicated in the murder is Freddie Smith, whom the Houston Police Department has "documented" as a member of the Hoover Gangster Crips, according to an Austin Police Department memo. The phone that texted Dean to meet at "SFA blvd." (she was found at a shopping center on Stephen F. Austin Boulevard) hours before her demise was purchased the day of the murder in Austin and activated in Houston. The Texas Ranger writes in the affidavit that he believes the three burner phones "were purchased for the sole purpose of facilitating the commission of the Capital Murders of Dean and Baby Dean."

On the night of the murder, Clark was nowhere to be found, according to his girlfriend, who he lived with. He'd left his cell phone and pager at home, which she told investigators was uncharacteristic for him. Clark told police that he had hung out at the nearby elementary school, but investigators couldn't find him in the school's surveillance footage. He eventually went to a local police station, but only stayed there for 30 minutes. There's a four-hour window of time that is so far unaccounted for, and during that time Dean was meeting someone in that empty parking lot—cell phone towers put her phone and the burner phones that police say belonged to Clark, Watson and Fisk in the area of the crime scene around 10 PM.

About a week after Dean was found, the victim services coordinator at the Austin Police Department (who was Dean's friend) received a threatening message. It read, "I fucking got her I am going to get him then I am coming for you. I will show you what a crisis is." According to the affidavit, surveillance video showed that Watson (Clark's former roommate) and a second man, Aaron Williams, bought the phone at a Walmart outside Houston. The two presumably then drove to Bastrop and sent that text, perhaps to make police believe whoever killed Dean was still in the area. Williams later told investigators that Clark paid Watson to kill Dean.

The Texas Ranger on the case believes that those involved in the murder tried to use cellular tower tracking to their advantage. That would explain why Clark left his phone at home that night and why two men took the trouble of making a four-hour round trip drive just to send a threatening text message from a gas station and throw cops off their scent. It would also explain why the phone numbers used on the night of the murder were never used again.

The warrant that was released Wednesday for Clark's police station locker details conversations between Clark and the others, obtained via wiretap in April. Clark tells them not to talk to police, and they agree that they should distance themselves from each other. When Fisk wants to reach Clark, she calls another friend first and has him call Clark so as not to leave a trace of their communication in phone records.

In June, Clark failed to provide Internal Affairs with the cell phone and bank records they requested. His attorney, Bristol Myers, issued a statement at the time saying that Internal Affairs already had the phone records and that Clark didn't have the legal authority to obtain the bank records. Myers did not return request for comment.

VonTrey Clark. Photo courtesy Austin Police Department

Last month, Clark failed to show up to an in-person interview with Internal Affairs, and flew to Jakarta, Indonesia the next day. Myers said his client traveled there for medical reasons that had to remain private, but some speculated he was trying to escape as the investigations piled up. "If Officer Clark truly intended to slip out of the United States undetected, there are more clandestine methods than booking an international flight in his own name and using his own passport," Myers said in his statement. Clark was detained by Indonesian authorities on a visa issue and remains there.

The FBI says it cannot provide comment as to Clark's status or possible extradition, deferring to the local district attorney, who doesn't see his current location as an insurmountable obstacle.

"That doesn't mean we can't get somebody back," Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz told VICE. "It just means we gotta work it a different way."

Meanwhile, Watson was arrested for an unrelated drug charge in April and remains in jail, and his girlfriend Fisk went to jail for tampering with evidence—she allegedly destroyed the hoodie Watson was wearing on the night of the murder. Williams, for his part, spent a month in jail after being arrested for sending the threatening message to Dean's friend at the Austin Police Department.

District Attorney Goertz said he can't talk specifics because the investigation is ongoing, but that whoever killed Dean will be charged with Capital Murder—in Texas, that means the killing of more than one person at the same time. That's one of the crimes that can get you the death penalty in the Lone Star State, which leads the nation in executions by a significant margin.

Investigators seized dozens of shoes and electronics from Clark's car and home in May, though Goertz wouldn't say whether they found any evidence in the physical items or electronically-stored data. Police were looking for a herringbone shoe print that matches prints left at the crime scene, including a print left on the plastic covering Dean's corpse, as described in the affidavit. Authorities confiscated Clark's PlayStation 4 and were attempting to establish whether he might have used it to plan details of Dean's murder with Watson.

District Attorney Goertz believes the government can have Clark back in the states by the end of the month. Not having an extradition treaty doesn't preclude recovery, he says, but would not comment as to what will happen to him once he's back in Texas.

Dean's family hasn't publicly commented as police have continued their search for answers in the tragic murders. On her Facebook page, Dean's mother posted a photo of her granite tombstone surrounded by flowers and colorful balloons. "I spent some time with Sammi on her birthday," she wrote. "This is not how I planned to spend your birthday: I'm still pissed."

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This post has been updated.

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More coverage of the WikiLeaks saga:

Chelsea Manning Could End Up in Solitary Confinement for Possessing the Caitlyn Jenner Issue of 'Vanity Fair'

Is Julian Assange's Latest Legal Setback the End of the Road for the WikiLeaks Founder?

Inside the Mountain That Used to House Wikileaks's Servers

On Thursday, expiring statues of limitations forced Sweden to drop some of its investigations into sexual assault allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, though prosecutors have promised their investigation into the more serious rape allegations will continue.

Assange, who fled to Ecuador's London embassy in 2012, has claimed since the allegations were made in 2010 that all the sexual encounters he had with the women were consensual. The activist and his supporters have long feared that if he went to Stockholm he would be extradited to the US and tried on charges related to his publishing of documents provided to him by Chelsea Manning, who is now in prison. This March, Swedish prosecutors agreed to to question Assange inside the embassy rather than in Sweden, but that agreement later fell apart.

On Thursday, UK Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire issued a statement protesting Ecuador's continued hosting of Assange, saying, "Ecuador must recognise that its decision to harbour Mr Assange more than three years ago has prevented the proper course of justice... It is completely unacceptable that the British taxpayer has had to foot the bill for this abuse of diplomatic relations."

According to the New York Times, police surveillance of the embassy has cost the UK government about $14 million as of April.

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The rocking chair memorial Doris keeps for her niece Krystle. Photo by Adam Dietrich.

It's called "milk carton 2.0" because the faces of missing kids used to go on the side of milk cartons: boost your calcium and hopefully help return a child safe and sound. Now a person can donate their Facebook or their Twitter to the Missing Children Society of Canada and, when a child goes missing, their photo, their height and build, the colour of their clothes and other relevant details are broadcast automatically via your social media accounts.

"Regardless of the circumstances," says Amanda Pick, CEO of MCSC, "police need to be able to get that information into people's hands."

But 16-year-old Krystle Knott was missing for three years before the RCMP first broadcast her disappearance. Three years before the first release was sent out, before the first headline was written, before her image—dark hair pulled back, lined eyes, slight smile, labret piercing—appeared on TV screens, in newsprint, on websites.

"Three years after a young mother from Fort St. John, B.C. and a teenager from Dawson Creek disappeared, Project Kare announced Sunday police are looking for the pair," reads the opening line in the Edmonton Journal on Feb. 18, 2008, three years to the day Krystle was last seen with 19-year-old Rene Gunning at the West Edmonton Mall.

There was a deluge of stories about the pair that day and in the days that followed. It was not the first time the media had heard about Rene, although archives reveal it was the first time her disappearance made major news. A series of press releases went out from the RCMP in 2005 after she was reported missing. But curiously, there were no press releases about Krystle. None, until the official announcement that prompted that first story in 2008—even though the RCMP confirmed she was reported missing to them in 2005.

So why didn't they tell anyone? Why didn't the public know Krystle was missing too? Would it—could it—have helped her and Rene?

Campers found their remains on May 21, 2011 off Forest Trunk Road, a highway running just south of Grande Prairie, Alberta.

Doris Goulet at home in High Prairie, Alberta, holding a photo of herself, her husband Dave, and Krystle that was taken at a family wedding the summer before Krystle disappeared. Photo credit to Adam Dietrich.

People are always telling Doris Goulet she has to forgive and make peace in order to heal. "No," she says, seated at her kitchen table in High Prairie, Alberta, roughly a two-hour drive from where Krystle's remains were found.

She brushes away furious tears.

"You have to forgive everybody for what happened before you're going to heal? Well, I'll never heal then because I'll never forgive."

Doris is Krystle's aunt, raising her niece until Krystle was 14. It was Doris who visited the site where the skulls were found, in order to release Krystle's spirit. It was Doris who waited anxiously during the week between when police identified the first skull as Rene's and when they finally identified the second as Krystal's." All through that week, Doris waited and she hoped, but all the while she knew.

It's been a decade since Krystle disappeared; this year, she would have turned 26.

In a corner of Doris' living room is a rocking chair memorial to a life cut short. It's draped with a red blanket gifted by Sisters in Spirit, a non-profit led by families of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. Nestled atop the blanket is a cropped photo of Krystle's smiling face glued to a piece of sturdy red paper. Above the photo is a caption: Krystle Ann Julia Knott. Born Feb. 14, 1989, missing Feb. 18, 2005.

At the forefront of the memorial is a tiny pair of beaded moccasins, rewinding to the spring of 1989, when baby Krystle was placed carefully in Doris' arms. At the time, Doris and her husband Dave were living in Dawson Creek, BC, as were Doris' brother and Krystle's mother. The new parents had brought five-week-old Krystle to Doris and Dave because they weren't ready or able to parent themselves.

Doris and Dave raised Krystle from a crawling tot to a smiley, determined, inquisitive teenager. At no time did they have official custody. They raised her because they loved her.

It was during her times with Dave's family that Krystle immersed herself in Métis culture. Krystle herself is Cree from Duncan's First Nation. She learned to make bannock, to dry meat, and to weave moccasins like the beaded ones she'd worn as a baby. She loved to learn; she picked up new skills fast; she had few inhibitions.

Krystle wanted to be a veterinarian, but she could have just as easily been a mechanic.

"Give her anything," Doris says, "and she'd do it."

When Krystle was 14, Doris and Dave moved with her to their current home in High Prairie. But shortly thereafter, Krystle went back to live with her mother.

A picture of Krystle Knott as a child on the front of a photo/memory booklet about her life. Photo credit to Adam Dietrich.

The last time Doris saw Krystle was in January 2005. Doris and Dave had made the three-hour drive west for a weekend visit. Now the weekend was over and Doris was dropping off Krystle, just a month shy of 16, at a friend's apartment in Dawson Creek. Doris remembers her girl singing the words to Shania Twain's "Up" almost relentlessly that weekend: Up, up, up / Can only go up from here / Up, up, up / There's no way but up from here...

"You gonna be okay here?" Doris asked.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," Krystle said.

"Okay," Doris said, "I'll see you next time we come."

"Okay," Krystle said, "love you."

"Love you too," Doris said.

Krystle disappeared into the apartment.

Doris drove off.

Sometime between saying, "love you" and vanishing forever, Krystle travelled to Edmonton, six hours away. Exactly when, how, and why is unclear. What is clear is that she was last seen at the West Edmonton Mall on February 18.

The West Edmonton Mall, where Krystle Knott and Rene Gunning were last seen on February 18, 2005. Photo credit to Adam Dietrich.

On February 17, Naomi Ratcliffe hitchhiked from Grande Prairie down to Edmonton with Rene. On the 18, Naomi and Rene rented a storage locker at the mall. After dumping their belongings, they began to wander around.

It was a coincidence, Naomi says, that they ran into Krystle, who was with a mutual friend, Sara. Naomi, Krystle, and Sara had all gone to middle school together in Dawson Creek.

The four strolled together for a while.

As Naomi remembers it, they attempted to buy some pot but were fleeced by the kids on the other side of the deal. Then Rene went to the liquor store and bought a 26er of vodka to mix with Sprite. Pissed at Rene for spending her money, Naomi walked off with Sara, while Krystle and Rene hung out. Later, a friend picked up Sara and Naomi to go to a party. Naomi recalls that Krystle and Rene wanted to hang back—something about a cute boy—and that they'd meet up at the party later.

The rest of the night is "a little fuzzy," Naomi says. At some point, Krystle and Rene called to say they were hitchhiking back home. It was the last time anyone would hear from them.

Naomi has been gripped by the need to understand everything that happened the night of February 18, 2005. Even now, a decade later, she is "obsessed" with what happened to Krystle and Rene, with warning others off hitchhiking, and with advising them how to travel if they must travel at night: find single-occupant cars; sit in the front seat—the rear doors have childproof locks—and never, ever, fall asleep.

She thinks Krystle and Rene may have fallen asleep.

The information requested poster Wendy Goulet carries with her for her cousin Krystle Knott. Handout image.

The first RCMP press release went out from Fort St. John ten days after Naomi last saw them, on February 28. It was a request for public help in locating Rene. On March 1, another press release went out. This one asked for help in locating both Rene and Naomi; at that point, police believed the pair to be together. But by mid-March, Naomi had been located by police and had returned to Fort St. John.

Within a few days of her return, she recalls, the RCMP asked to interview her. They wanted to know when she'd last spoken to Rene and Krystle. What were they wearing? Where did they plan to go?

She was interviewed a few times, she says, and the questions got more and more specific. At one point they even took a DNA sample, she says.

Later that month, Krystle was officially reported missing to the RCMP. Yet the next press release on the case, dated May 22, named only Rene. A later release on June 10 describes someone who is presumably Krystle, but does not name her: "[Rene] is believed to have left back to the Fort St. John area in the company of another female from Dawson Creek. The pair were thought to be hitchhiking for transportation."

At the time, it didn't occur to Naomi to wonder why the girls' faces weren't on the news; why Krystle's disappearance wasn't even announced in the police releases.

"I was honestly too caught up in my own world," she says.

The stretch of Forest Trunk Road, the highway south of Grande Prairie, Alberta, where Krystle and Rene's remains were found. Photo credit to Adam Dietrich.

When Doris returned to visit Krystle in late March 2005, she realized the teen had vanished. She reported Krystle's disappearance to the RCMP. Its around this time that Naomi recalls being interviewed by the RCMP in Fort St. John.

Mary Schlosser, a spokeswoman with the RCMP's Alberta division, says the RCMP has been investigating Krystle's disappearance since it was first reported. The investigation began in BC, the home province of both Krystle and Rene, but was eventually taken over by Project Kare, a division of the Alberta RCMP that investigates the deaths and disappearances of vulnerable persons.

"The file was afforded appropriate consideration given the information available to police at the time," Schlosser says. But she won't explain why Rene's disappearance was the subject of media releases, while Krystle's was not. "The decision whether or not to issue a media release when a youth—or anyone—is reported missing is based on an assessment of the information gathered by police during their initial investigation."

But, as Naomi notes, she answered police questions about both Rene and Krystle within a month of their disappearance. And given that the RCMP's own press release seemed to indicate that Rene and Krystle were together—Rene was thought to be "in the company of another female from Dawson Creek"—and the fact that Krystle had been reported missing, why then did Rene's case warrant public awareness, but not Krystle's?

The RCMP won't say, and an attempt to get answers through the Access to Information Act has been unsuccessful: the information is protected because it pertains to an ongoing investigation. But Doris wonders: is the investigation ongoing, or is it merely unsolved?

In determining whether to issue a release, Schlosser says, "In the vast majority of cases, speaking with the child's legal guardians would be an investigator's first step."

Here, Doris and Dave believe their on-and-off guardianship of Krystle factored into the silence after her disappearance. Schlosser says she can't say specifically why Krystle's disappearance was not publicized, but she does acknowledge general issues pertaining to investigations into youths who go missing repeatedly. For example, she says, officers who get a call from a group home will respond, assess whether the disappearance fits a person's regular behaviour, and then "that would help them assess, prioritize the missing person and what steps should be taken."

"Say, oh, this kid goes missing all the time so maybe we'll leave it for 48 hours," Schlosser says.

In the last year or so, she says, there's been a "heightened awareness" around the need not to wait, even if the person has a habit of disappearing, and especially if it's a case "involving vulnerable people."

The last two years have seen heightened awareness around the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women, with a huge increase in media articles addressing the issue. The increase coincides with demands for a national inquiry into the epidemic, which reached deafening proportions after a series of horrific, high-profile murders and attempted murders in 2014.

By the RCMP's account, more than 1,200 Indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered since 1980. Many say that number is far too low, the methods used to track them far too flawed.

Wendy Goulet, Krystle Knott's cousin, and also the chair of the Peace River Sisters in Spirit Committee. Pictured in High Prairie, Alberta, holding the booklet she made about missing and murdered indigenous women in the region. Photo credit to Adam Dietrich.

The cropped photo of a smiling Krystle that sits on the rocking-chair memorial was taken at a family wedding the summer before she disappeared. The wedding was the last time Wendy Goulet saw her young cousin. Krystle was 15 and hurtling around outside. The two caught up for maybe a moment, a simple what's up between cousins.

"You don't realize at the time that this might be the last time you see one of your family members," Wendy says.

Wendy is, among other things, the chair of the Peace River Sisters in Spirit Committee. When she is about in her community, she carries posters of missing indigenous women, pausing as she goes about her daily life to tack them to community boards in the hopes of stirring someone's recognition.

She recently spent a month trying to gather information about the many indigenous women and girls who've gone missing or been murdered in Alberta.

"It was hard," she says.

Sometimes a simple internet search would yield nothing, so she'd experiment by adding different search terms to see what turned up. Some of the sites she stumbled on would freak her out: anonymous blogs purporting to know intimate details about what happened to this woman, that girl, and so on. On the internet, women she felt certain were mothers or grandmothers were reduced to nothing more than a name, a city, and a date of death or disappearance—if that.

"Wendy, never go missing," she recalls a chief of one northern Alberta nation telling her.

"What?" She remembers asking, confused.

"Never go missing," she says he told her. "No one's going to look for you."

Today, a decade after Krystle vanished, four years after her remains were found, and her case remaining unsolved, Wendy is certain the chief's words are true.

"I don't think anyone will look for me," she says, "I don't think anyone would take it seriously, just [me] being an Aboriginal. I say it jokingly, but I don't think people would."

She imagines going missing in Edmonton. She imagines officials or investigators somehow insinuating she had been living a high-risk lifestyle. She imagines going missing in a casino and then: "Oh, they'll make up a story."

Wendy thinks about her cousin and she wonders: if Krystle hadn't been an Indigenous woman, would the justice system have moved just a little bit faster? Would the RCMP have stepped in sooner? Done more due diligence? Solved the case?

The answer to these questions, based on numerous reports and commissions and inquiries and terrifying, heartbreaking anecdotal stories, is probably—sadly—yes.

In February 2013, Human Rights Watch released an extensive report investigating policing abuses and failures in the protection of indigenous women and girls in northern British Columbia, where Krystle was born and raised.

Human Rights Watch documented numerous RCMP violations in northern towns: young girls Tasered and pepper-sprayed, one girl attacked by a police dog, another punched repeatedly by the very officer summoned to help her.

"The most apparent thing to me is the lack of safety women feel. A lot of women, especially First Nations women we see, never feel safe approaching the RCMP because of the injustices they've experienced," one service provider told Human Rights Watch. "The system is really failing women."

For Doris, the bottom line is that more effort needs to be put into solving Indigenous cases. At the very least, she says, the stories and pictures of these women and girls need to be put into the public sphere again and again.

"They put [Krystle and Rene] on the backburner because they found them?" She says. "You still have to find the people that did this, you know. So if you keep their pictures out there, both of them, maybe somebody's going to have a guilty conscience and come forward, say something. Wouldn't you think?"

Right now, she says, it simply doesn't seem like anyone cares.

"It's like: they're found, they're buried, so it's done."

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