VICE is exploring America's prison system in the week leading up to our special report with President Obama for HBO. Tune in Sunday, September 27, at 9 PM EST, to see his historic first-ever presidential visit to a federal prison.

Thirteen years ago, I pleaded guilty to an armed bank robbery thatended in a high-speed chase and shootout with the police. Since then, I've gone from a small, bum-fuck county jailwhere I spent all my time in isolationto some of the most violent penitentiaries in the United States.

Behind these walls, I'm an oddity: a middle-class, educated,dreadlocked hippie. Navigating through a world where the wrong step could bemy last has been mind-numbing. The horrors people hear about are very real in prison. Rapes, stabbings,murderswe've got it all. What people don't hear about is the interactions we have with the officers who make a living off our misery.

Everywhere I've been there's been good and bad copsones who have actually changed my point of view towards them, and the ones who bring itright back to where it is today.

When I first got locked up I had one thing on my mind: survival.I was a 130-pound, 23-year-old junkie who had neverdone any sort of stretch up to that point in my life. The longest amount of time I ever didbehind bars was a nine-month county hit for marijuana trafficking out inArizona when I was 19. With this arrest, I knew I'd graduated to thebig time.

More from America Incarcerated: How One Man from the St. Louis Projects Got Out of Prison and Went Back Again

Erie County Pennsylvania is the jail where I awaited trial for myfederal case. This was by far the worst place I've ever been incarcerated; theyactually threw me in isolation for having dreadlocks. I was threatened with acourt order to shave my head and told if I didn't, I'd be "held down andscalped."

I refused to cave, and spent several months in isolation. Mostdays I was denied my hour of recreation simply because I wouldn't "followtheir rules." I was denied mail that was sent by my family, and multipletimes I was denied visits. I was the "city boy who doesn't follow orders."

My first day in, I saw two convicts attacking a third in the middle of the softball field; one had a lock on a belt, the other was brandishing the weapon of choice of all prisoners: a bone-crushing prison shank.

This was my first real interaction with the authority figureswho would be overseeing my every move after I was sentenced to 16 and a half years. Sitting in that hole I vowed to myself that no matter what they did tome, I'd live my life the best way that I saw fit.

After receiving my sentence, I was shipped down to Pittsburgh formultiple heroin cases that I had been on the lam avoiding. It was like night and daybetween the two institutions. The correctional officers (COs) left me alone to do whatever I wanted,which was to get as high as possible. Allegheny County Jail is notorious forcops getting busted bringing in packages. Anybody that set foot on my unit was apotential mule.

"I've got $500. What's up?" This was thestarting point in negotiations between the two sides.

"OK, OK... how bout a stack? All I want is somecigarettes."

Once you got them to bite that first time, it was on.

I inherited a CO from my boy who was leaving to go do five yearsin the federal prison system. He'd pick up a package from my brother to deliver to me every fewweeks. It was supposed to only be a few ounces of weed and some cigarettes, but eventually turned into a cornucopia ofevery consumable narcotic known to man.

Opening the package was better than Christmasshit, it wasbetter than ever holiday of my life combined. All the worries about the time Ihad ahead of me was up in a cloud of smoke and a spoon of dope.

"Jesus Christ. This place is badass," my boy Mark saidwhen he first came onto the unit and saw the smorgasbord. Eventually, my timeran out there and I transferred into the feds. I started out in FCI Gilmer withan assfull of weed to get me going.

Most dudes would take their time and see how things work. Not meI was off and running, slinging weed like I was back on a Grateful Dead lot,which landed me right in the crosshairs of special investigative supervisors (SIS)the feds inside of thefeds. My cell was liable to get torn to pieces at any given time.

I was alsoplaced on something called "dread check." This form of degradation consisted of me being pulled off thecompound, stripped naked, every orifice of my body checked to two onlookingofficers' satisfaction, and then my dreadlocks being thoroughly molested. They'd comb through my locks looking for stashed folds of the devil's lettuce while I hung my head down in humiliation.

"We've got you now. We know where you hide your shit," they said on the first of many searches, courtesy of their many informants. Eventually they had enough and hit my cell in full force. Two shifts of theBureau of Prisons' (BOP) finest annihilating my house. They knew I had shit, and they weren't goingto stop until they found it.

After six hours ofdestruction, they hit the jackpot: over $600 in mailing stamps(the preferred form of currency in the federal system), hidden in a sealed laundry soap box. Fifty individual folds of tobacco. And the kiss of death: a aknot of weed stashed in the false bottom of a legal work folder.

I was hitsent directly to the hole and then off to thepenitentiary for "greater supervision."

"No offense, but you wore out your welcome," I wastold by my case manager when he informed me my next destination would be the United States Penitentiary (USP) Pollock in Louisiana. "Good luck," he said through clenched teeth as hewalked away. "You're going to need it."

After an extremely tumultuous "misunderstanding" with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, I was shipped to USP Canaan in Pennsylvania.

Back in the mid 2000s, USP Pollock was a bit like 1960s Vietnam. There were more than a dozen murders in 18 months while I was there, and they averaged dozens of stabbings a month. My first day in, I saw two convicts attacking a third in the middle of the softball field; one had a lock on a belt,the other was brandishing the weapon of choice of all prisoners: a bone-crushing prison shank. When the COs ran to break it up, the attackers shiftedtheir attention from their mark to his saviors.

"That's what those fuckers get for trying to break it up," the convict next to me said as we continued our walk to the chow hall.

All illustrations by Matt Rota

Youhear all kinds of stories about the penitentiary when you're in the medium; they always end with, "You don't want to go there." But to me, the max wasthe best place you could do time.

The COs would leave you alone to do your bid. At all times, mycell door window was covered. If they wanted me for something, they didn't darecome inside; they'd knock on the door politely and wait for me to come out.Then they'd respectfully tell me whatever the reason was for intruding in on myday.

After informing me of the request (because everyonecarries around a sword in prison, there's no such thing as an order), they'd leave andallow me ample time to ponder whether I felt like fulfilling the proposal. Aslong as I wasn't stabbing someone, the cops could care less what I did. Theyknew the convicts ran the prison. We kept the order. If someone was out of lineand had to go, it was dealt with swiftly and justly. All they had to do wasclean up the mess, and they graciously played their part.

But after an extremely tumultuous "misunderstanding" withthe Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, I was shipped to USP Canaan in Pennsylvania.

Cannon and Pollock were two completely different worlds. I didn'teven last two weeks before I received a "shot"disciplinary reportfor usinganother inmate's telephone. That incident landed me directly on the other sideof the table from the self-appointed and appropriately named man called "The Hammer." The Hammer was the Disciplinary Hearing Officer who took pride in takingeverything from you. He "hammered" me with a loss of my phone andcommissary (or prison store) rights for two years, taking 90 good-conduct days with him for an added kick to the nuts on his way out.

Canaan was a miserable compound. Half the inmates there had zeroprivileges. Something that wouldn't have even been looked at twice in Pollockwould cost you years worth of good time. There were convicts that couldn't gobuy a pair of shoes and talk to their families until the 22nd century.

In 2013, an officer was brutally murdered in C block. The inmate who did it took more than half an hour to take out year's worth of pent-up aggressionout on an authority figure who represented the guards who controlled everyaspect of his life. As tragic as the incident was, what made it even worse wasthat the officer was actually a good guy. He was one of the few that were thereto do the eight hours and go home to his family.

What preceded the attack was one of his fellow officers on theearlier shift tearing apart the inmate's cell for the third day in a row. Duringthe search, he destroyed the convict's headphones. When the inmate confronted theofficer about it, he was told, "It happens." After a further debatebetween the two, the officer said he'd be back to hit him again tomorrow.

The thing that most people don't understand about theconvict/cop relationship is this the officer's worst enemy isn't usit's theirfellow officers. We're just trying to do our time and be left alone. We're inprison as punishment, not for punishment. When we're targeted by those who aresimply here to babysit us, that's when we begin to lash out.

After the homicide, Canaan turned into a chemical warfarebattleground. Any type of incident would merit a noxious dose of pepper spray from the COs,followed by a beating out of sight from prying eyes and cameras, and then a trip back to thehole. I left Canaan that same year following another"misunderstanding," this one involving 19 Mexicans withknives. I was shipped off to USP Hazelton in West Virginia.

The years of shakedowns, strip searches, and beatings have taken a toll on me and every other prisoner in the system.

The only thing consistent in Hazelton is inconsistency. You caneat breakfast at 6 AM, or at 8:30. You can get outside for recreation at 7:30, or nine o'clock. At any given time, you can look forward to receiving the most extensivepat-down in the history of mankind. This includes hands going down into yourpants, and a nut-tap that would make a dominatrix blush.

As I currently reside here, and know the ramifications of whatI'm writing, I can only say so much. Freedom of speech is one of the libertieswe absolutely do not have behind these walls.

I'm subject to being gripped up and sent to isolation, all myproperty destroyed, and then being shipped off to the 24-hour lockdown facilityin Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for simply speaking out on the conditions we endureeveryday.

What I will talk about is the one bright spot in USP Hazelton: the think-tank group sponsored by a staff member that wants to seechange for the betterment of the BOP. With her help, college professors andstudents from West Virginia University, along with other members of thecommunity, come deep inside the belly of the beast to help create programs for the convicts who have spent decades behind bars.

The core of the group, called "United Circle 4Hope," consists of convicts who are never going homelifers who aretrying to bring about a positive change in the stagnant culture of the federalprison system. This collective is one that everyone should have a vestedinterest in supporting. The other inmates they help will soon be your neighborsand coworkers, the ones who will be building your houses and serving yourfood. Without receiving the training they require, and a shift in ideology thatthe classes present, they'll be the ones robbing your house and selling drugsto your kids.

The years of shakedowns, strip searches, and beatings have takena toll on me and every other prisoner in the system. It's turned our approach from one of survival to resentmentreactivity to proactivity. The only way inmates willchange their actions and ways of thinking towards their overseers is the hiringand training of staff that are of the same mindset as the think tank sponsor inUSP Hazelton. And the community at large has to push for better education fundingfor prisoners re-entering society.

I have grown up in the federal prison system, and been taught life lessons by men doing life sentences. I've been a victim and anassailant. In a few years, I'll be a free mana part of your community. Ichanged my life for the better while incarcerated.

It's time that others havethe programs to change for the better, too.

Follow John "Judge" Broman on Facebook.

Read: An Infallible Guide to America for God's Main Dude

Pope Francis is speaking to a packed crowd at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, but he might be back to headline it soon. Rolling Stone reports that the Vatican is planning to release an album of rock songs featuring the pontiff on lead vocals. This is not a joke.

The album, titled Wake Up!, will feature backing tracks from a variety of Church-approved artists, underscoring speeches and religious chants from His Holiness. The first singlea triumphant track that sounds like something that the boys from Slint would've made if they went on Wellbutrin and found Godis already up via Rolling Stone. You can already preorder the album ahead of its November 27 release date, if you feel so moved.

Will Pope Francis tour to support the new record? Will he drop to one knee on stage as cardinals drape the shroud of Turin over him, James Brown style? Will he adorn his mic stand with strings of rosary beads like Axl Rose once did with scarves? Only time will tell. Listen to the first track below and bask in its glory.

Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic via Getty

You just don't know what the hell he's going to do next. Maybe he'll go on Fox News and start shooting out light fixtures or ripping the electrical wiring from the walls. Maybe he'll pick Jay Z as his running mate, or simply drop the mic tomorrow and leave the Republican party smoldering. He's a billionaire, his campaign is self-funded, and at 69, he's seven years shy of the average American male life expectancy. The game Donald Trump is playing is a mystery to us, buried behind an impenetrable wall of shtick and braggadocio.

Picking a Republican presidential candidate is supposed to be like picking the most viable lead for an inspirational sports movie. They're supposed to convince America that they can rally a team of underachieving kids to stand up straight and get courageous on a dusty baseball diamond next to a junkyard, not own casinos in Atlantic City and have hair that looks like something out of a Japanese role-playing game. A Republican President is supposed to have a couple polite Bible verses memorized, not say "God is the ultimate" like a Viking warrior king praising Thor before battle. Donald Trump is taking a sledgehammer to our archetypes, and we still haven't figured out how to react.

The Republicans are cutting out the chaff now. Rick Perry and Scott Walker are a bust, and George Pataki, Bobby Jindal, and Rand Paul are rumored to be the next to go. Maybe the cull will consolidate support for Trump's more boring, level-headed opponents and it will be revealed that Trump's frontrunner status was always a fluke, that he'd already peaked. But maybe not. Maybe Trump will surge even higher in the polls and, dejected, the Republican Establishment will be forced to support him because hey, he's better than Deez Nuts. We just don't know.

How do you react to unmitigated chaos? What do you do with a narcissist with years of reality-TV experience who treats every policy issue like a personal beef and campaigns primarily by mugging for the camera like he's emceeing a mobster's birthday party at the Bellagio? Yeah, he's Ric Flair and "The Million Dollar Man" and Biff from Back to the Future in one body, but that's only a punchline once. He's an unacceptable human being, yet he's an unstoppable force. This fleshy personal brand is the honest-to-God Republican frontrunner, and there's no way out of admitting that. How do you deal with the cognitive dissonance of what you thought presidential material was and what Donald Trump is?

If you're National Review editor Rich Lowry, you try to out-Trump Trump on Fox News with a confrontational one-liner. "Part of what's going on here is that last debate. Let's be honest: Carly cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon, and he knows it," Lowry told Megyn Kelly, shortly before Trump demanded Lowry be kicked off television.

If you're Trey Parker and Matt Stone, you call as much attention to yourself as possible and fly a couple million miles away from tactfulness. On Wednesday night, 1.5 million people watched as South Park introduced a Donald Trump character, explained with a rhetorical bullhorn that his anti-immigration platform preys on fear and hostility, then promptly showed the character get viciously murdered.

And if you're the newly reasonable Stephen Colbert and scored Trump for a sit-down interview, you try and play the wacky diplomat while politely acknowledging the likelihood that the world is ending. "Who knows, one day I might be able to tell my grandkids I interviewed the last President of the United States," he joked in his monologue on Tuesday before an interview in which Trump immediately took control and never let go. Not even a surprise Charles Manson quote during a game of "Who Said ItTrump or Colbert?" could throw The Donald off his game.

The interview is a good encapsulation of Trump's campaign strategy of unchecked personality politics. While the country is still shell-shocked by the realization that his candidacy is legitimate, not quite done cocking its collective head at the Time magazine cover, Trump has taken the opportunity to light some fireworks (say, for instance, promising to make Mexico pay for his promised border wall). This forces people to notice him, and then he can set the terms of the national discussion with theatrics. He's become the most talked-about candidate by acting like what would happen if David Mamet started writing WWE storylines.

On Noisey: I Accidentally Convinced Voters that Donald Trump Hates Pavement

We kept assuming the carnival would pack up and head over to the next town; that this was a fad, a grotesque respite from the status quo, and that Trump be gone in a few weeks. But he's still the entire discussion. Every move he makes is front-page news. When the political news circuit decided he was slipping, the Politico headline wasn't that Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson or Marco Rubio was winning, it was that Donald Trump was losing.

The numbers don't lie. It works. Trump got Colbert his highest post-debut ratings. He made the second GOP debate the highest-rated event in CNN history even though there are ninenine!more debates scheduled. Mentioning him in the media is like pulling page views out of thin air. He's incentivized talking about him, even if what people have to say about him is deeply negative. In this way, he's already won.

Every week that he stays in this campaign, the less his campaign looks like a high-budget novelty and the more it looks like a proof of concept for the future of national campaigning. He's the embodiment of social-media success: a candidate who's not just a news item every day, but a clickable headline. Scott Walker could make news without being someone you talked about, without being a headline, and now he's gone. Trump can make headlines just by calling someone a name or pulling a big, stagey face that can go in a list of GIFs on Buzzfeed. His low-five with Jeb Bush alone got more chatter than John Kasich's entire existence.

All this, and Trump doesn't really have a platform. He stays in the comfortable realm of bombastic generalities and applause-friendly talking points that play well to big crowds. But what he does have is a perfect mechanism for running the conversation regardless of the ideas powering that mechanism. He knows how to call attention to himself in any outlet. He's the only Republican who knows how to get traction on the internet. But his platform is a winner-take-all nationalist nightmare that collapses in on itself without the fog machine and laser light show. So who knows if he'll make it to the White House, if policy can be entirely substituted with publicity, but momentum still says this race is his to lose. Best-case scenario, maybe he'll just force us to reevaluate which candidates we take seriously.

Follow Kaleb on Twitter.

George Osborne enjoying a cup of tea, with much the same level of sternness as he seems to have shown when taking his Chinese counterparts to task about human rights. Photo via HM Treasury Flickr account

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you judge someone by the company they keep, then youjudge a nation by its allies. So imagine you've just started seeing a guycalled Britain. He's a bit arrogant, a bit reserved, maybe a bit too keen onweird sex stuff, but you want to give him a chance because he seems like hecould be charming. Then you go to the pub to meet some of his friends and itturns out they're all arms dealers, oil merchants, and torturers. More than oneof them wears a Johnny Deppstyle fedora. "I mean, I know they're a bit shady," Britain chuckles as he gets the shots in, "but I reckon they'd be a lot worseif I didn't occasionally think about telling them to take it down a notch." Youmake an excuse and leave. Britain goes back to the table with his shots. "Don'tknow what the problem was," he says.

Jesus told us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Jacques Lacan pointed out the irony in this injunction: People, after all, hate themselves. Accordingly, Britain's foreign policy is an exercise in disowning morality. "Osborne praised for not 'not stressing human rights' in China" ran a BBC headline today, reporting on the chancellor's visit to Xinjiang, home of the repressed Uighur people. What with the Chinese media's delight at our boy Osborne's laid-back attitude, and another ally, Saudi Arabia, preparing to crucify and behead a teenager, it felt like a good time to compile a list of Britain'smost evil allies.

Ali Mohammed al-Nimr. Photo via Facebook

SAUDI ARABIA

In 2012, 17-year old Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrestedduring an anti-government protest in Saudi Arabia. In the authoritarian Gulfstate, using your Blackberry to try and promote democracy is even less chillthan telling a bunch of posh Oxford students to go easy on a dead pig.

Al-Nimr was tortured, denied access to a lawyer, and forcedto sign a confession. Now, he has been sentenced to crucifixion.That's right, the West's favorite oil-rich kingdom is set to crucify (andalso, just for good measure, behead)a juvenile for peacefully suggesting that a little bit of democracy might be agood idea.

Related: Watch VICE's interview with the wife of a Saudi blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes

Campaigners are calling on the UK, a longterm ally of SaudiArabia, to denounce al-Nimr's sentence and insist that he is released. But withSaudi still the number one market for British arms and the Gulf state's oil still in demand (until Cameron has fracked the livingshit out of the English countryside), Britain will continue to put the humanrights chat to one side in favor of flying royal flags at half-mast and getting Prince Charles to sing for his supper in traditional Arab dress. In fact, the UK is tacitly supporting the execution of pro-democracy activistsby continuing with a bid to provide services to the Saudi prison system, despite the upcoming teen-crucifixion-and-beheading-fest.

How evilare they? These guys will fund terrorists, hoard oil, and repress theirown peopleand they'll do it with your grateful support.

An Uighur rights protest in Berlin. Photo via Flickr user langkawi

CHINA

The Uighur Muslim minority of western China have long been violently repressedby the state. Quite how much is hard to tell because Xinjiang province is a blankspot for reporters and media companies who are operating in China's potentially huge,lucrative market and unwilling to test the resolve of the Chinese state. Likethose media companies, the UK government sees China as a giant, well-fed cashcow that, if it would allow itself to be milked, would bring great prosperityto those doing the milking.

And so George Osborne is currently in Xinjiangthe firstUK minister to visit the provincebeating the drum for British business,talking big about China's plan for a "new Silk Road" and laughing loudly andnervously anytime someone mentions Uighurs.

How evilare they? They'll use the prospect of investment to get they want butGod damn it you need the money.

Art by James Yee, a former chaplain at Guantanamo Bay

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Ever since America made it so that happy young Brits didn'thave to "grow up speaking German," Britain has followed Uncle Sam around theworld, eagerly carrying his bags of Bibles, trade manuals, and drones while he wagesperpetual war for perpetual peace from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Britain'spostcolonial melancholia is so strongand its need to feel like a player so deepthat it will gargleAmerica's balls in its mouth before invading half the Middle East if it ensuresa good seating position at a top White House dinner.

Somewhere in the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Britishcitizen Shaker Aamer, who was accused of being a terrorist but has been cleared for release by American authorities since 2007, is only now being allowed to return home.

How evilare they? They're not called The Great Satan for nothing, youknow.

EGYPT

Britain has always been selective in its support fordemocracy so it was hardly a surprise that Britain did not approve of Egypt'sdemocratically elected Muslim Brotherhood (MB) government. After all, the partyhas the word "Muslim" in the title.

Now that the army runs Egypt again, Britain is back on boardand keen to show its support. Our military is now training Egyptian troops andEgypt's Chief of Staff recently visited the UK for security talks. Just so there was no misunderstanding about quite how much Britain lovesEgypt's military, UK defense secretary Michael Fallon wrote an op-ed inEgyptian state-run newspaper Al Ahram,in which he said that his country "stands shoulder to shoulder" with Egypt. That's "shoulder to shoulder" with a military government that is directlyresponsible for the arrest and torture of thousands of protestors, journalists, and citizens, many of whom have since received death sentences.

How evilare they? Not as powerful as they were in the days of the Pharaohs,but still capable of imprisoning thousands of their innocent citizens

Andy Tesge (right) with his partner Yemi Hailemariam and their children

ETHIOPIA

Islamic terrorism. It is bad and anyone who fights it isgood. This is one of the reasons Britain supports Egypt's military rulers andit's also one of the reasons it supports an Ethiopian government whosecommitment to democracy was there for all to see when the ruling party wonevery single parliamentary seat at this year's general elections. Britain givesEthiopia hundreds of millions of pounds of aid money every year. In return,Ethiopia fights the militant group AlShabaab (trans: "the lads"), in Somalia. If they didn't, then obviously we'dall be living in The Lads' IslamicRepublic of Great Britain.

This commitment tofighting the war on terror with Ethiopia has led to some problems for Andy Tsege, a British citizen currently sentenced todeath in Ethiopia for his involvement in opposing the current Ethiopiangovernment. The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) has repeatedly raisedTsege's case but, given that it can't alienate a crucial regional ally, there'snot much they can do apart from mumble something about giving the chap a fairtrial, before apologizing and murmuring a couple of sentences about, you know,not torturing him...

How evilare they? I know we keep banging on about Andy, but then he is still in prison.

Dubai. Photo via Flickr user Panoramas

UAE

In May 2015, the Abu Dhabi Police and New Scotland Yardsigned an agreement under which the two organizations will "cooperate in providing modern trainingprograms, equipment, and experts." A few weeks ago, UAE police visited London fortraining and the UK routinely encourages arms and policing exports to the UAE. This, inspite of the fact that police there regularly torture confessions out of theirvictimsconfessions that can result in the death penalty. Ahmad Zeidan, aBritish student, had just such a confession tortured out of him, but the UK hasrepeatedly refused to intervene robustly with the UAE on his behalf.

How evilare they? I don't want to sound like a sixth form student railingagainst George Bush, but a country with this much oil has got to be pretty evil.

Over on Noisey: The Craig David and Killswitch Engage Collab You've All Been Waiting For

PAKISTAN

Like many of the world's countries, Pakistan is a Britishcreationa product of an empire that once extracted gold and slaves from theAtlantic to the Pacific. Today, Britain spends millions of pounds on Pakistan'sAnti-Narcotics Force (ANF), which is responsible for the execution ofhundreds of people who have "confessed" to what are often minor drugs offenses.UK military personnel are suspected of having participated in the CIA's dronewar in Pakistan but the UK also supports the Pakistani state's war on terrorist groupsoperating within its borders. Of course, the empire had no part in creating anyof this instability. The empire was about fair play. And cricket.

How evilare they? How can drones be that evil if some of them have beendesigned to deliver Amazon parcels?

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter.

Hamilton Zoo's Sumatran Tiger, Oz, back in 2006. Image via Flickr user Peter Harrison

Recent years have seen wild tigerpopulations dwindle to just over 3,000 internationally, while captive populations have soared to 5,000 in the US alone, with another 4,500 in China. Yet, despite how sexy a tiger selfie can look on Tinder, theseanimals kill people in astonishing numbers.

New Zealand was reminded of this on Sunday whena zookeeper named Samantha Kudeweh was mauled by a male Sumatran tiger at the HamiltonZoo. Samantha held a senior position as zoo curator and was no rookie, yet thiswasn't the zoo's first tiger issue.

In 2013another keeper walked approximately 30 feet into an enclosure she thoughtwas empty before realizing she was accompanied by a five-year-old female. Accordingto reports, a door had been left open while her pen was being cleaned, allowingthe cat to get back in. The zookeeper fled unscathed.

These aren't issues isolated to the city of Hamilton. Sunday'stragedy came only days after a Sumatran tiger killed a zookeeper in Poland,which itself came months after three zookeepers were killed by escaping animals, including tigers, in Georgia. One of the most respected pieces of feline literature, Tigers of the World, estimates that 373,000 people were killed by tigers between 1800 and 2009.

Related: Interested in tigers? Watch VICE's documentary on the exotic animal trade

Also on the subject, watch 'Big Cats of the Gulf'

"These are not pets" says Hans Kriek,Executive Director of SAFE, New Zealand'sleading animal advocacy organization. "You can't make them into pets. These arewild animals designed to kill and they're always dangerous."

Hans acknowledges that zoo managers knowthis, but deaths are frequent due to human error. There isn't a set mandate onsafely managing and exhibiting big cats, but most Western zoos fashion safetyprocedures around a principle of no-contact. "I believe this was the case withHamilton," says Hans, "but mistakes are made when peopleworking with the animals on a daily basis become blas and lose attention."

Read on Motherboard: Zoos of the Future Won't Have Cages

Again, this was the case in 2009 at a zoojust a few hours north of Hamilton called the Zion Lion Park. There, a white tiger named Abu attacked and killed his handler, Dalu Mncube, while the man wascleaning Abu's enclosure. For some reason the 26-year-old didn't secure theanimal first, and despite a colleague's attempts to fight off Abufirst with astick and then with a fire extinguisherAbu crushed the man's head between hisjaws. A subsequent inquest heardthe tragedy was the result of poor training and lax safety procedures. In that case, a string of near-misses in the months prior should have signaled a red flag, and senior managers admitted handlers should have been equipped with tasers.

Thankfully, rationality prevails after mostattacks and tigers are infrequently blamed. Hamilton Zoo, for example, hasannounced they won't put Oz down. As Hamilton City councilor Lance Vervoort said in a statement,"Although there is an inherent risk for zoo professionals who manage big catslike Oz, there is no wider ongoing risk. There is no reason for us to put Ozdown."

There are a few theories on why tigers sofreely attack zookeepers, but most hinge on instinct. "Captivity causes boredomand unpredictable behavior in big cats," explains Hans. "They lose some of theirfear of people because they're being fed but they're still wild animals thatinstinctively kill so it's a deadly mix."

He claims it's not because they're underfedor even that they hold a particular animosity towards handlers. To Hans, attacks aremuch more a product of boredom. "They're just responding to movement, like agame of cat and mouse, it's instinctive."

Zoos are, however, a well-monitored and well-resourcedsector of exotic animal ownership. Most captive tigers are not under the careof zoo professionals, but are kept in private collections. Of the 5,000 captivetigers in the US, it's estimated that only around six percent live in zoos,leaving most in backyards, sideshows, truck stops, and private breedingfacilities.

The problems surrounding this arrangementwere highlighted in 2011 when a man named Terry Thompson released hiscollection of tigers, lions, and bears into Zanesville, Ohio, before committingsuicide. The animals ran wild through the town until authorities stepped in,shooting 49 of them dead, including ten of Thompson's 18 tigers. At the time ofhis suicide, the man was on parole for weapons charges and was apparently in nomental state to run a zoo.

As Kudeweh's death on Sunday makes clear, tigersdon't care if humans think they're cute. Even when taken out of the wild, tigersare wild animals.

Follow Max on Twitter.

Screenshot via Twitter user Mariana Torre

Read: Four Out of Ten Canadians Want to Build a Wall Between the US and Canada

Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge, where people dumped freezing cold water on themselves and nominated friends to do the same to raise money for charity?

Well, rich Mexican teenagers are embracing that concept, with one fucked up twist: instead of soaking themselves, they're apparently snorting cocaine.

Several videos depicting reto del pasesito, or "the little pass challenge," have surfaced online in recent days. In them, teenage girls, whom the Latin Times identifies as upper class, appear to be doing key bumps of blow and then calling on their homies to do the same.

One of the participants gives the camera a thumbs up after taking a hit while another erupts into giggles, 'cause, you know, cocaine is a pretty lighthearted subject down in Mexico. Not everyone is in on the joke, though. YouTube has reportedly removed one of the original videos because it shows "harmful activities" and a search of the hashtag

#RetoDelPasesito on Facebook yields many angry warnings from Mexican parents in addition to more videos, obvi.

In another departure from the Ice Bucket Challenge, there is no charitable aspect of reto del pasesito; its sole purpose seems to be to get high in an extremely public way.

But before we judge those Mexican teens too harshly, let's not forget last year's Neknominate craze, which saw young people pounding back booze on camera and daring their peers to follow suit.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

We all think of filmgoing as a leisurely activityI mean, the minimum requirement for the viewer is to just show up and sit there for 90 minutes or sobut a film festival is a different beast entirely, especially for someone who's obsessed with movies. Incessant filmgoing is not something I dabble in for 11 days just once a year. It's a year-round activity, an obsession that never grows old. But for any Toronto cinephile, TIFF is the most manic period in the city's filmgoing calendar.

The festival is a little more complicated if you're also a journalist, as you find yourself in a relentless (if very often pleasurable) grind: a marathon interrupted by the occasional sprint. Doing this right requires a massive time commitment and a singularity of purpose, but even that can't protect you from the dark side. For all the great films you've seen in past festivals, the impending TIFF melee also triggers memories of tedium, exhaustion, and movie-fuelled disassociation.

The days before the festival begins are all about tying up loose ends. In a sense, covering TIFF is a lot like going on vacationwith two crucial differences: (1) you return home every night and (2) you constantly have work to do. During the festival, you become one of those people who is always too busy to answer emails, even invitations to cocktail parties featuring free drinks and movie stars.

Knowing it's impossible to see everything worthwhile, you try to find a reasonable balance between your interests and your obligations. Past experience teaches you that sticking to this schedule is virtually impossible, but piecing it together is still a gruelling process. After all, every film you choose is 20 films you miss.

Hitchcock/Truffaut

DAY 1: Thursday, September 10

Going into my first film, I learn that the co-director of The Chickening has sent responses to my interview questions, and the interview needed to be edited immediately. As a result, The Chickeningan insane re-mix of The Shiningis in the back of my mind the whole time I watch Hitchcock/Truffaut. Several hours later, I'm ready for my second screening of the day, but I wind up at the wrong theatre. Fortunately, texts from my editor and a fellow contributor confirm that they're in line at the right theatre, helping me secure a respectable seat.

As your festival routine kicks in, the only people you maintain regular contact with are those similarly immersed in the alternate universe of TIFF. In addition to my editor, the core of my entourage is an old friend who works in acquisitions for a California-based distributor. I only see him once a year, but we tend to find time for dinner, drinks and/or movies just about every day of the festival.

After our first festival meet-up, I wind up in the longest movie line I've ever seenat the first public screening of Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next. Experiencing TIFF in more digestible doses, the public is often in a better position to enjoy the proceedings. This may explain the exaggerated enthusiasm often found at public screenings. Where to Invade Next turns out to be one of Moore's least accomplished efforts, but the audience dutifully rewards his good intentions with a standing ovation.

MOVIES SEEN: Hitchcock/Truffaut, Sicario, Where to Invade Next

Green Room

DAY 2: Friday, September 11

You're always in a rush at TIFF, but this is especially true during the chaos of the first weekend. Thanks to delays at the Princess of Wales Theatre's press and industry screening of The Martian, I only have seven minutes to get to the Scotiabank for Youth, my third screening of the day. Wondering why I'm late, my editor sends a series of texts to check on my status. I scramble to respond while delicately weaving through a flurry of people moving in every conceivable direction. After a decade covering the festival, this scenario is so familiar that the obvious dangers don't even cross my mind. And then someone passing in front of me stops abruptly, forcing me to do the same. My phone flies from my hands, landing facedown on the sidewalk. When I pick it up, my worst fears are confirmed: the screen is completely smashed.

This was a fitting blunder, as TIFF often feels like a much-needed experiment in cell-phone deprivation. If you fully commit to the festival, your phone is likely to go dark for upwards of 100 (non-continuous) hours.

Which is actually not such a bad thing. Surviving the chaos and clutter of TIFF requires a kind of single-minded focus that is increasingly difficult to achieve in these phone-saturated times. To take it all in, you have to block out some of the usual distractions. When your phone is rendered almost unusable, this shift is even more dramatic, heightening your senses and making you far more attentive to your surroundings. Still, if you can avoid breaking your phone, that's probably for the best.

MOVIES SEEN: Green Room, The Martian, Youth, The Final Girls

Evolution

DAY 3: Saturday, September 12

Phone etiquette has grown far more civilized at TIFF, but my first screening of the day (Evolution) is disrupted by a flash photo, a line-crossing faux pas that could only be an accident. This screening is also disrupted by mysterious house music booming from a neighbouring theatre, even though no film is scheduled in that time slot.

With so much time spent alone in lines or waiting for movies to start, eavesdropping is an unavoidable part of TIFF. Members of the industry are often heard revealing elliptical details about themselves, hinting at mysterious biographies that never fully come into focus. Of course, overheard TIFF conversations extend far beyond the boundaries of the festival. During an amusing subway ride on day three, I overhear an adolescent boy mercilessly mock his father for expressing an interest in Deepa Mehta's Indian-Canadian gangster comedy, Beeba Boys.

If you have non-passholder friends who happen to be festivalgoers, there is one way to stay in touch during TIFF: public screenings. However, a case could be made that this is more hassle than it's worth, particularly during opening weekend. On Saturday night, I join four friends for a public screening of Maggie's Plan, but we spend roughly two hours in the cold/rain before we're allowed inside the theatre. I vow not to make that mistake again.

MOVIES SEEN: Evolution, The Lobster, The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, Maggie's Plan

Black Mass

DAY 4: Sunday, September 13

As I leave my first screening of the day, I get a text from a friend in Montreal asking if I plan to see a film called James White. In a strange piece of synchronicity, this happens to be the film I just emerged from. Not long after this, another friend texts to ask if I can recommend any films to his girlfriend... who just happens to be walking past me while I'm in line for Black Mass. During the chaos of TIFF, these kinds of coincidences create a false sense of order that's vaguely reassuring.

As I take my seat for Black Mass, a European distributor engages in a friendly chat with someone standing in the aisle. Once this visitor wanders off, the distributor wipes the smile off his face, turns to his colleagues, and starts venting about a variety of slights and infractions. He's "offended" by this and "disappointed" by that. His cohorts roll their eyes, but the man's frustration only grows. Eventually, his companions tell him he needs professional help. Whatever the cause of this crisis, two thirds of the trio dart from the theatre halfway through the film.

For the most part, covering TIFF is a smooth, even idyllic experience. Given all the obvious perks of a press pass, it's easy to tolerate the occasional drawback, but there are a few. For example, you may find yourself watching films from seats you'd never tolerate under normal circumstances. During Hardcorean ultra-violent Midnight Madness selection shot entirely from the protagonist's point-of-viewI wind up in the second row, a vantage point that renders this film almost unwatchable. (At one point the protagonist smashes his phone after falling from a moving helicopter, an incident that seems no more traumatic than my own phone mishap a few days earlier.)

The occasional sub-par seat plays a role in the frequent walkouts at press and industry screenings, but this also stems from the price of admission (free) and the abundance of options and obligations found elsewhere. Except in very extreme cases, I have a strict no-walkouts policy. For press, suffering through the occasional film is part of the job. It's a different story for distributorswho are really there to sample as many films as possiblebut I still interpret every walkout as a scathing insult.

If you don't believe in walkouts, you become very familiar with the feeling of being trapped in a movie that is failing to achieve the desired effect. In my experience, it only takes around 15 minutes to determine if a film is working, and it's rare for any film to nosedive or make a miraculous recovery. By my estimate, approximately 20 percent of the films I see during the festival are walkout-worthy. If you tough it out, your mind wanders to other things, hatching plans for later in the day and generally making the best of a bad situation.

MOVIES SEEN: James White, Black Mass, Hardcore, Baskin

High-Rise

DAY 5: Monday, September 14

After my fourth screening of the day, I meet my California friend for a quick drink. My plan is to see Janis: Little Girl Blue in half an hour, making this a rare five-film day. But our quick drink turns into four hours of boozing, bringing us into contact with a gathering of American theatre programmers and a party hosted by the Fantasia Film Festival. It wouldn't be TIFF without a few nights like this.

MOVIES SEEN: Spotlight, High-Rise, The Other Side, Les Cowboys

Lace Crater

DAY 6: Tuesday, September 15

Watching dozens of films in a condensed period of time has some unanticipated effects. For one, it tends to exaggerate the significance of recurring themes and incidents. If you saw Black Mass and Spotlight, you might conclude that Boston is nightmarishly corrupt and dangerous. If you saw Baskin and The Lobster, you might develop a strange neurosis about knives and eyeballs. If you saw The Other Side and The Family Fang, you might feel compelled to shoot cars with assault rifles and/or potato cannons. Those are the first three examples that come to mind, but the list goes on and on.

Over the last few days, I've rolled the dice on several wild cardswith mixed results. Now halfway through the festival, I'm tempted to take risk out of the equation, if only for a few hours. I spend a big chunk of my day watching a pristine 35mm print of Michael Mann's 1995 epic Heat. With the director in attendance celebrating the film's 20th anniversary, this screening proves to be one of the highlights of my festival.

MOVIES SEEN: The Family Fang, The Meddler, Heat, Lace Crater

Anomalisa

DAY 7: Wednesday, September 16

I'm feeling somewhat revived by yesterday's Heat screening, but the long hours and repetition are starting to wear on the nerves of some pass-holders. During a screening of Demolition, a journalist in the seat beside me squirms through every minute of the film, cracking his knuckles, chewing his press pass, and repeatedly pulling a hoodie off and on (generally backwards). As the lights go down before the screening, he even turns to ask what movie we're watching.

It's not clear if fatigue has anything to do with it, but factual errors also become more prevalent in pre-screening small talk. While waiting for Anomalisaone of the best films I saw at the festivalto start, I hear someone express curiosity about High-Rise. After acknowledging some bad buzz, he explains that he's a fan of director Ben Wheatley, particularly "his last film, Kill List." (Wheatley actually directed two other films in the intervening four years.) When his friend asks what Kill List is about, he complicates matters further by summarizing the plot for Wheatley's Sightseers.

If anything, my pace seems to be accelerating, with one curious side effect: the line between fiction and reality is starting to blur. Just hours after watching a vicious killer torment several victims in The Girl in the Photographs, I cross paths with that very actor in front of TIFF Bell Lightboxand I'm genuinely afraid. Even after processing the reality of this, I'm still half-convinced this dude is dangerous.

MOVIES SEEN: The Devil's Candy, Demolition, Anomalisa, The Girl in the Photographs

Southbound

DAY 8: Thursday, September 17

As the festival crowds start to dissipate, everything about TIFF gets easier. This may explain why there's no sense of relief associated with the home stretch. In fact, the winding down process is somewhat bittersweet. Sure, it will be nice to eat normal food again and get a good night's sleep, but you start feeling comfortable with the simplicity of the festival routine: line up, watch movie, repeat.

That said, there's a limited supply of worthwhile new movies in the world, and you feel a diminished sense of potential with each passing day. Early in the festival, many films are screening for the first time, creating a sense that anything is possible. Some are gems, some are duds, some are a bit of both, but there's real excitement in the mystery. By day eight, you know what to expect, and most of the films that remain have been discredited in some way. At this late stage in the festival, even a worthwhile film feels like a non-event.

Keith Richards: Under the Influence is a perfect example. While this documentary hits all the right notes and Richards turns up for a lively Q&A, director Morgan Neville's introduction reveals that the film is coming to Netflix... tomorrow. This kind of buzzkill bombshell would never fly during opening weekend.

MOVIES SEEN: Southbound, Our Brand is Crisis, The Mind's Eye, Heart of a Dog, Keith Richards: Under the Influence

Yakuza Apocalypse

DAY 9: Friday, September 18

While watching Hitchcock/Truffaut on the first day of the festival, I found myself pondering the challenges of interviewing a filmmaker in another language. A week later, I'm at Rue Morgue Manor interviewing Yakuza Apocalypse director Takashi Miikethrough his Japanese translator.

This was an irresistible opportunity, but it did result in a regrettable TIFF first. In the 11 consecutive years that I've covered the festival, this is the first time I've gone a full day without attending a screening. Even on the heels of a five-film Thursday, I felt no need to slow down, but I had to watch an online screener of Miike's film, do all kinds of research, and wait as the interview fell further and further behind schedule.

MOVIES SEEN: Yakuza Apocalypse

Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One

DAY 10: Saturday, September 19

With most of the press and industry now long gone and most of my writing assignments complete, I treat myself to all 381 minutes of Miguel Gomes' artfully eccentric Arabian Nights Trilogy. In this public screening, I'm seated beside Theresa ("like Mother Teresa," but with very different taste in entertainment), a spirited movie fan, who seems to be acquainted with almost everyone in our vicinity. Repeatedly describing herself as an old woman with limited stamina, she has nonetheless made it through 25 films at the festival. While quizzing me on my TIFF experience, she even manages to tell an off-colour joke about The Lobster. Under normal circumstances, this interaction might have been replaced by texts, email, or some other smartphone time-killer. Our brief chat proves to be a refreshing alternative, but as the festival comes to an end and everything goes back to normal, I can no longer ignore my most urgent errand: I need to get my phone fixed.

MOVIES SEEN: Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One, Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One, Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One

Top photo from The Lobster. All film stills courtesy TIFF

"Now listen, young lady, that's not what I meant. Listen to me!" Photo via Flickr user Alex Guibord

On Tuesday, it came to light that Regina police saw "no indication of foul play" after a 29-year-old Indigenous sex worker was found dead at the foot of a ten-storey laundry chute.

That's the only comment they've made, and when she died nine months ago, they used police speak and vagaries to attempt to bury their lack of investigation.

Police claimed in a statement that the investigation was still open, and yet there is still no toxicology report, and the final autopsy report is not yet complete.

Violence against women, especially Indigenous women, is pervasive in this country, and yet Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau made no mention of that just the day before, when he was asked why so many young men are so misogynistic. Instead, it seems he relied on what Toronto journalist and Toronto Star columnist Desmond Cole calls "well-worn stereotypes about black people."

"There is a lot of misogyny in certain types of music," Trudeau said, adding that there are "a lot of communities in which fathers are less present than they have been or than they might be in the past, and there's more need to have engaged, positive role models." He also vaguely referenced "the prevalence" of pornography.

Not only did he dig up harmful old tropes about Black communities (though he later denied he was referring to any community in particular), but he also failed to answer the question in any meaningful way.

This is especially disturbing given the fact that Trudeau uses reproductive rights of uterus-bearing people as a pawn to get votes, claiming that he will ensure all of his MPs vote pro-choice when the topic comes up. But we've already seen this blatant hypocrisy exposed because those pro-choice votes don't have any impact on the provincial level, which governs abortion access: it's still officially impossible to access abortion services on Prince Edward Island, and next to impossible for many people in New Brunswick.

Though his answer was criticized as both racist and tone-deaf, the floppy-haired cherubim did (albeit insufficiently and indirectly) manage to touch on the correct answer: better role models are needed. They're needed both at home and in our schools, and they need to be teaching children the importance of consent and tearing down the "male-as-aggressor" concept. It's so incredibly tired, and yet in Ontario, we have parents yanking their kids out of school to protest the teaching of these tenets of very basic human decency. He might have addressed that had he wished to be cogent and/or relevant. Or, if he was so desperate to talk about issues Black Canadians face, he could have proposed working with women of colour to determine their specific needs in the aftermath of violent crimes perpetrated against them, or addressed the heightened risk of violence trans women of colour are likely to face.

But he missed the point entirely, failing to recognize the real reasons why young men have no fear of being violent against women. Other leaders, and I'll get to them in a second, are also missing the point. Young men are violent toward women because they are living in a space that uplifts a systemic undervaluing of women's lives. They're not taught any better. And so when they grow up, they know there will be few, if any, consequences for abusing women. Examples abound. Have you heard of Cindy Gladue? She died from an 11-centimetre wound in the wall of her vagina, made by the sharp edges of a glass bottle puncturing her. A man, who paid to have sex with Gladue and in whose hotel room her body was found, was acquitted by arguing that the injury was the result of consensual fisting. Then there's Jian Ghomeshi: How long did it take the CBC to cut ties with him despite his reputation as, at the very least, a harasser? And how many women did it take for the claims of assault to be taken seriously?

Tom Mulcair spots a woman in the distance. "What... IS it?" Photo via Flickr user Joe Cressy

Trudeau flubbed his chance to address any of this, but it's really no wonder. What did we expect from him? Canada has not had a federal leaders' debate on women's issues in over 30 yearsthe last one was in 1984. Harper and Mulcair refused to participate in one this year, so the parties' views on women's issues were delivered by pre-recorded interview Monday. (That format didn't do anyone any favours either as the video clip of Trudeau's answer was edited to make it appear as the Liberal leader was answering a different question, when he was actually asked this.)

As Elizabeth May said in her interview, "Here we were on the verge of having a debate on women's issues for the first time since 1984 and the woman party leader who wants to do it is me, and because two men decide they don't want to participate, it doesn't happen."

Stephen Harper, on being asked to treat violence against women as a real issue. Photo via Flickr user Prime Minister of Greece

Harper has always steadfastly refused to acknowledge violence against women is even an issue. Many Canadians and even international groups such as the UN have been begging him to hold an inquiry as to why there are well over 1,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women in this country, and he repeatedly just says "naw." And earlier this year, the Conservatives literally voted against a plan to end violence against women.

And while Mulcair is trying to tackle this issue, his promises are making gendered violence seem more simple than it is. Like, he's going to eradicate violence against women entirely. That's a wonderful thought. And it's important that we have a party willing to try. But how committed can he be if he can't be bothered to show up to a debate centred on the very problem he's claiming he wants to fix? Further, the steps to get there are small and nuanced and they will take time. All children need to be taught about what constitutes violence and consent, and police need substantially more in the way of sensitivity training than they receive now. Violence against women won't cease simply because a federal leader says it should.

What we need our leaders to focus on is creating more awareness surrounding just how prevalent violence against women is in this country. Half of all women in Canada have experienced physical or sexual violence at least once. Every six days, a woman is killed by her intimate partner. If women die violently, our deaths are not usually taken seriously unless we are white. If we are women of colour, Indigenous women, trans women or sex-working women, there is this sense that our deaths are either our own fault, or are completely inconsequential.

Because of the dangers, shame and stigma in reporting these crimes, about seven in ten don't report them to the justice system, but go through "informal" sources of support instead. One in ten sexual assaults goes unreported in Canada because we know police don't believe us. And so we tell other women about our rapes, and out the rapists on shit lists created in private Facebook groups, on bathroom walls, and in our living rooms, surrounded by candlelight, wine, carrots and hummus. They nod, say they're sorry, and usually, they respond with "Me too." Women are the ones policing our own communities.

Violence against women is not born out of any type of music, any type of family. We are all living in a collective culture that fails to value women's lives. It's everyone's fault. If "certain music" is misogynist, it's a reflection of our culture at large. It does not exist in a silo. This culture is the reason women don't report their rapes.

I never thought I'd say thisand don't misread me, I'm no fan of Harperbut his attack ads are right. Without learning all of this, Trudeau just isn't ready. And from what I've seen, neither are the other two leaders in the running.

Follow Sarah Ratchford on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Kars Alfrink

On Thursday, two women riding the TTC were allegedly accosted by a large, aggressive man who degraded them for what they were wearing over the course of several stops. One of them, Sarah Beamish, who described the incident on Facebook, said with the exception of one woman who asked if they were OK, no one stepped in.

Beamish identified the aggressor as David Zancai, which the TTC later confirmed to VICE. Nicknamed Zanta, he was a well-known fixture in downtown Toronto throughout the 2000s for performing shirtless push-ups while dressed in a Santa hat. VICE interviewed Zanta for a story last year, which also discusses his history of mental illness; while working construction in 2000, he fell 25 feet, leaving him with brain damage that friends say triggered schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

According to Beamish's post, Zanta was allegedly "storming around" the subway Thursday, "yelling, doing pushups and roaring, and ranting about how 'ladies' and 'girls' need to 'keep their knees together' and 'stop showing their monkey' to men." Beamish wrote that he zeroed in one girl who looked to be 17, and began shaming her for her choice of wardrobe. When he went to take a photo of her, she started crying, which is when Beamish intervened. As a result, she said Zanta started verbally attacking her. Beamish helped the girl move onto a different subway car, but said Zanta followed them, dragging around a large banner featuring the bare legs of two women all the while. He ended up getting off the train before they did.

"The girl was clearly terribly shaken up," wrote Beamish. "This entire time, not a single man other than that harasser had said or done a thing." The post has prompted much discussion on what bystanders should do when someone who appears to be mentally distressed gets aggressive in public.

"People not giving a shit" isn't uncommon, said Toronto police spokesperson Victor Kwong, but he strongly advised against that reaction. "By doing nothing, you're allowing these crimes, whether serious or petty, to continue."

He advocates for helping the victim, whether that means calling the cops (the TTC is equipped with an alarm that will alert police, fire and ambulance services to an emergency), removing the victim from the situation, or being a good witness.

While Kwong said the police "will never tell someone to get physical," it depends on the situation and an individual's abilities. To paraphrase Kwong: If it gets to the point where you have to punch someone in the face for a good reason, you'll likely be protected by the Good Samaritan's Act.

When it comes to dealing specifically with people who appear to be mentally ill, Kwong said only use de-escalation tactics if you have the right training.

Dr. Arielle Salama, an outpatient and emergency psychiatrist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, said de-escalation methods are best left to medical professionals.

"I think if you have any concerns at all and you're on public transit you should leave the vehicle and go to a public spot," she said, adding, "don't hesitate to call the police or call any authorities."

Salama also stressed that mentally ill people are rarely violent and are much more likely to be the victims of violence.

Todd Minerson, executive director of White Ribbon, an organization that educates men on how they can stop violence against women, said the most troubling part of Beamish's story is the lack of bystander support.

"Why didn't someone press the emergency alarm? Why didn't anyone who got off tell the ticket operator? Why didn't anyone check in with ?"

The likely reason, according to research, is people assume the only way to help is to have a physical altercation, he said. But talking to the victim or just physically standing in the perpetrator's waythings that Beamish didcan be effective too.

Minerson was careful to note that his organization isn't proposing that men need to swoop in and "protect women."

"Women do a great job of doing that themselves," he said. "What men need to do is intervene in other men's bad behaviour."

The TTC told VICE it is investigating the incident.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

The new faces of the marijuana industry. All photos by the author

Nothing is more suspect than a man in a suit talking about drugs. Unless he's your attorney, he's inevitably police. And even if he's not literal law enforcement, he'd flip in an instant if you got caught with a brick of cocaine, weed, or insider information about Sour Diesel futures.

Enter the 2015 Cannabis World Congress and Business Exposition, which turned out to be the trade show equivalent of watching hedge fund managers cover Sublime songs for hours on end. If you're old enough to drink, you probably remember public perception of "chronic" before it became possible to purchase organic green juice infused with psychotropic greens. You can still find the High Times wookie stoner at HempCon or a String Cheese Incident concert, but we're living in a future where imminent legalization has incubated a gold rush mentality among the nascent marijuana industry, and the suits have inevitably followed the money.

It's been nearly 20 years since California passed its landmark Proposition 215, allowing people to grow and obtain marijuana for medical purposesa law easily manipulated by fly-by-night Dr. Nick Riviera types so eager that they'd dole out a prescription to grapple with the agony of a ruptured carburetor.

I've had a cannabis "recommendation" for years, but whenever it's time to get renewed, I forget what I told the doctor in the first place. Excuses have included: anxiety, insomnia, back problems, arthritis, and the neuroses incurred from being Jewish. On the morning of the Cannabis Congress, my excuse for smoking was that I needed to cope with men in suits talking about drugs. So in the interest of pain relief and professionalism, I incinerated a roach while walking up to the venue.

Before I entered the actual conference floor, I thought I spotted Tommy Chong looking dapper in a tailored suit, but quickly realized that it was George Zimmer, founder of Men's Wearhouse. He'd flown down to give the final keynote address of the three-day expo. The decision to recruit the silver-bearded New York native with a gnarled voice and nine-figure net worth as the conference's keynote speaker says volumes about the cannabis industry's re-branding efforts: they'd like you to like the way you look (while consuming cannabis).

The actual floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center, where the CWCaBE was held, looked like a combination of an agribusiness convention, TechCrunch Disrupt, a beauty expo, a medical marijuana dispensary, and a political rally. Fast talkers in suits (presumably from MW, courtesy of Zimmer) stalked the chlorine-blue carpet, greeting passersby with pitches about the illimitable promise of the marijuana industry. If the shills didn't persuade, the conference slogan emblazoned everywhere offered greedy reminder: "Cannabis is business."

Firms like Potbiotics, Cannabis Climate Solutions, and CannaCeuticals Luxury Skin care (which, yes, brands itself as "a green company") joined the old guard from NORML and the Marijuana Policy Project. There were esoteric tech start-ups like Amercanex (an "electronic cannabis marketplace), MJIC ("The Marijuana Investment Company") and GenTech, which makes cannabis testing equipment. As one of the exhibitors told me, "good luck finding anyone here who has been open for much more than a year."

The conference room was mostly full. Behind me, two nondescript women in their late 30s and a bald bro chatted; one of the woman started talking about her Wall Street husband and how "we're so boring all we do is Netflix and chill." They briefly discussed an app they'd heard about that makes dates for people too busy to think about a loved one, but all agreed that it's a little "too tech" for them. If you ever needed an anti-weed PSA, this was it.

The pony-tailed geriatric

In the hallway, a pony-tailed geriatric talked on his cellphone on a Segway. I asked for directions from a man with feathered earrings and a dreaded queue of hair that extended to his calves. The sides of his head were shaved to reveal crop circle tattoos (presumably, they depicted an ancient agricultural formula to yield the highest THC.) That these people were even in the same 4.20-mile radiuslet alone the same conventionas all the venture capital goombahs boggles the mind. Worlds are converging and you must like it, because George Zimmer will guarantee it.

In his keynote address, the ex-leader of the world's largest chain of modestly priced suit emporiums displayed the requisite charisma to rally the troops. He ran through his life story: smoking weed in the 60s, dodging the draft, and his rise to schmatta king. The message was clear: you can smoke weed and still run a billion-dollar enterprise.

Zimmer unspooled a valid rant against the war on drugs. For next year's California ballot, he advised a moderate approach and sensible legislation, saying this is the only way that legalization can occur without incurring the zealous wrath of "soccer moms" and the police.

If you've ever had a conversation with a weed activist who's also a policy wonk, you've heard a version of this speech. They want fair and uniform state taxes, with the money earmarked for education. The principal difference is that this specific speech was being delivered by a guy whose net worth has been estimated at anywhere from $150 million to $800 million, who delivered lines like "I'm proud to be a capitalist," alongside his endorsement of MDMA for therapeutic use.

The convention floor was raucous. The weed wore off so I cased the booths to see who was handing out free samples. Roughly 18 people told me something to the effect of, "this ain't HempCon" and proceeded to shoo me away.

I struck up a conversation with a good citizen manning the Kushy Punch booth, who handed over an illicit gummy candy that I quickly gulped. A salesgirl at another way station offered me a spicy yellow salve which I put under my tongue without asking many questions.

Passing by Norm's Edibles and Cannabis.Com, I approached the sales directors from Elemental Digitala company from Torrance, California, that makes digital display signage for weed dispensaries.

One underlying question I sought to answer was whether weed has entered the realm of the tech worldat least in the eyes of this odd congress. According to the first person I spoke with at Elemental Digital, yes, weed is "tech." His partner, Anthony Vernaglia qualified the statement.

"In the current state of the world, you can't avoid technology. Cannabis is still in its infancy. You get a lot of enthusiasts trying to do tech stuff, which works sometimes and doesn't work sometimes," Vernaglia said. "It's going to come, but I don't know if we're there yet."

For Elemental Digital, most business has come from dispensaries trying to break out of traditional stoner archetypes.

"We don't like to work with people who use dirty and nasty stoner images. We have people who want their dispensaries to be more like a Starbucks or a Tiffany's," Vernaglia said. "Everyone smokes weed. We should kick those old images out the door and kick their ass on their way out."

The booth for CMATES, which helps those in the cannabis industry learn about compliance

A God-like voice boomed from the loudspeakers, paging people to get seated for the "Sports Pain Management and Cannabis" panel. So up the stairs I went, ducking into a packed room filled with doctors and former NFL players, including ex-Pro Bowler Kyle Turley, who's found an unlikely second career as a cannabis activist. He was there with one-time Denver Bronco Nate Jackson, who wrote Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile.

For all the dumb weed jokes and thirsty cannabis exploitation on display earlier, the ex-NFL players offered a humane and sharp advocacy for marijuana. In particular, Turley legitimized the legalization movement in a way that no one in expensive wool ever could. He discussed his addiction to pain pills, fostered by team doctors swayed by pharmaceutical companies and hidebound logic.

"I don't want to be high all the time, but I like to get high and talk to God occasionally," Turley said with a smile. "I've been married for 13 years. I'm a father of two, and this was the only thing that helped me break my pain pill addiction. Athletes are increasingly getting addicted to pills at younger and younger ages. This is a morality issue."

The Hulk-sized lineman walked with a cane, due to the myriad injuries suffered on the field. He indicted the hypocrisy of team owners, who refuse to soften marijuana testing due to the drug's unpopular public perception, echoing the cultural pushback in the face of marijuana's demonstrable benefits in the field of pain management. Turley mentioned the coaches he used to regularly burn with. He lacerated the yes-man culture and automaton obeisance expected from a player in the league, and the recent autopsies of dead NFL players, which displayed the brain damage inflicted by brutal hits. This is the new face of legalization: Not some decrepit hippie, but a rational thinker with a story one can empathize with, who just so happens to be capable of bench-pressing a tractor.

When the panel ended, I floated back into the suit and tie fiasco. By this time the Kush Punch had hit like Kyle Turley had just flattened my brain. I kept seeing the Men's Wearhouse CEO at every turn, until he became a rattling psychedelic vision in an affordable two-piece. His raspy voice started getting louder in my head, telling me, "You're going to love this edible. I GUARANTEE IT."

I passed by liquid gold cannabis, infused with real cherries. My focus turned to the dizzying, oily business card-swapping surroundings and I was struck by the urge to start yelling at everyone to cease this sham. Even weed smoking, once the refuge of the pleasantly heathen, has become sterile and corporate. It's only a matter of time before Phillip Morris and Altria buy up everything and spoil all the fun. A recent USA Today investigation confirmed that Big Tobacco has been looking into becoming Big Marijuana ever since the 1970s, meaning my fears weren't just paranoid delusions induced by the gummies.

The man on the left is responsible for the legacy of Jimi Hendrix

A booth for Purple Haze Properties slurred across my line of vision, and soon enough I found myself speaking with a guy who looked like Subway Jared. He explained how a few months ago, his firm launched a line of edibles, genetics, and pharmaceutical products branded in Jimi Hendrix's name. Their inspiration came from the Bob Marley estate and Willie Nelson, who have expanded their brands into buds. "Imagine Purple Haze lounges," he said. "$15 million dollar clubs opened by the owner of Hard Rock Caf and House of Blues... but this has Jimi Hendrix everywhere and you can puff our Foxy Lady weed in them." What a time to not be alive.

I meandered into the booth of Apex Super Critical, an Ohio firm that sells a complex phalanx of complicated steel pipes and levers that allow for the extraction of cannabis oils. This machine is how wax and dabs are made. The model on the floor retails for the low low cost of just $88,500, but if you want to spring for the $185,000 option, you can extract 10,000 grams a day. Once processed, you've got 1,000 grams of pure oil a day. At $15 a gram wholesale, that's $15,000 a day. Assuming we're not counting the money you'll make when you sell your life rights to fuel Showtime's inevitable Weeds meets Breaking Bad one-hour drama, you'd break even in two weeks.

MJIC, proving that blondes do indeed have more fun

Next I hit the booth of MJIC, aka the Marijuana Investment Company, an investment firm based in nearby Newport Beach. The firm has been open less than a year, its booth staffed by two men so blonde they looked like they were manufactured by Mattel. They told me how they've made 13 investments in the last year, and equated themselves to a smaller Berkshire Hathawaybut for weed.

They showed me some sort of chart and index that looked very "professional," like a kid putting a marginal book report in a clear plastic folder to get a slightly higher grade. Then the older blonde man came clean.

"I didn't know cannabis at all a year ago... I'm not a user. I don't really get it. I still prefer a beer or a glass of wine, but so many people have so many benefits from it," this Orange County prototype said. He's been at the company roughly six months, following a quarter century in corporate finance.

"But when it finally goes from illegal to legal, we'll be in a position to make a lot of money off this."

Recommended: The Cannabis Republic of Uragway

Another encounter occurred with a nattily dressed Australian man who spoke at a clip that only a con man or square dance caller could match. He worked for something called Americanex and started throwing out alphabet soup acronyms that I couldn't have fathomed even if I wasn't stoned. Something about CFTC compliance but they've got a full KYC and they've "approached it like a financial technology."

When I finally unraveled what he was saying, I discovered Americanax is a cannabis exchange that helps link growers with dispensaries around the world, as well as listing the actual strains themselves. The phrase "we do flower and trim" was uttered.

"We're pure tech," he told me. "We want to bring the future to futures." Then he launched into the need to make the product mainstream and how important regulation will be. My brain glazed over as he said a sentence containing the word "connectivity."

We shook hands and he scrutinized me, as though I was not in CFTC compliance and never will be. This was his world, not mine. Dollars are the drug of choice for many here.

As I skulked out of the venue, I saw the Men's Wearhouse founder once more (for real this time). It was just me and him, walking down a hallway towards the exit. He gave a slight nod, looked at me for a second, and probably thought to himself, "That guy could really use a suit."

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Photo of Shaker Aamer via Reprieve

Last year, VICE asked me if I wanted to edit a series of stories about the prison at Guantnamo Bay. Working with the legal charity Reprieve, which represents a number of Guantnamo detainees, we put together Behind the Bars: Guantanamo Bay, a collection of stories, reviews, and reports that featured several pieces written by men who were still locked up inside the detention center.

One of those men was Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national who was the last remaining British resident in Guantnamo. On Friday, it was announced that Aamer is finally going to be released and returned to his family in London, possibly as early as October 25. This has been a long, long time coming. Aamer has been cleared for release from Guantnamo since 2007 butfor reasons that remain hard to fathom but are probably related to the horrific treatment Aamer witnessed and receivedhe has not been allowed to leave.

Read one of the stories Shaker Aamer wrote for VICE: The Declaration of No Human Rights

His situation is not a polarizing one. This isn't the story of a politically divisive figure championed by some and scorned by others. Every British newspaper, from the usually right-wing Daily Mail to the usually left-wing Guardian, has covered Aamer's case from the perspective that his detention without trial has been an injustice. Politicians like the Conservative MP David Davis and the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have lobbied for Shaker's freedom.

In 2001, Aamer told us, he was working for a charity in Afghanistan. After 9/11, the American military was offering financial rewards to any local who brought in suspicious charactersand Aamer was apparently suspicious enough. In November 2001 Northern Alliance troops took him into custody and passed him to the Americans. It was claimed that he was an al Qaeda operative. But like many Guantnamo inmates, he was never charged with any crime.

Aamer has said that he was tortured at Bagram Air Base, a CIA "black site" in Afghanistan. Once, he recalled, a British intelligence officer was in the room while he was having his head repeatedly smashed into a wall. Eventually, he was taken, hooded and shackled, to Guantnamo. Aamer has four children, the youngest of whom was born on the day he was taken to Guantnamo.

Twelve years later, I found myself workingalbeit at a distance of a few thousand mileswith Aamer. We asked him questions and his lawyers would get answers for us, usually with the help of Clemency Wells, Reprieve's brilliant, tireless press officer. Aamer asked us questions about the outside world and we commissioned pieces based on what he and his fellow detainees had asked. He wrote about his experiences and his lawyers would pass the writingand some of his artworkon to us. I read his work, looked at the photos of a smiling family man, and wondered how anyone who was experiencing what he was experiencing could remain committed to the idea of living in this world.

His longest piece for our series wasn't jeremiad. It wasn't a list of the terrible things that had happened to him. It was a piece of satire: Shaker took the UN Declaration of Human Rights and rewrote it as the US Declaration of No Human Rights. He joked about "Muslims with beards," Donald Rumsfeld, and how it would be less embarrassing for Barack Obama if we all shut up and pretended that nothing was happening on this strange chunk of American land at the tip of Cuba.

Shaker's choice of subject was not accidental. The UN Declaration of Human Rights, written as it was after the trauma of the Second World War, represents a highpoint in human cooperation, a document that says that what applies to one must apply to all. The prison at Guantnamo Bay, which sits outside the law, is a betrayal of these ideals.

The British detainee built on this idea, accessed his inner-Aesop and wrote a fable, "Colonel Bogdan Has No Nose," about the man who basically ran Guantnamo for a number of years. The story was beautifully illustrated by Molly Crabapple and told the tale of a land that, because of the actions of a king long since dead, had come to think of cutting off the noses of its children as normal practice.

The point Shaker was making was simple. He wrote:

And so it is with Colonel Bogdan, the Admiral, the Guantnamo administration, and even the US Government. They believe what they are doing in the name of the "War On Terror" is normal and that everyone should act exactly the same. But it is time to tell the people of No Noseland that they should not cut off the noses of their children. It only spites them, and makes their world a nastier place.

Reprieve told me that they had only found out about Aamer's release after the British government announced it. The battle will not be over until he is at home with his wife and four children. Emad Hassan and Younous Chekkouri, the two other detainees who contributed to our series, were released from Guantnamo earlier this year. Younous is not free yet, though, as he faces a series of baseless charges back in his home country, Morocco.

Today, though, we can celebrate the release of a good man.

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In 1940, the world's greatest movie clown, CharlieChaplin, starred in The Great Dictator, asilent film about a funny little man with a toothbrush mustache named AdenoidHynkel. In one memorably madcap scene, Hynkel, hanging from the curtains, ordersa lackey, Greta Garbo-style, "Leave me. I want to be alone." He slidesdown the curtain like a fireman, spies a giant globe in the middle of the room,and, imagining himself emperor of the world, does a mincing Fred Astaire-styledance with the giant globe, bopping it around like a giant beach ball. Theglobe pops. Hynkel collapses in tears. It's hilarious. Everyone loved the movie,including then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, after learning yearsearlier that the studio was trying to scrap the project, sent a representativeto Chaplin to encourage him to persist.

The president's judgment was poor, however. As thewriter Ron Rosenbaum has pointed out, Chaplin "did nothing buthelp Hitler because he made him seem like an unthreatening clown just at atime, 1940, when the world needed to take Hitler's threat seriously." Chaplinagreed, saying that had he know about the horrors Hitler was responsible for atthe time, " and Governor Brownwon't make it with those who don't think the President is a dictator."Nevertheless the lightweight announced he would run, and a columnist in the WashingtonStar recorded an "air of furtive jubilation down at Lassie for Governorheadquarters."

Reagan's1965 Republican primary opponent was judged a political superstar by the NewYork Times, easily "matching oratorical skill" with the former actor. When Reaganvisited Redwoods National Park, and reporters quoted his immortal words, "atree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?", the San FranciscoChronicle reported his campaign would soon "bottom out."

"TheRepublican Party isn't bankrupt, or isn't that bankrupt that it has to turn toLiberace for leadership," Esquire observed at the time. "'Bring him on'is our motto," a Brown aide saidand Reagan was brought, winning the nominationin a landslide, and eventually winning the general election.

READ: Trump in Public: The Donald's Pop Culture Domination Is the Reason He's the GOP Frontrunner

Butthe jokes only continued. When Reagan entered the 1968 presidential race, theTV comedy revue Laugh-In made "RonaldReagan is running for president," an unadorned punchlinethat was the whole gag.He ran again in 1976, challenging an incumbent president in his own party, andtaking for the nominating contest all the way to the convention, an almostunheard of feat in modern American politics. That this was a historic accomplishment largely escaped the media,however; it didn't matter, for instance, to the author of the syndicated comicstrip Dunagin's People, who depicteda TV announcer explaining, "Now that the conventions are over, we can get backto our regular programold Ronald Reagan movies."

Aspreparations began for the 1980 race, Lyn Nofziger, Reagan's late advisor, notedthat Team Reagan didn't discourage the belittlement. In fact, they came to relyon it as part of their campaign strategy: being underestimated only made theirman stronger. Liberals fell right into the trap: in the week running up to theelection against Jimmy Carter, Doonesburyran a series where the strip's indefatigable TV reporter, nature documentary-style, took "a fantasticvoyage through...the brain of Ronald Reagan."

"Unhappily,the brain stops growing at age 20, and thereafter, neurons die off by themillions every year," the comic reported. "What this means is that thebrain of Ronald Reagan's has been shrinking ever since 1931."

Thiswas a fairly accurate portrayal of how Carter's aides saw their opponent. Carterspeechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg has related that the campaign's strategists wereconfident that if they only could get Reagan side by side on the debate stagewith the incumbent, the public would finally realize that the Republicancandidate and former star of Bedtime forBonzo was just stupid.

Well,they got their wish: A debate between Reagan and Carter took place the weekendbefore the voting. Reagan wiped the floor with the president, and a race thathad been virtually tied turned into a Reagan landslide.

Trumpis a very different figure from Reagan, who had governed America's mostpopulous state, and rather successfully, before he ever ran for president. Theyare similar, however, in that they both top-rated TV stars for years beforethey ever sought office, Reagan as host of G.E.Theater anthology programs, andTrump as the billionaire host on 14 seasons of The Apprentice. Because of this, both men had a profound head startover their opponents, having already imprinted themselves in voters' mindsexactly as they wished to be seenReagan as the genial curator of stories thatalways had happy endings, Trump as the omni-competent boardroom warrior beforewhom weaker mortals can only grovel.

Butmore than that, Reagan, and now Trump, reveal our own tendency torepress our fear of demagogues by dismissing them. And ultimately, it's allabout us. Follow the bouncing beach ball. Take demagogues seriously. Voterslove them. And they're only a joke until they win.

Rick Perlstein is a historian and journalist, and the author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.

On Friday night in Weston-super-Mare, England, famed activist punk bandand VICE contributorsPussy Riot staged a performance at the closing of Banksy's massive faux theme park, Dismaland. The Russian group debuted their new song, "Refugees In," as part of a massive productionfeaturing a staged conflict between "rioters" and "protesters"that was a collaboration between the band and British artists the Connor Brothers.

"Regardless of ones political views we have a moral duty to offer refuge to people fleeing war and persecution," said Pussy Riot in a statement. "Having experienced persecution during the two years we spent in a Russian prison and repeated incidents of attack by Russian authorities we feel solidarity with those who suffer under oppressive regimes."

The band also indicated that it would become further involved in activism around the refugee crisis, which has become a hotly debated topic in Europe as hundreds of thousands of refugeesmost of them fleeing civil war in Syriaseek sanctuary in the EU. In October, Pussy Riot and the Connor Brothers plan to visit a notorious refugee camp in Calais, France, that has become known as "the Jungle," and they are also raising funds to build temporary homes for those trapped there.

Scroll down for more photos from Pussy Riot's performance.

Photo via Flickr user Marc Nozell

On Motherboard: Hillary Clinton's No Good, Very Bad Email Security

Another day, another string of "hidden" Hilary Clinton emails. Earlier this week, during an interview with CBS's Face the Nation, Clinton claimed that she had provided the Obama administration with all of the work emails she had sent from her private account during her time as secretary of state. Apparently, that wasn't the case.

Today, the Associated Press reported that the State Department has uncovered a chain of emails that "were not previously in possession of the department," according to agency spokesman John Kirby. The newly-uncovered emails are reportedly conversations between the now-retired General David Petraeus, who, at the time was in charge of the military's US Central Command, which was running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The emailswhich date back to January 10, 2009began on Clinton's now-inaccessible AT&T Blackberry email account, but switched to a private email account on her "homebrew" server after about two and a half weeks. From there, the emails continue until February 1, 2009. According to officials, there were less than ten emails sent back and forth between Clinton and General Petraeus.

"Emailgate" has been a source of ongoing controversy for Clinton since March, when news outlets learned of the existence of the private email server. Clinton, a 2016 presidential candidate and the presumptive Democratic nominee, has claimedon numerous occasionsthat "it was allowed, it was above board," and that she is now "being as transparent as possible" in trying to provide officials with the relevant information.

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The August release of the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton unearthed an old conspiracy theory about the tragic 1995 death of charismatic rapper Eazy E from AIDS. Some fans and the son of the late emcee believe that Death Row Records mogul Suge Knight, perhaps along with unknown conspirators, somehow infected Eazy E with HIV in a deliberate (and rapidly successful) attempt to kill him.

Now, a new wrinkle in this ongoing game of amateur CSI has emerged: Frost, a rapper signed to Ruthless Records back in the early 90s, says the murder weapon was an HIV-infused acupuncture needle.

In a new video from For the Record, an aspiring hip-hop documentary crew, Frost claims Eazy E had been injured on a quad bike, and was receiving acupuncture treatments. Frost details the infection scheme around 4:16:

"I think they really had a stronghold of giving him tainted needles with the AIDS virus in them through acupuncture, because how else could somebody die that fast of AIDS? Have you even heard of somebody dying in two weeks of AIDS bro? Come on, man. It's unheard of, bro."

HIV is just a virus. It is notit should be noteda biological weapon invented by a screenwriter to serve as the MacGuffin in a Mission: Impossible movie. What's more, as Wilmore Webley, a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst told us, acupuncture would be a terribly ineffective way to give someone HIV.

Acupuncture needles lack the shaft and reservoir of a syringe where HIV-infected blood can hide, Webley explained, "so the probability of it actually storing enough blood or serum with enough viral particles in there to lead to an infection is extremely low."

To infect someone, the acupuncture needle would have to coated in fresh blood, or a HIV serum, "which also means that they would have had to use that needle right away," Webley continued. Moreover, HIV would most likely have to enter a blood vessel to find a hospitable place to infect, and acupuncture is superficial, and deliberately avoids blood vessels. After all, said Webley, "you're not getting up from acupuncture bleedingall over yourself."

Naturally, the acupuncture theory has other holes. Webley points out that people shouldn't make too much of the fact that Eazy E's acquaintances learned that he had the virus just two weeks before he died. "That was the time of diagnosis, not the time of infection," he said.

This type of theory can be harmful, Webley added, "especially in African-American and underrepresented minority populations where this virus continues to be a huge problem." Ludicrous rumors like this cloud people's perception of HIV and AIDS. He said in his experience, when people think of HIV as some kind of high-tech conspiracy, rather than a public health issue, "they're not as apt to take personal responsibility."

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All photos via POV Documentaries

Angy Rivera was 19 years old when she first came out as undocumented, in 2010. Since then, she's helped countless others in similar situations, running Ask Angy, an advice column and video series in which she provides guidance to undocumented people in the United States. For years, people have sought out the young Colombian-American activist's advice about living a life without papers, and she faithfully wrote back to them with information about everything from getting a driver's license to getting married. Many of these people had nowhere else to go, afraid that exposing their undocumented status would provoke the brutal force of US immigration law. In her column, Rivera not only doled out counsel, she also helped chip away at the stigma attached to the "undocumented" label. Now 24, River is the subject of a new documentary, No Le Digas a Nadie (Don't Tell Anyone), which premiered on PBS earlier this week.

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No Le Digas a Nadie captures Rivera's activism in the immigrant rights movement in New York while also chronicling the emotionally taxing process she went through to apply for a U visa, only granted to immigrants who are victims of mental or physical violence. It's a status that was created through the passage of the Battered Immigrant Women Protection Act of 2000; Rivera was eligible because she had been abused by her former stepfather. VICE spoke to Rivera about Ask Angy, her new documentary, and why she didn't celebrate when she got her visa.

VICE: Talking about being undocumented in public is tricky, because it means exposing yourself. Why did you decide to start your column?
Angy Rivera: In March 2010, New York State Youth Leadership Council had our first "Coming Out of the Shadows" rally in New York. I handed didn't matter. We always say, "Immigrants need to learn English and pay their taxes and work hard." But at the end of the day, that wasn't at all what impacted my case.

The immigrant rights movement is so much bigger than just getting immigration papers. I've have plenty of people come up to me and tell me that they had been assaulted in a different country or they were assaulted and never reported it. These stories go untold. They're never going to be able to qualify.

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Harriet Alida Lye in George Whitman's former apartment, above Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore. Photo by Laura Stevens

George Whitman opened the legendary bookshop now known as Shakespeare and Company in the shadow of Notre Dame in Paris in 1951, and having spent all his money on the shop he slept on a pullout couch among the books. He insisted on giving it up, though, if a writer came by and needed a place to stay. (He often asked writers to sleep there even if they didn't need a place to stay.) Soon, he started housing several writers at a time, either published or aspiring, and these literary vagabonds came to be known as the Tumbleweeds.

"Several million persons have walked in our door like tumbleweeds drifting in the wind," George wrote in his letter from the editor in the second edition of The Paris Magazine, published by the bookshop in 1984, "and then walked out, their innocence lost, as free citizens of the cosmos." He believed "we're all homeless wanderers in a way," and over the years, Shakespeare & Co. has welcomed wandering writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Anas Nin, James Baldwin, Julio Cortzar, Darren Aronofsky, and Dave Eggers.

This past month I've been living as a writer-in-residence above Shakespeare & Company bookshop and I've been thinking about tumbleweedsboth kindsmore than ever. I'm not from America and I've never seen a western, so I'm missing the necessary cultural framework to understand what a tumbleweed is, and when I first heard the term I thought of dust bunnies, small clumps of fluff that mysteriously gather under furniture and in forgotten corners of a room.

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In botanical terms, tumbleweeds are not dead, exactly, nor are they useless detritus: A tumbleweed is a plant's way of propagating, a satellite full of seeds that pops off from the root and tumbles on to a bright future (think of blowing wishes on a white-headed dandelion, the seeds parachuting in the wind). When I first learned this, I was disappointed in the metaphorical significance of tumbleweeds not having any roots. I wanted them to have portable roots, and be able to plant themselves anywhere, because I wanted the be reassured I could take root wherever I end up.

But what has more power: roots, or seeds?

Photo via Flickr user Alexandre Duret-Lutz

The shop estimates that somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people have slept here. The Tumbleweeds sleep in beds that have been placed throughout the bookshopnext to the piano, above the Mirror of Loveand there are generally around four people living in the bookstore at a time. One of George's rules that still remains is that all Tumbles must read a book a day. (They also help open and close the shop, work for two hours a day, and help out with the weekly readings.) I've never been a Tumbleweed myself, but some of the "Tumbles" I've met over the years remain my best friends today. There's Alice, the drummer in a "sassy queer anti-colonial feminist punk-band" from London; and Hanna, a gentle yet mischievous Swede who studies Russian and bakes lavender cake; and Daniel, a Californian who taught me about Joni Mitchell and whose life seems to have the pulse and buzz of a Beat poem. By now they've all returned to their home countries, and new people have replaced them. The whole world comes here, it seems, and then the whole world leaves.

I first came to Shakespeare & Company as an exchange student in the fall of 2007 and started working here part-time shortly after that. George was 93 when I met him. He wore pajamas and a paisley jacket almost exclusively. I was working at the shop one Saturday morning and Sylvia, George's daughter who now runs the store, asked me to help her dad prepare for his weekly pancake party. I went up to his apartment for the first time and found him in his corridor of a kitchen, making lemonade. "The secret to the best lemonade you'll ever have," he told me conspiratorially, without offering or expecting an introduction, "is using fresh lime blossoms."

"Fresh lime blossoms?" I'd never heard of such a thing. "Where do you find those in Paris?"

He paused, sugar in one hand and wooden spoon in another. Nearly a minute passed as he continued to stir the lemonade. "I'm lying," he said, finally. "You don't actually use lime blossoms. It just sounds more poetic that way."

Photo via Flickr user Drew Leavy

As I write this, black dog called Colette is sitting at my feet and a walleyed tabby with a broken tail is sitting on my lap. The cat is a stray the staff found contentedly curled up in the crime section one morning last winter; she was accordingly named Agatha Christie, but all animals who live at the bookshop, even the dog, wind up getting called Kitty. George said it was more convenient this way, as he only had to call one name and they'd all come to him at the same time.

Rather than alphabetizing books, George preferred to shelve them to make "interesting marriages." Sylvia eventually managed to convince him to systematize the books in the shop, but his personal collection is still arranged according to his personal preference. Sitting in this book-lined bedroom, I see The Gates of Africa beside In America and The Romance of American Communism, and then An Outline of Psychoanalysis beside Sexual Self-Stimulation.

The whole world comes here, it seems, and then the whole world leaves.

I take tea breaks in the front room, shared by staff and Tumbleweeds, and if I feel like talking, there's an endless supply of interesting people to talk to. If I don't, though, then I sit at the table with a book and read alongside whoever's there. There's the girl who uses her iPhone as a paperweight to hold down the thinner side of Infinite Jest; the tall Scot who eats cheese that's as orange as his classic Penguin paperback; the Buddhist who looks like Jesus and tells me about the Zen book that changed his life; the bespectacled antiquarian bookseller whom I first met through the cat-flap in my bedroom door when he came to feed Agatha.

Watch: Hanging with the People Who Ritualistically Suspend Their Bodies from Hooks

One evening last week, some Tumbleweeds and I were reading through the archive of autobiographiesit was another of George's mandates that everyone who sleeps here write a one-page life story. Almost all of the attempts acknowledge the limitations of such an endeavor: How do you set about writing your life story when you're 19 years old and drunk on Paris? How can you contribute to a living archive? Around half of them try to start from the beginning (birthplace, earliest memories); the other half just dive right in, knowing they'll never be able to capture the whole mess of past and future. My favorites are these bold prose poems of the present.

I talked to Krista Halverson, director of Shakespeare & Company's new publishing arm, about her experience going through the shop's archives to put together the forthcoming book to be called, aptly, Shakespeare & Company, Paris: The Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart.

"I had no idea the extent of the archives before I started the job," Krista tells me. "It took years to go through." The archives include the one-page autobiographies, George's personal letters and journals, rare and surprising pieces of literary history, but also "receipts, resumes, and movie showings at cinemas from 1997." George kept most of his papers in his bedroom, but they mushroomed across the whole apartment: One unpublished manuscript by a Beat poet was recently found wedged above the shower between some pipes.

"Kitty." Photo via Flickr user gadl

Krista's intention behind The Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, which will be published before this Christmas, was "to recreate for the reader experience of sitting in George's bedroom and going through all these incredible papers." Krista came across notes from James Baldwin, rare artifacts of James Joyce's work, and letters from other literary giants. "You're getting the archive's greatest hits in the book," Krista told me, "but you'll still feel that sense of discovery."

Sylvia had recruited a few Tumbleweeds to help with the archival process before George died, but at that point, it wasn't an easy task. "It was partly just because he was such an old man," Sylvia says, "and partly because he was a bit cantankerous, but in order to do the job properly, it had to be done in secret." If George came across someone going through his papers, he would stop them and tell them a long story about a particular Tumbleweed, or tell them they were doing the job all wrong and had to start over.

Here, foreground blends with background into a head-in-the-sand sort of carpe diem: You know people will leave, but that doesn't stop you from enjoying them while they're here.

For someone who was so careful to keep everything, and whose life's philosophy was so intertwined with words and physical documents, I find it strange that George would have made it so difficult for people to archive his papers. Didn't he realize their value in simply having kept them?

Krista believes that George did understand the value of his documents, as well as the legacy they'd leave behind, but that he was more concerned with living in the present and moving forward with his life's work. "He was too busy to look to the past. It's probably why he lived such a long life."

I wanted to write an essay about living in a legendary Parisian bookshop that also talked about losing myself, finding myself, and then letting it all go again. I wanted to try to show you how home is something that doesn't have to be permanenthow maybe it never can be.

It is at Shakespeare & Co, with the constant turnover of tourists and Tumbleweeds, that I've learned to embrace the present even when I know it won't last. Here, foreground blends with background into a head-in-the-sand sort of carpe diem: You know people will leave, but that doesn't stop you from enjoying them while they're here. In other cities where I've lived, and even among less transient circles in Paris, I find people are less willing to open up their lives to the random scatterings of chance. Maybe they're focusing more on roots than on seeds.

It's hard, often impossible, to deal with departures and endings, whether you're the one who leaves or the one who stays. But for now, I'm grateful to have the dog at my feet, the cat on my lap, and to be surrounded by people for whom forever is just right now.

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There really aren't enough men. Photo via Flickr user krystiano

We all have that friend: the beautiful, intelligent, driven woman wholike Katherine Heigl in every rom-comcan't find a decent date. Every guy she goes out with is an asshole; she consistently dates "below" her league, and she's on the verge of giving up on a committed relationship altogether.

Not long after he turned 30, the writer Jon Birger realized he and his wife knew a lot of women like that. The couple didn't have a lot of single male friends left, but the many single women they knew all seemed to be buyers stuck in a seller's market. One of those friends, Birger told me, "had been dating a guy for a couple years. It certainly seemed like they were well on their way to getting married. She was in her late 30s, he was in his mid 40s. She really wants to have kids, get married, the whole

Are there any societies where men outnumber women, or where women have the power that men have in America?
China. There was a semi-recent story in Bloomberg, and it quoted a young couple who were about to start having a family. The dad said, "Oh, I hope I have a girl, having a boy is just too expensive." Because in the middle-upper class in China, it's now accepted that in order to be marriageable a young man has to own his own apartment. In Shanghai, that could be $300,000 to $400,000, and he has to own a car, too. This creates pressure not only on the young man but on the family, to be able to afford to help him. It's a reverse dowry, essentially.

Check out Jon Birger's book, Dateonomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game, out now.

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President Obama announcing the commuted sentences in July. Photo courtesy WhiteHouse.gov

VICE is exploring America's prison system in the week leading up to our special report with President Obama for HBO. Tune in Sunday, September 27, at 9 PM EST, to see his historic first-ever presidential visit to a federal prison.

Their calls are recorded and often cut off. Their emails are monitored, the word count limited. But there's a tangible light at the end of the tunnel now for Douglas Lindsay and Telisha Watkins, two of the 46 federal prisoners whose sentences for nonviolent crimes were commuted by President Barack Obama in July.

Reached by telephone and email, Lindsay and Watkins, incarcerated at federal prisons in Georgia and Minnesota, respectively, were ticking off the days until their freedom. Both are serving time for drug crimesmassive sentences of the sort that have been the subject of intense scrutiny as the excesses of the war on drugs have been laid bare over the past two decades.

But these two don't spend much time reflecting on their role in some historic sea change in American criminal justice policy.

They just want to be free.

Lindsay was serving a life sentence and Watkins 20 years until they got the good news. On October 8, Lindsay will be admitted to a halfway house prior to his return home, and Watkins, saying that she needs simply to decompress after nearly a decade behind bars, is going home to a family that has withered while she was awayher mother has died and she's grown estranged from her relatives and friends.

When reached by VICE, the two seemed equal parts excited and nervous about emerging from the prison-industrial complex. Technology and slang may have changed while they were inside, but their goals and expectations for life are timeless. Hopes and dreams, even behind bars, do not diminish.

Douglas Lindsay. Photo courtesy Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM)

"It was a blessing for me," said Alcindor Lindsay, Douglas's brother. "It's been a long time since he's been incarcerated. It's something we've been praying on for a long time, and God finally answered our prayers."

In 1995, Alcindor was in prison facing a drug sentence of 25 years for possession of crack cocaine with intent to distribute. He would only serve seven years and nine months before being paroled, but his brother Doug got sentenced to life a year later.

Along with 15 others, according to an indictment unsealed in 1996, Lindsay was arrested and charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute and distribution of cocaine and cocaine base. Lindsay had no prior criminal charges, though he'd spent time dealing crack small-time in his suburban South Carolina hometown.

"I turned myself in that Monday, then I was let right out," Lindsay told VICE. "As much as that sounds good, that was the worst thing that happened to me."

While inside, his codefendants received a crash course on what a federal charge meant at the height of America's drug war. According to Lindsay, they were persuaded to slap a litany of their own charges onto him.

Shortly after turning himself in, Lindsay spent several months on bond.

"It was terrible. When I was out, I was worried to death, I was fearful," he said.

In December 1996, Lindsaya graduate of Limestone College in Gaffney, South Carolina, who spent four years in the US Army as a combat signalerwas sentenced to life.

"Honestly, to have them say that, I didn't have any idea I could probably get that, it still didn't register to me. I was in a state of shock. I didn't believe it," Lindsay tells VICE. "My mind registered it as some kind of mistake. It settled in after I got into the federal prison. If you get a life sentence, there's a possibility you could die in prison."

Check out the moment President Obama meets with federal prison inmates as part of our upcoming HBO special on the criminal justice system.

Seventeen years later, he will walk out a free man. There is awfully little chance of of relapsing, of finding himself back in the throes of drug dealing, Lindsay says. While inside, he never believed he'd serve out his sentence. Instead, he prepared for the day when he'd be released, studying real estate and the stock market with inmates who'd navigated those systems on the outside."Because I believed I would one day get out," he says, "I wanted to be emotionally, mentally, and spiritually prepared for when I get out. I never gave up, I never gave in."Telisha Watkins, who will be freed in mid-November after being sentenced to 20 years in 2007 for charges of cocaine and marijuana possession, declined relocation to a halfway house, instead opting to be released to her older sister who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. Having not been raised together, Watkins doesn't know her sister well, but is hoping to spend that time reacquainting herself with what little family she still has.

Telisha Watkins. Photo courtesy FAMM

"I don't honestly know what direction my life will take and I want to be able to feel that out without any pressure," she told VICE in an email. "I want more than anything to be successful and support myself. I know that in order to do that I may have to start at the bottom, but I welcome the challenge."

In the federal prison in Minnesota where she would have served out her sentence, Watkins had become somewhat of a mentor to other inmates, or what is called an inmate companion. Often she'd spend time sitting with suicidal or otherwise mentally-ill inmates who needed a bit of encouragement, a maternal support that came natural to her.On the day she heard that President Obama was poised to commute sentences for non-violent criminals, Watkins joked with other inmates that she couldn't wait for her release.The joke was only that for so long. She heard she'd been chosen as one of 46, and that she'd be going home soon, and for good. (So far, Obama has commuted the sentences of 89 criminals, 76 of which are for nonviolent crimes.)

"At this point, I just feel exceedingly blessed," Watkins says. "I am so humbled by the whole experience. To go from knowing that I wasn't going home until 2023, to going home before the end of the year, it's surreal."

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A stone's throw north and inland from the bong-and-airbrush wonderland of Panama City Beach lays Seacrest Wolf Preserve in rural Chipley, Florida. There, married wildlife advocates Wayne and Cynthia Watkins run the roughly 20-acre preservation homing over four packs of pure wolves with names like Princess Moonstar, Spirit Prince, and Legacy along with a host of other wild animals. But unlike many other conservation efforts, the Watkins invite visitors to come face-to-fucking-face with these creatures they often call "wolf ambassadors."

Behind two state-mandated fencesone eight, and the other ten feet talla menagerie of breeds like Arctic, British Columbian, and Gray clomp around in separated packs. Many are biologically wired to accommodate climates much cooler than the Florida Panhandle's sweaty armpit, so they spend a lot of time in the natural springs Wayne rerouted into small ponds beneath towering oak and pine trees. It's apparently enough to keep them kicking and in (mostly) good spirits.

"They're just like us. They're just like humans," Wayne, a gruff Vietnam vet, often says on the Saturday tours he leads. The tour waiver reiterates the sentiment: "As humans, we experience different emotions and moods. Wolves also experience these same feelings. Please be respectful of our awesome Seacrest wolves. Talk softly, move slowly, and be attentive." That last rule meant that on a recent visit I was unfortunately not allowed to run with the wolves, a trope that sounds metal as hell, but probably would have gotten me eaten.

A series of dirt roads lead to the Oaks Farm property, which swallows 430 acres. Cynthia's grandson Hunter, a bulky young man in a DIY Superman muscle shirt, welcomed us to the premises with genuine warmth. He explained he'd been "helping out" the past four years but the wolves had always been part of his life. They've been important to his grandmother for a long while and the appreciation trickled down the generations.

Cynthia's teenage love for the elusive canines eventually carried her to a conservation effort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the early 90s, where she met her first wolf in person. "I saw the wolf ambassador and I was so stunned I heard nothing else," she told VICE. The "wolf ambassador" term is part of the Watkins' M.O.: wolf education and dispelling ancient smacktalk of the majestic animals. "I heard nothing. I was just drawn to him. He was just lying by the handlers. I went over and knelt down beside him. I asked if I could touch him and he said yes," Cynthia recalled. "I reached down and touched a pure wolf for the first time. I felt his energy. I saw the incredible entity that it was. It was a spiritual experience for me. I had tears in my eyes. It was profound. It changed me. It changed my life."

After her then-husband died shortly after her visit west in 1994, Cynthia was introduced to Wayne and the two married in 1996. Wayne moved Cynthia and the Siberian Huskies she'd spent a decade breeding to the Oaks Farm, a property he purchased while active in the military and settled upon retiring. He originally used the land to raise cattle, but when rattlesnakes wiped out the Husky bloodline Cynthia spent years developing, they replaced the cows with wolves.

In 1999, an at-capacity zoo contacted the Watkins about taking on a wolf rescued from domestic captivity. " in every state nationwide kill more animals and wild species than any other entity," Wayne says. "The agency that is supposed to be protecting the wild species the most are the ones that kill the majority of them." The Watkins' cite European folklore and fairytales like Little Red Riding Hood's demonic depiction of wolves as perpetuating the fear still intact across the ocean and centuries later. That's part of what this couple want visitors to see: the truth about wolves and how truly gentle and fun they can be.

The tour also features lectures focused on wolves' essential role in various ecosystems, offering hard facts relating to the wolf's key role in the trophic cascade and inviting us to question local and national government rulings.

I ask Wayne about the biggest payoff in founding and running Seacrest, expecting another spiel littered with figures and governmental acronyms. "Being able to come out here at midnight and go into a wolfpack or wolf family of Gray wolves, have one of 'em come up and kiss you and want you to rub him and him interact with you," he says, reclining in a low-slung lawn chair in the snack pavilion. "That's probably the most rewarding thing. They are our family."

Although that's not to say Wayne isn't still a little surprised how his life turned out. "When I was flying missions in Vietnam, do you think I was ever thinking about wolves?" he asks before chuckling and literally walking toward a sunset on the horizon, while the wolves around us burst into another round of howls.

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