Host Ricky Gervais at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards. Photo by Paul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

The Golden Globes have long been known as the looser, drunker, more risqué cousin to the Academy Awards. In recent years the event has been known for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's Bill Cosby impression and the 2008 writers' strike. However, to hear host Ricky Gervais—himself a winner of three Globes—tell it last night, the awards are "worthless"—best used for a "doorstop," something to "hit burglars with," or an object to " up my arse."

Last night's ceremony—the 73rd, hosted at the Beverly Hills Hilton in Los Angeles, —included Sean Penn/El Chapo jokes, more than a few testy exchanges, and some unexpected award-winners, including a cookie-sharing Taraji P. Henson (of Empire fame) taking home her first Globe, and Crazy Ex-Girlfrind's Rachel Bloom, not to mention Lady Gaga (American Horror Story: Hotel). Her victory over Queen Latifah prompted a miffed, GIF-able look from Leonardo DiCaprio, whose chair she bumped on the way to the stage to accept her award. At the time of publication, a Vine of the exchange had racked up over 30 million loops.

Carol—the sole film with five nominations—was shut out, while The Revenant secured three top honors: Best Actor in a Drama for Leonardo DiCaprio, Best Director for Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Best Picture, Drama. Iñárritu is the reigning Oscar-winner for best director—his 2014 film Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) raked in four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. However, last year's Best Director Golden Globe went to Richard Linklater for Boyhood. As for DiCaprio, 41, this marked his third Golden Globe win in 11 nominations. He previously won for The Aviator (2005) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2014).

During their respective turns at the podium, the collaborators traded praise. "Leo, you are the guy. Thank you for making this the best experience of my life," Iñárritu said. A few minutes later, DiCaprio, a consummate awards-season contender who's yet to earn an Oscar, received a standing ovation. "This film was about survival, it was about adaptation, it was about the triumph of the human spirit, but more than anything, it was about trust. And there's no one more deserving of that trust than our director, Alejandro Iñárritu."

DiCaprio closed his speech with an environmental call to action. "I want to share this award with all the first nations people represented in this film, and all the indigenous communities around the world. It is time that we recognize your history and that we protect your indigenous lands from corporate interests and people that are out there to exploit them. It is time that we heard your voice and protected this planet for future generations." This was only one of two political statements delivered in this round of award acceptance speeches; the other occurred when the producers of Best Television Limited Series Wolf Hall implored British Prime Minister David Cameron to continue funding BBC programming.

Another film that garnered multiple statuettes was Steve Jobs, for Best Supporting Actress (Kate Winslet) and Best Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin). Ridley Scott's The Martian also picked up awards for Best Actor (Matt Damon) and Best Picture, Comedy, but the fact that the dire plight of Damon's stranded astronaut character was somehow labeled "comedic" was a recurring joke throughout the evening. Before Damon introduced the film, Gervais made the actor squirm by calling him "the only person who Ben Affleck hasn't been unfaithful to."

Like DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence also won her third Golden Globe, this time for Joy, the story of Joy Magano, the inventor of the Miracle Mop. "Every time I'm up here it is because of you," she said to director David O. Russell, who previously directed her Globe-winning performances in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013). "Thank you for choosing me. Thank you for your brilliance. Thank you for teaching me so much, professionally, personally. Your love of cinema is so pure." When onstage earlier in the evening to introduce their films, she and BFF Amy Schumer engaged in some naughty banter that's likely a preview of their upcoming screenplay. When they were coming up with nicknames for themselves, Lawrence asked Schumer, "What do people usually call you?" "Usually they just call me 'cunt,'" Schumer appeared to respond (the dialog was bleeped).

On VICE: Meet the Animator Behind Star Wars and 'Jurassic Park':

Besides that palpable tension the audience felt radiating off the censors, there was a stiff exchange between Gervais and Mel Gibson. During one of his previous Globes host outgigs, Gervais made a few jokes at Gibson's expense. Tonight Gervais had the awkward task of introducing Gibson, which he chose to make considerably more awkward. "I want to say something nice about Mel before he comes out," he began. "So OK, here you go: I'd rather have a drink with him in his hotel room tonight than with Bill Cosby." When Gibson, who is reportedly sober, came out from behind the curtain, Gervais ostentatiously lifted his beer glass out of sight. To which Gibson remarked, "I love seeing Ricky once every three years, 'cause it reminds me to get a colonoscopy." After disappearing momentarily, Gervais returned to the stage to ask one last question—"What the fuck does sugar tits even mean?" a reference to what Gibson allegedly called one of the female officers who booked him for a DUI in 2006. Gervais took one last jab at Gibson at the end of the telecast, choosing the parting words: "From myself and Mel Gibson, Shalom," an allusion to the actor's infamous antisemitic rants from that same night.

Still, the most uncomfortable moment of the three-plus-hour show was, unexpectedly, not courtesy of Gervais, whose jokes about Caitlyn Jenner and Transparent actor Jeffrey Tambor some critics called "transphobic" and " unsettling." Actress Lily James (who, incidentally, caused a stir when her character, Rose, fell in love with a black jazz singer on Downton Abbey) presented Best Score with Oscar-winner and Django Unchained star Jamie Foxx. Foxx unclasped the envelope and announced the "winner": Straight Outta Compton, a film that was not nominated. Then Foxx segued into his best impression of Steve Harvey broadcasting the wrong winner at last month's Miss Universe Pageant. "I'm sorry folks, I've made a mistake. It's right here on the card, I take full responsibility," Foxx parodied. The actual winner was 87-year-old Ennio Morricone for The Hateful Eight, and director Quentin Tarantino accepted the statue on Morricone's behalf. In late October, Tarantino participated in a New York City rally opposing police brutality, leading some officers to pledge they'd boycott The Hateful Eight.

Knowing his level of political awareness, it's fair to wonder if Tarantino spoke with intent when he said, "Do you realize that Ennio Morricone, who as far as I am concerned is my favorite composer—and when I say favorite composer, I don't mean movie composer, that ghetto..." and he proceeded to speak of Morricone as a contemporary of Mozart and Beethoven. After Tarantino wrapped up his speech, Foxx stared deep into the camera and uttered one word: "Ghetto," before moving on with the show. And so it goes with awards season in the internet age—weird, very public moments followed by trying to pretend nothing weird or very public happened while everyone else replays it over and over at home until, eventually, we lose interest.

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David Bowie in 1974. Image via Wikipedia

The Thin White Duke has died at 69, leaving behind some of the greatest songs of all time. Here, some of our writers choose their favorites and explain what he meant to them.

LET'S DANCE

"Let's Dance" isn't necessarily my favorite David Bowie tune (although, needless to say, it is a tune), but in terms of remembering Bowie, I've chosen it because it's the centerpiece of one of his greatest achievements: the Serious Moonlight tour. With an artist like Bowie, whose work is about so much more than music, whose work is endowed with so much vision, it seems that maybe looking at the individual songs doesn't really tell the story of what he was trying to do.

And while most people seem to associate Bowie's greatest with androgynous alien creations like Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust, for me his greatest moments are when he becomes David Bowie the great romantic. It's around this period in the early 80s that Bowie finally became the slightly-older pop star who sang love songs and wore suits, yet for me, it's the summation of his work, and maybe the closest thing we got to the real Bowie. With his bleached wedge and half-worn zoot suit, he looked like a high-fashion private eye, crooning about lost loves and lust into sold-out baseball stadiums and continental hippodromes. It has great trousers, great dancing, and great tunes. It's just about the coolest, most original, brilliant, honest, weirdest, sexy thing I've ever seen. Which is what saddens me most about Bowie's death: The fact that being weird and cool and sexy and original seems to be as unviable as it was when he first started out.

—Clive Martin, Writer

ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR

I have no idea if this song is really about Bowie ramming his car into his coke dealer repeatedly, but that's the myth surrounding it. Obviously the Berlin period means a lot to all of us here. This is as big a day as I can remember.

—Alex Miller, Global Head of Content

MODERN LOVE

There are so many songs. There are so many styles. When you have an artist as beautiful and brilliant as David Bowie, how can you narrow it down to one? The melancholia of "Where Are We Now," the cool grandeur of "Heroes," and this blueprint for living from "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)": "We'll buy some drugs / and watch a band / and jump in the river holding hands." But I'll say "Modern Love," because it combines pinpoint cultural observation with an infectious beat, arrangement and Bowie's unmatched voice. And it has another blueprint for living: "I know when to go out / and when to stay in / get things done." He knew how to go out. He knew how to stay in. He got so much done.

—Oscar Rickett, Writer

CHINA GIRL

I could spew some bullshit about why I like "China Girl" because it skewers Orientalism so well, or how the 80s video hilariously replicates every Asian stereotype going (including David Bowie doing "slanty eyes") but honestly? When I was growing up and listening to music, rock and pop weren't really made for people like me. It was singing about and for cute white girls with big hair and nice tits. Awkward queer Asian teenagers were not the pretty, lust-worthy girls that boys sung about; we weren't the people who even got on the mic. "China Girl"—and David Bowie in all his tenuously bisexual glory—showed me that you could be both.

—Zing Tseng, UK Editor, Broadly

MOONAGE DAYDREAM

"I'm the space invader / I'll be a rock and rollin' bitch for you." Have two sentences ever foreshadowed the concept for an entire album to come in better fashion than track three of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars? No. The answer is aways no. Because when those delicate piano keys come dancing in, and Bowie screams about ray guns and space faces, and Mick Ronson's guitar cuts through like a revving chainsaw in an empty forest, then, at that point—at that exact moment thirty seconds in and for four minutes after—there is nothing else, only the Moonage Daydreams.

—Joe Zadeh, Editor, Noisey UK

V-2 SCHNEIDER

Honestly, this isn't some jumped-up prick from VICE desperately trying to wave his cooler-than-thou flag in the face of the passing of one of the most important cultural icons this shitty little island's ever produced. My favorite David Bowie song really is the skronky, difficult, whining, and whirring "V-2 Schneider" from Heroes. Even though Bowie's voice is barely present on it, aside from few cooing, crooning intonations of the title. "V-2 Schneider" sounds like, well, a V-2 taking off, which means it sounds a bit like Eno's "Here Come the Warm Jets" which is basically the best song ever. It's a propulsive blast that still, 38 years on, sounds like everything you thought the future'd sound like. Oh, and that sax! That lewd, lascivious, downright dirty sax, courtesy of the man himself. It's an otherworldly testament to the man's otherworldly genius.

—Josh Baines, Editor, Thump UK

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Some melodies are created, others are discovered, and David Bowie had an unearthly knack for the latter. There is no greater example of this, in my eyes, than 2013's "Where Are We Now?" A song that strangely sounded like it has existed forever, both in tune and sentiment. While "Lazarus" and many other moments on the very recently released Blackstar will likely offer far more in the way of obvious poignancy, to me, "Where Are We Now?" is a far more heartbreaking final testimony. The lyrics, specifically smattered with references to his days in Berlin, are a strangely mournful recollection of the years of revolution he largely helped to shape. Yet more generally, with the simple pairing "As long as there's me / As long as there's you," he evoked an idea that still makes me feel a bit sick with sadness if I hear it in the right mood. That all the time we spend looking back on past glories is meaningless if recollected alone.

—Angus Harrison, Staff Writer, Thump UK

MAGIC DANCE

Bowie's legacy is richly diverse, otherworldly, and incomparable, but for me he was crystallized by this first visual impression: spiked mullet, frosty eyeshadow, leggings packed with that eye-averting bulge. The mischievous Jareth, Goblin King, a wicked grin stretched as his muppet minions cavorted around pirate boot-clad ankles. "Magic Dance" is a perverse song to write about as a favorite—highly camp and ridiculous and anchored by those synth stabs that sound fantastically dated now. Certainly, there are far many more moving, era-defining efforts in his canon, but this is Bowie at his most playful, a song and dance that's full of joy, tongue firmly in cheek (note the oft-mentioned and no doubt improvised coke referencing choreography). And what an incredible jumping-off point—which this was for so many kids in single digits who watched VHS copies of Labyrinth, utterly entranced. It's Bowie as he always was: doing exactly what he wanted and surprising us every step of the way.

—Kim Taylor-Bennett, Editor and Producer, Noisey

ROCK 'N' ROLL SUICIDE

I could give you the music journalist line about how this song is the moment Bowie makes Ziggy Stardust into the washed-up rock 'n' roll has-been cliché, and what it all means... But I love this song because it's been the soundtrack to the morning after every great night of my life. It's a song that speaks to the fragility after excess, when you're hungover and broken and lost and asking yourself why you do it and what it's all worth. That moment when suddenly, you realize you're not immortal. Or, in the great man's words: "Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth."

—Jenny Stevens, Managing Editor, VICE UK

HEROES

"Heroes" is an obvious choice, and that's because it's undeniably the greatest Bowie track. Within its glamorous walls there's an immortal store of something burning and golden that every truly great song strives toward: a sense of wild possibility. It's as though the love of my life is waiting around the corner, and if I turn we could stumble into each other's arms. "Heroes" makes me feel alive, fills me with promise, has me yearning for moments I haven't yet experienced and to fondly relive others I have. It is a distillation of life's beauty, tugging on the heartstrings that tie together the all-too-brief moments we search for on our never-ending journey to understand what it means to be human.

Thank you for this feeling, Bowie.

—Ryan Bassil, Staff Writer, Noisey UK

Beginning this Friday, students on the MA Photography course at the London College of Communication will be exhibiting their final projects. There was no specific brief, but the title chosen for the show—"In the Forest of Things"—is inspired by a quote from journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, in which he states that, to tell authentic stories, one must " as deeply as possible." We spoke to a few of the photography students about their chosen case studies and will be running one interview a day in the run-up to the opening of the show.

This year will mark a century since fires began perpetually burning under the Indian mining town of Jharia. Caused by the collapse of deep-lying coal mines, the town is now constantly filled with toxic fumes, with the pollution causing deaths in Jharia as well as nearby towns and villages. Injuries or fatalities from workers falling into the pits of fiery coal are also common.

Mining companies in the area have been battling for years to stem the fires, with minimal success. As well, any progress made often fails to impress the locals because of their built-up resentment over the improper work practices that have led to these deaths and the displacement of an estimated 100,000 families in the vicinity of Jharia.

I spoke to photographer Seb Heseltine, who visited the town in 2015, about the realities of life and work in the region.

VICE: What brought your attention to Jharia?
Seb Heseltine: Well, I've always been fascinated with learning about other cultures, so when it came time to prepare for our final project I had this kind of naive idea to document somewhere that was totally foreign to me. Over the year I began to really appreciate the work of Steve McCurry, especially his work in India.

So when I began looking into a subject, I kind of targeted my efforts into an industrial part of India, due to some discussions as to whether India should be labeled as a developing country or a developed country. From there, I learnt about how vital coal currently is to India and the complex situation happening in Jharia at the moment.

So was your main motivation to raise awareness, or purely to document what was happening for posterity?
Well, the area had been documented quite a lot up to 2010 and in 2012, when the local government began moving people whose homes were at risk from the underground fires into some of the rehabilitation homes—but I couldn't find many details on whether there were any developments. And as 2016 marks 100 recorded years of fires, I couldn't shake the feeling of wanting to investigate for myself.

What challenges did you face while taking the photos?
I'd say one of the key challenges I faced was actually trying to photograph some of the mining areas and the places where some of the fires were burning. I wouldn't be granted a journalist visa because it's not a situation that the local government want documented, and the situation isn't covered in the local press.

So you think there's perhaps an element of government suppression here?
Yes, I believe so. The police commissioner of the state actually phoned my fixer out of the blue and said I wasn't allowed to take any more photos of coal after my second week. Guards for the mining corporations are told to keep an eye out for photographers, and locals are actually paid to inform on photographers. That's why my fixer received a phone call.

Which moments stick with you most from your time out there?
I heard many stories of people falling into the flames. A week before I arrived, a guard for BCCL Mining had fallen into the flames and died near the town of Dhanbad. It was also difficult seeing the family of one of the children I photographed; the child had severe burns around his body, and the wounds would get infected from the insects and lack of medical resources they needed.

The locals of Bokahapadi are scared of the toxic gases and fires next to their village, but they have no option but to stay there because scavenging for coal brings in the livelihood they need to send their children to school and to eat. If they go to the relocation camps they will have to travel longer distances and therefore not make as much to provide for their families. And the people already living in those camps are very unhappy with their living situation.

How would you like to see the problem addressed?
Ideally, I would really hope to see the local government paying more attention to families in need with financial aid, reimbursing them for what they've lost, and having the the mining company BCCL give medical aid to those who've suffered from injuries from the unstable land. BCCL is one of the key mining companies in the area. I spoke to one of the main protesters from Jharia, Ashock, who stopped teaching physics at a local university to protest full time against BCCL. He believes the BCCL safety standards are not good enough and that other companies, such as TATA, have very few issues with spreading fires.

What is the photo of the x-ray about?
I went to one of the local hospitals and met with Dr. Ashutosh Kumar and some of the other people working there, and he spoke of the long-term ramifications of working in the conditions that the locals and miners face. That image is an x-ray of a local suffering from pneumoconiosis , a disease that often effects people working in mines with no safety equipment, after prolonged periods of breathing in coal dust. Dr. Kumar stated the average life expectancy of locals who have worked in the mines to be around 55.

See more photos from Seb's project, as well as the final projects from other photographers on his course, at the LCC MA show, open from 10AM to 5PM, Monday to Saturday, from January 15 to 23, at the London College of Communication.

A protestor faces off with a security guard at Copenhagen Airport. All photos by Alexander Zehntner unless otherwise stated

More than 800 Danes and Swedes congregated by the trains from Denmark to Sweden at Copenhagen Airport on Saturday to protest the newly-instated border control between the two countries. As of January 4, the Swedish government requires everyone entering the country by train, bus, or ferry from Denmark to show a valid photo ID. The move is explicitly an effort to decrease the number of refugees entering Sweden. In response, the Danish government has implemented temporary border control towards Germany.

A mock passport made by protestor Salim Assi

The new border checks have been criticized by the Swedish Green Party as well as several Danish left-wing parties that have called for joint European solutions and "stable agreements" between the two neighboring countries. On Saturday, protestors shouted support for refugees, with slogans like: "Say it loud and say it clear, refugees are welcome here."

Søren Warburg of Refugees Welcome.

The Danish protestors met in central Copenhagen to receive instructions by Søren Warburg of Refugees Welcome, who organized the Danish side of the protest. "Everyone is pushing the responsibility on to their neighbor, but the fact is that no one can succeed alone," he told the crowd via megaphone before they made their way towards the airport.

They then met up with a group of Swedish protestors led by Stellan Lindell of the Green Party, who told VICE: "The protest is a show of solidarity with the refugees who can't have their legal right to asylum sought in Sweden because they don't have any identification papers. The goal is to make the government listen and terminate the controls at the airport."

The Hjelmstedt-Krantz family. Photo by Theo Rogowski

Among the protestors were Martin Hjelmstedt and Hiro Krantz who had brought along their kids Vilmer and Astrid. "There are thousands of reasons for not having a passport, and most refugees come here without one," said Hiro Krantz. "I grew up in Helsingborg, with Helsingør as the closest neighboring city. This is the first time in my life that I have had to show my passport when traveling between Denmark and Sweden. This is totally absurd, and it breaks my heart."

A small group of protestors succeeded in breaking through the checkpoints without showing identification, but their efforts were quickly shut down by the police. Trains between Denmark and Sweden were briefly cancelled following the incident but no arrests were made.

Salim Assi

Protestor Salim Assi arrived in Denmark in 1992 as a refugee from Palestine. "I know how the refugees are feeling. I've been there," he told VICE. "They feel like shit. No one chose to leave their country for the fun of it. They come, because they have to. I believe that by demonstrating here today, we can showcase that not everyone supports the policy Denmark is leading these days."

Each day, around 20,000 commuters cross the Oresund bridge, which connects the Swedish cities Malmo and Lund to Copenhagen. The extra security checks are believed to be adding around 30 minutes to the current 40-minute commute.

Trains to Sweden resumed after around half an hour after Saturday's protests, but not all travelers took kindly to the delay. "Can't you just kick out the protesters?" a woman asked an airport security guard in the arrival hall. "Just go out on the platforms and threaten them with guns. Why don't you just threaten them with guns?" The guard politely explained that they wouldn't do that even if they had guns.

After some more timid confrontations between travelers and protesters in the arrivals hall, things quieted down. An orderly line was formed to the re-opened checkpoints, where everyone going to Sweden presented a photo ID, boarded the train, and went home—including the Swedish protestors.

Disgruntled traveler at CPH Airport.

Back at Malmö central station, on the Swedish border, we asked the disgruntled traveler from Copenhagen Airport, how she had perceived today's events. "What good does it do to stand around shouting, ruining everyone else's trip? They should get involved in politics instead," she said. "Too many people are coming here anyway, we can't take care of them all. Our schools and healthcare and economy will collapse. And we don't know what sympathies they have, or how they treat women. Haven't you seen how they treat their women?" she asked, before running off to catch a connecting train.

But the controversy over the new checks looks set to continue. Emergency talks will be held by the EU on Wednesday after Germany warned the checks could jeopardize Europe's principles of free movement. In the meantime, the border checks will stay.

Image via flickr

This is a very short note of thanks. Many, many more will come.

David Bowie died today and that's the end of that.

It is tempting to write that his legacy will extend for years beyond his life—and of course in many ways it will—but also, perhaps it can't. Pop art doesn't necessarily survive the loss of its greatest hero. He was an epoch machine and perhaps this is the end of the pop epoch.

Unlike most of his peers, who ended up trawling across the world every two years on giant tours and performing at overblown state occasions, Bowie never succumbed to the Hard Rock Café, the hall of fame, and the cheapening of rock 'n' roll as an art. Everyone else gave up, but the Thin White Duke refused to.

There is no VICE without Bowie, but not because we're special—that's because there is very little in the modern world that would exist without his influence. He is part of the smallest club in history: artists whose work didn't reflect the world, but rather the world reflected their art.

Bowie had, throughout his career, performed disappearing acts, staging dramatic final performances for Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, retiring his most loved alter-egos when they were at their most creatively fertile. Today, he did it once more, retiring David Bowie before anyone had time to say goodbye.

For many of us, the Christmas period meant doing our best to convert our own blood into alcohol. For others, it was business as usual. Some 900,000 people in the UK worked on Christmas Day; among them were the paramedics and responders who staff the thousands of ambulances throughout the country. For this lot, the holiday season is a time like any other: People still get stabbed, cut their own fingers off by mistake, and suffer colossal heart failures.

In fact, considering our alcohol intake reportedly rises by 40 percent during December—and people traditionally hurt themselves a lot when they're drunk—I figured this time of year must be a particularly busy one for the people tasked with pumping our stomachs and bandaging our open wounds. So, to find out how they cope during a period in which everyone's getting even more fucked up than usual, I went to Birmingham last Saturday—a couple of days after New Year's Eve—to spend the night with the West Midlands Ambulance Service.

Birmingham's drizzly Broad Street was quiet when I arrived at the City Centre Treatment Unit (CCTU), a station—made up of two response cars and an ambulance—that pops up weekly opposite the Walkabout to treat anyone who needs treating.

Mike Duggan. All photos by the author

"We know that on Friday and Saturday nights people are coming here to enjoy themselves," said Mike Duggan, who's been in charge of the CCTU for three of its five years. "Where there are lots of people, and drinking, our call numbers are going to increase, so the CCTU was set up to keep ambulances free for medical assistance. The biggest successes are stopping hospital admissions; we can keep people here who are seriously intoxicated until they get collected, whereas before there wasn't that facility, so they'd be taken to A&E."

In 2015, this center alone treated over 2,500 patients, the majority of whom had been a bit over-eager with the booze. So if you live in Birmingham, regularly find yourself in A&E and have noticed everything moving a bit speedier than it did five years ago, you can thank the team at the CCTU for taking some of the strain off those working at the hospital.

It had just passed 9 PM when Mike started up one of the response cars and hit the switch for the flashing blue lights. "We've had a call for a stabbing in Pigeon Park," he explained. Arriving at the scene, we were greeted by a pair of cops who informed us that it looked like the call was a hoax.

"It came through on a payphone," Mike sighed as we headed back into the car. "To be honest, we don't tend to get calls from phone boxes that turn out to be legit."

Mike and CCTU staff at the scene of the hoax stabbing

This kind of thing is a massive hindrance to the service, as each call has to be treated as if it's real. Just this one dud claim meant two response crews had to get to the location, as well as a doctor being dispatched from outside the center of the city, when they could have all instead been on call to deal with real incidents. In 2015, West Midlands Ambulance Service received at least 455 hoax calls, with 498 in 2014, and over 630 the year before, eating up plenty of time and resources.

As we drove back to the center of Birmingham, Mike and I got chatting about legal highs and the difficulties these substances can cause for paramedics. "They're a real challenge for us," said Mike. "It's not that we've never seen them before, but now they are much more common, sometimes more than your traditional street drugs. People seem to think, because they're legal, they're safe, which is dangerously far from the truth."

When responding to patients who've consumed legal highs, paramedics are often presented with packets bearing names like Black Mamba, Pink Panthers, or Dust Til Dawn. "There's no description on the packets," Mike told me, "just bizarre names and then numbers and chemicals, and we really have no idea what they are."

Watch: 'Spice Boys,' our film about young men in Manchester addicted to the legal synthetic cannabis Spice

Because their contents are impossible to keep track of, with manufacturers routinely changing chemicals to evade new legislation, legal highs present all manner of clinical challenges. Take heroin: although it might be cut with all sorts of nasty shit, paramedics know what they're dealing with.

"Heroin acts as a respiratory depressant, sometimes to the point where you can stop breathing—but we can intervene and recover the patient," Mike explained. "With legal highs, we don't know what they are. If we were to give you something, it might have an adverse effect. Do I give you something that could save your life, but could make you worse?"

A couple of weeks before we met, Mike was called out to a block of flats where a man had smoked Black Mamba, a synthetic cannabis, and subsequently believed he could fly. "When we got there, common sense said to us that he couldn't fly, but he was intent on launching himself off a sixth floor balcony," Mike recalled. "It took me and a small squad of police officers to pin him down and save his life. His chances of survival would have been as good as zero had he made the leap."

Back at the treatment center, it was just past 11 PM and the crowds outside the clubs were getting bigger and rowdier. Leaning against the ambulance was a young guy who, having got a bit too tipsy, had been ditched by his friends. He seemed pleasant—and conveniently his sister's boyfriend had agreed to drive into town to take him off the team's hands—but not everyone who interacts with the CCTU staff is quite so friendly.

"In any environment where you have people drinking or taking drugs, you start with joviality, but as the night goes on, it can often turn to violence and aggression," said senior nurse Les Young, handing me a Haribo from a stash inside the ambulance. "People get into scrapes—domestics, that sort of thing—and often end up getting looked after by us."

Problem is, people are often still raging from their confrontations while Les and the team are trying to treat them. The paramedics have a duty of care over patients, so they'll keep on treating them wherever possible, but, said Les, "Getting attacked? It's becoming a sad reality of the job."

Les Young

Outside, a group of wasted lads staggered over, asking the crew if they would check the "government computer thing" for a date of birth, because one of them had forgotten to bring out his ID. Unsurprisingly—partly because the "government computer thing" is not a thing—they were told there was no chance.

"We had a large fight outside Walkabout a while back," said Les as the guys wandered off. "I'd say ten blokes having a punch up, and plenty of police were deployed."

The girlfriend of one of the guys was shouting at the police. "I identified myself as an ambulance man and said I was concerned for her welfare, so suggested she come and stand by the ambulance with others not involved," continued Les. Instead, the woman told him to fuck off and swung her red stiletto straight at his face. "I managed to avoid it , but it hit me in the chest, which was really quite painful," said Les. "It was a fairly minor injury, but it scared me. I could have lost an eye, and this wasn't in a confrontational environment."

I'd always seen paramedics on nights out as the good guys. They train for years to treat the sick and wounded, then end up looking after you when you're throwing up all over yourself, which I think you'll agree is a very nice thing to do.

However, all that hard work and altruism doesn't necessarily come to mind when you've had eight pints and a bag of Dust Til Dawn. Between April and September of 2015, the number of physical assaults on West Midlands Ambulance staff rose by almost 30 percent, to 139 incidents, and those are just the ones that got reported.

As we were about to grab a cup of tea, the rear doors of the ambulance we were sitting in swung open and a young women dived in, howling. At first I thought we had a major incident, but it turned out someone had just accidentally stepped on her big toe, smashing the nail and giving her a scare.

"Have you got a wipe?" her friend asked anxiously.

"If this blood stains my desert boots..." he muttered, wiping away at his shoes.

As Les got on with treating the woman's injury, the blood and the shrieking getting a bit too much for me, I went for a chat with veteran paramedic Tony White, who was in his car, hiding out from the rain.

Tony White

"This isn't everyone's cup of tea, doing the treatment center. People just think of drugs, drunks, and fighting, and think, Nope, it's not for me. It's fair enough, really," he laughed.

In October of last year, a survey found that 53 percent of police time is spent dealing with alcohol-related crime, with the majority of police and ambulance staff blaming 24-hour licensing for the increase of booze-related incidents. As little as ten years ago, when bars closed at 2 AM, emergency services could plan, overlap shifts, and, because they knew when they'd be getting an influx of calls, increase the amount of staff accordingly.

"We just can't plan any more," said Richard Smith, who's been on the job for 14 years. "Even the bars don't know when they'll close. If you'll keep drinking, they'll keep serving."

Back in Richard's clubbing days—which he assured me were long-finished—you'd go to the pub until 10 PM, before charging into town to find a nightclub, which would close less than four hours later.

"Now people can just party until they drop. There's no time limit," said Richard. "When people had that structure, I think the clubs, emergency services, and the people themselves managed it better."

It all felt a bit "back in my day," but I knew Richard had a point.

"It's just not fair," he continued, "the way that things have changed. While we're tied up doing this, we're not doing what we're trained to do. I didn't study to pick up people who can't control their own greed; when you've shat yourself, urinated on yourself, and rolled around in your own vomit."

Mel Perrins

Mel Perrins only started working as a paramedic three months ago, but she's already dealt with her fair share of messy patients. "I was on a job in Oxford and we got called to a female on a Sunday afternoon, about 6 PM," she told me. "She was laying in a taxi, rank, and had pissed and shat herself. She must have been in her twenties, having been out drinking with her dad."

While the clubbers outside began to stumble home, Mel reflected on what she's made of the job so far.

"This year I've worked Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Day. I've worked all of it, and the frustrating thing is I joined this job to really try to help people, you know. Make a change."

The Broad Street CCTU—and other schemes like it throughout the UK—do a good job of looking after people on nights out. People who probably wouldn't need looking after were it not for the huge quantities of alcohol they'd drunk.

For most paramedics, I can't imagine it's why they got into the job. As Tony pointed out, many find that literally any other type of work beats dealing with bleeding, shitfaced clubbers—but they continue to do it nonetheless, in the face of government cuts and, subsequently, a larger workload. None of the Birmingham crew I spoke to, for instance, had been given a pay-rise in the past five years, despite their responsibilities increasing.

Nobody wants to prevent Britain's weekend warriors from enjoying themselves. But if there's one thing I picked up from my evening in Birmingham, the least we could do—I'd imagine—is not drink to the point that we shit ourselves. Or, at the very least, when someone comes to help us out, not chuck our shoes at their face.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

Our oceans are rising. With human use of hydrocarbons skyrocketing, waters around the globe are getting hotter and the warm sub-surface water is washing into Antarctica's massive western glaciers, causing them to retreat and break off.

Antarctica holds 90 percent of the world's ice and 70 percent of its freshwater, so if even a small fraction of the ice sheet in Antarctica melts, the resulting sea level rise will completely remap the world as we know it—and it's already happening. In the last decade, some of the most significant glaciers here have tripled their melt rate.

In the first episode of season three of our HBO show, VICE founder Shane Smith traveled to the bottom of the world to investigate the instability of the West Antarctic ice sheet and see firsthand how the continent is melting—and how Bangladesh gives us a glimpse into the world's underwater future.

From the UN Climate Conference to the People's Climate March to the forces that deny the science of global climate change, this special extended episode covers all sides of the issue and all corners of the globe, ending with a special interview with Vice President Joe Biden.

The world is collectively mourning the loss of David Bowie right now, with everyone from Kanye West to Iggy Pop to Prime Minister David Cameron penning tributes to the Thin White Duke. The mood at VICE is pretty dour, with everyone drifting around the office while our favorite Bowie songs shuffle through the office speakers, but the news that David Bowie and Brian Eno were planning to collaborate on a new album before his death makes the whole thing hurt a bit more.

Eno and Bowie's most famous collaborations were during the Berlin Trilogy, but they worked together on a number of projects over the years, including 1995's Outside—an album that the pair had planned to revisit and take "somewhere new" before Bowie's death, according to a statement from Eno released by BBC.

David's death came as a complete surprise, as did nearly everything else about him. I feel a huge gap now.

We knew each other for over 40 years, in a friendship that was always tinged by echoes of Pete and Dud. Over the last few years—with him living in New York and me in London—our connection was by email. We signed off with invented names: some of his were Mr. Showbiz, Milton Keynes, Rhoda Borrocks, and the Duke of Ear.

About a year ago we started talking about Outside, the last album we worked on together. We both liked that album a lot and felt that it had fallen through the cracks. We talked about revisiting it, taking it somewhere new. I was looking forward to that.

I received an email from him seven days ago. It was as funny as always, and as surreal, looping through word games and allusions and all the usual stuff we did. It ended with this sentence: "Thank you for our good times, Brian. They will never rot." And it was signed "Dawn"

I realize now he was saying goodbye.

Outside was a dystopian, high-concept record, which Bowie hoped would capture "what the last five years of this millennium feel like," but the final product was over-long and weirdly paced and didn't quite work. Now we'll never get to hear where the duo might have taken the album's ideas if they'd had a chance to revisit them again.

St. Louis County cops face off against protestors in August 2014. Photo via Flickr user Jamelle Bouie

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show which will premiere this February, we are releasing all of season three for free online. Watch all the episodes here, and don't miss the premiere of season four on Friday, February 5, at 11PM on HBO.

When Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in August 2014, the 18-year-old's death sparked protests and a national conversation over the disparate treatment of African Americans by law enforcement. Almost overnight, the small Missouri town became a symbol of everything from the militarization of local police to the countless incidents in which unarmed people of color don't survive encounters with cops. Last year, VICE on HBO explored the Ferguson protests and the use of military-style equipment against civilians.

Since Brown's death, the St. Louis suburb remained in the news: A federal report found that there was, in fact, endemic institutional racism in Ferguson's law enforcement system; a grand jury declined to indict Wilson; and, perhaps most important, the governor of Missouri appointed a commission—which disbanded this month—to address the underlying racial and economic gaps across the St. Louis region. In addition, the Department of Justice appears poised to announce an agreement with Ferguson to overhaul its police department.

Byron Watson, a 28-year veteran of the St. Louis County Police Department, served on the Ferguson Commission and spoke with VICE about how bad things were then—and what's changed since.

VICE: Law enforcement agencies are often a lot whiter than the communities they police, and that's obviously been a problem in Ferguson and other places in the St. Louis area where you've policed. The Justice Department report on Ferguson also describes a culture of racism and discriminatory practices. Did you experience that at all as a black officer?
Byron Watson: Oh my gosh, yes. When I came on in 1981, it was not good—probably even more difficult than dealing with the citizens. It's a lot better now; it's not perfect. It's kind of ironic that you hear minorities always talking about police departments not reflecting the community that they serve, and when I did get on the police department you would have thought those same people would have been more supportive of me. I'm not saying all of them were not supportive, but a large portion of them, whenever we would have a situation like we had in Ferguson—or a situation that was sort of tense—instead of them looking at me as of a liaison or someone who would be supporting of their cause, I was looked at as an Uncle Tom.

And if that wouldn't be bad enough, you would think that the police that you work with would at least be a lot more supportive than some of them were. I had a lot good officers than bad, but unfortunately the bad ones always stuck out because they hurt so much. And being subjected to that and knowing that these are the same people that you would need in the event of a life-threatening situation—in other words, a call for help—you were really outnumbered. And as a result, you remained quiet.

Watch our HBO episode about Ferguson:

Given that experience, were you surprised at all that basically overnight Ferguson became this national symbol of police violence and institutional racism?
I wouldn't say surprised. I would say that these are some things that have been historically going on. I've lived in St. Louis my entire life and historically there has been a racial divide. When I was on the Ferguson Commission, one of the things that I learned through our research is that St. Louis is about the fifth-most segregated city of its size in America. And that surprised me.

In the summer of 2014, public plazas in Chahuites, Mexico, began overflowing with Central Americans who bore open wounds, foot blisters, and decrepit knapsacks. As they slept in the squares, the migrants—babies, elders, mothers, teens and men from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—were often robbed or raped as they paused on their journey to seek asylum in the United States.

Immigrants have long traversed the towns of southern Mexico on their way to the US border, but by July 2014, more migrants than ever were seen passing through the towns, traveling on foot and atop the notorious network of freight trains known as La Bestia, or The Beast. In the second episode of the third season of VICE on HBO, VICE founder Suroosh Alvi visited El Salvador to explore the conditions motivating this mass migration from Central America, and traveled north on The Beast to see firsthand the perilous journey migrants must take in order to get to the US.

WATCH: 'Coming to America,' from VICE on HBO:

Since the episode aired last year, Central Americans have continued to migrate in record numbers, fleeing pervasive gang violence fueled by the drug trade in their home countries. Last year, more than 12,000 Central American families crossed the border in October and November alone—nearly triple the number from the previous year, according to the US Department of Homeland Security.

In response, Mexican authorities have stepped up raids on La Bestia, in a massive crackdown aided by tens of millions of dollars from the US government. As a result, a growing number of Central American migrants are resorting to what may be an even more dangerous means of transport: walking.

A migrant suffers from painful blisters after the grueling walk through southern Mexico. All photos by Irineo Mujica

In the US, the Obama administration has sought other ways to curb the flow of migrants from Central America, imposing a set of harsh policies including long-term detention, deportation, and even raids on the houses of undocumented families. But many individuals have been removed to their home countries only to attempt the dangerous journey north once again.

Struck by the migrants' plight, human rights activist and photojournalist Irineo Mujica created the Center for Humanitarian Aid, a shelter in Chahuites , a 10,000-person town in the southwestern state of Oaxaca in August 2014. Since then, the center has become a beacon for thousands of desperate pilgrims seeking asylum in the US. Mujica, a Mexican native who has lived in the US since age 13, now splits his time between his home in Arizona and Chahuites, where he employs a full-time staff to keep the shelter running 24/7.

In a recent phone interview, Mujica detailed how migrants are adjusting to the recent crackdown, and the heightened dangers they now face as they travel north to the US border.

Migrant families prepare to eat at Mujica's shelter in Chahuites, Mexico.

VICE: What did you see that compelled you to open a shelter in the summer of 2014?
Irineo Mujica: The Mexican government started doing a lot of raids on La Bestia, so many more people had to walk to cross the country. They had to walk for hours through deserts and through areas with no houses. Robbers have always gone after migrants, but on the train it's harder to rob a person—it's easier to rob people who are walking, so the walkers are more vulnerable. I saw people with horrible blisters, and many sick and hurt from the journey.

Migrants have been crossing all across Mexico. Why did you pick Chahuites?
La Bestia starts in Arriaga, about three hours south by the train from Chahuites, but the government was taking people off the train in Arriaga and everyone would run away. There would be 200, 300, even 500 people getting off the freight trainand they'd walk north looking for shelter. It takes about 16 hours walking from Arriaga to Chahuites. There was a need for something in Chahuites, because the next shelter was about 4 or 5 days walking north. We put the shelter in the middle of the hardest hit area.

Are people still taking La Bestia?
Yes, people always take the train, but in the south, the number has dropped about 90 percent. In the north there are fewer checkpoints so more people continue to take the train up there.

Can you tell me about the people who stay in your shelter?
The majority are migrants from Central America that go to the north fleeing violence. There are women, children, all ages of people, but in recent months I've seen more teens, which is the gangs' biggest targets.

How long do people stay? Do you ever have to turn people away
People stay about three days, or if they're really sick maybe longer. The shelter is a house with 3 rooms—it's not very big, but we always find a way to make space for everyone. We don't have beds. We fill up the inside and the outside with people sleeping. What we try to provide is security so people won't be robbed and can have a moment of peace, and can have food and be restored to be able to continue their journey.

Residents pose outside the shelter.

You mentioned security—does the shelter have problems with security?
Thieves have threatened the people who run the shelter, also because we help migrants with legal problems. We've helped make about 100 complaints to the police about robberies since we opened. When we've been walking in the town, thieves have told us they'll kill us, but they haven't done it. There always is danger.

The US government has tried to use detention and deportation as a deterrent to Central American migrants, to discourage more people from coming. Does it seem to you that people are migrating in hope of getting an easy entry into the US?
No, not at all, no. The majority are fleeing the gangs and they are only looking for a place with more security. They're not coming for economic reasons—they're pushed out of their homes by the violence. They can't return to their home countries, or they'll be killed.

How often do people actually make it to the US?
We estimate that about 15 percent of people at our shelter make it to the US. Many people get deported from Mexico and then return and return again. There was one family who arrived 3 times at our shelter, a father and children.

What's one of the most difficult things you've encountered at the shelter?
There was a 9-year-old child who had been walking with his uncle from Chiapas, and they were in the middle of the 14-hour walk from Arriaga when they were robbed. The thief put a pistol to the uncle and captured the child. The uncle came to us and we searched and searched. We found the boy's hat and someone said they'd seen him, but he had totally disappeared. We still don't know what happened to him. It's a little Hell here.

This interview has been translated from Spanish, and lightly edited for clarity.

Follow Meredith Hoffman on Twitter.

On Friday afternoon, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto tweeted that his country's most notorious criminal, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, best known as "El Chapo," or "Shorty," was once again in custody. As the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Guzmán is arguably a bigger deal than Pablo Escobar was at his heyday. What's for certain is that he's responsible for a huge swath of the global drug trade—along with the routinized kidnappings and murders endemic to that world.

His escape out of Mexican prison through an elaborate tunnel system last July propelled the man into further infamy. And because he's been indicted in multiple US states, the question on everyone's mind since Guzmán's escape (his second from a maximum-security prison) last summer has been: What happens if he gets captured again? Since Guzmán's home country seems unable to hold him, would American law enforcement be allowed to extradite and try him, as officials reportedly tried to do just weeks before his latest escape?

But all the practical questions about Guzmán's fate were temporarily shelved on Saturday night when Rolling Stone published an insane 10,000-word El Chapo story by actor Sean Penn.

Apparently, in October, the 55-year-old flew out to Mexico and spent seven hours with the kingpin. He brokered the meeting through Kate del Castillo, a Mexican actress who once played a crime boss on TV and had previously won the affection of Guzman with a series of sympathetic tweets.

The scenario is almost too bizarre to be true. That the dude who played Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was able to track down a drug lord who's eluded the governments of two countries is astounding. It's even more crazy when you read, in the first paragraph of his story, that Penn doesn't even know how to use a laptop.

The humiliation of various bureaucratic agencies aside, reporters on the Chapo beat are feeling a bit stung, too. Scoring an exclusive with the biggest fugitive in the world is a journalistic holy grail, and there are writers who've spent years trying to pick apart the shadowy underworld of Mexican drug gangs, risking their lives in the process. El Chapo was also allowed to see the story before it was published, which had experts debating whether or not the magazine breached a core tenet of journalistic ethics. Finally, in the short Q and A (dispatched by Chapo via video) that closes out the article, Penn's (written) questions leave a lot to be desired. It's the equivalent of having God in a room and the chance to ask just one question, and going with, So, what's your favorite color?

What's more, almost any reader who peruses the story is apt to feel embarrassed because the account is so bloated and self-centered. The actor's narrative, which opens with a quote from French Renaissance philosopher Montaigne and veers into tangents about own penis, has been widely mocked online.

Check out our documentary on how Pablo Escobar's legacy of violence drives today's cartel wars.

In any event, a Mexican law enforcement official told the Associated Press on Sunday that the interview with Penn helped lead to Chapo's arrest. Security forces apparently raided the area where the two met in Tamazula, a rural enclave of Durango state, a few days after the sit-down, and then finally captured Chapo after a gunfight in his Sinaloa homeland on Friday.

What remains unclear is whether or not the actor colluded with authorities or was merely insufficiently scrupulous in his reporting—although he writes in Rolling Stone that he went to great lengths to conceal his subject's whereabouts, using a different burner phone every day. (Another possibility, of course, is that the Mexican government is simply playing it cool by suggesting it knew all about the interview as it happened.) Meanwhile, Mexican authorities have begun the process of formally extraditing El Chapo to the United States—a nod to the virtual impossibility of guarding against the man's money and influence.

Sean Penn, for his part, has not commented publicly since his story appeared online.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

The Karail neighborhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which is now home to many refugees of climate change. All photos by Alex Braverman

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show which will premiere this February, we are releasing all of season three for free online. Watch all the episodes here, and don't miss the premiere of season four on Friday, February 5, at 11PM on HBO.

In the premiere of the third season of VICE on HBO, VICE founder Shane Smith and correspondent Vikram Gandhi revisited a topic that's been covered previously on the show: the Earth's melting polar ice caps. Having visited Greenland in the second season, Smith headed to Antarctica to investigate the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Over the course of the episode, he and Gandhi see firsthand the devastating impact that global warming has wrought on the southern pole—and meet some of the people already been impacted by rising sea levels.

While talking to NASA's Eric Rignot about the agency's mission to study land ice levels, Shane asked if the glaciologist had a "holy shit moment" when he learned that three meters of sea level rise were almost inevitable.

"That's not 'holy shit'—it's worse than that," Rignot replied. "We're not ready for this."

But producers Erik Osterholm and Alex Braverman said they had their own "holy shit" moments while shooting—moments that impacted the direction of the episode, and ultimately linked what would have been two separate stories—one about ice melt, and one about its impact on human populations—into a single story line.

"It's all tied together," said Osterholm, who produced the portions of the episode shot in Antarctica. "It goes from massive blocks of ice melting in the ocean to the human faces, and the impact that the melt is going to cause."

Osterholm and his crew took a sailboat to Antarctica via the Drake Passage, a 500-mile stretch of stormy seas between Cape Horn and the tip of the Antarctic peninsula. It's a short route, but it's rough going: the Pacific, Atlantic, and Southern oceans all converge at the Drake Passage, turning it into a roiling mess of waves and competing currents. "Once you get seasick on a passage like that, there's really no respite," Osterholm said. Plus, he pointed out, the route is extremely isolated. "When you sail, there's usually a coast guard, and you can say 'Oh, as long as I can survive a week, the coast guard will get me,'" he explained, "but you really don't have that option in Antarctica."

But the "holy shit" moment that informed the episode wasn't when he feared for his own life, but when he finally had the overwhelming realization that the continent's melting ice sheet is putting much of humanity in danger.

"The vastness is mesmerizing" Osterholm said, describing his flight with NASA over the Western Antarctic ice sheet. But it also brought on an unsettling understanding, he added, that "this is a giant ice cube that's begun to melt, and—holy crap—if this thing goes, we're not talking about incremental amounts of sea rise."

"Get your ticket to Antarctica now," he joked.

While Osterholm's team was in Antartica, Braverman was in southern Bangladesh, exploring the human consequences of the Earth's rising sea levels. The people VICE spoke with had been farming for generations, Braverman said, but thanks to a couple centuries worth of industrial hydrocarbons, they now find themselves refugees of climate change.

"It was as though we were watching a certain way of life be washed away and pushed into the city," Braverman said. As salt water encroaches upon areas used for agriculture, he explained, ocean water mingles with farmland and the increased salinity in the soil kills any agricultural prospects, even if the land itself is not submerged.

When it came to connecting all this to global warming, Braverman added, oftentimes the locals had no clue. "We asked probably every person we talked to, 'Why is this happening?'" he recalled, "and some people had an answer, and some people said 'I really don't know, my family's been here forever, but now we can't do this anymore.'"

Residents of Karail, Bangladesh

It's not just farmers who are suffering. According to Braverman, sex workers are also among those whose professions have been adversely affected by the rising sea levels. While shooting for the episode, VICE visited an island called Banishanta, near a port in the south of Bangladesh, which Braverman described as "basically an entire red light district."

"Each little hut was a separate window where someone lived and worked as a prostitute, and they had their families there," he explained. "That way of life is disappearing."

But Braverman's "holy shit" moment came after a storm left the crew stranded in one of Bangladesh's farming communities—and the effect of the encroaching waters finally hit home in a visceral way.

"We didn't have much food, and we felt like we were going to be stuck there for the night. I all of a sudden understood that it wasn't just like a box we were ticking off on our list," he said. "These people live in very near constant fear that they could slide into the water at any moment."

The fact that Western visitors would have the luxury of leaving Bangladesh wasn't lost on locals experiencing the negative impact of global warming, Braverman added.

"They weren't rude about it, but they wanted us, as representatives of the Western world, to know that this was our fault," he said. "They wanted us to be aware of the fact that the way we conduct business, this is the outcome."

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Look at Ines Estrada's work on her Instagram, Twitter, website, and online store.

UK-based artist Helen Green has—or had—a tradition. Every year, for David Bowie's birthday, she drew a picture of the groundbreaking songwriter and performer. Last year, she drew 29 of them, each from a different era of Bowie. She animated them in a remarkable GIF—each Bowie look flicking past in the blink of an eye, all of them together forming a thorough illustration (pun intended) of Bowie's expansive, impressive career. You likely saw the GIF when it first made the internet rounds 12 months ago, and no doubt you've seen it today, when Bowie's death became public.

Photo via Flickr

Was it Marx—or the philosopher Gob?—who once theorized: "90K a year buys nothing but complaints."

Either way, their thesis remains as true now as it was then: "While the boss gets richer is why Justin Trudeau got elected.

The prime minister swore that he would hike taxes on the rich, cut them for the Middle Class™, and tackle income inequality.

Here's the problem: Trudeau's policies are a long way off from being the sort of egalitarian quick fix that he billed them to be.

And while Canada's isn't quite (yet?) slipping down the Crisco-lubricated slope to hell like some of the deeply unequal states in Europe, there's a growing feeling in the country that things aren't working the way they're supposed to.

That means there's going to be a big gap for some other leader to step in, exploit that discontent, and say they will fix this shit themselves.

The only question now: will it be the leader of the NDP, or the leader of the Conservatives?

How bad is it?
Pretty bad.

Canada's Gini coefficient—the numerical representation of the income gap between the economy's richest earners and your high school class—is above that of every European country, except the United Kingdom. The richest 20 percent of the country makes twice as much as the next 20 percent, three times as much as the middle 20, four times as much as the next 20, and nine times more than the poorest 20 percent. And that's after our supposedly progressive tax system evens everything out.

But is income inequality really a problem?
OK, no, not really.

Every time I say this, I get a flood of angry emails and tweets quoting Joseph Stiglitz, who I assume is either a rap producer or an economist. But emails be damned.

Despite DJ Stiglitz's calculations, and however many stories get published in the Toronto Star, there's not a whole lot of proof that income inequality is, in and of itself, a problem. It's possible that it could reduce confidence in the economy and the government, and it's quite likely that it's a symptom of other problems in an economy, but it's not a sure thing that wage disparity actually does any harm. That is: it correlates with bad things, but it doesn't cause them, necessarily.

Everyone in the economy could be making 10 percent more, year-over-year, but the top one-percent could be earning 11 percent more. There, the Gini coefficient would grow, despite the fact that everybody is doing a-OK.

At the end of the day, it's really more of a symbolic problem. You want people to feel like they're getting a fair shake, and you want to make sure that you're maximizing your tax intake (within reason). You also want to get that money circulating through the economy.

How do you do that?
Well, you could re-jig income tax levels, close tax loopholes, draw up new rich-people taxes, or release luxury wolves to hunt down anyone worth over $10 million.

What is Trudeau planning?
A very weak version of that, minus the wolves.

Obviously, the biggest change will be the creation of a new tax bracket for every dollar earned over $200,000. Those gold-plated captains of industry will be paying a new rate of 33 percent. Meanwhile, the tax rate for income between $44,700 and $89,401 will drop slightly. Tax benefits for families with spawn will be means-tested, so lower-income families will benefit the most.

Those measures will slow, and maybe even reverse, the trend of inequality. It will go nowhere near bringing Canada towards the egalitarian utopia that some would prefer.

But, hey, again, maybe that's OK. Maybe we don't need government to socially engineer an economy. Maybe we can let things work themselves out.

But....
But then again, economic inequality spills over into social inequality, which spins into a political motivation for many voters. Even if it's basically envy and jealousy, it drives cash, votes, and people yelling.

Trudeau won his election by tapping into that dissatisfaction. He promised to hike taxes, and spend the country out of financial mediocrity. Coded language made clear to Joey Sweatshirt that this is for you. This cash won't end up in ol' Thomas Tracksuit's Italian leather wallet. No. This is for you. My friend. You.

Liberals, in hushed tones that turned to gleeful cackles between the beginning and end of the campaign, fretted that someone else would figure this out. They figured Thomas Mulcair would promise a new income tax for the One Percent, or vow to melt down all rich people into a fine chocolate that would be exported, with the proceeds going towards stock car races, or whatever it is the people like these days.

But the NDP did no such thing. They ran a campaign promising the plebs that things would stay, ultimately, the same. No new taxes. No class warfare.

Stalwarts of the left and right alike are maddeningly bad at figuring this out. In America, where the problem is magnified to an even greater degree than it is in Canada—and where public trust in government and the economy is fast approaching absolute zero—the mainstream of both sides of the political divide grab their hair and moan: Donald Trump! Bernie Sanders! Politics is screwed up.

Donald Trump! Bernie Sanders! They are very different.
Yes. But they are mainlining the exact same political heroin.

Donald Trump has honed in on the rural and post-industrial poor with inspired salvos against the timed-tested American scarecrows of immigration and those-bums-in-Washington. Bernie Sanders has offered a hail mary pass to masters-degree-having urban lower-class and the union agitants who have long believed that the evils of Wall Street and corporate America could be dismantled if only they had the right political savior.

But both sides will tell you that the problem with America—nay, the world—is that politicians keep politicianing, and that the rich get richer while Joe America gets deeper in debt.

Trudeau caught that current in the most happy-go-lucky way possible, choosing to phrase his class warfare as a national-building exercise in fairness and equality, instead of opening fire against the fatcats.

But that means there's room for someone else to do exactly that.

The only question now is whether it'll be the NDP, or the Conservatives.

Oh.
Yeah.

However, both opposition parties are currently going through a bit of a self-immolation.

The NDP, still—somehow—helmed by the the Great Bearded Blunder, Thomas Mulcair, have doubled down on middledom, and seem lost for cause. The question of: why does the NDP still exist? has no clear answer with Trudeau in the driver's seat. ("We're no longer new, We're certainly not democratic. And no one is having a party anywhere," Ontario MPP Cheri Dinovo told the Toronto Star.) To give it one, Mulcair, or the malcontent that displaces him, needs to give the NDP a cri du coeur once more. Higher taxes on the rich, a guaranteed minimum income, a new national rail plan, nationalizing the banks — the buffet of aggressive policy options is the NDP's to parooze through. All it will take is a political spine to push it past the naysayers.

For the Conservatives, they have a choice to make.

They could find a traditionally small-c conservative, working-class hero persona to put on. A new, broad, negative income tax. Maybe a flat tax. Increased tax credits and benefits that—unlike Stephen Harper's freak show of tax code violations—benefit the poor and working class over the upper middle class and rich. An industrial action plan to get the workers working again.

Or, they could Trump out and blame the damn immigrants, and fire off at a bunch of potshots at some political strawmen besides the One Percent. That option is pretty odious, and I wouldn't recommend it.

Alternatively, both parties could continue down their current paths, and try to convince the public that they don't actually care about economic equality. Good luck with that.

This sounds dangerous.
Not really.

Trudeau won a decisive victory, a come-from-behind surprise upset, thanks to optimistic messaging and broad vision. Quibble with the characterization of his campaign platform as being actually bold or significant—and quibble vigorously you should—but it certainly looked exciting. Latching onto the Liberal campaign, you believed that things would change. You believed that the crap things you've always wanted to see become good again (the CBC, e.g.) will become great again.

But those things will continue to suck. You will continue to go bald. Inequality will continue to exist. You will continue to see dead pigeons on the side of the road. People will continue to kill each other over stupid shit. You will continue to think the economy is unfair.

The imperative for the future leadership of the NDP and Conservative Party will be to look at those problems and figure out the most ambitious, broad, mind-numbingly obvious solution, then sell it to Canadians.

It's a disservice to the country to have one party offer a set of solutions, only to have its two opponents sit back and nay-say. We need three radically specific and individual political parties, each proposing actual reform.

Currently, we only have one.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Your move, Mr. Rabbit. Photo via Flickr user Mike Beauregard. All following photos courtesy of Bilodeau Canada

Taxidermin' ain't easy.

The training required to properly embalm bears and foxes to preserve their "natural state" takes about 600 hours, or more than ten times the in-flight hours required to become a private pilot.

"There's a number of different skillsets at play" says Mario Bilodeau, a 52-year-old taxidermist who has been involved with the industry since the tender age of eight. "You have to be a good sculptor, painter, welder, wood-worker. There's a lot involved in becoming a good taxidermist."

Yet despite the rigorous curriculum, the traditional métier is picking up steam, and the Quebec government is taking note.

"Demand for taxidermy is on the rise, namely with hunters and the film industry," reads a December press release announcing a quarter of a million dollar government investment meant to "showcase one of our exceptional natural resources, fur."

"The fur industry is currently undergoing a global resurgence, especially on Asian and Russian markets, and Quebec must seize any business opportunities that arise," the document quotes Jacques Daoust, Minister of the Economy.

Bilodeau, whose enterprise Bilodeau Canada is now the biggest fur and taxidermy shop in Quebec, says he's witnessed this growth first-hand. He attributes the popularity increase to the internet and social networks, which have allowed him to develop an international client base.

"Twenty years ago, it was inconceivable that we'd be working for clients in China, in Europe," he says. "Today, I sold a whole caribou to someone in Thailand. They want a moose, they want a head of this, the head of that."

There's also been a supposed revival of amateur taxidermists which makes sense considering our axe-throwing-is-a-date-night-activity culture.

Bilodeau, who built his enterprise from a one man operation into an 86-employee business, says has also diversified his offerings beyond the typical hunter's trophies.

"We dress furs, we do taxidermy, we build props for movies and for plays, we build robotic creatures," he lists off. "Right now I'm building a whale spine replica for the Montreal airport."

Bilodeau's company will now be shepherding much of the government funds into a training program for new taxidermists. The two-year course will be taught near Bilodeau Canada's headquarters, in the rural town of Normandin, Québec.

The 600-hour requirement and the out-of-the-way location doesn't seem to have affected demand for the course, which is the only professional taxidermy training in the province. Bilodeau says he's been overwhelmed with demand to fill the 12 available spots.

"We're getting calls from everywhere," he says. "Last week we got at least 20 calls, and people even came observe our taxidermists to see if they liked it."

The veteran taxidermist's do-or-die attitude towards his craft gives the whole process a reality show-type aura. "If we manage to train two or three good taxidermists we'll be very happy," he told a local paper in December. In conversation with VICE, his outlook is slightly more optimistic. "Only time will tell, but we think that maybe five or six people will , or so we hope."

For Bilodeau, the ideal taxidermist is meticulous and concentrated. It's also someone with a deep love of animals, an understanding of wildlife anatomy, and a respect for ecology.

Bilodeau Canada does not source its products from fur farms, as Bilodeau feels that segment of the fur industry is problematic. Rather, he gets animals from hunters and trappers, and the more exotic creatures are purchased from zoos and sanctuaries after they've died.

"You have to treat the animals in a respectful way," he says. "For a dozen years, our objective has been to use everything we touch. We make bear grease soap, coyote fur wool, from which we make hats, mittens, and scarves, everything."

He says the lobbying of activists like Brigitte Bardot and PETA have wounded the industry, but claims much of the movement against his trade is misinformed.

"Fur is much more ecological than anything else on the planet because it's biodegradable, it's controlled," he claims. "A beaver only lives eight or nine years so if you don't use him, he'll just die and biodegrade. Whereas everything that's made with synthetic materials pollutes the planet, it's quite unreal."

All this, Bilodeau says, leads to a pretty good way to make a living. "Good taxidermists make $25 to $30 an hour," he says. "But you start at the bottom. There is a ladder to climb before becoming a master."

Bilodeau's students are set to start their taxidermy challenge education in mid-January.

Follow Brigitte Noël on Twitter.

From 'The Rise of David Bowie: 1972–1973.' All photos by Mick Rock/courtesy of Taschen Gallery

Without him, there would be no punk, no glam, no post-punk, no hair metal, no goth, no Brit-pop, no new wave, no freak folk, no new romantics, no (as we know it) blue eyed soul, no (as we know it) art-pop. Most of the original genres we love and most of the revivals of the genres we love would be gone, too. No glitter, no too tight pants, no wonderful, wonderful haircuts (and therefore no Nick Cave or Robert Smith). No heels on men, hell, possibly less heels on women. No Kate Bush and no Maxwell. Without Heroes, no U2, no Coldplay, no Arcade Fire, no blessed and absurd grandeur to get us through the prosaic. No Pulp—who would have taught Jarvis to move? No Talk Talk. No Blue Nile or Japan. No Labyrinth, The Hunger, or The Linguini Incident. While we're talking about the vision, the humor and, forgive me, lust for life: no Zoolander. No Bauhaus or Smiths; without a slinky and elfin arm around Mick Ronson while singing "Starman" on Top of the Pops, there's no Morrissey, Marc Almond, Boy George, or George Michael. No Outkast or Kanye West, I'd be willing to bet, and I'd be willing to bet they'd agree. Iggy Pop would've died or found that just crawling through glass tends to yield diminishing returns. Nile Rodgers maybe (probably) would be a footnote in his own coke dream. Eno would have disappeared into atmospherics and useless art.

Maybe not. Maybe not to all of this. Maybe Scott Walker or Bryan Ferry or somebody I've never heard of or an alternate-reality still-living Marc Bolan would have stepped into the absence and all would have been exactly as it turned out after all. And didn't it turn out fine? I mean, the music. The world is still entirely fucked, but wasn't it nice to have David Bowie for the time we did. And isn't Blackstar a lovely note to rest after? Even if you weren't a fan—I was certainly late to that particular party—your band, your haircut, your life probably would be far worse without him. Of course there's no way of knowing. Thank God.

David Bowie has died and for minutes, the internet equivalent of eternity, nobody believed it. A mix of well-earned skepticism and childlike wishful thinking kept the hoax talk going, up until his son Duncan Jones confirmed his death via Twitter. And, at the risk of mawkish superstition, wasn't the brief moment of showmanship, the hope that this was just another false retirement, perfectly apt? Right after his 69th birthday? Right after releasing his best album in years? Everyone who'd dismissed him as an aging rocker had started eating their words and pretending to have been along for the ride all along. It was like Bowie released one final bit of misdirection to remind us how it ought to be done and then, with all of us doing our best to catch up with him one more time, he was gone.

David Bowie was a singular songwriter, a sophisticate who made oddballs feel cosmopolitan, an aesthete who rarely resorted to mere tastefulness, a science fiction unto himself and fantasist, a dream and always so very dreamy. From his early success (after years of striving) with Space Oddity in 1969, through the glam and Berlin years of the 70s, up till the, in immediate hindsight prescient, stunner that is Blackstar, Bowie was allowed by grace (divine, spiritual, secular) to change, if not the world, enough worlds. I'm a cynic—often cruel, really—and I regularly scoff at outpourings of grief from strangers. But I'm wrong when I do. Especially in cases such as this, where so much of the man's music seemed specifically designed to offer solace. For all his love of Nietzsche, Bowie didn't make art with an expectation of strength from the listener. Maybe a hope for fortitude, maybe a willingness to give the listener a little push forward, maybe a bit of archness in delivery (nobody batted an eye at the idea of him as aristocracy after all), but it was music free of contempt.

He was aware of the effect he had on music, reveled in it, and never stopped being affected by what was around him, be it Little Richard, Scott Walker, drum and bass, or Kendrick Lamar. He wasn't a chameleon; he just listened, made the materials at hand his own. His art wasn't sentimental or maudlin, so I'll spare his memory too much of that (though if you'd like to be sentimental or maudlin, do so with gusto and don't let anyone on social media shame you from it). But David Bowie's music, along with being hilarious and dark and, yes, sophisticated, was enduringly kind. And it's his music, his personas, his artifice and his art that we're talking about here. I didn't know the man and, men being what they are, maybe I'd feel differently if I did. But I love his influence. I love what he's leaving behind in his wake. It's is a gift; he wanted us to take it. So start a band, listen to David Bowie, any era you like, and steal with abandon.

Follow Zachary Lipez on Twitter.

Check out more of Mick Rock's photos of David Bowie and buy the book.

Lemmy's favorite video poker machine in the Rainbow Room, replaced by a bouquet of flowers. All photos by the author

By two o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday, I was already covered in whiskey and coke. I'm not sure how it happened, but I suspect Lemmy would have wanted it that way. As the vocalist, bassist, and mastermind of Motörhead, the baddest rock band in the land, Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister loved his Jack Daniels, his uppers, and his favorite watering hole, the Rainbow Bar & Grill, located on Hollywood's Sunset Strip. Over the course of 40 years and 22 Motörhead albums, Lemmy wrote several (iron) fistfuls of thunderous classics that bridged the frenetic gap between punk and metal—"Killed By Death," "Ace Of Spades," "Overkill," etc.—but he always called it rock n' roll. He died on December 28, and on Saturday, several hundred fans crammed into the Rainbow, in full Motörhead regalia, to raise a glass to their fallen hero. They queued up to write messages on a massive wall-sized Lemmy poster out on the patio. They drank Jack and Cokes. A few of the stealthier patrons appeared to indulge in exotic powders by the outdoor bar where Lemmy once held court in front of his favorite video poker machine. The Rainbow's owner apparently delivered the infamous machine to Lemmy's nearby apartment shortly before his death. For the memorial, it had been replaced by flower bouquets and a sign that said "Lemmy: Born to Lose, Live to Win."

After an hour or so of pregaming, Lemmy's graveside memorial service was live-streamed to the dining room TV from Forest Lawn Cemetery. Rock luminaries like Slash, Dave Grohl, Rob Halford, and Motörhead drummer Mikkey Dee shared their memories of Lemmy, born on Christmas Eve in 1945, who fought off cancer just long enough to give age 70 the finger. Lemmy's longtime manager, Todd Singerman, was kind enough to speak with me in this time of mourning. "Lemmy had honor and integrity, and you don't see much of that in this business," he said. "He lived by a whole different set of rules. He was pure and he didn't have malice toward people, which is rare anywhere. You just don't see that in human nature. Everyone's got agendas and motives. I can't tell you he really had any."

Singerman briefly managed Marlon Brando before the famed actor died in 2004. He saw "enormous similarities" in how both Brando and Lemmy were adulated and respected by their peers: "At Brando's services, Johnny Depp and John Travolta and all these guys spoke about what Marlon meant to them. I'm talking every massive star in the world. What tripped me out is that it's the same effect that Lemmy has on other rock stars. They're nervous around him. They're in awe of him. So some average kid that he gave attention to was blown away because this wasn't just a rock star they loved giving them attention. This is Lemmy. This is the rockstar that their other favorite rock stars loved."

The outside of Rainbow Room, where fans were signing a massive Lemmy poster

But Lemmy was nothing if not a man of the people. He was always gracious with his fans—no photo or autograph was refused, so long as you made it quick and let him get back to his poker machine/Jack and Coke/lady friend/what-have-you. If he wasn't occupied, he'd offer you a drink and talk music. And that was probably the coolest thing about being at Lemmy's public memorial at the Rainbow: Many of the folks there traded stories about meeting him at that very bar.

"Fuckin' Lemmy, man—he's been a huge inspiration," said Andy, a 28-year old musician who came to hoist a J&C in Lemmy's honor. "I heard Motörhead on a skate video when I was 18, and I've been hooked ever since. The first time I met him here was in the bathroom. We were taking a piss right next to each other and I wasn't sure what to say. I mean, what do you say to Lemmy? So I leaned over and go, 'You call that a cock?' He looked over and started chuckling."

A girl called Christina drove up from San Diego to be there at Rainbow Room. "About eight or nine years ago, I was on a first date with a guy who was designing a jacket for Lemmy," she says. "So we went over to Lemmy's apartment, right up the street from here, but there was no talk about the jacket at all. It was just Lemmy showing us all the stuff in his apartment. He was super friendly and nice. He took me into his bedroom and showed me like six freezer bags full of butane lighters that he collected from truck stops around the world. He's got crazy Nazi daggers everywhere, but he was more excited about the lighters than anything else. He shared his drugs with me and said, 'I brush my teeth with that shit.' When we left, he handed both of us a t-shirt from one of his dirty laundry baskets. It smelled horrible, but I still wanted to sleep in it because it stank so good."

Close-up of fans signing the Lemmy poster

Metal musicians rolled to the Rainbow in force, including Saviours drummer Scott Batiste. "I can't talk about him like he's dead," he said, shaking his head. "It's hard. Motörhead is my favorite shit. The first time I saw them was at the Maritime Hall in San Francisco in 1999, and it was just so raw—the power, the vibe; the way he plays. No one does it like that anymore."

Tony Foresta and Ryan Waste from Virginia crossover thrash kings Municipal Waste stopped by as well. "I met Lemmy in 2008 in France when we played Hellfest together," Waste said. "I was drinking all day and hanging out with these girls who breathe fire called the Fuel Girls. We stumbled back into our dressing room, not realizing it had changed over to Motörhead's room. But Lemmy looked right at me and handed me a Jack & Coke and mumbled something incoherent that basically meant I was accepted."

Scott Carlson, vocalist and bassist for legendary extreme metal outfit Repulsion—the band that arguably invented both death metal and grindcore with their first and only album, Horrified—estimated that he'd been to about 25 Motörhead gigs since first seeing them back in 1984. "From a musical standpoint, Motörhead was the game changer for me," he said. "It led me to punk, which shaped the way I wrote, played and judged music going forward. There is no greater influence on my taste than Lemmy. I even wear black jeans and boots every day, drink whiskey and play my bass with piles of distortion. I guess I've always wanted to be a little bit like Lemmy."

Roses, Jack Daniel's, and prayer candles: a fitting shrine to Lemmy

Just how hard Lemmy lived cannot be overestimated. "Lemmy lived the rock star life every day," Singerman said. "Keith Richards is known for partying heavy, but Keith Richards doesn't live it every day. Most people can't because they'll die. Lemmy went 70 years like that. I'm talking about a half gallon of Jack a day since the 1960s; two to three packs of cigarettes a day, plus speed daily. I've been with him 25 years and I've never, ever not seen him on all that stuff. When I started working with him, he was doing two or three broads a night on top of everything else. He had a lifestyle that nobody could keep up with. But he always maintained—always showed up, never fucked up."

It's telling that Lemmy's favorite drug was speed. Speed requires a commitment that other drugs do not. A line of coke might wear off in 15 or 20 minutes before you want another, but a line of good speed can keep you up for 24 hours. And Lemmy was nothing if not committed—to his fans, to his lifestyle, to rock n' roll itself.

Motörhead finished a European tour just two weeks before his death. "In retrospect, he was dying out there," Singerman said. "We just didn't know that at the time. But he finished the fucking tour. Can you imagine what it took for him to get up and play every day? It's a real Rocky story. And he did it all for the fans. He didn't want to let them down."

Singerman told me the recent death of longtime Motörhead drummer Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor, who succumbed to liver failure at age 61 on November 11, had a severe effect on Lemmy. "He took it bad when Philthy died. You could see the change in him that night. He looked like he gave up. I'd never seen him like that before. It killed him inside—you could see it. Philthy was his brother."

In the end, Lemmy did everything short of dying onstage. "Oh, he wanted to die onstage," Singerman said. "He told me that a million times. But I ain't gonna lie to you—the way he lived, I'm surprised he made it this far. When the doctor came over to give him the cancer diagnosis, Lemmy had a drink in his hand. The doctor told him he had two to six months to live. Lemmy looked at him and goes, 'Two months, huh?' and then went back to playing video games. That's all he said. He was dead two days later."

Follow J. Bennett on Instagram.

If the story of how Sinaloa Cartel boss El Chapo got re-captured on Friday wasn't already sufficiently cinematic, you can now watch video of the assault that took him down, courtesy of Mexican TV show Primero Noticias, as ABC News reported.

The raid ultimately lasted about 15 minutes and left five Chapo associates dead (and one Marine injured). The government apparently made GoPro footage culled from the helmet worn by a Marine involved in the raid available to TV network Televisa. True to form, Chapo—known for pioneering the use of tunnels in the drug trade—snuck out a secret compartment behind a mirror into a tunnel with a top deputy. They then stole a car before being captured by federal cops.

Chapo—real name Joaquín Guzmán Loera—reportedly wanted to make a biopic with admirers in the movie biz while he was out. That at least begins to help explain why he would dare meet up with actor Sean Penn for a jungle chat (the Rolling Stone story was published to much controversy on Saturday.)

For now, Chapo will have to make do with the above brief—albeit plenty violent—documentary treatment.

In anticipation of the upcoming fourth season of our HBO show which will premiere this February, we are releasing all of season three for free online. Watch all the episodes here, and don't miss the premiere of season four on Friday, February 5, at 11PM on HBO.

The fatal shooting of Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 sparked a series of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, which quickly spread across the country. The violent response to these protests by Ferguson's law enforcement set off a fierce debate about the increasing militarization of the American police force.

In this episode from season three of our HBO show that originally aired, Thomas Morton heads to Ferguson at the height of the protests to get an in-depth look at the situation on the ground. He speaks with experts about the current training that US police and SWAT teams undergo, and learns about how they are now being given military-grade equipment to police their communities.

We also visit El Salvador with VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi to investigate the increasing gang violence and deteriorating living conditions that are motivating a mass migration to the US border. Alvi himself travels the dangerous route that these migrants take as they attempt to make their way to the relative safety of the United States.