None of these officers were involved in Tuesday's friendly fire incident. Photo via Flickr user Nick Gulotta

Once Detective Jon Gladstone saw his suspects hand heroin to an undercover officer, he went in for the arrest. It was around 6:15 PM on Tuesday evening in Bushwick when the 37-year-old New York City police officer and his partner moved their cop car in front of the alleged dealers's minivan and approached from either side of the vehicle.

The three suspects tried to back out after Gladstone reached inside, bumping into another police car in the process, as the Daily News reports. During the ensuing chaos, four shots were fired, and one of the bullets hit Gladstone's shoulder in an apparent case of friendly fire.

Police in the Greater New York have come under scrutiny for cop-on-cop shootings in the past. In 2008 and 2009, a set of racially charged incidents led to to the creation of a task force on the issue. The 2010 investigation revealed that out of 14 fatal mistaken-identity shootings of cops nationwide over the previous 15 years, ten were of non-white people.

Tuesday's shooting seems rather less complicated. And if what witnesses say is true, this was the third friendly fire incident of 2016, meaning half of all New York police officers who've taken a bullet this year were hit by their colleagues rather than perps.

That surprising stat puts a dent in the idea that cops are under siege––one that proliferated after a man executed two officers in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn in late 2014. The shooting came amidst a wave of protests against police brutality, and some police defenders argued it was the tragic but logical conclusion to a wave of anti-cop sentiment.

The Bushwick shooting also highlights the extent of the danger officers routinely face for what seems like awful little reward. The cash value of the "American Dream" brand heroin purchased in the sting was $80, and besides the fact that Gladstone almost died during the bust, the NYPD is likely out thousands of dollars in damages to the police car, hospital bills, and sick leave for the injured cop. (Gladstone is expected to make a full recovery.)

Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD detective sergeant and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says police work is inherently dangerous and that these small-time drug busts happen every day in the city—in hopes of catching a so-called big fish.

"Since heroin is the biggest problem every jurisdiction is fighting, this is the area that they should be concentrated on," he tells VICE. "There will be a lot more enforcement, and unfortunately, more incidents like yesterday if they go after it as hard as they should."

According to the NYPD, two suspects were taken into custody Tuesday evening and a third remained at large, possibly after committing a carjacking to escape.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

All pictures published with the kind permission of Havelka Verlag.

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

For years, people in Zürich only knew high rises from photos of New York and Fritz Lang's film Metropolis. That changed when a housing crisis in the 1950s drove the city council to buy a four-acre plot from the company Locher. Plans for a completely new housing project—a modern high rise—was put before the people of Zürich in a referendum, who approved the plans with an 85 percent majority.

The new building, christened "the Lochergut," was finished in 1966. Despite the results of the referendum, the sheer height and density of the building was met with resistance by many Swiss, who had always known their spaces to be relatively vast and open. The fact that the complex was outside the city at the time didn't do much to calm the debate.

The Lochergut was the first taste of big city in Switzerland. Never had so many apartments been built on such a small patch of land. To some Swiss, it seemed like a foreboding of an impersonal and dystopian future. Every part of the Lochergut was an experiment: from the purely functional way the size of the apartments were calculated to the cultural diversity of the tenants to the window design and the size of the lifts.

A recent exhibition in Zürich called True Love Lochergut centered around the people who've lived there at some point during the past 50 years. It featured art projects, interviews and portraits, presented together with snapshots taken by the inhabitants. Below is a sampling from that exhibit.

Scroll down for more pictures.

Not the gun shop that was inspected in Arkansas. Photo via Flickr user Brian Ambrozy

This article originally appeared in The Trace.

Arkansas just got an unwelcome distinction from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). In 2015, the mid-sized state topped all others as the place where the most guns went missing.

Federally licensed gun dealers (FFLs) in Arkansas reported 2,951 guns lost or stolen last year, according to ATF statistics released on March 5. In a state with 2,000 gun dealers, that makes for an abnormally high total: Texas, a state with five times as many FFLs, reported just 1,024 guns lost or stolen.

Arkansas doesn't owe its distinction to a wave of gun store thefts. Nor did a cloud of carelessness settle over the Ozarks. Rather, the number of missing guns there shot up after ATF agents elected to inspect several of the state's gun stores. A note on the report says, "audits in Arkansas resulted in a higher number of losses from this state." Not just a little higher, either: The previous year, only 317 lost or stolen guns were reported there.

According to ATF spokesman Brian Garner, 98 percent of the missing Arkansas guns stemmed from a single unnamed dealer. Kevin Moran, the spokesman for the regional division that oversees operations in Arkansas, says field agents discovered the guns missing from the store's inventory during an inspection. Neither Garner or Moran could comment on what prompted the ATF's visit.

Moran did say, however, that ATF agents found missing or incomplete paperwork during the inspection. With that in mind, he says, it's possible the guns were sold in legal transactions that the dealer neglected to record. But however they left the store, since the guns don't appear on a ledger, they must be declared lost.

"It's impossible to say what exactly happened to those thousands of weapons," Moran tells The Trace.

Similar spikes occurred in 2014 when ATF audits of firearms dealers in New York and Texas sent those states' numbers of guns missing from stores soaring (New York reported 4,017 lost or stolen guns that year, and Texas reported 2,510). Ditto in 2013, when internal audits of gunmakers in Kentucky and New York revealed higher than expected numbers of missing firearms from those states.

Licensed gun dealers are required to report lost or stolen guns to law enforcement within 48 hours. But responsibility for enforcing that rule lies with the ATF's compliance department, which only managed to inspect 7 percent of the country's 140,000 FFLs in 2014, the last year for which figures are available. That lack of accountability is compounded by the Tiahrt Amendments, which since 2003 have prohibited the ATF from requiring FFLs to submit inventories to the government.

Former ATF agent Jay Wachtel, who specialized in trafficking and studied the role licensed gun dealers play in supplying the black market, says that FFL inspections are often the result of crime gun traces. If a high number of traces of crime guns point back to a particular seller, then inspectors will follow up. When confronted by inspectors about missing weapons, the dealer has to declare whether the weapons were lost or stolen.

And if a dealer is in fact crooked, "obviously they aren't going to tell the inspector they were illegally selling guns," Wachtel says. "They'll say, 'Oh my god, they must have been stolen!'"

According to the ATF, licensed gun dealers reported 14,800 guns lost or stolen last year. But if Arkansas is an example, the true total remains a mystery.

Follow The Trace on Twitter.

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

I've come to learn that no one outside of myself can fix me, and perhaps there is no psychological endpoint at which I will arrive and be totally repaired. The aspiration to be completely OK with the fact that I exist, or some other iteration of a perfectly whole human being, has only led me to self-delusion and further anxiety. This self-delusion occurs most profoundly in the times when I feel good, and wishfully make the assumption that I will never feel anxious again. My own perfectionism, and the expectation that one must arrive at "perfection" or "wholeness," have probably caused me more anxiety than anything else. Perhaps true wholeness (if such a thing exists) is not when all is fixed within, but an acceptance of one's broken parts.

All that being said, I believe that I may have recently achieved the anxiety disorder American dream. I finally found a great therapist who specializes in panic attacks and general anxiety, and takes my insurance.

This week, my new therapist and I did some detective work and stumbled upon something that in 15 years of panic attacks I had never discovered before. In looking closely at the three panic attacks I experienced the week prior, we found a commonality in each of them. All three—one in bed, one on the internet, and one in her office—had begun with a minor physical sensation in my body: a shift in how I was feeling. These minor shifts led directly into the physical symptoms of a panic attack: suffocating and choking sensations, tightness in the chest, racing heart, dizziness, and feelings of unreality. I always assumed that the physical symptoms of my panic attacks were preceded by a thought—usually one of the "I'm dying," "I'm not OK," or "I'm fucked" variety. I hadn't realized that it was the other way around.

What happened last week was that I had a cold. It wasn't a massive cold, just a minor sniffle. One night I was lying down, making a playlist, when I suddenly noticed that I couldn't breathe out of my nose very well. Immediately, my heart rate sped up, my breathing felt more shallow, and the room began to spin. I remember thinking my usual panic thoughts, Oh no, oh my god, something's wrong, I'm dying. In that moment I completely ignored the fact that I had a cold, which was most likely the cause of my breathing obstruction. That's hypochondria 101. But my therapist pointed out that there was not even a second between the sensation of the stuffed nose and my physical response. There was no time for a thought. It was only after my body responded the way it did that my mind jumped in and attempted to explain those symptoms.

The order of this sequence is subtle, but profound. If there is no time between a stuffed nose and a physical terror response, then it's the response that must be addressed and not just the thoughts. What's more, my therapist said she believes this involuntary reflex of entering an erroneous fight-or-flight mode indicates some type of trauma. I can continue to work on reframing my thoughts through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. But there might be a way to disconnect that erroneous fight-or-flight reaction before it even occurs.

When the therapist said "trauma," I cringed. I feel like the word "trauma" has become very trendy lately. I don't want my subconscious to be a form of clickbait. But the way my therapist described the role of trauma in linking my panic attacks to shifts in my physical body undeniably made sense to me. In a way, it reframed the history of my panic attacks as I've known them.

I've always had high levels of anxiety, dating back to hypochondria, nightmares, and fear of non-existent catastrophes as a child. But I always thought that my first panic attack occurred much later, around the time I had an abortion in my early 20s. The abortion was scarier than I thought it was going to be, and I remember being surprised by the way I felt after. I was not expecting to feel such nausea or dizziness. Since I hadn't anticipated these feelings, I assumed that something had gone very wrong. I thought I was dying. At the time it didn't register as a panic attack, but as an adverse physical reaction to what had just occurred. But a few weeks later I had the same exact physical sensations, and it's what I remember as my first panic attack.

Yet in talking to the therapist, I realized that my body has been having panic responses long before the abortion. I remembered jumping into a cold lake as a kid, and despite knowing how to swim, hyperventilating from the change in temperature. Immediately I knew I was dying. I remembered accidentally inhaling a little soda down the wrong pipe—not enough to cut off my breathing entirely, just enough to tickle my lungs. But my body went into panic mode and I knew for sure that was the end.

I'm not sure exactly what this new phase of my psychological journey, entitled "trauma work," is going to entail. This week, I was asked to simply pay attention to what precedes my symptoms of panic. I now see that I experience it everywhere! Mild heartburn, minor fatigue, a mouth numbed by the dentist each led my body to react as if something were very, very wrong. This new realization is making it easier for me to then redirect my brain when it says, "I'm dying." Now I have a response. I can tell it, "Dude, your traumatized body is overreacting. This isn't death. It's heartburn."

I'm also not sure where this next phase of getting better will take me. The state of "better" is perhaps an illusive one—impermanent, nebulous—and not a final destination, in my experience. It seems the more I see my relationship to panic disorder as a journey, the better I do. It's helpful for me to try on different modalities as a series of experiments, rather than aiming for a final state of absolute okayness. Does absolute okayness exist for anyone? If I had my choice I wouldn't have to continue growing. I would just chill out and be lazy for a while. But I've never been a chill person. And I guess sometimes our path chooses us.

So Sad Today: Personal Essays will be released March 15 from Grand Central Publishing. Pre-order it here.

Follow So Sad Today on Twitter.

It was no surprise that the first question of Wednesday night's Democratic debate, held at Florida's Miami-Dade College, was about Michigan.

Without saying it, Univision's Maria Elena Salinas, one of the debate moderators, essentially asked Hillary Clinton how she lost the Rust Belt state's primary to her rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Tuesday. Clinton, in true Clinton fashion, skirted the question, instead noting her campaign's success elsewhere—namely, in Mississippi, a state she won handily this week, and which comes with a bigger delegate haul than Michigan. Sanders, in true Sanders fashion, ignored this, and declared that Tuesday's results were a sign that his message is resonating, and that his campaign will rack up additional wins as the race moves forward into Ohio and Illinois next week.

To hear Sanders tell it, his upset win in Michigan amounted to his own personal Gettysburg, marking a turning point in his White House bid that just last week had been written off as over. Clinton, meanwhile, seemed to be fighting tooth-and-nail Wednesday to stall Sanders's new momentum, arguing that while her opponent may pick up some additional wins, she will continue to rack up an "insurmountable" delegate lead, and have the party's nomination by the start of the summer. If Wednesday's debate is any indication, however, the former secretary of state may be in for a tougher, and longer, fight than she anticipates.

At this point, it's understandable if these weekly cable news rodeos have started to blur. Clinton and Sanders are clearly more civilized than their Republican counterparts, and yet they too have spent months reciting the same stump talking points and lobbing the same attacks at each other—at this point, even the casual observer can likely recite Sanders's Main Street vs. Wall Street lines in his or her sleep. Questions about college tuition and Wall Street donations and health care have become almost a call-and-response in these debates, with Sanders taking the ideological high road, and Clinton casting herself as the pragmatic—read: electable—choice.

Wednesday's debate—the last one scheduled for the Democrats this cycle—followed the same formula, with a few notable changeups. Clinton, who needed a commanding performance to recover from her disappointment in Michigan, faced a grilling. Moderators (and occasionally Sanders) threw her questions on Benghazi; on the Iraq War vote; on her less-than firm positions on fracking and deportation; and on those Goldman Sachs speeches. At one point, Univision star Jorge Ramos even asked her about the possibility she could be indicted.

For the most part, Clinton took it in stride. "Oh for goodness—that's not going to happen. I'm not even answering that question," she told Ramos in response to the indictment question. In a surprisingly candid moment, she even addressed the fact that an overwhelming number of Americans don't think she's trustworthy. "Obviously it's painful for me to hear that," she responded. "And I do take responsibility.

"Look, I have said before, and it won't surprise anybody to hear me say it, this is not easy for me," she added. "I am not a natural politician, in case you haven't noticed, like my husband or President Obama."

Meanwhile, Sanders was also faced with some of his political demons, and she had to own up to some shit he said back when he was a real socialist and not the democratic kind. Specifically, he was asked to watch—and then explain to the Florida debate audience—a 1985 video of himself praising the achievements of one Fidel Castro.

But Sanders took his real hits from Clinton, whose debate strategy seemed to be to mention her opponent's name in the same sentence as some liberal bogeyman—the NRA, the Koch brothers, the Minutemen—and see what sticks, regardless of whether any connection actually exists. The approach didn't work in Michigan, where Clinton was widely criticized for her basically untrue claim that Sanders opposed the auto industry bailout. It's too early to tell whether her new attacks will do any damage—but they did succeed in making Clinton look just a tad desperate.

In the second part of the debate, the moderators focused mostly on immigration and other issues important to Univision's Spanish-language voters. Ramos baited the two candidates into a squabble over their respective votes on Senate immigration bills, which naturally devolved into Clinton accusing Sanders of abandoning Ted Kennedy.

Ramos, apparently unwilling to let his debate devolve into a Kennedy-off, then deftly moved on to the issue of deportation, introducing a woman whose husband had been deported and demanding that the candidates say whether they would break with the Obama administration's policy. By the end of the night, Ramos essentially got both candidates to promise that they would not deport undocumented children if elected president.

Of course, Democrats also seized the opportunity to attack Donald Trump. Asked if the Republican frontrunner is a racist, both Sanders and Clinton declined to walk through that door—while still leaving it slightly ajar. "I think that the American people are never going to elect a president who insults Mexicans, who insults Muslims, who insults women, who insults African-Americans," Sanders said.

Clinton, perhaps predictably, was a little more subtle, noting Trump's recent KKK issue, and saying that "people can make their own conclusions about him." Later, though, when the subject turned to the Republican frontrunner's proposed border wall, she couldn't resist getting in one more jab.

"As I understand him, he's talking about a very tall wall," she said. Then, keying up to the audience's laughter, she added, "Right? The most beautiful tall wall, better than the Great Wall of China, that would run the entire border.That he would somehow magically get the Mexican government to pay for. And, you know, it's just fantasy."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Photo via Flickr user Dank Depot

The Ontario government has completely abandoned its former plan to help medical marijuana users vape in public.

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care plans to announce a new set of rules Thursday effectively banning patients from smoking up anywhere indoors, at workplaces, and in some outdoor public spaces, according to the Toronto Star.

In November the Liberals announced patients would be able to vape wherever they needed, including inside restaurants, on the job, in movie theatres, and at playgrounds. But public backlash forced them to put that plan on hold almost immediately, while they reconsidered regulations around vaping. They appear to have arrived at a stance that's 180 very disturbing degrees from where they started.

The move is reportedly to ensure Ontarians are protected from second-hand smoke.

By law, you can't smoke cigarettes in enclosed workplaces, enclosed public spaces and other designated outdoor places in Ontario. Restaurant and bar patios are also banned as is smoking in cars carrying passengers under the age of 16. As of January, the government placed similar restrictions on e-cigarette use. It seems smoking medical marijuana will now fall under the same category.

Jonathan Zaid, founder and executive director of Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana, told VICE he's disappointed in government's flip-flop.

"It's within the human rights of medical marijuana users to be able to use their medicine in places like work, especially in emergencies... and I think the government has completely overlooked that right."

But he said it's too early to say whether or not a formal human rights complaint challenging the legislation is in order.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

(Photo via Geishabot)

Teen pregnancy rates have almost halved since 2007, which is sad for your mum – your mum loves to gossip about all the girls you went to school with who have since fallen pregnant, doesn't she, your mum, over a cup of tea, your mum, hissing almost with the deliciousness of the gossip, "Lisa – you know Lisa," your mum is saying, "almost pretty girl in the year below you. Well—" and she pauses, your mum, she pauses to really breathe in the moment "— well, she's pregnant, and Jan spending time at home – rather than sitting at bus stops with a bottle of vodka they are doing it remotely with their friends." Paton also argued access to contraception alone couldn't explain the fall due to major budgeting cuts in that area, but major improvements in schools in London around the same time could go some way to explaining the reduced teen pregnancy rate in that area. On the whole: "Nobody really knows why we've got this sudden change around about 2007 to 2008."

Just looking at what else happened in 2007 that could explain the drop. "The new Ford Mondeo went on sale in Britain with a range of saloons, hatchbacks and estates," it says here. Is that information helping anyone? Does it make you want to fuck or not fuck? Let's see what else. "The Concert for Diana was held in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales"; "Sir Menzies Campbell resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats"; "Pop four piece Scooch controversially won the right to represent the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki, Finland". Some mysteries we will never solve. Some mysteries only the universe will truly know.

@joelgolby

More stuff from VICE:

The Women Who Smoke Weed While Pregnant

Teen Pregnancy Rates Are Falling – Now We Need to Work on Our Attitudes Towards Young Mothers

How Do Illegal Drugs Affect Women's Fertility?

A New Age writer doing the apple experiment. Via Daniellelaporte.com

In one of his studies, Emoto separated water into 100 petri dishes and assigned each a vibe: good or bad. Emoto said nice things to the "good water" and scolded the "bad water" for being shit, and the petri dishes were frozen. Lo and behold, the bad water made "ugly" crystals. He even got a team in Tokyo to transmit its thoughts to some water in California in a double-blind study. The results? Exactly the same.

Emoto continued studying this phenomenon in various ways, eventually concluding that our vibes—our thoughts, words, intentions, and sounds—can affect the molecular structure of water. Here, have a look at him talk about rice:

This idea is highly seductive to me. The New Age school of thought is a bit like a trendy religion for young people with commitment issues, a.k.a. me. I read my horoscope weekly and check my shit moods and paranoia against the movements of planets. I've watched all of Spirit Science, an animated series that explains the basics of New Age philosophy. I am ready for—and receptive to—any mystical bullshit that might elevate my existence beyond being a meaningless bit of flesh destined to die on a hunk of rock. I am nothing. I need guidance.

But seeing is believing, as they say. And if I was to believe in Emoto's vibes-are-power philosophy, I needed to see cold hard facts. So I decided to carry out a little experiment of my own.

I found an experiment inspired by Emoto's work online: the 25-day apple experiment. You smack-talk one apple and give the other loads of love, and after 25 days, one should be moldy and rank, and the other less so. Plenty of bloggers and do-gooders have tried it, and they all claim it's legit. So I bought an apple and cut it exactly in half, dropping each half into labeled jars, so I could keep track of where to aim my magical mind powers.

Before locking the apples up in their little cells, I thought I'd throw some vibes in there, just to kick things off. I blew the love apple kisses and gave it my very best dirty talk.

Next, in this highly scientific experiment, I screamed so hard at the other half of the apple that I probably also got quite a bit of spit on it. Then I left the jars behind the editorial desk, ready to rot.

Week One

The loving, though, became a chore. "You're so hot," "You rock," "Go apple!" blah, blah, blah. But I did it every day.

(I know what you're saying to yourself: "You didn't keep it up. You thought you could get away with doing a photo article and not actually talking to the apples every day, you lazy little cheater." But I honestly did do it every day, bar this one day I came in late and got stressed and then just forgot. Go easy. We're all human.)

Week Two

The love apple after a week

Early days, and already bad news for Emoto. Somehow, the hate apple remained relatively unscathed, with only a thin film of green mould across its surface, while the love apple was getting really quite horrible. Almost overnight it had sprouted some wet moustache hairs so long they touched the wall of the jar.

I decided to step things up a notch. I showed the hate apple my exes' profile pictures and read it some more Facebook comments. " seem like a mega cunt," was one of them. "Fuck off you shit cunt," was another. Really nasty stuff.

Week Three

And then, midway through the week, this happened:

Week Four

On the other hand, look at the hate apple. With a quick scrape, that'd be almost good to go:

With prudence, I opened the love jar.

I had opened a world of hate. If there was any doubt as to which was the more rotten of the two, the fact I haven't eaten an apple since smelling the rancid love apple should settle things.

I wish Emoto's theory had worked. I wish the hate apple had been withered and deadly, and I'd been able to take a bite from the still-crisp love apple and been nourished by the positivity, love, and light instilled in each of its cells. But it hadn't worked out that way. From the second week, it was clear that it didn't matter whether I was screaming at an apple or making out with it through glass—the natural process of decomposition could not be prevented.

Hot take: I still believe deep down that positivity is good, and negativity is bad—for society, for one's own mental health and well-being, for not being an unbearable dick to be around. But that did not reconcile with the results.

So did we learn anything from the burden of this four week experiment? Yes, we learned that hatred from Facebook commenters fuels us, gives us life, and makes us slightly less moldy than we would be otherwise.

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE France

Balaruc-Les-Bains is a seaside spa town in the south of France, roughly 20 miles from Montpellier. Each year, swarms of retired working and middle class people visit for a couple of weeks to get their treatments, cure rheumatisms, and enjoy the sun. They take their treatment in the morning and go to the beach, play pétanque, or have a drink in one of the bars on the promenade in the afternoon. Every Sunday, there's a tea dance in the early evening.

Most buildings in Balaruc-Les-Bains seem to be made of cardboard, but the visitors don't mind. They're not rich people, but they've worked hard for decades and they're now making the most of their retirement.

This series was inspired by a different project I recently did in black and white. I followed my grandfather around for two years, who suffered from Alzheimer's and was living in a care facility. I documented his relationship with my grandmother until his death. That was an emotional project, so with this one, I wanted to take the opposite approach. I decided to work with colors, outside, under the sun, showing another side of old age. The side that, despite some health concerns, is very happy and enjoys life to the fullest. Old age isn't just about physical and mental decline, and that's what I needed to be reminded of.

Yann Castanier is a French photographer and member of the Hans Lucas studio. Follow him on his website.

When I heard that GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump was coming to Clemson University, where I teach, I didn't initially plan to protest.

My intentions changed when someone brought it to my attention that Trump's visit roughly coincided with the one-year anniversary of the murder of three Muslim students in a Chapel Hill, North Carolina, parking lot. I remember huddling on a cold evening shortly after that incident, as members of the Muslim community here at Clemson came together for a vigil. Then a few days before the Trump rally, I got a Facebook message from a former student of mine, Sheffy Kaur Minnick, asking me if anyone was planning to protest. Minnick seemed disheartened when I explained that Clemson University had the right to rent its property out to any presidential candidate, no matter how controversial. "I grew up with my family and dad being targeted because he wears a turban as a Sikh," she replied. "Since I work with university students, it triggered me knowing he was talking at Clemson. I just can't accept the idea of him spreading his rhetoric of fear and spreading his delusional methodology for making America great to the next generation." Reading her words, I felt that I had a responsibility to engage in some small act of resistance.

Earlier this year, I had seen Muslim activist Rose Hamid and her ally kicked out of a Trump rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, an action that was widely covered by the media. Hamid, who is now facing an Islamphobic backlash, was effective in drawing attention to the problems with the Trump campaign's rhetoric, but I wanted to do something different. I would attend the rally in a peaceful, non-intrusive manner, but I would not go out of my way to be small, invisible, or to make anyone feel comfortable. I wanted to challenge the Trump campaign and its supporters to see and treat me as human. So I decided to wear a red West African shirt and pants and a keffiyeh that had been wrapped by an Arab friend, an outfit that represented both my heritage as an African-American man and solidarity with my friends from the Middle Eastern community. It was also, I felt, an outfit that a neither a terrorist nor a Syrian refugee would be likely to wear to this type of an event.

The rally was held in the T. Ed Garrison Arena, a facility normally reserved for livestock events such as rodeos, horse shows, and cattle auctions. The place was packed with nearly 5,000 attendees, a sea of red "Make America Great Again" hats and "Bomb the Hell Out of ISIS" T-shirts. The smells of popcorn and stale manure hung in the air, and Trump's voice echoed through the arena.

At the security check, the officer gave me a confused look before passing me through. I walked with a friend toward a section near the stage and stood in the aisle of the front row for about ten minutes before sitting down. Had I been a white woman dressed in jeans or a skirt, or a white man in a "Make America Great Again" hat, standing at the edge of that balcony, I probably would have been interpreted as just another enthusiastic Trump supporter. But instead I was a six-foot, 245-pound black man in African clothes and a keffiyeh. Although I had only been standing silently and then sitting, it felt as though every subtle movement I made was being interpreted as threatening.

Once Trump ended his speech and began the handshaking, autograph-signing portion of the event, hundreds of people moved toward the stage, and I was one of them. Suddenly, I felt a hand grab my arm. I turned around to find that I was now surrounded by several police officers, one of whom asked me to leave. I forced myself to be as calm as I could, knowing what kind of danger can occur to black folks who are deemed noncompliant. I agreed to leave, but I asked why. "This is a private event," the officer responded, "and we have the right to ask you to leave." After asking a few more times, I was told that I had to leave because the event was over. It was true that Trump's speech was over, but there were hundreds of people still in the venue interacting with the candidate.

Eventually seven or so officers escorted me out—two Secret Service types, two Anderson County officers in military fatigues, and three more officers in black uniforms. Strangely, my friend A D. Carson, who was standing nearby and filming, was also asked to leave. Once outside, I again asked why we had been asked to leave. The same frustrated officer from before was growing annoyed. "Look, we're being really generous," he huffed. Finally, Anderson Sheriff Captain Garland Major appeared, explaining, "The Trump people said that you're no longer welcome here," and finally, we left.

That evening, using footage from both A. D.'s and my mobile phones, we quickly put together a video documenting the events. I uploaded the video to Facebook and YouTube and went to sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I noticed that the video had 500 shares and several thousand views. By noon the video had over 2,000 shares and 100,000 views. Currently the video has been shared over 12,000 times and has over 3 million views after being posted on various sites on the internet.

A friend of mine also sent me a snippet from a conservative talk radio caller who claimed to have been sitting near me. After giving a basic description of my actions that I mostly agreed with, she recounted her feelings of "sheer fright" and how "shifty" I had been acting. Another caller informed listeners that I had clearly been a Muslim who wanted to "put Islam at the center" so that "they can take over."

There was another kind of comment, too, the kind that pops up whenever there are insinuations of discrimination of any kind in the US.

It may seem unfair to point to these anecdotal examples among the many comments we received. The problem is that these bigoted, threatening comments and emails echo the culture of physical violence at Trump campaign events. Over the past few months, this has included the forceful ejections of Hamid and numerous other protestors. In late February, a Secret Service agent choke-slammed a TIME photojournalist at a rally, a week later a mob of Trump supporters shoved a black protester across the arena before she was finally escorted out by police, and this Wednesday, another black protester was sucker-punched at a rally in North Carolina.

These attacks on the press, peaceful protesters, and visible "others" highlight a fascinating irony in a campaign that is so focused on stomping out threats to American safety and freedom. In light of that, we should be clear about something: From a statistical perspective, there simply is no evidence that Islamic terror or immigration are primary or even significant threats facing US citizens. The National Safety Council places the lifetime odds of dying from cancer or heart disease at one in seven, dying from chronic lower respiratory disease at one in 28, and dying in a motor vehicle crash at one in 112. Richard Barrett, former coordinator of the United Nations al Qaeda/Taliban Monitoring Team, estimates that your odds of dying of a terrorist attack in the US from 2007 to 2011 were one in 20 million. Despite these figures, exit polls showed that 66 percent of GOP voters in New Hampshire support Trump's temporary ban on Muslims. In South Carolina, it's 74 percent.

In 2016, South Carolinians and people across America are facing more than fears for their safety, but unique and very real challenges in the areas of poverty, social mobility, gun violence, and an oppressively low minimum wage. So I understand why many people feel insecure, anxious, and angry. These challenges structure the everyday lives of lower- and middle-class folks regardless of what religion they practice, or what language they speak.

But I also know that we are most vulnerable to manipulation when we are scared. After my experience at the rally, when I hear the phrase, "Make America Great Again," I can't help but think about the costs and casualties of American greatness both abroad and here at home. When I heard about the backlash against Hamid, I reached out to her and asked her if she felt safe. Her answer was instructive: "Is anyone really 'safe'? I put my faith in God, and I refuse to live in fear."

Follow Chenjerai on Twitter.

ISIS photo via Wikicommons

Read: Why Does Radical Islam Appeal to So Many Young Men?

A trove of leaked documents from ISIS has been obtained by numerous media organizations, including German outlets and the UK's Sky News, providing a window into how the world's most famous terrorist organization operates.

These documents include recruitment records revealing the names of 22,000 people—of 51 different nationalities—who have allegedly left their homes to join the Islamic State. The form would-be fighters reportedly have to fill out has 23 questions, which begin with basic information you have to provide when you do anything: name, date of birth, education. You know the drill.

Then they get kind of weird. The form asks about any "previous fighting experience, blood type, special skills, level of obedience," any "chemical knowledge," and whether the applicant would favor frontline fighting or training as a suicide bomber.

New recruits also have to write down a person to recommend them and a guarantor. Some of the released records list well-known jihadists as recommenders, while others rely on people like a "20-year-old from Minneapolis with just a high-school education" to vouch for them, according to NBC News.

NBC News also added that the documents were leaked by "a man who claims to be a disillusioned ISIS fighter who recently defected."

German authorities are going over the files now, and they reportedly believe the documents to be genuine.

On November 1, 2014, as 17-year-old Tykwone Davis was recovering from multiple gunshot wounds in Chicago's Cook County hospital, police announced his impending prosecution. Anita Alvarez, the state's attorney, was bringing two charges of first-degree attempted murder against the black teenager, three days after Chicago cops gunned him down. Officers claimed they had no choice but to shoot after the boy fired in their direction. But Davis's brother, who was at the scene, disputed that account immediately, telling local media the kid was running in the opposite direction when an officer began discharging his weapon.

"He didn't say, 'Freeze. Get down. Stop. What you doing?' He just started shooting," Davis's older brother said. Standing outside the emergency room, waiting to see her son, Willette Middleton added, "How in the hell could he have a gun pointed at the police when all his shots is from the back?"

Davis survived the injuries after extensive surgery. But just days earlier, another 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald did not make it even as far as the hospital, dying en route after being shot 16 times by Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke. In the months following the pair of shootings, Davis's 18th birthday was marked by his transfer from juvenile detention to Cook County Jail's adult population, where he awaited trial. Meanwhile, Van Dyke walked free. Only in the hours leading up to the November 2015 release of the now-infamous dash cam video depicting McDonald's killing did Alvarez bring a charge of first-degree murder against the officer.

That was more than 400 days after the shooting.

Now running for her third term in the March 15 Democratic primary, the state's attorney has been dogged—virtually and in person—by Black Lives Matters activists, who have disrupted her campaign events as frequently as three times in 24 hours and used the hashtag #ByeAnita to harangue her online. At the same time, a consortium of the city's leading civil rights lawyers, politicians, and community organizations have sought to remove Alvarez from the case against Van Dyke, with a recent motion seeking the appointment of a special prosecutor.

Countering the barrage of scrutiny, Alvarez recently asserted that she "won't apologize for the length of time" Van Dyke's prosecution took, as the result of a "meticulous, thorough, comprehensive investigation," and cited the prosecution of 96 law enforcement officers during her tenure. But analyzing the state's attorney's claims, VICE found that metric to have little merit when it comes to prosecuting Chicago Police violence against civilians. Looking at the number of misconduct complaint referrals to her office from the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) and comparing fatal shooting statistics to corresponding prosecutions, we instead found a clear pattern in which Alvarez has consistently gone easy on cops accused of brutality—while aggressively pursuing charges against civilians who survived police encounters.

The state's attorney's rhetoric about the 400 days being essential to charge Van Dyke also does not square with reality given the far more efficient work of her counterparts across the country and the speed by which she charges civilians. And Alvarez's stated commitment to proceeding with prosecutions only when a case is meticulously in order is contradicted by both the botched prosecution of police officer Dante Servin for killing unarmed black woman Rekia Boyd in 2012 and the state's attorney's track-record of hostility to reopening wrongful conviction cases, in which nine men have been exonerated based on DNA evidence. Local activists hope to use her ouster to send a national message about how police can and must be held accountable—even in a city with a storied legacy of brutality by law enforcement.

"It's not just about Alvarez," says Paris Fresh, communications co-chair of BYP100's Chicago chapter, one of the organizations that has made the faces of fatal shooting victims and chants of "16 shots" a regular feature on the campaign trail. "We're letting whoever else wants to hold that position—in Illinois, anywhere—know: They will be held accountable.... The local fights, in Ferguson and Baltimore and Chicago, are connected. They're about what happens to poor black people."

Spokespeople with Alvarez's office and reelection campaign did not respond to a bevy of requests for comment from VICE on the prosecution of Davis, details regarding the 96 officers prosecuted, and the process by which civilians can track the outcomes of police review referrals. Regarding IPRA's investigation into the shooting of Davis, spokesperson Larry Merritt told VICE that the case is in its final stages but declined to share any further details.

Since late 2008, Alvarez has been top prosecutor in Cook County, comprised of 129 distinct police departments. That means that, on average, the state's attorney has pressed charges against a law enforcement officer less than once per department and less than 14 times per year. Within the same timeframe, IPRA has referred 447 misconduct complaints about Chicago police to Alvarez's office for consideration of criminal charges, according to the agency's reports.

In contrast, Alvarez has aggressively pursued the conviction of those who survived incidents of police violence and alleged abuse, in some cases going out of her way to charge civilians with murder even when there is no dispute that the person in question was killed by cops. The state's attorney has also pursued charges against other civilians who survived police shootings, including 20-year-old Denzel Ford and Antonio Cross, who was unarmed when he got shot in the hand in the same hail of bullets that killed Boyd.

In a city that has earned dubious distinction as America's "False Confession Capital," the state's attorney has been hostile to attempts by the wrongfully convicted to clear their names. Most recently, despite the findings of an official investigation commissioned by Mayor Rahm Emanuel that four men who are currently imprisoned on murder convictions are likely innocent, Alvarez has refused to reopen their cases. The state's attorney also opposed all motions by a group of exonerees known as the Englewood Four to vacate murder convictions challenged by new DNA evidence. In 2012, when the Englewood Four were eventually freed, Alvarez defended the prosecution of another group of exonerees known as the Dixmoor Five on 60 Minutes. Like the Englewood Four, the Dixmoor Five had been locked up as teens on false confessions and won their release by virtue of new DNA evidence.

After months of pressure, Alvarez lifted their convictions.

Many of those seeking to depose the current Cook County state's attorney have voiced recognition that new leadership alone will not change the game in Chicago. But the actions of Alvarez's counterparts in New York City, Baltimore, and Boston offer a glimpse of what's possible when a reform-minded prosecutor is at the helm.

In Brooklyn, District Attorney Kenneth Thompson staffed a Convictions Review Unit with ten prosecutors that has resulted in 19 exonerations since he took office at the start of 2014. Later that year, a grand jury indicted officer Peter Liang 83 days after he shot and killed unarmed black man Akai Gurley in the stairwell of the Pink Houses, a housing project in East New York. Liang was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and official misconduct last month.

In Baltimore, Marilyn Mosby, the state's attorney, has fought and won a legal battle in Maryland's highest court to compel the testimony of the first of six police officers to face trial in the death of Freddie Gray. Less than two weeks after the 25-year-old died from a spinal injury following an aggressive arrest and transport by police, Mosby charged involved officers with depraved heart murder, assault, false imprisonment, and misconduct in office.

And in Boston, Adam Foss, assistant district attorney of the Juvenile Division for Suffolk County, has begun implementing an altogether different vision for the role of prosecutor through the lens of restorative justice—actively seeking ways to reduce charges and offer second chances to troubled youth.

Such sweeping reforms are still out of reach in Chicago, where Alvarez is being challenged on Tuesday by veteran prosecutors Kim Foxx and Donna More. But Tykwone Davis's mother Willette Middleton still hopes to see some measure of accountability for her child's shooting and incarceration.

"They shot a child. It took two police—and they still working," she tells VICE, exasperated. "We need justice."

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I dropped a chandelier on his head. I couldn't help it. I knew that there'd be collateral damage—three others, merely fashion fans here for the Sanguine show, would ultimately die in the "accident." But it had to be done. He was just hanging by the bar, directly beneath the contorted mass of metal and crystal that was his undoing in waiting. The opportunity was screaming at me.

I paused, just for a few seconds. Could I do this? Could I, as the Hitman series' iconic Agent 47, take innocent lives to achieve my remaining objective, to kill Viktor Novikov? While he was the fashion host with the majority of partygoers assembled at the Palais De Walewska, Paris, to see new designs on the catwalk, I knew differently. He and his ex-supermodel partner, Dahlia Margolis, were ringleaders of a spy organization, IAGO, selling government secrets to the highest bidders. He had to be eliminated. This was the moment.

He'd eluded me once already. I'd lured him away from the festivities to meet with a corrupt Russian FSB agent, but in my haste to take him out, I loosed a silenced round at the wrong person. I escaped the attention of security easily enough, slipping out of a bodyguard's outfit and into a waiting staff uniform. Nobody batted an eyelid as I mingled with the other workers.

Between then and now, 47 standing beside the winch that'd bring the lighting crashing down, I'd taken care of Margolis. I discovered that a certain Sheik was on the premises and was planning to attend an IAGO auction upstairs, away from the hustle of the show. I found where he was in the Palais and gave him the evening off. In his place, I registered my intent to exchange cash for no-questions-asked information, and we retired to Margolis's office. There, I took my chance—I strangled the life out of her. Nobody noticed. I returned to my waiting clothes and the party. Target one of two, down. Simple.

But Novikov wasn't simple. He was being followed everywhere by a bodyguard. He refused to duck into any side rooms, to any space within this expansive, ornate building where an assassin with a little stealthiness to his craft could take care of business, quickly and quietly. No. This would have to be very loud and very public. Thankfully, I had an exit strategy. The tuxedo that I'd arrived in was nearby—I'd passed it on the way to the bar—and if I could make it there without attracting too much attention, I'd likely be in the clear to stroll right on through the main gates, job done.

I pulled the winch. The chandelier fell. My plan worked. Straight out the front door, no heat on me at all. Mission accomplished, and I felt cool as fuck.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch 'Street Fighter V: KO Dreams,' commissioned by Capcom

But you could play Hitman's first stage proper, the "Showstopper" mission, in any number of different ways. I spy fire axes just waiting to be buried into skulls, foolishly positioned electrical wires that could so easily prove deadly, the potential to poison drinks, and to get up close and personal with Novikov by assuming the identity of the Sangine show's star male model, Helmut Kruger. (We pass each other in a hallway, and I'm sure that the virtually identical NPC does a double take.) This is sandbox gaming at its most potential-rich—all you are told is who your targets are. You can switch on aids to assist you—objective markers that help place the people, the pieces, in such a way as you can best exploit them; "instinct" mode, which highlights your targets in red, wherever they are in the level, through however many walls—or turn everything off and go it strictly solo.

Most players, the first time, will tackle the mission with help enabled, but such is the replay value here, even within a single miniature open-world, that with each restart the situation can be edited. You can stash weapons and equipment in certain locations. You can combine solutions to each problem at hand to produce literally explosive results. Being a completely amateur contract killer myself, I need all the help I can get. And not just in Paris—I fail multiple times on Hitman's first prologue stage before finally doing away with my target, Kalvin Ritter, a master thief. But losing, dying, and restarting is all part of the process—rushing in, guns blazing, will always result in disappointment. Which is why Hitman feels so strange, so alien, compared to the majority of triple-A releases in modern gaming.

Hitman demands patience, planning, and study. It doesn't offer a fanfare for completion. Execute a perfect kill, and there are no fireworks, no fist-bumps. It's your job, you do it, and then you go home unmoved, emotionless. In Paris, you can lose an hour, two, maybe more, just exploring the Palais and its grounds, learning the layout, the most effective routes of escape, the best hiding places. This is vital, as even the smaller prologue areas can leave you spun around, disorientated. Novikov and Margolis will go about their business, but they won't leave. You'll always have your chance, assuming you're calm and controlled enough to carry out a waiting game. Let them come to you; always let them come to you. Agent 47 isn't Marcus Fenix, Master Chief, or anyone else with body armor and recharging health. He might be a clone, but he's still a human being beneath his frosty exterior. A few bullets, and it's goodnight—so always creep, always crawl, and never let your trigger finger get too itchy.

Because of big-budget gaming's typical blockbuster speed and style, some will quickly be turned cold by Hitman's methodical mechanics, its many ways of doing things not accommodating raw brute strength. I know that I struggled, early on, with my inability to play this master assassin as anything more than a bumbling chancer, a gun for hire that got lucky. But sticking with the game will lead to some astonishing rewards.

Hitman is an episodic title—all you can play today is Paris plus the two-mission prologue, as well as a few more modes within each main sandbox. Escalation, Elusive Targets, and Contracts were outlined in our preview piece, which you can read here. But what's most exciting, to me, is where Agent 47 is heading after Paris. Mastering your skills in the Palais De Walewska is recommended, because it's a child's bucket in scale compared to the incredible sandboxes that are coming next.

Episode three goes to Marrakech, as pictured here

First up is the coastal Italian town of Sapienza in April, a sun-kissed stage that sees your primary target ensconced within a well-guarded mansion. Just like Novikov, he's not all that he seems to the townsfolk. And just as in Paris, there's also a second target that needs to be silenced. The town's old buildings provide useful sniper points, assuming you can reach them; there's a crypt to explore, and many shops and residences open for access; and there are many player-aiding opportunities that will present themselves by exploring the sizable area. The scale of Sapienza is awesome, the level of detail that makers IO Interactive has achieved surpassing all expectations given previous experience of episodic releases. It's a beautiful location, from the boats bobbing in the bay's crystal sea to the brilliant, almost Sega-blue sky above. It's a postcard from somewhere you'd love to vacation—a postcard that you're here to stain red.

But more impressive still is Hitman's third episode, set mostly within the medina of Marrakech, which sees Agent 47 uncovering a dangerous plot between domestic military forces and the Consulate of Sweden in the Moroccan city. To say any more about the reasons for 47's arrival would be to spoil a chapter in the game that really moves its story onward with no little force—while each mission seems like a standalone operation, it's clear even from the ending of the Paris contract that something massively shady is going on, something beyond a straightforward series of hits. Marrakech comes out in May, followed by missions in Thailand, the United States, and Japan. And once every episode's been released digitally, Hitman will come out on a disc, in early 2017.

Since the days of the arcades, gaming's been about the quick turnover, the fast completion, the high score. Hitman tempts you to always improve the latter while resisting the need for speed, asking you to retry the Paris hit over and over. Try not to be compromised, next time. Maybe take to the catwalk yourself, to earn a new achievement. Why strangle when you can garrotte? But to see everything that this game has to offer, in its Paris stage and beyond, will take a long time. Perhaps too long for some, but then, what's a little waiting when the payoff is so very satisfying? And getting it all wrong sometimes is not only the point, but also another step toward perfection.

Hitman will be released on March 11 for PlayStation 4 (version tested), Xbox One, and PC. Find more information on upcoming episodes and game modes at the official website.

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Writer Jane Jacobs walking on streets of New York. Photo by Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Last weekend in the Berkshires, 150 miles outside of New York City, a small group gathered to preview A Marvelous Order, an opera based on Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, two ideological rivals whose legacies have defined 20th-century urban planning and the landscape of New York, the city they both loved.

To get there, most attendees had taken convenient, scenic drives up the Taconic State Parkway from New York, a road master-planned by Moses for exactly this sort of weekend escape. Still, most attendees toasted the neighborhood-led planning ideas of Jacobs, his ideological enemy, who would have turned 100 this April.

Over smoked salmon hors d'oeuvres, architects, artists, and musicians alike pondered why this story warrants its own opera. Because it really is that dramatic, say the opera's creators. "It was a love triangle between Moses, Jacobs, and the residents of New York City," composer Judd Greenstein told the group.

In one breath, describing Jacobs as "an incredible hero" and Moses "in many ways a terrible person," Greenstein nonetheless urged his audience to try to see their respective motivations. "You can't just say bad Moses and good Jacobs. That's not art."

Seeing it in those shades of gray might be a tall order for some. Career urbanists tend to take a more severe view of the twin legacies, and in large part, they side firmly with Jacobs, who despite being dismissed by critics as a "housewife" and a "crazy dame," is widely considered the most important urban thinker of the 20th century, complete with her own reference term: Jacobsian. She despaired at the idea of suburban sprawl and celebrated the idea of a thriving mixed-income urban neighborhood, a concept that has rarely panned out, despite her widespread influence. "Eyes on the street" and "social capital," terms she coined, are now a central part of urban-planning vernacular. Her ideas are so embedded now that it can be a struggle to remember they were once new.

History has mostly demonized Moses for his top-down approach and made an urban heroine of Jacobs. "Urban renewal is commonly considered to be destructive," said Stacey Anderson, public events director of the Municipal Arts Society, which advocates for public participation in city planning. In an era of virtually closed-door planning operations, mostly strong-armed by Moses, "Jacobs was really revolutionary in bringing that conversation to the street-level. She's sort of our patron saint."

A mother, journalist, and champion of Greenwich Village, Jacobs took on Moses when his vision of an expressway through Lower Manhattan was still under serious consideration—and won.

"All of Soho, Chinatown, the Lower East Side—were ready to be wiped out for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Those are all monuments to Jane," - Roberta Gratz

Despising one another's ideas from a distance, Jacobs and Moses only came face to face once at a Board of Estimate hearing in 1958 that squashed Moses's plan to build a ten-lane expressway through Downtown Manhattan that would have razed the cast-iron district of Soho and much of Chinatown and Little Italy through a "slum-clearance" initiative.

"All of Soho, Chinatown, the Lower East Side—were ready to be wiped out for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Those are all monuments to Jane," said Roberta Gratz, another rare female urbanist and close friend of Jacobs's.

Self-educated but with no college degree, Jacobs was disparaged by the Establishment for her lack of formal credentials at every turn. "To this day, she is often referred to as the housewife who wrote a book," said Gratz. "She didn't let any of that stuff bother her. She had a job to do."

Jacobs has inspired politicians in Brazil; projects based on her ideas are currently taking shape in India. She's even big in Japan, where her death in 2006 was commemorated with an entire magazine. A series of walks in her honor has spread to 180 cities. Her seminal critique of 1950s urban-planning policy, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , has been translated into six languages.

But, Gratz warned, when it comes to actual development, while Jacobsian ideas are bandied around a lot, they are rarely put into practice as intended. Though the planning community has latched onto the rhetoric, many developers still build cookie-cutter neighborhoods wholesale with enormous injections of cash—what Jacobs would call "cataclysmic money."

"Developers love to say they're building something 'à la Jane Jacobs,'" Gratz told me. "The planning field has learned how to co-opt the language, but they don't follow the process that Jane advocated," which involves enhancing existing neighborhoods rather than building new ones and stresses local engagement in the planning process. These methods stand in stark opposition to Moses's dictatorial approach and the enormous scale of his projects, many of which are unmissable throughout the city—not only the neighborhood-zapping Cross Bronx Expressway but also Jones Beach and Lincoln Center, built on the cleared slums where West Side Story was filmed.

"You cannot design a whole new neighborhood 'à la Jane Jacobs,' because Jane's neighborhoods evolved," Gratz continued. "Moses would say you have to break an egg to make an omelet. Jane would say you have to cultivate the chickens to make an omelet. She valued above all else the local wisdom."

In her later years, Jacobs continued to take on the Establishment in her new home, Toronto, where she helped stop another expressway. Here, too, her ideas were embraced. Still, despite the prevalence of Jacobs's ideas in more holistic cities like Vancouver, much of big planning remains in a hurry to build and earn.

In her final piece of public writing, a year before her death in 2006, Jacobs wrote to Mayor Bloomberg advocating an alternative to the "ambush" City Hall proposals for development in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, warning of "destructive consequences, packaged very sneakily with visually tiresome, unimaginative, and imitative luxury project towers." Sun-blotting silver condos with names like the "Edge" soon peppered the waterfront. Starbucks wasn't far behind.

It's turned out that this type of wealth is what has brought people back to living in city centers. Jacobs's neighborhood-centric approach to planning has been widely embraced as a noble concept, but as with Moses, things haven't panned out exactly as she predicted. The beauty of the historical neighborhood she fought so hard to protect has made Greenwich Village one of the most unaffordable neighborhoods in New York City, in large part because it does not contain an expressway.

Scratching the surface of her ideas makes Jacobs seem easy to understand. But her legacy is nothing if not complex. "People will argue tooth and nail about what it is she stood for," said Stacey Anderson.

As with many things, Jacobs summed it up best in her own words, in her humble salutation to that final letter: "Dear Mayor Bloomberg, My name is Jane Jacobs. I am a student of cities."

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One of my first birthday parties at McDonald's—see regular-sized friend beside me (all photos via the author)

When my mom came home at the age 22 and said she was pregnant, aside from the general disappointment parents feel when your unwed young daughter says she's knocked up, my grandmother was thrilled. I was the first baby in our immediate family in decades, and when I arrived, a mere six pounds and one ounce, my grandparents decided they would give me everything they could. By the age of eight, I had visited most of the world's continents, loved Broadway and took dance classes and gymnastics. I also had unlimited access to food. I lived like a queen: I ate well, I had people at my beck and call, I always had a stroller to ride in or someone to carry me. If I threw a fit, I got a milkshake; if I threw another, I got one more.

I ate just about everything nutritionists would say no to—Big Macs, fries, McDonald's pizza (remember those?), hot dogs, milkshakes, Dunkaroos, Lunchables, Teddy Grahams, Mr. Noodles, Fruit Gushers, Spice Girls Chupa Chups, Bugles, Pillsbury toaster strudels—in large quantities, all day, every day. If I wasn't eating a delicious assortment of food items and sweets, I was overfeeding my Tamagotchi and Neopets to the point of food explosion.

I was a 90s fat kid, the biracial doppleganger of Bruce Bogtrotter from Matilda. I used to skip to that part of the movie just to watch him eat that perfect chocolate cake. I dreamt of being in that position. Would I eat that cake even though a sweaty, mustached lady just told me it was made with blood, sweat and tears? Hell yes. I spent my childhood searching for a similar cake until I stumbled upon one at a Just Desserts café. My mom saw the savage come out as I devoured it. She never took me back again.

A 2015 study found that the epidemic of childhood obesity in the US and UK actually started in the 90s, with nearly a fifth of boys and a quarter of girls born after 1990 being obese before their tenth birthday. According to the study, individuals born in the 1990s are two to three times more likely to be obese than individuals born between the 1940s and 1980s.

In my favourite spot in the house with a flair for dramatics, age 4

The study suggested the changing lifestyle of the 90s to be one of the kickstarters of childhood obesity: more kids in front of computer and TV screens, more time on homework, and aggressive marketing of junk food targeted at children.

The health consequences for overweight children are serious. Rebecca Hardy, a researcher involved in the study, told Vitality that, "The more of their lives people spend overweight or obese, the greater risk of developing chronic health conditions such as coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and arthritis."

Childhood obesity is now considered a health crisis in Canada. According to a 2013 report called "No Time to Wait" by the Ontario's Healthy Kid Panel, 30 percent of children and adolescents (one in three children) are overweight. It mostly affects boys and Aboriginal children (the number of obese adults has doubled, tripled for children, and 62.5 percent of Aboriginal children under 11 are obese). Obesity costs Canada between $4.6 and $7.1 billion annually, and the Canadian Health Measures Survey says kids today are "fatter, rounder, weaker, and less flexible than their parents were a generation ago."

A few weeks ago, a new Senate report addressed new ways to end obesity in Canada. The report criticized Canada's Food Guide, declaring it needs a major overhaul because it's "dated" and "enabling." The report also urged federal action to curb obesity by suggesting a sugar tax on drinks and banning food and drink ads for kids. "We can't sugar-coat it any longer. There is an obesity crisis in Canada and sugar is a big part of that problem. We must act," said Kelvin Ogilvie, the committee's chair.

In the 90s, we didn't have the same knowledge on obesity that we do now, let alone a Senate report warning about the dangers of sugar and junk. Life went on as usual with fat kids and their parents.

My mom and grandparents never consulted once with a doctor, nor did my doctor make any comments—so it's hard to tell if I was just overweight or obese. I believe it was the latter. "It was more in relation to seeing other kids, or when we took pictures, that you looked a little bigger than the other kids," my grandpa tells me. "We just didn't want you getting any bigger." I question how parents whose child is the size of a small sumo wrestler didn't notice a weight problem, but when I call up my family to ask them, they were genuinely surprised.

My grandpa tells I threw fits every time we passed by a McDonald's (which was relatively easy considering it wasn't far from where I lived). He says it was the toys that I wanted most, but when I got there, I'd end up eating.

By kindergarten (keep in mind that I was five), I was towering over my classmates, both in height and circumference. Most years, my mom would have my birthday party at my favourite place—McDonald's. If you see my pictures, you'd think someone invited Yogi bear to a children's campfire. That, or the girl-child version of Biggie was in town.

Who said food? Age two

By the time I was six years old, I was wearing pants with elastic and drawstring sweatpants. If I did fit into kids clothing, it was for older children. Add to the fact that my Pakistani mom and grandma didn't know how to style black hair, and I was a hot mess in an oversized T-shirt, hot pink leggings pulled up to my chest, and frizzy braids adorned with plastic butterfly clips.

But what I wanted was to look more like a girl-lady. My grandma would buy these DIY kits that came with fabric to make your kid a dress. She'd have to buy two packages to make me one dress, probably the equivalent of material needed to make a tablecloth.

When I was barely six and well beyond the average weight of 44 pounds, my grandparents enrolled me in all-girls soccer practice. I couldn't kick the ball for shit, and the team thought I was useless. At the end of our first practice, we had to line to up get our team jersey. My coach was a cute teenage guy, and I knew right then that this wouldn't end well as all the pint-sized little girls ran up and got their beautiful, small-sized, emerald green jerseys.

Fat but not stupid, I waited until the line was done to go up and get mine. I couldn't look the cute coach in the eye. But he eyed me, alright—just not the way I hoped.

"Um... let's try this one," he said nicely as he scrounged for the next size up. When he took it out, my grandma put it on me. It was like squeezing sausage into casing. To conclude, it took a painstaking 15 minutes to find me a jersey that fit, which ended up being for the older girls' team. While my teammates ran around, glistening in their silky, deep green jerseys, I hobbled around in an ugly, algae green one.

I asked my grandpa if it was then that they realized maybe I had a weight problem. He says it still never came up, although he made the point of commenting on my athletic abilities. "You couldn't run as fast as the other kids," he tells me.

Me and normal-sized friend at age six. We were the same age

My mom also never thought I was obese, just a little hefty. "When me or your grandmother would go on Jenny Craig and we'd get the pre-cooked meals, you'd sneak into the freezer and eat the mac and cheese," she tells me. My mom worked late when I was a toddler, and I'd spend all day with my grandma, who obliged my every food desire. When my mom got home, I wanted to be carried, but she couldn't pick me up. "You were so fucking heavy," she says. "But you were fed with love."

This denial is coming from the woman who knows I'd choose food over a man. The last time my mom dared to share food with me, I was six years old and wouldn't give her a bite of my blueberry pie. We got into a fight and she didn't talk to me for days.

The whole "we loved you and didn't notice you were fat" comes up a lot when I ask my family to share my fat stories. Nobody has any, because they didn't think I was fat. They keep telling me how cute and happy I was (little did they know about my school yard life, keep reading), even though by eight I had reached colossal status. Keep in mind, I come from a family that doesn't sugar-coat anything. These people weren't trying to soften the blow—they genuinely didn't notice they had raised a blimp.

Me, my uncle, and my elastic-drawstring shorts blend, age four

What's missing from the equation of childhood obesity is parental responsibility. In 2015, researchers at NYU Langone Medical studied two groups of children: a group of 3,839 kids from 1988 to 1994, and a group of 3,151 kids from 2007-2012. In the first group, 97 percent of parents of overweight boys and 88 percent of parents of overweight girls said their kids were the "right weight." The numbers were similar for the more recent group, and a study the year before had similar findings.

When I ask my aunt if she noticed how big I was, she was speechless. "We used to say that kids who are well-loved and hugged are healthy, so we'd assumed that you were like that because we were always hugging you. You were so happy."

Not really. School was the place I found out I was a bigger fatty than I thought. The only reason I wasn't picked last in gym class was because during dodgeball, I made a fabulous human shield to hide behind, and during volleyball, kids would scatter like loose coins when I served the ball. During red rover, they would unlink their hands long before I even made it to the other side.

When boys played that stupid game of rating their female classmates, I was at the end of the list. My friends tried to set me up with a kid at the school across the fence, but when he saw me, he recoiled. I became the weekly school yard event because some little shit would steal my lunch and run around the yard, and kids would laugh as I chased him for my food.

This is all funny, but what it really did was kill my confidence, even to this day. I was 16 the first time I spoke to a boy, and 19 by the time I was comfortable making eye contact with people. I'm still extremely shy when I go out in public, and I assume that everyone is laughing at me when they probably don't even realize I'm there. Sometimes I swear I waddle. I even monitor how I eat my lunch because I think I'm going to be ridiculed for holding my sandwich a certain way, and I avoid trying to squeeze through tight spaces even though I know I can. Weight is still a constant battle.

Even the parrot is concerned. Age 4

Some experts say that the research is too limited to link self-esteem and depression issues to childhood obesity, but several studies have found a correlation. A 2009 report by researchers at the University of Alberta used Statistics Canada data from the mid and late 90s and surveyed kids at the ages of 10 and 11 on their self-esteem. They surveyed the same kids after two and four years, and found that children who were obese had almost twice the chances of reporting low self-esteem four years later compared with normal weight children.

The epidemic had to start somewhere; unfortunately it started with 90s kids (wasn't it bad enough we had soul patches and Fred Durst?). Now we have endless food options for children (kale puree is a thing now?) and value the importance of a healthy diet and lifestyle for the little human. Even though our obesity rate is not as bad as the States, we at least acknowledged that we've all played a role in fattening up our kids.

People are appalled when I tell them that I won't allow my future kids to eat whatever they want, but these are usually the skinny people who would've salivated at the chance to tease me. Once a fat kid, always a fat kid, no matter if you've shed the weight, and I refuse to have my children spend their youth crying in their room or starving themselves or being used as a fucking human dodgeball shield because I let them treat their stomach like a garbage can.

When I ask my mom why she let me get so big, she seems entirely convinced that I made myself fat. Deep down, we both know that isn't true, but I'll let her believe what she wants. I think she's still bitter about the blueberry pie.

Follow Eternity Martis on Twitter.

Syrian refugee children pet some furries at a hotel outside of Vancouver. Photo via Twitter user Dray

Though the number of Syrian refugees who've come to Canada just hit 25,000, only a small number of them can say that one of their first introductions to Canadian culture was being greeted by people in fursuits.

Newly arrived Syrian refugees in Canada who were being housed at a hotel just outside Vancouver by chance ended up sharing their temporary residence with a furry convention. VancouFur attendees wearing fursuits greeted enthusiastic children from some of the Syrian families with hugs and posed for photos with them at the Executive Airport Plaza Hotel where the con was held last weekend.

The annual furry con, attended by over 800 people this year (171 in fursuits), had clued into the fact that they'd be sharing the hotel with Syrian refugees and, in turn, informed its attendees by handing out a letter to each. "A major concern that VancouFur has is ensuring that each and every one of the refugees (and attendees) feels welcome and safe and the fact that this is likely to be a major shock to them... Keep in mind that they likely will not want to interact with you and consent is important to everyone," part of the letter read.

READ MORE: When Edmonton's Furry Scene Parties, They Party Hard

Late last month, in an interview with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, CNN host Jake Tapper asked the candidate whether he would disavow an endorsement from longtime Ku Klux Klan leader and white nationalist celebrity David Duke. Trump declined. "I don't know anything about David Duke," he said. Moments later, he added, "I know nothing about white supremacists."

Trump has since walked back his comments, blaming his hesitance to condemn the Klan on a "bad earpiece." The matter has now been filed away into the ever-growing archives of volatile statements Trump has made about race and ethnicity during the current election cycle—a list that includes kicking off his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, calling for the "'total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States," and commenting that perhaps a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies "should have been roughed up."

But the particulars of the David Duke incident call to mind yet another news story, one that suggests that Trump's father, the late New York real estate titan Fred Trump, once wore the robe and hood of a Klansman.

Versions of this story emerged last September when Boingboing dug up an old New York Times article from May of 1927 that listed a Fred Trump among those arrested at a Klan rally in Jamaica, Queens, when "1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all," in the streets. Donald Trump's father would have been 21 in 1927, and had spent most of his life in Queens.

As Boingboing pointed out, the Times account simply names Fred Trump as one of the seven individuals arrested at the rally, and states that he was released without charges, leaving room for the possibility that he "may have been an innocent bystander, falsely named, or otherwise the victim of mistaken identity during or following a chaotic event."

A few weeks after Boingboing unearthed that 88-year-old scoop, the New York Times asked Donald Trump about the possibility that his father had been arrested at a Klan event. The younger Trump denied it all, telling interviewer Jason Horowitz that "it never happened" four times. When Horowitz asked if his father had lived at 175-24 Devonshire Road—the address listed for the Fred Trump arrested at the 1927 Klan rally—Donald dismissed the claim as "totally false."

"We lived on Wareham," he told Horowitz. "The Devonshire—I know there is a road 'Devonshire' but I don't think my father ever lived on Devonshire." Trump went on to deny everything else in the Times' account of the 1927 rally: "It shouldn't be written because it never happened, number one. And number two, there was nobody charged."

Clipping from the Long Island Daily Press, January 22, 1936

Biographical records confirm that the Trump family did live on Wareham Place in Queens in the 1940s, when Donald was a kid. But according to at least one archived newspaper clip, Fred Trump also lived at 175-24 Devonshire Road: A wedding announcement in the January 22, 1936 issue of The Long Island Daily Press,places Fred Trump at that address, and refers to his wife as "Mary MacLeod," which is Donald Trump's mother's maiden name.

Moreover, three additional newspaper clips unearthed by VICE contain separate accounts of Fred Trump's arrest at the May 1927 KKK rally in Queens, each of which seems to confirm the Times' account of the events that day. While the clips don't confirm whether Fred Trump was actually a member of the Klan, they do suggest that the rally—and the subsequent arrests—did happen, and did involve Donald Trump's father, contrary to the candidate's denials. A fifth article mentions the seven arrestees without giving names, and claims that all of the individuals arrested—presumably including Trump—were wearing Klan attire.

Clipping from The Daily Star June 1, 1927

The June 1, 1927 account of the May 31 Klan rally printed in a defunct Brooklyn paper called The Daily Star, specifies that a Fred Trump "was dismissed on a charge of refusing to disperse." That article lists seven total arrests, and states that four of those arrested were expected to go to court, and two were paroled; Fred Trump was the only one not held on charges.

Clipping from the Queens County Evening News, June 2, 1927

The Klan's reaction to the alleged police brutality at the rally was the subject of another article, published in the Queens County Evening News on June 2, 1927, and titled "Klan Placards Assail Police, As War Vets Seek Parade Control." The piece is mainly about the Klan distributing leaflets about being "assaulted" by the "Roman Catholic police of New York City," at that same rally. The article mentions Fred Trump as having been "discharged" and gives the Devonshire Road address, along with the names and addresses of the other six men who faced charges.

Clipping from The Richmond Hill record, June 3, 1927

Yet another account in another defunct local newspaper, theRichmond Hill Record,published on June 3, 1927, lists Fred Trump as one of the "Klan Arrests," and also lists the Devonshire Road address.

Clipping from the Long Island Daily Press, June 2, 1927

Another article about the rally, published by the Long Island Daily Press on June 2, 1927, mentions that there were seven arrestees without listing names, and claims that all of the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire. The story, titled "Meeting on Parade Is Called Off," focuses on the police actions at the rally, noting criticism of the cops for brutally lashing out at the Klan supporters, who had assembled during a Memorial Day parade.

While the Long Island Daily Press doesn't mention Fred Trump specifically, the number of arrestees cited in the report is consistent with the other accounts of the rally. Significantly, the article refers to all of the arrestees as "berobed marchers"; if Fred Trump, or another one of the attendees, wasn't dressed in a robe at the time, that may have been a reporting error worth correcting.

According to Rory McVeigh, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Notre Dame, the version of the Klan that would have been active in Queens during the 1920s may not have necessarily participated in stereotypical KKK activities like fiery crosses and lynch mobs.

"The Klan that became very popular in the early 1920s did advocate white supremacy like the original Klan," McVeigh told VICE in an email. "But in that respect, not too much different from a lot of other white Americans of that time period." In New York, McVeigh added, "the organization's opposition to immigration and Catholics probably held the biggest appeal for most of the people who joined."

None of the articles prove that Fred Trump was a member of the Klan, and it's possible that he was, as BoingBoing suggested, just a bystander at the rally. But while Donald Trump is absolutely right to say that his father was not charged in the 1927 incident, the candidate's other claims—that Fred Trump never lived at 175-24 Devonshire Road, and more importantly that his involvement in a Klan rally "never happened"—appear to be untrue.

The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Photo by Time & Life Pictures via Getty

In the decades following the 1927 rally, after Fred Trump had gone on to become a wealthy real estate developer and landlord to thousands of New Yorkers, he faced accusations of racism, some of which were relatively quiet and informal. In the 1950s, one of his tenants, folk icon Woody Guthrie, wrote in the lyrics of an unpublished song that Fred Trump had drawn a "color line" in his Brooklyn neighborhood. "I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial Hate / He stirred up," the lyrics go. According to Trump biographer Gwenda Blair, Fred Trump, who had close ties to the Federal Housing Administration in the 1950s, likely profited from racist practices that the government tacitly endorsed at the time.

Formal accusations of racial bias in Fred Trump's residential real estate business eventually materialized in 1973, around the time that his son Donald was taking over management of the company. In a lawsuit filed that year, the US Department of Justice alleged that Trump Management Corporation had violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by systematically denying people rentals "because of race and color." Fred Trump, testifying as company president, said he was "unfamiliar" with the Fair Housing Act, and that he hadn't changed his business practices after the federal law went into effect.

In 1975, the Trumps made a deal with the government to resolve the suit without an admission of guilt. According to a New York Times story from June 11, 1975, the Trump Management Corporation "promised not to discriminate against blacks, Puerto Ricans and other minorities." But in 1978, the Justice Department filed another discrimination suit against the company, alleging that the Trumps weren't complying with the original terms of the 1975 settlement.

A 1979 story in The Village Voice chronicled the rise of Trump's real estate empire, including allegations of racial discrimination at properties managed by Trump. According to the Voice, when there were vacancies in a Trump housing block, rental applications were secretly marked with the applicant's race, and doormen were coached to discourage black people from renting; at times, Trump rental agents were allegedly told simply not to rent to black people. In 1983, the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal looked at two "Trump Village" residential properties, and found that they were 95 percent white.

In subsequent years, as Donald Trump morphed into a grandstanding tabloid celebrity, he developed a reputation for agitating the public about racially-charged issues. In 1989, he faced national criticism over full-page ads he took out in New York newspapers, warning of "roving bands of wild criminals" and calling for the return of the death penalty in a veiled reference to the Central Park Five. More recently, in the lead-up to the last presidential race, he reignited right-wing conspiracies over Barack Obama's birthplace, sending a team of investigators to Hawaii to uncover the president's true origins.

So the fact that race has become a central part of Trump's 2016 campaign should come as no surprise. Despite Trump's own insistence that he's the "least racist person that you have ever met," devoted racists like Duke are thrilled that The Donald has "sparked an insurgency." Trump may reject their endorsements, but that doesn't mean they've rejected him in return.

Tom O'Donnell performed archive research for this story.

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83-year-old murder suspect and former priest John Feit. Photo via Maricopa County Sheriff's Office

When the body of 25-year-old schoolteacher and beauty queen Irene Garza washed up in a canal, no one wanted to accuse the man whose photographic slide viewer was found near her corpse.

That's because the murder took place in the heavily Catholic South Texas in 1960, and the man was a priest. Even though Father John Feit was the chief suspect, and even though he was tied to the assault of another woman that same year, it was unfathomable that a man of God might commit such a heinous act. For decades, no one was charged in connection the to murder. As Garza's aunt would later explain to Texas Monthly, "Who were we to question a priest?"

But Feit, who is now 83, was finally indicted for the crime last month thanks to new evidence that has yet to be made public. On Wednesday, he was extradited from Arizona to Texas to stand trial for first-degree murder by asphyxiation.

On Easter weekend 1960, Garza borrowed her parents' car to go to Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas, and confess to Father Feit. But she never came home. Instead, her body was found five days later across the street from a Sears department store, facedown in the water, with evidence she had been beaten and suffocated. A light-green Eastman Kodaslide belonging to Feit was recovered nearby, and an autopsy would later determine Garza had been raped while in a coma.

Three weeks earlier, another woman named Maria America Guerra was attacked at a different Sacred Heart Church in the nearby town of Edinburg while praying her rosary. She eventually identified Feit in a lineup, and the priest told investigators he had been there that day.

Remarkably, even after Feit's alibis were strongly challenged by witnesses, he was never charged with the murder. The clergyman also gave suspicious––almost baiting––answers on a lie detector test that spanned questions about both Guerra's assault and Garza's murder. The examiner recorded that the test "definitely implicated him in both crimes." Eventually, the priest was charged with attempted rape of Guerra, but the jury deadlocked (with a majority in favor of conviction), and there was a mistrial. He instead pleaded no contest to aggravated assault, for which the penalty was a mere $500 fine.

In 2002, the case was reopened because two former priests said that Feit had confessed, but a grand jury failed to indict after prosecutors bizarrely declined to call either man to testify.

Hidalgo County District Attorney Ricardo Rodriguez promised during the 2014 election to reexamine the case. "I want to make one thing clear: This case is not about politics," he said in a press conference on Wednesday. "This case is not about proving a point. The only motive in this case is to try to finally bring justice and closure to this cold case."

Feit is currently awaiting trial in the infirmary of the Hidalgo County Jail. According to court records, several different parishes have been subpoenaed for records.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

About thirty minutes into the Republican debate Thursday night, Donald Trump's eyebrows rose out of sheer surprise. "I cannot believe how civil it's been!" he exclaimed, making that GIF-ready "Can you believe it?" face he does so well.

The Donald had a point: The debate—the 12th of the Republican primary race—was clean: no punches, no personal attacks, and no penis measurements. It was a remarkable show of restraint among candidates who, until now, haven't hesitated to dive head first into the political gutter. Clearly, the collective cringe over last week's dumpster-diving debate forced Trump's remaining rivals to realize that they would never be able to out-brawl the reality-TV star, and so might as well try to act mature.

In the first hour of the debate, hosted by CNN at Florida's University of Miami, the issues echoed those posed to the Democratic candidates during their own debate in Miami this week. The Republican contenders fielded questions on trade, national security, immigration reform, and other surprisingly substantive topics, rehashing their views on guest worker programs, job outsourcing, and K-12 education with a couple of anti-Obama platitudes, but surprisingly little vitriol told one another.

Trump, in particular, seemed more subdued—a gesture of détente, or perhaps just fatigue, from a man who has basically blown up the party whose presidential nomination he's seeking. The rivals surrounding him followed suit, adopting a tone of civility in one final attempt to derail the frontrunner at the polls.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who needed—and for the most got—a strong night Thursday, turned his attacks away from Trump's hands and "con man" personality, and toward his platform policy proposals, essentially arguing that the frontrunner's plans don't actually add up. At one point, Trump was asked if he really did believe "Islam hates us," and Rubio quickly criticized his brash attitude, to much applause, "I'm not interested in being politically correct," the Cuban-American Senator told the debate audience. "I'm interested in being correct."

For the most part, it worked well for Rubio, whose campaign needs a home state victory in Florida's primary next week just to stay in the race. Smartly, he appealed to Miami's substantial bloc of Cuban-American voters Thursday night, dominating Trump on questions about US diplomatic ties with Castro & Co. He also pledged to save Miami from sinking, while also toeing the conservative line on climate science. Meanwhile, Rubio's own policies never received much scrutiny, since Trump and the other candidates essentially just ignored him all night.

Trump, when he could bothered, turned most of his attention toward Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who was the first to attack the frontrunner Thursday night. But his attacks, as far as Trump attacks go, were lackluster, devoid of any references to "Lyin' Ted," or the fact that the Texas Senator is generally unlikeable. The only hint of hostility came after Trump did a brief impersonation of Cruz, before announcing loudly that, "I've won 10 states!"

Mostly, though, Trump kept his opinions to himself—a sign that either something had gone terribly wrong, or that Trump, like the rest of us, is ready for these nightmare debates to be over.

Asked whether the Republican primary race could stretch on all the way until the convention in Cleveland this summer, Trump reassured debate viewers that he would have no problems locking up the nomination beforehand. Rubio and Ohio Governor John Kasich, on the other hand, both of whom may not make it another week, deflected the question, entertaining the possibility of a drawn out primary as a justification for their flailing candidacies.

Cruz, however, sided with Trump, concurring that the GOP elites would not take the crown away from a candidate who had amassed the delegates needed to win the nomination. Throughout the night, he made the case that it would be he, not The Donald, claiming that top prize in Cleveland. To that end, Cruz desperately tried to poke holes in Trump's peculiar brand of billionaire populism, going after the frontrunner again for his donations to Hillary Clinton and other Beltway Democrats, and also for his positions on free trade.

"We've got to get beyond rhetoric of 'China bad' and actually get to, how do you solve the problem?" Cruz said during a protracted exchange on the latter subject. "This solution would hurt jobs and hurt hard-working taxpayers in America."

But the best line of the night came at the end, during the Texas Republican's closing remarks. "What an incredible nation we have that the son of a bartender, and the son of a mailman, and the son of a dishwasher," Cruz said, gesturing to Rubio, Kasich, and then himself. "And," he added, without missing a beat, "a successful businessman can all stand on this stage competing and asking for your support."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.

Life Inside is an ongoing collaboration between The Marshall Project and VICE that offers first-person perspectives from those who live and work in the criminal justice system.

In 2008, Sven Berger got a letter instructing him to report for jury duty. He ended up on the jury of Paul Storey, a young black man on trial for the shooting death of Jonas Cherry, an employee at a putt-putt mini golf chain in Hurst, Texas, near Fort Worth. There was little doubt about guilt, but Storey was facing the death penalty, and Berger, along with 11 other jurors, had to decide whether he should die for the crime.

They unanimously decided he should, and Storey is still on death row. But two years after the trial, a lawyer handling Storey's appeals called the jurors and discovered that Berger was having second thoughts.

The lawyer showed Berger a new report from a psychologist, detailing Storey's "borderline intellectual functioning," history of depression, and other "mitigating evidence" Storey's lawyers had not presented during the trial. Berger wrote in an affidavit that had he heard this evidence, "I would not have voted for the death penalty."

Today, Berger works as a software engineer in Olympia, Washington. We spoke by phone and email over several weeks about his experience sentencing Storey to death, and his subsequent regrets. Here's his account of that experience.

During jury selection, when lawyers for both sides asked me questions, I saw Paul Storey in the courtroom. He was skinny, wearing a suit that clearly didn't fit him, and his tie was tied poorly—way too long. (I wore suits every day so I noticed that sort of thing.) He appeared to be friendly, though he didn't make much eye contact. Maybe he was coached on how to behave.

I don't believe I met the other jurors until the trial began, and I was the youngest by maybe ten years. The presentation of evidence was incredibly long, and actually boring for a while. Everyone was a little tense, which makes sense considering that nobody really wanted to be there.

Once we found Storey guilty—the case against him seemed airtight: he'd confessed to the shooting multiple times—lawyers made their cases for and against the death penalty over a period of two or three days. At one point, the defense presented evidence that Storey stayed out of trouble in jail during the time leading up to the trial, and participated in bible study. I felt two ways about this: avoiding conflict is always good, but the whole finding religion thing made me suspicious of his intentions. I imagined a stereotypical prisoner, pretending to find God on the inside only to increase his chances of parole, or whatever. I'm sure this is unfounded, but we've all seen crime dramas or movies where some "reformed" criminal gets out just to inflict more harm.

To give someone a death sentence in Texas, the jury has to decide that he is capable of committing violent crime again in the future. I didn't believe that from what I saw—I just didn't get the feeling he was dangerous. Maybe it was a gut feeling. But the other jurors seemed anxious to deliver the death penalty, except for one woman, who might have been sympathetic.

It was a very stressful situation, and my brain tends to block that sort of thing out, which makes recall difficult. But I know we didn't deliberate long—one to two hours, maybe. The room was pretty quiet; it felt like everyone came in already knowing how to vote. All the other jurors thought he should be put to death.

If I could have done anything, it would have been to deadlock the jury, but I didn't have the personal strength to do it. I was 28, and not a mature 28. I've grown quite a lot since then, but at the time, I was really uncomfortable speaking out. Once we were asked to decide a sentence, I felt a rush of adrenaline and my stress level shot up. I couldn't have been the only one. In times like that, I know I don't think as clearly or rationally. I almost feel that in a case like this, jurors should be required to deliberate for some minimum amount of time.

When we delivered the sentence, it was quite emotional. That one woman juror—the one I thought had been sympathetic, like me—began to weep. I handed her my handkerchief.

The decision says something about who you are, and a lot of people don't want to look at the part of themselves that's willing to kill someone, to send them to death.

After we delivered the death sentence, we were told we could leave out the front and talk to press or go out a back door. Everyone took the back door.

I felt guilty about what happened. And sad. And a little helpless. I talked with my parents and my wife about how it bothered me. Eventually I started saying, "I don't think I made the right call." I had a friend, a police officer, who was a sounding board, and he tried to make me feel better, saying Storey's sentence would be appealed and the case would last a long time.

Storey's mother made a Facebook page for him. I considered sending a friend request, but then I thought if anyone looked into it and found out, it would be weird. Maybe once a month, I'd look at the page, which had pictures of him in prison — I was curious to see how he was doing or if he got clemency. But Texas doesn't do that very often.

I've always wanted to contact Storey, yet it never felt right. What would I say? What would he say? I'm not sure I'd be open to speaking with someone who helped ensure my own execution.