Editor's Note: You might know Bun B as the Texas-based rapper, professor, and activist who's one half of the legendary Houston duo UGK. He's also VICE's newest political correspondent, reporting on the ground from the campaign trail of the strangest presidential election in recent memory.

I have a question that's been on my mind for the last few weeks. Since the primary in New Hampshire, I've noticed that a number of the men attending Republican campaign rallies wear athletic gear—local sports jerseys and caps, and even some jerseys with the name of a presidential candidate across the back. There aren't a ton of these guys, but they're really hard to miss. The Ted Cruz campaign even seems to be giving "Cruz Crew" jerseys out to its volunteers. So are these guys treating political campaigns like sporting events?

Let's think about it: Sports fans get up on the morning of a home game; they put their gear on, turn on sports talk radio, and listen to guys call in to talk about how great the local team is and trash talk the day's opponent. That sounds a lot like how things go at campaign rallies, except instead of sports talk radio, they're listening to Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. Otherwise, the same basic structure applies: Our guy is good; the other guy is bad. Take the charged language of AM radio, mix it with a little beer and politics, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Trump fans. All photos by Abazar Khayami

And in Wisconsin at least, most guys who show up to campaign rallies seem like they've been drinking beer for hours, and by the time they get to the event, they're already buzzed and charged up for their candidate. At the Donald Trump town hall in Janesville on Tuesday, I actually saw guys drinking beer from clear plastic cups in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express where the Donald was speaking. At the campaign rally, everyone there looks and acts like these guys—so when they see someone else wearing a homemade Trump jersey, it's understood that he's on the same side. And how do they greet one another? "Go us! Fuck them!"

Enter the opposition: The away team, or in the case of a Trump rally, the protesters—in other words, the same people that the guys drinking in the parking lot have been talking shit about all day. And these guys are pumped, they've been drinking. So what happens now? At the very least, some kind of verbal confrontation. But as with any particularly rowdy sports game, the conflict easily escalates from verbal to physical. Think about an Oakland Raiders tailgate, or a Red Sox game—that's what it's like at a Trump rally. Things get ugly real quick.

An anti-Trump protest in Wisconsin

OK, back to our regularly scheduled program. It's our last full day in Wisconsin, and the candidates are taking a break before they come back and barnstorm the place before the primary on Tuesday. Without any big rallies on the schedule, we decide to roll by the Cruz campaign office in Waukesha County, a key Republican stronghold in southeast Wisconsin that all three of the remaining GOP candidates are trying to win.

For all of the fanfare surrounding Waukesha, the Cruz office itself is pretty low-key, located in an office park right off a main drag. The Republican Party of Waukesha County has an office a few doors down, and the storefront is covered in signs asking people to stand with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and a number of other local candidates who will be on the ballot April 5. The Cruz office is on the second floor, above the office for something called the Industrial Clutch Corporation, and a couple of campaign posters and yard signs let us know we're in the right place.

Volunteers make calls for Ted Cruz inside the campaign's Waukesha County field office.

Inside, the office is small and cramped, packed with volunteers phone-banking for Cruz. For those of you who've never been inside a campaign field office, a phone bank room is basically just a bunch of volunteers sitting at folding tables, calling their friends, relatives, neighbors, and basically anyone else they've ever met, asking them to commit to voting for the candidate in question, and maybe volunteer, or donate $5, depending on how the call goes. It's kinda like telemarketing, but they're doing it for free.

Maybe I've watched too many West Wing reruns or episodes of House of Cards, but I expected campaign field offices to have this incredibly infectious energy and be filled with some of the county's smartest political minds debating strategy and pacing around war rooms. I don't mean that to be condescending: The people in Cruz's Waukesha office are doing hard and thankless work. But this has to be the single most boring room in the county right now. The people here must really care about Ted Cruz to trap themselves in a room and do this shit for free. That's some real moral obligation shit right there. Mary Baxa, a first-time volunteer, tells me she got her son involved, knocking on doors for Cruz, and that she's been trying to get her parents to volunteer too. That's how seriously she's taking the election.

A sign inside Ted Cruz's Waukesha County field office informs volunteers about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's endorsement announcement.

Later in the afternoon, we make our way to Oak Creek, to the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. Some of you may remember this as the place where on August 5, 2012, a 40-year-old white supremacist named Wade Michael Page shot six members of Sikh faith and wounded four others, before turning the gun on himself. Nearly four years later, the Sikh community in Wisconsin continues to rebuild, but like Sikhs across the United States, they are forced to deal with racism and discrimination. According to the Sikh Coalition, the number of hate crimes against Sikhs have risen since 2012.

And because Sikhs are often confused with Muslims, they also have to contend with a growing strain of Islamophobia in American politics—a sentiment that's been stoked by recent statements from both Trump and Cruz. At a CNN town hall with Trump in Milwaukee on Tuesday, Lieutenant Brian James Murphy, the first police officer to respond to the 2012 shooting at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, noted that 99 percent of men in the US who wear turbans are Sikh, and not Muslim, and asked how the country can protect the constitutional rights of religious minorities while still addressing Islamic radicalization. Trump's answer was so rambling and incoherent that anyone who belongs to a minority faith in the US should reasonably be terrified at the prospect of his winning presidency.

A man worships inside the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

It's customary in the Sikh religion to cover one's head and take off one's shoes inside the temple, so naturally, we oblige. I meet Balhair Dulai, the temple's vice president, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more grail and peaceful human being. Dulai is calm, and he tells me about the 2012 massacre and how it helped bring the Oak Creek community—and Wisconsin—together: People who would have never even acknowledged him before the shooting now stop him to talk, he said. We're standing in the temple's library, and on the wall around us are images of the six people who were killed that day. Dulai mentions that the shooter, Wade Michael Page, didn't know anyone in the temple personally, and therefore must have simply been mentally unstable. That type of forgiveness, and faith, is incredible to me.

Dulai tells me a little bit about Sikhism, and he says that Sikhs represent peace and love. The temple, he says, has an open-door policy, and it offers free food to anyone who comes into the building—a policy that hasn't changed since the shooting. As he gives us a tour of the temple, Dulai tells me a little bit about the history of the Sikhs, specifically their legacy as warriors, and their contributions to the world wars. As he talks, it sickens me to realize that it's usually the people like Dulai—the ones who open up themselves to everyone, and who's work centers around being good to all—who get grossly taken advantage of.

Dulai leaves us with some literature on Sikhism and an offer of food and drink, and we thank him for his time and insight. I realize that, as a human being, I am better for having met this man. It takes everything in me to walk out of there with dry eyes. I can only hope his compassion for the world and his fellow man rubs off of me. Out here on the campaign beat, I could use it.

Follow Bun B on Twitter.

Over the last couple of days, dozens of media outlets have dropped stories on the so-called Panama Papers, which expose how the world's global elite hide their money. The 11.5 million documents—originally obtained by the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung—focus on a shady law firm called Mossack Fonseca, which as VICE reported in 2014, helps the rich and terrible conceal their assets. Not only did MF squirrel away cash that might otherwise have gone toward schools, highways, and hospitals, but the firm allegedly covered for people interested in financing terrorism without having their names linked to it.

Obviously, it's gonna take a long time to sift through all 2.6 terabytes of new data. But what we've seen so far suggests a conspiracy that belongs in a Bond movie, and implicates pretty much every genre of rich and powerful person on the planet.

Surely, heads are gonna roll. Already, some are calling for Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson to resign over revelations about a company he and his wife held in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister David Cameron has some awkward questions to answer about an offshore fund apparently run by his father, and FIFA officials continue to have a very, very bad stretch in the public eye. Finally, on Monday, the US Department of Justice said the feds are trying to suss out an American link to the scandal. But realistically, what will happen to the country that housed the law firm that allowed all of this to go down? Perhaps more importantly, is there anything that can be done to prevent the same thing from happening again once all eyes are no longer on Panama?

To answer some of these questions, I called up Christian Reeves, a tax consultant who works at Premiere Offshore––a planning company that, as its name suggests, helps clients set up offshore assets. (The company's website boasts, "We are the only international incorporator that offers US tax compliance.") Reeves helped me get an idea of the industry reaction, and what we can expect from on high in the next couple of years.

VICE: For those of us still wrapping our heads around it, can you lay out what, exactly, the scam is here?
Christian Reeves: So what people were doing is they would find people in Panama who are lawyers or financial advisors and form companies with them as the advisors. So the advisor is the alleged beneficial owner of company and the signer of the bank account. And he goes, "This three million dollars is mine, and I want to put it into your bank." And the bank opens the account and lists the attorney or advisor as the owner––which is obviously in violation of every kind of tax compliance rule there is. But that's apparently what they've been doing at Mossack Fonseca for a number of years.

I thought the stereotype of being shady was having a Swiss bank account, not a South American lawyer.
Well, Americans were doing the same thing in Switzerland years go. The US came in an audited the heck out of UBS and eventually got them to disclose all of their American clients. What these clients had done was put nominees as signers and managers on their accounts, and a great number of them went to jail for failing to report the ownership of the account. So the same thing that happened in Switzerland is going to be happening in Panama over the next couple of years.

When did Panama become the epicenter of this sort of financial crime?
It's been an offshore center for many years, and just about every offshore center has been accused of this from Hong Kong to the Cayman Islands back in the day. Panama is certainly the biggest in terms of Latin American clients.

How big of a problem are offshore tax havens both in the US and worldwide?
The American client who has a couple hundred thousand or a million dollars hidden offshore and unreported––the US government has closed most of those loopholes. I think the ones you'll find coming out of the Mossack leak over the next couple of years will be very big, multi-millionaire clients. I would expect that these are extremely high net worth individuals because the middle of the market was pretty much shut down by the US. The average guy with a few million he wants to hide offshore and untaxed––those days are long gone.

How did the US government close those loopholes?
In the UBS case, the US came in and stripped Switzerland's financial privacy, audited all of their banks, made their banks pay giant fines, and disclose all of their clients. And then at the same time the US issued a voluntary disclosure program that said if you had an offshore account that was unreported and know it's illegal and we catch you, the penalties are going to be extremely severe including massive fines and jail time. But they gave people the opportunity to come forward and disclose the unreported account with less severe penalties. They promised not to lock those people up, and several hundred thousand Americans went through this program and they raised something like $12 billion.

How did the US have the ability to tell another country what to do?
In UBS, what happened is that it's a global bank—a great deal of its transactions are done in United States dollars. They have a bank license here in the US that had many hundreds of millions of dollars in it. So what the US did was say, "We're going to shut down your US bank, seize your assets, and prohibit you from doing transactions in US dollars." And maybe 75 percent of the world's transactions are in US dollars, so the bank would have gone out of business. So the shareholders of the bank say, "Well that's no good, you can't do that. So we'll just go ahead and eliminate the Swiss privacy that's been around for many hundreds of years." It managed to withstand World War II, but it didn't withstand the US IRS.

So will the feds do the same thing to Panama?
Well they haven't really disclosed what information is out there. The big statements are about heads of state. I have a feeling that's probably going back to the 80s. But they were talking about people who have raided their country's coffers and taken money out of the country illegally and put it in the name of the ex-president's brother, or something. What the US can do is say, "You've hidden money to escape our sanctions, so we're going to levy fines against your banks." And they were successful in doing that after the Libor scandal broke. So the US has a history of levying massive fines against foreign banks that take steps to help clients the US doesn't like.

Is this just like a whack-a-mole vibe? Are we gonna be hearing about another country doing the same thing in three years?
I think it's just gonna be whack-a-mole. Panama has an enormous banking center, much larger than any of the other little Caribbean jurisdictions like Belize. The US essentially shut down the country of Belize's banking system back in November or December. There was Bank of Belize, and the government said they were hiding clients who didn't pay taxes, so they shut them down. The Bank of Belize was the clearinghouse for every offshore bank in the country. So just about every offshore bank was shut down for three or four months and they're just starting to get back up and running. So in theory the US can do the same thing––they can just shut down their banking and freeze the funds they have in the US and force them to comply with any rule or regulation that they want.

Based on your sense of what's come out so far, if someone's name is in the leak, are they necessarily a criminal? Or did the law firm offer legitimate services, too?
I would bet that the vast majority of the clients were doing legitimate, ordinary business and probably a small fraction of them are doing illegal business. Let's say you're an American citizen and you formed your Panama business with these guys. Should you be worried about it? Well, if you haven't reported to the US IRS, you should be extremely afraid and the government is going to be looking to make examples of a few people in order to get a few hundred or thousand people to voluntarily disclose. What the US does when they get leaked data is go after a few people with a vengeance, one or two in each state. They'll put them in jail and put up posters on their site saying, "We got this guy for tax evasion." And the reason they do that is because it's their marketing campaign. There will be a new wave of voluntary disclosures who just want to pay their 50 percent penalty before the IRS can digest the leaks and go about their way.

What's the difference between tax fraud and tax planning? Like, why might someone have an offshore business account that's not solely to pay less in taxes?
There's a couple different reasons. One, somebody might just want to hold their funds out of the country for assets protection or privacy. They want to keep cash out of the reach of civil creditors. And such a situation would be tax neutral. It's not going to increase or decrease their US taxes, and if somebody tried to sue them, they'd have to sue them in Panama, for example, if it was a Panama corporation. Then there's people with legitimate businesses with offices and people and staff outside of the country. So let's say you're a makeup company and you're selling to Latin America. It would probably make sense to put an office in Panama to facilitate your distribution.

I bet you get some shady calls. Are people ever straight-up, like, "Help me hide my shit"?
We get people all the time, but maybe 90 percent of them don't know it's illegal. They ask, "If I'm going to open a business, can't I just operate my business through an offshore corporation, live in the United States, and then pay taxes in the United States when I bring the money back?" They think that's what Apple and Google do, and I have to tell them no, because they have offices and staff and employees and a real legitimate business happening outside the US. That physical presence abroad can earn money and only be taxed when it comes back to the US. That's how they're able to do it. I think the vast majority of people who get in trouble for this have just been given bad advice; they talked to someone in Panama or Belize or somewhere else, and now they're screwed.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

Musical Urban Legends is a series of comics based on music world whispers and hearsay. The scenes depicted are not matters of historical fact. Check out Peter Bagge's website, Twitter, and buy his books from Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly.

The Panama Papers—11.5 million leaked documents that detail the inner workings of Mossack Fonseca, a law firm accused of helping drug lords, sports stars, Ponzi schemers, kings, presidents, prime ministers, FIFA officials, Mafia members, high-profile thieves, high-ranking politicians, and at least one convicted sex offender launder money, evade taxes, and escape criminal prosecution—are a big deal.

Mossack Fonseca has ties to the £26 million Brink's-MAT robbery of 1983, which British media called "the crime of the century." Thirty-three of its clients have been blacklisted by the US government for allegedly doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations, and "rogue nations" like North Korea and Iran. Its files have unearthed a secret, shady $2 billion trail of money that leads to Vladimir Putin. One of its clients played a crucial role in the Watergate scandal. Another was convicted for the torture and murder of a US drug enforcement agent.

READ MORE: The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators

With a story this big—dubbed by Edward Snowden as "the biggest leak in the history of data journalism"—it can be difficult to understand exactly what's at stake. The Panama Papers are, unquestionably, insane. But what do they have to do with you?

If you live in one of the 200 countries and territories that Mossack Fonseca's clients call home—and, given the fact you're reading this article, you probably do—the story of the Panama Papers is your story. The money the law firm helps to hide should be used to pay for your schools, your highways, your hospitals. The criminals it works with run the most violent illegal organizations your country has ever seen. The politicians who have taken and made bribes, dodged taxes, and amassed fortunes of unimaginable scale are your politicians.

Not long after the story broke, people started posting tweets along the lines of: "Shock, horror: wealthy, powerful people are corrupt—why should I give a shit?" Well, because of course you should give a shit. To know this story—of hidden millions, of corruption, of murder and bribery and power and betrayal—is to know your own. Here's how the revelations came to be, and why you should care.

THE LEAK

A little over a year ago, an anonymous source reached out to the German newspaper Süeddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and offered them heaps of internal documents from Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in selling offshore companies based in tax havens across the globe. The source didn't ask for compensation. Instead, he wrote in an email to the paper that he wanted one thing: "To make these crimes public."

Over the next several months, SZ found themselves with about 2.6 terrabytes of data. They shared it with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), allowing hundreds of reporters from more than 100 media organizations in 80 countries to sift through the documents. After a year of research, they've finally begun to figure out how Mossack Fonseca works—and to uncover how a business that's never faced criminal prosecution could have a bigger hand in corruption, bribery, and crime than anyone ever imagined.

THE SCHEME

Offshore companies aren't illegal—not inherently, anyway. But using them to hide assets from tax authorities, thwart investigations, and protect criminals is.

Here's how this whole mess of a situation works:

An individual, often through a middle-man they're close to, pays Mossack Fonseca to create a "shell company"—a business on paper, but in reality, a storehouse for a shit-ton of money, whether in cold hard cash or tied up in shares. Mossack Fonseca sets up the shell company offshore in a place like Panama (where the firm is based), the British Virgin Islands, or any other "tax haven"—a place where the true owner of a company can be anonymous and their home country (which, typically, doesn't know about the company in the first place) can't tax it.

Say a politician makes $100,000 per year as their salary, and for some reason—bribes, business deals, all manner of shady shit—also makes upwards of $1 million in some other way. If they put that money in an offshore shell company, they can access it without being taxed for it. Even if the shell company is discovered, it can't be tied directly to the politician because the company is technically owned by someone else—a stand-in owner who's appointed by Mossack Fonseca to run the company on paper, but, in reality, doesn't own anything. To move the money, the company pretends to make business deals: the Panama Papers reveal thousands of fake share trades, million-dollar payments for "consultancy," and huge payouts in "compensation" for canceled transactions.

"This is not business," money-laundering expert Andrew Mitchell QC told BBC Panorama. "This is creating the appearance of business in order to continually move and hide assets."

THE SCANDALS

Let's start with the big one: Vladimir Putin.

His boyhood friend, Sergei Roldugin—a major-league cellist and the godfather of Putin's firstborn daughter—is listed as the owner of a slew of offshore companies. They've been set up by Mossack Fonseca, and they've received innumerable payments worth tens of millions, the Papers revealed. However, it appears that the money's not actually going to Roldugin. Instead, the ICIJ believes, it's going to Putin's closest associates—and maybe even Putin himself.

The way that works is tricky. It's best explained, I think, by a mind-blowing example that the ICIJ highlighted in their reporting:

On the February 10, 2011, an anonymous company in the British Virgin Islands named Sandalwood Continental Ltd. loaned $200 million to an equally shady firm based in Cyprus called Horwich Trading Ltd.

The following day, Sandalwood assigned the rights to collect payments on the loan—including interest—to Ove Financial Corp., a mysterious company in the British Virgin Islands.

For those rights, Ove paid $1.

But the money trail didn't end there.

The same day, Ove reassigned its rights to collect on the loan to a Panama company called International Media Overseas.

It too paid $1.

Photo: kremlin.ru via

In the space of 24 hours, the loan had, on paper, traversed three countries, two banks, and four companies, making the money all but untraceable in the process. St. Petersburg-based Bank Rossiya, an institution whose majority owner and chairman has been called one of Putin's "cashiers," established Sandalwood Continental and directed the money flow.

International Media Overseas, where rights to the interest payments from the $200 million appear to have landed, was controlled, on paper, by one of Putin's oldest friends: Sergei Roldugin.

The point is this: here, somebody with extremely close ties to Putin traded $200 million for $1. That's just one of several transactions ICIJ uncovered in Mossack Fonseca's files—totaling at least $2 billion—that involves companies or individuals "uncomfortably close" to Putin. As ICIJ points out, the money might be changing hands in secret because it's being used as "payoffs" for aid from the Russian government or big-ticket contracts. To boil what's at hand down to a word: corruption.

FIFA, it turns out, is more fucked up than we thought—and Mossack Fonseca is involved. Four of the soccer organization's 16 officials indicted in the US for corruption used Mossack Fonseca to create offshore companies. A member of FIFA's Independent Ethics Committee, Pedro Damiani, did work for seven MF offshore companies tied to former FIFA Vice President Eugenio Figueredo—the guy who was charged for wire fraud, money laundering, and racketeering in May of last year. Additionally, it looks like there's no way Damiani didn't know that Hugo and Mariano Jinkis—a father-son duo who allegedly bribed FIFA officials with tens of millions for broadcasting rights to Latin American matches—were doing something dirty. Damiani is now the subject of an internal investigation by the very ethics committee he helps to run.

Iceland's Prime Minister, who came to power after the collapse of several major banks in his country, effectively owned an offshore company (yep, you guessed it, set up by our friends at Mossack Fonseca) that had major holdings in those same banks. I say "effectively" because, though he once owned half of the company's shares, he's since sold the rest to his wife. For $1. While it's unclear if the PM, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, did anything illegal, he and his government negotiated settlements with the same banks he held shares in. Since the Panama Papers story broke, he's been called to step down.

Every major scandal that the Panama Papers have brought to light is equally (if not more) tricky to understand as this whole Putin business. If you're interested in the evidence behind each shit-show, I'd highly recommend exploring the ICIJ's website.

Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson. Photo by Frankie Fouganthin via

THE POINT

I could keep listing these scandals for days—exposing the questionable financial affairs of the prime minister of Pakistan; the king of Saudi Arabia; the children of Azerbaijan's president; the son of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; eight members of the Politburo, China's main ruling body; even the shady dealings of Jackie Chan—but for now, I think it's enough for you to know the numbers.

The Panama Papers uncovered a total of 61 family members and associates of prime ministers, presidents, or kings who use Mossack Fonseca's services. The firm has helped hide billions of dollars from governments across the globe—dollars that, ordinarily, would be subject to taxation. It's done business with folks who looted millions from a death benefits pool that was supposed to go to widows and orphans. And it's been doing all this for 40 years now, undetected—until that anonymous source got in touch with Süeddeutsche Zeitung.

We all have content nausea. Every day, hundreds of advertisements scream at us from billboards and phone screens and televisions. We couldn't listen to all the music released in the past six months over the course of our entire lifetimes. We are buried in headlines, overwhelmed by the amount of news we have access to, and unsure, sometimes, of the best place to turn for it. In an era where information is so abundant, it's exhausting to try to consume it all.

The Panama Papers—more so, perhaps, than any piece of news you'll come across in the next decade—isn't an easy story to understand. It'll take a long while to figure it out—the dozens of media outlets covering it haven't even sorted through all the documents they've been given. But it's a story worth spending time on. Because, unlike so much of what this world is inundated with, it is a story that applies to you.

Follow Drew on Twitter.

According to a Pew study from late last year, thanks to immigration, the US is going to change quite a bit over the next 50 years. One in three people will be an immigrant or a child of immigrants instead of the current one in four. The population will also be eight percent more Asian and six percent more hispanic. That sets the scene for a lot of changes in the way people will talk.

When people show up and start having their way with the local language, pidgins—or hybrid languages—form, typically remaining isolated, like Louisiana French Creole did. And as the linguist William Lavov pointed out in the 60s and 70s, regional dialects aren't wrong; they're just part of the natural changes that happen to every language over time.

French Creole never really made it into American English, but Ilan Stavans, an Amherst College English professor, lexicographer, and linguistics pundit, suspects that some of the Spanish being spoken in the US will cross over into the mainstream in the next few decades. Some of what will creep in, he thinks, will be some of the more common words derived from Spanglish—which isn't a language, but a term for various English-Spanish hybrids. I chatted with him to find out what kind of changes are in store for the American way of speaking, despite President Trump's best efforts to stop them. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

VICE: Hi Ilan! How do you see English changing in the next 50 years?
Ilan Stavans: DuBois called the 20th Century the century that was going to be defined by the color line. I think the 21st Century no doubt is the century that's going to be defined by the immigration line.

What kind of changes will come about from immigration in particular?
It's hard to predict exactly how people are going to be speaking 50 years from now, in terms of how the sentence is going to be built. But we can speculate. People usually hesitate to ask me what's going to happen in the future, and when they do, I generally answer that the future is difficult to tackle, but let's consider the present a form of the future, because Spanglish is so widespread today. I think in 2056, the language is going to have absorbed a lot of neologisms—terms that come from African languages, Asian languages, Spanish and Portuguese, through immigration, and through other strategies.

Right, but Spanglish in my experience varies from city to city. Do Spanglish terms end up in the general lexicon?
The word "Washateria" is a word that started in New York to describe laundromats, and now it's found in Miami and in Texas in neighborhoods that are Spanish-speaking or Spanglish-speaking.

Are you sure the Spanish language will be the most powerful driver of change, considering Mexico no longer dominates in terms of immigration like it once did?
The number of Mexicans has decreased because more Mexicans are leaving the country than entering the United States, but I don't think that establishes a pattern of less Mexicans wanting to come north. It's just that the economy has been down mostly in the last few years, but the "allure of the north" in Mexico remains as strong as ever. I think in 50 years you're going to see a lot of elements that are from Spanish in the English language in a much more emphasized fashion.

You've also looked at the effects of Chinese immigration on language. Do you think words from hybrid languages like so-called "Chinglish" will show up in American English?
Asian parents are much more conservative in allowing their children to switch language. The thing where you switch languages at home is not as accepted as it is in Latino families. There is not a cultural or political force behind it in the way that there is for Spanglish.

What kinds of Spanglish terms are already on the verge of entering English?
Two or three years ago, something very interesting was published by McGraw-Hill. They released a dictionary of Spanglish for construction purposes, for Anglos to use to communicate with the people working construction who only speak Spanglish. You can see words that really are only used by the folks that are doing the building, and now gringos need to absorb them. There are also words like "registrar" are words that are likely to enter the English language.

Apart from Spanglish words creeping in, will the language change in other ways?
The grammar and syntax of English will change as a result of the high number of latinos in the United States. You don't build a sentence in the same way in Spanish as in English. English is a Germanic language, and Spanish is a Romance language, but with the growth of the population, you can sometimes have expressions, or build sentences where, for instance, objects have a gender. A chair is feminine. Sometimes I have heard people referring to a "the" as a "she."

That would really be weird. Do you think we might see something as drastic as people using an adjective after a noun in English?
Absolutely.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Read: Eating Candy Is the Most Adult Thing You Could Do

In the dystopian criminal justice netherworld that is New Orleans, stealing candy is no laughing matter.

After "career shoplifter" Jacobia Grimes was arrested in December for allegedly pocketing $31 worth of candy at a local store, the district attorney boosted the low-level theft to a full fledged felony charge that could put him behind bars for 20 years to life, the New Orleans Advocate reports.

Because of Grimes's previous crimes, he's considered a "quad offender" and Orleans Parish DA Leon Cannizzaro was able to charge him with the felony under the state's habitual offenders law, intended for people who have committed theft at least two times before. (Grimes has been convicted five times of theft, though each case centered on items valued at under $500.)

When Grimes appeared in court on Thursday to plead not guilty, even the judge was stunned.

"Isn't this a little over the top?" asked Criminal District Court Judge Franz. He later added, "It's not even funny. Twenty years to life for a Snickers bar, or two or three or four."

Louisiana has long been known for having some of the harshest sentencing laws in America. The state has also been coping with a budget crisis in the public defender system that leaves some accused people without counsel.

Grimes is lucky enough to have a lawyer, but he's still in serious trouble.

Michael Kennedy, Grimes's attorney, said the 34-year-old is a heroin addict with a ninth-grade education. "It's unconscionably excessive to threaten someone with twenty years to life for candy," he argued.

Military and police personnel on the streets of Brussels in March. Photo by Bertrand Vandeloise

The really awful thing about terrorism is the way it can suddenly, brutally, turn banality into significance. Whatever the mythopoeic pretensions of the attackers, the target is almost always ordinary, everyday life: People are killed on their way to work, bored and restless and hovering over their small worries, or while enduring the administered interminability of air travel, or buying food and necessities, or on another vaguely satisfying night out with friends. Terrorism cuts right into the safe anonymity of normal life and raises that moment into a horrifying importance. That's why it's so terrifying. You hear about people being murdered, not in danger zones or battlefields, but while doing the most ordinary things, and you think: I do that, I do that every day, that could have been me. When personal history turns into world history, it's always something monstrous.

But it doesn't always work. The series of attacks in Brussels on the March 22—two bombs at an airport, one in a train station, 32 victims dead, scores injured, that lurid and panicked nightmare we've all been dreading—are also notable for what didn't happen. After Paris was attacked last November, normal life seemed to stop, as if in sympathy; it felt impossible, or at least insulting, to keep on doing all our insultingly mundane stuff in the face of this sheer tragedy. With Brussels, it seemed, something had changed. Are we growing more callous? There were still frantic news reports and stiff statements of sorrow from politicians. There is still the insidious nonsense of the far right, their calls to close the borders and deport all Muslims, the sense radiating off them that they're secretly glad that this happened, that wormy conviction nestling deep in their outrage: People died for the sole purpose of proving just how right I was all along; as if the mere fact of saying this doesn't prove that you were wrong the whole time.

Of course, in Belgium, it must have felt very different, but here in England, at least, there wasn't that same feeling that the Earth had briefly stopped spinning. It's obviously subjective, but there were some concrete signs. There was no Belgian flag photo filter on Facebook. After the Paris attacks, thousands gathered for a vigil in Trafalgar Square; this time, a number of people laid flowers outside the Belgian embassy.

A fortnight on, data from content analysts Buzzsumo can add some numbers that might give us pause for thought. In the 24 hours following the Paris attacks, media organizations made over 172,000 Facebook posts mentioning the word "Paris." In the same time period following the Brussels attacks, over 45,000 public posts were made mentioning "Brussels."

This might be because, standing on the outside, it felt so much like an appendix to the events in Paris—after all, it did erupt just after the arrest of Salah Abdeslam by Belgian police. But it's more than that: Terrorism, which is supposed to be singular and shattering, is becoming normal. We saw something similar with the IRA's mainland campaign in the 1970s—so many bombings that they ended up becoming part of that same social fabric they were trying to disrupt. It's starting to fade into the background: just another worry, a paranoia among paranoias.

This is called compassion fatigue. It's always been common among nurses and paramedics: people who start out with a real horror of all the evil in the world and the determination to end it, but after a while something starts to fade, and they become cynical. Spend too much time around death, and it becomes ordinary. But now, this is happening to everyone. Take Syria, or the migrant crisis. At the beginning of the war, every new massacre or atrocity really was treated with the indignation and solidarity it deserved; when boats started sinking in the Mediterranean, people really were as horrified as they ought to have been by the cruel and capricious destruction of innocent lives. Today, if a bomb hits a market in Damascus and 30 people die, it's hardly even noticed. It already dissolves into the constant background of horror, the screaming we pretend not to hear: That's just the kind of thing that goes on over there. Attacks in Europe haven't reached that stage yet, but it's not hard to see it happening: How many more killings until they stop making the front page of the newspapers, until spectacular violence becomes as unspectacular as car accidents, or homelessness, or any of the other things that tear away hundreds of lives without anyone feeling the need to do anything about it?

And this is monstrous: The value of people's lives shouldn't depend on where they live, or whether something similar had already happened to someone else. The only conceivably ethical response would be the refusal to ever stop caring about the suffering of others, and the only problem with this is that it can't be done. As Derrida put it, "the world is going very badly, it wears as it grows." Millions are starving, and millions are hopeless. Every day new corpses are churned out by a seemingly impersonal system burrowing its foundations deep into the planet's core. To mourn each victim with the sadness he or she deserves would make it impossible to ever really live. It's almost blasphemous to just go about your day when the everyday is being so systematically lacerated, or to ever enjoy yourself in the face of a tragedy that never lets up. This is why there's something very cruel about the occasional self-righteousness of the grief police: "Why do you care about this happening in Europe, but not this happening in Africa?" Because it's all too much. Compassion fatigue is a self-defense mechanism, a barrier against the world, the only shelter in which it's possible to survive.

The sad fact is that caring about the victims of tragedy, however morally necessary, doesn't really do anything. The frightening fact is that things don't have to be like this. And it's frightening because it replaces the impossible duty of infinite compassion with a duty that's entirely achievable but very, very hard: to find out why things are so bad, and to actually work to make them better.

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Dani and Mathilda. Photo Courtesy of Dani

This article originally appeared on VICE Netherlands.

On a recent visit to Stockholm, I met Miranda—an LGBT-activist and mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old child. I use the word "child" deliberately here, because Miranda chose to raise her baby gender neutral, which means she is trying to bring her child up in an environment free of gender stereotypes.

It seems like a very Swedish thing to do—what with the Swedish government handing out Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists to every 16-year-old in the land, and encouraging Swedish dads to take 90 days of paid leave off work for every baby they make. With that in mind, it's no surprise that the first gender neutral pre-school, Egalia, opened in Stockholm in 2010, funded with money from the municipality.

But raising your children gender neutral is not an exclusively Swedish thing: Beck Laxton and Keiran Cooper are Britain's most famous gender neutral raising parents, having appeared in the media about the subject and maintaining a blog about it for a while. A very short phone call I had with the couple made it pretty clear that they didn't want any media attention. On her blog, Beck Laxton writes that the couple got "accidentally splashed all over the media after innocently giving an interview to a friend of a friend who was working for Cambridge News" in January 2012.

But there are quite a few Facebook groups for parents who want to raise their children gender neutral, and that's where I found Dani, who was willing to talk to me. Dani, from Dartford, Kent, is the stay-at-home parent of a five-year-old who identifies as agender. I talked to Dani and Miranda, as well as Lotta Rajalin – the founder of Swedish gender neutral pre-school Egalia – about what it means to raise a child gender neutral.

Miranda and her baby. Photo courtesy of Miranda

For both Miranda and Dani, their parenting philosophy doesn't feel like a radical change: "My ideas on gender were already part of my life before I gave birth, so that was just an extension of what I believed and practiced," Dani explains. Miranda tells me she sees it as a basic feminist notion to believe we're all limited by gender roles and the expectations that go along with these roles.

According to Dani, gender neutrality is not about finding a gender neutral middle but about offering a child the option to be whoever they want to be—without feeling obliged to choose blue over pink. "We love all colors—we love the rainbow," Dani says. "The world is colorful." For their children, they try to mix toys and clothes meant for both sexes. "Whether my child wants to wear something pink or a shirt with Superman on it, it's all fine," Miranda explains. Which doesn't sound very radical, but Dani says people do take Mathilda for a boy every now and then, when she's wearing a blue shirt. Which doesn't bother Dani nor Mathilda.

Miranda and Dani both say the way they were raised influenced them in their own parenting. Miranda's mother was, as they say, a bit of a tomboy. "My mother was worried she wouldn't naturally do girly stuff with me, so she actively took me to ballet and horse riding. But I hated it." Dani's mother was different: "My mother loved red so that's what she dressed me in. She didn't like the fact that I cut my hair short, but I grew up in East Germany in the 1980s, so it wasn't as big of a problem as it might have been here in the UK these days."

When they found out they were pregnant, they both decided they did not want to know the sex of their baby before birth. Miranda says: "I noticed that when people hear you're pregnant, the first question they ask is whether it's a boy or a girl. I really didn't care myself—why were other people so eager to figure out my child's genitals?"

Miranda doesn't call her child a he , but she uses the gender neutral pronominal hen, that officially exists in Swedish since last year. She also doesn't use the traditional pronouns when she reads to her baby. "Stories in children's books contain a lot of gendered clichés, and I'd like my child to remember the characters and actions without connecting them to a sex." She gave her child a unisex name, so the name won't influence the child's sense of gender either. "I'm just being honest about what I know and what I don't know. My baby is just two and a half, how much can we know about its gender?" she exclaims.

Critics say the effort that goes into gender neutral parenting is a form of unnatural indoctrination—that there's simply a biological difference between men and women, and that that difference starts even before birth. But Miranda feels she's actually liberating her child from the gendered indoctrination society pushes on people. "It's ridiculous to say that gendered behavior is purely natural—it's cultural. Representations of men and women throughout history have been so different, and I'm just trying to liberate my child from that mold. People say I indoctrinate my child, but I'm really not the one doing the indoctrinating."

Lotta Rajalin. Photo by Gustav Mårtensson

Lotta Rajalin, the director and founder of Egalia, tells me she received a lot of hate and threats when the pre-school opened. Apparently, the hate is gone: "There is actually a long waiting list now," she says.

I ask her if she thinks that Egalia is preparing kids for the real world or not, and she says she thinks it does. "The world is changing so fast: There are a lot of non-traditional families—a lot of children are raised in a family with two fathers or mothers, and within traditional families, gender roles are changing. We're preparing them for that." She adds that a lot of people think that there are no toy cars in the pre-school. "But why shouldn't we have toy cars? We don't limit anyone. We find a way to play with cars that can interest everybody."

Despite living in Stockholm, Miranda's child isn't going to Egalia. "I think people who send their kids to Egalia need help in raising their kids gender neutral. I don't. My child and I are surrounded by people who already identify as queer. Besides, that pre-school is in Södermalm—an upper-class, white neighborhood. I don't want my child to grow up in an environment dominated by white people." She also did not ask the pre-school she did choose to treat het child gender neutral: "I'm not a utopist, but I just want to offer one environment where my child can feel free from gender roles."

Reactions on their parenting philosophy are mixed—split 50-50, according to Dani: "Some people agree with me, but some people around me ignore it and keep buying Mathilda girly stuff."

Miranda, on the other hand, feels she has inspired some other parents: "They start to wonder why they wanted to know the sex of their baby." According to her, it's mostly the older generation that has difficulties accepting her lifestyle. "When older people want to give a compliment to a child, it's often expressed within a gender stereotype. They say stuff like, 'You're my big strong boy,' or 'Aren't you a cute little princess?'" Her family, however, respects her decisions and tries to avoid addressing her child that way. "The world is changing and adapting to new gender concepts, she says. "It just needs time."

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Read: You Might Be Jeering at the Victims of the Ashley Madison Hack, but Watch Out—You're Next

There's a new way to find out if you're being cheated on, and it only costs a few dollars more than your average cup of coffee. Vanity Fair reports that a new website called Swipe Buster will let you find anyone on Tinder for the low, low price of $5.

After paying the fee, all you have to do is enter the first name, age, and general location of whoever you're spying on. Swipe Buster will scour Tinder's public API—which holds all Tinder users info—and spit the data back at you. It'll show you who fits the info you entered, their photos, when they last logged on, and whether they're looking for women or men.

In the old days, a distraught spouse would have to hire some Philip Marlowe–type to track their husband or wife. Thanks to Swipe Buster, you can do the whole thing from the comfort of your own home. Handy, right?

According to the Vanity Fair article, Tinder—clearly peeved by Swipe Buster—said in a statement that "searchable information on the website is public information that Tinder users have on their profiles. If you want to see who's on Tinder, we recommend saving your money and downloading the app for free."

You could also, like, maintain an open and honest relationship and just talk things out instead of spying with some freaky-ass technology, but whatever.

Photo courtesy THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

After being elected to office last November, in part because young people turned out in droves to vote for him, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made himself minister of intergovernmental affairs and youth. This, combined with a campaign that promised more jobs for that same demographic and improvements to student grant/loan policies, left many hopeful that his government would pull through for the increasingly broke and struggling under-40 set.

Those hopes, however, were diminished with the recent unveiling of the federal budget.

According to an age-based breakdown by Generation Squeeze, a lobby group for Canadians in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, Trudeau's budget actually builds on the previous government's tendency to spend exponentially more on people aged 65 and up than those under 45, with $21,000 being spent per person in the first group compared with $4,550 per person in the second.

Paul Kershaw, a professor at the University of BC's School of Population and Public Health and founder of Generation Squeeze, explained that, when it comes to issues that matter most to young people, such as housing, child care, and post-secondary education, the budget is lacking.

"You might have expected, given all of the focus and to some degree you might say 'hype' the federal Liberal party has oriented around a younger demographic... that there might have been a little bit of actually narrowing the gap in spending between an older and younger demographic by giving some more significant investments in younger people," Kershaw told VICE. "At the end of the day, that's not what the prime minister's first budget is going to do."

Though the Liberals have touted their $4-billion Canada Child Benefit, aimed at giving cash back to Canadians with kids, as the "most significant social policy innovation in a generation," Kershaw argues that's mostly spin. There's little new money going into child care, he said, and the investment pales when compared to the $11-billion boost Old Age security will see over the next three years and the $6-billion increase in medical care, much of which will go to seniors.

Meanwhile, the $2.3 billion in affordable housing over the next two years is targeted at the homeless and working poor, Kershaw explained, which is important, but there's been no mention of how to fix a real estate market that's "broken" for young people and newcomers.

"No matter what we do with respect to the job strategy, our primary cost of living—housing—is really getting more and more out of reach from a cost standpoint, and there was very little conversation about that in the budget at all," he said.

To combat youth unemployment, which is sitting at around 13 percent nationally, the Liberals have pledged to top up the annual $330 million already earmarked for the Youth Employment Strategy with $165.4 million in 2016-2017, with a total investment of about $1.3 billion over three years.

But Toronto-based labour lawyer Andrew Langille told VICE that's not enough.

"$1.3 billion over three years simply is insufficient when one looks at the mounting barriers facing racialized and First Nations youths when they try to enter the labour market. Simply put, the Liberals should be taking steps to ensure that all young workers in Canada, regardless of their background, have opportunities available to them, but that's not happening given the low priority that young Canadians have in this budget," he said. "There's an utter lack of intergenerational equity and once again the boomers come out on top."

The Canada Summer Jobs initiative, originally set to generate 40,000 new jobs in each of the next three years, was slightly tapered in the budget, and now says it will create 35,000 new jobs per year.

The budget made no mention of Trudeau's promise to offer a year-long break on EI premiums to employers giving young people permanent jobs.

Langille told VICE he's more concerned that only 15 percent of young employees qualify for EI when they lose their jobs. About a third of youth employment is made up by temp jobs, according to a 2015 study by TD Bank.

The budget also revealed the government's plans to increase student grants and change policies around student loans, by bumping up the income level at which grads will have to start paying back loans from $20,200 to $25,000. But Kershaw said there's little new money going into post-secondary, and that the strategy has been instead to tweak existing funds.

"From the standpoint of intergenerational fairness, really tackling problems facing younger Canadians, the prime minister likes to say 'better is always possible' and I would say with respect to his budget that's absolutely right."

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

Still via 'Daily VICE'

"You took Lu's class? I've been coming here for a year, and I'm still afraid to take a Lu class!" the woman beside me said as she rolled out her yoga mat in preparation for the late night class that was starting next.

This article originally appeared on VICE Mexico.

Standing on loose soil among merchants of sweets and beer, hundreds of people in the town of El Jazmin, in the state of Queretaro, Mexico, wait for the Shitases to reach a makeshift arena where they will fight heifers. The Shitases are the stars of the evening—a group of dancers who dress in costumes every February to scare the animals, as part of a local festival celebrating the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Our Lady of Guadalupe. This year, I went along to enjoy the spectacle.

At around 4 PM, a brass band called Los Rehenes (the Hostages) began to play, and everybody immediately stopped talking. The music is meant to signal the arrival of the Shitases.

The music also helps the Shitases get in the mood: "It is not easy to stand in front of a horned animal that weighs twice as much as you do," one of them told me. No matter how impressive your costume, a heifer can bring you back to reality with one single blow—it makes you remember you're only human.

The Shitases dance alone or with a partner, but the bravest ones will fight the animal that is confused by the colors, the textures, the smells, and the sounds surrounding it. This year, while some danced, others got to chasing some guy who fondled a local woman thinking he would get away with it in the anonymity of the costumes and the crowd. "The Shitases are going to beat the shit out of him," ordered a voice coming from a megaphone, and that's exactly what happened.

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Read: I Lived on Trump Products for a Week to See if It Would Make Me Great Again

Donald Trump finally outlined a plan for funding his oft-discussed behemoth wall across the Mexican border on Tuesday, and it's about as wild as you'd expect.

The Republican frontrunner has been bellowing about the wall for a while now as part of his angry pitch about scary immigrants. But a two-page memo released to the Washington Post represents his first attempt at providing a strategy for getting the thing built—besides broadsides about making Mexico pay.

That's still basically the plan, though.

Seeing as how the former president of Mexico has already made it clear to Trump that the country won't just "pay for that fucking wall," the Donald has hatched a strong-armed business scheme that might have come straight from the pages of The Art of the Deal.

Here's how he's going to make Mexico pay for the Great Wall of Trump in three days or less:

On day one, Trump will lean on provisions of the Patriot Act to block some wire transfers from the US to Mexico, preventing immigrants from sending cash home without proof that they are legal. (Some experts the Post talked to are skeptical he can even make this happen under current law, but whatever.)

On day two, according to Trump, Mexico will erupt in protests, since immigrants in the US are—according to him—responsible for about $24 billion flowing into Mexico each year. (Trump's a little confused, since that number actually refers to the amount of money sent into Mexico from the rest of the world, not just the US.) When that alleged flow of money stops, Trump basically suspects riots won't be far behind.

The Mexican government, faced with a country of enraged citizens, will then be given the chance to kick President Trump a "one-time payment of $5–10 billion" to keep the wire transfers flowing from the US to Mexico. (That's day three.)

The multi-billion dollar payment from Mexico will go toward building expenses for the wall, and well, there you go.

"We have the moral high ground here, and all the leverage," Trump writes in his strangely crumpled memo, which includes mention of drugs and gangs. "It is time we use it in order to Make America Great Again."

Illustration by Julia Scheele

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Detective Superintendent Adrian Green remembers the day he got the call. It was Friday April 6, 2012—his birthday, and also his first introduction to the Rathkeale Rovers.

At around 8:30 AM, Green was called by colleagues investigating a break-in. As a senior investigating officer, he was more used to dealing with murders and kidnappings than burglaries, but once the seriousness of the crime became clear, he made his way to the major incident room.

At around 10:40 PM the night before, thieves had broken into Durham University Oriental Museum. Using hammers and chisels, they took around 40 minutes to create a two-foot-by-three-foot hole in an outside wall, before crawling into the museum's Malcolm MacDonald Gallery. In less than 60 seconds, the thieves smashed two glass cabinets and escaped with two Qing Dynasty artifacts. The items were valued at about $2.8 million.

Green didn't know it then, but his investigation would spiral into a four-year international operation targeting an organized crime gang with links around the world.

In the first six months of 2011, the Metropolitan Police recorded a crime wave. At least 20 rhino horn thefts had been reported at museums, auction houses, and private homes around Europe. In 2012, the thieves expanded their efforts to include Chinese artifacts like the items stolen in Durham. By 2013, Europol put the number of rhino horn thefts at more than 80.

As the police investigation gathered pace, it became clear the raids were largely the work of one gang. Originating from a small town in rural Ireland, the Rathkeale Rovers were now operating across the globe. In just a couple of years, the gang made tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of pounds from stolen rhino horns, as museums struggled to adapt to this unexpected threat.

The gang's luck would not last. This week, seven members of the Rathkeale Rovers have been jailed for a total of more than 37 years. Another gang member was sentenced last year. Later today, six more will receive their sentences. Their convictions relate to crimes involving stolen items worth up to $80 million, but this represents just a fraction of the gang's likely activity: The sentences relate to six incidents in the UK—the police believe they were responsible for many, many more.

Guy Schooling was at home with his wife and father on Monday February 21, 2011, when he received an urgent phone call at around 10 PM. It was a colleague at Sworders, the auctioneers where Schooling is managing director. An alarm had been sounded at the firm's Stansted sales room; Schooling listened as his colleague described how burglars had smashed through the front doors.

As he made the drive from his home to the sales room, Schooling considered the possible motives. Two weeks before, there had been another break-in, when thieves escaped with an antique vase. Schooling now wondered if this was a precursor to a more serious raid. Arriving at the sales room, his suspicions were confirmed. Stepping over broken glass and twisted metal, he observed a gap on the wall where a rhino head had been mounted just hours before.

Rhino horn is comprised largely of keratin, a substance scientists describe as a "fibrous structural protein." In layman's terms, that's the same material found in fingernails. It has no proven health benefits. Despite this, it's long been an ingredient in traditional Asian medicine, used to treat everything from fevers to gout. This demand for rhino horn has contributed to a trend that has seen rhino populations plummet from half a million to fewer than 30,000 in less than a century.

International trade in rhino horn was banned in 1977 and demand for the substance seemed to be steadily declining. However, in around 2009, a rumor began circulating of an unnamed "Vietnamese official" who had ingested rhino horn and been cured of liver cancer. Demand spiked and the poaching industry went into overdrive. Statistics published by South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs show that, in 2007, just 13 rhinos were killed by poachers. In 2015, the figure was 1,175.

Today, demand for rhino horn is as strong as ever. Wealthy consumers across Vietnam, China, and Taiwan buy it for medicinal purposes, as a hangover cure and even for use recreationally. According to a report commissioned by the World Wildlife Federation, by 2012 the black market price of rhino horn had risen to as much as $57,000 per kilogram—more than gold, platinum, diamonds, or cocaine.

It didn't take long for criminals to realize that poaching was not the only source of rhino horn. Shortly after the burglary at Sworders, two horns were stolen from the University of Coimbra in Portugal. An alert went out to museums across Europe.

At the time, Paolo Viscardi was natural history curator at London's Horniman Museum and a committee member at the Natural Sciences Collections Association (NatSCA). Viscardi had seen the rising price of black market rhino horns and had already warned his employers about the risk of theft. Nevertheless, the targeting of museums was cause for concern. "Physical assaults were taking place, and the last thing you want is people injured," he says. "Mainly, there was an overarching sense of tension."

It soon became clear that this was more than a series of isolated incidents. In July of 2011, Europol announced it believed the people involved were also involved in drugs trafficking, organized robbery, distribution of counterfeit products, tarmac fraud, and money laundering. "The theft of rhino horn shows how organized criminals are always on the lookout for new and creative crime opportunities," it said. "Significant players within this area of crime have been identified as an Irish and ethnically Irish organized criminal group."

The same month, the Metropolitan Police issued their own statement, urging museums to remove rhino horns from display. Not everyone heeded the warning.

At 12:28 AM on Thursday July 28, 2011, an alarm sounded at Ipswich Museum when a fire escape was forced open. Police arrived just five minutes after the alarm call, but the thieves were nowhere to be seen. A search of the premises quickly revealed a victim: Rosie, an Indian rhinoceros who has lived at the museum since 1907. Museum staff were horrified to discover her horn was gone. "It was immediately obvious that was the only thing that was targeted," says Jayne Austin, development manager at the Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service. "It wasn't just a random break-in."

Rosie, the rhino at Ipswich Museum, before her horn was stolen

The break-ins were not always successful. As museums took precautions, on several occasions, thieves conducted raids only to escape with replicas. In most cases, the Rovers themselves kept a safe distance from the crime scenes and recruited street criminals to carry out the crimes. The tactic reduced their risks, but it also yielded unpredictable results.

Shortly before 1 PM on February 20, 2012, a dark-colored hatchback crossed the bridge that spans the moat around Norwich Castle. Parking in a disabled bay, the driver remained in the car while four men got out and made their way to the entrance of the museum, inside Norfolk's medieval fort. The group arrived at the reception desk, where two of the men paid for entry, while their companions snuck inside with a large group of visitors.

Entering the museum's main hall, the group ignored invitations to visit the castle's art galleries or historic keep, instead bearing right and entering the natural history section. Inside, a group of museum staff were giving a tour to some visiting zoologists from Cambridge. The men lingered around the exhibits, waiting until the group had moved on. Once alone, they made their way to one of the deep mahogany cabinets that lined the room and pried open the glass door.

The 19th century black rhinoceros head at the base of the cabinet had been part of the museum's collection since 1896. The head had been stuffed with clay many years ago, and the men knew it would be heavy and cumbersome to carry. They tried unsuccessfully to wrench the horn free, but were hampered by nails that had been put in place more than 100 years before. Switching tactics, they bent down and lifted the entire head from the cabinet.

Emerging into the museum's main hall, one of the robbers screamed at a group of visitors to "get out of the fucking way." Sitting in the museum cafe, the group of museum staff and visiting zoologists heard the commotion. Abandoning their tea, they ran into the main hall where they found the robbers, burdened by the weight and bulk of the rhino head, as they awkwardly made their way to the exit.

Staff and visitors looked on aghast as the gang struggled. Seizing this opportunity, one of the zoologists and a member of the public stepped in to obstruct the gang, allowing a museum curator to sweep their legs from under them. As the rhino head tumbled from their grasp, another member of staff pulled it to safety. Cutting their losses, the gang ran from the building and jumped into the waiting car, before driving away empty-handed.

"Norfolk was a bit of a balls-up," says Detective Superintendent Green. Luckily for him and other investigators, it was far from the gang's only mistake.

A crime scene photo of the hole made in the wall at the Durham University Oriental Museum

It was two days after the Durham break-in, and Lee Wildman was getting worried. Having made a successful getaway from the Oriental Museum, he and Adrian Stanton—two professional burglars from Birmingham—had stopped to stash their stolen artifacts on waste ground on the outskirts of Durham. Hiding the goods for collection at a later date seemed like a reasonable precaution, but the pair hadn't anticipated this unforeseen complication: Wildman was back at the stash site, and he couldn't find the Chinese antiques.

Reluctantly, Wildman made a series of calls to his superiors and gave them the bad news. If these were difficult conversations, his day was about to get a lot worse. Shortly after starting his drive back to Birmingham, Green's colleagues at Durham Constabulary rammed his car off the road. Wildman was placed under arrest. Eight days later, a police search of the waste ground would recover the stolen items under some discarded hedge trimmings. In February of 2013, Stanton and Wildman would be jailed for a respective eight and nine years for the burglary.

The series of calls that took place that day gave Green the break he needed. "We refer to that as 'panic day,'" he says. "We started to appreciate there was probably a team above those burglars that was probably pulling the strings."

Starting with a mobile phone recovered from Wildman's car, it would take Green and his team a year to build a picture of the network behind the raids. The first major breakthrough came two weeks after the break-in, when Green's team traced one of the calls to a small town in southwest Ireland.

For most of the year, Rathkeale is a quiet town. It's a 22-mile drive from Limerick, the closest city. On the high street, you'll find a convenience store, a bookmakers, and a smattering of pubs, but the outskirts of the town give some clues to the changes that have taken place here in recent years. Mock-Georgian houses feature large paved driveways, to accommodate the caravans parked outside. The 2011 census estimated that 40 percent of the population is from the Travelling community, Ireland's indigenous ethnic minority. Some now put that figure closer to 80 percent.

With most of the town's residents out on the road, the streets are often empty. However, once a year, Rathkeale bursts into life. In December, the population swells to nearly three times its usual size as Travellers return home to celebrate Christmas and the wedding season. An episode of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding from 2012 captured the spectacle, showing top-of-the-range Porsches, Mercedes, and Range Rovers lining the streets and brides getting married in dresses adorned with 20,000 crystals.

The source of this wealth is the subject of much speculation. Many Rathkeale Travellers run law-abiding businesses specializing in home repairs, vehicle sales, or market trading. But one group of loosely affiliated Traveller families has gained particular notoriety for the scope of their illegal schemes and voracious appetite for doing business. Over the years, they've come to be known as the Rathkeale Rovers.

In his 2013 book, Gypsy Empire, Sunday World crime journalist Eamon Dillon describes the Rathkeale Travellers as "willing to do business on any continent, moving quickly from one deal to the next, following the trail of euros, dollars, or pounds sterling." In the last few years, members of the Rovers have been found attempting to pull the tarmacking scam on nuns in Italy, smuggling tobacco through Belgium, and selling dodgy generators in Australia.

In January of 2010, customs officials discovered eight horns in the luggage of two passengers arriving on a flight from Portugal. Two Rathkeale brothers, Michael and Jeremiah O'Brien, were later fined $570 each for illegally importing the horns.

It seemed the Rovers had discovered a new source of income.

"What this particular group did was really quite brilliant," says Dr. Donna Yates, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow and an expert in the trafficking of antiquities. Museums aren't particularly hard to steal from, she says, but the goods are hard to sell: Most art is immediately recognizable and easy to track, while other exhibits tend not to be particularly valuable. Except for rhino horn. "They have a clear market," says Yates. "It's out of the country, and there's no tracking of it."

The Rovers were among the first to realize the opportunity presented by European museums at a time when the black market for rhino horn was booming. The vulnerability of museums, combined with spiraling prices for rhino horn, made stealing the items low-risk and high-reward. And when horns were taken off display and replaced with replicas, the gang just changed tactics and moved on to stealing Chinese artifacts. As Yates says: "Incidentally, these are the same pieces that also appeal to those people buying rhino horn."

Illustration by Julia Scheele

Just before 7:30 PM on Friday April 13, 2012, a week after the raid in Durham, three men and a 16-year-old boy arrived at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. CCTV footage from the night captured the men pulling up hoods and adjusting clothing as they made their way through the parking lot. The museum's Far East gallery is located at the back of the building on the ground floor, with a window in an external wall. Using a disc cutter, the men made a hole in a metal roller blind, revealing the window behind. Smashing the glass created a hole just large enough for a person to squeeze through into the gallery.

Just a few feet to the left of the window was a tall glass-fronted cabinet, its shelves stacked with Chinese jade artifacts worth millions of pounds. The thieves cleared the bottom of the cabinet, removing a total of 18 items. Estimates put the value at up to $25.6 million. Among the stolen objects were eight artifacts from the Qing Dynasty. They bore striking similarities to the items recovered after the raid in Durham.

As officers in Durham and Cambridge discovered more similarities between the raids, a meeting was called to discuss the situation. In June of 2012, officers from several forces joined colleagues from the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the National Crime Agency at the Home Office. "All the forces were picking up the people who had done the burglaries, but no one was taking on the people who were commissioning them," says Green. "At that meeting, we said we were going to do something about it."

Green was chosen to lead a joint investigation: Operation Griffin.

Over the following months, Green and his team gradually put together a picture of the gang. A review of similar crimes found more than 30 break-ins at museums and auction houses that had targeted rhino horn or Chinese artifacts. It was then that the harder task of linking individuals to the crimes began.

Much of the work was painstaking, involving analysis of phone records to placing gang members in certain places at certain times. The Rovers would "drop" phones frequently, changing numbers to cover their tracks. Occasionally, however, they would slip up. A doctor's appointment would be booked on a dirty phone, providing a crucial lead. "Every telephone that we cracked was a breakthrough," says Green. By the end of the summer of 2013, he had the evidence he needed to bring the gang in.

On Tuesday the September 10, 2013, Green arrived at the national command center at 4 AM. His alarm had gone off at around 3 AM, but it hadn't really been necessary. It had been a tense few days leading up until this point, and Green had managed only a few hours' fitful sleep. In around 90 minutes, Green would give the order for doors to be broken down at 40 addresses in four different countries. Months of work had been building up to this date, and Green wanted to make sure it went smoothly.

The last few days had been spent liaising with 26 different police forces and colleagues at the Serious Organised Crime Agency to ensure the raids took place simultaneously, while maintaining the utmost secrecy around the operation. The investigation had been hard enough—the last thing he wanted was to blow his cover and to spend an extra few months tracking down the gang as its members scattered.

At 5:30 AM, Green gave the order to move in. As battering rams broke down doors and suspects were led away in handcuffs, Green listened carefully as reports of the raids came in. Seven arrests in London, five men and two women. Four men taken into custody at the Smithy Fen Traveller site in Cambridge. Two more at Cray's Hill in Essex, plus arrests in Sussex, Walsall, and Nottingham. Three more in Northern Ireland.

Green went down his list of suspects, checking off the names. By the time dawn had broken, 19 arrests had been made. "It went like clockwork," he says.

From left to right: Michael Hegarty, Richard "Kerry" O'Brien Junior, and Daniel "Turkey" O'Brien

Twenty-eight individuals were arrested as a result of Operation Griffin; half of them were brought to trial. Among those convicted are Michael Hegarty and Richard "Kerry" O'Brien Junior, who in 2010 were both jailed in the US for attempting to buy rhino horn. Another, Daniel "Turkey" O'Brien, has served time for stealing a rhino horn from an antiques dealer in 2011.

Handing down the sentences yesterday, Murray Creed, the judge, said the gang's activities represented "serious organized crime" and "involved very high value goods with significant harm caused to victims—both museums and members of the public who would otherwise have viewed the material stolen."

The Rovers' convictions may offer some relief to the institutions they targeted. But Chief Constable Mick Creedon, who helped lead the investigation with Green, knows there are others who got away. "I think it struck a blow, but we know the network is a large network, and it won't stop them," he says. "Putting it bluntly, it's low risk."

It is now four years since the break-in at Durham's Oriental Museum. A lot has changed since then. Museums are no longer naïve to the threats posed to their collections, more aware of the risks created by unscrupulous buyers and the gangs who seek to supply them. In 2013, a rhino horn DNA database was set up in an attempt to deter thieves. Since the gang was arrested, there has been a significant slowdown in the number of offenses. Still, the threat hangs in the air.

"What's really important for museums is that what we show is genuine," says Jayne Austin, at the Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service. Museum curators put much stall in authenticity and take great pleasure in sharing the treasures in their care with the public. "No museum wants to have to put replicas out instead of the real thing," she says.

At Ipswich Museum, Rosie the rhino still stands in the museum's natural history gallery. In most respects, she looks the same today as she has done for the last 100 years, except for one significant detail: A sign informs visitors that her horn is made of glass fibre, a replacement fitted after the original was stolen. It serves as a warning to potential thieves, but also as a reminder of an innocence that has been lost.

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A refugee child is comforted by a volunteer on Lesbos. Photo by Oscar Webb

On Monday, the first boats full of Syrian refugees left Greece for Turkey as part of a controversial "one in one out" deal that makes the EU sound like some sort of exclusive nightclub. Under the deal, refugees on Greek islands will be sent to Turkey, and in return, the EU will accept those who have made legitimate asylum claims in Turkey.

At first glance, the deal is an attempt to curtail smuggling and provide vital humanitarian aid for Syrians fleeing a war that has been raging for five years. EU boss Donald Tusk has said that "the days of irregular migration to Europe are over." However, human rights groups have been critical, saying the $6.8 billion in aid requested by Turkey as part of the deal could end up being used to beef up borders and expand detention centers, rather than help anyone. As millions of Syrian refugees wait in their temporary homes in Europe and the Middle East to see what the outcome will be, for many, it's the beginning of a new chapter in their already chaotic lives.

In the days after the deal was struck, I asked Syrians living in various places what they made of it.

NOUR, 27, CURRENTLY IN ISTANBUL, TURKEY

Do you think it's important to hear our voices? We are just money on the table in this deal. We're currency for governments. They are completely objectifying us, and they don't really care about Syrians. Is it logical to take Syrians from Greece and move them back to Turkey, then to take Syrians from Turkey and move them to Europe?

They are generating lines in embassies, and people are waiting for a space to open up. It's very strange. A huge pressure has been built up, and we cannot read the future, but I predict nothing good will come of this. People who have left their homes as refugees have nothing to lose. What I'm afraid of is that people will take more risks. Turkey isn't the only door out of Syria, but the other ways are more dangerous, like crossing the Mediterranean, for example. Will more people have to die? If that happens, it will definitely damage the reputation of the EU.

AMER, 28, CURRENTLY IN BERLIN, GERMANY

The EU deal, in my opinion, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is a way to protect people from dying in the nightmare that is the Aegean Sea, and it stops smugglers from putting people in harm's way. On the other hand, I don't trust Turkey. They are working for their own interests and not for humanitarian principles. Who will make sure that the money from the EU will really go to help poor people? And who is thinking about the people stranded on the border who sleep out in the cold? We need to try to help them without a load of political bargaining.

I can't say it's bad, but I'm not going to say it's good. Refugees at the border need safeguards to help them, and they need them fast. When you're in that situation, you're not thinking about politics. I lost everything, my home, my friends, and now we need to start a new life. People in Europe need to understand we're not thinking about money or politics or bargaining from selfish governments. We just need ways to get away from the war. They're making it into a game.

ADEL, 24, CURRENTLY IN ISTANBUL, TURKEY

We are all worried now. Especially about the situation here in Turkey—it's bad for Syrians like me who live here. We wonder what is going to happen to us. I heard they canceled the visa for Syrians who want to come to Turkey. Now the EU is closing its borders in the faces of Syrians, and Arab countries are also blocking the way for us. The situation is just getting worse and worse. Young guys like me can't go back to Syria—it's just not safe. There are so many armies there. I guess when I think about this agreement, I realize they're just selling Syrians. I heard they sent one hundred buses back to Syria. If this is true, it is just so wrong. What about people like me here in Turkey? Will they send us back? Even though it's hard to have a good future here, there's peace. But what about the people in Syria? They lost everything. People will still try to get to Greece, some of them will die doing it.

MOHAMMED, 25, CURRENTLY IN DAMASCUS, SYRIA

This deal is awful. They are trading us like animals. One goes back, to where? One comes in, from where? What do they think we can do? It's OK in Damascus now, but that can change. My dad wanted me to leave. I stayed. Now I can't leave. I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of the war, tired of being alone when my friends left. I'm just missing my friends; they are all in Europe now. I don't care about Turkey or Europe or politics—it's all the same. No one cares about us. We're just dying. We thought Europe was good, but now it's changing.

Related: Watch 'Rise of the Right,' our film about Poland's nationalist march

WADDAH, 26, CURRENTLY IN MUNICH, GERMANY

I think this is a good deal between the EU and Turkey. If they are telling the truth and not lying, it could be good for Syrians. I will be able to see my family in the north of Syria and in Turkey. Life in Turkey is similar to Damascus. I am in Germany now, and life here is very lonely. I think Syrians who are living in Turkey should stay there—it is better than life here. Everything here is so different, and my family is very far away. I don't know if I trust Turkey or Europe, but maybe it's better to live near our culture. I find integration hard here in Europe.

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The story of 2012's Max Payne 3, at the best of times, is convoluted. In places, however, it's notably subversive. Max, our ostensible hero (or at least anti-hero), starts every mission with a clear objective: deliver the money, kill the police chief, rescue the girl. But on virtually every occasion, he fails.

In mission two, Fabiana is kidnapped. In mission three, the bad guys make off with the cash. In mission five, the kidnappers escape. In mission six, Rodrigo is killed. And on, and on, and on. The men in video games—especially the big, rugged men with guns—usually get the job done. They are unambiguously capable, returning heroes who always save the day. Max tries to be one of these men, but invariably he screws it up.

Unlike a lot of Rockstar's other "flawed" protagonists, all of who are at least partway successful—like the GTA series's Trevor Phillips and Niko Bellic, and Manhunt's James Earl Cash—Max is a failure. His consistent inability to do what video games have led us all to believe men can and should do finely undercuts the typical power fantasy narrative—a hard talking, ultra-violent, muscle bound man on the outside, Max, in practice, is a tragic incompetent.

Nevertheless, he's very well turned out. The disciplines of costume and character design, in video games, have become synonymous with ostentatiousness and flamboyance—rather than the grungy perfection of Kane and Lynch's thrown-together ensembles, or Cole Phelps's immaculate pinstripes, hairstyles, wearable gadgets, and distinctive monsters, often from fantasy and sci-fi games, are what enthusiasts fawn over. But you need to pay attention to Max's wardrobe.

In the mission at Rodrigo's office, he wears a crinkled, linen suit. At the stadium, he's in a loose-fitting shirt. These are tiny details, but they lend each mission ambience, a kind of mood. Looking at that tired, gray two-piece, you really get the sense that Max has just thrown it on, that he's hungover, dazed, and worn out even before the shooting starts. The shirt that clings to his back at the soccer field and the sweat dripping from his forehead in mission five make both those environments feel sticky and close.

Max Payne 3's gunfights, too, are claustrophobic and tense—the impression of hot weather and not being able to cool off and get a clear breath makes them more so. And smell, after all, is the most evocative sense. As you heave Max around a condemned hotel building, his vest stained brown from perspiration, you can really smell the world of Max Payne 3.

Details like these make me feel that, contrary to reputation, Rockstar is best at short, linear games. Manhunt is fantastic, so is The Warriors, and Max Payne 3, certainly, is for my money the best game the studio has made. Considering it's built its name from open-world and crime games, two genres that by definition betoken free rein and anarchy, it must be difficult for Rockstar to justify the production of something more structured.

Perhaps that's why, compared to its other big games, Max Payne 3 was a low-seller, shifting 4 million copies, a figure that just about covered development costs. (Red Dead Redemption, in comparison, has sold more than 14 million copies, and Grand Theft Auto V over 60 million.) But I wish the company would belie its audience's expectation more often. When Rockstar constructs sequences intricately, rather than letting players dictate the action, the results are often electric.

Article continues after the video below

Related: Watch VICE's new documentary, 'Walking Heavy'

Three things stand out about Max Payne 3's gunfights. First, they're always properly defined. You know from where the enemy is attacking, you comprehend the area you're supposed to "defend," and you get a clear sense of what's around you—positioning the camera slightly at an angle, looking down at Max's shoulders, opens up the environments, and shows where you can run and where you can take cover.

In an open-world, the stakes and "set" for a shootout are harder to quantify—the nature of the games makes everything baggy and unevenly paced. Max Payne 3 doesn't just carry you through one distinct, vibrant setting to the next—it does so deliberately. They're taking her to the roof. There's a sniper in the tower. They're heading for the runway. Rockstar excels at these simple, concrete action set-ups. The studio's been practicing them ever since it dropped you into a parking lot with three enemies and nothing but a plastic bag in Manhunt.

Second, the game's gunplay is wonderfully scored. Given that Max Payne 3 boasts perhaps the greatest original soundtrack in popular gaming, it's difficult, at this point, to keep from devolving into useless sycophancy—Los Angeles noise rock group HEALTH has yet to cut a better album than its score for Max Payne 3. (Though VICE Gaming's editor might disagree, and does.) In an effort to keep things measured, rather than describe the music, the video below illustrates one of its strongest uses. (Spoilers, obviously.)

So many shooters—possibly self-conscious about heightening their players' enthusiasm for on-screen violence, or possibly just boring, are scored by either generic orchestral droning or nothing at all. Rockstar, expertly and proudly uses tracks like "TEARS" and "MAX: FINALE" to egg players on. Max is washed up and exhausted, but he's very determined. When the soundtrack dips, in between gunfights, we feel his lethargy. When the bullets start flying and the tribal drums swell, we want to get stuck in and win the fight.

If Portal 2's soundtrack, which grows increasingly complex with each piece of a puzzle that is slotted into place, reflects the gradual process of finding a solution, Max Payne 3's music appeals similarly to the players' emotions. Ebbing and flowing at just the right times, it's another example of how Rockstar works better within close structure.

Finally, Max Payne 3's shootouts physically play in a way that reflects your character. Violence in games is often a kind of story intermission, something for only the player to do, which is never discussed, formally, by the characters. The player's murders exist outside the narrative. When John Marston rides into town in Rockstar's celebrated Western Red Dead Redemption, nobody talks about the hundreds—literally hundreds—of people he's killed: They ask only about his (narratively vital) hunt for Bill Williamson.

Max, however, in the players' hands is the same Max as in the story. Ducking behind cover, playing it cautious will often get you killed in Max Payne 3's gunfights—a more effective method is to dash onto open ground, hit the slow-motion Bullet Time mode, and charge your enemies, suicidally. Given how often Max talks about having "nothing to lose" and acknowledges his depression, his loneliness, his listlessness, the fact that playing like somebody who actively wants to die, or at least doesn't much care about life, is the most rewarded approach, feels appropriate. Like the sly undermining of the male power fantasy, it's subtle but lends Max Payne 3 a consistency rarely found in shooting games, and practically never found in Rockstar's open-world efforts.

I've criticized Rockstar in the past for what I see to be poor writing, but perhaps it's more a matter of genre. With Max Payne 3, its strongest game, Rockstar shows that on linear, more restrictive projects, it truly thrives.

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READ: Here's Why You Should Give a Shit About the Panama Papers

The Panama Papers, 11.5 million documents leaked by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and a bevy of other outlets this week, could give Bernie Sanders a boost in his presidential campaign—or at least convince a few fans he should take on a second career as a phone psychic.

As Mic points out, on October 12, 2011, Senator Sanders condemned a pending free-trade deal with Panama. In his speech, Sanders indicated there was no way the agreement could possibly help generate more American jobs.

Then he pivoted to the risk of the wealthy stashing their millions in illegal offshore tax havens.

"Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade US taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens," he said. "The Panama free-trade agreement will make this bad situation much worse. Each and every year, the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations evade about $100 billion in taxes through abusive and illegal offshore tax havens in Panama and in other countries."

Of course, being pissed that Panama-based lawyers help people hide shady financial assets is different than predicting dozens of power players across the planet were in on the action, as the papers have shown. But if nothing else, this week's revelations bolster Sanders's message that nefarious rich people are screwing everyone else.

For her part, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton congratulated President Obama for passing the agreement a day after Sanders leveled his criticism, claiming the administration was "constantly working to deepen our economic engagement throughout the world, and these agreements are an example of that commitment."

Thumbnail via Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Mississippi State Capitol photo via Flickr user Ken Lund

Read: Georgia's Governor Says He'll Veto the State's Horrible Anti-LGBT Bill

Passing what critics and LGBT activists have called the "most sweeping anti-LGBT legislation" in the US, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed a bill Tuesday giving religious groups and some private businesses the right to reject services to people whose lifestyles do not line up with certain religious beliefs, the AP reports.

According to House Bill 1523, Mississippians can decline to serve people if they offend the beliefs that marriage should be between a man and a woman, sex should occur only between straight married couples, and men and women should identify only by their biological sex.

In his statement posted on Twitter, Bryant echoed the sentiments of the bill's supporters, writing that "this legislation is designed to prevent government interference in the lives of the people from which all power to the state derived."

Georgia's governor recently vetoed his state's similar anti-LGBT law after major companies vowed to take their business elsewhere, and North Carolina is facing a lawsuit and business boycotts over a similarly controversial law that forces transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender on their birth certificates.

Photo via Instagram

Everybody's been talking about black hair lately. There is that viral video on WorldStar where a black girl confronts a white dude with dreads on the grounds that he's "appropriating" her culture. Then, earlier this week, white teeny-bopper-turned-sex-symbol Justin Bieber unveiled his new dreaded emo-swoop to the horror of woke black folks everywhere. Both the aforementioned video and Biebs's new 'do have inspired some righteous think pieces and frustrated tweets over the complete lack of self-awareness that some white folks have when it comes to pretty basic shit regarding race and privilege in this country.

That's not to say that we should be burning Bieber at the stake for rocking dreads. I certainly don't think Biebs's new look should consume more of your righteous indignation than the mass incarceration or voter disenfranchisement of people of color. Black people have very real, tangible enemies in this country—Justin Bieber doesn't even come close to making the top of that list. He's a talented young artist who's trying to develop his own style by borrowing elements from the things he likes. But, to be fair, I understand why so many people were mad. Simply put, we've all seen this movie before.

Basically, any time white folks do something that people of color have been doing forever, they manage to take all the damn credit. I learned this lesson before I learned my timetables. It's an essential fact of American life. In elementary school, my teachers told me that Christopher Columbus had discovered America, regardless of the fact that some of the greatest civilizations that ever existed thrived on this continent long before he arrived. They talked at length about the Capitol Building and the White House, but conveniently forgot to mention that it was enslaved Africans who actually built those shining symbols of democracy. What's crazy is that the same sort of shit happens in culture, too—Elvis was named the King of Rock 'n' Roll, when we all know Chuck Berry really wears the crown; Miley Cyrus became the face of twerking, even though I was getting twerk long before Miley was even Hannah Montana; and business magazines proclaimed that Iggy Azalea ran hip-hop, despite the fact that she can barely recite the rhymes T.I. wrote for her.

Yes, black folks have a problem when we see white people angling to dive into our culture. It's not that we don't wanna share it and embrace the sort of melting pot ethos that makes this country an exciting place to be. We just don't wanna see white people rocking dreads today, because we know that they will be telling us that they invented them tomorrow. This loss of credit isn't just an ego thing. The dissociation of black people from the very real contributions we've made to this country has done incalculable damage to the psyche and socio-economic standings of black Americans. This country was literally built on black bodies. And yet, blacks have very little to show for the sacrifices and suffering endured by our ancestors in making this place the economic and cultural powerhouse it is today.

We must remember that it was a core tenant of slavery to strip enslaved Africans of their heritage. Enslaved men and women were not allowed to worship their own gods, perform their own music, use their own language, or even be called by their own name. Instead, they were told again and again that they had no culture, or that whatever culture they may have had was primitive and subpar. Now we're in this insane situation where we live in a country where our enslaved ancestors' culture—the same culture that this country expended great effort to erase—is something that white people are now desperate to take part in. There's a bittersweet irony to it all.

The truth is, we're also so protective of these hairstyles because we've only recently rediscovered them and begun reclaiming them as our own. The institutionalization of white supremacy has made many of us hate our own hair. This hate manifested itself in everything from the conk of the 1920s to the Jheri curl of the 80s. Although these methods to make our hair look straighter, thinner, and whiter are marvelously inventive, and they're often just salves we use to obscure the pain and indignity of what it means to be black in America. I'm not saying that everyone who wears a weave or has a Jheri curl hates themselves or blackness. But within our community, there is a self-loathing that does manifest itself in the lengths we're willing to go to have "good hair," considering that up until recently, "good hair" was just a another way of saying "white hair."

I know these processes all too well. My dad's been rocking a Jheri curl since Billy Ocean was on the Billboard charts. This means that I spent thousands of hours in black beauty salons as a kid waiting for him to get his hair done. Today, when I smell that sulfuric odor of the chemicals used to straighten out nappy black hair, it kind of makes me nostalgic.

However, when it was time for me to take my place in the salon, I didn't go for a relaxer or a Jheri curl. I wanted braids. But it wasn't out of a desire to connect with my African roots at first. The impetus was really to be more like Allen Iverson, the coolest dude on Earth between 2000 and 2003. But even though I fell into my braids in a fashion not too dissimilar from the way Justin Bieber probably fell into his dreads (he probably wants to look like Future or Young Thug, the current coolest dudes on the planet), I quickly realized that my natural hairstyle wasn't just a style. Whether I liked it or not, it was a political statement.

We just don't wanna see white people rocking dreads today, because we know that they will be telling us that they invented them tomorrow.

People treated me different once I had braids—even black people. Back then, I was a member of a youth group for gifted young black men in the city of Cleveland, but once I had my hair braided, I was promptly asked to either cut it, get it straightened like a white man, or quit the group altogether. I was told again and again by black adults that prominent historically black universities like Hampton's business school had banned all students with dreads and braids from even enrolling. These older brothers and sisters made sure that I knew that natural hairstyles like braids and dreads were not for black men who wanted to be a success in this country. According to them, braids and dreads didn't belong in the boardroom, or the courthouse, or the university... But a Jheri curl did?

It was reckoning with this negrophobia over natural hairstyles from within the black community that I realized how radical braids and dreads still are. The truth is that black men in America didn't start proudly wearing braids and dreads until the late 60s and 70s, thanks to the swag of artists like Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley. And even those guys, people who embody the Afrocentric spirit, went through a process where they decided to embrace these aesthetics. You can easily find pictures of a young Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder in traditional suits and conservative haircuts. They made a choice, before it was fashionable, to explore their roots through their hair back. And right now, in a lot if ways, millennials like me are still on that journey, trying to come to terms with our African-ness in a country that has been historically hostile to that identity.

Considering how easily so much has been taken away from black people and the fact that we're still on a journey to define ourselves within this country, I don't think it's surprising at all that we'd be possessive over our culture. When we see an Instagram of Bieber with his new look or catch a goofy dude walking down the street in locks, we feel like we have to make a fuss. If we don't, we wonder what will the magazine articles, and TV broadcast specials, and textbooks say a hundred years from now. Will they read "Justin Bieber Was the King, Emperor, Creator, Discoverer, Lord of Dreadlocks"? I certainly hope not.

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