The best big-wave surf spot in all of Southern California, by some standards, is on a public beach in Lunada Bay. Except it's not really public. For decades, a local surf gang from the ultra-wealthy neighborhood of Palos Verdes Estates has done everything in their power to keep people out.

The gang, known as the Lunada Bay Boys, has operated in various incarnations, with impunity, for years. They've pelted rocks at beachgoers and slashed peoples' tires. One woman, Diana Reed, alleges that a member of the Bay Boys poured beer onto her and exposed himself when she attempted to surf there. When she complained to the local police, she claims the officer refused to investigate and instead asked her "why a woman would go down there" in the first place.

For years, it went on that way. But in January, when the Bay Boys allegedly assaulted Cory Spencer, an off-duty cop who was attempting to surf the break, he and others finally banded together to say, enough is enough.

Read: A Gang of Rich, White Surfer Dudes Is Terrorizing a California Beach Town

Last week, Spencer, Reed, and the Coastal Protection Rangers, a nonprofit that works to keep public beaches public, filed class-action lawsuit against the Lunada Bay Boys, eight of whom are listed by name. The suit also names the city of Palos Verdes Estates and its police chief, Jeff Kepley, for allegedly supporting the gang's vigilante efforts to protect the beach from outsiders. The suit seeks compensatory damages from the Bay Boys and an injunction that would force the police force to investigate complaints rather than ignoring them.

Kurt Franklin, the lead prosecuting attorney, is a surfer himself, and grew up in Southern California. We spoke to him about the case and why he believes the police department is complicit in the existence of California's most notorious surf gang.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Lunada Bay. Photo courtesy of Kurt Franklin

VICE: The thing that I find really interesting about this lawsuit is that the Palos Verdes Estates police are involved. What leads you to believe that the police is partially responsible for how out of control the situation has gotten?
Kurt Franklin: We're still at the beginning of investigation. I can tell you some stuff we know right now. And some things I can't say because it's part of my lawsuit.

We've got decades of this gang type activity, flat out gang activity, that hasn't been addressed. We wanted to address it. We have our two plaintiffs, Corey and Diana, who had both made complaints and both tried to follow up on them, that haven't been addressed, at least in a satisfactory way.

One of the comments was in the complaint. When Diana asked, "Am I going to be safe at Lunada Bay?" and I'm going to paraphrase here, but the police told her, "No, you're not going to be safe." When the chief of police says just to not go down there... we wanted to address that. Diana also indicated they have photos of these Bay Boys. She said was willing to identify some of the Bay Boys, and the police wouldn't even let her look at photos, which we find unusual. If you're serious about moving forward with an investigation, wouldn't you want the witness to identify the person who did the bad act? I don't understand that.

Aside from the plaintiffs, is there a history of the police turning a blind eye?
We have witnesses we've approached who corroborate it, and say this sort of thing has been going on for a long time, for decades. They corroborate that, the people who live there now. Decades of inaction. And there are other things I'm not allowed to talk about publicly.

We haven't found any records of anyone being issued a citation on this, let alone prosecuted for any of these crimes, those should show up. Those should be public record.

When I wrote about the Bay Boys last year, I interviewed a man who been assaulted by them in the early 90s. So it seems like this goes back pretty far.
I talked to some community members that are ashamed about this too, and think it's appalling that the police don't do anything about it. There are people in the community who are sad what has happened as well.

Watch: VICE heads out to Santa Cruz and to meet locals who have surfed the legendary Mavericks break.

Some of the legal team are surfers, correct? Have you or any of your team had personal experiences with Lunada Bay?
Three of us are surfers, and have surfed since '78 or '79. I grew up in Southern California, but even in the 70s and 80s, I knew not to go to Lunada Bay because of the reputation. I personally never bothered to go because of that. I've been since as a part of this investigation. I've never surfed Lunada Bay, but as a kid, I would've liked to.

Your question about localism: I've surfed up and down this state. I've surfed all over. I've encountered localism, but nothing as extreme . I've never had rocks thrown at me. I've had some pretty aggressive responses though.

It seems like localism exists because there's a finite number of quality breaks. I mean like, if you play basketball, anywhere you go play, every hoop is ten feet high, but every surf break is different. And so if people have a nice one—
I sort of disagree. I mean, if you go look, you can find them. I surf now anywhere from Kelly's Cove to Monterey, and there are spots if you don't mind surfing by yourself. But the well-known spots, people really try to protect them.

People seem to think Lunada Bay is a pretty good spot.
I will give you this: Three weeks ago, before we filed the lawsuit, I made a trip down to Lunada Bay to see it. It was way better than I anticipated, in terms of a break. It was mid-week, three feet overhead, blowing slightly offshore, seventy-five degrees outside—and there are only three guys in the water! I scratched my head. How could this be in Los Angeles County? Three guys in the water when it's seventy-five and three feet overhead? And two of the guys were kneeboarders, which I was surprised to see.

The "rock fort" at Lunada Bay. Photo courtesy of Kurt Franklin

I understand there's a "rock fort" on Lunada Bay—sort of like a fortress for the Bay Boys. Do you know how long it's been there? It seems strange that there's basically an illegal drinking shack on a public beach, and it's allowed to stand by the police and the city.
If you look at some of the comments from the chief, the police just doesn't like to go down to Lunada Bay, in terms of sending officers. In a meeting with one of our clients, they said the police claim they don't have the manpower to go down to the beach. But they have forty officers to serve a community of thirteen thousand five hundred people. If you wanted to keep it safe, they could. And Lunada Bay is a city park. The city owns the land. If the city wanted to put a camera down there, for instance, they could. If the city wanted to put lighting down there, they could. What I believe, personally, is that the police force is that area exclusive.

So when someone complains, the police just take the complaint, but then nothing ever happens?
You hear comments a lot like "boys will be boys." That's just not acceptable. I think one of the defendant's mothers said, "We don't want to see non-locals changing under towels," or some nonsense. Or comments from the community like, "We don't want the riffraff here." What does that mean? People who aren't a protected category? Or surfers? It makes me sad as someone who cares about civil rights.

Are you familiar with localism being broken up with injunctions?
There are examples of individuals being prosecuted criminally. There's the well-known one in Four Point in San Francisco, a break right below the Golden Gate Bridge, where a guy got enjoined from surfing for two or three years. I've seen others like Hollywood by the Sea, which doesn't have the same reputation anymore—I haven't heard that it's turned into Malibu or anything . But I'm not aware of anything like this specifically happening before.

Right, and you don't normally see gang injunctions against a group of rich guys in their 40s and 50s.
Well, you don't usually have groups of rich guys in their 40s and 50s battering people. It calls for an unusual solution.

Follow Jacob on Twitter.

The behavioural contract at Brandon University. Photo courtesy of Stefon Irvine.

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Read: We Asked an Ashley Madison User if He's Screwed After the Hack

That whole idea of "what happens in " probably used to be true at one point, but this is 2016. Everything that happens is everywhere, always. Your Ashley Madison account will get leaked, and websites like Swipe Buster will rat your Tinder profile out to your spouse. Cheating just isn't what it used to be.

But what if there was a place where you really could get away with it all? What if there was an island where other bored husbands or wives could slip off their wedding bands, escape those prying eyes, and just sex other people constantly on a beach or something?

Apparently, the people at the website Illicit Encounters had the same thoughts, because they are in the process of turning this mythical cheater island into a reality.

According to the New York Post, the site is purchasing an entire island off the south coast of England where you are "guaranteed" the opportunity to cheat in secret. The island's program—appropriately named Illicit Retreat—is said to house tons of apartments with bedrooms, dining rooms, and hot tubs that are more than likely heart-shaped.

Illicit Encounters will blindfold you and fly you to the island by helicopter, so even you won't be able to say exactly where you've been if your suspicious lover asks.

"All you need to do is sneak out for a 'business trip,' and the rest is taken care of for you," a spokesperson for the site told New York Daily.

The fact that the island's off the coast of England means that the climate isn't exactly tropical, but if you're actually so committed to sleeping around that you're jumping through all these hoops, then you probably won't mind the weather.

Image by Lia Kantrowitz

Good news, assholes: All those cockheads who have been telling you for years that curse words are a sign of poor breeding, low intelligence, and a shitty command of the English language should shut their fucking mouths, because it turns out that eloquent swearing is merely a sign of a strong vocabulary.

As the Scientific American blog reported Tuesday, many people believe in what's called the "poverty-of-vocabulary" (POV) hypothesis—the belief that douchebags who curse a lot do so because they don't have anything else to fucking say. In this view, people who use phrases like "spiky fucker," "that thing you cut shit with," and "goddamn round cocksucker for wet food" for forks, knives, and spoons, respectively, aren't being creative—they're leaning on bad language like a crutch.

But a study from some fucking eggheads at Marist College and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts shows that the POV hypothesis can go eat a big bowl of ass, because it turns out that those who are more proficient in coming up with taboo words are also more verbally proficient in general.

The way those fuckers worked that shit out was by giving some study participants a Controlled Word Association Test (COWAT), which is basically a way of judging how big a vocabulary those study assholes really had. Then the participants were asked to drop as many taboo words as possible—from "cunt" to "crackhead" to "clit"—in a minute.

The results found that people with the most curses on the tips of their shit-eating tongues were less agreeable and conscientious and more neurotic than others, but we pretty much knew that already. The surprising finding was that generally, the more taboos they threw out, the more words they knew overall.

That shit is not exactly surprising, because anyone with a cable subscription and a pair of fucking eyes knows that curse words add a soupy, cum-like richness to the feast that is the English language. Shows like The Thick of It, The Wire, Deadwood, and South Park have painted whole fucking murals with their profanity, and all that shit is beloved by graduate-degree-holding motherfuckers. And Louis CK? Yeah those fancy pants cocksuckers will always talk about how great he is at dinner parties and shit, and he has whole routines about the worst words in the English language. Even that old dickbag Shakespeare loved curses: According to some NPR shit from 2013, he invented the slang term "Roger" for penis and also once referred to a vagina as "Spain" in a play.

Basically, anyone who actually read Chaucer in school knows that vulgarity and art have gone hand-in-fucking-glove for as long as there's been vulgarity, art, gloves, and fucking, but it's nice to have some no-doubt-grant-supported fuckfaces telling us that profanity doesn't make you stupid.

As the Scientific American fucker notes, "Just because verbally fluent people have the ability to cuss with the best of them, does not mean that they will do so." So smart people might know 20 ways to tell someone to go suck a horse's cock, but they also presumably know how to moderate that shit based on circumstance. Someone whose every other word is fuck might not be all that bright, but it's hard to tell, and maybe you shouldn't judge a book by its fucking cover. Shit.

King of the Road is an institution in skateboarding. Started by Thrasher magazine in 2003, it's a demented, roving adventure that follows various skate teams across the country as they compete to accomplish a set list of tasks, some of which carry great risk of bodily harm, and others that don't involve skateboarding at all (but still might carry great risk of bodily harm). VICELAND has teamed up with Thrasher for the latest season, which will feature the Girl, Chocolate, and Toy Machine teams hauling ass across America, throwing their bodies and whatever dignity they might have had into the wind for a chance to become the reigning King of the Road.

Watch the trailer above and make sure to check out the first full episode airing Thursday, April 28 on VICELAND. Here's some info on all the ways you can watch our new channel and check out free episodes of shows like BALLS DEEP, GAYCATION, and WEEDIQUETTE online now.

Screencap via Soundcloud

It's been an exciting couple weeks for middle-aged Albertans' terrible crimes against hip-hop.

A prescription fentanyl patch (screenshot via YouTube)

A newly released study has found that half of those prescribed fentanyl patches in Canada were put at risk of overdose due to doctors failing to follow guidelines for prescribing the opiate.

Images courtesy Blake Butler

Flipping through the first of the 839 pages of Mark Z. Danielewski's Volume 1 of The Familiar, subtitled One Rainy Day in May, one gets the sense that anything could happen. Like the work for which he is most known, 2000's House of Leaves, and the two other calculatedly form-bending novels in the 16 years since, The Familiar appears again heavily bent on using an extreme array of unusual typeface, alignment, layout, and illustration to bring some disruptive vibrancy to its build. Every 15 pages the way the text has been arranged against the page reconfigures. Some appear nearly blank, while others deform their format in the style of concrete poetry. For someone like myself, who loves nothing more than the chance to find a work of language that innovates on the way a story on paper might be told, the book's ambition is very exciting.

But what is odd about Danielewski, based on The Familiar as well as his other works, is how ambition doesn't appear to sync up with ability. Behind the façade of bizarre typography and stylization, there's something missing, something left desired in the sprawl. Never has this been truer than with The Familiar: Volume 1, the first of an almost hilariously gargantuan proposed set of 27.

For starters, I'm not sure what The Familiar is about, a remark I find amusing coming out of my mouth, being the kind of reader who usually loathes tropes like plot, character, setting, epiphany, meaning. But where in other hands the presence of ambiguity can be exciting, in Danielewski, it just seems flat. Often the book relies on its typography to carry forward what otherwise remains undeveloped, switching modes just in time to get away from actually having to get somewhere beyond its pace. Instead of reinforcing the momentum with equally provocative language—or even, more simply, compelling writing—it is merely the bang and flash of the production that fuels the motor.

This isn't, again, for lack of effort. The novel carries on multiple different character POVs, elicited with conceptually variable manners of speaking, globe-spanning settings, and of course divergent layouts for their dialogue. Each POV is also color-coded by a tiny earmark at the top of the page, a design intended to assist a thorough reader, yet the book seems to be more interested in the perception of an obsession with complexity than complexity itself. Meaning: Despite all the different perspectives and their constraints, much of the writing sounds and feels the same, like a filter on an image shifting only cosmetically the actual foundation. The lack of actual difference in feel between the concepts, and the subsequent lack of anything really interesting happening to any of them, is a hole into which the book flails and hurdles itself toward its absent center.

There is, for instance, a young girl, Xanther, whose epileptic complications cause her to repeat incessant questions about the world. Danielewski uses this as a chance to get weird with layout, splaying "How many rain drops?" across a number of pages. A lot of the scenes involving Xanther end up depicting her and her father in search of a dog (I am not sure why they wanted the dog) and instead finding a cat and bringing home the cat (I am not sure why we're supposed to give a shit about the cat besides the fact that it's probably cute). Interwoven in Xanther's story is her father, Anwar, whose work in game design provides some of the book's more compelling evocations (proving Danielewski isn't devoid of talent, and that perhaps he should rely on language more often than formatting theatrics), but still only semi-absently revolving around references to the structure of the characters as characters, the plot as illusory and hyperbolically blank.

But the traces of such postmodern devices, used to much greater successes in books similar to The Familiar (such as The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara and The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt), can't seem to save it from the fact that there's very little actual meat here, as language or image, nor is the effect of it so new. Even as the book transitions into its other major characters, the voices all seem to bleed together, mostly evoking only cursory observations of their world, constantly riddled with pat stereotypes that bely the one true presence of Danielewski behind them all. Xanther is a tween (she actually says "which, like obvious, duh," and amongst a mostly blank page the "weird typography" includes her describing the cat as "soooooooooooo feeble"); Shnorkh Zildjian, an LA taxi driver, speaks in cringe worthy Borat-like broken English ("What would violin teacher have thought of Shnork's tissue?"); Luther Perez, the book's "gang member," actually talks about his vatos, his homies, without realistic effect.

Throughout these and other voices, the mass of already dated references to Instagram, YouTube, Snoop Dogg, Johnny Knoxville, The Matrix, and so on, create a tone of residual reference, though somehow one mired in bland pop culture, decades passed. It does not feel new, nor thrilling. Instead, it provides the feeling of being in a world created by that guy with the Tom Waits hat on at the coffee shop, maniacally typing so that everyone can hear and see. Despite all of its often arbitrary-seeming conceptual fanfare, it feels patently conservative, flat, the opposite of what a book of such visual heft should actually be. In the end, the bells and whistles don't hold the floor up underneath writing that can't quite hold up its own façade.

Follow Blake on Twitter.

This hoser is the premier of Saskatchewan. Photo via The Canadian Press

Well, there you go. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Brad Wall and the Saskatchewan Party steamrolled their opponents yet again, setting up a third consecutive monster majority government. Saskatchewan is firmly locked down as the new homeland for conservative politics in Canada.

Meanwhile, the NDP have totally fallen apart. After running one of the sleepiest campaigns in recent memory, they managed to snag one more seat than they did in 2011. But they took less of the popular vote, just over 30% this year compared to 32% in 2011. And their leader, Cam Broten, lost his seat—making this is the second election in a row where the NDP leader has lost a seat to the Sask Party.

To put it politely, this is a goddamn trainwreck for the NDP.

So how did this happen? Why has the NDP collapsed so badly, so deeply, in the historic homeland of Canadian socialism?

Basically: the Saskatchewan NDP is not very good these days, and people fucking love Brad Wall. But let's back up a bit first.

The NDP Just Can't Get Past the 90s

GIF-based nostalgia for the 90s is all the rage in our current cultural zeitgeist, but you can forgive Saskatchewanians who are hesitant to get on board. The 1990s were an extraordinarily shitty time for the province, and it still casts a long shadow on the provincial NDP.

Ironically, this is largely thanks to the Saskatchewan Party's forebears: the Progressive Conservative party and its last premier, Grant Devine. Devine's government was famously terrible. Among other things, Devine's government brutalized the public sector, moved government buildings to totally irrational (and inefficient) rural areas, and saw a whopping 13 government MLAs get charged with expense account fraud. Another of Devine's cabinet ministers was convicted of killing his ex-wife.

They also totally bankrupted the province. Finances were so rough that by the time 1991 rolled around, the government was refusing to release a budget. Instead, they circumvented democratic oversight, prorogued the legislature, and governed through special warrant until they were turfed in the next election. It's legitimately impressive how badly the Devine PCs fucked up considering they were only around for nine years.

This was the shape in which Saskatchewan's last Dipper dynasty found the place when Roy Romanow took power in 1991. The books were so bad that credit agencies in New York were threatening to come in and take over the finance ministry. Throw in Canada's grueling recession, and the NDP were stuck cleaning up the mess for the better part of the of their 15-year run.

Not satisfied to see the social democrats returned to power, the last four MLAs from the Devine PC rump joined up with four disgruntled Liberals in 1997 to form the Saskatchewan Party, the Prairies' mean, green, NDP-stomping machine.

Even so, it took a couple elections to get properly revved up. Like, for instance, then-leader Elwin Hermanson had to tearfully explain to voters in 2003 thathe was not, in fact, a Nazi. But once young firebrand Brad Wall came on board in 2004, everything started coming up Saskatchewan.

It's Actually Pretty Easy to be Green

Even if you hate his politics, it's genuinely hard to hate Brad Wall. How can you hate someone who does such a killer rapping Ronald Reagan impression?

(Photo by Gage Skidmore via)

Everything you need to know about the world this morning, curated by VICE.

US News

• Cruz and Sanders Get Momentum from Wisconsin Wins
  Ted Cruz won a decisive victory over Donald Trump in the Wisconsin primary and said it was a "turning point" in the Republican race. Bernie Sanders insisted his campaign also had "a path toward victory and the White House" after a strong win over frontrunner Hillary Clinton, by 56 percent to 43 percent. —CBS News
• Mexico Replaces US Diplomats
  The Mexican government has replaced two of its top diplomats in the US, citing concerns about anti-Mexican rhetoric in America. Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu said the new appointments were designed to "act in a different way" to respond to "a more hostile climate." —Reuters
• Home of Anti-Abortion Activist Raided
  California authorities raided the home of David Daleiden, the anti-abortion activist who made secret videos at Planned Parenthood clinics and accused doctors of selling fetal tissue. Daleiden called it "an attack on citizen journalism," while the Attorney General's office would not comment on the investigation. —Los Angeles Times
• Drug Giant Drops Merger Plans
  Pfizer is set to abandon its $152 million merger with Allergan, a deal designed to help the company drop its US corporate citizenship and pay less tax. The announcement, expected this morning, is a victory for President Obama, who yesterday criticized firms that "effectively renounce their citizenship." —The New York Times

International News

• Iceland PM Resigns, Deputy Takes Over
  Revelations about an undeclared offshore firm led Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson to resign, making him the first major casualty of the leaked Panama Papers. An Icelandic government statement late Tuesday night said his deputy, Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson, would take over for "an unspecified amount of time." —AP
• Global Rise in Execution Numbers
  There was a "profoundly disturbing" rise in the number of people executed around the world last year, according to Amnesty International. At least 1,634 people were executed in 2015, a rise of more than 50 percent on the previous year, and the highest number since 1989. —BBC News
• Tripoli Authorities Back Libya's Unity Government
  Local authorities in Tripoli have ceded power and backed a new unity government and UN-appointed prime minister-designate, Fayez al-Sarraj. The Tripoli officials, not recognized internationally, decided to exit to "preserve the higher interests of the country and prevent bloodshed." —Al Jazeera
• Ceasefire Between Azerbaijan and Armenia Holds
  Azerbaijan and Armenia halted hostilities after four days of intense fighting over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Forces in the region said a ceasefire largely held overnight. "The ceasefire was generally maintained," said a Nagorno-Karabakh self-defense army statement. —Reuters

(Azealia Banks photo by Manfred Werner, via; Sarah Palin photo by David Shankbone, via)

Everything Else

• Sarah Palin Wants to Sue Azealia Banks
  Sarah Palin has threatened to sue NYC rapper Azealia Banks after Banks tweeted that the onetime vice presidential candidate should have group sex with "the biggest burliest blackest negroes," an apparent response to a fake Palin quote about how African Americans "enjoyed" being slaves that Banks thought was real. Palin said, "I'm suing Azealia Banks and can't wait to share my winnings." —Rolling Stone
• San Fran Grants Fully-Paid Parental Leave
  San Francisco has become the first city in the US to require businesses to offer fully-paid leave for parents for six weeks. The city's board of supervisors agreed too many families can't afford time off after their child is born. —NBC Bay Area
• Video Game Reveals the Rise of the Ayatollah
  New video game 1979 Revolution: Black Friday puts players in the middle of the Iranian Revolution. Using actual events, people, and places, Canadian Navid Khonsari's game explores the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini. —VICE News
• Hacker Got Free Domino's Pizza
  A bug in the British version of Domino's Pizza app let UK security expert Paul Price trick the app into thinking he paid for his pizza. But Price felt guilty, fessed up, and even helped Domino's fix their app. —Motherboard

Done with reading for today? That's fine—watch our political correspondent Bun B explore Wisconsin's fight to stop Donald Trump.

Last month, aides for Donald Trump made a rare admission of error, conceding that the candidate's charitable foundation had made a mistake by donating money to a group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a possible violation of federal tax rules preventing charities from giving to political causes.

It was a surprising mea culpa from a public figure who doesn't do that sort of thing, coming in response to a watchdog ethics complaint that claimed the Donald J. Trump Foundation gave $25,000 to Bondi's political organization in 2013, and also mislabeled the donation on its tax filings, claiming the money went to a Kansas-based anti-abortion group with a similar name. At the time the donation was made, Bondi was considering a state investigation into Trump University; the investigation never occurred, a decision that created a minor controversy in Florida. Last month, Bondi endorsed the real-estate mogul's presidential campaign.

In a March interview with the Washington Post, Allen Weisselberg, the treasurer of Trump's charity—and also the chief financial officer at the Trump Organization—chalked the donation up to a mere clerical mistake. "All these years, we had no idea anything happened," he said, conveniently forgetting that the donation had made headlines three years prior. Weisselberg added that the foundation would "straighten it out" with the IRS.

Save for the glimmer of Florida cronyism, the controversy was pretty unremarkable, at least as far as Trump news goes. But it did draw attention to one of the less-explored corners of the strange Trump Family empire—namely, the real-estate mogul's foundation, an eponymous entity that the reality-TV star tends not to mention when he runs through his long list of personal accomplishments.

Established in 1988, the Donald J. Trump Foundation has never been a prominent part of its namesake's brand. Until January, the organization had no website, and doesn't publicly identify an overriding mission or goal for the family's philanthropy. According to public tax filings, Donald Trump is the foundation's president, and three of his children—Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr.—are listed as directors; no one is paid for their time, which is estimated at 30 minutes per week.

As of 2014, the last year for which public tax filings are available, the foundation had assets of about $1.3 million. According to a review of the charity's tax filings, the foundation doled out about $1 million or less annually over the past decade, with the exception of 2012, when its gifts totaled $1.7 million.

Unlike most rich dudes with family foundations, Trump himself appears to have donated a relatively small portion of the money his charity manages—since 2006, he has given less than $700,000 to the charity, according to tax filings; his last donation was recorded in 2008, when he chipped in $35,000. All $565,832 in gifts, contributions, and grants that the Trump Foundation reported on its last tax filing came from outside donors, many of whom have business or personal ties to Trump.

The numbers are surprising, given Trump's wealth—an estimated $4.5 billion, according to Forbes, which ranks him at number 324 on its list of the world's richest people. "Trump has an appallingly dismal record of giving," said Pablo Eisenberg, a founder of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute. "In terms of charity, he's a cheapskate, and particularly for someone who allegedly has so much wealth."

Of course, it's possible that Trump has made donations outside of his charity. In August, the Republican frontrunner told the Associated Press that his philanthropic contributions have amounted to $102 million in land and cash over the past five years, but as the AP points out, it's not clear where that figure comes from. (Last year, Crain's New York noted that Trump "has given away properties only after his efforts to develop at least some of them failed.") Moreover, for a man thought to be the richest individual ever to run for president, even the $102 million number seems low: By contrast, Mitt Romney and his wife Ann gave 29.4 percent of their $13 million-plus income to charity the year before his 2012 presidential run, according to his personal tax disclosures. Trump has so far declined to release his own tax records, making a full accounting of his charitable giving impossible.

In the intensely scrutinizing process of a presidential campaign, philanthropic contributions are used not only as a measure of a candidate's generosity, but also as a proxy for determining a candidate's values and ideological or spiritual values. And while the size of Trump's foundation may indicate some level of stinginess on the part of its president, what the charity's donations say about the candidate is much harder to sort out.

A review of the last the Donald J. Trump Foundation's tax filings for the last decade uncovered an eclectic— and in some cases downright bizarre—mix of beneficiaries that eschews any discernible mission or coherent point of view, and ultimately raise more questions than answers about where the 2016 candidate's moral compass might lie.

On the one hand, the foundation has given to an assortment of right-wing organizations that one might expect to see associated with a Republican presidential candidate—groups like the Palmetto Family Council of South Carolina, whose current projects include a "Defend Christmas Freedom Hotline"; the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; and Liberty Central, a conservative nonprofit founded by the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Tax filings from 2013 also show a $50,000 donation to the American Conservative Union Foundation, sponsor of the influential annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

In 2014, the year before Trump announced his campaign, the foundation's tax filings list a $100,000 donation to the Citizens United Foundation, the charitable arm of the conservative lobbying firm linked to the infamous 2010 Supreme Court campaign finance ruling. Filings from that year also list a $25,000 gift to the American Spectator Foundation, publisher of the conservative American Spectator magazine.

(In an email, Donald Rieck, president of the American Spectator Foundation, confirmed the donation, but stressed that there is a "firewall between the foundation and the website and our writers, hence the contribution has had no impact on our coverage of Mr. Trump.")

But while the above gifts seem to gel with Trump's current political role, his foundation has also bestowed its largesse on a number of far more liberal groups. Most notable, of course, are the Trump Foundation contributions to the Clinton Foundation—one for $100,000 in 2009, and another for $10,000 in 2010, according to the Trump Foundation's tax filings.

In the years following, Trump's charity continued to bestow its largesse on other decidedly left-wing organizations, including a donation of just under $57,000 in 2012 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, a major donor to Planned Parenthood and frequent target of conservative ire. And in 2014, his foundation gave $5,000 to Protect Our Winters, a group that, according to its website, aims to "mobilize the snow sports community against climate change," because global warming would "mean the end of skiing as we know it."

Other Trump Foundation gifts since 2011 include $20,000 to the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, $10,000 to Gay Men's Health Crisis, $5,000 to the AIDS Service Center, and $10,000 to the Latino Commission on AIDS, a group "dedicated to fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS in the Latino community." In 2013, Trump also sent a whopping $325 in pocket change to the ACLU Foundation of Florida.

(The donations to Protect Our Winters, as well as those to the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network and the Gay Men's Health Crisis, were made on behalf of Celebrity Apprentice contestants, according to spokespeople for the respective charities.)

More controversially, in 2010, the Trump Foundation gave $10,000 to Jenny McCarthy's Generation Rescue, which promotes the belief, apparently shared by Trump, that vaccines cause autism in children. Perhaps the most bizarre donation, though, dates back to 2006, when the Trump Foundation's gave $1,000 to the Rescue Workers Detoxification Fund, which supported a project led by Tom Cruise that offered a "cleansing" program to 9/11 rescue workers known as the "Purification Rundown."

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, told VICE via email that many of the grants given to some of the more unusual recipients, especially liberal groups, were made on behalf of former Apprentice contestants but said that she couldn't be more specific. "Given that this occurred several years ago, over the course of a decade, it would be a weeks long process to determine the source of the contribution and at who's ," she wrote.

In the end, the foundation—like most Trump-branded entities—reveals little about what the 2016 candidate believes, and even less about how he might behave as president. And that's just how his campaign likes it. "These groups may not share Mr. Trump's political ideology," Hicks wrote, "but Mr. Trump's generosity does not deserve to be questioned."

Follow Ken Silverstein on Twitter.

Bun B is a Houston-based MC, activist, and Rice University lecturer, who makes up one half of the legendary rap duo U.G.K. that's credited with pioneering the sound of Southern hip-hop. He's also VICE's political correspondent, covering the strange and bloody cage match that is the Republican presidential campaign.

Last week, we sent him to Wisconsin, arguably the most politically divisive state in the country, where Donald Trump is set to suffer his first major defeat in the GOP primary on Tuesday. Bun B spent three days on the front lines of the fight to stop the Republican frontrunner there, talking to Trump's fans and detractors to find out what was really going in the nastiest contest of the 2016 race so far.

This weekend, New York's MX Gallery will display a strange wooden box, propped open and full of colorful vials. Above the vials, the gold plated lid will be scrawled with text and a picture of a human digestive system. It's the Ripley. Created by designer Nikolas Gregory, the kit has everything you need to make intimately personalized jewelry with your ass.

The vials as, instructions on the case and notes accompanying the exhibit explain, contain edible abrasive, coloring, and polishing materials, as well as a ring encrusted with gems. Potential users eat these materials as a meal. The idea is that once the ring hits a user's stomach, the abrasives as well as stomach acids and corrosives from other things consumed will wear away the ring, exposing the jewels beneath. Moving on to the small intestine, abrasive materials (think roughage) polish the ring. Then as the ring moves along with other waste through the gut, hardening shit compacts around and colors the gems. Finally—you guessed it—the user must fish for the finished ring, which will take on different properties depending on his or her metabolism, diet, and other factors, from within the potentially rough bowel movement at the end of the gastrointestinal line.

It sounds fucking nuts—and it's meant to be. Named after a stomach-and-ass-eating alien from Stephen King's 2001 novel Dreamcatcher, the Ripley is, Gregory told VICE, his reflection on the trajectory of the world. As of yet, no humans have actually tried to use this kit, which remains a unique prototype with no clear market. However, when VICE caught up with Gregory, he explained not just what he was thinking while making the Ripley, but who might want to use it.

VICE: Walk me through how you wound up creating the Ripley.

All photos by the author

This article originally appeared on VICE US

A young white male in a tank top approached another young white male in a tank top. "My fuckin' nigga!" he exclaimed, embracing him—but not too much, lest the act be perceived as homoerotic. I looked around to see if anyone else was suitably horrified by this exchange; no one was.

I was in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, for the final week of spring break, a month-long celebration of beer-soaked debauchery that, according to the city's Visitors Bureau, brings 30,000 college students each year to the manmade lake's littered shores. The weather had been windy, overcast, and cold, creating an environment more befitting to the end of days than partying. Yet still, in spite of it all, they partied. There is a lit that never goes out, fam.

Earlier in the day, a smattering of frat brothers and sorority sisters, a mere fraction of 30,000, stood on the sand surrounding the Nautical Beachfront Resort—epicenter of SWATopia, the "West Coast's Largest Spring Break Event." Hovering around folding tables, the sun above intermittently emerging and disappearing behind dark, foreboding clouds, they played beer pong while an apathetic DJ blasted Fergie's "London Bridge." (The original London Bridge was disassembled and transported to Lake Havasu City in 1971 at a cost of $7 million; it is the city's pride and joy.)

Exposed to the elements, going hard for days, the toll this endless party takes on their (young, sure, but still fallible) bodies seemed intense. When you look into the eyes of the average attendee, drunk at 1 PM on a weekday, you see nothing, only yourself staring back.

When the sun went down, SWATopia's Rockstar Stage was set for a concert by a DJ who goes by the name 3LAU. But he had postponed his appearance until the next night because, according to the venue's bouncer, he "thought it might rain or some garbage." I was not disappointed by this development, as I know nothing of 3LAU's oeuvre, but the bouncer nevertheless offered me a $10 refund for the inconvenience of having to listen to the beats of a replacement DJ. He also offered me a bit of advice: Next time, bring a can of Rockstar Energy Drink and get in for half price. "It's gotta be full though," he warned me. "Not empty."

Rockstar Energy Drink logos were everywhere, as were representatives of the brand, throwing beach balls and trucker caps into the sparse crowd. This collection of drunken Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Long Beach students, it seemed, was their target demo.

At 9 PM, the concert's scheduled start time, there was virtually no one at the event. I wandered around the Nautical's perimeter and looked into the open doors of hotel rooms, filled with bikini-clad girls and board-shorted boys. Mountains of discarded red Solo cups and beer cans lay ignored on the sparse grass outside.

The spring breakers' rooms were filled with the same detritus. Walking past, you could see their temporary owners sitting on beds, yelling about nothing in particular, while listening to the same EDM music that blared from the stage mere paces away. They were here to celebrate a weekend devoid of noise constraints, devoid of RAs breathing down their necks. A weekend without rules; a weekend without adults. But the adults, like the ambulances, are always a stone's throw away, there if necessary—Lake Havasu City also acts as a tourist destination for middle-aged water sports enthusiasts, who share the space with spaced-out youths.

In my meandering, I came across a green-haired girl who told me this was the smallest crowd the event had seen in years. She had spent her spring break here for the past three years and told me this year, only 25 of the hundreds of Cal State Fullerton students who normally attend came. None of the Las Vegas crew—students from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas—could make it, as their spring break this year didn't coincide with the dates.

Even with less of a crowd, she said, it's still fun, as "less people means less drama." I asked her where, at 10 PM, everyone was. "They're still waking up," she told me. No one would leave their rooms until at least 11, so she suggested I find some people to pre-game with, as outside alcoholic drinks weren't allowed in the concert area.

I chose, instead, to go to the concert area. Sipping from a lukewarm can of sugar-free Rockstar, I surveyed the bleak scene before me, watching smoke machines billowing out into the nothing that surrounded them. "It's like a really sad middle school dance," my companion remarked while gazing at the 30 or so attendees standing awkwardly in groups. A kid in a Hawaiian shirt to our left took a pill, chasing it with a swig of bottled water.

As time passed, more spring breakers trickled in, but the crowd never grew to more than a few hundred. A remix of Ludacris's "Move Bitch (Get Out the Way)" got everyone hyped, but the hype quickly waned. A friend of the DJ shot copious iPhone footage of him, smartly refraining from shooting the sparse crowd he was spinning for. I watched as a man leaned back on a platform and fingered his lady, the smoke circling them making it appear as though they were in a war zone, and thanked God I, in a literal sense, am too old for this shit.

Follow Megan on Twitter.

Photo via Wikipedia

Read: How Can I Get My Parents to Stop Talking About Death?

In startlingly upsetting news, it turns out that, yes, you can actually die of a broken heart. According to a fucking magnificently morose and depressing study done in Denmark—whose use of antidepressants is the fourth highest in the world—statistics taken over roughly ten years show that there's a correlation between a recent bereavement and subsequent death. Other studies have shown that once someone's life partner dies, they are more susceptible to heart disease and strokes.

The study was published in the online Open Heart journal, which stated that "the risk was highest 18–14 days after the loss."

Though the dizzyingly dark stats paint a picture of crushing loneliness and despair, the study, which was led by Simon Graaf of the Aarhus University, is keen to make clear that the study is just an observational one—no concrete conclusions can be drawn from it.

That said, it does paint a bleak picture of what it's like to be physically affected by an incredible grief. When people's partners aren't even unhealthy and still have the audacity to die, the risk for the living partner to follow is raised by 57 percent.

The irregular heartbeat—or atrial fibrillation—quickens and shifts the pulse around, and it increases the risk of strokes and dementia, which might be welcome if you're waking up in an empty bed every morning wondering why you must still be alive.

You know how the people who live the longest are the ones working until they're 70-odd, still walking around, still exercising? It's because they have something to do. When people retire, their bodies sort of just... give up. That seems to be what happens when you lose the love of your life, too, which is kind of sweet but also terrifying.

Do you trust this guy's fridge? All photos by the author.

There's a working fridge in a Montreal alleyway with a raccoon on its door.

Akko, Israel, from a boat. Photo by Michael Homan

It was a rite of passage. The gap year trip for Israel is for many British Jews a sine qua non, an essential part of becoming a Jewish adult. For me at least it wasn't particularly ideological. I'd grown up with a vague sense that Israel and Zionism was part and parcel of being Jewish, and it was something I wanted to explore for myself. To the small degree that I thought about it, I supported the Israeli Left and disliked settlers—that was par for the course in my liberal synagogue in north London. To me, at that time, being leftwing and being Jewish were pretty much the same thing. As far as I knew, Israel was basically good, and engaged in peace negotiations, and the only problem was a small minority of ultra-orthodox settlers.

So I went, age 18 in 1999, ironically at what we can now see was the height of the peace process, with the Ehud Barak government negotiating at Camp David and at Taba. In terms of peace it was about as good as it got. The Jewish youth movement I'd gone with was a pretty incompetent one and they'd sent me to a kibbutz on my own, where I met a range of international travelers and volunteers rather than mixing with other British Jews. In retrospect, perhaps that was significant. For the early weeks I was there, I associated the elation I felt at being away from home for the first time with Israel; its landscapes, its people, and its language. I also fell in love with the kibbutz‚—the egalitarianism, the communal meals, the general sense of bonhomie.

Akko again. Photo by Chris Yunker

I was loosely aware of ethnic tensions—I remember being warned by a kibbutznik to take care when hitchhiking to the local synagogue on a Friday, as there were "Arabs on the roads." But on my regular afternoons off (Kibbutz work turned out not to be so arduous after I was sacked from the Banana fields) I visited local towns, and became particularly entranced with the old city of Akko, on the coast. While most of the Jewish areas featured more modern architecture, old Akko, a predominantly Palestinian Arab area, still retained many Ottoman buildings, and featured narrow streets, hidden nooks and crannies, and market stalls galore. I was entranced. Sitting on a rock in Akko's port in the autumn sunshine, looking out onto the small boats, and onto the Mediterranean beyond, I experienced something of a revelation—my favorite place in Israel was an Arab town.

Many Israeli towns to me lacked the depth, history, and serenity I found in the turrets, clock towers, and stone walls of Akko. The warmth and calm I felt in this place made me question the notion of separation that was popular at the time—that "we are here and they are there." In that moment I realized I didn't want to live in a nationalist country in which the culture of one group predominated, but rather one in which different cultures lived, if not exactly side by side, then at least down the road. I realized that I believed in what's known as the one-state solution—that instead of partition, Israel/Palestine should become a state for all its citizens, with equal rights and freedom of movement for all.

Related: Watch 'Israel's Radical Left'

In those heady days of peace talks such a position was certainly unusual, but not completely ridiculous. It seemed then that everyone was committed to peace and human rights, and the idea of a single state in which Jews and Arabs lived together had been proposed by various historical figures who identified as Zionist, such as Martin Buber, Judah Hamagnes, and Hannah Arendt. So even while taking a fringe position I felt connected to an Israeli-Jewish consensus.

But my enrollment in university in the autumn of 2000 coincided with the start of the second intifada, the end of the peace process, and the arrival of Ariel Sharon as Israeli Prime Minister. From then on, everyone seemed to move to the right, blaming Palestinian terrorism for the end of the Oslo process, condoning Israel's military actions, and increasingly putting "security" before peace and human rights. My support for a one-state solution went from being a harmless eccentricity to a view utterly at odds with most Jewish opinion. I began to call myself a non-Zionist, feeling that, whatever the precedents in pre-state Zionist thought, the belief that Israel should become a state for all its citizens now put me beyond the Zionist fold.

While at university I formed a Jewish left-wing, pro-peace group, focused on criticizing Israeli human rights abuses during the second intifada. We were critics from within, putting up flyers for Israeli society events, and campaigning within the Jewish society. This was hugely controversial, as the Jewish society tolerated only limited criticisms of Israeli policy, and we certainly crossed the line. We were also committed to a strong Jewish identity and practice that didn't involve solidarity with Israel, a position that many found hard to comprehend.

Later, with a friend I'd met on my gap year, I founded Jewdas. It's a radical diaspora Jewish group that has taken an explicitly non-Zionist stance, alongside satirizing the many absurdities of the British Jewish community, and throwing excellent parties. Jewdas has worked hard to resuscitate strands of Jewish history and culture not based around Israel and statist nationalism, particularly Yiddish, socialism, and the rich history of Jews in London's East End. It began as a joke in 2005, designed mostly to amuse ourselves, but 11 years later it is still standing, providing space for diasporic, radical, and progressive Jews in the UK who do not feel catered for by the Jewish mainstream. Peace and justice in Israel/Palestine seems as far off as ever, but in the mean time, Jewdas aims to create a model for how Jews can live a rich and full life without the need for ethnocracy and without compromising Jewish ethical values. Much has changed in the intervening years but I still remember that autumn day, sitting on the rock in Akko, and feel that the moment changed the way I think and live.

Follow Joseph Finlay on Twitter.

All photos courtesy of Eddie Otchere

This article originally appeared on VICE France

In 1993, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) saw the light of day. Around the same time, and hours before their first ever show in the UK, British photographer Eddie Otchere met the Wu-Tang Clan. He spent a couple of hours with them then and, fascinated, he kept coming back to take the group's photographs for almost a decade.

Eddie's work is one of the most beautiful photographic documents ever made about the Wu, captured at a time when the group was at its peak. I spoke to him about how it all came to be.

VICE: Where and when did you start taking pictures of the Wu-Tang Clan?
Eddie Otchere: I regularly shot them during the 1990s and early noughties. I took the first photos in 1993, maybe 1994. It was during their first show in the UK, shortly after the release of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). I bought my tickets in advance, and I had heard that each member would arrive on his own plane. I headed down to RCA records in London, who where handling the Loud roster, and literally bumped into them outside.

Cool. And they were immediately OK with you taking pictures?
I chatted with them and developed a rapport, which meant they allowed me to get on their tour bus and follow them to the Kentish Town Forum to shoot them during sound check. The thing is, there was no sound check—they were just standing outside, throwing rocks at passing trains, smoking, and chilling. U-God practiced his tiger style.

In any case, I managed to capture the Wu except for the RZA and Ol' Dirty. I don't believe Cappadonna was a member as such at the time, so I knew I had to catch the 9 MCs. By the end of that day, I had shot 7. Later that night, I witnessed the beautiful chaos of that first show.

Cappadonna

You did end up taking pictures of Ol' Dirty Bastard.
Yes, but that happened a few years later—in 1997. That was around the release of Forever, when I also took new shots of Method Man, U-God, and their producer DJ Mathematics. They made the cover of Time Out London that week. Sonny Takhar, the product manager of the Wu at the time, made sure that album went to number 1—he paid all the right people to play their part, and they did. I'd hoped to capture the RZA as well at that shoot, but he was a no-show. And as brilliant as it all was, I still couldn't say I had captured the Wu in their entirety.

RZA as Bobby Digital

Can you tell me more about the photo of RZA dressed as a superhero?
The RZA came to the shoot in character. He walked into the room as Bobby Digital. To be honest, I was a massive Kool Keith fan at the time and I felt RZA's character was too close to Keith's alter ego. I think he had a brilliant response as Robbie Analogue. Anyway, the RZA created a whole superhero persona with one simple costume, and he had a great way of expanding hip-hop's cultural landscape that way. In that sense, I want to expand hip-hop culture into fine art spaces and large format books.

How deep does your Wu-Tang fanaticism run?
I'm a music collector—especially of music on vinyl. About half of my collection is contemporary and half is classic. In the 1990s, I was totally immersed in hip-hop culture. On the same day the Wu released Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chanbers), A Tribe Called Quest released Midnight Marauders and although the two albums are vastly different, it's interesting how influential the Wu were. The golden age of hip-hop is interesting because it covered so many different kinds of music, all under one banner.

Method Man

Tell me about this Method Man picture, with that weird eyelid.
Method Man always had a trick up his sleeve. On that day, he was practically brimming with ideas and he just wanted to show me a new trick. He developed it further in his video for Bring the Pain.

Who did you get along with best?
Method Man is the most giving. Even when he's in a bad mood, his personality shines through. Ol' Dirty was the funniest, although his humor was tinged with tragedy. Ghost is great too—a cross between ODB and Meth. They are all incredible people. Even when I think about them now, they seem like a sort of gods to me.

Ol 'Dirty Bastard

How do you feel when you look at these pictures now—almost two decades later?
Looking at them now, I'm reminded of what I set out to do with these pictures, which was to find a new path for hip-hop photography. And I'm reminded of the political nuances in our society; how these men are seen as a menace in some communities and heroes in others. They're guys whose creativity and social pastimes are criminalized and demonized, but they also serve as an inspiration to generations of people.

These images are so strikingly beautiful, especially when you consider normal hip-hop photography. What did you want to do with the photos?
At the time, I wanted one thing—to capture the ultimate group shot of hip-hop's ultimate super group. That was the challenge. I had it in my mind to pitch to shoot the cover for their next album. I wanted to create a coherent body of work that best represented the group. I can't help but see them in a sort of religious context, so my ideas for them gravitate around prayer books, iconography, and their canonization within hip-hop. And after 20 years, time has proven that Wu-Tang is forever.

When Barbara Denham first saw Gabriel Kovari's body, sitting upright against a wall in an East London graveyard on her early morning dog walking route, she thought he was just sleeping. She walked past, but it occurred to her that he was just a little too still.

"I thought, he hasn't moved - he hasn't flinched, it didn't look right," she told the Daily Mail. "So I just clapped near his face and shouted 'whoo hoo', but there was nothing. He had dark glasses on, a bit askew. I gently touched his cheek and withdrew immediately as it was cold."

It was the summer of 2014 and Kovari, a slim, blonde, 22-year-old artist, had recently arrived in London from Slovakia. With only a handful of friends in the city, Kovari had made it known on Grindr that he was looking for a room to rent. John*, a television commercial producer had a spare room at his home in Deptford and so they arranged to meet up.

"He was a sweet-natured guy, he had a kind of quiet charm," says John. "I felt comfortable inviting him to lodge with me and we became friends. He told me he was looking to make a go of it in London and this made sense, because yes, this city attracts young gay men from other parts of the UK and Europe, it's seen as a tolerant, liberal place compared to others. He told me he wanted his life to begin in London."

Kovari stayed for six weeks, then told John he'd found a new place to stay. "We had a last little drink," says John. "That was the last I heard. I tried to contact him a few days later, but I never got a reply."

On August 28 2014, there was a knock at John's door. On his doorstep were four uniformed police officers, who asked John if he knew a Gabriel Kovari. Yes, he told them, Gabriel had been his lodger. The officers informed John that Kovari had been found dead that morning in St Margaret's church graveyard in Barking, a neighborhood in East London. The death was unexplained, they said.

Roughly two months before that, in June, Anthony Walgate and his two friends, China and Kiera, all in their early 20s, were on a summer break from Middlesex University, where they were getting their degrees in fashion design. China and Kiera remember it well, because it was the last time they saw Walgate alive.

They wiled away the afternoon drinking in the sun, taking in some rare British rays. After a meal in a Turkish cafe they went back to Walgate's room in a shared house in Golder's Green, North West London. "Anthony was talking passionately about going to the Royal College of Art to do his Masters degree in fashion," Kiera recalls of the skinny, blonde 23-year-old young man from Hull in the north of England. "He'd become dedicated and self-confident over the last year and was really looking forward to starting out as a designer."

Later that Sunday, Walgate told them about a meet-up he had arranged on a dating app for the coming Tuesday. Since one of China's friends had been mugged by a gang on Tinder, Walgate made sure to tell his companions who he was meeting, as well as where and when. On Tuesday evening, Kiera remembers messaging Walgate as he was getting ready. "Anthony was waiting to go out and was talking about what he was going to wear," she says.

The next day, Walgate failed to show up to meet China for a pre-arranged drink in Soho. She guessed he was sleeping off a big night. The day after, she still heard nothing; Walgate didn't answer his phone. So China went looking for him at the shared house where he lived. Walgate's room was locked. She tried shouting and called his phone again, but there was just silence, so she went to report her friend missing at the local police station. The officer tapped the details into a computer and said that, unfortunately, Anthony had been found dead at 4:20 AM that morning in Barking, East London.

From left to right: Anthony Walgate (via Instagram), Gabriel Kovari (via Facebook), Daniel Whitworth (via Twitter), and Jack Taylor (via Facebook)

It dawned on John not long after the body of his former lodger was found that something sinister was afoot. He had read an article in a local newspaper about the unexplained death of Anthony Walgate, whose body had been found a few minutes walk from the churchyard where Kovari had been found.

"I remember thinking, hang on a minute, this is weird," says John. "So I Googled 'unexplained deaths' and whether it was common to have them so close to each other. It looked suspicious. They were similar ages. Dumped within a small area. It seemed, well, dodgy."

Then, on September 20, Denham, the dog walker who found Kovari, came across another body propped up in the same place as before. "There was a bare space between sock and jean so I just gently touched his leg," she later told a reporter. Like the previous body, this one was "virtually sitting upright, in virtually exactly the same spot."

The Calgary drop-in centre. Photo by Flickr user Davebloggs

Around seven years ago, Nigel Kirk fled from a domestic violence situation to the streets of Calgary. He's been bouncing in and out of homelessness ever since. Until last month, Kirk was working in the kitchen of a family restaurant and living on his own. But hours were cut as the city's economy flatlined and he couldn't afford to pay his rent.

Kirk's now back in a homeless shelter. And he's certainly not the only Calgarian with such a tale.

The drop in global oil prices has resulted in a 73 percent spike in unemployment and 23 percent increase in food bank usage. Employment insurance claims in Alberta have almost doubled since 2015.

Crisis calls to the Calgary Women's Emergency Shelter have increased in frequency and complexity, with many now attached to issues like homelessness and financial duress in addition to domestic violence; executive director Kim Ruse says clients are now averaging month-long stays at the shelter, up from the standard of 21 days.

"We're seeing an increased demand across the board for all our services," says Ruse, who notes many of the shelter's clients are children. "Programs that never had waitlists before have waitlists."

According to executive director Debbie Newman, the city's downtown Drop-In Centre—the largest homeless shelter in the country, which averages 1,200 people a night even though it was opened with an expected capacity of 520 people—is seeing 10 to 15 new faces every day.

All up, it's a crisis of massive proportions and devastating consequences. But it's also a problem that plagued the city far prior to the economic downturn.

"I'm still seeing a lot of people in the shelters who were there when I first became homeless seven years ago," says Kirk, who serves as a board member for the anti-poverty organization Vibrant Communities Calgary. "These are people who really should be among some of the highest priority for help. But they're still there."

In 2013, York University's Homeless Hub calculated that Calgary had the highest homeless population of any major city by percentage (0.29 percent of the total population compared to 0.19 percent in Toronto and 0.27 percent in Vancouver).

It also "cautiously" estimated there are three people experiencing "hidden homelessness"—aka couch-surfing without any prospect of permanent housing—for every one person counted as homeless in Canada.

Calgary's last homeless count, officially dubbed a point-in-time (PIT) count, occurred in October 2014 and found a conveniently memorable number of 3,555 people to be staying in emergency shelters, supportive housing, or rough sleeping. Over 31 percent of those surveyed were Aboriginal, despite only making up 2.8 percent of Calgary's total population.

Photo via Flickr user Calgary Reviews

There were some successes prior to the start of the downturn: the total number of homeless people stabilized between 2008 and 2014 despite significant population growth. Over 7,000 people have been housed since the Calgary Homeless Foundation was tasked with its ambitious but unrealistic goal of "ending homelessness" by 2018. But such efforts haven't been nearly enough.

As Kirk's experience suggests, getting people housed doesn't actually ensure they can consistently afford to pay rent. Calgarians experienced a near-zero percent vacancy rate in recent years, a landlord's dream when combined with the fact the province doesn't have any form of rent control (an issue the Alberta NDP has bizarrely refused to address).

In other words, the concept of "affordable" is a highly nebulous one. For example, a 224-suite downtown apartment building opened in 2014 by the Mustard Seed, another major homeless service agency in Calgary, charges low-income tenants between $550 and $880 per month: "It's too expensive for a lot of people," Kirk says in a bit of an understatement.

Since 2008, the number of rental units have dropped by 3,000 mostly due to condo conversion (joining the loss of almost 5,000 rental units between 2001 and 2006). So it's no surprise that over 15,600 households in Calgary are in extreme housing need, meaning they earn less than $20,000 per year and pay more than 50 percent or more of income on shelter (housing is considered affordable if it costs under 30 percent of your before-tax income).

Such people aren't technically homeless. But they're pretty close.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi, who's previously described the housing crisis as the number one issue in Calgary, notes the "huge spaghetti of operating agreements" currently in place means someone who's in desperate need of housing can't always move into a vacant unit because they don't fit the right criteria.

"We have a significant shortage of affordable housing options throughout the community," he told VICE. "There are 3,000-plus people on the waitlist just for Calgary Housing . There has to be a significant building of new units, and that starts with funding."

Money's obviously a key aspect of the conversation. Over the past 25 years, federal investments in affordable housing have plunged by almost half. The Homeless Hub estimates that 100,000 units haven't been built in Canada over the past two decades as a result of the lack of funding.

Calgary will likely receive additional funding due to the federal government's recent commitment of almost $800 million nationally over two years to the construction and repair of affordable housing.

But there's also a very real concern that that real estate developers and business moguls operating in Calgary aren't much concerned with solving the housing crisis even though it could help reduce their tax burdens by cutting down on costs associated with social services, healthcare and crime.

Take, for instance, the recent and rapid "revitalization" of the East Village, a bougie wonderland located a stone's throw from the DI that's filled with sparkling condos, "walkable streets," and the so-to-be opened National Music Centre.

Over the years, gentrification efforts have displaced homeless people via a poor-bashing "public behaviour bylaw," deployed dozens of beat cops, and closed a 189-bed shelter and two of the city's three public washrooms (for reference, public urination or defecation results in a $300 fine thanks to the aforementioned bylaw, which maybe seems a bit like entrapment).

Then there's the ever-present and idiotic controversy over secondary suites, a popular form of housing that's still illegal in Calgary because many city councillors and suburban developers are more interested in propagating dumbass conspiracy theories about declining property values and parking availability than increasing desperately needed housing options for low-income residents.

In a similar vein, the Mustard Seed was required to relocate all emergency shelter services from the downtown to a warehouse in a far-off industrial park in order to ensure a "positive urban experience" following the signing of a "good neighbour agreement" in 2011.

Kirk notes clients can't leave once they arrive at the warehouse shelter because the community doesn't want homeless people wandering around: "I can't go to Tim Hortons for a coffee, I can't go to a corner store to get cigarettes."

For him, such "segregation" serves as a strong indicator of the city's attempt to confront homelessness as a simple numbers game instead of a human rights issue, and makes it even more difficult for people to hold on to housing once they finally manage to secure it.

"If someone can feel like they're a human being in a shelter who is worthy of dignity and respect, then you have someone who is housed who feels like they're worthy of dignity and respect," he concludes. "Otherwise, all you're doing is housing someone who doesn't feel like they deserve housing because they've been dehumanized so much for the past couple of years."

Follow James Wilt on Twitter.