I don't know what it is about SUNY Purchase—maybe it's the low tuition, the desolate upstate New York atmosphere, or the heavy drinking—but those kids know how to make music. The college has recently spawned LVL UP, Porches, Spook Houses, Mitski, and Rotaries. Now there's Pupppy, a bummer-pop enterprise that began as the solo project of Will Rutledge and has quickly evolved into an outstanding band. "Puking (Merry Christmas)" is a track from Pupppy's new album, Shit in the Apple Pie, out April 21 on Father/Daughter Records. In it, Rutledge plasters his insecurities over reliable (but never derivative) pop song structures to make something unique. Give it a listen.

Listen to more Pupppy at their Bandcamp.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='heres-how-a-labour-election-win-could-play-out-body-image-1429108605.jpg' id='46269']

Labour supporters looking happy. Photo by Adam Barnett.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Related: How the Tories Will Win the Election

They are calling it the war of the weak. The 2015 general election seems to present the electorate with the two least appealing main parties since at least the 1970s. It's a choice between being trampled on by a toff, or winded by a geek—that's how things look to much of the electorate.

And, sure, there's a lot for Labour to worry about. Despite a slight improvement in his personal ratings, Ed Miliband remains spectacularly unpopular: a drag on a party that can hardly afford it. Labour won only 29 per cent of the vote in 2010—its lowest share of the vote since 1983. Outside of London, Labour is largely irrelevant in the south.

Yet Labour actually goes into the 2015 election in much better shape than widely anticipated after its defeat in May 2010. There has been no re-run of the 1980s or 1950s, decades when Labour was far too busy squabbling with itself to worry about trying to win over the electorate.

However easy it is to mock Miliband, the good news for Labour is that politics is becoming more local. The paradox is that, in an age of 24/7 news and the apparent presidentialization of the election, the uniform nation swing is dead. A national election fought on local grounds suits Labour. The party has achieved something quietly remarkable under Miliband, maintaining a party membership of 190,000 in an age when being a member has never been less fashionable. It has 40,000 more members than the Conservatives.

And this isn't just a number. Lord Ashcroft's polls of marginal seats have repeatedly shown that Labour is outperforming national trends in these critical constituencies. Polling by Lord Ashcroft this week found that, in all ten marginals seats surveyed, voters had had more contact with Labour than the Tories, suggesting the party has a significant advantage in "ground game"—the unglamorous art of dragging reluctant voters to polling booths that underpinned Barack Obama's two presidential victories.

For more on the '15 Election, watch our doc "The UK's House Party Politics":

In those wins, Obama was famously indebted to the ethnic minority vote. The same could be true for Labour in 2015. In 2010, 68 percent of ethnic minorities plumped for Labour. About 8 percent of the 2010 electorate were black and minority ethnic, and Maria Sobolewska, an expert on ethnic minority voting, reckons that will be 10 percent this May. If ethnic minorities are equally loyal to Labour this time—and actions like the Conservatives' notorious "Go Home or Face Arrest" vans push them towards voting for the alternative main party—it will give Labour a significant electoral boost. Labour SPADs will be hoping that once the Twitter bullies have stopped laughing, Britain's young ethnic minorities will answer Sol Campell's call to vote. Depicting the Tories as a bunch of bigoted white guys could be crude but effective. And Labour really should resist any race to the bottom on immigration, which only UKIP could ever win.

[body_image width='640' height='425' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='heres-how-a-labour-election-win-could-play-out-body-image-1429109540.jpg' id='46288']

Labour should remind young people why they're angry at Nick Clegg. Photo by Henry Langston

Labour also needs to remind young people of what led them to burn effigies of Nick Clegg and put excrement through his letter box. Labour has pledged to reduce tuition fees to £6,000 ($9,000). This isn't about asking university more accessible but is about reminding the young why they loathe the Lib Dems. Labour needs the votes of disaffected left-wing Lib Dems to win in May—and the good news is the much-promised spike in the Lib Dems' support has still yet to materialize. More incidents of enraged students screaming at Nick Clegg for lying to them could help Labour no end.

While Labour benefit from a depressed Lib Dem vote more than the Conservatives, they have also gained from UKIP's rise. The much-anticipated collapse in UKIP's support is yet to happen, which is a big reason why we are still waiting for "crossover"—the moment when the Conservatives start regularly leading in the polls. It might never come. Ofcom's ruling that UKIP is a "major party"—unlike, to Labour's relief, the Greens—means that Nigel Farage's party will get copious coverage in the election campaign. If this leads to an upsurge in support for UKIP, that will increase Ed Miliband's chances of ending up in Number 10. In this election your enemy's enemy is your friend, so Ed Miliband won't want Nigel Farage to implode this side of May 7.

UKIP's rise could benefit Labour in two ways. Firstly, by taking more Tory votes than Labour ones, it means Labour need fewer votes to gain constituencies. Secondly, it is in Labour's interests to talk up the UKIP threat. Doing so gives Labour the opportunity to present themselves as the "anti-UKIP" option and convince normal Lib Dem and Green voters—plus ethnic minorities and young voters who might not otherwise vote—to plump for Labour to keep UKIP out. Labour candidate Will Scobie could yet sneak victory over Nigel Farage in Thanet South by adopting this tactic. Playing on people's fears of UKIP as a party of racist porn stars should be replicated by Labour candidates wherever UKIP is strong.

Labour has other reasons for optimism. The electoral system is massively distorted in its favor. Because the Conservatives failed to reform electoral boundaries, and turnout is lower in Labour-held seats, Labour could win a majority on as little as 33 percent of the vote if its performance continues to hold up in marginal seats. Tony Blair won a convincing majority in 2005 with a lower vote share than David Cameron managed in 2010.

Scotland is the main reason that Labour is not feeling more buoyant. The party won 41 seats here last time—but could be almost wiped out this general election. Labour is right to be terrified: A YouGov poll this week put the party on course for its worst result north of the border for 97 years.

But there are tentative signs of hope. Jim Murphy is a charismatic and engaging leader, the antithesis of the plodding second-raters Scottish Labour has been led by for too long. He's no friend of Ed Miliband, but he could help Miliband's path to Number 10 by reminding SNP defectors that the choice to be next Prime Minister is between Miliband and David Cameron. Just 19 percent of Scots would rather Cameron become PM than Miliband.

Besides Murphy, Labour has two main weapons against the SNP. It can hammer home that a vote for the SNP makes it more likely that David Cameron will remain in Downing Street. And it has Gordon Brown, whose impact in the referendum campaign was a reminder that he is still revered by many Scots. Labour should wheel Brown out whenever they can tempt him away from a lucrative speaking engagement. Avoiding collapse in Scotland is still a possibility.

For all Miliband's faults, Labour is more resilient than it gets credit for. Labour's great source of optimism is their brand remains stronger than the Tories: while 33 percent of the electorate would never vote for Labour, 40 percent would never vote for the Conservatives. The main reason is that voters see the Tories as a party of yuppies who only represent the interests of the rich—maybe the Conservative pledge to cut inheritance tax wasn't quite as canny as they thought.

Labour must remind voters of their worst fears at every turn and emphasizing that it represents the only possible alternative to leading the UK. If anti-Tory sentiment can be transferred into a cross for Labour at the ballot box—especially if the party can ramp up enthusiasm among young people and ethnic minorities—it could just lead to a Labour majority. Will it happen? Probably not. Or, "Hell yes" as Ed, rather regrettably, might say.

Follow Tim on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='803' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='heres-how-a-conservative-election-victory-could-play-out-483-body-image-1429106481.jpg' id='46226']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Related: How Labour Will Win the Election.

It is 23 years since the Conservatives last won a majority: an age before the existence of the Premier League, Oasis's first album, and Friends. With just 20 days to go, time is running out for the Tories to relive one of their greatest election hits: the underdog triumph of 1992.

The great Tory hope is that politics will see an early-90s comeback in 2015. Folklore has it that it was "The Sun Wot Won It" for the Conservative Party in 1992. But really the Tories won because voters still thought that Labour would piss their money up the wall quicker than a footballer on a Vegas retreat.

While for many the Conservative Party is about as toxic as Katie Hopkins—18 million voters, some 40 percent of the electorate, say they would never vote for it—the fear of an Ed Miliband-led coalition government could yet mean that, as in 1992, pollsters might have underestimated one thing: closet Conservatives. "Yeah, that David Cameron is a right pillock," they will say without conviction to a pollster, before sneaking off to vote for him, afraid of what Labour will do to the price their house. Unspoken support for the Tories might see them through.

Of course, a Conservative victory would be remarkable. The failure to pass reform of electoral boundaries three years ago—which would have benefited the Tories by redrawing boundaries in a way that wasn't so generous to Labour—remains raw today. The upshot is that the Tories need a lead of around 5 percent to be the largest party in Parliament, and probably even more to win a majority. Broadly, both the rise of UKIP and the collapse in support of the Lib Dems have benefited Labour at the expense of the Conservatives.

For more on the '15 Election, watch our doc ''Talking Politics with Drunk Yuppies at the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race":

But despite all these obstacles, the Tories are just about on course to be the largest party in Westminster. This is a reflection not merely of Labour weakness, but also the credit the public gives the Tories for what they believe to be the sound state of the economy. Of course, judged by his own targets, George Osborne has been a catastrophe as Chancellor. He has not only spectacularly failed to eliminate the budget deficit, but also actually reduced it by less than the Alistair Darling Plan he denounced as a "reckless gamble."

It doesn't matter. The Tory plan was always to go into the general election being able to show off an impressive record of growth. They can now boast that the economy is the fastest growing in Europe—not over the lifetime of the Parliament, but, crucially, over the last year. Voters will be inundated with messages about how only the Tories can keep Britain on the "road to recovery" as one Conservative Poster put it—even if, that road is being used to ferry night busses full of miserable workers to their poverty-wage jobs.

Relentlessly emphasizing their economic record—and framing the election choice as Tory competence vs. Labour chaos—might be about as exciting as finding out who's going to sit in for Dianne Abbot on This Week next time she's off, but it presents the Tories with their best hope of winning a majority. The good news is the electorate already views the economy as the most important election issue. The Conservatives' best chance is keeping it that way by turning every conversation back to the economy. Your granny's hip operation, little Jimmy's education: It's all about scrabbling for pennies.

[body_image width='427' height='640' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='heres-how-a-conservative-election-victory-could-play-out-483-body-image-1429106804.jpg' id='46233']

The sort of image the Tories don't want to be projected. Photo by Chris Bethell.

The party also needs to address another key weakness—a net 85 percent of the electorate say that it is close to "the rich." Labour will try to caricature the Tory leadership as a Bullingdon Club reunion at every turn. So the Conservatives must remorselessly repeat Cameron's message at the Tory manifesto launch that "We are the party of working people." Certain pledges—like keeping minimum wage workers out of tax, doubling free childcare, and extending "right to buy" home ownership—have the potential to appeal beyond the kind of people who gave up their day to pay their respects at Margaret Thatcher's funeral. But who the messengers are is important: More use should be made of MPs like Patrick McLoughlin, Sajid Javid, and Robert Halfon—Conservatives who don't look like the vampiric baronets who appear in newspaper caricatures.

The Tories are very lucky in that their main opponents are so useless. "If we can't defeat this shower of an opposition we don't deserve to be in politics," the PM declared last year. More than anything, he was talking about the identity of the Leader of the Opposition. Reminding voters that the only alternative to David Cameron in Number 10 is Ed Miliband should make Cameron's advantage in leadership ratings matter come the May 7. Hammering Ed Miliband for his uneasiness and raising alarm at the specter of a dweeb who you would bully in school representing the UK against Vladimir Putin cannot be done enough.

Labour is under attack from all sides. Many of those who plumped for Gordon Brown are decidedly hostile to Ed Miliband, having switched to the Greens, the SNP, or even UKIP. Miliband is under assault from a coterie of "none of the above" parties in a way that Brown never was. This week's challengers' debate—which Miliband surprised Tories by agreeing to—allows the leaders of Plaid Cymru, the SNP, and the Greens anther chance to gang up on Miliband and accuse him of being a sellout. Extra exposure for Plaid and the Greens (at least if Natalie Bennett improves her performance) could split the left-wing vote decisively in a number of seats—that's why Cameron was so desperate for the Greens to appear in the main TV debate. On Thursday night, when the final election debate airs, the Tories will be cracking open the beers and watching with smug grins, expecting socialist OAPs and lefty students across the country to ditch Labour for a more radical party.

Much of the Conservatives' fate will be determined by how they fare against the Lib Dems. The Tories were second in 37 of the 57 seats won by the Lib Dems in 2010. There is good reason to think they can gain at least half of those. As David Cameron said when outlining a plan to "destroy" the Lib Dems, the Conservatives need to scare Lib Dem voters with the prospect of a Miliband-led government—and present a vote for the Tories as the only sure way to stop this.

But even while taking Lib Dem seats, the Tories need the Lib Dem vote to increase in Tory-Labour fights to deprive Labour of left-leaning voters. Accentuating divisions in the coalition to increase the Lib Dems' appeal to the left and hoping for a Clegg debate bounce in the challengers' debate is the Tories' best hope. The Conservatives will also hope that Natalie Bennett avoid any further media car-crashes to further split the vote. Even with the Green surge having ceased, the party is on course to win 5 percent of the vote—4 percent more than in 2010. That's great for the Tories—each Green vote is a Guardian subscriber who's not buying what Ed Miliband's selling.

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/04/15/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/15/' filename='heres-how-a-conservative-election-victory-could-play-out-483-body-image-1429106983.jpg' id='46236']

Photo by Nick Pomeroy

UKIP remains a fundamental problem for the Conservatives. The much-promised UKIP collapse has yet to materialize, though support for the party has wilted slightly this year. The Conservatives will hope that the framing of the election as a Cameron-Miliband dogfight—and Cameron's plea for UKIP supporters to "come home"—entices significant numbers of disaffected Tories back. UKIP will do well in safe seats—the party could come second place in 100 seats—but the Tories need to focus on winning back UKIP voters in Tory-Labour scraps. Emphasizing the promise of an EU referendum will only help so much—really, the Tories need to show they get the everyday problems ordinary Brits face. They could also stoke fear about a Labour-SNP coalition, playing on UKIP voters' anger that the English get a raw deal, which they've been doing a lot of.

In government, the Tories have been giving pensioners bells and whistles while imposing austerity on the young. Crude electioneering underpins this strategy: the old are far more likely to vote than the young, and an aging population means the granny vote will have even more clout than in 2010. Cultivating fear among OAPs about what the two Eds would do to their pensions might be crude, but it could be very effective. Get ready for your Grandma to raise hell about Miliband stealing from her as if he was a retirement home nurse as she cheers Cameron to victory.

The bigger the generation gap in voting—over-65s were 32 percent more likely to vote than under-25s in 2010, according to Ipsos-Mori—the better for the Conservatives. Voter registration is a deeply unglamorous topic, but the introduction of Individual Electoral Registration last year could be the biggest boost to the Tory chances of winning a majority this Parliament. There are fears that swathes of ethnic minorities, those without steady accommodation, and young people—all unlikely to vote Tory—will not be able to vote.

The specter of thousands of people being turned away at the ballot box on the 7th of May because, unknowingly, they are not registered to vote, looms as an uncomfortable possibility. Combine that with pensioners loyally voting blue and the electorate recoiling at the thought of Ed Miliband in Number 10, and it could yet ensure a second term for David Cameron—only this time without any need for a coalition partner.

Follow Tim on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='589' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='never-getting-over-you-is-going-ok-015-body-image-1429201630.jpg' id='46839']

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin

Ending a relationship is one thing. But getting over the fantasy of a person is a whole other thing. For me, it's harder to accept the death of a fantasy than it is to stop texting a person. I can block a person on my phone. But I can't block them in my brain.

Or can I? Through the deaths of my many fantasies, I've found that training the mind to forget is actually possible. It's kinda like training a puppy. My mind isn't cute like a puppy. I like puppies and I hate my mind. But in order to deflect the euphoric recall of memory (as well as blot out the recollection of those totally amazing qualities that maybe never even existed in that person) I need diligence, consistency, patience, and gentleness.

I've been romantically obsessed with so many people that I've kind of become a getting-over-the-fantasy-of-people athlete. I want to share with you some of the tactics I've incorporated into my training: the ones that worked and the ones that didn't.

1. Conducting "research" by checking the person's Twitter, FB, Tumblr, and Instagram every second, all the while feeling proud that at least you aren't liking and faving their shit anymore

What are you doing? Stop doing this. Close all the tabs right now. If you feel like you absolutely can't stop, try abstaining for 30 days. Or seven. Count the days.

Once you abstain from checking their social media, you will enter a short period of withdrawal. This is because you aren't getting that hit of dopamine from seeing the person's face pop up—or that shot of adrenaline from the sudden appearance of a mystery person in their selfies. You're eliminating what may feel like your last connection to them.

But what you're also getting is a reprieve from that emotional hangover every time they tweet something good (note: the tweets are never that good, you just want them to be). Soon you are going to feel really free.

If you really love yourself, you will block and unfollow the person on all social media. But if you really love yourself you probably don't read this column. So let's take it slow.

2. Giving the person a new nickname amongst your friends, like "heroin" or "pancake ass," or "teletubby," and only referring to the person with this nickname

Yes. This is one of the best ways to "reframe" the image of a person in your mind. Sometimes we don't want to give up our idea of a person, because it provides us with a beautiful place to go in our heads—even when that beauty is painful. Well, laughter is beautiful too. I fully encourage you to impale that vampire on the cross of his tiny penis, simply by giving the tiny penis a name.

3. Writing down the person's name on a piece of paper and throwing it into a fire or any other type of "magic goodbye surrendering ritual"

Eh. This can be freeing for, like, ten seconds. It's exciting when a $30 candle promises to eliminate the memory of a person forever. But it's unrealistic to suspect that you'll surrender the entire fantasy of a person and never go there mentally again. And if the candle doesn't work, you might stop believing in magic. I think it's important to never stop believing in magic.

4. Having sex with them again "one last time"

There is no last time.

5. Having sex with someone else (or multiple people) immediately after having sex with the fantasy person to avoid the "come down" off of sex with the fantasy person but sort of sustain the emotional high

This can be powerful, in a fake way, like being the militaristic dictator of your own sex nation. But you're probably going to end up comparing the second person to your fantasy person. Usually, the second person won't be able to live up to the fantasy person and it'll just be sad.

It should be noted that this tactic can work really well on the rare occasion that the second person is as hot and amazing as the fantasy person (or at least, you perceive them to be). But be warned: this tactic can backfire if you end up getting hooked on the second person too. There's nothing worse than waiting for texts from two (or even three) fantasy people and not hearing from any of them.

6. Getting into a relationship with someone else who you don't even like and pretending that new person is the fantasy person while you are having sex with them

Relationship experts say that fantasizing about one person while fucking another person is natural and normal. But it's one thing to fantasize about someone you've never had feelings for, and it's another to be re-enacting Wuthering Heights in your head with an old lover while fucking a totally new lover. For me this has only resulted in crying during sex. And not in a good way.

7. Trying to "stay friends"

You have enough friends.

Do you really want to just be friends? There is nothing worse than just being friends with someone you're in love with who isn't in love with you. Actually, being friends with benefits with someone you're in love with who isn't in love with you is worse. But friendship with no benefits is bad too.

You'll know when (if ever) it's finally time to be friends with the fantasy person if they text you and it's just boring and annoying, rather than intoxicating. Like your real friends.

[body_image width='1200' height='1053' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='never-getting-over-you-is-going-ok-015-body-image-1429201744.jpg' id='46840']

8. Changing the person's name in your phone to DO NOT CONTACT or STOP or the toilet emoji

I'm a very slow learner and I don't like being told what to do—not even by me. The little warnings I leave for myself on my phone never seem to deter me in the moment of bad decision-making. I've sexted with the word STOP for hours. I've declared my love for a toilet emoji.

But this method will probably work for some of you, and I encourage you to try it. Maybe try using the cop car emoji.

9. Reading the other person's horoscope to see what's going on in his life and if he is ever coming back to you

No. Stop doing this. Also, let's take a break from reading the love section of your horoscope. Also, let's stop googling "how to seduce Aries" and "how to make Aries man fall in love with you." For the record, I think Aries men should just be avoided entirely. Aries women are fine though.

10. Going to a psychic

Depends on the psychic and depends on what they say. If they say that the fantasy person is your "soul mate" you're fucked.

11. Talking to your craziest friends about their love problems

Yes! Pick your craziest friend. Ask her about some douchebag she is obsessed with. Watch her try to turn the douchebag into a knight. Observe her inability to see that person as he really is, because if she did, she'd have nothing to obsess about.

Be grateful. You may be in a shitty place, but you aren't as crazy as her. Remember that you have the potential to be that crazy if you don't let go of the fantasy person.

12. Get a mantra

Mantras have saved my ass so many times. If you have an overactive mind like mine, it's very hard to continually deflect your thoughts away from the fantasy person if you don't immediately have a replacement thought on deck. Definitely get a mantra. As soon as you catch yourself thinking about the person (even if it's hours in) go to the mantra.

Different mantras work for different people. Some people like doing positive affirmations, but those just make me feel like a loser. Instead, I prefer weirder, trippier, psychedelic mantras and prayer mantras so I feel more like a space cowgirl than someone who is trying to tell herself she is worthy, whole, and loved.

13. Therapy

I feel like therapy doesn't really work, but that's only because I've been in therapy my whole life and I'm not perfect or "fixed" so I'm always like therapy is stupid.

That being said, I can't imagine not being in therapy. I may never become a completely whole person, but I might have a shot at becoming ¾ of a person. ¾ of a person isn't bad.

Final assessment: therapy is stupid and annoying, but it works just well enough that you should still do it. Definitely get help.

14. Become totally obsessed with the fantasy of someone else

Don't do this. But obviously, you're going to do this and so am I.

So Sad Today is a never-ending existential crisis played out in 140 characters or less. Its anonymous author has struggled with consciousness since long before the creation of the Twitter feed in 2012, and has finally decided the time has come to project her anxieties on a larger screen, in the form of a biweekly column on this website.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/n8GJMzYlMGo' width='640' height='360']

The Egyptian female kata team, including Shaimaa Mohamed, competing in 2013

The gym in Shubra, one of Cairo's largest districts, was like a scene from the Battle of the Titans. The women wrestlers training there pinned each other to the ground in thunderous clashes. In a matter of minutes, they had transformed from veiled Egyptian women into solid rocks. Despite being cornered by a squad of 30 children practicing karate, they seemed laser-focused, unaware of the noise and the room's dimensions.

Although the wrestlers here are among the best athletes in the country, they deal with low pay, little recognition, and limited opportunities in the sport, because they are women. Egyptian female athletes do not only face the challenges female athletes face in a male-dominated sports industry, but the additional challenges of the country's stringent gender norms.

"Many people in Egypt are afraid athletes will lose their femininity, get injured, or lose their virginity," said Shaimaa Mohamed, an Egyptian gold medalist in karate. Shaimaa does not find this amusing. She was careful to dispel the myth that female athletes are deflowered during training, as if she were afraid I would believe it. ¨Being an Egyptian athlete is not as easy as it is for foreign women, because of our culture."

The problem begins with the value on athleticism itself. "Physical education is not important to the government," said Lamia Bulbul, a scholar at the American University in Cairo, when we spoke in one of the city's air-conditioned cafés. Many public schools in Egypt lack sport facilities for PE classes, other than bare concrete courtyards. In 2011, the UNESCO had no record of PE classes in grades first through third in public schools throughout Egypt, and recorded only two hours per week for fourth through sixth grades. Young girls are not exposed to sports and, as Bulbul explained, "once they reach the ages between nine and 12, they disappear completely from playing and jumping in the streets." The moment a girl's childhood is betrayed by her growing breasts, Bulbul said, she becomes an spectator.

Cairo is home to many luxury sports clubs, but the memberships are expensive, making these sports clubs exclusive to the wealthy. Youth centers are publicly accessible, but these "are completely dominated by men," according to Hayam Essam, a former basketball player and founder of Girl Power, an initiative dedicated to empowering women through sports. Girl Power is a group of volunteers who go to youth centers once a week to create and coach female basketball teams. By creating safe spaces in youth centers, says Essam, parents don't object to girls exercising. Initiatives like Girl Power follow the United Nations Sports for Development and Peace's (UNOSDP) efforts to promote sports as a human right and a tool for development. Essam's initiative does just that by using basketball to empower young girls by including them in sports and exposing them to the sport´s indirect teachings of decision making, leadership, and self-esteem.

Related: VICE travels to Tahrir Square to learn about the horrible conditions Egyptian female protesters have been put in while their country has been turned upside down.

The female athletes that triumph over the institutional and financial challenges still face a short-lived career in Egypt. ¨It's difficult to find athletes in their 30s in any sport," said Eman El-Abbasy, the first Egyptian female referee in the Karate Federation, when we spoke over the phone. But in Egypt, the problem isn't just aging out of the sport—it's also about familial obligations. ¨It is a community problem," El-Abbasy said, between deep sighs, "not a problem many athletes in the international community have to face."

Shaimaa, who is now 28, is one of the few Egyptian gold medalists who did not end her career after she got married and had her first child. "The problem is that when women get married, they stop," she told me. "It is our culture." Womanhood is often synonymous with motherhood in Egyptian society, and "the goals of an Egyptian woman before and after marriage are different," Shaimaa explained. Either athletes stop training on their own volition or "men ask female athletes to retire."

Karate is "difficult, difficult, difficult," she stressed as Basmala, her three-year-old, wailed for attention behind her. Before joining the national team, Shaimaa earned around $6.50 per championship she won. Her starting salary in the national team was $40, not including gear expenses. Before she retired, she was still only making $105 per month, which is a paltry sum considering Egypt's newly-instituted minimum wage is $170 per month. It wasn't until 2008 that the Karate Federation began providing athletes with health insurance.

The rate of female athletes quitting sports is higher than male athletes, Essam told me matter-of-factly. All athletes I spoke with attributed this to the overarching problem of low wages. This is way the government prefers to invest in male athletes, she continued. "Other than football players, if you are an athlete in Egypt, you don't do it as a job," she said over the phone with unmistakable pungency. "What you get in the basketball national team is peanuts." Eman, who is a dentist as well as an internationally certified referee, says working women are not like professional athletes, since they only make a symbolic sum. Once female athletes start a family, the "hobby" is no longer justified or affordable.

Each sports federation treats its athletes differently, and while some are better funded and provide better compensation, there is still a wage discrepancy between male and female professional athletes. "Professional [female] squash players get contracts at clubs that are nowhere equal to men's," said Raneem El Welily, an Egyptian squash champion. "In local tournaments, the men's prize money is higher."

After retirement, managerial opportunities are scarce. Shaimaa noted "it is so difficult for women athletes to become coaches." There are a lot of male coaches waiting in line, and women can't cut in. "Male coaches don't think it's fair for a young athlete to become a coach."

There problem is institutional, too. The Egyptian Ministry of Sports subjects potential national team coaches to a point system, which takes into consideration a coaches' education, medals, and experience. The conflict of interest between a woman's career as an athlete and her family duties impedes many women from gathering enough points.

Women represent just 2.5 percent of coaches in the basketball federation, according to Hayem. As a solution, Shaimaa suggests that world champions be made into coach assistants. "After one or two years, she should be able to coach by herself." At the moment, the Karate Federation has four or five female athletes that have the experience to become coaches; Shaimaa is one of them.

Egypt sent its largest delegation of female athletes to the 2012 Summer Olympics since it first participated in 1912—but there is still much work to be done. "We need more support from the government," Shaimaa told me. "In Egypt, first-place world champions make $15,000, while Turkish Mediterranean champions make $32,000. Plus," she adds, "they get a car."

Follow Lorena on Twitter.

One day in December of 2013, someone at St. Peter's College (which Americans would call a "private high school") in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, started pumping reclaimed sewage water into a drinking fountain. No less than 16 months later, on April 1, a member of the custodial staff at the school noticed the switcheroo, and notified the authorities, according to The Guardian. For the one year and four months in between, the students attending St. Peter's were unwittingly drinking poop water.

South East Water, the local water authority, shut the flow of possibly-contaminated water off as soon as they received the report, and the town's health department has indicated that everyone's probably going to be fine. They've asked people to be on the lookout for an uptick in gastroenteritis cases though.

According to the WHO fact sheet on sanitation, contaminated water that might have come into contact with feces can do much worse than give you a case of the shits. "The human health effects caused by waterborne transmission vary in severity from mild gastroenteritis to severe and sometimes fatal diarrhea, dysentery, hepatitis and typhoid fever," the report says.

Related: "You Don't Know Shit"

But fortunately this wasn't just any poop water. It was Class A recycled water, a differentiation that sounds pedantic, but makes a big difference in terms of how many dookie molecules it contained. Recycled water in Australia is reclaimed rainwater, drain water, and sewage, filtered and prepared for unsupervised use by any person, as long as it's relegated to things like toilet tanks and landscaping. In other words, there were relatively few dookie molecules being squirted into the mouths of the students at St. Peter's.

You might remember a video of Bill Gates from earlier this year, in which he sips from a jar of crystal clear water that has been freshly squeezed from a batch of ripe turds. Gates was plugging a fabulous contraption he had just paid to have built called the Janicki Omniprocessor, but he was also making a really good point about the fact that most water on Earth has probably been poop at some point, and recycling wastewater is useful not just in places in the developing world that are experiencing famines, but also drought-stricken California, and even-more-drought-stricken Australia.

As we've noted here before, Australia is in the midst of a major drought, one that will potentially go on for infinity years. Recent indicators don't show any improvement in rainfall. Victoria, where this incident took place, lives under some pretty harsh restrictions on water use.

Now, when the Australian EPA says, "Reusing and recycling alternative water supplies is a key part of reducing the pressure on our water resources and the environment," they probably don't mean "shoot it into the mouths of children." Still, a group called Horticultural Australia Limited built a site to tout the glories of recycled sewage that includes a cringe-inducing YouTube video starring Jack Black, in which he struggles to sip that same kind of water that Bill Gates had no problem with.

With the right spin, this accidental experiment that used students as lab rats could be turned into great PR for the recycled water lobby. (Assuming, of course, that none of them come down with a slow-onset of fatal diarrhea in the next few days.) The slogan could be, "It was good enough to go down the gullets of a bunch of teenagers for over a year. Why not try watering your golf course with it?"

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

If you live in China, there's a good chance you've already watched Under the Dome, Chai Jing's viral 104-minute lecture on the country's postapocalyptic smog.

If you didn't get around to it when it came out, though you're out of luck: After less than a week and a few hundred million views in late February and early March, the documentary abruptly disappeared from web sites and search engines. Apparently under orders from the central propaganda department, state media dropped all mention and returned to serious journalism, like calling Uncle Sam a butt.

Of course the rest of the world—and Chinese users with naughty software—can still watch the whole thing.

The air people breathe in China is the source of some pretty major problems. Most Beijingers are accustomed to using a breathing mask for the sulfurous murk we call "outdoors." Instead of the weather, our awkward small talk on any given day is about PM 2.5 particles and the Air Quality Index (AQI). As in: "Hey, you want to hit the park this weekend? The AQI is supposed to go under 100."

Last year, the filthy air was so embarrassing that the government had to shut down the capital for a week in order to freshen up for visiting world leaders.

Still, I didn't expect the film to get the memory hole treatment. Pollution is not a state secret here, and Chai Jing, the former TV reporter who made Under the Dome, knew which lines she could cross. The film doesn't challenge the political system; instead, much of her message is ordinary, drive-less-and-bike-more environmentalism. There's lots of saccharine music and cute animations. The closest she comes to rebellion is when she tells the audience to nag their local polluters.

The biggest revelation is the government's hilarious incompetence. Behind China's authoritarian facade, Chai uncovered a bureaucracy that's too invertebrate to enforce its own laws. As she says in the film:

This [Atmospheric Pollution Law] can only be enforced by the departments with the legal right of supervision." Everyone says, "I don't know which department that is." Since there are only a few departments related to automotive management, I just called them one by one. First I asked the Ministry of Environmental Protection. They said, "As far as we know, it's not us." Then I asked the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. They said, "It's definitely not us." Then I asked the General Administration of Quality Supervision and Inspection. They said: "It should be all three of us."

I never expected a two-minute video clip to capture the experience of living here so perfectly. US Congress, take heart: There's someone worse at running a country than you.

One can't help cringing in sympathy for the throngs of environmental regulators who appear before the camera, each of whom wryly admits their own impotence. "There is nothing we can do if [polluting] enterprises don't stop," one says. "I don't dare open my mouth," says another. "I fear that people will see I have no teeth."

The best (or worst) of the would-be-funny-if-it weren't-true moments comes when we find out why China uses such shitty fuel: the fuel standards are set by the oil industry.

"When convening a committee to set petroleum standards, you shouldn't be looking for someone who doesn't understand the oil refining business," the committee's chairman—a veteran, along with most of the standards committee, of the notoriously corrupt state oil monopoly—says in the film.

Still, I didn't understand why Under the Dome was worth banning, and I wasn't the only one puzzled. "This is particularly ironic when one-third of Chinese netizens have already seen the film," one Greenpeace representative said by email. "You cannot censor the smog."

Local activists are reluctant to speak openly about the film, given its sensitive subject. In Beijing, many environmental organizations exist in a precarious legal limbo between recognition and proscription, and it is not uncommon for foreign workers to leave on "visa runs" at 90-day intervals if their NGOs can't get work visas. Some have been deported.

I recently met Leon White, an expat who lives in Beijing and works on environmental causes, to talk about the film. I figured he'd have some insight—he's one of the 50 or so volunteers who spontaneously translated the film's English subtitles after seeing a request for help in the initial clip's YouTube comments.

"I think the government misread how much people care about the pollution," he told me. "When it took off< the way it did, and didn't die down even after a few days, they had to kill it to free up airwaves for the political meeting that was on the next weekend.

"I personally think the government was pushing it as a kind of semaphore," he speculated. "They were probably hoping to have something not obviously official to point to as justification for an upcoming policy, but the story became about the documentary itself, they were losing control of the media narrative, and so first tried to turn the volume down, then pulled the plug."

White told me that environmentalists working in China have to navigate a sometimes complicated network of interests. "Nominally or actually independent pressure groups also get a fair bit of leeway, and do valuable work," he said. "It's the local groups below the radar of the big national ministries that often end up getting intimidated."

According to White, the biggest culprits are usually "local officials who feel that some cushy deal they have going is threatened."

He gave the example of a local activist near Shanghai, who "just keeps getting thrown in jail and diagnosed with mental illness" after reporting polluters to the police. "I doubt anything has changed since then."

White's take is consistent with the tangled bureaucracy depicted in the documentary. "Agencies responsible for inspection have no meaningful recourse in the case of non-compliance," he said. When they issue fines, "they have no means to collect."

Even given all that, and the fact that the government just censored a documentary about the environment, White seemed relatively optimistic about the future.

"Policy is already in line with international best practices" he said. "The entire system is just waiting for enforcement and management. The law needs to be worth more than the paper it's written on."

Recent changes in the government have suggested a policy shift. The government released promoted the Environmental Protection offices to full ministry status and appointed a new leader, Chen Jining.

"I expect the first changes to be stricter enforcement of Environmental Impact Assessments," White said.

If he's right, China may have the beginnings of an environmental reform movement somewhere on the murky horizon. Until then, we'll just have to tighten our breathing masks.

As I write this, today's AQI is 215—"Very unhealthy."

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='cbcs-report-into-ghomeshi-says-management-basically-condoned-his-behaviour-body-image-1429214833.jpg' id='46908']

Jian Ghomeshi in 2010, four years before long-simmering allegations of his abusive behaviour became public. Photo via Flickr user Brenda Lee

In what should come as no surprise to anyone at this point, an independent investigator's review into Jian Ghomeshi's behaviour during his time at the CBC concludes that management utterly failed its employees.

The 52-page report, which was conducted by Toronto lawyer Janice Rubin, says that management basically decided to see no evil, hear no evil, so it could speak of no evil. In other words, they couldn't have been ignorant to the allegations of appalling behaviour by the former host of Q.

After interviewing 99 people, the report states to have found evidence that Ghomeshi was "emotionally unpredictable" and would play cruel jokes on his employees, make demeaning, inappropriate, and unwanted comments about their appearance, and not credit them for their work, among other things that violated CBC standards.

The report also describes incidents of sexual harassment by Ghomeshi, which included unwanted backrubs, flirtatious behaviour with employees and on-air guests, and his tendency to share TMI about his sex life, which those interviewed felt were "too personal, too graphic, and generally unsavoury."

Evidence gathered in the report also states that employees of Q weren't clear on who was in charge of the show or its host, a situation that often allowed Ghomeshi to abuse his position of power.

"Executive Producer as well as other staff members of Q felt that Mr. Ghomeshi's ability to 'go up the food chain' successfully meant that at best the Executive Director was Mr. Ghomeshi's boss on paper, but insofar as Mr. Ghomeshi got his way, Mr. Ghomeshi was the de facto boss of the show," the report said.

What's more unsettling is how little the higher-ups did about anything, according to Rubin.

"Management knew or ought to have known of this behaviour and conduct and failed to take steps required of it in accordance with its own policies to ensure that the workplace was free from disrespectful and abusive conduct," the report states. "It is our conclusion that CBC management condoned this behaviour."

Prior to the release of the report, CBC announced Thursday that two senior managers were no longer with the corporation—Chris Boyce, formerly the head of radio, and human resource executive Todd Spencer. Both had been placed on leave in January.

The report also arrived on the same day that 244 CBC employees were receiving pink slips, which CBC president Hubert Lacroix called a coincidence.

The report goes on the detail three missed opportunities where management could have addressed and remedied employee concerns, including the so-called Red Sky Document that was put together by Q employees in the summer of 2012 to outline issues about their working environment.

The report ends with seven recommendations, which include providing more training to all its employees on its revised policies and the establishment of a Respect at Work and Human Rights Ombudsperson.

On a conference call, Lacroix said the corporation was comfortable with the recommendations. While some steps were relatively simple, others would require more time and discussion.

"We are committed to making this happen," he said. "This is a culture shift, it's going to be about raising awareness, instructing employees and training."

Earlier in the call, a wooden-sounding Heather Conway, executive vice-president of English Services, issued a formal apology to employees of CBC and to Canadians.

"I'm confident we can and will do better," she said.

Ghomeshi's next court date will be April 28. He has been charged with seven counts of sexual assault and one charge of overcoming resistance by choking.

Follow Elianna Lev on Twitter.

In the webseries The Adventures of Jamel: the Time-Traveling B-Boy, board members of the Illuminati accidentally send a modern-day, Wild Style–idolizing B-boy (Kangol hat, Adidas jumpsuit, and all) back in time, where he unwittingly changes the course of history again and again. In the intro montage alone, we see Jamel photobombing the moment Martin Luther King Jr. met Malcolm X, crashing the Last Supper, and dashing through tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Created by artist Jayson Musson, known for his Coogie sweater canvases, satirical paintings, and online alter ego Hennessy Youngman, the series is a hilarious and refreshing take on revisionist history, a genre that could use a break from Quentin Tarantino's death grip. In episode two, released this week, our B-boy hero (played by James III) ends up at Ford's Theater on the night of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Jamel, not realizing what year it is, befriends John Wilkes Booth after the President is a dick to him. When Booth pulls out a gun, Jamel convinces him that a dance-off is the best way to settle beef ("We put down the steel, and we keep it real"). Fingers crossed that in a future episode, he'll make a cameo at the moment Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, or prevent Hendrix from ODing.

Since this isn't a traditional time travel narrative, and Musson is a master at messing with images and re-appropriating pop culture (from the webseries' intro, to his Too Black for B.E.T. series, to his Instagram account), we thought it'd be fun to do an interview with him in which he could only answer using images found online. Here's what he sent us.

VICE: What do you consider to be the golden age of hip-hop?

[body_image width='500' height='500' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202147.jpg' id='46842']

Who would Jamal consider to be the greatest rapper of all time?

[body_image width='448' height='323' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202178.jpg' id='46843']

But, for me, my favorite rapper is:

[body_image width='600' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202212.jpg' id='46844']

Was there a particular pop culture moment or an event in your own life that inspired this webseries?[body_image width='2032' height='3011' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202247.jpg' id='46845']

[body_image width='720' height='486' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202301.jpg' id='46846']

Who inspired the Illuminati characters from episode one?

[body_image width='495' height='270' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202338.jpg' id='46847']

What historical moments would be too real or intense to include in this comedy series?[body_image width='852' height='154' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202373.jpg' id='46848']

How has the response to the series been so far?

[body_image width='500' height='200' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202505.jpg' id='46850']

What reactions were you expecting from your past fanbase?

[body_image width='541' height='499' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202537.jpg' id='46851']

In the intro montage of the show, which historical revision with Jamel added is your favorite?

[body_image width='720' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202580.jpg' id='46852']

If Jamel could have a sidekick or partner-in-time-traveling-crime from pop culture, who would it be?

[body_image width='1700' height='998' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202617.jpg' id='46853']

Do you consider this webseries a part of your oeuvre as a fine artist, or is it a whole new beast for you?

[body_image width='550' height='481' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202685.jpg' id='46854']

Would you like to see the webseries expanded into an longer television program?

[body_image width='424' height='500' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202734.jpg' id='46855']

How do you think Quentin Tarantino would respond to the first episode?

[body_image width='700' height='700' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='messing-up-history-with-jamal-the-time-traveling-b-boy-999-body-image-1429202791.jpg' id='46857']

Follow Zach on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='polish-ultra-nationalists-weird-meeting-in-ireland-378-body-image-1429183716.jpg' id='46730']

Anti-fascists heckling the far-right meeting

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last week, right-wing politicians Marian Kowalski and Grzegorz Braun came to Ireland to hold some debates and drum up some diaspora support for their campaigns to become President of Poland. Unfortunately for them they ended up banned from hotels in Dublin and Cork following complaints from anti-fascist organizations.

Braun, a member of Poland's religious right, is strictly against gay rights and abortion—two of Ireland's most pressing political issues. He's famous for his socially conservative Catholic ideology and making anti-abortion documentaries. Coming to Ireland was probably a bit of a busman's holiday for him.

Kowalski heads up Ruch Nardowy—"National Movement." He's more of the militaristic type and is both a Eurosceptic and a vehement critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. National Movement is an umbrella grouping of Poland's far right, which just registered as a political party this month. It's a merger of the All-Polish Youth, famous for their homophobia, anti-Semitism, and swastika burning rallies; the ONR (National Radical Camp), whose members frequently participate in violent attacks on gay people; and a group of conservative nationalists called the Real Politics Union. It's a strange electoral alliance harking back to the brief interwar period of Polish history that saw the rise of fanatical nationalism. The National Movement are openly homophobic and their recruitment videos talk about "fighting against homosexual and feminist propaganda."

I met some National Movement supporters outside a hotel in Dublin while they waited for a new venue after an anti-fascist demonstration erupted forcing them to change hotels. Vlad, a 23-year-old from Suwalki is northern Poland, has been living in Ireland for eight years. He helped organize the debates after attending National Movement meetings in Poland. He felt his organization had been misrepresented.

"All the arguments against the National Movement in Ireland are wrong because they come from our mainstream media in Poland which is totally biased. We're not fascists. We remember our history in Poland so we are pure enemies to Nazism and Communism. I understand why people want to protest here—I used to be more on left side myself until I did my research and went to some meetings," he said.

Vlad was one of several young Polish who had gathered in front of the hotel while anti-fascist demonstrators shouted "Fascists! Fascists! Out! Out!" and "No Platform!"

When I asked Vlad about the National Movement's dimly veiled anti-Semitism he batted it off, saying the group was just defending Poland from "German propaganda."

Brian O Reilly, a spokesperson for militant group Anti Fascist Action Ireland (AFA), who attended the protest, said the National Movement is not welcome in Ireland. "We have been observing the activity and membership of the group Ruch Nardowy in Ireland and are confident their anti–working class and anti-minority views reflect only a tiny fraction of the over 150,000 Polish people working in Ireland. The AFA guarantee Ruch Nardowy will not operate here with impunity," he said.

[body_image width='640' height='427' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='polish-ultra-nationalists-weird-meeting-in-ireland-378-body-image-1429183656.jpg' id='46729']

Thanks to the protests, the meeting had to move. Vlad and about a dozen of his mates told me the new location of their meeting in a slightly fancier hotel down on Dublin's Quays. The National Movement are usually kitted out in nationalist garb but this was a muted affair, with a lone Polish flag decorating the room. The meeting started with Braun condemning the "attack on freedom of expression" that had happened outside while Kowalski's wife translated.

He said labeling a Polish person a "German national socialist" is "something outrageous" because of how Poland was destroyed by the Nazis in the Second World War. He echoed the words of Vlad saying Polish people couldn't possibly be fascist because every Polish family was in some way affected by fascism. He then went on to tell us that he wasn't a democrat or a fan of the democratic system, but as long as we have democratic laws around he "recommends" we obey them. He ended talking about discrimination and how the Irish saved Latin culture in the dark ages. It was pretty fucking weird.

Related: Inside a German biker gang full of former Nazis.

Kowalski was more interested in talking about Putin and specifically how Ireland had been infiltrated by the "agents of Putin" he also talked about the "dumbing down of Western society" which, he said, left us more vulnerable to the influence of Putin.

The organizer of the event then talked about how his grandfather died in Auschwitz and Braun talked about his family also "suffered under totalitarianism" and that Irish people should ask Polish people to give them lessons on fascism. At that point we were all confused.

After the meeting a group of anti-fascist demonstrators clashed with National Movement supporters, one of whom bizarrely took off his belt and started banging it on the street. Later anti-fascists bricked a window of the hotel.

Pissed off, the two presidential candidates went to Cork in search of votes, but after the protest in Dublin, Cork hotels refused to host the confused motley crew, forcing them to have their last meeting in an empty computer repair shop.

Follow Norma Costello on Twitter.

[body_image width='1798' height='1212' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='scorzayzee-profile-aeon-peace-to-the-puzzle-201-body-image-1429194227.jpg' id='46797']

Scorzayzee on stage. Photo Daniel Whiston

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

An artist's ambition is a delicate, precarious thing. As thousands of would-be novelists or filmmakers will tell you, it's often preferable to flirt with projects—to primp and polish and plan and keep them all safely in the future—than risk them crash-and-burning in the here-and-now, in the full glare of a pitiless public.

Chuck enough weed to fell a rhino into that already pathological procrastination and you start to get a handle on the unusual path of Nottingham hip-hop MC Scorzayzee. He's a rapper who, by 2002 and the release of his ode to sneakers, "Crepes," was voted the world's seventh best rapper byHip Hop Connection. That's above 2Pac, Xzibit, Talib Kweli—everyone except (in ascending order) Mos Def, Nas, Evidence, J-Zone, Ghostface Killah, and Jay-Z.

The following year, his underground rep burgeoning, Scorzayzee had a tune played by Zane Lowe twice on the same show. "Great Britain" was a double-barreled drive-by of perceived establishment crimes that tapped into seething anger at the cynicism of the Iraq invasion. Looking back today, Scorz reflects that he was "just an angry lad, stressed, broke," and the track's lyrics were filleted in an overblown Sunday Telegraph piece that accused the BBC of endorsing a rapper who claimed the Royal family had Lady Di murdered. It was even debated in Parliament. BBC refused to budge, but in the end the track was pulled.

[body_image width='1000' height='659' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='scorzayzee-profile-aeon-peace-to-the-puzzle-201-body-image-1429194280.jpg' id='46800']

Not bad for "a chubby teenager who wasn't really cool but who wanted to be cool, and rapping was cool." Which is why it's surprising that, 20 years after he first picked up the mic, now in his mid-30s, Scorz has never released an album. Until now, with the release of the enigmatically titled Aeon: Peace to the Puzzle, a 28-track double CD that 1Xtra's MistaJam, a childhood friend from Nottingham, is calling "the definitive British hip-hop album."

It's been quite a journey for Dean Palinczuk, who, bored at school and looking for something to do, dropped into the Community Recording Studio in St Ann's, one of Hoodtown's toughest hoods. There, he kept out of mischief and learned to rhyme, battle, and freestyle. Dean became Scorzayzee, one of the sharpest-tongued MCs in the competitively collaborative Out Da Ville crew, a sort of British Wu-Tang Clan nurtured under the watchful eye of Trevor Rose. "Big Trev" was a community worker "who helped kids learn and develop through music, giving us an opportunity to do it professionally. He didn't have to do it. He took us on these trips to London, to open mic nights, handing out tracks to famous DJs to get our stuff out there."

MTV Base described Out Da Ville's promo for "Blood, Sweat, and Tears" as "the best UK video ever produced," yet the collective drifted apart. Without that direction, Scorz started to unravel, eventually being diagnosed with schizophrenia. 

As he explained with disarming candor in "S-word"—an interview with MistaJam that won an award from Mind, the mental health charity—the catalyst for his psychosis was weed. "At first, I smoked because my mates did it," he says. "There was nothing to do. I was just bored, so we blazed, and wrote raps, then went freestyling in people's garages. Later, I smoked to forget daily life."



His imagination had been fired by Out Da Ville's success—"delusions" of grandeur without a road map—yet his daily reality comprised getting baked or going along to the dole office to sign on. Grand ambition, frustrated daily. "People like to live in a fantasy, the whole Del Boy thing: 'This time next year we'll be millionaires...' You get all these ideas of what you want to do, but you're so mashed you can't do anything. When you get up, you're hungover. It's a vicious cycle."

There was a slowly widening chasm between the public persona—the Scorz presented to the world, or the image that people saw—and the private self. "Out there, you're Scorzayzee, getting props. But the reality is you're living at home with your mum, broke and angry."

Related: VICE visits Brooklyn-based Baby DJ School, where your kids can learn to mix and match beats before they learn to walk.

Depression set in, compounded by poverty and contracting possibilities: "Going to the Job Center, where nothing seems to go right for you, and the pressures and expectations of being a man, not fitting in or matching up—it can have an effect on your mental health. The way the system's built, it makes you feel like shit."

Scorzayzee's disillusionment and lack of direction fed into the undiluted rage of "Great Britain," after which, with the storm brewing, Scorzayzee withdrew from music amid rumors of retirement and a conversion to Islam (he follows the "universal spiritual message" and anti-jihadi teachings of Hamza Yusuf). Weed psychosis—paranoid delusions of airplanes monitoring his thoughts and tactile hallucinations—took hold of him until an intervention and medication got him back on track.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/fxbu_61ozbE' width='640' height='360']

The whole episode is laid bare in his comeback tune, "Luv Me," itself testament to the uncanny tenacity of his artistic dreams and ambitions. 

Although Scorz used to like nothing better than wrecking the mic with Out Da Ville—he can freestyle and rap-battle with the best of them—there is none of the overblown, posturing ego, or depressingly reactionary consumerist fetishization you get with a certain type of hip-hop star, an attitude that comes through in "Crepps," or his piss-take of Wiley's Rolex fascination, "Casio Sweep." There's a new vulnerability to him, a lack of bone-deep confidence that might have held back his musical output.

A caricature of this character was presented in Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, Shane Meadows's improvised low-budget mockumentary following Paddy Considine's eponymous roadie as he tries to get his roommate a slot opening up in front of 50,000 fans at an Arctic Monkeys gig at Old Trafford. "I knew I was coming across as a chubby lad who looked a bit slow," Scorzayzee chuckles, but he was happy to play to type, as it "gave me a little push. It got my name into places, rap-wise, it wouldn't have done."

The film also helped to replenish Scorz's artistic confidence, yet by October last year, there was still no sign of an album. At this point, record label owner, friend, and promoter Ste Allan, along with mates Jack Curtis and Greg Howard, launched a crowd-funding campaign, #KickStartScorz, setting the initial target at a modest about $12,000, partly out of fear for the psychological blow that failure would have dealt Scorzayzee. 

They needn't have worried. With Shane Meadows as one of the main backers, buying Scorz's lyric book for $1,500, the target was hit inside three days, and more than doubled over the 30-day window as almost 500 pledged support.

[body_image width='720' height='539' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='scorzayzee-profile-aeon-peace-to-the-puzzle-201-body-image-1429194397.jpg' id='46805']

Scorz got writing, and all bar two of the tracks on Aeon: Peace to the Puzzle are fresh material, blending his trademark humor, lyrical dexterity, politics, and pathos. Meanwhile, Allan has gathered the master versions of Scorz's various classics, most of which were sent out as SendSpace links, and is planning a compilation. There are rumors, too, of an album of old rhymes spat over bootlegged beats circulating online: Decoy to the Puzzle: The Lost and Ancient Chronicles of Scorzilla the Gorilla.

Scorz describes himself as "an elusive snow leopard that only comes down from the mountain every few years. Sometimes he's seen, sometimes he's not seen. He has to deliver rhymes to a certain standard to be Scorz." 

With the love and help of friends and backers, the leopard has changed his spots and descended the mountain ready for his CD to drop. An ambition has been realized. "I'm just proud it's out there. A proper CD! No longer am I just an artist selling burnt CDs for $8 via DM on Twitter."

Given his Del Boy observation, it's little surprise he adds: "I sold a hundred, which I reckon's alright!" 

With this goal finally ticked off, his mental health in check, a wife and children of his own, and him having found peace to the puzzle of his inner self and the outer world, this unlikely looking MC is more than thick-skinned enough to take any barbs that might come his way.

"There was a YouTube clip where I'd spat a 100-bar rap and this comment just said: 'You look like a fucking egg,'" he laughs. "I thought that was hilarious."

Aeon: Peace to the Puzzle is released on Monday the 20th of April on Gangsta Wraps

Follow Scott Oliver on Twitter.

Earlier today, the second trailer for the J.J. Abrams-directed Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released to the internet. Unlike the movie's first trailer, which provided no details other than reassuring Star Wars fans that the movie totally exists and will feature all the things that Star Wars movies should have (X-Wings, lightsabers, explosions), this one actually gives us a sense of what the film might actually be about. Namely Luke Skywalker (again played by Mark Hamill) will be passing The Force onto some kid (presumably his own, or the child of Leia and Han Solo), people will be fighting on Tattooine, the Dark Side of The Force has returned, and someone—presumably a grizzled Han Solo and weirdly ageless Chewbacca—will fly the Millennium Falcon into the tail pipe of some gigantic ruin of a spaceship.

With a film franchise as beloved and tied to our culture as Star Wars is, it's less important that The Force Awakens is actually, y'know, good, as much as it matters that it exists. Star Wars is the type of thing that fans (including me) have a bunch of preconceived notions about—we've already decided that we're either going to love it or hate it, and at this point, we're just looking for clues about how we're going to love/hate it and why.

Judging from the trailers, it seems like The Force Awakens is shaping up to be a pretty good sci-fi movie for children, albeit one that's tied to a whole lot of familiar symbols. Seeing noted aircraft crasher Harrison Ford reprise his role as Han Solo—who was the original films' sole complex character with motivations that extended beyond "act good/bad; shoot blaster in corresponding direction"—sent a tinge of joy up my cerebral cortex, and seeing R2D2 do R2D2 stuff gave me a lesser, but still faint, hope that this movie might actually be good.

On the other hand, that might just be the nostalgia talking.

There's not really a nice way to say it—the Star Wars prequels sucked. They were movies for children, full of simplistic cutesy horseshit like podracing and Jar-Jar Binks, meant to separate parents from their money, both through shelling out money for movie tickets as well as action figures. This alone is bad enough, but where the original Star Wars trilogy drew from classic modes of epic storytelling, the prequels featured convoluted plots concerned with trade negotiations and backroom political plots. By the time the third movie, Revenge of the Sith, hit theaters, fans went into theaters begrudgingly, with the knowledge that this was a zero-sum game. Though Revenge of the Sith featured a much more coherent plot than its predecessors as well as that extremely cool lightsaber battle between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin, for many it was too little, too late. The prequels weren't necessarily concerned with doing things that good movies are supposed to do (namely, be actually good), as much as they were concerned with doing things that Star Wars movies did. As anyone who's ever listened to a middle-period King Crimson album can attest, working only within the context of your own canon is rarely a good thing.

With all of that in mind, I'm optimistic about The Force Awakens. It seems like George Lucas handing the reins off to J.J. Abrams has given the series a shot of life—or at least an understanding that you can't just make a shitty, complicated children's movie, throw in some lightsabers, and call it a day. Whether The Force Awakens actually follows through on the promise of making a movie that's genuinely entertaining as well as remaining loyal to the Star Wars universe remains to be seen. But for now, I'm hopeful.

Follow Drew Millard on Twitter.

[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='i-went-to-a-nude-comedy-show-and-learned-to-accept-my-body-415-body-image-1429148598.jpg' id='46516']

Photo via Flickr user Andrew Malone

A few weeks ago, I found an email in my inbox with the subject line: "THE NAKED COMEDY SHOW RETURNS." I opened it and learned that I was on the email list for a nudist Meetup group that I don't remember joining. The email was an invitation to a nudist comedy show, which required everyone involved, including the audience, to be in the buff. I bought my ticket on the spot.

Even though I was a part of this Meetup group (which, again, I really don't remember joining), I hadn't thought much about nudism—but the movement is very important to some people. Nudist events first gained popularity in America in the 1960s, when nude beaches were popularized and Americans started to push back on Puritanical attitudes toward nudity (though there was a long history of nudism before that). Today, according to the Young Naturists of America, there's a "generational gap" in nudist circles. That is to say, millennials aren't that into it.

I enjoy being naked in the comfort of my own home, probably more than the average person. The only time I'm not naked in my apartment is when I have company over, or when I'm frying food in the kitchen—it took an oil burn on my chest the size of a third nipple to learn this lesson. In the past, I wore underwear in my sleep due to an irrational fear of spiders crawling up my vagina, but have since overcome this fear by the possibility of a thousand spider eggs hatching inside me. I am purportedly infertile, so that could be my only real chance of motherhood.

As much as I like being naked at home, I have an entirely different attitude about being naked in public. Of course, most people do. While we are generally a nation that agrees a bare human body is inoffensive, we still prefer that bare body stay indoors or on our television and movie screens.

Advocates for social nudity are obviously aware of all this, and thus keep their public nudity within the confines of private property. This comedy show was no exception: It would take place inside a rented-out theater space in the San Fernando Valley. Cameras and recording devices were strictly forbidden, while towels were strictly required.

The day of the show, I wasn't completely sure I could go through with attending. Hours before the event, I had stared at my naked body in front of my mirror, analyzing each and every thing I liked or disliked about it. I concluded that I disliked my nipples. If my nipples were eyes, the left one would be a lazy eye. While my right nipple can look you in the face, the left appears to wander off, giving the impression that it's bored of your conversation or looking for someone better to network with. Then there's my back acne. Though not as drastic as it was when I was a teen, remnants of those miserable years are still present.

Then I thought about what others might not like about my body. Surely, most would find my gut unattractive. I don't love my gut, but I welcome it as part of the package deal that gave me my sizeable ass, breasts, and thighs. Actually, my thighs could be considered unattractive as well. They're far too mighty to have one of those quaint little gaps thin girls hashtag about. Then there's the stretch marks, cellulite, and thick mound of pubic hair—things that are inherently me, but I worried about them anyway.

When I arrived to the theater, I had to stand outside for a bit and give myself a final pep talk. I couldn't quite figure out why this was so hard for me. I kept telling myself this would be a group of accepting people—it had to be—and yet, even though I knew I was to be in a room full of other naked people, I couldn't imagine not being personally judged for my nakedness. I finally just sucked it up and powered through.

Once inside, I was taken back by the sea of naked men and women. This was a smorgasbord of dicks, butts, and breasts, all varying in shapes and sizes. There were at least 70 people present, and they stood around talking with one another real casually. They looked like parents standing around and chatting while waiting for their kids to be let out of school.

Related: Joshua Haddow tries stand-up comedy... on acid!

I sat near the back, next to a woman who still had her button-up shirt on. I asked her if she was going to take it off and she said she was planning to. I was still hesitant, so I asked her if we could take our clothes off together. She agreed, and on the count of three I removed my dress, ripping it off as swiftly as a BandAid. I had deliberately chosen to not wear underwear or a bra underneath, knowing that if I did, I probably wouldn't have the courage to take them off. So once I pulled off my dress, there I was—naked.

It took a few minutes to adjust, but I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I felt being naked in my chair (sitting on my mandatory towel, of course). I wasn't sure if I could leave my chair though, as it became my new safety blanket. It took a lot of mental debate as to whether or not I had it in me to get up and buy a drink at the bar. Luckily, my desire for whiskey outranked my fear of awkward stares. Waiting in line completely nude became my true test of courage, and I passed.

As I stood at the bar and waited, I distracted myself by scoping the space to get a better look at everyone present. The men outnumbered the women, and most people seemed to be in their mid-40s and 50s. There were about ten or 15 men and women in their 20s and 30s. The woman I was sitting next to, Leslie, looked to be around my age. When I got back to my seat, she introduced me to her much-older boyfriend, Patrick. He told me there were people at this show he didn't expect to come, and I got a sense of what a tight community this was. Some of these nudists drove several hours to be at this event. Patrick said he'd known some of these people for over a decade, purely through the nudist community. Outside of nudism, these were people he would probably never meet or interact with in real life.

The show finally started, and ran for about an hour and a half. The host was the only woman other than me who had a hairy bush. (Hers was neatly trimmed though. Kudos.) Some performers were trying comedy for the first time. Others were more seasoned. The headliner was probably the worst performer of the night—she had multiple holocaust jokes, made fat jokes about her obese husband, and sang a song about her slutty friend, which was an excuse to make a herpes joke—but I had to admit, her body was bangin'. At that moment, I understood why she has TV credits and I don't.

As awful as some of the performances were, I wasn't really there to see comedy. I was there for the nudist experience, and am genuinely happy to have done it. By the end of the show, I was able to get up and grab more drinks, as well as walk to the bathroom, without any hesitation about my body.

I took to public nudity a lot better than I thought possible. In fact, it felt pretty great. Not one comment was made about any of the things I obsessed over in front of my mirror. No one was offended by my lazy nipple, or disgusted by my back acne. By the end of night, I came to terms with the fact that though these things on me were definitely being looked at, they simply didn't matter. Just like I took notice of a strange growth on one woman's breast, and one man's legitimate micro-penis, people were noticing what I thought of as "flaws" in my body and nobody cared. I left the show that night with Leslie and Patrick's contact information. They urged me to join them at another nudist gathering, and I think I just might take them up on it.

Follow Alison Stevenson on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='335' path='images/content-images/2015/04/16/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/16/' filename='a-dutch-group-is-suing-its-government-over-climate-change-could-we-do-the-same-in-america-193-body-image-1429219105.jpg' id='46927']

People's Climate March 2014 in New York City. Photo via Flickr user South Bend Voice

Climate change sucks. It's getting hot in herre but nobody can take off all their clothes because of all the deadly UV rays. While we've made some nice strides over the years, governments around the world have proven time and again that they aren't particularly good at curbing carbon emissions. On Tuesday, a Dutch environmental group called the Urgenda Foundation tried to hold their government responsible for its failure to protect them from climate change by filing a class action lawsuit on behalf of 866 citizens .

The case, resting upon Dutch domestic and European Union-wide human rights laws (supposedly making it the first human rights-based climate change case in the world ), is an attempt to use legal means to bypass legislative and executive logjams on environmental policies—a first in European courts. Urgenda and its plaintiffs hope that they can convince the courts to compel the Dutch government to reduce carbon emissions to 25 to 40 percent below 1990s levels by 2020, the purported bare minimum needed to avoid a two-degree Celsius rise in worldwide temperatures.

Experts expect to see a verdict out of The Hague within the next six months . This may seem quick, but Urgenda has been building this case since 2012 , when they sent a letter to the Dutch government requesting that they please reduce emissions ASAP and threatening a court case if appropriate legislation was not passed. They based the legal theories of their lawsuit on the writings of the American climate change lawyer (and currently one of the head lawyers involved in the litigation in the Hague) Roger Cox, who has equated the role of the courts in pushing climate change policies to their role in advancing civil rights policies in the fraught political environment of mid-20th century America.

Although no one is sure where the Dutch courts will fall on the issue, local papers have quoted court officials saying that they're open to forcing the adoption of climate change policies. Yet Urgenda and its allies are hoping for more than just a victory in the Netherlands—they're hoping that their case will inspire similar attempts to push environmental policies via legal channels across the world. At least one related case, on behalf of 8,000 Belgians against their government , seems to signal that such a global judicial climate change policy push could be on the way.

But although the Dutch case is novel in its approach and location, it's not the world's first use of the courts to try to push carbon emissions reduction requirements. Unfortunately, almost all of the previous attempts have met with failure. Most notably, in 2011 the US Supreme Court ruled in a case filed by several states against fossil fuel-powered utilities companies that federal courts couldn't issue rulings or requirements that would regulate emissions. And another case (a class action lawsuit against national governmental entities similar to the one in the Netherlands) filed in 2011 has failed to gain substantial traction. That's partially due to similar assertions that, in the US, it's the job of the legislature and existing regulatory bodies (like the Environmental Protection Agency), rather than the courts, to regulate emissions and determine climate change policies.

Although these previous failures in the US courts will likely have little to no impact on Dutch judges' decisions, they do call into question whether the global movement Urgenda and its associates hope to inspire can take root here. Hoping to learn more about the potential impact of the Dutch case on American judges and lawyers, VICE reached out to Michael B. Gerrard of Columbia University, a professors of environmental law focusing on cases like the one in the Netherlands.

VICE: Tell me a little bit about the cases that've been filed in America with an eye toward pushing climate change policies through the judiciary—why did they fail?
Michael Gerrard: There were four lawsuits filed in the federal courts in the US based on the theory of public nuisance, with some of the same ideas that [show up in the Dutch case].

They were all ultimately dismissed under various legal doctrines, but they all revolve around the push for a separation of powers—what is the proper role of the courts versus the proper role of the Congress and the executive. One of these cases went up to the US Supreme Court, that actually was seeking relief somewhat similar to what's sought [in the Dutch case]—seeking an order from a court that half a dozen power companies reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And the Supreme Court rejected that and said that when Congress enacted the Clean Air Act, it gave [the Environmental Protection Agency] the authority to regulate air pollution, including greenhouse gases. Therefore it's the EPA's job, not the job of the courts, to set emissions limits.

Related: "America's Water Crisis"

Were those public nuisance cases the only ones in America?
There's one other theory that is being litigated now. That's the public trust doctrine. There's this group in Oregon called Our Children's Trust that has organized lawsuits in several different US states. Most of those have been dismissed, but there's one still pending in Oregon.

Why were the others dismissed?
There are three principle grounds that have been used. One is that the public trust doctrine does not extend to the atmosphere. Second is that it's not the proper role of courts to be setting emissions limitations. The third is that the plaintiffs don't have standing in that they're affected by climate change the same as everyone else—under some theories in order to have standing you need to be affected differently than the public at large.

Decisions in the US thus far have been pretty gloomy. Is there really any hope that the remaining case will open up a path for people to use the judiciary to advance climate change policies?
[The remaining Oregon public trust case is] based on state law, and so it will be up to the courts of Oregon to decide. The case did survive an initial motion to dismiss, which meant that the court felt there was enough there to be worth going forward.

But future cases suing for policy change in America would have to happen state-by-state?
I think it would most likely be on a state-by-state basis.

Hasn't the dismissal of such cases in some states made that difficult in those areas?
But remember this was on particular grounds. If somebody came up with other grounds [the courts] might think about it differently.

How do the theories US cases were built on compare to those used in the Dutch case?
As I read the Dutch complaint, it's an array of theories. Some of them overlapped with what we have in the US. I think there was some reference to the public trust issue and to nuisance. They also relied heavily on various human rights as established by the European Commission on Human Rights, which are not applicable here.

Even if they're similar in spirit, does the difference in the theoretical basis and legal system at play in the Netherlands mean that there's little we can learn from that case?
I don't want to prejudge that. Who knows whether something will emerge that will inspire some US judges. But certainly the Supreme Court precedent in the Connecticut case is difficult. But on its terms it only applies to federal common law. It doesn't apply to state common law. So one could imagine a state court taking up such a case.

The legal avenue for pushing climate change policies in America seems pretty knotty. Should we just look to legislative solutions as the more promising approach?
In the United States, Congress is moving backward. The current Congress is dominated by those who deny the very existence of climate change and by those who would like to cut back on the EPA's authority to deal with greenhouse gases.

So a judicial route would be preferable in the US?
Don't put words into my mouth [laughs].

Most of the judicial effort in America is by states and industries to shut down the EPA's rule-making, and the legal effort of the environmental community is mostly to defend the EPA and upholding its current actions under the Clean Air Act.

We're not close to seeking affirmative judicial action along the lines of what's being sought in the Netherlands. That was tried. It didn't succeed. And that's not the current focus.

VICE also called Professor Mary Wood of the University of Oregon, who focuses on pushing environmental policies in the courts via public trust theories. We asked her to clarify a few points on the legal grounds for bringing cases in America and to share her own views on the Dutch case.

VICE: What's the big difference between nuisance and trust cases?
Mary Wood: The nuisance cases were brought against corporations for the most part. Public trust is a claim brought by citizens against a government.

What do you think of this recurrent idea that the American courts can't play a role in pushing climate change policies?
They've assumed that the other two branches of government would deal with the problem. And what the Netherlands plaintiffs are saying and what the US plaintiffs are saying is, if the courts stay passive , and the other branches don't act, it will be too late . I can only believe that judges, like everybody else, are starting to wake up to the urgency of climate change and will view their role a little differently once they truly appreciate the gravity of the situation.

[Plaintiffs in America and the Netherlands] are simply asking the courts to require a plan of action, requiring the other branches to do their jobs. In the United States, courts have done that many times in history. They've done that in land use cases, education funding cases, treaty rights cases, and so forth. The only thing that makes it difficult here is that courts have become very passive in environmental law.

Even if courts can play a role in determining climate policies, it seems like they're just too reticent to do so. Is there any hope for the remaining cases in the US court system?
Two courts have found that there is a public trust in the atmosphere... and the cases are moving forward and more are being brought.

How would you compare the basis of the Dutch case to America's cases? They're part of the same thought. Each country has a different legal system, but both of them proceed from the same basis: that government is in control of the atmospheric property and has control over actions that affect the climate. So government should be held responsible when we're facing climate catastrophe.

What do you think the chances are of the Dutch plaintiffs winning their case?
At some point, the chances of success are moved from the realm of law to the realm of judicial courage.

For months, wide-eyed Republicans have been lining up to run for president, jockeying to be the lucky guy who gets to lose to Democratic nominee Jim Webb in 2016. At this point, it's hard to keep track of all the conservative politicos who've said they're "thinking" about running—each week, it seems, another doughy Senator or Reagan-era tax official suggests he'd make a great leader of the free world, and that 2016 might be the year he decides to do something about it.

At the end of the day, though, only one clown will make it out of the car alive. And while the campaigns will spend the next year trying to tear down their opponents, the truth is the candidates themselves are their own worst enemies. Already, the 2016 GOP field has shown remarkable gifts for saying stupid shit, and eventually the weight of those gaffes will likely crush their White House dreams. So rather than wait for the inevitable fuck-ups, we've imagined our own ending, coming up with the most plausible way that that the candidates will torpedo their own campaigns.

Jeb Bush
The presumed favorite for the nomination, Jeb "Everyone I Know Is a President" Bush is actually in a dead heat with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in the latest polls, casting some doubt on the whole idea that he's a shoo-in for the party's nomination . And there other things that could cause problems for Bush's nascent candidacy—like, for instance, that time he listed himself as Hispanic on a 2009 voter-registration form. Or this 1991 LA Times story, in which his wife Columba, who is from Mexico, is quoted saying, "My husband wanted me to say as a Mexican citizen," but that she changed her citizenship to vote for George H. W. Bush.

Whether any of this actually damages Bush is up for debate—but it suggests that the GOP's safe and boring option might not as safe and boring as he looks. Problem is, Republicans happen to like safe and boring. They're also mostly white, and tend to think undocumented immigrants are driving America's moral and economic collapse. So while Bush's desperate attempt to become an "honorary Latino" might help in a general election, it will also his albatross in a Republican primary. And once those secret documents reveal Jeb's secret plan make Puerto Rico the 51 ^st state, and eventually annex Mexico, it'll all be over.

Rand Paul
He's only been an official candidate for one week, but it's already clear that Rand Paul's presidential campaign will end when he finally punches a reporter in the face. The senator formerly known as Aqua Buddha has revealed that he has no patience for the press and their stupid questions. This was clear on the first day of his campaign, when he gave an interview to The Today Show's Savannah Guthrie that could most generously be described as "mansplaining" and less generously as "being a huge dick."

Instead of giving a canned response to Guthrie's very appropriate question about his shifting foreign policy positions, like a more genteel politician would do, Paul told Guthrie how to do her job, speaking over her for most of the interview. Later, he told the Associated Press that rather than ask him for his stance on abortion, reporters should ask DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz "if she's OK with killing a seven-pound baby that's just not been born yet."

Since then, his wife has had to come out and say, "Hey, Rand's great with women! He has a wife that's a woman! It's me! And a surgical partner who was a woman! Two women!" (I'm paraphrasing.) Still, Paul clearly has a little bit of a problem with the media. It's only a matter of time before he finally loses it, likely on an unsuspecting embed who tries to ask him about foreign aid.

Ted Cruz
Assuming you don't think that Cruz's entire career has been a gaffe , the moment that stands out most was when the Texas Senator called net neutrality "Obamacare for the internet," then followed up that incredibly confusing statement with a Washington Post op-ed reinforcing the fact that he has just no idea what net neutrality actually is.

Doubling down on a mistake is an impressive commitment to gaffe-making, much like accidentally uploading your botched response to the president's State of the Union address, and it gives hope that Cruz could be the likeliest presidential candidate to provide a truly awesome gaffe in the weeks and months to come. How does it all end? My guess is during the first Republican primary debate, when Cruz tries to explain free trade as "a really great selection of samples at the farmer's market."

Scott Walker
Walker's political star is hotter than his Wisconsin Badgers in the NCAA men's basketball championship—and like the Badgers, Walker might be in for a very hard fall. On the way to becoming a conservative darling, he's managed to say a lot of silly shit, mostly having to do with cultural matters outside the state of Wisconsin. Like when he signed "Thank you again and Molotov" on a Hanukkah card. Or when he compared dealing with thousands of American citizens protesting union regulations to dealing with the Islamic State. This week, during a trip to Germany, he forgot a letter at the end of the word Hannovermesse, changing "Hannover Fair" to "Hannover mess."

All of which reinforces a belief held among some Republicans that Walker's fortunes will start to change as soon as the country hears him speak. Just wait until he tells a diner full of voters in Ames, Iowa, that he's "always considered himself a Hoosier at heart."

Ben Carson
If I were to list all the ridiculous things Carson has said since he first started talking politics, this piece would make Moby Dick look like a tweet. But the most recent example might also be the most impressively offensive, so we can focus on that. In March, Carson—remember, this guy was one of the most successful neurosurgeons in the world—told CNN that being gay is "absolutely" a choice.

He followed that up with this reasoning: "A lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight—and when they come out, they're gay. So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question."

But nothing Carson says, no matter how outrageous, seems to derail his political ambitions. In fact, his disdain for what he calls "political correctness" has actually made him a hero, at least among Republicans. Carson has surged in early polls, and his likability rating is higher than anyone else in the 2016 race, including Hillary Clinton's. Presumably, this will all be over when Carson slips up and tells people he read Origin of Species, and kind of liked it.

Marco Rubio
The most recent addition to the presidential field, Rubio has yet to commit a truly remarkable screwup, at least in front of a national audience. The closest he got was the time he had to drink water during his response to the State of the Union, which is so lame I fell asleep writing this paragraph. ( Twitter loved it though, so naturally Rubio can't make it through a speech now without mentioning it.) But I have faith that every candidate, no matter how skilled, fucks up eventually. For Rubio, this will probably happen when he's finally admits he doesn't actually know Pitbull.

Chris Christie
His aides once closed lanes on the George Washington Bridge just to get back at a political rival. I'm pretty sure that's how it ends.

Follow Kevin Lincoln on Twitter

[body_image width='1810' height='1231' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='suge-knight-is-believed-to-have-killed-someone-near-the-set-of-the-nwa-biopic-body-image-1422604291.jpg' id='22673']An older mug shot shot of Suge Knight via the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department

It's been a busy week in an even busier year for Suge Knight, the ailing former rap mogul and alleged murderer. After a few eventful court hearings, on Thursday Knight was given the bad news that he's going to have to stand trial for a January hit-and-run that killed one man and injured another. Knight then had to be taken to the hospital for an undisclosed medical problem.

This is the fifth time the former Death Row Records scion has been taken to the hospital on the same day as one of his court appearances, according to the Associated Press.

Along with decision to proceed with trial, the judge in the case lowered Knight's bail amount from $25 million to $10 million, and Knight's lawyer Matthew Fletcher suggested to TMZ that the latter is more manageable.

Knight is charged with murder for allegedly running over and killing a man named Terry Carter at a burger joint in Los Angeles after a scuffle on the set of the NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton. Surveillance footage taken at the crime scene shows a truck colliding with two victims, Carter and Cle "Bone" Sloan. An attempted murder charge has been slapped on Knight in connection with Sloan's injury.

But in a Monday hearing, Sloan told the court that he would not testify against Knight. "I will not be used to send Suge Knight to prison," he said, adding that he wasn't a "snitch."

It was a setback for the prosecution, but it apparently didn't sway the judge from rejecting Knight's self-defense claim and deeming the case sufficiently strong for a murder trial.

Fletcher, Knight's attorney, has detailed a number of his client's health problems, along with a claim of self-defense. He suggested to TMZ—apparently his outlet of choice—that Knight's diabetes caused glaucoma, which in turn led to partial blindness, rendering him unable to see that Carter was in the path of his car. As of last fall, Knight also reportedly had a blood clot in one of his lungs.

Related: Watch other seedy tales from the Golden State in our series "California Soul":

Long before this case, Knight had cultivated a reputation for intimidating people. It was a part of his business practices, according to Dan Charnas's comprehensive tome on the history of hip-hop, The Big Payback. And Sloan, who suffered numerous injuries in the incident, said Thursday that he "screwed up," seemingly blaming himself for Carter's death—a sequence of a events that he claimed not to remember clearly at the hearing.

With Knight seemingly incapacitated just about every time he appears in court and his reputation for intimidation—a practice that can obviously hinder a prosecution's ability to coax testimony out of witnesses—this murder trial is extremely unlikely to proceed without further drama.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.