The death of Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old boy who was in a coma after being hit by a tear gas canister in last year's anti-government rallies, prompted large-scale protests in Istanbul over the past two weeks. Violence between the Turkish police and protestors was worst in Berkin's neighborhood of Okmeydani. It was there that we first encountered the Turkish government's policy of media censorship. Turkey jails the most journalists of any country in the world, according to the Committe to Protect Journalists, and they've expanded the scope of this censorship in the week leading up to their local elections. Both Twitter and YouTube were banned this week, along with Google DNS and OpenDNS. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to also shut down Facebook, and there are rumors that Istanbul's internet will be blocked on election day. The bans come in response to a series of leaked audio recordings that implicate Erdogan in a corruption scandal serious enough to threaten his political party, the AKP, in Sunday's elections.

Photo by the author

After exploring art, New York, and skateboards for over a year, Taji's Mahal is ending this week. For my column's grand finale, I caught up with Alfred Leslie, a legendary artist and Renaissance man who has claimed New York as his stomping ground since the glory days of the Beat Generation. From abstract expressionism to Pull My Daisy (the 1959 film he created with Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac) to his new Pixel Scores series currently on display at the Janet Borden Gallery, Alfred has been a New York art-world fixture for over half a century. This month, I met with Alfred to discuss the new series he created with Photoshop.

Bardamu, Alfred Leslie, 2012-2014

VICE: How did you become a part of New York's art scene?
Alfred Leslie: I just fell into it. When I came out of the service in 1945, I met all of the major so-called abstract artists in post-war New York. That was the atmosphere I came into, the post-war art world, filled with hundreds upon hundreds of those who had fled Europe, like Mondrian, many of the Surrealists, and others. They were here mingling with Rothko, de Kooning, Pollock, and all of the other artists who had already been in New York and contributed to it.

Fast forward to 2014 and your Pixel Scores series. You used a tablet and mouse to create your latest artwork. How do you use modern technology to create art?
Photoshop is a tool, like a hammer, and it's designed to mimic what a painter does. It has many limitations, but I twist the tool around and make it do what I want. There is nothing I have to learn about painting or composition, so everything that the designers had to figure out to make this tool work, I already know. There are different types of hammers with different uses, so I've taken a tool that is used mostly for one thing, notably for adjustments and transformations in photographs, but I don't use photographs. I draw using the tablet and the mouse and create images. These images, from a formal point of view outside of the technology, are exactly the same as the paintings I did. The only difference was before I used a stick, with a couple of hairs on it, and some mud mixed with oil.

Miss Wonderly, Alfred Leslie, 2012-2014 

Who are the people you chose as subjects for this series?
They're all fictional characters from books.  

I thought they were real people you knew!
No, but all of the relevant details are from places I knew and grew up with that are special to me. For instance, Miss Wonderly is a pseudonym for a woman in The Maltese Falcon.  When she appears she is a homicidal gangster dame and introduces herself as Miss Wonderly. I always thought it was the most extraordinary of names and that she was a great creature. The setting of my picture is old New York circa 1932.  I can show you in the details of the background of Miss Wonderly the subway station and different characters: a woman aggressively standing with two of her daughters, a man standing with his [mentally challenged] daughter, a newsboy selling the Saturday Evening Post, and a group of women looking down and watching an Indian woman hanging clothing on a rooftop line. 

That's incredible, Alfred. Thanks for sharing your New York history with me for the last Mahal!

Follow Taji Ameen on Twitter. 

As Crimea becomes part of Russia, tensions continue to rise in Ukraine and demonstrators attempt to break into parliament in Kiev. VICE News reporter Simon Ostrovsky joins the protesters in Independence Square as they fight for a change in their government.

Photos by the author

Earlier this year, I joined a small team of doctors, nurses, and volunteers from Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli non-profit organization, on a trip to Holot Open Detention Center. Situated in the heart of the Negev desert, miles from any major city, Holot was erected in late 2013 to hold 3,000 of the 53,000 African asylum seekers who have made their way to Israel since the mid-2000s, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea.

Asylum seekers at the Holot Open Detention Center are free to enter and leave in between three daily headcounts. Even if people do leave, by the time they reach the nearest city, they will only have an hour or two before they have to report back to Holot. They are prohibited from working, except for low-paying jobs cleaning the prison, and rely on a meager allowance of about $45 every ten days, according to Haaretz, a popular Israeli newspaper. With this money, they must buy clothes, call family members, and pay for transportation.

According to the Guardian, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called the asylum seekers “infiltrators” whose presence in Israel is illegal and a demographic threat to the ethnic identity of the Jewish state. Until they create a path to legally deport the asylum seekers, the authorities maintain that these people must be kept behind bars. In the words of former Minister of the Interior Eli Yishai, “We will make the lives of infiltrators bitter until they leave.”

After Israel's High Court declared the policy of imprisoning illegal migrants for three years unconstitutional, the Israeli government found an original way to ruin refugees' lives. Migrants are now given an ultimatum: indefinite detention, in the newly opened Holot facility, or “voluntary” deportation to Uganda. The 1951 Refugee Convention prevents Israel from deporting asylum seekers straight back to their homelands, where their lives may be in serious danger. To solve this problem, Israel struck an agreement with Uganda for the transfer of African asylum seekers in exchange for agricultural aid. 

The effort to drive the asylum seekers out of the country has intensified in recent months. Hundreds of refugees have received orders to report to Holot. In response to the government’s strategy, a wave of demonstrations has swept the country. The protestors have called for Israel to finally review the refugee status of the asylum seekers, which, so far, Israel has completely neglected to do.

When I visited the prison, a young man named Filmon was among the several dozen detainees waiting in line to receive treatment in PHR's small makeshift clinic at Holot's parking lot. He approached me and immediately began telling me about his journey from Eritrea to Israel and his life in Israel's jail system. We exchanged phone numbers and planned to meet at another time.

Three days later, he called me. “Please come. I want to talk,” he said. I drove down to Holot with Helen, my Eritrean-American friend, who helped me translate his messages. Filmon stood among a small crowd in front of a preaching Eritrean priest. We sat down and discussed the conditions in Holot, life in Eritrea, and his uncertain future. 

VICE: When you crossed the border from Sinai, you were told you were going to prison. Did they tell you why?
Filmon: No. Israeli soldiers just gave us a paper saying we had to go to jail, and took us to Saharonim [the jail adjacent to Holot]. I was there until one month ago, and since then I have been in Holot. Saharonim is ten times worse. You cannot leave at all. When we do something bad, like coming back too late at night, we are sent to Saharonim as punishment. You are put in a small room alone. There is not much light, just a small door for food. They don't tell us how long we will stay there. It can be ten to 20 days and sometimes more.

What are the conditions like in Holot?
We are ten people in a room. The bunk beds are hard. It gets very cold at night—there is no heater, and there are not enough blankets. There is also not enough food. We eat rice, but it is like mud. In the morning we get a small yogurt and bread. We sometimes share to make the portions bigger. No one checks if the food is edible. 

Why did you leave Eritrea to come to Israel?
In Eritrea they forced me to go to the army, so I would not get a chance to have an education. I had been a soldier there for six years. If I had stayed, I would have been in the army until I was 40 or 50 years old. Only after one year and six months can you come home for 20 days. After that, [you can only come home] once a year. 

What is life like in the Eritrean army?
There is no war, but you always have to be ready. All you do is train. If you try to escape and are caught, you go to a prison camp for five to eight years, where they starve and torture you. I had been in a military jail for one year. This is why we chose to leave our country. There is no future when you are in the Eritrean army.

What happened when you left Eritrea?
When I escaped Eritrea, the Rashaida, the bandits, they put us by force into a car and took us to Sinai. It happened very quickly. They were waiting for us in Sudan. They took us to a camp where they tortured us. They heated a piece of iron and burnt me on my face and my arm. They told me to have sexual contact with the girls and with the boys, too. If you don't, they punish you.

How long did you stay at the camp?
I was there for three months. They demanded money from my family, $33,000. [Such absurd ransom demands are common, according to BBC reports]. My family had to sell the house and the gold. They took money from another family. I don't know exactly how they paid. After three months, they released me. They put me on the road and told me to start walking. That's how I reached the Israeli border. I did not know I was going to Israel when I left Eritrea. I just escaped.

Do you want to stay in Israel?
I just want to be in a free country that accepts me. I will be happy to stay in Israel if they let me, but I don’t know Israel. I don't know Tel Aviv. I've been in Israel for a year and a half, and I only know its prisons.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Victor

During my teen years, the police regularly chased me, but I got away nearly every time. When the cops caught me, they typically harassed me for a bit and then set me free. The cops only arrested me once.

It was the end of a long summer that my friends and I had spent doing drugs in the New Jersey town where we lived. A handful of our friends getting arrested didn’t slow our momentum. Kev, my friend who was busted three times over a couple of months, was in the midst of an ecstasy bender, though he faced a charge for possessing several pills. I was with him every time he was cuffed, but remained unfazed by the threat of going to jail. I had only done ecstasy a couple of times, and though it didn’t seem worth the hangover, I wanted to continue experimenting. Getting pills was a pain in the ass, but one Friday, my friend gained a bundle of pills.

In addition to procuring the drugs, we also had to find a safe spot to experience them. The cops knew most of our outdoor hangout spots, so we tried to find a house to chill at, but everyone’s parents were home. We would have gone to Jerry’s house—his mom never cared what we did—but Jerry and his family were out of town. It was starting to get dark, and we had nowhere to go, but a few of us decided to take the pills anyway. We ended up sitting around a small pond, the least likely place the cops would find us. To my dismay, a terribly annoying kid named Theo showed up to join the party. He was normally pretty jittery and loud, and once the pills kicked in, he started getting on everyone’s nerves. Kev even asked him to leave, but Theo laughed it off and stuck around.

As time passed, the temperature seemed to drop dramatically. I’m still not sure if this perception was purely because of the pills or if it was unseasonably cold that night, but it was real enough to make us move. We were debating where to go when someone suggested we break into Jerry’s house. The back door was always unlocked, so we could easily slip in and spend the rest of the evening in his basement. Kev called Jerry to ask if it was OK. “Fine,” Jerry told him on the phone, “but if I get a call from the cops, you’re on your own. I’m not telling them I let a bunch of rolling kids hang out in my mom’s house.”

We filed into Jerry’s basement as silently as we could and crept to the basement in the dark. Once we were down there, we relaxed a little. My pill finally started to kick in, but it didn’t feel like my previous rolling experiences. For one thing, I was hallucinating pretty hard. I had experienced visual hallucinations on acid and mushrooms, but nothing like this. For the first time, things were appearing out of nowhere. As the effects grew stronger, I began seeing toys, which I had owned as a kid, laying around the room, partially obscured by imaginary piles of leaves and gravel. The illusions screwed with my head. I was having a hard time distinguishing between reality and hallucinations.

I lost all concept of time, so I have no idea what time it was when we saw a cop car roll past the house. We were smoking a blunt in the dark living room for what felt like days, when suddenly panic erupted. Kev told us we should disperse throughout the house and hide in case they decided to knock on the door. I was still fraught with powerful hallucinations, so Theo led me to the basement with a very drunk girl and a first-time roller named Fish. We sat quietly in the basement for about a minute before we heard someone ringing the doorbell. There was a second of silence, and then we heard the door burst open and several men storm into the living room above us. This scared the crap out of the drunk girl. She stood up, yelled, “I’m getting the fuck outta here!” and then ran for the doors leading outside. She didn’t manage to open them, but tried to go through anyway, slamming her head loudly against the door. We heard the footsteps above us stop and then the men began running toward the basement door.

We all knew that we were fucked. The town’s cops rarely dealt with this kind of excitement, so they were definitely going to cuff us. The lights came on, and then six cops rushed into the basement. The main cop said, “Well, well. What do we have here?” All the cops started laughing and smiling. One of them approached Theo and asked, “Now, what do you suppose this little nerd is on tonight?” Theo twitched visibly, which made the cops laugh even more. The same cop turned to me. “Seriously, though,” he said, “you guys just smoking pot, or are you on something else?” I tried to respond, but my jaw was locked. As soon as the cop saw this, he said, “Alright! I guess that answers that.” They led us upstairs to ask us some more questions. Once they figured out that none of us lived there, they got Jerry’s number from us and called him. As he had told us, Jerry denied any knowledge that we were in his house, and none of us blamed him. Then the cops asked for our parents’ numbers and started calling them to tell them what was going on. Fish had recently turned 18, so he was spared this humiliation. Theo had gotten into trouble plenty of times before, so the call to his parents was routine. When they called my mom, she asked to speak to me. I have never been more terrified of my mom than I was at that moment. She asked me if I had done what they were saying. I said, “Yes.” She was silent until the cop took the phone back and told her to come pick me up at the hospital.

“Hospital?” I asked the cop when he hung up the phone. “Yeah,” he said. “You guys are obviously fucked up. We have to take you in for detox and testing.” They cuffed Fish behind his back and cuffed me to Theo. He was twitching uncontrollably, jostling my arm with every movement. The cops brought us outside and put us in the back of a cruiser. They left us alone for a moment, and Theo started freaking out. “You think Kev got away? I hope so. He’ll go to jail if he gets arrested again.” I told him to shut up and used the cuffs to smack him with his own hand. I was sure that the cops were searching the rest of the house and that we’d see Kev walk out in cuffs any minute. Luckily, they didn’t bother. They seemed satisfied with their haul for the evening.

My mom was already there when we arrived at the hospital. Rather than being upset with me right away, she patiently waited through the detox process before disciplining me. I had to drink a cup of nasty charcoal solution, give a urine sample, and wait around while the cops told my mom about the details of the arrest. I grew worried when they told her that I was technically breaking and entering Jerry’s house. After my mom and I left the hospital, we silently sat in her car for a few minutes. She finally broke the silence by giving me a firm smack in the face. My mom has only struck me about ten times in my life when I’ve displayed my worst behavior, and this was the last time. She grounded me and made me take on more hours at work so that there was no way I would hang out with the same group of kids again. I didn’t fight her over it. I still smoked weed and did some mushrooms now and then, but I never touched another pill of ecstasy.

It turned out that the pills barely had any MDMA in them. Instead, they were chockfull of DXM, the chemical found in cough medicine that can make you trip, which explained the hallucinations and the skewed perception of time. It didn’t explain the lockjaw—I think genuine guilt caused that. Because I was under 18, I wasn’t charged with a crime and only had to give a written statement admitting what I did was wrong, but I didn’t feel like I had gotten away with anything. I had disappointed my mom, and that was the hardest punishment of all.

Getting arrested might have been the best thing for me at the time. My experimentation with drugs was getting a bit too wild, and I may have ended up trying something that I wouldn’t have come back from easily. The experience was also a reality check for my mom, who learned something about drugs. She had always seen drugs as a general category of bad things, but over time she has learned to understand that there are all kinds of drugs and the way they are treated by the law doesn’t always reflect their nature. Today, she’s an avid Weediquette reader.

Hi mom!

Follow T. Kid on Twitter.

Photo by Isabelle Andarakis

Porn isn't a hard sell. In fact, it's pretty much completely self-sustaining, in that there aren't many other avenues you take when you're planning to spend some time with yourself. And if you can think of anything else, there's probably already porn of it.  

It is a little harder to actually advertise it on posters and billboards, though, which is presumably why PornHub is running an online competition for a new creative director, getting the entire internet to pitch concepts for adverts at them, and hiring whoever submitted the best one. At the moment, it's a bit of a mix between some good ideas and a dumping ground for visual puns involving hot dogs and donuts. 

I wanted to know how people in a half mile radius of me would handle the position of creative director at a big porn website, so I walked around and asked some of them. 

VICE: How can porn be improved?
Will, 27: I don’t think there's enough loving porn. There's a lot of violent porn and porn that people aren’t having a lot of fun with. God, I don’t know—that sounds pathetic. But Jesus, there is a sadness that fills my heart when I see the sadness in everyone’s eyes.

Why do you think they look so sad?
Maybe that's purely my judgement. I guess the position they're put in? But I don't know. I’ve never shot porn. I’ve never been in that position. Maybe they feel completely empowered and happy to be where they are, but often I don’t get that impression.

So how would you combat that?
Maybe support amateurs. Get amateur couples who enjoy filming one another and like sharing that with people. But there's so much porn. It'll be difficult to make a real change, since there's a niche for everything as much as there's a market for everything. As much as I might want to see a loving couple make love beautifully, there will be someone who wants to see a girl fisted by eight guys. 

That's a very valid point. Are there any niches that you would champion if you were to, say, take control of a porn website?
I've certainly never gone online and been like, Why can't I find this thing? Because it's remarkable what you can find. I’ve certainly gone online and thought, How the fuck is someone into this thing? I guess I’d like to see less weird stuff—no donkeys, no one getting upset or hurt. I'll ask myself some questions about it tonight.

How can porn for women be improved?
Lucy, 19: I think it should portray more accurate sexual relationships, and not some kind of warped view of what it should be like in the bedroom.

Can you give me an example?
I suppose violence. I think that too much violent pornography could lead to that being taken back to the bedroom and end up in people having quite unrealistic views of sex. Also, I think that it can affect you much more if you're exposed to pornography from a young age. You grow up with a different view of relationships from what they actually are.

If you were the new creative director of a big porn site, what kind of videos would you focus on?
I don’t know—I’ve never really thought about it before. I think maybe something where women aren’t in such a demeaning position. Pornography is probably often aimed much more towards men. But I don’t know—I’m not really a pro.

You're the new creative director of a huge porn site. What's your first move?
John, 27: It’s a difficult question to answer, but I would continue doing what's going on now and find ways to make it even better. I'd help the business grow using social media.

That's a sensible enough answer. What about the content?
I’m not a regular user. I don't watch porn that often.

OK. Anything you're not a big fan of?
Not particularly. There's usually a lot of advertising, but I understand that's how it's funded and stuff.

Yeah. How about introducing new stuff? Are there any niches that you feel don't get enough exposure?
Any niches? No, I think the internet covers most things.

What would you change about porn?
Jack, 24: Well, a lot of gay porn—and I'm sure other porn—is quite violent. A lot of people are into that stuff. I personally don't like it at all. It gets a bit graphic with all the fists and bums and stuff like that. I’d never watch that.

So what changes would you make as the new creative director of a porn website?
Probably less of that and less of the old people and pooing. I don’t know why that ever became a thing to sexually arouse anyone.

So you'd introduce a maximum age limit for performers?
Yeah, definitely. Old sweaty balls being thrown around the set is just so horrible to watch. Even if you just catch it at the side of the screen, it's a big turn off.

What are your personal porn watching habits?
I watch it alone. I’ve watched it maybe once or twice with somebody else. But yeah, usually very much alone.

Say you became the new creative director of a porn website, what would you do?
Anonymous: Make it safer for women. Get reputable companies who use reputable models, and you don’t get any exploitation or dodgy dealings. I don’t know whether porn companies or producers would have to get some sort of accreditation. Is the industry regulated by authorities? Can the regulation be improved?

That's a good question. What about the more consumery stuff, rather than actually making porn?
Are we talking hardcore porn of softcore porn?

Whatever you want.
I guess there's the argument: Should young people be exposed to pornography? And if you paid for porn, would it not be better if they gave the user a little sneak preview so you could actually see whether it's the type of porn you'd actually like? There's one porn site that's actually free. You can access free videos.

I think there's a lot of those kinds of sites.
Well, that obviously negates the need to pay for it. So maybe there's a lot of porn providers out there who are being screwed by the free providers. 

You land a job as the new creative director of a porn site. What do you spend your first day doing?
Daniel, 25: The biggest problem with most porn is that it's very unrealistic, and a lot of young people get completely the wrong idea about what's in store for them, which is usually difficult and awkward and clumsy, initially. I like stuff that is real, that isn’t staged. The plumber who ends up having sex with every woman in the house is ridiculous. Those terribly acted storylines leave me completely cold. If there's a new director coming in, it’s difficult, because you can’t exactly say, "Get better actors," because that's not the point. And I’m an actor.

So what can you do? How would you improve porn for your consumers?
Place more emphasis on what comes before it. Those things are usually more exciting, just from my own sexual experience. Anything that comes before it is the real excitement, and anything after that is obviously fantastic. Make people invest in the romance of it all, I suppose. There's little romance in porn. There are a few things, like couples on their wedding nights, but it’s all bullshit. I'd try to make the people a little more realistic. Just a dude and a woman, rather than steroidy, veiny monsters.

Tom and Matt Berninger. All photos by Taylor Girouard

My house was overrun with people when I sat down to watch an advance copy of the National’s new documentary, Mistaken for Strangers. I live with five other people. At the time, someone’s boyfriend was staying over. So were two friends from back home in Oregon—one was sleeping on the couch, and the other was holed up in my walk-in closet. None of them cared much about the National, their brooding indie rock, or the new documentary made by the ten-years-younger brother of the band's lead singer, Matt Berninger.

When I put the movie on in my living room, a few people were cooking dinner in the kitchen, another was writing his résumé, and a pair was in the shower together. After 15 minutes, they had all sat down to watch. By the time Mistaken for Strangers was over, the couch was full—a half-cooked meal was on the stove, and the couple from the shower were wrapped in towels, air-drying next to me.

I sat down to watch the movie because I love the National. But the reason my roommates got sucked in was Tom—the movie’s director and Matt Berninger’s little brother. Nobody is as vulnerable and real as Tom—he puts on display all the embarrassing stuff that the rest of us spend our lives trying to hide.

While Matt was drinking wine on stage in front of packed stadiums over the past decade, Tom was still living with their parents in Ohio. While Matt was opening for President Obama, Tom was making low-budget slasher movies with his friends. While Matt was releasing a string of critically acclaimed albums, Tom wasn't even listening. He liked Judas Priest.

Matt made sporadic attempts to stay in touch—like late-night phone calls from France—but the brothers lived in two separate worlds. In 2010, Matt wanted to reconnect, so he gave Tom a job on the band’s European tour. The little brother would be like a personal assistant to the band members. Tom told Matt he was going to film a documentary about the National. But he made himself the star.

I could relate to the two brothers—Matt left home for college when Tom was nine. My own little brother, Larkin, was ten when I moved to New York City. After I finished Mistaken for Strangers, I drunk-dialed Larkin in Oregon and asked if he wanted to skip a week of middle school and help me interview Tom and Matt.

Two days later, I picked Larkin up at the airport and we went to sit down with the Berninger brothers. They gave Larkin advice on staying in touch after the older brother leaves home, how to pick up high school girls, and the importance of not giving a fuck.

VICE: Larkin was ten when I left for college. Matt left when you were that age, Tom. Was that hard on you?
Tom: Honestly, I didn't even register it at first. I mean, I guess I was sad.

Matt: It was harder on me than it was on you.

In what way?
Matt: Before I moved away, Tom was always a close confidante—somebody who would listen to me. It was fun to have someone that just look up to me. And then I went off to college and I was a small fish, and Tom wasn't around.

The other four guys in the National are all brothers. They had each other. When the band started touring, I would call Tom from random places and be really depressed. I maybe missed him more than he missed me.

Tom: I would never call Matt. He would always call me. He'd be overseas, and I'd think it was so cool that he was calling me from France or something. Little did I know that he was on a month-long tour, playing in crowds of five or ten people. He had to talk to me to get his mind off of playing in front of nobody. To feel like he was home.

What's it like for brothers reconnecting as adults?  
Tom: I think once Larkin hits 20, you'll realize how different you've both become. You'll get back together, but the differences will really start to show. Around that time, I became my own person. I started liking metal.

Matt: I tried to get him to listen to the Smiths, and I think he started listening to AC/DC to spite me.

How was it for you, Matt, to see Tom grow into his own person?
Matt: When I asked Tom to come on tour, I wanted him to be what he was back then—a guy that would listen to me pontificate and vent. But he wasn't that. He wasn't that little kid anymore. He was an adult. He swam through the world with a completely different stroke than I did.

There was a lot of tension. I was trying to make him more buttoned-up because I am more buttoned-up. But I learned that I had to stop trying to shape him. I stopped trying to get him to listen to the Smiths, and I started listening to AC/DC a little bit.

After a while, I realized—thank God—that Tom's got a different way of being in the world. Thank God he's more buttoned down. Thank God he's less like me than I wanted him to be.

Larkin is very smart, but he's also super quiet.
Matt: That's the opposite of Tom. Tom's really loud and dumb.

Tom just doesn't give a fuck. Even in the movie, he's completely out there—completely himself, for better or for worse. Do you think that's a way Larkin should try to be?
Tom: My not giving a fuck is a fairly new discovery. It was in my late 20s, right before I started making this documentary, that I stopped caring. I stopped letting myself feel bad. I was suffering from a lot of depression. I was on all sorts of drugs—

Matt: [to Larkin] He means antidepressants.

Tom: Right, not the good drugs.

Matt: That's terrible.

I blame Larkin's impending drug issues completely on you.
Tom: You guys are from Oregon—come on. Anyway, I just stopped caring about what people think of me. I made a mental note to stop feeling bad about myself. I still suffer from depression every day, but there was a shift—now I'm just going to act the way I want to act. I'm just going to say what I want to say.

I used to be afraid to fail. It paralyzed me. When I starting making this movie, I had a whole mess of footage. I didn't have a direction. But there was something there, and I refused to let myself feel bad. I turned the footage into something.

Matt and the author hugging their respective younger brothers. 

You have any advice for Larkin, Matt?
Matt: I don't think you should try to shape yourself into a different person. But conversely, you should push yourself to do things that you're nervous about. The biggest one is going up to the person you're attracted to and asking him or her out on a date. Honestly, that's the hardest thing in the world to do. Nobody's actually good at that. But you do it anyway. You have to do it anyway.

Larkin: OK.

Matt: Don't try to change yourself, but take chances. Don't worry about failing, or falling on your face. Don't be somebody you're not, but work hard and accept failure as another step forward.

You will get knocked down by a million things in the world, whether it's a girl in high school or a failed project. You'll get rejected nine times, but the tenth time you won't. And all those times you got knocked down helped you figure out how to stand up that tenth time.

Larkin: OK.

That's the brilliance of Mistaken for Strangers, Tom. You aren't afraid of showing your missteps or little failures. That vulnerability is what kept me so engrossed. It sucked in all my roommates, too. Even those who aren't fans of the band.
Matt: We've heard from a lot of therapists that the movie is being buzzed about in those circles. There are so many people that have so many insecurities, especially in relation to their family. This film is about all of that.

You're supposed to be 30 and know what you're doing. You're only 14, Larkin, but you might get to 30—or to my age, 43—and still feel lost. That's something about the film that I like. Everyone stays a little lost their whole lives.

You're not going to figure it all out. You're not going to put all the pieces together. But that's the fun of it.

Larkin: OK.

Tom: You will figure it out to a point, but there's still a giant unknown. That's just adulthood. I really found a voice with this film. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be. And it's scary—I still have to figure out what I'm going to do next. Becoming an adult is very weird.

Thanks for talking to us, guys. It's inspiring to see how your relationship as brothers has evolved as you've grown up, but you're still close.
Matt: Tom lives in my garage!

Tom: Hopefully not for much longer.

I'd love if Larkin moved in with me as an adult.
Matt: I'd rather have Larkin living with me, too. [Laughs]

We can trade. Larkin, you're going to live in Matt's house now.
Larkin: OK.

Follow River Donaghey on Twitter.

Mistaken for Strangers will be in theaters, On Demand, and on iTunes today. You can find theater listings and links to digital downloads at the official website.

If you are completely obsessed with the movie, and truly can't get enough, you can follow it on Twitter and Facebook for exclusive content and updates.

Collages by Marta Parszeniew

It's become commonplace to say that we "young people" have no future. We blame the financial crisis that's led to brutal unemployment rates; we blame an inefficient government that has no interest in helping us; we blame the Baby Boomers who have refused to bequeath their wealth to the generation beneath them; we blame the corporations that provide only part-time, insecure service-industry jobs. And we're right to.

These problems have set our generation back years and led us into a fruitless, childless existence that we can only escape with drinking games, Taco Bell breakfasts, gut-rotting drugs, and shitty cell-phone games. But what are we going to do when the shit really hits the fan?

Everyone’s been predicting the end of time since time began, obviously. God was going to kill us. Then the Devil was going to kill us. Then the nuclear bomb was going to kill us. And now asteroids, or the sea, or our own shitty behavior is going to kill us. Whatever happens, we know that one day it's all going to end in fire, and for the media this paranoia is a golden ticket, the ultimate paper-selling, SEO-friendly scare story. Most people have at least some passing interest in hearing how and when their species is going to end, which is why apocalyptic religious sects will never go out of fashion. It's grade-A clickbait with a highbrow twist, the Holy Grail of the modern media.

Unfortunately, when you pick up the New York Times or whatever, it’s not cartoonish doomsday prophets waving "THE END IS NIGH" placards—it’s serious-sounding scientists. This gives weight not only to individual scare stories about bird flu or acid rain but to the patchwork of terror as a whole, which suggests that—through a combination of gluttony, stupidity, and cruelty—we really have fucked up the planet beyond repair and the future is looking like a disaster film directed by Michael Bay.

The latest study I read, which was partially funded by NASA, "has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution." That's in the words of the Guardian, a respectable publication that, apparently, can't write "WE'RE FUCKED WE'RE FUCKED AHHHH!" In any case, the article is an interesting, and a somewhat sobering, reading.

The real question, however, is not the degree to which humanity is screwed but what we are supposed to do with this information. Is there anything we can do? Or should we just get the patio chairs out of the garage, put some Budweiser on ice, and wait for our neighbors to start barbecuing German shepherds? I mean, it’s one thing for old people to hear that their planet is fucked and that they'll spend their golden years drinking urine on a makeshift raft à la Kevin Costner, but it’s quite another thing for young people to hear that they have no future.

If you’re 20 now, what’s the point? What’s the point of babies, of careers, of not smoking, of building a family, of education, of anything that takes any effort whatsoever? Why should we spend our post-adolescent lives working toward material stability when that stability is going to begin crumbling in 15 years, no matter what we do? Why not just sit around doing whip-its and having unprotected sex with strangers we meet on Grindr and/or Tinder? Are we just living through Bowie’s “Five Years” but with shitter music?

It wouldn’t surprise me. I’m not sure we’re a generation that's particularly good at confronting reality in any case, and now it looks to me as though we’re the generation dealt the shittiest hand imaginable. The idea of global environmental catastrophe is so horrifyingly hard to grasp that the danger is we'll just be scared into a state of slightly worried stasis and basically continue doing everything we were doing before—i.e., ignoring anything beyond our weekend.

None of us has a clue what to do when faced with the kind of miserable predictions that are regularly coming out of the most respected research institutions in the world. It might be too late to stop the effects of global warming, not that we seem to have any desire to slow our demise; we're just too set in our ways. The solutions either seem impossible, or like too-little-too-late hippie tokenism. We curse our ancestors for fucking it up for us, but then remember that we were the generation that demanded to be driven to school, to have an increasing number of consoles and phones and bullshit gadgets. We didn't start the fire, but we didn't exactly try to put it out, either.

Thus we live in a world in which we are all to blame, and there's nothing we can do about it. News of the imminent apocalypse becomes just another thing happening to somebody else, another thing to be indifferent and apathetic about. What's the point in even acknowledging it? We've known the polar ice caps have been melting for years now, but how many of us have changed our lifestyles because of that? Let's just keep going as we are, and hopefully we won't care about dying when it finally hits us.

Of course, there's been a whole lot of false starts and scares when it comes to the end of the world, a lot of shaky science fiction and very little fact, but the sheer weight of problems we're facing makes you feel like we must be on the home stretch of the path toward destruction.

The problem is that ignorance is bliss when the truth means knowing that you and all of your friends are staring down the barrel of fate. If nothing can be done, then it seems better to just live our lives as we always have: networking, hobnobbing, chitchatting until the sun goes black and the birds start to fall out of the sky.

Apathy is surely the defining emotion of our times. Politically, culturally, everything-ly. So much so that we can't even seem to get worked up when NASA suggests we're merely decades from total social collapse, and just about every other scientific agency suggests it's our own geography that will get us first.

It's fine, though. Chill out. We've got Flappy Bird. We've got Drake and Rihanna. There's a Five Guys opening near us soon. We all die. There's nothing we can do about it, right?

Follow Clive Martin on Twitter.

If you don’t know the Ukrainian pop star Ruslana Lyzhychko, you should. She’s known as the Britney Spears of Eastern Europe, except she doesn’t shave her head for attention, she leads political rallies, and she was recently a key figure in the Euromaidan protests in Kiev. She hyped the crowds by singing the national anthem every night, spending endless hours onstage and in camp sites, deflecting violence and calling upon international help. Michelle Obama recently honored the pop diva with the International Woman of Courage Award.

Don’t let this modern-day political pop star fool you, Ruslana is known to roll up on stage in leather outfits with orange flames bubbling in the background. Influenced by old-school Ukrainian folk music, the Carpathian Mountains' Hutsul traditions, and endless renditions of the Ukrainian anthem, she has a bold and wild stage presence. Today, she uses the mic as a walking symbol of unity for Ukraine’s past, presentm and future.

Next week, Ruslana will join Pussy Riot, Hillary Clinton, and Barbara Bush at the Women in the World summit in New York on April 3. So I called up the 40-year-old activist and singer to chat about music, bullets in Kiev, collaborations in China, and her thoughts on Crimea. 

Ruslana singing Ukraine's national anthem

VICE: You play many roles, but at heart, you are a musician. How does music change during turmoil? Does it go from love songs to more nationalistic songs?
Ruslana: My music was changing because I was changing myself. I started my music career as romantic girl who was waiting for the spring. But I found the unique culture of the Carpathian Mountains and the Hutsul people who are living there. It was my new beginning as a folk singer. I never thought that it would be such a big success with Wild Dances all over the world. Ten years have passed since my win in the Eurovision Song Contest, but a few months of the Ukrainian revolution have changed me and all Ukrainians more than these ten years. I don’t feel ready to produce new albums or singles now. Today, I am person who would like to protect the Ukrainian image by public events and speeches. Today I am not ready to sing and dance, even if my dance is wild and brave.

Are you still playing music and touring with your band? Do you still hope to record a new album that revisits the ethnic motifs of Wild Dances?
Maybe I will restart my concerts in a few months. Today, I have a lot of international visits related to the situation in Ukraine. I have already visited Brussels, Strasbourg, Warsaw, Stockholm, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, and Washington, DC, and I have a chance to talk true about Ukraine and hope for international support. I will go to Paris in a few days, and after that I will visit New York to participate in the Women in the World summit. In the end of April, I will go to São Paulo and will give a speech at a TEDx event. And finally I have one more ceremony at the Atlantic Council in Washington. As you can see, my schedule is so hard now that I haven’t a possibility to perform as a singer.

Are there any traditional Ukrainian songs you really connect with?
Yes, I have a song called "Arkan." This is an ancient Hutsul dance in which people are whirling with a great speed. I feel a special energy when I am singing the melody of "Arkan," and I always ask people to dance and sing together with me.

How will the protests reflect your songwriting in the future?
I must note that Ruslana, before the protests and after the protests, is different. I changed, and my music will change as well as me. I can imagine my new singles as a march of Ukrainian victory and independence. A lot of people are sending their own songs about Ukraine to me. Maybe I really will record something patriotic. I have an idea to perform the same song in different languages as Ukrainian, Russian, English, German, French, even Chinese.  But it is only an idea.

I know you’ve been extremely busy in America with both Michelle Obama and John Kerry. Have you found the time to write or be creative?
Unfortunately, I have no time for music now, and I am very worried about it. Music is the main part of me, and I am coming short of it.

You’ve recorded with Missy Elliott and T-Pain. Do you have any collaborators in mind for the future?
Maybe I will record a music duet with some Chinese singers, because I would like to visit China in the summer and I’m really thinking about such collaboration.

How does it feel to represent your country at this moment, especially with the International Women of Courage award?
It's a great honor and responsibility for me to represent Ukraine in such a decisive moment. I understand that I must do my best for my country and Ukraine.

If you are the voice of Ukraine, do you think the same message can be delivered through both music and social movement?
I think that music is a connecting link for people anytime. We sing when we are happy and lucky, and we also sing when we are in trouble. But it’s important to understand that there is a very thin dividing line between our troubles. When people die from bullets, as we saw in the Maidan, it’s better to listen to the silence instead of music and try to join people by speeches and prayers.

Follow Nadja Sayej on Twitter.

Photos by Daniel Bolt

Mona Eltahawy is the complete opposite of the former Mubarak regime’s official version of the Egyptian woman: she’s opinionated, cerebrally outraged, and loves talking about her vagina. The activist and journalist has spent the last 20 years fighting for the rights of women in Egypt, where many females face catcalls, sexual abuse, and worse for doing apparently unseemly things, like protesting or just walking through a university campus.

Mona’s fight against lady hating took on unfortunate new dimensions in late 2011, when she returned to her beloved homeland to protest on the streets in the wake of Egypt’s ongoing revolution. “It was during that protest that Egyptian riot police broke my left arm and my right hand, sexually assaulted me, threatened me with gang rape and detained me for 12 hours,” she told VICE.

In the two years since, Mona has refused to keep quiet about her experience despite the best efforts of Egyptian right wingers, patriarchal douchebags and a significant amount of online trolls. In 2012, she published the inflammatory piece "Why do they hate us?” in Foreign Policy, and has increasingly become the face of violence against Egyptian women as the country struggles to escape religious zealots, military dictators and other vagina-meddlers.

I spoke to Mona during her visit to Australia for All About Women at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday.

VICE: What was it like being a teenage girl in Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s?
Mona Eltahawy: We left Egypt when I was seven and we didn’t return until I was 21. My teen years were divided between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. Up until we left the UK, it was like your regular teenage years. The one thing I remember is that I couldn’t date. That was one thing my parents made very clear. By the time we moved to Saudi Arabia, it was a very difficult shift. To move from the UK to Saudi Arabia at a time when you’ve got hormones and everything exploding was a very, very difficult thing for me.

When I turned 19, I had already started university and I became this feminist in Saudi Arabia. I often say that to be a woman in Saudi Arabia, you have two options: you can either lose your mind or you can become a feminist. So I did start off losing my mind because everything was so culturally and religiously different and then I became a feminist in the 1990s. That decision made me the woman I am today.

I just read an interesting New Internationalist story about sex in the Arab world. It says one problem is the gap between “appearance and reality”. What were you taught about sex growing up?
Sex education is a huge problem in the Arab world as it’s often not taught or it’s removed from the curriculum altogether in Egypt. I was first taught about sex by my mother. I grew up in the UK and my parents are both doctors. One day, when I was about 9 or 10, one of my friends told me that babies come where they come from. So my mother bought this book about sex and got my brother and me and she insisted that we join her in reading it.

Sex is not something that’s taught in Egypt and teachers are embarrassed to talk about it. It’s something you read about at home. In some instances, parents will pull their daughters out of these classes. They don’t want them to be involved in anything that’s sexually educational. For a lot of boys, they find out through porn. If the girls are lucky enough to watch porn, they get something as well, but I’m not sure how straight to form that knowledge is! When a girls reaches her wedding night [when they’re expected to be a virgin] some kind relative may just have to explain to her what is going on. There’s a huge black hole.

You started working as a journalist in Cairo in the early 1990s. Do you have one story that you filed during that period that sticks out today?
I started off at a local newspaper called The Middle East Times, which is no longer in existence. I remember one of the earliest stories that I wrote for them was a study about domestic violence in Egypt from a government run research institute think tank. One of the pull quotes was from a judge during a domestic violence hearing who basically blamed a wife for the fact that her husband was beating her.

Because our newspaper was a foreign paper, it had to through the censorship office before it could go on the newsstands. To be my great surprise, that particular story that I wrote got the newspaper banned. It was not allowed to publish that week. I took this as proof that even though the government had been funding that research institute on woman’s issues and things like domestic violence, to this day there’s still this great cover up and women being told to shut up about the abuses that they face. If our revolution has any chance of succeeding now and in the future, we should never shut up.

And then you moved to the United States in 2000. What there one factor that drove you to move or was it a combination of things?
It was basically because I married an American who I divorced two years later. I had never, ever thought I would end up in the US. I had always wanted to go to London, which I really considered as an early idea of home for me. It had never crossed my mind that we would live in the US.

We lived in New York when I was 14 in 1982. I love New York – it’s one of those cities that you must love – but it never crossed my mind to move to the US, especially not Seattle. This is where I first lived because this ex-husband lived there. When I left him, I spent 18 days driving from Seattle to New York, where I found a job, and then I fell in love with New York more than I was ever in love with my ex-husband! So, I decided to stay because it’s just a fantastic city.

There’s a really interesting polarity in your activism as an Egyptian-American. On the one hand, there’s an intense hatred and criticism of the Egyptian regime, but there’s also a vivid nostalgia and beautiful defence of Egypt. How do you reconcile this polarity?
I think the Egyptian regime has insisted on hijacking Egypt. They have done this through a centralized authority and its insistence on telling us what is Egyptian and what is a good Egyptian or whoever isn’t an Egyptian. But for me, Egypt is a much bigger thing than the regime, which is why I am optimistic about the revolution.

To me, Egypt is a wonderful history, a wonderful people and it’s represented through artists like Om Kalthoum, who is considered the fourth pyramid of Egypt. She’s a wonderful diva whose voice for me is really Egyptian. The country really is bigger than what the regime claims to it to be. That’s what I think of us freeing Egypt from the tentacles basically of both religious fascists and military fascists. Egypt is bigger than both of them.

What are the major everyday differences of being a woman in the US to being a woman in Egypt?
When I tell my American friends about what we’re fighting for in Egypt, I’ll remind them to ask their grandmothers to see what it was like in the US in the 1940s. In some places today in the US, you have the right wing trying to roll back reproductive rights and only teach abstinence. You asked me before about sex education in Egypt and there are places in America where there is also today no sex education given to kids. The connections that I make are where the religious right wing is obsessed with having a foothold and they’re obsessed with my vagina. My message to them both in US and Egypt is stay out of my vagina. I do not want you in there!

On the other hand, because of these decades of feminist fighting in the US, we’ve cleared a space that we’re fighting to clear in Egypt. It’s obviously easier to be a woman in New York than it is to be a woman in Cairo. But I connect those fights through that history. New York wouldn’t be what it is today without those decades of women fighting for that fight. We have that feminist fight in Egypt but we’re just at a different place along the spectrum.

The modern Egyptian feminist fight was launched in 1923 which people often forget. We’ve had cycles and we’ve had progress and been pushed back it a bit. I don’t think anybody’s history is linear. The sort of fight we’re having today is about freedom. We take it for granted in New York and I’m hoping future generations of women in Egypt can take it for granted too.

You probably saw the viral video this week of a blonde woman walking through an Egyptian university. Is that an accurate depiction of life in Egypt as a woman now?
Well, yeah. Unfortunately that is. The sad thing about the woman who was harassed on campus and verbally assaulted on Cairo University campus is that it’s happening in university capitals now. There’s no place for woman to be safe. It’s a reality for the majority of Egyptian women. It’s been happening for decades even if we’re in denial about it and we’re shamed into silence about it.

What has changed since the revolution began is that the attacks have been much more violent and organized against women. And then the revolution is about standing up to authority, and women are more willing to speak out. So the question is: is it getting worse or are women more willing to speak about it? I would say it’s probably both. We’re insisting that people take it seriously. I think part of [the backlash] is about pushing women back off the street and back into the home. We refuse to do that.

There’s been so many more development coming through Egypt since 2011. One story that’s big in Australia is about our expat journalist, Peter Greste, who is currently awaiting trial in an Egyptian jail for allegedly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Are you hopeful for journalists like him?
I think it’s outrageous how the Egyptian regime is treating journalists. Not just Peter and the Al Jazeera crew but many others who are completely unknown and have been in jail for months on end without any charge or trail. I think this speaks to the Egyptian regime’s determination to silence any information that it does not approve and basically just set the tone, like it does with state controlled media that it terrifies into speaking what it wants to be heard.

Myself and many other people who work in media demand a release of all those journalists. I think if they don’t release those journalists, it’ll just keep on telling the world that we’re scared of the truth. Any regime that is scared of the truth is not a regime that deserves any sort of respect. I think Egypt’s allies should make it very clear that they will not tolerate any sort of attacks on activist on peaceful activists, protestors or journalists.

You’ve been vocal about the role of Egypt’s allies. There’s this wonderful quote from you about how one of the best things about the Egyptian revolution was that it stuck a middle finger to the “hypocritical” US foreign policy that supports Egypt’s military regime. Can you tell me about the tension of supporting your infamously patriotic adopted country but also having those sorts of opinions?
I only became a US citizen in 2011 ironically after the Egyptian revolution began. The revolution began in January and I became a US citizen in April of 2011. I didn’t want to become a citizen before that because I didn’t want to take the oath when George Bush was still the President of the US. I obviously couldn’t stand him and there are many Obama policies that I still oppose today. The whole thing for me is being very open and very honest about the hypocrisy of the US foreign policy. Over the last few years, I’ve found its foreign policy towards Egypt is very confused and still refusing to acknowledge that for decades it chose the side of a dictator at the expense of the people’s rights.

For me as an Egyptian-American, my fight is in both of those countries. When I’m in Egypt my fight is a much more feminist fight against patriarch. When I’m in New York, my fight is against racism and xenophobia, which is why in September 2012 I painted over this racist and bigoted ad in the New York subway. And I got arrested and I’m yet to stand trial for that as I was charged for various charged of vandalism. My fight in the US is to present myself as a Muslim and I refuse to be bullied as a Muslim.

One of the most famous Mona moments is your article “Why do they hate us?” which received a lot of backlash in the media. One of the many responses is “Why does Mona Altahawy hate Arab men?” How do your reconcile your thoughts on patriarchy in Egypt with your relationship with your father or perhaps other men?
One of the things I found most frustrating was all these people saying “my daddy doesn’t hate me” or “my brother doesn’t hate me”. It’s not about your father. That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s about what happens when they leave the house and they’re on the street.

Obviously my father and I have a great relationship for which I am very grateful. One of the wonderful things about the home I grew up in is that my parents met at medical school: they got their masters together and their PhDs together. So from a very early age, I saw a relationship of equals functioning together that gave my brother and then my much younger sister this great template for us to work to. It showed us that you can grow up in the home as equals and that boys and girls and men and women can have access to all the education that they want.

Recently, I was on an Al Jazeera show called Head to Head and discussed that essay. I was challenged at great lengths by the audience and the host and I think it served as a title change for me. It’s not something I say just to be controversial. It’s something that I say because I’m Egyptian and I’m a woman. So, as painful as it was for some people to read that article, I think [we need to be] honest about this kind of patriarchy and take this revolution into the home. Just as we overthrew the Mubarak in the streets we have to over throw the Mubark in the home.

You went back to Cairo after the start of the 2011 revolution.  Your sexual assault at the hands of Egyptian riot police during the November protests is well documented. Can you talk me through the steps of emotions that you experienced after this attack?
It was firstly anger. I was determined after I was released from hospital to recognise that, despite what happened to me, I was very lucky. I’m lucky because I have a media profile and I’m a dual citizen and various media departments were looking for me. There was a #freemona campaign that was happening on Twitter. So I was angry but also determined to speak out and shame the Egyptian regime for what they had done to me.

I also understood that had I been an unknown Egyptian woman who was taken in like this than I would have been treated much worse. I would have probably been gang raped and I could have been killed. So, I wanted to expose and shame the Egyptian regime for what it did to me, and also say that there were other people who have experienced much worse than me.

So, I was angry for a very long time. And then when I went back to the US [my response] to what had happened was very, very delayed. That is what post-traumatic stress disorder is. You have a great deal of detachment from what happened to you. It took many months to sink in and still affects me around the anniversary of that attack. Whenever the anniversary comes up, I struggle mightily. The trauma recurs every time the anniversary happens.

Because I know that were at least 12 other women sexually assaulted on that street but for various reasons have not been able to speak out, I’ve been very forthright about what happened to me. There is no shame and I carry no shame about what happened to me or what happened to us. It is the regime who should feel the shame for thinking they can do this to us.

You used tattoos as way to heal post-sexual assault. What’s your favourite tattoo and how did it come about?
I only just have two right now but I’m hoping to get more. When my arms were in a cast, I determined the best way for me to celebrated survival when my bones healed – and I say bones and not my heart healed because I’m still working on that heart. Once my bones healed, I wanted to celebrate my healing by dying my hair red and getting tattoos on both my arms.

So on my right arm I have a tattoo of Egyptian goddess Sekhmet. She is the goddess of retribution and sex – both of which I want. On my left arm, I have tattooed the name of the street where the protest took place and where I was attacked which is now an icon of the revolution, because for five days more than 40 people on the side of the revolution were killed by security forces and hundred injured. So I wanted to honour that street. Under that I have the Arabic word for freedom tattooed into my left inner arm because I believe I was liberated on that street.

I have a scar on my left arm from the surgery. I did not choose that scar but I’m very proud of that’s scar. But because I didn’t choose it I wanted to choose markings on my body of my own. I’d also read that over the last few decades about women who have survived sexual assault choose tattoo to celebrate survival and reclaim their body. And that’s what tattoos help me do. I’ve chosen those marking on my arms to remind me that I’ve survived something terrible.

What’s another tattoo that you’d love to get?
The tattoo on my left arm is Arabic calligraphy. I love calligraphy and it’s a way for me to celebrate heritage and also to reclaim the language that’ is often stereotyped as the code language for terrorists. I would like to take some of the lyrics of that diva I told you about, Om Kalthoum. And get an artist friend of mine to draw them up in beautiful calligraphy and have them tattooed on my arm. That would be a way for me to celebrate this wonderful artist, who represents the beauty of Egypt, but also celebrate survival.

Your Twitter profile says that “bad singing” and “dancing” are the solutions to life’s horrors. What’s one song that you’re really like singing in the shower?
[laughs] Shower or karaoke?! Oh goodness. I often take my laptop into the shower room and sing along to anything that I like. Lately I’ve been singing along very badly to The Weekend’s “Wicked Game”. I like the lyrics “I got my heart right here, I got my scars right here.” I think he’s got a very honest and nothing held back singing style. It’s very appealing to a lot of people but especially those words because they talk about pain and scars. I relate to them a lot.

Sum up the Egyptian woman in 2014 in a few words?
Ferocious. Determined. Enraged. Optimistic. Revolutionary.

Follow Mona: @monaeltahawy

Follow Emilia: @EmiliaKate

It's the season finale of Fresh Off The Boat. In Chengdu, Eddie—a.k.a. the Human Panda—returns to his bamboo roots and discovers that pandas watch panda porn. He gets a taste of Chengdu traditions with hip-hop pioneer DJ SuperBestFriend and eats pig-brain mapo tofu at a "fly" restaurant on the brink of demolition.

A billboard promoting the many talents of the Sultan of Brunei. Photo via Flickr user watchsmart

It’s pretty rare that Brunei makes international headlines, unless Prince Jefri Bolkiah has bought another jewelery business or decided to christen his new superyacht Tits (and its tenders Nipple 1 and Nipple 2). In fact, aside from the vast wealth of its royal family, little is known about the tiny sovereign state in northern Borneo.

So unless you’ve worked for Shell at some point in your life, surveying the huge oil fields responsible for the royals’ fortune, you’d be forgiven for not being too knowledgeable about Brunei’s people and government, or for not knowing that, starting tomorrow, it will become the only Southeast Asian country to implement Sharia law at a national level.

But why does that matter? Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa first coined the phrase “the perfect dictatorship” in 1990, in reference to Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI managed to centralize power through institutionalizing unions and employing the carrot-and-stick method of governing; as workers demanded higher wages, the PRI would suppress their demands with concessions, such as apparently improved health care and subsidies on basic essential food. Once in a while it would shoot or imprison movement leaders just to show people it wasn’t fucking about.

This method of bargaining is reminiscent of the Bruneian way of doing things—only there’s not really any bargaining in Brunei. The majority of the population live extremely relaxed lifestyles thanks to the huge amount of concessions the government grants its people; most work six-hour days and get a bonus every year; gas costs about a dollar a gallon; and the entire nation is tax-free.

And it’s the preservation of that laid-back lifestyle that distracts people from other issues. Even though every citizen technically has the right to free speech, it’s pretty apparent that, in reality, they really don’t—hardly surprising for a country that operates an absolute monarchy. Every Wednesday and Sunday, for instance, an “opinions” page in the Borneo Bulletin—the most popular of the two government-produced English newspapers—aims to provide people with a platform to speak out about whatever’s on their mind. But what seems to be on most people’s minds is how amazing the national police force is, or how fantastic the Ramadan buffet at a certain restaurant has been.

Yet the people of Brunei don’t seem to care too much about the stifling of their free speech, which is mostly down to three reasons: The country is rich; the government is generous; and the population is small, meaning authorities find new projects—as well as new laws—easy to administer and regulate.

A mosque in Brunei. Photo via Flickr user amanderson2

Tomorrow, Brunei will become the first and only Southeast Asian nation to enforce Sharia criminal law. The code—which will only be applied to Muslims (who make up 67 percent of the population)—could ultimately ensure Brunei’s status as the world’s newest “perfect dictatorship.” Googling the topic, the results almost exclusively detail the Sultan’s already “feudal” rule, or describe the severe kind of Sharia law being introduced in Brunei as “barbaric and draconian.” Both of those things may be true, but Brunei's is a feudal rule that people can handle, because the benefits of living there seem to far outweigh the negatives.  

Rather than fearing Sharia law, people in Brunei are instead questioning the reason for its introduction. According to a source from the Telegraph, it may be because influences are brought into the country from students who have studied abroad—but that sounds pretty speculative to me. As far as I can gather, no one really understands why it’s being implemented.

Having spoken to various locals, the most obvious reason seems to be that Sharia will be used as a deterrent for petty crimes. But crime in Brunei is already extremely low, and there isn’t really any reason to steal. The government gives you everything you need, so if you get your hands chopped off for stealing a five-pack of ramen, you only have yourself to blame. Also, the death penalty has always existed in Brunei, so little has changed there, except for the admittedly brutal fact that—if you’re Muslim—you’ll now be stoned to death rather than hanged.

Western opinion has often played upon the fact that people don’t—and won’t—speak out against the implementation of Sharia law, but this usually simplistic assessment fails to account for a number of important local factors. Bruneians have no time to speak up, because, by 3 PM, they’re out of the office, heading to the coffee shop in their new E-Class. And really, would you complain if you were living tax-free with a stable, high-paying job, two cars, free education and health care, and a house rented at close to nothing, all in constant 95-degree weather?

The implementation of Sharia in Brunei doesn’t make a lot of sense—the state is already incredibly safe, and it’s not like altering the criminal code is going to do a huge amount to further guarantee that safety. And while Sharia’s brutal practices understandably draw ire from the West, the people of Brunei don’t appear to be all that bothered—they’re happy living in a peaceful nation under a “perfect dictatorship.”

So while there are clearly problems with Sharia law that can't be excused by any amount of government concessions—and even though you may question the Bruneians' apathy about living under a dictatorship—I'd ask you to look into all the other factors that make Brunei the country it is before taking what Western media have to say as gospel truth.

On March 18, the Brigade of Drug Activists (BADD) organized a meeting in front of Bucharest's Municipal Police Station to commemorate those who died while in police custody.

The Romanian Police's slogan is "Safety and Trust," yet some weeks ago a 26-year-old man died while in police custody at the 10th Precinct in Bucharest. Daniel Gabriel Dumitrache was allegedly running a one-man racketeering operation from Unirii Square's parking lot, and so on the evening of March 4 police officers escorted him to the station for identification. He left the police station in a body bag, with the forensic report pointing at three possible causes of death: anemia, ruptured spleen, or abdominal bleeding. This is at best a story of police negligence and at worst one of police brutality.

It's not the first case of its kind, either. In the last two decades, Romania has had to pay more than 100,000 Euros [$138,000] worth of damages to the European Court for Human Rights for torture violations. These include a hate crime, an accidental handicapping, and a beating that occured in a postal office after the victim stole six bottles of mineral water.

As in the case of the 10th Precinct, the majority of abuses take place during a statutory procedure stipulated extensively in the 31st paragraph of the Romanian Law for Police, called ”administrative escorting to the police station." The problem is that in the particular document the escorted individual's rights aren't as analyticaly laid out as the police officer's.

The Association for the Defense of Human Rights in Romania – Helsinki Committee (APADOR-CH), has been struggling to change that since 2011. I met up with their executive director, Niki Andreescu, to understand why they have not succeeded yet and how these abuses happen.

VICE: Is it normal that this "administrative escorting" procedure exists?
Niki Andreescu, APADOR-CH: ”Administrative escorting” implies depriving a person of his or her freedom. It is reasonable that it exists, with the condition that the time the police can keep you is up to 24 hours and that they grant you minimum security: the right to notify someone about the place one is being kept, the obligation of the police officer to call a doctor if the person complains of fatigue or the symptoms of a disease, the possibility to sue against such a method, and a written document of the proceeding that the person deprived of freedom gets to keep.

The only administrative procedure currently enforced is done by the police, and they just write down the person's name in a registry kept in the police station. That is the only way you can prove that you were indeed being held at that police station. Aside from that, the law does not grant you any other right.

Why haven't you managed to modify the law?
In 2012, we managed to convince a group of MPs to introduce the law modifications in parliament, but it got rejected. The government did not back the proposal. We are insisting though.

Under what conditions are police officers allowed to use force against those escorted to the station?
Under no circumstances. Police officers can immobilize a person if they become violent toward others or themselves. Even immobilizing is an extreme procedure, which goes against Article 5 of the Constitution—the right to be free and safe, guaranteed by the Convention of Human Rights. Immobilizing needs to be proportional to the intensity of the act, and it needs to be statutory by the law.

There are no statistics for police brutality in Romania. Why?
If you get beaten up at the precinct, you have to go to the Forensic Institute and get a medical certificate stating that you were hurt. Although they sometimes accept evidence such as photos or video recordings, that certificate is sacred. Then you have to go to the Prosecutor’s Office to file a complaint.

In Romania, however, the only people who make these complaints are relatives of the deceased or people who are so desperate that they feel they have nothing to lose. Many of these complaints are annihilated by the police because they accuse the plaintiff of contempt toward authorities. The people from the Romanian Police always cover for each other. Their mentality is still that of a military organization—they operate within a closed caste system.

Participants lit candles in solidarity with those who died.

How are the Romanian Police monitored?
A so-called form of control would be the Territorial Authority for Public Order (ATOP), formed by local counselors, the chief of police, and the chief of riot police. But that just means the police are watching over themselves. There is very little external control from a few NGOs.

There aren't any programs making sure that even the old lady from the village of Pungești knows her rights. These should be organized by the Romanian Institute for Human Rights, but their sole activity is publishing a study every once in a while. And most police abuses happen in rural areas where the police chief has the utmost authority.

Is there any way the European Committee could regulate the system?
Yes, through the Committee for Torture Prevention (CPT). The next CPT visit is this summer. They visit a few governmental institutions and put together a report that they first submit to the Romanian government, so they can comment on it. Then they publish the report and the comment. The recommendations need to be appropriated and corrected. Three days after their last visit, in 2010, the government had to close the section that held minors in the Rahova Maximum Security Penitentiary.

Some cases make their way to ECHR, and the fines are paid by the Romanian government from the taxpayers' money. How many sanctions does Romania have?
We have a leading position in sanctions because of detention conditions—we're pretty much on a roll when it comes to this sort of rulings, and there are still many to come because these cases do not get solved easily. A notable case is Mugurel Soare's, who received whopping damages of 130,000 Euros [$179,000]. He was seen chasing his brother-in-law on the street because he had hit Mugurel's sister. He was a Roma though, so the police officers thought he had stolen something and they shot him in the head. Mugurel is now unable to work and mute. He can only understand what you are saying if you look into his eyes and talk in simple words.

Did the police officers get sanctioned?
Not at all. ECHR forces the state to pay damages, so the police officers should be sanctioned internally. If things were done properly in the country, we wouldn't get to the ECHR so often. The Romanian state should target the guilty. The Ministry of Finance is the one that pays the damages, but nobody is asking, "Why am I constrained to pay?" The Ministry of Finance should open legal action in retrospect to recover the money.

The Alliance for Roma Unity states that the death of Daniel, the parking-lot racketeer, has a racist motive. Is ethnical discrimination a relevant factor in the case of the beatings?
In some cases, yes. The most targeted groups are the vulnerable ones: sex workers, drug addicts, homeless people. They form those marginal groups that obviously have fewer recourses and fewer chances to file a complaint. Also, they deal with police officers daily. These abuses usually involve hitting the soft spots on the body so as to not break any bones.

Are the police officers the problem, or is there a systemic flaw that perpetuates this sort of behavior?
It is obvious there isn't any form of psychological training for officers. There are some tests, but we all know how those are done. There is a serious lack of education in the sense of respecting human rights. The Institute for Public Order has had a human-rights model in its mandatory curriculum for continuous training for the past few years. But only 30 to 40 policemen per year take it, because it is optional. The police chiefs could send them off to take different modules: weapons, logistics, or traffic. Either way, it's not enough to take a two-day course; human-rights training should start at the academy.

How is Romanian society affected by the fact that the police break the law?
We should try to see the big picture: not all of them are wretched. Only a few, OK? But that's not necessarily what the public thinks. In order for the police to regain the population's trust, these perpetrators should be sanctioned, to set an example.

Photos by Jake Lewis

How has it taken so long for gay wedding to become legal in the UK? Weddings are great; they’re an affirmation of our ability to love one another and a legitimate space for adults to do the Macarena. But for many, the passing of the law allowing gay couples to marry, which went into effect at midnight on Saturday, isn’t about weddings. It's about the principle that gay people should be allowed to do everything that straight people can do—which should be a basic human right.

Sadly, it’s not. Being gay is still illegal in more than 70 countries, and while the UK is making progress, a recent BBC survey found that a fifth of British people would turn down an invitation to a same-sex wedding. On Friday night, I went to one of the first gay weddings in the UK to find out what kind of fun these bigots are missing out on.

The grooms were Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway. They got talking on a gay dating site last year and met for drinks at a hotel while Sean was on a business trip in Los Angeles, where Sinclair was living. Clearly someone did something right, because months later, when marriage came up in conversation, the feeling was mutual. Neither Sean nor Sinclair proposed per se, but they both felt certain that they wanted to get married ASAP.

They wanted to do it on the first day the could, meaning Saturday, but local government officials in Camden, London, suggested they marry at the stroke of midnight on Friday in a bid to be the first same-sex couple in the UK to tie the knot, thus making LGBT history. As befitting a serious historical event, the dress code was, “Hot, sexy, and camera-ready.” Sean invited me to his house in Camden before the wedding to watch him get ready and nervously sip champagne. Sinclair was there too, dusting off a blue velvet suit jacket.

“The biggest surprise is the opposition to gay marriage in the gay community itself,” said Sean. “A lot of gay people feel like they've been excluded from heterosexual society, so they think, We’ll keep our culture separate. But I think the fact it’s changed is positive and progressive, and we should support that.”

We arrived at Camden City Hall and were greeted by Jonathan Simpson, Camden’s first openly gay mayor, a giant Mancunian bear of a man who resembles a heavyweight boxer more than he does an elected official. He wrote his speech quickly. “I was speaking from the heart, but I am nervous," he told me. "I think I’ll struggle not to cry, what with the music and importance of the occasion.” I worried that I might involuntarily hug him.

“You can't see this wedding in isolation,” Jonathan said. “Around the world kids are living in fear every day because their families won't accept that they’re gay. They will see this, and it will give them some hope—it’s a political act.” Do gay weddings have to adhere to wedding traditions? “It’s completely up to the individual. If someone wants to get married in an underground gay sex club, that's up to them,” he joked. Would he get married? “If I found the right person.” I wished it were me.

Steven, the registrar (who is also gay) told me that tonight’s wedding would be a race against the clock, because a bunch of other gay couples around the UK had decided to get hitched at midnight, meaning Sean and Sinclair would be competing to be the first. He then began explaining some deeply unromantic process whereby a document had to be printed out at midnight and signed before the couple could be officially wed. I downed my champagne.

We entered the hall to take our seats. The room, all polished wood and green leather chairs, looked a bit like the House of Commons in Parliament, which contrasted nicely with Sean and Sinclair’s pre-made playlist, which was blasting "Fantasy" by Mariah Carey. Sean’s friend Natalie took her place as best man, and the grooms' mothers had come along to lead them in and give them away.

Despite the Mariah and shiny blue velvet jackets, the ceremony itself was much like any other wedding, including that awkward moment of silence when the registrar asks if anyone objects. At about six minutes after midnight, Steven uttered the words, “I now declare you husband and husband.” I cried. Jonathan cried. But no one who actually knew the grooms cried.

The band came in with strings, but those words, “husband and husband,” hung in the air.

Outside the hall, the women of the Camden Council PR team were scanning Twitter on their iPhones, disputing whether Sean and Sinclair had in fact been the first gay couple in the UK to marry. The grooms didn’t seem to care, making out in front of the camera crews like a pair of horny teenagers. A lone guest leaned over to me and said, “There’s been some right munters [British slang for "ugly people"] getting married today. I hope these guys’ looks get them enough press coverage for it to at least seem like they were the first.” Classy.

At about 1 AM we piled into one of those tacky old London buses and headed to the reception. When I walked in, Kylie Minogue's “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” was playing, and the room was shrouded with red silk. The evening had officially just reached peak camp. I sat in the corner with a mustachioed gay man in an all-white suit discussing the "fag hag" stereotype and had a bemusing conversation about David Icke with a guy basically dressed as Jamiroquai.

I drunkenly cornered Mayor Jonathan and asked him annoying questions like, “Are you allowed to go to gay bars if you are mayor?” He cryptically described himself as a "naughty mayor" before slipping off to give an impromptu speech: “Tonight we made fucking history in Camden. Islington might have beat us, but we had the sexiest couple!” Then a man-child in guyliner taught me how to swing-dance.

At about four in the morning, after hours of being asked whether I should be drinking on the job, I surveyed the room. Sean’s coworkers were dad-dancing in circles, 40-something men were sneaking off for a joint, and the best man was drunkenly telling Sean and Sinclair to “never be the one who’s scared to show their love more.”

All in all, it was a pretty typical wedding.

Follow Amelia Abraham on Twitter.

Oscar Orozco in the operating room after being shot in the face on January 10, 2014

Three months after being shot point-blank in the face with a tear-gas canister by riot police, union leader Oscar Orozco has successfully undergone reconstructive surgery. But he still has no feeling in his forehead, and his left eye is gone. “Because I am well known,” Orozco told me over the phone, “I am completely convinced that this action specifically targeted me. Their goal was to do me harm, and it was a goal they were able to achieve.”

It wasn’t the first time that Orozco, a chapter president of both the CUT—Colombia’s largest labor federation—and the electrical workers’ union Sintraelecol, has suffered an attempt on his life. Coming home one evening last November, Orozco’s driver-side window was hit by multiple bullets, the glass lacerating his hand and neck; in the summer of 2012, the armored SUV he and union secretaries were driving in was riddled with bullets in broad daylight. Before that came years of threats and harassment: fake obituaries in his name; pipe bombs with instructions to stop union activity, or else; and suspicious packages in the parking lot of his apartment building. These days, when Orozco travels he’s accompanied by a colleague. “We have to make sure that our union-related work doesn’t allow our enemies the opportunity to harm us,” Orozco said. “It could happen at any moment.”

A mysterious package left on Orozco's lawn. The tag bears his name and the name of the labor federation he is a part of.

Anti-union violence has been endemic to Colombia for decades, with roughly 3,000 organizers killed by assassins and paramilitaries over the last quarter century. In fact, more than half of all murders for union-organizing activity worldwide take place here. But as murder numbers have dropped in recent years, the nature of the violence is changing, and there’s evidence to suggest that the Colombian state is complicit in the repression.

On December 4, 2013, Campo Elías Ortiz, José Dilio Naranjo, and Héctor Sánchez—political activists, members of the oil-sector union Unión Sindical Obrera, and key witnesses in a criminal suit against Colombia’s largest private oil company, Pacific Rubiales Energy—were arrested. The charges against the men stemmed from a massive strike they helped organize against their former employer, Pacific Rubiales, in the summer of 2011 in Meta, an oil-rich department in the center of the country. Ortiz, Naranjo, and Sánchez stood accused of a number of charges, including conspiracy to commit a crime, blocking roads, and—most incredible of all—aggravated kidnapping and hostage-holding of hundreds of their fellow union members. If convicted, they could face up to 45 years in jail.

Oscar Orozco leading a march

“We weren’t ordering people around or kidnapping them,” Sánchez told me when I met him last month, six days after he’d been released from jail. “It is illogical to say that the three of us kidnapped all these people when there were 1,300 members of the army standing nearby, maybe 200 police, and maybe 200 or 300 members of Pacific Rubiales’ private security force. How could we kidnap all these people?”

A leather motorcycle jacket pulled over his stocky frame, Sánchez spoke with a measure of disbelief at what’s happened to him and his colleagues over the past four months, particularly when recounting the day of his arrest.

“They didn’t want to arrest me at my home, as I live on land right next to Pacific Rubiales. So they made an appointment with me far from home. I was leaving the designated meeting place because no one had shown up when, all of a sudden, two dozen military agents along with 50 police officers appeared. They mounted an operation to capture me as if I were one of the most dangerous men to ever set foot in the country. And there were three trucks there: one from the military, one from the police, and one from Pacific Rubailes, loaned to aid in my arrest. From there they took me to the airport, handcuffed, where a chartered plane was waiting for me—Héctor Sánchez.”

Before we parted ways, Sánchez pulled out a flyer he says was circulated around his hometown by Pacific Rubiales’ separate, business-orchestrated union to defame him. Using innocuous photos pulled from Facebook, the flyer accuses Sánchez and his union of being “poor idiots,” “bandits,” and “sons of bitches” addicted to whores and drugs. “Look at all these guys who are on this flyer,” Sánchez said, pointing at the photos. “They are all my friends, people I work with. Here is Camilo; here is José.” 

A flyer distributed around Sánchez's hometown defaming him and his union as idiots and drug addicts

Of course, if you’re a business person, Colombia is a great place to be. The World Bank ranks the country third in Latin America and the Caribbean—after Puerto Rico and Peru—on its “Ease of Doing Business” survey. The country’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Trade reported a record $16.7 billion in foreign direct investment for 2012. “Improved security in recent years has turned Colombia into a hot spot for foreign investment after a decade-long US-backed offensive battered Marxist rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups, reducing their numbers and making it safer to do business in the Andean country,” reads a Reuters article from last summer.

On paper, life for union organizers has also improved. In 2011, Bogotá and Washington signed the US-Colombia Labor Action Plan (LAP), meant to improve the rights and conditions of workers and labor activists in Colombia. Union-related murder statistics are down too—the Escuela Nacional Sindical (ENS), a Colombian think tank that tracks this sort of thing, reported that 26 trade unionists were murdered in 2013, compared with more than 250 in 2001 and 2002.

“If you look over a ten year period, the murder rate has dropped,” says Daniel Hawkins, director of research at ENS. “But if you take the bigger picture—attempts at one’s life, arbitrary detention, and threats—Colombia’s rate in participation worldwide has not dropped notably.”

What has changed, he says, is the tactic. Instead of going after low-level unionists en masse, companies are selectively striking at leaders. Since the signing of the LAP three years ago, 73 unionists have been killed, 31 more have seen attempts on their life, six have been forcibly disappeared, and 953 death threats have been issued. The LAP, says Hawkins, “has been a complete failure.”

Hawkins isn’t the only one who thinks so: In October 2013, US congressmen George Miller and Jim McGovern released a report titled “The US-Colombia Labor Action Plan: Failing on the Ground,” which characterizes the much-heralded accord as a toothless agreement with pitifully little impact. “Despite the LAP,” the report reads, “murders and threats against union members and harmful subcontracting persist in Colombia largely unabated... More than 90 percent of cases of violence against trade unionists do not result in conviction.”

Rhett Doumitt, the director of the AFL-CIO-sponsored Solidarity Center in Bogotá told me that it isn’t the laws that are the problem—it’s their application, or lack thereof. “The government passes laws that, if they were enforced, would change things,” Doumitt told me. “But they find a number of ways not to enforce them. What is done in order to create statistics is piecemeal, it’s sporadic, it’s chaotic—and worse, it’s not systemic... What you need is a strong democracy with strong institutions that can uphold the laws in front of national and international capital.”

Until that day comes, union leaders have to seek refuge. In late 2013, Neil Martin and Nathan Miller launched PASO Internacional, a Bogotá-based NGO that offers accompaniment to union organizers and works with both Sánchez and Orozco. The idea is simple: When you’re with an international observer, you’re less likely to be killed. The Colombian government has its own program to protect people like Orozco—the National Protection Unit (NPU), which offers armed guards and bullet-proof cars—but Martin insists that the NPU is inadequate in terms of how many individuals it can protect. “Furthermore,” says Martin, “the way that they decide who is at risk seems to be fairly arbitrary. The majority of these government protective measures don’t go to grass-roots organizers—they are often assigned to politicians and other government representatives.”

Orozco's government-issued armored car, riddled with bullets in the summer of 2012

Case in point: Six months after the first attempt on Oscar Orozco’s life, his government-provided protection was lifted. That’s when the latest round of shootings, death threats, and deliveries of mysterious packages started. The union leader is currently applying to have his protection reinstated, but whether or not he’ll be approved is unclear.

“It has been extremely difficult,” says Orozco of living life as a hunted man. “It has come to the point of breaking family ties. Family members ask me to decide between family life and the union, and the union is my priority on principle. I have dedicated my life to the union and the principles for which we struggle.

“Several organizations have offered to help me leave the region or the country [as a political refugee], but to leave is another form of dying. It is psychological assassination—it is to be removed from your environment, from your setting, your life, your passion, your love.”

Follow Michael Zelenko on Twitter.