VICE News

Founder of VICE Shane Smith spends an eternity on a train and hops out at the end of the line in Siberia to investigate logging camps that use North Korean slave labor. While on his way to uncover labor camps setup by Kim Jong Il and North Korea as a way to bring in hard currency for their impoverished nation, Shane Smith gets re-accustomed with how to handle Russian alcoholics aboard the trans-Siberian railway. After many days on trains and much vodka Shane arrives in Tynda but has to dodge the Russian secret police - the FSB. After sidestepping the authorities and boarding a single carriage train to the middle of nowhere Shane arrives at a Nortth Korean labor camp. Accompanied by the former chief of police Shane and Simon break into a disbanded North Korean labor camp to explore the propaganda and the "Laboratory of Kim Jong Il". On their way out with their arms full of "memorabilia" Shane and Simon fear that they've been caught but end up being introduced to a real North Korean labor worker by two Russian scrap metal dealers. Shane and Simon head off to Tataul and link up with a member of the local mafia known as "The Fish". From there they drive out into the forest and into an active North Korean labor camp in the middle of Siberia where they meet North Korean workers who inadvertently admit that living conditions back in their homeland were tough- something that would never of be mentioned back in their police-state. More adventures in the middle of nowhere; Shane and Simon are introduced to more North Korean workers by their gold-teethed guide. Here they find out that many workers are being stationed in the camps for upto 10 years but the conversation halts when the managers or the logging camp arrive. The FSB (Russian secret police), North Korean secret police and the local militia all decide to find out what Shane has been getting upto, so the only logical thing to do is make a run for the border.

VICE heads to Columbia for a week of fashion, cocaine and plastic surgery. Formerly the old stomping ground of Pablo Escobar, the city is now trying to throw off its powdery legacy and push fashion up the noses of the world. Charlet, your host, goes to two rival fashion weeks running simultaneously and is presented with two very different ideas about what Columbian beauty is.

VICE travels to West Africa to rummage through the messy remains of a country ravaged by 14 years of civil war. Despite the United Nation's eventual intervention, most of Liberia's young people continue to live in abject poverty, surrounded by filth, drug addiction, and teenage prostitution. The former child soldiers who were forced into war have been left to fend for themselves, the murderous warlords who once led them in cannibalistic rampages have taken up as so-called community leaders, and new militias are lying in wait for the opportunity to reclaim their country from a government they rightly mistrust.

Issei Sagawa murdered an innocent woman and spent three days eating her flesh. Due to loopholes in the law, Issei is a free man to this day. On the afternoon of June 13, 1981, a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa walked to the Bois de Boulogne, a park on the outskirts of Paris, carrying two suitcases. The contents of those suitcases, to the lament of a nearby jogger, was the dismembered body of a fellow student -- a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt, whom Sagawa had shot three days prior and had spent the days since eating various parts of her body. He was soon arrested. According to reports, Issei uttered, "I killed her to eat her flesh," when they raided his home, whereupon they found bits of Renne still in his fridge. Sagawa was declared insane and unfit for trial and was institutionalized in Paris. His incarceration was to be short, however, as the French public soon grew weary of their hard-earned francs going to support this evil woman-eater, and Issei was promptly deported. Herein followed a bizarre and seemingly too convenient set of legal loopholes and psychiatric reports that led doctors in Japan declaring him "sane, but evil." On August 12, 1986, Sagawa checked himself out of Tokyo's Matsuzawa Psychiatric hospital, and has been a free man ever since.

The rivalry between football clubs Rangers and Celtic goes past typical name calling and dives into violence, racial slurs and pure hatred. The rivalry between Glasgow's "Old Firm" sides is the most famous in world football. It's the game's flagship loathing, proof of the power of the sport to inspire profound levels of tribal loyalty and near-Pavlovian revulsion at anything to do with a rival. We examine the situation and try to get a handle on the political, religious and national identity clashes that have shaped the rivalry, speak to fanzine editors on both sides of the divide and travel with the Bhoys' away support to a match at Tannadice.

VBS travels to England’s northwest, Liverpool, Europe’s capital of beauty. There are more gyms and tanning salons per head here than anywhere else in the UK. In episode one of Beautiful Liverpool, we meet tan-obsessed Carolyn who’s willing to inject herself with chemicals to alter the colour of her skin. We also meet model-turned-local-celebrity, Amanda Harrington, as well as Serena Sophia whose modelling is helping the fallen soldiers of the Afghan war.

Learn how easy it is to make fake passports and scam the rich into trusting you with thousands of dollars. If the fraud industry were its own country, it would have the fifth strongest economy in the world, just ahead of the UK. Come and meet the fraudsters who're making a killing from the fastest growing crime on Earth.

The drug cartels of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, are at war with a group of polygamous Mormons, some of whom are related to Mitt Romney. VICE founder Shane Smith went down there to investigate the conflict.

Fashion Week Internationale lands in Seoul, the technology and entertainment capital of East Asia. Charlet tries and fails to understand why people there shop at 4 AM, gets a makeover on the subway, and meets Donald King, the loneliest punk in the world.

In this episode of Fashion Week Internationale, host Charlet Duboc heads to Kingston, Jamaica and gains an audience with Elephant Man, AKA The Energy God, to find out why the dancehall girls “cause the local men so many problems”. She then explores the illegal and dangerous trend of skin bleaching.

Charlet heads to the sexiest city in the world for Fashion Week and, taking the advice of 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger, goes hunting for ass. She plays “spot the transsexual model” backstage at the shows, and after a spot of kerb crawling in the VICE bang bus, she befriends a 19-year-old transgender prostitute and finds out the “ins and outs” of her job.

In 2013 Israel became the first country in the world to pass legislation banning 'underweight' models. Mere weeks before the law passed, the first Tel Aviv fashion week in 30 years featured typically waifish high-fashion models. Charlet caught a show by Italian giant Moschino just in time for the first rockets to rain down on Tel Aviv from Gaza in over 20 years.

Swansea Love Story: An award-winning look at a generation lost to heroin, as told through the tragic love story of Amy and Cornelius. In 2009, Swansea drug agencies reported a 180 percent rise in heroin use, and it's visible on the city's streets. Early one morning we meet a young, homeless couple named Amy and Cornelius in a city centre alley. As heroin-addicted alcoholics, they're smack in the middle of two of South Wales's most harrowing epidemics.

In Memphis's Forrest Park, there's a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most infamous and powerful racists in American history. Lately it's been at the center of the city's often shaky race relations. Watch as the KKK, the Memphis City Council, and the local gang members fight for what they each believe is right.

In Memphis's Forrest Park, there's a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most infamous and powerful racists in American history. Lately it's been at the center of the city's often shaky race relations. Watch as the KKK, the Memphis City Council, and the local gang members fight for what they each believe is right.

Ten years ago Shaun Smith was an enforcer for one of the biggest crime families in Liverpool and embroiled in a war against a rival drug gang. Shaun introduced urban terrorism to the British underworld. He sprayed up houses with machine guns, tortured people and used homemade napalm to firebomb his enemies. Today, after a spell of five years in prison for firearms offences, he is trying to transfer those skills to the legal economy by working as a debt collector in the northern English satellite town of Warrington.

When AMC's Breaking Bad premiered in 2008, one of Alabama's most successful meth cooks was already knee deep in building a massive meth empire. His name? Walter White. In this documentary, Walter tells us the secret behind his product, how he stacked up thousands of dollars per day, and why his partner is now serving two life sentences.

The war in Syria is dragging neighboring Lebanon to the edge of the abyss, and nowhere is the growing chaos more stark than in the second city of Tripoli. Sunni militants aligned with the Syrian rebels frequently clash with fighters from the city’s encircled Alawite minority, who support the Assad regime, in bitter street fighting the country’s weak government is powerless to stop. With the rule of law no longer in effect in Tripoli, warlords like Sunni commander Ziad Allouki are now the city’s real rulers, so VICE hung out with him and his fighters for a week to discover why they’re fighting, and whether the country really is on the brink of civil war.

Kiev's Euromaidan protesters began 2014 the same way they ended 2013: by rioting in the streets in an attempt to bring down their government. Key victories have already been won, with Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and his cabinet resigning. The demonstrators also forced the annulment of a new anti-protest law that was, ironically, the cause of much of their protesting. The protesters haven't been contented by this, however, and are still out in the streets, demanding the head of President Viktor Yanukovych and the staging of fresh elections. What began as a protest against the Ukrainian government's close ties with Russian leader Vladimir Putin has become a focus for wider discontent. However, Yanukovych seems in no mood to relinquish his power. As the social unrest spreads across the country, its first post-Soviet President, Leonid Kravchuk, has gone as far as to warn that Ukraine is on the brink of civil war. Dozens of people have lost their lives in just the last two days of violence. At the end of January, VICE flew to Kiev as rioters hurled Molotov cocktails at police and the city turned into a battlefield.

The Central African Republic's capital of Bangui has seen its Muslim population drop from 130,000 to under 1000 over the past few months. Over the past year, thousands across CAR have been killed and nearly a million have been displaced. The United Nations recently stated that the entire Western half of the country has now been cleansed of Muslims.

For almost a decade, Thailand has been trapped in a bloody conflict between supporters and opponents of the tycoon-turned-politician, Thaksin Shinawatra. During his time as prime minister, Thaksin improved life for the poor and the working class, while his autocratic tendencies and crony capitalism led his opponents, mainly made up of royalists and the middle class, to rise up. Thaksin was ousted in a military coup in 2006 for alleged abuse of power and corruption. Since then Thaksin's opponents — widely known as the Yellow Shirts — and his avid supporters, the Red Shirts, have taken turns instigating mass protests to topple their opponents. While attempting to clear her brother's name of corruption charges in November 2013, Thaksin's sister and Thailand's current PM Yingluck Shinawatra triggered a new Yellow Shirt uprising that has so far killed a reported 23 people and injured hundreds.

VICE looks at the UK's underground wrestling scene, from the community centres of Plymouth to the streets of Glasgow. A far cry from the now faded memories of terrestrial TV's World Of Sport and even further from the glitz and glamour of the stateside WWE, Brits across the country have been escaping the banality of their everyday lives by moonlighting as pro-wrestlers in the largely unheard scene of today.

Over the last year a quasi-religious turf war has sprung up on the streets of London. Young radicalised Muslim patrols are enforcing Shariah law in the capital. In reaction, far right Christian Patrols are also taking the law into their own hands. Since the Woolwich killing, anti-Muslim rhetoric as been at an all time high, and the right-wing Christian Patrols are only exacerbating the rising tensions.

As the conflict in Thailand intensifies, VICE News goes deep into the lives of the rich and powerful royalists of Bangkok, who are fighting to keep the old order from crumbling. These Bangkok elite have long aligned themselves with the most potent symbol of Thai unity — King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world's longest ruling current monarch. The royalists' fanatical devotion to the king has long assured them the unquestionable claim to represent the country. But that's changing rapidly, and the country's political climate is inspiring PDRC leaders Nat and Victor, two young, Ferrari-driving multi-millionaires, out to the streets — and into a violent and unpredictable future. How long will they be able to hold on to power?

Following the Euromaidan protests, Charlet heads to Kiev to see what Ukrainian Fashion Week has to offer. The capital is still reeling from months of revolutionary turmoil which has only started to die down days before the fashion week is scheduled to take place. Ukraine's fashion industry has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite the seriously unstable security situation which means many high profile attendees have cancelled their visit, fashion week organisers insist on going ahead with a unique, post-apocalyptic event which simultaneously confronts and buries the troubles.

VICE News visited the slums of Port of Spain and spoke with police, activists, community leaders, and gangsters to understand the country's decade-plus spike in killings. Many of the murders are attributed to ruthless and politically connected street gangs who control territories that are sometimes no larger than a city block. The gangs fight over lucrative government contracts meant to provide social services and combat unemployment. But gang violence is merely a symptom of a bigger problem. Trinidad has become an important stop for drugs headed to West Africa and the United States. Many observers point to "the big fish" — the nameless political and business elites who are behind drug trafficking and the culture of endemic corruption and murder that come with it. They are accused of turning a country rich in oil and gas deposits into their own personal narco-state, fostering impunity through a web of bribes and murders. Unlike the profits from the energy industry, however, this phenomenon trickles all the way down to the street level.

At his compound on the outskirts of Port of Spain, the man responsible for the only attempted militant Islamic overthrow of a Western government is smiling. "I've been charged with treason, I've been charged with sedition, with murder, conspiracy to murder, [stockpiling] guns...." Abu Bakr, the fiery 73-year-old leader of Jamaat al Muslimeen, rattles off the many accusations that the government of Trinidad and Tobago has leveled against him. "Nothing has stuck, because it's fabricated," he continues. "They list all the charges in a book, and they just throw the book at me.... That's not prosecution, that's persecution!" Bakr has mellowed a bit in his old age, but he still relishes the opportunity to serve as a thorn in the side of the government with whom he has clashed for decades. Depending on which local you ask, "The Jamaat" is either a jihadi group, a vast criminal organization, an invaluable community resource providing jobs and social services to Trinidad's disadvantaged, or a combination of all three. But everyone agrees that the coup that Bakr led in 1990 — which held the state hostage for six days, unleashed widespread looting and chaos, and resulted in 24 deaths and the shooting of the prime minister — changed the country forever.

In recent years, a small amount of hackers and gamers have been anonymously reporting fake hostage situations, shootings, and other violent crimes designed to send elite police units, like SWAT teams, to unsuspecting people at their residences. Swatting is a dangerous and expensive prank, which is easy to pull off. Swatters are utilizing easily accessible technology to mask or even alter the ID during calls to 911 dispatchers. With SWAT teams and paramilitary gear becoming the norm across small town America, these calls have predictably chaotic results. Despite the hyper-vigilance of America’s law enforcement, authorities still struggle to defend themselves from the unlikeliest of threats — tech-savvy teenagers. Police militarization meets hacker culture as VICE News investigates the dangerous crime of swatting.

Although it might have seemed like a good idea to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil-one of the most soccer-obsessed countries in the world-massive social unrest has taken the country by storm in the lead-up to the tournament. The Brazilian government is spending an estimated $14 billion on this year's tournament, making it the most expensive World Cup to date. This has provoked outrage among Brazilians, who view the government as corrupt. They are seeing vast amounts of money being spent on soccer stadiums and police while politicians ignore the country's endemic poverty and social issues.

America is locking up more people than any other nation on earth. Home to just 5 percent of the world's total population, the United States houses more than 20 percent of the world's prisoners. In the last three decades, fueled in large part by a national drug policy and legislation like three strikes laws, America has imprisoned more people in local jails, federal penitentiaries, and private correctional facilities than Stalin put in the Gulags. New court rulings have declared overcrowded prisons to be unconstitutional, and the sheer cost of incarceration is forcing prisons to let prisoners back out on the streets. VICE News was granted rare access to go inside one of the most maximum-security prisons in the country, a place that's on the frontline of what could be a sea change in prison policy. Salinas Valley State Prison is home to America's most powerful prison gangs including the Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia. It's a place that's projected to have more than 700 assaults this year. In an institution that houses the worst of the worst, we see how one maverick warden is trying to turn the system around by rehabilitating murderers before they get returned to the streets.

Once regarded as something that happens exclusively in Guy Ritchie films and on gypsy sites, bare knuckle boxing is fast becoming a thriving scene in the UK -- the ultimate British bloodsport. When Clive Martin embeds with the bare knuckle boxing elite, what he discovers is not dissimilar to Fight Club; IT technicians, builders, lifestyle coaches and even a solicitor, all throwing their unprotected fists into each other's faces. It's a subculture of honour, pride and violence. As the UK prepares to play host to the first US vs UK bare knuckle title fight in 150 years -- the biggest event the scene has known since it went underground in the 19th Century -- Clive tries to find out if violence is a cause or effect for these angry young men.

The interpreters who worked alongside American and NATO forces in Afghanistan are among our bravest and most loyal allies. They played an essential role in sourcing intelligence and educating Western troops about the local culture. Now they're in danger of being abandoned.

VICE News travels to Western Sahara's occupied and liberated territories, as well as the Polisario-run refugee camps in Algeria, to find out more about one of the world's least reported conflicts.

VICE News travels to the Dominican Republic, site of a looming environmental and economic crisis many experts believe is the result of climate change. Lake Enriquillo is the largest lake in the Caribbean — and for the past 10 years, it's been getting larger. Having already doubled in area, the lake is destroying everything in its path and displacing local residents who are being forced to take extreme measures to survive.

VICE founder Suroosh Alvi travels to Mexico to see the effects of cartel oil theft firsthand. Mexico’s notoriously violent drug cartels are diversifying. Besides trafficking narcotics, extorting businesses, and brutally murdering their rivals, cartels are now at work exploiting their country’s precious number one export: oil. Every day as many as 10,000 barrels of crude oil are stolen from Mexico’s state-run oil company, Pemex, through precarious illegal taps, which are prone to deadly accidents. Pemex estimates that it loses $5 billion annually in stolen oil, some of which ends up being sold over the border in US gas stations. As police fight the thieves, and the cartels fight each other, the number of victims caught in the battle for the pipelines continues to climb.

The Islamic State, a hardline Sunni jihadist group that formerly had ties to al Qaeda, has conquered large swathes of Iraq and Syria. Previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the group has announced their intention to reestablish the caliphate and declared their leader, the shadowy Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as the caliph. The Islamic State now governs its caliphate from the north central Syrian city of Raqqa, which was once a relatively westernized agricultural hub. As the State's power base, Raqqa is where it imposes its version of Sharia law throughout large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

Almost 800 men have been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility since it was established in 2002. Today, fewer than 150 remain. Despite the fact that more than half of current detainees have been cleared for transfer from the base, and in spite of the executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2009 ordering the closure of the prison within one year, there's no indication it will be shuttered anytime soon. VICE News traveled to Guantanamo to find out what the hell is going on. After a tightly controlled yet bizarre tour of the facility, we sought out a former detainee in Sarajevo and a former guard in Phoenix to get their unfiltered impressions of what life is like at Gitmo.

In Rosario, Argentina's third most populated city, slums known as villas miserias are beset with poverty and crime. As narcotics use has grown among the city's population, it has spawned a violent drug war that is little known outside of the country. Local drug dealers have managed to infiltrate the police, Rosario's economy, and its society, especially through the supporter groups, known as “barras bravas”, of the city's two football teams: Rosario Central and Newell's Old Boys. And in the villas, the gangs have setup fortified kiosks, known as bunkers, where drugs are sold at plain daylight all over the city.

Ibiza is a place that looms large in all our imaginations, the sun-kissed, beer-drenched rock in the middle of the Mediterranean where all our hedonistic dreams can come true. But what is it that makes people come back year after year to the same tiny island? Host Clive Martin sets off to investigate the magnetic appeal of “the party island,” and meets a cast of characters including DJs Carl Cox and Luciano, a crew of scantily clad club-dancers, puking kids on vacation, Alfredo Fiorito—the man who basically invented Ibiza as we know it today—and a 10-foot-tall flying rave robot.

The black plague has broke out in Madagascar. In late 2013, a deadly outbreak of the plague hit small villages around the country killing dozens of people. Rumored to have taken root in overcrowded prisons, the disease has flourished amid Madagascar’s increasing poverty and poor waste management. Antibiotics to treat the disease have been developed and are available in most countries, but Madagascar’s rudimentary healthcare system has left a number of people stranded without care.

The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa began in Guinea in December 2013. From there, it quickly spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Cases also appeared in Senegal and Nigeria, and there was another outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Today, Liberia is at the center of the epidemic, with more than 3,000 cases of infection. About half of them have been fatal. As President Barack Obama announced that he would be sending American military personnel to West Africa to help combat the epidemic, VICE News traveled to Monrovia to spend time with those on the front lines of the outbreak.

Milan is often the last stop for migrants trying to get out of Italy and into other parts of Europe. Milan’s central station, with its daily trains bound for the other side of the border, is a key strategic gateway out of the country. European Union immigration law prevents asylum seekers from being able to simply buy a ticket and hop on a train. The Dublin Regulation stipulates that migrants have to stay in the country where they first claimed asylum. As a result, Italy is filling up with migrants who came by boat and don't want to stay there, as the country is notoriously bad at integrating immigrants into society.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has released a blistering, 500-page report on the CIA’s controversial detention and interrogation program, a document that committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein said represents the most significant oversight effort in the history of the US Senate. The committee reviewed more than 6 million pages of top-secret CIA documents and found that the architect of the interrogation program was a retired Air Force psychologist named James Mitchell, an agency contractor who — according to news reports — personally waterboarded alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Senate report does not identify Mitchell by name. Mitchell has a signed a non-disclosure agreement with the CIA and was unable to discuss his alleged role in the agency's enhanced interrogation program, but VICE News met up with him in suburban Florida to discuss the Senate's report and one of the darkest chapters of the war on terror. This is the first time Mitchell has ever appeared on camera.

The Black Flock Motorcycle Gang is a German biker club made up of former neo-Nazis who swear they've rehabilitated and abandoned their hateful ways. VICE Germany went to hang out with some members of the club and learn about their bigotry-free lives of crime and debauchery.

In August, al Nusra Front jihadists took control of Syria's side of the border crossing with Israel and kidnapped over 40 United Nations peacekeepers — who have since been released. But al Nusra Front, an al Qaeda-affiliate, isn't Israel's only threat from Syria. President Bashar al-Assad's military, in a possible effort to bait Israel into its civil war to shore up Arab sympathies, has been lobbing mortars across the border. Just a few weeks ago, the Israeli military shot down a Syrian plane flying over the Golan Heights — the first time it has done so since the 1980s. VICE News travels to Israel's "quiet border" in the Golan Heights, where members of al Nusra Front are now a visible threat.

Officially founded in 1999, Nunavut is the youngest territory in Canada. It's only been two generations since Canada's stewardship of the land forced the Inuit people out of their semi-nomadic way of life and into a modern sedentary one. But while the introduction of contemporary conveniences seem to have made life more comfortable, the history of Canada in the arctic is mired in tragedy, and the traumatic effects of residential schools and forced relocations are still being felt. Today, Nunavut is in a state of social crisis: Crime rates are four times the national average and the rates of suicide are more than ten times higher than the rest of Canada. If you ask people here what the driving force of the problem is, a lot of them will say: alcohol. Even though alcohol is completely illegal in some parts of the territory, it's been reported that 95 percent of police calls are alcohol-related.

Bangladesh is one of the few Muslim nations where prostitution is legal, and the country’s largest brothel is called Daulatdia, where more than 1,500 women and girls sell sex to thousands of men every day. Daulatdia is infamous for drug abuse and underage prostitution, and many of its sex workers are victims of sexual slavery who were trafficked into the area and sold to a pimp or a madam. They are forced to work off the fee that was paid for them, a debt that takes years to clear because they receive as little as a dollar for sex. VICE News correspondent Tania Rashid visited the notorious Bangladeshi brothel — where human trafficking, underage prostitution, and drugs are commonplace — and met the traffickers and the trafficked, as well as the clientele.

Last week, the extremist militant Sunni group — Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), along with other Sunni militias and former Baathist party members, seized control of large parts of Iraq, including Mosul, the nation's second largest city. In many places, the Iraqi army barely put up a flight. Soldiers dropped their weapons and fled, whether because of fear, incompetence, or internal sabotage. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have become internally displaced after fleeing the fighting or the potential for potential Iraqi air strikes. As ISIS and the other groups continued to fight their way to Baghdad, gruesome videos of brutal executions began to surface. Iraqi army units stationed near Baghdad, as well as Shiite militias, have pledged to not give up so easily. Many say the conflict was brewing for a while, and that ISIS, along with some of the other groups, has had some semblance of control in Sunni areas for quite some time. They point to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki's increasingly sectarian polices and crackdowns on Sunnis as having provoked the events of the last week, and fear this could be the start of a devastating civil war.

Coal ash, which contains many of the world's worst carcinogens, is what's left over when coal is burnt for electricity. An estimated 113 million tons of coal ash are produced annually in the US, and stored in almost every state — some of it literally in people's backyards. With very little government oversight and few safeguards in place, toxic chemicals have been known to leak from these storage sites and into nearby communities, contaminating drinking water and making residents sick. VICE News travels across the US to meet the people and visit the areas most affected by this toxic waste stream. Since coal production is predicted to remain steady for the next few decades, coal ash will be a problem that will affect the US for years to come.

Japan’s obsession with cutesy culture has taken a dark turn, with schoolgirls now offering themselves for “walking dates” with adult men. Last year the US State Department, in its annual report on human trafficking, flagged so-called joshi-kosei osanpo dates (that’s Japanese for “high school walking”) as fronts for commercial sex run by sophisticated criminal networks. In our exclusive investigation, VICE News host Simon Ostrovsky will bring you to one of Tokyo’s busiest neighborhoods, where girls solicit clients in their school uniforms, to a concert performed by a band of schoolgirls attended by adult men, and into a café, where teenage girls are available to hire by the hour. But the true revelations come behind closed doors, when schoolgirls involved in the rent-a-date industry reveal how they’ve been coerced into prostitution.

The United Nations announced in 2013 that Peru has overtaken Colombia as the world’s top producer of coca, the raw plant material used to manufacture cocaine. For the past two decades, Colombia has been virtually synonymous with cocaine. Now that Peru has become the global epicenter of cocaine production, the Andean nation runs the risk of becoming the world’s next great narco state. The Peruvian government is trying to crack down on the problem by ramping up eradication of coca plants, and devoting military and police resources to interdiction efforts. Despite the response — and a hefty amount of foreign aid devoted to combatting cocaine production — Peruvian coke is being consumed in the nightclubs of Lima and in cities around the world like never before. VICE News travels to Peru to learn more about the government’s battle plan against cocaine, and to see how nearly every aspect of Peruvian society is caught up in the fight. We witness how the fine, white powder has forced an entire nation to the brink in the global war on drugs.

With one of the lowest birth rates in the world, South Korea is in danger of disappearing by the end of the millennium. If the situation stays as it is, South Koreans are predicted to become extinct by 2750. Because of the rapidly aging population, elderly prostitutes known as "Bacchus ladies" have cornered a number of public parks as their working areas. Meanwhile, South Korean kids are living with their families well into their 20s—as a result, an entire economy of sex motels has sprung up to give kids a place to fool around outside the watchful eyes of their parents. We sent Matt Shea to investigate this generational crisis, which led him to Seoul's red-light district, a pre-wedding photo shoot on the set of a Korean soap opera, and an erotic sculpture park on South Korea's "honeymoon island."