VICE: How France Became the Muslim World's Most Hated Country in the West

 While 70 percent of French Muslims think Charlie Hebdo was wrong to publish the caricatures of Mohammed, 60 percent of all French people support the publication, and say they don’t understand the offence that the cartoons cause Muslims. [...]

“In 2003-2004, France was the most popular Western country in the Muslim world. Today, it is the least popular Western country. Something went wrong,” says Pascal Boniface, director of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS). [...]

He argues that – on top of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons – there’s a lot of anti-Islamic rhetoric in the French media. Headlines published in political magazines like “Shameless Islam” or “The Mosque Invasion” are not anti-Islamist, he says – they’re anti-Muslim. [...]

There’s poverty and joblessness, she says. “The absence of prospects – of job prospects, of career prospects – that's what these people, the extremists, that's what they thrive upon.”

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VICE: The Next Generation of the French Far Right

All of the major political parties in France have youth wings, but the National Rally remains particularly concentrated on attracting young people, training them, promoting them to leadership positions, and encouraging them to run for office. It does this with an eye towards expanding its base and recruiting youth like Ferreira and her ambitious, well-educated peers in and around Paris—a population usually thought more likely to sympathize with the students of 1968 or the people who took to the streets to protest systemic racism this summer than with a party best known for anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. But the next generation of the French radical right lives outside of the stereotype of National Rally voters as rural, less educated, older, and male. Instead, many of its dedicated organizers and future leaders reside in universities at the center of a city widely associated with protests, strikes, and revolution, antagonizing that centuries-long history from the inside. [...]

Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, the National Rally has historically attracted men, both very young and very old, and been most notorious for the elder Le Pen’s Holocaust denial, hate crime accusations, and flirtations with Nazism. When Marine Le Pen took control of the party in 2011, she sought to change that image and professionalize the party. With her “de-demonization” strategy, she saw results fairly quickly: In 2014, the party began experiencing gains in municipal, regional, and European Parliament elections. Last year, the National Rally beat Macron’s party in elections for the European Parliament, riding a wave of anti-elite sentiment embodied by the Yellow Vest protest movement that rocked the country for months. The party’s 2018 name change was part of Le Pen’s larger strategy to distance herself from her father, whose reputation is seen as beyond salvageable. The presence of well-groomed students from elite universities, too, fits nicely into that strategy.

Everyone I interviewed differentiated Marine Le Pen’s party from the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, accepting the National Rally’s former iteration as racist and anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, they also expressed blatantly nationalistic and Islamophobic views, remnants of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party that remain hallmarks of the National Rally today. Just two years ago, the youth wing marked International Women’s Day by tweeting a meme that read, “Defending women’s rights is fighting against Islamism: The French woman is neither veiled nor submissive!” And last month, the National Rally launched a new campaign titled, “French, wake up!,” calling for security and justice in the face of “savagery” and promising to, among other things, increase prison capacity, apply zero tolerance, end “mass immigration,” reinstate mandatory minimums, and end social services for families of repeat juvenile offenders. [...]

But Rooduijn sees radical right parties gaining broader acceptance, gradually chipping away at the stigma surrounding them. “I think that the National Rally is a good example because you can really see when Marine Le Pen took over the leadership, she really changed the image of the party, trying to present the party as a party that you could vote for, a party that's there for everyone,” he explained. “At the same time, when it comes to policy positions, to the actual ideas and the ideological base of the National Rally, nothing really changed. The party is still very radical when it comes to immigration. It's still very radical on the European Union. It's still very strict on law and order. It's still very populist, meaning that it's still very negative about all kinds of elites, most importantly the political elites.... So these parties have become more generally accepted. However, they have not really become less radical.”

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VICE: Donald Trump Is Getting Less Popular by the Day

Fifty-two percent of Americans polled disapprove of Trump’s handling of the protests, while just 36 percent approve. Even among older Americans, who were most likely to approve of Trump’s response, a clear majority (54 percent) disapproves. (Nineteen percent of respondents overall said the presence of federal agents “doesn’t have much effect one way or the other.”)

Trump gets similarly bad marks on relations with Russia (36 percent approval, 63 percent disapproval) and his handling of the pandemic (34 percent approval, 66 percent disapproval), the issue that’s dominated American life since March and which could decide the election.

On all three topics, the only groups more likely to approve of Trump’s handling of the issue than not is white voters without college degrees and Trump’s fellow Republicans. According to Ipsos, 64 percent of Republicans said the presence of federal troops made the situation better, as did 42 percent of white voters without college degrees.

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VICE: Inside the Newly Reopened, Socially Distanced Strip Clubs of America

Groups of ethnically diverse patrons aren’t standing in line but rather in clumps, strategically placed six feet away from other groups. And while venues such as Trails used to have strict dress codes regarding hats and facial coverings, everyone in line has their face covered. Some wear medical grade N95 masks. Some wear makeshift Western-style bandanas. A large majority wear high-end ski balaclavas, a subtle nod to a ski season that was abruptly cut short due to the pandemic.

A bouncer in an N95 mask pulls double duty, checking IDs before taking temperatures. (Those with temperatures above 99 are denied entry.) Once all members of a group pass the temperature scan, the group is escorted to a table as the bouncer recites the rules of the new world [...]

Inside Trails, the LED lights surrounding the stage shine extra bright due to the absence of patrons sitting around the “tip rail” (the counter immediately next to the stage). At the end of each performance, a masked employee dutifully uses a Swiffer to remove the dollar bills from the stage (where they will then be counted and handled by a separate gloved employee) while another sterilizes the performing area in preparation for the next masked dancer. [...]

Morgan, the bartender, estimates that the club is about 60 percent fuller than usual, a similar approximation provided by staff at Trails.

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VICE: Photos of the Most Egregious 'Anti-Homeless' Architecture

At its core, hostile or "defensive" architecture amounts to a forever campaign waged, consciously or otherwise, by designers, landlords, and developers to force people to use property in exactly one way. Sometimes, the end result isn't exactly a tragedy; skaters might have to go somewhere else, for instance. But in its most malignant form, hostile architecture can deter homeless folks from resting. In those cases, public or quasi-public spaces of cities—often defined by unequal access to transit, groceries, and other essentials—become a visceral extension of society's collective disregard for their fate. [...]

Previously, when asked about their strategy for managing public spaces, a spokesperson for the California Department of Transportation (DOT)—which had placed boulders where folks once camped in the Bay Area—said they "use fencing and landscaping elements to prevent and discourage.... illegal encampments." It’s worth noting that many people sleeping outdoors within U.S. city limits are doing so illegally, although due to the 2018 Martin v. Boise court decision, they might not be punished for doing so on public property unless the city in question provides adequate indoor space. It's still unclear what this decision will mean to the estimated 550,000 homeless people in the country, nor the growing population in the Bay Area, which has massively increased over the past two years. [...]

As "hostile architecture" posts have in the past, the story blew up for a few days on social media—until the Coalition deleted their original, having determined the restaurant was "a valued member" of the community and "supportive of its homeless neighbors." That may be true, as the business explicitly denied anti-homeless intent, pointing to the rock as part of a Japanese garden. And this isn't the place for a debate about whether or not businesses are in the right or wrong even if they do choose to shoo homeless people away. Because when it comes to hostile architecture, it's more important to realize the effects than the intent, whether aesthetic or otherwise. And you can't do that without knowing what it looks like.

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VICE: Trump’s Obsession with Toilets Is Less of a Random Rant Than It Appears

This focus on flushing seemed at first blush like just another one of those weird fixations that habitually grips a president with the attention span of a TV remote. But the conservative war on toilets—or the war on behalf of the toilets of yesteryear—both predates Trump and lines up with a surprisingly large chunk of Trumpian grievance politics. Denouncing toilets, lightbulbs, and sinks as worse than they used to be is a way to both tap into a powerful strain of nostalgia and express contempt for the regulatory state. [...]

Days after Trump complained about dishwashers in Milwaukee, the Department of Energy announced a rule change that introduced a set of changes that will limit the government's ability to set new efficiency standards on appliances. "Existing standards are saving the typical household about $500 per year. That's an accumulation of standards developed over the past 30 years that are now resulting in more efficient appliances and devices on the market today," said Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. "This means that it'll be much harder to keep improving those standards and adding to those savings in the future." [...]

Making appliances more efficient used to be seen as a relatively uncontroversial good. The first bill setting appliance standards was signed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 after passing a Democrat-controlled Congress on bipartisan lines. In 1992, George H.W. Bush signed legislation requiring toilets to use 1.6 gallons per flush, and in 2007 George W. Bush approved a law that phased out particularly energy-inefficient lightbulbs. These regulations have made a difference: For instance, according to Appliance Standards Awareness Project data, fridges have gotten more energy efficient even as they've gotten bigger and cheaper in inflation-adjusted dollars. Consumer Reports notes that dishwashers use half the water they did 20 years ago, which also means a reduction in energy required to heat that water, though the tradeoff is they take longer to run through a cycle. And while newer energy-saving lightbulbs like LEDs are more expensive than traditional incandescent bulbs, they also last much much longer and save consumers money on their electricity bills.

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VICE: Boris Johnson Constantly Gets Away with Lying – This Is Why

Today, the problem is of a different order: we are no longer dealing with mistakes. We are dealing with a conservative political elite whose core strategy is falsehood. And – as Marr's interview showed – the normal journalistic strategies are not working.

The authoritarian right now speaks to us through a carefully constructed echo chamber, where partisan amateur news websites, right-wing tabloids and shady "think-tanks" take any given lie, amplify it until it becomes accepted and then force reputable news outlets to respond to it as if it were true. [...]

If they were, Marr would have said to Johnson: "I'm sorry, Prime Minister, you are systematically lying to me in this interview and I am going to read out the facts..." And the next news bulletin would have started: "The Prime Minister lied four times today..." [...]

Even so, there's a lot of room for talented people to move through that system on one condition: you do not rock the boat. People who rock the boat do not get promoted; they are accused of "having an agenda"; their journalism becomes a percentages game: how much crap do I have to produce to get away with one good exposé? And because the pay of senior onscreen journalists – and their managers – is spectacularly good, there is always a lot to lose.

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VICE: NASA’s Solar Probe Found Things Near the Sun That We Can’t Explain

During its two encounters, Parker traveled within 15 million miles of the Sun’s surface, far surpassing the 25-million-mile record first set by NASA’s Helios 2 mission in 1976. Parker has also claimed the title of the fastest human-made object in history from Helios 2, as it surfed near the Sun at over 153,000 miles per hour. [...]

“To our big surprise,” Kasper said, “by the time we got to our closest approach, [the solar wind] was flowing between 35 and 50 kilometers per second around the Sun. That’s something like 15 to 25 times faster than the standard solar models predict, so we’re missing something really fundamental in our standard models of the Sun—how it rotates and how the wind escapes—and that’s really interesting.” [...]

Though the mechanism behind these waves is still unknown, the sheer force of them may help explain two of the most persistent mysteries about the Sun: Why is solar corona, or the atmosphere of the Sun, about 1,000 times hotter than its surface? And why does the solar wind suddenly accelerate to supersonic speeds at a certain distance from the Sun?

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VICE: Indonesian Prison Officials Believe Inmates Are 'Turning Gay' After Sleeping Next To The Same Sex

The latest bout of LGBTQ discrimination is ongoing in West Java’s prisons. District office head of Indonesia’s Ministry of Law and Human Rights, Liberti Sitinjak, claims “deviant sexual acts” are becoming more rampant among prisoners in his area. This allegation is based on the discovery of same-sex relationships in detention centers. [...]

Sitinjak said the solution to overcapacity is to stop incarcerating people for minor offenses, like drug use. Send them to rehab instead, he suggested. Sounds pretty progressive, right? Not so fast. His aims are conservative at their core, because with less prisoners and more space in cells, inmates won’t have to sleep so close to each other, which according to Sitinjak, means less homosexuality. [...]

Sitinjak did get one thing right: there are too many offenders in West Javanese jails and prisons. In fact, 60 percent of inmates in West Java are incarcerated for drug use. Indonesia’s criminal law needs an update, considering minor drug offenses can earn you a three-year sentence.

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VICE: AI Trained on Old Scientific Papers Makes Discoveries Humans Missed

In a study published in Nature on July 3, researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used an algorithm called Word2Vec sift through scientific papers for connections humans had missed. Their algorithm then spit out predictions for possible thermoelectric materials, which convert heat to energy and are used in many heating and cooling applications. [...]

“The way that this Word2vec algorithm works is that you train a neural network model to remove each word and predict what the words next to it will be,” Jain said. “By training a neural network on a word, you get representations of words that can actually confer knowledge.” [...]

This new application of machine learning goes beyond materials science. Because it’s not trained on a specific scientific dataset, you could easily apply it to other disciplines, retraining it on literature of whatever subject you wanted. Vahe Tshitoyan, the lead author on the study, says other researchers have already reached out, wanting to learn more.

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VICE: the significance of men's fashion at pride

In Pride Parades: How A Parade Changed the World, Katherine Bruce writes that “having fun in a new way -- counter to one that is prescribed by society -- can be a method to urge society to change. In this way, fun is prefigurative, meaning that it acts out the world that activists hope to make a reality.” The same applies with fashion: dressing in ways which contradict societal expectations of gender or heterosexuality, acts as a critique. [...]

Stonewall represented a radical departure from this appeal to respectability. According to a contemporary account by writer Lucian K Truscott IV, “the sudden spectre of ‘gay power’ erected its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale”. The day after the riots, protestors took to the streets in as much a spirit of revelry as anger. At the time, fashion wasn’t seen as something frivolous or separate to the serious business of political protest: Truscott writes, "if Friday had been pick-up night, Saturday was date night”, complete with ‘posing and primping’, and ‘flaunt[ing] it’. Drag formed a crucial part of this visual spectacle but, looking at Fred W. McDarrah’s photos taken at the time, not all of the fashion on display was outré. Much of it doesn’t even read as particularly queer: many of the rioters are wearing over-sized white shirts, striped black tees, short-shorts or sensibly cut trousers. [...]

For many queer men Pride offers an occasion to dress in a more “feminine” style than they normally would. But Pride fashion also has a tendency towards hypermasculinity. Leather has been a mainstay since the 70s, not to mention constituting a rich subculture in its own right. If leather culture emerged as a response to contemporary stereotypes of heterosexual masculinity, it has become a look which signifies, above all, its own queerness. This is also true of harnesses or mesh, two other staples of Pride fashion, with the former being explicitly drawn from the aesthetics of BDSM. Wearing these clothes conveys an exaggerated masculinity which is just as performative as going in drag. After all, if you wanted to be read as masculine in a straight way, you’d be better off turning up in a plain white T-shirt and a pair of shorts from Superdry (which, sadly, all too many do). The fashion of leather and harnesses, then, represents both a celebration and a parody of masculinity. [...]

I ask Robin whether he would dress differently at Trans Pride. “Yes, I’d be more comfortable being visibly trans there. But at the mainstream event, I almost want to pass as a cis man, simply because I don’t want the hassle of trying to claim space. This affects what I wear: hiding my surgery scars, not wearing trans colours, assimilating more into cis gay men fashion. Part of me wants to be more visibly trans at Pride as a ‘fuck you.’ But, on the other hand, I’m also really tired of having to make these defiant gestures.”

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VICE News: The Brexit Mistakes That Led to Theresa May's Resignation

After almost three years of waiting for their country to leave the EU, British voters finally saw some action. Prime Minister Theresa May resigned as leader of the Conservative Party last week.

Her resignation has been inevitable since May failed to get Parliament to accept a deal and was forced to delay Brexit. Still, there’s no clear frontrunner to fill the power vacuum that will emerge as she steps down, and whoever takes over will inherit the problems that took May down.

One thing, however, is clear: In the next few months, her successor will clarify whether Theresa May single-handedly and spectacularly failed at her only job or whether delivering Brexit is a suicide mission for any politician.

More than a few conservative hardliners are banking on the first hypothesis — that May’s string of bad decisions were the problem. They’re pushing to see Boris Johnson, the figurehead of the 2016 leave campaign, take over and finish what he started.

Whoever ends up in the unenviable position will first have to handle the fallout from the European Parliament elections. Polls show the Conservative Party finishing in a humiliating fifth place. And with Nigel Farage and his newly-formed Brexit Party raging toward victory, the humiliations are likely to continue well after the results are in. 

VICE: Take a Look Inside Some Abandoned Secret Mansions in Italy

Paris-based photographer Thomas Jorion has gone out of his way to prove that in Italy, even neglected things can be excessively beautiful. Over the past decade, Jorion has traveled across Italy to document the country's most stunning abandoned buildings. His work—which mainly focuses on spaces from the 18th and 19th century—has culminated in the project Veduta (View).

Jorion's last series, Vestige d’Empire (Vestiges of Empire), focused on the architectural heritage of French colonialism in countries such as Vietnam, Senegal, China, and Madagascar. For Veduta, Jorion stayed a bit closer to home and discovered most of the abandoned palaces and gardens through a basic Google satellite view search, but also thanks to tip-offs from people he met along the way in Italy. Jorion won't reveal their exact locations, but we do know that the majority can be found between the regions of Umbria and Tuscany in central Italy, and Lombardy in the north.

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VICE: Nazis Explain Why They Became Nazis

Radtke's letter was just one of 683 personal accounts sent to Abel in the years after Hitler was elected in 1933. Last January, the Hoover Institution – a public policy think-tank based at Stanford University in California – published 584 of those letters online. These personal testimonies are not only useful in understanding why so many people were attracted to the Nazis in the 1930s, but also provide insight into the minds of the millions of Germans today who are still turning to far-right political parties, like the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).  [...]

Many of the letter writers were happy to see the end of the Weimar Republic, which was founded in 1919 after the German defeat in the First World War, and which they blamed for the economic state the country was left in after the war and for the Great Depression. The writers were excited by Hitler's promise to introduce strict political order; Bernard Horstmann, a miner from Bottrop in western Germany, wrote that he thought the previous government had promoted "the betrayal of the people and our fatherland". [...]

At the time, left-wing groups tried to counter the surge in nationalist support. Fights would often break out between Communist Party members and thugs from the Nazi paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung (SA), while some more liberal groups called for the boycott of shops owned by Nazi Party members. But that only seemed to make Hitler and the Nazis more appealing to many. "It was because Adolf Hitler and his party faced so much criticism and resistance among the press that I became particularly interested in joining their movement," wrote a party member named Friedrich Jörns.  

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VICE: The South Korean Love Industry

With one of the lowest birth rates in the world, South Koreans are predicted to become extinct by 2750.

Because of the rapidly ageing population this situation has created, elderly prostitutes known as "Bacchus ladies" have cornered a number of public parks as their working areas. Meanwhile, as the marriage rate falls and the country's younger generation continues to live at home well into their twenties, young people have been forced to book themselves into purpose-built sex motels to avoid the prying eyes of 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".

VICE: This Town Is Tearing Itself Apart Over Non-Christians Owning Houses

For over a century the “Chautauqua on Lake Michigan,” perched on a hillside overlooking a particularly scenic expanse of coastline, has served as a local cultural center and sacred retreat for families like Sheaffer’s, who mostly have been visiting for generations. But for the past decade idyllic, serene Bay View has been embroiled in a bitter internal conflict that’s sharply divided the tight-knit community and—because of its echoes of the ugly housing discrimination fights of past decades—resonated far beyond, tapping a nerve in the country’s culture wars and the broader debate about the role of religion in American life. The core of this dispute is that while anyone is welcome to visit Bay View or participate in its events—and many outsiders do—for decades only Christians have been allowed to actually own cottages and act as voting community members. In early August, after years of escalating tension, members voted to finally amend the bylaws to allow non-Christians to own property, but the dispute remains ongoing. A group of plaintiffs, arguing the new provisions still amount to religious discrimination, are forging ahead with a federal lawsuit against the Bay View Association.[...]

Bay View was clearly established as a Protestant retreat. Members opposed to changing the requirements point to its mission statement outlining the centrality of Christian values, and to historical documents that suggest the founders’ religious intent. “We did not enter this wilderness to make money, nor build a city of pleasure,” one 1900 brochure reads. “We came to worship God, to establish a center of Christian influence.”[...]

At the time he joined, Duquette liked Bay View’s Christian association, he said, but he didn’t give the membership requirements much thought until the mid-00s, when the dispute started catching fire. One member, poking around in the archives, discovered that Bay View’s explicit Christian-only requirement didn’t originate with its founding but was actually added around 1942, when the board adopted a resolution that members must be “of the white race and a Christian.” (By 1959 Bay View had dropped the race requirement; from the 1960s to 1980s it implemented a 10 percent quota on Catholics. Bylaws later changed “Christian” to “Christian persuasion.”) [...]

This summer’s vote was billed as a kind of compromise that would finally end the dispute. The “Christian persuasion” and minister-letter requirements would be removed, although a new amendment would require prospective members to agree to “respect the principles of the United Methodist Church” and support Bay View’s Christian mission. It would also add a requirement that a majority of the nine-person board is Methodist.

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VICE: The Horrific Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Is About to Get a Lot Worse

So what's different about this, than any of those I just mentioned, is that there was really no effort in any of those evolutions to do anything but prosecute predator priests. For example, law enforcement had Mahony in their sights—they could have indicted him. And Steve Cooley, who was the district attorney in Los Angeles County at the time, didn't do it. And I think he didn't do it because the Church—the hierarchy of the Church—still had a significant amount of influence. What's happened, as time has gone on, is the individuals who hold elected office have had less and less exposure to a Church that's had the sort of political power it did 30 years ago. The Church, now, simply has less political influence now, and can't stop it.

Frankly, if you're the attorney general of Pennsylvania, and you begin getting these calls, and you see the scope of this, why wouldn't you investigate it? It's criminality, really, on a scale that's unheard of. In California, the Church paid $1 billion to settle cases in the mid 2000s. A diocese went bankrupt. And it's not just the number of perpetrators. The real criminal conspiracy, and the real criminality, is the effort to cover it up, and conceal it as a matter of policy and practice. I think a lot of people still want to believe that something like what happened in Pennsylvania is an anomaly. It's not. It's the norm. Every diocese is the same—and the reason for that is the Church is a hierarchal organization, managed from the top-down.  [...]

I think the next step—and I do think it's going to happen—is a federal investigation. Catholic institutions are not only religious, but they're massive receivers of federal, state, and local financial aid through charity and other organizations. And, more than anything else, they're a tax-exempt organization. If Scientology, which is tiny sect, [eventually loses] its tax-empt status because of criminality, then isn't a fair discussion to have that for the Catholic Church [too]? Can you imagine, say, if you found out that 300 United Airlines flight attendants were molesting children, what would happen to United Airlines? And we don't have 300—[we have even more] priests who have been removed for this behavior since the early 2000s. The only reason they haven't been held to the same standard that everyone else has been is the religious works in front of them. [...]

Me too. So the difference between Catholicism and basically any other Protestant sect is that the only way to salvation in the Church is through the sacramental life. And the only way to participate fully in the sacramental life is to go through all seven sacraments, one of them being to become a priest. And the victims that priests typically target are almost always the most devout kids who truly in their heart believe.

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VICE News: Michel Barnier Is Negotiating Brexit For The 500 Million EU Citizens That Remain (HBO)

The EU AND UK will soon launch the latest round of Brexit talks next week, and one man will be speaking for the 27 remaining countries: Michel Barnier.

The future rights of 500 million citizens and and the world’s most powerful trading bloc are riding on the deal his team brokers with the UK.

Barnier has a reputation as a hardliner, which stems primarily from the strong banking reforms he introduced as the EU internal market commission between 2010 and 2014. And his opponents have seized on that reputation to paint him as a villain in current Brexit talks.

With Brexit’s deadline looming, VICE News sat down with Barnier to discuss the the status of the world’s largest divorce proceedings.

“Right now, I have no certainty,” Barnier tells VICE News. "I can see the difficulty and the intensity of this debate. We’re waiting for the British to have a clear position and choices."

VICE: Here's What Will Happen After a Huge Earthquake Inevitably Hits California

The San Andreas is the most notorious of these faults. It runs roughly 800 miles long and produces quakes so catastrophic that there’s a 2015 action movie about it starring The Rock. The southern section of the fault generates earthquakes every 150 years on average, and considering some parts of it haven’t ruptured in more than 200 years, Southern California is overdue for a major shaking, otherwise known as “the Big One.” [...]

Scientists don’t know exactly where the Big One will hit or how large it will be when it does, but they do have some ideas: One of the most likely scenarios, according to a 2008 federal study, is a 7.8 magnitude earthquake starting at the Salton Sea and running up through Lake Hughes, on a 200 mile long section of the fault that, in parts, hasn't ruptured since 1680—almost two centuries before California became part of the United States and long before it had any major infrastructure. [...]

The death toll probably won’t be as bad as movies like San Andreas—which Benthien calls “Hollywood fantasy”—make it out to be. Scientists predict that a magnitude 7.8 earthquake along the southern San Andreas would likely kill about 2,000 people—or less than .1 percent of Southern California’s population of more than 22 million. [...]

The estimated total impact of just building damage is $33 billion, not counting the costs following a potential quake-induced fire. It’s a hefty price tag, especially considering that most Californians don’t have earthquake insurance, which is rarely included in homeowners or renters’ insurance. Just over 14 percent of homeowners and 5 percent of renters with residential insurance have an earthquake policy, which typically covers damage to belongings and personal property like furniture and the cost of relocating to either new or temporary housing, according to 2016 data from the California Earthquake Authority. (The state agency, which supplies most of the state’s earthquake insurance, doesn’t keep statistics on how many Californians don’t have residential insurance.) 

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VICE: How Putin Is Using The Orthodox Church To Build His Power (HBO)

Vladimir Putin's victory in last week's Russian presidential elections came as no surprise. Putin has spent much of the past two decades building an enduring and loyal following in Russia, and alliances with some of the country's most powerful institutions — none, perhaps, more important that the Russian Orthodox Church, which has fully embraced his leadership.

It's all part of a dramatic turnaround for the Church, which just 30 years ago was only a marginal force in Russian society. The Soviets had sought to stamp out organized faith, stripping religion from education, arresting clergymen, and ordering the destruction of many of Russia's grand cathedrals, including one, Christ the Savior, that was demolished to make room for a public pool.

But under Putin, the Church has been making a comeback. More than 70% of Russians today identify as Russian Orthodox, up from 30% at the end of the Soviet Union. And huge swaths of land have been transferred back to religious ownership, with thousands of new churches being built or restored -- at a rate of almost three a day, by church figures. And Putin, by building loyalty among the leaders of a cherished institution, has arguably been the greatest beneficiary of this largesse. 

VICE News Tonight went to Moscow to ask Church leaders, and experts on the role of religion in society, how the church's resurrection has played into Putin's gambit for everlasting power.