Season 2012

Israeli settlers have been slowly nibbling away at Palestine's West Bank territory for four decades. 300,000 setllers now occupy outposts that range in size from plywood shacks to full-blown suburban housing complexes. Their abundance has grounded the much-ballyhooed two-state solution to a halt. VICE correspondent Simon Ostrovsky travels from Tel Aviv to the remote West Bank outposts where young Israelis squat for the sake of their heritage. But first, Simon pops in for some quick counter-terrorism training with a member of Israel's Special Forces, just in case.

SOFEX is where the world's leading generals come to buy everything from handguns to laser-guided missile systems. It stands for "Special Operations Forces Exhibition Conference" and it's essentially a trade-show where just about anyone with enough money can buy the most powerful weapons in the world.

We finally got a rare glimpse of the embattled Gaza Strip and a chance to see what life was like under the rule of Hamas. In 2007 we tried and failed to get into Gaza through the Israeli-controlled Erez Crossing. Back then the rival Palestinian factions of Hamas and Fatah were engaged in a bloody war for control of this tiny strip of land. Hamas won. When the post-Mubarak government of Egypt decided to start letting small numbers of folks into Gaza through their Rafah Crossing, we knew we could finally enter the region.

Come with us to Northern Iraq for a springtime frolic with the lovely lady guerillas of the Kurdish Liberation Movement.

Anjem Choudary wants to turn Buckingham Palace into a mosque, impose Sharia law in the UK, and destroy the porn, gambling, and alcohol industries.

VICE Founder Shane Smith takes you into the heart of the Libyan revolution, where the stakes are simple: victory or death. We head into rebel-controlled eastern Libya, traveling from the Egyptian border to Benghazi and then onto the front lines in Misrata to document the violent revolution.

Teens in Athens, Greece take to the streets with rocks and molotov cocktails to protest the government and its large-scale austerity measures. Upon arriving in Athens we find a city whose streets are disappearing under uncollected waste. There's a sense of desperation overcoming the citizens. In the run up to a 48-hour national strike we meet teenage anarchists who are desperate for police blood, communists praying for revolution, and civil servants struggling to understand what has happened to their country.

Most people know Dubai for its massive skyscrapers and luxurious hotels, but few know that the city was built by modern-day slaves. For months, the BBC's Ben Anderson hung out around the glittering, insane towers springing up in Dubai trying to infiltrate the community of expatriate workers who are putting them up. What he found when he finally got in was that the jewel of the Arab world is almost entirely built upon imported slave labor.

Suroosh Alvi of VICE travels to Bin Laden's infamous compound to see what people really think about living next to America's most vilified fugitive. Unsurprisingly, their concern lies less with the proximity of Bin Laden than the chaos that his death has sparked. Although the controversy over whether or not Pakistan was harboring Bin Laden and the "trust deficit" is the primary focus for the American media, Pakistani news is busy covering the onslaught of violence that has broken out since the May 2nd raid. The people have seen a marked increase in American drone attacks, while the Taliban continues its retaliation with a relentless wave of suicide bombings. Anti-American sentiment has never run higher and this turbulent nation clearly has bigger issues than Bin Laden's death to contend with.

Armed with signs, rocks, and molotov cocktails, huge numbers of students and masked protesters hit the streets of Montreal to protest tuition hikes and political corruption. For over 100 days, students in Quebec protested against proposed tuition hikes by Premier Jean Charest, the leader of an allegedly corrupt provincial government with widespread mafia links. On May 1, 2012, VICE took to the streets to see what the fuss was about.

We went to the Swedish town of Eskilstuna, where an extreme right wing protest quickly escalated into a full-blown riot. Sweden was the cradle of social democracy for almost 70 years, and that legacy has made May Day as big a celebration as Christmas Eve for the Swedish labour movement. So when the extreme-right groups Svenskarnas Parti (The Party of the Swedes) and the scary dudes from Förbundet Nationell Ungdom (The Nationalist Youth Movement), chose the idyllic town of Eskilstuna to spread their xenophobic agenda on the international labour movement's holy day, all hell broke loose.

We went to the West Bank on Nakba Day 2012 to survey the protests and avoid getting hit by stink trucks and rubber bullets.

The big one-year anniversary protest is upon us. 10,000 people show up and spirits are high, but then something tragic that no one had expected happens meters from where we're standing. Moshe Silman sets himself on fire in the middle of the protesting crowd. It's a gruesome reminder of the depths of desperation felt by many Israelis.

The cartels of Juarez, Mexico, are at war with a group of Mormons, some of whom are related to Mitt Romney. We went there to document the conflict, meet Romney's Mormon family, and find out more about how US policy is impacting the war on drugs.

Last year alone, Caracas had more violent deaths than Baghdad. Ryan Duffy traveled to Venezuela to investigate the country's crime epidemic. While President Hugo Chavez has raked in billions from Venezuela's oil boom, the crime rate in Caracas has skyrocketed. The crime epidemic has been so punishing that it could be the reason Hugo Chavez finally topples in the country's upcoming elections.

We spent some time on a clone farm to learn how genetic engineering works and why it is so controversial.

Documenting Mexico's Most Violent Crimes