The Meaning Behind Taylor Swift’s 1989 Vault Track ‘Slut!’

In September, when Taylor Swift announced that one of the vault tracks off of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) would be called “Slut!,” it immediately became the most anticipated song from the re-release.

Released Friday along with the rest of the re-recorded 1989, “Slut!” sees Swift boldly reclaiming a word that was often hurled at her, especially in her early years as a singer. Swift is known for her searing, honest lyrics—especially in songs like “All Too Well” to “Dear John”—which many fans have connected to specific relationships in her life. But critics have used that to turn her into the punchline of sexist jokes, even as recently as 2021 when the Netflix show Ginny and Georgia made a joke at Swift’s expense. (In response, Swift called the joke “deeply sexist”).

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In “Slut!”, Swift embraces the word. “But if I’m all dressed up they might as well be lookin’ at us. And if they call me a slut, you know it might be worth it for once.” She goes on to sing about the public’s perception of her as a “rose with thorns.” “Love thorns all over this rose. I’ll pay the price, you won’t.”

“Slut!” isn’t the first time Swift has addressed the media’s coverage of her relationships; two of her most popular songs from 1989 did just that. On “Shake It Off,” she sings, “I go on too many dates, but I can’t make them stay; at least that’s what people say.” And on “Blank Space,” “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane.”

Swift rarely speaks publicly about her relationships. Still, fans who purchased a physical copy of 1989 (Taylor’s Version) could glean some more insight into her songwriting process while making the album from a letter she included. Swift writes about wanting to silence “the voices that had begun to shame me in new ways for dating like a normal young woman.”

the 1989 taylor’s version prologue 🥹🥹🥹🥹

taylor alison swift i love you.#1989TaylorsVersion pic.twitter.com/xccKrSswhU

— jake (taylor’s version) (@taylorsrep13) October 26, 2023

“In the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut shaming — the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today,” she writes. Swift calls out the jokes about the number of boyfriends she had and the way her songwriting was portrayed as “a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath.” She writes that this was taking a toll on her, so she needed to write to get through it. “So I swore off hanging out with guys, dating, flirting, or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian era.”

The pop star attempted to redirect the attention to her female friendships and how she felt that would’ve been a foolproof way to change the narrative, but that didn’t seem to be the case. “If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that — right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.”

The song itself is an indication of what was going through Swift’s mind during this time in her life and how she had to assuage the negative feelings that arose when, no matter what she did, the public theorized that she was a boy-crazy psychopath who couldn’t keep a man. In fact, she was just a woman who could convey her feelings through song expertly, and sometimes, they happened to be about a specific man. If that makes her a “Slut!” then she’s OK with it.

source https://time.com/6329228/taylor-swift-1989-slut-song/

Settler Violence in the West Bank Undermines Israel’s Security

For the past few weeks, in the wake of Hamas’ brutal massacre of 1,400 Israelis and kidnapping of over 200 more, Israel has been teetering on the brink of a multi-front war. The threats are easy to grasp, as they typically take the form of Iran-backed terror organizations. But falling under the radar are events in the West Bank, arguably the most complex sphere of the ongoing conflict, and certainly one of the most consequential.

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The West Bank has seen a significant increase in violence since Oct. 7 in what has already been the deadliest year since the Second Intifada. Since the outbreak of the war, at least 100 Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed in the West Bank. From Israel’s perspective, the most obvious threat emerging from the West Bank is Palestinian violence—including terror attacks against Israeli civilians—which had already claimed the lives of over 30 Israelis between January and September 2023. The Israel Defense Forces claims to have foiled several Palestinian attacks in the past three weeks through raids and even drones and other aerial strikes on militant cells in Palestinian cities.

Read More: As War Rages in Gaza, Violence Surges in the West Bank

It’s easy to see Israel’s challenge in the West Bank as merely an extension of Israel’s fight against terror organizations in both Gaza and in Lebanon, where the IDF and Hezbollah are engaging in clashes that have reportedly killed over 50 Hezbollah militants and 8 Israelis so far. But that is only part of the picture. The ongoing war has emboldened far-right Israeli settlers in the West Bank, who have escalated their attacks and provocations against Palestinian civilians.

Perhaps the most shocking and sickening example of this phenomenon occurred in the West Bank village of Wadi as-Seeq, located near Ramallah. In Haaretz, Hagar Shezaf recounted the unrelenting abuse and torture three Palestinians there endured from several IDF soldiers and settlers on Oct. 12. The Israelis handcuffed, beat, stripped, and photographed them, and subsequently urinated and extinguished cigarettes on them. One soldier reportedly attempted to insert an object into one of the victims’ rectum. The perpetrators also handcuffed and threatened to kill leftist Israeli activists present at the scene, including a minor.

According to the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, settlers attacked Palestinians in the West Bank on 100 different occasions and in at least 62 locations from Oct. 7 to 22 alone. Settlers have killed at least six Palestinians during this period. In particular, Palestinian shepherding communities have borne the brunt of these attacks, which have caused them to flee their homes in Wadi as-Seeq, nearby Ein ar-Rashash, Ein Shibli in the Jordan Valley, and other communities. Settler extremists have themselves adopted shepherding and farming as a method of taking over large swaths of land.

While threats and attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank have spiked this month, they are hardly new. According to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 12% of Palestinian herding communities had fled their homes as of September, primarily due to Israeli settlers attacking them and preventing them from accessing their land. An average of three incidents of settler violence occurred per day during the first eight months of 2023, an uptick from two per day in 2022. This rise can at least be partially attributed to far-right figures ascending to power in Israel, including Bezalel Smotrich, who has defended setters who commit violence, and Limor Son Har-Melech, who railed against security officials who speak out against the settler movement. Violently driving Palestinians to flee their homes is a tactic in the so-called war for Area C—the 60% of the West Bank under direct Israeli administration—where many of the small Palestinian hamlets facing the most acute threats are located.

IDF soldiers rarely act to prevent these attacks, and, according to that recent Haaretz report, sometimes even collaborate in them. Soldiers serving in the West Bank are often themselves settlers, a trend heightened by the recent IDF reservist mobilization. Many settlers also receive arms reputedly for self-defense, especially in far-flung, hardline settlements that see frequent friction with Palestinians. All of this sends the message that they can violate the law with impunity—whether by building illegal outposts or targeting their Palestinian neighbors. The IDF often opens investigations into high-profile incidents of settler violence, as it did for the Wadi as-Seeq case, but rarely do the perpetrators face legal consequences.

While Israel is focused on their justified fight against Hamas in Gaza, it cannot neglect addressing what is happening in the West Bank, where settler violence threatens the integrity of Israel’s democracy and security. A responsible Israeli government would approach Israel’s challenge in the West Bank as the two-front battle that it truly is: against Palestinian and Jewish violence alike.

But this problem transcends Israel’s current political reality. Just as this war is prompting Israelis to question long-held assumptions about how Israel should navigate the challenges posed by Hamas in Gaza, it should also spur a reckoning about the unnecessary and avoidable security burden posed by the settlement movement. 

When the war broke out on Oct. 7, 70% of standing IDF troops were stationed in the West Bank, and most of that 70% were protecting isolated settler enclaves in overwhelmingly Palestinian areas, not keeping Israelis safe within the country’s sovereign borders. Military operations against militant Palestinian cells is a partial and woefully incomplete remedy for Israel’s chronic West Bank migraine. While now may not be the time for more substantive political conversations about the future of the settlement movement and the West Bank in general, the first step is to uphold and enforce the rule of law for West Bank settlers, for the good of Israelis and Palestinians alike.

source https://time.com/6329142/west-bank-settler-violence-israel-security/

Why America’s Reagan-Era Approach to Terrorism Could Hold Back Progress on Hamas

Since the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7 that have now killed around 1,400 Israelis, a fierce debate has been raging in the United States. An outspoken minority on the left has portrayed the attack as an inevitable response to oppression. But the majority viewpoint among Democrats and Republicans alike has been revulsion against Hamas and support for Israel’s right to self-defense.

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The majority position fits with Americans’ longstanding views on terrorism, which has been informed by a strong desire for “moral clarity” in every situation. Terrorism is 100% wrong in every situation and stems not from complex historical contexts and legitimate grievances, but from hatred and radical ideologies.

But while condemning terrorism should be a no-brainer, moral clarity has not guaranteed sound U.S. counterterrorism policies over the last half-century. This history shows that moral absolutism can obscure the compromises required to fight terrorism. It also encourages a self-righteousness that inhibits understanding of terrorism’s complex roots—which is necessary to best prevent it.

The modern U.S. struggle with terrorism began in the 1970s and 1980s, as nationalists like the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), extreme leftists like the German Red Army Faction, and state sponsors like Libya targeted the U.S. and its allies.

Read more: How the Activist Left Turned On Israel

The concept of “moral clarity” emerged in the 1980s as the Reagan Administration made terrorism a priority, believing that Jimmy Carter had focused too much on human rights and not enough on foreign threats. Advocates of moral clarity sought to discredit arguments that terrorism stemmed primarily from the legitimate grievances of dispossessed peoples suffering under racist and imperialist regimes—many of which were U.S. allies. Moral clarity enabled them to explain terrorism’s roots in a way that exempted the U.S. from any responsibility and cleared the path for a forceful response.

For example, in 1984 Secretary of State George Shultz criticized the idea that U.S. policies, such as support for Israel, were the root cause of terrorism. He described this view as “moral confusion” and argued: “We have been told that terrorism is in some measure our own fault, and we deserved to be bombed.” But Shultz dismissed such thinking. Terrorists were would-be totalitarians whose radical ideologies drove them toward absolute goals like the destruction of Israel. Caving to them on particular issues or changing American policy wouldn’t end their violence. It would only fuel it. Terrorists struck the U.S., Shultz claimed, “not because of some mistake we are making but because of who we are and what we believe in.”

Read more: What the World Can Learn From the History of Hamas

Moral clarity resonated with U.S. policymakers in this period for practical as well as ethical reasons. Many post-colonial states at the United Nations, such as Algeria and Tanzania, tried to exempt “national liberation” movements like the PLO from the label of terrorism despite their repeated attacks on civilians. Furthermore, some U.S. allies attempted to reduce the risk of terrorism by releasing suspects or refusing to extradite them. American policymakers hoped that by drawing stark moral lines, they could harden international resolve and isolate terrorist groups and their sponsors.

In 1990s, the intensifying culture wars roiling American society increased conservatives’ reliance on moral clarity as a principle, including against terrorism. While the culture wars largely affected domestic policy, conservatives saw a foreign policy connection. Restoring moral absolutes was the only way to repair what they viewed as a relativistic and decadent society—one that lacked the self-confidence needed to counter foreign threats.

Conservatives only became more certain of the need for moral absolutes after 9/11. The prolific culture warrior and former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett founded “Americans for Victory against Terrorism” to counter leftist anti-war sentiment on college campuses. He described 9/11 as “a moment of moral clarity…when we began to rediscover ourselves as one people even as we began to gird for battle.” Total certainty in America’s virtue was necessary to unite the country around an expansive war against terrorism and the renewal of order and tradition at home. 

President George W. Bush echoed these principles, asserting that “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place.” Bush declared of Islamist extremists: “They hate our freedoms-our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree.”

Moral clarity, however, didn’t produce good policy decisions in the War on Terror. It encouraged Bush and his team to assume that the universality of liberal democracy would enable the transformation of internally riven societies that had never been democratic. These dreams collapsed in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Moral clarity also inhibited Bush from thinking through the difficult ethical trade-offs of counterterrorism policy. Even as he championed democracy as a means of moderating the anger that drove many to extremism, his administration worked with and even bolstered autocratic partners like Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to combat Al Qaeda. To facilitate operations in Afghanistan, for example, the Bush administration expanded its support of Islam Karimov’s regime in Uzbekistan. This dictatorship jailed and tortured opponents, helping radicalize Uzbek Islamists.

Because the U.S. was demanding cooperation against Al-Qaeda, Bush was in no position to push dictators to risk their own survival by instituting real reforms. Moral clarity proved elusive where the U.S. needed help from autocratic partners, even as those autocracies exacerbated the problem of extremism in the long run.

Finally, moral clarity prevented Bush from digging into the role American policy may have played in creating the grievances driving Al Qaeda. It is impossible to explain the rise of the terrorist group without reference to U.S. policies like its partnership with the Saudi government or its stationing of troops in the Persian Gulf in the 1990s. While none of these factors provided justification for the heinous attacks on 9/11, reevaluating U.S. policy could have helped forestall further extremism. 

While Bush’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan made a new breed of Republicans increasingly open to an America First, anti-interventionist foreign policy, they did not destroy the belief on both sides of the aisle that terrorism demanded moral clarity.

That has been clear since Oct. 7. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others have praised President Biden for “the moral clarity that you have demonstrated from the moment Israel was attacked.” Secretary of State Tony Blinken stated, “This is—this must be—a moment for moral clarity. The failure to unambiguously condemn terrorism puts at risk not only people in Israel, but people everywhere.”

Biden and Blinken are right that moral clarity provides a useful counterweight to those who have excused Hamas’ actions. It affirms that no cause, ideology, or set of real or imagined grievances can justify the deliberate slaughter of civilians. It also refutes the canard that “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” Hamas, like most terrorist groups, is not fighting for freedom or democracy, but only to solidify its power and impose its radical ideology.

Yet, as the War on Terror demonstrated, moral clarity has significant limitations and drawbacks. It can lead policymakers astray while failing to prepare them for the necessary trade offs that fighting terrorism requires. Moral clarity is also not a useful lens for understanding the roots of the extremism fueling terrorism, which is a necessary step for finding long-term solutions.

Learning this history can improve our response to the current situation. Denouncing terrorism unambiguously, as Biden has done, is a must. But the U.S. is now backing a far-right Netanyahu government that is eroding the rule of law in Israel, bolstering extremist groups, and making a resolution to the conflict unfeasible by supporting settlements in the West Bank. 

Once this crisis recedes, the U.S. should not let its rightful condemnation of Hamas prevent reconsideration of whether it needs to push Israel to take more steps—like ending the blockade of Gaza or stopping new settlements in the West Bank—that might produce peace by addressing Palestinian grievances.

Halting settlements will not lessen Hamas’ determination to destroy Israel. However, it may intensify many Palestinians’ growing disillusionment with Hamas by undermining its false claim to legitimacy as a resistance organization. If the U.S. cannot convince Israel to change course, this conflict will continue.

It’s true that terrorists, including Hamas, are radicals undertaking evil actions. Moreover, the horror of terrorism understandably prompts humane people to demand moral clarity. Yet, by explaining terrorism exclusively in these terms, moral clarity can hamper our capacity to address the problem. It can also feed a self-righteousness that, in the War on Terror, led to overreaction and self-inflicted blunders. Accepting the inevitability of some moral murkiness, therefore, is an unpleasant but important step.

Joseph Stieb is a historian and an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.

source https://time.com/6328097/hamas-terrorism-moral-clarity/

How a Tiny Team of Journalists Held the World’s Biggest Fishing Fleet to Account

ABOARD THE OCEAN WARRIOR on the South Atlantic – On the high seas roughly a thousand miles north of the Falkland Islands, an 18-year-old deckhand working on a Chinese squid ship nervously ducked into a dark hallway to whisper his plea for help. “Our passports were taken,” he said to me. “They won’t give them back.” 

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Instead of speaking more, he then began typing on his cell phone, for fear of being overheard. “Can you take us to the embassy in Argentina?” Just then, my minder rounded the corner and the deckhand abruptly walked away. Minutes later, I was ushered off the ship.

After I returned to shore, I contacted his family. “My heart really aches,” his older sister, a math teacher in Fujian, China, said, after hearing of her brother’s plea for help. Her family had begged him not to go to sea, but he was drawn to the idea of seeing other countries. She hadn’t known that he was being held captive, and she felt helpless to stop it. “He’s really too young,” she said. “And now there is nothing we can do, because he’s so far away.”

This was one of many stark encounters during a four-year investigation I conducted with an international team of reporters at sea and on land that revealed a broad pattern of severe human rights abuses tied to the global seafood industry. We focused on China because it has by far the largest high-seas fishing fleet and processes much of the world’s catch. 

The investigation documented cases of debt bondage, wage withholding, excessive working hours, beatings of deckhands, passport confiscation, the denial of timely access to medical care, and deaths from violence on hundreds of Chinese fishing ships. Data from just one port—Montevideo, Uruguay—showed that for much of the past decade, one dead body has been disembarked there per month, mostly from Chinese fishing ships. The State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both named China among countries most likely to engage in illegal labor practices in the seafood sector. The U.S. nonetheless imports much of its seafood from China. Half of the fish sticks served in U.S. public schools, for example, have been processed in China, according to a study by the Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers. The organization explained that state and large school districts have historically used USDA grants to purchase seafood directly from commercial vendors, many of which source from China.

This Chinese fleet is also categorized by The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime as the largest purveyor of illegal fishing in the world. Our reporting revealed Chinese vessels illegally entering the waters of other countries, disabling locational transponders in violation of Chinese law, breaking U.N. sanctions that prohibit foreigners fishing in North Korean waters, transmitting dual identities (or “spoofing”), finning of protected shark species, fishing without a license, and using prohibited gear. More than one hundred Chinese squid ships were found to have engaged in illegal fishing practices, including the dumping of excess catch back into the sea.

Journalists, especially from the West, are rarely, if ever, permitted aboard Chinese ships. To get a glimpse into this world, my team and I visited China’s fishing ships in their largest fishing grounds: near the Galapagos Islands; near the Falkland Islands; off the Coast of Gambia; and in the Sea of Japan, near Korea. Occasionally, Chinese captains permitted me to board their vessels to talk to crew, or to interview officers by radio. In many cases, the ships got spooked, pulling up their gear and fleeing the scene. “Don’t talk to these guys!” a Chinese captain yelled at another officer who was speaking to us over the radio. After this happened, we trailed the ships in a smaller and faster skiff to get close enough to throw aboard plastic bottles weighed down with rice and containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions. On several occasions, the deckhands quickly wrote their replies, often providing phone numbers for family back home, and then tossed the bottles back into the water. After returning to shore in foreign ports, we contacted families of the workers and interviewed several dozen additional former and current crew. 

Getting onto these ships was essential not just to hear from the crew, including some that said they were being held against their will, but also to experience first hand the gritty and dehumanizing conditions on board. Many deckhands spend over two years at sea without touching land or communicating with their families, and they work long shifts that often last more than twelve hours. Some contract beriberi, a disease caused by deficiencies in vitamin B1, also known as thiamine, and often induced by diets consisting mainly of foods such as white rice or instant noodles, which are low in this vitamin. The disease, fatal if left untreated, has historically appeared in prisons, asylums, and migrant camps, but it has largely been stamped out. Experts say that when it occurs at sea, beriberi often indicates criminal neglect because it is so easily treatable and avoidable. Ships often quickly run out of fresh fruit or vegetables, and conditions on board are filthy. The setting can feel surreal. On squid ships, which make up a large portion of the Chinese distant-water fleet, every surface is covered in oozy ink, and at night the decks are bathed in bright light from bowling ball-sized bulbs that are used to attract squid to the surface of the water.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese fishing ships often used Indonesian deckhands, but with the global lockdowns in response to the pandemic, captains shifted to primarily Chinese crews. Court records offered a rare window into the problem of Chinese-on-Chinese labor abuse, including the trafficking of workers, typically from poorer inland regions of the country. Labor contracts provided by former deckhands from fishing ships and online advertisements posted by recruiters showed how the unwitting and desperate are often targeted in schemes that amount to labor trafficking. 

The investigation also sought to chronicle labor concerns within China’s factories, where large amounts of the world’s seafood gets processed, including catch coming from European and U.S. ships and waters. Over the past decade, China has overseen a crackdown on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, a province in the far west of the country, setting up mass detention centers and forcing detainees to work in cotton plantations, tomato farms, and polysilicate mines. More recently, in an effort to disrupt Uyghur communities and find cheap labor for major industries, China has transferred Uyghurs to work in industries across the country. The U.S. government has described the country’s actions as a form of genocide.

Our investigations revealed for the first time that Uyghurs are also being transferred to work in the seafood industry. As part of its labor-transfer program, the Chinese government has been forcibly relocating thousands of Uyghur workers and sending them to plants on the other side of the country in Shandong province, a major seafood processing hub along the eastern coast. That Shandong is more than two thousand miles away from Xinjiang may have helped it evade scrutiny. But, as it turns out, we found that state-sponsored forced labor from Xinjiang is used extensively in the country’s seafood factories that supply hundreds of restaurants, grocers, and food-service companies in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. Since 2018, ten large seafood companies in China have used at least two thousand Uyghur laborers. During that time, these companies have exported at least forty-seven thousand tons of seafood (among it, some seventeen per cent of all squid) to dozens of American importers. 

In 2021, Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which declared that all products produced “wholly or in part” by workers from Xinjiang should be presumed to have involved state-imposed forced labor, and are therefore banned from the U.S. market. In the past year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seized more than a billion dollars of goods connected to Xinjiang, including electronics, clothing, and pharmaceuticals. Seafood has largely remained unquestioned.

Foreign journalists are generally forbidden from reporting in Xinjiang, and censors scrub the Chinese Internet of information about human rights issues. To get around these roadblocks, our team reviewed hundreds of pages of internal company newsletters, local news reports, a database of Uyghur testimonies, trade data, and satellite and cell phone imagery to verify the location of processing plants. We watched thousands of videos uploaded to the Internet, mostly to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which showed Uyghur laborers; we verified that the users had initially registered in Xinjiang; and we had specialists review the languages used in the videos. We also hired investigators in China to discreetly visit several plants using Uyghur workers.

One video uploaded to Douyin provided us with a glimpse of what these transfers look like. In April, for example, a group of roughly a hundred and thirty men and women stood in orderly lines in front of the train station in the city of Kashgar, in Xinjiang. The people were Uyghurs, one of China’s largest ethnic minorities, and they stood watching a farewell ceremony held in their honor by the local government. A banner reads, “Promote mass employment and build societal harmony.” At the end of the video, drone footage pans back to show trains waiting to take the men and women across the country, where they will be put to work.

We also identified North Korean labor used in China’s seafood-processing industry. The Chinese government has largely scrubbed references to these workers from the internet, but by using the search term “North Korean beauties,” we found dozens of videos on Douyin of what appear to be female seafood-plant workers, most posted by male employees. One Chinese commenter said the women “have a strong sense of nationalism and identity and are self-disciplined!” Another pointed out that the workers have no choice but to obey orders, or “their family members will suffer.”

This type of investigative journalism tends to have more impact if you can demonstrate the tie between crimes and consumers. As a result, we tried to connect the supply-chain dots from the abuses at sea or in the Chinese factories to the global brands, buyers, and sellers of this seafood. This goal is distinctly difficult with seafood because in the many handoffs of catch between fishing boats, carrier ships, processing plants and exporters, there are gaping holes in traceability.

We relied heavily on two satellite tools to track ships and to identify illegal or suspicious behavior, including when ships turned off their transponders for longer than seven days, a practice prohibited by Chinese law. These included Skylight, a fisheries monitoring tool built by the Allen Institute for AI, and Global Fishing Watch. In some cases, we hired investigators in China to covertly follow trucks carrying seafood from Shidao port to factories. Trade data then allowed us to track exports from processing plants to stores and restaurants abroad.  

In order to get a view inside the processing facilities, we used cell-phone footage from workers in seafood plants that had been published on Douyin. This footage often featured frozen squid bags showing useful details like vessel names or brand labels, providing the reporters another way to connect ships tied to illegal behavior or factories using forced labor to consumers that consume the seafood. We authenticated the locations where the videos were taken by using Google Earth Pro satellite imagery. Google Lens searches for the unique export codes of Chinese processing plants returned images of packaging with those codes. The reporting team used these codes, along with information from Chinese and American trade databases, to trace the full supply chain.

Our trips at sea to visit the Chinese fleet were facilitated by hitching rides with willing partners. In some cases, national-fishery law-enforcement authorities or private fishing-boat captains agreed to taxi us to target the various fishing grounds around the world. In other instances, ocean-conservation groups, including Sea Shepherd, EarthRace, and Greenpeace, transported the team to high-seas locations of interest. 

To ensure that the reporting would carry global impact, we partnered with two dozen newspapers and magazines in as many countries to publish the findings while also providing reporters from these outlets with country-specific memos tailored for their distinct audiences so these journalists could carry the investigation forward in a way that spoke to their particular audiences. 

Other elements of this journalism project also make it distinct. 

To offer a more intimate and humanizing perspective on why someone, whether Chinese or a foreigner, might choose to take a dangerous, often exploitative job on these ships, we produced a documentary film that follows a fictional character: a young man from China who is deciding whether to follow in his father’s footsteps and work on a Chinese squid jigger. The fictional narrator of the film is an amalgamation drawn from interviews with dozens of deckhands, and he provides a glimpse into a sense of national pride, adventure, and duty that may motivate someone to take this work. The film also makes the point that the U.S. and much of the West may be apt to cast judgment on the brutality of the fleet, but American diners are among the primary consumers of seafood produced on these ships.

We took two steps to heighten the transparency of our reporting process. The first was to publish the sourcing behind most of the facts, figures, and analysis that appear in our dozens of stories. The second was to present a webpage that showed all of our interactions with the more than 300 companies, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations that were associated with the problematic behaviors we uncovered. This page included contact information and the emails we exchanged back and forth with companies, in which they defended themselves or answered our questions, so that advocates, journalists, and policymakers could see in raw fashion the full version of those discussions, and potentially follow up in the future. 

In case we were wondering whether we had tapped into something bigger, there were constant reminders that the problems we were identifying were likely pervasive in the industry. In June 2023, a woman named Silvina González was walking along a beach in Maldonado, Uruguay, picking up trash, when she found a small plastic bottle holding a napkin with black writing in Mandarin. It started with the abbreviation SOS. She quickly sent a photo of the message to her brother-in-law, who spoke Mandarin and sent back a translation: “Hello, I am a crew member of the ship Lu Qing Yuan Yu 765, and I was locked up by the company. When you see this paper, please help me call the police! Help-help.”

Sixteen months before the message in a bottle washed up on Uruguayan shores, my team and I were in the South Atlantic chasing down ships from the Lu Qing Yuan Yu fleet. One of them was the ship named in the message.

This story was produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization in Washington, D.C. Reporting and writing was contributed by Ian Urbina, Daniel Murphy, Joe Galvin, Maya Martin, Susan Ryan, Austin Brush, and Jake Conley.

source https://time.com/6328528/investigation-chinese-fishing-fleet-ian-urbina-essay/

The U.S. Energy Department Is Spending $36 Million On Ocean Carbon-Capture Research

In recent years, startups have begun trying to scale up methods to use the world’s oceans to remove carbon dioxide from an overheating atmosphere. As of today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is getting in on the idea too. As TIME can exclusively report, the department is distributing $36 million to 11 scientific projects across the U.S. that aim to help quantify exactly how much carbon potential ocean projects would be locking away.

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The basic idea behind ocean-based carbon removal has been around for decades: With a bit of human manipulation, the oceans could—theoretically—suck up billions of tons of carbon dioxide and take care of some of the world’s climate woes. Humans could dump alkaline materials like lime into the water to suck up greenhouse gasses (ocean water gets more acidic as it absorbs more CO2), or potentially use iron filings to create algal blooms, which would absorb carbon as they grow. We could even start sinking plant biomass into the deep ocean (thus preventing it from decomposing and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere).

In recent years, climate investors drawn by the promise of lucrative carbon offset contracts and predictions from scientists that humanity will need to find a way to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the decades ahead have started pouring money into startups pledging to prove out such approaches. It’s a subset of the nascent, venture capital fueled carbon removal industry, which also includes better known approaches like ClimeWorks’s carbon-sucking fans in Iceland.

Read more: The Ocean is the Next Frontier for the Carbon Removal Industry

Right now, such approaches are only able to remove a negligible amount of carbon from the atmosphere—and they would need to be scaled up hundreds of thousands or even millions of times more to make a difference in the decades ahead. There is no way to tell whether such an expansion can or will happen. And if they work, such engineering-heavy carbon removal methods—or simpler efforts like planting millions of trees—would need to come in alongside rapid worldwide emissions cuts in order for humanity to meet its climate goals.

Ocean-based methods of carbon removal could have particular promise compared to other methods. Many proposed approaches would essentially speed up natural processes that already cause ocean water to draw CO2 out of the atmosphere. There are also problems, though: for instance, legal issues around working in international waters, and unknown effects on ocean ecosystems. Then there’s the potential public relations problem: climate change is very bad, and we’re running out of time to implement solutions, but we have yet to see if, for the public, engineering the oceans will be a bridge too far (efforts to study how humans might engineer the atmosphere, for their part, have stirred up considerable controversy). And then there’s the issue of actually measuring how much carbon the oceans are absorbing, which would be essential for separating good projects from bad, and preventing a proliferation of bogus offsetting claims like those that have plagued more traditional efforts like planting trees. 

That last problem has caught the eye of ARPA-E, an office within the Energy Department specializing in developing new technologies. Earlier this year it launched a program to help develop sensors and computer models that could one day help determine exactly how much carbon dioxide ocean-based carbon removal concepts are pulling out of the atmosphere. Today, it announced that it was funding a series of research proposals to that end submitted by scientists and engineers around the country.

“Reaching President Biden’s ambitious decarbonization goals and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change will require a wide range of innovative climate solutions, from common-sense approaches like improving energy efficiency to novel applications like utilizing the ocean’s natural carbon removal abilities to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from the atmosphere,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in a press release. “With critical funding from DOE, project teams from across the country will develop groundbreaking new technologies to cut emissions that will help combat the climate crisis while reinforcing America’s global leadership in the clean energy industries of the future.”

One proposal from General Electric’s research division, which received about $4 million in government funding, proposed to develop a miles-long fiber optic cable that boats could tow through the water to measure ocean carbon. A project from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin that would aim to develop acoustic sensors to measure how much carbon is being stored in seagrass beds received $2 million. Another project from a small company in Cambridge, Mass. that would try to design new software that could model ocean dynamics 100 times faster than current methods can, received a grant of $2.5 million.

The ARPA-E funding follows a slew of other announcements signaling the Biden Administration’s strong interest in ocean carbon removal. An “Ocean Climate Action Plan” released by a White House committee in March stated that “a substantial ramp up in marine [carbon removal] research and development investments, and enhanced interagency coordination is needed to evaluate efficacy and ensure safe and effective implementation and regulation of these techniques to mitigate climate change.” In September, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that it would distribute about $24 million in funding to study ocean carbon removal. Earlier this month, the White House formed a “Fast-Track Action Committee” of government experts, who will evaluate different ocean carbon removal approaches.

Matt Long, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and director of [C]Worthy, a nonprofit aiming to help build tools to measure and verify ocean carbon removal, is working on a project that received about $3.9 million in ARPA-E’s announcement today. He says that the grants won’t be enough to do all of the scientific work that is necessary in the field, but that it does provide an important signal to private investors and philanthropists that the government is interested in ocean-based carbon removal innovation, and in making sure that there is hard science to back up its proponents’ claims. 

“The hope is that, in combination with venture capital and philanthropic support, we can really establish a foundation for the industry to grow,” Long says. 

source https://time.com/6328555/energy-department-funding-ocean-carbon-capture-research/

City of Orlando Buys Pulse Nightclub Property to Build Memorial to Massacre Victims

ORLANDO, Fla. — The city of Orlando is moving forward with plans to create a memorial on the property of the Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were massacred seven years ago.

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City leaders agreed Monday night to purchase the property for $2 million. Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said they plan a collaborative approach, working with families of the victims to create the memorial.

On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen opened fire in the gay nightclub, killing 49 and wounding another 53 people. At the time, it was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. But that number was surpassed the following year when 58 people were killed and more than 850 were injured among a crowd of 22,000 at a country music festival in Las Vegas.

A SWAT team killed Mateen, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, following a standoff.

Plans to build the memorial had been in the works for years, but the nonprofit onePulse Foundation announced earlier this year that it was scaling back plans for a $100 million memorial following fundraising challenges.

The building still stands, surrounded by a temporary display that honors the victims.

“We look forward to being a part of the discussion with the City of Orlando as this moves forward,” a statement from the onePulse Foundation said.

source https://time.com/6328422/city-of-orlando-buys-pulse-nightclub-property-to-build-memorial-to-massacre-victims/

Mike Johnson Would Be the Least Experienced Speaker Since 1883

After three weeks of infighting over who should lead the lower chamber, House Republicans are on the cusp of installing a new Speaker in Rep. Mike Johnson, a social conservative from Louisiana who, if elected, would be the least experienced House Speaker in decades.

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The choice has triggered a mix of reactions within the party, with some hailing it as a unifying moment and others expressing concerns about his qualifications and controversial stances, including his role in seeking to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. The House is expected to vote Wednesday on whether to give him the gavel, following 22 days of deliberation, 14 candidates, four nominees, and three floor votes.

While it remains to be seen if he has enough votes to be elected, the enthusiasm among some House GOP members and the absence of vocal opposition from others marked a significant shift after a period of turmoil. “Democracy is messy sometimes, but it is our system. This conference that you see, this House Republican majority, is united,” Johnson said Tuesday night, flanked by an exuberant conference cheering his name.

Johnson, 51, was first elected to the House in 2016. He gained recognition for his involvement in conservative policy circles and became the chair of the Republican Study Committee in 2019. But if elected, Johnson would be the least experienced Speaker in 140 years, with just four terms in the House and no senior leadership roles or full committee chairmanships under his belt. The lack of experience may pose some challenges, especially given the complexities of the role. Julian Zelizer, a political historian and professor at Princeton University, says that most House Speakers tend to be drawn from senior lawmakers or those in the party leadership who have been in office for some time, rather than rank-and-file members. “The elevation of the least experienced is not usually the strategy for the party,” he says. “It has a big impact. The GOP would elect someone with weak personal ties in the House, lack of institutional knowledge, and without the personal memory of how different things seem to unfold. You also end up with someone who has the least commitment to government as an institution.”

As Speaker, Johnson would need to oversee a large staff and manage a substantial national fundraising apparatus—and he is far from a prolific fundraiser, which is a key responsibility for party leaders. His campaign raised about $1.3 million in the 2022 election cycle, a fraction of the $28 million raised by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign.

But while Johnson’s lack of experience might pose some challenges, it could also be what helps him get elected, says Matthew Green, a politics professor at Catholic University who authored a book on the historical role of House Speakers. “It’s almost like picking a Supreme Court Justice who has never written any prior decisions,” Green says. “We just don’t know what he’s going to be like. I think it’s one of the big reasons that he got the nod and will likely be elected, because every member and every faction can sort of look at him and see something they like.”

(To wit: asked about working with Johnson on spending issues, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told CNN that she doesn’t know him and was going to Google him.)

Despite being relatively unknown on the national stage or even among other lawmakers, one significant point of contention surrounds Johnson’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. He led the organization of an amicus brief, signed by 125 House Republicans, supporting a Texas-led lawsuit seeking to intervene in the vote counting in key swing states won by Biden. Asked by a reporter about his role in attempting to overturn the election on Tuesday night, Johnson responded “next question” as Republicans beside him booed.

His stance on various hot-button issues, including abortion, civil rights, and free speech, along with his positions on foreign policy and federal spending, have also concerned some moderates. He has expressed opposition to continued funding for the war in Ukraine, which could become a divisive issue for him to navigate. 

Despite these concerns, Johnson’s nomination appears to have quelled the chaos within the House GOP, and his ascension could bring some stability to the divided conference that has hindered legislative progress for three weeks. If his colleagues elect him, the position may come with a steep learning curve for Johnson himself. “The speakership is unique in the amount of skill that’s required to do well, and some of that comes from experience,” Green says. “It’s through experience that you learn the ins-and-outs of House procedure, you learn more about your colleagues, and you also get to know the dynamics of working with the Senate and with the White House and with the press. Those are things that Speakers have to deal with to a much greater degree than a rank-and-file member.”

source https://time.com/6328412/mike-johnson-speaker-republicans-experience/