The Māui dolphin seafood ban is a rare win for conservationists – but just how significant is it?

Māui dolphin and the New Zealand sea lion are on a countdown to extinction – so why do politicians drag their feet?

The list of victories in marine conservationists’ never-ending struggle to halt the degradation of oceans is very short.

And so the decision of a United States court to place a temporary ban on New Zealand seafood exports from Māui dolphins’ habitat was greeted with first astonishment – taking even litigants Sea Shepherd by surprise – and then celebration.

But the courtroom win was not just a much-needed morale boost: it may be an important milestone in the battle to save other threatened native marine species.

“It is such a big deal,” says Liz Slooten, of Otago University’s zoology department. “This is probably the biggest thing that’s happened for Māui and Hector's dolphin conservation in decades.”

READ MORE:
* Only 54 Māui dolphins remain, leaked Department of Conservation report shows

* DoC faces questions over ‘hidden’ Hector’s catch

* How New Zealand's 63 Māui dolphins hold the key to a $263m export market

“To my knowledge, this is the first time that a major trading partner said to New Zealand: we're happy to buy your products, but only if your environmental standard’s the same as ours. And won't be the last time.”

Ever since we have known about them, Māui dolphins have been in peril.

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
Māui dolphins, swimming between Port Waikato and the entrance to the Manukau harbour.

In 2002, the North Island Hector's dolphin was re-classified as a separate subspecies. Giving them their new official name: Cephalrynchus hectori maui, then-conservation minister Chris Carter warned there were perhaps only 100-150 still alive “making them as rare as the kākāpō”.

Their discovery sparked a long, futile battle to stop the species teetering into extinction. And the nocturnal, flightless parrot has fared much better: an intensive recovery and breeding programme had already started to show results when Carter made the comparison.

Two decades later, the kākāpō population now sits at 252. Māui went the other way – the population has crashed to about 50, collateral damage in our insatiable drive for economic growth.

Commercial set nets (or gill nets) are deemed to be the main human activity that threatens their survival as they roam shallow coastal areas and forage in harbours and estuaries along the West Coast of the North Island. (There are other possible threats – pollution, littering and a parasite found in cat poo).

It’s a gruesome death for a winsome, gentle creature. When a dolphin swims into a fishing net, often invisible in murky waters, it becomes entangled. Its lungs are small, roughly the same size as humans’, and within minutes it begins to suffocate.

Desperate to avoid drowning, it thrashes and struggles, breaking teeth or fins. The nets cut into its flesh.

BRUCE MERCER/WAIKATO TIMES
Twenty years ago, comparisons were drawn between the plight of the kākāpō and Māui dolphin. But the parrot population now outstrips that of the tiny marine mammal.

Over the years, successive governments have implemented plans to protect Māui, now recognised as the world’s rarest dolphin. Many marine conservationists agree these measures – mainly restrictions on commercial fishing – are half-hearted.

Deeply frustrated, Sea Shepherd began looking for other avenues. Direct action – the campaigns they are famous for – wasn’t an option in domestic waters, where authorities could arrest protesters and impound vessels.

Onshore, efforts were thwarted at every turn by a well-connected and politically savvy fishing industry, and a complex debate about a property right in fisheries for Māori, which is entrenched in law.

“It's very, very hard to get any more protection for marine life in New Zealand,” says Michael Lawry, managing director of Sea Shepherd New Zealand. So campaigners looked overseas, learning of legal action taken by conservation groups against the Trump administration.

In 2018, activists secured a ban in the US courts on seafood imports from Mexico caught with gill nets that were wiping out the critically endangered vaquita porpoise. With just 15 left, almost half the population drowned each year.

Inspired, Sea Shepherd took on the might of the US Government, with a lawsuit against the Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, NOAA Fisheries, and the Treasury Department. Jacinda Ardern’s Government joined the US defendants in fighting the case.

The marine conservationists petitioned the US Court of International Trade, adopting a similar argument: that New Zealand is not applying protections equal to those in place in US waters for critically endangered marine mammals.

They got lucky: the New York-based judge assigned to the case, Gary Katzmann, also oversaw the vaquita porpoise proceedings. Three years later, he granted a preliminary order immediately banning the import of snapper, tarakihi, spotted dogfish, trevally, warehou, hoki, barracouta, mullet, and gurnard caught in the dolphin habitat. In a ruling totalling more than 70 pages, he said the case is “likely to succeed”. It could take months to come back before the court. The ban could cost up to $2m a year in exports.

Lawry says the decision sends a strong signal that stronger regulatory control is needed. But the $4bn industry was quick to dismiss the ruling as procedural.

STUFF
With only 10-15 vaquita porpoise left, there’s a sad probability they’ll disappear in our lifetime.

Jeremy Helson​, chief executive of Seafood New Zealand, said: “Any assertion that this ruling in any way is a criticism of the Ministry for Primary Industries risk management decisions around Māui dolphins is not reflected in the court documents. The court has yet to issue its ruling on the substantive issues of the case.”

Teall Crossen​, an environmental barrister, doesn’t agree. She says the judge’s opinion was engaged on the substance of the case.

That comes down to how the two countries deal with the human-caused deaths of marine mammals.

The US has a zero mortality goal – and imposes strict requirements if the number of those deaths start to have an impact on the sustainability of a population.


BRADEN FASTIER/NELSON MAIL
McDonald’s in the US buys a lot of hoki, the main ingredient of its fish sandwich.

In New Zealand, any action is at ministerial discretion. The Government also chooses to use the Fisheries Act to make decisions about restrictions – not the stronger Marine Mammals Protection Act.

“Basically, the US law says you have to do something ... in New Zealand, it’s quite extraordinary that there’s no legal requirement,” Crossen says.

“If you want to protect marine mammals you have the ability [under the Marine Mammals Protection Act] to prohibit activities, and you can only do that if it's reasonable. When you’ve got 50 or 60 dolphins left, that would be reasonable. Under the Fisheries Act that you have to balance it with the utilisation of the fisheries resources. It gives them an escape clause.”

Crossen says the case may do significant harm to New Zealand’s international reputation.

“It exposes that the Government is not doing everything it can to protect one of the world’s rarest marine animals. It does seem that the US law is stronger.”

Slooten, who has been studying Hector’s dolphins since 1984 and was an expert witness in the case, says other countries are starting to take notice of where their fish comes from.

It is likely the US will require a traceability programme – and if New Zealand cannot prove where fish are caught, that could cost upwards of $200m worth of exports.

The European Union – one of the world’s largest markets for seafood – already has strict rules about product tracking and in recent years has taken a firm line on countries it believes are failing to deal with illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

International environmental organisations are now putting pressure on the trading bloc to ensure that imported products are not contributing to the depletion of endangered species, such as sea turtles.

Slooten says the International Whaling Commission has already judged New Zealand’s measures inadequate, and has asked independent experts to review the model it is based on.

“To be blunt, the fishing industry don't seem to care very much for the dolphins, but they do care about dollars. Finally, someone has thought of an incentive that will get them to pull their finger out and solve this problem.”

But the industry disagrees that fishing is the problem – and says restrictions are working. Helson says vessel camera monitoring in the last two years “has seen no Māui or Hector’s dolphins at all, let alone any captures”.

Sanford chief executive Peter Reidie says his company – the country’s largest – withdrew from Māui habitat in 2016 “to avoid fishing where these beautiful creatures might be”. The company also supports a drone tracking programme.

He says remaining crews have changed their fishing methods.

“All this good work might be overshadowed by an attack via the courts by an organisation that has not been in touch with us as fishers to understand all the measures we have in place to keep all dolphins, but particularly Māui, safe from any risk presented by fishing.”

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF
Could court action in the US extend to other threatened species – such as the New Zealand sea lion?

Buoyed by the win, advocates are already eyeing the decision with a view to future action. Lawry says Sea Shepherd believes there is scope for a similar case involving the plight of the NZ sea lion, or rāpoka, the world’s rarest.

With only 12,000 left, the commercial squid trawl fishery overlaps with foraging territory of the sea lions which breed at the Auckland Islands, and has led to the accidental capture in fishing gear. In 2019, Sanford voluntarily pulled all of its fishing vessels after catching five in the first eight weeks of the season.

Leatherback turtles are also captured in the surface longline fishery off the east coast of the North Island, and activists are also hoping a door may open for New Zealand’s imperilled seabirds – four native penguin species are already on its endangered species list.

The Antipodean albatross, likely extinct within 2-3 decades is also a casualty of the huge US tuna market.

Dec 12 2022

Japan picks 'war' as kanji character of the year

Agence France-Presse
December 12, 2022

The character is chosen in an annual event © STR / JIJI PRESS/AFP

Japan chose the kanji character for war on Monday as the symbol for 2022 after a year marked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the assassination of former leader Shinzo Abe.

The public votes in the annual event for the written character they think best represents the past year. Olympic-themed choices dominated 2021.

The mood was darker this year, however, according to the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, which organises the vote.

"The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the shooting of former Prime Minister Abe, and the rapid yen depreciation and inflation faced in daily life have caused anxiety for many people," the group said in a news release.

Japanese TV stations broadcast the announcement live, with Seihan Mori, master of the ancient Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto, writing the character on a large white panel with an ink-soaked calligraphy brush.

"I was surprised, frustrated, angry and sad by the war in Ukraine. I am also angry at myself for not being able to do anything about it," said one voter who picked the character.

Abe was shot in July by a man who reportedly resented the Unification Church over massive donations his mother made to the sect.

War -- also picked to represent sporting battles in baseball and at the World Cup -- was followed in the rankings by a character meaning both cheap and safe, with the weak yen and inflation adding to feelings of insecurity.

The character for fun and easy was ranked third, with one voter citing the opening of the Studio Ghibli theme park.

Japan chose "gold" as kanji of the year last year in honour of the Tokyo Olympics, which took place after a Covid-19 virus postponement.

The 2020 winner was "mitsu", meaning dense, crowded and close: three situations people in Japan were urged to avoid to prevent Covid-19 infection.

© 2022 AFP

France bets on tech and transparency to beat Chinese caviar

Agence France-Presse

France wants its caviar to become the gold standard 

At the fish farm near Bordeaux, Christophe Baudoin is running an ultrasound device over the belly of a large sturgeon to check its eggs.

"Caviar!" he shouts as the monitor shows the right sparkle around each little round ball.

"Over-mature!" comes the next shout, indicating the fish's pregnancy cycle has gone too far and the eggs have softened -- losing the crucial crunch. It will go back in the lake to await another cycle in two years.

For the company, Sturia, it's an incredibly laborious process -- they ultrasound some 20,000 fish a year for a total of 300 tonnes of caviar -- but climate change has made it vital.

Many fish are coming out "over-mature", in part because warmer waters have accelerated the pregnancy cycle.

For the guys standing in the water, scooping up the huge fish for inspection, the winter days when 10 centimeters (four inches) of ice coated the lakes are not entirely missed.

But the change is still shocking.

"It's been 10 years since we've seen any ice on these lakes," said Baudoin.

One in five of the fish died in 2021 when water temperatures hit 30 degrees, five degrees above a sturgeon's comfort zone.

"You might not know each one by name, but it's never nice to pull out a dead fish -- and of course the cost for the group is enormous," said Sturia boss Laurent Dulau.

Extinction threat

Fished to the brink of extinction in the wild -- including the once-rich Russian and Iranian waters of the Caspian Sea -- sturgeon now exist almost exclusively in farms, most of them in China.

Sturgeon were fished in France's Gironde river for centuries, but their eggs were given to children, old people and pigs until Russian nobles fleeing the Communist revolution a century ago showed locals their potential.

It became a delicacy in Paris after Armenian emigrants Melkoum and Mouchegh Petrossian convinced the Ritz Hotel in Paris to serve caviar in the 1920s.

Farming only started in France in the 1990s, and since it takes up to a decade to raise a sturgeon, progress is painstaking.

Unable to compete with China on quantity, French producers focus on sustainable and healthy farming.

The ultrasound avoids unnecessary killing and Sturia sends the meat to be used for rillettes pate, the collagen-rich gonads for cosmetics, and the skin for leather and a specialist glue favoured by violin-makers.

'Produce better'

Dulau said the focus on traceability and quality is rebuilding caviar's image after the over-fishing crisis.

"The idea is to produce less, but produce better," he said. "People will eat less because it's a lot more expensive, but it will be so good that they'll be satisfied."

But Michel Berthommier, of nearby Caviar Perlita, is frustrated that "nine out of 10, maybe 10 out of 10" French restaurants still source from China. He blamed middle-men for preferring the mark-up on foreign eggs.

"It's bizarre at a time when restaurants are always saying they source their products locally. We sell more to Singapore than restaurants 10 kilometers down the road," he said.

But he said the transparency of French production will win over buyers.

"There used to be a mystery around how these fish were raised and harvested. We have opened our books on how our fish live, how they are fed and selected.

"We can't be number one in production, but we can lead the way in creativity and science."

Hungary: What's Viktor Orban's problem with Ukraine?
Keno Verseck
12/12/2022

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Hungary has been blocking EU support for the war-torn country. This is nothing new: Ukraine has long been a hostage of Viktor Orban's domestic and foreign policies.

"A veto game," "a foreign policy low," "running amok" — these are just some of the phrases used by independent Hungarian media in recent days to describe Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's veto of EU financial assistance for Ukraine. The weekly newspaper HVG even asked, "What does the Orban government actually have against the loan for Ukraine?"

For months, there has been speculation as to whether Hungary really would veto the bloc's planned €18 billion loan ($19 billion) for Ukraine. Right up to the end, many European politicians hoped that Orban was bluffing.



But on December 6, Orban really did carry out his threat and blocked the financial package in Brussels. A short time later, he took to Twitter to deny Hungary had used its veto: "This is fake news. [...] No veto, no blackmailing." He also said that Hungry was willing to support Ukraine on a bilateral basis.

Whether it was a real veto or not, Hungary's blocking of EU aid for Ukraine is the most recent low in an already problematic relationship between the two countries. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, there has been a whole series of such lows.
Hungary's stance on Russia's invasion of Ukraine

To begin with, Orban and his government were slow to condemn Russia's aggression and describe it as contrary to international law. To this day, Orban speaks of a "Russian–Ukrainian war." He also repeatedly emphasizes that "this is not our war" and says that it is a "dispute that the relevant parties should settle among themselves."

Viktor Orban caused consternation in Ukraine and Romania when he wore a scarf with a map of Hungary's pre-World War I territory, which included parts of modern-day Romania and Ukraine

Image: facebook.com/orbanviktor

Orban recently said that Hungary was interested in having a "sovereign state between Russia and Central Europe that we will, for the sake of simplicity, now call Ukraine." A short time later, he was photographed at a match involving the Hungarian soccer team wearing a scarf with an image of "Greater Hungary" — the territory covered by Hungary until the end of World War I, which included parts of modern-day Ukraine.

Orban's strategic use of Hungary's veto in the EU

Although Hungary has for the most part gone along with the EU's sanctions against Russia, it did veto planned sanctions against Patriarch Kirill, who is the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and a notorious warmonger.

Orban has, however, negotiated sweeping exemptions for his country such as on the boycott of Russian oil. He has also repeatedly voiced harsh criticism of sanctions against Russia. Indeed the government in Budapest is currently running a campaign in Hungary that accuses the EU of destroying Hungary's economy with its anti-Russian sanctions.

In June, Hungary threatened to veto the adoption of the EU's sixth sanction package to have Russian Patriarch Kirill removed from the EU's sanction list

Image: Alexander Nemenov/AFP

What's more, Orban has rejected the delivery of arms to Ukraine, refusing to allow the transit of weapons shipments through Hungarian territory.
Viktor Orban: Former supporter of Ukraine

So what is Orban's problem with Ukraine? It is worth noting that Hungary's prime minister was once an emphatic supporter of a democratic Ukraine with Euro-Atlantic ambitions.

At its summit in Bucharest in April 2008, NATO decided not to admit Ukraine and Georgia to the military alliance. A few months later, just after the start of Russia's war against Georgia, Orban said that this had been a bad decision. At the time, he was still a member of the opposition.

Support for Ukraine's Hungarian minority

But Orban sang a very different tune once he became prime minister in 2010. There has been considerable ill-feeling between Hungary and Ukraine because of the Hungarian minority living in the western Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia. When Orban became prime minister in 2010, just under 200,000 ethnic Hungarians lived there; today, this figure has dropped to 130,000.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, the alliance decided not to admit Georgia and Ukraine to NATO, a move Viktor Orban later described as a bad decision

Image: Vladimir Rodionov/dpa/picture-alliance

Budapest was, for example, unhappy about a planned Ukrainian language law that was primarily intended to reduce the influence of the Russian language in Ukraine. Orban's government felt it also targeted the Hungarian minority in the country.
Accusations of separatism

The welfare of Hungarian minorities living in Hungary's neighboring counties has been a continual concern of governments in Budapest in the post-communist era. But after 2010, Orban took things several steps further.

Just a few weeks after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Orban gave a speech in which he called for autonomy, collective rights and the right to dual citizenship for the Hungarian minority in Ukraine. His choice of words left him open to accusations of separatism.

Secret citizenship

Hungary has on a number of occasions since 2017 — and most recently in early February 2022 — vetoed NATO cooperation with Ukraine because of Ukraine's policy on minorities.

In September 2018, the issue of dual citizenship caused a major diplomatic rift between the two countries. At the time, a leaked video showed Ukrainian citizens at the Hungarian consulate in Berehove (Beregszasz) secretly being granted Hungarian citizenship, which was against the law in Ukraine.
Courting far-right voters in Hungary

Ever since, diplomatic relations between Hungary and Ukraine have been icy. The visit to Kyiv by Hungarian President Katalin Novak, a loyal Orban supporter, at the end of November is unlikely to have changed this.

Hungarian President Katalin Novak's visit to Kyiv in late November is unlikely to have thawed the icy relations between neighbors Hungary and Ukraine

Image: Szilard Koszticsak/AP Photo/picture alliance

Overall, however, Orban's Ukraine policy is less likely to be about the country itself and more about other domestic and foreign policy priorities. With his ambivalent words about autonomy for the Hungarian minority in Ukraine or the statehood and sovereignty of that country, Orban is above all targeting far-right voters in Hungary who still dream of a "Greater Hungary" and its pre-1918 boundaries.
EU politicians believe Orban is blackmailing the bloc

On the foreign policy front, Hungary's close ties to Russia are more important to Orban than a good relationship with Ukraine. The reason for this is simple: Hungary is dependent on Russian energy supplies. In other words, every anti-Ukrainian statement from Budapest is also an indirect declaration of loyalty to Moscow.

Hungary's close ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin (right) are more important to Viktor Orban (left) than a good relationship with Ukraine

Image: Sputnik via REUTERS

Such statements include Orban's repeated insinuations that the West is to blame for Russia's war on Ukraine. He seems to be increasingly of the conviction that "the West" — and in particular the USA — pushed Russia into the war against Ukraine and is now waging a proxy war there.

But for Orban, it is also about having a means of exerting pressure on the EU in the matter of the yearslong dispute about the rule of law in Hungary. The EU will soon be deciding whether to withhold billions of euros in funding for Hungary because of corruption and deficiencies in the rule of law there. Even if Orban disputes the fact, there is hardly a politician in the EU that doubts that Hungary is blackmailing the EU with its veto on financial assistance for Ukraine.

In short, Ukraine has long been a hostage of Orban's domestic and foreign policies. But the person who benefits most from all this is not Hungary's prime minister himself, but someone else entirely, namely Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This article was originally published in German.

Robots Set Their Sights On A New Job: Sewing Blue Jeans

By Timothy Aeppel
12/12/22 

A worker uses a sanding block to distress the surface of new blue jeans at Saitex's factory in Los Angeles, California, U.S. September 21, 2022. REUTERS

Will a robot ever make your blue jeans?

There is a quiet effort underway to find out -- involving clothing and technology companies, including Germany's Siemens AG and Levi Strauss & Co.

"Clothing is the last trillion-dollar industry that hasn't been automated," said Eugen Solowjow, who heads a project at a Siemens lab in San Francisco that has worked on automating apparel manufacturing since 2018.

The idea of using robots to bring more manufacturing back from overseas gained momentum during the pandemic as snarled supply chains highlighted the risks of relying on distant factories.

Finding a way to cut out handwork in China and Bangladesh would allow more clothing manufacturing to move back to Western consumer markets, including the United States. But that's a sensitive topic.

Many apparel makers are hesitant to talk about the quest for automation -- since that sparks worries that workers in developing countries will suffer. Jonathan Zornow, who has developed a technique to automate some parts of jeans factories, said he has received online criticism -- and one death threat.

A spokesperson for Levi's said he could confirm the company participated in the early phases of the project but declined to comment further.

THE FLOPPY CLOTH PROBLEM

Sewing poses a particular challenge for automation.

Unlike a car bumper or a plastic bottle, which holds its shape as a robot handles it, cloth is floppy and comes in an endless array of thicknesses and textures. Robots simply don't have the deft touch possible with human hands. To be sure, robots are improving, but it will take years to fully develop their ability to handle fabric, according to five researchers interviewed by Reuters.

But what if enough of it could be done by machine to at least close some of the cost differential between the United States and low-cost foreign factories? That's the focus of the research effort now underway.

Work at Siemens grew out of efforts to create software to guide robots that could handle all types of flexible materials, such as thin wire cables, said Solowjow, adding that they soon realized one of the ripest targets was clothing. The global apparel market is estimated to be worth $1.52 trillion, according to independent data platform Statista.

Siemens worked with the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute in Pittsburgh, created in 2017 and funded by the Department of Defense to help old-line manufacturers find ways to use the new technology. They identified a San Francisco startup with a promising approach to the floppy fabric problem. Rather than teach robots how to handle cloth, the startup, Sewbo Inc., stiffens the fabric with chemicals so it can be handled more like a car bumper during production. Once complete, the finished garment is washed to remove the stiffening agent.

"Pretty much every piece of denim is washed after it's made anyway, so this fits into the existing production system," said Zornow, Sewbo's inventor.

ENLISTING ROBOTS

This research effort eventually grew to include several clothing companies, including Levi's and Bluewater Defense LLC, a small U.S.-based maker of military uniforms. They received $1.5 million in grants from the Pittsburgh robotics institute to experiment with the technique.

There are other efforts to automate sewing factories. Software Automation Inc, a startup in Georgia, has developed a machine that can sew T-shirts by pulling the material over a specially equipped table, for instance.

Eric Spackey, CEO of Bluewater Defense, the uniform maker, was part of the research effort with Siemens but is skeptical of the Sewbo approach. "Putting (stiffening) material into the garment--it just adds another process," which increases costs, said Spackey, though he adds that it could make sense for producers who already wash garments as part of their normal operation, such as jeans makers.

The first step is getting robots into clothing factories.

Sanjeev Bahl, who opened a small jeans factory in downtown Los Angeles two years ago called Saitex, has studied the Sewbo machines and is preparing to install his first experimental machine.

Leading the way through his factory in September, he pointed to workers hunched over old-style machines and said many of these tasks are ripe for the new process.

"If it works," he said, "I think there's no reason not to have large-scale (jeans) manufacturing here in the U.S. again."

Same-sex couples from China are getting married in Utah over Zoom

Utah County introduced weddings over Zoom during the pandemic, unintentionally providing a valuable service for China's LGBTQ+ community.

A Utah County deputy clerk and team lead officiates a wedding ceremony over Zoom in Provo, Utah.

Russel Daniels

By VIOLA ZHOU
30 SEPTEMBER 2022

Xu Yanzhou and Zhu Xiaoming had a beautiful wedding. In front of flowers and candies, they exchanged vows reflecting on their five-year relationship, moving guests to tears. The pair put bangles on each other’s wrists. An officiant legally pronounced them husband and husband.

But little else was typical of a traditional Chinese wedding. The happy couple stood in their living room in Guangzhou, China, where same-sex marriage is illegal. The ceremony took place at midnight. And the officiant, appearing on Zoom, was in Utah.

“My first challenge to you is to choose each other each day and choose to be happy,” the 69-year-old officiant, Ben Frei, said in the video conference, as guests posted congratulatory messages in Chinese in the Zoom chat box. “You need to create your marriage … is somebody translating that?”

The state of Utah in the United States has no citizenship requirements for marriage licenses, and Utah County is the only place there that allows international couples to register their marriages online. Since the county rolled out virtual weddings during the Covid-19 pandemic, it became a wedding haven for same-sex couples who are not able to officially marry in their own countries.

As sexual minorities in China face suppression at home, Utah County is allowing them to officially marry and celebrate their love — all for around $100. Although the marriages aren’t recognized in China, some 200 same-sex couples from mainland China and Hong Kong have gotten married via the county’s digital marriage license system since 2021, wedding planners and county staff told Rest of World.

Sexual minorities struggle with discrimination and censorship in China. The country’s longest-running LGBTQ+ festival, Shanghai Pride, canceled its annual event indefinitely from 2020. Last year, messaging app WeChat shut down dozens of LGBTQ+ accounts. Queer content in films or TV shows often triggers censorship — related plot lines in Friends, Fantastic Beasts and Bohemian Rhapsody have been removed in China.

For authorities in Utah County, the influx of international couples came as a surprise. The Utah County and Auditor’s Office moved its marriage licensing service online, as part of a digitization initiative in 2019, Burt Harvey, a division manager who oversees public services and tax administration, told Rest of World. At the start of the pandemic, a number of couples requested Zoom ceremonies, and the county made those available as well. The service first attracted couples in Utah, followed by people from across the U.S., and later, from all over the world. From May 1 to September 20 this year, at least 77 same-sex couples with mainland Chinese addresses have been married there, said county deputy clerk Russ Rampton, who oversees marriage licensing, to Rest of World.

Xu and Zhu told Rest of World that they wanted to get married one day, but didn’t think it was worth traveling overseas. When they heard of a close friend getting married through a Zoom meeting in Utah, they decided to go for it. “It sounded very cheap and convenient,” said Xu, a tech product manager.

Kimberly Wang, the Europe-based founder of wedding-planning business Unlimited, told Rest of World that she has organized Zoom weddings for about 50 couples, mostly lesbian, since February. On Chinese social media, Wang advertises her business with coded language to avoid censorship of terms such as “same-sex” and “lesbian.” Most of her clients are in their late 20s to mid-30s, and live in big cities. Some wanted big online gatherings, Wang said, while others had secret ceremonies with no guests.

Liu Yangming married his husband Zhu Guangyu in a similar Zoom wedding in July. The couple, also in Guangzhou, had planned to marry on an overseas trip, but China’s strict zero-Covid policy made it difficult to leave (and re-enter) the country. Liu also told Rest of World that the couple worried about the future of same-sex marriages in the U.S., after the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion last June. They decided to get married right away via a virtual wedding with an officiant in Utah.

For the wedding, the couple decorated their living room with balloons, photos, and Absolut Rainbow Vodka. At the 1 a.m. ceremony, with tears in their eyes, the grooms recounted marching together for LGBTQ+ rights. Liu’s mother, watching via video call from another Chinese city, wished them a happy married life. A friend interpreted everything into English for the officiant. “It made our love stronger,” Liu told Rest of World, two months after their wedding. “My husband was talking more about our responsibilities. Before we would think we might break up some day, but now we can’t just break up.”

Zhu Guangyu (L) and Liu Yangming (R) prepare for their wedding at their rented apartment in Guangzhou, China. Liu Yangming

A Chinese queer rights activist, who goes by the name Qiubai, got married in January over Zoom, so that her partner in China could join her in the United Kingdom by applying for a spousal visa. They had been separated for more than a year when Qiubai learned about Utah County’s remote-marriage system. “It was like seeing a beam of light when we felt so hopeless,” the 28-year-old told Rest of World.

In Hong Kong, since July 2021, wedding-planning company Next Chapter, focused on the LGBT+ community, has helped more than 100 couples get married this way in Utah. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the company had set up European wedding trips for nearly three dozen couples each year. Founders Mac Chan and Kurt Tung, a lesbian couple, told Rest of World the affordable Zoom weddings have prompted more same-sex couples in Hong Kong, including working-class people, to get married. By holding the ceremonies in their home city, with officiants showing up remotely on a screen, clients are also able to invite more family and friends — some have organized cocktail parties with more than 100 guests. “We are happy to see that when the option becomes available, many people choose to do it,” Tung said.

Although same-sex marriage remains illegal in Hong Kong, under a different set of laws to mainland China, residents who get married in other places are able to apply for dependent visas in the city for their partners. Married gay people are also able to mark themselves as married in tax filings. Hong Kongers who were married virtually by an officiant in Utah include ex-legislator Raymond Chan, Hong Kong’s first openly gay lawmaker. (Chan, along with other pro-democracy figures, has been charged with subversion under a Beijing-imposed national security law.)

A Utah County Clerk inspects envelopes with marriage certificates at the Utah County Marriage License and Passport offices in Provo, Utah. Russel Daniels

Frei, a former equipment specialist who joined Utah County’s marriage licensing team in 2019, performs wedding ceremonies from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. from a conference room at the county government building in Provo. He sometimes shares advice from his own 47-year marriage during the ceremonies. “I’m just happy that I can help them satisfy what their hearts are telling them, because a lot of the couples really, really, really do love each other,” Frei told Rest of World. “I find it interesting that we have it on our books that it’s okay, and we are a very conservative state.”

In Utah County, where 72% of residents are members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, which denounces same-sex marriages, Frei has helped many others get married online, including soldiers, prisoners, Israeli couples looking for secular weddings, and couples separated by wars. To meet the growing demand, the county has expanded the working hours and head count for the marriage licensing team. It has no plan to stop the remote marriage service, division manager Harvey said.

As Xu Yanzhou and Zhu Xiaoming do not speak fluent English, a friend helped them fill in the marriage application. Ahead of their wedding in July, the couple organized a very different sort of wedding rehearsal: one to test whether all of the guests were able to log into Zoom smoothly. On the night itself, more than 60 family and friends showed up for the midnight ceremony, including one who joined them in the living room as an interpreter. Zhu said Frei’s marriage pep talk gave the otherwise-bureaucratic procedure a human touch.

In his vow, however, Zhu said he was looking forward to getting married a second time — in China. “If one day our country allows this, I hope we could get married again in this country,” Zhu said to his husband before they kissed.

Chinese tech giants are creating a new class of elite workers in Latin America

These young employees are so coveted that Chinese tech companies are quick to poach each other’s talent.

Jorge Villegas/Xinhua/Getty Images

By DANIELA DIB and MEAGHAN TOBIN
26 OCTOBER 2022 • MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

Chinese tech giants are creating a new class of elite workers in Latin America

When China’s Uber-beating ride-hailing giant Didi expanded into Mexico in 2018, Aurora Morales Sánchez was part of the launch team. Morales, a marketing manager, was recruited through LinkedIn. She had lived in China for six months as a student, and although she doesn’t speak Mandarin, she told Rest of World that she believed the experience was decisive for her career.

“It is super important for the company to hire people that understand Chinese culture,” Morales said.

After almost three years covering the Latin American and Russian markets in Didi’s marketing team, Morales went on to work for another Chinese firm, Kuaishou, which operates TikTok’s main global competitor, Kwai. There, she ran marketing for Spanish-speaking Latin America. Her experience with Didi served as a springboard into the broader world of Chinese corporations in the region. “I got into Kwai because people at Didi that had moved to Kwai knew me and my work,” she said.

As companies like Didi, Kuaishou, Huawei, and TikTok expand across Latin America, they are hiring young, local tech professionals and accelerating their corporate careers. In return, Chinese companies are forming a specialized talent pool to gain an edge in a region where roles at American and European companies have long held prestige. Rest of World spoke with nine employees at Chinese tech companies in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia — Latin America’s largest markets — and found that these firms commonly serve as young corporate employees’ gateway into the region’s coveted tech cohort. Employees’ positions ranged broadly from mid to high-level management roles in marketing, operations, and compliance, among others.

As these workers quickly become specialized in translating Chinese firms’ goals into Latin American markets, their expertise has become too tempting to resist for other Chinese companies arriving in the region. The result has been a competition as Chinese firms poach local talent from each other. “When we launched Kwai, we brought along plenty of people from TikTok — then Snapchat started poaching people from Kwai,” said Morales, the former marketing manager at Didi. “Despite [their] non-compete agreements, there’s plenty of knowledge theft between competitors.”

For years, many of China’s biggest tech companies did not look far beyond the country’s borders for growth. With a large and increasingly affluent market at home, companies like Didi and Kuaishou could rely on the bulk of their expansion happening inside China. But, the market for digital services consolidated as the Chinese government ratched up scrutiny on tech companies’ power and influence. When the Covid-19 pandemic intensified competition for everything from food delivery to short video e-commerce, Chinese firms stepped up their focus on global business as a foundation for their future growth.

For tech giants like Didi, Kuaishou, Huawei, and TikTok, Latin America has been a priority growth region over the past five years. Since 2012, Chinese firms have invested over $120 billion in Latin America — from port projects in Peru to acquisitions of local startups. That number is likely to grow in the next few years, according to Daniel Lau, lead partner at the São Paulo branch of KPMG’s China Practice. For Didi, successfully gaining traction in Mexico — where it controls nearly 60% of the ride-hailing market — has been a rare bright spot, compared to its otherwise beleaguered attempts to reach foreign markets like South Africa, Kazakhstan, and Russia.

In targeting the Latin American market, Chinese companies have followed a playbook that has already served them well, proving effective in markets from Indonesia to Pakistan. Joey Ding, a Shanghai-based corporate recruiter for Chinese and international tech companies, told Rest of World that Chinese companies have, in turn, adopted a version of the strategy of “product localization” — the practice of adapting a product to the needs and interests of the local market — used by American companies in China. Especially when launching products new to a market, such as Kwai’s short-video format telenovelas, it is key to hire locals who understand what consumers are looking for, Ding said.

“Of course there’s a language component, but a lot of times, it’s a management culture difference,” Wenyi Cai, CEO of Bogotá-based Polymath Ventures, which publishes information in Chinese to encourage investors to the region, told Rest of World. “Very few people can be that cultural translator.”


“We want to be paid the same as someone working in the U.S. or China or any other country.”

In turn, mid-career professionals in marketing, business development, and operations roles at these Chinese firms told Rest of World that, rather than the American and European companies that had previously scooped up local talent, they and their peers are looking to Chinese companies for their future professional and career advancement. Huawei, Didi, Kuaishou, and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

Creator and audiovisual designer Cecilia Velazquez Traut, 38, led the team that helped Kwai break out in Latin America by adapting the telenovela format to short video in the wildly popular TeleKwai format. The Buenos Aires-based video content consultant told Rest of World she had felt constrained at her previous job on Meta’s video team. She said she’d found little room for creativity, describing the growth trajectory as rigid and prescribed. When Kwai offered her the chance to develop fictional content that would make the Chinese short-video giant catch on in her home market, Velazquez Traut jumped at it.

José Ancona, 26, is the digital marketing director at Nanopay, a fintech company backed by Chinese investors that focuses on small personal loans in emerging markets. He was poached from Nu, the Mexican subsidiary of Brazilian competitor Nubank, the first company he worked for after graduating. Nanopay, which has over 1.5 million credit cards in Mexico, seemed willing to trade Ancona’s scant experience for the knowledge he might bring in from the competition. “If I had stayed at my previous job, it would have probably taken me at least two years to be promoted to a director’s role,” he told Rest of World, adding that Nanopay offered him three times the salary he had earned at Nu.

Some Chinese companies also offer something that most Western companies in Latin America don’t: higher pay, sometimes in U.S. dollars. Velazquez Traut, whose native Argentina has been wracked by inflation for decades, not only valued getting paid in a more stable currency, but also felt that her company respected her labor, despite working from abroad. Jorge Reyes, an ad operations manager for Huawei who previously worked at TikTok, also considers that the salary he’s had at both TikTok and Huawei is higher than at similar Western companies in the region. “TikTok definitely offers a higher salary than other regional companies with similar roles,” he told Rest of World.

“We want to be paid the same as someone working in the U.S. or China or any other country,” Velazquez Traut said. “Working at a Chinese company really did impact my career because I learned how to scale and scale fast and work with really big goals,” she added. “I felt more powerful after working at a Chinese tech company. This was something different from the experiences I had with American companies.”

 
Daniela Dib is a Rest of World reporter based in Mexico City.

Meaghan Tobin is a reporter at Rest of World.

Why the protests in Iran are so hard to understand

Censorship, trolls, and bots: The information war distorting Iran’s protests.

By Jonathan Guyer@mideastXmidwestjonathan.guyer@vox.com
VOX
Dec 12, 2022

A picture obtained by AFP outside Iran on September 21, 2022, shows Iranian demonstrators taking to the streets of Tehran during a protest for Mahsa Amini, days after she died in police custody. AFP via Getty Images

Jonathan Guyer covers foreign policy, national security, and global affairs for Vox. From 2019 to 2021, he worked at the American Prospect, where as managing editor he reported on Biden’s and Trump's foreign policy teams.

Protesters in Iran have been resisting the government there for over two months, in response to the death of the young woman Mahsa Amini in police custody. Since September, more than 18,000 Iranians have been arrested, among them at least 70 journalists. Close to 500 protesters have been killed.

But at times, it’s been difficult for news outlets and newsmakers to convey the complete picture of the emerging protest movement and its aftershocks.

Last weekend, US newspapers sent news alerts about Iran abolishing its so-called morality police, the authority that had arrested Amini in September. But that wasn’t the full story, and US outlets quickly reframed what was initially a definitive news article. Iran’s state media said comments from Iran’s attorney general had been misinterpreted. It was more of a sign of the stress that the regime is under, perhaps, than a policy change.

This comes after a false report circulated in mid-November that Iran would execute 15,000 of the protesters. It was later debunked, but not until after it became a meme shared by influential posters. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau even tweeted it out.

And though not as extreme, the New Yorker’s first article on the protests in late September said that exiled activist Masih Alinejad was leading the protests. She has indeed come under attack from Iranian intelligence agents, but many observers disputed the idea that the New York-based Voice of America journalist played a key role. “Today, few of the young people on the streets of Iran’s cities and towns are saying Alinejad’s name,” Brandeis professor Naghmeh Sohrabi wrote in a letter to the magazine.

Why is this such a difficult set of political developments to make sense of?

In a severely restricted country with limited press freedoms, the information environment is poor and prone to exploitation. The protests defying the government are horizontal and leaderless, with Iranians agitating not for reforms but for fundamental change. These are strengths in many ways, but also structural conditions that can impair a clear presentation of what’s happening in Iran.

And then there are the groups deliberately trying to shape (or misshape) the story. As protesters in Iran counter a brutal regime, online battles are unfolding among the diaspora. More sinisterly, Iranian American journalists have seen a wave of online attacks that look like a coordinated influence campaign, and Iranian government–linked hackers have baited journalists and experts.

Internet researchers say the inorganic online activity around these protests is unprecedented.

“I’ve not seen something of this scale before,” Marc Owen Jones, a professor and author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East, told me. Some 330 million tweets on the Mahsa Amini hashtag in Persian were sent — in one month, he said. “By way of comparison, #BlackLivesMatter over eight years got about 83 million. And since February, the word #Ukraine has been mentioned 240 million times,” he added. It renders the hashtag useless for news consumers looking for real-time analysis of what’s happening.

Despite all those bots and troll armies, powerful videos of anti-government resistance continue to reach our feeds. The focus needs to remain on accountability for the Iranian protesters who have died and their impetus for protesting in the first place.

The information flow from a highly restricted Iran

With a lack of press freedom in Iran, knowledge of the country is hampered. Getting it out of the country is even harder.

The Western press was on the scene during the 2009 protests, but just a handful of foreign news agencies continue to work on the ground. “There is no reform movement left but there is still a reformist press,” Barbara Slavin, a former journalist who researches Iran at the Atlantic Council, told me. “We have, still, some very brave Iranian journalists, like the ones who wrote that Mahsa Amini was killed in police custody, and immediately found themselves in jail for reporting that.”

An anti-social networking banner in Tehran Grand Bazaar, December 3, 2022.

 Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Reporters Without Borders has described Iran as “one of the world’s ten worst countries for press freedom.” The government closely monitors social media and cracks down on reporters posting updates on the protests. “What is new is the amount of violence that they are using while they are arresting journalists,” researcher Yeganeh Rezaian told Nieman Reports.

None of this is helped by the fact the US does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, which means there is no American embassy and no diplomats in the country.

By extension, the Iranian government can be difficult for the US government to understand. There is often talk of hardliners and reformists within the Iranian government, and the outsized role played by the aging Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader. Many US analysts on the far-right side of the spectrum talk about the mullahs and the ayatollahs, language that gets batted around by the likes of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, which further obscures how politics really works in the country.

Though the religious authority of Khamenei is important, it’s also worth noting that Iran holds elections. Turnout was low and many political rivals were disqualified in the flawed 2021 election that brought current President Ebrahim Raisi to power. But over the past several decades the Iranian system has brought to the fore conservative and liberal presidents, and governments with complicated and changing political agendas.

The protesters throughout Iran pose a major challenge to Iran’s entrenched leadership, but the survival of the government is not at stake. “We’re not seeing the regime perceive this as an imminent threat to their stability,” the US’s top spy chief, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, said recently. “We see them doing a lot in the information space to try to manage it, as we’ve seen, obviously, Iran’s efforts to influence our own politics and policymaking.” A senior Israeli intelligence analyst concurred that the government will “manage to survive these protests.”

As Iranian authorities continue to arrest journalists, especially women journalists, further battles unfold in the information space.

The online war over the Iran protests, explained

On October 18, Iranian American journalist Negar Mortazavi was scheduled to speak at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, but the in-person panel was canceled and moved online after an anonymous bomb threat. Author Reza Aslan’s event two days later in Seattle was similarly postponed due to “credible threats of disruption.” And a sophisticated scamming campaign targeting Middle East experts and journalists has been thoroughly documented by Human Rights Watch, which says the hackers are backed by the Iranian government.

An Iranian American friend recently decided to publish an article for a US magazine under a pseudonym because of the hot conflicts among the Iranian diaspora. But those fights don’t just stay on social media — “They’re going to get someone killed,” the friend told me.

There are many fault lines at play among the Iranian diaspora, and many disparate groups who have fled the country since the 1979 Islamic revolution with conflicting political interests being surfaced at this moment. There is the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq, an exiled resistance group that has immense influence among US policymakers despite the US having labeled it for years as a terrorist entity, which has a major online presence. There are those who support Iran’s ousted former monarchy.

In this confusing space, it’s easy for malign actors to enter online conversations, disguise their identities, and harass others. Those antagonistic perspectives, sometimes from inauthentic accounts, then get amplified by real people among Iranian diaspora communities across the world. The result is cruel.

Experts, journalists, and nonprofits that have advocated for the Iranian nuclear deal have especially come under attack, as have those who criticize the intensive US-led sanctions that have detrimental effects to many Iranians. (President Joe Biden’s effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal, which had already been on hold, has been further frozen in response to the protests.)

Mortazavi has been an active voice publishing a nuanced analysis of all of the above. She hosts the popular Iran Podcast, but hasn’t produced an episode since the protests began because she has been worn down from the attacks she has received on Twitter and on Instagram. “If they can’t get us de-platformed, they want to threaten us so we self-censor,” she told me. It “counts as a good day,” she said, when she’s only called a sexual slur by online trolls but is not physically threatened. “It’s a way to make Iranians live in fear.”

In September, she was receiving more than 50,000 mentions a day on Twitter, many of them targeted harassment. There was even a concerted campaign online to say that she had made up the bomb threat at University of Chicago that cancelled her talk.

Mortazavi is among the journalists and researchers, mostly women, it might be noted, who have produced rigorous reporting on Iran are under attack. New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi “has faced months of vile threads and attacks online,” according to the paper, as well as protests outside her office, and she has since stopped tweeting. “Others targeted include activist and writer Hoda Katebi, academic Azadeh Moaveni, Human Rights Watch researcher Tara Sepehri Far and virtually anyone working for or associated with the National Iranian American Council,” the site Middle East Eye reported.

In 2020, Mortazavi and journalist Murtaza Hussain wrote in the Intercept about a US State Department–funded Iran Disinformation Project that deployed an aggressive Twitter feed to attack journalists and activists. She sees parallels from that period to what’s going on today. “My gut feeling is that some of those people are the trolls,” she told me. “I think it’s an operation.”

Marc Owen Jones, the scholar of disinformation in the Middle East, notes that about 20 to 30 percent of all tweets with the Mahsa Amini hashtag are being sent by accounts created in a 10-day period — a sign that they could be bots or bogus accounts.

Within that is plenty of commentary that is written by real people with social media accounts, but then is boosted by a lot of fake accounts. “Those fake accounts give people a sense of permissibility, that it’s okay to attack others, part of like a bandwagon approach,” Jones explained. “The scale of this operation, the motivation for it, the sustained nature of it, suggests that there is some high level of expertise going on, or an ability to circumvent Twitter’s policies.”

It’s not clear yet whether this apparently concerted effort to bully and threaten journalists like Mortzavi and others is state-sponsored, but it has some hallmarks of coordination. “There could well be all sorts of different actors messing about in here,” says digital propaganda expert Emma Briant. “It has huge consequences in the real world” — especially in shaping how people outside of Iran see the country and its protests.