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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Hey there! It's Shumita here. Every so often we're going to recommend a show that we think is worth you checking out. This week it's "The Outlaw Ocean," an immersive true crime podcast from the "LA Times" and CBC podcasts. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Urbina uncovers the lawlessness and exploitation that takes place on the high seas.
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Ian Urbina: If they got within eight hundred meters of you, that is when we would fire warning shots. Most of the time that's when the pirates do leave.
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Listen and subscribe at theoutlawocean.com/podcast or on Apple Podcasts.
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Good morning! It's Friday, November 4th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." On today's show, why slavery will be on the ballot in several states, how Haiti is on the brink of collapse, and the story behind some not-so-temporary tattoos.
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But first… Mass layoffs are happening at Twitter today in one of the biggest moves Elon Musk has made since buying the company. There are expectations that around half of employees will lose their jobs. They're being notified by email.
Alex Heath: I think stressful is a really good word to explain what it's like to work at Twitter right now. There are employees there who are literally sleeping on the floor of the office, trying to get projects that Musk has tasked them in, sometimes with a one-week deadline, or else they're fired.
We spoke to Alex Heath at "The Verge" about the tense atmosphere at Twitter recently.
Heath: It's probably the most dramatic cultural reset of any company that I've ever reported on.
The layoffs of rank-and-file workers come after Musk got rid of many top executives.
Heath: When Musk came in, the first thing he did was fire the CEO, the CFO, the head of legal and policy, and then a bunch of other executives under them quickly left as well. And I think what that's trying to signal is that, you know, this is a new day for Twitter. It's the Elon Musk company.
Twitter gets a lot of media attention, but relatively few people actually use it. It's tiny compared to platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and it's long struggled as a business.
Musk's takeover added to the company's problems. It took on $13 billion in debt to finance his deal, that means it's now on the hook for about a billion dollars in yearly interest payments. In Twitter's last quarterly earnings report, it posted a loss of $344 million.
Heath: Musk, the way he's doing this deal, he really needs to pay back his lenders and he needs Twitter to make money.
Musk wants to make money by charging users for verifying their accounts and other premium services. But many users and analysts are super skeptical, and the reality is roughly 90% of Twitter's revenue comes from advertisers. And that's a big question mark. Ad spending declined over the summer and multiple agencies have told their clients to pause Twitter advertising as a result of the shakeup. And it's not clear whether Musk can get enough of a handle on hate speech to make companies comfortable running ads there.
Heath: He's gotta keep advertisers happy, and guess what? Advertisers don't want to be next to hateful content, misinformation, and the like.
All these challenges for Twitter to take on, now with far fewer employees to make it happen.
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Next week, in five states, slavery will be on the ballot. Voters in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Vermont and Oregon will decide whether slavery should no longer be an acceptable punishment for crime. Advocates for prison reform say this could be an important step toward changing the rules around pay for prison labor.
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First, let me just back up and explain why this is even showing up on ballots. After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment banned slavery except as a punishment for a crime. Many states have similar language in their state constitutions. Now voters in these five states will get to weigh in on new language that abolishes slavery fully.
Prison reform advocates say the exception in the 13th Amendment paved the way for people who are incarcerated to be exploited for labor. The ACLU estimates that around 800,000 incarcerated people work, producing around $11 billion a year in goods and services. The average maximum wage is 52¢ an hour. Some work pays nothing.
"NPR" spoke to a man named Troy Ramsey, who was incarcerated for more than two decades. He's now volunteering with a campaign in Oregon to change the constitution there. He says existing wording about slavery dehumanizes people in prison.
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Troy Ramsey: A lot of officers and stuff use that language against you while you're in there, you know, that they're allowed to treat you the inhumane way that they treat you.
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There are some who have pushed back on these proposals. The Oregon State Sheriffs' Association says it doesn't condone slavery, but the measure as its written could force it to suspend work programs, which would increase costs. Supporters say changing the constitution wouldn't automatically force prisons to pay more for labor. But they do hope it starts a conversation that moves the system in that direction.
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Haiti is in crisis. Nearly 100,000 people have been displaced by gang violence, cholera is spreading, and politicians have been assassinated. There was even an attempted kidnapping of air traffic controllers, leading to new concerns about safety in the skies. The Miami Herald's Jacqueline Charles has covered Haiti for a long time. Now she says it's "on the verge of collapse."
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Jacqueline Charles: When you look at this country and you look at what's happening, it isn't just one crisis but it's multiple crises that are all happening on top of, of course, political paralysis that the country has been dealing with for quite some time.
It's been over a year since Haiti's president was killed while in office. Since then, Charles says, gangs have become more powerful.
Charles: They have, you know, been behind kidnappings. They've been behind an increase in criminality in the country. People are virtually prisoners in their houses. You just don't know when you step out your door if you're going to make it back home alive.
In the past few months, gangs have blocked the country's seaports and roads. All of this has jammed up critical infrastructure, leaving people without safe drinking water and driving the deadly cholera outbreak. There has been talk of international troops coming in to help stabilize the situation, but Charles says the country is divided over possible foreign intervention, and overall, they're deeply pessimistic.
Charles: So you know, the interesting thing about this country is that when you think that things can't get any worse, you know, it does. And people are asking themselves "Is this rock bottom?" And we just really don't know.
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How much thought have you ever put into a temporary tattoo? You know, the peel and stick kind? I can confidently say I've never really hesitated to slap on a fake tattoo, they're fun and harmless. But if you told me after the fact I'd have to live with it, possibly for a very long time, let's just say I would not be very happy.
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Well, for a few people who got a special kind of temporary tattoo, they're finding out it's not exactly fading away as promised.
The "San Francisco Chronicle" has this story of a startup company called Ephemeral. It offers a more high-tech version of a stick-on tattoo, one that looks permanent but uses a special ink that's supposed to fade away after nine to 15 months.
But the "Chronicle" spoke to multiple customers who were having a different experience. For them, the ink is still very visible well beyond 15 months.
Now the company says the range is an estimate, and consent forms given to customers warn that the tattoos may last longer. It all depends on how your body breaks down the ink. The people the "Chronicle" talked to seem not so much furious, just frustrated. But they're not exactly feeling the company's slogan, which is "regret nothing." As one woman who's going on 17 months with a cat tattoo puts it, "If I had known I would still have this on my leg, I wouldn't have done it in the first place."
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You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, including coverage of a big story in sports: the Brooklyn Nets suspension of Kyrie Irving.
And this weekend on "Apple News In Conversation," you can hear the final episode of our special midterm series. My colleague Gideon Resnick spoke with a panel of election-watchers, including Errin Haines, the editor-at-large at "The 19th."
Errin Haines: I think there's certainly a lot of voters of all stripes, Democrat, Republican, Independent, who say that they are concerned about the direction of the country. They think the country is headed in the wrong direction.
That's your weekend listen. Enjoy it, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
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