For most of his life when he was in between jobs, Tim Tulvey would toss his resume up on a hiring site like Indeed.com. He had decades of management experience working for landscaping companies, and even owned his own pest control business for a while.

“I was getting hits left and right,” Tulvey said, recalling previous times he’d posted. “I mean, there was companies reaching out to me a lot.”

But this time was different. This time, he had been through rehab, and picked up an assault charge. He didn’t get any bites.

For many with a history of addiction, finding a job can be tough. Of the 22 million adults in recovery in the United States, nine percent are unemployed — that’s more than double the overall rate. There are lots of reasons for this – addiction can cause people to go long stints without working, and that doesn’t look great on a resume. For others, like Tulvey, addiction goes hand-in-hand with jail time and a criminal record.

But that doesn’t necessarily make them less qualified for a job — or at least, that’s the logic behind a new hiring website called Retrofit Careers, designed specifically for people in recovery.

Tulvey was 50 years old when he decided he had to stop drinking. It had gotten bad — each day when he woke up, he knew he’d be drinking by lunchtime until he went to bed at night. He had no illusions that quitting would be easy — he checked himself into rehab and after, moved into a recovery house to get back on his feet. But he was homesick, and wanted to move back into his own place. As soon as he did, he started drinking again. One day, he blacked out and threw a glass at the wall, hitting his wife. He was arrested for assault and spent almost a month in jail.

Tulvey had been working as a warehouse manager for a construction company, and through rehab and the assault charge, his boss agreed to keep him on. But maintaining regular hours on probation can be tricky — as a condition of his release, Tulvey had to carry a breathalyzer that he was required to blow into at random times to give his bail officer a blood alcohol level. But, Tulvey says, often the machine didn’t work right. So, to prove he wasn’t drinking, he would have to take a train from his job in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia, into the city, and hop on another train to head South to the courthouse where he would blow a negative breathalyzer test in person for his bail officer.

Pretty soon, Tulvey’s boss said all the trips to see his bail officer were eating up too much of the workday, and he let him go.

Tulvey put his resume on Indeed, like usual, but he didn’t get any responses. He figured potential employers must be doing background checks. So, he stopped even applying for lots of the jobs he thought he’d be qualified for.

“Right now, I’m steering away from anything that I think might be iffy as far as, you know, having an assault on your record,” Tulvey said. “I mean, I’m not that person, but the word assault says it all.”

Eventually, Tulvey got a job with the recovery house where he lives — they knew about his past, but also trusted that he was a good guy.

That idea — that with a little context, employers will give someone a chance — is the foundation for Retrofit Careers. Doug Kiker, who has been sober for 13 years, is one if its founders. He always made an effort to hire people in recovery for his construction business, and he knew there were other employers out there like him. So he figured there should be a formal way to connect people in recovery with workplaces that will understand their situation.

“So that even if the question’s asked, the answer is, well, this is when I was rehabbing, this is when I was on the street, this is why I got fired from my last job,” Kiker explained.

It may seem like a tough sell to ask employers to pay to post jobs that draw from a pool of applicants in recovery. So far, Retrofit has just a handful of employers advertising for jobs. But more and more, job places are actually looking for people with a history of addiction. While private job boards are less common, some states are aggregating “recovery friendly workplace” lists.

Delta lighting runs a bustling call center just north of Philadelphia. Its 50 or so sales reps sell lighting and cleaning supplies to companies across the country. Joe Arndt is Vice President there. He’s been recruiting workers with a history of addiction for years and says he’s found they make great employees.

“They’re tremendously loyal to us, and they just work harder because they realize that they don’t necessarily have a lot of other options which is kind of sad,” he said.

When Arndt heard about Retrofit, he called to see how he could advertise for open positions at Delta.

“I’m not gonna sit here and say like we’re saints and we really want to help the community, which we do, but at the same time, we see it is an opportunity to get more employees like the ones we had gotten,” he admitted.

Arndt says he knows there are risks involved with hiring people in recovery – commission jobs aren’t for everyone, and the potential for relapse is real.

But, he says, a lot of those are risks you’d come up against with anyone. At least this way it’s out in the open.

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More than a decade since Mexico first brought its case to the World Trade Organization, the country has lost its argument that U.S. labeling rules unfairly discriminate against its fishing industry. The WTO’s appellate body announced Friday that it was dismissing Mexico’s claim, saying the U.S. had justly denied Mexican tuna products the use of its “dolphin safe” label.

Though the label is not mandatory for tuna products to be sold in the U.S., denying Mexico the label, as the WTO itself observes, “constitutes an ‘advantage’ on the US market for tuna products.”

Authorities north of the border reject Mexican tuna products because they generally reject Mexican fishing techniques in the eastern Pacific Ocean — which frequently involve tracking dolphins because they often swim with tuna. Tuna fishers using large nets can kill large numbers of dolphins.

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Here is what one of those “dolphin safe” labels may look like.

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Tim Boyle/Getty Images

“But over the years, those numbers have dropped significantly. Fishermen now use techniques so the mammals can escape. They’ve banned night fishing. And all boats in Mexico’s tuna fleet have independent observers onboard,” NPR’s Carrie Kahn reported in 2013, when a previous WTO ruling sided with Mexico.

Mexico’s government told the WTO that now that these changes were in place, it was unfair to punish Mexico in the U.S. market. The WTO initially agreed but then reversed itself in October 2017, and it was this decision that the WTO appellate body upheld Friday.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a statement released last October, “The Trump Administration is committed to defending U.S. rights to enforce environmental measures that protect wildlife and facilitate fair trade.”

Environmental advocates cheered Friday’s decision, with Humane Society International calling it “truly amazing news for dolphins.”

“The WTO has delivered a US victory in what looks to be the final & decisive battle of a long war between the US & Mexico over the US Dolphin Safe label.”

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Virgin Galactic says it has reached a rather lofty milestone.

During a test flight Thursday morning in Mojave, Calif., a pair of pilots flying the company’s SpaceShipTwo spacecraft hit an altitude of 51.4 miles. That height clears the 50-mile threshold that is sometimes considered the boundary of space.

“Today, as I stood among a truly remarkable group of people with our eyes on the stars, we saw our biggest dream and our toughest challenge to date fulfilled,” Virgin founder Richard Branson said in a statement released Thursday. “It was an indescribable feeling: joy, relief, exhilaration and anticipation for what is yet to come.”

A close-up of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceshipTwo, seen Thursday during a test flight in Mojave, Calif. The craft, known as the VSS Unity, took off attached to an airplane, then fired its rocket motors to reach new heights.

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The space tourism company’s feat marks the first successful manned space flight launched on U.S. soil since NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011. It has also earned the plane’s pilots, Mark “Forger” Stucky and Frederick “CJ” Sturckow, commercial astronaut wings from the Federal Aviation Administration.

“Like the early days of aviation, these commercial space flights take grit and innovation — the very attributes it takes to blaze a trail for generations to follow,” the FAA said in its announcement. “It’s that grit and innovation we want to recognize.”

It should be noted that Virgin is using one measure of where space begins — but it’s not the only one. Perhaps the most common definition of space is the Karman Line, which is about 62 miles (100 km) above sea level.

“In theory, once this 100 km line is crossed, the atmosphere becomes too thin to provide enough lift for conventional aircraft to maintain flight,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains, noting that many international organizations use the Karman Line as their own benchmark. “At this altitude, a conventional plane would need to reach orbital velocity or risk falling back to Earth.”

However you measure it, though, the flight represents a triumph for Virgin Galactic — and a stark change from just over four years ago, when the company grabbed headlines for a very different, altogether tragic reason. In October 2014, its spacecraft crashed during a test flight over the Mojave Desert, killing one of the pilots aboard and severely injuring the other.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s months-long investigation into the incident ultimately concluded that it was caused by human error — though, as NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel reported at the time, “investigators found that SpaceShipTwo’s design was also to blame.” The believed that the ship should have had better safeguards to protect against such mistakes.

So the company went to work on updating the design, ultimately rolling out the ship flown Thursday, which goes by the name VSS Unity. Earlier this year, the supersonic plane climbed to about 32 miles during its third-ever rocket-powered flight.

“I’ve been so proud of the [Virgin Galactic] team, how they’ve responded to [the tragedy] and really moved forward with a sense of urgency,” Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told CNN Business two weeks ago.

Unlike other rockets launched by NASA, Virgin’s spacecraft does not make a vertical launch from a pad on the ground. Instead, it is carried into the sky by another, larger plane, which then detaches the craft and drops it like a bomb. Then, the VSS Unity activates its rockets to push itself even faster, turning upward at the same time.

Thursday’s test flight “saw a 60 second planned rocket motor burn which propelled VSS Unity to almost three times the speed of sound and to an apogee of 51.4 miles,” the company explained in its news release. “As VSS Unity coasted upwards through the black sky and into space, Virgin Galactic Mission Control confirmed the news and congratulated the two astronaut pilots: ‘Unity, Welcome to Space.’ “

The successful spaceflight is something of a coup for Virgin Galactic, which has been competing with other commercial space ventures — Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin among them — in what is increasingly becoming a crowded field. While SpaceX has had some high-profile launches of its own lately, Virgin Galactic says Thursday’s flight marks “the very first time that a crewed vehicle built for commercial, passenger service, has reached space.”

The development also likely comes as welcome news to the prospective space tourists who have already invested heavily in tickets aboard the first official flights, whenever they get off the ground. The price for a single ticket runs up to a quarter of a million dollars.

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Updated at 7:03 p.m. ET

A Canadian judge ruled Tuesday a Chinese tech executive, detained at the request of the U.S., can be free on bail while awaiting an extradition hearing.

The judge said Meng Wanzhou must meet stringent conditions aimed at making sure she doesn’t flee Canada for China.

The Vancouver judge, William Ehrcke, said Meng must post bail of $10 million Canadian ($7.5 million U.S.), according to Reuters. A portion of the money must be paid by other people, who presumably don’t have the vast resources of Meng’s family and would take a greater hit if she absconded.

Other conditions include handing over her multiple passports to the court, wearing an electronic monitor and not leaving home overnight.

Ehrcke said he believed under those conditions, the risk that she wouldn’t appear when required could “be reduced to an acceptable level.” He set her next court appearance for Feb. 6.

Ten days after Canadian authorities detained Meng, China reportedly detained a former Canadian diplomat — ratcheting up tensions in this diplomatic row.

The International Crisis Group said Tuesday it was aware of the reports that its North East Asia senior adviser Michael Kovrig had been detained. “We are doing everything possible to secure additional information on Michael’s whereabouts as well as his prompt and safe release,” the Brussels-based organization said in a statement. Kovrig was formerly a diplomat to Beijing and Hong Kong, as well as the United Nations.

Canada Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said he was “deeply concerned” about a Canadian citizen detained in China, but did not identify the person, Reuters reports.

While China has not discussed Kovrig’s detention, Bob Rae, former premier of Ontario tweeted that he finds the reason obvious: “Of course it’s clear. It’s called repression and retaliation.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that China has held a Canadian as part of larger geopolitical events. In 2014, a Canadian couple was arrested and detained seemingly as retribution for the U.S. seeking the deportation from Canada of a Chinese national accused of stealing U.S. military secrets. The husband, Kevin Garratt, was imprisoned for two years.

In Meng’s case, the U.S. seeks her extradition to stand trial on fraud charges. Meng, the chief financial officer at telecom juggernaut Huawei, owns two multimillion-dollar homes in Vancouver. Her lawyers offered those properties and a cash payment as bail, amounting to about $15 million, The New York Times reports.

She also offered to pay for the costs of her own security, and suggested her Chinese husband and the head of a security firm could be her sureties to guarantee her presence in court, an idea that the judge questioned.

“Is it appropriate to name as a surety someone who is not ordinarily resident in Canada, even though they might have the status which would permit them to reside in Canada?” said Justice William Ehrcke, according to the Vancouver Sun. “The purpose of naming a surety is that they act as the jailer for the person during the period of release. So that’s an important responsibility.”

In a letter, the U.S. Justice Department argued strongly against Meng’s release, warning that she would likely flee back to China, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S. The Justice Department also pointed to Meng’s access to enormous wealth: She is the daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, whom the U.S. says has a net worth of $3.2 billion and is the 83rd richest person in the world.

The Justice Department says that around April 2017, Huawei (and Meng) became aware of a U.S. criminal investigation into the company, and so its executives began avoiding traveling to or through the U.S. Meng traveled to the U.S. “on numerous occasions” from 2014 to 2016, but made no further trips to the U.S. after March 2017.

Meng has used seven different passports — four from China, three from Hong Kong — in the past eleven years, U.S. authorities say, adding that she may have more they don’t know about. “Even if Canadian authorities seized Meng’s travel document that she used to arrive in Canada, she could use any number of additional travel documents to flee from Canada,” they write.

Her husband, Liu Xiaozong, denies in his affidavits that Meng has extra passports, and says she needed the new ones, the Sun reports:

“His wife, he says, travelled so frequently between 2007 and 2016 and required so many visas that ‘the pages in these passports for such visas were utilized, requiring the acquisition of the replacement passports.’

Other passports were ‘broken,’ invalidated and replaced to reflect changes in her name after their marriage.”

As NPR’s Shannon Van Sant has reported, the U.S. alleges that Huawei used a Hong Kong-based subsidiary called Skycom as a shell company to circumvent U.S. sanctions on Iran:

“Meng’s arrest has become a flashpoint in relations between the U.S. and China, and came on the same day President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping agreed to a 90-day truce in a trade war between the two countries.

“Huawei is China’s largest telecom equipment maker. Its sales recently surpassed Apple, making Huawei the world’s top supplier of mobile phones. U.S. intelligence agencies have warned Americans not to buy Huawei phones because of concerns over espionage, and pressured allies to not use Huawei technology.”

The Sun reports Meng is being held at the Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, about 20 miles east of Vancouver.

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Japanese lawmakers have passed controversial legislation expanding the number of semi-skilled foreign workers who can live and work in the notably insular nation for up to five years.

Japan has been pressed to make the change because of a critical labor shortage that results from its rapidly aging society and low birth rate.

Japan’s upper house of parliament passed the law 161 to 76 just after 4 a.m. Saturday local time, after a day when the opposition parties tried to unsuccessfully to block the measure.

The law will go into effect in April 2019.

The legislation has been viewed as a last-resort measure by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ultra-conservative government to address a severe shortage of workers in 14 industries, including restaurants, nursing, construction and agriculture.

According to the Associated Press, two categories of workers will be accepted, with conditions that will discourage them from trying to immigrate permanently.

The law will apply to as many as 345,000 less-skilled workers who will be allowed to stay for up to five years, but not bring in family members. It will also permit higher-skilled workers to enter with their families for 10 years and will provide them a path to Japanese citizenship. Both categories will have requirements for Japanese language competency.

Japan’s population is expected to decline from about 127 million to about 88 million by 2065, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security. In September, Japan’s Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry released data showing that for the first time, one in five people in the nation is older than 70.

Japan has felt the pressure of an aging population and declining birthrates for decades. The government has tried to meet labor shortages by encouraging more employment of women and older workers, and using more robots and other automation.

And it does have foreign workers. Their number has more than doubled since 2000 to nearly 1.3 million last year, out of a working-age population of 67 million, according to the AP.

“Workers from developing Asian countries used to stay mostly behind the scenes, but not anymore. Almost all convenience stores are partly staffed by Asian workers and so are many restaurant chains.”

Many foreigners are working in Japan on training visas “that don’t allow them to switch jobs even if they are abused or underpaid,” says The Wall Street Journal editorial board. Thousands of student visa holders also work in Japan, often for longer than the 28 hours a week legally allowed.

But until now the government has resisted opening the door to a legal influx of semi-skilled foreign laborers, as many Japanese, particularly Abe’s right-wing supporters, fear a loss of cultural distinctiveness and homogeneity. It’s one reason the government has been careful not to characterize the new visa program as immigration.

But, as The Washington Post reports, Abe’s government is “closely entwined with the business community, and the message it hears from every quarter — shipbuilding and construction, agriculture and fishing, elder-care establishments and convenience-store owners — is ever more insistent: We need more workers.”

A report by Tokyo Shoko Research showed the number of bankruptcies in Japan caused by staff shortages doubled between 2016 and 2017, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes office next month, representing New York’s 14th District, she will be a part of the “blue wave” of new Democrats in the House. But the 29-year-old may end up being a part of a different kind of wave, too: a bipartisan effort for members of Congress to pay the interns they employ.

“Time to walk the walk,” she tweeted on Tuesday. “Very few members of Congress actually pay their interns. We will be one of them.” And she pledged more than just a stipend: Her interns will make $15 an hour.

Last year, two former unpaid House interns, Carlos Mark Vera and Guillermo Creamer, founded an organization called Pay Our Interns. They collected data about who pays what on Capitol Hill, and they found that about 90 percent of House offices don’t pay their interns at all — a figure that Creamer called “abysmal.”

The numbers are a bit better on the Senate side: Half of Senate Democrats pay their interns at least a stipend, while 55 percent of Senate Republicans do.

As for the $15 hourly wage, only three members of Congress currently pay their interns so well, Creamer tells NPR: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Doug Jones, D-Ala., and Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington state.

In the for-profit world, the Department of Labor’s rules on paying interns have been clarified in recent years to state that that an intern must be the “primary beneficiary” of the internship, rather than the company. If the company is the primary beneficiary, then that intern is really an employee, and employees are entitled to minimum wage and overtime.

But those laws exempt internships at nonprofits and in the public sector. Thus congressional offices are not obligated to pay interns, and often, they don’t.

The House and Senate both passed bills earlier this year appropriating money for intern pay. The House approved $8.8 million, giving each member’s office $20,000 per year to pay interns. The Senate version includes $5 million, to be allocated according to a state’s population, providing an average of $50,000 per office.

Despite those new pools of money, most members haven’t started to advertise paid internships, Creamer says, because they’re waiting for new guidelines about using the funds. And that’s an issue, because the congressional offices are accepting applications for the January class of interns right now.

He points out that Ocasio-Cortez isn’t waiting for guidelines: “Her intention was to pretty much pay her interns regardless, and that’s because they allocated that in their budget.”

Whether an internship pays has a profound effect on who is able to apply for and accept it. Young people without wealthy parents or a university footing their expenses may find themselves juggling second or third jobs in the evenings after their internship.

But a congressional internship can be an important step toward future opportunities in government or elsewhere. If such positions are open only to children of the wealthy, then the wealthy will very likely continue to be overrepresented as public officeholders.

As Congress prepares for the next session, Creamer urged its members to start making plans for paying their interns — something his organization is more than happy to assist with.

“They know the money’s there; they know the money is coming,” he said. “Why not try and start structuring it now?”

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