On a military aircraft high above the Pacific Ocean en route to Singapore, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin swore in one of the Biden administration’s leading experts on China as the newest assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security.
 
For the past six months, Ely Ratner led the department’s China task force, which reviewed where the Pentagon stood in its efforts on Beijing. Austin called it “magnificent piece of work” that fueled future policy plans.  
 
“I’m excited about having Ely firmly in the seat in this position,” Austin said during the ceremony Sunday held at about 9,100 meters (30,000 feet) in a plane traveling at 988 kph (614 mph).  
 
Ratner is a longtime aide to President Joe Biden, according to Politico, serving as a staff member when Biden was in the Senate. From 2015 to 2017, he was deputy national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden after working in the office of Chinese and Mongolian affairs at the State Department.  
 
Ratner was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday, along with five other national security team appointees.
 
On Austin’s trip, the first to Southeast Asia by a top member of the Biden administration, the secretary will visit Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines. It is Austin’s second trip to the Asia-Pacific region.
 
He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address on Tuesday at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. He likely will touch on his stated pursuit of a “new vision of integrated deterrence” of Chinese aggression across the region.
 
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Staging an Olympics during the worst pandemic in a century? There’s a widespread perception that it couldn’t happen in a better place than Japan.

A vibrant, open democracy with deep pockets, the host nation is known for its diligent execution of detail-laden, large-scale projects, its technological advances, its consensus-building and world-class infrastructure. All this, on paper, at least, gives the strong impression that Japan is one of the few places in the world that could even consider pulling off the high-stakes tightrope walk that the Tokyo Games represent.

Some in Japan aren’t buying it.

“No country should hold an Olympics during a pandemic to start with. And if you absolutely must, then a more authoritarian and high-tech China or Singapore would probably be able to control COVID better,” said Koichi Nakano, a politics professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.

The bureaucratic, technological, logistical and political contortions required to execute this unprecedented feat — a massively complicated, deeply scrutinized spectacle during a time of global turmoil, death and suffering — have put an unwelcome spotlight on the country.

Most of all, it has highlighted some embarrassing things: that much of Japan doesn’t want the Games, that the nation’s vaccine rollout was late and is only now expanding, and that many suspect the Games are being forced on the country because the International Olympic Committee needs the billions in media revenue.

The worry here isn’t that Tokyo’s organizers can’t get to the finish line without a major disaster. That seems possible, and would allow organizers to claim victory, of a kind.

The fear is that once the athletes and officials leave town, the nation that unwillingly sacrificed much for the cause of global sporting unity might be left the poorer for it, and not just in the tens of billions of dollars it has spent on the Games.

The Japanese public may see an already bad coronavirus situation become even worse; Olympics visitors here have carried fast-spreading variants of the virus into a nation that is only approaching 25% fully vaccinated.

The Tokyo Olympics are, in one sense, a way for visitors to test for themselves some of the common perceptions about Japan that have contributed to this image of the country as the right place to play host. The results, early on in these Games, are somewhat of a mixed bag.

On the plus side, consider the airport arrivals for the thousands of Olympics participants. They showcased Japan’s ability to harness intensely organized workflow skills and bring them to bear on a specific task — in this case, protection against COVID-19 that might be brought in by a swarm of outsiders.

From the moment visitors stepped from their aircraft at Narita International Airport, they were corralled — gently, cheerfully, but in no uncertain terms firmly — into lines, then guided across the deserted airport like second-graders heading to recess. Barriers, some with friendly signs attached, ensured they got documents checked, forehead temperatures measured, hands sanitized and saliva extracted.

Symmetrical layouts of chairs, each meticulously numbered, greeted travelers awaiting their COVID-19 test results and Olympic credentials were validated while they waited. The next steps — immigration, customs — were equally efficient, managing to be both crisp and restrictive, but also completely amiable. You emerged from the airport a bit dizzy from all the guidance and herding, but with ego largely unbruised.

But there have also been conspicuous failures.

After the opening ceremony ended, for example, hundreds of people in the stadium were crammed into a corrallike pen, forced to wait for hours with only a flimsy barricade separating them from curious Japanese onlookers, while dozens of empty buses idled in a line stretching for blocks, barely moving.

Japan does have some obvious advantages over other democracies when it comes to hosting these Games, such as its economic might. As the world’s third-largest economy, after the United States and China, it was able to spend the billions needed to orchestrate these protean Games, with their mounting costs and changing demands.

Another advantage could be Japan’s well-deserved reputation for impeccable customer service. Few places in the world take as much pride in catering to visitors’ needs. It’s an open question, however, whether that real inclination toward hospitality will be tested by the extreme pressure.

A geopolitical imperative may be another big motivator. Japanese archrival China hosts next year’s Winter Games, and many nationalists here maintain that an Olympic failure is not an option amid the struggle with Beijing for influence in Asia. Yoshihide Suga, the prime minister, may also be hoping that a face-saving Games, which he can then declare successful, will help him retain power in fall elections.

And the potential holes in the argument that Japan is the perfect host nation for a pandemic Games?

Start, maybe, with leadership. It has never been clear who is in charge. Is it the city of Tokyo? The national government? The IOC? The Japanese Olympic Committee?

“This Olympics has been an all-Japan national project, but, as is often pointed out, nobody has a clear idea about who is the main organizer,” said Akio Yamaguchi, a crisis communications consultant at Tokyo-based AccessEast. “Uncertainty is the biggest risk.”

Japan has also faced a problem particular to democracies: a fierce, sometimes messy public debate about whether it was a good idea to hold the Games.

“After the postponement, we have never had a clear answer on how to host the Olympics. The focus was whether we can do it or not, instead of discussing why and how to do it,” said Yuji Ishizaka, a sports sociologist at Nara Women’s University.

“Japan is crucially bad at developing a ‘plan B.’ Japanese organizations are nearly incapable of drafting scenarios where something unexpected happens,” Ishizaka said. “There was very little planning that simulated the circumstances in 2021.”

Another possibly shaky foundation of outside confidence in Japan is its reputation as a technologically adept wonder of efficiency.

Arriving athletes and reporters “will probably realize that Japan is not as high-tech or as efficient as it has been often believed,” Nakano said. “More may then realize that it is the utter lack of accountability of the colluded political, business and media elites that ‘enabled’ Japan to hold the Olympics in spite of very negative public opinion — and quite possibly with considerable human sacrifice.”

The Tokyo Games are a Rorschach test of sorts, laying out for examination the many different ideas about Japan as Olympic host. For now, they raise more questions than they answer.
 
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Robert Parris Moses, a civil rights activist who endured beatings and jail while leading black voter registration drives in the American South during the 1960s and later helped improve minority education in math, has died. He was 86.  
 
Moses worked to dismantle segregation as the Mississippi field director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and was central to the 1964 “Freedom Summer” in which hundreds of students went to the South to register voters.
 
Moses started his “second chapter in civil rights work” by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project thanks to a MacArthur Fellowship. The project included a curriculum Moses developed to help poor students succeed in math.
 
Ben Moynihan, the director of operations for the Algebra Project, said he spoke with Moses’ wife, Dr. Janet Moses, who said her husband had died Sunday morning in Hollywood, Florida. Information was not given as to the cause of death.
 
Moses was born in Harlem, New York, on January 23, 1935, two months after a race riot left three dead and injured 60 in the neighborhood. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, had been a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and a supporter of Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist leader at the turn of the century.  
 
But like many black families, the Moses family moved north from the South during the Great Migration. Once in Harlem, his family sold milk from a Black-owned cooperative to help supplement the household income, according to “Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots,” by Laura Visser-Maessen.
 
While attending Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, he became a Rhodes Scholar and was deeply influenced by the work of French philosopher Albert Camus and his ideas of rationality and moral purity for social change. Moses then took part in a Quaker-sponsored trip to Europe and solidified his beliefs that change came from the bottom up before earning a master’s in philosophy at Harvard University.
 
Moses didn’t spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to “see the movement for myself.” He sought out the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to SNCC.
 
“I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe,” Moses later said. “I never knew that there was (the) denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.”  
 
The young civil rights advocate tried to register Blacks to vote in Mississippi’s rural Amite County where he was beaten and arrested. When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man and a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave.
 
He later helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi. But President Lyndon Johnson prevented the group of rebel Democrats from voting in the convention and instead let Jim Crow southerners remain, drawing national attention.
 
Disillusioned with white liberal reaction to the civil rights movement, Moses soon began taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War then cut off all relationships with whites, even former SNCC members.
 
Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, Africa, returned to Harvard to earn a doctorate in philosophy and taught high school math in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  
 
Later in life, the press-shy Moses started his “second chapter in civil rights work” by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project.  
Historian Taylor Branch, whose “Parting the Waters” won the Pulitzer Prize, said Moses’ leadership embodied a paradox.  

“Aside from having attracted the same sort of adoration among young people in the movement that Martin Luther King did in adults,” Branch said, “Moses represented a separate conception of leadership” as arising from and being carried on by “ordinary people.”

 
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Madrid’s tree-lined Paseo del Prado boulevard and the adjoining Retiro park have been added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee, holding an online meeting from Fuzhou, China, backed the candidacy on Sunday that highlighted the green area’s introduction of nature into Spain’s capital. The influence the properties have had on the designs of other cities in Latin America was also applauded by committee members.

“Collectively, they illustrate the aspiration for a utopian society during the height of the Spanish Empire,” UNESCO said.

The Retiro park occupies 1.2 square kilometers in the center of Madrid. Next to it runs the Paseo del Prado, which includes a promenade for pedestrians. The boulevard connects the heart of Spain’s art world, bringing together the Prado Museum with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the Reina Sofía Art Center.

The boulevard dates to the 16th century while the park was originally for royal use in the 17th century before it was fully opened to the public in 1848.

“Today, in these times of pandemic, in a city that has suffered enormously for the past 15 months, we have a reason to celebrate with the first world heritage site in Spain’s capital,” said Madrid Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida.

The site is No. 49 for Spain on the UNESCO list.

Also on Sunday, the committee added China’s Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan, India’s Kakatiya Rudreshwara Temple, and the Trans-Iranian railway to the World Heritage list.

World Heritage sites can be examples of outstanding natural beauty or manmade buildings. The sites can be important geologically or ecologically, or they can be key for human culture and tradition.

 
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Ethiopia’s Amhara state on Sunday called on “all young people” to take up arms against Tigrayan fighters who are battling the federal government military and forces from all of Ethiopia’s other nine regions.

The call for mass mobilization against Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters – whom Amhara’s military said were now attacking the state – expands the eight-month-old war and instability in the Horn of Africa country.

“I call on all young people, militia, non-militia in the region, armed with any government weapon, armed with personal weapons, to join the anti-TPLF war mission from tomorrow,” Agegnehu Teshager, president of Amhara regional government was quoted as saying by the region’s state media.

Calls to TPLF spokesman Getachew Reda, for a comment were not answered.

War erupted between the Ethiopian military and the TPLF, which rules Ethiopia’s northernmost region, in November.

Three weeks later, the government declared victory when it captured Tigray’s capital Mekelle, but the TPLF kept fighting. At the end of June, the TPLF seized control of Mekelle and most of Tigray after government soldiers withdrew.

This week, the Tigrayans pushed their offensive to Afar, their neighboring state to the east, where they said they planned to target troops from the Amhara region fighting alongside the federal military in the area.

Afar is a strategic region for landlocked Ethiopia because the main road and railway linking the capital, Addis Ababa, with the seaport of Djibouti runs through it.

On Saturday, Amhara’s special forces commander, Brigadier General Tefera Mamo, was quoted by the region’s state media as saying the war had expanded to the state.

“The terrorist group has started a war in the Amhara and Afar regions and is also harassing Ethiopians,” Tefera said, referring to TPLF. “Amhara Special Forces are fighting in coordination with other security forces.”

Thousands of people have died in the fighting, around 2 million have been displaced and more than 5 million rely on emergency food aid.

 
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On this edition of Encounter, Ambassador Michelle Gavin, senior fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Ambassador to Botswana, and Frans Cronje, CEO of the Johannesburg-based Institute of Race Relations, analyze with host Carol Castiel the political, economic and social situation in South Africa following the arrest and detention of former South African president Jacob Zuma given the protests, looting and violence which this incident triggered.  How did the celebrated multiracial democracy led by Nelson Mandela reach this critical juncture point, and what does the future hold for South Africa? 
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Tax officials in India have raided the offices of two major media houses in what the press community believes may be a retaliatory response to recent coverage.

The Income Tax Authority raids on the offices of the Dainik Bhaskar newspaper group and Bharat Samachar or BSTV regional television network took place on Thursday and Friday in six states, including Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. The homes of some employees were searched and Dainik Bhaskar reported that agents confiscated cell phones from some staff.

Unnamed government sources cited in The Indian Express said authorities are investigating tax evasion, false expenses and “purchases using shell entities.”

But Dainik Bhaskar and local media associations say they believe the investigations are in retaliation for critical coverage and are an attempt to send a message to journalists.

Both media houses have been critical of the Indian government’s response to a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, including a shortage of oxygen supplies and apparent under-reporting of the death toll.

India’s health ministry on Thursday reported 41,383 new cases of the coronavirus in 24 hours and over 500 daily deaths, Reuters reported.

Dainik Bhaskar was also one of the few Hindi-language newspapers to prominently cover details of the Pegasus spyware hack, where surveillance software licensed to governments was found to have targeted around 40 journalists in India. None of Dainik Bhaskar’s journalists were among those named as being affected by the hack.

The Indian government has not publicly commented on the findings by the Pegasus Project.

In a statement, Dainik Bhaskar said it believes raids were a result of its coverage of the government’s alleged mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Broadcaster BSTV reacted to the raid of its offices via Twitter, saying that it would “continue telling the truth.”

The Editors Guild of India condemned the raids in a statement, saying it was concerned that government agencies are being “used as a coercive tool to suppress free and independent journalism.” The guild added that the actions were “all the more disturbing” following the revelations of Pegasus spyware targeting journalists in India.

VOA emailed India’s income tax directorate and finance ministry for comment but did not receive a response.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes—the government department responsible for tax investigations—denied any editorial interference and said via social media the team was looking only into financial transactions related to a tax evasion investigation.

Daniel Bastard, of the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, said raids can have a chilling effect on other news outlets.

“Government agencies harassing media houses over spurious accusations has almost become a pattern now,” Bastard, who heads RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk, told VOA.

He said the investigations this week may have been a pretext to intimidate the two media groups, adding, “The reason behind it might be the sharp coverage by Dainik Bhaskar and BSTV’s journalists of the government’s poor handling of the COVID-19 crisis.”

Geeta Seshu, co-editor of Free Speech Collective, an Indian organization that promotes freedom of expression, also questioned whether the raids were an attempt to send a message.

Both media houses are known to be supportive of the larger Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist agenda of the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP central government and Uttar Pradesh state, she said.

“There is no doubt that the raids are a very crude attempt to keep some of the biggest and most prominent Hindi language media houses in line in the run up to the [Uttar Pradesh] elections scheduled for early next year,” Seshu told VOA.

Dainik Bhaskar is the largest multi-edition daily in circulation, according to the most recent report published by the Registrar of Newspapers of India. The 63-year-old group works in 12 states, publishing 65 editions in Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi.

BSTV is a regional Hindi TV news channel that focuses on Uttar Pradesh from the state capital, Lucknow.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, several media outlets have been investigated for alleged financial irregularities. New regulations have also been put in place to ensure social media platforms comply with government takedown orders.

An investigation was started into the media website Newsclick in February of this year, when members of a government financial investigation agency raided its offices in south Delhi as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering.

At the time, the independent news website had been reporting on large scale farmers protests.

“A majority of mainstream media houses are already operating under a lot of pressure and operate with an unhealthy dependence on the government for advertising revenue.

The media houses that still strive to be independent face court cases and lawsuits and, as the Newsclick experience shows us, prolonged raids and investigation into their finances,” Seshu said.

As well as being intimidating, such actions bring financial pressures and act as a warning to other media outlets.

“It is crippling and debilitating for the operation of a free and fair media and ultimately, for a democracy,” Seshu told VOA.

Umakant Lakhera, the president of Press Club of India, believes such raids are meant to send a message to others reporting on public interest stories.

“Government failures are now in the open on many fronts like economy and security and a section of the media has started highlighting these failures in recent months,” Lakhera told VOA. “The government and party in power try to brand those critics in media and opposition as anti-national. This new mantra is being used to attack political opponents. It is becoming very difficult for the independent media to function … in such [an] atmosphere.” 
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