DUBAI — The U.S. Navy said it intervened to prevent Iran from seizing two commercial tankers in the Gulf on Wednesday in the latest in a series of seizures or attacks on ships in the area since 2019. 

Chevron said one incident involved the Richmond Voyager, a very large crude carrier managed by the U.S. oil company, and that crew onboard were safe.  

An Iranian navy vessel fired shots during the second seizure attempt, Navy Fifth Fleet spokesperson Timothy Hawkins said. 

Both incidents took place in the Gulf in waters between Iran and Oman.  

Hawkins did not say how the U.S. Navy prevented their seizure. Details regarding the second vessel involved in the incident were not immediately clear.  

Since 2019, there have been a series of attacks on shipping in the strategic Gulf waters at times of tension between the United States and Iran. 

Iran seized two oil tankers in a week just over a month ago, the U.S. Navy said.  

About a fifth of the world’s supply of crude oil and oil products passes through the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point between Iran and Oman, according to data from analytics firm Vortexa. 

Refinitiv ship tracking data shows the Richmond Voyager previously docked in Ras Tannoura in eastern Saudi Arabia before Wednesday’s incident in the Gulf. 

A Chevon spokesperson said “there is no loss of life, injury, or loss of containment” aboard the Richmond Voyager.

“The vessel is operating normally. The safety of our crew is our top priority,” the spokesperson said in a statement.  
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Americans are divided by the Supreme Court overturning decades of precedent supporting affirmative action in college admissions, a policy that advantaged otherwise disadvantaged students from racial or ethnic minority groups. 

“Unfortunately, race still matters in our society and affirmative action is essential in guaranteeing that everyone — not just the advantaged — benefit from an education that can serve as a pathway to upward mobility,” Coalition for a Diverse Harvard board member Michael Williams told VOA.

Harvard University, along with the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, were sued by Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit organization against racial classifications in college admissions. By ruling in their favor, the Supreme Court is disadvantaging all Americans, Williams said. 

“Many of our college applicants have been systematically and purposefully excluded from aspects of our society and discriminated against based on race, and an equitable college admissions process must recognize these disadvantages,” Williams said. “But this affects everyone because studies show that diverse institutions are better institutions. Affirmative action helps prepare all our students for the diversity they’ll find in the workplace.” 

Other Americans welcomed the high court’s ruling against race-conscious admissions. 

“America is supposed to be a meritocracy, and race shouldn’t play any part in college or job decisions,” said Angelica Garcia, a teacher in Saginaw, Michigan. 

“Assuming every Black and brown person has lived this underclass or inferior experience and needs help is racist,” she continued. “As a person of color, I worked hard for what I’ve gotten and I’ve overcome a lot, and I hate that some people think I’ve only been accepted into college or my job because of my race.” 

Born from civil rights movement

Race-conscious admissions in American universities were born from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and laws supporting affirmative action in the U.S. labor market. Colleges that adopted these policies were challenged in the Supreme Court, where justices ruled that while quota systems were an unconstitutional violation of equal protections, race could still be considered by universities as one factor among others. 

“Affirmative action was implemented to address the longstanding exclusion and segregation of Black and brown students in higher education and to recognize the persistent inequalities that students of color face on both individual and systemic levels,” Edgar Saldivar, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, told VOA. 

The impact of eliminating that is clear to Connie Chung Joe, chief executive officer of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. 

“Without race-conscious admissions, racial segregation will rise at our nation’s colleges and universities,” she predicted. “This will disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, and Asian communities. Entire generations of talented students of color will be denied the future they deserve.” 

Policy has harmed, say opponents

Opponents of race-conscious admissions say it’s the policy itself that has done harm by overlooking those excluded from preferential treatments. 

“Maybe affirmative action was something necessary many years ago, but in the present day, it was time for it to be revisited,” said Jillian Dani, a former teacher from Merritt Island, Florida. “I understand the desire to give minorities more opportunities, but in today’s world, minorities have the same opportunities as the rest of us.” 

“All-women colleges exist, and all-Black colleges exist,” Dani told VOA. “But there aren’t any all-white male colleges even though poor white people are a real thing. They’re missing out on opportunities, too, and affirmative action wasn’t helping them.” 

Twenty-year-old San Diego entrepreneur Willow Hannington believes the decision to strike down affirmative action is a positive one for the country. 

“It’s a significant stride towards fostering a truly fair and equal society,” she told VOA. “This nation has achieved significant progress, and, in my opinion, race should no longer play a decisive role in any aspect of our lives.” 

Schools commit to diversity 

In a recent poll by ABC News/Ipsos, a majority of Americans favor this more “race neutral” or “color-blind” approach. Following the ruling, many colleges and universities issued statements reaffirming their commitment to diversity. 

“Eliminating the use of standardized test scores in admissions, increasing guaranteed financial support, broadening recruitment efforts to underserved communities, and developing robust middle and high school pipelines that benefit all students are just some of the things that can be done,” Saldivar told VOA. 

Craig Mindrum from Chicago has a strategy to add. With experience on a graduate school admissions committee, he said students should continue talking about how their lived experiences and race has shaped their character, drive and talents.

“No legislation or court decision is going to stop me from making some recommendations while considering minority or disadvantaged status,” he said. “Admissions counselors are people, not legislative robots, and across the country they’re going to be making the final decision on who is accepted into their college.” 
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Seeking a valid U.S. passport for that 2023 trip? Buckle up, wishful traveler, for a very different journey before you step anywhere near an airport. 

A much-feared backup of U.S passport applications has smashed into a wall of government bureaucracy as worldwide travel rebounds toward record pre-pandemic levels — with too few humans to handle the load. The result, say aspiring travelers in the U.S. and around the world, is a maddening pre-travel purgatory defined, at best, by costly uncertainty. 

With family dreams and big money on the line, passport seekers describe a slow-motion agony of waiting, worrying, holding the line, refreshing the screen, complaining to Congress, paying extra fees, and following incorrect directions. Some applicants are buying additional plane tickets to snag in-process passports where they sit — in other cities — in time to make the flights they booked in the first place. 

So grim is the outlook that U.S. officials aren’t even denying the problem or predicting when it will ease. They’re blaming the epic wait times on lingering pandemic-related staffing shortages and a pause of online processing this year. That’s left the passport agency flooded with a record-busting 500,000 applications a week. The deluge is on-track to top last year’s 22 million passports issued, the State Department says. 

It was early March when Dallas-area florist Ginger Collier applied for four passports ahead of a family vacation at the end of June. The clerk, she said, estimated wait times at eight to 11 weeks. They’d have their passports a month before they needed them. “Plenty of time,” Collier recalled thinking. 

Then the State Department upped the wait time for a regular passport to as much as 13 weeks. “We’ll still be OK,” she thought. 

At two weeks to travel, this was Collier’s assessment: “I can’t sleep.” Failure to obtain the family’s passports would mean losing $4,000, she said, as well as the chance to meet one of her sons in Italy after a study abroad semester. “My nerves are shot because I may not be able to get to him,” she said. She calls the toll-free number every day, holds for as much as 90 minutes to be told — at best — that she might be able to get a required appointment at passport offices in other states. 

“I can’t afford four more plane tickets anywhere in the United States to get a passport when I applied in plenty of time,” she said. 

Bottom ‘dropped out’

By March, concerned travelers began asking for answers and then demanding help, including from their representatives in the House and Senate, who widely reported at hearings this year that they were receiving more complaints from constituents on passport delays than any other issue. 

The U.S. secretary of state had an answer, of a sort. 

“With COVID, the bottom basically dropped out of the system,” Antony Blinken told a House subcommittee on March 23. When demand for travel all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government let contractors go and reassigned staff that had been dedicated to handling passports. 

Around the same time, the government also halted an online renewal system “to make sure that we can fine tune it and improve it,” Blinken said. He said the department is hiring agents as quickly as possible, opening more appointments and trying to address the crisis in other ways. 

Passport applicants lit up social media groups, toll-free numbers and lawmakers’ phone lines with questions, appeals for advice and cries for help. 

Long waits overseas

At U.S. consulates overseas, the quest for U.S. visas and passports isn’t much brighter. 

On a day in June, people in New Delhi could expect to wait 451 days for a visa interview, according to the website. Those in Sao Paulo could plan on waiting more than 600 days. Aspiring travelers in Mexico City were waiting about 750 days; in Bogota, Colombia, it was 801 days. 

In Israel, the need is especially acute. More than 200,000 people with citizenship in both countries live in Israel. On July 2, Batsheva Gutterman started looking for appointments immediately after she had a baby in December, with an eye toward attending her sister’s wedding in July, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her quest for three passports stretched from January to June, days before travel. And it only resolved after Gutterman paid a small fee to join a WhatsApp group that alerted her to new appointments, which stay available for only a few seconds. 

She ultimately got three appointments on three consecutive days — bureaucracy embodied. 

“This makes me incredibly uneasy having a baby in Israel as an American citizen, knowing there is no way I can fly with that baby until we get lucky with an appointment,” she said. 

There appeared to be some progress. The wait for an appointment for a renewal on June 8 stood at 360 days. By July 2, the wait was 90 days, according to the website. 

Waiting in line and online

Back in the U.S., Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, stood in line in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, in hopes of snagging her son’s passport. That way, she hoped, the pair could meet the rest of their family, who had already left as scheduled for Europe for a long-planned vacation. 

She’d applied for her son’s passport two months earlier and spent weeks checking for updates online or through a frustrating call system. As the mid-June vacation loomed, Larsen reached out to Senator Mitt Romney ‘s office, where one of four people he says is assigned full-time to passport issues were able to track down the document in New Orleans. 

It was supposed to be shipped to Los Angeles, where she got an appointment to retrieve it. That meant Larsen had to buy new tickets for herself and her son to Los Angeles and reroute their trip from there to Rome. All on a bet that her son’s passport was indeed shipped as promised. 

“We are just waiting in this massive line of tons of people,” Larsen said. “It’s just been a nightmare.” 

They succeeded. And Ginger Collier? She found her happy ending. “I just got my passports!” she texted. A seven-hour visit at the passport office in Dallas, Texas, plus a return the next day, produced the passports with four days to spare. 

“What a ridiculous process,” Collier said. Nevertheless, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. She texted last week: “It was the best hug ever!” 
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In recent years, there have been more prominent TV shows and movies featuring Asians and Chinese Americans, with many of them targeting younger audiences.  

The increase in media showing Asian Americans is more than just a product of the streaming era. For summer camp director C.C. Hsu and her students, it is also a step toward more accurate representations of their identities.   

The summer camp hosted by the Washington DC Taiwanese School, located in Maryland about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) north of the U.S. capital, is made up of the children and grandchildren of immigrants from Taiwan.   

“Our community is generational,” Hsu said.   

Hsu, who immigrated to the U.S. as a child, aims to teach the students at the summer camp more about her culture. She said what she sees at the summer camp is reflected on screen in the new Disney+ show, “American Born Chinese.”   

The show is about a child of Asian immigrants who is introduced to a new student from China and their adventures as a result of their budding friendship.   

“When he [main character Jin Wang] says multiple times, ’Can you say that slower? My Chinese isn’t very good,’ this is something that is very, very familiar with the kids that are at the Taiwanese School,” Hsu said.   

Emmanuelle Roberts, Hsu’s daughter and a camp student, said she would like to see more Taiwanese American representation.   

“I don’t feel like Taiwanese and Taiwanese American people are portrayed enough in the media,” she said.

Her comments reflect a desire among many Taiwanese Americans for recognition of an identity distinct from Chinese Americans.   

“I usually just think of myself as either Asian American or Taiwanese American,” Freddy Meng, another camp student, said. “I don’t really identify with Chinese American that much.”   

More Asian faces on screen   

Among the many reasons why Hollywood is producing more Asian American stories, experts said, is because changes to the structure of the industry have opened more doors for Asian talent in front of and behind the camera.   

“In the last few years, the last decade or so, as Hollywood — as much of corporate America — has shifted into thinking about diversity as one of its core values, thinking about, ’How do we create a pipeline?'” said Brian Hu, who teaches television, film and new media at San Diego State University and is artistic director of the San Diego Asian Film Festival.   

“This is among the first times where the showrunner is Asian American or Chinese American, where the production team behind it and the whole cast and crew … is Asian American or … Chinese American, and part of that is because we’re seeing a new generation of talent… who are… kind of reaching that level in the industry where they have that sway,” said Jason Coe, assistant professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University Academy of Film.    

Hollywood has also grown more aware of the importance of Asian American representation as a component of its broader push toward diversity.   

“Asian Americans are part of the diversity equation … 20 years ago that wasn’t necessarily the case. It wasn’t necessarily self-evident that if you are doing diversity, that Asian faces is a part of that,” Hu said.  

The increase of anti-Asian hate incidents during the pandemic is another reason behind more shows about Asian Americans, said Yao Zhang, a Chinese Canadian YouTuber and human rights activist.   

“Some people, especially Chinese people, want to show the world that we are not all spies, right? We are not all agents, right?” Zhang said. “Like, we are a loyal American citizen or whatever or just to see a different part of us.”

Hollywood and China  

For years, Hollywood has been looking outside of the U.S. to China to reach one of the largest movie markets in the world. But films would first have to get past Beijing’s government censors.   

“This obsession of Hollywood entering China that obsession was especially high like 10 years ago where you do see a lot of coproductions happening,” Hu said.  

The Tom Cruise sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” was accused of making changes to appeal to China. In the original 1986 “Top Gun” movie, the Taiwanese and Japanese flags were on Cruise’s bomber jacket. In the trailer of the 2022 sequel, those flags do not appear. The film was accused of self-censoring to please Bejing because China considers Taiwan a part of its territory.   

“When the original teaser or trailer came out that it was digitally erased or a more politically neutral flag was inserted there so as not to offend the mainland audience, but as soon as they realized they would not be that audience, the Taiwan flag came back,” Hu said.  

Chinese company Tencent Holdings was supposed to be an investor, but the company decided to pull out of the film due to fears that the strong pro-U.S. military themes would anger Beijing, The Wall Street Journal reported. The film never received permission from Beijing to be shown in China.    

Last week, Politico reported the U.S. Defense Department updated its rules to filmmakers, saying if Hollywood wants help from the U.S. military, it cannot let China censor its films.   

Focus on Asian Americans   

Film analysts say production companies may do better by focusing on audiences closer to home.   

“If they see themselves as first for making a culturally American film that, of course, will have global appeal, but they know what they know, most which is that like American culture and American way of making movies that to have to, to cater culturally to somebody else is a big list, and I think they realized that let’s not be so obsessed with the Chinese market that we forget who we are,” said Hu, of San Diego State University.   

Some recent productions about Chinese American stories have received positive reviews.   

“I think that both ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ and ‘American Born Chinese’ are made with the Asian American and Chinese American audiences in mind, and I believe that the immigrant story is a very American story,” Coe said. 

“I think what we’re proving is that there is money to be made here. People want these stories,” said Hsu, the summer camp director.   

Increased Asian American representation means roles less rooted in stereotypes, activist Zhang said. 

“On the TV shows or on the movies, we are just [a] certain type of people, like nerd, IT [information technology] specialist — all guys are IT specialists, all women are accountants, all nerds,” Zhang said.   

The Hollywood Diversity Report 2023, conducted with the help of the University of California Los Angles College of Social Sciences, found in theatrical films that Asians make up 2.3% of lead actors, 6.5% of overall acting roles, 5.6% of directors and 4.5% of writers in 2022.

According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Asians, Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders make up 6.2% of the U.S. population. 

It is unknown whether more Asian Americans will find work in Hollywood in 2023. For people such as Hsu and her summer camp attendees, increased representation is important not just for seeing more faces who look like them, but also to ensure that their experiences are meaningfully portrayed onscreen. 
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