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Banyan : Not whaling but drowning (Mar 11)
In a sea of international opprobrium. But a compromise may be at handIF YOU’RE tempted by a slab of meat gristle which surrenders little but an ooze of grease when chewed, then you’ll love whale. Add to the sensory experience the accumulated mercury to be found in whale meat. Consider the suffering caused by the hunt to these intelligent mammals; and a military-industrial approach to their extermination. Japan going a-whaling is, to borrow from Oscar Wilde, the unspeakable in pursuit of the almost uneatable. As with foxhunting in Britain, views seem irreconcilable. Since 1986 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling. Yet every Antarctic summer, Japan sends a whaling fleet south to catch hundreds of whales for “research”. And every year at the IWC’s meeting, pro- and anti-whaling camps gather in sullen deadlock. On the whaling grounds the Japanese fleet encounters the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. The ocean warriors hurl rancid bu...

Rigging Myanmar's election: Belt, braces and army boots (Mar 11)
The generals leave nothing to chanceTHE junta ruling Myanmar has had 20 years to digest the lessons from the country’s most recent election. It was trounced by the National League for Democracy, even though the opposition’s charismatic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was already under house arrest. This year on an unnamed date (perhaps its astrologers cannot agree) the junta will hold another election. It will not lose this one.Election laws published this week do not quite spell out the result. But a “political-parties registration law” bars Miss Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, of whom there are more than 2,000, from belonging to a party because of their criminal convictions. Cut off from politics by her house arrest, Miss Suu Kyi is anyway barred from office as the widow of a foreigner. Her party now has to expel her and other detainees. The law also bans civil servants from joining parties, along with monks, who led anti-government protests in 2007. ...

China mulls a property tax: An odd sort of tax (Mar 11)
That some liberals want and local governments fear A GRANDMOTHER killed trying to stop developers flattening her home; university graduates forced to live in crowded slums: China’s ebullient property market has generated many tales of woe, and a promise from the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to “rein in” the speculators. But calls for this to be achieved with a new property tax have put the government in a bind. In the past year property prices have surged to new highs in some places, helped by a torrent of carefree lending from state-run banks. Mr Wen made his pledge on March 5th, in a speech to China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), launching its annual ten-day session. The NPC is filled with party loyalists. But some have fretted openly about property bubbles. The government says house prices in 70 cities rose 10.7% in February compared with a year earlier, the fastest rise in 20 months. There are early signs that this is denting sales. In both January and Februa...

Elections in the Philippines: Vote before the system crashes (Mar 11)
Technology complicates life for vote-riggers and counters alikeRIGGED elections and the instability they create have been the bane of the Philippines for much of its democratic history. Filipinos are fervently hoping that the computerisation of the vote-counting in May’s presidential, congressional and local elections will solve the problem. But faith in the technology is less fervent. Many fear it is no solution.In past elections voters had to write down the names of their preferences for up to 32 national or local positions on blank ballot forms. Their votes were tallied by hand at the precinct, municipal, provincial and finally national levels. Definitive results could take weeks to emerge, giving ample opportunity for vote-padding and shaving. Vote-rigging by President Ferdinand Marcos led to his downfall in 1986. The incumbent president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, has had a shaky grip on power since she was accused of rigging her election in 2004. ...

Economic reform in Malaysia: Out with the new (Mar 11)
Najib wavers over undoing affirmative-action policiesWHEN Najib Razak took office last April as Malaysia’s prime minister, the timing could hardly have been worse. The export-led economy was in recession. The ruling coalition was in the dumps after an unprecedented near-defeat in elections in March 2008. Opponents warned that Mr Najib’s government would crack down on political dissent to save its skin. Against the odds, though, Mr Najib, a British-educated economist, has emerged as a more sure-footed, and less scandal-prone, leader than many expected. He has stimulated the economy back to life and liberalised some financial services. Growth is likely to exceed 4% this year—reaching 6%, in his own optimistic forecast. There are ambitious new targets for cutting crime and building roads, among other populist policies. Foreign businesses have been encouraged by Mr Najib’s promises to liberalise the broader economy, spur innovation and raise productivity. Everyone agrees that Malaysia n...

Koreans in Japan : Taxation without representation (Mar 11)
The DPJ stumbles in its efforts to grant foreigners the voteBY RIGHTS, giving long-term South Korean residents in Japan the right to vote in local elections should be uncontroversial. They pay taxes, speak Japanese, and come from families that have lived in Japan for decades. Most were dragged here to work under the colonial cosh before and during the second world war. A limited move to enfranchise them came from the very top of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). It swept to power last September promising to end prejudices built up under the ousted Liberal Democrats. Yukio Hatoyama, the prime minister, backs it. The DPJ’s secretary-general and puppeteer-at-large, Ichiro Ozawa, even assured Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, that he would soon push it through the Diet, or parliament. ...

Indian politics and women: Indian women on the march (Mar 11)
An historic change in the offing; but India’s ruling party may be overreaching itselfYELLING dementedly, seven lawmakers mobbed the chairman of the Indian parliament’s upper house on March 8th and tore at the document, containing the women’s reservation bill, he was reading from. Yet the bill passed the next day, with the two-thirds majority needed to change India’s constitution. With broad political support, including from the Congress party that leads India’s coalition government and the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the bill could soon clear the lower house and win the support it needs in at least 15 out of 28 state assemblies. The president would then sign it into law: imposing a 33% quota for women in India’s federal and state assemblies.This would be momentous, especially for India’s half a billion, badly served women. Today’s Lok Sabha, or House of the People, as India’s lower chamber is known, contains 58 women, a record number, but fewer than 11% of the seat...

India's Muslims and job quotas: The call to poll (Mar 4)
Politicians vie for poor-Muslim votesFIFTEEN years after he migrated with his family to the bright lights of Delhi, Muhammad Naushad has little to show for it. An illiterate 20-year-old weaver, he earns 2,000 rupees ($43) a month, half of which he sends to his mother in the poor state of Bihar. Amid the evening babble of Nizamuddin, a fly-blown Muslim quarter in the heart of India’s capital, Mr Naushad says his only ambition is to get a better job. It is hard to guess what that might be.He is all too typical of India’s 160m Muslims. Found mostly in its northern and eastern states, poor giants such as Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar and West Bengal, they are among the country’s poorest and least educated people. According to a 2006 government-commissioned report, Muslims are almost as badly off as dalits, Hinduism’s former “untouchables”—a finding made tragic by the dashed hopes it represents: many Indian Muslims once converted from Hinduism to escape that reviled low-caste status. ...

Vietnam's economy: The Tet effect (Mar 4)
Worries about renewed overheatingDURING Tet, the lunar new year holiday, money is everywhere in Vietnam. It is dished out to children, gambled in roadside card-games, and splurged on gifts, feasts, and trips to home villages. This leads to an annual bump in inflation. And this year’s spike in the consumer-price index, which rose by 2% in February, seemed bearable at a time of rapid growth. GDP grew by 5.3% last year. It came, however, among some more worrying signs. On February 10th, just before Tet, the central bank devalued the currency, the dong, by 3.4%, following a devaluation of 5.4% in November. The aim was to entice holders of dollars to buy dong. A dollar shortage has been starving Vietnam’s exporters of the currency they need to purchase imported parts and materials. ...

Thaksin Shinawatra: Divided loyalties (Mar 4)
Some scent compromise; more fear a looming showdownIN THAILAND politics has long been about compromise rather than conviction. Political parties run on expediency, not ideology, which makes it possible to cobble together all manner of oddball coalitions. But in recent years pragmatism has given way to more rigid loyalties. Rival camps rally their base with fiery talk of an all-out struggle for the nation’s soul, all the while tugging relentlessly at its seams. Might compromise yet make a comeback? Some scented a whiff of detente on February 26th, when the Supreme Court ruled on the family fortune of the former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. But that still seems wishful thinking. The nine judges found Mr Thaksin guilty of abusing his powers while in office to favour Shin Corp, his family-owned telecoms group, which was sold in January 2006 to Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund. The court decided to seize $1.4 billion of the $2.3 billion in proceeds from that sale, whic...