In a sea of international opprobrium. But a compromise may be at hand

IF 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 butter on Japanese decks, use warps to foul propellers and attempt citizen’s arrests of the whaling captains. Early this year a Sea Shepherd boat sank after a collision. Now an American film has turned a spotlight on Japan’s coastal hunt for cetaceans. “The Cove”, shot largely in secret, shows the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, a village on Japan’s main island. This week it won an Oscar. ...

The generals leave nothing to chance

THE 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. ...

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 February the volume of housing sales fell sharply from the previous month. ...

Technology complicates life for vote-riggers and counters alike

RIGGED 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. ...

Najib wavers over undoing affirmative-action policies

WHEN 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 needs to move beyond run-of-the-mill electronics and focus on knowledge-based industries. ...

The DPJ stumbles in its efforts to grant foreigners the vote

BY 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. ...

An historic change in the offing; but India’s ruling party may be overreaching itself

YELLING 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 seats. By greatly boosting women’s membership of India’s legislatures, the proposed amendment, its supporters say, will also begin to make a dent in their more grievous suffering—in a country where female fetuses are often aborted, where wives are battered and women earn on average $1,200 a year, less than a third of the male average. A woman can take credit for this: Sonia Gandhi, Congress’s leader, who has pushed the long-mothballed bill against a furious band of dissenters—of a kind that persuaded previous BJP- and Congress-led governments not to touch it. ...

Politicians vie for poor-Muslim votes

FIFTEEN 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. ...

Worries about renewed overheating

DURING 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. ...

Some scent compromise; more fear a looming showdown

IN 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, which had been frozen after the army deposed Mr Thaksin in September 2006. ...

The defining battle of Lee Myung-bak’s presidency nears its climax

ODDLY for a politician, South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, has never hidden his loathing of politics. During his successful presidential-election campaign he vowed to “take politics out of Youido”, a reference to the island on the Han river that houses the National Assembly in Seoul. Mr Lee’s hero is the dictator Park Chung-hee, architect of South Korea’s rise from basket-case to industrial powerhouse. Much like him, Mr Lee believes politicians are impediments to his country’s progress. Unlike Park, however, Mr Lee has to operate in a robust democracy. He is making rather a hash of it.

In a bitter twist of fate, his nemesis is Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye. She was the rival Mr Lee defeated in 2007 to become the presidential candidate of the Grand National Party (GNP). The two have never been reconciled. Mr Lee believes his election entitled him to rule without opposition within the GNP. But Miss Park has never accepted her defeat and still commands a group of as many as 40 loyalists in parliament. ...

After a hard-won battle, President Yudhoyono has a chance to start again

FEZ-WEARING members of Indonesia’s parliament called each other transvestites, yelled and scuffled. Outside, the police turned water cannon on protesting students. The climax this week of a parliamentary investigation into a government bail-out of a private bank in 2008 superficially recalled 1998, and the chaos surrounding the fall of the dictator Suharto. But this time the stakes were smaller; the government of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was never going to fall. At issue was how well it could govern.

The Bank Century scandal had riveted the press for months. But most of Indonesia’s 240m people have preferred chat shows and Hollywood movies, content that the economy has been doing well, growing by 4.5% last year. Inflation last year was just 2.8%, unemployment is down, and consumer confidence booming. That, however, did not deter Mr Yudhoyono’s enemies from plotting to embarrass him and paralyse his government. They managed to do both. Yet he still enjoys an approval rating of about 75%. ...

To a sitting room, mobile telephone or supermarket screen near you soon

ON MARCH 1st China Daily got its biggest makeover since the newspaper was launched in 1981 as China’s first English-language daily. As well as a new look, the paper is boosting the number of its foreign correspondents. With a new investigative-reporting feature, China Daily said that it was aiming to “set the news agenda instead of just follow it”.

So far, this agenda seems unlikely to set foreign pulses racing. Next to this bold new feature China Daily splashed an “exclusive” interview with the foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, under the headline “FM: China is doing all it can in foreign affairs”. Still, the makeover marks a departure for the vapid broadsheet. And China Daily is only the latest Chinese media organ to revamp itself in what President Hu Jintao calls an “increasingly fierce struggle in the domain of news and opinion”. ...

A rigged vote keeps the ruling party in power in a failing state

TO THE surprise of no one, the governing People’s Democratic Party of Tajikistan (PDPT) won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections on February 28th, with almost 72% of the vote. Nor was anybody taken aback by the myriad irregularities on election day. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which monitored the polling, said it “failed to meet many key OSCE commitments”. It noted a high prevalence of family- and proxy-voting and cases of ballot-box stuffing.

Preliminary results give the PDPT, led by Emomali Rakhmon, the president, 53 seats out of 63 in the lower house of parliament. The Islamic Revival Party, Central Asia’s only religiously based party, came second, with 7.7% of the vote and two seats. The party’s leadership, which expected to win around 30% of the vote, has cried foul, and plans to sue the election board. ...

Life gets harder for Thailand’s guest-workers

THEY sew bras, peel shrimps, build blocks of flats and haul fishing-nets. In return, migrant workers in Thailand are paid poorly, if at all, and face exploitation and abuse at the hands of employers and the security forces. Up to 3m migrants, many undocumented and mostly from Myanmar, fall into this category. So a scheme to start registering this workforce and bring it into the legal fold sounds like a step forward. Migrants have been ordered to apply to their home countries for special passports so that they can work legally in Thailand and, in theory, enjoy access to public services, such as health care.

But the plan has run into practical and political difficulties, mostly among workers from Myanmar, who rightly fear their awful government and do not want to return home, even temporarily. Many are unaware of the registration drive. So the first applicants have come mostly from migrants from Laos and Cambodia, where the authorities are more willing to help. ...